"Kitten on a Trampoline"

John D MacDonald wrote or edited seventy-nine books in his thirty-year career, many of them paperback originals, all eventually having paperback editions, and all featuring covers illustrated by the great and near-great popular artists of the era. Names such as Mitchell Hooks, Victor Kalin, Robert Maguire and Barye Phillips are well known to those of us who study and prize illustration art from the last century, and the work these artists did for John D MacDonald books is among their best. Many were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to illustrate multiple titles, and multiple editions of the same title, but there is one artist whose name towers above the others when counting the sheer number of both titles and illustrations done for JDM’s work: Robert McGinnis.

Beginning in May 1959 with his cover art for the first edition of Deadly Welcome, McGinnis went on to illustrate 48 different JDM books with 63 unique paintings. The only other illustrator to come close to that number was William Schmidt, who provided 41 illustrations for 39 different titles, and almost all of them for the final physical editions the titles have seen so far. McGinnis, like MacDonald, was a workhorse, responsible for around 1,200 paperback covers, over 40 movie posters, and scores of magazine illustrations. His style is instantly identifiable, marked by a peerless esthetic, unique, perfect composition, an intuitive sense of color and, of course, his women: beautiful, sexy and unobtainable. (The only other illustrator who could give him a run for his money when illustrating these kinds of women is Maguire.) And although he is known more famously as the main illustrator of the Carter Brown and Mike Shayne detective series, he did covers for fifteen of the twenty-one Travis McGee novels, with first edition credit on three of them (Indigo, Lavender and Tan) and first paperback edition credit for two that originally were published in hardcover (Lemon and Turquoise.) His depiction of McGee on his cover for Turquoise is a fan favorite, although the Travis McGee in my mind looks more like John McDermott’s original illustration.

There are scores of sites on the internet featuring the artwork of McGinnis. Google his name and you’ll come up with over 300,000 hits. Most, if not all of his paperback work is reproduced on various sites (none officially) and his movie posters are equally well displayed. More obscure is the work he did for magazines, primarily illustrating short stories and novellas by famous and not-so-famous authors of the day. His work appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, The Ladies' Home Journal and Argosy, among others, and only a few of these have been scanned for sharing on the web. One of the reasons for this is that he began his career in the late 1950’s when both fiction and its accompanying artwork in magazines was on the wane. There is one illustration, however, that is widely shared and well known by aficionados, both for its artistry and sheer audacity. That is the two-page spread he did for John D MacDonald’s short story “Kitten on a Trampoline.” Published in the April 8, 1961 issue of the bedsheet-sized The Saturday Evening Post, the illustration nearly jumps off the page at the reader with its multi-pane depiction of a bouncing beauty in various mid-air poses. It is representational McGinnis, beautiful to look at, and even if his depiction of the character is overly glamorized, it certainly must have inspired many a buyer of this particular issue to read MacDonald’s short story.

“Kitten on a Trampoline” is MacDonald doing mainstream fiction, with no crime, no bad guys, and without even a tough guy protagonist. He takes a fairly preposterous premise and makes it work, placing the action in his own backyard, depicting a world that must have been as foreign to him as that of, say, a marina in Fort Lauderdale.

The story is told in the first person by protagonist Paul Fox, a twenty-five year old traveling rep for the Owens Drug Company. He’s a typically MacDonaldean best-of-the-best, the company’s most successful rep, pulling down $20,000 a year (that would be nearly $160,000 today), working 90-hours a week, unencumbered by wife or family, living life “on a dead run.” And there are costs.

But I was chronically hoarse from giving my spiel to doctors and druggists, and I tried not to notice that I was going through three packs of cigarettes a day, or notice the persistent tremor in my hands or the deepening frown wrinkled between my brows. I hadn't been sleeping well of late, and I was bothered by nervous indigestion. My weight was down, and my temper was too easily lost. But you have to keep pushing and churning if you are going to get anywhere in this world.

Paul’s territory is the entire southern half of Florida and his company is based in Tampa. The story opens with him driving with breakneck urgency up from Naples to attend a four o’clock meeting at headquarters. At a stoplight in Sarasota he notices a movement far off from the side of the road in a roped-off parking lot. A crowd of people are surrounding a trampoline, watching a young woman jumping.

I saw the girl burst up into the air, higher than their heads. With her body straight out, she made a turn so slow and so elegant it seemed that I was watching it in slow motion, and then fell back out of sight and reappeared again in a slight variation of the first turn. I knew that the girl in the sunlight was the most astonishingly beautiful thing I had ever seen... I suddenly had the horrible realization that I was close to breaking into tears. I now know it was a clue to the extent of my nervous exhaustion. Something so precious had occurred that I couldn't even put a name to it. And here I was, running away from it.

He immediately turns around and joins the crowd of observers.

It was like a wild strange dance she was improvising as she went along, with a complete grace and total control in spite of the tremendous height she was achieving. She was young, she had a burnished tan and she was sweetly and strongly constructed. Her hair was a tousled brown-red mass. She wore a sleeveless yellow-print blouse and little chocolate-colored shorts. I could see her face clearly only at the apex of those leaps when she was turning slowly. It was one of those wide-cheeked Slavic faces of a totally deceptive placidity. She had a dreaming look, a contentment, a half smile. She drifted and spun in a better world than any of us could know.

When she finishes and dismounts, Paul complements her, but the girl is disinterested and dismissive. He offers to buy her a soda and she accepts by stating "I'm thirsty" in a so-what tone of voice spoken "with a faraway spice of accent." She grudgingly tells him her name is Wanda Markava, and he asks her to wait while he calls the office to tell them he won't be able to make it to the meeting. He follows her on her long walk home and at one point asks her if she was a member of a gymnastic team. She answers by doing a few flips on the grass and haughtily tells him that she is with the circus.

I felt like thumping myself in the head. This was Sarasota. It explained some of the strangeness of her. These were the most clannish people in the world.

She tells him she is with Rossoni and Markava, a small but well respected circus, and that she is a flier, on the rings since she was five, and considered a most promising prospect. Once home he meets the extended family, watches Wanda and her uncle practice for a while on the swings, and is eventually invited to dinner among the hectic extended family.

It was the most confusing house I've ever been in. There seemed to be four or five tiny living rooms, each with its own group. In one room three old ladies were gabbling at each other in a foreign tongue while they sewed sequins to heavy new material with a dazzling speed. People were singing, some were arguing, some were cooking and some were eating. Two television sets and a radio were going with the volume turned high. I estimate I met about one out of every four of them, and usually it was only the first name. They all had muscles, vitality and violent opinions. The children seemed able to run up the walls and across the ceiling, but I suspect that was an illusion.

It's not clear what exactly attracts Paul to Wanda besides her good looks -- certainly not her temperament or personality --  but he is smitten, and after he is driven home that night the Markava's find him the next morning again watching a practice session on the rings. Wanda asks, "How many meeting can you miss?"

“Kitten on a Trampoline” was one of nine works of short fiction MacDonald published in 1961, the most he had produced since 1956. The year before saw only one novella (the excellent “The Trap of Solid Gold”) and the year after he produced only two short stories. Of course, these three years also saw the publication of no fewer than eight novels, so it’s pretty obvious where his focus lay. All but three of these short stories were mainstream, non-crime-related tales and most were published in the big slicks of the day. Nineteen sixty-one was one of the last big years of short fiction for the author, eclipsed only by 1964 when he produced eleven, and he never really focused on this form in any serious manner again.

As of this writing, Robert McGinnis is still alive, and at age 90 still working, God bless him. (He provided the illustration for only one additional JDM magazine work, a 1967 condensation of the novel The Last One Left that was published in Argosy.) As far as I can tell, he and MacDonald never met or corresponded with each other, and I have no information on what MacDonald may have thought of his work. However, in 1981 when JDM bibliographer Walter Shine was compiling a list of cover artists of the numerous different editions of MacDonald’s paperbacks, he wrote to McGinnis to ask for his help in identifying some that were unattributed. McGinnis responded “with alacrity” and ended his written response with the following request: “Thank John for me for the opportunity he created for an illustrator.”

“Kitten on a Trampoline” appeared only once and has never been anthologized or republished.

Losing One's Head

Back in 1977 JDM bibliographer Walter Shine asked the question “What is JDM’s favorite joke?” He answered the query himself with a listing of five different books wherein one particular truism had been repeated. Here are the specific quotes:

He pulled himself slowly out of the chair. “I don't condemn you on moral grounds, Morrow. Better men than you and me have done like that little old dog on the railroad tracks. I just think it was damn poor judgement for a man in your position to fediddle the Mayor’s wife.”

