Stuart Leuthner by Clive Cussler
Selecting the name at the top of his list, Clive sent his first query to Peter Lampack at the prestigious William Morris Agency in New York:
Dear Peter: As you know, I primarily handle motion picture and television screenplays. However, I’ve run across a pair of book-length manuscripts which I think have a great deal of potential. I would pursue them, but I am retiring soon. Would you like to take a look? Charlie Winthrop.
A week after he mailed the letter, Clive’s father, who had been alerted to the ruse, called and told him a letter had arrived addressed to Charlie Winthrop. After setting what was probably a record for the twenty-mile drive to Laguna Hills, Clive tore open the letter:
Dear Charlie: On your say-so, I’ll take a look at the manuscripts. Send them to my office. Sincerely, Peter Lampack.
After mailing the agent copies of The Sea Dweller and Catch A Teaser By The Fin, Clive tried to concentrate on a campaign introducing a new El Toro lawnmower. Several weeks later, another letter resulted in another mad dash to Laguna Hills:
Dear Charlie: Read the manuscripts. The first one is only fair, but the second one looks good. Where can I sign Cussler to a contract? Sincerely, Peter.
Clive read the letter a second time, and then a third. “I was dumbfounded,” he recalls. “Could finding an agent possibly be that easy?” Clive dispatched his address to Lampack. The agent responded, introducing himself and including a contract Clive signed and sent back. The remaining Charles Winthrop Agency envelopes ended up in the trash, and Clive wrote his next novel on the back of the stationery.
Lampack is often asked why he was willing to take Clive on as a client. “Not only was I intrigued by the idea of an ongoing adventures series, I found Dirk Pitt to be an attractive and compelling protagonist. Clive is a natural storyteller, an extremely important attribute if he hoped to maintain the reader’s interest throughout a series. I was pretty sure I could find a publisher for Catch a Teaser by the Fin, but I was not impressed with The Sea Dweller. The science fiction elements not only interfered with the adventure genre, it was also his first attempt and I did not think it was as accomplished as his second manuscript.”
With a legitimate New York agent in his corner, Clive began to believe he might be able to pull off what had seemed a fading dream a few months earlier. “When Peter took me on as a client,” Clive says, “it was the inspiration for me to believe someday I might actually be able to make a living writing novels, It was also time to get out of Los Angeles.”
In May of 1970, Clive, arriving home from work, walked into the kitchen and announced, “The time is right. We should leave.” Barbara, busy preparing dinner, dried her hands on a towel and smiled, “Fine, let’s go.”
Disenchanted with Southern California’s urban sprawl, clogged freeways, and smog, Clive and Barbara had been considering a move to another part of the country for some time. In short order, Clive sold the house and boat, put the furniture in storage, and bought a new Mercury Monterey station wagon, fitted with a hitch to pull a tent trailer. The couple had absolutely no idea where they would end up. Clive’s utopian vision saw his family settled in a picturesque resort town. Barbara would work in a crafts store, and he would drive a school bus. His part-time duties would provide him with the time to write Dirk Pitt adventures.
“I figured,” Clive says, “wherever we landed, it would be almost impossible to starve in the United States.”
The Cusslers hit the road in early June. Driving up the coast, they arrived in Coos Bay, Oregon. Delighted with the area’s stunning natural beauty, Clive deposited his family in a campground and drove to the state employment office. The fellow behind the desk was a volunteer who worked at the local television station. After looking over Clive’s resume, he almost begged him to apply for a job at the station. Clive was tempted. “Coos Bay is a beautiful place, and the job sounded interesting. But we were only two weeks into our trip, and I wanted to see more of what the country had to offer. I thanked him, and we headed east.”
Teri Cussler looks back on the odyssey as a wonderful adventure. “Even though my sister, brother, and I had a lot of fights in the back seat, we have always considered that summer to be the best three months we ever spent together. We camped out a lot, but every three or four days we would stay in a motel. Dad was always great about finding one with a pool. He also stopped at a lot of historic sites because Dad has always liked that kind of thing. It got a little old after a while because a young girl couldn’t care less about battlefields.”
