Bill Broyles, as Ever, at War
His screenplays for Apollo 13 and Cast Away have made him hot in Hollywood, but the Austin writer still does battle each day with an array of old demons: his memories of Vietnam, the failures that accompany his successes, and everyone's expectations of him—especially his own.
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THE EXPERIENCE THAT HAS SET BROYLES apart from most of his peers, first at Texas Monthly and Newsweek and now in Hollywood, is his service in Vietnam, which he uses as a private touchstone. He had taken part in anti-war teach-ins, and in 1968, he returned from the University of Oxford and was preparing for graduate school at Princeton University when he joined the Peace Corps. But he resigned a short time later, feeling guilty that friends back in Baytown were going off to war. The draft notice that soon followed allowed him thirty days to enlist in the service of his choice. He picked the Marine Corps because a recruiter had promised that after basic training he would be sent to language school in Monterey, California, then assigned to a desk job in Washington, D.C. Broyles barely made it through basic training. By his own description more nerdy than cool in high school, he was haunted by memories of a cross-country coach shouting through a bullhorn, "Broyles, you'll always be a quitter!" Motivated by this long-remembered humiliation, he performed far better at the officer's course, leading his class in several categories. Instead of language school, he was sent to Vietnam. His sole objective, he told me, was to get his platoon out alive.
He reveals little about his feelings about the war. One night in 1975, as several of us were driving back to Austin from Dallas, I asked Bill about the transition from combat in Vietnam to editing a magazine in Austin. He considered the question, then told me in his mild, semi-detached fashion, "When I was in Vietnam, I got up in the morning and went to war. Now I get up and go to the office." (He did say later that the awkward homecoming scene in Cast Away was based upon his own homecoming from the war.) Most of his stories are funny or self-deprecating or both. One of his jobs was to follow a general around as he pinned medals on the wounded. "We'd come to some guy bandaged from head to foot like the Soldier in White in Catch 22," Broyles recalled. "I would bend down and whisper in his ear that the general was here to give him a medal. He'd whisper back, 'Tell the general to go f— himself and the horse he rode in on.' And I'd look up at the general and say, 'He says he's very proud to be a Marine.'" Harry Hurt III, a Texas Monthly writer during the Broyles years, remembered Broyles relating his initial experience in Vietnam: "He jumped out of a helicopter and landed facedown in the mud. A sergeant ran up to him and shouted, 'Hey, jerk-off, don't you know our new lieutenant is coming today?'" The new lieutenant was Broyles. Years later, in the often-hostile atmosphere of Newsweek, Broyles kept a grenade on his desk.
In the early seventies Broyles was considered a comer in Houston political circles and a possible successor to conservative Democratic congressman Bob Casey. He was the assistant to the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District and the point man for the reform-minded school board's huge bond issue. Al Reinert, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle at the time and later a Texas Monthly writer, said, "The bond issue lost big and that was the end of Bill's political career." Broyles now says, "Thank God I failed at that." But John Sacret Young, the co-creator of China Beach, remembered seeing Broyles at a Houston motel in the early nineties when he was at his lowest. "Clinton had just been elected president," Young said. "Two Bills. Both went to Oxford. And Broyles was comparing their two careers and wondering why Clinton had made it to the top while he was broke and sitting alone in a motel room." Reinert was with Broyles on election night and recalled, "Bill couldn't get over the fact that he was older than the president."
Broyles often speaks to groups on the subject of failure, telling them, "It's important to face up to failure, to know it's not the end of life." He entered Rice as a math major. When he scored a 4 on his first test, he wisely switched to history. When he failed as the editor of Newsweek, it was a signal to change careers. Two of his big film successes, Apollo 13 and Cast Away, deal with overcoming failure. In the last, autobiographical scene of Cast Away, Chuck stands at a rural crossroads in Texas, and we understand that it no longer matters which direction he chooses: He will find a way to reinvent himself.
BY THE END OF THE SEVENTIES Broyles was beginning to feel the need to get off the Texas Monthly island. Publisher Mike Levy and other magazine executives, Broyles included, decided to buy Los Angeles-based New West magazine (soon to be renamed California) from Rupert Murdoch. The move was probably doomed from the outset. Broyles realized quickly that he knew nothing about California, and later came a second realization: that if Murdoch wanted to sell, the magazine had to be a dog. "California was a steep learning curve," Broyles told me. "You had no cohesive feel of culture and pride as you had in Texas. Texas Monthly let people recognize a common culture—from barbecue to summer camp to bluebonnets to the Alamo to our special brand of politics. You could look at it and recognize it." Another reason Broyles might have been unhappy in California is that he was in the wrong branch of the media for the Left Coast. As a magazine editor, there was no way he could achieve greatness. After a year and a half, Broyles jumped ship. He met Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post Company, at a dinner party in Los Angeles, and turned on his famous charm, and she later offered him the job of editor at Newsweek. Broyles had zero experience running either a newsweekly or a large organization—especially one in New York. In the back of his mind was the thought of getting out of the magazine business entirely, but Newsweek was a challenge he couldn't resist.
If California was a mistake, Newsweek was a disaster. Broyles calls his tenure there "two of the worst years of my life." His mandate from Graham was to shake up the stodgy old magazine, which he did. Back in 1982 most newsweekly articles followed a long-established format, in which writers did not report, reporters did not write, and all stories were edited by corporate pea brains cultured in a bratty, backward-went-the-sentence form of prose. Broyles's idea was to hire good writers who were also good reporters and encourage them to be as original and creative as possible—the same formula that he had instituted at Texas Monthly.
Broyles also wanted to nudge the magazine toward more "soft" news about lifestyles and popular culture. Old-line editors openly resented being shoved aside by an outsider, especially one who dared to suggest change. "It was a complete culture clash," Howard Fineman, Newsweek's political writer, said. "Bill knew nothing of the bizarre folkways of New York or the inbred world of newsmagazines, and he didn't care to. He even looked out of place, this tall, rangy, hip, glamour guy from Texas with his Hollywood connections." Broyles's first serious clash with the old guard came early in his tenure when he decided that the death of Princess Grace made a better cover story than a massacre at a refugee camp in Lebanon. "Grace Kelly meant a lot to her generation, and she turned out to be a great-selling cover," Broyles said. "But the reaction of my staff was very negative." Late in his tenure, Newsweek dodged a catastrophe when Broyles nixed the purchase of the purported (and, as it turned out, fake) Hitler diaries that others on the staff supported. Instead, Newsweek ran a thirteen-page news story about the diaries.
After ten years at the helm of three magazines, Broyles, in one of his periodic self-examinations, realized that he hated running institutions, that he wanted personal achievement, not power. At a meeting with Katharine Graham to discuss the upcoming year's plans for Newsweek, Broyles suddenly blurted out, "I don't want to do this anymore!" Broyles's vision of a magazine that considered soft news as important as hard news survived his resignation and is now the model used by all newsweeklies.
NOW JOBLESS WITH RELATIONS strained between him and his second wife, Sybil (the mother of his two older children), Broyles decided that he wanted to write a play. He rented a separate $650-a-month apartment as his studio and spent his days reading and thinking, mostly about Vietnam. At the Vietnam Memorial in Washington he ran into his old radioman and remembered his first time in combat, when his mouth was so dry with fear he couldn't speak. Like so many of his generation, the war had changed his life, but he still kept wondering what it meant. He accepted an assignment from Atlantic Monthly to return to Vietnam and write about it, something no American veteran had been allowed to do. In the fall of 1983 Broyles went to the United Nations and talked to the foreign minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Co Thach: "I told him I wanted to return and write about the people we had fought against. For me the war had never really ended. If I could meet my enemy in peace, perhaps it would finally be over." The call that his visa had been approved came a year later, in September 1984. For five weeks Broyles revisited the battlegrounds and cities, interviewing former MiG pilots, anti-aircraft gunners, ammunition haulers, a driver on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a woman whose husband had been away fighting for nine years. He saw a former prison for American POWs and a hospital bombed by a B-52. He went again to China Beach, south of Da Nang, where, he would write, "once Red Cross Donut Dollies and Army nurses in bathing suits had drawn the hungry stares of thousands of lonely men." Fifteen years later all he found was an old woman gathering seaweed.
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