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By Root 4136 0

he'd come to realize his script needed a lot of work—the PBS adaptations of his stories had been edifying in that respect—and when money suddenly became available in early 1981, Cheever was wide open to suggestions. His main collaborator was the director Paul Bogart (of All in the Family fame), who showed Cheever how to cut his teleplay by almost an hour and a half. Fortunately, this was easy to do. The “mysterious and oracular Bogart,” as Cheever called him, pointed out that all the long descriptive bits would have to go, or else be converted to dialogue, ditto the “very peculiar” set pieces that seemed to bear little relation to the story proper.* But Cheever held firm on the five Elixircol commercials he'd written into the script, insisting rather absurdly that they played an “integral part” in the drama; in fact, he'd appropriated two of them almost word for word from “The Death of Justina,” doubtless for the simple and sufficient reason that they delighted him.

He was not mistaken on that point: the commercials were by far the most entertaining part of the show. “The Surgeon General says that Elixircol has caused cancer in certain laboratory animals,” intones a louchely preserved Celeste Holm. “But who ever heard of the Surgeon General? Does he ever get asked anywhere? … Who wants to heed the warnings of a nonentity? Forget the Surgeon General.” The tenor of these commercials harked back to a time when Cheever was at the height of his powers, driven to brilliance by (among other things) his indignation over a collective tendency to deny one's mortality in the midst of the nuclear age. But even at his most caustically satirical, there was always a softer, more wistful side to Cheever, a side that wanted to “cheer himself up,” as Alfred Kazin had perceived. It is this side of Cheever—the glib transcendentalist—who wrote The Shady Hill Kidnapping. “What a paradise, what a kingdom it is!” exults his protagonist, Charlie Wooster (played by George Grizzard), as he sits in his backyard gazing out at a verdant suburbia. Nor is there any trace of irony here—caustic, wistful, or otherwise. Life is a paradise (particularly among the genteel middle class), or rather potentially, if only we can be a bit more mindful of just how precious we are to one another. The members of Wooster's winsome family are brought to this realization by the supposed kidnapping of Charlie's grandson, Toby, who wanders off for the day. This also serves as the premise for some broad-as-a-barn satire about the evils of bureaucracy: In order to pique the interest of an indifferent police department, Charlie's son Bob decides to drop a phony ransom note in the City Hall suggestion box; then a stuffy banker informs Charlie that he cannot receive a loan for the ransom unless he first agrees to build a swimming pool as “entrepreneurial collateral.” And so on. As for the discontents of suburbia, they are touched on, lightly, by a kooky matron who entertains Toby while the community pursues its frenzied, oblivious search for the boy: “I have a nice husband, two beautiful children. We have so many consumer goods that we have a garage sale every autumn. But I terribly want something more. Guess that's why I like the thought of being in outer space. I'm so lonely I think there must be someone out there for me. I want to be kissed by a passing star.”† This while Toby—too young to comprehend the spiritual bankruptcy of a materialistic society—cutely watches the skies.

Back when Cheever was writing some of the best fiction of the postwar era, a few captious critics chided him for having a sentimental streak: “He does not yet disturb us enough,” said John Aldridge; “a toothless Thurber,” said Irving Howe. It is interesting to imagine what the likes of Aldridge and Howe would have made of The Shady Hill Kidnapping. But Cheever had become a name, and most reviewers (not to mention Cheever himself) were willing to believe there was something more here than meets the eye. Harry F. Waters of Newsweek was bound to admit that certain scenes were “as gooey as a box of Mallomars,