Chocolates for Breakfast (22 page)

She kept writing. Her sixth novel was tentatively titled “Kathy on the Rocks.” Its protagonist was a washed-up writer, contemplating her failure. Pamela's model, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had taken sixteen years to travel the path from
This Side of Paradise
to “The Crack-Up”; she had covered the distance in less than half that time. Through the early months of 1964, as
Chocolates
was reissued and as stray readers in news shops and drugstores discovered she had other books, she continued to work. One of the characters in her new novel, according to Detective Robert Gosselin of the NYPD, “talked about marital difficulties and suicidal tendencies . . . there was a reference to that guy Hemingway and how he died.”

 

On Sunday, June 7, 1964, she reached the end of the line.

It was late afternoon. Her husband was out of the apartment. Her nine-month-old baby was asleep in the bedroom. She sat in the living room, at her desk, and wrote in her diary. “If you put it all together,” Detective Gosselin told the press the following day, “the last four pages, under the date June 7, indicate that she was having trouble with her writing and intended to destroy herself.” He said that the pages describe the rifle barrel feeling “cold and alien” in her mouth, and continued: “She wanted the last four pages, the suicide note, added to the novel she was working on.”

Pamela Moore finished writing, inserted a .22 caliber rifle into her mouth, and pulled the trigger. Her husband found her on the living-room floor. She was three months short of twenty-seven.

 

“Kathy on the Rocks” was never published. In September, Dell issued Moore's second novel under the title
Diana
; both it and
Suzy-Q
were out of print by the following year. Bantam reprinted
Chocolates
thrice more; it went out of print in America for the last time sometime in 1968, about when Dell pulped its last copies of
The Horsy Set
and not long after what would have been Pamela Moore's thirtieth birthday. In England and Europe, her books stayed in print until a little after the turn of the decade.

Since then, her work has never been reprinted. Apart from a 1982 reference that drew my attention to her, the
Contemporary Authors
sketch (last updated in 1968), and an entry in
Who's Who of American Women
for 1965–66 (apparently compiled before her death), her name appears in almost no books or reference materials. She has been the subject of no articles since the newspaper stories immediately following her suicide. Nor does she figure in any academic discussions of feminist literature, despite the fact that some of her work clearly prefigures the great awakening of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Don Moore, her father, was rediscovered when the movie version of
Flash Gordon
came out in 1980, and he colorfully recounted his years in Hollywood for movie and science-fiction magazines that year. He didn't discuss Pamela. He died in Florida in 1986.

 

Isabel Moore continued to write for a time. In 1965, under the pseudonym Grace Walker, she published a biography of her surviving daughter, the full title of which is:
Elaine Moore Moffat, Blue Ribbon Horsewoman: The Complete Life Story of a Champion Rider Who Learned to Cope with Life by Dealing with Horses
. Four years later, she published
Women of the Green Café
, a paperback novel about lesbians. In 1970, she published
That Summer in Connecticut
, a smoothly written but cliché-riddled account of a May–December romance that indicates the difficulty she must have had understanding her younger daughter, given the generational gulf that separated the women who came of age before the 1950s and those who matured just as the implications of Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex
were beginning to resonate in America.

Had Pamela lived and continued writing, perhaps she would have ultimately proved incapable of serious literature and would have finished her career composing smart but schlocky bestsellers, stylish counterparts to those of Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins. But her work frequently manifests a fairly sophisticated awareness of her society and its workings, whether satirically or melodramatically expressed, that is absent from the other two writers. This awareness gives lasting value to
Chocolates
and, to some extent,
The Horsy Set
. Pamela's writing may have been polished, but still it was the work of a woman who either could not or, to some extent, was not allowed to mature as a writer; a woman desperately in need of the kind of social changes that the feminist movement brought into being over the years that followed. From a purely clinical perspective, and given
Chocolates
's description of bipolar depression and how
The Horsy Set
, in its most frantic pages, epitomizes a classic “mixed state,” it is important to remember that those years also saw the introduction of the first, and rather ineffective, medications for depression. Pamela Moore's chronicles of an America that is still with us in some ways, and in others as distant as the world of Jane Austen, deserve serious critical examination.

About the book

In the Next Room

by Kevin Kanarek

O
NE CLOUDY AFTERNOON
in the summer of 1964, Pamela Moore adds several pages to her diary. The script is neat and lucid; the hand of someone who has made a decision and wishes to set it forth clearly.

She has kept a diary ever since she was a fifteen-year-old student at boarding school. Her journal has often consisted of notes to herself, ideas, outlines and drafts of stories. Over the past year, however, she has recorded in detail the circumstances of her own life: pregnancy, a difficult birth, and a long stay in the hospital; her return to the small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where she has struggled to regain her health, adjust to her new role as a mother, and resume her writing.

She sets down a detailed record of her arguments with her husband, Adam, and all the ways in which she feels abandoned by him. “There is my $6000 in the bank, but he won't give me a vacation or let me hire a baby nurse!”

Adam, she writes, dismisses her ideas and questions her seriousness. He tells her that it's too late to do what she aspires to. She's already beaten. “I'm 26 years old, I'm 26 years old. I keep repeating that to him so much that I feel sometimes I'm secretly 36 and lying to us both.”

A year earlier, pregnant and unable to finish her fifth novel, she had agreed to let her husband direct her writing—not just in the business aspects and the critiques of her drafts, as he had been doing until then, but in everything. She recalls the elation, the eagerness with which she told him her Big Decision. “The final and irrevocable submission of my will and being to his,” she calls it. “I can't write without him. We really are one.”

June 7, 1964. In the diary, she writes that before leaving for work that morning, her husband yelled at her for overfeeding the baby. But she is hardly eating anything herself, she writes, because there is no one to care for her, to cook a meal or even take her out to a restaurant. “Yesterday, ice cream and a doughnut. Today, so far, just coffee.”

In the diary, she promises herself that she will no longer argue with him, no longer cry. She returns to a conclusion that seems to her inescapable: artists cannot love, and that by loving Adam so deeply, she has betrayed her art.

The summer afternoon has suddenly grown cooler, Pamela notes. A thunderstorm gathers. “Pure literature,” she writes of the dramatic shift in the weather, as if the clouds are setting the stage for what she is about to do. At the end, she writes: “this diary should be added on to the unfinished [‘Kathy on the Rocks'].” There is a .22 caliber rifle in the closet, which Adam keeps in their small apartment for protection. It was her birthday present to him four years ago. She uses it to shoot herself.

I was in the next room, nine months old to the day, when this happened. The newspapers say I was asleep.

 

 

Pamela Moore was my mother, but I never really knew her. I've heard it said that for an infant, when someone leaves the room it's as if he or she has left forever. When that person reappears, it's nothing less than a miracle.

For me, my mother reappeared mostly through her books— copies on bookshelves, larger piles of the later titles that sold fewer and fewer. There was also the unpublished writing that filled a locked filing cabinet in my father's office and folders stacked in a small, unused room with peeling green paint in the ancient apartment on 110th Street in Manhattan where my paternal grandmother, whom we called Baba, lived and where Pamela had sometimes stayed, to write and be fed Baba's Polish home cooking.

When I was thirteen years old, I lived in that 110th Street apartment for about a year, after my father and stepmother divorced, and Baba took it upon herself to initiate me into Pamela's full history. Baba had survived the Holocaust by hiding for three years in the Polish countryside with my father and my aunt, who later took care of me after my mother died. The three of them had spent the last year of the war living in a hole in the ground under a barn.

Most people try to turn their backs on such horror; Baba savored it. When I asked, “How did my mother die?” the answer was “She didn't just die! She shot herself!” Baba's version of my mother's story was very tabloid, like the brittle newspaper clippings she gave me along with a copy of
Chocolates for Breakfast
. It was the hardcover edition with the line drawing of the girl on the cover, so, of course, I assumed that girl was Courtney, and Courtney was Pamela. And the black-and-white author photo, her immense eyes with dark circles around them—that also was Pamela. I'd like to think that even without all the dramatic buildup—
this is your mother's soul, take it and read it
—I still would have liked the book. But I loved the book. It is very odd to acquire at age thirteen an aloof yet sensitive and melancholic teenager for a mother. I have continued rereading
Chocolates
at the junctures of my life where I needed . . . not guidance, necessarily, but to be reminded of something that preceded memory.

Who killed Pamela Moore? Of course I wondered what had actually led to my mother's death. Choose one or more of the following: early celebrity, followed by a career on the skids; a difficult childbirth with complications for months after, including a likely case of undiagnosed postpartum depression; a marriage that had begun as a salvation but was becoming a prison. Added to these immediate circumstances were preexisting conditions. Pamela had had a difficult childhood, including her parents' bitter divorce, a mild-mannered and absent father, and a ruthless mother who was not above seducing her daughter's high-school sweetheart, John (the likely model for Charles Cunningham in
Chocolates
). The novel that Pamela wrote at the age of seventeen includes an episode of severe cutting and a suicide, both of which are seen as having a cleansing, redemptive effect, chastising the grown-ups and reminding them of their responsibilities. It is a very young person's seductive view of suicide as a means of somehow making things right again, a view that Pamela may not have ever outgrown.

The years I spent with my father from ages six to eighteen gave me a vivid picture of all the ways he might have been an accessory to my mother's death. After a lifetime of trauma, his default emotion was rage, and he was often vicious to others without seeming to realize his effect. He had learned, perhaps in hiding during the war, that the best way to motivate and engage people was to threaten them with doom. His work as a lawyer had fortified an innate tendency to be cynical and overbearing. He would later make pronouncements such as: “Feminism is nothing but an epistemological construct which holds that Zelda was a better writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

There was the matter of Pamela's last diary, which included the suicide note—a big red bounded ledger that the police held on to for a while and that still bears the evidence-room stamp. My father was very undecided about letting me see that volume. He once showed it to me briefly, but he didn't tell me where it was hidden until a few months before his death. “I may decide to destroy it,” he periodically reminded me, and when I asked why he would even say that, he responded, “Because I am the hero of those diaries!” There was anger, and also real pain, in his words.

It turned out he had never read that volume. A few days before his own death, he asked me what was in it. I said something about the logic of a sixteen-year-old girl who thinks that, because her prince is late in saving her, she must die.

 

My assumption had always been that Pamela learned from Adam not to trust in her own experience, but rather to impose on it some larger plan. I blamed my father, with his legalistic mind and didactic tendencies, for teaching her that ideas are all that matter, and that raw emotions and sensations are, as he would put it, “simply nonsense.”

But then, in my late thirties, having lived for a while in France, I came upon the French edition of
Chocolates
and was amazed at what I found. The French text was very different from the English, and in these new passages I could see the first stirrings of a change I had felt so strongly in my mother's writing. By this time, I knew the basic chronology of her life and work, and I knew that the French edition was published several years before her marriage to my father, at a time when they had just met. So contrary to the theme of most of his stories about her, and most of what she wrote about him in later years, Adam did not sit solidly at the center of Pamela's entire cosmos. He had rivals for that role, and neither he nor I could understand her without understanding their influence.

I had vaguely known that, after the first publication of
Chocolates
, Pamela had fallen under the sway of filmmaker, screenwriter, and international man of intrigue Edouard de Laurot. She had met him on the ocean liner that took her from New York to Paris in August 1956, around the time that the media buildup began around
Chocolates
. For the next two years she followed him on an odyssey across Europe, investing all the profits from the international sales of her book into his projects, supporting de Laurot on his “revolutionary missions,” and purchasing a car—a Mercedes-Benz 180D—for his use.

During this time, Adam Kanarek, the man who would become my father, was back home in New York. He and Pamela had been introduced by a mutual friend, and they sometimes met in the libraries at Columbia University, where Adam had a job in the Slavonic department. During Pamela's European travels, she and Adam wrote each other with increasing frequency. Adam was cast in the role of loyal, steadfast friend, submitting Pamela's papers to Barnard College and lobbying her professors to give her the credits she would need to graduate.

Although she was nearly eight years younger than he, in her letters to Adam, Pamela often took to lecturing him on the importance of engagement in history. One must not allow one's fate to be determined by circumstances, she wrote, nor by lack of faith or courage. Adam sometimes responded that, having witnessed in Poland both the Nazi occupation and the Soviet liberation, he was suspicious of all ideologies and their calls to action.

(In addition to my father's letters and anecdotes, I had the complete typescript of Pamela's second novel, “Prophets without Honor,” which was largely based on her experiences with de Laurot. Her agent, Sterling Lord, sold this book to Knopf in 1959. The villain, named André de Sevigny, is a bona fide military spy and a traitor, rather than a fabulist filmmaker. Like de Laurot, de Sevigny is of mysterious trans-European origins. There is a dangerous edge to his charm, as he and the heroine, Susan, engage in a kind of power play reminiscent of Anthony Neville and Courtney in
Chocolates
, only much darker. Once the full book was submitted to Knopf, however, it was rejected—in spite of the publisher having paid a hefty advance. Pamela continued to rework the story in various forms, including the unfinished novel she was working on at the end of her life, “Kathy on the Rocks,” with its themes of “Europe versus America” and innocence betrayed.)

But what had really happened during that two-year hiatus? To find out, I began meeting with people who had known de Laurot, and they described a charismatic, fascinating, and often destructive genius of boundless energy who was always engaged in some highly important and secret mission. His son told me how his father had taught him to build pipe bombs for an explosion sequence on one of his films, and how he would disappear for years at a time. The widower of one of de Laurot's later companions told me that de Laurot had tested her usefulness early in their collaboration by instructing her to raise $10,000 for his next film. When she showed up a week later with the cash, he asked her, “How did you get this?” “We robbed a bank,” she replied. According to the story I was told, this caught de Laurot off guard, but he must have decided that this girl was a keeper, because they remained lovers and then friends for many years, collaborating on screenplays with Abel Ferrara.

De Laurot also collaborated with the filmmaker Jonas Mekas on the magazine
Film Culture
and on Mekas's first film,
Guns of the Trees
. This was in the late 1950s, before Mekas went on to make dozens of acclaimed films and eventually founded Anthology Film Archives. When I met with Mekas in August 2012, he recalled de Laurot's imperious style, and how de Laurot had begun to direct the actors and the camera crew until Mekas kicked him off the set. He also recalled de Laurot's letter to him, when he first met Pamela on the ocean liner. She was interested in cinema, de Laurot wrote, and would be useful to their projects. Mekas then gave me a large envelope stuffed with my mother's letters, which de Laurot had entrusted to him for safekeeping nearly fifty years before.

With these letters, I have pieced together some of the story behind her two-year disappearance beginning in 1956, which the press took to be a charming eccentricity of a young writer— very Salingeresque, perhaps. My first discovery was that Pamela's relationship with de Laurot began long before she was a celebrity. Perhaps de Laurot had chosen her in part for her naïveté and usefulness to him, but her wealth and fame could not yet have been a factor. Her first letter to him, written after she had gotten off the boat where they had first met, was dated June 14, 1956. “I have been progressing in my elementary education, as you outlined it, so perhaps when I see you again, I shall have become more conversant.”

Though a very charismatic man—the center of attention in any room, by many accounts—de Laurot always kept his activities shrouded in secrecy. Pamela wrote that she would do anything to support his projects, and that her greatest fear was to be unworthy of helping him.

 

Why did you go to Zurich? Only to earn money, or to work on a film? I am not interrogating you, but I was distressed to think that you might have been sent from Paris solely by need of money. It is now only a dream, but it is my most fervent wish that I might make enough money so that you could be freed for more significant work . . . I want to do so much, Edouard . . . I think, with the joy that one might have in contemplating a revolution, of how much you might do if you were not beset with the problem of mere sustenance.