A Tragic Honesty (56 page)

After the
Remagen
debacle Yates was finished with movies, or so he thought. “I wouldn't want to try it again,” he said as late as 1981. “It's a brain-scrambling business.” That left teaching, though if possible he was even less enthused by the prospect of Iowa than a year before: Cassill had bitterly resigned, while most of Yates's old grad-student pals, including Dubus, had taken degrees and moved on. Even after the Workshop officially invited him back with a three-thousand-dollar raise, Yates continued to test the waters elsewhere—the University of Arkansas, San Francisco State, University of North Carolina at Greensboro—but there were no takers, and in June, Yates accepted his fate. “We are delighted,” Bourjaily replied, offering his family's old apartment ($155 per month) to Yates when he returned in the fall.

He was in no hurry to move. “Still hate [Hollywood],” he assured Cassill, “but I think I'll hole up here anyway to work on the book, rather than spend the dough and time necessary to go back to New York or somewhere else. In a way it's a good place to work because it
is
so lousy—no very tempting distractions.” By then, however, it didn't take much to distract Yates. That summer another refugee from the Workshop, Murray Moulding, came to Los Angeles to join his clinically depressed wife who was in the midst of intensive psychotherapy. Moulding was the kind of rich Ivy Leaguer whom his former teacher had scorned (“There's Murray, squirming in his chair to tell us the news again”), but now Yates was just relieved to have a reliable drinking buddy. He didn't even begrudge Moulding the large inheritance that enabled him to buy a fancy home in Brentwood: “Hey, Styron was a rich guy, and
he
did okay,” declared a newly pragmatic Yates.

Fair to say the two were not a good influence on each other, despite Yates's occasional stabs at being a wise big-brother type. “One of these days I've got to
do
something about this,” he said frowning at his glass; Moulding tipsily suggested he go back to AA, but Yates shook his head. “Nah. Once you've done it, it doesn't work again.” Add to the picture a melancholy, neglected wife, and the household might have resembled a Eugene O'Neill play. Attempts to seek more wholesome diversions were less than successful. One night they bought tickets to
The Fantasticks,
but the Mouldings got in a fight and were an hour late picking up Yates, who sat placidly drinking on a wall outside his apartment. A few minutes into the play he was fast asleep, and incoherent when they roused him for intermission.

Frances Doel remained a port in the storm, but the young woman's extreme adoration seemed to make Yates uncomfortable, especially as he began to fall apart in earnest. He'd try to act jaunty as he drank his morning martinis, but Doel would insist on gazing into his eyes, which (she recalled) “betrayed feelings that went against the grain of his conversation.” Impotence was again a problem. Earlier, when he was sober, Yates had responded to the odd lapse with a kind of fatherly aplomb: “Well, I guess this has never happened to you before—you're too young,” etc. But now that he was drinking again, impotence became a suggestive aspect of his overall desperation. “Don't leave me!” he'd plead as he was falling asleep, though the smitten Doel hadn't the faintest notion of doing so; indeed she was flattered by his need (though she could scarcely help but detect something a little impersonal about it). Even if she hadn't been in love, it would have been hard for Doel to abandon such a tormented man. When Yates disappeared for several days in mid-July, Doel was convinced he'd had another breakdown: “Forgive me,” she wrote him, “but I called the UCLA place in case you were there. I wanted to come and see you … but I didn't because I thought you probably wouldn't want that. Then again, it might be that your family would be here with you, so whatever the circumstances it seemed I shouldn't worry you.”

He wasn't quite crazy, nor was he with family. Rather, he'd received a long, semiarticulate fan letter (and perhaps a photo) from a woman in Texas named Carole,
*
whom he tracked down by telephone and offered to fly expenses paid to Los Angeles. Her two-year-old daughter from a previous marriage was also welcome. Murray Moulding described the woman as a “free-floating opportunist” and “groupie,” while Robin Metz called the episode “a Maureen Grube–type affair: life imitating art.” Like Maureen Grube (in
Revolutionary Road
), the woman had a bad complexion beneath heavy layers of makeup, but also a voluptuous body and a kind of coquettish vulnerability that made her attractive, at least to Yates. Also she was willing to match him drink for drink.

