The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived Read online

  ALSO BY TOM SHRODER

  Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives

  Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal

  Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster (with John Konrad)

  Seeing the Light: Wilderness and Salvation—A Photographer’s Tale (with John Barry)

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Tom Shroder

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  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from the letter of Ernest Hemingway to MacKinlay Kantor dated May 16, 1952. Copyright © Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Frontispiece photograph by Tim Kantor. Photograph of John M. Kantor (here) courtesy Baltimore Sun. All other photographs are from the author’s personal collection.

  eBook ISBN: 9780698194267

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shroder, Tom, author.

  Title: The most famous writer who ever lived : a true story of my family / Tom Shroder.

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016016448 | ISBN 9780399174599 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kantor, MacKinlay, 1904–1977. | Kantor, MacKinlay, 1904–1977—Family. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Authors, American—20th century—Family relationships. | Shroder, Tom—Family. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Editors, Journalists, Publishers. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3521.A47 Z84 2016 | DDC 813/.52 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016448

  p. cm.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY TOM SHRODER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  FAMILY TREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  POSTSCRIPT

  PHOTOS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This book is dedicated to my mother, who never let me forget. I wish she could have lived long enough to read this.

  ONE

  My mother once told me that when she and her brother, my uncle Tim, were growing up, their father led them to believe he was the most famous writer who ever lived.

  This was an absurdity, of course, but not to the degree it may at first seem. My grandfather MacKinlay Kantor wrote innumerable works of fiction, including thirty-one novels, one of which, Andersonville, won the Pulitzer Prize. Another novel, Glory for Me, was the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which took seven Oscars, became the highest-grossing film since Gone with the Wind, and is often ranked among the greatest American movies of all time. These successes played out over more than three decades, during which Mack, as everyone called him, rose from near-starvation poverty to considerable wealth, performed on popular television shows, and made cameo appearances in movies. He “discovered” Oscar-winning actor and folksinger Burl Ives, mentored the crime novelist John D. MacDonald, and hung out with the likes of Grant Wood, Gregory Peck, Stephen Vincent Benét, Carl Sandburg, James Cagney, and Ernest Hemingway.

  My first clear memories of my grandfather are from the late 1950s, when he was still at the height of his fame. He was fifty years old in 1954, the year I was born, already acclaimed on the front of The New York Times Book Review for having reinvented the historical novel and two years away from his Pulitzer. When he came to visit us in our suburban New York home, often between long sojourns in Europe, he arrived in a limo. Maître d’s in swank New York restaurants fussed over him and gave him primo tables. I was mightily impressed, both with the chauffeur-driven limos and the kowtowing factotums, but also painfully uncomfortable when, after the third or fourth cocktail, he would grow loud and demanding, and could be counted on to make a profanity-laced scene if some product, service, or individual fell short of his expectations.

  We all knew that he had overcome a difficult childhood. We’d been told the story in bits and pieces, which I’d always suspected were a little too lurid to be entirely true. They added up to this: His father, my great-grandfather John Kantor, was a con artist who had abandoned his family (Mack, his sister, and their mother) before Mack was born, barely staying ahead of the sheriff, rose to wealth and power in corrupt political machines in Chicago and Montreal, hobnobbing with characters out of a gangster film, and ultimately did time in Sing Sing prison for one or more of a series of scams. My grandfather talked often of his bitter hatred for the man, who continued to hold out the possibility of love and support throughout Mack’s youth, only to betray his hope over and over. But to us great-grandkids, John Kantor was merely a splash of spice on the family tree, an object of curiosity and irony, an off-color genealogical punch line. We didn’t take him seriously, just as, in the years to come, we wouldn’t take Mack—his bluster, his fame, or his literary accomplishments—entirely seriously.

  When we were young, he was simply Grandpa. Once each winter, my parents; my brother, Michael; my sister, Susan; and I would board a train at Pennsylvania Station in New York City and make the overnight trip down the East Coast and through the swampy wilds of Central Florida to Sarasota on the state’s southwest Gulf Coast, where we would be met by Mack and my grandmother Irene Layne, a petite woman with dyed-blond hair who was a fairly accomplished amateur painter and still daintily pretty well into her fifties. They would pull into the gritty small-town train station in a late-model canary-yellow Lincoln Continental. Grandma, dressed in pastels, would enfold me in a hug smelling of gardenias, oil paints, and the little cigarillos she smoked and kiss the top of my head while Mack stood back, puffing on his pipe. When the cuddling was out of the way, he’d stick out his chest and offer a firm handshake, man to man.

