The summer of 1955 had not been good to Grace Metalious. A nine-week drought had left tiny Gilmanton, New Hampshire, bone dry, including the well in the back of the ramshackle cottage she'd sarcastically nicknamed "It'll Do." Her three children were living on lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. She was three months behind on payments for her beat-up car. At the age of 30 she was broke, smelly, thirsty, exhausted, and desperate.
She had dreamed of a different life for herself, a life of romance and adventure, a life all little girls dream of. Escaping a troubled home to sneak off to her Aunt Georgie's bathroom, she would lock the door and sit in the tub for hours, putting those dreams to paper by scribbling tales of heroines and dashing princes.
She kept writing, even after her wedding at 18 to her high-school sweetheart, George Metalious; after giving birth to her third child and having her tubes tied when doctors told her she wouldn't survive a fourth pregnancy; after George went away during World War II and had an affair; after he came home and she had an affair of her own. Writing was neither hobby nor diversion, but lifeline. During those years when George was getting his teaching degree at the University of New Hampshire under the G.I. Bill, Grace often locked her children out of the apartment so she could write, leaving her runny-nosed charges to fend for themselves in the cold by knocking on neighbors' doors, asking to be let in.
In the end, she'd written a book. Actually, a polemic. She titled it The Tree and the Blossom—about the secrets, scandals, and hypocrisy in a fictional New Hampshire town not unlike her own.
Grace discovered literary agent Jacques Chambrun by browsing through a library directory, singling him out because his was the most French-sounding name. Born Marie Grace DeRepentigny (prone to embellish, she would later state that her birth name had been Grace Marie Antoinette Jeanne d'Arc de Repentigny), she'd been brought up with an air of French snobbery that belied the modest apartment she'd shared with her mother, grandmother, and sister.
Chambrun, an unctuous dandy who favored long lunches and chauffeured cars, had an office facing the Plaza and a client roster that at one point included W. Somerset Maugham and Jack Schaefer, the author of Shane. He already knew Grace Metalious. The year before, she had sent him a passionate five-page plea outlining her dreams of becoming a published writer, along with a 312-page manuscript that focused on the travails of a pair of newlyweds—which had clear parallels to her life with George. The agent had circulated it among a few publishers; all of them declined.
So when Chambrun got The Tree and the Blossom, in April 1955, he wasn't optimistic. He perfunctorily sent it on its way through the publishing circuit, where it ended up on the desk of Leona Nevler, a manuscript reader at Lippincott. Most days, Nevler's job was to field the runoff from less discriminating agents, such as Chambrun, and sift through the mounds of unsolicited "slush," then pass along the rare jewel that might warrant an editor's attention. Nevler, it turned out, quite liked The Tree and the Blossom, but her bosses at Lippincott passed.
During a job interview at rival Julian Messner, Inc., Nevler told the firm's president, Kitty Messner, about the novel. Chic and thin, Kitty Messner was the Katharine Hepburn of the publishing world, known as much for her draping tailored suits and signature cigarette holder as for her sharp eye for commercial fiction. According to Emily Toth's 1981 biography Inside Peyton Place—the Rosetta Stone of Grace Metalious arcana—on the night of August 16, Messner decided to stay in and read Grace's saucy, compelling, and surprisingly literary book.
Mia Farrow and Dorothy Malone stir up their share of gossip in the 1965 TV version of Peyton Place, the first nighttime serial drama. From Bettmann Corbis.
The next day, Kitty called Chambrun. "I have to have it," she said. The title, however, would need to be changed to the name of the town where the novel was set: Peyton Place.
Grace had been at the market in nearby Laconia, buying frozen French fries because you don't have to wash them before you cook them. Then she had taken her kids to swim in Opeechee Park. When they got back to Gilmanton, Grace, carrying two bags of groceries, spotted the mail. Amid a pile of bills and past-due notices, a yellow telegram peeked out: please call me at your earliest convenience. regards. chambrun.
"He's sold it!" Grace screamed, waving around the wire. "He's sold it!"
Indeed he had, as she discovered when she placed the call to New York, a grocery bag still tucked under one arm. Two days later, Grace Metalious, the frowsy New Hampshire housewife whose bombshell would rock American publishing, slid into a booth at '21' with her dashing agent and toasted to her success with what she remembered as a daiquiri "all pale green and so cold it hurt my teeth."
Years later, her best friend, Laurose Wilkens, would remember the phone call she'd gotten from Grace that hot and humid August day, crying and laughing at her incredible news. "Grace Metalious," Wilkens said, "would never be really poor or really happy again."
