The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family - Hardcover

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Tom Shroder is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author of Old Souls and Acid Test, a transformative look at the therapeutic powers of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of PTSD. As editor of The Washington Post Magazine, he conceived and edited two Pulitzer Prize–winning feature stories. His most recent editing project, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte, was a New York Times best seller.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2016 Tom Shrodder

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 to 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 aban- doned his family (Mack, his sister, and their mother) before Mack was born, stayed one step 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 the possibility of love and support out to Mack throughout his 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 over- night 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 standard. The house, built with termite-proof pecky cypress lumber and a pair of coquina rock fireplaces, was hid- den 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...