The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (12 page)

“Nobody fucks with one of my kids,” Dad said, when I finished the letter and put it down on the coffee table in front of me. “Nobody.”

Once Dad’s letter arrived in Chicago and among my mother’s people, the criticisms ceased. I never heard a disparaging word from family members again. It took a longer time to soothe my father’s ruffled
feelings about the book. After some time, he learned to use the book to his great advantage and to turn his fictional self into a blissful second career.

“Dad, I’m sorry I hurt your feelings with the book,” I said the day I read the letter. “I really am—but I want you to know that nothing I write can ever make up for my ruined childhood.”

“You exaggerated everything,” he said.

I answered, “I exaggerated nothing.”

When my friend and bookstore owner Cliff Graubart threw me a book party for the publication of
The Great Santini
, my father was one of the first guests to arrive and the last to leave. It was the first time he had come to Cliff’s Old New York Bookshop as a celebrity, and people gathered around him to question him about his response to the book. Then I saw someone make a request that would alter my father’s world forever. A guest opened my book to the title page and asked my father to sign it.

At first, he hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders and began to inscribe the book in his lovely penmanship, but with the slight awkwardness of the southpaw. He signed many copies of
The Great Santini
that night, and his inscriptions became prized by many collectors. His first inscriptions were witty. He signed to one of my friends, Frank Orrin Smith, in the following way:

He signed off as, “Yours truly, old lovable, likable Col. Donald Conroy, USMC ret.”

The next day, I signed books in Rich’s department store with a small crowd of readers in attendance. When I handed a book back to a woman who’d bought it, I saw my father watching from the back of the store, pretending to be shopping for cutlery. I waved for him to join me in the book department, and with feigned reluctance, he approached the signing desk. I introduced the real Great Santini to the
twenty-some people who were in attendance, and they seemed thrilled to meet him. The request for an inscription happened again when a pretty customer asked my father to sign her book. My father hesitated, and I could see his old allegiance to protocol and the chain of command were making it unclear what he should do. I helped him by pulling out a chair beside me.

“Sit here, Dad,” I said. “Sign away.”

So, my father took his place beside me and, in many ways, he never left my side, nor I his, for the rest of our lives. Together we had forged a secret language made up of the blood and contentious harmonies that composed the music of our lives together. I marveled at my father’s charm as he schmoozed with the readers and made them laugh and feel happy to be there. Two separate lines formed—one for me and one for the Great Santini. Dad’s favorite part of the afternoon was when he looked up and I heard him say, laughing, “Hey, son, my line’s longer.”

My father learned to turn my portrait of him to his own favor. He would joke about my famous sensitivity, and how could he help having a son with such a spineless, emotional makeup who wilted in the face of lawful orders by a parent who flew fighter jets? On the Neal Boortz radio show in Atlanta, Dad became a frequent guest, and he would often give parents his unsolicited opinions about raising children. “Don’t spare the rod. America is falling apart because parents are afraid of their own children. The father is the center of the family unit. He gives out the guidance and the punishment. He is judge, jury, and king. From him, all good things flow.”

One day when Dad got home from Neal’s show, he asked me what I thought, and I said, “The Great Santini giving advice about raising children. That’s not exactly why I wrote my book. Jesus Christ! My dad, the Nazi Dr. Spock.”

For the rest of his life, my father and I would sign all my books together. We signed for five hours in Atlanta when
The Prince of Tides
came out in 1986. When
Beach Music
appeared in 1995, we signed for seven straight hours in Charlotte. We made a vow to each other that no customer would ever leave these stores without books signed by us both. Though he often drove me nuts with his bullheadedness, his prejudices, his free-flowing narcissism, his awful Santininess, his letter had given
me a way back to him. There was something in my father that the book touched, and it opened up a place in his heart that I thought had closed off long before I was born. So we began a journey together, set off on a voyage that would take us to many places and shared experiences that I never thought were possible with such an incomprehensible man. But that would come in bits and pieces and slow increments over the years. When I was on the modest tour for
The Great Santini
, I called my father on the road to give him a piece of news that would have a critical impact on both of us.

“Dad,” I said, “Hollywood wants to do a film of
The Great Santini
.”

