The Huntress

by Alice Arlen

  The Miracle had its American opening in Boston on December 16, 1924, to sell-out crowds and awestruck reviews, with Lady Diana Manners reprising her role as the Virgin Mary, and Miss Elinor Patterson, in a magnificently costumed nun’s habit, with eyes wonderingly cast upward or somberly cast downward, as the Tragic Nun. The production then moved to New York’s giant Hippodrome Arena (one of the few venues with enough space for setting up a satisfactory Gothic cathedral), where it stayed for many hugely profitable months before traveling off across the country to equally welcoming destinations, very much including Chicago. There its arrival coincided nicely (depending on one’s point of view) with Alicia’s own little debutante party, also at the Blackstone but with only one all-purpose band, and (so she claimed) champagne from Canada, and where much of the chatter in the receiving line was naturally about Elinor: Would she be there? Would Lady Diana? The answers being yes to the first, no to the second. And then, some months later, when The Miracle reached San Francisco, Elinor suddenly disappeared, leaving the show, a life on the stage (or at least a life in a plywood cathedral), and ran off to be married to Proper Bostonian Russell Codman. And so at last: farewell, lovely Elinor!

  · 16 ·

  LEDYARD SMITH was not Alicia’s only suitor, or even the most impressive, but he seemed to be cut from different and more interesting cloth than her other beaux, as people used to call them, or “young men” or “swains” and so forth. Not that he wasn’t from the same proper, prosperous Midwestern background as most of his rivals: For instance, young Daggett Harvey (of the railroad dining-car Harveys) or Sage Cowles (of the Minneapolis newspaper publishing Cowleses) or Princeton junior Adlai Stevenson (also from a newspaper publishing family, in downstate Illinois), or for that matter Smith’s fellow Yale classmate, Jim Simpson, son of the president of Marshall Field & Co., and perhaps his chief competitor. As it happened, Smith and Simpson were each fair haired, tall, athletic, both formed in the same Anglophile, Eastern prep-school mold at St. Paul’s, and friends of a sort. But where the Marshall Field heir was cool, assured, and self-contained sometimes to the point of arrogance, an unusually gifted college athlete who already played polo at an international level, Ledyard Smith was more of a warmhearted, enthusiastic outdoorsman with an adventurous spirit; an undergraduate archaeology student, he was sufficiently proficient to be heading south soon to Guatemala, on a dig among newly discovered Mayan ruins for the Carnegie expedition.

  The time we are talking about is the summer of 1926, six months or so after Alicia’s coming-out party at the Blackstone. There’s a photo portrait from that period: a youthful, pretty face, though one perhaps not yet fully formed or well defined, and wearing a somewhat anomalous expression that might be described as demure or even maidenly. Given the all-too-real reputational hazards for a girl her age (nineteen and some), and in her position, of not being an actual maiden, it’s more than likely she was still intacta, as the horrible Church Latin adjective put it; but while not being a seriously “bad” girl, she was definitely not a “good” girl either. By the conservative standards of the midwest, she was probably somewhere on the near or far edge of being “fast,” as well as footloose; which is to say that, having failed her entrance exams to Bryn Mawr college, she hadn’t bothered or quite got around to applying anywhere else; and what with her father busy in New York with his ever-more-successful tabloid (and ever-more-complicated personal life), and with her mother preoccupied with Elinor, and if not Elinor then with something else, Alicia was mostly content to spin her wheels as a horse-riding society girl, going to parties, shuttling between Chicago and Libertyville, and now nearby Lake Forest, with its sporty Onwentsia Club.

  Alicia, demure debutante, at her coming-out at the Blackstone Hotel, Chicago, 1925.

