“My Own Private Altamont”:

Reminiscences by Terry Southern and Gail Gerber

on J.X. Williams

On the top shelf of a dusty closet in a small apartment just North of W. 191 St., there is a leather-bound scrapbook. The yellowing pages hold four photographs apiece, 4” x 4” Polaroids tacked to parchment in orderly fashion, revealing private moments of public figures who cavorted in disorderly fashion. Dennis Hopper, Rip Torn, and a couple Fondas mug for the camera. At the periphery, wannabes, has-beens, and never-weres try to the squeeze into the frame.

Page 24 goes blank. Page 25 breaks the rhythm. Three photos of the same lonely man on the same anonymous barstool are scotch-taped across the length of the page. In the photograph marked “1960,” he sports a jet-black buzz-cut as dark and conservative as the briefcase at his feet. In the 1964 shot, his coiffure grows into a salt and pepper pompadour. By 1970, his hair turns cocaine white.

The intriguing triptych has been withheld at the request of Mr. Williams. But, thankfully, the story behind it may now be told.

“Hair color was always a sensitive issue with J.X.,” notes Gail Gerber over a glass of Merlot at her favorite bistro up in the Cloisters. “Ray[1] hated age. He would lie about it. Told everyone that he was 29 after he turned 39. He probably would have sold his soul to stay young. It drove him crazy when he saw young turks like Den and Peter getting studio deals that he’d chased after for half his life.”[2]

But getting back to the hair…

“J.X. sent out an S.O.S. to Terry. He was making 2am phone calls, begging him to fly to a very remote area of the Sonoran desert where they were shooting ‘The Virgin Sacrifice.’ Williams felt that Terry could save his film with a substantial but speedy re-write. Everybody warned him not to go. The word in Hollywood was that the set was a disaster zone. Even Dennis Hopper came back spooked after Ray invited him for a walk-on. He said the Hell’s Angels were not only running security but handled the grip and electric because the union guys quit. But that probably only steeled Terry’s resolve to make the trip out West. He loved circuses.

“So when Terry arrived on set, he saw this crazy man with a McCartney moptop running back and forth, barking orders, knocking over equipment, and making a general nuisance of himself. At first, he didn’t recognize his old friend. The X-Man had dyed his hair back to black. It was classic Williams. He never had a very good handle on ‘hip.’ His idea of youth culture in 1969 was a Beatles bowlcut circa Ed Sullivan! Terry said he looked like a dead ringer for Moe from The Three Stooges. In fact, I think that’s what all of the cast and crew called him behind his back, as in ‘Moe wants you back on set in five, ya’ knucklehead!’”

And it gets worse…

“With all of the lamps and the hot desert sun, his coiffure literally began to melt like a bowl of licorice ice cream. The concoction of Clairol, Brilliantine, and god knows what else was dribbling down his neck and forehead. And here’s the best part. Williams’ new directorial affectation also included an all-white three-piece suit á la Tom Wolfe. His jacket and trousers were streaked with oozing rivulets of black hair goo. You would have thought someone had dumped a can of motor oil over his head.”

J.X. continued his mad dash around the set for another ten minutes until Terry politely tapped him on the shoulder to announce his arrival. J.X. angrily whirled around and took a swing at him. Fortunately, he missed.

“’Oh, shit! It’s you,’ the director laughed. ‘How do you like the movie so far?’”

“’Ray, you are the movie!” replied Terry.[3]

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The complicated friendship of Terry Southern of J.X. Williams goes way back, back to the salt-and-pepper pompadour, the black briefcase, and beyond…

“Williams pimped for Henry Miller,” begins Gail, Terry Southern’s lifelong companion. I am halfway through my second Merlot and decide to start chronologizing our interview before the sun sets over the beautiful park that overlooks the dining patio. We’re still in Manhattan but this is the secret part of the city where all is quiet and green. “Ray had a reputation for fixing up the rich and famous with aspiring starlets. Publicly, no one wanted to be seen with him. He never got invited to the premieres or the Oscar parties. But, at 3am, you knew he was out there wheeling and dealing with a studio head about personal matters.

“I had not met him personally until he cast me for a bit part in Beach Bum[4] but Williams was already a legend in Hollywood for his stags. Since no one would let him a direct a real movie until the 60s, he used pornography as an outlet for his personal vision of cinema. As distasteful as I found the subject matter, he knew what he was doing. Yes, I confess to seeing one of his “art” films and the production values and cinematography were exquisite.

