Adventures of an Ultra Fab Prof:
Terry Southern at Columbia University

by CHARLES ZIGMAN

Terry Southern, who passed away in 1995, is the Father of Contemporary Black Comedy. Period. And if you don't like it -- or if you don't agree with it -- then I can't help you out, because it happens to be true.

Terry was the peerless genius without whom there would be no Saturday Night Live; no National Lampoon; and probably even no Howard Stern. Beginning in the 1950's, he wrote, or co-authored some of the sharpest black comedy of our time, in both film (Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider) and literature -- he first gained notoriety from his novel Candy, a hilarious satire of porn that some people misconstrued to be actual porn itself . (Terry was so subtle in his irony, that he was always misunderstood like that.) He was an admired part of an ultra-cool pantheon of counter-culture denizens who included his pals Bill Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

But then, suddenly, starting in the seventies, something happened to Terry - or, should I say, nothing happened. The world, for the most part, stopped requiring his unique services as hipster laureate. It's not that he stopped writing; he didn't. His counter-culture style, so popular in the turbulent sixties, could no longer find a home in a 1980s-1990s world where, increasingly, there was no counter-culture, where even the most liberal of people had become "establishment." (He spent these years writing many great screenplays which never came to fruition, due to the vagaries of the film industry.) So, for the most part, Terry just lived out his last twenty years quietly. Nobody knew what became of him, and almost nobody asked... except, thank God, for the Columbia University Graduate Department of Film.

I was amazed to find, on that morning in the Spring of 1991, that the famously reclusive Terry Southern would be teaching the Wednesday afternoon screenwriting course that I had signed up for Columbia University. I became fortunate enough to know this writer, whose literature and films I had enjoyed from the time I was very young, for the last four years of his life. And I'm happy to report that this 'grand guy' was sharp and hilarious, right up until the very end.

"JOAN OF ARC WEDNESDAY." Writing class. One of our more earnest classmates stands up. She reads the class a short screenplay she has written-- a feminist retake on the Joan of Arc legend, featuring Joan and her same-sex lover. This student prattles on for upwards of half an hour. We, her peers, are supposed to listen to this incredible boorishness, and to make comments when she is finished. But she is just so incredibly boring, that we are all dropping off like flies. People who are not wearing watches start, absently, checking their arms. When the student finishes laying down her never-ending monologue, she gazes at the class triumphantly; ready for the admiration that she knows she deserves.
She asks us, "What did you think?"
Terry, who has been nodding off during the reading, answers gracefully:"Why don't they just get stoned and fuck?"
The young woman runs out of the classroom, never to return. Our whole class takes Terry out for a well-deserved beer.

To borrow a phrase from the beginning of Terry's novel Blue Movie,
Now dig this...
Fall 1991. Orientation day for the new semester arrives. All of the teachers congregate on stage, pontificating wildly about what their courses will involve. Most of these professors have never worked in the film biz proper (one guy edited an episode of "Sea Hunt" or something), so this assortment of intimidated students is probably the largest audience most of them will probably ever get. I notice, as I listen to these teachers droning on incessantly, that the mythic Terry Southern is nowhere in sight; his chair, on stage, is unoccupied. Moments later, Southern is introduced... but where is he?
In the front row of the audience, hidden anonymously among the students, an unassuming gentleman stands, wearing a simple (and, apparently, food-stained) work shirt. This is Terry Southern. Staring at his shoes, shyly, he lays out his whole plan for the semester, "I just want to help people write screenplays." Then he sits down again, as fast as he can. He's too frail-looking, obviously, to make the Everest-like climb up to the stage.
Days later, when Terry arrives in our classroom for the first time (always out-of-breath for the first few moments), he thanks us graciously, and we assist him in putting his cane down and getting himself seated. This is not the, dark-haired, Ray-Ban-wearing, swingin' sixties Terry Southern immortalized by the Beatles on the jacket of the "Sergeant Pepper" album. (Southern was Ringo's favorite author.) The Terry Southern in our classroom is the rumpled model, twenty-five years hence. He's obviously teaching just because he "needs the bread," although he doesn't let on about this in words (he'll even admit this to a couple of us much later) -- but we know it, nevertheless, because his tweed jackets and shirts are old and stained. He is sixty-eight, although he appears to be ten years older, due to many years of mistreatment at the hands of a Hollywood that has shunned him, and also to the fact that he has steadily mistreated himself over time -- even admitting to us, when our class went out for a beer after class, that he's "just an old drinker." The Terry's in our class has weathered strokes, heart attacks, you name it.

The irony of the brand-name of this always tired-looking guy's backpack - the label reads, "Active Sack" (!!) -- is not lost on him; Terry always takes pleasure in showing us the label, instantly seeming years younger as laughter lights up his face. He relishes the attention that our class pays to him. We realize -- even if the majority of the world seems to have (somehow) gone out without him -- that we are more than lucky to be in his presence.

What was Terry Southern like in class? Well, he was absolutely like Guy Grand, the main character of his absurdist novel "The Magic Christian," always gleefully 'putting everybody on,' (as he always said) -- but always good-naturedly so, and with no offense intended. While he didn't exactly teach screenwriting in the strictest sense of the word (he never, for example, lectured about "story structure"), he would take students' screenplays home in his Active Sack and make really copius - and hilarious - handwritten notes on them, most of them on yellow post-it notes. (In a screenplay I wrote in his class, a transvestite prostitute asks an aroused client, "Want to smell my tasty feet?" Terry crossed out my too-innocuous line, and replaced it with the even more mellifluous-sounding, "Want to shit on top of my head?")

All of Terry's students got nicknames-usually a monosyllabic version of our real names. So, for example, a student named Evan became "Ev;" 'Colin' was 'Col'; a corpulent guy named Marco became "Big Marco;" and on and on. And, as far as my name was concerned-since 'Chuck' was already one syllable-I became an amalgamation of all of my names plus my nickname: ("Hello, is Charles 'Chuck' Zigman there?" Terry would ask, when he once rang me up.)

Sometimes, Terry would absently doodle on one of his omnipresent yellow legal pads, while students read their script pages aloud. I pilfered one of the drawings he had generated - for posterity, of course -- and, while I can't make out exactly what's happening in the sketch, to this day, Terry at least had the good sense to entitle it, "Gus and the Doll." Terry would also smack his dry lips many times during an average class session, which - in my nice Jewish boy naïveté-I would later learn to be classic dry mouth. (He would have a few beers between classes quite often and we, his students, would sometimes bring him some Heinekins; we became his most dedicated ennablers.)

On other and other Wednesday afternoons, when lazy students didn't bring in any script pages to read, Terry screened videos of his old films: We watched his funeral industry satire, "The Loved One" right along with him, as well as "Dr. Strangelove." He really beamed when we laughed at the films. He carried these videos in said 'Active Sack,' 'for just such an eventuality,' (he would say). Terry even showed us a short film that some young filmmakers at another college had recently fashioned out of one of his short stories, "You've Gotta Leave Your Mark." He seemed to be as proud of this little student film as he would have been if it had been a major studio film - which is something that we found to be very poignant. You see, T.S. had been disappointed by movie industry people for so long, that he was excited whenever someone was interested in filming his work at all, whether it was Twentieth Century Fox or Twenty Worshipful Film Students. And that was the cool thing about Terry - that even though he wrote this very black comedy -- he was always modest and self-deprecating.

One Saturday, Terry happened to be appearing at a Greenwich Village coffee klatch, reading some of his old short stories, in tandem with Allen Ginsberg, who chanted some of his poetry. He didn't bother to tell his students that he was doing the reading.
"Terry, why didn't you tell us you were doing a reading?" we asked him. "We would have come to see you."
Modestly, he mumbled, "Oh, you wouldn't have wanted to waste your time with that. It was nothing." He was always diminishing his great accomplishments like that.
(And The Modesty Goes On: Terry found out, in his third semester with us, that he would only be teaching a "beginning screenwriting class," in the upcoming semester, and that he wouldn't be able to have us -- his 'advanced' students -- in class anymore. He wanted to have our class back for another semester, but he was too shy to go and find out if this was a possibility -- so he asked a few of us if we would go down to the administrator's office with him to help plead his case. We did, and it worked.)
Anecdotes about Terry Southern at Columbia are legion and, recently, many of his ex-students gathered to recount our favorite "Terry stories." I have compiled a "top twelve list" of the most bizarre ones; these are odd incidents, all, and each one seems to be right out of a Southern novel or film. In no particular order:

1.) "INNOCUOUS HARRASSMENT DAY:" An attractive brunette in our class asked if she could meet Terry later for a consultation about her new screenplay, since she was on her way to the gym for an aerobics class. Terry perked up, immediately -- obviously imagining the girls'shower room - and inquired, "Can I look through the keyhole?" (Terry's female students would never get mad at him when he occasionally uttered 'dirty old man stuff' like this, because everyone knew that he was just playing on the conventions of being a dirty old man more than he was actually being a real dirty old man-even though he was doing both, simultaneously.

2.) "BATHROOM FUN DAY:" On this day that will live in infamy, Terry dismissed himself from class and departed for the men's room. He emerged five minutes later, grinning lopsidedly few other students and I went in there on a reconnaissance mission. We found that Terry had drawn a huge penis on the bathroom wall in indelible black ink. Underneath, he scrawled, "Let's all dive into some ultra-fab clit!" We confronted our brazen teacher.
"Hey, Terry, did you just write on the bathroom wall," we asked.
"Oh, Good Lord, no," he said. (Terry had the coolest speaking voice. In spite of being raised in Texas, he had somehow cultivated a kind of strange British accent.)

3.) "TRES GAY DAY": Terry cancelled our class one Wednesday, so that we could all go into our student screening room and catch "Swoon," a new gay-independent film version of the Leopold and Loeb story, which had originally been popularized in "In Cold Blood."
"Film in Room 511," Terry told us excitedly. "Let's all fly to Room 511!" Terry chuckled all the way through the homoerotic flick. During the movie, he leaned over to anyone who could hear and whispered, "This is tres gay, no?"

4.) "GEORGE BUSH HOLOGRAM DAY:" 2:00am. Terry called me up during the rebroadcast of a George Bush press conference, not realizing how late it was. I didn't pick up, so he told my answering machine that George Bush did not exist -- that the President was, in fact, merely a hologram being projected from some kind of combination mental hospital/observatory, high atop a mountain!

5.) "'MIRACLE IN MONTAUK' DAY": Once, our whole class wrote a screenplay together -- each person writing five pages until it "got done" -- "Miracle in Montauk." The idea was that each student in the class would write the next five pages, (which never actually happened.) On the last day of class, Terry wrote his five pages of "Montauk" (this unfinished screenplay is no longer extant), which were awesome, even though they had nothing to do with the script:
"How's your ultra-fab clit hanging?" one lesbian (!) asks another at the beginning of Terry's pages.
"Hanging?" the other lesbian replies. How's it hanging? Glimmering in the sun, maybe. Shimmering, yes, granted. I'll give you that. But hanging, never."
After Terry read that to us, we were silent. There are no words to follow up something like that.

6.) "HEROIN DAY": One student in our writing class was in the hospital, and Terry wrote her a very sweet letter, making sure that she was "in fine form and fettle." He recounted to her the fact that he, himself, had been in the hospital on numerous occasions, and that the nurses always gave him a tray so that he would have something on which to write. He also sent the student a postcard, which addressed a problem he thought that I may have had: Apparently, because I was so quiet in Terry's class for the first several weeks, he mistook my silent awe of him for drug addiction! The picture on the postcard Terry sent this hospitalized girl, was that of an anthropomorphized hypodermic needle - it had legs and a happy face -- being chased by two cherubic-looking children. On the reverse of the card, Terry scrawled a terse note: "GET ZIGMAN OFF HEROIN! FROM A CONCERNED FRIEND, IN EAST CANAAN, CONNECTICUT."

7.) "THE AMAZING DISAPPEARING SCRIPTS DAY": There was one Spring day when Terry came to school, really depressed. He was afraid to look anybody in the eye. I was sitting on a bench reading, when he shuffled by, staring down at his shoes.
"What's wrong, Terry?" I asked him.
"Man, I just had a heavy scene," he said, stopping in his tracks, looking guilty.
"What happened?"
Apparently, on Terry's way up to Columbia in a cab - he came by himself that day and not with his wife, Gail, as he usually did -- he had lost our entire class's screenplays in a cab. We all assured him that it was okay, and he looked really relieved.

