CHAPTER TEN

A New Yorker Discovers the Middle West: 1964-1966

Before the poet Paul Engle and others began to teach creative writing there in the mid-thirties, the University of Iowa was a minor member of the Big Ten with nothing much to recommend it other than a picturesque locale (Victorian architecture, the Iowa River winding through campus). Thirty years later, the “Workshop” was by far the most famous writing program in the country, rivaled only by its counterpart at Stanford established by Wallace Stegner, an Iowa graduate. The Workshop was composed of a hundred or so carefully selected graduate students who prided themselves on being part of a bohemian community of writers coexisting with, but remaining aloof from, the conservative bumpkins of both town and campus. “Greenwich Village West” they called it, and tried to live up to the name by smoking pot, getting drunk, and enjoying a certain amount of “free love” long before such a lifestyle was assimilated into the national counterculture. Just beneath the surface of this self-styled Arcadia, however, was a snakepit of internecine strife between poets and fiction writers, traditionalists and experimentalists, the talented and not-so-talented, the drunk and not-so-drunk, the faculty and administrators.

Yates would have preferred to stand apart from all that, or most of it anyway. He’d come to Iowa for one reason—as he liked to say (echoing Vonnegut), “The business of teaching creative writing offers solace to writers who are down on their luck.” He was down on his luck, and grateful for the chance to make a living, but continued to think the whole idea of “teaching” writing was ridiculous. He felt no particular solidarity with the whole noble experiment—a Community of Writers—much less its affected bohemian nonsense, though he was glad enough to know that liquor by the drink was now legal in Iowa City. And certainly he could use whatever comforts were afforded by an emancipated sexual ethos, whether he quite subscribed to it or not. As he’d written Cassill, “I must admit I’m a little leery about the idea of living in Iowa as a bachelor—what if anything does a fella do for laughs on those long winter nights out there?” Cassill replied that the night life of the town was fairly dull—“few places interesting to eat out in, even fewer to drink in”—but assured him that he’d be invited to a lot of parties, and that “a great deal of flexibility” was possible in one’s private life: “That is, everyone will know what you are up to, but no one will interfere.”

Yates’s arrival in Iowa was far from auspicious. His car overheated and caught fire on the way, and what few worldly possessions weren’t in storage (and hence lost forever) were scorched in the mishap. Somehow he managed to be only a few minutes late to his inaugural guest lectureship, but was ill prepared and utterly cowed: “I found myself talking about Bellow,” he said later, “about whom I knew nothing. And they were writing it down!” When that ordeal was over he was conducted to his lodgings, which Cassill had found within the specified price range of eighty dollars a month or less: a drafty ramshackle Victorian mansion divided into four apartments at 317 South Capitol Street (“Turn at the sign that says ‘Save Two Cents,’” Yates would instruct visitors in a despondent drawl), where he would dwell for the next nine months with a table, bed, typewriter, and little else. One of the first things he did was write a letter to his daughter Monica, at the bottom of which he drew his signature cartoon of a sad daddy with a thought balloon above his head filled with the face of a pretty girl: “Thinking of you.”

*   *   *

Yates was a celebrity at the Workshop as soon as he arrived—many regarded Revolutionary Road as the most important novel written by a faculty member—and before long he became something of a legend. “I think we all wanted to be Richard Yates,” his student Robert Lacy remembered. “I know for a fact that I did. He was tall, lanky, and movie-star handsome back then, and he moved in an aura of sad, doom-haunted, F. Scott Fitzgeraldian grace. He was Gatsby and Nick Carraway and Dick Diver all rolled into one.” Gaunt and dapper and courtly, coughing mortally as he lit one cigarette after another with palsied hands, he was “everybody’s idea of a writer” as David Milch put it. And for many Iowa students, learning how to look like a writer was at least as important as learning how to write—of course, one had to cultivate a fair amount of misery to look as “doom-haunted” as Yates, though perhaps that was a price worth paying.

Yates wasn’t much comforted by the admiring eyes that followed him around. Not only was he losing faith in himself as a writer—a little worse than dying—but he’d never had any faith in himself as a teacher, and now he was being scrutinized by people, intellectuals, who took the whole business very seriously indeed. It was one thing to “teach” nice-biddy hobbyists and car-painting dreamers at the New School, another to be exposed as a fraud in the eyes of some of the brightest, most talented young writers in the country, many of whom hailed from the dreaded Ivy League. And the earliest signs seemed to indicate that Yates and the Workshop wouldn’t mix. At one of his first parties he was approached by an admiring new student named Robin Metz; Yates was tipsily cordial until the young man happened to mention that he’d gone to Princeton. Yates squinted at his necktie. “What’s this,” he said, flipping it into Metz’s startled face, “—a fucking club tie?” Then, to make matters worse, the two found themselves having brunch together the next day, in a group that included Richard Baron and E. L. Doctorow (both with the Dial Press at the time), who were in town for a publishers’ conference. At one point it came to light that Metz had been a student of Philip Roth at Princeton, and Yates’s face darkened as Baron went on about what a prodigy Roth was as a teacher and a writer—the National Book Award at age twenty-six! Verlin Cassill and Vance Bourjaily heartily concurred. Then Metz (“still irked”) mentioned the tie-flipping incident of the night before, and the mortified Yates explained to the table that he didn’t remember that at all. By the end of the brunch both men were miserable: Metz, because he’d alienated the writer he most admired on the faculty; Yates, because some Princeton snotnose had just made him look like a fool in front of his new colleagues—and for that matter he was stuck in a place where people made a big fucking deal out of Philip Roth, whose lack of basic human sympathy was evident on every page of his books (and who’d won the NBA at age twenty-six).*

A week later Metz got a message to meet Yates at Donnelly’s Bar. Warily, the young man arrived at the appointed time and found Yates sitting in a booth with a coterie of three or four older students he’d already picked out as drinking buddies. “There he is now,” one of them hissed. Yates sprung to his feet and shook Metz’s hand: “I read your story ‘Doughboy,’” he said. “That’s one fucking good story! I’ve wanted to meet you ever since.” Metz, a little puzzled, pointed out that they’d already met—the necktie and Philip Roth and so forth. Yates waved his hand: “Oh, well, I don’t care about that.…”

And (beyond the heat of the moment) he didn’t, and that was one of the things that proved a bit of a revelation to Yates’s more smitten students: He cared about the writing—whether Hemingway’s or Metz’s or whosoever’s—more passionately than any jargon-spouting literature professor, such that life itself was somewhat less than secondary. In the World War II–era Quonset huts where Workshop classes were held, Yates would sit on the edge of a desk with his long legs dangling, as he lovingly flipped through and finger-thumped the ragged paperbacks he taught from. His student Luke Wallin called him a “sublime, rugged presence,” and particularly looked forward to his seminar on contemporary fiction:

His lectures were like his narrative voice: gentle and careful, honest and clean and surprising. He was something to watch, with his aging good looks, his shyness (he was extremely polite to his students, almost afraid of them), and best of all his personal, thought-out views of each novel we read. He, too, had an incredible voice, expressing such pain and such love for American writing.… His views were presented in quiet, open challenge to the class, and it always amazed me how little his otherwise boisterous students would take exception and argue. His criticism reminds me most of Kazin’s, about as nonacademic as one could find, and full of power. His lasting example was of a writer who had taken his tradition deeply to heart.

As his listeners at Bread Loaf had also learned, Yates had a gift for imparting his very subjective enthusiasms; he rarely if ever approached a text in any kind of systematic way, but rather pointed to a line, a detail, a bit of dialogue, and said in effect, See? His fixed ideas remained the same—revealing dialogue, objectification, structural integrity, precision—but he digressed more than ever in discussing them. The “controlled sentiment” of Lolita might remind him of “Guests of the Nation” or “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” and (legs softly kicking, head wagging in awe) he’d enumerate certain pertinent aspects of those stories, and perhaps others, until it was time to go. And then the following week he’d discuss an entirely different novel, as dictated by the syllabus, and Lolitawould be forgotten unless it happened to cross his mind again for whatever reason. Such an approach would explain the rather inchoate notes that student Loree Wilson took as she tried to follow the thread of Yates’s “lectures”:

The Sun Also Rises: Pathos of the book—it’s almost as if … Story of a nymphomaniac, a romantic, and an emasculated.… Book is pernicious if read the wrong way. Hemingway is not speaking—Jake Barnes is speaking.

All the King’s Men: Road company Faulkner. Melodrama is pejorative term.

Babbitt: Can’t look for grace and tightness in Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt is an accidental work of art. Worked in the 19th c. tradition. Ear for American speech. Scene—education between father and son p. 66, hilarious. Babbitt man going to pieces before our very eyes—contradictions.

Lolita: Beautiful book—funny and tragic. N. takes such pains setting up this complicated voice of Humbert. Very first pages brilliant. A story about love—but not how Humbert loved Lolita—but the generative writer’s love of Nabokov for Humbert Humbert.…

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”: Eloise a type—a neurotic—standardized suburban wife (surroundings and furniture of mind).… Big action doesn’t amount to much, but the little bits of dialogue—delicacy—finally make the shape of things. “Down at the Dinghy” a flimsy story … because we’re told to love Boo Boo. Mistake of kite and kike is sweet and icky and sentimental.… “Teddy”: annoying damn story. Dick suspects Salinger’s zen kick.

The few lines quoted above represent the whole gist, more or less, of what Yates had to say about each book; ellipses indicate either where he left a thought unfinished, or the omission of a line or two (but no more) from Wilson’s original notes. What she didn’t write down, of course, were all the points where he quoted from the text, as well as his various conversational glosses and digressions (“By the way, for a good example of that kind of rhetorical style you might want to read Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Flowering Judas’.…”), in the course of which he’d come up with the best of those “clean and surprising” aperçus of which Luke Wallin and others were so enamored. Finally, while students waited for him to return to the subject at hand—be it Lolita or Babbitt or whatever—Yates would abruptly stand up and announce: “I’m going to the Airliner [bar] for a martini. Would anyone care to join me?” There were no exams.

