Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  These activities—the screenwriting, the travel—were welcome distractions not just from anxieties about writing a second novel but also from daily life, with its occasional sorrows, which Shirley tried to keep as his center. His mother had finally died in the old Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. The qualities he knew he shared with her—vanity, a deep cynicism, especially about institutions—became exaggerated in her speech and behaviors near the end. She worried about the way her hair looked, when there was not much hair to fret about. She accused the staff of mistreating her (increasing Joe’s guilt that he had not invited her to live with him).

  He remembered visiting Lena in the hospital years earlier, when she had broken her hip, and mistaking another woman for her. It occurred to him that this incident might have been the basis of the scene in Catch-22 when a mother and father visit their dying son and mistake Yossarian for the boy: Well, why not? We’re all dying.

  Lena’s biggest pleasure late in life was the taste of bacon—trayf! It pleased Joe to see her wolfing it down in the mornings. He remembered meals she had shared with his family before her incarceration in the old-age home, before Ted was born, when Erica was a baby and her every gesture seemed cute and charming, designed by nature to smooth the edges of an irascible old woman. Well, often it’s best to shed even good things, Joe reflected. Especially when you have no choice. Youth—the past—has its limits. After one of his last visits to Lena, he wandered down the old block, past boarded-up taverns and cafés, the doorways filled with junkies and shivering runaways—kids not much older than his daughter. Despite the poverty, you never used to see that sort of thing before the war. We had character, Joe decided. Whatever else we lacked, we had that at least—in no small part, thanks to women like his mother.

  He stopped to remember Irving Kaiser and his typewriter. He wished he saw more of Sylvia and Lee. Sylvia, now married to a man named Bernie Fields, still worked for Macy’s, and Lee, the proud father of Joe’s nephew, Paul, worked these days for a film-production company. Joe was sorry they had drifted apart. But that’s what families did when they became successful.

  * * *

  ON NOVEMBER 1, 1962, McHale’s Navy featured an episode entitled “PT 73, Where Are You?” written by Joe Heller. The program credits listed a man named Si Rose as “Script Consultant.”

  The plot concerned a group of hapless navy men who misplace their boat somewhere in the South Pacific. How this happened is never clear; it is simply the premise from which events ensue. In a bit of slapstick dialogue reminiscent of Catch-22, the skipper says, “I always felt it wasn’t too easy to lose a boat.” One of his men answers, straight-faced, “No, it wasn’t easy at all. Why, the mosquitoes…” Everything works out in the end, paced by an annoying laugh track. The crew returns to its comic books and beer (cans of which have been stored in the torpedo tubes), and dreams of R & R, where everyone will “squeeze … red-head[s]” on shady spots in the sand.

  Four months before the program’s air date, Joe wrote producer Jay Sanford to complain about Si Rose. “Friends of mine in TV had warned me that there is usually a staff writer or story editor around on every show who will bend heaven and earth in order to get in on the script credit for the purpose of sharing in the residual earnings,” Joe said. Worse, without consulting Joe, Rose had added material to the script that was “deplorably trite and singularly flat.” Joe asked that his name be removed from the credits. “I am very serious about this because frankly, and unhappily, I think it is now a bomb. It is no longer a funny show but a show based on a funny situation, and that is something different entirely.… [T]he comic tensions have been removed and replaced by static intervals of dialogue that are not funny and do not advance the action.” Finally, he insisted he receive full financial compensation for the work he had done.

  On August 6, Edward J. Montagne wrote him: “I would like to assure you, Joe, that we didn’t make the changes in the script purely for the sake of making changes. Nothing would please us more than to have a script come in that was perfect. Unfortunately, it is seldom the case—particularly so early in a series when characters are being formed.” The producers stuck to this point—that the series was not yet properly established—to argue that Joe was not “contractually entitled” to the money promised him before Rose reworked the script. Joe’s name remained in the credits. Seven years would elapse before the Writers Guild of America determined he had been wronged in the matter and was due a settlement of $2,375.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, “[c]omedy [variety] shows were out of style,” Mel Brooks said. “One day it’s five thousand a week [to write skits], the next day it’s zilch.”

  The Borscht Belt patter of Your Show of Shows had given way to the harder, jazzier, more political and absurd stand-up routines of Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl, and Woody Allen. The accumulated dramas of McCarthyism, the bomb, the Cold War, and Camelot in the White House had relegated Catskills shtick to the past (on top of which, the routines had become overly familiar on TV).

  The New York Times “generally ignored the satirical cabaret performers on the theory that such entertainment was not sufficiently highbrow,” Arthur Gelb wrote in City Room, his memoir of working at the Times. Gelb would soon become one of Joe’s close friends. “The best [of the comics] were well versed in literature, the Bible, psychology and current events,” he said. “At times, I saw them as our new evangelists, using the cabaret stage as a pulpit to shock audiences into an awareness of hypocritical, repressive aspects of our culture.”

  Mort Sahl would carry a newspaper onto the stage: the source of the new “black humor.” In many ways, stand-up comedians and comedic actors in such clubs as Second City in Chicago (featuring a young Alan Arkin), the hungry i in San Francisco, the Unicorn in Los Angeles, the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, and New York’s the Vanguard, the Bon Soir, Basin Street East, and the Bitter End presaged the personal, social nature of the coming cultural revolution—a trend with which Catch-22 was very much in step.

  One of Sahl’s jokes best embodied the moment: As he imagined responding to the badgering questions of an investigative committee, he said, “I didn’t mean to be subversive, but I was new in the community and wanted to meet girls.”

  Lenny Bruce was the Catskills on weed (or something harder), with a copy of Howl stuffed in its pocket. After a performance at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in the fall of 1961, Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges for having uttered onstage the word cocksucker as well as the sexual term to come. He was acquitted after his lawyer, Albert Bendich, argued that Bruce’s humor was “in the great tradition of social satire, related intimately to the kind of … satire found in the works of such great authors as Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift.” Bendich called literature professors and jazz critics to testify on Bruce’s behalf.

  More arrests followed in cities across the country. Finally, Bruce was brought to trial in New York after a performance in Greenwich Village’s Café Au Go Go, during which a former CIA agent named Herbert Ruhe, now working as a license inspector for the city, noted Bruce’s use of the expressions “nice tits,” “jack me off,” and “go come in a chicken.”

  Immediately, a petition circulated in the literary and entertainment communities protesting the comedian’s arrest. “Lenny Bruce … [is] in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain,” the petition said. “Although Bruce makes use of the vernacular in his night-club performances, he does so within the context of his satirical intent and not to arouse the prurient interests of his listeners.” Joe signed the petition along with hundreds of others, including Saul Bellow, James Jones, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Lionel Trilling, George Plimpton, Norman Podhoretz, and Barney Rosset.

  The trial, in the Criminal Courts Building downtown, was beyond parody, with the former CIA man performing some of Bruce’s routines for the jury (“I’m going to be judged by his bad timing,” Bruce groaned). A prosecutor asked a Presbyterian minister, “Would you s
ay the phrase, and you’ll excuse me, Reverend, for using this language, but the phrase ‘motherfucker’ is in accord with that Commandment, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother?’” Following a thoughtful pause, the minister replied, “I don’t think the term ‘motherfucker’ has any relationship to that Commandment.”

  Despite Bruce’s pleas that the court not “lock … away [his] words,” he was convicted of violating Penal Code 1140-A, prohibiting “obscene … entertainment … which would tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others.” Two years later, while still appealing the conviction, he died of a morphine overdose. One of his prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, admitted, “I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart.… We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

  In fact, as Arthur Gelb discovered while investigating for the New York Times, the NYPD regularly demanded graft from club owners and nightclub entertainers in exchange for not busting them or pulling club licenses. “[P]olice payoffs … were a fact of cabaret life,” Gelb wrote. It was the New York literary community—sharing Bruce’s concern that language could be outlawed—that led the charge against corrupt practices. At a meeting in George Plimpton’s Seventy-second Street apartment, at which Random House’s Jason Epstein and Robert Silvers, then of Harper’s, were present, along with Barney Rosset, Norman Mailer, and Norman Podhoretz, Gelb got the go-ahead to write a story for the Times announcing the formation of a committee of intellectuals; this committee planned to petition Governor Nelson Rockefeller to investigate police corruption with regard to cabarets. The story appeared on page one. Eventually, cabaret supervision was transferred to City Hall, away from the police department. None of this helped Lenny Bruce, but a blow had been struck, loosening restrictions and allowing performers such as Woody Allen to carry comedy to further extremes of satire and absurdity—as in Allen’s routine about a beatnik girl he wanted to seduce who liked to listen to Marcel Marceau LPs.

  It was a transitional moment for the culture (“I feel the hints, the clues, the whisper of a new time coming,” Norman Mailer had written) … and Joe Heller, the World War II vet who would soon be hailed for writing a Vietnam novel before Vietnam cracked the public consciousness, was an attractive transitional figure.

  In addition to Newsweek, the first national magazine to conduct an in-depth interview with Joe was The Realist, founded by Paul Krassner. A former violin prodigy who had worked for a while as a stand-up comic and television comedy writer (he adored Lenny Bruce), Krassner identified himself as a lapsed, nonconforming Jew. In the late fifties, he was working in lower Manhattan, in the business office of Lyle Stuart, Mad magazine’s business manager and publisher of the anticensorship magazine The Independent. Krassner wrote for The Independent and Mad, but felt these iconoclastic publications were becoming too tame in their appeal to more mainstream audiences. He penned a piece called “Guilt Without Sex: A Guide for Adolescents” and offered it to Mad. The editor, William Gaines, turned it down. Too racy, he said. Piqued by Gaines’s ever-more-conservative editorial taste, Krassner said to him, “I guess you don’t want to change horses in the middle of the stream.” Gaines replied, “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass.” Krassner decided to start his own magazine. “I founded The Realist as a Mad for adults,” he said.

  He refused advertising. This freed him to throw rocks at America’s prevailing mythologies. At first, he had only six hundred subscribers. He kept the magazine afloat with his own money, earned by freelancing. He spoofed religion, blacklisting, military expansionism, and nuclear fears (“Atoms for Peace,” Ike called A-bombs, in a line that could have come from Catch-22).

  Krassner printed a FUCK COMMUNISM poster, which outraged the Left and the Right (no one could tell where the satire was aimed). He interviewed Lenny Bruce as well as George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi party. The Rockwell interview opened with a note to readers: “When canceling your subscription please include your zip code.”

  In time, Krassner’s audience came to him. “What [our] readers had in common was an irreverence toward bullshit. Except their own, of course,” he said. As the magazine found its footing, it combined satire with incisive investigative reporting. In 1972, with financial backing from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Realist would produce a special issue documenting the Nixon administration’s improprieties in far more depth than the mainstream media had attempted.

  One of Krassner’s earliest “Impolite Interviews” was with Joseph Heller. Krassner recalled, “I had gone to my first literary cocktail party in my capacity as editor of The Realist,” at about the time Newsweek ran its profile of Joe in 1962. “When I met Heller, he asked if I’d read his book. I said I was in the middle of it, but [later] admitted that I had lied to him and didn’t have the book. As a result, he sent me a copy with a note: ‘You don’t have to read Catch-22, you write it every month.’ So then I requested an interview and read the book very carefully to prepare my questions. I learned much from his answers about the structure and modus operandi of satire.”

  Whereas Newsweek had covered the novel’s popularity and Joe’s growing celebrity, Krassner focused on the novel’s critique of society. In the interview, Joe insisted Catch-22 was “quite an orthodox book in terms of its morality.” He went on: “I think anything critical is subversive by nature in the sense that it does seek to change or reform something.… [T]he impetus toward progress of any kind has always been a sort of discontent with what existed.… But it doesn’t necessarily follow from that, that people would take exception to [the book].” He affirmed his belief that “people, even the worst people, I think are basically good, are motivated by humane impulses,” and he swore he was “more concerned with producing a work of fiction—of literary art, if you will—than of converting anybody or arousing controversy. I’m really afraid of getting involved in controversy.”

  “Are you serious?” Krassner asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Joe replied. “I’m a terrible coward. I’m just like Yossarian, you know. It’s the easiest thing to fight—I learned that in the war—it takes a certain amount of courage to go to war, but not very much, not as much as to refuse to go to war.”

  In response to critics’ charges that his characters were interchangeable, lacking real selves, Joe said, “People die and are forgotten. People are abused and forgotten. People suffer, people are exploited, right now; we don’t dwell upon them twenty-four hours a day. Somehow they get lost in the swirl of things … so [I had] a definite technique [in mind], at the beginning of the book particularly, of treating people and incidents almost in terms of glimpses, and then showing as we progress that these things do have a meaning and they do come together.”

  Finally, he said, “I regard [Catch-22] essentially as a peacetime book.… [W]hen this wartime emergency ideology is transplanted to peacetime, then you have … not only absurd situations, but … very tragic situations.”

  Following the interview, Joe “pretended he had taken the subway to our meeting,” Krassner recalled. Later, he learned Joe had hailed a cab. “I thought [that] was revealing,” Krassner said, “[but] I never thought that his identification with the counterculture and [his] desire for financial success were in the least mutually exclusive.” The times they were a-changin’; everyone was trying to negotiate the seams.

  * * *

  “WE MOVED to [a] much larger apartment in the [Apthorp] building right before 1963,” Ted Heller recalls. “I remember watching Oswald get shot in that apartment, live on TV. Most nights we ate in but we had a practice of going out on Sundays. We either went to a place called Tony’s (Italian) on West 79th Street or a Chinese place called Eastern Gardens somewhere in the 80s or 90s on Broadway (neither place is still extant). Eastern Gardens was, as I remember, not on street level but on the second floor and was very old school: red checked tablecloths and silver metal serving dishes with the tops on them.
The bartender and the maitre d’ at Tony’s knew my father and called him Giuseppe. The bartender’s name was Flavio and he knew that my father liked a Beefeater martini straight up, extra dry, with a twist.”

  On weekdays, Shirley cooked at home. She was glad the new apartment came with a washer and dryer.

  By 1963, among the biggest-selling Dell paperbacks were Catch-22 and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (“… the housewife-mother … [is] the model for all women; [this mystique] presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in the here and now, as far as women are concerned”). At the time, Paperbound Books in Print had no Women’s Studies category. The “women’s” line included books on beauty, cooking, and child care—though Benjamin Spock was still considered the national baby guru, and had the royalties to prove it. “Give up Dr. Spock? I’d rather give up my husband,” said one woman in a UPI survey seeking to determine if Spock’s growing political activism had eroded his readers’ confidence.

  Spock’s political consciousness, like that of most men of his (and Joe’s) generation had not yet widened to include feminism. “I think that when women are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable,” he was quoted as saying. Newsweek declared that menstruation was a “natural restriction” keeping women at home, and faulted American housewives for not accepting their destinies with “grace.”

  “Men went mad,” Joe had written in one of the nation’s bestselling books.

  “[W]omen[’s] … lives [are] confined,” Betty Friedan claimed in another.

  13. Bombs

  BACK ON Corsica in 1966, on assignment for Holiday magazine, Joe realized the mission count was still being raised. As ten-year-old Ted hung out a car window, gazing with “sour … irritation” at his dad’s wartime haunts, Joe understood his missions were over, but his son’s “military service was still ahead”: “I could have clasped him in my arms to protect him.”