Who hasn’t fantasized about meeting the man who gave us Holden Caulfield?
Alas, it’s too late now. J.D. Salinger died in 2010 at 91, having spent nearly 60 years recoiling from the adoration accorded “The Catcher in the Rye.” But in 1969, a 16-year-old tracked him down. Twice.
Not only did James Sadwith live to tell the tale but, decades later, he made a film about it: Out Friday and featuring Chris Cooper as the world’s favorite reclusive writer, “Coming Through the Rye” is “about 99 percent true,” Sadwith tells The Post. (The 1 percent that isn’t involves an on-the-road hookup.)
Like the movie’s Jamie, Sadwith, now 63, was a nerdy Jewish kid from New Jersey, a fish out of water at Connecticut’s tony Hotchkiss boarding school. It was there he first read “Catcher.” Enthralled by Holden’s voice and a shared hatred of phonies, he vowed to turn it into a school play.
All he needed was Salinger’s permission.
“You’re wasting your time,” the writer’s publicist (and everyone else) assured him.
Undeterred, Sadwith had a friend drive him to Cornish, New Hampshire, whose townspeople stoutly maintained they’d never heard of any Jerome David Salinger.
“They were protecting him,” Sadwith says.
But some kids overheard and directed him to a house about five miles from town. As Sadwith knocked on the door, several yapping dogs emerged, followed by Salinger himself.
“What do you want?” that exchange began. (Sadwith says he taped himself reciting every bit of it he could remember once he was back at school.)
Suffice it to say, Salinger didn’t approve. Sadwith put on his play anyway.
“He played Holden,” recalls George Anastasio, 86, the teacher who co-directed the production. “He was very enthusiastic!”
A month or so later, Sadwith drove back to Cornish to relate his triumph. When Salinger opened his door, a cat ran out. “Now look what you’ve done,” he told the teen.
The man who worshiped children had two of them himself, with his ex-wife, Claire Douglas. With him that day was Matt, age 10 or so, who had inspired the dedication page of 1961’s “Franny and Zooey”: “. . . in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor . . . to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.”
Salinger was taking Matt to the train station and offered Sadwith a lift. He had to decline.
“I always wondered, ‘What if I’d taken a ride with him?’ ” Sadwith says. “But my car was in the driveway and I couldn’t lie.” What he did do was confess that he’d gone ahead with his play.
“[Salinger’s] response was, ‘First of all, I don’t write plays, I write books. And second, how did it go?’ ” Sadwith recalls. “I told him [the audience] loved it.”
Decades passed. Salinger kept writing, though never publishing, while his children grew up: Daughter Margaret, now 60, wrote “Dream Catcher,” a 2000 memoir about her miserable home life, partly due to her father’s penchant for bizarre rites, like speaking in tongues and drinking his own urine. Matt, 56, became an actor who would later cross paths with one of his father’s most determined stalkers: James Sadwith, now an Emmy-winning director.
As Sadwith recalls it, he was helming the 1988 miniseries “Baby M” when Matt’s agent submitted him for a part. “I thought, ‘God, I can cast Matthew Salinger and we can become friends!’ ” Instead, he went with someone else: John Shea, who won an Emmy for the role.
“We did offer Matt a part in [‘Coming Through the Rye’], but he turned it down,” Sadwith says. “[He said] he didn’t want to be in a film about his dad.”