Chapter Eight
The MGM Lion
Jackson had said that he wanted to raise awareness about alcoholism, though he would always be ambivalent about this aspect of his fame—which, to put it mildly, tended to overshadow his literary achievement. Walter Winchell hailed The Lost Weekend as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of alcoholism, and for his part Jackson professed to be unsurprised by the book’s popularity—there were, after all, a lot of alcoholics in the world, whether or not people saw fit to talk about them: “Almost everybody has somebody in their family who’s a drunk but who’s worth worrying about,” he said. In the past, however, such people had been pariahs merely—bums, losers, jokes—and nobody wanted to identify with that, no matter how much they drank. “Since the publication of Charles Jackson’s somber novel about an alcoholic,” Life reported in 1946, “an unprecedented amount of attention has been paid to the drinking of alcohol and the problems arising therefrom.” As a direct result—so the magazine applauded—the “complicated disease of alcoholic addiction” was now widely regarded as a medical rather than a moral issue.
Jackson’s life, meanwhile, was “turned completely upside down”: rarely averse to publicity, he didn’t mind so much the constant requests for interviews and public appearances, but the letters and late-night phone calls from drunk and disturbed people, who desperately wanted to know his “secret,” were another matter. That he was Don Birnam, to them, simply went without saying: “Now, that day you carried the typewriter up Third Avenue—” a person would begin, and Jackson became more and more belligerent in his objections. “It was Don Birnam!” he’d retort—so many times that he almost believed it, backing away from earlier, more candid statements in the press (“I used to drink like a lot of other people and now I don’t drink at all like a lot of other people”) in favor of his elegant “one third” formula (i.e., Don was one third himself, one third an alcoholic friend, one third “pure invention”), and finally flat denial: “I wish,” he remarked to one reporter in late 1945, “that you’d say too how sick I am of being asked if The Lost Weekend is autobiographical. It isn’t.”
No matter. His readers kept calling, and especially writing (“I have yet to receive a fan letter from a reader who is not primarily a crack-pot,” Jackson observed to his sister-in-law)—often in a palsied hand that expressed, touchingly, an almost childlike faith that the novelist was ready to help, whether by sending his book “C. O. D.” or offering a saving and highly personalized piece of advice. In most cases (“ANSWERED”) their faith was not misplaced: “I do not see how you can go on letting him make such a monkey of you, if I may put it so crudely,” Jackson sternly admonished one woman (“I’m one of the ‘Helens’ … ”). “[Jones] only thinks to telephone you when he is drunk, and then, I am sure, does it partly out of a compulsion to make himself important.… For your own sake, you should pull yourself out of this and forget it.” At the same time Jackson couldn’t resist showing some of the choicer epistolary specimens to his publisher, who hit on the idea of quoting them in a full-page ad for the Times Book Review on the first anniversary of publication. There was, for instance, a letter from Mrs. G. F. Lyle, whose husband had read The Lost Weekend and recognized himself “in black and white as the scoundrel” he was: He “said that if every woman and man, young or old could have a copy of your book, that it would do more for humanity than all the sermons in the world.” Jackson’s “reluctance” over the printing of such testimonials was duly noted in the Times (his “great sense of responsibility for people’s confidences”), and hence his relief when Mrs. Lyle, at least, wrote to say she hadn’t minded: “It was a dirty trick to play on you, I felt,” he wrote back. “Now your new letter makes everything all right.” To a friend, however, he admitted that the Times ad had left him “shrieking with laughter”: “If there is anybody on the Atlantic seaboard with whom people’s confidences are not safe, it’s ME!”
The novel’s efficacy as a temperance tract was belied by an exclusive interview Jackson gave to The Beverage Times (“The Weekly Trade Newspaper of the Beer, Wine and Liquor Industries”), in which he permanently alienated organizations such as the WCTU by declaring himself staunchly opposed to prohibition in any form. Pointing out that Don Birnam had gotten his start during the Prohibition Era, Jackson said he would never have published his book if he thought it might be used as “dry” propaganda: “Others shouldn’t be deprived of the privilege of drinking alcoholic beverages simply because a few neurotics can’t handle such drinks. I think drinking is one of the real social pleasures for those who can handle it. It is a pleasure and a social asset.” That said, Jackson was wary of becoming a spokesman for any side of the argument. A few months later, Stanley Barr of Allied Liquor Industries made a special trip to New Hampshire (where Jackson had since moved) in hopes of persuading him to address their convention at the Waldorf and repeat his opposition to prohibition. “I’m a novelist, not a public speaker,” Jackson replied, wryly offering to make such a statement in exchange for two thousand dollars or two Darrel Austin paintings worth the same amount. “You’re asking $1,995 too much,” said Barr, who would later mount a campaign to prevent the movie release of The Lost Weekend.
