On this particular night in London, Portis and the others were playing cards in a room thick with smoke.

As he put it in a column for the Gazette when he was only twenty-four, “Show me a reporter and I’ll show you an arrested cretin.” They probably provide a more useful service.” His low opinion of his own field, not historically all that uncommon, developed early. “Something like barber college-not to offend the barbers. “I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard,” he once said of his decision to study journalism. “It was cold, damp, and the people were pretentious.” Added to this was his growing contempt for the institution of journalism itself, and consequently for other journalists. “He never liked London from day one,” his friend and former colleague at the Arkansas Gazette Roy Reed would later remember. He resented the city’s bureaucracy, its weather, the tailored suit jacket he wore every day to work. His time in London had been marked by noxious and near-constant concerns over protocol. “I began to wonder about protocol,” he later recalled. As the London bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune, he’d already interviewed Marlon Brando and reported from the set of Goldfinger.

He’d spent stretches of his earliest years in journalism trailing Elvis and Martin Luther King Jr.

Born in 1933, he’d been raised along the southern border of Arkansas, in that region one of his narrators calls “the Arklatex”-where Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas converge-before serving in the Korean War. Portis was by then mostly inured to the aura of celebrity. Not long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a rare invitation to “Her Majesty’s Afternoon Party,” he found himself in a one-bedroom apartment getting summarily hammered with a group of foreign correspondents.

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