Return to Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  Yet even as sexual frankness in popular culture gained traction in the mid-fifties, especially after the famous Kinsey Reports, talk about sex in the private sphere remained difficult. “They coped,” the writrer Annie Dillard recalled of her mother's friends. “They sighed, they permitted themselves a remark or two; they lived essentially alone.” Sexual knowledge was difficult to locate in an era when communication between parents and children, and even among friends, was often circumspect and limited. In her fictionalized account of growing up in the 1950s, That Night, Alice McDermott recounted how her mother struggled to tell her daughter that their neighbor Sheryl, an unmarried teenager, was pregnant. “After a botched, embarrassed and only sporadically explicit attempt to explain what Sheryl had done, she told me, ‘Let's say the stork missed our house and landed on hers.’” For some, Peyton Place was all they had, and because it was published by a respectable, hardback firm, readers could purchase it openly in department stores, five-and-dimes, and in quality bookstores. “I learned a few things from your book that I will not soon forget,” a fan wrote to Grace. And like many books, Peyton Place circulated as gossip, outrageous tale, and hot commodity in ways that brought the hidden but suspect into everyday conversation. “I heard my mother and her best friend whispering in the kitchen,” one reader recalled. “As soon as I entered they whipped a book into a bag, but they were too slow. I had caught my mother reading Peyton Place, a book banned by our own town library.” Peyton Place was not just a written text, it was also a “spoken text,” a story whose meanings and influence increased as readers discussed it, exchanged passages, and used it to interpret, measure, and reimagine their own lives.16 “Please keep on writing,” fans implored the controversial author.

  Grace Metalious had every intention to do just that. Before starting Peyton Place during that “winter of horrors,” she had completed another novel while her husband, George, attended the University of New Hampshire under the G. I. Bill. Entitled “The Quiet Place,” the story was based on a professor who had lost his position at the university due to his homosexuality. In the wake of Peyton Place, Grace planned to rework the manuscript she now called Tight White Collar. But the reception of Peyton Place as a “dirty” book—“a bad book without redemption”—stunned and wounded her, putting her on the defensive well before she had time to cultivate confidence as a writer. Not unlike the nineteenth-century literary domestics illuminated by historian Mary Kelley, Grace Metalious was a housewife who struggled to write, primarily as a way to earn money.17 When she heard that her agent had sold Peyton Place to a small but well-regarded publishing firm called Julian Messner, she thought that “If I made $10,000 … I could pay off all the money we owed and have enough left over to see me through the winter.”18 It was, after all, her first publication. But as the “hullabaloo” unfolded, the newly published author found herself at the center of intense controversy: an “ordinary” housewife and mother whose “filthy” book called into question her fitness as both. “I don't know what all the screaming is about,” she told Patricia Carbine of Look magazine. “To me Peyton Place isn't sexy at all. Sex is something everybody lives with—why make such a big deal about it?”19

  The controversy catapulted sales overnight, but her fame vastly outpaced her confidence. A few months after her publishing debut, the young author was invited to appear on television's hottest new talk show, Night Beat. The brainchild of Ted Yates and Mike Wallace—whose irreverent and and confrontational interviewing style quickly earned him the nickname “Mike Malice”—Night Beat pioneered late-night programming, pulling into television's orbit millions of viewers eager to watch Mike take on the rich and famous.20 Grace arrived by limousine, her new boyfriend, local New Hampshire disc jockey T. J. Martin, in tow. Nervous and uneasy in the public eye, Grace felt especially vulnerable under the Night Beat gaze, not only because of its hard-hitting reputation, but because the show was recorded live, an unedited hour that pioneered tight camera close-ups, black backgrounds, and one-on-one exchanges. The arrangement was designed to make guests sweat, and Grace obliged. Already uncomfortable in the requisite panty-girdle and skirt that replaced her comfortable dungarees and flannel shirt, she visibly wilted under the hostile gaze of Mr. Malice. “I thought your book was basic and carnal,” Wallace thundered. “You did, huh?” Grace squeaked. “What gives you the right to pry and hold your neighbors up to ridicule?” Grace's eyes moistened.

  Poised offstage in her Schiffli-embroidered dress, fashion commentator Jackie Susann watched in fascination and horror as Wallace hammered away at America's most successful authoress. As Barbara Seaman tells the story, Susann prayed for divine intervention. “Don't let this woman cry in front of millions of people,” Jackie pleaded. “Get her through this show, God, and I won't smoke another cigarette tonight.”21 Grace played with her ponytail, twitched, pulled at her skirt, but she didn't cry. Then, suddenly, she altered course, rattling Wallace by calling him by his hated birth name, “Myron,” and asking him to tell the audience how many times he had been married (three), a subject still taboo on television and especially sensitive to the reporter.22 But to watch Grace Metalious on old television interview shows is to see a person much in conflict with herself: a vast insecurity and emotional vulnerability cohabitating with a keen intelligence and driven ambition. Wallace remembered liking her, “he found her ‘ample, not unattractive’” he told Toth. Others recalled her plainness: a drab ordinariness made more pronounced, perhaps, by her earthy use of language and her sharp wit. When Carbine, later a founder of Ms magazine, asked Grace if there was anything about sex that offended her, the young author quipped, “Far worse to me than any sex act is unattractive food, and I'm no gourmet.”23 To read Grace Metalious was to expect sartorial fireworks, confident poses, and ebony cigarette holders. Al Ramrus, a writer for Night Beat, imagined the author of Peyton Place as “a very flamboyant, outspoken, colorful woman,” but he found instead an overweight wife and mother who “could just as easily have been sitting behind a drugstore counter.”24 Susann, with her “spiky false lashes, chain smoker's gravelly voice, and glittery dresses,” was equally stunned by Metalious's plainness.25 But it was the popular writer's complete lack of promotional skills that made the future author of Valley of the Dolls rethink her own career plans. “How could this woman, ‘chunky, depressed, and colorless,’ Jackie wondered, write such a popular book “almost in spite of the author's publicity efforts?”

  Grace, too, was amazed by her success. It dazzled and at times frightened her. Unlike Susann, who could bring all the elements of Hollywood hucksterism into the promotion of her books—pioneering bookstore signings, personal appearances, and celebrity tie-ins—Grace knew little about publishing and even less about promotion. She imagined book publishing to be a noble endeavor, a business run by professor-types in corduroy jackets with patches on their elbows and pipes always at hand. She found an agent by going to the Laconia, New Hampshire, library and picking out the first French name on the list. Handsome, charming, and debonair, he would eventually cheat her of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If Jackie Susann brought to publishing “show-business vulgarity,” Grace brought images of art and culture, erudition and refinement. Press agents, producers, and promoters shocked, then irritated and bruised her. Publicity of all kinds rekindled a constant sense of inadequacy—not pretty enough, never able to fit in, unloved and ultimately unlovable. When reporters flocked to Gilmanton to interview her, she hid in Laurie's farmhouse. “She was a very scared girl,” Gilmanton neighbor Ken Crain remembered. “After the book came out, nobody let her be, and she was even more scared.”26 Even New York City—which once excited and thrilled Grace—grew increasingly traumatic, its tinsel tarnished by the pressures to produce another best-seller. Twenty months after her literary arrival at “Club 21,” Grace Metalious distanced herself from the city, settling into her beloved Granite State retreat, the Cape-styled house she had purchased with her fifteen-hundred-dollar advance for Peyton Place. Whenever she g
ot back from New York, “she'd sort of embrace the fireplace,” her former friend and lawyer recalled, “as if it were the Rock of Gibraltar.”27 Even after neighbors shunned her and friends bled her dry, Grace never stopped calling Gilmanton, New Hampshire, “home.” “Here I was safe,” she told a reporter. “I drank, I wept.”28

  Twenty months after the publication of Peyton Place, Grace hugged the fireplace, embraced the April mud season, and looked forward to “my return to normalcy.” In February she had married Thomas James (T. J.) Martin, the man she publicly and scandalously admitted was her lover. “My life,” Grace told reporters, “has resumed a pattern now. The only thing that is over is the storm. At last I have found my way safely home.”29 When reports circulated that Grace Metalious was planning to write another Peyton Place book, she fumed, “That's a damn lie. … I'm not going to write about Peyton Place again, that's for sure.” And she meant it.

  Not long before their marriage, Grace and T. J. had taken an extensive road trip out West. There they met with Jerry Wald, a sharp-eyed, up-and-coming producer who was fast turning Grace's “fourth baby” into a major motion picture for Twentieth Century Fox. But it soon became clear to everyone that Grace was not to have any part in the making of the film. Her “consulting job,” she quickly realized, was a joke. Hollywood was a “wasteland,” a “junk heap,” the treatment of women “dreadful,” with actresses sorted and branded like “cattle.” What Wald wanted was simply the publicity generated by Grace's presence in Hollywood. Grace Metalious left in a fury, but not before giving Wald a searing tongue-lashing and the scriptwriter John Michael Hayes a Bloody Mary in the face.30 “The whole trouble with Hollywood and me,” she would generously write a year later, “was that we did not know each other's language.”31 But if Hollywood and Grace had a communication problem, Wald had no intention of providing a translator. Like the colonists who bought Manhattan for mere trinkets, Wald profited by the tangled languages that separated writers from their stories and authors from their titles. Peyton Place might have been Grace's “fourth baby,” but Twentieth Century Fox was its legal guardian. The studio owned movie and television rights to Peyton Place but also, and most unusually, owned the name. There would be no residual rights. Peyton Place was now a brand name, a simple commodity uncoupled from individual authorship. It could return or not, depending on the commercial needs and plans of Twentieth Century Fox.

  In the wake of Peyton Place’s success as a film, Jerry Wald became convinced that lightning could strike twice, and legally nothing prevented him from creating a script for a new Peyton Place film. Indeed, the idea of hiring anonymous writers to produce stories from outlines created by corporations was central to the emergence of the cheap-book business and the expansion of a mass audience. Early in the twentieth century, literary syndicates such as the famous Stratemeyer group operated by developing ideas for books, pitching them to publishers, and then outlining them for ghostwriters hired to develop the story, usually into a “series” published under pseudonyms like Carolyn Keene, the invented author of girl detective Nancy Drew.32 Even before the syndicates, however, entrepreneurs of dime novels and story papers had depended on “unauthored discourse,” pulling into the production process anonymous writers who could meet tight deadlines and write according to formulas designed by others.33 “In authorship, as in more tangible things,” noted the historian Mary Noel in 1954, “demand expressed in dollars and cents created a supply. With capital came the ‘hack,’ who was as much a product of the Industrial Revolution as was the Hoe printing press.”34 Wald adapted the concept to suit the needs of studios, using “tie-ins” that increasingly bound authors and their hardback firms to paperback publishers and Hollywood studios. When Wald telephoned Gilmanton in the spring of 1958, all he wanted was a ten-page script. Grace's return to normalcy was over.

  It took Grace thirty days to write Return to Peyton Place. What began as a ten-, and then twenty-page “original screenplay” for twenty-five thousand dollars huffed and puffed into a ninety-eight page “novelization,” which Dell agreed to publish if Wald came through with a movie version. Wald had smartly reversed the “tiein” process whereby hardback publishers contracted for a book only if a paperback firm guaranteed it by purchasing reprint rights or Hollywood showed interest by buying movie rights. Return to Peyton Place became the first published book that originated as a movie “treatment,” a practice Wald made famous and that in turn made him one of Hollywood's most successful producers. It made Grace angry and sick.

