Who Played Me in a Movie?

 

 

   Everybody has a family mystery they would like to solve. Here's mine. In 1979, some uncredited kids played me and my sister in the ABC TV movie Friendly Fire. We know Sam Waterston played my dad and an actress named Jenny Sullivan played my step-mother Sam. But, in the scene below, who are the two children who race out to greet the Volkswagen Bus in front of the house? If anyone has any idea, please leave a comment. Thanks!!

 

 

 

Letter to Kurt Vonnegut Dec 3, 1975

It had been six years since Dad had praised Kurt Vonnegut in a  New York Times Book Review article entitled "Kurt Vonnegut, Head Bookinist", timed for the release of Slaughterhouse-Five. Nine years since he'd written a"ground breaking" retrospective of the author's works for The New Republic. Now, with the looming publication of Friendly Fire, Dad was seeking friendly blurbs from the kind of people who would make a difference. He thought Vonnegut owed him one so when the esteemed author declined, Dad was incensed enough to write Vonnegut a "snarler".

      Dear Kurt:

           Harvey Ginsberg at G.P. Putnam's told me you had declined to read the manuscript of my book Friendly Fire because everyone was asking you to read books these days. When I wrote you and said that if you were too busy I'd understand and promise not to sulk, I did not promise not to be angry and a little amazed. Back in 1966, you may remember, when you were still trying to make it big, I helped you out by doing that long retrospective review of your previous books for The New Republic suggesting people consider you  something more than a science fiction writer and that you be taken seriously. I later, out of friendship for you , did that "side-piece" on you to tie in with Bob Scholes' review of Slaughterhouse-Five for the NYTBR.

         In the copy of Mother Night you autographed for me in Iowa City in 1967 you wrote :

   

          "To Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan, cousin of my fourth best student, main sponsor of me as a Guggenheim fellow--in short, a friend worth ten thousand dollars, three thousand of them tax free. Love, Kurt Vonnegut Jr."

   

          As I said, I understand that you are very busy. In turn, I trust you will understand that I figure you're a friend worth about two cents.

         Sincerely,

          C.D.B. Bryan

    

  I have no reason to believe the two ever spoke, or wrote,  to each other again.

Major Influences on Dad's Writing, 1976

In a 1976 letter to Chris Cannon who handled publicity for Friendly Fire at G P Putnam's Sons

J Bryan III

  I suppose the major teacher of the craft has been my father, J. ( Joseph) Bryan III, who was an associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post for years, has written several non-fiction books, a biography of Admiral William F. Halsey, P.T. Barnum, and many articles in the old Post, Colliers, Life, Esquire and more recently the old Holiday and now Travel & Leisure.

William Maxwell

The man who had has the most influence on my style of writing has been Bill Maxwell of the New Yorker and Seymour Glass who wrote his younger brother: "If only you'd remember before you ever sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible but so simple I can barely believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself."( Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction).

    While I'm at it, let me throw in two more: the first was a quote passed across his desk to me at the New Yorker by Bill Maxwell, it's by W.B. Yeats: "Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain is irresistible." I now have that framed and hanging on my roll top like an exhortation from Chairman Mao.

W B Yeats

    The other is from an interview with Anthony Powell in a recent NYTBR which helps to explain the why and how of writing: "The great thing about writing is its two stages: first trying to make yourself understand; then, putting it to other people. The first is the most difficult."

Anthony Powell

   There had to be some way to understand the Vietnam War, to contain it in a frame of reference I ( we) could deal with. The point of Friendly Fire, or certainly a point, is that there is no enemy, there is only war.

The Selling of Friendly Fire, Part One

In late 1975, Dad asked agent Carl D. Brandt to send manuscripts of Friendly Fire to more than 80 opinion makers. His fear --as he put it--was "that because it deals with Vietnam no one will want to read it.". He was hoping for a blurb or at least some word of mouth.

Among the names on that list are reporters, politicians, intellectuals,  writers, musicians, actors and editorial cartoonists.

 In no particular order they were:

William F Buckley, Jr.

William Fulbright
James Reston
Arthur Schlesinger
Tom Wicker
Marquis Childs
Theodore White
Peter Farb
Dan Rather

John Gardner

Howard K Smith
Anthony Lewis
Evans and Novak
Barbara Jordon
Walter Cronkite

Bella Abzug

Bernstein and Woodward
Samuel Eliot Morrison
James J Kilpatrick
Iowa Gov. Harold Hughes
Frances Fitzgerald
Ben Bradlee
Joan Didion

Hunter Thompson

Clark Moellenoff ( of the Des Moines Register)
Gloria Steinem
I.F. Stone
Norman Podhoretz
Paul Harvey

Truman Capote

Jack Anderson
Shana Alexander
Joe Pultizer
Meg Greenfield
Hodding Carter III
Barbara Howard

Gregory Peck

Director, ACLU
Director, Amnesty International
Daniel Boorstein
Elizabeth Drew
Editor, Atlanta Constitution
William Sloane Coffin

John Kerry, VVAW

Shirley MacLaine
Annie Dillard
The Berrigan Brothers
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
Tom Hayden
Gary Trudeau
Bernadette Dorn
John Leonard
John Blum
Robert S McNamara

Judy Collins

Arthur Schlesinger
Bill Moyers
Calif Gov Brown
James Michener
Bill Mauldin
Bernadette Dorn
Ramsey Clark
Commander, VFW
Commander, American Legion
Clarence Kelley
Elizbeth Hotzman
Elizabeth Janeway

Richard Nixon

Spiro Agnew

Edward M Kennedy
John V Tunney
Seymour Hersch
David Brinkley
Buckminster Fuller
Jean Jacques Servan- Schreiber
Robert Audrey
Carlos Fuentes
George S McGovern
Hubert H Humphrey
All Presidential Candidates

Dad followed up some of these people with letters, most notably Vonnegut, Capote, Michener and Shirley MacLaine. More on that effort in a later post.

The General

Dad first met H. Norman Schwarzkopf in October 1971. He was then a 37 year old lieutenant colonel not long back from completing his second tour of duty in Vietnam. Twice wounded, he had just been released from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and was recuperating at home with his wife, Brenda, and two year old daughter, Cindy.

 Seventeen months earlier, Schwarzkopf had been commanding the Americal Division's 1st Battalion of the 6th Infantry Brigade in South Vietnam's Batangan Peninsula when a young soldier a dozen yards from Schwarzkopf stepped on a mine. The explosion punched the kid up into the air, injured Captain Bob Trabbert and Schwarzkopf himself. The soldier's right leg was flapping out to one side. "I'm going to die! We're all going to die!" he screamed. As Schwarzkopf began inching across the mine field to reach the soldier, his legs began to shake uncontrollably:

  His knees were suddenly so watery that he had to reach down and grip them until they were stilled. Perspiration stung his eyes. The men watching him, waiting for him to move again. To his astonishment, Schwarzkopf said, he suddenly thought of the sign on Harry Truman's White House desk:"The buck stops here". 
   The kid was whimpering, "I don't want to die! You've got to get me out of here."
    "I'll get you out," Schwarzkopf said. "Just Keep Still. You're all right."
     Five feet...three feet...Schwarzkopf gently lowered himself across the wounded boy's body to keep him still. "I don't want you to move around," Schwarzkopf told him. "We're going to have to set that leg." 
    Schwarzkopf needed a splint and spotted a small, waist-high tree back where he had left Trabbert and three other men. Schwarzkopf called to them to cut some splints from the tree. Trabbert pulled out his sheath knife and passed it to one of the men. The soldier took one step toward the tree and triggered another mine. 
    Schwarzkopf was horrified. Trabbert had taken the full force of the explosion. His left leg was blown off, an arm broken backward so that the bone of the elbow socket showed, and a great hole was gouged in his head. He would survive, but three other men were killed instantly.
     For having crossed the mine field to rescue the wounded private, Schwarzkopf was awarded his third Silver Star. He says he had no other choice, It was his responsibility. And by being there in the mine field taking care of the boy instead of with Trabbert, his life was saved. "But you live with those things, " he said. "You become terribly fatalistic in combat."

Dad had interviewed Schwarzkopf repeatedly for Friendly Fire, a book he wrote about an Iowa family whose son, a sergeant in one of the infantry companies in Schwarzkopf's battalions, was killed by a howitzer shell fired by his own supporting artillery in Vietnam. Another death that deeply distressed Schwarzkopf.

These were some of the experiences that helped Schwarzkopf prepare for Operation Desert Storm command. For a 1991 article that appeared in The New Republic, Dad asked Schwarzkopf if he would be disappointed if his ground forces never got the opportunity to go into battle.

   "Not in the least!" he said vehemently. "I don't want to kill one more American! I don't want to see one more American die-- be it from accident or from battle. There's no blood lust on the part of myself or anybody else around here. What we want to do is accomplish the objectives of this whole thing, get it over as quickly as we can, and get back home. And I tell you, that's the attitude of everybody from the top general down to the lowest private."

How Friendly Fire got started, 1970

Dad has just published his novel The Great Dethriffe when he went back to Iowa to visit a fellow teacher at the writer's workshop, Vance Bourjaily. Bourjaily's wife Tina asked Dad if he'd heard about the Iowa farm mother, Peg Mullen, who had taken the money the Army had sent her to bury her son Michael, who had been killed in Vietnam, and spent it instead on a half page anti war advertisement that appeared Easter Sunday in the Des Moines Register.

Dad's words:

Both Vance and Tina thought Mrs. Mullen might be worth looking into, that it sounded like a good story. "Mom's Apple Pie Gone Sour" I remember was Tina's phrase. Still I couldn't help asking myself who was left in America who would be willing to read a story which in any way touched upon the Vietnam War. I certainly didn't want to write one. Like everyone else, I was sick to death of hearing about Vietnam.

The turning point came for me when President Nixon went out to Kansas State and told his college audience, "The heart of America is sound...the heart of America is good?"
That simply wasn't true.

The heart of America was broken over the death of her young in Vietnamese jungles, in bunkers along the Cambodian border, in helicopters over Laos, on campus hilltops in Kent, Ohio and in dormitories at Jackson State. If the President thought otherwise then, it seemed to me, it was a clear case of "The Emperor's Clothes".

I felt there had to be some way to articulate the American people's discontent, their estrangement from their government, their increasing paranoia and distrust. And what better way was there than to return to Iowa? Iowans are among the most open, honest, friendly, trusting people in the country...if the government of the United States had lost the loyalty and support of an Iowa farm family then it indicated to me at least that the government was in very grave trouble indeed.

When I telephoned Peg Mullen and introduced myself and explained what it was I wanted to do, she was willing to have me come. I was, in fact, a little startled and dismayed by how eagerly she invited me. I left for Iowa two days later.

Dad's plan was to write a 6,000 word article for The New Yorker which would appear a few months later. Instead, the story of the Mullens became the book Friendly Fire, which would not appear for five years.



Dad's words:

Even before it was published, back when I had sent Peg and Gene Mullen the finished manuscript, I knew they would have problems with it. They could not and did not agree with me on how Michael had died. I want to backtrack a bit: when I went out to Iowa I was supposedly doing a story on why Peg had taken out the advertisement. But when I got there I discovered the real story lay in the Mullens' conviction that there existed a conspiracy to prevent them from learning how their son had died. He had been killed, they knew, by his own artillery, by FRIENDLY FIRE, but they believed the men on the guns had been drunk or on drugs, that the Army battalion commander was responsible for the cover-up, that the men had been threatened with court martial should they write the family the truth...And so when I returned to Guilford after speaking with the Mullens I told (William) Shawn (editor of the New Yorker) that I couldn't do it as an article, that I wanted to do it as a book, I wanted to find out how Michael died.


Michael Eugene Mullen
Sergeant, United States Army
Killed-In-Action 18-February 1970
By Friendly Fire



And I did find out. I spoke to the men who had been with him on the hill that night and they all agreed on what had happened. The men I talked to ranged from the West Point Lt. Colonel with three silver stars (future General Norman Schwarzkopf) to a young private in prison in Terre Haute, Indiana (William Polk) They all agreed. But the Mullens wouldn't believe that it had been just an awful, stupid accident. Their son's death had had to have more meaning. Eventually they came to believe that because of my Army Intelligence background, my Ivy League East Coast upbringing, that I was part of the conspiracy too. They don't believe that anymore...but they still aren't sure I told the truth.

Peg Mullen

In fact Peg Mullen wrote her own book in 1995, “Unfriendly Fire: A Mother’s Memoir,” expanding on her doubts. She remained distrustful of government and the media. In 2002 she wrote a columnist for the Register:

I have no idea of your age,but I hope you never have to stand in a quiet corner of an airport and say goodbye to a son in uniform, knowing in your heart that you’ll never see him again.

I hope you never suffer the horror of a military man sitting at your kitchen table trying to tell how your son died — then wait 10 days for his body to be returned and his casket unloaded in a darkened corner of the same airport.


Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Michael’s commander in Vietnam, met with the Mullens to answer their questions. But nothing he could say brought comfort.

“To me, the death of Michael Mullen was not just one tragedy, but two: the needless death of a young man, and the bitterness that was consuming his parents,” the general wrote in his autobiography.

