Still Kicking

He joined the Marine Corps, fought in the Guadalcanal campaign, did D-Day landings on Guam, then Okinawa. "I considered myself something of a pacifist. But I'm Jewish and I wanted to get at that S.O.B. Hitler. But who the hell knew all the Marines would be sent in the opposite direction?"

He got dengue and malaria, so after the war he stayed on the West Coast and became a screenwriter. "Why the hell not?" he says. "Why not get into the picture business? There's always some kind of crazy thing going on. So I did." He was hired by Dore Schary, the studio boss at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. "He was a very bright, very decent man," Kaufman says. "And he liked Marines, so he gave me a job."

At MGM, Kaufman was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of "Take the High Ground!," a 1953 movie about a tough-as-leather drill sergeant at boot camp, starring Richard Widmark and Karl Malden. He was nominated again for the 1955 "Bad Day at Black Rock," about a town of losers who conspire to kill a Japanese American after Pearl Harbor, a movie that managed to be both subversive and moral, with a cast that included Spencer Tracy as the one-armed man and Lee Marvin as a cowboy punk.

"Most of people who talk with contempt about Hollywood never made it out here. I like the place," he says. Many screenwriters nurse grudges. Not Kaufman. "Acting?" he says. "Now that is a miserable profession. An awful life. Even the best of them, they sit around most of the year, not working, not doing anything. Brando once told me acting is not a job for a grown man. Even the successful ones. Like Bogart. Who was a drinker. Very bright. A wonderful chess player. But most of the year he had nothing to do, so he drank. He was a helluva decent man."

Kaufman is credited with writing only about a dozen screenplays in 40 years, though he guesses he rewrote a hundred more scripts written by others. Along the way, Kaufman co-created the nearsighted, well-heeled fumbler Mr. Quincy Magoo when he wrote the script for animator John Hubley's cartoon short "Ragtime Bear" in 1949. Kaufman didn't have any more credits for Magoo after that first outing, and today dismisses the pop toon with a roll of his eyes and yet another dirty word.

Deep into his 80s, Kaufman was working on a screenplay about the boxer Jack Johnson, "the Galveston Giant," the first black world heavyweight champion, 1908-1915. The project fell through. "I thought, okay, I'm finished. I don't want to do movies anymore. I would rather sit at home on my [rump] and write books."

So off he sat. "I write every day, always did," Kaufman says. "Or put it this way, I sit down to write every day, but a lot of times I just fool around. I do it seven days a week. Weekends and holidays. I used to get up at 6 in the morning and be at the studio by 9. It was absurd." (Now he rises at 10 a.m., does a mile on the treadmill, then writes.)

He doesn't use a computer. "I don't like all the electricity," he says. He has a secretary who is also a carpenter, named Ron Lindblom. "He builds sets in Vegas," Kaufman says. Instead of Wikipedia, Kaufman roots around in his 24-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the 1911 edition, "which gives it a certain exotic flavor, which I love."

His novel follows the journey of his young protagonist, Judd Breslau, a brainiac finishing up his PhD at Yale at 14, who is tossed out into the world -- a geek Huck Finn -- to travel through porn studios, horse farms, poetry workshops and think tanks to end up imprisoned in Assama, a mythical backwater in Iraq, where he is sentenced to be executed by "ganching" -- tossed from a tower onto a hedgerow of pointy bamboo spikes.

"I intend neither faint praise nor an ironic joke when I write that nonagenarian Millard Kaufman shows signs of promise," wrote the critic Akiva Gottlieb in the Jewish newspaper the Forward. "He might even be on the verge of a Real Contribution." Critic Ron Charles in The Washington Post wrote: "The weird incongruity between highbrow/lowbrow humor is only part of what makes 'Bowl of Cherries' so irresistible. Kaufman's comic imagination, his ability to mix things scatological and historical, political and philosophical, reminds one of those young'uns Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller."

Kaufman says, "I had no idea that at the age of 88 I would start writing a book about a 14-year-old. I just started and let it carry me. It writes itself. My God, I finally know what that means. I didn't know it until I wrote this novel. You write a sentence and another sentence comes along. There is an excitation about it. You write a movie, you know where it comes from. It's an idea already on paper. Or your boss tells you what to write. Writing a novel was quite different."

Before meeting for lunch, Kaufman sat at his dining room table in an open, airy house filled with sunlight. There's a big crucifix hanging on the wall. "Religious art," he explains. Outside, the gardeners are going at it with the leaf blowers around his swimming pool. He has kept the mood purposefully merry and bright, though he keeps mentioning friends, allies, combatants, actors, directors . . .

He stops and says, "It occurs to me that everybody my age is dead. They're all gone. Every morning now, after 10 seconds with the front page of the newspaper, I go to the obits. Who the hell do I know who died this time? The last one was Abby Mann," who wrote "Judgment at Nuremberg." "Who wasn't my age, either, he was 10 years younger." Before that, Melville Shavelson, who wrote "Houseboat," starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. "He got up in the middle of the night to pee, then he was dead as hell. He was the last of them."

Kaufman says the idea of not writing disturbs him. Because it would mean he was not well. The more he talks about his book, the more he finds reasons why one sentence followed the next, why, for instance, his protagonist is a kid, awaiting execution, in a country far away.

"It's a peculiar feeling," he says. "It reminds me of the war. The first death. In my outfit, we were coming into Guam and what I didn't know until we got there was the Japanese let you land and get up on the beach and that's where they hit you. We were spread out and my sergeant came to me and said, so and so is dead. It was such a shock. We were playing soldiers and suddenly you realized you weren't playing. It happened within five minutes of our landing.

"In a way the deaths of my older colleagues are like that, but it is not so unexpected. But it still comes as a shock. You're on the beach, and then you're not."