My father’s most famous story was published in The New Yorker on July 18, 1964. Its hero, a Waspy, aging, and boyish suburban businessman named Neddy Merrill, is hanging out at a neighbor’s pool on a Sunday morning when he decides to swim home across the county from swimming pool to swimming pool. It’s a lovely, languorous, rich-boy idea.
Neddy begins the story and his afternoon adventure as the quintessential Cheever hero: the best of the patriarchy, the loving, prosperous father of beautiful tennis-playing daughters and the husband of a lovely wife, Lucinda. But in art as in life, this surface is nothing but surface.
The brilliant alchemy of narrative threads from myth, literature, and local gossip enabled my father to hit a watery nerve with the splash of an exuberant cannonball. He began with summer and the myth of Narcissus. Then there was Odysseus in our family’s often-read Robert Fitzgerald translation. Like Neddy, Odysseus traveled home across the water to Ithaca with many fraught stops. My father also still relished that gossipy story from our neighborhood about a man whose wife left him and took the children and all the furniture. And most of all there were our friends’ and Westchester neighbors’ elegant swimming pools, many built in the glorious 1920s, when no country estate was complete without one.
Perhaps the idea for the story began at Yaddo, when my father, who had gone there to write, encountered the preternaturally boyish composer Ned Rorem at the writing colony’s pool. My father, also preternaturally boyish, embarked on an affair with Rorem. Although he once boasted that he had sex on every surface at Yaddo, gay affairs caused him a lot of emotional trouble. Ned became Neddy. The swimming pool at Yaddo became the Westerhazys’ pool.
It had originally been intended as a novel, worked on in the downstairs guest room of the house in Ossining where my father typed away all morning. It would have been his third novel, after The Wapshot Chronicle, which had won the National Book Award in 1958, and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, published in 1964. Both novels are set in the fictional town of St. Botolphs outside Boston, and both feature two brothers wrestling with their difficult fates. This would be something different, my father thought. It would be a contemporary novel about class and money, a novel about one man’s progress, a suburban pilgrim’s progress, from pool to pool. The novel would begin on a sunny summer day with cumulus clouds gathering like an army in the distance.
My father was a connoisseur of Westchester County swimming pools. He refused to build one for himself, although there had been times when he could have afforded to. Indeed, there had been a pool built from a pond in the original plans of the house my parents had bought in 1961. But my father had a wandering heart, the soul of a renter, and perhaps he knew that no pool he built could rival the neighboring pools, where we all swam as if we owned them.
First there was the magnificent Vanderlip pool. When we moved to the suburbs in 1951, one of the draws had been the estate’s glorious swimming pool, across the lawn from our front door. Encased in marble with a 12-foot-deep end, it was presided over by a statue of Neptune.
At the pool, we kids were all just kids, although some of us had inherited substantial fortunes and others would scrape together livings as teachers. At the pool, how well you swam, how you looked in a bathing suit, and how comfortable you looked seated on the edge were more important than what you had in your investment account. Long after we moved north to the house in Ossining that we bought, we commuted like migrating wild geese to the Vanderlip pool as soon as the weather got hot.
When the elegance of the Vanderlip pool got lonely, or there was discomfort in one of the family friendships, there was the Swopes’ pool. A few miles north and closer to the new house, it was equally elegant, with its faux-natural setting—a landscaped stream splashed down a rocky waterfall into the shallow end. The Swopes’ pool had soft, pale green water and also featured two bathhouses, men’s and women’s—barny, shady spaces cooled by damp stone floors.
After 1961, when we moved from the Vanderlip estate to Ossining, the closest pool was Sara Spencer’s, also marble. It was encased with a lighting system that made night swimming more feasible, although the depths of the Vanderlip pool on a moonlit night were often satisfyingly mysterious and cold. Then there was the Helprins’ pool, and the Wallaces’ new pool, built a few feet from the back deck of their ranch house in the next town. “I wouldn’t spit in that pool,” my father would say if anyone suggested a swim at the Wallaces’.
As always, we were self-appointed aristocrats separated from the hoi polloi by intellect, a quality more important than wealth until you needed a mortgage. My father made myths when he was at work and made more myths when he wasn’t.
One afternoon—was it by mistake?—we all drove over to swim in the Hudson River at Croton Point, a Y-shaped peninsula that juts out into the dingy water below the cliffs of Ossining. “After lunch we drive to a public beach,” my father wrote on August 28, 1963, at the end of a long summer. “An abundance of trash cans, turnstiles, ticket windows, men and women in county park uniforms, worn lawns, pretty willows, water the color of urine that smells, to my long nose, like an open sewer. A plump lifeguard sits in his tower, blowing his whistle and shouts commands through his electrical megaphone at every infraction of the numerous regulations.”
Inspired, as he often was, by the nightmarish quality of ordinary lives, he wrote about the halitosis, pimply backsides, and unpleasantness of most people’s bodies in bathing suits. It was just a few miles but worlds away from the slate-green waters of the Swopes’ pool, the magnificent Neptune brooding over the Vanderlips’ pool, even the smaller Helprins’ pool set in front of their house built to look like a Westchester château.
After he had worked on “The Swimmer” for weeks, my father decided that it was not a novel but a short story. He sorted through the manuscript, making two piles of paper, one slight, one heavier. Then he picked up the pile of rejected pages—about 150 of them—walked out through the kitchen, out the back door onto the slates behind the house, stuffed them into an oil barrel for burning trash, and set them on fire. With the 10 pages he had left, sitting in that back room looking out at the clothesline and hearing my mother in the kitchen, he did that thing: He magicked it into a story.
Every summer my mother headed north to New Hampshire, almost always taking my brothers, Ben and Fred, sometimes taking me. Left alone in the house, my father’s mind tacked and jibed. In his drinking years, he drank too much. In his journals, he reminds himself to write what he calls the summer story. After a rain on one of those lonely days, he saw a red de Havilland trainer airplane flying over the valley, writing that “the maneuvering of the pilot who goes aimlessly up down and around for an hour seems to convey his ecstasy in the fineness of this late summer afternoon. I seem almost to hear him laugh.” In the story, the red plane becomes a symbol of delight and prosperity during the first half of Ned Merrill’s swim. “Overhead a red de Havilland trainer was circling around and around and around in the sky with something like the glee of a child in a swing. Ned felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for the gathering as if it was something he might touch. In the distance he heard thunder.” In the distance, he heard thunder.
What starts as a mild and distant atmospheric rumble, within five pages is the end of the world. Beware, the story seems to say to the reader. You can be in the prime of your life, with a beautiful wife and four tennis-playing daughters, identifying with a man who is literally flying, and within the course of an afternoon you can lose everything. You will lose everything. You have already lost everything. This certainly was one of my father’s great themes and a theme that readers often seem to misunderstand. Those who think of the stories as set in a glorious suburban landscape, a place where even the little airplanes have fun, have missed something. Darkness lurks just under the surface. Odysseus gets back to Ithaca, but when he does, it will be almost unrecognizable. By the time Neddy Merrill swims across the final pool—the Clydes’—he has to stop and rest on the edge, and he wonders if he has the strength to get home.
Once The New Yorker published it, the summer story almost immediately attracted attention from Hollywood. Although his times in Hollywood had terrified my father—for many reasons—he had also found friends there. He drank with Peggy Lee. He befriended Alan Pakula and his charming wife Hope Lange—Hope would become my father’s most public mistress. Their affair was complicated by two problems, as she later told me: He always had to get the 6 p.m. train home to Westchester; and, because of his accent, she never understood much of what he was saying.
In the summer of 1964, my father got a call from Frank and Eleanor Perry, a smart, classy filmmaking couple who had rocked Hollywood by making a low-budget movie titled David and Lisa, a romantic story of mentally ill teenagers that was nominated for two Oscars. The Perrys had my father’s number. Fifty-five years old and on the verge of a flashy kind of success, he had recently bought himself a small red Karmann Ghia convertible for tooling around the roads of northern Westchester.
They would make a literary movie, the Perrys said. The music would be Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Burt Lancaster was so eager to play the part that he was working out already with the head swim coach at UCLA, perfecting his Australian crawl. What my father didn’t know was that Lancaster, who was nicknamed The Build and who thought “The Swimmer” was “Death of a Salesman in swimming trunks,” had taken the part after William Holden, Paul Newman, and George C. Scott had turned the Perrys down.
For once, the Perrys promised, over many, many drinks, a movie would be made that didn’t dumb down the story on which it was based. Shooting began in Westport, Connecticut, in the summer of 1965.
But just as Neddy starts with great dreams and promise at the beginning of the short story and ends naked and alone and abandoned, the movie soon found itself besieged and in a new world of wintry change.
My father was told that the Perrys had somehow run out of money. (Finances were never their strong point.) Frank Perry also kept having fights with Burt Lancaster. Frank thought of himself as a genius, an improviser, a moviemaker whose black-and-white movie shot from the heart had touched the soul of the American people. Lancaster had doubts.
To salvage the movie, the Perrys called on Columbia Pictures. The higher-ups far away in Hollywood insisted on it being produced by Sam Spiegel, the producer of On the Waterfront, who had won three Oscars and who had so many blond girlfriends that friends referred to them as Spiegelettes.
For Spiegel, an immigrant kid who liked nothing better than spending time on his yacht off the South of France, the soul-searching of a suburban WASP was less than thrilling. He hired his friend Marvin Hamlisch to write the music (he didn’t like the sound of Miles Davis—too sad) and had the writer create a part for Janet Landgard, the current Spiegelette. Landgard was added to the script as a babysitter named Julie Ann Hooper—a name that brought Hollywood idiocy to the names my father was so good at.
Still dazzled by Hollywood and, as always, in need of money, my father complied. When Bill Maxwell, his editor at The New Yorker, suggested changes in a story, my father balked. When Sam Spiegel just went ahead and made changes—radical changes—my father got in his red convertible and peeled out of the driveway. Nothing was said. The Perrys pretended. Lancaster—seething because Spiegel never showed up on the set—did his job. He had become a very good swimmer. He was also very good at looking sad. He knocked on the door. No one home. Empty house. Cut.
According to many writing teachers, philosophers, and even writers, there are three basic human stories—or there are seven—or there are four. In all the lists, a principal story is the journey story, a story of a hero or an antihero setting out in search of something or someone, encountering unexpected obstacles or distractions. While they journey to their goal, the goal itself changes.
There are 15 pools in the 10 pages of “The Swimmer,” a progression that gives the story the power of a sledgehammer. Still, in the same way that people assume I just stepped into my own writing as one would borrow a sweater from a parent on a chilly day, they love to remember Neddy Merrill, the swimmer, at the beginning of the story or the beginning of the movie: Burt Lancaster, with a gorgeous male body dripping wet, a slight hangover, a complicated past, four tennis-playing daughters, and a whimsical idea about swimming home.
Tennis is an atmospheric footnote to many of my father’s stories, but he himself had no idea how to play. I was supposed to play tennis for him. He hired a tennis pro to teach me at a time when he could hardly afford groceries. Disaster. He rented a house with a tennis court. No dice. I like to joke these days, as I play tennis, that he thought that if I were a better tennis player, he would be less gay. People laugh.
“I take F[red] and the red boat over to the B’s [the Boyers’] where the week-end tennis tournament is in progress,” he wrote about what tennis meant to him. “The sounds of a game I cannot play and the voices of the players force me into a painful and unwanted sense of aloneness. I am some damp-souled child, remanded to the edge of the playing field on a summer afternoon…and while you were learning tennis at Deerfield I was starving in a furnished room on the lower west side. Poor me.”
The brilliant story and the patched-together movie have developed some kind of cult following. Something about the idea my father had that summer, something about swimming as a form of locomotion across the landscape, stays with people. It’s odd, though, that when they talk about “The Swimmer”—and I have been approached about it dozens of times—they never, ever talk about the ending.
Adapted from When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever, out October 28 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
