L. on Wheels
On an eight-day road trip with Larry L. King, the crotchety West Texan who wrote some of the greatest magazine stories of all time, only one thing was certain: I never knew what was going to come out of his mouth next.
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“Well, that showed up in the papers and it got to him. So one day I get a letter from him saying something about how he’d like to take me out behind a barn and teach me some Southern manners. Well, that really pissed me off. So I wrote back and said, ‘You may be as tough an old Southern boy as you think you are, but I doubt you’re bulletproof, you sorry son of a bitch. Most sincerely, Larry L. King.’ And I thought that was that.
“But then Burt told the studio big shots that he wouldn’t come to the world premiere in Austin if I went. Maybe he thought I really was going to shoot him. Well, I hated to give him his way, but the studio wanted him to be there, so I agreed not to go.
“But I had to do something to him while he was down there. I had written a book about the making of the play and the movie, and I had included all the shit about Burt. Of course, that was the chapter that Playboy excerpted, and the issue happened to come out just as Burt was starting his PR tour in Texas. So I called Shrake and said, ‘There is bound to be a f—ing way we can get a copy of that to Burt.’ Well, Shrake sent his secretary with a copy of it to Burt’s press conference, where she innocently asked him to sign it. Burt went ape shit. He tore the magazine up and said that he’d never met me but that if he ever did, he was going to hit me so hard my whole family would die. Just what we wanted. Immediately the gossip columnists started to call, and to each of them I’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sorry he said that about my dear old parents, because they’re both dead. I don’t know why he’d say that. You think he was drinking or doping?’
“And that got in all the papers too, and there was such a flap about it. And then, I’m proud to say, with that very movie he lost his title as number one box office star and never recovered it.”
Larry opted to pass on a swing through Putnam, a detour that would have added a mere four hours to the trip. He allowed, however, in a quiet moment between Waco and Austin, that after he’d gone on the oxygen in D.C., three years ago, he hadn’t expected to ever get back to Texas. But any ghosts stirred up by his return to his native state were drowned out by the fanfare awaiting him in Austin, where forty-odd old friends and family members from around the country had assembled to cheer his award. The official festivities kicked off with an authors’ breakfast at the Governor’s Mansion early Saturday, where, with his wife in attendance, Larry was on his best behavior. He even smiled for a photograph with Republican governor Rick Perry. At the Bookend Award ceremony, later that morning, with six hundred attendees packed into the selfsame House chamber at the Capitol that Larry had toured with his father 34 years before, former congressman Charlie Wilson introduced him with a short speech that, as Larry put it, was “diplomatically” devoid of any salacious recollections. Then Larry made his own remarks, thanking among others his parents, Mark Twain, his high school football coach, Bud Shrake, and Willie Morris.
“And last but far from least,” he concluded, “I thank my wife-lawyer-agent, Barbara S. Blaine, for putting up with my writer’s insanity and grumpiness when my words won’t decently parade themselves across the page and for hectoring me to reorder my words until they are close to right. Which is the most any writer can hope for.” That, and the standing ovation that followed.
DAVE DIDN’T MAKE the return trip with us to D.C. So it was just Larry and me on that same 1,500-mile drive, minus the Alabama sightseeing; at Larry’s uncharacteristically gentle insistence, we kept to the interstate. To be honest, a few of his stories repeated themselves, but when they end in punch lines like “Plimpton looked at me like I’d just hit him in the face with a sock full of wet shit,” they can stand a second listen.
The two of us shared hotel rooms. The first night was a Monday in Monroe, Louisiana, in a small Holiday Inn room with two queen-size beds, a television, and little else. As he did everyplace we stayed, Larry fired up his oxygen tank as soon as we got to the room, fit its hose over his head and into his nostrils, changed into striped pajamas, and phoned Barbara. Then we laid in our beds and watched the Jets beat up on the Dolphins. After about an hour of air, Larry was ready to talk.
“Did you ever read a story I wrote later on called ‘Happy Birthday to a Fine Boy’?”
“Which one was that?” I asked.
“That was a very important story to me, a big part of my history,” he said. “It was about how I learned the truth as to how my grandfather had died long before I was born. He’d been shot by a man that I’d always known as a close family friend, who I had been taught by my parents to call ‘Uncle Charlie.’ He always brought me gifts at Christmas and birthdays, and that’s where I got that title, from a New Testament he gave me for my eleventh birthday and wrote ‘Happy birthday to a fine boy’ in it.”
Now I remembered. Charlie Hasp, not yet close enough to the King family to be considered an uncle, had come home from work early one day in 1904 and found Mrs. Hasp in bed with Clyde King’s father. Calmly, Mr. Hasp had then walked Mr. King out into a field, instructed him to kneel, and shot him in the back of the head with a shotgun. Clyde, twelve years old when his dad was murdered, later found Jesus and, judging his father to have been in the wrong, forgave Charlie and made him a member of the family. Larry learned all of this just after he himself had turned twelve.
“I never understood how my own father could have become so close to that man, could have welcomed him into our home. It made me so goddammed angry at my father and at the church that allowed him to stand in judgment that way. Between that and having to grow up so poor, and not being able to remember when the family had had some pretty good times . . .” He looked off past the television.
“Dad had had his own blacksmith shop, which had made him some money back in the old days, but then, as he put it, ‘The car come along and I was blowed up.’ He did do a little oil development, some shallow-field stuff around Putnam, but then the crash hit and wiped that all out. But maybe it gave me some ambition. When I was a star on the high school football team after we’d moved ourselves to Midland, I’d be invited to certain parties but not others. Now I realize that those parties were about marriage, about getting rich folks’ kids together. That’s why I wasn’t invited, and I resented it.”
I thought about how far it was from Midland to Manhattan and tried to reconcile competing images of Larry that popped into my head: a young kid leaning into a doorman’s face at a country club in Midland and the self-styled “famous arthur” holding court at Elaine’s, with Willie Morris and David Halberstam hanging on every word.
“Halberstam and I shared an office when we wrote for Willie at Harper’s,” he said after a while. “He was the hardest-working writer I’ve ever known. Still is. Writes a fat book, then a small book, then a fat book. Always working.”
“How important was Willie to you?” I asked.
“Willie Morris really did make my career. He gave me a place to write and insisted that I find my own voice. He had chosen Elaine’s to be the bar where all the writers hung out, and it was sort of his second office. He’d sit and drink with a writer and start ’em to talking about something, and then when their eyes started glowing, he’d say, ‘Why don’t you write about that for me.’ He could tell when you really cared and were bound to write a good piece. He was just brilliant that way.”
Larry got up and walked to the bathroom. He had thirty feet of hose on his oxygen so he didn’t have to come unplugged. While he was up, the Jets scored again, and I heard him yell from the bathroom, “If the Dolphins don’t start playing better, I do believe that Miami coach’s ass belongs to the gypsies.” Then he came back in and lay down.
After a short while, he spoke. “God, I miss Willie. Cursed attrition has taken him and a lot of my old friends. Warren Burnett. My cousin Lanvil Gilbert. Malcolm McGregor, a former state representative from El Paso. He was even younger than me.
“You look at my life, you’d think I’d be gone before a lot of those people.”
“When young people die, it’s supposedly tragic,” I said. “It’s an event. Does it get easier?”
“Oh, it stops being a surprise. But it doesn’t get easy, no.”
He paused. But then he rolled onto his side and started to smile. For a moment he looked like a little kid. “Have I told you what I’m gonna do when I die?” He sat up in bed and put his old feet on the floor. “I want to be cremated. And I’ve told Barbara and the children that I want—I still own the lot in Putnam where I was born. I’ve kept the taxes paid up, and I want them to go over there and scatter the ashes on the same plot I was born on. That’ll take me full circle. And then there’s a song I’ve taught the kids that they’ve all got to sing.”
He raised his right hand high over his head and started swinging it up and down and stomping his feet, one-two-three-four, leading a procession he saw in his mind. And at the top of his battered old lungs he began to sing his self-penned death march:
Da Da King was mighty handsome
Beloved by millions throughout the world
And they all cheered for his statues, with features fair, and hair of curls
So thick and beautiful
And people worship him by the hour—
Larry stopped mid-song, putting an abrupt halt to the graveyard parade.
“Oh, my God, that’s funny,” was all I could muster. And then, “But you can’t stop there. How does it end?”
Larry didn’t answer. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.
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