Books: Where Has the Young Buck Gone?

A SOLO IN TOM-TOMS (390 pp.)—Gene Fowler—Viking ($3).

Gene Fowler (Timber Line; Good Night, Sweet Prince, etc.). who once, in his maverick days, described himself as “an American peasant,” is now an independent movie producer, and lives in a four-bedroom house of “West Los Angeles baroque” which, he says, looks like a Cunard liner. He used to write Hollywood movie scripts at $2.750 a week. Before that, as managing editor of the old New York American, he liked to lean back in his editorial chair and play an accordion to drown out the roaring of the Hearst press. Earlier still, as a wild young newspaperman in Denver, he toted firearms in a city room, fell in love, married, wore Jack Dempsey’s cinnamon-brown, pearl-buttoned overcoat on his honeymoon.

A Solo in Tom-Toms is a backward glance at his Colorado boyhood and bachelor days. Youth itself, he explains, is a sort of solo in tom-toms. Once he heard some Sioux Indians beating out a lament for a dead boy: Where has the young buck gone? Tell us where the long ride ends; say to us where the young buck has gone? It seemed to him “a goodbye to the West, a goodbye to youth. . . . I began to find a meaning of my own young years.” Fowler trained in the same up-from-cops school of journalism as Ben Hecht. Stanley Walker and the late Courtney Ryley Cooper, whose credo is that the old bars were the best, and that the only thing to do with a tall tale is to make it taller. Solo has many moments of awed moralizing, semi-penitential, Hollywood-haunted sentiment. But throughout runs a vein of the old, Rocky Mountain, free-&-easy Fowler yarning.

Life without Father. Father’s name was Devlan, not Fowler. He was an apprentice patternmaker in the machine shops of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Mother sang a rich soprano in the choir of the Methodist Church. Not long after their marriage in 1889, Father decided that he had had all he could stand. Without even waiting to see whether the baby was a boy or a girl, he cleared out for the mountains of Clear Creek County, west of Denver. The boy grew up and never laid eyes on Charlie Devlan until he was 30 and Charlie was 52. He decided that his youth was in partia “quest for a father.”

But he had a stepfather, Frank Fowler, who tried to make ends meet by selling Egg Wonder Powder, a baking preparation, and Eureka pants-hangers. He also had a grandfather, an old prospector who still hoped to strike it rich in the Colorado hills and spent much of his free time dosing himself with quinine, calomel and the secret remedies of one Gun Wa, a Chinese doctor. Most important of all, Gene had a grandmother, a pious, masterful woman whose hair had once been admired by General Lew Wallace.

Maximilian & Molly. Grandmother took in boarders. One of the boarders had two prized possessions: an immoral Mexican hairless dog and an urn containing the ashes of his late wife. The urn was lost in a saloon, but young Gene finally inherited the Mexican hairless, which was named Maximilian. From another source he acquired a parrot named Molly, which was fond of mulberries and, much to the consternation of a neighbor’s chickens, liked to hang upside down from the branches of a mulberry tree. Molly had been trained by a lady known locally as French Marguerite. Her habits “bewildered the virtuous and provincial hens and caused them to molt before their season.”

Young Gene went to public schools and, although one teacher termed him an “impetuous dunce,” got to the University of Colorado for a year. Between times he worked for a taxidermist, swept floors in a print shop, delivered groceries to the city’s tonier brothels. After his year at the university, he began to long for the life of a reporter. He got a job on the Denver Republican at $6 a week and dreamed of the days when he would be making $30. He drank hard liquor, played bad poker, fell briefly in love with a girl trumpeter in the Salvation Army.

Much of it was a “downhill way,” full of “asinine bravado,” concludes Gene Fowler, now 56.