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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Carroll: Rae calmed him down, gave him a reason to live, a center for his erratic orbit. She was just great in every way to him. And he knew it. He was aware of how lucky he had gotten with Rae.
Rae Lewis: I didn’t even entertain the possibility of a family. But also he was a serious boozer for many years. And I think that that did not make me wish to have children. But I didn’t want to anyway. The reason I bring up the children is because in letters to friends, he wrote about the possibility of having a family and ay, ay, ay! I wanted a life of adventure and to be the glamorous girlfriend of the smart, rueful detective.
Robert Draper (correspondent at GQ; former writer at TEXAS MONTHLY; met Lewis while researching Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History): Around the time I interviewed him for the book, he hadn’t really done any work at all for two or three years. His confidence was shot. Maybe, to put a finer point on it, his ability to reconcile his standards with the realities of the publishing business had gone the way of the buffalo. Not to give myself too much credit, but in his eyes my book had restored his rightful place in magazine journalism, and it was only after that that he started to churn out magazine stories again. Although by churn out I mean three stories a year rather than one a year.
Hickey: Grover was a little older than me, I guess. He wasn’t nearly as cynical as people of my generation. He believed in truth and beauty and all that. So he would go off on rants on the sorts of things we shrugged our shoulders at, like, “Jann Wenner’s an asshole.” It’s like, tell a priest! That sort of thing. “New York editors are sleazebags.” So what? ’Twas ever thus. He took everything personally. He took the weather personally.
Kit Rachlis (editor of Los Angeles; edited Lewis at the L.A. Weekly in the early nineties): I was at the L.A. Weekly, and one Saturday I got a phone call at home from a writer named Clancy Sigal. He says, “Kit, this is Clancy.” And I thought, “You’ve never called me at home in my entire life.” And he said, “Do you know Grover Lewis?” I said, “No, but I’m familiar with his work.” He said, “Grover is interested in writing a piece for you, but he’s too shy to call you. A friend of ours, Gus Hasford, just died. Gus Hasford wrote a book that became Full Metal Jacket, and Grover would like to write his obit.” I said, “Yikes. Well, we don’t really do obits at the L.A. Weekly, but it’s Grover Lewis. Of course I’ll do it.” The idea that a writer of Grover’s stature and accomplishment would need an intermediary to find out whether he could write a short obituary for a short alternative paper—it seemed so wrong to me. So I called Grover. I gave him a deadline, and six weeks later he handed in a 7,500-word piece on Gus Hasford that was as near perfect a piece as anything I’ve ever edited in my entire life. I think probably two paragraphs got rewritten; otherwise there were about thirty word changes. It was near, near perfect.
Draper: I cajoled him into writing for TEXAS MONTHLY, and he decided he wanted to go back and revisit Oak Cliff as a story.
Curtis: He was very professional, although high maintenance. It took a long time for the story to come in, and when it did come in, I didn’t like it in its entirety. So I wrote Grover a letter: “Here’s how I’d like to see it reworked.” Very gentle, polite. A few days later, the phone rang, and it was Grover. And he just—it was—this was the best thing he had ever written and how could I be so dense and so tone-deaf and plain ignorant. The phone call ended, and I remember I was bent over; it was like somebody had kicked me in the stomach. A few days passed, and I got a call from Grover, and it was the complete opposite: “Greg, I’ve read over the story. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. This story is terrible. That I would send something like that to you—I’m just ashamed.” I found myself saying, “No, now, Grover, that’s not right, you know, I did think there were these things, but it—” and he said, “No, no. It’s just trash.” In the end, his standards were so high that even he couldn’t live up to them.
Hickey: After the [Oak Cliff] piece ran, he got the book deal from Judith Regan. Judith Regan was thinking, “Oooo-kay! Child abuse, murder, violence!” That’s what she does. Still does. So, yeah, Grover was fully aware of the ironies that accrued around it. The whole going back through and documenting all the things you’ve overcome is sort of silly. “Ohhh, I can still remember in sixth grade . . .” Jesus. What the f— is that about?
Farewell
Several pages into writing his memoir, Goodbye If You Call That Gone, Lewis was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He died on April 1, 1995, a few months shy of his sixty-first birthday. He was buried in Rae’s hometown, Kanarraville, Utah.
Kafka Wagner: At the end of his life he was on an up. He had quit drinking and he had gotten things together and he and Rae had this place in Utah he really liked. He had come back to Texas to trace the roots of his family and write about his mother’s story, and he was working with Judith Regan on this book about his parents’ terrible experience. Then he got sick.
Carroll: It’s a morbid game—and I bet you’ve played it—in which you consider all the people in your life and rank them according to most likely to die early. And he topped that chart.
Garnier: I think there was a reason he was saving all his stuff. He was directing his posterity. I’m sure he thought, “Well, they don’t get it while I’m alive; maybe they’ll get it when I’m gone.”
Kenneth Turan (film critic for the Los Angeles Times; worked with Lewis at New West): Posterity is so quirky. Grover was as good as anyone who wrote nonfiction journalism in his era. You can hold his stuff up against anybody’s. Who knows why some people get to be better known than others? But in terms of quality, Grover took second place to no one.
Rachlis: He asked me to read the first couple of pages of his memoir, and I said, “Absolutely.” I got the first eleven or twelve pages, and I felt guilty because I didn’t get to them until a few days later. It was classic Grover, near perfect; every sentence was carved into stone. And I got him on the phone Saturday morning to say, “Sorry it has taken me so long,” and Rae said, “I have horrible news. He’s got terminal cancer.” And he died six weeks later.
Kafka Wagner: I saw him out in L.A., and a friend had a dinner party and he and Rae came, and the diagnosis wasn’t certain, and he was very upbeat. He was brave to the end. I didn’t expect anything less; he was very dignified. He was kind of old-school and courtly.
Rachlis: Grover was an extraordinary writer in a form that was not considered art by most. Certainly writing feature pieces about movies for places like Rolling Stone wasn’t. And yet you look at that body of work, and it’s a stunning body of work. And that body of work is about what it means to be American. That sounds really corny, but that’s what it’s about: what it means to be an individual in this culture that both demands that we conform and yet prizes those who refuse to conform.
Carolyn See (novelist; friend): The day he died, we went over to be with Rae, and as we were leaving, another journalist, who had suffered his own disappointments, said, “You know, you have to have a thick skin in this business.” And Grover didn’t have a thick skin. I think there are some people who have terrible childhoods, and what it does is make them strong and tough and mean and nothing can hurt them ever again. Or it mortally wounds them and they never get over it, and that would be Grover. He had too much to take too young, and nothing good happened for way too long until he began to write and married Rae.
Kafka Wagner: I miss him. It was tragic and heartbreaking, but in a way it was like, he had a great time. He says in the poem “Thanks for the Use of the Hall”—I think this poem really sums it up—“It was really a very fine circus.” I’ve never met anyone remotely like him. I’ve never said to anyone, “You remind me of Grover Lewis.”
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