The Man

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