8.) "KEYHOLE DAY": Terry couldn't get into his classroom to teach his 1:00pm course. The door was locked, because the class that was in there before hadn't let out yet. He freaked.
"What's going on in there," I asked.
Terry peered through the keyhole and then offered me a relatively simple explanation:
"Some form of sexual excess, I should think."

9.) "REVISIONIST HISTORY NIGHT:" Terry attended a screening of student films one night at Manhattan's tony National Arts Club on Gramercy Park Place, a curious sort of establishment where octogenarian patrons-of-the-arts drink vermouth and feed their poodle dogs filet mignon right at the table . Terry was given a tour of the century-old venue, which included a brief history lesson about the building. I arrived late, so I asked Terry to recount the history of the century-old National Arts Club and he told me that it was "designed in 1975 by Ken Russell."

10.) "MARLON BRANDO ZYGOTE DAY:" Terry electrified our class when he told us about a party at Marlon Brando's house in the sixties. To this day, none of us students knows whether this actually transpired or not - most probably it did not -- but Terry relayed the story, nevertheless, as if though really happened. He actually made us see it:
"Bud Brando's housekeeper miscarried his baby, right there at the party -- this right-rave up. So, dig, Marlon scoops the [stillborn infant] into a coffee cup, and he proffers this mug to all of the guests, instructing them to 'taste the zygote.'"

11.) On the first day of class, during Terry's second year with us, the smug film school administrator encountered Terry in the hallway. "Hi, Terry," she chirped, cheerfully. "Did you do some writing this summer?' With a fake smile, he replied. "Heh -heh- heh. [long beat] No."

12.) Terry told us the same joke every week, and we would all pretend we had never heard him tell it before - since he would take such pleasure in telling it, and then breaking himself up; this joke became something to which we all looked forward. The (old) joke, roughly, is that Little Red Riding Hood is skipping down the path. The Big Bad Wolf pops out of some brambles and growls, "Little girl, I'm going to fuck you!" Little Red replies, "Stick to the script, Grandpa, it just says you're supposed to eat me."

One of my very favorite things about being a student in Terry Southern's class, is that he used to do nice things for every single one of his students. He wrote, and posted, humorous letters to each of us, just as he had done for our hospitalized classmate. (In a letter to one student, Terry recounts an episode of "Beavis and Butthead" that he particularly enjoyed -- and for no reason, about halfway into the letter, he reverts into fluent French); he tried to help get another student the film rights to Leonard Cohen's novel "Beautiful Losers;" he sent all of us books and CD's that he thought we would like; he phoned all of us, too, late into the night-not only to speculate about George Bush, but also to make sure that we were not too overwhelmed by our schoolwork. Terry freely gave students his home phone number, demanding that each of us would call him, too, and often. (When we called Terry, he would routinely answer the phone with a gleeful shout of, "Pronto!" When Terry would call us, and our answering machines would pick up, he would, invariably, keep yelling, "Mayday!" until we picked up the call.)

I often think that Terry felt sympathetic with young people who were trying, unsuccessfully, to get breaks in show business, because it was so difficult for him to get his own projects going in his later years. He, better than anybody, knew how cruel, unethical (and how downright creepy) Hollywood was. He did something especially nice for me, something that I'll never take for granted:

Going back to that very first day of class, Terry's instructions were simple: Everyone around the room was supposed to read a few pages of a screenplay that he or she had written during the previous summer vacation, and he would critique them. After each person read, Terry offered really sharp, incisive comments. I was the last one to go. After I read, he made no comments at all. He just stared at me as if I were something out of a Petrie dish and uttered, "Next." I wanted to crawl into a corner. My favorite writer hates my guts!
One week later, a priority mail package arrived at my 113th Street apartment, return addressed from East Canaan, Connecticut, Terry's home since the sixties. The envelope contained a copy of a short story he had written, "Heavy Put Away or, A Hustle Not Wholly Devoid of a Certain Grossness, Granted." Along with the manuscript came this note: "I thought this might make a nice film for you." Terry knew that, like all film students, I was supposed to start production on a short film that would serve as my masters' thesis, and he felt that this would be a good story for my film. When I encountered Terry in class, a few days later, he asked if I'd like to co-author the script for "Heavy Put-Away" with him.
Naturally, it was the happiest day of my life. After years of Hollywood people telling me to get lost - practically throwing out me out of their offices because they felt my writing was too "weird" -- here is the validation I needed. An offer of "collaboration" from my all-time favorite writer!
Terry and I spent three or four lunch breaks hammering out the adaptation. His original short story is set in a tavern, where a con man details his shady exploits to a Mickey Spillane-type writer. Terry and I discussed how to open the story up and make it more cinematic; how to show characters that had only been described in the story; and, most of all, how to make this twenty-five minute flick funny.
We wrote at some of the taverns up near Columbia. I'd fuel him with ham sandwiches and Heinekin ("We're getting a bit thirsty, Charles, yes?"), and watch his imagination take flight. The always-great Gail Gerber, a dance instructor who was Terry's dutiful companion for many years (always taking his arm and walking him to school each week), would give me ballet-tinged instructions for watching Terry carefully when I walked him down Broadway for lunch ("Don't let Terry do any plies across the street," she would admonish; not to mention, "Watch Terry at the traffic lights!") Many times, Terry and I would be followed up the street by homeless guys, who would hit on the avuncular-looking Terry for a few bucks, greeting him with cries of, "Yo, Professor, how about a dollah?!"
It was also during these writing lunches that I got my first taste of how badly Terry must have felt about his decline in the entertainment world, in the eighties and nineties. At a sushi place near campus, where he and Gail ate from a huge wooden plank full of Jules Verne-like delicacies, one of which I think may have even been some kind of a starfish (and washing all of this down with sake) I asked him about a project he had co-authored with songwriter Harry Nilsson, "The Telephone." This low-budget film released in 1985, and starring Whoopi Goldberg, was Terry's first filmed screenplay in fifteen years. Terry said that he and Nilsson had penned the script for Robin Williams, but that it was impossible for he and Nilsson to get it to him.
"Yeah, Robin's scripts have to go through his wife, and she wouldn't give it to him," Terry mumbled, downing one more in his series of sakes.
I felt so awful. The genius scribe of "Dr. Strangelove" and "Easy Rider," and he couldn't get a script to fucking MORK? The horror! The horror! (Terry's friend Rip Torn directed "The Telephone." The great Mr. Torn always makes sure, whenever he is interviewed, to talk his late friend Terry up.)

Terry told me more of his troubles: In the eighties, he scored a gig writing for "Saturday Night Live," through his friend, satirist Michael O' Donoghue, but he was soon replaced, in short because his sketches-one of which was apparently about a gynecologist -were deemed improper for network television (even though this program aired at such a late hour). I learned at roughly the same time, through a network of fellow film geeks, that a strapped-for-cash Terry had written a hard core porno film, "Randy, the Electric Lady," under a pseudonym. I got a hold of this video - research, of course-and found out that in between the hard core sex acts, the film was peppered with acerbic/literate dialogue, the likes of which I had never seen in a film of this kind, much of the dialogue simply consisting of Southern archly sending himself up. (In the film, a doctor at a Masters and Johnson-like sex clinic barges in on two other scientists who happen to be in flagrante delicto. He tells them, "No fucking in here. This is the sex room" - a joke on "No fighting in here, this is the war room" from "Dr. Strangelove.")

While Terry's style (sometimes dark, never mean-spirited), may not have been in vogue in the Hollywood of the nineties, at least, he never gave up. Between classes, when he wasn't being treated to lunch by his students, he would sometimes sit alone in the classroom, huddled over pen and paper. Once, I peeked at what he was writing; it was something about Slim Pickens, who rode the rocket in "Strangelove" -- an anecdote, apparently, for his memoirs. (Terry did have a biographer, Lee Hill, who accompanied him to class on a couple of occasions.)
Terry always looked a bit pallid, sometimes more than other times. He came to school on the days when he wasn't feeling quite up to snuff, too, always afraid to miss a class, and needing every bit of the meager money that Columbia paid him; once, he walked into the film school office and asked if there was any such thing as a "faculty loan" -- just as a strapped student often needed to take out a "student loan."

