WILLIAM GOLDMAN R.I.P.

I never met William Goldman. But I feel like he's been an integral part of my life since I first discovered him in the late 1950s. In 1964 when I married my first wife, Lee, we had only met once, briefly, but had corresponded for years, and our first deep connection was our mutual love of Goldman's first novel, THE TEMPLE OF GOLD.

When it came out in 1957, it was initially banned from many libraries and schools for its "sexual" content though by today's standards there is none really. But it had critics and others associating him with The Beats, who were coming TO prominence then, even though it was as far from Beat as a young rebellious novelist could be back then. Despite it being to me a way too "white suburban" tale, I loved it because it was told from the perspective of a young man and made the self-conscious embarrassments of boyhood and adolescence really funny.

After we married, Lee and I would periodically read our favorite funny passages from it to make each other laugh, and it always worked. But Goldman maybe wanted to make his mark as a serious writer, because his second much slimmer novel, YOUR TURN TO CURTSY, MY TURN TO BOW (1958), was very dark. Lee loved it, and would use lines from it as shorthand for various situations, like, "Nail me to the cross Peter, nail me to the cross." I lost my copy years ago so I'm quoting that from memory and might have the name wrong, but the sentiment was the essence of the novel.

He then wrote a novel about his military experience, SOLDIER IN THE RAIN, which I read just before I entered the military and identified with a lot. But the big success of his early novels was the major bestseller BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER, which I read as his declaration that if you can't beat what we called in those days the "hack novelists" who gave the then mass paperback novel audience what they seemed to want, might as well join them.

He went on to become the most successful screenwriter in Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century. Where I ended up and partly as a result of writing screenplays too (though his were often made into movies, and very successful ones—like HARPER, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, MARATHON MAN, et.al.—mine weren't). And the year I arrived in Hollywood, 1983, he published a book about Hollywood called ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, with the opening sentence: "Nobody knows anything." That book was as much a comfort to me during that period of my life as his first novel was to my late adolescence and first marriage.

The best example for me of his skill as a story teller though, whether in novels or screenplays, is the delightfully funny and poignant THE PRINCESS BRIDE.  His like will not pass this way again.