Salinger

by David Shields

  Screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, who wrote the script for My Foolish Heart.

  LESLIE EPSTEIN: My father and my uncle, the Epstein boys, as they were known, became identified with Warner Bros., even though my father began at RKO. They were a legendary team of screenwriters—certainly, I think, the greatest team of screenwriters. My uncle worked on over fifty films. He’s the only person I know nominated for an Academy Award every decade from his twenties through his seventies. After they did Casablanca together, they were going to be allowed to produce and direct, but my father died soon afterward. He died young, at only forty-two. My Foolish Heart was done after Casablanca.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Goldwyn’s team, composed of some of the top talent in Hollywood, could not have gotten much more than a short film out of Salinger’s story. What had to happen was the inevitable: characters, scenes, subplots, and dialogue had to be added. . . . Goldwyn’s team added flashbacks . . . [and] created new characters, most notably those of Eloise’s mother and father, characters who are not even mentioned in Salinger’s story. But what was most egregious was this: manipulating tone and emotional content, Goldwyn’s team somehow turned Salinger’s bitter indictment of the Connecticut WASP into a picture so unabashedly maudlin that one critic called it a “four-handkerchief” tearjerker.

  A. SCOTT BERG: Every time an author sends something to Hollywood, part of him says to himself, “Well, my work is so special that mine won’t get changed, and certainly they’re not going to rape it.” As I think in some ways Hollywood did to “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.”

  LESLIE EPSTEIN: The ads for the film said, “She was a good girl, wasn’t she?” In the Salinger story, she says, “I was a nice girl, wasn’t I?” In the story, it’s not that she’s not a good mother; she’s not nice. The regret she has is about that quality of niceness, which is a particular Salinger quality. It’s tough for anyone to capture a quality like that outside that particular story and that particular context.

  J. D. SALINGER (“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” The New Yorker, March 28, 1948):

  All of a sudden he [Walt Glass] said my stomach was so beautiful he wished some officer would come up and order him to stick his other hand through the window. He said he wanted to do what was fair.

  A. SCOTT BERG: The critical response to the movie was mostly pretty bad, and deservedly so. It’s a movie marked by too much sentiment, too much coincidence. There’s just too much happening in it. It’s got a classic Susan Hayward performance: she pulls her heart out in every scene and was nominated for an Academy Award. It’s not a god-awful movie. It’s not horrendous. It just bears very little resemblance to Salinger’s story.

  MARK HOWLAND: I can understand why Salinger was upset with My Foolish Heart. As appealing as Susan Hayward and Dana Andrews are, the character of Walt [Dreiser] was not Walt Glass. Not even close.

  MY FOOLISH HEART, 1949:

  Eloise (to Walt): Is this how it’s all going to end? We miss each other very much. We think about each other. I’ll be yours; you’ll be mine. Is this how you want it to end?

  A. SCOTT BERG: Salinger’s response to viewing My Foolish Heart was extremely violent.

  LESLIE EPSTEIN: Salinger hated My Foolish Heart.

  JEAN MILLER: I remember his spouting off about Hollywood. I think he had just seen My Foolish Heart and was fit to be tied. He was furious. And that pretty much took up that evening because he was furious. He didn’t understand how intelligent people—of course he’d decided that once you hit the California border there wasn’t a brain left—but how anybody could take his story and make such sentimental hash out of it. He felt it had nothing to do with his story, which of course had such a different message. It was trash, and he didn’t want anything to do with it.

  A. SCOTT BERG: Clearly, the compromise was not worth it to Salinger. He saw the film that was based on something he had written, and I think he was probably embarrassed and humiliated by the movie.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald, August 26, 1949:

  If you’re interested in movies—and I hope you’re not—an old story of mine, called UNCLE WIGGILY IN CONNECTICUT is being released pretty soon under the title of MY FOOLISH HEART. Two brothers named Epstein bought the story and wrote a screenplay out of it. I haven’t seen it, but from what I’ve heard they’ve loused it up nicely. My own fault. Money’s the root of you-know-what.

  MY FOOLISH HEART, 1949:

  Eloise: The important thing, Lou, is that I’m through hurting people. I’m through doing wrong. I’m paying for what I’ve done, and now I’m all alone. I don’t want others to suffer, too.

  JOHN McCARTEN (THE NEW YORKER): Full of soap opera clichés . . . hard to believe that it was wrung out of a short story that appeared in this austere magazine a couple of years ago.

  JOHN GUARE: I was a kid when I saw My Foolish Heart, and I remember laughing at Susan Hayward, but I liked the song “My Foolish Heart.”

  A. SCOTT BERG: It’s got an overdone score and yet the main theme was an Academy Award–nominated song, “My Foolish Heart,” which became a big standard in the 1950s and would be covered for years to come. It’s a wonderful, slightly schmaltzy melody. It was a marginal movie—not a big hit, not a big loser. It didn’t have huge stars. It was not as if he [Samuel Goldwyn] were able to compete against the Clark Gables and the Gary Coopers with this movie. There was no Bette Davis in the film. It did only all right.

  MARK HOWLAND: My students love seeing this movie. They get sucked into it; they love the romantic comedy of it. They think the theme song is corny, but otherwise they really like it. At the same time, they immediately recognize that the movie is not the story.

  A. SCOTT BERG: It was very glossily done, as almost all of Sam Goldwyn’s movies were. The production values were extremely high, perhaps a little too high. Everything in Goldwyn movies was polished just a little too much. The costumes were just a little too perfect. The lighting was just a little too neat. There was never a bit of debris anywhere on any of the Goldwyn sets.

  JOYCE MAYNARD: Jerry and I did talk about the movie version of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” The movie was terrible. Jerry said he would never sell his work again. His work was like his children, and his child had been sullied by the movie.

  LESLIE EPSTEIN: America and perhaps the world owe my father and my uncle, Philip and Julius Epstein, a great debt—for many things. But perhaps the greatest debt of all, or let’s say in a tie with Casablanca, is that they spared the world Catcher in the Rye being made into a film. That is to say, Salinger so hated their adaptation of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” that he wouldn’t allow anyone to touch his work after, and what a blessing that is.

  SHANE SALERNO: This is the official version: that My Foolish Heart so deeply offended Salinger’s sensibility that he never again considered selling his novels and stories to Hollywood. It has been repeated many times, but it’s not completely true. As late as 1957 Salinger’s agent H. N. Swanson—who represented F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many other prominent writers and screenwriters—was submitting Salinger’s work to Hollywood producers. In a January 25, 1957, letter, one such producer rejected a submission from Swanson on behalf of Salinger.

  JERRY WALD, letter to H. N. Swanson, January 25, 1957:

  Dear Swanie:

  As you know, I am the number one fan of THE J. D. SALINGER FAN CLUB.

  Like all of Salinger’s work, THE LAUGHING MAN is a touching and delightful story. However, from the point of view of motion pictures, it offers little more than a slender idea upon which to build a comedy. Furthermore, I feel that the particular elements captured in the writing which give the story its special charm and pathos would be difficult to convey when blown up to screen-size reality. Basically, the material is similar to THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY, and you may recall what loud criticisms were made about what happened to Thurber’s special charm when his story was transferred to the screen by Samuel Goldwyn for Danny Kaye.

 
; I do not doubt that a special and charming comedy could result from this material, but it would pretty much involve starting from the barest essentials of the idea and setting and going on from there. Naturally, this would require a writer in perfect tune with the idea, and this also might be difficult to come by, since Mr. Salinger will not consider working on it himself. My main complaint is that THE LAUGHING MAN gives me too little to work on to make it worth the evident gamble its further development would mean.

  Will you please convey to Mr. Salinger that I am still interested in his brilliant CATCHER IN THE RYE, and I wish there was something I could do to convince him that it should be brought to the screen.

