Salinger (32 page)

Of all the topics Eppes wanted to know about, of course, Holden Caulfield was at the top of her list.

“Every question I asked about Holden Caulfield,” Eppes wrote, “he replied, Read the book. It’s all in the book. There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Over and over.
Except when I asked him if the book was autobiographical.” It was then that Salinger stopped, as if he were taken aback by the question. “‘I don’t know. I don’t
know,’ he said. ‘I’ve just let it all go. I don’t know about Holden anymore.’”

Next Eppes asked Salinger about a variety of topics—Indonesia, the movies, the counterintelligence corps. Each answer added little new information to what she, or any Salinger fan for that
matter, already knew. Finally she asked him if he had any future plans to publish.

“He said he had
no
plans to publish,” she wrote. “
Writing
was what was important to him—and to be left alone so that he
could
write.”

Then Eppes asked Salinger perhaps the pertinent question of her entire interview. Why, she wanted to know, had he seen her?

“He said,” Eppes wrote, “‘You write. I write.’ He had come as one writer to another.” With this, he started to ask about her writing career, which included,
besides the newspaper articles she had written, one unpublished novel that looked for a while like it was going to be released by a company called Southern Publishing before the company dissolved
and Eppes’s manuscript was lost. This prompted Salinger to assess the publishing business as “vicious.”

Once Eppes had taken Salinger through another litany of topics—autographs, politics, economics, the importance of cooking with cold-pressed oils, the American
Dream—she returned to his writing.

Was he writing every day? What was he working on?

“I can’t tell you that.” Salinger smiled.

After this, rather abruptly, Salinger left for the post office. While he was gone, Eppes rushed into Cummins Corner to buy a soft drink. Returning to sit in her Pinto, she soon saw Salinger
leaving the post office. A tiny drama followed. The owner of the Cummins Corner market approached Salinger on the street to ask him if he could shake his hand, and, when he tried, Salinger got so
mad he not only stalked off without shaking hands but walked over to the Pinto to chew out Betty Eppes.

Because of Eppes’s brief interview, Salinger said, this man he did not know had come up to talk to him on the street. He even touched his arm. This was not something Salinger wanted to
happen—ever! Furious, Salinger demanded that Eppes go away at once. “Don’t call my home,” he said; “don’t call any of my friends. Just leave Windsor, leave
Cornish, and leave me alone!”

Brazenly, Eppes asked Salinger if she could take a picture of him—a close-up.

“Absolutely not! No!” Salinger shouted.

Eppes calmed him a bit by putting down her camera. Then, as if to divert his attention, she asked him one last question—was he really writing?
Really
?

“I am really writing,” he said. “I love to write and I assure you I am writing regularly. I’m just not publishing. I write for
myself. For my own
pleasure, I want to be left alone to do it. So leave me alone.”

Turning on his heels, Salinger walked off. As he headed for the covered bridge, his back to Betty Eppes, she went ahead and snapped his picture anyway.

Returning to Louisiana, Eppes wrote her article for the
Baton Rouge Advocate.
The piece, which ran on June 29, created such a stir it was syndicated in newspapers across
the country. In addition, Eppes was flooded with letters asking her questions about Salinger; she even got two offers from film companies that wanted her to contact Salinger about making a picture.
Finally, the
Paris Review
asked her to write an expanded version of the piece, which she did. Entitled “What I Did Last Summer” when it appeared in the journal, it was edited by
George Plimpton.

For Eppes, there was one odd postscript to her encounter with Salinger. During her interview with him, Salinger had told her he didn’t believe in giving autographs. Then, back in Baton
Rouge, as she was going through her mail one day, she opened an envelope containing a letter written to a New York–based company called The Chocolate Soup. In the letter, which was typed, the
writer had ordered two schoolbags made in Denmark that he had seen advertised in the
New Yorker.
How peculiar, Eppes thought, that someone had sent this letter to her and not The Chocolate
Soup. Obviously the person had made a mistake. Then, at the bottom of the brief note, Eppes noticed it—J. D. Salinger’s signature.

There was always one unanswered question about the episode with Salinger and Eppes—a question she had even asked him during their interview: Why
had
Salinger shown
up to talk with her? One could argue he came because he knew Eppes would write about the meeting, something that would generate publicity for him. When Eppes’s piece appeared, news of the
article was carried in papers all across the country. Was Salinger so calculating that he had decided to meet her but, after answering a few questions, had become reluctant to continue and ended
the strained, oddly emotional ordeal by storming off in a huff and declaring he wanted to be left alone? If this were not the case, if he
didn’t
do it for the notoriety, what was the
motivation for Salinger to meet Eppes? “Well, in her letter she described who she was—a tennis pro,” says George Plimpton. “She gave her age, which was young, twenty-eight
or something like that. I’ve always believed she dotted her i’s in her letter with little circles. In the letter she said that she had come all that way to see the great man and that
she’d be waiting in her Pinto at the foot of the covered bridge. Salinger got the note and I think he couldn’t resist seeing what this girl was like. I mean—an attractive young
woman waiting in a blue Pinto. Curiosity got the better of him. And the letter was sort of plaintive. Hell, he’s a human being.”

3

In December that same year, 1980, Salinger was again in the news. On the evening of Monday, December 8, as an early-winter
darkness fell on Manhattan, Mark David Chapman, a disturbed loner, approached his idol John Lennon as Lennon emerged from his limousine in front of the Dakota, the building off
Central Park West at Seventy-second Street where he lived with Yoko Ono and their son Sean. After getting Lennon’s autograph, Chapman waited until the singer had turned and started toward the
Dakota. Then, Chapman pulled out a pistol, and, assuming a combat stance as he held the gun under a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye,
he fired five times at Lennon, who was twenty feet away.
Four of the five shots hit Lennon in the back and left shoulder. Staggering up to the entrance to the building, Lennon collapsed, blood pouring from his mouth. Hysterical, Ono fell to her knees
beside him, as Chapman walked idly away, sat down on the curb, and started to read Salinger’s novel. Unfazed by what he had just done, Chapman merely sat there, waiting for the police to
arrive. His inscription in his copy of
Catcher
was revealing. “To Holden Caulfield from Holden Caulfield,” it read, a reference to the fact that Chapman identified with
Salinger’s character so strongly he had recently tried to have his name legally changed to Holden Caulfield. “This is my story.”

Several weeks later, after he had been charged with murder and put in jail without bail, Chapman released an official statement, which he wrote out by hand with a ballpoint pen on a piece of
yellow legal paper and sent to the
New York Times.
“My wish is for all of you to someday read
The Catcher in the Rye,
” the note read in part. “All of my efforts will
now be devoted toward this goal, for this extraordinary book holds many answers. My true hope is that in wanting to find these answers you will read
The Catcher in the Rye.
Thank
you.”

Much later, when Chapman was on trial, it was revealed that he had killed Lennon because he believed Lennon had become a phony as insincere and contemptible as the ones
in
The Catcher in the Rye.
Chapman argued that, because Lennon had been corrupted by commercialism, he was protecting Lennon’s innocence by shooting him. Even after Chapman was found
guilty, he believed he was justified in his actions. To prove it, during his sentencing hearing, Chapman read out loud in the courtroom the famous “catcher in the rye” speech from
Salinger’s book.

Years later, Chapman added to the story when he told Barbara Walters in a television interview that before he went to kill Lennon he had gone through a satanic ritual to make himself become
Holden Caulfield, whose mission in life, according to Chapman, was to cleanse the world of phony people. “John Lennon fell into a very deep hole,” Chapman said to Walters, “a hole
so deep inside of me I thought by killing him, I would acquire his fame.”

On March 30, 1981, less than four months after Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon, John Hinckley Jr., a twenty-six-year-old Midwesterner who would be described as
“alienated” and “deranged,” stepped from the crowd waiting at a side door of the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., and fired six times at Ronald Reagan as the president
headed for his limousine following a speech he had given in the hotel to the AFL-CIO. One bullet struck the head
of James Brady, the president’s press secretary.
Another struck the neck of Thomas Delahanty, a District of Columbia policeman. A third hit the chest of Timothy McCarthy, a Secret Service agent. A fourth bullet ricocheted off the presidential
limousine and struck Reagan in the left side. It would not be until later, when they performed emergency surgery on Reagan at George Washington Hospital, that doctors would discover the bullet had
traveled through Reagan’s body to within an inch of his heart, coming dangerously close to killing him.

In the days after the shooting, as reports about Hinckley began to surface, officials revealed the reason why Hinckley did what he did. Astonishingly, because he was infatuated with Jodie
Foster, especially the teenage prostitute she had played in
Taxi Driver,
Hinckley had decided that in order to get her attention he was going to assassinate the president. It was a real-life
story line that eerily resembled the fictional one carried out by Robert De Niro’s character in
Taxi Driver.
Two hours before going to the Hilton, Hinckley had written Foster a love
letter. “Jody,” the letter read, “I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you. . . . The
reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I’ve got to do something now to make you understand in no uncertain terms that I am
doing all of this for your sake.” Investigators found this unmailed letter among Hinckley’s personal effects in a suitcase in his Washington motel room. Earlier, at the crime scene,
police
also had found in one of his pockets a copy of a novel that, judging from its tattered condition, Hinckley had read many times—
The Catcher in the
Rye.