by Blake Bailey
The next day (July 13), Wylie tried again. It occurred to him that Charlie might view a harsh critique as retribution for their little set- to over Night Unto Night, which Wylie would “hate intensely”: “I am so keen about your writing when it’s on the beam that I did something for you I never did before and perhaps may never do again: I asked the Times to let me rave about it.” But reminding himself of Jackson’s superlative first novel only got his blood up all over again, until his second letter degenerated into an almost precise replica of his first. On July 16, finally, he managed that waggishly detached third letter—“the gist of which was,” as Jackson wrote a friend (six months later, and still furious): “what a stroke of genius on your part, how super-subtle, etc., to make the characters so dull in themselves that their problem becomes all the more interesting because they don’t matter.” At length he consoled himself that Wylie was probably insane, and many years later he couldn’t entirely conceal his glee when he bumped into the man (“much in need”) at an AA meeting in Manhattan.
SHORTLY AFTER PRODUCTION BEGAN on The Lost Weekend, the redoubtable Stanley Barr of Allied Liquor Industries fired a warning shot across Paramount’s bows: all too familiar with the novel’s invidious portrait of a drinker, Barr expressed his “very serious concern” that Prohibitionists would use the film version to persuade the public that Don Birnam is typical of anyone who sips an occasional cocktail, or of “the working man who has a glass of beer with friends at his neighborhood tavern.” Brackett tried to defuse the controversy with an interview in the New York World-Telegram, pointing out that Don Birnam was hardly a typical drinker: “We are making the movies’ first attempt to understand a drunkard, a chronic alcoholic, and interpret what goes on in his mind. This has been done with an opium smoker, so why not a drinker?”
But was the public ready for an unfunny drunk? The movie’s first sneak preview, in Santa Barbara, resoundingly suggested otherwise. To Wilder and Brackett’s horror, the audience burst into laughter from the get-go, when Wick discovers the bottle his brother has dangled out the window—and things went downhill from there. By the end of the movie the theater was almost empty, and the few who remained scribbled words like “disgusting” and “boring” on their preview cards. Afterward, sitting in a car with a subdued Brackett and the studio head, Henry Ginsberg, Wilder announced that he was leaving for Washington in the morning: There was nothing he could do about The Lost Weekend, and meanwhile he’d been offered a chance to go to Berlin and help de-Nazify the German film industry; Brackett would have to deal with this mess alone. (Jackson, for his part, had been told by a friend that the preview was boffo: “She was so thrilled her letter was almost incoherent,” he wrote Brackett. “Only fault she had to find was the ending … ”) Word of the debacle spread, and the liquor industry tried to make hay by offering five million dollars for the movie’s negative through a dummy corporation. “If they would have given me the five million,” said Wilder, “I would have burned the negative.”
The tide turned in the nick of time. The composer, Miklós Rózsa, was certain the movie’s temporary score—upbeat Gershwinesque jazz—was to blame for the disastrous reaction in Santa Barbara, and his eerie theremin-dominated music made it clear that the story wasn’t supposed to be funny. Nobody laughed at a second preview in San Francisco; indeed, as The Hollywood Reporter observed, everyone in the theater stayed put well past midnight and were “positively limp” by the end. Realizing the movie was likely headed for success, the liquor industry tried a radically different tack: producers of premium-brand whiskey reminded the public that Birnam only drank cheap stuff, and the House of Seagram went so far as to run an advertisement promoting the movie: “Paramount has succeeded in burning into the hearts and minds of all who see this vivid screen story our own long-held and oft-published belief that … some men should not drink, which might well have been the name of this great picture instead of The Lost Weekend.”
It galled Jackson that practically every single one of his Hollywood friends had already seen the movie, while he was stuck in boring Orford: “I can’t sleep nights, I want to see it so bad,” he complained that summer. He would have to wait until September 11, however, when Paramount was giving a private screening in New York for Jackson’s publisher and a list of friends, pundits, and creditors that Jackson had devised with particular care: Klaus Perls, Philip Rahv, Bennett Cerf, Tracy and Hepburn, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Edna Ferber (“ah, there!” he noted of the last), among many others. “I believe it’s the only movie adaptation of a novel which actually pleases the novelist,” he remarked afterward, ranking The Lost Weekend fourth on his personal list of favorite movies, behind The Informer, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Gold Rush. There were all sorts of little touches he wished he’d thought of himself (especially the bottle’s shadow behind the light fixture), and no matter how many times he saw the movie, tears sprang to his eyes anew whenever Don died for a drink during La Traviata, or screamed in horror at the bat hallucination. Not that Jackson considered the movie perfect: during his eleventh viewing he noticed that certain actors in the opera audience (notably the girl whose purse Don steals) reappear in other parts of the movie, and he would always cringe at the ham actors who played Helen’s parents (“they are something which Vincent Minilli [sic] might have dreamed up and often does”). For the most part, though—and despite the ending, which he would always despise—his cup ran over: “To my dying day,” he wrote Ginsberg, “I shall be enormously grateful to Paramount for handling my novel with such respect and for making such a big thing of it.”
To his dying day, too, he would resent Ray Milland for what he perceived to be base ingratitude on the actor’s part. During filming, Milland hadn’t hesitated to pick his brain about the fine points of alcoholic behavior, but later, when Jackson accosted him “for a good two hours” to gush about his performance—Don’s escape from Bellevue, say (“a dancer couldn’t have done it more beautiful”)—Milland did little more than nod: “I was disappointed in him,” Jackson grimly noted. But as Milland would write in his memoir, Wide-Eyed in Babylon (1974), he’d never taken himself very seriously as an actor, and often felt embarrassed unto speechlessness by all the lavish praise. Worse was the widespread perception that he’d based his portrayal on real-life alcoholism, which made him the butt of drunk jokes for the rest of his life (“Ray Milland’s been here,” said Bob Hope—a common offender—on finding a bottle in My Favorite Brunette). Eager to distance himself from such an undeserved image, he refused to reprise his Don Birnam role for a 1951 radio production that would have paid Jackson five hundred dollars—money he desperately needed by then, as perhaps it goes without saying.
Back in the fall of 1945, though, there was still some question as to whether the movie would ever see the light of day. British censors were especially appalled, threatening to ban The Lost Weekend unless Paramount agreed to a “drastically altered” version: such scenes as Don’s delirium tremens were cut, and moreover a monitory, idiotic subtitle was imposed: Diary of a Dipsomaniac. Sensing a chance to generate worldwide publicity, the studio decided to give the movie a premiere in London, whose critics (according to The Hollywood Reporter) went on “a praise binge for The Lost Weekend”: “Even with the paper shortage, it’s gotten more comment than any picture since Gone with the Wind.” At home, too, censor boards in Ohio and other states provoked even further buzz by insisting on cuts, particularly zeroing in on a speech that Brackett and Wilder had written to forestall solidarity with the temperance movement: “Good old Prohibition days,” says Bim, the sinister male nurse at Bellevue. “That’s what started half these guys off. Whoopee!”8
By the time the movie opened at New York’s Rivoli Theatre on December 1, executives at Paramount (who at one point had been “resigned to box-office receipts on a par with a collection plate in a Wesleyan chapel,” as Milland put it) went out of their way to milk the controversy as much as possible: “THE AMAZING NOVEL YOU WHISPERED ABOUT,�
� blared the ads, “ROCKS THE SCREEN WITH ITS DARING! / The shock best-seller that ‘no one would dare to film,’ ” etc. Most reviewers responded by commending the “courage” of what was, as Bosley Crowther wrote in the Times, one of “the best and most disturbing character studies ever put on the screen.… truly a chef d’oeuvre of motion-picture art.” One of the very few mixed reviews was James Agee’s in the Nation; he began by saying the movie had left him “pretty consistently gratified and excited,” but seemed to change his mind as he went along: “Thinking it over, though, there are curious and disappointing things about the picture. Good as he is, Milland is too robust for the best interests of his role … neither he nor the director happens to know very much about the particular kind of provincially born, genteelly bred failed artist Milland is supposed to be playing.” Agee (who incidentally had worked with Rhoda at Fortune, and had also been on Charlie’s invitation list for the Farrar & Rinehart screening) ended his review on a wry, somewhat conciliatory note: “I understand that the liquor interesh: innerish: intereshtsh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough.”
The consensus, however, was reflected in a full-page ad that ran after the movie’s release: “THE MOST WIDELY ACCLAIMED MOTION PICTURE ENTERTAINMENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE INDUSTRY”—and some even agreed with Howard Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune, who ventured to suggest that Brackett and Wilder had “taken an absorbing book … and made it into a far more absorbing film.” Before long, indeed, Jackson began to feel slighted in any number of ways. Though Brackett had assured him that he’d be credited as “Charles Jackson,” the title card for the finished movie read: “From the Novel by Charles R. Jackson”—an initial that never appeared on any of his books, though he was glad to be mentioned in whatever form, seeing as how Paramount liked to give “credit to their smallest bit-player in preference to the author of the novel,” or so he irritably observed. By the time the movie almost swept the Oscars in March 1946, Jackson was hardly surprised to learn that his name hadn’t been mentioned once during the ceremony—“but,” wrote Brackett, who certainly would have plugged Charlie if given the chance, “for the reason of your omission, the rules of Academy Presentations are to be changed to include a brief speech by the winner in future, if that’s any comfort.”9
Scant comfort, and over time the movie became such a classic that even literate people tended to forget that it had been based on an acclaimed best-seller of the same name. Sometimes, too, well-meaning types would remark to Jackson that they’d especially loved the part of his story where Don spies the hidden liquor bottle in the light fixture—which, of course, isn’t in the book. On the other hand: this “chef d’oeuvre of motion picture art” was based on his novel, and they couldn’t take that away from him. In later years he’d often drag his friend Dorothea Straus to see the movie, “quiver[ing] with pleasure” in the dark: “There was Charles Jackson the awed fan,” she remembered, “admiring Charles Jackson the celebrity and his inimitable success.”
1 Second Avenue in the novel—a mistake, Jackson admitted, since most of the pawnshops were on Third.
2 That is, paralleling Rhoda’s employment at another Luce publication, Fortune.
3 In the finished movie, at least, Don doesn’t go straight from a suicidal hangover to actual novel-writing, nor does Wick turn up to cook breakfast. Don’s final lines (spoken over a panoramic shot of New York) are an effective part of what is usually considered a masterpiece of screenwriting: “And out there in that great big concrete jungle, I wonder how many others there are like me. Poor bedeviled guys, on fire with thirst. Such comical figures to the rest of the world, as they stagger blindly towards another binge, another bender, another spree … ”
4 Bridgit: A Story for the Screen was published that year by Knopf, and appears to have vanished with barely a ripple. When I searched for the book on Worldcat.org (“the World’s Largest Library Catalogue”) I found a single copy at Yale. Bridgit the movie was never produced.
5 Jackson, an avid reader of Colette, quite possibly derived this device from her famous story “The Kepi,” in which an aging woman impulsively dons her young lover’s kepi (a soldier’s hat) in bed. All at once she looks ridiculous, and old, and he abruptly loses interest.
6 Now best remembered as the screenwriter for The Philadelphia Story and as model for Bill Gorton in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
7 Wylie made a point of preserving these unmailed letters among his papers at Princeton—the better for posterity to judge, perhaps.
8 Bim knew whereof he spoke. According to a 1936 study by Norman H. Jolliffe, admissions to the Bellevue alcoholic ward rose precipitously under Prohibition—from 2,091 in 1920 to 9,542 in 1933, the year of repeal.
9 Brackett (and Wilder) had won for Best Screenplay, a category whose winners were not invited to give an acceptance speech in those days.
Chapter Eleven
The Fall of Valor
One awful night, Jackson sat with his friend Elling Aannestad and weathered a lot of well-reasoned abuse about his second novel—but that wasn’t even the worst of it. When, to cheer himself up a bit, Jackson would mention, say, a recent dinner at “21” with one of his celebrated pals, the captious Aannestad would sit back and smile behind his hand, regarding Charlie as if he were an oddly risible specimen of bug. How Charlie hated such sour grapes! As he wrote the man afterward, “I remember your telling me before The Lost Weekend was published … ‘I hope you can stand success, Charlie, because I think you’re in for it.’ Well, I can—but you won’t let me. You have this preconceived idea that I am dizzy with a little ‘celebrity’ … ”
Whether such an idea was entirely preconceived is at least somewhat debatable. In many ways Charlie was, and would forever be, the kindest and most approachable of men, while at the same time he clung like grim death to his fraying cloak of fame. During that first summer in Hollywood, of course, he’d been mostly bemused by his own popularity, and appalled by such cautionary figures as Bernie Schoenfeld, a fellow MGM writer who would walk around Chasen’s doling out tips to waiters so they’d remember him next time. “Well that sort of thing—well, you know,” Charlie sadly wrote Rhoda, who two years later would complain to Boom about her husband’s “perverted sense of values”: “The insatiate lust for fame, for recognition. The tipping of five dollars right and left so the head waiter will say ‘Goodbye Mr. Jackson’ when he goes out. All the rest of that.” The dividends, however, could be sweet: at “21” he was invariably seated in the VIP room (second floor, front), and sometimes he even rated a mention in Leonard Lyons’s column, as when Toots Shor accosted him one night: “You’re the guy who knocks drinking,” the colorful saloonkeeper cracked. “I don’t knock your racket, so why do you knock mine?”
With many a witty, sweet-talking letter, Jackson had wooed the rich and famous, convincing himself that he liked them as human beings, too, and vice versa. One of his favorites was the lovely young tobacco heiress, Leonora “Bubbles” Schinasi, who’d recently married (chez Bennett Cerf) the producer Arthur Hornblow. “Though I never did see much of you in Hollywood,” Charlie wrote her, “I sort of bank on seeing Leonora when I’m in New York.” He also banked on seeing her mother, Ruby, whom he characterized as “chic beyond Vogue’s wildest dreams, and a swell guy besides.” Ruby, he drolly suggested, was perhaps the very woman who (as Elizabeth Brackett had predicted while reading his palm) would leave him a fortune—and later, after their friendship had soured, he wrote a story about it, “Money”1: Patton Hillyard, “in desperate need of a thousand dollars,” naturally tries borrowing it from Mrs. Mercereau (“She was not only rich, but they were friends”). Sensing her distaste with the subject, however, he never quite gets around to asking, and finally he’s left watching “the splendid massed pigeon feathers of her gorgeous hat” in the rear window of a taxi as she leaves his life forever.
Perhaps Jackson’s finest hour as a celebrity per se was neither as a writer nor as a society figure, but rather as a co
ntestant on the popular radio show Information, Please! Among friends and family it had long been commonplace to say that Charlie would kill on the show, what with the wealth of trivia at his fingertips—as he reminded Nila Mack (in the course of correcting her impression that The Jungle had been written by Sinclair Lewis): “I’ve many times seen you raise your eyebrows when I innocent-like happened to name not only the understudy of the actress who had a walk-on as parlor-maid in Act 3 of THE LION AND THE MOUSE but also … the glove-sizes and maiden-names of the ushers’ mothers; but I guess you’ve lost faith in me.” Information, Please! was moderated by the critic Clifton Fadiman, and featured a regular panel of experts including, at one time or another, Oscar Levant, Franklin P. Adams, and John Kieran, as well as celebrity guests such as Boris Karloff and Orson Welles. The night of Charlie’s debut in the latter role—January 7, 1946—he was, by his own admission, “a bundle of nerves” (“When I resisted the temptation to reach for a tall one,” he quipped, “I knew I was cured for good!”), but soon he began to “spout quotes by the yard,” as he wrote Katharine Hepburn. On questions relating to Shakespeare, of course—and there were plenty—he was all but untouchable: “ ‘The counterfeit presentment of two brothers,’ ” he rattled off in a high-pitched, pedantic voice, when asked to provide line, scene, and speaker based on a one-word prompt (“Counterfeit”). “The closet scene. Hamlet is comparing his father’s picture with that of his uncle.” But he could be versatile, too, as when Fadiman asked what opera included a scene wherein the set depicted a cross section of a temple with a dungeon beneath. “Aida … the death of Radames … Verdi.” And so it went (“I was wow”).