The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

by David Handler

  “Damn, you’ve got a pair of balls on you, Alberta,” Boyd said admiringly.

  She stubbed out her Newport. “He went home and thought it over. Six months later he sent me his revised manuscript, which was now called Not Far from Here. I felt it was a significant improvement and told him that I’d see what I could do. I warned him that it wouldn’t be an easy sell. It was a first-person coming-of-age novel with a twelve-year-old protagonist. Furthermore, Saroyan had already turned over a lot of the same soil in The Human Comedy, which I still believe is a vastly superior novel. But I agreed to send it out. The first eight editors who saw the manuscript turned it down cold, which all eight of them would regret until the day they died. I finally placed it with a young editor at Lippincott who offered us a nice little advance of $3,500. She had no great expectations for it. I certainly didn’t. But from the moment that the bound galleys of Not Far from Here began to circulate in the summer of ’68 it was an instant publishing phenomenon. Lippincott had to go back to press ten times within a matter of weeks. I’ve always felt that timing had a lot to do with it. The Vietnam War was raging. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Blacks were rioting in city after city. Students were rioting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everyone was angry at everyone else. Readers were desperate to travel back to a friendly New England village where everyone knew and liked everyone else. Nostalgia. That’s why Not Far from Here spent twenty-six weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list. And why I was able to make what was, at the time, the largest six-figure paperback sale in publishing history. I also had huge offers from every studio in Hollywood, but Richard refused to sell the movie rights. He did not want his beloved creation tampered with. He also, as you might imagine, became an even bigger ass.”

  “Is that when he and Eleanor started having problems?” I asked.

  “They changed,” she replied, pursing her lips. “Both of them. And it wasn’t just because of Not Far from Here. They became very outspoken leaders of the antiwar movement on the Yale campus. Led sit-ins and demonstrations. Got themselves arrested a couple of times. Also started fooling around with marijuana, and didn’t stop there. They fell in with the Timothy Leary crowd up in Millbrook that was experimenting with LSD. Within a few short months they’d become a pair of middle-aged hippies who were stoned all of the time. ‘I feel so free,’ Eleanor told me on the phone one day. She slept with every passionate young poet who wanted her. And Richard slept with every pretty young thing who wanted him. Meanwhile, Lippincott was desperate for another novel from him. When I asked him if he was working on one he told me, ‘I’m beyond that now.’ And Eleanor told me that poetry was ‘an outmoded form of expression.’ Instead, they became performance artists, I guess you’d have to call them. They rented a rather slummy apartment in the East Village and became part of that strange underground scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Took more and more LSD, drifted further and further from the life they’d known. And then one night, while Richard was fast asleep in bed next to her, Eleanor went up onto the roof of their building and flung herself off it. She left no note, although Richard said she’d been depressed for several weeks because she’d wanted to start writing again but couldn’t remember how. They found LSD in her system as well as marijuana and alcohol. Eleanor’s death was . . . it was tragic. A great loss for American poetry. And for me personally. She was my friend,” Alberta said softly. “Richard and the girls buried her at her family’s plot in Rochester. Monette was in her junior year at Bennington. Reggie had just started at Yale. The next day, at Richard’s insistence, we met with my lawyer in his office on Fifth Avenue and arranged for all future paperback and foreign earnings for Not Far from Here to go directly into a trust fund for the girls. Then I walked Richard downstairs and we stood there together on the sidewalk. It was a crisp, cold December day. The street vendors were selling roasted chestnuts. Richard told me that he was going to visit his friends Scott and Helen Nearing at their farm up in Harborside, Maine, for a few weeks. I put him in that Checker cab, wished him well and sent him on his way. The Nearings said he never showed up. He simply disappeared off the face of the earth. That was twenty-two years ago.” Alberta tossed back the last of her bourbon. “He abandoned those two girls. They were, for all intents and purposes, orphaned. Eleanor had an older sister up in Rochester. She and her husband did what they could to help. Her husband was an accountant and was able to take care of their finances. Not Far from Here remains one of the top-five-selling mass-market paperbacks in the world each and every year. It has sold nearly thirty million copies to date. But Richard’s disappearance left those girls grief stricken and lost. And Monette was so angry that she sat down and wrote that hateful ‘memoir’ of hers.”

  Monette’s corrosive tell-all account of her childhood, Father Didn’t Know Best, detailed her years as a silent victim of sexual abuse by Richard that dated all of the way back to when she was seven years old.

  “Monette was still at Bennington when she wrote it,” Alberta recalled. “She sent the manuscript to me. I refused to touch it because I didn’t believe one word of it. And I didn’t even like the man. To me it was nothing more than a troubled young girl’s cry for help. But it was so salacious that Father Didn’t Know Best turned Monette into a major public figure. Not to mention a polarizing one. The literary establishment hated her. The tabloids loved her. She was an attractive young blonde who craved attention. Reggie was not at all pleased.”

  That much I knew from personal experience. Richard Aintree didn’t respond to any of the accusations that Monette made against him in Father Didn’t Know Best. He stayed silent, wherever he was, but Reggie didn’t. She denounced every word of her sister’s book in letters to the editor of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek—anyone and everyone who reviewed Father Didn’t Know Best—blasting it as “a vicious lie from start to finish.” When Reggie and I were going out together she and Monette hadn’t spoken in years. Monette certainly didn’t mend any fences when she performed a 180-degree pivot and wrote her “cleansing” follow-up bestseller, Where Did I Go Wrong? in which she denounced the culture of victimhood that had led her to write Father Didn’t Know Best, which she now acknowledged had been riddled with fabrications and falsehoods. Undaunted by Reggie’s even angrier denunciations, Monette continued to traffic in her own celebrity with shameless zeal. She was on tour in Los Angeles promoting Where Did I Go Wrong? when she met Patrick Van Pelt, the ruggedly handsome former Notre Dame wide receiver turned television actor, who in those days was playing a softhearted private eye with a moustache. They got married, had two kids and soon after that Monette penned a pair of mommy self-help bestsellers, The Let Go Muscle and The Goldilocks Zone, that earned her so much face time on Good Morning America that she landed Me, Monette, a syndicated daytime talk show of her very own. Me, Monette wasn’t exactly a critical favorite, but criticism had never deterred Monette. She was rich. She was famous. She was . . . what was it Boyd had called her? A lifestyle brand.

  “Alberta, I have to ask you something in the interest of mental hygiene,” I said. “After all of those horrible lies that Monette spread about Richard, why on earth would he write to her and not Reggie?”

  “Why does he do anything?” she answered with a shrug. “But I agree. It makes no sense. Reggie’s the one who defended him. I’ve always had a soft spot for her. When she came to me with her first volume of poems I was happy to represent her. And when you two took up together I was ecstatic.” Alberta smiled at me fondly. “You were my golden children, you know.”

  “That’s ancient history, Alberta.”

  “It seems like only yesterday to me.”

  “That’s because you’re so old.”

  “I can put this cigarette out in your eyeball, you know.”

  “No, you can’t. Lulu would pounce on you.”

  “And do what, lick me to death?”

  “Be careful what you wish fo
r.”

  “Monette happens to be one of HWA’s biggest earners,” Boyd interjected. “She makes us a ton of money. So does Patrick.” For the past three seasons, Monette’s husband had been starring as a professional surfer turned high school guidance counselor in the mega-hit TV series Malibu High, which was Beverly Hills 90210 meets Baywatch meets Mr. Novak. And served as a showcase for a lot of hot, hard-bodied teens who seemed to wear very little clothing to school. “Monette and Patrick are very important HWA clients, not to mention one of Hollywood’s A-list super couples.” His face dropped. “Or I should say they were until this small marital dustup of theirs.”

  Page-one tabloid shit storm was more like it. Patrick Van Pelt, age forty-five, was having a very public affair with one of his hard-bodied young co-stars, super sexy Kat Zachry, age nineteen, who was currently three months pregnant with their love child. The producers of Malibu High were furious about Pat ’n’ Kat. The network was furious about Pat ’n’ Kat. But no one was more furious than Monette, who’d kicked her cheating horndog of a husband out of the house and filed for a divorce. The proceedings promised to be very public, very ugly and very, very expensive. It seemed that she and Patrick hadn’t signed a prenup. They’d thought it would be unromantic.

  I studied the Silver Fox from across the table. “Seriously, do you think this letter from Richard is genuine?”

  “Seriously?” She stared down into her glass. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s got to be.” Boyd stabbed the table with his index finger for emphasis. “No way Monette would try to fake something this huge.”

  “Sure, she would. She has a proven track record as a liar.”

  “So she played a little loosey-goosey with the truth back when she was a kid. She came clean about it in her second book.”

  “And profited handsomely from it in her second book.”

  “You say that like it’s a crime, amigo. This is America, remember? Besides, she’s a class act. Why would she make up something like this?”

  “Damage control,” I replied. “Monette has been trapped inside of the Pat ’n’ Kat tabloid freak show for weeks. That damned story’s bigger than Charles and Lady Di, bigger than Donald and Ivana, bigger than Bubba’s latest bimbo eruption, Shannen Doherty’s latest meltdown . . .”

  “I keep forgetting,” Alberta said. “Who is Shannen Doherty?”

  “Monette is being publicly humiliated day in and day out by her very famous husband. If her legendary father suddenly reappears after all of these years she’ll seize control of the narrative and bump Pat ’n’ Kat to the back pages. Me, I’d call that a shrewd career move by a woman who has a history of making shrewd career moves.”

  “You must admit that the timing is rather fortuitous,” Alberta said to Boyd. “Kat Zachry and her swelling belly are on every tabloid front page in America. That naughty girl seems to be loving every minute of it, too.”

  “She’s a bare-knuckle opportunist,” Boyd acknowledged. “She’s also an HWA client.”

  “Of course she is,” I said.

  “Mr. Harmon Wright has very high hopes for Kat Zachry.”

  “Of course he does. What sort of a client is Monette?”

  “Demanding,” he answered. “Some might call her bitchy. Not me. I get along with her fine. If her father’s really planning to resurface and if he’s ready to talk about where he’s been for all of these years, then we are talking about a major, major literary event.”

  “I’m hearing a lot of ifs. What I’m still not hearing is where I come in.”

  “I already have a firm, seven-figure offer from a major publisher for the exclusive rights to the inside story.”

  “Told by . . . ?”

  “Monette, which is to say you. Her father mentioned you by name in his letter. He wants you involved. And why wouldn’t he? You’re the top ghost in the business. Plus you have that former connection with Reggie.”

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “Did I mention that I’ve negotiated her a nice, fat kill fee? If the old guy changes his mind, Monette is still guaranteed $250,000. As her co-author you’d be entitled to a third of that.”

  “You told me you could guarantee Hoagy a $100,000 kill fee,” Alberta said. “One-third of $250,000 is only $80,000 and pocket change.”

  Boyd grinned at her. “I was just checking to make sure you were paying attention, Alberta.”

  “Do that again and I’ll put my cigarette out in your eyeball.”

  Now he grinned at me. “I am loving this, aren’t you? Somehow, I just knew we’d cook up another scam together.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight. If I agree to do this it’ll be strictly out of respect for Alberta.”

  “And let’s not forget the $100,000, dear boy.”

  “Are you thinking that Richard will show up—if he shows up—at Monette’s place out in L.A.?”

  She nodded. “We’d want you out there as soon as possible.”

  Lulu’s tail thumped on my feet. She loves L.A. The weather’s warm and dry, and the sushi plentiful.

  “HWA will cover it,” Boyd said. “Airfare, car rental, whatever you need. You can stay in Monette’s pool house. I hear it’s very nice.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Reggie before I give you my answer.”

  “Of course you will, dear boy.”

  “How does she feel about it?”

  Alberta lowered her eyes. “We were hoping you’d find out. She and Monette don’t speak.”

  “They still hate each other after all of these years?”

  “I can’t say for certain. But they’re still sisters, so it’s a pretty safe bet.”

  “Do you know where Reggie’s living these days?”

  “At the Root Chakra Institute—a five-thousand-acre meditation retreat that she owns in the hills outside of New Paltz. Money, as you’ll recall, was never Reggie’s problem.”

  “Is she doing any writing?”

  “She hasn’t sent me a poem in a long, long time.” The Silver Fox gazed at me through her owlish glasses. “What do you say, Hoagy? Are you in?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t think about it for too long,” Boyd Samuels said to me sharply. “This is a go project. If you turn us down, I’ll have to find somebody else, and I have no idea where to look. Let’s face it, there’s only one Stewart Hoag.”

  “Thank God for that. I’d hate to run into another me.”

  Maybe you’ve heard of me. Then again, maybe you haven’t. It’s been a while since I burst onto the scene as that tall, dashing author of that fabulously successful first novel, Our Family Enterprise. I won literary awards. I spoke at smart, prestigious gatherings of smart, prestigious people. I got a lot of attention. Esquire was keenly interested in what my favorite flavor of ice cream was (licorice, and it’s damned hard to find). Vanity Fair wanted to know who my favorite actor was (a tie between Mitchum and Howard, as in Moe). GQ applauded me as a man of “easy style” and wanted to know what I wore when I worked (an Orvis chamois shirt, jeans and mukluks). Hell, for a while I was as famous as John Irving, only he’s shorter than I am, and he still writes.

  Or maybe you’ve heard of me because of Merilee. Ours was a match made not so much in heaven as in Liz Smith’s column. Liz thought we were perfect for each other. And we were. I was, as you may recall, the first major new literary voice of the eighties. Merilee was Joe Papp’s loveliest and most gifted leading lady. We did London, Paris and most of Italy on our honeymoon. Bought a magnificent eight-room apartment in an art deco building on Central Park West, a red 1958 Jaguar XK150 and a basset hound, Lulu. I kept my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-Third Street as an office. Went there bright and early every morning to work on novel number two only to discover that there was no novel number two. Writer’s block, they call it. Trust me, it’s not a block. It’s a void. And a terror that you no longer know how to do the only thing you know how to do. I crashed and burned in style. Drank too much
. Snorted way too much Colombian marching powder. I drove my friends away. Worst of all, I drove Merilee away. She got the eight rooms overlooking Central Park West, the Jaguar, the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. Me, I ended up right back where I’d started—in my drafty fifth-floor walk-up. Just me, Lulu and my ego, which is so large that it recently applied for statehood.

  A failed novelist has a severely limited menu of career choices. You can teach, except I can’t. The academic world makes me want to hit someone. I don’t know why. I’m usually a peace-loving man. You can try your hand at screenwriting, except I can’t do that either. The movie business gives me acute nausea. You can go into television, which gives me acute nausea and hives. That leaves only the French Foreign Legion for lost literary souls—ghostwriting celebrity memoirs.