Jackson’s relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous was problematic. By the time he learned of the organization, in 1940, he’d been sober for almost four years and had little reason to expect a relapse; privately he believed that AA was for “simple souls” and “weaklings” who needed mutual comfort and a lot of “mystical blah-blah.” The American Medical Association agreed, more or less, dismissing Alcoholics Anonymous (the book) as “a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation” that had “no scientific merit or interest.” But doctors themselves, again, had little idea what to do about drunkards, continuing to treat (with a singular lack of success) underlying causes, while scarcely conceiving of alcoholism as a primary, independent disease. It was on this pragmatic level—find a remedy first, then worry (if at all) about etiology—that AA and Jackson were at least somewhat in accord: “To hell with causes,” says Don Birnam, who realizes he’s reached the point where “one drink was too many and a hundred not enough”—this a conscious homage to AA, as Jackson conceded.1 Little surprise then that the organization assumed he’d be an ally. “Every member should read” The Lost Weekend, wrote an old acquaintance, Carlton Hoste (later president of the Newark Rotary Club), who identified himself to Jackson as the only AA member in their hometown. Stanley Rinehart, meanwhile, had pressed the novel on founder Bill Wilson, who approved providing free copies to new recruits.
This seemed to mitigate Jackson’s reservations somewhat, though he remained skeptical. AA’s emphasis on the spiritual was bad enough, but he also believed that it failed to offer “any real substitute” for drinking: whereas he had his writing and various other inner resources, AA could only provide (apart from the bogus spirituality) a kind of banal fellowship; the average Joe, thought Jackson, was likely to relapse once he figured “he was more interesting as a ‘problem’ than he ever was as a useful citizen.” At any rate he simply couldn’t abide the “Rotarianism” of such gatherings. “I am a writer first of all, and a non-drinker second,” he wrote the Hartford AA chapter, whose invitation to speak he’d reluctantly accepted at his publisher’s behest. “I am not interested in reform of any kind, so please don’t look for me to give an inspirational talk or any kind of harangue on the evils of drink.” Once he arrived, though, and was greeted by no fewer than six hundred receptive people, Jackson couldn’t help trying to ingratiate himself. AA, he said, just might prove a good thing for Don Birnam—a solitary drinker who needs fellowship from people who don’t consider addiction a stigma, and who can help him overcome the shame of his past while making him see, too, that he must never drink again … all the reasons, in short, why any drinker might benefit from such a program, and why Jackson himself would someday become one of its foremost advocates. As for Rotarianism: “Just a word now about Charles Jackson, the man,” reported a writer for the AA Grapevine. “I expected to meet someone a little on the aloof side—someone above the usual level, where of course Jackson has a right to be. But Charlie won’t let you look up to him. When he’s talking to you or listening to you he makes you feel that you matter to him. Friendly, modest, sincere, unspoiled. That’s Charlie Jackson.” Scratch a superbly aloof artist and find a small-town boy who wants nothing better than to be well liked by “the happy, lovely, and commonplace.” “Strike me dead if this sounds corny,” Jackson wrote Dorothy Parker (pointedly) after his Hartford appearance, “but I don’t think I ever met a happier bunch of people in my life.”
And still he protested that he was a writer, by God, not an authority on alcoholism (“I’m awfully tired of all this identification with drinking!”), and still he accepted invitations to speak publicly on the issue. And it rankled, to say the least, when others seemed as doubtful as he about his credentials—when, for example, a prominent scientist, Dr. Anton J. Carlson, all but refused to acknowledge him during a panel discussion on behalf of the Washingtonian Hospital in Boston. “Dr. Gorrell and—and that fellow there,” Carlson said, repeatedly, in a “casual and careless fashion” meant to “belittle” Jackson, or so he indignantly wrote the man afterward. Why, the many letters he’d received about his novel—Jackson would have Carlson know—had been “in almost every case” from “distinguished men in your profession as well as men of letters” (no mention of crackpots) who felt indebted to the author for teaching them something new about human nature:
If the book is good enough to be the only work of fiction on the Required Reading list of the Yale Clinic, to cite only one example, then I think it is good enough for you; and I further think that as a scientist, you should acquaint yourself with what it has to say.… the intuitive artist—the artist who knows more than he knows, is of inestimable value to the progress of mankind, no less than the scientist.
Very true, no doubt, though one has to wonder whether Jackson’s public engagement with the subject was entirely disinterested. Rather it seemed compounded of roughly one third earnest desire to be of use, one third longing for the limelight, and one third need of cash. When he saw the hit Broadway play Harvey (about the amiable tippler Elwood P. Dowd and his eponymous rabbit friend), Jackson claimed to be shocked, shocked by the audience’s unseemly mirth when, say, Dowd retrieves a hidden bottle of whiskey from behind a book in his sister’s living room.2 “I wanted to stand up,” Jackson subsequently wrote for Cosmopolitan, “turn around and cry out: ‘What in God’s name are you laughing at—what the hell’s funny about it?’ ” Alcoholism, after all, was no laughing matter, and Jackson was quite willing to say so even at the risk of seeming (as he grimly admitted) “a stuffed shirt”—at any rate he was willing to say so for a price: “I’m god damned sick of the subject of alcoholism,” he wrote his agent, not for the first time. “I’m a writer first of all, et cetera, but if I can get $1500 out of a good strong provocative or even controversial piece on the alcoholic in our society … why not?”
He could be especially humorless on the subject of his own alcoholism. One morning in April 1944 he got a call from one Mr. Horton, the proprietor of a nearby bookshop on Washington Square and “a bloody bore,” Jackson thought, who was forever bending his ear about AA whenever he’d stop by to check on sales of The Lost Weekend. One day Horton phoned him at home: “I read in the paper today that you’re going to Hollywood,” the man said, and Jackson allowed it was true. “Well, I wish you’d do yourself a favor—” Horton continued, and began to give him the address and telephone number of the AA chapter in Beverly Hills. “You S.O.B.!” Jackson exploded. “If you don’t think I know what I’m doing by now, after eight years of sobriety on my own, then you don’t know very much! Go and talk to those people who need it! That’s the trouble with you holy rollers!” Then he hung up on him.
Nine years later, detoxing at the Saul Clinic, Jackson remembered his abuse of poor Mr. Horton. “And I thought, ‘My gosh. All that man was doing was trying to be kind … ’ ” If Jackson had been truly secure in his sobriety, he realized, he wouldn’t have lost his temper like that. “It was a sign of danger ahead that I didn’t even know.”
Still, he was filled with misgiving when he parted with Rhoda, the kids, and Boom before boarding the Twentieth Century Limited on April 15; he’d even gotten emotional saying goodbye to Herb on the phone, but when little Sarah ran back to kiss him on the platform, he could scarcely drag himself onto the train. Soon, though, excitement got the better of him. In Chicago he changed trains to the Super Chief, which made the Century “look like the Newark & Marion”: “Shower baths, barber shop, super-de-luxe club cars, bars, diners decorated with indian designs, wonderful food … ” At the Kansas City station he couldn’t resist revealing his identity to the bookstore owner, who breathlessly informed him that Bette Davis herself had bought a copy of The Lost Weekend en route to Hollywood the other day. “I hope she connects the author with ‘that sweet little man on the couch’ [in Nantucket],” wrote Jackson, who intended to drop her a note just as soon as he arrived. Later, as his journey continued, the gorgeous Western scenery put him in a subdued, philosophical mood: “It seems hard to believe, doesn’t it,” he wrote Boom, “that movie-people pass untouched through this incredible landscape which is the very utter in the eternal verities, and then pass on to the make-believe and sham of Hollywood.”
In that dubious milieu Jackson was thrilled to learn that he was something of a legend, and that the title of his book had become “part of the language”: at the Ruban Bleu, Imogene Coca was doing a popular drunk sketch she called her “Lost-Weekend number,” and many, many actual drunks were anxious to glimpse the author of the most-talked-about book in town. “You know, I think you’re a great writer,” the novelist Laura Hobson blurted, informing Jackson that everyone on the MGM lot had “talked of nothing else” the week before he arrived, though some were a little reluctant to meet him. “I wish they really would be reluctant,” he wrote Rhoda, “because I know they’re always disappointed; that is, they have some preconceived idea about you and expect you to be ‘interesting’ or intense or drunk or something different from just a normal average guy like anybody else.” But Jackson’s mild-mannered demeanor was perhaps the most exotic part of all, and never mind his artless affability. His fame, wrote Mary McCarthy, seemed foremost a means of making friends with strangers (“as though the friendship already existed on the ideal plane, in the mind of God, and had only to be cemented in the real world by the manly handclasp”). Everyone was disarmed: this dipso novelist—the model for Don Birnam!—was, quite simply, the nicest guy they’d ever met. As for Jackson, he was naturally pleased that he never had to dine alone, but more than a little bewildered: “Why I am wanted by these people I truly don’t know; I offer nothing and merely am amiable.”
