A Tragic Honesty (47 page)

White people of whatever kind—even prostitutes, narcotics pushers, Communists, or bank robbers—are welcome at establishments which will not admit certain of our federal judges, ambassadors, and countless members of our Armed Forces.… For most of the past hundred years we have imposed the duties of citizenship on the Negro without allowing him to enjoy the benefits. We have demanded that he obey the same laws as white men, pay the same taxes, fight and die in the same wars. Yet in nearly every part of the country, he remains the victim of humiliation and deprivation no white citizen would tolerate. All thinking Americans have grown increasingly aware that discrimination must stop—not only because it is legally insupportable, economically wasteful, and socially destructive, but above all because it is morally wrong.

Contrary to John Williams's understandable chagrin, Yates may well have been the right person for the job after all, or at least not the wrong one.

*   *   *

One of the secretaries in the Public Information office was a fetching, good-natured young woman named Wendy Sears, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a prominent Brahmin lawyer in Boston. She and Yates engaged in a hesitant flirtation for much of that summer: Sears felt shy in the writer's presence, but thought he was one of the handsomest men she'd ever seen, while Yates seemed too bewildered those first few weeks to take more than polite notice. One day, during a dull meeting in the attorney general's office, Yates passed her a note—“Bored?”—and Sears scribbled back “Oh, yes!” The practice took hold: While the rest of the (male) staff solemnly discussed civil rights legislation, Yates would mock them either in prose or cartoon form (he was still a good caricaturist), and pass the results under the table to the perky stenographer. At one point Kennedy caught Sears pausing thus in her shorthand and became vexed—
“We've got to get somebody else in here!”
—whereupon Yates sprang to her defense: It was
his
fault, he said, and firmly suggested that Miss Sears be allowed to stay. “That was typical of Dick,” she said. “He wouldn't even let
Kennedy
be offensive.” Yates was naturally given to chivalry on behalf of attractive young women, though he did find Sears “a little heavy in the leg.” She seemed to sense as much, and when she came upon the phrase “unpardonably thick ankles” in
Revolutionary Road,
she approached the author: “Dick, how thick do ankles have to be before they're ‘unpardonable'?” Yates recognized his own epithet and laughed. “That got the ball rolling,” Sears recalled.

“I have a new girlfriend,” Yates announced to the Schulmans upon his return to New York, “and she has really
sturdy
parents.” By then he'd come to dread the sight of the slatternly, whiskey-for-breakfast Craige, whose dissolute behavior he blamed in part on an unwholesome family background. But Wendy Sears was the healthy, well-groomed embodiment of good breeding, and what's more she laughed at his jokes. When she was pouty Yates called her “Wendy Serious” (a name that stuck whatever her mood), and he'd go to any length to cheer her up. Their mutual delight was infectious. As Jack Rosenthal put it, “Wendy and Dick were the hub of a circle of laughter—cynical, not necessarily loyal to the powers-that-be, but good-natured.”

Another member of the circle was an affable young AP reporter, Joe Mohbat, who shared a cubbyhole at the Justice Department with his UPI counterpart. Yates and Mohbat had a common fondness for certain kinds of sophisticated silliness, and became lifelong friends. Over lunch at the Kansas City Steakhouse or Hammel's, the two would swap “Tom Swifties” while Yates tanked up on vodka martinis (he preferred “something brown” for later) and laughed until he coughed so hard “it hurt to listen,” as Mohbat remembered. Often they were joined by Rosenthal and Wendy Sears, and the well-oiled Yates would regale them with table-slapping contempt for some fresh outrage among the “tight-ass political types” back at the office. His favorite expression at such times was
“big fucking deal,”
primarily applied to the brown-nosing toadies who clustered around the Kennedys. He made fun of the way Guthman jumped whenever“BAG” buzzed, or the way a certain young writer for
Look
magazine hung around the office all day dropping the phrase
Bob and I
. “Dick had an objective outsider's eye in a circle otherwise composed of Kennedy admirers,” said Rosenthal, who (despite his own youthful earnestness at the time) liked the way Yates sat back in his chair and “laughed at the whole thing.”

