Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  Bob turned over the notes of the interviews he had conducted long before. That was a good thing, because by this time virtually all the principals were dead. His interviews were invaluable and contained some intriguing surprises. In 2010, he pulled some of his information together for an article in a journal called Raritan to be published the following year. It was titled “The Old Girls Network,” a reference to the fact that many of the interviewees were women who had kept in touch with one another, offering up a kind of communal testament to what those days were like.

  One of the sources Bob got to know was Milly Blake, the woman from Dobbs Ferry, and he pried some more crucial information out of her. In particular, he wrote about an incident that happened at the Minetta Tavern in the early 1930s, an incident that bore an eerie resemblance to the scene I had imagined. She and Barney were sharing drinks and she confessed that life with Vinnie had become impossible, that she was thinking of leaving him. Barney responded by saying, “If you break up, let me know.” Was he offering sympathy—or something more? She didn’t know. But then several years later, in 1935, when she told Barney that she was getting divorced and was about to marry another man, he took it badly. Obviously hurt, he stood up and left the room. As Bob listened to Milly tell the story and looked over at her, he was struck with an odd thought: that she was almost saying she could have been Barney’s wife, that she might, in another life, have almost been his mother.

  Years later, when I began interviewing people, I was talking to the offspring of those he had interviewed. Still, they had vivid memories of their parents’ lives. And there were plenty of books about Greenwich Village. Putting all this together, I began to get a feel for the libertine men and women of the Jazz Age. They were urbane and polished, with an appreciation of the bon mot, a low tolerance for sentiment, and a thin overlay of cynicism. They consumed books. They exalted Sinclair Lewis’s gimlet eye and were greatly influenced by Hemingway’s stark style (described by Milly as “cat killed rat”). They took in the plays of Eugene O’Neill at the Provincetown Playhouse as well as movies with the Marx Brothers. They were mostly poor in the 1920s but managed to live pretty comfortably in the 1930s, even during the Depression, because newspaper salaries, though hardly exorbitant, were at least regular and magazines paid a lot. For a night out on the town, the men dressed up in tuxes or white tie and tails and the women wore long, clinging gowns.

  Prohibition sharpened their mania for the forbidden fruit. They made bathtub gin at home, adding juniper berries to distilled alcohol, and they haunted speakeasies along the Tenderloin and in the Village. Once Prohibition ended in 1933, the speakeasies converted to bars and the clientele barely had to shift bar stools.

  An important feature for the New York literati was the weekend getaway. On Fridays, they would knock off work early and pile into trains to go to Long Island or, as was the case with my parents’ crowd, the Connecticut coast. Easing the passage with a drink or two in the bar car, they would pour out at Westport or Fairfield or as far north as Madison, where Mac MacKaye rented a place not far from the water. They would spend two days talking shop, downing drinks, and playing croquet and badminton and games like charades and “murder” (the guest who drew the short straw killed off the others by catching him or her alone somewhere, like in a dark closet—sometimes a prelude to romance). They worked on gigantic jigsaw puzzles and pounded out songs like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” on a baby grand piano, tossing off quips and flirting. It sounded like an uneasy mix of innocence and hedonism.

  Sex was the organizing principle. The weekends in the country and long nights drinking in the city made for frequent couplings. Men—even when married and, in some cases, especially when married—made passes at the nearest women, married or not. Women, having long ago cast off the remnants of Victorian prudery, often responded positively. Sometimes they even hung their hats for certain males and went after them.

  Children were the great stumbling block. Some didn’t want any at all. Others had them but raised them almost as an afterthought. “I had a strange childhood because there was only one other child in my parents’ circle,” said Bill MacKaye, the only child of Mac and his wife, Dorothy. “No one wanted children.” Still, he remembers fondly the excitement of meeting the train on Friday evenings, of adults crowding around the piano for songfests and prodigious amounts of drinking. At one point the MacKayes had an apartment on Jane Street in the Village. They used a basket to lower the cat down to the street. “Everyone talked of going to Europe. They were constantly having people over, and the rule was if you came over to visit, you had to throw all your pennies on the floor. Periodically, my mother would sweep the pennies into the corner and they would be collected—the kitty for a trip to Europe. There were never enough to get there, but people were charmed by the idea of being separated from their pennies.”

  Bob located Dorothy MacKaye, who was in a nursing home in Washington, D.C. Years before, she had written mysteries under the name Dorothy Cameron Disney. One was titled The 17th Letter, published two years after Barney’s death, and it incorporated him in the story. He’s Max Ferris, news photographer and the best friend of the married protagonists, two reporters named Paul and Mary Strong. He disappears on assignment in Iceland after mailing back sixteen letters; the seventeenth is nothing more than a mysterious theater program, and they set off to find him. I devoured the book the moment I got it. Much to my disappointment, Max isn’t a memorable character; he makes only a fleeting appearance at the end. But the book intimates a lot about the bond of friendship between Barney and Mac: “Breaking up a bachelor establishment wasn’t always easy for the girl who accomplished it … not that Max Ferris was the sort who would openly sulk and gloom because his best friend had found a wife.… But there had been no withdrawal, no break in the friendship that meant so much to both men.”

  When Bob talked to Dorothy, a frail woman propped up in a wheelchair, her memories slipped in and out of focus. But she was able to come up with a few anecdotes. Some of them captured aspects of Barney’s personality, like his flair for the dramatic. When she gave birth to her son, Bill, Barney visited her hospital room not with a bouquet but with a seven-foot-tall dogwood tree. Others concerned Mac’s philandering. Although he had never promised to be faithful and she had never asked him to be, his romantic escapades became difficult to ignore. Once, at a party, she opened a kitchen door, to find him passionately kissing the hostess. She closed the door and summoned her energies to blot out the knowledge of what she had just seen. “I did not have to open that door. If it had remained closed, I would not have seen anything. I will not let that door determine the course of my life.” But of course she had seen it, and the memory dug in deeper and deeper, until it was one of the lasting few that disturbed her in her life’s twilight.

  She spoke of Mac and Barney as inseparable as “Castor and Pollux.” They had so much in common: both from the Midwest, both from religious backgrounds, even both burdened with given names heavy in literary import—Milton and Byron—which they rejected. Their personalities were different—Barney was calm and soft-spoken; Mac was all energy and movement, the last to give up on a party—but it became clear, the more that Bob talked to these elderly women, that Barney shared Mac’s philandering ways. At the Post, they were known as the two “skirt-chasers.” One time, they found themselves in New Haven on “tap night,” when Yale’s secret societies induct new members. “They went up and down the crowded sidewalks outside the Evening Post office, tapped the prettiest girls on the shoulder, and whispered, ‘Go to my room,’ ” Dorothy said. “Nobody called the police. They got a lot of laughs, and so did the girls. Whether they collected any phone numbers, I can’t tell you.”

  The ethos of the time is captured in a book written by Ursula Parrott, who had been married to Lindesay Parrott before he took up with Pollie, the woman my father seduced away from him. The Parrotts were divorced in January 1928 and shortly afterward Ursula produced a novel titled Ex-Wife, initi
ally published anonymously. It created a scandal, becoming the Fear of Flying of its day, going through nine printings, and ending up as a movie, The Divorcee, starring Norma Shearer. It depicts the life of a woman who is spurned by her shallow husband and then becomes “a Modern Woman.” She succumbs to a meaningless round of highballs and dinners, draining advertising jobs, and empty affairs with newspapermen. The setup is a little ridiculous—the heroine sleeps with her husband’s best friend and hides the fact by pretending she has committed a multitude of infidelities—but it ends as a rather moving portrait in loneliness. The trade-off for all this glamorous freedom, it says, is lack of stability and commitment. Ex-Wife was followed by a rival book, Ex-Husband, covering the same ground from the point of view of the enraged man. It was also of anonymous authorship—some claimed that Lindesay Parrott himself must have written it. I was told that Barney is a character in the books, but if so, he’s disguised so well that I couldn’t figure out which of the parade of adulterating men he is supposed to be.

  Ursula Parrott’s life, incidentally, turned out miserably. Lindesay left her, according to members of her family, because she became pregnant and he wanted no children. He would have nothing to do with the baby, a boy named Marc, who was raised by grandparents in Boston and sent off to a boarding school. His mother saw him once a year. She married three more times, wrote thirteen more books and various screenplays, but spiraled downward, dying a penniless alcoholic in 1957. One of the last articles written about her said that she was accused of stealing silverware from a couple who had befriended her.

  In May 1986, Bob achieved a breakthrough when he met Barney’s second wife. At the time, she was eighty-six years old and living in Arlington, Virginia. The intermediaries were two members of “the old girls network,” Edith Evans Asbury, a longtime Times reporter, and Mildred Gilman Wohlforth, the woman who had introduced herself to Bob at the Princeton Club. Bob had told them about his project, and they invited us over to a Manhattan apartment on East Sixty-third Street, reminiscing while serving champagne and hors d’oeuvres. After a few drinks, Edith Asbury began pestering her friend: “Call Pollie. Call Pollie.” Eventually, Mildred Wohlforth went to the phone, dialed a long-distance number, reached Eleanor Pollock, and placed the receiver in Bob’s hand. He was nonplussed. It was an extraordinary feeling, he said later, to be talking to a woman who had known Barney so intimately, having lived with him for ten years—three times longer that our mother had. It was all he could do to blurt out an invitation to take her to lunch the next time he went to Washington. She accepted, somewhat warily. Above all, she didn’t want to meet him at her home.

  He took her to the Jockey Club. They were both eager but awkward, eyeing each other across the table. Pollie didn’t want to be tape-recorded and Bob decided that taking notes would inhibit her, so he tried to memorize their conversation. She said she had been following both his career and mine. Right away, he saw similarities to Mom—she was expressive, fast-talking, animated. She waved her hands in the air so that the bracelets on her wrist would jangle. Carefully, he began with questions about that era—the books, the places, the people. Unlike those of others he had interviewed, her recollections were sharp and her answers specific. Like them, she talked about the free-flowing alcohol and the speakeasies. Chumley’s at Bedford and Barrow, with its unmarked door and escape route at the rear, catered to writers, whose framed book jackets hung on the wall. At Jack Delaney’s on Grove Street, the bartender, Joe, sang songs and would warn of an impending raid by shouting out the name of a gangster: “Get out. Johnny Torrio is in town.” For elegance, nothing could beat the Washington Square nightclub of Barney Gallant, who shared an apartment with Eugene O’Neill. His philosophy was: “No isms or cults are any good. Every man should be his own Jesus.”

  Pollie summed it all up, saying, “It was new, we were young, and things were happening. I can’t wave a wand and make you see Ruby Keeler tap-dancing ‘The Stars and Stripes’ at Texas Guinan’s and Texas greeting everyone with ‘Hello, suckers.’ ”

  For the first time, Bob was getting solid information about his father, and he soaked it up. Barney was a dapper dresser (he once spent $7.50 for a shirt, a lot in those days). He was well read but by no means an intellectual. His politics were not far left—he was basically a “Knickerbocker” Democrat, with a soft spot for Al Smith and Jimmy Walker. Pollie and Barney lived at 43 Fifth Avenue, in a building filled with Tammany people. Their social life was busy. They played poker with James Thurber, dined with Edna St. Vincent Millay at Squarcialupi’s on West Fourth Street, and hung out with writers like Philip Wylie and Sinclair “Red” Lewis. The night Prohibition ended, they and the MacKayes dressed up to the nines and celebrated at the St. Regis. At the same time, Bob was also hearing some disturbing new things about Barney: He was “strange,” “an unhappy man,” “had a lot of ego,” and, above all, was “restless.”

  And then there was all that sleeping around. Barney “loved women and ran after them,” Pollie observed. Shortly before she and Barney married, in 1932, he and Mac went off to the Bahamas on a junket. As the ship approached New York, Dorothy MacKaye suggested they take a harbor craft out to meet it, but Pollie refused. She didn’t want to surprise them—there was no telling what they might find. And she was right. On the return voyage, the two had had a competition to see which one could bed down an attractive young woman. Barney won. But Pollie insisted that underneath all the sleeping around and misbehaving, Barney was deeply conventional. “He loved women, was always chasing after them, but he wanted them to stay in their place, at home. You would call him a male chauvinist pig today. But it was a different world then. We were amoral. All that switching of partners hurt, but we wanted to have a good time, as much fun as possible, and to hell with the stuffed shirts.”

