Catch As Catch Can

by Joseph Heller

  After Rome was captured by my squadron executive officer, the fighting rapidly moved northward. By the middle of June French forces captured Leghorn, where broken blocks of stone from the battle still lie near the docks and will probably remain forever. On August 13 the Americans were in Florence. Before the Germans evacuated the city and moved up into the mountains beyond, they blew up the bridges across the Arno River; they hesitated about the Ponte Vecchio and then blew the approaches instead, leaving the old bridge standing. The damage at both ends of the Ponte Vecchio has been restored with buildings of stone and design similar to those around them, and only a searching eye can detect that the destruction of the war ever touched there.

  Perugia, Arezzo, Orvieto, Siena and Poggibonsi were all on our side of the action now. Pisa was captured on September 2, and the Germans pulled back along the flat coastal land to take positions in the mountains past Carrara. This was the Gothic Line now, extending clear across the country to the Adriatic; they were able to hold it all through the winter and far into the following spring. It was not until the middle of April that the Allies were able to push through to Bologna, and by then the war in Europe was all but over.

  Rome, Siena and Florence had all been given over by the Germans in fairly good condition. In the tiny village of Saint Anna, high up in the mountains, past the marble quarries of Carrara, some seven hundred inhabitants, the entire population, were massacred by the German army in reprisal for the killing of two soldiers. When the deadline came and the town did not produce the guilty partisans, every house was set on fire, and the people were gunned down as they fled into the streets. One can only wonder why people so indifferent to the lives of other human beings would be so sparing of their cities. Perhaps it’s because they expected to come back.

  Every spring now they do come back, as German tourists thirsting for the sun. Unmarried girls, I have heard, descend in great, aggressive crowds on Rimini and other spots along the Adriatic shore in a determined quest for sunburns, sex and sleep, in that order. On the western coast, where we stayed for several weeks on a fourteen-mile stretch of sand beach known as the Versilian Riviera, menus, signs, notices and price lists are printed in four languages—Italian, English, French and German. This area includes Viareggio, Camaiore, Pietrasanta, Forte dei Marmi. There was no doubt in June that German families were the main visiting group. By the beginning of July, they had all but vanished. Every year, we were told, they come early and depart before July. The Tuscans, who dislike the Germans with well-guarded propriety, sometimes hint that the Germans leave so soon because the high season starts and rates go up. I suspect there is something more. By July Italy turns hot; there is warm weather closer to home.

  The Hotel Byron in Forte dei Marmi is an inexpensive jewel of a family hotel. The rooms are comfortable, the food is meticulously prepared, and the setting is beautiful; but more delightful than any of these are the owner, the manager, the concierge and the entire staff of maids and waiters, who are all exquisitely sweet, polite, accommodating and sympathetic. They would fall to brooding if I snapped at my daughter or my son looked unhappy. A brief compliment to any one member of the staff was enough to bring us grateful smiles from all the rest. This was true in almost every restaurant and hotel in Italy. In Italy a word of praise, particularly for an endeavor of personal service, goes a very long way toward creating happiness.

  The owner of the hotel had served in Africa with the Italian army and could tell me nothing from his own experience about the war in Italy. I did not tell anyone at the hotel about mine, for we had flown many missions to targets in this area. We bombed the bridges at Viareggio at least once, those at Pietrasanta at least four times.

  I was soon very curious to visit Pietrasanta because of a strange war memorial near the road bridge there. The bridge was new and smooth and spanned a shallow river no wider than a city street, which helped explain why it had been bombed so frequently—it was so easy to repair. The war memorial was a bombed-out house that the people of Pietrasanta had decided to leave standing as an eternal reminder of the German occupation. I almost smiled at the incongruity, for the building stood so close to the bridge that it must certainly have been destroyed by bombs from American planes. On the new bridge was a memorial of another kind, which I found more moving—a small tablet for a girl named Rosa who had been killed there by an automobile not long before.

  One day my wife thought she recognized Henry Moore, the famous English sculptor, having lunch at the hotel. The manager confirmed it. It was indeed Henry Moore. He owned property in Forte dei Marmi and had many acquaintances around Viareggio and Pietrasanta. Shortly after that we met Stanley Bleifeld, a sculptor from Weston, Connecticut, and his wife. That made two sculptors we had come upon here in a short period of time, and Bleifeld told us about others—Jacques Lipchitz, who owns a spectacular mountain villa on the way to Lucca, and Bruno Lucchesi, who sells, it is said with envy, everything he produces, and many more sculptors who come to this part of Italy every summer to work and play. They work in bronze, which is cast in Pietrasanta in the foundry of Luigi Tommasi, who thinks they are crazy.

  He thinks they are crazy because of the work they do and the money they pay him to have it finished. Tommasi is a smiling, handsome man of about forty in blue Bermuda shorts and dust. His basic source of income is religious objects and, I suppose, leaning towers of Pisa—good, durable items of established appeal. But he is happy to set this work aside every summer when his artists arrive. Neither he nor his workers can convince themselves that the clay models they receive are deliberate; he has, however, given up trying to correct the errors he sees, for he has found in the past that such good intentions have not been appreciated. His foundry is a striking treasure house of works in various stages of progress. As we walked through, Bleifeld could not restrain himself from flicking out nervously with his thumbnail at a piece of residue on a casting of one of his own works, while a young laborer regarded him coolly. In the yard stood a tall and swarming statue by Lipchitz, a fecund and suggestive work of overpowering force and beauty that will soon stand before a building in California.

  Florence is the nearest large city to Forte dei Marmi, and we went there often to revisit the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Botticelli and to buy earrings for my daughter. Florence is the best city in the world in which to have nothing to do, for it offers so much that is worth doing. Except to my son; he had nothing to do but review all the uncomfortable places he had visited. One evening in Florence we all went to the race track to watch the trotters. Children are admitted, and many play politely on the grass in back of the grandstand or sit on the benches with their parents and watch the horses run. The minimum bet is small. The race track is a family affair, social and safe. My son picked four straight winners and came out eight dollars ahead. The next day he no longer wanted to go home. He wanted to go back to the race track. There were no races that night, so I took him to the opera instead. After that he wanted to go home.

  Soon he was a step nearer, for we were leaving Italy by train, on our way to Avignon. We arrived in a debilitating heat wave that settled for days over all of southern Europe. My family had never heard of Avignon before from anyone but me, just as most of us in Corsica had never heard of Avignon before the day we were sent there to bomb the bridge spanning the River Rhône. One exception was a lead navigator from New England who had been a history teacher before the war and was overjoyed in combat whenever he found himself in proximity to places that had figured importantly in his studies. As our planes drew abreast of Orange and started to turn south to the target, he announced on the intercom:

  “On our right is the city of Orange, ancestral home of the kings of Holland and of William III, who ruled England from 1688 to 1702.”

  “And on our left,” came back the disgusted voice of a worried radio gunner from Chicago, “is flak.”

  We had known from the beginning that the mission was likely to be dangerous, for three planes had been assigned to precede
the main formations over the target, spilling out scraps of metallic paper through a back window in order to cloud the radar of the anti-aircraft guns. As a bombardier in one of those planes, I had nothing to do but hide under my flak helmet until the flak stopped coming at us and then look back at the other planes to see what was happening. One of them was on fire, heading downward in a gliding spiral that soon tightened into an uncontrolled spin. I finally saw some billowing parachutes. Three men got out. Three others didn’t and were killed. One of those who parachuted was found and hidden by some people in Avignon and was eventually brought safely back through the lines by the French underground. On August 15, the day of the invasion of southern France, we flew to Avignon again. This time three planes went down, and no men got out. A gunner in my plane got a big wound in his thigh. I took care of him. I went to visit him in the hospital the next day. He looked fine. They had given him blood, and he was going to be all right. But I was in terrible shape; and I had twenty-three more missions to fly.

  Therewas the war, in Avignon, not in Rome or Île Rousse or Poggibonsi or even Ferrara, when I was too new to be frightened; but now no one in Avignon wanted to talk about anything but the successful summer arts festival that was just ending.

  More people had come than ever before, and the elated officials in charge of this annual tourist promotion were already making plans for doing still better the following year.

  Avignon subsists largely on tourism, I was told, and this surprised me, for the city is small. It is so small that the windows of our bedrooms, at the rear of the building, were right across a narrow street from what I took to be a saloon and what the people at the hotel hinted was a house of ill repute. A woman with a coarse, loud voice laughed and shouted and sang until four in the morning. When she finally shut up, a baker next door to her began chopping dough. The following day I asked to have our rooms changed, and the man at the desk understood and advised me not to visit the place across the street from the back of the hotel.

  “It is a very bad place,” he observed regretfully, as though he was wishing to himself that it were a much better one. He transferred us to rooms in the front of the hotel, overlooking a lovely dining patio with an enormous tree in the center that shaded the tables and chairs.

  A day later we were traveling by train again, my tour of battlefields over. It had brought me only to scenes of peace and to people untroubled by the threat of any new war. Oddly, it was in neutral little Switzerland, after I had given up and almost lost interest, that I finally found, unexpectedly, my war. It came to me right out of the blue from a portly, amiable middle-aged Frenchman whom we met during our trip on one of those toy-like Swiss trains that ply dependably over and through the mountains between Montreux and Interlaken.

  He spoke no English and smoked cigarettes incessantly, and he stopped us at one station from making a wrong change of trains. He was going to Interlaken, too, to spend his vacation with a friend who owned a small chalet in a village nearby. That morning he had parted from his wife and son in Montreux; they had boarded the train to Milan to visit Italy, where his son wanted to go.

  He volunteered this information about his family so freely that I did not hesitate to inquire when he would be rejoined by his wife.

  Then it came, in French, in a choked and muffled torrent of words, the answer to the questions I hadn’t asked. He began telling us about his son, and his large eyes turned shiny and filled with tears.

  His only boy, adopted, had been wounded in the head in the war in Indochina and would never be able to take care of himself. He could go nowhere alone. He was only thirty-four years old now and had lain in a hospital for seven years. “It is bad,” the man said, referring to the wound, the world, the weather, the present, the future. Then, for some reason, he said to me, “You will find out, you will find out.” His voice shook. The tears were starting to roll out now through the corners of his eyes, and he was deeply embarrassed. The boy was too young, he concluded lamely, by way of apologizing to us for the emotion he was showing, to have been hurt so badly for the rest of his life.

  With that, he turned away and walked to the other end of the car. My wife was silent. The children were subdued and curious.

  “Why was he crying?” asked my boy.

  “What did he say?” my daughter asked me.

  What can you tell your children today that will not leave them frightened and sad?

  “Nothing,” I answered.

  JOSEPH HELLER TALKS ABOUT CATCH - 22*

  For me, turning Catch-22 into a film was quite easy since I had nothing to do with it. I solved the problem very quickly back in 1962 by stepping out. I really didn’t give a damn what happened to it once I sold it to Columbia Pictures and the first check cleared.

  That may sound surprising, and maybe even corrupt, but I don’t really think there are so many good movies made that I could have realistically expected a good one to be made out of my book. So I didn’t care if they never made it at all, or if they put the Three Stooges in it.

  Of course, I had to do a great job of acting during the next four or five years because most people I met were desperately concerned that “they” not spoil my book, or that “they do justice to it,” and I had to pretend I was equally concerned. But I really wasn’t. I was so little concerned, in fact, that even though I had the right to do the first script—the studio didn’t have to use it, just pay me for it—I very early waived that right. I didn’t want to do a movie script of Catch-22 because then I would have to be concerned with what came out. And I knew that the script writer has very little control over a movie.

  When the novel was published in 1961, inquiries about stage rights and movie rights began to come in. There would be calls from producers and directors to my agent asking, “Are the movie rights available?” and she would say, “Yes” and they’d say, “I’ll get back to you” and then she’d never hear from them again.

  The truth was that nobody at any of the studios really wanted the movie rights to Catch-22 because the people who read for studios really don’t read. They just read the best-seller lists, and what they like to buy are best-selling books or hit plays. Well, Catch-22, which never did make the New York Times best-seller list, was like a blight to all these studio executives, a plague, a swarm of gnats, because actors and directors began calling up in growing numbers and insisting that the studio buy Catch-22 and that they be allowed to make it. But the studios didn’t want to have anything to do with it. In the first place, as I said, it was not a best seller. Secondly, these people at the top couldn’t figure out what sort of book it really was. If any of them did try to read it, I’m sure they stopped at about page eight and said, “There’s no love story here. What’s missing from this plot is a girl who dies from leukemia in her early twenties and makes millions of dollars for us.”

  So when I would meet with executives of movie companies I could detect an active dislike on their part even before I revealed that unpleasant side of my personality which might have stimulated it. I was a problem with which they didn’t want to contend.

  On the other hand, there were a few people who really did want the book and did see it as a motion picture. Orson Welles, for example. In 1962 or 1963 I was in London and Welles called me up on the phone. It had been a strange week for me because the phone had rung the day before, too, and it had been Bertrand Russell calling to say he’d like to meet me. I did go to Wales to meet him and it was one of the more thrilling experiences I have had.

  And now here was Orson Welles saying he liked the book and would do anything, would give anything, to be allowed to make the movie. He asked me to talk with Mr. Mike Frankovich, who at the time was with Columbia Pictures, and to tell him that he would come to London and get down on his knees because he would do anything he could to make Catch-22 into a movie. So I did talk with Frankovich about allowing Orson Welles to make the movie, and before I had hardly begun Mike was shaking his head saying, “He goes over budget and he goes over schedule and
he changes his mind in the middle of a movie. There’s no chance of Orson Welles making this movie for us.” Then, when I got back to the States, I read two interviews with Orson Welles by John Crosby in the New York Herald Tribune, which was still being published then, and in both of them Welles spoke about his need, his craving, to be the one to make Catch-22 into a movie. It was his feeling, he said, that Catch-22 was the book that could be turned into the movie of the mid-century.

  So it was a real irony that Orson Welles wound up being in the movie, in a bit part that anyone could have played.

  Well, my lawyer at that time—he’s a kind of Svengali—finally managed to lure two studios into a reluctant auction for Catch-22. I didn’t need money particularly, because I had a very good job as an advertising man, but I wanted money desperately, for good as this very good job was, I hated it. Then, just as things were heating up in the bidding, the man negotiating for one of the companies dropped dead. So there was only one studio left and that was Columbia and Columbia did eventually buy the movie rights.

  But it wasn’t that easy. Negotiations over movies are endless. Just when you’re shaking hands and think you’ve reached an agreement, each side tries to sneak in certain things that nobody, until that moment, had even thought of. I know that my contract with Columbia eventually covered everything. It even covers sweatshirt rights and breakfast cereal rights. They own them. But I did retain TV and stage rights and am already in the process of exercising them.