12. The Realist

“AMERICA IN THE SIXTIES, ostensibly an effort by the editors of Fortune [magazine] to forecast the major social and economic trends of the 60’s, reveals more about the Luce mind than about the [coming decade].” Thus began a review in the February 1961 issue of Commentary. “Written in the characteristic self-congratulatory and breathless style of Fortune … [the book] exhibits that willed commitment to a roseate view of the future which we have come to expect from Luce publications (though not, interestingly enough, from the ex-Luce men),” the reviewer said. The ex–Luce men now included Joseph Heller. “Fortune writes that soon the poor will no longer be with us.… This can be called the ‘midtown’ view of economic realities. Were Fortune’s writers to take an occasional trip some sixty blocks further downtown, they would learn that [most] people … hardly [try their luck] in the stock market.… But such realism would tend to spoil the picture so lovingly composed by Fortune.”

The “Luce men” did misperceive the sixties—badly. In retrospect, it seems they missed the mark not because they refused to speak of “drags on productivity” (on the grounds that this would be “a mark of disaffection, perhaps even of disloyalty”). No. Fortune correctly predicted the “miracles of rising income, rising productivity, [and] rising consumption” driving the decade. The federal government under Lyndon Johnson launched a war on poverty. The major indicators suggested everyone should have “afford[ed] a second divorce along with a second car and a second television set. Cheer up, boys!” Something happened. What was it?

If we tunnel through the years and glance back at the 1960s, from the point of view of a Commentary editor so rattled by the times that he reinvented himself, we confront the question once more: What happened? Writing in 2000, Norman Podhoretz, who once praised Catch-22’s author for his boldness as an artist, now condemned the novel as having done “moral, spiritual, and intellectual harm” to several generations of Americans.

Between Fortune’s “roseate” view, looking ahead in 1961, and Podhoretz’s embittered summary in 2000 lay four decades of a culture at war with itself, during which Catch-22 remained steadily in print, selling in vast numbers. What happened to make the novel a central document during this period, a touchstone—positive and negative—in our self-assessments? As early as 1962, before Catch-22 sold so astonishingly, Newsweek was declaring a “Heller Cult,” saying Joe was the man to write the novel of the American 1960s (without realizing that perhaps he already had). As for the new novel Joe would tackle, he had glimpsed it in his mind at the decade’s outset, telling the Newsweek reporter he had begun to make notes on it in his rental house on Fire Island. It would be “about a married man who is working for a large company and who wants to work himself up to the point where he makes a speech at the company’s annual convention in Bermuda.”

He paused, as if to acknowledge how unpromising this material sounded.

“It has implications,” he said.

That a thirty-nine-year-old World War II vet could be the literary spokesperson for a culture besotted with the Kennedys seems odd. Again in retrospect, we can see how many of the cultural skirmishes from the 1960s to the present orbited the World War II generation. Former television newscaster Tom Brokaw called this generation the “greatest” in a bestselling book in 1998. Born in the “fulcrum [years] of America in the twentieth century” and headed for a “rendezvous with destiny” (to quote FDR), this group represented our national peak, from which all subsequent generations—their artists, writers, and politicians—had fallen, Brokaw said. Catch-22, a book embraced both as a World War II novel and a novel about Vietnam, now seems an inevitable flashpoint.

In 1961, the Luce men were unprepared to envision Barnard College switching from the home of panty raids to the site of a major controversy over cohabitation before marriage. In 1968, Linda LeClair, a twenty-year-old sophomore at Barnard, would be punished for breaking school regulations by living off campus with her boyfriend, a junior at Columbia. The story was covered for weeks in national newspapers and sparked a dialogue about sexual mores. What had happened to our values? Our children? What would happen to marriage?

Eventually, LeClair dropped out of college and went to live in a commune with her boyfriend, who resisted induction into the army.

In 1961, the Luce men were unprepared to envision Catskills stages trading Borscht Belt shtick for the world’s largest rock concert, a mud bath of collective property, free love, and drugs, serenaded by Jimi Hendrix’s national anthem, whose “bombs bursting in air” became electric guitar riffs sounding like napalm falling from the sky. Many children of the Woodstock Nation wore army fatigues with Yossarian name tags on the breast pockets. What had happened to America’s rendezvous with destiny? Was the mud at Woodstock a benign metaphor for Vietnam? Was destiny supposed to look like a quagmire?

What couldn’t be seen in 1961 was the truth of Plato’s dictum that “Forms and rhythms in [art] are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.” For years, the men on Madison Avenue had flirted with this concept in their attempts to manipulate the American consumer; soon, a man calling himself Dylan, men named John, Paul, George, and Ringo would seize the idea and plumb it to its core. Joe Heller had grabbed it when he’d changed the emphasis in his fiction from the story to the way the story is told.

What was true in 1961—the prevailing national temper that Joe would voice in his second novel, published in 1974, when sixties convulsions were settling (or subtler)—was this: “I know so many things I’m afraid to find out.”

*   *   *

WHAT DID YIDDISH sound like with a Chinese accent?

Joe would soon find out via Irving “Speed” Vogel, who introduced him to Ngoot Lee and established an extended series of friendships that would comfort Joe for the rest of his days. Speed once said, “The “motivation of my entire life has been friends.” Like Joe, he had a gift for friendship.

One day on Fire Island, in the summer of 1962, Joe, Shirley, and their children were walking on the beach. Speed Vogel had bought an oceanside house from Carl Reiner and was out, that afternoon, sunbathing. He noticed an attractive woman. He studied her face and recognized her as an old friend of his kid sister: Shirley Held. She told him she was married to the writer Joseph Heller. He gushed about Catch-22. She took him over to meet Joe and they hit it off. In no time, “Joe somehow managed to squeeze all [my] juicy gossip … out of [me],” Speed wrote.

Irving Vogel was the son of an Eastern European immigrant who became one of Manhattan’s most prosperous building contractors. Julius Vogel built apartment houses in the Bronx, on the Upper West Side, and all along Broadway and Central Park. The family lived on Riverside Drive at Seventy-second Street. As a teenager, Speed referred to his dad’s buildings as his father’s “erections.” The two did not get along. Dubbed “Speed” at the age of four by a wry camp counselor ribbing him for taking so long to tie his shoes, the young Vogel did not share his father’s drive for achievement. He preferred a slower pace, a more bohemian life. He rebelled against the family and its riches (while continuing to accept his father’s money). For a while, he worked as a herring taster at a Manhattan delicatessen, Zabar’s, he started a textile business, he worked as an assistant to the architect Charles Gwathmey, and he tried his hand at sculpture, working with found metals.

One day in 1960, fleeing a failing marriage and seeking studio space for his art, he rented a place on West Twenty-eighth Street. Zero Mostel was one of his neighbors. A former Borscht Belt performer and an Off-Broadway actor, Mostel (who had tangled with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s for giving “Red” speeches) was trying to be a painter, and he shared a studio with a sculptor named Herby Kallem, a friend of Speed. Recently, Speed had met at a party another downtrodden showbiz type, a loud little fellow named Mel Brooks. Born Melvin Kaminsky to a Russian-Ukranian Jewish family, and raised in a Brooklyn tenement, Brooks had been a tummler at Grossinger’s, a writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, and was now scrambling for money while trying to write a novel—or maybe it would be a play—tentatively titled “Springtime for Hitler.” He was married to a woman named Florence, but the marriage was ending. Impulsively, Brooks asked Speed if he could move in with him. For three months, the men lived together uneasily, bickering over housekeeping and laundry, keeping alternate hours. “[Mel] had a blood-sugar problem that kept us a scintilla away from insanity, and his brushstroke of paranoia had me on the verge (more than once) of calling Bellevue to come and collect him,” Speed wrote. For his part, Brooks did not appreciate Speed’s sculptural talents. Once, while he was watching Speed—tall, wiry, deliberate in his movements—hammer metal, the phone rang. “Mr. Vogel can’t speak to you now,” Brooks said into the receiver. “He’s working on his horsey and he cannot be disturbed.”

Finally, tensions broke into the open. One day, while Speed was away, Brooks painted all over the walls “You snore, you son-of-a-bitch! Yes, that’s what you do! All night! Snore! Snore! Snore! You fuck!” Speed called Brook’s ex and asked her to take him back. “What do you want from me?” she said. “If you can’t stand him anymore, throw him out.” Throughout the ordeal, the men remained friends (Brooks referred to Speed affectionately as “Huck Finn on his raft in Manhattan”). Years later, Speed heard Neil Simon had based his play The Odd Couple on stories he’d heard about them.

Speed introduced Brooks to Joe. They became buddies. “Mel and Joe had tremendous similarities in their backgrounds,” Speed said. “Their fathers died when they were young. Mel was two, Joe was five. They both lived in Brooklyn and were very poor. Neither expected to afford an education.” In Brooks, Joe saw what he could not yet fathom in himself. “There’s a side of Mel that will never be fulfilled, no matter how hard he drives himself,” he told Kenneth Tynan for a New Yorker profile of Brooks in 1978, “and it all goes back to his father’s death.”

The men shared a wicked sense of humor. “Tragedy is if I cut my finger,” Brooks once said. “Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”

At about this time—early 1962—Zero Mostel smelled warm and grassy odors wafting down the stairwell from a second-floor loft late each afternoon. He walked up and introduced himself to the man in the apartment, a young Cantonese fellow named Ngoot. Mostel told Ngoot his cooking smelled marvelous, thereby earning an invitation to lunch. Speed wrote:

Ngoot, a little guy, said Zero looked like a Japanese sumo wrestler, so he prepared plenty to eat. As soon as Zero finished the food on his plate, without asking, Ngoot filled it again. Zero ate himself into a stupor. He could not rise from his chair. Acknowledging his guest’s mumbled appreciation for the exquisite cuisine, Ngoot thoughtfully removed Zero’s plate so his head did not smash it as he fell asleep at the table.

Soon, Ngoot was feeding Mostel and his friends on a regular basis, and giving Speed lessons in Cantonese cooking: soy sauce chicken, barbecued spare ribs, beef and spinach with oyster sauce, lobster, egg foo young, pork chops and onion in beer, shrimp in the shell, sautéed butterfish. “If you don’t have it, you don’t need it,” Ngoot would say, surveying his kitchen in the evenings. Speed asked if he could invite more friends to dinner. “No problem,” Ngoot said.

Mel Brooks came by, bringing a pal, Julie Green, a diamond merchant he’d met. Joe came once, twice, twice more. He brought George Mandel. In time, George brought Mario Puzo. Joe Stein, a playwright who would one day write Fiddler on the Roof, showed up now and then. No one had any idea what Ngoot did for a living. They knew he had come from a Cantonese village run by his grandfather. They knew that as a kid he’d kept a pet water buffalo. Mostel taught him Yiddish, as well as curse words in English. According to Speed, no matter how hard he tried, Ngoot was unable to learn the phrase Se schver tzu zein ah yid (“It’s hard to be a Jew”).

The men called themselves “the Group of the Oblong Table” or “the Chinese Gourmet Club.” Eventually, they shortened this to “the Gourmet Club.” They met in Speed’s studio, which had a fireplace, formerly walled off, and a cast-iron grate. “Mel was strangely attracted to fire so we put him in charge of providing us with heat,” Speed wrote. “We picked up our fuel from the street—fruit crates, parts of cargo pallets, broken furniture—anything that would burn. Once Mel got started, there was no holding [him] back.… [T]he blaze was so tremendous it was coming out of the wall. We feared for the building and our lives.”

The male camaraderie soothed them. They could just be themselves. They could confess their ambitions, career insecurities, and puzzlement over women. One night, Mario Puzo quipped, “The trouble with fucking is that it leads to kissing.” On another occasion, George Mandel told the group the story of how he’d received his head wound. A silence fell; there was only the crackling of fruit crates in the fireplace. Then Brooks said, “I’m sure glad that happened to you and not to me.” As Joe recalled, “He wasn’t being cruel. [H]e was just being honest.” That was the great thing about the Gourmet Club. “He just blurted out what we were all thinking but didn’t dare to say.”

*   *   *

JOE NEEDED FRIENDS NOW. It was fun to share his success, to be able to walk into a room, shout “I’m hot! I’m hot!” and give people bear hugs. More important, it was essential for folks who had long known him to keep him grounded. “Joe loved to move around Manhattan, being lionized,” said Mell Lazarus, a cartoonist whose daily comic strip, “Miss Peach,” Joe admired. Lazarus met Joe one day at the Café Renaissance, a place over in the East Forties, near the UN. Joe was sitting in the bar with Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate. Lazarus introduced himself, told Joe he had been “staggered” by Catch-22, and they got to talking. “We were both Jewish, both mother-stricken. We had so much in common,” Lazarus said. “He was so much fun, so interesting to know. He seemed to get to know everybody very quickly. He was magnetic, charismatic.” He was most at ease with men, but Lazarus learned how much Joe depended on his wife’s “sweetness” and “typical middle-class” values to help him maintain a solid daily perspective. It was difficult to stay steady when reporters kept coming around asking him to expound upon literature, on the state of American politics. Little Joey from Coney Island! They wanted to know what he thought! He would say something—“The Kennedy Administration [is] like a bunch of spoiled fraternity brats celebrating after having bought a campus election … cavort[ing] around, pushing each other into swimming pools”—and reporters scribbled every word. Then Joe would go to a bar or restaurant with friends. “Women flock[ed] to him,” said Barbara Gelb. It was “difficult to know whether this happen[ed] because of his curls, his fame, his hostility or a combination of all three.” (“You can’t be a female fan of [Heller’s work] without feeling a bit daft,” wrote the British journalist Sally Vincent years later. The writing, she believed, showed a “total disregard for [women].” Still, she was charmed by him.)

Joe had quit his advertising job, but among men in the pubs and eateries of Manhattan, success was still measured by the size of a paycheck and the number of affairs a man had—or the ability to brag, regardless of the truth. Joe insisted he wasn’t all that invested in literature, writing, and reading; he admired achievement, no matter the field, and he had seized his opportunity. That it happened to be in novel writing was neither here nor there.

Shirley saw through this ruse. She had no patience with his posturing. Her insight was both reassuring and irritating. She never let him forget he had a family to support. But she also told him to guard his integrity. She knew he valued literature and art. She understood it mattered to him whether he had written a good, as opposed to a merely popular, novel. Sometimes, though, her support felt like pressure and he’d respond with anger or impatience. In truth, the pressure came from within: He’d gotten a few tentative ideas for his second novel; he’d written a few lines on index cards. But the fear that he might not be able to pull off another book never left him. It was all very well for Shirley to talk about integrity. She didn’t have to do the work!

The apartment could seem stultifying when ideas weren’t coming and the children ran from room to room, distracting him. “I think as soon as I was old enough to have my own opinions and challenge him things changed [between us],” Erica recalls. “As far as I was concerned, he pretty much always had to be right, and whenever I challenged that as a kid … I think he found it tiresome. George Mandel told me a story about a dinner party my parents gave when I was about three. Apparently, at some point they heard my father screaming and he was in my room, shouting and stabbing his finger at me for emphasis. No one knew what any of it was about, but I think George had to pull my father away from me. ‘Joe!’ he told Dad. ‘She’s three years old!’”

“[W]e were not an … affectionate family,” Ted says. “Maybe this came from Joe not having a father … [but] I don’t know if our relationship was that much different than any other one between fathers and sons back in those days.… I was always a very, very private person and still am and if our relationship was warier than others, I’ll take the blame for it.… [I]t was a great thing to have a dad who didn’t have to work all day long. We would often go to Riverside Park and play football or baseball or do it in the courtyard in the Apthorp. I loved sports (a lot more than he did) but when he could he was always ready to play.”

In reflective moments, Joe understood it was confusing for his kids to watch him get so much attention from strangers. And he was sometimes confused about how to balance his responsibilities. “[I]t is never, or hardly ever, an entirely good thing [to be a celebrity presence in the household],” he wrote years later. “It would have been witless of me to attempt to ward off [people’s] flattering acknowledgements, and hypocritical to pretend I did anything other than lap them up.”

He would leave the apartment to relax with the Gourmet Club or he’d head down to P. J. Clarke’s or some other place to sit and swap stories with buddies. “He was funnier, more incisive, more interesting than anybody else,” said Norman Barasch. “He could be abrasive, but not if you made him laugh. I always made him laugh, so he didn’t turn that abrasiveness on me. We always had a good time.”

Joe’s Swedish publisher, Per Gedin (a “very warm, open man,” Erica recalls) became a close pal. “They loved each other and when Per would come to town, he would always take Dad to the Russian Tea Room, quite the place then, and I gather they would drink mass quantities of vodka and have a real blast,” Erica says.

At parties with other couples, Joe was often the center of attention, sometimes to Shirley’s embarrassment. “He was always complaining about the food,” Barasch said. “‘This is all you’re serving?’ he’d say. ‘This is nothing!’ He’d go around saying, ‘Water! Water! I want more water!’ He was like a camel.” If in public his voice, stories, and gestures were getting grander, it was, Shirley knew, because he was swinging from the joy of being “lionized” to the terror of not being able to make another Catch.

He took screenplay assignments. Why not? People threw them his way. Easy money, he told himself. He could knock these things out in his sleep. The work was a merciful relief from brooding about his “serious” writing. On April 3, 1962, Fred Astaire’s Premiere Theatre on ABC-TV aired an hour-long drama entitled “Seven against the Sea,” starring Ernest Borgnine. Fred Astaire, dressed as if for a dinner party, introduced the story, walking along a set meant to evoke a war-wrecked beach. “This is the world of Stevenson, Conrad, and Gauguin,” Astaire announced, “men who were inspired to great art by the beaches of the South Sea Paradise. But even Paradise has its hell, and in the late spring of 1942, [the island of] Taratupa became an inferno.” In the background, waving palm trees gave way to the flashes and sounds of big guns firing. The story concerned a U.S. Navy Commander named Quinton McHale—played by Borgnine—who was trapped on the island with a handful of men following a devastating Japanese attack. The script was attributed to veteran TV writer Albert Aley. Overwrought and melodramatic, the show received respectable ratings.

ABC ordered scripts for a series to be called McHale’s Navy. The series producer, Edward J. Montagne, veered the material toward slapstick, as he had scored a previous TV success with a military comedy starring Phil Silvers. McHale’s Navy evolved into a weekly half-hour situation comedy about a reprobate noncom officer and his motley PT boat crew: a forerunner of M*A*S*H, and both of them—M*A*S*H to a greater degree—descendants of Catch-22.

Montagne asked Joe to write a script for the show. At the time, John F. Kennedy was widely admired for having served on a PT boat; Joe may have relished the chance to lampoon him by representing PT crewmen as opportunistic, greedy, and none too bright.

Meanwhile, he was being courted by the literature crowd. The Cheltenham Literary Festival in London, in its thirteenth year in 1962, invited him to participate in a panel discussion on “Sex in Literature” (a topic designed to exploit the recent British publication of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Without his family—the children were in school—Joe went to London. This was his first time in many years on a plane, and it took several drinks to calm him. He appeared on the panel with Carson McCullers and Kingsley Amis. McCullers had broken her left arm; she was drunk and nearly incoherent, waving her cast and slurring that “so long as a book is true and beautiful,” it could never be pornographic. When it was his turn to speak, Joe observed that the makers of mink coats had corrupted more girls than any book had ever done. After the festival, Amis left his wife of fifteen years for the festival organizer, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Joe was surprised and bemused that literary types behaved like copywriters on Madison Avenue.

Following the festival, he rented a car and drove to Wales to meet the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had praised Catch-22 in print. Russell was then in his nineties and somewhat hard of hearing. Joe came to the door and introduced himself. Russell waved his cane, shouting, “Go away, damn you! Never come back here again!” Perplexed, Joe started for his car, when Russell’s manservant came after him. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding,” the man said. “Mr. Russell thought you said ‘Edward Teller.’” Confusion cleared, the men lunched together—Russell was quite hospitable—and though the exchange was uneventful, Joe described the afternoon as “thrilling.”

On this same trip to Europe, he met James Jones for the first time. In Paris for a book signing, Joe ran into a fellow novelist, the son of John Marquand, who asked him, “What are you doing tonight?” Joe replied, “Nothing. I am alone in this city. I don’t know anybody, and I’d like to meet someone like Marilyn Monroe.” His companion took him for drinks with Jones and his wife. “[I] expressed my gratitude to Jim [for his book],” Joe said. Among the other guests at the table was a man named Mitchell Parish, who had written the lyrics to “Stardust” and “Deep Purple”—a “very fussy old man,” Joe said. “[N]ot till six or seven o’clock the next morning did I find myself back at my hotel.”

These activities—the screenwriting, the travel—were welcome distractions not just from anxieties about writing a second novel but also from daily life, with its occasional sorrows, which Shirley tried to keep as his center. His mother had finally died in the old Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. The qualities he knew he shared with her—vanity, a deep cynicism, especially about institutions—became exaggerated in her speech and behaviors near the end. She worried about the way her hair looked, when there was not much hair to fret about. She accused the staff of mistreating her (increasing Joe’s guilt that he had not invited her to live with him).

He remembered visiting Lena in the hospital years earlier, when she had broken her hip, and mistaking another woman for her. It occurred to him that this incident might have been the basis of the scene in Catch-22 when a mother and father visit their dying son and mistake Yossarian for the boy: Well, why not? We’re all dying.

Lena’s biggest pleasure late in life was the taste of bacon—trayf! It pleased Joe to see her wolfing it down in the mornings. He remembered meals she had shared with his family before her incarceration in the old-age home, before Ted was born, when Erica was a baby and her every gesture seemed cute and charming, designed by nature to smooth the edges of an irascible old woman. Well, often it’s best to shed even good things, Joe reflected. Especially when you have no choice. Youth—the past—has its limits. After one of his last visits to Lena, he wandered down the old block, past boarded-up taverns and cafés, the doorways filled with junkies and shivering runaways—kids not much older than his daughter. Despite the poverty, you never used to see that sort of thing before the war. We had character, Joe decided. Whatever else we lacked, we had that at least—in no small part, thanks to women like his mother.

He stopped to remember Irving Kaiser and his typewriter. He wished he saw more of Sylvia and Lee. Sylvia, now married to a man named Bernie Fields, still worked for Macy’s, and Lee, the proud father of Joe’s nephew, Paul, worked these days for a film-production company. Joe was sorry they had drifted apart. But that’s what families did when they became successful.

*   *   *

ON NOVEMBER 1, 1962, McHale’s Navy featured an episode entitled “PT 73, Where Are You?” written by Joe Heller. The program credits listed a man named Si Rose as “Script Consultant.”

The plot concerned a group of hapless navy men who misplace their boat somewhere in the South Pacific. How this happened is never clear; it is simply the premise from which events ensue. In a bit of slapstick dialogue reminiscent of Catch-22, the skipper says, “I always felt it wasn’t too easy to lose a boat.” One of his men answers, straight-faced, “No, it wasn’t easy at all. Why, the mosquitoes…” Everything works out in the end, paced by an annoying laugh track. The crew returns to its comic books and beer (cans of which have been stored in the torpedo tubes), and dreams of R & R, where everyone will “squeeze … red-head[s]” on shady spots in the sand.

Four months before the program’s air date, Joe wrote producer Jay Sanford to complain about Si Rose. “Friends of mine in TV had warned me that there is usually a staff writer or story editor around on every show who will bend heaven and earth in order to get in on the script credit for the purpose of sharing in the residual earnings,” Joe said. Worse, without consulting Joe, Rose had added material to the script that was “deplorably trite and singularly flat.” Joe asked that his name be removed from the credits. “I am very serious about this because frankly, and unhappily, I think it is now a bomb. It is no longer a funny show but a show based on a funny situation, and that is something different entirely.… [T]he comic tensions have been removed and replaced by static intervals of dialogue that are not funny and do not advance the action.” Finally, he insisted he receive full financial compensation for the work he had done.

On August 6, Edward J. Montagne wrote him: “I would like to assure you, Joe, that we didn’t make the changes in the script purely for the sake of making changes. Nothing would please us more than to have a script come in that was perfect. Unfortunately, it is seldom the case—particularly so early in a series when characters are being formed.” The producers stuck to this point—that the series was not yet properly established—to argue that Joe was not “contractually entitled” to the money promised him before Rose reworked the script. Joe’s name remained in the credits. Seven years would elapse before the Writers Guild of America determined he had been wronged in the matter and was due a settlement of $2,375.

*   *   *

MEANWHILE, “[c]omedy [variety] shows were out of style,” Mel Brooks said. “One day it’s five thousand a week [to write skits], the next day it’s zilch.”

The Borscht Belt patter of Your Show of Shows had given way to the harder, jazzier, more political and absurd stand-up routines of Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl, and Woody Allen. The accumulated dramas of McCarthyism, the bomb, the Cold War, and Camelot in the White House had relegated Catskills shtick to the past (on top of which, the routines had become overly familiar on TV).

The New York Times “generally ignored the satirical cabaret performers on the theory that such entertainment was not sufficiently highbrow,” Arthur Gelb wrote in City Room, his memoir of working at the Times. Gelb would soon become one of Joe’s close friends. “The best [of the comics] were well versed in literature, the Bible, psychology and current events,” he said. “At times, I saw them as our new evangelists, using the cabaret stage as a pulpit to shock audiences into an awareness of hypocritical, repressive aspects of our culture.”

Mort Sahl would carry a newspaper onto the stage: the source of the new “black humor.” In many ways, stand-up comedians and comedic actors in such clubs as Second City in Chicago (featuring a young Alan Arkin), the hungry i in San Francisco, the Unicorn in Los Angeles, the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, and New York’s the Vanguard, the Bon Soir, Basin Street East, and the Bitter End presaged the personal, social nature of the coming cultural revolution—a trend with which Catch-22 was very much in step.

One of Sahl’s jokes best embodied the moment: As he imagined responding to the badgering questions of an investigative committee, he said, “I didn’t mean to be subversive, but I was new in the community and wanted to meet girls.”

Lenny Bruce was the Catskills on weed (or something harder), with a copy of Howl stuffed in its pocket. After a performance at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in the fall of 1961, Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges for having uttered onstage the word cocksucker as well as the sexual term to come. He was acquitted after his lawyer, Albert Bendich, argued that Bruce’s humor was “in the great tradition of social satire, related intimately to the kind of … satire found in the works of such great authors as Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift.” Bendich called literature professors and jazz critics to testify on Bruce’s behalf.

More arrests followed in cities across the country. Finally, Bruce was brought to trial in New York after a performance in Greenwich Village’s Café Au Go Go, during which a former CIA agent named Herbert Ruhe, now working as a license inspector for the city, noted Bruce’s use of the expressions “nice tits,” “jack me off,” and “go come in a chicken.”

Immediately, a petition circulated in the literary and entertainment communities protesting the comedian’s arrest. “Lenny Bruce … [is] in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais, and Twain,” the petition said. “Although Bruce makes use of the vernacular in his night-club performances, he does so within the context of his satirical intent and not to arouse the prurient interests of his listeners.” Joe signed the petition along with hundreds of others, including Saul Bellow, James Jones, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Lionel Trilling, George Plimpton, Norman Podhoretz, and Barney Rosset.

The trial, in the Criminal Courts Building downtown, was beyond parody, with the former CIA man performing some of Bruce’s routines for the jury (“I’m going to be judged by his bad timing,” Bruce groaned). A prosecutor asked a Presbyterian minister, “Would you say the phrase, and you’ll excuse me, Reverend, for using this language, but the phrase ‘motherfucker’ is in accord with that Commandment, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother?’” Following a thoughtful pause, the minister replied, “I don’t think the term ‘motherfucker’ has any relationship to that Commandment.”

Despite Bruce’s pleas that the court not “lock … away [his] words,” he was convicted of violating Penal Code 1140-A, prohibiting “obscene … entertainment … which would tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others.” Two years later, while still appealing the conviction, he died of a morphine overdose. One of his prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, admitted, “I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart.… We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

In fact, as Arthur Gelb discovered while investigating for the New York Times, the NYPD regularly demanded graft from club owners and nightclub entertainers in exchange for not busting them or pulling club licenses. “[P]olice payoffs … were a fact of cabaret life,” Gelb wrote. It was the New York literary community—sharing Bruce’s concern that language could be outlawed—that led the charge against corrupt practices. At a meeting in George Plimpton’s Seventy-second Street apartment, at which Random House’s Jason Epstein and Robert Silvers, then of Harper’s, were present, along with Barney Rosset, Norman Mailer, and Norman Podhoretz, Gelb got the go-ahead to write a story for the Times announcing the formation of a committee of intellectuals; this committee planned to petition Governor Nelson Rockefeller to investigate police corruption with regard to cabarets. The story appeared on page one. Eventually, cabaret supervision was transferred to City Hall, away from the police department. None of this helped Lenny Bruce, but a blow had been struck, loosening restrictions and allowing performers such as Woody Allen to carry comedy to further extremes of satire and absurdity—as in Allen’s routine about a beatnik girl he wanted to seduce who liked to listen to Marcel Marceau LPs.

It was a transitional moment for the culture (“I feel the hints, the clues, the whisper of a new time coming,” Norman Mailer had written) … and Joe Heller, the World War II vet who would soon be hailed for writing a Vietnam novel before Vietnam cracked the public consciousness, was an attractive transitional figure.

In addition to Newsweek, the first national magazine to conduct an in-depth interview with Joe was The Realist, founded by Paul Krassner. A former violin prodigy who had worked for a while as a stand-up comic and television comedy writer (he adored Lenny Bruce), Krassner identified himself as a lapsed, nonconforming Jew. In the late fifties, he was working in lower Manhattan, in the business office of Lyle Stuart, Mad magazine’s business manager and publisher of the anticensorship magazine The Independent. Krassner wrote for The Independent and Mad, but felt these iconoclastic publications were becoming too tame in their appeal to more mainstream audiences. He penned a piece called “Guilt Without Sex: A Guide for Adolescents” and offered it to Mad. The editor, William Gaines, turned it down. Too racy, he said. Piqued by Gaines’s ever-more-conservative editorial taste, Krassner said to him, “I guess you don’t want to change horses in the middle of the stream.” Gaines replied, “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass.” Krassner decided to start his own magazine. “I founded The Realist as a Mad for adults,” he said.

He refused advertising. This freed him to throw rocks at America’s prevailing mythologies. At first, he had only six hundred subscribers. He kept the magazine afloat with his own money, earned by freelancing. He spoofed religion, blacklisting, military expansionism, and nuclear fears (“Atoms for Peace,” Ike called A-bombs, in a line that could have come from Catch-22).

Krassner printed a FUCK COMMUNISM poster, which outraged the Left and the Right (no one could tell where the satire was aimed). He interviewed Lenny Bruce as well as George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi party. The Rockwell interview opened with a note to readers: “When canceling your subscription please include your zip code.”

