On May 29, 1968, Joe Fox had excitedly informed his colleagues that Roth was a week away from delivering his new novel, for which Random House would be expected to pony up an advance that was “probably astronomical and worth every penny of it.” By then the four early excerpts had made Roth a celebrity: Time had already called his latest work “the most brilliant piece of radical humor in years,” and two months later The New York Times predicted Portnoy would “be one of the most talked about books of the winter.” When Roth returned from Yaddo at the end of May, Donadio phoned Cerf and briskly negotiated an advance of $250,000, followed that summer by another $250,000 for movie rights, $350,000 from Bantam for paperback rights (Roth got half), and $60,000 from the Literary Guild. Also a sizable portion of Roth’s advance for When She Was Good was still unpaid, along with various foreign monies, so that Roth predicted his total income for 1968 would come to roughly $827,000.* And it was all his!

  Roth prepared for wealth and fame by looking for a new car, a new apartment, and (as he mentioned to New York magazine) a new editor at Random House. Almost two years earlier—three days after Roth had composed his ten-point grievance letter against his publisher, dated July 28, 1967—Donadio had sat down with Fox and Cerf to talk things over. “I think it was fruitful and cleared the air,” Fox wrote Roth afterward, admitting he’d been “hurt” at first, but had since seen the justice of Roth’s complaints and was “heartily sorry”: “For your possible interest, amusement and/or derision,” Fox concluded, “what I have learned from all this has pushed me over the brink into going into therapy. If I am so insensitive to the anguishes of someone I have thought of as a close friend, as well as a treasured author to whose work and aspirations I feel very close, I am obviously in big trouble.” In fact Fox got in touch with none other than Kleinschmidt, lest Roth doubt the sincerity of his remorse, which was all the more extraordinary given Fox’s well-known reluctance to become attached to people he worked with. His friend and colleague Jason Epstein—who would replace him as Roth’s editor—remembered a “bright line [of privacy] you didn’t want to cross” vis-à-vis Fox, who told another of his authors, Edward Hoagland, that he wasn’t available to him as a friend (“I have my personal life and you are not a part of it”).

  The first thing Roth did with his Portnoy windfall was write a check to Fox for the $8,000 (plus interest) he’d borrowed over the years; then he had his agent break the news that Epstein would be Roth’s editor going forward. “I’m sorry, for both our sakes, that you did not feel able to tell me yourself,” Fox wrote him, austerely, doubtless bearing in mind all the weekends Roth had been a guest at Fox’s houses in Bedford and East Hampton—all the hilarious touch football games with Plimpton, Nelson Aldrich, and so on. “I asked Candida to sever a professional relationship for me,” Roth replied. “I was ‘able’ to do it myself, but frankly I didn’t want to. I am as fond of [you] as I’ve ever been, though if your engine doesn’t throb any longer at the sound of my name, I can understand.” Roth confessed he’d been unpleasantly reminded of the problems they’d had over When She Was Good when Fox had recently warned him—“in Bedford and again in your office”—not to demand so much money for Portnoy (“I didn’t like it when rich guys were offended that I asked for a lot of money,” said Roth in 2012). “You have been a good and devoted friend,” Roth continued, “—another reason (not that I expect you’ll think it a good one) why I asked my agent to do the dirty work.” Fox was decidedly unpersuaded. After a gruesome encounter at a party that August of 1968, he wrote a final note to Roth clarifying his position:

  Despite our differences in the past, I considered you one of my closest friends, and if you had come in to see me Monday morning and said—sheepishly, defensively, angrily, coolly, or whatever—that for various reasons, rational or not, you wanted to change editors, we could have survived the awkwardness and remained friends. But you couldn’t bring yourself to do that, and this indicates to me, rightly or wrongly, that our relationship meant far less to you than it did to me.

  THE NEXT BIG CHECK Roth wrote, after paying off Fox, was for two first-class tickets on the luxury liner France. Somewhat impulsively he’d decided to take Mudge to England for a couple of months, staying a few days in a nice hotel before renting a car and driving “the length and breadth of the British Isles”; then, during August, he planned to rent a posh flat back in London where he could work on Portnoy galleys. Mudge told him he’d need a proper tuxedo for dinners aboard the France and helped him pick one out at Barney’s. “I could take you back to Pittsburgh in that,” she said, admiring the result. “Sure,” said Roth, “we’d wow ’em at the country club. Especially after my little book comes out.” She never mentioned Pittsburgh again.

