Farther and Wilder

by Blake Bailey

  He could be especially humorless on the subject of his own alcoholism. One morning in April 1944 he got a call from one Mr. Horton, the proprietor of a nearby bookshop on Washington Square and “a bloody bore,” Jackson thought, who was forever bending his ear about AA whenever he’d stop by to check on sales of The Lost Weekend. One day Horton phoned him at home: “I read in the paper today that you’re going to Hollywood,” the man said, and Jackson allowed it was true. “Well, I wish you’d do yourself a favor—” Horton continued, and began to give him the address and telephone number of the AA chapter in Beverly Hills. “You S.O.B.!” Jackson exploded. “If you don’t think I know what I’m doing by now, after eight years of sobriety on my own, then you don’t know very much! Go and talk to those people who need it! That’s the trouble with you holy rollers!” Then he hung up on him.

  Nine years later, detoxing at the Saul Clinic, Jackson remembered his abuse of poor Mr. Horton. “And I thought, ‘My gosh. All that man was doing was trying to be kind … ’ ” If Jackson had been truly secure in his sobriety, he realized, he wouldn’t have lost his temper like that. “It was a sign of danger ahead that I didn’t even know.”

  MGM HAD OFFERED Jackson a screenwriting job a month before his novel was published—Brandt & Brandt had sent them a copy—and prior to his interview at the New York office he fretted over the baneful influence of Hollywood on him, a serious writer (“Will I have the courage to say No?”). “One best seller did it,” Hedda Hopper announced on March 22, when Jackson happened to be visiting Newark, where word of his movie contract was received with far greater awe than a mere novel could ever command, and gave Jackson another chance to wear his eminence lightly (he was “modest in spite of his mushrooming literary success,” the Courier-Gazette noted). He was careful to point out that this was only a temporary detour: four months in Hollywood that summer, then five during each of the following two winters, and meanwhile his thousand-dollar weekly salary would serve to finance another novel.

  Still, he was filled with misgiving when he parted with Rhoda, the kids, and Boom before boarding the Twentieth Century Limited on April 15; he’d even gotten emotional saying goodbye to Herb on the phone, but when little Sarah ran back to kiss him on the platform, he could scarcely drag himself onto the train. Soon, though, excitement got the better of him. In Chicago he changed trains to the Super Chief, which made the Century “look like the Newark & Marion”: “Shower baths, barber shop, super-de-luxe club cars, bars, diners decorated with indian designs, wonderful food … ” At the Kansas City station he couldn’t resist revealing his identity to the bookstore owner, who breathlessly informed him that Bette Davis herself had bought a copy of The Lost Weekend en route to Hollywood the other day. “I hope she connects the author with ‘that sweet little man on the couch’ [in Nantucket],” wrote Jackson, who intended to drop her a note just as soon as he arrived. Later, as his journey continued, the gorgeous Western scenery put him in a subdued, philosophical mood: “It seems hard to believe, doesn’t it,” he wrote Boom, “that movie-people pass untouched through this incredible landscape which is the very utter in the eternal verities, and then pass on to the make-believe and sham of Hollywood.”

  In that dubious milieu Jackson was thrilled to learn that he was something of a legend, and that the title of his book had become “part of the language”: at the Ruban Bleu, Imogene Coca was doing a popular drunk sketch she called her “Lost-Weekend number,” and many, many actual drunks were anxious to glimpse the author of the most-talked-about book in town. “You know, I think you’re a great writer,” the novelist Laura Hobson blurted, informing Jackson that everyone on the MGM lot had “talked of nothing else” the week before he arrived, though some were a little reluctant to meet him. “I wish they really would be reluctant,” he wrote Rhoda, “because I know they’re always disappointed; that is, they have some preconceived idea about you and expect you to be ‘interesting’ or intense or drunk or something different from just a normal average guy like anybody else.” But Jackson’s mild-mannered demeanor was perhaps the most exotic part of all, and never mind his artless affability. His fame, wrote Mary McCarthy, seemed foremost a means of making friends with strangers (“as though the friendship already existed on the ideal plane, in the mind of God, and had only to be cemented in the real world by the manly handclasp”). Everyone was disarmed: this dipso novelist—the model for Don Birnam!—was, quite simply, the nicest guy they’d ever met. As for Jackson, he was naturally pleased that he never had to dine alone, but more than a little bewildered: “Why I am wanted by these people I truly don’t know; I offer nothing and merely am amiable.”

  What they hoped he offered—apart from amiability—was, of course, “the secret”: “I just stopped drinking,” Jackson would shrug, whereupon people would pry even more. He was flattered when big stars such as Spencer Tracy “hounded [him] for days on end,” but others made him nervous. Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz had reputedly attempted suicide after reading The Lost Weekend (his doctor suffered a dislocated shoulder while tussling with him), and Jackson was relieved when he managed to get out of lunching alone with the man in Malibu. Algonquin wit Robert Benchley—whose career had devolved into odd, demoralizing cameos for movies such as National Barn Dance—“hung onto [Jackson] for dear life,” and later wired his friend Dorothy Parker that the novelist known as “the MGM lion” (“literary lion,” Charlie glossed for Rhoda) was returning to New York. “I’ve got to meet the man who saved my life,” she would greet him. “Well, it’s all fun,” he’d written from Hollywood that first month, “though it truly goes in one ear and out the other … ” Sometimes, though, he could hardly restrain his ecstatic incredulity: “This fantastic town! My fantastic life! … the other night when I got in there was a note that Vincent Price had called; I don’t know him yet … ”

  The provincial lad with stars in his eyes was pleased to realize that (in those days anyway) a top-tier writer was considered something of an “aristocrat” in Hollywood. Sitting in the MGM commissary with his fellow wordsmiths and new best friends—Whitfield Cook, Robert Nathan, and Donald Ogden Stewart—Jackson was stunned when Clark Gable sat down opposite him just like that and began chewing the fat (“I still can’t get over it … it is something that’s happening to somebody else, not me”). Nor was commissary talk the sort of bland gossip one heard on the stoop in Newark, but rather shimmering effortless repartee—“real brilliance,” which Jackson was at pains to report to the folks back home with curatorial precision: “They tell the story about the Hollywood writer who got tired of it all and committed suicide by jumping into his Capeheart while it was changing records, for instance.”

  Jackson felt esteemed in every way. His minder at MGM was a fatherly Russian producer named Voldemar Vetluguin, who counseled Charlie to be choosy about his assignments and would-be collaborators. “Arsur is hard to work with,” the man gravely advised, when Jackson wondered whether he should team up with the producer Arthur Hornblow. Jackson was touched by “Vet’s” concern, but also dismayed to find that such a brilliant, kindly man lived all alone in an enormous house and commenced getting drunk every night, without fail, at 5:30 on the nose. He did, however, steer Charlie to a plum assignment within a single week: a big ensemble picture tentatively titled A Day to Forget—about the one day in the lives of various characters that they would most like to relive—featuring all the big stars at MGM (Garland, Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, et al.), with Van Johnson in the lead. The producer was Carey Wilson, screenwriter for the original Ben-Hur and Mutiny on the Bounty, and Jackson envisaged the key credits as follows: “Story by Harry Ruskin and Charles Jackson / Screenplay by Charles Jackson.” Indeed, the episodic narrative offered an intriguing technical challenge—namely, how to weave together so many disparate plots without seeming to start the movie over again every few minutes—and Jackson was eager for the chance to prove his “virtuosity” and become known as a “name writer and sound craftsman.” “Already ballyhooed
as an all-star drama to spotlight virtually every major player on Leo’s lot,” Box Office trumpeted a month later, “Nor All Your Tears [as it was now called] is a story of human conflicts laid against the background of an American coastal city … ”

  The coastal city in question was San Francisco, to which Jackson was sent for three days in late May to “absorb some of the atmosphere”—both haut and bas, it would seem: put up at the elegant Mark Hopkins Hotel at the crest of Nob Hill, Jackson was taken under the wing of professional hostess Elsa Maxwell, no less, who “paved [his] way with social engagements that are too-too,” he reported, including lunch with the mayor at the Pacific-Union Club and entrée into houses of “some of the old families.” Nights, however, were spent in the company of his roguish old friend Haughton C. Bickerton, who lived with his mother in Sausalito. “You must remember bad Bick, don’t you?” he wrote Whitfield Cook (“Angel”) a few months later, which suggests that Cook had come along for the trip. By then Cook had begun to feel like “an old old friend” to Charlie: “We have many many laughs to the minute … and we almost always lunch together.” Cook’s seventy-year career as a screenwriter, novelist, and composer is now best remembered, if at all, for his contribution to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), for which he’s generally credited as having underlined the sexual tension between Farley Granger and Robert Walker. Later, as a sixty-year-old widower, Cook became attached to the gay Australian writer Sumner Lock Elliott; the two lived apart until Elliott’s stroke in 1985, when Cook moved in and became the man’s caretaker for the last six years of his life.

  Around this time Charlie received a “sharp letter” from his mother—“reminding me” (as he indignantly related to Rhoda) “that I have a good wife and two perfectly good children, and I mustn’t do anything to … ‘bring shame upon them.’ Imagine!” Indeed, this seemed unduly harsh, given that almost every single day Charlie wrote long, newsy letters to his wife (urging her to keep them “as a kind of diary” in case he needed to look stuff up later), and twice a week they spoke on the telephone—though, truth be known, these chats tended to be “less than satisfactory” (“we never know what to say … and besides we’re probably too conscious of the fleeting expensive minutes”). “Lately I have longed for you physically—which may surprise you,” Charlie wrote shortly after that trip to the Bay Area. “I could have sex if I wanted it, but funny thing is it doesn’t enter my head: what I want is love, someone to hold and love and be with long hours through the night, even if it’s only lying side by side … ” Certainly he wanted his family around him—in fact, he was considering buying a house in Hollywood so they could spend winters there, and meanwhile he wanted Rhoda to leave the kids with her family and join him for a few weeks that summer, while he was still “a so-called ‘celeb’ ”: it “will never be the same after this year,” he accurately predicted. Rhoda protested that she would feel “terribly ill at ease” in such a place, and Charlie replied that he’d felt the same way until he realized everyone felt that way, even the “Big Names”: “it’s the 20th Century neurosis, and keener or more acute here than anywhere, because everyone is really so insecure and this is such an unreal world.” This failed to reassure Rhoda, who decided to stay put in the East.

  THAT SPRING, director Billy Wilder had discovered The Lost Weekend—piqued by the title—while traveling between coasts. Back in Los Angeles he chatted with various doctors and AA people, all of whom vouched for the novel’s verisimilitude and agreed that an adaptation would be a pioneering work: that is, a movie that didn’t milk the subject for laughs. Paramount’s production head Buddy De Sylva was skeptical about the commercial end, and almost assuredly would have vetoed the idea if it had come from anyone but Wilder—who, with his writing partner Charles Brackett, enjoyed an almost unrivaled “prestige and independence” in the industry, according to a 1944 Life profile. After eight years together, Brackett and Wilder (“the happiest couple in Hollywood”) had never misfired, producing a string of quirky classics including Ball of Fire, The Major and the Minor, and Ninotchka (one of Jackson’s favorites, needless to say: “Garbo laughs!”). They were an odd pair: Brackett, a Harvard Law School graduate, was vice-president of the bank his family owned in Saratoga—“a courtly, somewhat rumpled, affable gentleman,” as Life put it, whereas Wilder was a foul-mouthed Austrio-Hungarian Jew with a bleak view of humanity that (said Brackett) stood their partnership in good stead.

  The agent Leland Hayward had arranged for Jackson to meet the two at Romanoff’s in early May—“a triumph, nothing less,” Charlie wrote Boom: “Wilder and Brackett were wonderful, crazy about the book, anxious to do the picture, and that’s what we talked about.” He was especially smitten by Brackett (“the nicest man I have met here”), who in turn was even more fascinated by The Lost Weekend than Wilder: “It had,” he said, “more sense of horror than any horror story I have ever read—lingering like a theme in music.” A few days later, Wilder “dragged [Jackson] away” from a party to attend a screening of his latest movie, Double Indemnity, after which he stood up and announced, “Next picture coming up: The Lost Weekend!” Jackson could hardly demur, since he’d found Double Indemnity “truly wonderful” and considered himself “the luckiest guy in the world”—but wait: yet another genius, Alfred Hitchcock, had also read The Lost Weekend and wanted to buy it, or so he told the author (who was dining with Whit Cook) one night at LaRue’s. Toward the end of May, not a day passed that Jackson’s name didn’t appear in one of the big columns: “Yesterday I read that four major movie companies are all hot about the book,” he wrote Philip Wylie. Without a doubt, he announced, The Lost Weekend would sell by the end of the month, “and certainly for not less than $75,000.”

