4
Frankie Y. Bailey
Introduction
In her review of Elmore Leonard's novel Out of Sight (1996) for The Nation, critic Annie Gottlieb observes:
Nearly all the information in Leonard's novels comes through the auditory channel, but he makes that channel carry it with wonderful economy and clarity, like fiber‐optic cable. We never see a character except by eavesdropping on another's thoughts, with the result we learn something about both.
(Gottlieb 1996, p. 33)
When discussing his writing process, Leonard often said that he wanted to be “invisible” as the author. He wanted whatever occurred in his fiction to be relayed through one of his characters. He said he needed to go through the process of looking for names, developing biographies, and listening for the voices of his characters. When the characters began to speak, he could begin to write. As he put it, “It's about the characters. They're the writing; the plot just comes along” (quoted in Zaleski 2002).
The characters that Leonard writes about are professional criminals and con artists, police officers, federal agents, and a wide assortment of ordinary people with whom they interact: housewives, construction workers, melon growers, nuns, movie producers, criminal lawyers, psychics, reporters – you name it and you will probably find it in a book by Elmore Leonard. In stories with multiple viewpoints, readers see the world through the eyes of these characters. The characters observe each other and the readers “hear” their thoughts – and their conversations. Leonard was acclaimed for the realistic dialogue that was one of his trademarks, but as often as not, his skill with the sound of an individual voice is displayed as he leads us along a particular character's train of thought about another character's looks or behavior.
In his “10 Rules of Writing,” Leonard advises writers to avoid the weather, prologues, adverbs, and the dull parts that readers skip. Rule No. 8 states: “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” Leonard offers an example of effective description by Ernest Hemingway, a writer that he himself read as he was learning his craft. In “Hills like White Elephants,” Hemingway describes two characters as “the American and the girl with him” and observes, “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table” (Leonard n.d.). But in spite of his preference for lean writing, Leonard often violates his own rule about detailed descriptions.
The characters in Leonard's works rely on visual clues (and cues) to “get a read on” the people with whom they are interacting. The point of view (POV) characters are not only talkers, but they are also, on occasion, close observers. Leonard's readers are given the choice of accepting or rejecting his characters' conclusions. The characters that people his works and the situations in which they are placed reflected the author's own worldview, which was saturated by popular culture and genre crime fiction. Because he often wrote his novels and short stories contemplating the sale of film rights to Hollywood, he tended to create characters that would entertain readers, but in addition, show us who they were in what they wore and how they carried themselves.
Dress and Demeanor as Communication
In real life, we use dress and demeanor to craft our individual and group identities and engage in impression management. The degree to which we are successful in projecting a desired persona depends on numerous factors, including the resources we have available to “costume” ourselves, the skill of our “performance,” and the receptiveness of our “audience” to actors like ourselves. As sociologist Erving Goffman argues in his seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman 1956), we spend our lives engaged in such performances on public stages. To varying extents, we do the same during intimate moments with family members, friends, and acquaintances.
When we encounter a stranger, we make judgments about that person within seconds. We place him or her in an initial category based on our conscious perceptions, unconscious biases, and the situation. As a survival mechanism, such rapid‐fire assessments prepare us for “fight or flight.” If we decide at a glance that a stranger looks dangerous or untrustworthy, we can approach with care – or cross the street to avoid trouble (see e.g. Slepian and Carr 2019).
In real‐life law enforcement, dress and appearance have multiple uses, serving as clues at a crime scene and means of identifying victims and suspects, and also taking the form of the uniforms worn by police officers, the robes worn by judges, and the colors worn by gang members by choice and prisoners by coercion. The ability to exercise control over not only one's own appearance but also that of others is power. However, those who are the objects of labels and compelled to dress according to their ascribed status may engage in resistance. In real life, labels and stereotypes are used to categorize others as friend or foe, to be welcomed or feared.
Writers use these inherently recognized clues to clothe their characters in the language of dress and appearance (see e.g. Curteman 2018). In Leonard's fiction, protagonists and other characters constantly scan their environment, sizing up the people they encounter by means of these signs. Teeth, for example. In Stick (1983),
Stick kept looking at the girl bartender because she was so fresh and clean looking she could be in an orange juice or a suntan ad. She had a glow to her perfect tan, perfect white teeth, a tall girl with nice easy moves, natural. She wore a little nameplate that said her name was Bobbi.
(Leonard 1983, p. 9)
In Freaky Deaky (1988),
A woman detective named Maureen Downey asked if she just happened to run into Mr. Ricks at Galligan's. Greta said she went in when she saw his car parked there. The woman detective, Maureen, had nice teeth and appeared to be a healthy outdoor girl. Greta could see her teeth even in this dark end of the lobby that seemed like part of an empty building.
(Leonard 2015, p. 756)
In Leonard's fiction, such details also provide the reader with information about the viewpoint character – what he or she values and what is valued in the world of the story. The protagonist of Rum Punch (1998), flight attendant Jackie Burke, is sent to a women's correctional facility. There she is greeted by a male deputy:
Jackie looked at him, a young guy, clean‐shaved, his hair carefully combed. He said, “After you,” and she walked in expecting to see cells with bars.
(Leonard 2016c, p. 278)
What she sees instead are the doors to the women inmates' dormitory rooms.
Jackie's false expectations register for us just how new and unprecedented she finds this experience of being jailed. A few minutes later, Jackie's anxieties rise again as she meets the deputy at the guard post near the dormitory room to which she has been assigned:
A woman deputy stood inside the waist‐high enclosure, the guard post: a tall, broad‐shouldered woman with pale‐blond hair combed up in a pile. She was smoking a cigarillo, the pack stuck in her empty holster. The sergeant said, “Miss Kay, take care of this lady, would you please?” and handed her a three‐by‐five inmate status card. Miss Kay said, why certainly, Terry, looked at the card for a moment and then at Jackie. “Would you believe you're my first flight attendant in about, I'd say, three years?”.
(Leonard 2016c, p. 279)
This remark is so incongruous with her expectations that Jackie wonders if Miss Kay is “putting her on.” She catches the aroma of the female guard's cigarillo and thinks, “That was real” (Leonard 2016c, p. 279). As Miss Kay shows her around, the uneasiness and self‐consciousness Jackie feels is captured in how she perceives the other prisoners responding to her: “Black women, one or two Hispanic. All watching her, paying no attention to the television set that was on” (p. 279). She focuses on “[a] black woman wearing a shiny black wig” because the woman makes a crack about Jackie's uniform – “What is she, a general?” (p. 279) – and because Miss Kay warns the black woman, Ramona, to “stay away from” Jackie (p. 280).
When Ramona disobeys Miss Kay's order and approaches Jackie in the dormitory room as she is choosing a bunk, Jackie looks at her again and sees her as “[h]eavyset, her skin dark, her black wig highlighted from behind.” Ramona asks Jackie, “You gonna talk to me?”
To which Jackie responds, “If you want … Just don't give me a hard time, okay? I got enough problems” (Leonard 2016c, p. 280). Whatever Jackie, a white woman, thinks Ramona wants, the black woman's next question surprises her, and us, and we suddenly realize that our own naivety matches Jackie's: Ramona asks about being a flight attendant, how well it pays.
Among the things Jackie knows about being a flight attendant is that with her pending felony assault charge, Ramona has no chance of becoming one, but she tells her about it anyway. Ramona reciprocates by sharing her knowledge about how the criminal justice system functions. The “cleaning woman in the forty‐nine‐dollar wig who didn't smoke” tells Jackie how to handle her plea: “I don't see you have a problem. The way you look? The kind of hair you got? If I done it [smuggled money] I'd go to jail, see, but you won't. They slap you on your hand and say, ‘Girl, don't do it again’ ” (Leonard 2016c, p. 281). Ramona warns Jackie that she may be in more danger from the man for whom she has been working than from the justice system.
These encounters with strangers are often brief but important both to the character and to the reader. Ramona turns out not to be the tough, lesbian character that readers who have watched “women behind bars” movies are expecting. She gives Jackie advice she can use in dealing with her public defender. She also informs Leonard's readers about disparities in the criminal justice system that have greater impact on women of color than on white women.
Perceptions and Descriptions
In spite of Rule No. 8, Leonard's POV characters sometimes provide detailed descriptions of the people they encounter. As Barry Taylor notes, “In Leonard's novels, dress sense is one of the key indicators by which the reader is invited to form judgements of character” (Taylor 1997, p. 23). In Be Cool (1999), Chili Palmer compares his attire to that of Tommy Athens. Tommy asks, “You always wear a tie?”
It stopped Chili for a moment. He said, “When I feel like it,” and pressed his chin down to look at the tie he was wearing with his navy‐blue summer suit: tiny red polkadots on a deep‐blue field, his shirt a pale blue. “What's wrong with it?”
Tommy Athens was wearing a T‐shirt with words on it under a chambray workshirt that hadn't been ironed, worn‐out prewashed Levis and pumpup Nikes. Chili noticing the shoes when Tommy arrived, twenty minutes late for their lunch date. He held his arms out to display himself, presenting his midlife girth.
“This is how you dress in this town you're in arts and entertainment.
“Or you do yard work,” Chili said.
“Same difference, on the surface. You don't dress to impress. You don't give a shit how you look, your talent speaks for itself. But in case there's any doubt ….”
(Leonard 1999, p. 5)
Tommy draws Chili's attention to his Rolls parked behind a Ford pickup. His car, Tommy says, makes it clear who he is. Chili is driving a Mercedes.
“New one?”
“Seventy‐eight, a convertible.”
“You can get away with that.”
(Leonard 1999, p. 5)
Chili Palmer, who first appears in Get Shorty (1990), can get away with that because he is not only cool. He has style.
For Leonard, style is a matter of attitude, not appearance. In Rum Punch (1998), two detectives are doing surveillance when Ordell Robbie arrives, and they see him for the first time. They catalog the details of his appearance as if they were making an entry on a police blotter:
black male, mid to late forties, six foot maybe, about one seventy, sunglasses, patterned tan silk shirt and tan slacks. Stylish and fairly dressed up, compared to the two law enforcement officers in their Sears sport shirts and Levis this morning. Nicolet in his cowboy boots. Tyler wearing gray‐and‐blue jogging shoes.
(Leonard 2016c, pp. 315–316)
To the two police officers, Ordell and the kid he is talking to seem to think of themselves as a “couple of cool guys.” (p. 316).
Occasionally, one character looks at another and imagines the other character's biography based on his or her appearance. Sometimes, it's not the clothing that's significant, but what's (imagined to be) beneath it. In Freaky Deaky (1988), Chris Mankowski, a cop, is watching a man who has been accused of rape and using his imagination:
He was thinking that seeing a guy naked could give you an entirely different impression than seeing him with clothes on. Woody was one of those fat guys who hardly had an ass on him. Why didn't any fat go there? … Chris could see what Woody looked like when he was a kid. He could see other kids pushing him into swimming pools. … A kid who slept with the light on and wet the bed a lot. … Chris usually felt sorry for quiet boozers who didn't cause any trouble. He felt a little sorry for Woody, the type of guy he could see Woody really was.
(Leonard 2015, pp. 792–793)
All of these uses of dress and appearance in real life and in fiction are well illustrated in Leonard's Out of Sight (1996). The book was successful both as a novel and as a film adaptation.
Cops and Cons in Out of Sight
As book and as film, Out of Sight, directed by Stephen Soderbergh, resembles the classic James Cagney gangster film White Heat (1949). Based on a story by Virginia Kellogg, White Heat combines elements of prison movie, gangster movie, and film noir. Gangster Cody Jarrett (Cagney) goes to prison, breaks out, and plans another heist. What he doesn't know is that the guy he befriended in prison is an undercover police officer. What Cody also doesn't know is that his wife, Verna (played by Virginia Mayo) has betrayed him with a member of his gang, and they killed his mother. In Out of Sight, professional bank robber Jack Foley escapes from prison, taking along Karen Sisco, a young deputy federal marshal who happens to be outside the prison when the escape begins. He learns who she is, but she – like Jarrett's undercover cop – makes an impression.
Jack Foley, the protagonist of Leonard's novel, is first seen in the prison yard. While talking to one of the guards, he is watching two teams of prisoners play football. Foley thinks Pup, the guard, is “about the dumbest hack” he has “ever met in his three falls, two state time, one federal, plus a half‐dozen stays in county lockups” (Leonard 2016,b, p. 455). With Foley's assessment of Pup, the reader receives important information about Foley and his experience with the criminal justice system. He is a career criminal, but he has screwed up once again and been caught.
Leonard seems to let his protagonist describe Pup in detail for no other reason than to show us the prison guard through Foley's eyes:
Foley turned enough to look at the guard's profile, the peak of his cap curved around his sunglasses. Tan shirt with dark‐brown epaulets that matched his pants, radio and flashlight hooked to his belt; no weapon. Foley looked at his size, head‐to‐head with the Pup at six‐one, but from there, where Foley went pretty much straight up and down in his prison blues, the Pup had about forty pounds on him, most of it around the guard's middle, his tan shirt fitting him like skin on a sausage. Foley turned back to the game.
(Leonard 2016b, p. 455)
Foley is soon in conversation with a Latino prisoner, who has been running laps around the yard with his male lover. Foley has noticed that they didn't do “anywhere near” their usual 10 mi. He suspects something is up, that Jose “Chino” Chirino has moved up the schedule for the prison break he has been planning. Chino tells him he and his men are going that night because a second fence is about to be built beyond the area they have been tunneling. He invites Foley, again, to come with them. But Foley has plans of his own, plans that involve Pup.
When Foley gets Pup to meet him in the prison chapel to tell him about the escape, the reason for his close examination of Pup's clothes and body is revealed. Foley knocks Pup out with a well‐aimed two‐by‐four and dresses in the guard's uniform. As the guards scramble to stop the escape by Chino and his friends, Foley comes out of the tunnel outside the prison fence with his face covered with muck. Posing as Pup, he sends the other guards off on the trail of the escapees. When he approaches the parked cars, Karen Sisco, the federal marshal, realizes that something is wrong. But before she can give another alert, Foley and Orren “Buddy” Bragg, his friend and partner‐in‐crime who has come to pick him up, have tossed her into the trunk of her car. Foley joins her there.
Foley and Sisco are curled up spoon‐fashion in utter darkness, but Leonard provides haptic and kinetic details that do the work of sight. Even with his hand resting on Karen's hip, Foley is unaware that she has a weapon – the gun she stored in the trunk:
Karen was holding the Sig Sauer between her thighs, protecting it, her skirt hiked up around her hips. She said, “If I could have a little more room …” “There isn't any.” She wondered if she could get her feet against the front wall, push off hard and twist at the same time and shove the gun into him. Maybe. But then what?
(Leonard 2016a, p. 476)
None of these details are visual – not even Karen can see the gun between her thighs – but they work just as effectively as visual clues to tell us something about Karen. First, she's professional enough not to care about decorum when it comes to doing her job: she'll keep her gun within reach even if it means her skirt's “hiked up.” Second, even without being able to move, what she imagines as possible motion shows that she's not just beautiful but also supple and athletic. And she “smells good,” says Jack, especially compared to him. “I smell like a sewer, it's the muck I had to crawl through, all that decayed matter” (p. 476). Karen's “smell” attests to her good grooming. When she says, “You've ruined a thirty‐five‐hundred‐dollar suit my dad gave me” (p. 477), we also understand that Karen is fastidiously upscale in her taste in clothes. Foley is not impervious to these attractions. In the next minute he wonders out loud “what would happen” if the two of them had “met under different circumstances and got to talking,” “like in a bar” (p. 481). A few days later, Foley's wondering comes true.
It is worth noting that in both Leonard's novels and in his films, one item – sunglasses – signals coolness when worn well and to suit the occasion. Leonard's protagonist Chili Palmer, in Get Shorty, has the sartorial savvy to do both. Other characters, such as Glenn Michaels in Out of Sight, are clumsier in their handling of this accessory, wearing them at the wrong time or failing to master the use of the glasses as a part of performance. Known as “Studs” when he was in prison, Glenn thinks of himself as superior to Foley and Buddy because he “spent a couple of years at Berkeley.” But Glenn believes he has “never copped a superior attitude” (Leonard 2016b, p. 486). In fact, he admires the two older men: “They were cool guys for hicks, both fairly tall and stringy.” He thinks, “these two guys never lost their cool or acted crazy” (p. 485). Glenn tries to be “as cool as these guys” (p. 489), but he wears his sunglasses all the time, which shows he doesn't really know what to do with them or when they're appropriate – a fashion faux pas. When Foley learns from his ex‐wife, Adele, that Buddy has recruited Glenn to help with the escape, he says, “Tell Buddy I see this guy wearing sunglasses I'll step on ‘em. I might not even take ‘em off him first” (p. 462). When Foley next sees him, Glenn is not only wearing sunglasses, he's also wearing “a limp, ratty‐looking raincoat that hung long on him, open, over a T‐shirt and jeans cut off at the knees” (p. 492). Foley tells him to take the sunglasses off, and when Glenn hesitates, Foley adds, “I'd take ‘em off … before they get stepped on” (p. 492).
Foley, like Karen but unlike Glenn, knows how to look cool, but he doesn't need $3500 suits to do so. Before leaving Miami for Detroit, he and Buddy make a stop at a Jewish Recycling Center to buy winter clothes for the trip. Here, Foley looks for a replacement for the “orange and baby‐shit yellow beach outfit” he is currently wearing to disguise himself as a Miami Beach tourist (p. 548). He wanders through the aisles of home furnishings, small appliances, and clothing and finds a navy‐blue Brooks Brothers suit and tries it on. He expects to look like “a businessman, some kind of serious executive” (Leonard 2016b, pp. 548–549). Instead when he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees “a guy who'd just been released from prison in a movie made about twenty years ago. Steve McQueen as Doc McCoy” (p. 549). Foley doesn't mind this. He remembers the real‐life gangster Clyde Barrow and strikes a pose, imagining he is being photographed after his “daring prison escape.”
As a crime writer, Leonard was known as the master of “cool” – of creating characters who are self‐assured, calm, and charming as they navigate the violent world in which they live. As Charles Rzepka puts it, “‘Being cool’ is above all performative. In its most basic form it is a ‘knowing how’ rooted in the body,” and spontaneous in its expression (Rzepka 2013, p. 12). In prison, Foley experiences cool's opposite, “the pains of imprisonment” that sociologist Gresham M. Sykes (1958) identifies in his classic book, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison. Sykes described these pains as deprivations of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and security. These deprivations restrict Foley's spontaneity in nearly every conceivable sense, inhibiting his free and “cool” performance of self. Like Paul Newman in the film Cool Hand Luke (1967), Foley would rather risk his life to regain his freedom than continue to exist in so “uncool” an environment, and once escaped, he tells both Buddy and Karen that he would rather be shot dead than arrested and returned to prison.
From Book to Screen: Visual Clues of Casting
In movies, point of view is much more limited as a device for revealing the personality of the character whose viewpoint we are supposed to adopt. Cutting from the face of the POV character in a movie to what or who is seen cannot tell us what that character is thinking unless it's spoken aloud. In the more successful movies made from Leonard's crime fiction, casting plays an important role in making up for this loss. Viewers assess the personalities of characters on screen partly by means of the screen personae of the actors and actresses playing them. These personae, in turn, have been shaped and informed by the performers' previous movie roles.
Elmore Leonard's books – both the westerns and the crime novels – persistently attracted the attention of filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed Jackie Brown (1987), a film based on Leonard's Rum Punch (1992). In the book, Jackie is white. In the movie, she is not only black, but she is played by Pam Grier. In the sixties and seventies, Grier was both a sex symbol and an action heroine. Tarantino, who grew up “surrounded by black culture” and “went to an all‐black school” (Wootton 1998), wrote the script with Grier in mind as the lead character. The nuances she brings to the role of Jackie Brown reflect her cinematic pedigree. This “color‐blind” casting must have surprised some viewers who had read the novel. But when Tarantino called to tell Leonard what he intended to do, the author said he had no concern about the change. According to Tarantino, “He liked the movie a lot. When I sent him the script and asked him what he thought, he said, ‘Not only do I think it is the best adaptation of any of my work, I think it is the best script I have ever read’” (Wootton 1998).
Tarantino's reimagining of the character was well received by critics. In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert wrote that although Tarantino is strong on dialogue and plotting, “his gift is casting.” Ebert described Pam Grier as “the goddess of 1970s tough‐girl pictures” who in this film struck “just the right note” of a experienced woman who, tough as she was, seemed also “tired and desperate” (Ebert 1997). In addition, the casting of Grier in the film brings it into the criminal justice discussion about offending by women of color. Jackie Brown in jail awaiting her arraignment has the color of her skin in common with many of the other women she encounters.
As in Leonard's novel, the use of a woman of any race or ethnicity as a courier is in keeping with criminal justice research. As lower‐echelon participants in criminal activities, women may be coerced or willingly participate. When apprehended, however, they have less information to bargain with than many male participants. They often don't have knowledge of the structure of the criminal operation that they can use in negotiating a plea deal. As with criminal participants in any organization, they are also at risk of retaliation if they tell what they know.
But even with these threats from both law enforcement and her criminal associates who want their stolen money back, Jackie manages to extricate herself. She is helped by Max Cherry (played by Robert Forster), the bail bondsman who falls for her at first sight as she walks toward him in her wrinkled uniform. When he suggests a drink, she wants to go to some place dark because she looks as though she has just gotten out of jail, which she has. Roger Ebert described the affection that develops between these two people as “the heart of the story.” What he also notes is that in this movie, Jackie, Max, and Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), the crime boss, can be seen thinking with the pauses that Tarantino inserts. In what Ebert (1997) describes as a “smart” movie, the mental processes of Ordell and the other characters are translated from words in a novel to visual images in the movie.
In the same fashion, the casting of John Travolta as Chili Palmer in the movie adaptation of Get Shorty (1995) was a nod to the filmography of the actor. Travolta was famous for his working class roles in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Pulp Fiction (1994). In the first he played a young Italian American struggling to make a better life for himself amid the street gangs of Brooklyn, and in the second he was a mob hitman. His casting as Chili Palmer offered audiences a visual clue suggesting cinematic authenticity by linking the character to those two earlier films. Leonard's original dialogue was crucial in cementing this connection. During interviews Travolta said he had “insisted the original Leonard dialogue be put back into the screenplay,” which had been “translated into flat, functional Hollywood Speak” (Ebert 1995). One example he gives is when a mobster named Ray Barboni, aka “Ray Bones,” steals Chili's prized leather jacket from a restaurant cloakroom. In the book, Chili says to the manager, “You see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, has lapels like a suitcoat? You don't, you owe me three seventy‐nine” (Leonard 2016a, p. 4). In the screenplay this became the lackluster “Where's my coat? You better find it. It cost $400.” Ebert praises Travolta for insisting that the original language be restored. He describes the dialogue in the film as “[o]ne of the tactile pleasures” of Get Shorty. (Ebert 1995).
Chili Palmer, like Jack Foley, is what Leonard considered “cool.” In Rzepka's terms, he has a self‐performative know‐how that in the film is displayed in how Travolta dresses, among other things. In the opening scene (set in Miami) Chili wears a black shirt and suit, gold watch, and ring, attire that displays a self‐conscious attention to detail that is in sharp contrast to his casually dressed friend, Tommy Athens. Other characters in the film also display sartorial style. In Hollywood, Chili pitches a movie, Get Leo, based on what has happened to him up to that point in Get Shorty. He is negotiating with a black man, Bo Catlett, who is willing to provide $500 000 to produce the movie but also wants to work on the film. Catlett is first seen wearing a dark burgundy suit, burgundy and white striped shirt, and vest. In each of his scenes he looks like a businessman who favors colors. This is in contrast to Ray Bones, the mobster who stole Chili's jacket, who arrives at the airport wearing a gray suit that is well cut but too shiny to be understated. His choice of fabric suggests that his sense of style is vulgar and not well developed. Later in the film, Bones wears a powder pink jacket, pink pocket handkerchief, open‐necked white shirt, and gray slacks. Although the colors of his attire are in harmony, the pink jacket seems not quite “masculine” enough for a tough guy. In short, Bones lacks decorum, the ability to recognize what's appropriate to the image one wants to convey or the role one wants to perform. He's not “cool” because he lacks fashion “know‐how.”
In Get Shorty, the character referred to in the title is an actor named Michael Weir (played by Danny DeVito), whom Chili is advised to “get” to star in his projected film, Get Leo. Weir's nickname “Shorty” refers to his height. He was previously married to a movie “scream queen” (played by Rene Russo). The visual contrast between the height of DeVito, known for his comic roles, and Russo emphasizes his diminutive size. But at the same time, De Vito's “Shorty” holds his own with Travolta's “Chili,” showing more competence as an actor than he's allowed to show in Leonard's book. This is played for laughs when Chili gives star Michael Weir, a method actor whose “method” is at odds with Chili's performative skills, a lesson in how to do “the look” and tone of voice used by mobsters to intimidate.
Sometimes a movie version of an Elmore Leonard book gets into trouble by being too self‐knowing about how its characters appear, destroying the deadpan understatement essential to Leonard's idea of “cool” performance. In Be Cool (2005), another film based on a Leonard novel by the same name (1999), Travolta returns as Chili Palmer, but this time he wants to get into the music industry. The movie was vigorously marketed as a sequel, with the original book reissued as a movie tie‐in. On its cover, the reader sees Travolta leaning back in a white chair and Uma Thurman, his co‐star in Pulp Fiction, sitting on the chair's arm with her legs crossed. Travolta is fashionably dressed in a black suit and highly polished black shoes, as if about to take Thurman for a night of dining and dancing. Thurman wears a short gold satin dress that displays her curves. Her calf‐high boots are also gold. She and Travolta are sitting in a chair on top of a rug in the shape of a gold record. The cover shouts “sex” and “money.” The movie's style echoes that of the book jacket. Ebert, who praised Get Shorty, was put off by the winking self‐consciousness of Be Cool. In his review, he described it as “a movie that knows it is a movie,” and worse, “It knows it is a sequel,” while making “disparaging references to sequels.” He suggests that the movie (directed by F. Gary Gray) came from “story conferences” rather than a creative mind. As Ebert notes, Thurman's casting in the movie was meant to connect it to Tarantino's hit film, Pulp Fiction. When Chili tells Edie that he is from Brooklyn, the movie is also connected to Travolta's star role in Saturday Night Fever, a huge commercial success for which Travolta won an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Travolta, who dominated the dance floor in that film, danced with Thurman in Pulp Fiction. He dances with her again in Be Cool (Ebert 2005). The book cover was designed specifically to suggest as much.
Even in the movie version of Be Cool, however, some casting decisions escaped the predictable manipulations of studio publicists. The Rock (an actor who looks hypermasculine with his tall, muscled body) is cast against type as Elliot Wilhelm, a bodyguard for Raji, the white agent who acts as if he were black. It is The Rock's portrayal of a “manifestly gay” bodyguard that Ebert finds one of the bright spots in the film. The bodyguard threatens Chili Palmer but is disarmed by flattery. Chili tells him he could be a movie star.
These movies featuring John Travolta have “star power,” attracting an audience that might never have read Elmore Leonard's novels. In the same vein, Out of Sight (1998) features actor George Clooney as Jack Foley. Much of the believability of the attraction between his bank robber and Jennifer Lopez's federal marshal, Karen Sisco, depends on the “chemistry” between the two actors. They need to convey an attraction that is sudden and strong, occurring while they are in the trunk of a car. Roger Ebert thought they succeeded, writing, “these two have the kind of unforced fun in their scenes together that reminds you of Bogart and Bacall” (Ebert 1998). Clooney's reputation as a Hollywood “heartthrob” makes it feasible that Lopez's Sisco would find him intriguing even when he smells like a sewer and is wearing a wet, dirty uniform after having escaped through a tunnel.1
Movies like these highlight the idea of self‐performance in Leonard's crime fiction, the kind of self‐performance people find themselves enacting in real life. Like Leonard's characters and the actors on the screen, we all engage in “impression management.” We not only claim but also construct our individual (and group) identity out of the clothing and accessories we wear, the way we wear them, and the occasions on which we choose to wear them.
Conclusions
Elmore Leonard established himself with his western novels, many of which were made into films, and later became a recognized master of the crime genre, known for his dialogue and the “cool” of both his criminal protagonists and the law enforcers who pursue them. Leonard spoke the language of dress and appearance. He largely succeeded in remaining invisible as an author by assigning his characters the task of categorizing other characters, even minor ones, in a phrase or two that conjures up a visual gestalt of their personality. Leonard assumes his readers are immersed in the same world of popular culture as he and his characters are. In Leonard's books and the more successful of his screen adaptations, clothing is a part of the material world that the characters inhabit. In his novels set in Florida and Hollywood, Leonard draws on the vibes of the settings – the tropical shirts, the expensive cars, and the sunglasses. Yet even in these settings, the characters are distinctive enough to have their own style.
References
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Note
1 Out of Sight was one of the more successful attempts to bring a Leonard novel or short story to the screen. The screenplay by Scott Frank was nominated for an Academy Award. Frank's adaptation won both an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America and the Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Director awards from the National Society of Film Critics.