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Bill Bayer's novel Pattern Crimes will be published this month. If that does not mean anything to Clevelanders, let it be known that unlike Bayer's last two murder mysteries, Peregrine and Switch, this new one does not feature a murderous sexual psychopath from Cleveland.
"Ah!" Bayer (he pronounces it buyer) laughs. "Not too many people have noticed that Jay Hollander and Peter Lane are both from Cleveland. It's one of those personal secrets that I like to put in my books. It's a way of plugging myself into the books."
In his novel Peregrine, which won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best novel of 1981, the killer, Jay Hollander, is from Shaker Heights, given to a life of genteel luxury in New York City.
Bayer, too, is a native Shakerite now at home in Manhattan. And while he does not exactly live a life of genteel luxury, a sunny co-op in the East 80s off Lexington Avenue is not a bad place to start - especially if one's wife and confidant is the inimitable Paula Wolfert, one of the America's leading food writers, cookbook authors, and reformed beatnik expatriates. ("Jack Kerouac once told me I had great legs. That was a long time ago... about 30 pounds.")
The Shaker secrets thicken with Bayers 1984 novel, Switch, a highly popular thriller that was made last year into a television miniseries called "Doubletake."
The killer in Switch, Peter Lane, is from the near West Side. Lane is now a director of hard-core gore movies in New York. One of Lane's blood fests is called Winslow Road, after the street in Shaker - the one with all the quaint little doubles - where Bayer spent his early childhood. About the plot of Winslow Road, Switch says, "The killer kept a garden behind his house on a middleclass suburban street, where, it turned out, he grew exemplary vegetables fertilized by the remains of the whores he lured to his potting shed and killed."
Are the Shaker Heights Aesthetics Police aware of this?
Bayer has been away from Cleveland since 1963, when after Harvard he went to Vietnam to make propaganda movies for the United States Information Agency. Cleveland is a memory but not merely a memory. The "secrets" in Bayer's recent novels - secrets that are wrapped in his upbringing in Cleveland and his extraordinary family - give a resonance to his work.
If Bill Bayers secrets in Peregrine and Switch associate rather grimly with his childhood memories, it is probably because, by his own admission, he did not have a particularly happy childhood. Bayer's parents, Leo and Eleanor Bayer, were Clevelanders - talented and successful writers who ultimately grew unhappy with each other and the inability of their hometown to accommodate their ambitions. At bottom, Bayer says, his parents felt that being Jewish precluded their being truly accepted by the East Side culture-ruling WASP society.
But Bayer is not working his way out of Cleveland psychologically through the secrets in his recent novels; he is working his way back.
Both Peregrine and Switch feature the same hero, New York City police detective, Frank Janek, who carries societal and personal salvation and redemption around like a badge. Pattern Crimes is set in Jerusalem, and the hero is an Israeli police detective who sets out to solve what appears to be the city's first serial-murder case. Bayer has refined his theme of redemption and salvation - of fractured worlds cohering, as his detective thinks of it, by including in the transformation the detective's own Judaism and that of the detective's family.
Bayer is obviously haunted by Cleveland and by his upbringing. Bayer's novels are pop thrillers, but they are also art, in that the writer calls up the emotions of his own past to address the universal themes of pain, transformation, and healing. The secrets in Bayer's novels are not there for his escape from Cleveland but for his reconciliation with it. It is in this hidden desire to work out his past by which Bayer sets himself apart from the town's other artistic expatriates. He even talks seriously about returning to Cleveland one day for the purpose of using the city as the setting for a novel.
Bayer is an intense, kinetic man with a friendly but brusque demeanor. His mother, who left Cleveland and her family to become a successful screenwriter and New York socialite, died several years ago. His father lives in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Bayer has lived in Saigon, Paris, and Morocco. He calls New York home, but nothing binds him to it except the publishing industry and Paula's family. It has been Paula who has provided the continuity in his life for the last 17 years, though they were not married until three years ago. It is his first marriage, and he is 48 years old. It is not surprising that Bayer, at this stage of his life, would talk about roots - but without sentiment attached.
"Bill is a loner, an outsider, an observer," says Suzanne Hamlin, one of Bill and Paula's best friends and the food writer for the New York Daily News. "Bill doesn't need people the way others do. Bill and Paula's social life in New York is dictated by Paula," Suzanne says. Consequently, the circle Bayer moves in, when he moves in circles at all, includes the food crowd.
