This interview was released on the day of the 25th anniversary of the movie Forrest Gump.
Forrest Gump author Winston Groom chats with Paul Leslie about bringing one of the most iconic characters in literature and film to life. From his beautiful home in Point Clear, Alabama, the writer also reminisces about his childhood, life in New York, spending time with Kurt Vonnegut – and his feelings about the movie Forrest Gump.
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Paul Leslie: Hey, it’s me. We’re joined by a man who has not lived a humdrum life. Winston Groom is the author of more than 20 books, everything from novels to history.
His book, Forrest Gump, brought into the public consciousness one of America’s most beloved characters. It was made into a major motion picture that launched on July 6, 1994.
Winston Groom’s most recent novel, El Paso, was published in 2016, and his non-fiction work, The Allies: Roosevelt Churchill and Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II, was published in 2018.
The creator of Forrest Gump on growing up – and returning – to Alabama
Winston Groom, thank you very much for joining us.
Winston Groom: Well, thank you for being here.
Paul Leslie: It’s a great honor to be in your home. Thank you. I’m hoping you can tell us a little bit about this area that we’re in, the Gulf Coast region of Alabama.
Winston Groom: Well, there’s not much of it. I think there may be 50 miles. And the Gulf Coast itself, I knew when I was growing up that there were three different places people went. They went to Dog River, they went over here to Point Clear, and they went down to the Gulf. There were Gulf people, river people, and bay people, and I was kind of in between all of them in a way.
But I used to know all the houses down at the Gulf, and they would build those homes down there. They’d take eight telephone poles and drive them into the ground, put plywood over them, build up a big sleeping porch in the living area in the kitchen, and that’d be it. It cost them about $2,500. Because when the storms came, it blew them away, which it would. You know, you didn’t lose much. Nobody insured them.
But then they started building these multi-million-dollar homes down there, and that caused problems. Then the developers came, and now you can’t even see the ocean anymore. The gulf is just these big towers, and I guess they don’t get blown down by storms, but I used to know everybody’s house down there.
Now there are tens of thousands of people who are there, and they do their thing, whatever it is, and I don’t go there. It’s kind of spooky to go to a place where you could drive along the ocean and see everything, but now you can’t see anything but these buildings. And that has happened in a lot of places along the sea.
One of the few places it hasn’t happened is Suffolk County, New York. They outlawed that. You can’t have that. I suppose it’s called the Hamptons. I used to live there. And that was one good thing about it. They said you can’t build these big skyscrapers along the water, so they built everywhere else.
Paul Leslie: You just mentioned that you lived in the Hamptons. What is it about this part of the country, the coastal Alabama region, that you like so much?
Winston Groom: Friends.
Paul Leslie: Friends?
Winston Groom: Yeah, I mean I can live anywhere in the world I want and I looked around all over the world from New Zealand to South Africa to China to everywhere and I said, you know I want to be with my friends.
I grew up here and it’s hot in the summers but it’s very pleasant in the winter time and the springtime and in autumn. We do get cold days, but I like that too. I like to have seasons, but it’s your old friends that I think are important.
I had a lot of friends in the Hamptons, but unfortunately, they all died. They were my neighbors, I was friends with some of the best writers, Kurt Vonnegut and Truman Capote, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Joe Heller. They were the best writers in America and the most fun people that you could ever be around.
But they were a generation older than I am and they all passed away and I lived in the city too in Manhattan. But that was the same thing. Everybody who I knew either left the city or they passed on.
Paul Leslie: Yeah.
Winston Groom: “This is where I probably belong.”
Winston Groom: And I thought at some point I was coming home to see my own father who was of that generation. And I’d come home in the winters because it got pretty brutal up there, no matter where you were living. The Hamptons was awful in the winters because nobody was there. In the city itself, it wasn’t that much fun. It was cold and it snowed.
And I was coming home to see Dad for two weeks and then it’d be a month. And then it would be two or three months. I finally thought, you know, what am I doing? I think this is where I probably belong.
The society down here is fairly closed. It’s like a lot of these old waterfront cities, they’re much older than the interior of the state, like Mobile, New Orleans, Richmond, Savannah, Charleston. They were there before anything.
The middle of the state was run by the Indians. And you make friendships that are very lasting, and good to cherish. So I came back. I wound up having a daughter and she’s happily up at the university and I don’t regret a moment of it.