  The crossing was “a delight, the food perfect,” Roth wrote friends; he’d been especially pleased by a photograph in the ship’s magazine of Mudge and him, splendid in their evening attire, identified as “Mr. and Mrs. Philip Roth.” In fact, the prospect of connubial respectability seemed to grow more distant by the day. Shortly after arriving in London, Roth was interviewed by an attractive young journalist, who politely declined his invitation to pass the afternoon in a hotel room. Indeed, the whole trip began to pall. Roth was bothered by noisy Piccadilly traffic outside their window at the Ritz, so they moved to the Connaught; then, the night before they were to depart for the long road trip to Edinburgh, Roth became sick at Jonathan and Rachel Miller’s house. Jonathan had directed The Old Glory at the American Place Theatre, and also, as luck would have it, had studied medicine before starting the comedy troupe Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett (also a guest that night). Roth had been holding forth after dinner about his near death experience the year before, then admitted he was feeling pretty queasy even as he spoke. Miller had him lie down on the butcher-block table where they’d just eaten, and after a brief examination decided to get him to University College Hospital, where he was diagnosed with adhesions beneath his appendectomy scar.

  Roth was ordered to rest, eat lightly, and stay close to London; instead of Scotland, then, they traveled fifty miles to Buckinghamshire, where the Gibberds lived in a small converted pub on the Grand Union Canal (the setting for Roth’s author photo on the Portnoy jacket). At the Gibberds’, Roth reported, they slept “in a pissy-smelling (cat piss) attic room” before returning to London and renting a “barny underfurnished flat” on Glebe Place, just off the King’s Road. At loose ends, Roth decided he might as well spend some money, and so embarked on a series of fittings at Kilgour, French & Stanbury on Savile Row, where he ended up buying four suits. He was also fitted for trendier duds at celebrity tailor Dougie Hayward’s shop in Mayfair; the bell-bottom trousers were tight in the crotch, and a friend remarked that they looked “like an ad for the Mattachine Society.” It hardly mattered, since Roth would hang all five suits in his closet at home and rarely look at them again.

  “I’ve been a perfect crab,” Roth noted, “—I keep thinking, How can this be happening to me, with all my money!” They drove through picturesque hamlets and toured old Anglo-Saxon churches, but the only thing that really engaged him was English TV—namely, the spectacle of Mayor Daley’s police bludgeoning yippies on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention: “[I] wondered what the hell I was doing trying vainly to have a good time abroad while the turbulence of the American sixties, which had enlivened both my fiction and my life, looked finally to be boiling over.” By August he’d had enough, booking passage on the Queen Elizabeth and arriving in New York the morning after Labor Day. “Delighted to be back in this madhouse,” he wrote a friend.

  MUDGE WOULD PROVE another casualty of his post-Maggie restlessness. In recent years Roth had found equilibrium in the quiet pleasure of Mudge’s company; otherwise he kept more and more to himself—working all day and reading at night. Now, however, rich and free and soon to be world-famous, he had to face facts: he adored Mudge but was sexually bored with her; as a rule he thought there was a “two-year limit” to sexual interest, and marriage was deadly in any case. Also, he never again wanted to give the state power to punish his private behavior, which would inevitably include adultery if he were to marry again. “You’re never coming back, lamb chop,” Mudge said sadly, when he proposed a six-month separation after their return from England, and of course she was right.

  Mudge remained devastated by her breakup with Roth. A mutual friend, Barbara Jakobson, mentioned to him how she and Mudge had packed up his things in her apartment, and both women had wept when Mudge remembered how much he’d loved an old pair of suede slippers. “Pure Chekhov,” Roth quipped at the time, though in later years—after many women and another marriage that went disastrously awry—he would sometimes wish he’d married Mudge after all: he would have been unfaithful, and the marriage would have ended, but he might have come out of it (à la the hero of Everyman after marriage to the Mudgelike Phoebe) with a loving daughter who’d care for him in his dotage.

