Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  In Brodax’s account, Joe ordered a second brandy and considered the offer. “You’re talking Lennon, McCartney … something with them … The Beatles?” Then he pulled out his credit card. “What the hell, the bridge is down, and the Beatles, they’re up!… What a gift, dinner is on Heller. Sonofabitch, Brodax!” As he left the restaurant, he gave Brodax a “poignan[t]” bear hug.

  “I [had] told [Joe] what he was desperate to hear,” Brodax wrote. In fact, the people of Pietrasanta informed him the American bombs were “so far off” their targets, “they could hear [them] but … couldn’t see them.”

  As for Yellow Submarine: “With Heller in [his] pocket,” Brodax felt he had a hit on his hands. Once Joe finished the script, Brodax bound the “all-important Heller treatment” in a green cover and flew to London “with a stack of [other] scripts … each one with a different color cover.” He presented the range of options to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, certain he would “buy Heller.” At the time, Epstein’s behavior was increasingly bizarre—within a year, he would die of a drug overdose. At the meeting, Epstein “picked up the first treatment and said, ‘I don’t like this—it’s purple,’ and threw it on the floor,” Brodax said. “The next one—‘I don’t like this, it’s orange.’ Then he gets to one in a green cover, which was written by Joseph Heller, and that one he throws away, too. So I said, ‘Brian, that’s by Joe Heller.’ He said, ‘I don’t care who it’s by, I don’t like green.’” So ended Joe’s flirtation with the Beatles.

  In New York, Joe had told Brodax he saw a “connection between his Yossarian and [John] Lennon”: “They share a dislike for bureaucratic institutions.”

  * * *

  MANY WHO LIVED through the 1960s recall moments on which they believe the decade’s movements hinged. One such instance, often cited by writers, occurred in August 1964, when Bob Dylan offered marijuana to the Beatles in their room at the Delmonico Hotel. John Lennon used one word to tap the evening’s importance: “Surrealism.” The awareness of growing cultural power shared by the five young men in that room; the willingness to play with mind-flexing “organics”; the spark of Dylan’s influence on Lennon’s songwriting, leading to more personal reflection as well as sharp political statements—and greater ambitiousness in rock music, generally; the meshing of music, poetry, politics, and celebrity to an unprecedented degree: It was, says writer Bob Spitz, a “cultural milestone … [and] nothing would ever be the same again.”

  Billy Graham knew it. This quintessential Luce hero—the hardheaded entrepreneur with an unshakable faith in the Christian God—warned that the Beatles and rock music were leading the children of the 1960s to perdition. When Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Christ, the Ku Klux Klan rushed to Christ’s defense. They burned Beatles records and showed, more than anything, that Lennon may have uttered an uncomfortable truth.

  The ex–Luce man Joe Heller knew things had changed. “He loved Bob Dylan.… [He] had everything Dylan did on a reel-to-reel tape (he had a Tandberg tape deck—I loved playing with that thing),” Ted recalls. Joe tried wearing a string of love beads made by his daughter. “She told me that after about three days, I’d get used to them. This is the third day and, you know, she’s right,” he told an interviewer. (The beads clashed with the checkered blazer he often wore and the orange Stim-U-Dent toothpick perpetually hanging from his mouth.)

  More seriously, he remained engaged with the underground press, even as mainstream publications courted him. In his blazers, Joe set “a new trend for the … 60s, along with the high-waisted dress and the overblouse,” Vogue said. As often as not, he displayed his “trendiness” in The Realist, Crawdaddy! and other tabloid-style rock-music venues.

  To a dismissal by Jean Shepherd of the “polemic[al]” satire of Lenny Bruce, Joe responded, in the pages of The Realist, “[I]t is [not] the function of satire to present all sides of a question; that is the function of … the Sunday Times. I’m not sure, even, that it is the function of satire to convey information, but, instead, to convey an attitude about information.” He took Shepherd to task for suggesting that passion and intellect were mutually exclusive. “They are not at opposite ends of the pole, or even within the same circumference of definitions,” he wrote. “One of the opposites of passion is indifference; and one of the opposites of intellect is stupidity.”

  In the May 1965 issue of The Realist, Joe attacked syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak for an “attempt to discredit the Student Non-Violent [sic] Coordinating Committee.” Borrowing a page from Joseph McCarthy, Evans and Novak had claimed, without substantiation, that SNCC had been infiltrated by “known Communists.” Joe called their charges “contemptible” and lauded the “hundreds of brave young men and women, white and colored, Northern and Southern,” who had organized voter-registration drives in the South, at considerable physical risk, and “demonstrated virtues not often found anywhere else in this country of ours.”

  In more mainstream outlets—the New York Times, the Harvard Crimson—he criticized America’s leaders. He insisted “[a]ny society that puts Cassius Clay and Benjamin Spock in jail and makes McGeorge Bundy head of the Ford Foundation is not one to which allegiance should be given lightly.”

  To Richard B. Sale, an editor of the academic journal Studies in the Novel, who asked him to talk about Yossarian, Joe offered this: “All I want to say is it ain’t that hard. It ain’t that hard to take a stand on something.”

  Increasingly, he was seen as—and accepted the role of—cultural spokesperson, as Catch-22 came to be regarded as prophetic about the complexities of Vietnam (some war protesters even ragged Yossarian for not assassinating his commanding officer).

  For all the talk in the “legitimate” press about a generation gap, hawks and doves, liberals and conservatives, one of the developments making possible the “American 1960s” was this: Figures such as Jack Kennedy, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, Joseph Heller, and John Yossarian moved fluidly from the mainstream to the underground and back again, from High Art to Pop Culture. The perfect icon of this blurring was the paperback book, the conveyor of classics and corn. With boundaries broken, nothing could resist change.

  As early as 1960, Norman Mailer wrote in Esquire that a Kennedy presidency might give “unwilling charge” to forces now bottled up in the American underground. The underground could not be dismissed as marginal; now it existed on the fringe no more than Time’s latest cover. And because it could not be dismissed, it was, some believed, dangerous. In the mid-1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) switched its focus from investigating civil rights murders by the Ku Klux Klan to trying to block the rise of any “real Mau-Mau” who could unify black America. It tried to disrupt the “New Left movement[’s] … propaganda activities,” especially in its “anarchist-type” underground papers.

  According to Abe Peck, “[T]he FBI … placed an ad in the L.A. Free Press designed to discredit the Communist Party.” It asked the IRS to examine magazines’ tax returns. It “use[d] its contacts to persuade Columbia Records to stop advertising in the underground press.” The Crawdaddy! offices on Fifth Avenue in New York were burgled one night, in a way that would soon conjure the word Watergate. (Mark Felt, later famous as “Deep Throat,” was a central figure in COINTELPRO operations.) John Lennon, whose FBI file gradually fattened as the U.S. government tried to deport him, told Paul Krassner that if anything happened to him and Yoko Ono, it would not be an accident.

  Meanwhile, bombers roamed the skies above the heartland: the Strategic Air Command, keeping the United States safe from Soviet attack. Missile silos ticked among desert mirages in the American West. Watts burned. Assassins stalked leaders. Surrealism, indeed.

  “If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick,” John Steinbeck wrote.

  By mid-decade, the country’s pace had quickened in a smoky, black-lighted whirl. In 1967, Playboy declared “t
he suburbs” were reeling from one college scandal after another, from sex to marijuana to “treated sugar cubes.” Over ten years earlier, that magazine had broken ground, scandalously; now it was mainstream, almost respectable. The once-staid New Yorker was upsetting longtime subscribers by printing the absurdist stories of Donald Barthelme.

  Rolling Stone was another publication redefining cultural boundaries, straddling the fence between “alternative” and “general interest.” One of its founders, Ralph J. Gleason, a jazz and pop-music critic, wrote, “I dare say that with the inspiration of the Beatles and Dylan we have more poetry being produced and more poets being made than ever before in the history of the world.” He quoted Plato on the way music (broadly defined) alters politics: “The new style quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs and from there it issues a greater force … [it] goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overthrowing everything, both in public and in private.” Gleason said, “That seems to me to be … the answer to the British rock singer Donovan’s question, ‘What goes on? I really want to know.’” In addition to the Beatles and Dylan, Gleason listed Joseph Heller as one of the purveyors of the “new style.” “Heller … [has] hold of it,” he wrote.

  In the liner notes to an LP record of Lenny Bruce’s performance in Berkeley on December 12, 1965, Gleason wrote, “Lenny Bruce was really, along with Bob Dylan and Miles Davis and a handful of others (maybe Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, and Allen Ginsberg in another way) the leader of the first wave of the American social and cultural revolution which is gradually changing the structure of our society and may effectively revise it, if the forces of reaction which are automatically brought into play by such a drive, do not declare military law and suppress it.”

  Always in the background were Vietnam and the Cold War.

  That Catch-22 was a Vietnam novel appeared to be confirmed with each new revelation of military strategies (or lack thereof), with buzzwords used by the country’s leaders to obfuscate tactics and unintended consequences. Michael Herr produced some of the finest reporting on Vietnam. He collected the pieces in his book Dispatches, but they first appeared in a range of journals from the esoteric to the mainstream and in between—New American Review, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. Under editor Harold Hayes, Esquire recast journalism, stressing personal style and subjectivity over attempts at objective reporting. It was an approach perfectly suited to the merry, scary 1960s.

  Herr, a Syracuse graduate, served for a time as the “unpaid film critic for a tiny, leftist magazine called The New Leader, but was fired after … [one] year for liking the wrong movies,” wrote critic Keith Saliba. Candida Donadio tossed Herr his first break, negotiating a contract for a short-story collection that she converted to a book deal about Vietnam. Esquire issued him press credentials.

  Dispatches opens with the following description:

  There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore.… [I]t was very old.… The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older [no longer extant] territories.… [N]ow[adays], even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We [were learning] that the uses of most information were flexible.…

  Herr went on to tell the story of an information officer who insists American troops controlled the ground once identified on maps as the Ho Bo Woods. The place had been pacified, “denying the enemy valuable resources and cover.” The Ho Bo Woods had vanished. Maps now called the region something else. “And if in the months following … enemy activity in the … area … had increased ‘significantly,’ and American losses had doubled and then doubled again, none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you’d better believe it,” Herr wrote.

  Years earlier, another of Candida’s boys had exposed the military’s “flexible … uses of information.” In chapter 12 of Catch-22, Yossarian moves the bomb line on the captain’s map so the captain will think the Allies have captured more territory than they have, and thus won’t force the men to fly a mission to Bologna. Throughout Catch-22, reality is never as powerful as perception and willed ignorance. If Doc Daneeka’s paperwork says he’s dead, then he’s dead, even if he’s in your face denying it. One can imagine a young GI crouched in the Ho Bo Woods, muttering, “That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”

  * * *

  AT PARTIES, Joe—the trendsetter, the cultural spokesperson—“was nothing if not a provocateur: perverse, paradoxical, consistently inconsistent,” Erica Heller said. He would “casually let it slip that he’d [not] voted [for years], then sit back smiling, relishing the … whirlwind controversy as, one by one, people challenged him, asking quite reasonably how he could possibly criticize the government (as he often did), while not participating in the process of changing and electing its leaders. As soon as I was old enough to vote, I, too, got swept up in one of these … conversations with him, at a party I’d gone to with my parents. Midway through, just as I was beginning to get very worked up, my mother leaned over to me and quietly said, ‘Don’t even start. Don’t you see? He loves this. He does it purposely.’”

  In Something Happened, Bob Slocum wrestles emotionally with a strong-willed adolescent. “She would break my heart, if she were somebody else’s [child],” he says, responding to his daughter’s confusing combination of naïveté and maturity. “I realize now that I have not always given replies to her questions and comments that were appropriate. When she tells me she wishes she were dead, I tell her she will be, sooner or later.… My error, I think, is that I always speak to her as I would to a grown-up; and all she wants, probably, is for me to talk to her as a child.”

  Slocum’s daughter tries to tell him how to speak to her, and they have this exchange:

  “You always like to give short answers when we argue. You think it’s a good trick.”

  “It is.”

  “You’re so sarcastic.”

  “Be a sneak. I’m not being sarcastic now.… Sneak outside … when you want to smoke or burn that crappy incense or do something else you don’t want us to know about. And close the door to your room when you’re on the telephone so we won’t have to listen to you complain about us to all of your friends or see those crappy sex novels you read instead of the books you’re supposed to be reading for school.… Just don’t let me find out.… Because if I do find out, I’m going to have to do something about it. I’m going to have to disapprove and get angry and punish you, and other things like that, and that will make you unhappy and me unhappy.”

  “Why will it make you unhappy?” she wants to know.

  “Because you’re my daughter. And I really don’t enjoy seeing you unhappy.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ha!”

  In many ways, Erica says, “Something Happened … was certainly [an] accurate” portrait of her family. When she argued with her father or tried to discuss a serious issue with him, “it wasn’t really sparring or playing because we were not evenly matched. He was a brilliant grown-up and I was a kid.” To Barbara Gelb, Erica “acknowledg[ed] her resemblance to the daughter in Something Happened, commenting, ‘That girl is out to make trouble every minute. As an adolescent, I was out to make it every five minutes.”

  Joe’s relationship with Erica had never been easy—in part, because she was too young to understand his humor. Once, while Shirley was out shopping, he stuck little Erica on the upper shelf of a bedroom closet to see if Shirley would notice the child was missing. The experience frightened and puzzled Erica. When she was older, he told her he was going to lock her out of the apartment unless she came home
with pizza every time she went out. To her, this was not a game, especially as, for days, the threat remained imminent.

  And in part, Joe stayed masked in front of his children. Mario Puzo often remarked on how important it was to Joe to maintain control of his feelings—so much so, he couldn’t have fun, even with his kids. If he caught himself feeling happy, he’d pull a sullen face.

  In her teens, Erica tried to understand him indirectly through her mother. Often, he seemed “grumpy, disaffected and blasé, casual, seemingly bored by his own accomplishments,” Erica said. But when she talked to Shirley, she glimpsed a different side of him. “When Catch-22 came out, my mother told me, she and Dad would often jump into a cab late at night and ride around the city, just to look at all the bookstore windows filled with the red, white, and blue of his book jacket. He would giggle at the sight. There was a part of him, the poor boy from Coney Island, that had never stopped giggling. You just had to know how to read him.”

  As for her: “[I]t took many years for me to be able to properly decode him, learn the language … recognize the love he deeply felt, couched in gravelly growls and R’s that often leaned into guttural V’s. Like examining some complex pointillistic painting, standing too close was merely distorting.”

  Joe could not see Erica clearly, either. The happy baby who had charmed his mother, and given the old woman simple pleasures late in life, had become an individual with opinions, adult needs, and ambitions of her own. “[S]he is, I fear … dissolving into her surroundings right before my eyes,” Slocum says of his daughter. “She wants to be like other people her age. I cannot stop her; I cannot save her. Something happened to her.… Her uniqueness is fading.” The novel expresses every mother and father’s lament: A child’s growth augers prideful, painful losses for the parent.

  Eventually, Erica learned to appreciate her father’s nostalgia, fears of aging, and puzzlement. When Something Happened appeared in 1974, as she was about to graduate from NYU, she published her first piece, in Harper’s. A response to the novel, it was entitled “It Sure Did.” She wrote: