by Blake Bailey
Another member of the circle was an affable young AP reporter, Joe Mohbat, who shared a cubbyhole at the Justice Department with his UPI counterpart. Yates and Mohbat had a common fondness for certain kinds of sophisticated silliness, and became lifelong friends. Over lunch at the Kansas City Steakhouse or Hammel’s, the two would swap “Tom Swifties” while Yates tanked up on vodka martinis (he preferred “something brown” for later) and laughed until he coughed so hard “it hurt to listen,” as Mohbat remembered. Often they were joined by Rosenthal and Wendy Sears, and the well-oiled Yates would regale them with table-slapping contempt for some fresh outrage among the “tight-ass political types” back at the office. His favorite expression at such times was “big fucking deal,” primarily applied to the brown-nosing toadies who clustered around the Kennedys. He made fun of the way Guthman jumped whenever“BAG” buzzed, or the way a certain young writer for Look magazine hung around the office all day dropping the phrase Bob and I. “Dick had an objective outsider’s eye in a circle otherwise composed of Kennedy admirers,” said Rosenthal, who (despite his own youthful earnestness at the time) liked the way Yates sat back in his chair and “laughed at the whole thing.”
The group found clever ways to fill downtime in the office. Mohbat filed his wire-service copy as briskly as possible so he could “lurk for tidbits” around the fifth floor, which often meant ducking into the Herbert Brownell Room to cut-up with Yates. The latter liked to boast that he’d worked so hard on Revolutionary Road he knew it word for word, so Mohbat and Sears would kill time trying to stump him with his own novel: They’d read the first few words of a random passage, and the author would (flawlessly) supply the rest. Also they played a word game devised by Rosenthal—a former “Quiz Kid” finalist—called “Merkins,” taken from LBJ’s phrase “Mah fellow Merkins.” The game entailed contracting syllables according to American dialect—for example (Yates’s favorite), “Jeat jet?” for Did you eat yet? from Salinger’s “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.”* All day long they’d leave “Merkins” on each other’s desk and keep score, awarding one point per contracted syllable—hence three points for “Shadune?” (What are you doing?), two for “Salacornta how you look at it” (It’s all according to how you look at it), and so on. Such silliness spilled over to dinners at Wendy Sears’s Georgetown apartment; because of RFK’s crusade against organized crime, Yates would compulsively name his food after mobsters—“Potatoes” Dinado, “Peas” Gambino—and collapse into hacking laughter.
From the beginning, though, Yates’s friends at the Justice Department noticed that there was something a little off about him. “His rages were tyrannical when he was drunk,” said Mohbat. “He’d shout, cough, swear like a sailor. You couldn’t believe he wrote so elegantly when he talked like that. And it was all over nothing—some neutral talk about politics or whatever.” Yates was particularly impatient with Wendy Sears, whose youth and relative passivity made her an easy target for “correction”—as when she’d say something ungrammatical or use a hackneyed expression like relationship or yea high. Right away Yates insisted on adopting a mentorly role à la Fitzgerald’s “College of One” vis-à-vis Sheilah Graham: He gave Sears a list of ten books “she might find nourishing” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,† and occasionally treated her to spontaneous disquisitions on, say, the meaning of “craftsmanship.” And whenever she’d let some solecism slip, he’d sigh, “Wrongedy wrong wrong wrong” and bemoan how poorly educated even genteel girls were these days. When Sears happened to mention that she’d attended the same prep school (Beaver Country Day in Brookline) as Yates’s former girlfriend Sandra Walcott, his response was to remember how “appalled” he’d been when Walcott misspelled the word “Congratulations.” In fact, this aspect of Yates’s relationship (attachment, rather) with Wendy Sears would survive to the very end: Almost thirty years later, the deathly ill Yates told Sears that he’d enjoyed her latest letter, “except that part where you refer to your daughter as a ‘private person.’”
For a while, though, Sears was “enraptured” by Yates. He was quirky and pedantic, yes, but at his best he was the most charming of men. Sears and her roommate Suzie would beg him to sing—especially “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store,” the many verses of which he’d croon with a winsome lilt in his voice. When Sears told him that her father Samuel was a good amateur pianist who’d written lyrics for Hasty Pudding shows at Harvard, the wistful Yates wondered if he’d written, by chance, “Columbus Discovered America” (he hadn’t), and then of course Yates would sing that, too. The song reminded him of his daughters (many things did), and he’d happily begin telling stories about them, imitating their voices in turn. For her part Sears was adoring and tactful, a good sport, and as Yates liked to say: “She doesn’t tell me long, boring stories about people I don’t know.”
And finally he liked the fact that she was very young and had a youthful sense of fun. When he mentioned he didn’t have a proper typewriter at his apartment, Sears encouraged him to steal one of the many neglected machines at the Justice Department—a caper they pulled off together, under the proverbial cloak of darkness. Around this time, too, Bob Riche came to town and had dinner with the couple at an elegant restaurant, and was “horrified” when Sears casually removed a bottle of wine from one of the tables and stuck it in her purse. As it happened, that was the night Riche informed his friend that he was marrying the woman he’d met at Bread Loaf three years before. Yates remembered her well. “You mean you’re gonna marry the orphan?” he said.
* * *
As the summer ended Yates’s speechwriting duties began to pall. The words he’d put in Kennedy’s mouth had gone a long way toward improving the man’s image and advancing his agenda, but Yates’s services were rarely acknowledged except for the odd, casual compliment. Kennedy gave no sign of letting Yates into his inner or even outer circle: He didn’t invite him to lunch or dinner or for visits to Hickory Hill. And while Yates certainly hadn’t taken the job with the hope of cultivating a camaraderie with the attorney general, he resented what Styron called the “cold transaction” of working for the Kennedys. It became less and less gratifying when the public cheered his speeches, since he never got any of the credit. Of course Yates realized this was his job, but as a matter of principle it rankled that people like himself did all the work while the Kennedys simply accepted it as their due.
Above all he was anxious to get back to his fiction, an attitude that puzzled his colleagues on the fifth floor: As Rosenthal put it, they didn’t understand “why anyone would bother with ‘mere literature,’ when one could be involved in changing the world.” Besides, if Yates insisted that speechwriting was “whoring” but he needed the money, why not write fiction in his spare time or vice versa? Why not write both? But Yates couldn’t compartmentalize that way—“When I’m writing, I’m writing”—and it wasn’t as if he could alternate fortnights working on one or the other, as he’d done in his Remington Rand days. Meanwhile, as always when he wasn’t writing fiction, Yates drank to numb the painful sense of lost time, not to say a bleak suspicion that he was already washed up as a serious writer. Once, after returning to Washington via the Eastern shuttle, he mentioned to Sears that he’d spotted John Kenneth Galbraith on the plane: “God,” he said, “if the plane had gone down, all they’d talk about was Galbraith.” And when John Williams visited Washington as part of his Holiday junket, he was startled by the change in his friend: “Dick was drinking like he needed to get out of himself one way or the other. He said, ‘I’m the best fucking writer in America!’ I’d never seen him so full of himself—usually he was laid back and just let the work speak for itself.” But there hadn’t been any work in a long time (arguably none worth keeping in almost two years), and such boasts were the gasps of a drowning man.
Perhaps there was some consolation, then, in the imminent prospect of a thumbs-down from the FBI. Yates expected as much, and moved out of the Knorrs’ hous
e in late August; he rented a basement apartment on Ashmead Place off Connecticut Avenue, where he could stay close to Wendy Sears and work on his novel in relative privacy once his job ended at the Justice Department. Sure enough, the FBI report landed on Kennedy’s desk almost exactly four months after Yates’s hiring, and alcoholism and mental instability were its major themes. The interview that followed in Kennedy’s office—a stock anecdote in Yates’s repertoire—happened pretty much as reported in Uncertain Times:
“Would you describe yourself as a heavy drinker?”
“Yes, I would.”
Kennedy gave a small nod as if to commend him for honesty.
“But I don’t drink when I’m working,” he lied. “I’ve never done that. Be sort of like drinking and driving a car.”
“I see. Still, the most disturbing parts of the report for me are these several hospitalizations you’ve had for mental or emotional illness.” Only two, Bob, Grove wanted to say; it’s only happened twice, but he kept his mouth shut. A drop of sweat seeped from one armpit and slid down his ribs. “That’s a cause of some concern to me,” Kennedy said. “Still, your work here has been fine. It’s been excellent.… Tell me something, though, Bill. When you had these several—breakdowns of yours in the past, has it been possible for you to sort of sense them coming in advance?” …
“Yes, I can, Bob,” he said, though that had never been true; and to soften it on the side of less flagrant dishonesty he said “At least I’m pretty sure I can.”
“I see. Well then, look.… Suppose we leave it this way: If that should ever happen while you’re working for me—if you ever sense you’re in some kind of imminent difficulty of that kind, I mean, will you come and tell me about it?”
“Certainly, Bob.”
Yates was allowed to stay. As a speechwriter he wasn’t a high-security risk, and the decision was ultimately Kennedy’s to make. More mysterious, perhaps, was Yates’s willingness to prevaricate in order to keep a job he didn’t much want anymore. The easy explanation was that he still needed the money—as of course he did—but a few other factors come to mind: One, he was loath to have it known that he’d been fired because of mental illness; two, at whatever level he actually dreaded the prospect of writing (or rather not writing) fiction again, and was somewhat relieved to have an excuse to put it off; and three, at the time he badly needed the esteem he derived from being RFK’s speechwriter, and liked to think Kennedy needed him as much as he needed Kennedy. “I think it’s sort of important to consider,” says Bill Grove after the FBI interview, “… that [Kennedy] may not want to lose his voice.… I’ve written every fucking word that’s come out of his mouth for the past four months.”
Yates’s job had been considered “provisional” pending the FBI report, after which the news was finally released to the press: “After searching for months,” Newsweek belatedly reported in its September 16 issue, “Robert Kennedy has found a new speechwriter. He is 37-year-old novelist Richard Yates … who has just finished a screenplay for William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. (Styron suggested him for the job.) The Attorney General started looking after a stormy session with Negro leaders in New York convinced him that his civil-rights speeches were missing the mark.”* At last Yates would get some credit in the public mind for RFK’s occasional eloquence, though perhaps the most intriguing result of the Newsweek announcement was a phone call: Was this Richard Yates the writer, a woman wanted to know, and if so how long had he been working in Washington? “Yes,” Yates replied to the first question, and “about four months” to the second. The woman sighed, explaining that she’d been seeing a guy in the Village who claimed to be Richard Yates, though various people had suggested he was an imposter. “Can you imagine?” Yates told friends. “People getting laid claiming they’re me?”
But such glee over reminders (ribald and otherwise) of his literary importance was mingled with rue. It almost hurt to be told that the French edition of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness had been selected as Best Foreign Book of the Month, that reviews were ecstatic, when Yates himself had lost faith in his ability to write a short story. As for his stalled novel, he certainly wouldn’t be able to make his January delivery date now that he’d indefinitely committed himself to Kennedy, and really he wondered if he’d ever finish the book at all, or if he should even try. Sam Lawrence tried to goad him back to work with an offer of five hundred dollars a month until the book was finished, but Yates declined: He was already in debt to the publisher and had little incentive to accept further advances at his own risk.
Yates’s company became more of a mixed blessing than ever. In the early days of their courtship, Wendy Sears had caught glimpses of his occasional volatility, but never in her life had she witnessed such uncontrollable rage as when she let drop that her mother had questioned whether “Richard Yates” was his real name. Yates was convinced the woman had meant to imply he was some kind of fraud—déclassé, a foreigner perhaps, not worthy of her blueblood daughter and so forth. It didn’t help that the woman had also seen fit to belittle the Back Bay Ledger (“Never heard of it”), which had provided one of the more glowing blurbs for Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. “He went berserk,” said Sears, “and he wasn’t even drunk. It went on and on—‘What does she know?’—for almost two hours, shouting, his face red. It was like something snapped in his brain.”
Yates seemed to prize the fact that Sears came from “sturdy” Brahmin stock, but it also piqued his deepest insecurities. The worst of his outbursts were almost always related to matters of class, and he often gave Sears the impression of railing against an abstraction rather than her (“You rich Boston debutantes! Who the hell do you think you are?”). “It had become important lately to find good reasons for losing his temper at Wendy,” Yates wrote in Uncertain Times*—this in the context of a “fictionalized” account of his meeting one of Sears’s cousins: a young man who happened to remark that he wanted to work for the FBI in order to carry a gun. “That cousin of yours,” says Grove, “is nothing but a spoiled, stupid, brutal fucking kid.… He’s a graduate of Exeter … he’s a graduate of Brown University; and now all he wants to do in the world is carry a pistol. That’s how fascists are made, sweetheart: That’s the way the Nazi party was conceived and born.” Perhaps, but in real life Sears had readily conceded that such a remark was unworthy of her cousin, that in fact he wasn’t a bad sort at all, but anyway why was Yates screaming at her? She hadn’t said anything about wanting to carry a pistol. And why drag Exeter and Brown into it?
The worst lay ahead. In early November Sam Lawrence came to town and took the couple to Billy Martin’s Carriage House on Wisconsin Avenue, a “suave, expensive and quiet restaurant” (as Yates described it), where one could have drinks around the piano before adjourning to a gilded dining room. Yates liked that sort of thing and seemed at ease, when suddenly he bellowed that Lawrence was a son of a bitch and stood ranting at him for reasons that nobody (Yates included) could later fathom. Sears begged him to sit down and be quiet, Lawrence looked bemused, and finally “four hefty waiters” carried the shouting, writhing author out the door and threw him bodily into the street. The piano played louder throughout the ordeal, like a saloon scene in a Western movie. Sears fled the restaurant and walked home, weeping with humiliation, while Lawrence paid the check and implored the management not to call the cops. “That, I guess, is the kind of awful experience that can sometimes be laughed off,” Yates wrote with retrospective serenity in 1972, “as [Lawrence] and I were able to do the very next day, when I crept to his hotel to apologize and retrieve my raincoat.” Yates was somewhat less apologetic to Sears, and when he described the scene to Joe Mohbat it was “almost as if [Yates] were talking about a separate person, a person he didn’t like, a character in a book: ‘Can you imagine such an asshole?’”
* * *
After the FBI report, Yates made an effort not to drink while at work, but it was a losing battle. Eight or nine hours of sobriety a day, at a job he now acti
vely disliked, meant that he drank with even greater abandon at night and on weekends—so much so, in fact, that temperance at any time became out of the question. Every morning he’d be ashen and shaky with hangover, and the only remedy was to sneak well-paced shots of vodka throughout the day. Neither his heart nor his head was in his work anymore, and people in the office began to notice: His speeches were less original, even a bit lifeless, and Yates himself seemed fed up with more than just the work. When Kennedy and Guthman returned from a trip to the Midwest, the latter remarked that “people out there” were “the real Americans”—the folks who paid taxes and fought wars and so forth. Yates held his tongue, but later exploded to Wendy Sears: “That asshole! What does he mean, ‘the real Americans’? What, the Negroes aren’t real?” Yates thought it a fatuous, reactionary thing to say, and all too typical of the basic hypocrisy that lurked at the heart of the whole political establishment, however much obscured by the liberal cant of the Kennedys. He wanted out.
Wednesday, November 20, was the attorney general’s birthday, and his staff was invited to a White House reception that night for the Supreme Court and other members of the judiciary. For the first and last time Yates shook hands with President Kennedy, the object of his scorn and perhaps wistful envy, and then danced with Wendy Sears in the East Room. At one point he ran out of cigarettes, and was aghast to discover there were none on the premises.
Two days later Joe Mohbat and reporter Jack Vandenburg of the UPI were returning from lunch when they passed the teletype room on the fifth floor, where Yates stood watching the chattering ticker. He waved them inside: “They shot the president!” he hissed. “They shot the fucking president!” The reporters ran to their phones, and Yates left for the airport to spend the weekend with his daughters in New York. He was back in time to watch the funeral cortege pass beneath the fifth-floor balcony of the Justice Department. Unlike many of the others, Yates was somber but dry-eyed. The following Thursday was Thanksgiving, and Yates and Wendy met the Mohbats for a restaurant dinner in Potomac, Maryland. The four hardly spoke. Yates shook his head a few times and said “Holy shit.”
