She gave the tribe her solemn promise to go to Washington and fight for their rights. She was surprised and greatly moved when they loaded her with gifts: beaded moccasins and belts, a wonderful painted parfleche made from buffalo hide, a medicine necklace of rare old Hudson’s Bay brass trading beads and small bones from a buffalo’s ankle. Most precious of all was the tribe’s last war pipe, a cherished relic of the old days before they had been driven from their homeland.
This time, the promise would be honored. As soon as she got to Washington, Mary went straight to Franklin Lane, secretary of the interior, and poured out her rage. The Blackfeet had been viciously exploited, they were debilitated from neglect and lack of food, many were going blind from trachoma. Spurred by her vehemence, Lane acted at once. By the time she’d had lunch and gone back to her hotel room, he was on the phone, letting her know that supplies were already on the way and that a full-scale investigation would follow. From then on, Mary would serve as a friend and mentor to the tribe.
But her own husband must come first. While she was still on the trail with Howard Eaton, a ranger had galloped up to her with a telegram. Dr. Rinehart had been operated on for appendicitis. The abscess was draining nicely, but Mary knew too much about those draining abscesses: She galloped frantically down the mountain, caught the first possible train, and sat in agony through the long ride. She found Stanley gray in the face but over the hump. When he was well enough to travel, they went to a seaside resort where they were lucky enough to find another convalescent with whom he could exchange talk about his symptoms.
The man was Irvin S. Cobb, a newspaperman from Kentucky who’d become widely known as a comic writer and speaker. A few years later, Mr. Cobb and Mary fought a duel of the sexes; American magazine, in October 1919, carried two articles. Mary’s was titled “Isn’t That Just Like a Man?”; Cobb’s was “Oh Well, You Know How Women Are.” Their modes of expression made an interesting contrast.
Cobb swung his broadsword like a true male chauvinist, taking wide swipes wherever he saw his chance to get a horselaugh at a woman’s expense. At the end he wiggled out from under with some high-flown rhetoric about Mary Magdalene redeemed in the persons of those noble, self-sacrificing women who, however bitchy they might be as a general rule, were willing in times of crisis to work their heads off doing all the dirty jobs and expecting no thanks for their labors. As, he seemed to think, why should they?
Mary’s was a subtler, more penetrating appraisal. She liked people in general and men in particular, but had few illusions about them; she had a lovely time exploding the popular misconception that women are cats, while men resemble dogs. To her, it appeared to work the other way around.
Cats, she pointed out, were night wanderers. They loved familiar places, but didn’t allow their love of the hearthside to interfere with their nocturnal rovings. Cats could conceal under the suavest exterior principles that would make a kitten blush. And, heavens, how those whisker-frisking tomcats enjoyed being petted and praised. They liked love, but not as a steady diet. They preferred to select their own companions. They were predatory creatures … and showed a few other traits that Mary enumerated with reasonably ladylike restraint.
Women, on the other hand, were like dogs. They loved with doggy devotion and expected plenty of pats in return. They could be trained to fetch and carry and often had to. They were always ready to gnaw a bone of contention, they sometimes enjoyed a good growling match so long as it ended in (metaphorical) tail wagging and kisses. As to men resembling dogs, Mary finally concluded that the two species were alike only in the respect that both tended to have disproportionately big feet during their early puppyhood.
In 1917 Mary’s and Cobb’s articles were bound together into an attractive but unfortunately fragile little book by Doran. In browsing through it, the reader comes upon such delights as “Men … are curiously loyal. They are loyal to ancient hats and disreputable old friends and to some women. But they are always loyal to each other. This, I maintain, is the sole reason for alluding to them as the stronger and superior sex.”
The Saturday Evening Post had been publishing Mary’s war pieces in sequence from April through July. On July 17, they had varied this sometimes hard to digest diet with “Clara’s Little Escapade.” Now they wanted Tish to come along and liven up the menu. Mary obliged with “My Country Tish of Thee,” a two-part story that would run the following April.
