Typewriter Tycoon

A SUMMER PLACE (369 pp.)--Sloan Wilson--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

This novel keeps the reader in suspense at the end of every chapter--waiting for the soap commercial. Can Molly Jorgenson and Johnny Hunter, teen-age lovers and troubled children of divorce, find lasting happiness by racing the stork to the altar? Will Johnny's mother Sylvia desert her alcoholic husband, with his blue-blood pedigree and red-ink bank balance, for an adulterous affair with Molly's self-made millionaire father? Is life a game of second chance or an inescapably heir-conditioned nightmare?

The answers to these and sundry other questions are offered in a fictional session of bland man's buff by Sloan Wilson, the man who did more for gray flannel suits than Brooks Brothers. The novel's key setting is Pine Island, Me., a summer retreat and a kind of "perverted Garden of Eden from which one was expelled for the sin of poverty." Among the unexpelled nouveau poor are the Hunters, who eke out their stay as genteel innkeepers. Fortyish Bart Hunter is an existentially minded drunkard whose most cutting insult is to call someone "cheerful." His disillusioned wife Sylvia once took him for a big social cheese, but now knows him for an ineffectual mouse. Their son John, a taut, brooding boy of 14, and his nondescript little sister round out the unhappy Hunter clan.

Outdoor Amours. When another family, the nouveau riche Jorgensons, turns up in the harbor on a rented yacht and takes rooms at the inn, the Hunters go into a tizzy. Ken Jorgenson is a hearty Midwestern manufacturing tycoon, but years before he was a lowly swimming instructor on Pine Island, cruelly taunted by the rich young summer crowd. Ken's whiny wife Helen is a cellophane-wrapped neurotic, untouched by life. Their 13-year-old daughter Molly is an adolescent sleeping beauty waiting to be kissed into existence. The kiss comes, of course, from Johnny, but before that the grownups get involved in more serious goings-on.

Ken Jorgenson and Sylvia Hunter's idea of turning the clock back is to get divorced and marry each other. A couple of years pass, and as Molly and Johnny cool toward their parents, they warm to each other. In keeping with the outdoorsy spirit of the novel's amours, Molly finally succumbs to Johnny on a sand dune. The wedding bells have a somber ring, what with Molly pregnant at 17, but middle-aging Ken and Sylvia Jorgenson rally round, and Summer Place ends on a sunnily implausible note of general contentment.

Boom Mentality. Novelist Wilson is slick, readable and craftsmanlike. He has again chosen a highly American theme: the intensive pursuit of happiness. But he has recorded his findings without giving himself the satirical elbow room to comment on them. Author Wilson has chided gloomy fellow novelists who write "as if we were back in the Depression years," and his point is well taken. He himself is open to the opposite charge of a boom mentality about the human condition. The pithiest critique of this point of view came from F. Scott Fitzgerald during another boom: "The victor belongs to the spoils."

Novelist Wilson's own spoils will be impressive. Prepublication orders totaling nearly 50,000 copies make A Summer Place an automatic bestseller. With serialization in McCall's ($100.000) and a Hollywood sale ($500,000 plus 25% of the profits), the book is as good a property as the oil wells Wilson bought with his earnings from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. There is a touch of poetic justice about Sloan Wilson's success, for he used to be far more fascinated by business than by the writing game, once dreamed of making his fortune in soybeans. (He was born into a Connecticut literary family, and his financial fancies, he thinks, were a kind of "adolescent rebellion in reverse.") Now a dedicated writer. Wilson is nevertheless in the midst of a business coup that is interesting publishers' row a lot more than soybeans. Author Wilson has taken a baby step toward becoming a co-publisher of his own novel.

Marquand-Type Society. While Wilson signed a more or less routine contract with his publisher Simon & Schuster, his royalties are above the 15% top writers receive, and certain unusual details are involved. The contract was negotiated and held by an intermediary group known as Ridge Press, in which Sloan Wilson is a minority stockholder. Head of Ridge Press is a pal of Wilson's, a onetime magazine (Argosy) executive named Jerry Mason, who acted as editor, designer and bargaining agent for the new book (Simon & Schuster handles printing, advertising and distribution). For Ridge Press, Mason kept full movie and TV rights, of which the publisher would ordinarily take 10%. Moreover. Wilson's income will be spaced out for tax purposes "at $25,000 a year or better." This. Author Wilson hopes, will keep him from the fate of many another bestselling author--"being a millionaire one year and broke the next."

With this financial peace of mind, likened by Sloan Wilson, sometime teacher of English, to a professor's "permanent tenure," Novelist Wilson, at 37, hopes to become "an old-fashioned man of letters whose obituary lists 20 or so novels to his credit." Unpretentious about his writing so far ("a small, humble and private thing"), Wilson would like most "to describe my own Marquand-type society with Hemingway's power." With his blond, blue-eyed, Ivy League good looks, Wilson leads a quiet life in not quite Marquand-type country (Pound Ridge. N.Y.), has only one major crotchet: he does not own a gray flannel suit ("I won't have one in the house"), although clothiers have offered to outfit him with enough gray flannel suits "to last a lifetime."

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