  The philandering of Mac and Barney fell under the rubric of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” It was not something their wives chose to confront. The men were not romantic hedonists, searching for Blake’s palace of wisdom on the road of excess. Rather, the motivation was more superficial—the lure of novelty and the thrill of the chase. They did it because they were allowed to do it. The times condoned it and skidded over the emptiness that lay at its heart, much like the ethos of their favorite novel and secular bible, The Sun Also Rises. Their morality possessed a strain of rectitude and conventionality. Pollie stressed over and over how Barney was seized by the idea of having children and living a quiet life in the country, counterbalancing his ever-present sense of restlessness.

  When he accepted the assignment to cover the war in the Pacific, Mac phoned Pollie to tell her. “I just laughed,” she recalled. “It was so like him. I told Mac, ‘He got Tootie. He got the boys. He got a house in the country. Now he’s running off to Australia.’ Mac hung up on me.”

  After her meeting with Bob, Pollie sent him a letter, elaborating on things she felt she had perhaps glossed over. She repeated her assessment of Barney. He was personable, witty, charming, intelligent, and a hard worker. He loved the theater (the play Journey’s End, about soldiers in World War I, made him cry). He liked jazz—in particular Libby Holman singing “Body and Soul” and “Can’t We Be Friends?” Then she added as an afterthought, “He was not a drunk. But he could and did get drunk. When he drank, he reached out for the nearest woman. I walked in on him at parties (by mistake) a couple of times, and while it was not in flagrante, it could have been had the opportunities been different. He was, I think, completely amoral but expected everyone else to be of Puritan stock. Harsh judgment on my part? No, I don’t think so.”

  Bob was to meet Pollie one more time and correspond with her over the ensuing couple of years. Throughout, she refused to delve into certain areas. She couldn’t shed any light on the mystery of our parents’ failure to marry—in fact, she had a hard time believing it, given Barney’s basic “bourgeois” nature. She tried to keep in check her strong animus toward Mom, but failed. She said Tootie had been her best friend, had taken Barney from h
er, and had seemed to want everything else she had. Once, she actually said, “Have you ever considered that your mother was a nymphomaniac?” She then ticked off a list of men she said Mom had slept with, topped by Meyer Berger, the Times reporter who had been a frequent visitor when we were children. Bob was so shocked that, in scribbling notes to recall the conversation, he forgot that assertion for a couple of days.

  Set against what Pollie told him were memories of things Mom had said long ago on those rare occasions when she had talked about Barney’s second marriage. Shifting the blame, Mom insisted that Pollie was the one who effectively broke up the marriage, because she was given to sleeping around with all sorts of men. Confronted with a straightforward choice, Bob didn’t know which one to believe.

  I did. When Bob turned over his notes, including that scurrilous remark about nymphomania, I felt that Pollie had hoodwinked him. I was sure that for all her insistence that she was refraining from speaking ill of the dead, the remark was not an offhand comment. It had been dropped with malice. She was extracting revenge.

  Pollie died in November 1991, at the age of ninety-one. She didn’t leave any close relatives. I discovered years afterward, in talking with Bill MacKaye, that there may have been another reason she lost Barney: She couldn’t have children. The one thing Barney wanted—progeny—she couldn’t provide.

  Bill, who had been close to Pollie, the friend of his parents, added other bits of information, which further complicated the picture. He said he had overheard “whispered conversations when your mother came on the scene.” One was that there had been “a rivalry for your mother’s affections between your father and another chap—his name may come to me as we talk.” He elaborated: “I mean your father had strayed into Tootie’s arms and Pollie was quite certain that Tootie was the instigator of this, that she wanted Barney, had set her cap for him. But your mother was also pursuing this other chap.”