“A lot of famous producers had their own screening rooms back in the 50s where they could invite guests to watch movies. On Saturday nights, they might sneak preview a new feature that wouldn’t open for a couple weeks. Afterwards, the ladies would adjourn for coffee but the men would stay put. As soon as the coast was clear, they’d bolt the door, break open the humidor, and project the latest ’masterpiece’ from Williams’ oeuvre.

“In fact, even Stanley Kubrick praised one of J.X.’s stag films. He remarked that it seemed like a “real” movie and predicted someday a major studio would release a film that featured actors having actual sex on camera. Terry loved that idea and it became the initial inspiration for his novel Blue Movie.”[5]

However, the Kubrick-Southern-Williams connection goes back further…

“I don’t remember how Terry met J.X. but it might have been through Lenny Bruce who, not surprisingly, dug his stags. Terry was still living on the East Coast but Williams came to New York frequently on ‘business’ which probably involved matters of dubious legality. Everyone knew he had connections with organized crime though he always tried to compartmentalize things so that we never knew much about that part of his life.”

But not always…

“Ray always tried to pass off his screenplays to Terry. In part, I think he just wanted advice. And, maybe, he harbored some crazy idea that Kubrick would get wind of his projects. Anyway, one night, J.X. took out his latest script from his briefcase and a second one slipped out, hitting the barroom floor with a loud thud. The latter didn’t look like a screenplay so much as a phone book. To Williams’ chagrin, Terry immediately seized upon the mysterious tome.”

The dog-eared cover bore the title in red magic marker: “An American Tragedy: The Unjust Trial and Conviction of Samuel DeStefano, Jr.” For those not familiar with obscure gangsters of the 1950s, “Mad Sam” had become the undisputed king of the Chicago “juice” rackets. DeStefano was also a sadistic psychopath who tortured his victims to death with an icepick. But, worst of all, he fancied himself a writer.

“The best thing about working with mobsters,” notes Williams in an unpublished interview. “Was that they were all illiterate. None of them sent you their crummy screenplays.”[6] Unfortunately, Sam DeStefano proved the exception to the rule. The career criminal actually used his long prison stretches for productive purposes. As he once told an acquaintance before his maiden voyage to Leavenworth, jail was an opportunity to “read the Bible and dictionary and any books he could get his hands on” and “understand business books and psychology books” in order to “learn how to manipulate people.”[7]

Generally, the Mafia operated according to the well-known principle of omerta or silence. On the other hand, Mad Sam, who, in fact, was associated with organized crime but not an official member of the Chicago Outfit, practiced just the opposite approach in his dealings with law enforcement. He would hold press conferences, threaten journalists, mail letters to politicians, write an op-ed column for the Chicago Defender, and even attempt to purchase a local radio station so he could air his views on the government 24 hours a day.[8] In one of the many trials where Sam acted as his own attorney, two attendants wheeled him into the courtroom on a portable hospital bed. He wore pajamas and addressed the court through a transistor-operated megaphone. That such a man would write a screenplay about the story of his life was not a likelihood. It was an inevitability.

Unfortunately, J.X. Williams became the unwilling recipient of that inevitability. “Sam Giancana could have passed that piece of shit to a thousand other guys in Hollywood,” harps the director. “Instead, he chose me because it would save him the embarrassment of showing it to one of his big-shot producer pals in Bel-Air. Personally, I found the gesture humiliating.” Writing from Statesville Prison, DeStefano also penned a long, enthusiastic letter to Williams about the “unprecedented commercial potential” of his script and offers an exhaustive list of possible celebrity attachments for his film.[9] So, when Terry asked for the copy, J.X. felt a certain degree of relief to be unburdened of the unseemly 300-page tome. Williams had not dared to throw it out in case DeStefano asked for its return but he certainly had no interest in reading it either.

A few weeks later, Williams met up with Southern to discuss his screenplay. “I love it!” he told him. “This is the best piece of social satire I have read in years!” “Ray was so excited that his hero finally read his work,” recalls Gail. “And then he realized that Terry was talking about the other script! I wasn’t there but I can just imagine the look on his face.”

Unfortunately, the current whereabouts of DeStefano’s screenplay are unknown. Most likely, it disappeared during one of Gail and Terry’s bicoastal moving trips. Or, perhaps, the unproduced script awaits rediscovery, locked away in a steamer trunk at the foot of Gail’s bedstead. “I lost the key years ago,” she laments. In any case, Southern kept the screenplay for years and sometimes would take it to bed with him to re-read. “The mattress would start shaking because he was trying to restrain his giggling,” recalls Gail. “I told him to read the goddamn thing downstairs so I could sleep.”

Though Gail never read it herself, she described the basic plotline. “An American Tragedy…” attempts a rather daunting narrative feat: to create a sympathetic, heartwarming portrayal of a loan shark. The first hundred pages of the script describe a series of episodes in which Sam, a humble small-business owner, loans large amounts of cash to distant acquaintances and perfect strangers who visit his hardware store. They invariably fail to repay the protagonist and rough him up when he tries to collect. At the conclusion of each episode, the debtor kills himself or dies in a freak accident.

The close of the first act arrives when Sam confronts a debtor who has returned to his hardware store for another loan. “I don’t remember the exact dialogue,” notes Gail. “But I think the guy tells Sam ‘Oh, yeah. Well I’ll show you what’s going to happen if you don’t loan me more money!’ And then he takes a butcher knife out of his jacket and repeatedly stabs himself in the chest. I’m not sure exactly how one could film that scene in a convincing manner but that’s what the script called for.” Sam then yanks the knife out of his hands just as the police arrive and you can fill in the blanks.

After a few courtroom monologues that run five pages at a clip, our hero gets hauled off to Statesville on a life sentence. That’s when the real fun begins. The screenplay describes the prison conditions in excruciating detail. Sam protests everything from a leaky faucet in his cell to the quality of the bologna in the commissary. For the bologna monologue, Sam stands atop one of the long tables in the mess hall to deliver his speech as the other inmates slam their tin cups against the benches in solidarity. However, Terry’s favorite passages had to do with a subplot about how the warden had fluoridated the prison’s water system to interfere with the inmates’ “bodily functions.”

In the final hundred pages of the screenplay, Sam’s tale of injustice inspires a grassroots movement of indignant citizens who take to the streets and demand his release. In the climactic scene, a team of doctors carries him up the steps of the Supreme Court on a stretcher where he makes a deathbed proclamation of his innocence. The gavel slams “not guilty” at the same moment that Sam’s heart stops. The End.

Though J.X. was disappointed that Terry had embraced DeStefano’s screenplay at the expense of his own, he decided to take a look at it out of curiosity. Whatever Southern had interpreted as satire, Williams recognized as the good old-fashioned ravings of a lunatic. [10] He made it to about page 208 before returning the five-pound burden to Southern who wanted it back for research.

The fruits of that “research” horrified Williams. “Terry didn’t take anything directly out of that script,” Gail assures me. “But I am sure that it inspired some of the dialogue he wrote for Dr. Strangelove.” After viewing a rough cut of the film, J.X. was convinced that Southern based the character of Jack D. Ripper in part on Mad Sam, particularly his ranting about the “fluoridation of the water supply” and “precious bodily fluids.” That, in itself, did not bother J.X. Southern’s usage of the DeStefano material was indirect at best. Rather, Williams was alarmed because Terry put him on the “Thank You” list during the credit roll at the end of the film. He figured that if DeStefano saw the film, the gangster might trace the fluoridation material back to Williams and come after him. “You’re going to get us both clipped!” he warned Southern. “He’s a hot-blooded killer!” “You mean a cold-blooded killer?” corrected a bemused Terry. “No! Hot-blooded! Cold-blooded killers are ruthless… but reasonable.”[11]

“Terry said that was the only time he ever saw Ray get scared,” remembers Gail. Was J.X. paranoid? Though mafia folklore tends to exaggerate itself, Sam DeStefano has the infamous distinction of making #6 of the Chicago Tribune’s 2003 list “Most Evil Chicagoans of All Time” along with John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, and H. H. Holmes (chronicled in Erik Larson’s “Devil in The White City”).[12]

Despite Southern’s annoyance, J.X. remained emphatic that he had to have his name taken off the credits of Dr. Strangelove. “It was a real pain in the ass for Terry,” recounts Gail. Southern had gone out of his way to get the micromanaging Kubrick to put Williams on the list and now he had to ask him to take him off. Terry’s request came at the last minute, right before the studio was ready to send the final negative to the film labs for exhibition prints. Kubrick was furious. “I think Stanley said something like ‘So you’re telling me that low-rent pornographer is too good to be associated with my film?’ Kubrick could be very thin-skinned and he had the memory of a cranky elephant. Ten years later, when Terry wanted him to direct Blue Movie, Stanley told him ‘Why don’t you just have J.X. Williams direct your film since he is so goddamn brilliant?’”

