Distinctly Montana Magazine

68 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 5 On Condor, His Home State of Montana, and His New Book James Grady B Y MOST ANY STANDARD OF MEASURE, James Grady has led a charmed life, and one of the most attractive things about him is that he is not only completely aware of this fact, but he still delights in it fifty years after everything turned for him. When Grady was fresh out of college, he got a chance to work for Senator Lee Metcalf in Washington, and he used to walk by a small government building every day. "There never seemed to be anyone coming out or going into this building, so it made me wonder whether it was a CIA office, or maybe FBI." Grady would sometimes go out to grab sand- wiches for his fellow employees for lunch. And one day it occurred to him how odd it would be for a low-level CIA employee go out to buy lunch for everyone, only to return to find all of his fellow employees dead. When he returned to Montana, Grady had ac- cess to a typewriter through another job, and he began work on a novel based on these two basic ideas. The result was a thriller called Six Days of the Condor. But Grady knew nobody in the publishing business, so he decided to look through The Writer's Market for publishers that published similar books, and began sending the novel out. After getting a rejec- tion letter from the first publisher, Grady sent the man- uscript to W. W. Norton, and several months later, he got a call one day from a man named Starling Lawrence, telling him that Norton wanted to publish Six Days of the Condor, and give him a one-thousand-dollar advance. Grady was so over the moon that when the editor also mentioned something about a possible movie deal, Grady just assumed the guy said that to all new authors, and didn't take it seriously. So when he got another call from Mr. Lawrence a few months later, telling him that they had sold the movie rights, and that Grady's take from the deal was over $80,000, Grady went silent for a time before Starling Lawrence asked him if he was okay. "I'm fine, sir, it's just that I haven't heard a word you said since you said $80,000." Over the course of the next year, Grady found himself in some pretty heady company when Sidney Pollack, who later earned two Oscars for Out of Africa, signed on to direct the film, and they landed Robert Red- ford, fresh off a run including The Sting, The Great Gatsby, and The Way We Were — and just about to film All the President's Men. Faye Dunaway was signed as his costar, not too long after completing Chinatown, and the legendary Swedish actor Max von Sydow was re- cruited to play the chief villain. by RUSSELL ROWLAND

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