by Blake Bailey
* * *
“I loved and hated Richard Yates,” said Susan Braudy, “as I believe he did me. I miss talking to him very much.” More than his daughters or even Dan Childress, Braudy became the most fixed presence in Yates’s life during his last two years in Alabama—though many miles apart, the two spoke on the phone almost every day, including the day Yates died. Originally Braudy had called to discuss her screenplay of The Easter Parade, in the hope of drawing Yates out about the “nuts and bolts” of what was “probably [her] favorite novel in the world.” Yates shrunk from the subject. “Sure, sure,” he said finally. “The Easter Parade probably is about the failure of love.” Soon they found other things to talk about, and Braudy saw a more appealing side to the man. He was forthright but not maudlin about the grim facts of his life, and gruffly opinionated about Braudy’s. When she mentioned that she wanted to refurbish an old church in the country, Yates insisted the idea was gauche. But he was also hard on himself, and inclined to be contrite when he sensed that he’d gone too far and hurt Braudy’s feelings. This was easily done, as Braudy was nothing if not tenderhearted, to the point of being sorely distressed by the sadness of Yates’s life and determined to do something about it. It was Braudy who got in touch with Childress and arranged to pay for the “fictitious box-lunch driver,” and sometimes she’d send money straight to Yates; once, after she’d given him five hundred dollars, he casually admitted that he’d sent it to Gina so she could buy a car.
Yates often made it known that his fondest desire was to return to New York—he had no intention of “nodding out in Dixie”—but as things were, he couldn’t even afford to visit. Braudy’s affection for her favorite writer was buoyed by a preoccupation with certain Jewish ethical imperatives, namely Honor elders, so she decided to bring Yates to New York and honor him one way or another. It wouldn’t do, though, simply to buy him a plane ticket and put him up for a few days: It was one thing for such a proud man to accept the odd check out of the blue, another to let a woman explicitly offer him charity. Besides, Braudy wasn’t rich, despite whatever Yates had surmised to the contrary because of her generosity and Central Park South address (he was under the impression she was a “dowager” à la Gloria Vanderbilt). She decided, then, to organize a reading and pay Yates an honorarium, raised with donations of a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars apiece from a few well-heeled admirers, starting with Woody Allen. “Ms. Braudy found that many writers shared Mr. Allen’s take on Mr. Yates and has now organized a group of them to bring the novelist to New York for a tribute,” read an item in the New York Observer for April 15, 1991. “Mr. [Paul] Schrader, Richard Price, and Kurt Vonnegut are among the literary stars who’ve contributed money to fly Mr. Yates in from his home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is scheduled to read at the Donnell Library on April 11 at 6 P.M., with a reception to follow at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street.”
Yates planned to arrive the day before his reading—as it happened, his daughter Monica’s thirty-fourth birthday. She’d recently moved back to New York prior to starting nursing school at Columbia in the fall,* and when she learned of her father’s visit she was plunged into a funk. She dreaded seeing him so deathly ill, not to mention drinking again, and figured the reading would be a failure and he’d be sad. She spent the day gloomily riding her bicycle until, as a kind of despondent “madcap stunt,” she rode it down a flight of stairs and gave herself a black eye and a swollen, badly bruised chin.
Meanwhile air travel had taken its usual toll on Yates. “He was a total mess,” said Braudy. “Thinner than any living person should be, and too weak to walk from the plane to a cab.” The appalled woman called for a wheelchair, while Yates muttered dazedly that he’d be all right as soon as he got to the Algonquin, where he’d arranged to have oxygen tanks waiting in his room. Before they arrived, though, Yates seemed to perk up a bit. “You’re no dowager,” he said to Braudy in the cab, staring at her intently. “You’re a young girl.” Braudy was hardly a “girl” except by Yates’s quaint reckoning, though she was very pretty and her relations with Yates had shifted the moment his head cleared enough to get a good look at her. But eros alone wasn’t enough to resurrect such a wasted man, and by the time they got to the Algonquin—where the oxygen tanks wouldn’t work—he seemed on the verge of total, perhaps permanent collapse. Nonetheless he insisted on meeting Monica and his old student Richard Price as planned, so Braudy assisted him into the dining room; by the time the others arrived, Yates had put his head on the table and begun panting for air. “Not drunk,” he gasped to Monica. “Not drunk, baby.” Then he noticed his daughter’s grossly swollen face. “What can I say?” he managed to quip. “I love the big lug.”
While Yates tried to pull himself together, his companions exchanged glances. “No, Dick,” said Price, as Yates croaked at the waiter for menus, “I think we’d better get you upstairs.” In the room they called the house doctor, and soon Yates was bound for New York Hospital in an ambulance. Braudy, Price, and Monica followed in a cab. After Yates had been taken into the emergency room and given oxygen and fluids, Braudy returned to his side and he groggily resumed pitching woo. “I’m falling in love with you,” he said with a faint smile. As Braudy recalled, “He was half dead, but coming on to me! And I’m a complete wreck!” Finally, around four in the morning, Yates was admitted as a patient. In the meantime Braudy and Monica sat talking outside the ER cubicle, and the latter reflected that this was a hell of a way to spend her birthday.
Sharon Yates remembers her father looking “very jaunty” in his hospital bed, and Braudy confirms that he was “in fine fettle.” Yates was impressed by how much nicer the hospital was than his usual VAs, and of course it always pleased him to cheat death with a certain stylish insouciance. It was fine to be back in New York and in love again. His agent Ned Leavitt visited and noticed something distinctly in the air between Yates and Braudy, at least on Yates’s part, and Monica noticed the same with exasperation. Meanwhile a steady stream of visitors came to pay their last respects, or so it seemed at the time. Richard Price visited every day, and Monica brought the writer Elizabeth Cullinan, whom Yates found impressively pretty despite the fact that she was almost his own age. Monica also invited her father’s old Boston girlfriend Laura, who sat by his bed for a long time and made him laugh.
Everybody agreed that the reading at the Donnell Library and the reception afterward were “Yatesian occasions.” A reporter from the New York Times abruptly departed when he learned that Yates himself wasn’t among those present. Braudy had made an audiotape of Yates in the hospital, wheezing his way through one of his stories, and this was played for a bemused audience of seventy-five or so. Paul Schrader and the journalist Harvey Shapiro read from The Easter Parade, after which the crowd adjourned by foot to the Gotham Book Mart for a reception hosted by Braudy and the actor Patrick O’Neal, who still owned the rights to Revolutionary Road and still planned to make a movie of it written and directed by himself. The bookstore was soon divided between a defiant group of smokers and those who reviled them, until a number of guests repaired to the hospital to visit Yates, who received them bravely.
Four days later, after Braudy had paid the hospital bill with fifteen hundred dollars of honorarium money, she and Yates returned to the airport. As she wheeled him out to the ambulance, his suitcase slipped off his lap and cracked open on the street. Braudy chased down and repacked his effects, then sat with him during the ambulance ride. Yates began to light a cigarette, and when Braudy snapped it out of his hand he tried to kiss her. This went on for the rest of the ride. “Finally I’m wheeling him to his gate at the airport,” said Braudy, “and he begs me to come live with him in Alabama. After that I felt very obligated and spoke to him almost every day.”
* * *
Having been feted in his hospital bed, Yates wanted more than ever to go on living long enough to return to New York, where clearly he had a number of admirers as well as a lovely “girl” to pursue. He even quit
smoking on his return to Alabama: In light of his recent collapse, the bravado of a four-pack-a-day habit began to seem a bit silly; besides, the way people stared at him when he lit up with oxygen tanks made him feel freakish. To Yates’s mild surprise—and awful regret—he found that stopping cold after fifty years was remarkably easy.
Getting back to New York was a different story. The only affordable housing in Manhattan seemed to be WestBeth, the low-rent artists’ tenement on the Hudson that Yates had briefly considered fifteen years earlier, after the fire that sent him to Boston. As ever there was a long waiting list, but Braudy had a friend on the tenants’ board, Hugh Seidman, who thought an exception might be made in Yates’s case based on his distinction and ill health. Seidman arranged an exploratory meeting with the board, and Monica came to plead her father’s case—a humiliating experience, as it turned out. The board was mostly made up of artists and dancers who’d never heard of Yates and were unwilling to make an exception in any case, and Monica resented having to “play the role of begging daughter.” Above all she felt sad that things had come to this.
Meanwhile Yates was a few months away from depleting his latest advance—that is, an advance on “Book II” of his two-book contract with Sam Lawrence—and his progress on Uncertain Times was slower and more problematic than ever. Sometimes he’d call up friends and ask their opinion of certain passages, a temptation he’d always resisted in the past and proof of just how doubtful he’d become. “He couldn’t seem to finish it, didn’t want to let it go,” said Bob Lacy, whose opinion Yates sought. He was mortified by the prospect of asking Lawrence for more money, but as he told Prettyman that summer, he’d be completely broke by December and needed at least $2,000 a month to live; the two men discussed whether Prettyman (a mutual friend) should “drop a hint” to Lawrence, but in the end Yates decided he should handle it on his own. As Ned Leavitt recalled, “It was an odd situation: As agent, I didn’t have anything to offer Lawrence, who had a faint hope (but not much) that he’d finally get Uncertain Times, and definitely doubted he’d ever see ‘Book II.’ Dick’s health was just too precarious by then.” Still, Lawrence had always maintained that “someday Dick’s books will sell,” and he’d kept the faith too long to give up now; at any rate their old friendship made it impossible to refuse. In September, then, the contract was amended yet again to provide nine more payments of $2,300 a month.
That summer Yates’s ex-wife Martha remarried in Bisbee, Arizona, where she’d gone to think things over after several years as an art therapist. “She’s gone and married an electrician,” Yates dolefully announced. Until then he’d never quite given up hope that maybe someday Martha would come to her senses and take him back; as he’d quickly admit to any acquaintance, he still “carried a torch” for his ex-wife. But he gracefully let go of that dream when the time came: “Congratulations,” he wrote Martha. “I am very glad for your new happiness. With best wishes always, Dick.” After that, his old ardor assumed a more paternal form. “Oh, those poor kids!” he exclaimed when Gina told him about the hardscrabble, odd-job life Martha and her husband were leading in arty Bisbee. “What are they eating on!”
He continued to implore Susan Braudy to visit, if not keep house with him, and she didn’t have the heart to refuse outright; indeed, Yates anticipated her arrival for many months and spoke of little else. He told Prettyman that he was worried about his “performance”—it had been a long time—and while he thought the emotional Braudy was “a little crazy,” he was very excited about seeing her all the same. When Mark Costello came to Alabama that fall, he proved every bit as lovelorn as Yates; Tony Earley called the two “poster children for depressed writers.” Costello was involved with a former Iowa student who’d gone on to a rather distinguished career, but Yates warned him that two writers didn’t make a good match. (Then he’d inquire: “How many stories you say she’s had in The New Yorker?… Six? Goddamn it!”) As for his own infatuation with Braudy—also a writer, though Yates hardly considered her as such—he told Costello again and again of her impending visit, of his moving to New York to be with her and so on, but beneath it all was a belying melancholy. “We both spent a lot of time together in expectation of women who wouldn’t come,” said Costello. “Dick was too physically infirm for that sort of thing, and he knew it.” Knowing it was one thing, accepting it another. Such was the candor of his talks with Braudy, his lonely need to tell her everything, that one day he excitedly confided that a young waitress seemed attracted to him; he planned to comb his hair and take her to a movie. When Braudy asked about it later, though, Yates sighed and said he’d gone back to the diner and realized it was nothing.
Yates had fewer manic spells now that he was drinking less, and those he had tended to burn out quickly for want of energy. At first his friends in Alabama didn’t know what to make of Yates’s mania—he didn’t discuss his illness—only that it came and went, and seemed to leave him no worse for wear. Once he called Tim Parrish and sounded as if his “head [was] exploding”: “It was a brilliant and terrifying stream of consciousness,” Parrish remembered, “and I sensed there was some overarching theme that I wasn’t capable of grasping. Dick was referencing events on the senate floor in the fifties, quoting speeches verbatim. It gave me a sense of what a trial it was to be Richard Yates.” Every so often Yates would “veer into paranoid speculations” about this or that person, and Parrish would try to calm him (“Oh, I don’t think that’s true, Dick”). Another time an alarmed Dan Childress called Costello and reported that he’d found Yates “totally whacked”; to this day Costello is puzzled by the episode. “I went to Dick’s house and he was drunker than I’d ever seen him, but there were no bottles around. There was no booze in the place at all.” This time the “overarching theme” of Yates’s spiel had to do with an official tour of Germany that Vonnegut had made with Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll (which had actually taken place during a PEN conference in the seventies): Yates said that Vonnegut was chosen for the junket because he was German and a WWII veteran and of course famous.… “Costello—goddamn it—Murphy—” he panted, pausing now and then to catch his breath (he called Costello Murphy after the latter’s fictional alter ego); finally he closed his eyes and fell asleep. Two days later he was fine again.
Lucid or not, Yates’s lack of fame didn’t bother him nearly so much as his lack of money, especially now that time was running out. He’d regularly call his friend Bruce Ricker to discuss possible movie deals, and impress on the lawyer his urgent desire to provide some kind of inheritance for his daughters. Yates realized the best bet for a feature-length adaptation of his work was Revolutionary Road, and he was desperate to wrest the property away from Patrick O’Neal, who owned it outright. O’Neal had written a screenplay of the novel that he still hoped to produce and direct someday, but Yates thought the script godawful and was tired of the man’s stalling. O’Neal wouldn’t budge: “It’s in the stars,” he’d tell Ned Leavitt with a mellow sense of assurance. Such “new agey” pronouncements, said Leavitt, “used to send Dick through the roof.”
A far more “tortured” situation, as Leavitt put it, developed over Braudy’s adaptation of The Easter Parade. Calder Willingham, the author of a number of novels and successful screenplays (e.g., Paths of Glory and One-Eyed Jacks), was a great Yates fan and common friend of Seymour Krim. For a long time he’d wanted to adapt The Easter Parade, but his hands were tied as long as Braudy held the option. Yates demanded to see Braudy’s screenplay, and after a bitter argument she finally sent it to him; later, when she asked his opinion, he said he’d decided not to read it after all. This was by way of sparing her feelings. He’d read it and immediately directed Leavitt not to renew the woman’s option under any circumstances. But Braudy would not go quietly: She’d invested a lot of time and emotion in the project, to say nothing of money, and legally she was within her rights. “I feel like taking a gun and shooting you!” she told Leavitt, who lapsed into stunned silence. Even Yates was impres
sed: “You’ve scared everybody to death,” he told her. But still he insisted she relinquish her option; he calmly explained that the project would be more “viable” if Willingham wrote the screenplay. When Yates spoke of the matter to Leavitt, though, he reverted to an “operatic” rage: He was sick of the woman, he said, and wanted to be rid of her once and for all. “But he kept letting her back into his life,” Leavitt mused, “even though he didn’t like her screenplay. He seemed to make a distinction between her as a writer and a person, and basically he was a sweet-natured man, even when he was pissed off. After he’d rail against Braudy or Patrick O’Neal, I’d remind him of their positions and he’d back off. In fact he felt sympathy for Braudy.” And vice versa. “For my birthday he drew me a cartoon of this dilapidated person holding a heart,” she recalled. “I don’t know, looking back, how I had the fortitude to deal with the situation.”