I remember clearly the night that my father conceived the idea for The Man. It was after midnight June 8, 1963. I was fifteen years old. My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper and talking. My father burst into the room, his eyes gleaming. “Have I got a great idea for a story,” he said excitedly.
It was not unusual for my father to tell us his ideas for novels. He would try them out and talk through a few possible plot directions. If an idea progressed to the stage where he would actually start writing it, he would clam up and, although we knew what he was working on, we wouldn’t hear again about the plot or the characters until he had written the words, “THE END.”
My father loved writing novels. He loved every aspect of the process. He enjoyed thinking of ideas. He enjoyed developing a plot and interweaving sub-plots. He enjoyed creating characters. He even enjoyed the minutiae of novel writing, like paging through the phone book looking for names to match his characters. He enjoyed researching the locations of his stories and he prided himself on the accuracy of his descriptions. He particularly loved the writing itself-putting a blank piece of paper into his typewriter (the same Underwood his parents gave him when he was thirteen years old) and filling it with the thoughts and dialogue of the characters he had created. He even liked, although to a lesser extent, rewriting, proofreading, and responding politely to the suggestions of editors.
My father was born March 19, 1916, in Chicago, Illinois. When he was still an infant, his parents moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and it was there that my father grew up and came of age.
I visited Kenosha once in 1978. It was quite a revelation to me and helped me to understand my father’s worldview. The houses he had lived in were still there, with their open yards and their long front porches. His father, in good times, owned a general store. When times were bad, he worked as a clerk in someone else’s shop. His mother always had snacks and sweets ready for my father and his friends. Even forty years after my father left it, Kenosha still exuded the pleasant charm of an All-American town where citizens could feel safe walking the streets at night and where everyone could dream the American dream. It was just like a small town from a Frank Capra film of the 1930s except that the inhabitants were Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, Swedes and Jews.
My father played high school football, edited the school newspaper, acted in the school play and was a star of the debate team. As active as he was in these diverse pursuits, none of them absorbed him as fully as his true passion: writing. At the age of thirteen he was already working as a sports stringer for the Wisconsin News. At sixteen he saw his first published magazine article appear in Horse and Jockey. When he was seventeen, he won a national journalism competition and earned the title of “America’s Best High School Feature Writer.” At eighteen he sold his first work of fiction: a baseball short story entitled “Sacrifice Hit.”
In 1935, he accepted a scholarship to the Williams Institute, a creative writing school in Berkeley, California. But it turned out that the curriculum there emphasized writing for magazines. Because he had already published dozens of magazine articles, my father lost interest in the school after only five months. He headed south: to Hollywood.
Hollywood was a glamorous place in the 1930s, particularly for a 20-year-old. But the Depression was the Depression and, although my father worked hard to earn a living as a writer, there came a point in 1937 when he had to borrow money from a friend to buy the bread, eggs and milk that he lived on for weeks. Financial security was a long way off. Eleven years later, when I was born, my parents had to borrow money again just to pay the obstetrician.
It was in Hollywood that my father developed a writing routine that would last for twenty years. For six days a week he would write to earn a living; on Sundays he would write for himself. In these early days, that meant writing plays, four of which were produced in Los Angeles.
Early in 1940, he met Sylvia Kahn, who was West Coast editor of Modern Screen magazine. They would marry the following year.
In July 1940, Liberty magazine sent my father to Japan and China. He interviewed the Japanese foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and naval strategist Admiral Nobumasa Suetsgo, both of whom threatened war with the United States. When my father’s report that Japan was preparing for war appeared in Walter Winchell’s column, the Japanese government accused my father of lying and banned him from returning to Japan. Seven years later, as a result of an article he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, he was also forbidden from reentering Francisco Franco’s Fascist Spain.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, my father volunteered to be a combat correspondent for the U.S. Marines. He was rejected because he was colorblind. He tried again with the Army. This time he was accepted. He was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Forces and stationed in Culver City, California, a few miles from his home in Hollywood. Later he was transferred to the U.S. Army Signal Corps Photographic Center, also in Los Angeles. For more than three years, my father drove to the War. He worked on twenty-five films, the most important of which was Know Your Enemy Japan, part of the “Why We Fight” series. On this project, my father worked with Frank Capra, John Huston, screenwriter Carl Foreman and a writer named Ted Geisel, who would later gain fame as “Dr. Seuss.” Although he had been working in Hollywood for several years, this was my father’s first contact with filmmakers.
