Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Speed rushed back to Skimhampton Road. By the time he got there, Valerie had arrived. “Joe was still upset, but he was trying to calm down,” Speed wrote. “Valerie had been taking a riding lesson [at a nearby stable] and Joe was in his study, lying on the couch, going over some pages he had just written, when he heard someone at the door. He naturally thought it was Valerie and was astounded when he saw his wife. It must have been an awful moment and I felt sorry for them both. Joe and [Shirley] had not been on speaking terms. All I knew was that now she was in the guest cottage with her long-time housekeeper, Viola. [Joe] had no idea how long they intended to stay.”

  Speed talked Joe, Valerie, and a friend, Trudi Stretton, into going shopping with him. They bought a “good supply of shrimp, lobsters, pork, garlic, scallions, and ginger, as well as some vodka, gin, scotch, and appropriate wines.” As therapy, Joe helped take the groceries into the house (presumably, this is the moment he was “observed” carrying bags).

  Joe made martinis. Speed prepared lobster, rice, and Chinese barbecued shrimp. Viola, Joe’s old housekeeper, loved his barbecued shrimp. “I could not conceive of a diplomatic way to invite her over [from the guesthouse],” Speed wrote.

  “After dinner,” he said, “Joe told me he’d been married exactly thirty-seven years [today]. This was his wedding anniversary. After everything that [had] happened … it was a bizarre announcement and we all fell silent for a moment, each with our private thoughts. None of us knew what to do until Trudi smiled and said, ‘Open some champagne! Any anniversary, even this one, should be celebrated!’”

  The following morning, Speed said, the guest house “seemed vacant.”

  * * *

  “CATCH-22 may have been the beginning of the end of the marriage of Joseph and Shirley Heller—but Mario (Godfather) Puzo didn’t help matters any. So says Shirley in an affidavit filed in New York State Supreme Court, regarding the break-up of her 36-year [sic] marriage,” wrote Susan Mulcahy in her syndicated gossip column, “Celebrity Corner,” on March 12, 1983:

  The Hellers are about to give depositions and the divorce trial is expected to start in April. Shirley, who states that the phenomenal success of Catch-22 started the “ruination of our marriage,” also states that her husband shared a studio with “Mario Puzo, the famous writer, and unfortunately, the equally famous bon vivant and womanizer. After that, Joseph Heller was never the same.” Joseph … scoffs at his estranged mate’s charge: “Anybody with good vision and good sense cannot with a straight face describe Mr. Puzo as a bon vivant or womanizer, and he has never shared a studio with me.”

  On this last point, Joe was correct. As for “bon vivant,” perhaps it was in the eye of the beholder. Puzo was a regular at Elaine’s, the Cannes Film Festival, and the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. After his wife died, he maintained a long-term relationship with Carol Gino.

  Mulcahy’s column concluded: “In the court papers, Shirley says she is ‘destitute’ and asks for half of Heller’s earnings, which she estimates as at least one million dollars. He calls her assessment of his financial situation ‘fantasy.’”

  Liz Smith’s syndicated column said Shirley sought half the earnings from Catch-22, Something Happened, and Good as Gold, as well as moneys from “two unpublished novels”—“[o]ne of [which] … was not just unpublished but unwritten,” Joe said.

  For the next year and half, the battle got nastier. Shirley hired yet another lawyer, this one a minor celebrity in his own right, dubbed by newspapers the “Sultan of Splitsville”: Raoul Lionel Felder, in his late forties, bearded, soft-spoken, the son of a poor Jewish immigrant from Brooklyn. He charged $450 an hour. He had represented Mrs. Martin Scorsese, Mrs. Carl Sagan, and Mrs. Frank Gifford, among others. The Washington Post once quoted him as saying, “A woman is like a Stradivarius violin. The humidity has to be right to play it. Otherwise, they’ll throw in the towel.” The Post said Felder’s ability to “pluck” this “particular instrument, the grief-stricken wife” was unmatched among New York’s high-profile lawyers.

  Felder introduced himself to Joe by letter. He said he regretted Joe had not found “contentment and/or quietude of spirit.”

  On February 7, 1983, according to Joe’s notes on the case, Felder declared publicly that Joe’s illness was “ancient history”; he was “a highly visible figure on the party circuit [who] drives a car,” and he was a “multimillionaire who can finance wearying and debilitating litigation.”

  In early March, during a bitter cold snap in Manhattan, William Binderman, another of Shirley’s lawyers, deposed Joe in a small conference room in the legal firm’s office. The deposition’s sole purpose was the disclosure of financial information, and it dragged on for nearly two weeks, several hours each day. Shirley’s legal team accused Joe of withholding financial documents. Joe told them to ask Shirley—most of what they wanted (tax returns, check stubs) was still in the Apthorp. One day, Binderman asked Joe where certain papers were. Joe pointed at him. “You’re holding them in your hands!” he said. “You got them from the ‘marital apartment’!”

  Cohen and his team said the deposition resembled a “grand jury hearing [rather] than a disclosure proceeding.” The time it took was completely “unreasonable”; Cohen charged Shirley’s lawyers of stalling to pad their bills and deplete the “marital estate.” (Joe declared that “not in [thirty-seven] years of marriage had I done anything as damaging to the aspirations of my wife as had been done to her by her attorneys.”)

  Cohen urged Supreme Court justice Marvin Evans to start the trial. A Miss Delbaum, representing Shirley’s legal team, countered, “Mr. Heller is now saying … Let’s go to trial.… Your Honor, this is not World War II. It’s a simple matrimonial case.”

  During this period, Joe filled a notebook with observations of his medical progress: “Trouble with the letter ‘l.’” “Trouble with ‘w’ and ‘oo.’” “Bob Towbin commented that [the] right side [of my] upper lip seems immobile.… I still cannot suck in my cheeks and puff them out, although I am making a start.” “Speed and Erica both commented on a habit they noticed of passing my finger to the side of my face.… [It is] not a habit, but a conscious means of cleaning food from between my teeth and cheek at the rear of my mouth.”

  It was his mental health that had become an issue in the divorce case. Back in September 1982, Dr. Roberta Jaeger, Shirley’s psychiatrist, released a statement to the court that said Shirley “was eager to do whatever she could to save the marriage.… [T]hough she worked with unfailing determination toward that result, her efforts were futile. They were, in fact, doomed”:

  They were doomed because of Joseph Heller’s need to attribute all of his (chronic) unhappiness and personal lacks to his wife. If she was strong and supportive he resented her because she “made me feel inadequate.” If she withdrew or was quiet, then he insisted that she needed him too much. It rapidly became apparent that Mr. Heller, who I had occasion to meet with in my office, could not be pleased by his wife. Indeed, he appeared intent on maintaining an imaginary picture of her which reality did not affect. During the meeting referred to above, Mr. Heller remarked, “I’m a celebrity. I’m rich. I’m famous. So how come I’m not happy?” This unprovoked rage toward Mrs. Heller was striking, even to him. It was, therefore, not surprising that he left the marital home after “attempts” to get along which were of an ilk worthy of a trash novel.

  Dr. Jaeger accused Joe of depending on friends loyal to him because he was famous, and of using his illness to manipulate people, as well as to salve his guilty conscience: “Since I saw Mr. Heller as a man who was simultaneously dependent and enraged over that very need of his, his unfortunate illness appeared to be one affliction which would be extremely difficult to bear.… Mr. Heller seemed to be getting taken care of in a way he could tolerate (perhaps the only way)—by professional medical and nursing personnel.”

  Joe was outraged that the doctor would discuss his visit to her office. He had not been a patient of hers. (To make ma
tters worse, he learned she had once been a physician resident where his father had died.) Naïvely, he had assumed his talk with her would remain confidential; he doubted he said the things she attributed to him, or if he did, he had done so in a context her account did not clarify: “The confession is not … [the] kind I would make,” he said, “[especially] to a psychiatrist upon whom I was making a courtesy call.”

  Furthermore, he objected to her characterization of his attitude toward his children: “cavalier,” she’d said. In a notebook, he scribbled, “[This was a] spectacular insight that even the psychiatrist I’d [seen] regularly … could have missed forever. But he, of course, unlike Dr. Jaeger, had the disadvantage of knowing me.”

  Jeffrey Cohen warned Joe to prepare for the worst. Things would deteriorate from here. Indeed they did: At one point, to establish background, Erica was forced to testify against her father.

  Then, on July 19, William Binderman accused Joe of writing the “Mein Kampf of matrimonial warfare.” He turned to Joe, who was on the witness stand, and said, “Are these the words of Joseph Heller, ‘I want a divorce, I need a divorce, I crave a divorce, I pray for divorce, all my life I have wanted a divorce, even before I was married’?… You wrote these words in Good as Gold, didn’t you, Mr. Heller?”

  “No,” Joe said.

  Binderman had been quoting from Something Happened.

  “And that was just about it for his foundation for my Mein Kampf,” Joe wrote in No Laughing Matter (besides which, the judge had stated, “If we were to say every author is guilty [of] all the sins of which he writes, Shakespeare would have been hung for murder fifteen times over in his earlier days and for rape and several other things.… [T]here is no adequate relationship between what may be written in a book and the actual action of the author outside of the book”).

  In his account of the court proceedings, Joe gloated over his cleverness in exchanges with Shirley’s lawyers without addressing or mitigating the behaviors in question. Like Bob Slocum, he took perverse pleasure in winning each argument despite mounting emotional damage.

  The clearest example of win at any cost occurred on October 19, 1983, shortly after the Hellers’ thirty-eighth wedding anniversary. Once again, Joe took the witness stand. Binderman referenced the deposition Joe had given back in March: Under oath, he said he had never written a check to a woman named Joanne Wood. Convinced he had caught Joe commiting perjury, Binderman asked the court, rhetorically, “Is this man a liar or does he believe in the oath?”

  He produced a photocopy of one of Joe’s checkbooks. In it was a clear entry of a check for fifty dollars made out to J. A. Wood. He showed Joe the check. “Do you know what an oath is, Mr. Heller?” he asked.

  The court transcript reads:

  A: I—

  Q: Do you recognize it, Mr. Heller?

  A: Do I recognize it as what?

  Q: Do you recognize this as being a check journal or check stubs for the checking account of the period indicated on the face of that document?

  A: I am trying to find a date.… Well … I recognize that as being from my book. I don’t see my handwriting on it.

  Q: Is that the entry, J. A. Wood?

  A: Yes.

  Joe kept denying he had written a check to J. A. Wood. Binderman was flabbergasted. But Joe was telling the truth. Speed had forged Joe’s name on this particular check. When Binderman learned what had happened, he said it made no difference. The larger point remained: evidence of Joe’s infidelity. Jeffrey Cohen counterpunched: “[Y]ou are trying to show credibility and you are asking … if he drew a check to J. A. Wood and he said he did not and there is a check registered in somebody else’s handwriting.”

  “In his account!” Binderman protested.

  “That was not the question,” said Cohen.

  The judge agreed. He sustained Cohen’s objection. The absurd and irrefutable logic was worthy of Catch-22. “That is the way it is in life,” said the judge.

  * * *

  IN THE FIRST WEEK of April 1984, the Hellers’ long marriage was officially dissolved. Shirley was granted the divorce (she had countersued Joe). The terms of the settlement remained unclear. How much was Joe worth? The “value of copyrights [is] so amorphous,” Liz Smith reported.

  Shirley and Joe agreed to arbitration, to be conducted by an attorney and family friend named Sidney Elliott Cohn, the “most persuasive person I [have] ever met,” Joe said. “If he did his work well, as I expected he would, I was sure that all sides would be at least a little disgruntled, and of course I was right.”

  As he anticipated, in the end his monthly support payments to Shirley amounted to roughly what he had been paying anyway. The cadre of lawyers on both sides made out well, amassing over $300,000 in aggregate. Shirley would remain in the Apthorp apartment, while Joe was granted exclusive occupancy of the East Hampton house. He would live there for the rest of his life.

  Shirley’s devoted friend Dolores Karl summed up what had happened: “Joe’s public life was not good for him. My husband, Fred, used to tell him, ‘Joe, cut out the celebrity stuff and do more work.’ It did change Joe. There’s no question about that, and it was his celebrity life that ended the marriage. Women … well, Shirley put up with it for a long time. It finally got to be too much for her and reached a breaking point.”

  Shirley’s cousin, Audrey Chestney, said, “Joe went Hollywood in his own inane way.… [H]e was impatient and engrossed in his work, as all writers are, I guess. He was a controlling presence; he prevented Shirley from having the connection with her family she once had. That wasn’t good for her.”

  Bob Towbin takes a broader view. “Shirley was very important to Joe,” he says. “If Joe did one stupid thing in his life, it was when he split up with Shirley. But it wasn’t just his fault. Shirley was pretty stupid about it, too”—when, for example, she opposed his move into the East Hampton house. “You know, they had typical fights between older husbands and wives,” Towbin says. “I mean, you’d have separations, you know, fucking around, but when they really broke up … everyone who knew them was devastated.”

  Barbara Gelb agrees, adding, “Joe was very shaken by his divorce. He was a terrible philanderer, but he never wanted his marriage to end. He would never have left Shirley. He loved his wife. And she was never happy after he left. She was a sweet, nice woman, but a little bit helpless, with no career of her own. She kind of collapsed after he left.”

  At first, Shirley tried to put the best face on things. “Right after she was divorced from Joe, she came down to Florida to visit her mother,” Chestney says. “I was living in Florida then, too. One day we went to the races, out at the track. We looked down the list of names and saw a horse called Time to Make a Change. We were hysterical with laughter. We bet on it and won.” That day, Shirley must have recalled late afternoons watching the horses at Santa Anita with Joe, in the earliest weeks of their marriage.

  As for Joe, settling into the East Hampton house, he mused on the emergence of what Mario Puzo had called his wild man during the explosive year of 1981. “I was alone for the first time in my life, rather nervous, hypochondriacal and desperately unhappy, though very active sexually,” he told a London newspaper reporter. To his friend Cheryl McCall, he said, “I had been very unsettled and confused since the dissolution of my marriage.… I had no idea where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do … [I had] lots of choices. Guillain-Barré pinned me down, removed the choices”—just as World War II had done, when he graduated from high school—“and gave a strong organization to my life.”

  Before that, in truth, “I was a stranger to myself,” he said.

  He was now sixty-one years old. According to Barbara Gelb, he had one or two “girlfriends” during this period, but for the most part, he had begun a new, loving relationship with Valerie Humphries. (“The chemistry was plain dumb luck, I guess,” he said. “Without [her], I would probably have been depressed for years.”) He had recovered from his illness, though he still endu
red muscle weakness. He slurred some words and drooled a little at mealtimes. Apparently, he would not again be quite the vigorous man he once had been. This was not the end—far from it—but this phase of life had a penultimate feel to it.

  By now, from close rereading and therapy sessions, Joe was aware of the patterns in his novels. In the penultimate chapters, someone crucial always died so the protagonist could survive: a comrade, a child, a brother.

  Borrowing a page from Shirley’s psychiatrist, or examining Joe’s life the way a critic might read his work, we could say he had sacrificed his marriage in an attempt to shed unhappiness and move ahead: an act so awesome—in the oldest, truest sense of the word—he could not face what he had done, and so had slain himself. The man who emerged from the hospital was not the one who had gone in.

  By nature, literary patterns are artificial. They can help illuminate life’s sloppiness, dangers, and arbitrary byways but cannot ultimately account for them. Still, this was a time of life Joe approached with as much trepidation as relief. Artificial or not, the pattern had a strong pull on his imagination. Hence, perhaps, the repetition in his books: a desire to circle back, to hold the narative still. Joe would one day write in his memoir, “There is a reluctance to proceed,” a sentiment applicable now as he contemplated his remaining years.

  17. Go Figure

  ONE NIGHT, during the second week of his stay in Mount Sinai’s intensive care unit, Joe fell asleep under the influence of Benadryl. When he awoke, startled, he had “none of the customary feelings that tell us we have been asleep.” Momentarily, he was disoriented, to the point of disembodiment. Nurses gave him a second dose of Benadryl. He slept and woke again later, he said, “without realizing I’d been gone.” Eight or ten doctors and nurses huddled at the foot of his bed, discussing his condition “in voices raised to normal level,” Joe recalled. “I was aghast: Why had I not had an inkling this was going on? And after that initial … moment of incomprehension and confusion, I felt humiliated and exposed, mocked, pathetic, vulnerable, and indignant. I was almost overcome by a powerful impulse to mourn.”