Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  Grobel couldn’t fathom why the New Yorker would turn down anything by Salinger. Would the magazine do that?

  “Yes,” Capote said simply, and that was the end of the discussion.

  On this topic, however, Roger Angell, who joined the fiction department at the New Yorker in the 1950s, is emphatic. “Nonsense!” he says. “Salinger has not submitted to the New Yorker since the mid-1960s when ‘Hapworth’ appeared. Shawn wouldn’t have turned any stories down. Robert Gottlieb wouldn’t have turned them down. Tina Brown wouldn’t have turned them down. It just doesn’t make any sense. This is what happens to people when they become enigmas.”

  Salinger had bigger problems to worry about than insulting comments made by Truman Capote. Recently, Salinger had received word from family and friends that Ian Hamilton, the British poet who was also known for writing a biography of Robert Lowell, had started a biography of Salinger. Hamilton had been requesting interviews of people who knew him, just as numerous journalists had done in the past. Obviously, if there was one figure in the twentieth century who didn’t want his biography written, it was Salinger. As soon as he found out about the book, Salinger made every effort to encourage his family and friends not to cooperate with Hamilton. In January 1985, for example, Salinger, who had recently taken a fall on an ice-covered hill and broken his sternum, wrote to William Faison, Elizabeth Murray’s brother who had been his friend at Valley Forge, to put a request to him in no uncertain terms: Do not talk to Ian Hamilton, Salinger said—not under any conditions.

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  In the early 1980s, Random House had commissioned Hamilton to undertake a Salinger biography, since nothing like it had been written. Hamilton sold the publisher on the concept of approaching the book as if he were researching and writing a mystery. Who was Salinger and why was he hiding? Hamilton’s hope, he said in his book proposal, was that, while he did his research, he might actually be able to lure Salinger out into the public eye. Maybe, just maybe, he could even convince Salinger to give him an interview “to set the record straight.”

  Random House bought the book—for an advance of $100,000—and, despite the obstacles Salinger put in his way, Hamilton went about the process of researching and writing the book, which he titled J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life. Hamilton then began guiding it through the normal publishing process. That process included a legal vetting of the manuscript by the publisher’s lawyers. After the vetting was completed, the book was scheduled to be released in the fall of 1986. In the late spring, as the galleys for the book were making the rounds in the New York publishing circles, Salinger got a copy. Of course, he was horrified that a book about his life was going to be published at all, but he was particularly enraged when he discovered that Hamilton had included in the book parts of letters Salinger had written to people through the years—letters Salinger’s friends had either sold or donated to several university research libraries where Hamilton had read them. While he was writing the book, Hamilton made one key mistake. Even though he did not get Salinger’s permission to quote from the unpublished letters, he had included passages from those letters in his text. The total number of words Hamilton used from Salinger’s unpublished letters was about three hundred.

  Determined to stop the release of A Writing Life, Salinger retained a lawyer in New York, Marcia B. Paul, who immediately put Hamilton, Random House, and William Heinemann (Hamilton’s British publisher) on notice that Salinger was going to claim copyright infringement because Hamilton had used excerpts from Salinger’s unpublished letters without permission. Hamilton rewrote the manuscript, paring down the number of words he quoted to as few as possible, a number so small his lawyers believed he was protected by the fair-use clause of the U.S. copyright law. Random House lawyers submitted the new version of the book to Salinger’s lawyers on September 18, 1986. A week later, Salinger’s lawyers filed suit in the Southern District Court in Manhattan. “For the past two decades I have elected, for personal reasons, to leave the public spotlight entirely,” Salinger stated in court papers that were actually written by his attorneys. “I have shunned all publicity for over twenty years and I have not published any material during that time. I have become, in every sense of the word, a private citizen. I have filed the instant action and seek to restrain publication of a book . . . which is a blatant infringement of my copyrights in certain of my heretofore unpublished letters.”

  On October third, the Southern District Court issued a temporary restraining order to stop the release of J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life. Additional information had to be gathered by the courts to determine whether the book’s release should be blocked permanently—information that would come in the form of affidavits and depositions. It was odd to hear Salinger saying words like “heretofore”—a word he had probably never used in his published prose, certainly not seriously. However, if Salinger’s own voice did not emerge from the court papers, it would come through clearly in the deposition he was forced to give in the fall of 1986.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon on October 10, 1986, and Salinger sat in a conference room in the law offices of Satterlee Stephens, a high-profile, white-shoe firm located in the Helmsley Building on Park Avenue in New York City. Accompanied by his lawyer, Marcia Paul, Salinger was there to be questioned by Random House’s lawyer, Robert Callagy, an understated yet aggressive man who was an experienced litigator. A witness to the event says that Salinger wore an attractive business suit with a shirt and tie. Despite his age, sixty-eight, he looked to be in good health and excellent physical condition, even though his hair had fully grayed and he was somewhat deaf. For the first time in his life, Salinger was going to have to do something he had previously gone out of his way to avoid at any cost: answer questions about his life and work.

  Salinger was focused. He kept his cool. He often answered questions, reluctantly. During the early part of the deposition, Callagy asked him about a number of topics. Salinger answered questions about the way one of his stories had been made into a movie. He also expressed unhappiness with book publishers. Callagy was particularly curious about how much Salinger had been writing since he had stopped publishing in the mid-1960s.

  “Mr. Salinger,” Callagy asked him at another juncture in the afternoon, “when was the last time that you wrote any work of fiction for publication?”

  “I’m not sure exactly,” Salinger said.

  “At any time during the past twenty years,” Callagy asked, “have you written a work of fiction for publication?”

  “That has been published, you mean?”

  “That has been published.”

  “No . . . ” Salinger said.

  “At any time during the past twenty years have you written any fiction which has not been published?”

  “Yes,” Salinger stated.

  “Could you describe for me what works of fiction you have written which have not been published?”

  “It would be very difficult to do . . . ” Salinger said.

  “Have you written any full-length works of fiction during the past twenty years which have not been published?”

  “Could you frame that a different way?” he asked. Callagy asked Salinger what genre he was working in.

  “It’s very difficult to answer,” Salinger said, “I don’t write that way. I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it.”

  “ . . . Would you tell me what your literary efforts have been in the field of fiction within the last twenty years?”

  “ . . . Just a work of fiction,” Salinger said. “That’s all. That’s the only description I can really give it . . . . I work with characters, and as they develop, I just go on from there.”

  In the course of the deposition, which went on for six hours, Callagy asked Salinger about an array of issues, some important, some mundane. Callagy had Salinger talk about the conflicts he had had with specific editors, such as John Woodburn at Little, Brown. He also asked questions about the author’s personal life and his income. Call
agy asked for dates of publication of Salinger’s books, dates of interviews, information about other lawsuits. Salinger revealed little.

  By the end of the deposition, Salinger seemed exhausted. No doubt it had been one of the worst days of his life. In order to stop Hamilton’s biography, however, he had no choice but to do what he did. It might have been painful for him—by answering questions about himself he was violating the very way he had lived his adult life—but he did it. When he was finished, Salinger left the law offices as anonymously as he had arrived at them. Except for the lawyers directly involved with the case, no one at the firm even knew it was Salinger who had come there that day for a deposition.

  This much is true without question. In the last half of Salinger’s life, he has remained coy and manipulative—just as many adolescents are, only he was an adult, fully capable of taking adult actions. Eventually it could be argued, part of what Salinger was protecting by filing his lawsuit against Hamilton was the image he had created over the years, an image that promoted sales of books. In 1986, even though the novel had been in print for thirty-five years, The Catcher in the Rye still sold more than two hundred thousand copies a year, mostly because it remained part of the required reading lists at many high schools and universities. It didn’t hurt Salinger’s reputation (which he was perfectly aware of—as the interview with Fosburgh demonstrated) that the author of the novel was perceived to be eccentric and mysterious. Catcher accounted for a good portion of Salinger’s yearly royalties. If he had to file a lawsuit to block the publication of J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life under the guise of protecting his copyright, then that’s what he would do. He was also protecting his trademark.

  It would take some months—and a history-making legal battle—before the suit was settled. On November 5, Salinger’s papers for a preliminary injunction were filed in Manhattan. That same day, Judge Pierre N. Leval issued a thirty-page judgment allowing the publication of the book to go forward on the grounds that Hamilton’s limited quotation fell within the limits set forth by the copyright laws. In England, Hamilton was elated. On December 3, he was still celebrating when Salinger’s lawyers appealed Leval’s opinion to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuits. On January 29, 1987, Hamilton certainly was not celebrating when Judge Jon O. Newman and Judge Roger Minor reversed Leval’s decision, effectively preventing the distribution of A Writing Life. “On balance, the claim of fair use as to Salinger’s unpublished letters fails,” the decision read. “To deny a biographer like Hamilton the opportunity to copy the excessive content of unpublished letters is not . . . to interfere in any significant way with the process of enhancing public knowledge of history or contemporary events.” Months passed. The fate of the book hung in limbo. Finally, in September 1987, lawyers for Random House submitted a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States to hear the case. On October 5, the Court denied the petition. At last, this ended the case and allowed J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life to be blocked once and for all.

  The ordeal, which had been covered extensively in the media in both the United States and England, left a lasting mark on everyone involved. “The whole thing was awful,” says Ian Hamilton. “It came down to this. Salinger thought that he could stop the publication of my book by doing what he did. He wanted to kill it, period. When we protested, it got nastier and nastier.” Events were no easier on Salinger. “You know that terrible ordeal he had to go through, that awful ordeal they put him through,” Lillian Ross would one day say to Andreas Brown about the legal wranglings. “I had to go to court with him and hold his hand he was so upset. He would come over to my place and wait until we’d have to go and I’d go with him. Literally, sometimes I’d have to hold his hands he’d be shaking so badly. Afterwards, I’d make him chicken soup at the end of the day. He was such a sensitive and fragile person, so vulnerable to the world. He was such a sweet man.”

  In the end Hamilton reworked A Writing Life and turned it into a book called In Search of J. D. Salinger. In large part, it was a chronicle of Hamilton’s efforts to write and publish A Writing Life. When it appeared in 1988, it met with warm reviews and poor sales. In a sense Salinger had killed Hamilton’s book, period.

  Years later, Callagy would remember details about the lawsuit, especially the day he deposed Salinger. After all, Callagy’s deposition of Salinger would constitute the only full-fledged legitimate question-and-answer interview anyone had ever conducted with Salinger. The flirty pseudo-interviews Salinger gave through the years were nothing compared to this six-hour legal deposition.

  “Here was a man,” Callagy says, “who could have had it all by today’s standards of authorship and he had gone out of his way to avoid exploitation of his literary properties. He had almost made a crusade out of destroying the memories of works that so many young people in America have come to treasure. As a result of this, he had a very modest income by the standards of someone with his status in the business. Then again, my thought is that he was not the J. D. Salinger who had been the vibrant novelist back in the 1950s. Here was a man who was well put-together and held himself high but who was definitely angry or disturbed or upset about something. Something must have happened after the war because when I asked him about letters written around that time I’d say, ‘What did you mean?’ And he’d say, ‘The young boy meant . . . ’ I thought that it was odd that he’d describe himself in the third person. In all of the depositions that I’ve done, no one has ever referred to himself in the third person.”

  This was not the only time Salinger had seemed unable to distinguish between the first person and the third person—that is to say, between “I” and “he.” Years earlier, when he was dating Leila Hadley, Salinger often spoke of Holden as if he were an actual person. Apparently, Salinger had trouble drawing distinctions between himself and his creations, between his creations and the real people around him. In short, at least following World War II, Salinger was not always able to make a strict distinction between fiction and memory, a problem that created significant difficulties for him in his life.

  In the end Callagy also felt sympathy for Salinger. “At one point there was a sad episode that occurred when during one of the breaks he asked me for a Manhattan telephone book. I got it and gave it to him. He was clearly having trouble finding the number he wanted so I said, ‘Can I look up the number for you?’ And he said, ‘I’m trying to find my son’s phone number. He lives over by the Roosevelt Hotel.’ And then he said he couldn’t find the number in the book so he was not going to be able to contact him, which I thought was very sad.”

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  In 1987, an incident involving Salinger created an enormous amount of talk throughout the entertainment industry. It concerned the actress Catherine Oxenberg who was then one of the stars of the popular nighttime television soap opera Dynasty. She was young and blonde and beautiful, and she had attracted a large television following. One person whose attention she had caught was Salinger, or so the story went. “Salinger fell in love with her on the TV show,” says Hamilton, who was by then extremely familiar with Salinger’s comings and goings. “He had had a habit for some years of falling in love with actresses on TV shows. He’d call them up and say, ‘I’m J. D. Salinger and I wrote The Catcher in the Rye.’” Of course, in 1981, Salinger had used this very same approach with Elaine Joyce, although he had written her a letter. As for Oxenberg, according to Hamilton, Salinger had traveled out to California in pursuit of the actress. “He had shown up on the set,” says Hamilton, “and he had to be escorted off.” A story to this effect appeared in the papers at the time. When it did, an agent for Oxenberg received a telephone call from Salinger’s lawyers informing them that Salinger intended to sue whoever had first run the story, but, from all indications, no lawsuit was ever filed.

  One day in April 1988—under the banner headline “GOTCHA, CATCHER!”—the New York Post ran a full-page photograph of Salinger on its front cover. Obviously agitated in the picture, Salinger has one fis
t pulled back as if he is about to punch the camera. There was, of course, a history to the picture. Recently, Paul Adao and Steve Connelly, both freelance paparazzi, had gone to New Hampshire, as had become the custom of so many fans and journalists through the years, and stalked Salinger for several days until they saw him coming out of the post office in Windsor. Clicking away, they photographed him as he walked up and spoke to them. “Listen,” he said sternly, “I don’t want to be interviewed. I don’t want any part of this.”

  They left, but three days later they returned and stalked Salinger again until, this time, they spotted him leaving the Purity Supreme supermarket in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Now, Adao blocked Salinger’s car into its parking space, and, after Connelly got out of their car, they both began taking pictures of him. Furious, Salinger came at them, smashing his grocery cart into Connelly and hitting at Adao, still in the car’s driver’s seat, with his fist. It was one of the times Salinger was drawing his fist back to swing at Adao that the photographer caught the gesture on film. Soon, giving up, Salinger covered his face with his hands and tried to open the door to his Jeep, but the photographers kept on snapping shots. Several shoppers stopped to gather around what had turned into a minor melee. “What are you doing to him?” one finally shouted out at the photographers. “He’s a convicted murderer!” Adao yelled back, a comment Adao later said he regretted. Finally, Salinger got into his Jeep and, when Adao saw that he was about to back into his car, he moved the car and Salinger drove away.

  After the picture appeared on the front page of the New York Post, a controversy ensued with many readers disapproving of the way the paparazzi had stalked Salinger. One person who was fascinated by Salinger’s photograph was Don DeLillo. Later, it would be said that that photograph inspired him to write his novel Mao II.

  On the evening of July 18, 1989, Rebecca Schaeffer, the attractive, lively twenty-one-year-old actress who had co-starred with Pam Dawber on the short-lived sit-com My Sister Sam, answered the door of her apartment in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles and discovered standing before her Robert John Bardo, a twenty-one-year-old ex-janitor from Tucson with a history of serious mental illness. For some time, Bardo had been sending letters and gifts to the young actress whom he was obsessed with in much the same way John Hinckley had been obsessed with Jodie Foster. He had even shown up once on the set of her television show to try to see her. Consistently, Schaeffer had ignored him. So far, she had been able to escape him. Until this particular night. Calmly, Bardo pulled out a .357-caliber handgun and, without so much as saying a word to her, shot her in the chest at point-blank range. Schaeffer was dead by the time Bardo fled the neighborhood.