by John Cheever
Life at Astoria—as veterans of the Signal Corps Photographic Center call their post—contrasted sharply with the restrictions and rigors of Regular Army duty in the South. Cheever was treated like a professional there, and granted certain privileges accordingly. Best of all, he could live at home in New York with Mary, now seven months pregnant, and commute to his work like a civilian.
In preparation for the baby, the Cheevers settled into a small garden apartment on Twenty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues in Chelsea. It was not a fashionable neighborhood in those days. On their first Sunday in residence, an outraged cry punctured the morning quiet as Mary served breakfast outdoors. “Dontcha call me a whore,” a whore yelled. That night a drunken woman wearing a feather boa and carrying a fluffy dog under her arm stopped to pee in the gutter. Cheever was back in New York.
At three in the morning on July 31, Mary gave birth to a healthy eight-pound baby girl they named Susan Liley Cheever. John was on hand during delivery, and held Mary in his arms through the last of a long labor. Both parents were very proud. Mary “liked being pregnant … and now she likes nursing,” John wrote Josephine Herbst. “Mother’s bird,” Mary called the baby, and attached a rose over her cradle. As for John, the birth made him “absurdly happy.” Having a child, his father used to tell him, was as easy as “blowing a feather off one’s knee.” But Cheever felt a kind of rapture mingled with justification. Susan’s arrival, and later that of her brothers, Ben and Fred, gave him the family he ardently wanted. The most exciting days of his life, he was often to proclaim, were the days his children were born.
The Signal Corps Photographic Center where the new father went to work occupied the capacious grounds of the studios at Thirty-fifth Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street in Astoria, Queens. Many of the great silent movies of the 1920s had been made there. Quiescent during the Depression, the studio hummed to life as part of the propaganda war that Frank Capra—deputized by President Roosevelt—was leading against the sophisticated techniques of Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis. In charge of operations when Cheever came on board in 1943 was Colonel Manny Cohen, the five-foot-tall former production chief at Paramount Studios. Stanley Kramer was administrative head. Head writer Leonard Spigelgass directed the work of such professionals as Irwin Shaw, William Saroyan, Carl Foreman, Don Ettlinger, Arnand D’Usseau, Jimmy Gow, John D. Weaver, and Ted Mills. Their primary function was to write scripts for the biweekly Army-Navy Screen Magazine, a film series “using fact and humor, animation, combat footage and specially photographed features to answer gripes, clear up confusions and misunderstandings, pass on information about new policies or plans,” and in general improve morale among the nation’s servicemen. The unit also turned out special films on the D-Day landings, the liberation of Paris, and so forth. As a group the filmmakers felt a strong sense of mission as “shock troops in the idea war,” along with an uneasy sense that they were really amateurs at the business of propaganda.
The army mustered the best writing talent it could find, but even in this all-star cast Cheever stood out. After reading a dozen or so scripts, Weaver recalled, he realized that Cheever was “by far the best writer of our group.” Mills, sitting at the desk opposite, marveled at the way Cheever sweated over selecting the right verb for the ear instead of the eye, and at “the lean purity” of the language he composed for the voices of such favorite narrators as José Ferrer. He was also extremely productive. “One problem immediately arose,” Spigelgass recalled. “There wasn’t enough work for him.… There never was. He was a writing machine.”
The filmmakers at Astoria had an important job to do, but they were determined to be as unmilitary about it as possible. The place soon became a battleground between these free-spirited professionals and Regular Army types frantically trying to impose some discipline. The men were damned if they’d show up for muster at 6:00 A.M. or live in the barracks provided. According to legend, Irwin Shaw and Bill Saroyan did turn out, ostentatiously, for one early-morning muster. Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life had made a great deal of money, so he hired a Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur uniformed like an admiral in the Venezuelan navy to drive them to Astoria. At 5:58 A.M., the Rolls pulled up next to the parade ground, the garishly uniformed chauffeur opened the doors, and Shaw and Saroyan fell in with the other moviemakers. Roll call was advanced to a more reasonable hour, and even then the writers usually adjourned to Borden’s for bagels, cream cheese, and coffee before settling down to work.
