Just One Catch (49 page)

“But will you mean it?” his son asks.

Starkey replies “slowly, truthfully”: “I won't know. I won't ever really know.”

In what could only be heard, in 1968, as a rejection of U.S. culture and leadership, Starkey's son, bundled off to war, says, “Bastard.”

*   *   *

THE 1960S
, as a distinct cultural period in America, as opposed to a set of dates on a calendar, is hard to bracket. Did the era's immense social and political energies culminate in the
Eagle
's landing in the Sea of Tranquillity in 1969? Abate (sanely or sadly, depending on one's view) in the rout of liberals in the elections of 1968? In the Kent State killings in 1970, or the announcement of the Beatles' breakup later that year? Or did they crumble, once and for all, in the rubble of the Nixon administration, following a minor break-in at the Watergate Hotel in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972? Historians, critics, and writers have suggested each of these moments, and more, as the period's capstone.

For Joe Heller, the closing of his play, spurring a wholehearted recommitment to fiction writing, was a watershed. Sixties fashions would pass; what remained for Joe were a love of literature and the discipline of writing. In a telling anecdote, journalist Tom Nolan reported that in 1969, in a corner booth of a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard in L.A., “maybe a booth at which Dash Hammett once ate with Lilly Hellman—[I] had dinner with … Joseph Heller. Heller spoke of a recent meeting in San Francisco with the Jefferson Airplane, who were fans of his, and who tried to induce him to take LSD. ‘But it'll make you want to write,' the Airplane crew told the author. ‘I already want to write,' Heller said.”

Another watershed for Joe was the destruction of Dustin Hoffman's apartment on West Eleventh Street on March 6, 1970. Joe had met the actor through Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, who lived on West Eleventh at the time (Bancroft had starred with Hoffman in Mike Nichols's movie
The Graduate
). “[Hoffman and I became] good friends [because] we have never been close,” Joe wrote. “We have never worked together … leaving each of us with an unmarred respect for the judgment and consideration of the other that is probably unwarranted by both.” The foundation of their friendship, he said, lay in the “ground rules”: “he [didn't] have to read my novels, and I [didn't] have to see his movies.”

Just past noon on that chilly March day in 1970, a woman named Marie-Thérèse Thiesselin, whom Hoffman and his wife had hired as a baby-sitter for their daughter, Karina, was standing in Hoffman's living room at number 16. Suddenly, the fireplace lurched at her, a violent blossoming of bricks. Shock made her strangely calm. She picked up Hoffman's pet terrier, O.J., walked into the kitchen, and phoned Hoffman (Karina was not at home). Then she walked out on the street, where she saw a gaping hole in the building next door, debris strewn across the pavement, flames licking the windows of number 18. Soon, the country would learn that members of the Weathermen had been manufacturing bombs in the basement of that building. By accident, one had gone off.

From the air, from his perch in a B-25 during World War II, Joe rarely knew if he had hit a little bridge. On the ground in Greenwich Village, the mayhem was impossible to miss and even harder to absorb. As Hoffman and his neighbors salvaged whatever they could from their apartments, they wondered if other blasts were imminent and might eliminate the street entirely.

In the aftermath, city officials discovered, buried in the waste, sixty sticks of live dynamite.

Some time later, speaking of the bombers on
The Dick Cavett Show,
Hoffman said he didn't feel anger, but fear—for all of us, our families, our nation. His words seemed a valediction for the decade. The dissidents at number 18 had benefited from the “rising income, rising productivity, [and] rising consumption”
Fortune
magazine, in 1961, had predicted would lead to contentment and glorious achievement. What could have steered them toward that basement? Disillusionment after years of racial strife, a questionable war, and a rash of political assassinations? Still, to most observers, the Weathermen's actions were unfathomable. The culture seemed to have come unhinged.

The old thrill rides at Coney Island were nothing compared to this.

In what seemed another eulogy for the sixties, a resident of West Eleventh Street expressed the mood of the neighbors in the days following the blast: “At first there was camaraderie, but then there was a general sense of helplessness, a kind of loneliness, [and finally] a sense of distance.”

 

14.
Where Is World War II?

IF IT HAD BEEN ACAPULCO
, Joe would have beaten the film crew there. But the location scouts had staked out a patch of desert twenty miles northwest of Guaymas, in the Mexican state of Sonora. According to
Catch-22
's screenwriter Buck Henry, the area offered a “breathtaking panorama of poverty, dust, [and] unidentified plant life”—not the ideal setting in which to ring out the old decade and, along with the roar of over half a dozen B-25s, ring in the new.

Originally, the film crew had hoped to shoot where Joe had fought the war. John Calley, the movie's producer, and Richard Sylbert, the production designer, flew to Corsica. Up and down the coast, they asked (“in our failing Italian,” Sylbert said), “Where is World War II?” Joe could have told them. Nowhere. Oil refineries and highways had replaced the old American air base.

Besides a desire for accuracy, Mike Nichols, the film's director, wanted a setting that conveyed Yossarian's “how-do-I get-outta-here feeling.” He found such a place near the Tetakawi mountain, known as “Goat's Teats,” north of Guaymas. There, the crew built a $180,000 five-mile highway to haul necessary equipment to the location, and a $250,000 six-thousand-foot runway for the B-25s. The mayor of Guaymas welcomed these improvements to the infrastructure, particularly because he owned a local construction company.

In the years preceding production, Columbia, which had first optioned the book, sold the film property to Paramount/Filmways. At one point, Jack Lemmon wanted to make the movie (and play Yossarian). Later, Richard Brooks said he would do it, but he wound up making a version of Joseph Conrad's
Lord Jim
instead, exhausting his capacity for orchestrating war movies.

Columbia had financed
Dr. Strangelove
and purchased
Fail-Safe,
so the studio released two antiwar movies in the same year. “[T]he Pentagon didn't like it,” Joe said. “Each of the studios has a man in Washington who talks to the generals and the admirals, and keeps them happy, and [the Columbia heads] didn't want to embark on another movie that they thought the Pentagon might not like. Then a stockholder's fight got in the way. All this time my reputation was suffering because the rumor was spreading that
Catch-22
was hard to adapt to the screen. And I was getting stigmatized. People in Hollywood and New York were saying, ‘That's Heller over there—his books don't make good screenplays.' I stopped being invited to parties.”

Joe was kidding when he made these remarks during a talk at the Ninety-second Street Y, but he wasn't exaggerating much.

Enter Mike Nichols. With two phenomenal successes,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and
The Graduate,
he had earned the right—in a shifting Hollywood climate—to make whatever he wanted. He had become the first American director since Orson Welles to gain creative control of his movie, including the right of final cut and the option of keeping studio executives from seeing daily rushes. Welles had wielded such power with
Citizen Kane
in 1941. Now,
Catch-22
was to be an important “auteur” film.

Throughout the early 1960s—in fact, since the end of World War II—the American film industry had floundered, losing its grip on an audience tired of the kinds of formulaic projects Joe had worked on (with certain exceptions, like
Casino Royale
). In 1968, Jack Valenti, a former insider in the LBJ administration, and now president of the Motion Picture Association of America, oversaw the creation of the movie rating system. It was established to assuage the fears of parents and politicians fussed about inappropriate material for children (much the way the comic-book industry had regulated itself in the 1950s). But the system was also designed to lure bigger audiences to “mature” movies, for which moviegoers were showing a predilection.

In his comprehensive
American Film: A History,
Jon Lewis says movies like
The Graduate,
explicit about sex and other “adult” behaviors, “moved the industry one step closer to a simple truth: the old guard running the studios were desperately out of touch, and a new breed of American filmmakers—young and audacious, with an understanding of and an interest in a more international film style and form—had a much better idea of what American audiences wanted than they did. The success of …
The Graduate
[which earned forty million dollars in its first run] made the auteur renaissance—the brief golden age … in Hollywood when directors finally seemed to be the ones to call the shots—not only necessary but inevitable.”

In the 1950s François Truffaut was the first to use the term
auteur theory,
which refers to the notion that every movie had an author: the director. “A peculiarly American brand of auteurism was embraced by the studios only so long as the auteurs were able to satisfy the audience's tastes and make money,” Lewis writes.

Nichols, a refugee from Hitler's Germany who spoke only two sentences in English when he first arrived in the United States—“I do not speak English” and “Please do not kiss me”—was thirty-seven years old when he was granted so much freedom with
Catch-22.
With Elaine May, in the 1950s, he had honed not just his English but his wit and comic timing. The couple took their comedy act from Chicago's Second City to Broadway. Nichols went on to produce and direct plays, then movies.
Catch-22
was his third feature-length film.

“Every time you get too much for what you've put in, you know it's going to come out of you later,” he told Nora Ephron, who flew to Mexico to cover the filming for the
New York Times.
He said he kept thinking about the Beatles—in their early days, they wondered when “the Fall” would come: that inevitable moment when success dimmed, soured, or backfired. Nichols said he would almost welcome that moment. Perhaps it would dispel his feeling that he had been given more than he deserved. In the meantime, he would restage World War II.

One day in the Apthorp, Erica picked up the phone. “It's another one of your friends,” she said to her father.

“Which friend?” Joe asked.

“I don't know, but he's giving me false names.”

“I don't have friends like that, you do,” Joe said.

“Well, he says he's Mike Nichols.”

Like the students in the Yale Drama School, Nichols couldn't believe
this guy
had written
that book
. One of his associates said maybe Heller had found the manuscript of
Catch-22
on the body of a dead soldier. One night in Chinatown, Joe joined Nichols and Buck Henry over noodles and a movie script. The meal was awkward. Nichols wanted to know what Joe thought, but Joe did not want to criticize Henry's script in front of the man. The writing had been herculean: The first draft of the screenplay topped out at 385 pages (a typical script rarely exceeded 120). “[This] indicated to me that they had made an effort to include in the motion picture everything in the book that they themselves liked, and that was pretty much the whole book,” Joe said. Touched but doubtful the film could succeed, he decided to stay out of the process. Buck Henry was working in good faith. Besides, Joe realized that when it came to movie scripts, he was probably too bound by conventional patterns. He understood that were he to have undertaken the adaptation of his novel, he would have made a mess of things by going for easy laughs and avoiding some of the book's darker moments. Whatever flaws stippled Henry's script, he was taking a mighty shot at doing the book justice.

Nichols said he'd “get back” to Joe. Over the course of many months, he would say this several times. Joe never saw him.

Nichols tapped Alan Arkin—a Brooklyn native and another Second City vet—to play Yossarian. “[It's] the only part I've ever worked on that didn't demand a conception,” Arkin said. “[T]here isn't much difference between me and Yossarian.”

The mayor of Guaymas dispatched seventy-five peones armed with machetes to clear a one-mile-square site of rattlesnakes, brush, and cactus, leaving only mesquite, which could pass for the small olive trees native to Corsica. Nichols issued a call for thirty-six bombers. Eventually, Frank Tallman, a stunt pilot, rounded up eighteen old B-25s, most of which had been destined for the scrap heap, repaired them, and readied them to fly, at a cost of ten thousand dollars each. One of the planes came from heiress Barbara Hutton, who had given it as a wedding present to a playboy pal of hers. It had been fitted with a bed, reclining seats, and a leather-lined toilet.

Tallman signed former fighter pilots to steer the planes. An additional plane, beyond repair, was shipped to the desert, burned to film a crash scene, and buried beside the runway, where it remains to this day.

The sight of Tallman's artificial leg unnerved all the actors scheduled to fly in the bombers.

A reporter from
Time
magazine, watching the filming, wrote, “Under Nichols' direction, the camera makes the air as palpable as blood.… [T]he sluggish bodies of the B-25s rise impossibly close to one another, great vulnerable chunks of aluminum shaking as they fight for altitude. Could the war truly have been fought in those preposterous crates? It could; it was.”