9. Caught Inside

“ISN’T THIS THE BUILDING where they found dead people on the roof?”

This anonymous 2009 posting on a Web site devoted to discussions of New York City real estate rumors captures one of the chief characteristics of the Apthorp Building, located between Broadway and West End Avenue and stretching from Seventy-eighth to Seventy-ninth streets: Once inside, you either dream or fear you’ll never escape it, depending on your temperament. Joe and Shirley Heller moved into the Apthorp in the summer of 1952, while Joe was on leave from Penn State.

The building, completed in 1908, has a history to enflame the most overheated gothic imagination. “This is like the House of Usher,” a longtime tenant once said. “Beautiful on the outside, but on the inside it’s a corpse, and its guts are rotting away.” Another tenant swore that he once turned on his kitchen faucet and “pigeon feathers … [came] out.” Chandeliers in the old elevators used to chime with the creaky movements up and down: a whispery music conjuring visions of long-gone visitors in diaphanous gowns and suits as white as light. It was a place entirely worthy of the oddities that would distinguish Joe Heller’s mature fiction, which began to take shape in Apartment 2K South, situated, strangely enough, on the north side of the Apthorp’s interior courtyard.

From around the time of the nation’s founding, no plot of ground spoke more volubly of America—and money—than Charles Ward Apthorpe’s combined land holdings along what is now known as upper Broadway in Manhattan. The history of this particular sod was irony-soaked, in ways Joe richly appreciated.

Apthorpe was a British Loyalist who built one of the grandest pre-Revolutionary houses on the continent. The house, finished in 1764, known as Elmwood after the stately elms that surrounded it, faced the Hudson. Here, George Washington rested with some of his troops following the Battle of Long Island during the Revolutionary War. After the war, Apthorpe was indicted for high treason, but—in a foretaste of the American way—his wealth enabled him to escape the charges.

His mansion fell in 1891 to make way for Ninetieth and Ninety-first streets. Litigation among his heirs and several other families who claimed parcels of the land, including some of the most famous names in New York history—Astor, McEvers, Van den Heuvel, and Burnham—befogged the courts for years, in grim Dickensian fashion, and was finally settled in the first decade of the twentieth century. One can almost hear the sigh of relief in a New York Times article, dated July 24, 1910, celebrating the laying to rest of the “doughty royalist Charles Ward Apthorp.”

William Astor commissioned the prominent architects Charles William Clinton and William Hamilton Russell to design the Apthorp Apartments, a twelve-story limestone structure modeled on the Pitti Palace in Florence. Its presence transformed the atmosphere of quaint colonialism that had characterized the area for over a century, and signaled the move toward apartment living that would shape Manhattan’s crowded and frenetic future.

The Apthorp’s High Renaissance exterior, carved and rusticated, featuring large cornices and a three-story porte cochere leading to a formal courtyard with a garden and two fountains, was elegantly tasteful. There were two arched entrances endowed with bas reliefs of garland-bearing female figures and delicate ironwork in and around the gates. Putti were tucked modestly beneath the rooftop cornice, which overlooked the Italian Romanesque First Baptist Church, built in 1894, just across Seventy-ninth Street.

Originally, the building sheltered ten apartments per floor, each with glass-paneled French doors, room-size foyers with mosaic tiled floors, and Wedgwood friezes. In the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, many of the apartments were divided into smaller units. Because they overlooked an interior courtyard, several of the rooms received poor, indirect lighting: a trade-off for the cozy, private, secure atmosphere created by the design.

When it opened, the courtyard measured 95 by 134 feet and, according to Architecture magazine, offered a “display of horticulture that would grace a botanical garden.” Brick walkways surrounded the two bowl-shaped fountains. There were shrubs, yuccas, and flowers; vines hung from boxes placed in upper-story windows. All in all, the Apthorp exuded timelessness, with a mixture of classical styling, ostentation (private living on a public scale), and forward-looking development fever.

The West Side was a blighted area when Joe and Shirley settled there. A citywide housing shortage followed World War II; hastily, owners partitioned residence hotels and apartment buildings to squeeze more people into smaller spaces. The city passed a law encouraging this practice by making it quite lucrative, turning brownstones that had once hosted one or two families into overcrowded rooming houses, attracting hordes of real estate speculators, and driving out modest landlords who had overseen their properties with personal concern.

