Love, Jerry

So I'm like this guy you meet in a bar who has a crazy story to tell. It's about a one-of-a-kind old lady who lived next door and, I'm pretty sure, was J.D. Salinger's secret sweetheart while he was writing The Catcher In the Rye.

Her name was Becky Hallman or Becky Gehman, a.k.a. Rebecca Tugel: These were all her names, and she had quite a life, filled with lovers. But don't waste time googling her; you won't find any reference to her or any mention of her in any of the Salinger biographies. Believe me, I've looked. Besides, you know how it always is when you read about some celebrated literary femme fatale: The love affairs always sound so sexy and so provocative, you're Just dying to know what the object of desire looked like, and then you finally see a picture of this alleged irresistible beauty--and she looks like Tallulah Bankhead. It's always a buzz kill. But in this case, with the pictures I've got, the femme fatale thing makes sense. And I've got a letter, a torn, damp-stained letter from J.D. Salinger himself that starts with "Dear Becky" and ends with "Love, Jerry."

Did the reclusive author of the favorite novel of, what, one, two generations and counting once have a thing for my neighbor? And is she the missing link that might challenge at least 50 years of Salinger scholarship? I hope so.

Even in her old age, Becky was a witty and well-read combination of Audrey Hepburn and Calamity Jane, with blazing green eyes. She never said she was J.D. Salinger's girlfriend, but her friends did. They would come visit--aging beatniks, artists, the occasional retired insurance guy wearing a rakish hat and driving a classic MG--and every so often one of them would have a beer too many, wander over to my place, take my wife and me aside and say things like "You know about Becky, right? She was Salinger's girlfriend when he was writing The Catcher in the Rye." They'd insist that she was the first person to read the entire manuscript and that Salinger sat with her in her apartment in New York, watching her while she proofread it.

It was a sweet story, and if you knew Becky, you could believe it. But that didn't mean it was true. What I knew was that she was from Spearfish, South Dakota--sometimes she said Sioux City, lowa--and that she had landed herself in the middle of the New York literary scene in the 1940s. My wife and I were friends with her and her husband, an elegant old Swedish guy named Ake Tugel, and even he told us all the writers in New York at that fabled moment were nuts for her. But Salinger?

Becky and her Swede owned the property adjoining our place in upstate New York. They would invite us to their converted barn on cold March afternoons, where we would join them for a lunch of freshly made pea soup with ham, good bread, a big wedge of cheese, dark beer and aquavit. The meal would be lit by candlelight, with Stan Getz or Bach crackling from an old record player. Ake adored her. They'd whisper jokes, tell us about their adventures and pour more drinks. He'd show us the watch Becky bought him many years ago, an anniversary gift that she borrowed money for. It was a pink-gold Breitling Premier, and she had had it inscribed to him: Anyplace, Anytime, Anywhere. It was like having those suave, cocktall-swigging ghosts from the classic movie Topper as neighbors, and we were thoroughly charmed.

In our naivete my wife and I assumed their Increasingly eccentric lifestyle was, well, a lifestyle. It took us a while--too long--to realize they were in fact desperately poor and in trouble. Now, I'm not going to get into the story about the large local females who moved in and seemed to take over their lives or the teenagers who began using their barn for black-magic ceremonies, and I'd especially like to forget the near-deadly episode when a neighbor's house was robbed by a local punk who ran off with a motorbike and a revolver--a loaded revolver--which he then burled in Ake and Rebecca's overgrown backyard. Let's just say that at a certain point things for Rebecca and Ake were not going well.

Yet they had been around the world together and had a barn filled with boxes stuffed with their "collections," which they said they'd eventually open and sort through--abandoned boxes that leaked and became more lopsided and waterlogged with every winter. We'd notice items we knew they could sell--Pynchon and Hemingway first editions, 17th century baroque carved heads--going moldy or being crushed; The deadbeats living in their barn deemed all those old books to be of excellent use as blocks on which to rest junked cars, never dreaming that the volumes might be more valuable than a rusted Dodge Charger in need of a lube job.

We offered to sort their stuff with them; maybe there were still undamaged treasures of value that might help them through their ever-mounting financial crisis. They'd say yes, we'd sell a few items for them--buy them some time--then they'd lose focus. Things had gotten away from them. There were increasingly serious illnesses; we were in denial about how sick they both were. At the time, my wife and I were kids, really, and we never recognized the profound but unspoken sadness they shared from the secret disasters of their shattered parenthood. We'd glimpsed a strewn latter from a 1960s Juvenile psychiatric facility with allusions to the horrible shit every parent fears (under the heading "Symptoms": "State as nearly as possible the date of the beginning of [your son's] mental symptoms and describe them as completely as possible"). This part of their lives was (continued on page 170) Love, Jerry (continued from page 88) never discussed, and they drank as if it were still 1952 and they were in their prime. With smiles and jokes that recalled memories of pleasant adventures, they drank and smoked, hemmed in by the strange people who had invaded their barn, and they didn't really want outside opinions or judgments from us.

Should we have called the authorities, with the result that their lives would be put under the control of some county bureaucrat? No way. They were 30 years older than we were and not our parents. They were the ghosts from Topper. They were Nick and Nora from The Thin Man. They were our friends.

When it finally dawned on us how difficult things had become for them, with the bank threatening foreclosure, we had to invent some way to keep them from getting tossed into the street. So with what cash we had, little by little we started buying their ruined stuff and let them keep it all in their place. Then we finally scraped together enough money to buy their house, and we let them stay there, surrounded by their history, for the rest of their lives. And we talked to the cops and a local lawyer who knew a big guy with a ponytail and a big motorcycle, and soon the people who had taken over their lives were gone. You've got to understand that this was a few years ago in rural upstate New York, and things were more informal then.

•

It was the booze that finally got her. It was the cigarettes that got him. Booze and cigarettes were at the heart of the era that defined them, with a few wild experiments in living thrown into the mix. But even at the end, she kept her sense of style and humor, still played elaborate practical jokes on us, fixed up her place funny-creepy for Halloween, loved to laugh, never gossiped and somehow retained her dignity--with a lifetime of sad secrets--and her blazing green eyes.

After they died it was a struggle to keep their old place from collapsing, but once we had it stabilized we started picking through the piles of rags, junk and rain-soaked books we had bought along with the house. That's when we started finding pictures--and the letters.

The first batch were from "Sid"--S.J. Perelman, the now mostly forgotten but then defining 20th century American humorist who wrote for the Marx Brothers and The New Yorker and won an Academy Award for his work on Around the World in 80 Days. A typical "Dear Becky" letter he wrote to her in 1955 started out with "How could I be so paltry as to fritter away seven weeks before replying to a hazel-eyed brunette with a 34-inch bust will have to be one of those questions that my biographers puzzle over endlessly"; Sid added that "having been a longtime admirer of yours and one who, when the conversation turns on attractive girls, says, 'Yes, but you never met Becky,'...I'm a paid-up and worshipful fan."

Among the jumble of moldy books, we discovered a collection of Perelman's titles, all inscribed "Dear Becky," including Baby, It's Cold Inside (1970), dedicated to J.D. Salinger. Turns out Perelman and Salinger were friends. In The Last Laugh, a posthumous compilation of Perelman stories, Paul Theroux's introduction makes that clear: "[Perelman] was the only person I have ever known who dropped in on J.D. Salinger, whom he called Jerry." According to Paul Alexander's Salinger: A Biography, Perelman and Salinger also shared a literary connection: They were the only New Yorker authors who were edited exclusively by the legendary William Shawn. Author Leila Hadley, with whom Perelman had a "long, intense relationship" (Dorothy Herrmann, S.J. Perelman: A Life), noted that "Jerry was a great friend of Sid's in those days--they used to have lunch together quite a bit," and the biographies of both writers state that Perelman was among the few who would regularly visit Salinger's hilltop New England retreat. One of the things I can imagine they might have discussed, beyond their shared editor at The New Yorker, was that they were both nuts for a certain hazel-eyed brunette.

I soon found a box of photographs of Becky when she was young--1950s modeling shots, pictures of her in Mexico, even goofy shots of her when she was a kid, posing at a waterfall somewhere in the Black Hills in an old-time bathing suit, shaking hands with an Indian chief. The girl could not take a bad picture. This was definitely not Tallulah Bankhead but someone at that crossroads where old-fashioned beauty met a more modern look that still works today. Then, at the point when I had to reassure my wife I was not developing a film-noirish obsession with a dead girl's pictures, I found a copy of Good Housekeeping.

Becky had kept piles of French style magazines from the 1950s and old New Yorkers and PMs. Becky was into lots of things; she had weaknesses and strengths, but one of her strengths was not good housekeeping. So why was she saving this February 1948 issue? Was there a recipe inside for pea soup with ham?

