Just One Catch (27 page)

For Jacquet and a handful of companies—Better Publications, Timely Comics, Novelty, Hillman, and Fox—Mandel worked on “Doc Strange,” “The Black Marvel,” “The Woman in Red,” “The Patriot,” “Voodoo Man,” “The Angel,” and “Sons of the Gods.” These were some of the projects Joe had seen him prepare for back at the Club Alteo.

Other gifted young men in Jacquet's stable included Mickey Spillane, Carl Burgos, and Bill Everett. Spillane said Jacquet, a Douglas MacArthur look-alike (right down to the corncob pipe), “never could understand artists and writers.” He was a pure businessman; when Mandel, Spillane, and others went off to war, he replaced them with the cheapest labor he could find. “They had a bunch of creeps come in there … and they took over all our stuff,” Spillane told an interviewer. “They'd formed a union, that's what the problem was, and we were going to kill that union. Because these guys, they didn't have the talent … we had, I'll tell you that!”

After the war, Mandel worked his way back into freelance drawing (at smaller wages than before), but he was itching to be “literary”—that is,
serious,
in comics, painting, or writing. Plus, he had discovered his injury made it harder for him to visualize, but easier to talk, write—torrents of language poured from him. Each time Joe visited him, he marveled at how much his friend had improved. He had come a long way from the days when restaurant noise unnerved him to the point that he'd slap at a waitress with his menu and shout that nothing pleased him, nothing, nothing.

Miki helped him. She typed the expanding manuscript of the novel he had told Joe about on his visit to Penn State. Initially, it was called “The Hook and the Tower,” but it was retitled, at an editor's suggestion,
Flee the Angry Strangers.
Bobbs-Merrill brought out a hardcover edition of the book in 1952. The following year, with the appearance of a Bantam mass-market paperback edition (featuring a Harry Schaare cover, like that of a comic book: a woman shooting heroin), the novel got noticed by journals and prominent critics. “All [his friends] were ecstatically astonished when the paperback reprint rights … sold for a price of $25,000,” Joe wrote. “His share of half that seemed a fortune. And …
was indeed
a fortune to someone living largely on disability payments for his war wound, and to someone like me … [working] as an advertising copywriter.”

In time, critics saw
Flee the Angry Strangers
as a proto-Beat novel, capturing, before Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, and others, what Thomas Newhouse called the cultural “transition between … [a] wail of hopelessness” after the war and a “freedom to choose dissolution” rather than middle-class life.

Mandel's protagonist, eighteen-year-old Diane Lattimer, a drug-hazed habitué of the jazz clubs on Bleecker and MacDougal streets, hustles by day and is, despite her self-destructiveness, a rare feminist heroine in the fiction of the time. Mandel's comic-book training showed in the larger-than-life appetites of his characters, in their heroic embrace of instantaneous pleasure (a kind of personalized justice for all) and their rejection of society's straight-and-narrow paths. These qualities would characterize all of Beat writing; the Beats' link to the comic-book ethos of the time—through figures like George Mandel—is not accidental.

Flee the Angry Strangers
uncovered other crosscurrents swirling through American popular writing in the early 1950s—for, just as Mickey Spillane smuggled comic-book action into the hard-boiled detective genre, the values of proletarian fiction had stiffened comic heroes' spines. Mandel's characters encompassed each of these strains; they were amalgams of the Human Torch, Mike Hammer, and Nelson Algren's Frankie Machine. The combination sowed a path for the Beats, who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, would change America's popular vocabulary.

Mandel's people spoke “jive”: jazz talk. They didn't
provide their partners with sexual delight;
they
sent
them. They didn't smoke
marijuana;
they indulged in
pod,
a term that degraded into
pot
after many “engorged [mis]pronunciations [by] its consumers,” Mandel said. The novel's language was so strange, his publishers asked him to include a lexicon in the back of the book. Later, he regretted he didn't accede to this request, because soon, “Madison Avenue” began to “spoil” the “flavor” of jive's “perceptive music.”

Other crosscurrents began to flow: Underground hip became a rich source for mainstream advertising.

Since the days of Charles Ward Apthorpe, and even before, America had been a scene of clashing images, but now the country was getting
really good
at producing these images, and presenting them in easy-to-get, inexpensive formats. The big books coming out of Manhattan's midtown publishers in handy paperback form—
The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity
—showcased an America where values rooted in land still held sway over human destinies; the comic books, genre stories, and early Beat poetry—in throwaway tabloid formats—emerging from artists and writers, several of whom lived in the Village, pictured urban alleyways as free zones where the individual could be an outlaw hero; while the ads, many created by aspiring novelists and painters, packaged in East Side offices and sent to magazines and television stations, offered the accumulation of goods as the secret to bliss and America's world dominance.

From his perch above the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Joe kept an eye on all this. The culture's variety impressed him, as well as the darker patterns he saw, like scratches in the ice below, in the city's (and perhaps the nation's) mood.

For example, he understood that, for a segment of middle-class American women who wanted to be valued for their “natural” looks, but to whom businessmen were banking on selling millions of dollars' worth of hair dye, the catch phrase “Does she … or doesn't she?” was irresistible because it was titillating without being
too
naughty. He also understood that a whole other group of American women whose lives had been junked by the war and its family upheavals had no truck with such cuteness. For them, the only thing that mattered was “Nembutal goofballs and pod.” Sad, absurd, diverse—what American novelist had successfully gathered the country's currents, like a Coney Island hawker snagging all the cotton candy and wrapping it around a single cardboard stick? In his spare time, he reread Kafka and Céline, as well as Evelyn Waugh. He wrote no fiction.

*   *   *

“AN OLD LINE,”
Tom Messner says. “In the fifties, everyone wanted to write a novel; in the seventies, a screenplay; in the nineties, a business plan. Ad men—to wildly generalize—seek fame and fortune. And the novel [in the 1950s] they view[ed] as the quickest way. I don't think many reflect[ed] on the
art
of the novel.” For one thing, it was too easy to be seduced by corporate perks—the long lunches, the bottles of scotch stashed in file drawers.

Messner recalls a book called
Advertising Man,
by Jack Dillon, and a review of the book by Israel Horowitz. In the review, Horowitz said copywriters were men who did things well that were not worth doing.

But this view undersold the business. The business “sought people who were funny, who could make things out of nothing when there was nothing unique to say, who understood TV, which the old guys didn't, who could find some notion or manner of expression that could guarantee rapid success,” Messner says. The children of the well-to-do went into finance or medicine or law. Many ad writers prided themselves on the fact that they were the “sons and daughters of a lot of working-class people (Italians, Jews, Irish),” people “who could
think.
”

“It took … the Jews with their great imaginations and dramatic writing skills and the powerhouse Italian artists to join up, take over, and make advertising the [country's] preferred entertainment,” Mary Wells insists, unapologetic about her cultural generalizations.

Messner notes, “World War II vets were naturally the drivers of the business in that era. [In later years,] one that I worked for—Carl Ally—even imagined he was Yossarian.”

Genuinely heroic figures: Joe Daly, Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy.

So the ad people earned their perks. You couldn't blame them for straying into temptation. It wasn't unusual or surprising to find older men having dinner with younger women in Madison Avenue restaurants, especially on Thursday nights, says one old copywriter. He called Thursdays “Cheater's Night,” figuring men were having dinner with their girlfriends prior to spending weekends locked away in the suburbs with children, pets, and wives.

In those days, there were no direct-dial phones in the offices. This aided and abetted nocturnal meanderings. At 5:30, when the company switchboard closed, a person could call out, but no one could call in. It was hard for a wife to check on her husband's whereabouts, or to be certain he was not working late.

In contrast to this, the sexual culture blocks away, at Columbia and Barnard, was characterized by frustration, ignorance, and tentative rebellion—true across much of the country, if the national reaction to the first Kinsey Report was any indication. In the early 1950s, police had to be summoned to Barnard to quell panty raids that had gotten out of hand. Mobs of boys, tanked up on testosterone and alcohol, moved up Broadway, stopping traffic, and planted themselves outside Barnard dormitories, shouting to see women's underwear. In his memoir
New York in the Fifties,
Dan Wakefield, who joined a mob one night, recalled that “girls came to the windows of the dorms, some of them tossing down tokens of intimate apparel, like morsels of meat to a pack of baying hounds.” Compared to
these
desperate rituals—which spread across U.S. college campuses in 1952 and 1953—clandestine dinners seemed the height of civilization to the women and men of Madison Avenue.

The backlash against panty raids in newspapers and political speeches reflected the generally repressive national mood Joe McCarthy and others had been able to exploit. “Why aren't [the panty raiders] in the Army if they have so little to do?” asked
U.S. News & World Report.
College kids, unable to control their sexual urges, were blamed for giving the nation's enemies comfort and undermining U.S. efforts in Korea.

But students weren't the only ones challenging conventional attitudes. The January-February 1954 issue of
Partisan Review
featured a short story by Mary McCarthy entitled “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself.” In it, the characters spoke openly about diaphragms, “female contraceptive[s], a plug.”
Such words,
in pages that conveyed the deepest thinking of the day, from Lionel Trilling, William Phillips, and Irving Howe!

Then there was Trilling himself, discoursing on the Kinsey Report—again, in
Partisan Review
—calling its appearance “an event of great importance in our culture,” a balm whose “permissive effect” might overcome the “sexual ignorance which exists among us” and create the possibility of a healthy “community of sexuality” in the country.

Mainstream magazines such as
Reader's Digest
weighed in on Kinsey and ran articles about abortion. The pieces were both reactionary and exploratory, but they indicated a surprising new openness about sexual subjects.

In this atmosphere, men and women Joe Heller's age, having married, as they thought they were supposed to do, now starting families and working their way into the heart of American success, naturally wondered if the social contract had changed just as they'd signed it. Were they
really
bound by their signatures? How bound were they?

Corporate culture encouraged
having it all.
Not only that, it provided multiple opportunities. Calvin Trillin, who worked at
Time
in the 1950s, recalled “there was lots of underground romantic stuff.… Working at
Time,
you had to be in close quarters with fifty people through the week. There were late closings, time spent with feet up on the desk.… You didn't know people were involved [with each other] until there was some awful scene in the hall or you got an invitation to a wedding.”

In 1998, Joe admitted to British journalist Lynn Barber that he'd had “affairs” during his nearly ten years in the advertising business. “[T]here were not that many.… [I]t was part of the male culture,” he said. “I was working in New York City in an atmosphere where men did that. We'd have parties and a couple would go into a room together.… I never had any wish to end my marriage.” At the time, Shirley “never accurately detected” his affairs. She was too busy raising Erica and Ted.

Where sexual mores were concerned, the New York ad world (driven, as Tom Messner says, by World War II vets) was an extension of the army. The men reasoned that as long as they did their duty—this time, for wives, kids, extended families—they were entitled to R & R in the city, as they had been in Cairo, Rome, or Capri.

Joe enjoyed himself, but he insisted he was not a “womanizer.” In 1975, he told
Playboy
interviewer Sam Merrill, “I would … say that my imagination … [kept] me from making foolish mistakes.” Obviously, Shirley would not have agreed.

*   *   *

WQXR
, the classical radio station Joe liked to listen to, started its broadcast days with Aaron Copland's
Fanfare for the Common Man
: a rousing send-off to work (with the children crying in another room).

In Joe's third year at
Time,
the company imposed a salary freeze, marshaling start-up funds for its new publication,
Sports Illustrated.
Employees grumbled; investors worried about company morale. At a sales convention, Joe was asked to set up projection equipment for slide shows to accompany various presentations, including one by Henry Luce. Sternly, the Great Man told his audience “publishing was the business” of the Time-Life Corporation, and he was not going to sacrifice
Sports Illustrated
just to ease investors' fears or soothe the ruffled feathers of his employees.