SHARK THRILLER THAT 50 YEARS AGO CAPTURED READERS’ ANGSTThe New York Times (International Edition)
20 Jul 2024
In 1973, the first chapter of an unpublished novel was photocopied and passed around the Manhattan offices of Doubleday & Co. with a note. “Read this,” it dared, “without reading the rest of the book.”
Those who accepted the challenge were treated to a swift-moving tale of terror, one that begins with a young woman taking a postcoital dip in the waters off Long Island. As her lover dozes on the beach, she’s ravaged by a great white shark.
“The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water,” the passage read. “The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly.”
Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, had circulated the bloody, soapy excerpt to drum up excitement for his latest project: a thriller about a massive fish stalking a small island town, written by a young author named Peter Benchley.
Congdon’s gambit worked. No one who read the opening could put the novel down. All it needed was a grabby title. Benchley had spent months kicking around potential names (“Dark White”? “The Edge of Gloom”?). Finally, just hours before deadline, he found it.
“Jaws,” he wrote on the manuscript’s cover page.
When it was released in early 1974, Benchley’s novel kicked off a feeding frenzy in the publishing industry — and in Hollywood. “Jaws” spent months on the best-seller lists, turned Benchley from an unknown to a literary celebrity and, of course, became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s blockbusting 1975 film adaptation.
While most readers were drawn to the book’s shark-centric story line, “Jaws” rode multiple mid-1970s cultural waves: It was also a novel about a frayed marriage, a financially iffy town and a corrupt local government — released at a time of skyrocketing divorce rates, mass unemployment and a presidential scandal.
At a time of change and uncertainty, “Jaws” functioned as an allegory for whatever scared or angered the reader. Even Fidel Castro was a fan, describing “Jaws” as a “splendid Marxist lesson,” one that proved that “capitalism will risk even human life in order to keep the markets going.”
The success of “Jaws” — at bookstores and in theaters — had unforeseen consequences for Benchley. Throughout the late ’70s, he watched in frustration as sharks were branded public enemies. Benchley, a longtime sea lover, spent decades transforming himself into an amicable shark defender, reminding readers that the man-eater in “Jaws” was a work of fiction.
“Many people took ‘Jaws’ as a license to go out and kill sharks,” said Wendy Benchley, who was married to Benchley from 1964 until his death in 2006. “We tried to use ‘Jaws’ in every way we could to sound the alarm about sharks, and about how important they were to the ecosystem.”
It was an unlikely legacy for Benchley’s gruesome, toothsome book — one the author never expected to be a hit in the first place. He didn’t think readers would seize on a beast-versus-beach tale from a first-time novelist. And the idea of “Jaws,” with its monster shark, making it to the big screen seemed unworkable to him.
“Everything about it was an accident,” Benchley would say decades after the summer of “Jaws” — the book, the phenomenon, the whole thing.
Benchley’s infatuation with sharks — and with writing — began during his childhood summers on Nantucket. That’s where he’d go fishing with his father, the novelist Nathaniel Benchley, and notice the many fins cresting the water. It’s also where he’d spend hours by himself, practicing his craft.
“His father was very smart with him,” Wendy Benchley recalled in a recent video interview. “He said, ‘If you want to write novels, you just absolutely cannot have writer’s block. So I’ll tell you what: I’ll pay you what you would make mowing lawns for the summer if you get up every morning at 7 and go out and produce something.’”
The younger Benchley was just starting his writing career when, in 1964, he spotted a newspaper story about a fisherman named Frank Mundus, who’d used harpoons to capture a giant great white shark off Montauk Point. There’d been a recent uptick in great whites in the area, but none as large as Mundus’s catch, which was more than 17 feet, or 5 meters, long and estimated to weigh nearly 4,500 pounds, or over 2,000 kilograms.
Benchley clipped the article from The New York Daily News and put it in his wallet, where it would stay for the next several years. During that time, Benchley worked as an editor at Newsweek, and later as a speechwriter for Lyndon B. Johnson. When his White House gig ended in 1969, Benchley began freelancing for numerous publications, writing
book reviews, film reviews and occasional travel pieces.
But Benchley hadn’t forgotten about that oversize shark on Long Island. He’d occasionally pull the yellowing story from his wallet and show it to others. “I would brandish it at the first hint of disbelief that such an animal could exist, let alone that it might attack boats and eat people,” he later wrote in his memoir “Shark Trouble.”
In the early 1970s, interest in great whites was surging, thanks to a series of high-profile undersea dives captured in the documentary “Blue Water, White Death” and the book “Blue Meridian,” both released in 1971. That same year, Benchley was invited to lunch with Congdon in Manhattan. He pitched the editor a couple of potential book ideas — including one about a great white shark that plagues a seaside community.
Congdon, knowing sharks were a hot commodity — and seeing that Benchley was an amateur expert on the subject — agreed to pay him $1,000 for the first four chapters. Benchley, then living with his wife and two young kids in Pennington, N.J., rented a room in a furnace factory and got to work.
Benchley’s first stab at “Jaws” was rejected by Congdon, who thought the book was trying too hard to be humorous. But by the second draft, parts of the novel were coming together — especially that first chapter, in which the shark glides through the night water, “propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.”
Kate Medina was an editorial assistant at Doubleday in the early ’70s when she was recruited to help guide Benchley through the revision process. “I don’t think the beginning of ‘Jaws’ was ever changed,” she recalled.
“Peter had from the start a strong and intuitive sense of pace and of storytelling, and a deep love for writing and for the sea,” Medina, now an executive editorial director at Random House, wrote in an email. “Every time that fish swam into the book, it was great.”
With Medina’s assistance, Benchley developed the novel’s many non-aquatic characters, including its three unlikely heroes: Martin Brody, the harried police chief of the fictitious town of Amity, Long Island; Matt Hooper, an oceanographer brought in to track the shark; and Quint, a rugged fisherman tasked with killing the fish.
Those who are only familiar with the big-screen version of “Jaws” may be surprised by the many juicy subplots in Benchley’s novel. Amity itself is on the brink of ruin, having barely survived the early ’70s recession. Also in decline: Brody’s marriage to his class-conscious wife, Ellen, who has a sexually charged encounter with Hooper at a surf-and turf spot. Then there’s the town’s mayor, Larry Vaughn, who’s so deeply indebted to the mob, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep the beaches open — even if it means people die.
For all the intrigue, though, the book’s main attraction is the shark lurking in the background, its actions and desires described with clinical rigor.
“Part of the book was from the shark’s point of view,” said Daniel Kraus, the author of last year’s acclaimed ocean-set thriller “Whale fall,” who first encountered “Jaws” as a young reader. “The book is from the perspective of a monster, and it’s not even behaving monstrously — it’s a creature just being itself.”
As the novel’s publication date neared, Doubleday’s belief in “Jaws” was so strong that the company considered a series of promotional stunts, such as hiring skywriters to spell out “READ JAWS” over Jones Beach, or putting up signs in Long Island Rail Road cars that read, “A great white shark is as long as this car.”
Yet “Jaws” didn’t end up needing a highflying marketing campaign. The novel became a must-read long before it arrived on shelves, thanks to a combination of book business might, Hollywood hype and a killer cover.
In April 1973, not long after turning in his manuscript for “Jaws,” Benchley was sitting in his kitchen, eating breakfast, when he got a phone call. It was Congdon, telling him that Doubleday had received a bid from another publishing house, Bantam, for the paperback rights to “Jaws.” The offer? More than half a million dollars.
It was life-changing money. On hearing the news, Wendy Benchley began to cry. “I thought it was just too much,” she said, “that it was going to be bad for our little family.”
The hefty payday made it clear that “Jaws” was certain to be a smash. The demand for mass market paperbacks had recently exploded, with publishers doing brisk business at drugstores and supermarkets. A paperback deal in the high six figures — as had been the case with Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and Piers Paul Read’s “Alive”— was a solid predictor of future sales.
Then came word that Universal Pictures was planning a film adaptation of Benchley’s book, after winning the rights in a bidding war in the summer of 1973. The film would be directed by Spielberg, then an amateur auteur whose second film, “The Sugarland Express,” had yet to be released.
Finally, in February 1974, “Jaws” hit bookstores. The cover image was striking: a minimalist illustration of an openmouthed shark — which one Doubleday employee compared to “a penis with teeth” — racing toward a hapless female swimmer.
As the summer drew near, “Jaws” became an essential beach read — albeit one best experienced far from the shoreline. And its popularity ballooned even more after the film adaptation, which was co-written by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb and featured a famously temperamental mechanical shark, came out in 1975.
As Wendy Benchley had feared, the success of “Jaws” also proved disruptive. Over the years, Benchley received death threats from readers who resented how much “Jaws” had scared them. And because Benchley was easily recognizable — he’d made the promotional rounds on TV and even had a cameo in the film — it felt as if the author couldn’t make a supermarket run without being accosted.
Even worse: After “Jaws,” Benchley noticed a marked increase in shark hunting and tournaments. He decried the “spasm of macho lunacy” his book had inadvertently inspired — and bemoaned the fact that, thanks to “Jaws,” millions saw sharks as ruthless killers that targeted humans.
Benchley began raising awareness of sharks’ importance to the ecosystem, even visiting Hong Kong to speak out against the mass production of shark fin soup. He also embarked on several dives with his wife — including expeditions in which they encountered sharks up close.
“We grew in our appreciation of the ocean,” Wendy Benchley said. “We learned with everybody else.”
Not long before his death in 2006, Benchley looked back on “Jaws” with what sounded like a tinge of regret. “Knowing what I know now,” he said, “I could never write that book today. Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”
But Wendy Benchley said the author remained proud of “Jaws,” and of its impact — not just on readers and moviegoers, but also ultimately on the awareness of sharks. “He was at peace with it,” she said.
And over the years, whenever someone brought up how much “Jaws” had scared them, he had a quick and punchy response: “It was just a novel.”
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