John F. Kennedy was Cary Grant in the White House. Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Cary Grant, and the next morning we all understood that we were living in another country. And by the end of the week, when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, surrealism was in the saddle and rode mankind.
JFK was our first movie star president. He had the glitter, the glamour, the randiness, the sexiness, the bad-boy image that moviegoers love for their larger-than-life stars. Kennedy had wit and style and a knowing slyness. He affected both men and women, making them want to play a part in the movie he starred in—and if that movie was about high times and hope replacing the blandness and conformity of Grandfather Ike, then so much the better. Who could say no to that mischievous grin? We even forgave him his failed black comedy, The Three Stooges Go to Cuba.
He offered himself as a symbol of change. And we were ready. And if his bad-boy pugnaciousness came perilously close to ending it all, nonetheless you had to admit, he almost got away with it. He won the missile crisis, he got Khrushchev to back down, he started the Peace Corps, he started Vietnam, he threw so many balls in the air, with so much confusion and so much spin in so many directions, that it now seems inevitable that one of them had to come down with history-changing force and blow him apart.
And with Kennedy gone, we, his audience, recognized for the first time that we were living in the wrong movie.
His movie, full of risk, made us giddy with excitement. His wild streak, couched in the language of pragmatism, kept us on our toes. Touch football, the game preferred by the Kennedy family, was the metaphor that best described his style of leadership: lots of running, dodging, fumbling, breaking free, getting nailed … He was youth, he was idealism, he was gone in an instant.
Our sense of shock ran in tandem with our sense of wonder at the razzle-dazzle effectiveness of the Johnson succession. If JFK was Cary Grant, LBJ invoked the spirit of FDR and the New Deal, moving on civil rights legislation with a swiftness that seemed a rebuke to his predecessor. An accidental president with no broad-based constituency, he nonetheless buttonholed, coaxed, cajoled, and convinced former Senate colleagues, deep-dyed segregationists, to support his voting rights bill.
And after his civil rights victory, he pushed through a poverty program, then ran for president in his own right, sounding like a peace candidate, and not long after that, he cynically and duplicitously escalated the war in Vietnam. After an extraordinary first year in office, he is remembered today more for Vietnam, the Chicago riots, the beginning of the belief that was to become axiomatic—that government lies—and the subsequent collapse of liberalism. On the other hand, without his civil rights legislation it is impossible to imagine that Barack Obama could have ever run for president. (Some other hand!)
LBJ’s very own personal Vietnam was not the only violence confronting us. Acts of random violence, unconnected to politics, started popping up all over the place. In LBJ’s own Texas, a young student, Charles Whitman, climbed to the top of a tower on the Austin campus of the University of Texas and started shooting people below.
Whitman’s mass murders seemed to symbolize what was erupting in less dramatic fashion in other parts of the country. I was convinced by the end of 1964 that the Kennedy assassination was inspiring a colossal national nervous breakdown, which was going unacknowledged in our media although signs of it, large and small, were in evidence almost everywhere I looked.
One became uncomfortably aware that the U.S. was coming unglued as a nation, all forms of authority delegitimized. We were breaking into rebellion, separating ourselves into fiefdoms—emerging signs of Closet America.
As a nation we were undergoing not a change of guard or a change of values but a change of everything. From structure to confusion, from confusion to disillusion, from disillusion to anarchy. America was dissolving before our very eyes.
Was it a blowback from the racial wars? Was it the sexual revolution? Rock ’n’ roll, early drugging, the decline and fall of official maturity? Or was it a Cold War madness brought on by twenty years of suffocation and threat and paranoia and prosperity? Had our hypocrisies become too transparently obvious for the system to go on pretending that they made sense? Were the acts of random violence breaking out helter-skelter, from the Texas tower to Charles Manson, separate but equal acts of a collective psychosis?
Was there a logic of disturbance and disenchantment at work here? The American Dream transformed into the American Killing Machine? Bitter citizens, feeling cheated and thwarted, pick up whatever weapon is at hand, in a land full of handy weapons, and cry out, in Paddy Chayefsky’s immortal words from Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
But take it we did, and take it some more—and these outbursts, flaring incidents of violence, little murders up and down our fifty states (or was it forty-nine back then?) were indigenously American, true to how our traditions taught us to let off steam, dating from the old frontier to the New Frontier.
Had anyone written about this? Not in any of the periodicals I read. I had a vision of imminent onrushing insanity: educators no longer able to educate, leaders unable and unqualified to lead, parents unable or unqualified to establish beliefs and boundaries for their children … The breakdown of every form of traditional authority—why wasn’t I reading about this? In Time and Newsweek and the New York Times or Commentary or Partisan Review?
I would have to work on this. But it was too complicated for a comic strip or a long cartoon narrative. It would have to be a novel—my second, God help me! The first, published early in 1963, the year Kennedy was shot, had been an awful experience. I had a title for this new one. Little Murders. I hoped it would go better.
I made copious notes, hid them away, and began writing. As I wrote I permitted myself to drift away from my theme. I found myself bogged down in writerly trivia.
Page after page of endless digression. Descriptions of nature that I had no business trying to record: what spring in Nebraska looked like, what snow in New Hampshire looked like. My readers needed to know. I needed to tell them. I needed so badly to tell them what I lacked the powers to describe that I forgot the story I meant to write. I forgot the point. Why exactly was I sitting at my desk for two years, legal-size yellow pads piling up in a file cabinet that I did not go near after locking away whatever it was that I had assigned myself to create?
I hid out in the back-room studio of our apartment on Riverside Drive, where Judy and I had moved after the birth of Kate. I was able to make up stories to tell our beautiful red-haired baby daughter at bedtime but I was getting nowhere with my own story. It took almost a year for me to admit that I was stuck. Again. Just as I’d been with my first novel three years earlier.
HARRY, THE RAT
Writing my first novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, had been one of the few times that I despised and resented the act of creation. Every page was a thankless effort. Even when the work was going well, I couldn’t wait for this dreadful assignment I had handed myself to wind itself down, dragging myself each day to my desk to do what felt like homework.
Bogged down in the last third of the novel and hopelessly and endlessly moaning about it, I was offered a refuge. My friend Don Stewart invited me to use his father’s empty house in Upper Jay in upstate New York as a hideaway to write. Don’s father was the screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, who started out as a humorist for the original Vanity Fair, wrote for The New Yorker, and ended up in Hollywood writing famous adaptations of Philip Barry’s plays Holiday and The Philadelphia Story.
Don’s father was a lefty, probably a Communist, who was converted in the 1920s by his Upper East Side doorman. Old Don had been in the midst of writing a play with a working-class character. Coming from a middle-class family in Columbus, Ohio, he knew nothing about the working class. So he approached the only member of the working class he had ever met, the doorman of his apartment building, and asked for his help. His doorman lent him his copy of Das Kapital, and that was enough to turn Old D
on Red.
Later, Don landed in Hollywood and met and married Ella Winter, the widow of my muckraking hero Lincoln Steffens. Don and Ella became mainstays of the Hollywood Left in the antifascist thirties, which of course set them up as prey for HUAC when, in the early postwar years, it went headline hunting for Reds. To avoid testifying, the Stewarts decamped for England, where they sought sanctuary and founded a salon in Hampstead Heath, outside of London. They became the social outpost for left-wing émigrés. Sympathizers of every nationality, blacklisted or not yet blacklisted, came for Sunday lunch at the Stewarts’. Charlie Chaplin was a frequent visitor, but never while I was there.
My first visit to the famed Stewart homestead at 103 Frognal was in 1959. I was in London at the invitation of the Observer, which in concert with Billy Collins, the publisher of the English edition of Sick, Sick, Sick, was bringing me over to celebrate my book. The strip had, to my delight, created a lot of talk in London. And in London, a lot of talk means that you’ve arrived.
I arrived by way of the Queen Elizabeth, mother of all Cunard liners and straight out of a Fred and Ginger movie. And why would I travel that way? It was my fear of flying. I was terrified of flying—I did all those things on a plane you do when you know that you and you alone are responsible for keeping it in the air. When the plane banked sharply left, I leaned right so that it would regain its balance. When the plane banked right, I corrected in the opposite direction. My heart was never out of my mouth, and that was for short trips. Trips to L.A., I barely survived.
