In a pair of late-life interviews with female journalists, he flirted openly, talked freely of the many affairs he’d had, professed his faith in “old-fashioned ideas” about men and women—“strong women have a tendency to create weak men,” he said—and admitted his desire to be “fed [and] … coddled, [as well as to have] things fixed up for [me].”
He seemed to be baiting the women to admit he remained attractive. One day, Erica came across some of his comments in a London paper. She called and said he should be more discreet when speaking of his affairs. The words were hurtful to family and friends. Even if they appeared in foreign publications, the U.S. press was bound to pick them up. He agreed to be more careful.
Valerie talked openly to reporters. In an interview with Lynn Barber in March 1998—the longest and most candid (not to say careless) interview Joe gave in his final years—Valerie and Joe exhibited “strange turbulent undercurrents.” “I’m never sure if they’re joking or [arguing],” Barber admitted. “The effect of the Hellers together is … unhingeing [sic].” They sniped at each other over travel plans, food, their lives together, his children. “She’s as bossy as can be,” Joe said.
“[He used to be] different,” Valerie said. “He was a very happy person, very agreeable. Even though he was almost paralyzed, he was very happy and he really did not realize that he might not recover. The doctors said, ‘You’ll be fine,’ and he believed it. A lot of times, when people are sick, there is a different personality to when they are well.”
“When I met her in the hospital, I was flirting,” Joe said.
“And now he flirts with everybody else!” Valerie added.
“You have noticed that she talks more rapidly than I do.…”
“Have you ever heard his daughter speak?” Valerie asked. “She speaks in entirely slow motion. I’ve never heard anyone speak like that in my life. Never. It’s very strange to me. Real … slow.”
“What she’s saying is that she talks rapidly, and I get irritated by people who talk rapidly,” Joe snapped.
Getting back to flirting, Barber asked Joe if he regretted the affairs he’d had. “[They] were just individual sexual encounters,” he said. “It was a delightful phase. It mostly started after Catch-22, and I felt very good about myself. Looking back, I don’t feel so good about it because the effect on my wife was devastating. I regret much of the outcome. On the other hand, I enjoyed very much the experiences and if I had to do it all over again, I don’t know which I would do.”
Speaking of daughters, there were “some truly harrowing scenes between father and daughter in Something Happened,” Barber ventured. “I don’t relate to children particularly, or even young people anymore—there’s no basis for conversation,” Joe replied.
What did he make of the fact that his children had never married? “They don’t relate as openly to people as I do.” Was that because he set a bad example? “Not me!” Joe protested. “They had a mother, too, and they had a grandmother [Dottie] who was a tyrant!”
“But he agrees that he was probably an ‘oppressive’ parent and … fatherhood was not his thing,” Barber wrote.
What drew him to Valerie? “Well … she’s attractive. She was my day nurse, she was single, and it developed. One thing I say which is amusing but true is that we were intimate before we were friendly.”
When the interview was over, Joe drove Barber to a bus stop so she could catch her plane. He “burbled fondly about Valerie as if they hadn’t just been verbally beating each other to a pulp—maybe it’s their normal form of conversation,” Barber wrote. He gazed out the window at local landmarks—the boat docks, the bagel store, the tackle shop, and a pig shed with the name Elvis painted in huge letters on its side. He said he felt lonely here. Most of his neighbors were people with whom he had nothing in common, egocentric businessmen. “Really?” Barber said. “Some people might say you were a bit egotistical.”
“Do you mean egotistical or self-satisfied?” Joe said. He turned the steering wheel. “I’m well into my seventies. I’m in good health. I have a nice personality. I can live comfortably. It doesn’t mean I don’t go into periods of depression or anxiety like now … wondering … what you’re going to write about me, but I’m no longer anxious about things like money, and I’m no longer really anxious about sexual activity—that’s in the past. I wish I was younger. I wish I was as virile as I was, and I wish I was ambitious. I wish I had as much energy.” They had arrived at the bus stop. Barber opened her door. “But all those things”—Joe waved his hand—“waned with age.”
