'Montauk to Manhattan: An American Novel' by Thomas Maier - Part I

Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series in which Dan’s Papers will publish excerpts of Thomas Maier’s new book Montauk to Manhattan: An American Novel, published on July 9 by Post Hill Press. The kickoff event for Montauk to Manhattan will be at the Montauk Library on Saturday, July 13 at 2:30 p.m.

“The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in distance, the wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps — that inbound urge and urge of waves, seeking the shores forever.” –Walt Whitman, “From Montauk Point” (Leaves of Grass, 1891–92)

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” –Donald Trump, heard on a secret videotape conversation made public in 2016

“He talked about virtue and vice as a man who is color-blind talks about red and green.” –Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel, 1880

Introduction

Montauk to Manhattan, as they say in Hollywood, is “inspired by” real-life headlines, though it is entirely fictional.

This murder mystery in the Hamptons examines many aspects of American life, including greed, fame, race, sex, #MeToo Hollywood, the rise of Trumpism, as well as the legacy of one of the most outrageous Native American scandals in US history. The protagonist, Jack Denton, is a reporter for a New York newspaper who authors a historical novel called The Life Line — about the stealing of Montauk Indian lands in the 1880s by a railroad tycoon named Austin Corbin. Denton’s vain attempt at the Great American Novel is given new life when it is adapted into a big-time television drama by a well-known streaming service and its controversial showrunner, Max Kirkland.

Back and forth, Denton travels between his Manhattan newsroom, covering the 2016 Trump campaign, and the on-location television set in Montauk, where The Life Line is being filmed and a young female “bit player” goes missing. With his personal life falling apart, Denton hopes this book-to-TV transformation might lead to some kind of redemption. Instead, he becomes a suspect in a murder.

My own interest in the Montauketts and Corbin stems from an investigative chapter that I wrote for a 1998 Newsday book about Long Island’s history. It detailed the rapacious taking of tribal lands and was later cited in legal papers filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. In a terrible miscarriage of justice, the Montauk Indian tribe was declared extinct in 1910 and has been fighting for recognition ever since.

My experience with Hollywood comes mainly from the Emmy-winning television show Masters of Sex, based on my biography of researchers Masters and Johnson, which gave me some sense of what it’s like to be on a production set. Ultimately, through the eponymous voice of reporter Denton, I combined both experiences to form Montauk to Manhattan — a veritable “play within a play,” which uses historical fiction, both from the past and today, to look at America and ask where we are headed in the future. –Thomas Maier, Long Island, New York, 2024

Chapter 1

The Voice of God

“The SS Louisiana moved across the Atlantic, a mere speck on the ocean horizon, lost in the gaping greenish maw of cresting waves. Onboard the battered ship were more than a hundred passengers, including the American tycoon Austin Corbin, returning home from London. As the schooner neared the Long Island coast, it became stuck in a sandbar. Suddenly all aboard found themselves in mortal danger.” –The Life Line by Jack Denton

The first time I heard the booming voice of Max Kirkland, the Hollywood legend, I felt transfixed by his deep baritone growling into my iPhone. Nearly every rapid-fire sentence was punctuated with profanity and showbiz grandiosity. In no time, he presented an elaborate scheme to transform my small historical novel, The Life Line, into a big-time television drama.

Writers have been warned about the tempting lure of such pitches for more than a century, ever since novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald of Great Gatsby fame was enticed to move to Tinseltown, hoping in vain to transform his literary words into gold. Kirkland must have sensed my trepidation. With a sweeping theatrical tone, as if on stage in a soliloquy, he promised to make my literary dreams come true. By the time he hung up, I had agreed to sell the rights to my book without much fuss.

Now, many months later, with our contract signed and sealed, I was getting the chance to see Kirkland personally in his natural habitat — an on-location production set along the beach in Montauk. I was instructed to sit quietly behind him and watch the master at work.

Kirkland stared out at the Atlantic Ocean from his director’s chair, a long-legged wooden throne in the sand. He sat perched on his seat like one of those red-tailed hawks hovering along the beach, eyeing its prey menacingly.

“How much longer are we going to have to wait, people?” he bellowed, loud enough to sound like the voice of God.

“Max,” as Maximilian Betancourt Kirkland was called by friend and foe alike, was indeed almighty on the set. He was a powerful combo plate of producer, writer, and director, known in television terms as a “showrunner.” Max ordered his assembled crew around the drifting sands, like an emperor crossing the dessert, while they prepared the opening scene of his new creation.

Kirkland grabbed a megaphone so he could be heard above the waves. He barked out last-minute instructions to the frantic camera people, struggling to find the right angles on the rocky shoreline before shooting commenced.

The highly paid Hollywood stars, surrounded by scores of 15-dollar-an-hour extras, waited patiently aboard an exact replica of the sunken SS Louisiana, a ship carefully restored and temporarily anchored on the waterfront.

“Can’t someone steady that shot?” Kirkland yelled again, upset by the jumpy images flickering on his sleek black video monitors. In disgust, he flung a copy of the script, aware that delays cost him money.

Many setbacks already beleaguered Kirkland’s production. The previous week, a sperm whale’s carcass washed up on shore within sight of where Max wanted to shoot. Instead of being harpooned, as in the fictional epic Moby Dick, this dead leviathan had been killed by a mammoth metal cargo ship cruising toward the port of New York.

Before clearing the beachfront, Kirkland was annoyed that he had to hire oceanographic experts to examine the whale’s crushed head and torn gray skin. They concluded for insurance purposes that his production was not at fault. Then, to avoid environmental complaints, he paid even more to a hauling firm to take away its rotting remains.

On this day, Kirkland’s petulant performance made him appear like some man-child in an outsized highchair. Only after several minutes — when he sat back in his director’s seat and surrendered his electronic bullhorn to an assistant — did Kirkland seem resigned to the slow pace of the day’s shoot.

Eventually, an idea brightened his mood. From a side pocket in his chair, Kirkland pulled out a worn copy of my novel, the inspiration for this production of the same name. With a flourish, he decided to read the book’s opening passage to the entourage around him. Most of us sat in wooden directors’ chairs like his own. Kirkland wore his open-collared white shirts low enough to show off his hairy chest. His lively green eyes and exaggerated movements dazzled all in his thrall. Dramatically, he intoned the book’s opening lines — especially “found themselves in mortal danger” — to emphasize the importance of the day’s scene.

Ever the impresario, Kirkland made it clear that this production — a limited series by this famed, Oscar-winning movie producer, his first for Comflix, a deep-pocketed television streamer — would be as faithful to my novel as his purported $100 million budget would allow.

“What do you think, Jack? Doesn’t this shipwreck scene look just as it’s described in your book?” Kirkland asked. “After all, we wouldn’t want to disappoint the famous writer Jack Denton, would we?”

The encampment of production assistants and other hangers-on — ensconced in the dunes behind Kirkland and the video monitors — tittered at his joke.

“It’s great, Max, just great,” I enthused, ignoring Kirkland’s disingenuous tease. Getting off to a good start was most important to me, aware that the fate of my book was now in his hands. I knew the “famous writer” crack was a gross exaggeration at my expense. “Lucky” was more like it.

With any good fortune, my rather high-minded but poor-selling novel would now be turned into a resounding success. Originally published by an academic press, the book received virtually no attention and anemic sales. Amazon listed The Life Line no higher than #230,000 in “Nautical Historical Fiction.” Out of desperation, I sent complimentary copies over the transom to various studios and well-known producers. Most sent back my pitch package without opening it.

Somehow, almost magically, the book came to Max’s attention, and he scooped it up. News about the next Kirkland production catapulted my book onto the “TV tie-in” bestseller list. However, the cost of doing business with him, like most Faustian bargains, emerged over time.

Already, I’d learned not to contradict Max, even about my own book. As my entertainment attorney advised, only an idiot author criticizes a producer willing to pay ten times the original literary advance for the movie and television rights.

Once I’d dreamed of writing the Great American Novel, the elusive goal of so many authors who came of age in the twentieth century, a time when the public still devoured printed works. With any luck in the twenty- first century, my literary creation — which the studio lawyers called “IP” for “intellectual property” — would become Great American Binge TV, a “special television event” entertaining a new generation of cord-cutters.

The chosen alchemist for this transformation was Kirkland, a crude but critically acclaimed filmmaker now turned mega-showrunner responsible for everything in this production. He’d prove to be more of an enigma than I ever imagined — a man very much his own creation, Hollywood-style.

