MOVIES : A World Where Heroes Still Exist

Terrified. Infuriated. Frustrated. On a chill day in January, 1944, at Ft. McClellan, Ala., 240 trainees pressed their bodies flat against the mud while machine gun bullets crackled inches above their helmets.

When the shooting stopped, the GIs assembled for a surrealistic lecture from their captain, a combat veteran:

“As you men know, soon you will replace casualties in a fighting infantry regiment. On a battlefield somewhere you will probably be pinned down as you were today. I promise that one of you will find the situation intolerable. He will get up and go on, in behalf of himself and for you all. Which one of you will make that move?I can’t predict, and neither can you. But one of you will, and if that one is put out of action, another will rise, and go forward. And if need be, another. And another.”

Pvt. Glendon Swarthout and his buddies peered incredulously at one another. You? Him? Me? Impossible!

Now, nearly half a century later, for novelist Glendon Swarthout, the mystery persists: “That in the right circumstances ordinary men and women may transcend themselves and accomplish the most extraordinary deeds.”

Like a literary laser, the theme streaks through three decades of Swarthout fiction: “They Came to Cordura,” “Bless the Beasts and Children,” “The Eagle and the Iron Cross,” “The Shootist.” Now, bent through yet another prismatic plot, Swarthout’s recurring, hopeful premise illuminates his latest, “The Homesman,” to be published this autumn by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, and as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate.

Paul Newman has bought the movie rights and a screenplay by Malibu writer Miles Hood Swarthout, Glendon’s son. Walt Disney Studios will finance and produce the film, to star Newman, but would not comment on the project’s status other than to confirm that it is “in development.”

As theater, “The Homesman” bugles reveille, full blast. Set on the high Great Plains during territorial times, Swarthout’s first book in three years deals with a little-known frontier dilemma: What to do with women driven mad by bitter winters, crushing loneliness, loss of children, fear of Indians and infinite boredom.

In the 1850s, no asylums existed to care for women so demented that they endangered the lives of themselves and those around them. Derived from Swarthout’s characteristically meticulous historical research, one option was to transport deranged women as secretly and swiftly as possible back from whence they came--to relatives in Eastern states.

In “The Homesman,” a man of murky ethics becomes guide and guardian of a clutch of crazy women imprisoned for their own protection in a stout wagon, mule-drawn eastward.

Swarthout’s memory of the World War II machine gun training exercise remains as vivid as yesterday. As a casualty replacement in the U.S. 3rd Division, Swarthout fought through the caldron of Anzio before headquarters reassigned him to an uncommon duty: Write accounts of the actions of soldiers nominated for the Medal of Honor.

“My personal card noted the fact that in civilian life I was a published novelist,” recalls Swarthout. “That was the slimmest of qualifications, but in an army with few writers of any description, that was enough.”

The 3rd Division was the outfit of Audie Murphy, the most-decorated soldier of the war. At full strength 15,000 men, by war’s end the 3rd took 45,000 casualties. From North Africa through Italy and into Bavaria, men of the 3rd were awarded 39 Medals of Honor. About half the medals were issued posthumously. Swarthout documented the acts of six winners. As nominees were considered and awardees pulled out of combat for public relations duty back home, Swarthout interviewed them, analyzed them, befriended them . . . especially one Alton Knappenberger, a Pennsylvania teen-ager.

“You might not entrust this otherwise ordinary lad with the keys to your car,” remembers Swarthout. “He was too young to vote and below legal drinking age, yet one day in the mountains of central Italy he got up out of his hole and from a standing position fired an automatic rifle with deadly effect on the Germans, shrugged off a grenade attack, wriggled through a hail of bullets to resupply himself with ammo from a fallen comrade, again turned his rifle on the enemy, and single-handedly opened the way for his unit to move forward.

“Try as I might, I could never determine why he did it. For me, it represented a miracle of character, a message of redemption. Sacrifice, honor, courage repose inside the least of us. Somehow for a world so full of frailty and failure, I find optimism in this irony: That within each of us, dormant most of the time, live the seeds of valor.”

Now at age 70, for a long time both well-known and well-off, Swarthout braces his modern world with that paradoxical mix of impeccable courtesy and go-to-hell manner often encountered in elderly working cowboys.

He complains of the ills and pains of growing older: “I can’t remember everything anymore. I run out of energy. Occasional travel wears me out.” Yet the man still stands ramrod straight, strides like a drill sergeant, combs most of his mostly dark hair, and bellows immortal extemporaneous lines: “I do not write for the movies. I’ve been accused of it, and I deny it. I do plead guilty to writing stories with a beginning, middle and end. I actually see these things happening in my mind, and I report upon them, and they I suppose they naturally can be converted back into images.

Swarthout vocally eschews sentiment. Yet he names rooms of his house after favorite people. In a hallowed niche ticks a wedding clock that has been in the family 152 years. Of an antique six-shooter and genuine 1860s Army recruiting poster: “My great-grandfather was a cavalryman in the Civil War, and I’ve used his name in my book, ‘The Melodrean.’ ” He prizes a first edition copy of “Death in the Afternoon,” signed by the author, a gift of a Hemingway spouse.

Any regrets? “None,” he blurts. “Oh, I suppose I wished more had happened to a couple of my books.”

Michigan-born and a 1939 graduate of the University of Michigan, Swarthout labored for a spell in an immense defense plant assembling military aircraft. His first novel, “Willow Run,” from the factory of the same name, suffered saturation bombing by critics. One atomized Swarthout’s characters as “unreal people who talk all wrong and act like idiot children.” Deserved criticism, Swarthout later had to admit, but “I was so ashamed of it, I didn’t risk another novel for 15 years.”

Thank Heavens for Kathryn, his childhood chum, college sweetheart, first and only wife, who saw him through war’s setback and postwar’s catch-up. While he earned his doctorate and instructed at Michigan universities, she taught grammar school. Eventually they would collaborate on six juvenile books, quite apart from Swarthout’s mainstream works.

As Macbeth, to “make assurance double sure,” Prof. Swarthout picked the plot and protagonist of his next novel with supersensitive caution. He recalls, “I knew that the war story would be in vogue, and of course, Mailer and Jones and others brought forth a whole library of realistic World War II fiction. But my own war was too immediate. Then I chanced to read accounts of the punitive expedition of Gen. Blackjack Pershing into Mexico in 1916, and abruptly I knew I had the setting for what I needed to say.”

Swarthout was nearly 40 and earning $11,000 a year teaching at Michigan State when Random House and Columbia Pictures paid him an astonishing $275,000 for “They Came to Cordura.” Along with the long green, “Cordura” reviews turned rosy: “Its dramatic impact is immediate, but beyond this it conveys a concept of heroism and of life as triumph through and over suffering that is both profound and thought-provoking.”

The windfall royalties delivered the Swarthouts into a pleasant quandary. They wanted to move to the warm, dry Southwest where Glendon might write full-time, but “We were afraid the checks would bounce,” says Kate. “We had never seen that much money.”

To hedge their bet, Glendon signed on as a lecturer at Arizona State University, beginning a sputtering love/hate affair that in one breath has Swarthout railing against student indolence, and in the next grudgingly admitting his generous financial support of the cow college suddenly grown to America’s sixth-largest university core campus. “Oh, I spout off like a volcano, but it’s benevolent, because I desperately care about what young people might make of educational opportunity.”

Swarthout has written numerous short pieces of fiction for slick magazines; he tried at least one play. “Cordura” was followed by another sensation, “Where the Boys Are,” a broad, prescient farce upon sexually rebellious collegians in annual invasion of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Critics picked nits, but judged Swarthout’s comic novel “very funny and very grim.” And, “he never falls into limp banalities. He is a stylist who also entertains and instructs and I say good for him. It is not as easy as it sounds.”

MGM made “Where the Boys Are” into a box-office smash in 1960.

Grinding gears again, Swarthout ventured a familial tour de force in “Welcome to Thebes,” a satire of Scottsdale in “The Cadillac Cowboys”; a tragicomedy involving escaped German prisoners-of-war in “The Eagle and the Iron Cross”; a moonstruck, Depression-era, Midwestern juvenile love story in “Loveland” and an impudent adventure of a young Caucasian do-gooder on a make-believe Indian reservation in “Luck & Pluck.”

But the book that intensified Swarthout’s fame all the way from his front door to foreign capitals was his seething indictment in 1970 of a state-operated buffalo slaughter, as exposed in “Bless the Beasts and Children.” In an obscene charade of sports hunting, surplus animals from a government bison herd annually were led to butchery to provide trophies for feckless riflemen. Swarthout portrayed a grotesque shooting gallery cast of slob sportsmen pecking away at an endangered species.

As Swarthout related, on publication day Jack Williams, then governor of Arizona, telephoned him at home.

“Is this true?” Williams demanded.

“Yes, governor, every damned word of it. In one so-called controlled hunt I witnessed, there was only one clean kill out of the dozen selected for harvest.”

“Then rest assured, before the sun sets, there will be changes,” said the governor. And there were.

A fiercely reflexive fraternity of wounded hunters heaped abuse on Swarthout. He had to unlist his telephone, restrict socializing, retreat behind the wall and staffed security gate of his Scottsdale desert home.

The postman also brought him a thousand letters from the world over, many from children disturbed by an America that could condone such a grisly assault upon nature.

Stanley Kramer of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Caine Mutiny” directed the shocking “Bless the Beasts,” released in 1972.

As for Swarthout, few authors can contemplate a movie parlay engaging Gary Cooper (“Cordura”), John Wayne (“The Shootist”) and, now, Paul Newman. The Swarthouts seem especially smitten by Newman, who is labeled by the three Swarthouts as “decent, courtly, amusing, giving, dedicated.”

If that seems a form of Boy Scout oath, that’s not the role Newman will play in “The Homesman.” “Dad has contrived a male character of few redeeming virtues,” says Miles, who in his Malibu den sculpted his father’s 367-page manuscript into a 132-page screenplay by writing nonstop eight weeks and rewriting nonstop three weeks.

“Duke is dead,” says Miles, like his father a fastidious wordsmith and sometimes professor. “Paul Newman seems a logical heir to America’s tireless theatrical character: That of a free-wheeling Western bad guy who is delivered by circumstance into an association with a good woman, and despite his worst proclivities, realizes his own humanity and thereby arrives at his own redemption.

“This story has elements of ‘The Africa Queen’ and ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Let’s face it, of the mass of creative work produced in a year, not 5% is touched with greatness, and Dad’s latest novel is.”

Meantime, back at the cactus patch, bird refuge, eclectic museum and rambling Scottsdale abode where the Swarthouts have dwelt for 30 years, in an interview the author reveals the origin of “The Homesman”:

“It took longer to evolve than any of my other books. About 15 years ago, I read a historical account of wagon trains of pioneers heading East. They were losers. They couldn’t make it in the West. In some years there were about as many defeated settlers heading home as emigrants heading West. In the 1850s, all over the Great Plains the winters were so awful, dangers so numerous, life so dreadful, about 2% of the women went mad.

“Years after I read that, I was sitting at my desk ruminating, and the curiosity washed over me: ‘What the hell did they do with them?’ Homicidal, runaway, suicidal. No place to put them. Probably I read another 40 books in researching the story.

“Ardent feminists may be put off by how the women in my book are treated. I beg to remind them that the Great Plains territories in the 1850s were among the more rude and crude areas on earth, that this was the earliest stage in the civilization process. Into this sod-house scene I drop an ordinary guy, something of a scoundrel, who does an extraordinary deed, and after it’s over, reverts to form.

“Maybe it doesn’t seem enough--but in a long life, that’s the most hopeful aspect of humankind. When it counts, when circumstances are right, people have it in themselves to win.”