Paul Leslie: Who would you say are the authors that have made the biggest influence on you?
Winston Groom: Oh Lord, well you want to start with Shakespeare or would you rather go some more current?
You know, the good thing about being where I was during that period, which was back in the mid-70s to the mid-80s, was knowing probably the best writers that this country had seen in a generation. And I knew them minimally. I mean, everybody had parties.
“Writers don’t talk about writing – not that I know of.”
George Plimpton would always have big parties. Heller and I could go on naming people who were too famous even to drop names on. But they were friends and nobody talked about writing. Nobody said, “Oh, let me tell you what you ought to do.” They were your friends and you talked about whatever you wanted to talk about.
I could go on about some funny stories about it, but I’m not sure your radio audience would appreciate them, but writers don’t talk about writing – not that I know of.
I remember there was a young man who came to a Lane’s restaurant, which was sort of the writer’s hangout back in the ’70s and ’80s and even later, and he was sent from the Kansas City Star. He was a reporter. Somebody at his paper had read about this famous restaurant called Lane’s, which is sort of my watering hole. There was a table that she kept there. She called it the family table. It was full of divorces but people came to the town and that was the family table. She keeps you near everybody there. And this young man came to do a story.
He’s supposed to get his deadline – it was like 11 o’clock that night – with the Kansas City Star and he came in at five o’clock in the afternoon thinking that’s when people were gonna have their dinners in New York which was ridiculous. That’s when they eat in Kansas City. They don’t eat dinner at five o’clock in New York.
And I don’t know what she did behind the bar, but she liked this guy and she told him, “Look, at about 8:30 or so people start coming in.”
She said, “Now, the rules are no pictures, no going up and talking to people, no doing all this stuff. You just sit there and somebody will come to the family table. Bruce J. Freeman will be there, or Norman Mailer will be there, or somebody will come in.”
And so he waited and he waited. I was there that night with William Styron, who was a very famous novelist, he’d just published Sophie’s Choice, and we were having dinner with him and his wife and so on. And it was a star-studded night, and this poor guy was there, I remember Barbra Streisand came in, and Woody Allen was there – he was always there – and Lionel Neal was there, the actors, and he was about to jump out of his skin because he couldn’t go up and talk to people.
So Elaine would go there every once in a while. Nobody came to the latest table, to the orphan’s table, whatever you’d call it, family table. And she would tell him, “Look, somebody, they’ll be here, don’t worry about it.”
And it got closer and closer to the deadline, and nobody came in, and I didn’t know anything about this. I didn’t know who that guy was there. Elaine told me this story later, but about 20 minutes to 11, she went over and sat down with him. She was the old heavy-set lady Elaine was. Weighed three – four hundred pounds. She sat down.
“How is he doing?”
Well, she said, “I don’t know what to do. I’ve got 20 minutes to my deadline and I haven’t talked to them. I see all these famous people, but I can’t talk to them.” He said, “Can you just tell me what they talk about to writers?”
Between them, I see Gaye Talise sitting over there, A. E. Hochner, and I say, “What do they talk about? How do they talk about baseball, money, and sex?” That’s the only thing they talk about. They don’t talk about writing. I don’t know. I didn’t see the story that was published if there was one in the Kansas City Star, but that was a story and Elaine didn’t use the word “sex” either, but I won’t repeat that on the radio, what she said.
But that’s probably very true. Every once in a while, I’ve talked to writers about technical devices. Willie Morris was very good. Willie was the editor of Harper’s Magazine, probably the best line editor of generations. And every once in a while, I would ask him just to look at something I did because I had been a newspaper reporter for 10 years. But switching from that to being a novelist is a big switch.
“Even today, I welcome editorial help.”
And I just wanted to know, “Am I doing anything wrong here?” And he’d look at it and he’d say, “Well, you know, show me this.” He’d do a line editing job that was just magnificent. And I would learn from it. I could learn more from two pages of his line editing than I could learn from four years of college, and from somebody trying to teach me how to write, because he would show you, this is what you do, this is how to condense and don’t be verbose.
Jim Jones was probably the best war writer, he wrote From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, and I dedicated my first book to him. I loved Jim. He was a great guy. He passed away before my first book came out, but he helped me a bit with some technical things about writing.
Like I said, Jim, I got all this dialogue here. I don’t think it belongs here. And he said, “Well, let me look at it.” And he did. And he said, “You know, what you do is you can have one of these characters thinking,” he said, “what I did, not just thinking what the other character is thinking about him, but having him thinking about what the other character might be thinking about him.”
And there are so many ways, they’re just devices. You get older, more experienced. Now they come to be second nature, but when you just start out in fiction, they are important things to learn. And so I had some help that way, but not a lot of it.
I was lucky to be living with a fellow writer, and I always thought he’d grown up in France and in Switzerland, and I thought his father must have been in the Foreign Service. Apparently, his father was Irwin Shaw, who wrote The Young Lions and Rich Man, Poor Man, and so on.
Adam Shaw became one of my closest friends, so we would read each other’s stuff and make critical analysis of it, and that helped some. And then you had some editors who were either good or bad, I’ve had both, but somehow you muddled through it and you get to where you can do it yourself.
Even today, I welcome editorial help. I don’t need it as much as I might have years ago, but El Paso, part of that, was a mess. And I personally hired a guy, I paid him a lot of money. I said, “Don’t unravel this thing.” Because I’m getting to where I can’t, I’ve been working on it for so long I can’t see the forest from the trees. He was able to do it. He’d been an editor at Random House previously. Every once in a while, you’ll have a young editor who has an insight to look at something and say, “Okay, this is where this ought to be. “ This happened with this fella, he was a good editor.
Kurt Vonnegut was “a lot of fun”
Paul Leslie: One of the authors that you mentioned was Kurt Vonnegut.
Winston Groom: Yep.
Paul Leslie: Can you tell us a little bit about him?
Winston Groom: Of course, good guy. He was a lot of fun. I remember one time he had a pool party. Nobody was in the pool, but he had a party outside by his place there in Bridgehampton with a big swimming pool.
They had a hedge right behind it, a 20-foot private hedge. Behind the hedge, there was a field. And these people would get these model airplanes, and the flight of the airplane only would crank them up, and it would make more racket than the lawnmower. They’d fly these damn radio -controlled things. He was just infuriated by it.
I was sitting there with him and Plimpton, and I forget who else—and he could hear this stuff going on behind the hedge, and he said, “You know what I’m going to do?” He said, “I’m going to get a submarine, put it down at the bottom of the pool.” “They’re going to get a radio control thing, and it’ll come up to the top of the pool, and the openings would happen, and big missiles will come out of the submarine and they’ll fly over the hedge. And I’ll hit those damn planes and kill every one of them
So he worked on that for I guess a year or two. I don’t think anything came of it, but it was an interesting moment in time.
Kurt was a nice man.
Paul Leslie; You were mentioning your years as a journalist. I’m hoping you can tell us about how your journalism helped you when it came to writing books.
Winston Groom: It didn’t hurt me.
It’s just a different thing than fiction in the sense that as a journalist we were taught you don’t fix things up, you don’t clean up quotes, you don’t. And so I found myself in Washington D.C. trying to write fiction in an enormously political town, and every time I would write, make up dialogue, which I did, in my first book, I’d cringe. I’d say, “Yeah, I can’t do that.”
Finally, I got the hell out of there. My friend Adam Shaw, who I just mentioned, he had left The Washington Post, but Bob Woodward had been my opposite there, and he went to do his Watergate thing. So they sent Adam down there to take his place into the federal court system. I didn’t know where Woodward had gone or why. I didn’t really care, although they started getting on my case when he started publishing all those stories. And because him and Bernstein—and we had fired Bernstein years before. I thought they were hype artists, but whatever it was, Shaw and I didn’t get along very well with the Washington Post people. They didn’t get along with me or anybody else. They were very secretive and suspicious.
Anyway, Adam came down there, so we got to be friends and he said, “Where can we get something to eat?” I said, “Well, the cafeteria downstairs in the basement at the federal government.” He said, “No, I’m talking about good food.” I said, “Oh, we’re talking about that?” Well, I said, “Go to Garfinkels, they got a big department store there, and they had a tea room at Garfinkels, which is about a block away. You can get a good meal there and you get a martini.
So we sat there and we had a good meal and good martinis. And we figured out together that if we weren’t in the court, who the hell was gonna know what was going on? We could stay as long as we want. And we did and we got to be friends. He played tennis at Penn, and I played at Alabama, and so we got to be tennis friends and this, that, and the other, and it took me probably four or five months, I forget who his daddy was. But he moved up.
