The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  Claire told me another story about when the Morrises were living in Southampton. “I was down in the Keys and I got a call from Marcella telling me to come back to New York and out to their house as soon as possible. I asked her what was wrong. She told me her neighbors were planting bushes on her property. Well, I had to go up north to find out what the story was. Not very happily, I flew to New York and went straight out to the Southampton town hall to find out what was going on, and I brought a copy of Marcella’s deed. It seems there is a law in Southampton stating that if you put bushes or plants on property other than yours and it abuts your property, in seven years it transfers to you. Smart! But not smart enough for the Morris sisters.” Marcella was always ready to fight for what was hers.

  * * *

  • • •

  Their house was torn down not long after Marcella died in 1997. Though I was told that theirs was an ordinary-looking house, the address of Gin Lane was tony: It is now one of the most sought-after streets in one of the most exclusive towns in the Northeast.

  When Mattie and I drove up to the address, all we could see from the street were tall hedges and a big iron gate, and behind it a long driveway. I found an online listing for the current house on the property and read it out loud to Mattie: “The house was built in 2007 with eight bedrooms and eleven bathrooms, and it has 9,500 square feet. The house last sold for $2,300,000 in January 1998. The estimated value of the house in today’s dollars was more than $18 million.

  “More than $18 million,” I repeated for emphasis.

  Mattie asked, “What should we do?”

  “We should ring the doorbell and tell them you grew up here.”

  We did nothing of the sort. Instead we tried to peek through the gate and hedges to try to get a glimpse of the house, failed, got back in the car, and headed back to Montauk. As she drove, Mattie berated me (or really my father) for not cozying up to the Morris sisters when he had the chance. I was angry, too, but not about any lost money or inheritance. I was thinking about what I could’ve asked them about their lives but never had the chance. Oh, the party in 1980. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve wished to go back to that place and just ask her and Malvina all the questions. “Hi, Malvina and Marcella, in forty years I’m going to be obsessed with you and I will need to get some details and facts about your life if you wouldn’t mind.” Sadly, I was too young and not me yet and they were old ladies and an opportunity of a lifetime was missed. Also, I wish I had bought a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side at that time, when it was cheap, and now I’d be living like a queen. Again, I had no forethought. Children, pay attention!

  * * *

  • • •

  Even though I ordered all the Morris sisters’ Social Security applications at the same time, they came one at a time over several weeks. I think that’s because the Social Security Administration has a flair for drama.

  The first to arrive was Malvina’s, and I was excited to see her handwriting on the application. It was dated December 21, 1936, and it listed her address as 29 Charles Street, New York, NY. She was working at Sobel Brothers at 150 Duane Street, downtown. Her age, thirty-six; date of birth, 11 March 1900; place of birth, “Roumania”; sex, female; race, white; father’s name, “George Bernard Morris”; mother’s maiden name, Schneirer; and below that was Malvina’s signature. Not much new information, but what I found encouraging was that these were hard facts, and facts are the building blocks of truth. More research revealed that Sobel Brothers was a shoe company whose headquarters was on Duane Street, and Malvina was the company’s bookkeeper.

  The next application to arrive was Selma’s. Hers was dated December 14, 1936, which suggested that all of the sisters applied together. It said, “Unemployed at Present,” and it also listed her address as 29 Charles Street. Her age, forty-two; date of birth, 15 December 1893; place of birth, “Focsini Roumania,” sex, female; race, white; father’s name, “George Bernhart Morris,” mother’s maiden name, Schneirer; and below that was Selma’s signature.

  I remembered what Herbie said about Selma: “Selma! Never! Stopped! Talking! Ever! She had a mouth like a machine gun and could drive everyone in the world batshit.” He added, “If you’re trying to measure up who was the biggest wacko of the sisters, she was, you know, premier, in my opinion.”

  I told him that was not something I was going to measure, and truthfully, I think wacko is in the eye of the beholder.

  Claire had told me she thought that throughout her life Selma carried a heavy burden and a lot of guilt. After all, at seventeen she watched her father put her mother in an insane asylum and her younger sisters into an orphanage several months later. Claire told Selma there was nothing she could have done to prevent it, but Selma believed that she should have been able to stop some of it or at least make it easier for her sisters to understand. I told Claire that Selma was just a kid herself, but Claire reminded me that wasn’t how they considered you at seventeen in the early twentieth century: Many women were married at seventeen. Including two of my mother’s sisters.

  “I don’t know if you know this, Julie, but Selma was very pretty and had a beautiful singing voice,” Claire said. I had seen pictures of Selma as a teenager and she was quite lovely: long wavy brown hair, large dark eyes, and a perfect bow mouth.

  Claire continued, “She was also very bossy. She got a job with Sears and Roebuck in St. Louis selling washing machines. She traveled door-to-door.” She stopped, and the expression on her face changed. “Did you know that one of her good friends was Golda Meir? She told me this! I didn’t believe her until she showed me a letter Golda Meir had written to her. If I remember, Golda wanted Selma to join an organization in St. Louis and then go to Israel.”