Herb Leighton in Judge Me Not (1951)

She set the bottle down, and fluffed her back hair, and arched her back a little, just enough to push those things out farther than God intended. There wouldn’t be any of that in prison. Not a morsel of it. They’d let you dream about it, and that was all. Probably stop that too, if they could figure out how. Sure turned out to be the little dog on the railroad tracks this time.

Del Bennicke (interior monologue) in The Damned (1952)

“Wipe your mouth, I’ll be damned if I’m going to get all mixed up in a … This is the craziest thing anybody could possibly… I’m not going to let you be the little dog on the railroad tracks, Lloyd. Because it can’t mean that much. I can’t mean that much in that kind of way to anybody.”

Sylvia Danton in The Empty Trap (1957)

“Look, you’ve got to get yourself sorted out. I mean it. It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.”

Leo, in “The Random Noise of Love” from S*E*V*E*N (1971)

I had seen somebody I had invented, not Mary Alice. I explained away her inconsistencies, overlooked her vulgarities, and believed her dramatics. And so it goes. It is humiliating, when you should know better, to become victim of the timeless story of the little brown dog running across the freight yard, crossing all the railroad tracks until a switch engine nipped off the end of his tail between wheel and rail. The little dog yelped, and he spun so quickly to check himself out that the next wheel chopped through his little brown neck. The moral is, of course, never lose your head over a piece of tail.

Travis McGee in The Scarlet Ruse (1973)

"The Tin Suitcase" ("She Cannot Die")

The subject of John D MacDonald’s practice of updating many of the stories in his two pulp collections -- The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff -- has been discussed often here on this blog when writing about the various stories that made up those two anthologies. But to belabor the point, I’m going to rehash the issue as a preface to this particular posting as context for anyone not familiar with the issue.

In 1981 John D MacDonald, at the time one of the bestselling novelists in the United States and famous worldwide for his series character Travis McGee, was contacted by Francis M Nevins and Martin H Greenberg about putting together an anthology of MacDonald’s early short stories that had appeared in the pulp magazines of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Nevins was (and is) a mystery writer, a biographer and expert on the works of Cornell Woolrich, and was a student of MacDonald’s pulp work, having written several articles on the subject in the pages of the early JDM Bibliophile. The late Martin H Greenberg was, without doubt, the greatest anthologist and academic expert on popular American fiction of the last century. According to his Wikipedia entry, he edited or co-edited 1,298 unique anthologies in his lifetime.

MacDonald was, in his own words, “not transfixed with delight” about the idea, worrying about the “overall quality of such a collection.” He agreed to have the two men present him their ideas for such a collection and he put them in touch with his own bibliographic experts, Walter and Jean Shine, who had both a working relationship with the author and a practical knowledge of the holdings of the John D MacDonald Collection housed at the University of Florida. Together the four editors collected and read all of MacDonald’s pulp work (excluding science fiction, which had already been anthologized by Greenberg a few years earlier in Other Times, Other Worlds) and winnowed the pile to thirty stories. MacDonald wanted to review them in manuscript form, so all of the stories had to be typed up from the original tearsheets. He took the stories to his summer home on Piseco Lake in upstate New York and chose 27 of the thirty stories for the now two separate anthologies.

MacDonald wrote that he was astonished that these stories merited republication, but only up to a point. He felt it would “jar” the reader to come across a passage wherein a character paid twenty cents for a quart of milk, or put a mere nickel into a pay phone, so he updated certain aspects of the stories, but only in the ones that didn’t depend on the specific time and place in postwar America. Still, the wholesale changes that he did make were far more jarring to most readers than any reference to a penny candy or to a now-forgotten celebrity. In “A Time for Dying," which was titled “Tune Into Station Homicide” when originally published in New Detective in 1948 (MacDonald also restored all of his original titles to the stories, as many were changed by pulp editors, but at least the original titles were provided in the table of contents), a radio show is updated to a television show, even though someone as savvy as MacDonald had to know that the production of a live radio show in 1948 bore almost no resemblance to a television show in the early 1980’s. In “Trap for a Tigress” (“Noose for a Tigress”) he changed a recent war from Korea to Vietnam but retained the setting of a cross country train ride (updated to Amtrak) even though almost no one of any means was traveling this way in 1981. And in “The Scarred Hand” (“I Accuse Myself”) he updated references from radio to television but retained the threat of lobotomy, even though that particularly horrific medical procedure had long since fallen out of favor by the early eighties.

MacDonald must have been surprised at the animosity from many readers over the changes he made in many of these stories. After all, he had been updating his novels for years. When Fawcett got the reprint rights to his books in the early sixties he went through all of them in order to excise period references. In All These Condemned he changed a reference to Marilyn Monroe from present to past tense. He frequently changed references to then-popular sports celebrities to more current ones. In Contrary Pleasure a reference to then up-and-coming female tennis star Maureen (“Little Mo”) Connelly was changed to Billie Jean King. And let’s not forget Area of Suspicion, which underwent so many changes that its first Fawcett edition featured the blurb on the cover “Specially revised by the author”. So he probably thought nothing of the updating of the pulp stories and was likely frustrated with the ones he couldn’t change.

These changes have a different effect than the ones in the novels, however. As Nevins observed in his Introduction to the first collection, “... MacDonald portrayed more vividly and knowledgeably than any other crime writer the readjustment of American society in general and American business in particular from a war footing to a consumer-oriented peacetime economy, and the redemption and return to the real world of all sorts of war-haunted people on the verge of self-ruination by drink and detachment… perhaps enough remains of the ambiance of the late forties and early fifties to demonstrate how the best crime fiction of any period bears witness to later generations about the way we lived then.” That “perhaps” was overly optimistic, and some of the stories are quite nearly ruined by MacDonald’s changes.

Take “The Tin Suitcase”. Originally published in the May-June 1948 issue of Doc Savage (under house name Peter Reed), all references to the protagonist’s war experiences were removed, completely altering the mood and motivations of the original story. In addition, there were literally dozens of other changes made that had nothing to do with the period, disproving MacDonald’s assertion that he did so only in cases that “might confuse the reader”. I know this from having read the two versions of the story side by side, an exercise I hadn’t tried before, and it got to the point where I decided to document all of the changes made to the original. Two pages of a notebook were filled before I gave up. If “The Tin Suitcase” is any indication, the changes MacDonald made to these stories were far more sweeping than I originally believed.

If your first exposure to the story came from the pages of The Good Old Stuff -- mine was -- then the plot of the story you read goes like this. Protagonist Jud Brock is employed as a low-level worker at the Brasher Scrap Metal Company in the city of Louisavale. As he is working out in the yard one day, a secretary comes out of the office with the intention of handing Jud his daily work orders. Stella Galloway is also a friend of Jud’s and they have gone out together on several dates. Suddenly a shot rings out and Stella falls to the ground, a bullet in her back. She is alive, but barely, and is taken to the hospital to hopefully recover. When the cops arrive we learn that Jud himself used to be a cop, but was thrown off the force after a breakdown following the murder of his young wife. He has taken the job at Brasher Scrap Metal as a means of recovery, and had mended well by the time the story begins, but it doesn’t stop the cops from needling him mercilessly when they discover him on the scene. Jud’s cop instincts take over and he gets the owner of the business to agree to let him investigate what happened, and even the cops grudgingly agree, as long as he stays out of their way. It is determined that the shot must have been fired by someone at the business, as no one from the outside could have gained entry to the yard when the attempted murder took place. MacDonald begins rolling out the various suspects, including  the business owner, a normally mild mannered chap who fires Jud after the shooting for a relatively minor act of insubordination, and a scrap purchaser who had worked with Stella at a previous employer. There’s also the possibility that the bullet had been meant for Jud himself, and that Stella had gotten in the way.

After the cops see what a changed man Jud is they become more agreeable to him using his considerable investigative skills to help them solve the mystery, and they begin gathering, then eliminating all of the possible suspects until there are only a few, and some things simply don’t add up. All the while, Stella lies in a hospital bed fighting for her life…

The most interesting part of “The Tin Suitcase” -- the best written and most engaging part -- is a lengthy account of how Jud lost himself and hit bottom. Even The Good Old Stuff version of it retains some of its original power:

They all knew the story of Jud Brock. He had put in six years with the Louisavale police, going on the force directly from college. He had advanced rapidly, had been transferred to Homicide, where he worked under Captain Davis. He was looked on as one of the bright young men in the department. Since Louisavale was a city of two hundred thousand, he could plan on merit promotions to the point where he would make a good living and have a responsible position. He was popular and he liked his work and he was good at it.

