"So it's 1979." "I'm 20 years old." "I get an assignment from 'Newsweek' magazine to photograph this author." "I'm like, "Great."" "And they were like, "It's not quite that easy this time, Mike," ""because he doesn't like to be photographed." ""We don't have an address or a telephone number to give you," ""but we do know he picks up his mail in Windsor, Vermont."" "So the first day, after sitting here for four hours, drinking Pepsi and eating Cheetos, making myself sick didn't happen." "I decided, "It's 5:30." "The post office is closed." ""Nobody's gonna come get their mail that day."" "Then I just walked the streets of Hanover late at night." "Started to wonder if somebody tipped him off." "So the next day, I came back." "One man came out of the post office." "I photographed him, wrote down the license plate number, but it wasn't him." "So I waited." "And then this Jeep pulls up, but I don't see his face." "He gets out and he goes into the post office really quickly, and as he came back out..." "Newsroom." "McDERMOTT:" "I got it." "I got Salinger." "Thinking back on the guys who sat around the poker table, what distinguished Jerry out of that pack was that there was in him no doubt he was going to be published, no doubt that he had an enormous talent" "and no doubt that everybody else at the poker table was inferior to him." "His work was ordained by God." "His work was his way to enlightenment." "He was put on this earth to work, to write." "'Catcher in the Rye' caught my attention when it first came out." "There had not been a voice like that - so personal, so revealing." "It seemed like somebody stripping the layers away from his soul." "It said on the cover, "This book will change your life."" "And I bought the book, but I was afraid to read it because I didn't want my life changed." "It's magical - you're a little like, "How'd he do that?" ""How did he put it all together that way?"" "And lead me through it in such a way that I would just land like that in that final statement, where you're just so grateful to him and you wanna go find him - like you're doing now." "It is an extraordinary phenomenon how many millions and millions and millions of people came to that book." "'Catcher in the Rye' has sold 60 million copies." "That's an unprecedented figure." "And continues to sell, by the way, 250,000 copies a year." "It's defined who we are as an American culture." "A long-lost sibling had arrived, and it was Holden Caulfield, and he became part of our conversation." "Like a whole generation," "I thought he was writing about me." "To be on the cover of 'Time' magazine in 1961 was something that went to statesmen and Nobel Laureates." ""You owe us another book." ""I mean, after all, we rewarded you" ""with fame, with money." ""We said you're one of" ""the important writers of the century." ""Now, come on, let's have some more."" "And then he doesn't give it." ""How dare you turn your back on us?" ""We're your fans." "You've gotten inside our heads."" "The great mystery is why he stopped." "Jerry had scaled heights, big success." "At the height of that success, he disappears." "I've heard that he has a huge bunker." "There has been a rumour for many years that Salinger continues to write." "And there would be long stretches of time where he wouldn't come out of the bunker at all." "He sort of became the Howard Hughes of his day." " Mr A.E." " Oh, there he is!" " How the hell did you get here?" " How are you?" "My God." "It was the year after the war ended, and the only person I knew who had a job was a man named Don Congdon, who was the fiction editor of 'Collier's magazine." "And we used to play poker, maybe twice a week - nickels and dimes, not much of a game." "And one of the players was a tall, lanky, dark gentleman named Jerry Salinger." "Do you remember down here with Jerry?" "After the poker games?" " Well, of course." "Yeah." " Yeah?" "The end of the evening, we would go over to Chumley's bar and grill, which is an old, old hangout for writers." "So everybody in here was convinced that they were the next Hemingway or whatever, except for Salinger, who didn't wanna be the next Hemingway." "Jerry himself said," ""There's been no great writers from Melville until me."" "He dismissed everybody - Theodore Dreiser," "Hemingway, Steinbeck - they were all second-rate talents." "And then it dawned on me - of all those writers," "Herman Melville was the only one that was dead, so it was all right." "He was the only writer I ever knew who talked about his characters as if they were real people." "And it was very strange, this thing, because he made them real in his stories, they became real for him." "And because they were so real for him," "I began to think of them as real," "I began to see them as real." "His attitude, and he lived as if he was really one of us - scrabbling and trying to get along best as we could." "And I was pretty shocked to discover that he literally lived with his parents in a very posh apartment on Park Avenue, that he had been to a succession of posh eastern schools - kicked out of most of them " "that he really came from a country club society." "But it didn't seem to make any difference with him." "He wasn't impressed at all with the life that he had lived." "And I think that all becomes very apparent when eventually he writes the one book that he writes, and that's 'Catcher in the Rye'." "Salinger's father, Solomon, was the son of a rabbi, an importer of cheese and meats - very unkosher." "His mother was Catholic - her name was Marie, which she changed to Miriam to be accepted by her husband's Jewish family." "He was very down on education." ""Don't believe everything your professors say." ""They're just giving you information." ""Get your own information on your own terms."" "I think that Salinger understood something about the culture long before the culture understood it about itself." "He saw fakes everywhere." "A woman asked Salinger," ""Mr Salinger, what does the 'J.D.' stand for?"" "And he smiled sheepishly and said, "Juvenile delinquent."" "After getting kicked out of prep school, his father decided he needed discipline, he needed structure, and he shipped him off to a military academy." "Valley Forge is important for two real reasons." "Number one - that's where" "Salinger really got his act together." "And number two - that's where Salinger first began to write." "Salinger wrote at night by flashlight under the covers." "He was always writing." "What I have here is J.D. Salinger's yearbook from the Valley Forge Military Academy." "It's an extraordinary item." "He signed it not only in his own name but he signed the names of the characters that he played in the various plays in which he performed, because he wanted to be an actor." "When he was in high school, he announced that his ambition was to succeed Robert Benchley as the theatre critic for the 'New Yorker'." "His father thought it was ridiculous that he was going to write, 'cause his father very much wanted him to join him in the cheese business, which he had no intention to do, and I think that caused a lot of friction." "His mother, on the other hand, approved of everything he did." "Salinger enrolled in" "Whit Burnett's short story class at Columbia." "It was a very important move for Salinger." "Whit Burnett was also editor of 'Story' magazine." "'Story' magazine published the very first work of an extraordinary number of American writers " "John Cheever, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams," "Erskine Caldwell, Jean Stafford, Peter de Vries." "Whit Burnett ended up being a father-figure." "And based on Burnett's encouragement," "Salinger went home and wrote a story called 'The Young Folks'." "And much to Salinger's surprise," "Burnett accepted the story for 'Story' magazine and paid him $25." "It was the first money J.D. Salinger ever made as a writer." "Salinger always had one goal in mind - he wanted to be in the 'New Yorker'." "The 'New Yorker' was considered the best place for a writer to be published in terms of prestige for the simple reason that it was hard to get published there." "J.D. Salinger's entrance into 'New Yorker' was not easy." "The response to Salinger's early stuff was one word - no." " No." " No." "You can go to the 'New Yorker' archives in the New York Public Library and read rejection after rejection." ""It would have worked out better for us" ""if Mr Salinger had not strained so for cleverness."" ""We think Mr Salinger is a very talented young man" ""and wish to God you could" ""get him to write simply and naturally."" ""If Mr Salinger is around town, perhaps he'd like to come in" ""and talk to us about 'New Yorker' stories."" "His reaction was, "They want me to write" ""an O. Henry type of short story," ""but I have to find my own voice, and this is it," ""and they'll catch up to me."" "He wrote a letter to Wolcott Gibbs, the editor, where he took the 'New Yorker' to task for not really publishing major, big short stories." "He said they were too tiny." "I mean, this was a kid lecturing the editors of the 'New Yorker' on what they should publish." "He was published in other magazines." "It wasn't good enough." "He was determined " ""The 'New Yorker' was going to publish me."" "And, by George, they did." "He had a story accepted in 1941, towards the end, called 'Slight Rebellion Off Madison', about a kid named Holden Caulfield." "December 7, 1941." "A date which will live in infamy." "Before they could get it into the magazine," "World War II broke out, and suddenly this wonderful story about a young man named Holden Caulfield and this personal rebellion he was going through seemed trivial and beside the point and, you know, it just didn't seem appropriate" "to put in the magazine, and so they put it on the shelf." "And Jerry was infuriated at this." "That was his whole thrust in life, was to be published by the 'New Yorker'." ""A man is in Cornish." ""Amateur, perhaps, but sentimentally connected." ""The saddest - a tragic figure without a background." ""Needing a future as much as your past." ""Let me."" "I wrote this note to J.D. Salinger which I thought that only he could understand, practically begging him for an audience." "Do I go left here?" "'Cause I don't go left." "There's been countless fans now for decades who have done this." "They leave notes for him, they go up to his house unannounced, they knock on his front door." "They're showing up to try to find out from Salinger some answer to something in their lives." "1978, I remember driving on this road alone feeling very lonely, next to the Connecticut River, hoping that J.D. Salinger, my hero, would give me a few minutes of his time." "One day, I said to my wife, "I've gotta try it." ""I've gotta go," and I kissed her goodbye and drove 450 miles to the Vermont/New Hampshire border and tried to find him." "I knew this was a hard thing because I found the neighbourhood people protected him, and they wouldn't exactly tell me where he lived." "He may be the only writer in American history who's created such a story around himself that just catching a glimpse of him becomes an important experience in your own life." "I drove about six miles to where I thought Salinger lived." "I wasn't 100% sure." "I knew that he lived on top of this mountain, this wise man living in this cabin in the White Mountains." "So I waited below this long, winding gravel driveway where I thought he lived." "Sure enough, probably