From the Terrace by John O’Hara
Author of more than 400 short stories, 17 novels (one posthumous), several plays and non-fiction collected works, 13 short story collections (and more posthumous collections), and two screenplays, John O’Hara (1905–1970) was often accused of writing too much. O’Hara was so prolific, in fact, that he banked his royalties with Random House and at one time had about $1 million on deposit (Gibbsville Preface 12).
The 1999 Carroll & Graf second reprint edition of From the Terrace comes in at 897 pages and weighs almost five pounds. The cover promises an introduction by Budd Schulberg (screenwriter of On the Waterfront) but, regrettably, it is nowhere to be found. Still, it is a clear printing and fairly sturdy for a hefty paperback. (Just for the record, at no point, did I wish for the convenience of an e-book.)
O’Hara is often accused of “bloated” books and certainly one might feel that a four page telephone conversation, for example, is a bit much. But O’Hara’s boundless confidence in his ability to entertain is contagious, and any real fan gulps down his portions with the glee of a real trencherman. If a sign of a good writer is that he can be trusted, then O’Hara is one. Like all of his fiction, From the Terrace is rich and varied, full of fascinating period detail and the pitch-perfect dialogue for which he was well-known. From the jazz age lingo of the opening chapters to the Depression-era statistics and the 1940s wartime jargon—words like “logistics” and “squared away”—O’Hara plays it back with gusto and charm. It must also be admitted that he was a master of scatological phrases and R-rated slang.
From the Terrace charts events in the life of Raymond Alfred Eaton, second son of Pennsylvania iron and steel magnate Samuel Eaton. But as O’Hara notes in the introductory passage, the book’s purpose is more ambitious than merely cataloging the men, women, and children who intersect with Alfred’s life. What exactly that might mean is carefully deferred because “an early statement of our purpose…might tend to make us too constantly aware of our purpose” (5). Rather, O’Hara plunges into the lives and events of the characters at hand, their delineation being his immediate goal.
From the Terrace has all the makings of an epic. The book spans from 1894 to almost 1950. Its characters are involved in two wars, the advent of automobile and air travel, the crash, and the Depression. The main characters start out in O’Hara’s fictional mecca, Pennsylvania coal country, and rapidly fan out into domestic playgrounds from Connecticut to Long Island, Manhattan, and California. What they wear, what they drive, the clubs to which they belong, and the cocktails they drink offer a comprehensive view of American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. But O’Hara was not interested in the generational family saga. O’Hara shares much with the likes of Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis such as their sardonic perspectives and their interest in the slow despair of daily life. But O'Hara's prose has an earthy boldness and a swagger that sets him apart.
The clubs, the cocktails, and the clothes are all props for the real story, which as always with O’Hara centers on sex. Critics and readers might be excused for thinking him more than a little obsessed with sex. However, his is not a prurient interest, but a clinical eye cast on how sex powers the hidden engine of social machinery. Sex turns the plot, it develops character, and, of course, it brings forth future generations to perpetuate the action.
O’Hara’s treatment of one blatantly voyeuristic scene in From the Terrace demonstrates this approach. Alfred’s marriage to Mary St. John has disintegrated, and Alfred and his mistress Natalie Benziger are together in their New York love nest. They have begun to make love when photographers burst in and begin to snap incriminating photos. Alfred worries that these images will be splashed across the newspapers and that this public exposure will violate the agreement that he and Mary have to keep their respective affairs quiet. Rather unexpectedly, Mary isn’t interested in blackmail and she even agrees to turn over all the photographs.
The incident fizzles into nothing because O’Hara isn’t interested in being a voyeur. Rather, he wants to demonstrate how Mary exerts her sexual power. Surprisingly, it is the lead female protagonist of the novel rather than the lead male protagonist who repeatedly wields power in the sexual game. Mary’s need for this kind of power has resulted from her liaison with her former fiancé Dr. Jim Roper, a quack whose practice consists of persuading society women to fulfill themselves sexually. He is also a bit of a degenerate, using Mary (with her cooperation) to lure young men to his apartment for all sorts of sexual shenanigans. In thrall to Roper, Mary becomes increasingly skeptical about love. She doesn’t even seem to care enough about Alfred to feel jealous of Natalie—after meeting Natalie, Mary gloats that she would rather have “guts” than Alfred’s adoration. Mary's sexual dalliances have tainted her very soul, turning a self-disciplined young girl into a contemptibly promiscuous woman.
Where Mary is portrayed as the skeptic who doesn’t believe in the possibility of love, Alfred is shown to be consumed with it. Having failed his father and been unable to reach his mother, Alfred as a young man seeks love in the wrong places. His high school love is killed in a motor accident, and his affair with an older girl is cut short when she dies in a murder-suicide pact with her married lover. Overseas during World War I, Alfred’s good looks and diffidence lead to many casual affairs. After the war, Alfred's apartment becomes a playboy’s paradise. Alfred's marriage to Mary leads to her sexual awakening, but her timing if off because Alfred, having already slaked his youthful sexual urges, is transferring his energies to his career. They satisfy each other in bed, but it becomes clear that they want different things. When Alfred meets Natalie, he is away from home, lonely, and stalled in his professional ambitions. He sees Natalie as a refreshing contrast to the decadent sophistication of his city life. She represents the innocent, uncomplicated love that he does not have with Mary.
Almost exactly halfway through the book, O’Hara checks in again, this time in a third person voice that turns out to be Mary. They are newlyweds, and Alfred is trying to make a go of the aviation design business. He has returned to his hometown of Port Johnson in 1921 to inspect the fire damage at the Eaton steel mill. Its devastation represents the loss of his father’s lifetime of work. With his father gone (he died on the day of Alfred’s wedding, finding even in death a way to spoil his son’s happiness), the fire is a decision point for Alfred. He could have stayed in Port Johnson and resurrected the family business. But he doesn’t, because as Mary says “he was not a second-rater. He could have been the leading citizen of Port Johnson without much competition, but it would have been avoiding life and rather cowardly. . . .All through his life he has been one of those men who gravitate toward the top by instinct, and I suppose that’s one of the reasons why I love him. It is very complimentary to a woman to know that she is loved by a man who has a touch of greatness” (411).
The introductory narration was coy, refusing to divulge the author’s purpose. Here, O’Hara engages in deliberate misdirection. Mary’s voice at this point is an odd dislocation, easily forgotten as the pages pile up. It is a subtle yet masterful maneuver. For the first half of the book, O’Hara has set up one set of expectations for Alfred. Against an epic background, Alfred has made a prodigal return. He could have saved the family business and brought the family home all the warmth it never had while his father was alive. Mary, the dutiful—and egocentric—young wife, wants to see greatness in her husband not because Alfred is inherently heroic, but because it shows her good taste in marrying him.
But has Alfred really “gravitated toward the top”? As a second son, he never received his father’s love because his father had invested all his love in the first son who died of spinal meningitis at age 8. Alfred never had his mother’s love because she began drinking and taking lovers after Samuel shut her out. Two women Alfred loved died violent deaths. He had a respectable showing in the war, but was hardly a commanding officer. His attempt to run an aviation business has failed, and he had to rely on a loan from a Texas oil millionaire friend to buy out his interest.
O’Hara advances the possibility that Alfred could have a “touch of greatness,” and, in another (truly) epic novel by another author, he might have. In this book, however, by the time of the story's ineffably sad conclusion, it is clear that Alfred is no more than a mediocrity. He had a remarkable career as a partner at a private banking firm, he weathered the Depression, and had the stalwart friendship of one of the firm’s founders. (Granted, he received these advantages because he’s saved the life of the founder’s grandson.) During World War II, he embarked on a cross-country promotional tour among American industrialists at the request of FDR, a president whose policies he disliked but whose goodwill he coveted. His wife was beautiful, popular in society, and a loving mother (at least to outward appearances).
But in California, Alfred’s real nature is revealed. Divorced at last from Mary, Alfred and Natalie marry and move to Los Angeles so he can recuperate from a hemorrhage that precipitated an early retirement. They are living in the Beverly Hills home of Alfred’s long-time friend, Texas oil millionaire Jack Tom Smith. Alfred spends his days sleeping on the terrace in the California sunshine, golfing, and lunching with friends. Gradually, Natalie begins to wonder if Alfred was worth all the years that she waited for him to marry her. Her regret becomes a quiet scorn, even hatred. It’s a shocking realization, one of those moments that critic George V. Higgins calls an O'Hara signature moment of “random despair.” Alfred, too, senses that he has become a banality. He has been doing things his whole life, but he has accomplished nothing. In the end, the most he can do is watch the world pass by from the terrace.