When I flipped through the damp pages, I found "A Girl I Knew," by J.D. Salinger.

This unknown-to-me Salinger story was illustrated with a pretty young woman looking out from a balcony. And this illustration looked exactly--right down to the body language--like those photos of Becky. Was it her? This was, from what I'd been told, precisely the moment when she may have been dating Salinger. Thanks to this find I had to up the ante, proudly admit I was obsessed and dive back into all the rest of the junk.

After I unearthed more gushing letters from Perelman, I found, in a drawer filled with leaky Eveready batteries and cheap plastic bracelets, a letter signed "Jerry Salinger."

Hate to say this, but I whooped. I howled. I screamed.

I was not unaware that a Salinger signature might be a very valuable commodity. I was not unaware that this same signature on New Yorker stationery might go a long way toward paying next winter's heating bill. The howl, though, was the result of my playing a high-strung anti-Sherlock Holmes who had just found a very pertinent clue. The Becky-as-Salinger's-girlfriend story was actually starting to piece together, and I was the only guy who could prove it.

•

The note was dated August 1951, a month after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. It was addressed "Dear Mr. Hallman."

Mr. Hallman was Becky's father.

In the note Salinger makes a cheerful reference to Hallman's "wandering daughter" and apologizes for a wisecrack he'd made about Hallman's hockey playing. Here at last was the first bit of real proof that Salinger actually did know Becky, which proved--not much. All I'd uncovered was that Salinger was pen pals with her dad. I had been hoping for something juicier or transcendental, and all I got was a hockey joke.

So I dug deeper into the drawer. I found a poem to Becky in Spanish with a picture enclosed of a suave Mexican guy. Then I found a different letter to Hallman, from Eleanor Roosevelt. (She thanks him for his January 1950 letter describing a Mexican celebration.) Then I found a small envelope.

It was addressed to Mrs. Ake Tugel. That would be Becky.

Return address: "Salinger, Windsor, Vt."

I took a breath and very gently pried it open.

Empty. No letter inside. Damn.

Okay, maybe this was just the envelope the New Yorker note came in. It was the right size. But why would it be addressed to Mrs. Ake Tugel when that 1951 note was to Becky's father? So I checked the postmark: It was stamped 1962, which proved, even without a letter inside, that Salinger was still connected to Becky long after the first letter. Here was a pretty serious suggestion that at least part of the legend of Becky and Salinger was real--not necessarily that they were lovers, but certainly they were friends--documentary evidence that there was some form of communication for more than 10 years.

What made this so intriguing was that by now I had studied all the available sources on Salinger's life in search of Becky. She isn't mentioned in either Ian Hamilton's or Paul Alexander's Salinger biography, both of which go to great and often salacious lengths trying to prove that Salinger could not sustain a healthy relationship with a woman, that he was interested only in inappropriately young women and that there was a pattern: He would meet someone, become infatuated, barrage her with notes and letters, then suddenly come to loathe her within a month's time and never speak or write to her again. But the correspondence I'd discovered, with its postmarks, suggests J.D. Salinger wasn't so easily defined by some neurotic's MO but could be quite simply a friend. Here was Becky Hallman Gehman Tugel (we'll get to the Gehman part in a minute), with whom he was in contact for more than a decade. Perhaps the tabloid-level scholarship had Salinger all wrong. The proof of his redemption may be whatever was written in the letter that went with the 1962 envelope, and I was determined to find it.

•

Now, I'll admit when this all started I was more interested in the idea that my neighbor might have been romantically linked to someone famous and in the possible value of a rare signature than in J.D. Salinger or his writing. I had read all the gossip about his reclusive life and odd behavior, but I had never read his books. I do remember testing a few pages of The Catcher in the Rye when I was around 15 and then promptly putting it aside. It's not that I was illiterate, but I preferred reading the encyclopedia. ("Hey, Ma, did you know Utah was the Beehive State?") Yes, I did force myself to skim Moby-Dick, but that was because I was willing to wade through all that detailed character and plot development to get to all the fun stuff about whales. My dad and his brothers owned a toy store on one of the toughest blocks of the Lower East Side. My mother and grandmother spoke 15th century Spanish (long story there). My older brother built a floor-to-ceiling rocket ship in our small apartment's living room that remained in place as an accepted piece of furniture, with lights flickering, for months. It was going to be a long stretch for me to find a point of entry into an angst-ridden book about a kid unhappy with prep school. I distinctly remember asking my mother, "What's a blazer?" before giving up completely. But with these Becky-Salinger myths now part of my life, I figured I should make another attempt to read Salinger. At least now I knew what a blazer was.

Maybe it's because I missed the book as a teenager and neglected it in college, but reading Catcher as an adult blew me away. What's striking is not only the unique character of Holden Caulfield but how extraordinarily well presented all his antagonists are. Everyone Holden finds phony, idiotic, cruel or simply disappointing is drawn with such accuracy and empathy that any adult reader can easily support why they all might find Holden insufferable. The dumb jock Stradlater, Jane and Sally, Sunny the hooker and her elevator-operator pimp, the teacher who makes a pass at Holden, everyone he encounters, including cabdrivers and nuns--their reactions to Holden and his acceptance of the logic of their reactions is, I've come to think, the ingredient that gives The Catcher in the Rye its permanence. That and how damn funny it is.

•

It was a couple of years later when I did find it.

The Big Letter.

No, not the missing letter from 1962, a different one. It had been resting in a pile of garbage for several years, stuck between moldy 1950s utility bills in a plastic bag destined for the town dump. But it never made it there because by now my fixation had worsened. I'd get into a frenzy to clear out the barn, finally tossing things out, but then I'd promptly change my mind and bring the garbage back to pick through one last time, just to be sure. To anyone watching, it would seem I was a man conducting an investigation into his own life by going through his own trash, allowing nothing to be discarded unless it was checked and double-checked. And one dank afternoon, while shuffling through papers I had gone through many times before, there it was: a by now almost transparent folded page that seemed--as in some stupid occult movie--to glow. I knew it right away, knew what this little yellow missive could be, and as I carefully peeled the folds open I saw the words Love, Jerry.

It was a letter from 1959, 600 words, beginning with "Dear Becky." With its references to Isak Dinesen, Truman Capote, their mutual pal Sid, devious agents, comical librarians, snarky critics and Salinger's own lonely self-imposed exile in New England, the letter was a snapshot of a literary moment in time, but more important, this slyly sexy missive--with its typos, hep syntax, jokes, sense of generosity and affection for a beautiful, whip-smart knockout from the Black Hills of South Dakota--suggested all the rumors about my friend and neighbor may actually be true.

Finding this letter did not make me do a victory dance. Instead, after brushing away 50 years of accumulated grime, feeling with my fingers the indentations made by Salinger's typewriter, knowing he had touched this, Becky had read it, and now I was reading the breezy, unmistakable voice of J.D. Salinger, it made me smile. And it gave me a sense of relief. Despite all the aspersions cast on Salinger by his biographers, so assured in their insistence that he was a misanthropic curmudgeon without any female friends, in 1959 he was exactly what three generations of fans had always hoped he was: a decent, modest and very droll guy with a spot-on knack for telling a story. And the letter's reference to a movie date with Becky in 1947, when added to the note I'd found written to her dad in 1951 and the forlorn little empty envelope addressed to her in 1962, provided the irrefutable proof that J.D. Salinger had a heretofore unknown warm friendship with my neighbor Becky--a friendship that spanned not one but three decades.

•

So why does Rebecca Hallman Gehman Tugel's name not appear in Salinger: A Biography by Alexander, or In Search of J.D. Salinger by Hamilton, or Dream Catcher by Salinger's daughter Margaret, or the biography of S.J. Perelman by Dorothy Herrmann? How did they all miss what I found? The answer: They all came very close. There is a trace of Becky, however faint, in all those books.

Becky made "the mistake" (as she referred to it) of marrying the wrong writer: Richard Gehman, a then prolific scribe known at the time as "the king of the freelancers." According to Becky and Ake, Gehman could be very abusive. (You can google this guy; you'll find that even the website of the college that holds his papers offers, diplomatically, that Gehman was "emotionally troubled.") They had a child, but the marriage ended poorly, and Gehman would wed several times, including a marriage to Academy Award-winning actress Estelle Parsons. Gehman's name may ring a bell for vinyl collectors--among his output are liner notes to a couple of albums by Allan Sherman, of "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!" fame; for modern-lit historians he's also noted for his feud with, of all people, Mr. S.J. Perelman.

Perelman's brother-in-law was the author Nathanael West, and 10 years after West's death in an automobile accident, Gehman somehow got the gig of writing the intro notes for the New Directions edition of West's The Day of the Locust. Perelman, according to Herrmann's biography, "particularly objected to" the "opportunistic" intro Gehman wrote. Hamilton also alludes to a Salinger beef with Gehman, whom he calls Salinger's "old Cosmopolitan adversary." These literary footnotes are puzzling: Why even mention someone nobody's ever heard of today? Did the biographers sense something? Of course none of them knew about Becky, so none of them could make the leap that Gehman just happened to marry the girl both Salinger and Perelman seem to have loved. That's an excuse to dislike someone. Yet what's fascinating is that in neither Perelman's nor Salinger's correspondence does either guy take Becky to task for marrying a jerk. Admirable restraint.

•

Becky ran away from this marriage and made her way to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Mom and Dad Hallman were wintering. In 1952 Salinger made a mysterious trip to Mexico. (According to Hamilton, "We know nothing of what happened there.") Maybe he was chasing Becky; if so, it was too late. In Cuernavaca Becky had already met Tugel, the young, gentle, guileless Swedish artist with whom she stayed for the rest of her life.

In Mexico more connections can be gleaned: Tugel was there visiting with his mother, an international adventuress of sorts, who, according to the Cuernavaca gossip pages, was friends with Martha Gellhorn, the fearless war correspondent who was Hemingway's third wife (and the only wife to leave him). Salinger and Hemingway had met in Paris during World War II, just after Salinger had survived D-Day and shortly before he was to fight in the battle of the Hürtgen Forest--one of the most disastrous and bloody American campaigns in Europe, according to historian Stephen Ambrose. (As for meeting Hemingway, writes Hamilton, after his experiences in combat "Salinger...had little patience for Hemingway's macho posturing.")

Now I've got a harebrained theory about the war's effects on Salinger: He served in the 12th Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Division, he was in the thick of combat, and I'm of the opinion that his now out-of-print story "The Stranger" (Collier's, December 1945) ranks with the finest stories ever written about a soldier's post-traumatic stress. I can get overheated about this tangent. I mean, Salinger was in the midst of the slaughters that were D-Day, "the bloody Mortain" and the Hürtgen (where, per Hamilton, "casualties were of a scale that appalled even D-Day soldiers"), and his regiment sustained a casualty rate of 130 percent in the summer of 1944--4,034 killed or wounded out of an original 3,080 men. So let's assume that, like any sane person, Staff Sergeant Jerome Salinger might have been haunted by these events.

According to Salinger's daughter Margaret, "My father has never taken being warm and dry and not being shot at for granted--the constant presence of the war, as something not really over, pervaded the years I lived at home." She recalls at the age of seven "standing next to my father...as he stared blankly at the strong backs of our construction crew of local boys.... Their T-shirts were off, their muscles glistening with life and youth in the summer sun. After a long time he spoke to me, or perhaps just out loud to no one in particular, 'All those big strong boys...always the first to be killed, wave after wave of them."'

And then, she adds, he would tell her, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."

If J.D. Salinger could, after all that, still find the clarity, chops and goodwill needed to write The Catcher in the Rye, then perhaps we could cut the guy a little slack for his impatience with biographers, journalists and cocktail chatter. Tangent over. What is actually pertinent here for my story is that in Mexico, Becky Hallman and Ake Tugel fell in love.

Soon they were traveling the world together--Sweden, Scotland, South Dakota, even Hollywood, where Tugel's paintings were bought by Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn. The couple returned to New York and settled in the then bohe-mian community of Sea Cliff, Long Island. Things went well in Sea Cliff for a long time; then, it seems, they did not. In the 1980s they moved into the dilapidated place next to our dilapidated place in upstate New York, and that's how this all began for me.

Clearly, though, Becky stayed in touch with her old friend Jerry. Her husband was not the jealous type, and besides, when a woman gives you a pink-gold watch she can't afford inscribed with Anyplace, Anytime, Anywhere, you shouldn't object to her getting a letter from time to time from J.D. Salinger. As for me, unless that 1962 letter surfaces to prove different, the story I'm sticking with is that J.D. Salinger is just who all his fans--me included now--would like to think he is: a hell of a writer, a good friend and someone who could conclude a letter to an old flame by saying that, despite the many vicissitudes, horrors and promises of life, what he'd really prize is "a naughty picture of Becky."

I found, in a drawer filled with cheap plastic bracelets, a letter signed "Jerry Salinger."