Tom Canford

Please check out the website featuring Tom Canford at: http://hollowsquarepress.com/

Tom Canford is the name that Tom Miller used for his published writings. He was born in Carrier Mills, Illinois on October 24, 1922. When Tom was about seven years old, his father and mother moved with their son and the two younger twin girls Jane Rose and Betty Jo from southern Illinois to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to join their first-born child, Norma, who had already moved there and was teaching school. The family move was prompted by the discovery of a scar on Tom's lungs, and the high desert country of southern New Mexico was believed to be better for him than the coal mining community of Carrier Mills. Tom was raised in a houseful of strong women (including his mother), and that contributed greatly to his lifelong interest in, fascination with, and comfort with members of that sex. There would have been one more sister, Evelyn, born between Norma and Tom, but she had died of complications from the 1918 flu.

Tom adored his mother, and perhaps the central tragedy of his life was her death from pneumonia following a hysterectomy when Tom was thirteen. Norma, who was about thirty at the time, became the surrogate mother for her much younger siblings, a role she filled until her death in September 2000. After the death of Tom's mother, his father married an old friend and fellow teacher of Norma's, to Tom's great distress. Certainly Clyde Miller needed all the help he could get with his three youngsters. Gradually Leanah Miller won Tom's affections, and he grew to love her.

As a young boy, Tom fell in love with the American popular song. For years, to write songs for the movies or the Broadway stage was his great ambition. And he did write. After his death there was a trunk packed full of his lyrics and lead sheets to be dealt with.

His early childish songs showed great promise. Tom always had a wonderful facility with images and words and rhyme. Anything could trigger a quatrain. Or (shudder) a limerick. This could be a mixed blessing to anyone around Tom, it must be confessed. It may well be that Tom's great facility with song was the enemy of great accomplishment: he could come up with a good lyric so easily that he often settled for that and did not make the extra effort at the time to perfect the song. Of course he never threw a lyric away: decades later he might haul one out and work on it again, but by then the world of music would have moved on.

Somehow, Tom didn't care. While fame and fortune would have been nice, it was the writing itself that sustained him. In addition to song lyrics, he wrote short stories, radio stories, comedy skits, plays, and musicals. His musical The Darwin Theory was produced successfully at Los Angeles City College (where Tom was an advanced student in playwriting) in June 1949. Book, lyrics, and music by Tommy Miller. (The musical director and arranger was one Jerrald Goldsmith: he went on to fame, fortune, and awards as movie composer Jerry Goldsmith.) Dealing with the human fallout from the battle between science and religion at the Scopes trial in Tennessee, it preceded the hit play Inherit the Wind; it is said that the authors of that play attended a performance. Meanwhile Tom was working on his musical version of Voltaire's Candide, but Leonard Bernstein got there first. At the suggestion of screenwriter Ben Maddow and composer Lukas Foss, Tom submitted a selection of lyrics including the riotous I Was Buggered by a Tall Bulgarian to Bernstein, who declined the offer on the grounds that he had already selected a lyricist.

Tom worked in order to write. At various times in Los Angeles he worked as an elevator operator, a clerk in a shipping room, and a postal clerk. When he moved to New York in the 1950s, he fairly quickly started getting jobs in the movie business (most folks move to Los Angeles to do that: Tom always did things his own way). At various times he held staff positions, primarily in publicity, at MGM, Embassy Pictures, and American International Pictures. The movie work was interesting and varied and not so challenging as to interfere with his writing and his active and adventurous life of the flesh.

In the fall of 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey was released, and it immediately joined Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura as Tom's two favorite movies of all time. Initial reaction in the New York press to Kubrick's great movie was more negative than not, and Tom took particular umbrage (something he tended to do quite easily) at Renata Adler's review in the New York Times. Tom struck back with, of course, words, in a letter to the Times:

TO THE EDITOR:

In what was meant as a put-down, Renata Adler dismisses the murkier and more metaphysical aspects of Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey as being simply there, like a Rorschach.

True, but what a Rorschach; and what a revelation. A searing inkblot of modern thinking man's apprehension as to the ultimate place of technology in the celestial scheme of things. Death and resurrection sanctioned by what? A machine? God, the perfect machine, overseeing decay, death and a new Immaculate Conception.

Who is triumphant in the here or in the hereafter, man or machine? Study the Rorschach. The answer comes from the individual viewer. Interpretations abound, and will proliferate. Is HAL, the computer, in a foreboding and unsettling manifestation of an Age of Anxiety neurosis, becoming humanized, memorizing, learning the emotions of jealousy, fear, hate? Or has he become subverted by a Higher Computer, an agent and representative of a culture in which the machine has emerged as the dominant and evolving form of life? God (perfect machine or standard variety) knows.

The film is a ghost story of the spheres, a veritable haunting of heaven's doorstep, eerie, spellbinding, beautiful; and in form an orchestral composition of sight, sound and the senses.

Like a Rorschach, it is an insight, an experience. As an experience and as art, it is a masterpiece. TOM MILLER New York City.

An old friend of Tom's in the movie publicity business was working on the United States release of 2001. He read the letter over the phone to Kubrick, who reportedly was pleased. A few years later, this same friend was hiring unit publicists to work on MGM movies during production. He remembered Tom's letter as well as Tom's abilities as a staff publicist and called Tom to inquire about his availability for unit jobs. Tom made himself available, and except for a few special assignments like dealing with stars and press during the New York premiere of Ryan's Daughter, escorting an actor dressed up in a monster suit to the 1976 Democratic Convention headquarters to publicize Godzilla vs. Megalon, and occasionally filling in for a staff publicist on leave, he never held any other job.

He loved the work, and the episodic nature of the assignments gave him plenty of time off for his own creative activities. He was good at the work. He quickly earned a reputation for working well with black creative artists and performers and with actors and directors with reputations for being difficult. At various times he worked on some 17 films, including Shaft, The Last American Hero, Mikey and Nicky, Blow Out, and The Cotton Club. His last film was A Gathering of Old Men, for television in 1987.

In 1989 he accompanied his long-time friend Jonathan May on a move from New York back to May's family home in Alabama. He was offered more movie jobs, but the move itself interfered with one and a knee procedure with another. That was all right with Tom, for he was more than content with his life in rural Alabama. He had a great office, and he spent his days at his electronic typewriter and later his computer. Although Tom and Jonathan both missed the cultural advantages of New York, they were able to fill the gap with books, CDs, DirecTV, videotapes, laser discs, and DVDs. Tom expressed interest in a dog; and not two weeks after the move, Tom found an abandoned white bundle of fur down in the pasture with the four goats that came with the place. She was named Huckleberry, and she was a great friend for her too-short ten year life. A month after her death, they stumbled upon Orozco Cahaba (Roscoe for short), a six-pound black and tan Rottweiler mix who wormed his way just as deeply into their affections and grew into a sturdy eighty-pounder. He managed to outlast Tom by two and a half years.

Tom wrote and wrote and rewrote, by now working mostly but not exclusively on novels. Jonathan was cook, gardener, chauffeur, and in-house editor (did a little writing on his own, but that's another story). During the last few years Tom finally became satisfied enough with three of his novels that he was willing to have them published. All were deeply influenced by his life, but only the first, Boy at Sea, life in the Coast Guard in WWII, had any autobiographical content. The second, The Curse of Vilma Valentine, his funny and astute account of shenanigans involving Hollywood in the forties and sixties, Nazis, murder, stolen art treasure, and the vicissitudes of fame, draws heavily on his knowledge of movie history and movie publicity. The final one, Ghost Guitars, is infused with his knowledge of the music industry, songwriting, the 1960s war protest movement, and again, Hollywood. Author's copies of Ghost Guitars arrived in the fall of 2007, just as he was starting to exhibit symptoms of his final illness. He died on December 6, 2007, of a pulmonary embolism.

Tom had written accounts of some of his movie experiences over the years. He polished the memoirs a bit in the 1990s and put them on a back burner except for a few more recent emendations and updates. It was his intention to add at least one more major section for possible publication in a year or so. Unfortunately that was not to be. As Jonathan was going through his papers after his death, he set aside the relevant manuscripts and finally got around to reading them again and found that they were as interesting and amusing as had been remembered. He believed that Tom's worm's-eye view of the movie-making process offered insight and perspective worthy of sharing. His editorial hand drifted lightly over the words; and changes tended to involve commas and semicolons, spelling, and the occasional repositioning of a word or phrase or sentence, mostly just the neatening up that Tom had not gotten around to doing. The work was published in June 2013 with the title Tom had chosen: A Fever of the Mad.

Tom liked people. He liked weird people. He liked difficult people. He had a great knack for getting along with people. Fellow publicists would warn him about actors from whom he might expect a hard time, a list that includes but is not limited to Robert Mitchum, Rita Hayworth, Ryan O'Neal, Peter Falk, John Travolta, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Richard Gere. Yet with all of these he had wonderfully positive experiences, and his memories of all of them were warm and friendly. None of them were pussycats, but Tom just had a knack. His words about the people mentioned in the memoir certainly reveal his great affection for them.

Once at a party in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, someone asked Tom who, of all the actors he had worked with, was his favorite. It was a hard question, and Tom gave it some thought. He was able to narrow his list down to two: Robert Mitchum and Paul Newman.

Tom accumulated quite a bit of movie-related material in his lifetime: thousands of still photographs, books of contact sheets, press kits, preliminary press kits, screenplays (not just those he was issued while working on films but also ones from files that were being weeded over the years at AIP, MGM, and Embassy Pictures), working drafts, notes, screening programs. He had wanted this material to go to a library, and in the late summer of 2007 he had written to one library in New York making the offer. He did not get a reply. After Tom's death, Jonathan mulled the matter over with an old friend from Tom's publicity days, who put him in touch with the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and in the spring of 2008 some nine large boxes of material were shipped to the library. Tom would have been pleased.

So why Tom Canford? That name was cobbled together from part of his real name (Tom) and one fake name (Canford). Canford sounds like it ought to be somebody's name, but it's not. Once upon a time back in the dim dark past when Tom was working in name clearances for television shows like Dr. Kildare, Canford turned up on a list of safe names. If you had a raping murdering drug-addicted lying traitor in your story, you didn't really want to name him John Q. Smith for fear that one of the real ones out there might take offense and sue. Canford sounded like a real name but nobody was named Canford. Hence he couldn't sue. If a dastardly villain could be named Canford, then why not an author?

Yeah, but why did he want a pseudonym in the first place? The problem was his real name: Tom Miller. Thousands of them out there. Check it on Google sometime and just see how many hits you get. Heck, narrow it down to the Internet Movie Database and you'll find some 47 in the movie business alone (of which Tom is number III).

He played around with it a bit: Thomas Canford. Tomas Canford. Tom Canford Miller. Then he decided to opt for simple.

Even his real name had its variations over time. During the Second World War, the United States Coast Guard knew him as Tommy Miller, and that name stuck with him through his post-war college years in Los Angeles and well into the 1950s. His family called him Tommy (still do) and so did his friends from the time. Actually, if you dig way back to the certificate of his birth in Carrier Mills, Illinois, you'll discover another interesting variant: Tomi James Miller. Nobody knows where that Tomi came from. Maybe the registrar of births simply made a mistake, or maybe a drop of ink got smeared. When he moved to New York, he was already Tom Miller, using middle initial J (for James) for more formal occasions. A nice, neat, adult name.

The name Miller is itself suspect. It is known that even farther back in time, Tom's father, James Clyde Miller, was sired by someone other than his mother's husband. But like his father, Tom was raised a Miller, lived his life a Miller, and died a Miller. A Miller through and through. Except when he wrote.

And write is what he did. Words were life's blood to him from his earliest memories until the day before he entered the hospital for his last illness. He was in his office working away at the computer on his new novel, The Wiretapper's Daughter, right up until two o'clock when he had to begin taking the "prep" for the next morning's surgery. One wonders if possibly it was not the pulmonary embolism that took Tom away three weeks later but rather his being kept away from his writing for so long a time.