The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  The PR piece went on to speculate that perhaps it was because in books like Long Remember, Mack had shown himself to be a “writer with deep sympathy and understanding of the American scene,” or because several of his books had already become successful movies, or because he’d just “lived through a particularly intense period as virtual member of a heavy bombardment group.”

  Anyway, Goldwyn called, and Kantor came. “Within a week he was in Hollywood. (‘A few minutes of conversation with Goldwyn,’ his biographer Alva Johnson once wrote, ‘and writers go to California as if extradited.’)”

  A month later, the account continues, Mack entered Goldwyn’s office not with the requested fifty-to-sixty-page screen treatment, but one hundred typed pages that covered only the first quarter of the story—“in blank verse!”

  “Whatever consternation the producer experienced he managed successfully to conceal, and Mr. Kantor was instructed to continue his ‘treatment.’”

  I found an annotation in a Library of Congress file that sheds light on Mack’s odd approach to this assignment. A year before Goldwyn called him, during his first return home from the war, Mack made a journey around the country “to call on the next of kin of a number of the boys I had known who had gone down. From this highly emotional experience” came the idea of writing a story about a returning vet forcing himself to visit his fallen comrades’ families and confront the altered landscape of home. It didn’t go well. “It seemed that I couldn’t write about anything except the war, and yet somehow I couldn’t get started properly.” He put aside the few aborted pages he’d managed, and returned to Europe and the 305th.

  When Goldwyn called, Mack, just back home again, saw an opportunity to begin afresh on the very subject he’d been forced to abandon. It went no better the second time around. He worked for a month in frustration, hating everything he wrote, until he thought of the success of the Bailey poem, and decided to try verse once more. After all, what subject could be more Homeric than coming home from the wars? Suddenly, something in him unlocked. He pounded out the first hundred pages in a fever, and that’s what he brought to Goldwyn. Either Goldwyn took it in good grace as the publicist claimed, or he didn’t. Some other articles cite allegedly eyewitness accounts of Goldwyn’s reaction to the manuscript. “What the hell am I going to do with this?” is one. “This is utterly useless” is another. But whatever Goldwyn’s reaction, it didn’t stop Mack from finishing.

  By the time he handed the completed screenplay to the movie mogul, it had mushroomed to 434 pages. The publicist’s account concludes in astonishment, “Mr. Goldwyn had bought a poem!”

  The most complete account comes in an extensive 1996 piece in the VQR literary journal by Philip D. Beidler. Beidler says that, first of all, it wasn’t true that Mack “came immediately to Goldwyn’s mind,” as the publicist would have us believe. The producer would have preferred to have had Lillian Hellman write the treatment, but the two were feuding. His second choice would have been Sidney Howard, who wrote the screenplay for Gone with the Wind, but Howard had been dead for five years.

  So, Mack.

  What Mack delivered to Goldwyn, “a homey conflation of verse modes” according to Beidler, “seemed so eccentric . . . he gave up on it at once as unfilmable and prepared to write off the whole business as a bad $12,500 self-indulgence.”

  Beidler asserts that the director William Wyler, just back from the war himself and still owing Goldwyn a film on his prewar contract, was the sole reason that Glory for Me didn’t end up in the trash heap. Goldwyn tried to interest Wyler in two other projects without success. In desperation he pulled Mack’s poem out of the circular file.

  I found a 1946 interview with Wyler in The New York World-Telegram in which he describes his reaction: “I told Mr. Goldwyn I didn’t want to work for a long time. He asked me to read some stories, and I read a good many of them. Then when I hit this thing of MacKinlay Kantor’s it really set me on fire. Whatever anybody contributed to this production, the primary thing is that it was Kantor’s inspiration that made the picture possible. He is really responsible for the whole thing.”

  (The glossy-paper account written by Goldwyn’s press agent entirely reversed the poles of the story. Wyler, it said, “soon became as enthusiastic about [Kantor’s] story as was Mr. Goldwyn himself.”)

  I was struck by something Wyler was quoted as saying at the end of Beidler’s essay. Talking about why his war experience had so affected him, Wyler said, “The war was an escape to reality. . . . The only thing that mattered were human relationships; not money, not position, not even family. . . . Only relationships with people who might be dead tomorrow were important. It is a sort of wonderful state of mind. It’s too bad it takes a war to create such a condition among men.”

  In Wyler’s words, I understood for the first time why my grandfather’s identification with the Air Force, the surly colonel who commanded him, and the slouching men posed beside planes painted with naked women in those group photos on the wall of his study had become a primal force, perhaps the primal force, throughout the remainder of his life.

  If that interest in, and identification with, the military by my grandfather influenced me in any way, it was to push me in the opposite direction. I grew up anti-regimentation (I was bounced from the Cub Scouts for wearing the wrong color socks to a “jubilee”), antiwar, and extremely suspicious of all men in uniform. Yet, when I found the love of my life, it just so happened that she was an Air Force colonel’s daughter who grew up on air bases around the world. And when I wrote my most recent nonfiction book, Acid Test, I chose as the emotional focus a Marine veteran of the Iraq War and his painful struggle to return to civilian life. In the scores of hours I spent getting to know the most intimate details of his combat experiences and their painful aftermath, and the weeks and months I spent writing about it, I never once considered the glaringly obvious connection between my work and my grandfather’s efforts in writing Glory for Me. Until. Just. Now.

  —

  Now I had a fairly complete picture of Mack’s involvement in the film, except for one thing: None of the accounts—except my mother’s and my uncle’s oral history—mentioned anything about Mack starting, and then abandoning, a screenplay.

  I was forced to wonder, Was that a fantasy? An artifact of a story too often told?

  Then I found it—in a bulging file stuffed into box 71 at the Library of Congress: the screenplay itself.

  At 226 pages, it is twice as long as most movie scripts, and it ends with a synopsis of unfinished scenes—which, fleshed out, would have made it even longer. So it seems that the “half-finished” screenplay idea my mother had told me about was an understatement.

  I found Mack’s explanation, once again, in his annotations: “I didn’t proceed any further with this because I quarreled with Goldwyn, who insisted I come to Hollywood and take a seven-year contract with him . . . at a suggested salary of $2,000 per week. I think that this was a lot of money for any young-middle-aged writer to turn down, but I had my complete fill of Mr. Goldwyn. All I wanted to do was to go back overseas, and when Goldwyn said somewhat sneeringly, Well, what good could you do over there? that really clinched the deal. Incidentally, Frances Goldwyn, his wife, told me that she considered this the greatest screenplay she had ever read in her life, even in its incomplete form.”

  Given the above, and the actual existence of the screenplay by my grandfather, the complete lack of any mention of it in the accounts, both from the 1940s and from recent retrospectives, is puzzling. The official press agent account says Wyler and Goldwyn were already hashing out “who should be cast in the principal roles and how certain scenes should be played. And then they remembered that they still lacked a screenplay.”

  It’s possible, even likely, that despite Mrs. Goldwyn’s alleged high opinion of it, Goldwyn and Wyler considered Mack’s script so unsuitable that it was not even worth mentioning. The
y hired four-time Pulitzer-winning dramatist Robert Sherwood to write the screenplay, and the contemporaneous articles say quite clearly that he based the work on the original story, not the first draft of a screenplay. In her 2007 biography of Sherwood, Harriet Hyman Alonso says the initial reaction of the playwright (and more recently FDR’s speechwriter) to the story was “negative. . . . He found Kantor’s emphasis on the veterans’ isolation and their ‘bitterness against civilians, whom they considered slackers and idlers’” too depressing. He said he’d work on the film only if he could make it clear that the vets realized that those on the home front also had had a tough time, and so would they as civilians. “Kantor was very amenable to the revisions,” Alonso wrote.

  Sherwood would win a Best Screenplay Oscar for his effort, and even Mack praised his work. But he clearly believed he deserved some of the credit.

