When “Brokeback Mountain” hit theaters in late 2005, it quickly became that simplest and yet rarest thing: a work of art that moves a sizable audience and then becomes a cultural phenomenon. It was the equivalent of drilling for oil and setting off the Spindletop gusher. The movie anticipated and perhaps even accelerated society’s acceptance of gay rights, including the right to marry.
Making a good film was practically impossible in the best of circumstances. For a writer in the late 1990s to remain in control was unheard of. Words in Hollywood were the basest commodity. Writers were the butt of jokes, always had been. But screenwriter Larry McMurtry — who would go on to win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with longtime collaborator Diana Ossana — was undaunted.
“It’s the only weapon we have,” he said. “Good writing.”
“Brokeback Mountain” was a 10,000-word story in the Oct. 13, 1997, issue of The New Yorker. It is a tale of two very young men, lower class and sinking, who are thrown together herding sheep one summer in 1963 on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in northwest Wyoming. They discover, against their will, a mutual overpowering desire for each other. “I’m not no queer,” Ennis del Mar says. Jack Twist replies: “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.”
Ennis and Jack separate, marry, have kids, come together again, separate. Ennis even more than Jack is torn between what he wants and what the world around him says he must not want. “Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain’t over,” says Jack. Ennis cannot love, can barely speak. He is suffocating in the closet. Jack dies, murdered by a gang with a tire iron. Ennis survives with his sadness and his memories. All of it is told in Annie Proulx’s distinctive style — staccato, visual and quirky:
“The road to Lightning Flat went through the desolate country past a dozen abandoned ranches distributed over the plain at eight-and 10-mile intervals, houses sitting blank-eyed in the weeds, corral fences down. The mailbox read John C. Twist. The ranch was a meagre little place, leafy spurge taking over. The stock was too far distant for him to see their condition, only that they were black baldies. A porch stretched across the front of the tiny brown stucco house, four rooms, two down, two up.”
Larry and Diana were in Archer City. Diana had a friend visiting, a gay man who had not come out to his family, and he gave her the magazine and told her to read the story. Late that night, suffering from her chronic insomnia, she did. The next morning she read it again, just to be sure. She thought it was a masterpiece and something else: a film. She asked Larry to read it. He usually didn’t read short fiction because he didn’t enjoy it, perhaps because he couldn’t write it. Texas cared only for novels. One reason the literary establishment dismissed Katherine Anne Porter is that she wrote short stories.
I realized instantly that it was a masterpiece, and I wish I’d have written it myself. It’s a story I’d been dreaming about for 30 or 40 years. I’d known many cowboys over the years that were gay.”
He read the story, grudgingly, and agreed it should be a film, despite the fact that it violated his rule that good films are made from stylistically flat fiction. His connection with “Brokeback” was immediate and deep.
“I realized instantly that it was a masterpiece, and I wish I’d have written it myself,” he said. “It’s a story I’d been dreaming about for 30 or 40 years. I’d known many cowboys over the years that were gay.”
There was Johnny, the McMurtry family’s favorite uncle, who lived in remote Muleshoe, near the New Mexico line. Larry had no proof that he was gay but Johnny didn’t marry until he was 65 and even then preferred to sleep in the bunkhouse with his cowboys. And there was cousin Claude, who lived in Clarendon like many of the Panhandle McMurtrys. Claude had a gentleman friend, a schoolteacher he met in the army. The friend came to the McMurtry reunions and everyone treated him respectfully, perhaps because he was nicer than Claude. Claude and his friend might have been Larry’s inspiration for the character of Jimmy, Molly’s estranged son in “Leaving Cheyenne” and one of the first openly gay characters in Texas fiction. Jimmy goes off to fight the Japanese in World War II and later writes a letter saying he will never come home again: “I don’t take after girls any more, I take after men. I have a friend who is rich, and I mean rich, he says if I will stay with him I will never have to work a day, so I am going to. I guess we will live in Los Angeles if we don’t get killed.” Alas, Jimmy is killed.
Like the army, the West brought men together in ways that offered opportunities for intimacy. And unlike boot camp, the lonely spaces of the West provided privacy. This is a theme in “Brokeback” — on the mountain, away from prying eyes and the strictures of society, Ennis and Jack can literally be themselves. Historians didn’t have much to say about gay men on the range. In their survey “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America,” John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman devote only a paragraph to the topic.
“Some men were drawn to the frontier because of their attractions to men. All men were thought to have strong innate lusts, and the absence of women may have channeled those desires to other men,” they write. They cite a Western limerick: “Young cowboys had a great fear / That old studs once filled with beer / Completely addle’ / They’d throw on a saddle, / and ride them on the rear.” They also mention an intriguing case at Fort Meade, in the Dakota Territory, where a Mrs. Nash married a soldier, and then after he was transferred married another man. Mrs. Nash was discovered after her death to be biologically male.
As Diana recounted the origin of the film, she and Larry wrote immediately to Proulx, who said she was doubtful it could become a movie but go ahead. Actually, their initial letter, written by Larry, was dated nearly two months after the story appeared. Most likely the magazine was a few weeks old when they saw it.
Larry contacted Proulx through her film agent. In a fax dated Dec. 3, 1997, he introduced himself and expressed admiration for the story, saying it was as good as any fiction he had ever read about the West. He said he knew she had been approached already by producers with more money than he could offer, but that he heard she was concerned about exactly what Hollywood might do with the story. His own plan was simple: a “straight-on” adaptation, using her words as much as possible. He cautioned her not to fall for any flowery come-ons by other producers. They might mean it but Hollywood was a bottomless pit of good intentions.
Proulx responded two days later, acknowledging she had already gotten “a couple of anything-you-want film tenders.” But Larry had said the magic word: “West.” Some would-be producers saw a story of forbidden love that could be set anywhere. Larry, like Proulx, saw the tale rooted in one specific place.
“Except for you,” Proulx wrote, “not one of them saw that.” She added her agent would be in touch for the “grits & gravy, nuts & bolts.” No dollar figure was mentioned in these first letters by either party. When Proulx told a friend, “This was too good a match to pass up,” it wasn’t money she was thinking of.
In that first letter, Proulx went on to say she was a longtime McMurtry reader. She didn’t mention any fiction but said she had read a dozen times Larry’s essay in photographer Louise Serpa’s 1994 photo book Rodeo. Serpa had been entranced by rodeos since she first saw one in Reno in 1934, when she was nine and waiting for her mother to divorce her father. She was the first woman to get permission to officially take pictures inside the rodeo arena and was the official photographer for the Tucson Rodeo for decades. This was her first book, and her publisher felt it needed something more. The publisher approached Larry, not realizing he had been writing barbed commentary about rodeo for most of his career.
Larry’s “Notes on Rodeo” praises Serpa’s photographs as art but says rodeo is show business and bears little resemblance to any actual work on a ranch. Where Serpa sees cowboys as noble specimens of humanity, Larry finds them “physically competent but emotionally limited men who are in most cases sexist, chauvinistic, xenophobic, quasi-fascistic and not infrequently dull.”
It’s a relatively brief essay, 27 numbered paragraphs. But it is Larry’s most effective explanation of his failed quest to strip the myth from the West. Can’t be done, he says.
“The lies about the West are more powerful than the truth about the West — so much more powerful that, in a sense, lies about the West are the truths about the West — the West, at least, of the imagination.”
Serpa hated the afterword and wanted to drop it but her editor thought it added a helpful tension to the project and kept it in. “Why Larry is so embittered about the West I don’t know,” Serpa told her editor, adding that “if ‘tension’ is what you want, you’ve got it, from me at least.” The essay, Larry told Danny Lyon, angered every rodeo buff in the country, which was OK by him. Proulx’s evaluation of the piece: “Deadly accurate.”
This is what would unite the two writers during the long slog of trying to get the movie made: the notion that they were on the same wave-length, that the West was hopelessly romanticized.
Proulx was a student of Larry’s in the sense that she also aspired to deflate the region through satire or exaggeration.
“Sometimes I like to throw my little darts at the rhinoceros hide of the American frontier myth where all men with hats and boots are cowboys, and all cowboys are noble, straight and heroic,” she said.
There was another bond. “I happen to be a fiendish lurker amongst the book stalls and am curious as hell about your book town project,” Proulx said in that first note. Larry told her how he found the elusive how-to nonfiction books she had written early in her career, one of which he bought from a Chicago scout who was “so smudged I offered him a bath as a bonus, which he accepted.” Proulx used books for extensive research but they clearly had much deeper hooks in her psyche. She wasn’t a collector per se, just another obsessive. After Larry enticingly described some new arrivals, she responded: “Jeez! I have to see those books. The Barber books. I know there are books there that I need. I am tied up with business stuff here and in Denver until Nov. 16, but could get away then and come down and look at them. Awful feeling buyers will have clawed through all and taken the juice by then. Utterly maddening.”
They were soon trading anecdotes about the bizarre nature of the West. Proulx on Wyoming: “Reality profoundly unimportant, ditto underwear.” She acknowledged the state’s “underlying malevolence, both in landscape and inhabitants.” That’s the way Larry described West Texas as a young writer.
Larry told Proulx he once had the idea of opening an all-night lingerie shop in Archer City to spark up sales. Proulx said she knew a place where there were all-night wedding dress shops next to a strip of bars, so why not? Larry talked about his relationship with Gerry Spence, Wyoming’s most famous defense lawyer. He had worked on a film about a murder case that Spence had won, but the movie was never made because the lawyer insisted on playing himself, something no studio would allow. Spence then wrote a book and kept bugging Larry for a blurb. Larry finally compared him to Socrates, which apparently sufficed.
It was the beginning of a great friendship. Proulx was like a female version of Larry, Diana said. “They’re both tough and tender.” Hearing them talk was like listening to a couple of musicians jamming together, one melody segueing and blending into the other.
David Streitfeld is a Pulizer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times. His biography of Larry McMurtry, “Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry,” published March 27.
