No, But I Read the Book: ‘Harold and Maude’

The cult classic began life as a screenplay for a thesis film. While Hal Ashby directed the film, screenwriter Colin Higgins turned it into a novel that took on a life of its own.

No, But I Read the Book is an occasional series exploring the places where the worlds of movies and books overlap.

If you picked up a copy of Jackson, Tennessee’s Jackson Sun on September 12, 1971 and turned to the “Books in the News” column, you’d find a rave review of the first novel by a young writer named Colin Higgins, penned by Sun staffer Delores Ballard. “This little bombshell is hardly bigger than a paperback; set in large type it is perhaps an hour-long reading experience,” Ballard writes, continuing, “Its impact is something approaching a punch in the stomach.”

The name of the book: Harold and Maude. Unmentioned: that a film of the same name, directed by Hal Ashby and starring Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, had already been produced and would arrive in theaters a few months later.

Assuming Ballard didn’t just forget to include this information, her confusion was understandable. The novel’s first edition made no mention of the film on the front cover or the dust jacket. The former features a “Harold” in a stark, black font above a psychedelic rendering of “Maude.” The latter offers a plot description of “a love story so tender and touching that nothing like it has been seen since Pyramus and Thisbe” and a bio of Higgins that mentions his master’s degree from UCLA, ignoring that his Harold and Maude screenplay was his master’s thesis. (He got an A.)

My copy of Harold and Maude looks a little different. A tattered paperback picked up secondhand, its all-text cover also doesn’t mention the movie, instead offering a thumbnail sketch of the premise via short descriptions of Harold and Maude before ending with an ellipses: “A bizarre thought, but…” The novel completes the thought.

Evidence of the movie can be found elsewhere, however. The back cover references the movie and features caricatures of stars Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon taken from one of the film’s posters. If the book's first readers were those who might be curious about a quirky-sounding (and slim) new novel, its second, wider audience was those who fell in love with the film in the years during which it became a cult classic after initially flopping at the box office. You couldn’t take the movie with you. You might not even have been able to see it a second time were it not in current rotation at your nearest art house (if you were lucky enough to live by one). But you could slip this in your back pocket and relive it on the page.

That’s the primary reason movie novelizations came into being in the first place. It’s also why they reached their golden age in the years before home video provided easier access and why they’re more marginal now that the wait between a film’s time in theaters and its streaming availability has grown so short, when there’s a wait at all. But Higgins’ Harold and Maude isn’t exactly a novelization. It’s more akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a derivative work created by one of the film’s primary creators that took on a life of its own.

At least up to a point: one reason Ballard and other reviewers pointed out the novel’s briskness is that it practically reads like a screenplay. Dialogue dominates its pages, with other passages essentially providing stage directions. The screenplay’s “She settles back with her tea,” for instance, becomes “Her voice trailed off and she absently sipped her tea.” It’s a lovely book, but I wonder if readers who’d never seen the film would consider it incomplete. Having seen the film many times, that’s how it reads to me.

Maybe that’s not the right way to think of it, though. Perhaps Ashby’s film should be seen as just the most successful incarnation of a work that took on several forms. Though Higgins was just 30when Harold and Maude was released, he’d already lived several lives. Born in France and raised in Australia and California, he was the son of an American father and Australian mother. Heattended Stanford, moved to New York to become an actor, enlisted in the Army, became a merchant marine, and served as, in his words, “pool cleaner and tennis court sweeper” to producer Ed Lewis upon graduating from UCLA, where Harold and Maude began life as a screenplay to a short film.

Through Lewis, Higgins’ screenplay landed at Paramount before becoming Ashby’s second film as a director, after The Landlord. Higgins wrote the novel while the film was being made, an experience that he described as revealing some of the differences between the two media in a 1972 interview with venerable New York radio journalist Casper Citron. “Things in the movie, like the chases, are so funny in the film… they’re not as funny in the book,” Higgins says. “You can’t say, ‘The cop zoomed’ off and get the same feeling.” Higgins doesn’t say it, but Harold and Maude’s characters don’t have the same life on the page as they do on the screen. I’m not sure who fresh readers of the novel would picture as the main characters, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Cort and Gordon, even beyond the usual difficulties that come when attempting to overwrite a film’s casting when reading a book that’s been adapted to film. When I read L.A. Confidential, for instance, I don’t picture Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe. Higgins’ book doesn’t have the same force.

Which isn’t to take anything away from Higgins. If anything, the novelization serves as a reminder of how faithfully Ashby adapted his screenplay. But to read the novel is also to remember all that’s missing and the ways Ashby and the film’s team transformed the material. William A. Sawyer and Edward Warschilka served as the film’s editors but the credit undoubtedly also belongs partly to Ashby, who began as an editor and never really stopped thinking like one. That’s evident in the moment when Harold, and the audience, first sees the tattoo that reveals Maude as a survivor of the Holocaust, a detail that casts her zest for life, vague talk of her past, and her flashes of melancholy in a new light. The film holds on the detail just long enough for it to make an impact, and not a moment longer.

It’s editing, too, that creates Harold and Maude’s most breathtaking moment. Here’s how it reads on the page:

And here’s how it plays in the film:

Higgins’ novel reflects his screenplay, where Maude’s “that” refers to the mass of daisies around them, where no single flower stands out from the crowd. Ashby’s film moves to a cemetery on the cut as the camera zooms out, out, out, then further out still to reveal the city of the dead around the couple, who remain discernible details within the frame no matter how much their surroundings dwarf them—all to the accompaniment of one of the bittersweet Cat Stevens songs that serve as the film’s soundtrack.

After whiffing in theaters, Harold and Maude found its audience via the midnight movie circuit and other revival venues. Speaking to The New York Times for a 1983 article about the film finally turning a profit, Higgins told the story of a man who put himself through college by renting and screening the movie for fellow students. In one Minneapolis theater, it played for 114 weeks in a row. Undoubtedly, many of its fans kept a copy of Higgins’ book on their shelves.

Higgins would never write another novel, though he did adapt Harold and Maude as a play. (It enjoyed considerable success in France.) Higgins also never really wrote a movie like Harold and Maude again. He segued into making more mainstream, but sometimes pointed, comedies and enjoyed considerable success as a screenwriter and director via films like Foul Play and 9 to 5. Higgins’ life was cut short by his AIDS-related death in 1988 at the age of 47.

Maybe there was only one small window in which such a movie could be made. Harold and Maude arrived in theaters in 1971 and found its audience later in the decade, but it often plays like the last expression of a ‘60s counterculture that believed that, in spite all the evidence to the contrary, goodhearted people could still carve out an oasis where freedom and individuality could thrive. Perhaps it was a nod to changing times that in Harold and Maude that oasis only has room for two. But maybe Harold and Maude, in whatever form it took, was at heart a wish for those who loved it to realize these oases could be much bigger and home to many more.