Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (24 page)

Well, this old fantasy—which over the years an increasing number of skeptics and unimaginative sorts had pooh-poohed as being “farfetched”—received a tremendous boost in vividness the other day when I learned that Mickey Spillane had decided that he himself would play the role of Mike Hammer in the film version of his novel,
The Girl Hunters.

Mickey Spillane’s literary status has never been fully defined in America. Hard-core quality-Lit. buffs, however, will recall how he smashed into international prominence, in 1947, by concluding his first novel,
I, The Jury,
in a manner which made Malaparte, Celine and the other high priests of the
roman noir
look like a bunch of pansies:

The roar of the .45 shook the room, Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. A thin trickle of blood welled out. . . . Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief.

How could you? she gasped.

I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.

It was easy, I said.

This confused girl, to make matters even more delightfully
noir,
was a psychiatrist.

Since then Spillane has written eight additional novels which in turn have compiled as yummy a set of statistics as have yet been garnered in the belles-lettres game. They have sold more than seventy-four million copies. In terms of foreign translations, this body of work is now seeded fifth in world literature, topped only by Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Jules Verne. He is the only contemporary whose work figures among the best sellers of all time. According to Alice Payne Hackett’s informative volume,
Sixty Years of Best Sellers,
of the ten best-selling fiction titles in the history of writing,
seven
are by Mickey Spillane (and it only remains to be added, in all fairness, that when Miss Hackett’s book was published, in 1956, Mr. Spillane had then
written
only seven).

The denouement of a Spillane story is always softly understated, but not so the middle distance. Here’s an engaging high point from
The Girl Hunters:

My hand smashed into bone and flesh and with the meaty impact I could smell the blood and hear the gagging intake of his breath. He grabbed, his arms like great claws. He just held on and I knew if I couldn’t break him loose he could kill me. He figured I’d start the knee coming up and turned to block it with a half-turn. But I did something worse, I grabbed him with my hands, squeezed and twisted and his scream was like a woman’s, so high-pitched as almost to be noiseless, and in his frenzy of pain he shoved me so violently I lost that fanatical hold of what manhood I had left him, and with some blind hate driving him he came at me as I stumbled over something and fell on me like a wild beast, his teeth tearing at me, his hands searching and ripping, and I felt the shock of incredible pain and ribs break under his pounding and I couldn’t get him off no matter what I did, and he was holding me down and butting me with his head while he kept up that whistlelike screaming. . . .

“Will you be able to re-create the exact mechanics of that fight scene in the movie?” I asked the Mick when I visited him on the set.

“Well, some of that scene will simply have to be
indicated
,” he replied with simple candor.

The Girl Hunters
, like
I, The Jury
, is a story of personal vendetta and eye-for-eye (or maybe even two-for-one) justice. Due to a miscalculation, which Mike himself feels responsible for, his beautiful assistant Velda (more friend then employee) has been killed, or so it is presumed, and Mike hits the road with good old-fashioned plasma-and-pulp vengeance in mind.

The film is being made on the MGM lot at Elstree Studios just outside London. It’s a Robert Fellows wide-screen production, directed by Roy Rowland, and features, besides the author, Lloyd Nolan, Shirley Eaton and Scott Peters. One of the more unusual aspects of the book is that (like
Fail-Safe
) it also includes a real-life person as one of the major characters—in this case none other than Hy Gardner.

“I think it’s a nice touch,” said Mickey. “And Hy is going to play himself in the movie.”

Spillane’s literary conceptions have received strong endorsement from unexpectedly intellectual quarters—most notably from grand Ayn Rand, author of
Atlas Shrugged
, and the founder of the objectivist philosophy.

“Spillane,” she says, “is the only writer today whose hero is a white knight and whose enemies represent evil.” He is alone, she contends, in having accepted the responsibility of taking a forthright moral position. Mickey himself speaks less abstractly about it. “I’ve been in the business for twenty-five years. I moved out of pulps because there was more money in the novel field.”

