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than a week after he returned from San Francisco, the telephone rang at midnight: Jerry Wald of Twentieth Century-Fox wanted Cheever to write a treatment for an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl, the hitch being that he'd have to work in Hollywood for a few weeks—a big hitch, as Cheever saw it, and despite the money he almost refused. The prospect was ominous for a number of reasons. As he considered other writers who'd accepted such work, and been tainted by that milieu, he couldn't think of “anyone who [had] come out of it intact.” The most baleful example was Irwin Shaw, whose most recent fiction had struck Cheever as almost awesome in its vulgarity, as if written expressly for the movies. Enumerating the characters of one Shaw novel, Cheever noted, “X is a terrible man, Y is afraid, Z is a beast. Ten years ago [Irwin] would have trimmed and modified all these judgements.”*

A far more troubling concern was whether Cheever could, as he put it, “keep [his] nose clean.” After almost twenty years of tortured monogamy, Cheever had begun to hope that he'd put “the sins of [his] childhood” behind him forever; besides, the world seemed to be getting a little more tolerant on that score. Watching Gore Vidal on TV that year, Cheever was impressed by how “personable and intelligent” the man seemed: “I think that he is either not a fairy,” Cheever reflected, “or that perhaps we have reached a point where men of this persuasion are not forced into attitudes of bitterness, rancor and despair.” But then, two months before Cheever's departure for Hollywood, Newton Arvin was arrested at Smith College for possession of homosexual pornography—a controversy that was “huge” in Cheever's household, as Susan remembered: “Maybe I heard Malcolm [Cowley] talking about it—this innocent man hauled off to jail by brutes because he was homosexual. I may have asked Daddy, in all innocence, how that could happen. Now I know he was scared out of his mind.” At the time of his arrest, Arvin was director of Yaddo's executive committee, and Cheever may have expressed a quiet sort of solidarity by refusing an offer to replace him. But any open discussion of the matter made him “very unhappy and ill-tempered,” as he wrote when Susan asked why homosexuality wasn't legalized. As it happened, in Cheever's home state of Massachusetts, where Arvin had been arrested, sodomy was classified as an “abominable and detestable crime against nature,” often resulting in lengthy prison terms.†

Cheever feared that such a long isolation in the alien, decadent world of Hollywood would fatally impair his better instincts, and in his journal he agonized over “the Hollywood problem”: “It is true that I do protect my perhaps unstable and dangerous nature … with properties and affections that have the force of clemency and continence, and that Hollywood represents for me, at least, financial and sexual corruption.” One “immense consolation” was the proximity of his old friends John and Harriett Weaver, who lived in the Hollywood Hills. “She is a sweet, pretty woman without a line on her face and he is a most gentle, affectionate, and excellent man,” Cheever reassured himself, and to the Weavers he expressed a seemingly comic wish that their “kind presence will guide [him] away from violent drunkenness and disgusting venereal embroilments.”

THE WEAVERS ARRANGED for Cheever to stay at the Chateau Marmont—a few blocks from their house—where the management grandly informed him that he'd been given the “Mitzi Gaynor Suite.” It was small comfort. What struck Cheever most about his lodgings was the constant racket from the Sunset Strip outside his window, where he could observe an enormous papier-mâché chorus girl advertising the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Los Angeles was “the magnification of all our vices,” he wrote, with special reference to the large metaphorical chorus girl. Finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning, Cheever would pick up the telephone and order an elaborate breakfast by way of goading himself into the shower before he committed suicide. As for