Authors: Otto Penzler
In August of 1970, Donna and I again packed suitcases, put our daughter in our little green car, and set out on another odyssey, this time to the University of Iowa, where Philip Young had written his PhD dissertation on Hemingway and where I was now employed as an assistant professor. There, one of the first things I heard about was the massive student protest that had shut down the Iowa campus after the Kent State shootings. Accounts of that event stoked my emotions when, between preparing classes and teaching, I found time to continue writing First Blood, eventually finishing it in the summer of 1971.
Back at Penn State, a creative-writing professor, Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), had introduced me to Henry Morrison, a literary agent who accepted me as a client. Until that time, few novels had the amount of action that First Blood had. Henry wondered if a hardback publisher would be comfortable with it, but six weeks after the novel was submitted, a hardback house, M. Evans and Co., accepted it. Evans was known for its bestselling nonfiction books Body Language and Open Marriage, and promoted First Blood with the enthusiasm it had brought to those other titles.
Columbia Pictures purchased the movie rights for Richard Brooks to write and direct. High schools and colleges taught the book. Before he was a bestselling author, Stephen King used it as one of his two texts when he taught creative writing at the University of Maine (the other was James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity).
Columbia, evidently not liking the script that Brooks prepared, sold the film rights to Warner Bros., which hired Sydney Pollack to direct Steve McQueen, only to realize after six months of script development that McQueen, in his mid-forties, was far too old to be a returning Vietnam veteran. In another possible production, Paul Newman was considered. It’s interesting that the two protagonists are so balanced in the novel that Newman’s role would have been the police chief, whom some book reviewers considered to be the main character.
The project was sold to another studio, and another. Twenty-six scripts were prepared. Finally, ten years after the book’s publication, a new company, Carolco, hired Ted Kotcheff to direct Sylvester Stallone, and the resulting 1982 movie was the most successful autumn release in memory.
Some changes were made. The setting was moved to the Pacific Northwest (to get Canadian financial incentives). The character of the police chief was simplified. The degree of action was reduced. Rambo was allowed to live (although in an early version of the film, he did die). Perhaps most important, the character was softened. My Rambo is furious about his war experience. He hates what he was forced to do, and he especially hates that he discovered he had a skill for killing. It’s the only thing he knows how to do, but he’s a genius at it, and in the novel, when the police chief keeps pushing and pushing, Rambo finally explodes, almost with pride in the destruction he can accomplish.
Not in the movie. Concerned that the character might not be sympathetic, the producers made him a victim. At the start of the film, Rambo walks soulfully to a home near a lake where a black woman hangs washed clothes on a line. Rambo, we discover, is looking for a friend who was in his Special Forces unit, but as the black woman explains, Rambo’s friend died from cancer. Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the military in the Vietnam War, killed him.
After pressing these sympathetic emotional buttons, the script arranges for Rambo to walk into town, where the police chief gives him trouble because he doesn’t like the look of him. In the novel, this motivation works because Rambo has the long hair and beard of a hippie, an automatic target for police officers when I wrote the book. But by 1982, ten years after the novel’s publication, just about all American men had a long-haired hippie appearance. People in the audience murmured to one another, “What’s wrong with the way he looks?” But then the plot got down to business, showing Rambo being harassed by the police, and when the razor came toward him, the book and the movie coincided.
I was fascinated to see how the same story could be interpreted in different ways, but I became even more fascinated when, three years later, I saw how the 1985 sequel film, Rambo (First Blood Part II), interpreted the character in yet another way, as a jingoistic superhero who rescued American POWs, long rumored to still be in Vietnam, and single-handedly won a second version of the Vietnam War, which had ended with the North Vietnamese invasion of Saigon in 1975. One often-quoted line from the film was “Sir, do we get to win this time?” The obvious implication was that American politicians, influenced by the antiwar protests, had hampered the military’s ability to show its full strength.
President Ronald Reagan made frequent references to Rambo in his press conferences. “I saw a Rambo movie last night. Now I know what to do the next time there’s a terrorist hostage crisis.” Not surprisingly, the novel was no longer taught in high schools and colleges. The jingoistic Rambo also appeared in 1988’s Rambo III, in which he fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan, but this time audience emotions weren’t as engaged because the day the movie premiered in American theaters, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. Perhaps they’d heard that Rambo was coming. The political controversies struck me as being ironic inasmuch as I’d made so strong an effort to conceal the politics that had prompted me to write the book.
The ironies became stronger. In 2001, now an American citizen, I was on a publicity tour in Poland. So many journalists asked for interviews that I met with them for twelve hours in a row. They all spoke excellent English. A woman in her mid-thirties noted that I seemed surprised by all the journalistic attention I was receiving. She told me that I needed to understand the way Rambo was viewed in her country. During the Solidarity years of the late 1980s, when Polish youth protested against the Soviets, the Rambo movies were not allowed to be shown, but illegal videotapes were smuggled in. She said that protesters would watch the movies to fire up their emotions. They would then put on forehead sweatbands resembling the one Rambo wore and go out to demonstrate. In an indirect way, she said, Rambo was an element in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her explanation reminded me that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, demonstrators were filmed painting “Rambo” on the wall before they tore parts of it down.
Rambo’s name is in the Oxford English Dictionary. In positive and negative ways, it continues to be part of daily vocabulary around the world. The novel has been translated into twenty-six languages. It has never been out of print. But I didn’t expect to see a fourth movie about Rambo. Released twenty years after the previous one, the new film, simply titled Rambo, took the character into one of the most politically repressive and violent regions in the world, Burma, the official name for which is Myanmar. Yet again, my character was reinterpreted, but now, to my surprise, for the first time he was presented in the way that he had appeared in my novel so many years ago: angry and disillusioned. Sickened by violence but knowing that killing is what he does best, Rambo has fallen into despair. He hunts cobras for a snake farm and is so at home with death that he handles them with indifference, just as they seem to recognize a kindred soul and submit to being handled. He spends a lot of time in the rain, trying to cleanse himself of what he has done. People call him “the Boatman,” with all the Greek-myth implications of death and the River Styx. During an anguished scene in which he forges a knife to go into yet another battle, he tells himself: “Admit it. You didn’t kill for your country. You killed for yourself. And for that, God won’t forgive you.”
