by Blake Bailey
It was a relief to be solvent again, though money went only so far to ease the pain of being back in Hollywood. Phoniness and impermanence were writ large in the very landscape of the place—the ornate plaster facades of drugstores and gas stations and office buildings, the “grubby white edifice of the Hollywood Palladium,” the ubiquitous Orange Julius stands—all around the corner from Yates’s apartment. As for the movies themselves, as for The Industry: “Don’t get me started,” he’d say, but by then he was already started. “The goddamn movies” had a malignant effect on society; they were made by greedy, dishonest, untalented, manipulative bastards, and created a wholly false version of reality that made people think love or success or whatever was right around the corner, when in truth (as they were soon reminded) it wasn’t. “I used to like the movies,” he’d sigh, shaking his head. It was a lousy way to make a living.
But he never lost sight of why he did it. “Guess what, hey,” he wrote Wendy Sears two weeks after his arrival. “Remember how down-in-the-mouth I was because Monica Jane and I didn’t hit it off very well that weekend? Well, by God, today I received my Father’s Day package … and among other goodies there was the following: an illustrated poem by Monica Jane which damn near made me burst into tears, and which I can’t refrain from quoting in full to you.” His daughter’s poem was titled “Father’s Day” and included the lines, “I love you when your near./Little as your here,/I’ll still love you always.” “How’s that for a heart-breaker?” Yates continued. “It’s the ‘Little as your here’ line that really tore me up.… It’s also a little disturbing, because anybody who can write that well at the age of eight is almost certain to have a complicated and difficult life.” Perhaps he also sensed that any daughter of his was bound to have a difficult life no matter what, though it cheered him to be a good provider again—indeed, that fact alone made the situation bearable: “[W]hatever kind of place Hollywood may be,” he wrote the Schulmans, “it certainly beats the hell out of Iowa City.”
He was also fortunate in his employer, whom Yates forever exempted from his general indictment of the industry: “[Corman] turns out to be a very nice and smart and gentlemanly fellow,” he wrote, “nothing at all like Frankenheimer, and he seems to like what I’ve done so far.” Still in his thirties at the time, Corman had already made some seventy movies and managed to turn a profit on almost every one; unlike Frankenheimer, he didn’t consider himself an Artist in his own right, though he took a pardonable pride in his proficiency for cutting corners, and the quality of his product set an almost legendary standard for watchable schlock. His approach to collaboration was also highly agreeable to Yates: After the basic idea was worked out, he’d modestly insist on a few fundamentals (story structure, the visual nature of the medium), and leave nuances of character and dialogue to the writer—in this case a writer whose work he deeply respected.
In fact Corman hadn’t hired the author of Revolutionary Road for just another B-movie. Rather, the director’s first vehicle for Columbia was meant to be something of a breakthrough in his career—a big-budget feature about the Battle of Iwo Jima called The Inevitable Island, to which Corman wanted to take an innovative approach if at all possible. “I poke around trying to find some wrinkle in the Iwo Jima story that hasn’t already been crushed flat by John Wayne,” Yates wrote the Parkers, and after a couple of weeks he came up with a treatment that satisfied Corman as well as himself—that is, the battle as seen from both sides, Japanese and American, with all that implied of sympathetic ambiguity, a very Yatesian refusal to reduce any character to a demonized stereotype.
Except, perhaps, certain Hollywood characters. As long as Yates was out on the Coast, he thought it wise to take a meeting with Al Ruddy (the future producer of The Godfather), who professed a grim determination to make a faithful adaptation of Revolutionary Road despite the obvious obstacles of the industry. As Yates told this “funny Hollywood story” to the Schulmans,
[Ruddy] turned out, predictably enough, to be a very agreeable, friendly bullshit artist, the kind of young man who has read somewhere that ‘vitality’ and ‘magnetism’ and ‘integrity’ are considered attractive traits. For the first five minutes he’s elaborately, embarrassingly respectful, creating this atmosphere of Hushed Reverence, see, because he Admires my Work so much (so very, very much) and because he’s always, always wanted to meet me. Get the picture? Okay. Then pretty soon he turns into this brusque, ballsy, rough-diamond kind of guy: hell, maybe he’s crude and maybe he’s coarse, in his own lovable way, but no son of a bitch in This Town, in This Industry, can ever say he’s copped-out on a property yet. For instance, let’s take a property like Revolutionary Road. Let’s take the ending. Is that a problem? Why hell, let’s face it, of course it’s a problem. Nine guys out of ten in This Town would cop-out on a problem like that—but wait. Listen. Do I know what he’s gonna do?
