27 January: JD Salinger

J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger died on this date in 2010 at the age of 91. Here are ten facts about him:

1. Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York on January 1st, 1919. His father was Jewish, of Lithuanian descent.
2. At school, the young Jerome, usually known as Jerry, was into acting rather than writing. He signed his yearbook with the names of characters he’d played.
3. Although Salinger was a prolific writer of short stories, he only ever published one novel, Catcher in the Rye, a coming of age story about a young man named Holden Caulfield trying to find himself after being expelled from school. This book is often on school reading lists, including mine – I recall reading it aged about 15. At the same time, it’s also one of the most frequently banned books of the past 50 years because there’s a fair amount of swearing and sex in it. It has been a favourite of killers, as well. Mark David Chapman, John Lennon's assassin, was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye, and claimed, “The reason I killed John Lennon was to promote the reading of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye”. Police found a copy of the novel in John Hinckley Jr’s apartment after he shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, and in 1989, Robert John Bardo had a copy in his pocket when he was arrested for murdering actress Rebecca Schaeffer.
4. Salinger served in WWII, and was writing Catcher in the Rye at the time. He carried pages of the manuscript with him into battle. He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of Bulge and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. After the war, he suffered a nervous breakdown, which today may well have been diagnosed as PTSD.
5. He met his first wife while working for the Counter-intelligence Corps in Germany. Her name was Sylvia Welter. She was a doctor, of French and German heritage. When Salinger and Welter married, they avoided the non-fraternisation rules by forging Welter’s papers so she didn’t appear to be German. It probably goes without saying that Salinger’s Jewish family weren’t impressed when he showed up back home with a German wife. The marriage only lasted 8 months, and may have ended when Salinger heard rumours Sylvia had actually been a member of the Gestapo. She returned to Germany.
6. Sylvia was the only love interest of Salinger’s who was the same age as him. Mostly, he went for much younger women. At 23, he was dating Oona O’Neill, who was 16. She clearly had a thing for older men as she dumped him for someone even older – Charlie Chaplin, who was 53, and became his fourth wife. Salinger’s second wife was Claire Douglas, who was 16 when they met. He was 31, and still involved with Jean Miller, a woman he’d met when she was just 14. Salinger dumped her after she persuaded him to sleep with her when she was 20, and went looking for Claire, who by now had married someone else. He enticed her away from her husband and they married in 1955, and had two children. Their daughter would later claim that the only reason Salinger married and had a family at all was because he’d read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru who wrote that being a “householder” was the way to enlightenment.
7. Salinger explored and studied a number of religions during his lifetime, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian Science and Scientology. It’s possible part of the reason Claire and he divorced was that he’d frequently come home from his travels insisting the family follow a new religion. After the divorce, he built himself a house just down the road from where Claire and the children lived so he could visit them often. At 53, he started a relationship with Joyce Maynard, 19. She moved in with him after they’d corresponded for a while. “Getting a letter from J.D. Salinger was like getting a letter from Holden Caulfield but written just to me — It was a pretty strong drug. It was the only drug I took in college,” she would later write in her memoir. They were together for 8 months. Maynard states that she later found out that he’d written to many other young women, grooming them to be his future partners, including one while he and Maynard were together. He dumped her, possibly because she’d started expressing a desire to have children, or because he’d already met his future third wife, Colleen O'Neill, who was 40 years younger than him.
8. In 1948, producer Darryl Zanuck purchased the rights to one of his short stories, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. Released as My Foolish Heart in 1949, it earned Susan Hayward an Oscar nomination, but Salinger hated it. He refused to sell the rights for Catcher in the Rye, although he didn’t rule out a film after he died, since he’d never have to see it.
9. He had a blazing row with one of his editors once. When submitting a short story, he’d insist that it must be published exactly as he’d written it, or not at all. The editor, A. E. Hotchner, was okay with that and agreed, but one of his colleagues changed the title and Hotchner didn’t find out until it was too late. Salinger stormed out, and the two never saw each other again. Salinger only ever gave one interview, to a high school student for the school magazine and was horrified when the local paper got hold of it and printed it. He also sued author Ian Hamilton for attempting to write a biography of him.
10. W.P. Kinsella did manage to publish a book with a character based on JD Salinger without getting sued. The book was called Shoeless Joe, and was made into a film, Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones.

Character birthday

Slim, aka Mortimer Fortelli. He is a member of one of three rival gangster families based in New York City. Slim is good looking, suave and charming; he is also the business brains of the family, dealing with the accounts and financial aspects of the “family business”.