Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  One consolation was the charming protégés he encountered as a script editor for Kraft. From the Yale School of Drama came Ron Sproat and A. R. “Pete” Gurney, recipients of the J. Walter Thompson Fellowship in the summer of 1956.2 As fellows, the two young men were allowed to observe Kraft productions from first rehearsal to final performance, and also to work as readers, choosing scripts and novels to send along to Charlie or one of the other editors. During the midmorning break they’d all chat around the coffee wagon, and soon Charlie began asking the young men to lunch; when Sproat mentioned he was looking for another apartment, Charlie promptly offered him a maid’s room at the Dakota. (Sproat had to use a common bathroom in the hall, and was startled one night when he tried the door and was met by none other than Boris Karloff—then appearing in The Lark on Broadway—who, marking his astonishment, graciously explained that he sometimes used that toilet when he had guests.) Sproat was happy to be living at such a grand address, though soon he began to worry he’d have to move out. Nightly, almost, Charlie would invite him over for drinks (though he didn’t drink himself) and importune him for sex; to be exact, he wanted to perform fellatio on the young man, who repeatedly protested that while he was very fond of Charlie (true), he was straight. Then one night they bumped into each other at a gay bar near the Dakota.

  As it happened, Jackson wasn’t the only one who’d been deceived on the subject of Sproat’s homosexuality. “Pete Gurney was my closest friend,” said Sproat, “and I was pretending to be straight because gay men weren’t friends with straight men in those days.” Jackson had “amazed” Gurney with frank talk about his own proclivities, and one day he blithely let drop that their mutual friend Ron was gay, too. Gurney was stunned (“I hate to think I was that intolerant then, but, as Ron said, those were different times”), and said as much to Sproat, who was almost traumatized with shame. Though Charlie might have assumed Gurney already knew, Sproat thought it far more likely his mentor had outed him by way of getting his own back for those rejections at the Dakota.3

  Edward Pomerantz, another Yale student, had written a one-act play titled The Garden that Jackson professed to love (though he was unable to interest his colleagues), asking to meet the author. Pomerantz was “gaga” at the prospect: he’d seen The Lost Weekend as a movie-besotted eleven-year-old, and here was the novel’s author! And he loved Eddie’s play! One night the young man brought Jackson home to meet his parents for dinner in Washington Heights, and after a delightful time the two walked back to the Eighth Avenue subway, where Jackson said good night to the puzzled lad by patting him on the rump. “You know, Katharine Hepburn has sat in that chair,” Charlie remarked during a subsequent evening at the Dakota. “Why don’t you take your socks and shoes off? The rug is so soft … ” At that point the penny dropped (“the pat on the ass!”), and Pomerantz politely declined to remove his shoes.

  Jackson mentioned that Bill Inge lived downstairs and asked the young man if he’d like to meet him. As Pomerantz recalled, “I’m like, ‘Oh my God: Picnic! Bus Stop! Wow, yeah, I’d love to …’ ” Because Inge was terrified of heights (one of his many phobias), he lived on the second floor over the Dakota’s arched entrance, and when Charlie arrived with his guest, they found the playwright entertaining a “young toy boy,” as Pomerantz put it (realizing, of course, that he was perceived the same way vis-à-vis Charlie). In the bathroom he found an eyelash curler on the sink. Meanwhile a blandish decorum prevailed: Jackson and Inge were nothing but chaste in their talk, mildly swapping AA and theater gossip. Though ten years younger and far more acclaimed at the time—Picnic had won the Pulitzer in 1953, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs was about to begin a successful run on Broadway—Inge had a lot in common with Jackson: both were alcoholic pill-takers who wrote about the hypocrisy and thwarted longing of small-town life (Inge had grown up in Independence, Kansas), and both were gay and deeply unhappy about it. Indeed, Inge might have envied Jackson’s relative good fortune in finding a woman as fine and understanding as Rhoda, given that Inge had lived alone for most of his adult life, pining the while (by all accounts) for a more conventional life. One day, when they were neighbors on Long Island, Arthur Laurents walked in on Inge wearing a corset; the latter, abashed, announced he was going to marry the actress Barbara Baxley—a wistful notion he considered for years, but never acted on.

  For the most part Inge was a man without intimates, though Charlie was a friend insofar as he had any. Both were analyzed by Lawrence Kubie with roughly the same result, and when Inge was a mental patient at Austen Riggs in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, he made a nine-inch bronze statuette (a male nude with upraised arms) for Charlie in his expression therapy class. But the main connection, particularly during the Dakota years, was AA. The composer Ned Rorem noted in his diary that Jackson and Inge were the “star pupils” of their meetings, after which they’d adjourn en masse to Schrafft’s or the Croydon for ice cream. (At least once, said Rorem, Charlie brought his “clear-faced and likable” daughter Kate along.) The two older men, whatever their similarities otherwise, struck Rorem as a study in contrast: Charlie tended to be chattily animated in a group (no matter what his actual mood), whereas Inge was “somber and pessimistic, becoming more so with each new success.”

  Failure, however, did not lift his spirits. After winning an Oscar for Splendor in the Grass (1961), Inge went into a slow, grinding decline. “I’m feeling very good now, but the summer has been hellish,” he wrote Charlie on August 26, 1963, explaining that he’d become suicidal during a recent trip to Kansas. Rather than kill himself, though, he’d invoked his faith in a “higher power” and attended some AA meetings: “[I was] determined to give up the sleeping pills (I’d been taking them every two or three nights, normal doses but enough to create an undermining kind of dependence and a compulsion to take one big dose that would be my last), and I began to catch hold.… And I feel that probably I’ll be able to work well again. I haven’t worked well now for a couple years.” But his best work was all behind him, as he’d learn thoroughly in that final decade. The following year, he and Dick Berg—one of Charlie’s old Kraft colleagues—wanted to option The Fall of Valor with their own money, hoping to get a studio deal once they’d attracted a big enough star. “What a break that would be,” Charlie wrote his agent; “then no more time wasted on short-stories, full steam ahead to finish the novel …” The novel in question was A Second-Hand Life, but unfortunately no stars stepped forward to claim the part of Grandin, even with William Inge on board. “Whatever happens,” Charlie wrote his demoralized friend, “you are the only one I would want to do the screen play, not only because of our old long friendship and your sympathy and understanding of the problem of the novel, but also because of your enviable skill and talent as a playright [sic]: I wish I had it.”

  Inge wished he still had it, too. After his play Where’s Daddy? flopped in 1966, he declared himself fed up with “the frustrations, the anxieties, the pressures” of the “public arts,” and moved to Los Angeles to live with his sister Helene. When a former assistant and friend, John Connolly, went out to visit him—phoning ahead to confirm date and hour—nobody answered the doorbell for a long time; finally Inge drifted out wearing a bathrobe, in an all but unreachable stupor (“Charlie was like that too,” said Connolly, who’d known both men in New York; “he’d just quietly look at you”). On June 2, 1973, Inge was taken to UCLA Medical Center after a barbiturate overdose, but signed himself out the next day; a week later his sister found him dead in the garage, slumped over the steering wheel of his Mercedes. She told the Times that her brother had been depressed, though she didn’t know why, and “did not believe he really knew either.”

  BY 1956 the popularity of anthology dramas such as Kraft had begun to wane in favor of sitcoms and other serials. JWT commissioned an outside study that recommended the agency “restimulate interest” by becoming more topical (“Newspapers and magazines will be watched to see what is being read and talked about”), which
resulted in such episodes as “The Singing Idol,” capitalizing on the Elvis Presley craze and even producing a hit single, “Teenage Crush.” The overall trend, however, was downward in every way: wary of alienating more of their mainstream viewers, JWT saw to it that topical never meant controversial, killing a script by Allan Manings about the first black family to vote. Director Paul Bogart (later of All in the Family fame) remembered that an agency rep was on hand at all times to make sure a given show “didn’t misstep,” and the end product was perforce in keeping with a satirical “recipe for an average TV program” written by a disgruntled executive at the time, calling for a bland mixture of “Sponsor’s Requirements” and “Staff Suggestions” (“However fresh and flavorful, they will curdle when combined with Agency Ideas, so they must be beaten until stiff”).

  And so Charlie’s job, hardly a joy to begin with, became all the more hateful. An internal memo dated April 3, 1957, noted that a JWT employee named Chuck Spaulding had made a “most advantageous connection with a Canadian Oil Company” and hence was leaving Kraft; his duties would be assumed by Jackson, who (it was hoped) would “take advantage of his many contacts with publishers and writers.” The precise nature of this fresh hell is hard to say, though it would seem Charlie didn’t entirely satisfy in either his old or new capacity. Six weeks later an irascible producer at NBC wrote the agency a letter to the effect that the present Kraft editors and other personnel were “adequate (just) but not inspired,” and that “a new slate may be required” to get the show back on its feet.

  Perhaps it was not unrelated that Charlie suffered a bad overdose the following month, though something of the sort had been in the cards for a while. “I had arrived at the stage where I took twenty [Seconal] a day and could not get along unless,” he later admitted in his AA talks. His daughters noticed that he often seemed “quite pale” and “shaky,” and once, when Kate had arranged to meet him for a pre-matinee lunch at Sardi’s, a stranger came instead and explained that her father was unwell and wouldn’t be able to make it. In fact, he’d been hospitalized four times in a single year for overdoses, and his latest had landed him back in Bellevue. This time he “went off [his] head completely” and was taken in a straitjacket to the violent ward, where he raved for some three days until sensible enough to recognize a priest friend who paid him a visit. Just before his release two weeks later, a young psychologist summoned him to his office for a confidential chat. As Jackson would remember for AA:

  He said, “Look, you’re an addict by nature and you always will be.… Just look at the record: twenty-two hospitalizations by now, and that’s the way it will be.… I have only one word of advice for you, and that is: Ally yourself with a good, middle-aged, kindly psychiatrist. Not deep Freudian therapy, because you’ve had that. Just a sympathetic, kindly man to whom you can go two or three times a week as a confidant, and settle for the fact that you will be doing this probably for the rest of your life. And this may keep you out of trouble, but that’s all I can suggest.”

  And yet Charlie managed again to steady himself. After a summer that can only be imagined, he entered an inpatient rehabilitation program at Columbia Presbyterian. Rhoda asked Kate and a friend to wait in the car while she visited him on August 6, and the girls were thrilled to spot Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Mike Todd leaving the hospital after the birth of their daughter, Liza. A week or so later, the incarcerated Charlie wrote Sarah that he was feeling “vastly improved” but “bored all to hell,” and asked her to mention to Mama that there were twenty-two patients in the clinic and thus she should “bake [cookies] accordingly.”

  In truth Jackson was profoundly depressed, and with plenty of reason quite apart from the morbidities of withdrawal. For one thing he was hanging by a thread at J. Walter Thompson: they hadn’t fired him outright, but clearly they weren’t paying for his latest leave of absence either, given that his family was forced to move that autumn (1957) to a fifty-dollar-a-month rental on Main Street in Newtown (“floors sag, practically no closet space, in very bad shape”). Meanwhile, too, he and Rhoda were in the midst of a trial separation. “He feels completely homeless and alone just now,” she wrote Boom in late September, “and it does make you feel sorry for him for he is. I know that he’ll recover from it and bounce back (I almost fear that though—for if he bounces he’ll get into trouble again) … ” This last, nicely considered qualm conveys volumes of what the woman had been through over the years. As for Charlie, he was not only homeless in terms of his marital situation, but in actual fact, since he’d lost his little apartment at the Dakota amid the recent tumult. Wanly he wrote Kate that he hoped they could spare “some little nook or corner” on Main Street until he found a new place, and privately he wondered what his poor, retiring wife would do without him. Rhoda was less worried on that score: “My life may be dull by his standards,” she wrote, “but it isn’t empty. I don’t have to be sustained by constant exposure to other people the way he does. He’s a very lonely person.”

  “Kraft carried [my father] through the summer until January 1958,” Sarah wrote in a college essay from around that time, and the word “carried” was used advisedly. He no longer had an office when he returned to the agency that fall, and the sense of doom was general. As a last desperate measure, the show was changing its name to the more “provocative” Kraft Mystery Theater (“Such titles as ‘Climax’ ‘Suspense’ ‘Danger’ connote to the viewer a type of story,” NBC had recommended), and Talent Associates was replacing JWT as producer on March 26, 1958. A “production estimate” from the previous November indicated that most of the current staff would actually survive the regime change, but Charlie’s departure was noted for December. Kraft Mystery Theater expired less than a year later, in September 1958.

  Charlie was jobless, then, for much of that long year, and yet things might have been worse. He was back in his routine of spending weekdays in the city canvassing agencies—he’d managed to get his old room back at the Dakota (though he complained that he’d been unable to make it as “charming” as before)—and weekends he was again welcome at the little house on Main Street, as Rhoda had been somewhat persuaded that he was ready to make a lasting “readjustment, with the help of AA, after so many years of a different kind of life.” Happily, too, Rhoda was able to find steady if low-paying employment in the research department of the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies, a position she would keep for the rest of her working life (“It’s just a coincidence that we are both in this,” Charlie quipped; along with Rhoda’s eleven years at Fortune, though, it couldn’t have hurt to be married to the author of The Lost Weekend).4

  Now that he wasn’t writing fiction anymore, or even bothering (much) to pretend, Charlie’s days at home had a way of passing slowly. “House lonely and cold today, really chilly,” he wrote Sarah, who’d gone away to college that year. “Only smelly Juno”—their beloved boxer—“to keep me company (Mama in New Haven, Kate at school).” TV assignments were occasional at best: in October he wrote a sentimental adaptation of Fitzgerald’s “Absolution” for a series titled The Priesthood (“devoted to an understanding of the human struggle of the Roman Catholic priest”), as well as a scenario for a single episode of Naked City, “The Other Face of Goodness,” based on a subplot in The Outer Edges about a Raskolnikov-like college student who contemplates (and, in Naked City, actually commits) murder.

  The year 1958 seemed to end on a high note when Jackson was hired as a script editor for Roy Winsor Productions. Winsor is best remembered as the creator (in 1951) of Search for Tomorrow, the first long-running TV soap, and he later served as producer of Love of Life and The Secret Storm before setting up his own company in 1955. Jackson found the man affable enough, and naturally was happy to “have a little money in [his] pocket, for a change,” but otherwise it was dreary work. “Just came from watching the actors rehearse in the studio,” he wrote Sarah, a few weeks into the job. “Not much fun after our big Kraft shows, and I don’t expect to go to the studi
o again—that is, not until Kate comes down to visit me next month. I’ll take her once, just for something to do.”

  By the following November he’d already parted with Winsor, and was scrambling for odd jobs again. Rhoda reported that he seemed “very edgy” about things: NBC had assigned him to write a pilot for a new series about alcoholism that didn’t pan out, and meanwhile Rhoda advised Sarah to expect a lean Christmas (“Won’t it be nice when we hit a year we don’t have to say that?”), and leanness generally, at least until Papa was “well started on free lancing or else established in a job again.” As it happened, though, the NBC pilot would be his last TV work of any kind, and by 1960 (according to his agent) he was “financially desperate.”