SILLIPHANT : CRITIC AT LARGE : CLEARING THE DECKS FOR FICTION

The mark of the really compulsive writer is that you never retire, never even contemplate it, because it would feel like retiring from joy, or from breathing. Writers are wrenched away from their yellow legal pads or their keyboards only by superior forces, like death.

Stirling Silliphant has always seemed to me to fit the profile of the compulsive writer, drawn to writing not only by the profitability, which in his case has been considerable, but by the singular pleasure of it.

“I get impatient with the breast-beaters,” he said the other day. “I couldn’t do anything else, can’t do anything else, but it’s a joy.”

Silliphant won an Oscar for “In the Heat of the Night” in 1967 and has written a string of major commercial films, including “Charly,” “The New Centurions,” “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.”

Before that he was one of the defining figures in series television, as the writer-producer of “Naked City” and a principal contributor to “Route 66,” whose pilot he wrote. He remembers writing a “Route 66” episode in 1962 called “Fifty Miles From Home,” about a returning Vietnam veteran.

And before that, Silliphant grew up around San Diego, majored in journalism at USC, worked briefly on small papers, did publicity for Disney and Fox in New York, published a first novel called “Maracaibo,” returned west as a screenwriter (and did some writing for the Mickey Mouse Club between larger chores).

When I last talked at length with him, he had lately written and produced a nice little film called “A Walk in the Spring Rain” (1970) with Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman. It stayed too nice and uncompelling for its own good, as he admitted over lunch, and was not a success, but it was an effort worth making and he has no regrets.

He was then, in the early ‘70s, about to commit the bulk of each year to life aboard a 76-foot ketch, sailing the exotic waters of the world. With his Vietnamese wife, Tiana, he did. They crossed the Atlantic and saw much of the Pacific and the China seas. Somehow, between the ketch and a home base in San Francisco, he kept up his usual prolific output.

But finally, Silliphant says, enough was enough. “The ketch had a crew of five, and it was like running a hotel. It develops a life of its own, and every time I came aboard, I felt like a visitor. And I found I was working more and more ashore to keep the thing at sea--nothing ever goes wrong for less than $8,000 or $9,000. Those are the magic figures.”

The crowning blow came a few months ago, he says. He had written and was co-producing a seven-hour miniseries for NBC called “Mussolini” (airing during the November sweeps period), with George C. Scott playing the late dictator. The location in Yugoslavia was cold and uncomfortable. “The ketch was in Majorca, and I kept getting reports about how warm and swell it was. I said, ‘That’s it,’ and called the ship broker and told him to sell it.

“I began to realize that it takes forever to sail to Australia. You’re better off to fly there and charter a boat.” So, two months ago, he unloaded his private ketch-22.

“They say your two happiest days with a boat are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. That’s true.”

Silliphant has trimmed his life style back significantly, he says, back to the fiscal expectations of the novelist rather than the successful screenwriter, because he has undertaken a fiction project that does hint strongly of the compulsive writer at work.

This is a projected 12-novel series, being published initially as paperback originals by Ballantine (two hardcover publishers are said to be beginning to be interested), about an American sailor of fortune named John Locke, who slightly suggests Travis McGee and James Bond rolled into one.

The first two titles are already out. “Steel Trap” is set in New Caledonia, “Bronze Bell” in Bali. The third, “Silver Star,” which he’s finishing now, unfolds in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. The three are a linked trilogy taking place in the present. The fourth, “Iron Kiss,” will be set on an island off Japan.

Locke, not accidentally named for the English philosopher admired by the makers of the American Revolution, is a Vietnam vet, former San Francisco narcotics and vice officer, the son of a poet, a San Diego boat designer and indeed lives aboard a 40-footer. He talks in a present-tense stream-of-consciousness blend of street argot, Nam grunt talk and Joseph Conrad, all enriched by Silliphant’s close knowledge of the geography and the cultures of Asia. It is the paperback thriller with advanced aspirations; Locke is cover-billed as the Ultimate Adventurer.

No movies or miniseries until the novel sequence is complete, Silliphant swears, lest the casting and production reshape the concept in midstream. Later on, he says, “If I could find a producer who would do for me in 1989 what Cubby Broccoli did for Bond, well, now. . . . “

For the present, he means to divide his year between the novels and his movie-TV work. Next up: producing a four-hour miniseries for NBC based on “Brotherhood of the Rose,” a spy genre novel by David Morell, who created the Rambo character in “First Blood” and who did not write “Rambo” but has novelized it.

“I’m trying to be accepted in two different worlds,” Silliphant says. “I don’t have an ego-need to have the books made into films. I do have a need to have the novels accepted as novels.”

That’s the real problem of being a compulsive writer. It is a teasing joy, a need that is never entirely satisfied.