by Blake Bailey
Harold Ober Associates, Inc.: Excerpt of unpublished letter by Philip Wylie to Charles Jackson. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc. on behalf of Karen Wylie Pryor.
Nathaniel R. Benchley: Robert Benchley quote courtesy of the Estate of Robert Benchley as administered by Nat Benchley, Executor.
Simon & Schuster, Inc.: Excerpts from A Second-Hand Life by Charles Jackson. Copyright © 1967 by Charles Jackson. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Vassar College Libraries: Excerpt of unpublished manuscript “The Lost Week or The Caged Lion” by Mary McCarthy. Reprinted by permission of Special Collections at Vassar College Libraries.
A Note About the Author
Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cheever: A Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes. He edited a two-volume edition of Cheever’s work for the Library of America, and in 2010 received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
Cheever is also available as an eBook: 978-0-307-27137-2
Like: www.facebook.com/pages/Blake-Bailey/137022166320170
Follow: @BlakeBaileyOn
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
Charles Jackson in the bloom of his adorable boyhood. One of his teachers called him a “perfect child.” (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
The Jackson family shortly before their arrival in Newark, New York, in 1907. From left to right: Herb, Thelma, Charlie, Fred (the baby), Sarah, and Fred (father). (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
The Jackson family—minus the errant father—on their lawn in Newark, circa 1916, shortly before a series of tragic disasters befell them. Standing from left: Thelma, Sarah, Richard, Herb. Kneeling in front: Charlie and Fred. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Charles Jackson’s older sister, Thelma, with their youngest brother, Richard. Thelma insisted that her friends include little Richard for a Sunday drive, and the siblings were both killed when a train smashed into the car. As the Newark Union-Gazette characterized that fateful decision: “In their life, they had spent hours in play and enjoyment and it seemed almost as if Heaven had decreed that in their death they should not be divided.” (Courtesy of Kraham family collection)
Fred Jackson and his youngest son, Richard, whom he doted on. Fred’s visits with his family in Newark become more and more infrequent, as he’d secretly had a child (another Fred!) with a sixteen-year-old Irish girl in New York. After the four-year-old Richard was killed, Fred abandoned his first family altogether. (Courtesy of Kraham family collection)
The young Charlie loved to go on long hikes (either alone or with Bettina) and dream of his glorious destiny in the wider world. (Dartmouth/Rauner)
Marion “Bettina” Fleck, the great companion of Charlie’s youth. The two considered themselves soul mates, though their friendship was more platonic in Charlie’s mind than in Bettina’s. (Courtesy of Fabry family collection)
Charlie’s mother, Sarah (“Sal”). Charmingly high-spirited in her youth, Sarah became “a creature of sighs and bewilderment” after her husband abandoned the family, and lavished a suffocating affection on her youngest surviving boys, Charlie and Fred. Charlie would later subscribe to a then-popular theory that both homosexuality and alcoholism (“a disease of emotional immaturity”) were caused by overprotective mothers, and resented Sarah for that and other reasons. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Charlie spent a single year (1922–23) at Syracuse University, where he joined the editorial staff of the monthly literary magazine, The Phoenix. He also pledged a fraternity, Psi Upsilon, that hounded him out of Syracuse after Jackson’s scandalous behavior with an older pledge—an episode that inspired Don Birnam’s “fraternity disaster” in The Lost Weekend. (Syracuse University Library)
Dr. Thorvald Lyngholm, a Danish osteopath whom Charlie met when he was twenty-two and Lyngholm was thirty-six. The latter was lovingly evoked (as osteopath Dan Linquist) in one of Charlie’s unpublished stories: “In repose, his face seemed always as if he were thinking deeply and at the same time scenting the air. When he laughed or smiled, his serious mouth became miraculously boyish and charming, and little lines, of mirth rather than age, appeared below his eyes.… His good Scandinavian head was partly bald, but the hair that remained at the sides and top was fine and silky, of a light sand color.” (Wilmette Public Library)
Charlie’s brother Fred (“Boom”) attended the Art Students League in New York before contracting tuberculosis. He drew this portrait of his sleeping brother while both were patients at Devitt’s Camp, a tuberculosis sanatorium in Pennsylvania. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Rhoda Booth, who became lifelong friends with Fred/“Boom” when they both worked at Brentano’s in New York. Soon Rhoda was hired at Fortune magazine, where she researched articles for writers such as Archibald MacLeish and James Gould Cozzens. A Vermont Scot, she was the temperamental opposite of her volatile future husband, Charles Jackson, who often accused her of having no imagination but realized he couldn’t survive without her. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Bronson Winthrop, wealthy Wall Street lawyer and blueblood, a descendant of John Winthrop on his father’s side and the Manhattan Stuyvesants on his mother’s. Called the Exquisite by his best friend and law partner, Henry Stimson (Secretary of War in the Taft and FDR cabinets), Winthrop was a vastly cultured man whose father, Egerton, had been one of Edith Wharton’s best friends. A lifelong bachelor, Bronson took a shine to the Jackson brothers, subsidizing their treatment in Davos, Switzerland, where Charlie longed to go after reading Mann’s Magic Mountain. (Dartmouth/Rauner)
Charlie, always a dandy, used his Winthrop money to buy himself an expensive European wardrobe, pieces of which he often pawned during his drinking years. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
The Jackson brothers on a sleigh ride in Davos. Many assumed the two were amants rather than brothers—the boyish Boom “kept” by the bald Charlie. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
A nude Boom, photographed in Paris by the famous gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Boom was also photographed by Man Ray, and became a favorite of the European haut monde. “He had not been the least bit impressed by his social success in Paris, London, St. Moritz, Davos, Berlin, the Riviera, Rome, Capri,” wrote Charlie; “he simply took it all for granted in the most disarming, artless way that only added to the charm he had been so unself-conscious of.” (Dartmouth/Hood Museum)
Charlie and an unidentified reveler, during his Don Birnam years in the 1930s. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Charlie’s bookplate, which reflected his passionate love of (and resemblance to) the Bard. His all but infallible knack for quoting Shakespeare made him a big hit on the radio show Information, Please! (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Charlie and his older daughter, Sarah, whom he dubbed “the dimsal girl” because of her charming tendency to transpose consonants. Sarah had her father’s almond eyes and dark skin, but was unlike him in every other way—and therefore the love of his life. He later wrote that he used to hide behind the curtain and watch her leave for school “like a love-sick fool.” (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Kate, though she resembled her mother physically, was volatile and precocious like her father. He once offered to drown her (“for your own sake”) if she turned out to be a genius. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Six Chimney Farm in Orford, New Hampshire—“one of the most beautiful houses in New England,” according to a 1927 issue of House Beautiful. Charlie thought that owning such a house would prove the “absolute peak of fulfillment and happiness,” but he was wrong. (Courtesy of Jackson famil
y collection)
Rhoda, Charlie, and Kate at the entrance of Six Chimney Farm in happier days. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Jackson became friends with The Lost Weekend’s director and producer, Billy Wilder (left) and Charles Brackett (right), though their friendship was strained by (among other things) the sentimental, uncomfortably personal ending of Wilder and Brackett’s screenplay: “The final scene,” Jackson wrote them, “as you sent it to me, with the hero working out his problem by writing a book (the implication being, of course, that the novel is the very movie we are seeing and the book we have read) is an out-and-out Judas kiss.” (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
The Lost Weekend was an enormous critical and commercial success, winning Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Screenplay. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
After his great social success in Hollywood, Charlie covered the walls of his bedroom with autographed portraits of his celebrity friends. “I like to show off to my New Hampshire neighbors that I am just-like-that with the Hollywood great,” he wrote Gregory Peck. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Charlie with Boom and Rhoda at the Stork Club. Rhoda took a dim view of her celebrity husband’s “perverted sense of values”: “The insatiate lust for fame, for recognition,” she wrote Boom. “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.” (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
After Jackson became disenchanted with the small-town bigotry of Orford—outraging his neighbors by writing about the subject for Leonard Lyons’s nationally syndicated column—he lived most of one year (1946–47) in Sniffen Court, a mews of carriage houses on East Thirty-Sixth in Manhattan. One of the boons of city life was the availability of like-minded companions. From left to right: Ted Amussen, Boom, Midy McLane, Charlie, Ann Amussen, the poet Phyllis McGinley Hayden and her husband, Charles (both seated at piano), Tar McLane (the family obstetrician), and Rhoda. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Jackson continued to spend summers in Orford, until financial pressures forced him to live there year-round. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
With Bronson Winthrop’s help, Boom bought a quaint house in the tiny hamlet of Malaga, New Jersey. His antique shop on the ground floor, Scotland Run, was named after a stream that passed behind the home of his lover, Dr. Jim Gates, who lived two blocks away on Defiance Road. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Boom and his mother, Sarah, who lived with him in Malaga for the last seventeen years of her life. Boom was a devoted caretaker, though Sarah’s self-pitying complaints got on his nerves (and drove Charlie up the wall). (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Boom and Jim Gates were popular among their neighbors in South Jersey. Here they saunter along the boardwalk in Atlantic City with a lifelong Malaga friend, Barbara Peech. (Courtesy of Pepa Ferrer Devan)
Roger and Dorothea Straus with their son, Roger III, on the porch of their home in Purchase, New York, in the early 1950s. Roger had become Jackson’s publisher a few years before, and Charlie remained smitten with the couple (and mostly vice versa) amid the many ups and downs that would follow: “There’s only one thing to do about it,” Charlie wrote Dorothea, shortly after their first meeting in 1949: “we all just have to manage, somehow, to get ourselves shipwrecked on a desert island together.” (Courtesy of Laura Straus)
Dorothea, whom Charlie bombarded with ebullient letters addressed to “Madame Straus,” in homage to Proust’s great confidant, Madame Émile Straus, salonnièrre and widow of Bizet. Dorothea shared Charlie’s passionate love of certain writers, though she viewed both Jackson and the world at large with a rather cold eye: “Charlie’s violent swings did not disturb me,” she later wrote, “nor did I feel pity for him.” (Courtesy of Laura Straus)
Charlie and Roger Straus (on the right) remained friends even after Roger dropped the author from Farrar, Straus and Cudahy’s list in 1962—“a dreadful black hour and black day in my life,” as Charlie wrote in his unpublished confession, “The Sleeping Brain.” Here they appear at a cocktail party in honor of Jackson’s last novel, A Second-Hand Life, which made the New York Times best-seller list in 1967. (Dartmouth/Rauner)
Rhoda and Charlie with their daughter Sarah and her stockbroker husband, Alexander “Sandy” Piper III, after the young couple’s wedding, on Christmas Day, 1963. Charlie could hardly stand his son-in-law, though for Sarah’s sake he tried to ingratiate himself. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Charlie and Kate at Sarah Lawrence, where Kate was elected president of her senior class. Charlie “discovered” his younger daughter during her college years, and (for better and worse) she became the closest confidant of his final years. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Charlie at his desk in New Brunswick, New Jersey, surrounded by his “household gods”: Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Chaplin, et al. The picture was taken for a 1964 Star-Ledger profile that tactlessly adverted to Charlie’s “slightly prissy manner.” “You should have seen her!” Jackson wrote of his interviewer. “A dyke, yet. All butch and a yard wide.” (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Boom in his backyard with one of his gorgeous hand-braided rugs. To the end, he enjoyed showing off his legs. (Courtesy of Jackson family collection)
Stanley Zednik, Charlie’s final companion. “To [Stanley],” wrote Dorothea Straus, “Charles Jackson was a dazzling celebrity and he the faithful servitor.” (Courtesy of Marta Kadrliak-Zednik)
Charlie in Room 405 of the Hotel Chelsea, where he moved after separating from Rhoda in 1965. He kept his room “neat as a pin,” one journalist observed, “his books standing in serried ranks on the shelves, his paintings hung at precisely the right level, and not a speck of dust visible anywhere.” (Dartmouth/Rauner)
Charlie adjusting his necktie in the Chelsea lobby beneath a nude painted by one of his fellow residents. (Dartmouth/Rauner)
During his Chelsea years, Charlie ate almost every meal at the Riss Diner, around the corner on Eighth Avenue, where he was a great favorite among proprietors and patrons alike: “Hello, Charlie!” they always greeted him, as did the newsie on Twenty-Third Street where Charlie bought his daily Times. (Dartmouth/Rauner)
ALSO BY BLAKE BAILEY
Cheever: A Life
A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates