by Lisa Boghosian Papas
Bill and Yep grew up across the street from one another in Fresno. Bill grew up to be the noted playwright William Saroyan; Yep, known later as Frank Moradian, became a successful grain merchant and president of the Penny-Newman Grain Company. Their friendship lasted from their jazz-age childhoods to Saroyan's death in 1981, a period of over 60 years.
Through those years, Saroyan led the peripatetic life of an artist, bemoaning his fate as an unknown writer in New York then drinking with Hemingway in Paris. Throughout all this, Moradian, known to his friend as Yep, was building a stable life with his wife of 47-years, Roxie.
Roxie, who still resides in the Moradian's Fresno home nine years after Yep's death, still recalls fondly the lifelong relationship she and her husband shared with Saroyan. "Bill liked to laugh, and to be the center of attention in front of a small group of close friends. Informal gatherings were his style, rather than high society shindigs."
The Moradians often accompanied Bill and his wife Carol (now Mrs. Walter Matthau) to parties with other members of their circle of friends, including Charlie and Oona Chaplin. "One time," explains Roxie, "we were invited to a party by John Hertz of Hertz Rent-a-Car. We went to the party with them but after a while, Bill said to us and Charlie and Oona Chaplin, who were also there, 'Let's go now, I don't like these formal high society parties.' So we ended up going to a small restaurant, all six of us, which was much more to Bill's liking."
Described by those who knew him as "difficult," and as the "type who would get mad at people for a long time, then make up," the Moradians seemingly had few run-ins with hot-tempered author who rejected the Pulitzer Prize on the grounds that "commerce should not judge art." "Bill was misunderstood," says Roxie. "He liked to be the center of attention, but didn't like the spotlight. His idea of fun was riding his bike over to our house, playing penny poker with Yep, or reading poems aloud. Many people perceived him as kind of a "rough" character. But when you got to know Bill, he was different than that. I'll never forget one time we were on our way to a big barbecue, and took Bill with us. On our way there, a pheasant hit our windshield and Bill made us stop the car. We all had to get out of the car and look for the pheasant to make sure it was okay."
A gambler, however, Saroyan was. "Bill would go through these very low periods," explains Roxie. "He was depressed, and very poor. But he used the money he had to gamble. He was known as a gambler throughout his life. He once told my husband, 'There are two pleasures in life. One is to gamble to win and the other is to gamble and lose.'"
Saroyan highly prized his relationship with the Moradians, especially their correspondence. In fact, according to Roxie, Saroyan planned to make a book out of all the letters he and Yep wrote to each other. But when he went to his mother's house to recover the letters, she told him that she had burned them just a week before. Fortunately, Roxie and Yep preserved the letters, and the memories of their friend.
"When Bill was a young boy in school," says Roxie, "his teacher told all the Armenian children to tell their parents not to put so much garlic in their lunches because they were smelling up the room. So Bill said to the teacher, 'then open the windows!' Bill and Yep shared so many things together, including a love for literature. When he and Bill were teenagers, they would talk about different books and authors, and about the history of Fresno and Armenians. Bill liked American literature the best."
From those early days, Saroyan showed promise as a writer, despite his mother's complaining to his friends that her child was a "home-grown genius." Roxie explains, "His mother used say, 'Instead of tending to his work, my home-grown genius sits hour after hour at that rickety typewriter dedicated to the proposition that he will be the greatest writer of all time. And here we are struggling to put food on the table.'"
Eventually, Saroyan lived up to his potential, renowned for his books including, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and The Human Comedy, along with hundreds of short stories. He also wrote close to a dozen plays, including The Time of Your Life, which earned him the Pulitzer and the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for the best play of the 1939-40 season.
Throughout his life and friendship with the Moradians, Saroyan never lost contact with his friends. Roxie remembers, "The first time we were going to go to Paris, Bill told us to go to the Ritz Hotel to the bar in the back. He said he and Hemingway loved to sit in a corner of the bar and get drunk. We went to the bar when we got to Paris and talked to the old bartender who pointed out the corner where they used to sit. He told us the two of them would get drunk, get mad, and then kiss and make-up. He said he missed those old days."
