Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  She had. There was no time to take those other two ratty carbons to the bindery but Editor Howland didn’t care. He read them both, sitting all day long in the living room with the Rinehart boys and the Rinehart dogs for company. He could not but have been impressed by the virtuosity of a young housewife who could spin off three diverse tales in such a fresh and often amusing style. He’d take them all and be glad he got them. He was already planning to publish The Circular Staircase in 1908, The Man in Lower Ten in 1909, and The Mystery of 1122 in 1910. He didn’t care much for that last title, so he and Mary wisely changed it to The Window at the White Cat.

  Mary had scrupulously listed each one of the small sums she’d gotten for her short pieces and her serial rights in the old bankbook, but she didn’t know what to put down for Bobbs-Merrill’s three-book deal. That didn’t matter. Her husband was by now making a goodly amount of money at his practice, and he naturally expected to be the family’s major breadwinner for the rest of his life, but it was beginning to look as if there might be plenty of jam on the Rineharts’ bread.

  By now, Stanley must have managed to sublimate any atavistic qualms; he had begun taking an enthusiastic interest in his wife’s burgeoning career as a writer. Knowing Mary as he’d had every opportunity to do since that fateful day when she’d tripped into his office with her flounced parasol and rose-bedecked hat, applied to join the nurses’ training program, and proved throughout her arduous three years of training to have a backbone of good Pittsburgh steel, he must have realized somewhere along the line that she’d never be content to spend the rest of her life sewing on buttons and ordering lamb chops. He’d taken her for better or worse. There’d been enough of the worse. Why play dog in the manger now that the good times were starting to roll?

  Despite his ongoing war with the inanimate, the collar buttons that willfully leaped from his shirts, the matches that wouldn’t light, the cussedness of things in general, Stanley Rinehart was clearly a man who would rather be happy than not. He showed himself a genial host to Mary’s suddenly acquired editor. When they gathered around the piano after dinner, it was his fine baritone that led the singing. Mary played, the little boys sang, Hewitt Howland sang, even the family collie sang. This could hardly have been the kind of reception Howland was used to; he must have left the next day with a strong awareness that his newest author would turn out to be somebody altogether out of the ordinary.

  CHAPTER 13

  Stagestruck and Stricken

  Mary Roberts Rinehart was her mother’s daughter. As soon as she’d got hold of some extra cash, she’d begun splurging on ways to upgrade the Rineharts’ standard of living. She’d hired more servants. Remembering the misery of her own grammar school days, she’d persuaded her husband to send the boys to a private school.

  Mary had been uneasily aware of late that she’d been gradually boosting the family’s lifestyle up to the thin edge of her husband’s earning capacity. Of course she was easing the burden to some extent with her own sporadic earnings, but she still felt guilty. Mary was always ready to feel guilty. Grandmother Roberts had seen to that. Lately she’d been pushing herself harder and harder to earn more and more so that Stanley wouldn’t feel overburdened. Now, with a substantial three-year contract tucked under her corset cover, she could let herself relax a little, get some rest, and indulge that unfulfilled hankering to write a successful play.

  For no reason that Mary could put her finger on, she had been stagestruck ever since she was a little girl. Maybe this lust for the footlights had been triggered by her parents’ daring escapade in going to see The Black Crook, even though it had apparently incited Grandma Roberts’s implacable God to vent his displeasure by hurling Mary and Aunt Ella down from the balcony along with that overload of pianos. Maybe it stemmed from her being born under the sign of Leo. Anyway, throughout her childhood, Mary had played theater, staging little tableaux with her friends, making sure that she herself always got the starring part.

  A couple of decades later, Alice Roosevelt Longworth would talk to Mary Roberts Rinehart about her father. If the redoubtable Teddy was at a wedding, he felt himself to be the groom; if at a funeral, he became for the moment both mourner and corpse. That was Mary all over, she had been playing one role or another for as long as she could remember. She always would, because this is something fiction writers do: feel their way into a character’s persona then dart to the other side of the footlights to critique the plot and write the review. Mary had this ability to throw herself into a new situation, to play her role to the hilt but always to see past the tinsel, even while she was enjoying the glitter.

