Peyton Place, Grace Metalious, Naomi Foner and Literary Housekeeping
So how oh how did Naomi Foner (Naomi Foner-Gyllenhaal at the time) get first dibs to write the screenplay back in 2004? The problem is, a high-minded entity such as Ms. Foner has no business delving into the life of a woman like Mrs. Metalious, if for no other reason that if she’d met Grace in real life she would have cut her dead, as the rectitudinal ladies of Gilmanton, New Hampshire did when Grace’s tell-all novel, Peyton Place, hit the bestseller list and opened their town to public scrutiny.
I remember reading Peyton Place in the late 60s. It was one of those dog-eared paperbacks that was passed around from girl to girl in high school. We were on the brink of life and we wanted to know How the World Really Deals With Women—and books like Peyton Place showed it all: rape, virginity, incest, abortion, mutilation, illegitimacy, interracial marriage, religious repression, aging, loss of looks, romantic rivalry, weird mother-love, and last but not least, female sexual pleasure. That it all came from an unruly lower middle-class housewife in a tidy middle-class town, an expressive Catholic in a town of uptight Protestants, an outsider—and therefore one of our tribe—made it sweeter, because we knew she was telling the truth.
After forty years I re-read the book last month (first published in 1956, it was out of print for ages and re-released by an academic press ten years ago) and was a little surprised to see how well-structured a novel Peyton Place is. Its style, pacing, character development, thematic strength, clarity of purpose and just all-around engagingness display the best qualities from the Golden Age of the American Novel. Very few people write like this anymore, and it’s our loss as readers.
But it’s how Grace achieved this fine work of literature that makes her life story so compelling. According to her biographer and by first-hand accounts, she was an unsatisfying wife, neglectful mother, sloppy housekeeper and unpredictable drunk. She married young to get away from her parents, and once she did, nothing mattered to her as much as her secret writing. But oh, in that realm she was mistress. It was in her writing that she put her passion, her sense of orderliness, her commitment. And not a little bit of fist-shaking, too. I’ll show you. I’ll show you all...
But to get back to Naomi. You want to know how this whole thing started between Naomi and me. It started back in spring, 2006 (coincidentally around the time she was dropped from the Grace Metalious project) when my little press acquired her then-husband Stephen Gyllenhaal’s book of confessional poetry—you know, the book of poetry she later mentioned in her goddamn divorce papers. Stephen had sworn up and down to me that his family knew all about his impending book and that Naomi, Jake and Maggie were all “one hundred percent” behind it.
Well. April 4, 2006 at 1:35PM Eastern Time Stephen called me in NY from LA, didn’t reach me, and left a callback number. I pressed it and a mature-sounding woman answered. I recognized the voice, I addressed her politely as Ms. Foner and asked for Stephen. Her reply is below, verbatim:
“How did you get this number?”
“This is our HOME!”
“Don’t ever call here again!”
That pretty much set the tone of our acquaintanceship. Listen. I’m no Grace Metalious but I know a locus of hypocrisy, venality and small-mindedness when it slaps me in the face and forces me to take notice. Mulholland Drive was no Peyton Place but there are stories. Although, frankly, they’re pathetic little bleats in the wide, wide world where there are much bigger fish to fry.
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