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.