Wish You Were Here (27 page)

So I came up with the wheeze of putting him in a hotel room someplace. But it was no good putting him in a hotel room if he wasn’t going to be supervised. So I said, “Look, I’m going to do this: I’m going to get a hotel suite and I’ll move in myself and
make
Douglas churn out pages.” Everyone thought it was a good idea if I was prepared to do it. We found the Berkeley—fucking great terrace outside, I might add . . . It did cost a few bob. I phoned Bruce Harris at Crown, and said, “Listen, this is what I’m going to do,” and it turned out those guys were even more anxious than we were at Pan, so I said, “But you’re going to have to pick up half the tab for the hotel.” There was a big silence and then they agreed.

And so I went to look at the suite, and I told Douglas that we’d better be there at 3 o’clock tomorrow, and he agreed. He and Jane talked about it. I said, “Bring clothes and whatever else—there is going to be a routine, I’ll spell it out to you when you turn up.” And we sent a cab around to pick him up.

So he turned up with a typewriter, his clothes, a guitar or two—I didn’t mind at all. [Douglas was in a Dire Straits mode at the time.] I was just so relieved the fucker turned up. The office shipped across a case of wine for me and boxes of manuscripts, so that I would be able to work. And I moved in. There were two bedrooms—I remember putting Douglas in the smaller one because I was extremely pissed off.

The reason we hit the Berkeley was he wanted to swim, and there was a pool upstairs. The other reason was that it was close to my house, so I could nip out from time to time and say hello to my wife. So I explained the routine was that I’d get him out of bed; he’d go up for a swim; we’d have breakfast; finish by 8:30 a.m. Then Douglas would sit down at this small desk with a typewriter, and I would sit in an armchair at forty-five degrees from that, my back facing him, and I’d read a manuscript. I’d wait for the sound of those fingers on his typewriter keys—which sometimes would happen, sporadically, and then there’d be long periods of silence, and I’d turn around to check him out and see that he hadn’t croaked on me or something. He’d be sitting up, staring out the window at this roof terrace. Every now and then I’d say, “How’s it going?” And he’d say, “Fine, fine.” And you’d hear paper being crumpled and thrown into a bin.

It was quite macabre, looking back on it. Gradually the pile of manuscripts that I was reading would grow on the floor as I went through yet another submission. At the end of the day I would gather together whatever pages Douglas had written, and we’d talk about it and then I would phone the office. My assistant, Jenny [Gregorian] would turn up and collect the pages and take them to the office. Room service would come down for lunch, and in the evening we would go out to some restaurant round the corner, have dinner, and then I’d bring Douglas back, and say, “Okay Douglas, you’d better get some sleep,” and he would be sent to his room.

That is roughly what the routine was. Every now and then he would get up and play the guitar. And we’d talk a little bit . . . you know. That was about it. Occasionally I’d go through the bin to see what he’d chucked away—you know, discreetly, when he was gone to have a piss or something—and it would say things like, “Who the fuck does he think he is?” There was one page, I remember, of very choice abuse, which I actually kept and had on my notice board for quite a while—even in New York, actually. During one of the refurbishments it kind of vanished, along with other memorabilia.

This kidnapping of Douglas has entered publishing legend. Sonny and Douglas are so unlike each other that at times it must have been like some dodgy hostage siege.*
 
¹³⁹
Sonny was extraordinarily patient, but he has always had the capacity to concentrate on a manuscript and, being incarcerated in a hotel with coffee and room service, he probably got through an unusual amount of work.

It says a lot for Sonny’s sympathy, and the general affection in which Douglas was held, that this desperate expedient was resorted to at all. Of course, Pan needed the book and you just cannot terrorize an author into creative brilliance. But there are not many industries in which a party in breach of contract would receive such succour.

Every evening in the Berkeley, Sonny would sit and read the day’s output under the close inspection of Douglas. All authors need approval. In my experience the best writers are actually or incipiently a little nuts; you have to be slightly mad to pursue such a solitary craft in the first place. Reading an author’s work in his or her presence is a kind of agony. No study of your face has ever been so close or unremitting. Was that a twitch? Did you smile? In which case, at which bit of text? Did you get that joke? For Christ’s sake, say something. Most authors are content—no, “content” is not a word that can be applied to writers—are
prepared
to wait until they’ve finished the book before demanding admiration from their editor. With his later books there were times when Douglas needed love almost page by page.