Then he moves into his third phase: he becomes Creative. Suddenly he’s pacing the floor with wild eyes, waving his hands around to show me different camera angles—he’s gonna cut into this flashback here, lay-in this dialogue there, match-dissolve to this track-shot, then dolly-back and pan and zoom into this close-up.… His plan is to make the ending of the picture so artsy-craftsy, so impossibly full of tricky camera work, that the audience is left hanging in doubt as to whether April Wheeler is dead or alive. And the punch line of the whole story is what he said when I asked him if he didn’t think that might be a little confusing, or a little ambiguous. He said, and this is an exact quote:
“Well, but don’tcha see? I’m trying to eat my cake and have it too!”
In the end, of course, it came to light that he has absolutely no plans for producing the picture in the near or even foreseeable future … and that the whole afternoon was really just an opportunity for him to try out his personality on me.
* * *
Though he halfheartedly resumed his affair with the aging Catherine Downing, Yates was almost entirely alone those first months in Los Angeles. Roger Corman saw little of him, and what little he saw was reassuring; rather like Frankenheimer he dimly remembers Yates as a “friendly but reserved” man who drank a little more than normal, maybe, but otherwise gave no sign of being troubled. After Corman okayed the initial Iwo Jima treatment at the beginning of July, there wasn’t much need to speak until the screenplay (which would take a certain amount of research) was finished three months later. Unknown to Corman, Yates spent roughly half that time hospitalized at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.
Apart from Dr. Robert T. Rubin,* the only known witnesses to Yates’s breakdown, Catherine Downing and Bill Reardon, are both dead. Yates’s address during much of his hospitalization was “c/o Catherine Downing, General Artists Corp.,” and ten years later she wrote a brief note to Yates after reading Disturbing the Peace: “There’s really not much that I am able to say.… It’s just that I have always known you would eventually write the book and that reading it.… would be a painful experience for me. I want to give you the well-deserved words of congratulations and praise, but I can’t just now. Today is a fragile day for me.” Monica Yates attests that John Wilder’s third, most devastating breakdown in the novel was “as true as [her father] could write about how [his breakdown in Los Angeles] went,” and what slender evidence exists would seem to confirm as much. Such a meltdown may explain Downing’s lingering trauma ten years later, as well as the fact that she and Yates mostly avoided contact after the summer of 1965.
Yates’s relief over the “ridiculous amounts of money” he was making didn’t last long, and the main theme of his letters throughout July was loneliness. When he wasn’t working on the Iwo Jima script—which hardly engaged him the way Lie Down in Darkness had—there were long nights of despondent brooding over his distant daughters, the writer he used to be, everything. He made a number of drunken phone calls to his Iowa friend Jim Crumley, who was going through a divorce at the time. Mostly they talked about broken homes, but once Yates mentioned th
at he’d just spent a night in jail for drunk driving; he’d gotten lost in one of the hilly sections of Los Angeles, he said, and the contemptuous attitude of the arresting officers had enraged him.
As with other breakdowns, Yates’s drinking became more compulsive as he tried to medicate his rising mania, and like John Wilder he probably stopped sleeping (hence the late-night drives). In the novel Wilder complains to Dr. Rose at UCLA that he needs his prescriptions refilled, but the young man won’t oblige him without a records-release form from “Myron T. Brink” (the Nathan S. Kline character) in New York; meanwhile the best he can do is advise Wilder to stop drinking immediately. What happens next was perhaps the sort of thing Rose’s real-life counterpart, Robert Rubin, remembers so vividly about Richard Yates:
For the fourth night in a row—or was it the fifth?—[Wilder] hardly slept at all. No amount of whiskey could make him drowsy as he sat or sprawled on the sofa and tried to think things out, and he watched the morning break through the closed blinds.…
“Mr. Wilder [said Dr. Rose], these phone calls are becoming a little bizarre.”
