(1964) The Man (125 page)

That was the end of my father’s screenwriting career. There would be no more writing for others six days a week.

This is the way my father put it: “Here was the miracle I had dreamed of in my youth. At last, free, independent, confident. I wrote my next book, and my next, and my next, and my next, and each was an international bestseller. By wildest luck and unbelievable good fortune, combined with a love of what I was doing and a love of the stories I had to tell, and the freedom to tell them in my own way, I had won my seven days of Sundays.”

After thirty years of writing hundreds of published magazine articles, short stories, plays, movies, television scripts and books, not to mention a closetful of unpublished works, my father was suddenly “an overnight success.”

The Chapman Report
explored the tensions and hypocrisy of suburban life. But many reviewers saw only that it dealt explicitly with sex and they claimed to be offended. In fact,
The Chapman Report
was less explicit than
The Sins of Philip Fleming
, which had not been similarly attacked. Clearly there was something else about
The Chapman Report
that upset some reviewers, namely that it was a popular success and it earned its author quite a bit of money.

Although my father would become famous as a novelist, the fact is that half of his published books were non-fiction. He followed
The Chapman Report
not with another novel, but with
The Twenty-Seventh Wife
, a biography of Ann Eliza Young, the last wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young. But more novels would come soon enough.

The Prize
, an intricately plotted story about one year’s winners of the Nobel Prize, was even more popular than
The Chapman Report
. By mid-1963 my father had already completed another novel,
The Three Sirens, The Chapman Report
had been released as a movie starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Shelley Winters, Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom (director George Cukor would later apologize personally to my father for the poor result), and a movie version of
The Prize
, starring Paul Newman, Elke Sommer and Edward G. Robinson, was nearing completion.

And then came that June night when my father told my mother and me, “Have I got a great idea for a story.” He sat down and explained the premise: the president and vice-president of the United States die and, because of the rarely noticed Law of Succession, a Negro (this was 1963) becomes president. The reason I remember the discussion so clearly is that it was the first time my father incorporated one of my suggestions into one of his novels. He asked my mother and me what we thought white racists would do when they realized that a Negro was President of the United States. I thought a moment and then replied, “They’d impeach him.” At that time there had only been one presidential impeachment and that had been almost a century earlier. The concept of impeaching a president was as remote and obscure as the Law of Succession.

My father’s eyes lit up. “Impeachment,” he muttered, and I could almost see the plotting possibilities mushrooming in his brain.

Actually my father had wanted to write about racial injustice in America for a long time. He came up with several ideas, but kept rejecting them. Once he came very close to going ahead with one outline. It was about an African-American student who applies for entrance to a prestigious university and is turned down because of his color (this was long before the days of affirmative action). A liberal white lawyer takes the case, but discovers that his client really doesn’t deserve to be accepted by the university. The lawyer is caught between political principle and the truth. In the end, my father decided not to write the story because it was more about a moral dilemma than it was about racism. Years later he would pursue this same moral dilemma, although in a different context, as the theme of his novel
The Word
.

My father was aware that in black ghettoes “The Man” was slang for “white man” or “the white boss.” In
The Man
he placed a black man in the role of the ultimate white boss. But the title had a second, more important meaning to my father. In the early 1960s the vast majority of black males were used to being treated by whites as a separate species, as something less than a man. Douglass Dilman, the protagonist of the novel, after a lifetime of living as a milquetoast, token Negro, wants to be treated as a man and must learn for himself what it is to act like a man.

During the summer of 1963, my father, my mother, my sister and I traveled in France and Italy. In cafés on the Champs-Elysée, in hotel rooms on the French Riviera, in cafés on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, my father mulled over the plot of
The Man
and began writing an outline. That summer he also discovered that he was more famous than he had imagined. One afternoon he walked onto the beach in Cannes and saw three different people reading
The Prize
—each in a different language. Incidents such as this one were gratifying to my father’s ego, but they also impressed upon him the fact that his popularity with readers gave him an opportunity he did not have before. With
The Man
he could bring the reality of racism to white people who would not otherwise read about it, who would not bother to pick up a novel written by a black author.

As usual, my father wanted to study first-hand the locations he would be writing about. In particular, he wanted to visit the Oval Office and those wings of the White House that were closed to tourists, including the president’s living quarters.

Through a friend, he contacted Pierre Salinger, President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary. Kennedy granted my father’s request on the condition that he not reveal publicly the president’s cooperation. In September my father spent four days visiting the White House, the Pentagon, the Departments of State and Defense and the House of Representatives and the Senate. He interviewed President Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, was guided through the president’s private quarters by the president’s valet, and interviewed the White House police. Three times he watched President Kennedy in action: at a swearing-in ceremony, giving a speech to the nation and hurrying across the South Lawn to catch a helicopter. He exchanged greetings with Kennedy but did not interview him. For my father, the highlight of his visit came when, during one of Kennedy’s afternoon breaks, Pierre Salinger took my father into the Oval Office and suggested that he sit in the President’s chair.

My father grew up in an era when patriotism was not considered corny. Sitting in that chair genuinely moved him. When the American Sunday supplement
Family Weekly
asked him to write about “My Most Inspiring Moment,” my father chose sitting in the chair in the Oval Office. That article was supposed to appear on the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. It didn’t. When
Family Weekly
finally did run the article two years later, the editors, worried about offending white readers in the South, cut out all references to
The Man
and its Negro president. This same oversensitivity to the Southern white market would lead the Book of the Month club to reduce
The Man
to an alternate selection so that the separate sheet announcing its availability could be left out of mailings to the South.

