Rubbing Elbows

A middle-aged woman approached a table that had been set aside for writers at a Manhattan restaurant.

"How I yearn to be a writer," she said.

The playwright Jack Richardson asked pleasantly, "Do you have anything to say?"

The woman was shaken by the question. She'd been in love with the idea of becoming a writer, the romance of it, but had never considered there might be more to it than that.

Some writers have succeeded with little to say by having known how to say it grandly. Others with much to say haven't known how to say it well and have struggled to survive. In the past decades I've had brushes, encounters and friendships with many of the great and near great of American letters. Here are some impressions of what Henry James called "our little tribe."

The Master

I've known only two people who felt comfortable referring to J.D. Salinger as Jerry. One was A.E. Hotchner, author of Papa Hemingway.

"Of course I knew Jerry," he said. "Jerry and I played poker once a week at Chumley's in the Village. He didn't care much for American writers, although he did feel Melville had ability."

The other was Hollis Alpert, who bought and published my first short story at The New Yorker in the early 1950s. He invited me to visit the fabled magazine's offices.

"Have you ever met J.D. Salinger?" I asked as we strolled through the hallowed corridors.

"Many times," he said. He pointed to a desk in an unoccupied office. "That's where Jerry put the finishing touches on 'Bananafish.'"

After that brief meeting I did not see Alpert until decades later, on a street in Sag Harbor, New York.

"I discovered you, Friedman," he said. "Discover me back." Then he added, "Incidentally, I haven't been in touch with Jerry in quite some time."

The Salinger mystique continues to resonate. Has he been writing all these years? Will we ever get to read this work? Is he aware of Lindsay Lohan? What does he make of Rummy and Condi? Does he know of Manu Ginobili and Chauncey Billups? Did the photographs of Saddam in his underwear amuse him? What is his take on chick lit? Has he ducked in to see Spamalot? What on God's earth is he doing up in New Hampshire? And aren't we entitled to know? Or does he just want to make us crazy?

As to his literary output in decades past, the theater director Jacques Levy said dismissively, "He's probably just got a lot of stuff about Truman."

I thought this was unkind and far off the mark. I prefer to think the Master--and he remains the Master--has produced boundless treasures and we will get to devour them.

But would it kill him to give us just a hint of what he's been up to?

Bellow, Roth, Richardson, Plimpton

Along with Hollis Alpert, the novelist Saul Bellow claimed the questionable honor of "discovering" me. He was convinced he had published my story "The All-American" in his magazine The Noble Savage. This was not true, although he may have considered publishing the story and changed his mind. Still, I was pleased he was aware of me at all.

I had only a single encounter with the future Nobelist, on a movie line in midtown Manhattan.

"Answer one question for me, Friedman," he said. "How can you live in this ungodly city?"

In the mid-1960s, at a cocktail party given by George Plimpton, I met Philip Roth. It was the first of several brief encounters.

"Saul Bellow," he said, "am de daddy of us all."

I disagreed. Though I admired The Victim and Dangling Man, I did not feel Saul Bellow was my daddy.

"If anyone is my daddy, it is J.D. Salinger or James Jones--or Evelyn Waugh."

He considered this and suggested I read I'm Not Stiller by the Swiss novelist Max Frisch. "It will speak to you," he said.

I read the novel--and it did. But he did not become my daddy.

My wife at the time aspired to be an actress. An agent learned she was married to me.

"So you're Friedman's wife, eh? Isn't he the guy who writes like Philly Roth?"

At the same Plimpton party, I met the dashing playwright Jack Richardson (Gallows Humor), who were a cloak. I became envious when he used the cloak to envelop two Swedish models and sweep them off to attend rehearsals of his new Broadway play. Soon after, his wife filed for divorce.

It's become clear since his death that Plimpton took up a great deal of space. He was the social glue that held the East Coast literary world together, and it is difficult to imagine anyone coming forth to replace him. He managed to be distant and also warm and convivial. And he enjoyed speaking. Robert Brown, a Shakespeare scholar and Plimpton friend, said, "Whenever George saw a group of people, he felt compelled to address them." Yet he had the strangest accent--part Princeton, part Eton, part God knows what. When he spoke I closed my eyes and felt I was listening to Audrey Hepburn. The essayist Roger Rosenblatt was the only one brave enough to challenge him on this peculiar manner of speech.

"What on God's earth is that accent of yours, George?" he asked from a podium at Southampton College.

In a fine moment Plimpton replied, "Affectation, my dear boy, affectation."

Malamud

Writers tend to forget people actually read what they've written or see the plays they've created. In my play Scuba Duba I include an homage to the great Bernard Malamud. Midway through the second act, I have an actress who plays a Paris Hilton type announce that she adores his work.

"I can't get enough of him. Reading Bernie Malamud is just like eating potato chips."

One night, on a buffet line at Sardi's, I found myself standing next to the distinguished novelist.

"So it's Bernie Malamud, is it?" he said with a raised eyebrow.

Being Shoved over to Famous Writers

There were few books in my family's small apartment in the Bronx. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini was one. I believe my father won it in a contest. Yet from an early age and for some unfathomable reason, I've always been in awe of writers. The way they spoke, the way they dressed. The idea that someone knew enough to fill an entire book was astonishing.

The first writer of note I met was Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny) on the island of St. Croix. He was on the phone with his publicist.

"Tell him you're a writer," my wife said. She then shoved me over to him. We have a tradition in our family of shoving people over to celebrities. My mother once shoved my wife over to Frank Sinatra, who was shopping for ties at Nat Lewis's clothing store in midtown Manhattan. ("Go over and show him how gorgeous you are" was my mother's instruction.)

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Wouk," I said, "but I am a young writer who is yet to be published."

"Maybe you will be," he said and turned back to his publicist.

I'm not entirely sure how I expected him to react, but I was let down by his frosty response.

(continued on page 154) Rubbing Elbows (continued from page 110)

Is there a lesson in this? As a young writer, do not allow yourself to be shoved over to a famous novelist.

Hemingway's Brother

In the 1960s I worked for a publisher called Magazine Management. Ernest Hemingway's brother, Leicester, came by with a short story in hand. He was a bluff, hearty-looking man who lived on a fishing boat and looked more like Ernest Hemingway than his famous brother did.

"Ernesto thought you might enjoy this," he said as he handed me a bait-stained manuscript.

I found Leicester enormously likable and wanted nothing more than to love and publish his story in one of our men's magazines. But it was a nautical piece that seemed to be targeted at young boys just beginning to read. "Hi ho, me hearties" is how it began. "Oh, you son of a sea dog," it continued. I was put in the awful position of having to reject a story by Hemingway's brother. (In retrospect, he may have been more in touch with our readership than I was.)

At a cocktail party soon afterward (there were always cocktail parties), I met Mary, the fourth and last of Ernest Hemingway's wives. I told her I had run into Leicester and how charmed I was by him.

"That swine," she said. "You dare to mention his name to me." She stormed off but soon returned to apologize, saying she hadn't meant to be rude. The Hemingways were having awful litigation problems, and poor Leicester had come to be seen as some kind of black sheep of the family.

The Short Story

Hemingway cyclically falls into critical disapproval, particularly for his arch and mannered dialogue between men and women (which served, incidentally, as a model for many of us in our early romantic endeavors. We could hardly wait to get started on a failed romance). But nothing in the English language compares to the descriptive power of his collected short stories.

In my experience novelists do not enjoy being complimented on their short stories. They would rather receive praise for their weakest novel. Norman Mailer has called short-story writing "the jeweler's art." More often, the writer of short stories is likened dismissively to a singles hitter. But what about Pete Rose, the baseball legend, who for the most part hit singles?

I've read very few big novels that couldn't profit from being cut by at least a third. A few exceptions are Middle-march, Lonesome Dove and Trollope's great The Way We Live Now.

Terry Southern

The master satirist Terry Southern wandered into my rental house on Fire Island in the 1960s and presented me with the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I had written several plays; he was taken up with the movies. We argued long hours into the night about the relative merits of theater and film.

"But Bruce, if you sit in the audience of a stage play, you can see the actors spit," he said.

"Not in my plays," I assured him. "During auditions we eliminate the spitters."

(That same summer of momentary affluence, the great Nelson Algren stayed with us on Fire Island and fell in love with Isabel Sullivan, our housekeeper. He had just ended a widely publicized affair with Simone de Beauvoir. "Will that woman ever shut up?" he'd said famously. The author of The Man With the Golden Arm went directly from the arms of the famed French philosopher into those of the plump and grandmotherly Mrs. Sullivan. Very strange, although she was a charmer.)

At a memorial for Southern sponsored by the Virgin Atlantic company, I received the biggest laugh of my life by quoting a line from his novel Blue Movie.

A Hollywood starlet has slept with a producer, then been turned down for a part in his movie. The starlet says to her agent, "That's the last Jewish cock I'll ever suck."

The executives, who were convulsed by this line, could not quite put it together that I hadn't actually written it and kept showering me with film and recording deals and pressing me to come work for the company.

Last Words

The deathbed pronouncements of writers often have a scripted feel, as if they'd been prepared in advance. But Southern's final words feel spontaneous.

"What's the delay?"

Mario Puzo's last words were to his longtime companion, Carol Gino. "I'm still here. And you said you'd knock me off," he said.

She responded, "I am not knocking you off, Mario."

My favorite deathbed exchange was between a 19th century literary figure and his priest.

"Father, is it true that I'm dying?"

"I'm afraid so, my son."

"And there's no hope?"

"None."

"Then I can say it: I never cared for Dante."

Close Encounters

Meeting literary heroes can be disappointing.

A friend introduced me to Barbara Tuchman, who wrote one of the great works of history, The Guns of August.

"Mr. Friedman is a novelist," said the friend.

"I don't read novels," she said and turned away. (But at least she didn't storm off.)

At a dinner party, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, irritatingly kept referring to me as Mr. Stern (Stern being the title of my first novel).

At yet another dinner party at the Hotel Avila in Caracas, Robert Lowell suddenly turned in my direction and mystifyingly berated me for joining in on the oppression of the Kurds. I had never met or spoken to the great poet before. Nor had I ever thought much about the Kurds--other than wishing them well.

My one encounter with John Cheever--at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago--was brief and (for me) memorable. There was a great deal of drinking going on. At some point I may have taken a few sips of Cheever's cocktail. When a waiter asked if he could refill our glasses, the great short-story writer said, "Mr. Friedman and I appear to be sharing a drink."

I accepted an award that day of $500 for a story I'd written for the magazine. My entire speech was as follows: "Thank you. I need the money."

The normally reserved John Updike cried out, "Hear, hear," and shook my hand.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I had an exchange that lingers with Isaac Bashevis Singer at lunch during a symposium in North Carolina. The Nobelist leaned across the table toward me during lunch. I leaned toward him, expecting to hear a weighty philosophical pronouncement, one that would no doubt involve Spinoza.

"Mr. Friedman," said the legendary vegetarian, "would you mind exchanging my meat for your spinach?"

After Singer's death I made my first and only literary pilgrimage, to his home in Florida. Not only was I in awe of his great body of work but it intrigued me that he was the only Nobelist to use his prize money to buy a condo in Miami Beach. I never got to see the condo itself, but I was able to talk to his widow, Alma, on the building intercom.

"To tell you the truth, Mr. Friedman, he wasn't that happy in this apartment, and I couldn't do a thing with him here. Broadway is where he was happy. And I would love to talk to you some more, but I just got back from shopping and my feet are killing me."

Two elderly women, condo owners, overheard this exchange in the lobby. One of them reported that Singer had behaved disgracefully at the synagogue.

"He told stories that were filled with schmutz," she said, using the Yiddish for filth, "and when he looked at you, all of a sudden you didn't have any clothes on."

"Not only that," said the other, "but he went around with a crony even worse than he was."

I wondered who the crony was.

That night in my hotel room I toasted Singer, who was in his 80s when he scandalized the synagogue.

•

Singer once asked me if I knew of a place in Manhattan where writers congregated. I thought of Elaine's but didn't mention the restaurant. My feeling was that he wouldn't care for it, since the writers there spoke of sex and money and rarely discussed literature. I realized later that this was exactly the kind of place he was looking for. This bothered me until Jack Richardson eased my conscience.

"Elaine would have been impressed by his Nobel Prize. But if he ordered one of his vegetarian platters, she would have told him to leave immediately."

Book-Jacket Quotes

Writers are often put in the position of writing jacket quotes for books they don't particularly admire. I found myself in that situation when asked to read a dreary novel about golf written by a waiter I'd gotten to know at a midtown restaurant.

I thought for a bit and sent along the following quote: "This book is loaded with energy."

The waiter and his publisher were delighted--so much so that two years later the waiter approached me with a second unreadable novel.

"This book," I wrote the publisher, "has even more energy than the last one."

A friend asked me for a quote for his wife, who had written a bland, innocuous book of historical anecdotes. I wrote the publisher, "This book gave me more pleasure than I deserve."

The mystery writer George Fox was pleased by a quote for his book in the Times and used it in the promotion: "Fox's novel is above the routine ruck."

A woman approached me at a book party in Toronto and said she had never read a word of mine. "But I love your book-jacket quotes."

The Viennese writer Frederic Morton (A Nervous Splendor) may be the only living author whose book jackets have quotes from Thomas Mann. He interviewed Mann in Switzerland on the world-famous but impoverished writer's 80th birthday.

Eco and the Nobel Prize

At a cafe in Reykjavík an ancient, bearded poet said he would put me up for the Nobel Prize for literature. He knew the judges. He assured me there was a good chance I would win.

"But first," he said, "you must arrange a meeting for me with Michael Ovitz," who was then president of the fabled Hollywood agency CAA.

Such is my ego--such is the secret ego of every writer, no matter how far down the food chain--that for a split second I believed him.

Tennessee

Toward the end of his career--and of his life--Tennessee Williams left a note in Gaelic on a table at Elaine's. A bartender translated it as "I have lost my way."

The Theater

Writing plays brought me into contact with Peter Schaffer, who had written the classic drama Equus. After watching a performance of my play Steam-bath, he put an affectionate arm around my shoulder.

"You can write for the theater," he said.

I took this as an enormous compliment until I realized I already did.

•

There was a dinner at the Algonquin with Sir Harold Printer and the novelist Edna O'Brien. Each of us took turns telling a story. I thought I did well by describing a tableau I'd witnessed while driving into Manhattan that night from Long Island: Two drivers had gotten out of their cars and begun a murderous fight on the expressway. Pinter followed with two of the most exquisitely chiseled word-perfect stories I'd ever heard, both delivered in the formidable voice of a trained actor (which he is). One involved a massive wrought-iron chair somehow thrown through a small window at a party to the courtyard below. So masterful were the stories and so brilliantly were they told that I vowed never again to speak at a dinner party. A bit later, in London, I described the evening to Max Rosenberg, who had produced Pinter's film The Birthday Party.

"Oh for God's sake," he said. "Those are two plays. Harold has been trying them out at dinner parties for years."

•

At a time when he was putting together the revue Oh! Calcutta! the critic Ken Tynan invited me to lunch to explain the concept. He felt the show would give me a chance (finally) to exercise my sexual fantasies.

"Surely, Bruce, like all of us you've felt an occasional urge to tie up your housekeeper, force her into a corset, spank her with a fish and then watch her go rolling down a staircase."

"No, Kenneth, I don't believe I've had that one."

"You haven't?" he said with surprise. "Well, then, let's try another. Suppose you're stranded in a motel with a one-legged Eskimo hooker...."

The Lunch

At a literary luncheon held once a month in Southampton, the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman announced he had just completed a script for Sophia Loren. "She was so pleased with it that she personally cooked a plate of spaghetti for me," he said.

"I like the story," said Joseph Heller, "but it would have been much better if she had given you a blow job."

Southampton has always been a magnet for artists and writers, but the social currents can be treacherous.

The author Willie Morris (North Toward Home), a Water Mill resident, was said to have been driven back to Mississippi by a single remark an elderly doyenne made at a cocktail party.

"Willie Morris?" she said when introduced to him. "You never did pan out, did you?"

Inevitably at one of the Southampton literary luncheons the subject of Viagra came up.

Speed Vogel, Joseph Heller's writing partner on No Laughing Matter, said he'd heard that nine out of 10 men use the pill for sex with women other than their wives.

"Ten out of 10," said Heller.

The author of Catch-22 claimed to know nothing of the personal ads, in which it was possible to meet women of every variety. Heller had his doubts.

"Certainly not girls with big bushes," he said.

"Absolutely," I assured him. "There are long lists of them."

"That's wonderful," he said.

To show his appreciation he told me about passes that seniors could use to ride Manhattan buses and subways for half fare. And that was our exchange: senior bus passes for girls with big bushes.

•

The Southampton luncheons, held at Barrister's restaurant, were casual, but it wasn't that easy to get a seat at the table.

The regulars were Heller, Puzo, David Zelag Goodman, George Mandel and Speed Vogel. I was there because I'd given Puzo what he described as his first straight job, in 1960, as an assistant editor of True Action magazine.

William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, was proposed for membership in the group. All agreed he was the most charming of men, but there was a sheepish awareness that no one in the group had read his books.

"That's all right," Candida Donadio, who had been his agent for many decades, assured us. "No one has read his books."

I suggested James Salter, whose stories were like rare diamonds.

Puzo considered this, then said no.

"He is too good a writer."

Yet another distinguished novelist was rejected because of his continual reference to his membership in the National Academy of Arts and Letters. ("As I was saying to my friends in the National Academy of Arts and Letters the other day....")

"It's an organization for guys who can't get film deals," Puzo said.

Mel Brooks would join the group on occasion.

"Is it true," Puzo asked him, "that to be a successful screenwriter you have to know how to write explosions?"

"Yes," said Brooks, "but they have to be the right explosions."

Brooks was unusually quiet and introspective through this period. He was in his own world and for the most part hummed to himself. We realized later that he'd been composing music for The Producers.

I saw the monster hit and sent him the following telegram: "I don't care what anyone said. I loved it."

Puzo and Heller

Though the talk at the monthly luncheons was generally about sex and money, on rare occasions it turned to literature.

Puzo: I have finally figured out John Grisham's success. He writes so that a 10-year-old can read him.

Heller: I can't read light fiction. It's too heavy. [He also felt decaf had more caffeine than regular coffee.]

Puzo: I don't get this guy Borges.

Heller: I can't stand science fiction. And I'm not too crazy about Shakespeare, either.

Puzo: A novelist must have meat on his bones.

I said I couldn't write effectively from the female point of view.

"Who can?" said Puzo.

The annual Nobel Prize for literature was about to be announced.

"This year," Heller announced confidently, "it's either me or Gore." (The winner that year was an obscure Finnish novelist.)

Puzo felt Heller hadn't written enough to qualify for the prize. And though he never thought of himself as a prizewinner of any kind, he felt he also hadn't written enough. I've never met a writer who felt he'd written "enough." I'm sure that would have included Trollope, who wrote almost 50 novels.

•

Puzo reported he had read Norman Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost in bed at night. The two had had a long, low-simmering feud dating back to an Esquire article in which Mailer had been critical of Puzo's literary hero, William Styron.

"I was halfway through the book," said the author of The Godfather, "when I became aware of a heaviness on my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack. Then I realized it was the weight of the book."

"So what did you do?" asked Heller.

"I cracked it in half."

•

I mentioned I'd been offered a cameo role in a Woody Allen movie. A pall came over the group. Writers for the most part are supportive of one another and, with exceptions, won't begrudge a colleague's success, i.e., a book contract or a film sale. But acting roles are a different story. You can hear the unspoken questions: How come I didn't get the part? I'm much better looking than he is.

"Aren't you afraid he will exploit you," asked Puzo, "and make you look ridiculous?"

I said I didn't mind playing the fool. Seeing yourself on-screen is the greatest diet of them all. You immediately want to lose 20 pounds. And in the case of most writers, myself included, more people will see you on the screen than have read all your books combined.

"Also," I said, sounding like Puzo for the moment, "it beats working."

•

Inevitably, a woman--and a fan--would approach Puzo and ask him if he was "connected." How else could he have written so accurately about the Mob?

"The closest I ever came to what looked like the Mafia," he would insist, "was when I sat across the table from three executives at the Warner Bros. commissary."

A wide-eyed college student would come up to Heller and ask if he had any advice for the future generation.

"Frankly," Heller would say, "I don't give a shit about the future generation."

•

Puzo became ill and retired to what had become an estate in a working-class section of Bay Shore, New York. That brought an end to the lunches. I saw Heller a few times after that, once by chance at Elaine's. He'd been looking around for a dinner partner and seemed relieved when I turned up. A few pretty young fans came over and took turns sitting on his lap. I've known writers to embrace women, even fondle them. Heller is the only one I knew who openly copped feels. We talked about how much we missed Mario.

The 76-year-old writer made a touching confession. "I'd like to fall in love," he said.

Always the model of propriety, I reminded him of his beloved wife.

"I know, I know," he said, but he was talking about something else.

As we left, Elaine pulled me aside. "Did Joe have a good time?" she asked, untypically anxious.

"He had a great time."

"Thank God," she said and smacked the table, as if she'd gotten good news from a doctor.

Heller called a week later and asked if I'd like to go to dinner.

I was free that night, but I was too lazy to leave the house and said I had another engagement.

"You'll regret that," my wife said.

She was right.

A week later he died.

Moving Along

Puzo, Heller, Cheever, Southern, Algren. Giants all. Gone now. Others moving along. Some of the greats disappear. Who remembers Elizabeth Taylor, one of the finest story writers in the English language? Do students read Algren? The critic Robert Phelps called the writing profession "a mug's game." Lawrence Kasdan--a screenwriter, of all people--offered the best description of the work:

"A writer is someone condemned to do homework for the rest of his life."

It can be a dreary business--dizzying highs, abysmal lows. The early reviews of "Jerry" Salinger's Catcher in the Rye were mixed. The Times dismissed Catch-22 in a nasty little paragraph. But there isn't a single ink-stained wretch who, when asked his profession at Customs, doesn't feel like royalty when he gets to answer with a word that suddenly feels proud and elevated: writer.

The Salinger mystique continues to resonate. Is he aware of Lindsay Lohan? What does he make of Rummy and Condi?

"Mr. Friedman," said Isaac Bashevis Singer, "would you mind exchanging my meat for your spinach?"