What they hoped he offered—apart from amiability—was, of course, “the secret”: “I just stopped drinking,” Jackson would shrug, whereupon people would pry even more. He was flattered when big stars such as Spencer Tracy “hounded [him] for days on end,” but others made him nervous. Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz had reputedly attempted suicide after reading The Lost Weekend (his doctor suffered a dislocated shoulder while tussling with him), and Jackson was relieved when he managed to get out of lunching alone with the man in Malibu. Algonquin wit Robert Benchley—whose career had devolved into odd, demoralizing cameos for movies such as National Barn Dance—“hung onto [Jackson] for dear life,” and later wired his friend Dorothy Parker that the novelist known as “the MGM lion” (“literary lion,” Charlie glossed for Rhoda) was returning to New York. “I’ve got to meet the man who saved my life,” she would greet him. “Well, it’s all fun,” he’d written from Hollywood that first month, “though it truly goes in one ear and out the other … ” Sometimes, though, he could hardly restrain his ecstatic incredulity: “This fantastic town! My fantastic life! … the other night when I got in there was a note that Vincent Price had called; I don’t know him yet … ”
The provincial lad with stars in his eyes was pleased to realize that (in those days anyway) a top-tier writer was considered something of an “aristocrat” in Hollywood. Sitting in the MGM commissary with his fellow wordsmiths and new best friends—Whitfield Cook, Robert Nathan, and Donald Ogden Stewart—Jackson was stunned when Clark Gable sat down opposite him just like that and began chewing the fat (“I still can’t get over it … it is something that’s happening to somebody else, not me”). Nor was commissary talk the sort of bland gossip one heard on the stoop in Newark, but rather shimmering effortless repartee—“real brilliance,” which Jackson was at pains to report to the folks back home with curatorial precision: “They tell the story about the Hollywood writer who got tired of it all and committed suicide by jumping into his Capeheart while it was changing records, for instance.”
Jackson felt esteemed in every way. His minder at MGM was a fatherly Russian producer named Voldemar Vetluguin, who counseled Charlie to be choosy about his assignments and would-be collaborators. “Arsur is hard to work with,” the man gravely advised, when Jackson wondered whether he should team up with the producer Arthur Hornblow. Jackson was touched by “Vet’s” concern, but also dismayed to find that such a brilliant, kindly man lived all alone in an enormous house and commenced getting drunk every night, without fail, at 5:30 on the nose. He did, however, steer Charlie to a plum assignment within a single week: a big ensemble picture tentatively titled A Day to Forget—about the one day in the lives of various characters that they would most like to relive—featuring all the big stars at MGM (Garland, Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, et al.), with Van Johnson in the lead. The producer was Carey Wilson, screenwriter for the original Ben-Hur and Mutiny on the Bounty, and Jackson envisaged the key credits as follows: “Story by Harry Ruskin and Charles Jackson / Screenplay by Charles Jackson.” Indeed, the episodic narrative offered an intriguing technical challenge—namely, how to weave together so many disparate plots without seeming to start the movie over again every few minutes—and Jackson was eager for the chance to prove his “virtuosity” and become known as a “name writer and sound craftsman.” “Already ballyhooed as an all-star drama to spotlight virtually every major player on Leo’s lot,” Box Office trumpeted a month later, “Nor All Your Tears [as it was now called] is a story of human conflicts laid against the background of an American coastal city … ”
The coastal city in question was San Francisco, to which Jackson was sent for three days in late May to “absorb some of the atmosphere”—both haut and bas, it would seem: put up at the elegant Mark Hopkins Hotel at the crest of Nob Hill, Jackson was taken under the wing of professional hostess Elsa Maxwell, no less, who “paved [his] way with social engagements that are too-too,” he reported, including lunch with the mayor at the Pacific-Union Club and entrée into houses of “some of the old families.” Nights, however, were spent in the company of his roguish old friend Haughton C. Bickerton, who lived with his mother in Sausalito. “You must remember bad Bick, don’t you?” he wrote Whitfield Cook (“Angel”) a few months later, which suggests that Cook had come along for the trip. By then Cook had begun to feel like “an old old friend” to Charlie: “We have many many laughs to the minute … and we almost always lunch together.” Cook’s seventy-year career as a screenwriter, novelist, and composer is now best remembered, if at all, for his contribution to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), for which he’s generally credited as having underlined the sexual tension between Farley Granger and Robert Walker. Later, as a sixty-year-old widower, Cook became attached to the gay Australian writer Sumner Lock Elliott; the two lived apart until Elliott’s stroke in 1985, when Cook moved in and became the man’s caretaker for the last six years of his life.
Around this time Charlie received a “sharp letter” from his mother—“reminding me” (as he indignantly related to Rhoda) “that I have a good wife and two perfectly good children, and I mustn’t do anything to … ‘bring shame upon them.’ Imagine!” Indeed, this seemed unduly harsh, given that almost every single day Charlie wrote long, newsy letters to his wife (urging her to keep them “as a kind of diary” in case he needed to look stuff up later), and twice a week they spoke on the telephone—though, truth be known, these chats tended to be “less than satisfactory” (“we never know what to say … and besides we’re probably too conscious of the fleeting expensive minutes”). “Lately I have longed for you physically—which may surprise you,” Charlie wrote shortly after that trip to the Bay Area. “I could have sex if I wanted it, but funny thing is it doesn’t enter my head: what I want is love, someone to hold and love and be with long hours through the night, even if it’s only lying side by side … ” Certainly he wanted his family around him—in fact, he was considering buying a house in Hollywood so they could spend winters there, and meanwhile he wanted Rhoda to leave the kids with her family and join him for a few weeks that summer, while he was still “a so-called ‘celeb’ ”: it “will never be the same after this year,” he accurately predicted. Rhoda protested that she would feel “terribly ill at ease” in such a place, and Charlie replied that he’d felt the same way until he realized everyone felt that way, even the “Big Names”: “it’s the 20th Century neurosis, and keener or more acute here than anywhere, because everyone is really so insecure and this is such an unreal world.” This failed to reassure Rhoda, who decided to stay put in the East.
The agent Leland Hayward had arranged for Jackson to meet the two at Romanoff’s in early May—“a triumph, nothing less,” Charlie wrote Boom: “Wilder and Brackett were wonderful, crazy about the book, anxious to do the picture, and that’s what we talked about.” He was especially smitten by Brackett (“the nicest man I have met here”), who in turn was even more fascinated by The Lost Weekend than Wilder: “It had,” he said, “more sense of horror than any horror story I have ever read—lingering like a theme in music.” A few days later, Wilder “dragged [Jackson] away” from a party to attend a screening of his latest movie, Double Indemnity, after which he stood up and announced, “Next picture coming up: The Lost Weekend!” Jackson could hardly demur, since he’d found Double Indemnity “truly wonderful” and considered himself “the luckiest guy in the world”—but wait: yet another genius, Alfred Hitchcock, had also read The Lost Weekend and wanted to buy it, or so he told the author (who was dining with Whit Cook) one night at LaRue’s. Toward the end of May, not a day passed that Jackson’s name didn’t appear in one of the big columns: “Yesterday I read that four major movie companies are all hot about the book,” he wrote Philip Wylie. Without a doubt, he announced, The Lost Weekend would sell by the end of the month, “and certainly for not less than $75,000.”
Two years later—sadder but (perhaps) wiser—Jackson wrote his agent: “I feel, and will always feel … that The Lost Weekend was handled very badly indeed.” Jackson had been in San Francisco on May 29, when his agent Carl Brandt called to relay Paramount’s decidedly lowball offer: $35,000. Other studios, Brandt explained, were only willing to option at that point, so there was no competitive bidding; in any event Paramount wanted an answer within two hours. “I’m no businessman,” said Charlie. “What should I do?” “I cannot take the responsibility of deciding for you,” Brandt replied. Frantic, Jackson tried to reach his newest best friend, Brackett—who had urged him, in confidence, to ask Paramount for the moon, since he and Wilder were determined to make the movie “come hell or high water”—but Brackett was away from his desk. Charlie waited, then waited a little more, then caved. “I wish this did me some good financially,” he’d later sigh, whenever someone reminded him of The Lost Weekend’s astounding box-office success. “Me, I sold it outright for $35,000.” At the time Louella Parsons speculated in print that he’d doubtless gotten “a pretty penny—up in six figures” for such a hot property.
Still, it was a long way from writing Sweet River scripts at forty bucks a pop, and Jackson consoled himself that Wilder and Brackett would, after all, do a “brilliant job.” Tacked on their door at Paramount was a sign: “DO NOT DISTURB: MEN WORKING ON NEXT YEAR’S ACADEMY AWARD”—a bit of desperate bluster, many thought, given what seemed an almost unfilmable novel about a single major character who hardly spoke except inside his head. “If they bring it off,” a colleague remarked, “I bet they’ll try next to make a musical out of Finnegans Wake.” In fact, as Brackett later claimed, it turned out to be “the easiest script we wrote, thanks to the superb novel,” and Wilder agreed: the more you took the book apart, he said, the better it seemed. Also, they were glad to consult with the author, to whom they’d promised not to make drastic changes without his approval—as, for example, when they toyed with the idea of turning Helen into an ex-alcoholic whom Don meets in a psychiatrist’s office: “Simply won’t permit such a thing,” said Jackson, winning the point. But mostly he was nothing but pleased: the script’s opening was “brilliant,” and the new “Boy-Meets-Girl” sequence (Don and Helen are given each other’s coats by mistake while leaving La Traviata) was “original & effective.” And meanwhile the columns buzzed with rumors about who would play the controversial lead. Wilder and Brackett wanted Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, or Ray Milland, in that order, while Jackson had hoped for Robert Montgomery (the two had hit it off at a party chez Brackett), who, he thought, had the “charm” and “knowledge of ‘psychopathia’ ” to do justice to such a difficult role.3 As for the long-suffering Helen, an actress named Andrea Leeds (“remember her? the lovely girl in STAGE DOOR who committed suicide?”) was then the top candidate, and Jackson moreover observed that a live bat (“Actually”) was being trained for the climactic hallucination.
She reminds me of one of those lovely little appealing calves, or fauns [sic]—and they say she cries at night because she isn’t beautiful. But she is so much more beautiful, really, than any Hollywood actress of her class, with the kind of beauty that comes from within, and an honesty and simplicity about her that are almost pathetic. She has worked so hard all her life that she has never had a chance for herself or any private life at all: that’s why she’s so insecure.… One of the troubles is people her own age don’t appreciate her: older men love her.
Older bisexual men particularly loved her—not just for the vulnerable, fawn-like quality noted above, but also for her androgynous looks (“like the girl and boy next door,” said theater critic Margo Jefferson) and a well-known tendency, fragility withal, for seducing such men (and other women).
Probably, though, her seduction of Jackson was on a higher plane, from afar, as when he watched her rehearse a big number for Ziegfeld Follies: between performances, he noticed, she seemed “all but lifeless,” looking like a sleepy child waiting for a bus, but when she got her cue to speak or sing, “she was transformed”—a personality sprang forth and filled the studio, sucked up the very air. Jackson felt as though “he was seeing nothing less than a demonstration of the workings of art itself,” and the disparity between bigger-than-life persona and “terribly mixed up” girl moved him profoundly. “Dear Judy,” he began a poem for her twenty-second birthday (June 10), inscribed on the flyleaf of The Lost Weekend:
… Once, within a wood,
The willows parted and there stood,
Soft-eyed and innocent, a fawn;
One moment later it was gone.…
Never did I expect to see
Again such simple purity
So be it, too: susceptible man
Must bear such moments as he can.…
A few days later he shyly asked his “new love” (as he frankly described her in a note to Alma Pritchard at Brandt & Brandt) whether she’d accompany him to the “preem” of The White Cliffs of Dover on June 19, and was startled by her ready acceptance. Vetluguin, ever the mentor, explained that “no man in his right mind” would take Judy Garland to a premiere: “You’ll be mobbed,” he said. “You’re taking your life in your hands.” But Charlie figured it was “all part of the Hollywood experience,” and was determined to see it through. In his subsequent letter to Rhoda (souvenir police pass enclosed), he described the atmosphere at Grauman’s Theatre that night as being akin to a “Nazi demonstration,” complete with a “battery of search-lights” and rabid, howling fans packed into bleachers along the street:
As the car pulled in to the curb the crowd screamed “There’s Judy!” over and over again.… Your heart would have been touched (as mine was) if you could have seen how Judy turned to the crowd and gave a tiny little wave, acknowledging the applause, though all the while, her hand on my arm was trembling and shaking against me. We were stopped, then, every few feet, and photographed; and Judy kept saying “For God’s sake, Charlie, smile!” Each time the flash went off, Judy’s face was turned toward mine, looking up at me in a charming smile, as though I were The Only Man In The World.… My legs knocked together, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world: a real experience.
Rhoda was understandably bemused by her husband’s effusive tone (never mind the photos and rumors that had begun to appear in the press), and he hastened to assure her that she needn’t feel “the slightest twinge of jealousy”; writing to Alma at Brandt & Brandt, meanwhile, he mentioned that he was taking tea with his idol Thomas Mann the following Saturday, though his “real passion” was for Judy: “Alas, how are the mighty fallen, when I go from Mann idolatry to Garland worship. But that’s Hollywood.”
Which is not to say that his Mann idolatry was inconsiderable: ever since The Magic Mountain had changed his life, Jackson had read almost every word of Mann’s work that had been translated into English; the only greater writer, in Jackson’s eyes, was Tolstoy. When he learned, then, that his hero would be a fellow guest at the home of producer Edwin Knopf (brother of Mann’s American publisher, Alfred), he was stricken by a bad case of “stage-fright” exacerbated by sobriety (“such a handicap, at moments like that”). Happily he was soon seated beside Mrs. Mann, and in the course of an easy chat about Davos and the like, he mentioned his admiration for her husband: “Then you must talk with him yourself after dinner,” she said, and arranged for the two to be left alone, more or less. At first Mann seemed to take it in stride that Jackson knew his work (essays too) like a rabbi knows the Talmud, but presently he flattered Jackson—and stunned guests within earshot—by inquiring about The Lost Weekend. “Oh, but that’s very well!” he exclaimed, when Charlie told him how it was selling. As Mary McCarthy wrote in her roman à clef about Jackson—wherein he appears as Herbert Harper, author of the confessional novel A Short One If You Don’t Mind4—his meeting with Mann became something of a legend among writers whose own books “the great dichte” had never deigned to notice:
So when Herbert Harper approached the great man at a Hollywood party, the meeting was watched with a good deal of sardonic anticipation: the irresistible force was meeting the immovable object. To the astonishment of everyone, a conversation began and continued all evening, and the phrase, “A Short Vun” was heard, by those nearby, to drop frequently from Herr Danz’s [Mann’s] lips.
When they subsequently took tea at Mann’s house in Pacific Palisades, Mann presented Jackson with an inscribed copy of his new novel, Joseph the Provider—in exchange for the “fine gift” of The Lost Weekend—and a mutual admiration society was born. Mann compared Jackson’s novel to Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, while Joseph the Provider became one of Charlie’s indispensable masterpieces (“I know of no book,” he wrote Dorothea Straus, “that leaves one with a greater sense of fulfillment than this one”). For a few years the two kept up a correspondence that, as McCarthy put it, “echoed benevolently Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann.” The following spring, Jackson wrote Mann of a visit he’d received in New Hampshire from G. B. Fischer, Mann’s German publisher, whom Charlie had spirited upstairs to see his portrait of Dr. Mann, framed in red lacquer and proudly displayed (along with Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Beethoven, et al.) in his study. Fischer had solicited an essay from Jackson for a special issue of Die Neue Rundschau in honor of Mann’s seventieth birthday: titled “Strictly Personal,” Jackson’s contribution (the only one printed in English) was a charming, eminently readable history of the author’s unrestrained adulation, going back to his choice of sanatoria in 1929 and proceeding to the present day. “I was really delighted with this little piece of prose which, though informal, touches the heart in a truly poetical manner,” Mann wrote. His last letter, in 1948, acknowledged Jackson’s “generous and gratifying impulse” to phone Mann one Sunday night and express his indignation over certain unsatisfactory reviews of Doctor Faustus. Probably, by then, it was not an entirely sober impulse on Charlie’s part; in any event Dr. Mann pleaded a “very bad” connection, though he clearly appreciated the thought.
Back in Hollywood that summer, Jackson’s social life had crystallized around two households: the Bracketts and the Gershwins. Every Sunday the former gave daytime dinner parties whose attendance by “the most entertainingly articulate writers … and assorted geniuses of the craft” inspired Life to liken them to “Madame de Staël’s salons in 18th century Paris”—an ambience due in part to Brackett’s witty wife, Elizabeth, who was sometimes, alas, absent from public view. The fact was, she’d struggled with severe alcoholism for years, as had their twenty-four-year-old daughter, Alexandra (“Zan”), and hence at least one reason Charles Brackett had been eager to adapt The Lost Weekend and re-create, as he remarked, “the strange and sometimes beautiful things” that transpire in an alcoholic’s mind. “It’s genuinely tragic,” Charlie wrote Rhoda, “because Elizabeth is almost one of the most loved women I ever knew.”5
From the Bracketts’, Charlie would hitch a ride with playwrights John Van Druten or Marc Connelly and spend the rest of the day—often past midnight—at Lee and Ira Gershwin’s house. His “nicest day in Hollywood” was spent thus: lunching and playing charades at the Bracketts’, then lazing around the Gershwins’ pool (the swarthy Jackson fancied a tan) with twelve others; later they feasted al fresco on “tremendous steaks (they shot all their coupons for a month, they said) … and the most wonderful ice cream with chocolate sauce I ever ate” before heading inside, as the evening turned cool, and sitting for hours around a cozy fire. The Gershwins, said Charlie, were “nice people, who really love you: Ira sat around like a fat old woman in the most preposterous shorts, all day and evening, looking something like a toad, but a nice toad, and Lee is just like a happy affectionate little girl …” As tokens of their friendship, they gave Charlie rare photographs of George and Ira, as well as an original pastel drawing by George. Almost twenty years later Jackson would reflect, a little sadly, that “out of all the people [he] used to see so much of [in Hollywood]”—and there had been many—his only lasting friendships had proved to be with the Gershwins and Charles Brackett.
Meanwhile he’d more than acquitted himself as a screenwriter, arriving at the studio every morning at six o’clock (“the other writers say they’ll report me to the Screen Writers Guild as a scab and saboteur”), the better to oblige Carey Wilson’s demands for draft after draft—theirs, indeed, was a “hair-raising” relationship: “he doesn’t know what he wants until he gets it, and then he doesn’t want it …” Still, Charlie felt certain that old “Vet” would be in his corner when push came to shove, and to this stalwart man he appealed once he’d proven his mettle. As he recounted their meeting to Carl Brandt:
I proposed that my fall option be suspended for one year, as I needed more time to write my second book. Vet acquiesced with such alacrity that my breath was taken away, practically; and even suggested that I go off payroll right now. I said, “But what is to become of my assignment with Carey Wilson?” And he replied, to my astonishment, that I had been taken off the assignment three weeks previous, and another writer put on—put behind me, as the expression is, out here.
Actually as many as five writers had been “put behind” him, including (but not limited to) Harry Ruskin, Michael Arlen, James M. Cain, I.A.R. Wylie, and his friend John Van Druten, each working separately on his own sequence of The Common Sin (as it was now called), which in any case was never produced. “I have been taken in and how by Vetluguin”—Jackson noted afterward with no little rue—“who is the smoothest bird this side of a[n] Archipenko sculpture.” On the brighter side, he and MGM had mutually decided to dissolve their contract, though he’d get paid for the full sixteen weeks of his first term. And when he next encountered the wily Vetluguin—later that November, in the office of Brandt & Brandt—the man seemed hardly to recognize him (“I think he remembered that I was a writer, maybe, and that my name was Johnson”).
For his last three weeks in Hollywood, anyway, he was free to enjoy the fruits of his abundant popularity, as his friends all but fought for the chance to entertain him one last time. Judy Garland and the Gershwins were giving him big parties, while Kate Hepburn and “Spence” wanted to see him both en masse and privately. Finally, with a week to go, the exhausted Charlie wanted nothing more than to go home to his family and his own bed: “Darling, I go all funny at the thought,” he wrote Rhoda on August 7. “It means more to me than anything that has happened in 4 months: you are mine, you are what I want in life and—what is more—what I have. Truly I am the luckiest guy in the world to have so much.” Before the homecoming proper, though, he suggested they give a smallish cocktail party at the New Weston Hotel in New York (this for some Hollywood friends on the East Coast, as well as friends of friends such as Dorothy Parker, Celeste Holm, Sally Benson …). He was to arrive on August 14—or rather we, since “our Whit Cook” also happened to be heading to New York, and the two had booked a double-bedroom compartment aboard the Chief and the Century.
