The Six Green Grand

The following article appeared in the August 1, 1965 edition of the Miami Herald, under the title "The Six Green Grand". John D MacDonald was still living on Point Crisp Road, Maynard was still called John, and Bright Orange for the Shroud was a month away from hitting the stands.

It's fairly straightforward as MacDonald articles go, but at the end there is a mention of The Blood Game, the novel he spent years working on and was ready to publish until... he didn't. I've never been able to find a reason why this work was mothballed, and done so at the last minute after the publishers has produced working galleys. The setting for the novels was the world of banking, and much changed in that industry in the 1960's, perhaps to the point where it made certain plot points untenable. Just a guess. Those galleys still sit, gathering dust in the John D MacDonald Collection at the University of Florida. Perhaps one day some enterprising publisher will take the initiative and bring out a "new" John D MacDonald novel.


The Six Green Grand
By Larry Devine

BY 1 p.m., the sun is beating down hard on the side street in Sarasota and the old Plaza Spanish Restaurant has its Venetian blinds closed.

From his manager's table just inside the front door, little Benny Alvarez bends down a slat with a crooked finger and peers out. The rest of his Friday regulars are already inside, but MacKinlay Kantor and John D. MacDonald are missing.

Kantor comes in a striped shirt and some pants that are too big for him since he lost all that weight. Kantor wrote his Pulitzer-winning Andersonville here and has lived here for 30 years. He is grousing about the increased traffic lately.

Now only MacDonald is missing, the prodigious selling author of 48 mystery novels, whose latest success is the brittle Travis McGee series. "Mac can't get here today," says Kantor. "He's down with one of those migraines he gets every three or four months. He called and said those horse-pills he takes for them has him a little groggy."

The group of authors moves into the back dining room. They have been gathering every Friday for the past 15 years at Benny Alvarez's restaurant. Everybody knows enough by this time to leave them alone and they sit around drinks and lunch until 3:30 and talk about anything else but writing. There is Joseph Hayes in a white short-sleeved shirt, the author of The Desperate Hours ... Ted Woltman, another Pulitzer winner for his 1947 series in the New York World Telegram on communism . . . Dick Glendinning, who is writing young people's books lately. Back in the high-ceilinged dining room with the drab green-and-cream wallpaper, they leave a chair because maybe MacDonald will show up after all. He never does, but he is talked of as a good friend.

About MacDonald's work, crusty Mac Kantor said "Sure, sure he's a good writer. I just wish to heaven he'd get off these books about those little girls with bikinis and sand on their legs, and write something serious like he could ..."

Next day, his migraine gone, the man a publisher's flack once dubbed “the best-selling unknown in America" is back behind his typewriter.

"Mac Kantor," he says resignedly, "has been saying that same thing for 15 years. He is not the only one.

"But I write now exactly what I feel like saying. I'm doing what I can do as well as I can do it. I don't do it with my tongue in cheek. I don't think there is anything reprehensible in entertaining people. I have my own vision of reality. I can express my individual reactions in the kind of book I write as well as I could in a more pretentious work.

"In doing this, I am certainly avoiding more profitable areas of fiction. I don't need to write 'the big book,' however." The "big book" kind of writing is what MacDonald calls “the Irvings"
- Irving Wallace, "Irving" Robbins,"Irving" Ruark — "and that woman, Ayn Rand." He shudders a little.

MacDonald for years has been many a mystery-story connoisseur's pet. He has been pouring them out since 1945. The latest count is more than 500 short stories and 48 books. Three more books are in the works now. His books carry what New York Times critic Anthony Boucher described as "a sense of sweet warm horror." More than that, however, a MacDonald book is marked with his own particular psychological insight, unstinting sex analysis, and recurring strong statements of his own philosophy about things he considers criminal in a way: housing developments, conventioneers, TV dinners, Miami Beach hotels, installment buying, and litterbugs.

Early last year, John Dann MacDonald wrote a book about a tall, tanned "reject from a structured society" named Travis McGee who lives on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale and engages in extra-legal sorties against crime for a living. MacDonald called the first of what he hoped would be a long series of McGee books The Deep Blue Good-By. It sold out its first printing within weeks and Travis McGee and MacDonald were on their way.

MacDonald is unknown no longer. "That hokey business about 'best selling unknown' was just something Simon and Schuster made up anyway," he snorted. McGee has sold over three million copies since last year in five books, the sixth is on its way. All the titles are colorful: Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying, The Quick Red Fox.

"I can keep going until I run out of colors," MacDonald says with a grin. "I have yet to investigate the criminal possibilities of fuschia, puce or heliotrope."

HIS McGee lives on a 52-foot, barge-type houseboat called The Busted Flush. "McGee won it on a bare-faced bluff with two deuces in a stud poker game in Palm Beach. He docks it at slip F-18 at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale.

McGee is what MacDonald wryly calls "a salvage expert."

"If X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away from him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back and you keep half. Is that it?" one of McGee's inevitable sun-tanned girls asks him in The Deep Blue Good-By. "It's a simplification," McGee drawls dryly, "but reasonably accurate... I am sort of a last resort."

McGee is a maverick, wary of plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits. savings accounts, trading stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages. miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, political parties, lending libraries, television, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny.

But he is a Lochinvar of sorts, on the comfy big houseboat with the pale blue four-by-seven foot sunken bathtub. He has yet to fail in his "salvage work." He does not always take his 50 per cent cut, because he is a sucker for a pretty girl who is sad about something or needs the cash herself.

McGee does not like cookouts, funny chef aprons, slacks on fat female picnickers, or meat burned on the outside and red in the middle. He does not think a big cigar is a sign of masculinity or success.

MacDonald never lets him get too overcome with philosophizing to bypass an opportunity to knock a few heads together (he weighs 212) and get back the rubies, gold idols, incriminating pictures or whatever the current "salvage" calls for.

The inescapable feeling, of course, is that McGee is an extension of MacDonald.

"No. Travis over-simplifies. He is less tolerant than I am. He is more inclined to see things in black and white than in shades of gray like I do. He wants some kind of security, but he's unwilling to pay the price. So he makes like he really doesn't want it."

McGee drives an incredible car. It is a 1936 Rolls-Royce, cut down by some former owner who made a pick-up truck out of it. It is weird blue, the color of McGee's old school teacher's hair.

MacDonald himself drives no such picturesque vehicle. A British Land Rover is parked outside on the road, but it is his 26-year-old son John's. Many authors write as if a man's car is a clue to his character. MacDonald's auto is a Ford station wagon, colorful enough in an outdoors way. It has heavy-duty springs and heavy duty shock absorbers, a giant, extra-cost 420-horsepower Thunderbird engine "and a couple of little gizmos on the carburetors."

The rush to buy Travis McGee does not impress MacDonald too much. "When I was poor as a church mouse, Universal one day suddenly paid $15,000 for a book of mine called Cry Hard, Cry Fast. A terrible title, they made it up, not me. There are enough of my books going at any one time to give me a little bit of a cushion. I know, somewhere, somehow, a little bit of dough will be coming in."

He treats very cautiously an offer from a screenwriter to collaborate on a movie of McGee. "I'd want a five-million dollar budget and my own choice of star. I'd like Jack Lord for McGee. His face sort of looks lived-in." But MacDonald is in no hurry to crack the silver screen again. He did it once before with his novel Cape Fear for Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. "Eventually Travis will have enough clout and then somebody'll come along and pick him up."

MacDonald writes his tremendous outrush of fiction in a big board and glass house out on Sarasota's Siesta Key. From the wide windows by his desk, there is a view of Little Sarasota Bay lapping up at the rough road outside his door on Point Crisp Rd. He writes on a big gray electric typewriter with bright blue keys that he leases from IBM for $200 a year. He writes so fast and so much that he wears out a ribbon in two days.

He writes and re-writes endlessly. A 70,000-word story will get up to 140,000 words before he is satisfied. "I write by throwing away," he said.

MacDonald is tall and his wavy hair is white. It has been that way, his friends say, ever since he first settled down in Sarasota 15 years ago. A long scar from birth digs through his forehead from hairline to left eyebrow. He is a voluble and cultivated man who has known few slim days since he gave himself over to the tenuous business of writing for a living.

