John Cheever (33 page)

In
The Wapshot Scandal
Cheever set out to paint nothing less than a terrifying picture of the times. “I look for a simple world,” he commented in his notes,

and I seldom find it. I look for resolute and homely faces, good health and the authority of decision, for wit, vitality and good cheer, but instead I find timidity, the half-formed and sometimes the malformed, suspiciousness, cupidity, and lust. And so I think I see here in these crowds, and in my heart the deep confusions of my nation and my time.

For some time he had integrated dream and reality in his fiction, and now dream turned to nightmare. In his spare time Coverly feeds the poems of Keats into a computer to discover the frequency of word use, and to his amazement (and in defiance of all mathematical logic) the words come out in a comprehensible verse of subterranean darkness:

Silence blendeth grief's awakened fall

The golden realms of death take all

Love's bitterness exceeds its grace

That bestial scar on the angelic face

Marks heaven with gall.

“It is as if Marquand had suddenly been crossed with Kafka,” a surprised reviewer wrote. The surprise was not really justified, for it was past time for readers to recognize that Cheever's writing constituted “something unique in contemporary fiction,” completely outside the
New Yorker
pattern or any other. “The terrible vision you have is of our daily lives in their emotional squalor and incongruity,” Cowley wrote him after reading the novel in galleys. “You're getting angrier and angrier.”

As the book was coming off the press in December 1963, the simmering antagonism between Cheever and
The New Yorker
came to a boil. The Christmas holidays with their annual financial burden tended to trigger the author's resentment about the prices paid for his fiction. Besides, he felt himself in a strong bargaining position. He'd completed his novel,
Time
was doing a cover story on him, and he had just submitted his magnificent story “The Swimmer” to the magazine. So he went down to New York and asked Maxwell for a raise. Maxwell did not have the power to give him one, and explained that he was already getting the highest fiction rate. A disgruntled Cheever went downstairs to a pay phone and called Candida Donadio, who was not then his agent but was overjoyed to hear from him, and asked if she could do better. A few minutes later Donadio called back.
The Saturday Evening Post
, which had recently lured John O'Hara away on a similar basis, was prepared to offer him twenty-four thousand dollars for a first-look contract and four stories a year.

This was about five times what
The New Yorker
was then paying him, so Maxwell and editor William Shawn could hardly match that in their counteroffer. “A key to the men's room and all the bread and cheese I could eat,” John Cheever characterized it. He reached an agreement with the magazine, nonetheless. He promised to give
The New Yorker
a first look at his stories in return for his usual rate on acceptance and a tacit understanding that if he wanted to submit any of his fiction elsewhere, the editors would look the other way. On this basis the relationship staggered on, though in the years ahead Cheever was to publish twice as many stories in other magazines, including the
Post, Esquire
, and
Playboy
, as he did in
The New Yorker
. Of his 121 stories in the magazine, 5 appeared in 1964, and only 6 more during the remaining seventeen years of his life.

RUSSIA

1964

1964 was in almost every respect an extremely important year in Cheever's life. He published not one but two books:
The Wapshot Scandal
in January and
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow
in October. In March he appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine, for the first time emerging as a public figure. The surge of accomplishment carried him on trips to Italy and Hollywood and Russia. In Hollywood he met and fell half in love with actress Hope Lange. In Russia he got to know John Updike and conceived an admiration for a people who—it seemed to him—valued their artists far more than most Americans.

The
Time
cover story acquainted Cheever with some of the costs of fame. To begin with, he resisted the idea. “I don't want the story,” he said. “We didn't ask,” the
Time
people said. Still the project might have foundered except for the involvement of Time-Life editor Alwyn Lee, a gregarious and witty Australian who was one of Cheever's closest friends and drinking companions. Cheever felt he could trust Lee, but he was not prepared for the persistence of the magazine's editors, researchers, and photographers. With characteristic Yankee diffidence, he refused to unburden himself on intimate matters. His technique with interviewers, during those years, was to try to get them drunk, or failing that, to involve them in some form of exercise that made question-asking and note-taking virtually impossible. “Cheever doesn't really like to talk about himself but about other people,”
Time
correspondent Andrew Kopkind reported. “When I would say, ‘Now we really must talk about you,' he would leap up and say something like ‘Let's go tobogganing.'” In fact, Lee and another
Time
staffer did accompany Cheever and his son Ben on a ski trip to Stowe, where they followed him around the trails. Meanwhile, another editor had been at work “asking indecent questions” in Ossining. Altogether it was far from a pleasant experience.