"Bill would rather be with himself than anybody else," says Suzanne. "I could even tell you Bill's a difficult person, but I don't think that anymore. He's just who he is. He has accomplished what he has because of his talent and his extraordinary self-imposed discipline and dedication."
And so it is something of a relief to see Bill Bayer relaxing from his rigorous schedule of meetings in the wake of finishing a story for television, a sequel to "Doubletake," which may or may not survive the caprices of the industry. We're at Mortimer's, a tiny restaurant on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks from Bill and Paula's apartment. Mortimers is a place where tourists and other unknown faces are not especially welcome. Owner Glenn Bernbaum prefers that his restaurant serve as a private club for New York Names rather than a public establishment. The danger, of course, is that the more clubby the restaurant becomes, the more the tourists and local yuppies scramble to get in to hobnob with the likes of Bianca and Jackie.
Mortimer's is clubby enough for male patrons to get away with not wearing ties, but just barely. "Don't worry about it," Paula advises a fretful tieless guest. "The people at the bar are on their way to somewhere else. They just stop here to look around. That's part of the fun."
The bar is three layers thick in sartorial splendor. There is even a young woman with a mink hat that looks like a coonskin cap, complete with tail.
Bill has arrived wearing an open-necked shirt with frayed collar, a V-neck sweater, and an orange knock-around jacket.
"I wonder how much it costs to take a leak here," Bill laughs, looking around at an indignant yuppie who has just been ejected for refusing to check his coat for a five minute layover at the bar.
"I once wrote an article for New York Magazine about how much it costs to use the bathroom at some of the fanciest restaurants in town," Bill explains. "That is, if you just walked in off the street and said 'May I use your restroom?' I went around to these places and actually did it. At '21,' it costs $2.50. You have to check your coat just to get in the door - and pay the tip, or course - and you have to tip the restroom attendant."
"The food here isn't much," apologizes Paula, who, being Mortimer's kitchen consultant, should know. "But there's nothing I can do about it. I have no control over the chef."
A food consultant is now the sine qua non of prestigious New York restaurants, and it is essential for a restaurant like Mortimer's, not noted for its cuisine, to have a prestigious name like Paula Wolfert's attached to it. Mortimer's is not doing Paula a favor; she is doing it a favor - and only because she likes the owner so much.
"Glenn just likes to have somebody to call when he's having a crisis," Paula laughs. "We don't come to Mortimer's for the food, anyway. We come here because it's so much fun, so New York. And I get a 50-percent discount, so drink up. I'm going to make an appearance in the kitchen. The chef 's going to love this."
Paula's name in New York food and restaurant circles, ergo in international food and restaurant circles, is the equivalent of Bergdorf Goodman in haute couture or Rolls Royce in automobiles. A culinary genius and one of the country's most sought-after cooking instructors, Paula is a larger-than-life personality who, unlike her husband, thrives on being surrounded by people and who will talk to anybody, any time. Her first cookbook, Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, has been in print for almost 14 years. Her latest book, The Cooking of SouthWest France, has been greeted by the food world as equally important and trendsetting and has made her a star.
Paula's talents were first recognized in 1959 when she was only 20. James Beard, the world's food god at that time, took her under his wing. Beard engineered Paula's debut into food society - cooking for a dinner party of 150 at the Stamford, Connecticut, estate of producer Josh Logan.
Beard then wanted Paula to work as an assistant chef at the Four Seasons. Paula said no; she would never work in a restaurant kitchen. Instead, she took a Yugoslavian steamer to Morocco and then went to Paris for eight years.
Paula and Bill are quite a contrast: a highly disciplined, no-frills introvert from Cleveland who suffers few people easily, and an extroverted, people-loving girl from Brooklyn with a performer's bent.
"Well, it makes sense" says Gael Greene, the food writer for New York Magazine and a member of Bill and Paula's social circle. "I don't think two of Bill could live together. Paula's life is filled with friends who adore her. If one of them calls her for help, she'll drop everything and somehow make up the time later. But Bill is disciplined, perhaps the most disciplined person I know. I'm insanely jealous of his discipline and drive. When he focuses on his work, that's all there is for him."
That Bayer has done the best work of his career since running off to Morocco with Paula for five years in 1972 is probably not a coincidence. (They had met at a party two years earlier.) Bayer has found in Paula a woman who thrives on giving. It is a lucky writer indeed whose need for solitude is understood and respected. Behind Paula's ample brains and unmatched elan lurks an earth mother, a matriarch who not only provides the household's glue but also understands the needs of its members. And it helps that she, too, is a writer.
Strong women writers have played a major part in Bayer's life, starting with his mother. Eleanor Bayer Perry was a Clevelander who became a New York socialite through the strength of her ambition and her talents as a screenwriter. She is best known for her screenplay for David and Lisa, an influential 1962 movie that dealt artistically and compassionately with teenage mental illness.
Bayer does not talk about his mother as the famous Eleanor Perry - only as Eleanor Bayer, as she was before his parents' divorce and as his father's partner in novels and plays. And even then, Bayer speaks of her little.
"I know that Bill feels it's a very difficult thing being the child of Eleanor Perry when you're trying to make it as a writer in New York," says Suzanne Hamlin. "He doesn't talk about her because he has singularly forged his own life and career."
Bayer prefers to let his novels do the talking about his past. Though his Jewishness is addressed in Pattern Crimes with a broad brush of political intrigue in Israel, he uses a character named Max Rosenfeld to supply the vital clue to the mystery. Max Rosenfeld was his mother's father's name.
"That's one of my secrets in Pattern Crimes, "Bayer says. "Pattern Crimes, and writing detective fiction in general, is for me a form of self-detection. With Pattern Crimes, there is an obvious personal interest in Israel ... a roots thing. And it made me think again about Cleveland, which I've thought about on and off over the years - about going back and doing a book there."
If he returned, Bayer would confront a hundred ghosts. The family's old homes on Winslow Road, Fairmount Boulevard, and Fairhill Road are haunted; so are the Shaker Lakes, where Bayer and his father, Leo, who made his living as a lawyer, used to stroll together.
There are also ghosts who inhabit a much more powerful memory in Bayer. the memory of an intellectual boy's confusion over his family's Jewish identity crisis. These ghosts have the potential to be scary monsters, but they are not. Bayer addresses his past without bitterness. There is a certain amount of intellectual detachment but also a hint of fondness, a sense that enough time and distance has passed between Bayer and Cleveland for him to hold no grudges.
"My family did not really want to be Jewish," Bayer shrugs. "My parents tried to assimilate into that Shaker Heights social circle of WASPs and their damned Union Club but were never really accepted."
His parents, Leo and Eleanor, moved in East Side social circles that were dominated by the theater crowd. Not only were the Bayers published mystery writers who wrote together under the name Oliver Weld Bayer (after Leo's idol, Oliver Wendell Holmes), they were also playwrights. Eleanor was on the board of the Play House and Karamu House. One of their plays, The Left Hook, was produced at the Play House; another, The Third Best Sport, came to the Play House after premiering on Broadway.
Bill went to Hawken School, which in the late '40s and early '50s was still largely non-Jewish, the first stop on the Ivy League road for the East Side gentry.
"Whatever anti-Semitism there was was not overt," Bayer says. "It was in little things, like being excluded from dances and parties."
He graduated in the class of 1953. Jack Sherwin, who now serves on Hawken's board of trustees, was in Bayer's class. "Oh sure, I remember him," says Sherwin. "He was a loner - that says it in a nutshell. "And he was smart," Sherwin is quick to add.
Bayer was smart enough to get into Exeter for his prep school years (Hawken went only to the 9th grade at the time) and then into Harvard, where he earned a degree in art history.
At first, he studied pre-med at Harvard with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. One summer, he worked at the old Cleveland Receiving Hospital. One of his duties was to hold shut the jaws of psychiatric patients while they got a jolt of shock therapy... "one after another, like an assembly line," he recalls with a shudder.
Changing his mind about medicine, Bayer followed his artistic bent. Another summer found him working as an assistant curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art under the imperious Sherman Lee.
A few years later, after Bayer graduated and was applying for a job making films in Vietnam for the U.S. Information Agency, the FBI interviewed Sherman Lee about the young candidate. Bayer knew nothing of the interview until, many years later, purely out of curiosity, he applied for his FBI dossier under the Privacy Act.
Lee's comments to the FBI startled and infuriated Bayer.
"He said incredibly nasty things about me," Bayer says. "I wouldn't think that a student working for a summer would have such an impact on him. He said I was arrogant and implied that the government should not give me the job."
Even though he did not discover the criticism until 15 years later, Bayer's fierce pride would not allow him to let go of Lee's remarks, which had been a potential roadblock to his artistic advancement. Bayer wanted to be a filmmaker, and Vietnam propaganda movies were to be part of his entree. Lee's questioning of his capabilities elicits more emotion from Bayer today than any other part of his Cleveland past.
