Fifties (94 page)

The success of his magazines and his personal success reflected a powerful new chord in postwar American life: the changing attitudes about sex and a steadily more candid view of sexuality. Hefner was fighting that part of the Puritan ethic that condemned pleasure. He thought hard work and sexual freedom were not incompatible in this ever richer society. In the broader sense as well,
Playboy
shepherded
a generation of young men to the good life. It helped explain how to buy a sportscar, what kind of hi-fi set to buy, how to order in a restaurant, what kind of wine to drink with what kind of meal. For men whose parents had not gone to college,
Playboy
served a valuable function: It provided an early and elementary tutorial on the new American life-style. For those fearful of headwaiters in fancy restaurants, wary of slick salesmen in stores and of foreign-car dealers who seemed to speak a language never heard in Detroit,
Playboy
provided a valuable consumer service: It midwifed the reader into a world of increasing plenty. “Hefner,” said Arthur Kretchmer, his longtime executive editor, “helped the world to discover toys. He said ‘Play, it’s okay to play.’” Americans, particularly younger Americans, lived in a world of more and more toys; that was the good life, and it was fun. “We are,” Kretchmer added, “more about indulgence and the celebration of frivolity than we are about envy and greed.” Hefner’s central message, Kretchmer said, was “Celebrate your life. Free it up. Your sexuality can be as good as anybody else’s if you take the inhibitions out, if you don’t destroy yourself internally.”

The spectacular rise of
Playboy
reflected the postwar decline of Calvinism and puritanism in America, due as much as anything else to the very affluence of the society. Ordinary Americans could afford to live better than they ever had before, and they now wanted the things that had previously been the possessions of only the very wealthy; and they wanted the personal freedoms the rich had traditionally enjoyed too. In the onslaught, old restraints were loosened. If religion existed only as a negative force, Hefner was saying, if it spoke only of the denial of pleasure and made people feel furtive about what was natural, then it was in trouble. He preached pleasure. He touched the right chord at precisely the right moment.

THIRTY-EIGHT

“I
NDIAN SUMMER IS LIKE
a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor how long she will stay.” It began in prose that threatened neither John Cheever nor John O’Hara as the most famous chroniclers of American social mores. “In Northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchanged season which lives until winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully, that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism ...”

In 1956, the most surprising book on the best-seller list was
Peyton Place,
by Grace Metalious, a young woman who had never published a word before. It was brought out in hardcover by Julian Messner, a small publisher, and went on to become the third best-selling hardcover novel of the year. Allan Barnard, an editor at the paperback house Dell, read the manuscript just before it was published and told his boss, Frank Taylor: “I have something I want to buy [to reprint as a mass softcover edition], but I don’t want you to read it.” Taylor gave Barnard permission to go ahead and he bought the softcover rights for $11,000 in an auction with other publishing houses. It turned out to be one of the great bargains of all time. A few years later, Taylor asked Barnard why he had asked him not to read it. “Because you wouldn’t have let me buy it,” Barnard answered, referring to the ambivalence many paperback editors felt about the commercial quality of the books they published.

Peyton Place
was considered a hot book in the vernacular of the time, although Metalious was far less explicit than other, more serious writers who were then struggling with the oppressive censorship laws of the era. But
Peyton Place
was such a phenomenon that the title entered the language as a generic term for all the small towns that appeared placid on the surface but underneath were filled with dark secrets, most of them sexual. In her book, Metalious tore away the staid facade of Peyton Place/Gilmanton, New Hampshire, to reveal a hotbed of lust and sexual intrigue. “To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard,” Ms. Metalious told Hal Boyle of the Associated Press in an early interview. “But if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot—all kinds of strange things crawl out. Everybody who lives in town knows what’s going on—there are no secrets—but they don’t want outsiders to know.”

Indeed, the principal occupation of
Peyton Place
seemed not so much farming or the town’s textile factory but gossip; people there not only led secret lives, they devoted most of their waking hours to sitting around and talking about them—at least about everyone else’s. To wit: of Kenny Stearns, a local handyman with a green thumb whose wife runs around on him, the locals say, “Too bad Kenny don’t have the same good luck with his wife as he has with his plants. Mebbe Kenny’d be better off with a green pecker.”

It was a small town of some 3,700 people, still largely cut off from the rest of the society. A certain sense of loneliness pervaded it. A teacher lamented the waste of time teaching the children of this sad little town: “What sense was there in memorizing the date of the rise
and fall of the Roman Empire, when the boy, grown, would milk cows for a living as had his father and grandfather before him? What logic was there in pounding decimal fractions into the head of a girl who would eventually need only to count the numbers of months of each pregnancy?” Class lines ran through the middle of Peyton Place; a handful of powerful men—the town’s factory owner, the lawyer, the editor of the newspaper, and the doctor—played poker once a week and decided what was going to happen in the town. When Betty Anderson, a local girl from the wrong side of the tracks whose father worked for Leslie Harrington (the mill owner), became pregnant after a fling with Harrington’s son, the senior Harrington handed his employee a check for $500. A furious Betty charged in to see Harrington in his office and announced that she planned to marry the son. But Harrington told her that it would require only six men to say that they also had had relations with her to make her legally a prostitute. He then tore up the check for $500 and gave her one for $250, promising that it would be $125 if she came by him again.

Mostly, the town’s secrets stayed secret with much less fuss. Constance MacKenzie, the prim, attractive young widow who ran the town’s dress shop, dreaded the idea that people might learn that in her brief time in New York she had an affair with a married man, who was the father of her daughter; another local girl was sexually assaulted and impregnated by her sinister stepfather, and the kindly local doctor decided to save the young girl’s reputation by disguising an abortion as an emergency appendectomy.

If there ever was a book that reflected the changing nature of American book business as it changed to the new high-powered world of paperbacks from the more genteel old-fashioned world of hardcover publishing, it was
Peyton Place.
It was not so much a book as an event, with a force all its own. Published as a paperback in the fall of 1957, it quickly sold 3 million copies and it kept right on selling. By the middle of 1958 its sales were over 6 million. By 1966 there were some 10 million copies in print. In years to come, as the paperback industry grew and as the capacity to promote books became an ever more sophisticated industry, there were best-sellers whose path up the best-seller list was achieved with several hundred thousand dollars in promotion costs.
Peyton Place,
by contrast, was a true popular success.

At the time of publication Ms. Metalious’s novel was perceived as being successful for the most basic of reasons: It told the blunt truth about the sexuality of a small town at a time when that was still sensational. Gradually, however, as the society evolved into the sixties
and seventies, there was a revisionist view of that success, a sense that at least some of it had been due to Ms. Metalious’s powerful and visceral comprehension of the problems faced by women in the modern world. Metalious did not exactly become a heroine or a role model to the generation of young women who emerged in the seventies determined to lead lives more independent than those of their mothers. Nonetheless, cultural detectives tracking the evolution of the feminist movement could find in her pages the emergence of independent women who dissented from the proscribed lives and limited opportunities reserved for women. Metalious, they suspected—for there was little evidence of this in the initial reviews of the book—had touched a nerve without anyone realizing it. Kenneth Davis noted in his book on the paperback revolution,
Two-Bit Culture,
that the women in
Peyton Place
“were on the cutting edge of a movement that had not yet arrived and still had no voice. They wanted more than to simply find the right man, settle down and begin breeding and keeping house.”

Rather, Davis pointed out, Metalious’s characters might have come right out of the Kinsey Report on women. They had sexual feelings and appetites that contrasted starkly with the attitudes women were then supposed to have, as set down in endless books written by men. Nor were Metalious’s women nearly as admiring of men as they were supposed to be. In fact, they often considered men unreliable and childish. They did not want to be controlled by men; they wanted to be independent and to have careers in places like New York or, even if they remained in towns like Peyton Place, to have some control over their lives and their bodies. “For perhaps the first time in popular fiction a writer was saying that women wanted sex and enjoyed it but they wanted it on their terms,” wrote Davis. “They were not passive receptacles for dominant men. To a generation fed on Mickey Spillane, for whom women counted as little more than animals, or Erskine Caldwell, whose Southern women were for the most part sluttish trash, the women of Peyton Place presented a new image. Independent, self-fulfilling, strong yet capable of love and desire, they were far from the perfect exemplars of the shining new woman that eventually followed with the onset of the feminist movement, but they were a breakthrough, a first faint glimmering that women were preparing to break out of the mold carefully prepared for them by centuries of male domination.”

As Emily Toth pointed out in her book
Inside Peyton Place,
a serious feminist reappraisal of Metalious and her work,
Peyton Place
brought very different attitudes to sexual politics than the seemingly
similar books that preceded it. It described rape not as an act of sexual pleasure but as violence; the doctor who performs an abortion is described as saving a life. In
Peyton Place,
Toth pointed out, the women who depend too greatly on men lose out, while the women who are independent are winners. Therefore, she noted,
Peyton Place
was a book before its time.

Metalious was, at first glance, an unlikely feminist hero. She never fully articulated her own vision and probably would have been surprised to find some thirty years later women at colleges reading her book not so much as literature but as part of the change in the politics of gender. With a few rare exceptions, she was not close to other women, and as her literary career progressed and her own life began to unravel, she wrote of the frustrations of women with less skill and perception than she had in her first book.

Metalious had written as she did—roughly, simply, but powerfully—because it could have been her own story. She was, by instinct, angrier and more rebellious than she herself realized, although she had always shown contempt for conventional female roles. Women were expected to be good housekeepers; Grace Metalious’s home was littered with garbage, dirty dishes, and beer cans. Women were supposed to be good mothers, putting their children above their own ambitions; Grace Metalious loved her three children in her own erratic way, but she let them do pretty much as they wished; any real supervision tended to come from neighbors. Women were supposed to be dutiful handmaidens to their husbands’ careers; Metalious made little effort in that direction. She dressed in a way that jarred small-town sensibilities—in blue jeans, checked shirts, and sneakers. She stayed home and wrote a book instead of attending polite dinner parties. She never fully articulated her own feminist vision and probably would have been surprised had someone told her that one day she would be a heroine of the women’s movement. But she was not slick and she did not know how to romanticize her own story.

She was a lower-middle-class French Canadian girl who grew up in small towns in New Hampshire, living always involuntarily in a matriarchy. The men in her family were bit players; her own father deserted the family when she was young, and she was raised by her grandmother. Her mother fantasized a better life but slipped into alcoholism at a relatively early age. Grace loved to read and fancied that she would be a writer one day; at age thirteen she had already begun a historical novel.

In high school Grace was bright and different, and teachers noticed her. Nonetheless, a literary future seemed out of reach. It
seemed dimmer still when in February 1943, at the age of eighteen, she married George Metalious, a high school friend, because she was pregnant. When George Metalious enlisted and went off to war, Grace was stunned by his decision—she was not caught up in the patriotic cause, and remembering her father, she saw her husband’s desire to serve as an escape from family responsibility. She worked at different jobs and raised her daughter Marsha. When George Metalious came back from the war, sure that his army salary had been salted away for the down payment on a dream house, he was stunned to find that she had saved none of it. Rather, she had been supporting her extended family with his allotment checks. “How could you be so stupid!” he shouted at her.