Dirk describes the trip as, “Probably the closest our family has ever been. I was nine, an age when a trip across America was a major event. There were so many great things to see along the way, but it seemed like it took us forever to get there.”
Dayna, only six, thought they were on, “a very long vacation. I don’t think I had any realization we were leaving our house in California forever and moving to someplace new.”
One stop Clive had included on their itinerary was Aspen, Colorado. “From everything I read, I had created this fantasy that Aspen was a Rocky Mountain Shangri-La. It ended up being a terrible letdown. The entire town was overrun with hippies and dogs.” Leaving Aspen’s bohemians and canines behind, the Cusslers drove to Denver. Unimpressed with the “Mile High City,” Clive and Barbra decided it was time to return to Coos Bay.
Stopping at a camp site in Boulder, Clive struck up a conversation with a fellow traveler parked next to them. He suggested Clive would regret it if he failed to drive through Rocky Mountain National Park on their way west. The park’s gateway is the picturesque town of Estes Park, nestled against a backdrop of snowcapped peaks. Among the towns attractions were herds of elk, charming Victorian homes, and the stately Stanley Hotel, where Stephen King penned part of The Shining.
As they rolled into town, Clive and Barbara realized Estes Park was exactly what they were looking for. After Clive parked the car and trailer on Elkhorn Avenue, Barbara and the kids set out to explore the town’s shops and galleries. Clive bought a copy of the local newspaper, the Trail (now the Trail Gazette). A listing under “Houses for Rent” caught his eye: “Pretty Swiss chalet, well maintained with marvelous views, $200 a month.” Clive hurried to a phone booth, and a half hour later, the owner met him at the property.
“It was exactly like the ad described,” Clive remembers, “A pretty place out in the woods, with a great view of Longs Peak. We signed a lease for a year.”
During their first year in Estes Park, the children were enrolled in school, Barbara was hired as a secretary at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Clive finished his third book, Hermit Landing (later published as Iceberg). A missing yacht - its crew incinerated at their posts - is found inside an iceberg. Sinister industrialists, planning to take over South America try to stop Dirk Pitt from discovering the yacht’s connection to their nefarious conspiracy. The book’s supercharged climax has Pitt foiling the attempted assassination of the presidents of French Guiana and the Dominican Republic at Disneyland.
Hermit Landing introduced Clive’s now familiar use of multiple, interlaced plots. “My first two books,” Clive explains, “were basic potboilers, what I call formula A - the reader walks beside the protagonist from chapter one to the last page. In Hermit Landing, I began to use Formula B. Convoluted plots and subplots are going on that not even Pitt and Giordino are always aware of.”
Clive also moved the action into the future, something he came up with while researching the James Bond books. “The gadgets Bond had at his disposal,” Clive says, “were usually dated five years after the books were published. By placing Dirk Pitt in the future, it allows me to introduce technology scientists and engineers predict will be available in ten or twenty years from now.”
Although Clive was pleased with Hermit Landing, Barbara’s salary was insufficient to cover the bills; the family’s savings were dwindling. It was once again time for him to look for a day job. Since consolidating their commute would cut expenses, Clive began his job
Walking in the door, he stuck out his hand and announced to the young man sitting behind a desk, “Hi, I’m Clive Cussler your new partner.”
Once Barry Cossette concluded the tall, brash visitor was not dangerous, demented or worse, a salesman, he offered him a chair. Clive gave him a quick summary of his experience and Cossette decided this might be the best thing that had walked in his front door since he opened the agency. The two men shook hands and agreed to join forces.