She also experimented with a new character. “The Sub-Deb,” a word alleged to have been coined by the author but in fact supplied by Stanley Junior and meaning a girl almost but not quite old enough to make her debut in society, appeared March 4, 1916, featuring a semiliterate flibbertigibbet named Bab. Within the next three years, Mary wrote a total of six Bab stories. Those were quite enough; Bab is a joke that ceases to amuse. But she paid well. Mary got a total of $9,250 out of the stories from the Post, another $10,000 from Famous Players-Lasky for the film rights, and an unlisted but no doubt impressive sum from Doran for the hardcover collection.
In her autobiography, Mary mentioned that she hadn’t been feeling well that fall. All the while she sat churning out comedy she’d been comparing herself to the family parrot, which startled visitors by emitting peals of raucous laughter without cracking a smile. Perhaps she was having belated sympathy pangs with Stanley, or maybe those huge meals of beans and bacon and strong black coffee she’d gobbled on the Eaton expedition had done her in. Whatever the cause, she too lost her appendix in January 1916.
When Mary was able to travel, Dr. Rinehart took her and Ted, then aged thirteen, the only one of their sons still living at home, on a trip to Panama, Costa Rica, and Cuba. In Panama they met Rex Beach and his wife. Beach, a highly successful author of red-blooded he-man novels set in Alaska, married to an actress-turned-innkeeper whom he’d met in Nome, was also an ardent sportsman. Having lived in Florida during his boyhood, he knew all about tarpon fishing; the two parties joined up on a yacht on the Chagres River to catch some tarpon. Mary, the ardent fisherwoman, had no luck until Rex Beach ripped off a strip of his red flannel shirt and made her a lure. Thanks to Beach’s shirttail, she landed two good-sized fish and became, as far as she knew, the first female member of the Tarpon Club of Panama.
In Costa Rica, Mary was presented with a baby ocelot but had to return the scratchy little bundle of fur and fury to the donor rather than face permanent mutilation. In Havana, nobody wanted to give the Rineharts anything but a hard time. Maybe the Cubans just didn’t like the Americans; the islanders were rude to tourists for no reason, and they expected too much money for extremely poor service. Little did those insolent islanders reck the power of the Rinehart pen. As soon as Mary got home, she sat down and ripped off a piece of her mind. The Pirates of the Caribbean ran in the Post on November 16, 1916, and the Spanish-American War was on again. The Cuban government protested to the U.S. State Department; Mary was deluged with nasty letters and hostile editorials. They didn’t faze her a whit. She’d got her facts straight. She let the ravers rave without bothering to answer back, even to the man who wrote furiously that he wouldn’t marry her if she were the last woman on earth.
Much as Americans tried to ignore the real war overseas, it was obvious to Mary that the United States was going to be drawn in before long. And her sons were growing up fast. Stanley Junior, now at Harvard, was already older than many of the young soldiers she’d seen at the front. Alan, finishing up at prep school, would be seventeen on his next birthday. How long would it be before they were in uniform?
Nineteen sixteen was an election year. In June, the Philadelphia Public Ledger Syndicate importuned Mrs. Rinehart to cover all three conventions—Republican, Democratic, and Progressive—for them. Mary didn’t want to do it, but eventually she capitulated; perhaps because this would be a new experience, perhaps because, being Mary, she wanted the money. Her first assignment was to interview the old Rough Rider, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, the man for whom all the Teddy bears in the world ar
e named.
Roosevelt had served as vice president under McKinley, had succeeded to office in 1901 when McKinley succumbed to an assassin’s bullet, and had been enthusiastically reelected in 1904. At the end of his second term, he’d declined to run again and thrown his support to his then secretary of war, William Howard Taft. Once elected, however, Taft balked at carrying on some of the programs that Roosevelt had initiated; a schism opened between the conservative and progressive elements in the Republican party. The upshot was that, in 1912, Taft was dutifully renominated by the Republicans, Roosevelt ran as a Progressive, and both of them were defeated by Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate.
