The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  I took a closer look at the guests listed on the menu, and began to do a little research. I laughed out loud when I got this hit on the distinguished guest with top billing, a “Mr. J. Factor” in 1925 Chicago:

  John Factor (October 8, 1892–January 22, 1984), born Iakov Faktorowicz, was a Prohibition-era gangster and con artist affiliated with the Chicago Outfit.

  He later became a prominent businessman and Las Vegas casino proprietor, owner of the Stardust Resort and Casino. It is alleged that he ran the operation on behalf of the mob, with a lifetime take of $50–$200 million.

  His friends knew him as “Jake the Barber.”

  THREE

  So maybe John Kantor’s villainous nature hadn’t been as greatly exaggerated as I’d always assumed.

  I went home and stood on a chair to get to the high bookshelf, where a dozen of my grandfather’s books had stood untouched since they were placed there fifteen years earlier—a transfer from yet another bookshelf where they had long stood similarly undisturbed. They were, not surprisingly, coated in dust. I knew that he had published a book about his childhood, and that it had been titled But Look the Morn, but I couldn’t find it until I got close enough to smell that oddly unique odor of old books gradually disintegrating. There it was. Upon close inspection, what appeared to be a blank blue spine actually had a few specks of gold ink still upon it. The letters they once delineated were unrecognizable, but beneath it I could barely make out the subtitle: The Story of a Childhood.

  I took it down and opened it carefully—the binding was fragile, beginning to separate from the yellowed pages. On the first, blank page there was that familiar, legible, but not prissy left-slanted handwriting: To Layne, Bill, Mike, Tommy, Susie, Charley and Buster—Love, MacKinlay Kantor.

  I smiled, remembering suddenly how it had amused us that he never signed his books Dad or Grandpa or Mack, but always with his full name. “Because they will be more valuable that way,” my mother explained—which seemed a funny way to look at it. Layne was my mother, Mack’s daughter, whom he had always called Layne-o, from the refrain to a song he used to sing to her when she was a fussing baby and he was trying to write: “Layne-o, the bane-o of my life.” (It really stuck: Even to my brother and me, she was never “Mom,” always Layne-o.)

  Bill was my dad, a New Yorker of German Jewish descent who was in the building business with his father in New York City. Mike and Susie were my older brother and younger sister; Charley (I would have spelled it “Charlie”) and Buster were my Lassie-lookalike collie and mustard-colored tabby cat. I could have dated it from the roster of pets alone. He’d signed the book in 1964, though it had been published in 1947. Maybe he thought at twelve, ten, and eight, the three of us kids were now old enough to read it. I never did.

  Finally, exactly a half century later, I began to read.

  It didn’t take me long to find a mention of John Kantor. Ten pages in, Mack describes the circumstances of his birth. “I had a grandfather who was angrily engaged in losing the tiny fortune which it had taken him nearly forty years to accumulate. I had a grandmother adjudged to be dying of cancer. I had a father adjudged by society as a pompous and treacherous scapegrace. I had a three-year-old sister, and a mother who lay in childbed without security . . . her young life torn into ribbons. . . .”

  Even so, he wrote, Effie Kantor joked during the prolonged and difficult delivery. In the political debate of the day between those who supported expansion of the nation to the limits of the continent and those who favored consolidation, Effie declared herself—huffing and puffing between contractions—a passionate adherent of the expansionist cause.

  When that expansion allowed a new infant into the world, “They put me into a wicker basket and called me John,” Mack wrote. “Not for long, thank heaven.”

  On his birth certificate it says his name is Benjamin McKinlay. The Benjamin he rejected outright—except as a joke name used with old friends. The McKinlay he altered as he entered adolescence to MacKinlay, because he thought it looked more authentically Scottish with the added a. (Despite the fact of my middle name—which happens to be MacKinlay—I have never thought of myself as having a Scottish origin. My guess is because my last name, and my father’s heritage, was less complicated—German Jewish all around—that’s how I identified. Also, I never had any definite picture of that Scottish connection until I discovered it on a “find-a-grave” website: Mack’s maternal great-grandfather, my great-great-great-grandfather, had been born in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, in 1828. The entry, along with a photograph of his substantial tombstone, noted that William McKinlay had been a carpenter and lumber dealer, and one of the founders of the tiny Iowa town of Epworth.)

  Of the non-Scottish side of his family, MacKinlay, with an a, wrote: “My father had ‘run away.’ That was what people told me, though it was not the literal truth. Rather, my mother had left him, driven by practical and economic necessity. . . . It seemed simpler, if definitely unjust to the father, to tell the child that his father had run away. I had a mental picture of him, running as I ran, a specter cloaked and featureless, scampering past the edge of the garden.”

  I was shocked to learn that “abandonment,” the bedrock of the Bad Father story I had always been told, may not have been pure, literal truth. But Mack had no doubt that it was at least abandonment of all responsible behavior. Effie met John as a student at the nearby Drake University in Des Moines. It was a small Christian college, where John, avowing himself to be a recent convert to Christianity whose wealthy Jewish parents had disowned him as a result, must have created quite a splash. Physically imposing, well over six feet tall with a wild effusion of black hair, he would have appealed especially to a young girl like Effie, whose sharp mind and adventurous spirit would have been excited by John’s exotic origins, foreign-tinged accent (he had been born in Sweden to a long line of Jewish rabbis originally from Portugal), and fluency in five-dollar words.

  Effie married John in 1899, barely twenty. A photo of her in her wedding dress suggests why she might appeal to someone who could have had any number of women. Thick, dark hair braided down her back; dreamy eyes under perfectly arched eyebrows; a flawless complexion shaped by high cheekbones and punctuated with a pert nose and Cupid’s-bow lips.

  The wedding took place in Webster City. The humble McKinlay home had been tricked up with flowers on the mantel for a small reception. John’s parents were not present. He had lied about their wealth—they were immigrants who had never even regained the modest status they’d enjoyed as merchants in Sweden.

  It was only the first of an unending flood of lies he would tell.

  From the moment of those wedding vows to 1904, the year of Mack’s birth, “their story would not bear repeating,” he wrote. “[It was] an ugly montage of lost jobs, new jobs, American Beauty roses never paid for, scrofulous hotel rooms, jail doors opening and closing and opening again, baffled tearful trips back home to Webster City, furniture dumped out on sidewalks, letters, telegrams—and always check after check written by my grandfather, checks written with a crabbed hand.”

  In fact, I would discover, it was immensely worse than Mack knew. Surely, if he had ever become aware of the story printed on the front page of The Webster City Tribune on January 3, 1902, there would have been some trace of that almost unbelievable account in the thousands of bitter comments he made about his father throughout his life. But in his lifetime, of course, that small-town newspaper was neither digitized nor searchable. Nothing he ever said or wrote in any of his autobiographical writings or in the scores of letters in the Library of Congress files that refer to John Kantor suggests that he ever knew about this:

  JOHN M. KANTOR’S UNIQUE CAREER

  J. M. Kantor, the young man who was arrested at St. Paul on Christmas Eve . . . on a charge of having swindled the Des Moines Life Insurance company out of several hundred dollars, has . . . enjoyed an illustrious career before landing in
the Polk county jail. In fact Kantor has just come back [to Drake University, where several years ago] he wooed and won one of the most beautiful girls in the university, who is now his wife. But a few weeks [ago] Kantor is said to have deserted her and her baby daughter and started for Minnesota with a young woman of prominence. . . . Efforts to carry out this plan have been foiled, but when arrested in St. Paul . . . Kantor is said to have been engaged to [yet another] young woman . . . and about to marry her.

  The abandoned wife—one of the most beautiful girls at Drake University!—was my great-grandmother Effie, and the baby daughter was Virginia.

  The story, which fills half the front page, continues to sketch an astonishing chain of events. After enrolling in Drake in 1897, “claiming to be a converted Jew,” John said he wanted to enter the Christian ministry. He took Bible and oratory classes, and impressed his teachers as bright, but lazy. Early in John’s academic career, a liveryman complained to faculty members that John had hired a horse and buggy for the day, then abandoned it in a neighboring town without paying his bill. When confronted by the faculty, John denied the claim and insisted he was being persecuted because of his Jewish origin.

  The faculty decided to accept his word that it was a misunderstanding fueled by prejudice.

  Before his studies were complete, John applied for ordination as a minister. He was turned down for insufficient qualifications, but managed to persuade a small-town Iowa church to hire him as a pastor anyway. He brought Effie and Virginia there to live with him, but the job lasted barely three months until dissension among his flock forced him out for mysterious reasons.

  The young family returned to Webster City, where John occasionally delivered sermons at the church there, which the newspaper said were received enthusiastically as “eloquent and convincing.”

  He also sold insurance, but instead of giving the premiums to the insurance company, he pocketed them, leaving those he’d sold policies unprotected. When he thought one company might be catching on, he switched to another.

  When not cheating his customers and insurance companies, he played poker—“a fiend for card playing and a most clever player,” the newspaper said.

  On one insurance-scamming trip out of town, the local minister was so impressed by John, he not only purchased the bogus insurance he was selling, he invited him to give a guest sermon at his church that Sunday. On Saturday night, John convened a poker game with a group of fellow traveling men. “They continued their sport until 5 o’clock in the morning, when Kantor had cleaned up the whole crowd. . . . It was then Sunday morning, and Kantor . . . stated that he guessed he would stay up and be ready for church. . . . About 10 o’clock Kantor emerged from the hotel, smooth shaven and well dressed, and walked to the Christian church, where he is said to have preached a sermon worthy of a more eminent divine.”

  Afterward, he claimed to have received a telegram urging him to return home immediately because Effie was ill. He told a traveling companion with family in town that he’d already sent all his money home to his wife and was in need of an emergency loan for travel expenses. His trusting companion vouched for John to his father, a well-off farmer of that town, who agreed to lend them money to pay their hotel and livery bills, with enough left over to fund a trip back to Webster City. But when the young friend awoke in the hotel the next morning, John was gone, the money was gone, the bills still unpaid.

  In Webster City, the story said, John had “made many friends among some of the leading citizens, who but recently have discovered that their friendship was misplaced. For some time past residents of Webster City have been predicting that the young man would land in jail, so that the news of his arrest was not a great surprise. The McKinlay family is well known and respected in Webster City, and they have the sympathy of everyone there.”

  When John’s misdeeds seemed at last about to catch up with him, he took off, stopping first in a town just north of Webster City, Eagle Grove, where he bought a train ticket for himself and “a young woman to whom he had been devoting himself during a stay [there].”

  The girl’s uncle, who happened to be a conductor on the very train John and his lady friend boarded, discovered them together and “invited her to return home with him.”

  John continued on to Minneapolis, where he “worked his insurance graft among the Scandinavian farmers of Minnesota so cleverly” he was not discovered until nine weeks later.

  “When arrested on Christmas Eve, he was about to take part in a festival chorus in St. Paul and it is stated upon good authority that he was engaged to a St. Paul girl.”

  Of all these riotous facts, the most amazing of all is the dateline. These events occurred two years before Mack was born. Obviously, despite all the completely impossible to ignore evidence of John’s spectacular perfidy as both a husband and a man, Effie took him back, at least for a time. One thing Mack never learned—and I certainly won’t figure out—is why. She obviously saw and read the front page of her hometown paper—how awful must that have been?—not to mention, suffered the gossip of a very small, close-knit, conservative, churchgoing town. Was John’s eloquence so great that he somehow managed to persuade her it was “all a big misunderstanding,” just as he had persuaded Drake University officials that he was the victim of a bigoted livery owner instead of the perpetrator of petty larceny? Did her passion for this exotic, handsome, eloquent, and decidedly nonboring lover overwhelm her common sense? Was she so afraid of being left alone with a small child that even a lying, cheating, no-good husband was better than no husband?

  I can only imagine it was some calculus involving all the above.

  In any case, a heavy burden fell on Effie’s father, who not only had to bail out his daughter’s husband again and again—make good on an endless series of bad checks, provide restitution for business deals reneged on, literally bail him out of jail—but he had to put up with the inevitable small-minded, small-town whisperings. Adam McKinlay, a miller who was suffering through a downward financial spiral due to ill health and a changing world, also had to negotiate the public humiliation. He was a difficult figure to love. I found an obituary Mack wrote for him, in which you can assume he was being as positive as possible: “A taciturn man, he did not move easily in political and business circles. The bright time of his life ended when the prairies were fenced, and telephone lines began to lace from grove to grove. Honor, integrity, silence, poverty, respect—he had these and only these.”

  When Effie’s marital association threatened that respect, it triggered something in him. While in a drugstore, Adam overheard a man saying loudly that the McKinlay girl had “married a nigger,” which clearly referred to the olive-skinned John and was meant and taken as an insult. Adam was a small man, but toughened by a lifetime of lugging heavy sacks of grain and incited by humiliation. He decked the offender with a single rage-fueled blow. According to Mack, Adam never let Effie forget her role in his sacrifice, both of reputation and money, remaining bitter and passive-aggressively accusatory the rest of his life.

  John came back, long enough at least to plant the seed that became my grandfather, and then he was gone again. (On Mack’s birth certificate, under residence of father, Webster City is written in ink, and crossed out. Above it is written Chicago, Il.) Mack didn’t even know that much. Where his father was and what his father had been doing since his disappearance remained a mystery.

  Effie had kept some pictures of John, but never showed them to her son.

  “I didn’t know what he looked like,” Mack wrote in But Look the Morn, “but I began to hear about him. . . . He was tall; he had swarthy skin and kinky black hair.”

  His absent father lived only in playmates’ taunts; a swirl of tense, quickly hushed comments; and his ill-informed imagination, until one night, when Mack was six, the phone rang. “Chicago is calling” is the way his grandmother put it, her hand over the mouthpiece, her eyes round with alarm.

&n
bsp; Effie talked first, then Virginia. “I watched entranced from the sofa,” Mack wrote. “The room seemed resounding with a strange presence.”

  After an interminable stretch of suspense, he was summoned to the phone. He had to stand on a chair to reach the handset on the wall. His mother prompted: “Say hello.”

  Mack squeaked out the greeting. Through the earpiece emerged a basso profundo. “Hello there, sweetheart! . . . Do you love your Daddy, sweetheart?”

  Mack wrote: “Through all the years I can hear the fatuous rumble, the oily conceit of his voice. ‘Daddy loves you, sweetheart. Daddy wants to send you something. What do you want your Daddy to send you?’

  “I did not know what to say. This was not real, it was all an imagining and a mistake, a peculiar contrivance of nightmare. The great black voice blurting inside the sweaty receiver . . . father . . . I did not know. What should one ask of a father whom he had never seen? . . .

  “‘How would you like to have a bicycle? Do you want your Daddy to send you a bicycle?’

  “I whispered, ‘Yes.’ And then as the magnitude of this proposal flashed upon me, I yelled it at the top of my lungs: ‘Yes!’

  “‘I will send you a bicycle tomorrow.’”

  This is the one part of the story I had been told many times; the single fact that, in my mind, had stood for my grandfather’s childhood: Every day for months he would wait and wait for the delivery truck carrying his bicycle, until it became a joke among the older boys.

  A year later, in 1911, Mack was still wondering if one day a bike might appear when instead three train tickets arrived, one for Effie, one for Virginia, one for him—all to Chicago, courtesy of John Kantor. I would learn from my uncle Tim’s book, My Father’s Voice, that, ironically, John Kantor somehow ended up suing Effie for desertion after she’d given up following him on his crooked trail. He’d won a divorce, remarried, and was now separated, awaiting a divorce from his second wife. Hence the spasm of generosity in sending train tickets to his first wife and daughter, whom he’d decided he missed, and the son he’d never met. Effie, then thirty-two, must have had misgivings about the implications of those tickets, but she had been living with her parents, cleaning bedpans as a practical nurse, and working as a cashier at the Webster City grocery store—all for a pittance that was pathetically necessary to keep the economically strapped household from utter destitution. Plus, her children desperately needed a father. And, Mack would later say, in spite of everything, she was still drawn to the man.