Their first order of business was to pitch new accounts. In addition to a Dodge dealership, they picked up Deep Rock Water, a bottled water company dating back to 1896. When the city of Denver refused to run city water to druggist Stephen Kostich’s property, he drilled his own well and began to bottle and sell the crystal clear water that flowed from the aquifer. The company was purchased by Merrill and Dorie Fie in 1967, and a few years later, Deep Rock Water was supplying drinking and distilled water to the entire state of Colorado.
The market for bottled water in the early 1970s was a far cry from what it is today. Deep Rock’s customers, with few exceptions, were commercial accounts and advertising was limited to radio spots during the spring and summer months. Clive created “Drinkworthy,” a character who resided in Deep Rock’s well and praised the water’s attributes with an enigmatic Maine accent. Although it was never clear if Drinkworthy’s girlfriend, Ida Mae, lived in the well with him, she provided a sarcastic foil to his good-natured sales pitch. Both character’s voices were provided by “Little Johnny” Harding, a local radio personality.
Although Clive was working with tight budgets, he added occasional cameo appearances by character actors whose voices would be instantly recognized by the public - Andy Devine, Dennis Day, and Harry Morgan helped Drinkworthy sell Deep Rock Water. In addition to western themes aimed at the local audience, Clive’s commercials featured story lines inspired by current topics. In one spot, Drinkworthy uses Deep Rock water to cure a young girl during an exorcism. In another, Ida Mae threatens to burn her bra because Drinkworthy is paying more attention to his precious water than to her.
Merrill Fie remembers Clive as “a very colorful character who helped us sell a lot of water. You never knew what he was going to come up with, but it always worked.” Dorie Fie concurs - “Although it has been a lot of years since the Drinkworthy spots were on the radio, our friends still tell us they were some of the most unforgettable advertising done in Denver.”
Clive and Barry Cossette’s relationship was amicable and the agency was profitable, but Cossette, inspired by Clive’s tales of Los Angeles advertising, picked up and moved west in late 1970. Although Clive inherited the agency’s accounts, without somebody to share the load, he decided it was time to look for a steady paycheck.
In the Denver Post’s classifieds, he discovered three downtown Denver agencies were seeking a copywriter. After setting up appointments with all three, Clive dusted off his portfolio and resume, put on his best suit, and drove to Denver, confident he would be working by the end of the week. At his first interview, the agency’s owner began their conversation by telling Clive he was extremely overqualified. Clive countered, telling him he was getting a good deal. Dismissing Clive’s argument with a wave of his hand, he ended the interview, adding, “The last thing we need is a hotshot from the West Coast coming in here and telling us we’re doing everything wrong.”
Assuming he had simply run into a small-minded yokel with a cow-town mentality, Clive was still upbeat when he arrived for his second interview. “It was like listening to a tape recording of the first guy,” he says. “After telling me I was overqualified, he - this is a true story - told me, ‘We don’t need hotshot from the West Coast coming in here telling us how it’s done.’” Walking out of the office, Clive was tempted to drive to the city limits and check to make sure the sign read, “Welcome to Denver,” and not “Pumpkin Corners.”
It was now Friday. Clive’s third interview was scheduled for the coming Monday. He used the weekend to prepare a signature Cussler gambit.
Wadding up his oldest suit, he tossed it in a corner. Next, he eradicated the word “creative director” and any mention of awards from his resume and portfolio. The reels of his television commercials were deposited in a drawer. As an added touch, he skipped shaving for two days.
At the appointed time, Clive, looking like a lanky version of Willy Loman, was sitting in the reception area of Hull/Mefford Advertising. Looking around, he noticed the furniture had seen better days; the walls were past due for a paint job, and the solitary framed award was four years old. He was ushered into Jack Hull’s office, and after some small talk, with as much humility as he could muster, Clive explained he was very happy to be in Denver, far away from those know-it-all hotshots in California who made his life miserable. Hull ended up offering him the job for $10,000 a year. Clive talked him up to $12,000.
