Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Painfully, he scribbled a few lines of his King David novel: “[O]ur inner lives ordain for us … terrors of loneliness.… The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.”

  * * *

  ON JUNE 3, 1982, he filed for divorce from his wife of thirty-seven years, charging her “with mental cruelty and abandonment” for refusing him the house. The motion was accompanied by an affidavit from one of his doctors attesting to the severity of his illness, his debilitated condition, and his needs. Another affidavit, this one from a physical therapist, detailed how the East Hampton residence would be optimal for a program of physical therapy.

  Joe’s lawyer submitted these materials to the court, along with a four-page affirmation deploring the fact that legal action had been necessary to obtain the use of the East Hampton house, Joe’s only wish.

  “I was not sure I had a case,” Joe said. “Financially, in fact, I would gain if I lost. There would not be a division of property without a divorce and it was close to a sure thing that the support payments I’d been making monthly were not going to be increased by much over what they had been for the two years we had now been separated.”

  Shirley’s lawyer contested the motion. His opposing affidavit referred snidely to the “famous Joseph Heller.” He insisted that “[a]ll of Mr. Heller’s and Mr. Cohen’s dirty tricks and legal maneuverings are not erased and they cannot be erased by Mr. Heller’s illness.” The sudden request for a divorce was “without rhyme or reason.” The “request [for] exclusive possession of a house … in Easthampton [sic] … simply ignore[d] the whole history of this case which preceded the request.” As Mr. Heller was “worth several million dollars,” he could afford “thousands of better facilities,” and to grant him the house would give him nothing but a “senseless ‘win’” over Mr. Sheresky’s client.

  Justice Hortense W. Gable heard the case on June 10 in New York State Supreme Court. Joe did not attend the hearing. Jeffrey Cohen reiterated, “[I]t’s tragic that I have had to make this application [for divorce], because we have been willing to talk about some way to rectify this situation that would give Mr. Heller the therapy he so desperately needs and use of that home he so desperately needs, your Honor.”

  The judge did not discuss the marriage. She concentrated on the request for the house. She remarked, “What [Mr. Heller] is suffering from isn’t funny, this condition.… He does need help, and from the little I know of it he certainly needs not only the physical therapy … but perhaps some kind of cushioning to cope with what has happened to him.” She decided Joe would get exclusive use of the house for “June, July, and August and up through September 15th … conditioned upon his payment … of the sum of $7,500 to Mrs. Heller so that she may, if she so desires, use [it] towards the payment of a summer rental.”

  * * *

  “THIS IS THE HAPPIEST SUMMER of my life,” Joe told Cheryl McCall for a People magazine profile. “This whole ordeal has deepened my friendships with a lot of people because of the solicitude they’ve showed—and the love. Just as I avoided thinking I’d ever be seriously ill, I shied away from the word love.… I realize now that love does exist between me and a large number of people, and I’m glad.” He added, “I’ve been lucky most of my life.… [I]n World War II I thought I was safe.… I was lucky there. I may be lucky with this illness.”

  He had talked Speed and Valerie into staying with him in the house. His financial records for June, July, and August show he paid Valerie three hundred dollars a week (prior to that, she had averaged close to seven hundred). She tended him as needed, and typed the new pages of his novel.

  Speed helped him dress (light cotton shirts, shorts, tennis shoes), cut his hair, and did most of the cooking. Don Shaw, a young physical therapist, came three times a week. He’d pull up to the lawn on a big Harley-Davidson. He worked with Joe in the backyard swimming pool, helping him stand in shallow water from a sitting position, make bicycle-riding motions with his legs, and push off from the sides of the pool while Shaw applied pressure from behind. Shaw would grip a wooden rod and tell Joe to push against him as he maneuvered away, forcing Joe to switch his angle of attack. “Each time he told me to change the direction, I was stunned for a second and did not know how to comply,” Joe recalled. “I could understand the words. I could not comprehend the instruction. I had to reason it through, recall how to do what was expected of me.”

  He approached these exercises with eagerness and discipline. Each walk to the mailbox and each nightly emptying of the dishwasher was a victory. Most of the time, he managed to rise from bed without the transfer board and to bathe himself with the aid of a shower bench. He had a constant fear of falling. Valerie and Speed hovered near him. Sometimes, while he chewed food, his neck cramped.

  In the mornings, he sat in the sun by the pool in an antique wheelchair Speed had bought him, and wrote on yellow legal pads. His hospital experiences were showing up in the novel. On his deathbed, the king suffers weight loss and bedsores. He dreads days alone.

  That summer, “Joe was an entirely different social being,” Speed wrote. “That he was extending himself for others (Valerie and me) was remarkable”:

  I remember years back when I needed help hauling a refrigerator up the stairs to my studio, Julie Green and George Mandel immediately volunteered. Heller wouldn’t lift a finger, despite my pleading. Without him we managed to get the damn thing halfway up but no further. Finally, he came toward us and offered advice: “Why don’t you hire someone to do this?” We just yelled obscenities at him until he said, “Okay, I’ll help.” [But] he just stood there doing nothing until we yelled at him to get out of the way. We completed the job in spite of him. Later, while we were eating and our anger was gone, I asked Joe how come he behaved so uncooperatively. Predictably, his answer had the ring of a line out of a novel: “I would not do for others what I would not do for myself.”

  Now, Joe told Cheryl McCall, “I’ll be grateful to Speed … Valerie Humphries, and other friends for the rest of my life. There’s nothing that Speed or Valerie can ask me that I’d deny them, ever. I owe them both more than I can possibly repay—so I won’t even try.”

  The three of them ate out often at a trendy new place called the Laundry or at the Lobster Roll, a popular roadside restaurant in Montauk. They accepted a number of social invitations. One night, they went to pick up some homemade ice cream at a shop in Bridgehampton. There they ran into Bruce Jay Friedman, a longtime area resident. He told Joe he was happy to see him on his feet. He said, “You guys gotta come over for dinner sometime.” Speed was stunned when, instead of his usual answer (something like “Why? I’ve got my own food at home”), Joe said, “When?”

  All was not bliss. “Every now and then, there’s a little spat between Valerie and Speed … [and I have to] patch it up,” Joe told Cheryl McCall. Speed was not happy with Valerie’s attempts to help with the cooking. It offended him that “she [was] the kind of person who [would] buy canned peaches when fresh peaches [were] in season and use garlic salt when fresh garlic [was] at hand.” She liked to leave bread wrapped in plastic (“It gets moldy that way”). He preferred to wrap it in paper (“Then it [just] gets stale”). In general, Speed thought Valerie’s tastes were rather crude. She was not much of a reader. She “seemed no more in awe of Joe as a man of letters than Nora was of [James] Joyce,” Speed said. Joe was amused by this, but her attitude “affronted” Speed. She talked too much for him. “[W]e were … like [an] old married threesome,” he wrote. He could not believe Joe’s patience with her, or how much he tolerated her chatter. He “was now the most … considerate of men. Nothing like the man he used to be,” Speed said. “He strove to gratify Valerie’s every wish.… I had never seen anyone a zoi fahliebed (‘so much in love’).”

  One day, during one of McCall’s interview sessions, Joe, McCall, Valerie, and Speed picnicked on the sand with a basket of bread, a cooler of drinks, and champagne in a bucket. Joe remarked,
“It’s expensive to be sick and a luxury to recuperate.… You see my nurse and my therapist.… I mean, they both get paid.”

  This was true. Nevertheless, Valerie no longer thought of herself as Joe’s nurse. His comment angered her and she walked off. Later, she and Joe argued. He suggested she take a vacation for “seven or nine days and decide if she wanted to come back.” She left. Joe asked Speed if they could manage without her. He feared she wouldn’t return. A few days later, she phoned to remind Joe not to go into the pool unless someone was watching him. A few days after that, she moved back in.

  * * *

  OVER THE FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND, Arthur and Barbara Gelb stayed over. On Saturday morning, by the pool, Arthur introduced himself to Speed. He was amazed at Speed’s generosity. Speed said his friend’s ordeal had been a boon for him: He’d gotten to stay in Joe’s apartment, wear Joe’s clothes, and forge Joe’s name on checks. He was living the celebrity life without being a celebrity. The previous spring, Joe had arranged for Speed to travel with Bob Towbin on his yacht, the Sumurun, a ninety-four-foot Fife ketch built in 1914, on Towbin’s annual trip to the Cannes Film Festival. Life couldn’t get any better than that. Here he was, living for free in East Hampton.

  Gelb laughed. He said Speed should write about his experiences for the New York Times. Speed wasn’t sure he was serious.

  As the deputy managing editor of the Times, Gelb rarely said things he didn’t mean. He had developed a reputation for “encourage[ing] [positive] pieces about [his] friends,” Newsweek reported. (“You can’t blame the people who run the Times for thinking the paper belongs to them,” Bob Gottlieb said. “[B]ut those of us who have grown up with it secretly believe it’s ours. The Times is in the same position as the Jews: it’s expected to behave better than everybody else.”)

  Gelb had been at the paper a long time. He trusted his instincts. He had seen the consequences of a powerful man’s biases; as a youngster, he was appalled by the Times’ scant mentions of Jewish suffering during World War II, even after stories of Buchenwald and other camps had broken. Subsequently, Gelb learned from “Jewish reporters on the staff that Arthur Hays Sulzberger [the Times’ then owner] had serious conflicts about his Jewish roots, believing that Judaism was a religion and not a national or ethnic identity.… [He] determined that the Times must never be viewed as a ‘Jewish paper,’ which he believed would undermine its image as an objective source of news.”

  Gelb guarded the paper’s objectivity, but he understood, from Sulzberger’s example, that no man can escape personal obsessions. Sometimes you had to ignore them, on other occasions indulge them; learning the difference was part of being a good newsman. If some of his friends—say, Joe Heller—benefited in the process, so be it.

  Speed mentioned to Joe what Gelb had said about writing a piece.

  “What are you worried about?” Joe said, delighted. “Do it!”

  “Seriously, do you really think I can?”

  “It’s easy. Of course you can.”

  “I already have an idea,” Speed said. “It’s ‘How to Beat the High Cost of Living in the Hamptons … All You Need Is a Sick Friend with a House.’”

  Joe loved it. So did Arthur Gelb. “I think it should go in the ‘Living Section,’” he told Speed. “Do a thousand to fifteen hundred words. How about a two-week deadline?”

  Within days, Speed had drafted a few pages. After cutting Joe’s hair one afternoon, he asked Joe to critique them. “I thought the piece was to be about the high cost of living in the Hamptons, not ‘The Speed Vogel Story,’” Joe said.

  Speed redrafted the article. Several days later, he took it to Arthur Gelb’s office. Gelb read it at his desk while Speed pretended to study the photographs on his walls. Finally, Gelb said, “It’s funny.” He hadn’t laughed. “Needs some editing.… Thanks.… We’ll get back to you.… Regards to Joe.”

  Speed left the building, certain he’d wasted his time.

  On July 28, Joe shoved the morning paper at him. There he was, in the “Living” section: “Helping a Convalescent Friend (in Style).”

  Speed boasted that he’d never known rejection as a writer. Joe warned him not to expect the Pulitzer Prize.

  A month later, LuAnn Walther, a junior editor at Bantam, who’d met Speed through a mutual friend, the playwright Israel Horovitz, said to him (either by phone or during a stroll on Fire Island—their memories clashed), “I read your Times piece and the People story on Joe. Why don’t you think about writing a book about it all?”

  “Yes, do it,” Joe said.

  In No Laughing Matter, Speed said that a couple of days after urging him on, Joe said, “I’ve been thinking about your book, and I would like to be the co-author if you don’t mind. Is that okay?” The truth is, Candida Donadio advised Joe the advance would be much larger with his name attached to the proposal.

  Speed told Mario Puzo and George Mandel he might write a book. “[D]on’t begin before you have a signed contract and an advance,” Puzo counseled him. “Mario’s got it wrong,” Mandel said. “You don’t write a word until you’ve spent the advance. Why should anybody write when he’s got money?”

  * * *

  AS AUTUMN APPROACHED and Joe’s summer idyll neared an end, he studied his financial records. He was on track to have spent, for the year, almost $80,000 in hospital costs, with $10,000 more for physicians’ fees and over $23,000 for nursing care; physical therapy added nearly $4,000 to the total. Because of his lapsed insurance policy, he bore most of this sum personally. Additionally, he owed $35,248 in legal and accounting fees; he supported Shirley, paying rent and utilities; he gave incidental money to his children; and, in what he considered a moral obligation, he sent $250 a month to his in-laws: a gesture of support, given Barney’s recent medical problems. The Helds took the money, but Dottie would not speak to him. To friends and relatives, she disparaged Joe’s “interest in other women” and said, “How could he just discard my darling daughter like an old hat after all the years she cared for him?”

  Joe got by on monthly royalties, loans from friends, the anticipation of his advance for the King David book, and an unexpected windfall: a royalty check of $21,890.07 from a special hardcover reprint of Catch-22 by Simon & Schuster, in celebration of the novel’s twentieth anniversary.

  He was legally obligated to leave the house by September 15. His lawyer urged him to consider new arrangements, but Joe didn’t want to think about the future. In late August, he, Speed, and Valerie attended an outdoor feast at the Long Island home of the Times food columnist, Craig Claiborne. It was Claiborne’s birthday and he was celebrating the publication of a new cookbook.

  The Gelbs had introduced Joe to Claiborne. According to Arthur, “Craig developed a crush on Heller, who had eyes only for attractive women and who often crankily rebuffed new acquaintances of both sexes. To my surprise, he good-naturedly tolerated Craig’s flirting. After enough margaritas and wine, Craig was apt to launch into a routine about his sex life, past and present. He told us once that as a boy in Mississippi he had experimented with various barnyard stock, including chickens. ‘Tell me, Craig,’ Heller asked with a typically devilish grin, ‘is there much foreplay with a chicken?’”

  On that August evening, a chill tinged the air. Leaves were turning. Joe tried not to dwell on any of this or consider what it augured. With relish, he cut into a plate of grilled Cajun catfish. A man he didn’t know approached him, limping. He said his name was Mike Alexander. He was a friend of Speed. He wished Joe continued luck with his recovery, and said he had also battled Guillain-Barré syndrome.

  “How long ago?” Joe asked.

  “I had it twice,” said Alexander. “The first time—”

  Joe cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about it now. Really, I don’t, not at a party.”

  No more missions. Please.

  * * *

  JOE RETURNED his rented wheelchair and commode. “I could get up from a toilet but not from a sofa,” he said. He took wa
lks along the relatively car-free road in front of the house. “[A]s I saw my time of privileged residence running out, I could envision no better place for me to be for the rest of that year than the one in which I was.”

  At Joe’s urging, Jeffrey Cohen made application to the court to extend the occupancy order from September 15 until December 31. Shirley had procured a new lawyer, Diane Blank, from the firm of Gordon & Schechtman. Blank said her client would grant Mr. Heller occupancy of the East Hampton house until the end of the year if he agreed to relinquish claims to the house after that and to pay her client $2,500 a month.

  Shortly after this, Ms. Blank would accuse Joe in court of being an active participant “on the East Hampton party circuit.” She said he had been observed “carrying bags of groceries.” Therefore, he was fully recovered and no longer needed the house for recuperation. Cohen argued that until the divorce proceedings came to trial, the status quo should be preserved, with Mr. Heller in East Hampton and Mrs. Heller in the marital apartment. Eventually, the judge agreed (Joe had already exceeded the deadline to move).

  Two days before Joe was to leave the house, he wrote a check for $160 to cover Shirley’s visit to a psychiatrist named Roberta Jaeger. Shirley would see Dr. Jaeger a few times that fall. On one of these occasions, Joe agreed to go with her, apparently at the doctor’s request. He went to provide information to the doctor so she could treat Shirley more effectively. At least this was Joe’s understanding at the time.

  On October 2—while the court was still considering the occupancy issue—Speed went to his studio apartment in Manhattan for messages and mail. “One of the messages was from Jeffrey Cohen,” he said. “[H]e explained that he had heard from Joe that his wife had unexpectedly shown up at the house in East Hampton.… Joe was, for the moment, alone in the house and frightened.”