KINGS, QUEENS,
AND PAWNS
An American Woman at the Front
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
Introduction by Rick Rinehart
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INTRODUCTION
THE first American journalist permitted to visit the front in the early months of World War I was not a battle-tested Ernie Pyle or Hemingway-esque larger-than-life character, but rather a diminutive yet fearless woman who had made her way to the war zone through a combination of charm and subterfuge.
In 1915 Mary Roberts Rinehart was arguably the most popular woman in America, and inarguably one of the country’s most successful authors of romances, mysteries, and plays, in addition to regularly contributing stories and essays to such popular magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and McClure’s. After first cracking the top-ten best-seller list with The Man in the Lower Ten in 1909, she rang up three more best-selling books before her departure for Europe and the Great War. And more was to follow: her prolific output and enduring popularity did not wind down until 1953, with the publication of her last book, The Swimming Pool and Other Stories. However, her success in writing was merely a medium through which she could satisfy her lifelong temptation toward adventure, often taking her places and putting her in situations hitherto known only to men. Such was the implausibility of much of her life—especially for a woman of the early twentieth century—that one biographer quoted a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to describe it: “If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”
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Mary Ella Roberts was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now a part of Pittsburgh), in 1876, in what has traditionally been referred to as “genteel poverty.” “All week the house was busy enough, although there was no money,” she wrote of her early childhood in a family cluster that consisted of her grandmother, Aunt Sade, and Uncle John, as well as her own parents. “There never was any money in those days.” Her father Tom was a dreamer, ostensibly the proprietor of a sewing machine shop, but in his heart an inventor whose several patents were “paid for in agony . . . later lapsing without result to him.” Maybe in spite of himself, the business nevertheless prospered—albeit briefly. He moved his family to their own home in 1880; two years later he was managing the Domestic Sewing Machine Company in Pittsburgh. However, by 1887 he had lost his franchise as well as his job. The small family picked up and moved to a less expensive, more austere neighborhood; Tom took to the road to sell everything from wallpaper to insurance policies.
Mary graduated from high school at the height of the Panic of 1893, fully expecting to pursue a career in medicine. However, the Panic changed all that: “Now when I spoke of going to college there was a curious silence,” she later recalled. “My music lessons ceased. One day I came home to find that my belongings had been shifted to my sister’s room on the second floor, and that two strange men had rented the room on the third.” At about this time she submitted three short stories to the local newspaper in an effort to improve the household finances. All three were accepted for the disappointing sum of $1 each, after which she declared that her career as a woman of letters was over. Prophetically, however, her Uncle John remarked that there was enough plot in one of the stories to make a book.
Medicine still intrigued her, so she lied about her age and talked her way into Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses at Homeopathic Hospital in August 1893, a place where surgeons who had learned their trade during the Civil War still insisted that maggots could be used to cleanse a dirty wound. Her first assignment was to remove from the operating room a bucket containing a human foot. Though this incident certainly shocked her, it did not make her physically ill. She reckoned at that moment that she was cut out for not only nursing but also the greater dramas in life. In her autobiography, My Story, she wrote:
And the emergency ward had drama. One morning I came on duty to find the battered body of a man who had been beaten to death with an iron pipe. One cold evening that fall just before going off duty, I turned down the bed for a burly policeman, crying as though his heart would break, while he placed on it the body of a small newsboy, burned and dying from the fire he had built to keep himself warm. A woman was brought in slashed in thirty places by a jealous rival with a knife; a pretty woman. She recovered.
Indeed, her acceptance of the horror of life at such a tender age well prepared her for the dreadful conditions on the Belgian Front years later. While her mysteries and romances may have been breezy and circumspect, her work as a journalist was at times direct and unrelenting. As she herself affirmed, “Why all the evasion, the fear of acknowledging what we know exists, goes on? A big emergency hospital deals with life itself. It cannot evade.”
In her early days at the hospital she also became acquainted with the “rather severe” Dr. Stanley Marshall Rinehart, whose legendary scowl frightened away just about every nurse except the steely Mary Roberts. Dr. Rinehart, a very young (twenty-five years old in 1894) surgeon, and thus probably not of the maggots-as-antiseptic school, was known not only for his skill with the knife but also for his perfectionism and fierce temper. However, Mary saw another side to him that clearly attracted him to her, because it was something that she so lacked as a weary and overworked nurse:
I was in the children’s ward, and he had some cases there. More than that, he loved children. He would walk in, apparently very severe, looking through his pince-nez at the children, and they would rush to him and surround him. He was very gentle with them, and he would play with them. It seemed very strange to me, that playing. Neither then nor later had I that gift of being a child with children. . . . Later on when my own children were born I was to look back with much heart searching at the neat tidy machine which had fed and bathed and nursed those little wrecks of humanity. I had missed something there. But I was always tired.
Their acquaintance grew into a friendship, and then into a romance. Ever the risk-taker, Mary flouted hospital policy by agreeing to an engagement with a fellow staff member. Very soon thereafter the hospital’s chief engineer stumbled upon a tryst, and word spread like an epidemic. Confronted with the facts by the hospital board, Dr. Rinehart responded to their accusations by yelling at them and telling them that it was none of their business. With the meek request that Mary not flaunt her engagement by wearing a ring, the board simply “went away.”
It was to be a two-year engagement, interrupted by a personal tragedy that Mary seemed to react to with disturbing detachment, even nearly forty years after the incident—which she recalled, almost as an anecdote, in My Story. Long despondent over his own failures as well as those precipitated by the nation’s continued economic depression, Tom Roberts shot h
imself through the heart and died while on a business trip to Buffalo on November 14, 1895. Away from the hospital and caring for a woman left alone with her illegitimate daughter to die of cancer, Mary received a telegram bearing the news. “It stunned me,” she simply said of her response. The balance of the detail imparted in My Story is merely clinical:
Early the next morning I bought a paper to see if there was any explanation. There was indeed. It was blazoned on the front page. He had gone to a hotel in Buffalo and killed himself. Shot himself.
I had not even known he owned a revolver.
Indeed, prior to recounting the circumstances surrounding her father’s suicide, she had shown more compassion in defending the cancerous mother and her love child against the people who had ostracized them both:
She had had a child, and had had the courage to acknowledge it, so she was dying alone. Ever since that time, I have felt the cruelty and bitterness of our attitude toward the unmarried mother and her child. How stupid we are, that two wrongs can ever make a right.
Although later in life her politics could only be described as conservative, she showed a tendency—illustrated by these two events—to elevate the disenfranchised who accepted life as it was and met it head on over those who, notwithstanding the opportunities available to them, were confounded by it. In short, she did not abide weakness, most especially in herself. Unlike her father, she made no excuses.
Mary Ella Roberts became Mary Roberts Rinehart on April 21, 1896, and, after intervals of illness and residual exhaustion brought on from her two years of work at the hospital, found my grandfather forming in her belly in December of that year. While none of her three pregnancies was easy, all were ultimately successful, yielding first Stanley Marshall Rinehart Jr. in 1897, then Alan Gillespie Rinehart in 1900, and finally Frederick Roberts Rinehart (Ted) two years later. By all accounts, both those of her own hand and those of her biographers, marital life and motherhood did not constitute the crowning achievements of her life. “Once again, however, the world was a small place,” she told readers in My Story, “smaller than ever.” She further complained that she didn’t dine out for ten years (because of Dr. Rinehart’s late office hours) or sleep the night through for seven (because the boys apparently kept no particular hours).
There were moments of true crisis, however, that fully engaged her attention as wife, mother, and (working with her husband) medical practitioner. When Ted became gravely ill at six months and “solemn processions” of medical men would only shake their heads and go away, Dr. and Mrs. Rinehart would stare them down and will their child to live. He did. A year later, after he had swallowed enough carbolic acid to sicken a grown man, Ted again was given up for lost. In the family mythology (at least as my father tells it), Ted was in fact presumed dead at one point following this incident and laid to rest (if temporarily). His sudden gurgling and crying told his parents he was not quite ready to be taken. Uncle Ted lived on to become a favorite of my father’s (thus our common name, Frederick) and, except for a bout with alcoholism, enjoyed a long, loving, and exuberant life.
In 1904 the Rineharts were riding high with a house full of children and servants, a busy medical practice, and a stock portfolio worth $12,000. In her spare minutes Mary would dash off a few lines of verse and shop them around to popular magazines such as Munsey’s and the Pittsburgh Sunday Gazette, where she published for the first time under the name of Mary Roberts Rinehart. On a visit to New York to try to sell a collection of her poems, she and Dr. Rinehart decided to pay a visit to the stock exchange for a first-hand look at how their money was growing. Instead, they witnessed a panic of the first order and came home knowing that their entire savings had been wiped out. Not only that, but they were $12,000 in debt as well. (“We might as well have owed twelve million,” she wrote.) And even though Dr. Rinehart received a salary as city physician (and presumably a small stipend for representing the state board of health in the county), patient fees for an office visit were only $2, with perhaps an additional dollar for an office prescription. The practice of medicine was not then the lucrative profession that it has become today, and though Stan Rinehart earned more than most, every dime went to support the household—even after, “save one strong girl,” all the servants were dismissed.
But this was not a precipitous ledge with a view to a deeper despair; it was the foot of the arc of a life that would make Mary Roberts Rinehart a household name in just a few years’ time. Mary Roberts Rinehart was no Tom Roberts: faced with adversity, she declared that she “had found a way to help” the family after a short story was accepted by Munsey’s for the sum of $34. And they wanted more:
I began to work now, to write fast and furiously, to listen with a sinking heart to the postman, to glance at the mail in a maid’s hands and know at an incredible distance the envelope containing a returned manuscript. Now and then one was accepted. The checks at first were small, from ten to thirty dollars, but money was not important. I was learning a new profession, and being paid while I learned.
By the middle of 1906 she had sold forty-six stories and made $1,842.50.
Notwithstanding the presence of a muse in her life, she did not succumb to the sort of creative self-indulgence that has isolated so many artists from their families, and ultimately broken them. She was fiercely devoted to her family and claimed in her autobiography that she would never work when the boys were in the house: “the slam of the front door” and “the shout of ‘Mother’ was the signal to stop.” Except for slipping away for an hour or so under pressure of a deadline, she early on established a routine that did not allow her work to interfere with family life.
Still, possibly because she was exploring uncharted terrain for a woman of the early twentieth century, she did a bit of hair-splitting when it came to defending exactly what it was she was doing in those hours alone in the house. While freely referring to writing as her “profession,” she refused to admit that it was a “career.” Years later, when her reputation as a writer was well established, she wrote, “I did not want a career. The word has never been used in the family and never will be. I ‘work’ when and where I can, but there is no real career, and never has been.” Webster’s simple definition of career is “course of life”; for profession, it is “a calling or occupation.” By these narrow terms she differentiated her craft from that of writers who would sacrifice everything for the greater interests of their art.
In retrospect, she was true to her ethos—at least as far as writing goes. Inadvertently, however, she did make a career out of something else, and that was building and promoting the American institution that she herself became. The emotional sacrifices made by her family for the greater good of the institution were, at times, equal to those of any relative who has lived in the penumbra of a personality who belongs to the public as much as she belongs to her husband and children.
The cornerstone for this particular institution was laid toward the end of the first decade of the new century, when, at the urging of her Uncle John, she submitted a book-length manuscript to a publisher. (Not knowing one publisher from another, she picked one by the “simple method of taking a story by Anna Katherine Green from the book case” and noting the name. The fortunate imprint was Bobbs Merrill in Indianapolis.) Though intended as a satire of the mystery genre, The Circular Staircase was taken seriously by the critics, who stressed the “relief of humor in a crime story.” “I kept to myself,” Mary later recalled, “the deadly secret that the book had been written as a semi-satire.”
The Circular Staircase, which had sold 1.25 million copies, was followed a year later by The Man in the Lower Ten, which was the #4 best-seller in 1909, and The Window at the White Cat and When a Man Marries as the #8 and #10 best-sellers in 1910. The pattern continued pretty much unabated for the next twenty-five years, with subsequent top-ten best-selling novels in 1915, 1918, 1919, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1927, 1930, and 1936. Indeed, when book club and paperback editions are taken into account, Mary Roberts R
inehart was in all likelihood by 1950 the all-time best-selling fiction author in the United States since the birth of the Republic.*
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Notwithstanding her rising literary success, by 1915 Mary Roberts Rinehart wanted something more: to witness history first-hand, and perhaps even become part of it. When war broke out in 1914, all she could think about was leaving her young family behind and getting to Europe to report on the fighting—all contrary to her own ethos of always putting the family first. Initially resistant, Stan Sr. ultimately agreed that Mary should go, hoping that, like most journalists, the closest she would get to the war would be London. Little did he know that her subterfuge as a representative of the American Red Cross would get her across the English Channel and beyond, and she had already made arrangements with the Saturday Evening Post to fully fund the trip in return for a book’s worth of dispatches of her experiences. George H. Doran quickly published them as Kings, Queens, and Pawns later that year.
Hailed as “the best of the war books” by newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, Kings, Queens, and Pawns gave Americans their first glimpse into the grim reality of what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. (It also dispelled rumors of German atrocities against Belgian women and children that had been reported in American newspapers.) Since Mary Rinehart’s stated purpose in visiting the front was to report on conditions at the hundreds of temporary hospitals across Belgium in France, she spared no detail in describing what she saw:
Every sort of building is being used for these isolated hospitals—garages, town halls, private dwellings schools. At first they had no chloroform, no instruments. There are cases on record where automobile tools were used in emergency, kitchen knives, saws, anything. In one case, last Spring, two hundred convalescents, leaving one of these hospitals on a cold day in March, were called back, on the arrival of a hundred freshly wounded men, that every superfluous bandage on their wounds might be removed, to be used again.
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