Peyton Place

by Grace Metalious

  “They're all right,” the New Englander was apt to say, especially to a tourist from the city. “They pay their bills and taxes and they mind their own business.”…

  This attitude was visible, too, in well-meaning social workers who turned away from the misery of the woodsman's family. If a child died of cold or malnutrition, it was considered unfortunate, but certainly nothing to stir up a hornet's nest about. The state was content to let things lie, for it never had been called upon to extend aid of a material nature to the residents of the shacks which sat, like running sores, on the body of northern New England. (29)

  Contemporary reviewers tended to interpret the town's laissez-faire attitude as a sign of small-town hypocrisy, and the open secret of domestic violence as one of the “false fronts and bourgeois pretensions of allegedly respectable communities.”20 From this perspective, Peyton Place became a narrative of sexual exposé: “earthy,” “racy,” a “Small Town Peep Show.” But Metalious provided a social narrative that was far more powerful to readers than simply the spicy “revolt from the village” that structured many reviews of her novel. In ways that would foreshadow the modern feminist movement, Peyton Place turned the “private” into the political. By reinterpreting incest, wife beating, and poverty as signs of social as well as individual failure, Metalious turned “trash” into a powerful political commentary on gender relations and class privilege.

  In the years that followed the publication of Peyton Place, the pulp book industry escalated the book's “racy” reputation and used the title to signal the sensationalism that awaited readers. On the cover of Orrie Hitt's tabloid novel Pushover the publisher proclaimed, “The torrid tale of a town more wicked than Peyton Place!” Even today, the title denotes for most Americans less a particular book than a general set of behaviors, so that Peyton Place has become the nation's yardstick against which to measure sexual intrigue and social scandal. In part, this reflects the novel's extraordinary variety of problems and its many entangled alliances. Healthy libidos and ghosts of sex past appear to haunt a rather large percentage of residents in so small a town; there is the sent of soap in Metalious's opera. Yet Peyton Place was not the only potboiler to mention bodily parts and expose erotic yearnings. That Peyton Place has become a barometer for moral wickedness and sexual scandal is a story as much of cultural revision as of social revelation.

  In 1956 certain sexual acts among consenting adults, including sodomy, oral sex, and sexual intercourse with a married partner not your own, were in most states prohibited by law. Abortion was illegal. In the era before the Pill, birth control was unreliable and often hard to find. Female sexual agency was itself highly suspect: a cause for concern, and at times a cause for medical or psychiatric intervention. Sexual “perversion,” a code word for homosexuality as well as other sex acts deemed abnormal, roamed the land. Peyton Place gnawed on the logics of such a regime. “Their sex habits,” complained one reviewer about the town's inhabitants, “are what the late Dr. Kinsey reported in people who have never progressed beyond eighth grade.” Another, who found “merit” in Metalious's “feeling for a small town,” recoiled from those who lived there. “Characters like these, he argued, “belong in an asylum, and, as a security measure, the town would be declared out-of-bounds by all civilized people.”21

  It would be easy to dismiss such comments as merely reflecting the conservative moral climate of the 1950s: Peyton Place was just racy for its time. But this approach would miss the degree to which sexual and gender politics both mirrored and helped to shape that climate. The “War on the Sex Criminal” worked not only to unmask so-called sex perverts but to normalize certain notions of gender that, when violated, signaled sexual perversion: the mannish lesbian, the effeminate male, the over- (and under-) sexed woman. For many reviewers, and not a few readers, it was not sex per se that made Peyton Place scandalous, but rather the extent to which Metalious's characters, especially her women, both enjoyed and gave sexual pleasure. Metalious celebrated female sexuality and positioned women at the center of sexual relations, politicizing both the female body and attempts to control it. In the process, Peyton Place called into question the parameters of the “normal.” “The ladies of the town,” whined a typical reviewer, “are so preoccupied with the mating instinct (with or without benefit of clergy) they have no time for household chores— certainly none for making beds.”22 Many critics castigated Metalious for her “out-house” mouth, shocked “that a young mother should publish a book in language approximately that of a bellicose longshoreman.”23 Her biographer, however, counted only three four-letter words. “Peyton Place isn't sexy at all,” responded Metalious. “I don't know what all the screaming is about. Sex is something everybody lives with—why make such a big deal about it?”24 Rereading Peyton Place in the midst of a new sex panic brings into view once again the connections between sexual politics and the social order.25

  Nervous over the ways in which Peyton Place cut against the borders of “normal” sex and gender codes, conservatives sought to criminalize the book's sale. Declaring it “lewd and indecent,” Indiana county prosecutor Glenn Beams ordered booksellers not to sell Peyton Place, or face prosecution if they did. Canada, Italy, Australia followed suit. In America, most attempts at censorship were directed at protecting minors. “Not for Kiddies” was the title of one review. In Rhode Island, bookseller Harry Settle was convicted of selling a copy to a minor and faced both a fine and a prison sentence. Conservatives were perhaps right to be concerned, for young readers seem to have turned to Peyton Place in droves. They read it, memorized lines from it, and dog-eared it for friends. Teenagers mimicked the gestures, sighs, and moves of characters such as Betty Anderson, Constance MacKenzie, Rodney Harrington, and Tom Makris (later changed to Mike Rossi). For some, reading Peyton Place was a sex act. “I didn't find out about masturbation until I was eighteen,” reported the rock star Grace Slick. “I was lying down on the bed, reading a book called Peyton Place, and it was a horny book.… For the next two weeks I went bananas with it.”26 Such topics as masturbation, sadomasochism, and homosexuality, which only recently have become acceptable topics for public discourse, were opened up to the general reader by Metalious in a series of books, including The Tight White Collar, that put homosexuality on the middlebrow map. (Two million copies of that title were sold.) When, as a young girl, the writer Barbara Wolf-son tried to sort out what exactly to call her sexual relationship with an older man, the father of the child she was hired to baby-sit, she turned to Peyton Place. “Once a week I sat for him and once a week he took me home in the little compact car he drove, and we, for lack of more descriptive words, made love. Of course, it wasn't love; it actually wasn't even intercourse. We did other things. It was the year that I'd read Peyton Place. Hard to remember now just how central to all our lives Peyton Place was that year. I did Peyton Place. “27

  For Metalious, Peyton Place was never merely about sex and she continued to find reviewers’ absorption with it peculiar. When a Look reporter, Patricia Carbine, later a founding member of Ms. magazine, asked whether sex ever seemed repulsive to her, Metalious tried to put things in perspective. “Far worse to me than any sex act is unattractive food, and I'm no gourmet.”28 What seemed more important to Metalious than sexual activity was women's right to participate in it and to control its consequences. In the story of Matthew Swain, Metalious's impassioned pen pricks the moral skin of abortion opponents in the decades before Roe v. Wade. Doc Swain, the crusty but much-loved town doctor, discovers Selena's secret when she becomes pregnant. Swain, we learn, hates three things: death, venereal disease, and organized religion. As he wrestles with his conscience over breaking the law as well as violating his own code of ethics, the reader is pulled into the drama and slowly but firmly transformed into a fellow outlaw eager to bring justice to the living. Through Doc Swain's “silent voice” Metalious asks, What is life?

  You've lost, Matthew Swain, it said. You've lost. Death, venereal disease and organiz
ed religion, in that order, eh? Don't you ever let me hear you open your mouth again. You are setting out deliberately this night to inflict death, rather than to protect life as you are sworn to do.

  “Feeling better, Selena?” asked the doctor, stepping into the darkened bedroom.

  “Oh, Doc,” she said, staring at him with violet-circled eyes. “Oh, doc. I wish I were dead.”

  “Come on, now,” he said cheerfully. “We'll take care of everything and fix you up as good as new.”

  And to hell with you, he told the silent voice. I am protecting life, this life, the one already being lived by Selena Cross.

  “Listen to me, Selena,” said Dr. Swain. “Listen to me carefully. This is what we are going to do.” (145)

  It is difficult to assess the impact of Swain's action upon readers, but Selena's abortion contributed to both Peyton Place's “wickedness” and its popular appeal. “It was the first book I read that didn't make me feel guilty over what I had done. We were middle class yet I had to sneak out into the night, risk getting arrested or, worse, infected or butchered by some doctor I didn't know. There were no choices here. To have another baby would have killed me. I remembered that line.… I was protecting life, the one that was already depending on me.”29 Published in an era many historians regard as lacking in either feminist or class ferment, Peyton Place provides a valuable corrective to the myth of quiescent domesticity and class consensus.30

  Thick in cultural meaning and enormously popular, Peyton Place was considered at the time a publishing “phenomenon.” A feature film quickly followed publication (in 1957), and in 1964 Hollywood introduced a new form of nighttime entertainment: the “television novel,” a form of episodic drama reintroduced in the 1980s with Dallas and Dynasty. No show, however, would reach the audience figures of Peyton Place. Shown three times a week for five years, the Nielson Company reported a viewing population of 60 million, or one in three Americans. Regular viewers would spend two hundred hours watching Mia Farrow and Ryan O'Neal as Allison MacKenzie and Rodney Harrington in 514 installments and more than a million feet of film. At least one critic has suggested that if in 1965 viewers had switched channels and watched Lyndon Johnson's press conferences instead, they might have been less surprised by the escalation of events in Vietnam.31

  Despite the enormous popularity of Peyton Place—its record sales, its layers of social criticism and controversy, its place in the national imagery, and its storytelling power—few scholars have given the book serious attention. Even among cultural critics who have begun to remap the territory of writing's publics and explore popular reading practices, Peyton Place remains on the academic sidelines. In part, this reflects a traditional bias against the popular: the conflation of well-liked with badly written, of pop with trash. But it is also the result of historical memory and the cultural politics that shape it. Memory, as a number of recent scholars have shown, is neither neutral nor instantaneous, but, rather, “a process and a generator of meaning.”32 Unlike the written word, which takes on the appearance of things recalled, stored, and fixed in time, the act of memory involves uncertainty, change, motion; it traffics in things lost, discarded, detached, and remembered. It is, in other words, produced rather than recalled and as such takes on an ideological function. Peyton Place, the book, rattled what the cultural theorist Michael Warner has called the “regime of the normal.” Peyton Place, as memory, locates the origins of the normal and establishes its traditions. Severed from the relations of class and gender, from sexual politics and social power, and from the processes of cultural production, Peyton Place takes on meaning as both lightweight literature and frivolous hanky-panky. In the fall of 1998, for example, U.S. Representative Lindsey Graham rose on the House floor to denounce the House Judiciary Committee's hearings regarding impeachment of President Bill Clinton, accused of covering up an intimate affair with a White House intern. He queried Congress, “Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?” No one needed an explanation. But instead of acting as a sharp critique against the sex panic of our day (an antisex politics that continues to mask the social problems Metalious sought to unearth), Peyton Place has become the antithesis of the “political”: a mere code word for sexual scandal, rather than a map to chart what it hides. Uncompromising in its attack upon class inequities, poverty, male privilege, and the sexual closet, Peyton Place gradually has become a salacious trope for erotic excess, serial philandering, and the trivialization of sex. For many, remembering Peyton Place involves a confusion between Metalious's book and the work of Jacqueline Susann, whose novel Valley of the Dolls focused on the entertainment industry and never reached the sales record of Peyton Place. “I don't know,” recalled one undergraduate I spoke with, “it's kind of like Valley of Dolls, right? Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll?”

  Both the film and the television series based on Peyton Place substantially altered the book and its meaning. While the film maintains some of the novel's trenchant attacks on small-town conformity, insularity, and petty meanness, and is sympathetic to Allison's quest for independence and selfhood, it views these things through the eyes of Peyton Place's men, who become the real actors and storytellers, despite Allison's occasional voice-overs. The women appear more as victims than as agents of their own lives; their networks have been severed, replaced by petty jealousies. Men show them the way to true happiness, moral courage, and safety. The town's women, who become for Metalious an oasis of comfort and a source of support, are reduced to marginal players, their quiet heroism reframed as gossip and helplessness. Selena's dark, ethnic features are transformed to conform to Hollywood standards of beauty. Blonde and blue-eyed, the girl from the shacks wins the hearts of the citizens, who rally behind her when her secret—her rape by her stepfather and her miscarriage—is disclosed. Incest is revealed but as a rare, senseless act of violence; sexuality becomes romance and the search for love; poverty is portrayed as something to be overcome with new clothes and “good” morals.

  It was television, however, that radically repositioned Peyton Place in popular memory, aggressively relocating it within a narrative more in tune with the conservative politics of domesticity, social censensus, sexual conformity, and male privilege. Adrian Samish, director of programming for ABC, regarded the book as both immoral and sensational. “We always do the right thing,” he told a reporter in 1964. “Our villains get punished. When people do what they shouldn't do, we draw the moral conclusions and either they suffer the consequences or are changed. We would never favor violence. Violence is taboo.”34 The director of the television series, Paul Monash, agreed. He “hated” the book, which he saw as “a negativistic attack on the town, written by someone who knew the town well and hated it.” Selena and her father are duly dropped from representation. Like violence, poverty, and alcoholism, Lucas Cross represented for ABC “the novel's unsavory aspects.” Doc Swain's abortion was also stricken from the script. Swain, in any case, was rendered unable to perform any operations, for as the placid new editor of the Peyton Place Clarion, he swaps his role as town conscience for town apologist. The bookish Norman Page, overly involved with his mother and subject to erotic fantasies, finds himself the second son of the widower Rod Harrington, Sr., himself transformed from paternalistic local mill owner to powerful industrialist. “Ours is a love affair with the town,” Monash explained. “Our people are not hostile to their environment. The general feeling we have of the town is of people evolving toward the light.”35

  Monash, of course, was not alone in rejecting Metalious's view of life in Peyton Place. The manuscript had been turned down for publication by five firms before Julian Messner, a small New York house, decided to accept it for publication. Kitty Messner, president of the company since the death of her ex-husband in 1948, read the manuscript in one sitting and found Metalious's work to be “a product of genius.” Certain that it was “a big book,” she quickly called the author's agent and made an offer. Tall, elegant, and “high styled” (she wore expensive tailor-made pants
uits designed to look like menswear), Messner was one of only two women to head a major publishing company and her feminism was expressed in more than her apparel. She staffed the firm almost entirely with women: women were the editors, sales directors, publicity agents, readers, and editorial assistants, as well as the company's typists and secretaries. What seems to have turned off other publishing houses fired the imagination of Messner and her staff. “I have to have it,” she told Metalious's agent, and she cut a deal that night.36 Like most publishing firms, however, Messner depended on reprint houses to subsidize the risks involved in printing works of unknown authors. For this book Messner's president turned to the only other female head of a publishing firm, Helen Meyer, director of Dell Publishing. Meyer agreed to back the book and in a few days Dell contracted to reprint it in paper, providing Messner with $15,000 to launch Peyton Place. Meyer's decision would ultimately transform both Dell, which sold more than eight million copies, and the paperback industry, which would begin to aggressively nurture, market, and redefine both the paperback and its readership.

  What appealed to Messner and Meyer, however, was precisely what repelled post-McCarthy-era Hollywood. “We are careful to be a moral show,” explained Monash. “We appeal to the audience that relates to My Fair Lady. We have a group of people the audience basically likes.”37 Violence was eliminated and sex transformed into love. “Allison MacKenzie is searching for love,” insists the director. “She is afraid that love leads to sex, and wants it to be more than that.”38 Metalious had shown that each was quite different from the other: that erotic pleasure and lust were related to power and desire. Turning Peyton Place on its head, the sexual stirrings and personal ambitions of Allison (and Grace) are rescripted by television to fulfill the middle-class fictions and patriarchal assumptions of female dependency, domesticity, and nubile love. Like the 1950s hit tune “Love and Marriage,” TV's Peyton Place insisted that sex and love go together “like a horse and carriage.”