in the midmorning, two cars came down the driveway." "One was his son, Matt Salinger, a teenager." "And J.D. Salinger stopped his car, his BMW, got out, walked over to the driver's side." "I said, "Are you J.D. Salinger?"" "Because I did not recognise him from the photographs." "He says, "Yes." "What can I do for you?"" "I said to him very dramatically," ""I was hoping you could tell me."" "And he said, "Oh, come on." "Don't start that kind of thing." ""Are you under psychiatric care?"" "And he got out of that BMW in the middle of the forest - to me, it was almost like he stepped out of a dream." "He talked about my life as if it was as important as his life." "He asked me why I left my family, why I drove 450 miles, why I left my job, and I said to him it was his writing." "I thought he felt like I did and I wanted to talk to him about deep things." "Then he kind of got very frustrated." "And then he stepped back from my car." "It was almost like he grew six inches." ""I'm a fiction writer." ""For all you know, I'm just a father." ""You saw my son go down the road." ""I'm not a teacher or seer." ""There's people come and see me like you every year," ""from all over North America, from Canada, from Europe." ""I've had to run from people on the street." ""There's nothing I can tell these people" ""to help them with their problems." ""I may present questions in my writing in a certain way," ""but I don't pretend to know the answers."" "He was sick of it." "He'd had 25 years of this." "He said, "Do you have any other income besides your writing?"" "Because I told him I wanted to become a published author." "I told him I was a reporter." "He got a little bit angry, got into his car and drove off." "And as I sat there, I felt that I blew it, my chance to talk intimately with J.D. Salinger." "I sat in my own car, writing him another note, telling him that I was a little disappointed " "I'd driven all this way and he'd only given me a few minutes." "And as I was finishing the note, he came back in his car." "And he says, "Haven't you left yet?"" "And I said, "No, I was just gonna actually" ""pin this note up by your door."" "He says, "Well, come over here and give it to me."" "I gave him the note." "His face became long and drawn." ""Jerry, I'm sorry." ""It was probably a mistake coming to Cornish." ""You're not as deep, as sentimental as I had hoped," ""the person who wrote those books I love."" "And then that seemed to defuse his frustration from earlier, and he says, "Well, I understand it, but I'm not a counsellor." ""I'm a fiction writer."" "In 1941, J.D. Salinger was 21 years old, living with his parents in New York City, when he met Oona O'Neill, who was then 16 years old." "Salinger was absolutely floored with her beauty." " Say something!" " What?" "It's a silent film." " Is it silent?" " Yes." "What'll I say?" "Shall I turn over here?" " No, turn around there now." " All right." "Oona O'Neill was the daughter of Eugene O'Neill, still America's only Nobel Prize-winning dramatist." "He was a dedicated genius and a really rotten father." "And he always said his real children were his characters in his plays." "Oona O'Neill was someone who was clearly attracted to genius." "Between the ages of 16 and 18," "Oona dated Peter Arno, Orson Welles and then J.D. Salinger." "It's interesting to think of a 16-year-old girl holding such fascination for such an illustrious group of men, but remember, we're talking about a young woman who was intellectually astute, beautiful, shy, loving," "quite an extraordinary young woman." "She was original." "She wasn't like everyone else." "I think this is why Salinger liked her so much, because the one thing that she was never guilty of was any clichés or any banalities." "She was totally original." "He had a lot of things going for him." "He was handsome, he was intelligent, he was published - he was everything." "After school, Oona would do her homework and then get dressed up, and she'd go to the Stork Club." ""Oh, my!" "Look at Oona O'Neill - debutante of the year."" "They always photographed her with a glass of milk, because, of course, she was under-age." "It was a tremendous love story." "They truly loved each other." "In 1941, 22-year-old Jerry Salinger wanted to join the army." "But when he went to enlist, the military doctors rejected him." "This distressed him terribly." "He got very angry about this." "Salinger was determined to serve." "He wrote letters arguing to be accepted, and then, in the spring of 1942, he was finally allowed to enlist." "What a mindset - to come from an existence of absolute ease and luxury." "And what do you aspire to?" "To being in the trenches." "Oona loved hearing from Jerry." "He wrote wonderfully seductive, totally delightful, wonderful letters." "Salinger bragged to all his army buddies," ""This is my girlfriend,"" "and he showed them pictures of Oona O'Neill." "But when Oona moved to California, she never answered his letters." "He had to know something was up." "In Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin was working on a film that called for a very young girl." "And he walked into a room and Oona was sitting on the floor by the fireplace and the light was playing on her and she looked up, and he just..." "When I went to Austin to look at the Salinger collection there I read a number of letters." "And I have to say that reading them, I felt like a voyeur." "And I was reading Salinger's letters." "A number of them were about Oona O'Neill." "Some of them were about Oona O'Neill and Charlie Chaplin." "And there were some distasteful bits." "Imagine you're J.D. Salinger, you're in the army, getting ready to fight in the great war in Europe, you've professed your total and complete love to this woman and she goes off and marries, on her 18th birthday," "the most famous movie star in the world." "Chaplin was 53 going on 54." "The headlines - all over the world." "Salinger found out that he lost her by reading about it in the newspaper." "He was humiliated in front of everyone." "He was very upset about this." "He did speak about this." "You could feel his anger." "You could feel his terrible anger about his rejection, her rejection of him." "For the rest of his life, Salinger was haunted by the love affair that he could have had that didn't happen." "The Second World War created J.D. Salinger." "It's the ghost in the machine of all the stories." "Well, I think in the beginning," "Jerry felt very patriotic." "I remember he said it was extraordinary you know, to feel that he was part of something doing good in the world." "Of all the days for someone to be initiated to combat Salinger's was D-day." "On D-day, Salinger was carrying six chapters of 'Catcher in the Rye'." "He told Whit Burnett that he needed those pages to help him survive." "Salinger was in a landing craft coming in towards Utah Beach." "Shells were flying." "The artillery shells were coming in." "I lost my first man by a sniper." "Shot right between the eyes." "You take a quick look, you know that's it, and you're off." "At the end of the day, you can sit back and... .. "Man." "Hoagie's gone."" "The Americans thought that landing would be the hardest thing." "The day after D-day, that's when the fighting really started, when the 4th Division, that Salinger belonged to, went into the ancient fields and hedgerows." "They learned basically that everything that they'd learnt in basic training didn't apply." "Every field was gonna cost them 20, 30 guys." "One field, 100 yards by 100 yards, would sometimes cost a whole platoon." "Killing ground, absolutely, for us, like a meat grinder." "That's where our casualty rate began to climb tremendously." "Salinger was a part of the Counter Intelligence Corps whose job it was to interview enemy prisoners and civilians." "Salinger played a very important role." "GIs, young guys, in squads, being asked to attack a village, they wanted to know every single thing they could possibly know about that village - where the machine gun nests were, where the alleyways were," "where the avenues of fire were." "Men like Salinger, their job was to provide information that would have kept more of those guys alive." "He had a lot of latitude to move behind and near the enemy lines, to understand the culture, to understand the people, to understand what war did to the local people." "It was a more intellectual, probing war for him than the average grunt." "My dad was actually 21 when he met Mr Salinger, and Mr Salinger was 25, so he's four years his senior." "And they were in the Counter Intelligence Corps." "The four gentlemen you see here," "Mr Salinger, Mr Altaras," "Mr Keenan, and my father, Paul Fitzgerald, they refer to each other as the Four Musketeers." "They corresponded for nearly 65 years, and there's really a bond." "My dad used to comment that Altaras and Keenan would say," ""There was really no time for us to do anything," ""because we always had to stop" ""for Salinger to sit by the roadside," ""working on short stories or his novel."" "And my father took the only photo that anybody's ever seen of Salinger writing 'The Catcher in the Rye'." "I took five students to Princeton." "They wanted to see what they could find, what they could discover of Salinger at Princeton Library." "After we got into the reading room, we turned the last page of something and came across a 3-by-5-inch light green spiral-notebook-bound paper." "And I remember, at that moment, everybody's pulse sort of jumped because it was handwritten." "Ostensibly, it was written by Salinger, about the Allies coming into Paris." "He talked about driving in the jeeps into Paris and the Parisians holding their babies up for the Americans to kiss." "And he said that you could stand on the hood of your jeep and take a leak on it, and it wouldn't matter, it would be OK." "Anything you did would be fine." "I think one of the great stories of literary history is the meeting of Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger in Paris during the liberation." "Ernest Hemingway was his icon." "He loved the way Ernest Hemingway wrote." "At the time that Salinger met my grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, in World War II, he was the most famous writer of the 20th century, and so you can see why Salinger would seek him out." "And I think that would have been a kind of romantic vision for my grandfather to see in Salinger a talented young writer in the Infantry division fighting during World War II." "And Jerry actually gave him a manuscript and asked Hemingway to look at it." "Which took a great deal of derring-do on his part, really." "But Hemingway saw what he'd written and loved it." "Jerry was thrilled that" "Hemingway appreciated his writing." "This was like getting the greatest accolade he could possibly have." "I didn't think that Jerry would ever push up to see anybody 'cause he seemed rather shy and reclusive." "J.D. Salinger is a recluse who likes to flirt with the public to remind them that he's a recluse." "He's not a recluse." "He appears whenever he feels like it." "The Cornish Fair would start, and we'd see all our friends and all our neighbours, and Jerry Salinger was one of 'em." "He came to all the fairs and enjoyed them immensely." "A friend of mine said, "Oh, I met J.D. Salinger tonight," ""popped in backstage to meet the cast." ""And he was very jovial and very cheery."" "He's not reclusive in the total sense of the