Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  What “happens” to Bob Slocum’s children, that ineffable and awesome thing that he can neither explain nor undo, that change in his children that leaves him feeling so alone and so inept at human contact, is simply that his kids have grown up, have matured.… A terrible thing, this business of growing up, but it happens to the best of us.… [It] means adjusting yourself to the shortcomings of [your family], realizing their limitations and being glad that they are no more abundant than they are … and then going out into the world to transcend the disappointments.

  This was hard-won wisdom. “Erica had a tough time with her father,” says Norman Barasch. “One time she told me he said to her, ‘You’re not my daughter! You’re not my daughter!’ I was mad at him. I thought I couldn’t be friends with someone who said something like that. And so we didn’t talk for a while.” Erica’s Harper’s piece drew little praise from Joe—her defensiveness, the hurt beneath the insight, was hard to miss. He told Erica all he wanted was for her to follow a path of steady work and money.

  Meanwhile, like Slocum, Joe saw himself in his son: another form of misperceiving a child. For the time being, it made for a relatively smooth surface: perhaps too much parental concern. Ted responded to music and language. He admired his father’s war medals in a dresser drawer. He watched television and played with his dad’s tape deck. He enjoyed trips to Coney Island with his father.

  “I always felt I was a disappointment to him but, to be honest, I’ve always felt that way with most people,” Ted says. In part, he attributes this feeling to the family’s noncommunicativeness. “He [n]ever mentioned his mother or father to me. And I felt strongly that I shouldn’t ask,” Ted says.

  He remembers “the year Sergeant Pepper came out, I went to summer camp in the Berkshires (I was very homesick). When I returned to New York, everything was fine for a few days. My Aunt Sylvia was supposed to visit us and have dinner one night. Well, that night the doorbell rings and someone, I think my sister, goes to get it and that very second is when my parents told me Sylvia’s husband, Bernie, had passed away. While the door was being opened to let her in! I didn’t really care for him but was stunned by the timing.… I can’t help but laugh [now].… I can’t explain why it’s funny. It’s just indicative of the family.”

  Ted loved the family’s summers on Fire Island; his memories of the place suggest he was an unusually sensitive child. One day, Joe “warned me there was going to be something called an eclipse and told me not to look at the sun. I was so frightened that during the eclipse I hid under my bed,” he says. On another occasion, “I was on the beach with a kite and Joe and I were flying it. All of a sudden the lifeguard (who seemed so old to me then but was probably sixteen) comes over and asks if he can hold the kite. I was reluctant. He kept asking nicely. Joe told me to hand the lifeguard the kite—everything would be okay. I was maybe six or seven but I knew something terrible would happen. I handed the lifeguard the kite and sure enough within six seconds the kite slipped out of his hands and was gone.”

  Shirley’s cousins recall hearing from her mother that Ted struggled with school, experienced behavioral and discipline problems, but they never met him. When pressed for details, Dottie insisted Ted was working through his troubles and Joe and Shirley were “good parents.” “Teddy—that was a mystery,” says Audrey Chestney. Ted confirms he didn’t like school but prefers not to discuss that period of his life.

  In Now and Then, Joe recalled taking Erica and Ted to Coney Island one day, along with George Mandel, Mario Puzo, and their kids. “The very qualities that had disappointed us in the past made Steeplechase now ideal for languid fathers in their forties,” Joe wrote. “It was clean, it was orderly, it was safe. While the children chased [one another] … gawking … enjoy[ing] themselves … the three of us could rest calmly on a bench and talk quietly.”

  Before he left that day, Joe recognized the “passing of generations.” He remembered running up to weary older people as a kid and asking if he could take their remaining ride tickets. Now he was one of those old dodderers who would have gladly relinquished the goods.

  He often felt tired. He struggled with his weight. He was approaching two hundred pounds and did not feel comfortable in his body. “He went to a health club called Al Roon’s on Broadway in the 70’s (I think men only), before joining the Y,” Ted recalls. “That Y is not around anymore … it was in the 60’s on Broadway, I think. Lots of famous people went there [like the singer Paul Simon] and my father used to run around the small track. (It was something like five hundred times around to make a mile.) This was before there were dozens of gyms all over the place.”

  Joe noticed Shirley—still, as Erica said, a glamorous woman—fighting to adjust to middle age. She did not like to undress in front of him in the light. She felt self-conscious about the red marks her girdles left on her flesh. Sometimes she drank a little wine in the evenings—never too much, but if a day had been particularly tense, with chores, children, misunderstandings with Joe, it did not take much to make her irritable or, more rarely, sorry for herself. Dolores Karl saw she was discomfited by Joe’s growing celebrity and the attention it brought him from women. In public, Joe always kidded about the adjustments necessary in a long marriage. “Neither one of us has ever had a divorce. We’re beginning to think there’s something wrong with us,” he told one interviewer. To another, he said, “Maybe we just don’t quit easily. I know many people whose marriages have ended for reasons I don’t think are serious enough. If everyone were to end a marriage because of disappointments or dissatisfactions or moods or temporary attractions, almost no marriage would survive.”

  In Something Happened—certain sections of which Joe did not want to publish in magazines, fearing that, removed from the novel’s context, they would embarrass Shirley—his narrator laments the loss of sexual novelty. Alternately, he cherishes and bemoans the infatuated tolerance that years of familiarity instill in a marriage. “I don’t think my wife has learned how to lie to me yet. (My wife doesn’t know how to flirt and doesn’t know how to lie to me.) When she does have something she hopes to conceal, she remains silent about it and hopes I will not inquire,” says Bob Slocum. “I try to keep away from whatever I think she is trying to hide. I suspect she does the same for me (I suspect she knows a great deal more about me than she discloses). Our conversations, therefore, are largely about nothing, and frequently restrained.”

  In another passage, Slocum recalls his wife “was always afraid” they’d be caught making love when they were young. “I didn’t care,” he says. “I was a pretty hot kid once. I didn’t care whether she enjoyed it or not; just as long as I got mine.” These days, “I often wish I were driven … by that same hectic mixture of blind ardor, haste, and tension,” he says. “Maybe that’s what’s missing.… I have more control and maturity now … but it isn’t nearly as much fun anymore as it used to be with her, and I miss her greatly and love us both very deeply when I remember how we used to be.”

  The family always found ways of displacing affection. Erica recalls “begging and nagging and driving my parents crazy about getting a puppy” when she was in high school. “One day Dad and Speed went to some pet shop on Queens Boulevard in Queens and Dad brought home a beagle named Lucy after ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’” For a while, the family lavished love on the dog, but that didn’t last. “Lucy only lived [a short while],” Erica says. “She fell over in the park one day and sprained her back, and the next thing she was paralyzed and in agony, and it was only going to keep getting worse.”

  Work, though difficult, offered some consolation whenever Joe got to brooding about what was missing in his life. He fiddled with screenplays, writing with George Mandel; he filled cards with thematic possibilities for Something Happened; now and then, he spoke to movie people about the slow progress of turning Catch-22 into a film. “[A]ctors ranging all the way from Wally Cox to Jack Lemmon, John Gielgud [and] Zero Mostel” contacted him, asking, “Don’t you think I’m
right for the part [of Yossarian]?” “Nobody else,” Joe would tell them. “You’re just the guy I had in mind when I wrote it.”

  “And I really believed it when I was saying it,” he said. “I don’t know whether it was because I genuinely felt that Catch-22 as a novel was so adaptable that any good actor could play it, or whether I was corrupt, more corrupt than I understood myself to be.”

  During this period, Joe wrote, discarded, and rewrote drafts of a stage version of Catch-22, encouraged by Broadway producer David Merrick and actor Paul Newman, who urged him to work with the Actors Studio in New York. One of Joe’s ideas was to have four actors and actresses speaking lines from the book and reciting passages from Shakespeare echoed in the novel. The more he pursued this thought, the more he entertained the possibility of staging misreadings of Shakespeare. Eventually, this tack led him to write an original play. He would call it We Bombed in New Haven.

  He rented an office with a few other people, “purportedly for writing reasons, but I’m not so sure,” Ted says. “[It] had an old-fashioned slot machine in it.” Over time, Joe “had several studios,” Ted recalls. “One was on 59th Street west of Broadway and Eighth Avenue. He also had one in the apartment complex west of Lincoln Center … rented from a man who taught French history at City College.”

  After spending a morning in his studio, he dropped in on friends. Regularly, he met with Joan Goodman, an old pal from his NYU days. He’d stop to see Alice Denham, who had moved to a small apartment west of Central Park. “Welcome to the Uppa West Side!” he’d bellow, coming through the door. “[C]lassy joint. Very uptown. You getting rich modeling?”

  She’d talk about the novel she was trying to sell. She wanted to quit being a photographer’s model. She asked Joe if his editor would look at her manuscript. “I’m not sure S & S is into female books,” he told her, but he said he’d ask. Over drinks, he said it would be a “miracle” if Hollywood ever “stop[ped] diddling” and did Catch-22. But no matter. He’d gotten his money up front. “My charmed life is paved with green,” he’d say unconvincingly.

  One day, after a couple of scotches, “Joe strong-armed my head [and pulled me] toward him,” Denham wrote. “I’m a young stud, baby,” he said, half-joking. “How come we never made out?”

  “You’re hitched,” she replied. She hated to admit he was too pudgy for her taste. She wrote, “I thought he deserved one good smack for fame,” so she gave him a “movie-star” kiss.

  In 1967, Bobbs-Merrill accepted Denham’s explicitly feminist novel, My Darling from the Lions. She contacted her male literary pals, hoping they’d blurb the book. They all declined. “I honestly can’t believe my name would sell a single copy.… I’ll keep an eye out for reviews,” William Gaddis wrote her. The most poignant passages in Denham’s memoir concern her growing realization that her writer friends had never taken her seriously, had spent time with her because she was attractive and, for many of them, sexually available. “Why had I thought I was one of the gang … when I was the Second Sex?” she wrote.

  Joe is the one man she forgives. For months, she left messages with him. He did not respond. In the spring of 1968, he dropped by and said he would have given her a blurb “for sure,” but he’d been away in Hollywood, working on a screenplay. He had not received her messages. Joe was always honest, Denham said, and “good.” “Probably he really would’ve given me a blurb for my novel, if I’d reached him.”

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD—the mid- to late 1960s—the Gourmet Club weathered several changes. From time to time, the charter members suggested potential recruits. Guests came and went. For a while, the composer Hershy Kay (orchestrator of Evita and A Chorus Line) ate with the group, but Mel Brooks wanted him out. “Except for Joe, all of us are quite short,” Brooks explained. “Some of us are very short. Hershy is too short.” The truth is, Kay had broken one of the club’s sacred rules: He had eaten from another man’s plate.

  One night, after years of preparing weekly feasts, Ngoot Lee turned to his companions and said, “Wassah matter with you fucking guys, you got no fucking class? I’m cooking my fucking ass off for you fucking guys, not once not any of you fucking guys got the brains to take me out to dinner? You schmucks! You guys ever hear about Mother’s Day?”

  Joe said, “Ngoot, you’re right. Next week, we will take you to the best restaurant in Chinatown.”

  They did. Once the meal was over and the tab paid, the men pushed back their chairs. They asked Ngoot if he was happy. “No!” he said. “Not one of you fucking guys thought to bring me one farshtunkener flower for Mother’s Day!” The men apologized and promised to do better the next year. On the way uptown, the car stalled at a traffic light. “Hey, Ngoot, get out and pull it!” Joe quipped, to everyone’s delight.

  Shortly afterward, Ngoot announced he had gotten a job as an advertising consultant for a department store and could no longer cook for this lousy bunch of “hot dog eaters.” He agreed to recommend Chinatown restaurants as long as club members refused to tell other “round-eye[s]” about them. He did not want the restaurants spoiled by tourists. This arrangement worked fine, until one night Joe told the others that Ngoot had taken him to an establishment that served the best lobster in the world. Ngoot had sworn him to secrecy, even within their group, because this place was so small and special. Joe’s friends did not believe him, so he led them to a joint called New Sun, which resembled a luncheonette. He asked the waiter to bring them the same meal Ngoot Lee had ordered the night they’d gone there. “The soup was superb, the braised crab perfect, the pork tender, crisp, and most delicious, and then … the lobster, steamed in lemon oil and other exquisite spices. Marvelous,” said Speed Vogel. But Joe was frowning. This was not the lobster he had eaten before. He spoke to the waiter. Another pair of lobsters appeared on the table, served this time Cantonese-style, with egg, scallions, minced pork, and black-bean sauce. “Absolutely the best [lobster] we had ever had. We left nothing but the shells, and these were picked clean,” Speed said. Joe said, “Just take it easy, guys. It’s not the right dish.” He spoke to the waiter once more. Speed groaned; he couldn’t eat another bite. “Yeah, just wait till you taste this,” Joe assured him. More lobsters arrived, prepared very simply this time, sautéed in chicken fat. “Oh boy, that’s the one I meant,” Joe said, and dug in. He was the only member of the Gourmet Club who did not use chopsticks, because they were “too slow.”

  The following morning, Joe got a call from Ngoot. “You Judas prick,” Ngoot said. “I take pity on you, you animal. I take you this best place in Chinatown, you gonif, you swear you would not betray me. I’ll never trust you again, you dreck!”

  “Who told you?” Joe asked. “Was it Speed?”

  “None of them fucking guys. You schmuck. [B]y now all fucking Chinatown knows about four crazy round-eyes … that ate up all the lobsters in town, you fuck. How fucking smart do you think I have to be?”

  The Gourmet Club was not good at keeping rules, but the members were brilliant at setting them: no waiting for latecomers; no grabbing the best pieces of chicken and lobster without eating your rice; no eating from another man’s plate; no women.

  “Once—and only once—I managed to find out where the club was meeting, and I crashed the dinner,” said Anne Bancroft, whom Brooks married in 1964. “As soon as I came in the restaurant, it was as if a blanket had descended on the gathering. Dead silence. Faces falling. I turned around and left without eating.”

  Guests were allowed as long as they were male, and as long as one of the members vouched for them in advance. Brooks’s good friend Carl Reiner was welcome whenever he came to town. “The members [were] very polite,” Reiner said. “Once, I had a seat facing the kitchen door and I looked through and saw a rat strolling across the floor. They immediately offered me a chair facing the other way.”

  Another rule: You were not allowed to complain about ordering too much food. This was known as “Heller’s Law of Too Much Is Never Enoug
h.”

  “I’d rather have a bad meal out than a good meal at home,” Joe used to say. “When you’re out, it’s a party. Also, I like a big mediocre meal more than a small good one.”

  Success, he insisted, was never having to eat with anybody you didn’t want to see.

  Most nights, after Chinese food, the men walked to Little Italy for lemon ice in paper cups from their favorite place on Mulberry Street. Joe would keep them out all night if he could. “From the very start, we accepted Joe on Speed Vogel’s word that he would behave, and Speed lied to us, because he did not behave,” Brooks liked to say. “He took the best pieces of everything and laughed in our faces.” One night, the men were amazed when Joe rose over a tureen of steaming soup on the table. He picked up a bowl and the ladle. “Here, I’ll serve,” he said. His friends had never seen Joe so generous at dinner. He filled the bowl, sat down, and handed the ladle to Reiner. “Now, you serve,” he said, and began to slurp his soup.

  * * *

  IN THE SEPTEMBER 1966 issue of Esquire, a seven-page excerpt of Something Happened appeared, featuring a protagonist named Joe Slocum. Slocum believed he “deserved” punishment as a child, “although [he] did not know what for,” and feared, as an adult, “that someone [was] going to find out something about [him]” that would mean “the end,” though he couldn’t imagine what. “Something happened to me somewhere that robbed me of courage and left me with a fear of discovery,” he admitted. “[T]here are so many things I don’t want to find out.”

  Dostoevsky’s influence on Joe was confirmed by an epigraph from the Russian master: “It was then, while sipping my tea, that I formulated to myself in so many words the idea that I neither know nor feel what evil is.” Joe was also reading Beckett for the first time, amazed by the long, mellifluous monologues in Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.