So I was not about to fly across the Atlantic. The Atlantic? Are you kidding? This vast stretch of black ocean twenty-five or thirty-five thousand feet below, flying blind at night with pilots whom I didn’t know, I had never met. My boundless fear could not keep a plane in the air for the eight hours it would take to get me to London. No, I would plunge into the dark, turbulent, and murky Atlantic, gone in an instant, who would know where? Vanished without a trace, me and Amelia Earhart.
Better to go by boat. Ted Riley, my agent, was coming with me, and since he, with his high-toned prep school accent, was the most English-sounding person I knew outside of George Plimpton, he seemed like an obvious choice to accompany me. But if Ted was with me, I had to make an impression, so it was a given that we would travel first class. I bought my first tux at J. Press (fifty years later, I have a second tux). We had a farewell party in my stateroom just as Joel McCrea did in Foreign Correspondent, I strolled the deck with Gershwin music in my head just as Astaire did in Shall We Dance, and I dined and drank and drank and dined magnificently, just as Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck did in The Lady Eve.
I was living out my movie life. Most appropriately, our second day out, in the Queen’s lavish screening room, a vast theater with heavy leather armchairs spaced comfortably apart, they screened a not-as-yet-released Alfred Hitchcock film that I hadn’t heard of, North by Northwest. Here I was, living out my Fred Astaire fantasy, and who should join us? Cary Grant.
After which, long after midnight, Ted and I, in our tuxedoes, retreated for a nightcap to the top of the top deck. Unless you climbed a smokestack, you could go no higher. We sat on bar stools in the quiet and under-attended Verandah Grill, sipping Pimm’s Cups, observing another insomniac passenger looking far more elegant in black tie than we did. He was fooling around on the piano, playing Duke Ellington. And why not? He was Duke Ellington.
WORKING
The Observer had asked me if there was anyone I would particularly like to meet in London. I wrote back that if it could be arranged (and if it couldn’t be, that was perfectly fine) I’d love to meet my hero, the great political cartoonist of World War II David Low. And I’d love to meet Vicky, aka Victor Weisz, another brilliant socialist cartoonist, who drew for the Evening Standard, and I’d love to meet Felix Topolski, the Polish émigré artist who came to London and began producing weekly illustrated journals on butcher paper, diaries scrawled in pen and illustrated in charcoal that documented his travels around the city. And, oh yes, I’d like to meet that guy who wrote Look Back in Anger, John Osborne.
Nigel Gosling and Terry Kilmartin, the art and literary editors of the paper, set up everything that I requested. And more. Lunch with Philip Toynbee and Gavin Young, their dashing, trench-coated foreign correspondent (who became a friend) and Anthony Sampson, their dogged and diligent and even more brilliant foreign and jack-of-all-trades correspondent, a kind of English David Halberstam.
Lunch with David Low, his wife, and his aunt: Low looked like a kindly version of his famous cartoon character Colonel Blimp. He was warm and witty and curious and everything I could have wanted in a hero, but later I couldn’t remember a word he said because all my time with him I was thinking, “I can’t believe I’m having lunch with David Low!”
London treated me like a rock star. It was a degree of celebrity I was yet to experience in the States. I was bowled over by the attention, the admiration, the flattery. I didn’t ever want to return home to find out that this wasn’t my real life.
My friend Tom Migliore, a big, bushy-haired Bronx beatnik, was in town. I had met Tom through Norton Juster. He was a builder by trade, a closet intellectual masquerading as macho working class. He was a hunk with a mouth that strung words together in jazz-riff improvisations. This was 1959, before the Beatles, before long hair, before English cool. I showed up at Chelsea and Soho parties with England’s first American beatnik talking indecipherable gibberish to the English, who adored it. Tom spoke in sentence fragments, sudden stops and starts, cadenced like a bass player, a Bronx neighborhood accent (Italian vintage), stuffed with literary and political references: “You don’t know,” “You gotta,” “You know?” “You don’t wanna know.”
