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In 1946, we lived in a schoolhouse. At the time, there was a severe post-war housing shortage. The small town of Munday wanted to hire my father as its coach, and he wanted to take the job, but he couldn't find a place for us to live. The superintendent suggested that we live in an empty classroom. So my mom, my dad, and I moved into a new one-room home that came equipped with blackboards. The desks were carried out to be replaced by beds, a couch, coffee tables, a stove, and even a refrigerator. I wasn't much taller than a football when I started working out with my dad's football teams. I would suit up with them on game days and sit beside my father on the bench. For a long time, I thought jock straps were defective underwear, another result of post-war shortages. Just before my sophomore year in college, I decided I needed a break. I called home to tell my parents that I planned to spend the year in France. I expected them to protest, but all my dad said was: "I'll be there tomorrow to pick up the car." After my year abroad, I got a second academic wind. I finished college and graduate school and then went to work for the Washington Post. Doing a memorable murder story one day, I managed to get a couple of names mixed up, calling the killer the victim and vice versa. Both families were upset. That was the first time the city editor called me "Ace." In 1973, while covering the Watergate Hearings for New York magazine, I needed help with a story. Somebody suggested I talk to Lesley Stahl at CBS. I phoned her at home. She hung up on me. The next day, I called her at the office. She asked if I wanted to have dinner. Months later, Lesley and I planned to go to Bermuda together, but her father intervened. He asked her if she had slept with me. She admitted that she hadn't. Her dad said: "Then you can't go because something will go wrong--and I'm not coming to get you again." So we didn't go. But several years later we married. My first novel, Orchids for Mother, contained a disguised version of our romance. I dedicated the book to my mom and dad. Several years later, my first movie, Urban Cowboy, started as a magazine story Esquire. Hollywood bought the rights to "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy" and my services as screenwriter. I was drawn to the subject because it was a chance to get back to my mesquite-and-tumbleweed roots. In the movie, "Bud" comes from Spur which happened to be the town where I was born. Seventeen years later, a fellow named Phil Oesterman wrote me a letter proposing Urban Cowboy: The Musical. I promptly lost the letter. My wife forced me to search my office for days until I finally found it. We got together and went right to work. He taught me that you can=t just cut from scene to scene as in a movie: sometimes people have to change clothes. He also showed me that other differences between movies and the theater. Movies hate to be too on the nose; they never say what they really mean. Theater loves to be on the nose; if you want somebody to say what they really mean, have them sing a song. We finally made it to Broadway with Urban Cowboy: the Musical ub 2003. The national tour begins January 2007. While I was working on the movie "Urban Cowboy," Debra Winger gave me a copy of T.H. White's "The Once and Future King." That book gave me an idea for a series of books based on a single insight: The cowboy is the American Knight Errant. The first was "Code of the West" about my Old West King Arthur whom I called Jimmy Goodnight. The second was "The Cowboy with the Tiffany Gun" which was a reinvention ot the Fisher King tale told as a cowboy western. The third is "Riding with John Wayne," just arrived in bookstores, which is about making a movie in West Texas. The hero is Chick Goodnight, screenwriter, who has written a film about his great-great-great-ever-so-great grandfather Jimmy Goodnight (my original Old West Once and Future Cowboy King). |