I like my Jews mean and fighting.
—URIS, 22 DECEMBER 1964
JUST BEFORE THE PUBLICATION of Armageddon in the spring of 1964, Uris needed a safe haven. Not because of the novel, but because of the publicity and pressure of a London libel trial instituted by a Polish-born British citizen who claimed that Uris had defamed him in a passage from Exodus. The trial generated international headlines, which Uris sought to escape. Mexico was the answer.
Settling in Acapulco to write a screenplay for Paramount in February 1964, Uris joined a cadre of other writers who found the locale conducive to a relaxed style of work: Tennessee Williams, Budd Schulberg, Robert Roark, and Ernest Gann all enjoyed the sun and sea. By June 1964, after his victory in London, he told his father that he had more or less settled in Acapulco after a long motor trip through the country with Betty, and was now sitting down to write a screenplay to be titled “The Gringo,” set in Mexico during the Porfirio Díazera.1 The screenplay of Armageddon would follow, which he would coproduce. He was also trying to make a deal for the film rights to Mila 18.
Acapulco was a respite from the tensions of publishing, and he told his father that there was “every possibility” that he would “build a part-time home in Acapulco: my health is wonderful. I water ski every day and find life on the sea generally very healthy.”2 Betty came and went, going first to Aspen to assist with plans for a new house—Uris had bought a parcel of land on Red Mountain in February for seven thousand dollars—before coming down to the Las Brisas Hilton in Acapulco. She then went back to Malibu for Karen’s high school graduation, which Uris missed. She and the family returned to Mexico in July after closing up their Malibu beach house in anticipation of the move to Aspen.
London was a battle, however. A libel action for damages caused by defamation had been brought against him by a sixty-one-year-old surgeon, Dr. Wladislaw Dering. Dr. Dering had been a prison doctor in Auschwitz from August 1940 to January 1944. The cause of the action was a single sentence in Exodus referring to a “Dr. Dehring,” who performs medical experiments dealing with human sterilization (EX, 146). Dr. Dering of London claimed it was libelous. It led to an eighteen-day jury trial beginning 1 April 1964 in Queen’s Bench VII at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Conducted in Greek, Polish, Hebrew, English, German, French, and Ladino, the trial became a sensation, receiving coverage around the world.
The issues went beyond one man’s reputation. The case addressed morality and ethical behavior in the face of human horror. Twenty-two witnesses from Auschwitz representing some 130 prisoners subjected to medical experiments gave testimony, in many ways echoing the momentous testimony at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which had taken place only three years earlier.
Uris, with the backing of his English publisher William Kimber, knew he had to fight the case. The year before the trial, the printer Purnell & Sons Ltd. had published a public retraction and apology for handling the book and had negotiated an out-of-court settlement of £500 with Dr. Dering. Uris, of course, with his pugnacious nature, relished the chance to challenge Dr. Dering in court and eagerly pushed his publisher to do the same. Pretrial briefs debated the value of the case, known as Dering v. Uris and Others, but it went ahead. Leading Uris’s defense team was Lord Gerald Gardiner, later lord chancellor of England. Seven witnesses spoke on behalf of the plaintiff, Dr. Dering, twenty-two on behalf of the defendants, both sides bringing forward Holocaust survivors. The most important speakers, however, were silent: the names in a registry of surgical operations written partly in Dr. Dering’s hand from the camp’s prison hospital.3
Twenty-three days after the trial began, and after eighteen days of testimony, the jury returned a verdict on 6 May 1964. The jury of ten men and two women found in favor of Dr. Dering, awarding him one halfpenny (the smallest coin of the realm) in damages. But the plaintiff also had to bear court costs, and the judge ordered Dr. Dering to pay the expenses of Uris and his publisher as well. The victory was clearly Pyrrhic, as a telegram from Uris to his father stated. It simply read: “THE VICTORY IS OURS LOVE BETTY AND LEON.”4 Dr. Dering died a year after the trial, and Uris and his publisher decided not to press his widow for the outstanding court costs. Yet he remained proud of his triumph, displaying a three-volume leather-bound transcript of the case in his Aspen home and later in his New York apartment.
Betty was with Uris in London that spring, and supportive throughout the ordeal, although they were having difficulties. Uris’s abrasive manner—he was always battling producers and agents and in this instance his publisher, which had been reluctant to support him, as well as the plaintiff—spilled over into his personallife. He could be demanding, preferring to command rather than cooperate. He also took things personally, especially slights and insults, the more so if they occurred within the family. Willful and aggressive behavior, partly learned from standing up to his father and his intrusive manner, made him insistent (others said unreasonable) and difficult. His relationships were governed by a double standard: he could challenge anyone, but could never himself be challenged. Life with Betty became fractious as well as fragile. In June 1966, he would refer to their relationship as “a life of continuous warfare.”5
In June 1964, he and Betty were back in Acapulco, having taken a 3,000-mile road trip across the northern part of Mexico, part of his research for a film but also, and more importantly, a chance to reconnect. He was expecting to finish the screenplay by September and then to immediately begin a screenplay of Armageddon, which had been sold to MGM, a project he would coproduce with Marty Racking, of Los Angeles. There was also talk of a film of Mila 18. Betty suggested a property in Mexico for them to buy, all part of a possible reconciliation. Sales of Armageddon were not large, but Uris expected it would “have a sales pattern like Exodus that is, make its big move after Christmas.”6
In early July 1964, the entire family joined him in Mexico, first at the Las Brisas Hilton in Acapulco and then at a small villa. The country increasingly appealed to him: “I need a few years of peace before renewing serous writing,” he told his father, who continued to disagree with or dismiss him.7 The publication of Armageddon did not bring Uris the fatherly approval he sought: “It has been another painful experience for me not to have received a single word from you about Armageddon,” he wrote from Acapulco in July 1964, adding, “Literary critics I have enough of … I only have one father and when his only son spends several years of soul searching and at hard labor in the creation of a book it seems that a few kind words concerning the effort would be in order.”8
In August, his daughter Karen made plans to go to Colorado State University at Fort Collins, majoring in Spanish and international relations. He had also just been elected to the Jewish Academy of Arts and Science, the first academic honor he received. Israel struck an Exodus medal “in honor of the first blockade runner 30 years go” and presented him with the first one.9 He had finished the story outline of the Mexican film for Paramount and was eager to begin the screenplay for Armageddon, which was beginning to bring in money, receiving the largest paperback-reprint guarantee in publishing history. In October 1964, Paramount Pictures and the Yugoslavian government signed a joint venture for the filming of Mila 18. Betty, meanwhile, left for Aspen, and he purchased a small parcel of land in Acapulco.
But as his reputation grew, his relationship with his family, especially with his wife, began to disintegrate. Throughout the early sixties, Uris, as one family member explained it, increasingly believed that the world revolved around him and that he was entitled to lecture others on politics, the economy, or society, a habit inherited from his father.10 He also began to demean those who were close to him, displaying little empathy for or understanding of their problems. He sought control and felt he could exert it if he exposed others’ weaknesses. According to his children, his behavior was often contradictory: generous in giving time to causes and fund-raising, but niggardly with both time and money for his family. On one hand, Uris could proudly tell his father about his honors but, on the other, castigate his father for neglecting his work. He would alternately praise and blame his children. His behavior could be friendly one moment but cruel the next; years later, he would not talk to his children for long periods or else kick them out of the house, only to welcome them back later. Consequently, those closest to him never really got to know him; he didn’t allow it. If he trusted you, you were in the inner circle; if not, you were out.
His sociability at this time also seemed to alter. Formerly gregarious with friends, both in Larkspur and Encino, he increasingly withdrew from them, an act Betty at one point attributed to his decision to quit smoking.11 He also fought with his celebrity status as his fame began to create conflicts: one moment he wanted people to pay attention to him, but the next he would be upset if they paid too much. He would welcome recognition from the maitre d’ of a restaurant but be upset if the chef ran out of the kitchen to greet him and prepare something special.12 In the midst of these contradictions came the move to Aspen, a world different from any he had known.
Aspen in the 1960s had its share of free-loving, drug-using hippies and would soon attract figures like Hunter S. Thompson and even serial killer Ted Bundy. Long a magnet for ski bums, rebels, and others who found the extraordinary natural surroundings, purified air, and dry, powder-like snow irresistible, Aspen was an unlikely place for a popular writer to settle, but at the same time it was absolutely right. Removed from Hollywood and New York but accessible to both coasts, Aspen provided Uris with a retreat from the demands of public life and allowed him to indulge his passion for the outdoors. Skiing and tennis became his focuses, and when he wasn’t holed up in his writing studio, part of the striking double A-frame house he constructed on Red Mountain, he was on the slopes or the courts.
Aspen tolerated fame and privacy, outlandishness and extravagance. When Uris arrived, he had already achieved immense acclaim for Exodus, which he would regain with Trinity. But in between, his profile and income shifted, although he continued to write with discipline and dedication.13 Aspen provided him with the proper balance between social recognition and distance, although he would often write to friends that he was not a monument to be visited and so refused to meet the many friends of friends who felt, for one reason or another, entitled to visit the valley’s most prominent writer. Nevertheless, he always viewed Aspen positively, telling his father that “the atmosphere is conducive to good writing and longer living. … I personally have always desired this type of life and I think it will work out fine.”14
But Aspen was not just snow and ideas. It had a dark side marked by scandal, murder, suicide, and drugs. In 1976, for example, the glamorous French actress Claudine Longet accidentally shot and killed her lover, the ski champion Vladimir “Spider” Sabich. Her story was that Sabich was showing her the proper use of a gun when it went off and wounded him in the stomach. The prosecutor argued that the two were having difficulties and that, in the midst of a fight, she shot him. The charge was murder. Andy Williams, her ex-husband, flew to Aspen to be with her. The jury found her guilty of “reckless endangerment.” She could have been sent to prison for two years but, instead, served only thirty days in jail. Aspen was outraged, even more so when she served her time only after returning from a Latin American vacation. She then married her defense attorney.15
Aspen came to define celebrity culture, becoming a celebrity itself. Other writers in residence included Clifford Irving, best known for his forged “autobiography” of Howard Hughes, and the elegant prose stylist James Salter. This was a world where porcini-dusted elk or Jack Daniel’s–marinated caribou became de rigueur, or at least common fare. The intrigue, money, and undercurrent of a louche counterculture offsetting the jet-setting crowd were irresistible. One reason Aspen appealed to the star crowd was that it never made a fuss over them. The social code meant never asking for an autograph and never looking impressed. “Be blasé, don’t notice” was the mantra.
Aspen also meant available young women, although sometimes there was a price to pay, as one experienced Aspen rogue admitted, noting that there were only three types of women in the town: “tourists, married and coke whores. You’re lucky if you can find one who’s not one of those.”16 But the young women kept coming, and in this environment, Uris found the track of his personal life derailed. This was what Hunter Thompson meant when he called Uris “Aspen’s leading stag movie fan … who writes books.”17
For a writer like Uris, the glitz was both good and bad. The lifestyle was attractive, but he intentionally avoided it. He did have his favorite haunts, including restaurants like The Steak Pit and The Tippler, where his friend Walt Smith, a musician, restaurateur, and bon vivant, often played. The dark but western-style J Bar at the Hotel Jerome was another favorite spot. As he settled in, his friends were locals rather than celebrities: Freddy Fisher, an incomparable Aspen fix-it man and personality; Francis Whitaker, one of the few blacksmiths still in Aspen and a source for details about blacksmithing (used in the early pages of Trinity); Martie and Ken Sterling, the owners of the Heatherbed Lodge; Dr. Harold Whitcomb; and Dr. Robert O’Hare.18
It is likely Uris knew little of the Aspen culture when he first appeared at the door of the Heatherbed Lodge in December 1960. The lodge sits at the base of Aspen Highlands Mountain, which is 463 feet higher than Aspen Mountain and offers numerous expert trails as well as the longest vertical drop of any ski resort in the state. Aspen Highlands was where Uris would become a certified ski instructor under the guidance of the Swiss skier Fred Iselin.19
Ken and Martie Sterling operated the Heatherbed, which became the subject of Martie’s comic memoir Days of Stein and Roses. Uris loved the informality and atmosphere of the place, which was several miles out of town toward the famous Blue Bells, two startling mountain peaks. The Heatherbed was also the subject of one of his few published essays. Appearing in Ski Magazine, “Heatherbedlam” narrates misadventures at the Heatherbed.20
Uris loved the outdoors and the thrill of skiing, which he would share with all three of his wives. And he made sure his children knew how to ski expertly, his son Michael becoming a racer. One of Uris’s happiest periods some years later was when he received his ski instructor’s badge. In his Ski article, he noted that he was writing the film script of Armageddon in one of the Heatherbed’s rooms until the ski season began and that every morning he got on his Honda (trail bike) and buzzed out to the Heatherbed to write in splendid isolation.
Uris returned to the Heatherbed Lodge often, preferring its semi-isolation and quiet to the activities at home, at one point using it for several months as his office while working on a film script. He had a room at the south end of the building, and the owners built a separate outdoor staircase that allowed him to enter and exit unnoticed. He would arrive each morning on his motorcycle, actually a dirt bike, ahead of his secretary, Sheila DeVore. Together, they would go through his mail, and then he would write for hours until he needed a break, usually running downstairs to split firewood for the lodge in order to clear his head before going back to work. Physical activity was his antidote to typing, according to Martie Sterling.21 The Heatherbed was also gaining in reputation: it was visited by Alex Haley and the British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, thereby continuing the literary tradition of Aspen, which was also the birthplace of famed New Yorker editor Harold Ross.
Uris enjoyed Aspen so much that he decided to move there, first renting a house and then, in February 1964, buying a lot on Red Mountain on which he thought he would build a small winter home. Not everyone celebrated the idea, however, notably his children. They found the constant relocations difficult: as soon as they had settled in and made new friends, they were uprooted. From Larkspur to Encino to Malibu and then to Mexico, the family was constantly moving. Picking up and leaving repeatedly felt much like a military life, his son Mark felt.22 Aspen was another major change, but one that had the potential for being permanent.
Uris rented a house in town after buying the lot. The seller was Fritz Benedict, an architect who had first seen Aspen when he trained there with the Tenth Mountain Division of the U.S. Army. As soon as the war was over, Benedict had returned to the States and bought the 600-acre Red Mountain Ranch for twenty dollars an acre. He put in housing developments, designing many of the homes himself. Construction on Uris’s new house was to begin in the spring of 1965 at 5 Wrights Road. In December 1965, Uris and his family moved into to a semipermanent residence in Aspen, finally moving into their own home on 2 May 1966.
The house, a unique double A-frame design, was, at the time, thought to be one of the largest A-frame homes in the West. By the time of its sale in 1989, it had grown to six bedrooms and five and a half baths, plus a nanny suite, for a total of some 8,000 square feet. A large detached garage with a caretaker’s suite and a separate office-cabana building overlooking a hot tub and pool added to the home’s distinction. Located midway up Red Mountain, it had a fabulous view across the valley to town and two magnificent mountains: Aspen and Shadow. Uris would occasionally move his typewriter out to one of several decks and work while facing the magnificent view. The living room was on the second floor, set there to obtain the finest views of the valley.23
A marvelous, though anomalous, Gothic-style library was a few steps off the dining room, adjacent to a massive white fireplace in the living room. The library would later display a stained-glass window at one end, outlined with the traceries of pointed Gothic arches. Standing before the large south library window was a handsome nineteenth-century-style desk flanked by two massive candlesticks. Bookshelves lined both sides of the room (reference works that had not made their way to his office were often found here); in the center was a refectory table surrounded by tall, red-upholstered wooden chairs with a large U carved on the back of each. Hanging from the tops of the bookshelves would be an increasing number of academic “collars,” which were part of the robes worn by Uris when he and his later wife, Jill, received honorary degrees. The library also held Uris’s collection of hats.
Off the library in a small, eave-like space was the paperback library, the location of the numerous paperback editions of his work in various languages.24 The actual library was largely for show—and a favorite setting for photographs—25 though it was sometimes used as a second dining room. Uris worked and wrote in an office that was connected to the main house by a walkway and adjacent to the pool. Below this office was one for his research assistant, whose work ranged from correcting pages (spelling, punctuation, grammar, mechanics) to pursuing research questions and overseeing the progress of the current novel. At some point each afternoon, Uris and his assistant would meet to review new material or new assignments.
The doors to the house were unique. Rather than evoking something of the rustic ski environment of Aspen, they reflected past grandeur: they were two massive, oversized steel doors with inset copper plating rescued from the original Denver customhouse by Uris’s close friend Charles Goldberg (a junk and metal dealer) and trucked to Red Mountain. Visitors needed two hands to open them. At the center of the wrought-iron gate that led up to the house—Uris’s office was just past the gate and to the left—was the image of the freedom fighter from Exodus, seeming both out of place and yet at home in the rustic vernacular architecture that defined Aspen. Francis Whitaker, an Aspen blacksmith, manufactured the gate.
Uris enjoyed visiting Goldberg’s junkyard and later brought to Aspen twelve stained-glass windows that would go into his library, a brass chandelier that was half gas and half electric, and old Corinthian columns to be used at the entrance. They were from the International Trust Company of Denver. He also had a large oak panel with an intricate carving of an owl, which had surmounted the courtroom doors in the old customhouse. Another highlight was a large stained-glass window that had once been in the Mining Exchange Building. Goldberg remarked: “I think he’s going to start his own yard up in Aspen he’s bought so much.”26
Ironically, while Uris was constructing his house, a young, seventeen-year-old skier from Massachusetts was looking across the valley from Aspen Mountain and asking her ski instructor about that red gash on the mountainside. Leon Uris’s new home, she was told. Some five years later, Jill Peabody would be Jill Uris and find herself living there.27
Completion of the house did not mean, however, peace. Uris promptly filed a lawsuit against his architect, displaying his usual aggressive, argumentative nature. He complained that situating the house over a creek bed had weakened its structure. A leaky roof needed to be redone. He also thought the house was too close to the road that circled above it in the rear, a fear confirmed in 1970 when a large yellow dump truck overturned and landed in the narrow backyard, a wheel spinning just outside the kitchen window. Uris insisted that the truck remain there for some weeks while he pursued another lawsuit against the builder-architect. And even after he sold the house in 1989 to the media baron Mort Zuckerman, he launched a lawsuit against the businessman concerning promises unfulfilled.
In his mountain studio, with its view across the valley to Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands with Mount Hayden’s sharp peaks separating the two in the distance, Uris could feel both above and yet a part of nature. The city below meant observation and perspective, which he metaphorically brought to history and its major players. His location seemed to represent the novelist as observer and participant in the past. Uris wrote at a U-shaped desk surrounded by cork walls on which were pinned maps, charts, historical details, plot points, and character features. Reference books, catalogues, and history texts stood stacked up on the floor and on bookshelves around him. His office also featured a leather couch and chair, a 1,000-year-old Star of David, letters from Harry Truman and John Steinbeck, and an invitation to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
Uris wrote on an IBM Selectric, often from late morning to early evening, although he called himself a “twilight writer,” working best between four and seven.28 Aspen appealed to Uris because he could be both an outsider and an insider. He could be forgotten and recognized, leaving and returning without a fuss. His home, however, was a symbolic statement to Aspen: its scale and location were signs that here was a writer at home in the past and the present, a man of action who understood and defended both justice and history. And no matter what challenges his personal life presented, his work and ideals were defined for all to see.
Uris preferred to keep his work separate from his home, perhaps a holdover from his studio days, when writers went to bungalows on studio lots to write. The practice also lent an air of professionalism to his work. In a brief profile of Uris, Ken McCormick, his editor at Doubleday, emphasized that Uris was a restless man but intense about his writing.29 A cast of characters from his current project was often pinned to the wall of his office. He usually wrote for three to five hours a day, producing from six hundred to a thousand words, unless he was moved to explosive action, when he would turn out three thousand to four thousand words. A secretary ensured his privacy during working hours. After work he would ski or walk his two Alaskan dogs, taking them in his Jeep to a nearby national park.
But while Aspen provided Uris with the mental and physical space to write, Betty found herself more and more unhappy. Marital problems escalated as she became increasingly upset by Uris’s constant traveling and his troubling behavior with other women, which was likely an extension of his insecurity and need to impress. She also found that life in Aspen was isolating. She did not enjoy the outdoors, and although she could ski, she disliked it. And while she tolerated life in town, she felt that the move to the then-remote mountain resort only confirmed the dislocation in their lives. Domestic stability was in jeopardy.
Uris and Betty had separated three times over the past decade, once while he was writing in Mexico. Fights and arguments began to be regular features; as early as February 1954, she had written in a diary that “Lee decides again that maybe he likes me—had another long talk on all my faults. I can’t dwell on my loved one’s faults like he can.”30 He was often in a “moody rampage,” she wrote, caused as much by problems with the filming of Battle Cry as by his personal outlook. He had formally finished his screenplay and left Warner Bros. in March 1954, and in May he had an offer from MGM, but in July he was back at Warner Bros., working on a boxing film. In September, she recorded another fight: “Lee still mad but made up finally.”31 Battles with the studio also continued, especially with the producer Milton Sperling, who shifted Uris from a fight movie to the Billy Mitchell story. But by the early sixties, there was little rapport between the couple. Life, Uris told his father, had narrowed “down to a continuous brawl.”32
Uris dominated his business relationships as firmly as his personal ones. He was often hard on his lawyer–business manager Herb Schlosberg, “almost downright mean at times,” said his son Mark Uris.33 He could also be that way with his children and friends: “he wanted things done his way,” and if others objected, he either turned on them or shunned them.
By the spring of 1966, Uris wanted a divorce; Betty reluctantly agreed. They were both young enough to be able to enjoy some future happiness with others, he reasoned.34 Betty took the two boys with her to her family in Iowa; Karen visited them later. Uris went off to Florida, where he continued working on his current novel, which would become Topaz (1967). On his return to Aspen, he stopped in Iowa to get the children and take them with him for the summer.
So far, everyone had been civilized, but it hadn’t been easy: the marriage had been “declining badly for some four or five years,” and “all hope” was “completely gone” of his living with Betty.35 In a note to his father six months later, he was less polite, reporting that Betty was asking for too much money in the divorce: he told her she was “going to have to fight it out in court,” and he cut off all direct communication between them.36 Nonetheless, his morale was high as he looked forward to “what is probably going to be the first freedom in my life.” Betty agreed to a property settlement and planned to relocate to Santa Monica; Uris would remain in Aspen, overseeing final construction of the house. A month later, in August 1966, Herb Schlosberg, his business manager, visited, and about forty friends dropped by to celebrate Uris’s forty-second birthday, arriving in a large cattle truck to the sound of shotguns being fired into the air. At this time, his enthusiasm for his new novel, ten chapters of which were written, was also extremely high.
Betty was less upbeat. While he could adjust to living alone, she seemed to be confused over the developments and incapable of making any decisions. He, by contrast, spent time getting his new house in order, writing, and getting his life organized: “Of course, I went through a series of enormous low points, but did not wake up in the morning thinking about it all day.”37 Betty, in the meantime, went to court over the settlement she had originally accepted.
In the meantime, Karen had dropped out of college, planning to marry a young man from Philadelphia—although by September, to Uris’s relief, she had called it off. A truce with Betty was also arranged, at least through the fall of 1966. She also told Uris that she wanted to take instruction in Judaism. By September, however, the truce had collapsed, and he decided to go forward with the divorce. Karen would be with him through the winter, working in Aspen. The events distracted him from his writing, but that had “always been the case with us in one way or another.”38
In November 1966, Uris noted the presence of a new friend, Marge (Margery Edwards), and that the focus of his new novel, titled Topaz, would deal with “the decline and fall of the French-American relations in the past few years.”39 In court, he won a motion for temporary alimony, although Betty was going to fight it. Uris, who had opened two modest bookstores in Southern California (one in Sherman Oaks), offered them to Betty for a dollar as part of a settlement. She refused. He decided that she just wanted to live off the alimony, calling her “lazy.”40 Five weeks later, he was still struggling with the case as the other side tried to wear him down, but they didn’t “realize what a pair of tough guys Herb and I are and they will have to fight it out in court and then they will get a fair and just settlement.”41 A belligerent Uris stepped forward, ready for the challenge; he wanted little to do with Betty now. A week later, he felt better: “From the top of the mountain the troubles seem much smaller. I’ve begun skiing again.” Margery Edwards had also become a good friend, and although there was “nothing at all serious” between them, Uris did “enjoy her companionship.”42 The comment was, of course, misleading.
Before year’s end, he provided an update on the divorce, reassuring his father that he and Herb had “been in and out of litigation for over a decade” and were not the “type to get sick or squeamish about it.”43 Having a father who had argued with him for years had also prepared him for battle. But three projects were distracting him from the conflict and the anticipation of seeing Topaz in print: the motion picture “The Gringo,” which he wrote in Mexico two years ago; a film of Mila 18 in development with the Yugoslavian government; and a musical of Exodus, for which he wrote the script and lyrics, although challenges remained before it could be produced.
Uris’s outspokenness, of course, could be harmful—to his family as well as to others. An insomniac, Uris always took sleeping pills. And after as many as three vodka martinis a night, he could become intolerant and, at his worse, emotionally abusive. When a little marijuana or cocaine was available, his behavior could become even worse. In later years, marijuana brownies would regularly be served, sometimes unknowingly, to dinner guests. He could be hard on people, always testing their friendship as his emotions became exaggerated and he challenged others.
For a year he did not speak to his daughter Karen, and when his youngest daughter, Rachel, went to boarding school in Connecticut, even though he was by then living on Shelter Island, New York, he did not visit her once.44 On another occasion years earlier, when his son Mike had left records strewn about on the floor of his room, Uris angrily took them and threw them out the window. When he discovered this, Mike reacted indifferently. Several days later, more records lay on the floor, and Uris again angrily flung them out onto the hillside, where they broke. But he acted too quickly: Mike had thrown his father’s records about, and Uris became the victim of his own behavior. By the time he left Aspen, in 1988, he had alienated almost everyone.
One of those he alienated was Philippe de Vosjoli, who provided much of the material for Topaz, which was written in Aspen. Uris met Vosjoli, a “retired” member of the French secret service, in Acapulco in the late spring of 1964. The general manager of the Las Brisas Hilton introduced the two: “I was separated at the time, and we were both living [with] difficulties and we became very close friends and there was an introduction of some papers regarding his memoirs and so forth,” Uris stated.45 Through Vosjoli, Uris then heard of shady dealings and communist infiltration of the French intelligence corps.
Vosjoli had been the Washington liaison between the CIA and the French secret service. Anatoli Golitsin, a Soviet spy who defected to the West in Helsinki, claimed that there were moles in the French secret service (le Deuxième Bureau) and that a group of Soviet agents—who may have included the French deputy prime minister—were working at the cabinet level, close to Charles de Gaulle. However, there was not enough evidence to take any action. Nonetheless, Golitsin insisted that at least six French intelligence officers, including two colonels, were Soviet moles. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s director of counterintelligence, informed Vosjoli of these developments.46
Did the KGB control French Intelligence? Vosjoli thought so. When he was ordered to set French agents to spy on American nuclear-missile sites, he protested: France had no interest in spying on the United States. When his orders were not changed, he resigned, but was told in November 1963 that he would be assassinated if he returned to France.47 Vosjoli had also gathered information about Soviet missiles in Cuba for the CIA. He refused to identify his sources to French intelligence, fearing that Soviet spies in France would pass the information to Moscow. One of his sources was Castro’s sister, Juanita, who in Topaz is Juanita de Cordoba, the secret mistress of the hero, Devereaux. When Uris met him in Mexico, Vosjoli had drafted an autobiography, Le Réseau Topaz (The Topaz Network), which recounted these adventures.
Uris was suspicious at first, but after long discussions with Vosjoli, he began to believe the story and offered to help the former agent publish his autobiography. But literary agents and publishers were not interested, and there was some concern over the security of the manuscript, which Vosjoli took to Uris, then in Los Angeles, for safekeeping. Uris accepted it in sealed envelopes, which he turned over to Schlosberg for protection. In the spring of 1965, Uris met with his publisher and editor from Bantam in Denver to discuss the possibility of writing a new work on Nazi war criminals still at large. Uris felt that the war-criminal topic was too vast, but he remembered Vosjoli’s story. A conversation with Vosjoli followed, and soon Uris looked at the documents and saw their potential. He and Vosjoli then met in New York, and the two came to a working agreement concerning payment and royalties, a fifty-fifty split.48
After receiving assurances from Vosjoli that he would have full rights to the material, Uris went to Bantam with a proposal for a novel. By going to Bantam first, Uris was trying a new arrangement. He knew that for his novels, the value of the paperback edition was greater than that of the hardback. Instead of negotiating for a hardback first and then entertaining bids for a paperback, he tried to do the reverse. Bantam agreed, even though Uris wanted to be paid 100 percent of the paperback royalties and not to split them with a hardback publisher, the standard practice. In late May 1965 at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, with Schlosberg present, Vosjoli signed a memorandum in which he agreed to Uris’s control over the material for the purpose of the Bantam deal. The memo would lead to a later disagreement.49 The document, dated 27 May 1965, guaranteed Vosjoli an equal share of royalties and film profits from the book to be written by Uris.50
Uris then invited Vosjoli to join him in Aspen in late June 1965 and act as researcher and “technical advisor” for the book; his main job would be to check the accuracy of the intelligence details and covert practices.51 To distract curious parties, Uris and Vosjoli set up a dummy project: a book on Nazi war criminals. Did Uris believe there was a Soviet espionage ring operating within the French government? Possibly, but it was a novel he was writing, so its truth did not have to be proved. Uris even formally denied having much interaction with Vosjoli, although this was easily disproved.
When Vosjoli arrived in Aspen with his companion Monique, Uris found a new concern: fear that French intelligence would come to get Vosjoli. Uris’s worry prompted him to purchase several handguns. After a few months, Vosjoli went to Florida, although during this period the FBI had visited Uris as part of an investigation into Vosjoli. The visit was intimidating, Mark Uris recalled.52
Uris began to draft the novel, the second time he had used someone else’s material (the first was his uncle’s autobiography, the source of The Angry Hills). Not only did he develop the anti-American attitude of the French and the possible infiltration of the French intelligence service by the Soviets, but he also centered the action on the Cuban missile crisis. “Topaz” was the code name for the Soviet spy ring within the French government. By September 1966, Uris had finished a first draft and went to see Vosjoli in Coral Gables to review the text for errors.
With characteristically curt dialogue and flamboyant descriptions, the novel tells a story of espionage, love, and international intrigue in Washington, Havana, and Paris. The five-part story begins with a prologue, the identification of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In a flashback to the late summer of 1961, a CIA agent in Copenhagen responds to a Russian defector, Boris Kuznetov. After confirmation of his identity, he and his family are spirited away to the United States. During an interrogation, he implicates André Devereaux of the French secret service, and the plot picks up speed with the revelation of a spy ring in the upper echelons of the French government. To illustrate Uris’s taste for excess, the names of Devereaux’s dogs are Robespierre and Picasso (TP, 31). Shifting to New York in Part II, the plot reveals the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba, and Devereaux heads to investigate; this allows Uris to give his views of the country and the high price it paid to be under Castro’s rule. We meet Juanita de Cordoba, the disillusioned revolutionary who is Devereaux’s lover and who is able to confirm the placement of the missiles. Under dangerous conditions, Devereaux leaves with proof.
Intrigue greets Devereaux when he returns to Washington, partly because he has agreed not to inform his own government of what he has done, fearful it will get back to the Soviets via their agents in the French secret service. The need to betray one’s government in order to be loyal to one’s country is the dilemma Uris presents. This section also reveals that “Columbine” is the name of the top agent in Topaz and that the French president plans to pull France out of NATO. The specter of communism controlling Europe continues the geopolitics Uris first outlined in Armageddon. As Devereaux flies to France to deliver a letter from President Kennedy outlining the Topaz scheme, the American blockade of Cuba begins.
A flashback to 1940 introduces the final section of the novel, which is concerned with the Resistance. Uris not only provides a history of the Free French forces but also criticizes America’s recognition of the Vichy government rather than that led by de Gaulle, who is mysteriously present in the novel as President La Croix. The conclusion ends the flashback: La Croix reads the letter from President Kennedy as he learns of the American actions in Cuba. A Colonel Brune enters the fray and is thought to be the mole Columbine, but Uris twists the plot until the actual Columbine is discovered at the end.
The publication of the book was as controversial as its writing. Doubleday, the publisher originally contracted for the hardcover, pulled out after questioning the authenticity of Vosjoli’s story. Uris and Schlosberg were then able to make a lucrative deal with Harper and Row, which, in return, wanted Uris to flesh out the story with an additional twenty thousand. But after seeing the completed text, it pulled out in March 1967 because of concerns about libel. Little, Brown also rejected the manuscript. Uris, with Herb Schlosberg’s guidance, then began another search; McGraw-Hill finally published the book in late 1967, although Uris received approximately $100,000 less than his original figure. While this was going on, Uris also had to attend two divorce hearings as Betty tried to get additional monies based on the lucrative Bantam contract. Oscar Dystel, the president of Bantam, testified at a hearing held in Aspen that the contract was null and void, since Uris at that time did not have a hardback publisher, a prerequisite for paperback publication. Even Vosjoli gave evidence.53
To make ends meet, Uris contributed to a fast-tracked book titled Strike Zion! This so-called instant book about the Six-Day War was published in July 1967 and was written by William Stevenson for Bantam. Uris contributed a twenty-one-page essay called “The Third Temple.”54 It is a thirteen-part testimonial, with biblical references, to the courage and fighting spirit of the Jews, and to the Israelis in particular. The final page of the paperback is a full-page advertisement for Exodus, “THE EXPLOSIVE NOVEL OF HEROISM AND DESIRE.”
At the last minute, McGraw-Hill almost refused to release Topaz. The publisher wanted a waiver from Bantam that freed it from any liability for libel or misrepresentations. Uris, who was on his way to Israel at the time (July 1967), agreed to sign, but Vosjoli did not. Forty-five thousand copies were in a warehouse, and McGraw-Hill threatened to hold them unless Vosjoli signed. Uris threatened Vosjoli: he had already made representations to the publisher that the book was truthful. He argued that Vosjoli was contractually obligated to sign.55 The latter refused because he thought the waiver was too restrictive and would prevent him from publishing his own autobiographical account of the espionage. In the end, Schlosberg gave assurances to McGraw-Hill that Uris would take full responsibility for the work and assume any liability. But Uris, clearly believing Vosjoli to be in breach of their contract, did not show Vosjoli a revised Bantam–McGraw Hill contract.
Adding to the scandal surrounding the book, John Scali, a news correspondent for ABC, prepared to expose what Uris and Vosjoli hoped to reveal. Scali apparently knew a great deal about Vosjoli’s actions. At a meeting of all three participants at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, Vosjoli was evasive and ambiguous, Uris protective. Complications, contractual and public, ensued; Vosjoli retained a lawyer, who made financial demands on Uris. Scali’s story never aired, partly because Vosjoli asked for a large fee to appear on the television show. Subsequently, Vosjoli sold part of his story to Life magazine, which incensed Uris.
For the paperback version of Topaz, Bantam issued a pamphlet that was essentially an interview with Uris. Clearly, the potential spy scandal was international news. In 1966, Uris had signed a deal with Columbia Pictures that was tied to the Doubleday publication, but just before the scheduled spring publication in 1967, when Doubleday sought a release, the picture deal also fell through over libel concerns. In October 1967, as McGraw-Hill readied the hardcover for release, Look magazine, breaking with its policy of publishing only nonfiction works, printed a two-part preview of the novel, justifying the decision by saying “although it is fiction, many of the incidents are based upon fact.” The fee paid to Uris was $75,000.
After the story appeared in Paris, there was silence: Washington and Paris said little, and French publishers stayed away. The appearance of the novel in October 1967, however, renewed debate. Some thirteen countries bought translation rights, although not France. In April 1968, however, a French satirical magazine reported that Vosjoli was about to publish his memoirs, and the London Sunday Times announced it would print excerpts.56 In an interview, Uris claimed that his source had told the truth.57 Life magazine reprinted Vosjoli’s memoirs as a cover story, headlined “French Spy Scandal.” Universal Studios then acquired the film rights and hired Alfred Hitchcock as the director. Sales took off. Uris loved the attention.
In his interview for the Bantam pamphlet, Uris clarified that the actual name of the spy ring was “Sapphire” but confirmed that the group had infiltrated the highest reaches of the French government. It had also planted disinformation to confuse the French—for example, by authenticating falsified reports. The novel, he claimed, also anticipated the French withdrawal from NATO and the French attack on the dollar.58
This episode in Uris’s career raises questions about his writing practice: Is research a proper substitute for originality? Is history an adequate source of character and plot? For Uris, the answers were yes; this perhaps explains why he told his son Mark that his novels seemed to write themselves.59 The plot is already in place; all you need to do is to order the characters and events into a dramatic form. None of his novels contains an original story, with the possible exception of A God in Ruins. All the others are drawn from history or personal experience, combined with his sense of observation, and focus on how personal details and historical events reveal character and provide drama and action. His novels are constructed rather than created. A realist and traditionalist who shunned narrative experimentation and formal innovations, Uris preferred the linear accumulation of events leading to a conclusion.
Reaction to Topaz was mixed; critics generally complained that his flat style and polemics kept the story from “being a first-rate suspense yarn.”60 The Los Angeles Times thought the story urgent, adding that “if it weren’t for the incredible soap opera dialogue of the endless love stuff, the book would rank high in the espionage field.”61 Life began its review with this sweeping remark: “Here is Leon Uris, a novelist trying to pass once more as a historian—and just when Cornelius Ryan and Barbara Tuchman have conditioned us in the opposite, to expect history to read like a novel.”62
Criticism of the banal writing style led to the question who but Uris would select as a spy’s recognition signal Irving Wallace’s The Chapman Report. His knack was for being “simultaneously commonplace and improbable” as he “cheerfully … proposes disasters [and] zestfully marches to meet them.”63 He was a man who clearly enjoyed writing for himself, prompting one critic to cite an Oscar Wilde quip as a suitable epitaph for Topaz: “As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable.”64 The London Sunday Times felt it was an admirable compendium of stock phrases and that the only good personality belonged to the French diplomat’s girlfriend, “who seems to be a cousin of Carmen Miranda.”65
Errors could not be overlooked. The Cuban missile crisis occurred in October 1962. In the novel, it shifts between the autumn and spring of either 1962 or 1963 or both. Additionally, the sketch of Fidel Castro is defamatory, the flashbacks are irrelevant, and the American chauvinism is demeaning. Nevertheless, interest in the book was high, all the more so when it was announced that Alfred Hitchcock wanted to film the work.
Uris reacted with surprise when Hitchcock called him to say he intended to do the film and wanted Uris to write the screenplay. He was, of course, aware of the director’s reputation but not that it had dimmed, especially after the end of his television series in 1965. Hitchcock now relied on the story department of Universal for properties, and it came up with Topaz. He found the story appealing because it seemed to be based on a real-life figure who had gathered information about Russian missiles in Cuba for the CIA but had fallen out of favor with French intelligence for refusing to name his Cuban sources and his belief that Soviet spies were operating in the French government. Working with Lew Wasserman, then the head of Universal, Hitchcock undertook the project. Wasserman told him that they would build Cuba on Universal’s back lot but that he could shoot the last third of the film on location in Paris and Copenhagen.
Hitchcock met Uris in January 1968. They began having regular meetings in late April, although Hitchcock was apparently defensive and unhappy. When Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock’s assistant, greeted Uris, she made it clear that Topaz would dust off Hitchcock’s reputation and “bring him out of the museum”; it would be his comeback film.66 From the first, however, the men did not get along. The prickly Uris did not like Hitchcock’s need for control, and when he was shown a small office in a cottage on the Universal lot, Uris objected: he wanted a private office in the studio’s executive building. Hitchcock’s habit was to befriend his writers, frequently having lunch with them. Uris’s habit was to work alone. He disliked the daily encounters in which Hitchcock presided over the menu and conversation. But Uris couldn’t say no, even when forced to watch old Hitchcock films with the master. Uris had moved to Beverly Hills for the project, renting a house on San Ysidro Drive.
By June, Hitchcock was sending long notes to Uris about the narrative outline, criticizing the writing. One comment advised Uris that the dialogue should be “a little more oblique in describing traitors in the French government … My feeling about this scene is that we should use sophisticated, humorous dialogue, otherwise it is going to be a very dull scene.”67 He also criticized Uris’s tendency to resort to melodrama, as when the Russian Kuznetov says that “the Soviets might well unleash a nuclear attack.”68 Discussions and revisions continued throughout the summer, although Hitchcock complained to Wasserman in mid-June about Uris and his interference with the production—namely, a suggestion of how to do the main titles of the film, dissolving from the title to a shape that becomes the Capitol in Washington: “As Last TITLE FADES we HOLD on the Capital [sic] Dome for a beat in time. From there we go on with the perforated code tape. Didn’t you use something like this? Was it in ‘Vertigo?’”69 Hitchcock’s acerbic two-sentence note to Wasserman begins: “I don’t usually bother you with my writer problems, but I attach a letter from my current writer merely to indicate the quality of thought I am receiving.”70
By late August, Uris was gone, having received only a portion of his $125,000 fee. He was not unhappy to go, since he felt Hitchcock did not grasp the political complexities of the story, which had so absorbed Uris.71 The director was constantly trying to impose his will on the material, which Uris instinctively opposed. Hitchcock, however, having had enough of the project, brought back the unfinished Frenzy to Universal executives. He presented test footage, slides, and storyboards to Wasserman and his assistant Ed Henry in July 1968. They declined to go ahead and suggested he return to Topaz, now with Sam Taylor as his screenwriter; Taylor had written for Hitchcock before—namely, Vertigo.72 Taylor promptly altered the plot of the novel and de-emphasized the romanticism of the story. At Hitchcock’s request, he also turned Rico Parra, a Castro critic, into a more sympathetic character.
Details from a story conference of 27 August 1968 acknowledge the feud between Vosjoli and Uris and the work that still needed to be done, especially the sequencing of the Cuban section. The problem was that they had, until then, faithfully followed the plot of the book, at Uris’s urging, but now, for purposes of filming, needed to deviate from it. A comment from the story-conference transcript (it may be Sam Taylor speaking), reads: “We have a saying, at least I have a saying, when devising a picture of this kind, logic is dull.”73 After analyzing the novel, the participants noted that there was something fascinating about Topaz, perhaps the fantasy quality of a life: “The fantastic qualities that you find not quite plausible are the things that are easy to do in the book and difficult to do in the movie; they do seem implausible”; another voice adds, “It was a great story, but … the technical handling of it was pretty jarring.”74 The shooting schedule meant that some scenes were written just days or even hours before they were filmed, and pages were often being rushed to Copenhagen or Paris when location shooting started.
The film itself received uneven reviews: some scenes, like the opening sequence of the defecting Russian agent, were called dazzling, others not. The plot was criticized as too convoluted, but the surface tensions, absurdities, and odd references were “pure Hitchcock,” according to the New York Times. The actors, however, were forgettable and entirely subordinate to their roles. Only a few key images stand out, as when the anti-Castro female agent Juanita is shot and collapses onto a marble floor, her body framed by the brilliant purple of her dress. It was “a movie of classic Hitchcock effects” whose star was Hitchcock himself, one critic, Vincent Canby, concluded.75
At the box office, the film was a financial flop, costing four million dollars to make but earning less than a million. Hitchcock, however, did not forgo his traditional cameo appearance. Thirty minutes into the film, he is shown getting out of a wheelchair at an airport (could he be trying to leave the production?). The only happy experience during this entire period for Uris was his second marriage.
Uris had gone through a difficult time before his temporary return to Hollywood. His divorce from Betty in January 1968 after twenty-three years of marriage had been finalized at the same time he began to consider his 1964 libel trial as the possible subject for a novel and became more deeply involved with the considerably younger Margery Edwards.
Uris had met attractive, Pennsylvania-born Margery Edwards in Aspen, where she was a model and then a jewelry designer. She had recently worked as a silversmith and was thinking about opening her own gift shop when Uris encountered her during the fading days of his marriage with Betty. Their nineteen-year age difference did not bother Uris; in fact, he was proud to be seen with this five-foot-six-inch beauty who had modeled ski clothes. A graduate of Skidmore College, she had moved to Aspen in 1965 for the outdoor life.76
One morning in 1968, William Uris received a phone call in Philadelphia from a woman who introduced herself as Margie Edwards. She had arrived from Aspen and brought personal regards from Leon. William invited her over; she was there in less than an hour. A “young beauty … tall, blue soft eyes, a gorgeous figure, dressed very simple but tasteful,” she spent the entire day with William and Anna (AUTO, 322). She left Philadelphia by train for Berwin, Pennsylvania, where her parents lived. About ten days later, she returned to Aspen but visited William again before she left. She did not answer the question whether she was engaged to Leon. Several months later, when visiting Aspen, William met her again, and shortly after that, Uris and she were married.
Uris and Margery had lived together for almost two years (while Uris was separated from Betty) before marrying on 8 September 1968. Some sixty guests attended the wedding at Temple Israel in Hollywood, the Reform synagogue celebrated on its stationery as “Filmland’s House of Worship”; Margery had converted the month before. The wedding of the forty-four-year-old “lion of the bestseller lists”—to quote Time magazine—and the twenty-five-year-old former model was widely covered in the press.77 Herb Schlosberg was the best man, and they planned to honeymoon in England, which would allow Uris to research what would become QB VII. Two weeks after the ceremony, but before they left for England, they held an open house at Uris’s Red Mountain home. In early October, they attended a White House reception: President Johnson was honoring the prime minister of New Zealand. Guests included Arthur Ashe, Jr., Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Martha Graham. Uris told reporters it was his thirtieth wedding anniversary: he had been married just thirty days.78 Otto Preminger was also at the reception, but Uris refused to talk to him. After the reception, Uris and Margery returned to Aspen before flying to London.
Uris was at first ecstatic to be with such a beautiful woman; he was proud to show her off wherever they went. When they returned to Aspen from their England trip, she decided to team up with Uris’s friend Walt Smith to establish a John Robert Powers modeling agency, and plans were being made to get it underway. But soon, friction between the couple erupted, leading to an unexpected tragedy. Late in the evening of 18 February 1969, the twenty-six-year-old Margery Edwards shot herself a hundred yards behind Uris’s home. The shock devastated Uris, although it later came out that Margery suffered from depression and had had various quarrels with her new husband, who, according to some reports, remained a domineering perfectionist. Petty domestic details would ignite great flare-ups. To the police, Uris admitted that a string of arguments over the previous three weeks had gotten progressively worse. On the evening of 18 February there had been “a pretty hot one.”79
The day of the suicide, Uris told Margery he did not want to ski with her and refused to make up with her after another disagreement. He met Walt Smith at Snowmass, and they skied together; Uris told Smith that there was a “damn good chance I was going to ask her for a divorce.”80 He had taken “this” for ten years before, “and he did not want it again.” This was after five months or so of marriage. After skiing without her all day, he returned home. She again tried to make up, having bought some gifts for Uris and his son Mike (it was his sixteenth birthday), but he rejected her. Because it was Mike’s birthday, Uris took him downtown for a few hours. When he came back, he had decided to ask Marge to leave, and at about six he called his lawyer, Schlosberg, to discuss his options. Marge at first listened in, and Uris had to call back on a private line from his separate office. Schlosberg advised separation.
Except as noted, the following account of what happened on the night of Margery’s suicide and on the days leading up to it is taken from “Author Uris Testifies in Death of Wife,” a story by Barbara Browne in the Rocky Mountain News (8 March 1969). According to his testimony at a coroner’s inquest held on 6–7 March 1969, Uris, after talking to Schlosberg, told his wife of his decision and ordered her from their bedroom: “We’re through. Go sleep downstairs.” She said, “I knew it,” adding that she had made other arrangements.81 Shortly after, Walt Smith arrived with a model from the Powers agency in Denver, a woman who had once worked with Margery. Uris told them to wait downstairs in a sitting room, adding to Smith that he had walked into a bad scene and that in the past Uris had often sent Margery out of the bedroom in the middle of the night. But she always came back. This time, when she came down and confronted Uris in the living room, she repeated, “I’ve made other plans.” This angered Uris because he thought she meant with another man. In testimony, he said: “Her walking out like that … She usually obeyed me. It was a test of wills, I guess.” At the same time, he stated that he was “absolutely and totally in love with this girl, I was pleased that no one else could turn me on even slightly. It was such a change.”
Expressing a different view was Anne Burrows, a friend of Margery Edwards, who testified that she had been uneasy about the relationship. The couple had had several fights while dating, and at one point Margery said she doubted whether she could be happy with him. Burrows added: “I know she tried very hard to do everything and be everything he wanted.…I don’t think he gave her the feeling of security but rather of insecurity.” Uris, in turn, said his wife had “a low boiling point” and a “compulsion toward perfection”: “We liked to argue but we recognized the fact we were arguing over nothing.” A few days before the shooting, on 13 February, they gave a cocktail party. She wanted to clean up afterward but Uris ordered her to bed. She exploded and started throwing things, “including a knife. She came at me very violently.” He grabbed her and “must have pushed her. At any rate, she lay on the floor and kicked and screamed like a child having a tantrum.” As a result of their quarrel, he moved his handguns from a safe where Margery kept her jewels and placed them on a high shelf under some hats. She must have known, because one of them was the weapon that killed her.
Before finally going to bed on 13 February, Margery said, “You’re not going to throw me out are you? You’re not going to get rid of me?” She made this plea most nights after they fought, Uris testified. The next morning, she had a small black eye: “It cost me a pair of ski boots and a parka,” he said. She replied, “Maybe you ought to punch me in the other eye.” She never showed any fear but could not stop contesting Uris and his rules: “It was almost as if she kept the provocation up until I would finally tell her to get out. Almost like she wanted that spanking.” Dr. H. C. Whitcomb, the deputy coroner and a friend of Uris, also gave testimony, saying that in his opinion, Mrs. Uris “was constantly challenging the ultimate rejection—death.” He later remarked that she “was a loner and a perfectionist … a prime candidate for suicide.”82
Margery had gone out of the house at about seven after their quarrel, taking one of Uris’s pistols. A few moments after she left, Uris saw her pause in the driveway, wearing high black zipper boots and a parka, enter the garage, come out, and then disappear from view, heading down the driveway toward Red Mountain Road. Uris added in his police statement, however, that she turned and “looked up at me, there was a look of anguish on her face & it looked as if she wavered for a minute & like she wanted to say something to me. She turned and then continued down the driveway.”83
About twenty minutes later, he heard a shot, then two others, all about twenty seconds apart. He assumed she was firing at the house “to show me she was good and mad.” He then thought of his guns and found that a .38 revolver was missing from his study. He and Smith immediately began a search, but when they couldn’t find her, they got into a Jeep and drove slowly down the winding Red Mountain Road in a snowstorm and continued to look. They then drove to the sheriff’s office.
The formal search that began shortly afterward continued until two in the morning; the police at one point thought that she had walked down the road and might have been picked up by someone. She was not found until the next morning when about nine twenty when a young man walking down the road behind and above Uris’s house discovered her body lying about a hundred yards from the home near a two-foot-high snow-covered hammock. She had fired three shots: one went into her purse, another into her cheek, and the third through her mouth and into her brain. She had apparently been standing on the frozen, snow-covered hammock and looking down at the house when she fired. A suicide note partly expressed her love for Uris but also the view that “if we had both used our [wits] … we would have called an end to this affair long ago … We each knew the outcome in our own hearts.”
The papers had a field day with the sensational story. The Los Angeles Times ran a banner headline that read: “BRIDE OF AUTHOR URIS FOUND DEAD.” A beaming wedding photo of Margery and Uris appeared alongside the story. The subhead read: “Apparently Shot Herself, Sheriff Says.”84 A week later, Herb Schlosberg conducted a private memorial service in Aspen. The Aspen Times quoted Uris: “On the surface there was no apparent reason why Margery took her life … We were deeply in love, with more than everything to live for.”85 Her ashes were scattered on Red Mountain. The papers also followed the coroner’s inquest, initially raising the suspicion that Uris might have had a hand in her death. He did not.
The inquest confirmed that the death of the twenty-six-year-old had been a suicide. Attending with Uris was his son Michael (who was in the house at the time of the final quarrel) and his daughter Karen, twenty-two. A photo in the Rocky Mountain News showed an upset Uris in a dark suit leaving the witness box in front of the six-person jury. He testified that for the ten days preceding the event there had been a series of quarrels. The police report refers to a “series of uncontrollable arguments with her husband,” the implication being that she was the uncontrollable participant.86 Uris testified that the night of their party, 13 February, five days before her shooting, he removed “five loaded guns out his safe and hid them around the house.” Nevertheless, she found a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol he owned. His last words to her: “Marge, I want to know where you’re going. If you don’t tell me, it’s the worst mistake you ever made in your life.” He also claimed that although he had called his lawyer in Los Angeles to discuss a divorce and had mentioned a separation earlier in the day to Walt Smith, he “was bluffing. We had been through this before.”87
After several hours of deliberation, the coroner’s jury ruled that Margery Uris had taken her own life. The case was closed, but the effect of the suicide on Uris remained. Lacking any desire to write, he had a great urge to be alone. Only when his editor Ken McCormick of Doubleday visited to console him did Uris begin to understand the therapeutic value of writing again. But as he told a reporter in 1984, “No one comes out of a thing like this whole. No one can describe the pain. Once you decide you are going to survive you don’t know how much of you is left and you can’t really know until you face a test.”88 His reputation shattered and his willpower blunted, his future was uncertain.