Hey, Did You Know I Helped Create Succession?
Lol not really. But it is partially based on a story with Houston ties I once covered and even contributed key original reporting to.
Every now and then you come across a story and think “There really ought to be a movie about this.”
One I came across was that of John Goodman, not the actor but rather the failson heir, formerly of River Oaks, to a gargantuan HVAC fortune. And it turns out the tragedy he caused has been made into a movie, sort of.
Well, not a movie, but instead Succession, an esteemed and renowned HBO series with three gripping seasons in the can and a fourth, I believe, on the way.
And yes, while HBO’s lawyers will deny this until they are blue in the face, the show is most definitely mostly about the battle among some of Rupert Murdoch’s kids to succeed him at the helm of his all-powerful media empire. However, other bitter berries have gone into this toxic smoothie.
I am convinced that the events near Wellington, Florida of February 12, 2010 that left an innocent recent college grad dead and would eventually send Goodman to prison for 16 years — a sentence from which not even his estimated fortune of perhaps half a billion dollars could save him — greatly inform much of the dramatic arc of Succession.
And not just in an episode or two, but as a major through-line that carries one of the series’ themes, perhaps the main theme of the show, period.
Namely, that the obscenely wealthy are different from you and me. Or at least they believe themselves to be, and if one of them victimizes one of us, well, amongst themselves anyway, that’s fine.
A case of what they call NRPI, which stands for “No Real Person Involved.”
Because to them, the reality of a person is measured solely in the currencies they understand — money, power, or both. Maybe beauty too, so long as that beauty is put at their disposal.
Anyway, to say too much more here up top would necessitate spoiler-age, so for those of you who haven’t yet seen Succession, and plan on doing so, I am hereby warning you to leave now, right after these messages from Destroy All Plutocrats, Inc,:
Okay then, on to the story of former Houstonian John Goodman and its parallels to Succession. Second and final warning, spoilers ahead.
First off let me jut say that my jaw hit the floor when I came to realize that a story I’d once covered was so informative to the plot of an HBO series of such note. No, I am not saying I was ripped off, or that I deserve a writing credit, or that Succession should rightly be MY BABY or “ought as daft as tha’,” as they say in Lancashire.
Just that hey — I recognize a great, eternal story when I see one, and so did my editor Margaret Downing, who indulged my passion for it even though it took place far from Houston and had no real bearing on the city as a whole. And to gently remind the world that my own reporting added a key element to the retelling of the whole sordid and tragic story.
Long before his troubles began, way back in 1998, the Press had done a cover feature on Goodman. This basically covered, in a sneaky-snarky way, how this do-nothing son of an air conditioning tycoon had given his life over to polo, of all things for a Texan to succumb to, and how the Sport of Kings had taken over Goodman’s life.
I can’t find the story online right now, but as I recall, Goodman had yet to make the full-time move to rural South Florida, America’s polo hotbed. (Thanks in part to the climate but in larger part due to its proximity to the idle rich in Palm Beach.)
And that was 12 years before Goodman killed 23-year-old Scott Patrick Wilson, just starting out on a career as a civil engineer, on that lonely south Florida backroad not far from Palm Beach.
The facts of the Goodman case:
A little after midnight, Goodman blazed through a stop sign at over sixty miles an hour in his Bentley, t-boning Wilson’s Hyundai and sending it careening into a canal.
Instead of stopping to render aid, Goodman, drunk, dazed and bleeding, hobbled away from the scene.
Wilson survived the impact of the crash, but drowned in his sinking car.
It’s quite possible Goodman could have saved him, but he chose not to try. And he did not even have it within himself to call 911 for an hour or so after the crash, and that after he called his girlfriend first.
It was believed at the time Goodman was roaring around on those backroads in search of cocaine. It is documented that he was quite fond of the devil’s dandruff — indeed, that was my one sole contribution to the original reporting on the case. His ex-wife / babymama’s Harris County divorce petition was delivered to me by a trusted confidant, and in it, there was mention of his cocaine abuse. This item was enthusiastically pounced upon by the media in and around Palm Beach — for one of the only times in my life, I found myself being interviewed by fellow reporters.