Yates’s approach didn’t appeal to everyone. It was true that “otherwise boisterous students” tended to defer to him, but not always because they agreed with his opinions; rather the man’s extreme politeness—so anxious and unsettling at times—could turn into something else when he was put on the defensive. “Now that is fucking good writing!” Yates would exclaim after reading dialogue from Gatsby, say, then thrum a few pages to the next example—perhaps the part where Daisy sobs over Jay’s “beautiful shirts”: “Now, if that’s Daisy talking, and not Fitzgerald, we’ve got a great novel!” Thrum … If a hand went up, and a puzzled (or cocky) student asked why it was so great, Yates would often get irritated, and suddenly the soft-voiced monk of literature would vanish, replaced by a hungover curmudgeon who hated show-offs. “There’s Murray, squirming in his chair to tell us the news again,” Yates said of one student who (until that moment) had a tendency to talk too much, and who happened to be an Ivy Leaguer. And while Yates was compellingly reverential toward the books he loved, he became downright antic on the subject of books he loathed, and dissent was hardly encouraged. Southern students—or those such as David Milch who’d been protégés of Robert Penn Warren at Yale—would blanch at Yates’s (literal) trashing of All the King’s Men as fake, derivative, melodramatic shit.

“We all adored him,” said Cassill, and by “we” he meant all the people at Iowa who “got” Yates. “We found him stubborn and foolish sometimes, but he was constantly turning up with his heart in the right place.” While Yates would sometimes overexcitedly praise or damn a book, or put certain students in their place, usually he was the essence of modesty and tact. Though he didn’t much like to have his convictions challenged (especially since such a response tended to have faintly mocking overtones), he often wanted to know what students thought, and would listen with an almost disconcerting intensity to any well-meant comment or question. And when a student would say something that seemed (inoffensively) “callow and absurd,” as Geoffrey Clark recalled, Yates was at his best: “[H]e’d take special pains to be gentle with you; it hurt him to inadvertently discomfit a student.… About the only things that really aroused his contempt or derision were pretension or condescension of any kind.”

Accordingly Yates preferred underdogs: students who were socially inept, who were talented but hadn’t found their voices yet, and who tended to be the target of mean-spirited sallies from the smart-ass contingent. “Oh c’mon, you don’t really mean that!” Yates would admonish the latter, if they unfairly attacked a person’s work or observation. When one of his more awkward students went on to become a well-known critic and novelist, Yates fondly reminisced how “smelly and shy” the man had been at Iowa, how others had mocked him as a crackpot. Yates lavished attention on such students, and protected them both in and out of the classroom. John Casey remembers how “furious” Yates became with him and David Plimpton for bullying their roommate (and Yates’s student) Robert Lehrman: The three young men had rented a farmhouse together, but the suburban Lehrman was ill-suited to country life; he’d tag along in his loafers while the older, bigger men shot birds and turtles, ridiculing Lehrman the while. Both Casey and Plimpton were from genteel backgrounds—Casey had prepped in Switzerland and attended Harvard Law, Plimpton (like his cousin George) was the product of an illustrious New England family—and Yates considered their treatment of Lehrman a typical instance of the rich picking on the (relatively) poor. Yates let Casey know that he wouldn’t stand for it.

But, as Lehrman himself remembers, it was always a student’s work that mattered most: “Yates had no doubt that writing was important. Unlike some of the other writers on the faculty—Nelson Algren, for example, who was shocked that he had to actually read student work—Dick threw himself into helping us.” Yates put himself at the disposal of those who wanted to discuss writing—whether their own or others’, at the Airliner or in his office—and he’d not only read their work, but cover it with scribbled commentary in his own recognizable voice. Once Lehrman wrote a demurring essay on Yates’s pet concept of literary “condescension,” as it applied (or rather didn’t apply in Lehrman’s view) to Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus; Yates’s marginal notes (given below in italics) were typically prickly but amused. “‘Condescension’ is not a part of the official language of criticism,” Lehrman began, “—certainly Northrop Frye would disapprove of it [big deal]—for good reason.… The word doesn’t apply to literature [Why not?].… Sinclair Lewis, for example, feels superior to Babbitt [says who?], Flaubert had great difficulty convincing himself [But he did, which is the point] that Emma Bovary wasn’t too petty to write about, and so on.” Lehrman went on to claim that writers of farce (e.g., Roth) necessarily “condescend” to their characters, and noted: “It is not that Roth satirizes the Patimkins but that at the same time he takes Neil Klugman seriously [Right! And there goes your argument about ‘Farce’].” And so on. Yates’s good-natured sniping continued to the last page, at the bottom of which he wrote: Okay. You finally convinced me—but it was touch and go for a while there, buddy. R. Y. He gave the paper an A.

Actual “workshop” sessions—in which student fiction was read aloud and discussed, often viciously—were held once a week in the afternoon. Each writer on the faculty had a section of fifteen workshop students, assigned somewhat on the basis of mutual affinity: That is, if a student wrote in a purely realistic mode then he or she might be apt to sign up for Yates, and if Yates liked his or her work then he might be apt to accept the student into his section. Sometimes he’d give the person a call first. DeWitt Henry had been so “galvanized” by Revolutionary Road that when he left his Harvard Ph.D. program to transfer to Iowa for a continued draft deferment and time to write, he was thrilled to discover Yates among the staff and left a writing sample for him. At a dingy table in one of the Workshop Quonset huts, Yates praised “The Lord of Autumn”—then told Henry to scrap it: Too influenced by Faulkner, he said, but a talented piece of work nonetheless. Henry handed him the tentative pages of a new story, and a few days later was even more thrilled by an excited call from Yates, announcing that these pages were “the real thing” and had to be a novel. “The sword fell on my shoulder,” said Henry.

Where his students’ fiction was concerned, Yates was polite if he could help it, but also emotional, blunt, and uncompromising: Either a story (a scene, a line, a word) came alive or it didn’t, and he was eager to explain why it didn’t and how (if possible) to fix it. Intellectual exercises, ideas, abstractions, didacticism, pretension, or implausibility of any kind were fatal errors. Mark Dintenfass was startled when Yates called to discuss his first three stories, and dismissed two of them as “crap”: Dintenfass was trying to write like Nabokov, Yates explained, and only Nabokov could do that; Dintenfass’s other story, however, was about real life, the life he knew, and that’s what he should be writing about. “It’s the most important thing anyone ever told me as a writer,” said Dintenfass, who turned away from “fruitless experimentation” and started a novel about Jewish life in Brooklyn. Yates encouraged him to send opening chapters to Monica McCall, who eventually sold the book.

Yates could get away with calling a piece of fiction “crap” (though he’d rarely say as much unless he had some kind of compliment in store) because his goodwill was never in doubt. Flattery was bullshit; what was good for the work? “Would it really happen that way?” he’d expostulate. “I don’t think so.” He wanted students to see the “Platonic form” of the work—its latent state of finished perfection—and this involved examining every nuance in terms of precision and truth. “Dick demonstrated the keenest eye I’ve ever seen for the flaw, great or small, in fiction,” said Geoffrey Clark; “and for the small telling detail that transfigures or transfixes; and for cant, cheap tricks, and especially unfelt fiction.” A student’s ego never stood in the way of Yates’s insistence that something could be improved, even if the story or novel in question had already been accepted for publication (or published). “They’re rushing you,” Yates told James Alan McPherson, whose first collection Hue and Cry was in press at the time. “Slow down.” And he proceeded to tease through McPherson’s paragraphs, pointing out all the little things that needed to be “fixed” prior to publication. “I hope this won’t make you sore,” he wrote DeWitt Henry, “but I’m not too crazy about your story”—a typical preamble to an epistolary critique, both in terms of candor and modest reluctance.

If a story was a total loss, was “crap” in short, Yates would summarize the reason(s) as briefly as possible and elaborate only if challenged. And he much preferred to say he liked a given story, then list his various quibbles at length—e.g., “I simply can’t imagine a man polishing off a whole fifth of whisky in a single drive between Philadelphia and New York. Better make it a pint”; “You have her kick off her shoes, flop on the couch, throw back her head, eyes closed, and rub her throat (hardly the gestures of a frightened girl, or even a wary one).”

Yates was more diffident during the formal workshop sessions. At the New School he’d never felt comfortable criticizing students’ work in front of their peers, and amid the ruthless crucifixions of Iowa the best he could do, at times, was serve as a gentle referee. “Hm, did you really have to say that?” he’d intercede, and try to silence the more rabid critics by pointing out the better qualities of a given story, while (in accordance with workshop protocol) its reeling author would have to weather the onslaught in red-faced silence. Occasionally Yates was so startled by the carnage he’d simply withdraw into chain-smoking bemusement. His student Bill Kittredge described a session in Yates’s workshop as “the most savage thing [he’d] ever witnessed”: “This guy from Spokane just got shelled. People were reading lines aloud from his story and everybody would laugh. Dick let it get out of hand. There were a lot of strong personalities in the class—Ivy Leaguers, New Yorkers. The guy from Spokane left town after that, and nobody ever saw him again.”

More often than not, Yates was less tolerant of such excesses. Sometimes he’d check a student with a look of baleful disapproval, slowly shaking his head (“Bill, Bill, Bill”), or else he’d let others express views that decorum forbade to himself. “You motherfuckers wouldn’t know literature if it ran you down in a car!” shouted his student Jane Delynn in defense of a story under attack. There was a silence. “As the lady in the rear suggested—” Yates sighed approvingly. Above all he became fed-up with the condescending sarcasm of certain students, perhaps most notably David Milch. As one student recalled, “Milch was a slasher in workshops. He was part of a new wave of Ivy League students at Iowa, and some of these students were contemptuous about Iowa’s casual nonacademic milieu. Milch thought Yates was a joke—too nonprofessorial, stumbling, and shy. Too conversational.” Robert Penn Warren had helped Milch get a teaching fellowship at Iowa, where he was touted as a writer of tremendous promise. At twenty-one he was brilliant, learned, and witty, and apt to make light of other students’ writing. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Milch!” Yates would erupt. “Who’s interested in your jokes? What do you think it feels like to be at the other end of a barb like that?” Not only did Yates object to Milch’s wisecracks, but he wasn’t much inclined to praise the young man’s work either: Sometimes he’d begrudge Milch’s (vaunted) facility for writing dialogue, but was often exhaustive in taking him to task for other lapses.

The enmity between the two doesn’t call for a lot of subtle analysis. Milch was a catalogue of Yates’s foremost bogeys: an unapologetically intellectual graduate of Yale who’d arrived at Iowa under the aegis of the world-famous author of All the King’s Men, no less; a condescending young man who sneered at both students and Yates alike. Milch, for his part, deplores the arrogance of the young man he was, but points out that all the Workshop people, teachers as well as students, were “unfinished spirits” in one way or another: “Self-taught writers like Yates and Vonnegut who’d developed their talents outside the citadels of culture—the ‘apostolic succession’ of Harvard, say: William James teaching Gertrude Stein and so on—had this rage against the Tradition even as it attracted them. They had an adolescent relationship with the authority of culture.” Certainly Food Field Reporter and Remington Rand were about as removed from the citadels as one could get; in any case Yates let himself go one night at Kenny’s Bar. “Who wouldn’t want to be David Milch?” he announced to an audience of Workshop people, on whose periphery was Milch. “He went to Yale! He graduated first in his class! Warren said he has an ear for dialogue that rivals Hemingway! And here he is twenty-one years old.…” It went on and on. The whole spiel, said Milch, “was a devastating encapsulization of everything pretentious and self-important.” Many years later, though, Milch would be in a nice position to get his own back.

*   *   *

For the most part, Yates chose not to socialize with his fellow faculty members, except for Cassill. “That many writers were never meant to be together in the same place,” he said of Bread Loaf, and so with Iowa. He never felt particularly at ease with rival authors unless they were the sort who wore their eminence lightly—“good guys” as Yates would have it. His colleague Vance Bourjaily was a good guy, modest and affable, though perhaps a bit too much of an outdoorsman for Yates’s taste. The two were cordial but not close. Yates would make a point of attending the frequent parties at Bourjaily’s farm (or any party to which he was asked), but if the guests were mostly faculty Yates would recede into a quiet corner where he could soak in peace.

He preferred the company of graduate students, the more down-to-earth the better. The first to accept his invitation to the Airliner was a burly Texan named Jim Crumley, and soon they were joined by others who, like Crumley, tended to be married ex-servicemen in their late twenties: Bob Lacy, Jim Whitehead, and Andre Dubus; Ted Weesner and Robin Metz also became part of the circle. After a few hours of noisy, drunken argument, one of the young men would call his wife to say they were coming over (while the others would call theirs to say they weren’t), and the evening would continue until three or four in the morning.

Dubus belonged in another category—perhaps the closest thing to a soulmate Yates ever had (though both men would have cringed at the term). Dubus was a shy, plain-spoken ex-marine who became raucous and swaggering when he drank. As his third wife Peggy Rambach observed, “Andre wanted to be a tough guy. He was picked on a lot as a kid, and both he and Dick grew up in a time when men couldn’t be sensitive.” The two friends would sit drinking on Dubus’s porch for hours—sometimes bellowing at each other amid skirls of laughter, sometimes hushed—and Dubus got to where he could mimic Yates so perfectly that others couldn’t tell them apart. Along with their temperamental affinities, both had unqualified admiration for the other’s work. Within three weeks of his arrival Yates decided that Dubus was by far the most talented student at Iowa: “Most of the clowns here will never be writers,” he wrote Miller Williams, “and it’s depressing to think of their getting degrees called ‘Master of Fine Arts’—Good God!—but [Dubus] is one of the very few exceptions to the rule. I haven’t read much of his work—he’s Verlin Cassill’s student here, not mine—but I read a story he published in the Sewanee Review a while back that really knocked me out. He’s also a fine guy, which supports my rather shaky theory that good writers tend to be good men.” Almost seven years later, when Yates left Iowa for good, he still considered Dubus the most talented student he’d ever encountered there, while in turn Dubus revered Yates as a master comparable to Chekhov.* As he wrote in a 1989 tribute, “Richard Yates is one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in most nations of the world.”

Dubus and the other married students were almost ideal companions for Yates: Most were hard-drinking men’s men who loved to stay up late and talk about books, and they admired Yates both as a writer and a personality. When he wasn’t shouting them down on some literary point or lost in the throes of another hilarious coughing fit, he’d teach them his vast repertoire of show tunes, ribald ditties, and patriotic anthems. He loved the clever rhymes of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart (particularly the latter’s “Mountain Greenery”: “While you love your lover, let/Blue skies be your coverlet…”), which he’d linger over with leering relish as he sang verse after verse in their Quonset-hut duplexes. Along with his occasional cartoons, the nearest thing Yates ever had to a hobby was learning old songs and working out routines for performing them, and his memory for lyrics was flawless. Sometimes he’d prefer obscurity for its own sake, whether a parody version (e.g., “Honey Suck My Nose” for “Honeysuckle Rose”) or an old Wobbly*variation (“You’ll Get Pie in the Sky When You Die [That’s a Lie]”)—but the climax of almost any night’s recital was an old WWII hillbilly anthem called “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Flying Somewhere.” The sentimental vet Yates would become when singing this song was an affecting sight, and fellow servicemen such as Bob Lacy couldn’t resist joining him in joyous harmony. One verse in particular elevated them into a kind of ecstasy:

Though I realize I’m crippled that is true, sir,

Please don’t judge my courage by my twisted leg,

Let me show my Uncle Sam what I can do, sir,

Let me take the Axis down a peg.

“God, how we loved that song!” Lacy remembered. “And, God, how Yates used to love to lead us in it! No doubt there were happier moments in his life. But those were the happiest I ever saw. We’d be gathered in someone’s kitchen, our heads, including Yates’s, all leaned in close together in a drunken bouquet, and the look on his face as he put us through our musical paces would be positively beatific. Occasionally a spouse or girlfriend might stick a head in the door to see what was going on, see what all the racket was. But after one look they’d shake their heads and go away.”

Yates’s high spirits were a necessary outlet, because he was miserable in almost every other department of his life. “Dick walked around with the weight of the world on his shoulders,” said Kittredge. “On the one hand you had the poet Marvin Bell, who’d just written a poem that day and would write another tomorrow, whistling on the way to his eleven o’clock class. Then three o’clock would roll around and here comes Yates shambling down the hallway, depressed as hell because he’s got a six-hundred-page novel and doesn’t know if it’s any good.” Somehow he needed to make his unwieldy manuscript cohere by Christmas, but teaching proved too much of a drain on his time and energy. “If that goddamned movie thing had panned out I wouldn’t be fucking around here!” he’d grumble, faced with at least two hundred pages of student writing a week—with lectures and conferences and chaotic workshop sessions—all in exchange for a gross income of $666 a month, almost $400 of which went to alimony and child support.

Then in October, to make matters worse, he was hospitalized with pneumonia. The Iowa weather was ill suited for a consumptive chain-smoking alcoholic: Scores of pigs were slaughtered each year by hailstones, and it was all but suicidal to run out of gas on a country road in winter. But whatever the season, the creaky old wind-moaning mansion on South Capitol Street was meager shelter at best, and Yates was felled by the first bitter drafts. For two weeks he lay abed in the hospital, deathly ill, alone in a cold alien land, thinking he could scarcely afford to be there. He said as much to Wendy Sears, and sounded so weak and depressed she wanted to “hug [him] to pieces,” while the stolid Sheila was moved to write a kindly note advising him to get well and stop worrying about money (for now). He was somewhat cheered by the concern of his students—one of whom, Jonathan Penner, recalled their hospital visit as an unexpected lesson in Yatesian style: “Steve Salinger sneaked in whiskey. Immediately, Dick poured a shot for his roommate, an elderly farmer. We studied that. That was style.” But such admiration went only so far to alleviate loneliness, to say nothing of paying the bills. “I don’t think I’m at all cut out for this teaching scene,” the convalescent Yates wrote Monica McCall. “It becomes increasingly clear that screenwriting is the only way I can ever hope to achieve minimal solvency and still have the freedom to write fiction.” McCall replied with maternal reassurance: She’d look into getting him that Hollywood job, and meanwhile a further advance on his novel was forthcoming.

Even before his health took a turn for the worse, Yates was an object of tender regard among female students and wives. “He really listened to women when they talked,” said Pat Dubus, “and that was a new experience for us.” Lyn Lacy agreed: “Dick saw more in me than I did myself at the time, and I adored him for it. He was sort of an uncle or brother figure—so friendly, open and interested.” Such intense solicitude on Yates’s part was touched with desperation: More than anything he missed the intimate company of women—a wife, a girlfriend, his daughters. And while the young women at Iowa, married or not, were used to predatory advances (particularly from distinguished authors), there was little of that from Yates: Soft-spoken and handsome, the picture of a gentleman in his coat and tie, he’d prolong the sweetness of their company with fervent curiosity, the only selfish aspect of which was a naked fear of being left alone. “Dick attracted women as a victim,” said Robin Metz, “a kind of Keatsian figure who needed to be cared for.” At least in that respect he’d come to the right place.

In the Workshop there was no particular stigma attached to the rather common phenomenon of love affairs between teachers and students; in principle they were all writers together, and “human moments” were to be expected. Cassill—who looked after Yates in a fraternal way, and was distressed by how sickly and morose he was becoming—urged their friend and mutual student Loree Wilson to help care for him. A single mother who got by on a graduate assistantship, Wilson was strong, voluptuous, and warm hearted, and she adored Yates. “Dick appealed to one’s deepest sympathies,” she said. “He was so clearly unwell, and seemed to be reaching out with those big, soulful eyes, but he could be insatiably needy. He was the loneliest man I ever knew.” As Wilson soon discovered, Yates required at least as much care as that soulful aspect of his seemed to suggest. Mornings she’d find him sitting alone in a booth at the Airliner, forlornly eating a hard-boiled egg with his beer as he listened to Barbra Streisand on the jukebox. Other times he’d call from his apartment—“I’m sick, I’m cold, I’m sitting here in a sweater”—and, if possible, Wilson would drop everything and go make him warm. One day Cassill called and told her something was wrong with Yates, that he’d “lost it” and needed to be calmed down. She rushed over, but by the time she arrived Yates had already taken his “emergency kit” of pills prescribed by Kline. “You’re a good kid,” he murmured as he fell asleep.

Perhaps the best part of the arrangement were Wilson’s children, a boy and girl aged seven and eight. It was widely known how much Yates suffered from the absence of his daughters: He blamed himself for being a bad father, and fretted incessantly over whether he’d be able to provide for them. A necessary solace for Yates was lavishing affection on whatever children were available, whether Wilson’s or the Dubuses’ or the Lacys’. He’d give them his undivided attention and refuse to discuss adult matters in their presence. He was particularly attached to Wilson’s daughter, who sometimes joined her mother in bringing soup and other comforts to Yates’s dismal apartment. Both children were disturbed by his gaunt appearance, his wheezing, and for Christmas they gave him a muffler to keep him warm. Yates had nothing to give them in return, and later became so enraged at himself that he began weeping and beating his fist on the car.

*   *   *

Sam Lawrence’s career had taken some curious turns of late. The previous April, as Yates prepared to leave Washington, Lawrence had come to town and gloomily announced that he’d parted company with Atlantic Monthly Press. As Yates remembered the episode a few years later, “He talked of prospects for a big job at Knopf and asked me, shyly, if I’d stick with him.… Not only did I promise, but we firmly and maybe even mawkishly shook hands on it.” As good as his word, Yates severed his connection with Atlantic as soon as Lawrence was established at Knopf—a somewhat sturdier firm, after all. But Lawrence had gotten used to being in charge of things (“I’m a publisher, not an editor”), and a few months later he took a leap of faith and hoped Yates would follow again: “I resigned from Knopf early this week to embark on my own and establish an independent imprint here in Boston. I want you to be on the First List which will appear in the Autumn of 65. There will be 5 or 6 books and you will be in good company: Brian [Moore], Anatole, Katherine Anne Porter, Alastair Reid.”

This, Yates thought, was getting a bit thick. Certainly it was the wrong time for him to be taking any kind of financial gamble: He was already in debt for a novel he couldn’t finish, his teaching income was a joke, and there were no other prospects in sight. He and Sheila had also decided to take Sharon out of that “dumb, blue-collar” high school in Mahopac and send her to a proper boarding school (“I don’t want Bigger to be finger-fucked by the motorcycle crowd,” he told the Schulmans); just the week before, in fact, both mother and daughter had visited—and set their hearts on—a Quaker school called Oakwood, where the annual tuition was a whopping $2,435. Sheila thought she could arrange a partial scholarship ($800), but either way the expense was grim for a man who could barely pay his bar tab. And though they’d made a gentleman’s agreement, Lawrence’s recent employment record hardly inspired confidence. Monica McCall was adamant: “Sam’s attitude is rather deplorable, certainly arrogant. Not for one moment could I advise you to commit yourself to any editor, I don’t care who it might be, only just starting out on their own.… I told [Lawrence] that your illness had set you back desperately in regard to your work … and that probably he wouldn’t get any answer to his letter. So that lets you off that hook!”

Yates’s poor health, poverty, and general malaise made for a strained Christmas. In New York he stayed with the Schulmans, who were shocked by his deterioration over the past three months. That first evening, as he dined with Grace at the Blue Mill (Jerry was out of town), he told her he was badly in need of medication and had an emergency appointment with Kline in the morning. But any further mention of his mental state became redundant when they returned to the Schulmans’ apartment, where Yates began shouting and kicking furniture. For the first time Grace felt a little afraid of him; they were alone together, and he seemed capable of anything. More than fear, though, she felt a kind of weary exasperation: “Insanity is no excuse for bad behavior,” she told him, then turned around and went to bed. Yates was demonstratively calm the next day, though further outbursts followed and it was a long visit all around.

“I know apologies are a bore,” he wrote afterward, “but I am sorry as hell about those several loud-mouth evenings, and am filled with admiration for your patience in putting up with me.” The Schulmans replied graciously as ever (“people don’t stop caring for one another because of some silly thing like that”), though they were slowly but surely coming to the end of their tether. After a ruckus Yates was sometimes sorry, but seemed incapable of conceding actual insanity and often blamed others for his behavior. If the Schulmans asked him to leave when he lost control, or offered to take him to the hospital, he’d only wax more belligerent—and later, in moments of seeming lucidity, he’d still look back on the incident with a sense of injustice (“Why’d you ask me to leave? Obviously there was nothing wrong with me!”). Though he often complained about his awful childhood—indeed more so all the time*—any suggestion that he augment drug treatment with some form of psychotherapy was met with table-pounding scorn: “Why go to a two-man to tell me what a ten-man has discovered?” By “two-man” he meant an ordinary shrink, and by “ten-man” he meant Freud—or rather (since he didn’t like Freud) some personage of ideal wisdom and tact, which pretty much ended the discussion.

Back in Iowa Yates was “lonesome as hell.” If nothing else, New York had been a blessed respite from his novel, during which he’d almost managed to convince himself it wasn’t as bad as he thought; on his return he resolved to undertake “a crash program to get the bleeding book finished by March One.” But within days he was gloomier than ever—the novel simply wasn’t working, and he didn’t know what to do about it. Also Iowa was cold, he felt sick all the time, and other people weren’t much of a comfort; as for his job, it was a daily torment. “[T]he ‘teaching’ routine grows increasingly dreary,” he wrote the Schulmans. “It’s easy work, but so basically lacking in substance—and even fraudulent—that I’m damned if I can understand how full-grown men can find it rewarding in its own right, year after year. I’ve now firmly decided not to come back here next fall, even if they ask me real pretty.… I’d rather rot in Hollywood than go on performing the ponderous bullshit-artist role I’m expected to play in this place.”

But the privilege of rotting in Hollywood remained purely speculative, and his only immediate chance for escaping the Middle West lay in finishing his novel. So far the only part he’d dared show around was that unimpeachable prologue; meanwhile he’d “tinkered and brooded and fussed” so much with the rest he could scarcely see it anymore—though he sensed something was terribly, organically wrong—and in February he finally accepted the fact that he’d have to get an outside opinion before he went any further. His friend Cassill was the inevitable choice: The author of Writing Fiction and one of the leading practitioner-teachers of same, Cassill was an astute if somewhat captious critic, who for months had bullied Yates to quit “digging himself into a trap” and move on. Yates could count on the man’s probity, but that was rather the problem—if Cassill said the book was bad, the book was bad. And Yates had once told him it might turn out to be better than Revolutionary Road!

“Verlin Cassill’s verdict on my book could not have been more negative,” he informed the Schulmans. “He talked for a long time, some of it incomprehensible but most of it all too painfully clear—he said at one particularly unkind point that it ‘reads like a book written by a man on tranquilizers’ (Jesus!)—and I was pretty shattered for a few desperate and boozy days.” Cassill himself doesn’t remember it that way, and particularly disowns the “tranquilizer” remark. What he recalls telling Yates, in effect, was that the book probably wasn’t as good as Revolutionary Road, but it did have a “Hardyesque compassion” to it and a number of fine incidental things. But at that stage of composition the story of Prentice’s mother wasn’t developed much beyond the prologue, which after all was the strongest section of the book. Hence Cassill suggested that he either balance the war sections with more stuff about Alice Prentice, or just finish the damn book as it was and write an entirely different one about his “crazy sainted mother.” Yates would eventually take most of this advice to heart, but for a while his almost total despair was akin to “a kind of peace”: “I can remember the same kind of thing happening fifteen years ago, when the first X-ray showed that I really did have TB, and could therefore stop worrying.”

*   *   *

After an all-night celebration of his thirty-ninth birthday, Yates became increasingly withdrawn from the communal world of the Workshop. Partly this was a matter of depression and ill health, but a number of other factors conspired to make the whole atmosphere distasteful to Yates. For one thing Cassill was engaged in an ugly feud with the head of the English department, John Gerber, who wanted to absorb the Workshop into the regular academic program. Cassill thought that writers (à la Hemingway’s “wolves” who ought to stick together) should be immune from the bureaucratic, bourgeois rigmarole of conventional academia, and that the MFA should be regarded as a legitimate terminal degree.* Yates agreed with his friend, more or less, but lacked the man’s crusading fervor. “I think my loyalty has been called into question at least once,” he wrote in a later tribute to Cassill, “but then, calling people’s loyalty into question is as much a part of Verlin as his endless conspiracy theories, or his wrong-headed rages,… or his ominous way of saying ‘Ah.’” Reluctantly Yates attended a dramatic meeting at Cassill’s house, where the charismatic host conducted himself like the leader of some revolutionary fringe group. “What will you do?” he hectored each person in turn. “And you?” He thought they should all resign from the Workshop if their demands weren’t met, and insisted on an overt pledge of loyalty from everyone in the room. Yates looked miserable: “Oh Christ, Verlin, do we have to go through all this? Can’t we just talk it out?” Cassill shushed him as if he were a callow little brother: “Dick, you just don’t understand.” At one point Yates looked ill and left the room (“It just seems so concocted—”), and when he finally returned Cassill was pacing and shouting as before. “Is this shit still going on?” Yates sighed. “C’mon, let’s all go have a drink.”

But a tiresome, divisive political situation wasn’t the main reason for his low profile. That spring, as his health and spirits continued to flag, his friend Andre Dubus offered Yates the greatest conceivable form of succor—his wife Pat. At the time he thought it the least he could do where both parties were concerned: Dubus (“a cherry when I got married,” as he put it) had spent the first years of his manhood raising a family, and now amid the swinging milieu of the Workshop he openly made up for lost time with various students and wives; it seemed only fair, then, that Pat be allowed to follow her heart and comfort a talented man who needed all the comfort he could get, and who happened to be one of her husband’s dearest friends.

A nice gesture, perhaps, but hardly one that enhanced the friendship. As Dubus later wrote Yates, “I wasn’t so Goddam happy because, as you know, Pat loved you then and still does, and I reckon I got jealous, not about the boudoir, but the heart.” The tension between them became so sticky that Yates almost gave up going to parties altogether, particularly since a lot of them took place at Dubus’s house down the street from a certain sign on South Capitol that said “Save Two Cents.” Yates felt terrible about the whole thing—he was “a moralist at heart” as Milch pointed out—but not so terrible that he was willing to go without female company. It was certainly a trade-off, though; Yates sometimes had to be seen in public, after all, and Iowa City suddenly seemed a very small place. One day, after Pat had spent the night with Yates, the two men bumped into each other on the street. Dubus’s first novel had just been rejected by Viking, and Yates tried to console his friend over Bloody Marys at the Airliner. “[But] all the time you were feeling bad,” Dubus wrote, “and I knew you were, so I was uncomfortable, and I kept thinking what an ass I was, how I was ruining all those fine moments in all of our lives.” They would not reconcile while at Iowa. Dubus knew that Yates had no intention of returning in the fall, and decided to bide his time until the affair necessarily ended in May. But the last months were sad for both men: They adored each other, and the constrained civility between them was perhaps more painful than outright hostility. For Yates, the year was shaping up as an all but total loss.

Meanwhile another, far older friendship was in danger. In late March Sam Lawrence had finally made a deal with Dell-Delacorte to finance and distribute books under his own imprint; he assured Yates that he was prepared to offer a larger advance and better terms than he was presently getting at Knopf. The month before, however, Yates’s project had been passed on to a brilliant young editor, Robert Gottlieb, who lost no time getting off to a good start with his new author: “I’ve wanted to publish you ever since reading Revolutionary Road,” Gottlieb wrote, “which I loved.” As for Monica McCall’s advice, it was predictably anti-Lawrence: “Was Sam ever useful to you as editor?” she knowingly inquired. “I have had no particular experience with him in that respect, though I have had with Bob Gottlieb and do know that he is magnificent.” Having insinuated the point that Gottlieb was precisely the kind of hands-on man that Yates might require this time around, McCall addressed the main issue: “Sam’s present position could result in one of two things: either further monies from [Knopf] or more money from Sam now that he has Dell-Delacorte behind him.” For the moment, though, McCall urged Yates to stay put.

But at this point the real question was whether he had any book to sell. After Cassill’s withering (or perhaps only ambivalent) critique, Yates had despairingly informed his agent that the novel wouldn’t be ready that spring after all—despite the fact that he’d already promised as much to Gottlieb, despite the fact that Rust Hills had already bought the prologue as an “advance excerpt” for the Saturday Evening Post. McCall replied that he “mustn’t worry”: They’d simply show the manuscript “unofficially” to Gottlieb as a first draft, and the prologue would run in the magazine without any reference to the novel. Official or not, though, Yates dreaded the prospect of presenting inferior work to an admiring new editor, and spent feverish weeks “making notes and drawing spooky diagrams and trying to figure out some way to break [the book] open and take it apart and put it back together a different way.” He even consulted a somewhat more accomplished work, which now seemed to have been written a long, long time ago: “[M]aybe it’s a kind of literary masturbation,” he wrote, “but I’m rereading Revolutionary Road, studying the way it’s put together as if it were written by somebody else, in the hope that it will give me some clues.”

But the mystery remained unsolved, and Yates’s latest annus horribilis—the academic year 1964–65—came to a kind of logical end in early April, when he went to New York and was told by both Gottlieb and McCall that his novel was unpublishable. “I’m afraid we really are in trouble this time, dear,” says Grove’s agent “Erica Briggs” in Uncertain Times. “It doesn’t work as a book. It’s not a war novel because there’s not enough war in it, and it isn’t a coming-of-age novel because the boy doesn’t really come of age.” All was not lost, however: Briggs-McCall suggested (not unfamiliarly) that Grove-Yates expand the narrative to tell more of the mother’s story:

“She’s one of the world’s lost people, isn’t she? And you always do that kind of thing so well.”

“Jesus, I don’t know [Grove replied]. That would be opening a whole new can of worms.”

“I suppose it would, yes. But I know you can work it out.… The point is I can’t handle the manuscript as it stands. I don’t want to represent you with this.”

“So there went the ball game,” Yates wrote friends. If Cassill’s verdict had been the moral equivalent of TB, this was advanced cancer. It was awful on so many levels that it might have inspired a kind of vertigo. The very idea of “expanding” the novel to write in detail about his mother (and hence the ghastly childhood of a character “clearly and nakedly” himself) was “a whole new can of worms,” to put it mildly, and never mind that Dookie wasn’t even dead yet—indeed, still enjoyed the odd moment of fleeting lucidity. Moreover he was sick to death of “that crummy novel” one way or the other, his credibility as a promising writer was waning fast, and he didn’t know what to do next or even if there were any more books in him. And finally he was broke and had no definite source of income that summer, and if it came down to living in Iowa another year he’d pretty much rather die.

“If calling me when you get into your worse moments of panic helps you at all,” McCall wrote him in early May, “then I want you to know that I don’t really mind, except that you create a sense of frustration and failure and pressure, pressure which you know realistically is not necessary!… I know these are hideous days for you, but urge you to try not to panic.” She was pursuing every possible lead in Hollywood: The producer Albert Ruddy presently held the option on Revolutionary Road, and might be persuaded to hire its author to write a screenplay; Ross Hunter or Elliott Kastner might have work, or a man named Richard Lewis who produced TV dramas, or even Johnny Johnson at Walt Disney (though McCall had to admit she could hardly picture Yates as a Disney writer—“however if you can write speeches and articles for Remington Rand…”); and finally Yates’s old Hollywood agent Malcolm Stuart handled a young B-movie director named Roger Corman, who’d just signed a big contract with Columbia and was shopping around for a screenwriter. McCall doubted, however, that anyone would hire Yates sight unseen; he’d simply have to go west and hope for the best. “Train yourself to go into appointments where for the moment it is talk and not necessarily a firm offer of a job,” she advised, “[and] get in the mood where you don’t care if there is a job or not.” Sensing, perhaps, that this was a tall order for such a desperate man, she added two lines from “Chaucer’s translation of the Boethius Cancellations [sic] of Philosophy.… ‘Ne hope for nothing/Ne drede not.’” Yates was well on his way to mastering the first part of that formula.

At the end of May he stopped in New York to see his daughters, but the eight-year-old Monica was upset over the brevity of his visit, and acted moody and unresponsive. More depressed than ever, Yates confided his fears about Hollywood to Nathan S. Kline, who made a referral Yates scribbled on his bill: “Dr. Robert T. Rubin, Neuropsych Inst UCLA.”

*   *   *

Yates’s luck took a temporary turn for the better. Roger Corman hired him in mid-June for “ridiculous amounts of money,” and Yates splurged on a “sleek” Hollywood apartment at 1215 North Harper in hope of attracting visits from his daughters. Frugal as ever, though (where his own needs were concerned), he made up for this extravagance in other ways: His tendency never to change the oil had reduced his previous car to a smoldering husk, and now he replaced it with the cheapest thing he could find—a yellow Volkswagen (used), which he regarded as “Hitler’s car” and cursed himself for buying.

It was a relief to be solvent again, though money went only so far to ease the pain of being back in Hollywood. Phoniness and impermanence were writ large in the very landscape of the place—the ornate plaster facades of drugstores and gas stations and office buildings, the “grubby white edifice of the Hollywood Palladium,” the ubiquitous Orange Julius stands—all around the corner from Yates’s apartment. As for the movies themselves, as for The Industry: “Don’t get me started,” he’d say, but by then he was already started. “The goddamn movies” had a malignant effect on society; they were made by greedy, dishonest, untalented, manipulative bastards, and created a wholly false version of reality that made people think love or success or whatever was right around the corner, when in truth (as they were soon reminded) it wasn’t. “I used to like the movies,” he’d sigh, shaking his head. It was a lousy way to make a living.

But he never lost sight of why he did it. “Guess what, hey,” he wrote Wendy Sears two weeks after his arrival. “Remember how down-in-the-mouth I was because Monica Jane and I didn’t hit it off very well that weekend? Well, by God, today I received my Father’s Day package … and among other goodies there was the following: an illustrated poem by Monica Jane which damn near made me burst into tears, and which I can’t refrain from quoting in full to you.” His daughter’s poem was titled “Father’s Day” and included the lines, “I love you when your near./Little as your here,/I’ll still love you always.” “How’s that for a heart-breaker?” Yates continued. “It’s the ‘Little as your here’ line that really tore me up.… It’s also a little disturbing, because anybody who can write that well at the age of eight is almost certain to have a complicated and difficult life.” Perhaps he also sensed that any daughter of his was bound to have a difficult life no matter what, though it cheered him to be a good provider again—indeed, that fact alone made the situation bearable: “[W]hatever kind of place Hollywood may be,” he wrote the Schulmans, “it certainly beats the hell out of Iowa City.”

He was also fortunate in his employer, whom Yates forever exempted from his general indictment of the industry: “[Corman] turns out to be a very nice and smart and gentlemanly fellow,” he wrote, “nothing at all like Frankenheimer, and he seems to like what I’ve done so far.” Still in his thirties at the time, Corman had already made some seventy movies and managed to turn a profit on almost every one; unlike Frankenheimer, he didn’t consider himself an Artist in his own right, though he took a pardonable pride in his proficiency for cutting corners, and the quality of his product set an almost legendary standard for watchable schlock. His approach to collaboration was also highly agreeable to Yates: After the basic idea was worked out, he’d modestly insist on a few fundamentals (story structure, the visual nature of the medium), and leave nuances of character and dialogue to the writer—in this case a writer whose work he deeply respected.

In fact Corman hadn’t hired the author of Revolutionary Road for just another B-movie. Rather, the director’s first vehicle for Columbia was meant to be something of a breakthrough in his career—a big-budget feature about the Battle of Iwo Jima called The Inevitable Island, to which Corman wanted to take an innovative approach if at all possible. “I poke around trying to find some wrinkle in the Iwo Jima story that hasn’t already been crushed flat by John Wayne,” Yates wrote the Parkers, and after a couple of weeks he came up with a treatment that satisfied Corman as well as himself—that is, the battle as seen from both sides, Japanese and American, with all that implied of sympathetic ambiguity, a very Yatesian refusal to reduce any character to a demonized stereotype.

Except, perhaps, certain Hollywood characters. As long as Yates was out on the Coast, he thought it wise to take a meeting with Al Ruddy (the future producer of The Godfather), who professed a grim determination to make a faithful adaptation of Revolutionary Road despite the obvious obstacles of the industry. As Yates told this “funny Hollywood story” to the Schulmans,

[Ruddy] turned out, predictably enough, to be a very agreeable, friendly bullshit artist, the kind of young man who has read somewhere that ‘vitality’ and ‘magnetism’ and ‘integrity’ are considered attractive traits. For the first five minutes he’s elaborately, embarrassingly respectful, creating this atmosphere of Hushed Reverence, see, because he Admires my Work so much (so very, very much) and because he’s always, always wanted to meet me. Get the picture? Okay. Then pretty soon he turns into this brusque, ballsy, rough-diamond kind of guy: hell, maybe he’s crude and maybe he’s coarse, in his own lovable way, but no son of a bitch in This Town, in This Industry, can ever say he’s copped-out on a property yet. For instance, let’s take a property like Revolutionary Road. Let’s take the ending. Is that a problem? Why hell, let’s face it, of course it’s a problem. Nine guys out of ten in This Town would cop-out on a problem like that—but wait. Listen. Do I know what he’s gonna do?

Then he moves into his third phase: he becomes Creative. Suddenly he’s pacing the floor with wild eyes, waving his hands around to show me different camera angles—he’s gonna cut into this flashback here, lay-in this dialogue there, match-dissolve to this track-shot, then dolly-back and pan and zoom into this close-up.… His plan is to make the ending of the picture so artsy-craftsy, so impossibly full of tricky camera work, that the audience is left hanging in doubt as to whether April Wheeler is dead or alive. And the punch line of the whole story is what he said when I asked him if he didn’t think that might be a little confusing, or a little ambiguous. He said, and this is an exact quote:

“Well, but don’tcha see? I’m trying to eat my cake and have it too!”

In the end, of course, it came to light that he has absolutely no plans for producing the picture in the near or even foreseeable future … and that the whole afternoon was really just an opportunity for him to try out his personality on me.

*   *   *

Though he halfheartedly resumed his affair with the aging Catherine Downing, Yates was almost entirely alone those first months in Los Angeles. Roger Corman saw little of him, and what little he saw was reassuring; rather like Frankenheimer he dimly remembers Yates as a “friendly but reserved” man who drank a little more than normal, maybe, but otherwise gave no sign of being troubled. After Corman okayed the initial Iwo Jima treatment at the beginning of July, there wasn’t much need to speak until the screenplay (which would take a certain amount of research) was finished three months later. Unknown to Corman, Yates spent roughly half that time hospitalized at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.

Apart from Dr. Robert T. Rubin,* the only known witnesses to Yates’s breakdown, Catherine Downing and Bill Reardon, are both dead. Yates’s address during much of his hospitalization was “c/o Catherine Downing, General Artists Corp.,” and ten years later she wrote a brief note to Yates after reading Disturbing the Peace: “There’s really not much that I am able to say.… It’s just that I have always known you would eventually write the book and that reading it.… would be a painful experience for me. I want to give you the well-deserved words of congratulations and praise, but I can’t just now. Today is a fragile day for me.” Monica Yates attests that John Wilder’s third, most devastating breakdown in the novel was “as true as [her father] could write about how [his breakdown in Los Angeles] went,” and what slender evidence exists would seem to confirm as much. Such a meltdown may explain Downing’s lingering trauma ten years later, as well as the fact that she and Yates mostly avoided contact after the summer of 1965.

Yates’s relief over the “ridiculous amounts of money” he was making didn’t last long, and the main theme of his letters throughout July was loneliness. When he wasn’t working on the Iwo Jima script—which hardly engaged him the way Lie Down in Darknesshad—there were long nights of despondent brooding over his distant daughters, the writer he used to be, everything. He made a number of drunken phone calls to his Iowa friend Jim Crumley, who was going through a divorce at the time. Mostly they talked about broken homes, but once Yates mentioned that he’d just spent a night in jail for drunk driving; he’d gotten lost in one of the hilly sections of Los Angeles, he said, and the contemptuous attitude of the arresting officers had enraged him.

As with other breakdowns, Yates’s drinking became more compulsive as he tried to medicate his rising mania, and like John Wilder he probably stopped sleeping (hence the late-night drives). In the novel Wilder complains to Dr. Rose at UCLA that he needs his prescriptions refilled, but the young man won’t oblige him without a records-release form from “Myron T. Brink” (the Nathan S. Kline character) in New York; meanwhile the best he can do is advise Wilder to stop drinking immediately. What happens next was perhaps the sort of thing Rose’s real-life counterpart, Robert Rubin, remembers so vividly about Richard Yates:

For the fourth night in a row—or was it the fifth?—[Wilder] hardly slept at all. No amount of whiskey could make him drowsy as he sat or sprawled on the sofa and tried to think things out, and he watched the morning break through the closed blinds.…

“Mr. Wilder [said Dr. Rose], these phone calls are becoming a little bizarre.”

“Whaddya mean? This is the first time I’ve—”

“You called me four times yesterday, three times at the office, and once at home, and you called twice the day before. I’ve heard a great deal about ‘emergency kits’ and ‘shots’ and all sorts of disconnected talk, and I’ve given you the same advice each time: ‘stop the alcohol.’”

Yates was perhaps desperate enough to take such advice to heart, but by then it was too late. In an earlier fragment of Disturbing the Peace, the protagonist (a tall man named “William Jeffries” in this version) tells a doctor that he realized he’d been drinking too much prior to his breakdown and poured a whole bottle of Jim Beam down the sink; as for Wilder, he smashes his bottles against the wall of his apartment. But like both characters Yates nonetheless ended up wandering Sunset Boulevard (so he told his second wife) dropping large bills out of his wallet while a mob gathered in his wake—an interesting gesture, given Yates’s loathing for the way he’d made such “ridiculous amounts of money.” In any event, he seems to have acted on some sort of expiatory impulse: When he was arrested for disturbing the peace, Yates apparently told police that he was Lee Harvey Oswald; he also thought (once again) that he was Jesus Christ.

What happened next was a blur to Yates and hence to posterity. On the aforesaid novel fragment he scribbled a note to himself: “West Hollywood Sheriff’s Office. Los County Gen Hospital Psych Unit. Zonal Ave.” Thus a doctor tries to reconstruct for “William Jeffries” (while the latter enjoys a brief spell of Thorazine-induced lucidity) what happened over the past week—namely, that Jeffries was taken from the police station to the County Psychiatric Unit for three days, then removed to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital (where John Wilder also finds himself at a similar juncture). It’s likely that Yates checked himself out of the hospital prematurely—as he was wont to do, especially in later years—and went on a rampage of sorts. At some point he made the usual raving phone calls to Sheila, convinced that he’d hurt or possibly killed their children; again and again she assured him they were fine, they were right here, but it was no use; sometimes, too, he sang nursery rhymes. Either Sheila or Yates or Catherine Downing got in touch with Bill Reardon, who caught a flight to Los Angeles and helped his friend commit himself to UCLA. As Reardon pushed the necessary documents under his nose, Yates thought he was certifying his identity as the new Messiah, or else signing confessions of one sort or another. (“In the bughouse I thought I was Jesus,” he told a girlfriend. “How does that grab ya?”)

All this was during the first week in August. By August 10 his daughter Monica had written a get-well card, though she was misinformed about his illness. After the latest disturbing phone calls, Sheila bluntly announced to Sharon that her father had suffered a nervous breakdown, and added that Monica should know nothing except that he was in the hospital. From now on, Sheila insisted, either she or Sharon would answer the phone—never Monica, unless it was one of their father’s regular Sunday-morning calls. She then wrote Yates a comforting note: “We have had a wonderful, relaxed summer, and the only cloud on our horizon has been your illness.… All your worries are just terrible dreams you are having.… If there were anything more serious than a cold wrong with either of the children, I would let you know immediately.”

In the meantime word of Yates’s predicament had spread, at least on the other coast. “I am awful sorry to learn of your dark passage,” McCall wrote on August 23, “but very happy to learn you are at the psychiatric department of UCLA.” As soon as he was sufficiently sane to do so, Yates had written or phoned such people as McCall, his children, Wendy Sears (who’d written on August 18, “Are you still alive? Where are you? Why aren’t you writing or calling?”), and the Schulmans; his friend Reardon had notified everyone else. “I had a full report from Bill Reardon,” wrote his old girlfriend Natalie Bowen, who congratulated Yates for doing “the right thing” by committing himself. “The only thing that worries me is that you’re so leery of psychiatrists. I hope you’ll let one of them get at you this time, no matter how painful it is at first. It’ll be much better for you than all the pills in the world.” Yates may or may not have appreciated such well-meaning advice, but he was clearly alarmed by the extent of the gossip. He obliquely queried people in the publishing world, and the response was less than reassuring. Marc Jaffe at Bantam wrote that he hadn’t heard “much” gossip, and promised not to “spread any unfortunate word around Madison Avenue and/or East Hampton”; but Rust Hills had heard plenty, and hectored Yates to write more and drink less: “The fact of talent is really given to very few; Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe—they all drank like fish and seemed to us to have acted in self-destructive ways. It’s very romantic—but they all did their work.… [Your friends] don’t gossip about you, but they sure worry about you.”

As the whole thing began to sink in, Yates seems to have accepted such lectures as his due. Time would tell how much this latest fiasco had cost him, financially and otherwise, but for now he was determined to limit the damage as much as possible. In the hospital he worked steadily on his screenplay, impressing staff and patients alike with his industry. Also he met regularly with Dr. Rubin, whom he described to the Schulmans as “voyeuristic”; to what extent he let the young man “get at” him is a mystery, though there’s no question Yates was at least somewhat persuaded that alcohol was a big part of the problem. By the time he was released on October 2, he was taking Antabuse and attending AA meetings; also his screenplay was finished and by his own account he looked five years younger. Unfortunately a few specters lingered from “the great travail”: A shady character named Dr. Salem insisted that Yates was still under his care, and was calling around to inquire into his patient’s whereabouts (“he is not my doctor,” Yates warned McCall, “and not to be trusted”); also Yates discovered that he was persona decidedly non grata at his former apartment, and in a rush he was forced to take rather seedy lodgings on Clark Street—“the kind of place you commit suicide in,” as he put it.

*   *   *

While in the hospital Yates was somewhat heartened by the reception of his novel’s prologue, published as “A Good and Gallant Woman” in the September 11 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. “People found it very warm and moving,” Rust Hills wrote, “and so well made that they are astounded when I tell them it is a novel sequence.” A second excerpt titled “To Be a Hero” ran two weeks later, and was also successful despite Yates’s being too deranged to approve galleys in time for a rushed production schedule. “I made it as good as I possibly could,” Hills reported a bit defensively. “It was certainly your job to do, not mine.” Some of Yates’s friends remarked on the abrupt ending of the second excerpt, but both stories were listed in the 1966 “Best” volume, and “A Good and Gallant Woman” won an O. Henry Award.

Meanwhile Corman was delighted with the screenplay: The only immediate change he made was to scotch the fancy title and go with the more saleable Iwo Jima. Yates was emboldened to send a few copies of the script to friends, though he tried to downplay it as so much craftsmanly hackwork: “There are several good things in it,” he wrote Cassill, “but basically it’ll be just another combat flick, the kind you forget five minutes after finishing your popcorn.” One of the copies floating around Iowa fell into the hands of Andre Dubus, which prompted an icebreaking postcard: It was a “fine well-focused script,” Dubus wrote, though he couldn’t help but point out that “Marines call ’em NCO’s, not non-coms.”

The movie was never produced. “Dick wrote a very good script,” Corman recalled, “but it was turned down by Columbia—some misunderstanding, or double-dealing, or misinformation. Turned out they wanted me to go on doing medium-budget films.” Not only did studio executives want a less elaborate, more commercial picture, but they were also unimpressed by the whole Japanese-are-people-too angle, and thought the two lead characters on either side of the battle should meet at the end (a convention that Yates and Corman had expressly nixed). Hence the project was killed; Corman was assigned to shoot the kind of slapdash Western he did so well, and a few weeks later the studio fired him after he gave a disgruntled interview to the Los Angeles Times. Yates had since moved on: Days after his release from UCLA, he was hired by producer David Wolper to do a rewrite of another World War II movie, The Bridge at Remagen.

Yates was busy enough but lonelier than ever. He no longer had a female companion, his apartment depressed him, and he was sober. That summer he’d sustained himself (or not) by looking forward to his daughters’ visits—they’d definitely planned to come for Christmas, and he hoped to coax Sheila into letting them have at least one other visit in between. But recent developments had changed all that: “This is your third breakdown,” Sheila wrote, “and you are, as you yourself are now recognizing, an alcoholic.… I can understand your wanting to mend your fences as fast as you can, but it would be better for [the girls] if you let the past lie and concentrate on getting well. You have been a good father, and they love you.”

Worried that Yates’s sobriety was unlikely to last under the circumstances, both Wendy Sears and Sam Lawrence made a point of informing him that his old friend Brian Moore was also now in Hollywood, writing a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock (Torn Curtain). Yates, however, seemed in no hurry to get back in touch—his respect for Moore as a writer was unwavering, but he’d come to regard the man as “kind of fat and grumpy and sour”: “He’s a very, very touchy guy,” Yates wrote a friend. “He absolutely hates to have anyone praise Judith Hearne, however elaborately, with even the faintest implication that it’s his best book (which of course it is).” Meanwhile the vast sums Moore was making as Hitchcock’s screenwriter might have served as a further disincentive for resuming the friendship. But finally Yates got lonely enough to leave a message at Universal, and Moore replied with a note inviting him to his house in Malibu.

Yates reported afterward that he’d “never seen such a change in a man”: Moore—married to a “stunning new wife” (that is, his old friend Frank Russell’s ex)—was “trim, expansive and happy as hell.” On the other hand, now that Moore was something of a Hollywood bigshot, Yates also found him rather “abrupt and impatient” at times, and noticed that he seemed to prefer the company of other bigshots. The most agreeable exceptions were their mutual friends Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne—or rather, as the latter liked to say (or as Yates liked to tell it): “I’m John Gregory Dunne, the writer”—pause—“and this is my wife, Joan.” “What a colossal ego!” Yates would hoot. “Joan is the real writer in that family.” A year later Didion used Yates as a reference for the Guggenheim she needed to complete her second novel, Play It As It Lays, which Yates considered something of a masterpiece (“you are one of the very few people I hoped would [like it],” Didion wrote).

In mid-December Yates flew back to New York for five days—time enough to deliver presents to his daughters and see a few friends—but on Christmas Eve he was alone again in Hollywood: a ticklish business for a recovering alcoholic outpatient living in a stark apartment off the Sunset Strip. At 6:45 that evening he called the switchboard at the Hollywood Studio Club (a sort of YWCA for would-be starlets) and asked for Frances Doel, who was out; Yates left a message but no number. A little before midnight he called again: “Where’ve you been?” he asked. The young woman, flustered but not displeased, replied that she’d been out with friends. “Of course,” Yates sighed. “That was dumb of me.” Then he asked if she was doing anything for Christmas Day, and if not, would she like to have dinner with him? She was not, and she would.

Doel was Roger Corman’s twenty-two-year-old assistant, who’d just arrived in the States that summer after taking a degree at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. One of her teachers had recommended Eleven Kinds of Loneliness as “an example of good American writing,” and a year or so later who should appear in her boss’s office but the good American writer himself. “He was my romantic ideal,” said Doel—meaning, more or less, that he was a handsome, talented man who appeared to be down on his luck (“I’d grown up in a culture where failure was glamorous,” she added). Doubtless Yates sensed her interest but kept her in reserve for some emergency: During the Iwo Jima project he’d been polite and bantering at times, but not very attentive. They’d exchanged a few greetings at the Copper Skillet, near the studio, and once during a script conference he’d suddenly asked Doel if she had any ideas: “No,” she said, and Yates shouted, “Think! That’s what you’re paid for!”—then burst out laughing. But that was pretty much the extent of it until Christmas.

They went to a meat-and-potatoes place called Tail of the Cock and had a low-key conversation about books, Hollywood, and their awful childhoods. Yates brightened when Doel mentioned that her father, killed in the war, had worked for General Electric, but his glee waned quickly as he recounted his own father’s career in the Mazda Lamp Division, as well as the man’s almost total absence during his childhood. Doel was in a position to suggest, however, that it might have been worse: She told Yates that her stepfather was a miserly, ineffectual man who’d treated her with such cruelty that her mother had tried to kill him. This seemed to chasten Yates, who was gentle and protective toward Doel from that point on. Later they went back to his melancholy apartment, for which he apologized. “Dick generally expressed bewilderment at finding himself in a particular place and time,” Doel remembered.

*   *   *

While in New York, Yates had seemed stable enough to warrant a Hollywood visit from his daughters in late January, and in preparation he moved to a nicer apartment on Sweetzer Avenue—a small two-bedroom that opened on a catwalk balcony. As he counted the days and struggled to make progress on the stalled Remagen script, he was hourly tormented by the glibly clicking typewriter of Charles (True Grit) Portis, who lived on the same block. As ever, Yates wasn’t able to write fiction while he worked on something else, though he did brood and make notes about it every so often. “Haven’t done any more wrestling with the abortive manuscript you read last year,” he wrote Cassill, “and doubt if I will for some time, if ever. A whole new novel is more likely and I’ve got the barest beginnings of one started.” But that soon petered out, and again Yates wondered if he was all washed up; he wrote Dubus that he was sober and functioning, but couldn’t seem to write a single decent line (“Is just ‘functioning’ being alive at all?”), and one awful night he told Loree Wilson that maybe it didn’t matter if he ever finished another book.

But later that spring he wrote Cassill, “I’m feeling pretty jaunty for a change. I’m loaded with ideas for maybe salvaging that crummy novel—mostly, oddly enough, along the lines you suggested last year: more stuff about the mother, less about the kid.” Meanwhile Bantam had reissued paperback editions of Yates’s first two books, and while sales were thin (“Not an unhappy experience for [Bantam],” Marc Jaffe reported, “but not up to expectations either”), the mass-market printing would at least bring somenew readers and remind others that Yates was still alive. And finally the altruistic Cassill was doing his best to liberate Yates from Hollywood, if only for a while; he’d learned that the National Council on the Arts was awarding ten thousand dollar grants to eight novelists that fall: “[Yates] has been in Hollywood for the past year,” Cassill noted in his recommendation letter, “doing the kind of bitter work one does there when he is neither quite in or out of the screen writers guild. The year before that he taught in the Workshop at Iowa—and with all the sordid, backbiting politicking that went on that year, I can’t think we gave him much of any chance to write.” He concluded that Yates was the “most deserving” of any writer he knew, and urged a quick decision in his friend’s favor (though as it happened recipients wouldn’t be notified until August).

Amid such ups and downs, his daughters’ visit helped “take the curse off this loathsome town,” as Yates put it. This time there was no sitting around Howard Johnson’s debating the day’s activities; Yates had planned almost every hour in advance. The girls flew first-class and ate lobster on the plane, and were duly impressed by the fact that, for once, they had a bedroom all to themselves. They went to Universal Studios, visited Brian Moore’s swanky home in Malibu, and met a number of pleasant grown-ups who paid attention to them. They also took a day trip to Tijuana, though this outing proved a bit much for the cranky Monica; at one point she stood, arms folded under a giant souvenir sombrero, and imperiously commanded her father, “Take me to the car!” (For years afterward, Yates delighted in saying “Take me to the car!” whenever she started pouting.) Monica invented a game during the long drive back that was much to her taste: It involved making her father say “What?” so she could retort, “Shut up!” Lest his older daughter feel slighted, Yates arranged for some “irresponsible college kids” (as Monica remembers) to baby-sit while he and Sharon went to a fancy restaurant and saw The Sound of Music at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

After the girls had left, Yates became increasingly morose. One night he and Frances Doel drove to Van Nuys to have dinner at the home of Peter and Polly Bogdanovich, but the evening was not a happy one for Yates. At the time Bogdanovich was a bright young man trying to get started as a writer and director; he’d met Yates through Corman, and deferred to him as the author of a distinguished novel. Bogdanovich, however, depressed Yates on almost every level: The young man was determined to be a serious artist in Hollywood, while Yates hated the place and was stuck plugging away at his “loathsome” Remagen script; worse, Bogdanovich’s then-happy marriage was a painful reminder of Yates’s own broken home (much on his mind at the moment). As Doel summed it up, “Peter represented lost opportunities for Dick.” On the whole Yates was far more relaxed having casual chats with his neighbor Portis, who understood what it was like to spend most of one’s life alone, writing fiction of whatever sort.

Yates began drinking again in March. He considered AA meetings a maudlin bore, and as for the twelve steps—well, he’d tried to seek out a few people he’d harmed and ask their forgiveness, but he hated that part almost as much as being sober. Perhaps the last straw was in late February, when he got in touch with his old girlfriend Craige because he blamed himself for pushing her into hard-core alcoholism. Sure enough, the woman was still plastered. “Is this some kind of AA thing?” she asked. When Yates admitted it was, she berated him with a slurred tongue and hung up on him again and again. “The purpose of this letter is really to apologise for my extraordinary conduct on the telephone,” she wrote afterward. “It must have cost you pots of money and been terribly depressing. I really don’t remember much after you called back the last time except that it must have been pretty bad on my part.” On Yates’s part, too.

Another reason sobriety was out of the question was The Bridge at Remagen—an experience that made Yates long for the halcyon days of Iwo Jima. As he wrote Cassill,

[The story] is all tricked out with sinister Nazis, plucky GI’s and more cliches than Louis B. Mayer ever dreamed of. On Iwo I was left pretty much alone; this time I’m stuck with a pea-brained “Story Editor” who wants to control the whole project and has his own dreary and emphatic ideas for each scene. But the money is far better than I got for Iwo, so I’m keeping a tight asshole and ought to be done with it by April, when I hope to buy a little free time.

Yates was looking forward to an additional ten thousand dollars when he submitted the finished script (in its “final-final stages” as of late-March), but Wolper apparently wanted another rewrite and fired Yates without further payment.*

For whatever byzantine Guild reason, though, Yates was given lead screenwriting credit and hence received the odd residual pittance once the movie was finally released in 1969—though Yates had disowned it so completely that he even refused to list Remagenon his otherwise all-encompassing résumé of 1973. He told friends he was appalled to have his name associated with such a “dog,” and claims the final version was an almost total rewrite. But the basic idea Yates brought to that original, cliché-ridden script does seem to have remained intact—to wit, the whole Germans-are-people-too angle: The Bridge at Remagen cuts between “plucky GI’s” (George Segal et al.) and not-so-sinister Nazis (Robert Vaughn et al.), the better to suggest that war is hell no matter what your nationality. And that’s not the only abiding Yatesian touch, as the author himself pointed out during Thanksgiving 1969 with Robin Metz’s family, when they all piled in a car to see the movie at a local drive-in. Yates took a sheepish bow as Metz blared his horn—“This is the guy who wrote it! Right here!”—but as they settled down to watch, Yates began shaking his head (“Nope, didn’t write any of that…”), then suddenly bolted upright and thrust a finger at the screen: “There! I actually wrote that part!” The “part” was a gold cigarette case that’s fumbled on the bridge by Nazi Vaughn and recovered by GI Segal, for whom it becomes a prize possession while its previous owner is reduced to cadging a last, sad fag before he’s shot for desertion; thus the gold case serves as a neat little objective correlative suggesting the spoils of war, the common bonds of humanity, and so forth. Suffice to say it’s the best thing in the movie.

After the Remagen debacle Yates was finished with movies, or so he thought. “I wouldn’t want to try it again,” he said as late as 1981. “It’s a brain-scrambling business.” That left teaching, though if possible he was even less enthused by the prospect of Iowa than a year before: Cassill had bitterly resigned, while most of Yates’s old grad-student pals, including Dubus, had taken degrees and moved on. Even after the Workshop officially invited him back with a three-thousand-dollar raise, Yates continued to test the waters elsewhere—the University of Arkansas, San Francisco State, University of North Carolina at Greensboro—but there were no takers, and in June, Yates accepted his fate. “We are delighted,” Bourjaily replied, offering his family’s old apartment ($155 per month) to Yates when he returned in the fall.

He was in no hurry to move. “Still hate [Hollywood],” he assured Cassill, “but I think I’ll hole up here anyway to work on the book, rather than spend the dough and time necessary to go back to New York or somewhere else. In a way it’s a good place to work because it is so lousy—no very tempting distractions.” By then, however, it didn’t take much to distract Yates. That summer another refugee from the Workshop, Murray Moulding, came to Los Angeles to join his clinically depressed wife who was in the midst of intensive psychotherapy. Moulding was the kind of rich Ivy Leaguer whom his former teacher had scorned (“There’s Murray, squirming in his chair to tell us the news again”), but now Yates was just relieved to have a reliable drinking buddy. He didn’t even begrudge Moulding the large inheritance that enabled him to buy a fancy home in Brentwood: “Hey, Styron was a rich guy, and he did okay,” declared a newly pragmatic Yates.

Fair to say the two were not a good influence on each other, despite Yates’s occasional stabs at being a wise big-brother type. “One of these days I’ve got to do something about this,” he said frowning at his glass; Moulding tipsily suggested he go back to AA, but Yates shook his head. “Nah. Once you’ve done it, it doesn’t work again.” Add to the picture a melancholy, neglected wife, and the household might have resembled a Eugene O’Neill play. Attempts to seek more wholesome diversions were less than successful. One night they bought tickets to The Fantasticks, but the Mouldings got in a fight and were an hour late picking up Yates, who sat placidly drinking on a wall outside his apartment. A few minutes into the play he was fast asleep, and incoherent when they roused him for intermission.

Frances Doel remained a port in the storm, but the young woman’s extreme adoration seemed to make Yates uncomfortable, especially as he began to fall apart in earnest. He’d try to act jaunty as he drank his morning martinis, but Doel would insist on gazing into his eyes, which (she recalled) “betrayed feelings that went against the grain of his conversation.” Impotence was again a problem. Earlier, when he was sober, Yates had responded to the odd lapse with a kind of fatherly aplomb: “Well, I guess this has never happened to you before—you’re too young,” etc. But now that he was drinking again, impotence became a suggestive aspect of his overall desperation. “Don’t leave me!” he’d plead as he was falling asleep, though the smitten Doel hadn’t the faintest notion of doing so; indeed she was flattered by his need (though she could scarcely help but detect something a little impersonal about it). Even if she hadn’t been in love, it would have been hard for Doel to abandon such a tormented man. When Yates disappeared for several days in mid-July, Doel was convinced he’d had another breakdown: “Forgive me,” she wrote him, “but I called the UCLA place in case you were there. I wanted to come and see you … but I didn’t because I thought you probably wouldn’t want that. Then again, it might be that your family would be here with you, so whatever the circumstances it seemed I shouldn’t worry you.”

He wasn’t quite crazy, nor was he with family. Rather, he’d received a long, semiarticulate fan letter (and perhaps a photo) from a woman in Texas named Carole,* whom he tracked down by telephone and offered to fly expenses paid to Los Angeles. Her two-year-old daughter from a previous marriage was also welcome. Murray Moulding described the woman as a “free-floating opportunist” and “groupie,” while Robin Metz called the episode “a Maureen Grube–type affair: life imitating art.” Like Maureen Grube (in Revolutionary Road), the woman had a bad complexion beneath heavy layers of makeup, but also a voluptuous body and a kind of coquettish vulnerability that made her attractive, at least to Yates. Also she was willing to match him drink for drink.

Yates later told his second wife that he knew he’d made a mistake the minute this woman walked off the plane, but the truth is somewhat more complicated. She was, after all, bright enough to appreciate his work (whole paragraphs of which she could quote verbatim), and a letter she wrote Yates in 1970 reflects a kind of grandiosity that might have seemed intriguing at first: She describes herself as “brilliant,” an “emotional genius,” and so on; she also calls herself Yates’s “soul-sister” and cryptically alludes to the “things that went on between [them]” that he “may have completely forgotten.” Her intellectual pretensions almost surely annoyed him, as she claims to have made him feel “edgy and challenged all the time”: “I made you nervous, even when I tried to play the role of a background stage-setting. What all this amounts to is HELP! ‘Where did I go wrong?’”

At the time Yates seemed rather sheepishly pleased with himself. He wrote friends that he’d “found a girl”—his “fair Texan”—and broke the news to Frances Doel as though he expected her to be happy for him. After his mysterious disappearance, he asked Doel to meet him at an old haunt, the Raincheck Room on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he greeted her with a “guiltily triumphant” smile: “You thought there was something wrong with me, didn’t you? Well, there isn’t.” He then explained about the “healthy woman” who’d helped him over that “problem” he was having. He spoke to Doel as if she were a fond old confidante who happened to be familiar with the problem in question. The young woman was stricken but tried to seem pleased.

This meeting was meant to be good-bye, though Doel didn’t know it at the time. When the days passed and she didn’t hear from Yates again, she paid him a visit on the pretext of returning some books; he was sitting alone amid some boxes, about to leave Los Angeles. Doel burst into tears: “I tried to be stoical—not to let my emotions go to the point where they became false, as Dick would have it—but I couldn’t help it.” Yates tried to comfort her, then rummaged through some boxes and came up with copies of his two books. Doel had once mentioned how much she used to love Christmas pantomimes in England, and that she’d always preferred playing the principal boy in Shakespearean productions at school (she found it oddly fascinating that the audience knew she was really a girl). Hence Yates inscribed Revolutionary Road, “For Frances—Who may once have wished to be a Principal Boy but who, in a far larger and more desperate pantomime, has been unforgettable as my principal girl. Love, Dick.” Then he took her hand and walked her back to the apartment she’d recently found on the same block.

“The world was out of sync for days after,” Doel recalled. To cheer her up, the Bogdanoviches took her to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which turned out to be a “terrifying” experience: “I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t match the words with the images.” Yates wrote her a last kindly letter, but she never saw him again and remained haunted by his memory. “I obsessively studied the jacket photos: He looked ill, rapidly aging, and I guessed things weren’t going well. Then there were no more books, and then I saw his obituary. I’d always had a sense that I could call him, that he was at least around, and suddenly it was no longer possible.”