word." "He's in touch with people." "He travels to Europe." "He comes to New York." "We were just hanging around the house when the phone rings." "I answered it." "This male voice asked for Lacey Fosburgh." "Salinger has to do everything exactly on his own terms." "The true recluse would never pick up the phone and call a reporter from the 'New York Times'." "Lacey was the first woman to ever cover the police beat for the 'New York Times', and now working out of the San Francisco bureau." "She picked up the phone, and his first line was," ""This is a man called Salinger."" "He enjoys the game." "Reclusivity is a great public relations device, among other things." "By being out of the picture, he's in the picture." "I think that is probably an intentional paradox on his part." "She goes..." ""Salinger!" "It's Salinger!"" "This was the first interview that Salinger had granted since 1953." ""Give me some paper!" "Give me some paper!"" "He says, right off the bat, "I can only talk for a minute."" "So I'm scurrying around, grabbing some paper, she's furiously writing notes on anything that's around." "Then, of course, the conversation ends up being a half an hour long." "He sets the scene - it was a cold, windswept, rainy night in New Hampshire as he was talking to her." "And the point of the call was he was concerned that pirated editions of his uncollected short stories were being sold across the country." "J.D. Salinger paperbacks." "Two little volumes." "He referred to them as "the gaucheries of his youth"." "The stories that he never wanted published at all, that he had written in the 1940s." "He called her because he was clearly upset about this pirate publication." "These were stories that he did not want in circulation." "He didn't have to do that." "He just had to file a lawsuit." "One of the great coups of the story was that she was able to get Salinger to talk about what he was up to as a writer and that he was writing every day, which was one of the great mysteries of the literary world" "for a decade or so." "He paints this portrait of someone who is completely devoted still to his craft, still turning out story after story, novel after novel, perhaps." "And she got him to talk about his own feelings about publishing and being published and being private." "Salinger said, "I don't have any intention of publishing." ""There's a stillness that comes from not publishing."" "Lacey immediately got on the phone with the national desk of the 'New York Times' to say, "Hey," you know, "I just talked to Salinger."" "He knew if he called a 'New York Times' reporter, that story would be on the front page of the 'New York Times', which is exactly what happened." "Which was extraordinary at the time - this was before the 'Times' format had changed, and so running soft news on the front page was a big deal." "I didn't have a lot of money then, and I didn't know quite what was going on, so I bought volume one, and when I went back to buy the second one, not only was the book gone, both volumes were missing." "The store owners declined to admit they'd ever sold it." "Salinger had pulled them from all the bookstores." "I mean, this was a second-hand bookstore on Telegraph Avenue." "I couldn't even believe he could reach that far." "It was incredibly eerie, almost sort of medieval primal fears came out of the Hilrtgen Forest." "Salinger experienced that firsthand." "It was basically described as a meat grinder." "Soldiers described that battle as one where they wished they could crawl inside their helmets." "Whole companies of 200 men would be down to 20 or 30 after four or five hours." "Guys would literally have their arms blown off, half a leg missing, and they'd be laughing as they were taken off on a stretcher because they knew they were going home." "The only way Salinger could have survived an intense shelling would have been to literally hug a tree." "To get close enough to that thing and pray to God that somebody else gets it." ""November 10, 1944." ""Dear M, This poor young man" ""has been bombarding me with poems for a week or so." ""It appears that he's serving overseas," ""so everything becomes more touching."" "J.D. Salinger and Louise Bogan first crossed paths when he wrote to her in November of 1944." "He may have thought that she was the poetry editor of the 'New Yorker'." "She wasn't." "She was simply their reviewer." "And she passed the poems along to her friend at the magazine, William Maxwell." ""Dear M, I send you another of Sergeant Salinger's letters." ""I've written him, but it is better if you write him too." ""Perhaps this would help stem the tide." "Love, Louise."" "We don't really know what she thought about the poems themselves, but she was deeply touched that he had written to her and his life was in danger." "For a soldier like Salinger, walking into a camp there was a stillness to it and a craziness to it." "They were caught off-guard." "These weren't liberations in the sense of busting down the gates or anything like that." "These soldiers were walking into a place... open." "This was like falling into a graveyard." "In the case of the camp that Salinger saw, that was the Krankenlager, the camp for the sick." "Naked bodies stacked up, bodies that looked like they were dead people, but sometimes discovering sounds coming from the bodies." "Salinger was an experienced fighter by this time, but nothing prepared him for this kind of sight." "This kind of desecration of humanity." "The Germans had locked prisoners into flimsy barracks and set them on fire." "They were burned alive." "The sentence that Salinger says is that you never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils, no matter how long you live." "The National Broadcasting Company delays the start of all its programs to bring you a special bulletin." "It was announced in San Francisco half an hour ago by a high American official not identified as saying that Germany has surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, no strings attached." "There would be no more firing, no more death, no more killing, no more destruction." "It was over." "They could look forward to life." "The sacrifices that had been made, the horrors they'd seen were over." "V-E Day meant that they were on their way home." "On behalf of the commanding officer and his staff," "I wanna extend a hearty welcome to all of you." "There's no need to be alarmed at the presence of these cameras as they're making a photographic record of your progress at this hospital from the date of admission to the date of discharge." "As a result of the horrors that he witnessed in World War II," "J.D. Salinger suffered a nervous breakdown." "Salinger's stuff is all about innocence, somehow, and the damage done to innocence in the world." "J.D. Salinger went from D-day all the way through to V-E Day " "299 days in combat." "What Salinger experienced was basically a continual assault on his senses, mentally, spiritually, physically." "He would have been under immense, unimaginable stress." "The probability of not making it, either by being killed or wounded, is really... was really there from day to day, and that makes people snap later." "The statistic is that anybody - doesn't matter how you were raised, how tough you are mentally - anybody after 200 days goes nuts." "After 200 days of combat, you are insane." "Shortly after he was released from the hospital," "Salinger wrote the first short story narrated by Holden Caulfield." "It was called 'I'm Crazy'." "After his nervous breakdown," "Salinger signed up for a longer tour of duty so that he could be part of the denazification program." "Salinger got to be a detective, detective in uniform." "His basic job was to chase down the bad guys, whether they be Nazis that were pretending to be civilians, whether it was collaborators, black market operators." "He actually got to look into the dark heart of Nazi Germany and interrogate the people who committed the greatest crimes in human history and bring them to justice." "There has been a rumour for many years that one of the people Salinger arrested and interviewed was a woman by the name of Sylvia." "She was reported to have been a member of the Nazi Party." "Salinger and Sylvia supposedly fell in love and married." "This has led me to travel in Germany, following the footsteps of Salinger, the various places where they could have lived, the hospital in Nuremberg where Salinger was treated for his nervous breakdown, but we drew blanks." "So then we hit upon the idea of looking at the passenger arrival forms of ships arriving in the United States in May and June of 1946." "Eureka!" "When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it." "I actually jumped up and people had to shush me." "But there it is." "We have the passenger arrival form." "Sylvia Louise Salinger." "Age - 27." "Place of birth - Frankfurt am Main, Germany." "Now we know that woman really was married to Salinger." "American soldiers were not allowed to marry German nationals during 1945 and 1946." "Salinger took an enormous risk." "He could have been court-martialled." "It's absolutely fascinating that he would actually do the opposite of what any so-called decent American would do, which was to go and marry a Nazi." "It suggests that he really got to a place intellectually and emotionally, importantly - emotionally - whereby he could identify and sympathise with the victim and perpetrator." "He told me his first wife was extraordinary, that they had a telepathic communication and they met in dreams." "When Salinger brought Sylvia home to his parents' house, she walked into this Jewish household with a Nazi Party affiliation." "How he ever thought this would work is beyond me." "My father was best man at J.D. Salinger's first wedding, and my father later on received a letter from Salinger." ""Sylvia and I separated" ""less than a month after we returned to the States." ""If I gave you all the reasons for the separation," ""I would have to go straight back to the beginning," ""as most of the details would probably depress you." ""Almost from the beginning," ""we were desperately unsuited to and unhappy with each other."" "Within months, Salinger filed to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of deception, which may indicate that he found something troubling about Sylvia's past in Germany." "The very next story that he submitted to the magazine was one called 'The Bananafish'." "Salinger comes back from the war aware that the devastated and shell-shocked tone is his tone." "Just as the Civil War could give us Mark Twain and Whitman," "World War II gave us Salinger." "Jerry always said," ""You have to get away from fantasy." ""Write about something you know." ""There is no passion otherwise."" "I remember his words." ""There's no fire between the words."" "'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' is very much about a man who's suffering from having gone through the Second World War." "Seymour Glass on the beach talking with a charming little girl." "Goes to his room, lies down on the bed beside his sleeping wife and shoots himself through the head." "♪ You've got to accentuate the positive... ♪" "The story made a huge splash, and it signalled a success streak, a winning streak, for Salinger." "Everyone was totally captivated by his writing." "We'd call each other on the telephone about it when the 'New Yorker' came, and, "Have you read this?"" ""Have you seen