My father was aware that in black ghettoes “The Man” was slang for “white man” or “the white boss.” In The Man he placed a black man in the role of the ultimate white boss. But the title had a second, more important meaning to my father. In the early 1960s the vast majority of black males were used to being treated by whites as a separate species, as something less than a man. Douglass Dilman, the protagonist of the novel, after a lifetime of living as a milquetoast, token Negro, wants to be treated as a man and must learn for himself what it is to act like a man.
During the summer of 1963, my father, my mother, my sister and I traveled in France and Italy. In cafés on the Champs-Elysée, in hotel rooms on the French Riviera, in cafés on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, my father mulled over the plot of The Man and began writing an outline. That summer he also discovered that he was more famous than he had imagined. One afternoon he walked onto the beach in Cannes and saw three different people reading The Prize-each in a different language. Incidents such as this one were gratifying to my father’s ego, but they also impressed upon him the fact that his popularity with readers gave him an opportunity he did not have before. With The Man he could bring the reality of racism to white people who would not otherwise read about it, who would not bother to pick up a novel written by a black author.
As usual, my father wanted to study first-hand the locations he would be writing about. In particular, he wanted to visit the Oval Office and those wings of the White House that were closed to tourists, including the president’s living quarters.
Through a friend, he contacted Pierre Salinger, President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary. Kennedy granted my father’s request on the condition that he not reveal publicly the president’s cooperation. In September my father spent four days visiting the White House, the Pentagon, the Departments of State and Defense and the House of Representatives and the Senate. He interviewed President Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, was guided through the president’s private quarters by the president’s valet, and interviewed the White House police. Three times he watched President Kennedy in action: at a swearing-in ceremony, giving a speech to the nation and hurrying across the South Lawn to catch a helicopter. He exchanged greetings with Kennedy but did not interview him. For my father, the highlight of his visit came when, during one of Kennedy’s afternoon breaks, Pierre Salinger took my father into the Oval Office and suggested that he sit in the President’s chair.
My father grew up in an era when patriotism was not considered corny. Sitting in that chair genuinely moved him. When the American Sunday supplement Family Weekly asked him to write about “My Most Inspiring Moment,” my father chose sitting in the chair in the Oval Office. That article was supposed to appear on the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. It didn’t. When Family Weekly finally did run the article two years later, the editors, worried about offending white readers in the South, cut out all references to The Man and its Negro president. This same oversensitivity to the Southern white market would lead the Book of the Month club to reduce The Man to an alternate selection so that the separate sheet announcing its availability could be left out of mailings to the South.
After completing four outlines, including a final one that was sixty-five pages long, my father started writing The Man on October 31, 1963. He finished the first draft four months later on March 8, 1964. It was an exhausting, almost fevered process. Several times he worked so hard that he became ill. My father lived with his characters and was sorry to say goodbye to them when the manuscript was completed. But few novelists live in isolation from the real world. While my father was working on The Man, both of his parents were hospitalized and his father underwent emergency surgery from which he might not have emerged alive. My father was shaken by saying goodbye to his father the night before the operation, and thankful when he survived.
One day my father learned that one of his closest friends, screenwriter Guy Trosper, had died suddenly of a heart attack. He was only 52 years old. Not only was my father grieved to lose his friend, but because Trosper was so young and my father had spoken with him only three days earlier, he was confronted with his own mortality. He rewrote his will, put his papers in order and redoubled his efforts to do justice to The Man.
On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. My father had been invited to join Kennedy’s entourage on the Texas trip, but had declined because it was not relevant to his novel. He was a great admirer of John F. Kennedy and he spent the rest of the day, the rest of the weekend in fact, watching the television reports. At one point, one of the news anchors read aloud the speech that Kennedy had planned to deliver later in the day. The last line was a quote from Psalms 127: 1: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” My father felt the proverbial chill go up his spine. It was the exact same quotation he had written less than two weeks earlier, the one that his fictional president, Douglass Dilman, had chosen to place his hand on when he was sworn in as president.
The Man was published in September 1964. Although my father’s primary target audience was white readers, he was concerned about its reception in the black community. Shortly before publication, my father spent a long evening on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes with James Baldwin and several mutual friends. Baldwin asked my father what he was working on. My father replied that his latest novel was about the first Negro President of the United States. Baldwin was taken aback. “How can you write about that?” he demanded. “You’re not a Negro.”
My father pointed out that Baldwin had just written a play with white characters even though he wasn’t white. This reaction would turn out to be typical of African-American readers. One after another they opened The Man expecting to hate it and ended up loving it. In the end my father was hailed for advancing the cause of racial understanding and civil rights. On October 29, 1964, Jet magazine published a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. reading The Prize-on the day he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Two days later I accompanied my father to a studio in Hollywood where the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute gave him the Supreme Award of Merit. (My father had declined the offer of a public presentation.) It was Mollie Robinson, the mother of black baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, who handed him the plaque.
There was a dark side to the publication of The Man: the death threats. They came in the mail and they came by telephone. My father, who believed that having an unlisted phone number was a sign of snobbism, was forced to remove our home phone number from the telephone directory. But even that did not prevent one particularly upsetting incident. A disgruntled racist managed to get hold of our address and phone number. One night he started calling, threatening to kill my father. With each call he announced that he was closer. My father contacted the police, who intercepted the caller before he reached our house.
My father was disappointed that The Man received bad reviews. As a matter of fact, the positive reviews outnumbered the negative ones by more than two to one. But, like so many authors, my father found that it was the negative ones that stuck with him. Some of these reviews were honest criticisms of my father’s writing style or his plotting choices. Although my father was sensitive to criticism, these were not the reviews that bothered him. What upset him was that some reviewers seemed to hate him personally. Their criticisms were irrational, even incoherent. It became clear to my father that these reviewers were not responding to The Man, but to my father’s previous successes. He realized that if these reviewers would attack him for a novel as serious as The Man, there was nothing he could ever do to win them to his side. My father found this conclusion disheartening-but also liberating. If certain reviewers were determined to attack him no matter what he wrote, there was no point in worrying about them anymore.