Murray Leinster
Page 5
Will made long visits to his half-sister Lula and her family in Norfolk, Virginia. Lula had married the Rev. George William Cox, a Baptist minister, in 1910, and they had a daughter, Francis [ sic], and a son, George Jr. Lula’s marriage was particularly fortunate for Will, as it was through his brother-in-law that Will was introduced to Gloucester County, Virginia, the place which soon became the home of his heart, no matter where else he lived.
Gloucester is in the southeastern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia in what is referred to as the Tidewater region. Technically, it includes all areas where water level is affected by tides, and Gloucester, Portsmouth, Norfolk, Suffolk, Hampton, Newport News, Yorktown, Williamsburg and Richmond are all in Tidewater.
There is a great deal of local pride in being from Tidewater Virginia perhaps because of its rich colonial history — the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607, and the first continuous English-speaking settlement at Hampton in 1610. Norfolk, where Will was born, continues to be Virginia’s primary port as it has been since the 1700s. At the time of the Revolution, it was the largest community in Virginia.
There may be no place other than Tidewater Virginia that more closely represents the quote from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead; it is not even past.”
Four • Entering Science Fiction: 1919 –1921
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There is pride of family and heritage, and these Virginians know who their ancestors were, even distant cousins, for generations back, and their lives are remembered and celebrated. Many of these early settlers were educated and cultured and traveled to England and France. There were wharfs on almost every Tidewater farm that had access to water. The network of rivers and creeks made them useful not only for local travel, but many were also accessible to ocean-going vessels. This allowed these early residents to go abroad for business or to send and receive products, keeping up with the latest trends and fashions.
The Rev. George W. Cox, “Uncle Will” to Will’s children, was from Glou -
cester County. His brother and sisters, Ned Cox and Miss Ada and Miss Emmie Cox, owned and managed the Botetourt Hotel in Gloucester Court House, and Will became a frequent visitor, falling in love with the area in the process. As early as 1917, he rented a writing room at the hotel. Gussie and Hylda Lawson and Edith Lawson Hatch, nieces of the Coxes all lived there. They were shirt-tail relatives, the southern term for people related by marriage, and they formed a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives.
The rural, small town life where everyone has known you forever, and everyone knows everything about you — and there are few surprises — suited Will perfectly. He liked familiarity; he liked to go to the same places, to be with the same people with whom he felt comfortable and unchallenged. This gave him the stability and security he longed for after his unsettled teen years.
Although at this time he was living primarily in Newark, New Jersey, and New York City and visited his half-sister Lula in Norfolk frequently, for the rest of his days, Gloucester was the only place he ever really wanted to be.
• FIVE •
Marriage:
The 1920s
During one of his stays in New York, Will met Mary Mandola, the Green wich Village–born daughter of Attilio and Marianna Mandola. Attilio had arrived in New York in 1891 from Sarno, a town in the region of Campania in the province of Salerno, Italy. Marianna came two years later with their two-year-old son, John. Four daughters (Rose, Mary, Julia, Adeline) and a second son (Rudolph) were born in Manhattan.
Will and Mary met on the beach at Coney Island, and Will said later:
“I thought she was the prettiest kid I’d ever seen.” She had beautiful brown eyes and very white skin that never tanned in the years in the hot Virginia sun. Although she was 22 and Will just a year older, he thought she was a teenager.
Born on March 14, 1897, Mary had grown up on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village and had fond memories of roller-skating in nearby Washington Square. Intellectually, she was a good match for Will. She graduated from Washington Irving High School, and the breadth of Mary’s education there made her more than just a pretty girl; she had a literary and artistic education that made her especially appealing to the young writer.
Washington Irving was the newest high school in New York City. Its brand-new building opened at 40 Irving Place in Greenwich Village in February 1913. The school itself, however, started earlier, coming from the 1906
joining of the prestigious Wadleigh High School for Girls and Girls Technical High School. In organizing the new school, the principal, Patrick McCowan, believed in integrating the curricula, combining academic instruction in the liberal arts with the technical skills of typewriting, stenography, commercial art, dressmaking and home economics. He developed a creative atmosphere that made the school a model for education in that time.
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Five • Marriage: The 1920s
39
A repertoire course, which in -
cluded literature and the arts, was
required. Students studied the poets,
including Whitman, Thomas Gray,
Lord Byron, Wordsworth and Shel-
ley. However, the policy was that
poetry must be not only be studied,
but also recited on a regular schedule
in performances that encouraged
and trained future actresses. School
plays included Shakespeare produc-
tions and performances of operas
such as Bizet’s Carmen. Metropolitan
Opera stars visited. Washington Irv-
ing was the first school to have an art
gallery and, in art classes, each stu-
dent had her own worktable. The
integration of art and dressmaking
inspired an interest in fashion de -
sign. Girls learned to tailor on living
customers and sold their own cre-
ations from a room next to the library.
