While Nile waited, he sorted through his father’s things in an effort to make sense of his career, to shape a narrative out of something inherently shapeless. “Each time,” the broker told a Dallas newspaper, “I have had the feeling that they did not consider Terry Southern a ‘serious’ enough writer to warrant such a large expenditure.”
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To help place the estate, Nile enlisted a broker, who found that university libraries generally weren’t interested. He heard from at least one of his father’s famous collaborators, Peter Fonda, who said he’d call back the following day but never did. Nile walked every day to a nearby copy shop, where he’d Xerox papers and mail them off to old friends and agents and university libraries, hoping to interest someone in the archive’s contents. It was the detritus of his father’s life, arranged chronologically: pairs of glasses, files of research and arcana, magazine centerfolds, a manila envelope stuffed with losing lottery tickets. Here were forty boxes of unproduced screenplays, unpublished stories, unfinished novels.
TERRY ON MILLION DOLLAR PYRAMID ARCHIVE
Nile spent the next several years chipping away at the project, eventually relocating the archive to a corrugated-steel locker on the third floor of a climate-controlled warehouse on the West Side of Manhattan. “Terry’s notion of filing was cleaning off his desk,” Nile told one reporter, describing the imposing mess that constituted his father’s estate. The job presented a number of difficulties. (“I guess I’m the only person he paid some money back to,” the actor Rip Torn told a Denver newspaper.) Partly in an effort to begin paying off these creditors, Nile volunteered to become his father’s literary executor, and he soon began the arduous process of locating and organizing his father’s work and belongings. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band-Southern died owing approximately $30,000 to the I.R.S., to say nothing of his debts to friends, publishers, and local hardware stores. Strangelove and Easy Rider-one of the iconic faces from the cover of Sgt. Gerber was given thirty days to vacate the property. He remembers his father asking, “What’s the delay?” Southern died that Sunday, and his ashes were spread into a pond on his farm, which was almost immediately thereafter seized by the federal government.
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Nile sat by his father’s side, reading him letters from friends and fans whenever he found him awake. “As far as I know, he has never been off a bar stool,” Gerber joked. Looking over his X-rays, a nurse asked if Terry had ever worked in a mine or on an industrial farm. Gerber had resorted to hiding the Raid cans under the sink, hoping he wouldn’t notice.Īfter the fall, Southern was taken to a hospital, where his ex-wife, Carol Kauffman, and their son, Nile, came to be with him. In his last days, he’d also developed a compulsive hatred of flies and would stalk the house spraying them with Raid. Sometimes students would stop by as a kind of pilgrimage, and he’d sit on the porch with them and drink wine. Gerber taught ballet classes to supplement their income-Southern hadn’t had a script produced since 1988’s The Telephone, starring Whoopi Goldberg (“As dull it is exhausting to watch,” claimed the New York Times). Not long before, Southern had been forced to remortgage his farm in East Canaan, Connecticut, where he spent most of his days sleeping, eating meals in bed, and talking to his two orange cats. He was seventy-one years old, though Gerber would later write that he “looked like he was 140.” He’d recently suffered a mild stroke and a bout with colon cancer that left his hair white and his vision blurred. His girlfriend, Gail Gerber, was parked across the street and watched him stumble backward and fall, his glasses and backpack scattering around him on the steps. Terry Southern collapsed on a bright Wednesday afternoon in 1995 while climbing a staircase on the campus of Columbia University, where he taught screenwriting. Yours in Haste and Adoration: Selected Letters of Terry Southern,Įdited by Nile Southern and Brooke Allen.