DINTY MOORE: Hinckley settled on assassination as his best strategy to win Foster’s heart, and on March 30, 1981, fired six times at President Ronald Reagan outside of the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. In Hinckley’s hotel room, police found a John Lennon calendar and a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye.
CYRUS NOWRASTEH: When Reagan left the luncheon, he walked out of the hotel. There was a very small group of people waiting to see him, cordoned off by some tape, and John Hinckley was waiting in the group. In fact, he had been there when the president arrived and had wandered around outside the hotel; he had gone inside and come back out. He may have been debating with himself whether he was really going to go through with it.
Something within Hinckley clicked when Reagan emerged from the luncheon, and he pulled the trigger.
J. REID MELOY: John Hinckley talked about how he wanted to be linked forever with Jodie Foster—which, through this act of attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan, he has. In the minds of many people, he’s linked with her, and it’s unlikely she’ll ever forget the name “John Hinckley.”
CYRUS NOWRASTEH: Why repeat the same story? With Hinckley, you’ve got a much sexier cast: it’s Jodie Foster, Taxi Driver, De Niro, Scorsese, people the media can hound and show clips of, and that’s much more immediate than this book, which they’d already covered as the foundation to events.
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ROBERT D. McFADDEN: A teacher’s aide dismissed recently after a fight with a student returned to a Long Island school yesterday, wearing military fatigues and carrying a rifle, shot the youth and the principal, and took 18 students hostage.
Nine hours later, after releasing 17 hostages unharmed in groups and singly through the day and the evening, the gunman, 24-year-old Robert O. Wickes, fatally shot himself in the right temple.
JAMES BARRON: Mr. Wickes was calm, never pointed the gun at the hostages and tried to soothe them when they became nervous. He freed the students who were most uneasy and kept the calmest ones with him the longest. He even consulted some of the students before firing shots.
“He asked me if it was O.K. if he shot a few rounds at the map,” Bryant [a student] said. “He was very polite. I said, ‘Please, no, I get too nervous at guns.’ ”
Inside the second-floor social studies classroom, with a garbage can atop the teacher’s desk to hide behind and shoot if the police stormed the room, Mr. Wickes told the students over and over that he trusted no one and that his dog, Goalie, was his only friend.
Nancy DeSousa, Mr. Gonzalez’s daughter, noted Mr. Wickes’s recent interest in Judaism and said he had been studying Hebrew. He talked of going to Israel, she said. “Bobby was very interested in everything, everything,” she said. “He just was very intelligent.”
Mrs. DeSousa spoke of his love for J. D. Salinger. “Bobby always carried around Catcher in the Rye—it was like his Bible,” she said. “He was more thoughtful than the average boy his age. There’s a deep story here. It’s not just a mad killer with a gun.”
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MARCIA CLARK: During 1989 Robert Bardo had been communicating with Rebecca Schaeffer, sending postcards and letters for quite some time. Initially he wrote to her that she was someone he admired, someone who was not the usual Hollywood starlet type. She responded only twice, with postcards that were very neutral, very nice—thank-you-for-your-support kind of thing—and nothing more. There was nothing personal, nothing that seemed inappropriate at all.
Robert Bardo, who, under the influence of The Catcher in the Rye, killed the actress Rebecca Schaeffer.
J. REID MELOY: What Schaeffer didn’t know was that Bardo had actually come to Los Angeles on a couple of occasions to look for her, driving around the Hollywood Hills because he had read in an article in TV Guide that she lived in the Hollywood Hills and he thought that by just driving around on the streets he would find her. He had come to the Warner Bros. ranch where she was shooting [the television show] My Sister Sam and made contact with the security guard there. Bardo had chocolates and a big teddy bear for her, but the security guard told him, “You’re not going to get to see her and you really ought to go home.” The guard tried to counsel him and actually drove him back to the bus station because he thought he was harmless, a lonely kid who was in love with a star but who would never be seen or heard from again.
On July 18, after he had paid a private investigator in Tucson $250 for Schaeffer’s address, Bardo came to her neighborhood with what could be termed his assassination kit: a CD, a gun, a bag, and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.
STEPHEN BRAUN and CHARISSE JONES: From his parents’ house in a treeless, sun-parched subdivision in Tucson, Robert John Bardo wrote letter after letter to actress Rebecca Schaeffer, missives to another world.
Scrawled shakily in pen, the letters were Bardo’s way of reaching out from the boredom and insignificance of his young life. At 19, a janitor at a succession of hamburger stands, he was on the cusp of manhood, but going nowhere.
Bardo detailed his chaste devotion to the fresh-faced young woman who appeared to him only when his television set glowed. He quoted John Lennon lyrics. He told her he was “a sensitive guy.” In one passage, he explained: “I’m harmless. You could hurt me.”
Just before his journey to Los Angeles, he wrote his sister in Knoxville, Tenn., saying: “I have an obsession with the unattainable and I have to eliminate (something) that I cannot attain.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS: The star of the television series “My Sister Sam” was shot to death outside her apartment here Tuesday, and a man described as “an obsessive fan” was being held today in Arizona in the shooting.
California authorities filed a felony arrest warrant today for the man, Robert John Bardo, 19, of Tucson, Ariz., a former fast-food restaurant worker who was arrested by Tucson police earlier today for running in front of cars.
STEPHEN BRAUN and CHARISSE JONES: Later, acting on information supplied by Bardo, police would find a gun holster in the alley just south of and parallel to Beverly Boulevard. A yellow shirt was found on the roof of a cleaners. And on the roof of a rehabilitation center came a final piece of evidence—a red paperback copy of the novel The Catcher in the Rye.
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J. REID MELOY: It’s important to remember that these three males—Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo—were all in their early to mid-twenties when they did what they did. It takes a young male’s aggression to carry out an act of assassination. These individuals are not just pursuing a celebrity figure; they are intent on killing the celebrity figure. We know murder is an act of young men.
If you are driven by homicidal urges, if you have a desire to kill certain figures, the book becomes a rationale for your killing and for the planning of that assassination. Holden Caulfield feels emotionally impotent. Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo felt emotionally impotent. The gun became the equalizer. The gun brought potency to these young men, for a moment, through their assassinations.
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: Let’s examine the record: The diary purported to be by [Arthur] Bremer, who shot George Wallace [a copy of The Catcher in the Rye was found in Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment after the shooting], contains references to Dostoevsky, especially to Raskolnikov [the main character and murderer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment]. Dostoevsky is thought to be a big inspirer of assassins and bomb throwers—who knows why I find it easier for people to think of Dostoevsky than J. D. Salinger as a terrorist tutor? You’re talking about a very particular kind of assassin, someone who feels neglected and lost, and I do think that Salinger is a great romantic about loneliness, about not being loved or wanted, about not being able to figure out how to move on.
What could be more beautiful? Who didn’t want a masked avenger to protect you if you were the pimply guy whom no one wanted to talk to or who wasn’t let into the room when the clique was meeting? In Salinger’s very last published work [“Hapworth 16, 1924”], Seymour Glass is telling his family that they have superpowers. Buddy can read and memorize a
n entire novel in twenty minutes. They’re a family of superheroes, and they’re warned not to tell the librarians and teachers about their ability. These characters clearly are on earth to rescue the rest of us.
HENRY GRUNWALD: The discussion can easily become obsessive and excessive. Perhaps we should all observe a moratorium on Salinger talk. But we won’t, and [the literary critic] John Wain has explained why not. Wain dislikes “Seymour” for all the usual reasons, and in fact suggests rather plaintively that Salinger brutally maltreats his readers in that story. But, he admits, “We won’t leave. We stay, rooted to the spot. [We’re] not in a position to go elsewhere. Because no one else is offering quite what Mr. Salinger is offering.”
MARK DAVID CHAPMAN: I’m not blaming a book. I blame myself for crawling inside of the book and I certainly want to say J. D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye didn’t cause me to kill John Lennon. In fact, I wrote to J. D. Salinger, I got his box number from someone, and I apologized to him for this. I feel badly about that. It’s my fault. I crawled in, found my pseudo-self within these pages . . . and played out the whole thing. Holden wasn’t violent, but he had a violent thought of shooting someone, of emptying a revolver into this fellow’s stomach, someone that had done him wrong. He was basically a very sensitive person and he probably would not have killed anybody, as I did. But that’s fiction, and reality was standing in front of the Dakota.
John Lennon wasn’t the only person to die because of this. . . . Robert Bardo wrote me three letters. I don’t have them anymore. I tore them up. They were very deranged letters. . . . I got frightened.
DAVID SHIELDS: During a period of four months, a world-famous musician/political activist was killed and the president of the United States was nearly killed, winning admiration for uttering the movie-like line, “I should have ducked.” Both John Hinckley and especially Mark David Chapman cited The Catcher in the Rye as an influence. Salinger drove into Windsor, Vermont, every day to pick up the New York Times, which his letters indicate he read carefully. A large satellite dish was attached to his house; he watched quite a lot of television, including the news. In late 1980 and early 1981 he must have been inundated with information about the role his iconic novel played in these two traumatic events, about which he never made a public comment. Maybe he felt found out. Maybe he thought Chapman and Hinckley had gotten the blood-soaked violence buried within the pages of his beautiful book. Reportedly, in 1979 he pulled back a story—already in galleys—from the New Yorker at the last minute. He never published another story or book, never even came very close, and it’s difficult to believe Chapman and Hinckley weren’t forever standing guard at the gates of his imagination.
ETHEL NELSON: I remember seeing Jerry a week or so after John Lennon was murdered. Jerry was walking the streets alone, head down. I said hi to him and he walked by without even saying hi. And I knew him since 1953.
PART IV
SANNYASA
RENUNCIATION OF THE WORLD
19
A PRIVATE CITIZEN
CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1981–2010
For the past two decades [1966–86] I have elected, for personal reasons, to leave the public spotlight entirely. I have shunned all publicity for over twenty years and I have not published any material during that time. I have become, in every sense of the word, a private citizen.
J. D. Salinger
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger spent 1950–80 crafting a myth. He will spend 1980–2010 fighting to control, protect, and defend that myth. He’s in a defensive crouch—battling his daughter, his former lover, his would-be biographer. He loves to hate them, to see in them only ego. He’s partly right: the world provides minute-by-minute proof of human corruption. But in Salinger’s flexible moral compass, his nonabsolute absolutism, one can see ego as well. This contradiction doesn’t sit well with the Salinger purity narrative, and so he moves to quash rumors of his human foibles, anxiously managing his image while pretending to be above any such base considerations. Salinger is a man hungrily alive to the sound of his own righteousness. His message to Ian Hamilton, Joyce Maynard, and Margaret Salinger: “I don’t know who you are,” which for him is the definition of oblivion. Complicating irony: in his zeal to save himself, he destroys himself—his reputation, his writing life, his relationships with friends, loved ones, family members.
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S. J. PERELMAN: [After a visit to Martha’s Vineyard] I ended up spending a night with Jerry Salinger, up on the Vermont border, in his aerie. We hadn’t seen each other for six years, and I’m glad to report that he looks fine, feels fine, and is working hard, so you can dispel all those rumors, manufactured in Hollywood by the people to whom he won’t sell Catcher in the Rye, to the effect that he has taken leave of his senses.
ANDREAS BROWN: Through the years, Salinger would come into the store five or six times a year, usually with his son. He normally made a beeline for the philosophy/religion alcove, and if Mrs. Steloff, who founded our store, was in, he’d sit and talk with her for a considerable length of time. His demeanor in our store was this: If he needed something, he would talk to the staff. We treated him offhandedly, as if he was nobody, because that’s the way he wanted to be treated. We would help him, quote books for him we thought he might be interested in, and search for books for him on occasion. But if a fan came up to him and wanted to strike up a conversation or wanted him to sign something or talk to him, he would excuse himself and almost always leave the store. People would always want him to explain why Holden Caulfield did something in chapter seven—that sort of thing. Or they’d ask him what he meant by something in Franny and Zooey. They’d be playing college sophomore. Then again, more than one generation has grown up with Salinger.
The first time he brought in Matt, I thought to myself, “That’s Holden Caulfield, he’s stepping right off the paperback,” because Matt had his baseball cap sideways or backwards at a time when kids didn’t wear baseball caps that way. This little kid came into the store looking just like that, and he’d be completely disinterested in what his father was doing. He’d find the cartoon books. He could sit on the floor for hours looking at Charles Addams.
CATHERINE CRAWFORD: One example of the lengths that fans will go to get Salinger’s attention was when a number of high school kids devised this elaborate plan, and they actually threw one of their friends out of a car. They drove by his house, and they had covered the kid in ketchup to make him look bloody and he landed on the ground outside of Salinger’s house, moaning, rolling around. Salinger came to the window, took one look and knew it was fake, so he shut the blinds and went back to work.
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DAVID SHIELDS: In 1981 Elaine Joyce, one of the stars of Mr. Merlin, a sitcom, received a fan letter from Salinger—the same M.O. he followed with countless other young, talented, beautiful women. A correspondence ensued.
PAUL ALEXANDER: As he had with Maynard, Salinger eventually arranged for [himself and Elaine Joyce] to meet. Subsequently a relationship developed. They spent a lot of time in New York. “We were very, very private,” she says, “but you do what you do when you date—you shop, you go to dinner, you go to the theater. It was just as he wanted it.” In May 1982, when the press reported Salinger showing up for an opening night at a dinner theater in Jacksonville, Florida, where Joyce was appearing in the play 6 Rms Riv Vu, to conceal their affair she denied knowing him. “We were involved for a few years through the middle eighties,” Joyce says. “You could say there was romance.” Eventually the romance ended and, ironically enough, she moved on to marry the playwright Neil Simon.
SHANE SALERNO: After his brief relationship with Elaine Joyce, Salinger dated Janet Eagleson, who was much closer to Salinger’s age than most of the women he dated.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Janet Eagleson, August 9, 1982:
The more I age, senesce, the more convinced I am that our chances of getting through to any intact sets of reasons for the way things go are nil. Oh, we’re allowed any
number of comically solemn assessments—the burning of “Rosebud” the adored sled, or, no less signally, the burning of the new governess’s backside—but all real clues to our preferences, stopgaps, arrivals, departures, etc., remain endlessly hidden. The only valid datum, anywhere, I suspect, is the one the few gnanis adamantly put forward: that we’re not who or what we thing [sic] we are, not persons at all, but susceptible to myriad penalties for thinking we’re persons and minds. . . .
I’m o.k., I think, and so is Matthew, thanks for asking. He’s in California, at the moment. Talking to actors’ agents, etc. My other kid, Peggy, is off to Oxford for two years, on some sort of academic scholarship. She and her mother are looking rather exalted about it. Exemplary achievers, both of them, mother and daughter.
MYLES WEBER: In 1982 an aspiring writer named Steven Kunes submitted an interview with J. D. Salinger to People. The magazine prepared to publish it. Salinger caught wind of the hoax, brought suit against Kunes, and stopped publication of the interview.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Janet Eagleson, August 9, 1982:
I’m in the middle of some legal action, irritating and wearying, and probably hopeless. Meaning that no sooner is one opportunist and parasite dealt with than the next guy turns up. Some prick took out a whole page ad in the Sunday Times Book Section pretending it was me or my doing. It, too, shall pass, no doubt, as Louis B. Mayer once said, but it would be nice to know when.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: According to the suit, Mr. Kunes “offered for sale to People magazine a completely fictitious ‘interview’ with J. D. Salinger” and misrepresented it as “a transcript of an actual interview.” “The fraudulent interview,” the suit adds, “grossly distorts and demeans the plaintiff’s character, it misrepresents the plaintiff’s opinion, and it falsely imitates his style.”
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