Terry Southern facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Terry Southern
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Southern in the North Texas Agricultural College yearbook, 1940s
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| Born | May 1, 1924 Alvarado, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | October 29, 1995 (aged 71) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Northwestern University (BA) |
| Literary movement | New Journalism |
| Spouse |
Carol Kauffman Southern
(m. 1956; div. 1965) |
| Children | Nile Southern |
Terry Southern (May 1, 1924 – October 29, 1995) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style. Part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village, Southern was also at the center of Swinging London in the 1960s and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. He briefly wrote for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.
Southern's dark and often absurdist style of satire helped to define the sensibilities of several generations of writers, readers, directors, and filmgoers.
Biography
Southern was born in Alvarado, Texas. He graduated from Sunset High School in Dallas, Texas in 1941. He attended North Texas Agricultural College for a year as a pre-med major before transferring to Southern Methodist University, where he continued to cultivate his interest in literature. From 1943 to 1945, he served in the U.S. Army as a demolitions technician during World War II. Stationed in Reading, England with the 435th Quartermaster Platoon (allowing for frequent forays to London), he earned a Bronze Star and a Good Conduct Medal. In the autumn of 1946, he resumed his studies at the University of Chicago before transferring to Northwestern University, where he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1948.
Southern left the United States in September 1948, using a G.I. Bill grant to travel to France, where he studied at the Faculté Des Lettres of the Sorbonne. His four-year stint in Paris was a crucial formative influence, both on his development as a writer and on the evolution of his "hip" persona. During this period he made many important friendships and social contacts as he became a central figure in the expatriate American café society of the 1950s. He became close friends with Mason Hoffenberg (with whom he subsequently co-wrote the novel Candy), Alexander Trocchi, John Marquand, Mordecai Richler, Aram Avakian (filmmaker, photographer and brother of Columbia Records jazz producer George Avakian), and jazz musician and motorsport enthusiast Allen Eager. He also met expatriate American writer James Baldwin and leading French intellectuals Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.
During the early 1950s he wrote some of his best short stories, including "The Butcher" and "The Automatic Gate", both published in David Burnett's New-Story magazine. His story "The Accident" was the first short story published in the Paris Review in its founding issue (1953); it was followed by "The Sun and the Still-born Stars" in issue #4. Southern became closely identified with the Paris Review and its founders, Peter Matthiessen, Harold L. "Doc" Humes, and George Plimpton, and he formed a lifelong friendship with Plimpton.
He met French model Pud Gadiot during 1952; a romance soon blossomed and the couple married just before they moved to New York City.
In 1953, Southern and Gadiot returned to the US and settled in Greenwich Village in New York City. As he had in Paris, Southern quickly became a prominent figure on the artistic scene that flourished in the Village in the late 1950s. He met visual artists such as Robert Frank, Annie Truxell and Larry Rivers. Through Mason Hoffenberg, who made occasional visits from Paris, he was introduced to leading beat writers including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.
He frequented renowned New York jazz venues such as the Five Spot, the San Remo, and the Village Vanguard. It was in this period that Southern read and became obsessed with the work of British writer Henry Green. Green's writing exerted a strong influence on Southern's early work, and Green became one of Southern's most ardent early supporters.
Southern struggled to gain recognition during this period, writing short stories as he worked on Flash and Filigree, his first solo novel. Most of these stories were rejected by leading magazines and journals. Here, as in Paris, Southern was almost entirely supported by his wife Pud, but their relationship fell apart within a year of their arrival in New York and they were divorced in mid-1954.
Southern's fortunes began to change after he was taken on by the Curtis-Brown Agency in mid-1954; through them he had three of his short stories accepted by Harper's Magazine. It published "The Sun and the Still-born Stars" and "The Panthers" in the same edition in late 1955, and "The Night Bird Blew for Doctor Warner" was featured in the January 1956 edition.
In October 1955, Southern met model, aspiring actress, and editor Carol Kauffman. They were married on July 14, 1956.
Southern returned to Europe with Kauffman in October 1956, stopping off in Paris and then settling in Geneva, Switzerland, where they lived until 1959. Kauffman took a job with UNESCO, which supported them as Southern continued to write. The years in Geneva were a prolific period during which he prepared Flash and Filigree for publication, and worked on Candy and The Magic Christian as well as TV scripts and short stories. The couple made trips to Paris, where they visited Mason Hoffenberg, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and to London, where Southern met Henry Green and Kenneth Tynan.
In early 1958, Southern made his first foray into screenwriting, working with Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, who had come to Britain to work for the newly established ABC Weekend TV company. Kotcheff directed Southern's TV adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, which was broadcast in the UK in March. This coincided with the publication of Flash and Filigree, which was well-reviewed in the UK but coolly received in the U.S.
The first major magazine interview with Southern, conducted by Elaine Dundy, was published in UK Harper's Bazaar in August 1958. In October Olympia published Candy under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton, and it immediately was banned by the Paris vice squad.
The Magic Christian, Southern's first solo novel, satirically explores the corrupting effects of money. He finished the book in Geneva over the fall and winter of 1958–1959. and it was published by André Deutsch in Spring 1959 to mixed reviews; however, it soon gained an avid cult following. By the time it had been published, the Southerns had decided to return to the U.S.; they left Geneva for New York in April 1959.
After moving back to the U.S., the Southerns stayed with friends for several months until they were able to buy their own home.
Terry and Carol's son and only child Nile Southern was born on December 29, 1960. Around this time, Southern began writing for Maurice Girodias' new periodical Olympia Review. He began negotiations with the Putnam company to reissue Candy under his and Hoffenberg's real names, and he hired Sterling Lord as his literary agent.
In the summer of 1962, Southern worked for two months as a relief editor at Esquire, and during this period, he had several stories published in the magazine.
Southern's life and career changed irrevocably on November 2, 1962, when he received a telegram inviting him to come to London to work on the screenplay of Kubrick's new film, which was then in pre-production.
Partly on the recommendation of Peter Sellers, Stanley Kubrick asked Southern to help revise the screenplay of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The film was based on the Cold War thriller Red Alert (1958) by Peter George, the rights to which Kubrick had secured for $3,000. Kubrick and George's original screenplay (which was to be called Edge of Doom) was a straight political thriller. They then reworked it into a satirical format (provisionally titled The Delicate Balance of Terror) in which the plot of Red Alert was situated as a film-within-a-film made by an alien intelligence.
Southern's work on the project was brief but intense; he officially worked on the script from November 16 to December 28, 1962. The major change Southern and Kubrick made was to recast the script as a black comedy, jettisoning the "film within a film" structure. Kubrick, George, and Southern shared the screenplay credits, but competing claims about who contributed what led to confusion and some conflict among the three men after the film's release. The credit question was confused by Sellers' numerous ad libbed contributions—he often improvised wildly on set, so Kubrick made sure that Sellers had as much camera 'coverage' as possible during his scenes in order to capture these spontaneous inspirations.
After the film went into wider release in January 1964, Southern was the subject of considerable media coverage, and erroneously was given primary credit for the screenplay, a misperception he did little to correct. This reportedly angered both Kubrick—who was notorious for his unwillingness to share writing credits—and Peter George, who penned a complaint to Life magazine in response to a lavish photo essay on Southern published in the May 8, 1964 edition. Stung by the article's assertion that Southern was responsible for turning the formerly "serious script" into an "original irreverent satirical film", George pointed out that he and Kubrick had been working together on the script for 10 months, whereas Southern was only "briefly employed (November 16–December 28, 1962) to do some additional writing."
Toward the end of his work on Dr. Strangelove, Southern began canvassing for more film work.
Southern's writing career took off in 1963. His essay "Twirlin' at Ole Miss" was published in Esquire in February 1963, and this work of satirical reportage is now acknowledged as one of the cornerstone works of New Journalism. This was quickly followed by the publication of several other essays. The fiction anthology Writers In Revolt was published in the spring, soon followed by the U.S. publication of Candy, which became the #2 American fiction best-seller of 1963.
The success of Dr. Strangelove and the re-published version of Candy was the turning point in Southern's career, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his day. In the words of biographer Lee Hill, Southern spent the next six years in "an Olympian realm of glamour, money, constant motion and excitement", mixing and working with international literary, film, music, and TV stars. His work on Dr. Strangelove opened the doors to lucrative work as a screenwriter and script doctor, and allowed him to greatly increase his fee, from the reported $2,000 he received for Dr. Strangelove to as much as $100,000 thereafter.
During the latter half of the 1960s, Southern worked on the screenplays of a string of "cult" films. His credits in this period include The Loved One (1965), The Collector (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Casino Royale (1967), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1969), The Magic Christian (1969), and End of the Road (1970).
He and Kauffman were divorced in 1965.
Southern's pre-eminence waned rapidly in the 1970s—his screen credits decreased, his book and story output dwindled.
His later career was complicated by ongoing financial woes. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
In December 1970, Southern found himself in the position of having to beg Dennis Hopper for a profit point on Easy Rider—a request Hopper refused. Southern's tenuous financial position was in contrast to that of his creative partners, who became wealthy thanks to the film's commercial success. For the rest of his life, Southern was repeatedly forced to take on work in order to pay tax bills and penalties, and on many occasions he struggled to keep up the mortgage payments on the East Canaan farm.
Blue Movie was published in the fall of 1970, with a dedication to Stanley Kubrick. It received only moderate reviews, and sales were hampered by the refusal of the New York Times to run ads for the book.
Southern worked on a variety of screenplays in the immediate aftermath of Easy Rider, including God Is Love, DJ (based on a book by Norman Mailer), Hand-Painted Hearts (based on a story by Thomas Baum), and Drift with Tony Goodstone. While Fonda and Hopper continued to assert that much of Easy Rider had been improvised, Southern remained largely silent about his role.
Because of his acute money problems (exacerbated by the IRS affair), Southern took an adjunct lectureship in screenwriting at New York University, where he taught from the fall of 1972 to the spring of 1974. Southern began writing for National Lampoon in November 1972.
Southern's only on-screen credit during the 1970s was the teleplay Stop Thief!, written for the TV miniseries The American Parade (based on the life of 19th Century American political cartoonist Thomas Nast). Although he continued to reside in northern Connecticut "beyond the commuter belt", Southern maintained his social life in New York with diligence; longtime girlfriend Gail Gerber often drove him to Studio 54 (where he cultivated a convivial acquaintance with co-owner Steve Rubell), parties hosted by George Plimpton, and other engagements.
Southern turned 60 in 1984, and his career continued to alternate between promise and disappointment. Flash and Filigree was reissued by Arbor House with a new introduction by Burroughs, and Sandy Lieberson (now at Fox) hired him to work on a script called Intensive Heat, based on the life of jewel thief Albie Baker. During this period, Southern ran into problems with his long-overdue new book (a bildungsroman inspired by his Texas childhood alternatively known as Youngblood, Southern Idyll and Behind the Grassy Knoll) when Putnam demanded the return of the $20,000 advance, precipitating his abandonment of the work. In 1985, Candy and The Magic Christian were reprinted by Penguin and Southern featured prominently in the Howard Brookner documentary Burroughs: the Movie.
In February 1989 Southern was admitted to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, where he underwent surgery for stomach cancer. Soon after the surgery, he was interviewed by Mike Golden, and excerpts were published in Reflex, Creative Writer, and Paris Review. After he recovered from his surgery, Southern collaborated with cartoonist R. O. Blechman on a project called Billionaire's Ball, based on the life of Howard Hughes.
Southern landed a job teaching at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in the summer of 1989.
With encouragement from his son Nile, Southern returned to his long-shelved Texas novel. Retitled Texas Summer, it was published in 1992 by Richard Seaver. During the year Southern was also invited to teach screenwriting at Columbia University's School of the Arts and School of General Studies as an adjunct professor, where he worked until his death.
Southern's health deteriorated in the last two years of his life, and he suffered a mild stroke in November 1992.
In September 1995, Southern received the Gotham Award for lifetime achievement by the Independent Film Producers Association at the age of 71.
On October 25, 1995, Southern collapsed on the steps of Columbia's Dodge Hall while en route to his class. He was taken to the adjacent St. Luke's Hospital, where he died four days later of respiratory failure. According to Bruce Jay Friedman, Southern's final words were "What's the delay?"
In early 2003, Southern's archives of manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs were acquired by the New York Public Library.
Works
Books
- Flash and Filigree (1958)
- Candy (with Mason Hoffenberg) (1958)
- The Magic Christian (1959)
- Blue Movie (1970)
- Texas Summer (1992)
- Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950–1995 (2001)
Screenplays
- Dr. Strangelove (with Stanley Kubrick and Peter George) (1964)
- The Loved One (with Christopher Isherwood) (1965)
- The Collector (with John Kohn and Stanley Mann; uncredited) (1965)
- The Cincinnati Kid (with Ring Lardner Jr.) (1966)
- Casino Royale (1967) (with John Law, Wolf Mankowitz and Michael Sayers; uncredited)
- Barbarella (with Roger Vadim, Claude Brule, Vittorio Bonicelli, Clement Biddle Wood, Brian Degas and Tudor Gates) (1968)
- Easy Rider (with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) (1969)
- The End of the Road (with Dennis McGuire and Aram Avakian) (1969)
- The Magic Christian (with Joseph McGrath) (1969)
- The Telephone (with Harry Nilsson) (1988)
Awards and nominations
- 1963 O. Henry Award; "The Road Out of Axotle", published in Esquire, August 1962
- 1964 Writers Guild of America; Screenwriter's Award for Best Written American Comedy of 1964, for Dr. Strangelove
- 1964 Academy Award nomination for Best Writing (Adaptation) for Dr. Strangelove
- 1965 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for Dr. Strangelove
- 1969 Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay; Easy Rider (with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper)
- 1975 The Paris Review; Funniest Story of the Year; "Heavy Put-Away, or, A Hustle Not Devoid of a Certain Grossness, Granted"
- 1994 Gotham Award; Writer Award
See also
In Spanish: Terry Southern para niños