Many of the new tenants, back from the war and now facing horrid prospects, were in transit, troubled, isolated. At about the time Joe and Shirley moved into their apartment, Mayor Robert F. Wagner, disturbed by the deterioration of West Side housing, appointed the mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee, headed by Robert Moses, to rebuild the area. In consequence, huge demolition projects displaced thousands of low-income families for years to come. Several tenements appropriated by redevelopers fell into greater ruin, but with higher rents and poorer care. The city’s Welfare Department took over a number of crumbling furnished rooms in ratty hotels in order to stow away society’s undesirables. Within a few years of Joe and Shirley’s arrival at the Apthorp, West Side streets teemed with former mental patients still in need of treatment, single mothers with hungry children, prostitutes, petty thieves, and all manner of the destitute. Crime rates soared.

In spite of this steady decline, the West Side maintained a unique identity, formed by diversity and turbulence. Joe loved the atmosphere. Chaos it was, but a cohesive chaos, able to bind people tightly. For example, the year before the completion of the Apthorp, a nearby charitable foundation built a 350-unit tenement for West Indian domestics. Over sixty years later, 650 people still lived in those rooms, most of them the children and grandchildren of the original tenants.

Simmering cultural tensions made the neighborhoods all the more exciting. Predominantly Protestant throughout the Civil War, the area became the province of Irish Catholics until around 1910, when Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, and Germany came crowding in. By the late 1930s, West Side neighborhoods felt European, dotted with bookshops, newspaper stands selling international publications, and sidewalk cafés. Throughout these demographic dances, vestiges of the area’s former personalities clung to the streets and walls. To Joe Heller, in 1952, the area had a bit of the carnival, old and new, that he recognized from Coney Island.

Inside the Apthorp, a similar sensibility—continuity spiced with variety—rang out in hallway greetings. One of the first people Joe and Shirley learned about was Elizabeth Kirwin. For thirty-five years, she had operated elevators in the building’s northern wing, after replacing her brother once he entered the army in World War I. She had thought her time in the building would be temporary, but her brother got another job after demobilization, so she stayed on. “She never had a cross word with a tenant or an employee. If a tenant fell ill, she paid a call and brought flowers. She did thousands of little services outside her job, always courteously and cheerfully. We found out later that her blood pressure rose to 280, but no one heard a word of complaint from her,” said Mrs. William Byrne, one of Joe and Shirley’s neighbors. After Kirwin collapsed in a locker room of a cerebral hemorrhage, most of the Apthorp’s tenants—men and women of many faiths—gathered in Calvary Cemetery to pay their respects. The scene, a coming together of vastly different types, epitomized the Apthorp in those days. In the years ahead, growing differences would nudge aside communal gestures: In mid-February 1997, when a dead woman was discovered on the roof, no one in the building claimed to know her. Later identified as Gabriele Opferman, forty-one years old, she was apparently a German tourist. No illnesses or wounds. She was not intoxicated. An autopsy determined she had died of exposure. What she was doing at the Apthorp and how she got on the roof without anyone knowing or seeing her remained a mystery, and spoke to some of what the Apthorp had become.

By this time, Joe had left the building, but Shirley stayed on. Rumors spread, like water damage, that management hoped to force everyone out so it could drive up rents or turn the apartments into condos. Asbestos leaked from the walls, toxins poured from the radiators, my god, we’ll all die in a flood when the plumbing bursts.…

But in the beginning, Joe and Shirley loved their four small rooms, secured with financial help from Dottie and Barney. A daughter, Erica Jill, had joined them on February 1, 1952, right before they found a place at the Apthorp. Joe was in his last semester of teaching at Penn State. He made arrangements to be back in New York when Erica arrived. “I was born at French Hospital, a place with nuns, of all things,” Erica says. The hospital, now gone, once stood on West Thirty-fourth Street, opposite what is now the Lincoln Tunnel exit. It had been built in 1904 by the French Benevolent Society, a nonsectarian organization determined, in its early days, to treat patients free of charge. William Carlos Williams interned there. It was Willa Cather’s favorite infirmary.

“Erica, for Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and Jill from Jack and Jill,” Jerome Taub recalls learning from Dottie. “Joe named her.”

By mid-summer 1952, father, mother, and daughter were ensconced in the Apthorp. Erica, blessed with her mother’s fair coloring, was delighted by the flowers in the courtyard (where children were not allowed to play) and by the trembling glass pendants in the slow, gently swaying elevators.

*   *   *

“NOW HERE’S how it was … in the … fifties,” wrote Shirley Polykoff, one of the most respected women in American advertising. “On T.V., women were having love affairs with refrigerators.… Bufferin … were racing Aspirin … from the stomach to the seat of the pain, while sinus cavities were being lit up and cleared out fast, fast, fast. The sell was hard, the voice-over was the voice of authority and the models mostly male because the research showed that, in the fifties, viewers were much too fine to watch a woman suffer.” On the other hand, “magazine ads … were almost entirely peopled with high-fashion, overly made-up, overly groomed ‘Park Avenue penthouse’ types whose brilliant smiles reflected the sheer pleasure of mopping floors, baking cakes, and gentle laxative relief.”

Joe would meet Polykoff at a cocktail party sometime in the late 1960s. By then, she knew him as one of the few former advertising copywriters to make a leap to literary success; certainly no one had pulled it off with as much panache as he had. In her memoir, Does She … or Doesn’t She? Polykoff recalls her encounter with Joe. The exchange captures the easy sophistication men and women effected in that time and place (as well as Joe’s rough charm):

“Your name is familiar.…” [Joe said.] “You’re in advertising.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I once wrote you a letter asking for a job.”

“You did?”

“But you didn’t give me a job. Even though I’m Jewish.”

“I can’t go around giving everyone a job who’s Jewish.”

“But you could have given me one.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a man. And I only hire women writers.”

… Late in the evening he offered to take me home—to Park Avenue and 62nd Street.

“I don’t live on Park and 62nd Street,” I protested. “I live on Park and 82nd.”

“I can only take you to Park and 62nd.”

“How come?”

“That’s where I’m meeting my wife.”

… “So go meet your wife,” I said. “Someone else will take me to Park and 82nd.”

“That’s not a nice attitude,” he said. “First you don’t give me a job. Now you don’t let me take you home.”

The “opportunity” in the “publishing field” on which Joe hung his leave from Penn State in the spring of 1952 never materialized. The position with the Army Air Force and Exchange Service was temporary. So one day, he purchased a “gray fedora with a dark band [and] … a new white-on-white shirt with French cuffs” and hit the streets, looking for jobs in advertising, where he felt he could unleash his creativity (and sparkling personality).

Briefly, he worked at the Merrill Anderson Company for sixty dollars a week; there, he drank his “first Gibsons with a copy chief named Gert Conroy and learned to love extra-dry martinis in a chilled glass with a twist of lemon peel”; he spent some time at Benton & Bowles, best known for its work with Proctor & Gamble in launching radio soap operas and the television show As the World Turns (at B & B, a fellow copywriter named Art Kramer recalled Joe’s typewriter “going when I came into work and still going when I left in the evening. Everyone marveled at this non-stop output. As one writer joked, ‘What, is that guy writing a novel or something?’”); he wrote copy for Remington Rand, the former arms manufacturer turned typewriter and then computer maker, alongside Mary Higgins Clark, who would later publish suspense novels.

In 1955, he became an advertising-promotion copywriter at Time magazine, where he received a starting salary of nine thousand dollars a year. For his steady and innovative work, he received one-thousand-dollar raises at the end of each of his first two years there. Look magazine offered him a thirteen-thousand-dollar annual salary beginning in 1958, and in 1959, he went to work for McCall’s as an advertising and promotion manager.

Always, he said the men and women he met in advertising departments were far more creative and intelligent than the people he had worked with in academia. “All the copywriters were writing plays and novels and the people in the art department were interested in serious art,” he recalled. To some degree, at the heart of the academic enterprise lies a conservative impulse, a desire to nurture and pass on traditions of learning, a valuable endeavor; on the other hand, the men and women in American advertising believed they were creating the future, and their shared excitement was palpable.

“Even before 1960, the agency world was glued to the new-wave movies by Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut, Godard, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, to the Group Theatre and Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando,” Mary Wells, a prominent former ad executive, has written. “Advertising [was] always part of the [cultural] front line.”

Moreover, as Shirley Polykoff insisted, for many kids, particularly the first-generation children of Eastern European immigrants, advertising was a key to successful assimilation. “[I]t was from the magazine advertisements that we really learned how to be truly American,” she wrote. “How a home should look. How a table should be set. How to dress. How to be well groomed.” Advertising “taught the immigrants that they could achieve a clean complexion by using the soap used by nine out of ten screen stars.” Through advertising, “you could look right into the homes of real people,” Polykoff said. “See how they act. Learn to do as they did.”

These lessons were disseminated from a roughly four-block stretch of Madison Avenue, on Manhattan’s East Side. Within a three-block span sat the headquarters of the nation’s two largest radio and television networks, the main offices of “national reps” (over sixty of them) selling ad space to the country’s newspapers, and the editorial and advertising offices of Time, Look, Life, McCall’s, Vogue, Redbook, Coronet, Esquire, Mademoiselle, and The New Yorker, to name a few. As Martin Mayer wrote in Madison Avenue, U.S.A., one of the first comprehensive studies of the ad world, “On the outside … the new buildings [were] mostly very much alike; on the inside, it [was] every man for himself.”

Many of the city’s finest restaurants and bars opened in this area, catering to high-paid executives and their clients, who prided themselves on discriminating taste (after all, they were the people setting America’s tastes). “[I]t can truthfully be said that the great restaurants of New York are here quite simply to serve lunch to men in the advertising and communications fields,” Mayer wrote. “The company will [always] pick up the tab.”

Favorite spots for lengthy business meals included “21,” with its collection of large wooden Negro jockeys, La Reine, dark and intimate, and Romeo Salta. Tom Messner, cofounder of the prominent ad agency Messner Vetere Berger Carey, recalls, “There was a steam table bar run by a World War II vet, Irving Bloom, called Kilroy’s on Sixth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Copywriters and Art Directors went there and often worked at the bar. The Tehran on 44th Street—a Persian restaurant and bar—was more upscale: free hors d’oeuvres between five and eight. Generally, account people did all the wining and dining [of clients].”

Mayer reported that “[s]urprsingly often … the business lunch really [was] for business purposes, part of a selling venture which may [have seemed] more certain of success after it [was] washed a few times in alcohol.” (Some agencies installed in-house bars, open for cocktails each day at the close of business. A former employee at BBDO recalls the only client who ever showed up at their bar, Central Filing, was Pepsi’s advertising director.)

Despite growing public perceptions, even in the immediate postwar period, that ad men caroused and drank more than they worked, the best people in the field spent brutal hours of hard concentration and constant pressure. According to Advertising Age, in 1956, the average age at which prominent people in the business died was 57.9, ten years under the national average for men.

Nor was the image of the man in the gray flannel suit ever really accurate—Sloan Wilson notwithstanding. In the fifties, many advertising executives lived in Westchester, Locust Valley, or other suburbs, and dressed modestly for their long subway rides into the city. “I thought it bizarre that people of such means should live where they did when they could easily have afforded to live where I did … and get to the office or back as quickly as I could,” Joe wrote in Now and Then. He’d had enough subway rides as a kid shuttling to Times Square from Coney Island.

But many people thought the commute was worth it to jettison stress at the end of the day—the stress of handling multimillion dollar accounts (in 1956, seventy-three companies spent over ten million dollars each to advertise their products: soft drinks, cars, soaps, drugs, liquor, tobacco, and electrical supplies; Miles Laboratories spent nine million to push Alka-Seltzer; General Motors budgeted $162,499,248 to promote Cadillacs and Chevys; and Seagram’s shelled out $31,547,043 to convince people their lives were poorer without Chivas Regal, Four Roses, and Wolfschmidt).

Stress also came from the hierarchical nature of most ad agencies. Someone was always fiercely watching your work. Mayer quotes a research company officer’s account of a typical meeting: “The media people come first, usually about ten minutes early. Then about the time the meeting is supposed to start, the agency people show up and start kicking the media people around. The advertisers come about fifteen minutes late and for the rest of the meeting they kick the agency people around. Then everybody goes out for a drink.”

The original Time-Life Building overlooked Rockefeller Center. From his office, Joe could watch ice-skaters in the rink below. In 1957, Marilyn Monroe detonated a block of dynamite to signal the construction-start of a new home for Henry Luce’s empire, closer to the Avenue of the Americas. The new building would be distinguished by its column-free interior space and the brushed stainless-steel paneling of its elevator banks. Eames chairs graced many of the offices.

Time was a “man’s world,” according to Jane Maas, who worked there briefly around the time Joe was there. “The lines were clearly drawn” in the editorial department, she said: “[W]omen researched the stories, men wrote them.” More than this, the organization was built around belief in the possibility of a “Great Man”—and the resident Great Man was Henry Luce (the Man of the Year, every year, to his employees). He had coined the phrase “The American Century,” and he saw himself at the center of the era, shaping politics, minds, and culture. “[E]verybody was aware of the … biases that flowed from Luce,” Maas said. “While I worked there, Time helped to defeat the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson when he ran for President in 1956.”

One morning, in the old Time-Life Building, Maas accidentally rushed into Luce’s private elevator and stood there staring at his “beetle brows” as he made his way to his thirty-second-floor penthouse. Luce was a devout Presbyterian, and he used his elevator time to pray. The sudden presence of a woman in the midst of his sacred ritual merely confirmed his greatness, for it is to the Great Man that the severest temptations appear.