Efforts at shaping up the unit were also compromised by Colonel Cohen’s diminutive stature. “The mini-colonel,” he was called. In the subway kids used to grab his cap and run with it. One yarn has it that a ramrod-straight major general, a West Pointer, marched into Cohen’s office and lectured him on the need for order and discipline. “When a superior officer enters the room, the least you can do is stand up,” he thundered. “But, General,” the mini-colonel responded, “I am standing up.” The general left in disarray, defeated.
Though Cheever did have an unsuccessful interview with an OCS selection committee, and still wished he could serve overseas as a correspondent for Yank, he was doing about as well as an enlisted man could expect at Astoria, and remained stationed there for more than two years, until his discharge in November 1945. Along the way he made some of the closest friends of his life, including Weaver, Ettlinger, and producer Leonard Field. For the most part they called each other by their last names. Rank counted for almost nothing, except when they wanted it to. Cheever, Ettlinger, and Mills, for example, dubbed themselves the Three Sergeants. Together they threw a wild New Year’s Eve party in Greenwich Village, inviting almost everyone they could think of. To their surprise almost everyone showed up, and all the champagne was gone by eleven o’clock. Cheever then discovered a case of club soda, this was dispensed in lieu of the bubbly, and no one was sober enough to notice the difference. At midnight Manny Cohen made a maudlin speech about the Three Sergeants. On the spot the mini-colonel was made an honorary member of their brotherhood.
A fine spirit of comradeship developed among the amateur propagandists of Astoria, only occasionally disturbed by a sense of guilt that they were having too good a time and not getting shot at. On Wednesday morning they settled down at their desks, and as if on cue whipped out their copies of Variety. Once a week or so they made a run across the bridge for lunch at Canarie d’Or in Manhattan, ordering two dry martinis and two pots de crème au chocolat apiece in advance. Comedian Herbie Baker did a wonderful imitation of the maître d’s suspicious French. Cheever himself perfected a takeoff on the standard VD lecture, warning in his own fake French against the dangers of “le bal bleu.” This performance he delivered at parties, where he used to be “the brightest person in the room until ten o’clock, when he fell over drunk.” Even in a hard-drinking group, there were those who thought he was overdoing it.
The political stance at Astoria tilted sharply to the left. Three of the men Cheever worked with in Building Six attended Communist cell meetings. Anti-Fascism was the watchword, and there was talk of freedom, liberty, and justice—terms that Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to devalue as subversive a decade later. The Three Sergeants, liberal but decidedly not Communist, were invited to parties in Manhattan given by such glamorous show-business figures as Fredric March, Abe Burrows, Paul Draper, and Moss Hart on behalf of the Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (CCASP). Certain attempts were made at these gatherings to recruit Party members, Mills reports. An attractive female Communist he met at one such occasion took him to bed, and after use of an “exquisite instrument” spoke of seeing him at the Party meeting the next day. Mills did not go. Cheever, married, was less susceptible to such means of persuasion. Besides, he resented the “assault on the language” he encountered in the speeches of American Communist leader Earl Browder. Communism was not for him, Cheever decided. He was considering going in for “some form of sun worship” instead, he wrote Josie Herbst.
In the f
all of 1944 the Cheevers embarked upon an experiment in communal living, bourgeois-style. Together with two other couples they rented a town house at 8 East Ninety-second Street for two hundred dollars a month, unfurnished. At the time it was virtually impossible to locate roomy apartments for growing families—each of the three couples had a child—and the house on Ninety-second Street offered amenities of space and decoration they could not have afforded separately. It had eight flush toilets and five floors. There was a handsomely paneled library and a morning room. The floor of the downstairs hall was made of black and white marble. Each of the couples occupied a bedroom, dressing room, and bath; each of the children had a bedroom and bath. The only telephone was in the Cheevers’ upstairs bedroom. Friends were warned to let it ring a long time when they called.
The other renters were John and Peggy McManus and Reuel and Ruth Denney. Film editor McManus worked with Cheever at Astoria, and his wife had known Mary Cheever at Sarah Lawrence. Denney, later to become a distinguished scholar, worked for Time-Life. From the beginning there were tensions among the tenants. The Denneys were serious, intellectual, the McManuses gay, party-loving. The Cheevers more or less held the middle ground, but in time that proved to be untenable territory. In an effort to secure community of purpose, the three couples decided to take turns cooking dinner. This endeavor failed when one of the three young matrons prepared elegant gourmet meals, another heated up Spam, and the third burned her meat loaf. A child spat at a mother, not his own. Another child wrecked the flower garden. One of the women washed her hair in the kitchen sink. A secondhand bed purchased to furnish the place turned out to have bedbugs that traveled. In the spring and summer of 1945, matters grew even worse. “In the house there has been constant disorder, hysteria, and vermin,” Mary reported to Josie Herbst in July 1945, along with the joyful news that she had found an apartment of their own at 400 East Fifty-ninth Street.
However unpleasant things may have been at the town house, Cheever knew how to capitalize on the experience. First he regaled his fellow travelers in the car pool to Astoria with the ongoing story of the house on Ninety-second Street. Then he began to work nights transforming what happened into “funny, funny pieces” for The New Yorker. He wrote six of these “Town House” stories, all published between April 1945 and May 1946. Negotiations also began for a Broadway play based on the stories, inspiring visions of a financial windfall.
In April 1945, Cheever finally got a taste of overseas service on a research-and-writing trip to Guam and the Philippines. En route he stopped in Chicago to see Dorothy Farrell. They went out to dinner in her new Ford roadster, which ran about half a block and stalled. Cheever got out to push, and gleefully started berating her.
“I come all this way to see you, and you make me push your car,” he said. “How much did you pay for it, anyway?”
“I bought it from my dentist,” she said. “I paid seventy-five dollars.”
“He’s some dentist. Are you sure you’ve still got your teeth?”
Later that night, Cheever’s jocular mood gave way to melancholy, and Dorothy did what she could to comfort him. They were the same age, but it was almost as though she were mothering him. On arrival in Los Angeles, he wrote to tell Mary how much he missed her and Susan. “I have never left anyone so reluctantly.” To make the time pass he started reading The Best Known Novels of George Eliot.
He stayed in Los Angeles for a week, taking shots for bubonic plague and getting an impression of the city. The motion-picture industry affected almost everything. All the women had conspicuous breasts, wore fancy hats and furs, and ate in drugstores, waiting to be discovered. He and Carl Foreman went to the Brown Derby instead. Then he finished Adam Bede, started The Mill on the Floss (“a dog,” he reported), and flew to the Marianas.
When he landed at Guam at dusk, the public-address system was playing a Strauss waltz. At the edge of the jungle one evening, he heard someone playing Chopin. It was the soundtrack from A Song to Remember, with Merle Oberon and Cornel Wilde. Troops in the Pacific were obsessed with collecting Japanese souvenirs, he discovered, and built that observation into a story. Having completed The Mill on the Floss—he had only Romola and Silas Marner left—he was off to the Philippines, where daily existence did not much resemble that on Ninety-second Street. One morning a monkey that had set up headquarters in Cheever’s tent bit a native who came by selling bananas. The monkey found its way into a story, too. Manila was a casualty of the war; “there was absolutely nothing over waist-high” in the city.
On V-E Day Cheever was in the Marianas again. There was no celebration on Guam. The war in the Pacific was not over. Early in June he was on his way home, and glad of it. “It seems incredible that I’m finally coming back,” he wrote Mary. He had been away just over two months.
Late in July the Cheevers abandoned the ménage at Ninety-second Street to move to their freshly painted East Side apartment in the same neighborhood, if not the same rent district, as Sutton Place. “Here we are,” Mary wrote Josie Herbst, “living like the wicked rich surrounded by swells and movie magnates and the reproachful stares of doormen and other dignitaries whom we can’t afford to tip.” Susie occupied “her little suite, and ours as well, with the ease and airs of a well-kept woman,” Mary reported. Often her parents took her along with them in the evening. During a party at Irwin and Marian Shaw’s, Susie as radiant toddler shared the spotlight with Ingrid Bergman.
In August the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima and the war was soon over. Mary and Susie were at Treetops on V-J Day, so Cheever celebrated with Don and Katrina Ettlinger. They hired a taxi and shouted from the windows, “La guerre est finie.” Like most other servicemen, Cheever was eager to return to civilian life as soon as possible. He was discharged at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, on November 27, 1945, having served in the army for three years, six months, and twenty days. Cheever was disbursed $187.03 in mustering-out pay and went back to New York “with a wonderful sense of liberation.”