For someone like myself, with a Café Flore and White Horse Tavern orientation—where the whole point was not to write a book but to talk one—speaking with Spillane in regard to the Lit. Game was refreshment itself.

“Mick,” I said, “the issue of the magazine I’m preparing this for is entirely devoted—except for ads and the like, natch—to the American Literary Scene.”

After a terrific guffaw, and a slow, rather deliberate and somehow menacing cracking of knuckles, the Mick said, “Yeah, I’ve seen those articles—they never mention me; all they talk about are the Losers.”

“The Losers?”

“The guys who didn’t make it—the guys nobody ever heard of.”

“Why would they talk about them?”

“Because they can be condescending about the Losers. You know, they can afford to say something
nice
about them. You see, these articles are usually written
by
Losers—frustrated writers. And these writers resent success. So naturally they never have anything good to say about the Winners.”

“Is it hard to be a Winner?”

“No, anybody can be a Winner—all you have to do is make sure you’re not a Loser.”

“What brought about your decision to portray Mike Hammer yourself?”

“Well, everyone was making a mess of it; they were all missing the point. You see, Mike is a genuinely dedicated person. He’s also a
real
person—I mean he’s not suppose to be like an actor. You know, a lot of people
believe
in Mike Hammer—they write letters to him, asking his advice about certain things, giving him tips and so on. And it’s even stronger than that. For example, I was autographing my last book in a big bookstore down in Puerto Rico, and they ran out of the Spanish edition. So these people started buying the
English
edition—they couldn’t
read
it in English, you understand, but they wanted to have the new one with them anyway. It seemed to make them feel more secure to have it with them, even though they couldn’t read it.”

“I suppose you have certain theories now about acting. What do you think of The Method?”

“Pretending to be a
tree
and so on? No, that doesn’t interest me. I have no interest in acting as such. Besides, this is not really an
acting
job.”

Before I could get a clarification of this last remark, he was called back to the set, and I took the opportunity to corner the luscious Miss Eaton. She was lolling on the sidelines in a black bikini, a veritable darling, adding a provocative touch of vermilion to her toenails.

“What do perfect young darlings like yourself find attractive about a man like Hammer, if I may ask?”

I detected a slight and exciting flush of ambivalence as she lowered her smoldering gaze.

“Well,” she said softly, “if you like tigers . . .” then confided with a disquieting twinkle, “and what girl doesn’t—at least in her dark wild dreams? Hmm?”

“Are you kidding?” I asked, but her half-closed eyes and cryptic smile told me no more.

Miss Eaton is a professional and accomplished performer, as are, of course, Lloyd Nolan and the rest of the cast (except perhaps Hy Gardner). Could Mickey hold his own in this crowd? I sought out Mr. Robert Fellows, amiable producer of the film and seasoned vet of Hollywood flicker productions since the heyday of de Mille.

“Now see here,” I said, “Spillane admits to no training as an actor—how will he cope?”

Mr. Fellows handed me a British press release, headed
Spillane an Actor?
which quoted Mickey as saying among other things: “I will tell you this much, I
am
Mike Hammer!”

“He
is
Mike Hammer? Is he serious?”

“Mike Hammer is Mickey’s alter ego,” Mr. Fellows explained quietly, “as you’ll find out quickly enough if you ever get drunk with him. Not that I would advise that,” he added with an ominous chuckle.

“You mean he starts kicking people’s teeth out?”

“No, no,” said Mr. Fellows with a frown of distaste, “. . . at least not unduly.”

Actually Mickey Spillane seems to be a rather warm and likable person—relaxed, unselfish, with a genuine naturalness that impresses everyone who meets him. Like his manner, his opinions are strong and somewhat direct.

“Thomas Wolfe was a lousy writer,” he said. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“How about Hemingway?”

“I’ll tell you something about Hemingway—he knocked me out of
Life
magazine once. I was set for a spread in
Life
and Hemingway had those plane crashes and it knocked me out of the issue.”

“Well, what about his work?”

“No, his work was too morbid for me.”

“How about Cain, Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett?”

“Well, Chandler was all right except that he could never come to a conclusion. But these guys are all in the past. You see, in this business you’ve got to progress, you’ve got to keep ahead—or else you just stay behind, being imitated.”

“Do you like anyone’s work in particular?”

“Most writers don’t seem to know what they’re doing—they can’t come to a conclusion. But I do like Fredric Brown and John D. Macdonald; they’re good—they have a point of view and they follow it.”

Mickey Spillane’s books are now required reading in the writing courses of six different universities.

“How do you feel about literary criticism of your books?”

“The public is the only critic. And the only
literature
is what the public reads. The first printing of my last book was more than two million copies—that’s the kind of opinion that interests me.”

Then the Mick was called to the set again, back to the turbulent embrace of Miss Eaton. So I decided to walk over and see for myself how things were going. There beneath lights and camera lay a lavish patio pool, framed in the swank courtyard of a Westport-type mansion. The blonde Miss Eaton was reclining on a chaise lounge—black bikini, vermilion nails—a perfect vibrant darling as she stretched lithely forward to lay a persuasive hand on Mickey’s sleeve.

“I think I could like you, Mike . . .” she said in a voice both husky and tremulous, “quite a lot.”

Mickey shook his head, unsmiling.

“I’m trouble, baby,” he said earnestly.

And I must say the Mick looked pretty good in there. Exactly the way Tiger Mike would have handled it, I thought.

The filming of
The Girl Hunters
represents the first time, of course, that a protagonist has been portrayed by its author on the silver screen. If Spillane’s undertaking is a successful one, and it appears quite possible, will it not definitely signal a new trend in creative fiction? Many writers are, in fact, already regarding this as a unique and long-awaited opportunity for having their way not merely with the run-of-the-mill starlets but with their
ideal woman,
the girl of their dreams, the marvelous heroine of their own creation. Does it not follow that our literary chaps, with their voraciously inquiring minds, their insatiate quest to get to the bottom of things, will start writing in outlandishly heroic sex scenes, with an eye to ultimate personal realization? It must also be remembered that your writer is notoriously more virile, more sexually interesting, and unscrupulous than is your effete or coldly professional actor. Also generally better-looking. This is known fact. I say we may anticipate some almost incredible developments on the shooting set. An irate and astonished director shouting, “Cut! Cut!” is apt to have precious little effect on chaps like Mailer and Kerouac once they are swinging.

But what about the broader implications? Is it not just remotely possible that here we have stumbled onto the key to obtaining certain highly sought and hitherto unavailable film rights—Holden Caulfield’s, for example? Has anyone sounded J.D. about this? But, of course, the real coup will be when some enterprising producer signs up grand old Henry Miller—providing, natch, that Hank is given free rein, and the books are done
right,
without your usual cinematic compromise.

T
HEY STOOD ALONE NOW,
in the street outside the cinema, hesitant, as though they expected him there.

“Eh alors?”
said Monsieur Beauvais raising his hands to draw the scarf closer. He shrugged. “I knew that it would be difficult.”

“We can spare ourselves looking,” she began, touching his arm, “just as I told you, you see. We will find him at home.”

“Oh yes,” he agreed shaking his head a little, “yes, yes,” and they began to walk.

Old Beauvais’ son was just back from the fighting, and now he had gone out of the cinema and left them, during the newsreel.

Certainly. And yet (it had to be considered) what had there been? Pictures of soldiers and trucks moving past, some explosions in the distance. What was it, artillery shock? Nerves? Weren’t his nerves alright? Oh yes. Surely. But he had gone to a café no doubt, to get a drink, a girl. Perhaps even to get really drunk. So they said, so they said.

“Perhaps he had seen it before,” she said, not wholly serious. She was old too of course, as old as he, but never so old as the way they walked now, slowly, together in the market street, in the late afternoon.