Yeah … more that for me too.
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I wondered about this, too. That episode didn’t move the plot along in any way and was disgusting to boot: “After six weeks of the most prolonged spree in town history, Kenny’s cellar floor was covered with vomit and feces.”
This segment just served to reinforce the novel’s image of men as beasts. I don’t remember reading anything about Grace Metallious’ own life that would prompt such a viewpoint. Ironic and sad that her own life ended due to severe alcoholism post-publication of Peyton Place.
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Actually, the Vanity Fair article posted above says the episode was rooted in reality – or, at least in stories Grace was told.
“Grace soaked up the details, and she used them in Peyton Place in the story of Selena Cross, the dark ingenue from the wrong side of the tracks who is brutally raped by her stepfather and kills him, burying his body in a sheep pen. (Saying that the American public wasn’t ready for full-on incest, Kitty Messner insisted Grace change him from father to stepfather.) Grace frantically scribbled down additional tales of Gilmanton life, including some from Arlington “Chunky” Hartford, a Gilmanton cop and born storyteller who told Grace about “hard-cider parties” held in the basement of a local farmhouse. Men would supposedly pile in for up to a week at a time, getting sauced. The anecdotes also piled up—as did Gilmanton’s wrath once they all appeared in print.”
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Thank you, @CBBBlinker – I just settled in for a Saturday morning read of the Vanity Fair article. The author has a colorful way with words, and I don’t just mean the parts about Grace Metalious:
Lana Turner received the only Academy Award nomination of her career for playing Constance MacKenzie—this, despite a performance that resembles that of a department-store mannequin that has somehow wandered away from its window.
Considering all the dark truths Metalious revealed about the inhabitants of Peyton Place, and the novel’s cynical view of human nature, it’s surprising and ironic that her own downfall was hastened by deceptive people who took advantage of her: her literary agent who stole much of her fortune, her British husband who coerced her on her deathbed to will everything to him – and who turned out to have a wife and five children in England, etc.
Her ex-husband George says, “She was naïve, unfortunately. She put her trust in the wrong people, and she believed in the basic good of people. She had faith, and it worked against her.”
Not the description I would have expected of the woman who penned the words in Peyton Place.
How young she was – around the age of many of our own children, I suspect. Very sad.
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Yes, it is very sad how young Metalious died. From the article you’re quoting above it sounds like she was living her own Peyton Place. I was thinking about my own town and how over the years we have definitely seen some Peyton Place-ish adventures, but never in the amount shown in the novel.
The Cameron introduction was in the version of the book I got from my library. I tried to find it online to post here but couldn’t. But it was because of her intro that my eyes were really opened to what I thought (and still think) were the feminist themes in the book.
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I like Foner Gyllenhaal’s take:
Screenwriter Foner Gyllenhaal sees Grace less as feminist icon than as unwitting trailblazer, and has framed the script for the upcoming film version of her life in those terms. “I don’t think she went out there to be a feminist,” Foner Gyllenhaal says. “I think she went out there to be a human being who wanted to live in a world where people weren’t hypocritical and told the truth and stood by their actions. And in that regard I think she was innocent as well as brave.”
That Vanity Fair article is from 2006, so I guess the biopic on Grace Metalious came and went a long time ago – if it was ever made at all. I did a quick IMDB search, but couldn’t find it.
The movie with Sandra Bullock as Grace, was never made. Dang ! I think it would be fascinating look at her life. I’m surprised no one has mentioned the possibility that Grace was Bi- polar, or some kind of mental illness, beyond. Alcoholism.
Here is article -
“ The Forgotten Legacy of Grace Metalious and PEYTON PLACE
“ Apart from Selena Cross’s rape, the general theme of Peyton Place can almost be summarized by a philosophy that women are their own people who don’t need permission to live out their own lives. “[Grace] was doing something on a cultural level that was extremely important. She was telling women it was O.K. to be sexual beings … to have the aspirations that men had,” said screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, who in the mid-2000s had completed a script based on Emily Toth’s biography of Grace Metalious called Grace that was once slated to star Sandra Bullock in the title role, never to materialize. “It was sort of like The Emperor’s New Clothes . She got herself into a lot of trouble because she had no idea that there was anything wrong with any of the things she was saying and doing.”
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I’m not so sure I buy into Grace being “naive” etc. You don’t write a colleague into your book and then forge his name on a release. Forging his name indicates an awareness of wrong-doing, otherwise she would have mentioned to her agent or editor. Why keep it a secret if she’s nothing but naive or trusting? Why not mention to the Gilmanton cop that his “anecdotes” would be in her book?
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I found this article:
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What was all of your take on Norman and his mother always giving him enemas? Was that weird or what?
It made me wonder where Metalious had even come up with that idea! Norman seemed remarkably normal despite his mother at least for a while…
I think it’s possible to be emotionally naive while also being rash, amoral, and/or untrustworthy. Toth comments, in either the preface or afterward of her biography, that Metalious was looking for a mom. That kind of hole can make a person indiscriminate about forming human connections. That’s sort of the way I took “naive,” rather than a more conventionally innocent definition. It’s also possible to believe in other people but behave horribly yourself at the same time. I don’t know, maybe “needy” would have been a better word.
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Interesting commentary. For those without NY times subscriptions here is one writer’s view of Peyton Place.
Metalious’s gender politics, however, leave much to be desired. Suffice it to say that the author was either incapable or unwilling to critique the very real violence of patriarchy — physical, psychic and otherwise — without making a simultaneous and cartoonish mockery of femininity. Although the men of “Peyton Place” are by no means immune to the withering disapproval of the author’s poison pen — they beat, they cheat, they rob, they lie — the town’s chorus of women comes in for a special sort of sadistic dispensation. There’s the sexually frustrated, cat-loving spinster; the long-suffering working-class simpleton; the conniving Lady Macbeth; the teenage tramp; the adulterous wife; the hysterical and controlling Queen Jocasta. All of them are here, and all of them are made to pay.
Of course, perhaps this — the male commission of crimes that disproportionately target women — was Metalious’s point. Maybe she felt that tarnishing the patina of the picture-perfect New England of the American imagination required the bruised faces and broken bodies of the fairer sex. Maybe she didn’t know how to indict what Carlos Baker’s review in these pages called “the false fronts and bourgeois pretensions of allegedly respectable communities” without resorting to characterizations of women that reduced them to hoary clichés. Maybe she honestly believed that a scene meant to demonstrate the sexual awakening of one of her characters required that this woman, the fair-haired Constance MacKenzie, be forced into submission by a violent, swarthy suitor, Tomas Makris, who “slapped her a stunning blow across the mouth” before he made her feel “the first red gush of shamed pleasure.” Constance eventually marries Tomas, and they live happily ever after. Maybe Metalious thought this stuff was romantic and liberating. I would call it anything but.
Anna Holmes has written for numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Harper’s, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker online. A 2012 recipient of the Mirror Award for Commentary, presented by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Journalism, she is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s Web site she created in 2007.</“>
The enemas were very weird. I was also really upset when Norman killed the cat. It really seemed out of character to me. Not expected and very disturbing.
I watched the first two episodes of the Peyton Place TV series on YouTube. There are significant changes in some of the characters. Different jobs and different relationships. Not sure I can handle watching much more.
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“Emotionally naive” – yes. Grace was thrown into another world that she did not know how to navigate. Not unlike some of our own kids when they go off to college, in that they depart well-read, intelligent, ambitious, confident – and then face a freshman year crisis they didn’t expect and struggle to achieve or fit in (and sometimes party too heavily!) But Grace was entering a much more dangerous environment, with little support and lots of people poised to take advantage of her.
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I was not at all surprised! Funny thing…I read this interaction between Norman and his mother:
“You’d get along without your mother.”
Norman collapsed on the floor at his mother’s feet. He sobbed hysterically and tugged at her skirt with both hands, but she would not look down at him.
“No, I wouldn’t get along! I’d die myself. I love only you, Mother. I don’t love anybody else.”
"Are you sure, Norman? There’s nobody else you love?
“No, no, no. There is no one else, Mother. Just you.”
…And I typed into my Kindle notes, “Is this Norman Bates? He’s going to end up one day keeping his stuffed mother in a rocking chair.”
Shortly thereafter, came the cat killing:
…he jumped at the cat and fastened his hands around its throat. The tom fought, digging his claws deep into Norman’s hand, but to the boy the scratches were no more than red marks made by a feather dipped in paint. He squeezed and squeezed, and even when he knew that the tom was quite dead, he continued to squeeze, and all the while he was sobbing, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
Is that a serial killer in the making or what? After that, I kept picturing Anthony Perkins as Norman. If you think about the way Perkins played Norman Bates, it was very similar to Norman Page – soft-spoken, a little shy, comes across as sweet, but also a bit peculiar.
I know Norman didn’t end up a serial killer in Peyton Place. At least not yet. Maybe that happens after his mother is in the rocker. 
In the Vanity Fair article, we learned that Metalious’ agent didn’t think the public was ready for incest, so she pushed to have the relationship between Selena and her (step)father changed. But man, the Evelyn-Norman Page enemas came pretty darn close to a similar scenario.
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I did not go down the path of potential serial killer. I just thought he was a pathetic child who was cruelly manipulated by his mother. I didn’t see the violence in the background.
Interestingly, in the TV series, Norman is a Harrington. He is Rodney’s younger brother, Leslie’s son. He seems like the same shy withdrawn character, but now in the Harrington family.
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Nobody has mentioned Allison’s friend Kathy. She calls Allison out for cruel behavior when needed (and Norman’s strangeness, if I remember correctly.) She seems the most content of various characters despite losing an arm and despite losing her lawsuit. While we’ve mentioned the bad behavior of multiple male characters, Kathy’s fiancé/later husband never wavers.
And, yes, I have hope for Allison and Selena with the hints of the young men possibly in their future. Actually, more so for Selena, as I find her the stronger of the two characters. It’s easier for me to see into her future, whether or not she develops a relationship with the young attorney. She seems to have built something solid with a job, close ties with her brothers, and support from the community (not everyone … but still). Allison seems more a work in progress.
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