During the war years Cheever saw more and more of the Winternitzes and less and less of his own family. His relations with his parents were “correct” but “never intimate,” as he later said. Rightly or wrongly he believed that they had rejected him. “I think they were terribly disappointed that I survived the war,” he told Pete Collins. One of the most touching of his army stories is about a young soldier who returns home to find that his parents have “adopted” a youth stationed nearby in his stead.
Cheever’s father, retired for twenty years, mellowed into a sweet patient man who drew pictures of boats for his grandchildren (Fred and Iris’s children) on Sundays. To the end he remained very dapper, with beautiful white hair and bushy eyebrows, and smelled fresh and clean, probably of bay rum. Late in 1945 he died at eighty-two, and John went to Norwell for the funeral at Fred’s house. His mother told him on the drive over from Quincy that his father had passed away sitting in a wing chair beside a cup of tea. On a table nearby was another cup of tea with two cigarette butts, stained by lipstick, in the saucer. Whoever had been with him that day never came forward, but they concluded that for her it must have been “a terrible afternoon.” At the graveside, Mrs. Cheever wanted John to read Prospero’s speech from The Tempest—it was something, she said, that his father had requested—but he refused. (Prospero’s words, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” were later engraved on his tombstone.) “It was a very long association,” Mrs. Cheever remarked at the graveside.
As a civilian, Cheever had more time to watch his daughter grow, along with an exacerbated awareness of the need to support his family through his writing. Nothing was to be wasted. The Cheevers spent the New Year’s holiday at Candlewood Lake with the Ettlingers, where a primitive ski lift jerkily conveyed skiers up the hill. John’s “vacuum mind” took it all in: in a story of his, a little girl is caught in a similar ski lift. Susie was in fact unscathed, except that back in New York she became convinced that a lion lived in her room (“The lion is busy,”
she had heard over the telephone). She took the lion on walks in the neighborhood, struggling to keep him on the leash. The creature stayed in the city when the family went up to Treetops for most of the summer.
Life at Treetops conformed to a regular routine. During the summer up to twenty-five people might be on the grounds, living in individual cottages. Dr. and Mrs. Winternitz occupied Stone House, the large central building the doctor had constructed largely with his own hands. “Winter” was very much in charge; some awe was commingled in Cheever’s admiration for him. Polly served as hostess and manager, ordering quantities of detergent, mayonnaise, and toilet paper as if for a hotel. Each morning after breakfast everyone went to the vast vegetable gardens and picked corn or squash or raspberries, whatever was in season. The rest of the day was free, except for lunch and the almost obligatory swim in the lake. Cheever soon began to climb the nearby mountains with Bill Winternitz, Mary’s younger brother, and with Joe Hotchkiss, who had married her stepsister Janie. The people he met at high altitudes in the Appalachian Mountain Club huts fascinated him, and eventually he converted his hikes into an article for Holiday on the New Hampshire mountains.
Often he and Joe hustled home from their climbing to be in time for the grand social hour at Stone House, which commenced precisely at 6:00 P.M. and ended at 7:00 P.M. with the ringing of the dinner bell. Some hard drinking was done during that daily one-hour cocktail party. On Sundays the Treetops schedule changed. For the Sabbath only, drinking was permitted at lunch, and ordinarily there was homemade ice cream with the meal. Once, Hotchkiss recalls, he and Cheever nearly cranked their arms off trying to make the rum ice cream harden. Polly, it turned out, had poured in too much of the principal ingredient.
Cheever was “nearly always friendly” in those days, Hotchkiss observes, except when he caught a whiff of unkindness in someone else’s behavior. He felt strongly about good manners and about the respect for the feelings of others that lay behind them. And “he was good with so many different sorts of people,” too. Polly adored him, Winter was very proud of him, and for six to eight years after the war he felt himself more their son than their son-in-law. He also got along well with the hired help, as did Susie. She sequestered herself in the back of the house with the Swedish cook and her children, acquiring their speech patterns in the process. “Ain’t the Winternitzes got a nice summer place?” she asked her father. Meanwhile, he made friends with a doctrinaire Communist from Czechoslovakia who farmed the land and took care of the buildings the year round. Cheever helped him plow the fields, and undertook to be of assistance by ridding the place of the raccoons that were eating dozens of ears of corn each night.