  She knew what the theme of her play was to be. Amnesia was a trauma about which most people still didn’t know much. That story of Stanley’s about the amnesiac, the one that had already netted her thirty-four dollars from Bob Davis and would be used again on two future occasions, offered fascinating possibilities. Mary set about her work more systematically this time, cutting a stage out of an empty starch box, shuffling her sons’ toy soldiers around on it to get the actors’ movements right. Within a few days she had a one-act play down on paper. On Saturday morning of that same week she set off for New York to sell her magnum opus to David Belasco.

  On this trip, the budding playwright was in much the same position as the pussycat going to London to visit the queen, although a cat might have shown a greater feeling of tolerance toward the personage she expected to meet. Along with her slender script, Mary carried a freight of ignorance and prejudice based on her early indoctrination, as well as the arrogance of a respectable young doctor’s wife who’d just sold three novels to a prestigious publishing house. That a mere theatrical impresario, however renowned, might not care to see Mrs. Stanley Marshall Rinehart was simply out of the question. She left her script in the stage-door mailbox once she’d learned that stage-door mailboxes did exist and where to find one. She gave the doorman a dollar to make sure her masterpiece got into Mr. Belasco’s hands at the earliest opportunity. She then went to sit in the room that she’d engaged at the Holland House and wait for the telephone to ring.

  Having learned that Mary Rinehart was in town for the weekend, Mr. and Mrs. Bob Davis invited her to join them on a Sunday visit with famous cartoonist and writer Homer Davenport and his wife. Mary didn’t want to go for fear of missing Mr. Belasco’s call, but Bob was a hard man to resist. Mr. Davenport met them at the railway station with a team of white Arabian stallions out of the herd of twenty-seven that he’d obtained from the sultan of Turkey through the good offices of Theodore Roosevelt. Uncle John would have considered it an honor and a privilege to ride behind such magnificent steeds, but Mary was in fidgets. When she confessed the reason for her anxiety, she got the horselaugh; Bob told her that he knew playwrights who’d been waiting twenty years for Belasco to call them.

  Nevertheless, Mary was relieved to get back to the Holland House and not a bit surprised to hear the telephone ringing as she opened the door to her room. David Belasco was on the line, as she’d known he would be. She was pleased to hear his voice but scandalized when he asked her to meet him Monday evening in Mr. Frank Keenan’s dressing room.

  What kind of soiled dove did Mr. Belasco think she was? Mrs. Rinehart was traveling without her spouse, she informed him stiffly; it was quite out of the question that she should enter a strange man’s dressing room unchaperoned. Surely Mr. Belasco must understand.

  Mr. Belasco quite understood, and he rose to the unexpected like a gentleman of the old school. Would Mrs. Rinehart come if he sent his private carriage for her, with Mrs. Keenan as duenna? Mary was gracious enough to accept Belasco’s offer and did not regret having done so, even when Mr. Keenan retired behind a screen to change his nether garments.

  She would not have to wait twenty years to get her play read, for Mr. Belasco scanned it then and there. He liked her idea, he could see that Mrs. Rinehart had a sense of theater. What he wanted, however, was a three-act play. Why didn’t she run along home, exp
and her script, and bring it back for further discussion? This might make an excellent new vehicle for Mr. Keenan after he’d finished playing the lovelorn outlaw in Belasco’s own play, The Girl of the Golden West.

  Mary kindly acquiesced. Mr. Belasco escorted her back to the Holland House, waited to see her safely inside, then probably went off to enjoy a quiet chuckle over his unexpected confrontation with a respectable housewife from Pittsburgh.

  Quite a few years ago, a charming human-interest story appeared about Queen Elizabeth II. She’d spent a pleasant afternoon with members of a village Women’s Institute. All of them, the queen included, chatted happily and informally about their families, their housekeeping, their needlework, subjects on which women have traditionally enjoyed sharing their views over the teacups. When the meeting ended, nice Mrs. Windsor thanked her new acquaintances with a friendly “This has been a change,” and turned back into a queen.

  That seems to have been much the way David Belasco reacted to Mary Roberts Rinehart. Here was a character quite outside his usual cast of acquaintances, this proper little doctor’s wife who popped into New York for a day or two now and then in a homemade summer frock, gave him about the same amount of attention she allotted to selecting the Sunday roast, then scurried back to her waiting family. Because the theater was not a life-and-death matter to her, because she didn’t take his every word as a threat or a promise, he found that he could talk with Mrs. Rinehart about anything he chose. It was indeed a change.

  Belasco was happy to give what Mary didn’t beg for. Sometimes he talked about her play, sometimes about the theater in general: what could be achieved with staging, what would never work. He sent her to watch other plays in rehearsal, to learn how they were put together. He let her see things about himself: he was superstitious, he was profligate with money, he was tactful. Toward her, at least, he was considerate. After they’d finished discussing the latest batch of changes to her play, he would take her somewhere for a bite of supper, then send her back to her hotel in his open victoria.

  Belasco could also be vindictive. Once Mary had got her play finished to his satisfaction, he offered her a lump sum for the rights. Compared to her three-book contract, the money evidently wasn’t much. Even so, she realized too late, she ought to have taken it. She’d already gained a great deal from Mr. Belasco in the way of technical advice. The prestige of having written the script for one of the great man’s productions would have been invaluable to a novice.

  But Mary had too good a memory. She recalled what her father had said when he’d been offered $10,000 for his revolving bobbin. If it was worth that much, it was worth far more. So she proceeded to make the same mistake Tom Roberts had made. One of her actor acquaintances intimated that Belasco was a sharp customer to deal with, suggesting that Mrs. Rinehart had better find herself an agent before she signed any contract. She did, and Belasco went up in smoke. It was years before he’d even speak to her again, much less have anything further to do with her play.

  The agent who had roused Belasco’s wrath by denouncing his contract as “infamous” was Mrs. Henry DeMille, widow of a playwright and mother of William and Cecil, both destined to become eminent figures in the motion picture industry. Beatrice DeMille not only found a new home for Mary’s play, she also provided one for the playwright whenever Mary needed a place to stay in New York. This meant a significant drop in travel expenses. Mary became deeply attached to her new agent, although she occasionally found such an indomitably strong-minded personality somewhat hard to take. It’s possible that Mrs. DeMille might once or twice have felt the same about Mary.

  A Double Life went into rehearsal in the fall under new management. Mary would waste far too many hours away from Stanley and the children, sitting in an empty theater, watching actors wander around a bare stage speaking lines she wished she’d never written. She would go back to Mrs. DeMille’s apartment and spend all evening—sometimes all night—doing rewrites. Then she’d have to get up early and have the revisions typed in time for the new day’s rehearsal.

  Mary wouldn’t have minded this hectic pace so much if she hadn’t begun to suspect that it was lost labor. The management had cast a Dutch actor as the hero. This man, whom Mary tactfully refrained from naming in her autobiography, had a great reputation abroad but was totally miscast in his current role. He was too old, too fat, and too hell-bent on being the star of the show. He knew almost no English, he couldn’t learn his lines, he demanded a prompter to feed them to him virtually word by word.

  Prompters’ boxes were standard equipment in Europe, Mary gathered, but not in America. When the show went on the road for a tryout, a young woman understudy had to be stuffed into a prop grandfather clock and hiss the right words out from behind the pendulum. Sometimes, Mary claimed, the clock delivered the dialogue more clearly than the star did.

  Dr. Rinehart joined Mary for part of that very brief tour. He told her she looked ill; she was. That bumptious mass of vanity was wrecking the play, snatching away all the good lines for himself, making goulash of the plot and the cast’s morale. Mary’s one bright moment came when the self-aggrandizing star stepped forward to make a speech and got whacked on the head by the descending curtain.

  Opening night in New York City was on Christmas Eve, the one time of year when even the stage-door Johnnies were nestled all snug in their own beds. Mary didn’t even care. She washed her hands of the whole debacle and stayed home to trim the Christmas tree. Bob Davis did go to see the show, and telephoned Mary at midnight to complain about that awful leading man. Where the hell had she got him?

