Everything else was mine.
There wasn’t an adventure story anywhere that was safe from me. “Come on,” I would say to Miss Roginski when I was well again. “Stevenson, you keep saying Stevenson, I’ve finished Stevenson, who now?” and she would say, “Well, try Scott, see how you like him, “ so I fried old Sir Walter and I liked him well enough to butt through a half-dozen books in December (a lot of that was Christmas vacation when I didn’t have to interrupt my reading for anything but now and then a little food). “Who else, who else?” “Cooper maybe,” she’d say, so off I went into The Deerslayer and all the Leatherstocking stuff, and then on my own one day I stumbled onto Dumas and D’Artagnan and that got me through most of February, those guys. “You have become, before my very eyes, a novel-holic,” Miss Roginski said.
“Do you realize you are spending more time now reading than you used to spend on games? Do you know that your arithmetic grades are actually getting worse?” I never minded when she knocked me.
We were alone in the schoolroom, and I was after her for somebody good to devour. She shook her head. “You’re certainly blooming, Billy. Before my very eyes. I just don’t know into what.” I just stood there and waited for her to tell me to read somebody.
“You’re impossible, standing there waiting.” She thought a second. “All right. Try Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame .”
“Hugo,” I said.” Hunchback. Thank you,” and I turned, ready to begin my sprint to the library. I heard her words sighed behind me as I moved.
“This can’t last. It just can’t last.”
But it did.
And it has. I am as devoted to adventure now as then, and that’s never going to stop. That first book of mine I mentioned, The Temple of Gold —do you know where the title comes from? From the movie Gunga Din , which I’ve seen sixteen times and I still think is the greatest adventure movie ever ever ever made. (True story about Gunga Din : when I got discharged from the Army, I made a vow never to go back on an Army post. No big deal, just a simple lifelong vow. Okay, now I’m home the day after I get out and I’ve got a buddy at Fort Sheridan nearby and I call to check in and he says, “Hey, guess what’s on post tonight? Gunga Din .” “We’ll go,” I said. “It’s tricky,” he said; “you’re a civilian.” Upshot: I got back into uniform the first night I was out and snuck onto an Army post to see that movie. Snuck back. A thief in the night. Heart pounding, the sweats, everything. ) I’m addicted to action/adventure/call-it-what-you-will, in any way, shape, etc. I never missed an Alan Ladd picture, an Errol Flynn picture. I still don’t miss John Wayne pictures.
My whole life really began with my father reading me the Morgenstern when I was ten. Fact: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, no question, the most popular thing I’ve ever been connected with.
When I die, if the Times gives me an obit, it’s going to be because of Butch . Okay, now what’s the scene everybody talks about, the single moment that stays fresh for you and me and the masses?
Answer: the jump off the cliff. Well, when I wrote that, I remember thinking that those cliffs they were jumping off, those were the Cliffs of Insanity that everybody tries to climb in The Princess Bride . In my mind, when I wrote Butch , I was thinking back further into my mind, remembering my father reading the rope climb up the Cliffs of Insanity and the death that was lurking right behind.
That book was the single best thing that happened to me (sorry about that, Helen; Helen is my wife, the hot-shot child psychiatrist), and long before I was even married, I knew I was going to share it with my son. I knew I was going to have a son too. So when Jason was born (if he’d been a girl, he would have been Pamby; can you believe that, a woman child psychiatrist who would give her kids such names?)—anyway, when Jason was born, I made a mental note to buy him a copy of The Princess Bride for his tenth birthday.
After which I promptly forgot all about it.
Flash forward: the Beverly Hills Hotel last December. I am going mad having meetings on Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives , which I am adapting for the Silver Screen. I call my wife in New York at dinnertime, which I always do—it makes her feel wanted —and we’re talking and at the close she says, “Oh. We’re giving Jason a ten-speed bike. I bought it today. I thought that was fitting, don’t you?”
“Why fitting?”
“Oh come on, Willy, ten years, ten speeds.”
“Is he ten tomorrow? It went clean outta my head.”
“Call us at suppertime tomorrow and you can wish him a happy.”
“Helen?” I said then. “Listen, do me something. Buzz the Nine-nine-nine bookshop and have them send over The Princess Bride .”
“Lemme get a pencil,” and she’s gone a while. “Okay. Shoot. The what bride?”
“Princess. By S. Morgenstern. It’s a kids’ classic. Tell him I’ll quiz him on it when I’m back next week and that he doesn’t have to like it or anything, but if he doesn’t, tell him I’ll kill myself. Give him that message exactly please; I wouldn’t want to apply any extra pressure or anything.”
“Kiss me, my fool.”
“Mmmm-wah.”
“No starlets now.” This was always her sign-off line when I was alone and on the loose in sunny California.
“They’re extinct, dummy.” That was mine. We hung up.
Now the next afternoon, it so happened, from somewhere, there actually appeared a living, sun-tanned, breathing-deeply starlet. I’m lolling by the pool and she moves by in a bikini and she is gorgeous. I’m free for the afternoon, I don’t know a soul, so I start playing a game about how can I approach this girl so she won’t laugh out loud. I never do anything, but ogling is great exercise and I am a major-league girl watcher. I can’t come up with any approach that connects with reality, so I start to swim my laps. I swim a quarter-mile a day because I have a bad disc at the base of my spine.
Up and back, up and back, eighteen laps, and when I’m done, I’m hanging on in the deep end, panting away, and over swims this starlet. She hangs on the ledge in the deep end too, maybe all of six inches away, hair all wet and glistening and the body’s under water but you know it’s there and she says (this happened now), “Pardon me, but aren’t you the William Goldman who wrote Boys and Girls Together ? That’s, like, my favorite book in all the world.”
I clutch the ledge and nod; I don’t remember what I said exactly. (Lie: I remember exactly what I said, except it’s too goonlike to put it down; ye gods, I’m forty years old. “Goldman, yes Goldman, I’m Goldman.” It came out like all in one word, so there’s no telling what language she thought I was responding in. )
“I’m Sandy Sterling,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi, Sandy Sterling,” I got out, which was pretty suave, suave for me anyway; I’d say it again if the same situation came up.
Then my name was paged. “The Zanucks won’t leave me alone,” I say, and she breaks out laughing and I hurry to the phone thinking was it really all that clever, and by the time I get there I decide yes it was, and into the receiver I say that, “Clever.” Not “hello.” Not “Bill Goldman.” “Clever” is what I say.