“Whaddya mean? This is the first time I’ve—”
“You called me four times yesterday, three times at the office, and once at home, and you called twice the day before. I’ve heard a great deal about ‘emergency kits’ and ‘shots’ and all sorts of disconnected talk, and I’ve given you the same advice each time: ‘stop the alcohol.’”
Yates was perhaps desperate enough to take such advice to heart, but by then it was too late. In an earlier fragment of Disturbing the Peace, the protagonist (a tall man named “William Jeffries” in this version) tells a doctor that he realized he’d been drinking too much prior to his breakdown and poured a whole bottle of Jim Beam down the sink; as for Wilder, he smashes his bottles against the wall of his apartment. But like both characters Yates nonetheless ended up wandering Sunset Boulevard (so he told his second wife) dropping large bills out of his wallet while a mob gathered in his wake—an interesting gesture, given Yates’s loathing for the way he’d made such “ridiculous amounts of money.” In any event, he seems to have acted on some sort of expiatory impulse: When he was arrested for disturbing the peace, Yates apparently told police that he was Lee Harvey Oswald; he also thought (once again) that he was Jesus Christ.
What happened next was a blur to Yates and hence to posterity. On the aforesaid novel fragment he scribbled a note to himself: “West Hollywood Sheriff’s Office. Los County Gen Hospital Psych Unit. Zonal Ave.” Thus a doctor tries to reconstruct for “William Jeffries” (while the latter enjoys a brief spell of Thorazine-induced lucidity) what happened over the past week—namely, that Jeffries was taken from the police station to the County Psychiatric Unit for three days, then removed to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital (where John Wilder also finds himself at a similar juncture). It’s likely that Yates checked himself out of the hospital prematurely—as he was wont to do, especially in later years—and went on a rampage of sorts. At some point he made the usual raving phone calls to Sheila, convinced that he’d hurt or possibly killed their children; again and again she assured him they were fine, they were right here, but it was no use; sometimes, too, he sang nursery rhymes. Either Sheila or Yates or Catherine Downing got in touch with Bill Reardon, who caught a flight to Los Angeles and helped his friend commit himself to UCLA. As Reardon pushed the necessary documents under his nose, Yates thought he was certifying his identity as the new Messiah, or else signing confessions of one sort or another. (“In the bughouse I thought I was Jesus,” he told a girlfriend. “How does that grab ya?”)
All this was during the first week in August. By August 10 his daughter Monica had written a get-well card, though she was misinformed about his illness. After the latest disturbing phone calls, Sheila bluntly announced to Sharon that her father had suffered a nervous breakdown, and added that Monica should know nothing except that he was in the hospital. From now on, Sheila insisted, either she or Sharon would answer the phone—never Monica, unless it was one of their father’s regular Sunday-morning calls. She then wrote Yates a comforting note: “We have had a wonderful, relaxed summer, and the only cloud on our horizon has been your illness.… All your worries are just terrible dreams you are having.… If there were anything more serious than a cold wrong with either of the children, I would let you know immediately.”
