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Odd Couple A FRIENDSHIP: Rowan and MacDonald

3 minute read
Christopher Porterfield

At first it seems a bizarre coincidence. The fellow represented here in correspondence with the late crime novelist John D. MacDonald has the same name as Dan Rowan the comedian, half of the team of Rowan and Martin, co-star of TV’s red-hot Laugh-In series of the late ’60s and early ’70s. In fact, he is that Dan Rowan. But before we ask what he is doing in such bookish company, it should be noted that he put in his time as a comedy writer, and that he knocks out a sharper, shrewder letter than one would ever expect from a former headliner on the Vegas strip (except for Noel Coward, of course).

Furthermore, MacDonald does not come off all that bookish anyway. Show business, not literature, is the common ground on which this epistolary odd couple meet and swagger and josh heartily. They are put in touch by a mutual friend, the wife of Novelist Erskine Caldwell. Before long MacDonald is asking Rowan’s guidance on film and TV deals for his books; Rowan reciprocates by playing back studio goings-on for MacDonald’s hard-boiled appraisal. When Laugh-In takes off, the novelist watches at home in Florida with a note pad at hand, sending Rowan comments and suggestions for new bits (“How about a TV interview where the lady interviewer does not realize that she is holding the wrong book and interviewing the wrong author”). Rowan enthusiastically forwards some of these to his staff, tactfully describes others as “filed.” A couple of hopelessly naive notions, writes Rowan, “simply point out — old recluse — that you get out about as often as Willie Sutton.”

The two men, with their wives, get together occasionally and hit it off in * person as well as on the page. But meetings are hard to arrange; Rowan belongs more and more to his relentlessly successful show. MacDonald, who should know about such things, is worried that his friend is succumbing to the tyranny of a popular formula. “One never rides with anything,” he warns, “because that is the way to dull up the world. One tries to improve everything with the tools available: imagination, mischief, irony and the marvelous knowledge that the world is mad.” Rowan seems to agree, agonizing about his struggles with producers and network honchos, his efforts to break up the partnership with Martin, and above all his disenchantment with Laugh-In (whose life cycle, he fears, “will be a death cycle”). But in the end, he rides with it all.

The crusty moralist in MacDonald — familiar, especially, from his gratifyingly mordant asides in the Travis Magee books — finally erupts when Rowan and his wife split up. Rowan castigates the self-sufficient woman his wife has become and complains that he wants his “compliant, noncombative, dependent, absorbed-in-me girl back.” MacDonald responds with two long, tough letters describing Rowan’s attitude as an “adolescent dream” and maintaining that his celebrity has given him an “iron insistence upon being totally right in all things.” After this, does Rowan take MacDonald’s well-intentioned scolding to heart and renew the friendship on a deeper, more self-aware basis? Or does he bitterly take offense and break everything off? Even readers who get out about as often as Willie Sutton should know the answer to that one.

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