Mary had been interested in
studying law and had taken a few
classes, but the death of her mother
when she was 18 and her training at
Washington Irving led her to focus
on fashion design. A few years later,
Mary Mandola circa 1920.
the actress Claudette Colbert also
developed this interest while at Washington Irving. Colbert’s major interests were art and acting, and she had been encouraged in those studies at school.
However, her early eclectic training served her well, and when she went on to study at the Art Student’s League, she helped pay the tuition and support herself by dressmaking. After she achieved great success as an actress, she continued to remember what she had been taught and took great interest in the style and fit of her costumes. She always remembered her high school and sent an autographed picture that is still on view in the library.
Mary worked for a French custom dressmaker — always called Madame —
in the Village after she graduated, and she designed and made her own stylish clothes for her petite 5' 2" frame. Her portrait, showing a sweet-faced, dark-
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M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
Mary’s wedding picture, 1921.
haired young woman in a romantic black and white dress she designed, was displayed in the photographer’s window as a sample of his work for several months.
Mary’s father, whose youngest child, Rudy, was only six when his wife died, soon remarried. He moved their home and his established real estate brokerage business to Brooklyn.
Mary was very close to her older brother John, who limped badly from an accident in his teens. John provided a limousine service for the early motion picture studios then located in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Astoria, in Queens, New York City. He also started the first commuter airplane service to Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Bluebird Airline and Limousine Service. Althoug
h Mary never drove after she was married, she had a license and was proud to have learned in her brother’s Cadillac.
Will was very much in love, and it is obvious that he was thinking about her in the fall of 1919 when staying with Lula and her family in Fentress (a section in Norfolk), Virginia. The evidence of this poem suggests that their meeting on the beach may have taken place that previous summer. The poem, dated October 25, 1919, and signed Murray Leinster, survives: I gaze, unseeing, from my small high window
And lean outside to seize my little share
Of faint, infrequent, vagrant breezes,
While longing for a country fair
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41
Where cities do not make the very night winds
Hot-breathed and dust-filled torments, where
I might recline upon broad moonlit beaches
And watch your face, framed in your dark, dark hair.
I sigh, and know sighing foolish,
For was there ever such a lovely place,
Where I might find you shyly waiting
Until I saw you, shadow veiled in lace?
For all I know, tonight you may be sitting
In this same city’s drab, dull covered space
In some small room, by some high attic window
A wistful look like mine upon your face.
Will had been selling regularly and, during their courtship in New York City, Will and Mary’s usual hangout was Keens Steakhouse near Herald Square on West 36th Street. Keens was originally the meeting place of the Lambs Club, the well-known artists and writers club. It opened to the public in 1885
and continued to be frequented by the literary and theater crowd, including publishers, producers, newspapermen and playwrights. Originally gentlemen-only, the gender barrier was broken in 1905 when Lily Langtry, actress and paramour of King Edward VII of England, sued for admittance and won.
Keens is still known for its huge collection of churchwarden pipes, some of which hang from the ceiling in the dining room. Keens’ Pipe Club continued a tradition from 17th Century England when the long stemmed clay pipes were kept at the owner’s favorite inn, because they were too fragile to transport. Members of the club included Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Albert Einstein, General Douglas MacArthur and even opera singer Grace Moore.
Will’s first venture into the movies was “The Purple Hieroglyph,” a short story that was published in Snappy Stories March 1, 1920. It was a mystery melodrama, and one of the last of his stories to appear there. It was filmed by Vitagraph Studios in their Brooklyn location and released in October 1920.
Vitagraph was founded in 1897 by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, and by 1907 was producing most of the films made in America. Warner Brothers bought the company in 1925.
The Purple Hieroglyph was the working title of the movie, changed later to The Purple Cipher. The Purple Hieroglyph would be filmed twice more, first as Murder Will Out in 1930, featuring Lila Lee, Noah Beery and Hedda Hopper, and then as Torchy Blane in Chinatown in 1939.
Torchy is a newspaper reporter who is involved with a police detective in solving crimes. This familiar plot was used in a series of Torchy Blane films starring Glenda Farrell. A five-cassette collection is currently available. The 42
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
Chinatown story involves a rich young man engaged to a U.S. senator’s daughter, three murders, blackmail, an Oriental gang, a speedboat kidnapping, and a rescue by a U.S. submarine. Some shots were made in the shipyards of San Francisco and at the San Diego Naval Base.
In 1921, Will added Mencken and Nathan’s new magazine Black Mask to his list of markets. However, in spite of these successes and continuing short story sales, he wanted more to offer his bride and decided to write a play. His agent, Bob Hardy, submitted it to the Shuberts, then the leading Broadway theater producers. He was again visiting Lula in Virginia when he heard they had accepted it and fired off a letter to Mary with a proposal.
When wooing her, he had told her, “Just think, our children can say their father is a writer.” He said he was “walking on air” when she accepted, but then he got another letter from Hardy saying, although the play was accepted, the date of production was indefinite, and no money would be forthcoming until then. (The play was never produced, and Will never made any money from it.) He was “tearing his hair out,” he said later. Mary, in the meantime, had other concerns.
The slightly built, ambitious young writer with the soft Virginia accent was undoubtedly unlike anyone else she had met, and Mary was understandably worried about marrying a man whom she really didn’t know very much about. Although sheltered and naïve, she gathered strength and took the train to Portsmouth, Virginia, to meet more of Will’s family, including his half-sister Lula, Lula’s husband and children, and the uncles and aunts on his mother’s side who lived nearby. She was delighted to meet another engaged young woman on the trip, and that made her feel better. More importantly, getting to know Lula and more of the family gave Mary the confidence to go ahead, and the wedding took place in New York on August 9, 1921.
Knowing Will, he had probably drawn an idyllic picture of life in the area of Tidewater Virginia that he had come to love and so was able to convince the city-bred Mary to give living in rural Gloucester a year’s trial. As he later told the story, “Thank goodness, she liked it.” For her, that first long drive down to Virginia was novel and exciting.
She saw her first cow, and Will had to stop the car so she could get out and examine it. Later she enjoyed discovering that horses were for riding as well as pulling wagons. A house was found to rent in Ark, a settlement in Gloucester County, where their first daughter, Little Mary, was born on May 6, 1922.
They searched and soon found what became Will’s dream home, a dete-riorating story-and-a-half colonial built in the late 1600s. It sat on several acres high over the north bank of the York River at Clay Bank in Gloucester County across from Williamsburg. Long abandoned, it had recently been the
Five • Marriage: The 1920s
43
residence of a flock of chick-
ens. It was quite small, as
were those early colonial
houses, but full of charm
with low ceilings, beautiful
wide board floors, the orig-
inal HL hinges and box
front door lock with a foot-
long key. There were three
working fireplaces. Best of
all, there was a view to die
for. As you looked west, the
Will and “Little Mary” at Ardudwy in 1922.
sun scattered diamonds on
the water every morning, and set off an explosion of color over that same river at night.
Mary and Will faced a daunting task but went ahead and bought it, signing the papers on August 26, 1922, just over a year after the date of their marriage. In homage to his Welsh ancestry, Will named it Ardudwy.
The original Ardudwy is in northwest Wales and is prominent in Welsh mythology. Historically, Collwyn or Colwyn, depending upon your source, was lord of Ardudwy and progenitor of one of the Fifteen Noble Tribes of Gwynedd. He is credited with restoring Harlech Castle in the tenth century.
A 1909 article in The Washington Post that was circulated widely among the various Jenkins families of the time traced their lineage to Sir Leoline Jenkins and Judge David Jenkins calling them father and son. There is no verifiable family link to either man, they were not father and son, and there is no indication that they were related to each other. However, ancestral records of some English Jenkins families lead back to Colwyn of Ardudwy.
Like Harlech Castle, Clay Bank’s Ardudwy needed restoring and Will and Mary were equal to the task. First came the scrubbing. Mary’s younger sister Adeline came down to help, and Will remembered her crying hysterically when her fingernails became soft from the lye soap, and how he comforted her, telling her they would har
den again. They did.
The house was in Clay Bank, a farming settlement that was little more than a post office and a county store. It was just up the hill from Clay Bank wharf where the steamboat from Baltimore landed. The landmark clay banks, visible from the river, are in front of Ardudwy.
Clay Bank, rural and remote as it was, was also a community center of sorts. Before reliable automobiles and trucks and widespread railroad service, all transport, commercial and pleasure, was by boat. A series of wharfs extended
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M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
to the channel up and down the river and the bay, and Clay Bank wharf was a focus of activity at least twice a day when the steamer that went from Baltimore to West Point, Virginia, and back docked there. It was not until World War II that trucks completely replaced the freight service it provided. In the early days, when there was not much in the way of entertainment, people would stroll out to see the boat come in. A walk to the wharf shed at the end was a favorite activity for courting couples, even more popular later in the evening. There was a smell of saltwater, mud flats and old rope, but it was not unpleasant if you were used to it.
At the foot of the wharf, there was an area with the shipping office, a store and post office, and the home of the merchant and postmaster, Louis Groh. Will had bought the Clay Bank property from Groh, and his wife, Frieda, became a close friend of Mary’s, with their babies coming along close to the same time. The York River is four miles wide at Clay Bank, and there was a rail line from the shore to the wharf shed and loading dock at the channel. A double-ended cart was designed to be pulled by a mule and ride the rail. In the 1930s, Barneymule was in charge of pulling the truck for the mile-long rail trip along the wharf stem.
After his freight had been loaded onto the steamboat and another load had filled his truck, he was led around to the other end of the cart and hitched up for the trip back. Some of the more unusual shipments were daffodils that were grown as a crop for the northern market and watermelons. Will and Mary reported that they once scratched a name and address on the rind of a watermelon, added stamps, and the melon safely reached Mary’s family in New York.