Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea

by Peter Benchley

  I tried to save a couple of days each week for work of my own (a very writerly thing to say, full of promise that from my spare time would spring a Ulysses for the 1970s or a seminal exegesis of the Dead Sea Scrolls). The results were, mostly, short stories that didn’t sell to The New Yorker and film scripts that didn’t sell to anyone. Since there was no room to work at home and I couldn’t afford a proper office, I rented, for fifty dollars a month, an empty back room in the Pennington Furnace Supply Company. The manufacture and repair of furnaces isn’t the quietest of businesses, nor the most conducive to the flowering of the creative imagination, but since the garden of my imagination appeared to be producing only weeds, little seemed to be lost to the music of sledgehammers against sheet metal.

  I was very fortunate to have a literary agent. As a favor to my father, one of his agents, a kindly and generous woman named Roberta Pryor, had taken me on when I was sixteen and had—mirabile dictu—actually sold a short story of mine when I was twenty. (I received one fan letter, from a woman who pronounced the story the single most execrable piece of rubbish she had ever read.) In my early twenties I had written a nonfiction book about a journey around the world, and it had sold out its only edition: five thousand copies, I recall, most of which I’m certain were bought by my grandmother. Still, my freelance income was hardly enough to reimburse the agency for postage spent on my behalf.

  Roberta refused to give up on me and encouraged me to have lunch with editors from publishing houses, a ritual that provided countless writers with vitally necessary meals and encouragement and, now and then, even generated a viable book idea.

  I kept two arrows in my quiver expressly for those lunches. One was a nonfiction idea about pirates—as in, a history of. Pirates had always interested me. The other idea was for a fictional story about a great white shark that lays siege to a resort community. Folded in my wallet was a yellowed 1964 clipping from the New York Daily News that reported the capture of a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island. I would brandish it at the first hint of disbelief that such an animal could exist, let alone that it might attack boats and eat people.

  I believe implicitly, though without a shred of evidence, that every male child on earth is, at some period in his life, fascinated—enraptured! enthralled!—by sharks or dinosaurs or both. Most of us outgrow our obsession. A few—we happy few, we band of brothers—are able to indulge it throughout our lives. I spent my summers, from 1949 to 1961 and occasionally beyond, on the island of Nantucket, whose waters were well populated by sharks: sand sharks, blue sharks, and, once in a great while, a mako. I fished frequently, and on hot and windless oil-calm days the Atlantic Ocean surrounding Nantucket sprouted shark fins like asparagus spears. To me they spoke of the unknown, the mysterious, of menace, prehistory, and adventure—and (when I’d get carried away) of primeval evil.

  I had read most of the accessible literature about sharks—there wasn’t much—and had seen Blue Water, White Death, the 1971 feature film that, for me, remains the finest documentary ever made about sharks. So I knew as much as any civilian about sharks, and I could spin my idea into a yarn sufficient to justify the lunch tab.

  Editors went away interested and armed with a vague pledge from me to write an outline—sometime, about something to do with sharks—and I went away and didn’t write the outline.

  Then, one midday, I had lunch with Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, and when he returned to his office he had the temerity to violate all the rules of the ritual: he called Roberta and offered to pay me money—one thousand dollars—for the first four chapters of an untitled shark novel, to be applied against an overall advance of seventy-five hundred dollars, which would be paid when—and, most critically, if—I delivered a complete and acceptable manuscript.

  Of course, I fell headfirst into the trap. A thousand dollars was exactly a thousand dollars more than I had at the time; it was nearly half a year’s tuition at our children’s school; it was … well, hell, thirty years ago a thousand dollars was real money.

  I signed the paper, took the money, cashed the check, didn’t write the four chapters until Roberta told me I’d have to either write them or return the money (which, naturally, had vanished). Then I did write the four chapters, and Tom didn’t like them because I had tried to write them funny. (A funny thriller about a shark eating people is, I soon realized, a nearly perfect oxymoron.) I rewrote the pages, and Tom liked them, so I continued with the rest of the story, which didn’t proceed anywhere near as easily as I’m making it appear, but which did, at last, get done, after more than a year of writing and rewriting.

  There were problems with the jacket design of the book. One version was rejected by Doubleday salesmen, who said they couldn’t sell a book that looked so disgusting: it brought to mind, they claimed, the Freudian nightmare of the vagina dentata. Another was too boring. Another was black. Then Doubleday’s artistic genius, Alex Gotfryd, found the perfect combination of erotic symbolism (Freudian, but nobody said so), blatant (but acceptable) sexuality, and horror.

  There was a problem with the title: we didn’t have one. Half an hour before the book was to go into production, there was still no title. Tom and I sat over lunch at a steakhouse called the Dallas Cowboy and reviewed some of the more than a hundred titles we had tried. I had come up with titles reminiscent of French novels in vogue at the time, like A Stillness in the Water and The Silence of Death. There were monster titles: Leviathan, Leviathan Rising, The Jaws of Leviathan. There was White Death and The Jaws of Death and Summer of the Shark. My father contributed Wha’s That Noshin’ on My Laig? and (for the hard-core crowd) Cunna Linga Here No Longa.

  Finally, when we had finished lunch and Tom had paid the check, I said, “Look, there’s no way we’re gonna agree on a title. There’s only one word we agree on, so let’s make that the title. Let’s call it Jaws.”

  Tom thought for a moment, then agreed. “At least it’s short.”

  I called my father and told him the title.

  “What’s it mean?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But at least it’s short.”

  I called Roberta and told her the title. “That’s terrible,” she said. “What’s it mean?”

  “Beats me,” I replied. “But it sure is short.”

  Though no one liked it much, no one had a better idea, so no one disagreed. After all, they reasoned, what we have here is a first novel, and nobody reads first novels, anyway. Besides, it’s a first novel about a fish, for God’s sake, and who cares? At least it’s done.

  Furthermore—and as a final dose of reality—we all loudly agreed that there wasn’t a chance that anybody would ever make a movie out of the book. I knew it was impossible to catch and train a great white shark, and everybody else knew that Hollywood’s special-effects technology was nowhere near sophisticated enough to make a credible model of a great white shark.

  So we called it Jaws, and put it to bed, and that, for the time being, was that.

  The book was published in the spring of 1974, to generally favorable reviews. Though the reviewer for Time dismissed it, the Newsweek critic liked it well enough. The Washington Post loved it, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times liked it a lot, but with reservations. I thought that the last line of his review—“Read ‘Jaws,’ by all means read it, and see if you agree”—was a great “money” line and should be plastered all over every ad (with the minor deletion of the few useless words “and see if you agree”), but Doubleday hesitated to mutilate a quote from a Times review.

  Nor would they use in their ad campaign my all-time favorite review. Fidel Castro, in an interview with Frank Mankiewicz for National Public Radio, pronounced Tiburon (Jaws in its Spanish editions) not merely a popular fiction but (I’m paraphrasing here) a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism. Other reviews declared the book to be an allegory about Watergate and a classic story of male bonding, which Doubleday also declined to publicize.

&n
bsp; Jaws was not, in hardcover, the gargantuan best-seller that legend has made it. It climbed slowly up the best-seller list of The New York Times Book Review, and though it lingered on the list for forty-four weeks, it never made it to number one. An obstinate book about a rabbit, Watership Down, refused to relinquish the number one slot and relegated Jaws to months at the bridesmaid’s position.

  Nor did it sell anywhere near the number of hardcover copies that a comparable best-seller would today. Nowadays, a novel by Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, or Danielle Steele may sell as many as two million hardcover copies, cover-priced at around twenty-five dollars.

  Jaws, priced at $6.95 in hardcover, sold something in the neighborhood of 125,000 copies. If you think that I, as the author, should be able to offer numbers more precise than “in the neighborhood,” you’re right, but unpredictable returns, multiple editions, and so forth make it difficult to do so.

  The story in paperback was entirely different. Sales figures were, if anything, underestimated. It was number one for months on lists all over the world. In the United States alone it sold more than nine million copies. But that success had to do, in part, with the release of the movie, with brilliant cross-promotion by the paperback publisher and the movie company, and with phenomenal good luck.

  Film rights to Jaws had been bought, for $150,000, by Universal Pictures on behalf of Richard Zanuck and David Brown, two of the few true gentlemen in the movie business. Thoughtful, generous, and honest, Messrs. Zanuck and Brown are widely known for two qualities rare in Hollywood: they don’t lie, and they do return phone calls. They permitted me to write a couple of the early drafts of the screenplay, and—knowing that in the heart of many writers lives a secret ham—they actually cast me in the film.

  The movie went into production not long after the book was published, which provided additional publicity momentum. I visited the set, played the role of the TV reporter on the beach on the Fourth of July, was cast by the press as being in constant conflict with Steven Spielberg—which was not true but which, through repeated telling, nearly became self-fulfilling—and tried, meanwhile and unsuccessfully, to live a normal life.

  Sometime during that hectic spring and summer of 1974, John Wilcox, producer of ABC’s venerable television show The American Sportsman, contacted me through an old friend to ask if I’d be interested in traveling to Australia to do a show about going into the water (in a cage, of course) with great white sharks. Sportsman, which ran for twenty years, from 1966 to 1986, was among the first and best of the “magazine-format” sports shows. Each week it ran three or four segments that featured celebrities from one field participating, as rank amateurs, in one or another outdoor sport. A movie actor might go bass fishing; a baseball player might try bird shooting; John Denver would observe polar bears in the wild (and exclaim, time and time again, “Far out!”), and old chums with legions of nostalgic fans, like Bing Crosby and Phil Harris, would perform duets and exchange light banter while fly fishing and reminiscing by a campfire.

  Thus far, Wilcox hadn’t produced any scuba-diving segments because there hadn’t been any demand for them. Where was the excitement or entertainment in taking a movie camera under water, where the celebrity couldn’t talk, and filming fish swimming around on a reef?

  Jaws and the tumult attendant on it led Wilcox to believe that sharks—unseen, malevolent, and, best of all, man-eaters—could produce … oh, well, the pun is unavoidable … monster ratings.

  I was a certified diver, though by no means a confidently experienced one. Years earlier, while earning my certification in the Bahamas, I had seen a shark in the distance, minding its own business, and my reaction had been commonplace: panic. I grabbed my instructor by the arm, pointed at the meandering shark, gestured that it was time for us to surface, and when he calmly refused, breathed so deeply and so rapidly that I sucked my tank dry.

  So I agreed to journey to Australia for ABC, on one condition: that I could bring with me one of the handful of people who had ever been in the water with white sharks: Stan Waterman, a cameraman and associate producer on Blue Water, White Death, a pioneer in scuba diving who was often referred to as “America’s Cousteau,” and most important, a neighbor and close friend whom I would trust with my life.

  It sounded like fun. After spending the last year and a half locked up in a room alone, writing, it would be a welcome relief, an adventure, a unique experience to recount to my grandchildren, with suitable embellishments, of course.

  As with the writing and publishing of Jaws and the writing, shooting, and release of the subsequent movie—and, in fact, as with most of the rest of my life to that point—I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was about to get myself into.

  6

  South Australia, 1974

  Part III

  We flew to Adelaide, South Australia, and from there across Spencer Gulf to Port Lincoln, a rugged frontier town in a neighborhood rife with optimistic place-names like Coffin Bay and—our destination—Dangerous Reef.

  This was the world of the great white shark and the home of Rodney Fox. Fox had become a national hero in Australia, introducing the Blue Water, White Death crew to the great whites of South Australia and embarking on a career as a shark expert, tour guide, and conservationist. Even back then, Rodney knew ten times more than anyone else, scientist or civilian, about great whites, and he was the only individual in the known world who had any notion of how to attract them and film them, under water, in relative safety.

