Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (31 page)

ANDREW SHAFFER

S
HORTLY AFTER
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY
topped bestseller lists, the
New York Times’
Maureen Dowd could hardly contain her disbelief that a woman like E. L. James was the author of such dirty books. “The plump, happily married forty-something mother and former television producer seems like a normal lady,” she wrote. Dowd’s condescending tone was typical of the media coverage surrounding
Fifty Shades
, as if James was the first “plump mother” to ever write a dirty book. In actuality, James was following in the footsteps of Grace Metalious, who faced similar critical derision over fifty years earlier for a dirty little book called
Peyton Place
.

“It’s an odd book to come from the typewriter of a plump, thirty-two-year-old mother of three children, but Mrs. Metalious is no ordinary housewife,” her editor wrote. Metalious was lower middle class, wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, and lived in a tiny house with no running water. Howard Goodkind, who worked as
a publicist for
Peyton Place
, later recalled, “All over the United States there were women with children saying they could write, but Grace Metalious had gone ahead and done it.”

Prior to Metalious, bestselling women writers such as Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were typically upper middle class and lived at the heart of the publishing world, New York City. Most importantly, these women were childless. It was regularly assumed that if a mother was writing, she wasn’t spending enough time raising her kids. “You live in a town, and there are patterns,” Metalious said of Gilmanton, the conservative New Hampshire small town where her family lived. “The minute you deviate from the pattern, you’re a freak. I wrote a book, and that makes me a freak.”

Her husband, George, was a school principal—a sweet, honest man by all accounts, but what was his wife doing writing a
book
? When, prior to the publication date, Metalious’ publicist let it slip that not only was
Peyton Place
a great book, but it was also “a very dirty book,” a scandal erupted.

Without even reading a line of
Peyton Place
, the people of Gilmanton were swift in their judgment. “Word has got around that it’s a shocking book. People suddenly decided that George is not the type to teach their sweet innocent children,” Metalious told a reporter. “I feel pretty sure of one thing,” Metalious was quoted as saying by the Associated Press on the eve of her book’s publication. “It’ll probably cost my husband his job.”

When the
Boston Traveler
ran an AP story on August 29, 1956, under the headline, “TEACHER FIRED FOR WIFE’S BOOK: Gossipy, Spicy Story Costs Him His Job,” the public took notice. The truth, however, was less sensational: George’s contract as school principal in Gilmanton was set to expire at the end of the school semester, and the school board had no intention of renewing it. Still, George backed up his wife’s story, saying, “They told me it was because of my wife. They don’t like her book.” The three-person school board, however, denied that their decision had anything to do with
Peyton Place
(which none of them had
read at the time the story ran). “His wife’s book had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was a personal matter,” William Dunn, chairman of the Gilmanton school board, said.

Metalious denied that Gilmanton was the basis for Peyton Place. “It’s a composite picture of life in a small New Hampshire town, but it’s not Gilmanton. As a matter of fact, the book was three-fourths written before I moved here,” she said. “To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture, but if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot—all kinds of strange things crawl out. Everybody who lives in town knows what’s going on—there are no secrets—but they don’t want outsiders to know.”
Peyton Place
threatened to kick over the stone on Gilmanton and every other picture-perfect New England town.

By the time the book was finally published on September 24, 1956, the entire country was curious to get a glimpse inside the book that had cost the author’s schoolteacher husband his job. “Whatever the merits of the Metalious case [George’s dismissal], the novel lives up very fully to its advance billing,” an enthusiastic
New York Times
review read (headline: “Small Town Peep Show”). At a time when the average debut novel sold about 2,000 copies over the course of its shelf life,
Peyton Place
sold 60,000 copies in hardcover in just ten days. It hit the
New York Times
bestseller list, where it stayed for an astonishing fifty-nine weeks.

Peyton Place
was banned in several cities and in Canada. “Letters to the editor debated the book’s merits; libraries worried whether to purchase it,” Emily Toth wrote in her biography of Grace Metalious,
Inside Peyton Place
. In Beverly, Massachusetts, a sign at the public library read, “THIS LIBRARY DOES NOT CARRY ‘PEYTON PLACE.’ IF YOU WANT IT, GO TO SALEM.”

“Novelist Metalious suggests that sex is never long out of the town’s mind; anyway, it seldom is out of hers,”
Time
magazine wrote in its review. “Her love scenes are as explicit as love scenes can get without the use of diagrams and tape recorder. The low
animal moans produced by Peyton Place’s mating females must be audible clear to White River Junction.”

Metalious countered with, “Too much sex? How can you write a novel about normal men and women, let alone abnormal ones, with no sex in the plot? We all had a mother and father!” The millions of middle-aged, married women who read
Peyton Place
likely agreed, even if they hid the book from their children and husbands. (The kids got hold of it, regardless: “Everyone was passing that book around,” novelist John Irving, who was fourteen when the book came out, recalled in an interview with the Associated Press on
Peyton Place’s
fiftieth anniversary.)

The book was brimming with taboo topics for the 1950s, including casual sex, underage sex, pseudo-incest, adultery, and abortion. But just how
dirty
was the book? Not very, it turns out—at least not in an erotic sense, a la
Fifty Shades of Grey
. A sample passage: “He grunted like a rooting pig, and he breathed like a steam engine puffing its way across the wide Connecticut River, while from Nellie there was no sound at all … Lucas grunted harder and puffed louder, and the old spring on the double bed creaked alarmingly, faster and faster. At last, Lucas squealed like a calf in the hands of a butcher and it was over.”