By that point, however, Terry hadn’t walked away from the X-Man, he had run. Williams was that movie and it had been a real horror show. Not even with his fertile imagination could Southern have scripted what transpired over the next two days…

DOCUMENT INSERT: Excerpt from “Spectres of the Sonoran” screenplay.[13]

EXT. SONORAN DESERT – DAY

J.X. WILLIAMS and TERRY SOUTHERN walk across the sandy landscape of an empty Arizona desert. In the distance, a film crew breaks down equipment from the previous day’s film shoot in a ramshackle ghost town. They approach a luxuriously appointed trailer powered by a generator. Two behemoth bikers from the Hell’s Angels stand guard at the door. They both have shotguns holstered behind their backs.

                 J.X. WILLIAMS
In the trailer. We’ve got to write a
film…quick.

      TERRY SOUTHERN
How quick?

J.X. WILLIAMS
What month is it?      TERRY SOUTHERN
August.

J.X. WILLIAMS
Final draft should have been finished
in April. I fucking called you for
months. You’re late.

J.X. opens an ice-cold Coleman cooler stocked with canned cocktails. Southern pops a Daquiri. Williams opts for the Martini.

J.X. WILLIAMS
(to bikers)

Hey, you guys see “Easy Rider”?
     Here’s the guy who wrote the
      goddamn film.

The bikers grunt respectfully and stand to attention like actual soldiers.

J.X. WILLIAMS                     
Terry and I are having a story
conference. Anything less than a
murder or OD of a principle cast
or crew member, we are not to be
bothered. Got it?

The main problem with the script was that there was not a script. Williams had lost it months ago and directed the picture from memory though he also made changes on the fly inside his head. Predictably, the actors had no idea what he wanted so the mad auteur regularly blew his moptop when they could not deliver the lines in his mental screenplay.

Over drinks, J.X. Williams unbundled the movie in his mind. They chucked out empty cocktail cans and took more from the Coleman. Slowly but surely, Southern began to comprehend the picture in all its insanity and brilliance. An hour later, Ray solemnly led him to a large wooden liquor crate for a desk. Terry dumped a half-dozen unused yellow notepads out of his valise and clicked up the lead tip of his mechanical pencil.

Meanwhile, the director dashed to the other end of the trailer and cracked open a walk-in closet. Inside, a big fat biker by the name of “E-Z Writer” had wedged himself behind an IBM Selectric, crackling his knuckles in preparation for transcribing Terry’s Hail Mary pass of a screenplay.

Alongside the desk, J.X. kept a file cabinet. Each drawer had been stuffed with color-coded folders and dividers. The files had been alphabetized and tabbed with neatly printed stickers. Inside these folders, Williams maintained a pharmacopoeia rarely seen outside of major metropolitan hospitals. The director flipped through the “D” files and produced a small plastic bag of Dexedrine to kill Terry’s alcohol buzz. After a quick toast to chase down the pills, Southern went to work.

As the legendary writer scribbled out page after page of dialogue, Williams paced up and down the length of the trailer like a sentry. As soon as Terry tore a page out of his notepad, the director briskly walked it over to the closet for transcription. Only the distant sound of gunfire interrupted his perambulations. Thereupon, he would speak about the incident with an unknown party via walkie-talkie and nervously peek out from behind the curtains into the pitch black desert landscape.

The director occasionally skimmed one of the yellow sheets but said nothing. He kept his focus on Terry. With the precision of an anesthesiologist, Williams controlled the supply and variety of Southern’s drug intake. Making notes, pulling files, measuring dosages, consulting the PDR, and even checking Terry’s blood pressure and vital signs, Dr. Williams somehow kept his subject not too up or down or sideways but just in the right space for a marathon writing session.

“Terry had been under deadlines but this was different,” recalls Gail. “He said it felt as though Williams tended to him like a piece of complex industrial machinery. Not that Terry really minded. He was high on drugs but on literary inspiration as well. All the same, the experience was…unique.”

“E-Z! Come on,” yelled J.X. “You’re holding up cinematic history!” With his eye obsessively fixed on Terry, Williams failed to notice that E-Z had bottlenecked the operation. The biker couldn’t touch-type and had been using his index fingers for the past four hours at a rate that hovered around 5 WPM. J.X. demoted his typist to gofer and sent him to the crafty for a case of Schlitz.

“Son of a bitch!” a voice boomed from inside the closet. “These pages are single-spaced![14] Motherfucking goddamn biker typing pool! Fuck!” Rolling up his sleeves, the resigned director started pounding out triple-spaced pages of screenplay. The trailer went silent again save for the typewriter and occasional strings of obscenities whenever Williams had to Wite-Out a mistake. After 24 hours and the case of beer, J.X. crashed. Terry followed. He woke with his nose against the notepad. Williams had vanished.

Wandering outside the trailer, the desert was deserted. The biker guards had abandoned their post and an eerie calm had descended upon the trailer. Over a sand dune, Terry heard distant noise. He followed it. Downhill, he re-entered the strange cinematic atmosphere that enveloped Williams on the set.

DOCUMENT INSERT: Excerpt from “Spectres of the Sonoran” screenplay.[15]

EXT. DESERT – DUSK

J.X. Williams stands atop the roof a beaten-up VW microbus with a director’s megaphone in hand. Surrounding the van, a ragtag CROWD of bikers, hippies, and random roustabouts pump their fists in the air and cheer him on.

J.X. WILLIAMS
      (through the megaphone)
Brothers and Sisters, here’s the score.
Rumor has it some boys from Chicago
are coming to the set to shut us down
tonight. Remember Chicago? The whole
world is watching?

The crowd loudly BOOS.

J.X. WILLLIAMS (CONT’D)
             (through the megaphone)
That’s right. Six, seven months we sweat      
our asses off in the desert to shoot the
greatest film all of time. And now The
Man’s coming to shut us down. What
do you say to that?

CROWD
                 (chanting)
            Hell no! We won’t go! Hell no!
                           We won’t go.

“As foolish as he might have seemed to an outsider like Terry,” reports Gail. “J.X. really worked that crowd. He had acquired this strange charismatic aura about him on the set. The cast and crew had elevated him to the status of some cinematic messiah. When you mix an endless supply of narcotics with six months in the desert, I guess it could happen.”

When the raucous pep rally dispersed. J.X. made a beeline for Terry. “Get back in the trailer,” he ordered. “It’s going to get ugly out here tonight.” On their walk back to HQ, Williams explained he was on “juice” and “The Man” comprised some disgruntled members of the Chicago Outfit who wanted to collect.

Back at his desk, Terry continued to scribble pages as Williams and two leaders of the biker gang sat around a table in conference. They examined a topographical map of the local terrain as General Williams explained where to position the cyclists for the imminent siege: “We’ve got a dozen HMI’s. Ordered the prototypes straight from OSRAM, flown in all the way from fucking Germany.[16] Way cheaper and easier than incandescents, believe you me! On a clear night, a light with that force should be able to pick up anything 200, 300 yards away. So we put four at the pass, four on the back drive, and four up in the mountains just in case this crew has the balls to sneak up on us offroad. If we do this right, we’ll see them, they won’t see us. Remember, tell your snipers to go for the grill and the tires. The grill and the tires, got that? We’re just trying to scare them. If we hit someone, they’re going to come back again and they’ll be mad as fuck.”

The director’s walkie-talkie blared an urgent message and the trio took to their heels but not before Williams locked the trailer from the outside. No longer under supervision, Terry decided to raid the pharmacological file cabinet for pills but he mistook downers for uppers and ended up face down on his notepad before he cranked out another quarter-page.

“Get up!” yelled J.X., yanking Terry upright by the back of his collar. A bleary-eyed Southern saw two or three Williamses. All of them looked pissed. “It’s time to go,” he told him. “But I’m not finished,” pleaded Terry. “You stick around here, you’ll be finished,” replied the agitated director as he handed him his already-packed valise.

