A Tragic Honesty (43 page)

“The truth is a funny thing,” as Leon Sobel says. “People wanna read it, but they only wanna read it when it comes from somebody they already know their name.” Perhaps, but not necessarily in the case of Richard Yates: Readers who already knew his name as author of the depressing
Revolutionary Road
—that is to say, readers who were keen for diversion amid the grim uncertainties of the cold war—might have decided to give
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
a miss, while those who didn't know Yates at all plumped in favor of Updike's
Pigeon Feathers
. In any case the stories didn't sell despite a number of excellent reviews in the provincial press. When Monica McCall fired off an angry letter to Sam Lawrence demanding a full-page ad—the kind of treatment Updike was getting—the hapless man demurred: The “economics of publishing” wouldn't permit it, he explained, and the Updike situation was “by no means comparable” since the latter had received front-page reviews all over the country; for Yates they'd already spent almost a dollar a copy on advertising, and distributed 543 gift copies to reviewers, critics, authors, and booksellers. But the total sale had petered out at around two thousand, and there it was.

Yates took the news remarkably well, though he did venture to inquire why he couldn't find the book anywhere in greater Los Angeles. Lawrence replied that at least seven area bookstores had ordered copies, and added a bit of heavy humor to ease the strain: “They're there, and now all you have to do is persuade those starlets and tycoons to buy them. But do they read out there?”

*   *   *

The last week in March, while laid up with pneumonia, Yates set aside work on his screenplay to make a final selection for the Bantam anthology. By then he was thoroughly sick of the whole business—in his introduction he wrote that he'd begun to develop “a kind of literary snow-blindness” amid the “blizzard of manuscripts”—but fairly satisfied with the result: He'd managed to cull fifteen good stories out of the five thousand submitted, and also sent thirty-five runners-up just in case. Rust Hills was “quite impressed” by Yates's selection, though he did decide to rearrange the top two prizewinners so that a quirky, formless story called “Two Semesters at Wagner Inn” got first place instead of George Cuomo's more conventional “A Part of the Bargain.” The anthology was titled
Stories for the Sixties
(“Here are some of the writers you'll watch for in the Sixties,” trumpets the cover blurb), and Yates's introduction was a precise summary of his own principles whatever the decade:

There are, I believe, no sentimental stories in this collection. None of them betrays the uncomfortable sound of an author trying to speak in a voice that is not his own, nor is there any in which the voice is not worth listening to.… It might be tempting to look for literary trends in these fifteen stories, or to draw conclusions from them about contemporary ways of seeing Man and Society, but that's a risky business better left to scholars and critics. For an editor, it's enough to know that they encompass a healthy variety of style and content, that each writer has accomplished what he set out to do, and that what he set out to do was neither false nor trivial.

Fair enough, though readers who watched for these particular writers in the sixties or any other decade were bound to be somewhat disappointed. Of the fifteen, only one would become at all well-known: Judith Rossner, author of
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
. George Cuomo and Helen Hudson (a former New School student of Yates) would go on to have productive if rather obscure careers, while another, Silvia Tennenbaum, wrote a commercial novel titled
Rachel, the Rabbi's Wife
.

After Yates's first hectic month in California, he was perhaps too exhausted to feel proper elation at the news that he'd won a Guggenheim in the amount of $4,500. He was deflated further by the fact that his friend and fellow NBA-nominee Ed Wallant had just gotten a Guggenheim for
$6,000,
and had kited off to Rome after submitting his third and fourth novels simultaneously. Yates was gleeful when he got word that both manuscripts had been rejected pending further revision (“Maybe the little bastard will now begin to learn that it's difficult to write good novels”), but shocked into taking a kinder view a few months later, when Wallant died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at thirty-six. “It was almost as if he knew he didn't
have
much time,” Yates remarked in a later interview, having noted his friend's hasty working methods.

Yates himself, of course, couldn't help but work with agonizing care, which was hardly the sort of thing his present employers had in mind. “At the rate Yates is going he will complete [the screenplay] about the time we land the first Astronaut on the moon,” Malcolm Stuart, his Hollywood agent, reported in May. Meanwhile Yates was “discovering endless problems” in adapting the novel he admired so much: “How can you expect an audience to sit through two hours of unrelieved heartbreak without breaking up into peals of derisive laughter?” he wrote the Schulmans. “The
really
ludicrous part is that I'm going to damn sure have to figure it out before July first or my economic ass will be dragging again—I don't get another paycheck until I've turned in the first draft, and July first is when my dough runs out.”

