Hollywood: A Third Memoir by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster 2010)

 

HOLLYWOOD—as opposed movies, its principal product—entered my life almost simultaneously with my son, James McMurtry, who arrived in March 1962, at which time I was teaching world literature—all of it, from the Ramayana to Dylan Thomas—at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. To the farm and oil patch kids I was teaching, literature—or at least my mandated selection of it—held little appeal. In desperation I began to challenge these reluctant students to Ping-Pong matches, a game at which I was then quite good. If a student won, he or she got an A; if they lost they got a C.

That may seem a little unorthodox, but then five classes is a lot of classes. Between matches I was able to make friends with two writers, John Graves and Dave Hickey, both still alive and both still friends.

Then one day a man from Paramount Studios called, taking me by surprise. He turned out to be a location scout—that night he took me to dinner at what was probably the best restaurant in Fort Worth. Though, by this time, I had lived in both Houston and San Francisco, I knew nothing of fine dining. The man wore a pin-striped suit which bespoke a standard of eloquence far beyond my own. Though the suit was probably just normal Brooks Brothers, I remember it to this day; and I also remember the news he brought me, which was that Paramount had just bought the film rights to my slight first novel, Horseman, Pass By, and planned to film it in the Panhandle of Texas, starting almost immediately, with Paul Newman to star. The sum they planned to pay me, $10,000, meant, to me, farewell forever to the Ramayana and to table tennis as a grading system as well.