Fifties (95 page)

They were not unlike many couples trying to make their way after the war. George had come back to a child and a wife he barely knew. They struggled for a time, had a second child, both of them held jobs, and yet they could save very little. Finally, it was decided that the only way to succeed was for George to go to the University of New Hampshire on the GI bill. His family would follow and his wife would take a job to support him—so common an arrangement in those days that there was even a phrase for it: PHTS, Putting Hubbies Through School. But Metalious was different; for above all she wanted to write; it was the one way she could escape the dreary world that seemed to be closing in around her.

If other young couples were caught up in the excitement of those years, living in cramped housing with young children, eating cheap meals thrown together from cans, always sure that their current sacrifice would be rewarded eventually, when the husband got his degree, Grace Metalious was having none of it. She hated being a poor student’s wife. “I am trapped, I screamed silently,” she later said of those years. “I am trapped in a cage of poverty and mediocrity, and if I don’t get out, I’ll die.”

She was already writing, absolutely sure that she was going to be a novelist. Her work habits were excellent. She wrote every day. The odds against her must have seemed hopeless. She had no college education. She knew no one in the literary world. She was utterly without literary connections. She had no immediate literary role models. Her chances of success seemed ever slimmer, particularly after 1950 when their third child arrived, when by all rights she should have stopped writing and been crushed by the terrible odds against her. Yet she kept writing, feeling the loneliness of someone virtually without friends and without a support system. But she had several qualities that kept her going—a fierce drive, a belief that in
writing and publishing there was liberation, an innate talent and shrewdness that were not to be underestimated, and finally a love of books.

In 1950 their third child had arrived. When George graduated, they were so poor that they had to borrow $300 to pay his debts so the university would release his degree. His first job, as a teacher at a tiny school in Belmont, paid $2,500, with an additional $1,100 thrown in for coaching the baseball team.

By 1953, she began to send manuscripts to publishers and began the search for a literary agent. She surveyed various writers’ magazines and finally came up with a name, Jacques Chambrun, an agent with a good deal of charm and a most unfortunate reputation for siphoning off the earnings of his writers. By early 1955 she had sent him her first novel, a rather routine semiautobiographical story about a young couple struggling through GI-bill life at a New England college.

Entitled
The Quiet Place,
it was rejected everywhere it was sent. Around the same time, she sent off her second novel, entitled
The Tree and the Blossom.
She had read
King’s Row,
an extremely popular novel of the forties that dealt with the incestuous relationship of an adolescent girl and her father. By chance a similar incident had occurred in the small town where Metalious lived: A young girl had shot her father to protect herself and the rest of her family. In that, Metalious seized on a sensational incident that would give her novel a special darkness. The novel, which was renamed
Peyton Place,
was mailed to publishers in May 1955.

It was turned down at several houses, but a young woman named Leona Nevler, who had a good eye, read it while she was working as a free-lance manuscript reader at Lippincott. It was impressive, Ms. Nevler thought: There was something poignant, vital, and authentic about the book. But it was not right for Lippincott, an unusually staid house. A few days later, Ms. Nevler was interviewed for a full-time job by Kitty Messner, the head of Julian Messner. She had founded the small publishing house with her husband, Julian Messner, and had divorced him, but she had continued to work with him. When he died she took over the company; so when Ms. Nevler mentioned the book, Kitty Messner, one of the first women to head a publishing company, was unusually receptive to the theme, which dealt with a young woman’s desire for a better life. Ms. Messner, a formidable woman of very considerable independence, made a note of it, called Chambrun, got a copy, and stayed up all night reading it. She understood immediately the force of the book
and made Chambrun an offer. “I know this is a big book,” she told him. “I have to have it.” Chambrun cabled Metalious, who was so excited that she forgot to ask how much her advance was—the answer was $1,500. He told her to come to New York as soon as she could to sign the contracts, which she did. She was awed by the fashionably elegant Kitty Messner, who wore jackets and pants—not, as one friend noted, off the rack, but beautifully tailored by a man’s tailor for her. She seemed, particularly to this vulnerable young woman from a small New England town, to be the epitome of a New York career woman. It was mid-August and Metalious felt wilted by New York’s steamy heat; by contrast, Messner “looked as if she had never had a hot uncomfortable moment in her life. As for me, my armpits itched, I stuck to my chair, and my hair had gone all limp.”

The early editing did not go well. Nevler had made a number of notes on how she thought it could be improved and tightened, but the relationship did not work out well. Metalious took the editing as a sign that Nevler had really never liked the book. Nevler had a series of lunches and dinners where they tried to work together but where Ms. Metalious ended up drinking and not eating. Later she decided that what she had encountered was the first sign of an increasingly serious problem with alcohol. Soon Ms. Messner took over the book herself.

Messner thought the book might sell 3,000 copies—standard for a first novel—but editor Howard Goodkind, who handled the publicity, thought it could be promoted into a best-seller; he suggested spending an additional $5,000 to get a publicist to create a special promotion campaign for the book. That sum was a considerable risk in those days, but Messner agreed. A man named Bud Brandt was hired and he in turn got the AP’s veteran reporter Hal Boyle to go up to Gilmanton to do a prepublication story on the author.

In the course of his visit, Metalious casually predicted to Boyle that her husband would be let go as the local school principal (as he soon was) and perhaps the reason was that a number of powerful people in town disapproved of her—she behaved differently, she dressed differently, and she was said to be writing a book. In Boyle’s subsequent article, the story had been mutated sufficiently to eliminate any doubt: George Metalious had been fired from his job as a principal because of his wife’s book, which tore the veneer off the respectability of this small town. The publicity machine was ready to roll. The ads for the book employed a series of headlines reflecting the controversial nature of the book. By the time it was published in late September, it shot up some best-seller lists and a number of
studios were bidding for the film rights. It sold 60,000 copies in the first ten days. The reviews were generally respectful. Carlos Baker, the distinguished Hemingway scholar, placed Metalious in the tradition of American writers who had helped expose the underside of small-town American life. Interestingly enough, a critic named Sterling North, writing in the
New York World Telegram,
who had earlier praised blunt language when used by male writers, was appalled by Metalious’s use of the same words: “Never before in my memory has a young mother published a book in language approximately that of a longshoreman on a bellicose binge.”

Fame and success were sweet at first. The people in New York were touched by the contrast between her sweetness, and indeed vulnerability, and the harsh quality of her life as depicted in the book. All her dreams seemed to be coming true. She sold the book to the movies for $250,000, and the first check was for $75,000. She seemed to take particular pleasure in taking it to various stores in Gilmanton asking the owners to cash it for her. But if she had been well prepared to overcome the adversities of her life, she proved significantly less able to deal with the pressures of success. “This book business,” she wrote friends in November 1956, “is some evil form of insanity.” Everyone suddenly seemed to want something from her and wanted her to play the role of a sexy writer.

The writer of
Peyton Place
was supposed to be both sexy and glamorous, after all, and Grace Metalious was a rather plain young woman. (She would tell the makeup men and women in television studios to make her look beautiful.) She was uneasy about the press and television appearances that were a part of the book’s promotion and she particularly disliked it when someone asked whether or not the book was autobiographical. She made an appearance on an early television talk show called
Night Beat,
hosted by a young man named Mike Wallace, then gaining a reputation for himself as a tough interviewer. She thought she had been assured he would not ask the autobiography question. Almost as soon as the interview began, Wallace asked her, “Grace, tell me, is
Peyton Place
your autobiography?” She struck back by calling him Myron, his real name, which she had been told beforehand he did not like to be called, and by asking him how many times he had been married, another sensitive point.

Even before the book’s publication, her marriage had started falling apart. There had been an affair with a local farmer. Liberated by her success and her changed financial position, she ended her marriage, took up with a disc jockey, and married him. She began to
spend money freely; at the same time she stopped writing. Years later George Metalious referred to that period in her life as “the tinsel years.” Driven mostly by Hollywood producer Jerry Wald, she eventually wrote a listless sequel she was not proud of, called
Return to Peyton Place.
At the last minute a writer named Warren Miller was brought in to doctor it into a readable book. Nonetheless
Return
also sold well, though not as well as its predecessor.

For all of her fame and the attention, Metalious’s emotional needs did not abate. “Our mother had to be told with the consistency of a flowing brook that echoes, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’” her daughter Marsha remembered. “We did love her strongly, but after a while ‘I love you’ became a ludicrous expression—worn to its nap like a rug traveled on day after day, night after night.”

Her work habits continued to deteriorate. When T. J. Martin, the disc jockey whom she had married, tried to get her to work, she would yell at him, “Who the hell are you? Who appointed you my guiding light?” Soon she was always seen with a glass in her hand, usually with Canadian Club and Seven-Up in it.

By 1960, George Metalious had come back into her life, and she published
The Tight White Collar,
which became her favorite book. It sold well, but not nearly as well as
Peyton Place.
To shrewd editors, it was obvious that her audience was beginning to slip away. Soon she had serious financial problems. When
Peyton Place
had been a success, she had worked out an agreement with her lawyer to place her and her family on a budget of $18,000 a year, a good deal of money then. But she never lived by the agreement and had paid almost nothing in taxes; she was said to owe the government $163,400, plus 6 percent interest. Now, ever more fearful of the government, she tried to return to writing. She finished
No Adam in Eden,
a book about her French Canadian family, which was published in September 1963. Messner passed on it, albeit selling the rights to Pocket Books for $50,000, and the movie rights went for $150,000. Her unhappiness, indeed her increasing lack of self-esteem, one shrewd critic noted, now showed in her work. “It would seem that the writer hates women, individually and en masse. If she had anything kind or understanding to say about them, I confess to having forgotten what it was, so weighed down are all the female characters under a load of sin, lechery, selfishness and cruelty.” The remaining year of her life was sad. Metalious left her again in the fall of 1963, and a few months later, in February 1964, she died of chronic liver disease.

THIRTY-NINE

I
T WAS ALL PART
of a vast national phenomenon. The number of families moving into the middle class—that is, families with more than five thousand dollars in annual earnings after taxes—was increasing at the rate of 1.1 million a year,
Fortune
noted. By the end of 1956 there were 16.6 million such families in the country, and by 1959, in the rather cautious projections of
Fortune
’s editors, there would be 20 million such families—virtually half the families in America.
Fortune
hailed “an economy of abundance” never seen before in any country in the world. It reflected a world of “optimistic philoprogenitive [the word means that Americans were having a lot of children] high spending, debt-happy, bargain-conscious, upgrading, American consumers.”

In all of this no one was paying very close attention to what the new home-oriented, seemingly drudgery-free life was doing to the
psyche and outlook of American women. The pictures of them in magazines showed them as relentlessly happy, liberated from endless household tasks by wondrous new machines they had just bought. Since the photos showed them happy, and since there was no doubt that there were more and better household appliances every year, it was presumed that they were in fact happy. That was one of the more interesting questions of the era, for the great migration to the suburbs reflected a number of profound trends taking place in the society, not the least important of which was the changing role of women, particularly middle-class women. Up until then during this century women had made fairly constant progress in the spheres of politics, education, and employment opportunities. Much of their early struggle focused on the right of married women to work (and therefore to take jobs away from men who might be the heads of families). In the thirties a majority of states, twenty-six of forty-eight, still had laws prohibiting the employment of married women. In addition, a majority of the nation’s public schools, 43 percent of its public utilities, and 13 percent of its department stores enforced rules on not hiring of wives. A poll of both men and women in the thirties that asked “Do you approve of a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her?” showed that 82 percent of the men and women polled disapproved.