A Tragic Honesty (55 page)

Meanwhile Corman was delighted with the screenplay: The only immediate change he made was to scotch the fancy title and go with the more saleable
Iwo Jima
. Yates was emboldened to send a few copies of the script to friends, though he tried to downplay it as so much craftsmanly hackwork: “There are several good things in it,” he wrote Cassill, “but basically it'll be just another combat flick, the kind you forget five minutes after finishing your popcorn.” One of the copies floating around Iowa fell into the hands of Andre Dubus, which prompted an icebreaking postcard: It was a “fine well-focused script,” Dubus wrote, though he couldn't help but point out that “Marines call 'em NCO's, not non-coms.”

The movie was never produced. “Dick wrote a very good script,” Corman recalled, “but it was turned down by Columbia—some misunderstanding, or double-dealing, or misinformation. Turned out they wanted me to go on doing medium-budget films.” Not only did studio executives want a less elaborate, more commercial picture, but they were also unimpressed by the whole Japanese-are-people-too angle, and thought the two lead characters on either side of the battle should meet at the end (a convention that Yates and Corman had expressly nixed). Hence the project was killed; Corman was assigned to shoot the kind of slapdash Western he did so well, and a few weeks later the studio fired him after he gave a disgruntled interview to the
Los Angeles Times
. Yates had since moved on: Days after his release from UCLA, he was hired by producer David Wolper to do a rewrite of another World War II movie,
The Bridge at Remagen
.

Yates was busy enough but lonelier than ever. He no longer had a female companion, his apartment depressed him, and he was sober. That summer he'd sustained himself (or not) by looking forward to his daughters' visits—they'd definitely planned to come for Christmas, and he hoped to coax Sheila into letting them have at least one other visit in between. But recent developments had changed all that: “This is your third breakdown,” Sheila wrote, “and you are, as you yourself are now recognizing, an alcoholic.… I can understand your wanting to mend your fences as fast as you can, but it would be better for [the girls] if you let the past lie and concentrate on getting well. You have been a good father, and they love you.”

Worried that Yates's sobriety was unlikely to last under the circumstances, both Wendy Sears and Sam Lawrence made a point of informing him that his old friend Brian Moore was also now in Hollywood, writing a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock (
Torn Curtain
). Yates, however, seemed in no hurry to get back in touch—his respect for Moore as a writer was unwavering, but he'd come to regard the man as “kind of fat and grumpy and sour”: “He's a very, very touchy guy,” Yates wrote a friend. “He absolutely hates to have anyone praise
Judith Hearne,
however elaborately, with even the faintest implication that it's his best book (which of course it is).” Meanwhile the vast sums Moore was making as Hitchcock's screenwriter might have served as a further disincentive for resuming the friendship. But finally Yates got lonely enough to leave a message at Universal, and Moore replied with a note inviting him to his house in Malibu.

Yates reported afterward that he'd “never seen such a change in a man”: Moore—married to a “stunning new wife” (that is, his old friend Frank Russell's ex)—was “trim, expansive and happy as hell.” On the other hand, now that Moore was something of a Hollywood bigshot, Yates also found him rather “abrupt and impatient” at times, and noticed that he seemed to prefer the company of other bigshots. The most agreeable exceptions were their mutual friends Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne—or rather, as the latter liked to say (or as Yates liked to tell it): “I'm John Gregory Dunne, the writer”—pause—“and this is my wife, Joan.” “What a colossal ego!” Yates would hoot. “Joan is the
real
writer in that family.” A year later Didion used Yates as a reference for the Guggenheim she needed to complete her second novel,
Play It As It Lays,
which Yates considered something of a masterpiece (“you are one of the very few people I hoped would [like it],” Didion wrote).

In mid-December Yates flew back to New York for five days—time enough to deliver presents to his daughters and see a few friends—but on Christmas Eve he was alone again in Hollywood: a ticklish business for a recovering alcoholic outpatient living in a stark apartment off the Sunset Strip. At 6:45 that evening he called the switchboard at the Hollywood Studio Club (a sort of YWCA for would-be starlets) and asked for Frances Doel, who was out; Yates left a message but no number. A little before midnight he called again: “Where've you been?” he asked. The young woman, flustered but not displeased, replied that she'd been out with friends. “Of course,” Yates sighed. “That was dumb of me.” Then he asked if she was doing anything for Christmas Day, and if not, would she like to have dinner with him? She was not, and she would.

Doel was Roger Corman's twenty-two-year-old assistant, who'd just arrived in the States that summer after taking a degree at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. One of her teachers had recommended
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
as “an example of good American writing,” and a year or so later who should appear in her boss's office but the good American writer himself. “He was my romantic ideal,” said Doel—meaning, more or less, that he was a handsome, talented man who appeared to be down on his luck (“I'd grown up in a culture where failure was glamorous,” she added). Doubtless Yates sensed her interest but kept her in reserve for some emergency: During the
Iwo Jima
project he'd been polite and bantering at times, but not very attentive. They'd exchanged a few greetings at the Copper Skillet, near the studio, and once during a script conference he'd suddenly asked Doel if
she
had any ideas: “No,” she said, and Yates shouted,
“Think! That's what you're paid for!”
—then burst out laughing. But that was pretty much the extent of it until Christmas.

They went to a meat-and-potatoes place called Tail of the Cock and had a low-key conversation about books, Hollywood, and their awful childhoods. Yates brightened when Doel mentioned that her father, killed in the war, had worked for General Electric, but his glee waned quickly as he recounted his own father's career in the Mazda Lamp Division, as well as the man's almost total absence during his childhood. Doel was in a position to suggest, however, that it might have been worse: She told Yates that her stepfather was a miserly, ineffectual man who'd treated her with such cruelty that her mother had tried to kill him. This seemed to chasten Yates, who was gentle and protective toward Doel from that point on. Later they went back to his melancholy apartment, for which he apologized. “Dick generally expressed bewilderment at finding himself in a particular place and time,” Doel remembered.

*   *   *

While in New York, Yates had seemed stable enough to warrant a Hollywood visit from his daughters in late January, and in preparation he moved to a nicer apartment on Sweetzer Avenue—a small two-bedroom that opened on a catwalk balcony. As he counted the days and struggled to make progress on the stalled
Remagen
script, he was hourly tormented by the glibly clicking typewriter of Charles (
True Grit
) Portis, who lived on the same block. As ever, Yates wasn't able to write fiction while he worked on something else, though he did brood and make notes about it every so often. “Haven't done any more wrestling with the abortive manuscript you read last year,” he wrote Cassill, “and doubt if I will for some time, if ever. A whole new novel is more likely and I've got the barest beginnings of one started.” But that soon petered out, and again Yates wondered if he was all washed up; he wrote Dubus that he was sober and functioning, but couldn't seem to write a single decent line (“Is just ‘functioning' being alive at all?”), and one awful night he told Loree Wilson that maybe it didn't matter if he ever finished another book.

But later that spring he wrote Cassill, “I'm feeling pretty jaunty for a change. I'm loaded with ideas for maybe salvaging that crummy novel—mostly, oddly enough, along the lines you suggested last year: more stuff about the mother, less about the kid.” Meanwhile Bantam had reissued paperback editions of Yates's first two books, and while sales were thin (“Not an unhappy experience for [Bantam],” Marc Jaffe reported, “but not up to expectations either”), the mass-market printing would at least bring
some
new readers and remind others that Yates was still alive. And finally the altruistic Cassill was doing his best to liberate Yates from Hollywood, if only for a while; he'd learned that the National Council on the Arts was awarding ten thousand dollar grants to eight novelists that fall: “[Yates] has been in Hollywood for the past year,” Cassill noted in his recommendation letter, “doing the kind of bitter work one does there when he is neither quite in or out of the screen writers guild. The year before that he taught in the Workshop at Iowa—and with all the sordid, backbiting politicking that went on that year, I can't think we gave him much of any chance to write.” He concluded that Yates was the “most deserving” of any writer he knew, and urged a quick decision in his friend's favor (though as it happened recipients wouldn't be notified until August).

Amid such ups and downs, his daughters' visit helped “take the curse off this loathsome town,” as Yates put it. This time there was no sitting around Howard Johnson's debating the day's activities; Yates had planned almost every hour in advance. The girls flew first-class and ate lobster on the plane, and were duly impressed by the fact that, for once, they had a bedroom all to themselves. They went to Universal Studios, visited Brian Moore's swanky home in Malibu, and met a number of pleasant grown-ups who paid attention to them. They also took a day trip to Tijuana, though this outing proved a bit much for the cranky Monica; at one point she stood, arms folded under a giant souvenir sombrero, and imperiously commanded her father, “Take me to the car!” (For years afterward, Yates delighted in saying “Take me to the car!” whenever she started pouting.) Monica invented a game during the long drive back that was much to her taste: It involved making her father say “What?” so she could retort, “Shut up!” Lest his older daughter feel slighted, Yates arranged for some “irresponsible college kids” (as Monica remembers) to baby-sit while he and Sharon went to a fancy restaurant and saw
The Sound of Music
at Grauman's Chinese Theater.

After the girls had left, Yates became increasingly morose. One night he and Frances Doel drove to Van Nuys to have dinner at the home of Peter and Polly Bogdanovich, but the evening was not a happy one for Yates. At the time Bogdanovich was a bright young man trying to get started as a writer and director; he'd met Yates through Corman, and deferred to him as the author of a distinguished novel. Bogdanovich, however, depressed Yates on almost every level: The young man was determined to be a serious artist in Hollywood, while Yates hated the place and was stuck plugging away at his “loathsome”
Remagen
script; worse, Bogdanovich's then-happy marriage was a painful reminder of Yates's own broken home (much on his mind at the moment). As Doel summed it up, “Peter represented lost opportunities for Dick.” On the whole Yates was far more relaxed having casual chats with his neighbor Portis, who understood what it was like to spend most of one's life alone, writing fiction of whatever sort.

Yates began drinking again in March. He considered AA meetings a maudlin bore, and as for the twelve steps—well, he'd tried to seek out a few people he'd harmed and ask their forgiveness, but he hated that part almost as much as being sober. Perhaps the last straw was in late February, when he got in touch with his old girlfriend Craige because he blamed himself for pushing her into hard-core alcoholism. Sure enough, the woman was still plastered. “Is this some kind of AA thing?” she asked. When Yates admitted it was, she berated him with a slurred tongue and hung up on him again and again. “The purpose of this letter is really to apologise for my extraordinary conduct on the telephone,” she wrote afterward. “It must have cost you pots of money and been terribly depressing. I really don't remember much after you called back the last time except that it must have been pretty bad on my part.” On Yates's part, too.

Another reason sobriety was out of the question was
The Bridge at Remagen
—an experience that made Yates long for the halcyon days of
Iwo Jima
. As he wrote Cassill,

[The story] is all tricked out with sinister Nazis, plucky GI's and more cliches than Louis B. Mayer ever dreamed of. On Iwo I was left pretty much alone; this time I'm stuck with a pea-brained “Story Editor” who wants to control the whole project and has his own dreary and emphatic ideas for each scene. But the money is far better than I got for Iwo, so I'm keeping a tight asshole and ought to be done with it by April, when I hope to buy a little free time.

Yates was looking forward to an additional ten thousand dollars when he submitted the finished script (in its “final-final stages” as of late-March), but Wolper apparently wanted another rewrite and fired Yates without further payment.
*

For whatever byzantine Guild reason, though, Yates was given lead screenwriting credit and hence received the odd residual pittance once the movie was finally released in 1969—though Yates had disowned it so completely that he even refused to list
Remagen
on his otherwise all-encompassing résumé of 1973. He told friends he was appalled to have his name associated with such a “dog,” and claims the final version was an almost total rewrite. But the basic idea Yates brought to that original, cliché-ridden script does seem to have remained intact—to wit, the whole Germans-are-people-too angle:
The Bridge at Remagen
cuts between “plucky GI's” (George Segal et al.) and not-so-sinister Nazis (Robert Vaughn et al.), the better to suggest that war is hell no matter what your nationality. And that's not the only abiding Yatesian touch, as the author himself pointed out during Thanksgiving 1969 with Robin Metz's family, when they all piled in a car to see the movie at a local drive-in. Yates took a sheepish bow as Metz blared his horn—
“This is the guy who wrote it! Right here!”
—but as they settled down to watch, Yates began shaking his head (“Nope, didn't write
any
of that…”), then suddenly bolted upright and thrust a finger at the screen:
“There! I actually wrote that part!”
The “part” was a gold cigarette case that's fumbled on the bridge by Nazi Vaughn and recovered by GI Segal, for whom it becomes a prize possession while its previous owner is reduced to cadging a last, sad fag before he's shot for desertion; thus the gold case serves as a neat little objective correlative suggesting the spoils of war, the common bonds of humanity, and so forth. Suffice to say it's the best thing in the movie.