If it’s difficult to imagine just how
Peyton Place
could have been considered the epitome of the “dirty book,” one only has to look at the state of culture in the 1950s: Elvis Presley had only recently made his national television debut, in January 1956. In a world where the wiggling of hips was considered the height of obscenity, it’s easy to see the moral majority getting their panties wet over lines such as, “You have the long, aristocratic legs and the exquisite breasts of a statue.”

Thanks to the controversy,
Peyton Place
was the third bestselling hardcover novel of the year and eventually sold 300,000 copies in hardcover. Big-city critics praised the book—if it wasn’t a work of art, it was at least art of a certain type—but small-town critics and self-proclaimed moral guardians ripped Metalious’ book apart. In a front-page editorial that ran in 1957,
New Hampshire’s
Union Leader
called the book “literary sewage,” before adding, “This sad fascination [with sex] reveals a complete debasement of taste and a fascination with the filthy, rotten side of life that are the earmarks of the collapse of civilization.”

“If I’m a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste,” Metalious said. When Dell released the mass-market paperback in 1957, it became the top-selling paperback of the year, with more than 3 million copies sold. Dell eventually sold over 10 million
Peyton Place
paperbacks, and it was estimated that one in twenty-nine Americans had read
Peyton Place
.

After Metalious sold the film rights for $125,000, movie talk heated up. “Somehow, the smoldering bestseller would be filmed. Each important casting decision got play in the newspapers,” Metalious’ biographer wrote. The route from page to screen was a rocky one. It was never clear that the men who produced, wrote, and directed
Peyton Place
ever understood their source material: screenwriter John Michael Hayes offended Metalious by asking her if the book was her autobiography. (She threw a drink in his face.) Still, the film debuted on December 13, 1957, and had long legs: despite being toned down for censors,
Peyton Place
was the second highest–grossing film of 1958.

Metalious, flush with cash from her advances and royalties, looked forward to a long and prosperous career. “From now on everything was going to be wonderful forever. Life was going to be all beer and skittles and nothing unpleasant was ever going to happen to me again,” Metalious said. In 1958, she divorced her husband and married her business manager, a radio disc jockey, three days later. She’d never been happier, she told the press. New husband Martin “was the only man in my world who made me feel intensely female. A stallion type.”

Even with her success, she stayed true to her lower middle-class roots: “I don’t waste any time shopping when I’m in New York. These Fifth Avenue stores are strictly for jerks. I get all the clothes I need [locally],” she said. Despite being a celebrity, she
made no effort to get her plump figure into shape. “I’m just fat and happy,” she said. “I think diets are stupid.”

Unfortunately, her comment about “beer and skittles” was a little too on-the-nose: she drowned herself in alcohol, which led to a quick end for her second marriage. She then reunited with George. “I’m taking her home to be a mother mainly,” he told reporters. “Being a writer is just incidental.” Privately, he told colleagues he wanted to “help get Grace sober.”

The newly reunited couple bought a hotel on the shores of Paugus Bay in Laconia, New Hampshire. They named it, of course, “Peyton Place.” Still, George was unable to help his wife. “All I have left is five hundred dollars, and I’m going to drink myself to death,” she said. In fact, five hundred dollars was a bit of an overstatement: she owed the IRS hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, and now, with the hotel purchase, was hopelessly in debt. The only way out was for her to write more, faster—which was complicated by her alcoholism.

Meanwhile, her hardcover and paperback publishers were hungry for more
Peyton Place
. A sequel,
Return to Peyton Place
, was released in 1960 to drum up interest in a second movie. When Metalious complained to reporters that Hollywood producers had coerced her into writing it against her wishes, her producer wrote, “I did not guide her hands across her golden typewriter.” In fact,
no one
had guided her hands: Metalious had written what amounted to little more than a screenplay treatment, which was fleshed out by a ghostwriter into a full novel (“A foul and rotten trick,” Metalious later said).

The second
Peyton Place
book still sold 5 million copies in paperback, about half of what the original had sold. Critics, however, were less kind to
Return
. One of her publishers suggested that Metalious write a “spring break in Peyton Place” book—even though Peyton Place, a town of less than 4,000 residents, had no college. “Couldn’t you just put a college there?” her publisher asked. Metalious was dumbfounded by the request. Peyton Place may have been a fictional town, but it was real to her.

Metalious wrote two more novels, neither of which were associated with
Peyton Place
. They were met with diminishing returns—both commercially and critically. When her final book,
No Adam in Eden
, was published in 1963,
Newsweek
wrote, “Yes, fans, the sensational author of
Peyton Place
has run another one through her typewriter, just the way you like it. But you’d better hurry. The author’s supply of talent is strictly limited.” Their words would prove eerily prophetic.

On February 25, 1964, Metalious died suddenly of cirrhosis of the liver, the result of drinking a fifth of liquor a day for several years. She was just thirty-nine years old. In its obituary for her, the
New York Times
took a final shot at her. “It is debatable whether literary merit alone sold so many copies or made it one of the most talked-about novels in the United States,” they said in a postmortem on
Peyton Place
and its author.

In the wake of her death, a prime-time television soap opera and nine ghostwritten sequels from Pocket Books followed (sample title:
Pleasures of Peyton Place
). The soap opera, in particular, sanitized Metalious’ gritty fictional New England town, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Her family earned next to nothing from the continued exploitation of
Peyton Place
, in part due to the front-loaded contracts Metalious had signed and the money she still owed the IRS at the time of her death.