Read Boys & Girls Together Online
Authors: William Goldman
Boys & Girls Together
A Novel
William Goldman
FOR
My
Father
East Side, West Side
,
all around the town,
The tots sang
“
Ring-a-rosie
,” “
London Bridge is falling down
”
;
Boys and girls together, me and Marnie Rorke,
Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.
JAMES W. BLAKE
(1894)
XXII-XXVI. BOYS & GIRLS TOGETHER
A Biography of William Goldman
Boys & Girls Together
I
N 1938 I WAS SEVEN
, and my family had recently moved to the then very small town of Highland Park, outside of Chicago, and why I cannot tell you, but for either one week or several, we got the Sunday
New York Times
.
I was already a movie nut, had been to the theater more than a little and right now, as I write this, sitting in 2000 at a machine undreamed of then, I can still see the seven-year-old child, turning page after page of
Times
movie ads and theater ads and thinking, “I must try and live there someday.”
I remember where I was in the room, the pattern of the yellow rug, the light coming in from the bay window at the far end. And as anyone who knows me will tell you, I don’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, much less rug patterns.
But the kid of that moment and that wish have been inside ever since.
I think the original working title was
Magic Town
. I think I had this much: a bunch of young people come to New York. I know I knew it went badly for them.
That’s it, folks.
Oops, sorry, one more thing: I knew more than anything that the novel
had to be long
. If it ran over a thousand typed pages, fine. Ask me now where that lunatic notion came from, I know not. But long novels, I have survived to tell you, are the worst to write.
I’ve always been good at guilt, but I think when I began
Boys & Girls Together
, I must have had Olympic records in mind. You see, I
had
come to the city. When I was twenty-two. And I
had
miraculously become a writer. And the first three novels, though short, had also been successful. I was going great, no question.
But all around me, my friends were falling to earth.
And so, around thirty, I set out to write my book of atonement.
Because I was programmed all my life to fail, to finish, if I got to the line at all, at the back of the pack. When I was maybe six or seven, I went to playgroup and at the end, they had parents’ day and there was a running race, I was in it, and it started and I took off—
—entering a nightmare—
—I looked around—no one was near me—
I had gone in the wrong direction
—
—can you imagine the humiliation? I could. I did.
—and then blessedly came Minnie’s voice, Minnie, who had worked for my family close to half a century was shouting now, “run Billy run”—
—so I ran, and I won—because I had
not
been going in the wrong direction at all, I was simply out in front, far out in front, winning if you will—and I simply could not conceive it.
Hiram Haydn, my beloved editor for fifteen years, was a novelist himself and quick to understand the problems of fellow fumblers. Usually I presented him with a completed novel and we would then go to work.
Since I had no idea what
Boys & Girls Together
would be, he pretty much directed the way the book might go. Take the five characters and write a chapter about each of their childhoods, he’d say. So I would. Then we’d go on to the next period of their lives. The process of writing the book took three years—I stopped in the middle to do a play and a musical on Broadway, both of which stiffed, you will be thrilled to learn—and he was essential all the way. He might say “What’s happening to Walt, how’s Walt doing, that’s what I’d like to know,” and off I’d go, trying to figure for myself how Walt was, in point of fact, doing, and I’d come up with a Walt chapter, write it down.
My first three novels—
The Temple of Gold
,
Your Turn to Curtsy
,
My Turn to Bow
and
Soldier in the Rain
had not been well received critically. Except by Dorothy Parker who, bless her, could not have been kinder.
Hiram thought
Boys & Girls Together
would establish me as one of the serious American novelists of my generation.
Wrong. It was ... how shall I put it ...
Slaughtered
.
The most crucifying reviews up and down the line. I was truly on the verge of tears for weeks. But out of that came a wonderful decision—
—fuck ’em!
I have not read reviews for over thirty-five years now, good or bad. I remember being sent an entire package of raves for the film of
All the President’s Men
.
—fuck ’em!
Never opened it. I don’t want to read what those assholes have to say. And if any of you want to write, I cannot give you better advice. Don’t read anybody.
Just fuck ’em!
And go write some more.
Two final
Boys & Girls Together
stories, both involving Princeton.
The first involves finishing the book. It was 1963 and I was not in great shape. I’d rented a house in Princeton for the summer to complete the writing and I was, of course, exhausted from finally almost getting it done but more this: I had a bad back then and it had chosen to go out. So I lived on red wine and pain pills to force sleep, caffeine to get me going.
Plus this: I had to wear a girdle to get through the day.
Didn’t do a lot for my good old masculine sense of self-esteem.
Anyway, the day I was done I was alone in the house and stared at “the end” when I wrote those blessed words, got up, went outside to the backyard, where we had a child’s swing set up for daughter Jenny, then all of a year. I sat in it, smoking, and suddenly I had this realization:
I had told all my stories
.
Every one.
I sat there thinking it couldn’t be true, because that would mean the end for me as a writer, then luckily I remembered the story of the mother who dressed her son in her clothes ...
No, I’d put that in the novel, given it to Branch.
I went through them
all
and I’d given them
all
away. That’s my chief memory of that afternoon. Knowing what I’d done, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life. (I did not realize at the time that two years down the line, in that same university town, over Christmas vacation, these two outlaws named Butch and Sundance would ride up from South America to save me.)
We moved permanently to Princeton in early 1965, when Susanna, Daughter Number Two, was born.
Shortly after, the regular writing teacher came to me and said he had gotten a sudden shot at sabbatical and needed a quick replacement. Would I do it?
I had always wanted to teach. Easy yes answer.
I had a bunch of kids for creative writing, wanted them to remember me kindly, so I stopped writing for the year and just taught. I must have done well because the visiting writing professor (there were two at Princeton in those days) came to me on a Spring afternoon and asked if I would like to be the permanent professor of writing there.
My decision was that if I did not have any heavier a workload than I’d already had, yes. Any more, and I would never be able to get back to my own work.
He said he would get back to me.
Now you must know this—that summer,
Boys & Girls Together
was
the
beach book in paperback. Huge success. A very sexy cover for those days. And was the book salacious? Sure, the gay characters I guess were more shocking then. But no more than that.
Days kept going, as they do, by.
No answer about becoming a writing professor.
Finally (we are well into May) I ran into the visiting teacher and asked what was going on. “I’ve been avoiding you,” he said. “I’m just dreading this.”
What he was dreading was that one of the top professors in the English department, old and gray and gay, had heard about
Boys & Girls Together
, and rejected me with these words:
I WILL NOT HAVE OUR CHILDRENWORSHIPING AT THE SHRINE OFA PORNOGRAPHER.
I took my family and left Princeton that week. Back to Magic Town where I belonged. Been to Princeton one time since. As someone must have said: fuck ’em!
A
ARON WOULD NOT COME
out.
Nestled inside his mother, blind and wrinkled and warm, he defied the doctors. Charlotte’s screams skimmed along the hospital corridors, but Aaron, lodged at his peculiar angle, was mindless of them. Charlotte vomited and shrieked and wanted to die. As that possibility became less and less remote, the doctors hurriedly decided to operate and, deftly cutting through the wall of Charlotte’s abdomen, they slit the uterus and reached inside.
Pink and white like a candy stick, Aaron entered the world.
It seemed to be a great place to visit. His father could not have been gladder to see him. Henry Firestone, universally known as Hank, was a big man, confident, with a quick smile and a loud, rough voice. Aaron never forgot that voice; years later he would still spin suddenly around—on the street, in a restaurant, a theater lobby—whenever he heard a voice remotely similar.
Hank was a lawyer, for Simmons and Sloane, the Wall Street firm, and when he was thirty-one Mr. Sloane himself made Hank a full partner, Mr. Simmons being bed-ridden that day with gout, a disease to which he noisily succumbed some months later. The week he became a partner, Hank was sent to Roanoke, Virginia, for a three-day business trip.
He stayed two weeks and came back married.
Her name was Charlotte Crowell, of the Roanoke Crowells, or what once had been the Roanoke Crowells, the family having been comfortably poor since shortly before the turn of the century. Charlotte was tiny, barely five feet tall, with a sweet face and a voice as soft as her husband’s was harsh. Her hair was black and she wore it long and straight, down her back; even when it began turning cruelly white (she was not yet thirty) she wore it that way.
Hank and Charlotte lived in New York for a few months but then, the summer after they were married, they moved to a large white colonial on Library Place, a gently curving tree-lined street in the best section of Princeton, New Jersey. Mr. Sloane himself lived in Princeton, on Battle Road, of course, and when he saw that the house on Library Place was up for sale he mentioned it casually to Hank, who immediately took Charlotte for a look-see. Charlotte loved it—it reminded her so of Roanoke—so Hank bought it for her. He couldn’t afford it but he bought it anyway, partially because Charlotte loved it and partially because she was pregnant and everybody told them New York was no place to bring up children. They moved into the house the week after Deborah was born, all waxy and red, the only time she was ever unattractive. The wax soon washed away, the red softened into pink, and she became a beautiful baby, fat, spoiled and sassy. Charlotte adored her and Hank liked her well enough—he cooed at her and carried her around on his big shoulders and gently poked her soft flesh till she giggled—Hank liked her fine, but he was waiting for his son.