Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  To have an excuse for the trip, just in case Salinger wouldn’t talk to her, Eppes lined up an interview with William Loeb, the publisher of the conservative newspaper the Manchester Leader. Talk about a backup, Eppes thought, Bill Loeb had probably never turned down an interview So, in early June, Eppes flew to Manchester and interviewed Loeb, whose main message consisted of him urging all Americans to vote for Ronald Reagan for president. After she was done with Loeb, she rented a blue Pinto and headed for Salinger country.

  When she got there, she stopped in Claremont at the Claremont Eagle to get the back issue in which Shirlie Blaney’s interview appeared. It had been because of that interview, Eppes would later write, that Salinger had dodged “people [who were] trying to get an interview with [him] for twenty-seven years.”

  In fact, Salinger had given the Fosburgh interview to the New York Times in 1974, but it made better copy to say the last interview Salinger had volunteered was to a high-school teenager twenty-seven years ago, so that was the slant Betty Eppes put on her story. Following Claremont, Eppes drove her blue Pinto to the Cornish-Windsor area where, speaking with some of the locals, she determined that the best way to ask Salinger for an interview was to put her request in a letter, go to the Windsor post office, and instruct the postal attendant to place the letter in Salinger’s mailbox. That’s what Betty Eppes did. In the letter she told Salinger she would love to meet him the next morning at nine-thirty at Cummins Corner, a business establishment in Windsor. Also, to let him know what she looked like if he did show up, she described herself, saying she was “tall with green eyes and red-gold hair.”

  The next morning, Eppes parked the Pinto near Cummins Corner in such a way that she could see Salinger if he appeared on the Windsor side of the covered bridge. Because the bridge had been closed off to traffic for repairs, people coming and going from Windsor had to walk across the bridge. Then, at exactly nine-thirty, while Betty Eppes sat in her Pinto and studied the covered bridge, she could not believe what she saw. “[H]e stepped out of the black of that covered bridge,” Eppes later wrote, “J. D. Salinger!”

  With obvious determination, Salinger walked straight from the covered bridge to the Pinto and said to her, briskly, “Betty Eppes?” Eppes was so shocked over seeing Salinger in person she actually began to cry. “He didn’t look like I thought he would,” she eventually wrote. “He had white hair. That freaked me out. In all of the pictures I had seen of him he had dark hair. Not only that, but I was surprised by the intensity of the man. He walked almost like he was driven or pursued, his shoulders hunched up around his ear . . . it was almost a run.”

  He shook her hand and stepped back. Eppes could not get over how tall he was. She also noticed his piercing black eyes.

  “First,” Eppes wrote, “I thanked Mr. Salinger for coming. He said, ‘I don’t know why I did, actually. There’s nothing I can tell you. Writing’s a very personal thing.’” Clearly, Salinger believed Eppes had sought him out to ask him about writing.

  Of all the topics Eppes wanted to know about, of course, Holden Caulfield was at the top of her list.

  “Every question I asked about Holden Caulfield,” Eppes wrote, “he replied, Read the book. It’s all in the book. There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Over and over. Except when I asked him if the book was autobiographical.” It was then that Salinger stopped, as if he were taken aback by the question. “‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve just let it all go. I don’t know about Holden anymore.’”

  Next Eppes asked Salinger about a variety of topics—Indonesia, the movies, the counterintelligence corps. Each answer added little new information to what she, or any Salinger fan for that matter, already knew. Finally she asked him if he had any future plans to publish.

  “He said he had no plans to publish,” she wrote. “Writing was what was important to him—and to be left alone so that he could write.”

  Then Eppes asked Salinger perhaps the pertinent question of her entire interview. Why, she wanted to know, had he seen her?

  “He said,” Eppes wrote, “‘You write. I write.’ He had come as one writer to another.” With this, he started to ask about her writing career, which included, besides the newspaper articles she had written, one unpublished novel that looked for a while like it was going to be released by a company called Southern Publishing before the company dissolved and Eppes’s manuscript was lost. This prompted Salinger to assess the publishing business as “vicious.”

  Once Eppes had taken Salinger through another litany of topics—autographs, politics, economics, the importance of cooking with cold-pressed oils, the American Dream—she returned to his writing.

  Was he writing every day? What was he working on?

  “I can’t tell you that.” Salinger smiled.

  After this, rather abruptly, Salinger left for the post office. While he was gone, Eppes rushed into Cummins Corner to buy a soft drink. Returning to sit in her Pinto, she soon saw Salinger leaving the post office. A tiny drama followed. The owner of the Cummins Corner market approached Salinger on the street to ask him if he could shake his hand, and, when he tried, Salinger got so mad he not only stalked off without shaking hands but walked over to the Pinto to chew out Betty Eppes.

  Because of Eppes’s brief interview, Salinger said, this man he did not know had come up to talk to him on the street. He even touched his arm. This was not something Salinger wanted to happen—ever! Furious, Salinger demanded that Eppes go away at once. “Don’t call my home,” he said; “don’t call any of my friends. Just leave Windsor, leave Cornish, and leave me alone!”

  Brazenly, Eppes asked Salinger if she could take a picture of him—a close-up.

  “Absolutely not! No!” Salinger shouted.

  Eppes calmed him a bit by putting down her camera. Then, as if to divert his attention, she asked him one last question—was he really writing? Really?

  “I am really writing,” he said. “I love to write and I assure you I am writing regularly. I’m just not publishing. I write for myself. For my own pleasure, I want to be left alone to do it. So leave me alone.”

  Turning on his heels, Salinger walked off. As he headed for the covered bridge, his back to Betty Eppes, she went ahead and snapped his picture anyway.

  Returning to Louisiana, Eppes wrote her article for the Baton Rouge Advocate. The piece, which ran on June 29, created such a stir it was syndicated in newspapers across the country. In addition, Eppes was flooded with letters asking her questions about Salinger; she even got two offers from film companies that wanted her to contact Salinger about making a picture. Finally, the Paris Review asked her to write an expanded version of the piece, which she did. Entitled “What I Did Last Summer” when it appeared in the journal, it was edited by George Plimpton.

  For Eppes, there was one odd postscript to her encounter with Salinger. During her interview with him, Salinger had told her he didn’t believe in giving autographs. Then, back in Baton Rouge, as she was going through her mail one day, she opened an envelope containing a letter written to a New York–based company called The Chocolate Soup. In the letter, which was typed, the writer had ordered two schoolbags made in Denmark that he had seen advertised in the New Yorker. How peculiar, Eppes thought, that someone had sent this letter to her and not The Chocolate Soup. Obviously the person had made a mistake. Then, at the bottom of the brief note, Eppes noticed it—J. D. Salinger’s signature.

  There was always one unanswered question about the episode with Salinger and Eppes—a question she had even asked him during their interview: Why had Salinger shown up to talk with her? One could argue he came because he knew Eppes would write about the meeting, something that would generate publicity for him. When Eppes’s piece appeared, news of the article was carried in papers all across the country. Was Salinger so calculating that he had decided to meet her but, after answering a few questions, had become reluctant to continue and ended the strained, oddly emotional ordeal by storming off in a huff a
nd declaring he wanted to be left alone? If this were not the case, if he didn’t do it for the notoriety, what was the motivation for Salinger to meet Eppes? “Well, in her letter she described who she was—a tennis pro,” says George Plimpton. “She gave her age, which was young, twenty-eight or something like that. I’ve always believed she dotted her i’s in her letter with little circles. In the letter she said that she had come all that way to see the great man and that she’d be waiting in her Pinto at the foot of the covered bridge. Salinger got the note and I think he couldn’t resist seeing what this girl was like. I mean—an attractive young woman waiting in a blue Pinto. Curiosity got the better of him. And the letter was sort of plaintive. Hell, he’s a human being.”

  3

  In December that same year, 1980, Salinger was again in the news. On the evening of Monday, December 8, as an early-winter darkness fell on Manhattan, Mark David Chapman, a disturbed loner, approached his idol John Lennon as Lennon emerged from his limousine in front of the Dakota, the building off Central Park West at Seventy-second Street where he lived with Yoko Ono and their son Sean. After getting Lennon’s autograph, Chapman waited until the singer had turned and started toward the Dakota. Then, Chapman pulled out a pistol, and, assuming a combat stance as he held the gun under a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, he fired five times at Lennon, who was twenty feet away. Four of the five shots hit Lennon in the back and left shoulder. Staggering up to the entrance to the building, Lennon collapsed, blood pouring from his mouth. Hysterical, Ono fell to her knees beside him, as Chapman walked idly away, sat down on the curb, and started to read Salinger’s novel. Unfazed by what he had just done, Chapman merely sat there, waiting for the police to arrive. His inscription in his copy of Catcher was revealing. “To Holden Caulfield from Holden Caulfield,” it read, a reference to the fact that Chapman identified with Salinger’s character so strongly he had recently tried to have his name legally changed to Holden Caulfield. “This is my story.”

  Several weeks later, after he had been charged with murder and put in jail without bail, Chapman released an official statement, which he wrote out by hand with a ballpoint pen on a piece of yellow legal paper and sent to the New York Times. “My wish is for all of you to someday read The Catcher in the Rye,” the note read in part. “All of my efforts will now be devoted toward this goal, for this extraordinary book holds many answers. My true hope is that in wanting to find these answers you will read The Catcher in the Rye. Thank you.”

  Much later, when Chapman was on trial, it was revealed that he had killed Lennon because he believed Lennon had become a phony as insincere and contemptible as the ones in The Catcher in the Rye. Chapman argued that, because Lennon had been corrupted by commercialism, he was protecting Lennon’s innocence by shooting him. Even after Chapman was found guilty, he believed he was justified in his actions. To prove it, during his sentencing hearing, Chapman read out loud in the courtroom the famous “catcher in the rye” speech from Salinger’s book.

  Years later, Chapman added to the story when he told Barbara Walters in a television interview that before he went to kill Lennon he had gone through a satanic ritual to make himself become Holden Caulfield, whose mission in life, according to Chapman, was to cleanse the world of phony people. “John Lennon fell into a very deep hole,” Chapman said to Walters, “a hole so deep inside of me I thought by killing him, I would acquire his fame.”

  On March 30, 1981, less than four months after Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon, John Hinckley Jr., a twenty-six-year-old Midwesterner who would be described as “alienated” and “deranged,” stepped from the crowd waiting at a side door of the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., and fired six times at Ronald Reagan as the president headed for his limousine following a speech he had given in the hotel to the AFL-CIO. One bullet struck the head of James Brady, the president’s press secretary. Another struck the neck of Thomas Delahanty, a District of Columbia policeman. A third hit the chest of Timothy McCarthy, a Secret Service agent. A fourth bullet ricocheted off the presidential limousine and struck Reagan in the left side. It would not be until later, when they performed emergency surgery on Reagan at George Washington Hospital, that doctors would discover the bullet had traveled through Reagan’s body to within an inch of his heart, coming dangerously close to killing him.

  In the days after the shooting, as reports about Hinckley began to surface, officials revealed the reason why Hinckley did what he did. Astonishingly, because he was infatuated with Jodie Foster, especially the teenage prostitute she had played in Taxi Driver, Hinckley had decided that in order to get her attention he was going to assassinate the president. It was a real-life story line that eerily resembled the fictional one carried out by Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver. Two hours before going to the Hilton, Hinckley had written Foster a love letter. “Jody,” the letter read, “I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you. . . . The reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I’ve got to do something now to make you understand in no uncertain terms that I am doing all of this for your sake.” Investigators found this unmailed letter among Hinckley’s personal effects in a suitcase in his Washington motel room. Earlier, at the crime scene, police also had found in one of his pockets a copy of a novel that, judging from its tattered condition, Hinckley had read many times—The Catcher in the Rye.

  Ernest Jones had written the following about Holden Caulfield in a piece called “Case History of All of Us,” which appeared in the Nation on September 1, 1951:

  His sense of alienation is almost complete—from parents, from friends, from society in general as represented by the prep school from which he has been expelled and the night club and hotel world of New York in which he endures a weekend exile while hiding out from his family. With his alienation go assorted hatreds—of the movies, of night clubs, of social and intellectual pretention, and so on. And physical disgust: pimples, sex, an old man picking his nose are all equally cause for nausea. It is of little importance that the alienation, the hatreds, and the disgust are those of a sixteen-year-old. Any reader, sharing or remembering something like them, will agree with the conclusion to be drawn from this unhappy odyssey: to borrow a line from Auden, “We must love one another or die.”

  In 1981, as he continued living in solitude, Salinger became fascinated with Elaine Joyce, the television actress who was currently appearing, along with Bernard Hughes, on the sitcom Mr. Merlin. The widow of entertainer Bobby Van, Joyce was thirty-six, Salinger was sixty-two. After watching her for several weeks on Mr. Merlin, Salinger approached Joyce the same way he had Maynard. “I was doing a series,” says Joyce, “and he wrote me a letter. I get fan mail all the time but I was shocked. I really didn’t believe it. It was a letter of introduction to me about my work.” As Maynard had done before her, although she could not have known anything about it, Joyce responded to Salinger, which led to an exchange of letters. “It took me forever,” she says, “but I wrote back and then we wrote to each other quite a bit.”

  As he had with Maynard, Salinger eventually arranged for the two of them to meet. After that, a relationship developed. The couple spent a lot of time in New York. “We were very, very private,” Joyce admits, “but you do what you do when you date—you shop, you go to dinner, you go to the theater. It was just as he wanted it.” The only real suggestion the public had that the two were involved occurred in May 1982 when the press reported Salinger showing up for an opening night at a dinner theater in Jacksonville, Florida, where Joyce was appearing in the play 6 Rms Riv Vu. But to conceal their affair, Joyce denied knowing him. “We were involved for a few years all the way through the middle eighties,” Joyce says. “You could say there was a romance.”

  That romance ended and then, in the late 1980s, Salinger met Colleen O’Neill, a young woman from New Hampshire who was the director of the annual Cornish town fa
ir. “Jerry used to come and walk around the fairgrounds with her,” says Burnace Fitch Johnson, the former Cornish town clerk, “Colleen would have to repeat things to him when people spoke to him because he’s quite deaf.” It would be some time still before the true nature of their relationship was revealed.

  Trials and Tribulations

  1

  In 1982, another controversy concerning Salinger erupted in the literary community as a result of a comment Truman Capote made to Lawrence Grobel, a journalist who had interviewed Capote extensively over the years. When Grobel asked which writers would have their reputations improved if they “dropped dead tomorrow,” Capote answered by saying, “Well, it would help J. D. Salinger.” In an exchange that Grobel would include in a book about Capote, Grobel shot back that “figuratively speaking” Salinger had died long ago.

  “Yes, well, he might as well make it legal,” Capote snapped.

  Then, when Grobel asked why Salinger had stopped writing, Capote, who had been a regular contributor to the New Yorker for many years, said this: “I’m told, on very good authority, that he hasn’t stopped writing at all. That he’s written at least five or six short novels and that all of them have been turned down by the New Yorker and that he won’t publish anywhere except the New Yorker. And that all of them are very strange and all about Zen Buddhism.”