John Cheever (37 page)

The one person Cheever was eager to talk about in his meetings with Dr. Hays was his brother, Fred—the older brother who had once played “mother, father, brother, and friend” to him and who had recently gone to pieces in front of him: the only Cheever in worse shape than he himself. After these psychiatric sessions, Cheever usually went home and talked things over with Susan. Hays thought it unusual that he should go to his daughter rather than to his wife with such confidences.

For years John had been simultaneously encouraging and discouraging Susan's romances. Once when she was invited to a house party in Bucks County, he told her not to go unless she planned to sleep with the man who asked her. Otherwise, her date would feel humiliated, he warned. Yet when she brought beaus to the house, he objected to any displays of affection. By late 1966 all such ambivalence about Susie's boyfriends faded away when she gave up her teaching job at Colorado Rocky Mountain School and came to New York to move in with Rob Cowley. Cowley, divorced and the father of two young girls, was the only son of Malcolm and Muriel Cowley. He and Susie planned to marry in the spring.

Young Cowley grew up worshiping John Cheever, who used to visit Sherman, Connecticut, once a year or so to see his parents and such other friends as Peter and Ebie Blume and Matthew and Hannah Josephson. A lot of literary folk passed through Sherman, but Cheever was “something special,” Rob thought. When Rob was a teenager, he sat around the dinner table marveling at this engagingly funny man who spoke as well as he wrote, with wonderful limpidity and without any “ers” or “urns” or unintended repetitions. He liked Mary Cheever too, whose brilliant humor issued incongruously from her high little-girl voice. Some of his initial attraction to Susie, he thinks, stemmed from his admiration for her parents.

When Rob and Susie decided to marry, Cheever found it hard to visualize his daughter amid “organ music, white lace, flowers, cakes, and wine.” He also wondered whether he should caution her against getting married. But whatever the trials of his own marriage, he concluded, it would be “obscene” of him to warn Susie “not to marry, not to love.”

On May 6 the wedding took place at St. Mark's in the Bowery church in the East Village. A beautifully catered reception followed in the churchyard, with a massive tent erected for the occasion and green felt carpet spread over the graves of the departed. It was a rainy, windy day, and passing derelicts stared through the isinglass peepholes at the festivities within. Inside there was some tension between the two principal families. As Malcolm Cowley recalled, “the Cheever connection drank their champagne on one side of the tent, while the smaller Cowley contingent sat grouped on the other.” The Cowleys thought the wedding too expensive and ostentatious, while the Cheevers were determined to give their daughter the best sendoff they could afford. As it happened, Rob and Susie were then able to begin their married life in extraordinarily elegant surroundings, as tenants at the mansion at Beechwood. With the estate tied up in the courts after the death of Mrs. Vanderlip, the place stood idle, and Zinny Schoales installed the young Cowleys as house sitters. Cheever, visiting for dinner at Beechwood Hall, thought that Rob and Susie should work up from a ranch house to a mansion instead of vice versa. When the newlyweds visited Cedar Lane, Rob was taken aback by the competitive atmosphere around their dinner table. Sarcasms flew, and no one was spared. “In that Bear Pit you had to perform,” he decided. “Dullness was not tolerated.”

In July 1967, Cheever went to Italy to interview Sophia Loren for
The Saturday Evening Post
. Mary and Fred went along, and the itinerary included Sperlonga and Rome as well as Loren's Naples. Sperlonga he liked. Father and son walked along the beach mornings, and watched the daily soccer game in the evening. In Rome he met an American businessman at a United States Information Agency party. The businessman had come to Rome to open an American-style supermarket. “Mr. Shivers,” he told Cheever, “Rome needs Minimax and Minimax needs Rome. I'm going to build a supermarket in Rome that will put the Pantheon to shame.”

The
Post
paid him “a shirtfull” for the interview with Loren. The actress herself was “what used to be known as an eyeful,” with an amazing front and gleaming legs. In Naples as in Rome, he wrote in his article, there were people on their way to one-room basement flats that smelled of drains and cheese rinds who still carried themselves with style and grace. Loren had that quality, and yet there was no trace of artifice about her. She wore “no perfume, no makeup,” her dress was simple, and she seemed “sincere, magnanimous, lucky, intelligent and serene.” The interview over, she walked him to the door as the bells of Naples rang noon. Before leaving he asked if he might kiss her. “Of course,” she said, and so he did. In his notes he reduced the meeting to three words: “See Loren. Pow.”