this?" "Isn't it wonderful?"" "People whom I didn't even know were talking about," ""Did you read that story?"" ""That little girl - isn't that remarkable?"" "It caused a great buzz." "1948 was really a turning point for Salinger and the 'New Yorker'." "He published 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' and two other stories." "And from then on, he was known and identified as a 'New Yorker' writer." "And Jerry was thrilled - he told me how much it had meant to him to be published by the 'New Yorker'." "Salinger was considered really a shooting star." "A 'New Yorker' contributor in Hollywood said," ""Everybody out here talks about Salinger." ""My God, that guy is good." ""Evenings are spent, and this is on the level," ""discussing the guy and his work."" "I would ask people who worked with him," ""Did he have a reclusive personality back then?" ""Did you ever see him?"" "They said, "Oh, you know, we saw him all the time."" ""We talked to him." "He was very warm." "He was Jerry."" "He would call up and say," ""I'm going to the Blue Angel tonight." "Wanna come along?"" "So we would go to the Blue Angel, which was a nightspot where young talent would try out." "When we were at the Blue Angel together, he was very sociable." "He talked to people." "He even talked to the performers." "Jerry was a different person there." "Jerry had a wonderful time, because he'd identified with these types who were trying to make their mark, just as he was trying to make his mark with his writing." "And he was very charitable." "He was very encouraging." "But he wouldn't encourage a young writer." "That was different." "That was competition." "He was pretty suave with the women." "He used to lie to them and tell them he was a goalie for a Montreal soccer team." "But it was a very platonic going out." "I mean, he didn't try to kiss me or hug me or squeeze me or anything the way other people did." "Maybe I was too old for him." "I think he liked younger girls." "I was only seven years younger." "I think maybe he preferred them 12 years younger." "Or younger than that." "♪ Don't mess with Mr In-between. ♪" "We were in Daytona Beach, and I was sitting at this rather crowded pool reading 'Wuthering Heights'." "And this man sitting next to me said," ""How is Heathcliff?" "How is Heathcliff?"" "And I turned to him, and I said, "Heathcliff is troubled."" "He was in this terrycloth bathrobe." "He was very white, and his legs were white." "He didn't look like he belonged at this pool." "It's the classic veteran's syndrome." "You come back from a war and see all around you - people that don't understand, don't have a clue about the first thing that you did when you were over there, rather than here." "His mind seemed to skitter over various topics." "He told me he was a writer, that he had published stories in the 'New Yorker', and he felt that was his finest accomplishment." "We sat there for quite a while, and finally he asked me, "How old are you?"" "And I said, "14."" "And I do remember very clearly his grimace." "He said he was 30." "He made a point of saying that he was 30 on January 1, so that, in a way, he was just 30." "I finally left, and as I was going away, he told me his name was Jerry." "I saw him the next day, and we began these walks." "We would walk down the beach to this old rickety pier." "We did this every afternoon for, say, about 10 days." "We'd walk very slowly down to the pier." "It was though he was escorting me, and he would always have his left shoulder behind me and lean down to hear what I had to say." "He was very deaf in his right ear." "I think something to do with the war." "But Jerry Salinger listened like you were the most important person in the world, and he wanted to know about my family." "He wanted to know about my school." "He wanted to know about what games I played." "He wanted to know who I was reading, what I was studying." "He wanted to know whether I believed in God." "Did I want to be an actress?" "He wanted to know everything about me." "We would end up at the pier, and we'd sit." "We'd buy popcorn and we'd buy ice-cream and we'd feed popcorn to the seagulls." "He was having a wonderful time." "There's an image from 'Esmé' which haunts me, and it's that image late in the story where" "Sergeant X feels his mind dislodge itself and begin to teeter, and he compares that to luggage on an overhead rack that's unstable." "Think of 'For Esmé - with Love and Squalor'." "Surely, there is no better story in the half-century on either side of that novel." "You're in a tea shop in England, and an American soldier is on his way to war." "And he finds himself explaining himself to a 12-year-old girl, whose manners are too good, and this wish that she expresses that he should return from the battle with all his, as she says, F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact" "with all his faculties intact." "And then he makes this abrupt kind of shattering cinematic cut to this soldier after he's been to battle writing a letter to Esmé." "And he has barely clung to his F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S." "He's barely hung onto his intelligence and his powers, and he's gonna return to America and he's gonna be J.D. Salinger and he's gonna write." "I would do cartwheels on the beach, and then I would flip off into the ocean." "And he would love that." "I was fresh and new, like a breath of spring, and I knew I brought him joy." "I think he felt it was as close to a perfect, maybe even direct, moment that he'd had ever... maybe ever had." "These perfect moments, they got him away from his melancholy, his angst about the war." "On his very last day, he asked me would it be all right for him to write me?" "And I said, "Of course."" "He also said, "I'd like to kiss you goodbye," ""but you know I can't."" "And then Jerry went up to my mother and said very seriously," ""I am going to marry your daughter."" "Years later, he told me that he could not have written 'Esmé' had he not met me." "Well, I remember talking once to William Maxwell about what it was like to work with Salinger." "He said Salinger was very specific, he was a very careful writer." "He knew what he wanted, even down to his punctuation." "And Maxwell told me the story of a piece that Salinger had written that had been edited, it had gone all through the process, down to the final page proof, when they were getting ready to publish the magazine," "and a final proofreader found a spot that he felt like needed a comma." "And he went to Maxwell," "Maxwell looked at it, and he said," ""It looked like it needed a comma to me."" "They couldn't find Salinger, so they went ahead and put the comma in." "And when the story came out," "Maxwell said Salinger was melancholy about that comma." "Salinger's idea of perfection is really perfection and shouldn't be tampered with." "Samuel Goldwyn was one of the original Hollywood moguls." "He was one of that group of a half-dozen Jewish immigrants who realised early on that there was not only a lot of money to be made in the movie industry but that there was a budding art form there." "And he became famous for being the most literary of the Hollywood producers." "And it's a great irony because he was probably the most illiterate of the Hollywood producers." "The Epstein brothers, who had written 'Casablanca', they came to Goldwyn with an idea for a movie based on a short story they had recently read in the 'New Yorker'." "And the story was 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut', and the author was a young J.D. Salinger, who was just being talked about a great deal." "So this appealed to Goldwyn, who bought the rights and turned it into a movie called 'My Foolish Heart'." "I think every time an author sells something to Hollywood, part of him says to himself," ""Well, my work is so special." "Mine won't get changed."" "You know, "And certainly, they're not gonna rape it,"" "as I think Hollywood did to 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut'." "Gosh, what about the rest of YOUR life, El?" "Please, darling, don't you be crazy." "You just go..." "Mary Jane, I'll never tell." "The beauty of the short story is how much Salinger left out." "And the great delight for the Epsteins was how much they could put in." "That's a very aristocratic ear." "Salinger's response was extremely violent, and he vowed never to sell another work to Hollywood again." "It's that protectiveness that actually led to the end of our friendship." "Eventually, I got a job as an editor at 'Cosmopolitan' magazine, which then was a literary magazine before Helen Gurley Brown got hold of it for 'Sex and the Single Girl'." "And in the course of our poker game," "Jerry handed me a story and said," ""Here." "I think this is a good story for 'Cosmopolitan'."" "It was called 'Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record'." "And he said, "But one thing " ""you tell your editor, not one word can be changed," ""and that's up to you." ""You gotta watch it, because they like to cut" ""and they like to make it fit a space." ""If they do that, then there's no go."" "He attached a note to it." ""Either as is or not at all."" "And it was all fine, but I forgot to check on the title that they gave it." "Instead of 'Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record', they changed it to 'Blue Melody'." "I thought, well, the best thing I can do is meet this head-on." "So I called him and I said," ""Can we have a beer at Chumley's tonight,"" "or whatever." "And I met him, and I had the magazine." "And I had a tough time sort of getting around to the topic." "And after hemming and hawing, he even said," ""Would you get to the point?" "What's bothering you?"" "And I said, "Jerry, I have to explain this to you." ""I really very carefully attended to" ""the prose that you wrote" ""so that nothing was changed." ""But unbeknownst to me, and I have no control over this," ""because I am not the fiction editor," ""they put a different title on."" "So he grabbed the magazine out of my hand, and he looked at it." "And his face turned apoplectic red." "And he just spewed an angry denunciation at me." "What kind of a friend was I?" "How did I let this happen?" "And I tried to get a word in to say," ""You know, I have no control" ""over what's done in the final edit."" "He said, "You had to have control." ""I told you you're in charge of it" ""and I trusted you with it," ""and I'll never trust you again in anything."" "And he walked out." "That's it." "Left me with my beer sitting at the table." "And he took the magazine with him." "When we next met, after Daytona, was in the spring, when I was in New York with my family." "I was 14, and I can remember exactly what I had on." "I had a little tan suit on, with little white gloves and a little straw hat." "And we were walking down a street and the straw hat blew off." "And I thought, "Oh, how embarrassing."" "And... he went tearing down that street laughing and chortling." "He came back and formally gave me my hat, which was a little bit bashed, and I put it back on my head." "And he laughed about it for about 15 minutes." "This is one of the letters that Jerry sent me." "He was at the time writing 'The Catcher in the Rye'." "He felt nervous about Holden's language." "He was worried about how it was going to be received by people, particularly people he loved." "He wanted people to know absolutely that he was trying to write