In the meantime word of Yates’s predicament had spread, at least on the other coast. “I am awful sorry to learn of your dark passage,” McCall wrote on August 23, “but very happy to learn you are at the psychiatric department of UCLA.” As soon as he was sufficiently sane to do so, Yates had written or phoned such people as McCall, his children, Wendy Sears (who’d written on August 18, “Are you still alive? Where are you? Why aren’t you writing or calling?”), and the Schulmans; his friend Reardon had notified everyone else. “I had a full report from Bill Reardon,” wrote his old girlfriend Natalie Bowen, who congratulated Yates for doing “the right thing” by committing himself. “The only thing that worries me is that you’re so leery of psychiatrists. I hope you’ll let one of them get at you this time, no matter how painful it is at first. It’ll be much better for you than all the pills in the world.” Yates may or may not have appreciated such well-meaning advice, but he was clearly alarmed by the extent of the gossip. He obliquely queried people in the publishing world, and the response was less than reassuring. Marc Jaffe at Bantam wrote that he hadn’t heard “much” gossip, and promised not to “spread any unfortunate word around Madison Avenue and/or East Hampton”; but Rust Hills had heard plenty, and hectored Yates to write more and drink less: “The fact of talent is really given to very few; Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe—they all drank like fish and seemed to us to have acted in self-destructive ways. It’s very romantic—but they all did their work.… [Your friends] don’t gossip about you, but they sure worry about you.”
As the whole thing began to sink in, Yates seems to have accepted such lectures as his due. Time would tell how much this latest fiasco had cost him, financially and otherwise, but for now he was determined to limit the damage as much as possible. In the hospital he worked steadily on his screenplay, impressing staff and patients alike with his industry. Also he met regularly with Dr. Rubin, whom he described to the Schulmans as “voyeuristic”; to what extent he let the young man “get at” him is a mystery, though there’s no question Yates was at least somewhat persuaded that alcohol was a big part of the problem. By the time he was released on October 2, he was taking Antabuse and attending AA meetings; also his screenplay was finished and by his own account he looked five years younger. Unfortunately a few specters lingered from “the great travail”: A shady character named Dr. Salem insisted that Yates was still under his care, and was calling around to inquire into his patient’s whereabouts (“he is not my doctor,” Yates warned McCall, “and not to be trusted”); also Yates discovered that he was persona decidedly non grata at his former apartment, and in a rush he was forced to take rather seedy lodgings on Clark Street—“the kind of place you commit suicide in,” as he put it.
* * *
While in the hospital Yates was somewhat heartened by the reception of his novel’s prologue, published as “A Good and Gallant Woman” in the September 11 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. “People found it very warm and moving,” Rust Hills wrote, “and so well made that they are astounded when I tell them it is a novel sequence.” A second excerpt titled “To Be a Hero” ran two weeks later, and was also successful despite Yates’s being too deranged to approve galleys in time for a rushed production schedule. “I made it as good as I possibly could,” Hills reported a bit defensively. “It was certainly your job to do, not mine.” Some of Yates’s friends remarked on the abrupt ending of the second excerpt, but both stories were listed in the 1966 “Best” volume, and “A Good and Gallant Woman” won an O. Henry Award.
Meanwhile Corman was delighted with the screenplay: The only immediate change he made was to sco
tch the fancy title and go with the more saleable Iwo Jima. Yates was emboldened to send a few copies of the script to friends, though he tried to downplay it as so much craftsmanly hackwork: “There are several good things in it,” he wrote Cassill, “but basically it’ll be just another combat flick, the kind you forget five minutes after finishing your popcorn.” One of the copies floating around Iowa fell into the hands of Andre Dubus, which prompted an icebreaking postcard: It was a “fine well-focused script,” Dubus wrote, though he couldn’t help but point out that “Marines call ’em NCO’s, not non-coms.”
The movie was never produced. “Dick wrote a very good script,” Corman recalled, “but it was turned down by Columbia—some misunderstanding, or double-dealing, or misinformation. Turned out they wanted me to go on doing medium-budget films.” Not only did studio executives want a less elaborate, more commercial picture, but they were also unimpressed by the whole Japanese-are-people-too angle, and thought the two lead characters on either side of the battle should meet at the end (a convention that Yates and Corman had expressly nixed). Hence the project was killed; Corman was assigned to shoot the kind of slapdash Western he did so well, and a few weeks later the studio fired him after he gave a disgruntled interview to the Los Angeles Times. Yates had since moved on: Days after his release from UCLA, he was hired by producer David Wolper to do a rewrite of another World War II movie, The Bridge at Remagen.
