by Blake Bailey
Yates himself, of course, couldn’t help but work with agonizing care, which was hardly the sort of thing his present employers had in mind. “At the rate Yates is going he will complete [the screenplay] about the time we land the first Astronaut on the moon,” Malcolm Stuart, his Hollywood agent, reported in May. Meanwhile Yates was “discovering endless problems” in adapting the novel he admired so much: “How can you expect an audience to sit through two hours of unrelieved heartbreak without breaking up into peals of derisive laughter?” he wrote the Schulmans. “The really ludicrous part is that I’m going to damn sure have to figure it out before July first or my economic ass will be dragging again—I don’t get another paycheck until I’ve turned in the first draft, and July first is when my dough runs out.”
By then Yates was already disenchanted with the whole “diseased” Hollywood milieu, even more so than he’d pessimistically anticipated. It had taken all of two months for his stock as a screenwriter to drop—for his agent to mock his dilatory progress, for his phone to quit ringing while Frankenheimer et al. got on with their high-powered lives—but no matter how bored, lonely, and disgusted he felt, Yates hardly thought he’d find much comfort in whatever “friendships” he managed to make in Hollywood. “Don’t think I’m neglecting you, sweetheart,” he wrote Bob Parker:
Matter of fact I happened to mention your name to Jerry Wald just the other day—we were grabbing a bite in the Commissary with Frank and Dean and Shirley and some of the group—and I said Jerry, you know why your last four pictures bombed?… I said Jerry, you’re weak artwise—costumes, set design, the whole schmier. I said Jerry, it so happens I’m personally acquainted with the all-time greatest little art talent of our generation. I said You know the way Judy puts over a song? I said You know the way Marlon puts over a scene? I said Well that’s the way this kid puts over a painting.… Kid out in Carmel, New York, name of Bobby Andy Parker.
Jerry just looked at me. He said Dick baby you know what I love about you? He said if there’s one thing I love about you it’s your loyalty to your friends; right, Frank? Frank said That’s right, Jerry, that’s Dick’s whole action: loyalty. Dean said That’s right, Frank. Shirley kind of cuddled up and she said You can say that again, Dean. She said That’s why we all love you, Dick; that’s your whole action: loyalty. Very wonderful; very human; very warm.
Yates went on to write that Wald had rejected his overture in Parker’s behalf (“he said Dick baby … in this industry you’ve got to be a businessman”), but begged Parker not to lose heart: He knew of an opening in the “Animation Department (Black & White)” at Disney, where the salary was $67.50 a week, union scale, and in the meantime Yates would find him lodgings at a “very reasonable trailer park out in East L.A.” And finally—lest Parker think the target of all this was something other than Hollywood phoniness—Yates added a conciliatory postscript: “This struck me as side-splittingly funny when I wrote it; now it seems much less so, and I’m haunted by visions of Dot saying ‘Oh, that’s mean.’ But I’ll mail it anyway because it represents hours of work. If it doesn’t make you laugh you have my permission to roll it into a tight cylinder and stick it up the nearest horse’s ass.” That Yates was willing to spend “hours” composing a clever letter to distant out-of-touch friends speaks volumes about his frame of mind.
Loneliness is perhaps the best way to explain Yates’s affair with his agent’s thirty-seven-year-old secretary, Catherine Downing, who later turned up as the title character in “Saying Goodbye to Sally.”* Sally Baldwin (née Munk) was born of working-class parents in an industrial California town, and the same may be assumed of Catherine Downing (née Meng) of Lomita, California. Downing was a well-spoken divorcée who did most of Malcolm Stuart’s reading for him, and as such had read and admired Revolutionary Road. This was the basis of a flirtation that resulted in her “shacking-up” with Yates (as he later put it) for the rest of his stay in California. Yates was surprised to learn that Downing lived in a lavish replica of an old Southern mansion on Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, then a bit repelled as he began to see the whole picture: The owner of the place was a promiscuous single mother who’d enticed Downing to live there not only as a friend but as “protective coloration” for the woman’s sordid behavior despite the presence of a young son. For a while Yates was too relieved at having Downing’s company to remonstrate much over this arrangement. Like Jack Fields in the story, he romanticized her struggle to rise above the poverty of her early life, and saw their affair as parallel to that of Fitzgerald and gossip columnist Sheilah Graham: “He knew she would never be Zelda; that was one of the ways he knew he loved her. Holding himself together every day for her, dying for a drink but staying away from it, putting what little energy he had into those sketchy opening chapters of The Last Tycoon, he must have been humbly grateful just to have her there.”
Yates may have been humbly grateful, but he was hardly staying away from liquor for Downing’s sake; indeed, he was rather hard pressed to keep up with her. Every night was pretty much the same for Downing and her drunken vulgarian friends, and she became ever more willing to linger among them as a way of putting off her return to Yates’s mildewy Malibu hovel. After a few drinks Downing’s charming facade would fade and she’d become like a parody of the trite Hollywood types Yates had come to despise: She’d use “fudgy little showbusiness” endearments such as “a very dear person” or “a very gutsy lady,” and express amusement by laughing “as stridently as an unpopular schoolgirl over things he didn’t think were funny at all.” Despite such shortcomings, Yates considered Downing a worthwhile if limited person, a pathetic victim of her environment, and the two stayed in occasional contact for years to come. But he had no illusions about her (and perhaps vice versa) after that first stay in California: Three years later, back in Hollywood, Yates alluded to Downing as a cautionary figure while advising another young woman, “You need to get out of here now.”
* * *
After a busy and somewhat chaotic five months, Yates finally submitted a finished screenplay in August. All agreed that it had been worth the wait. “You didn’t leave anything for me to do,” Frankenheimer laughed, noting that Yates had specified almost every conceivable nuance, visual and otherwise, in written form; but then, too, the director had to concede that Yates’s choices were inspired. Most gratifying was the reaction of Styron, who thought the adaptation a work of considerable brilliance in itself; for years he advocated its production as a film, and when the screenplay was published by Ploughshares in 1985, Styron helped promote the event with a public reading. Back in 1962, though, such praise was so much gravy for Yates: United Artists had tentatively scheduled production for the following year—starring Henry Fonda and Natalie Wood in the roles of Milton and Peyton Loftis—whereupon Yates would receive “a whole new avalanche of money.”
The money was his foremost concern, of course, since Yates had no particular ambition to become a famous screenwriter; and years later, typically, he’d see fit to deprecate his work on Lie Down in Darkness: “Good novels—let’s say great novels—have almost never been adapted into good movies,” he observed, explaining that in the case of Styron’s work there were a number of “subtleties that would inevitably have been lost in the translation.” That said, he did single out a favorite moment in his screenplay—when Helen Loftis admits to the minister Carey Carr that she doesn’t know what God is, and he replies “God is love.” “Then, wham,” said Yates,
instantly there’s a cut to the blinding hot sunshine of the Daddy Faith parade … and you see these two white-robed blacks carrying a big satin banner that reads GOD IS LOVE. I think that might’ve been pretty effective. Here’s Carey delivering himself of what he thinks is a profound philosophical statement, and then you see these crazy, ignorant Daddy Faith people carrying the same message, and it undercuts it and makes it meaningless for you as well as for Helen.
In fact Yates’s adaptation is full of such apposite effects; as G
eorge Bluestone noted in his introduction to the published screenplay, Yates skirted such common pitfalls as voice-over narration (“delivering great globs of Styron’s prose”) in favor of finding, always, some exact visual or aural equivalent.
Perhaps the main challenge that Yates’s work poses for any ego-driven auteur is how to bring something other than technical facility to the making of a movie that, as Frankenheimer put it, “is all there on the page.” Yates took pains to describe facial expressions, sound effects, and camera angles, all of which work to convey in cinematic terms the maximum possible meaning and mood of a given scene. For example, when the jealous Helen scolds her daughter Peyton before Christmas dinner, the stage-directions indicate that Milton’s “light, tinny, inexpert” xylophone music (which he plays for the feeble-minded Maudie in order to appear a doting father) be heard throughout the scene. The “music” suggests not only the dissonance between the actual and feigned causes of Helen’s rage, but also the gruesome awkwardness of the whole family gathering, the childishness of Milton’s not-so-furtive infatuation with Peyton—and so on, level on level. Likewise, Yates managed to find subtle solutions for the novel’s alternating points of view, as when the drunken Milton attends the UVA football game in hope of finding Peyton; for the establishing shots, Yates specified “intentional newsreel clichés” (a roisterous crowd, players trotting out on the field, and so on), to provide contrast with the same scene as Milton sees it: “narrow concrete steps leading straight down, in dizzying perspective … a cheering man’s wide-open mouth full of chewed hot dog.” Such images suggest a drunkard’s viewpoint and more—a sense of foreboding, the grotesquerie of a world bereft of hope or moral center.
Yates was faithful to the novel’s episodic, nonlinear structure, which he tightened as much as possible with cuts, dissolves, and motifs linking discrete episodes into a symphonic whole. Perhaps the most structurally crucial sequence in the screenplay is the one leading up to its first climactic plot point, when Milton and the prepubescent Peyton climb the bell tower together. Here as elsewhere Yates evoked character and theme with precise visual economy: After Milton persuades Peyton to apologize for tormenting her sister, the screenplay indicates an immediate cut to father and daughter singing a silly song in the car, like two gleeful children involved in a successful conspiracy; then, as they climb the bell tower, they pause near the top to exchange a look that lingers, ominously, until the clappers fall with a denunciatory clamor to the tune of “Jesus Calls Us”—which we will hear again when Milton passionately kisses Peyton at her wedding, and still again when Peyton climbs the stairs (a visual parallel) to commit suicide. Thus Yates suggested the main thematic conflict between illicit love and convention (religious or social) without heavy-handed explication one way or the other, and used the best of Styron’s material in doing so. Birds recur in the novel as symbols of flight and freedom, and so too at key points in Yates’s version: Pigeons fill the screen when the bell tower clock begins to whir, and later, finally, a flock is disturbed by the fatal impact of Peyton’s fall.
Add the sheer perfection of Yates’s prose, and the result is a finished work of art that (contrary to his later disclaimer) may well have amounted to a great movie adapted from a great novel. “God, it’s good,” Frankenheimer said forty years later of Yates’s screenplay. “I’d still like to make that movie.”
* * *
Sheila and Yates exchanged characteristic letters, at once fond and bickering, throughout his stay in California. “At a distance in time and space of four months and 3000 miles,” she wrote, “perhaps we can lay it on the line to each other in a way that will either break the tie … or suggest a way to preserve it.” For Sheila it was a question of giving up “old, reliable tranquility” for the possibility of a greater happiness, though she realized that disaster and disillusionment were far more probable. She pointed out that he’d be better off with a “literary-type girl,” and made it clear that, if they did reunite, things would be different: “I will never—and I mean never—stay home again. Housewifery was my Remington Rand.” Also she was “appalled” at the memory of having to clean up after Yates, but knew all too well what to expect: “Judging from your little flat, and your visit out here, [you] are less likely to keep the trash down than you were in the old days.” Yates responded with a harsh letter to the effect that Sheila was “less wife than anybody [he could] think of,” but later apologized and continued to press for a reconciliation on his return.* By July Sheila seemed almost won over: She asked whether he’d like to settle in Danbury or the city—possibly go back to Europe, even—and as late as mid-August she signed off with, “I love you (and miss you).” Then something happened to remind her, permanently this time, that all such prospects were hopeless.
California had been a draining experience for Yates, and two weeks at Bread Loaf seemed a perfect way to relax and savor his triumph before returning to New York and his novel. Indeed, the first week of the conference went remarkably well, though it was far from relaxing. Yates found himself the most celebrated writer on the faculty, a figure of considerable romantic appeal: tall and handsome, still tan from his stint in Hollywood, the embodiment of literary glamour—looks, talent, money. Copies of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness were snapped up by the conferencees (particularly female), many of whom also regarded Yates as the most scintillating lecturer. He discussed, variously, his experience adapting Lie Down in Darkness, the matter of tragic design, the influence of Conrad on Fitzgerald (the peripheral narrator, the “dying fall”), and certain postwar American novels he’d take on a “tight boat”—The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, Catcher in the Rye. After his lectures Yates would return trembling to Treman Cottage, the applause ringing in his ears, and try to calm himself with massive amounts of alcohol. “I should, damn it, have known how much you were giving,” a rueful John Ciardi wrote him afterward; “you were being so damned great, I guess I forgot everything but my directorial gloat over the way you were rocking the Great Hall.”
Yates’s breakdown at the 1962 Bread Loaf conference became part of the permanent lore of the place, but details are sketchy at best—a lot of stale, contradictory impressions heard second and third hand from the principal witnesses, most of whom are dead. All agree that Yates was drinking too much, perhaps in an effort to mitigate the rampant pangs of mania—the exhilaration and paranoia, the sense of being stared at and discussed. Yates finally erupted into full-blown, roaring-drunk psychosis at Treman Cottage, where he seems insistently to have helped himself to other people’s liquor. When challenged about it (or not), Yates went berserk and began shouting. He apparently called an older woman on the faculty, whom he liked and who liked him, an “ugly fucking battle-ax.” Ultimately he thought he was becoming the Messiah (a common delusion of mania), and legend has it he clambered onto the roof of Treman and held out his arms as though crucified. He told Grace Schulman he remembered swinging from tree branches and naming his gawking students after Christ’s disciples, though it’s hard to imagine someone with Yates’s stamina exerting himself to that extent.
Ciardi and Dr. Irving Klompus, a guest at the conference, somehow managed to coax Yates down from the roof (or tree) and conduct him back to his room, where he was forcibly restrained and sedated. Yates was later under the impression that he’d abused Ciardi as a bad poet and dirty old man, but he appears to have made that much sense only to himself. “You can take my word for one thing,” Ciardi wrote him: “you did say some fairly hairy things to me in your room, but you weren’t sore at me. There was a lot of stuff you somehow had to get out but I’ll swear you were throwing it by me, not at me.” Typically at the height of his mania, Yates’s speech would become a kind of rapid-fire regurgitation of (seemingly) random verbiage—hence Ciardi’s impression that it “had to get out” and that it was mostly impersonal, that is, indecipherable; Yates was drunk as well as psychotic after all. In any case he remained “convulsively distraught” (as one witness put it) until the ambulance
arrived; a few students stood in the doorway and watched in horror. Sam Lawrence’s associate at Atlantic Monthly Press, Peter Davison, was backing out of the parking lot when he was startled by the sight of his firm’s most promising author being led away in a straitjacket. It was a brilliantly sunny day.
As always, the worst came later. “After it’s over I wince and wither,” the poet Robert Lowell wrote apologetically to T. S. Eliot, whom he’d berated on the phone during a “feverish” episode of mania: “The whole business has been very bruising, and it is fierce facing the pain I have caused, and humiliating [to] think that it has all happened before and that control and self-knowledge come so slowly, if at all.” And so with Yates. After Bread Loaf he found himself at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington, where he became so despondent with shame that a doctor predicted he’d kill himself within two years.* In Disturbing the Peace, Wilder’s response to the information that he is not the Messiah—rather just a man behaving oddly at Marlowe College in Vermont—may serve to evoke Yates’s own devastation at such times: “That was when he started to cry, because what she said did have the ring of reality; and if this was real and all the rest was a dream, then he’d made a colossal fool of himself and everyone at Marlowe College knew it, or would know it soon.” A number of prominent writers—including the ancient Robert Frost, no less—knew that Yates had behaved like a lunatic, perhaps was a lunatic, to say nothing of all the students who’d admired him. John Ciardi was a generous friend, and Yates had said awful things to him; ditto the woman he’d called “an ugly fucking battle-ax.” And still that wasn’t the worst of it. When Grace Schulman visited him at the hospital, she made the mistake of sharing a “recognition poem” she’d written based on Seneca’s Hercules Furens, wherein the protagonist wakes from a spell of madness to learn he’s murdered his wife and children. Yates became stricken: As would often be the case, his mania had left him with a terrible lingering delusion that he’d harmed his daughters, or would someday, and he felt helpless to do anything about it.