Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

“I just ran up to her like a lunatic”: ibid.

  “I remember thinking the boats and cars I was seeing”: Ted Heller in an e-mail to the author, January 19, 2010.

  “had a natural flair for comedy”: Suzanne Finstad, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 252.

  “needed the money to settle a divorce”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, p. 166.

  “told me that he and I both did a version of the same scene”: Sam Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” Playboy, June 1975, pp. 66–68.

  “was tempting”: Joseph Heller, “How I Found James Bond, Lost My Self-Respect and Almost Made $150,270 in My Spare Time,” Holiday, June 1967, p. 123.

  “When you put glasses on them”; “No background dogs in my picture!”: “General Information, Casino Royale, 1967,” posted at 007museum.com/casino_royale-1967.htm.

  “ninety minute[s] … of what appears to be Frank [Sinatra]”: See sinatraguide.com/filmedsinatra.

  “worst movie you ever saw”; “sort of on impulse”: Tayt Harlin, “Inteview with David Markson,” posted at conjunctions.com/webcon/harlinmarkson07.htm.

  “denigrating attitudes toward women”: See sinatraguide.com/filmedsinatra.

  “I’ve had some experiences with motion pictures”: Joseph Heller, remarks made at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, December 7, 1970; audio recording available at nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller.html#hear.

  “You owe me”: This and all other quotes and details regarding Heller’s meeting with Brodax are taken from Al Brodax, Up Periscope Yellow: The Making of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2004), pp. 53–56.

  “[A] little kid”: Bob Hieronimus, “Transcript of Interview with Lee Minoff, 12/15/97, Originator of the Story ‘Yellow Submarine’ and Author of the First Script and Screenplay for the Film,” posted at 21scentury radio.com/articles/0523005.html.

  “With Heller in [his] pocket”: Brodax, Up Periscope Yellow, p. 56.

  “connection between his Yossarian”: ibid.

  “Surrealism”; “cultural milestone”: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), p. 536.

  “He loved Bob Dylan”: Ted Heller in an e-mail to the author, October 23, 2009.

  “She told me that after about three days”: Ken Barnard, “Interview with Joseph Heller,” Detroit News, September 13, 1970.

  “a new trend for the … 60s”: cited in Susan Braudy, “Laughing All the Way to the Truth,” New York, October 14, 1968, p. 41.

  “polemic[al]”: Jean Shepherd, “Radio Free America,” The Realist, May 1964, p. 27.

  “[It] is [not] the function of satire”: “Joseph Heller Replies,” The Realist, May 1964, p. 30.

  “attempt to discredit the Student Non-Violent [sic] Coordinating Committee”: Joseph Heller, “A Letter from Joseph Heller,” The Realist, May 1965, p. 9.

  “[a]ny society that puts Cassius Clay and Benjamin Spock in jail”: Israel Shenker, “Did Heller Bomb on Broadway?” New York Times, December 29, 1968.

  “All I want to say is it ain’t that hard”: Richard B. Sale, “An Interview in New York with Joseph Heller,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 14. This interview was conducted in 1970.

  “real Mau-Mau”; “New Left movement[’s] … propaganda activities”: Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 139–41.

  “[T]he FBI … placed an ad”: ibid., pp. 174–75.

  “If I wanted to destroy a nation”: Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 12.

  “the suburbs”: Jacob Brackman, “The Underground Press,” posted at trussel.com/lyman/brackman.htm.

  “I dare say that with the inspiration of the Beatles”: Ralph J. Gleason, “Like a Rolling Stone,” posted at jannswenner.com/Press/Like_A_Rolling_Stone.aspx.

  “Lenny Bruce was really”: Ralph J. Gleason, “The Berkeley Concert,” posted at golbalia.net/donlope/fz/related/Berkeley_Concert.html.

  “unpaid film critic”: Keith Saliba, “Hayes, Herr and Sack: Esquire Goes to Vietnam,” Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 9, no. 2 (2007): 12–13.

  “There was a map of Vietnam”: This and subsequent Herr quotes are taken from Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), pp. 3–4.

  “nothing if not a provocateur”: Erica Heller, “Joseph Heller’s Daughter Remembers Her Prickly Pa,” New York Observer, January 10, 2000; draft copy provided to the author by Erica Heller.

