Return to Peyton Place (3 page)

It took Grace thirty days to write
Return to Peyton Place.
What began as a ten-, and then twenty-page “original screenplay” for twenty-five thousand dollars huffed and puffed into a ninety-eight page “novelization,” which Dell agreed to publish if Wald came through with a movie version. Wald had smartly reversed the “tiein” process whereby hardback publishers contracted for a book only if a paperback firm guaranteed it by purchasing reprint rights or Hollywood showed interest by buying movie rights.
Return to Peyton Place
became the first published book that originated as a movie “treatment,” a practice Wald made famous and that in turn made him one of Hollywood's most successful producers. It made Grace angry and sick.

Grace Metalious gambled that readers would understand the book for what it was: “a Hollywood treatment. It was never intended as anything else.”
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To her, the short-page novella was an expensive bone tossed to a greedy Jerry Wald. She may also have been thinking of her many fans who so often requested a sequel. And certainly the beginnings of the novel must have given her a sense of satisfaction: payback time. Here she used her considerable narrative skills to illuminate the cupidity she experienced as a young writer thrown, as she saw it, to the literary wolves. The main story of
Return
follows Allison MacKenzie and her family after she finds success by selling her novel
Samuel's Castle
to a small publishing house in New York City. More parody than satire, the novel strolls down Grace Metalious's own rise to fame like a bitter vogueing act. As with her own novel,
Peyton Place,
the publication of
Samuel's Castle
raises the indignation of townspeople, causing her stepfather, the Greek schoolmaster Mike Rossi, to lose his job and the neighbors to shun her and her family. And like her own bewilderment at having to rewrite
Peyton Place
to meet the demands of editors and publishers, Allison is forced to make alterations to
Samuel's Castle
that she fears will ruin her book and turn her into a hack. When she meets her new publisher, Lewis Jackman, we can feel Grace's own anger at Kathryn Messner, who forced Grace to change the incestuous relationship between Selena Cross and Lucas Cross into a nonfamilial rape by making Lucas the stepfather of Selena rather than the father. “No one,” Messner and her editor pointed out, “would believe the story otherwise. Incest simply didn't exist, at least that's what people believed at the time.”
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“There are places, Miss MacKenzie, where your manuscript is a little too much,” the suave Mr. Jackman tells Allison in
Return
. “He fingered pages of her manuscript and Allison wanted to slap him. She felt as if she had had a child and that Lewis Jackman was now fondling that child in a depraved, obscene fashion” (56). If readers wouldn't believe in child sexual abuse, Grace would show them publishers, agents, and Hollywood producers who raped writers and prostituted themselves every day. Grace always believed that by turning Lucas Cross into Selena's stepfather, her editors had turned “tragedy into trash.” In
Return,
Grace slapped back.

But
Return
also provides readers a small window into Grace Metalious's vulnerability and intense insecurity. Known for her generosity of spirit and purse, the celebrated author often lent people, even strangers, large sums of money. She took unusual amounts of time to write back to her fans; she never turned away strangers who came knocking at her door; and she didn't ignore fans who asked for her autograph, even while dining out. But, like Allison, it all seemed to Grace an unearned celebrity. “I feel like such a fraud,” Allison tells Lewis. “I know it's only me, little Allison MacKenzie. Why doesn't everyone else see that?” (93). Grace Metalious knew what it meant to feel inadequate; to live as an outsider hungry for acceptance, validation, and love. Running throughout
Peyton Place
is a pervasive sense of Otherness, of people who are not quite “right” and who feel the weight of being different. In
Return,
readers could marvel at Allison's success, make that dream their own, and recognize in themselves the writer's longing for acceptance and validation as well as for material things. But it was Allison's undercurrents of unease in the public world of success and fame that performed in the sequel some of the emotional and psychic services rendered by the original. “Walking through the lobby of the Plaza, Allison looked at the expensively groomed, beautifully dressed women who sat chatting or strolling about. They were at their ease, in their element; places like this were a customary part of their daily lives. For them there was nothing dreamlike or exotic about stopping at the Plaza for cocktails. Will it ever be like that for me? Allison wondered” (60). Readers wondered, too.

But writing
Return
gave Grace the literary shakes. Concerned that she had sold out on some level, she also worried that
Peyton Place
might be remembered as a one-shot wonder. She began to drink heavily. But she also fought back. In both novels, Grace Metalious floats the unfashionable notion that popular stories and mass-circulated books are not mindless “ooze,” as literary critics so famously asserted throughout the fifties. Acutely aware that women writers were especially vilified for their popularity and high sales figures, Grace positioned Allison in opposition to the “boy geniuses” so admired by Norman Page and represented by David Noyes, who wrote what Allison referred to as “Novels of Social Significance.” “David was twenty-five and had been hailed as a brilliant new talent,” we learn in
Peyton Place.
“He wanted to reform the world and he had a difficult time understanding people like Allison who wanted to write for either fame or money” (PP, 356). In
Return,
Allison's book sells in the millions, not because it is good, David suggests, but because of its “sexy” parts and fraudulent publicity. David belittles her for her radio and television appearances, until Allison finally yells, “Maybe you don't care what happens to your books, but I care what happens to mine. What's the good of writing anything if nobody reads what you write?” (89). Like Grace, Allison wanted to write quality books, but she also took pleasure in knowing that millions of readers—many of whom had never picked up a novel before—had found her story to be meaningful and compelling. Nor would she concede to David the right to define the boundaries of quality. “She had made up her own mind: if there was a price to be paid for all this, then she would pay it. But she would not take David's way, would not sneak out the back door. She was young, but not so young that she still believed that art could be found only in a cold-water flat” (92). The cult of the solitary genius struggling alone in his garret fit the American literary imaginary, but Allison “had outgrown” it. Like her creator, she never confused poverty with literary merit, or popularity with bad taste.

Whatever Jerry Wald thought of the effort is unclear. Scriptwriters would rewrite the story anyway, so it had little effect on him. But no one else involved with the project was pleased. “We used her name,” Helen Meyer of Dell Publishing recalled. “But we hired somebody else to do the writing.”
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Too short, it was also at times incomprehensible. Grace refused to look at it again. In her place, Dell hired Warren Miller, a reputable writer of fiction whose novels had sold well. He took on the job, Emily Toth explains, as a “hoot” and earned a flat fee for the effort of several thousand dollars.
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Miller continued the saga of Allison's return to her small New England town as a celebrity authoress. Selena Cross, Betty Anderson, Constance MacKenzie, and Mike Rossi return to their lives, each haunted in some way by the shadows cast in
Peyton Place.
Miller obviously enjoyed hacking out the melodramatic sequel, but where his fun begins and Grace's ends remains uncertain. Just how the autumn birth of Rodney Junior “got figured” is also unclear. Grace never met Miller, and if she had? “Another Bloody Mary down the shirt,” T. J. offered.
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Given Grace's distaste for Wald's treatment idea, we can read
Return
as a mélange of cynicism, irony, self-parody, and spoof. And Grace Metalious's fingerprints are all over it. Consider the weird tale of Roberta Carter and her panting daughter-in-law, Jennifer. In
Peyton Place,
Ted Carter is the handsome boyfriend of Selena Cross, but his ambition to become a famous lawyer trumps his love, and he drops Selena when she is put on trial for the murder of her father. In
Return
disloyal Teddy gets his. Ted marries Jennifer, the daughter of a well-known and prosperous Boston lawyer. Unlike the loving and loyal Selena, Jennifer is manipulative, selfish, and wanton. Together the young couple visit Peyton Place often to see Ted's overly involved mother, Roberta Carter, and her husband, Harmon, both of whom had teamed up long ago to murder Roberta's first husband, the naive, but wealthy, Dr. Quimby. It is classic Grace Metalious melodrama/ camp. Roberta is out of fifties central casting: a whining, clinging mother who is jealous of her daughter-in-law's relationship with her son. She spies on their lovemaking. She thrills in their violent sexual encounters in Ted's childhood room. What is to be done? In true pulp fashion, Roberta plots to kill off the lustful Jen. And how, readers might wonder, does an ordinary woman in small-town America manage that? “Roberta Carter began to read murder mysteries … During the day … she wrote down the plot of each novel and listed the clues that had finally landed each murderer in the nets of the police. In this way, she discarded murder by shooting, stabbing, strangling, and poison” (200). What was left? Keep turning the page, the author answers. A lover of Nancy Drew, Grace Metalious knew how to use suspense, but she also understood that fiction was where many readers turned when seeking knowledge about life and sex, so why not murder?

Return
was a publishing success, but the reviews tortured Grace. “Whatever the inspiration that sent a flat-wheeled caboose clattering after Author Metalious' steam-powered first novel,
Peyton Place,
”
Time
magazine announced, “the sequel bears all the marks of a book whacked together on a long weekend.”
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Critic Elizabeth Bayard, an admirer of
Peyton Place,
was irked. “It takes more than spying on the eating, drinking, and love-making habits of Mr. Mrs. and Miss America to make a memorable novel,” she scolded. Grace had hoped the book would pass “unnoticed” or at least that reviewers would understand that it was a script written for Hollywood. “People are all saying I couldn't write a second novel. It's a Hollywood treatment … It was a foul, rotten trick. They made a hell of a lot of money on
Peyton Place
and they wanted to ride the gravy train … I've been played for a sucker all around.”
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Her emotional swings grew more intense and frequent. She drank more. Fights with T. J. escalated. Money rolled in and then flew out. “The bottle is empty,” Grace told a friend, “and I can see myself at the bottom.”
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There were still many highs after
Return:
Grace would complete two more novels, both of them well received by critics and audiences alike. Her oldest daughter, Marsha, would provide her with a grandchild, and Grace would remarry her first husband, George. But
Return
had taken a toll. “Return to Peyton Place should never have been written,” George Metalious later wrote. “It was another event in a series that helped in undermining Grace's confidence and contributed to her feelings of inadequacy.”
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But Grace also began to recognize the logic of Jerry Wald's universe.
Peyton Place
had become a cash cow. If the author had lost her “baby,” she nevertheless maintained cultural capital as the authorized voice of Peyton Place, whatever its commodified form. But it was a Faustian bargain Grace made reluctantly with herself. When money needs pressed, taxes came due, and business ventures turned sour, Grace returned with new ideas of how to milk the Peyton Place cow.

“I think Hollywood would like another P.P. script,” Grace wrote to her agent in the summer of 1961. “In spite of the fact that I've screamed No, No to this idea I might consider it now because of a project in which George and I are interested here in New Hampshire. It would not interfere with the new book because any day that I can't turn out a silly script for those silly bastards at 20th century I'll turn in my typewriter and get a job in an insurance office or something.”
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She was responding to a letter earlier that year from Jerry Wald, who had just previewed the rough cuts to
Return to Peyton Place.
“I can certainly say that lightning does strike twice in the same place.” The film featured the music of Franz Waxman, whose score for
Peyton Place
won an Oscar. Eleanor Parker played Allison's mother Constance, and Carol Lynley replaced the elusive Diane Varsi as Allison. Unlike the
Peyton Place
movie, which premiered in Camden, Maine, without Grace, Wald agreed to Grace's request that the first showing of
Return
be held in Laconia, New Hampshire, the closest town to Gilmanton that had a movie theater.

The success of the book and the early cuts of the film convinced Wald that there was money still to be made with Peyton Place. “One of the future projects I have in mind,” he wrote, “is a story dealing with the conflicts between the townspeople and the constantly changing influx of students and teachers into a small New England town which has a college which offers a rather special situation, which should provide possibilities for interesting dramatic conflicts.” The new sequel, he suggested, might be called “Spring Riot in Peyton Place.”
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Grace thought the idea “nuts,” then went on to develop a storyline of her own.

Only the outline remains. At the age of thirty-nine, Grace Metalious died suddenly, if not surprisingly, of “chronic liver disease.” Known as the writer's disease, cirrhosis built up dangerously in her liver before many in her family even knew that she was sick. A few months before her death, the motel that she and her husband George owned—“one of the future projects”—failed, and Grace wrote a panicked letter to her agent. “I could write another book, but as at December 12th, 1963, I feel that a contract and all the worry that that involves would be impossible for me. Is there a magazine market which could be met from Gilmanton, is there a newspaper market for Gilmanton gossip?”
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Can writing kill? “Disenchantment,” Grace once wrote, “is a slow, painful, agonizing process. Sometimes it is a long road, and in the beginning you don't even know you're on it, then when it is too late you can't even fight or find a way back.”
Return
was not a book Grace was proud to have written. But it is an enduring monument to an agency embodied in writing's social life. To reread
Return
is to enter into the complex relationships between authorship, book production, hierarchies of taste, readerly desire, and the labor of writing in an age of commodity production. It is also to grasp the thin hopes and fears of a young woman born on the social and cultural margins of America: an outsider even to those who knew her best. “I'm glad you came,” Allison tells a friend at the end of
Return.
“You've helped me a lot … by reminding me that the world isn't full of mobsters waiting to cut me down. And by showing me that work will exorcise all the ghosts that haunt me” (238). Grace may not have written this ending, but it was the kind of “happily ever after” finale she dreamed a literary life could ultimately provide. To the delight of her fans, Grace Metalious kept on writing, but in the end, words failed her. They were never enough; the demons always returned. Grace Metalious died in Boston, Massachusetts, and returned for the last time to Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where she was buried in the spring of 1964.