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 magazine article grew into a book, Brothers in Arms. Though well reviewed, it sold under 10,000 copies, far fewer than Broyles had counted on. He had dipped into his savings while writing the book and was running out of money. While trying to decide his next move, he took his dad on a fishing-and-rafting trip on Colorado's Gunnison River. Broyles was extremely close to both of his parents, who had always doted on him and encouraged him to think big. He had just turned forty and his father, whose name was also Bill, had just turned sixty: Big Bill and Little Bill, people called them. "I grew up to be a man in motion—restless, changing, always uprooting whenever I got too settled," Broyles wrote later in an article for Texas Monthly. "[My father] was completed, defined, fixed, and, above all, there." Broyles's parents had lived in the same house most of their lives, he realized. He'd moved seven times in the previous four years. Walking alone in the woods one night, he heard the sound of hooves thundering in his direction. He froze in place and watched as a large buck and a doe leaped majestically and sailed past, so close that "I felt the air shudder and saw the vapor puffing from their nostrils . . . the buck's eyes glinting in the moonlight." Back in camp, he told his dad about the magical moment. Big Bill was quiet for a while, then he said, "Son, I wanted to tell you something before I forgot it. Except for those two grandchildren, this trip is the best thing you ever did for me." At that moment, Broyles wrote, "I knew with absolute clarity that I had to leave New York."
"My life was a mess," he told me. "My marriage was ending, and I was nearly broke. I had worked so long for success, had come to expect it and the trappings that go with it. Success was killing me."
He moved to Los Angeles, hoping that a fresh start and a change of scenery might alter his luck. That's when Richard Bangs called and suggested that Broyles join a team of climbers and take on Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. Bangs, now the president of Outward Bound, was compiling an adventure book and thought Broyles might enjoy a daunting challenge. Six people had died on the mountain the previous month. The climb almost killed Broyles too, but he made it to the summit. "This wasn't like Vietnam," he wrote. "I could go home any time I wanted. Then I became angry with myself. I wasn't a quitter." In the bitter cold, at a brain-numbing altitude, he noticed how focused he had become. Back in the real world he had waged a losing battle against distractions, but on the mountain there was no choice. Weak and bent, his lungs gasping for breath, his mind senile, Broyles made it back safely. He wrote, "I had thought to recover my youth; instead I became an old man. I had climbed not toward life but death . . ." His essay, "Pushing the Mid-Life Envelope,"published in Esquire in 1987, may be his best piece of work.
Few who knew him anticipated Broyles's dramatic rise to power in Hollywood, but once it registered, his friends slapped their forehead and exclaimed, "But of course!" Hollywood had been his destiny all along. Nicholas Lemann, whom Broyles recruited to write for Texas Monthly and who is now the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, told me, "In the early days at Texas Monthly, it was like we were making a movie. Texas didn't have a lot of celebrities or events at the time, so Bill skillfully made Texas itself the hero. He extracted this heroic, dramatic ongoing story as if he was writing a movie about Texas." Equally important, writing for the screen played to his personal needs—his contemplative nature, his need to create, his internal rhythm.
Broyles had no specific plan when he returned to L.A. after his climb, but he had friends and he was an optimist again: He believed something good would happen. At a party to welcome him back, Broyles met John Sacret Young, an established television and film writer with connections at Warner Bros. and ABC. Young was intrigued by Broyles's idea for a half-hour comedy series set in Vietnam, except Young thought it should be a one-hour drama set on China Beach. They agreed to form a partnership, with Young in charge. ABC liked the idea and guaranteed them two full seasons of 22 episodes. The show lasted four seasons, from 1988 to 1992. Though it never attracted great ratings, China Beach was intelligent and original, and it won numerous acting and writing awards.
"China Beach was my film school," Broyles said. "I didn't know a crab dolly from a lobster, but in a TV series you do it all—writing, filming, post-production, all at once." Broyles was a quick study and grateful to work in Young's shadow. "A lot of guys would have lifted the idea and pushed me out the back door," Broyles said. Young recalled, "We worked well together. Bill was day; I was night. He was a positive force; I was always going for the throat. He brought humor to the show. He told me, 'In Vietnam there was boredom, fear, and terror, but when things were funny, they were never funnier.'"
He was enjoying success—and not just professionally. "It was his time to chase and be chased by beautiful women," Young said. "They were all over him." Morgan Fairchild was mentioned. So was Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis. Nicholas Lemann remembered reviewing a novel written by Davis in which a woman living alone on an isolated beach has a torrid affair with a handsome but haunted Vietnam veteran. "My God!" Lemann said to himself. "That's Bill!" He asked Broyles later if there was anything to the gossip about him and a certain president's daughter. "Bill didn't miss a beat," Lemann told me. "He said, 'Oh, you must be talking about the time I took Lynda Bird Johnson to a football game when I was in college.'"
He began dating Linda Purl, an actress who had been in two hit TV series, as Fonzie's girlfriend in Happy Days and Andy Griffith's girl Friday in Matlock. After a whirlwind romance, they married and bought a home in Pacific Palisades. But the marriage didn't last, and neither did the money. Once again he found himself depressed and single. Another outdoor adventure, skiing the backcountry of Yosemite, resulted in a torn rotator cuff. An accident during surgery damaged nerves, and he lost the use of his right arm for months. He drifted back to Texas, living for nearly a year with old friends in Austin and with his parents in Houston. "He was drowning in California," Lois Chiles recalled. "He needed the touch, the smell, the big sky of Texas to get his power back."
BROYLES DIDN'T KNOW IT AT the time but a brief meeting with actor Tom Hanks in the last days of China Beach eventually catapulted him to the big time. Hanks had read Brothers in Arms and wanted to do a movie about the siege at Khe Sanh. "The siege was emblematic of the entire war," Hanks told me recently, "but it was difficult to adapt it into the narrative of a two-hour motion picture. I talked to Bill about it, but then I moved on." Hanks still had the idea in the back of his mind when he met Broyles again, on the Apollo 13 project.
David Friendly, an old friend of Broyles's from the Newsweek days who was now a producer, approached him about writing the screenplay on behalf of director Ron Howard, whose company had purchased the film rights to Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell's yet-to-be-written memoirs. Broyles telephoned another old friend, Al Reinert, who had produced an award-winning documentary about the Apollo missions, For All Mankind. Reinert had hours of taped interviews and had become good friends with Lovell and other astronauts. The Broyles family had been closely involved in the documentary, which was ten years in the making: Bill Broyles, Sr., was the vice president of the production company, and Bill's sister, Betsy, was a co-producer. Reinert was like a member of the family.
Broyles and Reinert signed on, and over the next year, they wrote three drafts, drawing mostly on their own interviews and on Reinert's store of knowledge. Kevin Costner was originally considered for the role of Lovell, but the producers grabbed Hanks, who had just finished Philadelphia, for which he would win an Oscar. Reinert and Broyles were asked to write a new draft for Hanks. Reinert remembered their story conference: "On the way, Bill said, 'Let's do a good cop, bad cop routine. You be the bad cop.' Hanks, a serious reader of scripts, came in with thirty pages of notes. We went over it line by line. Hanks had an actor's gift for making a line he hated sound like the sorriest words ever assembled in the English language. It was my job to defend the line, while Broyles played Mr. Reason, siding with Hanks."
Apollo 13 won an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay for the two Texas writers—they lost to Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility—and it got Broyles a three-picture deal with Twentieth-Century Fox: Cast Away was the first, and the second will be the Khe Sanh film he and Hanks had talked about a few years before. Over the next six years Broyles wrote four major versions of Cast Away; the fourth went through sixty drafts, and he wrote a crucial new scene two weeks before the film was scheduled to open. "What's interesting about Bill," Hanks said, "is his reference point is what he's seen and done, not what he's seen on the screen or read in a book. He gets an original idea, then he works it over and over and over. He worked with me for three years doing rewrites, then he worked two years rewriting it with [director] Bob Zemeckis, then another two years with the two of us. Any other writer would have walked away long ago, but Bill doesn't let his ego get in the way, and he doesn't quit until he's got it right."
WHEN I VISITED BILL AND ANDREA at their getaway in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last August, he was working on Khe Sanh and two other screenplays and writing the third draft of a novel he began six years ago, a tale of the life of Billy the Kid as related by a contemporary. Their home is a wood-and-glass two-story contemporary, facing the majestic spiral of the Grand Teton. Growing up in Baytown, Broyles kept an Ansel Adams photograph of this same mountain tacked on his bedroom wall. Andrea works in a studio inside an unpainted barn, and Bill writes in a tiny tack room, bare except for a desk and a laptop. Broyles seemed at peace in this setting. His smile was unforced, his hair dusted with gray, his husky voice soft and relaxed. Yet, inevitably, there is always a new challenge. This time it was his novel. He knows now that he can write a good screenplay. A novel is something else. One afternoon, as we strolled beside a creek, with two-year-old James riding on his shoulders and five-year-old Katie walking alongside, Broyles said, "Writing a novel has restored my creative humility."
I saw him again in mid-January, back in Austin from skiing in Wyoming and a quick trip to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where David, his 24-year-old son, had graduated from boot camp before heading for the much tougher training of the pararescue service. "Like those guys in The Perfect Storm," Broyles said, adding that daughter Susannah, now twenty, is attending Austin Community College. I asked him how his novel was doing, and he said he had finally finished it. Now it was making the rounds of publishing houses. Nothing scares a writer more than waiting. Nothing makes him feel so vulnerable, helpless, and totally alone.
"What will you do if the novel gets rejected?" I asked.
"Write another one" was his immediate answer, and I knew it could have been nothing else.
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