Joe predicted his narrator in Something Happened. “[My son’s] terror … [is] more dreadful than any I have ever been able to imagine,” says Bob Slocum, the narrator father. “I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze.” He smothers his boy in his zeal to save him.
Nothing so dramatic happened on the return to Corsica, but Joe’s impulse to shield his son, and its switch in the novel to murderous terror, suggests something crucial about his fiction-making process—a subject for later. For now, while Joe and his family walked the hills of Corsica, let’s note: Joe didn’t die as a child (surrounded by arcades simulating the noise of war); his father did. Joe didn’t die in the war; army brothers did. In revisiting his past—and celebrating his continuing vitality—he felt something he would later imagine as hastening a child’s death.
Sacrifice and honor, the liberated and the fallen: In a sense, these military tropes, which Joe first encountered as a boy reading the Iliad, defined his life view and mature fiction.
“Is this what we came to see?” Ted grumbled one day, gazing at gravel and dirt on a flat Corsican patch.
“The airfield was right here,” Joe explained to his son. “The bombers used to come back from Italy and France and land right out that way.”
“I’m thirsty,” said Erica, fourteen.
“It’s hot,” Shirley said.
Ted said, “I want to go back.”
Joe told him they weren’t returning to the hotel. They were moving on to another spot.
“I mean back to New York!” Ted said. “I’m not interested in your stupid airfield! The only airfield I want to see is John F. Kennedy!”
From the first, the kids had been excited but wary about the trip. “Up until [this] time, we hadn’t … really been anywhere and suddenly we were packing to go on the S. S. Rafaello, [one of its earliest] voyage[s], in first class, pretty heady stuff,” Erica says. Before leaving the States, she had asked her father why the family couldn’t go to Italy by car. At the time, Joe was paying to send her to the New Lincoln School, a progressive private school in Harlem, and he wondered if the money was worth it. “My brother and I played Ping Pong across the Atlantic,” Erica recalls. “My always beautiful mother was now splendidly glamorous, dressed up for dinner and suddenly looking like some enchanting actress or a Tzarina. My father begrudgingly wore a tux to dinner every night and was the life of the party: sardonic, bored and faintly irritable, but still somehow a delight to all around him. The young Italian waiters in their spanking white jackets all giggled a bit when my mother spoke to them and I caught one, once, blushing while trying … to look down her celery-colored evening gown as he bent to serve her baked Alaska.”
Holiday had assigned Joe to write about the old Alesan Air Field, to note the changes in people and places, and relive his experiences. The kids were bored by his talk of the past. “There [was] nothing [left],” Joe conceded. “It’s almost … as though there had never been a war.” The mountains were higher than he remembered, the landscape rougher, the dangers he had faced more intense than he had realized at the time. The cab rides, on steep, winding paths in reedy, dry hills spooked his wife.
At Ile Rousse, a summer resort where the army had built a rest camp in Joe’s day, teenaged girls and boys from Paris, Marseille, and Nice lounged about or swam, listening to Nancy Sinatra, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones on a jukebox. Up and down nearby beaches, fancy new cottages lined the shore: This could have been Fire Island. Only now and then did Joe catch a glimpse of something familiar: a bar on the road to Cervione, a mountain village, where pilots and bombardiers used to drink warm, bitter wine. Now the place, much brighter than it used to be, served Coca-Cola, and Joe’s kids delighted in the gelato allemagne, the German ice cream he ordered for them there. “Don’t drink the water,” Shirley warned them. At one point, Joe wrote, a “shy, soft-spoken young man stepped toward us hesitantly,” wishing to honor this American who had fought to liberate Italy. He “begged permission to give us a cadeau, a gift, a large, beautiful earthenware vase from the small pottery shop from which he gained his livelihood,” Joe said. “It was touching, sobering; I was sorry I had nothing with which to reciprocate.”
Joe was curious to see the town of Pietrasanta and to inspect its bridge. For years, he had not been certain he had hit it with his bombs. Recently, in New York, an acquaintance, the film producer Al Brodax, said he’d visited Pietrasanta. The villagers assured him the bridge had been ruined in the war.
Joe couldn’t tell. The bridge had been small, sturdy, and smooth. Destroyed, it would have been easy to repair.
The family stayed at the Hotel Byron in Forte dei Marmi nearby, where the sculptor Henry Moore was also staying at the time. He went out in the mornings to Cararra, a white-marble quarry, to select pieces for his work. Erica recalls the Byron as a “little jewel of a hotel.” She loved the “salty breezes” and the hotel chef’s “salsa pomodoro, still the cleanest, freshest taste I know.” On the beach, striped chairs stood in rows on the sand; every afternoon at three o’clock, a stooped, toothless man came around, wearing bright red sandals, selling “bambaloni balls of crisp, fried dough, dusted with sugar, hot in your hands, ambrosia in your mouth,” Erica says.
In Florence, she and her mother bought earrings while Joe sat with his son in sidewalk cafés, scribbling, pondering, recalling his war. He remembered that, on his thirty-seventh mission—the one to Avignon—he’d learned the lead navigator had once been a history teacher. Flying over Europe, he’d recognized places he had read about. At one point, as the bombers made their way to France, he announced excitedly over the intercom, “On our right is the city of Orange, ancestral home of the kings of Holland and of William III.” “And on our left,” came the worried voice of a radio gunner, “is flak.”
In Siena, Frederick Karl, Dolores, and their kids joined the Hellers for the Palio, a spectacular citywide horse race. In Rome, Joe perused the streets, recalling how American soldiers used to justify their visits to prostitutes here. Their money helped poor girls obtain the necessities of life, they said: For only thirty-five dollars (a couple of afternoon visits), a woman could get a nice pair of shoes. Frequenting brothels was a form of humanitarian aid.
As a young man on R & R, Joe had skipped the museums and architectural tours. Now, the city’s art and history overwhelmed him. He was especially touched by Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. “It is the best motion picture ever made,” he wrote. “There is perpetual movement in its violent rising and falling, and perpetual drama in its agony and wrath. To be with [it] is to be with Oedipus and King Lear. I want that wall.” He dreamed of transporting and refashioning it in the Apthorp, turning his apartment into a Hall of the Great Dead.
* * *
HE HAD TAKEN the Holiday assignment for the same reason he accepted screenplay work. His portion of the Catch-22 paperback sale to Dell—about thirteen thousand dollars—was gone now, and his royalties, though steady, were thinly stretched from month to month. “I started worrying about money,” he told journalist Chet Flippo in 1981. “I had my savings in bonds—about $50,000, which was all I had in the world.… I had a few very bad nights … when I felt I might have to give up my apartment, have to take the children out of private school, have to tell my children that we’re moving out to Queens or Brooklyn. It was not the poverty, but the shame, that worried me.”
McHale’s Navy had soured him on writing original screenplays, but he discovered he was very good at rewriting movie scripts quickly because of his facility for dialogue and humor. With George Mandel, he did form a production company, Scapegoat, to represent various projects they started together but never brought to fruition: “The Big Squeeze,” a movie about the culture gap between 1960s teenagers and an older immigrant generation, featuring, Joe wrote, “much music … by many name entertainers—all of it good, loud, and fast,” and ending with a “chase
… that involves all the principals”; “Howe and Hummel,” a musical about two shysters and lots of pretty girls; and an outline for a television series called “King Solomon’s Smidjik,” an international caper comedy swirling around a magical object with the power to impart wisdom but whose use inevitably leads to chaos and mischief.
In the summer of 1963, Joe was offered five thousand dollars a week to rework a script called Sex and the Single Girl, distantly based on the book by Helen Gurley Brown. Like Betty Friedan, Brown, a former copywriter for a California advertising agency, championed female independence. Rather than rejecting kittenish femininity, women should use sexual allure to get what they wanted from men, Brown said. Most nascent feminists did not consider her one of them, but her book, condoning casual affairs, sold briskly, and Brown became a regular on the television talk-show circuit. Warner Bros. optioned the book for $200,000. During development, a studio executive complained to producer Saul David that the book had no plot. “I told you that a hundred thousand dollars ago,” David replied. The studio had bought a sexy title—that’s all.
A veteran screenwriter, David R. Schwartz, took a shot at the script in February 1963. Joe inherited the project a few months later. Nudged by the studio, he based his script less on Brown’s book than on Joseph Hoffman’s How to Make Love and Like It, about a virgin anthropologist who writes a bestselling book on sex. He was told to “spice things up” with a car chase. The final product, starring Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall, was billed as “based on the book … by Helen Gurley Brown. Screenplay by David R. Schwartz and Joseph Heller. Story by Joseph Hoffman.” Along the way, coherence vanished. The film’s finest scene, said the New York Times, had the “two young, muddled protagonists yammering about love and Freud at a zoo, tiredly watched by monkeys and baboons.” The script contained “some genuinely amusing, peppery dialogue and incidents,” but the film reinforced stereotypes about strong women who secretly wanted a man, and unfaithful men who wanted a woman to keep them in line.
“We had never experienced anything like that [summer],” Erica recalls. “[W]e relinquished [our] summer house [on Fire Island] and got on a plane [to Hollywood] … We really didn’t know we were going until about two days before; in fact, we had just gotten a puppy named Brillo and had to find a place for him to spend the summer.… Audrey Chestney’s parents took him—and kept him, they were all so attached to each other.… Dad stretched out the script writing so it would take us through the summer until it was time to come back to school.”
Erica’s biggest thrill was meeting Eydie Gormé. “I just ran up to her like a lunatic, threw my arms around her and told her I loved her. She was probably very frightened,” she says. “I learned two words [in L.A.] I was never able to forget: ‘Charge it.’ I remember tennis lessons and sitting at the pool with Ted and ordering hot fudge sundaes and charging it to ‘the bungalow.’”
The flight to California was the kids’ first experience on an airplane. “I remember thinking the boats and cars I was seeing after take-off were toys,” Ted says. He recalls “swimming in Tony Curtis’s pool, him getting me a Superman costume, being in a movie studio and seeing Bob Hope.… [M]y parents were astounded how expensive a room service hamburger was at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
Joe took Ted to a Hollywood studio to watch a TV show being filmed—Arrest and Trial, starring Ben Gazzara. “They were about to film a scene and my father told me not to make a noise.… I was so scared, I thought everyone could hear my heartbeat and hear me swallowing. I think I held my breath,” Ted says.
Briefly, Joe met Natalie Wood. She hated the movie and agreed to act in it only because she was contractually obligated. Watching her on the set, Joe felt she “had a natural flair for comedy, something she dismissed” to be taken seriously as an actress. Tony Curtis signed on because he “needed the money to settle a divorce,” Joe said. “That’s what I like best about the movie industry: the art and idealism.”
When producer Charles K. Feldman released Casino Royale in 1967, the film’s publicity slogan was “Casino Royale is too much for one James Bond!”—a cover for chaos. David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen all played Bond in what was supposed to be a spoof of the spy genre. In fact, it was a grab bag of scenes directed by five different men, hired willy-nilly by Feldman, all working without communication, a clear budget, or a coherent script. Though Joe is not credited on the film, he worked on a draft of the screenplay (with George Mandel), as did a host of others, including Terry Southern, Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. Allen “told me that he and I both did a version of the same scene,” Joe said. Joe took the job because it “was tempting, and it came at a good time, as I was between novels, where I had been for five years, and where I would have liked to remain for at least four or five years more,” he said. “[I figured the] work would be easy—there was no danger of failing, since somebody else had already done that.”
During the filming, Sellers’s marriage to Britt Ekland was crumbling. He behaved erratically, threw tantrums, and eventually walked off the set. Leo Jaffe, Columbia Picture’s executive vice president, didn’t seem to notice. One day, he mistook Allen for Sellers. “When you put glasses on them, they do sort of look alike,” he explained. Nothing fazed Feldman. He was determined to make the biggest, most dazzling screen comedy in history, featuring the world’s loveliest women. “No background dogs in my picture!” he told his crew. “Get only real beauties.” The film showcased Ursula Andress, Joanna Pettet, and Jacqueline Bisset. Like many of the writers and directors, Joe wanted his name removed from the credits. In the end, the movie’s anarchic silliness distilled some of 1967’s psychedelic spirit; the film grossed $17.2 million dollars at the U.S. box office.
Dirty Dingus Magee, credited to Joseph Heller, along with Tom and Frank Waldman, released in 1970, and based on the novel The Ballad of Dingus Magee, by David Markson, is, according to one critic, “ninety minute[s] … of what appears to be Frank [Sinatra] having a mid-life crisis.” Markson agreed, calling it the “worst movie you ever saw.” He knew Joe. Both were friends of Alice Denham. Markson wrote the novel, a half-serious, half-satirical Western, “sort of on impulse,” he said. “It’s intricate and carefully plotted.… I had a bunch of rejections because everybody said there was no such thing as a satirical Western. Then a movie came out called Cat Ballou [starring Jane Fonda]. That suddenly made it interesting for the Hollywood types. So when Dingus was published, they jumped in and bought it. I got $100,000, and that was 1966.” The lead was meant for a nineteen-year-old actor. Sinatra was fifty-five at the time. It was the last film role he would take for a decade. Bret Wheadon, author of Sinatra: The Complete Guide, wrote that the movie conveyed “denigrating attitudes toward women, Native Americans, and anyone else … in [the] film’s sights.… Truly a low point in the careers of Sinatra and writer Joseph Heller.”
In a talk at the Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y on December 7, 1970, Joe said, “I’ve had some experiences with motion pictures, all of which I have to apologize for. The latest one is something called Dirty Dingus Magee. I think I’ve gotten more [bad] notices … than Frank Sinatra. But that was just a youthful indiscretion, and we all commit those.”
Shortly before his return to Corsica, Joe lunched with Al Brodax in Manhattan’s Palm Restaurant. The men had met through Mel Brooks. Brodax told Joe, “You owe me.”
“What for?” Joe asked.
“Pietrasanta.”
“The bridge, the bridge!” Joe said.
He had once told Brodax about the Pietrasanta mission, and confessed he didn’t know if he’d hit his target. Brodax said he had just visited the town—“I was in the neighborhood”—and nosed around.
According to Brodax, “Joe leaped to his feet” and asked, “And the bridge?”
“Direct hit … no question … gone … you blew that mother to smithereens.”
“Joe dance[d] in small … circles and stomp[ed] his feet,” Brodax
said. “He howl[ed] in shameless joy.… ‘No shit, Brodax … I leveled the motherfucker!’”
He had eased Joe’s mind; in return, he wanted Joe to write a screen treatment for an animated Beatles film.
Many details in Up Periscope Yellow, Brodax’s account of the making of Yellow Submarine, have been questioned by those involved in the film’s production, and Brodax admits to stretching the truth when it suits him. But with the exception of overwriting, his anecdote about Joe rings true. “Time with Joe [was] always a joy,” he wrote. “We share[d] lots of things … Brooklyn-born, Jewish-bred, war-torn slightly, but only slightly.”
Brodax, working for King Features in New York, had produced a Saturday-morning Beatles cartoon show, which ran on American television beginning in 1964. The Beatles loathed it. They resisted his notion that an animated film could be built around their novelty tune, “Yellow Submarine.” Still, Brodax pushed ahead, approaching several writers (the Beatles were legally bound to make one more film for United Artists after A Hard Day’s Night and Help!).
Lee Minoff, a young playwright, claimed he wrote the first script. He recalled meeting Paul McCartney in London. “[A] little kid,” Minoff said. At the time, McCartney was “twenty-one, twenty-three [at the] oldest.… We had some brief conversations [about the proposed movie] which Brodax sort of led. The only thing that seemed to come out of the meeting was Paul McCartney talked about a monster. He wanted a monster in it. Monsters are good.”
Meanwhile, Brodax cast about for other writers. He told David Picker, a vice president in charge of production at United Artists, that he knew Joe Heller. “Heller’s … very much the flavor of the sixties, a hell of a possibility if you can nail him,” Picker said. Thus the meeting at the Palm.
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