Return to Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  Whatever Jerry Wald thought of the effort is unclear. Scriptwriters would rewrite the story anyway, so it had little effect on him. But no one else involved with the project was pleased. “We used her name,” Helen Meyer of Dell Publishing recalled. “But we hired somebody else to do the writing.”37 Too short, it was also at times incomprehensible. Grace refused to look at it again. In her place, Dell hired Warren Miller, a reputable writer of fiction whose novels had sold well. He took on the job, Emily Toth explains, as a “hoot” and earned a flat fee for the effort of several thousand dollars.38 Miller continued the saga of Allison's return to her small New England town as a celebrity authoress. Selena Cross, Betty Anderson, Constance MacKenzie, and Mike Rossi return to their lives, each haunted in some way by the shadows cast in Peyton Place. Miller obviously enjoyed hacking out the melodramatic sequel, but where his fun begins and Grace's ends remains uncertain. Just how the autumn birth of Rodney Junior “got figured” is also unclear. Grace never met Miller, and if she had? “Another Bloody Mary down the shirt,” T. J. offered.39

  Given Grace's distaste for Wald's treatment idea, we can read Return as a mélange of cynicism, irony, self-parody, and spoof. And Grace Metalious's fingerprints are all over it. Consider the weird tale of Roberta Carter and her panting daughter-in-law, Jennifer. In Peyton Place, Ted Carter is the handsome boyfriend of Selena Cross, but his ambition to become a famous lawyer trumps his love, and he drops Selena when she is put on trial for the murder of her father. In Return disloyal Teddy gets his. Ted marries Jennifer, the daughter of a well-known and prosperous Boston lawyer. Unlike the loving and loyal Selena, Jennifer is manipulative, selfish, and wanton. Together the young couple visit Peyton Place often to see Ted's overly involved mother, Roberta Carter, and her husband, Harmon, both of whom had teamed up long ago to murder Roberta's first husband, the naive, but wealthy, Dr. Quimby. It is classic Grace Metalious melodrama/ camp. Roberta is out of fifties central casting: a whining, clinging mother who is jealous of her daughter-in-law's relationship with her son. She spies on their lovemaking. She thrills in their violent sexual encounters in Ted's childhood room. What is to be done? In true pulp fashion, Roberta plots to kill off the lustful Jen. And how, readers might wonder, does an ordinary woman in small-town America manage that? “Roberta Carter began to read murder mysteries … During the day … she wrote down the plot of each novel and listed the clues that had finally landed each murderer in the nets of the police. In this way, she discarded murder by shooting, stabbing, strangling, and poison” (200). What was left? Keep turning the page, the author answers. A lover of Nancy Drew, Grace Metalious knew how to use suspense, but she also understood that fiction was where many readers turned when seeking knowledge about life and sex, so why not murder?

  Return was a publishing success, but the reviews tortured Grace. “Whatever the inspiration that sent a flat-wheeled caboose clattering after Author Metalious’ steam-powered first novel, Peyton Place,” Time magazine announced, “the sequel bears all the marks of a book whacked together on a long weekend.”40 Critic Elizabeth Bayard, an admirer of Peyton Place, was irked. “It takes more than spying on the eating, drinking, and love-making habits of Mr. Mrs. and Miss America to make a memorable novel,” she scolded. Grace had hoped the book would pass “unnoticed” or at least that reviewers would understand that it was a script written for Hollywood. “People are all saying I couldn't write a second novel. It's a Hollywood treatment … It was a foul, rotten trick. They made a hell of a lot of money on Peyton Place and they wanted to ride the gravy train … I've been played for a sucker all around.”41 Her emotional swings grew more intense and frequent. She drank more. Fights with T. J. escalated. Money rolled in and then flew out. “The bottle is empty,” Grace told a friend, “and I can see myself at the bottom.”42 There were still many highs after Return: Grace would complete two more novels, both of them well received by critics and audiences alike. Her oldest daughter, Marsha, would provide her with a grandchild, and Grace would remarry her first husband, George. But Return had taken a toll. “Return to Peyton Place should never have been written,” George Metalious later wrote. “It was another event in a series that helped in undermining Grace's confidence and contributed to her feelings of inadequacy.”43 But Grace also began to recognize the logic of Jerry Wald's universe. Peyton Place had become a cash cow. If the author had lost her “baby,” she nevertheless maintained cultural capital as the authorized voice of Peyton Place, whatever its commodified form. But it was a Faustian bargain Grace made reluctantly with herself. When money needs pressed, taxes came due, and business ventures turned sour, Grace returned with new ideas of how to milk the Peyton Place cow.

  “I think Hollywood would like another P.P. script,” Grace wrote to her agent in the summer of 1961. “In spite of the fact that I've screamed No, No to this idea I might consider it now because of a project in which George and I are interested here in New Hampshire. It would not interfere with the new book because any day that I can't turn out a silly script for those silly bastards at 20th century I'll turn in my typewriter and get a job in an insurance office or something.”44 She was responding to a letter earlier that year from Jerry Wald, who had just previewed the rough cuts to Return to Peyton Place. “I can certainly say that lightning does strike twice in the same place.” The film featured the music of Franz Waxman, whose score for Peyton Place won an Oscar. Eleanor Parker played Allison's mother Constance, and Carol Lynley replaced the elusive Diane Varsi as Allison. Unlike the Peyton Place movie, which premiered in Camden, Maine, without Grace, Wald agreed to Grace's request that the first showing of Return be held in Laconia, New Hampshire, the closest town to Gilmanton that had a movie theater.

  The success of the book and the early cuts of the film convinced Wald that there was money still to be made with Peyton Place. “One of the future projects I have in mind,” he wrote, “is a story dealing with the conflicts between the townspeople and the constantly changing influx of students and teachers into a small New England town which has a college which offers a rather special situation, which should provide possibilities for interesting dramatic conflicts.” The new sequel, he suggested, might be called “Spring Riot in Peyton Place.”45 Grace thought the idea “nuts,” then went on to develop a storyline of her own.

  Only the outline remains. At the age of thirty-nine, Grace Metalious died suddenly, if not surprisingly, of “chronic liver disease.” Known as the writer's disease, cirrhosis built up dangerously in her liver before many in her family even knew that she was sick. A few months before her death, the motel that she and her husband George owned—“one of the future projects”—failed, and Grace wrote a panicked letter to her agent. “I could write another book, but as at December 12th, 1963, I feel that a contract and all the worry that that involves would be impossible for me. Is there a magazine market which could be met from Gilmanton, is there a newspaper market for Gilmanton gossip?”46 Can writing kill? “Disenchantment,” Grace once wrote, “is a slow, painful, agonizing process. Sometimes it is a long road, and in the beginning you don't even know you're on it, then when it is too late you can't even fight or find a way back.” Return was not a book Grace was proud to have written. But it is an enduring monument to an agency embodied in writing's social life. To reread Return is to enter into the complex relationships between authorship, book production, hierarchies of taste, readerly desire, and the labor of writing in an age of commodity production. It is also to grasp the thin hopes and fears of a young woman born on the social and cultural margins of America: an outsider even to those who knew her best. “I'm glad you came,” Allison tells a friend at the end of Return. “You've helped me a lot … by reminding me that the world isn't full of mobsters waiting to cut me down. And by showing me that work will exorcise all the ghosts that haunt me” (238). Grace may not have written this ending, but it was the kind of “happily ever after” finale she dreamed a literary life could ultimately provide. To the delight of her fans, Grace Metalious
kept on writing, but in the end, words failed her. They were never enough; the demons always returned. Grace Metalious died in Boston, Massachusetts, and returned for the last time to Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where she was buried in the spring of 1964.

  This essay is part of a work-in-progress entitled “Tales of Peyton Place: The Biography of a Big Book.” I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the University of Southern Maine for their generous support in funding this project. I am especially grateful as well to the Metalious family, to whom this work is dedicated. My debt to Marsha Metalious Duprey is deep and unending; my deepest regret is that I could not write her mother into a better ending.

  Stonington, Maine

  January 2007 ARDIS CAMERON

  Notes

  1. Letter, Mrs. Thomas H. Leary to Grace Metalious, March 8, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

  2. Letter, M. B. “bookworm” to Mrs. Metalious, March 20, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

  3. Letter, Harvey Tauman to Grace Metalious, February 16, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

  4. Otto Friedrich, “Farewell to Peyton Place,” Esquire (December 1971): 310. See also, William H. Lyles, Putting Dell on the Map: A History of Dell Paperbacks (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1983), especially pp. 35, 45.

  5. Letter, Ralph E. Hoyt to Grace Metalious, February 28, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

  6. Letter to Grace Metalious, February 17, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

  7. Otto Friedrich, “Farewell to Peyton Place,” Esquire (December 1971): 160.

  8. On the question of who wrote Return to Peyton Place, see “Reminiscences of Helen Honig Meyer,” Interview by Mary Belle Starr, February–June 1979, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 2003; Emily Toth, Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 200o); William H. Lyles, Putting Dell on the Map (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 35.

  9. Grace Metalious, quoted in John Rees, “Grace Metalious’ Battle with the World,” Cosmopolitan (Sept. 1964): 54.

  10. For a detailed account of her resistance based on interviews with T. J. Martin, Grace Metalious's second husband, see Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 217–224.

  11. See “All About Me,” The American Weekly (May 18, 1958): 8ff.

  12. Ardis Cameron, “Open Secrets: Rereading Peyton Place,” in Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), i–xxx.

  13. Letter from Treiva Jean Reed to Grace Metalious, February 1, 1961.

  14. For a more detailed account of the reception of Peyton Place, see Cameron, “Open Secrets,” xx–xxiv.

  15. Dorothy Roe, “Queen Elizabeth—Woman of the Year,” The San Francisco Flash, December 26, 1957. My thanks to David Richards for this citation.

  16. Mary Ellen Brown, “Motley Moments: Soap Operas, Carnival, Gossip, and the Power of Utterance,” in Mary Ellen Brown, ed., Televison and Women's Culture: The Politics of the Popular (London, Sage Publications, 1990), 183–198.

  17. Mary Kelley, Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  18. Grace Metalious, “Me and ‘Peyton Place,’” American Weekly May 18 (ff., 1958): 13, vertical file, Gale Public Library, Laconia, New Hampshire.

  19. Patricia Carbine, “Peyton Place,” Look (March 18, 1958): 108.

  20. Mike Wallace, with Gary Paul Gates, Betwen You and Me: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2005) 1–4.

  21. Barbara Seaman, Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 239–242.

  22. For a full account of the scene see Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 164.

  23. Carbine, “Peyton Place,” 108.

  24. Quoted in Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 163.

  25. The description is from Michael Korda, “Wasn't She Great?” New Yorker (August 14, 1995): 66–72.

  26. Ken Crain, quoted in Merle Miller, “The Tragedy of Grace Metalious and Peyton Place,” Ladies Home Journal (June 1965): 112.

  27. Miller, “Tragedy of ‘Peyton Place,’” 112.

  28. Friedrich, “Farewell,” 310.

  29. Metalious, “Me and ‘Peyton Place,’” 21.

  30. Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 173.

  31. Friedrich, “Farewell,” 310.

  32. See especially Deidre Johnson, “From Paragraphs to Pages: The Writing and Development of the Stratemeyer Syndicate Series,” in Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Romalov, Discovering Nancy Drew (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 29–40.

  33. The term is from Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987) 24.

  34. Mary Noel, quoted in Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club: Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 132.

  35. Grace Metalious, quoted in “Farewell to Payton Place,” 310.

  36. Leona Nevler, interviews with author, January 2001, September 2002.

  37. “Reminiscences of Helen Honig Meyer,” 80. Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 2003. Interviewed by Mary Belle Starr, Spring 1979.

  38. For a detailed account of Miller's role in ghosting Return, see Toth, Inside Peyton Place, 219.

  39. T. J. Martin, quoted in Toth, Inside Peyton Place.

  40. “Son of P.P. ,” Time, November 30, 1959.

  41. Friedrich, “Farewell,” 310.

  42. Miller, “The Tragedy of Peyton Place,” 112.

  43. George Metalious, in Girl From Peyton Place, 125–126.

  44. Grace Metalious to Oliver Swan, June 22, 1961, Paul Reynolds Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York.

  45. Jerry Wald to Grace Metalious, Feb. 9, 1961, Paul Reynolds Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York.

  46. Grace Metalious to Oliver Swan, Dec. 12, 1963, Paul Reynolds Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York.

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  PART ONE

  1

  SOMETIMES WINTERS, COMES gradually to northern New England so that there is an element of order and sequence to time and season. When the first snow comes it is not surprising because it has been expected for quite a while. When winter comes that way, it usually begins to snow big, fat flakes at mid-morning and by noon there is a thick edge of white on everything. The skies clear after lunch and the sun comes out and by the time school is out in the afternoon all the eaves on all the houses in town are dripping melted snow.

  Then the old-timers say, “’Twon't stay. Not this time. Not yet.”

  And everyone who is still young enough is disappointed and a little apprehensive because maybe it's really true that old-fashioned winters have left northern New England forever.

  Old-fashioned winters usually happen after hot, dry summers. Then the fall rains begin right after Labor Day and they are cold, wind-driven rains that are gray and destructive, and after those rains there is no beautiful autumn, no glory of red and gold leaves. The trees turn quickly from green to withered brown and the rain cuts the leaves from the branches in fast, vicious swipes. After the rains, the ground freezes hard and quickly and one day is like the next, cold and gray and waiting for the snow.

  Then it begins. A fine powder that sifts down from the dark sky in a seemingly unending screen and does not accumulate on streets and roads until after the wind has had enough of blowing, and cold, dry piles of white have gathered around the base of every fence post and tree. By suppertime the wind dies down and still it snows, so fine and thin that children are afraid it will take forever for enough of it to fall to cover the palms of their mittened hands.

  But those who are older remember other old-fashio
ned winters. They are the ones who check the gallon gauges on oil-burner fuel tanks, who have long since made sure that their car radiators are full of anti-freeze, and who know that with the coming of tomorrow's dawn, the wind, too, will return.

  Fireplaces do not exist in the houses of northern New England purely for their friendly, hospitable hearths. They are there because every once in a while there is an old-fashioned winter and power lines break like dry straws in the face of the wind and snow. Those who remember have small, wood-burning stoves in their cellars to keep water pipes from freezing; every wood box is filled and overflowing with logs and kindling, and the young sit in front of blazing fires and wax their skis and wonder what the accumulation will be at Franconia by morning.

  That was the way winter came the second year after Allison MacKenzie returned to Peyton Place. It was four o'clock on a November afternoon, and Allison was standing in front of the window in her bedroom when she saw the first flake of snow.

  Perhaps it will be tomorrow, she thought. Maybe tomorrow Brad will call and say, I've sold it, Allison, I've sold it; your novel has been accepted and will be published in the spring.

  2

  TUTTLE'S GROCERY SSTORE was located on Elm Street, Peyton Place's main thoroughfare, at a point halfway between the Citizens’ National Bank and Prescott's Pharmacy which stood on the corner of Maple Street. From the front window of Tuttle's, the old men who hung around the store in the winter could look out and see the courthouse and the benches where they loitered when the weather was warm and fair. During the summer, Tuttle's was something of a tourist attraction, for it was one of the few remaining stores in northern New England where you could buy Cheddar cheese by the slice or by the pound from Ephraim Tuttle's enormous cheese wheel. Tuttle's still sold rock candy and licorice drops by the penny-worth, and a nickel would buy a fat pickle, sour enough to set your teeth on edge, from a huge barrel that stood in a dark corner at the back of the store.