It began when a friend at thecollege I was teaching at in1969 decided to create a studyabroad program in Deià. Heasked me to be his AssociateDirector (after another friend haddecided he couldn’t do it). TheMediter ranean Institute enrolledtwenty-five students from allover the U.S. to study art and lit-erature. We invited some fineguest writers to stay and givelectures, including the Englishnovelists Colin Wilson andAnthony Burgess and theAmerican poet Galway Kinnell.

And Robert Graves, then still liv-ing, was also to grace us with abrief talk.

In the summer of 1969 I and mywife and three sons arrived twomonths before the Institute wasto open. I became friends withJay Linthicum, a young poet andnovelist (then 23) who wasfiercely ambitious. He and I soonbegan collaborating on a pot-boiler novel about sex and drugsin Deià. Jay persuaded me to lethim read the manuscript pagesof The Dice Man. He was the first

person to see the novel otherthan my wife. How Jay felt aboutthe book I no longer recall, butclearly he neither panned it norraved about it or I wouldremember.

In any case, in early November1969, when Jay was sitting in theSa Fonda Cafe, an Englishman,Mike Franklin, who had just creat-ed a publishing company with arock impresario named Talmy,happened to be passing throughthe village. Jay and he met at thecafé and began talking. Jay

eagerly mentioned the fact thathe had a finished novel and thathe and I were collaborating on apotboiler that would make us alla lot of money. As an aside hementioned that I was also work-ing on a novel. Mike Franklinasked us to give him the manu-scripts of all three books.

Weeks later Mike wired us (ah,the quaint old days of WesternUnion) that he’d like to publishboth the potboiler and The DiceMan. He suggested modestadvances for each of the two

The Dice Man, Deià, and ChanceBy Luke Rhinehart

Deià, a small coastal village on the northern ridge of the Spanish island of

Majorca, is known for its literary and musical residents.

Jay Linthicum and Luke at Sa Fonda Cafe, Deià, 1969

The Dice Man is a novel that in most all possible

universes would never have been finished and

never published. But Chance, ever busy, creat-

ed a series of accidents in 1969-70 in Deià, Mallorca,

that allowed a 222 page manuscript written over four

years by an un-ambitious, unpublished 37-year-old

college professor to be discovered and finished.

A young Englishman startinga new publishing house dis-covered the book in a Deiàcafé and signed me up topublish it. I was thus encour-aged to complete the final500 manuscript pages in lessthan six months—after aver-aging only 50 pages a yearover the previous four years.

As a result, Deià in that yearhas always been for me themost special place in theworld. Its beauty, ambiance,and gathering of interestingartists and writers made it special in the summer and fall of1969 even before my barely begun manuscript was unex-pectedly discovered. The events that brought me and myfamily to Deià and then led to my life being transformed fromcollege professor to novelist are worth describing.

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books. To our surprise, he offeredmore for The Dice Man, an intel-lectual book that had no com-mercial potential (in our eyes)than for our potboiler, which wasso au currant we were convincedit would become a bestseller.

So Chance had intervened to getmy book first a reader, and then a publisher. Next it intervened togive me the time actually to writethe book.

In 1969 the hippie revolutionwas at full tilt. Bob De Mariafound that smoking pot madehim feel he was about to have aheart attack. He much preferredalcohol. As Director of theInstitute he felt he had to bestrongly anti-dope. I wouldsometimes smoke dope with afew of the students. As a result,he asked me to take an early sab-batical—in the spring of 1970rather than later that fall as I hadplanned. He would find someoneelse to teach my courses.  I hap-pily agreed.

So in the winter-spring of 1970 Iand my family continued livingin Deià and I began finishing TheDice Man. At the same time I con-tinued work with Jay on the pot-boiler. Each morning  I would gomerrily up to my study in SesFigueres, (the name of the housein Deià we were renting), workfor three or four hours on THEDICE MAN, take a break, andthen work for a couple of hourson my sections of the potboiler.Sometimes I would let the dicedecide which book I should workon or which new scene I shouldwrite. By late May I had finishedThe Dice Man and my half of thepotboiler, and both completedbooks were sent off to MikeFranklin in London.

To my surprise Mike announcedthat he found that The Dice Man,although needing a bit of work,pretty good. (Later he wouldrefer to it as a “near master-piece”), but about the potboilerhe had some concerns. My stylewas simple and direct and I tooka comic look at everything. Jay’sstyle was convoluted and poeticand he took a serious look ateverything. Our collaborationwas probably doomed from the

beginning, but we were too inex-perienced to know it.

Then Chance intervened again. Ihad decided to invest my lifetimesavings ($11,000) in a sailboat tocruise the Mediterranean. Ibought a 30-ft. Catalac catama-ran lurking in Antibes and I andmy family boarded in June tobegin cruising a bit before sailingonto Mallorca in time to meetMike Franklin in late July to dis-cuss possible revisions of TheDice Man. The day before we leftto go to the boat Lloyds ofLondon wrote me a note to ask ifI wanted to continue the insur-ance on the boat of the previousowner. Being the author of a newnovel that celebrated chance, Ifelt it was my duty never to insureanything.. At the last second,however, I decided that perhapsjust this once, being the first timeI would have sailed a boat in theopen sea, I would go against allmy principles and get a littleinsurance. So I dashed off a noteto Lloyds simply saying “yes.”

We cruised from Antibes alongthe French Riviera to Genoa andthen south down to Pisa and thenacross to Corsica and Sardenia.On the day we were to set sail inclear calm weather for Mallorca,my wife had an overwhelmingpremonition of disaster. She firsttried to see if she and our twoyoungest boys could get a boator plane to Mallorca, but whenthat proved impossible she (whohadn’t been inside a church inseveral years) went into a littleseaside chapel to pray.

Luke at the helm of the doomed

Catina

Luke's family picnics in mountains above Soller.

Colin Wilson, center, with Institute students

THE DICE MAN, DEIÀ, AND CHANCE

Luke's sons Corby and Powers on Catina off French Riviera

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Eight hours out from Sardenia,motoring all the time in the deadcalm waters, our engine brokedown. I couldn’t fix it.

But then the wind arrived! Howwonderful! We began sailing. Thewind became fresh. We sailedfaster! The wind became stronger.We reduced sail. The wind becamea gale. We lowered all sails. Thewind became a huge gale, a mistralblowing down off the Alps in finesunny weather, waves ten feet highand breaking on top.

The morning after the storm hadfirst hit us we awoke to find oneof our two rudders sheered off.Later that second day, we lostour rubber dinghy, our only liferaft, which I had rigged as a seaanchor to hold the catamaran’sbow into the wind and seas. Welost our main halyard up to thetop of the mast. We were thuswithout power, without steeringability, without a life raft and noway to raise a sail unless some-one climbed to the top of themast in a gale.

The storm increased. We knewthat if our catamaran capsizedthat we would all die. For threenights I and the boys lay in ourbunks and heard the huge rollershissing towards us and thencrashing into the side of the boat,the boat tipping, tipping . . . . Allthree nights, although there wasnothing she could actually do, mywife stayed on deck, willing thewaves not capsize us. At some point I apologized to herfor killing her and the boys, andsaid I would never make the samemistake again.

On the fourth day, we saw afreighter in the distance and shotoff flares to attract its attention.We were rescued. The Scottish

freighter had been blown 200miles off course by the gale andthus appeared to rescue us. Wewere less than forty miles from adeserted section of the Africancoast where within ten hours ourlittle boat would have beendashed to pieces on the rocks .

I wanted to stay and try to savethe ship, but the Scottish Captainknew a fool when he saw one andpretty much ordered me to stayaboard his freighter while hetried to tow our boat to his nextport of call. I asked him where hisnext port of call was, and he saidHong Kong.

Actually it was O Porto, Portugal.He tried to get a message to Deiàto tell people that we were aliveand well but no one in Deià evergot the message (primitive timesback then, no cell phones, etc.).

Mike Franklin arrived in Deià tomeet the author of the novel thathe thought was quite promisingand found I hadn’t arrived asexpected. Nothing but the hugewaves crashing all along thecoast. My brother and his familyarrived to vacation with us andfound we were nowhere to befound, only huge waves crashingalong the coast. Mike began towonder if The Dice Man wouldsell better if he could promotethe story of the author’s tragicdeath.

Eventually we arrived back inDeià, our progress slowed by ourhaving lost our money and pass-ports when the catamaran sankwithin a half hour of being towedby the freighter. Mike had longsince gone back to London. Andwith him any chance of our work-ing together to make the novelbetter. (I did revise it a tiny bit inAugust but without much inputfrom the publisher).

With the loss of our catamaran,we were essentially penniless. Ichecked the piles of mail await-ing us and found nothing fromLloyds. Penniless. The next day Ichecked the mail again. A letterfrom Lloyds. They wrote thatthey would be happy to insurethe boat and would I please sendthe first year’s premium of onehundred and ninety pounds. I

sent off a check for one hundredand ninety pounds. Ten days laterI wrote them to sadly report thatthe boat had been lost in theMediterranean and would theyplease send me a check for seventhousand pounds.

Within a couple of months Mikesold American rights for a largeadvance and I was able to retirefrom teaching, and, after a yearback in the States, Mike sold filmrights to Paramount, who hadsigned up Academy Award win-ning director John Schlesinger todirect. (Forty years later and adozen screenplays later, still nofilm). In any case, such temporarywealth let us return to Deià in1972-1973.

There is one footnote to thislong story. What happenedto the pot boiler? When TheDice Man turned out to make mesome money and Mike Franklynsaid he really didn’t want to pub-lish the potboiler, I decided toshare some of my success withthe man who Chance had used toget me to finish the book. Ibought all of Jay’s rights to thepotboiler so I could make a novelof my own out of it.

Once in the seventies and oncein the eighties I took it up and

tried to create a coherent andamusing story out of the dis-parate stuff Jay and I hadwrought, eventually throwingout ninety-nine per cent of whatJay had written, not because itwas bad but because his sensi-bility was so different from mine.However, I was still not creatinga novel I was happy with. Then in2004 my wife urged me to tryagain: the book contained somany delightful comic sceneswritten literally at the same timeas and in the same manner asscenes in The Dice Man. So Irevised it yet again and this timewas pleased with the result:Naked Before The World: ALovely Pornographic Love Story.

And that comic novel, set entire-ly on Mallorca and mostly Deià,about an Institute and its stu-dents and professors and hippies,is now being made into a film,based on my screenplay. So wehope again, within the next sixmonths, to return for the filmingto our lovely Deià.

But as the novelist Thomas Wolfeso famously said: “You can’t gohome again.” Deià will neveragain be what it was for me inthat one year of 1969-70: theplace where a writer, thanks tomany accidents, was born.

Ses Figueres, the house in Deià

where Luke penned The Dice Man

The original pot boiler started with Jay Linthicum eventually becomes a

comic novel, Naked Before The World, and is now being made into a filmstarring Kristanna Loken.

THE DICE MAN, DEIÀ, AND CHANCE