  “I will not venture to estimate how much or how little Sherwood depended on my screenplay when he came to write his own,” he wrote. “I do know that I saw a copy of my play on his desk several times when I had business with him at the Goldwyn studio. Let me say, modestly, that I suppose it would be difficult for two accomplished writers to write their respective screenplays about the same story and keep them entirely dissimilar.

  “My own approach, I am now confident, was entirely too melodramatic. I am glad that this melodrama was finally discarded. . . . I have always had enormous respect for the talent of Bobby Sherwood.”

  In newspaper features on the opening of the film and its blockbuster success, Goldwyn, Wyler, and Sherwood all say kind things about Mack, and Mack lavishes praise on the film and everyone involved in making it. Nobody mentions the odd absence of the name of the novel Glory for Me in the movie credits, though later correspondence make it clear that Mack and Tim Coward conducted a campaign to correct that. Unsuccessfully.

  Goldwyn’s advertising director blew off their objections, saying, “Using the title Glory for Me would have been confusing to readers of the ads.”

  That’s about as clear a “fuck you” as I can imagine.

  So, despite the lovefest in the papers, there was bitterness, even infighting. Tim Coward wrote to Mack and threw a roundhouse at Donald Friede, Mack’s Hollywood agent. “Any agent who allows you to make a contract which is a means of putting out one of the greatest pictures in years without reference to your name and to the title of your book in public announcements should be bounced on his head.”

  The novel, which came out well before the movie release, had been reviewed viciously and sold poorly—at one point Coward sent a telegram warning that sales had come “to an absolute stop.” It seems that even in 1945, epic poetry was a hard sell.

  Now that the movie was such a hit, Goldwyn’s revenge on Mack—and surely it was revenge he intended, either for writing a poem instead of a treatment or for walking out on the screenplay—assured that Glory for Me would remain a relative failure.

  What should have been a high point in Mack’s career was actually the beginning of another decline. After Glory for Me, Mack worked on several small books that Coward rejected, and then wrote another Western novel Coward didn’t believe in and refused to publish without extensive revision.

  In the spring of 1947, Mack wrote back in anger, saying he wanted out of his contract with Coward-McCann.

  Coward responded with a letter that not only echoed Peggy Pulitzer’s breakup letter, but cited it. It must have been almost unbearable for my grandfather to read:

  Dear Mack,

  . . . I’m sorry indeed you are gone from us. It marks the end of an epoch. . . . I think you have been on the wrong track for years & I blame myself for not facing it & risking a showdown. I probably owed it to you, but whether you would have paid any attention I doubt. . . . Peggy criticized, but not the right things &, of course, Irene has never had the courage or perhaps the knowledge to stand up to you in things that really count. . . . You surrounded yourself with inferiors or people who so admired you personally they were incapable of a sound critical attitude toward you or your work. . . . All those who didn’t like your work were bastards with some axe to grind. . . . You have resolutely refused to grow up so that a remarkable fresh talent has been put to little use for the past ten years. Glory for Me, thoroughly thought out and with four times the time given to it that was and written in decent straight-forward masculine prose might have been a great novel. It’s getting late & the discipline of a full length novel is going to be harder & harder to suffer. A few more years of Hollywood & its quick silver written under high pressure will be all you will be able to do. . . . I’d like you to make a smashing success with a full length, fully thought out, digested creation worth divorce from any thought of Hollywood, that graveyard of serious literary talent. No one would shout Hosannas louder or be more pleased to point to the fact that C-McC first published you. . . . I have too much respect for the writer I once knew who WAS a writer and not an appendage of the movie industry. If this letter makes you grind your teeth and swear “I’ll show that x-xxx?@ so & so” I’ll be delighted.

  Given how things turned out, Tim Coward must have been delighted, indeed.

  FOURTEEN

  In the summer of 2014, after my very first visit to the Library of Congress manuscript reading room, I took the Metro home and started digging through the hard-to-reach cupboards, the ones where we stuff the boxes of family photographs we can’t bear to throw out but will probably never look through again. It took me a while, but I found the box of my mother’s old photos, including many of Mack and Irene. As I shuffled through, one jumped out at me—Irene entertaining company on the terrace of the Siesta Key house.

  It captured me at first because my grandmother looked so alive, so in her element, her head thrown back, chin jutting as she took a jaunty drag on one of those little cigars she’d taken to smoking in Spain. She had a drink in her hand, and guests similarly equipped were arrayed about her. This terrace was such known territory to me. I could close my eyes and put myself right there, feel the tiles of black slate beneath my bare feet and smell the almost painfully sweet gardenia blossoms from the garden wafting on the breeze through the screening. I had observed, from afar, so many of these “adults only” soirees at my grandparents’ home. At the time, they seemed a staple of life as I knew it. Now, of course, it was an antiquity, something I hadn’t even thought about in decades. But it all came back, not just the memory, but the sense of it—the bustle of preparation, the approach of tropical evening, the smell of my grandmother’s perfume. The recall came on sharply, a wave of longing for the irretrievable past.

  I began to study the faces of the guests. Four were visible, seated, smoking and drinking around a wooden folding table. Three were women, all in full or partial profile. The fourth face I could see full on, and suddenly I had to catch my breath.

  Hemingway?

  I looked closer.

  —

  There was the broad brow; the sweep of dark hair plunging to a dramatic widow’s peak; the huge, intense wide-set eyes; and the thick brush of a mustache—all characteristic of Hem before his hair turned white and his mustache became a full beard.

  I knew that Mack and Irene had visited him in Cuba in the early 1950s. My mother told the story many times. I have a picture of Mack, Irene, my parents, and my uncle seated along the bar in Sloppy Joe’s, one of Hemingway’s favorite bars in Havana. My father looks all of nineteen, though he was twenty-four then. Mack had taken them all to the island for a vacation—on his dime, as always—and one stop on the itinerary was a day with the Hemingways at Finca Vigía, Ernest’s rural homestead. My mom remembers seeing a chart on the bathroom wall by a doctor’s scale where Ernest had recorded his weight every day for months, and staring goggle-eyed at a stack of manuscript pages by the black typewriter set on a worktable. When she asked him what he was working on he said, “Oh, it’s just a small book.”

  My father said that he had
watched as Mack and Ernest sat together on a couch beneath a variety of antlered animal heads, discussing their work, and after a time it became embarrassingly obvious to him that Ernest knew much about my grandfather’s books, in fine detail, but my grandfather had not read much, if any, Hemingway. I later came across an article that quoted my grandfather saying that he hadn’t been able to get through For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s famously readable novel about the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway meanwhile considered Long Remember among his favorite books by contemporary American novelists. I found it listed among the books he had kept in his personal library at his home in Key West.

  My uncle gave his take on their relationship in his memoir: “Dad had avoided . . . friendship with major writers of the time. He knew many of them, he’d met them, but he tended to shun them, for it was important to him to be the center of any group of which he was a part. He needed to be the center.”

  My parents told the story of this visit to Cuba and the two authors’ interaction as an object lesson in my grandfather’s self-absorption and lack of humility, or at least that’s how I heard it.

  The truth is, I was never very clear on the nature of Mack’s relationship with Hemingway—though I vaguely remember my mom saying they were really more friends of Mary’s, Hemingway’s third and final wife, who had been a correspondent in the war along with both Mack and Ernest. I assumed that’s where they got to know each other.

  I remembered, too, a summer day when I was seven years old. My grandfather had taken us to our front driveway to light off some of his folded-newspaper hot-air balloons when my mother called him from the front door to take a phone call. When he came back out, his face was pale and stricken as he put his hand on my grandmother’s shoulder. I can’t remember who said what, but I remember understanding that whoever had called—Mary, I’d always thought, but I can’t say for sure—told him that Ernest Hemingway had shot himself.