MADness—the Blog

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was a story published in the New Yorker in the late 1940s.  Samuel Goldwyn liked it enough he made it into a movie.  He bought the rights from a hot young writer and hired the Epstein brothers to adapt it for the big screen.  Starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the film was called My Foolish Heart and came out in 1949.  It was not well-received.  Worse, the writer of the short story was so disillusioned with the “bastardization” that he swore never to let Hollywood film another of his stories.   He kept his word.

That hot young writer was, of course, J.D. Salinger.  For the rest of his life, members of that odd bunch called the Glass family, along with a fellow named Holden Caulfield, would be found only on the page, not on the screen, despite repeated efforts by moviemakers to get Salinger to change his mind.  Among the inquiring parties, apparently, were Jerry Lewis, Billy Wilder, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, and Leonardo DiCaprio.  We’ll see what happens now.  Salinger died Wednesday.  He was 91.

I had an experience with “Uncle Wiggily” and now that J.D. is no longer around, I suppose I can tell all.  After several attempts without success, I finally had my first crossword puzzle accepted at the New York Times.  The theme was based on “uncles” and one of the nine famous uncles in the grid was Uncle WIGGILY.  There was one problem, however—I had spelled the name WIGGLY.  How did I ever pull a boner like that?  It wasn’t for lack of checking.  I looked everywhere I could and found lots of support for the misspelled version.  Even today, the wrong spelling gets four times as many hits as the right one at Google.  (This New York Times article from 1976 makes the same error I did.)  I didn’t discover the problem until after the puzzle had been submitted and accepted.  The proof I discovered when I pulled Salinger’s Nine Stories from my bookshelf to see “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” on the cover.*  Wished I had looked there in the first place.

Whether the puzzle was to be my first or my last I wasn’t sure, but I wrote to Will Shortz, the editor and all-around puzzlemaster at the Times, to explain the problem.  He wrote back to say I was nuts to think I’d ever have a crossword puzzle published in his town again.  Actually, he could have, but he didn’t.  The story in fact has a happy ending.  I revised the crossword—including the correctly spelled WIGGILY—and the puzzle, my first in the Times, was published in January 2006.  There was to be an even happier ending:  Will had revised the puzzle himself, and that version (through some mysterious quirk of fate in which neither Will nor his team of test solvers noticed the duplication) was published nine months later.  I don’t know that had ever happened before, but it worked out fine for me.  I got paid twice for more or less the same puzzle.

* The Uncle Wiggily character, by the way, was not Salinger’s invention.  Uncle Wiggily Longears, the gentleman rabbit of children’s lit, was created by writer Howard Roger Garis in the early 20th century.  Salinger just borrowed the name.