Chapter Eighteen
A Place in the Country
While keeping himself on such a tediously even keel, Jackson was sometimes reminded that he’d once made quite an impact on American culture. On March 3, 1959, his old acquaintance Glenway Wescott, then president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, informed him that he would receive a $1,500 grant in literature at the award ceremonial in May, where his fellow honorees would include the likes of Truman Capote, Leon Edel, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. “I am overwhelmed—deeply moved, in fact,” Jackson wrote Wescott, beseeching the Institute secretary to let him exceed the ten-person guest limit by two (“You can’t think how much I am looking forward to receiving this honor”). Thus his wife, daughters, Boom, the Strauses, and various others were on hand to hear Charlie commended with a lofty citation written by his friend McGinley: “To Charles Jackson … whose muscular and masculine prose writing [has] extended the borders of artistic perception, and whose most celebrated novel, The Lost Weekend, is already a part of America’s literary experience.”
The following year Farrar, Straus and Cudahy acquired a paperback company, Noonday Press, whose inaugural line featured a new edition of The Lost Weekend with a panegyrical preface by John Farrar (“a masterpiece of fiction technique, of emotional power and, most important, of that particular variety of compassion for character and control of violent and special material that marked the great Russians and a few others”). And that wasn’t all: sensing the possibility of a bona fide Jackson Revival—not to say some return on his considerable investment—Roger had arranged for Charlie to meet with Robert Giroux, editor-in-chief since 1955, to see if anything could be done about Jackson’s work-in- progress, A Second-Hand Life. Stirred by the sudden interest, as well as the prospect of long-term unemployment, Charlie sent an outline of the novel to his old movie agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, in hope of getting “some advance loot from Hollywood” that would see him through completion; this failing, his devoted family rallied to keep him afloat. Not only was Rhoda working full-time at the Center of Alcohol Studies, but Sarah quit college that summer (1960) and took a job in New York (at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy), while Kate worked part-time too.
Not for nothing, though, had the novel languished these many years, and finally its author appealed to an old friend with a vaunted narrative gift, Charles Brackett. The problem, Jackson explained, was not his nymphomaniac heroine, Winifred, but rather the bland Harry Harrison, whose epiphany he envisaged as being similar to that of John Marcher in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”—that is, “his sudden awful realization that nothing ever is going to happen to him.” But how to dramatize Harry’s acedia? And how to account, plausibly, for his being a kind of emotional “eunuch” (as opposed to, say, a repressed homosexual)? “I could have him playing ‘safe’ by always going around with married women or with divorced Catholic women … ” Brackett’s response, if any, is unknown.
Meanwhile an old benefactor, Herb Mayes—the magazine editor who, ten years before, paid five thousand dollars for “The Sunnier Side”—had taken over as editorial director of McCall’s, and the promise of such a lucrative market was the carrot Charlie needed to finish his first story in six years. “One o’Clock in the Morning” was based on an episode from the summer of 1954, when the family had stayed in Malaga with Boom; one night the fourteen-year-old Sarah had broken curfew to canoodle at the lake with an older boy, until her frantic father had interrupted the tryst with a knock on the car window.1 In the story, the father’s search around the lake entails mortifying encounters with a state trooper as well as the father of his daughter’s girlfriend, whom he wakes up to interrogate, and in the end he’s forced to recognize that his daughter doesn’t, after all, tell him everything. Mayes liked the basic idea, but asked for two more pages “to establish the fact that both characters are expecting too much of good nature, that they are both a little in the wrong,” which Jackson obediently supplied. “The trouble with you, Daddy, is you’re jealous,” says the otherwise contrite daughter. “You just don’t want me to grow up.” The father manfully sees the truth in this, and henceforth vows to let go of the girl to some seemly degree.
Whatever satisfaction Jackson took in writing this trifle (which he’d originally submitted without a title) was dampened, perhaps, by the pandering involved; at any rate his creative impulse went promptly back into hibernation. “I now, like you, am convinced that you have a powerful and significant novel and one which will touch the hidden core of loneliness in many people,” Carl Brandt, Jr. (the son of his former agent, who’d died of emphysema in 1957), had written him on October 24, 1960, after reading his client’s outline for A Second-Hand Life. Then, three weeks later: “What’s going on? How is the book coming, and when do we see you?” But Charlie didn’t reply, and a few months later Rhoda mentioned a recent “overdose episode” in a letter to Sarah, who was now old enough (twenty-one) to know about such things.
Which should not have surprised him: during the hectic working day, at least, Roger was a man who liked to mix the “gossip, shop talk, good food and fun” that was all Charlie had to offer anymore with a little business; in any case the day came, at last, when there was a little business to discuss. By 1962—nine years after the author’s first ecstatic inklings—A Second-Hand Life consisted of two completed parts (out of a planned five) and an outline, which Roger had read with grave misgiving, and over lunch one day at the Brussels he said as much, adding (so he recalled in 1978), “But you know, Charlie, I could be absolutely wrong, and there may well be a publisher who’ll take it.” Jackson would remember the moment—“the stunning crisis”—somewhat differently: “After an hour or so of the usual gay small-talk,” he wrote in “The Sleeping Brain,” “my publisher, my friend, suddenly said: ‘You know? I don’t believe in writer’s blocks. I don’t believe there is such a thing: it’s a delusion or an excuse on the part of the writer who doesn’t want to work.’ ” Whatever his exact words—and Straus was legendary for his candor, too—the gist of it, as far as Charlie was concerned, was You’re Through: “It was a dreadful black hour and black day in my life.… I had to face the fact that my career, such as it was, was over … and I’d better forget it and do something else (at the age of 58).”
But Charlie endured. Soon he was back in the office of Brandt & Brandt, telling the whole sad story to his new agent, Carl Junior (Bernice Baumgarten had left the company after Carl Senior’s death). “I think he was feeling doomed,” the younger Brandt recalled. “He thought the world was giving up on him … but [he was] fighting it all the way.” After the two made an unsuccessful pitch for A Second-Hand Life to Putnam’s (in part, no doubt, because the firm had recently published the first American edition of Lolita), Jackson and Brandt approached a new editor at Macmillan, Robert Markel, who happened to be the son of Frieda Lubelle, the treasurer at Brandt & Brandt for almost half a century and a great friend (and soft touch) to Charlie for many years. Markel was trying to build a list, and saw the chance to do something decent for a once-lauded author besides. Within a month of that bombshell at the Brussels, then, Charlie was back in business: Macmillan paid him $5,000 on signing, with another $2,500 due when (if) he delivered the manuscript.
But there was still, as Rhoda wrote Brandt, “the ramifications of the Straus situation”: “I do get a little angry when I think that they’re bleeding him for 50% of any money received until his advance from them is paid off.” Or so she thought—Roger’s actual terms were somewhat more flexible and forbearing. Charlie was allowed to keep his $5,000 Macmillan advance, in hopes that this would bestir him to finish, at long last, his novel, after which the entire balance of $2,500 would be remitted to Farrar, Straus and Cudahy along with any other earnings until his debt was satisfied. In the meantime, though, Roger wangled him another $2,500 advance, free and clear, arranging for the Time Reading Program to bring out a 1963 reprint of The Lost Weekend; that summer, too, Roger mailed (Special Delivery) two crisp ten-dollar bills in response to Charlie’s phone call (collect) from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Saranac Lake, where he was badly in need of pocket money. “I wrote Roger a long chatty letter then, like the old days,” Charlie reported to Kate, “and a similar, gayer one to Dorothea in Purchase in answer to a charming letter from her.”
But his body, which had weathered so much, began to betray him. Three years before, he’d developed a duodenal ulcer that was serious enough for his doctor to advise hospitalization (it would ultimately prove the immediate, merciful cause of his death). In the fall of 1962, though, his main complaint was a recurrence of tuberculosis in his collapsed right lung that threatened to spread to his “good” lung—namely the one that had done the work of assimilating three or four packs of cigarettes a day for the past thirty-five years. That October, at Middlesex Hospital, he underwent emergency surgery to remove the infected lower lobe as well as three (or four) ribs, after which walking became more difficult and lifting almost impossible. He also got hooked on Doriden, which at the time was considered a safe alternative to barbiturates but was in fact every bit as likely to lead to addiction and awful withdrawal symptoms, as Charlie learned when he tried quitting cold turkey in the spring of 1963. Taken to the Carrier Clinic—a psychiatric hospital in Belle Mead, New Jersey—he was heavily sedated in the hope of averting DTs and hence was wont to repeat himself, sweating and shaking, when his daughters visited, though he was competent enough to introduce them to various cronies on the ward, and was discharged in time to address (with Marty Mann) the annual AA banquet in Wilmington.
By June, alas, he was sicker than ever: “A constant fever,” he wrote Kate, “absolutely no sleep (why I don’t die of sheer exhaustion I’ll never know … because the moment I lie down I can’t breathe, my heart goes into a pounding panic, and I have to sit upright to calm down).” X-rays revealed the worst: what was left of his right lung was now destroyed and the infection had broken through the chest wall and attacked his “good” lung; without drastic surgery he would be dead in about six weeks. More cheerfully, it so happened that his medical expenses would be paid in full by the Will Rogers Memorial Fund, which ran a hospital in the Adirondacks that was free of charge to anyone in show business—old-time vaudevillians, burlesque dancers, TV script editors—who suffered from cardiopulmonary illness. Like every other patient at Will Rogers, Charlie would have a private room in a lovely Tudor mansion that looked like a luxury resort hotel, and yet was a leading research facility with a first-rate staff and state-of-the-art equipment.
“Long grueling drive to Saranac but we made it,” Charlie scribbled in his appointment diary for July 17, 1963. “I was barely able to walk in. Rhoda did stupendous job of unpacking and settling me in while I was but thoroughly examined by Dr. Ayvazian. Lovely place, nice room and bath. Rhoda left—and it was a most difficult leave-taking for both of us.” After sputum and urine and blood tests and “x-rays, x-rays, x-rays,” doctors were still uncertain how to proceed, and so performed a bronchoscopy that Charlie described as “1 hour and 15 minutes of drowning”; three hours later, though, he was digesting dinner and watching Judgment at Nuremberg. A great sense of peace had begun to descend. “I needed to get away from home and my too dull environment there,” he wrote his agent and editor, “even from my wife—all I needed was a change.” For the time being, at least, he could do almost anything he liked: linger over breakfast (“with much very good coffee”), read every word of the newspaper, walk in the woods, sit on the lawn, and never once feel obliged to seem worthy of his wife’s solicitude. And who needed it, given the “love, affection, and trust” between him and his chest surgeon, Warriner “Woody” Woodruff, as well as the medical director, Fred Ayvazian, a kindly Armenian who wrote mystery novels on the side (Much Ado about Murder, et al.). No wonder some patients were content to stay in Saranac Lake for years on end, though Charlie was determined not to become one of these “beachcombers”: “I want to die, or get well quick and get out of here.”
The dying part seemed more likely than not. After two weeks, Charlie “learned [his] fate”: a complete pneumonectomy on the right side—a procedure that took a team of three surgeons almost five hours to perform, and left the patient’s right arm, hand, and fingers frozen for weeks. That he was alive at all, indeed, was little short of a miracle; Dr. Woodruff informed him afterward that he, Charlie, was “the only one—yes, the only one—who had survived in his experience, this exact operation,” or rather (as he alternatively related to Dorothea) the only one besides “a man of 42; and he died five days later.” For his family’s benefit he lovingly described the niceties: “Not only did they have to take out the right lung, but also a fistula, an empyema”—an accumulation of pus in the pleural cavity—“four ribs instead of the two that I had supposed, and (this surprised them most of all, though it meant nothing to me), the whole pleura and the lining of the whole chest wall.”2 As for that lining, Dr. Woodruff said it was “like cement” (the cutting of which was “less surgery than manual labor”) because of scar tissue left over from years of pneumothorax punctures. “And think of it,—me sleeping soundly the while.”
After a painful month of convalescence at the General Hospital, Charlie was moved to a “princely” room on the third floor of the sanatorium, and was soon able to resume little walks and write letters from his Adirondack chair on the lawn. Sometimes the sharp ends of his shorn ribs would give him agonizing tweaks—“those heavy horseshoes hanging inside my chest bang together once in a while or just move a little, and I hold my face still to keep from wincing and my mouth closed to suppress little helpless yips and yelps”—but Charlie was so glad to be alive, in such a gorgeous place, that he bore his misery with a kind of jaunty stoicism. “The movie tonight is ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’—and do you think I’d miss that, after Steve Reeves and all?” he delightedly wrote Sarah, only a few days after his release from the hospital. “Then coming up is ‘Diamond Head’ (more sex we hope) and ‘Dr. No’ and then, after one postponement, ‘Hud.’ ” Among patients and doctors alike, he was a beloved figure—a man for whom “there is no other word than charming,” as a local columnist noted, especially regarding Charlie’s tendency to be warm and “stupefyingly honest” with near-strangers. He made a point of attending Presbyterian services whenever Dr. Ayvazian’s wife, Gloria (“Gloria Mundi” as he called her), sang a choir solo, and made no bones about his lavish admiration for her husband: “Yes, I knew Charles was gay,” she laughed, many years later. “He had a crush on Fred! It was no secret.… He gave us a beautiful antique platter that I still have and that always reminds me of him.” Among the ailing entertainers at Will Rogers, Charlie’s gayness was rather less than shocking, and for his part he made a point of seeking out the more outré patients, such as Zita the stripper (“I’ve hardly ever met anyone more child-like … she’s an absolute darling”), and Don the transvestite showgirl. As Charlie wrote Dr. Ayvazian after leaving Will Rogers:
I asked Ruth Norman to give [Don] my record player, as I thought once the others got onto the nature of his career, which I had an inkling of very soon and nasty-minded Janet [another patient] got onto at once and made the most of it in dirty cracks to show her “sophistication”—I thought he would begin to feel isolated if not actually ostracised.… He is a remarkably intelligent and nice fellow, and I can only feel sorry for him from the depths of my heart.… A girl is what he wants to be more than anything else in the world.
By the time Charlie was able to leave—on November 21, 1963, after a four-month stay3—his feelings were profoundly mixed: on the one hand he desperately missed his family and was eager to get on with his work, while on the other (as he’d presently remark in a promotional film starring Charles Jackson), “I felt now as though I were leaving home—I’d come to love the place so much.” Physically he was much diminished. Within a few months he would begin to experience “drawing pains”—so called, by Charlie, to describe the sensation of being literally drawn to one side where most of his ribs were missing, their “bobbed” ends scraping against his right shoulder blade, which (he was told) might also have to be removed—though he was determined not to dwell on that. For now he was alive, and that was enough. “We refuse to let illness get us down,” he proclaimed to a friend, “and as William Faulkner said in that by-now trite Nobel Prize Speech in Sweden: ‘We shall prevail.’ ”
Charlie was so inspirational, and lovable, that the Will Rogers Fund implored him to write about his experience for Reader’s Digest, though Charlie’s own “aim” was Life (“I could even say, with all my ups and downs, that my aim has always been life”). On further consideration, though, it was decided that a mere magazine piece wasn’t enough; Charlie himself, in all his plucky Chaplinesque glory, would be preserved for posterity in a nineteen-minute film shown all over the country at movie theaters and professional conferences. “Yes, I am the star,” he proudly informed Dorothea, after an advance screening in New York, “and I speak the part, and I (or my voice) does the over-all narration, and it’s damned good and I’m proud of it for doing so well a job I was utterly unused to and inexperienced in …” Trade journals agreed. A Place in the Country was “one of the best institutional films to date,” and Charlie had quite acquitted himself as the protagonist/narrator: “If his voice is not professional, he more than makes up for it with the evident emotional influence on him made by his sojourn there.”
Amid occasional speeches by Dr. Ayvazian and other doctors and patients, the film is almost wholly concerned with Jackson’s progress as a kind of tubercular Everyman. “The years of pain finally leave your mind numb,” he narrates, as we follow him in a station wagon to the hospital, which he warily enters wearing a gray suit and straw hat, presently exchanged for a lucky Japanese robe (a gift from Rhoda) prior to his examination by Dr. Ayvazian. “Tomorrow the medical staff decides my case,” he later informs us, his pensive voice contrasted with a jolly gathering of patients in the rec room. “Downstairs a fire is going. People are chatting. Or singing around a piano [“I Left My Heart in San Francisco”] …. Here I am, wishing the hours away. And I don’t know how much time I have left.… Charlie, it may be later than you think!”
But of course he survives—nay, he’s reborn!—walking around the garden with a look of childlike wonder, cocking his head at birdsong and such. “To the people who gave me my second life,” he concludes, “I thank you all. I was free: Free to live! Free to write again! … Now Rhoda—the children—my other home.” And with that, he adjusts the brim of his hat and breezily relieves the driver of his (presumably empty) suitcase, tossing it into the backseat and embarking toward a future full of promise. It was touching because it was true. Charlie had been given another five years, and when they were over he would ask his mourners to remember him with donations to Will Rogers Memorial Hospital.
“The Loving Offenders”4 is about an otherwise well-behaved girl in Arcadia, Bertha Schroeder, who murders her father, a cuckolded jeweler named Ernie. More than that, the story is an attenuated exercise in nostalgia—“worth telling,” as Jackson would have it, only when he’s evoking the incidental ambience of Main Street, such as Ernie Schroeder’s shop: “On the walls around him were all those striking clocks, which, every hour on the hour and some at the half and quarter as well, would pull themselves together individually and in concert, with ominous, ratchety, interior wheezes for a second or two, and then let go.” When constrained to move the plot along, however, Jackson lapses into cliché with an all but heedless abandon: Bertha’s adulterous mother is “pretty as a flower” but a “darn good scout,” whereas Bertha herself is “hard as nails,” etc. Still, the author had been rather proud of his ambiguous ending (indeed the original title had been “Anybody’s Guess”), when the narrator asks Bertha why she shot her father: “ ‘Well,’ Bertha said, almost with a shrug, ‘he was there, and the gun was there too, and—and that’s all.’ ” But such subtlety didn’t wash with the fiction editor, Manon Tingue, who insisted the heroine expand a bit on her motive, to wit: “ ‘Well, sometimes I thought … that my poor father was a nothing. And if only he had been a something, then maybe this wouldn’t have … ’ ” “I have always marveled at the curious ways of editors,” Jackson wrote Tingue afterward: “They buy a story because they like it—and then they turn it into something else.”
But once the check arrived—and Charlie was able to pay Kate’s tuition ($1,200), dividing the rest between Middlesex Hospital, Bruno Motors, and Boom—any remaining hard feelings vanished, and he began to rack his brain for more story ideas (“I’m going to get out of debt if it kills me”). That was the summer of 1963, a few weeks before he entered Will Rogers, where his resolve was dissipated amid a leisurely convalescence. “How are things?” his agent inquired that October. “Are you able to work, or do [you] have any interest in working? Is there anything we can do to help?” But Charlie didn’t reply, except to slip into the offices of Brandt & Brandt around Christmas, after which Frieda Lubelle was obliged to circulate a memo to the effect that Charlie owed her, personally, thirty bucks, which should be paid to her directly out of the “first amount of money” he managed to earn.
“So I was forced to ask myself the question, over and over,” he wrote in “The Sleeping Brain”: “Did I want to prolong my life and keep my health and remain that sad thing, a writer who did not write, one whose reputation was all in the past; or should I say the hell with it and return to my former indulgence in what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the subtler poisons’?—and thus be released from my healthy prison, free once more from fear, able to function as a writer again.” An answer was suggested in June 1964, when he returned to Will Rogers for minor “repairs” (blunting the tips of his shorn ribs), and also to discuss the possibility of removing, later, that bothersome right shoulder blade (“scapulectomy”). This time Charlie was given Darvon for pain and Librium for sleep, but the latter (as usual) had the opposite effect: galvanized, he rented a typewriter and began writing through the night. As he described this breakthrough in A Place in the Country5: “Now I had to write, and the ideas and words came tumbling out! All the words piling up behind my fear marched out across the keys of my typewriter—except for a regular interruption. In my life in hospitals, I’ve taken 100,000 pills … ” Onscreen, a furiously typing Charlie absently waves off a nurse trying to get his attention, then his face lights up as he spies the pill cup in her hand; gulping down its contents with a smile, he resumes work while the camera lingers on the empty pill cup. “Oh, for so long I have had an inexplicable apathy about myself and my work, almost a despair, so that it seems often as if it couldn’t matter less whether I ever finished the book or not,” he wrote “Kate & everybody” in a six-page outpouring on June 10. “Now, mysteriously, I feel an upsurge, here, a renewal of a kind of confidence and belief in self that I have too long been without—and once again, life seems good, worthwhile, and the novel must be finished and find its place with the public.”
Now he could see all the way through to the end—that balky Part Five, for instance, would consist of interior monologues alternating between Harry and Winifred (“a pure poem of despair”): brilliant!—and meanwhile, too, he’d come up with “a new story natural-born” for McCall’s, “The Lady Julia.” “I remembered a chamber-maid at home called Julia McIntyre, who worked at the Windsor Hotel (the Royal Hotel in that last McCalls story),” he wrote his family.6
A tall, handsome, very cultivated Danish chemist visited Newark, to start a new chemical factory, and stayed at the Windsor. Julia was cleaning his room one day (so the story goes) and said to him, wistfully: “Wouldn’t it be a lovely day to go for a ride?” That did it. He took her for a ride, fell truly in love with her, gave up his considerable family back in Copenhagen (just like Gauguin, even to the very city), installed her in an apartment, and then they lived together as man and wife for years.
And that, indeed, was pretty much the story he proceeded to write—another story “not worth telling,” as he again confessed, though he labored for many weeks to make it otherwise, giving his heroine the kind of twenty-four-karat heart of gold that couldn’t fail to endear her to the average McCall’s reader. Finishing “The Lady Julia” at 2:30 a.m. on July 23 (so noted in his diary), he left the manuscript on the kitchen table for Rhoda and found her note the next day: “Charlie—the story is marvelous! … I’ve always felt your writing was going to grow—it wouldn’t be the brilliant breath-taking assault it used to be, but it would gain in depth and compassion and understanding.… Julia is wonderful.” As Charlie promptly wrote his older daughter, he was now trembling with “fatigue and emotion both,” eager to reread his “marvelous” story but unable to see the pages “for tears yet … ”
It would take almost four months to produce a satisfactory version for McCall’s, and it would be hard to say which side found the process more exhausting. “Treat my new baby kindlily,” he’d entreated Manon Tingue, who looked over the twelve-thousand-word typescript and reached for her machete. When Charlie saw the first revision—just over half his original length—he was plunged into “nearly suicidal” despair: “What remains now is just a story of a whore’s climb to a kind of position of wealth and nothing more (no wonder the town hates her, now), with all detail that showed kindness, heart, growth in stature, etc., taken out.” So he wrote Kate in a long, lachrymose letter evoking the veritable Calvary he’d endured for her sake, since—on the very day he’d received his eviscerated “baby”—Sarah Lawrence had demanded he pay his daughter’s tuition, or else. “With this in mind,” he wrote her, “I went up to New York with no fight left in me at all, saw Manon and Carl and Herb Mayes and said take it the way you want it, but pay me quick, and remove my name from the story, for it is mine no longer. This they refused to do. They wanted the name, and said mine was the only fiction writer’s name they ever featured on the cover, and that is true … ”
The next day he wrote Kate again, this time in feverishly good fettle. Her tuition was paid! As for “The Lady Julia,” who cared what those hacks at McCall’s made of it? “All can be restored and even re-written my way, when I re-publish it in my next collection of tales called ARCADIA RE-VISITED, as a companion volume to THE SUNNIER SIDE.” Meanwhile Mayes was dangling an extra boodle for Charlie if he agreed to recast the story in a more redemptive mode. In Charlie’s version, the Danish chemist kept Julia until he died in a factory explosion, whereupon she gave his fortune to the Church and disappeared, leaving a once-scandalized Arcadia to wonder if maybe they’d been hasty in judging her. But Mayes wanted Julia to exert herself in even more good works, wanted her and the chemist to be “quietly married” by a worldly priest, who in turn would preside over her subsequent death in childbirth, marveling at her goodness the while, which is finally celebrated by the whole town at “one of the largest [funerals] Arcadia had ever seen.” And what did Charlie make of such wanton liberties? “I thank you with all my heart,” he wrote Mayes, after considerable smoke had cleared. “I like the story ‘The Lady Julia’ … it is a story now, not just a long character-sketch; and I am grateful to you for your ideas as well as for the most generous and uncalled-for extra money.”
But the long job had taken a toll—not least on Manon Tingue, who’d reacted badly to an addled charm offensive on Charlie’s part. “Manon is under the impression that Charlie is anything but well,” an anonymous Brandt & Brandt employee wrote in a memo, having been summoned by Tingue to discuss the matter over lunch. “Please, a note?” Charlie had written her on August 3, while awaiting further news of “The Lady Julia.” “I pray for the results—any results—even if only money. My God how I need it. And how, too, I need you in my life—though you’ll never believe me.” When this failed to elicit a commensurate emotion, he tried phoning her at home and paving the way with a lot of friendly patter, and finally went over her head altogether and tried to deal exclusively with Mayes. “He can very soon wear out his welcome there,” the memo writer concluded.
