Just One Catch (46 page)

Joe is the one man she forgives. For months, she left messages with him. He did not respond. In the spring of 1968, he dropped by and said he would have given her a blurb “for sure,” but he'd been away in Hollywood, working on a screenplay. He had not received her messages. Joe was always honest, Denham said, and “good.” “Probably he really would've given me a blurb for my novel, if I'd reached him.”

*   *   *

THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD
—the mid- to late 1960s—the Gourmet Club weathered several changes. From time to time, the charter members suggested potential recruits. Guests came and went. For a while, the composer Hershy Kay (orchestrator of
Evita
and
A Chorus Line
) ate with the group, but Mel Brooks wanted him out. “Except for Joe, all of us are quite short,” Brooks explained. “Some of us are very short. Hershy is
too
short.” The truth is, Kay had broken one of the club's sacred rules: He had eaten from another man's plate.

One night, after years of preparing weekly feasts, Ngoot Lee turned to his companions and said, “Wassah matter with you fucking guys, you got no fucking class? I'm cooking my fucking ass off for you fucking guys, not once not any of you fucking guys got the brains to take me out to dinner? You schmucks! You guys ever hear about Mother's Day?”

Joe said, “Ngoot, you're right. Next week, we will take you to the best restaurant in Chinatown.”

They did. Once the meal was over and the tab paid, the men pushed back their chairs. They asked Ngoot if he was happy. “No!” he said. “Not one of you fucking guys thought to bring me one
farshtunkener
flower for Mother's Day!” The men apologized and promised to do better the next year. On the way uptown, the car stalled at a traffic light. “Hey, Ngoot, get out and pull it!” Joe quipped, to everyone's delight.

Shortly afterward, Ngoot announced he had gotten a job as an advertising consultant for a department store and could no longer cook for this lousy bunch of “hot dog eaters.” He agreed to recommend Chinatown restaurants as long as club members refused to tell other “round-eye[s]” about them. He did not want the restaurants spoiled by tourists. This arrangement worked fine, until one night Joe told the others that Ngoot had taken him to an establishment that served the best lobster in the world. Ngoot had sworn him to secrecy, even within their group, because this place was so small and special. Joe's friends did not believe him, so he led them to a joint called New Sun, which resembled a luncheonette. He asked the waiter to bring them the same meal Ngoot Lee had ordered the night they'd gone there. “The soup was superb, the braised crab perfect, the pork tender, crisp, and most delicious, and then … the lobster, steamed in lemon oil and other exquisite spices. Marvelous,” said Speed Vogel. But Joe was frowning. This was not the lobster he had eaten before. He spoke to the waiter. Another pair of lobsters appeared on the table, served this time Cantonese-style, with egg, scallions, minced pork, and black-bean sauce. “Absolutely the best [lobster] we had ever had. We left nothing but the shells, and these were picked clean,” Speed said. Joe said, “Just take it easy, guys. It's not the right dish.” He spoke to the waiter once more. Speed groaned; he couldn't eat another bite. “Yeah, just wait till you taste this,” Joe assured him. More lobsters arrived, prepared very simply this time, sautéed in chicken fat. “Oh boy, that's the one I meant,” Joe said, and dug in. He was the only member of the Gourmet Club who did not use chopsticks, because they were “too slow.”

The following morning, Joe got a call from Ngoot. “You Judas prick,” Ngoot said. “I take pity on you, you animal. I take you this best place in Chinatown, you
gonif,
you swear you would not betray me. I'll never trust you again, you
dreck
!”

“Who told you?” Joe asked. “Was it Speed?”

“None of them fucking guys. You schmuck. [B]y now all fucking Chinatown knows about four crazy round-eyes … that ate up all the lobsters in town, you fuck. How fucking smart do you think I have to be?”

The Gourmet Club was not good at keeping rules, but the members were brilliant at setting them: no waiting for latecomers; no grabbing the best pieces of chicken and lobster without eating your rice; no eating from another man's plate; no women.

“Once—and only once—I managed to find out where the club was meeting, and I crashed the dinner,” said Anne Bancroft, whom Brooks married in 1964. “As soon as I came in the restaurant, it was as if a blanket had descended on the gathering. Dead silence. Faces falling. I turned around and left without eating.”

Guests were allowed as long as they were male, and as long as one of the members vouched for them in advance. Brooks's good friend Carl Reiner was welcome whenever he came to town. “The members [were] very polite,” Reiner said. “Once, I had a seat facing the kitchen door and I looked through and saw a rat strolling across the floor. They immediately offered me a chair facing the other way.”

Another rule: You were not allowed to complain about ordering too much food. This was known as “Heller's Law of Too Much Is Never Enough.”

“I'd rather have a bad meal out than a good meal at home,” Joe used to say. “When you're out, it's a party. Also, I like a big mediocre meal more than a small good one.”

Success, he insisted, was never having to eat with anybody you didn't want to see.

Most nights, after Chinese food, the men walked to Little Italy for lemon ice in paper cups from their favorite place on Mulberry Street. Joe would keep them out all night if he could. “From the very start, we accepted Joe on Speed Vogel's word that he would behave, and Speed lied to us, because he did not behave,” Brooks liked to say. “He took the best pieces of everything and laughed in our faces.” One night, the men were amazed when Joe rose over a tureen of steaming soup on the table. He picked up a bowl and the ladle. “Here, I'll serve,” he said. His friends had never seen Joe so generous at dinner. He filled the bowl, sat down, and handed the ladle to Reiner. “Now,
you
serve,” he said, and began to slurp his soup.

*   *   *

IN THE SEPTEMBER
1966 issue of
Esquire,
a seven-page excerpt of
Something Happened
appeared, featuring a protagonist named Joe Slocum. Slocum believed he “deserved” punishment as a child, “although [he] did not know what for,” and feared, as an adult, “that someone [was] going to find out something about [him]” that would mean “the end,” though he couldn't imagine what. “Something happened to me somewhere that robbed me of courage and left me with a fear of discovery,” he admitted. “[T]here are so many things I don't want to find out.”

Dostoevsky's influence on Joe was confirmed by an epigraph from the Russian master: “It was then, while sipping my tea, that I formulated to myself in so many words the idea that I neither know nor feel what evil is.” Joe was also reading Beckett for the first time, amazed by the long, mellifluous monologues in
Molloy, Malone Dies,
and
The Unnamable.

Slocum is a World War II vet (formerly stationed in San Angelo, Texas), now working in the corporate world. He is doing well at his job despite the fact that there are many people in his office of whom he is afraid. He has an unhappy wife and unhappy children. He is unhappily aware that it is “almost impossible anymore to rebel and make any kind of impression. They'd simply fire and forget you as soon as you started. They would file you away.” Individuals have sacrificed freedom for high salaries and lengthy vacations: “People in the company like to live well,” he says. “We
are
those punched cards they pay us with.”

Slocum is “very good with the techniques of deception,” personally and professionally. His job depends on them. “[M]any people in the company … fall victim to their own propaganda,” he says. “Every time we launch a new advertising campaign … people inside the company are the first ones to be taken in by it.” He attempts to quell anxiety by starting affairs with girls he meets in the office. He is “experienced,” he says, and “can control and direct things” sexually more than he could as a boy, but the thrills are perfunctory. Wistfully, he says his wife “used to be very pretty when she was young.”

Such harsh honesty about middle age and the fate of many in the “greatest generation” (“I am one of those people … who are without ambition and have no hope”) was surprising in 1966, coming from a man with a growing reputation, among idealistic young people, as a cultural spokesperson. The excerpt could be read as a cautionary tale. It could be read as a portrait of certain American realities. But it could not be read as satire in the antic mode of
Catch-22.

Joe's words nestled among articles on “how our red-blooded campus heroes are dodging the draft,” how Richard Farina was a “mystical child of darkness,” how Marvel Comics had emerged as “twentieth century mythology.” Bob Hope was described as an entertainer who would “play anywhere—even Vietnam, where he came in two laughs under par last Christmas.” A cartoon showed a gruff present-day soldier speaking to an army chaplain who might have walked off the beaches at Normandy: “I don't give a damn what they said during World War II, Padre, this is my foxhole and I can be an atheist if I want to!” A reporter insisted Robert Kennedy was forming a “Shadow Cabinet” in a possible bid for the presidency. A fashion spread said white crew-necked sweaters were “in” on campus that fall; the photographs featured women squeezed helplessly between two well-groomed young men (not draft dodgers, but also not boys who had to worry about going to war).

Joe's excerpt served as bitter commentary on the rest of the magazine:

I've got anxiety: I repress hysteria. I've got wars on my mind and summer riots, peace movements and L.S.D. I've got old age to face. My boy, though still an innocent and unsuspecting child, is going to have to spend from two to six years of his life in the Army or Navy, and probably at war. I've got the decline of American culture and the guilt and ineptitude of the whole Government of the United States to carry around on my poor shoulders. And I find I'm being groomed for a better job.

And I find that I want it.

*   *   *

IN
WORLD OF OUR FATHERS
,
Irving Howe wrote that the “first Yiddish stage production in New York was held on August 12, 1882, at Turn Hall on East Fourth Street between Second and Third avenues.” Yiddish theater “betrayed a mixture of shrewdness and innocence … vivid trash and raw talent,” and contained “hardly a glimmer of serious realism.” It appealed to the audience's appetite for “spectacle, declamation, and high gesture”; it was born of Eastern European traditions in which “theatricality had long been suspect as a threat to social discipline”; it was a subversive art that “[crept] into culture” in “oblique ways.”

On October 16, 1968, in Broadway's Ambassador Theater, Joseph Heller's play,
We Bombed in New Haven,
opened, meeting all of Howe's criteria for Yiddish theater—yet it was not talked about in terms of the deepest traditions from which it sprang. Instead, it was seen by audiences and critics as either an avant-garde production, in the vein of Beckett, Pirandello, and the Theatre of the Absurd, or as antiwar agitprop. Reviewers fought about it.

The play had premiered the previous year in New Haven. At a dinner party during a visit to Yale in December 1966, Joe mentioned to Robert Brustein, dean of the Yale Drama School, that he had been working on a stage adaptation of
Catch-22,
trying to distill from the book scenes about repression and death (the novel's central themes, as he saw them). One version of the play featured misreadings from Shakespeare interspersed among quotes from the book. Brustein expressed interest. A month later, Joe had written a sketchy draft of a farce called “Bomber in New Haven”—a completed first act and an outline for the rest of the play. He said it was a “manuscript to be read like a novel.” Brustein encouraged Joe to flesh it out. Four months later, Joe sent him a full draft. Brustein was so excited by it—particularly by the second act, which turned the first act's comedy on its head, the way Snowden's death silenced
Catch-22
's laughter—he called Philip Roth and read it to him over the phone. Encouraged by Roth's response, Brustein invited Joe to be Playwright-in-Residence at Yale in the fall of 1967, where he would teach classes and work with the Yale Drama School to produce his play. (With Roth's help, Joe also secured some teaching work during this period at the University of Pennsylvania.)

Some of the Yale students questioned Brustein's decision. In his talk at Yale's Calhoun College, the previous December, Joe, wearing a green blazer, a striped shirt, and a tie, said little about the craft of writing, presenting himself instead as a “born promotion man.”

“He's incredible,” one student said after the talk. “He comes on like a real Madison Avenue fat cat.… If I were the author of
Catch-22,
I'd bill myself as a born American author.”

“Either that guy is wearing a mask or he didn't write that book,” said another young undergrad. (When apprised of this comment, George Mandel said, “Of course he's masked. He'd be an open wound otherwise.”)

Brustein had made the Yale Drama School a center for a theater of protest against the Vietnam War, staging, among others, Megan Terry's
Viet Rock,
Barbara Garson's
Macbird,
and the Living Theatre's
Paradise Now.
Joe's play, with its antiwar sentiments, fit the program beautifully. Besides, Brustein said, “Heller's script offers a perfect skeleton for using the improvisational and
commedia dell' arte
techniques we are interested in.”