Salon Books | The case of the brokenhearted father


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That's why it rings so true (03/12/99) Starring Monica Lewinsky, as herself Reviewed by Liesl Schillinger She was universally reviled -- until the public got a chance to hear her speak and, now, to read her version of events (03/12/99) Journey to the center of a race By Fetzer Mills, Jr. Randall Kenan talks about the seven-year odyssey that led him from Martha's Vineyard to Alaska in search of the truth about black life in America (02/24/99) Writing on Air By Geoff Edgers David Halberstam talks about his new book, "Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made" (02/18/99) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Books feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		THE CASE OF THE BROKENHEARTED FATHER \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Yes. Linda Jane was the troubled daughter I was searching for. If I'd been a real private detective, I would have flown out to Santa Barbara. But I was only a scribe writing on spec. So I hoofed it to the New York Public Library and dug up a New York Post article from June 11, 1959, that began, "Mystery writer [Ross Macdonald] is bringing his troubled daughter home today." Then it told how the "attractive brunette" had been emotionally disturbed for three years since she "fatally injured an 11-year-old-boy." In late May, she disappeared from her University of California dorm up in Davis. Several days later she cashed a check down in Santa Monica. Ten days after her disappearance she was picked up in Reno "under circumstances Reno police refused to divulge." The article ended with the information that Linda was found before she could have read her father's plea for her return in the morning newspapers. This was a story straight out of Macdonald's prime Lost Daughter novels, "The Zebra-Striped Hearse" (1962), "The Chill" (1964) and "Sleeping Beauty" (1973). I should point out that the troubled teen in the last title goes to Nevada and stages a fake kidnapping to get $1,000. Did Linda pull a trick like that? I would never get to ask her. I learned in Ralph Sipper's privately printed 1984 book about Macdonald, "Inward Journey," that Linda died of a "cerebral accident" in 1970. I know a few hard-boiled historians, so I got on the wire. A call to Richard Layman in South Carolina was my initial break. Layman is an early biographer of Dashiell Hammett. I know him because he published my first short story in his 1986 periodical the New Black Mask. Allow me this digression because it plays a big part in this caper: My short story was reviewed in a Los Angeles newspaper by a fellow who wrote under the name "Mr. Los Angeles" (the name of his column in Los Angeles magazine). The next year I met Mr. Los Angeles at a wine tasting party at the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi died. Mr. Los Angeles was tall and lanky and friendly enough, but an odd duck as well. He tended to smirk as if he knew all about a rank practical joke that had been played on you long ago. He even sounded edgy on the phone. I called him in 1989 and he mentioned that he'd begun a literary project but refused to divulge what it was. "The Secret Project?" I joked. As the '90s started, he got increasingly paranoid about this "Secret Project." In 1995, I planned to be in L.A., but he refused to meet with me. I never spoke with him again. Still hot on the trail, I manage to get the phone number of Ralph Sipper, the "Inward Journey" man. I called him up in Santa Barbara. Sipper was a soft-spoken, older man who chose his words carefully. He asked why I was nosing around Linda Macdonald. I told him. Sipper was polite, but said nothing about the girl. (But then, why should he?) He did give me the telephone number of Ross Macdonald's biographer. It was Mr. Los Angeles. Like any good detective, I put two and two together: Mr. Los Angeles' secret project was a biography of Ross Macdonald. I phoned him and learned I was right. Mr. Los Angeles is, of course, Tom Nolan. On the phone, Nolan was guarded, but not unfriendly, revealing that he'd been writing the biography for 10 years. He'd interviewed 200 people. The book would be out the following March, to be published by Scribners. I suggested that my essay on the effects of Linda Macdonald's tragic fate on her father's work could be excellent prepublicity. Silence. I asked him how Linda figured in Macdonald's work. Long silence. He finally told me that he wanted to preserve whatever freshness his biography will have. He did admit there aren't a lot of unknown facts about Macdonald's life. He did say something to the effect of, "You've found the main traumas, I'm sure." Then he remarked that there are "troubled daughters and sons" in almost all of Macdonald's books. How hard was the brick wall I ran up against? At least my hunch was confirmed: The disturbance that sent Macdonald to Freud was his 17-year-old daughter's vehicular homicide. And it was Freud, of course, who inspired Macdonald to transcend writing run-of-the-mill private eye novels. As the writer told Newsweek in 1971, "Freud was one of the ... greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been tying to turn it back into myth again in my own small way." But the "old movie projector" I was using for a brain -- to borrow a phrase Archer uttered in "The Wycherly Woman" -- wouldn't shut down. Even though it seemed unlikely that Mr. Los Angeles would drop any bombshells when his book came out, something didn't sit right with me about this Freud business. Now, I'm no nut case, but I stretched out on a shrink's couch once or twice in my youth. Maybe you have too. Picture this: A man's daughter runs down and kills a little boy. The daughter is shattered. The father is split between horror at what she's done and pain because the girl herself is so distraught over her crime. This turbulence is so distressing that he moves his family north to the Bay Area for a year and a half so they can go into therapy (or maybe Linda had to get out of Santa Barbara until things cooled down). Now, this is happening in the mid-1950s, don't forget. Ozzie and Harriet reign supreme. America is just learning that it has an unconscious. (You could say that's what the McCarthy hearings are all about.) This man is not going to see a Jungian therapist. Or sit in an Orgone box. Or do Primal Therapy. He is going to lay on a couch and tell a bald man with a beard how much he wants to kill his father and marry his mother. And what if while Macdonald is wading through this Oedipus Complex nonsense, he realizes that he doesn't relate to his daughter, the drunken driver, as much as he identifies with the boy who was run down. Macdonald considers his own childhood. From the time he was 6 until he was 12, he lived with his aunt and uncle. They were mom and dad to the boy. His home life was stable. Then, when he himself was 12 -- only a little older than the boy who was run down -- Macdonald was struck by a psychic car: His aunt died. And he lived an orphan's life ever after. So there Macdonald is, lying on a shrink's couch in the 1950s, torn between his daughter's pain and his own. Talk about Oedipus! Macdonald must have felt as if he were the one who'd been run down by his daughter on that bad night in Santa Barbara. Does that sound off-base? Well, even if it is, could Lew Archer do any better? How about Mr. Los Angeles? His biography is finally published and I read it over the weekend. I licked the case and yet I didn't. Nolan's biography is well researched. Well written. But he's a dodo when it comes to Freud. Macdonald was complex, maybe even a bit of a nut case, but Nolan makes no psychological judgments. Even when they seem necessary. For example, Nolan reveals that when Macdonald was a teen, he had numerous sexual encounters with other boys. Yet once Nolan reaches the writer's adulthood, he makes no references to Macdonald's possible gay inclinations. Did he spend his life repressing his gay or bi side? Or were these boyish frolics something Macdonald outgrew? Nolan is a gentlemanly biographer, and makes no inappropriate speculations. He even turns a blind eye to the possibility of hot sex having occurred between Macdonald and Eudora Welty. Nolan does, however, reveal much about daughter Linda's accident and disappearance. It turns out, she struck three boys, one of whom later died. Just after she hit them, she sped from the scene and a little later rear-ended another car. The girl was booked for hit-and-run. But Nolan's chapter on the accident ends on a note that makes a detective like me slap my forehead. And then want to slap Nolan silly as well. The biographer reports that an eyewitness stuck around long enough to report that a male jumped out of the driver's side of the car before it sped away from the scene of the first accident. If that was true, Linda was sitting on the passenger's side when the boys were clipped. It was only after the driver took a hike that she slid behind the wheel and stomped on the gas. Jesus! Any gumshoe worth his salt would have tracked that eyewitness down. It wouldn't matter that the trail was 40 years cold. But in the end, Nolan is just a biographer, not a detective. As for me, what a trick ending it would be if Linda had really been an innocent. If she was, why didn't she tell the truth about what happened? Was she too drunk to remember, or was she protecting some secret boyfriend? Ross Macdonald once wrote that because Dostoevski experienced the dark side of czarist Russia firsthand, he didn't have to "depend" on his imagination to describe the consequences of evil. If Linda's story had been a Russian tale, it would have been her double who fled the accident. If Sigmund Freud wrote detective novels (and maybe he did), her father would have been the driver. The girl covered up for him, and ultimately both father and daughter staggered under different burdens of guilt. Oh, but that's all cigarette smoke. I'm no more a detective than Tom Nolan. I wonder if Macdonald wrote a secret novel where he solved his troubled daughter's "crime." The closest he seemed to come was his great book, "Sleeping Beauty," written shortly after Linda's death. At the novel's end, Macdonald describes his daughter's fictional double like this: "Laurel lay asleep on the bed, a pillow under her dark head and an afghan over her. There was a telephone on the bedside table. Before I used it [to call the police], I bent over Laurel and touched her warm forehead with my mouth. I could hardly believe that she was alive ... She stirred and half awakened, as if my concern for her had reached down palpably into her sleeping mind. She was alive." What occurs in the ellipse in the above quote is that a murderess jumps out of a window in two quick sentences, falling "in silence until the black boulders stopped her." The ocean is burning because of an oil spill, and "smoke swirled over her body like the smoke from funeral pyres." Talk about an ending from Greek tragedy. The bad girl inside the troubled daughter is now dead, while the good daughter has been resurrected to sit by her father's side once again. When she awakes, they're both free to just ... go for a drive. SALON \| March 16, 1999 David Bowman's most recent novel is "Bunny Modern." He is a frequent contributor to Salon.