Jaws author Peter Benchley, the man who made the ocean a scary place for millions of fans, was actually quite fond of sharks, an image that seems as jarring as Alfred Hitchcock, the director of Psycho, enjoying a nice, relaxing shower.
”He cared very much about sharks. He spent most of his life trying to explain to people that if you are in the ocean, you’re in the shark’s territory, so it behooves you to take precautions,” Wendy Benchley said of her husband, who died on Saturday at age 65.
Wendy Benchley, married to the author for 41 years, said he died at their home in Princeton, New Jersey, of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and fatal scarring of the lungs.
Thanks to Benchley’s 1974 novel, and Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie of the same name, a simple dip in the ocean became synonymous with fatal horror — of still water scored by deep, ominous music that pumped and throbbed like a monster’s heart, of teeth and blood and panic.
”Spielberg certainly made the most superb movie; Peter was very pleased,” Wendy Benchley told The Associated Press.
”But Peter kept telling people the book was fiction, it was a novel, and that he no more took responsibility for the fear of sharks than Mario Puzo took responsibility for the Mafia.”
The author, a devoted conservationist, did not share in the mayhem his book evoked, his widow said. She recalled a trip to Guadeloupe, Mexico last year for their 40th wedding anniversary, when the two went into the water in a special cage.
”At times we would have four or five of the most gorgeous female torpedoes drifting by the cage,” she said. ”We were thrilled, excited. We’d been around sharks for so long.”
The grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and son of author Nathaniel Benchley, Peter Benchley was born in New York City in 1940. He attended Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, then graduated from Harvard University in 1961. He worked at The Washington Post and Newsweek and spent two years as a speechwriter for President Johnson, writing some ”difficult” speeches about the Vietnam War, Wendy Benchley said.
The author’s interest in sharks was lifelong, beginning with childhood visits to Nantucket Island in Massachusetts and heightening in the mid-1960s when he read about a fisherman catching a 2 060kg great white shark off Long Island, the setting for his novel.
”I thought to myself, ‘What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn’t go away?”’ he recalled. Benchley didn’t start the novel, for which he received a $7 500 advance, until 1971 because he was too busy with his day jobs.
The editor of Jaws, Thomas Congdon, told The Associated Press on Sunday that he had been impressed by some articles Benchley wrote for National Geographic and arranged a lunch at a French restaurant in New York.
”The lunch didn’t go very well,” said Congdon, an editor at Doubleday at the time and now retired. ”His non-fiction ideas did not seem very promising, but at the end of the meal, ‘I said, ”Have you ever thought of writing a novel?”’ And he said, ‘Well, I have an idea about a great white shark that marauds an Eastern coastal town and provokes a moral crisis in the community.”’
Congdon loved the idea, but said Benchley was reluctant to start the book because he couldn’t afford time away from his journalistic work. So Congdon got him $1 000 as a down payment, in return for an initial submission of 100 pages.
”Ninety-five percent of it was jokey stuff, because he thought that was the way you do it,” said Congdon, who dismissed a longtime publishing legend that the book was heavily edited and as much his triumph as Benchley’s.
”But the first five pages were wonderful. There were no jokes. I wrote heavily in the margin: ‘NO JOKES.’ He went out and did it again, and it generated whole industries — the movie, amusement park rides. It changed the way people looked at sharks.”
While Peter Benchley co-wrote the screenplay for Jaws, and authored several other novels, including The Deep and The Island, Wendy Benchley said he was especially proud of his conservation work. He served on the national council of Environmental Defence, hosted numerous television wildlife
programmes, gave speeches around the world and wrote articles for National Geographic and other publications.
Besides his wife, Peter Benchley is survived by three children and five grandchildren. A small family service will take place next week in Princeton, New Jersey, Wendy Benchley said. – Sapa-AP