Sonny, who is not a natural thespian, nevertheless has authority. “This is fine, Douglas,” would carry as much weight from him as volumes of gush from a lesser figure. Despite their solitary confinement, Sonny and Douglas remained on good terms. When the final page was delivered, they went out for a dinner that was so large and alcoholic that it was erased from both their memories.

Sonny never had to lock up Douglas again. Later, Sue Freestone, first on a freelance basis and then as his editor at Heinemann, took over the role, and discharged it with empathy and compassion.

What of the book itself? It is regarded by hardcore Douglas fans as rather thin. But it is very funny and more emotional than many of his others which tend to be sparkling with intellect, but less sure on characterization and human interaction.
So Long
is in many ways a tender love story, and its construction—which is very episodic—is full of little scenes that are almost self-contained and that show off Douglas’s talent as a sketch writer. In
Sputnik Sweetheart,
Haruki Murakami, the wonderful Japanese writer whose work in some ways has been influenced by Douglas, described the story within the story forever being written by one of his characters as “the best patchwork quilt of a novel sewn by grumpy old ladies.”*
 
¹⁴⁰
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
is also rather quilt-like; it’s enveloping, warm, a bit soppy, and the squares of the patchwork alternate between the surreal and the everyday. In places it reads almost as if he didn’t want to write the fantastical bits, but could not short-change his readers with their expectations of the weird.

Douglas ends the book on a note that seems both to work within the context of the narrative and to stand outside as a commentary upon it: “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind . . .” The truth is that he really did not want to write any more if he could avoid it. He was determined to make another
Hitchhiker’s
sequel impossible. Unfortunately, he was so inventive that he could escape from any dead-end of plot, as he had proved already by writing around the smashing into atoms of the planet Earth. Like Conan Doyle, forced by public demand to revive Sherlock Holmes after his headlong drop with the evil Moriarty into the Reichenbach Falls, Douglas had been pushed by his legions of fans—and, let’s not be ingenuous, by the huge advances—into carrying on hitchhiking.

Heartbreakingly for many of his fans, he killed off Marvin the Paranoid Android, who, after billions of years of boredom and depression mostly spent in a car park waiting to be patronized by dim primates, is allowed blissfully, finally and irrevocably to stop.

“I think,” he murmured at last, from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax. “I feel good about it.”

It’s a message from Douglas: no more. He yearned to move on.

NINE

Hippodust, Films and the Telly Saga

“Nobody knows anything.”

W
ILLIAM
G
OLDMAN
,
Adventures in the Screen Trade

“California is a great place to live if you happen to be an orange.”

F
RED
A
LLEN

C
alifornian evenings . . . As film people sit round their great oak-effect fires, and chronicle their adventures in the movie business, many are the tales told of the agent kings, borne on the heroic bodies of starlets from the field of battle to their Valhalla in the Polo Lounge. There they hold court, enthroned in bar furniture of the deepest plush, toying with their iced mineral water as they talk of fortunes won and lost, and deals that made or broke the names of mortal men. And of all the sagas, sung from rooftops, whispered in corners, few have been so terrible, so extended, so downright capricious as the Great Non-making of Hitchhiker, the Movie.

Shortly before he died, Douglas, with his talent for the telling analogy, said that making a film was like trying to grill a steak by having a series of people come into the room and breathe on it. In a moment’s despair, he told Ed Victor how he calculated that he’d wasted five and a half years of his life trying to get the movie made, and that, “I’m not going to spend another fucking minute on it.”

“Of course,” Ed recalled, “a month later he was back devoting himself to the film. He just wanted that film so much.”

There’s even this bitter definition in
The Deeper Meaning of Liff:

Spiddle
(vb)

To fritter away a perfectly good life pretending to develop a film project.

In part it is the horrific expense of making a movie that pervades the business with anxiety. It may be true that many people in the film world are unsure about their own judgement and frightened of looking like idiots, but in fairness the risks are huge. In publishing, for instance, if an editor buys a book that doesn’t sell, total loss will be the advance, the expenditure on manufacture and distribution, and the burden on overheads—tieing up costly machinery with a dog. Unless it were a huge punt on something disastrous, the total loss is unlikely to be more than tens of thousands of pounds or dollars. A movie, on the other hand, can burn up $100 million and recover only a few million in theatrical release and video sales. In a tough town like Hollywood you cannot have many disasters on that scale. Fear stalks the studio corridors like a Psycho-killer in Residence.

From the moment
Hitchhiker’s
was published in 1979, there was talk of a film. There had been mention of George Lucas, whose Industrial Light and Magic had stunned the world the year before with the special effects in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
However, there is no record of any flirtation with Lucas. Given that Douglas squirreled away everything (though in no kind of order), such a rumour was probably just wishful thinking.

But before the film saga could begin, the telly mini-series of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
had to come, and go.

The series was made at the end of 1980 and broadcast in six episodes from 5 January 1981 to 9 February 1981, about three months after publication of
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
which was still riding high in the bestseller lists. These days, TV and film rights are usually sold together on the grounds that if both were to be exploited simultaneously they could interfere with each other. Besides, their markets are so intertwined that it makes sense to keep them linked. For instance, even were it possible to negotiate a non-exclusive contract, whose video would be released first if both a film and a telly company make a version of a particular work? Films consume such prodigious quantities of money that every right with any commercial potential known to man, not excluding stained-glass dramatization and microdots, has to be part of the deal and is factored into the original decision. At the time, however, Ed Victor was able to put the film rights into play without the TV series representing too much of an encumbrance.

The TV version was firmly in the hands of the BBC. The Beeb had been thrilled by its success with the two radio series. Being jealous of its property, it was irritated that the runaway sales of the books were being enjoyed by an external publisher. During this period the institution was emerging from its noble mantle of public service into a harsher world of commerce and it was coming under a lot of pressure from the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, a woman suffused with the frightening certainty of one whose electoral prospects had been incalculably enhanced by the bloody war over the Falkland Islands.*
 
¹⁴¹
She seemed to have an almost visceral dislike of a broadcasting corporation that many of us regarded as a national treasure. In the demonology of the right wing, the BBC was staffed by left-leaning, over-privileged, disrespectful public schoolboys who were insulated from the real world*
 
¹⁴²
by the public’s money in the form of licence fees.

This was the background that predisposed the BBC to keep its goodies in-house. The huge, cultish success of the two radio series would surely translate to the TV. It was John Lloyd who started off the whole process with a memo back in September 1979 to the Head of Light Entertainment. In it, John persuasively listed all the credentials that
Hitchhiker’s
had acquired by then: radio series that were repeated over and over again by public demand, bestselling books, theatrical productions, even a nomination for a Hugo Award.*
 
¹⁴³
John had by then moved over to television where he was riding high on the success of
Not the Nine O’Clock News,
and was looking for another project. Evidently he had forgiven Douglas for firing him off the book, or at least both parties tacitly conspired not to talk about it. In their complicated dance of advance and retreat, they were again best friends. Eventually, however, John did not produce the show. Having started as co-producer on the first episode, he then became—in that exquisitely precise code known only to the initiated—Associate Producer. Several suggestions from him about how to proceed were disregarded, but in fairness creative endeavours like this do often need a single, strong voice. Eventually the demands of John’s own extraordinarily successful career took him away from the series altogether.

By this time Douglas had given up his job at the BBC. He had been doing it for fifteen months and was very tired. It was, as Neil Gaiman points out in
Don’t Panic,
the only proper job he ever had—and he’d worked at it like a man possessed. He had script-edited many episodes of
Dr. Who,
four of which he had also written (three of these, buffs will note, featured a disturbed Captain who, Vogon-like, destroyed worlds). Douglas had also written the entire second
Hitchhiker’s
radio series, and created and produced a pantomime, a characteristically odd and parodic work called
Black Cinderella II Goes East.
He had made enough money to declare independence; he was under contract to write more books; and his private life—of which there’s more in the next chapter—had acquired a shattering degree of intensity. The day job had to go.

All through his creative life, Douglas liked to have if not total control then considerable influence on how the different forms of his work would appear. This desire was later to prove a handicap with Hollywood which regards its writers as krill, a species destined to remain a long way down the food chain. It wasn’t just the vanity that declares “nobody can do this as well as I can!” His wish for control over his own material was more a response to the quirkiness of what he produced. There’s an integrity to it that could easily have been lost if it were emulsified and then poured into the standard formats that the mavens of mass-market entertainment patronizingly misperceive as being what the public wants.

To his credit, Douglas had, after some negotiation, turned down a TV offer from ABC in America, where
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
had made the
New York Times
bestseller list. ABC had offered a tempting $50,000 for the rights with more to come. But following discussion with the men in suits, Douglas realized that just about everything that made
Hitchhiker’s
unusual would not survive the process of rendering it down for the US market. He was proud of his decision (“though I had to get drunk to make it,” he told Neil Gaiman): it showed a respect for the integrity of the work and a refusal not to follow the money slavishly. ABC was, according to Douglas, more interested in special effects than in the script, which was apparently dire.*
 
¹⁴⁴
In any case, the cost of the first episode was estimated at an unacceptable $2 million plus. Perhaps it was this experience that prompted Douglas to say to his guitar-playing pal, Ken Follett: “The thing it took me some time to grasp, Ken, is that Hollywood is deeply shallow.”

Ed Victor recalls:

There was an American guy called Don Taffner who lived in England and made a very decent living by spotting shows in which he could buy format rights and then sell them in America. I think he did
’Til Death Do Us Part,
and he may have done
Steptoe and Son.
He wanted to make
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
as a television series. He planned to pilot ninety minutes for ABC. I made a deal with him, but it never happened.

One side-effect of the flirtation with ABC was that in late 1980 Douglas was flown out to Los Angeles where, on a colossal daily rate, earning him more in a week than he had been paid to write the series, he hung about the production office doing very little. This gave him an unfortunate appetite for doing very little in California, a place where the rewards from a deal are so mind-boggling that the investment of years of doing very little (camouflaged, of course, as networking or contractual foreplay) may seem perversely rational.

But back in the real world, Douglas had a BBC television script to write. In his books, he had been sole master. There were no imaginative or budgetary constraints; if he wanted a scene with a million singing robots or to crash a starship into a sun, he could do so—several times if he fancied. Such freedom does not apply to a visual medium. So Douglas couldn’t just adapt the radio scripts; he had to re-imagine the whole adventure visually.

There were some delicious bits of invention that were not in the radio series. For instance, the travellers’ final meal in Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe (and incidentally the biggest set ever made by the BBC at the time), features one of his most disconcerting comic flights of fancy,
viz
the Dish of the Day, a bovine, philosophical animal that actually wants to be eaten. Douglas had originally written this scene for Ken Campbell’s theatrical production, and it played so well that he kept it. The Dish, an off-beat creature, was acted by Peter Davison, the fifth Dr. Who and husband of Sandra Dickinson who played Trillian. He was keen to join in for less than his usual rate, performing any role, no matter how heavy the disguise (which was necessary for the
Dr. Who
office would not have been amused to see him in another SF role).

During the production the cast had a lot of fun. Douglas was by then something of an expert on restaurants and he had just discovered the
Good Food Guide.
With characteristic extravagance, at the close of the day’s filming he was wont to take people out to some amusing restaurant he had found in the guide. In his convertible Golf Gti, with its front seats pushed back as far as they could go and the rear passengers squeezed like midget contortionists into a near-natal position, he would lead a convoy. If it was warm, Douglas would have the hood down and, his head almost above the roof line, he’d drive at full speed through the night to the sound of the car’s specially installed bowel-vibrating sound system.

Incidentally, in the course of researching this book, I interviewed Professor Richard Dawkins, not only a great friend of Douglas’s but also a world authority on evolution. I asked him about the creature that yearned to be eaten, and whether such a thing could ever evolve. After all, I said, there are many plants that replicate by packaging their seeds in fertilizer collected on their journey through the digestive tract of something ingesting them. Could such a mechanism apply to an animal? “Hmm,” said the Prof, with the caution of a man who has been too often cornered by nutters with pet notions. “It is hard to see the reproductive advantages of such a strategy. On the other hand it might be theoretically possible to genetically engineer a creature that likes pain, though such a project would be perverse in the extreme . . .”*
 
¹⁴⁵
The idea of a creature that wants to be eaten is not prescient in the same way as, say, Arthur C. Clarke’s prediction of geosynchronous communication satellites. Rather it is another example of Douglas once again taking something so invisibly familiar to us that we just don’t think about it—in this case shoving heated lumps of dead animal down an orifice in our faces in order to absorb nutrition—and, by means of a comic trope, forcing us to do so.

For the TV series, the BBC appointed as producer/director Alan J. W. Bell, already an experienced programme maker, trusted by the powers-that-be, who had directed the delightful
Ripping Yarns
and the hugely popular
Last of the Summer Wine.
After
Hitchhiker’s,
through the eighties and nineties he went on to produce and direct a dozen major projects in film and TV, winning an Emmy Award in 1999 for
Lost for Words.

Alan Bell had been approached earlier about
Hitchhiker’s.
His first impulse was to say that it could never be televised because the special effects and the large sets would be prohibitively expensive. However, he was persuaded to take the job by John Howard Davis, the Head of Comedy, who described the TV script as one of the best he had ever seen.