"I wrote him a letter after I saw him one night on The MacNeil/Lehrer Report Bayer says. "I told him, 'If I'm arrogant, I learned it from you.' "
Lee's opinions obviously meant little to the government, and Bayer went to Saigon. He was already experienced in filmmaking. After Harvard, he had worked in New York as an assistant on the film production of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night. He was also a published novelist. He and his girlfriend, Nancy Jenkins (who later became a food writer for The New York Times), wrote a paperback for Ace Books called Love With a Harvard Accent under the joint nom de plume of Leonie St. John. It sold 300,000 copies.
By the time Bayer returned from Vietnam for good in 1968, his ties to Cleveland were broken. And by the time he and Paula left for their five-year sojourn in Morocco in 1972, Bayer was a full-time writer.
Pattern Crimes is Bayers tenth book. It has been over the last three, including in Peregrine and Switch, that he has started to find his voice, combining the fluidity of commercial mystery writing with the control of a literary artist.
"I was extremely pleased to have the chance to publish Pattern Crimes," says Peter Gethers, editorial director at Villard Books, a subsidiary of Random House, and Bayer's new editor. Bayer yanked the manuscript from his former publisher, Simon and Schuster, over irreconcilable editorial differences.
"I saw Pattern Crimes the same way Bill saw it," says Gethers, "as a big book, not just a tight little mystery. And that's the way I'm selling it to the critics. We're printing a tremendous number of copies. Sixty thousand hardback is nothing to sneer at, and I'm planning on spending a lot of money advertising it. I want Pattern Crimes to push Bill over the top, onto the bestseller list. He belongs up there with Elmore Leonard. That's how good he is."
Bayer wrote Pattern Crimes after he went on a food-writers' junket with Paula to Israel - "miserable cuisine," he says - and fell in love with Jerusalem.
"Going to Jerusalem had an enormous impact on Bill," says Paula. Every afternoon, when she's home, Paula retreats to the day bed wedged between the bookcases in her at-home office that Bill calls "Paula's World" to sip a glass of white wine and take a siesta. Raising her cowboy-booted legs onto the day bed and reclining in the sunshine, she says, "Pattern Crimes is very important to him. He finally understood what it meant to be Jewish, and it comes through in the novel. Going to Jerusalem and writing Pattern Crimes had a purging effect."
Paula's own upbringing in Brooklyn was exactly the opposite of Bayer's in Shaker. "Everybody was Jewish," she says. "I thought it was a novelty whenever I came across a non-Jew. And I thought that only Jews were smart," she laughs. "it wasn't until I went to Columbia that I realized that non-Jews could be smart too."
Paula had actually betrayed the subtleties of her background the night before at dinner at the United Nations Plaza Hotel's Ambassador Grill.
The Ambassador had three chefs flown in from Gascony to cook for a week. The chefs - Maurice Coscuella, Roger Duffour, and Armand Daguin - dote on Paula. The Cooking of South-West France has put Gascon chefs into the forefront of popularity in America. To be a member of the Wolfert party that night at the Ambassador Grill meant having your chair pulled out and your wine glass kept full and being treated to a specially cooked, splendid array of rustic French food: brochettes of olives and duck testicles; greens with grilled pigeon; venison stew covered with puff pastry; and poached chicken with vegetables, the carrots swollen with soup stock. Paula was particularly concerned about the carrots. "I told them none of those ridiculous nouvelle carrots - I want big carrots, big ones, like bosoms flowing out of a bra.... Whoomp!" she said, making an appropriate gesture.
During the middle of this feast, as plates were being cleared to make way for yet another round, Paula leaned back in her seat and sighed, out of the blue, "I had the most wonderful matzo ball in my soup at lunch yesterday."
Only a woman raised at the breast of the Jewish culture in New York could make such a statement while eating venison and duck testicles.
But Paula had yet to betray what it is about Pattern Crimes that reconciled Bill with his background as an intellectual Shaker kid with a Jewish identity crisis. She waited until she was in Paula's World for that.
Back in Paula's World, she is saying, "Bill is younger than that generation of writers - Roth, Bellow, Malamud - who have tried to define what it means to be Jewish in America according to their own generation. He's younger, so his approach to his roots is different.
"In Pattern Crimes, Jews are criminals, but not ordinary criminals. They're different," she says, "because they're so damned smart!
"Did Bill tell you what I thought the title for Pattern Crimes should have been? You know that movie Crimes of the Heart? Pattern Crimes should have been called Crimes of the Smart. "
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