The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  He tried to peddle an old, never-published short story to Good Housekeeping, whose editor responded, “It’s clearly too bucolic for us.”

  The frustration accumulated. When he got nowhere trying to pitch a 1949 novel to Hollywood producers, who called it too old-fashioned, he lashed back with a horribly cringe-inducing letter sarcastically proposing “real modern” stories. The first involved “a physical type (homosexual) and an embittered intellectual Lesbian” who “get swept into a sewer” together.

  Another was an elaborate mess about a hotel filled with “pansies who pick men up at night” and “bare-bosomed, short-skirted whores” who get into trouble with the law and decide to go straight. The “pansies” become fashion designers who use the whores as fashion models, and they become a huge success.

  The last is about “an American university commie” who falls in love with a beautiful Cuban communista and commits murder and treason just to have a tryst with her in front of the gates of the Guantánamo Bay U.S. Marine base, where they both get riddled by bullets from both sides.

  All of this is elaborated in four painful-to-read single-spaced pages seething with bitterness. My heart sank even lower when I saw that he credited my sweet grandmother as co-creator of these vile parodies.

  Mack was flailing, sensing a loss of contact with these new times, and no doubt feeling his mortality. This panic-tinged bitterness began to build just when I was getting old enough to notice my parents—both Adlai Stevenson liberals—rolling their eyes at Mack’s latest pronouncements, and to see for myself and wonder at the bold FUCK COMMUNISM placard prominently placed near the entrance to his study.

  In the Library’s files, I discovered to my surprise that Mack hadn’t always been this way—he’d once been a raging New Deal Democrat. In 1936, during the presidential race between FDR and Republican challenger Alf Landon, he wrote to his sister and her husband: “I want to tell you how gratified Irene and I are to hear of your change in political sentiment. I feel so violently on this question that I could scarcely admit to myself that you folks might vote against the President.”

  I was even more shocked to discover a note from just three years later when he mentions being invited to Hyde Park to picnic with Eleanor Roosevelt. “Irene got a fine note from Mrs. Roosevelt yesterday, asking us to come and suggesting that we bring our bathing suits so that we could all go swimming.”

  He saw the Roosevelts socially more than once. I later found a photograph of a laughing group surrounding a seated FDR on a summer lawn, probably at Hyde Park, and there was Mack standing right behind the president, unmistakable in a double-breasted white suit with the ever-present pipe clenched in his jaw. As late as 1958, Eleanor even wrote an endorsement of a rather patriotic story in one of his collections: “We all need a simple, uplifting philosophy. . . . In this saga, which is really a saga of America, we can see ourselves more clearly and live more happily because of it.”

  By 1967, Mack had developed a revisionist view of his relationship with Eleanor. “To be perfectly frank,” he wrote, “she and I never got on very well together. We met first during the 1930s and quarreled immediately on the question of the WPA writers’ projects. . . . I thought it was a boondoggle pure and simple like a lot of the Kennedy and Johnson stuff these days. Nonetheless, we threw back and forth a little mutual respect; but no affection. When it came to sitting down and talking about almost any conceivable subject, Mrs. Roosevelt and Uncle Mack always were arrayed on opposite sides.”

  This from a man who in 1933 wrote: “As for our economic system, I think it’s all shit. Any formula which, naturally or unnaturally, can bring the ghastly tribulation which has come to this country, ought to be wiped out. Communism, anything would be better.”

  By 1974, a newspaper article could sum up his views, which depicts the “grandpa” I knew and rolled my eyes at, this way:

  He believes in the American Dream, in George Wallace and Curtis LeMay, that Watergate is “a lot of crap” and President Nixon is the victim of a conspiracy. He hates the Kennedys, hippies, the anti-Nixon press. Anything written after WWII he just does not read. “America hasn’t changed at all,” he declared from his cabin on the American ship, the Monterey, in Sydney yesterday. “It’s just the young riff-raff and the anti-Nixon extreme Democratic press—they’re angry that Nixon swept all the states and they’ve conspired to get him and use every bit of ammunition they can get.”

