Every successful fiction writer develops his or her own approach to the novel and always has, but in the increasingly merchandise-oriented world of popular fiction, the most successful ones needed, in the words of the showstopper from Gypsy, a gimmick. Following in the footsteps of Edna Ferber, James Michener perfected (if that is the mot juste) the gargantuan travelogue novel, which provided the whole history of a country or an area (more or less in the spirit of John Gunther’s relentless piling up of facts), along with a strong plot. Harold Robbins provided a strong story, plus heavy-breathing sex and a light dose of the traditional roman à clef. (The Carpetbaggers, for instance, is loosely but recognizably based on the life of Howard Hughes, while the hero of The Adventurers resembles Porfirio Rubirosa, the famous Latin playboy.) Irving Wallace, drawn into the fiction game by Robbins’s example and tired of taking orders from producers, directors, studio heads, and actors, invented the novel that is at one and the same time a strong story and an encyclopedia, with some sex thrown in to keep the reader’s pulse going.
A famous piece of advice to writers is, “Do tons of research, then throw it away and start writing.” Wallace reversed this piece of folk wisdom. He did (or caused to have done) tons of research and incorporated it wholesale into his novels. Ungainly as the results were, they worked, perhaps because it is part of our Puritan inheritance to want to believe that we are being instructed, that we are learning something, anything, even while we are being entertained. Thus, although Wallace titillated his readers with sex scenes (none of them quite as hot as those of Robbins, a source of great envy to Wallace; in Robbins’s view, Wallace tended to write about sex as if he had never actually experienced it), he also gave them an opportunity to atone for their lascivious pleasure by reading what amounted to a whole travel book about whatever city the plot was set in, including the dimensions of every significant monument or work of art. It was like reading in alternate bursts from The Joy of Sex and a Baedeker’s travel guide.
Wallace had had a relatively tame career as a nonfiction writer at Knopf and had then published a fairly unsuccessful and undistinguished novel with a minor publisher before being brought to Paul Gitlin’s attention (though for a while, oddly, his agent was the stuffy and conservative Paul Reynolds, while Gitlin was his lawyer). Wallace had a positive mania for just those parts of publishing a book that bore or irritate most writers. He loved correcting proofs, indulged in deep, obscure arguments with the copy editors over knotty questions of punctuation, spelling, and accuracy, and rejoiced when he could prove them wrong. A loyal graduate of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, school system, he actually kept his old high school English teacher, Elizabeth Kempthorne, on his payroll to go over his manuscripts and proofs.
I was, in fact, drafted to work with Wallace by Schwed precisely because Wallace dearly loved the whole experience of being edited. The more pages of detailed notes Schwed and I threw at Wallace, the happier he was. “Don’t skimp!” he would plead—I was to play devil’s advocate to the hilt, without any respect for his feelings. Unfortunately, Wallace was so hypersensitive to criticism that he sometimes cried when contemplating a list of suggested cuts. Moreover, he invariably turned down every suggestion, however minor. His replies to editorial notes were usually two or three times the length of the notes themselves, full-blooded, single-spaced rebuttals, point by point, page by page. The first time this happened, I called Gitlin and asked him if he knew what happened and could explain what my role was intended to be. “Sure, kid,” he said affably. “Your job is to make Irving feel good by doing a really thorough edit of his stuff. Then he gets to prove that he’s smarter than you are, even if you did go to Oxford.”
“It seems like a waste of time.”
“What waste of time? It keeps you busy, it makes Irving happy. That’s why I asked for you to work with him. I figured the more he turns your stuff down, the more you’ll do. You two are made for each other, bubbi, trust me on that.”
This proved to be true. For years, I continued to send Wallace long, detailed, persuasive, carefully thought-out memoranda about his books, which he continued to rebut. On the rare occasions when I slacked off—on the sensible grounds that nothing I suggested would ever make the slightest bit of difference, since Wallace would merely explain at even greater length why I was wrong about every point—he complained, usually to higher authorities through Gitlin, that I didn’t love him or his work anymore.
Wallace had come to S&S with a novel that nobody else wanted to publish called The Chapman Report, about a Kinsey-type sex survey and the effect it has on a comfortable suburban community, which aroused Schwed’s immediate enthusiasm. There was a lot of sex in the book—it was about sex, after all—but most of it was more informational than titillating. Still, as anaphrodisiac as Wallace’s novels may have been to me, The Chapman Report stirred up a good deal of controversy, much of it within S&S itself. Unlike the books of Harold Robbins, The Chapman Report bore the S&S colophon—a small reproduction of Jean-François Millet’s The Sower—on its spine and was indubitably “ours.” S&S had always had something of a reputation for publishing novels that represented, or perhaps predicted, social change, particularly the kind that couldn’t be talked about. Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement had brought home the survival of old-fashioned anti-Semitism in postwar America, just as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was the first to explore the corporate commuter of the early 1950s as a new species of American.
Publishing a novel that more or less prefigured the sexual revolution was something else again, of course, and there was a lot of opposition to doing it, despite Schwed’s urging. I found this hard to understand; the real problem with The Chapman Report was that it was boring, not that it was pornographic. Still, the mere mention of the subject was enough to give Max Schuster cold feet, and the manuscript had to be submitted to his son-in-law, Ephraim London, S&S’s house counsel, for a legal reading.
Fortunately, London was a difficult man to shock. A crusading First Amendment lawyer, London had been battling censorship successfully for years, and there was nothing in The Chapman Report that was likely to surprise him. London swiftly gave his approval, though not with any particular enthusiasm. Since Ray Schuster was a one-woman fan club for her sons-in-law, there was no way Max could oppose the book. Max, however, was an expert at Nelson’s trick and turned a blind eye to The Chapman Report, simply pretending that it didn’t exist.
The Chapman Report swiftly rose up the best-seller list, establishing Wallace as a new superstar, comparable to Robbins and at least as productive. Unlike Robbins, Wallace seemed to live only to write. When he wasn’t writing a book, he was writing endless, single-spaced letters that soon filled my small office. From time to time, they had to be gathered up, carefully packed, and sent to some university in Texas or Wisconsin. There was grumbling about the amount of work that was involved in keeping track of all this paperwork, most of which, in the normal course of events, would have been disposed of or lost.
• • •
I HAD managed to avoid going to Cannes to work with Robbins, but there was no way I could wheedle my way out of going to California to see Wallace. Besides, having grown up in Beverly Hills from 1941 to 1943, I had a soft spot for L.A. and was not altogether unhappy to be going there at the expense of S&S. Unlike Robbins, Wallace didn’t show any signs of wanting to take over my life, so I booked myself into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where as a child I had once lived in one of the bungalows, and arranged to have Casey meet me there after I’d finished my business so we could take a leisurely drive up the coast to San Francisco.
At the time, a visit to L.A. was almost unimaginably rare among book publishers. Publishers traveled to London frequently, in pursuit of books or to sell their own wares, or to southern Florida or the Caribbean islands for sales conferences, but L.A. was alien territory, home of the movie industry and of an indigenous, sprawling, and exotic West Coast culture in which the book seemed to play no role at all; indee
d, from the East it seemed hostile to books and everything they implied.
The age of movie tie-ins and TV miniseries had not yet arrived; in New York and Boston, publishers still regarded “the entertainment business” as the enemy, luring prospective customers away from the healthy pastime of reading books into the unthinking illiteracy of moviegoing and television watching. The notion that some connection might profitably exist between book and movie, or that television might be used to sell books, had not occurred to anybody, let alone the possibility that book publishing itself would one day become an integral part of the entertainment business, with many of the major publishing houses actually owned by movie companies.
In a fairly sluggish and suspicious way, the major studios competed to buy the movie rights to best-selling novels. They maintained “scouts” and “spies” in New York to tell them about the latest hot books, but hardly anybody in the movie business had any direct dealings with book people. It was all done through shadowy go-betweens, as if the movie and television people were afraid of rejection at the hands of the Brahmins of East Coast high culture, while book publishers and editors were aghast at the thought of being contaminated by the vulgarity and crass commercialism of the movie business. There was, in short, no good reason for book people to journey all the way across the country to see with their own eyes something they already despised, and even less reason for movie people, when visiting New York, to cultivate those who despised them.
IRVING WALLACE was a short, stocky fellow, then in his mid-fifties, with a massive leonine head of graying hair and small, rather pudgy hands. Wallace was never without a pipe, and everywhere in his house there were racks of them to hand. He and his wife, Sylvia, showed me around their home as if I were proposing to buy it—a curious custom of Los Angeles—and I was able to admire the full-size and fully stocked soda fountain they had built for their two children, complete with large glass bowls filled with miniature candy bars.
With even greater pride, Wallace led me to a small separate building in which he had his office. Air-conditioned, as silent as Proust’s cork-lined study, equipped with every modern device from dictating machines to electric typewriters, Wallace’s writing room had the look of a corporate headquarters, fluorescent lit and sleekly decorated in pale colors and blond wood, with a staff of eager, attractive secretaries. Around the walls were smooth metal filing cabinets full of research.
Through a heavy door, like that of a bank, was a kind of vault, arranged as a library, with one copy of every edition of Wallace’s books, in every imaginable language: Urdu, Finnish, even pirated English-language editions printed illegally in Taiwan. The shelves and cupboards were all handmade by old-world master craftsmen out of rare woods. It looked rather like the cigar humidor at Dunhill, on Fifth Avenue, but lacked the deep, rich aroma of Havanas. As someone with an ambition to write myself, I felt a stab of envy at this floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall display. This, I felt, was fulfillment of a kind. Wallace seemed to feel it, too. He stood, slightly humble and bowed, his hands in a prayerful position, as if before a shrine. A silence fell over us, except for the faint hum of the air-conditioning system and the hiss of whatever system kept the place humidified. Finally, in a soft voice, Wallace said, “It’s bombproof.” Well, it made sense, he said, between puffs on his pipe. This was his life’s work. His scripts were here, too, in fact everything he’d ever written, even his term papers from high school. There was no way that he could risk having all this destroyed. The vault was guaranteed by the builders to survive anything short of a direct nuclear hit.
I nodded dumbly. The notion that Wallace foresaw some nuclear Armageddon in which all of Los Angeles would be destroyed except this room seemed too lunatic to comment on. He opened one of the cupboards to show that each script was contained in a gold-embossed, leather-bound box. One of them, in red morocco, was labeled, in fourteen-karat-gold letters, Additional dialog for Francis the Talking Mule. I wondered what some future generation would think when they found this strange time capsule among the glassy remains of a long-forgotten nuclear holocaust. Would they sum up all of mid-twentieth-century letters with The Chapman Report in Dutch and Francis the Talking Mule? Would learned papers be written about The Sins of Philip Fleming? What would the scholars of the future deduce from that dim tale of adultery and sexual longing that had so shocked Alfred and Blanche Knopf that they turned it down, forcing Wallace to look for another publisher?
These were questions that I couldn’t very well ask Wallace, who was busily showing me how much more space was available for his future works. The entire structure had been designed in the grand spirit of American optimism, on the assumption that Wallace’s output would be prolific and extend over a long, productive lifetime. There was ample room here for many more novels and nonfiction books, even should the Iron Curtain be raised and that many more languages opened up to him.