Born in Sharon, Pa., the writer went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and picked up a master's degree from Harvard's graduate school of business administration. He was married to Dorothy Prentiss in 1938 and still is.

Dorothy P. MacDonald, a talented artist, in 1945 sold a story her husband had sent from an Army post in Ceylon. MacDonald came home -- an O.S.S. light colonel - and worked three months in a business research bureau in Utica, N.Y. One day he chucked it to start writing full time and he has never gone to the office since.

"And I never regretted it a damn bit," he said about passing up the business world with his Harvard M.A. After the Army, I'd had it up to here with people telling me what to do. Most people who tell you what to do are idiots anyway. And by the end of 1946, I'd made about six grand."

HE now has had his books translated into 14 languages and has sold more than 25 million of them. He has an agent named Max Wilkinson he is making money for and a talented editor in New York, Knox Burger, who likes him and comes down to go fishing with MacDonald out in the Gulf.

Out there, at the end of the road beside Little Sarasota Bay, the creator of Travis McGee, the sensitive, sun-tanned worldly man, lights his pipe from a bowlful of kitchen matches and heads back for the gray IBM with the bright blue keys. He has work to do. He is half-way through the next McGee book, a quarter of the way through the next one after that and part way into a long novel called The Blood Game.

His credentials are impressive, but he discounts them. "I just get a great deal of pleasure out of saying things the way I want to say them."

Travis McGee Really is John D

In September of 1981 John D MacDonald, along with his wife Dorothy and paperback editor Leona Nevler, attended the Pacific Coast Independent Magazine Wholesalers Association convention, held that year in Honolulu. MacDonald attended these sorts of events because he had to, as most successful authors did, as it was typically part of the contracts drawn up between publishers and writers. This meant that JDM would have to sit for interviews, answering the same questions he was always asked by reporters who may or may not have had any familiarity with his work. Lois Taylor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin seems to have been in the know, or at least retained much of the pre-interview material supplied to her by Fawcett, but there is little here that is new outside of a few minor quotes.

When MacDonald talks about his two failed attempts at creating Travis McGee he characterized the second attempt as "too Shell Scott-y," a reference to the popular series character created by Richard Prather, an author JDM never failed to denigrate when speaking of the McGee origin story, mainly because of the author's politics. And toward the end of the interview he confirms something I had always wondered about: he asserts that he did no writing while on any of his many ocean cruises. This would certainly account for the drop-off in output toward the end of his career.

This article appeared in the newspaper's September 18, 1981 issue and is transcribed in its entirety below, including quotes from some of the novels. It carried the headline, "Travis McGee Really is John D.," something I'm sure JDM would have chafed at if he ever saw this piece.

By Lois Taylor... Star-Bulletin Writer

It was hot under the screened ceiling of the outdoor Sheraton-Waikiki coffee shop, and hotter still as the sun moved over the people eating breakfast there. Almost unnoticed, a waiter pulled a sunproof tarp across the area to shade it. "In Japan," said John D. MacDonald, "they'd have a heat-and-light sensitive mechanism that would automatically provide shade when it gets hot enough."

His editor, Leona Nevler of Fawcett Books, looked properly impressed by this random fact, but his wife, Dorothy, just smiled. The man whose Travis McGee adventure series has had more than 21 million copies in circulation has what he calls "a dustbin memory."

"I read, I listen," he explained. "A cab driver told me yesterday that if you are going to buy a Winnebago motor home, buy it in Canada. They're built to be better insulated for the cold weather there, and that means they're better insulated for hot weather, too. I'll take what he said as gospel -- I don’t have to prove it, and I'll drop it in somewhere."

Tequila anejo commemorativo is one of the world's more pleasant drinks. The anejo -- the "j" is pronounced like a guttural cough --means old. The commemorativo means a very special distillation. It is drunk straight, pale amber in color, strong, smooth and clean.

Dress Her in Indigo, 1969. 

MacDonald is in town as a guest of the convention of the Pacific Coast Independent Magazine Wholesalers Association, who are appropriately grateful for the tremendous sales of his paperbacks. Over a waffle, he talked about Travis McGee, a man who has come to mean a lot to MacDonald since he invented him in 1963.

A Master of Business Administration from Harvard, MacDonald might be up to his black knit tie in corporate problems instead of spending part of every year cruising around the world with his wife and the rest of the year in the job he enjoys most -- writing. He has written more than 70 books but it is the 19 published Travis McGee novels that have allowed him to do this.

“Travis is an amalgamation I arrived at very slowly," MacDonald said. "He really wasn't in shape until I wrote the third book, so I scrapped the first two. The third and two more were published in one month of 1964 with another one coming out four months later.

“I threw the first two out because I couldn't have lived with the series as they were written. The character was different -- heavy, solemn, Germanic -- in the first book, and then the second went too far the other way, too Shell Scott-y, filled with quips and pranks. In the third, he settled down to someone I could live with."

I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary… of plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, television, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny.

The Deep Blue Good-by, 1964. 

As originally written before publication, the hero of the series was Dallas McGee. But in November of 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and MacDonald's publishers insisted that Dallas was no name for a hero. So MacDonald looked through names of military camps and came up with an Air Force base northeast of San Francisco. "Travis sounded enough like Dallas. Since then, in traveling around the country, I've met a whole bunch of little boys named Travis."

The next decision for MacDonald and his publishers was to find a theme for the titles of the series. "We sat around and we talked about how you name a series. We thought of musical terminology. You want to keep people from buying the same book twice, something that annoys them."

They settled on color coding -- The Deep Blue Good-by, Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying -- and eventually 16 more. The latest, Free Fall in Crimson, has been a best-seller in hardback and will be available in paperback in December. One million copies are being printed by Fawcett. In the works, half-finished, is Cinnamon Skin. “Now nobody can keep the colors straight because there are so many," MacDonald said.

MacDonald's legion of fans know Travis McGee as a sort of a Florida samurai who calls himself a "salvage consultant," locating money and property that often weren't acquired legally in the first place and righting wrongs with a fair amount of violence and sex. He lives aboard The Busted Flush, a houseboat he won in a poker game, at Bahia Mar at Fort Lauderdale.

We had something together once, Carrie Milligan and I, but it was long gone. She came to me now looking years older and used and very scared. She had a lot of money with her. Over $100,000. She wanted me to keep it safe, and no questions please -- for old times sake.

The Dreadful Lemon Sky, 1974.

For land transportation McGee drives Miss Agnes, an electric blue Rolls-Royce converted into a pickup truck. His Dr. Watson is a portly economist called Meyer, which is either his first or last name, who lives aboard the neighboring John Maynard Keynes.

Meyer's role, MacDonald explained, is made necessary because of the first-person concept of the series. “Everything has to be described through the eyes of McGee, only how he sees it. It's a restricting form. Without Meyer, there would be too much interior monologue.

"There has to be a vehicle of getting information to the reader, and Meyer's conversations with McGee serve to do this. It's clearer and more entertaining than long paragraphs of what goes on in Travis' head." He added that Meyer also serves as McGee's conscience.

"A guy at the University of Alabama, an expert on computer testing, asked me to take the MMPI (Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory). I answered 540 questions as I would, as Meyer would and as McGee would. His findings were that McGee is my good side, who I'd like to be. McGee is violent, almost but not quite psychopathic, with a touch of paranoia -- much more suspicious. He won't publish this without my permission."

Is Travis aging, slowing down as the years pass? "Sure he's aging," MacDonald answered, “but at one. third the rate you are."

I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands...A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder: Can you get it back again?

Bright Orange for the Shroud, 1965. 

Asked about the possibility of making a television series based on the Travis McGee novels, MacDonald said, "I have an arrangement with Warner Communications -- I think they're misnamed because I haven't been in communication with them. Warner bought the rights (to a McGee series) on a reverting basis. If they don't do anything with it in a certain amount of time, I get it back. They've written a two-hour pilot with one-hour shows to follow, but then the writers' strike came along and I don't know what has happened to it since.

"I don't know a diddley about making movies, they don't know anything about writing books. Nothing is more ridiculous than a writer trying to interfere with movie making. Look at (Joseph) Wambaugh. He made a lot of money on the books he wrote and it all went out when he tried to make a movie."

Dorothy MacDonald added. “We thought that Jack Lord would have been a perfect McGee."

"But this was before he was in the 5-0 series," MacDonald said, “and he wasn't considered bankable -- they couldn't borrow money to go ahead. I thought that was a dumb thing.

"Lord really isn't McGarrett, he's a totally different man. McGarrett is a humorless guy and Lord isn't. Jack has his first officer's papers, is very boat-oriented. We were disappointed, and so was Jack, but then 5-0 opened up."

MacDonald said that he doesn't watch much television, but he's a reader. “I read my betters. Vonnegut I like very, very, very much. One of the best we've got, though he keeps wasting himself, is Norman Mailer. I like Cheever, and Updike. For suspense, Ross Thomas and Robert Parker.

"I once wrote Ross MacDonald that as long as there is some confusion about our names -- people buy his books thinking they're mine and buy mine thinking they're his, it's a handy thing we both can write. He took it in a kindly way.

"Everybody lives as well as he can, and every writer writes as well as he can. Comparisons are invidious. I have great admiration for Dashiell Hammett, but if you want to drive a college writing class crazy, ask them to outline Hammett's plots. They're nonsense, but he had great persuasive force."

MacDonald paused. "A lot of mine would sound like nonsense if you outlined them."

They weren't ordinary stamps, no indeed, they were rare stamps. $400,000 worth. Even so, McGee was not all that turned on until a generously endowed amazon named Mary Alice McDermit made her grand entrance. She was a 6 foot knockout who knew a helluva lot about rare stamps and the ways of a boat bum's vulnerable heart. Back-cover blurb.

The Scarlet Ruse, 1973. 

He said that he was less than satisfied with a recent Travis McGee book, The Green Ripper. "It was a deviation from the pattern, and it was not really successful. It was not as solid a book as the others. It is hard to sustain a given quality over such an extensive thing -- when I finish this one, the 20th McGee book, it will be one-and-a-half-million words.

"Time passes, one is not unchanging day to day, month to month. I was a little afraid of whether I could sustain the life of the series within the existing pattern, so I went outside the pattern in The Green Ripper." (The book, more violent than most of the series, is an assault on the religious cult movement. McGee, rather than working out a subtle plan to overcome the group, simply goes in and wipes them out.)

"There are enough easy targets around, so that religious cults are no more reprehensible than the U.S. Senate is reprehensible. What's reprehensible? Taking so much money from the inner cities. What is to replace it? I wonder if they know what they're doing.

"We are on our third or fourth generation of welfare people. Right or wrong, you've led people to expect it. What have they done, they will ask, to deserve that it be taken away? I see a lot of inner-city violence in the next year, in May, June and July -- the restless hot weather."

New York is where it is going to begin. I think...one day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others' throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point.

Nightmare in Pink, 1964 

In the meantime, MacDonald will have finished not only Cinnamon Skin, but a non-fiction book on the final cruise of the Mariposa, the last long trip of the last American passenger ship. It is titled Nothing Can Go Wrong, and is written with the ship's captain.

"Dorothy and I were on that last cruise and the captain said to me, ‘You ought to write a book about this.' He had done 16 tapes about the trip, so I told him, 'You do it.’” MacDonald said. The result was a compromise by which Harper Row, the publishers, will print MacDonald's comments in one typeface and the captain's in another. Fawcett will bring the book out in paperback next year.

The MacDonalds live on an island off Florida's Gulf Coast near Sarasota, and spend several months a year at their camp in the Adirondacks. At either place, he spends eight to 10 hours a day at his typewriter while working on a book, a process that takes about four months. He talks about retiring, but not much.

“I'm taking my retirement in chunks," he concluded. “I like the ship thing. Dorothy and I are going around the world in the fall on the Royal Viking Sea. No one can get hold of you without an extraordinary amount of effort, and I have found that I can't work at sea. That's a vacation."

It was named Odalisque II, and it was the splendid playtoy of Lady Vivian Stanley Tucker of St. Kitts. It was a 53-foot Magnum Maltese Flybridge cruiser...paneling, radar, recording fathometer, ice-maker, tub and shower, huge master stateroom...Lady Vivian and I had been out for about two weeks. provisions were running low, and soon we would have to decide whether to put into Nassau or run on over to Miami.

The Green Ripper, 1979.