  “She would break my heart”: Heller, Something Happened, p. 120.

  “You always like to give short answers”: ibid., p. 32.

  Something Happened … was certainly [an] accurate: Erica Heller in an e-mail to the author, October 21, 2009.

  “acknowledge[d] her resemblance to the daughter”: Sorkin, ed. Conversations with Joseph Heller, p. 198.

  Mario Puzo often remarked: See ibid., p. 189.

  “grumpy, disaffected, and blasé”: Erica Heller, “Joseph Heller’s Daughter Remembers Her Prickly Pa.”

  “[S]he is, I fear”: Heller, Something Happened, p. 66.

  “What ‘happens’ to Bob Slocum’s children”: Erica Heller, “It Sure Did,” Harper’s, May 1975, p. 4.

  “Erica had a tough time with her father”: Norman Barasch in conversation with the author, April 29, 2009.

  “I always felt I was a disappointment”: Ted Heller in an e-mail to the author, January 19, 2010.

  “the year Sergeant Pepper came out”: ibid.

  One day, Joe “… warned me”: ibid.

  “Teddy—that was a mystery”: Audrey Chestney, in conversation with the author, January 5, 2010.

  “The very qualities that had disappointed us in the past”: Joseph Heller, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 59.

  “passing of generations”: ibid.

  “He went to a health club called Al Roon’s”: Ted Heller in an e-mail to the author, October 23, 2009.

  “Neither one of us has ever had a divorce”: Barnard, “Interview with Joseph Heller.”

  “Maybe we just don’t quit easily”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” pp. 66–68.

  “I don’t think my wife has learned how to lie to me yet”: Heller, Something Happened, p. 92.

  “was always afraid”; “I didn’t care”: ibid., p. 110.

  “begging and nagging and driving my parents crazy”: Erica Heller in an e-mail to the author, March 21, 2010.

  “[A]ctors ranging”: Joseph Heller, “On Translating Catch-22 into a Movie,” in A “Catch-22” Casebook, ed. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 348.

  write an original play: Heller told journalist Beatrice Berg that he was about 250 pages into writing Something Happened, and he wrote a scene where Slocum’s son asks him, “Do I have to go into the army?” The chapter started him thinking, he said. He set the novel aside and began writing ideas that eventually became We Bombed in New Haven. See Beatrice Berg, “Heller of Catch-22,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 17, 1968.

  “purportedly for writing reasons”: Ted Heller in an e-mail to the author, October 23, 2009.

  “Welcome to the Uppa West Side!”: This and subsequent quotes regarding Heller and Denham are taken from Alice Denham, Sleeping with Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of New York in the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Book Republic Press, 2006), pp. 225–27, 283.

  “Except for Joe, all of us are quite short”: Kenneth Tynan, “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man,”: The New Yorker, October 30, 1978, p. 102.

  “Wassah matter with you fucking guys”: Unless otherwise noted, this and subsequent quotes and details regarding the Gourmet Club are taken from Joseph Heller and Speed Vogel, No Laughing Matter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 106–10.

  “Once—and only once”: Tynan, “Frolics
and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man,” pp. 101–02.

  “The members [were] very polite”: ibid., p. 102.

  “I’d rather have a bad meal out”: ibid.

  “From the very start”: ibid., p. 106.

  “Here, I’ll serve”: There are several versions of this story, related by different members of the Gourmet Club. See, for example, Speed Vogel, “The Gourmet Club,” The Southampton Review 2, no. 1 (2008), p. 211; Carl Reiner, My Anecdotal Life: A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 180.

  “deserved”: This and all other quotes from the excerpt of “Something Happened” are taken from Joseph Heller, “Something Happened,” Esquire, September 1966, pp. 136–41, 212–13.

  “how our red-blooded campus heroes”: This and other quotes from articles in this issue of Esquire are from ibid., pp. 115, 121, 128–29.

  “first Yiddish stage production”: Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 461–62.

  Joe mentioned to Robert Brustein: Heller first met Brustein in 1961, when they attended a party at the home of a Village Voice art critic.

  “manuscript to be read like a novel”: David Seed, The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 72.

  “born promotion man”: This and subsequent quotes regarding Heller’s talk at Calhoun College are taken from Susan Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes, Maybe Yes, But Not the Whole Book,” The New Journal 26 (1967): 7.

  Brustein had made the Yale Drama School a center: Seed, The Fiction of Joseph Heller, p. 73.

  “Heller’s script offers a perfect skeleton”: Elenore Lester, “Playwright-in-Anguish,” New York Times, December 3, 1967.

  “Today’s Rosh Hashanah”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” pp. 9–10.

  “If he said that, then he’s a schmuck”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” pp. 9–10.

  “What is there to keep me here?”: Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 58.

  “I’d rather read him than see him staged”: Lester, “Playwright-in-Anguish.”

  “[L]et me in on the biggest military secret of all”: Joseph Heller, We Bombed in New Haven (New York: Dell, 1967), p. 14.

  “art and trash”: Howe, World of Our Fathers, p. 477.

  “[I]f someone wants to call my movies art or crap”: Tynan, “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man,” p. 56.

  “What else, I wanted to make a million dollars”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” pp. 9–10.

  heard maniacs in the room: ibid.

  “For god’s sake, speak up”: ibid.

  “They’re not really idiots”: Israel Shenker, “Did Heller Bomb on Broadway?” New York Times, December 29, 1968.

  “told lies”: ibid.

  “I’m learning”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” p. 10.

  “It’s not that I’m trying to dominate the director”: Lester, “Playwright-in-Anguish.”

  “Listen, who’s nervous?”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” p. 10.

  “The real truth”: Lester, “Playwright-in-Anguish.”

  “close … to the Jewish sensibility”: ibid.

  “There’s nothing really funny about this”: Heller, We Bombed in New Haven, p. 122.

  “I thought we were going to have a good time”: Lester, “Playwright-in-Anguish.”

  “He lumbered to his classes”: In addition to the stress of rehearsals and anticipating the play’s opening, Heller missed the amenities of New York. Susan Braudy, a young journalist who audited Heller’s playwriting course, wrote: “I was dying to learn how to be a writer. But all Heller wanted to talk about was Zabar’s. Actually, he bragged about his proximity to the greatest delicatessen in the world. He was unseemly in his pride. He wagged [a] finger … ‘This orange drink here at Yale is terrible.’ He raised his voice. ‘Zabar’s fresh orange juice is the best in the world, and it’s only a few blocks from my apartment.’ When he wasn’t talking about the wonders of, say, Zabar’s cheeses, he bragged about New York. “Everybody’s a little Irish, a little Jewish, and more than a little black.’ See “Susan Braudy’s Manhattan Diary: An Introduction to Zabar’s from Joseph Heller,” posted at www.dnainfo.com.

  “It’s not really very expensive”: Lester, “Playwright-in-Anguish.”

  “Heller’s ending”: Seed, The Fiction of Joseph Heller, p. 73.

  “There’s no remission at the end of my play”: Shenker, “Did Heller Bomb on Broadway?”

  “Most guys think they’ll go into [the service]”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” p. 9.

  “cuts to the quick”: Roderick Nordell, “Premiere of We Bombed in New Haven,” Christian Science Monitor, December 8, 1967.

  “the play is very likely the most powerful play about contemporary irrationality”: Jack Kroll, “War Games,” Newsweek, December 18, 1967, p. 96.

  “The evening posits war as a glamorous game”: Walter Kerr, “Walter Kerr VS. Joseph Heller,” New York Times, October 27, 1968.

  “imagination that created”: Tom F. Driver, “Curtains in Connecticut,” The Saturday Review, August 31, 1968, pp. 22–24.

  “I have unlimited confidence”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” p. 9.

  “The American government is making war”: Seed, The Fiction of Joseph Heller, p. 85.

  “This could end the war”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” p. 7.

  “If it came to violence”: Shenker, “Did Heller Bomb on Broadway?”

  “McCarthy [is] an easy man to defend”; the “issues were so stark”; “to [his] everlasting shame”: Israel Shenker, “Joseph Heller Draws Dead Bead on the Politics of Gloom,” New York Times, September 10, 1968; posted at nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-politics.html?_r=1.

  “Every place I went”: ibid.

  “stung by the Gene McCarthy fever”: Erica Heller, “I Don’t Want to Be in That Number When the ‘Saints’ Go Marching In,” New York Times, September 30, 1990; posted at nytimes.com/1990/09/30/opinion/personal-i-don-t-want-to-be-in-that-number.