  We’d load the luggage into the trunk and Mack would whisk us off to Siesta Key and the rambling beach house he’d built in 1936 with the proceeds from his first big literary success. As he drove, he took long sips from the cocktail glass parked in the custom-made cup holder he’d had installed on the dashboard—this was long before the days when such things came stan
dard. The house, built with termite-proof pecky cypress lumber and a pair of coquina rock fireplaces, was hidden down a long shell driveway on three acres of beachfront jungle. We’d park in the carport and my sister, brother, and I would burst from the backseat and race through the open, airy house, out the sliding glass doors, through the screened patio, across the palm-studded lawn of prickly Bermuda grass, and straight down to the beach. We’d toss off our city shoes and splash into the gentle swells rolling from the Gulf of Mexico into Big Pass as Mack mixed drinks for the adults.

  Most days after that he spent in his study with the door closed, and woe be to any child or canine (of which there were always one or two) whose boisterous vocalizations disturbed him. But when the study door, just off the living room, opened at precisely five p.m.—cocktail hour—we were free to explore the big room with its book-lined walls and eclectic museum of mementos. The very atmosphere altered when we entered. The air seemed stiller, somehow, infused with an intoxicating bouquet of pipe tobacco, sea salt, seasoned wood, and the musty aroma given off by hundreds of bookbindings slowly decaying in the unconditioned Florida humidity. Hanging above the volume-crammed shelves and on every bare wall was a Boys’ Life fantasy of artifacts: black-and-white photos of bombing runs taken from the bombsight of a B-17, the impact of the bombs evident in a trail of tiny black mushrooms erupting from the distant surface; rough-and-tumble group shots of louche pilots lounging before sheet-metal hangars—the men of the bomber groups he flew with in World War II and Korea; framed Saturday Evening Post covers featuring his short stories; a photo of the bronze plaque containing a poem he’d written embedded in a wall on the eighty-sixth-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building; Nazi spoils of war, including German helmets, a dummy potato masher, uniform insignia, and, most intriguing, a bullwhip; original prints of Civil War battle scenes; a red, white, and blue sign that said FUCK COMMUNISM; and a scale model of a B-52 jet bomber perched atop a metal stand, which I coveted most of all.

  His mahogany desk backed up to a picture window overlooking the deep green lawn, which was studded with palms draped in long links of sausage-like cacti that made excellent targets for the archery sets Mack bought for us, much to my mother’s horror. The cacti’s juice-filled segments clung to the spiky palm trunks and threw out fragrant white blossoms. You could smell them through the open windows to either side, and hear the surf sliding along the beach beyond.

  Sometimes after dinner we’d all be summoned to the living room to find Mack enthroned in the middle of an aqua-blue sofa, a stack of onionskin typing paper beside him—the product of his day’s work. He’d read aloud, and we understood that even shuffling our feet loudly would bring down God’s own wrath on our heads. I don’t remember actually listening, just pretending to listen.

  Though he could be gruff with us—he once provoked a huge fight, prompting my parents to drag us off in a huff to a hotel, when he declared that we kids would have to vacate the premises entirely to eliminate any possibility that we would interrupt an adults-only party—he could also be kind and entertaining.

  Once, he showed us how they made floating lanterns when he was a kid in Iowa: He folded a newspaper into a box shape, turned it on one pointy end, and lit the bottom with a match. As it burned, the hot air filled the unlit end and made it rise like a balloon, the thin paper lit briefly with a flickering golden light before being entirely consumed. I always wondered how many forests had burned because of that little trick, but the lanterns’ beauty, lifting into the dusk against the dark silhouettes of palm fronds, was moving. He wrote us long letters including stamps from the many exotic places he visited, and brought home spectacular gifts—like the miniature replica of a Scottish castle with a working drawbridge and metal soldiers wearing tartan kilts that I have preserved for half a century.

  The year I turned fourteen, my parents moved us from the New York suburbs to a house on Siesta Key, less than a mile from my grandfather. He became a fixture in my most formative years. We’d have inevitably comical weekend dinners in which Mack, Irene, my mother, and Tim would argue with increasing passion and volume over the exact words of an alternate verse of some nineteenth-century ballad or whether they had spent the summer of ’47 in upstate New York or Southern California. (My grandmother, absent the loud gene herself, always threatened to write an autobiography titled I Learned to Shout.) When I was in high school, Mack would let me pitch a tent on his beach, where I camped out with friends. He’d often show up as night fell, puffing on his pipe in the firelight, telling us this or that anecdote about his war experiences or his childhood adventures in the Midwest outback as we listened politely. He even pulled strings to get me a job as a copyboy with the Sarasota newspaper. When I turned it down because the job would have required working Saturday nights—date night—his disgust, so justified, was shockingly brief.