J.X. drug a wobbly Southern through a field of sandy scrub and prickly bush to a small patch of fresh blacktop. Out of the darkness, a helicopter descended from above. Williams pushed him inside the cockpit.

“I was so relieved when Terry came home,” Gail tells me. “My worst fear was that Ray would hold him hostage on the set until the seventeenth draft. Out there in the desert, anything was possible. Terry had only been away for three days but he looked as though he had been away for three months. I never heard exactly what happened. Everything I told you was pieced together from stray remarks and allusions he made over the years. Terry never said it but I wonder if that was the moment. We all talk about the cataclysmic event that screamed “the party is over.” A lot of friends used the Manson killings as the demarcation line. Others go back to the RFK or King assassinations. But sometimes I think whatever happened out West did it for Terry.” Shortly before his demise, Southern planned to write an essay about his experiences on the set of “The Virgin Sacrifice.” He planned to call it “My Own Private Altamont” but the perpetual graphomaniac never could get past the title. The memories were too vague, painful, or both.

Then came the bad times. No work for Terry. A car bomb for Williams. Southern got three points of nothing. It had been a fool’s errand…

1978: Studio 54. Terry drifts towards the bar. The alcohol-thirsty crowd stands three rows deep at the counter. He should have brought a flask. Then, an arm yanks him counterside. “Terry!” yells the stranger. J.X. at 45: His hair is now Santa white. At this point, what’s the point? He’s been overtaken by several generations of up-and-coming cineastes. Fuck it…

“So how’s it going?” yells Williams above the disco din. Terry reorients for a moment. Good guy but isn’t he dead? And how did he end up here? A reptilian-visaged companion in black tie shakes his hand. “Terry, this is Roy. He’s a friend of ours,” oozes J.X. in pseudo-mob speak. “Let’s all have a drink!”

Roy locks eyes with the bartender: “Johnny Walker, Black Label.” The barechested barboy makes a beeline for the trio with an entire bottle and three shot glasses. J.X. handles the toast: “To all the great screenwriters of the world: Dalton Trumbo, John Lawson, Ring Lardner, Edward Dmytryk, Alvah, Herbie, Lester, Albert, Adrian and Sam. Let us salute The Ten!” The speech mystifies Roy but he plays along like a good sport. With a quick clink, the men drain their drinks. Before J.X. pours the next round, Roy excuses himself. A bouncer told him Hamilton Jordan was doing lines in the VIP lounge.

“Do you know who that was?” J.X. asks him, unable to stifle his laughter a moment longer. “You just broke bread with Roy Cohn!”

“J.X. always had a mischievous streak,” recalls Gail. “But the Roy Cohn bit took the cake. Terry never lived that one down.” Fortunately, J.X.’s dark sense of humor had a gentler side. “A few weeks after they reunited at Studio 54, Terry and I were sifting through the weekly mail that mostly consisted of unpaid utility bills and 39-cent royalty checks. At the bottom of the pile, I spotted a blank envelope”

It bore the return address:

J. Edgar Hoover
935 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20535

A thousand-dollar bill had been enclosed. Terry didn’t recognize the handwriting but he knew where it came from. Williams’ good-samaritanship did not end there. In 1980, he called Terry late-night. Roy tipped him off that the IRS had been snooping around Southern’s tax returns again. The FBI even gave them access to their own files to help build a case. Williams suggested they set a meet at Cohn’s law office to straighten out the matter. Before J.X. could go into details, Southern slowly declared in a whiskey-slurred Texan drawl “I’m giving back your three points. Fuck Cohn. Fuck Hoover. Fuck the FBI.” “Terry, this ain’t 1970,” creaked a hoarse voice on the other end of the line. “You either sell out or you die out!”

A year later, Williams cashed out: a one-way ticket to Geneva and a seven-figure wire transfer to Zurich from an anonymous beneficiary. In the early 90s, an international airmail letter arrived in Terry’s PO Box. No return address this time. Southern pulled out several crisp high-denomination Swiss banknotes. Williams also included a ten-franc note. On the obverse side of the bill, he drew a cartoon bubble from the mouth of the solemn Switzer that gazed into the lace intaglio: “Keep writing, motherfucker!” Terry did so to the end of his days.

Noel Lawrence