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."