My parents and some of my friends were terrified: nobody we knew made a living writing fiction. I didn’t care. In 1973, I was twenty-four, living in a shack in Missoula’s blue-collar section of town, subsisting off my savings, hustling less than a month’s rent worth of freelance journalism, spending only what I had to (I rationed the Cokes I drank to the nights my karate club practiced), excitedly pounding out fiction on that old green manual typewriter, including one twelve-plus-hour marathon session that ended only when my typing fingers began to bleed — call that chapter of my life Blood on the Keys.
That period’s output included a classically overly self-conscious novel in the college-awakening genre that hopefully no one else will ever read, and one subsequently published comic caper novel called The Great Pebble Affair, released under a pseudonym in the U.S. to mildly approving reviews. In Italy, Pebble was published under my name and stayed in print for years. In 2000, Wu Ming — an Italian collective of authors — told me it was one of their inspirations.
In the real world, my bank account was dwindling and the news increasingly focused on scandals smelling of crime and intrigue coming out of the Nixon White House. Washington, D.C., sounded much more exciting than starvation row. My former boss, Senator Metcalf, had a year-long fellowship open to Montana applicants who were journalists — a stretch for me, but the Missoula paper had published one of my freelance articles and the national magazine Sport was about to run my hustled three-paragraph story about a weird gopher-racing civic promotion stunt back in my hometown of Shelby. I applied for that fellowship, started thinking about road crew jobs or white collar bureaucracy work that wouldn’t sap my creativity for my real work.
When the phone rang.
The man on the call introduced himself as Starling Lawrence, an eventual novelist but then an editor at W.W. Norton, who said the house wanted to publish Condor, and it would pay me $1,000—more than ten percent of the annual yearly salary I’d been making working as a white-collar warrior. Of course I said yes, and he said: “We think we can sell it as a movie, too.”
Doesn’t he know that kind of thing only happens in movies? I thought, but said nothing and refrained from laughing. He was going to publish my novel; no way would I say a discouraging word.
Two weeks later, as I stood in my empty bathtub, trying to use duct tape to rig a shower out of some discarded plumbing parts, again the phone rang.
Starling Lawrence and a pack of Norton staffers were on the line, telling me that famed movie producer Dino De Laurentiis had read Condor in manuscript form and quickly (Dino later told me after the first four pages) decided to make it a movie. He bought the book outright, and my share of the sale would be $81,000.
I stood there, still holding the spool of gray duct tape, listened while Starling excitedly rehashed what he’d told me, then I said: “You’ll have to excuse me, I need to go back to duct taping my shower and I haven’t heard a word you’ve said after $81,000.”
I could subsist writing fiction for years on that!
A week later, Senator Metcalf awarded me the fellowship to come back to Washington and work on his staff.
I was twenty-four years old.
And I drove off into tomorrows of adventure I couldn’t have imagined.
Most of you reading this have some knowledge of the Condor story from the movie, so let me risk being a spoiler to reveal more of the Condor saga.
Every novel is two books: the manuscript the author writes, and the product that publishers, editors, and the author carve out for readers. In the process of creating that second book, the author is both beef and butcher.
My manuscript Condor character is as he’s become in legend, but the novel first published in 1974 is not quite the story I first created.
The manuscript is a noir spy story, which propels Condor through my what-ifs with a plot about a small group of corrupt CIA operatives and executives who turn rogue and create their own heroin smuggling operation out of the murky chaos of the Vietnam War that defined my generation. That MacGuffin races Condor through his six days of life-changing peril, during which the woman he dragoons into being his lover and co-target (think Faye Dunaway) is killed by the assassin, an act that transforms Condor from victim and prey to hunter and killer.
A prologue and epilogue set in Vietnam bookend the D.C. spy-slaughtering saga. The manuscript also set the story in rock ’n’ roll, from a classic “Just My Imagination” radio moment as we meet Condor aching in girl-watching to the brutal climax when — call it assassination or call it justice — Condor loses his innocence in the men’s room at the Washington airport while the piped-in lavatory music plays four quoted lines from the Beatles great song, “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
Those Beatles lines were the first to go when I was informed that what I saw as literary journalism, the rights holders saw as a necessary fee — a small fee that would have decimated my advance for the book. I was too nervous about my economic future to risk that in-hindsight paltry sum. Having the Temptations playing on the radio when Condor steals time from his work to sit at the window and watch for a certain unknown beautiful girl to walk by then seemed too obviously ironic. While the girl stayed — how often had I sat at that window? — the radio and song got red-lined.
But I was proud of how little editing the book seemed to need or get from Starling and the hardback publisher, though he did have me drop the Vietnam prologue and epilogue.
Then, after the movie sale had moved to movie-in-production, the paperback publisher — or rather, someone at a meeting in the paperback publisher’s firm — asked Norton if I would make two small changes.
First, change heroin into something else: “Could it be some kind of super-drug?” With the movie The French Connection having been a hit, “The feeling is, heroin’s been done.”
Second, let the Faye Dunaway heroine live: “Killing her is so dark.”
These paperback suggestions came to me over the phone in the suburban Washington apartment where I stayed briefly in January 1974 with Montana friends until I could get my own place in the city. What I didn’t realize was that I might have a choice in the matter: As a journalist, I’d been schooled to believe the editor’s word was law and that if you fought the editor, you lost and your story often died unread.
Losing the rock ’n’ roll made me sad, but seldom was it seen that much in novels then anyway. Dropping the epilogue and prologue in favor of faster, more immediate plot development made a lot of sense.
But changing heroin into “something else… some kind of super-drug” was ludicrous. I was writing a novel whose power came in part from being as close to real as possible, and a super-drug insulted reality.
And letting the heroine live meant the hero had no trigger to transform into the kind of assassin he’d been fleeing.
So I came up with Condor only thinking she’d been killed (I left her crippled but maybe on the road to recovery), on the theory that that was good enough for his motivation.
As for heroin, this rube from Montana ran a Trojan horse idea past the faceless sophisticated New York City paperback editors: instead of heroin, have the bad guys smuggling bricks of morphine. “Wonderful!” was the response, and I realized at that moment that these editors who were cultural gatekeepers knew next to nothing about the gigantic narcotics scourge they feared and that they’d been motivated by junior high school-level analyses of what’s cool and what’s so been done. Nobody smuggles morphine bricks into America: it’s economically not worth it, in part because morphine is an early manufactured stage of… heroin. But for me, at least it was a real drug and not some editorial committee hallucinated super-drug that would have made Condor more parody than plain-speak.