| A Third Benchley Has A Whale of A Novel Tall, slender and movie-star handsome, with eyes like the deep blue sea, Peter Benchley did not inherit the resemblance to a benevolent sea lion which distinguished his famous grandfather-humorist Robert Benchley - and which, slightly refined, was bestowed on Peter's father, writer Nathaniel Benchley. Instead, Peter is the fortunate legatee of the writing dynasty's quirky wit and knack for spinning a devilishly good tale. In February the 33-year-old Benchley published Jaws, his first novel. Within eight weeks, it had leaped to No.2 position on the New York Times' bestseller list. Before the book was even off the presses, it had already earned over $1 million, including $575,000 for U.S. paperback rights alone, and from sales to book clubs, foreign publishers and the film's producers. The movie version, which Benchley wrote, is already in production for Universal. The book is the tale of a great white shark which cruises Long Island's South Shore, gobbling up unwary swimmers, while a resort town's police chief, civic leaders and citizens battle angrily over which is more important-the safety of the residents or the tourist-based economy of the swank community in its high season. Jaws grew out of young Benchley's fascination with sharks, triggered by family swordfishing expeditions off Nantucket. "We couldn't find any swordfish," he recalled recently, "but the ocean was littered with sharks, so we started catching them." As Benchley became a successful journalist-reporter on the Washington Post, free-lancer for such magazines as Life and The New Yorker, an editor of Newsweek-his shark-watching continued. In the 1960s he capitalized on his interest with two magazine articles, not long after a 4,500-pound great white shark was taken off Long Island's Montauk Point. A few years later he was assigned to do a piece about Southampton-Long Island's tony watering place. Benchley remembers thinking, "My God, if that kind of thing can happen around the beaches of Long Island, and I know Southampton, why not put the two together." The star attraction of Benchley's book is the marauding monster whose savage attacks Benchley describes with horrifying clarity. On the fate of a child snatched from a raft, he writes: "Nearly half the fish had come clear of the water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh and bone and rubber. The boy's legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom." Like his father and grandfather, Benchley was educated at Exeter and Harvard. His life today is centered in a small yellow frame house in Pennington, N.J., which he occupies, amid genteely shabby furniture, with his wife Wendy and children Tracy and Clayton. He has another novel in progress and has just sold an original screenplay. Gazing somewhat wide-eyed through tortoise-shell glasses, Benchley mutters that he does find his sudden fame "awesome," but that he's glad about "not having to hustle magazine pieces anymore." Still, he doesn't expect the family's life-style will change much. "Oh, we'll probably move closer to Princeton. We play tennis and take the kids to school there." Joan Oliver |