In time, Krassner’s audience came to him. “What [our] readers had in common was an irreverence toward bullshit. Except their own, of course,” he said. As the magazine found its footing, it combined satire with incisive investigative reporting. In 1972, with financial backing from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Realist would produce a special issue documenting the Nixon administration’s improprieties in far more depth than the mainstream media had attempted.

One of Krassner’s earliest “Impolite Interviews” was with Joseph Heller. Krassner recalled, “I had gone to my first literary cocktail party in my capacity as editor of The Realist,” at about the time Newsweek ran its profile of Joe in 1962. “When I met Heller, he asked if I’d read his book. I said I was in the middle of it, but [later] admitted that I had lied to him and didn’t have the book. As a result, he sent me a copy with a note: ‘You don’t have to read Catch-22, you write it every month.’ So then I requested an interview and read the book very carefully to prepare my questions. I learned much from his answers about the structure and modus operandi of satire.”

Whereas Newsweek had covered the novel’s popularity and Joe’s growing celebrity, Krassner focused on the novel’s critique of society. In the interview, Joe insisted Catch-22 was “quite an orthodox book in terms of its morality.” He went on: “I think anything critical is subversive by nature in the sense that it does seek to change or reform something.… [T]he impetus toward progress of any kind has always been a sort of discontent with what existed.… But it doesn’t necessarily follow from that, that people would take exception to [the book].” He affirmed his belief that “people, even the worst people, I think are basically good, are motivated by humane impulses,” and he swore he was “more concerned with producing a work of fiction—of literary art, if you will—than of converting anybody or arousing controversy. I’m really afraid of getting involved in controversy.”

“Are you serious?” Krassner asked.

“Oh, yes,” Joe replied. “I’m a terrible coward. I’m just like Yossarian, you know. It’s the easiest thing to fight—I learned that in the war—it takes a certain amount of courage to go to war, but not very much, not as much as to refuse to go to war.”

In response to critics’ charges that his characters were interchangeable, lacking real selves, Joe said, “People die and are forgotten. People are abused and forgotten. People suffer, people are exploited, right now; we don’t dwell upon them twenty-four hours a day. Somehow they get lost in the swirl of things … so [I had] a definite technique [in mind], at the beginning of the book particularly, of treating people and incidents almost in terms of glimpses, and then showing as we progress that these things do have a meaning and they do come together.”

Finally, he said, “I regard [Catch-22] essentially as a peacetime book.… [W]hen this wartime emergency ideology is transplanted to peacetime, then you have … not only absurd situations, but … very tragic situations.”

Following the interview, Joe “pretended he had taken the subway to our meeting,” Krassner recalled. Later, he learned Joe had hailed a cab. “I thought [that] was revealing,” Krassner said, “[but] I never thought that his identification with the counterculture and [his] desire for financial success were in the least mutually exclusive.” The times they were a-changin’; everyone was trying to negotiate the seams.

*   *   *

“WE MOVED to [a] much larger apartment in the [Apthorp] building right before 1963,” Ted Heller recalls. “I remember watching Oswald get shot in that apartment, live on TV. Most nights we ate in but we had a practice of going out on Sundays. We either went to a place called Tony’s (Italian) on West 79th Street or a Chinese place called Eastern Gardens somewhere in the 80s or 90s on Broadway (neither place is still extant). Eastern Gardens was, as I remember, not on street level but on the second floor and was very old school: red checked tablecloths and silver metal serving dishes with the tops on them. The bartender and the maitre d’ at Tony’s knew my father and called him Giuseppe. The bartender’s name was Flavio and he knew that my father liked a Beefeater martini straight up, extra dry, with a twist.”

On weekdays, Shirley cooked at home. She was glad the new apartment came with a washer and dryer.

By 1963, among the biggest-selling Dell paperbacks were Catch-22 and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (“… the housewife-mother … [is] the model for all women; [this mystique] presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in the here and now, as far as women are concerned”). At the time, Paperbound Books in Print had no Women’s Studies category. The “women’s” line included books on beauty, cooking, and child care—though Benjamin Spock was still considered the national baby guru, and had the royalties to prove it. “Give up Dr. Spock? I’d rather give up my husband,” said one woman in a UPI survey seeking to determine if Spock’s growing political activism had eroded his readers’ confidence.

Spock’s political consciousness, like that of most men of his (and Joe’s) generation had not yet widened to include feminism. “I think that when women are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable,” he was quoted as saying. Newsweek declared that menstruation was a “natural restriction” keeping women at home, and faulted American housewives for not accepting their destinies with “grace.”

“Men went mad,” Joe had written in one of the nation’s bestselling books.

“[W]omen[’s] … lives [are] confined,” Betty Friedan claimed in another.