After completing four outlines, including a final one that was sixty-five pages long, my father started writing
The Man
on October 31, 1963. He finished the first draft four months later on March 8, 1964. It was an exhausting, almost fevered process. Several times he worked so hard that he became ill. My father lived with his characters and was sorry to say goodbye to them when the manuscript was completed. But few novelists live in isolation from the real world. While my father was working on
The Man
, both of his parents were hospitalized and his father underwent emergency surgery from which he might not have emerged alive. My father was shaken by saying goodbye to his father the night before the operation, and thankful when he survived.

One day my father learned that one of his closest friends, screenwriter Guy Trosper, had died suddenly of a heart attack. He was only 52 years old. Not only was my father grieved to lose his friend, but because Trosper was so young and my father had spoken with him only three days earlier, he was confronted with his own mortality. He rewrote his will, put his papers in order and redoubled his efforts to do justice to
The Man
.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. My father had been invited to join Kennedy’s entourage on the Texas trip, but had declined because it was not relevant to his novel. He was a great admirer of John F. Kennedy and he spent the rest of the day, the rest of the weekend in fact, watching the television reports. At one point, one of the news anchors read aloud the speech that Kennedy had planned to deliver later in the day. The last line was a quote from Psalms 127: 1: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” My father felt the proverbial chill go up his spine. It was the exact same quotation he had written less than two weeks earlier, the one that his fictional president, Douglass Dilman, had chosen to place his hand on when he was sworn in as president.

The Man
was published in September 1964. Although my father’s primary target audience was white readers, he was concerned about its reception in the black community. Shortly before publication, my father spent a long evening on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes with James Baldwin and several mutual friends. Baldwin asked my father what he was working on. My father replied that his latest novel was about the first Negro President of the United States. Baldwin was taken aback. “How can you write about that?” he demanded. “You’re not a Negro.”

My father pointed out that Baldwin had just written a play with white characters even though he wasn’t white. This reaction would turn out to be typical of African-American readers. One after another they opened
The Man
expecting to hate it and ended up loving it. In the end my father was hailed for advancing the cause of racial understanding and civil rights. On October 29, 1964, Jet magazine published a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. reading The Prize—on the day he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Two days later I accompanied my father to a studio in Hollywood where the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute gave him the Supreme Award of Merit. (My father had declined the offer of a public presentation.) It was Mollie Robinson, the mother of black baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, who handed him the plaque.

There was a dark side to the publication of
The Man
: the death threats. They came in the mail and they came by telephone. My father, who believed that having an unlisted phone number was a sign of snobbism, was forced to remove our home phone number from the telephone directory. But even that did not prevent one particularly upsetting incident. A disgruntled racist managed to get hold of our address and phone number. One night he started calling, threatening to kill my father. With each call he announced that he was closer. My father contacted the police, who intercepted the caller before he reached our house.

My father was disappointed that
The Man
received bad reviews. As a matter of fact, the positive reviews outnumbered the negative ones by more than two to one. But, like so many authors, my father found that it was the negative ones that stuck with him. Some of these reviews were honest criticisms of my father’s writing style or his plotting choices. Although my father was sensitive to criticism, these were not the reviews that bothered him. What upset him was that some reviewers seemed to hate him personally. Their criticisms were irrational, even incoherent. It became clear to my father that these reviewers were not responding to
The Man
, but to my father’s previous successes. He realized that if these reviewers would attack him for a novel as serious as
The Man
, there was nothing he could ever do to win them to his side. My father found this conclusion disheartening-but also liberating. If certain reviewers were determined to attack him no matter what he wrote, there was no point in worrying about them anymore.

Fortunately, the reader response to
The Man
was overwhelmingly positive. The book spent 32 weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list and 39 weeks on the
Time
magazine list. It was released in paperback in September 1965, reached number one on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and eventually sold more than two million copies. My father had achieved his goal of using his storytelling skills to educate millions of readers about a vital social problem.

In 1972 ABC-TV produced a movie version of
The Man
. Rod Serling wrote the script and James Earl Jones played Douglass Dilman. ABC was pleasantly surprised by the finished product. Although they had intended it to be shown on television, they released it in the theaters instead. Unfortunately, it suffered from its small screen production values, as well as from unnecessary plot changes. A serious cinematic version of
The Man
remains to be made.

After
The Man
, my father wrote thirteen more novels including three that dealt directly with the U.S. presidency (
The Plot
[1967],
The Second Lady
[1980] and
The Guest of Honor
[1988]), as well as one about an FBI plot to take over the U.S. government (
The R Document
[1976]). He also wrote or edited twelve more books of non-fiction. Almost all of these books were international bestsellers. In the 65-year history of the
New York Times
bestseller list, my father is one of only six authors to reach number one on both the fiction and non-fiction lists. The others are Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Jimmy Buffet and my father’s old army buddy, Dr. Seuss.

My father died in Los Angeles on June 29, 1990. He would have loved his obituaries. They praised his storytelling abilities and the honesty with which he presented difficult and controversial issues to the public.