Millard’s Cadillac

by Gary Phillips

On Saturday, March 14, a friend of mine passed away some days past his 92nd birthday. Millard Kaufman was a cool old gent. He was a decorated World War II vet, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, a front for blacklisted writers, husband, father, grandfather, and virgin novelist at the age of 90 (Bowl of Cherries). Millard and I met because we both had books published by an indie publisher here in Los Angeles, Really Great Books, back in the late nineties. His was a non-fiction title, Plots and Characters: A Screenwriter on Screenwriting. The book offered up an insightful take on the craft of writing for film as well as asides on his sojourn in that magical mind field called Hollywood.

Millard, as has been reported in his L.A. Times obit and elsewhere, received one of his two nominations for his screenplay of Bad Day at Black Rock, based on the short story, “Bad Day at Honda,” by Howard Breslin. Great flick; spare, noirishly elegant in a sun-faded way, biting dialogue coming out of the sideways mouths of remorseless characters trapped in a beat-to-hell whistlestop desert town. Curiously, I was in the desert when Millard passed, attending the inaugural Tucson Festival of Books in McCain country.

By the time we got to know each other, Millard, with his balding pate and oversized glasses, had come to resemble the character he co-created, Mr. Magoo. In contrast, I hasten to add, to the dark-haired, steely-eyed stud he was as a young man and captured in a painting on one of his walls. But unlike the stumbling Quincy Magoo, Millard was always on his game. He still worked on screenplays, writing them out in longhand, and due to Plots and Characters getting some love, had picked up a gig to do an adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s novella about Jack Johnson and the deadly Galveston flood of 1900, The Big Blow. At the time this bestowed on him the honorific of being the second oldest (A.I. Bezzerides was still around then) working screenwriter in this town.

Justifiably, Millard Kaufman will go down in history for Bad Day, but I told him that many years before we met, one Saturday afternoon on TV, I watched the film he wrote and directed, Convicts 4. There’s this scene that stays with me today of Sammy Davis, Jr. as one of the prisoners in his cell, his hair conked and a greasy handkerchief around his head as he beats at his cot with his shirt going on about how he hates bed bugs. Fuckin’ great.

The one thing that had slowed down with Millard due to age was his driving. He mostly drove during the day by the time, a little over a year ago, my car was totaled in an accident. Now, I loved that car. It was a Jeep Sport Liberty and I’d bought that vehicle with book money. Except for some transmission problems, that baby ran great, I’d paid it off, and with a mere 50,000 miles on it then, just knew I’d be tooling around in it till the fenders rusted off.

So shortly after the accident, I’d gone over to Millard’s house to pick him for one of our occasional lunches where we’d talk writing and I’d heard his tales of the business. We even spun a few variations on Bad Day at Black Rock, with its themes of racism and fear of the outsider, to update it for post-9/11. Well I got there in my aunt’s grocery-store-goin’ Ford Contour—she’s Millard’s age and had pretty much given up driving then due to infirmities—we got to chatting and he mentioned he was looking to unload this old, but low mileage, car he’s got sitting in his garage. He’d bought it new, but now wasn’t driving it that much and figured what driving he does need to do, he’d borrow his lovely wife Loraine’s car or have her chauffeur him. Did I mention it’s a Shaq of a 1992 Cadillac Eldorado? Battleship grey on grey, leather power seats, factory air, old school cassette deck in the dash. Shit. I drove it around the block and sold myself. My wife still laughs at me for buying such an impractical motorized beast.

In a time of global warming, dwindling fossil fuels, hybrid cars, unyielding gridlock along the 405, bus fares going up as low wage workers lose their jobs, greater L.A. remaining a desert of public transportation options (I well remember big auto-backed ads in the early seventies when the idea of a subway here was pooh-poohed as, well, downright un-American—that it was our birthright to have the “freedom” of at least one car if not two), GM going belly-up, and gas prices sure to raise again, driving this behemoth is very un-PC.

Even with gas relatively low again for the moment, I can only afford to power this 300 cubic inch V-8 around for a day or two each week. But I grew up around cars and, like Millard, always had a thing for them. My dad, Dikes, was a mechanic. His official Teamster Local 495 classification at his job at Pacific Motor Trucking in Lincoln Heights—the outfit was then the trucking arm of the Southern Pacific Railroad—was lead tire man. He repaired truck tires on 18-wheelers.

But on weekends, this poor boy from Seguin, Texas, who, with his two brothers, Norman and Sammy, first took a Model A Ford apart and put it back together, was always working on the car of some friend or sorority sister of my invalid mom. Also, we always had one or two of our own cars around our house on Flower Street in South Central in various stages of repair. And my dad, to earn extra money, used to inspect the short blocks—that is, an engine block sans all that other stuff that gets attached to it—as they came off the assembly line at the GM plant in South Gate.

As a teenager, during winter school break, I used to go down to Taft, near Muskogee (yes, that Muskogee), Oklahoma to drive my aging grandfather on my mother’s side around in the snow and ice in his massive ’71 Pontiac Catalina to see his old cronies. When I first started going out with my wife Gilda, me and pops were finishing our rebuilding of a 1958 Ford Fairlane Interceptor, the pristine redone heads sitting on our kitchen table when she first came over. I drove that rascal for several years thereafter, though it sits wasting away in my garage these days.

Politically correct or not, I guess I’ll have to hang on to the El-D for awhile longer. For when I’m behind the wheel, I’ll think about my buddy Millard. I’m sure going to miss him.

In Phillips’ Ivan Monk private eye series of short stories and books, the detective drives a cherry ’64 Ford Fairlane. His and the car’s next appearance will be in the Phoenix Noir anthology from Akashic this fall.

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