He was seen drinking heavily in at least three clubs on the night of the fatal crash. Three hours after the wreck, his blood alcohol level was .177, more than double that of Texas and Florida. Again, three full hours after the wreck. Whether he’d already ingested other drugs was not ascertained. As reported by Florida Weekly at the time: It is not known if tests were run for other drugs — specifically cocaine — and this becomes an issue later, when reports surface that Mr. Goodman’s exwife, in divorce papers filed in Houston, has alleged he has a longstanding fondness for the drug, according to press reports.
“(Mr. Goodman) has a history of substance abuse, namely cocaine use,” Carroll Goodman contends in divorce documents unearthed by the Houston Press.
And in Succession, we had:
Kendall Roy, the failson of a bazillionaire media tycoon, known to have addiction issues, seen by dozens or hundreds of people at a wedding party in his family’s Scottish castle, drinking heavily
In search of something more stimulating, Roy approaches Andrew Dodds, a waiter fired that very evening by Roy’s father, whom “Doddsy” had the temerity to accidentally slosh with champagne, thanks in large part to the elder Roy’s own actions.
Anyway, Doddsy is out on the grounds smoking a joint when Kendall Roy asks him idf he knows a guy who can get him “some powder.”
Doddsy says he does and returns with said powder, only due to a misunderstanding, it’s ketamine and not the cocaine Kendall was after. Because ketamine is the last kind of buzz you want at a family soiree, Kendall strongly suggests they head back into town for some blow.
Doddsy is too smashed on ketamine to drive, so Kendall, who barely knows how to drive because he’s a rich kid raised in Manhattan and therefore has never had to learn, offers to take the wheel. While drunk. After dark. Driving on the wrong side of the road in Scotland, on windy, narrow country lanes.
And of course, a deer gets in their way and the car ends up in a canal. Kendall escapes the sinking car, and Doddsy drowns.
Kendall does not report the accident to anyone. His father discovers his role in it instead and uses it as leverage over his wayward and rebellious boy.
So, you see, there are just too many commonalities for that to be mere coincidence.
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong had to have been an ardent follower of the Goodman case, and that would have been easy to do even in Armstrong’s native England, as the story was picked up with great gusto by your favorite sleazy tabloid and mine, the Daily Mail. The story linked above is only one of nine the Mail has on its website right now.
And as the holder of a degree in American studies from the University of Manchester, Armstrong likely had some working knowledge of the US media, so even while the Mail often fudges its sourcing of the stories it swipes from other reporters all over the globe, Armstrong would have known where to find the most in-depth coverage — the tabloid-y daily papers of South Florida, home of many an expatriated Brit and Aussie journalist and the National Enquirer. Their print media might be the most aggressive of any in America, more so than that of New York. They just seem to hit different in my experience, from the alt-weeklies up to the regions paper of record, the Miami Herald.
So, anyway, yeah, that was thrilling to see something I had contributed to even in such a tiny way, helping to write the rough draft of a history now transmuted into high art.
Which brings me to a point about writing, a tip for those of you who aspire to craft the kind of stories that might make it on HBO or some other streaming service. (The time has past for dangling offers of the “silver screen” as an inducement to young writers, unless those writers are heavily into comic books or blockbuster sci-fi franchises)
And that is this: don’t settle. Why make a movie about John Goodman’s vehicular homicide of Scott Wilson, sticking as close to the facts as possible, when you can instead take the framework of that tale and spin it within a larger tapestry that also encompasses other strands? Transform ugly reality into art, while retaining the essential truth, the nut of the story — namely, that the rich believe they are a higher order of being than the rest of us, and thus should be above the laws they craft to keep their lessers — that would be us — in line? If you are so moved by the tragedy that inspired this work of art to begin with, there will be plenty of time to tell everyone about it via press interviews and from the podium at awards shows.
Anyway, this is what Armstrong did with the facts of the Goodman events. He took an event from one family of degenerate but relatively obscure plutocrats and placed it into the story of another similar family that happens to be widely renowned all over the planet.
However, he does go a bit Hollywood, a bit soft and sentimental, and here is how.
Unlike Goodman, Kendall Roy is eaten alive by his conscience. He cannot bear to ponder what he did to Doddsy, his father’s assurance that no real person had been involved or no. And so where the series leaves off, he is pondering a confession that might cleanse his soul, albeit with a prison term as the price.
Although, maybe just maybe, he is thinking that implicating dear old dad in the cover-up might be just the kind of Hail Mary pass that could vault him back into pole position as heir to the company’s leadership. Perhaps his thinking is, Hey, if I confess and do my time and really do lay off the booze and coke this time, I’ll look better than dad, who tried so hard ro cover up my act of manslaughter and has lied about it publicly for years now. And will probably continue to do so even as I spill my guts, but I will conceal evidence proving him wrong until the time is right, and then…
Which probably won’t work, but as an addict in the full throes of that addiction, and with the weight of a dead young man’s soul dragging down what little remains of his own, Kendall is not thinking too clearly.
Okay, so maybe this will prove to be just another of Kendall’s Oedipal schemes. So far, Succession has yet to disappoint in bringing us ever-deeper sinks of depravity to which its characters may succumb.
But in real life, John Goodman has displayed almost no remorse for taking the real like of Scott Patrick Wilson, who was not a real person.
First Goodman fled the scene of the crime. Then, thanks to his millions, he managed to stave off his trial for a few years, instead enjoying house arrest at his palatial estate, though, and full credit to the judge in his case, he was made to pay for 24-7 prison guards even in his luxurious mansion.
He tried to escape by cutting off his ankle monitor. On the stand, he tried to blame his Bentley for malfunctioning on him. He lied about how much he’d had to drink and when he had it — claiming at one point to have just had a couple, though his arresting officer testified that he reeked so profusely it seemed to be coming from his pores and reporting that he had to roll down the windows of his squad car for some fresh air.
In post-conviction proceedings, Goodman admitted to a high level of intoxication, but claimed to have stumbled in his post-wreck daze upon an unlocked, untended man-cave belonging to another rich dude, where Goodman found and chugged a bottle of liquor to ease the pain of the injuries he’d suffered while killing Wilson. Because really how dare Wilson and his grotesque little Hyundai break Goodman’s wrist and cause extensive front-end damage to his Bentley?
Upon receiving his 16-year prison term, he has filed a series of ever more ridiculous appeals in which he attempts to cast blame on his attorneys — not real people — or anyone else but John Goodman, Real Person. He attempted to, get this, adopt his girlfriend, another real person, as his daughter in order to protect his fortune from civil litigation filed by the grieving Wilson family.
Who are not real people, after all. And in real life, the not-real among us are made to suffer even more than in fiction.
Goodman is the asshole who hit and ran sideswiped the El Orbits custom painted station wagon in front of my parents house while I was playing a show at the Ale House. My mother and our neighbor followed him and his partially wrecked G Wagon to a house on River Oaks Blvd where they confronted him. Cops were mildly involved and after denying he hit the car (red paint all over his g wagon) he confessed he'd been changing the radio station on his steering wheel after a few drinks and dinner at Carrabba's. Paid me $1200 for the damage (we drove the car for a while longer but it was pretty wrecked) . This was in 2002.
I remember the story imperfectly but with the Sterling/Reckling/Masterson connection to Goodman, it was sort of hard to miss. For example, I didn't remember that the actual "incident" occurred in Florida because here there was no shortage of wagging tongues. I have never seen Succession so was blissfully unaware of that angle. This is a story not unlike the Candace Mossler murder trial (along with her nephew) that also took place in Florida where both beat the rap represented by Percy Foreman. All of these people may or may not have been real but just like fiction, in the end, they are very real. As real as any performer or audience or even reporter.