—Carlos Baker,The New York Times Book Review
The book’s author, Grace Metalious, was a thirty-two-year-old stay-at-home mother of three. Truly a desperate housewife herself, she wrote Peyton Place in the hopes that it would lift her out of the “cage of poverty and mediocrity” in which she felt trapped. Driven and passionate, she neglected her wifely duties to write ten hours a day, leaving dishes to pile up in the sink and dust to accumulate throughout her ramshackle home. Independent and single-minded, she was not a typical woman of her time.
In the famous 1956 photo of the author, Metalious is shown dressed in rolled-up blue jeans, a man’s flannel shirt, and sneakers. Her hair is unceremoniously pulled back in a practical ponytail, her cigarette is burning in a nearby ashtray, and her typewriter sits before her, waiting to pound out the next steamy scene to emerge from her uncensored mind. The photo is entitled Pandora in Blue Jeans. It is an appropriate title. Like her mythological namesake, Metalious lifted the lid off the box of repressive 1950s society, unleashing the demons of adultery, abortion, incest, rape, and the unbridled yearnings of female sexuality. A controversial figure, to say the least, she became an instant celebrity, both applauded and reviled, as some readers deluged her with fan letters while others hurled stones and obscenities. She was, for a while, the most talked about woman in America. Soon the pressure of fame became too much for Metalious, and she turned to alcohol, losing her fortune and eventually her life before she would reach her fortieth birthday.
Today, though the talk about Metalious has long since quieted down, she is often hailed as one of the first liberated modern women and a courageous predecessor of the feminist movement. However she is remembered, as popular heroine or hell-bound pornographer, one fact is undeniable: It took tremendous courage for a wife and mother, in the 1950s, to write and publish a book like Peyton Place.
“A vivid, vigorous story of a small town and an expert examination of the lives of its people—their drives and vices, their ambitions and defeats, their passivity or violence, secret hopes and kindnesses, their cohesiveness and rigidity, their struggles, and oftentimes their courage.” —Boston Herald
The story begins in a picturesque New England town, where Indian summer has come to heat up the chilly autumn landscape. “Indian summer,” wrote Metalious in her famous first line, “is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.” The author walks us down the leafy streets of this seemingly peaceful suburb, introducing us to the players in her drama. On one side of the tracks, there are the wealthy Leslie Harrington and his spoiled son Rodney, as well as the good-hearted doctor Matthew Swain. On the other side, living in a tar-paper shack, is young Selena Cross and her wretched family. And in the middle class stand the book’s two central characters, single mother Constance McKenzie and her teenage daughter, Allison.
On its surface, Peyton Place looks picture-perfect, but, as Metalious herself once put it, “if you go beneath that picture it’s like turning over a rock with your foot. All kinds of strange things crawl out.” And that’s exactly what Metalious does next; she turns over that rock and lets the dark truths of the American small town come crawling.
Overprotected Allison McKenzie, desperate for a friend, grows close to Selena Cross, who is just as desperate to escape poverty and the clutches of her violent and sexually abusive stepfather, Lucas. Selena works in Constance McKenzie’s dress shop, seeking maternal love at a time when Allison pushes her own mother away. Constance, rigid and cool, forbids her daughter to run around with boys, especially boys like Rodney Harrington, who knocks up the town’s bad girl. Constance, once a bad girl herself, is terrified that Allison will end up like her—a single woman with a child born out of wedlock, forever hiding from scandal. This truth about her daughter’s birth is a carefully guarded secret, until Constance begins to thaw in the arms of the new school principal, Tom Makris. Arguing with Allison, she blurts out the secret, wounding her daughter, who flees the small town, running away to be a writer in New York City.
After four years pass, smarting from a disastrous affair with her literary agent, Allison returns to Peyton Place to attend the murder trial of her old friend, Selena Cross. The girl admits to killing her stepfather and burying him in the sheep pen, claiming self-defense. But she doesn’t specify what she was defending herself against, ashamed and afraid of losing her fiancé, Ted Carter. The trial turns around when Doc Swain testifies that he performed an illegal abortion for Selena, who was raped by her stepfather. This shocking admission blows Peyton Place wide open. Unable to hide from their secrets anymore, the townspeople must stand in the harsh light of truth. For Constance and Allison, two fiercely independent women fighting to make it in a man’s world, this means reconciliation and a sense of peace.
“Captures a real sense of the tempo, texture and tensions in the social anatomy of a small town.” —Time
Sensational and unstoppable, after publication Peyton Place expanded into an Academy Award–nominated film, a bestselling sequel, and a wildly popular television series. Starring Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow, the 1960s TV show was the first primetime soap opera, paving the way for future hits like Dallas, Twin Peaks, and, most recently, Desperate Housewives—where Wisteria Lane is truly an extension of Elm Street and Maple, the thoroughfares that crisscrossed the town of Peyton Place.
When asked in a television interview if she thought her creation would be remembered, Grace Metalious, without a moment’s hesitation, responded, “I doubt it very much.” Luckily for us, Grace was wrong. Half a century after its publication, Peyton Place lives on, still influencing popular culture. As we approach its fiftieth anniversary in 2006, there is renewed interest in the book and its groundbreaking author. Actress Sandra Bullock is planning a major motion picture based on Metalious’s biography, and writers like Barbara Delinsky are finding new inspiration from the pioneering woman writer. Metalious, says Delinsky, “was a free-thinker who was way ahead of her times where the plight of women—indeed women’s rights—was concerned.” In Looking for Peyton Place, Delinsky has crafted a creative homage to this almost-forgotten heroine, the Pandora who helped to liberate women’s hidden desires and domestic sorrows, to free them from the darkness and bring them out into the light, where shame has no place. For Grace Metalious, it was just something that had to be done. “I don’t know what all the screaming is about,” she said in an interview soon after publication. “Peyton Place isn’t sexy at all. Sex is something everybody lives with—why make such a big deal about it?”
A Reading Group Guide for Looking for Peyton Place that explores the similarities between Barbara Delinsky’s novel and Grace Metalious’s book is available at www.barbaradelinsky.com and at www.simonsaysauthors.com/barbaradelinsky.
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