The summer of 1955 had not been good to Grace Metalious. A nine-week drought had left tiny Gilmanton, New Hampshire, bone dry, including the well in the back of the ramshackle cottage she'd sarcastically nicknamed "It'll Do." Her three children were living on lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. She was three months behind on payments for her beat-up car. At the age of 30 she was broke, smelly, thirsty, exhausted, and desperate.

She had dreamed of a different life for herself, a life of romance and adventure, a life all little girls dream of. Escaping a troubled home to sneak off to her Aunt Georgie's bathroom, she would lock the door and sit in the tub for hours, putting those dreams to paper by scribbling tales of heroines and dashing princes.

She kept writing, even after her wedding at 18 to her high-school sweetheart, George Metalious; after giving birth to her third child and having her tubes tied when doctors told her she wouldn't survive a fourth pregnancy; after George went away during World War II and had an affair; after he came home and she had an affair of her own. Writing was neither hobby nor diversion, but lifeline. During those years when George was getting his teaching degree at the University of New Hampshire under the G.I. Bill, Grace often locked her children out of the apartment so she could write, leaving her runny-nosed charges to fend for themselves in the cold by knocking on neighbors' doors, asking to be let in.

In the end, she'd written a book. Actually, a polemic. She titled it The Tree and the Blossom—about the secrets, scandals, and hypocrisy in a fictional New Hampshire town not unlike her own.

Grace discovered literary agent Jacques Chambrun by browsing through a library directory, singling him out because his was the most French-sounding name. Born Marie Grace DeRepentigny (prone to embellish, she would later state that her birth name had been Grace Marie Antoinette Jeanne d'Arc de Repentigny), she'd been brought up with an air of French snobbery that belied the modest apartment she'd shared with her mother, grandmother, and sister.

Chambrun, an unctuous dandy who favored long lunches and chauffeured cars, had an office facing the Plaza and a client roster that at one point included W. Somerset Maugham and Jack Schaefer, the author of Shane. He already knew Grace Metalious. The year before, she had sent him a passionate five-page plea outlining her dreams of becoming a published writer, along with a 312-page manuscript that focused on the travails of a pair of newlyweds—which had clear parallels to her life with George. The agent had circulated it among a few publishers; all of them declined.

So when Chambrun got The Tree and the Blossom, in April 1955, he wasn't optimistic. He perfunctorily sent it on its way through the publishing circuit, where it ended up on the desk of Leona Nevler, a manuscript reader at Lippincott. Most days, Nevler's job was to field the runoff from less discriminating agents, such as Chambrun, and sift through the mounds of unsolicited "slush," then pass along the rare jewel that might warrant an editor's attention. Nevler, it turned out, quite liked The Tree and the Blossom, but her bosses at Lippincott passed.

During a job interview at rival Julian Messner, Inc., Nevler told the firm's president, Kitty Messner, about the novel. Chic and thin, Kitty Messner was the Katharine Hepburn of the publishing world, known as much for her draping tailored suits and signature cigarette holder as for her sharp eye for commercial fiction. According to Emily Toth's 1981 biography Inside Peyton Place—the Rosetta Stone of Grace Metalious arcana—on the night of August 16, Messner decided to stay in and read Grace's saucy, compelling, and surprisingly literary book.

The next day, Kitty called Chambrun. "I have to have it," she said. The title, however, would need to be changed to the name of the town where the novel was set: Peyton Place.

Grace had been at the market in nearby Laconia, buying frozen French fries because you don't have to wash them before you cook them. Then she had taken her kids to swim in Opeechee Park. When they got back to Gilmanton, Grace, carrying two bags of groceries, spotted the mail. Amid a pile of bills and past-due notices, a yellow telegram peeked out: please call me at your earliest convenience. regards. chambrun.

"He's sold it!" Grace screamed, waving around the wire. "He's sold it!"

Indeed he had, as she discovered when she placed the call to New York, a grocery bag still tucked under one arm. Two days later, Grace Metalious, the frowsy New Hampshire housewife whose bombshell would rock American publishing, slid into a booth at '21' with her dashing agent and toasted to her success with what she remembered as a daiquiri "all pale green and so cold it hurt my teeth."