We were a real live Bernard and Huey. Women went for Tom, literary types went for me. I had stimulating conversations, he got laid.
I took Tom to 103 Frognal to meet Donald Ogden Stewart and Ella Winter. It was at one of these gatherings that I worked up the nerve to ask Old Don the question that had been preying on my mind: “Is it true that in that great fishing scene in The Sun Also Rises where Jake and Bill Gorton have this long conversation—is it true that you’re Bill Gorton?”
Old Don, who was known to drink, tasted his martini and paused as if to consider this question that he had to have been asked a hundred times before. In his high-pitched, Columbus, Ohio, accent, he drawled, “Well … that’s what people say … but really, I was a lot funnier than that.”
And now, a year later, I was in Old Don’s house in Upper Jay, New York, a ramshackle, nondescript two-story barn, drab and characterless compared with Frognal, but I was thrilled to be there. Neither Judy nor I had ever learned to drive, so Don Junior drove us up to the house, shopped with us in town for groceries and booze, and drove off, cheerily leaving me to my long-delayed work. I didn’t know what Judy was planning to do with her time, but I was preparing to ready myself to sit down some day that week—and write—and write—and write.
I had not touched the book for weeks. I was trapped, comfortably afloat in a sea of self-loathing. I wasn’t a novelist. How did I get into writing a novel in the first place? Every sentence I wrote was an attempt to find a way of telling my story while getting around the fact that I lacked the powers of observation and description, not to mention a facility with words, that real novelists seem to be born with.
I was dealing with my deficiencies and I was bored by the effort. I was a six-to-nine-panel man who wrote the best comic strip dialogue in the business, but was I more than that? I had the ambition, but on the evidence of my paralysis, I was beginning to question whether I had the talent. Or the will.
Intent on not answering these questions, on my first morning in Upper Jay I distracted myself by attacking the Stewarts’ library. It was stacked with hundreds of books, classics I was meaning to read. Now, this very moment! Political tracts documenting the history of the American Left over the last forty years, including a collection of speeches from the Waldorf
Peace Conference held prior to Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union. Lillian Hellman and Don Stewart had spoken out against U.S. intervention in this “phony war,” as viewed by the Far Left.
I found a copy of a 1935 issue of the Nation magazine with an editorial condemning the passage of the Wagner Labor Act, which, for the first time, recognized the right of unions to collectively bargain. The legislation wasn’t nearly strong enough, or so thought the Nation, which went on to editorialize that no law would be better than a weak law. I thought, “Thank God I’m a humorist. It allows me to forgive the idiocy of the Left while still considering myself one of their number.”
I finally chose an anthology containing all four novels by Nathanael West. I was a great admirer of West. Perhaps an hour or so of reading his fiction would be just what I needed to set the proper mood for all the writing I was planning to do. That day, or the next, or someday very soon. I sped through The Dream Life of Balso Snell (new to me) and Miss Lonely-hearts and the first half of The Day of the Locust, both previously read. I was dazzled, I was sated. I had spent my entire first day reading West.
And now it was behind me, and Judy and I had dinner. I poured a Scotch or two to boost me out of my chair at the table and propel me upstairs to the cell I had chosen to confront my sadly overlooked novel. I set myself up at a small desk, with paper and fountain pens and a bottle of Waterman’s ink (I have never learned to type). And what happened next was extraordinary. Within seconds, doors that had been closed to me opened wide. All that was so muddled before suddenly cleared. I wrote five pages in an hour in longhand, went downstairs to keep afloat with a Scotch, then back upstairs for another hour to write three or four more pages, then downstairs for Scotch.
I was on a roll. Never had I written so well, not like a cartoonist uncertain of his talent, not a bit of it. Oh, the language! Oh, the grace! Oh, the wit, the style! Four hours later, drunk and euphoric, I collapsed into bed next to my long-snoozing wife. I passed out immediately and woke happy beyond memory six hours later, head throbbing with hangover but impatient to get back to my brilliant first novel. I was writing a masterpiece.
Backing Into Forward Page 30