I was old enough during the latter part of this period to know that my father hated working for the movies and television. Once I visited him at “the office”: Warner Brothers Studio. He liked to tell the story about Jack Warner walking into the writers’ room and complaining that the writers were “doing nothing.” What they were doing, of course, was thinking, an apparently inconceivable concept to Mr. Warner.
I recall distinctly my father coming home at the end of the day, having dinner, spending some family time, and then retreating to his makeshift home office to write what he wanted. By this time, that meant books.
He had already written at least five unpublished books before Alfred Knopf paid $1000 for the rights to The Fabulous Originals, a collection of biographies of real people who inspired famous fictional characters. Among the featured subjects were Dr. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s model for Sherlock Holmes, and Alexander Selkirk, the castaway whose tribulations inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. The Fabulous Originals was published in 1955. The first time that he saw his book on the front table of a bookstore and watched people pick it up and thumb through it, my father was so unnerved that he rushed out of the store. The Fabulous Originals was well-received and, unexpectedly, considering its subject matter, made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
For most of his life, my father had dreamed of being free of employers and of doing nothing but writing books for a living. For the first time, he could imagine his dream as a realistic possibility. But not yet. Now he and my mother had two children to support (my sister was born in 1955). He kept working at Warner Brothers.
My father’s next book, The Square Pegs, was another collective biography-about nine American eccentrics and nonconformists, such as Timothy Dexter, who wrote an entire book without punctuation, and Joshua Norton, who declared himself Emperor of San Francisco. Time magazine ran a glowing full-page review of The Square Pegs. A Beverly Hills bookstore displayed the book in its window. (This was before bookstores sold their window space to the highest bidder.) My father was so excited that late one night we drove to Beverly Hills and photographed the window. This was heady stuff for my father. That artistic freedom that my father associated with writing books now seemed tantalizingly close. So close that, in 1958, he wrote two complete book manuscripts despite continuing his full-time film and television work.
The Sins of Philip Fleming was my father’s first published novel. It dealt with a married man who experiments with infidelity before returning to his wife. Because of a legal dispute, the publisher chose not to promote the book and it did not sell well. My father was not terribly upset because he was not really pleased with the job he had done in writing the book. Still, he had learned some valuable writing lessons and he was, at last, a published novelist.
The Fabulous Showman, also published in 1959, was a biography of P. T. Barnum, the notorious con man/entrepreneur and co-founder of the Barnum amp; Bailey circus.
Then came the novel that would change my father’s life. The Chapman Report tells the story of six women in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb who agree to be interviewed by a sex survey team. Nine months before its publication, Darryl Zanuck purchased the movie rights to The Chapman Report. The book was released in hardcover March 23, 1960. The next day, the publisher, Simon amp; Schuster, received a record 12,000 reorders. That fall, New American Library/Signet ordered a paperback first printing of one million copies. In January they printed another million.
That was the end of my father’s screenwriting career. There would be no more writing for others six days a week.
This is the way my father put it: “Here was the miracle I had dreamed of in my youth. At last, free, independent, confident. I wrote my next book, and my next, and my next, and my next, and each was an international bestseller. By wildest luck and unbelievable good fortune, combined with a love of what I was doing and a love of the stories I had to tell, and the freedom to tell them in my own way, I had won my seven days of Sundays.”
After thirty years of writing hundreds of published magazine articles, short stories, plays, movies, television scripts and books, not to mention a closetful of unpublished works, my father was suddenly “an overnight success.”
The Chapman Report explored the tensions and hypocrisy of suburban life. But many reviewers saw only that it dealt explicitly with sex and they claimed to be offended. In fact, The Chapman Report was less explicit than The Sins of Philip Fleming, which had not been similarly attacked. Clearly there was something else about The Chapman Report that upset some reviewers, namely that it was a popular success and it earned its author quite a bit of money.
Although my father would become famous as a novelist, the fact is that half of his published books were non-fiction. He followed The Chapman Report not with another novel, but with The Twenty-Seventh Wife, a biography of Ann Eliza Young, the last wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young. But more novels would come soon enough.
The Prize, an intricately plotted story about one year’s winners of the Nobel Prize, was even more popular than The Chapman Report. By mid-1963 my father had already completed another novel, The Three Sirens, The Chapman Report had been released as a movie starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Shelley Winters, Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom (director George Cukor would later apologize personally to my father for the poor result), and a movie version of The Prize, starring Paul Newman, Elke Sommer and Edward G. Robinson, was nearing completion.
And then came that June night when my father told my mother and me, “Have I got a great idea for a story.” He sat down and explained the premise: the president and vice-president of the United States die and, because of the rarely noticed Law of Succession, a Negro (this was 1963) becomes president. The reason I remember the discussion so clearly is that it was the first time my father incorporated one of my suggestions into one of his novels. He asked my mother and me what we thought white racists would do when they realized that a Negro was President of the United States. I thought a moment and then replied, “They’d impeach him.” At that time there had only been one presidential impeachment and that had been almost a century earlier. The concept of impeaching a president was as remote and obscure as the Law of Succession.
My father’s eyes lit up. “Impeachment,” he muttered, and I could almost see the plotting possibilities mushrooming in his brain.
Actually my father had wanted to write about racial injustice in America for a long time. He came up with several ideas, but kept rejecting them. Once he came very close to going ahead with one outline. It was about an African-American student who applies for entrance to a prestigious university and is turned down because of his color (this was long before the days of affirmative action). A liberal white lawyer takes the case, but discovers that his client really doesn’t deserve to be accepted by the university. The lawyer is caught between political principle and the truth. In the end, my father decided not to write the story because it was more about a moral dilemma than it was about racism. Years later he would pursue this same moral dilemma, although in a different context, as the theme of his novel The Word.