  During the fall of 1968, anyway, he wasn’t single for long. The year before, while gathering in Central Park for the antiwar march along Fifth Avenue, he’d bumped into his old army buddy Marty Garbus, now a leading civil rights lawyer in New York. Back in touch, Garbus had recently invited him and Mudge to a small dinner party on November 8; the two were already broken up but decided to attend. Among the six guests was a beautiful twenty-three-year-old doctoral candidate at the Union Theological Seminary, Barbara Sproul, who’d murmured of Roth and his elegant companion, “What a lovely couple”—then was startled when Roth phoned the next day asking for a date.

  But not terribly startled. At the time she herself was seeing two men named Peter: a young publisher, Peter Mayer (her date chez Garbus), who had a cabin near hers at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, and a young newscaster from Canada, Peter Jennings, whom she’d met at the Byrdcliffe swimming pool. Otherwise she lived alone with her cat in a family apartment on East Thirty-fifth, between Park and Lexington, where her father had killed himself two years before. Her demeanor in the face of tragedy (there were others) was stoically matter-of-fact, which Roth admired: “She’d been through a lot of shit and she was solid,” he said. At a tender age she maintained two homes, shuttling between them in a little MG, and worked hard on her studies while doing what she liked with her free time. That year she spent Christmas with Jennings while seeing more and more of Roth, whom she took to Woodstock one snowy weekend and showed around town and the mountains beyond. Not a great reader of fiction, Sproul asked for recommendations and Roth gave her several marked-up books from his own library. “Why did you underline that?” she asked, pointing to a particular passage, and he quietly replied “Because it’s beautiful.” Later explaining Roth’s appeal to her twenty-three-year-old self, Sproul wrote, “In his writing, his humor, his interests, his commitment to the work and the subjects it considers, he was/is serious—morally serious. And that appealed to me enormously.”

  “The fucking was extraordinary,” said Roth, whom Sproul remembered as a little abashed by their intricate sex play (“Kink would scare him”), citing a time he’d plied a vibrator and then “mous[ed] around” the next day, as if expecting a Maggie-like tirade about his wickedness. “Well, that was fun,” said Sproul, proposing they get a couple of vibrators for friends and then openly asking for same at the drugstore. Others were struck by Sproul’s assertiveness, at least relative to Mudge, though Kleinschmidt (for one) wasn’t having any: “A mature woman wouldn’t take your shit,” he commented on Roth’s new romance.

  ROTH’S LEASE AT Kips Bay expired that winter, and he found more sumptuous quarters at 18 East Eighty-first Street, a stone’s throw from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum and incidentally across the street from Campbell’s funeral home, where he’d said goodbye to Maggie. Roth rented one of two parlor-floor apartments in the four-story building. His spacious living room was connected via a book-lined corridor to his study, also lined with bookcases and big windows giving a view of the backyard and its single plane tree. The small, nondescript bedroom was tucked away in the rear. Roth finished moving in at the end of January 1969 and summed up the month of February as “Awful . . . New apartment unfurnished. No Ann.” From his tall front windows he could see caskets going in and out of Campbell’s, and that June he would observe thousands of heartbroken fans lining up to see Judy Garland, lying in state.

  Desperate to cheer things up, Roth hired a professional decorator who arranged his living room, said Lurie, in the style of a “formal women’s club” with what appeared to be a “frieze of penises around the top of the walls”; Roth also splurged on a couple of gorgeous Persian rugs, and enlisted his discerning friend Nina Schneider to help pick out a handsome leather sofa and wing chair for the study, as well as a big sturdy worktable and bamboo ladder for his bookshelves. The little beige-walled bedroom remained almost grimly bare, perhaps because of Roth’s penitence for all the “fashionable decorating shit,” as he wrote Kleinschmidt: “WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP ME? As our poor pal Portnoy might put it.”

  Portnoy’s stridency was much on his mind, given the clamor arising from his hero’s increasing notoriety. Jason Epstein had predicted the year before that Portnoy would be “the biggest book in history”—a statement that seemed less hyperbolic as time went by. On January 11, the Times declared Roth’s novel “a certain best-seller six weeks before publication,” and gave a concrete reason why, to wit, “the prevalence of masturbation.”

