Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) (5 page)

Excerpt from
True Magazine,
October 1957
:

Lassiter:

A Portrait Of The Artist

As "Crime Writer"

By Eskin "B." Fiske

Self-described "crime writer" Hector Lassiter lives in the last house in New Mexico, so close to the Rio Grande he could toss his empties in the river from the window above his Smith and Corona typewriter.

The trap for all writers who enter the public consciousness as Lassiter has --- as, say, a Hemingway has --- is the tendency on the part of passionate fans to confuse their favorite writers with the characters that they have created.

That tendency is particularly tough if you are Hector Mason Lassiter, now 57, who came up through the old pulp magazines and occasional scripts for radio crime dramas. His characters include boxers, hard-drinking private detectives and cops, hired killers and desperate men whose lives fall apart in squalid hotels awash in flickering neon that strobes through slitted shades. Often, these men smoke and drink too much. Lassiter's men routinely take and hand out savage beatings most mere mortals wouldn't survive.

Lassiter, the man and the writer, stands in stark contrast to the rogue males about whom he has written in a string of classic crime novels that have shaped and defined the genre.

Each morning at five, Hector Lassiter rises and brews a pot of strong black Cuban coffee --- a brand he developed a taste for while living many years ago in Key West. As his pungent coffee brews, Hector Lassiter shadow boxes and punishes himself with a frenetic series of sit-ups, push-ups and leg lifts.

Then he writes.

"Three hours a day, minimum," Lassiter told me, sitting in his big study filled with his own books and the books of a few others whom he respects. "Rain or shine, holidays or funerals, there are no exceptions or excuses. On a good day --- a really good day --- I may do five hours."

Midday in extreme southern New Mexico is like Hell in the off-season --- "sweltering" doesn't cover it, and talk of a "dry heat" will get your ass kicked. So Hector Lassiter usually naps, then showers and eats a light lunch. Afternoons are spent reading and revising his morning's output. That takes perhaps another two hours.

Then it's time for relaxation: the bull-or cockfights in Juárez, drinks with matador friends and fellow aficionados, or entertaining the more comely Hollywood stars he now moves among as one of Tinsel Town's most sought after screenwriters. Ava Gardner, Carol Baker, Marilyn, he's been spotted with all of them on his arm.

One of his longtime friends is Marlene Dietrich; both deny persistent rumors of an affair. But Lassiter admits the German-born actress/singer probably knows him better than any other woman --- certainly better, he says, a little ruefully, than his first three wives.

"Hector is too easily misunderstood," Dietrich argues. "He is like Papa (Hemingway) in that way. He writes so cleanly and with such masculine voice and absolute authority that the subtle art of his writing is often missed. Hector is so much more than a crime writer, but reviewers haven't learned that yet. Since his first novel appeared in 1925, he has been giving us pictures of life as it truly is in our cities, in our outposts and in the American West. And it is interesting to me, interesting and funny and even a little bit sad, that his very best short stories have no crime in them at all.

"Like Hemingway," Marlene Dietrich continued, "he has this other terrible talent --- you find yourself warped or transformed by his writing. You find yourself speaking in the cadence and language of his characters. In his presence, you sometimes feel like a character in one of his books."

Actor and director Orson Welles agrees. On the set of
Touch of Evil
, where Lassiter was visiting as a consultant, Welles said, "Hector, really, is the last of that great breed of martial men steeped in the Western Canon and wholly committed to the craft of writing. I put him in that same vanishing class as a Kipling. A Bierce. Oh, and Hemingway, of course."

Lassiter's military record is at once transparent and mysterious. At age 15, he lied about his age and enlisted. Soon he was chasing the Mexican general Pancho Villa, riding behind Black Jack Pershing.

Following an injury in a skirmish in the high country when a part of the Punitive Expedition, Lassiter shipped out to Europe, eventually to serve as an ambulance driver along the Italian front. It was there that he met his longtime friend Ernest Hemingway. Ernest was slightly older and treated Lassiter as a kid brother.

After the war, when many writers of his generation were still finding their way to Paris, Lassiter instead located to Key West, where Hemingway would later join him. Like his present house --- his sprawling hacienda in La Mesillia --- Lassiter's Key West house was barely in the United States. "I like living on the edge, I suppose," he said. "Key West was practically like living in the tropics. Prohibition
wasn't
, down there. It was bohemian. It rained every day. I love the rain. But then Flagler and that ****sucker FDR ruined Key West ... turned it into a tourist trap ... tried to build that damned highway and rail-line. It was time to get out."

But there were also dark rumors of gun-running and rumrunning, the smuggling of refugees from Cuba into the United States.

Next came Seattle, another last American outpost. There, Lassiter lived on an island in Puget Sound. But he sold that cabin in 1941 when he left for Europe to cover the Second World War for a score of major magazines, news agencies and overseas newspapers. There, Lassiter was dogged by rumors of engaging in more than journalism. Some embittered correspondents whom he scooped claimed that Lassiter endangered their protected status by carrying firearms and secretly spying on behalf of Allied Intelligence Agencies. There have even been rumors of his having organized his own band of guerilla fighters during the final fight to liberate Paris. Confronted with these rumors, Lassiter said, with typical laconic good cheer, "Bull****."

In 1946, Hector Lassiter finally made his way back home. He moved as close to the Mexican border as he could and maintain American residency. There he built his present home.

His newest novel is titled
The Land of Dread and Fear
--- a wrenching study of Texas-Mexico tensions and lonely men confronting mortality along that border.

"These days,
all
days, I seem to be drawn to the borderlands," Lassiter said. We were sitting in a backroom of a cantina on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez at the time. "
The Land of Dread and Fear
exemplifies that inchoate obsession of mine," he said.

Lassiter will be staying in
La Frontera
for his next project: He's agreed to supply the script for a film by legendary director Sam Ford. The cyclopean auteur is working on a movie he's dubbed
Rooster of Heaven
, a hard-bitten tale of cockfighting and other "bloodsports" to be filmed on location in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. The promise of location shooting is what sold Lassiter on the project.

"It's important to me, and to the audience, to see Mexico how she is, not as we would wish her to be. We need to see the squalor ... the deprivation that drives her people --- people like Marita, the young unwed mother in my new novel --- to risk everything crossing the Sonoran Desert, or trying to swim the Rio Grande. We need to see those real Mexican faces ... to hear authentic voices. It turns my stomach every time I see Wallace Beery playing Pancho Villa as a drunken lout in a ridiculous suit of lights. The real Villa, love him or detest him, was a nuanced and complex creature and a military genius. He was a man who never drank and in fact banned alcohol in his native province. He was a passionate land reformer and a man committed to literacy and the education of children.

"We don't want to see the real Mexico, or its people," Lassiter continued. "How many of the sad people who read those damned movie magazines remember that Rita Hayworth ain't really Rita Hayworth? Her real name is Margarita Cansino. She was born south of the border. The Hollywood types plucked her hairline to give her a more 'American' forehead. They dyed her hair red and they put her on impossible diets. You think Lupe Velez is really the typical Mexican woman? I can tell you she isn't."

A young Mexican actress on the set of
Touch of Evil
has read many of Hector Lassiter's books. She read them before she met the man on the set of the film in which she makes her debut. She told your correspondent, "There is an old saying, 'Trust the art not the artist.' Mr. Hemingway, he has his own version: 'It is a dangerous thing to know a writer.' Mr. Lassiter exudes charisma. He robs rooms of their oxygen. He listens to what people say. So few people really listen to one another now --- not just the words, you understand, but the spaces and messages between the words, underlying them. I think it is a little dangerous to read Hector Lassiter and then to come to know him, even a little. When you do that, and then you go back and read his books again, well, it makes one more than a little sad. But he loves my country --- particularly its women. I suspect if he can be said to have one great regret, it might be that he was not born Mexican. I suspect he would have preferred to have ridden with Pancho Villa instead of after him."