Salinger Page #3

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"the person who wrote

those books I love."

And then that seemed to defuse

his frustration from earlier,

and he says, "Well, I understand

it, but I'm not a counsellor.

"I'm a fiction writer."

In 1941,

J.D. Salinger was 21 years old,

living with his parents

in New York City,

when he met Oona O'Neill,

who was then 16 years old.

Salinger was absolutely floored

with her beauty.

Say something!

What?

It's a silent film.

Is it silent?

Yes.

What'll I say?

Shall I turn over here?

No, turn around there now.

Alright.

Oona O'Neill was the daughter

of Eugene O'Neill,

still America's only

Nobel Prize-winning dramatist.

He was a dedicated genius

and a really rotten father.

And he always said

his real children

were his characters

in his plays.

Oona O'Neill was someone

who was clearly

attracted to genius.

Between the ages of 16 and 18,

Oona dated Peter Arno,

Orson Welles

and then J.D. Salinger.

It's interesting

to think of a 16-year-old girl

holding such fascination

for such

an illustrious group of men,

but remember, we're talking

about a young woman

who was intellectually astute,

beautiful, shy, loving,

quite an extraordinary

young woman.

She was original.

She wasn't like everyone else.

I think this is why

Salinger liked her so much,

because the one thing

that she was never guilty of

was any clichs

or any banalities.

She was totally original.

He had a lot of things

going for him.

He was handsome, he was

intelligent, he was published -

he was everything.

After school,

Oona would do her homework

and then get dressed up,

and she'd go to the Stork Club.

"Oh, my! Look at Oona O'Neill -

debutante of the year."

They always photographed her

with a glass of milk,

because, of course,

she was under-age.

It was a tremendous love story.

They truly loved each other.

In 1941, 22-year-old

Jerry Salinger

wanted to join the army.

But when he went to enlist,

the military doctors

rejected him.

This distressed him terribly.

He got very angry about this.

Salinger was

determined to serve.

He wrote letters

arguing to be accepted,

and then,

in the spring of 1942,

he was finally

allowed to enlist.

What a mindset-

to come from an existence

of absolute ease and luxury.

And what do you aspire to?

To being in the trenches.

Oona loved hearing from Jerry.

He wrote wonderfully seductive,

totally delightful,

wonderful letters.

Salinger bragged to

all his army buddies,

"This is my girlfriend,"

and he showed them pictures

of Oona O'Neill.

But when Oona moved

to California,

she never answered his letters.

He had to know

something was up.

In Hollywood, Charlie

Chaplin was working on a film

that called for

a very young girl.

And he walked into a room

and Oona was sitting

on the floor by the fireplace

and the light was playing on her

and she looked up,

and he just...

When I went to Austin

to look at the Salinger

collection there...

...I read a number of letters.

And...

...I have to say that...

...reading them,

I felt like a voyeur.

And I was reading

Salinger's letters.

A number of them

were about Oona O'Neill.

Some of them were about Oona

O'Neill and Charlie Chaplin.

And...

...there were some

distasteful bits.

Imagine you're J.D.

Salinger, you're in the army,

getting ready to fight

in the great war in Europe,

you've professed your total

and complete love to this woman

and she goes off and marries,

on her 18th birthday,

the most famous movie star

in the world.

Chaplin was 53 going on 54.

The headlines -

all over the world.

Salinger found out

that he lost her

by reading about it

in the newspaper.

He was humiliated

in front of everyone.

He was very upset about this.

He did speak about this.

You could feel his anger.

You could feel

his terrible anger about...

...his rejection,

her rejection of him.

For the rest of

his life, Salinger was haunted

by the love affair that he could

have had that didn't happen.

The Second World War

created J.D. Salinger.

It's the ghost in the machine

of all the stories.

Well, I think in the beginning,

Jerry felt very patriotic.

I remember he said

it was extraordinary...

...you know, to feel that

he was part of something

doing good in the world.

Of all the days

for someone to be

initiated to combat...

...Salinger's was D-day.

On D-day,

Salinger was carrying

six chapters of

'Catcher in the Rye'.

He told Whit Burnett

that he needed those pages

to help him survive.

Salinger was in a landing craft

coming in towards Utah Beach.

Shells were flying.

The artillery shells

were coming in.

I lost my first man

by a sniper.

Shot right between the eyes.

You take a quick look, you know

that's it, and you're off.

At the end of the day,

you can sit back and...

.. "Man. Hoagie's gone."

The Americans thought that

landing would be

the hardest thing.

The day after D-day,

that's when the fighting

really started,

when the 4th Division,

that Salinger belonged to,

went into the ancient

fields and hedgerows.

They learned basically that

everything that they'd learnt

in basic training didn't apply.

Every field was gonna

cost them 20, 30 guys.

One field,

100 yards by 100 yards,

would sometimes cost

a whole platoon.

Killing ground, absolutely,

for us, like a meat grinder.

That's where our casualty rate

began to climb tremendously.

Salinger was a part of

the Counter Intelligence Corps

whose job it was to interview

enemy prisoners and civilians.

Salinger played

a very important role.

Gls, young guys, in squads,

being asked

to attack a village,

they wanted to know

every single thing

they could possibly know

about that village -

where the machine gun nests

were, where the alleyways were,

where the avenues of fire were.

Men like Salinger, their job

was to provide information

that would have kept

more of those guys alive.

He had a lot of latitude

to move behind and near

the enemy lines,

to understand the culture,

to understand the people,

to understand what

war did to the local people.

It was a more intellectual,

probing war for him

than the average grunt.

My dad was actually 21

when he met Mr Salinger,

and Mr Salinger was 25,

so he's four years his senior.

And they were in

the Counter Intelligence Corps.

The four gentlemen

you see here,

Mr Salinger, Mr Altaras,

Mr Keenan,

and my father, Paul Fitzgerald,

they refer to each other

as the Four Musketeers.

They corresponded

for nearly 65 years,

and there's really a bond.

My dad used to comment that

Altaras and Keenan would say,

"There was really no time

for us to do anything,

"because we always had to stop

"for Salinger

to sit by the roadside,

"working on short stories

or his novel."

And my father took the only

photo that anybody's ever seen

of Salinger writing

'The Catcher in the Rye'.

I took five students

to Princeton.

They wanted to see

what they could find,

what they could discover of

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