Jovanovich entered my life like a whirlwind, a godsend, a guru, a father figure—those terms and many others would all apply. He was a self-made man, a first-generation American born of a Montenegrin coal-miner father and a Polish mother; after attending the University of Colorado, he had gone to Harvard on a scholarship and studied literature and philosophy. He had begun at Harcourt, Brace & World as a textbook salesman and advanced rapidly to running the company, eventually tacking his name onto the original one and expanding its holdings to include SeaWorld, the marine theme park. When I met him he was in his early sixties, imbued with limitless energy, wide-ranging curiosity, and extraordinary powers of concentration. He read voraciously in literature and politics, and had befriended some of the more intellectually muscular writers he published and personally edited, like Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and Diana Trilling.
Although the word “brilliant” is bandied around readily in general discourse, Bill Jovanovich is one of the few people I have met who strikes me as genuinely worthy of the term. I remember sitting next to him on the camel-leather seats of the corporate plane as we flew to his summer house in La Malbaie, Canada, feeling buoyed by the mere fact of his presence. He was explaining some esoteric company strategy, his light blue eyes ablaze with excitement at the germination of a new project. He told me once that he would have liked to become an architect, but I’m not sure any one profession could have held him.
I was more than a little in love with Bill—and he, I suppose, with me. In his presence, I felt both alluring and whip-smart; one quality no longer contradicted the other. Despite the romantic undertones—he wrote me long letters in slanting India ink offering all sorts of advice, on everything from the right hotel to stay at in London (Brown’s) to the right way to treat book publishing (like Bloomingdale’s: go in, get what you need, and leave)—and notwithstanding the rumors that circulated within the gossipy publishing network, our relationship remained virtuously chaste. I remember once talking to him in the swimming pool at his home in Canada and wondering for a moment what it would be like to kiss him, really kiss him, not just a peck on the cheek. But my fantasies remained just that, fantasies. I gradually got to know his family, becoming friends with his gracious Southern wife, Martha, who shared with me her recipe for crab cakes, and staying with their daughter, Martha, Jr., in her London apartment.
After I handed in my novel I went to work as an editor at HBJ, acquiring books directly with Bill instead of having to run them by the editorial and marketing staff. He had a fax machine and a Wang word processor installed at the rose-colored vinyl desk in my bedroom, well before I or anyone else had heard of these devices, so that I could work from home, as he knew I preferred to do. In a typically extravagant gesture, he also flew me to SeaWorld to be kissed by baby Shamu, the original orca whale born in captivity. I remember being scared out of my wits as, in front of an excited audience, I climbed a small stepladder that put me in the vicinity of Shamu’s snout; when I touched her skin it felt impermeable, like the hood of a car.
And so began one of the most productive periods of my life. Several years earlier, Bill had infamously fired most of HBJ’s New York staff in a single day, which went down in publishing history as Black Tuesday, and abruptly moved the company’s publishing division to San Diego, which is where he had decided to live after leaving New York. He kept himself removed from the hurly-burly of publishing, which earned him no small degree of enmity from agents and other editors; he was seen as arrogant and whimsical, both of which perceptions had some truth to them. For me, though, he was supremely confidence-inspiring, affirming me both as a woman and as an intellectual, and allowing me to inhabit both aspects simultaneously. He was always willing to stop everything to read the proposals I passed along that required a quick turnaround and he also provided me with the financial wherewithal to acquire “big” books that were out of reach for many of my peers at other houses. With Bill behind me, urging me on, I went about carving out a place for myself in the insular world of book publishing.
Soon enough I learned how to hold my own at auctions, where the object was to get the book away from other interested editors without overbidding on it. Bill and I were both lovers of the movies; I quickly swept up biographies of Gig Young and Cary Grant, the latter detailing Grant’s early homosexual affair with Randolph Scott. Bill was also independent-minded, enabling me to buy one of the first books written about AIDS—a riveting memoir called Borrowed Time, by Paul Monette—when other publishers were still wary of the subject. I began to have a vision of the sort of list I wanted to build, a mixture of the literary and the commercial, the quirky and the mainstream, with an emphasis on good writing. I realized quickly enough that the sort of nuanced, psychological novel that went under the rubric of “literary” fiction was a hard sell and although I continued to acquire novels and short stories that appealed to me, I was increasingly drawn to buying nonfiction, whether a swashbuckling history of Nike, a biography of the writer John Kennedy Toole, or a tale of drugs and mayhem in Hollywood featuring a show-business promoter named Roy Radin.
My schedule became increasingly hectic; I flew to London and Frankfurt to meet with foreign publishers; to L.A. to meet with Motown honcho Gordy Berry; and to Washington, D.C., to meet with former Ronald Reagan staffer Donald Regan. I was also making over six figures, far more than I ever could have imagined just a few years before, and employing two assistants as I tirelessly wooed leery agents, who doubted Bill’s commitment to book publishing, over expensive lunches and dinners. It was a vertiginous transformation, one that I found difficult to fully absorb. It didn’t help that my mother regularly mocked my swift rise, raising her eyebrows in disbelief whenever Bill sent a company car to pick me up. Just who did I think I was? Then I brought in the house’s first bestseller in a number of years—Regan’s For the Record (ghosted by the talented Charles McCarry)—for which I oversaw the editing, marketing, and publicity. The book landed a front-page article in The New York Times on the day of its publication, and not long afterward I was made a vice president and associate publisher of the company.
But if Bill was like a good parent—perhaps the first I’d ever had—he had come very late to the party. I continued to harbor a desperately unhappy and besieged counter self, which went undercover during the daylight hours when I had to function but reasserted itself at night and on the weekends. I might be possessed of enough intellect and poise to hold my own with music moguls and former Secretaries of the Treasury, but right under the surface I was held together with safety pins and bravura, still unable to get up in the morning or to fall asleep without drugs, still chronically constipated, still dependent on my mother to define where I began and she left off.
Then again, for a person as racked by ambivalence and indecision as I was, the steps to full-fledged adulthood were destined to be faltering ones, no matter what it looked like from the outside in. I had watched as my older siblings tried to take flight only to end up crashing back to earth in worse shape than when they left. With their examples before me, I knew better than to attempt a full escape into the wider world; it was bound to fail. I mean, you could go through the motions of independence—go to college, have a boyfriend, get a job, eventually even marry and have a child—as long as you knew where your true allegiance lay. And that was to my mother, of course, the beginning and the end of everything. And to the family, the original family, the six of us and the two of them, bound by misery everlasting.
This conviction didn’t translate into anything you could see, of course; it wasn’t as though I stood around, clearly shackled. To other people it might look as though I were a free agent, someone who could choose where she wanted to go and who she wanted to be. And, indeed, as the years went by, outsiders saw me as something of a “rebel”: the one who didn’t remain Orthodox; the one who wrote a novel that was treated as a lightly fictionalized memoir, so identifiable were all the characters; the one who married a man whose knowledge of Jewishness was so limit
ed, he might as well have been a goy; the one who got divorced; the one who wrote candid pieces about her sexual peccadilloes and her family’s attitude toward money.
Looking back now, I can see that I was the child my mother had designated to work out her unspoken conflicts with the life she had chosen: one which set marriage and children and religious observance above other interests. She had rebelled in her own way, after all, leaving the impecunious circumstances of her family’s life in Jerusalem for New York and dropping some of the observances her own mother had kept—such as covering her hair with a sheitel, or wig, after marrying, and abstaining from wearing pants. She opened the door to the outside world a crack, but with the implicit assumption that I understood the implacable and unreasonable crux of the situation: there was no getting away.
Talk about a double bind! Part of me recognized that it was an irrational and dangerously airless way to live, especially since I had never liked being in my family’s orbit to begin with. And yet this insight, honed and chiseled in one therapist’s office after another—that my only hope lay in escaping under the net and slipping out of my mother’s hold—didn’t stand a chance when it came to actually going up against the feeling of lostness that was induced in me at the idea of breaking free. Who and what were waiting for me on the other side? No one and nothing, as far as I could make out, just a vast and indifferent universe, got up in the guise of a welcome mat. Such thoughts accompanied me everywhere, more or less overwhelming depending upon the day. Sometimes very little was needed to send me spiraling downward; so it was that, despite a booming career, I slipped from a functional depression to a state of paralysis in my early thirties, and ended up at Payne Whitney, the psychiatric clinic of New York Hospital.
My stay, which lasted only four days, was precipitated, at least in part, by my having broken off my engagement to Michael, whom I had been seeing on and off for six years, minutes before we were to spend a week in Mexico together. My mother had organized a small dinner party to celebrate our engagement; she had done it with her usual style, the table beautifully set, the long white tapers flickering. But within days of the engagement I felt the same uneasiness that would assail me after we got married, and this uneasiness mushroomed into a state of dread that flattened me completely.
I had been harboring a fantasy of psychiatric hospitals and what they might offer ever since I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night at the age of sixteen or seventeen; I was particularly taken with the idea of Dr. Dohmler’s vine-covered sanatorium in Zurich, “the first modern clinic for mental illness.” Its cultivated multilingual clientele and French windows that opened onto “a blue sea of sky” seemed a perfect backdrop for the romance that develops between the newly minted psychiatrist, Dick Diver, and the lovely young patient, Nicole. Further encouraged by movies like Now, Voyager and David and Lisa and books like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, I began shaping a vision of psychiatric hospitals as soothing, hushed places that embodied some magical fusion of therapeutic sophistication and cradle comforts. From what I understood, you could regress there to a degree of immobility that would, paradoxically, allow you to blossom into emotional health. You might even fall in love with some other privileged, tormented person and acquire some sexual experience while you were at it.
The reality was dizzyingly dismal. I was scared at Payne Whitney, which seemed more like a holding cell for drug addicts and other assorted miscreants than a benevolent place in which to get well. I made frantic calls from the phone booths on the unit, which retained a sickeningly pungent smell: a mixture of stale urine, chewing gum, and cigarette-infused air. To calm myself down, I scribbled my observations in a loose-leaf notebook, trying to follow Henry James’s advice that a writer should be a person “on whom nothing is lost,” and use my stay as grist for the mill. I transcribed overheard remarks, such as one made by a painfully thin girl who floated disconsolately around the unit like a modern-day Ophelia: “I’m addicted to ice cubes. I just need to chew on them. Maybe for the vitamins.” And I hoarded my own perceptions: “2 thumbtacks in my room,” I studiously noted. “Could you thumbtack yourself to death?” I espied one romantic prospect on the unit, a young guy with a beard who struck me as sullen and mysterious—no doubt because he was wearing a body cast and was rumored to have jumped out the window. But by the time I had worked up the nerve to approach him, his room was empty.
I got out of the hospital after less than a week, in time to have one of my periodic lunches with Bill Jovanovich. I felt tentative about seeing him—would he be able to detect that I had recently been whiling the hours away in a loony bin?—but after the first glass of Dom Pérignon my anxieties dissolved. We talked with the same intensity with which we had always conducted our conversations, against the muted, expertly orchestrated background of Le Périgord, with its clinking of crystal and china, and the arrival on silver trolleys of shimmering dessert soufflés that had to be specially ordered and were presented as though to the sound of trumpets. Although only a few days before I had been hobbled by panic, for a moment under Bill’s all-protective wing I felt almost invincible.
19
I never got it together to make the sort of wedding album that people used to make (and for all I know still make), with “X and Y’s Wedding” embossed in gold lettering on a leather cover, followed by the date. I still have, all these years later, a box of photos on a shelf in a closet that I was supposed to go through and choose from for precisely such a book, which had been paid for ahead of time by my mother. I kept postponing the task of looking through the photos and deciding which to include; something about having to study those posed images of celebration—all the dressed-up grown-ups and children—made me feel profoundly sad just to contemplate. Maybe it had to do with the discrepancy between the elegant look of the affair, which had taken place in my parents’ apartment, and my chaotic experience of being a bride, outfitted in full bridal regalia bought in a mad rush at Kleinfeld’s, the famous bridal emporium. At any rate, before the photos were chosen for the wedding album, Michael and I got divorced.
* * *
I had been utterly apprehensive about getting married; it was something I knew I was supposed to embrace even though I wasn’t at all ready for it, not even at the antique age of thirty-four. The truth was I wasn’t ready to do anything that involved leaving my mother in such an official, wholesale fashion, and the decision to marry had been made not in a blurry, love-struck moment with my husband-to-be, but under far stranger circumstances. Less than a month before the wedding, Dr. E., the female therapist I was seeing at the time, scheduled a session for my mother and myself, at which the three of us discussed the probability of a marriage between Michael and me working out as though we were placing odds at a betting parlor.
You would have thought that the fact that I had broken off our engagement only months earlier didn’t augur well for our future, but no matter. My mother opined to Dr. E.—a young and inexperienced blond WASP analyst who was clearly no match for this embattled-but-entwined Jewish mother-daughter duo—that I was “loyal.” “That’s one thing you can say about Daphne,” my mother repeated in her heavy German accent. “She’s very loyal.” Ergo: once I got married, however much I kicked and struggled, I would stay married. This implicit line of reasoning seemed to carry the day with Dr. E. and the date was set for three weeks later, to ensure that I wouldn’t have enough time to reconsider.
In addition to everything else, I remained deeply unsure of my femininity and the various roles—girlfriend, wife, mother—attendant upon it, and standing under a chuppah bedecked with white flowers on a late November evening before the group of about seventy people who had congregated in my parents’ living room would do little to clarify matters. As the assembled guests watched me walk stiffly down the staircase in an off-white gown that added pounds to my figure and had an unbecoming bunny-like pom-pom on the back, some of them must have assumed that my hastily convened wedding was a shotgun affair. Whereas for me it w
as a different sort of masquerade: What was I doing there, dressed up in the costume of a bride, when I was already irrevocably linked to my mother?
My first reaction to most transitions continued to be one of desolation, which must explain why I sobbed myself silly on my wedding night as my brand-new husband looked on in disbelief from his side of the bed in our beige-on-beige room at the Regency Hotel, a few blocks away from my parents’ apartment. He had purchased a pair of black silk jockey shorts in honor of the occasion, a gesture I found both touching and a little hokey, and which somehow made me sob even more.
* * *
In the girlish fantasies I entertained for my future I rarely conjured up an image of a husband but I always saw myself with lots of children—three or four, at the least. My early passion for playing with dolls mutated into an abiding interest in babies and young children, and when I became an aunt in my early twenties, I transferred my substantial reserve of maternal energies into being an exceptionally devoted one.
I adored babysitting for first my nephew and then my niece, arriving at my sister Debra and brother-in-law Lewis’s apartment early to help give the children baths and get them into pajamas before their parents left for the evening. Once the front door closed after them, I settled down to the serious work of entertaining Noah and Erica, the latter still in a crib, on the way to coaxing them to sleep. Their bedroom was decorated in bright colors, red and blue and yellow, and boasted a charming night-light in the shape of a carousel that cast a cozy glow over everything. I played countless games with them, many of my own invention, before reading them a bedtime story or two, usually finishing up with Goodnight Moon, which neither of them could get enough of. The three of us would squash together on Noah’s narrow bed, like castaways about to set off on some great voyage, while I read. At some point, when Erica’s eyelids began to flutter, I would pick her up and put her in her crib. Then I would lie back down next to Noah and continue discussing which food we would elect to eat all the time if there was only one food item left in the world. Would it be rice with gravy? Or spaghetti? Or perhaps chocolate?
This Close to Happy Page 13