Yates later told his second wife that he knew he'd made a mistake the minute this woman walked off the plane, but the truth is somewhat more complicated. She was, after all, bright enough to appreciate his work (whole paragraphs of which she could quote verbatim), and a letter she wrote Yates in 1970 reflects a kind of grandiosity that might have seemed intriguing at first: She describes herself as “brilliant,” an “emotional genius,” and so on; she also calls herself Yates's “soul-sister” and cryptically alludes to the “things that went on between [them]” that he “may have completely forgotten.” Her intellectual pretensions almost surely annoyed him, as she claims to have made him feel “edgy and challenged all the time”: “I made you nervous, even when I tried to play the role of a background stage-setting. What all this amounts to is HELP! ‘Where did I go wrong?'”

At the time Yates seemed rather sheepishly pleased with himself. He wrote friends that he'd “found a girl”—his “fair Texan”—and broke the news to Frances Doel as though he expected her to be happy for him. After his mysterious disappearance, he asked Doel to meet him at an old haunt, the Raincheck Room on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he greeted her with a “guiltily triumphant” smile: “You thought there was something wrong with me, didn't you? Well, there isn't.” He then explained about the “healthy woman” who'd helped him over that “problem” he was having. He spoke to Doel as if she were a fond old confidante who happened to be familiar with the problem in question. The young woman was stricken but tried to seem pleased.

This meeting was meant to be good-bye, though Doel didn't know it at the time. When the days passed and she didn't hear from Yates again, she paid him a visit on the pretext of returning some books; he was sitting alone amid some boxes, about to leave Los Angeles. Doel burst into tears: “I tried to be stoical—not to let my emotions go to the point where they became false, as Dick would have it—but I couldn't help it.” Yates tried to comfort her, then rummaged through some boxes and came up with copies of his two books. Doel had once mentioned how much she used to love Christmas pantomimes in England, and that she'd always preferred playing the principal boy in Shakespearean productions at school (she found it oddly fascinating that the audience knew she was really a girl). Hence Yates inscribed
Revolutionary Road,
“For Frances—Who may once have wished to be a Principal Boy but who, in a far larger and more desperate pantomime, has been unforgettable as my principal girl. Love, Dick.” Then he took her hand and walked her back to the apartment she'd recently found on the same block.

“The world was out of sync for days after,” Doel recalled. To cheer her up, the Bogdanoviches took her to see
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
which turned out to be a “terrifying” experience: “I couldn't make sense of it. I couldn't match the words with the images.” Yates wrote her a last kindly letter, but she never saw him again and remained haunted by his memory. “I obsessively studied the jacket photos: He looked ill, rapidly aging, and I guessed things weren't going well. Then there were no more books, and then I saw his obituary. I'd always had a sense that I could call him, that he was at least around, and suddenly it was no longer possible.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Natural Girl: 1966-1968

Yates drove straight to Iowa City from Hollywood, but when he arrived he couldn't find his new apartment at 800 North Van Buren. His old friend Loree Wilson—who'd recently finished her thesis and was about to leave town—was with a new arrival, Mark Costello, when the phone rang. Yates was at the Airliner and needed her help, but there was no hurry. (“Dick's helplessness over logistical details was learned,” said Costello; “he didn't want to fuck with it and wanted other people to take care of him.”) When they arrived at the bar Yates was “drunk out of his gourd”; happily he only had a few more blocks to drive.

A year ago he'd been depressed about being in Hollywood, but grateful at least that it wasn't Iowa; now it was the other way around. He'd returned almost a month earlier than necessary, simply because he couldn't wait any longer and hoped to “get [his] brains into some kind of focus” before classes began and his “fair Texan” arrived with her daughter. (He and Carole had decided to live together.) He'd been in Iowa less than a week when he got some very good news: Along with such writers as Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, he'd been awarded that ten-thousand-dollar grant from the National Arts Council. “So I'm no longer in much financial stress and can pay off some of my debts,” Yates wrote, “and I guess it tends to prove that I'm a good deal luckier than I care to believe.”

So it seemed. The old Bourjaily place where he now found himself was on the ground floor of a stately Victorian mansion, and his typewriter was parked beneath a crystal chandelier; the dusty baubles gave him something to look at, but still the place struck him as big and empty and strange. Really, he didn't feel lucky at all. The change of scenery hadn't affected his writer's block a whit, and what the hell was he doing back in Iowa anyway? Why had he invited some feckless woman (and her two-year-old daughter) to live with him? After a couple of weeks beneath the chandelier he was miserable enough to write a rare letter to his sister, the contents of which are suggested by her reply: “If we stick together,” Ruth wrote, “we'll both live through it.” (By “it” she meant life in general.) “Don't ‘adapt,' dear; persevere.”

It wasn't half-bad advice. By the second week of September, the gloom had lifted somewhat: Workshop people were back in town, and the first big social event was a welcome-back-from-Hollywood party for Yates. There was a swimming pool and Sinatra tunes, old faces as well as new, and the guest of honor was in good form—just drunk enough to wax droll on the subject of Hollywood without becoming bitter and obsessive about it. Once again he was the most glamorous writer in Iowa, certainly the best dressed, and what's more he seemed to sense as much. Suavely he approached one of the youngest women at the party (about a week shy of her twenty-first birthday) and asked her out on a date. She accepted readily enough, though she seemed reserved almost to the point of indifference; in fact she was “bowled over” by the handsome celebrity.

Martha Speer was the fourth of nine children born to a well-to-do doctor in Kansas City, and she'd always wanted to be an artist of some sort. At Carleton College she'd auditioned for plays but ended up designing sets, and this soon became part of a larger disenchantment: The school was too staid and “goal-oriented” for her tastes, there was no art department per se, and anyhow such an environment was hardly the “real world.” So she dropped out and returned to her appalled parents in Kansas City, where she worked as a waitress for a few months. After that she went to Mexico for the summer, then followed a boyfriend to the University of Iowa and enrolled as an art student because she “couldn't think of anything else to do.” Around this time she found herself talking to Yates at the party in his honor; she'd attended as the date of a fellow art student who was not the young man for whose sake she'd come to Iowa.

Within days she'd moved most of her things into Yates's apartment. “He swept me off my feet with his personality,” she explained. He was a well-known writer, and though she was “a nobody” he listened to her with what appeared to be real interest, with humility and humor, and of course he sang the old standards for her. She couldn't quite understand why this charming, distinguished man of letters was paying so much attention to her—was, for that matter, practically goading her into merging her life with his. When she returned to Kansas City for a few days before the semester got under way, Yates suggested she persuade her parents to let her move out of the dorm and into Black's Apartments (where a lot of Workshop students lived), which would make it easier to deceive them about the fact that she was living neither at the dorm nor Black's, but rather with a man twice her age. Speer was happy to go along with that or whatever else he advised: “I was ready to strike out on my own,” she remembered. “I detested the role of the little Midwestern kid from an upper-middle-class family.”

There was, however, one immediate hitch. “I'm sorry your friend is having trouble disinvolving herself, sorry you have to argue with her,” Speer wrote Yates from Kansas City. An awkward business, to be sure, when the woman named Carole arrived from Texas with the rest of her things and a two-year-old daughter in tow, only to find she'd been superannuated in the meantime. One doubts she took it lying down either, as three years later she was still inclined to castigate Yates for the “traumatic and cowardly way” he'd ended the affair; but then, too, she allowed that he was “at least honest.” What he seems to have been most emphatically honest about was his obsession with Martha Speer (“I want the
hell
out of her,” he said), and nothing in the immediate future was liable to change that. He also reminded the older woman that it was essentially
her
idea to come to Iowa—he'd promised nothing.