`How I Got To Be This Hip' Shows Deceased Writer At His Eclectic Best

The first time I became aware of Barry Farrell, he was a gangly copy boy at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, fresh out of Queen Anne High School, and even then he was beginning his legend.

One of the first Farrell stories I heard was the time when Barry, the new copy boy, delivered some papers to then-Executive Editor Lee Ettelson.

Noting Ettelson deep in thought, the kid asked, "Making big decisions?" Any other editor and Barry would have been out on the sidewalk. But the half-innocent mischievousness of young Farrell's remark delighted the Hearst editor.

Ettelson became a Farrell admirer as so many others would be.

Even as a kid, Barry had this rich, deep voice that delivered coiling, precise English sentences. A rare species he was, in his teens, when his contemporaries cluttered their speech with "ya know" and "I mean."

Barry loved the poetry he found in words and thus his choice of words sparkled in his writing. So his career took off, first with Time magazine, then with Life, with books and in a dozen other publications.

He wrote countless cover stories and essays for both Time and Life. By the time he died at age 49 in 1984, his legend was secure. Now there is a new Farrell book, "How I Got to Be This Hip," put together by Steve Hawk, one of Barry's writing students at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

This collection is like one of those expansive, table-laden, multicourse Sunday brunches put on by good restaurants. What do you choose? Take your pick.

There is nostalgia, too, in this collection, because Barry wrote the big stories of his generation: the kidnapping and trial of Patty Hearst; the Gary Gilmore execution; the Hillside Strangler.

But this isn't merely a gathering of crime stories. The book also is about Billy Graham, Hollywood celebrities, sports, music, politics, social upheaval, poetry, laughter; it is about F. Lee Bailey's botched defense of Patty Hearst and about Frank Sinatra at his most thuggish.

Book-jacket blurbs are always suspect, but not these. Barry Farrell's admiring contemporaries are such major-leaguers as Norman Mailer, Calvin Trillin, Josh Greenberg and John McPhee. No mutual back-scratching here; they loved the guy and his work.

Mailer writes that his prose was "at once elegant, ironic, and never without feeling for his moral values." Trillin wrote of their years at Time, "we were awestruck by his graceful prose and dazzling insights. My admiration only increased in the ensuing years."

John Gregory Dunne, the novelist-journalist-screenwriter, writes the eloquent introduction to "How I Got to Be This Hip." They were good friends. Barry's daughter, Joan, is named after Dunne's wife, Joan Didion.

Like almost everybody else, I was a total convert in Barry's eclectic orbit. He taught me to care about cops, bureaucrats, fools, rogues - all kinds, all stations.

We sometimes worked the same stories together, but never in the sense of competing. He had a way of entering a scene, sifting through the chaff, sensing fraud, summarizing the whole; he seemed to absorb information through the pores of his skin.

Dunne puts it better: "Nothing was ever lost on Barry."

In his writing, Barry taught the virtue of detachment, the sin of righteousness; his instincts drew him to ordinary people who did their best on an unlevel playing field.

I push this book hard because Barry's elegant widow, Marcia, will get what royalties there are.

It also should be recorded that Barry's final medical bills were staggering. They were paid by Harrison Ford. Barry and Ford became friends early on when Barry used to encourage the fledgling actor before screen auditions.

A friend and I last saw Barry in a Los Angeles hospital; his mind and life force were gone after a massive stroke and heart attack.

He didn't know us, of course.

When we left, we talked about Barry's incredible way with words, the stories he told, the ones he had written, so many included in this book. After that, the only thing left to do was grieve.

Emmett Watson's column appears Tuesdays in the Local section of The Times.