After the war, my father continued his magazine writing. Indeed, even while the war was underway, he had been writing articles at night and on weekends.
By 1948, however, he had gone to work for the movies. Between 1943 and 1959 he received screen credit for fourteen films, most notably The West Point Story (1950), starring James Cagney and Doris Day; Split Second (1953), Dick Powell’s directorial debut; Gun Fury (1953), directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Rock Hudson and Donna Reed; and The Big Circus (1959), with Victor Mature, Red Buttons, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. My father also wrote fourteen scripts for television.
I was old enough during the latter part of this period to know that my father hated working for the movies and television. Once I visited him at “the office”: Warner Brothers Studio. He liked to tell the story about Jack Warner walking into the writers’ room and complaining that the writers were “doing nothing.” What they were doing, of course, was thinking, an apparently inconceivable concept to Mr. Warner.
I recall distinctly my father coming home at the end of the day, having dinner, spending some family time, and then retreating to his makeshift home office to write what he wanted. By this time, that meant books.
He had already written at least five unpublished books before Alfred Knopf paid $1000 for the rights to The Fabulous Originals, a collection of biographies of real people who inspired famous fictional characters. Among the featured subjects were Dr. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s model for Sherlock Holmes, and Alexander Selkirk, the castaway whose tribulations inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. The Fabulous Originals was published in 1955. The first time that he saw his book on the front table of a bookstore and watched people pick it up and thumb through it, my father was so unnerved that he rushed out of the store. The Fabulous Originals was well-received and, unexpectedly, considering its subject matter, made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
For most of his life, my father had dreamed of being free of employers and of doing nothing but writing books for a living. For the first time, he could imagine his dream as a realistic possibility. But not yet. Now he and my mother had two children to support (my sister was born in 1955). He kept working at Warner Brothers.
My father’s next book, The Square Pegs, was another collective biography-about nine American eccentrics and nonconformists, such as Timothy Dexter, who wrote an entire book without punctuation, and Joshua Norton, who declared himself Emperor of San Francisco. Time magazine ran a glowing full-page review of The Square Pegs. A Beverly Hills bookstore displayed the book in its window. (This was before bookstores sold their window space to the highest bidder.) My father was so excited that late one night we drove to Beverly Hills and photographed the window. This was heady stuff for my father. That artistic freedom that my father associated with writing books now seemed tantalizingly close. So close that, in 1958, he wrote two complete book manuscripts despite continuing his full-time film and television work.
The Sins of Philip Fleming was my father’s first published novel. It dealt with a married man who experiments with infidelity before returning to his wife. Because of a legal dispute, the publisher chose not to promote the book and it did not sell well. My father was not terribly upset because he was not really pleased with the job he had done in writing the book. Still, he had learned some valuable writing lessons and he was, at last, a published novelist.
The Fabulous Showman, also published in 1959, was a biography of P. T. Barnum, the notorious con man/entrepreneur and co-founder of the Barnum amp; Bailey circus.
Then came the novel that would change my father’s life. The Chapman Report tells the story of six women in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb who agree to be interviewed by a sex survey team. Nine months before its publication, Darryl Zanuck purchased the movie rights to The Chapman Report. The book was released in hardcover March 23, 1960. The next day, the publisher, Simon amp; Schuster, received a record 12,000 reorders. That fall, New American Library/Signet ordered a paperback first printing of one million copies. In January they printed another million.