  Grace Metalious gambled that readers would understand the book for what it was: “a Hollywood treatment. It was never intended as anything else.”35 To her, the short-page novella was an expensive bone tossed to a greedy Jerry Wald. She may also have been thinking of her many fans who so often requested a sequel. And certainly the beginnings of the novel must have given her a sense of satisfaction: payback time. Here she used her considerable narrative skills to illuminate the cupidity she experienced as a young writer thrown, as she saw it, to the literary wolves. The main story of Return follows Allison MacKenzie and her family after she finds success by selling her novel Samuel's Castle to a small publishing house in New York City. More parody than satire, the novel strolls down Grace Metalious's own rise to fame like a bitter vogueing act. As with her own novel, Peyton Place, the publication of Samuel's Castle raises the indignation of townspeople, causing her stepfather, the Greek schoolmaster Mike Rossi, to lose his job and the neighbors to shun her and her family. And like her own bewilderment at having to rewrite Peyton Place to meet the demands of editors and publishers, Allison is forced to make alterations to Samuel's Castle that she fears will ruin her book and turn her into a hack. When she meets her new publisher, Lewis Jackman, we can feel Grace's own anger at Kathryn Messner, who forced Grace to change the incestuous relationship between Selena Cross and Lucas Cross into a nonfamilial rape by making Lucas the stepfather of Selena rather than the father. “No one,” Messner and her editor pointed out, “would believe the story otherwise. Incest simply didn't exist, at least that's what people believed at the time.”36 “There are places, Miss MacKenzie, where your manuscript is a little too much,” the suave Mr. Jackman tells Allison in Return. “He fingered pages of her manuscript and Allison wanted to slap him. She felt as if she had had a child and that Lewis Jackman was now fondling that child in a depraved, obscene fashion” (56). If readers wouldn't believe in child sexual abuse, Grace would show them publishers, agents, and Hollywood producers who raped writers and prostituted themselves every day. Grace always believed that by turning Lucas Cross into Selena's stepfather, her editors had turned “tragedy into trash.” In Return, Grace slapped back.

  But Return also provides readers a small window into Grace Metalious's vulnerability and intense insecurity. Known for her generosity of spirit and purse, the celebrated author often lent people, even strangers, large sums of money. She took unusual amounts of time to write back to her fans; she never turned away strangers who came knocking at her door; and she didn't ignore fans who asked for her autograph, even while dining out. But, like Allison, it all seemed to Grace an unearned celebrity. “I feel like such a fraud,” Allison tells Lewis. “I know it's only me, little Allison MacKenzie. Why doesn't everyone else see that?” (93). Grace Metalious knew what it meant to feel inadequate; to live as an outsider hungry for acceptance, validation, and love. Running throughout Peyton Place is a pervasive sense of Otherness, of people who are not quite “right” and who feel the weight of being different. In Return, readers could marvel at Allison's success, make that dream their own, and recognize in themselves the writer's longing for acceptance and validation as well as for material things. But it was Allison's undercurrents of unease in the public world of success and fame that performed in the sequel some of the emotional and psychic services rendered by the original. “Walking through the lobby of the Plaza, Allison looked at the expensively groomed, beautifully dressed women who sat chatting or strolling about. They were at th
eir ease, in their element; places like this were a customary part of their daily lives. For them there was nothing dreamlike or exotic about stopping at the Plaza for cocktails. Will it ever be like that for me? Allison wondered” (60). Readers wondered, too.

  But writing Return gave Grace the literary shakes. Concerned that she had sold out on some level, she also worried that Peyton Place might be remembered as a one-shot wonder. She began to drink heavily. But she also fought back. In both novels, Grace Metalious floats the unfashionable notion that popular stories and mass-circulated books are not mindless “ooze,” as literary critics so famously asserted throughout the fifties. Acutely aware that women writers were especially vilified for their popularity and high sales figures, Grace positioned Allison in opposition to the “boy geniuses” so admired by Norman Page and represented by David Noyes, who wrote what Allison referred to as “Novels of Social Significance.” “David was twenty-five and had been hailed as a brilliant new talent,” we learn in Peyton Place. “He wanted to reform the world and he had a difficult time understanding people like Allison who wanted to write for either fame or money” (PP, 356). In Return, Allison's book sells in the millions, not because it is good, David suggests, but because of its “sexy” parts and fraudulent publicity. David belittles her for her radio and television appearances, until Allison finally yells, “Maybe you don't care what happens to your books, but I care what happens to mine. What's the good of writing anything if nobody reads what you write?” (89). Like Grace, Allison wanted to write quality books, but she also took pleasure in knowing that millions of readers—many of whom had never picked up a novel before—had found her story to be meaningful and compelling. Nor would she concede to David the right to define the boundaries of quality. “She had made up her own mind: if there was a price to be paid for all this, then she would pay it. But she would not take David's way, would not sneak out the back door. She was young, but not so young that she still believed that art could be found only in a cold-water flat” (92). The cult of the solitary genius struggling alone in his garret fit the American literary imaginary, but Allison “had outgrown” it. Like her creator, she never confused poverty with literary merit, or popularity with bad taste.