  The reviews were less dire than Mary had expected. Nevertheless, with some vague hope of rescuing her play from the hands of the spoilers, she issued an injunction to stop the butchery and take A Double Life off the boards. She was, for the moment, all through with the theater.

  CHAPTER 14

  From Playtime to Paytime

  When one door closes, another opens. The year 1908 brought Bobbs-Merrill’s first Rinehart offering, The Circular Staircase. All of a sudden, Mary was getting rave reviews, being praised to the skies for injecting a new dimension into the detective novel.

  So far, many of the mystery stories disdainfully classed by the literati as mere entertainment had, like the stage melodramas, been rigidly righteous outgrowths of the old morality plays. Authors of the Victorian era, dealing with gory plots that reeked of sin and shame, had felt duty-bound to maintain an atmosphere of drawn shades and festering lilies, with perhaps a deathbed repentance as a single touch of uplift. Take for instance this single sentence penned by Mary’s famous predecessor, Anna Katharine Green, in Hand and Ring (first copyright 1883, republished by Dodd, Mead in 1926):

  It was as if a veil had been rent before her eyes, disclosing to her a living soul writhing in secret struggle with its own worst passions; and horrified at the revelation, more than horrified at the remembrance that it was her own action of the morning which had occasioned this change in one she had long reverenced, if not loved, she sank helplessly upon her knees and pressed her face to the window in a prayer for courage to sustain this new woe and latest, if not heaviest, disappointment.

  Now here comes Rinehart’s Miss Rachel Innes, a feisty maiden lady with a large fortune and far more courage than she’d ever expected to need. She squabbles with her somewhat faithful maid, Liddy. She’s duly shocked but by no means overwhelmed at finding the slain body of a profligate young rogue sprawled out in his dinner jacket and bloodstained white waistcoat on the floor of the palatial but spooky house that she’s rented for the summer, out in the country where the crickets rub their legs together all through the darksome hours.

  Miss Innes doesn’t much care about the crickets or the corpse—she is too busy resuscitating her swoony young niece and hiding clues to keep the police from arresting her beloved nephew. She resists sudden, inexplicable pressures from sundry persons to give up the house, partly because she’s curious to see what happens next and partly bec
ause her city house is being redecorated. She’d much rather face an unknown murderer than a houseful of painters, as what sensible homeowner would not?

  The chills and shivers that Hewitt Howland had mentioned were present in abundance, but not the traditional fustian. True, the beautiful niece did a good deal of hand-wringing and carrying on, as beautiful nieces were prone to do when their lovers (this word did not mean in 1908 what it means now) were threatened with durance vile. The handsome nephew and the possibly even handsomer lover combined, in correct proportions, nobility of spirit with some foolhardiness in action, as young men of good family were expected to do in novels written so soon after the turn of the century. Through it all, there was Aunt Rachel, being thoroughly real even while Liddy was pinning a false switch to her mistress’s back hair. And how the reading public adored them both!

  Hewitt Howland had shown excellent editorial sense in publishing The Circular Staircase before the other two novels. It was in this book that Mary Roberts Rinehart really found her voice: the indefinable, unmistakable, individual cadence that can be copied but never quite satisfactorily matched. She’d meant her brainchild to be no more than a mild satire on the pompously righteous mystery novels that certain other writers of the time were still turning out. There was nothing mild about Rachel Innes, however; she pulled the same trick on her creator that Tom Sawyer had practiced on Mark Twain in the year Mary Roberts was born. Each had set out to write a potboiler and wound up with a classic.

  The Man in Lower Ten, written earlier but coming out the following year, shows some of the overplotting that Uncle John had complained about in one of Mary’s early short stories. Undoubtedly the book got a boost from its predecessor’s phenomenal success. It did have merit enough, though, not only to hit the best-seller list but also to have an unexpected effect on railway travel. Mary learned this fact in a surprising way. On her way home from a rest-cure establishment where she’d been trying to put on a little weight, she tried to get a Pullman berth. The clerk at the ticket office said they were all sold out, unless she’d be willing to take Lower Ten. Some fool woman had written a book in which somebody got murdered in Lower Ten, and now they couldn’t get anybody to sleep there.