Just One Catch (62 page)

Speed mentioned to Joe what Gelb had said about writing a piece.

“What are you worried about?” Joe said, delighted. “Do it!”

“Seriously, do you really think I can?”

“It's easy. Of course you can.”

“I already have an idea,” Speed said. “It's ‘How to Beat the High Cost of Living in the Hamptons … All You Need Is a Sick Friend with a House.'”

Joe loved it. So did Arthur Gelb. “I think it should go in the ‘Living Section,'” he told Speed. “Do a thousand to fifteen hundred words. How about a two-week deadline?”

Within days, Speed had drafted a few pages. After cutting Joe's hair one afternoon, he asked Joe to critique them. “I thought the piece was to be about the high cost of living in the Hamptons, not ‘The Speed Vogel Story,'” Joe said.

Speed redrafted the article. Several days later, he took it to Arthur Gelb's office. Gelb read it at his desk while Speed pretended to study the photographs on his walls. Finally, Gelb said, “It's funny.” He hadn't laughed. “Needs some editing.… Thanks.… We'll get back to you.… Regards to Joe.”

Speed left the building, certain he'd wasted his time.

On July 28, Joe shoved the morning paper at him. There he was, in the “Living” section: “Helping a Convalescent Friend (in Style).”

Speed boasted that he'd never known rejection as a writer. Joe warned him not to expect the Pulitzer Prize.

A month later, LuAnn Walther, a junior editor at Bantam, who'd met Speed through a mutual friend, the playwright Israel Horovitz, said to him (either by phone or during a stroll on Fire Island—their memories clashed), “I read your
Times
piece and the
People
story on Joe. Why don't you think about writing a book about it all?”

“Yes, do it,” Joe said.

In
No Laughing Matter,
Speed said that a couple of days after urging him on, Joe said, “I've been thinking about your book, and I would like to be the co-author if you don't mind. Is that okay?” The truth is, Candida Donadio advised Joe the advance would be much larger with his name attached to the proposal.

Speed told Mario Puzo and George Mandel he might write a book. “[D]on't begin before you have a signed contract and an advance,” Puzo counseled him. “Mario's got it wrong,” Mandel said. “You don't write a word until you've
spent
the advance. Why should anybody write when he's got money?”

*   *   *

AS AUTUMN APPROACHED
and Joe's summer idyll neared an end, he studied his financial records. He was on track to have spent, for the year, almost $80,000 in hospital costs, with $10,000 more for physicians' fees and over $23,000 for nursing care; physical therapy added nearly $4,000 to the total. Because of his lapsed insurance policy, he bore most of this sum personally. Additionally, he owed $35,248 in legal and accounting fees; he supported Shirley, paying rent and utilities; he gave incidental money to his children; and, in what he considered a moral obligation, he sent $250 a month to his in-laws: a gesture of support, given Barney's recent medical problems. The Helds took the money, but Dottie would not speak to him. To friends and relatives, she disparaged Joe's “interest in other women” and said, “How could he just discard my darling daughter like an old hat after all the years she cared for him?”

Joe got by on monthly royalties, loans from friends, the anticipation of his advance for the King David book, and an unexpected windfall: a royalty check of $21,890.07 from a special hardcover reprint of
Catch-22
by Simon & Schuster, in celebration of the novel's twentieth anniversary.

He was legally obligated to leave the house by September 15. His lawyer urged him to consider new arrangements, but Joe didn't want to think about the future. In late August, he, Speed, and Valerie attended an outdoor feast at the Long Island home of the
Times
food columnist, Craig Claiborne. It was Claiborne's birthday and he was celebrating the publication of a new cookbook.

The Gelbs had introduced Joe to Claiborne. According to Arthur, “Craig developed a crush on Heller, who had eyes only for attractive women and who often crankily rebuffed new acquaintances of both sexes. To my surprise, he good-naturedly tolerated Craig's flirting. After enough margaritas and wine, Craig was apt to launch into a routine about his sex life, past and present. He told us once that as a boy in Mississippi he had experimented with various barnyard stock, including chickens. ‘Tell me, Craig,' Heller asked with a typically devilish grin, ‘is there much foreplay with a chicken?'”

On that August evening, a chill tinged the air. Leaves were turning. Joe tried not to dwell on any of this or consider what it augured. With relish, he cut into a plate of grilled Cajun catfish. A man he didn't know approached him, limping. He said his name was Mike Alexander. He was a friend of Speed. He wished Joe continued luck with his recovery, and said he had also battled Guillain-Barré syndrome.

“How long ago?” Joe asked.

“I had it twice,” said Alexander. “The first time—”

Joe cut him off. “I don't want to talk about it now. Really, I don't, not at a party.”

No more missions. Please.

*   *   *

JOE RETURNED
his rented wheelchair and commode. “I could get up from a toilet but not from a sofa,” he said. He took walks along the relatively car-free road in front of the house. “[A]s I saw my time of privileged residence running out, I could envision no better place for me to be for the rest of that year than the one in which I was.”

At Joe's urging, Jeffrey Cohen made application to the court to extend the occupancy order from September 15 until December 31. Shirley had procured a new lawyer, Diane Blank, from the firm of Gordon & Schechtman. Blank said her client would grant Mr. Heller occupancy of the East Hampton house until the end of the year if he agreed to relinquish claims to the house after that and to pay her client $2,500 a month.

Shortly after this, Ms. Blank would accuse Joe in court of being an active participant “on the East Hampton party circuit.” She said he had been observed “carrying bags of groceries.” Therefore, he was fully recovered and no longer needed the house for recuperation. Cohen argued that until the divorce proceedings came to trial, the status quo should be preserved, with Mr. Heller in East Hampton and Mrs. Heller in the marital apartment. Eventually, the judge agreed (Joe had already exceeded the deadline to move).

Two days before Joe was to leave the house, he wrote a check for $160 to cover Shirley's visit to a psychiatrist named Roberta Jaeger. Shirley would see Dr. Jaeger a few times that fall. On one of these occasions, Joe agreed to go with her, apparently at the doctor's request. He went to provide information to the doctor so she could treat Shirley more effectively. At least this was Joe's understanding at the time.

On October 2—while the court was still considering the occupancy issue—Speed went to his studio apartment in Manhattan for messages and mail. “One of the messages was from Jeffrey Cohen,” he said. “[H]e explained that he had heard from Joe that his wife had unexpectedly shown up at the house in East Hampton.… Joe was, for the moment, alone in the house and frightened.”

Speed rushed back to Skimhampton Road. By the time he got there, Valerie had arrived. “Joe was still upset, but he was trying to calm down,” Speed wrote. “Valerie had been taking a riding lesson [at a nearby stable] and Joe was in his study, lying on the couch, going over some pages he had just written, when he heard someone at the door. He naturally thought it was Valerie and was astounded when he saw his wife. It must have been an awful moment and I felt sorry for them both. Joe and [Shirley] had not been on speaking terms. All I knew was that now she was in the guest cottage with her long-time housekeeper, Viola. [Joe] had no idea how long they intended to stay.”

Speed talked Joe, Valerie, and a friend, Trudi Stretton, into going shopping with him. They bought a “good supply of shrimp, lobsters, pork, garlic, scallions, and ginger, as well as some vodka, gin, scotch, and appropriate wines.” As therapy, Joe helped take the groceries into the house (presumably, this is the moment he was “observed” carrying bags).

Joe made martinis. Speed prepared lobster, rice, and Chinese barbecued shrimp. Viola, Joe's old housekeeper, loved his barbecued shrimp. “I could not conceive of a diplomatic way to invite her over [from the guesthouse],” Speed wrote.

“After dinner,” he said, “Joe told me he'd been married exactly thirty-seven years [today]. This was his wedding anniversary. After everything that [had] happened … it was a bizarre announcement and we all fell silent for a moment, each with our private thoughts. None of us knew what to do until Trudi smiled and said, ‘Open some champagne! Any anniversary, even this one, should be celebrated!'”

The following morning, Speed said, the guest house “seemed vacant.”