  Claire said that Selma would’ve gone, too, but she was very dedicated to her family. “She took it upon herself to make sure that everyone was okay. When Marcella and Malvina were older and able to take care of themselves, they grew to hate her interference,” Claire said. According to every member of my family, Selma’s defining characteristic—other than talking nonstop—was her really annoying personality. Despite that, the three of them lived together.

  While I believed Claire, I also wanted to confirm that it was possible that Golda Meir and Selma Morris could have known each other, let alone been good friends. Having learned the hard way that Marcella never worked with J. P. Morgan, I didn’t want to make the same error twice.

  I was able to learn that though Golda Meir was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1898, she emigrated to Wisconsin in 1905 to escape the pogroms. How she and Selma might have gotten to know each other remains to be seen, but they were close in age, both Jewish immigrants who had settled in the Midwest.

  Claire continued. “I don’t know if you know this, Jul, but your great-grandmother had a lot to do with the life of the Morris sisters. When they left the orphanage, they decided to go to New York to find family. Your great-grandmother Martha took them in. She also took my mother in. That’s why I know so much about the Morris sisters and why your grandmother, my mother, and the Morris sisters were so close. They were like sisters.” I had no idea about this, and it made me feel much warmer toward my great-grandmother.

  “Selma was the one who had the closest attachment to their mother; she always went to visit her,” Claire said. This was the first I had heard that any of them had gone to see her. “In the late 1940s, when they were all in New York, Selma went back to St. Louis to be near her mother till she died in 1953.”

  This detail caught my attention, because in my deep dive into the life of Golda Meir, I learned that Meir had actually been in St. Louis in 1948 and 1949. It was possible she and Selma could have met after all, as Selma was listed on her mother’s death certificate (incorrectly as Thelma) as being present and with a St. Louis address.

  On Selma’s own death certificate, when she died in May of 1991 in Southampton, her occupation was li
sted as a salesperson for washing machines.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Marcella’s Social Security application finally arrived, I ripped it open at the mailbox to see where she worked, only to find that the government had made a mistake: The information was for the wrong Marcella Morris. I called the Social Security helpline and spoke to the most confused government employee who ever existed, and after talking with him for an hour, I decided it was worth it for my mental health simply to pay another twenty-five dollars and order the application again. This time it came much faster and was correct, but it turned out to be not as informative as I had hoped. Much of Marcella’s information was the same as Malvina’s and Selma’s—the address of 29 Charles Street, her place of birth, her gender and race, and her parents’ names (except spelled differently). Her business was listed as Reliance Advertising at 444 Madison Avenue, which was in Midtown Manhattan near Rockefeller Center. So this was 1936 and she wasn’t in a financial firm yet. I knew that Harold Bache took over from his uncle Jules Bache in 1944, so she would have been his secretary sometime after that.

  I was disappointed that Marcella’s Social Security information wasn’t the golden key I was looking for, but I had done as much as I could as a regular person, not a historian, and I was going to have to be okay with that.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’d almost forgotten that I was waiting for Ruth’s application when it arrived. Hers was dated the following June of 1937 (I imagined her older sisters nudging her to do it). She was the only sister who didn’t live at 29 Charles Street. Instead her address was 257 West Fourth Street, which is about a ninety-second walk from her sisters’ home and just around the corner. Claire had told me the other sisters had never let Ruth live with them because she “got a little strange.”

  She “got” strange?

  “Yeah, did I tell you she got married?” Claire said.

  I had heard that Ruth was the only sister to get married, but I never found any record of her marriage. I did come across a lot of Ruth Morrises who were married in New York, but they all stayed married and went on to have children. So none of them were my Ruth Morris.

  “Ruth was married to a wonderful guy for about two years,” Claire said. “Her sisters could not accept him. You know they never liked men after their father abandoned them. And being that the money came from them, they made life difficult for the newlyweds, approving (or disapproving) how they spent money. The couple split up, and that’s when Ruth became a little strange. And then the husband died not long after that.”

  David remembered that Ruth’s husband had never gotten a new car. So Ruth made Marcella buy him one, but he died before it came. (The men in that family did not have good luck.)

  Herbie told me that Selma, Marcella, and Malvina used to say that Ruth’s marriage was the reason she died so young. It was true that Selma lived to almost ninety-seven years old, Marcella to ninety-five, and Malvina to ninety-four, while Ruth died at seventy-three.

  When I was growing up, Ruth was the sister I’d heard the most about. She was the colorful one. “The nut,” as family members called her, back when people were looser with their descriptions of others.

  I told Claire and she said she didn’t like that term. “I’ll tell you about her and you decide,” she said.

  Did she have some form of claustrophobia? As Claire had told me that Ruth did not like to live in anything with a roof, that possibility struck me. “She would camp out on Orchard Beach, which is in the Bronx, until she got caught, then she’d go to Brighton Beach or Rockaway. She did that a lot. Or if she was living in an apartment, she would sleep on the fire escape. I don’t know where she got her money, maybe Marcella, because she traveled all over the world. She told me that the Arab men were the best lovers.” Claire arched an eyebrow. “She said they would anoint you in oils after the loving.

  “One time, must have been around 1970 or so, Ruth called and asked me to come to her apartment. She said she had something that would just fit into my house.” Claire shook her head. “I didn’t want to go because she lived on Riverside Drive—you know, up where it’s not good, where you lived?”

  I said I knew exactly where she meant.

  “She insisted I come. I got my girlfriend to go with me for protection. When we got there and parked we saw these scary men hanging out of windows, sleeping on the street, and sitting all over the porches. I said, ‘This is it, we are in trouble.’ The men seemed to be in a stupor, so we decided to take our chance. We proceeded up the front steps of the building Ruth lived in, went into the lobby, and rang her bell. We saw by the apartment number that she lived on the third floor. There was no way we were going to take an elevator in that building, so we walked up the stairs, huffing and puffing, three flights. We got to her door, which was open—we thought she must have heard us coming. When we got in the apartment we noticed all her windows were open, too. I remarked about it. Her answer was, ‘They come in to rob me every day. If I leave everything open, they don’t break the locks and the windows.’

  “We looked around. Jul, she must have had thirty-six couches and forty-two tables and chairs. It was like a furniture showroom or the home of those crazy men who kept all those newspapers.” (She meant the Collyer brothers, notorious hoarders from the 1930s and ’40s who were crushed to death by their belongings in 1947.)

  “I said to her, ‘Ruth, what is this?’ She told me they were all antiques and she was storing them until they were sold. She had a couch in the bathtub. I said to my friend, ‘It’s time to go,’ but Ruth insisted I see the gift she had for me. It was a gigantic marble and metal table that you see in hotel lobbies. There was no way I could or would take that. She insisted. I said I would have to send a mover to get it. I never did.

  “Another time she called to ask if she could store a very expensive rug in my garage. Jerry”—Claire’s husband—“was not happy about it. He didn’t know what it was, and he knew Ruth. It was delivered all rolled up and papered. I had it put in the garage and waited and waited and waited for her to have it picked up. Finally, I called Ruth and said, ‘What’s with the rug? The moths are going to eat it!’ She told me to wait some more because she didn’t want to pay taxes for it—she lived in New York and we lived in Jersey. I think I waited a year and finally I said, ‘I’ve had it!’ So I opened the paper—and what was there? No rug, just the under padding of a carpet! I threw it out and Ruth never mentioned it again.

  “At one point, Marcella bought Ruth a house in Patchogue. She lived there with a couple; they paid rent to her and she slept on the beach. I was concerned for Ruth, so I asked Marcella why she was allowing this. Her answer was, ‘Should I put her away like Mother?’

  “Ruth died shortly after that. I am really angry at myself for not taking some things from the house. But who knew? Eileen, Bobby’s wife, took two paintings and had them framed. They look beautiful. Every time I go to her house I want to steal one. How would they know?”

  (I remembered seeing a painting by Malvina there, a beautiful vase with flowers, but never one by Ruth.)

  I told Claire that it sounds as if I would’ve loved Ruth.

  “You would have, Jul.”

  I asked Claire if she thought Ruth was different from her sisters because she was not just the youngest, but the only one born in the United States.

  “You know, I think that’s probably true. She saw herself as very modern, and Marcella, Selma, and Malvina were old-fashioned, like the old country. They felt very far apart in age, even though it wasn’t that much.”

  When I looked for a work address on Ruth’s Social Security application, I saw her business listed as “The Federalist Theater at 122 E 42nd Street.” I gasped.

  I’d studied Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) in college. In 1935, FDR signed an executive order to create the WPA as part of his New Deal to he
lp lift the United States out of the Great Depression by providing jobs for the legions of unemployed Americans (unemployment levels at the time were at a whopping 21 percent). In 1938, 3.3 million Americans worked for the WPA. A big part of the WPA was creating infrastructure jobs for unskilled people, but it also oversaw something called Federal Project Number One. These programs employed artists, musicians, actors, and writers across the country to perform for people and create art. Today, the WPA murals are some of my favorite works of American art. You can see them in many public places around the United States. The first one I saw was in a local post office when I was a child. I’ve seen several in New York City post offices.

  Roosevelt intended Federal Project Number One—or Federal One, as it was called—to put artists back to work to inspire and entertain the public. One of the programs, the Federal Theatre Project, under the direction of Hallie Flanagan, created theater troupes for out-of-work actors and writers. (There is a 1999 movie about it written and directed by Tim Robbins called Cradle Will Rock, with Cherry Jones as Hallie Flanagan.) The idea was to create a national theater that produced quality productions that would educate and engage audiences in social issues.

  So Ruth worked for the Federal Theatre Project as a writer. This revelation made me happy because she had continued to be creative after her lovely high school stories. And it was a significant achievement to be at that theater at that time.

  I knew that some of the Federal Theatre Project’s plays are kept in a collection at George Mason University in Virginia. I contacted the library and was able to order a copy of Ruth’s play Affidavit. When it arrived, it came with a cover sheet from the National Service Bureau WPA Federal Theatre Project, whose address was listed as 1697 Broadway, which is now the Ed Sullivan Theater. It said: