Return to Peyton Place (4 page)

This essay is part of a work-in-progress entitled “Tales of Peyton Place: The Biography of a Big Book.” I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the University of Southern Maine for their generous support in funding this project. I am especially grateful as well to the Metalious family, to whom this work is dedicated. My debt to Marsha Metalious Duprey is deep and unending; my deepest regret is that I could not write her mother into a better ending.

Notes

1.
Letter, Mrs. Thomas H. Leary to Grace Metalious, March 8, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

2.
Letter, M. B. “bookworm” to Mrs. Metalious, March 20, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

3.
Letter, Harvey Tauman to Grace Metalious, February 16, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

4.
Otto Friedrich, “Farewell to
Peyton Place,
”
Esquire
(December 1971): 310. See also, William H. Lyles,
Putting Dell on the Map: A History of Dell Paperbacks
(Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1983), especially pp. 35, 45.

5.
Letter, Ralph E. Hoyt to Grace Metalious, February 28, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

6.
Letter to Grace Metalious, February 17, 1960. Courtesy of Marsha Metalious Duprey.

7.
Otto Friedrich, “Farewell to
Peyton Place,
”
Esquire
(December 1971): 160.

8.
On the question of who wrote
Return to Peyton Place,
see “Reminiscences of Helen Honig Meyer,” Interview by Mary Belle Starr, February–June 1979, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 2003; Emily Toth,
Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious
(Jackson: University of Mississippi, 200o); William H. Lyles,
Putting Dell on the Map
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 35.

9.
Grace Metalious, quoted in John Rees, “Grace Metalious' Battle with the World,”
Cosmopolitan
(Sept. 1964): 54.

10.
For a detailed account of her resistance based on interviews with T. J. Martin, Grace Metalious's second husband, see Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
217–224.

11.
See “All About Me,”
The American Weekly
(May 18, 1958): 8ff.

12.
Ardis Cameron, “Open Secrets: Rereading Peyton Place,” in Grace Metalious,
Peyton Place
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), i–xxx.

13.
Letter from Treiva Jean Reed to Grace Metalious, February 1, 1961.

14.
For a more detailed account of the reception of
Peyton Place,
see Cameron, “Open Secrets,” xx–xxiv.

15.
Dorothy Roe, “Queen Elizabeth—Woman of the Year,”
The San Francisco Flash,
December 26, 1957. My thanks to David Richards for this citation.

16.
Mary Ellen Brown, “Motley Moments: Soap Operas, Carnival, Gossip, and the Power of Utterance,” in Mary Ellen Brown, ed.,
Televison and Women's Culture: The Politics of the Popular
(London, Sage Publications, 1990), 183–198.

17.
Mary Kelley,
Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

18.
Grace Metalious, “Me and ‘Peyton Place,'”
American Weekly
May 18 (ff., 1958): 13, vertical file, Gale Public Library, Laconia, New Hampshire.

19.
Patricia Carbine, “Peyton Place,”
Look
(March 18, 1958): 108.

20.
Mike Wallace, with Gary Paul Gates,
Betwen You and Me: A Memoir
(New York: Hyperion, 2005) 1–4.

21.
Barbara Seaman,
Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann
(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 239–242.

22.
For a full account of the scene see Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
164.

23.
Carbine, “Peyton Place,” 108.

24.
Quoted in Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
163.

25.
The description is from Michael Korda, “Wasn't She Great?”
New Yorker
(August 14, 1995): 66–72.

26.
Ken Crain, quoted in Merle Miller, “The Tragedy of Grace Metalious and Peyton Place,”
Ladies Home Journal
(June 1965): 112.

27.
Miller, “Tragedy of ‘Peyton Place,'” 112.

28.
Friedrich, “Farewell,” 310.

29.
Metalious, “Me and ‘Peyton Place,'” 21.

30.
Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
173.

31.
Friedrich, “Farewell,” 310.

32.
See especially Deidre Johnson, “From Paragraphs to Pages: The Writing and Development of the Stratemeyer Syndicate Series,” in Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Romalov,
Discovering Nancy Drew
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 29–40.

33.
The term is from Michael Denning,
Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America
(London: Verso, 1987) 24.

34.
Mary Noel, quoted in Janice Radway,
A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club: Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 132.

35.
Grace Metalious, quoted in “Farewell to Payton Place,” 310.

36.
Leona Nevler, interviews with author, January 2001, September 2002.

37.
“Reminiscences of Helen Honig Meyer,” 80. Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 2003. Interviewed by Mary Belle Starr, Spring 1979.

38.
For a detailed account of Miller's role in ghosting
Return,
see Toth,
Inside Peyton Place,
219.

39.
T. J. Martin, quoted in Toth,
Inside Peyton Place
.

40.
“Son of P.P. ,”
Time,
November 30, 1959.

41.
Friedrich, “Farewell,” 310.

42.
Miller, “The Tragedy of Peyton Place,” 112.

43.
George Metalious, in
Girl From Peyton Place,
125–126.

44.
Grace Metalious to Oliver Swan, June 22, 1961, Paul Reynolds Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York.

45.
Jerry Wald to Grace Metalious, Feb. 9, 1961, Paul Reynolds Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York.

46.
Grace Metalious to Oliver Swan, Dec. 12, 1963, Paul Reynolds Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

S
OMETIMES WINTERS, COMES
gradually to northern New England so that there is an element of order and sequence to time and season. When the first snow comes it is not surprising because it has been expected for quite a while. When winter comes that way, it usually begins to snow big, fat flakes at mid-morning and by noon there is a thick edge of white on everything. The skies clear after lunch and the sun comes out and by the time school is out in the afternoon all the eaves on all the houses in town are dripping melted snow.

Then the old-timers say, “'Twon't stay. Not this time. Not yet.”

And everyone who is still young enough is disappointed and a little apprehensive because maybe it's really true that old-fashioned winters have left northern New England forever.

Old-fashioned winters usually happen after hot, dry summers. Then the fall rains begin right after Labor Day and they are cold, wind-driven rains that are gray and destructive, and after those rains there is no beautiful autumn, no glory of red and gold leaves. The trees turn quickly from green to withered brown and the rain cuts the leaves from the branches in fast, vicious swipes. After the rains, the ground freezes hard and quickly and one day is like the next, cold and gray and waiting for the snow.

Then it begins. A fine powder that sifts down from the dark sky in a seemingly unending screen and does not accumulate on streets and roads until after the wind has had enough of blowing, and cold, dry piles of white have gathered around the base of every fence post and tree. By suppertime the wind dies down and still it snows, so fine and thin that children are afraid it will take forever for enough of it to fall to cover the palms of their mittened hands.

But those who are older remember other old-fashioned winters. They are the ones who check the gallon gauges on oil-burner fuel tanks, who have long since made sure that their car radiators are full of anti-freeze, and who know that with the coming of tomorrow's dawn, the wind, too, will return.

Fireplaces do not exist in the houses of northern New England purely for their friendly, hospitable hearths. They are there because every once in a while there is an old-fashioned winter and power lines break like dry straws in the face of the wind and snow. Those who remember have small, wood-burning stoves in their cellars to keep water pipes from freezing; every wood box is filled and overflowing with logs and kindling, and the young sit in front of blazing fires and wax their skis and wonder what the accumulation will be at Franconia by morning.

That was the way winter came the second year after Allison MacKenzie returned to Peyton Place. It was four o'clock on a November afternoon, and Allison was standing in front of the window in her bedroom when she saw the first flake of snow.

Perhaps it will be tomorrow, she thought. Maybe tomorrow Brad will call and say, I've sold it, Allison, I've sold it; your novel has been accepted and will be published in the spring.

T
UTTLE'S
G
ROCERY SSTORE
was located on Elm Street, Peyton Place's main thoroughfare, at a point halfway between the Citizens' National Bank and Prescott's Pharmacy which stood on the corner of Maple Street. From the front window of Tuttle's, the old men who hung around the store in the winter could look out and see the courthouse and the benches where they loitered when the weather was warm and fair. During the summer, Tuttle's was something of a tourist attraction, for it was one of the few remaining stores in northern New England where you could buy Cheddar cheese by the slice or by the pound from Ephraim Tuttle's enormous cheese wheel. Tuttle's still sold rock candy and licorice drops by the penny-worth, and a nickel would buy a fat pickle, sour enough to set your teeth on edge, from a huge barrel that stood in a dark corner at the back of the store.

Right after Memorial Day, every year, Ephraim Tuttle made his yearly concession to what he called the “summer trade.” At that time he brought brightly colored bolts of gingham and calico up from his cellar and lined them all in a neat row on the front counter as had his father and grandfather before him in the days before ready-made clothing. Once in a while, someone bought a few yards of material to make curtains for a summer camp, but otherwise the bolts of fabric stood on the counter until after Labor Day, when Ephraim sent them off to Ginny Stearns to be washed and ironed and then rewound to be stored in plastic coverings in Tuttle's cellar for another winter.

“Waste of space,” said Clayton Frazier, “settin' all that cloth right up there on the front counter that way. Nobody ever buys nothin' to speak of.”

“Lends the place a tone,” said Ephraim. “Summer folks like tone. What they call
atmosphere.
”

But with the coming of fall, Tuttle's reverted to what it had always been—a rather dusty, very old sort of general store where you could buy almost anything, if you were able to find it. This jungle of merchandise included magazines and cough drops and ear plugs and old sunglasses; tomatoes in a cellophane package and fish by the pound on Fridays only, eggs that you took from a carton yourself and put by the dozen into a paper bag; deerskin work gloves and pipe tobacco, Alka-Seltzer and lollipops and the Sunday papers. In the fall, Ephraim shut off the two circular ceiling fans that had whirred around slowly all summer and set up his potbellied wood and coal stove, but it was not until he took down and put away the awning, which shielded his front window all summer long, and began saving wooden packing crates suitable for sitting purposes, that the old men who occupied the benches in front of the courthouse knew it was time to move across the street to wait for winter.

“Gonna snow,” said Clayton Frazier. “Gonna snow sure'n hell.”

“'Bout time,” said one of the old men who sat with his feet up on the base of the stove. “November. And we all knew it was gonna come early this year.”

“Foolishness,” said Clayton, and sat down on the one wooden chair that was reserved for him. “I've seen it cold as this many a time and it never snowed 'til clear into January. But it's gonna snow today. Sure'n hell.”

“Don't snow in hell, Clayton,” said another man, and waited for a chuckle from his friends.

“How'd'you know, John?” asked Clayton Frazier. “Been there lately?”

And then the men around the stove did laugh, and Clayton leaned back happily and lit his pipe.

The front door of the store opened suddenly, letting in a sweep of cold air that immediately stifled all conversation around the stove. Clayton Frazier looked up at the stranger who had entered, and the only way that anyone could have known that Clayton was upset was that he kept his pipe out of his mouth when everyone around the stove could tell that he hadn't drawn on his pipe anywhere near long enough to be satisfied with its glow.

“Ephraim!” said the stranger.

Ephraim Tuttle looked up slowly.

“Ayeh,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Ephraim,” said the stranger and laughed. “For God's sake, don't you remember me?”

Everyone around the stove knew who the stranger was, but not a man moved to make an acknowledging gesture.

“I'm Gerry Gage,” said the stranger, still laughing and now clapping Ephraim Tuttle on the shoulder. “S. S. Pierce Co., out of Boston. Don't you remember? It was me that remembered about bringing that Navy fellow back to town, the fellow that was murdered by his own daughter. Remember me now?”

“Stepdaughter,” said Clayton Frazier, and put the pipe into his mouth.

“Well, whatever she was,” said Gerry Gage. “Anyway, it was me that remembered.”

“Ayeh,” said Clayton.

There was a silence, and the stranger rubbed one of his gloved hands over the edge of his briefcase.

“Well,” he said at last. “What do you need, Ephraim? I've got your usual list here, and I could go by that.”

“The usual,” said Ephraim.

Gerry Gage was suddenly angry. “Listen here,” he said, “I only did what I thought was right. I never meant to do anything in the first place. I just happened to mention something about a fellow I let off here in Peyton Place. A hitchhiker. How did I know I was talking to the sheriff? It was him that started everything. All I did was what I thought was right. That's all.”

Sheriff Buck McCracken glanced at Gerry Gage. “Whyn't you do the business you come for,” he said, and he did not ask it as a question.

Gerry began to make check marks next to the items listed on a slip of paper in his hand.

“No need for any of you guys to hold a grudge against me,” he said. “A man doing what he thought was right.”

“Ain't nobody in Peyton Place holdin' a grudge against you that I know of, Mr. Gage,” said Clayton Frazier. “It's just that some people talk a God-awful lot, and that does get tirin'.”

“Believe me,” said Gerry Gage, “I know exactly what you mean. Believe me, in my business I meet a lot of talkers. But then, it takes all kinds to make a world,” he added, as if he were the first man ever to have noticed this.