a good book." "Not just a bestseller - a good book." "Along came the gentleman about six years younger than I was." "And he had a big black dog." "He told me that all he would be doing was writing." "No parties, no visitors." "He was a loner." "The perfect tenant for me." "And that's how I met a man called J.D. Salinger." "And if his typewriter was going," "I knew enough not to intrude into him." "This was his own world." "George Orwell once said that "Writing a book" ""is a horrible, exhausting struggle." ""One would never undertake such a thing" ""if one were not driven by some demon."" "And it looks to me that he had demons that he was exorcising." "He came home and wrote about this adolescent at war with society." "That's when he found the real Jerry Salinger voice, so that he was Holden Caulfield." "And he was able to transmit that onto the page so that you get a real feel of the frustration of every kid that age." "Jerry said there was a great deal of Holden in him." "Holden was rejecting the whole world of his parents." "He hated these prep schools that he had gone to." "He had disdain for all these people." "Wealth, fame, career, possessions, possessions, possessions." "Salinger saw America as this shopping centre that has lost its mind, it's lost its soul." "He hated phoniness." "He just hated it." "Is it possible to grow up and not sell out?" "They're all there, all of the Salinger diatribes and all of his prejudices - they're all in that book." "He didn't spend just 10 years writing that book." "He spent 30 years writing 'Catcher in the Rye', 'cause everything in his life up to that point was funnelled into that book." "A book takes the time that it needs, and you don't have a choice about it." "But don't worry." "Novels grow in the dark." "It was a channelling." "It's some kind of miracle of ink making flesh and blood." "You see the artist at the peak of his powers." "Holden always imagined millions of little kids running to the field of rye and having to save them from going over the cliff." "The cliff of what?" "The cliff towards adulthood." "It was an accumulation of everything he had to say." "The great subversive, anti-establishment book of all time." "Salinger met with an important editor," "Robert Giroux, at Harcourt, Brace." "Giroux wanted him to publish a collection of short stories." "He didn't hear anything from Salinger for quite a while." "One morning, Salinger walks in and said," ""You know, I don't think we should publish" ""that collection of short stories." ""What we need to do is publish my novel" ""about this kid who goes to New York" ""and has an interesting time."" "Eventually, Salinger did deliver" "'The Catcher in the Rye' in manuscript to Bob Giroux." "Giroux read the novel." "He loved it." "He was impressed by it." "And he said that he'd be proud to publish it." "But then Giroux showed it to his boss." "Eugene Reynal, who looked at the novel and said, "This guy's crazy." "We need to have this rewritten."" "Bob Giroux got Salinger into his office, spent a lot of time looking out of his window and down into Madison Avenue and then turned to Salinger and had said," ""But of course Holden Caulfield is crazy."" "And there was no response from Salinger." "But then, on closer inspection," "Giroux saw that Salinger was weeping." "He rose, went down into the ground floor of the office building and called his agent and said," ""Get me out of this publishing house!" ""They think my Holden Caulfield is crazy!"" "Holden was, in fact, Jerry Salinger." "So, to be told that he was crazy meant that he had to take offence." "Salinger came to William Maxwell at the 'New Yorker' magazine to read him the manuscript in its entirety." "Salinger hoped to have segments of the novel published in the 'New Yorker'." ""Dear Jerry, The vote here" ""went, sadly, against your novel." ""To us, the notion that in one family, the Caulfield family," ""there are four such extraordinary children" ""is not quite tenable." ""Another point - this story is too ingenious and ingrown." ""Prejudice here against what we call writer-consciousness."" "If he thought everything was phoney, he thought the 'New Yorker' was anything but phoney." "They had the greatest status." "If you're published there, you are a real literary person." "So when that was rejected, he wondered if he was a middle-brow writer." "Salinger began to lose hope." "How could you pass up on 'Catcher'?" "Pages of 'The Catcher in the Rye' stormed the beaches on D-day." "They witnessed the atrocities of the concentration camps." "There was no way that J.D. Salinger was going to rewrite 'The Catcher in the Rye'." "A short time after that, he placed the novel with Little, Brown, and I guess we might say the rest is publishing history." "The publication of 'Catcher in the Rye' in 1951 was something of a revolution." "He really wanted to be up there, beyond Hemingway." "A figure of such brilliance and wisdom that we can only think of people like Shakespeare and Beethoven, and that novel was so popular, it meant he was middle-brow." "Here he was thinking he's saying the most original things that nobody's ever thought of, and the entire world's like," ""Yes!" "That's exactly what we feel."" "How many people actually read 'The Catcher in the Rye' in this class?" "That's pretty amazing." "There's only one person, actually, who hasn't read it out of 18." "When you're a kid and you read 'Catcher in the Rye', you're just like, "Oh, my God, somebody gets it."" "You suddenly realise that you are part of a larger world and that that larger world is no longer reliable." "I remember that being the first book you take with you when you walked around." "Just wanted to have it with you." "I think we all thought, "Ooh, here's this cool guy." ""He's such a badass." "He's such a rebel." ""I wanna date him."" "I think 'Catcher in the Rye' is one of the funniest novels ever written." "I re-read it and I started highlighting lines that I thought were great, and almost the entire book was yellow." "It just crossed all the lines, on every level, between old and young, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, everywhere." "Millions and millions and millions of people." "'The Catcher in the Rye'." "The enormous impact of 'Catcher in the Rye' overnight transported him into a major writer and personality." "I don't think he was prepared for the instant celebrity of 'Catcher in the Rye' when it became a Book of the Month Club, and there was a fantastic, very soulful picture on the back of it." "And he asked that that picture be removed from the book." "It was unheard of that an author would not want his picture on the back of the book or on the back flap of the book and as big and beautiful as you could possibly get it." "♪ As I walk down the street... ♪" "I understand why anyone who was becoming famous would stop it." "You're born with the right of anonymity." "You're just anonymous." "You walk the streets, you do whatever, and you can actually have private thoughts while you're amongst other people." "People who never had that change in their life don't think about it." "They don't even question it." "It just is." "He wouldn't go on a book tour or sign books or go on television shows." "He didn't ever want to be interviewed." "He always, always, felt that what people should know about an author was nothing personal." "They should know the author through his work, and that's all that he was willing to give people - his work." "So I was rather surprised to go to a cocktail party, as we did in the time, someplace on the East Side, where... the prominent young publishers were there, some publicity people and some editors." "I remember Joe Fox of Random House was there." "He and his wife, Jill, who were the ones that said, "Salinger's here!"" "And this was terribly exciting." "And I thought, "Is it that guy over there?"" "And then they said, "He's coming to dinner."" "And I remember we went to this restaurant, they'd shoved tables together, and, sure enough, he was there." "And I remember that he sat down at the table." "We were all excited about being in his presence." "He was really there, the real Salinger, and presently he got up and muttered something to someone that he had to make a phone call." "Disappeared and never came back." "When there was this sudden onslaught, he suddenly realised," ""I don't really need this, and I don't want this."" "And I think that's the moment he just turned on his heels and disappeared into the mountains of New Hampshire." "When you read 'Catcher in the Rye', you just know some day, some way," "Salinger's gonna end up in a spot that he considers his seclusion." "In letters, he said to me that his friends thought that he was like Holden moving west to run a gas station and just bailing out of the world." "It didn't mean that he was a hermit, you know." "He just didn't want to be with writers, and he certainly didn't want to be the toast of New York." "He was protecting himself." "His motives were really very pure." "He wanted the peace and quiet to do his work." "And Cornish is where he found it." "I think the world was..." "The world!" "The buzz-status group." "...was waiting for a big novel." "And I'm not sure that's the way Salinger really ever wanted to write." "Everybody wanted him to write a sequel to 'Catcher'." "He was the guy that wrote 'The Catcher in the Rye', and he was the only one that really knew what that took, how much that cost him, personally, and its true value." "Never mind what the society thought or the literary world." "To him, it was finished, and he had to move on." "'Nine Stories' begins and ends with a sudden suicide following a conversation in which something couldn't get said." "They are characters who wanna get out of the world, and the stories end when they're given permission to leave." "It's amazing." "It's a strange effect." "One doesn't bring the degree of obsession that creates perfection unless there is just unappeasable hunger, unappeasable sadness and what I would call a wound." "You don't get that kind of perfection unless you're trying to heal something that's incredibly badly hurt." "In 1954, I was in college, and Jerry would take me for an evening in New York." "He would take me to the Palm Room or we'd go to the theatre, we'd go to the Blue Angel." "I remember once driving back on that east-side highway and seeing the George Washington Bridge and thinking how absolutely beautiful it was, insane how beautiful it was, and he laughed." "He said, "Jean, you've got to learn not to say the obvious."" "And I felt, "Well, you know, he's right."" "I was still young, but here was this fascinating man who seemed to like me." "But in all those letters, it says," ""My work has to come first."" "And he's sorry to be such an unromantic man and I'd have every right to tell him to go jump in the lake and go off with some less neurotic person." "But once in a while, he would come and fetch me and we'd drive up to Cornish." "We would take a walk in the afternoon and talk and then dinner." "And then we'd look at television by the fire " "Lawrence Welk or Liberace or something like that - and we'd dance." "I remember one night, I said, "Let's dance."" "It was fun." "We would look at the people on the television, dancing, and we just would waltz or..." "laughing all the time." "He seemed filled with joy to me a great deal of the time." "But there was never a inkling of anything physical between us." "Jerry Salinger remembered me always on that pier in Daytona Beach." "I am the one who changed it." "We were in the back seat of a taxi and I turned and kissed him." "Not soon after the taxi, we went to Montreal for the weekend." "We went up to our room and... we went to bed." "And I told him I was a virgin." "And he didn't like that." "He didn't want the responsibility of that, I guess." "He just didn't like it." "And then the next day, we were flying to Boston, with me on to New York and he on to West Lebanon, and somehow in the airplane, he was told that his plane was cancelled." "And I began laughing, because I was delighted that we could spend the afternoon together, particularly after what had just happened the night before." "And I saw this veil come down on his face." "Just like this." "This look of horror and hurt." "It was a terrible look." "It was a look that conveyed everything." "I think all of a sudden, he saw me in an entirely different light." "He hustled me right onto a plane." "I didn't have a plane till later in the day." "He went right to the desk, got the ticket changed, hustled me right on the plane." "I knew I had come between him and his work." "And it was over." "Wow." "How do you describe Claire Douglas?" "In many ways, Claire Douglas will be the widow Salinger." "You know, there were women after Claire, but she's... she's the wife." "Salinger attended a party one night where he met this captivating, attractive, personable young woman who was 19 years old." "And Salinger, who was 34, was instantly attracted to her." "She's just the kind of a lady you think with a long dress and a neat hairdo... and with a glass of wine in her hands talking with lots of New York people." "Yeah." "Her role... just didn't seem right." "Her childhood was not one that set her up with any kind of foundation." "She was sent off to convent boarding school at age five, in and out of eight different foster homes, off to another boarding school, and the summer between her junior and senior year, met my father." "Many critics contend that Claire was the inspiration for Franny." "And on February 17, 1955," "J.D. Salinger married Claire Douglas in Vermont." "Salinger gave a copy of the story to Claire as their wedding present." "'Franny' became a national cultural event." "It had this kind of cliffhanger ending where the main character, Franny, fainted." "And people were wondering what happened - was she intoxicated, pregnant or what?" "On December 10, 1955," "J.D. Salinger became a father." "His daughter, Margaret, was born." "The way he viewed Claire changed after that." "Before that, she had been the late-teen/early 20s woman that he was fascinated with." "Now she was a woman." "She was a mother." "And I think the birth of that child had a permanent effect on their relationship." "When I started taking care of his kids," "Claire was due to have Matthew." "And Jerry knew me." "Back in the early '50s, when I was in high school, there was a soda fountain right in town that most of us gathered." "And Jerry Salinger used to come right in and be part of that." "So I knew him from then." "He was just one of the guys." "So Jerry asked me to help Claire with Margaret." "We called her Peggy." "Jerry built a small building down over the hill from the house." "It was just a little square house." "And that's where he would go down, any time, day or night, go in and shut the door, and you wouldn't see him for a week or longer, 'cause he got into a writing mode" "and had to be left totally alone." "Claire was not allowed to bother him." "Nobody could enter the bunker." "It was the safe place and a sacred place for him." "Salinger installed cup hooks upon which he would place scenes he had written." "There were notes tacked up all over the walls." "It was the place in which Salinger became the characters." "It was the place that was his and his Glass family's." "No-one else's." "So in 1955, Salinger gave birth to two families - his own..." "and the Glass family." "McGOWAN:" "The Glass family were seven children, all geniuses, who each appeared on a show called 'It's a Wise Child', the sons and daughters of two vaudevillians." "Seymour, the oldest, was the greatest genius of them all, the most spiritual, the most artistic, and he commits suicide." "And that informs their entire lives from then on." "'Franny' was quickly followed by a wonderful long story called 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters' about characters of that same family." "The Glass family and Salinger's real family would actually compete with each other for his attention and his affection." "How weird is it when your father is gone but you can actually see where he is, but you can't go disturb him?" "What does that do to a child psychologically when that's your childhood, that's your youth?" "No-one said, "Don't talk about this." ""Don't think that."" "I mean, you don't have to to a kid." "Kids pick up what the elephants are in the room that the family's not talking about." "By the time Matthew was born, you'd think Claire was a single parent." "And I think that had to hurt Claire a lot." "I don't think she thought that was gonna be part of her life with Jerry." "And she was left to do all the things for the children and to make all the decisions for weeks... weeks at a time." "He put a cot in so that he literally never had to leave the bunker." "You think about it daily." "You have flashbacks." "There are times in which I can be sitting in the living room and... have artillery land in my yard or in my living room." "So you do get those kinds of flashbacks." "I've never told my wife that." "Sid Perelman, a humorist and writer for the 'New Yorker', did go up to see him in New Hampshire." "Sid said, "He's got this concrete bunker where he works," ""but he's got a great big statue of Buddha in the garden" ""and he's got a lot of Buddhist priests around him," ""and they do a lot of chanting."" "And Sid thought this was very strange." "Salinger's religion was the central concern in his writing." "His championing the ideas of Vedanta Hinduism in his Glass stories." "The so-called karma yoga concept that comes from the Bhagavad Gita, that you should do your work as perfectly as you possibly can, with no thought of rewards, and only that way can you be a really happy person." "When Salinger submitted the sequel to 'Franny' to the 'New Yorker', this novella called 'Zooey', in 1957, the fiction editors unanimously agreed to reject the story." "William Shawn intervened." "He was the editor-in-chief, and he decreed that the magazine would, in fact, publish 'Zooey'." "And since he was the one who championed it, he would edit it himself." "The 'New Yorker' was Mr Shawn." "There was no other 'New Yorker'." "He was it." "Salinger is the perfect author for him." "Shawn is the perfect editor for Salinger, because they're both strange, brilliant creatures." "William Shawn was a very shy and introverted person." "He was a man who was riddled with phobias." "Devoted to ideas." "He wouldn't sit in the front of a theatre because he was afraid of a fire." "Has had more books dedicated to him than anyone, probably, in the history of publishing." "He carried a hatchet around, reportedly, in his briefcase." "He was always afraid he'd be caught in an elevator and have to hack his way out." "His whole life was really wrapped up in the 'New Yorker' and his writers." "He wouldn't travel if he had to go through a tunnel." "Salinger truly was grateful to him for the work he'd done, and he felt that he had found a kind of soul mate in Shawn." "'Zooey' was so successful that after that, all his work was handled by William Shawn." "He didn't work with the other fiction editors in the 'New Yorker' anymore." "In the 1960s, 'The Catcher in the Rye' takes off, becoming a cultural phenomenon." "It literally is a rite of passage." "It suggested that you had lost your literary virginity in a way." "Everybody loved him - kids, adults." "He was an idol, a teen idol." "Salinger was the national story." "In 1961, the big media really pulled out the big guns." "'Time', 'Newsweek' and 'LIFE' sent out some of their best reporters." "Newspaper people came and did interviews." "They all started coming, and Jerry, he couldn't stop for a cup of coffee." "They wouldn't allow it." "'Time' magazine tracked down" "Salinger's sister Doris at her job at Bloomingdale's, and in no uncertain terms, she basically told them," ""I would never do anything my brother wouldn't approve of."" "There was so much attention, so much heat, so much light being focused on J.D. Salinger." "Billy Wilder wanted to make a movie of 'The Catcher in the Rye' so badly that he had his agents hound Salinger." "I remember the whole talk in New York at that time was that Elia Kazan was desperate to make a film of 'The Catcher in the Rye'." "Jerry Lewis, who was, like, a huge movie star, publicly declared that he was gonna make a film of 'Catcher in the Rye'." "And on a fairly regular basis, he would call J.D. Salinger, who would hang up on him." "Salinger showed up unexpectedly at Billy Wilder's agent's office in New York, and he starts screaming, "Tell Billy Wilder to leave me alone!" ""He's very, very insensitive!"" "Elia Kazan going on his search for 'Catcher in the Rye', knocking on the door and saying, "Mr Salinger, I'm Elia Kazan."" "And Salinger saying, "That's nice," and closing the door." "I hope it's true." "If they'd made a movie, Holden wouldn't like it." "Enough said." "'Franny and Zooey' instantly took off." "It was on the bestseller list in no time." "It remained on the bestseller list for weeks and weeks and weeks." "When J.D. Salinger appears on the cover of 'Time' magazine, it's not a photograph." "It's an imaginary portrait." "It conveys the sense that the author has enough integrity not to be part of the publicity machine." "I was assigned by 'LIFE' magazine to go up and get a picture of this man who was very reclusive and had refused to be photographed," "I guess, for many years." "The challenge was to be unobtrusive, to not be noticed and to take advantage of the terrain, hiding in the bushes, much in the way that one would if you were photographing wildlife." "You don't walk up there with six cameras hanging round your neck." "So I put my cameras in a shopping bag." "I would find my little hiding place in the bushes and stay there all day shivering." "Very cold and rainy." "I had a horrible cold, bordering on the flu." "The editor had said," ""If it's more than three days, forget about it."" "Then lo and behold, on the third day, he made an appearance, to walk his dog, very briefly." "He just emerged just for a few seconds, just enough time for me to get off a half-dozen frames." "In fact, I was afraid that I was close enough that he might be able to hear the clicking of the shutter." "I remember reading about him in 'LIFE' magazine." "I remember reading about this man who lived in this house who didn't want visitors, didn't want to discuss himself." "And I remember sort of being puzzled by that, because, again, you know, you're at that age where you're suddenly realising there are famous people and then there's the rest of us." "There are people who have extraordinary lives and then there's the rest of us." "And here was a man who had an opportunity to have what, at that young age, you thought was an extraordinary life, and he was saying, "I'd rather not." "Please go away."" "McGOWAN:" "When 'Franny