That was the end of my father’s screenwriting career. There would be no more writing for others six days a week.
This is the way my father put it: “Here was the miracle I had dreamed of in my youth. At last, free, independent, confident. I wrote my next book, and my next, and my next, and my next, and each was an international bestseller. By wildest luck and unbelievable good fortune, combined with a love of what I was doing and a love of the stories I had to tell, and the freedom to tell them in my own way, I had won my seven days of Sundays.”
After thirty years of writing hundreds of published magazine articles, short stories, plays, movies, television scripts and books, not to mention a closetful of unpublished works, my father was suddenly “an overnight success.”
The Chapman Report explored the tensions and hypocrisy of suburban life. But many reviewers saw only that it dealt explicitly with sex and they claimed to be offended. In fact, The Chapman Report was less explicit than The Sins of Philip Fleming, which had not been similarly attacked. Clearly there was something else about The Chapman Report that upset some reviewers, namely that it was a popular success and it earned its author quite a bit of money.
Although my father would become famous as a novelist, the fact is that half of his published books were non-fiction. He followed The Chapman Report not with another novel, but with The Twenty-Seventh Wife, a biography of Ann Eliza Young, the last wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young. But more novels would come soon enough.
The Prize, an intricately plotted story about one year’s winners of the Nobel Prize, was even more popular than The Chapman Report. By mid-1963 my father had already completed another novel, The Three Sirens, The Chapman Report had been released as a movie starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Shelley Winters, Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom (director George Cukor would later apologize personally to my father for the poor result), and a movie version of The Prize, starring Paul Newman, Elke Sommer and Edward G. Robinson, was nearing completion.
And then came that June night when my father told my mother and me, “Have I got a great idea for a story.” He sat down and explained the premise: the president and vice-president of the United States die and, because of the rarely noticed Law of Succession, a Negro (this was 1963) becomes president. The reason I remember the discussion so clearly is that it was the first time my father incorporated one of my suggestions into one of his novels. He asked my mother and me what we thought white racists would do when they realized that a Negro was President of the United States. I thought a moment and then replied, “They’d impeach him.” At that time there had only been one presidential impeachment and that had been almost a century earlier. The concept of impeaching a president was as remote and obscure as the Law of Succession.
My father’s eyes lit up. “Impeachment,” he muttered, and I could almost see the plotting possibilities mushrooming in his brain.
Actually my father had wanted to write about racial injustice in America for a long time. He came up with several ideas, but kept rejecting them. Once he came very close to going ahead with one outline. It was about an African-American student who applies for entrance to a prestigious university and is turned down because of his color (this was long before the days of affirmative action). A liberal white lawyer takes the case, but discovers that his client really doesn’t deserve to be accepted by the university. The lawyer is caught between political principle and the truth. In the end, my father decided not to write the story because it was more about a moral dilemma than it was about racism. Years later he would pursue this same moral dilemma, although in a different context, as the theme of his novel The Word.
My father was aware that in black ghettoes “The Man” was slang for “white man” or “the white boss.” In The Man he placed a black man in the role of the ultimate white boss. But the title had a second, more important meaning to my father. In the early 1960s the vast majority of black males were used to being treated by whites as a separate species, as something less than a man. Douglass Dilman, the protagonist of the novel, after a lifetime of living as a milquetoast, token Negro, wants to be treated as a man and must learn for himself what it is to act like a man.
During the summer of 1963, my father, my mother, my sister and I traveled in France and Italy. In cafés on the Champs-Elysée, in hotel rooms on the French Riviera, in cafés on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, my father mulled over the plot of The Man and began writing an outline. That summer he also discovered that he was more famous than he had imagined. One afternoon he walked onto the beach in Cannes and saw three different people reading The Prize-each in a different language. Incidents such as this one were gratifying to my father’s ego, but they also impressed upon him the fact that his popularity with readers gave him an opportunity he did not have before. With The Man he could bring the reality of racism to white people who would not otherwise read about it, who would not bother to pick up a novel written by a black author.
As usual, my father wanted to study first-hand the locations he would be writing about. In particular, he wanted to visit the Oval Office and those wings of the White House that were closed to tourists, including the president’s living quarters.
Through a friend, he contacted Pierre Salinger, President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary. Kennedy granted my father’s request on the condition that he not reveal publicly the president’s cooperation. In September my father spent four days visiting the White House, the Pentagon, the Departments of State and Defense and the House of Representatives and the Senate. He interviewed President Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, was guided through the president’s private quarters by the president’s valet, and interviewed the White House police. Three times he watched President Kennedy in action: at a swearing-in ceremony, giving a speech to the nation and hurrying across the South Lawn to catch a helicopter. He exchanged greetings with Kennedy but did not interview him. For my father, the highlight of his visit came when, during one of Kennedy’s afternoon breaks, Pierre Salinger took my father into the Oval Office and suggested that he sit in the President’s chair.
My father grew up in an era when patriotism was not considered corny. Sitting in that chair genuinely moved him. When the American Sunday supplement Family Weekly asked him to write about “My Most Inspiring Moment,” my father chose sitting in the chair in the Oval Office. That article was supposed to appear on the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. It didn’t. When Family Weekly finally did run the article two years later, the editors, worried about offending white readers in the South, cut out all references to The Man and its Negro president. This same oversensitivity to the Southern white market would lead the Book of the Month club to reduce The Man to an alternate selection so that the separate sheet announcing its availability could be left out of mailings to the South.
After completing four outlines, including a final one that was sixty-five pages long, my father started writing The Man on October 31, 1963. He finished the first draft four months later on March 8, 1964. It was an exhausting, almost fevered process. Several times he worked so hard that he became ill. My father lived with his characters and was sorry to say goodbye to them when the manuscript was completed. But few novelists live in isolation from the real world. While my father was working on The Man, both of his parents were hospitalized and his father underwent emergency surgery from which he might not have emerged alive. My father was shaken by saying goodbye to his father the night before the operation, and thankful when he survived.
One day my father learned that one of his closest friends, screenwriter Guy Trosper, had died suddenly of a heart attack. He was only 52 years old. Not only was my father grieved to lose his friend, but because Trosper was so young and my father had spoken with him only three days earlier, he was confronted with his own mortality. He rewrote his will, put his papers in order and redoubled his efforts to do justice to The Man.
On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. My father had been invited to join Kennedy’s entourage on the Texas trip, but had declined because it was not relevant to his novel. He was a great admirer of John F. Kennedy and he spent the rest of the day, the rest of the weekend in fact, watching the television reports. At one point, one of the news anchors read aloud the speech that Kennedy had planned to deliver later in the day. The last line was a quote from Psalms 127: 1: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” My father felt the proverbial chill go up his spine. It was the exact same quotation he had written less than two weeks earlier, the one that his fictional president, Douglass Dilman, had chosen to place his hand on when he was sworn in as president.
The Man was published in September 1964. Although my father’s primary target audience was white readers, he was concerned about its reception in the black community. Shortly before publication, my father spent a long evening on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes with James Baldwin and several mutual friends. Baldwin asked my father what he was working on. My father replied that his latest novel was about the first Negro President of the United States. Baldwin was taken aback. “How can you write about that?” he demanded. “You’re not a Negro.”
My father pointed out that Baldwin had just written a play with white characters even though he wasn’t white. This reaction would turn out to be typical of African-American readers. One after another they opened The Man expecting to hate it and ended up loving it. In the end my father was hailed for advancing the cause of racial understanding and civil rights. On October 29, 1964, Jet magazine published a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. reading The Prize-on the day he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Two days later I accompanied my father to a studio in Hollywood where the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute gave him the Supreme Award of Merit. (My father had declined the offer of a public presentation.) It was Mollie Robinson, the mother of black baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, who handed him the plaque.
There was a dark side to the publication of The Man: the death threats. They came in the mail and they came by telephone. My father, who believed that having an unlisted phone number was a sign of snobbism, was forced to remove our home phone number from the telephone directory. But even that did not prevent one particularly upsetting incident. A disgruntled racist managed to get hold of our address and phone number. One night he started calling, threatening to kill my father. With each call he announced that he was closer. My father contacted the police, who intercepted the caller before he reached our house.
My father was disappointed that The Man received bad reviews. As a matter of fact, the positive reviews outnumbered the negative ones by more than two to one. But, like so many authors, my father found that it was the negative ones that stuck with him. Some of these reviews were honest criticisms of my father’s writing style or his plotting choices. Although my father was sensitive to criticism, these were not the reviews that bothered him. What upset him was that some reviewers seemed to hate him personally. Their criticisms were irrational, even incoherent. It became clear to my father that these reviewers were not responding to The Man, but to my father’s previous successes. He realized that if these reviewers would attack him for a novel as serious as The Man, there was nothing he could ever do to win them to his side. My father found this conclusion disheartening-but also liberating. If certain reviewers were determined to attack him no matter what he wrote, there was no point in worrying about them anymore.
Fortunately, the reader response to The Man was overwhelmingly positive. The book spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and 39 weeks on the Time magazine list. It was released in paperback in September 1965, reached number one on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and eventually sold more than two million copies. My father had achieved his goal of using his storytelling skills to educate millions of readers about a vital social problem.
In 1972 ABC-TV produced a movie version of The Man. Rod Serling wrote the script and James Earl Jones played Douglass Dilman. ABC was pleasantly surprised by the finished product. Although they had intended it to be shown on television, they released it in the theaters instead. Unfortunately, it suffered from its small screen production values, as well as from unnecessary plot changes. A serious cinematic version of The Man remains to be made.
After The Man, my father wrote thirteen more novels including three that dealt directly with the U.S. presidency (The Plot [1967], The Second Lady [1980] and The Guest of Honor [1988]), as well as one about an FBI plot to take over the U.S. government (The R Document [1976]). He also wrote or edited twelve more books of non-fiction. Almost all of these books were international bestsellers. In the 65-year history of the New York Times bestseller list, my father is one of only six authors to reach number one on both the fiction and non-fiction lists. The others are Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Jimmy Buffet and my father’s old army buddy, Dr. Seuss.
My father died in Los Angeles on June 29, 1990. He would have loved his obituaries. They praised his storytelling abilities and the honesty with which he presented difficult and controversial issues to the public.
After the funeral, we received hundreds of condolence letters. I thought I knew my father’s friends and acquaintances pretty well, but some of these letters were from people whose names I didn’t recognize. Many of them were readers, but most were from writers and would-be writers with whom my father had corresponded. My father loved writing so much that, no matter how busy he was, he always set aside time to answer anyone who wrote to him asking advice about how to be a writer.
My father respected the people who read his books. Writing in the London Independent, Rod MacLeish said of my father, “He understood his public because he was a member of it. Irving Wallace will probably be remembered as a writer who made a vast amount of money. It should be acknowledged that, in return, he gave his readers their money’s worth. He was an honourable entertainer.”
My father was also an optimist-a realistic optimist, but an optimist nonetheless. He believed in the good part of each person he met and he believed in the ability of the human race to solve its problems. Above all, he loved the honor of being alive. When I think of my father’s legacy, I think of a quotation from the final page of The Prize, the last line of which appears on his grave marker:
“All man’s honors are small beside the greatest prize to which he may and must aspire-the finding of his soul, his spirit, his divine strength and worth-the knowledge that he can and must live in freedom and dignity-the final realization that life is not a daily dying, not a pointless end, not ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust, but a soaring and blinding gift snatched from eternity.”
David Wallechinsky
Maussane-les-Alpilles
2 June 1999