In a Rambo movie. Absolutely astonishing. After four films and thirty-six years, the character returned to the tone of his origins in my novel. It felt like old times to see him again.
CAROL O’CONNELL
Born in New York in 1947, bred in New England and New Jersey, Carol O’Connell attended the California Institute of the Arts. This was back in the days when it was located not far from LA’s MacArthur Park (anarchy heaven of the 1960s). She was a hippie without portfolio (wrong wardrobe, no love beads, no albums of Indian sitar music, and she never bothered to lay out the cash for her own bong). Edging eastward, she completed her studies at Arizona State University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree (the major she had the most credits in when it came time to leave school). O’Connell then moved to Denver, Colorado, regarding it as a largish halfway house between coasts east and west. After a few years as a papergirl for the Denver Post, on to Manhattan. During the early New York years, she earned her living as a freelance proofreader, working at mind-sucking graveyard-shift jobs while doing the starving-artist thing. Upon publication of Mallory’s Oracle, the first of ten novels, she was (in her own words) incredibly overpaid, and this enabled her to quit the rent-money gigs. The author also trashed her alarm clock. Now O’Connell goes to bed when she gets tired and wakes up when she’s completely finished sleeping.
She writes every day.
MALLORY
BY CAROL O’CONNELL
In 1994, after my first book was published, I received a fan letter and a great deal of religious material from a woman who wanted to save me from eternal damnation. That was when I realized that I was onto something with my protagonist, who is an officer of the NYPD, a woman, and a sociopath. Call her Detective Mallory or just plain Mallory, neither Miss nor Ms., but never call her Kathy. She likes that chilly distance of the surname.
Aloof? Perhaps. In Stone Angel, she is likened to a cat:
The cat hissed and arched its back as Charles’s hand moved toward the sugar bowl. Apparently, he had violated some house rule of table manners. Slowly, his hand withdrew from the bowl and came to rest on the table by his cup. The cat lay down, stretching her lean body across the checkered cloth, and the tail ceased to switch and beat the wood. When his hand moved again, she bunched her muscles, set to spring, relaxing only while his hand was still. The cat controlled him.
Now who did that remind him of?
The old woman was back at the table. “Don’t touch that cat. She doesn’t like people—barely tolerates them. She’s wild—raised in the woods. When I found her, she was too set in her ways to ever be anybody’s idea of tame. She had buckshot all through her pelt and chicken feathers in her mouth. Now that told me, right off, that she was a thief. And she is perversity incarnate. Sometimes she purrs just before she strikes.
Charles nodded while the woman spoke, and he ticked off the familiar character flaws as she listed them. Now he peered into the cat’s slanted eyes. Mallory, are you in there?
Miss Trebec bent down to speak to the cat, to explain politely that an animal did not belong on the table when company was calling. The cat seemed to be considering this information, but she left the table in her own time, as though it were her own idea. The tail waved high as she disappeared over the edge.
It was disconcerting that the animal made no sound when she hit the floor. It crossed his mind to look under the table, to reassure himself that the cat did not float there, waiting to catch him in some new breach of etiquette. Instead he peered into his cup as he stirred the sugar in his coffee. When he looked up to ask his hostess a question, the cat was riding the woman’s shoulders.
(And, after wading through all of that, here is your punch line: A passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses inspired Mallory and best defines her in only eleven genius words. Mr. Joyce wrote, “Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.”)
However, like a cat, Mallory seems to have no affinity for these animals. In Dead Famous she had an encounter with New York City’s only attack cat, a pathetic creature with nerve damage. When he’s in pain, he lashes out at strangers, and this earned him the name Huggermugger, Mugs for short. He was softly creeping up behind Mallory when a tiny squeak of excitement gave him away. Then he paused as their eyes met, and they mutually agreed that she could kill him any time she liked. Mugs, wise cat, retreated to his basket.
I am nothing like my protagonist. Consequently, I am, in person, a huge disappointment to everyone who expects her and gets me. Mallory is tall, I’m short; she’s blond, I’m not; she carries a gun, and I don’t. Yet every time I lecture, someone will ask, “Is Mallory autobiographical?” I’m always stunned, but I never harm these people. I say, “No. Mallory is a sociopath, and I’m a nice person…. I’m a relatively nice person.” Given that proviso, people generally do not push their luck with the question.
I blame this on the Germans.
When I arrived in Berlin on tour with my first book, I was told that a local journalist had written an article that mistook Mallory’s Oracle for a rather strange third-person memoir. In every interview, and there were many, I set the reporters straight. Mallory was a work of pure fiction, I said, “Not me. Nothing like me. I’m a wimp.” But they preferred the earlier, erroneous version of me, and my correction never appeared in any of their newspaper interviews. To this day, many German people believe that I’m a tall blonde with disturbing defects.
So where did the fleshed-out Mallory come from? Well, in the usual order of things, she began as a little sociopath. The detective’s introduction to the NYPD came at a tender age.
The haunt of Grand Central Station was a small girl with matted hair and dirty clothes. She appeared only in the commuter hours, morning and evening, when the child believed that she could go invisibly among the throng of travelers in crisscrossing foot traffic, as if that incredible face could go anywhere without attracting stares. Concessionaires reached for their phones to call the number on a policeman’s card and say, “She’s back.”