He left The Post to write a book, and he called me up, and he said, “You need to come out here to the Hamptons.” I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Well, it’s a great place.” His father had rented a home there, where I think Tom Hanks now has a place. And in those days, it was two houses that were together, but they were separate.
“I just thought, why don’t I get the hell out of there? And I did.”
The one that was kind of fancy, and the one we had was not quite fancy, but it was the same property. I went out there for a weekend, and I thought I died and gone to heaven. It was the beauty of the place, and it was all potato fields back then that were in bloom, and it looked like cotton fields almost, and you’re right off the ocean, near this pond, which was big like a lake, with swans and geese and everything.
There was a Bobby Vans restaurant where everybody went, and you go in there, there’d be Truman Capote and Lauren Bacall, and everybody was friends with everybody. I got to know them all, and it was just a whole different thing than being in Washington, which was a political town entirely. And they were so rung out over this Watergate business that everybody was doing that thing.
And I just thought, why I don’t get the hell out of there? And I did. I did probably the most courageous thing I’ve ever done. I went to the editor of the paper and I said, I’m gonna resign because I’m going to write a book and I knew at that point that if I failed in writing the book, I had no way I could go back to the newspaper. It would have been just too humiliating. And so I told them that and I said, “This is what it’s going to be,” and that’s what I did and the book turned out to be a success and I lived happily.
It was a kind of an osmosis that led me, finally, after a decade of it, back here. I just wanted to come home. I said, “You know, I got friends all over, and I got a lot of friends who were in the ground. And my friend Adam Shaw, he went back to France, and PJ went up to New Hampshire, and Charles Gaines, he wrote Pumping Iron, and now he’s in Nova Scotia.
New York had become a social thing. And I had gotten balled into to some extent, the old New York society, and once they get a hold of it. You have to go to these damn things with black tie all the time. Down here, we don’t – we do white tie down here. Up there, these old ladies get you. And some of the young ladies. I became a member of certain clubs and did this and that, and I mean, I was in a club with Donald Trump’s people. You know, you just get there, and then you say, “Well, what am I doing here?”
Winston Groom on Forrest Gump: “I wrote the thing in about six weeks.”
Paul Leslie: When you were writing the book Forrest Gump, was there any kind of feeling that you had that this was an exceptional story? Did you think this is going to be a story that’ll captivate people?
Winston Groom: No, I thought I was crazy. I thought that probably I would be hooded out of the hall. I wrote the thing in about six weeks and I was never sure of it.
One time I was having lunch with Joe Heller and he told me Catch-22 wrote itself. And I never really believed it because that’s a complicated book. With Forrest Gump I did that and he and I talked about it after the fact and I don’t even know why I wrote the Dog on Books.
It just came from a story that my father told me over lunch. He was born in 1908 and grew up in Mobile, downtown. There was a kid in the neighborhood who was retarded, was what they called him then. A young kid who would be chased and teased by fellow people.
One day a piano truck came and they moved the piano into the house – his mom had bought it, and a couple of days later, music came out of the house.
I had seen a 60 minutes program about the Idiot Savant Syndrome, something like that, where you’ve got people who basically can’t tie their own shoes, but they are geniuses with their math or music. And I thought after that lunch with my father, “I’m going to go back and make some notes on this. Maybe I can use it for a scene somewhere in a book.”
By late that night, I had written the first chapter for Forrest Gump.
I never had any notes, I didn’t have any, what I call a net. I had no research, no nothing. I just said, “Well, what are you going to do today?” And every morning it was like that. That worked to the extent that I got through with it.
I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell my agent I was working with. And when I got through with it, I thought, well, this may be a total waste of my time. But I sent it along to my agent. Back then there wasn’t any email, so I sent it by mail. And the phone rang, and I could hear him at the other end of the line laughing. He loved it.
He just laughed about it; he was a great agent. He’s gone now, but he was James Dickies’ agent and various other people, and he said, “I love this.” And I said, “Well, I’m glad,” because I thought, “It scared me to death. I thought I’d been wasting my time. He said, “No,” and so he sent it out, and it was bought within a few days by Doubleday.
“It turned out to be a big deal.”
Actually, one of his former secretaries was working with Jackie Kennedy over there at Doubleday. Nelson Doubleday used to like to hire wives of famous departed people who worked for him to scout out things. Jackie was one of them, and Gloria Jones was another, and James Jones was another.
Jackie gave it to Shay and said, “What do you think?” She said, “I think it’s weird, but it’s good.” So, we settled it and hell, but within another week or two, it had been sold to the movies! I was just as astonished as anybody. When I’d done that, I said, I don’t know what the hell this is. But it turned out to be a big deal, and there you are.
Paul Leslie: What was it like for you to have your book be translated from the page to the big screen?
Winston Groom: I think every writer wants their book to be made into a movie that’s just like the book. In which case, the movie would be three or four days long, and your ass would go to sleep trying to watch it, so it can’t, it’s not going to happen.
They start tanking with it, and they start tanking, and they’re going to take this character here, that character, that’s not going to do that. And of course, my character in the book was six foot six and weighed 240 pounds and ran 100 yards and 10 flat.
Well, John Wayne had been dead for ten years. Schwarzenegger didn’t have the right accent. If you got a big studio, which we had at that point, Warner Bros., they don’t have to have a movie star. They can’t have an actor. It’s got to be a movie star, it has to be a draw to make people go to the movie. So, they figured that they couldn’t find anybody.
I did the first two or three drafts of the screenplay and they finally said, “Well, just make the character smaller.” I said, “Well, how am I going to do that?” Because most of the time, because of his size, that was what drove the story along. They suggested Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman. And I finally said, “Look, this is a joke,” and so he fired me, which is what happens to me frequently.
Fitzgerald got fired, Hemingway got fired, Fulton got fired. It made him pay more money next time, but there comes a point when you cannot get along with the powers that be. And to try to alter what I had written in that fashion would be very difficult.
“He had a screenwriter and he had Tom Hanks. And that worked.”
I think that professional screenwriters can do that because they don’t have a dog in the hunt. I did. And no, I got the hell out of Dodge, and that thing sat there for eight years, and nothing happened.
It went over to Paramount, and Bob Smith got ahold of it. He had the other two elements – he had a screenwriter and he had Tom Hanks. And that worked. I was very impressed.
I didn’t see the thing. They asked me to come to some of the filming and I declined because that wasn’t my first rodeo. I had all the movies made from my books and it’s the dullest thing in the world – first of all, to be on a movie set. They do the same thing over and over and they get nervous about the writer being there. It makes them nervous and then makes you nervous. I just didn’t care to do it and nor did I go to the big premiere.
But they gave me a premiere here, very nicely. Paramount did it. They took a big ol’ car mic over here and let me invite a couple hundred of my best friends. They had a big tent with refreshments and food and drinks and everything.
I watched the thing, and when you watch words that you have written roll off the tongues of actors, it’s a little bit unsettling. I mean, you’re thinking, well, that’s not the way I would have pronounced that, that’s not what I would have done it.
Then I got into it. I just watched the show and when I was through, I was stunned and I sat there. You don’t get up and leave when the movie’s over, you wait for the credits. And these people, my friend, they don’t wait for the credits. They get up and go, show’s over, show’s over. And I sat there and they sat there. And I don’t know what they thought of me, but I kept on waiting for all these credits and they had a thousand people that worked on the film. Then I got up and I thought, “Well, hell.” And I said, “Thank you.” Everybody was there, and they went out in this huge chair.
And I think that was my reaction. I thought, you know, that’s a damn good show, and I never expected it, because it was just different than what I would have done. But it captured the story, and Tom was the character.
“When this thing came out, everybody liked it.”
Paul Leslie: Why do you think that the character of Forrest Gump has found his way in so many people’s hearts?
Winston Groom: I don’t have a clue. Well, when this thing came out, everybody liked it. Then they started arguing about it and they started fighting about it. And they had this show on TV, I think it was CNN. They had an arguing period there in the afternoons. People got to default with each other.
They started arguing about it and they would call me up and ask me. Finally, I went up and I said, Look I’m gone, I’m bird hunting and I don’t have a phone. I don’t want anybody to talk to me about this anymore.
As soon as I got back, they started doing it again so then I went up to North Carolina to the mountains and I got a place where they couldn’t get me. I spent the whole summer up there. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but I would see these damn stories they would do, and it was almost enough to make you want to throw up.
There was somebody, I think it was from The New York Times, it was a psychiatrist or something, and he wrote this big old piece saying, “Forrest Gump is a horrible example because he doesn’t do anything. Everything just happens to him. And so he has no motivation. He has nothing. He’s a slob who lets things happen to him.”
I happen to know the editorial page in the New York Times. And I wrote her a very nice letter, from Forrest Gumo. She knew who that was coming from. And I just said, “What are you people thinking up there publishing this kind of stuff?” I mean, it has no bearing whatsoever on what I wrote. And they never published the letter. That’s when I quit reading the New York Times. It was 25 years ago.
You know, it’s just all that stuff that you say when something gets this big – and it got big for a while. It just got to the point where my feeling was that I just wrote a simple character.
Everybody started to analyze it like it was some big old deal – and it wasn’t. He was just a simple character, a simple guy who did his thing and he lived a pretty simple life. But that’s what happens in society where you’ve got people who have to insist on some strange principled reasons where there aren’t any.
I’m facing all that so anyway, what I do is I try to make my characters as real as possible. As likable as possible, or if they’re unlikeable I make them that too, but I don’t have second or third or fourth intimations behind it. Some writers may have, that’s their problem, not mine.
Paul Leslie: What was something from the movie that wasn’t in the book that you really wish they had included?
Winston Groom: Well, I love see Sue, but you know, that’s a problem. It’s hard to get a right thing to act properly. I’ve been not only involved with movies; I’ve been in movies as an actor.
One time I had to be in a movie with dogs. And you never want to ever get in a movie with dogs. They won’t ever do what the hell you tell them to do. I was in Mississippi shooting this damn thing in August. And the dog took all day to catch a piece of meat.
But, you know, there were parts of the book that were farce. Farce is hard to do. I mean, French can do it in place. It’s hard to do if you want to have a serious movie because it’s hard to separate farce from reality.
In farce, the movie that they made was reality. But I would love to see the spaceship in the film. That would have been extremely difficult to do correctly. So I didn’t have any problem with that. I talked to the producers, and they had all kinds of people who were interested in it. Various people wanted to do it and everybody’s got a different take. Which is okay, but all of a sudden, my pie is getting divided up real quick.
That was one reason I thought I got out of it. I thought, let’s let them go and do it because that’s what they do. I write books. They make movies. I’m assuming they know what they’re doing. Hell, they sure did.
People ask me well, would you rather have had your way of writing the movie? So you’re not just a billion-dollar show. Well, you can’t complain about that. It’s a big show. They just let me do all this, whatever I wanted to.
“It was that box of chocolates. Yeah. That’s a bunch of shit.”
But I was thinking you were going to ask me what was in it that they put in there that I didn’t – well not that I didn’t like. It was that box of chocolates. Yeah. That’s a bunch of shit – excuse me, I forgot the microphone’s on.
The only mention of chocolates was the first line in the book where he’s conducting a monologue and he says, Let me say this: being an idiot, that’s no box of chocolates. Yes. I remember he turns it on its head and all of a sudden it’s rolling off the tongues of a billion people.
Do you have any appreciation of how many boxes of chocolates I have received over the years? Everywhere I go and I make a talk they give me a box of chocolates everywhere!
And look I can’t complain about that, but I wouldn’t have written a corny line like that if somebody had put a gun to my head. They can do that; they get away with it and the people love it and that’s fine with me.
Paul Leslie: What did you like the most about the film adaptation?
I liked it because it was wildly popular and there were various ways they had to stretch to get everybody included because then the deal was the usual Hollywood deal where they screw the writers and everybody else.
Well, they did in fact change that and I appreciate that. But it could have been just an average movie and it wasn’t. There is not a week that goes by that I don’t hear from all parts of the world. I have a website and I get people wanting drafts or commentary or something about that movie.
It’s 25 years now. And I can’t believe it, but it is. They got a 25th anniversary coming up. I got an interview in Gardening Gun magazine of all the things, which I happen to be an editor at. I didn’t ask for that. But you know, it is ingrained in American culture and is as big as any movie since “Gone with the Wind” that I know.
It’s annoyed people. That’s good. It has gotten people very emotional. I know that people who are intellectually challenged have written or their friends or parents or somebody have written and said how much they appreciate it.
“This was my big deal.”
You can’t beat this kind of success. Can’t beat it. It’s a big show, it’s a big deal. I’ve written a lot of things and I do well with them. After that, I thought, you know, every writer wants to keep on writing novels. But if you’re lucky, you’ve got one book that’s going to be really a success. Maybe you’ll have two. And if you want to start looking over in England, like Dickens, you’ve got more. But you don’t have much more than two or three books that are going to be a big deal. This was my big deal.
And so I thought, well, I see writers and they don’t know what else to do. They keep on writing novels. And it’s not that they’re not good writers, that they don’t have a good idea. It took me 20 years to write El Paso, it was a novel. So I started writing history. ‘Cause I thought, you look at Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, they drank themselves to death. I went on the path I particularly wanted to go down, so I went to my editor at that point at Atlantic Monthly, and I said, “I want to do a Civil War history.” He said, “Are you nuts?” He said, “Just come out with this gun,” and I said, “No, I want to do this.”
He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to do one about the Battle of Nashville,” because I knew he was from Nashville. So he said, “Oh, really, you want to do it like this?” Yeah, so we did it and it was very successful, I mean for that kind of thing it was successful.
I had recently acquainted myself with Shelby Foote, who was an extremely nice guy. So I started writing some war books and then I started writing other books that were military history because I have a background in the military, not that I’m a professional soldier where I was, you know, the officer in Vietnam and all that. All interesting and I enjoyed doing every one of them.
I’m writing a book now called The Founders about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. And I’m learning things. And I have gotten a little following somehow that allows me to do it, and actually do it successfully, financially. My publisher’s happy, I’m happy – you know, you can’t go wrong there.
If I get an idea for another novel, I’ll do one. But it’s got to be a good idea, it’s got to be something that I’m not just writing because I have to write a novel. I think that a lot of times, that’s where they sink toward the end. You look at the literary histories, and they kind of vanish. They’ve written books that people will read, but they’re just not that good.
The idea has to be good. You can’t beat Fitzgerald when, you know, he came up with basically one good book, and that was probably the best book that’s ever been written in American literature, I think. But he couldn’t ever repeat it. And so there he went.
Paul Leslie: So what inspired you to want to write this book about the Founding Fathers?
Winston Groom: I think when I do these histories, I think that they’re successful because I’m learning while I’m doing them as opposed to having taught them before he used. In a way, I’m too educated now because I’ve read a lot and all that.
You know, there’s something I got fascinated with. And one of the things I’m fascinated with is hatred. I can’t believe it. I mean, back then it was worse than it is now. Horrible. And there were no rules. Now they leave the label. But back then it was basically duels. I mean, you could say just so much when they tut you.
But I’ve never seen the ferocity of opinion in the modern press like it was going on back. Because everything was a monarchy and nobody knew what a democracy was. You can look back to ancient Greece. They had people who were elected to do things. Not just every mob rule with everybody’s votes, but nobody quite understood how the thing was gonna work.
So they were petrified that they were going to screw it up. And they began to hate each other. Then the two sides, which are now Republican and Democrat, began to diverge. And they’ve been with us ever since. Washington hated every minute of it. He said, “This is going to ruin the country.” Well, the jury’s still out on that. But, you know, that’s what you’ve got.
Paul Leslie: I always like to end the interview by giving the guest the stage. What would you say to anybody who’s tuned in? Completely open-ended.
Winston Groom: What would I say to them? I’m glad you tuned in right now. I mean, I appreciate anybody who wants to listen to my BS, that’s fine with me. If I’ve got something to say that will help them in any way whatsoever, that’s great. Or just entertain them. That’s great too.
But I don’t stand on a pedestal. I don’t have a particular point of view that I want anybody to have. I’m just paroling this measure, that I’ve said before and that’s what I do. I’m not a trained journalist or a trained political science person or whatever and I enjoy doing what I’m doing.
Paul Leslie: But I have just one more question. What would Forrest Gump say about the world today?
Winston Groom: I don’t have a clue. I think he’s washed up. He’d probably be speechless about some of these things that go on – as I am. When I look at some of the stuff that goes on today, it is appalling. The hatred and the lanker and the viciousness of everybody, nattering at everybody else.
I’ve lived through periods where that didn’t go on. I’ve lived through periods when it did go on. I watched it as a journalist. I’ve watched it. You know, Washington is like that. I’ve lived in New York, where I basically kept my mouth shut. But what I should say, I don’t know. I’d have to make something up. I don’t think that would be a good idea. I think, let it rest there.
Paul Leslie: Well, Mr. Groom, thank you very much.
Winston Groom: Mr. Groom is my father. Winston.
Paul Leslie: Thank you.