  It was Rodney who had built the cages, he who had chartered the boats and hired the crews and bought the dead horse to use as bait and minced the chum and convinced me that I would be perfectly safe in the cage that was now being hammered to rubble by two thousand–plus pounds of maddened, panicked, and, seemingly, enraged great white shark.

  It was Rodney’s name that I invoked in vain as I was slammed about in the cage, envisioning myself reduced from a suddenly successful writer to a surf-’n’-turf snack for a prehistoric monster.

  The curious thing was not merely that I wasn’t afraid but that I knew I wasn’t afraid. In all the turmoil, the violence, the confusion, the darkness—the sensory overload—my brain made room for a conscious observation about itself. We had departed the realm of fear, my brain and I, and emerged into a peaceful pocket of detached observation. I felt no pain, save for the odd ache accompanying the thunk of my insulated bones against the bars. I watched my stubby rubber fingers plucking futilely at the little rubber ring that held the knife in its sheath. Every movement looked slow and deliberate, as if the “play” mechanism in my mental VCR had been slowed to “frame advance.”

  The noise was raucous, each sound distinct and surprising: the hollow, metallic whang of the cage slamming against the hull of the boat; the subdued whoosh as a ton of shark flesh lashed wildly through the water; the bubbles blasting both from me and from the rippling gill slits of the huge frightened animal; and, so far in the distance that they might have been imaginary or the relics of a resurrected dream, shrill shards of human voices.

  Even my own survival had become a matter more of interest than of anxiety.

  The cage began to move, scraping along the bottom of the boat, and now there was light enough for me to see that we—the shark, the cage, and I—were somehow still connected to the boat above. With a thrust of its tail, the giant body lunged upward and forward.

  What’s this? Now it wants to board the boat?

  Suddenly, with swiftness and grace and in complete silence, the shark slid backward and down, turned, and swam away. The rope had disappeared from its mouth. I had a final glimpse of its tail, and then the shark was gone, absorbed into the misty blue fabric of the sea.

  The cage righted itself, but because one of its floating tanks had been punctured, it hung askew. Someone above pulled on the rope, and I felt myself moving up toward the light. Through the moving glassy plane of the surface I saw faces, grotesquely distorted, staring down at me from the boat and, a b
ull’s-eye in their center, the round black eye of the ABC Sports camera lens.

  Once on board, I described my ordeal for the camera, nearly weeping with relief.

  Rodney, who had undergone (forget merely seen) circumstances infinitely worse, enthused with complimentary expostulations like, “You’re mad!”

  Stan, gifted with a silver tongue, an affection for eighteenth-century diction, and an infinite capacity for ironic flattery, said, “Tell me, sir, is it true that you don’t know the very meaning of fear?”

  Not till I described what I thought had gone wrong and inquired as to what had, in fact, gone wrong was there an awkward pause. Most of the crew seemed unaware that anything had gone wrong, and those few who did know seemed less than eager to discuss the matter.

  I chanced then to look up at the flying bridge, where my wife, Wendy, was leaning on the railing and watching with wry amusement the scene below on the stern. We’d been married for ten years by then, and from her expression I knew immediately that she knew everything, from exactly what had gone wrong to who and what had been involved in correcting it. I was confident, too, that whatever had transpired, she had played a role in its satisfactory outcome.

  As indeed she had.

  In 1974 much of Australia, particularly such outlying states as South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territories, was socially equivalent to Tombstone, Arizona, in the 1880s or Hanover, New Hampshire, in the 1920s. Binge drinking was a national pastime, fistfighting was accepted as entertainment and a valid means of self-expression, and women were regarded as fragile workhorses, delicate termagants, and necessary evils. (A joke of the time asked, “What’s Australian foreplay?” The answer: “Brace yourself, Shirley!”)

  Wendy and I stayed overnight in the Tasman Hotel in Port Lincoln, and when we went downstairs for a drink, we discovered that she was not permitted access to the bar; she could get a drink only in the ladies’ lounge.