Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [90]
I tried to work with no success and early in the evening Gus called me and said they were not going to buy the Mink Decade [story]. This means I'm out a thousand dollars and six weeks work. Bob Linscott came for dinner and told me that Irwin [Shaw] had completed his novel and that it was magnificent. I didn't talk particularly well and drank quite a lot. I woke at four in the morning. The struggle for recognition then, for money, even for success in my own terms seemed hopeless, and I felt … that I had betrayed my pure and gentle family, and because of this the desire to kill myself was strong.
While pondering suicide Cheever was his old jovial self among friends, though one day Ettlinger spotted him walking along First Avenue. About to say hello, he suddenly noticed the haunted look on Cheever's face—”such a powerful expression of sadness” that he quickly ducked behind a building until his friend had passed.
No matter how dejected Cheever got, he was quite determined to finance a private education for his daughter, and hence his main anxiety the following spring (1948) was whether she'd be accepted at the elite Brearley School. Not only did they accept the four-year-old, but their “charming letter” applauded the “independence and extraordinary maturity” she'd shown in her interview; Cheever—passing along the good news to Polly and Winter—wondered whether such glowing terms could possibly be used to describe his “fat and wayward daughter.” Almost from the moment of her birth, he'd begun to suspect she wasn't going to be the slender, perky debutante he longed for, and before she'd reached the age of reason he found ways of letting her know she was disappointing him. “Sue is about the same,” he wrote the Ettlingers, when the girl wasn't quite three. “For a minute or two I thought she was going to get thin; but it didn't happen. Then I thought she might learn to swim; but no.” Perhaps forgetting that he himself had been chubby and unpromising as a child, Cheever was forever browbeating his daughter about her weight, banning candy and cookies and other snacks, with predictable results: “[W]hen I picked her up at the party there was frosting in her ears, several pieces of candy in her mouth … so that I'm afraid all of our hard work has been undone.”
Mary Cheever's thirtieth-birthday gift, as she'd always say, was the birth of her second child, Benjamin Hale Cheever, on May 4, 1948. “We think he's handsome, intelligent, wirey, and strong,” Cheever reported to friends, “and actually he's very unlike Sue.” So at least the boy was born on good terms, though perhaps it helped that his father's financial prospects were looking up at the time. Two years before, dramatic rights to the “Town House” stories had been sold (netting Cheever $173) to Bernard Hart and Clinton Wilder, who'd hired Herman Mankiewicz to write an adaptation. The latter had won an Oscar for his Citizen Kane screenplay, but by 1946 he was often drunk, and the first (and only) act of his “Town House” play was, by Cheever's account, a cliché-ridden disaster: “All the people came out of a bad picture … a football bore, an old gentlemen [sic] with a tough, wisecracking cutie.” Mankiewicz was fired, and the property changed hands a few times, floating in limbo until the beginning of 1948, when it was picked up by one of Broadway's top producers, Max Gordon, who signed George S. Kaufman, no less, to direct and co-write (with Gertrude Tonkonogy). Cheever, though he received only fifty-two dollars a month until the play was in the black, was so bucked that he hired a maid to help his burdened wife with the housework: “This maid has a gray uniform with an apron … and