Killy nodded, saying nothing. The man shoved an airline ticket envelope at him, grinning self-consciously: "Could you autograph this for my little girl, please? She's all excited about being on the same plane with you."
Killy scrawled an illegible signature on the paper, then stared blankly at the cheap camera the girl was aiming at him. The man backed away, unnerved by Killy's failure to remember him. "Sorry to bother you," he said. "But my little girl, you know. . . since we seem to be delayed here. . . well, thanks very much."
Killy shrugged as the man backed off. He hadn't said a word and I felt a little sorry for the reject, who appeared to be a broker of some kind.
The moppet came back with the camera, wanting a second shot "in case the first one doesn't come out." She took one very quickly, then asked J.-C. to remove his glasses. "No!" he snapped. "The light hurts my eyes." There was a raw, wavering note in his voice, and the child, a shade more perceptive than her father, took her picture and left without apologies.
Now, less than a year later, Killy is making very expensive and elaborate commercials for United Airlines. He was in Aspen recently "secretly" filming a ski race for showing, months later, on national TV. He didn't ring me up. . .
Killy refused both the drink and the meal. He was clearly on edge and I was pleased to find that anger made him talkative. By this time I had disabused myself of the notion that we had any basic rapport; his habit-smiles were for people who asked habit-questions -- fan-magazine bullshit and pulp philosophy: How do you like America? (It is truly wonderful. I would like to see it all in a Camaro.) How did it feel to win three gold medals in the Olympics? (It felt truly wonderful. I plan to have them mounted on the dashboard of my Camaro.)
Somewhere in the middle of the flight, with our conversation lagging badly, I reverted to a Hollywood-style of journalism that Killy instantly picked up on. "Tell me," I said. "What's the best place you know? If you were free to go anyplace in the world right now -- no work, no obligation, just to enjoy yourself -- where would it be?"
His first answer was "home," and after that came Paris and a clutch of French resort areas -- until I had to revise the question and eliminate France altogether.
Finally he settled on Hong Kong. "Why?" I asked. His face relaxed in a broad, mischievous grin. "Because a friend of mine is head of the police there," he said, "and when I go to Hong Kong I can do anything I want."
I laughed, seeing it all on film -- the adventures of a filthy-rich French cowboy, turned loose in Hong Kong with total police protection. With J.-C. Killy as the hellion and maybe Rod Steiger as his cop-friend. A sure winner. . .
Looking back, I think that Hong Kong note was the truest thing Jean-Claude ever said to me. Certainly it was the most definitive -- and it was also the only one of my questions he obviously enjoyed answering.
By the time we got to Chicago I'd decided to spare us both the agony of prolonging the "interview" all the way to Baltimore. "I think I'll get off here," I said as we left the plane. He nodded, too tired to care. Just then we were confronted by a heavy blonde girl with a clipboard. "Mister Killy?" she said. J.-C. nodded. The girl mumbled her name and said she was there to help him make connections to Baltimore. "How was Sun Valley?" she asked. "Was it good skiing?" Killy shook his head, still walking very fast up the corridor. The girl was half trotting beside us. "Well, I hope the other activities were satisfactory," she said with a smile. Her emphasis was so heavy, so abysmally raw, that I glanced over to see if she was drooling.
"Who are you?" she asked suddenly.
"Never mind," I said. "I'm leaving."
Now, many months later, my clearest memory of that whole Killy scene is a momentary expression on the face of a man who had nothing to do with it. He was a drummer and lead singer in a local jazz-rock band I heard one night at a New Hampshire ski resort where Killy was making a sales appearance. I was killing time in a dull midnight bistro when this nondescript little bugger kicked off on his own version of a thing called "Proud Mary" -- a heavy blues shot from Creedence Clearwater. He was getting right into it, and somewhere around the third chorus I recognized the weird smile of a man who had found his own rhythm, that rumored echo of a high white sound that most men never hear. I sat there in the dark smoke of that place and watched him climb. . . far up on some private mountain to that point where you look in the mirror and see a bright bold streaker, blowing all the fuses and eating them like popcorn on the way up.
That image had to remind me of Killy, streaking down the hills at Grenoble for the first, second and third of those incredible three gold medals. Jean-Claude had been there -- to that rare high place where only the snow leopards live; and now, 26-years-old with more dollars than he can use or count, there is nothing else to match those peaks he has already beaten. Now it is all downhill for the world's richest ski bum. He was good enough -- and lucky -- for a while, to live in that Win-Lose, Black-White, Do-or-Die world of the international super TV athlete. It was a beautiful show while it lasted, and Killy did his thing better than anyone else has ever done it before.
But now, with nothing else to win, he is down on the killing floor with the rest of us -- sucked into strange and senseless wars on unfamiliar terms; haunted by a sense of loss that no amount of money can ever replace; mocked by the cotton-candy rules of a mean game that still awes him. . . locked into a gilded life-style where winning means keeping his mouth shut and reciting, on cue, from other men's scripts. This is Jean-Claude Killy's new world: He is a handsome middle-class French boy who trained hard and learned to ski so well that now his name is immensely saleable on the marketplace of a crazily inflated culture-economy that eats its heroes like hotdogs and honors them on about the same level.
His TV-hero image probably surprises him more than it does the rest of us. We take whatever heroes come our way, and we're not inclined to haggle. Killy seems to understand this, too. He is taking advantage of a money-scene that never existed before and might never work again -- at least not in his lifetime or ours, and maybe not even next year.
On balance, it seems unfair to dismiss him as a witless greedhead, despite all the evidence. Somewhere behind that wistful programmed smile I suspect there is something akin to what Norman Mailer once called (speaking of James Jones) "an animal sense of who has the power." There is also a brooding contempt for the American system that has made him what he is. Killy doesn't understand this country; he doesn't even like it -- but there is no question in his mind about his own proper role in a scene that is making him rich. He is his manager's creature, and if Mark McCormack wants him to star in a geek film or endorse some kind of skin-grease he's never heard of. . . well, that's the way it is. Jean-Claude is a good soldier; he takes orders well and he learns quickly. He would rise through the ranks in any army.
Killy reacts; thinking is not his gig. So it is hard to honor him for whatever straight instincts he still cultivates in private -- while he mocks them in public, for huge amounts of money. The echo of Gatsby's style recalls the truth that Jimmy Gatz was really just a rich crook and a booze salesman. But Killy is not Gatsby. He is a bright young Frenchman with a completely original act. . . and a pragmatic frame of reference that is better grounded, I suspect, than my own. He is doing pretty well for himself, and nothing in his narrow, high-powered experience can allow him to understand how I can watch his act and say that it looks, to me, like a very hard dollar-- maybe the hardest.
A Final Note from the Author
Owl Farm
Please insert this quote at beginning or end of Killy piece. -- Thompson.
"No eunuch flatters his own noise more shamefully nor seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry."
-- The quote, as I have it, is attributed to one Billy Lee Burroughs. . . but if memory serves, I think it comes from the writings of K. Marx. In any case, I can trace it down if need be. . .
Scanlan's Monthly, vol 1, no.
1, March 1970
The Ultimate Free Lancer
You asked me for an article on whatever I wanted to write about and since you don't pay I figure that gives me carte blanche. I started out tonight on an incoherent bitch about the record business. . . I was looking at the jacket copy on the "Blues Project" album. . . but the "producer's" name was in huge script on the back, and underneath it were four or five other names. . . punks and narks and other ten-percenters who apparently had more leverage than the musicians who made the album, and so managed to get their names on the record jacket.
I was brooding about this -- which I'll write about sometime later -- when I picked up the latest Free Press and read an obituary for a three-year-old kid named "Godot". . . which was nice, but as I read it I was reminded again of Lionel Olay and how the Free Press commemorated his death with a small block of unsold advertising space that had to be used anyway, so why not for Lionel? I'm also reminded that I've asked you twice for a copy of his article on Lenny Bruce (in which Lionel wrote his own obituary), and that you've disregarded both queries. Maybe there's no connection between this and the fact that the Blues Project people were fucked out of any mention except photos on their own album, but I think there is. I see it as two more good examples of the cheap, mean, grinning-hippie capitalism that pervades the whole New Scene. . . a scene which provides the Underground Press Syndicate with most of its copy and income. Frank Zappa's comments on rock joints and light shows (FP 1230) was a welcome piece of heresy in an atmosphere that is already rigid with pre-public senility. The concept of the UPS is too right to argue with, but the reality is something else. As Frank Zappa indicated, if only in a roundabout way, there are a lot of people trying to stay alive and working WITHIN the UPS spectrum, and not on the ten-percent fringes. That's where Time magazine lives. . . way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the wide world of Chamber of Commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.
Which brings us back to Lionel, who lived and died as walking proof that all heads exist alone and at their own risk. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe his funeral procession on the Sunset Strip was enough to bring even cops to their knees. . . but since I didn't hear anything about that action, I have to doubt it. I suspect Lionel died pretty much as he lived: as a free lance writer hustler, grass-runner and general free spirit. I'm sure a lot of people knew him better than I did, but I think I knew him pretty well. I first met him in Big Sur in 1960, when we were both broke and grubbing for rent money. After that we did a lot of writing back and forth, but we'd only meet (usually at the Hot Springs in Big Sur) after long months of different action in very different worlds (he was broke somewhere in New England when I was in Peru, and later in Rio I got a letter from him with a Chicago postmark). . . when I got back to New York he wrote from L.A., saying he'd decided to settle there because it was the "only home we had."
I've never been sure if he included me in that definition, but I know he was talking about a lot of people beyond himself and his wife, Beverly. Lionel saw the West Coast of the 1960's as Malcolm Cowley saw New York after World War One -- as "the homeland of the uprooted." He saw his own orbit as something that included Topanga, Big Sur, Tijuana, the Strip and occasional runs up north to the Bay Area. He wrote for Cavalier, and the Free Press and anyone who would send him a check. When the checks didn't come he ran grass to New York and paid his rent with LSD. And when he had something that needed a long run of writing time he would take off in his Porsche or his Plymouth or any one of a dozen other cars that came his way, and cadge a room from Mike Murphy at Hot Springs, or in brother Dennis' house across the canyon. Lionel and Dennis were old friends, but Lionel knew too much -- and insisted on saying it -- to use that friendly leverage as a wedge to the screen-writing business, where Dennis Murphy was making it big. Lionel had already published two novels and he was a far-better plot-maker than most of the Hollywood hacks, but every time he got a shot at the big cop-out money he blew it with a vengeance. Now and then one of the New York editors would give him enough leeway to write what he wanted, and a few of his articles are gems. He did one for Cavalier on the soul of San Francisco that is probably the best thing ever written on that lovely, gutless town. Later he wrote a profile on Lenny Bruce (for the Free Press) that -- if I ran a newspaper -- I'd print every year in boldface type, as an epitaph for free lancers everywhere.
Lionel was the ultimate free lancer. In the nearly ten years I knew him, the only steady work he did was as a columnist for the Monterey Herald. . . and even then he wrote on his own terms on his own subjects, and was inevitably fired. Less than a year before he died his willful ignorance of literary politics led him to blow a very rich assignment from Life magazine, which asked him for a profile on Marty Ransahoff, a big name Hollywood producer then fresh from a gold-plated bomb called "The Sandpiper." Lionel went to London with Ransahoff ("the first-cabin all the way," as he wrote me from the S.S. United States) and after two months in the great man's company he went back to Topanga and wrote a piece that resembled nothing so much as Mencken's brutal obituary on William Jennings Bryan. Ransahoff was described as a "pompous toad" -- which was not exactly what Life was looking for. The article naturally bombed, and Lionel was back on the bricks where he'd spent the last half of his forty-odd years. I'm not sure how old he was when he died, but it wasn't much over forty. . . according to Beverly he suffered a mild stroke that sent him to the hospital, and then a serious stroke that finished him.
Word of his death was a shock to me, but not particularly surprising since I'd called him a week or so before and heard from Beverly that he was right on the edge. More than anything else, it came as a harsh confirmation of the ethic that Lionel had always lived but never talked about. . . the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules. Like his Basque anarchist father in Chicago, he died without making much of a dent. I don't even know where he's buried, but what the hell? The important thing is where he lived.
Now, what? While the new wave flowered, Lenny Bruce was hounded to death by the cops. For "obscenity." Thirty thousand people (according to Paul Krassner) are serving time in the jails of this vast democracy on marijuana charges, and the world we have to live in is controlled by a stupid thug from Texas. A vicious liar, with the ugliest family in Christendom. . . mean Okies feeling honored by the cheap indulgence of a George Hamilton, a stinking animal ridiculed even in Hollywood. And California, "the most progressive state," elects a governor straight out of a George Grosz painting, a political freak in every sense of the word except California politics. . . Ronnie Reagan, the White Hope of the West.
Jesus, no wonder Lionel had a stroke. What a nightmare it must have been for him to see the honest rebellion that came out of World War Two taken over by a witless phony like Warhol. . . the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Lights, Noise, Love the Bomb! And then to see a bedrock madman like Ginsberg copping out with tolerance poems and the same sort of swill that normally comes from the Vatican. Kerouac hiding out with his "mere" on Long Island or maybe St. Petersburg. . . Kennedy with his head blown off and Nixon back from the dead, running wild in the power vacuum of Lyndon's hopeless bullshit. . . and of course Reagan, the new dean of Berkeley. Progress Marches On, courtesy, as always of General Electric. . . with sporadic assists from Ford, GM, ATT, Lockheed and Hoover's FBI.
And there's the chill of it. Lionel was one of the original anarchist-head-beatnik-free lancers of the 1950's. . . a bruised fore-runner of Leary's would-be "drop-out generation" of the 1960's. The Head Generation. . . a loud, cannibalistic gig where the best are fucked for the worst reasons, and the worst make a pile by feeding off the best. Promoters, hustlers, narks, con men -- all selling the New Scene to Time magazine and the Elks Club. The handlers get rich while the animals either get busted or screwed to the floor with bad contracts. Who's making money off the Blues Project? Is it Verve (a division of MGM), or the five ignorant bastards who thought they were getting a break when Verve sai
d they'd make them a record? And who the fuck is 'Tom Wilson," the "producer" whose name rides so high on the record jacket? By any other name he's a vicious ten-percenter who sold "Army Surplus commodities" in the late 1940's, "Special-Guaranteed Used Cars" in the 1950's, and 29 cent thumb-prints of John Kennedy in the 1960's. . . until he figured out that the really big money was in drop-out revolution. Ride the big wave: Folk-rock, pot symbols, long hair, and $2.50 minimum at the door. Light shows! Tim Leary! Warhol! NOW!
The Distant Drummer, vol. I, no. I, November 1967
Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog
Not being a poet, and drunk as well,
leaning into the diner and dawn
and hearing a juke box mockery of some better
human sound
I wanted rhetoric
but could only howl the rotten truth
Norman Luboff
should have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork.
Then howled around like a man with the
final angst,
not knowing what I wanted there
Probably the waitress, bend her double
like a safety pin,
Deposit the mad seed before they
tie off my tubes
or run me down with Dingo dogs
for not voting
at all.
Suddenly a man with wild eyes rushed
out from the wooden toilet
Foam on his face and waving a razor
like a flag, shouting
It's Starkweather god damn I Know
that voice