Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  She reminds me of one of those lovely little appealing calves, or fauns [sic]—and they say she cries at night because she isn’t beautiful. But she is so much more beautiful, really, than any Hollywood actress of her class, with the kind of beauty that comes from within, and an honesty and simplicity about her that are almost pathetic. She has worked so hard all her life that she has never had a chance for herself or any private life at all: that’s why she’s so insecure.… One of the troubles is people her own age don’t appreciate her: older men love her.

  Older bisexual men particularly loved her—not just for the vulnerable, fawn-like quality noted above, but also for her androgynous looks (“like the girl and boy next door,” said theater critic Margo Jefferson) and a well-known tendency, fragility withal, for seducing such men (and other women).

  Probably, though, her seduction of Jackson was on a higher plane, from afar, as when he watched her rehearse a big number for Ziegfeld Follies: between performances, he noticed, she seemed “all but lifeless,” looking like a sleepy child waiting for a bus, but when she got her cue to speak or sing, “she was transformed”—a personality sprang forth and filled the studio, sucked up the very air. Jackson felt as though “he was seeing nothing less than a demonstration of the workings of art itself,” and the disparity between bigger-than-life persona and “terribly mixed up” girl moved him profoundly. “Dear Judy,” he began a poem for her twenty-second birthday (June 10), inscribed on the flyleaf of The Lost Weekend:

  … Once, within a wood,

  The willows parted and there stood,

  Soft-eyed and innocent, a fawn;

  One moment later it was gone.…

  Never did I expect to see

  Again such simple purity

  So be it, too: susceptible man

  Must bear such moments as he can.…

  A few days later he shyly asked his “new love” (as he frankly described her in a note to Alma Pritchard at Brandt & Brandt) whether she’d accompany him to the “preem” of The White Cliffs of Dover on June 19, and was startled by her ready acceptance. Vetluguin, ever the mentor, explained that “no man in his right mind” would take Judy Garland to a premiere: “You’ll be mobbed,” he said. “You’re taking your life in your hands.” But Charlie figured it was “all part of the Hollywood experience,” and was determined to see it through. In his subsequent letter to Rhoda (souvenir police pass enclosed), he described the atmosphere at Grauman’s Theatre that night as being akin to a “Nazi demonstration,” complete with a “battery of search-lights” and rabid, howling fans packed into bleachers along the street:

  As the car pulled in to the curb the crowd screamed “There’s Judy!” over and over again.… Your heart would have been touched (as mine was) if you could have seen how Judy turned to the crowd and gave a tiny little wave, acknowledging the applause, though all the while, her hand on my arm was trembling and shaking against me. We were stopped, then, every few feet, and photographed; and Judy kept saying “For God’s sake, Charlie, smile!” Each time the flash went off, Judy’s face was turned toward mine, looking up at me in a charming smile, as though I were The Only Man In The World.… My legs knocked together, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world: a real experience.

  Rhoda was understandably bemused by her husband’s effusive tone (never mind the photos and rumors that had begun to appear in the press), and he hastened to assure her that she needn’t feel “the slightest twinge of jealousy”; writing to Alma at Brandt & Brandt, meanwhile, he mentioned that he was taking tea with his idol Thomas Mann the following Saturday, though his “real passion” was for Judy: “Alas, how are the mighty fallen, when I go from Mann idolatry to Garland worship. But that’s Hollywood.”

  Which is not to say that his Mann idolatry was inconsiderable: ever since The Magic Mountain had changed his life, Jackson had read almost every word of Mann’s work that had been translated into English; the only greater writer, in Jackson’s eyes, was Tolstoy. When he learned, then, that his hero would be a fellow guest at the home of producer Edwin Knopf (brother of Mann’s American publisher, Alfred), he was stricken by a bad case of “stage-fright” exacerbated by sobriety (“such a handicap, at moments like that”). Happily he was soon seated beside Mrs. Mann, and in the course of an easy chat about Davos and the like, he mentioned his admiration for her husband: “Then you must talk with him yourself after dinner,” she said, and arranged for the two to be left alone, more or less. At first Mann seemed to take it in stride that Jackson knew his work (essays too) like a rabbi knows the Talmud, but presently he flattered Jackson—and stunned guests within earshot—by inquiring about The Lost Weekend. “Oh, but that’s very well!” he exclaimed, when Charlie told him how it was selling. As Mary McCarthy wrote in her roman à clef about Jackson—wherein he appears as Herbert Harper, author of the confessional novel A Short One If You Don’t Mind4—his meeting with Mann became something of a legend among writers whose own books “the great dichte” had never deigned to notice:

