In San Francisco magazine, Grover Sales declared “Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 … an epic disaster.” He blamed this on the “children’s pop novel on which [the movie was] based.” Sales had deeply resented social pressures to read the novel when it first appeared: “[O]ne could as soon avoid Warhol, Bob Dylan, Blow-up, or the zodiac.… The party-line of the middle-aged youth cult decreed that unless we dug Catch-22 we couldn’t relate to our kids,” he wrote. He found the novel “harder going than Critique of Pure Reason and as fully devoid of wit.” He was in no position, then, to evaluate the movie he was watching. Still, his disgruntlement echoed other critics’ more measured responses.
Perhaps Nichols’s biggest problem was the release, earlier that year, of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, a similarly themed film made on a smaller budget, with a script that declared fidelity to the ordinary (overlapping conversations, situational humor). The actors (Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland) were more conventionally antiestablishment—grizzled, irreverent, loose—than the tightly wound, highly spooked Alan Arkin.
In its spoof of Catch-22, Mad magazine showed the M*A*S*H doctors threatening “Shmoessarian” with scalpels. They declared, “WE did this ‘Insane War Picture’ bit FIRST … and BETTER!!”
For Joe, there was very little downside to all this. He had been paid; he didn’t have to work on the movie; the critical failure was not his—in fact, the film’s misfortunes were a boon to the book (lots of publicity). With a redesigned cover, touting the movie tie-in, paperback sales reached a million copies within six weeks. More than ever, the old ads, written by Robert Gottlieb, seemed true: Catch-22—the book—was showing signs of “living forever.” After all these years, it made the bestseller list. “As soon as they told me that, I stopped working on my new novel, and I won’t have to do any more work on that for a year,” Joe said. Those who knew him understood how much fear his remark tried to hide. He said he took a “kind of sadistic” pleasure in knowing that many of the people who bought the new paperback edition “had never heard of the book before and … wouldn’t be able to get past page six or eight. It’s nice to get money from those people who make millionaires out of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann.”
To an audience at the Ninety-second Street Y, he joked, “[A]s I talk to you now, I’m kind of rich and famous and successful, but unchanged by success; I’m still as corruptible as [I used to be] … and God willing, I’ll remain that way.”
Before the movie’s release nationwide, Joe, Shirley, and Erica attended a private screening of the film in an empty three-hundred seat theater near Times Square. Joe sat apart from his wife and daughter; he wanted to take in the movie alone. He “found it … overpowering,” he said. (Erica says her mother was simply “relieved” the picture wasn’t embarrassing.) Joe said, “When it was over, Nichols was kind of slipping away and I took him by the arm and pulled him aside and I said, ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, it may be one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.’” They went to the Russian Tea Room and toasted the movie.
Nichols’s career would rise and fall, and rise and fall again, but his work on Catch-22 remained crucially important to him. As soon as he had wrapped the film, he told a reporter, “Catch-22 has made me feel differently about what I lay on the line.… [It] has helped me discover how I want to live—I’m going to get rid of myself in stages.… There are … so many things that we must do for one another to make sure that we continue to live on this earth.” He stayed in touch with Joe.
Joe had preserved pieces of his war—the war that could not be found. One of the B-25s restored for the movie is now on permanent display in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. During filming, in the spring of 1969, when eighteen remade bombers rose into the air, they constituted the twelfth-largest air force in the world.
15. The Willies
“IT WAS AFTER THE WAR, I think, that the struggle really began,” says Bob Slocum in Something Happened.
Just as Joe had arrived many years late with his great war book, he straggled in the rear with his business novel. Sloan Wilson and Richard Yates had tackled corporate facelessness in the 1950s in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road, respectively. William Whyte had thoroughly analyzed the organization man. But when Joe finally addressed the matter—the “thousand-and-first version” of “this written-to-death situation,” Kurt Vonnegut said in his ultimately ecstatic review of Something Happened—he made the subject his own, the way a great singer’s cover version of a standard links that song to one voice. Joe stepped beyond Wilson’s sentimentality and Yates’s bitterness to eviscerate modern America’s success ethic.
The subject screamed at him daily: middle-aged men, veterans of the war, muttering past one another on the sidewalks, indistinguishable in their suits, propelled, it seemed, by briefcases; frowning wives, wailing kids … the shouts of irritated drivers, convinced that if everyone else got out of the way, they would arrive at fulfillment, only to find, at their coveted destination, the parking lot full or the doors boarded up.
Joe witnessed all this in his walks around the West Side. It took him twenty-five minutes to get from the Apthorp to his studio. “There’s no reason why I couldn’t work at home,” he said, “but I like some demarcation between my personal life and my work life.… [T]here’s a certain renewal of the imagination that comes from getting out of the house and walking to the studio. Most of the time I’m walking I’m working. It’s psychological, I suppose.” Walking encouraged a “kind of free reverie within a very rigidly confined space.”
There was a store at Amsterdam Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street called Osner Business Machines, which sold Olivetti typewriters, Royals, and Underwoods. It was operated by a man named Stanley Adelman, a Polish Holocaust survivor, dapper, well dressed, soft-spoken. Joe frequented the shop to buy ribbons for his Smith-Corona or to drop off the machine to Adelman whenever it needed repair. Philip Roth, Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and Irving Howe were among many other writers who shopped at the store. They “stood around all day [and] talked [to Adelman’s wife, Mary] like she was their bartender,” Erica recalls.
On one trip to the store—or maybe it was a different afternoon when he went to Korvette or Brentano’s with George Mandel (he couldn’t remember)—Joe saw a commotion, people running toward the street, someone shouting, “Something happened!” A car wreck, a fallen pedestrian … whatever it was, the phrase stayed in Joe’s mind.
As with Catch-22, he began Something Happened on what seemed like solid terrain, but by the time he finished the book, the tectonic plates had shifted in publishing. Of most immediate concern to Joe was the defection of his editor to Alfred A. Knopf. “As the sixties passed … Bob [Gottlieb’s] reputation … had grown by leaps and bounds,” Michael Korda wrote. “He seemed capable of anything, from securing … the U.S. rights to John Lennon’s book A Spaniard in the Works to publishing a whole string of ‘commercial’ bestsellers.… [T]he news that he was leaving was a bombshell that rocked not only S & S but the industry.”
In those days, it was rare for an editor not to stay with one firm until retirement. The move was one more indication—like Random House putting its stock on the open market—that publishing, once a genteel trade, had become just another American business.
“[A]gent after agent called to say that this author or that one wanted to go to Knopf with Bob,” Korda recalled. “[It] was dispiriting and alarming.” He felt the company had “nickel and dimed” Gottlieb, until he’d had enough. Knopf had offered him the position of editor in chief; he would be the “heir apparent” and “chosen successor to the Knopfs.”
Joe tried to work without letting the news distract him. S & S insisted his contract did not give him the legal right to abandon the house just because his editor had left. He owed the firm a book and had to deliver it. He trusted Gottlieb and Candida Donadio to protect him.
One day, Korda met Donadio for a “stormy drink,” probably in the Italian Pavilion, where she had a regu
lar table. She wore “layers of black schmatta,” he said, and her “enormous handbag [was] weighted … with the manuscripts of her clients.” Almost everybody in the restaurant worked in publishing, and it occurred to Korda that they all knew why he was seeing her. She enjoyed watching him squirm. S & S had great plans for the future, he told her. He was certain they could make her clients happy. She smiled. She said she wished the company well but maintained that her clients had to go where they felt comfortable. Korda asked her to give S & S a chance. She insisted he expedite the release of her writers from their contracts. And if he didn’t? Korda asked. “There isn’t an agent in New York who will send S & S a manuscript,” she said.
“All writers were like children, but her writers were her children,” Korda wrote. “She felt about them as if she were their mother. If we forced the issue, she would fight … to defend them.”
Joe went happily to Knopf.
