A Tragic Honesty

by Blake Bailey

  After a long despondent bender in Boston, Yates reappeared in Los Angeles looking as if he were on the verge of death. His hands trembled, he couldn’t catch his breath, he seemed in pain all the time. He was frantic to finish his novel, but equally to do whatever he could to earn his keep with Milch. Milch was appalled: He urged Yates to concentrate on his health and novel, in that order, and let the rest go; they formalized a financial arrangement and found an apartment for Yates in west Los Angeles. Naturally Yates insisted on something spartan, and he got it: a furnished one-bedroom in a motel-like complex built around a shabby courtyard. On the orange shag carpet Yates set up a card table for his manual Royal, then nailed three portraits of his daughters to the wall and that was that. The apartment—as noted by a reporter who later interviewed Yates there—“was the kind of place people hole up when they’re on the lam from the law.”

  Other than Milch, Yates’s only companion during these months was a three-hundred-pound recovering heroin addict named Larry, who was dying of AIDS. Milch had put the man up in an apartment near Yates’s, and in return Larry cooked breakfast for Milch’s children and served as Yates’s chauffeur. “Larry and Dick formed the most unlikely duo,” Milch remarked with twinkling understatement. “They were the best thing in each of their lives. Driving Dick around gave Larry something to do during the day, and gave Dick something to bitch about.” The poignant Larry seemed to provoke Yates in a number of ways: The car always stank of his cigars (though he was careful to put them out as soon as Yates got in), and he insisted on taking Yates to intolerable movies; also, he was morbidly devoted to David Milch and Narcotics Anonymous, and Yates thought it was all a bunch of hokum—both Larry’s ease with accepting charity and his faith in twelve-step programs. Mainly Yates was exasperated by the hopelessness of the man: When he wasn’t placidly resigned to whatever remained of his life, he tended to dwell on the guilt he felt for being a bad father during his addict days. “You’re a hive of regret!” Yates would explode. “Dick resented everything about Larry, but in fact adored him,” said Milch. “He’d gather all his strength to berate Larry’s taste in movies or whatever, then he’d be tired and go to sleep, and Larry could go home. That’s why Larry was such a gift to Dick: Dick’s ranting was just background music to Larry, who understood it for what it was.”

  Yates’s rancor spared no one; indeed, at times, it seemed the only thing keeping him alive. Once he’d gotten over his initial gratitude, he became particularly abusive toward Milch, as if he were baiting the man to cast him into the outer darkness. As Milch recalled, “A necessary precondition for any conversation with Dick was to spend five or ten minutes on the extent to which I’d abused my gifts and abdicated my responsibilities as a writer. By then he was out of breath so we couldn’t talk about anything else.” In the end Milch was no more offended by such bluster than Larry—if anything it was simply painful to witness, as when Yates would insist on showing Milch bits of manuscript to prove his novel really existed. But no matter how pitiful Yates occasionally seemed, he commanded respect and hence forgiveness; he was struggling to keep his dignity, and he refused to give up.

  One day he asked Milch to meet him for dinner at the Bicycle Café on Wilshire. (The place was around the corner from Yates’s apartment, and soon became his Crossroads and Blue Mill in Los Angeles.) “After the usual diatribe about my having embraced everything philistine and inauthentic in American culture,” Milch remembered, “we settled down to business. It was hard for Dick to ask for anything: You had to figure out what he wanted, offer it to him, then be lambasted for a while for having offered it.” Yates embarked on an elaborate preamble about how “full of shit” Hollywood parties were, how Milch’s parties were liable to be worse than most (“I’d never been to a Hollywood party,” said Milch, “but I was trying to agree with him in principle”), full of “fucking Hollywood phonies” and so forth. Then Yates segued to the topic of his sixteen-year-old daughter Gina, who was coming out for a visit; he hadn’t seen her in a long time, etc. “Dick, I have an idea,” said Milch, getting the picture. “Why don’t we have a party?” Yates consented, and seemed pleased with the result: The other guests made much of him, and Gina seemed to enjoy herself and plainly adored her father. At some point the tipsy Yates, expansive with happiness, made to embrace Gina and caught his thumb in her hoop earring, tearing the lobe. As the blood gushed from her ear, Yates became abject, and Gina forgot her own distress and fell to consoling him. “It was so sad,” said Milch, “and yet a perfect moment from one of Dick’s stories: the best of intentions, but some fundamental inauthenticity or incapacity with devastating results … and yet something transcendently beautiful in the failure of the moment.”

  * * *

  What Monica Yates called her “last hurrah as a writer” was a 1988 stay at the MacDowell Colony, where she tried to revise her novel into something more literary, or anyway less embarrassing; in her cabin she noticed her father’s name on the roster of previous occupants, an ambiguous portent at best. Back in New York she was earning good wages as a part-time word-processor at Skadden Arps law firm, but Yates perceived her life as lonely and bleak. “I’m not Emily Grimes,” Monica would protest. “This isn’t depressing.” Then one night in September, as luck would have it, her building burned down and her novel with it. Monica watched from the street as everything she owned went up in smoke; she didn’t even have a toothbrush. She wondered if this was some kind of sign.

  Yates wasn’t inclined to put it that way, though he thought it might be a nice opportunity for both of them: He needed company in Los Angeles; she needed a place to stay and time to think; he’d sleep on the couch and she could have the bedroom all to herself. Monica was tempted—any change seemed good at that point—though she did have one predictable reservation. “I like to drink,” Yates had always balked in the past. “I enjoy it. It’s the one thing I really enjoy.” Monica had suggested he find something else. “Like what?” he asked. “Nature and exercise?” His last alcoholic collapse in Boston had coincided with Monica’s time at MacDowell, and over the phone she’d angrily insisted that he finally make the connection between drinking, drugs, and breakdowns. Yates professed to see her point and afterward seemed to limit himself to the occasional beer, but Monica demanded total abstinence before she’d move to Los Angeles. In the end Yates agreed: By then he was tired enough of hangovers, breakdowns, contretemps of all sorts—and loneliness—to give full-time sobriety a try.

  As Larry drove them in from the airport, Yates mentioned in passing that there was “a little bit of a cockroach problem” at his apartment. This proved to be an impressive understatement: Yates’s kitchen had been all but annexed by the pests; one cabinet in particular, where a rotten potato forlornly reposed, was “a moving sheet of cockroaches.” Monica spent her entire first night in Los Angeles smashing, spraying, and finally scrubbing away the sticky brown residue of the slaughter—though for weeks afterward, every morning, dead and dying roaches would appear on the floor with fresh abundance. Monica came to think of her father’s housekeeping as “tidy, but not clean”: Though he seemed oblivious to the ashes that covered the place like volcanic soot, to vermin of all sorts, to the gray slime left by the black sponge he sometimes ran over counters, to the stench emanating from a broken disposal unit, he nonetheless kept his manuscripts in neat piles, made up his couch each morning, and was nettled by his daughter’s inclination to leave newspapers strewn any which way.

  Other than that, they got along remarkably well. Though Yates missed alcohol every waking hour of the day, he kept his promise and stayed sober. The change in his temperament was astounding: Once again he became the doting, playful father whom Monica had known and adored as a child, with the difference that now they could live as companionable adults. Every morning they read and loudly discussed the New York Times. “People around here must think we hate each other,” they’d say, laughing at their own raised voices and merry fuck you’s. One night they went out with Lar
ry David (who’d come to Los Angeles to work on the Seinfeld pilot), as well as actor-comedian Richard Lewis and a starlet he was dating at the time. Afterward a tearful Monica lamented that her life was going nowhere—she was holed-up in a one-bedroom apartment with her father, while Lewis’s starlet lived in a penthouse. “Ah baby,” said Yates. “Cheer up. At least we’re not as bad as Woody Herman and his daughter”—whereupon he showed her a story in the Times about how the jazz great and his middle-aged daughter had washed up on a Los Angeles lawn, evicted with all their worldly goods.

  Amid this idyll Monica persisted in her childhood tendency to badger Yates about his bad habits—“baiting the lion in his lair,” she called it. Taped to the wall was a piece of paper titled “Things to Do,” and in Yates’s column she’d written such items as “Quit smoking”; “Stop saying ‘fuck’”; “Improve posture.” Yates, in turn, chided his daughter’s lack of discipline as a writer: “You read too much, you exercise too much, you do everything but write,” he told her. The truth was, whatever wan literary impulse abided in Monica was being killed by the daunting example of her father’s absolute commitment. Despite mortal illness and constant fatigue, he wrote for hours every day; even a letter to the electric company was polished into lapidary perfection. “I thought ugh, I can’t do that,” said Monica. When Yates would remonstrate with her on the subject, she’d sometimes accuse him of wanting her to be like him, to which Yates would reply No, he truly thought writing was the only fulfilling thing for her—apart from being a wife and mother. “He was very sincere about it,” said Monica, “and he was partly right: I had that sort of temperament, but not enough talent or drive. Still, it made me happy to hear him say that, since it made me see that he himself was fulfilled by his writing. He thought it a great, worthy life—the only life.”

  The most disquieting aspect of living with Yates was to witness at close range the morbidities of failing health. Every morning he’d hawk and retch in a desperate effort to clear his lungs; as his emphysema worsened, the wet bronchial cough of twenty years earlier gave way to a ragged hacking, the mucus drying up and the alveoli collapsing. Even more disturbing were symptoms akin to those of mental illness. Not long after Monica’s arrival, Yates was hospitalized with pneumonia, prior to which he seemed to be slipping into dementia—in one case obsessing about a check to Martha he’d already sent. “Gotta get her that check, baby,” he panted over and over as Monica tried to calm him. Not until later, when she became a nurse, did Monica realize that her father had been suffering from the effects of hypoxia—lack of oxygen to the brain and other tissues. At the time, however, such behavior was an ominous reminder of past lapses.

  Though he had every intention of finishing Uncertain Times and, with any luck, a few other books, Yates began to accept at least the possibility that he might die soon—out of print, forgotten, and broke. The old mirage of a big movie deal seemed the only hope of providing an inheritance for his daughters (he still wanted to send Gina to Harvard), and in his final years this became a fixed idea of sorts. In 1988 a Denver-based filmmaker named Donna Dewey optioned Cold Spring Harbor and hired Yates’s old friend Bill Harrison (of Rollerball fame) to write the screenplay. Harrison decided that the apparent protagonist, Evan Shepherd, was too unsympathetic to build a story around, and decided instead to focus on Phil Drake—that is, Phil’s bike riding around Long Island with the affluent loser “Flash” Ferris. Harrison proposed to call this adaptation Bicycle Summer, and further proposed not to reveal the details to Yates until it was too late for him to howl in protest. Over dinner at Tutto Bene in November, Yates sipped seltzer and pressed Harrison about his screenplay—questions Harrison artfully dodged, both then and during Yates’s subsequent phone calls. Finally Harrison and Dewey submitted the script to Jack Clayton, director of the 1974 remake of Gatsby, who seemed interested. Alas, the movie was never made, though for Yates it would have been a bittersweet experience at best.

  “There’s just no whore in that man at all,” Dubus once remarked of Yates. Despite his sheepish claims to the contrary, Yates could never deliberately write “soap opera” or be party to it (if he could help it), at least where his serious work was concerned; indeed, he felt hideous anguish when it was cheapened in even the most incidental way. Just before leaving Boston, he’d finally acquired a new agent—a young man named Ned Leavitt, who also handled Dan Wakefield. About a year later Leavitt arranged for Random House to reissue Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and The Easter Parade as part of their popular Vintage Contemporaries line, a deal that promised to revitalize Yates’s career somewhat. This happy prospect was diminished, however, when Yates saw the cover art, which so enraged him that he was tempted to stop the presses with legal action. “Why has surrealism been chosen as the cover style for these novels, when I can find it on no other Vintage books?” he wrote in a memo to Leavitt, which he copied to his lawyer friend Prettyman. The proposed cover for Revolutionary Road depicted a small suburban house and church within a floating glass jar, against which was propped a ladder; Yates thought this inexplicably evoked Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, that the ladder was a “mixed metaphor,” and that the church was “wholly inappropriate.” He demanded that the “three offending images” be removed and the house lowered to the ground. As for the cover of The Easter Parade (two hanging dresses with folded human arms): “The picture is gruesome, to no purpose. Does it mean to suggest identical twins who have only coat-hanger hooks where their heads ought to be? I am entirely baffled and believe readers will be, too.” With little change, though, the covers were allowed to stand.*

  Meanwhile Yates was casting about for some way to achieve financial independence, and toward that end he suspended work on his novel in early 1989 to write a twenty-two-page “proposal for a screenplay” titled The World on Fire. The treatments for Milch had been hateful labor, but the well-crafted and funny World on Fire reads like a pleasant exercise in nostalgia, if a somewhat mercenary and left-handed one. “This will be a story of the early 1950’s in America,” it begins, “when electronic computers were still an infant technology with a great if barely discernible future.” The protagonist is a twenty-eight-year-old salesman for Remington Rand named Harold Clark, whose go-getting ingenuity wins him a transfer from Wichita to New York, where he’s expected to promote the “cumbersome, intricate and expensive” UNIVAC by developing applications “sexy” enough to stir the public imagination. Harold is hindered in this venture by a bland, unimaginative boss named Ed Grundy, whose staff is comprised of “cool, languid snobs who have long made a virtue of despising their work.” Harold’s brainchild is to use the UNIVAC to predict the outcome, on national TV, of the 1952 presidential election; he railroads the idea past an envious sales staff and doubtful engineers, whereupon an “avalanche of publicity” ensues: “If machines relieve mankind of thought as a burden, will we then be free for more creative lives?” the media wonders. “Will the computer revolution bring a new Age of Enlightenment?”

  Yates used his insider’s knowledge of the UNIVAC and its various controversies to good effect, and bolstered it all with a subplot addressing his favorite theme of mediocre people—women in particular—who wistfully pursue “creative” lives. Harold’s bored wife Elaine falls in with a circle of women who “allow themselves long and adventurous days in Manhattan,” trying to “find themselves” via “psychotherapy and its numbing jargon” as well as painting, acting, dancing, and writing classes. Elaine enrolls in a lecture course at the New School called “Strategies of Indirection in the Novel” taught by a witty rake, Thurston Picard, who naturally seduces her. Picard surprises Elaine by finding her husband’s work interesting—computers, he says, may prove “a way of transcending reality”—but on the night of the election, everything goes wrong for Harold. The UNIVAC (with its “two separate, cable-linked components … each the size of a room”) all but crowds out the broadcasting equipment at the television network, and then delivers results that are not only late bu
t grossly inaccurate. Harold’s disgrace is mirrored by that of another modest visionary, Yates’s hero Adlai Stevenson, while the fatuous Eisenhower “is shown waving both arms, displaying the wide empty grin that will come to personify the United States for the next eight years.” It would seem a typical Yates ending, but this was for the movies, after all. Thus, when Professor Picard pointedly tells his students that the UNIVAC fiasco reminds him of “Flaubert’s great image of the carp on the kitchen table,” Elaine leaves the class in disgust and goes back to her sacked husband, who is far too plucky to be daunted long by this setback. The movie ends with the couple popping champagne on the road back to Wichita, as the song “Side by Side” comes up on the soundtrack.

  The proposal was shopped around the major studios, whose representatives tended to pass on the story but commend the writing; Ruth Pomerance and Scott Rudin at Columbia told Yates’s agent they were “huge fans and would like to develop something with him”—but nothing came of this, or of The World on Fire. In the latter case it was perhaps for the best, since the story’s pivotal event is fundamentally inaccurate: In fact the UNIVAC made history by predicting Eisenhower’s 1952 landslide based on less than 1 percent of the vote. Yates was puzzled when he couldn’t find newspaper accounts to verify his own version, though probably he didn’t research the matter very thoroughly. In later years he was intimidated by librarians (and cabbies and waiters and doormen) who were liable to look askance at his wheezing disheveled helplessness; a couple of years before, after one abortive attempt to research Uncertain Times at a Boston library, he’d asked the young Don Lee to go in his stead and find part of a speech he’d written in an old microfilmed issue of Time magazine.

  * * *

  Yates was heartily sick of living off Milch. A university placement service had shopped his résumé all over the country, but apart from a few nibbles, “nobody would touch him” as Monica Yates put it. Finally he called the director of the USC Masters of Professional Writing program, James Ragan, and laid it on the line: His daughter had come to live with him, Yates said, and he “want[ed] to give her stability”; he’d take anything the man could give him. As it happened Ragan had nothing, but such was his admiration for Yates—mixed with pity, perhaps—that he offered a half course for the spring 1989 semester, paid out of Ragan’s own budget, with a full course to follow if all went well. That was the end of the Milch money.