Salinger

by David Shields

  Salinger now has been inducted but has yet to see action; in “Personal Notes of an Infantryman,” he expresses his desire for war and oblivion. He’s pseudo-war-ravaged before he’s war-ravaged: “ ‘All wives are anxious to see their husbands go to war,’ Lawlor said, smiling peculiarly.” Desperate to serve overseas, he’s more desperate still for other people to be beatified by his art; in “The Varioni Brothers,” the commercial brother acknowledges about his more artistic brother, “Because I hear the music for the first time in my life when I read his book.” Salinger is seeking the purity of art even as he’s cranking out product for the slicks. This is a major trope for Salinger; all convenience is mediocre. In the 1944 story “Both Parties Concerned,” Billy’s wife, Ruthie, mocks him for loving their baby only when “it’s convenient for you or something. When it’s having its bath or when it plays with your necktie.” We’re back to Salinger and neckties.

  In “Soft-Boiled Sergeant”—published before Salinger had seen combat—a soldier says, “I met more good guys in the Army than I ever knowed when I was a civilian.” Salinger came to believe this; his lifelong friendships were with his fellow soldiers. In “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” published after but written before D-Day, “It’s no good being with civilians any more. They don’t know what we know and we’re no longer used to what they know. It doesn’t work out so hot.” Salinger has already divided the world up into us versus them, but he hasn’t figured out yet how to stage or frame the conflict. “ ‘I never really knew anything about friendship before I was in the Army. Did you, Vince?’ ” “ ‘Not a thing. It’s the best thing there is. Just about.’ ” The army has saved him, Salinger thinks, and he loves it, he thinks. The army will save him, transform him, transform his art, destroy him, but all that is to come. For now he is gesturing with increasing eloquence and vehemence toward existential despair, but it’s all still a slick magazine writer’s guess as to what such despair would actually feel like.

  The advent of America’s involvement in World War II had caused “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” not to be published in the New Yorker—undermining the fulfillment of his childhood dream. Salinger wasn’t just trying to survive; while bombs were falling, he was writing stories and seeing them published in well-paying slicks, though not, alas, in the New Yorker. He wasn’t interested in guns for guns’ sake. He was interested in guns for art’s sake.

  In a March 1944 letter, Salinger writes, “There’s a great man in every thousand idiots in the army and perhaps actually, and perhaps only in my mind. But I’m getting him on paper—either as he is, or as he is in my imagination. Anyway, I’m writing real stories.” In another letter, written the same month, Salinger writes, “I’m miserable in the Army, but I’m writing better than I ever did and that’s all that counts. . . . I’m working with nostalgia chiefly because that’s all there seems to be any more.”

  Rejection letter from the New Yorker.

  —

  JOHN LEGGETT: In 1942, Oona’s mother, Agnes Boulton, was determined to make her daughter a movie star, so she sent her to acting school in Hollywood.

  JANE SCOVELL: Oona went to Hollywood and was taken up as a client by Minna Wallis, who was the sister of Hal Wallace, a very important producer of the day. In letters to Carol Matthau, Oona mentioned meeting a lot of men, most of whom wanted to take her out. “They want to sleep with me,” she wrote. “It makes me nervous.” Nervous or not, Oona was in demand. Her reputation as New York’s number one debutante and the well-bred daughter of a Nobel laureate had preceded her. One of her escorts was Hollywood’s resident genius, twenty-six-year-old Orson Welles. Welles went for her in a big way and escorted Oona to a nightclub on their first date and volunteered to read her palm. He took her upturned hand in his, gazed at it intently, then raised his head and, looking deeply into her eyes, declared that he saw a love line which led directly to another, older man. Welles even named the man and said Oona would marry him. The man was Charlie Chaplin.

  LILLIAN ROSS: Charlie Chaplin was the first international movie star. He was also the first movie figure to be regarded as a genius. Through all the decades since Chaplin’s arrival in Hollywood . . . through all the changes and developments that have taken place in the industry with the advent of sound, color, new cameras, new dollies, the wide screen, stereophonic sound, big studios, little studios . . . the tie-ins with books, the tie-ins with records; through the rise of the director, and . . . the rise of movie-theory jargon, through everything, Charlie Chaplin has persisted as a gigantic, incomparable figure. His pictures have by now been seen by billions of people all over the world.

  Oona O’Neill and Charlie Chaplin.

  JANE SCOVELL: Oona did a screen test for a movie called The Girl from Leningrad. They put a scarf over her head and tied it up to make her look like a little babushka girl. This was not a Russian girl. She still looked like Colleen from County Cork. Minna Wallis heard Charlie Chaplin was making a film that called for a very young girl. She called him up and said, “I think I’ve got the girl for you. She’s terrific. Would you like to meet her?” Chaplin later wrote in his autobiography that when he went to Wallis’s he wasn’t expecting much, but he said he walked into a room and there was Oona sitting on the floor by the fireplace: the light was playing on her, she looked up, and he just fell in love.

  CHARLIE CHAPLIN: I arrived early and on entering the sitting room discovered a young lady seated alone by the fire. While waiting for Miss Wallis, I introduced myself, saying I presumed she was Miss O’Neill. She smiled. Contrary to my preconceived impression, I became aware of a luminous beauty with a sequestered charm and a gentleness that was most appealing.

  OONA O’NEILL: Just met Charlie Chaplin. What blue eyes he has!

  SHANE SALERNO: Oona stopped answering Salinger’s letters, but he didn’t know why.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger wrote to Whit Burnett that if he kept making money as a writer he planned on getting married. Salinger did not say he wanted to marry Oona O’Neill, but instead a girl he had dated before he entered the army, who attended Finch Junior College [a finishing school for upper-class women in Manhattan]. Perhaps Salinger was merely trying to save face with Burnett . . . because by then, the early months of 1943, it was widely known that Oona was having an affair with Charlie Chaplin, the legendary Hollywood actor and director, who was fifty-four years old when he first met Oona.

  JANE SCOVELL: Here was Oona, whom Salinger was writing fourteen-page letters to; probably in the back of his mind he thought when the war was over they would get together. And now, it was over.

  The minute she turned eighteen, Oona married Chaplin. The news made headlines all over the world.

  Chaplin puts a ring on Oona’s finger on their wedding day.

  Oona and Chaplin’s marriage certificate.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger was left to read about the Chaplin-O’Neill wedding in the newspapers, just like everyone else. He couldn’t escape the humiliation for months because in many prominent magazines Oona O’Neill was featured as the model in a series of cosmetics advertisements: “Be a Beauty to your Soldier Boy[.] Here’s how Deb [1942 debutante of the year Oona O’Neill] does it.”

  Soap ad featuring Oona O’Neill, Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1943.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Imagine you’re J. D. Salinger: you’re in the army; you’re getting ready to fight in the Great War in Europe; you’ve professed your complete love to this woman; and then off she goes and marries, on her eighteenth birthday, the most famous movie star in the world.

  Salinger, second from left, shipping off to England to enter the war.

  Oona O’Neill and Charlie Chaplin on their wedding day, June 16, 1943.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: He was very upset about this. You could feel this anger. You could feel this terrible anger.

  JOHN LEGGETT: Jerry thought Chaplin, who was fifty-four years old at the time, was far too old for Oona. She was still a teenager when he married her. Jerry thought that was really corrup
t.

  CHARLIE CHAPLIN: At first I was afraid of the discrepancy in our ages. But Oona was resolute as though she had come upon a truth.

  CAROL MATTHAU: It was a great, great love-affair, not only because of the intensity but because of the lasting intensity.

  MARK HOWLAND: When I went to the University of Texas Library in Austin to look at the Salinger collection there, I read a number of letters. I have to say that I felt like a voyeur, reading Salinger’s letters. A number of them were about Oona O’Neill. Some of them were about Oona O’Neill and Charlie Chaplin. And there were some distasteful bits.

  JANE SCOVELL: It was fairly well known that Chaplin got monkey glands, which were the Viagra of the day. Salinger wrote this letter, and then he drew this terrible cartoon. It was this old man, running around waving his—how can I say this nicely?—but waving his—and Oona is somewhere off giggling. And this he mailed to her.

  OONA O’NEILL: Salinger said terrible things about my being with Charlie. The things he thought up that we did. It made me glad I was with Charlie and not with Salinger.

  J. D. SALINGER (“Soft-Boiled Sergeant,” Saturday Evening Post, April 15, 1944):

  Burke, he didn’t stay for the whole show. About halfways through the Chaplin pitcher he says to me, “Stay and see it, Mac. I’ll be outside.”

  When I come outside after the show I says to Burke, “What’s the matter, Mr. Burke? Don’t you like Charlie Chaplin none?” My sides was hurting from laughing at Charlie.

  Burke says, “He’s all right. Only I don’t like no funny-looking little guys always get chased by big guys. Never getting no girl, like. For keeps like.”

  ARAM SAROYAN: The crucial distinction for Oona between Salinger, when she knew him, and Chaplin, when she met him, was that Salinger was at the very beginning of his career. He was publishing, but he had not published his important work yet. Chaplin was up there with Albert Einstein and George Bernard Shaw and, yes, her father, Eugene O’Neill. Between Salinger and Chaplin there was no competition. She was not looking for a contemporary to have an adventurous life with. She was looking for someone to be her shelter from the storm, and she was beautiful enough to get it.

  JANE SCOVELL: A lot of what happened to Oona later in life had to do with the fact that her father abandoned her. She spent her life looking for a replacement, and she found one in Charlie Chaplin. Charlie just took her and brought her into another world. True to form, when Eugene O’Neill heard about her marrying Charlie Chaplin, he completely and utterly disowned her. He never, ever saw her again, wouldn’t allow her to be spoken about in his presence. She wouldn’t accept that. She still tried, even when he was dying. She sent a letter to him with pictures and a friend delivered them to O’Neill in the hospital. And O’Neill took the envelope, never opened it, and stuck it under his pillow. And that was that.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: Oona had lived a life of privilege as a young girl. She was very used to life in New York and Hollywood among the celebrated and famous. She wanted to be with Charlie, who was famous. She loved the idea of his success. She certainly wouldn’t have been happy in Cornish, New Hampshire.

  Charlie was much more people-involved than Salinger was. Even when you met Chaplin for the first time, he would make you feel like you were the only person in the world he was talking with. And he would tell these wonderful stories. Offscreen, he was infinitely more amusing, I always felt, than he was on.

  JANE SCOVELL: Oona wrote a letter to a friend, saying, “Charlie bought me a mink coat. And you know what? He put it on first and wore it all around. Then he let me wear it.” This is not what she was going to get from Salinger. Chaplin offered her so many things and one thing that can never be overlooked: Chaplin made her laugh. She just loved to laugh and this was a man who made the whole world laugh. And now he was making her laugh. Salinger never made her laugh.

  OONA O’NEILL: Laughter is one of Charlie’s greatest gifts to me. I hadn’t known it before. My childhood was not very happy. We met when I was sixteen, a mere child at the time, and I have been in love with him ever since. He is my world.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: She was just totally devoted to Charlie, and he to her. I think this is why she preferred Charlie to Jerry. Charlie was emotionally so expressive—so caring, so devoted, so extravagantly emotional and expressive. Also, Chaplin wanted to have children. He wanted very much to prove himself as a man, as a father. Jerry, I don’t think, really cared about children all that much, or wanted to have children. Oona wanted Charlie Chaplin to be the father she’d never had in Eugene O’Neill. She was looking for somebody who could make up for all the things that her own father hadn’t been. I don’t think that Jerry was somebody who would give any woman the feeling that he was looking after them.

  JANE SCOVELL: I think that must have killed Salinger, the idea that he could be spurned. He had to vent his feelings by calling Oona a gold digger, which I truly don’t think she was. I think she did want security, and security is sometimes spelled m-o-n-e-y.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: For the rest of his life, Salinger was haunted by this love affair that didn’t happen. Salinger tried to forget about Oona by looking forward to the Saturday Evening Post publishing “The Varioni Brothers.” He anticipated this story’s release because he hoped a Hollywood studio might buy it, possibly as a Henry Fonda vehicle. He wanted more than ever the money he would earn by such a sale, but he hoped as well to make a splash in the community that had just accepted Oona.

  —

  ARAM SAROYAN: Everyone said they would never make it, but ultimately Oona and Charlie proved everybody wrong. They had a beautiful life together, mostly living in Europe. For forty years. Eight children.

  Oona, Chaplin, and six of their eight children.

  OONA O’NEILL CHAPLIN: [Charlie] made me mature, and I keep him young.

  A. SCOTT BERG: Certainly the greatest difference between Chaplin and Salinger is that Chaplin was a man who spent his life courting fame, pleasing people, making them laugh and cry, at the same time, if possible. From what we know, Salinger spent most of his life fleeing fame. It’s hard to imagine two people more different in that regard.

  JOYCE MAYNARD: As late as 1972, Jerry Salinger spoke of Oona O’Neill, and he spoke with surprising bitterness of Charlie Chaplin. The irony was that when Salinger first wrote to me and invited me to move in with him, I was the same age Oona was when she married Chaplin, and Jerry was just a year younger than Chaplin was when he first met Oona.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: Oona adored Charlie, and she went totally to pieces when he died.

  JANE SCOVELL: Once he was gone, she was gone.

  ARAM SAROYAN: I was interviewing Oona once. The interview was winding down and it was the last thing I had in my notes, so I said, “You knew J. D. Salinger, right?” She looked at me and said, “I’m not going to talk about that.”

  JANE SCOVELL: At the end of her life she became an alcoholic, that curse of the O’Neills which they speak about. Her brother committed suicide. Her half-brother committed suicide.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: The Oona O’Neill–J. D. Salinger relationship would never, ever have worked. Because of who she was, the family she came from, and who she wanted to be in her future life, she would have never stayed in New Hampshire while Salinger was locked up in a bunker in the woods, writing away. So this tragedy in Salinger’s life, the loss of the “love of his life,” the one woman whom he probably loved more than any other, is to a large degree a fantasy on his part. Salinger never recovered.

  DAVID SHIELDS: It’s significant and revealing that he carried a lifelong torch for a relationship that apparently was never consummated. He would replicate this relationship with a series of very young women. The girls that followed Oona were time-travel machines. His lifelong obsession with late adolescent girlhood was at least in part an attempt to regain pre-Fall Oona. She formatted him forever.

  Conversation with Salinger #1

  J. D. SALINGER (The Catcher in the Rye):

  What really knocks
me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like.

  Michael Clarkson with his boys and Santa.

  MICHAEL CLARKSON: “A man is in Cornish. Amateur, perhaps, but sentimentally connected. The saddest—a tragic figure without a background. Needing a future as much as your past. Let me.” That was the note I wrote to J. D. Salinger. It took me two months to write it.

  In 1978 J. D. Salinger was, to me, someone worth driving 450 miles to see. He was a missing father figure in my life, a soul mate, someone I wanted to go to Fenway Park with. I had to drive that 450 miles because there was someone in the world who felt the same pain that I did. My own father may have felt that pain, but he never talked to me. I had an emotional hole. I had no one to talk to. J. D. Salinger the writer and his fictional character Holden Caulfield thought like I did.

  It was what he called, later, “a very cynical note.” However, it obviously worked because the next day, when we met, he mentioned the note.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: There have been countless fans now for decades who have done this: they leave notes for him; they go up to his house unannounced; they knock on his front door.

  MICHAEL CLARKSON: I wanted to meet that guy and pick his brain and sit down and say, “Do you know something? I had those problems when I was a teenager, and you’re the only guy who seems to understand.” Like Salinger and Holden, I went to private school. As I understood it, Salinger had a cold, distant relationship with his father. My father was an old Brit and shared nothing with me; if anything, he just put me down. Children are to be seen and not heard. I wanted to tell Salinger, “But you listen to me. You listened to me when I was a teenager. You listen to what children had to say.” My father didn’t listen to what I had to say. I didn’t cry when my father died. I had no one to pour out my feelings to. J. D. Salinger and Holden Caulfield thought like I did. By going to see Salinger, I felt he could help me. I didn’t necessarily want him to save me, to catch me at the bottom of the cliff. I was somewhat depressed, but I don’t think I was that delusional. I had two young children and I wanted to ask him, “Where do I go from here? What’s the next step?” I thought he could make some of the pain go away. At the same time, I had an emotional-spiritual crush on this writer.