During his sixth year on the force he became engaged to Caree Ames. She was a slender, enchanting blonde, the only daughter of the city manager.

They were engaged for just two months before they were married. She seemed pleasantly but curiously anxious to be married, as though it would be some sort of haven for her.

Five weeks after the wedding and three weeks after they had returned from their Bermuda honeymoon, he came home to their new suburban house to find that a man with whom Caree had been intimate before he had ever met her had broken into the house, shot her twice in the skull, and then shot himself. She was dead. The man was still breathing. She had died almost within reach of the telephone. The man lived in a coma for five days before he too died.

He could not get that kitchen scene out of his mind, the two of them  on the vinyl pattern he and Caree had selected, both face down in the pattern of a grotesque T, the still-breathing  man lying across her dead legs.

Later he found out that quite a few people had known of her affair with the man who killed her. Her father had been anxious for her to be married. The man was demonstrably unstable, potentially dangerous.

For two months after the funeral he had continued his duties, walking through each day like a mechanical man. He had found he could not forget that scene; it was inextricably mixed somehow with some of the bloodier episodes which had happened during his years of police duty before he had met Caree.

During those two months, all the reality of the world around him took place dimly behind the shining screen of memory, and at last he had discovered that alcohol would dim the memories. At first he had been suspended for a month and had managed to get himself in shape to go back to duty at the end of the month. The second suspension was for six months.

After a long period of forgetfulness, he had walked into headquarters, his broken shoes flapping on his feet, his gray face dirty and whiskered, and found out that his suspension had been  up for over three weeks and that he had been suspended indefinitely.

Compare that with the original passage as it appeared in 1948:

They all knew the story of Jud Brock. Before the war he had put in two years on the Louisavale police force, going on the force directly from college. He had advanced rapidly, had been transferred to Homicide where he worked under Captain Davis. He was looked on as one of the bright young men in the department. Since Louisavale was a city of two hundred thousand, he could plan on eventually getting a very good position on the force. He was popular and fond of his job. He was engaged to Caree Ames, the sleek blonde daughter of the City Treasurer.

He was drafted in the fall of '40, went into the Infantry, earned a field commission in the Marshalls, was wounded in Saipan, placed on limited duty and transferred as a Captain to Air Corps Intelligence. In a Burma flight with the 10th Air Force, they were forced down and he spent two years as a Jap prisoner working in the rice fields near Rangoon. He was liberated in early '45, after a stay in the General Hospital in Calcutta, was shipped home and discharged at Dix with the rank of Major.

He married the blonde Caree Ames. She had acted odd about his return, and had seemed very anxious to be married. Three weeks later, during his first week back on the force, the man with whom she had been intimate during Brock's years overseas had broken into Brock's new house, had shot Caree and then himself. Caree had died immediately and the man had lived in a coma for five days before he too died. It was only then that Brock learned what had existed between the two of them while he had been away.

Brock had come home and found the two of them on the kitchen floor, the man still breathing, lying across Caree's dead legs.

For two months he had continued his duties, walking through each day like a mechanical man. He found that he could not forget the way the two of them had looked on the kitchen floor and it was inextricably mixed with memories of some of the unbearable days of captivity, and somehow through it all he recaptured that moment of intense surprise when the Jap mortar shell had dropped into the soft sand beside the shallow hole he had scooped and had tossed him a dozen feet in the air...

During those two months all the reality of the world around him took place dimly behind the shining screen of memory and at last he had discovered that alcohol would dim the memories. At first he had been suspended for a month and had managed to get himself in shape to go back to duty at the end of the month. The second suspension was for six months.

After a long period of forgetfulness, he had walked into headquarters, his broken shoes flapping on his feet, his grey face dirty and whiskered and had found out that his suspension had been up for over three weeks and that he had been suspended indefinitely.

Notice how when MacDonald changes one thing it forces him to  make other changes he wouldn’t have made otherwise simply for the sake of “updating”. By eliminating the war years he eliminates the affair Jud’s fiance had while he was overseas, requiring the author to have Caree now be killed by a former boyfriend. One could argue that it was Caree’s unfaithfulness more than her murder that caused Jud’s breakdown, a subtle bit of business that adds a deeper layer to the reader’s understand of the character, now missing altogether from the altered piece. The horrible memories of the POW camp are replaced by MacDonald’s odd addition of the dead couple “on the vinyl pattern he and Caree had selected, both face down in the pattern of a grotesque T, the still-breathing  man lying across her dead legs.” It’s clear in the original that Jud’s war memories are a large part of his breakdown, especially with the added bit about the mortar shell. It’s as if MacDonald had removed a vital support in a building, only to have to shore up the weakness elsewhere by other means, thereby weakening and changing the finished product entirely.

Some of the other changes MacDonald made throughout the entire story are in keeping with his intention of updating: increasing the cost of something from forty-four dollars to eighty-eight; changing a reference from boxer Primo Carnera to Superman; changing the phrase “gay as a lark” to “happy as a lark”; and, in the one war reference he couldn’t eliminate, changing “war surplus” to “Viet Nam surplus”.

Others make no sense and belie the author’s assertion in the Foreword that he “was horribly tempted to make other changes, to edit patches of florid prose, substitute the right words for the almost right words,” but didn’t because “that would have been cheating, because it would have made me look as if I were a better writer at that time than I was.” How else to explain some of the following alterations?

Original:     Two men with a detector were left back…

Update:    Two men with a metal detector were left back…

Original:    "I'm sorry. I'll pay you the hundred and twenty-one bucks. I'm sorry."

Update:    “I’m sorry. I’ll pay back that money. I’ve got it in savings. I’m sorry.”

Original:    "... the gal who turned him down getting palsy with... well, with a common laborer."

Update:    “... the woman who turned him down getting chummy with… well, with unskilled labor.”   

Original:    "She's had two more plasma transfusions, but she's losing moisture so fast that 

                 she'll be due for another one soon."

Update:    “She’s had two more plasma transfusions, but she’s losing fluids so fast that she’ll be due  for another one soon.”

Original:     “... a few times we went to the coke bar at the Pentagon…she was a nice neat girl and  very quiet.”

Update:    “... a few times we went to the cola bar at the Pentagon… she was very nice in a quiet way, very tidy and polite.”

I could go on with lots more, but you get the point. Cleaning things up? Yes, probably. Trying to make it seem he was a better writer at the time than he was? You be the judge.

So now I’m left with the gnawing feeling that I should go back and reread all of the Good Old Stuff stories in their original pulp form, where I have that opportunity. Unfortunately I don’t own a lot of the stories in the original magazines, so I’ll have to guess. But what I once thought was minor tinkering, where I could read an updated story and make substitutions in my mind with what was written for what had probably been written, no longer seems the case. Certainly not with “The Tin Suitcase.” The only real improvement I can see in MacDonald’s update is his restoration of the original title, “She Cannot Die.” Unfortunately, the better title is attached to the inferior story.

(A special thanks to Trap of Solid Gold reader Eric Gimlin for supplying me with a copy of the original story.)

Looking Sideways

A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece on John D MacDonald’s 1959 mainstream, hardcover novel Please Write for Details and mentioned the publicity campaign conducted for the book by the publisher Simon and Schuster. This week I’m posting an example of that effort, a feature in a syndicated column that appeared throughout the country (this particular version was transcribed from the March 16, 1959 edition of the Pampa [Texas] Daily News.) The “Looking Sideways” column was written by Whitney Bolton, a longtime newspaperman who had done work in Hollywood in the 1930’s and 1940’s as both a screenwriter (42nd Street, If I Had a Million) and head of publicity for Warner Brothers.

The interview took place at The Playbill restaurant, a then-new establishment located on 44th Street west of Broadway, and, although it is not mentioned, I’m sure there was drinking involved. The lady Bolton mentions as being “in tow” with MacDonald, one Temple Texas, was a then-thirty-five year old actress/singer of modest fame who had appeared in a movie or two and was doing television work at the time. How she hooked up with MacDonald is anybody’s guess.

Looking Sideways

by Whitney Bolton

New York - You can sit down here and there with 8,207 actors in succession, all as glossy as pigeons, and after all the yakking ended and you total the gain it comes out to about this: it was pleasant. You can sit down with one sensible book writer, just one, and the total gain comes out to a large plus. In a crescendo of candor, this means that actors are amusing for the moment, but authors are a steadily diverting class of human beings who lace large dollops of provocative thinking in with their idle chat.

On March 18, unless Simon B. Schuster can't read calendars, John D MacDonald of a variety of places including Sarasota, Florida, and Cuernavaca, Mexico, will be able to sit back and look upon his new novel, Please Write For Details, with relish. Up to now, it has been work. The book is receiving critical nip-ups from coast to coast; the movies, like a school of shad, are nibbling at the bait and one sagacious Broadway producer thinks highly of it in terms of a future musical comedy. Short of winning the Pulitzer Prize, which it hasn't, John's book has brought him just about all the rewards at hand.

We sat in The Playbill the other afternoon and John had the good taste to have Temple Texas in tow. Maybe she had him in tow, I'm not sure. But the three of us were still there when the dinner crowd began glowering because we were sprawled across a desirable table doing nothing more pertinent than talking. John's book is about a fugitive and slightly demented little art colony of Americans in Cuernavaca, and automatically this made it a Grade A item to me. I love Mexico on any terms and hate art colonies on all terms, so his wise, witty and often touching dissection in print reached me on all counts. But like any good author worth respect and time, John wasn't there to talk about Please Write For Details. He was there just to talk because it pleases him to do so, and he talks with scourging frankness and comic malevolence. When he elected a moment of the silences, Temple was supplying words and soothing tones and it was an afternoon worth remembering.

John had but recently been delivered whole from the clutches of a radio interviewer (female) and was still a little pale about the gills.

"She said: 'Now, tell me, should a girl marry for love or money, Mr. MacDonald?'" he revealed, "and all I said was: 'What kind of girl? How old is she, is this her first marriage, what was her economic background, where does she live and what are her future economic and romantic chances?' She almost fell over. She finally said, 'Well, this girl is about 22, this is her first marriage, she is reasonably attractive and is not the victim of abject poverty,' and I said: 'In that case, she'd be a sucker to marry for anything but love. Later, maybe when she's 30 and has experienced the lovely hurly-burly of young wedded bliss, she can turn practical and chuck her boy Romeo for an older and better-heeled guy.' You'd have thought I put a bomb under Lincoln's Memorial. She was furious at me."

Later, talking about a woman we both know, he idly said: "She's the kind of hostess who still makes fudge for a cocktail party," and in our discussion of an actress of resounding beauty but never great stature in theater and the allied arts, he said: "She's the enlisted man's Ginger Rogers." This, probably, will give you the impression that Mr. MacDonald does not have to tussle with and sweat out a new turn of phrase. You'd be right to suspect that. Nor does he entertain rigidly fixed ethics about lancing human beings who sorely need lancing. This put us on common ground and for an hour we coursed a mighty terrain from loud-mouthed tourists to living-room boors, sometimes generally speaking, and sometimes specifically speaking, with names intact. Temple, a beautifully skilled girl with a lance, often rode side-saddle with us on these excursions.

What kind of book does a man like this create? A good book, sound in wind and logic, strong in human estimations, a book of wit and charming invention, one in which acid and compassion, one about equally divided. I think you could read it with satisfaction. And, having read this one, you won't have too long to wait. John is no one-book author. His publishers have five more awaiting print. Books pour from him like waters from a gladed spring.

He is an alert, civilized and totally winning gent and I'm glad to have talked with him. Now, I can go back to yakking with actors with stouter heart.

Businessman Author

When John D MacDonald began his literary career in late 1945, he didn’t set out to be known primarily as a writer of crime fiction. His sights were set high and he imagined himself as a creator of “serious” works to be read by serious people. Eight hundred thousand words and reams of rejection letters later, he lowered his sights and focused on the pulps, where he eventually found a home producing hundreds of short stories and novellas. Some of his early tales are what we would call “mainstream” stories, published in periodicals such as Cosmopolitan, Collier’s and The American Magazine, but when MacDonald started writing novels in 1950, it was crime and science fiction that filled the early bill.

It wasn’t until his ninth novel, Cancel All Our Vows, published in May 1953, that he produced a genuinely mainstream work, and he did it in style, going hardcover. It wasn’t the first time the author had done this, as his two earlier science fiction novels were hardcover, but they were niche novels, and Cancel All Our Vows was the real thing: a book about infidelity in modern American society. It was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, a now extinct second-tier concern that, nevertheless, gave a good effort at publicizing and promoting the novel. They purchased an ad in the New York Times Book Review and made the author available for interviews by the press of the day.

One such conversation was with Rochelle Gibson and was syndicated in newspapers throughout the country. I found a copy of it printed in the Tucson Daily Citizen and have transcribed it below. This version of the piece seems truncated (did she really begin the first paragraph with the word “actually”?), and it is filled with errors, including the very title of the book (!), but it contains enough JDM thoughts to make it interesting reading. I wonder just how serious he was in his comments about the strata of meaningfulness in fiction?

Cancel All Our Vows never showed up on a best seller list, didn’t get a second printing, and took two years before appearing in paperback, so the all the publicity went for naught, although the novel was certainly worth the effort. A year later when MacDonald was ready to publish his second mainstream hardcover, Contrary Pleasure, he went to 22 other publishers and was rejected by them all, forcing him back into the arms of Appleton-Century-Crofts, who published a single printing of the book and provided no publicity whatsoever.

Anthropological Novel

        Businessman Author

by Rochelle Gibson

Actually, the theme of Cancel All Vows, [sic] an Appleton, Century-Crofts novel, is anthropological, explains John D MacDonald.

"Every society has its own rules," he notes, "and we are living today with a set of specific, pretty well-underlined rules. They are underlined by the church and by just the common ethics, and they are good rules because through them we have a cohesive society.

"It is important that a man and woman live together and raise children, and the home is an important social unit. Where you get social conflict today is where you have somebody violating the social rules under which we are living.

"This book is just an exploration of what happens when two people who have a good relationship[ to each other come into forcible conflict with one of the rules, and it affects their relationship to each other. People don't realize that it isn't in effect a violation of any basic human relationship; it's a violation of the rules. But rules are constantly changing. Compare what is acceptable now to what was acceptable in 1890. And as a matter of fact, the husband-wife relationship is probably healthier now than it was in 1890.

Cancel All Vows is the first hardcover book for MacDonald, who is 38 and makes about $100,000 a year writing magazine stories, soft-cover novels, mysteries and science fiction. The Damned, his 11th paperbound book, sold a million and a quarter copies. One that Dell is publishing was a serial in Collier's last year, and there are a few others coming out soon.

"I want to do more hardcover books," he says, "because it is not only a prestige thing, but you feel you are reaching people you can't otherwise."

As he sees it, "if a story is only meaningful on the top layer, then it is magazine fiction. If it is meaningful on a the secondary layer, with symbolism and so on, then maybe it is softcover fiction. If it is also meaningful on a tertiary level, I would say it is a hardcover book. Then, if it has multiple layers of meaning going way, way down, of course it is a great novel -- and it doesn't matter where it is published. Some of our greatest works were published in cheesy newspapers.

MacDonald's history as an author began during the six wartime years he served overseas with the OSS. Simply because he got tired of writing routine letters home, he sent his wife a short story instead, which she promptly sold to Whit Burnett, of the old Story magazine, for $25.

Back in the States he did about three million words at 1/2 cent and 1 1/2 cents a word for pulps, at the same time selling occasionally to the better magazines. In the first year he had stories accepted by Liberty, Collier's and Cosmopolitan. Then as the slick-magazine sales began to improve, he did less and less pulp writing and has not ceased completely.

Born in Sharon, Pa., and currently dividing his time between Sarasota, Fla. and the Adirondacks, MacDonald is an alumnus of the Harvard graduate school of business administration, where he went at the instigation of his father, now retired, who was vice president and treasurer of Savage Arms Corp.

"There has been a cult of taking down the businessman," he notes. "It started before Babbitt, and I see no particular basis for it. This will make me sound like a member of the NAM, but why should he be talked down any more than a grocer or a painter or a neurosurgeon for that matter?

"There can be a certain amount of glamour in the way he makes a living, because what can be more glamorous, for example, than just the idea of taking stuff out of the ground, like the Ford Co. -- iron ore -- and in a period of maybe four months from the time it's ore in the ground having it go 75 miles an hour down the New Jersey Turnpike? That's creative. I don't at all see why the businessman should be low man on our particular artistic totem pole."