  So when Herbert Harper approached the great man at a Hollywood party, the meeting was watched with a good deal of sardonic anticipation: the irresistible force was meeting the immovable object. To the astonishment of everyone, a conversation began and continued all evening, and the phrase, “A Short Vun” was heard, by those nearby, to drop frequently from Herr Danz’s [Mann’s] lips.

  When they subsequently took tea at Mann’s house in Pacific Palisades, Mann presented Jackson with an inscribed copy of his new novel, Joseph the Provider—in exchange for the “fine gift” of The Lost Weekend—and a mutual admiration society was born. Mann compared Jackson’s novel to Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, while Joseph the Provider became one of Charlie’s indispensable masterpieces (“I know of no book,” he wrote Dorothea Straus, “that leaves one with a greater sense of fulfillment than this one”). For a few years the two kept up a correspondence that, as McCarthy put it, “echoed benevolently Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann.” The following spring, Jackson wrote Mann of a visit he’d received in New Hampshire from G. B. Fischer, Mann’s German publisher, whom Charlie had spirited upstairs to see his portrait of Dr. Mann, framed in red lacquer and proudly displayed (along with Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Beethoven, et al.) in his study. Fischer had solicited an essay from Jackson for a special issue of Die Neue Rundschau in honor of Mann’s seventieth birthday: titled “Strictly Personal,” Jackson’s contribution (the only one printed in English) was a charming, eminently readable history of the author’s unrestrained adulation, going back to his choice of sanatoria in 1929 and proceeding to the present day. “I was really delighted with this little piece of prose which, though informal, touches the heart in a truly poetical manner,” Mann wrote. His last letter, in 1948, acknowledged Jackson’s “generous and gratifying impulse” to phone Mann one Sunday night and express his indignation over certain unsatisfactory reviews of Doctor Faustus. Probably, by then, it was not an entirely sober impulse on Charlie’s part; in any event Dr. Mann pleaded a “very bad” connection, though he clearly appreciated the thought.

  Back in Hollywood that summer, Jackson’s social life had crystallized around two households: the Bracketts and the Gershwins. Every Sunday the former gave daytime dinner parties whose attendance by “the most entertainingly articulate writers … and assorted geniuses of the craft” inspired Life to liken them to “Madame de Staël’s salons in 18th century Paris”—an ambience due in part to Brackett’s witty wife, Elizabeth, who was sometimes, alas, absent from public view. The fact was, she’d struggled with severe alcoholism for years, as had their twenty-four-year-old daughter, Alexandra (“Zan”), and hence at least one reason Charles Brackett had been eager to adapt The Lost Weekend and re-create, as he remarked, “the strange and sometimes beautiful things” that transpire in an alcoholic’s mind. “It’s genuinely tragic,” Charlie wrote Rhoda, “because Elizabeth is almost one of the most loved women I ever knew.”5

  From the Bracketts’, Charlie would hitch a ride w
ith playwrights John Van Druten or Marc Connelly and spend the rest of the day—often past midnight—at Lee and Ira Gershwin’s house. His “nicest day in Hollywood” was spent thus: lunching and playing charades at the Bracketts’, then lazing around the Gershwins’ pool (the swarthy Jackson fancied a tan) with twelve others; later they feasted al fresco on “tremendous steaks (they shot all their coupons for a month, they said) … and the most wonderful ice cream with chocolate sauce I ever ate” before heading inside, as the evening turned cool, and sitting for hours around a cozy fire. The Gershwins, said Charlie, were “nice people, who really love you: Ira sat around like a fat old woman in the most preposterous shorts, all day and evening, looking something like a toad, but a nice toad, and Lee is just like a happy affectionate little girl …” As tokens of their friendship, they gave Charlie rare photographs of George and Ira, as well as an original pastel drawing by George. Almost twenty years later Jackson would reflect, a little sadly, that “out of all the people [he] used to see so much of [in Hollywood]”—and there had been many—his only lasting friendships had proved to be with the Gershwins and Charles Brackett.

  THOUGH HE was having a “wonderful time,” Jackson was eager to get back to his own work. After all, he never would have taken the MGM job in the first place if he’d known that The Lost Weekend would sell to the movies, and besides he was longing to write a sequel about Don’s recovery (and the world was expecting as much) titled The Working Out. Or rather, sometimes he was “hot and bothered” about the sequel, and sometimes about an entirely different novel that had recently begun to germinate—to be titled, he thought, either My Two Troubles or Who Can Wonder? “Damn it to hell,” he wrote Rhoda in mid-May (even before the Paramount sale), “why can’t I get myself fired at once! … Darling, it’s such a magnificent rich idea I feel all trembly at the thought that it was ‘given’ to me to do: that I am to be the instrument through which such a story will reach people.” What he wanted, ideally, was to get out of the second term of his MGM contract—requiring him to return in November—so he could have an uninterrupted fifteen months to work on his fiction, an ambitious program that was to include The Working Out, a story collection, and My Two Troubles. As for the other poor hacks at MGM, well, he simply pitied them: his friend Bob Nathan, for instance, had just signed a contract that would pay him $700,000 over the next five years, and was therefore “the unhappiest man alive”: he “knows it’s his death warrant,” Jackson wrote, “knows he will never write another book.”6

  Meanwhile he’d more than acquitted himself as a screenwriter, arriving at the studio every morning at six o’clock (“the other writers say they’ll report me to the Screen Writers Guild as a scab and saboteur”), the better to oblige Carey Wilson’s demands for draft after draft—theirs, indeed, was a “hair-raising” relationship: “he doesn’t know what he wants until he gets it, and then he doesn’t want it …” Still, Charlie felt certain that old “Vet” would be in his corner when push came to shove, and to this stalwart man he appealed once he’d proven his mettle. As he recounted their meeting to Carl Brandt:

  I proposed that my fall option be suspended for one year, as I needed more time to write my second book. Vet acquiesced with such alacrity that my breath was taken away, practically; and even suggested that I go off payroll right now. I said, “But what is to become of my assignment with Carey Wilson?” And he replied, to my astonishment, that I had been taken off the assignment three weeks previous, and another writer put on—put behind me, as the expression is, out here.

  Actually as many as five writers had been “put behind” him, including (but not limited to) Harry Ruskin, Michael Arlen, James M. Cain, I.A.R. Wylie, and his friend John Van Druten, each working separately on his own sequence of The Common Sin (as it was now called), which in any case was never produced. “I have been taken in and how by Vetluguin”—Jackson noted afterward with no little rue—“who is the smoothest bird this side of a[n] Archipenko sculpture.” On the brighter side, he and MGM had mutually decided to dissolve their contract, though he’d get paid for the full sixteen weeks of his first term. And when he next encountered the wily Vetluguin—later that November, in the office of Brandt & Brandt—the man seemed hardly to recognize him (“I think he remembered that I was a writer, maybe, and that my name was Johnson”).

  For his last three weeks in Hollywood, anyway, he was free to enjoy the fruits of his abundant popularity, as his friends all but fought for the chance to entertain him one last time. Judy Garland and the Gershwins were giving him big parties, while Kate Hepburn and “Spence” wanted to see him both en masse and privately. Finally, with a week to go, the exhausted Charlie wanted nothing more than to go home to his family and his own bed: “Darling, I go all funny at the thought,” he wrote Rhoda on August 7. “It means more to me than anything that has happened in 4 months: you are mine, you are what I want in life and—what is more—what I have. Truly I am the luckiest guy in the world to have so much.” Before the homecoming proper, though, he suggested they give a smallish cocktail party at the New Weston Hotel in New York (this for some Hollywood friends on the East Coast, as well as friends of friends such as Dorothy Parker, Celeste Holm, Sally Benson …). He was to arrive on August 14—or rather we, since “our Whit Cook” also happened to be heading to New York, and the two had booked a double-bedroom compartment aboard the Chief and the Century.

  1 The famous AA slogan is usually quoted as “One drink is too many and a thousand not enough.”

  2 One can only imagine Jackson’s indignation (and/or delight) over the movie Educating Rita (1983), in which a boozy professor played by Michael Caine conceals his whiskey, aptly enough, behind a copy of The Lost Weekend.

  3 Montgomery was still in the Navy at the time, or he might have gotten the part. Ten years later he played Don in a Lost Weekend adaptation for his own live television show, Robert Montgomery Presents—a performance applauded by Time for its “artistry” and “careful delineation.” Wilder had also considered José Ferrer, but Buddy De Sylva put his foot down: audiences would reject the character, said De Sylva, if he wasn’t handsome enough.

  4 Alternately titled The Lost Week or The Caged Lion, this unfinished novel will be discussed in due course. Suffice it to say that McCarthy had asked Jackson’s permission (eagerly granted) to use him as the model for Herbert Harper. Thomas Mann appears as Heinrich Danz.

  5 Elizabeth Brackett died four years later (whereupon the widower married her sister, Lillian), and their daughter Alexandra died in 1968 after falling down a flight of stairs.

  6 The glibly prolific Nathan—best known for The Bishop’s Wife (1928) and Portrait of Jennie (1940)—would produce no fewer than twenty-one more utterly forgotten novels (and almost as many plays, children’s books, and poetry collections) before his death, in 1985, at the ripe age of ninety-one.

  Chapter Nine

  Six Chimney Farm

  Seventeen miles north of Hanover, New Hampshire, along the Connecticut River, is “the most beautiful town in America,” according to Washington Irving: Orford. On the east side of its single street, atop a natural twenty-five-foot-high ridge, are seven houses that have been called the finest examples of Federal architecture in the country. The northernmost (and arguably best) of these caught Jackson’s eye as he was driving from Brattleboro in 1935: If he could only have such a house, he thought, it would be the “absolute peak of fulfillment and happiness”—though of course that was an impossible dream for an alcoholic without prospects. Later, though, as a married and sober man, Jackson would insist on stopping the car in Orford each summer en route to Rhoda’s family in Barre, Vermont: “When I’m rich,” he would vow, “it will be mine!”

  Six Chimney Farm—“one of the most beautiful houses in New England,” said a 1927 issue of House Beautiful—was built between 1825 and 1829 by a manufacturer of beaver hats, William Howard, on ninety-seven acres of property that included a separate five-room farmhouse and a working dairy farm. The main house was
designed by Asher Benjamin, an eminent Boston architect influenced by Bulfinch—though Jackson would always prefer to believe that Bulfinch himself had done it (“He also did the Capitol at Washington!” he excitedly informed Boom), and he dated it at various times to as early as 1788 and rarely later than 1807. More accurately Jackson pointed out that the five-thousand-square-foot house had been completely restored in 1916 by Judge William Dana, who installed modern appliances and plumbing, and added open porches on either side. Each of the five bedrooms had its own fireplace, as did the living room and gorgeous dining room, which featured a built-in Hepplewhite china cupboard and lovely, antique wallpaper of North American scenery (Niagara Falls, West Point, Boston Harbor) first printed in Alsace by Jean Zuber et Cie, and also found in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House.

  What would seem an outlandish extravagance—even for a man with so fanciful a view of personal finance—was, objectively at least, a bargain: for thirty thousand dollars he got the two houses, the land, and Judge Dana’s collection of Sheraton furniture. As of 1944 the owner was John Owsley, a former head football coach at Yale who lived most of the year in New Haven; by all accounts a colorful man, he’d evidently wearied of the aesthetic charms of Orford, which (apart from its proximity to Dartmouth) was bereft of cultural diversions. As for Charlie and Rhoda, they’d both grown up in small country towns and thought at the time—for whatever reason—that they wanted their children to do the same. A little surprising is the fact that Jackson had decided to buy the place pre-Hollywood, purely on the basis of his earning potential as a radio writer and first-time novelist: “The possibility of our buying your house hinges on the success of a new book of mine,” he wrote Owsley on October 30, 1943. “I am not financially dependent on the success of my books, but I would have to be assured of a good sale on my new book in order to raise the cash required for a down payment …” He got the good sale, of course, and put down ten thousand dollars; then came the Paramount deal, on the strength of which he jubilantly reported to Nila Mack that the house was now “paid for twice over.” Not so, and the math would become even more creative once taxes, maintenance, and certain appurtenances entered the picture.