Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [374]
Perhaps, but then Cheever felt obliged to his publisher: his wealth and fame would have been considerably less, after all, if Gottlieb hadn't pressed him to publish the Stories. During a radio interview in 1980, Cheever had been asked if he ever thought about switching publishers: “Why should I do that?” he replied. “Bob Gottlieb has been a wonderful editor. Knopf has done a wonderful job for me. …” Purely by chance, Gottlieb was listening that day.
AFTER THE CONTRACT DEBACLE, Cheever lost a certain amount of faith in his book—a process that had begun in earnest a month before, when he'd read Updike's Rabbit Is Rich in galleys: “I am delighted,” he noted. “Indeed I am so covetous that I feel faint. But it is, this morning, I truly hope, a genuine sense of how serious an occupation this is.” Eager to do his part for so “important” a novel, Cheever came to the city in October to appear with Updike on The Dick Cavett Show, where he seemed in decent fettle despite breaking his fly zipper just prior to taping (he kept his legs tightly crossed and looked flushed). After so many years of competitiveness (albeit mostly in Cheever's mind), the writers now seemed determined to out-praise each other. “I see [Cheever] do things effortlessly that I couldn't do with a great deal of effort,” said Updike, and Cheever observed, “He is at the peak of his powers while I'm an old man nearing the end of my journey.” At one point Cheever delivered himself of an extravagant paean to Updike's “inestimable” gifts, then chuckled, “Match that one.” “I bet you wish you had Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal back on the show,” said Updike. Indeed, the only hint of discord arose when Cheever allowed that he didn't—as Updike did—write much in the way of explicit sex scenes: “I do think the emphasis on our erotic life has always seemed questionable,” he solemnly averred, adding a few days later (in a letter to Weaver) that Updike had “described erections so exhaustively that he's beginning to look like a big prick with a hair-piece.”
No matter. The writers were resolving their sometimes murky association in a mood of almost perfect rapport. A month later, Updike wrote that he'd “read at a gulp” Oh What a Paradise It Seems and found it full of “brimming magic,” whereupon Cheever replied that he'd meant to attach a cover letter to the galleys noting how “unenthusias-tic” he was about the book, in light of which Updike's praise was all the more “overwhelming.” As for the Cavett show, Cheever had watched it alone in his kitchen the night before and deemed Updike “comely,” whereas he himself “looked rather like a viper who was trying to break wind.”
Meanwhile PBS had finally managed to get American Playhouse off the ground, and The Shady Hill Kidnapping was scheduled to air on January 12, 1982, as the premiere offering of “the most ambitious and expensive single series in the history of public television,” according to the Times. Three years ago, Cheever had gotten excited about the project when a reading of his teleplay was performed at the Public Theater by such notable actors as Kevin McCarthy, Maria Tucci, and Tammy Grimes (the last in the role Cheever was holding open for Hope Lange: “Hope is out on the coast,” he wrote at the time, “playing the mother of a demented child in a two-part TV film”). Over time, though,