A word about the 1960 film version
From the Terrace, the motion picture, starred Paul Newman as Alfred Eaton, Joanne Woodward as Mary St. John Eaton, and Ina Balin as Natalie Benziger. The movie takes many liberties with the book’s chronology, opening with Alfred returning home after World War II. In an effort to distill the book’s denseness and sprawl down to manageable movie length, the producers focus on the relationship of Alfred and Mary and Alfred’s love affair with Natalie. Much of the novel’s sensational aspects—its language, its sexual situations, and the homosexuality or bisexuality of various characters—is, not surprisingly, omitted.
Paul Newman as Alfred is perfect. He combines the right amount of virility and vulnerability and his finely calibrated sense of patient perplexity is an important aspect of his character as O’Hara built it. It is critical to his ultimate failure in the novel, so it does not quite jibe with the movie version of Alfred as a rebel who chooses love over social expectations. Joanne Woodward’s portrayal of the ice queen Mary St. John is somewhat reserved, but her chemistry with Newman, to whom she’d only been married for about two years, is palpable.
The great weakness of the film, besides Mark Robson’s wooden directing, is Ina Balin as Natalie. Physically, she couldn’t be further from Woodward. Balin has a dark voluptuousness with large, limpid eyes and thick black hair. In keeping with the mannered look of the entire production, she is dressed in decorous ensembles rather more stylish than her coal-town surroundings might indicate.
Balin’s own limited acting skills, or maybe Robson’s lack of rapport with her, fail to give her the drawing power necessary to believe that Eaton would fall for her. The movie clumsily offers the idea that Natalie is a simple, small town girl open to love, without sophistication but not dumb. If Balin had turned up the heat even a few degrees in her portrayal, there might have been a tiny hope of some chemistry between her and Newman.
The most remarkable performances in the film are Myrna Loy as Martha Eaton and Leon Ames as Samuel Eaton. Ames, who may be most well-remembered as the kindly father in Meet Me in St. Louis, is here the brutal mill owner who can’t get over his first son’s early death. His marriage to Martha is ruined because of his isolation and his relationship with Alfred is catastrophic. Cruel and even brutal, Ames doesn’t overplay Samuel, but it is almost unbearable to hear him call the Myrna Loy a “pig.”
Loy’s small, but powerful role is heart-breakingly sad. When the film opens, she has passed out on a train. It comes out that she was drunk and on her way to visit her lowlife lover Charles Froelich in Philadelphia. Because of Samuel Eaton’s position, the incident is hushed up, but Mrs. Eaton’s drinking problem is common knowledge. Loy is frail with a thin, plaintive voice, and her characterization of the destroyed wife and mother is committed and true. Anyone who knows Loy only has the jazz age sophisticate of the Thin Man movies will be impressed by the energy and intensity of her short time onscreen.
The high-style production design of From the Terrace is a tribute to the O’Hara fictional universe. Especially notable is the Eatons’ New York apartment with its taupe color scheme and Chinese accessories. It reeks of money and class with just a hint of nouveau riche garishness—especially those center knob front doors in black and red. The Benziger home, on the other hand, has burlap-covered shrubberies and patterned wallpaper—sure signs of bourgeois homeyness.
This being the end of the 1950s, makeup is heavy but flawless, tending to emphasize the two-dimensional image onscreen. The wardrobe is vintage Travilla, the American designer most well-known for dressing Marilyn Monroe in some of her most memorable gowns (including the white halter dress with pleated skirt in The Seven Year Itch). His negligees, daywear, and formal gowns look stunning on Joanne Woodward and the statuesque Elizabeth Allen as the nosy Sage Rimmington. To the popular wasp-waisted silhouette of the day, Travilla added contrasting lengths or structured drapery falling from the hip. He favored monochromatic looks in this picture, something that is particularly successful in the film’s penultimate scene when Woodward arrives for a board meeting at Newman’s office in an ensemble of corporate grey—dress, furs, gloves, bag, and turban head wrap. Travilla says much with this costume: Woodward is trespassing on a male-only domain and she’s there on sufferance in spite of the deference of the gentlemen. Everyone thinks Alfred is about to deliver an important presentation, but instead he quits dramatically. He leaves the room and jumps in a taxi, declaring his independence from Mary. Woodward is left on a New York street corner, shouting “Alfred!” like any common fishwife. She may look like Park Avenue, but she’s really Bed-Stuy.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
