A Tragic Honesty (45 page)

Not ruined, perhaps, but often disappointed. At the beginning of March, right around the time Yates had hoped to be schmoozing with Natalie Wood (since his contract required that he report to the set), he got bad news from a “hesitant and old”–sounding Monica McCall: There would be no movie. As Yates explained it two years later,

Miss Wood's agent decided that it might Tarnish Her Image with the Teenagers if she appeared as a girl who loved her Daddy a little too much—and Blooey. She pulled out, then [Henry] Fonda pulled out, then United Artists pulled out, then John Frankenheimer (the Dedicated Young Director) pulled out—and the whole God damned deal fell through—leaving me with a fraction of the earnings I was supposed to reap. I had been counting on sending both my children through college on the money I'd been promised, so when the axe fell it was something of a blow.… That, I guess, is show biz.

He called Styron to commiserate, and a couple weeks later the wealthy, undismayed author wrote a consoling note to Yates: “Frankenheimer's mills, while grinding exceeding slow, seem to be grinding sure. What I mean is that he has just paid me a substantial amount of money in order to extend the option on
Lie Down in Darkness
. This seems to indicate that … he
is
eventually going to do it.” Alas, no, though the property would be kicked around Hollywood for many years, occasionally shimmering into view like a saving mirage in times of terrible need. As for Frankenheimer—whom Yates had come to consider something of a friend—he soon fell out of touch forever. “I always wondered why better things hadn't happened to Dick,” the director mused. “He was such a great writer.”

*   *   *

Yates's progress on his novel seemed thwarted by ambivalence toward his material, not to say a lack of clarity. When he first returned to New York that fall, he tried to capitalize on his “Builders” success by writing another short story, but it soon went cold—so cold, in fact, that he came to believe he'd lost his knack for short fiction entirely; some fifteen years would pass before he managed the trick again. So he went back to his war novel, or coming-of-age novel, or whatever it was apart from a journalistic, unformed account of his own experiences as a feckless private who'd played a nonheroic (as opposed to
un
heroic or even
anti
heroic) role in the mop-up action after the Bulge. He asked friends to suggest poems that dealt with “the trials of adolescence”—perhaps he'd find some sort of thematic focus there. Meanwhile he just kept writing: “I'm working hard as hell on a new novel in the hope of finishing it by the end of the year,” he wrote Cassill in early February; “don't know if it's any good or not, but the pages keep coming.”

Then they stopped coming—just like that—though the rest of his routine remained intact: Each morning he'd put on the same sweatshirt and corduroy pants, take his pills, make coffee, light cigarettes end on end, and stare at the wall. Then lunch and a long walk, the hopeful suspense as he hurried back to his desk, and another afternoon of nothing. Sometimes, in an agony of caffeinated frustration, Yates would force himself into a “spasm of writing”—then reread the pages and throw them away: “All the sentences were weak and lame and even the handwriting looked funny.”

Soon Yates was drinking heavily again and wondering whether he'd ever write another page of decent fiction, even as the world continued to honor him. In May, the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded $2,500 grants to a handful of the most promising young writers in the country, including Yates, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, William Humphrey, and Peter Matthiessen. An oppressively eminent crowd attended the ceremony at the Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan, where an outdoor luncheon was held under a large tent in the courtyard. There was little question of Yates's enduring such an affair soberly, and by the time he and his fellow honorees were herded into the first two rows of the auditorium, he was vividly impaired. Bob Parker watched from the audience as his friend, summoned at last to the dais, “lumbered like Frankenstein” across the stage: “Dick was wearing a tan gabardine suit, the top button buttoned to the bottom hole, his necktie awry—a cartoon of a drunk. He was barely able to say ‘thank you.'”

It didn't help that Yates's latest girlfriend was herself an unstable alcoholic, though perhaps a person of more sober habit would have been out of her depth. Craige
*
was an Irishwoman in her late twenties who worked as a copy editor for a fashion magazine; mordantly witty when coherent, she became (in Grace Schulman's words) “very sick and disturbed” when drunk. She had a way of falling down in public, and in a stupor would sometimes mistake Yates for her father or brother, with all that suggested of an unsavory subtext. And though she was still rather young and pretty, dissipation had already taken a toll: “Even then she had something of the Blanche DuBois agedness about her,” Schulman recalled. Indeed, Yates's description of her in
Uncertain Times
—where she appears as “Nora Harrigan”—bears this out in rather pitiless terms: “She seemed to be letting her appearance go in subtle, telling ways: something a little bedraggled about the hair, something flaccid in the lips, a generally unwholesome pallor in the face and neck.” Yates even pointed to the character's “toe jam”—the result of being too hung over to wash her feet in the shower.

Such a couple couldn't easily accommodate another lost soul, but when Yates learned the full extent of his sister's predicament he was willing, at least, to take her in. For years he'd been talking about “poor Ruth”—married to such a vulgar oaf, stuck out in “Ass Hole, Long Island” with nothing to do, her looks gone and drinking too much to boot. But he had no idea how bad things had become. By 1963 Ruth was a chronic alcoholic with an enlarged liver, and her husband beat her on a regular basis. “For years we'd hear the beatings,” her oldest son recalled. “The shouting and scrambling around downstairs. Finally, when I was seventeen, I walked in on them. They were both surprised. My father had always hit his children, but this time I was determined to stop him. I shoved him in a chair and held him there.” Both Ruth and her husband drank—it had always been part of the family culture—but since the late fifties Ruth's drinking had grown steadily out of control. Fred wanted things and people to proceed according to custom (“He was God Almighty,” said his son), and it enraged him to come home for the cocktail hour and find his wife already incapacitated. Usually the argument that followed was limited to screaming and weeping, and would end with Ruth tottering upstairs to pass out; but if Fred was in a particularly nasty mood, or a sufficient number of weeks had passed since the last time, he'd beat her. For years Ruth had claimed that she stayed in the marriage “for the children,” and then as the children grew up and moved out—and were themselves urging her to leave their brutal father—she'd say it was “[her] problem” and she'd “work it out.” Finally it got so bad that she turned to the only person she knew who might be able to help: her brother.

Yates was shocked and furious. He called Sheila—the only person in his life who knew Ruth—and asked her advice: “Dick thought he might go out there and confront Fred,” Sheila recalled, “because Ruth was too much of a cipher to stand up for herself. I thought his quixotic ideas were ridiculous, though I was sorry for Ruth. He was considering all options: take her in, confront her husband, whatever.” Finally Yates offered his sister a place to stay, but by then the crisis had passed: She couldn't bring herself to leave Fred after all. Her marriage, such as it was, had given her the only “security” she'd ever known, and besides she still loved the man. And what would she do on her own? Yates may have insisted on blustering at Fred over the phone, and even threatened to kill him, but that was pretty much the end of it.

*   *   *

As the summer approached, Yates was all but broke again. He now had a firm offer to teach at the Iowa Workshop in the fall, but continued to vacillate: There was still a chance the movie would be made, or something might come up in New York—so he told Cassill, who'd discouraged him from taking the job unless he could make a full-year commitment. But now Cassill thought he should come to Iowa anyway and leave whenever he pleased, no matter what the inconvenience to the Workshop. Cassill had become disillusioned with the place: Recently a “mentally ill, incompetent” former student had attacked him in the campus newspaper, and the administration had offered little more than polite sympathy as a show of support. “Hemingway said writers are wolves and have got to stick together,” Cassill wrote his friend, “and that is exactly how I feel again now.” But Yates remained evasive—the fact was, he didn't want to leave New York and teach in the sticks any more than he had four years earlier. He was even willing to take another PR job, though he was having a hard time convincing interviewers of that: “[H]e was earnestly seeking a kind of work he didn't want, and that embarrassing contradiction seemed to leak from his very pores.” All this was a long way down from a year ago—from Frankenheimer's palace in Malibu—and it began to look as though he'd have to brace himself for an Iowa winter after all. But then his friend Styron shook another deus ex machina out of his sleeve.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy was losing the sympathy of black Americans: The long-promised Civil Rights Bill had yet to materialize in May 1963, when activists in Birmingham were hosed and beaten and attacked by police dogs. Burke Marshall—the assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights—went to Alabama and negotiated a truce of sorts, but many viewed it as a feeble response to a widely televised outrage. Then, a week after Marshall's return to Washington, Kennedy asked the writer James Baldwin to convene a group of influential black celebrities and meet him in New York so they could “talk this thing over.” The meeting was a fiasco. Along with Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin saw fit to invite a few hard-core activists, such as a young freedom rider who'd been repeatedly beaten and jailed. At one point the latter stuck his finger in Kennedy's stunned face and told him he'd never fight for this country, that he
had
no country. “Was I impressed?” Baldwin's brother David told the media after the meeting. “You see Bobby Kennedys every day, on the street, at cocktail parties. They just don't get it. And he's our Attorney General.”

Clearly the administration's message (whatever it happened to be) wasn't getting across, and Kennedy decided he needed a decent speechwriter. He asked an assistant, E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., to find him a “real writer” who could take his ideas and “turn them into words with a snap and a bite to them.” Prettyman called their mutual friend Styron, who said he knew just the man: a superb novelist with extensive experience as a speechwriter, who also happened to need a job. “I don't even know if I
like
the fucking Kennedys,” Yates replied when Styron called with the news; Yates pointed out that he'd always been an Adlai Stevenson man, and for that matter couldn't “get much of a hard-on” for politics in general. “What have you got to lose?” Styron said, in effect, and a couple days later Yates boarded the Eastern Airlines shuttle for Washington.

At the Justice Department he was received by Prettyman, who briefly explained the job to him. It was the first of its kind: Before, Kennedy's speeches had been cobbled together by committee, at a certain sacrifice of both style and substance. Worse, Kennedy himself was a rather uncomfortable speaker, who tended to swallow his words and lose the thread, such that an audience hardly knew when to applaud. What was needed, then, were “short, clipped sentences” to match Kennedy's natural speaking style, as well as a lot of “humanity” to put over his civil rights agenda and counterbalance his “ruthless” image.

At the appointed time Yates was introduced to Kennedy, who struck him as remarkably boyish and slight (“part of his shirttail bulged loose on one side”). Kennedy noted with approval that Yates was not only a highly regarded writer, but also had a strong background in public relations. Then he said, “We're living in very uncertain times, Mr. Yates, and those of us in a position of leadership are obliged to be responsive to issues like civil rights, but at the same time I have a great sense of responsibility here. Do you understand that?” As Yates later told an interviewer, he replied, “‘Yes, I do,' without quite knowing what [Kennedy] was talking about.” Finally the attorney general asked him what he was currently working on, and Yates mentioned his novel about the last months of World War II. Kennedy observed that that was an “interesting period,” and expressed a hope that Yates would find time to work on it if he took the job. They shook hands.

After he left Kennedy's office and rejoined Prettyman and press secretary Edwin Guthman, the latter informed Yates that he was actually in competition with two other writers from
Newsweek
and
Time
; as it happened, Prettyman (who hadn't known this beforehand) wasn't the only one Kennedy had asked to find a speechwriter. Guthman went on to explain that the three candidates would each submit a “trial assignment”—a civil rights speech to be delivered at an “exclusive girls' college in the East.” Yates was intimidated by the prospect of competing with veteran journalists, but Prettyman felt confident that he had the edge: He was recommended by
Styron,
after all, and that had impressed the attorney general.

Back in New York, Yates spent an industrious all-nighter writing his trial assignment. Rather to his surprise he found he enjoyed the challenge, the craft, of imagining Kennedy as a kind of fictional character (with a Yatesian outlook, no less)—namely, an attractive young man seductively persuading a group of female admirers to support the cause of civil rights: “School is out, girls. You may sometimes regret your education, for a free mind will always insist on seeking out reality, and reality can be far more painful than the soft and comforting illusions of the intellectually poor.” Yates tightened the speech to fit the attention span of its audience, then typed the finished product on his beat-up Underwood and sent it off. A few days later he was summoned back to Washington. He had the job.