and Zooey'," "'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, 'and Seymour, an Introduction' were published as books, the literary knives came out." "Joan Didion wrote that he had a fondness for giving instructions to people on how to live life." "John Updike wrote, "Salinger loved his characters" ""more than God loved them."" "Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy." "She wrote an essay in 'Harper's Magazine' called 'J.D. Salinger's Closed Circuit', saying the Glass family was an amoeba that kept splitting off, each one lovable and wise and simple, and they're all really one face," "and they reflect each other back and forth." "There's no-one else who enters this world of theirs." "She saw the entire work he had done as being narcissistic." "It is one person reflecting on his own image." "You can't get so engrossed in your own image without it being a dangerous thing." "The fiction went over the edge with 'Hapworth' in 1965." "It's long on tone and absolutely devoid of plot." "It was just the brilliant Seymour writing as a brilliant 7-year-old from camp, and it was just too much." "It was impossible to believe." "They were kind of saying," ""What happened with J.D. Salinger?" ""I think he's kind of done." "He's kind of a crackpot."" "That was just a little bit too much theology for most people." "In the very last piece of published writing," "Seymour is telling us that Buddy is gonna have the perfect room to write in." "But we also notice that it's sort of like a solitary confinement." "That's what it takes to focus that much - that's what he needs." "Ultimately, Claire couldn't stand it anymore." "The isolation, the emotional distress that she felt because her husband was obsessively writing in the bunker." "And Claire filed for divorce." "Claire was a lady, and she deserved to be treated like one." "But Jerry didn't treat her like one." "So I was glad to hear that she was free." "When I was 18," "I wrote a magazine article that changed my life." "It was published in the 'New York Times Magazine' with a photograph of me on the cover." "Within three days of the publication of that article, there were three enormous sacks of mail in front of my dormitory room." "And in among them was this one letter that... eclipsed all the rest." "It began, "Dear Miss Maynard," ""I bet you're sitting in your college dormitory room" ""surrounded by letters from magazine editors" ""and book editors and TV people and radio people."" "All of which was true." "And then he went on to say that he knew a thing or two himself about the dangers, the perils, of early success." "He said, "People will try to exploit you," ""and I urge you to be cautious."" "And it was only when I got to the bottom of the letter - and by that time, you know," "I was already completely connected to this person - that I saw the signature 'J.D. Salinger'." "He knows exactly what he's doing." "He knows exactly how powerful the name J.D. Salinger is." "It's a name that with the right girl creates a spell that they fall under." "Getting a letter from J.D. Salinger was like getting a letter from Holden Caulfield but written just to me." "Within three days, there was a second letter and then a third and a fourth." "There was never any question that we would meet." "And for my mother, it was as if J.D. Salinger had recognised her, because I was her product." "It was as if she had gotten a letter from J.D. Salinger." "Both of my parents were brilliant, gifted artists, both of them sidelined in this small New Hampshire town with no acknowledgement of their work." "I had been raised to believe that I was going to do big, important things and that... this was a sign that I was going to " "I was going to spend time with this wonderful man." "My mother was a little unclear of the boundaries." "She sewed me a dress for our meeting." "It was an A-line dress with very bright primary colours." "Very short dress." "My English teacher from high school drove me to the Hanover Inn where we met." "Jerry was standing out on the porch." "This tall, lanky person, and he raised his hand, and he was waving as if he was somebody coming in off a boat." "He actually jumped over the banister." "There was something very boyish about him." "I threw my arms around him." "I hugged him." "He hugged me back." "And the very first thing he said when he saw me was," ""You're wearing the watch."" "Clearly, he'd really studied my photograph." "In the story 'For Esmé - with Love and Squalor', the character of Esmé is wearing a very large man's watch." "I jumped in the front seat of his little BMW." "He liked to drive fast along these New Hampshire/Vermont roads." "Covered bridge winding, winding, winding up the hill." "His house." "It was just this very quiet, simple place." "There were no personal items - photographs, letters." "The living room had piles and piles of 'New Yorker' magazines." "Books stacked everywhere." "Movies stacked everywhere." "Peggy's room - there were stacks and stacks of movie reels." "'Maltese Falcon', 'Casablanca', 'The 39 Steps'," "'The Lady Vanishes' - all these old movies." "He'd make a bowl of popcorn, which he'd sprinkle with brewer's yeast, as I recall, and we snuggled up on this really comfy couch and he threaded the films through the projector and turned out the lights and it was movie time." "He loved 'Lost Horizon'." "It's a movie about this place where you never grow old." "And he said that the only person who ever could have played Holden Caulfield was himself." "The women in his lives are really projections of his own wishes or characters he creates." "It's a series of very young women, because when you're young, and particularly if you're a rather lost and insecure and ungrounded young person, it's much easier to become who somebody wishes you to be." "I was looking for a sage." "I was looking for some sense of meaning to life." "And I found it with Salinger." "But from the moment I moved in," "I could do very little right." "We had a very set routine." "The first thing we did was have a bowl of Birds Eye frozen tender tiny peas, not cooked, but with warm water poured over them." "So they defrost a little bit." "So they were just cool." "Then we'd meditate." "Or at least, he would meditate and I would try to meditate." "But my mind kept on wandering to things of the world, which was a big problem." "And then we would get to work writing." "He would put on a canvas jumpsuit to write." "And he would put it on like a uniform." "It was kind of like he was, you know, a soldier, only he was going off to wage his war at the typewriter." "He sat on a high chair at his high desk in his writing room and worked on his typewriter." "A very old typewriter that clicked." "He cut himself off from a great deal of the world but maintained a huge interest in observing it." "I drew Jerry a lot back when I lived with him." "This is a picture of me sitting on Jerry's lap, listening to very old recordings of the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller and an obscure German singer whose name I don't remember who was a singer from World War II." "This is a picture of Jerry and me dancing, television set on." "Lawrence Welk, no doubt." "The bubbles would come up and we'd watch the show and we would dance." "While all of my contemporaries were off, you know, in New Haven doing drugs and listening to Led Zeppelin." "Every day, I heard typing." "A lot of typing." "And there was one space that was off the bedroom that was a safe." "I saw two thick manuscripts." "I've written nine books now." "I know what the size of a book manuscript looks like." "And this... these were thick." "I never read them, was never shown them and knew better than to ask." "He did show me one thing, although it wasn't like I got to sit down and read it, and that was a kind of an archive of the Glass family, who were, in his world," "as real as any relatives." "He was protective of those characters as if they were his children." "Only one time did I meet friends of his, and that was this memorable and, I guess, disastrous lunch." "We drove into New York, and we went to the Algonquin." "And there was this man, William Shawn." "I think Jerry Salinger really loved William Shawn." "And a writer whose work I did know, because I had read it and studied it and admired it - Lillian Ross." "But I knew from Jerry that Lillian Ross and William Shawn had been lovers for years, although William Shawn was married to somebody else." "They were known as Ross and Shawn to Jerry." "So she asked me what sorts of things I wrote, and I prattled on about my little career writing for 'Seventeen' magazine and judging the Miss Teenage America Pageant, and Ross shoots William Shawn a look." "And I could well imagine the 'Talk of the Town' piece that Lillian Ross would have written about that lunch." "This lunch must have deeply embarrassed Jerry, because we left the restaurant, rather hastily, and we went directly to Bonwit Teller, and he bought me a very expensive black cashmere coat of the sort that Lillian Ross might have worn." "I think he was indulging in a fantasy of innocence that... that that neither one of us could hold onto very long." "One day, I heard the telephone ring and I heard him speaking very briefly and then a click." "And then he emerged from his office with a look on his face I had never seen." "And he said," ""'Time' magazine" ""has got my number." ""You have ruined my life."" "For years, I avoided any information about J.D. Salinger." "Ask me about him, I said nothing and I wrote nothing about him." "And I was at a party in New York City, pregnant with my third child, and there was a woman who came over to me." "And she said, "So..." ""You're the one that lived with J.D. Salinger." ""He wrote you letters, didn't he?"" "And then she said, "I had an au pair girl" ""who got lots of letters from him too."" "And I remember feeling my stomach drop." "And that was the first of what ultimately were a surprising number of stories about girls, always girls, getting letters from Salinger." "J.D. Salinger's love letters come back and kick him in the ass." "14 highly personal letters by reclusive author J.D. Salinger to then 18-year-old writer Joyce Maynard in the early '70s are to be auctioned at Sotheby's." "Joyce Maynard wrote a sort of kiss-and-tell memoir, but when she put up at auction the letters that Salinger had written her," "Peter Norton, the software developer, thought it was such a terrible act of disloyalty that he bought the letters and returned them to Salinger." "When I made the decision to write that book," "I needed to go see Jerry Salinger." "And I didn't do what the worshippers did, which was to stand at the end of the driveway." "A woman called out to me, "What do you want?"" ""I've come to see Jerry." ""Would you tell him Joyce Maynard's here?"" "And then she sort of turned to me and looked at me through the window and smiled, actually, and I realised that that was the au pair girl, Colleen." "And then the door opened, and there he stood." "And he was shaking his hand at me, and he said, "What are you doing here?" "!"" "I said, "I've come to ask you a question, Jerry." ""What... what was my purpose in your life?"" ""That question, that question..." ""You don't deserve an answer to that question."" "And then he let loose this torrent." ""I hear you're writing something," ""some kind of reminiscence."" "And he said it as if that was an obscene act." "He watches