The making of movies from the books I have written has been one of the most surprising and unsettling parts of my adult life. When I first watched Jon Voight playing me in the movie
Conrack
, based on
The Water Is Wide
, I winced each time someone on the screen spoke my name, then went around for the next year feeling ugly. Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch, the gifted screenwriters who delivered the script, could not imagine a white Southern man could bring himself to be nice to black people—it was inconceivable in the Hollywood I entered in 1972. When the folks I met there found out I was from South Carolina, they would look at me as though I raised police dogs to attack poor black people marching for their freedom. There’s always a strong attraction and repulsion about the South in Hollywood, so the screenwriters felt like they had to make the Jon Voight character kind of goofy and disconnected as he performs those ditzy rituals in his first appearance on-screen. That I was born and raised in the South, and that the civil rights movement had a profound effect on me and thousands of other Southerners like me, did not make sense to anyone when I got to Los Angeles. Our image was set in stone. In the South, there were only fire-breathing white racists and wonderful, life-affirming black people hungry for their God-given rights.

The
Conrack
experience was a grand one for me and my entire
family, and a troubling one for the town of Beaufort, South Carolina. When
The Great Santini
was sold to the movies, the complications became apparent after Bing Crosby Productions purchased the book. It had never occurred to me that Hollywood would ever play a leading role in my life, especially those years at The Citadel when I dreamed of being a poet.

Then I received a phone call from Charles Pratt, the producer of the movie, who told me two notes of interest about the film—one that thrilled me and one that sickened me. He informed me that the actor Robert Duvall had signed up to play Santini. I had followed Mr. Duvall’s career since he played Boo Radley in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and I thought he was on his way to a long and distinguished Hollywood career. Then Charles Pratt told me that they planned to make the entire movie in Beaufort. Instantly, I thought of the strategies I could employ to keep my parents from having a fistfight on the set, or to prevent encounters between them as they walked the streets of a very small town.

After their divorce, my mother and father’s relationship became so rancorous and contentious that all seven children knew that there was no possibility of some peaceable agreement between them. When the divorce was final, Mom married a naval doctor, John Egan, and I thought there might be some cessation of hostilities between my parents. But Mom remained furious over the life she had lived with Dad, and I thought she had every right to be. Dad was hurt by the divorce, and I told him he had no right to those unexamined feelings.

The morning following my conversation with Charles Pratt, Dad arrived for coffee at my apartment in Atlanta, and I gave him the news as he was reading my copy of the
Atlanta Constitution
. I told him about Robert Duvall. He pretended to be disinterested in such a trivial piece of gossip, and then I heard, “Who’s Robert Duvall?” Dad said it without lowering the paper.

“The Irish lawyer in the
Godfather
series,” I said. “The guy who loves the smell of napalm in the morning in
Apocalypse Now
. Sounds like typecasting to me.”

“I know that guy,” Dad said as he lowered the paper. “What a role he just signed up for! This’ll make his career.”

“It’s the modesty of your character that attracted Duvall to the role, Dad.”

“Nah, I bet he’s been waiting for a script with some meat on it for years. He’s been a character actor.”

“Charles Pratt told me that he felt like he had hired a young Humphrey Bogart,” I said. “It’s being filmed in Beaufort.”

“Uh-oh. The land of your pissed-off mother. I smell trouble,” he said. “Who’s playing your mother?”

“Blythe Danner. A living doll and a great actress,” I said.

“I bet your mother wet her britches when she heard the news,” he said.

“She was pretty happy.”

“Who’s playing you?”

“A young actor named Michael O’Keefe. It’s his first film. A young actress named Lisa Jane Persky is going to play Carol Ann,” I said.

“What a family I produced,” he said. “Who said a dumb-ass Irishman from Chicago could make a family like this? We’re going to be in a fucking movie. It’s a shame John Wayne is dead. Only he could’ve brought my virility and toughness to the silver screen.”

“The silver screen?” I asked.

“That’s what they call it, sports fans,” he said. “A young Humphrey Bogart to play me—a nobody to play you. Kind of ironic, isn’t it, son?”

•   •   •

A month before the film crew would arrive, I made an exploratory trip to Beaufort to gauge my mother’s reaction to the gathering excitement that had elated the town with the arrival of the filmmakers. Mom had already spoken to Blythe Danner on the phone, and Mom was sure a deep friendship was in the making. Late one afternoon Mom and I walked down to the dock belonging to Billy Kennedy, a friend I’d made playing football in high school. It had a nice view of the bridge to Lady’s Island and was across the street from Tidalholm, which the filmmakers had rented out as the Meecham family’s Beaufort house—it was the purest fantasy of my military brat heart that I put my fictional family in the most impressive mansion in town. I had lived out a childhood
in trailers and Quonset huts, while my younger siblings lived in much fancier quarters as my father accrued higher rank.

The pride was a powerful, nourishing one as my mother regaled me with the town’s pleasure awaiting the coming of the film crew.

“You’ve made some people in this town mighty happy, son,” she said.

“That’s good to hear, after
Conrack
,” I said.

“They’ve gotten over that,” she told me, “at least most of them. Some people’ll always be mad about that. But they’re racist and we’ll never care what they think, will we?”

“Mom? Dad wants to come down to watch a little of the movie being made.”

“He can’t come,” she said.

“Yes, he can. Because I invited him,” I said. “And Robert Duvall wants to meet him.”

“I’ll go to Florida if that happens,” she said.

“Say hi to Aunt Helen for me,” I answered, then added, “I’ll keep him away from you. That’s a promise.”

It was a promise I was determined to keep, since my parents’ divorce proceedings had an inescapable linkup with the publication of
The Great Santini
. Based on their reaction to the book, the whole family refused to believe that Mom and Dad could pull off a simple act of legal dissociation without all the excesses of grand opera spilling out, and they had been right.

In the month leading up to their divorce trial, Dad and I had met for lunch at the Varsity, a legendary hot-dog joint near the Georgia Tech campus. As we sat eating our chili-cheese dogs, I said, “You’ve got to hire a lawyer to represent you in your divorce trial, Dad.”

“I’ve got rights,” he said. “I’m defending myself. I’m telling the judge that I’m a Roman Catholic and my church doesn’t believe in divorce. Your mother’s got nothing to back her up, and I’ve got Thomas Aquinas on my side.”

Putting my head in my hands, I said, “Dad, promise me you won’t mention Aquinas in court.”

“Yeah, that’s just the start of it. There’s Saint Francis of Assisi, you know—the bird guy. Saint Peter, who’s the rock upon which my church
was built. Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. I might even recite the confiteor to let the judge know who he’s dealing with.”

“What would you have done without the Baltimore Catechism, Dad?”

“It’s still my favorite novel, son.”

“It’s not a novel.”

“Hey, it’s a book. It looks like a novel to me. I still read it for pleasure,” he said.

“You need a lawyer,” I insisted.

“Negative.”

I said, in slight despair, “You’re going into court without one?”

“Affirmative.” His jaw was set in defiance.

“I hired you one, Dad.”

“I don’t need one,” Dad repeated, then, “Who is he?”

“Buster Murdaugh’s son.”

“Buster? I hate that Southern-ass name,” Dad said. “I’m a Chicago boy. I like my lawyers to be called Mickey the Blade, Sharkey, or Opie the Jew Boy.”

“Your lawyer’s name is Randy Murdaugh. He’s Buster’s son.”

“Tell me about Buster Murdaugh.”

I remembered the time I met Buster quite well, and repeated it to my father. “At Hampton, during my trial to get my teaching job back, this older man sat in the jury box and laughed his ass off at several things I said. When the trial was over, Buster called me over and introduced himself. Smoking a cigar, he said, ‘I’m the cock of the walk in this part of South Carolina, and, boy, you really know how to put on a show. You scared the living hell out of those bastards. But you’re going to lose your ass.’ ‘What if I’d had you as a lawyer?’ I asked. Buster took a puff of his cigar and blew a pillow of smoke in my direction before saying, ‘You’d be teaching in that little school of yours tomorrow morning. But you ain’t going to be teaching ever again. Let me send you to law school; then you come back and work for me. I’ll make you the goddamnedest lawyer you’ve ever seen.’ ”