Faced with Cheever's uncommunicativeness, the magazine's reporters widened their contacts with family, friends, neighbors—anyone who could claim acquaintance with the author. They promised to leave his brother, Fred, alone, something Cheever insisted upon, and then broke the promise. Clearly, everyone was fair game. One reporter came to see the Robert Penn Warrens in Connecticut. “I remember that son of a bitch,” Warren said. “He was after smut.” Another tracked down Fax Ogden in Delaware. “What have you done wrong?” Ogden inquired of Cheever by telephone. “Someone from
Time
magazine is coming to ask questions about you in half an hour.”

The legman in Westchester concentrated on Cheever's drinking and sex life. One neighbor was fairly bursting with gossip when—as she thought—this
Time
man finally came to call. She started in immediately with tales of martinis at noon, nude swimming, and other morally reprehensible behavior. When she paused for breath, the man said, “Lady, I'm your Fuller Brush representative.” Or so, at least, Cheever claimed in reconstructing the story.

It was not only shyness that made him distrust public recognition. He felt strongly that it was wrong to court publicity, and tried as far as possible to avoid the appearance of calling attention to himself. As Lee noted in the
Time
story, he was “not a writer with a public personality to flourish and exploit, such as Hemingway or Norman Mailer.” The story's strongest emphasis fell on Cheever as a kind of latter-day moralist who envisioned the individual “at the center of a system of obligations.” Let them neglect these obligations, and his characters might find themselves punished by a black-magical metamorphosis into some creature or object less than human. Cheever would have denied the designation of moralist—he passed judgment on no one, he liked to believe—but certainly his fiction is full of the struggle to build and then obliterate boundaries, and those who try to escape are sometimes consigned to a modern variation of the inferno. The best thing about Lee's story, working with bits and pieces as they trickled in from
Time
staffers, was that it derived from his own intimate acquaintance with John and Mary Cheever. He portrayed them as likable and talented human beings, as complementary yet very different people. “Ovid in Ossining,” as the cover story was entitled in an unhappy burst of alliteration, was much better than it might have been.

While the March 17, 1964,
Time
introduced his name and picture to a large audience (the cover portrait showed Cheever at his desk, with the family's pet doves in a cage beyond), the story did him little good with the critics. To the critical establishment, almost all of it liberal,
Time
was associated with upper-middle-class readers and their rather comfortable Republican viewpoints. Appearing on the cover was as likely to harm as to help a literary reputation.

Cheever himself was wary of succumbing to his new celebrity. People kept sending him copies of the cover to sign, and that was flattering, but he knew that
Time
had no power to canonize. In his journals he imagined Susie dressing him down. “Don't think anybody's impressed …,” he fancied her saying. “They put all kinds of people on the cover, including broken-down ballplayers and crooks.” Soon thereafter two Frenchmen from
Réalités
called for an interview and he consented. “My fatuous vanity,” he accused himself, “made their attentions irresistible.” Whatever others might think of him, Cheever was rarely free of the harshest criticism from within.