The group found clever ways to fill downtime in the office. Mohbat filed his wire-service copy as briskly as possible so he could “lurk for tidbits” around the fifth floor, which often meant ducking into the Herbert Brownell Room to cut-up with Yates. The latter liked to boast that he'd worked so hard on
Revolutionary Road
he knew it word for word, so Mohbat and Sears would kill time trying to stump him with his own novel: They'd read the first few words of a random passage, and the author would (flawlessly) supply the rest. Also they played a word game devised by Rosenthal—a former “Quiz Kid” finalist—called “Merkins,” taken from LBJ's phrase
“Mah fellow Merkins.”
The game entailed contracting syllables according to American dialect—for example (Yates's favorite), “Jeat jet?” for
Did you eat yet?
from Salinger's “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.”
*
All day long they'd leave “Merkins” on each other's desk and keep score, awarding one point per contracted syllable—hence three points for “Shadune?” (
What are you doing?
), two for “Salacornta how you look at it” (
It's all according to how you look at it
), and so on. Such silliness spilled over to dinners at Wendy Sears's Georgetown apartment; because of RFK's crusade against organized crime, Yates would compulsively name his food after mobsters—“Potatoes” Dinado, “Peas” Gambino—and collapse into hacking laughter.

From the beginning, though, Yates's friends at the Justice Department noticed that there was something a little
off
about him. “His rages were tyrannical when he was drunk,” said Mohbat. “He'd shout, cough, swear like a sailor. You couldn't believe he wrote so elegantly when he talked like that. And it was all over
nothing
—some neutral talk about politics or whatever.” Yates was particularly impatient with Wendy Sears, whose youth and relative passivity made her an easy target for “correction”—as when she'd say something ungrammatical or use a hackneyed expression like
relationship
or
yea high
. Right away Yates insisted on adopting a mentorly role à la Fitzgerald's “College of One” vis-à-vis Sheilah Graham: He gave Sears a list of ten books “she might find nourishing” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
†
and occasionally treated her to spontaneous disquisitions on, say, the meaning of “craftsmanship.” And whenever she'd let some solecism slip, he'd sigh, “Wrongedy wrong wrong wrong” and bemoan how poorly educated even
genteel
girls were these days. When Sears happened to mention that she'd attended the same prep school (Beaver Country Day in Brookline) as Yates's former girlfriend Sandra Walcott, his response was to remember how “appalled” he'd been when Walcott misspelled the word “Congratulations.” In fact, this aspect of Yates's relationship (
attachment,
rather) with Wendy Sears would survive to the very end: Almost thirty years later, the deathly ill Yates told Sears that he'd enjoyed her latest letter, “except that part where you refer to your daughter as a ‘private person.'”

For a while, though, Sears was “enraptured” by Yates. He was quirky and pedantic, yes, but at his best he was the most charming of men. Sears and her roommate Suzie would beg him to sing—especially “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store,” the many verses of which he'd croon with a winsome lilt in his voice. When Sears told him that her father Samuel was a good amateur pianist who'd written lyrics for Hasty Pudding shows at Harvard, the wistful Yates wondered if he'd written, by chance, “Columbus Discovered America” (he hadn't), and then of course Yates would sing that, too. The song reminded him of his daughters (many things did), and he'd happily begin telling stories about them, imitating their voices in turn. For her part Sears was adoring and tactful, a good sport, and as Yates liked to say: “She doesn't tell me long, boring stories about people I don't know.”

And finally he liked the fact that she was very young and had a youthful sense of fun. When he mentioned he didn't have a proper typewriter at his apartment, Sears encouraged him to steal one of the many neglected machines at the Justice Department—a caper they pulled off together, under the proverbial cloak of darkness. Around this time, too, Bob Riche came to town and had dinner with the couple at an elegant restaurant, and was “horrified” when Sears casually removed a bottle of wine from one of the tables and stuck it in her purse. As it happened, that was the night Riche informed his friend that he was marrying the woman he'd met at Bread Loaf three years before. Yates remembered her well. “You mean you're gonna marry the
orphan
?” he said.

*   *   *

As the summer ended Yates's speechwriting duties began to pall. The words he'd put in Kennedy's mouth had gone a long way toward improving the man's image and advancing his agenda, but Yates's services were rarely acknowledged except for the odd, casual compliment. Kennedy gave no sign of letting Yates into his inner or even outer circle: He didn't invite him to lunch or dinner or for visits to Hickory Hill. And while Yates certainly hadn't taken the job with the hope of cultivating a camaraderie with the attorney general, he resented what Styron called the “cold transaction” of working for the Kennedys. It became less and less gratifying when the public cheered his speeches, since he never got any of the credit. Of course Yates realized this was his job, but as a matter of principle it rankled that people like himself did all the work while the Kennedys simply accepted it as their due.

Above all he was anxious to get back to his fiction, an attitude that puzzled his colleagues on the fifth floor: As Rosenthal put it, they didn't understand “why anyone would bother with ‘mere literature,' when one could be involved in changing the world.” Besides, if Yates insisted that speechwriting was “whoring” but he needed the money, why not write fiction in his spare time or vice versa? Why not write
both
? But Yates couldn't compartmentalize that way—“When I'm writing, I'm
writing
”—and it wasn't as if he could alternate fortnights working on one or the other, as he'd done in his Remington Rand days. Meanwhile, as always when he wasn't writing fiction, Yates drank to numb the painful sense of lost time, not to say a bleak suspicion that he was already washed up as a serious writer. Once, after returning to Washington via the Eastern shuttle, he mentioned to Sears that he'd spotted John Kenneth Galbraith on the plane: “God,” he said, “if the plane had gone down, all they'd talk about was Galbraith.” And when John Williams visited Washington as part of his
Holiday
junket, he was startled by the change in his friend: “Dick was drinking like he needed to get out of himself one way or the other. He said,
‘I'm the best fucking writer in America!'
I'd never seen him so full of himself—usually he was laid back and just let the work speak for itself.” But there hadn't been any work in a long time (arguably none worth keeping in almost two years), and such boasts were the gasps of a drowning man.

Perhaps there was some consolation, then, in the imminent prospect of a thumbs-down from the FBI. Yates expected as much, and moved out of the Knorrs' house in late August; he rented a basement apartment on Ashmead Place off Connecticut Avenue, where he could stay close to Wendy Sears and work on his novel in relative privacy once his job ended at the Justice Department. Sure enough, the FBI report landed on Kennedy's desk almost exactly four months after Yates's hiring, and alcoholism and mental instability were its major themes. The interview that followed in Kennedy's office—a stock anecdote in Yates's repertoire—happened pretty much as reported in
Uncertain Times
:

“Would you describe yourself as a heavy drinker?”

“Yes, I would.”

Kennedy gave a small nod as if to commend him for honesty.

“But I don't drink when I'm working,” he lied. “I've never done that. Be sort of like drinking and driving a car.”

“I see. Still, the most disturbing parts of the report for me are these several hospitalizations you've had for mental or emotional illness.” Only two, Bob, Grove wanted to say; it's only happened twice, but he kept his mouth shut. A drop of sweat seeped from one armpit and slid down his ribs. “That's a cause of some concern to me,” Kennedy said. “Still, your work here has been fine. It's been excellent.… Tell me something, though, Bill. When you had these several—breakdowns of yours in the past, has it been possible for you to sort of sense them coming in advance?” …

“Yes, I can, Bob,” he said, though that had never been true; and to soften it on the side of less flagrant dishonesty he said “At least I'm pretty sure I can.”

“I see. Well then, look.… Suppose we leave it this way: If that should ever happen while you're working for me—if you ever sense you're in some kind of imminent difficulty of that kind, I mean, will you come and tell me about it?”

“Certainly, Bob.”

Yates was allowed to stay. As a speechwriter he wasn't a high-security risk, and the decision was ultimately Kennedy's to make. More mysterious, perhaps, was Yates's willingness to prevaricate in order to keep a job he didn't much want anymore. The easy explanation was that he still needed the money—as of course he did—but a few other factors come to mind: One, he was loath to have it known that he'd been fired because of mental illness; two, at whatever level he actually dreaded the prospect of writing (or rather
not
writing) fiction again, and was somewhat relieved to have an excuse to put it off; and three, at the time he badly needed the esteem he derived from being RFK's speechwriter, and liked to think Kennedy needed him as much as he needed Kennedy. “I think it's sort of important to consider,” says Bill Grove after the FBI interview, “… that [Kennedy] may not want to lose his voice.… I've written every fucking word that's come out of his mouth for the past four months.”