* * *
HE COULDN’T HELP it: He stared at women’s butts more than he used to. It wasn’t a sexual gaze. It was idle curiosity, flavored with a residue of prurience, like a faint vanilla smell. It gave the experience a sweet, nostalgic spice. It was instinctual, like something barely remembered. When he looked at young people’s faces, he couldn’t help but imagine their features wrinkled, slack, dry.
His major activity was observing himself observing the world.
* * *
IT WAS THE SEASON of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. People joked, “Hear about the new game they’re playing in the White House? ‘Swallow the Leader.’”
* * *
JOE SPOKE FREELY about missing his father, though he’d never known the man. He could not talk about his mother without a sting of tears.
* * *
“YOU’VE GOT A DAUGHTER and a son and you may find yourself … touched very deeply [by Something Happened],” Joe wrote Chris Buckley. Buckley was reading the novel for the first time. Joe continued to give him writerly advice: “The life of a novelist is almost inevitably destined for anguish, humiliation, and disappointment.”
As if to underscore the point, he said, “My new novel was not a great hit with Bob Gottlieb and [it was] a puzzlement to Binky [Urban] too, both of whom seem to prefer a different approach to the subject matter and a different novel than the one I have written.” He went on to say, “So I’ll be finding a different publisher for this one and a different agent.… Binky and I are still on the friendliest of terms, but you’ll appreciate the irony: The book is mainly about a well-known novelist … my … age struggling to come up with a subject for a new novel that will be welcomed with enthusiasm by his editor and his agent. Don’t grieve for me: I’ve been through this many times before, almost every time, in fact.”
Buckley replied, “[M]y heart goes out to you. I know this kind of thing hurts.… Hold on to the fact that you wrote one of the most amazing novels of all time.”
Meanwhile, Joe’s son had written a novel, a satirical look at the inner workings of New York’s magazine world, in which he’d had considerable experience. While still in the garment business, Ted delivered clothes one day to the Vogue offices. He was too scruffy for the snobbish reception staff. When he asked if he could use a bathroom, a secretary told him, “No. We don’t have one.” Soon afterward, he worked at Spy and Vanity Fair. His first assignment, in the late 1980s, was to help organize Spy’s index for The Andy Warhol Diaries. “Every time [Warhol mentioned] a famous name, [I had to] say why,” Ted said. “I would write things like, ‘Halston, cocaine use of.’”
Then he went to work for Nickelodeon.
Simon & Schuster was interested in Ted’s novel. Joe figured he was “going to have a better year as a writer than I’m having.” Buckley cautioned him, “[T]ell Ted—from me—expect the absolute worst. Every interview will begin with, ‘What is it like to grow up the son of the author of Catch-22?’ [Buckley, the son of conservative commentator William F. Buckley, spoke from experience.] Tell him the only solution to this intractable situation is … roll with it.”
Buckley’s comments turned out to be prophetic. “[Ted’s] great joy has been diminished already by an item in a … paper insinuating nepotistic preference,” Joe reported. (Ted said, “I sort of have a reputation but it’s not my reputation.”)
“[He should] ignore shit like this,” Buckley said.
“Writing is the most bottom-line profession there is. Either you can or you can’t, and the truth becomes apparent in seconds.… So tell him to kick back and enjoy. He is a novelist.”
In his work, Buckley was struggling with the “old dilemma”: Is “serious” writing more significant than satire? “[K]eep in mind it is possible to be both humorous and mordantly serious,” Joe told him. “Have you read the novels of Joseph Heller? If you’ve not read God Knows, do so right now.”
Literary faxing with a colleague was one thing, but because of his recent rejection, and the nastiness Ted was facing, Joe had no desire to go into the city. “What does someone like you or I do at a lavish book party in which crowds of people there seem more important to us than we know they are?” he asked Buckley.
Valerie went to parties without him. “So I walk into the Norman Mailer book party last night and someone pinches my bottom and it’s—Valerie! She looked great,” Buckley said. “We had a good catch-up, then she went over and pinched Muhammad Ali’s bottom and left with him. She sure gets around.”
Joe shot back, “Valerie has long experience at grabbing attractive men by the crotch … but she won’t have sex with black men or Jews.”
On another occasion, Buckley mentioned he’d run into Joe’s “old pal” Henry Kissinger. Kissinger “cornered” him at a gathering to “defend his [old] Vietnam policies. I was drunk as a skunk. Amazing twin sensations.”
Joe replied, “The picture of being both drunk and in conversation with Kissinger is appalling.” It was Buckley’s birthday. “Steadily … you grow wiser,” Joe said. “But, by the time you figure out what to do with your life, much of it may be over. Happy 46th.”
* * *
“SO WE WERE SITTING by Joe’s pool one day and he asked me to be the agent for his novel Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man,” says Deborah Karl. “I said sure. He was very easy to work with. He was who he was, and the book wasn’t that hard to sell. He liked me and I loved him almost as a parent.”
In her forties, Karl had built an impressive client list as a literary agent, but Joe turned to her as a friend. She had grown up with his kids. Despite his public professions of impatience with children, he loved her son, Christopher, and her baby daughter, Sofia. His backyard pool was a favorite gathering spot for Karl’s family. She knew Erica and Ted had a hard time with Valerie, but she enjoyed spending summer days with the couple. “Valerie was a good wife to Joe,” she says.
Karl appreciated the way Joe stayed loyal to her mother and father despite Fred’s disapproval of Joe’s “celebrity” life. Fred had been diagnosed with kidney disease. “He was determined not to let illness be a topic of conversation,” Deborah says. Her mother recalls, “People would phone and say casually, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and Fred would get furious at me. He’d say, ‘You’ve been telling people I’m sick,’ and I’d say no. He’d say, ‘People keep saying “How are you?”’ It was just a normal greeting!”
Joe “broke through” to her father, says Deborah. He got him to talk about his fears. He was the only person who could. In turn, Fred was the only one who could tell Joe he was wasting time on “being famous” and should get back to work. Joe knew it wasn’t so easy.
“Joe was a disappointed man—disappointed with himself. I do think that,” Dolores says. “One night, he and Valerie came to dinner. We were having a conversation about people like Gaddis and Pynchon who avoided publicity. And Valerie said something about, ‘Oh well, they’re crazy. Why do they do that?’ She went on and on about it. And Joe looked at us and said, ‘She doesn’t understand.’ He enjoyed the celebrity. But he knew.”
* * *
IN FEBRUARY 1999, Joe and Valerie took a two-week cruise to Norway’s Arctic region. Joe was paid to give a reading and a talk—he had done a similar cruise the year before.
To her delight, Diane Armstrong, a fellow passenger, found that “instead of shying away from inquisitive strangers, [Joe] had a friendly word for everyone on board, and [chatted] with them whether they [spoke] English or not. But then … [he’d profess] he [didn’t] like meeting people. ‘They usually end up boring me,’ [he’d say].”
One day on deck, Armstrong’s husband, Michael, started to tell a joke. “Don’t bother,” Joe said. “I’ve heard them all. They’re all variations of each other. Why don’t you save time and tell me the punch line? Or just tell me the beginning and I’ll know if I’ve heard it already.”
“There was this guy—”
“I’ve heard that one!”
Later, Armstrong overheard Joe muttering to Valerie, “Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to know about that.”
Valerie rolled her eyes. “He’s not interested in anything,” she said.
One chilly afternoon, Armstrong came upon Joe leaning against the ship’s railing. He watched the boat’s prow nudge the ice barrier. A brisk and gusty North Pole breeze ruffled his still-thick hair. She made small talk. “I’ve heard that already!” Joe snapped. “Time to get off the ship.”
By now, she’d witnessed this routine often enough to know it was pose as much as truth. She asked what he did like to speak about. What did he enjoy in life?
“Little,” he replied. “I feel passionately about nothing anymore.” Back home, he still went to lunch with old friends, but they didn’t talk much these days, he admitted. “We’ve said it all. There’s nothing new to say.”
The wind reddened his cheeks. Ice walls rose around the ship. “I’d like to be in love again,” Joe confessed. “Women seem more beautiful to me now than they ever were, or else I’m noticing them more than ever now that I can’t make use of them. I love sex and I miss it.”
Gingerly, Armstrong mentioned Viagra.
Joe shook his head. “There’s a big difference between desire and arousal. First, you have to find someone exciting enough to want to use it. Sex starts in the head. I need some sense of romance. Men have one fatal flaw.” He watched a seabird tilt against cloud light. “It’s the yearning for love and romance. And that longing for love outlasts the capacity for sex. It persists to old age.”
Armstrong was silent. Joe shrugged. Despite the cold, he suggested they go below for ice cream. Ever since childhood, he said, ice cream had been his favorite comfort food.
They joined Valerie and Michael. Later, on deck, Joe continued to be in a ruminative mood. “I’m realistic and resigned about life, but there’s one thing I regret,” he said. “I wish I’d been more adventurous, more confrontational. I’m a bit of a moral coward, really. Maybe it’s because I want people to like me. I’ve never had the courage to live like Norman Mailer, have four wives and stab one.” Armstrong couldn’t tell if he was joking. “I’m too conventional.” Joe sighed.
Valerie shook her head. “He’s lying,” she said. “He’s not at all conventional.”
“I don’t like arguments,” Joe insisted. “I withdraw and stop talking. I do anything to avoid confrontation. Maybe that’s because at home my family never talked about deep feelings.” The light was fading. The ship had eased into a narrow fjord. Joe stepped away from the group. Intently, he gazed at the jagged line of granitic mountains on the yellow-and-blue horizon.
* * *
FAITH SALE HAD CANCER.
Frederick Karl was on dialysis.
Mario Puzo’s legs pained him.
Speed Vogel was susceptible to respiratory infections.
Sister Sylvia took Coumadin for blood clots.
Candida Donadio was deteriorating.
Shirley was gone. Perlie was gone. Lee was gone. So was Lou Berkman.
What was it Willa Cather once said? When you reach a certain age, life rains death all around you.
The good news: Ted’s book had moved closer to publication. Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster had bought Portrait of an Artist, as an old Man. “What next, then?” Joe’s alter ego in the novel, the aging scribbler Eugene Pota, asks himself. “The artificer who lives long enough, particularly the writer of fictions … may come
to a time in his life when he feels he has nothing new to write about but wishes to continue anyway.” It isn’t a choice, even though the “singular fact about the creation of fiction is that it … turn[s] more, not less, difficult with seasoning and accomplishment.”
On most days, Joe still had interest and—knock wood—time. Nothing forced him more deeply into himself than the writing of novels.
And then Erica announced she was getting married.
She had met the Dutch artist Ronald van den Boogaard. He owned an advertising agency in Amsterdam called Brains-in-the-Box. He shared Erica’s wry sense of humor and was “incredibly expressive about his feelings,” an honesty that, in her experience, had been “verboten on this side of the Atlantic.”
The couple planned a small wedding at the Brant Point Lighthouse on Nantucket Island in November. Joe met them one day at a diner in Manhattan. He said he was pleased to see them looking so happy and hoped they would have a long life together. Marriages were made to last a lifetime, he told Erica with tears in his eyes, just like mine and your mom’s.
If you need money, we’ll talk, he said. Don’t fax anything to the house.
At Thanksgiving, he dropped in on Deborah Karl and her husband, Bob Massie. Sofia, their eighteen-month-old, had eaten a Popsicle and smeared chocolate all over her face. Joe was so amused by her surprised and messy expression, he took Valerie back the next day to watch Sofia eat another Popsicle.
At the end of November—now a proud father-in-law—he underwent a complete physical exam. The doctor pronounced him fit. He said it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Joe to consult a cardiologist, but there was no hurry. It just made good sense for a man of his age and weight (he was back up to 185 pounds) to take precautions.
During the first week of December, Arthur Gelb saw Joe at a dinner party in East Hampton. “That evening he was sweet-tempered and subdued,” Gelb recalled. “I asked him if he was feeling well. He said he regretted to report that age seemed to be mellowing him, and that people would have to stop referring to him as curmudgeonly.”
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