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
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