The Princess Bride

backed a loser. 'What does he want?' I said. 'A meeting with Mr. Jovanovich,' Charley answered....

It turned out that Kermit Shog did not just want a meeting with William Jovanovich, the brilliant man who ran the firm. He also wanted amazing amounts of money and he also wanted the unabridged The Princess Bride version printed with a huge first printing (100,000), and, of course, the idea of little me sending out the reunion scene died that day.

But the lawsuits began. Over the years, a grand total of thirteen—only eleven directly concerning me. It was horrible, but the one good thing was that the copyright on Morgenstern ran out in '78. So I told everyone who sent in for the reunion scene that their names were being put on a list and kept and once '78 rolled around, voila...but I was wrong again. Here is part of the next note I sent out to all people requesting the reunion scene.

I'm really sorry about this but you know the story that ends, 'Disregard previous wire, letter follows'? Well, you've got to disregard the business about the Morgenstern copyright running out in '78. That was a definitely a boo-boo but Mr. Shog, being Florinese, has trouble, naturally, with our numbering system. The copyright runs out in '87, not '78.

Worse, he died. Mr. Shog, I mean. (Don't ask how you could tell. It was easy. One morning he just stopped sweating, so there it was.) What makes it worse is that the whole affair is now in the hands of his kid, named—wait for it—Mandrake Shog. Mandrake moves with all the verve and speed of a lizard flaked out on a riverbank.

The only good thing that's happened in this whole mess is I finally got a shot at reading some of Buttercup's Baby. Up at Columbia, they feel it's definitely superior to The Princess Bride in satirical content. Personally, I don't have the emotional attachment to it, but it's a helluva story, no question.

It's funny, looking back, but at the time I had really zero interest in Buttercup's Baby.

Many reasons, but among them this: I was writing my own novels then. To make sense of that, I suppose I ought to tell you what I did with The Princess Bride. I know the book cover just says 'abridged by' and, yes, I jumped from 'good part' to 'good part.' But it was really a good deal more than that.

Morgenstern's The Princess Bride is a thousand-page manuscript. I got it down to three hundred. But I didn't just cut out his satiric interludes. I made elisions constantly. And there was all kinds of stuff, some of it wonderful, I got rid of. Example: Westley's terrible childhood and how he came to be the Farm Boy. Example: How the King and Queen went to Miracle Max because they knew they had somehow given birth to a monster (Humperdinck), and could Max change that? Max's failure is what led to his firing, which in turn, caused his crisis in confidence. (His wife, Valerie, refers to it when she says to Inigo: 'He is afraid he's done, that the miracles are gone from his once majestic fingers...' ([>] in this version.)

I felt all this, exciting and moving as a lot of it is, to be off the spine of the story. I went with true love and high adventure and I think I was right to do that. And I think the results have proved that. Morgenstern never had any audience for his book—except in Florin, of course. I brought it to people everywhere and, with the movie, to a wider audience still. So, sure, I abridged it.

But, I'm sorry, I shaped it. I also brought it to life. I don't know what you want to call that, but whatever I did, it's sure something.

SO BUTTERCUP'S BABY was just not for me at that time. The workload was one thing. It would have meant thousands of hours of labor. But that was nothing compared to the constant attacks by the Shogs. Lawsuit after awful lawsuit, and each time I had to defend myself, had to give depositions, which I frankly found hateful because they were all attacks on my honesty.

I had had, then, enough of Mr. Morgenstern for a while.

I didn't actually read Buttercup's Baby, either. I happened to be at Columbia University one afternoon—I gave my papers to Columbia—and some Florinese kid stopped by, handed me a rough translation to glance at. The full title of the book is this: Buttercup's Baby: S. Morgenstern's Glorious Examination of courage Matched Against the Death of the Heart. Had a great opening page, a real shocker, but that was mostly what I remember. It was just another book to me then, you see. It had not become lodged in my heart.

Yet.

***

SO WHAT CHANGED things?

To tell you the truth, and I might as well, my life the last dozen years has been, how can I put it, what's the reverse of giddy? Oh, I've written plenty of screenplays and some nonfiction, but I haven't written a novel, and please remember that that's painful for me because in my heart that's what I am, a novelist, a novelist who happens to write screenplays. (I hate it when I sometimes meet people and they say, 'Well, when's the next book coming out?' and I always make a smile and lie that I'm on the homestretch now.) And the movies I've been involved with—except for Misery—have all brought their share of disappointment.

I live alone here in New York, in a nice hotel, room service twenty-four hours, all that's great, but I feel, sometimes, that whatever I wrote once that maybe had some quality, well, maybe those days are gone.

But to balance the bad, there was always my son, Jason.

You all remember how when he was ten he was this humorless blimp, this waddler? Well that was his thin phase. Helen and I used to fight about it all the time.

He had just passed three hundred biggies when he turned fifteen. I had come home from work early, hollered my presence, was heading for the wine closet when I heard this heartbreaking sound—

—sobbing—

—coming from the kid's room. I took a breath, went to his door, knocked. Jason and I were not close at this point. The truth is, he didn't care for me all that much. He barely acknowledged my existence, pissed on the movies I wrote, never dreamed of opening any of the books. It killed me, of course, but I never let on.

'Jason?' I said from just outside his door.

The awful sobbing continued.

'What is it?'

'You can't help—no one can help—nothing can help—' And then this forlorn wahhhhhh....

I knew the last person he wanted to see was me. But I had to go in. 'I promise I won't tell anybody.'

He came rolling into my arms, his face fiery, distorted. 'Oh, Daddy, I'm ugly and I've got no friends and all the girls laugh at me and make fun because I'm so fat.'

I had to blink back tears myself—because it was all true, y'see. I was trapped there in that moment. I didn't know if he wanted to hear the truth from me or not. Finally I had to say it. 'Who cares?' I told him. 'I love you.'

He grabbed me so hard. 'Poppa,' he managed, 'Poppa,' the first blessed time he ever called me that, his hot tears fresh on my skin.

That was our turning point.

For the past twenty years, no one could have asked for a better son. More than that, Jason's the best friend I have in the world. But our real clincher happened the next day.

I took him down to the Strand Bookstore, on Broadway and 12th Street, where I go a lot, research mostly, and we were about to enter when he stopped and pointed to a photograph in the window, the front cover of a book of photographs.

'I wonder who that is?' Jason said, staring.

'He's an Austrian bodybuilder, trying to make it as an actor. I met him when I was in L.A. last. He wants to be Fezzik if The Princess Bride ever happens.' (This was the late '70s now, twenty years back. Schwarzenegger was nothing then, but when The Princess Bride did finally happen,