Tom Heggen: A Fragment

My wife and I live on Medicine Lake, a fair-sized body of water in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. The area is chock-full of lakes, and I often tell visitors that ours is probably the least fashionable one in Hennepin County. It does boast a unique distinction, however. Medicine Lake is where, as the result of some undergraduate horseplay in the spring of 1940, young Thomas Heggen, the future author of Mister Roberts, lost part of one of his fingers.

It happened at a seasonal roadhouse called the Trail Em Inn. Medicine Lake was a resort spot in those days and the Trail Em Inn was open only during the high-summer season. Heggen was a student in the University of Minnesota Journalism School. He organized something called the Copyreaders’ Ball, more or less in mockery of the higher-toned fraternity and sorority balls of the era, and talked the proprietor of the Trail Em Inn into opening up for the occasion to host it. All of this is recorded in the late John Leggett’s absorbing dual biography of Ross Lockridge and Thomas Heggen entitled Ross and Tom (1974), rereleased by Da Capo Press in 2000.

Admission to the Copyreaders’ Ball was by invitation only, according to Leggett, and the admission price was one dollar. “Dress would be semiformal,” Leggett writes, “which, Tom explained, meant tailcoat and tweed trousers.” A fellow journalism student named Tom Wadsworth, a sometime Heggen antagonist, announced that if Heggen came in tails, he, Wadsworth, would cut them off. Heggen came in tails. He and Max Shulman—another classmate and the future author of such comic novels as The Zebra Derby and Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys—were clowning around on the dance floor when Wadsworth approached Heggen from behind, brandishing a pair of copy shears. “Tom felt a tugging,” writes Leggett, “heard a cheer from the crowd and saw Wadsworth wave one tail in the air. A moment later when Tom noticed him lunge again, shears flashing, Tom put a protective hand to his seat just as the jaws closed. He felt a stab of pain.” The entire first joint of the ring finger of his left hand had been severed. After a somber search of the dance floor, it was Heggen himself who found the missing piece. “He picked it up,” Leggett writes, “studied it and said evenly, ‘This is the most significant moment of my life.’”

Well, hardly. But it wasn’t insignificant either. Heggen’s life would turn out to be a short one. He would end it himself, an apparent suicide, at the age of twenty-nine. The subtitle to Leggett’s dual biography is “Two American Tragedies.” Both Lockridge, the author of the immensely popular forties novel Raintree County, and Heggen, whose Mister Roberts was almost equally popular, would die by their own hands. Heggen had suffered since childhood from a self-destructive streak bordering on masochism: broken bones and car wrecks were commonplace. He possessed a sardonic sense of humor and was a mischief-maker by nature, as evidenced by the Copyreaders’ Ball. A little fellow, only five-feet-eight, he weighed, according to Leggett, less than a hundred and fifty pounds. He was discovered dead of an overdose of sleeping pills in the bathtub of his apartment in New York City in May of 1949, less than three years after the publication of Mister Roberts.

What happened in the interim is probably what killed him. He had met and come under the sway of Joshua Logan, a powerhouse Broadway director who thought Mister Roberts, a skimpy book of related short stories disguised as a novel, had dramatic possibilities and could be turned into a play—which is what the two of them, during a few heated months of collaboration, proceeded to do. The play, with Henry Fonda playing Mister Roberts in the original cast, was a huge hit and suddenly Tom Heggen, at the age of twenty-six, was rolling in money, so much that he didn’t know what to do with it all. He partied, he traveled, he gave it away. He chased...