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What polite conversation hushed up,
Peyton Place
opened up to readerly fantasy, invention, and guarded conversation. Typically unused to candid portrayals of incest, abortion, oral sex, female lust, and female sexual pleasure outside of sleazy magazines and pulp books, readers dog-eared pages, exchanged scenes with friends, and memorized lines. In the imaginary topography of
Peyton Place,
readers—some of whom had never picked up a book before—readjusted both the parameters of the “normal” and their own relationship to it. So, too, did they find a depth and authenticity lacking in much of popular culture. “The first requisite these days of a best seller,” a woman from Springfield, Oregon, wrote to Grace Metalious, “is that it be liberally sprinkled with sex. However … you have taken the reader into the intimate world of this so vital part of life. I found a depth in the book that I have not found in any other so called ‘best seller.'” She was not alone: thousands of women and men, young and old, mostly working class and white, wrote of how the book opened up to them “real life” in ways that seemed “true to life,” “honest,” “really good writing.” If for some it was a sex manual, for many others it was a way to remap the insistent contours of sexual and gender normativity.

It is often difficult for readers today to imagine the social landscape that confronted the “silent generation,” but in 1956 many sexual acts betweeen consenting adults, including sodomy, oral sex, and sexual intercourse with a partner not legally one's one, were prohibited by law in most states. Abortion was illegal and understood to be an unfit topic for conversation. Rape was a word seldom printed and always uttered in a whisper. Birth control was unreliable and hard to get. Divorce was a source of shame, even a sign of mental instability. In several states it was illegal for a physician to even discuss contraception with an unmarried patient. Female sexual agency was itself highly suspect: a concern among policy makers and, at times, a cause for medical and psychiatric intervention. Forced sterilization remained a viable option with which to treat delinquent girls. Homosexuality was punishable by fines and incarceration. Books that printed such things were confined to railroad stations, newsstands, and drugstore racks, where gaudy covers and titillating images signaled their trashy place on the margins of respectable literature.

Yet even as sexual frankness in popular culture gained traction in the mid-fifties, especially after the famous
Kinsey Reports,
talk about sex in the private sphere remained difficult. “They coped,” the writrer Annie Dillard recalled of her mother's friends. “They sighed, they permitted themselves a remark or two; they lived essentially alone.” Sexual knowledge was difficult to locate in an era when communication between parents and children, and even among friends, was often circumspect and limited. In her fictionalized account of growing up in the 1950s,
That Night,
Alice McDermott recounted how her mother struggled to tell her daughter that their neighbor Sheryl, an unmarried teenager, was pregnant. “After a botched, embarrassed and only sporadically explicit attempt to explain what Sheryl had done, she told me, ‘Let's say the stork missed our house and landed on hers.'” For some,
Peyton Place
was all they had, and because it was published by a respectable, hardback firm, readers could purchase it openly in department stores, five-and-dimes, and in quality bookstores. “I learned a few things from your book that I will not soon forget,” a fan wrote to Grace. And like many books,
Peyton Place
circulated as gossip, outrageous tale, and hot commodity in ways that brought the hidden but suspect into everyday conversation. “I heard my mother and her best friend whispering in the kitchen,” one reader recalled. “As soon as I entered they whipped a book into a bag, but they were too slow. I had caught my mother reading Peyton Place, a book banned by our own town library.” Peyton Place was not just a written text, it was also a “spoken text,” a story whose meanings and influence increased as readers discussed it, exchanged passages, and used it to interpret, measure, and reimagine their own lives.
¹⁶
“Please keep on writing,” fans implored the controversial author.

Grace Metalious had every intention to do just that. Before starting
Peyton Place
during that “winter of horrors,” she had completed another novel while her husband, George, attended the University of New Hampshire under the G. I. Bill. Entitled “The Quiet Place,” the story was based on a professor who had lost his position at the university due to his homosexuality. In the wake of
Peyton Place
, Grace planned to rework the manuscript she now called
Tight White Collar
. But the reception of
Peyton Place
as a “dirty” book—“a bad book without redemption”—stunned and wounded her, putting her on the defensive well before she had time to cultivate confidence as a writer. Not unlike the nineteenth-century literary domestics illuminated by historian Mary Kelley, Grace Metalious was a housewife who struggled to write, primarily as a way to earn money.
¹⁷
When she heard that her agent had sold
Peyton Place
to a small but well-regarded publishing firm called Julian Messner, she thought that “If I made $10,000 … I could pay off all the money we owed and have enough left over to see me through the winter.”
¹⁸
It was, after all, her first publication. But as the “hullabaloo” unfolded, the newly published author found herself at the center of intense controversy: an “ordinary” housewife and mother whose “filthy” book called into question her fitness as both. “I don't know what all the screaming is about,” she told Patricia Carbine of
Look
magazine. “To me
Peyton Place
isn't sexy at all. Sex is something everybody lives with—why make such a big deal about it?”
¹⁹

The controversy catapulted sales overnight, but her fame vastly outpaced her confidence. A few months after her publishing debut, the young author was invited to appear on television's hottest new talk show,
Night Beat
. The brainchild of Ted Yates and Mike Wallace—whose irreverent and and confrontational interviewing style quickly earned him the nickname “Mike Malice”—
Night Beat
pioneered late-night programming, pulling into television's orbit millions of viewers eager to watch Mike take on the rich and famous.
²⁰
Grace arrived by limousine, her new boyfriend, local New Hampshire disc jockey T. J. Martin, in tow. Nervous and uneasy in the public eye, Grace felt especially vulnerable under the
Night Beat
gaze, not only because of its hard-hitting reputation, but because the show was recorded live, an unedited hour that pioneered tight camera close-ups, black backgrounds, and one-on-one exchanges. The arrangement was designed to make guests sweat, and Grace obliged. Already uncomfortable in the requisite panty-girdle and skirt that replaced her comfortable dungarees and flannel shirt, she visibly wilted under the hostile gaze of Mr. Malice. “I thought your book was basic and carnal,” Wallace thundered. “You did, huh?” Grace squeaked. “What gives you the right to pry and hold your neighbors up to ridicule?” Grace's eyes moistened.

Poised offstage in her Schiffli-embroidered dress, fashion commentator Jackie Susann watched in fascination and horror as Wallace hammered away at America's most successful authoress. As Barbara Seaman tells the story, Susann prayed for divine intervention. “Don't let this woman cry in front of millions of people,” Jackie pleaded. “Get her through this show, God, and I won't smoke another cigarette tonight.”
²¹
Grace played with her ponytail, twitched, pulled at her skirt, but she didn't cry. Then, suddenly, she altered course, rattling Wallace by calling him by his hated birth name, “Myron,” and asking him to tell the audience how many times he had been married (three), a subject still taboo on television and especially sensitive to the reporter.
²²
But to watch Grace Metalious on old television interview shows is to see a person much in conflict with herself: a vast insecurity and emotional vulnerability cohabitating with a keen intelligence and driven ambition. Wallace remembered liking her, “he found her ‘ample, not unattractive'” he told Toth. Others recalled her plainness: a drab ordinariness made more pronounced, perhaps, by her earthy use of language and her sharp wit. When Carbine, later a founder of
Ms
magazine, asked Grace if there was anything about sex that offended her, the young author quipped, “Far worse to me than any sex act is unattractive food, and I'm no gourmet.”
²³
To read Grace Metalious was to expect sartorial fireworks, confident poses, and ebony cigarette holders. Al Ramrus, a writer for
Night Beat
, imagined the author of
Peyton Place
as “a very flamboyant, outspoken, colorful woman,” but he found instead an overweight wife and mother who “could just as easily have been sitting behind a drugstore counter.”
²⁴
Susann, with her “spiky false lashes, chain smoker's gravelly voice, and glittery dresses,” was equally stunned by Metalious's plainness.
²⁵
But it was the popular writer's complete lack of promotional skills that made the future author of
Valley of the Dolls
rethink her own career plans. “How could this woman, ‘chunky, depressed, and colorless,' Jackie wondered, write such a popular book “almost in spite of the author's publicity efforts?”

Grace, too, was amazed by her success. It dazzled and at times frightened her. Unlike Susann, who could bring all the elements of Hollywood hucksterism into the promotion of her books—pioneering bookstore signings, personal appearances, and celebrity tie-ins—Grace knew little about publishing and even less about promotion. She imagined book publishing to be a noble endeavor, a business run by professor-types in corduroy jackets with patches on their elbows and pipes always at hand. She found an agent by going to the Laconia, New Hampshire, library and picking out the first French name on the list. Handsome, charming, and debonair, he would eventually cheat her of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If Jackie Susann brought to publishing “show-business vulgarity,” Grace brought images of art and culture, erudition and refinement. Press agents, producers, and promoters shocked, then irritated and bruised her. Publicity of all kinds rekindled a constant sense of inadequacy—not pretty enough, never able to fit in, unloved and ultimately unlovable. When reporters flocked to Gilmanton to interview her, she hid in Laurie's farmhouse. “She was a very scared girl,” Gilmanton neighbor Ken Crain remembered. “After the book came out, nobody let her be, and she was even more scared.”
²⁶
Even New York City—which once excited and thrilled Grace—grew increasingly traumatic, its tinsel tarnished by the pressures to produce another best-seller. Twenty months after her literary arrival at “Club 21,” Grace Metalious distanced herself from the city, settling into her beloved Granite State retreat, the Cape-styled house she had purchased with her fifteen-hundred-dollar advance for
Peyton Place.
Whenever she got back from New York, “she'd sort of embrace the fireplace,” her former friend and lawyer recalled, “as if it were the Rock of Gibraltar.”
²⁷
Even after neighbors shunned her and friends bled her dry, Grace never stopped calling Gilmanton, New Hampshire, “home.” “Here I was safe,” she told a reporter. “I drank, I wept.”
²⁸

Twenty months after the publication of
Peyton Place,
Grace hugged the fireplace, embraced the April mud season, and looked forward to “my return to normalcy.” In February she had married Thomas James (T. J.) Martin, the man she publicly and scandalously admitted was her lover. “My life,” Grace told reporters, “has resumed a pattern now. The only thing that is over is the storm. At last I have found my way safely home.”
²⁹
When reports circulated that Grace Metalious was planning to write another
Peyton Place
book, she fumed, “That's a damn lie. … I'm not going to write about Peyton Place again, that's for sure.” And she meant it.

Not long before their marriage, Grace and T. J. had taken an extensive road trip out West. There they met with Jerry Wald, a sharp-eyed, up-and-coming producer who was fast turning Grace's “fourth baby” into a major motion picture for Twentieth Century Fox. But it soon became clear to everyone that Grace was not to have any part in the making of the film. Her “consulting job,” she quickly realized, was a joke. Hollywood was a “wasteland,” a “junk heap,” the treatment of women “dreadful,” with actresses sorted and branded like “cattle.” What Wald wanted was simply the publicity generated by Grace's presence in Hollywood. Grace Metalious left in a fury, but not before giving Wald a searing tongue-lashing and the scriptwriter John Michael Hayes a Bloody Mary in the face.
³⁰
“The whole trouble with Hollywood and me,” she would generously write a year later, “was that we did not know each other's language.”
³¹
But if Hollywood and Grace had a communication problem, Wald had no intention of providing a translator. Like the colonists who bought Manhattan for mere trinkets, Wald profited by the tangled languages that separated writers from their stories and authors from their titles.
Peyton Place
might have been Grace's “fourth baby,” but Twentieth Century Fox was its legal guardian. The studio owned movie and television rights to
Peyton Place
but also, and most unusually, owned the name. There would be no residual rights.
Peyton Place
was now a brand name, a simple commodity uncoupled from individual authorship. It could return or not, depending on the commercial needs and plans of Twentieth Century Fox.

In the wake of
Peyton Place
's success as a film, Jerry Wald became convinced that lightning could strike twice, and legally nothing prevented him from creating a script for a new
Peyton Place
film. Indeed, the idea of hiring anonymous writers to produce stories from outlines created by corporations was central to the emergence of the cheap-book business and the expansion of a mass audience. Early in the twentieth century, literary syndicates such as the famous Stratemeyer group operated by developing ideas for books, pitching them to publishers, and then outlining them for ghostwriters hired to develop the story, usually into a “series” published under pseudonyms like Carolyn Keene, the invented author of girl detective Nancy Drew.
³²
Even before the syndicates, however, entrepreneurs of dime novels and story papers had depended on “unauthored discourse,” pulling into the production process anonymous writers who could meet tight deadlines and write according to formulas designed by others.
³³
“In authorship, as in more tangible things,” noted the historian Mary Noel in 1954, “demand expressed in dollars and cents created a supply. With capital came the ‘hack,' who was as much a product of the Industrial Revolution as was the Hoe printing press.”
³⁴
Wald adapted the concept to suit the needs of studios, using “tie-ins” that increasingly bound authors and their hardback firms to paperback publishers and Hollywood studios. When Wald telephoned Gilmanton in the spring of 1958, all he wanted was a ten-page script. Grace's return to normalcy was over.