Gottlieb had never worried about him—or the long-delayed second novel (in 1961, Joe had promised to deliver the book before men walked on the moon, but the Sea of Tranquility proved easier to achieve than his deadline): “When he finished Catch-22, he knew what the title of his next book would be, knew more or less what the book would say, and knew he didn’t want to write it then, but he felt no pressure or neurotic agitation,” Gottlieb said. “[I always knew] he’d turn it in—like all real writers—when he was ready.”
Gottlieb could afford to be sanguine. According to Esquire magazine, he was, along with Donadio, at the “red hot center” of the New York publishing world. They were a formidable team. “We were of an age, and we had the same interests and the same tastes to a large extent,” Gottlieb told Karen Hudes. “It was a real friendship.” Donadio lived a block away from Gottlieb and his wife, at Fifty-third Street and Second Avenue. She would “pad over in her sneakers and babysit” their young daughter, Lizzie, he said. She longed to have her own children, but “I think she thought she wasn’t attractive,” Gottlieb explained. “There was a very big dark side. She was a hidden person … [and she] did more drinking than she should have done.”
In 1965, she attempted marriage to a writer and academic named H. E. F. “Shag” Donohue. Gottlieb threw a dinner party in the couple’s honor. The marriage lasted three months. Donadio’s friend Harriet Wasserman claimed in a published interview with Karen Hudes that she once saw Donohue put Donadio in a headlock. “[S]he looked terrified,” Wasserman said. Overall, “[s]he was a desperately lonely, unhappy person.”
In public—combining business and pleasure—Donadio could be “a great pal, a great drinking buddy,” said Herman Gollob, an editor at Little, Brown and then at Atheneum. When he first heard of her, he asked his colleagues if she was “screwing all the guys to get clients.” When they met, she said, “You think I fuck to get clients, do you?” “I meant that as a compliment!” he insisted, and they became tight. When he worked at Little, Brown, he rejected only one manuscript she sent him. “It was about a guy screwing a gorilla,” he said. He sent Donadio a note: “Dear Candida, Ape-fucking novels you’re sending me?” She framed the letter and hung it on her office wall.
At home, she kept a macaw in a cage—if her bird gnawed on a manuscript, she said, it was probably good. Erica recalls having dinner once in Donadio’s apartment and being startled by the macaw, which lived in the bathroom. “She had forgotten to mention [the bird]. I went in there at one point and almost had a coronary,” Erica says. Donadio claimed her apartment was haunted, and visitors confirmed one spot was colder than others. She could be superstitious—a Sicilian weakness, she’d say. She’d consult the I Ching to make office decisions. Once, she told her colleague Neil Olson that she was taking Good Friday off. “Neil, we don’t know, he may have been the son of God,” she said.
About her sons, there was no doubt. She protected her boys, her writers—from editors, critics, often from one another. In 1969, when, according to reports, she negotiated a $250,000 advance for Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, along with additional monies for a movie option and a paperback sale to Bantam, she refused to discuss the deal in public, fearing “sibling rivalry amongst her other charges.”
Joe was especially sensitive about money. He always worried that he didn’t have enough to take care of his family. In 1971, he returned to teaching, accepting a position—at the rank of full professor, specializing in creative writing—at New York’s City College (though the previous year, he had earned eighty thousand dollars in royalties from Catch-22). At City College, he made $32,625 a year. Among his colleagues were Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut. The students (Oscar Hijuelos, for one) were talented, smart, and challenging. “Teaching takes a lot of my time, and I enjoy it … a lot,” Joe said. His experience at Yale had erased the bad taste left by Penn State. When students were committed and ambitious, he discovered, universities could be a congenial place for a writer. “It’s a job I would like to keep. It’s interesting. It seems worthwhile,” he said. “The hardest thing to teach these people is that writing is hard work—and hard work for everyone. I’ve got a doctor [in my class] who wants to give up medicine, a lawyer who wants to quit the law. They read the finished, published work and think that’s exactly the way the writer dictated it. Well … they’re wrong.”
In the early 1970s, his novel writing still came hard—in part because of time in the classroom or reading student manuscripts, in part because he had been busy with short dramatic adaptations of Catch-22, and also because he remained intermittently active in politics, giving speeches for George McGovern. In East Hampton, he participated with other celebrities in a benefit softball game aimed at raising money for the Democratic party.
He spent many hours fretting about health. Toward the end of his time at Yale, he had caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror and was shocked by how bloated he looked. The double chins in his publicity pictures bothered him. A year or so later, an acquaintance of his, a man he often saw working out at the YMCA, died of a heart attack. This spurred Joe to action. “I was a really thin man who put on a lot of weight,” he told writer Robert Alan Aurthur. He remembered the willpower he’d shown, years earlier, when he quit smoking; once more, he summoned that determination. For breakfast, he limited himself to coffee and grapefruit. He often skipped lunch. In the afternoons, he’d take Sweeney, the family’s new Bedlington terrier, for long walks around the neighborhood (past the briefcase men) and think about his novel. On the small track at the Y, he ran three or four miles a day. From over 200, he dropped to 160. He looked ten years younger.
At the Y, he avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. He pursued his running (nine sets of eight laps each) with grim seriousness. He worried about the slightest ache or twinge—in his lower back, bladder, calves, the tendons of his ankles, or the bottoms of his feet. Sometimes vertical pains shot through his chest and up through his collarbone. This was a hell of a way to try to feel better. He’d lift small weights in the often-empty exercise room near the sleep lounge, the television room, the showers, and the sauna.
“The Angel of Death is in the gym today,” said the Y’s patrons every so often: Not infrequently, ambulance crews showed up to cart away on a stretcher an elderly man in T-shirt and shorts who had collapsed while running or doing chin-ups on a bar.
In this melancholy spirit (stretching, rolling his arms to ease the needling pains), Joe squirreled away portions of Something Happened in a locker at the Y, in case fire raced through the Apthorp or his studio, or he keeled over one day.
In the spring of 1974—a fit fifty-one-year-old!—he completed the manuscript to his satisfaction and decided to copy it for Donadio. He took Erica with him to the photocopying shop. “I figured if a car hit me, if I got mugged, or if I dropped dead of a heart attack, the manuscript might still be saved,” he said. “I asked him what would happen if he had a heart attack and I got run over,” Erica recalls.
Joe said, “Then we’re in trouble.”
I think I’m in trouble. I think I’ve committe
d a crime. I’ve always felt so. The victims have always been children.
Oh my father—why have you done this to me?
I am in need of the nipple that succored me and whatever arms cuddled me. I didn’t know names. I loved the food that fed me, the arms that touched and moved me and gave me to understand that I was not for that moment alone. Without them, I would be alone. I am afraid of the dark now. I have nightmares in strange beds, and in my own.
I was a boy when I met her and she was a girl, and now we are man and woman. We were shy once.…
… my children are parts of myself … in my wish to remain mute and dependent. All of us are projections of each other.
[There are] people everywhere of whom I am afraid.
These sentences, and hundreds of others, some typed, some written in red ink, black ink, or pencil, Joe kept on note cards or pieces of paper during the thirteen years he conceived, reconceived, shaped, and reshaped Something Happened. Several sentences came with headers, such as “Boy,” “Weird Experiences,” “Torment,” and “Wife (Sleep).” Many of the phrases made it into the final version of the novel, tucked into larger sections; others were dropped. Taken together, the poundage of rough drafts indicates that while Joe’s concurrent projects—screenplays and dramas—were willed into shape by a craftsman conscious of their commercial appeal, Something Happened was a poetic meditation on the psyche of a disturbed middle-aged man, a series of excursions into waking dream states in which a lifetime of experiences, fears, and imaginative visions were distilled in fragments whose ultimate forms Joe could not predict, and did not try to force.
Despite the image he sometimes peddled of a man unmotivated by a strong desire to write, the obsessive nature of these meditations, the length of the process, and Joe’s refusal to abandon it regardless of interruptions and the lure of more lucrative assignments reveal not only his ambition to be a serious artist but his inability to be anything else. No other activity besides novel writing challenged his mind or altered his perceptions so thoroughly—which is why he kept returning to the novel, agonies and all.
Just One Catch Page 38
