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By Root 4102 0

office and observed the following: “Lee lay on the floor, under his desk, with only his feet visible. Half kneeling, half peering into the dark hollow, stood Henry Grunwald, present Editor in Chief of Time, Inc., asking plaintively, ‘Are you all right, Alwyn?’ “ Lee's first appearance on Cedar Lane was also memorable. As Ben Cheever wrote, “I came home from school to find a tall, slender Australian in a suit and vest attempting cartwheels on the lower lawn. My father was standing off to one side watching.” Despite his own vagaries, Cheever tended to find overt eccentricity distasteful, and Ben felt certain his father would take an immediate dislike to the tipsy Australian. But not at all: he found Lee a “first-rate” raconteur and was in awe of his larger-than-life persona. “[Alwyn] had a series of ardent and eccentric attachments to barkeeps, whores, unemployed actors and an international spy called Hong Kong Harry,” Cheever recalled after Lee's death. “He had been, as a youth, the sexual and political terror of Melbourne and when his face was in the shadow you could see how comely he had been. In the light, of course, his face was heavily scored. He drank two quarts a day.”

Such was the man who proposed to write a cover story about Cheever for Time. At first the latter demurred as a matter of course—all such publicity was “abominable”—but Lee insisted: they were kindred spirits, he said, pointing out that they'd been born the same year (1912) in spring (or rather Cheever had been born in May and Lee in October—”the Australian spring”). Cheever claimed that he and Ben promptly absconded to Vermont to escape the predations of Time, but actually the trip was an expenses-paid “research” boondoggle for which he was accompanied by Lee and an assistant. (“In the bar after dinner,” Cheever mused in his journal, “Lee picks up a girl who dumps him out of her Volkswagen three miles from town. He walks home but still shows up for breakfast, bathed, shaved, dressed for skiing.”) It wasn't long, however, before the lark began to pall. When Cheever returned to Ossining, he found the artist Henry Koerner installed in Susan's bedroom, painting one of Cheever's shirts. Afterward, Koerner remarked that he'd included Cheever's pet doves in his cover portrait “because they seemed … to symbolize the peaceful world with which Cheever surrounds himself “—unaware, perhaps, that his placid host had suspected him all the while of seducing Mary and was “prepared to murder” Koerner if this should prove to be the case.

Cheever's general paranoia about the project was not unjustified. A second reporter, Andrew Kopkind, soon arrived from California and began interviewing family and friends.* One night Cheever got an idea of just how deeply the man intended to dig: “What have you done wrong?” Fax Ogden inquired, phoning from Delaware. “To have this friend of my adolescence, who I have not seen for forty years, brought into the picture is strange and unnatural,” Cheever wrote. It got stranger still. When Cheever had first agreed to cooperate (“it's better this way than hiding in the bathroom like Salinger who never seemed to find his way out”), he made only one request: Leave my brother in peace. Kopkind, however, lost no time running Fred to ground in Connecticut, and soon it transpired that he was indeed searching for “smut.” The Warrens almost kicked the man out of their house for asking unseemly questions about Cheever's marriage (“I remember that son of a bitch!” said Red Warren twenty years later), and certain other friends, Cheever noticed, seemed “uneasy” around him these days, as if worried they'd said a little too much to Kopkind.

In public Cheever affected a breezy, nothing-to-hide scorn: he claimed to have advised one group of friends to say he was impotent, the other that he had “two cocks.” He wrote the following set piece, word for word, to various correspondents:

Sally Ziegler, a small-town Georgian who lives in the cottage on the hill, has been preparing herself for the TIME interview for a month. On Friday the doorbell rang and she