By then Yates was already disenchanted with the whole “diseased” Hollywood milieu, even more so than he'd pessimistically anticipated. It had taken all of two months for his stock as a screenwriter to drop—for his agent to mock his dilatory progress, for his phone to quit ringing while Frankenheimer et al. got on with their high-powered lives—but no matter how bored, lonely, and disgusted he felt, Yates hardly thought he'd find much comfort in whatever “friendships” he managed to make in Hollywood. “Don't think I'm neglecting you, sweetheart,” he wrote Bob Parker:

Matter of fact I happened to mention your name to Jerry Wald just the other day—we were grabbing a bite in the Commissary with Frank and Dean and Shirley and some of the group—and I said Jerry, you know why your last four pictures bombed?… I said Jerry, you're weak artwise—costumes, set design, the whole schmier. I said Jerry, it so happens I'm personally acquainted with the all-time greatest little art talent of our generation. I said You know the way Judy puts over a song? I said You know the way Marlon puts over a scene? I said Well that's the way this kid puts over a painting.… Kid out in Carmel, New York, name of Bobby Andy Parker.

Jerry just looked at me. He said Dick baby you know what I love about you? He said if there's one thing I love about you it's your loyalty to your friends; right, Frank? Frank said That's right, Jerry, that's Dick's whole action: loyalty. Dean said That's right, Frank. Shirley kind of cuddled up and she said You can say that again, Dean. She said That's why we all love you, Dick; that's your whole action: loyalty. Very wonderful; very human; very warm.

Yates went on to write that Wald had rejected his overture in Parker's behalf (“he said Dick baby … in this industry you've got to be a businessman”), but begged Parker not to lose heart: He knew of an opening in the “Animation Department (Black & White)” at Disney, where the salary was $67.50 a week, union scale, and in the meantime Yates would find him lodgings at a “very reasonable trailer park out in East L.A.” And finally—lest Parker think the target of all this was something other than Hollywood phoniness—Yates added a conciliatory postscript: “This struck me as side-splittingly funny when I wrote it; now it seems much less so, and I'm haunted by visions of Dot saying ‘Oh, that's mean.' But I'll mail it anyway because it represents hours of work. If it doesn't make you laugh you have my permission to roll it into a tight cylinder and stick it up the nearest horse's ass.” That Yates was willing to spend “hours” composing a clever letter to distant out-of-touch friends speaks volumes about his frame of mind.

Loneliness is perhaps the best way to explain Yates's affair with his agent's thirty-seven-year-old secretary, Catherine Downing, who later turned up as the title character in “Saying Goodbye to Sally.”
*
Sally Baldwin (
née
Munk) was born of working-class parents in an industrial California town, and the same may be assumed of Catherine Downing (
née
Meng) of Lomita, California. Downing was a well-spoken divorcée who did most of Malcolm Stuart's reading for him, and as such had read and admired
Revolutionary Road
. This was the basis of a flirtation that resulted in her “shacking-up” with Yates (as he later put it) for the rest of his stay in California. Yates was surprised to learn that Downing lived in a lavish replica of an old Southern mansion on Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, then a bit repelled as he began to see the whole picture: The owner of the place was a promiscuous single mother who'd enticed Downing to live there not only as a friend but as “protective coloration” for the woman's sordid behavior despite the presence of a young son. For a while Yates was too relieved at having Downing's company to remonstrate much over this arrangement. Like Jack Fields in the story, he romanticized her struggle to rise above the poverty of her early life, and saw their affair as parallel to that of Fitzgerald and gossip columnist Sheilah Graham: “
He
knew she would never be Zelda; that was one of the ways he knew he loved her. Holding himself together every day for her, dying for a drink but staying away from it, putting what little energy he had into those sketchy opening chapters of
The Last Tycoon,
he must have been humbly grateful just to have her there.”

Yates may have been humbly grateful, but he was hardly staying away from liquor for Downing's sake; indeed, he was rather hard pressed to keep up with her. Every night was pretty much the same for Downing and her drunken vulgarian friends, and she became ever more willing to linger among them as a way of putting off her return to Yates's mildewy Malibu hovel. After a few drinks Downing's charming facade would fade and she'd become like a parody of the trite Hollywood types Yates had come to despise: She'd use “fudgy little showbusiness” endearments such as “a very dear person” or “a very gutsy lady,” and express amusement by laughing “as stridently as an unpopular schoolgirl over things he didn't think were funny at all.” Despite such shortcomings, Yates considered Downing a worthwhile if limited person, a pathetic victim of her environment, and the two stayed in occasional contact for years to come. But he had no illusions about her (and perhaps vice versa) after that first stay in California: Three years later, back in Hollywood, Yates alluded to Downing as a cautionary figure while advising another young woman, “You need to get out of here
now
.”

*   *   *

After a busy and somewhat chaotic five months, Yates finally submitted a finished screenplay in August. All agreed that it had been worth the wait. “You didn't leave anything for
me
to do,” Frankenheimer laughed, noting that Yates had specified almost every conceivable nuance, visual and otherwise, in written form; but then, too, the director had to concede that Yates's choices were inspired. Most gratifying was the reaction of Styron, who thought the adaptation a work of considerable brilliance in itself; for years he advocated its production as a film, and when the screenplay was published by Ploughshares in 1985, Styron helped promote the event with a public reading. Back in 1962, though, such praise was so much gravy for Yates: United Artists had tentatively scheduled production for the following year—starring Henry Fonda and Natalie Wood in the roles of Milton and Peyton Loftis—whereupon Yates would receive “a whole new avalanche of money.”

The money was his foremost concern, of course, since Yates had no particular ambition to become a famous screenwriter; and years later, typically, he'd see fit to deprecate his work on
Lie Down in Darkness
: “Good novels—let's say great novels—have almost never been adapted into good movies,” he observed, explaining that in the case of Styron's work there were a number of “subtleties that would inevitably have been lost in the translation.” That said, he did single out a favorite moment in his screenplay—when Helen Loftis admits to the minister Carey Carr that she doesn't know what God is, and he replies “God is love.” “Then,
wham,
” said Yates,

instantly there's a cut to the blinding hot sunshine of the Daddy Faith parade … and you see these two white-robed blacks carrying a big satin banner that reads GOD IS LOVE. I think that might've been pretty effective. Here's Carey delivering himself of what he thinks is a profound philosophical statement, and then you see these crazy, ignorant Daddy Faith people carrying the same message, and it undercuts it and makes it meaningless for you as well as for Helen.

In fact Yates's adaptation is full of such apposite effects; as George Bluestone noted in his introduction to the published screenplay, Yates skirted such common pitfalls as voice-over narration (“delivering great globs of Styron's prose”) in favor of finding, always, some exact visual or aural equivalent.

Perhaps the main challenge that Yates's work poses for any ego-driven
auteur
is how to bring something other than technical facility to the making of a movie that, as Frankenheimer put it, “is all there on the page.” Yates took pains to describe facial expressions, sound effects, and camera angles, all of which work to convey in cinematic terms the maximum possible meaning and mood of a given scene. For example, when the jealous Helen scolds her daughter Peyton before Christmas dinner, the stage-directions indicate that Milton's “light, tinny, inexpert” xylophone music (which he plays for the feeble-minded Maudie in order to appear a doting father) be heard throughout the scene. The “music” suggests not only the dissonance between the actual and feigned causes of Helen's rage, but also the gruesome awkwardness of the whole family gathering, the childishness of Milton's not-so-furtive infatuation with Peyton—and so on, level on level. Likewise, Yates managed to find subtle solutions for the novel's alternating points of view, as when the drunken Milton attends the UVA football game in hope of finding Peyton; for the establishing shots, Yates specified “
intentional
newsreel clichés” (a roisterous crowd, players trotting out on the field, and so on), to provide contrast with the same scene as Milton sees it: “narrow concrete steps leading straight down, in dizzying perspective … a cheering man's wide-open mouth full of chewed hot dog.” Such images suggest a drunkard's viewpoint and more—a sense of foreboding, the grotesquerie of a world bereft of hope or moral center.