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Bad dirt
The author of "Peyton Place" implicated
her neighbors in many sins. Now,
they're returning the favor.
By Bill Donahue
April 15, 1999 | The summer I turned 12, there was not much to do in Gilmanton, N.H., so I went to the post office daily and hung out, listening to the old-timers who congregated by the mailboxes to chew on the town's choicest rumors -- or "roomahs," as they pronounced that powerful word. These were true Yankees, men with calluses on their hands and framed photos of the grandkids atop the TV back at home, and listening to them, I could discern how a New England town works. People know one another's lives; every human error is as public as a sheet on a clothesline. Usually, the error is small -- a neighbor forgets to return a borrowed chainsaw, say -- and it is forgiven, laughed off as charming. Occasionally, though, the error is wounding and unforgivable. It is a sin, and it can be digested only through myth.
The greatest myth floating about the post office that summer of 1976 was an ancient one, and it involved Gilmanton's most famous writer, Grace Metalious, whose blockbuster 1956 novel, "Peyton Place," aired the pettiness, the crimes and the carnality of, ahem, a small town in New Hampshire. "Peyton Place" spawned a movie and a TV series. It will be reissued today by Northeastern University Press, and reissued again this fall by Random House. But in Gilmanton, a town of 2,600 that I have lived in, at my grandmother's house, every summer of my life, rumor still insists that Grace did not write the book.
Born Grace DeRepentigny, Metalious was a hard-drinking, sexually frank French Canadian from a rough working-class family and, according to legend, she was too drunk and too randy to compose cogent prose. She may have invented the seamy plot for "Peyton Place," but she relied (supposedly) on her best friend, Laurie Wilkens -- a Barnard grad and the Gilmanton correspondent for the local Laconia Evening Citizen -- to actually write the novel. In the mind's eye of many Gilmantonites, troubled Grace Metalious will be forever escaping her rented tar-paper shack on Loon Pond Road and trundling up Frisky Hill to find solace -- and serious editorial help -- at Shaky Acres, as Laurie's commodious old farmhouse is called.
Grace died of cirrhosis in 1964, when she was 39. This spring I deemed it safe to finally investigate the rumors about who really wrote "Peyton Place."  Next page | The author wore a mink coat -- and nothing else
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