In spite of hard work and stress, Joe recalled his stint at Time as one long party. Autumn’s World Series hoopla gave way to Thanksgiving and holiday celebrations, and then to the rites of spring. Each fall, “during the World Series there were personal table radios brought in and installed for the duration” in most offices, he wrote. This enabled people “to go on listening to every game at work when they could no longer do so at the bars in the nearby restaurants in which they had spent their long lunches.” Joie de vivre always “prevailed during business hours in [the] corridors in those days. The liquor would flow, the canapes would appear, the socializing would spill over after business hours into small groups in one nearby bar after another. Small wonder we were often reluctant to hurry home,” Joe said. “The women at work there were lively, educated, and bright.”

Meanwhile, Shirley was back at the Apthorp, tending two kids now: On May 11, 1956, at French Hospital, a son, Theodore Michael, had arrived. “We were pregnant together,” Shirley’s cousin Audrey Chestney said, “she with Teddy, me with my son Peter. We had lunch every day at Schrafft’s, and then went to the same doctor on Park Avenue. Shirley was very kind and fun to be with,” but the meetings at Schrafft’s were among her few outings. Chestney felt sorry for her: “Joe didn’t like to go to other people’s houses—I guess it was boring for him.”

He was often on the road. Time held sales conferences at deluxe resorts in Florida, Bermuda, and Nassau. In the hotels, Bloody Mary and brandy Alexander mixes were provided for the men’s breakfasts. On the golf course, where most of the men spent their afternoons, barrels of ice filled with beer stood next to the ball washers and tee boxes at each hole. Joe did not enjoy golf. He spent his days reading and writing. Executives jockeyed for the honor of giving keynote speeches at these conventions; generally, Joe skipped the ceremonies.

During his tenure at Time, the company reached a paid circulation of two million. A few executive officers discovered they were alcoholic (“[There] was a rumor … that the company maintained an ongoing arrangement with the Payne Whitney Clinic at New York Hospital for the discreet admission and treatment of important employees,” Joe wrote), and a few men, like Joe, kept getting promoted. He drew the attention of his competitors.

It was his job to provide a “platform” or “campaign theme” for a “purchase proposition.” Magazine ad space—at Time’s level—sold for approximately $24,000 for a black-and-white page, $30,000 for a two-color page, and $35,000 for a four-color page. One day, working with a colleague named Pete Haddon, Joe kicked off a sales presentation to a stubborn client by setting up an easel in a boardroom. On the easel, he placed an illustration of the Red Queen from an old edition of Through the Looking-Glass. The queen was dragging Alice on the ground, shouting, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place!”

Word got around that Joe had thoroughly charmed his clients. Soon thereafter, a colleague asked to borrow the Red Queen. He was trying to persuade the Simmons mattress company to buy ad space in Time in order to reach motel and hotel owners (who subscribed to the magazine in large numbers). A second colleague wanted the Red Queen to help him sway the H. J. Heinz Company to purchase ads, thereby interesting coffee shop managers in its products. Joe got his first raise.

*   *   *

MEANWHILE, IN THE VILLAGE, George Mandel “slept little and gamboled much,” he said, even though “seizures common to brain injury … harassed [his] every gesture.” The Village, with its “distinctive taverns and cafeterias swarming with bogus artists and drug addicts,” was “lucky” for him. In these environs, he found friendship and “romance,” especially with a woman named Miki, who became his wife, and of whom Joe was terribly fond.

Mandel had grown disillusioned with comic-book work. He wanted to be a fine artist, but the exploitive nature of the business also wore him down. Before the war, he had done most of his work with Funnies, Inc., a “packager” operating out of a small office on West Forty-third Street, near Times Square. A packager created comics on demand for various publishers. Lloyd Jacquet, Funnies, Inc.’s founder, couldn’t afford to be a publisher, so he hired writers and artists to sell the products to others. He made his first sale to Martin Goodman, a pulp magazine mogul: a spectacular package featuring the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. It was called Marvel Comics #1.

For Jacquet and a handful of companies—Better Publications, Timely Comics, Novelty, Hillman, and Fox—Mandel worked on “Doc Strange,” “The Black Marvel,” “The Woman in Red,” “The Patriot,” “Voodoo Man,” “The Angel,” and “Sons of the Gods.” These were some of the projects Joe had seen him prepare for back at the Club Alteo.

Other gifted young men in Jacquet’s stable included Mickey Spillane, Carl Burgos, and Bill Everett. Spillane said Jacquet, a Douglas MacArthur look-alike (right down to the corncob pipe), “never could understand artists and writers.” He was a pure businessman; when Mandel, Spillane, and others went off to war, he replaced them with the cheapest labor he could find. “They had a bunch of creeps come in there … and they took over all our stuff,” Spillane told an interviewer. “They’d formed a union, that’s what the problem was, and we were going to kill that union. Because these guys, they didn’t have the talent … we had, I’ll tell you that!”

