The Man Who Knew Too Much
Richard Grenier, R.I.P.

By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is author of Hollywood Party. He writes from Sacramento, California.
February 9-10, 2002

ast week Richard Grenier died at 68, too soon for someone who had in such abundance precisely what is so lacking in American culture: deep knowledge, vast experience, keen critical sense, all harnessed to utter fearlessness and expressed with style and raging humor. In fact, what amazes is that Grenier's major work, one of the funniest books ever and inexplicably left out of some obituaries, did not get him assassinated.

In his 1983 novel, The Marrakesh One-Two, Grenier pushed to the limit the adage that the test of a religion is whether we can make jokes about it. In this tale, one Burt Nelson is hired by big-oil interests to make a movie about Mohammed that will help popularize Islam in the West. This project entailed a detailed study of the Koran, quoted at length, and some of the curious rules and customs in places where it is about the only required reading.

In this story, Nelson observes that when Mohammed asks for something, you pretty much got the idea that Allah was going to give it to him. Explains the narrator, Allah just didn't seem to know how to say no to him.

The film raises other issues, such as whether the prophet could be shown at all, a real problem in a visual medium. And one of the actors, an Englishman, is homosexual. But then there is a coup, and Nelson is taken captive. It's all wonderfully worth reading but the Arab world does not come out well and few readers will be encouraged to convert to Islam. For similar tinkering, it might be recalled, Islamic clerics targeted Salman Rushdie with a fatwa.

Grenier, a better writer who suspected that Ishtar might have been a rip-off of his story, escaped such an edict but pop culture mullahs likely wished to do him harm. He was, after all, perpetually the man who knew too much, which prevented him from swallowing propaganda dished up as entertainment.

While the world was swooning over Gandhi, for example, Grenier penned "The Gandhi Nobody Knows," about the notable emissions, such as the Mahatma's cavorting with young girls and the way he could combine a greeting with blunt inquiries about bowel movements. Grenier's Commentary article outlined the Hindu practice of suttee, banned by the British, of tossing widows onto the funeral pyres of their departed husbands. And then there was that business about Gandhi telling the European Jews that they should not bother resisting Hitler.

The whole thing was a pacifist tract, bankrolled by a nation that supported a nuclear freeze while simultaneously developing nuclear weapons. But Grenier still praised Ben Kingsley for a remarkable performance.

In Grenier's treatment of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, he included some missing detail about scalping, skinning and other delights that awaited prisoners of the plains Indians. Nothing was wasted, Grenier wrote, the whole captive was used.

Nobody is writing that kind of criticism now. But then, few share Richard's qualifications and training. He was educated at Harvard and the U.S. Naval Academy, where he earned an engineering degree. He worked for Agence France Press and the Financial Times, and was arrested by Red Army paratroopers while covering the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He also covered stories from North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Cuba, and the Caribbean while finding time to write Yes and Back Again, a 1966 novel praised on both sides of the Atlantic. Grenier also served as a cultural critic for the New York Times, film critic for Commentary, and columnist for the Washington Times. He had been there and done that, and knew what cineastes call the "back story" to every thing from Dirty Harry to In the Name of the Father.

Not bad for 68 years but he could have done much more had he been allowed to enter his emeritus stage. He is the only one who could have outdone The Marrakesh One-Two. Richard Grenier was also, as they say, a nice guy who could always find time to read a manuscript or make his way to a friend's book event. Farewell, bonhomme Richard.