In its first month, it sold more than 100,000 copies, at a time when the average first novel sold 3,000, total. A week before it hit bookstores, on September 24, 1956, it was already on the best-seller list, where it would remain for half a year. It would spawn a sequel, a smash film nominated for nine Academy Awards, and television's first prime-time serial. "Grace Metalious," Wilkens said, "would never be really poor or really happy again."įifty years ago, Peyton Place helped create the contemporary notion of "buzz," indicted 1950s morality, and recast the concept of the soap opera, all in one big, purple-prosed book. Years later, her best friend, Laurose Wilkens, would remember the phone call she'd gotten from Grace that hot and humid August day, crying and laughing at her incredible news. Two days later, Grace Metalious, the frowsy New Hampshire housewife whose bombshell would rock American publishing, slid into a booth at '21' with her dashing agent and toasted to her success with what she remembered as a daiquiri "all pale green and so cold it hurt my teeth." Indeed he had, as she discovered when she placed the call to New York, a grocery bag still tucked under one arm. "He's sold it!" Grace screamed, waving around the wire. Amid a pile of bills and past-due notices, a yellow telegram peeked out: please call me at your earliest convenience. When they got back to Gilmanton, Grace, carrying two bags of groceries, spotted the mail. Then she had taken her kids to swim in Opeechee Park. Grace had been at the market in nearby Laconia, buying frozen French fries because you don't have to wash them before you cook them. The agent had circulated it among a few publishers all of them declined. The year before, she had sent him a passionate five-page plea outlining her dreams of becoming a published writer, along with a 312-page manuscript that focused on the travails of a pair of newlyweds-which had clear parallels to her life with George. Somerset Maugham and Jack Schaefer, the author of Shane.
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Born Marie Grace DeRepentigny (prone to embellish, she would later state that her birth name had been Grace Marie Antoinette Jeanne d'Arc de Repentigny), she'd been brought up with an air of French snobbery that belied the modest apartment she'd shared with her mother, grandmother, and sister.Ĭhambrun, an unctuous dandy who favored long lunches and chauffeured cars, had an office facing the Plaza and a client roster that at one point included W. Grace discovered literary agent Jacques Chambrun by browsing through a library directory, singling him out because his was the most French-sounding name. She titled it The Tree and the Blossom-about the secrets, scandals, and hypocrisy in a fictional New Hampshire town not unlike her own. Bill, Grace often locked her children out of the apartment so she could write, leaving her runny-nosed charges to fend for themselves in the cold by knocking on neighbors' doors, asking to be let in.
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During those years when George was getting his teaching degree at the University of New Hampshire under the G.I. Writing was neither hobby nor diversion, but lifeline. She kept writing, even after her wedding at 18 to her high-school sweetheart, George Metalious after giving birth to her third child and having her tubes tied when doctors told her she wouldn't survive a fourth pregnancy after George went away during World War II and had an affair after he came home and she had an affair of her own. Escaping a troubled home to sneak off to her Aunt Georgie's bathroom, she would lock the door and sit in the tub for hours, putting those dreams to paper by scribbling tales of heroines and dashing princes. She had dreamed of a different life for herself, a life of romance and adventure, a life all little girls dream of. At the age of 30 she was broke, smelly, thirsty, exhausted, and desperate.
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She was three months behind on payments for her beat-up car. A nine-week drought had left tiny Gilmanton, New Hampshire, bone dry, including the well in the back of the ramshackle cottage she'd sarcastically nicknamed "It'll Do." Her three children were living on lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. The summer of 1955 had not been good to Grace Metalious.