Reporting for work the next morning, Clive was shown to his office. “It was an alcove,” he says, “next to the restrooms. I was given a beat-up desk and an ancient Royal typewriter. There wasn’t even a phone, and everybody had to practically crawl over me to go to the john.” Clive’s assignments included writing copy for a trucking company, a real estate firm, and an insurance agency. “I had to come up with this saccharine prose,” he says, “congratulating gangs of grinning agents for selling a million dollars’ worth of homes or life insurance.”
On the job, Clive went out of his way to cultivate the image of a quiet, dedicated family man. If his co-workers noticed him at all, they were impressed by his work ethic. From the minute he walked into the office until quitting time, Clive pounded away at his typewriter. They had no way of knowing Clive could usually finish his assignments before noon, spending the rest of the day working on the next Pitt adventure.
In January 1971, Clive purchased a new house on West 72nd Street in Indian Tree Village - a development located in Arvada, a bedroom community ten miles northwest of Denver. “When my father got done with the house,” Teri says, “it was really something.” Dad built a sundeck in the back yard, installed overhead track lighting and a freestanding fireplace in the family room, and paneled the bathroom so it looked like a railroad caboose.”
The house backed up to a municipal golf course, a feature the Cussler children considered “our big backyard.” When no golfers were in sight, Dayna would go out and look for golf balls, selling them to the same duffers who originally lost them. Dirk and several of his friends found a golf cart stuck in a sand trap and spent the rest of the night driving around the fairways until the battery went dead. “I heard my father’s stories about growing up in California,” Dirk says. “He thought the forts and tree houses we built were fine, but we also cobbled together a boat. It wasn’t very seaworthy, and when Clive found out I had been out on the golf course lake, he flipped out.”
Juggling the demands of his family and job, Clive managed to put aside as many hours as he could spare to write. One of his cohorts at Hull/Mefford remembers Clive giving him a tour of his home office. “We went down the stairs to his unfinished basement and had to duck under the damp clothes hanging on the line. Tucked back in a corner, next to the cement brick wall, were two sawhorses with a door across them and this old manual typewriter. After he made it big, we always laughed about Clive’s classy office in his basement.”
In the spring of 1971, Hull/Mefford was in big trouble. Empire Savings Bank, the agency’s most important client, was unhappy with the shop’s lackluster television commercials. The bank’s president put it on the line - if Hull/Mefford did not come up with something better by the end of the week, he would look for a new agency.
Pandemonium reigned. Burning the midnight oil only resulted in a series of uninspired storyboards quickly shot down by the client. By Wednesday afternoon, the situation was on the verge of
Clive was called into Jack Hull’s office and given a quick briefing. Could he come up with something by Friday? “I flashed my best Machiavellian smile,” Clive remembers, “and said I would give it some thought. Jack didn’t know I had been listening to what was going on and already had a campaign laid out in my head.”
Early Friday morning, everybody involved with the account was assembled in the conference room. When it was his turn, Clive began his pitch by explaining all savings and loans were basically the same. By law, they had to pay the same interest, offer the same premiums, mortgages, etc. What convinces a customer to choose one bank over another? Service! Empire Savings had to be promoted as a friendly place to do business. Managers and tellers should know their customers’ names and treat them like friends - not an account number. The answer, Clive repeated for emphasis, was service.
Clive unveiled his storyboard. The hand-drawn frames followed a bad-tempered old lady who is avoided like the plague. When she arrives at Empire Savings Bank, the teller’s friendly demeanor wins her over, and she leaves smiling. Empire’s president loved the idea and Clive was no longer the quiet guy sitting next to the john.
After he had been working on the “mean lady commercial” for a few days, Clive was discussing the project with Barbara over dinner. “If only Margaret Hamilton was alive,” he lamented. “She would be perfect for the spot.” Barbara informed him Hamilton was definitely alive, having recently appeared in The Anderson Tapes. (Hamilton is best known for her role as the evil, cackling Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.)