| In a recent piece on Lee Hill in The Calgary Herald, the author of the article is surprised a how little Hill’s appearance resembles Terry Southern’s. Inexplicably, Southern, the now deceased jet-setting ’60s hipster and his biographer bear little resemblance to one another.
In fact, as the journalist sharply observes, Hill is nowhere to be seen on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, whereas Southern is plainly visible. In a more recent article in The National Post on the same subject, the writer notes that Hill’s writing "lacks the verve" of Southern’s.
Coincidence? By now you may or may not have inferred that Terry Southern was a talented and celebrated novelist, screenwriter and satirist – with such credits as The Magic Christian, Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider – and that Hill is a young Republican who has attempted, and might I add clumsily, to take on Southern’s identity for mischief and profit. Not so.
Hill is actually a Calgarian who has pulled off the coup of authoring A Grand Guy, the first biography of ’60s legend and almost forgotten counter-cultural guru Terry Southern. How does that happen you ask? It’s like that old joke where the tourist in New York asks a passerby, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" And the response is, "Practice." In this case, it’s a lot of work and a lot of years.
While Hill’s interest in Southern began much earlier, his actual contact with him started in the early ’90s when Hill was editing the now defunct VOX magazine. These first conversations eventually grew into an obsession that Hill had to pursue. He spent five years working on the project on spec before he landed a publisher in ’98. With the support of a major publisher and encouragement from an editor who was a fan of Southern’s work, he was able to access more high-profile interviews and dedicate himself to the book full time.
Recently back from launching the book in New York, and after seeing the finished hardcover prominently displayed in bookstores there, Hill’s feeling justly satisfied (but not smug) and perhaps even somewhat liberated from his obsession.
Obsessive behaviour aside, Hill has turned out a balanced, detailed and meticulously crafted look at Southern’s life. Like all good biographies, A Grand Guy also becomes a portrait of the times as well as the man.
"Initially it was interest in the ’60s that got me writing the book, but it was the ’50s that turned out to be really fascinating," says Hill.
It is certainly a striking aspect of Southern’s life that underlines the fact that a lot of the giants of ’60s counter-culture were formed in the ’50s. Southern’s generation, many of whom had fought in the Second World War and had gone to university on the government tab known as the GI Bill, seemed to have a genuine source for their outrage. It is this outrage that fueled Southern’s razor-sharp black comedy, and it was the ’60s that allowed it to bloom briefly.
Although Hill has respectfully kept his own personal experiences with Southern out of this biography, choosing to write a more straightforward and objective account of Southern’s life, they are not, as Hill modestly claims, without interest.
Hill went through a fascinating process of meeting and interviewing many of his own counter-cultural heroes, including chatting with the likes of Anita Pallenberg, Norman Mailer and sundry others.
Attempting to get an interview with Stanley Kubrick, Hill was cryptically told by a studio executive that, "If you do not hear from Kubrick, you will know he’s gotten your message."
Years later, after Kubrick’s death, he did get to interview Kubrick’s wife, Christiane. Being picked up at the train station by chauffeur and whisked through the English countryside to Kubrick’s gated country manor was a "rather surreal experience" for Hill.
All this aside, he seems most attached to the friendship he developed with Southern himself. Even though houseguests were rare at the Southerns’, Hill stayed there on several occasions and spent time getting to know his subject close up.
After enduring years of people asking, "Are you still working on that book?" Hill is wary of the pitfalls of letting people know too much about what he is up to next, and so he politely declines to discuss what that might be. He is also aware that the success of this book will open a door of opportunity which could slam shut any second, so keeping too quiet could also be a mistake. Appropriately he has already bent the ear of those who really matter – his publishers.
On March 30, Hill will launch his book at Books and Books. Go down, meet him in the flesh, fondle the fabric of his blazer, run your fingers through his "blow-dried hair" and find out what he’s really all about. |