Mary found the legendary Teddy a hard man to interview, not because he was unwilling to talk but because she had such a tough time getting a word in edgewise. Roosevelt was particularly outspoken about America’s foot-dragging on the war. If he had stayed on for a third term, he said, he would have called in the German ambassador and let it be known in no uncertain terms that, if Germany threatened Belgium’s neutrality, the United States would immediately mobilize to defend her. Teddy was vehement that America must forthwith drop its neutral position. These American pacifists were nothing but a pack of cowards; the reason he’d refused to enter the race this time was that he had no desire to preside over a country riddled with cravens.
In fact, Theodore Roosevelt must already have known that he wasn’t going to be offered the Republican nomination; that was patent to Mary from her very first day at the convention. Nor would Roosevelt accept a nomination from the Progressives, he was too astute a politician to let himself in for another defeat. Instead, he backed Charles Evans Hughes for the Republican nomination. Hughes had not gone after the nomination but did not turn it down. The convention drafted him in November; Hughes wound up losing to Wilson by a fairly close vote.
All this politicking was confusing and worrisome to a novice reporter, particularly with the Republican and Progressive conventions both going on at the same time in the already superheated Windy City. Mary had brought her secretary to Chicago with her; the poor woman must have had a boring time of it, sitting behind a typewriter back in the hotel room, waiting for her day’s work to begin. Mary herself had to divide her time between the two sweltering convention halls, trying to figure out what was going on. The Republican proceedings were decorous enough, and Charles Evans Hughes was nominated without a hitch. With Roosevelt out of the picture, however, the Progressives were going hog-wild. Speakers whom she dubbed their lunatic fringe were making all sorts of mad proposals. Much of this so-called lunacy, it may be noted, would have become law by the time Mary wrote her autobiography.
As her daily deadline drew near, Mary would race back to her waiting secretary, try to put her impressions into coherent form, correct the first typewritten draft, and have the secretary make several copies to be put on the wires by six o’clock. Then she’d eat a light supper and collapse into bed. Mary didn’t mention a cool, cleansing bath as her evening treat, but it’s unthinkable that she wouldn’t have taken as many baths as time allowed in the hectic circumstances.
One rainy day, Mary joined a Suffrage parade. As she marched down Michigan Avenue, she asked herself pessimistically what she was doing there. Her innate skepticism dampened any great hope of change. She’d seen too much wheeling and dealing at the conventions. What good was it going to do for women to get the vote? There’d be that same old male cabal, still putting their heads together in some smoke-filled room, making up the American people’s minds for them as to who would get to run their country next time around.
At the Democratic convention in St. Louis, the weather was even hotter than in Chicago. Politicians, delegates, and reporters sat in their shirtsleeves, trying in vain to cool off by waving palm-leaf fans while an impassioned orator cried, “Every mother whose son is today safe in his home may thank God for Woodrow Wilson, who has kept us out of war.”
More experienced political correspondents than she were exchanging cynical smiles, Mary noticed. This was nothing but campaign rhetoric; a statement, not a promise.
Mary couldn’t wait to get home, she wrote her final report sitting up in a lower berth on the overnight train to Pittsburgh. Hughes and Wilson would be pitted against each other in November, and she didn’t give a hoot or a holler which of the two was going to win.
CHAPTER 23
A Lull Before the Storm
By the time the conventions were over, Mary’s compatriots had begun to talk more positively about entering the war on the side of the Allies. Intelligent Americans had by now grasped the fact that, unless the United States stepped in, the carnage and ruination would drag on and on, just as General Foch had prophesied. Far too many others were romancing the war, calling it a great adventure, seeing it as a new thrill to relieve the drabness of everyday life. These dreamers pictured the brave boys marching off in their jaunty uniforms to cover themselves (and, by association, their stay-at-home friends and relations) with medals and glory. Of course every Johnny would then come marching home again with his eyes, limbs, and patriotic ideals all intact.
Mary doubted whether one citizen in ten thousand had any real idea of what these romantic notions were going to cost in money, material, and human suffering. Dr. Rinehart agreed with her absolutely; nevertheless, they decided to go ahead with the family expedition that had been abruptly terminated the previous summer by Stanley’s turbulent appendix, and spend two whole months riding and camping in the Rockies. The Head (short for “Head of the House,” a term Mary would apply to her husband when describing this and subsequent trips) had been a happy camper all his life. Mary had got her basic training the previous year in Glacier Park. The boys were all novices but they took to the rough outdoor life like three ducks to water. It was a good thing they did, considering some of the hair-raising situations they would find themselves having to face.
Tenting Tonight, the book that inevitably developed from this trek, sold well when it came out and is highly readable today, alternating humorous incident with hair-raising episodes, carrying the reader back to a time when the Northwest was still pretty much virgin territory and it was possible, though sometimes foolhardy, to take a pack train into areas where no human had ever gone before. After the grim subject matter of Kings, Queens, and Pawns, the ersatz gaiety of those too utterly killing Bab stories, and the hectic reportage of three political conventions, Mary clearly reveled in the chance to get away from it all with her beloved menfolk.
Theirs was not, however, just a family party. The Rineharts went first to the Eaton ranch and spent a couple of weeks at Glacier Park, giving the boys their chance to adjust to life in the saddle before they went back to the ranch and began packing for their own expedition. By the time they’d got organized, they’d wound up with fifteen men, thirty-one horses, and the one small woman who was the driving force behind it all.
Mary mentioned some of the ranch hands by name. The head guide was called Pete, probably because he was really something like Emil or Fritz and the times were getting chancy for people with German names. The teamster was Bill Hossick, the cook was another Bill, their movie photographer was Joe. There was also a still photographer who didn’t get called much of anything because he never talked to anybody. Somebody else named Joe, defined solely as an optimist, was the idea man, one of his inspirations being to bring along two sturdy boats in one of the wagons. Bills, Petes, Toms, Dicks, and Harrys were sprinkled throughout Mary’s text; she had a habit exasperating to a biographer of dropping names without explanation. Perhaps, being the sociable soul that she was, she stuck them in just to give some of her cronies the fun of seeing themselves in print.
The Rineharts kept together on the trail. Mary rode at the head of the line, the three boys followed their mother. Dr. Rinehart brought up the rear to encourage the stragglers, make sure none of his sons fell off a cliff, and provide the smokers among the working crew with matches. The Head had an almost kleptomaniacal way of acquiring matches; Mary
claimed her husband had so many boxes of them distributed about his person that if anybody were to whack him hard enough on any part of his body, he’d go up in smoke. Fortunately, nobody ever tested her claim.
Once Pete, the guide, had been assured that this expedition was not going to cross the border into Canada, where he, as a German, would have been an enemy alien and treated accordingly, he loosened up. Like a true cowpoke, he sang to his horse. Being German, he sang German songs. Dr. Rinehart happily joined in, but the only German song he knew the words to was “Die Lorelei.” “Ich weiss nicht was soll’ es bedeuten dass ich so traurig bin” is pretty at first hearing but can get monotonous in wholesale quantities. After a week or so of the same old tune, everybody else in the party knew perfectly well why the ballad of the fatally seductive Rhinemaiden made them so sad.
Despite her passion for camping, Mary liked her creature comforts. Sleeping on the ground was not her forte. Bough beds didn’t work unless they were properly made, which they usually weren’t. An air mattress was better than nothing, but not if it had a sharp rock under it. As the only woman in the party, Mary had to have a tent, even if the shelter was just big enough for her to crawl into and lie down. But where to pitch it? Come time to make camp, she took to flopping on the ground in likely spots. When she found one that felt right, she’d stay where she was and instruct the men to pound in the tent pegs around her.
Had She But Known Page 22