Another avenue to fame opened up early in 1964 when Alan J. Pakula and Robert Mulligan purchased screen rights to the two Wapshot novels for “a moderate amount—about $75,000.” The film was never made, though Pakula-Mulligan hired Tad Mosel to combine the two books into one screenplay and did some tentative casting: Spencer Tracy for Leander, Katharine Hepburn for Honora, and the then little-known Robert Redford for Moses. Cheever went to Hollywood to close the deal, and that trip was to have long-range consequences, for it was there that he met Hope Lange, then married to Pakula. To get acquainted the Pakulas had a dinner party for Cheever, and Hope remembers being terribly nervous, trying to fix dinner and to make sure everything went smoothly. Cheever arrived rather buttoned up, “with his New England mumble and suit on.” Then she ushered everyone to the basement recreation room, put
Guys and Dolls
on the record player, and that did the trick. Cheever sloughed off his carapace of reserve and they had a wonderful evening.

Among other things he and Hope shared a background in Greenwich Village. She grew up there with her brother and two sisters, supported by the restaurant—the Minetta Tavern in Washington Square—run by and named after her mother. “When we'd all been fed,” as Hope puts it, her mother closed the restaurant. The Langes were a warmly affectionate clan, as free with hugs and kisses as the Cheevers of Massachusetts were chary of them. John was attracted by her outgoing nature and found that they could laugh together, and of course she was very beautiful. He was, in short, smitten. He was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Hope's brother David assigned to drive him around. He got all shined up when he knew he'd see Hope, David recalls, and started shaving twice a day. “He was like a kid with an enormous crush.” It was as if one of his dream girls had materialized: married and hence not available, but certainly interested in him and willing to show it.

David Lange, then in his early twenties and working for Pakula-Mulligan, saw in Cheever everything he'd ever wanted in a father—a New England Yankee, a writer of consequence, witty and charming. For his part, Cheever regarded David as a glamorous son of Hollywood. Half jokingly he proposed to fix him up with Susie, though he knew the competition was tough: David was dating Natalie Wood. Cheever was not immune to the appeal of the star system. On his last night in California, David was driving him around Beverly Hills, pointing out the homes of famous actors. When he indicated Glenn Ford's house, Cheever immediately said, “Let's go see him. I've got to have something to tell the kids.” It was already midnight, but David called Ford up and they went over for a visit that turned out to be pretty dull, since both actor and author were basically shy people. The next day, on the way to the airport, Cheever stopped by the Pakulas' to say goodbye to Hope. Honk honk went the auto-horn doorbell, but Hope was out. So he said goodbye to Gus the dog and flew home to Westchester.

There his unshakable cafard awaited him. In May he went into New York City to have lunch with an old school friend. Life had not gone well with the friend; he was dissatisfied with his children and unsuccessful in his work. “The only jobs I could get,” he said, “are traveling jobs. A day in Topeka, a day in Chicago, a day in San Francisco, and Johnny, I'm too old to spend the rest of my life in hotel rooms.” When they parted, Cheever spent the rest of the day with “the lovely wife of a jealous friend.” This should have brightened his spirits, but it did not. Instead he castigated himself for taking so much pleasure in being loved. Wasn't that really a form of self-love?

He and Mary were planning a trip to Italy in June, but not even that prospect pleased. “You don't want to go to Italy with me,” she said, and he admitted it was true. She seemed unfriendly much of the time, he thought. But one magical night when a thunderstorm struck and all the lights went out, he and Mary dined by candlelight, and made love on the lawn afterward, and for the moment all the darkness left his heart and mind. Eventually they traveled together to Italy, along with Alwyn and Essie Lee, and visited Alan and Lucy Moorehead at Port'Ercole. Despite the good company and the beautiful countryside, Cheever felt “homesick and uneasy” overseas. He was glad to come home again.

On July 18
The New Yorker
printed “The Swimmer,” a story they'd been holding for midsummer publication. Almost immediately Frank Perry was on the telephone proposing a film version. Cheever had met Perry during the recent trip to Hollywood and tried to interest him in a film about the lives of expatriates in Rome. Sitting poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he sketched out scenes for the movie lifted from his stories. Perry was at least mildly interested in the idea—later he bought screen rights to “Clementina”—but he was bowled over by “The Swimmer.” He and his wife, Eleanor, the team that made the prize-winning
David and Lisa
, secured an option and started work on an adaptation right away.