More than twenty years later, Dad was still hearing from some of the soldiers who were with Michael the night he died. His favorite was surely Gary Samuels, "The Prince". who had lost a leg that night. Samuels and his wife would stop by Dad's house once a year for raucous visits full of laughter.
On a November night in 1998, Dad pulled down his leather bound edition of Friendly Fire and Gary wrote these words:



Friendly Fire--You've written quite a book! It's all true. It's as if you were sitting on my shoulder. I sincerely appreciate your efforts and so do the guys in the 198 1/6--God Speed. The Prince. Gary Samuels 11-13-98 Courty's house Guilford,CT

To which Dad responded

The inscription below was written in my presence and my response was extraordinary appreciation and affection because although Gary says "it's all true"--I WAS NOT THERE! Gary was. And he is a hero to me. CDBB Nov 13, 1998

Agent Orange: An Unending Nightmare, 1983

With the publication of Friendly Fire, Dad became one of the go-to journalists for magazines wanting to do stories on Vietnam. In 1983,The New Republic asked Dad to review a new book, Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange by Fred A Wilcox.
In the review he remembers meeting Paul Reutershan five years earlier at a sparsely attended Memorial Day Ceremony honoring Vietnam veterans in Hartford,CT. The young Vietnam vet, who flew helicopter missions through herbicidal mists, was dying of cancer of the colon, liver and abdomen. "I died in Vietnam." he said, "but I didn't even know it."


Not quite seven months later, Reutershan would pass away
During the war it is estimated that eleven million gallons of Agent Orange had been sprayed on Vietnam and 4,119,960 acres has been defoliated. The idea was to deny the enemy cover by destroying jungle growth in Vietnam.
However, Dow Chemical's own documents reveal the company knew as early as 1957 that the process used to synthesize Agent Orange also produced trace amounts of dioxin.
Perhaps 370 pounds of dioxin in all fell upon Vietnam.--an insignificant amount, one would think, were it not known that one part oer 20-billion dose of dioxin ingested by a young male rhesus monkey killed it in twelve days.
Vietnam vets who crawled through sprayed areas, and drank and bathed from water there, had been exposed to dioxin. They suffered from kidney, bladder, colonic and testicular cancers; chloracne rashes, migraine headaches, nausea, violent rages, mood swings, premature aging.
The Vietnamese also suffered of course: children were born without eyes, shortened limbs, abnormally small heads, with parts of their brain missing--at rates 100 times normal.



In the early 80's, The Veteran's Administration was still denying disability checks to Vietnam vets exposed to Agent Orange, asking for patience until further studies were concluded.
One vet responded "Five years, five more years. I think I have got it now. I think we've all got it now. They are just waiting. They are waiting for us all, every fucking one of us, to die".
Dad ends his article with this plea on behalf of veterans:

Let there be an act of Congress immediately authorizing the V.A. and the government to assume the cost of the medical care of these families. They need the money now; they can't wait until long-range studies and drawn-out lawsuits are completed. There is adequate reason to believe that Agent Orange might be responsible for many of the veterans' and their families' problems. Even if we don't know yet for sure, even if we doubt that Agent Orange has anything to do with the veteran's illnesses and their children's deformities, we have to take care of them. We should be generous in our compassion and in our willingness to provide these veterans and their families with the medical care they need.
The government should replicate the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission Study for Vietnam verterans in order to give them the answers they need about what is happening to them, so that they can plan the rest of their lives, help their children make decision about marriage and childbearing and allow the rest of the world to evaluate the full impact of the dioxin problem.
This is not too much to ask.
Two and a half million healthy young Americans went to Southeast Asia at their country's call. They did their patriotic duty. Regardless of our feelings about the merits of that war, we owe them honor. We owe them and their families care.

In 1984, a class action lawsuit against Dow, Monsanto and other chemical companies was settled out of court for $180 million, outraging many veterans who. at most, would receive checks amounting to $12,000 spread over ten years.

In 1991, Congress enacted the Agent Orange Act which gave the VA authority to treat and compensate veterans exposed to dioxin as long as the veterans suffered from a one of the wretched diseases on their list.

As for Vietnamese victims,their lawsuit against the chemical companies was thrown out in US District Court because the judge ruled Agent Orange wasn't designed to harm people. He ruled the chemical companies shared the same sovereign immunity as the government for which they worked.

In the past year hairy cell leukemia, Parkinson's disease and ischemic heart disease have been added to the VA's laundry list of illnesses associated with dioxin.
Last year, U.S. veterans of Vietnam received nearly $2 billion in disability payments related to Agent Orange.But Agent Orange is still killing veterans ten , fifteen, twenty years before their time. It truly is an unending nightmare

For more information on the cancers connected to Agent Orange exposure:
http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/IntheWorkplace/agent-orange-and-cancer

The Pearl of the Laramie Plains, 1975

It is the dead winter of early 1975 in Laramie, Wyoming and the author of the recently published Pilgrim of Tinker Creek , Annie Dillard, has written Dad that she's interested in moving there and wanted to know what Laramie was like. At the time Dad was earning $12,000 a semester to teach and give lectures there and, in his small apartment, he tried to finish off Friendly Fire "so that I can afford to feed my family for another year". We were back in Connecticut and some of us were driving my stepmother crazy.
Anyway, here are some of his lines about "The Pearl of the Laramie Pains".



I don't have a car here, so I go everywhere on foot. And the whole town can be covered in a day. Laramie wasn't even here until the 1880's, it is a railroad town, cattle ranches with small herds on huge acreage because there is no water. The Laramie River, for example, a small boy could jump across and, failing that, walk across without being greeted as a Messiah...



The town, itself, is filled with one-floor, white frame, semi-ranch houses with picture windows looking out on picture windows. The streets are named after Lewis and Clark and Fremont and Sheridan...and a marvelous one called Sublette after the French explorer who discovered the fiscal advantages of student housing. There are vast numbers of cottonwood trees around here, but few birds. That may be because it's winter. Or it may be because of the altitude (7200'+) which brings me to my knees. Or it may be they are trying to tell me something.

Dad wrote his friend Peter Neill he discovered a Park Avenue in Laramie:

Park Avenue here deadends into a drainage ditch followed by miles of gently rising plains broken only bu high tension lines, US 80 and three fuel storage tanks.

Well, I for one, would have been scared away. Annie Dillard would win the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim that year and wound up teaching the next four years at Western Washington University in the book loving city of Bellingham.

Annie Dillard
www.AnnieDillard.com

Filming The Great Dethriffe, 1974

In early 1972, these two men approached my dad about making a movie out of his second novel, The Great Dethriffe.

It's the story of two young men who cling to the long vanished life-style of the 1920's. The men , George Dethriffe and Alred Moulton, try to model themselves on the myth of a Scott Fitzgerald hero. But their pursuit of nostalgia alienates their other friends and Dethriffe's marriage literally goes up in smoke.
The book did not sell well so Dad has some surprising news for his friend Peter Neill:

There is a man who seems determined to make a movie out of The Great Dethriffe. Someone named James Ivory who did Shakespeare Wallah and the more recent "Savages" ...It got very strange reviews--rather like the Peter O'Toole "The Ruling Class" which I saw and loathed. I never saw "Savages" but the reviewers, too, either loved it or left it. Ivory wants to make a movie only about the Dethriffe part, leaving out Alfred, Rome, the model, Hawaii, the brother etc. which distresses me since that part is the part I liked least, or at least felt least interesting (Rome bored my ass off, but I liked Alfred and what was going on in parts of it)


The money would be 3% of the operating budget which seems to be set at around $500,000 meaning I would get $15,000, plus 5% of the producers' profits after the film...which will be nonexistent...He wants Sam Waterston to play Dethriffe which makes for interesting circles within circles.




(That's because Dad had known Waterston for years)

I know that Sam liked the book, mentioned wanting to play the part, but he's a very big star now particularly since the TV production of Much Ado About Nothing was such a smashing success and he may price himself out of it. If only I could get Candice Bergen to play "Alice"...if only I could get "Candice Bergen.. if only...if


So I went back to read Dethriffe yesterday and hated every minute of it. Why is it so difficult to reread something after it has been published.

Two weeks later, Dad received some incredible news:

For God's sake they do want, they really honest-to God no -kidding-scout's honor do want CANDICE BERGEN to play Alice...and (Ivory) told me that he wants his writers to spend considerable amount of time with actors and actresses to get speech patterns and pace as well as sentiment *sigh*

In May and June, Dad began writing the dialogue for The Great Dethriffe. James Ivory wrote the rest of the sceenplay. Ismail Merchant apparently already had backers at hand when news came that Waterston had signed on to play Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

Dad's reaction:

"Echoes within echoes within echoes. I cannot see how it can do anything but exactly what I had intended.

In fact Dad, his wife Sam and James Ivory went to Newport to see them filming The Great Gatsby. Sam Waterston showed them around the set. They were up all night filming the party sequences with extras taken from the cream of Newport society.
At one point a woman caught Dad's eye.