Years later, her best friend, Laurose Wilkens, would remember the phone call she'd gotten from Grace that hot and humid August day, crying and laughing at her incredible news. "Grace Metalious," Wilkens said, "would never be really poor or really happy again."

Fifty years ago, Peyton Place helped create the contemporary notion of "buzz," indicted 1950s morality, and recast the concept of the soap opera, all in one big, purple-prosed book. It would spawn a sequel, a smash film nominated for nine Academy Awards, and television's first prime-time serial. A week before it hit bookstores, on September 24, 1956, it was already on the best-seller list, where it would remain for half a year. In its first month, it sold more than 100,000 copies, at a time when the average first novel sold 3,000, total. It would go on to sell 12 million more, becoming one of the most widely read novels ever published. During its heyday, it was estimated that one in 29 Americans had bought it—legions of them hiding it in drawers and closets due to its salacious content.

Peyton Place is the story of the denizens of a small New Hampshire town, ostensibly centered around pudgy adolescent Allison MacKenzie, who dreams of being a writer but finds herself stifled by the expectations and duplicity of her small-minded neighbors, and by her own mother, Constance MacKenzie, the original desperate housewife. What sold it was possibly the most clever marketing campaign ever launched for a novel of its era: a colorful author who made good copy, and a crafty, page-turning brew of illicit sex, secret lives, public drunkenness, abortion, incest, and murder.

But the story behind Peyton Place—a scandalous phenomenon that became a metaphor for scandal ever after ("Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?" U.S. congressman Lindsey Graham remarked at the Clinton impeachment hearings, in 1998)—is one almost as lurid as the original yarn. It is a saga of rags and riches, loves won and lost, and, in the end, betrayal, malefaction, and regret. It is the story of a restless, creative girl who never quite fit in and who found an outlet to express what that was like in 1950s America, only to be crushed by the people whose faux morality she had so scathingly critiqued. It is also a revelatory tale of an accidental and largely forgotten feminist pioneer.

Overnight, Grace Metalious became wealthy, spending lavishly on stays at the Plaza and flirting with Cary Grant, her name and face splashed in newspapers across the nation. Eight years, another husband, and more than a million pissed-away dollars later, at the age of 39, she lay dying in a Boston hospital, in the company of a mysterious British lover to whom she had left her entire estate—by changing her will on her deathbed. "Be careful what you wish for," she told him in the hours before she died. "You just might get it."

Grace DeRepentigny was born in 1924 in Manchester, New Hampshire, a heavily Franco-American working-class city known for its textile mills. Her father, Al, was a merchant seaman who left the family when Grace was 10; her mother, Laurette, was a bitter would-be socialite who, as Emily Toth has recounted in her book about Grace, dreamed of writing for Harper's and bought flea-market items, which she then passed off as French family heirlooms. Despite both families' objections, Grace, still a teenager, married George Metalious, a studious Greek whom she'd known since the age of nine. Almost instantly, the marriage hit the skids. "I did not like belonging to Friendly Clubs and bridge clubs," Grace wrote later. "I did not like being regarded as a freak because I spent time in front of a typewriter instead of a sink. And George did not like my not liking the things I was supposed to like."

With her ponytail, baggy flannel shirts, and jeans, Grace broke every mold of the prim New England country wife: she was outspoken, a terrible housekeeper (once, when some P.R. guys from New York came to It'll Do, she grabbed what looked like a Brillo pad, only to discover it was a dead mouse), and shockingly well read. "She was a totally unbridled, free, glorious spirit," says Lynne Snierson, the daughter of Grace's longtime attorney, Bernard Snierson. "I didn't know any other woman like her. Grace swore, a lot, and she drank, a lot, and she had lots of guys around her. She got married and divorced and had affairs. And she talked about sex and she talked about real life and she didn't filter it. I didn't know any other woman who was like that in the 50s."

As a result, she quickly became a lightning rod for gossip wherever she lived, particularly when she would hole up writing and ignore her kids. "We didn't bother her when she was writing," says her daughter, Marsha Metalious Duprey, now 62. "We wouldn't have gotten into trouble if we did, but we didn't want to bother her. When she was writing, basically everything else went to hell: no housework got done, no cooking got done, and my dad mostly took care of us.… I didn't know any better, so I didn't question it."

Grace struck up a friendship with Laurose Wilkens, who wrote part-time for The Laconia Evening Citizen and had tracked Grace down when rumors surfaced that the wife of George Metalious, the new school principal, was writing a novel about some of the townspeople. Grace confirmed that she was working on a book, but insisted it was pure fiction. Soon, she and Laurie were together almost every day in the kitchen of Shaky Acres, Laurie's farm in Gilmanton.

While George began his job as a teacher and principal, Grace wrote. Laurie told her the story of Barbara Roberts, a local 20-year-old who in 1947 shot and killed her father, then buried his body in a goat pen on their farm. She had pleaded guilty to second-degree homicide and was sentenced to 30 years to life. Then the truth came out: for years, Roberts and her sister had been raped regularly by their father, and at times chained to a bed for days. One night he flew into a rage, chasing Barbara and her young brother around the kitchen table and threatening to kill them. She reached into a drawer, extracted her father's gun, and shot him dead. Only after an exposé by some crusading journalists—including a cub reporter for the New Hampshire Sunday News by the name of Ben Bradlee—was Barbara Roberts freed.

Grace soaked up the details, and she used them in Peyton Place in the story of Selena Cross, the dark ingenue from the wrong side of the tracks who is brutally raped by her stepfather and kills him, burying his body in a sheep pen. (Saying that the American public wasn't ready for full-on incest, Kitty Messner insisted Grace change him from father to stepfather.) Grace frantically scribbled down additional tales of Gilmanton life, including some from Arlington "Chunky" Hartford, a Gilmanton cop and born storyteller who told Grace about "hard-cider parties" held in the basement of a local farmhouse. Men would supposedly pile in for up to a week at a time, getting sauced. The anecdotes also piled up—as did Gilmanton's wrath once they all appeared in print.

"A lot of people wouldn't read the book—or they said they wouldn't," says Esther Peters, who, as a radio host at WLNH, in Laconia, interviewed Grace shortly after Peyton Place was published, and who still lives in neighboring Guilford. "Of course what happened was that people in Gilmanton, they had the book. If you happened to go to their house and asked them to bring out a copy, they'd bring out a copy—and it generally fell open at one of the places where there was a rather torrid passage."

In retaliation, the town gossips spread Grace stories with brutal efficacy, from the outlandish (she had gone to the grocery store in a mink coat while naked underneath; she had greeted the milkman in the buff) to the valid (her house was filthy; she cheated on her husband). According to Emily Toth's biography, Grace had drifted into an affair with her neighbor Carl Newman and was often spotted carousing with him at the Rod and Gun Club, on Beacon Street. So people talked. And talked. Grace had, in effect, begun living Peyton Place.

The most damning rumor was also the most hurtful: that she hadn't actually written the book at all. "People would say, 'Oh, she couldn't have written that. Her husband went to college. I bet he wrote it,'" says John Chandler, Bernard Snierson's law partner. At one point Grace sat in Chandler's office, writing some background information for a legal matter. "After I read that," Chandler says, "there was no question in my mind about who wrote Peyton Place."

In public, Grace struck back at her neighbors. Her point wasn't that her life was perfect; it was that their lives weren't, either. The only difference was that she wasn't hiding it. "To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture," she said. "But if you go beneath that picture, it's like turning over a rock with your foot—all kinds of strange things crawl out. Everybody who lives in town knows what's going on—there are no secrets—but they don't want outsiders to know."

‘Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay."

So begins Peyton Place, in an introduction that would become almost as famous as the work itself.

Peyton Place is a hybrid of the literary and the sordid, Upton Sinclair by way of Forever Amber. Although clearly influenced by Henry Bellamann's Kings Row, at its heart it is a manifesto, a blistering indictment of small-town values, classism, and racism—one that got lost in the titillating pages that Americans dog-eared and read behind closed blinds. John Waters, the flamboyant filmmaker who once left a bottle of liquor at Grace's grave, remembers the thrill of being 10 years old and reading his father's stashed-away copy. Indeed, he quotes "the V of her crotch" within the first two minutes of a phone call from Provincetown. "I thought, How filthy and great!" he says. "I just became obsessed with it."

"One of my earliest memories as a teenager is [of] sneaking off with friends and they grabbed their moms' copies of Peyton Place and we would go through 'the good parts,'" adds Barbara Delinsky, the best-selling romance novelist whose latest book, Looking for Peyton Place, is a tribute to Grace.

A "good part" meant sex, such as the famous scene where town harlot Betty Anderson, furious that bad boy Rodney Harrington has taken Allison MacKenzie to the school dance, gets him all riled up in his car.

"Is it up, Rod?" she panted, undulating her body under his. "Is it up good and hard?"

"Oh, yes," he whispered, almost unable to speak. "Oh, yes."

Without another word, Betty jackknifed her knees, pushed Rodney away from her, clicked the lock on the door and was outside of the car.

"Now go shove it into Allison MacKenzie," she screamed at him.

There were other steamy sections as well—most notably the scene where virile principal Tomas Makris, after a moonlit swim with the repressed Constance, commands her to "untie the top of your bathing suit. I want to feel your breasts against me when I kiss you." (It would turn out that Makris was the name of a co-worker of George's who matched his fictional counterpart's physical description; Makris sued Grace for libel, eventually settling out of court for $60,000. Years later, it was revealed that Grace had forged Makris's name on a release form. In the film and TV installments, the character's name was changed to Michael Rossi.) But it was through the nonsexual passages that Grace delivered her most withering social commentary, such as her description of the hidden, rancid shantytown, which the proper townsfolk pretended not to see.

In the end, reviews were largely negative. "Never before in my memory has a young mother published a book in language approximately that of longshoremen on a bellicose binge," bellowed the New York World-Telegram. Grace also took a hit in the editorial pages. In a scathing commentary under the headline the filth they live by in the Laconia Evening Citizen, publisher William Loeb branded the book "literary sewage."

"If I'm a lousy writer," Grace shot back, "then a hell of a lot of people have lousy taste."

Grace, in fact, found an unlikely ally in The New York Times Book Review. Calling Peyton Place a "small town peep show," the paper applauded the book's stand "against the false fronts and bourgeois pretensions of allegedly respectable communities," recognizing the book for what Grace had intended it to be: a cultural bitch slap at the duplicitous notions of proper conduct in the age of Eisenhower.

"It was sort of like 'The Emperor's New Clothes.' She got herself into a lot of trouble because she had no idea that there was anything wrong with any of the things she was saying and doing," says screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, mother of actors Jake and Maggie, who has just completed a script based on Toth's biography. Grace, to be produced by Sandra Bullock's Fortis Films and feature Bullock in the title role, is scheduled to begin production this year. The author of Peyton Place, says Foner Gyllenhaal, "was doing something on a cultural level that was extremely important. She was telling women it was O.K. to be sexual beings … to have the aspirations that men had."

Kitty Messner suspected that she had a winner in Peyton Place, and not just because of its incendiary content. She also had the perfect selling tool: Grace Metalious, the plump, salty schoolteacher's wife. Messner hired publicist Alan Brandt to beat the media drums. Brandt dashed off a memo to Hal Boyle, the nationally syndicated columnist, including an irresistible hook: Grace's bookish husband was likely to be fired because of his wife's off-color novel.

Boyle took the bait. Calling the book "Tobacco Road with a Yankee accent," he reported on August 29, 1956, that "a young schoolteacher's wife who never took a writing lesson in her life may become a literary sensation of the year next month. 'I feel pretty sure of one thing—it'll probably cost my husband his job,' said Mrs. Grace Metalious cheerfully."

The column appeared in the Boston Traveler under a headline in massive type usually reserved for events such as the bombing of Hiroshima: teacher fired for wife's book. (George had, in fact, not had his contract renewed.) Immediately, photographers and reporters in fedoras swamped tiny Gilmanton looking for Grace. She spent the day in Laurie Wilkens's bathroom, hiding.

The publicity did wonders for book sales but ravaged the Metalious marriage. George took a teaching job in Stow, Massachusetts, rented an apartment, and left Grace and the kids behind to weather the storm. Grace got threatening phone calls telling her to move, and her children suffered the fallout. "We had a lot of problems at school," Marsha Duprey recalls, "because parents didn't want their children playing with us." Her younger brother, nicknamed Mike, then nine, regularly beat up kids who taunted their sister, Cindy, six. "I felt sorry for all of them," says Esther Peters. "I wanted to make them happier, make them feel more accepted. What little I could do, I did."

If Grace was feeling blue, she hid it. She had bigger things facing her now. A publicity tour. A new man—a local D.J. who would change her life. And Hollywood, which had come calling.

In New York, Brandt arranged for Grace to be interviewed on a local news show called Night Beat, hosted by a young, rising journalist, Mike Wallace. Wallace had spent his boyhood summers in New Hampshire. "She was simply a surprise to all of us," he recalls. "Because of her background, because of the way she looked, because of 'Peyton Place,' New Hampshire. That kind of thing has been going on? Well, of course that kind of thing had been going on in small towns all over the world, forever. But suddenly here was this bland housewife."

Terrified at the thought of being on live television, Grace was a wreck, accidentally ripping her girdle right before the show aired. She was helped by an aspiring actress, Jacqueline Susann, who did commercial breaks for the station. (Ten years later, Susann would follow in Grace's footsteps by writing the steamy cult best-seller Valley of the Dolls.)

In her book on Grace, Toth relates how the author, just before the program started, begged Wallace's producer, Ted Yates, to promise that Wallace would not ask if Peyton Place was her autobiography. No sooner had the cameras begun rolling than Wallace, smoking a cigarette in his best noir fashion, turned to her and said, "So, Grace, tell me, is Peyton Place your autobiography?"

"Really," Wallace says with a chuckle when reminded of the incident. "Can you imagine that I would do a thing like that?"

Grace was more comfortable with the print media, where over the years she tossed out chewy bons mots feasted upon by reporters who were charmed by her self-effacing earthiness. "I have a feeling that Gilmanton got as angry with me as it did because secretly my neighbors agreed with me," she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "That was where the shoe pinched. You get angrier about the truth than you do about lies."

In October 1956, Grace went to New York and checked into the Algonquin to sign a $250,000 deal with Twentieth Century Fox producer Jerry Wald for the movie and television rights to Peyton Place. Her attorney, Snierson—whom she'd met years earlier, after she'd passed a bad check—urged her to set up trusts for her children to protect her newfound wealth. He drafted all the paperwork. Even though Grace signed with Wald, she never got around to inking Snierson's documents.

She was distracted: she'd fallen in love with Thomas James Martin, "T.J. the D.J.," who spun discs at WLNH. Stocky and handsome, he was the anti-George, a throwback to the rugged princes Grace had written about in Aunt Georgie's bathtub. They quickly became fixtures at the Laconia Tavern, where Grace was soon as notorious for downing highballs as for her racy book.

One night, a car pulled up to the house in Gilmanton after midnight. Grace and T.J. awoke to a camera's blinding flash—and George standing at the foot of the bed, snapping pictures. He calmly told them to put on some clothes and meet him downstairs. Wrapped in a blanket, Grace tore into him. But George had the upper hand: adultery was illegal. "I've got you," he told T.J. "You're going to jail."

The next day, Grace went to Snierson to file for divorce. As part of the settlement, she agreed to pay George's tuition for his master's degree. In exchange, he turned over the undeveloped roll.

Grace and T.J.'s relationship was volatile at best, with T.J. assuming more and more control over Grace—including how she blew through her fledgling fortune. "He would say to her, 'Darling, you're Grace Metalious. You don't get a room at the Plaza. You get an entire floor!'" Snierson says. So Grace did—along with a new Cadillac, new clothes, dinners at '21,' cases of champagne, and chartered flights to the Caribbean. Grace poured thousands of dollars into renovating the country house she'd bought on Meadow Pond Road, which had once been owned by a Chicago gangster. Opportunistic "friends" began drifting in and out at all hours.

All the while, Grace wrestled with the notion of celebrity. Staying with T.J. and the kids at the Beverly Hilton, Grace played the part of the kid in the candy store. She glimpsed Elizabeth Taylor at a Screen Actors Guild dinner, and chitchatted with Cary Grant on the back lot. Producer Wald made sure the family was treated to limos and lavish dinners. Marsha even got whisked to a studio set to cop an autograph from Elvis Presley, who between takes was playing a pickup basketball game. But, for Grace, it was largely an act. "I regarded the men who made Peyton Place as workers in a gigantic flesh factory," she would write in a Sunday-newspaper supplement, the American Weekly, "and they looked upon me as a nut who should go back to the farm."

And as the press continued to play up *Peyton Place'*s more tawdry aspects, Grace's insecurities ballooned. At lunch at Romanoff's, John Michael Hayes, who wrote the screenplay for the film, asked Grace the same question Mike Wallace had: Was it her autobiography? Grace asked him to repeat the question. Then she tossed her drink all over him.

The film adaptation of Peyton Place, released in 1957, was a sanitized sequence of slamming doors, wayward glances, and A-line skirts. The story line had no abortions, no moonlit swims, and certainly no Betty asking Rodney if it was up and hard. Despite the movie's almost picture-postcard tone of whimsy, it did manage to retain some of Grace's finger-pointing—most notably in a stunning montage of the duplicitous citizens filing into a myriad of churches, all dressed in their Sunday best.

It was, nonetheless, a roaring success, drawing nine Oscar nominations. The haunting score, by Franz Waxman, is instantly recognizable even today. The film earned generally positive reviews. (The Chicago Sun-Times crowed that it was "one of the best motion pictures ever made.") And it single-handedly revived the career of Lana Turner, then 36, who was coming off a string of box-office duds. Turner, in fact, received the only Academy Award nomination of her career for playing Constance MacKenzie—this, despite a performance that resembles that of a department-store mannequin that has somehow wandered away from its window. (A year later, Turner would find herself in her own, real-life Peyton Place, when her daughter, Cheryl Crane, said that in an act of self-defense she had wielded the knife that killed her mother's gangster lover, Johnny Stompanato, in the bedroom of Turner's Beverly Hills mansion.)

Peyton Place also made a sudden star of Diane Varsi, the wiry newcomer who anchored the narrative as Allison MacKenzie. Varsi got a best-supporting-actress nomination (as did Hope Lange, who played Selena), but, like Grace, Varsi was a bohemian who quickly grew to loathe the Hollywood machine. "Acting is destructive to me," she said later. "I don't see any reason to be made miserable because other people say I should go on with my career." Two years after her debut, she left motion pictures. And at the 1959 Academy Awards, M.C. Bob Hope closed the telecast by saying, "Goodnight, Diane Varsi … wherever you are."

The movie's premiere was held in Camden, Maine, where many of the exterior scenes had been filmed, but Grace stayed home, later insisting that she hadn't been invited. The studio, meanwhile, asked Gilmanton P.T.A. president and policeman's wife Olive Hartford to round up 25 people from the town to go on an all-expenses-paid junket for the New York opening. She could persuade only 13 to make the trip.

After the hullabaloo died down, Grace's violent relationship with T.J.—and her drinking—flared up. The pair would scream, drink, yell, drink, push and shove, then drink some more. As Toth describes it in her book, and as Marsha confirms, Grace, during one particularly vicious face-off in 1958, threatened to hurl a mink stole, a gift from T.J., out of a hotel window.

The next day, they got married; Grace wore the stole over a smart gray suit.

The pattern of highs and lows was set. Grace would throw raucous parties in Gilmanton, then call friends in the middle of the night after she and T.J. had fought. She once phoned Laurie Wilkens at one a.m. from the Plaza, telling her she had to come immediately. Laurie found Grace in the lobby, almost suicidal. "The phone would ring anytime, and it would be 'Bernie, I need you,'" Lynne Snierson recalls. Grace would come to the house, often drunk, and pass out in Lynne's bed.

After Grace and T.J. wed, George arrived in Gilmanton, packed up the kids, and took them to his home in Massachusetts. Mike and Cindy eventually returned to Grace, but Marsha, then 14, stayed behind with George to escape the madness. "At that point I decided, 'I need to do this for myself,'" she says. "I knew if I didn't do it, I wasn't going to make it."

Drowning in booze and running out of cash, Grace agreed to write a sequel, Return to Peyton Place, when Dell offered $165,000. She handed in 98 largely unintelligible pages that were re-written and fleshed out by a ghostwriter. The ensuing reviews, each more savage than the last, sent her spiraling further downward; a publicity tour was shelved. (Two later titles, The Tight White Collar, in 1960, and No Adam in Eden, in 1963, never caught on.)

One night Grace placed a call to Bernie Snierson, begging him to come over. After he arrived, he sat with her for a while.

"Bernie, I'm scared," Grace confided.

"What are you afraid of, Grace?" he asked.

Grace pointed to an empty fifth on the table. "I looked into the bottom of that empty bottle," she replied, "and I saw myself."

By 1960, T.J. was gone, fed up with the cycle of drinking and fighting. On the rebound, Grace reconciled with George, announcing to the world they'd remarried, even though they never had. They bought an inn and called it the Peyton Place Motel. Not surprisingly, no one wanted to stay there. They soon separated, this time for good.

Grace's highs grew more and more infrequent. One came in February 1961, when she received a letter from Jerry Wald that said, "We just ran a rough cut of Return to Peyton Place and I can certainly say that lightning does strike twice in the same place." Buoyed by the news, Grace convinced Wald that he should hold the premiere of the film—starring Carol Lynley, Mary Astor, Tuesday Weld, and Jeff Chandler (with Rosemary Clooney singing the theme song)—at the Colonial Theatre in Laconia.

The town crackled with excitement on the big night. Grace wore her hair in a stylish French twist; Marsha got to wear Grace's mink stole. Bernie and Muriel Snierson hosted a swanky post-premiere dinner party at their home, attended by co-star Chandler and actress Ina Balin.

But the reviews, with the exception of widespread praise for Mary Astor's deliciously evil appearance as Roberta Carter (in which she seems to be channeling Judith Anderson in Rebecca), were overwhelmingly grim. Even the promotional newsreel, featuring Lynley and Grace, was creepy. On-screen, Grace appeared awkward, bloated, and tired; Lynley says she remembers her as being "a little discombobulated … and verklempt." Even so, the film did reasonably well at the box office: moviegoers, it seemed, couldn't get enough of the dirty denizens of Peyton Place.

In October 1963, John Rees, a tall, broad, bearded British journalist, arrived in Gilmanton looking to interview its most famous resident for a profile in the Boston Daily Mirror. Within weeks he had become her lover— and moved into her house.

One day Esther Peters came upon the couple in a Concord taproom. Grace "was still in command of herself, but she was way off somewhere in dreams that didn't correspond with reality," she says, adding that "by this time, I think her liver had gone to hell.… She was delusional."

Marsha had married and moved to Laconia; Rees and then 16-year-old Mike had a huge argument and Rees threw the boy out as Grace watched in an alcoholic stupor. Every time Marsha called, Rees would answer, offering an excuse as to why Grace couldn't come to the phone.

"I went to see her one day and he wasn't there," her daughter recalls tearfully. "So I got in the house, and it was pretty bad. It was just awful. She looked so bad." Grace was practically incoherent, shuffling around the premises. It was the last time Marsha saw her. "[Rees] came back and I left. I'll never forgive myself for that, just leaving her like that."

Rees and Grace went to Boston on a trip that winter. While there, Grace fell ill and was rushed via paddy wagon—they couldn't find an ambulance—to Beth Israel hospital. Three days later, lying in her hospital bed, she asked for a lawyer to change her will. She left everything to John Rees. Two hours after signing it, Grace suffered a hemorrhage and died. The attending physician, Dr. Herbert Saver, believed that Grace's cirrhosis was the result of her having consumed a fifth of liquor every day for five years.

That afternoon, in Laconia, young Cindy, then staying with Marsha, woke her elder sister up from a nap. "They said on TV that Ma's dead," she said. Mike found out from someone on the street.

The Metalious children retained John Chandler to contest the will, which had directed, among other things, that there be no funeral. During the subsequent media frenzy, it was revealed that Rees had a wife and five children back in England. He dropped any claim to the estate.

Not that there was anything to claim. Years of large living, extravagant gifts, bad loans to fair-weather friends, and pilfering by Jacques Chambrun—who, it turned out, had been stealing from her almost from the start, and had been fired by Maugham in 1948, reputedly for having done the same—had caused Grace Metalious to burn through about a million dollars. By the time her finances were untangled, she had $41,174 in the bank and debts of more than $200,000.

"What day is it," Grace once wrote, "when you wake up and realize that what you have is not what you want at all?" Clearly, that day had come. In the end, no one could dig her out of the hole she'd fallen into. "Maybe she just didn't know who to ask," Marsha Duprey says. "Or who she could trust."

Nate Abbott, a tall, avuncular man who today serves as the chairman of the Board of Selectmen in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, moved there in the summer of 1998, unaware that his new hometown had been the basis for the most scandalous book of its day—until the people who sold him his house whispered, "Did you know that this is 'Peyton Place'?"

Curious, he asked Geraldine Besse, whose family had lived in Gilmanton for generations, about the connection. She glared at him. "Don't ever mention that to me again," she said. He didn't.

"This is something that the town was dipped in a long time ago, and the odor lingers," he says. "For those who were related to the incidents and who were alive at the time or affected at the time, it's still something they're reluctant to talk about."

That's an understatement. Drive along the winding country roads of Gilmanton today and there is no clue that this is the box that Pandora opened with her Remington typewriter. There is no plaque commemorating the town's most famous author, no statue in the public square. While a new copy of the book sits on the shelf in the library—replacing the tattered paperback dedicated by Barbara Walters (who did a TV segment on the book in the 1970s)—the only real indication of Grace Metalious is the white headstone on her grave in the back of the Smith Meeting House Cemetery.

The center of Gilmanton, in fact, looks quite like it did some 50 years ago, when Grace, looking forlorn, posed for Life magazine standing in front of the town hall, steepled church, and tiny library. But while there is a sense of palpable disdain for Peyton Place—you get the feeling that right below the surface the town is still seething—Grace Metalious has found redemption in other ways.

Today, Peyton Place appears on women's-studies curricula at universities, including Louisiana State, where the book is required reading in a course taught by Professor Emily Toth, Grace's Boswell. "It's a breakthrough for freedom of expression," she says. "It set new parameters for what you could say in a book—especially about women. It was an exciting, dirty book." Ten years ago, Ardis Cameron, a professor at the University of Southern Maine, was astonished to discover the title was out of print, and mounted a one-woman campaign to resurrect it. She eventually persuaded Northeastern University Press to reissue the novel, and wrote a Camille Paglia–worthy introduction that casts Grace as a literary Joan of Arc, sword drawn, swinging at the oppressive social conventions of the 50s. The book, says Cameron, "spoke about things that were not discussed in polite society, and allowed people to talk about all sorts of issues—but particularly their own sense of being different in the 1950s."

Screenwriter Foner Gyllenhaal sees Grace less as feminist icon than as unwitting trailblazer, and has framed the script for the upcoming film version of her life in those terms. "I don't think she went out there to be a feminist," Foner Gyllenhaal says. "I think she went out there to be a human being who wanted to live in a world where people weren't hypocritical and told the truth and stood by their actions. And in that regard I think she was innocent as well as brave."

George Metalious is 80 now, and on the sunny day I knock on the door of his tidy blue Shaker saltbox, in Rye, New Hampshire, he is not glad to see me. I have written him and called several times, asking for an interview, but he has not responded.

He has been picking raspberries in his garden, and as he stands in the doorway, beads of sweat drip down, under the brim of his floppy straw hat. He still wears the big, square, dark-rimmed glasses that made him so recognizable in the endless publicity photos taken for Peyton Place.

He doesn't want to talk about Grace anymore, he says. There isn't anything left to say.

I beg him to answer one question. Why, I ask, did Grace have such a difficult time handling her success, after she'd fought so hard to get it?

He sighs the sigh of old men. "She cared deeply, and she loved deeply," he says quietly. "She was naïve, unfortunately. She put her trust in the wrong people, and she believed in the basic good of people. She had faith, and it worked against her."

In the fall of 1964, ABC premiered a half-hour Peyton Place, television's first-ever soap-opera-style serial in prime time, which introduced two new young actors, Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow; eventually Lee Grant won a supporting-actress Emmy for her role. Long before Dallas, Dynasty, and Desperate Housewives, Peyton Place pioneered sudsy appointment television, at one point airing three nights a week. The show ran for a staggering 524 episodes over five years and made $62 million for the network—not a dime of which went to the estate of Grace Metalious, who had signed away all the rights to her work during that stay at the Algonquin.

In the final episode, broadcast June 2, 1969, Dr. Michael Rossi, played by Ed Nelson, is charged with murder and thrown into the local jail. In the very last scene, he lies down on a cot as a guard slides closed his cell door—like his creator, a prisoner of Peyton Place.