Novelist Knowles Goes Hollywood With ‘Axie Reed’

Twenty-five years ago, novelist John Knowles made literary history with a quiet, moving story about a group of boys in a New Hampshire prep school coming of age during World War II. Published when he was 33, “A Separate Peace” won Knowles the William Faulkner Foundation Award, was called by Time magazine one of the best 10 novels of the 1960s, and went on to sell 9 million copies. It was his first novel. Asked one reviewer hopefully of Knowles: “Is he the successor to Salinger for whom we have been waiting for so long?”

Looking at John Knowles’ latest and ninth novel, “The Private Life of Axie Reed” (E. P. Dutton: $15.95), one could wonder who the reviewer is talking about.

Set in Hollywood, the affluent Long Island community of Southampton and a fictional Greek island called Paxos, “The Private Life of Axie Reed” is a slick Hollywood-esque tale about a 50-year-old actress suddenly confronting her own mortality.

And not just any actress, mind you, but a “fascinating, complex, glamorous celebrity,” a “personality star on the order of Katharine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall.”

Knowles offered this giddy appraisal of his heroine during a recent interview one afternoon in his room at the Century Wilshire. A short, portly man of 59, who has lived in Southampton for 20 years, Knowles was in town for a week plugging his new novel, a job he approached with little false modesty. “I think it’s a terrific book,” he said.

But critics haven’t exactly been gushing over Knowles’ work in recent years. Although “A Separate Peace” continues to sell 500,000 copies a year, his other books have had only modest success.

“I’m not exactly the favorite person of the New York literary scene,” he noted dryly.

“We’d better not get into that,” he said. “We’d just better not get into that. I mean, I’ve had a very mixed press. My books are not obvious best sellers, are they? They’re serious literature. And when you write literature, you have to get a very good press.”

Moreover, the publishing industry is a “ terrible business,” Knowles said. “It’s a very old-fashioned, badly organized, under financed business.” And most publishers, he contends, are looking for Jackie Collins.

But don’t get the wrong impression. Knowles, an urbane, sophisticated man whose self-confidence borders on awe-inspiring, is hardly bitter. And why should he be? After all, “A Separate Peace” has been supporting him for 25 years. “Isn’t that incredible?” he asked. “And what touches me most, what pleases me most, is that people who are far removed from the world of prep schools love it.”

First Female Character

So now there is “The Private Life of Axie Reed,” a novel detailing about 50 years in the life of a renowned star of stage and screen. In what must be a classic piece of understatement, Knowles said he decided to concentrate on a female character for the first time because he wanted to try something “quite different.”

In his opinion, most of the great American male novelists who have written about women have created characters that are little more than simplistic stereotypes. Ernest Hemingway, for instance, “never wrote a successful woman character,” and Scott Fitzgerald “wrote repeatedly about his wife.” Thus for Knowles, “it was a challenge to see if I could really bring a talented celebrity woman to life convincingly or not.” He added, unprompted, “And I like to think I have succeeded.”

After all, Knowles’ female friends who read the novel told him they were fascinated by Axie Reed. “Have you seen this quote by Gloria Vanderbilt?” he asked, showing a glowing review. “And she’s a very perceptive woman, and sort of similar, a career woman from a moneyed background who’s had a full life.”

As for why he chose to write about an actress, Knowles said he has always been “fascinated by the world of movies and theater and I’ve been around them as a friend of people, sort of in the scene but not really participating. But I thought I knew a lot about the theater and the movies, and I wanted to use this setting for a different kind of novel.

“Also, everything I’ve ever written has been very firmly rooted in place. When it came to this novel, I chose eastern Long Island. That is her (Axie Reed) family’s summer home and has been throughout the 20th Century. She is in part a product of eastern Long Island, a very special land of farms, beautiful beaches and fishing. Then she marries into this very rich Greek-American family, and their roots are on an island in Greece. I also know that world very well.”

In the mid ‘60s, Knowles was in the Middle East doing a profile of King Hussein of Jordan when “lo and behold, I was invited to spend a month on a yacht sailing through the Greek Islands. Then, two summers later I spent another month sailing through the Greek Islands. And the special quality of the Greek people struck me tremendously, so I knew that sooner or later I would want to draw on that in a book.”

Cast of Characters

A well-bred Easterner, Axie Reed is not only a “brilliant actress” with a dazzling career that movie mogul Sam Goldwyn would have been hard-pressed to manufacture, but a tall, slender “glamorously beautiful woman” who inspires the unflagging adoration of every man and woman she knows. Her cousin Nick, a Russian history professor, tells her story through glazed, lovesick eyes; her ex-husband, Lambros, is a Greek-American shipping magnate; her brother-in-law, an aspiring politician; her mentor and manager, Douglas; her maid, Edna; her German shepherd, Bruno.

So how did Knowles come up with such a magnificent creature? He said he based Axie Reed on a famous actress he knows intimately. “And we’re not going to say who she is,” he said, chuckling.

“I did do some superficial research. There are all these books out now. I read Candice Bergen’s book. Let me see, I read Lauren Bacall’s book, Ingrid Bergman’s. I did have the character inside my mind, but I read those books mostly to check external things.”

For instance, how these real-life actresses got their big break in show business. “Which is so crucial,” Knowles said. “How do you get started in this field, which is almost impossible to get into?”

How indeed? The solution Knowles came up with was to cast his heroine in a “tiny, tiny off-Broadway play. And what happens is there’s a young man--it could have been a woman--who’s sitting in the audience. He’s an all-around theater and movie man, and he sees her, and a lifelong fascination begins at that moment.”

So where’s the dramatic tension in this riches-to-riches story? What problems could a woman with Axie’s career and looks--granted, she is retired, divorced, and childless--possibly have?

Auto Accident

The plot emerges after she suddenly collapses at a glamorous Southampton charity ball. At the hospital, in the intensive-care unit, perilously close to death, she ponders whether this charmed life of hers has really been all it’s cracked up to be. “Just what am I struggling for?” Knowles writes. “Career over, failed marriage, not even a lover, no children. . . . Is my future life really going to be so great?”

It is a question Knowles asked himself following a near-fatal car accident three years ago.

On the night of May 29, 1983, Knowles had dinner with friends at a Long Island restaurant, then got in his car to drive home. He’d had two drinks. “I was exhausted from all sorts of personal and professional pressures. My novel, ‘A Stolen Past,’ was about to come out, and I’d been staying up late for weeks, not getting much sleep.”

As Knowles turned onto a side road, he recalled, he swerved his car into the oncoming lane, and was struck by another car. “I fell asleep at the wheel,” he said.

Knowles was hospitalized for three weeks with, among other injuries, a fractured pelvis, a collapsed lung and severe internal bleeding. “It was very touch and go for four days whether I would live or not. And I knew that. I sort of accepted it. I thought, ‘If this is it, I’ve had a fascinating life.’ Then they must have stopped the bleeding. And I began to think there was a possibility to recover. I was determined to recover.”

Knowles decided to write a novel based on his experience because “there were things I had to communicate I thought were valuable about the will to survive or the will not to survive.”

And he clearly believes “The Private Life of Axie Reed” rivals the literary quality of “A Separate Peace.” “I think what really holds people to ‘A Separate Peace’ are the insights into human nature, how people react under tremendous stress. This book has the same kind of insights I hope and the same kind of validity.”

In a way, Knowles admitted, “A Separate Peace” has been “an albatross. Everything is compared unfavorably to it afterward.”

Such extraordinary success with a first novel “can be a stumbling block,” he said. Margaret Mitchell, for instance, “never dared publish after ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ” But Knowles wasn’t about to let the pressure that came with his own impressive debut intimidate him. Instead, he said: “I sat down and wrote a terrible second novel called ‘Morning in Antibes.’ It was really a rotten book. But then I got back on the stick and wrote ‘Peace Breaks Out.’ ”

If Knowles has his way, there will be a miniseries based on “A Separate Peace” and “Peace Breaks Out,” perhaps called “The Devon Novels” after their prep-school setting.

As for “The Private Life of Axie Reed”? “It would make a damn good movie, don’t you think?”