True to True Grit

New York Times Magazine has an interesting piece on Charles Portis, the author of True Grit.

From the story...

Portis says he’ll see the new movie, but he won’t have anything to do with publicizing it, and he has never taken any part in adapting his novels for the screen. He’s not trying to affect a reclusive literary persona, nor does he resent the popularity of film adaptations. Rather, he seems to have the old-fashioned notion that he said what he had to say on the page.

In November, I met him in a bar beside the Arkansas River in Little Rock. Portis, a hardy-looking fellow of 76, wearing jeans and a tan Members Only jacket, seemed ill at ease — not his normal state, especially in a saloon. A veteran of the Korean War and the newspaper trade in Arkansas, New York and London, he has long enjoyed a reputation in newsrooms and barrooms as a world-class raconteur and collector of characters, and he was described by Tom Wolfe (who worked with him at The New York Herald-Tribune in the 1960s) as “the original laconic cutup,” but this time he appeared to be torn between the wish to be present and the wish to be elsewhere. It occurred to me that he did not want to turn into one of his own characters, making himself ridiculous by trying to perform the role of Big-Deal Southern Littérateur.

Portis kept his eyes on the river or the college football game on TV as he told stories about visiting the set of the first film adaptation of “True Grit.” He marveled at the way that Wayne and Robert Duvall blew up and stormed off, only to return a few hours later as if nothing had happened. But actors are like that, he supposed; always making scenes.

The movie: