Shark Trouble (4 page)

Frightened, disoriented, and addled by excruciating pain in my locked legs, I extended an arm and … nothing. Nobody grabbed it.

I spun in place, and …
well, no wonder
. The boat was ten yards away and drifting farther.
No! Impossible! The boat was anchored …
I
was the one drifting.
I was caught in a surface current and being swept away.

I raised my arms, hoping to communicate that I was helpless in the water, and somehow that message got through to our director, Scott Ransom, who grabbed a rope, flung himself off the stern of the boat, and swam to me. Together we held on to the rope, and the crew pulled us to the boat.

I never once looked down. If the tiger shark was pursuing us, I didn't want to know.

Thus ended the “easy” leg of the shoot, the training leg, the get-acquainted-with-sharks leg. From here on, I knew, matters would become serious. We were headed south, to Dangerous Reef, where I would climb into a flimsy cage bobbing in a sea of blood and a crew of dedicated experts would do their best to entice a great white shark to approach the cage and attempt to eat me.

Why,
I wondered.
Why did I have to write a novel about a shark? Why not a novel about … well, I don't know … a puppy?

5

Jaws

 

I began to think about writing
Jaws
in the early 1970s. I remember phoning my father, Nathaniel, one day in Nantucket, where he lived year-round. He was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and author of children's books. By the time of his death in 1981 he had written seventeen novels, of which the best known was a wonderful story called
The Off-Islanders,
which was made into the movie
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
He also wrote such enduring kids' books as
Sam the Minuteman
and
Red Fox and His Canoe
.

“What would happen,” I asked him, “if you cut a body in two? What would float? Any of it?”

“Depends where you cut it,” he said. “Cut it above the air sacs, the lower half will float. Cut it below the air sacs, the upper half will float.” He paused, then asked, without a flicker of worry or judgment in his voice, “What're you up to?”

“Trying to tell a story about a shark.”

“That's some shark.”

“Yup,” I said. “I don't imagine anything'll come of it, but I figure, why not?”

“Sure. Nothing to lose.”

What I was doing, in fact, was making one final attempt to stay alive as a freelance writer. Since 4:00
P.M.
on January 20, 1969, when the Secret Service had forcibly ejected me and a dozen bibulous colleagues from my gigantic office in the Executive Office Building in Washington, where I had labored for the previous twenty-two months as the youngest and least-qualified of President Lyndon B. Johnson's speechwriters, I had had no steady employment.

I was scratching out a few days' work each week from subdivisions of the
Newsweek
division of the Washington Post Company, rewriting correspondents' files into stories for newspapers and TV spots for impecunious local stations across the country, and I was writing articles, on anything, for anyone who would pay for them: book reviews, movie reviews, travel pieces for
Holiday
and
Travel & Leisure,
stories on everything from the nouveau chic to the recession economy for
The New York Times Magazine,
and—most lucratively and enjoyably—reports from Nantucket, Bermuda, and New Zealand for
National Geographic
magazine.

I lived at the time with Wendy and our two small children in a tiny house in Pennington, New Jersey, which was—we had determined after weeks of comparison shopping—the least expensive suburb of New York.

I tried to save a couple of days each week for work of my own (a very writerly thing to say, full of promise that from my spare time would spring a
Ulysses
for the 1970s or a seminal exegesis of the Dead Sea Scrolls). The results were, mostly, short stories that didn't sell to
The New Yorker
and film scripts that didn't sell to anyone. Since there was no room to work at home and I couldn't afford a proper office, I rented, for fifty dollars a month, an empty back room in the Pennington Furnace Supply Company. The manufacture and repair of furnaces isn't the quietest of businesses, nor the most conducive to the flowering of the creative imagination, but since the garden of my imagination appeared to be producing only weeds, little seemed to be lost to the music of sledgehammers against sheet metal.

I was very fortunate to have a literary agent. As a favor to my father, one of his agents, a kindly and generous woman named Roberta Pryor, had taken me on when I was sixteen and had—
mirabile dictu
—actually sold a short story of mine when I was twenty. (I received one fan letter, from a woman who pronounced the story the single most execrable piece of rubbish she had ever read.) In my early twenties I had written a nonfiction book about a journey around the world, and it had sold out its only edition: five thousand copies, I recall, most of which I'm certain were bought by my grandmother. Still, my freelance income was hardly enough to reimburse the agency for postage spent on my behalf.

Roberta refused to give up on me and encouraged me to have lunch with editors from publishing houses, a ritual that provided countless writers with vitally necessary meals and encouragement and, now and then, even generated a viable book idea.

I kept two arrows in my quiver expressly for those lunches. One was a nonfiction idea about pirates—as in, a history of. Pirates had always interested me. The other idea was for a fictional story about a great white shark that lays siege to a resort community. Folded in my wallet was a yellowed 1964 clipping from the New York
Daily News
that reported the capture of a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island. I would brandish it at the first hint of disbelief that such an animal could exist, let alone that it might attack boats and eat people.

I believe implicitly, though without a shred of evidence, that every male child on earth is, at some period in his life, fascinated—enraptured! enthralled!—by sharks or dinosaurs or both. Most of us outgrow our obsession. A few—we happy few, we band of brothers—are able to indulge it throughout our lives. I spent my summers, from 1949 to 1961 and occasionally beyond, on the island of Nantucket, whose waters were well populated by sharks: sand sharks, blue sharks, and, once in a great while, a mako. I fished frequently, and on hot and windless oil-calm days the Atlantic Ocean surrounding Nantucket sprouted shark fins like asparagus spears. To me they spoke of the unknown, the mysterious, of menace, prehistory, and adventure—and (when I'd get carried away) of primeval evil.

I had read most of the accessible literature about sharks—there wasn't much—and had seen
Blue Water, White Death,
the 1971 feature film that, for me, remains the finest documentary ever made about sharks. So I knew as much as any civilian about sharks, and I could spin my idea into a yarn sufficient to justify the lunch tab.

Editors went away interested and armed with a vague pledge from me to write an outline—sometime, about something to do with sharks—and I went away and didn't write the outline.

Then, one midday, I had lunch with Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, and when he returned to his office he had the temerity to violate all the rules of the ritual: he called Roberta and offered to pay me money—one thousand dollars—for the first four chapters of an untitled shark novel, to be applied against an overall advance of seventy-five hundred dollars, which would be paid when—and, most critically,
if
—I delivered a complete and acceptable manuscript.

Of course, I fell headfirst into the trap. A thousand dollars was exactly a thousand dollars more than I had at the time; it was nearly half a year's tuition at our children's school; it was … well, hell, thirty years ago a thousand dollars was real money.

I signed the paper, took the money, cashed the check, didn't write the four chapters until Roberta told me I'd have to either write them or return the money (which, naturally, had vanished). Then I
did
write the four chapters, and Tom didn't like them because I had tried to write them
funny
. (A funny thriller about a shark eating people is, I soon realized, a nearly perfect oxymoron.) I rewrote the pages, and Tom liked them, so I continued with the rest of the story, which didn't proceed anywhere near as easily as I'm making it appear, but which did, at last, get done, after more than a year of writing and rewriting.

There were problems with the jacket design of the book. One version was rejected by Doubleday salesmen, who said they couldn't sell a book that looked so disgusting: it brought to mind, they claimed, the Freudian nightmare of the
vagina dentata
. Another was too boring. Another was black. Then Doubleday's artistic genius, Alex Gotfryd, found the perfect combination of erotic symbolism (Freudian, but nobody said so), blatant (but acceptable) sexuality, and horror.

There was a problem with the title: we didn't have one. Half an hour before the book was to go into production, there was still no title. Tom and I sat over lunch at a steakhouse called the Dallas Cowboy and reviewed some of the more than a hundred titles we had tried. I had come up with titles reminiscent of French novels in vogue at the time, like
A Stillness in the Water
and
The Silence of Death
. There were monster titles:
Leviathan, Leviathan Rising, The Jaws of Leviathan
. There was
White Death
and
The Jaws of Death
and
Summer of the Shark
. My father contributed
Wha's That Noshin' on My Laig
? and (for the hard-core crowd)
Cunna Linga Here No Longa
.

Finally, when we had finished lunch and Tom had paid the check, I said, “Look, there's no way we're gonna agree on a title. There's only one
word
we agree on, so let's make that the title. Let's call it
Jaws
.”

Tom thought for a moment, then agreed. “At least it's short.”

I called my father and told him the title.

“What's it mean?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “But at least it's short.”

I called Roberta and told her the title. “That's terrible,” she said. “What's it mean?”

“Beats me,” I replied. “But it sure is short.”

Though no one liked it much, no one had a better idea, so no one disagreed. After all, they reasoned, what we have here is a first novel, and nobody reads first novels, anyway. Besides, it's a first novel about a
fish,
for God's sake, and who cares? At least it's done.

Furthermore—and as a final dose of reality—we all loudly agreed that there wasn't a chance that anybody would ever make a movie out of the book. I knew it was impossible to catch and train a great white shark, and everybody else knew that Hollywood's special-effects technology was nowhere near sophisticated enough to make a credible model of a great white shark.

So we called it
Jaws,
and put it to bed, and that, for the time being, was that.

The book was published in the spring of 1974, to generally favorable reviews. Though the reviewer for
Time
dismissed it, the
Newsweek
critic liked it well enough.
The Washington Post
loved it, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of
The New York Times
liked it a lot, but with reservations. I thought that the last line of his review—“Read ‘Jaws,' by all means read it, and see if you agree”—was a great “money” line and should be plastered all over every ad (with the minor deletion of the few useless words “and see if you agree”), but Doubleday hesitated to mutilate a quote from a
Times
review.

Nor would they use in their ad campaign my all-time favorite review. Fidel Castro, in an interview with Frank Mankiewicz for National Public Radio, pronounced
Tiburon
(
Jaws
in its Spanish editions) not merely a popular fiction but (I'm paraphrasing here) a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism. Other reviews declared the book to be an allegory about Watergate and a classic story of male bonding, which Doubleday also declined to publicize.

Jaws
was not, in hardcover, the gargantuan best-seller that legend has made it. It climbed slowly up the best-seller list of
The New York Times Book Review,
and though it lingered on the list for forty-four weeks, it never made it to number one. An obstinate book about a rabbit,
Watership Down,
refused to relinquish the number one slot and relegated
Jaws
to months at the bridesmaid's position.

Nor did it sell anywhere near the number of hardcover copies that a comparable best-seller would today. Nowadays, a novel by Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, or Danielle Steele may sell as many as two million hardcover copies, cover-priced at around twenty-five dollars.

Jaws,
priced at $6.95 in hardcover, sold something in the neighborhood of 125,000 copies. If you think that I, as the author, should be able to offer numbers more precise than “in the neighborhood,” you're right, but unpredictable returns, multiple editions, and so forth make it difficult to do so.

The story in paperback was entirely different. Sales figures were, if anything, underestimated. It was number one for months on lists all over the world. In the United States alone it sold more than nine million copies. But that success had to do, in part, with the release of the movie, with brilliant cross-promotion by the paperback publisher and the movie company, and with phenomenal good luck.

Film rights to
Jaws
had been bought, for $150,000, by Universal Pictures on behalf of Richard Zanuck and David Brown, two of the few true gentlemen in the movie business. Thoughtful, generous, and honest, Messrs. Zanuck and Brown are widely known for two qualities rare in Hollywood: they don't lie, and they do return phone calls. They permitted me to write a couple of the early drafts of the screenplay, and—knowing that in the heart of many writers lives a secret ham—they actually cast me in the film.

The movie went into production not long after the book was published, which provided additional publicity momentum. I visited the set, played the role of the TV reporter on the beach on the Fourth of July, was cast by the press as being in constant conflict with Steven Spielberg—which was not true but which, through repeated telling, nearly became self-fulfilling—and tried, meanwhile and unsuccessfully, to live a normal life.

Sometime during that hectic spring and summer of 1974, John Wilcox, producer of ABC's venerable television show
The American Sportsman,
contacted me through an old friend to ask if I'd be interested in traveling to Australia to do a show about going into the water (in a cage, of course) with great white sharks.
Sportsman,
which ran for twenty years, from 1966 to 1986, was among the first and best of the “magazine-format” sports shows. Each week it ran three or four segments that featured celebrities from one field participating, as rank amateurs, in one or another outdoor sport. A movie actor might go bass fishing; a baseball player might try bird shooting; John Denver would observe polar bears in the wild (and exclaim, time and time again, “Far out!”), and old chums with legions of nostalgic fans, like Bing Crosby and Phil Harris, would perform duets and exchange light banter while fly fishing and reminiscing by a campfire.