After the war, Mandel worked his way back into freelance drawing (at smaller wages than before), but he was itching to be “literary”—that is, serious, in comics, painting, or writing. Plus, he had discovered his injury made it harder for him to visualize, but easier to talk, write—torrents of language poured from him. Each time Joe visited him, he marveled at how much his friend had improved. He had come a long way from the days when restaurant noise unnerved him to the point that he’d slap at a waitress with his menu and shout that nothing pleased him, nothing, nothing.

Miki helped him. She typed the expanding manuscript of the novel he had told Joe about on his visit to Penn State. Initially, it was called “The Hook and the Tower,” but it was retitled, at an editor’s suggestion, Flee the Angry Strangers. Bobbs-Merrill brought out a hardcover edition of the book in 1952. The following year, with the appearance of a Bantam mass-market paperback edition (featuring a Harry Schaare cover, like that of a comic book: a woman shooting heroin), the novel got noticed by journals and prominent critics. “All [his friends] were ecstatically astonished when the paperback reprint rights … sold for a price of $25,000,” Joe wrote. “His share of half that seemed a fortune. And … was indeed a fortune to someone living largely on disability payments for his war wound, and to someone like me … [working] as an advertising copywriter.”

In time, critics saw Flee the Angry Strangers as a proto-Beat novel, capturing, before Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, and others, what Thomas Newhouse called the cultural “transition between … [a] wail of hopelessness” after the war and a “freedom to choose dissolution” rather than middle-class life.

Mandel’s protagonist, eighteen-year-old Diane Lattimer, a drug-hazed habitué of the jazz clubs on Bleecker and MacDougal streets, hustles by day and is, despite her self-destructiveness, a rare feminist heroine in the fiction of the time. Mandel’s comic-book training showed in the larger-than-life appetites of his characters, in their heroic embrace of instantaneous pleasure (a kind of personalized justice for all) and their rejection of society’s straight-and-narrow paths. These qualities would characterize all of Beat writing; the Beats’ link to the comic-book ethos of the time—through figures like George Mandel—is not accidental.

Flee the Angry Strangers uncovered other crosscurrents swirling through American popular writing in the early 1950s—for, just as Mickey Spillane smuggled comic-book action into the hard-boiled detective genre, the values of proletarian fiction had stiffened comic heroes’ spines. Mandel’s characters encompassed each of these strains; they were amalgams of the Human Torch, Mike Hammer, and Nelson Algren’s Frankie Machine. The combination sowed a path for the Beats, who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, would change America’s popular vocabulary.

Mandel’s people spoke “jive”: jazz talk. They didn’t provide their partners with sexual delight; they sent them. They didn’t smoke marijuana; they indulged in pod, a term that degraded into pot after many “engorged [mis]pronunciations [by] its consumers,” Mandel said. The novel’s language was so strange, his publishers asked him to include a lexicon in the back of the book. Later, he regretted he didn’t accede to this request, because soon, “Madison Avenue” began to “spoil” the “flavor” of jive’s “perceptive music.”

Other crosscurrents began to flow: Underground hip became a rich source for mainstream advertising.

Since the days of Charles Ward Apthorpe, and even before, America had been a scene of clashing images, but now the country was getting really good at producing these images, and presenting them in easy-to-get, inexpensive formats. The big books coming out of Manhattan’s midtown publishers in handy paperback form—The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity—showcased an America where values rooted in land still held sway over human destinies; the comic books, genre stories, and early Beat poetry—in throwaway tabloid formats—emerging from artists and writers, several of whom lived in the Village, pictured urban alleyways as free zones where the individual could be an outlaw hero; while the ads, many created by aspiring novelists and painters, packaged in East Side offices and sent to magazines and television stations, offered the accumulation of goods as the secret to bliss and America’s world dominance.

From his perch above the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Joe kept an eye on all this. The culture’s variety impressed him, as well as the darker patterns he saw, like scratches in the ice below, in the city’s (and perhaps the nation’s) mood.

For example, he understood that, for a segment of middle-class American women who wanted to be valued for their “natural” looks, but to whom businessmen were banking on selling millions of dollars’ worth of hair dye, the catch phrase “Does she … or doesn’t she?” was irresistible because it was titillating without being too naughty. He also understood that a whole other group of American women whose lives had been junked by the war and its family upheavals had no truck with such cuteness. For them, the only thing that mattered was “Nembutal goofballs and pod.” Sad, absurd, diverse—what American novelist had successfully gathered the country’s currents, like a Coney Island hawker snagging all the cotton candy and wrapping it around a single cardboard stick? In his spare time, he reread Kafka and Céline, as well as Evelyn Waugh. He wrote no fiction.

*   *   *

“AN OLD LINE,” Tom Messner says. “In the fifties, everyone wanted to write a novel; in the seventies, a screenplay; in the nineties, a business plan. Ad men—to wildly generalize—seek fame and fortune. And the novel [in the 1950s] they view[ed] as the quickest way. I don’t think many reflect[ed] on the art of the novel.” For one thing, it was too easy to be seduced by corporate perks—the long lunches, the bottles of scotch stashed in file drawers.

Messner recalls a book called Advertising Man, by Jack Dillon, and a review of the book by Israel Horowitz. In the review, Horowitz said copywriters were men who did things well that were not worth doing.

But this view undersold the business. The business “sought people who were funny, who could make things out of nothing when there was nothing unique to say, who understood TV, which the old guys didn’t, who could find some notion or manner of expression that could guarantee rapid success,” Messner says. The children of the well-to-do went into finance or medicine or law. Many ad writers prided themselves on the fact that they were the “sons and daughters of a lot of working-class people (Italians, Jews, Irish),” people “who could think.”

“It took … the Jews with their great imaginations and dramatic writing skills and the powerhouse Italian artists to join up, take over, and make advertising the [country’s] preferred entertainment,” Mary Wells insists, unapologetic about her cultural generalizations.

Messner notes, “World War II vets were naturally the drivers of the business in that era. [In later years,] one that I worked for—Carl Ally—even imagined he was Yossarian.”

Genuinely heroic figures: Joe Daly, Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy.

So the ad people earned their perks. You couldn’t blame them for straying into temptation. It wasn’t unusual or surprising to find older men having dinner with younger women in Madison Avenue restaurants, especially on Thursday nights, says one old copywriter. He called Thursdays “Cheater’s Night,” figuring men were having dinner with their girlfriends prior to spending weekends locked away in the suburbs with children, pets, and wives.

In those days, there were no direct-dial phones in the offices. This aided and abetted nocturnal meanderings. At 5:30, when the company switchboard closed, a person could call out, but no one could call in. It was hard for a wife to check on her husband’s whereabouts, or to be certain he was not working late.

In contrast to this, the sexual culture blocks away, at Columbia and Barnard, was characterized by frustration, ignorance, and tentative rebellion—true across much of the country, if the national reaction to the first Kinsey Report was any indication. In the early 1950s, police had to be summoned to Barnard to quell panty raids that had gotten out of hand. Mobs of boys, tanked up on testosterone and alcohol, moved up Broadway, stopping traffic, and planted themselves outside Barnard dormitories, shouting to see women’s underwear. In his memoir New York in the Fifties, Dan Wakefield, who joined a mob one night, recalled that “girls came to the windows of the dorms, some of them tossing down tokens of intimate apparel, like morsels of meat to a pack of baying hounds.” Compared to these desperate rituals—which spread across U.S. college campuses in 1952 and 1953—clandestine dinners seemed the height of civilization to the women and men of Madison Avenue.

The backlash against panty raids in newspapers and political speeches reflected the generally repressive national mood Joe McCarthy and others had been able to exploit. “Why aren’t [the panty raiders] in the Army if they have so little to do?” asked U.S. News & World Report. College kids, unable to control their sexual urges, were blamed for giving the nation’s enemies comfort and undermining U.S. efforts in Korea.

But students weren’t the only ones challenging conventional attitudes. The January-February 1954 issue of Partisan Review featured a short story by Mary McCarthy entitled “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself.” In it, the characters spoke openly about diaphragms, “female contraceptive[s], a plug.” Such words, in pages that conveyed the deepest thinking of the day, from Lionel Trilling, William Phillips, and Irving Howe!

Then there was Trilling himself, discoursing on the Kinsey Report—again, in Partisan Review—calling its appearance “an event of great importance in our culture,” a balm whose “permissive effect” might overcome the “sexual ignorance which exists among us” and create the possibility of a healthy “community of sexuality” in the country.

Mainstream magazines such as Reader’s Digest weighed in on Kinsey and ran articles about abortion. The pieces were both reactionary and exploratory, but they indicated a surprising new openness about sexual subjects.

In this atmosphere, men and women Joe Heller’s age, having married, as they thought they were supposed to do, now starting families and working their way into the heart of American success, naturally wondered if the social contract had changed just as they’d signed it. Were they really bound by their signatures? How bound were they?

Corporate culture encouraged having it all. Not only that, it provided multiple opportunities. Calvin Trillin, who worked at Time in the 1950s, recalled “there was lots of underground romantic stuff.… Working at Time, you had to be in close quarters with fifty people through the week. There were late closings, time spent with feet up on the desk.… You didn’t know people were involved [with each other] until there was some awful scene in the hall or you got an invitation to a wedding.”

In 1998, Joe admitted to British journalist Lynn Barber that he’d had “affairs” during his nearly ten years in the advertising business. “[T]here were not that many.… [I]t was part of the male culture,” he said. “I was working in New York City in an atmosphere where men did that. We’d have parties and a couple would go into a room together.… I never had any wish to end my marriage.” At the time, Shirley “never accurately detected” his affairs. She was too busy raising Erica and Ted.

Where sexual mores were concerned, the New York ad world (driven, as Tom Messner says, by World War II vets) was an extension of the army. The men reasoned that as long as they did their duty—this time, for wives, kids, extended families—they were entitled to R & R in the city, as they had been in Cairo, Rome, or Capri.

Joe enjoyed himself, but he insisted he was not a “womanizer.” In 1975, he told Playboy interviewer Sam Merrill, “I would … say that my imagination … [kept] me from making foolish mistakes.” Obviously, Shirley would not have agreed.

*   *   *

WQXR, the classical radio station Joe liked to listen to, started its broadcast days with Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man: a rousing send-off to work (with the children crying in another room).

In Joe’s third year at Time, the company imposed a salary freeze, marshaling start-up funds for its new publication, Sports Illustrated. Employees grumbled; investors worried about company morale. At a sales convention, Joe was asked to set up projection equipment for slide shows to accompany various presentations, including one by Henry Luce. Sternly, the Great Man told his audience “publishing was the business” of the Time-Life Corporation, and he was not going to sacrifice Sports Illustrated just to ease investors’ fears or soothe the ruffled feathers of his employees.

Piqued, Joe began to search for a higher-paying job. Look was delighted to take him in. “A friend from Time, Arky Gonzalez, who earlier had left for more money at Reader’s Digest, cautioned me that things were very different in the rest of the business world from … Time, and that I might soon miss being there,” Joe wrote.

Gonzalez was right. Look was not as festive, paternalistic, or forgiving of employees’ foibles as Time. Its CEOs were obsessively poll-driven, constantly comparing subscription numbers and revenue forecasts. In Madison Avenue, U.S.A., Martin Mayer called Look the “most intensely and destructively competitive of the magazines in its space-selling policy,” and Joe did not last there more than a year.

In 1959, he moved to McCall’s to work for a young and vigorous advertising manager named Gilbert Lea. Lea had schemed hard with his editorial department to establish a “feel” for the magazine, a core direction guiding the content of the articles as well as types of ads to accompany them. “Around 1900, it was not unusual for a woman to refer to her husband as The Governor,” Lea told Mayer. “Somebody said that if you put men and women together around the turn of the century all you got was children. Today, there’s a ninety per cent overlap, a man and his wife share the same life.” This statement was questionable, coming from the center of a “male culture” condoning affairs. But Lea insisted Otis Wiese, McCall’s editor and publisher, meant no irony when he hailed “Togetherness” as the magazine’s philosophy. McCall’s was aimed at a “woman with a family instead of … individual [women].”

“The Togetherness theme, implying the existence of children old enough to participate in family decisions (including buying decisions) gave the sales staff a ‘feel’ to sell, a ‘feel’ which matched exactly … the known audience characteristics of the magazine,” Mayer explained. Polls showed women who bought McCall’s were generally older than average, yet teenage girls also formed a large part of the readership—they saw the magazine in their mothers’ houses.

Joe enjoyed exercising his imagination on considerations like these, but he remained frustrated that he had not found the confidence to do what George Mandel had done: finish a novel to satisfy his ambitions. Caught inside a seductive system, he firmly believed, with Mayer, that the “great bulk of advertising is culturally repulsive to anyone with any developed sensitivity. So, of course, are most movies and television shows, most popular music and a surprisingly high proportion of published books. When you come right down to it, there is not a hell of a lot to be said for most of what appears in the magazines.”

Joe spent his creative energy spurring mass sales. This meant he could not rise far above the lowest common denominator. Still, like any good adman, he believed he had the ability to change public taste; after all, this is what he was asked to do: persuade, cajole, alter perceptions. “Advertising requires extreme simplification of complicated subjects, and the advertising writer must therefore stretch previously precise words to cover large areas,” Mayer wrote: a principle that applied equally well to Joe’s evolving concept of a new kind of American novel.