Peyton Place (3 page)

Both the film and the television series based on
Peyton Place
substantially altered the book and its meaning. While the film maintains some of the novel's trenchant attacks on small-town conformity, insularity, and petty meanness, and is sympathetic to Allison's quest for independence and selfhood, it views these things through the eyes of
Peyton Place's
men, who become the real actors and storytellers, despite Allison's occasional voice-overs. The women appear more as victims than as agents of their own lives; their networks have been severed, replaced by petty jealousies. Men show them the way to true happiness, moral courage, and safety. The town's women, who become for Metalious an oasis of comfort and a source of support, are reduced to marginal players, their quiet heroism reframed as gossip and helplessness. Selena's dark, ethnic features are transformed to conform to Hollywood standards of beauty. Blonde and blue-eyed, the girl from the shacks wins the hearts of the citizens, who rally behind her when her secret—her rape by her stepfather and her miscarriage—is disclosed. Incest is revealed but as a rare, senseless act of violence; sexuality becomes romance and the search for love; poverty is portrayed as something to be overcome with new clothes and “good” morals.

It was television, however, that radically repositioned
Peyton Place
in popular memory, aggressively relocating it within a narrative more in tune with the conservative politics of domesticity, social censensus, sexual conformity, and male privilege. Adrian Samish, director of programming for ABC, regarded the book as both immoral and sensational. “We always do the right thing,” he told a reporter in 1964. “Our villains get punished. When people do what they shouldn't do, we draw the moral conclusions and either they suffer the consequences or are changed. We would never favor violence. Violence is taboo.”
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The director of the television series, Paul Monash, agreed. He “hated” the book, which he saw as “a negativistic attack on the town, written by someone who knew the town well and hated it.” Selena and her father are duly dropped from representation. Like violence, poverty, and alcoholism, Lucas Cross represented for ABC “the novel's unsavory aspects.” Doc Swain's abortion was also stricken from the script. Swain, in any case, was rendered unable to perform any operations, for as the placid new editor of the
Peyton Place Clarion,
he swaps his role as town conscience for town apologist. The bookish Norman Page, overly involved with his mother and subject to erotic fantasies, finds himself the second son of the widower Rod Harrington, Sr., himself transformed from paternalistic local mill owner to powerful industrialist. “Ours is a love affair with the town,” Monash explained. “Our people are not hostile to their environment. The general feeling we have of the town is of people evolving toward the light.”
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Monash, of course, was not alone in rejecting Metalious's view of life in Peyton Place. The manuscript had been turned down for publication by five firms before Julian Messner, a small New York house, decided to accept it for publication. Kitty Messner, president of the company since the death of her ex-husband in 1948, read the manuscript in one sitting and found Metalious's work to be “a product of genius.” Certain that it was “a big book,” she quickly called the author's agent and made an offer. Tall, elegant, and “high styled” (she wore expensive tailor-made pantsuits designed to look like menswear), Messner was one of only two women to head a major publishing company and her feminism was expressed in more than her apparel. She staffed the firm almost entirely with women: women were the editors, sales directors, publicity agents, readers, and editorial assistants, as well as the company's typists and secretaries. What seems to have turned off other publishing houses fired the imagination of Messner and her staff. “I have to have it,” she told Metalious's agent, and she cut a deal that night.
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Like most publishing firms, however, Messner depended on reprint houses to subsidize the risks involved in printing works of unknown authors. For this book Messner's president turned to the only other female head of a publishing firm, Helen Meyer, director of Dell Publishing. Meyer agreed to back the book and in a few days Dell contracted to reprint it in paper, providing Messner with $15,000 to launch
Peyton Place.
Meyer's decision would ultimately transform both Dell, which sold more than eight million copies, and the paperback industry, which would begin to aggressively nurture, market, and redefine both the paperback and its readership.

What appealed to Messner and Meyer, however, was precisely what repelled post-McCarthy-era Hollywood. “We are careful to be a moral show,” explained Monash. “We appeal to the audience that relates to
My Fair Lady.
We have a group of people the audience basically likes.”
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Violence was eliminated and sex transformed into love. “Allison MacKenzie is searching for love,” insists the director. “She is afraid that love leads to sex, and wants it to be more than that.”
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Metalious had shown that each was quite different from the other: that erotic pleasure and lust were related to power and desire. Turning
Peyton Place
on its head, the sexual stirrings and personal ambitions of Allison (and Grace) are rescripted by television to fulfill the middle-class fictions and patriarchal assumptions of female dependency, domesticity, and nubile love. Like the 1950s hit tune “Love and Marriage,” TV's
Peyton Place
insisted that sex and love go together “like a horse and carriage.”

Television also worked hard to give Peyton Place a face-lift. Shanties were abolished, the drunks sobered up. There were no winter binges in locked cellars filled with barrels of hard cider. Gossipy old men, quirky old women, and cranky Yankees of various types and ages were replaced with the monotonous personalities and tepid lives of Ryan O'Neal, Dorothy Malone, and Mia Farrow. Nothing but youthful charm and optimistic smiles crawled out from under the rocks of TV's Peyton Place. “Though an episode ends in a cliff-hanger,” explained the show's producer, “you can await the sequel without anxiety. For unlike the world we live in, villains will always be punished, justice will always be done, character will be improved by adversity. You are safe among friends.”
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For producers, no place seemed safer than Ye Olde New England, a nostalgic place of rock-bound tradition and shell-backed citizens. What Metalious had torn down, Hollywood built up. Studio carpenters nailed together a plywood town square, a ships chandler's, a bookstore (modeled after one in Camden, Maine), and a pillory, which was placed in the village square to remind viewers of Peyton Place's stern New England heritage. As was the case with the film, television producers relocated the town, abandoning the interior mill towns and wooded forests of northern New England for Metalious's nemesis: the picturesque, “postcard-perfect” coast. A lifeboat stood at the ready, ignobly (and oddly) hung over the chandler's front door. A wooden schooner, complete with a loading chute for its imaginary cargo of fish, waited patiently in Peyton Place's waterless harbor. Elm, Chestnut, and Maple, the names of streets Metalious had walked on as a child growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire, were replaced by Faith, Hope, and Charity, words Metalious neither used nor held in high esteem. Today, of course, television viewers will recognize the set as home to Jessica Fletcher, while shoppers no doubt will glimpse in its quaint little shops and folksy design the ersatz New England of L. L. Bean. In such a setting Allison McKenzie, Selena Cross, Doc Swain, and Michael Rossi would probably be arrested. “It has,” noted one reviewer in 1965, “no discernible Negroes, no obvious Jews, no bigotry, no religious or political division.” New England had been rebuttoned.
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In many ways, however, Hollywood's
Peyton Place
redressed what had been for most reviewers of the book a grievous distortion of New England life and culture. In the mind's eye of the 1950s, Metalious's Peyton Place seemed to be geographically dislocated. Images of tar-paper shacks, incenstuous fathers and drunken mothers, religious hypocrisy, strangled cats, single mothers, sexually assertive women, and peeping toms mingled in the imaginations of Americans with visions of the South, where pellagra, six-fingered hillbillies, white trash, depraved women, and weak-minded sharecroppers roamed the land. “Everybody knew that the South was degenerate,” wrote Merle Miller in the
Ladies Home Journal.
“Grace Metalious's books insist— usually stridently—that Puritan New England has all the southern vices and a few others that not even William Faulkner had come across.”
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“Peyton Place,”
wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hal Boyle, “brings
Tobacco Road
up North and gives it a Yankee accent.”
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The
Boston Post
agreed, describing the novel as “a lusty
Tobacco Road
type of book.” Metalious, it seemed, needed to reset her compass.

New Hampshire authorities were especially offended by the book, and newspapers throughout the state “gleefully” reprinted any unfavorable review they could find. In Boston, officials were equally quick to take issue with Metalious's vision of their region, and while southern and western reviewers concentrated on her “gift as a storyteller,” New England newspapers focused on the distortion of character and place. “According to the blurb,” announced one outraged Yankee, “it is the story of a New England town, but it's like no other town that this New Englander has ever known. The place is a hotbed of sex.”
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Distancing the “real” New England from the sexualized characters and impoverished hummocks of
Peyton Place,
critics simultaneously mirrored and reproduced class-bound and Anglo-identified narratives of Ye Olde New England. Eight years after publication, television would make them “real” once more.

Metalious would never live to see an episode. At the age of thirty-nine, she died suddenly, if not surprisingly, of “chronic liver disease,” a newspaper euphemism for cirrhosis. A few months later,
Peyton Place
appeared on television, a product now owned and controlled by the American Broadcasting Company. The rights to the show, which earned investors millions of dollars, had been sold for a pittance; her family inherited only debt. In the publicity for the series, promoters trumpeted the stars
Peyton Place
had launched, simultaneously pushing Metalious and her novel deep into the background. Soon, both would mingle in the popular imagination with images of Jacqueline Susann, hot sex, social scandal, and “bad” books.

This reissue of
Peyton Place
provides an opportunity for a new generation of readers and scholars to reconsider the cultural politics and literary legacy of Grace Metalious. Ambivalent about her own abilities as a writer, Metalious once explained that she saw herself more as “an entertainer,” a good storyteller rather than a writer. But she was also ambitious about her writing, ever eager to develop her craft, and always writing. She wrote hundreds of short stories, beginning in the fourth grade, when she would hole up in her aunt's locked bathroom, a board over her knees for a desk, a cache of yellow second sheets for paper. When she married George Metalious at the age of seventeen, she kept a typewriter close at hand in the rickety house they dubbed “It'll Do.” “It was a little shanty house, with dirty dishes everywhere,” recalled a neighbor. “Everything was covered with grime and dirt except one spotless corner, where Grace kept her typewriter.” Metalious bristled when neighbors, reporters, and even kin suggested that she spend more time behind her sink and less in front of her typewriter. Writing
Peyton Place
consumed her. “I thought twenty-four hours a day for a year. I wrote ten hours a day for two and a half months.”
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Peyton Place
was never considered a badly written book. On the contrary, a number of reviewers, especially those outside New England, gave Metalious good reason to think of herself as a writer. “The writing is good for its kind,” noted Edmund Fuller of the
Chicago Tribune.
“The pace is swift, for Mrs. Metalious has great narrative skill.” Even among those who found the book too explicit for their tastes, there was a grudging acknowledgment of her literary abilities. “When authoress Metalious is not all flustered by sex, she captures a real sense of the tempo, texture, and tensions in the social economy of a small town.”
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Reading
Peyton Place
today, one is especially struck by the carefully drawn, vivid descriptions of northern New England in the 1950s. She writes movingly of shack dwellers and spurned “old maids”; of the town drunk and the town bully; of underpaid teachers and parsimonious school boards; of bigotry as well as the quiet heroics of ordinary people. Her description of the cider binge in Kenny Sterns's locked cellar is both tragic and humorous and it ranks with the best of local color writing.

It is easy to imagine driving out of Peyton Place and into Egypt, Maine. Like the backwoods Maine of Carolyn Chute, Peyton Place is purposefully planned to offend the tourist. The lumber and textile industries, rather than lobster fishing, provide the backdrop, and Metalious writes poignantly of the woodsmen's relationship to the northern woods and the “company men” who owned them. “Men like Lucas looked on them [trees] as a precarious kind of security, a sort of padding to fall back on when one was given a shove by life. When all else failed and cash money was needed in a hurry, the task of ‘workin’ the woods’ was always available. The lumbermen had nothing but contempt for men like Lucas, and assigned to him the secondary jobs of the lumbering trade: the stacking of logs on trucks, the fastening of chains and the unloading at the sawmills” (28). Hardworking, a skilled carpenter, Lucas Cross couldn't afford siding. Like “It'll Do,” his home lacked running water as well.

Unlike Egypt, however, Metalious's “real” New England is a place intimately familiar with the possibilities as well as the problems of community life. Women are at the center, rather than on the margins as victims of men. Networks of kin and neighbors crisscross Peyton Place like ancient latticework, providing opportunities to both pry and protect, sneer and sympathize. Selena is a constant visitor in the MacKenzie household. Miss Thornton can imagine joining Kenny in a stiff drink. Doc Swain offers health care to the winter revelers and town drunks. Metalious's characters negotiate their way through and around a thick web of obligation and reciprocity, as well as meanness, personal pain, and petty voyeurism. “She'll get herself talked about” was both a community's worst fear and its greatest weapon, and Metalious shows both scorn and sympathy for the small vanities and personal longings that gave the phrase its force. She understood as well the role of the hardened outsider. Metalious wrote
Peyton Place
while living with her husband, George, whose job as school principal took them to the small New Hampshire town of Gilmanton. Of her neighbors Metalious remarked, “I can't say that I ever get invited into their homes. But then, I'm not sure I'd care to go.” Shunned after the publication
of Peyton Place,
she refused to leave. “I really love it here,” she confessed. “This is home.”