  There was a far coarser side to his fear-fed reactionary views.

  In 1961, he wrote to Dick Whiteman, “I wish that you were with us. I would sing you the song that I began work on at five o’clock this morning, knowing that you are just as disgusted as are we with the whole dratted mess which makes up our nation and our world today.”

  And then he reproduced a stanza of lyrics, and I really wish he hadn’t:

  Freedom Riders, hummin on the happy Greyhound Line / Off to Mississippi with that little coon of mine. . . .

  I can’t even quote any more of it. Thinking of him waking in the Siesta Key predawn to labor on this swill is heartbreaking.

  I remember hearing similarly awful stuff from him when I was a teenager, just when I was developing a polar-opposite political sensibility, and now I recognize that the recoil fueled my tendency to assess not only his politics but his career achievements and the writing itself skeptically and negatively. Even then, though, I knew there was another side to him, and I saw it confirmed while digging through the files.

  In the 1940s, Mack was friendly with a more or less openly gay couple to the point that they occasionally babysat Tim when Mack and Irene were away. Friends would say, “How could you let Timmy be with them alone?” And Mack would explode, “Oh, bullshit! Jake and Harry are about as eager to attack Tim as I am to rape some twelve-year-old little girl.”

  In 1939, he published a surprisingly nuanced story in The Saturday Evening Post about a young black boy who watches enviously from afar as an all-white Boy Scout troop tramps about the woods, learning merit badge skills. He finds an old discarded Scouting manual, and secretly teaches himself all about woodsman skills and first aid. When a white girl carelessly crashes her bike into the wagon he sells turnips from, he recognizes that she’s severed an artery in her wrist and insists that her panicky parents let him apply a tourniquet. This saves the girl’s life. When the Scout troop hears about it, they crowd the sudden hero, asking why he never joined the Boy Scouts.

  The final lines, recognizing how blind even well-intentioned whites can be to the racism all around them, are sophisticated even by today’s standards. For 1939, they are astounding:

  “He grinned at last, feebly, but he could not offer a coherent explanation. Perhaps he would never be able to explain to them how different he was from them all—how different he would forever be.”

  In 1956, Sarasota was still a Deep South town, complete with Jim Crow laws. With all its miles of beach, there wasn’t one foot of sand its black citizens were permitted to trod. Using his recent Pulitzer as clout, Mack conducted a campaign of interviews, letters to the editor, and the threat of writing a critical article for a national magazine to force the local politicians to create a public beachfront for blacks. One of his letters concerned a dream he claimed to have had in which the ghost of a black soldier, killed in the war defending American freedom, was wondering why he couldn’t so much as wade in the ocean back home.

  The Ku Klux Klan threatened to stage a demonstration on the road in front of the Siesta Key house. “I announced that that was fine,” Mack wrote. “I said they’d find me sitting on a chair on the lawn with my 30-30 on my lap. A few cars did come by, with idiot faces glaring from windows, but they took off fast when I picked up the rifle.”

  The campaign was successful, a black beach was created, but I also noted that Mack made it clear that he wasn’t “like some Yankee” insisting on integration of the beaches, just that blacks should have a beach of t
heir own.

  Perhaps the most ironic political switcheroo became evident in a 1934 feature on Mack, one of the first newspaper profiles ever written about him, shortly after the publication of Long Remember, in which the hero is vehemently antiwar amid the prowar fervor that surrounds him. When asked if he was a pacifist, Mack said: “I don’t see how any intelligent person could be anything else.”

  Ten years later, Mack was initiating an intimate and lifelong association with one of the least pacific, and most significantly bellicose, figures in American history, Curtis LeMay.

  LeMay was the architect and commanding officer of the World War II bomb group that Mack had adopted as his own. Robert McNamara, who would become the secretary of defense under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, said of LeMay, “He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal.”

  When too many of his bomber pilots were pulling out of formation to avoid heavy flak and missing their targets as a result, LeMay announced that every pilot who did so in the future would be court-martialed, and that he would personally lead the next mission.

  LeMay later designed and commanded the massive firebombing campaign against Japanese cities that did as much as the atomic bomb to bring Japan to surrender, and killed as many as half a million civilians in the process. He once said if the U.S. lost the war, he fully expected to be tried as a war criminal.

  In mid-October 1962, Soviet nuclear missiles were discovered in Cuba. LeMay, then Air Force chief of staff, fiercely argued for bombing the silos—an argument Kennedy resisted in favor of a naval blockade of the island coupled with negotiation. We now know what Kennedy suspected was true, that silo commanders had been given authority to launch the missiles if attacked. LeMay’s plan would almost surely have triggered World War III.

  Mack’s devotion to LeMay and the Air Force was a fierce passion, and he seems to have absorbed LeMay’s hawkish view of the world, and especially the Soviets. When Mack won the Medal of Freedom he told friends this was “the only medal I am apt to receive, ever, unless we hurry up and hit those sour-pussed s.o.b.’s beyond the Volga River before I get too old to fly.”

  In 1963, an Air Force jet landed under heavy security at Sarasota airport, and Mack was waiting on the tarmac. The local paper reported: “A red and silver jet Star streaked down through a storm cloud. . . . At the controls was Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff.”

  The paper said he’d stopped by “for a chat.” The truth was, he wanted to persuade Mack to act as the ghostwriter for his autobiography.

  Mack was flattered. Here was a universe in which he was still a hero. “Curt said that no one else could do a decent job with the book, and he had always supposed I would be the one to do it. I wouldn’t do it for anyone else in the world. I’m no ghost writer—never have been or wanted to be.”

  The book, Mission with LeMay, came out in 1965—after Lyndon Johnson had forced the general to resign as chief of staff, and as LeMay began preparations for a political career of his own. That career would consist entirely of running as vice president on the third-party ticket of Alabama segregationist George Wallace. (LeMay had never considered himself a bigot, but wasn’t bothered so much by Wallace’s racial views that he refused to join the ticket. Most likely he saw the campaign as a chance to step up on a national platform and preach an aggressive, militarily powerful response to the Soviets.)

  The reviews of Mission with LeMay were once again mixed, and largely dependent on how the reviewer felt about LeMay’s career. But to my delight, I discovered that the book had been reviewed retrospectively in Foreign Policy magazine in 2013 by Thomas Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning expert on military affairs and a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post. Presumably, a half century after publication, Ricks would have the capacity to view the book with dispassion and perspective. This is what he wrote: “I recently picked up the memoirs of General Curtis LeMay, partly out of guilt that I don’t know more about the history of the Air Force. My problem is, I still don’t. The book is mostly pablum . . . much of the rest of it is the type of claptrap that H. L. Mencken made a living destroying. I had expected that having MacKinlay Kantor, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Andersonville, as co-author of the memoir was a recommendation. I didn’t realize Kantor was a hack.”

  Harsh. But something else I found in the files, written before the book was even published, must have struck Mack even more harshly. Through three decades after the breakup of their affair, Mack had stayed in polite and respectful touch with Peggy Pulitzer. As he began work on the LeMay book, Peggy, now seventy and the possessor of twice as many Pulitzer Prizes as Mack, responded to a letter from him this way: “I enjoyed your budget of news. Sorry about the heart trouble, and hope it is gone for good. But I’m sorry, too, to hear you are doing a biography of LeMay—autobiography you say? Does that mean ghost-writing, for Pete’s sake?”

  It did.

  “I had to learn to think like Curt,” Mack had said in his letter. “Irene says I already talk like him.”

  Indeed, I came across a letter he wrote to my mother that colorfully demonstrated that, like LeMay, Mack insisted on looking at nuclear weapons as just another tool of war.

  “You may remember my old and oft-stated theory: a blunt sword, as used by some inept but fervent murderer in Genghis Khan’s time, killed people just as dead as a hydrogen bomb. . . . I don’t want Mike and Tommy and Susan to die suddenly, killed in a meaningless historical demonstration, any more than you do. But I should just as soon to have them die as a result of modern machinery as to have their heads lopped off with a sword.”

  It was in this state of possession—thinking and talking like Curt—in which Mack wrote the infamous phrase advising the North Vietnamese to “draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

  LeMay’s later insistence that this was a sentiment he didn’t endorse—“overwriting” by his ghostwriter, he claimed—is of course absurd, unless we are to believe that he didn’t even bother to read the page proofs of his own autobiography. The more relevant point to me is not that LeMay really thought that way, but that Mack no doubt did as well, and not just about the North Vietnamese. In his increasing dread of modernity, I have no doubt he would have longed, if only it were possible, to bomb the whole relentlessly changing world into its previous condition, in which he had felt so at home.

  Mack may have sensed his turn of fortunes with growing anxiety, but only in retrospect is it clear that his career was now in irreversible decline. In fact, in 1965, it may have seemed like the beginning of a great crescendo. Early in the year Mack crowed about signing a deal for three more books, including an anthology of old stories, a sequel to his autobiography, and a novel literally to be named later. “Between the LeMay book and these other projects of my own,” he wrote, “Doubleday will have committed themselves to an advance of $270,000, which could be a world’s record in confidence reposed in an author by his publisher.”

  It was a brag, of course, but the defensive whine echoes within, especially when you know that recent rejections of a handful of his books by his previous publisher, Bennett Cerf at Random House, had singed his confidence badly. In a childish pique, he said he was temporarily titling one of the proposed new books, a collection of “sentimental journeys into the past, which we think will sell like crazy,” While Cerf Burns.

  So who needed Random House? The money spigot was flowing again. More good news:

  In August, Columbia Pictures announced that, after a decade of delay, Andersonville was finally set to film, directed by a real cinematic heavyweight, Stanley Kramer, or as the news release put it, “a man who gets things done.”

  Indeed, Kramer had one of the best track records in Hollywood, having made huge critical and financial successes like Death of a Salesman, The Wild One, and The Caine
Mutiny.

  I, of course, knew that no film of my grandfather’s book was ever made—so when I came across this clip, saying that the script, casting, and even location scouting were all under way, I was baffled. I could find nothing in the files, or in quick searches online, to explain how such a high-powered film project simply vanished without a trace.

  I finally learned the answer in, of all places, a biography of Spencer Tracy by James Curtis. In 1962, Kramer had signed a three-picture deal with Columbia. The first of the three, Ship of Fools, performed poorly at the box office, and Columbia decided to rein Kramer in on his next film, which happened to be Andersonville. By this time, construction on vast sets of the prison camp was already under way in Georgia. When the moneymen saw the initial bills, they pulled the plug. “It was too expensive for them,” Kramer said.

  So Andersonville was abandoned, for the final time. Instead, Kramer made a less expensive movie with Tracy, opposite the inimitable Katharine Hepburn and a young African American actor named Sidney Poitier. It was a huge hit.

  I’m old enough to remember watching—and loving—Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in a first-run movie theater when I was fourteen, never dreaming that this groundbreaking movie on interracial dating existed at the expense of a significant part of my patrimony.

  I came across an interesting postscript to the whole situation by accident, when I stumbled on an interview with Daniel Taradash, who had won the 1954 screenwriting Oscar for From Here to Eternity. It turns out that Kramer, gung ho to make Andersonville an Oscar-worthy project, had hired Taradash to write the script. When the project was canceled, Taradash had apparently been far enough along to have sent the script to my grandfather for comment.

  “MacKinlay Kantor was a strange fellow,” Taradash said in that interview. “He got the Pulitzer for fiction . . . but he wanted to get it for history because of the research. He wrote me a six-page letter about inaccuracies in the script—uniforms, regiments, that sort of thing.”