This page: Sadwith flips through the Misch. Opposite page: a dog-eared copy of The Catcher in the Rye, a photo of Sadwith from his Hotchkiss production, and remarks from his English instructor.
T
hat was 47 years ago. But
James Sadwith recounts with clarity his teenage quest for Salinger, an adventure that inspired his first feature film, Coming Through the Rye, released this fall. An award-winning television director, writer, and producer, Sadwith’s movies have won or been nominated for more than 35 Emmys and Golden Globes. After years working in Hollywood, he now lives with his wife, Nerissa, in Woodstock, Vt., a half-hour drive from Cornish, N.H., where Salinger lived until his death in 2010. Sadwith’s home office is crowded with television manuscripts, awards, and accolades. Several thick manila folders hold yellowed copies of the The Record, dog-eared Hotchkiss composition notebooks, letters, and black-and-white photos, bits and pieces of his Salinger story.
IT BEGAN IN 1969 While the rest of the country was seething in antiwar protests and racial strife, James Sadwith was struggling to find his own footing at Hotchkiss.
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Like many adolescents at that time, he identified with Holden Caulfield, the anxious, disaffected protagonist in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Sadwith had entered Hotchkiss as a prep from rural New Jersey, full of expectations about boarding school life. His older brother, who attended a co-ed boarding school in Pennsylvania, brought home autographed bras and tales of going out to dinner with teachers and Saturday matinees. It all seemed very ideal to young Sadwith. Looking back, Sadwith says, he didn’t realize that Hotchkiss was “a whole other ballgame," where academics came before adolescent antics. Still, he was excited about going there. Hotchkiss was socially challenging for Sadwith. He was not into sports like many of the other boys, and he felt awkward and out of place. And he was one of a few Jewish students at Hotchkiss during a time when most prep schools were far less diverse than they are now. The Catcher in the Rye was required reading, and Sadwith’s classmate, John Hill ’70, remembers that a lot of students identified with Holden and his plight. “Jim
just took it to the next level and did something about it,” Hill recalls. “It was a tough time to be at all all-boys boarding school in the late sixties,” Hill adds. “Vietnam, racial tensions, drugs coming on the scene. Hotchkiss, for all its contributions to us students, was a lonely and intimidating place for Jim.” Sadwith, who had acquired the nickname “Caulfield” as a result of his obsession with The Catcher in the Rye, began adapting the novel into a school play, which eventually turned into his senior English project. He felt destined to play the role of Holden — not just in the Hotchkiss production, but on Broadway and in the movies. But there was a hitch. “I remember someone asking me if I had Salinger’s permission to turn his book into a play, and it was something I really hadn’t thought about before,” Sadwith recalls. Finding Salinger was next to impossible for the most determined journalists, let alone a teenage boy. The author was reclusive, and he was vehemently opposed to adaptations of his work. In the wake of the novel’s success in the 1950s, he had turned down