  “I guess he was proud”: Erica Heller in an e-mail to the author, May 7, 2009.

  “I’m not considered a first-stringer”: Brother Alexis Gonzales, “Notes on the Next Novel: An Interview with Joseph Heller,” The New Orleans Review 2 (1971): 218.

  “All the candidates can use humor”: Shenker, “Joseph Heller Draws Dead Bead on the Politics of Gloom.”

  Joe met Kurt Vonnegut: All quotes and details regarding Heller and Vonnegut at Notre Dame are taken from Carole Mallory, “The Joe and Kurt Show,” Playboy, May 1992; posted at vonnegutweb.com/vonnegutia/interviews/int_heller.html.

  “He lost because of the nature of American politics”: Shenker, “Joseph Heller Draws Dead Bead on the Politics of Gloom.”

  “[Politics] is not my thing”: ibid.

  “utter political disillusionment”: Erica Heller, “I Don’t Want to Be in that Number When the ‘Saints’ Go Marching In.”

  “With the murder of Robert Kennedy”: Jules Witcover, The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (New York: Warner Books, 1997), p. 263. For another insightful view about the atmosphere of the late 1960s in the United States, see Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America (New York: Grove Press, 1988).

  “Is it as good as our old one?”: Unless otherwise noted, this and subsequent comments regarding Gourmet Club get-togethers are taken from Reiner, My Anecdotal Life, pp. 177–82.

  A typical sampling: This exchange is reported in “Eating with Their Mouths Open,” New York Times, November 3, 1985; posted at select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FAOB1EFC3.

  “I imagine every amateur production”: Robert Merrill, Joseph Heller (Boston: Twayne, 1987), p. 57.

  “I am not at all certain what I felt”: Clive Barnes, “Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven Opens,” New York Times, October 17, 1968, p. 51.

  he never again wanted
anything to do with the theater: Heller did, in fact, complete two other stage plays, both adaptations from Catch-22. Catch-22: A Dramatization was first performed on July 13, 1971, in the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, New York. Heller finished the play at the urging of Larry Arrick; in it, the chaplain comments on war scenes in letters he writes to his wife, and Wintergreen serves as a dispenser and censor of military information. Clevinger’s Trial (1973) adapts chapter 8 of the novel. Samuel French published Acting Editions of both plays in 1971 and 1973, respectively, and in 1973, Delacorte Press published a trade edition of Catch-22: A Dramatization. In a foreword to that edition, Heller railed against the “bloody enterprise” of Vietnam, whose tragedy had been made all the more plain, he wrote, by revelations in the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

  “I will weep for you”: This and subsequent quotes from the play are taken from Heller, We Bombed in New Haven, pp. 216–17.

  the Eagle’s landing in the Sea of Tranquility: Sylvan Fox, a New York Times editor, called Heller at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing and asked him to write an article of about eight hundred words on the event’s historical and cultural importance. Heller was interested but said he could not write eight hundred words in the two- or three-day time period the paper’s deadline required. He said he would need several weeks, and Fox did not have that much time.

  “maybe a booth at which Dash Hammett once ate with Lilly Hellman”: Tom Nolan, “Martinis and Mythology,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, February 6, 2000; posted at articles.latimes.com/2000/feb/06/magazine/tom_61592?pg=3.

  [Hoffman and I became] good friends”: Heller and Vogel, No Laughing Matter, p. 77.

  “At first there was camaraderie”: Mel Gussow, “The Day Dustin Hoffman’s House Blew Up,” posted at mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=524.

  14. WHERE IS WORLD WAR II?

  location scouts had staked out: Unless otherwise noted, this and all other details and quotes in this chapter regarding the filming of Catch-22 are taken from four invaluable sources: “Some Are More Yossarian than Others,” Time, June 15, 1970, pp. 66–74; Buck Henry, “A Diary of Planes, Pilots, and Pitfalls,” Life, June 12, 1970, pp. 46, 48; Nora Ephron, “Yossarian Is Alive and Well in the Mexican Desert,” New York Times, March 16, 1969, posted at nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-yossarian,html?_r=1; and Joseph Heller, “On Translating Catch-22 into a Movie,” in A “Catch-22” Casebook, ed. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), pp. 346–55.