Salinger (34 page)

“At any time during the past twenty years have you written any fiction which has not been published?”

“Yes,” Salinger stated.

“Could you describe for me what works of fiction you have written which have not been published?”

“It would be very difficult to do . . . ” Salinger said.

“Have you written any full-length works of fiction during the past twenty years which have not been published?”

“Could you frame that a different way?” he asked. Callagy asked Salinger what genre he was working in.

“It’s very difficult to answer,” Salinger said, “I don’t write that way. I just start writing fiction and see what happens to it.”

“ . . . Would you tell me what your literary efforts have been in the field of fiction within the last twenty years?”

“ . . . Just a work of fiction,” Salinger said. “That’s all. That’s the only description I can really give it . . . . I work with characters, and as they develop, I
just go on from there.”

In the course of the deposition, which went on for six hours, Callagy asked Salinger about an array of issues, some important, some mundane. Callagy had Salinger talk about the conflicts he had
had with specific editors, such as John Woodburn at Little, Brown. He also asked questions about the author’s personal life and his income. Callagy asked for dates of publication of
Salinger’s books, dates of interviews, information about other lawsuits. Salinger revealed little.

By the end of the deposition, Salinger seemed exhausted. No doubt it had been one of the worst days of his life. In order to stop Hamilton’s biography, however, he had no choice but to do
what he did. It might have been painful for him—by answering questions about himself he was violating the very way he had lived his adult life—but he did it. When he was finished,
Salinger left the law offices as anonymously as he had arrived at them. Except for the lawyers directly involved with the case, no one at the firm even knew it was Salinger who had come there that
day for a deposition.

This much is true without question. In the last half of Salinger’s life, he has remained coy and manipulative—just as many adolescents are,
only he was an adult, fully capable of taking adult actions. Eventually it could be argued, part of what Salinger was protecting by filing his lawsuit against Hamilton was the image he had created
over the years, an image that promoted sales of books. In 1986, even though the novel had been in print for thirty-five years,
The Catcher in the Rye
still sold more than two hundred
thousand copies a year, mostly because it remained part of the required reading lists at many high schools and universities. It didn’t hurt Salinger’s reputation (which he was perfectly
aware of—as the interview with Fosburgh demonstrated) that the author of the novel was perceived to be eccentric and mysterious.
Catcher
accounted for a good portion of
Salinger’s yearly royalties. If he had to file a lawsuit to block the publication of
J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life
under the guise of protecting his copyright, then that’s what
he would do. He was also protecting his trademark.

It would take some months—and a history-making legal battle—before the suit was settled. On November 5, Salinger’s papers for a preliminary injunction were filed in Manhattan.
That same day, Judge Pierre N. Leval issued a thirty-page judgment allowing the publication of the book to go forward on the grounds that Hamilton’s limited quotation fell within the limits
set forth by the copyright laws. In England, Hamilton was elated. On December 3, he was still celebrating when Salinger’s lawyers appealed Leval’s opinion to the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Second Circuits. On January 29, 1987, Hamilton certainly was
not
celebrating when Judge Jon O. Newman
and Judge Roger Minor reversed Leval’s decision,
effectively preventing the distribution of
A Writing Life.
“On balance, the claim of fair use as to Salinger’s unpublished letters fails,” the decision read. “To deny
a biographer like Hamilton the opportunity to copy the excessive content of unpublished letters is not . . . to interfere in any significant way with the process of enhancing public knowledge of
history or contemporary events.” Months passed. The fate of the book hung in limbo. Finally, in September 1987, lawyers for Random House submitted a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of
the United States to hear the case. On October 5, the Court denied the petition. At last, this ended the case and allowed
J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life
to be blocked once and for all.

The ordeal, which had been covered extensively in the media in both the United States and England, left a lasting mark on everyone involved. “The whole thing was awful,” says Ian
Hamilton. “It came down to this. Salinger thought that he could stop the publication of my book by doing what he did. He wanted to kill it, period. When we protested, it got nastier and
nastier.” Events were no easier on Salinger. “You know that terrible ordeal he had to go through, that awful ordeal they put him through,” Lillian Ross would one day say to
Andreas Brown about the legal wranglings. “I had to go to court with him and hold his hand he was so upset. He would come over to my place and wait until we’d have to go and I’d
go with him. Literally, sometimes I’d have to hold his hands he’d be shaking so badly. Afterwards, I’d make him chicken soup at the end of the day. He was such a sensitive and
fragile person, so vulnerable to the world. He was such a sweet man.”

In the end Hamilton reworked
A Writing Life
and turned it into a book called
In Search of J. D. Salinger.
In large part, it was a chronicle of
Hamilton’s efforts to write and publish
A Writing Life.
When it appeared in 1988, it met with warm reviews and poor sales. In a sense Salinger
had
killed Hamilton’s book,
period.

Years later, Callagy would remember details about the lawsuit, especially the day he deposed Salinger. After all, Callagy’s deposition of Salinger would constitute the
only full-fledged legitimate question-and-answer interview anyone had ever conducted with Salinger. The flirty pseudo-interviews Salinger gave through the years were nothing compared to this
six-hour legal deposition.

“Here was a man,” Callagy says, “who could have had it all by today’s standards of authorship and he had gone out of his way to avoid exploitation of his literary
properties. He had almost made a crusade out of destroying the memories of works that so many young people in America have come to treasure. As a result of this, he had a very modest income by the
standards of someone with his status in the business. Then again, my thought is that he was not the J. D. Salinger who had been the vibrant novelist back in the 1950s. Here was a man who was well
put-together and held himself high but who was definitely angry or disturbed or upset about something. Something must have happened after the war because when I asked him about letters written
around that time I’d say, ‘What did you mean?’ And he’d say, ‘The young boy meant . . . ’ I thought that it was
odd that he’d
describe himself in the third person. In all of the depositions that I’ve done, no one has ever referred to himself in the third person.”

This was not the only time Salinger had seemed unable to distinguish between the first person and the third person—that is to say, between “I” and “he.” Years
earlier, when he was dating Leila Hadley, Salinger often spoke of Holden as if he were an actual person. Apparently, Salinger had trouble drawing distinctions between himself and his creations,
between his creations and the real people around him. In short, at least following World War II, Salinger was not always able to make a strict distinction between fiction and memory, a problem that
created significant difficulties for him in his life.

In the end Callagy also felt sympathy for Salinger. “At one point there was a sad episode that occurred when during one of the breaks he asked me for a Manhattan telephone book. I got it
and gave it to him. He was clearly having trouble finding the number he wanted so I said, ‘Can I look up the number for you?’ And he said, ‘I’m trying to find my son’s phone
number. He lives over by the Roosevelt Hotel.’ And then he said he couldn’t find the number in the book so he was not going to be able to contact him, which I thought was very
sad.”

3

In 1987, an incident involving Salinger created an enormous amount of talk throughout the entertainment industry. It concerned the
actress Catherine Oxenberg who was then one of the stars of the popular nighttime television soap opera
Dynasty.
She was
young and blonde and beautiful, and she had
attracted a large television following. One person whose attention she had caught was Salinger, or so the story went. “Salinger fell in love with her on the TV show,” says Hamilton, who
was by then extremely familiar with Salinger’s comings and goings. “He had had a habit for some years of falling in love with actresses on TV shows. He’d call them up and say,
‘I’m J. D. Salinger and I wrote
The Catcher in the Rye.
’” Of course, in 1981, Salinger had used this very same approach with Elaine Joyce, although he had written her
a letter. As for Oxenberg, according to Hamilton, Salinger had traveled out to California in pursuit of the actress. “He had shown up on the set,” says Hamilton, “and he had to be
escorted off.” A story to this effect appeared in the papers at the time. When it did, an agent for Oxenberg received a telephone call from Salinger’s lawyers informing them that
Salinger intended to sue whoever had first run the story, but, from all indications, no lawsuit was ever filed.

One day in April 1988—under the banner headline “GOTCHA, CATCHER!”—the
New York Post
ran a full-page photograph of Salinger on its front cover.
Obviously agitated in the picture, Salinger has one fist pulled back as if he is about to punch the camera. There was, of course, a history to the picture. Recently, Paul Adao and Steve Connelly,
both freelance paparazzi, had gone to New Hampshire, as had become the custom of so many fans and journalists through the years, and stalked Salinger for several days until they
saw him coming out of the post office in Windsor. Clicking away, they photographed him as he walked up and spoke to them. “Listen,” he said sternly, “I don’t
want to be interviewed. I don’t want any part of this.”

They left, but three days later they returned and stalked Salinger again until, this time, they spotted him leaving the Purity Supreme supermarket in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Now, Adao
blocked Salinger’s car into its parking space, and, after Connelly got out of their car, they both began taking pictures of him. Furious, Salinger came at them, smashing his grocery cart into
Connelly and hitting at Adao, still in the car’s driver’s seat, with his fist. It was one of the times Salinger was drawing his fist back to swing at Adao that the photographer caught
the gesture on film. Soon, giving up, Salinger covered his face with his hands and tried to open the door to his Jeep, but the photographers kept on snapping shots. Several shoppers stopped to
gather around what had turned into a minor melee. “What are you doing to him?” one finally shouted out at the photographers. “He’s a convicted murderer!” Adao yelled
back, a comment Adao later said he regretted. Finally, Salinger got into his Jeep and, when Adao saw that he was about to back into his car, he moved the car and Salinger drove away.