Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [169]
On the surface he affected to be cheerfully bemused by the oddities of Hollywood life. He told friends about his “fancy hotel apartment” at the Marmont, and proudly noted that his carnation-filled parlor had a water cooler in the corner. “I ran up a bill of a hundred dollars a day,” he wrote Maxwell, “but it was all so deluxe that I was terribly ashamed of the cigarette burns in my dressing gown and the fact that much of my underwear is torn. I had a white Lincoln Continental convertible” —actually a Ford Falcon—”which I never took out of the garage and when someone at the pool said: ‘There he is; that's Cheever’ I dove in and lost my trunks.” That he raffishly clashed with his environment was a matter of pride—part of his studied disdain for the “sumptuary laws,” the point being, of course, that such a vividly civilized man could dress howsoever he liked. “My God, John,” said Harriett Weaver when he appeared in her kitchen wearing a navy Brooks suit, “your crotch!” Cheever was about to leave for Twentieth Century-Fox to meet Jerry Wald, but Harriett demanded he hand over his pants. A few minutes later, when Henry Lewis arrived to pick up his client, he found Cheever sitting in his boxers sipping a martini while Harriett ironed the wrinkles out of his crotch.
As he loitered around the studio waiting to see Wald, Cheever ran into his old friend and Stories collaborator, Daniel Fuchs, now a gray-haired man whiling away his days in an office that reminded Cheever of “a side-parlor in the Hotel Gladstone.” Fuchs advised him to treat Wald “like a demented child,” and subsequently Weaver reported to Mary that her husband was following a serial about Marilyn Monroe in the Mirror so he and Wald could “talk more intelligently”: “They talk about Saroyan's tax problems, Yves Montand (‘an alley cat’) and the works of D. H. Lawrence, especially Ulysses, which seems to be Mr. Wald's favorite.” As a matter of fact, Wald was a kind, affable man who respected good writers and warmed to Cheever in particular. He claimed to have no problem with Cheever's request to spend a month in the Midlands soaking up Laurentian scenery, but as for his more earnest desire to work at home in Scarborough, Wald refused. He assured Cheever that he'd do his best to make him comfortable: the writer would have his own secretary, office, and nameplate, and be left entirely alone.
Though he liked Wald “immensely,” Cheever seemed miserable to a degree that puzzled his colleagues, among them Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, two writers from his Signal Corps days. Occasionally Cheever would stop by their offices to borrow gin—there was no alcohol in the Fox commissary—and vaguely complain about the place, which he described in a letter to Cowley as a “literary graveyard.” Mostly, though, Cheever holed up in his own office (“an old bathhouse at the edge of the lot”) and worked steadily, the better to return to his family as soon as possible. He submitted a finished draft of his treatment in early December, only to learn that he had to wait ten more days for the studio's verdict. Meanwhile he stuck as closely as possible to the Weavers, but even their wholesome company wasn't much of a diversion from the usual dark thoughts. Walking along Malibu Beach of an afternoon, Cheever picked out squalid details—swastikas painted on a wall, or “curious domestic scenes such as a blonde in an adhesive-tape bikini helping a drunken man up a flight of stairs.” He also obsessed over the brazen, ubiquitous homosexuals who seemed to be tempting him at all times. “I think there is a fag beside me at the lunch counter,” he somberly recorded in his journal. “He drums his nails impatiently