*   *   *

“
CATCH-22
may have been the beginning of the end of the marriage of Joseph and Shirley Heller—but Mario (
Godfather
) Puzo didn't help matters any. So says Shirley in an affidavit filed in New York State Supreme Court, regarding the break-up of her 36-year [
sic
] marriage,” wrote Susan Mulcahy in her syndicated gossip column, “Celebrity Corner,” on March 12, 1983:

The Hellers are about to give depositions and the divorce trial is expected to start in April. Shirley, who states that the phenomenal success of
Catch-22
started the “ruination of our marriage,” also states that her husband shared a studio with “Mario Puzo, the famous writer, and unfortunately, the equally famous bon vivant and womanizer. After that, Joseph Heller was never the same.” Joseph … scoffs at his estranged mate's charge: “Anybody with good vision and good sense cannot with a straight face describe Mr. Puzo as a bon vivant or womanizer, and he has never shared a studio with me.”

On this last point, Joe was correct. As for “bon vivant,” perhaps it was in the eye of the beholder. Puzo was a regular at Elaine's, the Cannes Film Festival, and the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. After his wife died, he maintained a long-term relationship with Carol Gino.

Mulcahy's column concluded: “In the court papers, Shirley says she is ‘destitute' and asks for half of Heller's earnings, which she estimates as at least one million dollars. He calls her assessment of his financial situation ‘fantasy.'”

Liz Smith's syndicated column said Shirley sought half the earnings from
Catch-22, Something Happened,
and
Good as Gold,
as well as moneys from “two unpublished novels”—“[o]ne of [which] … was not just unpublished but unwritten,” Joe said.

For the next year and half, the battle got nastier. Shirley hired yet another lawyer, this one a minor celebrity in his own right, dubbed by newspapers the “Sultan of Splitsville”: Raoul Lionel Felder, in his late forties, bearded, soft-spoken, the son of a poor Jewish immigrant from Brooklyn. He charged $450 an hour. He had represented Mrs. Martin Scorsese, Mrs. Carl Sagan, and Mrs. Frank Gifford, among others. The
Washington Post
once quoted him as saying, “A woman is like a Stradivarius violin. The humidity has to be right to play it. Otherwise, they'll throw in the towel.” The
Post
said Felder's ability to “pluck” this “particular instrument, the grief-stricken wife” was unmatched among New York's high-profile lawyers.

Felder introduced himself to Joe by letter. He said he regretted Joe had not found “contentment and/or quietude of spirit.”

On February 7, 1983, according to Joe's notes on the case, Felder declared publicly that Joe's illness was “ancient history”; he was “a highly visible figure on the party circuit [who] drives a car,” and he was a “multimillionaire who can finance wearying and debilitating litigation.”

In early March, during a bitter cold snap in Manhattan, William Binderman, another of Shirley's lawyers, deposed Joe in a small conference room in the legal firm's office. The deposition's sole purpose was the disclosure of financial information, and it dragged on for nearly two weeks, several hours each day. Shirley's legal team accused Joe of withholding financial documents. Joe told them to ask Shirley—most of what they wanted (tax returns, check stubs) was still in the Apthorp. One day, Binderman asked Joe where certain papers were. Joe pointed at him. “You're holding them in your hands!” he said. “You got them from the ‘marital apartment'!”

Cohen and his team said the deposition resembled a “grand jury hearing [rather] than a disclosure proceeding.” The time it took was completely “unreasonable”; Cohen charged Shirley's lawyers of stalling to pad their bills and deplete the “marital estate.” (Joe declared that “not in [thirty-seven] years of marriage had I done anything as damaging to the aspirations of my wife as had been done to her by her attorneys.”)

Cohen urged Supreme Court justice Marvin Evans to start the trial. A Miss Delbaum, representing Shirley's legal team, countered, “Mr. Heller is now saying … Let's go to trial.… Your Honor, this is not World War II. It's a simple matrimonial case.”

During this period, Joe filled a notebook with observations of his medical progress: “Trouble with the letter ‘l.'” “Trouble with ‘w' and ‘oo.'” “Bob Towbin commented that [the] right side [of my] upper lip seems immobile.… I still cannot suck in my cheeks and puff them out, although I am making a start.” “Speed and Erica both commented on a habit they noticed of passing my finger to the side of my face.… [It is] not a habit, but a conscious means of cleaning food from between my teeth and cheek at the rear of my mouth.”

It was his mental health that had become an issue in the divorce case. Back in September 1982, Dr. Roberta Jaeger, Shirley's psychiatrist, released a statement to the court that said Shirley “was eager to do whatever she could to save the marriage.… [T]hough she worked with unfailing determination toward that result, her efforts were futile. They were, in fact, doomed”: