Return to Splendor
Hunter S. Thompson, Larry McMurtry, and other literary lions remember San Antonio native Grover Lewis, the pioneering journalist who became one of the greatest magazine writers of our time— and whose best stories are being republished next month by the University of Texas Press.
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Tim Cahill (editor-at-large at Outside; former staff writer at Rolling Stone): He probably operated much more comfortably from the position of an underdog, but frankly, in the office for some number of years, he was a big star, maybe the star. It was sort of between Grover and Hunter Thompson, who was the literary lion at the time.
Hunter S. Thompson (writer; worked with Lewis at Rolling Stone): He was a cowboy, but in a quiet kind of way, like the difference between Austin and Dallas. He could get very dark. He would get into funks, and he had to be coaxed out of them. He’d stay that way for days. My job, as I saw it, was to get Grover out of the funk. I had great respect for Grover. He was a classic, solitary, almost academic writer. I mean, he was smart as a f—in’ whip. You could study Grover, and I did.
Gregory Curtis (former editor of TEXAS MONTHLY; knew Lewis while living in San Francisco): There was a bar we liked to go to in North Beach on upper Grant, and one night there was this guy standing in a doorway, and as we walked by, he whispered, “Grasssss.” “Aciiid.” “Hassshhhh.” And so Grover stopped, and he put his face right up next to this guy’s face. The guy was standing on a step, but Grover was as tall as he was—even though he was on the ground—and he had those big, thick glasses that made his pupils look the size of quarters, and they always vibrated back and forth. So right in the guy’s face, Grover, really loud, says, “I’ve heard of ’em! I’ve heard of ’em! I’ve heard of ’em!” The guy was completely petrified. He had no idea what to make of this.
Wenner: He was a very unlikely person for Rolling Stone in a way, but then we all were. He certainly did not fit the hippie rock and roll mold. Grover was more an old-school fifties kind of guy. Smoking, raspy voice, drinking all the time, you know? He was much more of an older, literary thing to me than a hotshot like Eszterhas or Hunter or our kind of new-worldies rock and rollers.
Jon Carroll (columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle; edited Lewis at New West): He was not fond of rock writing. He took stuff seriously. A lot of rock writing was self-important and inappropriate to the quality of the work under review. He didn’t have a lot of use for that.
Rae Lewis: He had a sign above his desk that said “I Do Not Write No Rock ’n’ Roll.” He was interested in music—I think he just found musicians not as interesting as actors.
Hickey: He was attracted to a certain kind of redneck-macho-loser poet. Bukowski-land, Robert Mitchum, those people.
Curtis: I think Grover saw himself in his subjects: They were doomed; they were brilliant; they never got the recognition they deserved; their lives were off-center.
Hickey: Jann Wenner’s idea of a reward for writing about rock and roll was to write about movies. And movies are really boring. You go out in the middle of nowhere; you stay in a motel; you drink with goddam camera guys. But Grover didn’t mind this. He got good access to people who don’t know anybody in the world, who have never stood up in front of an audience and acted. But he invented the tour story format, like the Allman Brothers story. Or the “movie set” story, like the Last Picture Show story [“Splendor in the Short Grass”]. There’s a way of recasting these events as a kind of narrative. That’s really Grover’s doing.
Perry: “Splendor in the Short Grass” was a new standard of writing for Rolling Stone. And it was a new standard for writing about movies too.
Peter Bogdanovich (director of The Last Picture Show): I don’t remember how Grover got on the set, obviously through Larry [McMurtry]. He introduced him. And at some point we decided he’d be good to play Sonny’s father. I had written something, and we told Grover what the lines were, and he did it. I don’t remember that I was told that he was going to write a piece about the film until it was a fait accompli. Because I never saw him take notes. No tape recorder. No interview. I was surprised when I saw the piece. At the time, I remember being very unhappy with it and thinking that it was ungenerous, unkind, and inaccurate, if well written. And I remember being rather angry about it at the time. I don’t believe I ever saw Grover again.
Rae Lewis: The thing about Grover—I saw this time and time again—was he had a reporter’s instinct for relaxing his subjects. By the time he’d interview them, he had researched them. When he talked to Robert Mitchum [for Rolling Stone], he knew about Mitchum’s short stories. He would start talking and point out that he was taping the conversation. He wanted them to understand that they would be quoted. But he just had a way of talking so they’d relax, and next thing you knew they were going to town.
Philippe Garnier (writer for Libération; hung out with Lewis in Los Angeles in the eighties and nineties): [His style] was not good for a lot of people’s egos. His portrait of Mitchum was actually embarrassing to Mitchum. Every interview he gave after that Rolling Stone piece, Mitchum denigrated the thing and played it down. It was in his biography. He says he spoke with the guy from Rolling Stone for five minutes, and that’s just not true. Well, opening Grover’s boxes after he died, I can assure you that whatever Mitchum says in Grover’s story is on tape. Every word. You can look it up.
Cahill: He was very particular about accuracy. I remember quite clearly he tended to tape-record a lot of his interviews. We had the same transcriber, and I thought the person did a really good job, but Grover was hell on her because he wanted precisely what they said, especially the “uhs” and “ers” and “ums.” Grover wanted that. So if somebody said, “Well, I’ve been a musician for, ooh, um, er, thirty years,” Grover wanted that “ooh,” “um,” “er” in there. Grover had a lot of people say, “I didn’t say that,” and Grover had it on tape. Down to the last “er” and “uh.”
Carroll: I made him a staff writer [at New West] pretty quickly, and one of the first ideas was to go cover the trial of [Hustler magazine founder] Larry Flynt. And he was walking five feet behind him when Larry Flynt was shot. He called me on the phone, just panicked. Just terrified. He said, “You have to get me out of here. They’re crazy. They’re shooting.” Which is a reasonable conclusion when a bullet has just passed your body and hit the guy in front of you. We figured out how to get a plane. And then the other side of me, the monster journalist, wanted the story for the next issue. We had the only eyewitness to the Larry Flynt shooting in the country, and he said, “I can’t write a word.” So we then come to a very interesting question: Am I a friend of Grover Lewis’s? But I also wanted the story. So I put him and Larry Dietz, the previous editor of New West, out on the back of Larry’s house in Santa Monica with two typewriters facing each other. Grover talked and wrote, and Larry listened and typed. And together, over the weekend, they produced the manuscript. Monday was our deadline for an issue to come out on Thursday.
Perry: He practically had a nervous breakdown. Imagine—when your eyesight is so bad in the first place, and then somebody’s shooting somebody next to you. His wife thought he might actually go around the bend.
Slowing Down
By the eighties Lewis’s health had begun to fail, and a lifetime of smoking, drinking, and bad eating had taken its toll. For the most part, he was writing only one or two stories a year.
Hickey: You’d go to his house, and there would be four or five books facedown on the table. And he pretended to be writing. To be honest—I’m not a nice person—I always thought he was being a sissy all those years. He’d let Rae go off to work, and he’d sit around and roll his own cigarettes all day. Prowl around the apartment, look at the ocean. But I’m not going to call somebody up and tell them they’re f—ing up. If they’re f—ing up, they know it.
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