  —

  Preoccupied with my own adolescence—the football team, the girls, the parties, the endless sun-saturated days on the beach—I barely noticed his slow decline. But I did increasingly notice his reactionary politics. He was a great friend, admirer, and ghostwriter of the “autobiography” of Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who had urged John F. Kennedy to bomb the Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba—which likely would have triggered World War III. He famously threatened to bomb North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age” and ran for vice president on a third-party ticket headed by segregationist George Wallace. We even once picnicked with LeMay and his family at a ranch east of town, which was the first and only time I shot a living thing with a rifle. As Mack and the general watched approvingly, I put the .22-caliber barrel to the head of a toothy garfish struggling at the end of a hook and blew it back to the Stone Age, from whence, no doubt, it had come.

  My own political awakening was proceeding in the opposite direction, which reinforced my sense of my grandfather as a discordant relic from a bygone era. My brother and I had always viewed him with the arrogant skepticism typical of youth—especially the youth of our particular generation. We cringed at what seemed to us to be his egotism and his need to be the center of attention. At one large gathering of family and friends, he interrupted the lively party chatter in his impossible-to-ignore voice to tell a long story, glaring at anyone who didn’t appear rapt. The tale went on and on. And on. Finally it reached a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion, and in the embarrassed silence, our smart-ass friend said: “Great story!” Then he pointed at me. “You remember the first half and I’ll remember the second half.”

  That brought down the house, and Mack stormed out. I laughed with everyone else, but felt sick inside.

  It wasn’t just his conversational style I considered old-fashioned. I was quick to judge his writing—though I’d read little of it—as overly mannered, alternately tediously detailed and overwritten, and sometimes downright hokey. I simply didn’t have the patience or the interest to give it much of a chance. Unfortunately, I represented the times well.

  Mack saw this creeping disdain of a new era and raised it. He went all in, railing against modernity with a bitter intensity. My father liked to say that Mack was born in the wrong century, and Mack took that as a badge of honor. But he somehow failed to understand that the flooding cultural tide would sweep him out to sea.

  Being a teenager, I never discussed this with him, of course, but through my mother and Tim, who both grew increasingly worried about their parents as the 1970s progressed, I understood that he had thought his royalties would keep rolling in forever, and that he could always get a big book advance or a movie deal. But his florid writing style and obsession with earlier centuries had gone out of fashion, and people stopped buying most of his books—followed by the publishers who’d been stung by disappointing sales on the heels of big advances.

  I discovered only recently some criticism from that period that pretty much summed up what was happening. One reviewer wrote of Mack, “Your grandfather and grandmother would take him to their
respective bosoms. Your present-day college son and daughter would find him strictly from ‘Squaresville.’” Another called one of his novels “embarrassingly jingoistic.”

  At the time, I merely had a vague sense that he wasn’t as famous as he seemed to think he was, and that there was tension around money. As the big paydays dried up, he kept living high. He couldn’t conceive of himself as anything other than the famous author of the past. He insisted on going on a monthlong luxury cruise because he said he couldn’t write at home. He picked up every check. He ran through his money and mortgaged his property. He had to rely on friends to keep from default. We eventually learned that John D. MacDonald, the perennially best-selling detective novelist who was a Siesta Key neighbor and longtime drinking buddy, had come to the rescue with an infusion of cash.

  By mid-decade, Mack’s life of hard drinking and his ever-darkening prospects had predictable effect and his health began to fail. In the late summer of 1977, he landed in a stark hospital room, dying of congestive heart failure and other complications of long-term alcoholism.

  I was twenty-three, just embarking on a writing career of my own at my first newspaper job in Fort Myers, another beach town, to the south. I was about to become a father—my daughter was due any moment—when my mother called to say that Mack wouldn’t last much longer. I begged off work and jumped in my car to drive the two hours north to Sarasota Memorial Hospital. My mother had warned me not to expect any kind of recognition: He’d descended into a near coma and hadn’t spoken a word for days. As my car rolled nearer, the familiar landmarks accumulating, an urge grew inside me to turn around. What was the point, I asked myself, if he was simply lying insensate, this man who had always been so full of words now completely devoid of them? But I forced my foot down on the gas pedal as if I were holding my hand over a candle flame, ashamed of the cowardly impulse to turn away from what mortality was doing to this man whom I had always loved, if not fully appreciated.