We stepped back through the door into the office. He opened another door, and there—Proustian indeed—was a small room lined in cork, with an old-fashioned table and desk chair. On the table was an antique typewriter. It was, Wallace said reverentially, the typewriter he had bought with his savings in Kenosha, where he had delivered newspapers to buy it. On it, he had written his first stories, which he had sent out to every magazine that published short stories. It was on this typewriter that he had composed all his books. Wallace stared at the typewriter, his eyes misting over, a cloud of pipe smoke drifting over his head, toward the concealed grille of the air conditioner. Here was where the act of creation took place, he whispered, in this very room, and on this very typewriter, beside which I could not help noticing a thick stack of fresh white paper, no doubt soon to be turned into yet another two-hundred-thousand-word novel.
Wallace shook his head, as if in awe. “Quite something, isn’t it?” he asked in a husky voice.
I nodded.
“I thought you’d like to see this place,” Wallace said. “This is where I got the idea for writing The Chapman Report—right here!” He touched the desk gently.
I stared at the clean, shining desktop, the rows of pipes, the glass humidor full of Wallace’s favorite tobacco. The emotion of the moment was evident on Wallace’s face. At any moment I expected him to ask me to take off my shoes, as if we were on holy ground, but fortunately he came out of his trance and took me off to admire his new Bentley.
THE MORE a writer is held in contempt by the reviewers, the more seriously he is likely to take himself. Harold Robbins was a notable exception to this rule, but Irving Wallace was more typical. In any case, life in L.A., particularly in those days, virtually forced writers to take themselves seriously, since nobody else did. In a society where money and beauty were the only things that mattered, it was hard for a mere writer, however successful, to compete. In the movie industry, screenwriters were at the bottom of the totem pole; on the other hand, a certain guarded respect, not unmingled with contempt, was accorded to what were described as “real” writers, the ones who actually wrote books that were published by major New York publishing houses. But they were still not taken altogether seriously by their neighbors in “the industry.” Writers who lived in the shadow of the movie business, like Wallace, tended to suffer from massive inferiority complexes, since at every party, PTA meeting, and visit to the supermarket, they were surrounded by people who considered them impoverished dilettantes who wrote books only because they couldn’t make it in the “real” world—that is, the studios. Hence, no doubt, Wallace’s Bentley and Robbins’s yacht.
Of course, L.A. was full of writers who didn’t live in the shadow of the studios and didn’t care whether they were invited to parties or not, who were there because they had always lived there, or because they liked the climate, or to escape from the presence of other writers, or out of some obscure combination of sun worship and natural living that was as deeply embedded in the city’s culture as the entertainment business. The Durants, needless to say, were in this category and ignored the movie people�
��to the extent that they were even aware of them—as much as they were ignored by them. Whatever had brought them to the West Coast from New York in the first place, they lived in resentful seclusion among the ravines and steep, wooded hills of North Hollywood, unfindable without elaborate directions and a map. Back in the day of silent pictures, this had been a fashionable neighborhood, though its aspect was sinister and strangely dark for L.A.: winding, narrow roads, high walls with dense shrubbery concealing grotesque houses and huge, overhanging trees, all combined to produce an atmosphere that was more Transylvanian than Californian. Unlike Brentwood, where the Wallaces lived amid flat, manicured lawns, stately palm trees, and cheerful houses, the Durants’ neighborhood was more in the spirit of Norma Desmond’s gloomy mansion in Sunset Boulevard. Their home, what could be seen of it behind high stone walls and fiercely overgrown vegetation, was in the 1920s Hollywood Spanish Gothic style, with much wrought iron, heavy wooden doors, gargoyles, tiny barred windows, and carved oak shutters. It looked more than capable of holding off an assault by armed pikemen or the angry peasantry, if necessary. Innumerable parapets and towers vaguely suggested a medieval castle, while the rusting wrought-iron gate in the wall that faced the street resembled that of a prison, so that one half expected to be taken immediately to a dungeon. Had Erich von Stroheim appeared in livery to announce a chimpanzee’s funeral, I would not have been surprised.
Another Life Page 17
