Scott Donaldson

by John Cheever

  What most struck Cheever was the regularity that Playboy owner Hugh Hefner imposed on himself, his club, and his employees. Rigorous rules obtained. Bunnies were not to date customers. The bunny who served him was saving up to cure her father of Parkinson’s disease. Every day of the week, there was a set menu. “If this is Tuesday, it must be pot roast.” Hefner circumscribed his own existence, too, never going out, always wearing pajamas, living in a kind of aphrodisiacal paradise that was also a sort of prison. The whole pattern mirrored Cheever’s concern for order in lives that might otherwise go off the rails.

  When Mailer, Robert Lowell, and other writers made their 1966 march on Washington, Cheever stayed in Ossining. He was opposed to the Vietnam War, but not at all sure what to do to end it. If he went to Washington, he speculated, he would probably suffer an attack of agoraphobia and/or acquire a hangover. Besides, he doubted whether demonstrating would serve any useful purpose other than “making a physical declaration of where one stands.” Actually he came to know the idealism of the 1960s best through his children. A few years later, Ben was to suffer the consequences of just such a public display against the war as his father declined to make. Meanwhile, both Ben and Susan worked for social justice. Susie, now out of college and—during the regular school year—teaching at a prep school in Colorado, spent the summers of 1965 and 1966 as a volunteer instructor in Mississippi. Ben, deep-voiced and handsome in late adolescence, did social work in the black slums of Ossining and settled on liberal Antioch as his college. His children’s determination to serve minority causes had its origins, Cheever liked to think, in their family history. After all, hadn’t his great-uncle Ebenezer espoused unpopular abolitionist sentiments and been dragged through the streets of Newburyport?

  On the social level as in politics, Cheever was not a joiner. He and Mary never belonged to a country club. On the other hand, he was a charter member of an exceedingly informal organization called the Friday Club. The club was simply a vehicle that enabled certain noncommuting males in the area to get together on Fridays for drinks and lunch and conversation. There were no dues, no rules, and to begin with only three members, but Cheever gave them all titles. Arthur Spear, retired but full of energy, was the Founder. Folksinger and songwriter Tom Glazer was the Treasurer, since he could figure out the tab with some accuracy. Cheever himself was the Membership. Around noon on Fridays the three of them would foregather at one of their homes for canapés and cocktails. (Mary, who regarded the club as yet another excuse for her husband’s drinking, was less hospitable than the other wives.) Then they went to one local restaurant or another for lunch. The early favorite was a place run by an ambitious Italian and advertised as the Oldest Seafood House in Croton. (Friday Clubbers kept putting a hyphen between Oldest and Seafood.) An irreverent waitress named Pam fit well into the humor of the group. How was the sole? she’d be asked. “I wouldn’t advise it today, dearie,” she’d answer. She was designated the Ladies Auxiliary. For additional humor the club expanded to take in Alwyn Lee, a wonderful raconteur, and he became the Entertainment. Usually the men did not get home until midafternoon, and sometimes, well fortified with liquor, sallied forth on a hike through the woods and hills behind Cheever’s house.

  From these modest beginnings the Friday Club grew to as many as a dozen members, including among others writer Bill Rickenbacker, sculptor John Dirks (the son of the man who drew the Katzenjammer Kids, Dirks was to replace Lee, after his death, as the Entertainment), foundation executive Roger Willson, and actor Barrett Clark. Cheever’s letter asking Clark to join them on Fridays captured some of the flavor of the club. The organization was “about as exclusive as a telephone booth,” Cheever acknowledged, but perhaps Clark would join them for Friday lunch anyway, sometimes.

  In the summer of 1966 the Perrys were filming their version of “The Swimmer.” It was a difficult film to sell, Frank Perry recalls; his wife Eleanor Perry’s script circulated for a year before Sam Spiegel at Columbia Pictures decided to buy in, with Cheever getting sixty thousand dollars for film rights. It was also a difficult film to make, since the story resisted the literal lens of the camera. If he were to do it again, Perry said, he would try to make the movie more suggestive of the undercurrents of myth in the story. Burt Lancaster was signed to play the lead role of Neddy Merrill, and initially both Perry and Cheever thought him somewhat miscast, since he lacked the requisite New England background and idiom. In one scene, for example, Lancaster insisted on reading a line, written “I’m going to send you both a check,” as “I’m going to send the both of you a check.”

  The movie was shot in Westport, Connecticut, where the pools were handsomer and less disturbed by highway noise than those around Ossining. Cheever came to the set only rarely. He was impressed during these visits by the way Lancaster managed to seem successively “lewd, tearful, crucified, boyish and infirm.” One day the Perrys arranged for Cheever himself to make a cameo appearance in the film. The scene was a pool party, where he shook hands with Lancaster and bussed actress Janet Landgard. It was not Landgard but another actress, the intelligent and sexy Diana Muldaur, whom Cheever developed a crush on. Muldaur was wearing close-fitting “pool pajamas” during the party scene. “Either they’ve lowered her neckline since yesterday,” a production assistant observed appreciatively, “or they’ve raised her bust.”

  At Yaddo in the fall of 1966, Cheever had a brief affair with the composer Ned Rorem. They had first met in 1962, also at Yaddo, when Rorem was hobbled by a broken ankle and Cheever was friendly and solicitous about his injury. During the four-year interim, Rorem had published Paris Diary with its explicit revelations about his sex life, and Cheever surely knew about the book. He came up to Rorem’s room about nine o’clock one night, rather drunk, and made his overtures. At first the composer was reluctant. He was not particularly attracted physically, but Cheever almost broke his heart, he was so wistful. “I simply have to,” he said, and when it was over he was “sentimental about it, like a high school boy,” Rorem recalled. During their three-day affair, they made love under the Ping-Pong table, in the woods, in the car. Cheever was extremely ambivalent about revealing their liaison. Once as they drove off together, Hortense Calisher saw them leave. “Never mind, I want everyone to know,” Cheever said, and then in the next breath, “but oh my God, what will they think of me?”

  The unsatisfactory state of Cheever’s marriage continued to trouble him. He saw himself in the role of lover and Mary as the beloved. Often he felt “proud of her beauty, her wit, her intelligence, her originality.” Yet at times he thought she seemed to despise him, to treat him as cruelly as the wife in “The Geometry of Love.” In seeking to know why, he resisted clinical explanations based on Mary’s unhappy childhood. Similarly, he repudiated her belief that he had been crippled by his mother. And, he reasoned, even if an unhappy marriage was “a full time occupation,” this did not mean that efforts to shore it up were necessarily hopeless.

  Liquor gave him at least as much trouble as his marriage. In the summer of 1965, his doctor—Dr. Ray Mutter—put him on tranquilizers as a substitute for alcohol. But the pills left him feeling as “stagnant as the water under an old millwheel” and he soon reverted to bourbon. He saw himself as engaged in a continuous and unavoidable struggle with drink. “I still fight the booze,” he wrote Stern, “but the score seems tied.” The battle commenced each morning, when the first or second thing he wanted was a drink. He went to his desk, determined to avoid drinking until noon, but it was not easy to stick to that resolve, with the bottles in the pantry calling out to him. Often he moved the noon deadline up an hour or half hour, and once the drinking was begun, it did not end until bedtime. In correspondence and in journals he chided himself for “the bitter and absolutely perfect circle of drunkenness and remorse” he had fallen into. But such self-criticism did not indicate any real desire to change his ways. On the contrary, it was as if the process of shaming himself gave him leave to continue his dependence on drink.
And he was also prone to rationalizations, among them the notion that liquor liberated his imagination and so was necessary to his work.

  He was hooked, he knew it, yet he did not want to confront his addiction directly. When he was bothered by a sore foot, he was reluctant to consult Dr. Mutter, for fear that he would diagnose some ailment that could only be treated by abstaining from alcohol. When at Mary’s urging he did go to a psychiatrist during the summer of 1966, he insisted—“Unicorn in the Garden” fashion—the problem was hers and not his and that if she would act differently, the marriage would be fine and his phobias and depressions and drunken episodes would simply evaporate.

  Dr. David C. Hays, who saw Cheever between early July and mid-September, was inclined to disagree. Cheever made it clear at the start that he opposed the idea of treatment and had consented only to please Mary. It cut against his Yankee grain to dig deep and then declare aloud what one found. Besides, he reasoned, how could anyone who had not read his work possibly know much about him? As a partial remedy he brought Hays an autographed copy of The Wapshot Chronicle. In their sessions he alternated between trying to appear as earnest as possible and trying to entertain the doctor. Hays was surprised at how quickly he went to the basics. If he wanted dreams, Cheever gave him dreams, including a highly erotic one in which he seduced the boyfriend of an old girlfriend. If he wanted family life, Cheever gave him the power struggle between his parents, with his mother, “the predatory sex,” as the winner, and he gave him too the unnaturally close intimacy he felt for his brother. If he wanted bedroom adventures, Cheever gave him a number of affairs and the report that at home he’d “been allowed to have an orgasm.” Usually, he said, Mary ignored him, and he complained when she went off to Treetops. In case Hays might fancy schizophrenia, Cheever spoke of the two John Cheevers, the pretended and the authentic one.

  Dr. Hays was both dazzled and dismayed by his patient’s performance. Admiring Cheever’s wit, he wondered what it was designed to conceal. What lay immediately below the surface was scorn. In a letter to Mary at Treetops, John satirically described his most recent visit to the psychiatrist. Hays beamed down upon him, he wrote, like a dentist with a drill. To brighten the atmosphere, he “regaled” the psychiatrist “with idle and meaningless accounts” of his past. Obviously Cheever was not ready to undergo a thorough psychoanalysis. Besides, Mary thought, he “was too smart for psychiatrists. He had so much quicker a mind, and was verbally so much more sophisticated than they were. He’d talk them up a tree.”

  Cheever’s resistance grew stronger as Hays made it clear he thought John ought to work toward “a characterological change.” He refused to attend group sessions. He turned up fifteen minutes late for his own appointments. Finally, on September 15, he announced, “I don’t like to talk about any of these things,” and that was that. Over such a limited period of time, Dr. Hays could hardly arrive at any definitive understanding of his patient, but he did form a strong impression of what kind of man he was. He felt an excessive dependence on Mary, Hays thought, and the multiple affairs, real and imagined, with women and men alike, were undertaken as a way of reacting against that dependence. He wanted badly to be taken care of and nurtured, and was inclined to transfer his resentment against a neglectful mother to his wife, while attributing to other women who paid attention to him—Sara Spencer, for instance—the qualities of the good mother. His marriage stood little chance of success, Hays told him, unless he was prepared to change. He wanted to change, Cheever replied, to be more compassionate and understanding and a better father to his sons. But most of all, he said, turning the tables once again, “I want a wife.” Wasn’t he the injured party?

  The one person Cheever was eager to talk about in his meetings with Dr. Hays was his brother, Fred—the older brother who had once played “mother, father, brother, and friend” to him and who had recently gone to pieces in front of him: the only Cheever in worse shape than he himself. After these psychiatric sessions, Cheever usually went home and talked things over with Susan. Hays thought it unusual that he should go to his daughter rather than to his wife with such confidences.

  For years John had been simultaneously encouraging and discouraging Susan’s romances. Once when she was invited to a house party in Bucks County, he told her not to go unless she planned to sleep with the man who asked her. Otherwise, her date would feel humiliated, he warned. Yet when she brought beaus to the house, he objected to any displays of affection. By late 1966 all such ambivalence about Susie’s boyfriends faded away when she gave up her teaching job at Colorado Rocky Mountain School and came to New York to move in with Rob Cowley. Cowley, divorced and the father of two young girls, was the only son of Malcolm and Muriel Cowley. He and Susie planned to marry in the spring.

  Young Cowley grew up worshiping John Cheever, who used to visit Sherman, Connecticut, once a year or so to see his parents and such other friends as Peter and Ebie Blume and Matthew and Hannah Josephson. A lot of literary folk passed through Sherman, but Cheever was “something special,” Rob thought. When Rob was a teenager, he sat around the dinner table marveling at this engagingly funny man who spoke as well as he wrote, with wonderful limpidity and without any “ers” or “urns” or unintended repetitions. He liked Mary Cheever too, whose brilliant humor issued incongruously from her high little-girl voice. Some of his initial attraction to Susie, he thinks, stemmed from his admiration for her parents.

  When Rob and Susie decided to marry, Cheever found it hard to visualize his daughter amid “organ music, white lace, flowers, cakes, and wine.” He also wondered whether he should caution her against getting married. But whatever the trials of his own marriage, he concluded, it would be “obscene” of him to warn Susie “not to marry, not to love.”

  On May 6 the wedding took place at St. Mark’s in the Bowery church in the East Village. A beautifully catered reception followed in the churchyard, with a massive tent erected for the occasion and green felt carpet spread over the graves of the departed. It was a rainy, windy day, and passing derelicts stared through the isinglass peepholes at the festivities within. Inside there was some tension between the two principal families. As Malcolm Cowley recalled, “the Cheever connection drank their champagne on one side of the tent, while the smaller Cowley contingent sat grouped on the other.” The Cowleys thought the wedding too expensive and ostentatious, while the Cheevers were determined to give their daughter the best sendoff they could afford. As it happened, Rob and Susie were then able to begin their married life in extraordinarily elegant surroundings, as tenants at the mansion at Beechwood. With the estate tied up in the courts after the death of Mrs. Vanderlip, the place stood idle, and Zinny Schoales installed the young Cowleys as house sitters. Cheever, visiting for dinner at Beechwood Hall, thought that Rob and Susie should work up from a ranch house to a mansion instead of vice versa. When the newlyweds visited Cedar Lane, Rob was taken aback by the competitive atmosphere around their dinner table. Sarcasms flew, and no one was spared. “In that Bear Pit you had to perform,” he decided. “Dullness was not tolerated.”

  In July 1967, Cheever went to Italy to interview Sophia Loren for The Saturday Evening Post. Mary and Fred went along, and the itinerary included Sperlonga and Rome as well as Loren’s Naples. Sperlonga he liked. Father and son walked along the beach mornings, and watched the daily soccer game in the evening. In Rome he met an American businessman at a United States Information Agency party. The businessman had come to Rome to open an American-style supermarket. “Mr. Shivers,” he told Cheever, “Rome needs Minimax and Minimax needs Rome. I’m going to build a supermarket in Rome that will put the Pantheon to shame.”

  The Post paid him “a shirtfull” for the interview with Loren. The actress herself was “what used to be known as an eyeful,” with an amazing front and gleaming legs. In Naples as in Rome, he wrote in his article, there were people on their way to one-room basement flats that smelled of drains and cheese rinds who still carried themselves with style and grace. Lo
ren had that quality, and yet there was no trace of artifice about her. She wore “no perfume, no makeup,” her dress was simple, and she seemed “sincere, magnanimous, lucky, intelligent and serene.” The interview over, she walked him to the door as the bells of Naples rang noon. Before leaving he asked if he might kiss her. “Of course,” she said, and so he did. In his notes he reduced the meeting to three words: “See Loren. Pow.”

  At Yaddo and Saratoga he saw other, more mortal women. Aileen Ward, biographer of Keats and one of the nations’s leading literary scholars, met him there during a brief visit, and they forged an instant friendship. Dining together at a restaurant near the racetrack, they rapidly established the feeling that they understood each other. Cheever spoke of his background, seeming somewhat defensive about his lack of education. Yet his manner was so conspicuously that of the upper-middle-class WASP that Ward assumed he was the product of the best prep schools, if not of the best colleges. There was affection between them but no intimacy. He made no overture toward sex, yet she was installed among his gallery of dream girls. “I would suspect,” she said, “that really close emotional relationships with women were not easy for him.”

  In the fall of 1967, Cheever spoke at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs as the guest of college president Joseph Palamountain and his wife, Anne. Formerly an haute couture buyer, Anne Palamountain took her duties as a college president’s wife seriously. (She was one of the first wives to be paid a salary for this work.) She was especially concerned that distinguished visitors to the campus be treated right, and so she arranged a dinner party for Cheever, put him up for the night, and generally made him feel welcome. He responded with gratitude and two dozen roses, and a close companionship began. Thereafter the author and the president’s wife foregathered regularly when Cheever came to town for meetings at Yaddo. They met for brunch at the elegant Gideon Putnam Hotel or for Big Macs at McDonald’s, for cross-country skiing in the afternoon and long confidential talks. “Every woman,” as she said, “needs a man other than her husband she can confide in,” and Cheever fulfilled that purpose for her. In talking of his own problems, though, he kept it light and amusing. She never was inclined to feel sorry for him. “He carried off his troubles so well, with a kind of detachment about himself.”