A beautiful tiny blond with porcelain complexion came down the stairs with two tiny children...and she kept looking at me as though she wanted to ask me something ( Did I have any pacifiers? Could I cure diarrhea? What do you do when a child vomits on your beaded purse?) but then she went away I and asked Sam who it was. He said "Daisy Buchanan."


(Mia Farrow to those who don't remember.)
Though shooting was scheduled to begin in the fall, Ivory had not found a leading lady and the movie just vanished. Nothing came of it.

 As Dad wrote in 1976:

The timing was bad. The Fitzgerald resurgence occurred about two years after the book

But the postscript is interesting. Merchant and Ivory went on produce and direct two Oscar nominated films, A Room With a View and Howard's End.
And Sam Waterston would play his friend, my dad, in the ABC TV movie "Friendly Fire" .
Finally Dad would use his screenplay experience when he wrote Beautiful Woman, Ugly Scenes.

Echoes Within Echoes ...Within Echoes... Within Echoes.

Correspondence with Carol Burnett February 9,1979

On the night of my Dad's 43rd birthday an estimated 64 million people tuned in to ABC to see the movie "Friendly Fire". Almost every other TV set in the nation was tuned to FF. The movie would go on to win four Emmys (including Outstanding Drama) and a Peabody Award. There were plenty of people wondering whether TV's favorite comedienne could play Peg Mullen, an Iowa mother trying to find out how her son died in Vietnam, but Carol Burnett impressed critics and was nominated for an Emmy.It seems her favorite review came from the man who spent six years writing Friendly Fire.
Here are two letters dated February of 1979.
The first from Dad. The second from Carol Burnett.

Dear Miss Burnett:

Last Friday Brandon Stoddard screened "Friendly Fire" for me at ABC in New York. It's been a week now and I'm still at a loss of how adequately to express my gratitude and appreciation to you for your superb portrayal of Peg Mullen. You did things on that screen with your eyes, the set of your jaw, with your posture, your sudden stillness and very absence of action that duplicated exactly all those same warning signs I would see in Peg the instant before she would say or do something that would me swallow hard of want to duck and reach for a yellow pad.

As you can imagine I found "Friendly Fire" at time almost unbearably difficult to watch. In the scene near the end where Sam Waterston says my "Look, I don't know if this is the proper time or not " line about telling the Mullens all I had learned about how Michael had died, the look you gave Sam was the look I got.


The inevitable death of that sweet-faced you actor who plays Michael is going to devastate the television audience. Now, thanks to you, all of Peg's rage and anguish and frustration will become understood. I hope you won't think it presumptuous of me to say you should be very proud of yourself--certainly you have made me very proud of me.

Dear Courty
I can honestly say I've never been more thrilled by any letter I've ever received.

I knew Brandon was going to show you the film and I was pretty nervous. I experienced the Mullens' story for a brief period--you lived it a lifetime.

I'm so proud to be a part of this remarkable film. I was overwhelmed by your book. The love and backbreaking work you undertook were astonishing to me.
My God what you all went through to get at the truth, all of us would do well to have a friend such as you.

I'm hoping...to be back in California when "Friendly Fire" airs. It's so special to me that I want to be home and watch it with my family.

With love,
Carol

P.S. I'm framing your letter






Carol Burnett and my father finally met the Wednesday before Friendly Fire aired.
Dad writes:

She was marvelous and funny and relaxed an quite lovely and she ...rushed up to me, threw her around me gave me a huge kiss and I was a bit shy, a bit dazzled, a bit pleased. We all went together to the bar of the Watergate Hotel and drank and yakked and laughed and got very serious for several hours.



I plan on writing more about the writing of "Friendly Fire" which seemed to take up the better part of our childhoods. Dad agonized over this book which was, of course, about more than Peg Mullen and the incident that killed her son. It was about the soldiers who fought beside Michael Mullen. It was about a colonel named Norman Schwarzkopf. It was about our country and its ideals. I'd also like to revisit the making of the movie some time and include the role one of Dad's very best friends, Brandon Stoddard, had in producing the film.



As sad as the subject matter may be, for my sister and me, the film offers one bit of fun trivia. There's a scene where Waterston pulls up to his house in Connecticut and two children run out to meet his Volkswagen bus. Those children were playing us.

A two minute preview of Friendly Fire can be seen here





http://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Fire/dp/B002W7EPZ0/ref=pd_vodsm_B002W7EPZ0

You can also see a clip at 3:23-4:01 in this "TV Annual 1978-79" special.