Jeremy Larner
Childhood
Jeremy Larner grew up in Indiana, in the quiet but violent '50's, and had some playground rep as a basketball player in Indianapolis, where he encountered Oscar Robertson and other future stars on the playground courts of that city.
Education and influences
Just turned 21, he graduated from Brandeis in 1958 (where he was close to Herbert Marcuse, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, and a fellow student named Abbie Hoffman, who later, running a small bookstore in Worcester, Mass., became an early champion of Jeremy's first novel.)
Early career
In 1959, Jeremy began a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at UC Berkeley, but finding himself unsuited for academic life (where a generation of fiction writers remained during the Vietnam War and afterwards), Jeremy left graduate school in his first year and came to New York City at 22, and stayed there throughout the 1960's, writing five books in that period. In Berkeley, and soon after, on the Lower East Side of NY City in the early 60's, Jeremy became acquainted with poets of the beat generation, who had suddenly become a public phenomenon due to the sudden success of Howl by Allen Ginsberg and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
In 1962, Jeremy was assigned by Dissent magazine to cover the teacher's strike, and decided to spend several months going to elementary school classes in Harlem, to see for himself the reality of the problematic classroom. His long account of what he discovered was widely anthologized, having come to the attention of Michael Harrington, author of the book, Poverty in America, which inspired John Kennedy & Robert Kennedy.
Jeremy's first published piece was a critique of J.D. Salinger, published in Partisan Review in 1961. Also in that year he journeyed south to cover the lunch-counter sit-in strikes organized at black universities, and wrote several pieces for The New Leader and Dissent.
In the torrid summer of '63, Jeremy sat in his rent-controlled New York apartment on 103rd and West End, while the plumbing was being torn apart for the whole building, and operated an old-fashioned reel to reel tape recorder with his toes, so that he could type and edit what he was hearing over the plumbing noises: taped interviews with heroin addicts at the Henry Street Settlement in New York. The harrowing stories told in these interviews became the basis of one of the first books from tape: The Addict in the Street, which remained in print for 20 years. Grove Press celebrated its publication in early '65 with a party for Jeremy and William Burroughs, where Norman Mailer challenged Jeremy to a fight.
First novel, Drive, He Said; Aga Khan Prize
During that active and difficult time in New York, where both his sons were born, Jeremy wrote his first novel, Drive, He Said, which in 1964 won the Delta Prize for first novels. The prize had gone unclaimed for several years and by then had reached $10,000—a fortune for Jeremy at that time. The judges were Walter van Tilburg Clark, Mary McCarthy & Leslie Fiedler.
The heroes of Drive, He Said were a college basketball star who has mixed feelings about his stardom and what is expected of him and his revolutionary roommate, who eventually burns the campus down. The reviewer in Playboy magazine echoed the establishment verdict when he said, "Nothing like this could happen in America." (Then it happened—and the book became an underground classic in the 60's, passed from hand to hand in its paperback edition.)
In 1964, Jeremy won the Aga Kahn Prize from the Paris Review, for the best short story of the year, "O the Wonder!"
After 1964, Jeremy easily obtained work as a freelance journalist and published articles, essays and stories in many magazines, including Harpers, The Paris Review, and Life.
Two pieces of lasting interest appeared in Life, both about sports. In 1967, Jeremy wrote "How Goliath Can't Win," the most widely anthologized piece about Wilt Chamberlin, based on the NBA finals that year, the only year when Philadelphia beat Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics. Chamberlin, believing that Life should pay him every time they ran his picture, refused to talk to Jeremy. Chamberlin's voice, however, echoed through lockerrooms, airplanes and restaurants during the two weeks Jeremy traveled with the team, and he was able to write everything down with no strings attached.
He also covered the 1968 Mexico City Olympics for Life, writing about track and field. One of the runners stayed in his hotel room, and he became close with the entire roster of U.S. sprinters, enabling him to write a second piece when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in protest on the victory stand.
Another well-known piece of reporting appeared in Harper's, for which Jeremy covered the court-martial of Dale Noyd, a decorated fighter pilot who had refused to train other pilots for the war in Vietnam. Jeremy's account was selected for an anthology of the best journalism that year.
In 1965, Jeremy began teaching in the English Department at Stony Brook, State University of New York, although he had no degrees beyond the B.A. He taught classes in poetry and in the modern novel from '65 thru '69, taking the year off in 1968, when he won an N.E.A. grant in the first year they were given to individual artists.
In January 1968, Jeremy wrote a feature for The Saturday Evening Post, about O.J. Simpson, who had just starred in the Rose Bowl, and was later to win the Heisman Trophy, before going on to an acting career and a famous murder trial. Jeremy spent an eventful weekend socializing with OJ, which he will describe in his coming memoirs.
Eugene McCarthy campaign, 1968
In March of 1968, Jeremy became a principal speechwriter for Gene McCarthy in his campaign for President, working with him closely from the Wisconsin primary (when LBJ, knowing he was about to lose, announced he would not run for re-election), through the California primary (at the end of which Robert Kennedy was assassinated), through the convention in Chicago, where the police were rioting in the streets as Jeremy wrote and faxed the famous seconding speech which Julian Bond gave for McCarthy, just in time to save Bond (who had never met McCarthy) embarrassment and put him on the map politically.
Afterwards Jeremy wrote a book, Nobody Knows, about his travels with the McCarthy Campaign, and most of it was serialized in Harpers Magazine in April & May of 1969. This book got good reviews and was widely read by many who participated in the campaign and wondered what happened to McCarthy after the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Jeremy took issue with McCarthy's idea that he had been unfairly denied the nomination, and showed that the movement begun in his name had accomplished great feats in just six months, unseating a sitting President and making it inevitable that the United States would withdraw from Vietnam. The book attracted criticism, however, due to Jeremy's portrayal of Gene McCarthy as a charismatic and intelligent Senator who was ambivalent about his own campaign and the troops who followed him, and who refused to make an all-out effort in behalf of the ideals that movement expressed.
Blair Clark, McCarthy's campaign manager, later wrote that Nobody Knows is the best book on that campaign and the dynamics of the running conflict between Gene McCarthy and those who were running him for President.
During the 60's in New York, Jeremy not only began his own career, but got to know many novelists, journalists, and poets whose names were or would become household words of the period. He was also acquainted with the chief politicians of the day, had a contentious debate with Tom Hayden (who was still advocating armed revolution) at the Theatre of Ideas in New York after the '68 election, and in 1970 wrote a piece about the gubernatorial race in California, warning that liberals underrated Ronald Reagan.
In 1967, Jeremy had met an actor his age in Los Angeles, who could not get enough work as an actor and wanted to write an adaptation of Drive, He Said. The project had gotten nowhere, but Jeremy had taken this actor as his guest in the pressbox at the Rose Bowl, on New Year's Day of 1968 when O.J. won the MVP. More than a year later, on that bleak winter day in 1969, when Jeremy, in the course of separating from his wife, was living in a one-room flat in Manhattan and rushing to meet a deadline for his McCarthy book, the actor called to say he was going to be a star, and could direct any picture his heart desired, and he wanted Jeremy to come out to Los Angeles and write the script for Drive, He Said himself.
Of course, Jack Nicholson did become a star with the release of Easy Rider that summer, and all the rest that Jack foresaw came to pass also. Jeremy spent a year in L.A., and in 1971, Drive, He Said, was made into a movie (directed by Nicholson, who collaborated with Jeremy on the screenplay).
Vietnam Peace Movement
Jeremy continued his work with the peace movement in 1969. During the Moratorium, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of people around the country, he wrote speeches for Sam Brown, the chief organizer and spokesperson of the Moratorium, and also for Paul Newman, who gave a statement on behalf of several actors who were advocating that war protestors miss a day of work. Jeremy had written radio commercials before for Newman, but during the Moratorium he had to spend a day baby-sitting Newman, accompanied by Jon Voight, which gave rise to some surprising and amusing circumstances.
During this time and afterwards, Jeremy spoke at many college campuses, first in behalf of the anti-Vietnam-war movement, later on movies and politics. He has spoken at one hundred universities around the country.
Travels
Jeremy had met Bill Bradley when he wrote a story for Life about his coming to the New York Knicks in 1967. They remained friends, and the summer after the Knicks won the world championship in 1970, they traveled around the world together… and hiking in the Hindu Kush, they actually located the tribe of "red-headed people" whom Rudyard Kipling describes as descendants of Alexander the Great. They also found their way to Bamiyan, a rural place in a hard-to-reach corner of Afghanistan, where centuries before a 100 foot Bhudda was carved out of a mountainside 1500 years before. Westerners did not discover the site until 1937. No one knows how this artistic-engineering feat was managed, and to top it off, the high priest evidently spoke to the people from the height of the Bhudda's outstretched hand, which actually moved up and down. The Bhudda was later blasted to smithereens by the Taliban.
After his year in Hollywood, Jeremy spent a year at The John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, where Henry Kissinger came to ask for suggestions relating to a new opening to China, and where Jeremy taught a seminar in politics and literature. He also gave minor assistance to Daniel Ellsberg at the time he released the Pentagon Papers.
The Candidate
In April of 1971, Jeremy got another life-changing call from Robert Redford, who, with director Michael Ritchie, was interviewing 10 writers who might be able to write a documentary-style script for a feature film about a campaign for Senator of California…and do it in a hurry, for a start date in November. Jeremy got the job, and after a few months of conferencing and research, wrote the first draft of the script in two weeks, subsequently doing six more drafts on the set outside of San Francisco, where he was available the entire time and re-wrote many more scenes on demand. He became close with Redford, and had to convince him to film the famous scene in the back seat where the exhausted Candidate parodies his own stump speech. This was one of those rare movies where one writer writes every word, and Jeremy was even consulted on voice-overs to bridge material that had to be cut. He was also involved with Ritchie and Redford in the casting process… and in the madness of trying to do a picture with over 120 speaking parts in 2 months on a low budget ($1.1 million), Jeremy was occasionally sent out to find possible actors for minor parts (including the lady who played Redford's mistress), and was otherwise active in decisions made every day on the set.
The Candidate ([1]) was released during the election of 1972, and got mixed reviews, especially from liberal critics who thought Senators were not so easily confused and led astray as the one Jeremy invented and Redford portrayed in the movie. The senators of the day were insulted. Redford and Ritchie, giving interviews, rarely mentioned Jeremy, and he expected nothing more from a picture which met with only moderate box office success.
Academy Award
Then in 1973, Jeremy got an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his script of The Candidate. This may have been the first sign that the movie would eventually become a classic.
Political implications
In contrast to senators at the time the movie was released, congressmen in the 80s and 90s confided to Jeremy, "that's just the way we are now." Some of them, like Dan Quayle, did not seem to realize the movie was ironic. Quayle spoke frequently about how the movie had inspired him, causing Jeremy, during the 1988 elections, to write an op-ed for the New York Times, saying, "Mr. Quayle, this was not a how-to movie, it was a watch-out movie. And you are what we should be watching out for!"
During this time, Jeremy occasionally wrote speeches for politicians, like Bill Bradley, when he gave his basic position on Israel, or stars like Robert Redford, when he spoke in behalf of environmentalism. Once a NY Times article poked fun at a gathering of show-biz environmentalists, saving positive comments only for the words of Redford (which Larner had written for him).
Family
Along the way, he became father to 2 sons and 4 step-children, all of whom he loves dearly.
Poetry
In 1987, after a particularly wrenching love-affair, Jeremy began to write poetry, because it was something he always wanted to try and because he could once more exercise control over what he was writing. He had only to tap the poems he found running in his head every day, for a long time back… including many lines from classic epics and 17th century British verse, as well as American verse from Ogden Nash to TS Eiot. He had no idea, at first, of whether it was any good or not. He certainly did not become a member of any current school of poetry, or a fixture on the academic reading circuit.
But his enthusiasm grew, and for one 20-month period in 1987-88, he wrote at least one poem every day, sometimes five, and some of them stretching to 20 pages. In the tiring days surrounding the death and funeral of his mother, Jeremy would sometimes fall asleep with a poem half-written on a yellow pad that dropped on his chest, then wake up in the morning and finish it.
To write poetry was the key to him for entrance to a special world, entered late at night and after the stress of the day was over, where he grew so absorbed he could not have told you who he was, except that he was a person through whom the poem was passing, and he was totally focused on getting it right.
In 1989, Jeremy began to have public readings, and got a tremendous response. In San Francisco he would rent the Eureka Theatre, charge $1 or $2 for admission, and draw a crowd of 150 people. He would read a 45 minute set, then announce there were refreshments in the lobby, and he would not blame anyone for going home. But he intended to read another 45 minute set in 20 minutes… and 90% of his listeners would return for it. He drew a turn-away crowd for the first of several readings at the Rosenberg-Kaufman Fine Art gallery in New York, and a capacity crowd at the Stern Gallery in Los Angeles. The enthusiasm of these listeners influenced him to include a CD inside the back cover of this, his first collection of poems.
Later work
In 1992, Jeremy wrote a long story, titled Rack's Rules, the only piece of fiction in an anthology titled Sex, Death & God in Los Angeles, which got such a tremendous response that for months show-biz friends running into problems would call and ask for Rack.
Jeremy moved back to New York City in the 90's, where he reached the point of disorientation before being diagnosed with sleep apnea, and wrote an article about the condition (not diagnosed or treatable till the 80s) and his experience of it, that caused many people to recognize and recover completely from a state that otherwise can lead to sudden death.
Chicken on Church
It was in New York that Jeremy was inspired to write Chicken on Church, both a mock-epic and a love poem to the city, particularly to the neighborhood on the end of Manhattan Island, Whitmanesque but full of specific detail and classical allusions that create for Jeremy a style all his own, expansive and yet funny.
He first wrote the poem in 1992. From the beginning it was too long and too outrageous, and only grew more so as he sat down to cut and polish it each year, only to discover wilder associations. A reference to 9/11 (8 blocks from his loft in Tribeca), seemed to fit naturally with a reference to the topless towers of Troy, and Jeremy's most electric reading experience took place in a club's dark basement on Irving Street, near the site and crammed to capacity one month later. Chicken on Church and selected other poems have recently been published by Big Rooster Press. More information can be found at the <A HREF="http://www.bigroosterpress.com" target="_new">Big Rooster Press</A> web site.
After a few more annual rewritings, Jeremy reached a point where he actually could polish it and make the poem shorter and tighter, and he was satisfied, and wanted to offer it to souls who might vibrate to it anywhere, at any age or time of life.
Present activities
Jeremy now lives outside of San Francisco, continuing to write poetry, finishing a Hollywood novel based on Rack's Rules, and making notes for his memoirs.