  Amid the headiness of autumn Roth had agreed to any number of interviews for what was shaping up as “a new record for publicity overkill”—as his friend Albert Goldman would presently write in Life—but as the air chilled Roth felt a growing dread, and fled to Yaddo for the month of December. He returned in time for Howard Junker’s profile in the January 13 New York magazine, which got the ball rolling in earnest toward persuading the public that Roth and Portnoy were one and the same: “Roth kicked the nice Jewish boy bit,” Junker wrote, “the stance of the Jamesian moral intelligence, and unleashed his comic, foulmouthed, sex-obsessed demon. His true self.” Very like Alex Portnoy, Junker observed, Roth “notices every girl that passes on the street,” and moreover is given to “exultant self-revelation” ever since he was “freed” by psychoanalysis and “the death of his estranged wife last May.” “He got so much wrong,” Roth wrote Susan Sontag (to whom he’d allegedly referred as Suzy Q. Sontag in Junker’s presence), “and made so much up (and probably more out of ineptness than malice) that I can’t hope to begin to straighten things out in this letter, or anywhere.”

  As for Goldman’s feature in Life (“ ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ by Philip Roth Looms as a Wild Blue Shocker and the American Novel of the Sixties”), it began, at least, as a lark: the photographer Bob Peterson had accompanied the friends as they explored Roth’s old haunts in Newark and spent a day at Yaddo. The piece that followed, however, went a little far in characterizing the novel as the cultural equivalent of the Second Coming: “A savior and scapegoat of the ’60s, Portnoy is destined at the Christological age of 33 to take upon himself all the sins of sexually obsessed modern man and expiate them in a tragicomic crucifixion.” Various Jewish luminaries—Bellow, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, the Marx Brothers, et al.—were invoked as relatively minor forerunners to Roth, who “has explored the Jewish family myth more profoundly than any of his predecessors, shining his light into all corners and realizing its ultimate potentiality is an archetype of contemporary life.”

  Random House, meanwhile—the firm that had brought Ulysses to American readers in 1934—was careful to have Portnoy vetted for obscene and defamatory content by Arthur F. Abelman of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who concluded that the novel, as a whole, “contains elements of redeeming social value, such as humor,” but advised that a reference to Mayor Lindsay’s genitals on pages 272–73 might be construed as “an invasion of privacy. . . . Furthermore, since he controls the police in this City, such reference is an unwise provocation.” Given, too, that Alex Portnoy is employed in the Lindsay administration, Abelman thought it a good idea to find out whether some actual person held a similar job and otherwise resembled Roth’s hero; Irving Goldhaber, assistant director of the Commission of Human Relations, worried that some such confusion might indeed ensue, so Portnoy’s title was changed to “Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity.”

  Random House celebrated publication day, February 21, with a dinner at the swanky Raffles club; on the menu were “Mousse de Homard à la Sophie, Fine Champagne (Château Weequahic 1949), Monkey soupe à la Tortue aux Xérès, and Dessert à votre choix (Cordon Klienschmidt [sic]).” But the fun had already begun to curdle for Roth, and the reviewers were even more exasperating than usual, what with their persistent tendency to regard his novel as a confession: “Roth’s past life resembles Alex Portnoy’s,” said Time, giving examples, and even the sympathetic Brendan Gill, in The New Yorker, described Portnoy as Roth’s “hero and counterpart.” Gill was mostly enthusiastic, though, whereas the novel excited a degree of generational testiness in Alfred Kazin: “I admire it, but love it I don’t,” he wrote Jason Epstein. “The Jewish family torture, even for those who have gone through the mill, has in the past not been so purely psychological, has certainly in the past gone along with a certain moral and even spiritual insight. But Roth is essentially a savage writer: no nuances, and above all, no love.” Kazin glossed over the worst of this verdict in his critique for The New York Review of Books, conceding Roth’s gifts as a “mimic and fantasist” but remarking that “he can write of Jews only as hysterics” and also taking him to task for what Irving Howe would later characterize as “thin personal culture”—as Kazin put it, “he writes without the aid of general ideas (Herzog suffered twice as much as Portnoy does, but Herzog also lived in history; Portnoy lives only through his mother).” Over the years Kazin would sometimes try explaining as much to Roth, whose idea of “Jewish identity,” said Kazin, was a callow secularization of a subject that “began in the desert, not in Newark.” “You don’t understand,” he’d say, poking the younger man in the chest. “You don’t even understand when I tell you you don’t understand.”