very much what's going on in the world." "He said, "I always knew this is what you'd amount to - nothing." ""You have spent your life writing meaningless garbage." ""And now you mean to exploit me."" "And he said, "The problem with you, Joyce, is..." ""..you..." "".." "love..."" ""..the world."" "Margaret Salinger is back with us this morning to talk some more about her controversial memoir, 'Dream Catcher'." "The book is an intensely private look at her famous, yet very reclusive, father, J.D. Salinger." "Do you think, Peggy, he ultimately went into writing so he could create characters or create his own universe where people met his expectations?" "I personally think that that is certainly, um, what's going on." "I sat and cried reading that book." "And I don't know how much of her book is really true and how much isn't." "But I think it's the saddest thing I ever read." "Guess we shouldn't have got on that." "Sorry." "Matthew Salinger told me that the picture that his sister painted of growing up in the Salinger household was nothing like his memories of childhood." "And he was quite adamant about that." "How would you characterise the relationship you have with your father today?" " Oh, that's easy." "None." " None?" "No!" "As a police officer in the 20th Precinct, we got a report of shots fired at 1 West 72nd Street - that's the Dakota." "I just couldn't wait till those police got there." "I didn't know what to do." "I took 'The Catcher in the Rye' out of my pocket." "There was a man standing in the street saying," ""That's the man doing the shooting."" "So I drew my gun, grabbed Chapman, and I put him up against the wall." "And here is John Lennon being carried out by two police officers from my precinct." "And at eye-level, I see John Lennon's face with his eyes closed and blood coming out of his mouth." "They decided to put him in the radio car and take him to the hospital immediately, try to save his life." "So I handcuffed Chapman." "I look down on the ground, I said, "Are these your clothes?"" "He says, "Yes, and the book too."" "I look at the book." "You know, it's 'Catcher in the Rye'." "I was literally living inside of a paperback novel," "J.D. Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye'." "We have to remember, the things we produce, symbolically and in language, we have no control over what happens to them once we let them go." "Salinger put his depression into Holden." "It's almost like black magic." "Some of his depression may go away, but the character lives, and there are some readers who will take the depression out of the character into themselves." "The conversation Salinger creates between himself and the reader is so close that if you misread it, you read Holden's antipathy to the culture as license to kill." "To have the book with him, he was right there with J.D. Salinger, right there with Holden." "Holden wasn't violent, but he had a violent thought of shooting someone." "The word 'kill' is used a lot in the book." ""This is my people-shooting hat." "I kill people in this hat."" "The word 'phoney' is used over 30 times in the book." "Chapman read an article in 'Esquire' magazine." "The theme of the article was" "John Lennon was a sell-out," "John Lennon was a phoney." "I say to myself, "That phoney." "That bastard."" "If you are reading the book through a distorted lens, you feel so acutely Holden's powerlessness, and you say, "Yeah." "I feel powerless too."" "John Lennon was talking to a nobody to sign an album for a nobody." ""Look at this guy." "He's a big rock star." ""He comes in a limousine." Look, he's a phoney." ""You want me to teach you what reality is?" Bang!" "Mark David Chapman wrote me a letter that I should read" "'Catcher in the Rye' to understand why he committed this murder." "He reads that novel in open court when he is sentenced." "This is my statement, underlining the word 'this'." "If one... person used something I had written as their justification for killing somebody," "I'd say, "God, people are crazy."" "It didn't end with the death of John Lennon." "You keep paying for this over and over when you hear of a death of a celebrity, and maybe they've got 'The Catcher in the Rye', as John Hinckley did." "Young Hinckley, the whiz-kid who shot Reagan, and his press secretary said, "If you want my defence," ""all you have to do is read 'Catcher in the Rye'."" "Rebecca Schaeffer was expecting a script to be delivered to her for 'Godfather III'." "Rebecca Schaeffer came to the door." "Like this." "Among the pieces of evidence was a copy of 'Catcher in the Rye'." "But if three people use something I had written as justification," "I would really be very, very troubled by it." "It's not the one." "It's the series of three." "I would see him downtown and I'd say hi and he'd walk right by and not even say hi." "And I knew him well." "I was talking to a friend who owned a bookstore, and I told him, I said, "I'm really thinking I'll just go" ""up to New Hampshire and find J.D. Salinger."" "And he says, "Yeah, well, I think you oughta call up NASA" ""and, you know, bum a ride on the next space shuttle too."" "Well, the minute you go into town and you say "J.D. Salinger", everybody becomes your enemy." "This one lady in the shop would not sell me an ice-cream cone." "So I thought, "Ooh!" "Not my friendliest place."" "The owner of the market suggested that I write a note, that I didn't need a mailing address, just leave it at the post office." "I bought a notebook, went outside, sat on the kerb, wrote a note" " I was determined not to go to his property." "I wasn't gonna cross that river." "I thought if he came in voluntarily to where I was that no-one could ever say with any truth that I had sabotaged the man, that I had waylaid him or any of those things." "So I was ready." "Sat down where I said I would be and waited." "He doesn't have to go down and meet her in her Pinto." "If he really wants to protect his seclusion that much, he doesn't go." "And so here he came." "He walked across the bridge." "I didn't know what to expect." "We've all seen that photograph on the back of the book." "You expect people to age, but somehow, it's not the same as seeing it." "There he was, and I was shocked." "He was as tall as I thought he would be, but he had snow-white hair, and I was not prepared for that." "We shook hands, and he said," ""If you're a writer, you need to quit that newspaper." ""Newspapers serve no purpose."" "And he said publishing was the worst thing a person could do." "He insisted that he was working, working for himself, and that's what writing should be - that every writer should write for their own reasons, but it should be for themselves alone." "The only important thing was the writing." "According to J.D. Salinger." "What is he writing about?" "He said, "I will say this." ""It is of far more significance" ""than anything I ever wrote about Holden."" "He said, "I have really serious issues" ""that I'm trying to tackle with these new writing projects."" "And he always said 'writing'." "I persisted" " I wanted to know if he was writing a sequel to 'The Catcher in the Rye'." "And he became rather annoyed, agitated." "And so I finally just put the notebook down, put my pen down and looked up at him and said, "Why did you come here?"" "He lost some of his intensity, uncrossed his arms and he said that he thought writing Holden was a mistake." "It meant he couldn't live a normal life." "His children suffered." "Why couldn't his life be his own?" "Then he turned around and stalked off." "And so I watched him walk away and I took the photo of him walking back toward the bridge." "It was just the personification of his attitude." ""Just leave me alone."" "J.D. Salinger is very much a Howard Hughes." "He is still a man in control of his domain there." "And it remains to be seen what, actually, he is sitting upon." "I think the guy's earned the right to do it his way, and you know what, whether he's earned it or not, he's doing it his way anyway." "I guess what I'd like to ask him is what he's written for the last 40 years - isn't that what everybody wants to know?" "It's the great literary mystery." "I want to believe." "I want to see more of the work." "He promised in the back flaps of 'Franny and Zooey' and 'Seymour, an Introduction' that he's writing other stories." "I just wanna see that stuff." "If he published a book tomorrow, it would be a number one bestseller the next day." "He very proudly showed me a set of files where a red dot meant "This is ready to go upon my death,"" "a green dot meant "This needs editing."" "Someone cracks that code, man, it's gonna be the story of the century." "If he does publish and the writing is actually good, it will be a second act unlike almost any American writer has had." "I wanted you to ask me if I ever met J.D. Salinger." "Mr Berg, have you ever met J.D. Salinger?" "I've never met J.D. Salinger." "But I came close." "When I was researching my book on Max Perkins," "I went up to visit Max Perkins's sister, and as we're sitting there at dinner, I said," ""Gosh," you know, "as I was driving up to see you," ""it occurred to me that across the covered bridge" ""is Cornish, New Hampshire, and J.D. Salinger lives over there." ""Have you ever seen J.D. Salinger?"" "And she said, "Well, why do you want to know?"" "I said, "Well, I was just curious."" "And she said, "Well, as a matter of fact," ""he sat in that chair you're sitting in just last night" ""when I served him dinner."" "I said, "You're kidding."" "She said, "No, no, he comes over here regularly," ""'cause he comes over to pick up his mail." ""He'll stop in." "Sometimes I'll ask him to stay to dinner."" "I said, "Really?" "J.D. Salinger?"" "She said, "Well, do you have anything to say to him?"" ""I mean, if I had J.D. Salinger and you to dinner," ""what would you want to know?"" "I said, "Well, I think I'd want to know if he's still writing."" "She said, "Well, yes, he's still writing."" "I said, "OK." And..." "She said, "Anything else you'd want to know?"" "I said, "No, just that he's OK, I guess."" "She said, "He's fine."" "♪ Every moment was so precious... ♪" ""So there's no reason for you to ever see him, is there?"" "Dinner was over." "That was as close as I got to J.D. Salinger." "♪ It's such a perfect day" "♪ I remember we were walking" "♪ Up to strawberry swing" "♪ I can't wait till the morning" "♪ Wouldn't wanna change a thing" "♪ People moving all the time" "♪ Inside a perfectly straight line" "♪ Don't you wanna curve away?" "♪ And it's such" "♪ It's such a perfect day" "♪ It's such a perfect day" "♪ Ah-ah... ♪ Ah-ah" "♪ Now the sky could be blue" "♪ I don't mind" "♪ Without you, it's a waste of time" "♪ Could be blue" "♪ I don't mind" "♪ Without you, it's a waste of sky... ♪" "It's called 'Catcher in the Rye', and it has some very risqué parts." " All right!" " Strong, vulgar language." "And, in fact many schools across the country still ban this book because it's thought to be so inappropriate." "Oh, man, I can't wait!" "Tonight, more coverage of Washington's Foley Follies, a tribute to one of America's most underrated presidents, and I sit down with author J.D. Salinger." "Jon?" "J.D. Salinger is on your show tonight?" "Yeah, got a new book out." "He's doing a junket." "Me, 'Hannity  Colmes' and 'The View'." "Stephen, you're... you're you're lying, right?" "Well, I did invite Salinger to come on." "Can we please read this right now?" "!"