Salinger (35 page)

After the picture appeared on the front page of the
New York Post,
a controversy ensued with many readers disapproving of the way the paparazzi had stalked Salinger. One person who was
fascinated by Salinger’s photograph was Don DeLillo. Later, it would be said that that photograph inspired him to write his novel
Mao II.

On the evening of July 18, 1989, Rebecca Schaeffer, the attractive, lively twenty-one-year-old actress who had co-starred with Pam Dawber on the short-lived sit-com
My
Sister Sam,
answered the door of her apartment in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles and discovered standing before her Robert John Bardo, a twenty-one-year-old ex-janitor from Tucson with a
history of serious mental illness. For some time, Bardo had been sending letters and gifts to the young actress whom he was obsessed with in much the same way John Hinckley had been obsessed with
Jodie Foster. He had even shown up once on the set of her television show to try to see her. Consistently, Schaeffer had ignored him. So far, she had been able to escape him. Until this particular
night. Calmly, Bardo pulled out a .357-caliber handgun and, without so much as saying a word to her, shot her in the chest at point-blank range. Schaeffer was dead by the time Bardo fled the
neighborhood.

The next day, Bardo was arrested in Tucson while he walked through traffic, supposedly trying to commit suicide. On the night of the murder, police found in an alley near the murder scene the
handgun Bardo had used to kill Schaeffer, a blood-soaked shirt, and a copy of
The Catcher in the Rye.
It was the third time in the 1980s that a stalker had either killed or attempted to kill
his victim with a copy of the novel in his possession.

By the late 1980s, Salinger was approaching his seventieth birthday. As he had done for almost four decades, he tried to maintain a life defined by
seclusion, spiritual enlightenment, and an overwhelming need to live on his own terms. For her part, after her divorce from Salinger in 1967, Claire continued to live near Cornish with her children
and then returned to school at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, to finish the degree she had abandoned when she dropped out of Radcliffe in 1954 to be with Salinger. She finished her
bachelor’s in 1969. Then, during the 1969–1970 academic year, she studied at the Antioch New England Graduate School in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; in that year, she earned a
master’s degree in education. During the 1973–1974 academic year, with her children in prep school, she studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology, taking a master’s degree
in social work. After this, Claire received her doctorate in psychology from the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco in 1984, which allowed her to become a Jungian clinical psychologist
specializing in the treatment of children.

By 1991, Claire Douglas had moved to New York City where she set up her practice and took an apartment on the Upper East Side just off the river, in the same building in which George Plimpton
lived. “She was very, very pretty,” Plimpton says. “Blonde. Very gracious. Very soft-spoken. The children were grown up and so she lived there alone in the apartment on the floor
above mine. It was strange, but in all of the time she lived in that apartment, three or four years, we never once, not once, discussed Salinger.”

Margaret had become an investment banker in Boston. Matthew was determined to make a career for himself in acting. “One night, we
all went down to see Matt in a
rather bad play in which he played the part of a homosexual rugby player,” Plimpton says. “He had to kiss another rugby player on set, which rather disturbed his mother with whom I was
sitting.” The play in question was
The Sum of Us,
which was running at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, and it was the latest credit in Matthew Salinger’s on-again,
off-again career as an actor. After attending Andover, he had matriculated at Princeton but took his degree in art history and drama from Columbia University. In the late 1970s, he became serious
about acting. In 1983, he got his first professional job portraying a college lacrosse player on the daytime soap opera
One Life to Live.
From there, he made his Broadway debut in 1985 in
Dancing in the End Zone,
a performance his father saw in previews. A small movie part followed, in Sidney Lumet’s
Power
in 1986, but mostly what he did between
Dancing
and
The Sum of Us,
which his father saw on closing night, was marry Betsy Becker, move to Los Angeles, and have a son, Gannon, Matthew had come back from Los Angeles to New York to appear
off-Broadway in
The Sum of Us.

During his career, Matthew acclimated himself to being in the public eye, although he defended the right of his father not to be. “I see red when I hear about people bothering him,”
Salinger said in an interview in 1984. “My father does not want a public life. That’s been clear for many years now. He wants to write for the page and he wants his characters to be on
the page and in the reader’s mind. He doesn’t want people to make him into something he’s not. He thinks it’s bad for him and his work to have a public life.”

While he loved and respected his father, Matthew had an extremely close relationship with his mother, who later on, in the 1990s, moved to Los Angeles to be near her son
and his family. Claire set up a child psychology clinic in Malibu and bought a house on the Pacific Coast Highway. It was a good distance, both literally and figuratively, from the house on the
hill in Cornish, New Hampshire, where she had once lived with Salinger so many years ago.

4

For some time, Cornish locals had known that another young woman was living in Salinger’s house, although, as was the case with
other young women in the past, the locals were not exactly sure what her relationship with Salinger was. That was cleared up once and for all one morning in October 1992 when the young woman called
the Cornish volunteer fire department and identified herself as Colleen Salinger—Salinger’s wife.

It happened on the morning of October 20 at about 1:20
A.M
. Frantic and panic-stricken, Colleen had telephoned the fire department to report that their house was on fire.
Within minutes, as flames consumed the house, fire trucks and emergency vehicles arrived from the volunteer fire department in Cornish as well as the fire departments of the New Hampshire towns of
Plainfield, Meriden, and Claremont, and the Vermont towns of Windsor and West Windsor. As Salinger and Colleen watched from their yard, the firemen fought the blaze for the better part of an hour
until they got it under control at about 2:20
A.M
. When it was out, the fire had destroyed half the house,
although it had not damaged a new wing
that was currently under construction.

Naturally, word of the fire traveled quickly. News outlets such as CNN ran stories about the fire at once. By Thursday, the story had become big enough that the
New York Times
sent a
reporter, William H. Honan, to Cornish to find Salinger and to learn, as Honan would later write in his article, “how he was bearing up.” Salinger was horrified when, on that Thursday
afternoon, still dazed by Tuesday’s fire but out on his property to survey the damage to his house, he looked up to see a reporter and a photographer coming quickly toward him.

Honan wrote: “When first spied, Mr. Salinger, lanky and with snow-white hair, was outside his house talking to his wife and a local building contractor. As strangers approached, Mr.
Salinger, like the fleet chipmunks that dash across his driveway, scurried into his charred retreat.” Once he was inside, the contractor stopped Honan from getting near the house.
“You’ve got to understand,” the contractor said, “this is a man who is really
serious
about his privacy.” Then, as the contractor blocked Honan, Colleen—a
woman who was, according to Honan, “considerably younger than her husband”—walked briskly away from the men towards a blue Mazda pickup truck. “I have things to do!”
she declared to Honan as a way of brushing off his questions before she got in the truck and sped away. When it was obvious no one was going to talk to him, Honan left.

Before he finished his story, which appeared in the
Times
on October 24, 1992, Honan began to wonder if the fire might have damaged the unpublished manuscripts Honan had been told
Salinger had
in his possession. To find out about them, Honan called Phyllis Westberg, Salinger’s agent at Harold Ober, who had taken over for Dorothy Olding after
Olding was forced to curtail her duties following a stroke in 1990. Westberg claimed she didn’t know anything about unpublished manuscripts. “She said Mr. Salinger had left a recorded
telephone message telling her of the fire but had not mentioned any manuscripts,” Honan wrote. “She has had no further communication with him, she said, because he does not have a
telephone.” This was an odd answer, naturally, since Salinger did have a telephone, the number for which was unlisted.

In these years Salinger would have run-ins with unwanted guests besides journalists. He did not treat some of them kindly. “You have to be careful of him because he
really gets angry,” says Ethel Nelson, his former housekeeper. “He glares at you with those big beady black eyes. My mom and I used to go around on the Cancer Drive and one time, even
though he knew us both, he met us at the driveway with a gun in his hands saying, ‘Just go away.’ When we got through talking to him, he gave a donation toward the drive. Then he said,
‘Don’t ever come back again.’”

5

He almost published one more time. In a style that had become typical of Salinger throughout his publishing career, the first mention of
this event was made in an almost calculatedly surprising way. On the on-line bookstore service Amazon.com, a brief notice
appeared announcing the release of a
forthcoming book. The name of the publisher to bring out the book was Orchises Press. The name of the book was
Hapworth 16, 1924.
The author was J. D. Salinger.

Because this would be the first book Salinger had published since 1963, Salinger fans surfing the Internet were astonished when they discovered the Amazon.com announcement. One fan
mentioned the notice to his sister, Karen Lundegaard, who happened to be a reporter for the
Washington Business Journal
On November 15, 1996, Lundegaard wrote an article saying that the
publishing event of the decade had apparently fallen to, as odd as it may have seemed, Orchises Press—a tiny press in Alexandria, Virginia, run by a fifty-one-year-old George Mason University
professor named Roger Lathbury. The article in the
Washington Business Journal
led the
Washington Post
to run a short item on January 13, 1997, in the paper’s book column.
Following the
Post
article, numerous reporters called Phyllis Westberg, Salinger’s agent. Reluctantly, Westberg admitted the item was true. A new book by Salinger was in the works and
it would be published by Orchises. Another article, “Salinger Book to Break Long Silence” by David Streitfeld, further confirmed the story when it appeared on the front page of the
Leisure section in the
Washington Post
on January 17.