Fifty years ago, Peyton Place helped create the contemporary notion of "buzz," indicted 1950s morality, and recast the concept of the soap opera, all in one big, purple-prosed book. It would spawn a sequel, a smash film nominated for nine Academy Awards, and television's first prime-time serial. A week before it hit bookstores, on September 24, 1956, it was already on the best-seller list, where it would remain for half a year. In its first month, it sold more than 100,000 copies, at a time when the average first novel sold 3,000, total. It would go on to sell 12 million more, becoming one of the most widely read novels ever published. During its heyday, it was estimated that one in 29 Americans had bought it—legions of them hiding it in drawers and closets due to its salacious content.
Peyton Place is the story of the denizens of a small New Hampshire town, ostensibly centered around pudgy adolescent Allison MacKenzie, who dreams of being a writer but finds herself stifled by the expectations and duplicity of her small-minded neighbors, and by her own mother, Constance MacKenzie, the original desperate housewife. What sold it was possibly the most clever marketing campaign ever launched for a novel of its era: a colorful author who made good copy, and a crafty, page-turning brew of illicit sex, secret lives, public drunkenness, abortion, incest, and murder.
But the story behind Peyton Place—a scandalous phenomenon that became a metaphor for scandal ever after ("Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?" U.S. congressman Lindsey Graham remarked at the Clinton impeachment hearings, in 1998)—is one almost as lurid as the original yarn. It is a saga of rags and riches, loves won and lost, and, in the end, betrayal, malefaction, and regret. It is the story of a restless, creative girl who never quite fit in and who found an outlet to express what that was like in 1950s America, only to be crushed by the people whose faux morality she had so scathingly critiqued. It is also a revelatory tale of an accidental and largely forgotten feminist pioneer.
Overnight, Grace Metalious became wealthy, spending lavishly on stays at the Plaza and flirting with Cary Grant, her name and face splashed in newspapers across the nation. Eight years, another husband, and more than a million pissed-away dollars later, at the age of 39, she lay dying in a Boston hospital, in the company of a mysterious British lover to whom she had left her entire estate—by changing her will on her deathbed. "Be careful what you wish for," she told him in the hours before she died. "You just might get it."
Grace DeRepentigny was born in 1924 in Manchester, New Hampshire, a heavily Franco-American working-class city known for its textile mills. Her father, Al, was a merchant seaman who left the family when Grace was 10; her mother, Laurette, was a bitter would-be socialite who, as Emily Toth has recounted in her book about Grace, dreamed of writing for Harper's and bought flea-market items, which she then passed off as French family heirlooms. Despite both families' objections, Grace, still a teenager, married George Metalious, a studious Greek whom she'd known since the age of nine. Almost instantly, the marriage hit the skids. "I did not like belonging to Friendly Clubs and bridge clubs," Grace wrote later. "I did not like being regarded as a freak because I spent time in front of a typewriter instead of a sink. And George did not like my not liking the things I was supposed to like."
With her ponytail, baggy flannel shirts, and jeans, Grace broke every mold of the prim New England country wife: she was outspoken, a terrible housekeeper (once, when some P.R. guys from New York came to It'll Do, she grabbed what looked like a Brillo pad, only to discover it was a dead mouse), and shockingly well read. "She was a totally unbridled, free, glorious spirit," says Lynne Snierson, the daughter of Grace's longtime attorney, Bernard Snierson. "I didn't know any other woman like her. Grace swore, a lot, and she drank, a lot, and she had lots of guys around her. She got married and divorced and had affairs. And she talked about sex and she talked about real life and she didn't filter it. I didn't know any other woman who was like that in the 50s."
As a result, she quickly became a lightning rod for gossip wherever she lived, particularly when she would hole up writing and ignore her kids. "We didn't bother her when she was writing," says her daughter, Marsha Metalious Duprey, now 62. "We wouldn't have gotten into trouble if we did, but we didn't want to bother her. When she was writing, basically everything else went to hell: no housework got done, no cooking got done, and my dad mostly took care of us.… I didn't know any better, so I didn't question it."
Grace struck up a friendship with Laurose Wilkens, who wrote part-time for The Laconia Evening Citizen and had tracked Grace down when rumors surfaced that the wife of George Metalious, the new school principal, was writing a novel about some of the townspeople. Grace confirmed that she was working on a book, but insisted it was pure fiction. Soon, she and Laurie were together almost every day in the kitchen of Shaky Acres, Laurie's farm in Gilmanton.
While George began his job as a teacher and principal, Grace wrote. Laurie told her the story of Barbara Roberts, a local 20-year-old who in 1947 shot and killed her father, then buried his body in a goat pen on their farm. She had pleaded guilty to second-degree homicide and was sentenced to 30 years to life. Then the truth came out: for years, Roberts and her sister had been raped regularly by their father, and at times chained to a bed for days. One night he flew into a rage, chasing Barbara and her young brother around the kitchen table and threatening to kill them. She reached into a drawer, extracted her father's gun, and shot him dead. Only after an exposé by some crusading journalists—including a cub reporter for the New Hampshire Sunday News by the name of Ben Bradlee—was Barbara Roberts freed.
