Salinger

by David Shields

  MARK HOWLAND: In the 1970s I walked into a bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, called Ephram’s. It’s a great place, about three stories, lots of cobwebs, dust, catacombs, floor-to-ceiling stacks—some new books but mostly used. I remember walking down from the street level to the basement. There were books stacked right along the stairwell and I saw three copies of the two-volume Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger. Immediately I knew what they were and couldn’t believe I was standing in front of a gold mine. I went to the owner of the store and said, “Where did you get these?” He said, “I was in a café in Paris and a traveling book salesman with a briefcase came by, sat down at the table, and pulled these out.” He told me he bought them for a dollar apiece, and I bought them for three dollars apiece from him. One of the big regrets of my life is that I didn’t get all three. I got just one of each.

  Conversation with Salinger #11

  MICHAEL McDERMOTT: In 1979 I received an assignment from Newsweek to photograph J. D. Salinger. I’d photographed other people for Newsweek before, so I just asked the editor for the telephone number and address; I thought it was a regular assignment, but it wasn’t. “It’s not that easy, Mike,” he told me. “We don’t have personal information. He doesn’t like to be photographed, we don’t have an address to send you to or a telephone number to give you, but we do know he picks up mail in Windsor, Vermont.”

  I went to the public library, did a little research on Salinger, and found the photograph Lotte Jacobi took of him in 1951 for the book jacket of The Catcher in the Rye. Life magazine ran a photo in ’61. Those weren’t too much help. I started to realize this was a very reclusive person I was supposed to photograph, but I wasn’t worried. I was a brash twenty-year-old, you know?

  So, first day, after sitting there for four hours in my 1978 light metallic-green Volkswagen diesel Rabbit, drinking Pepsi and eating Cheetos, making myself sick, I didn’t have him. I decided, it’s five-thirty, the post office is closed, nobody’s going to come and get their mail that day.

  Then I just walked the streets late at night. I started to wonder if somebody tipped him off.

  I never felt like I was chasing him or stalking him. It wasn’t really a paparazzi shot. It was a very private photograph that I took from across the street. He never even knew I took his picture. He was probably really surprised when he saw it in Newsweek. He never saw me, and just as I got the first few shots off and thought I was going to get a better shot at him coming to his car, a couple of teenagers came up and stopped him and began to talk to him. He was friendly—chatted for a couple of minutes—then he said goodbye to them and I pulled the camera back around and I snapped off a couple more frames as he walked to his car. I knew I had it. He was even smiling a little. It was a beautiful photograph, perhaps the only candid photograph of J. D. Salinger that was ever taken, and I had it. On the drive back to Brattleboro, I was so happy, but I needed to make sure that the license plate number from the car he got into came back as Jerome David Salinger, and it did.

  There were stories in newspapers; the AP ran it on the wire. There was a television story about me getting that photograph. Over the years I’ve thought about that picture quite a bit. It was a big deal.

  SHARON STEEL: In a letter to Michael Mitchell dated August 31, 1979, Salinger starts updating Mitchell on Matthew, who is a sophomore in college, and Peggy, who is married and living in Boston. He had to deal with “two shitty literary kids” who took a photo of his face outside of the post office, which ran in a “news magazine.” “Piss on ’em all,” Salinger gripes.

  Conversation with Salinger #12

  SHANE SALERNO: On October 31, 1983, People magazine published an article about Salinger’s son, Matthew Salinger.

  Salinger’s son, Matthew, an actor, in a CBS movie of the week.

  PAUL CORKERY: “I love acting, it’s great fun, but I don’t want to be a celebrity or a superstar, don’t want attention. I don’t feel comfortable with it.” That may seem a contrary opinion coming from a youth in a field where public recognition is practically the coin of the realm, but it’s a lot less surprising given the genes involved. The speaker is Matt Salinger, 23, the only son of one of the world’s most notable recluses, author J. D. (The Catcher in the Rye) Salinger.

  The elder Salinger hasn’t appeared in print since 1965, when the New Yorker published his short story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” and hasn’t made a public appearance in almost as long, despite being steadily sought—and sometimes stalked—by nosy interviewers. Matt has inherited that same distaste—only now he’s about to step onstage as a Studio 54 doorman, of all things. The play is One Night at Studio, written by his Princeton classmate Jordan Katz. The drama will run in a small theater in L.A. Even Matt acknowledges the play needs all the attention it can get. “It seems so selfish not to do interviews if people are curious about me because of my name and that will help the play,” he says gamely. But before you can ask the first question, he lays down the ground rules: “I won’t let people try to get at my father—find out about his life—through me. I know how much he does not want public attention. He is a wonderful father and I respect him, so I won’t talk about him.”

  All right, let’s talk about Matt. He and his sister, Margaret, 28, who is studying labor relations in England, were born and raised in Cornish, N.H., where J.D. still resides. His father and his mother, Claire Douglas, a Jungian psychologist now living in San Francisco, divorced when Matt was 6. But they lived near each other, and the children divided their time between them. “I was not the child of split parents,” says Matt. “I was lucky, I thought. I liked the change of pace, and I got to know my parents as individuals. They became friends to me.”

  After two years as a boarder at a ski-oriented private school and four more at Andover, Matt found himself at Princeton, where he was as uncomfortable as Holden Caulfield in prep school. “At Princeton they were still stamping out Southern gentlemen for life in high corporate echelons, and that was just a little stifling,” he recalls. “People knew all about everyone else. I didn’t want that. I resent any sort of categorization.” So he crossed the Hudson and joined the class of 1982 at Columbia. “It was wonderful,” he says. “It was completely anonymous. One day I was walking across from building to building and found myself smiling. It was because I didn’t know anyone, and no one knew me.”

  After trying his hand at several seasons of summer stock and getting his degree in art history, Matt worked briefly at Sotheby’s auction house, appraising paintings and wondering if acting was for him. He lives in an Upper West Side Manhattan walk-up and dates Betsy Becker, 27, who was a coworker at Sotheby’s. He has had roles on the soap operas Ryan’s Hope and One Life to Live. Surely the name helps a little? “Up until now I’ve gotten every acting job I’ve had without anyone knowing who I am,” Matt says. “I feel very good about that. In fact, only two people have ever recognized me on the street. One was a guy who tried to sell me a nickel bag on Columbus Circle in New York. He asked me, ‘Wasn’t you messin’ with Cassie [in One Life to Live] on the stories?’ ”

  Matthew Salinger, second from left, top row, Phillips Andover athletic team.

  The current role of Pete the doorman is Matt’s first big part, and he relishes the challenge. “It’s fun playing a bastard,” he says. “I fill up pages and pages of a journal about Pete—how he’d behave in cold weather, what he has for breakfast. It’s nice thinking and writing about those things. It’s fun.” Wait, did he say writing? “Well, yes,” he admits sheepishly. “Right now I’m writing a screenplay with a fellow actor.” But that’s all he’ll say. Anyway, he has been contemplating a more urgent challenge: opening night, Oct. 25, when he must face the critics as well as his mother. “She’ll be coming down to the opening,” he says with a small smile, “but I don’t think my father will be coming here.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: Then, on December 28, 1984, the Washington Post published “Matt Salinger, Into the Spotlight,” which was written by Davi
d Remnick, who would later succeed Tina Brown as the editor of the New Yorker. The interesting thing for me about the article is how thoroughly it plays out as a scene from “Franny”: Matthew keeps trying to figure out if he’s Lane Coutell or Lane Coutell’s creator. Just slightly offstage are Dudley Moore and J. D. Salinger as opposing models: Moore, ex-Oxford satirist turned into one-note Hollywood shtick, vs. his father—encased in his art on a hill in New Hampshire. Even Remnick’s tone is perfectly pitched between purr and scratch. Fame is what is being debated in every syllable: between and among Remnick, Moore, Matthew, and his father, and everyone in the room—including a couple putting on their coats—is completely confused about it. With every attempt to separate himself from his father, Matthew is hugging him ever more tightly.

  DAVID REMNICK: Just a few years before he stopped publishing and went into seclusion, J. D. Salinger urged his friend and editor at The New Yorker, William Shawn, to accept the dedication of “Franny and Zooey” “as nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean.”

  Matthew Salinger is 24 now, tall and rangy like his father, handsome like his mother Claire, an actor like his father’s creation Zooey. He has appeared as a hyperlibidinous lacrosse coach in the soap opera One Life to Live, as a crusher of slide-rule-bearing pipsqueaks in the movie Revenge of the Nerds. And he is now the star of Bill C. Davis’s Dancing in the End Zone, which opens Jan. 3 at Broadway’s Ritz Theatre. He plays a college football star tormented by the demands of his mother, his coach and his tutor.

  “This is it for me,” Matt Salinger says as he urges a luncheon companion to take a seat. “You don’t get a chance on Broadway every day of the week.”

  Salinger is sitting now in an Upper East Side bistro that serves 300 varieties of omelet. “I don’t know about fame,” he continues. “I want to be successful as an actor, and if fame is a byproduct of that, well, then it’s a necessary evil. It’s not something I aspire to.”

  Dudley Moore is sitting over in the corner. An excruciatingly casual couple enters the restaurant. They notice Moore and start fumbling with their coats a little longer than absolutely necessary so they can stare at the movie star (but not forever, of course, this being just about the center of the sophisticated universe).

  Salinger is the first to notice this little drama: “Fame is . . . well, you look over in the corner there at Dudley Moore. Everyone’s staring at him. It’s a loss of privacy.”

  Fame has been a constant and nagging companion to the Salinger family. Catcher in the Rye, published 34 years ago, was precisely the sort of intimate book that (in the words of Holden Caulfield), “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 it.”

  J. D. Salinger is about the last author in the world you could call up on the phone. It’s unfair to speculate on what he felt or why, but something made him stop publishing and keep his distance from the public world. . . .

  Salinger shuns interviews and makes it clear to his family and friends that he would rather not be talked about in public. He gave a brief interview to a girl from a local school in 1953 and to Betty Eppes of the “Fun” section of The Baton Rouge Advocate 27 years later. . . .

  Matt [Salinger says,] “Obnoxious people would show up at the house and start demanding things. There were reporters, photographers, aspiring writers. He was as polite as they were. I just sort of accepted it all like you would a surrealist drama.

  “I see red now when I hear about people bothering him. My father does not want a public life. That’s been clear for many years now. He wants to write for the page and he wants his characters to be on the page and in the readers’ minds. He doesn’t want people to make him into something he’s not. He thinks it’s bad for him and his work to have a public life.”

  Happily not everyone joined in on the crush. “I read my father’s books at the usual age, junior high and after. I love his writing. But my teachers were always sensitive enough not to teach them in the classes I was in, even though they normally would have. That was wonderful that they were so thoughtful.”

  Salinger began his acting career as Mouse Soldier No. 17 in a production of The Nutcracker at Norwich Elementary School in Norwich, Vermont, just across the river from Cornish. At Andover, Salinger had the lead role in Charley’s Aunt, which, he says, “was about the biggest thing I’ve done in theater until now.”

  Dancing in the End Zone is a drama marked by rather preachy writing and a set of conspicuous parallels and symbols. But the acting is strong and Salinger is a boyish, affecting presence on stage. At the opening preview last week, he fumbled his first line slightly, but as the play developed he looked comfortable and his performance was effective. Two highly experienced Broadway actors, Pat Carroll and Laurence Luckinbill, have been sage supports.

  “Matt’s doing great,” Luckinbill says. “He sweats the details. He takes notes on what everyone says. He’s not really that inexperienced. And if he’s young, well, the kid in the play is supposed to be young in feeling. If he’s not, he’s not right.”

  Says producer Morton Gottlieb: “We auditioned about 100 guys for the part and we loved Matt. He’s a wonderful actor and he looks like a football player. When we auditioned him, we didn’t even know if he was related to the writer. It really doesn’t matter. It may get us an extra mention or two in print, but I don’t think anyone goes and buys a ticket because one of the actors is related to J. D. Salinger.”

  In Revenge of the Nerds, Salinger paid a multitude of Hollywood dues. As an apish football player, he somehow managed to ride a tricycle, dress as a woman and join in a group mooning session all within a couple of hours. “Great scenes in cinematic history,” he calls them. Salinger turned down two movie roles to appear in Dancing in the End Zone. For sizable sums he could have beaten hell out of Rob Lowe in St. Elmo’s Fire and polished a Ferrari in Summer Jobs.

  Salinger is more than willing to work in the movies as well as on stage. “I’m getting married to jewelry designer Betsy Becker pretty soon and I do have to think about earning a living,” he says. But Salinger’s stint in Hollywood was not always pleasant.

  “You’re always having meetings with people you have little or no respect for. I’ve had people try to offer me things in exchange for doing something having to do with my father’s work. You know, buy the rights to his work. You want to spit at people like that.

  “When I first started acting I tried to make sure that as few people as possible knew who my father was. I was very self-conscious. My first agent didn’t know and the agent that I’ve got now, her partner didn’t even know until he saw a little squib in Time magazine. But I’ve finally realized that there’s too much money at stake for someone to hire me if I didn’t have any talent.

  “Two years ago when I was first starting out, I never would have done an interview like this because it would have been all about my father. There would have been no purpose. Now there’s a play. Maybe I can help the play.

  “I love my father. I’m not rebellious against him at all. He’s made a decision about how he wants to live. Why would I ever want to violate that in any way? It’s me who’s chosen a more public life. That’s acting. That’s the way it is.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: What’s heartbreaking about these two profiles is the secret father-son compact: People will pretend to be interested in the insignificant play or film in which you, my son, have a minor role, when what they want to hear about is me (which, you suspect, is the reason you got the role in the first place). You, Matthew, will dispense as much information as you need to in order to obtain the publicity, while maintaining a lofty distance toward any such calculation. And woe unto you if you prove to be less pure than I (who sat for a glam-photo shoot and then was shocked to find the photos in wide circulation). It has to be soul-killing. The problem lies in the beginning: Salinger is having it both ways, the way mos
t people do, being contradictory and even hypocritical, the way most people are, but insisting always that he—the author, the creator, the progenitor, the father—is the lone representative of clean hands, of saving spirituality. The Oedipal nature of it all is pretty explicit: Salinger supposedly hating Hollywood but not so secretly loving it, even being obsessed with it; his son seeking to become a successful actor, often playing the preppy monsters his father ridiculed.

  SHARON STEEL: In a letter from Salinger to Michael Mitchell dated December 16, 1992, Salinger wishes Matthew had chosen a profession that didn’t beat him down quite so much and wonders if he’d be happier doing something less “chancey” than “the acting business.”

  18

  ASSASSINS

  LAUREL, MARYLAND, 1972; NEW YORK CITY, 1980; WASHINGTON, D.C., 1981; BRENTWOOD, NEW YORK, 1983; HOLLYWOOD, 1989

  The Catcher in the Rye reemerges in the 1980s, misinterpreted as an assassination manual.

  DAVID SHIELDS: There’s a huge amount of psychic violence in the book; Holden’s voice is full of hellacious fury. If you read the book out of neediness or desperation, you will read Holden’s antipathy to the culture as a license to kill. In the “wrong” hands, read the “wrong” way, the book’s emotional rage can become an endorsement to express your hatred toward “phonies” through violence.