  In July, when young Ledyard Smith disappeared into the Guatemalan jungle, “four mule-riding days from the nearest trading-post,” as he put it in an early letter, for a while he seems to have had Alicia’s mostly devoted and certainly romantic attention. More letters followed (most of which she kept all her life). For example: “Our little boat upriver was so crowded with Indians I couldn’t stand up and for once in my life I was almost glad you weren’t with me…but at last we are on our way to the Oaxtun mahogany camp, which I think will appeal to you if or when you come down.” And: “How was our child, the little dog, and what can I bring him and you from the wilds…?” And: “I love you terribly, dearest. Let me know if you love me and exactly how much you love me.” Alicia replied to these endearments with her own warm protestations of love, as well as her eagerness for life in a Central American rain forest. But the truth was, she had not grown up with many examples of constancy in her life (aside from those noble sentiments expressed in the nineteenth-century poems her father loved to recite out loud). Besides, her other suitor, the impressive Jim Simpson, was not in Guatemala but right next door, so to speak, scoring goals on the polo field of the Onwentsia Club. In early December, when Ledyard emerged from his dig, he returned to Yale, sought out Simpson at Scroll and Key (the “secret society” both men belonged to) and in a spirit of Ivy League chivalry, politely asked his rival to step aside; when neither man would give up the quest, they ended up exchanging one of those sweet, weird handshakes of bygone days, accompanied by the obligatory wish that the best man win.

  Polo-playing Jim Simpson, department store heir and Alicia’s mother’s favorite.

  As for the object of all these knightly attentions, Alicia was neither especially desirous nor obviously ready to sign her life away to either boy, or man, or in fact to anyone at all. But then, in the way of large, conveniently faraway planets that suddenly change course and inconveniently start looming closer, both her parents, each in his or her own way, apparently decided to take an interest. First, her father, after returning unexpectedly to Libertyville one too many times and finding his daughter still out in the middle of the night, “driving around,” decided to bring her to New York, install her in a room in his apartment, and give her a low-level reporting job on the Daily News. This interesting experiment lasted three months, more or less, with Alicia by no means unwilling to run errands or trot around, notebook in hand, taking notes for the society page; in the end it largely foundered on young Miss Patterson’s chronic though cheerful confusion as to where exactly she was supposed to be, and when, and such details as, for example, who was it she had just interviewed? Meanwhile, back in Illinois her mother had been pursuing a different and altogether more ambitious strategy. This being a time when parents were fond, in thought and practice, of “settling down” their children by marrying them off, Alice Patterson had several businesslike conferences, or chats, with Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, and together they came to the sound conclusion that the best thing for young Jim and Alicia would be to make their evidently close friendship legal.

  When Alicia first got wind of the maternal push for a Simpson marriage, she was still in New York, still corresponding with the distant, beguiling Ledyard, and was distinctly cool to the idea. “I really don’t think I want to marry Jim, now or ever,” she wrote her sister Josephine. “Please don’t tell mother because I know they’ll [sic] be a complete explosion when she finds out.” But by June 1927 she was back on the Libertyville farm, unceremoniously bounced from her job on the Daily News, personally fired by none other than her pompous uncle Bert McCormick (since the war now preferring to be known as Colonel McCormick, or just “the Colonel”), feeling isolated and sorry for herself, and in a mood to agree to an August wedding to Simpson. At which point Ledyard Smith reappeared, on a two-week leave from his Guatemala excavations, first looking for his beloved in New York, next pursuing her to Libertyville, where, catching her in a different mood, he apparently persuaded Alicia instead to fly the coop with him, back to his tent in the jungle.

  Alicia in white satin and lace before her Lake Forest wedding to Jim Simpson, 1927.

  Some of what ensued sounds today like a scene, or several scenes, from one of the romantic comedies of tha
t era. For instance, in the Boston Herald, August 19, 1927: “Society Girl Betrothed to One Man, as Another Gets License to Wed Her.” From the New York Times of the same day: “Mr. Ledyard Smith, a young archaeologist with the Carnegie Expedition, explained that he had been in a hopeful and romantic mood” when apparently all by himself he had obtained a marriage license in Waukegan, Illinois (a town notorious for overnight marriage licenses), somehow “unaware that his intended was already engaged to another.” Perhaps a better exegesis of this odd tale was that Alice Patterson, on being tipped off about her daughter’s escape with Ledyard to the marriage-mills of Waukegan, had quickly sprung into action: first calling in her chips among Chicago’s society reporters so as to announce her errant daughter’s retroactive engagement to Simpson, and then browbeating her not-quite-ex-husband to send out a similar story to newspapers across the country.

  The bride and groom, with (left) sister Josephine, as noted in the Chicago Evening American.

  Faced with this force-majeure countermove, Alicia folded and returned to Libertyville, while poor Ledyard fled the scene, still trying to explain to sardonic reporters how, or why, a man might take out a wedding license on his own, returning to the safety of the Guatemalan mahogany forest. (NOTE: It’s worth mentioning that Ledyard Smith stayed the course in archaeology, in due course becoming Professor Ledyard Smith, and eventually chairman of Yale University’s preeminent Department of Archaeology, where by the end of a long and distinguished career he had been recognized as one of the pioneers in the excavation and interpreting of the great archipelago of Mayan ruins that runs south from Mexico into Central America.) Two days later the recent runaway bride, her face now swollen by tears and a bad case of hives, accompanied her mother to dinner with her future Simpson in-laws at their Tudor villa in suburban Glencoe. And five weeks later Alicia Patterson and James Simpson, Jr., were duly married, at a small, mostly private ceremony in the former Patterson farmhouse in Libertyville (by now convincingly transformed into a Georgian mansion), with the ruddy-cheeked, very Episcopal rector of St. Paul’s School officiating, and the scion of a rival Chicago department store as best man. The lovely Elinor, now Mrs. Russell Codman, had been designated matron of honor but called in sick at the last moment. Uncle Bertie McCormick, recent terminator of Alicia’s journalism career and copublisher of the Tribune, arrived in a maroon Rolls-Royce, with three bodyguards to protect him from what he called “new business competition” by the Chicago mob. For doubtless many reasons, the bride, who had seemed surprisingly self-possessed throughout the service, burst into loud sobs at its conclusion, and couldn’t or wouldn’t stop crying for long minutes, though apparently quieting down enough to whisper loudly to her father to the effect that, while she may have agreed to a wedding, her intention was to stay married to Simpson for only one year, no less but no more.

  Once a farmhouse, the Patterson house in Libertyville, Illinois, early winter.

  · 17 ·

  WITH ALL THESE HAPPENINGS taking place at more or less the high-water mark of the so-called Jazz Age, also known as the Era of Easy Money (at least for those who had some), it must have seemed almost natural, or at least not too unusual, that the young, and let’s admit it by no means unspoiled newlyweds, had been gifted by the groom’s rich father with a yearlong honeymoon: to be spent in England mainly riding horses, refining equestrian skills on the tough venues of the top English foxhunts, trying to learn what they could from the people who thought they had invented the sport. From a date three days after the wedding, there remains a newspaper photo showing the bride and groom at the deck rail of the great, four-funnel steamship Aquitania, Alicia in a trim new traveling suit and fashionable cloche hat, her head not quite at a level with her much taller husband’s shoulders, both of them chic, abstracted, and a bit blurry, though that might be a result of the obligatory sailing photo. Five days later they were in Liverpool, then London, and soon after back up into the English Midlands, in Leicestershire: then the heartland of English foxhunting country, where they began installing themselves in the town of Melton Mowbray.

  Should anyone be interested: In the phrase “painting the town red,” there actually was such a town; and the town was Melton Mowbray, where in 1832, or maybe 1833, the contents of three wooden buckets of red paint were splashed and flung about by the dashing, fun-loving, and mostly sodden young Earl of Somerset and his fellow huntsmen of the then-famous Quorn Hunt. Not quite one hundred years later, “the Quorn” (as it was known) was perhaps even more celebrated and esteemed, as possibly the best of the 120 or so foxhunting “packs” in England, with its meets bringing together many of the most skilled and audacious riders in the nation, a clubby gathering of mainly aristocratic riders of both sexes, in which the Simpsons had arranged to be included. Nor was this a casual, picturesque, weekend type of activity; indeed, “riding with the Quorn” was in some ways—in its physical demands and possible dangers—at least an equivalent to a long winter’s skiing in the high Alps: day after day going out on difficult runs, often in bad weather, in the company of the strongest and most competitive athletes. A season with the Quorn commonly ran from autumn well into winter, with as many as five or six meets in a week, each one a hard day’s outing, with sometimes sixty or seventy riders running their thoroughbreds at speed over uneven, gorse-covered fields (good protection for the fox, though with hidden hazards for horse and rider), across streams and brooks, taking high fences and stone walls at a jump, or not. Thanks to Papa Simpson’s largesse, the young Simpsons’ well-smoothed introduction to the British hunting scene extended to their living quarters, a suite of rooms at Bishop’s Inn, where the Prince of Wales, also a member of the Quorn, kept his own of course much grander suite. Out on the field Jim Simpson was easily the better rider of the couple, a world-class equestrian who in December wrote his father “how gratifying it is to be referred to here as Mr. Simpson, American sportsman and rider, and not always merely as the son of the president of Marshall Field.” For her part Alicia was good enough at least to hold her own in a tough crowd of women riders; what she lacked in precision and training she made up for in gumption and daring, galloping headlong when she could, and accepting the bangs and bruises that came with sometimes being thrown. For much of the season she went out three or four times a week, in the saddle for most of the day, with time-outs for a change of mounts. Even with the falls, however, the days were often easier than the nights, when she chafed under the British custom, all too easily adopted by her husband, whereby the women were left behind while the men went out to dine and drink together.

  The Quorn field assembles, early morning; AP is the lone woman in the middle.

  And then she had one mishap too many; as it happens not from being thrown by a horse but from a sudden, unexplained bleeding, an internal hemorrhage, while cantering across a farmer’s field. Back at the inn, after a doctor’s visit, the problem was revealed as a miscarriage from a pregnancy she hadn’t known existed. Worse still, it was from a rare, ectopic (or tubular) pregnancy, which in the short term brought with it considerable pain, and in the long term made it impossible for her to have children (a consequence only disclosed much later). It’s doubtful she told her husband about the miscarriage or that he’d have known how to respond had she done so; as things were, with his new wife pale, “under the weather,” and confined to bed, Simpson apparently saw no reason to alter his own schedule of hunting and dining out. But then, as Alicia recuperated at the inn, still hurting and feeling woebegone, she received a happily distracting letter from her father in New York. Whether vaguely guilty toward his daughter or just momentarily bored himself, for the time being he seemed to have abandoned the role of stern and disapproving father (of both feckless cub reporter and runaway bride) and now reappeared as good-natured, boyish Poppa. “I just read your letter about the English hunts,” he wrote, “and much like what you said and how you said it. I kid you not, you have a faculty for vivid, straightforward writing, and my guess is if you want to cultiv
ate this you can get somewhere…What I’m proposing is, you write me an article of 3 or 4 thousand words for Liberty about the English hunts and Melton Mowbray in particular. Tell about all the different kinds of people you’re around, both the nobs & ladies & the grooms etc. who do the work….Not too much horsy stuff but good horsy stuff. Customs of the hunt. The Prince of Wales on horseback. Anything of interest to the American mass reader—actually much like what you wrote in your letter. We’d pay a fair price for it, though not sight unseen, and if you do a good job it could help you make a start in the magazine business.”

  This was what Alicia needed to hear, and she quickly began to regain both strength and spirits, finding a typewriter to rent at a local law firm and soon setting to work in her room. She approached the piece as if she were writing another letter to her father: At once personal and informal, she spun out a narrative from the perspective of a clueless though spunky American girl rider in the heart of the British hunting establishment, struggling to get things right; with gossipy anecdotes, such as the time when the Prince of Wales got thrown at Dugald’s Gate just like everyone else; how she herself seemed to hit the dirt at least once a day, though Lady Somebody, in her sixties, had just managed five hours in the rain without a tumble. Unlike many of Alicia’s previous efforts, both at school and at the Daily News, this time she worked hard and methodically, taking pains, checking facts, doggedly rewriting, and making sure to have her copy “clean” before mailing it off. Two weeks later she heard from her father by cable: STORY ACCEPTABLE NEEDS ANOTHER THOUSAND WORDS. She quickly wrote another thousand words, put them in the mail, and cabled her father back: WORDS ENROUTE USE MAIDEN NAME ON BYLINE.