My career as a student at Columbia University was soon over. I graduated from film school in 1993 and moved back to my hometown of Los Angeles. I saw Terry once more the following year, when I came to New York for a visit. Terry always liked to hear about what was going on in L.A., where he had not spent too much time over the last few years . When I walked into his class-which was stuffed to the rafters with all-new, fresh-faced students, he beamed, "Zigman! What news from the Coast?"

The following year, I became a Professor of Film myself, at small Augusta State University, in Georgia. (Augusta's a sleepy bedroom community that wakes up once a year for the Masters Golf Tournament.) I wrote Terry a letter, telling him that I would be teaching a course called "Literature into Film," and that I would concentrate, for a few weeks, on his his novels and films (this turned out, by the way, to be the most popular part of the class). He wrote me back, immediately, and it's a letter I will always treasure. The letter was printed on the back of an invitation to an Independent Film Project awards dinner in NYC, where Terry had been honored that week (finally!) along with such other silver screen luminaries as Joel and Ethan Coen, Sigourney Weaver, Jane Campion, and Harvey Keitel. This missive reads as follows:

"Dear Chuck: Delighted to hear from you, and doubly delighted to hear of your good fortune there among the Georgia Peaches. If memory serves, teeny bop Georgia poon tastes almost exactly like peaches and cream - and is lined with little puppy dog tongues which know (is this instinct or what?) how to deal with a man's throbbing johnson. Am I right???
"Anyway, please keep me posted. Quite a bash the other night, the prestigious IFP Award Dinner. Was obliged to do the hang with Bobby, Marty, and Harve and finally, of course, to drop on Sig Weaver. ('P&C,' [peaches and cream] Chuck, but def[initely] yum yum!)"

The letter came in an envelope, return addressed from "Tonya Harding, East Canaan, Connecticut."

I talked to Terry one more time, in the fall of 1995, about a month before he passed away. I was responsible for finding a keynote speaker for Augusta State University's yearly writers'conference, the Sandstone Writer's Conference, which happens to be the largest annual convention of writers in the south. I suggested Terry to be this sort of "grand marshall," a move that thrilled my fellow faculty members who didn't know what happened to this famous recluse. The college's literature faculty was fascinated by the idea that Terry -- whom they, too, recognized to be a great icon -- would spend a whole weekend with students. When I asked Terry if he and Gail would like to fly down to Georgia, his enthusiasm was tempered by matters pecuniary:
"Any bread," he asked? (He said he'd do it for five hundred dollars. Apparently, money was now ultra-ultra-tight in Terry's house; in a rare interview Terry had given to the Washington Post a few months earlier, the interviewer found, on Terry's mantle, a stack of past due notices and a rifle.)
I was buoyed up by the idea of squiring Terry and Gail around the historic south, but it never came to be. For soon after I had spoken to him, Terry collapsed on the stairwell on his way to teaching a class at Columbia, and he passed away four days later.

In the sixties, Terry Southern was one of the most prominent members of the same Mt. Rushmore pantheon as Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs, Leary, etc. But due to the vagaries of a film industry that wasted his time, and no longer brokered in his type of humor, he soon - inexplicably - "slipped off the list," except to his diehard fans.
Unbelievably, according to his son Nile, universities aren't sure if they want to obtain Terry's archives, which are veritable pots of gold (unproduced scripts, random ephemera) which actually rest in a box at a self-storage facility in Chelsea!
Terry's friend William S. Burroughs (the two appear together in the documentary Burroughs, where they hilariously try out a Reichian Therapy 'orgone energy tank' together) once said of this grand guy, "Terry Southern knows how to write." And the ancient Egyptians said something that was pretty cool, too. (Since I know I have to end a hagiographic/sycophantic article like this in the most pretentious way I can, I won't disappoint): Those wily Egyptians said that if you utter a person's name three times, that person will live forever. In that case: Terry Southern. Terry Southern. Terry Southern.
(Post Script: Currently, it's August '99, and all of the sudden, after an absence of many years, dark/sharp/smart/out-there/frequently gross comedies are suddenly back in vogue again at the local multiplex. If Terry were still here, I'll bet Hollywood would take notice...)

Copyright 1999 by Charles L. Zigman. All Rights Reserved.

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