Just One Catch (41 page)

Meanwhile, he was being courted by the literature crowd. The Cheltenham Literary Festival in London, in its thirteenth year in 1962, invited him to participate in a panel discussion on “Sex in Literature” (a topic designed to exploit the recent British publication of D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
). Without his family—the children were in school—Joe went to London. This was his first time in many years on a plane, and it took several drinks to calm him. He appeared on the panel with Carson McCullers and Kingsley Amis. McCullers had broken her left arm; she was drunk and nearly incoherent, waving her cast and slurring that “so long as a book is true and beautiful,” it could never be pornographic. When it was his turn to speak, Joe observed that the makers of mink coats had corrupted more girls than any book had ever done. After the festival, Amis left his wife of fifteen years for the festival organizer, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Joe was surprised and bemused that literary types behaved like copywriters on Madison Avenue.

Following the festival, he rented a car and drove to Wales to meet the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had praised
Catch-22
in print. Russell was then in his nineties and somewhat hard of hearing. Joe came to the door and introduced himself. Russell waved his cane, shouting, “Go away, damn you! Never come back here again!” Perplexed, Joe started for his car, when Russell's manservant came after him. “I'm sorry, sir, but there's been a bit of a misunderstanding,” the man said. “Mr. Russell thought you said ‘Edward Teller.'” Confusion cleared, the men lunched together—Russell was quite hospitable—and though the exchange was uneventful, Joe described the afternoon as “thrilling.”

On this same trip to Europe, he met James Jones for the first time. In Paris for a book signing, Joe ran into a fellow novelist, the son of John Marquand, who asked him, “What are you doing tonight?” Joe replied, “Nothing. I am alone in this city. I don't know anybody, and I'd like to meet someone like Marilyn Monroe.” His companion took him for drinks with Jones and his wife. “[I] expressed my gratitude to Jim [for his book],” Joe said. Among the other guests at the table was a man named Mitchell Parish, who had written the lyrics to “Stardust” and “Deep Purple”—a “very fussy old man,” Joe said. “[N]ot till six or seven o'clock the next morning did I find myself back at my hotel.”

These activities—the screenwriting, the travel—were welcome distractions not just from anxieties about writing a second novel but also from daily life, with its occasional sorrows, which Shirley tried to keep as his center. His mother had finally died in the old Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. The qualities he knew he shared with her—vanity, a deep cynicism, especially about institutions—became exaggerated in her speech and behaviors near the end. She worried about the way her hair looked, when there was not much hair to fret about. She accused the staff of mistreating her (increasing Joe's guilt that he had not invited her to live with him).

He remembered visiting Lena in the hospital years earlier, when she had broken her hip, and mistaking another woman for her. It occurred to him that this incident might have been the basis of the scene in
Catch-22
when a mother and father visit their dying son and mistake Yossarian for the boy: Well, why not? We're
all
dying.

Lena's biggest pleasure late in life was the taste of bacon—
trayf
! It pleased Joe to see her wolfing it down in the mornings. He remembered meals she had shared with his family before her incarceration in the old-age home, before Ted was born, when Erica was a baby and her every gesture seemed cute and charming, designed by nature to smooth the edges of an irascible old woman. Well, often it's best to shed even good things, Joe reflected. Especially when you have no choice. Youth—the past—has its limits. After one of his last visits to Lena, he wandered down the old block, past boarded-up taverns and cafés, the doorways filled with junkies and shivering runaways—kids not much older than his daughter. Despite the poverty, you never used to see that sort of thing before the war. We had character, Joe decided. Whatever else we lacked, we had that at least—in no small part, thanks to women like his mother.

He stopped to remember Irving Kaiser and his typewriter. He wished he saw more of Sylvia and Lee. Sylvia, now married to a man named Bernie Fields, still worked for Macy's, and Lee, the proud father of Joe's nephew, Paul, worked these days for a film-production company. Joe was sorry they had drifted apart. But that's what families did when they became successful.

*   *   *

ON NOVEMBER 1, 1962
,
McHale's Navy
featured an episode entitled “PT 73, Where Are You?” written by Joe Heller. The program credits listed a man named Si Rose as “Script Consultant.”

The plot concerned a group of hapless navy men who misplace their boat somewhere in the South Pacific. How this happened is never clear; it is simply the premise from which events ensue. In a bit of slapstick dialogue reminiscent of
Catch-22,
the skipper says, “I always felt it wasn't too easy to lose a boat.” One of his men answers, straight-faced, “No, it wasn't easy at all. Why, the mosquitoes…” Everything works out in the end, paced by an annoying laugh track. The crew returns to its comic books and beer (cans of which have been stored in the torpedo tubes), and dreams of R & R, where everyone will “squeeze … red-head[s]” on shady spots in the sand.

Four months before the program's air date, Joe wrote producer Jay Sanford to complain about Si Rose. “Friends of mine in TV had warned me that there is usually a staff writer or story editor around on every show who will bend heaven and earth in order to get in on the script credit for the purpose of sharing in the residual earnings,” Joe said. Worse, without consulting Joe, Rose had added material to the script that was “deplorably trite and singularly flat.” Joe asked that his name be removed from the credits. “I am very serious about this because frankly, and unhappily, I think it is now a bomb. It is no longer a funny show but a show based on a funny situation, and that is something different entirely.… [T]he comic tensions have been removed and replaced by static intervals of dialogue that are not funny and do not advance the action.” Finally, he insisted he receive full financial compensation for the work he had done.

On August 6, Edward J. Montagne wrote him: “I would like to assure you, Joe, that we didn't make the changes in the script purely for the sake of making changes. Nothing would please us more than to have a script come in that was perfect. Unfortunately, it is seldom the case—particularly so early in a series when characters are being formed.” The producers stuck to this point—that the series was not yet properly established—to argue that Joe was not “contractually entitled” to the money promised him before Rose reworked the script. Joe's name remained in the credits. Seven years would elapse before the Writers Guild of America determined he had been wronged in the matter and was due a settlement of $2,375.

*   *   *

MEANWHILE
, “[c]omedy [variety] shows were out of style,” Mel Brooks said. “One day it's five thousand a week [to write skits], the next day it's zilch.”

The Borscht Belt patter of
Your Show of Shows
had given way to the harder, jazzier, more political and absurd stand-up routines of Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl, and Woody Allen. The accumulated dramas of McCarthyism, the bomb, the Cold War, and Camelot in the White House had relegated Catskills shtick to the past (on top of which, the routines had become overly familiar on TV).

The
New York Times
“generally ignored the satirical cabaret performers on the theory that such entertainment was not sufficiently highbrow,” Arthur Gelb wrote in
City Room,
his memoir of working at the
Times.
Gelb would soon become one of Joe's close friends. “The best [of the comics] were well versed in literature, the Bible, psychology and current events,” he said. “At times, I saw them as our new evangelists, using the cabaret stage as a pulpit to shock audiences into an awareness of hypocritical, repressive aspects of our culture.”

Mort Sahl would carry a newspaper onto the stage: the source of the new “black humor.” In many ways, stand-up comedians and comedic actors in such clubs as Second City in Chicago (featuring a young Alan Arkin), the hungry i in San Francisco, the Unicorn in Los Angeles, the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, and New York's the Vanguard, the Bon Soir, Basin Street East, and the Bitter End presaged the personal, social nature of the coming cultural revolution—a trend with which
Catch-22
was very much in step.

One of Sahl's jokes best embodied the moment: As he imagined responding to the badgering questions of an investigative committee, he said, “I didn't mean to be subversive, but I was new in the community and wanted to meet girls.”

Lenny Bruce was the Catskills on weed (or something harder), with a copy of
Howl
stuffed in its pocket. After a performance at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in the fall of 1961, Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges for having uttered onstage the word
cocksucker
as well as the sexual term
to come
. He was acquitted after his lawyer, Albert Bendich, argued that Bruce's humor was “in the great tradition of social satire, related intimately to the kind of … satire found in the works of such great authors as Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift.” Bendich called literature professors and jazz critics to testify on Bruce's behalf.

