A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  Yates was busy enough but lonelier than ever. He no longer had a female companion, his apartment depressed him, and he was sober. That summer he’d sustained himself (or not) by looking forward to his daughters’ visits—they’d definitely planned to come for Christmas, and he hoped to coax Sheila into letting them have at least one other visit in between. But recent developments had changed all that: “This is your third breakdown,” Sheila wrote, “and you are, as you yourself are now recognizing, an alcoholic.… I can understand your wanting to mend your fences as fast as you can, but it would be better for [the girls] if you let the past lie and concentrate on getting well. You have been a good father, and they love you.”

  Worried that Yates’s sobriety was unlikely to last under the circumstances, both Wendy Sears and Sam Lawrence made a point of informing him that his old friend Brian Moore was also now in Hollywood, writing a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock (Torn Curtain). Yates, however, seemed in no hurry to get back in touch—his respect for Moore as a writer was unwavering, but he’d come to regard the man as “kind of fat and grumpy and sour”: “He’s a very, very touchy guy,” Yates wrote a friend. “He absolutely hates to have anyone praise Judith Hearne, however elaborately, with even the faintest implication that it’s his best book (which of course it is).” Meanwhile the vast sums Moore was making as Hitchcock’s screenwriter might have served as a further disincentive for resuming the friendship. But finally Yates got lonely enough to leave a message at Universal, and Moore replied with a note inviting him to his house in Malibu.

  Yates reported afterward that he’d “never seen such a change in a man”: Moore—married to a “stunning new wife” (that is, his old friend Frank Russell’s ex)—was “trim, expansive and happy as hell.” On the other hand, now that Moore was something of a Hollywood bigshot, Yates also found him rather “abrupt and impatient” at times, and noticed that he seemed to prefer the company of other bigshots. The most agreeable exceptions were their mutual friends Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne—or rather, as the latter liked to say (or as Yates liked to tell it): “I’m John Gregory Dunne, the writer”—pause—“and this is my wife, Joan.” “What a colossal ego!” Yates would hoot. “Joan is the real writer in that family.” A year later Didion used Yates as a reference for the Guggenheim she needed to complete her second novel, Play It As It Lays, which Yates considered something of a masterpiece (“you are one of the very few people I hoped would [like it],” Didion wrote).

  In mid-December Yates flew back to New York for five days—time enough to deliver presents to his daughters and see a few friends—but on Christmas Eve he was alone again in Hollywood: a ticklish business for a recovering alcoholic outpatient living in a stark apartment off the Sunset Strip. At 6:45 that evening he called the switchboard at the Hollywood Studio Club (a sort of YWCA for would-be starlets) and asked for Frances Doel, who was out; Yates left a message but no number. A little before midnight he called again: “Where’ve you been?” he asked. The young woman, flustered but not displeased, replied that she’d been out with friends. “Of course,” Yates sighed. “That was dumb of me.” Then he asked if she was doing anything for Christmas Day, and if not, would she like to have dinner with him? She was not, and she would.

  Doel was Roger Corman’s twenty-two-year-old assistant, who’d just arrived in the States that summer after taking a degree at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. One of her teachers had recommended Eleven Kinds of Loneliness as “an example of good American writing,” and a year or so later who should appear in her boss’s office but the good American writer himself. “He was my romantic ideal,” said Doel—meaning, more or less, that he was a handsome, talented man who appeared to be down on his luck (“I’d grown up in a culture where failure was glamorous,” she added). Doubtless Yates sensed her interest but kept her in reserve for some emergency: During the Iwo Jima project he’d been polite and bantering at times, but not very attentive. They’d exchanged a few greetings at the Copper Skillet, near the studio, and once during a script conference he’d suddenly asked Doel if she had any ideas: “No,” she said, and Yates shouted, “Think! That’s what you’re paid for!”—then burst out laughing. But that was pretty much the extent of it until Christmas.

  They went to a meat-and-potatoes place called Tail of the Cock and had a low-key conversation about books, Hollywood, and their awful childhoods. Yates brightened when Doel mentioned that her father, killed in the war, had worked for General Electric, but his glee waned quickly as he recounted his own father’s career in the Mazda Lamp Division, as well as the man’s almost total absence during his childhood. Doel was in a position to suggest, however, that it might have been worse: She told Yates that her stepfather was a miserly, ineffectual man who’d treated her with such cruelty that her mother had tried to kill him. This seemed to chasten Yates, who was gentle and protective toward Doel from that point on. Later they went back to his melancholy apartment, for which he apologized. “Dick generally expressed bewilderment at finding himself in a particular place and time,” Doel remembered.

  * * *

  While in New York, Yates had seemed stable enough to warrant a Hollywood visit from his daughters in late January, and in preparation he moved to a nicer apartment on Sweetzer Avenue—a small two-bedroom that opened on a catwalk balcony. As he counted the days and struggled to make progress on the stalled Remagen script, he was hourly tormented by the glibly clicking typewriter of Charles (True Grit) Portis, who lived on the same block. As ever, Yates wasn’t able to write fiction while he worked on something else, though he did brood and make notes about it every so often. “Haven’t done any more wrestling with the abortive manuscript you read last year,” he wrote Cassill, “and doubt if I will for some time, if ever. A whole new novel is more likely and I’ve got the barest beginnings of one started.” But that soon petered out, and again Yates wondered if he was all washed up; he wrote Dubus that he was sober and functioning, but couldn’t seem to write a single decent line (“Is just ‘functioning’ being alive at all?”), and one awful night he told Loree Wilson that maybe it didn’t matter if he ever finished another book.

  But later that spring he wrote Cassill, “I’m feeling pretty jaunty for a change. I’m loaded with ideas for maybe salvaging that crummy novel—mostly, oddly enough, along the lines you suggested last year: more stuff about the mother, less about the kid.” Meanwhile Bantam had reissued paperback editions of Yates’s first two books, and while sales were thin (“Not an unhappy experience for [Bantam],” Marc Jaffe reported, “but not up to expectations either”), the mass-market printing would at least bring some new readers and remind others that Yates was still alive. And finally the altruistic Cassill was doing his best to liberate Yates from Hollywood, if only for a while; he’d learned that the National Council on the Arts was awarding ten thousand dollar grants to eight novelists that fall: “[Yates] has been in Hollywood for the past year,” Cassill noted in his recommendation letter, “doing the kind of bitter work one does there when he is neither quite in or out of the screen writers guild. The year before that he taught in the Workshop at Iowa—and with all the sordid, backbiting politicking that went on that year, I can’t think we gave him much of any chance to write.” He concluded that Yates was the “most deserving” of any writer he knew, and urged a quick decision in his friend’s favor (though as it happened recipients wouldn’t be notified until August).

  Amid such ups and downs, his daughters’ visit helped “take the curse off this loathsome town,” as Yates put it. This time there was no sitting around Howard Johnson’s debating the day’s activities; Yates had planned almost every hour in advance. The girls flew first-class and ate lobster on the plane, and were duly impressed by the fact that, for once, they had a bedroom all to themselves. They went to Universal Studios, visited Brian Moore’s swanky home in Malibu, and met a number of pleasant grown-ups who paid attention to them. They also took a day trip to Tijuana, though this outing proved a bit much for the
cranky Monica; at one point she stood, arms folded under a giant souvenir sombrero, and imperiously commanded her father, “Take me to the car!” (For years afterward, Yates delighted in saying “Take me to the car!” whenever she started pouting.) Monica invented a game during the long drive back that was much to her taste: It involved making her father say “What?” so she could retort, “Shut up!” Lest his older daughter feel slighted, Yates arranged for some “irresponsible college kids” (as Monica remembers) to baby-sit while he and Sharon went to a fancy restaurant and saw The Sound of Music at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

  After the girls had left, Yates became increasingly morose. One night he and Frances Doel drove to Van Nuys to have dinner at the home of Peter and Polly Bogdanovich, but the evening was not a happy one for Yates. At the time Bogdanovich was a bright young man trying to get started as a writer and director; he’d met Yates through Corman, and deferred to him as the author of a distinguished novel. Bogdanovich, however, depressed Yates on almost every level: The young man was determined to be a serious artist in Hollywood, while Yates hated the place and was stuck plugging away at his “loathsome” Remagen script; worse, Bogdanovich’s then-happy marriage was a painful reminder of Yates’s own broken home (much on his mind at the moment). As Doel summed it up, “Peter represented lost opportunities for Dick.” On the whole Yates was far more relaxed having casual chats with his neighbor Portis, who understood what it was like to spend most of one’s life alone, writing fiction of whatever sort.

  Yates began drinking again in March. He considered AA meetings a maudlin bore, and as for the twelve steps—well, he’d tried to seek out a few people he’d harmed and ask their forgiveness, but he hated that part almost as much as being sober. Perhaps the last straw was in late February, when he got in touch with his old girlfriend Craige because he blamed himself for pushing her into hard-core alcoholism. Sure enough, the woman was still plastered. “Is this some kind of AA thing?” she asked. When Yates admitted it was, she berated him with a slurred tongue and hung up on him again and again. “The purpose of this letter is really to apologise for my extraordinary conduct on the telephone,” she wrote afterward. “It must have cost you pots of money and been terribly depressing. I really don’t remember much after you called back the last time except that it must have been pretty bad on my part.” On Yates’s part, too.

  Another reason sobriety was out of the question was The Bridge at Remagen—an experience that made Yates long for the halcyon days of Iwo Jima. As he wrote Cassill,

  [The story] is all tricked out with sinister Nazis, plucky GI’s and more cliches than Louis B. Mayer ever dreamed of. On Iwo I was left pretty much alone; this time I’m stuck with a pea-brained “Story Editor” who wants to control the whole project and has his own dreary and emphatic ideas for each scene. But the money is far better than I got for Iwo, so I’m keeping a tight asshole and ought to be done with it by April, when I hope to buy a little free time.

  Yates was looking forward to an additional ten thousand dollars when he submitted the finished script (in its “final-final stages” as of late-March), but Wolper apparently wanted another rewrite and fired Yates without further payment.*

  For whatever byzantine Guild reason, though, Yates was given lead screenwriting credit and hence received the odd residual pittance once the movie was finally released in 1969—though Yates had disowned it so completely that he even refused to list Remagen on his otherwise all-encompassing résumé of 1973. He told friends he was appalled to have his name associated with such a “dog,” and claims the final version was an almost total rewrite. But the basic idea Yates brought to that original, cliché-ridden script does seem to have remained intact—to wit, the whole Germans-are-people-too angle: The Bridge at Remagen cuts between “plucky GI’s” (George Segal et al.) and not-so-sinister Nazis (Robert Vaughn et al.), the better to suggest that war is hell no matter what your nationality. And that’s not the only abiding Yatesian touch, as the author himself pointed out during Thanksgiving 1969 with Robin Metz’s family, when they all piled in a car to see the movie at a local drive-in. Yates took a sheepish bow as Metz blared his horn—“This is the guy who wrote it! Right here!”—but as they settled down to watch, Yates began shaking his head (“Nope, didn’t write any of that…”), then suddenly bolted upright and thrust a finger at the screen: “There! I actually wrote that part!” The “part” was a gold cigarette case that’s fumbled on the bridge by Nazi Vaughn and recovered by GI Segal, for whom it becomes a prize possession while its previous owner is reduced to cadging a last, sad fag before he’s shot for desertion; thus the gold case serves as a neat little objective correlative suggesting the spoils of war, the common bonds of humanity, and so forth. Suffice to say it’s the best thing in the movie.

  After the Remagen debacle Yates was finished with movies, or so he thought. “I wouldn’t want to try it again,” he said as late as 1981. “It’s a brain-scrambling business.” That left teaching, though if possible he was even less enthused by the prospect of Iowa than a year before: Cassill had bitterly resigned, while most of Yates’s old grad-student pals, including Dubus, had taken degrees and moved on. Even after the Workshop officially invited him back with a three-thousand-dollar raise, Yates continued to test the waters elsewhere—the University of Arkansas, San Francisco State, University of North Carolina at Greensboro—but there were no takers, and in June, Yates accepted his fate. “We are delighted,” Bourjaily replied, offering his family’s old apartment ($155 per month) to Yates when he returned in the fall.

  He was in no hurry to move. “Still hate [Hollywood],” he assured Cassill, “but I think I’ll hole up here anyway to work on the book, rather than spend the dough and time necessary to go back to New York or somewhere else. In a way it’s a good place to work because it is so lousy—no very tempting distractions.” By then, however, it didn’t take much to distract Yates. That summer another refugee from the Workshop, Murray Moulding, came to Los Angeles to join his clinically depressed wife who was in the midst of intensive psychotherapy. Moulding was the kind of rich Ivy Leaguer whom his former teacher had scorned (“There’s Murray, squirming in his chair to tell us the news again”), but now Yates was just relieved to have a reliable drinking buddy. He didn’t even begrudge Moulding the large inheritance that enabled him to buy a fancy home in Brentwood: “Hey, Styron was a rich guy, and he did okay,” declared a newly pragmatic Yates.

  Fair to say the two were not a good influence on each other, despite Yates’s occasional stabs at being a wise big-brother type. “One of these days I’ve got to do something about this,” he said frowning at his glass; Moulding tipsily suggested he go back to AA, but Yates shook his head. “Nah. Once you’ve done it, it doesn’t work again.” Add to the picture a melancholy, neglected wife, and the household might have resembled a Eugene O’Neill play. Attempts to seek more wholesome diversions were less than successful. One night they bought tickets to The Fantasticks, but the Mouldings got in a fight and were an hour late picking up Yates, who sat placidly drinking on a wall outside his apartment. A few minutes into the play he was fast asleep, and incoherent when they roused him for intermission.

  Frances Doel remained a port in the storm, but the young woman’s extreme adoration seemed to make Yates uncomfortable, especially as he began to fall apart in earnest. He’d try to act jaunty as he drank his morning martinis, but Doel would insist on gazing into his eyes, which (she recalled) “betrayed feelings that went against the grain of his conversation.” Impotence was again a problem. Earlier, when he was sober, Yates had responded to the odd lapse with a kind of fatherly aplomb: “Well, I guess this has never happened to you before—you’re too young,” etc. But now that he was drinking again, impotence became a suggestive aspect of his overall desperation. “Don’t leave me!” he’d plead as he was falling asleep, though the smitten Doel hadn’t the faintest notion of doing so; indeed she was flattered by his need (though she could scarcely help but detect something a li
ttle impersonal about it). Even if she hadn’t been in love, it would have been hard for Doel to abandon such a tormented man. When Yates disappeared for several days in mid-July, Doel was convinced he’d had another breakdown: “Forgive me,” she wrote him, “but I called the UCLA place in case you were there. I wanted to come and see you … but I didn’t because I thought you probably wouldn’t want that. Then again, it might be that your family would be here with you, so whatever the circumstances it seemed I shouldn’t worry you.”

  He wasn’t quite crazy, nor was he with family. Rather, he’d received a long, semiarticulate fan letter (and perhaps a photo) from a woman in Texas named Carole,* whom he tracked down by telephone and offered to fly expenses paid to Los Angeles. Her two-year-old daughter from a previous marriage was also welcome. Murray Moulding described the woman as a “free-floating opportunist” and “groupie,” while Robin Metz called the episode “a Maureen Grube–type affair: life imitating art.” Like Maureen Grube (in Revolutionary Road), the woman had a bad complexion beneath heavy layers of makeup, but also a voluptuous body and a kind of coquettish vulnerability that made her attractive, at least to Yates. Also she was willing to match him drink for drink.

  Yates later told his second wife that he knew he’d made a mistake the minute this woman walked off the plane, but the truth is somewhat more complicated. She was, after all, bright enough to appreciate his work (whole paragraphs of which she could quote verbatim), and a letter she wrote Yates in 1970 reflects a kind of grandiosity that might have seemed intriguing at first: She describes herself as “brilliant,” an “emotional genius,” and so on; she also calls herself Yates’s “soul-sister” and cryptically alludes to the “things that went on between [them]” that he “may have completely forgotten.” Her intellectual pretensions almost surely annoyed him, as she claims to have made him feel “edgy and challenged all the time”: “I made you nervous, even when I tried to play the role of a background stage-setting. What all this amounts to is HELP! ‘Where did I go wrong?’”