  I am returning to you herewith the original story of THE LAUGHING MAN.

  Warmest regards.

  Sincerely,

  Jerry Wald

  —

  EBERHARD ALSEN: When Salinger shows distaste for Hollywood and the movies, it shouldn’t be construed as meaning that he hates movies as a form of art; after all, he had an enormous movie collection.

  DAVID SHIELDS: In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is deeply ambivalent about Hollywood. He has seriously and fascinatingly mixed feelings about his brother D.B.’s working as a screenwriter. He claims he doesn’t want to talk about movies, and yet he talks and talks and talks about movies: 39 Steps and Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. The movies are Holden’s idée fixe.

  LESLIE EPSTEIN: By many accounts, Salinger’s contempt for Hollywood masks a not-so-well-hidden fascination with its star power.

  Apparently, and maybe not surprisingly from the creator of Catcher in the Rye, he was very intrigued by Marlon Brando.

  MONA SIMPSON: Salinger’s imagination has always been deeply engaged with fame and popularity; it just has, it’s in the books. The Glass family were performers, and there are great strains of that throughout.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: When Holden Caulfield says he hates the movies, he’s clearly lying because he’s constantly acting out scenes from movies. He knows how much he has been influenced by the movies, and he suspects that this makes him to some extent a phony.

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

  About halfway to the bathroom, I sort of started pretending I had a bullet in my guts.

  JOHN SEABROOK: When my college friend Matt invited us to his dad’s house, in Cornish, New Hampshire, about half an hour away, to watch an old movie, all parties were relieved. However, as we wound our way along the dirt roads leading up from the Connecticut River, my girlfriend and I became tense all over again, for a different reason. We were both young writers, and we were about to meet J. D. Salinger.

  The living room had a dorm-room air about it. We sat down on the uncomfortable, worn furniture and tried to think of something to say to each other. I listened to the popcorn—the first heraldic explosions of the kernels, followed by the dramatic crescendo, and then the dying fall—thinking, J. D. Salinger is in the kitchen making popcorn. After a while, Jerry came out and went to the back of the room, where he kept, on shelves, a collection of old 16-mm. films, the kind where you have to change the reel three or four times in the course of the movie. An old-fashioned projector had been set up behind the sofa. He ran through some titles; we settled on Sergeant York. Jerry threaded the film through the projector, and then he turned the lights off and remained behind us, his face illuminated by the flickering projector. The movie was captioned, perhaps because he was going a little deaf. Toward the end, he seemed to get choked up.

  —

  SHANE SALERNO: Even in this period of his life, the late forties, years before he had the immense cultural and financial cachet that Catcher in the Rye brought him, he was adamant about refusing to let anyone alter his work in even the most minor way.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: I got a job as an editor of Cosmopolitan. In the course of our poker games, Jerry said, “I have a story. I’ll submit it to Cosmopolitan.” I said, “Great.” The story was called “Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record.” He said, “But one thing: tell your editor that not one word can be changed. It’s up to you. You’ve got to watch it, because they like to cut and they like to make it fit a space. If they do that, then it’s no go.” That was his pride in his writing. So I took it to Arthur Gordon [the editor in chief]. It was an okay story. It was written as a story for a slick magazine.

  Jerry was very opinionated about everything, but he had already written a long short story, a novelette, for Cosmopolitan called “The Inverted Forest,” which Arthur had run. Arthur felt he had great talent. And [Arthur had] announced in the magazine, “This is one of the best pieces of writing of the last twenty years or so.” The trouble was, it wasn’t very good. And it certainly wasn’t fit for Cosmo, which was a general-purpose magazine with readers who were used to slick magazine stories. So he got a lot of flack about that from his readers. And Jerry just dismissed it as a fact that the people who read the slicks didn’t have any taste.

  DAVID YAFFE: “Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record,” later retitled “Blue Melody,” was based on what was then believed to be the story of Bessie Smith’s death. It was a story promulgated by John Hammond, the legendary producer at Columbia Records. In the pages of Downbeat magazine in 1939, he told the story that Bessie Smith died because she was denied admission to a segregated hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi. There were plenty of people who said the story wasn’t true, and Bessie Smith’s biographer finally completely debunked the story, but in 1948 it was still widely believed because it provided a dramatic account of the effects of segregation in the South, a region of the country Salinger knew very little about. Clearly, Salinger had a lot of affection for Bessie Smith, and that comes through. It’s a somewhat sentimental story. When one considers that “Blue Melody” was written the same year as “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the incongruity in quality between the two stories is astonishing.

  Even though Salinger begins “Blue Melody” by saying this isn’t supposed to be a slam against any part of the country, it’s obviously meant to be a slam against the South. To Salinger, Southern music performed in a dive by black musicians is less corny, less phony than something that would be indigenous to New York City—so, yes, he’s slamming the South, but there’s also an otherness to the South that’s appealing to him.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: Salinger had been edited, slightly, on previous stories for Cosmopolitan, so he even attached a note to the story [“Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record”] that said, “Either as-is or not at all.” Nevertheless, Arthur wanted to print the story, and I followed through on the galleys. It was fine. However, I forgot to check on the title. Arthur had decided to pander to the taste of his readers and called it “Blue Melody.” It never occurred to me he would change the title, and by the time he did, it was in camera-ready copy, which is the prepublication version that comes to you. Even though it says “camera-ready,” it can’t be altered, because it’s already being printed. I thought, “Well, the best thing I can do is meet this head-on.” So I called Jerry and said, “Listen, I gotta see you. Can we have a beer at Chumley’s tonight?” I met him there and I had the magazine. After I was hemming and hawing, he said, “Hotch, would you get to the point? What’s bothering you?” I said, “Jerry, I have to explain this to you. I really, very carefully, attended to the prose that you wrote so that nothing was changed, but unbeknownst to me—and I have no control over this because I am not the fiction editor—they put a different title on it.”

  J. D. Salinger.

  DAVID YAFFE: Looking at the pseudo–Norman Rockwell artwork in the magazine for “Blue Melody,” a drawing of two kids sitting and admiring the music of Black Charles, I think it’s obvious the title was chosen for the same reason editors often choose titles: to fit head space. There is room for only two words. Those two words were “Blue Melody.” The problem was, that was not the title Salinger gave it. “Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record” was Salinger’s original title, which does capture a sense of innocence lost Salinger was so clearl
y obsessed with.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: He grabbed the magazine out of my hand and looked at it. His face turned apoplectic red. He blew his stack. He spewed an angry denunciation of me. “What kind of friend are you? How did you let this happen?” I tried to get a word in, saying, “I have no control over what’s done in the final edit.” He said, “You have to have control. I told you—you were in charge of it and I trusted you with it. I’ll never trust you again on anything.” He said it was a terrible deceit on my part. I had promised. He was furious about it. And he walked out. That was it. He left me with my beer, sitting at the table. He took the magazine with him. I never saw him again.

  Conversation with Salinger #4

  SHANE SALERNO: In 1976 Gordon Lish, the fiction editor of Esquire, was told by his boss, “We need to publish something that’s going to generate a lot of buzz.” That night Lish got drunk, typed out a story, and called it “For Rupert—with No Promises.” It appeared in the magazine sans byline.

  MYLES WEBER: “For Rupert—with No Promises” obviously echoes “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Many people thought it might be a new Salinger story. In fact it was a rather brief exercise in mimicking Salinger’s style.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: The prose style was intended to feel like Salinger might have written it, had it been his first published story in a dozen years.

  There was a burst of interest; copies flew off the stands. The magazine literally sold out.

  MYLES WEBER: It’s astonishing that anyone took it to be a Salinger story because it has none of Salinger’s wit and it’s not very carefully written.

  ANONYMOUS, “For Rupert—with No Promises” (Esquire, February 1977):