Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  7. Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 131.

  8. William Loeb, “The Filth They Live By,” Manchester Union Leader, January 1957 (reprint in Metalious folder, GPL).

  9. Phyllis Hogan, article in Times Literary Supplement, September 20, 1956 (Metalious folder, GPL).

  10. As recent scholars have been making clear, the explosion of the paperback industry was fueled by readers from all class backgrounds attracted to the cover art and the authors’ gritty style. Even the overtly salacious pulps were churned out for “respectable” people and Fawcett, Dell, and Pocket Books were continually surprised by the extent of the market for soft porn, including both lesbian fiction and romance novels. See Harriet Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Thomas L. Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks (New York: Penguin, 1982); Ann Barr Snitow, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different,” Radical History Review 20 (1979): 141-61.

  11. One reader was the novelist Stephen King, whose discovery of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines in his aunt's closet helped launch his imagination and desire to write. See The New Yorker, September 7, 1998, 56-67.

  12. Quoted in Friedrich, “Farewell to Peyton Place,” 160.

  13. Emily Toth, quoted in “New Biography of Peyton Place.”

  14. Sidney Skolsky, “Latest Success Story of Peyton Place,” Laconia Evening Citizen, September 29, 1956 (Metalious folder, GPL).

  15. For an excellent discussion of New England scenery and how it was manufactured in the nineteenth century, see Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 41-47.

  16. Zolotow, “How a Best-Seller Happens,” 38.

  17. Estelle Freedman, “ ‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,” Journal of American History 74, no. 1 (1987): 83-106. See also Linda Gordon, “The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History,” Feminist Review 28 (January 1988): 56-64, and “Incest and Resistance: Patterns of Father-Daughter Incest, 1880-1930,” Social Problems 33, no. 4 (April 1986): 253-66.

  18. Jane Glenn pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to prison. Her brother was put on probation and remanded to the state reform school.

  19. Laurie Wilkins, quoted in the Boston Traveler, March 13, 1964 (Metalious folder, GPL).

  20. Carlos Baker, “Small Town Peep Show,” New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1956, VII:4.

  21. Sterling North, “Shocker Written by Village Wife,” New York World Telegram, September 29, 1956.

  22. Ibid.; J.O., “Not for Kiddies” (miscellaneous reviews, Metalious folder, GPL).

  23. “Novelist in Paris Suggests Banning Peyton Place,” reprinted in Laconian Evening Citizen (miscellaneous reviews, Metalious folder, GPL).

  24. Carbine, “Peyton Place,” 110.

  25. The term sex panic emerged in the 1990s to refer to efforts to shut down commercial venues of sex and public arenas of sexual exchange as well as to name the New York City-based organization created to oppose these efforts. It has since come to mean the social and cultural fears of sexual agency and the kinds of antisex crusades that such fears spawn. For a discussion of the relationship between sexuality and social order, see Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, Nationalisms & Sexualities (New York: Routledge. 1992); Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

  26. Karl Fleming and Anne Taylor Fleming, The First Time (New York: Berkley Medallion, 1975), 162.

  27. Barbara Wolfson, “Who's Taking Care of the Babysitter?” Women: A Journal of Liberation 6, no. 2 (1979): 18.

  28. Carbine, “Peyton Place,” 108.

  29. Interview with anonymous subject, August 1998.

  30. For an important reassessment of the 1950s and the limits of the “feminine mystique” as a metaphor for the times, see Joanne Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

  31. For statistics on the TV show see Leo Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,” New York Times, April 4, 1965, 46; Paul Monash and Cecil Smith, “Notes on Peyton Place,” Television Quarterly (Fall 1964): 49-56; Friedrich, “Farewell to Peyton Place,” 160-62. Comments on Vietnam and statistics are from Friedrich.

  32. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), especially 253-57.

  33. Francis X. Clines, “A Lawmaker Asks: Watergate or Peyton Place?” New York Times, October 6. 1998, A21.

  34. Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,” 52.

  35. Paul Monash, quoted in ibid., 54.

  36. Quoted in Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 94.

  37. Quoted in Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,” 52.

  38. Monash and Smith, “Notes on Peyton Place,” 53.

  39. Litwak, “Visit to a Town of the Mind,” 64.

  40. Ibid., 65.

  41. Miller, “Tragedy of Grace Metalious,” 111.

  42. Hal Boyle, “Grace Unfolds to Hal Boyle Hazard of Husband Losing Job,” Laconia Evening Citizen, August 29, 1956.

  43. North, “Shocker Written by Village Wife.”

  44. Louise Riegel quoted in Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 78; Metalious quoted in ibid., 80.

  45. Edmund Fuller, review, Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 23, 1956; review, Time, September 24, 1956.

  46. Miller, “Tragedy of Grace Metalious,” 111.

  47. Baker, “Small Town Peep Show.”

  48. Friedrich, “Farewell to Peyton Place,” 162.

  49. Grace Metalious, “All About Me,” American Weekly, May 18, 1958, n.p.

  50. Ibid.

  51. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 14.

  BOOK ONE

  ♦ 1 ♦

  Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening.

  One year, early in October, Indian summer came to a town called Peyton Place. Like a laughing, lovely woman Indian summer came and spread herself over the countryside and made everything hurtfully beautiful to the eye.

  The sky was low, of a solidly unbroken blue. The maples and oaks and ashes, all dark red and brown and yellow, preened themselves in the unseasonably hot light, under the Indian summer sun. The conifers stood like disapproving old men on all the hills around Peyton Place and gave off a greenish yellow light. On the roads and sidewalks of the town there were fallen leaves which made such a gay crackling when stepped upon and sent up such a sweet scent when crushed that it was only the very old who walked over them and thought of death and decay.

  The town lay still in the Indian summer sun. On Elm Street, the main thoroughfare, nothing moved. The shopkeepers, who had rolled protective canvas awnings down
over their front windows, took the lack of trade philosophically and retired to the back rooms of their stores where they alternately dozed, glanced at the Peyton Place Times and listened to the broadcast of a baseball game.

  To the east on Elm Street, beyond the six blocks occupied by the business section of the town, rose the steeple of the Congregational church. The pointed structure pierced through the leaves of the surrounding trees and shone, dazzlingly white, against the blue sky. At the opposite end of the business district stood another steepled structure. This was St. Joseph's Catholic Church, and its spire far outshone that of the Congregationalists, for it was topped with a cross of gold.

  Seth Buswell, the owner and editor of the Peyton Place Times, had once written, rather poetically, that the two churches bracketed and held the town like a pair of gigantic book ends, an observation which had set off a series of minor explosions in Peyton Place. There were few Catholics in town who cared to be associated in any partnership with the Protestants, while the Congregationalists had as little desire to be paired off with the Papists. If imaginary book ends were to exist in Peyton Place they would both have to be of the same religious denomination.

  Seth had laughed at the arguments heard all over town that week, and in his next edition he reclassified the two churches as tall, protective mountains guarding the peaceful business valley. Both Catholics and Protestants scanned this second article carefully for a trace of sarcasm or facetiousness, but in the end everyone had taken the story at its face value and Seth laughed harder than before.

  Dr. Matthew Swain, Seth's best friend and oldest crony, grunted, “Mountains, eh? More like a pair of goddamned volcanoes.”

  “Both of ’em breathin’ brimstone and fire,” Seth added, still laughing as he poured two more drinks.

  But the doctor would not laugh with his friend. There were three things which he hated in this world, he said often and angrily: death, venereal disease and organized religion.

  “In that order,” the doctor always amended. “And the story, clean or otherwise, that can make me laugh at one of these has never been thought up.”

  But on this hot October afternoon Seth was not thinking of opposing religious factions or, for that matter, of anything in particular. He sat at his desk behind the plate glass window of his street floor office, sipping at a cold drink and listened desultorily to the baseball game.

  In front of the courthouse, a large white stone building with a verdigris-colored dome, a few old men lounged on the wooden benches which seem to be part of every municipal building in America's small towns. The men leaned back against the warm sides of the courthouse, their tired eyes shaded by battered felt hats, and let the Indian summer sun warm their cold, old bones. They were as still as the trees for which the main street had been named.

  Under the elms the black tarred sidewalks, ruffled in many places by the pushing roots of the giant trees, were empty. The chime clock set into the red brick front of the Citizens’ National Bank, across the street from the courthouse, struck once. It was two-thirty on a Friday afternoon.

  ♦ 2 ♦

  Maple Street, which bisected Elm at a point halfway through the business section, was a wide, tree-shaded avenue which ran north and south from one end of town to the other. At the extreme southern end of the street, where the paving ended and gave way to an empty field, stood the Peyton Place schools. It was toward these buildings that Kenny Stearns, the town handyman, walked. The men in front of the courthouse opened drowsy eyes to watch him.

  “There goes Kenny Stearns,” said one man unnecessarily, for everyone had seen—and knew—Kenny.

  “Sober as a judge, right now.”

  “That won't last long.”

  The men laughed.

  “Good at his work though, Kenny is,” said one old man named Clayton Frazier, who made a point of disagreeing with everybody, no matter what the issue.

  “When he ain't too drunk to work.”

  “Never knew Kenny to lose a day's work on account of liquor,” said Clayton Frazier. “Ain't nobody in Peyton Place can make things grow like Kenny. He's got one of them whatcha call green thumbs.”

  One man snickered. “Too bad Kenny don't have the same good luck with his wife as he has with plants. Mebbe Kenny'd be better off with a green pecker.”

  This observation was acknowledged with appreciative smiles and chuckles.

  “Ginny Stearns is a tramp and a trollop,” said Clayton Frazier, unsmilingly. “There ain't much a feller can do when he's married to a born whore.”

  “’Cept drink,” said the man who had first spoken.

  The subject of Kenny Stearns seemed to be exhausted, and for a moment no one spoke.

  “Hotter'n July today,” said one old man. “Damned if my back ain't itchin’ with sweat.”

  “’Twon't last,” said Clayton Frazier, tipping his hat back to look up at the sky. “I've seen it turn off cold and start in snowin’ less than twelve hours after the sun had gone down on a day just like this one. This won't last.”

  “Ain't healthy either. A day like this is enough to make a man start thinkin’ about summer underwear again.”

  “Healthy or not, you'd hear no complaints from me if the weather stayed just like this clear ’til next June.”

  “‘Twon't last,” said Clayton Frazier, and for once his words did not provoke a discussion.

  “No,” the men agreed. “’Twon't last.”

  They watched Kenny Stearns turn into Maple Street and walk out of sight.

  The Peyton Place schools faced each other from opposite sides of the street. The grade school was a large wooden building, old, ugly and dangerous, but the high school was the pride of the town. It was made of brick, with windows so large that each one made up almost an entire wall, and it had a clinical, no-nonsense air of efficiency that gave it the look more of a small, well-run hospital than that of a school. The elementary school was Victorian architecture at its worst, made even more hideous by the iron fire escapes which zigzagged down both sides of the building, and by the pointed, open belfry which topped the structure. The grade school bell was rung by means of a thick, yellow rope which led down from the belfry and was threaded through the ceiling and floor of the building's second story. The rope came to an end and hung, a constant temptation to small hands, in the corner of the first floor hall. The school bell was Kenny Stearns’ secret love. He kept it polished so that it gleamed like antique pewter in the October sun. As he approached the school buildings now, Kenny looked up at the belfry and nodded in satisfaction.

  “The bells of heaven ain't got tongues no sweeter than yours,” he said aloud.

  Kenny often spoke aloud to his bell. He also talked to the school buildings and to the various plants and lawns in town for which he cared.

  From the windows of both schools, open now to the warm afternoon, there came a soft murmuring and the smell of pencil shavings.

  “Hadn't oughta keep school on a day like this,” said Kenny.

  He stood by the low hedge which separated the grade school from the first house on Maple Street. A warm, green smell, composed of the grass and hedges which he had cut that morning rose around him.

  “This ain't no kind of a day for schoolin’,” said Kenny and shrugged impatiently, not at his inarticulateness but in puzzlement at a rare emotion in himself.

  He wanted to throw himself face down on the ground and press his face and body against something green.

  “That's the kind of day it is,” he told the quiet buildings truculently. “No kind of a day for schoolin’.”

  He noticed that a small twig in the hedge had raised itself, growing above the others and marring the evenness of the uniformly flat hedge tops. He bent to snip off this precocious bit of green with his fingers, a sharp tenderness taking form within him. But suddenly a wildness came over him, and he grabbed a handful of the small, green leaves, crushing them until he felt their yielding wetness against his skin while passion tightened itself within him a
nd his breath shook. A long time ago, before he had taught himself not to care, he had felt this same way toward his wife Ginny. There had been the same tenderness which would suddenly be overwhelmed by a longing to crush and conquer, to possess by sheer strength and force. Abruptly Kenny released the handful of broken leaves and wiped his hand against the side of his rough overall.