Memory, Too, Is an Actor

By John Skow

There are lies and damned lies, and then there is memory. Writer Tobias Wolff reflects that "memory becomes an actor on its own. You try to make it tell the truth, and that's the best you can do." He is talking about his 1989 memoir, This Boy's Life, justly praised for the dead-on honesty of its scruffy boyhood self-portrait.

Ten years earlier, his elder brother, Geoffrey Wolff, had published his own memoir, The Duke of Deception, a remarkable account of life with their father Arthur Wolff, a loving, brilliant rogue who was a lifelong bankrupt, scamster and confidence man. "A bad man and a good father," Geoffrey wrote after he floated free of the wreckage his father had created. Tobias recalls that he admired Geoffrey's book but that some of the characterizations seemed jarringly out of key. Then his own book came out. It told of their mother's cross-country flight with him, leaving Geoffrey behind with Arthur, and ending up with a brutish new husband in a backwoods Washington town. Geoffrey had a similar reaction, or so his brother recalls: Yes, yes, but no; it wasn't exactly like that. "It was a lesson in perception and subjectivity," says Tobias, "so in the end I had great sympathy for Geoffrey's book."

Beyond damned lies and memory, however, there is Hollywood. Each brother sold his memoir to Warner Bros., and by coincidence, the same screenwriter, Robert Getchell, did both scripts. The Duke of Deception is still being sniffed by stars (Richard Gere is mentioned), but This Boy's Life hits the multiplexes this week. Geoffrey is silent about the film, but Tobias answers his phone cheerfully enough.

He accepts what producer Art Linson says about writers who sell their books to the movies: "You bought the ticket, and you have to take the ride." Tobias grumbles only a bit. He doesn't think much of Getchell's script, which seems to him "a little banal and sitcomish, with a few cheap thrills thrown in." He objects to a rough sex scene between Robert De Niro, who plays the churlish stepfather Dwight, and Ellen Barkin, who plays the mother Caroline. (The Wolff brothers' mother is Rosemary in real life.) Tobias believes the sex scene breaks the film's point of view, since otherwise the entire action is observed through the boy Toby.

But he admits that Getchell and director Michael Caton-Jones found a way to make the movie work. "It took me out of myself," he says, rather oddly for somebody who is supposed to be seeing his own boyhood. What he means, he says, is that "I was watching a movie; I was caught up in it." The main street of Concrete, Washington, looks, after a lot of work by set builders, exactly as it did in the '50s. Tobias thinks the actors were marvelous, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as Toby in a car-stealing scene, a dumb adolescent stunt that happened just the way it was filmed.

Very little in Tobias' boyhood was cute or funny, as he wrote it. He was a snob, a thief, a cheat and, much like the father he barely remembered, a prodigious liar who constantly re-edited his own past and then nearly believed he was, in fact, a crack shot or a swimming champion. His only constant was his beautiful, flighty mother. She had expected to be a movie star. Her father had been briefly rich, and they had lived in Beverly Hills, California. At 16 she had ridden, smiling and vamping, on a float in the Tournament of Roses parade. She was down on her luck when she met the glittering faker Arthur Wolff. Long after she left him, remembering Pierce-Arrows and Chrysler convertibles but driving a dying Nash, she went to Utah with her troubled 10- year-old boy. She was long on spunk, though not on practicality, and her intention was to get rich discovering uranium.

The film catches the love these waifs, mother and son, have for each other. But it softens the book's very bleak view of the grubby awfulness of being a teenage punk. Tobias' sons, Michael, 14, and Patrick, 12, haven't seen it yet, and he hopes they won't for a few years. "I've explained why, and they trust me," he says.

The film ends, more or less, with a goofy caper that actually happened. Tobias was desperate to leave his stepfather and the high-school tough-guy character he had invented for himself. He sent off for some prep-school applications, persuaded a friend to steal high school transcript forms, wrote glowing reference letters and actually succeeded in being admitted to the prestigious Hill School in Pennsylvania. Years after he and his brother had got to know and love each other again, he admitted the scam to the somewhat more proper Geoffrey, who, profoundly shocked and sure he was seeing a reincarnation of their calamitous dad, said in groaning despair, "Oh, Toby . . ."

Inevitably, Tobias says, he was kicked out of Hill for ignorance and bad ) behavior. His memoir ends there, but his life didn't. He went on to serve in Vietnam as an adviser to a Vietnamese regiment in the Delta during the Tet offensive. Then he got a degree at Oxford. He worked for a few months as a reporter at the Washington Post, then quit to invent himself again, this time truthfully, as a fiction writer.

Gravitas accumulated; he wrote as a waiter, as a night watchman, as a fellow and a teacher at Stanford and then at Syracuse. His third book of short stories will be out soon, and also a novel provisionally called In Pharaoh's Army, about his Vietnam service. A couple of years ago, the Hill School invited him back and, on the unanimous vote of his former classmates, gave him his high school diploma. Selections from his self-advertising reference letters were read at the ceremony.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York