  Two years later—sadder but (perhaps) wiser—Jackson wrote his agent: “I feel, and will always feel … that The Lost Weekend was handled very badly indeed.” Jackson had been in San Francisco on May 29, when his agent Carl Brandt called to relay Paramount’s decidedly lowball offer: $35,000. Other studios, Brandt explained, were only willing to option at that point, so there was no competitive bidding; in any event Paramount wanted an answer within two hours. “I’m no businessman,” said Charlie. “What should I do?” “I cannot take the responsibility of deciding for you,” Brandt replied. Frantic, Jackson tried to reach his newest best friend, Brackett—who had urged him, in confidence, to ask Paramount for the moon, since he and Wilder were determined to make the movie “come hell or high water”—but Brackett was away from his desk. Charlie waited, then waited a little more, then caved. “I wish this did me some good financially,” he’d later sigh, whenever someone reminded him of The Lost Weekend’s astounding box-office success. “Me, I sold it outright for $35,000.” At the time Louella Parsons speculated in print that he’d doubtless gotten “a pretty penny—up in six figures” for such a hot property.

  Still, it was a long way from writing Sweet River scripts at forty bucks a pop, and Jackson consoled himself that Wilder and Brackett would, after all, do a “brilliant job.” Tacked on their door at Paramount was a sign: “DO NOT DISTURB: MEN WORKING ON NEXT YEAR’S ACADEMY AWARD”—a bit of desperate bluster, many thought, given what seemed an almost unfilmable novel about a single major character who hardly spoke except inside his head. “If they bring it off,” a colleague remarked, “I bet they’ll try next to make a musical out of Finnegans Wake.” In fact, as Brackett later claimed, it turned out to be “the easiest script we wrote, thanks to the superb novel,” and Wilder agreed: the more you took the book apart, he said, the better it seemed. Also, they were glad to consult with the author, to whom they’d promised not to make drastic changes without his approval—as, for example, when they toyed with the idea of turning Helen into an ex-alcoholic whom Don meets in a psychiatrist’s office: “Simply won’t permit such a thing,” said Jackson, winning the point. But mostly he was nothing but pleased: the script’s opening was “brilliant,” and the new “Boy-Meets-Girl” sequence (Don and Helen are given each oth
er’s coats by mistake while leaving La Traviata) was “original & effective.” And meanwhile the columns buzzed with rumors about who would play the controversial lead. Wilder and Brackett wanted Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, or Ray Milland, in that order, while Jackson had hoped for Robert Montgomery (the two had hit it off at a party chez Brackett), who, he thought, had the “charm” and “knowledge of ‘psychopathia’ ” to do justice to such a difficult role.3 As for the long-suffering Helen, an actress named Andrea Leeds (“remember her? the lovely girl in STAGE DOOR who committed suicide?”) was then the top candidate, and Jackson moreover observed that a live bat (“Actually”) was being trained for the climactic hallucination.

  THAT FIRST MONTH in Hollywood, Jackson had gotten a call from the MGM publicity department, asking about his marital status: “Lovely,” he replied, and thereupon learned that he was being linked in the press with Phyllis Thaxter, a starlet who’d accompanied him to a party once and called him “sir” all night. “Romance, hell,” he wrote dismissively to Rhoda, but a couple of weeks later the idea began to seem less absurd—since, as he liked to confess to whosoever would listen, he’d fallen “like a ton of bricks” for “a scared shy little girl” of twenty-one (even younger than Thaxter): Judy Garland. They met at a dinner party on June 2, after which he lost no time writing his wife that, yes, “I all but fell in love with Judy—strictly as an artist, I mean”: