It's 1979.
I'm 20 years old.
I get an assignment from Newsweek magazine
to photograph this author.
I'm like, "great, great",
and they're like, "It's not quite that easy this time, Mike,
because he doesn't like to be photographed.
We don't have an address to send you to
or a telephone number to give you,
but we do know he picks up his mail in Windsor, Vermont."
So, the first day after sitting here for four hours,
drinking Pepsi and eating Cheetos,
making myself sick...
didn't have him.
I decided it's 5:30, the post office is closed.
Nobody's going to come and get their mail that day.
Then I just walked the streets of Hanover late at night.
I started to wonder if somebody had tipped him off.
So the next day I came back.
One man came out of the post office, I photographed him,
wrote down the license plate number, but it wasn't him.
So I waited.
And then this jeep pulls up, but I don't see his face.
He gets out and and goes into the post office really quickly.
And then as he came back out...
[Telephone rings]
MAN: Newsroom?
McDERMOTT: I got him.
I got Salinger.
Thinking back on the guys who sat around the poker table,
what distinguished Jerry out of that pack
was that there was in him no doubt
that he was going to be published,
no doubt that he had an enormous talent
and no doubt that everybody else at the poker table
was inferior to him.
He was very, very tall, and thin,
sort of attenuated, like a candlestick.
And he had amazing eyes, sort of the color of black coffee.
Very intense. Extremely intense.
When he was writing a book, you did not bother him.
Claire was not allowed to bother him.
You couldn't call him.
You couldn't go down, knock on the door.
You left him alone until he came out.
His work was ordained by God.
His work was his way to enlightenment.
He was put on this earth to work, to write.
"Catcher in the Rye" caught my attention
when it was first came out.
There had not been a voice like that.
So personal. So revealing.
It seemed like somebody stripping the layers
away from their soul.
MAN: It said on the cover,
"this book will change your life."
And I bought the book, but I was afraid to read it
because I didn't want my life changed.
It's magical. You're literally like how did he do that?
How did he put it all together that way
and lead me through it in such a way that
I would just land just like that in that final statement,
where you're just so grateful to him
and you want to go find him.
Like you're doing now.
MAN: It is an extraordinary phenomenon,
how many millions and millions and millions of people
came to that book.
"Catcher in the Rye" has sold 60 million copies.
That's an unprecedented figure.
And continues to sell, by the way,
250,000 copies a year.
It's defined who we are as an American culture.
A long lost sibling had arrived.
And he was, there was Holden Caulfield.
And he became part of our conversation.
Like a whole genermanual
to how to be a teenage boy, or a teenager.
To be on the cover of Time magazine in 1961
was something that only went to statesmen and Nobel Laureates.
We've said you're one
of the important writers of the century, now come on.
Let's have some more -- and then he doesn't give it.
In American literature, like Salinger's
the greatest "no" ever.
Jerry had scaled heights. Big success.
At the height of that success, he disappears.
No one said, "Don't talk about this.
Don't think that."
I mean, you don't have to to a kid.
Kids pick up what the elephants are in the room
that the family is not talking about.
He sort of became the Howard Hughes of his day.
[Typewriter typing]
Mystery.
We all like a mystery.
We all like to say, you know, what makes this guy tick?
I've heard that he has a huge bunker that he writes in.
He wanted nothing to come between him and his characters.
They were real for him.
He moved them about the stage like God.
MAN: He dove into this well, the Glass family, and drowned.
MAN: They were kinda saying,
"What happened with J.D. Salinger?
I think he's kind of a crackpot."
MAN: If everybody has told you
what a gift you're giving the world,
why is it that you actually want to board yourself up
in this place and hide?
ALEXANDER: You cannot dismiss the issues of his private life.
He didn't exactly say that he'd had a nervous breakdown.
MAN: How dare you turn your back on us.
We're your fans. You've gotten inside our heads.
[Gunfire]
What would I do if a killer invoked
something that I had written as his defense?
He says, "You take any more steps towards me
and I'm going to shoot at the ground right in front of you,"
and he had his gun in his hand.
MAN: Perhaps, there's a huge treasure trove up there.
WOMAN: I've heard that he has his manuscripts
locked in a safe.
I wanna believe. I wanna see more of the work.
But the great mystery is why he stopped.
What's in that... that vault?
What made him? What formed him?
What he's written for the last [bleep] forty years.
I mean, isn't that what everybody wants to know?
You son of a bitch, why won't you give us more?
I guess I went looking for Holden...
Myths have a way of vanishing in a second.
...and I found J.D. Salinger.
-Mr. A.E.? -Well, there he is.
How the hell did you get here?
It was the year after the war ended
and the only person I knew who had a job
was a man named Don Cogden,
who was the fiction editor of Collier's magazine
and we used to play poker maybe twice a week.
Nickles and dimes, not much of a game.
And one of the players was a tall, lanky,
dark gentleman named Jerry Salinger.
You remember down here with Jerry?
After the poker games?
Well, of course. Yeah, yeah.
MAN: At the end of the evening,
we would go over to Chumley's Bar and Grill,
which is an old, old hangout for writers.
So everybody in here was convinced that they were
the next Hemingway or whatever.
Except for Salinger, who didn't want to be the next Hemingway.
Jerry himself said, "There's been no great writers
from Melville until me."
He dismissed everybody.
Theodore Dreiser, Hemingway, Steinbeck.
They were all second rate talents.
And then it dawned on me --
of all those writers, Herman Melville was the only one
that was dead, so it was all right.
WOMAN: He was the only writer I ever knew
who talked about his characters
as if they were real people.
And it was very strange, this thing,
because they -- he made them real in his stories,
they became real for him
and because they were so real for him,
I began to think of them as real.
I began to see them as real.
MAN: His attitude, and he lived as if
he was really one of us.
Scrabbling and trying to get along best as we could.
And I was pretty shocked to discover that he literally
lived with his parents in a very posh apartment
on Park Avenue.
That he had been to a succession of posh Eastern schools.
Kicked out of most of them.
That he really came from a country club society.
But it didn't seem to make any difference with him.
He wasn't impressed at all
with the life that he had lived.
And I think that all becomes very apparent when,
eventually, he writes the one book
that he writes, and that's "Catcher in the Rye."
MAN: Salinger's father Solomon was the son of a rabbi,
an importer of cheese and meats.
Very un-kosher.
His mother was Catholic.
Her name was Marie, which she changed to Miriam
to be accepted by her husband's Jewish family.
WOMAN: He was very down on education.
Don't believe everything your professors say.
They're just giving you information.
Get your own information on your own terms.
SHEEN: I think that Salinger understood
something about the culture,
long before the culture understood it about itself.
He saw fakes everywhere.
MAN: After getting kicked out of prep school,
his father decided he needed discipline.
He needed structure.
And he shipped him off to a military academy.
MAN: Valley Forge is important for two real reasons --
number one, that's where Salinger
really got his act together.
And number 2, that's where Salinger first began to write.
MAN: Salinger wrote at night by flashlight under the covers.
He was always writing.
What I have here is J.D. Salinger's yearbook
from the Valley Forge Military Academy.
It's an extraordinary item.
He signed it not only in his own name,
but he signed the names of the characters that he played
in the various plays in which he performed,
because he wanted to be an actor.
MAN: When he was in high school,
he announced that his ambition was to succeed Robert Benchley
as the theater critic for the New Yorker.
WOMAN: His father thought it was ridiculous
that he was going to write.
And his father very much wanted him
to join him in the cheese business.
Which he had no intention to do,
and I think that caused a lot of friction.
His mother, on the other hand, approved of everything he did.
UNRUE: Salinger enrolled in Whit Burnett's short story class
at Columbia.
It was a very a important move for Salinger.
Whit Burnett was also editor of Story magazine.
MAN: Story magazine published the very first work
of an extraordinary number of American writers.
John Cheever, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams,
Erskine Caldwell, Jean Stafford, Peter Devries.
ALEXANDER: Whit Burnett ended up being a father figure.
And based on
Burnett's encouragement, Salinger went home and wrote
a story called "The Young Folks."
Burnett accepted the story for Story magazine
and paid him $25.
It was the first money
J.D. Salinger ever made as a writer.
Salinger always had one goal in mind.
He wanted to be in the New Yorker.
MAN: The New Yorker was considered
the best place for a writer to be published,
in terms of prestige,
for the simple reason that it was hard to get published there.
MAN: J.D. Salinger's entrance into New Yorker was not easy.
YAGODA: The response to Salinger's early stuff
was one word -- "no."
No...no...no.
You can go to the New Yorker archives
in the New York Public Library and read
rejection after rejection.
"It would have worked out better for us if Mr. Salinger
had not strained so for cleverness."
"We think Mr. Salinger is a very talented young man,
and wish to God you could get him
to write simply and naturally."
"If Mr. Salinger is around town, perhaps he'd like to come in
and talk to us about New Yorker stories."
MAN: His reaction was,
"They want me to write
an O'Henry type of short story,
but I have to find my own voice and this is it,
and they'll catch up to me."
YAGODA: He wrote a letter to Walcott Gibbs, the editor,
where he took the New Yorker to task
for not really publishing major, big short stories.
He said they were too tiny.
I mean this was a kid lecturing the editors
of the New Yorker on what they should publish.
WOMAN: He was published in other magazines.
It wasn't good enough.
MAN: He was determined
the New Yorker was going to publish me,
and, by George, they did.
He had a story accepted in 1941 towards the end
called "Slight Rebellion off Madison,"
about a kid named Holden Caulfield.
ROOSEVELT: December 7th, 1941,
a date which will live in infamy.
MAN: Before they could get it into the magazine,
World War II broke out,
and suddenly this wonderful story
about a young man named Holden Caulfield
and this personal rebellion he was going through
seemed trivial and beside the point
and, you know, it just didn't seem appropriate
to put in the magazine and so they put it on the shelf.
And Jerry was infuriated at this.
That was his whole thrust in life
was to be published by the New Yorker.
ALEXANDER: In 1941, J.D. Salinger was 21 years old,
living with his parents in New York City,
when he met Oona O'Neill, who was then 16 years old.
Salinger was absolutely floored with her beauty.
DIRECTOR: Say something! It's a silent film!
Is it silent?
Yes!
Shall I turn over here?
[Unintelligible dialogue]
Oona O'Neill was the daughter of Eugene O'Neill,
still America's only Nobel Prize-winning dramatist.
He was a dedicated genius and a really rotten father.
And he always said his real children
were his characters in his plays.
Oona O'Neill was someone who was clearly attracted to genius.
WOMAN: Between the ages of 16 and 18, Oona dated Peter Arno,
Orson Welles and then J.D. Salinger.
It's interesting to think of a 16-year-old girl
holding such fascination
for such an illustrious group of men.
But remember,
we're talking about a young woman who was
intellectually astute.
Beautiful.
Shy. Loving.
Quite an extraordinary young woman.
HADLEY: She was original.
She wasn't like everyone else.
I think this is why Salinger liked her so much.
Because the one thing that she was never guilty of
was any cliches or any banalities.
She was totally original.
He had a lot of things going for him.
He was handsome. He was intelligent.
He was published. He was everything.
After school, Oona would do her homework
and then get dressed up,
and she'd go to the Stork Club.
Oh my, look at Oona O'Neill!
Debutante of the year.
They always photographed her with a glass of milk,
because, of course, she was under age.
It was a tremendous love story.
They truly loved each other.
In 1941, 22-year-old Jerry Salinger
wanted to join the Army.
But when he went to enlist,
the military doctors rejected him.
HADLEY: This distressed him terribly.
He got very angry about this.
MAN: Salinger was determined to serve.
He wrote letters arguing to be accepted, and then,
in the spring of 1942, he was finally allowed to enlist.
[Bugle blowing Reveille]
MAN: What a mind-set.
To come from an existence of absolute ease and luxury.
And what do you aspire to?
To being in the trenches.
Oona loved hearing from Jerry.
He wrote wonderfully seductive,
totally delightful, wonderful letters.
MAN: Salinger bragged to all his Army buddies,
"This is my girlfriend!"
And he showed them pictures of Oona O'Neill.
But when Oona moved to California,
she never answered his letters.
He had to know something was up.
WOMAN: in Hollywood,
Charlie Chaplin was working on a film that called for
a very young girl,
and he walked into a room and Oona was sitting on the floor
by the fireplace and the light was playing on her
and she looked up and he just, thk!
When I went to Austin to look at the Salinger collection there,
I read a number of letters.
And...
I have to say that reading them, I felt like a voyeur.
I mean, I was reading Salinger's letters.
A number of them were about
Oona O'Neill.
Some of them were about
Oona O'Neill and Charlie Chaplin.
And...
there were some distasteful bits.
ALEXANDER: Imagine you're J.D. Salinger.
You're in the Army getting ready to fight
in the great war in Europe.
You've professed your total and complete love to this woman
and she goes off and marries,
on her 18th birthday,
the most famous movie star in the world.
WOMAN: Chaplin was 53, going on 54.
The headlines
all over the world.
ALEXANDER: Salinger found out that he lost her
by reading about it in the newspaper.
MAN: He was humiliated in front of everyone.
HADLEY: He was very upset about this.
He did speak about this.
You could feel this anger.
You could feel this terrible anger about
her rejection of him.
ALEXANDER: For the rest of his life,
Salinger was haunted by the love affair
that he could have had, that didn't happen.
[Explosions]
MAN: The second World War created J.D. Salinger.
It's the ghost in the machine of all the stories.
HADLEY: Well, I think, in the beginning,
Jerry felt very patriotic.
I remember he said it was extraordinary, you know,
to feel that he was part of something,
doing good in the world.
MAN: Of all the days for someone to be initiated into combat,
Salinger's was D-Day.
You look out to the horizon as far as you can see,
it's just full of ships.
MAN: Salinger told Whit Burnett that on D-Day
he was carrying six chapters of "Catcher in the Rye."
As a sort of
a mystical talisman.
That he needed those pages with him -- to help him survive.
MAN: Salinger was in a landing craft
coming in towards Utah Beach.
MAN: There is a roar of the engine as you pick up speed
and you know -- here we go.
MAN: Most of these guys were 19, 20 years old.
Salinger was 25 years old. Salinger was an old man.
Shells were flying.
The small arms were still coming in.
The artillery shells were coming in.
MAN: There was this tremendous explosion.
Landing craft hit a mine and blew up.
And there were bodies up in the air.
MAN: From the minute that ramp dropped
and Salinger ran out with the others into the surf...
[Gasps] cold, waist-deep water.
...it was pure and utter confusion.
I lost my first man by a sniper. Shot right between the eyes.
You take a quick look.
You know that that's it. And you're off.
At the end of the day, you can sit back and -- whew, man...
Hoagy's gone.
MAN: The Americans thought the landing
would be the hardest thing.
The day after D-Day, that's when the fighting really started.
When the Fourth Division, that Salinger belonged to,
went into the ancient fields and hedgerows.
They learned basically that everything that they learned
in basic training didn't apply.
Every field was going to cost them 20, 30 guys.
One field, 100 yards by 100 yards,
would sometimes cost a whole platoon.
Killing ground, absolutely, for us.
It was like a meat grinder.
That's where our casualty rate began to climb tremendously.
This fight around Edmondville
is one of the most bitter in the entire battle of Normandy.
At one point they see a white flag.
So the Americans think there's going to be a surrender.
The junior officers come forward
to accept the surrender honorably.
And all of the sudden the Germans open fire.
The Americans become kill crazy.
Such an act of treachery had to be punished.
It wasn't gonna be just a matter of saying,
"Well, we're not taking prisoners."
They're gonna hunt down every German in the area
and they're gonna kill 'em. [Gunfire]
MAN: Salinger was part of the Counterintelligence Corps,
whose job it was to interview enemy prisoners and civilians.
MAN: Salinger played a very important role.
GI's, young guys in squads,
being asked to attack a village,
they wanted to know every single thing
they could possibly know about that village --
where the machine gun nests were,
where the alleyways were, where the avenues of fire were.
Men like Salinger, their job was to provide information
that would have kept more of those guys alive.
He had a lot of latitude to move behind and near the enemy lines,
to understand the culture, to understand the people,
to understand what war did
to the local people.
It was a more intellectual, probing war for him
than the average grunt.
My dad was actually 21 when he met Mr. Salinger
and Mr. Salinger was 25,
so he was four years his senior.
And they were in the Counterintelligence Corps.
The four gentlemen you see here --
Mr. Salinger, Mr. Altaras,
Mr. Keenan, and my father Paul Fitzgerald --
they refer to each other as "The Four Musketeers."
They corresponded for nearly 65 years.
And there is really a bond.
My dad used to comment that Altaras and Keenan would say
there was really no time for us to do anything
because we always had to stop for Salinger
to sit by the roadside working on short stories or his novel.
And my father took
the only photo that anybody's ever seen of Salinger writing
"The Catcher in the Rye."
MAN: I took five students to Princeton.
They wanted to see what they could find,
what they could discover of Salinger at Princeton Library.
After we got into the reading room,
we turned the last page of something and came across
a 3x5-inch light green spiral notebk-bound paper.
And I remember at that moment
everybody's pulse sort of jumped because
it was handwritten...
Ostensibly it was written by Salinger
about the Allies coming into Paris.
He talked about driving in the jeeps into Paris
and the Parisians holding their babies up
for the Americans to kiss.
And, he said that you could stand on the hood of your jeep
and take a leak on it
and it wouldn't matter, it would be okay.
Anything you did would be fine.
I think one of the great stories of literary history
is the meeting of Ernest Hemingway
and J.D. Salinger in Paris, during the liberation.
Ernest Hemingway was his icon.
He loved the way Ernest Hemingway wrote.
At the time that Salinger met my grandfather,
Ernest Hemingway, in World War II,
he was the most famous writer of the 20th century.
And so, you can see why Salinger would seek him out.
And I think that would have been a kind of romantic vision
for my grandfather to see in Salinger
a talented young writer, in the infantry division,
fighting during World War II.
And Jerry actually gave him a manuscript
and asked Hemingway to look at it.
Which took a great deal of derring-do on his part, really.
But Hemingway saw what he'd written and loved it!
Jerry was thrilled
that Hemingway appreciated his writing.
This was like getting the greatest accolade
he could possibly have.
I didn't think that Jerry would ever push up to see anybody,
'cause he seemed rather shy and reclusive.
J.D. Salinger is a recluse who likes to flirt with the public
to remind them that he's a recluse.
He's not a recluse.
He appears whenever he feels like.
The Cornish Fair would start and we'd see all our friends
and all our neighbors,
and Jerry Salinger was one of them.
He came to all the fairs and enjoyed them immensely.
MAN: A friend of mine said,
"Oh, I met J.D. Salinger tonight,
popped in backstage to meet the cast.
And he was very jovial and very cheery."
He's not reclusive in the total sense of the word.
He's in touch with people.
He travels to Europe.
He comes to New York.
[Telephone rings]
MAN: We were just hanging around the house
when the phone rings.
I answered it.
This male voice asks for Lacey Fosburgh.
Salinger has to do everything exactly on his own terms.
The true recluse would never pick up the phone
and call a reporter from The New York Times.
MAN: Lacey was the first woman to ever cover the police beat
for The New York Times,
and now working out of the San Francisco bureau.
She picked up the phone and his first line was,
"This is a man called Salinger."
He enjoys the game.
Reclusivity is a great public relations device
among other things.
By being out of the picture, he's in the picture.
And I think that is probably an intentional paradox on his part.
She goes [whispering], "Salinger! It's Salinger!"
This was the first interview
that Salinger had granted since 1953.
"Piece of paper. Get me some paper!"
He says right off the bat, "I can only talk for a minute."
So I'm scurrying around grabbin' some paper
and she's furiously writing notes on anything that's around.
And of course the conversation ends up being
a half an hour long.
He sets the scene -- it was a cold,
wind-swept, rainy night in New Hampshire
as he was talking to her.
And the point of the call was
he was concerned that pirated editions of his uncollected
short stories were being sold across the country.
J.D. Salinger paperbacks.
Two little volumes.
He referred to them as the "gaucheries of his youth."
The stories that he never wanted published at all.
That he'd written in the 1940's.
He called her because he was clearly upset
about this pirate publication.
These were stories that he did not want in circulation.
He didn't have to do that.
All he had to do was file a lawsuit.
One of the great coups of the story
was that she was able to get Salinger
to talk about what he was up to as a writer,
and that he was writing every day.
Which was one of the great mysteries
of the literary world for a decade or so.
He paints this portrait of someone
who is completely devoted still to his craft.
Still turning out story after story,
novel after novel, perhaps.
And she got him to talk about his own feelings
about publishing and being published and being private.
ALEXANDER: Salinger said, "I don't have any intention
of publishing.
There is a stillness that comes from not publishing."
MAN: Lacey immediately got on the phone with the national desk
of The New York Times and says, "Hey...
I just talked to Salinger."
He knew if he called The New York Times reporter
that story would be on the front page of The New York Times.
Which is exactly what happened.
MAN: Which was extraordinary at the time.
This was before the Times format had changed
and so running soft news on the front page was
a big deal.
I didn't have a lot of money in those days and I didn't know
quite what was going on, so I bought volume one.
And when I went back to buy the second one,
not only was the book gone, both volumes were missing.
The store owners declined to admit they'd ever sold it.
Salinger had pulled them from all the book stores.
And this was a secondhand bookstore on Telegraph Avenue.
I couldn't even believe he could reach that far.
MAN: It was incredibly eerie, almost sort of Medieval,
prim fears came out of the Hurtgen Forest.
Salinger experienced that first hand.
It was basically described as a meat grinder.
Soldiers described that battle as one where they wished
they could crawl inside their helmets.
MAN: Whole companies of 200 men
would be down to 20 or 30 after four or five hours.
MAN: Guys would literally have their arms blown off.
Half a leg missing.
And they'd be laughing as they were taken off in a stretcher
because they knew they were going home.
The only way Salinger could have survived an intense shelling
would have been to literally hug a tree.
MAN: To get close enough to that thing
and pray to God that somebody else gets it.
November 10, 1944.
Dear M:
This poor young man has been bombarding me with poems
for a week or so.
It appears that he's serving overseas.
So everything becomes more touching.
J.D. Salinger and Louise Bogan first crossed paths
when he wrote to her in November of 1944.
He may have thought
that she was the poetry editor of the New Yorker.
She wasn't.
She was simply their reviewer.
And she passed the poems along to her friend
at the magazine, William Maxwell.
"Dear M.
I send you another of Sergeant Salinger's letters.
I have written him, but it is better if you write him, too.
Perhaps this would help stem the tide.
Love, Louise."
We don't really know
what she thought about the poems themselves,
but she was deeply touched that he had written to her
and his life was in danger.
For a soldier like Salinger, walking into a camp,
there was a stillness to it and a craziness to it.
They were caught off-guard.
These weren't liberations in the sense
of busting down the gates or anything like that.
These soldiers were walking
into a place open.
This was like falling into a graveyard.
In the case of the camp that Salinger saw,
that was the Krankenlager, the camp for the sick.
WOMAN: Naked bodies stacked up.
Bodies that looked like they were dead people,
but sometimes discovering sounds coming from the bodies.
Salinger was an experienced fighter by this time.
But nothing prepared him for
this kind of sight.
This kind of desecration of humanity.
WOMAN: The Germans had locked prisoners
into flimsy barracks
and set them on fire.
MAN: They were burned alive.
The sentence that Salinger says is, that you never really get
the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils.
No matter how long you live.
The National Broadcasting Company
delays the start of all its programs
to bring you a special bulletin.
It was announced in San Francisco
half an hour ago
by a high American official not identified
as saying that Germany has surrendered
unconditionally to the Allies, no strings attached.
MAN: There would be no more firing, no more death,
no more killing, no more destruction.
It was over.
They could look forward to life.
The sacrifices that had been made,
the horrors they'd seen, were over.
V-E Day meant that they were on their way home.
MAN: On behalf of the commanding officer and his staff,
I want to extend a hearty welcome to all of you.
There's no need to be alarmed at the presence of these cameras,
as they are making a photographic record
of your progress at this hospital
from the date of admission to the date of discharge.
As a result of the horrors
that he witnessed in World War II,
J.D. Salinger suffered a nervous breakdown.
MAN: Salinger's stuff is all about innocence, somehow,
and the damage done to innocence in the world.
MAN: J.D. Salinger went from D-Day
all the way through to V-E Day,
299 days in combat.
What Salinger experienced was basically
a continual assault on his senses,
mentally, spiritually, physically.
He would have been under immense, unimaginable stress.
The probability of not making it,
either by being killed or wounded,
was really there from day to day.
And that makes people snap later.
MAN: The statistic is that anybody --
it doesn't matter how you were raised,
how tough you are mentally --
anybody, after 200 days, goes nuts.
After 200 days of combat, you are insane.
MAN: Shortly after he was released from the hospital,
Salinger wrote the first short story
narrated by Holden Caulfield.
It was called "I'm Crazy."
After his nervous breakdown,
Salinger signed up for a longer tour of duty
so he could be part of the deNazification program.
Salinger got to be a detective,
detective in uniform.
His basic job was to chase down the bad guys,
whether they be Nazis pretending to be civilians,
whether it was collaborators, black market operators.
He actually got to look into the dark heart of Nazi Germany,
and interrogate the people
who committed the greatest crimes in human history
and bring them to justice.
There has been a rumor for many years
that one of the people Salinger arrested
and interviewed was a women by the name of Sylvia.
She was reported to have been a member of the Nazi party.
Salinger and Sylvia supposedly fell in love and married.
This has led me to travel in Germany,
following the footsteps of Salinger
to various places where they could have lived.
The hospital in Nuremburg where Salinger was treated
for his nervous breakdown,
but we drew blanks.
So then we hit upon the idea of looking at
the passenger arrival forms off ships
arriving in the United States in May and June
of 1946.
Eureka!
When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it.
I actually jumped up and people had to shush me.
But there it is, we have the passenger arrival form.
Sylvia Louise Salinger -- age 27.
Place of birth -- Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Now we know that woman really was married to Salinger.
American soldiers were not allowed
to marry German nationals during 1945 and 1946.
Salinger took enormous risk.
He could have been court-martialed.
MAN: It's absolutely fascinating that he
would actually do the opposite
of what any so-called decent American would do,
which was to go and marry a Nazi.
It suggests that he really got to a place intellectually --
and emotionally, importantly,
emotionally -- whereby he could identify and sympathize
with the victim and perpetrator.
HADLEY: He told me his first wife was extraordinary.
That they had a telepathic communication
and they met in dreams.
MAN: When Salinger brought Sylvia home to his parents' house,
she walked into this Jewish household
with a Nazi party affiliation.
How he ever thought this would work is beyond me.
MAN: My father was best man at J.D. Salinger's first wedding,
and my father later on received a letter from Salinger.
"Sylvia and I separated
less than a month after we returned to the States.
If I gave you all the reasons for the separation,
I would have to go straight back to the beginning,
as most of the details would probably depress you.
Almost from the beginning,
we were desperately unsuited to and unhappy with each other."
MAN: Within months, Salinger filed
to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of deception.
Which may indicate that he found something troubling
about Sylvia's past in Germany.
The very next story that he submitted to the magazine
was one called "The Bananafish."
MAN: Salinger comes back from the war,
aware that the devastated and shell-shocked tone
is his tone.
Just as the Civil War could give us Mark Twain and Whitman,
World War II gave us Salinger.
MAN: Jerry always said, "You have to get away from fantasy.
Write about something you know.
There is no passion otherwise."
I remember his words.
"There's no fire between the words."
"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is very much
about a man who's suffering from
having gone through the Second World War.
Seymour Glass, on the beach,
talking with a charming little girl,
goes to his room,
lies down on the bed beside his sleeping wife,
and shoots himself through the head.
[Big Band music plays]
¶ You got to accentuate the positive... ¶
MAN: The story made a huge splash.
And it signaled a success streak,
a winning streak for Salinger.
HADLEY: Everyone was totally captivated
by his writing.
We'd call each other on the telephone about it,
when the New Yorker came,
and, "Have you read this? Have you seen this?
Isn't it wonderful?"
MAN: People whom I didn't even know
were talking about, "Did you read that story?
That little girl -- isn't that remarkable?"
It caused a great buzz.
MAN: 1948 was really a turning point
for Salinger and the New Yorker.
He published "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
and two other stories.
And from then on,
he was known and identified as a New Yorker writer.
And Jerry was thrilled.
He told me how much it had meant to him
to be published by the New Yorker.
Salinger was considered really a shooting star.
MAN: A New Yorker contributor in Hollywood said,
"Everybody out here talks about Salinger.
My god, that guy is good.
Evenings are spent -- and this is on the level --
discussing the guy and his work."
I would ask people who worked with him,
"Did he have a reclusive personality back then?
Did you ever see him?"
They said, "Oh, we saw him all the time.
We talked to him, you know.
He was very warm. He was Jerry."
MAN: He would call up and say,
"I'm going to the Blue Angel tonight.
Wanna come along?"
So we would go to the Blue Angel,
which was a nightspot,
where young talent would try out.
HADLEY: When we were at the Blue Angel together,
he was very sociable.
He talked to people, he even talked to the performers.
MAN: Jerry was a different person there.
Jerry had a wonderful time because he'd identified
with these types who were trying to make their mark
just as he was trying to make his mark with his writing,
and he was very charitable, he was very encouraging.
But he wouldn't encourage a young writer.
That was different. That was competition.
He was pretty suave with the women.
He used to lie to them and tell them
he was a goalie for a Montreal soccer team.
But it was a very Platonic "going out."
I mean, he didn't try to kiss me or hug me or squeeze me
or anything the way other people did.
Maybe I was too old for him.
I think he liked younger girls.
I was only 7 years younger.
I think maybe he preferred them 12 years younger.
Or younger than that.
¶ ...don't mess with Mr. In-Between ¶¶
We were in Daytona Beach.
And I was sitting at this rather crowded pool
reading "Wuthering Heights."
And this man sitting next to me said,
"How is Heathcliff? How is Heathcliff?"
And I turned to him and I said, "Heathcliff is troubled."
He was in this terrycloth bathrobe.
He was very white and his legs were white.
He didn't look like he belonged at this pool.
MAN: It's the classic veteran syndrome.
You come back from a war and see all around you
people that don't understand, don't have a clue
about the first thing that you did
when you were over there rather than here.
His mind seemed to skitter over various topics.
He told me he was a writer.
That he had published stories in the New Yorker.
And he felt that was his finest accomplishment.
We sat there for quite a while.
And finally he asked me, "How old are you?"
And I said, "14."
And I do remember very clearly his grimace.
He said he was 30.
He made a point of saying that he was 30
on January 1st, so that, in a way, he was just 30.
I finally left, and as I was going away,
he told me his name was Jerry.
I saw him the next day and we began these walks.
We would walk down the beach to this old, rickety pier.
We did this every afternoon for, say, about 10 days.
We walked very slowly down to the pier.
It was as though he was escorting me.
And he would always have his left shoulder behind me
and lean down to hear what I had to say.
He was very deaf in his right ear.
I think something to do with the war.
But Jerry Salinger
listened like you were the most important person in the world.
And he wanted to know about my family.
He wanted to know about my school.
He wanted to know about what games I played.
He wanted to know who I was reading, what I was studying.
He wanted to know whether I believed in God.
Did I want to be an actress?
He wanted to know everything about me.
We would end up at the pier and we'd sit.
We'd buy popcorn and we'd buy ice cream
and we'd feed popcorn to the sea gulls.
He was having a wonderful time.
MAN: There's an image from "Esmé" which haunts me,
and it's that image late in the story where...
Sergeant X feels his mind dislodge itself
and begin to teeter,
and he compares that to luggage
on and overhead rack that's unstable.
Think of "For Esmé-- with Love and Squalor."
Surely there is no better story in the half-century
on either side of that novel.
You're in a tea shop in England.
And an American soldier is on his way to war,
and he finds himself explaining himself
to a 12-year-old girl, whose manners are too good.
And this wish that she expresses
that he should return from the battle
with all his, she says "f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s" intact.
With all his faculties intact.
And then he makes this abrupt, kind of shattering
cinematic cut to this soldier after he's been to battle,
writing a letter to this Esmé, and he has
barely clung to his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s.
He's barely hung onto his intelligence and his powers
and he's going to return to America
and he's going to be J.D. Salinger,
and he's gonna write.
WOMAN: I would do cartwheels on the beach.
And then I would whip off into the ocean,
and he would love that.
I was fresh and new like a breath of spring.
And I knew I brought him joy.
I think he felt it was as close to a perfect...
maybe even direct moment that he'd had,
maybe ever had.
These perfect moments, they got him away
from his melancholy,
his angst about the war.
On his very last day, he asked me
would it be all right for him to write me?
And I said, "Of course."
He also said, "I'd like to kiss you goodbye,
but you know I can't."
And then Jerry went up to my mother
and said very seriously,
"I am going to marry your daughter."
Years later, he told me that he could not have written "Esmé"
had he not met me.
Well, I remember talking once to William Maxwell
about what it was like to work with Salinger.
He said, "Salinger was very specific.
He was a very careful writer.
He knew what he wanted, even down to his punctuation."
And Maxwell told me the story of a piece
that Salinger had written that had been edited,
had gone all through the process,
down to the final page proof,
when they were getting ready to publish the magazine,
and a final proofreader found a spot
that he felt like needed a comma.
He went to Maxwell, and Maxwell looked at it and said,
"Well, it looked like it needed a comma to me."
They couldn't find Salinger.
So they went ahead and put the comma in.
And when the story came out, Maxwell said
Salinger was melancholy about that comma.
Salinger's idea of perfection is really perfection.
And it shouldn't be tampered with.
MAN: Samuel Goldwyn was one of the original Hollywood moguls.
And he became famous for being the most literary
of the Hollywood producers.
And it's a great irony because he was probably
the most illiterate of the Hollywood producers.
The Epstein brothers, who had written "Casablanca,"
they came to Goldwyn with an idea for a movie
based on a short story they had recently read in the New Yorker.
And the story was "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut."
And the author was a young J.D. Salinger,
who was just being talked about a great deal.
So this appealed to Goldwyn,
who bought the rights and turned it into a movie
called "My Foolish Heart."
I think, every time an author sells something to Hollywood,
part of him says to himself, "Well...
my work is so special -- mine won't get changed.
You know, and certainly they're not going to rape it,"
as I think Hollywood did to "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut."
Gosh, what about the rest of your life, El?
Please, darling, don't you be crazy --
Mary Jane, I'll never tell him.
The beauty of the short story is how much Salinger left out.
And the great delight for the Epsteins was
how much they could put in.
That's a very aristocratic ear.
Salinger's response was extremely violent, and he vowed
never to sell another work to Hollywood again.
It's that protectiveness
that actually led to the end of our friendship.
Eventually, I got a job as an editor
at Cosmopolitan magazine,
which then was a literary magazine,
before Helen Gurley Brown got hold of it
for "Sex and the Single Girl."
And in the course of our poker game,
Jerry handed me a story and said,
"Here, I think this is a good story for Cosmopolitan."
It was called
"A Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record."
And he said, "But one thing -- you tell your editor,
not one word should be changed, and that's up to you.
You've gotta watch it, because they like to cut
and they like to make it fit a space.
If they do that, then there's no go."
He attached a note to it.
"Either as is or not at all."
And it was all fine
but I forgot to check on the title that they gave it.
Instead of "Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record,"
they changed it to "Blue Melody."
I thought, well, the best thing I can do
is meet this head-on.
So I called him and I said,
"Can we have a beer at Chumley's tonight," or whatever.
And I met him, and I had the magazine.
And I had a tough time sort of getting around to the topic.
And after hemming and hawing, he even said,
"Get to the point. What's bothering you?"
And I said, "Jerry, I have to explain this to you.
I really very carefully attended to the prose that you wrote,
so that nothing was changed.
But unbeknownst to me -- and I have no control over this
because I am not the fiction editor --
they put a different title on."
So he grabbed the magazine out of my hand
and he looked at it.
And his face
turned...
apoplectic red.
And just spewed, uh...
an angry denunciation of me.
What kind of a friend was I? How did I let this happen?
And I tried to get a word in to say,
"You know I have no control over what's done in the final edit--"
He said, "You had to have control!
I told you you're in charge of it and I trusted you with it
and I'll never trust you again on anything," and he walked out.
That's it, left me with my beer,
sitting at the table.
And he took the magazine with him.
When we next met, after Daytona,
was in the spring,
when I was in New York with my family.
I was 14 and I can remember
exactly what I had on.
I had a little tan suit on,
with little white gloves,
and a little straw hat.
And we were walking down a street
and the straw hat blew off, and I thought,
"Oh, how embarrassing," and...
he went tearing down that street,
laughing and chortling.
He came back
and formally gave me my hat, which was a little bit bashed,
and put it back on my head.
And he laughed about it for about 15 minutes.
This is one of the letters that Jerry sent me.
He was, at the time, writing "The Catcher in the Rye."
He felt nervous
about Holden's language.
He was worried
about how it was going to be received by people,
particularly people he loved.
He wanted people to know, absolutely,
that he was trying to write a good book,
not just a best-seller, a good book.
MAN: Along came the gentleman,
about six years younger than I was.
And he had a big black dog, then he told me
that all he would be doing was writing.
No parties, no visitors. He was a loner.
The perfect tenant for me.
And that's how I met a man called J.D. Salinger.
And if his typewriter was going, I knew enough
not to intrude into it.
This was his own world.
MAN: George Orwell once said that writing a book
is a horrible, exhausting struggle.
One would never undertake such a thing
if one were not driven by some demon.
And it looks to me that he had demons that he was exorcising.
MAN: He came home and wrote about this adolescent
at war with society.
MAN: That's when he found the real Jerry Salinger voice,
so that he was Holden Caulfield
and he was able to transmit that onto the page,
so that you get a real feel of the frustration
of every kid that age.
WOMAN: Jerry said there was a great deal of Holden in him.
MAN: Holden was rejecting the whole world of his parents.
MAN: He hated these prep schools that he had gone to.
WOMAN: He had disdain for all these people.
MAN: Wealth, fame, career,
possessions, possessions, possessions.
Salinger saw America as this shopping center
that has lost its mind.
It's lost its soul.
MAN: He hated phoniness.
He just hated it.
MAN: Is it possible to grow up and not sell out?
MAN: They're all there,
all of the Salinger diatribes and all of his prejudices.
They're all in that book.
MAN: He didn't spend just 10 years writing that book.
He spent 30 years writing "Catch in the Rye,"
because everything in his life
up to that point was funneled into that book.
WOMAN: A book takes the time that it needs,
and you don't have a choice about it.
But don't worry -- novels grow in the dark.
MAN: It was a channeling.
MAN: It's some kind of miracle of ink making flesh and blood.
You see the artist at the peak of his powers.
WOMAN: Holden always imagined millions of little kids
running in a field of rye
and having to save them from going over the cliff.
The cliff of what? The cliff towards adulthood.
MAN: It was an accumulation of everything he had to say.
MAN: The great subversive, antiestablishment
book of all time.
MAN: Salinger met with an important editor,
Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace.
Giroux wanted him to publish a collection of short stories.
He didn't hear anything from Salinger for quite a while.
One morning, Salinger walks in and said,
"You know, I don't think we should publish
that collection of short stories.
What we need to do is publish my novel about this kid
who goes to New York and has an interesting time."
MAN: Eventually, Salinger did deliver
"The Catcher in the Rye" in manuscript to Bob Giroux.
MAN: Giroux read the novel.
He loved it. He was impressed by it.
And he said that he'd be proud to publish it.
But then Giroux showed it to his boss.
MAN: Eugene Reynal,
who looked at the novel and said,
"This guy's crazy: we need to have this rewritten."
MAN: Bob Giroux got Salinger into his office,
spent a lot of time looking out of his window
and down into Madison Avenue,
then turned to Salinger and said,
"But, of course, Holden Caulfield is crazy,"
and there was no response from Salinger.
But then, on closer inspection,
Giroux saw that Salinger was weeping.
And he rose, went down
into the ground floor of the office building
and called his agent and said,
"Get me out of this publishing house.
They think my Holden Caulfield is crazy."
Holden was, in fact, Jerry Salinger.
So, to be told that he was crazy...
meant that he had to take offense.
MAN: Salinger came to William Maxwell
at the New Yorker magazine,
to read him the manuscript in its entirety.
MAN: Salinger hoped to have segments of the novel published
in the New Yorker.
"Dear Jerry, the vote here went, sadly, against your novel.
To us, the notion that, in one family,
the Caulfield family,
there are four such extraordinary children
is not quite tenable.
Another point -- this story is too ingenious and ingrown.
Prejudice hear against what we call writer consciousness."
WOMAN: If he thought everything was phoney,
he thought the New Yorker was anything but phoney.
They had the greatest status.
If you're published there, you are a real literary person.
So when that was rejected, he wondered
if he was a middlebrow writer.
Salinger began to lose hope.
How could you pass up on "Catcher"?
MAN: Pages of "The Catcher in the Rye"
stormed the beaches on D-Day.
They witnessed the atrocities of the concentration camps.
There was not way that J.D. Salinger
was going to rewrite "The Catcher in the Rye."
A short time after that, he placed the novel
with Little Brown, and I guess we might say
the rest is publishing history.
The publication of "Catcher in the Rye" in 1951
was something of a revolution.
[Dramatic soundtrack plays]
He really wanted to be up there, beyond Hemingway.
Uh...
A figure of such brilliance and wisdom...
that we can only think of people like Shakespeare
and Beethoven.
And that novel was so popular,
it meant he was middlebrow.
Here he was thinking he's saying the most original things
that nobody's ever thought of, and the entire world's like,
"Yes, that's exactly what we feel!"
How many people actually read
"The Catcher in the Rye" in this class?
That's pretty amazing.
There's only one person who hasn't read it out of 18.
[Speaking Spanish]
When you're a kid and you read "Catcher in the Rye,"
you're just like, "Oh, my god, somebody gets it."
You suddenly realize that you are part of a larger world
and that that larger world is no longer reliable.
I remember that being the first book
you'd take with you when you walked around.
Just wanted to have it with you.
I think we just all thought, "Here's this cool guy.
He's such a bad ass, he's such a rebel.
I want to date him."
I think "Catcher in the Rye"
is one of the funniest novels ever written.
I reread it and I started highlighting lines that
I thought were great, and almost the entire book was yellow.
MAN: It just crossed all the lines, on every level,
between old and young, rich and poor,
black and white, male and female.
Everywhere.
-Millions and millions... -"Catcher in the Rye."
Great book. Read it as a kid.
[Readers speaking various languages]
"The Catcher in the Rye."
The enormous impact of "Catcher in the Rye,"
overnight, transported him
into a major writer and personality.
WOMAN: I don't think he was prepared for the instant celebrity
of "Catcher in the Rye" when it became
a Book-of-the-Month Club, and there was a fantastic,
very soulful picture on the back of it,
and he asked that that picture be removed from the book.
It was unheard of that an author
would not want his picture on the back of the book
or on the back flap of the book
and as big and beautiful as you could possibly get it.
¶ As I walked down the street... ¶
I understand why anyone wou want to --
who is becoming famous would stop it.
You're born with the right of anonymity.
You're just anonymous.
You walk the streets, you do whatever
and you can actually have private thoughts
while you're amongst other people.
People who never had that change in their life
don't think about it, don't even question it, it just is.
WOMAN: He wouldn't go on a book tour
or sign books or go on television shows.
He didn't ever want to be interviewed.
He always, always felt
that what people should know about an author
was nothing personal.
They should know the author through his work,
and that's all that he was willing
to give people, his work.
So, I was rather surprised to go to a cocktail party,
as we did in the time --
someplace on the East Side,
where the prominent young publishers were there.
Some publicity people and some editors.
I remember Joe Fox of Random House was there.
He and his wife Jill,
who were the ones that said, "Salinger's here!"
And this was terribly exciting.
And I thought, is it that guy over there?
And then they said, "He's coming to dinner,"
and I remember we went to this restaurant
and they'd shoved tables together, and sure enough,
he was there.
And I remember that he sat down at the table.
We were all excited about being in his presence.
He was really there, the real Salinger.
And presently he got up and muttered something
to someone that he had to make a phone call,
disappeared and never came back.
When there was this sudden onslaught,
he suddenly realized, "I don't really need this
and I don't want this," and I think that's the moment
he just turned on his heels and disappeared
into the mountains of New Hampshire.
MAN: When you read "Catcher in the Rye,"
you just know, someday, some way,
Salinger is going to end up in a spot
that he considers his seclusion.
WOMAN: It didn't mean that he was a hermit, you know.
He just didn't want to be with writers,
and he certainly didn't want to be the toast of New York.
He was protecting himself.
His motives were really very pure.
He wanted the peace and quiet to do his work
and Cornish is where he found it.
WOMAN: I was part of the high school gang
that he used to take in his jeep to ball games.
He was just one of the guys.
With Jerry around, you could just do what you wanted
and not think that you were going to be reprimanded
or, you know, put down because of what you were doing.
It was all laughter.
The whole time was all laughter.
It was neat.
He's like the world's greatest high school guidance counselor.
You know, that's him, that's Salinger.
WOMAN: There was a soda fountain right in town
that most of us gathered,
and Jerry Salinger used to come right in and be part of it.
There was four or five of us girls there,
and we were all just wide-eyed over him.
He may have been older than we were,
but he wasn't acting it, he was acting like just a pal.
And this is Kennedy's Pond,
where Jerry used to take us up and drop us off
when we wanted to go swimming.
The people did know that he was a writer.
You know, nobody really gave it much thought,
least of all us kids didn't.
Everyone keeps saying,
"Why did he hang around with the kids?"
Well, because we didn't care about what he did.
We were friends.
Until Shirlie Blaney blew that.
One of the girls that was part of our group, Shirlie Blaney,
at one point she and Jerry were pretty close.
She did a lot of newspaper work during high school
and so they did have this connection.
We all teased her about,
I mean, here was Jerry Salinger the writer,
and who do you think you're going to be seeing, you know?
And she said, "You'd be surprised
what I'm gonna do with this."
WOMAN: Salinger is having lunch in a cafe and Shirlie Blaney
approached him as his friend and asked
if she could interview him for her high school paper.
WOMAN: He said, "Okay," but with the promise
that it would go totally to the school paper, no further.
MAN: When asked if "Catcher in the Rye"
was in any way autobiographical,
Mr. Salinger said, "My boyhood was very much the same
as that of the boy in the book
and it was a great relief telling people about it."
It really went well
if it could have just stayed that friendship,
but when Shirlie started getting serious,
uh...
and not just a friend but wanted to be more than that,
I think that's when Jerry put a stop to it all.
He gave her an interview in good faith,
and she hurt him, she used him.
She found a way to make some fast bucks, I think.
WOMAN: The Claremont Daily Eagle
published it on their front page.
MAN: And then it snowballs from there.
It becomes a national story.
Then he didn't trust any of us.
Then he just w not our friend anymore.
He felt betrayed.
I remember the word "betrayal, betrayal!"
MAN: He literally built a wall around his house
and that was that.
I think the world was...
the world -- the buzz status group --
was waiting for...
a big novel.
Uh...
and I'm not sure that's the way Salinger
really ever wanted to write.
MAN: Everybody wanted him to write a sequel to "Catcher."
MAN: He was the guy that wrote "The Catcher in the Rye."
And he was the only one that really knew what that took,
how much that cost him, personally, and its true value,
never mind what the society thought, or the literary world.
To him it was finished, and he had to move on.
MAN: "Nine Stories" begins and ends
with a sudden suicide following a conversation
in which something couldn't get said.
They are characters who want to get out of the world.
And the stories end when they're given permission to leave.
It's amazing. It's a strange effect.
It's home movies of a family.
It's those old -- t-t-t-t-t...
we used to have -- they're 8-millimeter,
those movies our fathers used to take of us.
T-t-t-t-t-t-t.
And you're in the swimming pool.
Then you're at a picnic and then you're on a swing.
This is, to me, like the 8-millimeter movies
of these Glass children.
If they're not about the Glass children,
they're about the people who live next door.
In this neighborhood, in New York,
after the war.
And, in an amazing way,
how that war so supremely affected everybody,
and the loss of family members.
In 1954, I was in college,
and Jerry would take me for an evening in New York.
He would take me to the Palm Room,
or we'd go to the theater, we'd go to the Blue Angel.
I remember once
driving back on that East Side highway
and seeing the George Washington Bridge,
and thinking how absolutely beautiful it was
and saying how beautiful it was.
And he laughed, and he said, "Jean,
you've got to learn not to say the obvious."
I thought, well, you know, he's right.
I was still young, but here was this fascinating man
who seemed to like me.
But in all those letters,
it says, "My work has to come first."
And he's sorry to be such an "unromantic man,"
and I'd have every right
to tell him to go jump in the lake
and go off with some less neurotic person.
But once in a while,
he would come and fetch me.
And we'd drive up to Cornish.
We would take a walk in the afternoon and talk.
And then dinner.
And then we'd look at television by the fire.
Lawrence Welk or Liberace or something like that.
And we'd dance.
I remember one night I said, "Let's dance!"
It was fun.
We would look at the people on the television dancing
and we just would waltz or...
laughing all the time.
He seemed filled with joy, to me,
a great deal of the time.
But there was never
a inkling of anything physical between us.
Jerry Salinger remembered me always on that pier
in Daytona Beach.
I am the one who changed it.
We were in the back seat of a taxi
and I turned and kissed him.
Not soon after the taxi,
we went to Montreal for the weekend.
We went up to his -- our room --
and we went to bed.
And I told him I was a virgin.
And he didn't like that.
He didn't want the responsibility of that.
I guess -- he just didn't like it.
And then the next day, we're flying to Boston,
and me on to New York and he on to West Lebanon.
And somehow in the airplane,
he was told that his plane was cancelled.
And I began laughing,
because I was delighted
that we could spend the afternoon together --
particularly after what had just happened the night before --
and I saw this veil come down on his face, just like this.
This look of horror and hurt.
It was a terrible look.
It was a look that conveyed everything.
I think all of the sudden he saw me
in an entirely different light.
He hustled me right onto a plane.
I didn't have a plane till later in the day.
He went right to the desk, got the ticket changed,
hustled me right on the plane.
I knew I had come between him and his work.
And it was over.
Wow. How do you describe Claire Douglas?
In many ways, Claire Douglas will be the Widow Salinger.
You know, there were women after Claire,
but she's the wife.
Salinger attended a party one night
where he met this captivating, attractive,
personable young woman who was 19 years old.
And Salinger, who was 34, was instantly attracted to her.
She's just the kind of a lady, you think,
with a long dress and a neat hairdo and...
and with a glass of wine in her hands,
talking with lots of New York people.
Yeah. Her role...
just didn't seem right.
Her childhood was not one that set her up
with any kind of foundation.
She was sent off to convent boarding school at age 5.
In and out of eight different foster homes.
Off to another boarding school.
And...
the summer between her junior and senior year,
met my father.
WOMAN: In 1955, I was in Daytona at the Sheraton,
dancing.
And I looked out a window,
and here was Jerry Salinger with this beautiful girl.
They looked very comfortable together.
They were obviously out for an after-dinner walk.
He saw me. I know that.
Our eyes met.
He saw me.
And the next time I looked, he was gone.
They were gone.
MAN: Many critics contend that Claire
was the inspiration for Franny.
And on February 17, 1955,
J.D. Salinger married Claire Douglas in Vermont.
Salinger gave a copy of the story to Claire
as her wedding present.
MAN: "Franny" became a national cultural event.
It had this kind of cliffhanger ending,
where the main character, Franny, fainted,
and people were wondering, what happened?
Was she intoxicated, pregnant, or what?
On December 10, 1955, J.D. Salinger became a father.
And his daughter Margaret was born.
The way he viewed Claire changed after that.
Before that, she had been the late-teen, early 20s woman
that he was fascinated with.
Now, she was a woman. She was a mother.
And I think the birth of that child
had a permanent effect on their relationship.
When I started taking care of his kids,
Claire was due to have Matthew.
And Jerry knew me.
So he asked me to help Claire with Margaret.
We called her Peggy.
I'd get there at 8:30.
If there were dishes around, I'd do them up.
Usually, Peggy was still with mom in the other room.
And then she would come out.
And so we would either go out and walk around
or we would get things out for her to color.
We'd spend a lot of time just chatting together.
She was a neat kid.
Jerry built a small building
down over the hill from the house.
It was just a little square house.
And that's where he would go down, any time, day or night,
go in and shut the door,
and you wouldn't see him for a week or longer,
'cause he got into a writing mode
and had to be left totally alone.
Claire was not allowed to bother him.
MAN: Nobody could enter the bunker.
It was the safe place, and a sacred place for him.
Salinger installed cup hooks upon which he would place
scenes he had written.
There were notes tacked up all over the walls.
It was the place in which Salinger became the characters.
It was the place that was his and his Glass family's,
no one else's family.
WOMAN: The Glass family were seven children, all geniuses,
who each appeared on a show called "It's a Wise Child."
The sons and daughters of two vaudevillians --
Seymour, the oldest, was the greatest genius of them all.
The most spiritual, the most artistic.
And he commits suicide.
And that informs their entire lives from then on.
"Franny" was quickly followed by a wonderful long story
called "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,"
about characters of that same family.
[Typewriter typing]
MAN: The Glass family and Salinger's real family
would actually compete with each other for his attention,
and his affection.
MAN: How weird is it when your father is gone
but you can actually see where he is
but you can't go disturb him.
What does that do to a child psychologically,
when that's your childhood, that's your youth.
WOMAN: By the time Matthew was born,
you'd think Claire was a single parent.
MAN: He put a cot in, so that he literally
never had to leave the bunker.
[Muted explosions]
MAN: You think about it....daily.
Uh, you have flashbacks.
There are times in which I can be sitting in the living room
and, uh...
have artillery land in my yard
or in my living room.
So you do get those kinds of flashbacks.
I've told my wife that.
Sid Perelman, humorist, Houston writer for the New Yorker,
did go up to see him in New Hampshire.
Sid said, "He's got this concrete bunker where he works
but he's got a great big statue of Buddha in the garden
and he's got a lot of Buddhist priests around him,
and they do a lot of chanting."
And Sid thought this was very strange.
MAN: Salinger's religion was
the central concern in his writing,
his championing the ideas
of Vedanta Hinduism in his Glass stories.
The so-called karma yoga concept
that comes from the Bhagavad Gita,
that you should do your work as perfectly as you possibly can,
with no thought of rewards.
And only that way can you be a really happy person.
MAN: When Salinger submitted the sequel to "Franny"
to the New Yorker, this novella called "Zooey," in 1957,
the fiction editors unanimously agreed to reject the story.
When I interviewed William Maxwell,
who was one of the editors, he said that the reason
was that the New Yorker didn't publish sequels.
But, in fact, they had before,
and I think he was being tactful.
I think the case is they just didn't like the story.
William Shawn intervened.
He was the editor-in-chief and he decreed
that the magazine would, in fact, publish "Zooey,"
and since he was the one who championed it,
he would edit it himself.
MAN: The New Yorker was Mr. Shawn,
there was no other New Yorker.
He was it.
MAN: Salinger is the perfect author for him.
Shawn is the perfect editor for Salinger because they're both
strange, brilliant creatures.
William Shawn was a very shy and introverted person.
He was a man who was riddled with phobias.
Devoted to ideas.
He wouldn't sit in the front of a theater
because he was afraid of a fire.
Has had more books dedicated to him
than anyone, probably, in the history of publishing.
He carried a hatchet around, reportedly, in his brief case.
He was always afraid he'd be caught in an elevator
and he'd have to hack his way out.
His whole life was really wrapped up in the New Yorker
and his writers.
He wouldn't travel if he had to go through a tunnel.
Salinger truly was grateful to him
for the work he had done and felt that he had found
a kind of soulmate in Shawn.
"Zooey" was so successful that after that,
all his work was handled by William Shawn.
He didn't work with the other fiction editors
in the New Yorker anymore.
["Mony Mony" plays]
MAN: In the 1960s, "The Catcher in the Rye"
takes off, becoming a cultural phenomenon.
MAN: It literally is a rite of passage.
It suggested that you had lost
your literary virginity in a way.
Everybody loved him -- kids, adults.
He was an idol, a teen idol.
Salinger was the national story.
MAN: In 1961, the big media
really pull out the big guns.
Time, Newsweek, and Life
sent out some of their best reporters.
Newspaper people came and did interviews.
They all started coming in at Jerry.
He couldn't stop for a cup of coffee.
They wouldn't allow it.
MAN: Time magazine tracked down Salinger's sister Doris
at her job at Bloomingdales, and in no uncertain terms
she basically told them, "I would never do anything
my brother wouldn't approve of."
There was so much attention,
so much heatso much light being focused on J.D. Salinger.
Billy Wilder wanted to make a movie
of "The Catcher in the Rye" so badly
that he had his agents hound Salinger.
I remember the whole talk in New York at that time was
that Elia Kazan was desperate to make a film
of "The Catcher in the Rye."
Jerry Lewis, who was like a huge movie star,
publicly declared that he was going to make a film
of "Catcher in the Rye."
And on a fairly regular basis, he would call J.D. Salinger,
who would hang up on him.
MAN: Salinger showed up unexpectedly
at Billy Wilder's agent's office in New York
and he starts screaming,
"Tell Billy Wilder to leave me alone!
He's very, very insensitive!"
MAN: Elia Kazan, going on his search for "Catcher in the Rye,"
knocking on the door and saying,
"Mr. Salinger, I'm Elia Kazan."
And Salinger saying, "That's nice,"
and closing the door.
I hope it's true.
MAN: If they made a movie, Holden wouldn't like it.
Enough said. [Chuckles]
MAN: "Franny and Zooey" instantly took off.
It was on the best-seller list in no time.
It remained on the best-seller list
for weeks and weeks and weeks.
MAN: When J.D. Salinger appears on the cover of Time magazine,
it's not a photograph, it's an imaginary portrait.
It conveys the sense that the author has enough integrity
not to be part of the publicity machine.
MAN: I was assigned by Life magazine
to go up and get a picture of this man
who was very reclusive
and had refused to be photographed, I guess,
for many years.
The challenge was to be unobtrusive,
to not be noticed,
and to take advantage of the terrain,
hiding in the bushes,
much in the way that one would
if you were photographing wildlife.
You don't walk up there
with six cameras hanging around your neck.
So I put my cameras in a shopping bag.
I would find my little hiding place in the bushes
and stay there all day shivering,
and very cold and rainy.
I had a horrible cold,
bordering on the flu.
The editors said,
"If it's more than three days, forget about it."
Then, lo and behold, on the third day
he made an appearance to walk his dog, very briefly.
He just emerged, just for a few seconds,
just enough time for me to get off a half dozen frames.
In fact, I was afraid
that I was close enough that he might be able to hear
the clicking of the shutter.
MAN: I remember reading about him in Life magazine.
I remember reading about this man who lived in this house
who didn't want visitors.
Didn't want to discuss himself.
I remember sort of being puzzled by that
because, again, you're at that age where,
you're suddenly realizing there are famous people
and then there's the rest of us.
There are people who have extraordinary lives
and then there's the rest of us.
And here was a man who had an opportunity to have
what at that young age
you thought was an extraordinary life,
and he was saying, "I'd rather not; please go away."
When "Franny and Zooey,"
"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters"
and "Seymour: an introduction" were published as books,
the literary knives came out.
Joan Didion wrote that he had a fondness
for giving instructions to people on how to live life.
John Updike wrote,
"Salinger loved his characters more than God loved them."
Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy --
She wrote an essay in Harper's magazine
called "J.D. Salinger's Closed Circuit."
She saw the entire work he had done as being narcissistic.
It is one person reflecting on his own image.
You can't get so engrossed in your own image
without it being a dangerous thing.
Not since the creation of the universe
has there been such powerful forces at work
as this ghastly, self-observant family,
going on and on and on,
about everything of importance to them,
which they assume is important to all the world.
The fiction went over the edge
with "Hapworth" in 1965.
It's long on tone and absolutely devoid of plot.
It was just the brilliant Seymour
writing as a brilliant 7-year-old from camp,
and it was just too much.
It was impossible to believe.
That was just a little bit too much, uh,
theology for most people.
MAN: Ultimately, Claire couldn't stand it anymore.
The isolation, the emotional distress that she felt
because her husband was obsessively writing
in the bunker.
And Claire filed for divorce.
Claire was a lady
and she deserved to be treated like one.
But Jerry didn't treat her like one.
So I was glad to hear that she was free.
I want to tell you something
you really ought to ask Charlie Portis about,
'cause he told me -- and I may have it all wrong --
I remember Charlie telling me he was sent up to New Hampshire,
some political story, and he's heading back to New York
on a little commuter flight, and this was a propeller plane.
And two men sitting right in front of him,
one on one side of the aisle, on the outside seat,
one on the outside seat on the other side of the aisle,
realize they know each other.
And they have to shout almost
because the noise of the airplane.
The one on one side says, "Well, I'll be damned,
Jerry, I haven't seen you in so long!
What the hell have you been up to?"
And it dawns on Charlie Portis that this is J.D. Salinger.
And he's filling in almost the last 10 years of his life
for his friend.
And so Charlie, like any good newspaperman,
he's taking this down a mile a minute.
So when they land, he goes up to Salinger and he says,
"Mr. Salinger."
This guy turns around and he says,
"Hi, my name is Charles Portis.
I'm from the New York Herald Tribune.
I just happened to be sitting behind you."
He said he got no further than that,
when Salinger -- turned white -- said,
"You wouldn't! You wouldn't!"
And Charlie said to me, "You know, I wouldn't.
That guy looked so awful when he realized what I had."
He said, "I just dropped it."
Are you talking to Joyce Maynard?
MAN: You don't think we should?
Well, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
If you do talk to her, you're gonna piss off a lot of people.
And if you don't talk to her,
there's no way you're going to get the whole story.
WOMAN: When I was 18,
I wrote a magazine article that changed my life.
It was published in The New York Times Magazine,
with a photograph of me on the cover.
Within three days of the publication of that article,
there were three enormous sacks of mail
in front of my dormitory room.
And in among them was
this one letter that, um...
eclipsed all the rest.
It began, "Dear Ms. Maynard.
I bet you're sitting in your college dormitory room
surrounded by letters
from magazine editors and book editors
and TV people and radio people,"
all of which was true.
And then he went on to say that he knew a thing or two himself
about the dangers, the perils, of early success.
He sd, "People will try to exploit you,
and I urge you to be cautious."
And it was only when I got to the bottom of the letter --
and by that time I was already
completely connected to this person --
that I saw the signature, J.D. Salinger.
MAN: He knows exactly what he's doing.
He knows exactly how powerful the name J.D. Salinger is.
It's a name that, with the right girl, creates a spell
that they fall under.
WOMAN: Getting a letter from J.D. Salinger
was like getting a letter from Holden Caulfield,
but written just to me.
Within three days, there was a second letter,
and then a third and a fourth.
There was never any question that we would meet.
And for my mother,
it was as if J.D. Salinger had recognized her,
because I was her product.
I had been raised to believe that I was going to do
big, important things
and that this was a sign that I was going to.
I was going to spend time with this wonderful man.
My mother was a little unclear of the boundaries.
She sewed me a dress for our meeting.
It was an A-line dress with very bright primary colors.
Very short dress.
My English teacher from high school
drove me to the Hanover Inn, where we met.
Jerry was standing out on the porch,
this tall, lanky person, and he raised his hand
and he was waving as if
he was somebody coming in off a boat.
He actually jumped over the banister.
There was something very boyish about him.
I threw my arms around him. I hugged him.
He hugged me back.
And the very first thing he said when he saw me was,
"You're wearing the watch."
Clearly, he'd really studied my photograph.
In the story "For Esmé-- with Love and Squalor,"
the character Esmé is wearing a very large man's watch.
I jumped in the front seat of his little BMW.
He liked to drive fast
along these New Hampshire, Vermont roads.
Covered bridge.
Winding, winding, winding up the hill.
To his house.
It was just
this very quiet, simple place.
There were no personal items,
photographs, letters.
The living room had piles and piles of New Yorker magazines.
Books stacked everywhere.
Movies stacked everywhere.
Peggy's room, there were stacks
and stacks of movie reels.
"Maltese Falcon," "Casablanca,"
"The 39 Steps," "The Lady Vanishes" --
all these old movies.
He'd make a bowl of popcorn,
which he'd sprinkle with brewer's yeast, as I recall.
And we snuggled up on this really comfy couch,
and he threaded the film through the projector
and turned out the lights and it was movie time.
He loved "Lost Horizon."
It's a movie about this place where you never grow old.
And he said that the only person
who ever could have played Holden Caulfield was himself.
WOMAN: The women in his lives are really
projections of his own wishes,
are characters he creates.
It's a series
of very young women,
because when you're young,
and particularly if you're rather lost
and insecure and an ungrounded young person,
it's much easier to become
who somebody wishes you to be.
MAYNARD: I was looking for a sage.
I was looking for some sense of meaning to life.
And I found it with Salinger.
But from the moment I moved in,
I could do very little right.
We had a very set routine.
The first thing we did was have a bowl
of Birds Eye frozen, tender, tiny peas, not cooked,
but with warm water poured over them,
so they'd defrost a little bit,
so they were just cool.
Then we'd meditate.
Or at least he would meditate and I would try to meditate.
But my mind kept on wandering to things of the world,
which was a big problem.
And then we would get to work writing.
He would put on a canvas jumpsuit to write.
And he would put it on like a uniform.
It was kind of like he was a soldier
only he was going off to wage his war at the typewriter.
[Typewriter typing]
He sat on a high chair at his high desk
in his writing room and worked on his typewriter,
a very old typewriter that clicked.
We met at lunch to discuss life.
And then we'd carry on a little bit in the afternoon.
We'd take a walk.
Then we came back and watched TV.
He cut himself off from a great deal of the world,
but maintained a huge interest in observing it.
I drew Jerry a lot back when I lived with him.
This is a picture of me sitting on Jerry's lap,
listening to very old recordings
of the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller
and an obscure German singer whose name I don't remember,
who was a singer from World War II.
This is a picture of Jerry and me dancing,
the television set on -- Lawrence Welk, no doubt.
The bubbles would come up,
and we'd watch the show and we would dance.
While all of my contemporaries were off in New Haven,
doing drugs and listening to Led Zeppelin.
[Laughter]
Every day, I heard typing.
A lot of typing.
And there was one space that was off the bedroom.
That was a safe.
I saw two thick manuscripts.
I've written nine books now.
I know what the size of a book manuscript looks like
and these were thick.
I never read them, was never shown them,
and knew better than to ask.
He did show me one thing, although it wasn't like
I got to sit down and read it, and that was
kind of an archive of the Glass family,
who were...
in his world, as real as any relatives.
He was protective of those characters,
as if they were his children.
Only one time did I meet friends of his.
And that was this...
memorable, and I guess disastrous, lunch.
We drove into New York and we went to the Algonquin.
And there was this man, William Shawn.
I think Jerry Salinger really loved William Shawn.
And a writer whose work I did know,
because I had read it and studied it and admired it,
Lillian Ross.
But I knew from Jerry that Lillian Ross and William Shawn
had been lovers for years,
although William Shawn was married to somebody else.
They were known as "Ross and Shawn," to Jerry.
So she asked me what sorts of things I wrote,
and I prattled on about my little career,
writing for Seventeen magazine
and judging the Miss Teenage America Pageant.
And Ross shoots William Shawn a look.
And I can well imagine the "Talk of the Town" piece
that Lillian Ross would have written about that lunch.
This lunch must have deeply embarrassed Jerry,
because we left the restaurant rather hastily,
and we went directly to Bonwit Teller,
and he bought me a very expensive black cashmere coat
of the sort that Lillian Ross might have worn.
I think he was indulging in a fantasy of innocence,
that...
that neither one of us could hold onto very long.
[Telephone rings]
One day, I heard the telephone ring.
And I heard him speaking very briefly.
And then a click.
And then he emerged from his office
with a look on his face I had never seen.
And he said, "Time magazine has got my number.
You have ruined my life."
It was odd because, in fact, I was doing something
kind of significant, I was writing a book.
And I was finishing a book, and it was going to be published
in just a few months.
But we never discussed how on earth
Jerry was going to maintain
the secrecy of our relationship with a book being published
and a publicity campaign.
And I continued to envision
and actively discuss a future.
And what I wanted most was a family.
And that became a big part of my future planning with Jerry.
We were going to have children.
Jerry announced that we were going to take a trip to Florida.
It was March, and it was Matthew and Peggy's school vacation.
The four of us set out for Daytona Beach
and checked into a hotel on the beach.
And Matthew wanted to -- I think he wanted to fly a kite
or he wanted to play in the water
or he wanted to do something that a 12-year-old boy
would understandably want to do with his dad on a vacation.
After Jerry played with Matthew in the water for a while,
he came back to the towel where I was sitting.
He looked very tired -- not just tired, he looked weary.
And he said to me, "I can't do this anymore.
I'm finished with all of this.
I'll never have any more children."
And I said...
"Then... I can't stay."
And he said, "You'd better leave now, then."
He called for a taxi
and he leaned over and said to the driver,
"This girl needs to go to the airport now,"
and put two $50 bills in my hand.
And I drove away.
MAN: "A man is in Cornish.
Amateur, perhaps, but sentimentally connected.
The saddest.
A tragic figure without a background.
Needing a future as much as your past.
Let me."
I wrote this note to J.D. Salinger,
which I thought that only he could understand,
practically begging him for an audience.
You wanna go left here? 'Cause I don't go left.
MAN: There's been countless fans
now for decades who have done this.
They leave notes for him.
They go up to his house unannounced.
They knock on his front door.
They're showing up to try to find out from Salinger
some answer to something in their lives.
1978, I remember driving on this road, alone,
feeling very lonely,
next to the Connecticut River, hoping that J.D. Salinger,
my hero, would give me a few minutes of his time.
One day, I said to my wife, "I've got to try it.
I've got to go," and I kissed her goodbye and drove
450 miles to the Vermont-New Hampshire border
and tried to find him.
I knew this was a hard thing because I found
that the neighborhood people protected him
and they wouldn't exactly tell me where he lived.
WOMAN: Cornish folks are farm folks.
And they're very protective of their land,
their animals, and their friends.
So folks would literally
scorn you if you talked about him to anybody.
He may be the only writer in American history
who's created such a story around himself,
that just catching a glimpse of him
becomes an important experience in your own life.
I drove about six miles to where I thought Salinger lived.
I wasn't 100% sure.
I knew that he lived on top of this mountain,
this wise man living in this cabin
in the White Mountains.
So I waited below this long, winding, gravel driveway,
where I thought he lived.
Sure enough, probably in the mid morning,
two cars came down the driveway.
One was his son, Matt Salinger, a teenager,
and J.D. Salinger stopped his car, his BMW, got out.
Walked over to the driver's side.
And I said, "Are you J.D. Salinger?"
because I did not recognize him from the photographs.
He says, "Yes, what can I do for you?"
I said to him very dramatically,
"I was hoping you could tell me."
And he said, "Oh, come on, don't start that kind of thing.
Are you under psychiatric care?"
And he got out of that BMW in the middle of the forest.
To me it was almost like he stepped out of a dream.
He talked about my life
as if it was as important as his life.
He asked my why I left my family,
why I drove 450 miles, why I left my job,
and I said to him, it was his writing.
I thought he felt like I did
and I wanted to talk to him about deep things.
Then he kind of got very frustrated.
And then he stepped back from my car.
It was almost like he grew six inches.
"I'm a fiction writer.
There's people come and see me like you every year
from all over North America, from Canada, from Europe.
I've had to run from people on the street.
There's nothing I can tell these people
to help them with their problems.
I may present questions in my writing in a certain way
but I don't pretend to know the answers."
He was sick of it, he'd had 25 years of this.
He said, "Do you have any other income besides your writing?"
because I told him I wanted to become a published author.
I told him I was a reporter.
He got a little bit angry, got into his car and drove off.
And as I sat there, I felt that I blew it,
my chance to talk intimately with J.D. Salinger.
I sat in my own car,
writing him another note,
telling him that I was a little disappointed.
I'd driven all this way and he'd only given me a few minutes.
And as I was finishing the note, he came back in his car
and he says, "Haven't you left yet?"
I said, "No, I was just gonna
actually pin this note up by your door."
He says, "Well, come over here, give it to me."
I gave him the note anhis face became long and drawn.
"Jerry, I'm sorry.
It was probably a mistake coming to Cornish.
You're not as deep, as sentimental as I had hoped,
the person who wrote those books I love."
And then that seemed to defuse his frustration from earlier,
and he says, "Well, I understand it,
but I'm not a counselor, I'm a fiction writer."
And at that point, I asked him,
"Don't you want to share your writing,
don't you want to share your feelings with people?
You stopped publishing for many years."
And I remember him saying, "No!"
And he pointed his finger almost like a gun,
and he said, "That's where writers get in trouble."
[Gunshots]
Down!
MAN: As a police officer in the 20th Precinct,
we had a report of shots fired at One West 72nd Street.
That's the Dakota!
MAN: I just couldn't wait till those police got there.
I didn't know what to do.
I took "The Catcher in the Rye" out of my pocket.
MAN: There was a man standing in the street, saying,
"That's the man doing the shooting."
So I drew my gun, grabbed Chapman,
and I put him up against the wall.
And here is John Lennon being carried out
by two police officers from my precinct.
And at eye level,
I see John Lennon's face with his eyes closed
and blood coming out of his mouth.
They decided to put him in the radio car
and take him to the hospital immediately,
try to save his life.
So I handcuffed Chapman.
I looked down on the ground.
I said, "Are these your clothes?"
He says, "Yes, and the book, too."
And I look at the book, it's "Catcher in the Rye."
I was literally living inside of a paperback novel,
J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye."
MAN: We have to remember, the things we produce,
symbolically and in language, we have no control
over what happens to them once we let them go.
MAN: Salinger put his depression into Holden.
It's almost like black magic.
Some of his depression may go away,
but the character lives, and there are some readers
who will take the depression
out of the character, into themselves.
MAN: The conversation Salinger creates
between himself and the reader is so close,
that if you misread it,
you read Holden's
antipathy to the culture as license to kill.
MAN: To have the book with him.
He was right there with J.D. Salinger,
right there with Holden.
CHAPMAN: Holden wasn't violent,
but he had a violent thought of shooting someone.
The word "kill" is used a lot in the book.
"This is my people-shooting hat. I kill people in this hat."
The word "phony" is used over 30 times in the book.
MAN: Chapman read an article in Esquire magazine.
The theme of the article was,
John Lennon was a sellout. John Lennon was a phony.
I'd say to myself, "That phony, that bastard!"
MAN: If you are reading the book through a distorted lens,
you feel so acutely Holden's powerleness
and you say, "Yeah. I feel powerless, too."
CHAPMAN: John Lennon was talking to a nobody.
He signed an album for a nobody.
Look at this guy, you know, he's a big rock star
and he comes in a limousine.
He's a phony.
You want me to teach you what reality is? Bang!
MAN: Mark David Chapman wrote me a letter
that I should read "Catcher in the Rye"
to understand why he committed this murder.
He reads that novel in open court when he is sentenced.
CHAPMAN: This is my statement, underlining the word "this."
If one person used something I had written
as their justification for killing somebody
I'd say, "God, people are crazy."
[Gunfire]
It didn't end with the death of John Lennon,
and you keep paying for this over and over
when you hear of the death of a celebrity
and maybe they've got "The Catcher in the Rye"
as John Hinckley did.
MAN: Young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot Reagan
and his press secretary, said,
"If you want my defense, all you have to do
is read 'Catcher in the Rye.'"
Rebecca Schaeffer was expecting a script to be delivered
to her for "Godfather III."
Rebecca Schaeffer came to the door.
[Gunshot]
She fell.
Among the pieces of evidence was a copy of "Catcher in the Rye."
But if three people use something I had written
as justification, I would really be very, very troubled by it.
It's not the one, it's the series of three.
WOMAN: I would see him downtown
and I'd say hi
and he'd walk right by and not even say hi.
And I knew him well.
Margaret Salinger is back with us this morning
to talk some more about
her controversial memoir, "Dream Catcher."
The book is an intensely private look
at her famous yet very reclusive father, J.D. Salinger.
Do you think, Peggy, he ultimately went into writing
so he could create characters or create his own universe
where people met his expectations?
I personally think that that is certainly
what's going on.
WOMAN: I sat and cried reading that book.
And I don't know how much of her book
is really true and how much isn't,
but I think it's the saddest thing I ever read.
Guess we shouldn't have got on that. Sorry.
WOMAN: Matthew Salinger told me that the picture
that his sister painted
of growing up in the Salinger household
was nothing like his memories of childhood.
And he was quite adamant about that.
How would you characterize the relationship
you have with your father today?
Oh, that's easy -- none.
For over 20 years, beginning in 1973,
I avoided any information about J.D. Salinger.
Asked me about him, I said nothing
and I wrote nothing about him.
And I was at a party in New York City,
pregnant with my third child.
And there was a woman who came over to me
and she said,
"So, you're the one that lived with J.D. Salinger.
He wrote you letters, didn't he?"
And then she said,
"I had an au pair girl who got lots of letters from him, too."
And I remember feeling my stomach drop.
And that was the first of what ultimately were
a surprising number of stories about girls,
always girls, getting letters from Salinger.
J.D. Salinger's love letters
come back and kick him in the ass.
14 highly personal letters
by reclusive author J.D. Salinger
to then-18-year-old writer Joyce Maynard in the early '70s
are top be auctioned at Sotheby's.
Salinger's best known
for writing "The Catcher in the Rye,"
while Maynard is best known
for writing books about having sex with J.D. Salinger.
Maynard says she is selling the letters
to put her children through college,
in the hopes that they can go there
and meet some socially isolated author,
nail him, and then shamelessly cash in on it later.
WOMAN: Joyce Maynard wrote a sort of kiss-and-tell memoir,
but when she put up at auction
the letters that Salinger had written her,
Peter Norton, the software developer,
thought it was such a terrible act of disloyalty
that he bought the letters and returned them to Salinger.
WOMAN: When I made the decision to write that book,
I needed to go see Jerry Salinger.
And I didn't do what the worshipers did,
which was to stand at the end of the driveway.
[Knocking on door]
A woman called out to me, "What do you want?"
"I've come to see Jerry.
Would you tell him Joyce Maynard is here?"
And then she sort of turned to me and looked at me
through the window and smiled, actually.
And I realized that that was the au pair girl, Colleen.
And then the door opened, and there he stood.
And he was shaking his hand at me, and he said,
"What are you doing here?"
I said, "I've come to ask you a question, Jerry.
What... What was my purpose in your life?"
"That question, that question...
you don't deserve an answer to that question."
And then he let loose this torrent.
"I hear you're writing something,
some kind of reminiscence."
And he said it as if that was an obscene act.
He watches very much what's going on in the world.
He said, "I always knew this is what you'd amount to.
Nothing.
You have spent your life
writing meaningless garbage,
and now you mean to exploit me."
Then he said,
"The problem with you, Joyce, is
you...
love...
the world."
I was talking to a friend who owned a bookstore.
And I told him, "I'm really thinking I'll just
go up to New Hampshire and find J.D. Salinger."
And he says, "I think you ought to call up NASA
and bum a ride on the next space shuttle, too."
Well, the minute you go into town and say "J.D. Salinger,"
everybody becomes your enemy.
This one lady in the shop would not sell me an ice-cream cone.
So, I thought, oooh, not my friendliest place.
The owner of the market suggested that I write a note,
that I didn't need a mailing address,
just leave it at the post office.
I bought a notebook, went outside,
sat on the curb, wrote a note.
I was determined not to go to his property.
I wasn't going to cross that river.
I thought if he came in voluntarily to where I was,
that no one could ever say
with any truth that I had sabotaged the man,
that I had waylaid him or any of those things.
So I was ready.
Sat down where I said I would be and waited.
He doesn't have to go down and meet her in her Pinto.
If he really wants to protect his seclusion that much,
he doesn't go.
EPPES: And so here he came.
He walked across the bridge. I didn't know what to expect.
We've all seen that photograph on the back of the book.
You expect people to age, but...
somehow it's not the same as seeing it.
There he was, and I was shocked.
He was as tall as I thought he would be,
but he had snow-white hair.
And I was not prepared for that.
We shook hands, and he said,
"If you're a writer, you need to quit that newspaper.
Newspapers serve no purpose."
And he said publishing was
the worst thing a person could do.
He insisted that he was working,
that every writer should write for their own reasons,
but it should be for themselves alone.
The only important thing was the writing.
According to J.D. Salinger.
What is he writing about?
He sai "I will say this.
It is of far more significance
than anything I ever wrote about Holden."
He said, "I have really serious issues
that I am trying to tackle with these new writing projects,"
and he always said "writing."
I persisted -- I wanted to know
if he was writing a sequel to "The Catcher in the Rye."
And he became rather annoyed, agitated, and so I finally
just put the notebook down, put my pen down,
and looked up at him and said, "Why did you come here?"
He lost some of his intensity, uncrossed his arms,
and he said that he thought writing Holden was a mistake.
It meant he couldn't live a normal life.
His children suffered.
Why couldn't his life be his own?
Then he turned around and stalked off.
And so I watched him walk away,
and I took the photo of him walking back toward the bridge.
It was just the personification of his attitude.
"Just leave me alone."
MAN: J.D. Salinger is very much a Howard Hughes.
He is still a man in control of his domain there.
And it remains to be seen what actually he is sitting upon.
I think the guy's earned the right to do it his way.
And you know what, whether he's earned it or not,
he's doing it his way anyway.
I guess what I'd like to ask him is what he's written
for the last [bleep] 40 years.
I mean, isn't that what everybody wants to know?
MAN: It's the great literary mystery.
MAN: I want to believe,
I want to see more of the work.
MAN: He promised in the back flaps
of "Franny and Zooey" and in "Seymour: an introduction"
that he's writing other stories.
I just want to see that stuff.
If he published a book tomorrow,
it would be a number-one best-seller the next day.
He very proudly showed me a set of files
where a red dot meant "this is ready to go upon my death,"
a green dot meant "this needs editing."
Someone cracks that code, man,
it's gonna be the story of the century.
MAN: If he does publish, and the writing is actually good,
it will be a second act unlike
almost any American writer has had.
MAN: I wanted you to ask me if I ever met J.D. Salinger.
INTERVIEWER: Mr. Berg, have you ever met J.D. Salinger?
I've never met J.D. Salinger.
But I came close.
When I was researching my book on Max Perkins,
I went up to visit Max Perkins' sister.
And as we're sitting there at dinner,
I said, "Gosh, as I was driving up to see you,
it occurred to me that across the covered bridge
is Cornish, New Hampshire, and J.D. Salinger lives over there.
Have you ever seen J.D. Salinger?"
And she said, "Well, why do you want to know?"
I said, "Well, I was just curious."
And she said, "Well...
as a matter of fact, he sat in that chair you're sitting in
just last night when I served him dinner."
I said, "You're kidding."
She said, "No, no, he comes over here regularly,
'cause he comes over to pick up his mail.
He'll stop in.
Sometimes I'll ask him to stay to dinner."
I said, "Really? J.D. Salinger?"
She said, "Well, do you have anything to say to him?
I mean, if I had J.D. Salinger in here to dinner,
what would you want to know?"
I said, "Well, I think I'dant to know if he's still writing."
She said, "Well, yes, he's still writing."
I said, "Okay."
And she said, "Anything else you'd want to know?"
I said, "No, just that he's okay, I guess."
She says, "He's fine."
¶ Every moment was so precious ¶
"So there's no reason for you ever to see him, is there?"
Dinner was over. Whoosh!
That was as close as I got to J.D. Salinger.
¶ It's such a perfect day ¶
¶ I remember ¶
¶ We were walking up to strawberry swing ¶
Stay tuned for Charlie Rose
with "Salinger" director Shane Salerno.
ROSE: Shane Salerno, the director of the film
and co-author of the book, "Salinger."
I am pleased to have him here.
WhSalinger? For you?
There were several reasons.
First, in my house, when I was a kid,
Salinger was a big deal.
My mother really loved Salinger
and made sure that I knew about Salinger
and that I read Salinger.
There were two aspects of this.
The first was the work,
and it was how much she loved the work
and how much I became a true admirer of his work.
But the second was the man.
My mother was fascinated by Salinger the man,
who turned his back on celebrity before celebrity was celebrity.
And she would talk about this kind of iconic figure
who lived in the woods of New Hampshire
and he didn't want to be disturbed.
And so there was this mythology around the work
that I was incredibly...
interested in as a child.
But I didn't know --
like a lot of people who love Salinger's work,
they don't know much about his life.
And so I began, when I started this around 2003, 2004 --
ROSE: Now, when you started this, you were starting what?
Well, originally I was thinking of doing it as a feature film,
and I was very interested in having Daniel Day Lewis
play J.D. Salinger, and I had had friends make films with him
and they had told me that he was very serious about research
and that he needed a wealth of information
before he would ever consider anything,
so for an unplanned,
for a hoped meeting that I would have with him,
I started doing a lot of research.
And that research
led me to start talking with people
that had never spoken before on the record.
And it became very clear to me after that --
ROSE: Did you film these interviews?
I didn't, initially.
It was over the phone, and some in person,
but it became very clear to me
that those stories had to be told.
ROSE: And it became clear this was
a documentary, not a feature film?
Yes, it became clear to me that most of these people
were in their late 80s, early 90s -- 93, 94, 95 --
and that they were passing away very quickly.
And that if their stories weren't recorded now,
they would be lost forever.
And I began a quest, and that's really what it was.
At the time, I went in very naively.
I thought it was going to be a six-month project
that was going to cost $300,000.
It ended up being a 10-year project
that cost $2 million of my own money.
ROSE: Of your own money?
Of my own money.
I was 30 when I started, I was 40 when I finished.
It was a decade-long detective story.
You know, this was a deeply complex and contradictory man.
Nothing that we found about his personal life
takes away from the astonishing work.
The thing that comes to mind
is "A Beautiful Mind," the great story.
ROSE: About the mathematician.
Yes, and there are real parallels in that story.
There are things that John Nash does in the film and book,
wonderful book, of "A Beautiful Mind"
that are uncomfortable.
But they are surrounded by damage, in his case,
just like Salinger, psychological damage,
and...
And they are critical to understanding...
Salinger.
And so they do share that.
They do share that these are complicated men,
men of genius, who you're going to see do
uncomfortable things,
at the same time they were producing
some of the greatest work ever.
ROSE: I want to show some photographs.
Here is Salinger
during the height of the war at a writing table.
SALERNO: This is the only known photograph of J.D. Salinger --
took me 10 years to find this photo --
the only known photograph of J.D. Salinger ever
writing "The Catcher in the Rye."
J.D. Salinger landed on D-Day
carrying the six chapters of "The Catcher in the Rye."
Literally had them.
Other guys had pictures of their girlfriends
or letters from their mom, and J.D. Salinger had
six chapters of "The Catcher in the Rye" with him.
And he carried those chapters with him like a talisman.
And that's a very special photo.
When we got that photo, Charlie, it was this size.
You couldn't even make out what it was.
ROSE: How did you get it?
We got it from the Fitzgerald family,
who was one of Salinger's closest and dearest friends,
who was sitting on this mountain of photos and letters
that he had kept since 1945.
And we were able to convince them over time
to share those letters with us.
ROSE: Three murders were committed
by people who referenced "Catcher in the Rye."
Not one, not two, but three.
Yes.
And there's actually more.
Those are the three that are the most celebrated.
ROSE: John Lennon being the most.
John Lennon, the shooting of Ronald Reagan,
and the shooting of an actress in Hollywood
named Rebecca Schaeffer, 1980, '81, and '89,
in one decade.
And again, something that is truly unique to Salinger.
There's no murders connected to "To Kill a Mockingbird"
or any other, "Great Gatsby," or...
It's a bizarre phenomenon that...
lies in a very weird misreading of the book.
People taking Holden's thoughts, private thoughts,
and enacting them on other people.
People taking the idea of there being phonies in the world
and wanting to destroy those phonies.
It was one of the most shocking things
that we discovered was that there was this connection.
And here's what's really crazy, that the killers
not only did this but then
actually communicated with each other afterward.
And actually would discuss their affection
for "The Catcher in the Rye."
In Mark David Chapman's case, he stood in open court
and said, "This is my statement"
and started reading from the book.
When they came to arrest him, he said, "There's the book."
Yeah. In two of the three cases, they brought the books with them
when they did the shooting.
And that's...
That they wanted it as a talisman.
ROSE: What did the book say to these people?
Well, you know, there are references in the book
to "my people-shooting hat" and certain things that Holden says.
But it's important to remember that
this book has been read by
60, 70, 80 million people around the world
and these are very specific, disturbed cases
of disturbed individuals.
But if you misread the book, you can read
Holden's antipathy to the culture...
as some kind of bizarre license to kill.
ROSE: Ten years of your life.
SALERNO: Ten years of my life.
It was an incredible detective story,
trying to understand this man.
Trying to understand what happened.
It really started with, what happened to J.D. Salinger?
Why would someone sell
65 million copies of a book and disappear?
Why would someone be the toast of New York
and want to vanish?
Did he really write every day for 45 years? Alone?
To me, that was one of the most astonishing parts of this,
that every day --
Can you imagine someone like --
you know, if Terrence Malick or Steven Spielberg
had stopped making films,
but privately were making films
that they weren't showing to anyone for 45 years?
I mean, there is no precedent for this.
There's no precedent for a writer of his caliber
and weight
writing for 45 years and not publishing.
And at the same time...
we have to ask ourselves is the work full of silence
and are we going to get the work of silence,
silence from the world?
Or is it going to be...
the masterworks for which we hope?
And I'm betting on the masterworks.
I'm betting on J.D. Salinger.
ROSE: Shane Salerno,
"Salinger."
Thank you for joining us.
¶ We were walking up to strawberry swing ¶
¶ I can't wait until the morning ¶
¶ Wouldn't wanna change a thing ¶
To learn more about J.D. Salinger
and other American masters, visit pbs.org/americanmasters
or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
The companion book to "Salinger"
is available for $37.50 plus shipping.
To order, call 1-800-336-1917
or write to the address on your screen.
¶ It's such a perfect day ¶