At Yaddo and Saratoga he saw other, more mortal women. Aileen Ward, biographer of Keats and one of the nations's leading literary scholars, met him there during a brief visit, and they forged an instant friendship. Dining together at a restaurant near the racetrack, they rapidly established the feeling that they understood each other. Cheever spoke of his background, seeming somewhat defensive about his lack of education. Yet his manner was so conspicuously that of the upper-middle-class WASP that Ward assumed he was the product of the best prep schools, if not of the best colleges. There was affection between them but no intimacy. He made no overture toward sex, yet she was installed among his gallery of dream girls. “I would suspect,” she said, “that really close emotional relationships with women were not easy for him.”

In the fall of 1967, Cheever spoke at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs as the guest of college president Joseph Palamountain and his wife, Anne. Formerly an
haute couture
buyer, Anne Palamountain took her duties as a college president's wife seriously. (She was one of the first wives to be paid a salary for this work.) She was especially concerned that distinguished visitors to the campus be treated right, and so she arranged a dinner party for Cheever, put him up for the night, and generally made him feel welcome. He responded with gratitude and two dozen roses, and a close companionship began. Thereafter the author and the president's wife foregathered regularly when Cheever came to town for meetings at Yaddo. They met for brunch at the elegant Gideon Putnam Hotel or for Big Macs at McDonald's, for cross-country skiing in the afternoon and long confidential talks. “Every woman,” as she said, “needs a man other than her husband she can confide in,” and Cheever fulfilled that purpose for her. In talking of his own problems, though, he kept it light and amusing. She never was inclined to feel sorry for him. “He carried off his troubles so well, with a kind of detachment about himself.”

Within Yaddo itself, the reigning monarch was experiencing difficulties of her own. In her late eighties, Elizabeth Ames was almost blind, quite forgetful, and often cranky. When the Palamountains called, soon after their arrival in Saratoga in 1965, to ask if they might visit Yaddo, Ames slammed down the phone on them. So during Cheever's visit he snuck them into the mansion by the back door (he knew where the key was hidden), and the three of them spoke in whispers as they tiptoed around Yaddo's dark halls. The spirit of Elizabeth Ames seemed to pervade the place, though she was asleep in Pine Garde cottage a football field away. They encountered instead Philip Roth, as he came spooking downstairs to see who was there. As that episode suggests, Ames was threatening to become rather a tyrant at Yaddo, and of course she had always played favorites. “If she was fond of you,” longtime cook Nellie Shannon remarked, “she'd do anything for you. If she wasn't, forget it.” But to many Yaddo colonists—and to such board members as Cheever and Cowley—she represented everything that was valuable about Yaddo. In a sense, she was Yaddo, and they were reluctant to make her step down until the rigors of old age made it impossible to act otherwise. Finally it had to be done. After an extensive search, Curtis Harnack was named to replace her as director. Cheever was chosen to write a tribute to her accomplishment.

Elizabeth has seen all kinds—lushes down on their luck, men and women at the top of their powers, nervous breakdowns, thieves, geniuses, cranky noblemen, and poets who ate their peas off a knife. She has remained imperturbable, humorous and fair. This is much more than the conscientious stewardship of a will, much more than a friendly feeling for the arts. This is a life and a triumph.

Cheever's own capacity to derive humor from adversity was illustrated in late 1967 when he suffered a long episode of prostatitis. In a letter to Dr. Mutter, he explained that his prostate acted up in response to erotic stimuli. That whole part of him, he confesses, “was apt to be foolish.”

At Thanksgiving the family followed a regular ritual. First John and Fred lined the sloping lawn with tennis-court tapes, and then the crowd—as many as two dozen—arrived for the touch football game. Cheever himself was not much of a player. Next there were drinks for all and then the turkey that Mary had prepared and John carved, after reciting a grace he constructed out of the Cranmer Bible and Jowett's Plato.

The Cranmer is loud, resonant and liturgical and cuts into the small talk and the noise of silver. “Almighty God, maker of all things, judge of all men!” Then comes the Plato, even louder. “Let us consider that the soul of man is immortal, able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus may we live happily with one another and with God.”

The close is incantatory, close to plainsong. “By Whom and with Whom in the Unity of the Holy Ghost all honor and glory be to Thee oh Father Almighty, world without end. Amen.”

After dinner everyone took a walk, and after dark they played charades. The pattern was important to Cheever. Like Leander Wapshot, he intended that “the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life” should be “a gesture or sacrament toward the excellence and continuousness of things.”

And yet, he sometimes broke the bounds. One holiday dinner he and Natalie Robins slipped away from the dinner table to go shopping at Barker's, the discount store in the Arcadian shopping center nearby. Cheever loved shopping there: the shoddy merchandise, the piped-in variation on “In a Little Spanish Town,” the assistant manager “with ash-blonde hair, a grey lace dress and … a strong, unfresh smell like old candy” who counted on her fingers. Natalie, who had no hobbies other than shopping for bargains, was delighted to go along. She went off to look for junk clothes, socks, and shoes, while he visited hardware and chatted with Richard Van Tassel, the manager of the store. Both found a small treasure to purchase, and they drove back to Cedar Lane, where everyone was still at table.

In December 1967, Ben was arrested in Cincinnati. Together with a group of other college students, he had blockaded an induction center as a protest against the Vietnam War. All were thrown in the workhouse for disturbing the peace, with bail set at nine hundred dollars. Cheever wired the money as soon as he got word, but meanwhile Ben spent two nights in jail. When he came home for Christmas, he looked at his father “a little distantly” and told him, “You know, you don't know anything until you've been roughed up by the Man!” It was an experience Cheever was willing to forgo, but otherwise he was entirely supportive of his son, who was eventually tried and got off with a suspended sentence and a $150 fine. A few years later, Cheever was invited to appear in Cincinnati. “I won't make a speech there,” he declared. “I won't make a
potholder
in the city that arrested my son.” Early in April, he and Mary and Susie participated in an interracial march to mourn the death of Martin Luther King: whites and blacks elbow to elbow, united—however fleetingly—in the common bond of sorrow.

DOUBLING

1967–1969

John Cheever embodied the paradox of the bourgeois artist. Most of the time he pursued a respectable suburban existence as a family man, but he sometimes played the drunken rakehell and sexual adventurer. Most of his friends in Ossining saw only the Cheever who lived a conventional life. The bohemian exploits generally occurred on the road. This two-sided pattern of behavior was accompanied by a division within his spirit between the celebratory and the deprecatory. Darkness and light competed for preeminence in a continual chiaroscuro. Hypersensitive to beauty and ugliness alike, he “adored everything and deplored everything.”

He was, he liked to point out, a Gemini. The legend of Castor and Pollux, those mythical twins in the sky, holds that they alternated between different realms. Castor occupied Olympus one day while Pollux remained in Hades, and on the next day they changed places. A similar duality obtained in Cheever's personality and in his writing. In
Bullet Park
, the novel he was working on until midsummer 1968, he gave Tony Nailles the same birthday as his own, May 27. Tony's high school French teacher tells him he is a Gemini, and adds with seeming casualness, “Gemini determines many of your characteristics and one might say your fate.…” This does not mean that Cheever believed in astrology: he did not. It does suggest an awareness of the deep division within himself that is patent in almost everything he wrote.

“I want an environment, a house, dogs, children and love,” he observes in one introspective passage. Yet in another he accuses himself of having constructed a museum of a home, where the exhibits depicted only a drab and confining life. “The fully disciplined man,” he wrote a young admirer, “is a stick of wood.” He was damned if he would be a stick of wood.

Cheever began his extended affair with Hope Lange in the late 1960s. Of necessity they saw each other infrequently. She lived in Los Angeles most of the year, and was often busy in films or plays or starring in the television series
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(1968–70) and
The New Dick Van Dyke Show
(1971–74). From the beginning Cheever was proud of the affair, for wasn't Hope one of the most beautiful women in the world? Chatting with Jinny Kahn at Susie's wedding, he confidentially let her know about it. The Friday Club members heard about Hope regularly, sometimes in wildly exaggerated form. Alan Pakula, Hope's husband, was after him with a pistol, Cheever said. Hope had to hide him in the closet once when Frank Sinatra came to call, he maintained. These tales, Hope confirms, were outright inventions.