More arrests followed in cities across the country. Finally, Bruce was brought to trial in New York after a performance in Greenwich Village's Café Au Go Go, during which a former CIA agent named Herbert Ruhe, now working as a license inspector for the city, noted Bruce's use of the expressions “nice tits,” “jack me off,” and “go come in a chicken.”

Immediately, a petition circulated in the literary and entertainment communities protesting the comedian's arrest. “Lenny Bruce … [is] in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain,” the petition said. “Although Bruce makes use of the vernacular in his night-club performances, he does so within the context of his satirical intent and not to arouse the prurient interests of his listeners.” Joe signed the petition along with hundreds of others, including Saul Bellow, James Jones, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Lionel Trilling, George Plimpton, Norman Podhoretz, and Barney Rosset.

The trial, in the Criminal Courts Building downtown, was beyond parody, with the former CIA man performing some of Bruce's routines for the jury (“I'm going to be judged by
his
bad timing,” Bruce groaned). A prosecutor asked a Presbyterian minister, “Would you say the phrase, and you'll excuse me, Reverend, for using this language, but the phrase ‘motherfucker' is in accord with that Commandment, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother?'” Following a thoughtful pause, the minister replied, “I don't think the term ‘motherfucker' has any relationship to that Commandment.”

Despite Bruce's pleas that the court not “lock … away [his] words,” he was convicted of violating Penal Code 1140-A, prohibiting “obscene … entertainment … which would tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others.” Two years later, while still appealing the conviction, he died of a morphine overdose. One of his prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, admitted, “I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart.… We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

In fact, as Arthur Gelb discovered while investigating for the
New York Times,
the NYPD regularly demanded graft from club owners and nightclub entertainers in exchange for not busting them or pulling club licenses. “[P]olice payoffs … were a fact of cabaret life,” Gelb wrote. It was the New York literary community—sharing Bruce's concern that language could be outlawed—that led the charge against corrupt practices. At a meeting in George Plimpton's Seventy-second Street apartment, at which Random House's Jason Epstein and Robert Silvers, then of
Harper's,
were present, along with Barney Rosset, Norman Mailer, and Norman Podhoretz, Gelb got the go-ahead to write a story for the
Times
announcing the formation of a committee of intellectuals; this committee planned to petition Governor Nelson Rockefeller to investigate police corruption with regard to cabarets. The story appeared on page one. Eventually, cabaret supervision was transferred to City Hall, away from the police department. None of this helped Lenny Bruce, but a blow had been struck, loosening restrictions and allowing performers such as Woody Allen to carry comedy to further extremes of satire and absurdity—as in Allen's routine about a beatnik girl he wanted to seduce who liked to listen to Marcel Marceau LPs.

It was a transitional moment for the culture (“I feel the hints, the clues, the whisper of a new time coming,” Norman Mailer had written) … and Joe Heller, the World War II vet who would soon be hailed for writing a Vietnam novel before Vietnam cracked the public consciousness, was an attractive transitional figure.

In addition to
Newsweek,
the first national magazine to conduct an in-depth interview with Joe was
The Realist,
founded by Paul Krassner. A former violin prodigy who had worked for a while as a stand-up comic and television comedy writer (he adored Lenny Bruce), Krassner identified himself as a lapsed, nonconforming Jew. In the late fifties, he was working in lower Manhattan, in the business office of Lyle Stuart,
Mad
magazine's business manager and publisher of the anticensorship magazine
The Independent.
Krassner wrote for
The Independent
and
Mad,
but felt these iconoclastic publications were becoming too tame in their appeal to more mainstream audiences. He penned a piece called “Guilt Without Sex: A Guide for Adolescents” and offered it to
Mad.
The editor, William Gaines, turned it down. Too racy, he said. Piqued by Gaines's ever-more-conservative editorial taste, Krassner said to him, “I guess you don't want to change horses in the middle of the stream.” Gaines replied, “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass.” Krassner decided to start his own magazine. “I founded
The Realist
as a
Mad
for adults,” he said.