“Ayeh,” said Clayton.

“By the way,” said Gerry. “After all that murder business and all, I asked to be transferred off this route. And I was, too. The company understood. I mean, about all the notoriety and all. I haven't been back this way since the cops dragged me back to answer a lot of questions about Lucas Cross.”

Nobody said a word, and, as the seconds passed, Gerry Gage became more and more uncomfortable.

“Well, anyway,” he said, finally. “What's new in Peyton Place? I haven't heard much about this neck of the woods since all that stuff about the murder quieted down in the papers.”

“Nothin',” said Clayton Frazier.

“What?” asked Gerry.

“Nothin',” repeated Clayton. “There's nothin' new in Peyton Place. Seldom is. Nothin's different at all.”

And to the uneducated eye of a stranger it would have appeared that Clayton Frazier's words were true. Peyton Place looked as it had always looked—pretty, quiet and untouched by turmoil. In the late winter afternoon the lighted windows of the shops and houses presented friendly, innocent faces to each other and to the rest of the world.

The war was over and the Harrington Mills no longer throbbed in twenty-four-hour shifts straining to fill the demands of Army contracts, but that was true of factories nearly everywhere. Leslie Harrington still lived alone in his big house on Chestnut Street, and while time and the loss of his only son, Rodney, had aged and gentled him a little, he was still Leslie Harrington, a fact of which everyone in town was still very much aware.

Down the street from Leslie, Dr. Matthew Swain still practiced medicine and his friend, Seth Buswell, still wrote editorials for the Peyton Place
Times.
The house of Charles Partridge was as empty as it had ever been, for neither time, nor acquisitions, nor the lawyer's wife, Marion, had been able to fill it with any degree of warmth or love. None of the old families had moved away, and no new people had moved into town, leastways, as Seth Buswell put it, not enough of them to shake things up or to amount to anything.

No, nothing much had changed in Peyton Place. At least, nothing that anyone was willing to pour into the ears of a stranger. And if there had been changes in private situations and in individuals, surely these changes were the concern of those to whom they had happened and, again, nothing for the ears of a stranger.

Nope, thought Gerry Gage, as he left Tuttle's Grocery Store and climbed into his car, nothing new in Peyton Place. Hell, that girl killing her old man was probably the only big thing that ever did or ever will happen here.

Gerry Gage drove his car down Elm Street toward the highway that led to White River and was, as he put it, damned glad to be heading for a town where there was a hotel with a bar, where other salesmen gathered and there was something to talk about, drinks to be bought, and jokes to be told.

In the Thrifty Corner Apparel Shoppe on Elm Street, Selena Cross finished covering a counter top full of blouses that were on sale. Then, looking up, she saw a flake of snow flatten itself and spread against the windowpane. She left the counter and walked toward the front window of the shop to make sure that what she had seen was really a snowflake, and as she looked she noticed a car with Massachusetts license plates heading toward the highway to White River. She wondered briefly, as people will in a town like Peyton Place, just who from out of state was visiting whom, but then Gerry Gage's car was out of sight and Selena thought no more about it.

It really is snowing, she thought. I'll have to hurry home to Joey.

She glanced up again as another snowflake fell against the window and saw two hurrying figures cross her line of vision. For just a second, her heart thumped hard and then she turned quickly away from the window.

Outside, the two figures turned quickly into Maple Street and were out of sight.

“Hurry, darling,” said Ted Carter to the girl whose arm he held. “I don't want my wife to freeze to death during her very first winter in Peyton Place.”

The girl laughed up at him. “Remind me to buy a pair of flat-heeled shoes tomorrow. I can't keep up with those long legs of yours when I'm wearing high heels. I saw a shop back there—Thrifty something—I'll go there tomorrow.”

Ted Carter did not laugh with his wife and his steps grew even more hurried.

“They don't sell shoes at the Thrifty Corner,” he said, and, holding tightly onto his wife's arm, he tried desperately not to think of Selena.

S
ELENE
C
ROSS HAD JUST STARTED
to turn off the lights in the store when the front door banged open and Michael Rossi came in.

“Hi, Selena,” he called. “In the words of us natives, ‘It's gonna snow, sure'n hell.'” He brushed at the shoulders of his overcoat where the snow had already left a fine, white dust and he stood there and grinned at her.