by Blake Bailey
BOOM AND CHARLIE’S MOTHER, Sarah—called Sal by her sons—was both a blessing and a curse to Boom: a blessing because he doted on her and vice versa; a curse because in old age she’d become indolent, grossly obese, and self-pitying to a degree that annoyed Boom and infuriated Charlie, what with her constant whinging about “sick headaches,” gas, and above all the hideous neglect and downright cruelty she’d suffered at the hands of Herb and Charlie. When Thelma and Richard were killed by the train, the New York Central had awarded Sal enough money to pay off the mortgage on 238 Prospect, after which she’d always say that Thelma and Richard had “given [her] a home.” By 1943, though, the house was in disrepair and she couldn’t afford to maintain it, nor was she ambulatory enough to take proper care of herself, so her children insisted she give the place up. Right around the time she was “forced” out of her house, Charlie published The Lost Weekend and bought himself a mansion in New Hampshire!—or so Sal bitterly complained to whoever would listen, pointing out that a single painting of Charlie’s was worth enough to keep her in Newark! But no! … In fact, during the four or five years he was flush, Charlie had paid his mother a seventy-five-dollar monthly allowance, but when he tried to remonstrate about her complaints—which she even voiced to Rhoda and her sister, while a guest in his house—she would “rub her eyes in the most corny hammy fashion (without listening at all),” as Charlie wrote Boom, “pity herself more than usual, and then go upstairs to pack.” “I have gotten where I am afraid to talk before people,” Sal wrote Boom during that same visit. “One has to take much insult when in a position like mine and dependent on others.” As for Charlie’s donations toward her upkeep: “I’d like to shove his old check down his throat.”
The problem was solved, it seemed, when Sal came to live with Boom in Malaga. Each day had a placid sameness: in the morning she’d make her way slowly, painfully, down the stairs, with Boom’s help, then sit in her chair reading a magazine or listening to the radio (later watching TV) while Boom brought her meals and whatever else she needed until bedtime. “I often think that Sal couldn’t be pried loose from her sedentary moorings by the H-bomb,” Charlie wrote his sister-in-law in 1954, cheered by the fact that his mother was now safely ensconced elsewhere; “and why not, if she is comfortable that way?” Usually, to be sure, she seemed quite comfortable. Not only did she have a tender companion in her dotage—as well as many charming guests who professed to find her delightful—but Boom often made a point of buying her lovely new outfits at the Lane Bryant (for large women) in Philadelphia, and other little gifts that might please her. The only downside for Sal, really, were those long trips her son insisted on taking to California each year, during which she’d pepper him with scolding letters (“I don’t know when I have felt so all alone”—though Jim Gates and others were looking after her. “You told me you couldn’t afford to go to Orford … Well—how could you afford to go to California” etc.)—this, even when Boom informed her that he was suffering from one of his lung ailments: “I AM REALLY SICK,” he wrote in big red letters across a page of her kvetching, “AND YOU WRITE A COMPLAINING LETTER LIKE THIS TO ME.” But of course he didn’t mail it.
Nor did he mail a letter to Charlie, in 1956, that began, “It’s high time you contributed to Mother’s financial support.…” By the early 1950s Charlie could hardly pay the grocer, much less provide an allowance to his mother. Recently, though, he’d boasted to Boom about his “fabulous” salary at Kraft Television Theatre (“my cup runneth over”), and yet he’d failed to send so much as a Christmas gift to Sal. For that matter, neither had their brother Herb, though Bob sent ten dollars a month and wrote an occasional note. “Jim [Gates] does more for her than you or Herb,” Boom indignantly wrote Charlie. “You don’t care to remember when I helped you out. I could paper a wall with the checks I’ve given you—and what have you ever done for me? Nothing—even when you’ve been able to.” But perhaps he remembered that Charlie had, in fact, been generous in various ways (inviting Boom to live at Six Chimney Farm, for instance)—and then, things were just complicated in Charlie’s case; anyway he declined to mail such an irate letter.4 No such compunction applied, however, where Herb was concerned, and for his pains Boom received a scalding rebuttal from Bob, who hadn’t forgotten what it was like squeaking by on her husband’s piddling salary at the paper mill while Charlie and Boom gadded about Europe—and besides: why should a lonely, aging homosexual complain about the “privilege” of taking care of his mother? “My Gosh, Fred,” Bob wrote, “she is the only family you have [in Malaga] and I should think you would be so darned glad you had someone to think of besides yourself you would be down on your knees thanking the good Lord.” At any rate Boom continued to be a dutiful son, mostly at his own expense.
And he was nothing but grieved over his mother’s decline at the beginning of 1962. “It’s all she can do to get downstairs for her noon soap opera and then she dozes off many times during the day,” he wrote his niece Sarah. “She may pull out of it as she has before. I hope so.” Within a few weeks, though, she died, under circumstances that must have rankled. Charlie had been visiting while their mother lay on her deathbed, and at one point Boom stepped out to the post office for that day’s voluminous mail: the big event of his day, after all. When he returned, the mother he’d so lovingly tended these many years was dead. As Charlie would always tell it, “Well, Boom was off somewhere, but I was here and she died in my arms …”5
IN THE END Boom forgave his brother (almost) everything, and the two even seemed to rediscover the pleasure of each other’s company—so many wonderful memories in common, from Newark to the Riviera! And nobody was a more devoted admirer of Charlie’s work, as the latter knew well: “To my younger brother, Frederick Storrier Jackson,” he wrote for an elaborate “Card of Thanks” he’d hoped to include in his last novel, A Second-Hand Life, “who has always touchingly believed there is no writer living like you know whom, and whose blind but pure faith, goodness, and generosity of spirit have helped me through years of discouragement, ill-health, and just plain laziness.” Finally, not least, Boom was always an attentive uncle to Charlie’s daughters—especially Sarah, who moved to Manhattan as a young woman and often accompanied Boom to the theater and such, as well as visiting him in the “safe haven” of Malaga. “I was so lucky to have these two men in my life who just adored me,” she said of her sweet-natured father and uncle, though Charlie (by far the more problematic of the two) wasn’t altogether approving of his daughter’s bond with Boom, grumbling that homosexual men like to be “seen” with attractive young women …
More and more, though, Boom was content to be a homebody in Malaga, and why not? He had everything he wanted there, including a man who loved him to the exclusion of all others: “I don’t seem to enjoy anyone but you and everyone else tires me so,” Jim wrote him during one of his vacations, teasing him on another occasion (when he was in Sausalito with louche Bick) to “have a swell time … and let your conscience be your guide.” The two shared everything—houses, cars, pets (“Annie,” Jim would say to one of his many dachshunds, “show Barbara what girls do in the park,” whereupon the dog would roll over on her back)—and during the last decade of Boom’s life, they bought a place together in Strathmere, New Jersey, south of Ocean City, since Boom had always loved the beach and enjoyed showing off his legs to the end. “Jim is still out of control periodically,” Rhoda wrote in March 1972, nine months after Boom’s death, when Jim continued to weep at any reminder of his beloved.
1 Hamlet was friends with the doomed Flew, who would later kill himself after celebrating a last birthday with Boom in Malaga (see this page). Indeed, Hamlet and Flew had been planning to live together once Hamlet returned to the States—that is, until Boom entered the picture: “[Flew will] be dreadfully disappointed,” Hamlet wrote Boom, “but I can’t help it. I refuse to run away from happiness. And even if Ann Arbor is as full of the brotherhood as Flew’s boyfriend says, there will be none to replace
you. Ah, Boom, my dearest lover!” Hamlet’s fate is recorded in an entry Charlie made in his JAXON notebook, circa 1932, that also noted a ribald quip from Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet: “ ‘I tell you, for the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.’ The above was first quoted to me by R---- Hamlet, in Davos, now dead.”
2 Grace, a great reader, was perhaps Charlie’s favorite among Boom’s neighbors. He and Grace would play cards into the wee hours, chatting and smoking. Grace liked to wear silver bracelets, and Charlie gave her one with an inscription from Hamlet: “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
3 Barbara Peech’s “favorite night ever” was in 1954, when Boom told her to pack a bag and come to New York, where he had orchestra seats for Ondine, starring Hepburn and Ferrer, with whom they chatted backstage. Afterward Mel took them to a nightclub where Erroll Garner was playing the piano, and Marlon Brando of all people sat down at their table and began chatting, just like that!
4 An incomplete draft of which was found among Boom’s papers at Dartmouth.
5 Charlie’s own grief should not be discounted. “Foolish woman or not, she was his mother,” he’d written in an autobiographical story, “Parting at Morning” (1953), in which a long-suffering son anticipates his mother’s death. “And once the tie had been severed, you were probably alone in the world in a way you had never been before.” The day of Sal’s death—January 27—Charlie phoned his family and said he’d be coming right home to Connecticut and proceeding to Newark the next day for the funeral. When he arrived that night and found his daughter Kate had gone bowling with a friend from Sarah Lawrence, he was furious over what he perceived to be her callousness.
Chapter Twelve
The Outer Edges
On May 13, 1946—after The Fall of Valor had been written, edited, and tinkered with for the last time—a weary Jackson wrote the following resolution: “It’s about time I stopped dishing Krafft-Ebbing [sic] material in novels.” At the same time, however, he was afflicted with an idea that was an even more sensational foray into aberrant psychology than either of his first two books: a story based on ghastly real-life murders. As he wrote Brackett and Wilder (whose interest he hoped to pique), “When a social crime is committed, all of society is guilty, not just the murderer; and the victim of the murder is not the person killed but the one who does the killing.” The book would be a “very fast tour de force like Lost Weekend,” and contain some such word as “contagion” or “infection” in the title.
Jackson’s inspiration was the Edward Haight case, the details of which had haunted him ever since he’d read newspaper accounts in September 1942. Haight was only sixteen when he stole a station wagon in Stamford, Connecticut, and coaxed two little girls to go for a ride: Margaret Lynch and her sister, Helen, aged seven and nine. Helen was tied up in the trunk while Haight tried raping her little sister, whom he finally strangled when she continued to struggle; then (after stopping for lunch in Bedford, New York) he drove to a secluded area, raped Helen, and ran over her with the car several times before tossing her mangled body into a creek. That Haight’s childhood had been grim—he lived in a kind of squatter’s shack, the son of a convicted thief—hardly explained his almost flamboyant lack of remorse: during the trial he either smiled or looked bored, twiddling his thumbs and laughing out loud when photographs of his victims were produced; no surprise, then, when he became the youngest person ever to die in Sing Sing’s electric chair. Though such cases were exceptional in their brutality, rampant media coverage had stoked public hysteria, until most states adopted draconian laws meant to preempt the crimes of sexual psychopaths, resulting in lengthy prison terms even for minor offenses, often including homosexuality—which might explain, to some extent, Jackson’s notion of “contagion” or universal guilt. Also, of course, he was the father of two girls, and so felt Haight’s crime all the more keenly.
Fearing he’d managed yet again to hit on a subject that precluded a big movie deal, Jackson reluctantly agreed to write an assuasive seventy-page outline for his agents to shop around to the studios. Bernice Baumgarten, for one, was unimpressed and even a bit puzzled by this document: Jackson’s protagonist was a middle-class family man, Jim Harris, who feels morbidly connected to a murderous Haight-like pedophile because he, Harris, is having an extramarital affair. “As the outline stands,” Baumgarten wrote, “I am simply not convinced that Jim Harris could sufficiently identify himself with the crime to feel even a remote sense of guilt.” For the story to work at all, she thought, Jackson would have to involve Harris more directly with the murder—but really such a book was bound to be “minor,” at best, and Baumgarten advised him to put it aside until he’d written something more substantial.
But Jackson needed money now, and with Irving Lazar’s less discriminating assistance, he managed to sell the outline to MGM for what he always implied was $200,000 outright (“which ain’t hay, even by Texas standards”) but was actually a partial option of $50,000, with the balance due only if the studio liked the final product. Either way it was a sweet payday for what Jackson figured—mistakenly—would amount to a single summer’s worth of work. “The novel is a horrible headache,” he wrote on August 26, 1947, complaining that his deal with MGM seemed to inhibit him. “Somebody said that when you write for profit, it ends up being not only bad art but bad business. Still, my story is so good it seems I can hardly fail.”
Granted, there were many distractions. Shortly after he’d returned from Hollywood the previous May, he’d driven to New York to spend a few days shmoozing with Lazar (who was slated to serve as “associate producer” of the MGM adaptation), but Jackson’s ego was plainly in a delicate state: “It wasn’t the same old Lazar,” he wrote the Gershwins. “Maybe he’s got too many irons in the fire these days to have time for me …” He also went to the theater with Mrs. Leonard Lyons, lunched with Ruby Schinasi at “21,” and attended cocktail parties with the likes of Bennett Cerf and Dorothy Gish. Meanwhile—though he was always careful to drink Coca-Cola in public (while fortified with Seconal)—rumors began to spread that he’d fallen off the wagon, despite his almost operatic denials: “Nothing could make me take another drink,” he insisted. “My house could burn down, my capacities could fail, my wife and children could be killed, and I still would not drink.” In his own mind, perhaps, he qualified “drink” as meaning hard liquor, and of course he said nothing about his pill habit, nor did he tell loved ones of his dread that he was obscurely on the brink of disaster. While dictating to a secretary each day from ten to four, he found himself thinking more and more—pacing, checking his watch—about the beer he could start drinking at five, a blessed relief from work that wasn’t going at all well.
Most of his anxiety was vented against Rhoda, whose every utterance seemed to irritate him. Either she didn’t take his work seriously enough, cheerfully asking what he’d written that day (“in accents that were reminiscent of his 4th Grade teacher asking about his pet hobby,” as he put it in Farther and Wilder), or, worse, she’d take it very seriously indeed, gravely inquiring about his progress when there were bills to be paid. Her own literary tastes ran closer to Erle Stanley Gardner, but she could be censorious when she thought Charlie was pursuing an idea that wasn’t in his (their) better interest. She’d reacted coolly to his murder story, at a time when he was still bristling over her attitude toward The Fall of Valor (“a book I know you always deplored and were often snidely ‘amused at,’ ” he wrote her in 1968, three months before his death). And ever since his return from New York, she couldn’t help noticing that he was on the verge of collapse—so “jittery” he didn’t bother to deny he was taking pills again, though he insisted he was well enough for another long stay in Hollywood beginning July 9th. Rhoda begged him to reconsider, worried “he’d really go to pieces and perhaps even die” if left to his own devices, but her “nagging” seemed only to make him more determined. “He’s a terrible addict,” she wrote despairingly to Boom.
I don’t know how or when something will help him. He has to find something. I realized yesterday really, for the first time, how he managed to stop drinking. He held on to the fact that he was a great writer and he’d show everybody. When he got fame, that thing that sustained him all the time was gone—and he has nothing yet to replace it. Of course I always hoped it would be love—a happy family life, a feeling of full living in a generous sense. Not in present-giving, but in giving of himself without doing it for show and self-gratification. He must lose his utter egoism some way before he can ever find a peace that will relieve him from addiction.
At any rate he ended up going to the hospital rather than to Hollywood, though it was an uphill battle for Rhoda. At the very time he was serenely telling Baumgarten that July was “the great month of the year” in Orford—he was working well mornings and evenings, and knocking off afternoons “just to lie about on the lawn and see the lovely place we live in”—Rhoda was demanding he get help, and finally confiscated his Seconal only to discover he had a stash of some other mysterious pill he’d managed to obtain in New York. One night he washed these down with a lot of beer, accusing her of being “the cause of all his troubles” and announcing that he was leaving her for good, and yes (tearfully) the children, too. A couple days later, though, he was back in Mary Hitchcock. (“On May 28, 1947, you filled a prescription for Mr. Charles Jackson,” Dr. Gundersen wrote a drug store in the Barclay Hotel. This “called for some capsules which I assume contained some sort of sedative …”) By early August he was “in good shape” again, or so Rhoda reported: a bit restless, but sober and able to laugh, if not write.