Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  Chapter Seventeen

  A New Addiction

  Jackson would always hate the idea of working in television (“It’s a terrible medium”), though he was certainly grateful for the money. Once his first jobs began trickling in that summer (1954), he was finally able to repay long-standing personal loans to the Gershwins, Brackett, and his old playwright friend Howard Lindsay, and he even capitulated to his daughters’ demand for a family TV, their first, a top-shelf model with a twenty-two-inch screen: “Monstrous in a nice house,” he said. “And what do you get when you look?”

  In the beginning he’d go to the city once a week and “make the rounds of the agencies,” until his first teleplay was produced that October for General Electric Theater, “The High Green Wall,” an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “The Man Who Liked Dickens.” One can hardly imagine a more congenial assignment: Charlie adored Waugh so extravagantly that he’d reread A Handful of Dust (into which the “Dickens” story had been incorporated) four times in the summer of 1945 alone, when he was struggling with The Fall of Valor and hoping to pick up something of Waugh’s genius for dialogue and narrative pace. “The High Green Wall” starred Joseph Cotten as the hapless Paul Henty—held captive in the Amazon by an illiterate lunatic who makes him read Dickens aloud—and the director of the twenty-six-minute teleplay was Nicholas Ray, no less, then at the height of his career, having just made Johnny Guitar (1954) and soon to make Rebel Without a Cause (1955). With such a promising pool of talent (and Ronald Reagan hosting!) one would expect a stellar result. George McCartney, a Waugh scholar, remembered enjoying “The High Green Wall” as a twelve-year-old in 1954, but when he revisited the show almost fifty years later (at a Museum of Modern Art retrospective), he found it “astonishingly dull”: the “usually reliable” Cotten, he wrote, alternated “almost indistinguishably between two expressions: wounded nobility and weary bewilderment. To be fair, the role as written doesn’t afford many opportunities to do much else.”

  Jackson also submitted a script for Fork in the Road, a new television series to be produced, at Marty Mann’s behest, by the National Council on Alcoholism. Through the literary agent Audrey Wood, sample episodes were solicited from Jackson, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal. The last two apparently passed, but Inge submitted “Max” and Jackson adapted his short story about Grace Dana, “The Problem Child,” which he thought Marty Mann would “respond to” and “perhaps even like”: both she and Dana, after all, were from genteel backgrounds, and Mann had taken great pains to dispel the myth that alcoholism was primarily a male problem. As Jackson noted, his script was essentially a “one-woman show” and therefore required a highly skilled actress who could “indicate guile and duplicity throughout, and at the same time engage and hold our deepest sympathy and concern.” Given that the teleplay’s Grace Dana is, if anything, even more obnoxious than her counterpart in the story (“THROUGHOUT, THERE IS A HALF-SMILE ON HER PRETTY FACE, A SMILE OF SUPERIORITY WHICH SEEMS TO SAY: THESE PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT UNDERSTAND”), it would have taken an actress of Garbo-like subtlety to fill the bill, but in any case Fork in the Road was unable to find a sponsor.

  Around this time, happily, Jackson was hired by the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, producer of the live anthology drama, Kraft Television Theatre. As a script editor earning the princely wage of five hundred dollars a week, Jackson would no longer have to tax his dormant muse by writing for such an inimical genre (“I just can’t deliver in that field”). Rather he’d be vetting scripts, written by others, that appealed to suburban viewers, mostly housewives, who not only watched Kraft for its family-oriented entertainment (“realism with a modest moral,” as one JWT executive put it), but also for its practical advice about “gracious living,” such as viewers found in the regular two-minute segments featuring a pair of disembodied hands preparing a simple but delicious meal using Kraft products. During its eleven-year run from 1947 to 1958, Kraft would broadcast 650 plays chosen from an estimated 18,845 scripts, and much of that winnowing was accomplished by Jackson and his boss, Ed Rice, a veteran radio writer who’d been with Kraft from the beginning and had had to learn on the job (and later impress on his assistants) the profound difference between an aural medium and a mostly visual one. Rice and Jackson were interviewed by an AP reporter in the summer of 1955, and for his part Charlie presented himself as a levelheaded professional who took his work very seriously indeed, emphasizing that a good TV program was absolutely dependent on a solid script: “One very obvious problem is that many good writers suffer from snobbishness about TV,” he observed. “Perhaps that’s because a show is over so quickly and they don’t have the sense of tangible achievement that comes from a book. They forget that several million people will see their dramas—many more than will read their books.”

  It was hard to argue with that kind of mass-cult popularity, and the reporter was gratified to find “a first-rate American writer” such as Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, willing to labor “in the television vineyards.” Charlie was also treated with some deference by his colleagues—because of his prestige as a writer, certainly, but also (perhaps) because his tenure coincided with a considerable uptick in the quality of JWT’s programming. “The notion that an advertising agency must be a corporate dolt in TV theatrical matters is not standing up too well in one quarter,” wrote the New York Times television critic, Jack Gould, on March 7, 1955. “The J. Walter Thompson Co., one of the largest agencies, is quietly walking off with some major honors for distinguished TV drama.” So far that year, JWT had already produced a creditable abridgment of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, while airing two live performances (first on January 12, followed by an unprecedented encore on February 9) of Rod Serling’s “Patterns,” a critique of corporate viciousness that’s considered one of the greatest dramas of TV’s Golden Age. Ironically, the story of an aging executive (Ed Begley) who is literally humiliated to death by his boss (Everett Sloane) gained much of its power from verisimilitude, as Serling reputedly based the cutthroat office politics of “Ramsey & Company” on J. Walter Thompson.

  Be that as it may, Kraft continued for a while in this same ambitious vein, hoping to inspire its writers to greater heights by announcing a fifty-thousand-dollar award for best teleplay of the 1955–56 season, which included adaptations of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage and Walter Lord’s Titanic drama, A Night to Remember, as well as “one of the greatest of contemporary novels,” The Lost Weekend. The last had been successfully adapted the previous year for Robert Montgomery Presents, but Jackson quietly declined to involve himself with Kraft’s version—he didn’t want to seem proprietary about his own work (so he explained to the Newark Courier), and he might have also doubted that Montgomery’s performance as Don Birnam could be matched by the workmanlike Joe Maross (Kraft’s last-minute replacement for Jack Lemmon, who’d recently won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts). And then, just in general, Jackson kept a diffident distance from most of the “talent”—actors such as James Dean, Cloris Leachman, Paul Newman, Anthony Perkins, and many others who appeared in Kraft productions during the early stages of their careers—unless it was a question, say, of giving his daughters a thrill. On June 27, 1956, Kate and a friend came to NBC’s Studio 8H and met Farley Granger and Joanne Woodward, appearing in an episode titled “Starfish” that Kate was allowed to watch from the control room. And Sarah accompanied her father to two of the annual banquets at the Waldorf, where well-known actors and directors were seated at individual tables representing their respective episodes that season.

  The day before Kate’s visit in 1956, Charlie wrote Sarah from New York as follows: “I’m so involved with a job that gets in the way of things I want to feel and think (my novel, to mention just one) that letters of mine, lately, seem to be just padding.” Certainly he didn’t write many letters anymore, or much else. His correspondence files at Brandt & Brandt, hitherto thick to bursting with his s
chmoozing, exuberant prose, fell suddenly silent, as it were, and would remain that way for the rest of his life (while his agents grumbled in memos about his unresponsiveness—how it took “a year and a day” to get in touch with him). His appointment diary for 1956 is pristinely free of a single entry, a single stroke of the pencil. “He was a forgotten, sad man when I knew him,” said a friend from this time. “Nobody was talking about him anymore.” That is to say, nobody was talking about him except as the (washed-up) author of The Lost Weekend, as if he hadn’t published a word before or since. In 1958, when one of his daughters’ friends (later Kate’s husband) mentioned reading some of Jackson’s stories for an English class at Goddard College, Charlie wrote Sarah with a mixture of bitterness and pathetic pride: “John said ‘Gosh, I didn’t know he was that good!’ And I say, a prophet is not only without honor in his own country but even in his own family.”

  The longer his silence as a writer persisted, the more he felt compelled to account for it by talking about the magnum opus he’d been working on these many, many years, What Happened—and the more he built it up, the more it hopelessly receded beyond his capabilities. It wasn’t just a question of length, or exquisitely fine style, but also its sensational subject matter. At parties—especially gay parties—the euphoric, pill-popping Charlie would go on and on about how his novel would tell the truth, by God, and shock the world! “He was going to spill the beans about his life,” the playwright Arthur Laurents recalled of one such spiel. “The implication was that he didn’t ‘tell all’ in The Lost Weekend. He was very excited about [What Happened], and he was extremely persuasive: I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to read that!’ ” And no wonder, given that Laurents himself was gay and Charlie left little doubt as to what the world would find so shocking. “But to be told ‘honestly,’ if there was such a thing, what would it not mean or cost?” Don muses in the “Preview” section of Farther and Wilder. “It would mean going down to the very bottom, exploring the past to discover the present.…” “Save till later,” he scribbled in the margin, warning himself not to reveal too much at the outset about his adventures as “a kind of amorous animal-spirit, bodiless yet potent of body, charged with love yet ambiguous of sex, roaming the countryside like a Whitmanesque ghost …”

  However: it was perhaps the worst time in American history, or at least the twentieth century, to be writing of such things. Gay soldiers had learned the strength of their numbers during the war, and when the Kinsey Reports advertised the matter to mainstream America, the backlash was fierce. Throughout the 1950s, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield led a vigilant “antismut” campaign, prosecuting even the most benign forms of gay “pornography,” while the State Department purged more than twice as many homosexuals as suspected communists from its ranks. The pressure to seem “regular” in corporate America was, needless to say, intense—and to this pressure, and any number of ineffable others, Jackson buckled.

  At any rate he couldn’t write, with or without pills, and was often crushingly miserable. Pat Hammond, walking to her train in Grand Central one night in 1955, spotted her old employer sitting alone in a club car. When she tapped on the glass, Jackson looked up but didn’t seem to recognize her; he clawed the air with a weary “Go away” gesture, his face stricken. She never saw him again. One of the very few letters he wrote that year consisted mostly of a few lines copied from Gerard Manley Hopkins—one of the poet’s last, “terrible” sonnets, about which Aldous Huxley had observed (as Charlie noted), “Never, I think, has the just man’s complaint against the universe been put more forcibly”:

  THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

  With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

  Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

  Disappointment all I endeavor end?

  Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

  How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

  Defeat, thwart me? …

  Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

  THE HOPKINS PLAINT was for the benefit of Phyllis McGinley, one of the few old literary friends with whom he kept in touch—more than ever now that he was taking instruction in Catholicism, a move he’d been toying with throughout that wretched decade (“because I lack so much in my life”). His letters to Dorothea, meanwhile, had all but ceased; his heady artistic enthusiasms had curdled along with his writing, and he surely knew that Dorothea was bored stiff by his AA talk and bound to have even less truck with religious sentiment. McGinley, on the other hand, was an avid Catholic and moral traditionalist, declaring in Good Housekeeping, “Let Us Dare to Say It Out Loud—Unchastity Is a Sin.” Her paeans to the quotidian pleasures of Larchmont, where she remained happily married to a phone company executive, would actually win her a Pulitzer Prize in 1961.1 Charlie affected to admire the wit of her better work, while stopping well short of taking her altogether seriously; in an otherwise friendly review of a McGinley collection for the Sunday Times in 1954, he permitted himself the wish that she “would charm me less and disturb me more … let yourself go, honey!” And toward her Victorian social values he also endeavored to be indulgent: a few years later, after seeing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he remarked to McGinley that he couldn’t help thinking that such harrowing domestic scenes were being enacted all over America, to which she replied, “But not in Larchmont!”—their favorite catchphrase from then on.

  That autumn of 1955 he gave her an account of his ever increasing spiritual fervor. Through his AA sponsor, Dr. McGuire—with whom he’d contritely reconciled for the time being—he’d been introduced to an idealistic young priest named Tom Reese, soon to become director of the Catholic Charities of Wilmington, which specialized in getting help for people with addictions to drugs and alcohol. Charlie was smitten with the whole scene. Much of his talk became at least obliquely religious (“Be sure to tell Mama to have fish on Friday!”), and his reading ditto. For McGinley he ticked off a list of recent titles, including The Faith of Millions, by Father John O’Brien; The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton; various works by Cardinal Newman (“rough-going”); and Jesus and His Times, by Daniel-Rops (“most thrilling of all”). And while he was not quite jaded enough to consider these on par with, say, The Brothers Karamazov, he found himself so “staggered” by the Gospel According to St. John that the likes of Othello and Lear seemed suddenly, after all, “only art.”

  The main point was to forget his misspent life, his terrible urges, his egoistic absorption in art for art’s sake, whether it be his or others’—to get outside of himself, in short, a dilemma that love, psychiatry, and literature had all failed abysmally to solve. On this subject Charlie liked to quote Chesterton: “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.… You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” How Charlie longed for such blessed oblivion! To stroll about wondering what these others, these splendidly various others, were thinking and feeling! Meanwhile, sitting in a pew of a late afternoon at St. Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side, he felt a kind of gratitude he never thought possible.

  And so, on August 26, 1956, Charlie was baptized by Father Reese at the Church of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Wilmington, a small ceremony witnessed by his daughter Kate and Dr. McGuire. More than five decades later, neither Kate nor Sarah was quite sure how long their father had continued attending Mass at St. Rose in Newtown and eating fish on Friday and sitting in placid reverie at St. Vincent Ferrer, though Charlie himself had put it at “three or four years,” tops: “It was during a troubled period when I was living on drugs,” he remembered in 1964, “and the whole ‘conversion’ was euphoria—one part drama and three-parts fake, as I was forced to conclude when I more or less ‘came to.’ ”

  NOW THAT he was working full-time in the city, Jackson only went home to Newtown on weekend
s, taking a one-room apartment on the top floor of the Dakota, at 72nd Street and Central Park West. As always, he made the most of his little space, transplanting an elegant old ironing board (for a coffee table) that he’d inherited from a great-aunt, his polar-bear rug, a nice sleeper sofa, and a number of choice pictures. At last only a small patch of bare wall remained by the door, which he was saving for what he hoped would be a framed quatrain—“A Prayer for the New Pied-à-terre”—written by his friend McGinley. She more than obliged him:

  Lord, who blesses barn and barrow,

  Nest for wren and roof for sparrow,

  Castle, cottage, lighthouse, steeple,

  Attic for Artistic People,

  Walk-ups at important rents,

  Igloos, teepees, tenements,

  Villas where mimosa drowses,

  Maybe even ranch-type houses,—

  Bless, I beg, this building where

  Jackson has his pied-à-terre.

  —PHYLLIS MCGINLEY /

  Larchmont (but of course), N.Y.

  Charlie’s social life in the city was a rather bifurcated affair. When he wasn’t attending AA meetings, and chatting and playing cards with his more sedate AA acquaintances, he cultivated a diverse group of gay men (many, to be sure, in AA themselves). The dinner party where Arthur Laurents had heard all about What Happened, for instance, was an all-male gathering at the home of a TV director, Bill Corrigan, attended by older, somewhat well-heeled men and their younger charges; Charlie himself was excitedly flirting with Ken Boyer, the twenty-something boyfriend of pianist Arthur Whittemore. A more raffish milieu was a weekly “salon” held at a cold-water flat on First Avenue belonging to a man known as Sunshine. “Please do not throw cigarettes in the toilet,” read the ornately lettered sign in Sunshine’s bathroom. “They become soggy and hard to light.” Jackson despised such silliness (at least among the less illustrious), and would have given the group a wide berth were it not for the fact that Sunshine’s “was perhaps the only place, except an AA meeting”—according to Richard Lamparski, a young friend at the time—“where he could be certain that people would know who he was.” It was a high price to pay for the odd ego boost. Usually the last to arrive (“explain[ing] that he had been the guest speaker at some AA chapter where the members simply wouldn’t let him go”), Jackson would grow dour as the campiness waxed over the course of an evening. Their host was the most notorious perpetrator. One night, deadpan, he announced that Bill Inge’s play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs had originally been about a black man living above a white family’s flat; its then title, he said, was The Darkie at the Top of the Stairs. While the others held their laughter (“expecting the second shoe”), Jackson demanded to know where Sunshine had heard “such damn nonsense.” The man suavely replied that his source had been none other than “an executive of the National Association for Making Advances Toward Colored People”: “While the rest of us exploded,” said Lamparski, Jackson “sputtered and left soon after.”