They still can’t forgive her. Fifty years it’s been — half a century, for crying out loud — and still, when some people here talk about her, there’s a faint but perceptible lift of the upper lip. They have a way of saying her name that tells you all you need to know. It’s “Grace” this and “Grace” that, with a hint of distaste. Not even her full name; not “Grace Metalious.” Just “Grace.” With the little lip curl.
They haven’t moved on. They haven’t gotten past it.
Well, would you? If it were your friends and neighbors, if it were your family’s dirty laundry that somebody hung out on the world’s longest, gaudiest clothesline — a naughty best-selling novel and then a hit movie and then a popular TV series — would you let bygones be bygones?
Fifty years.
Or was it just yesterday?
‘You sell millions of books and they still call you a slut.”
Jeanne Gallant shakes her head, narrows her eyes, shrugs a sun-freckled shoulder. She’s 65, she has seen a lot of crazy things in this world, but never, she says, has she seen the likes of the folks in Gilmanton.
“This town cut out her heart,” declares Gallant, whose horse farm is nestled right next to the house in which Metalious lived, and who befriended Metalious in the late 1950s, just as the author began her fatal downward spiral.
“They all thought the book was about them,” Gallant says with a sniff of disdain. “Well, as Grace said, their lives were worse than anything she put in the book.”
The book. It all comes back to the book: “Peyton Place.” Published 50 years ago this fall, the novel made an entire nation blush — and buy, buy, buy. We’re talking “Da Vinci Code” territory here. The book sold upward of 100,000 copies in its first month of release, according to “Inside Peyton Place” (Doubleday, 1981) by Emily Toth, a biography of Metalious. The novel then settled its firm little fanny onto the best-seller lists for a four-month spell.
But over the years, “Peyton Place” has become oh-so-much more than a book; more, even, than the 1957 film and TV show (1964-69) and numerous TV movies based on the concept. That two-word title is now a catchphrase, a cultural touchstone, a verbal hieroglyph instantly signifying gossip and hypocrisy.
Even people who don’t know that the phrase “Peyton Place” came from a novel in the first place generally know what reference to a “Peyton Place” means: a wickedly wanton corner that seethes with spicy misbehavior.
Earlier this year, during the trial of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, Assistant U.S. Atty. Laurie Barsella grew irked at the jury and snapped, “They need to be reminded this is not just a little Peyton Place for them to have little squabbles.” And in 1998, as salacious details emerged during hearings on President Clinton’s impeachment, then-U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham asked his colleagues, “Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?”
Yet reading the novel that started it all, five decades removed from the frenzy of scandal that marked its debut during the cautious and uptight 1950s, you may wonder what all the fuss was about. In 2006, “Peyton Place” seems as mild and polite as a cookie break at Grandma’s. These days, there are TV ads for Viagra more explicit than the book.
In 1956, though, “Peyton Place” was a sensation, and it was also more than the humble, hardworking folks of Gilmanton could stomach. The world had quickly assumed that the author’s model for her fictional setting was right here, in the quiet little burg of about 3,000 people in the state’s lake district, about 30 miles north of Manchester. Metalious allegedly spiked “Peyton Place” with the real town’s dirty little secrets: incest, racism, alcoholism.
She also put in something a bit less racy: an autumnal sense of melancholy, of the inchoate longing that often besets creative people trapped in places where they feel misunderstood. Allison McKenzie, the novel’s teenage heroine, dreams of becoming a famous writer. Her dreams also were Metalious’ dreams — and for Metalious, they came true.
And then they destroyed her.
But dreams weren’t the only things that did her in, Gallant says. “The townspeople just screamed and hollered” about a novel they found shocking and intrusive, Gallant remembers. “She was so heartbroken. All she wanted was to be accepted.”
But surely the town has gotten over it by now, yes?
Surely, 50 years after the fact, Gilmanton can’t keep brooding about “Peyton Place.” After all, Metalious died in 1964 at 39, her liver in full surrender mode after years of out-of-control drinking, her short life transformed into an instant cautionary tale for the perils of sudden literary success.
Surely Gilmanton has forgotten all about the bad feelings, the bitter resentment toward Metalious. Right?
Debra Cornett, Gilmanton’s tall, courteous town clerk, ponders the question and then quietly replies: “There’s a lot of hurt still.”
Metalious isn’t the only famous person from Gilmanton. First there was Herman Webster Mudgett — a.k.a. H.H. Holmes.
The charming serial killer has enjoyed a new posthumous notoriety thanks to “The Devil in the White City” (Crown, 2003) by Erik Larson, the best-selling account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. While fairgoers swooned over the majestic temples and the Ferris wheel, Holmes, as Larson notes, was murdering dozens of Chicagoans and then neatly disposing of the bodies.
Some Gilmanton residents seem to take a roguish, eyebrow-waggling satisfaction in the town’s association with the charismatic killer who was hanged for his crimes in 1896. The Gilmanton Historical Society is located in the basement of the town offices; in the late 19th Century, the same big white building housed a school known as Gilmanton Academy — Mudgett’s alma mater. And in the museum’s small collection, there is a rickety rusty-red bench that once may have belonged to Mudgett.
There is, however, no exhibit for Metalious. And no public marker.
Greeting a reporter in the circular driveway in front of the town offices on a sunny afternoon, Barbara Angevine, the museum’s co-curator, says cheerfully, “You’re here about Mudgett?”
Well, no, she is told. About Grace Metalious, actually.
Angevine’s face twitches, ever so slightly. “Oh.”
Other Gilmanton residents have similar reactions to a mention of “Peyton Place” or its doomed author: a hesitation. A shake of the head. An implied eye-roll.
Richard Bickford, 67, was born and raised in Gilmanton — which he, like most natives, pronounces “GILM-tun.” He remembers Grace and her three children — all of whom now live in Florida — very well, he says, adding that the town was peeved about “Peyton Place” from the get-go.
“There was a lot of jealousy, I think,” says Bickford, batting away the mosquitoes in the purple-skied New Hampshire twilight. “You’d hear people say, `I could’ve written a better book than that. ‘Course, then my neighbors wouldn’t have spoken to me.’ Some people were kind of disgusted with her.
“The funny part is, I’ve never read the book. I tell people, `I don’t have to read it. I lived it.'”
Even in death, she still gets the cold shoulder.
Her headstone in the Smith Meeting House Cemetery is stark and white and isolated. Unlike the other markers that march in tidy gray rows, side by side like loyal comrades, Metalious’ last resting place looks a little forlorn, off by itself in a tree-cupped corner.
People often stop by and ask for directions to the grave, says Jean Hueber, 53, who shares caretaking duties with her husband at the beautiful old cemetery outside Gilmanton, where the earliest headstones date to the Revolutionary War.
Hueber, taking a break from her grass-cutting routine, points to the thin white slab in the distance, the one with the simple inscription: “METALIOUS/Grace/1924-1964.”
Jean Hueber’s husband, Roland, 57, joins her to talk about Metalious. The Huebers, lifelong Gilmanton residents, are a shy, friendly couple still a bit bemused at the perennial fuss made over Metalious.
“Once,” Roland Hueber recalls, “somebody left a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes on the grave.”
It is, sadly, a fitting remembrance: According to many published accounts, Metalious spent her days moving headfirst through multiple packs of unfiltered Parliaments and large tumblers of Canadian Club.
Indeed, Valerie Brooks, 55, a writer who grew up in the area and now lives in Oregon, remembers hearing wild stories about Metalious when Brooks was a child, about “what a mess Grace was.” Even before the shattering success of “Peyton Place,” many say, Metalious was a restless and deeply troubled young woman. She fought with husbands and lovers and shopkeepers in loud, public ways.
Born to working-class parents in Manchester, N.H., in an era when child-rearing was supposed to fulfill completely a woman’s creative urges, Metalious never fit in, according to Toth’s biography. As a stay-at-home mom, married to a teacher named George Metalious and living in a dingy cottage with very little money, Metalious wrote and wrote and wrote.
Among the results was a sprawling melodrama about secrets and lies in a small New England community that Metalious called “The Tree and the Blossom.” Her publisher retitled it “Peyton Place” — and suddenly, unbelievably, Metalious was rich and famous. “Grace,” Brooks says, “really pulled the veil off the town.”
Metalious followed it up with “Return to Peyton Place” (1959), “The Tight White Collar” (1961) and “No Adam in Eden” (1963), never again achieving the success of “Peyton Place.” And never again, many say, knowing anything that resembled contentment, because Metalious was a very square peg in a stubbornly round hole called Gilmanton.
“That town,” recalls Brooks, who left in 1973 but returns to visit her family. “They get to you, one way or another.”
Gallant, who’s brash and lively and bombastic, is also Roland Hueber’s sister, which indicates precisely the sort of relational web in which small towns specialize. Gallant met Metalious just as the one-two punch of global fame and local disapproval had left the author reeling.
“People say to me now, `If the town abused her so much, why didn’t she just leave?’ But she loved it here,” Gallant says. “It’s so beautiful.”
She’s right. Just past Gallant’s front yard along Meadow Pond Road, the thick-treed woodlands of rural New Hampshire rise in a great bristle-topped sweep of green, interrupted only by glassy blue lakes that look like pieces of sky that somehow broke off and fell randomly to earth.
Right next door is the big white house that Metalious bought with her “Peyton Place” earnings. It’s empty now and on the market again, having had several different owners over the years.
Greg Reece, 44, a contractor who’s fixing up the house for the real estate company selling it, pauses from his job — finishing the trim in the upstairs bedroom used by Metalious — and muses on the connections. His grandmother went to school with the author. His grandfather once was hired by Metalious to fix a leak in the basement. “Oh, there’s a legacy here, no doubt about it,” he says. “I’ve never read the novel, but every woman I’ve ever dated has sure read it.”
In another front yard just up the road from Metalious’ house, Jackie and Justine Bozeman, 16-year-old twins with long, straight blond hair, are hanging out. They know all about Metalious. It’s not ancient history to them. Like the author of “Peyton Place,” they, too, wonder about the world beyond Gilmanton. They want to see it for themselves.
“We don’t like it here,” Jackie says. “It’s too spread out. It’s wicked spread out.”
And that, in the end, may be the real legacy of “Peyton Place”: not the fact that people here are still livid about a novel they feel peeled the lid off their community and dumped out its secrets, but the certainty that in any number of small towns, young women still yearn. Metalious was Gilmanton’s Gatsby, searching for the elusive green light across the way. It didn’t turn out well for Metalious — but for someone else, it might work out just fine.
Nick Cournoyer, who has lived here all of his life, pauses in the clerk’s office to ponder the novel’s heritage.
“Every place is Peyton Place,” he finally says. Then he readjusts his baseball cap and heads out the front door, the same doorway through which, a century removed from each other, walked a mass murderer and a novelist; one celebrated by the town, the other reviled. Both, now, a part of its curious history.
And ours too.
———-
jikeller@tribune.com