Piecing together Kirkland’s background was hard to do. I found few clues about his views or what he was like personally. His official company bio said he had traveled decades ago to Los Angeles from the Midwest, portraying him heroically as a striver from humble beginnings who arrived without a plan. A few old news clippings said Max initially sold posters and artwork along Venice Beach. He struggled as a stand-up comedian before landing a job in a studio mailroom. He quickly learned La-La Land’s lingo and talked himself into a couple of important jobs. The news clips didn’t reveal much about him, only about the profits that he made.

Over the years, Variety and other trade publications celebrated Kirkland’s motion pictures. They called them “tentpole moneymakers” — action-packed thrillers based on comics — that kept a studio’s finances afloat.

Kirkland became the darling of Hollywood studios and their Wall Street investors. Eventually, he created his own boutique production company, combining Academy Award prestige with box-office popularity. Everyone wondered, including Max, if doing television now was a step down or the crowning achievement in his career.

On that warm, late spring day along the beach, Max wore gold-rimmed aviator shades, a silver-flecked Armani jacket (size extra-large) accented by a dark scarf around his neck, and leather boots with rubber soles to navigate the sand.

“If I could, I’d dress like Lawrence of Arabia,” he wisecracked when asked about his appearance on the beach.

At age fifty-seven, Max still projected himself as healthy and robust. He was living proof that men could be as vain as women, probably more so. His broad chest and arms were the byproduct of his personal trainer Gunnar — and perhaps a few testosterone supplements, too. His taut, tanned face and his plugged black scalp, weaved together like a bird’s nest, suggested implants and various touch-ups along the way. Upon closer inspection, the bloodshot veins in his eyes hinted at more going on than early morning workouts in the gym.

Max liked to flatter himself into thinking he still appealed to beautiful women other than his wife. On the set, there was little reference to Max’s marriage to a well-known former model who hosted her own popular reality show, Fashions with Tatiana Kirkland. Instead, Max tried to ingratiate himself with virtually every young actress on the set, whether invited or not, sometimes with apparent success.

“Come here, my darling, let me look at you,” he commanded as Kiara Manchester, the production’s female lead, walked by briskly to avoid his gaze. The acclaimed actress was headed to her position on the shipwreck, as the script called for, but she first stopped patiently for Max to gaze and take in her beauty.

In The Life Line, Manchester played Elizabeth Gardiner, wife of the 1880s East Hampton Town Attorney Edmund Gardiner. More significantly, she was the secret lover of railroad tycoon Austin Corbin and had travelled with him to London. On the set, the costume designer made sure Manchester’s cotton chemise was faithful enough to the book’s nineteenth-century character but thin enough to please Max and his sense of what today’s American audience desired.

“Isn’t she marvelous in this outfit, everyone?” Kirkland inquired about Manchester to the production crew, now complicit in his lust. The female assistant director looked away as if she didn’t hear anything.

For many years, before the #MeToo Movement, such sexually charged comments in the entertainment industry were kept secret from the public. Men like Kirkland felt free to say and do what they wanted without consequence. Max had no idea he was standing on the precipice of change.

“When you’re the showrunner, you’re the king,” he later explained. “You have to bend people to your will to get things done.”

Manchester tried to hide her uneasiness. As a young British actress with expressive eyes, silky hair, and a proper posh accent, she possessed all the tools of a gifted performer headed for stardom. She recently appeared as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Young Vic and was a much-touted graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Manchester had heard tales of Kirkland’s lasciviousness, including from her parents, both supporting actors from various television dramas in the 1990s. She assured them she could handle anything.

Nevertheless, Manchester seemed surprised when Max gave her a kiss — not a peck on the cheek or a glancing smooch that misses; it was an insistent smack on the lips that appeared awkward to everyone but Max. He acted as if it was another perk of being in charge.

“Americans will love you when they see you in their living rooms or bedrooms — wherever they watch TV — I’m certain of it,” Kirkland declared.

Manchester wasn’t amused. She allowed a polite smile before quickly leaving the director’s circle and getting on with her assignment. Other lesser-known actresses in the show learned to laugh nervously among themselves about Max’s toothy, unpleasant kisses, as if they were werewolf’s marks, and his lingering hugs that lasted too long.

There was more to these forced encounters with the famous director than I knew, certainly more victimization than I realized at that time. The sheer magnitude of this production, however, diverted my attention. Without much thought, I watched Manchester climb into a helicopter and be whisked a few hundred yards away to the floating shipwreck scene in the ocean.

When he wasn’t shouting or leering on the set, Kirkland was a nonstop talker, “a kibitzer,” as he called himself, a key ingredient to his industry success. Max acted as if everyone was his friend, an overture that I initially accepted without question.

During one lengthy delay in filming the first scene, Kirkland motioned me aside. Once more, he reiterated his reasons for taking on this showcase project.

“It’s a shame what the white man did to the Indians … er, you know, the Native Americans … we stole their lands, raped their women,” he began as earnestly as possible. He used the same politically correct language the studio’s press office advised for his interview with The Hollywood Reporter, when the production was “greenlit” months earlier.

“The studio wanted me to do another superhero franchise. Told them no. I wanted this story — to show what this country did to the Native Americans,” he explained. “The time is right for a classic story of what really happened. Think of all those cowboy-and-Indian films on the TV when we were growing up as kids. What crazy shit was that, huh?”

I nodded solemnly. During our telephone negotiations for the rights, Max used the same pitch. Over time, if he kept talking, Kirkland had a way of blurting out his real feelings, a bit raw and unguarded. As his aides wandered away, Kirkland’s voice lowered, so that only I could hear his confession.

“Of course, look at these Indians today — each tribe like their own separate nation. Casinos. Tax-free cigarettes. That freaking giant billboard on Montauk Highway with the flashing lights — I could see it from my helicopter flying in from the city!”

We both laughed at his litany of grievances. At moments like this, Kirkland seemed more like a funny uncle or the savant of a barbershop than the cinematic auteur who had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Eventually Kirkland simmered, an old Hollywood liberal afraid of sounding like a closet reactionary. He gazed at my expressionless face, wondering what I might be thinking.

“But let’s face it, Jack,” he continued. “There’s no doubt that the Montauk Indians had their lands stolen by this guy Austin Corbin — a goddamned thief if there ever was one. I guess every age has its hustlers. He sort of reminds you of Trump, doesn’t he?”

I resisted the urge to comment. Kirkland knew that I was now covering Trump’s 2016 campaign for The New York World, which hired me after the success of my novel and years of reporting for a local publication. The studio’s contract called for me to be a consulting producer/writer, but I still drew a steady paycheck from my newspaper that paid my mounting bills at home.

Politics was my beat. I was part of The New York World’s team coverage when Donald Trump, the former casino owner, came down his skyscraper escalator to announce his presidential candidacy. No one took him seriously. Trump’s demagogic skills were on full display that day. His vulgar incitements should have been taken as a warning rather than a publicity stunt.

The news desk instructed me to get reactions from New York Republicans, a vanishing breed of Nelson Rockefeller leftovers, William Buckley acolytes, and moderates derided as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Neither they nor I realized how consequential Trump’s announcement would be.

A few moments later, Max quizzed me about Trump. Though younger reporters freely expressed themselves on Twitter, just like Trump himself, I felt an old-fashioned journalistic commandment not to voice my opinions. Certainly not reveal anything to a big mouth like Kirkland, no matter how much he was paying me.

A decade earlier, Kirkland and his wife Tatiana had attended Trump’s Mar-a-Lago wedding, sitting with well-known British fashion editor Diana Trumbull and the Clintons. The former First Couple clearly had no idea back then that Trump might become a fearsome warrior in their chosen arena of presidential politics. Diana, as the Kirklands called her, was known for her pageboy hairdo, her skeletal figure, and her outsized power as the last word in the world’s multibillion-dollar fashion industry. Her much older husband was a legendary book editor with an eye for the young women in his employ. They all traveled to Trump’s Florida Shangri-La as guests of The Donald.

Now, Max was beginning to sense that being friends with Trump might be out of favor with the smart set on both coasts. Kirkland wanted to test that theory on me. When I didn’t take his bait, he acted dismissive.

“OK, Jack, so you’re not going to tell me what you really think, like a good little reporter for the great national paper,” Kirkland condemned in a jocular tone. “But tell me something — do you think Trump can win?”

Kirkland stared impatiently until I finally nodded my head.

“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s doubtful, but he may have more of a chance than we realize.”

Max smiled, as if given a tip about a racehorse, and then shared a hoary truism he learned long ago about America: “Sometimes you don’t have to be good,” he said. “Just lucky.”