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Irving Wallace (1916-1990) |
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American author, whose bestsellers have been translated into several languages, among others into Finnish. In his works Irving Wallace combined careful research and inventive, readable storytelling. Although Wallace was often scorned by serious critics, his 16 novels and 17 nonfiction works sold some 250 million copies around the world. Among Wallace's best-known books is The Chapman Report (1960). She had heard of him, of course. Everyone had heard of him. The sensationalism of his last book (all the women she knew had read it avidly, though Kathleen had disdained even to borrow a copy), and the progress of his current study, so-called, had enlivened the pages of newspapers and periodicals for several years and had served to bring his portrait to the covers of at least a dozen of magazines. One day, she supposed, Chapman would be a freak symbol of his decade and its obsessive concern with sex, just as Emile Coué was representative of a different curiosity in the nineteeth-twenties. (from The Chapman Report by Irving Wallace, London: Pan Books, 14th printing 1965, p. 18) Irving Wallace was born in Chicago, one of two children of Bessie Liss and Alexander Wallace (Wallechinsky), a clerk in a general store. He was named after his grandfather, a bookkeeper and Talmudic scholar of Narevska, Russia. Both of his parents were born in Russia and emigrated to the United States in their teens. The Wallaces were orthodox Jews, but Irving grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in an atmosphere devoid of anti-Semitism. "I never heard the work 'kike' until I was nineteen and going to college in Berkeley," Wallace later recalled. He attended Williams Institute, Berkeley, California, and Los Angeles City College. "But my main education has been in magazines," Wallace later said in a job summary. (Irving Wallace: A Writer's Profile by John Leverence, 1974, p. 95) Wallace always wanted to write. He began his career as a journalist
while still at school. Originally he
planned to become a sports writer. 'The Horse Laugh,' an imaginary interview about a thoroughbred racehorse,
was bought by Horse and Jockey for five dollars. After completing two semesters of college , Wallace gave up formal education, and traveled to Mexico, San Salvador, Panama, Colombia, and Cuba. His journal, entitled My Adventure Trail, was never published, but the experience emerged much later in his first novel The Sins of Philip Fleming (1959). Other unpublished works include a biography of Daniel Defoe, a memoir of celebrities Wallace had met, and a history of the French murderess Gabrielle Bompard. It was not until 1955, when his first book was accepted for publication. Wallace studied creative writing at the Williams Institute in Berkley and from the mid-30s he worked as a free-lance correspondent, making good contacts with large national magazines. 'We'll Give America Wings,' an article whixh came out in Liberty as the work of Donald Douglas, the aircraft manufacturer, earned him an assignment in the Far East. Wallace journeyed three and a half months, and came to the conclusion that Japan would go to war. Due to his comments on Japan's aggressive military and foreign policies, the Japanese government banned him from the country. A similar ban was granted in 1947 by General Franco, who disliked Wallace's article 'Will The Spanish Town Live Again' and ordered him to never enter Spain. (Saturday Evening Post, July 5, 1947) Japan's Mein Kampf, Wallace's account on the so-called "Tanaka Memorial," a
blueprint for world domination, was turned down by five publishers.
This infamous document was first published in China and then translated
and circulated in Europe and the United States during the 1930s. There
are doubts about the authenticity of the memorial, ostensibly a report
by Baron Tanaka Giichi (1864-1929) to Emperor Hirohito. No one has seen the the
original document. In 1941, Wallace married
Sylvia Kahn, Dell's West Coast editor. They had two children, Amy and
David. Caught up in he war fever, he decided not to wait for the draft
but to enlist. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, and in 1944 he
was transferred to the First Motion Picture Unit and Signal Corps
Photographic Center in Los Angeles, working there with directors John
Huston and Frank Capra, scriptwriter Carl Foreman, and Ted Geisel,
better known as the children's book writer Dr. Seuss. Wallace considered Capra too naive to make a film of the war
with Japan. "He was totally unsophicated when it came to political
thought," he said. "He came up with a simple foreign policy toward
Japan. It added up to this: the only good Jap is a dead Jap." (Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones, 2019, pp. 185-186) The documentary Know Your Enemy: Japan
(1945) in the series "Why We Fight," produced by Frank Capra and
written by Wallace and others, was
shelved by order of General Douglas MacArthur "due to change in
policy governing occupation of Japan." Noteworthy, the filmmakers drew
extensively on original Japanese footage. Wallace also contributed to
various periodicals, such as The American Legion Magazine, Liberty,
The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Collier's. In 1946, he went to Sweden to interview Nobel Committee judges. One of them was the Swedish explorer and writer Sven Hedin. "When I asked Dr. Hedin why certain authors had never won the Nobel Prize, I mentioned omission of Maugham. . . . Dr. Hedin gave me a few lame reasons and finally the real reason. "Mr. Maugham," he said, "was too popular."" ('Irving Wallace‐The Interview: The Author of The Word' by John Leverence and Sam Grogg, Jr., The Journal of Popular Culture, 1973, pp. 204-205) Already in 1943, Wallace had finished 13 original screen stories, but they all were rejected. His first produced screenplay was Jive Juncion (1943), co-written with Malvin Wald and Walter Doninger, and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Anything For a Laugh, released in 1944, netted him $2,430.
From 1948 to 1958 Wallace made screenplays for
routine Hollywood films, among them The West Point Story
(1950), Jump into the Hell (1955), and The Big Circus
(1959), earning seven hundred and fifty dollars a week and working
steadily, but at the same time wanting to become a novelist. "At my lowest
point, I wrote ten television scripts for six producers on order." Bad
for Each Other
(1953) Wallace co-wrote with Horace McCoy,
who had published his most famous novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They
in 1935. In spite of his success in Hollywood Wallace saw it as a place
of "indignity, disrespect, disdain" – like many writers from Raymond Chandler
to William Faulkner. His friend included the acclaimed screenwriter Ernest
Lehman, who was a member of "the Thursday night poker game." The
next-door neighbors were Norman and Francis Lear, with whom Wallace smoked
marijuana for the first time. It was delivered in a film can via Henry
Mancini and Quincy Jones. Wallace wrote his books on a Underwood typewriter, which his parents gave to him when he was 13. The Sins of Philip Fleming, about a young man who tries to build a career in professional writing, did not attract much critical attention. The Chapman Report, his breakthrough novel, was influenced by the Kinsey report. In the story Dr George C. Chapman conducts a study of female sex behavior in an American suburb, where the arrival of his research group unleshes passions and controversy. The book was published in fourteen foreign countries. Its success brought Wallace financial security and made his name internationally known. Moreover, it was made into a popular film. The reviewers agreed that it was not among George Cukor's best films. "The picture did have some virtues," said the director himself. In West Germany, the Home Ministry threatened to ban the book, but eventually authorities decided to back out. "Well, it's no fun seeing yourself, so often, attacked in print," said the author of the mixed reviews. (Irving Wallace: A Writer's Profile by John Leverence, 1974, p. 118) Wallace's message, along with sex, was that there is more behind the relationships between men and women than a survey can ever reveal. After The Chapman Report, which made a quarter of a million dollars in thirteen months, Wallace published mostly popular novels, and co-authored with his son David Wallechinsky The Book of Lists (1977) and its sequels. The science fiction writer John Scalzi has said of The People's Almanac by Wallenchinsky and Wallace that "[w]hen I was six years old, I thought The People's Almanac contained the sum of all human knowledge, but now I know it was information that was selected and organized and designed." ('John Scalzi on 'The people's almanac' by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace,' in The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People, edited by Bethanne Patrick, 2016, p. 224) Wallace's daughter Amy became an apprentice (and later lover) of Carlos Castaneda, the author of a number of works describing the teaching of Don Juan, a Yaqui sorcerer and shaman. In his novels Wallace blended sex, religion,
politics, jet set life, epoch-making discoveries, intriguing villains from
the Soviet Union, and all the necessary elements of the international
bestseller of the Cold War period. A typical product was The Prize
(1962), a conspiracy thriller, which penetrated into the lives of a
group of Nobel Prize winners, who have gathered in Stockholm
– a French husband-and-wife team of chemists,
an American heart surgeon, and a German-born physicist sought after by the
Communists of East Germany. The Prize sold in short time more than 100,000 copies in hardback. Despite his continuous popularity, Wallace maintained: "If successful novelists had a formula, they would not have failures, and I know of no novelist who has not had failures at one time or another." (The Sunday Gentleman by Irving Wallace, 1965, p. 21) Research has always been an essential part of Wallace's writing process. Wallace said in an interview, that the completion of The Word
(1972) took 10 years. "During that time I read all or most of 478 books
of biblical literature, and I interviewed (or had interviewed for me,
when I could not speak their language) 58 Bible experts." ('Irving Wallace--A Good Ear for Words' by Marshall Berges, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 27, 1985)
Before starting to work on the book, Wallace considered himself as an
atheist. Following a personal spiritual crisis, decided to learn all he
can about the world of Biblical scholarship, the Christian churches,
and Jesus. The Word tells about the discovery of a new gospel, ostensibly written by Jesus's brother, and the intrigues and mysteries surrounding the manuscript. The Fan
Club (1974) was about Hollywood's sexiest star who is kidnapped
by four men. The R Document (1976) was political thriller about
Christopher Collins, the Attorney General, who fights with the FBI
Director Vernon T. Tynan, who wants to get rid of the Bill of Rights with
a new amendment to the Constitution. According to this 35th Amendment, "no
right or liberty guaranteed by the Constitution shall be construed as
licence to endanger the national security." The Pigeon Project (1979) explored the idea of the elixir of life and what happens if it were invented. The Second Lady (1980) focused on the true identity of the First Lady. The Almighty (1982) was set in the media world, in which the head of the New York Record uses terrorism and espionage to exceed the circulation of the New York Times. The Miracle (1984) was set in the near future, and based on the story of Bernadette, the young peasant girl who first saw Mary at the Grotto in Lourdes in 1958. Franz Werfel used the same subject in his novel The Song of Bernadette (1941), which was filmed in 1943 and won three Oscars. In 1964 Wallace received Supreme Award of Merit
and honorary fellowship from George Washington Carver Memorial Institute
for writing The Man
(1964).
Wallace other awards include Commonwealth Club silver medal (1965), Bestsellers
magazine award (1965), Paperback of the Year citation (1970), Popular Culture
Association award of excellence (1974), Venice Rosa d'Oro award (1975). In 1972
Wallace was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News / Sun Times Wire Service at
the Democratic and Republican national convections. Wallace died of pancreatic
cancer on June 29, 1990 in Los Angeles. Several of Wallace's novels have been made into films. The screen adaptation
of The Chapman Report was made in 1962, directed by George Cukor, and starring Shelley Winters, Claire Bloom, Glynis Johns, and Jane
Fonda.
The director defended the film by saying that it "was not perhaps a
distinguished picture, but it was adroit and diverting and there were
some interesting performances in it. The episodes involving the frigid
woman, and the respectable one who has an affair, all explored rather
fully and, in the circumstances, rather honestly." (George Cukor: Interviews, edited by Robert Emmet Long, 2001, pp. 10-11) Shelley Winter played a married woman
with a passion for a man who doesn't really love her. Glynis Johns seeks
experience with a beach boy and Claire Bloom is a nympho who commits
suicide after being gang-raped. Russ Meyer's version of Wallace's The Seven Minutes (1969) from 1971 dealt with pornography and freedom of speech. "Meyer keeps the story, keeps a rather depressing number of the quotations, and though he slightly spices up everybody's private life, he centers his attention on the court case and its ramifications.I don't think that a court of law is the right Russ Meyer arena". (Roger Greenspun in The New York Times, July 24, 1971) The Man was adapted to screen in 1972, starring James Earl Jones, Martin Balsam, and Burgess Meredith. It was a story about the first African American president of The United States, who is resented by white southerners and by blacks. The Prize, produced by Roxbury Productions Inc. (1963), was a disappointing at the box office. Starring Paul Newman (as a drunken, womanizing novelist and a Nobel laureate), Edward G. Robinson (a German physicist and his double), and Elke Sommers (his beautiful niece), it strived to be a sort of Hitchcockian thriller. Ernest Lehman, who had written Hitchcock's North by Northwest, made the screenplay. Swedish authorities objected the script, claiming it gave a wrong picture about the annual Nobel Prize awards. Newman appears in one scene in jockey shorts and in another finds himself in a nudist convention. Later he admitted that he had never read the novel. Allegedly Newman tried to base his characterization on the author Norman Mailer. For further reading: 'Irving Wallace‐The Interview: The Author of The Word' by John Leverence and Sam Grogg, Jr. The Journal of Popular Culture (1973); Irving Wallace: A Writer's Profile by John Leverence (1974); 'Irving Wallace, As the Page Turns' by Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post, October 22, 1980; Contemporary Popular Writers, edited by David Mote (1997); Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda by Amy Wallace (2007); 'John Scalzi on 'The people's almanac' by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace,' in The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People, edited by Bethanne Patrick (2016) Selected works:
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