Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  In April, Mary had a happy ending of her own. Dr. Rinehart was at last discharged from the surgeon general’s office and free to come home. She went to meet him in Washington; on their twenty-third anniversary they drove home together in the major’s car to pick up the pieces of their life together.

  But, they had to face it, life would not be the same. Their eldest son was, of all incredible things, getting married! They could hardly fault Stanley Junior’s choice of a bride; she was the daughter of publisher George H. Doran. Stanley was only twenty-one, but Mary had to concede that young men matured fast in wartime. Alan, now eighteen, was to be best man. Even Ted at fourteen could hardly be called the family baby anymore. He was shooting up like his brothers, his voice was as deep as a man’s.

  Reconciled to being a father-in-law, Dr. Rinehart went back to work at the dispensary and began rebuilding his private practice. Mary’s thoughts turned once more to The Bat. She was understandably chagrined that Avery Hopwood had not lived up to his promise to work on the last act while she was in France. He was ready now to make amends, though; she laid aside her novel and the two of them went to work in her downtown office. Nothing much happened. In June they were still not happy with what they’d done. Hopwood was willing to keep on trying but Mary said sorry, she had a train to catch.

  Out in Hollywood, Mr. Samuel Goldwyn had had an inspiration. He was starting a collection of Eminent Authors in order to show the world what an erudite lot moving-picture producers really were. There were even rumors that the Eminent Authors would be permitted to adapt their own books for the silver screen. Furthermore, Goldwyn was offering his Eminences each a guaranteed three-year contract at $15,000 a year plus royalties, if there were any. Captivated by the glamour of filmland and the chance of some steady money, Mary signed. In July she set out by train for Los Angeles. Nearing her destination, she got a telegram. Would she mind being met at the station by a baby blimp instead of a taxi? Yes, she would indeed mind, she replied, so her promoters settled for an open car and armloads of flowers. Even this much ostentation seemed bizarre to the Eminent Author from Pittsburgh, but the locals took it calmly enough.

  Perhaps Mr. Goldwyn honestly believed that a successful author could be trusted to develop her own work into an acceptable scenario, but the professional screenwriters chose not to. The man assigned to her did not want her ideas, or her story, either. What the studio did in fact want was for Mrs. Rinehart to pose for a great many publicity shots and then go home until it was time to take some more pictures. They did lavish a good deal of time and attention on her appearance; she found it interesting to have her whole face redesigned by a makeup artist, although she did complain that the heavy beads of mascara on the ends of her eyelashes kept getting caught in the veil of her hat.

  And she got to socialize with the movie stars. Douglas Fairbanks was already on the Rineharts’ Christmas-card list. He offered to give her and Stanley a plot of land next to his so that they could build their own house and be neighbors. One day in Cecil B. DeMille’s office, Mary shook hands with a sweet young thing named Mary Pickford, who would become not only Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks but also for many years America’s sweetheart, notwithstanding the fact that Miss Pickford was born in Toronto, Ontario. In Hollywood, Mary Roberts Rinehart learned, things were seldom what they seemed.

  CHAPTER 27

  Playtime

  Certainly Eminent Authors didn’t get to write. Fed up with trying to buck the system, Mary wiped the mascara off her eyelashes and went home to round up the family for another holiday at Eaton’s ranch. Stanley Junior and his bride had other things to do, but Cornelia Roberts and her maid came along for a change. These two occupied the only bedroom of a cabin built over a rushing stream; this cabin would become the Rineharts’ regular summertime retreat for some years to come. Stanley Senior, Mary, and the boys bedded down in a row on the back porch. Mary got around the proprieties by staying asleep until her menfolk were up, dressed, and ready to ride.

  She was relieved to note that even the cowboys had moved with the times. It was now acceptable for female dudes to wear riding breeches instead of those cumbrous divided skirts. Mary bought herself a pair of gray leather chaps, a pair of high-heeled cowboy boots, and a Stetson hat to replace the tired old brown velour hat into which so many fishing flies had been stuck, and which had so often served her for everything from a potholder to a drinking cup.

  Perhaps because Cornelia was along, perhaps because parents and offspring alike were wrung out from their taxing wartime experiences, none of the Rineharts seems to have been up for anything more hair-raising than a short gallop or a day’s fishing. Then it would be back to the ranch for another good meal, a quiet night’s sleep, and the happiness of being together in a place they had all grown to love.

  Too soon it was fall, back to school for Alan and Ted, back to work for their father and mother. This was when Mary took time out to fight that previously mentioned battle of words with Irvin S. Cobb, thinking as she wrote how very much she knew about men, what fun she was having putting some of her knowledge down on paper, and how prudent she was being not to mention the rest. She finished A Poor Wise Man, didn’t like what she’d done, wrote the whole book over from start to finish, and packed it off before she could change her mind again.

  She also produced a sort of novella that she called The Confession. This is not the best piece she ever wrote, but it does have an interesting history. Pittsburgh’s district attorney, a relative of Cornelia Roberts, wanted Mary’s opinion on the authenticity of a note that some workman had turned up during the renovation of a building that had once been a house of prostitution. Folded into a tiny square, hidden in a dark rear hallway underneath the battery box of a telephone, the note purported to be a confession by the one-time madam. She had, she said, killed a woman in that house. She’d given the date and the year, ended with the words If this is found, may God have mercy on my soul, and signed her name in full.

  Mary took the note seriously. If this was supposed to be a hoax, or had been written by someone else out of malice, what would have been the point of hiding the scrap of paper so well that it might never have been found?

  The district attorney had verified the fact that the woman named had indeed kept a bawdy house in that building at that time. Mary had nursed enough girls from the red-light district during her student days to know all about their jealousies, their sudden rages, their hair-pullings, fistfights, and worse. She’d seen two of them brought in together, each bleeding from razor slashes inflicted by the other, both of them sorry for what they’d done, both ready to forgive and forget. She noted the date of the letter—Decoration Day—and remembered how drunkenness and license had run rife on holidays in Pittsburgh’s Tenderloin, how frantically overworked the ambulances and the police had been. So had the girls, no doubt; it would have been an ideal time for a murder in a whorehouse to go undetected.

  Having met that terrified shipyard worker in Los Angeles, having just finished the book that his confession had inspired, Mary could understand readily enough why an uncaught murderess might have felt the need to shrive herself by writing out a confession and squirreling it away, leaving the outcome to the God of Justice of whom, Mary remembered too well, plenty of girls from the houses had poured out their terror during those long nights on the wards.

  The ex-madam was still alive. She had gone straight and adopted a little girl. A signature of hers found on the lease of a place she had later rented matched the writing on the note. The cellar of the former brothel was dug up, but no body was found. With no case to pursue, the matter was dropped, to Mary’s secret relief. She suspected that the murder had really happened and that the body had been dumped in the river. She was sure that by now the perpetrator had been punished enough by her own tormenting conscience.

  Speaking of punishment, Mary was called back to Hollywood, actually to do some writing. Her picture was all filmed. This being still in the days of the “silents,” however, captions we
re needed, and she, who hadn’t been allowed to write her own scenario, was somehow now obligated to write them. The book that the screenwriters had allegedly adapted was Dangerous Days. What Mary saw in the final version bore no resemblance to her original work and made, she thought, very little sense. She did what she could, then packed to go home.

  Dr. Rinehart had come with her this time, which was a good thing. Less than a day before they were to catch their train, some bright soul realized that the sabotage theme, almost the only part of Mary’s book that the scriptwriters had retained, might be offensive to labor. Mrs. Rinehart needn’t get any silly ideas about their shooting the film over, her job was to rewrite all the captions, getting rid of the hypothetically inflammatory material while making the words appropriate to the existing photography.

  At that, Mary did the only sensible thing. She went back to bed. Dr. Rinehart pulled up a table beside her and took up his pen. Together they proceeded, as she bitterly recorded in My Story, to enfeeble the already moribund, and to suffer the indignity of having the result shown to the world as Mary Roberts Rinehart’s own work.

  This was the last time Mary would get herself into such a position. For the next Rinehart film, she asked the studio to find a scenario writer who was willing to come and work with her in Pittsburgh. That was fine with Mr. Goldwyn. He sent a nice young married couple with a proven record of successes. They and Mary developed a pattern of talking over the day’s work in the morning. After their chat, Mary would go to her own work and the scriptwriters to theirs. When they’d finished, the couple headed west with a well-plotted, technically correct scenario ready to roll.

  The scenario department paid them off, threw out the whole business, and wired Mary that they would have a complete rewrite ready in a week. Mary wrote back telling them to tear up her contract. They wouldn’t do it. Mr. Goldwyn still believed in his great experiment and just couldn’t understand why his Eminent Authors kept turning out such disappointing scripts.

  Meanwhile, The Bat was still hanging by its toes. Avery Hopwood came back to Pittsburgh. He and Mary finally conquered that recalcitrant last act, only to realize that their success with Act 3 meant having to make changes in Acts 1 and 2. And the timing was critical; they must check it to the second. And Alan had flunked out of Harvard and gone out West to be a cowboy. And other family matters were, as Mary put it, at a critical point, which may have meant that Dr Rinehart’s well-known temper was coming to the boil again, as well it might. Mary checked in at a New York hotel.

  At five o’clock one April afternoon, the curtain fell on the absolutely last, final, and totally satisfactory draft of The Bat. As the two playwrights reached to shake hands on a job well done, the telephone rang. Stanley Junior was on the phone—Mary’s grandchild was on the way. She rushed to the hospital and sat for eight hours at her daughter-in-law’s side, observing at firsthand the benefits of twilight sleep. At three in the morning she saw her granddaughter into the world, then took her son back to her hotel, made him eat a sandwich and drink a glass of milk, and tucked him up on her sofa. What, after all, was a grandmother for?

  The next day, the New York papers announced that publisher George Doran and his best-known author were cograndparents. One of them published a photo with the caption Who would believe from this picture that Mary Roberts Rinehart is a grandmother? Not many, probably; the unknown person in the picture was wearing a totally masculine full beard.

  Becoming a grandmother was a solemn business. Mary had to face the fact that she and her husband, whom she’d always thought of as one of her boys, were over the hill, not precisely heading for the last roundup but definitely going hand-in-hand into the sunset. Well, it happened to everybody sooner or later. In the meantime, she had plenty to do.

  Fully convinced at last that they had a hit, she and Avery Hopwood each retained a quarter interest in The Bat. The team of Wagenhals and Kemper would be the producers, and they would do an outstanding job. The only problem was the title. The management didn’t like it and opened the play in Washington as A Thief in the Night. Mary wasn’t standing for that. When they opened in New York, The Bat was back.

  She hadn’t bothered to stick around for the opening. Along with her husband, Ted, her mother, and the maid without whom Cornelia could not have managed, she went west to their cabin. At the train they were met by a burly young puncher wearing plaid pants tucked into reprehensible boots, a well-aged Stetson, and an old blue shirt that belonged to the camp cook, with whom he was bunking. Alan greeted his loved ones with the mild condescension of the dude rancher to the dude, then started hefting their luggage while the rest of the family lined up and cheered. His brother Ted magnanimously tipped him a quarter.

  For the first month or so, the Rineharts took things relatively easy. In August, Howard Eaton organized another of his jolly little camping trips, this time into Arizona and New Mexico. Because of the long distances involved, they would go by car instead of on horseback, some twenty of them, including a full complement of Rineharts; Ted had elected to join the party. Their motorcade of eight cars and three trucks full of camping gear left Flagstaff heading for the Grand Canyon. By the time they’d made their way through 700 miles of sand and mud, they’d got lost, run perilously short of gas, gone tentless one night when a truck broke down, experienced the unique discomforts of a sandstorm, had to be dug out of a hundred or so dry creek beds, got stuck fording the Little Colorado River, and been roped out by a team from an Indian school directed by a policeman wearing a big revolver and a magnificent parure of turquoise and silver earrings, necklace, and bracelets. They’d run out of water, got sick from bad wells, and watched an Indian kill and dress a prairie dog for his supper.

  In New Mexico, Mary got her first news of The Bat. Audiences loved it, critics on the opening night had not. Mary took the news calmly, for she was preoccupied with more immediate problems such as how to take a bath in an irrigation ditch and get into one’s nightgown with suitable decorum before an admiring audience of Native Americans. Stanley Senior and the boys also had their troubles, trying to change from pajamas to day clothes without revealing anything not meant to be seen. Since they themselves were tourists who’d come to gawk, they could hardly fault the natives for gawking back. One of Mary’s fondest memories on that trip was the story she told of her husband sitting inside an open tepee in his BVDs, mending the seat of his pants with adhesive tape, quite unabashed by an audience of six curiously watching Indian women and two babies.

  As the autocade went on, Mary kept getting more telegrams, brought by horseback riders, truck drivers, or swift-running Zuni messengers. The Bat was flying high; by the weekend, those critics who’d panned the show on Monday were lauding it to the skies. The producers were already starting to audition road companies. Audience members who couldn’t handle the suspense were ripping the arms off their own seats and shoving the debris under somebody else’s. Everybody was too caught up in the plot to be aware of anything but what was happening onstage. After the bemused playgoers had staggered from the theater, ushers would discover that they’d left behind them everything but their false teeth.

  One telegram told how a group of gamblers had each put a hundred-dollar bill in somebody’s hat at the end of the first act and added their guesses as to who the criminal was after the second. At the end of Act 3, each man had had to take his money back because not one of them had got it right. Mary tossed the telegram into the campfire and took another admiring look at the Grand Canyon.

  By the middle of September, though, back in Sewickley, Mary was hard at work on another play. Wagenhals and Kemper had acquired the rights to an old Spanish play called Maria del Carmen. The script was dreadfully outmoded for American audiences. Avery Hopwood had taken a stab at updating it, but work was still needed. Mary, the veteran play doctor, had risen to the bait once more.

  And a good thing, too. While Mary was out West, the two producers had been traveling in Spain. They’d brought back some wonderful Spanish co
stumes and a troupe of genuine Spanish dancers. Wagenhals and Kemper were making innovations at the theater as well, turning the orchestra pit into a forestage, which would be the first of its kind in America. Even more daringly, they’d have some of the characters entering not from the wings but down the aisles from the rear of the theater, speaking lines as they came. This would cause no end of a stir until audiences caught on that the chattering intruders were part of the show.

  Thanks to a vastly improved script, inspired production, and some superb acting, they had another hit. Particularly outstanding in the cast was a budding actor named William Powell, who played his role of a tubercular young man so convincingly that Mary feared he might not survive the run of the show. But Spanish Love stayed on the boards for a solid year and, and after it closed, Powell went on to become one of the shining lights of Hollywood.

  Mary remarked in her autobiography that, while good playwrights and producers could turn actors into stars, it was only fair to add that good actors could also enhance the reputations of the playwrights and producers. She felt it was time to give credit where credit was surely due.

  That winter of 1920–21, Mary Roberts Rinehart would be on more playbills than she’d bargained for. While The Bat and Spanish Love were drawing full houses, Helen Hayes was playing in a dramatization of Babs by Edward Carpenter, while May Robson, Mary’s erstwhile sparring partner, starred in Edward Rose’s farce, Tish.

  For years, Mary had neglected her bookkeeping; her business affairs were in an almost impossible welter. At last, to her ineffable relief, Dr Rinehart took over as her business manager. The volume of mail that Mary received each day had become overwhelming; even with a secretary she couldn’t begin to handle it all. Still less could she handle her money, and she’d made some terrible mistakes in her income-tax returns.

  Besides maintaining an extravagant lifestyle, she’d literally thrown away thousands and thousands of dollars on bad investments and smooth-talking con artists. Her husband set to work to curb Mary’s enthusiasm for thrusting money at anybody who held out a hand. Stanley’s endeavor was to build her an estate to fall back on when she grew older and couldn’t keep up her heavy workload. Ten years the elder of the two, himself not in the best of health, he was determined to leave his wife properly provided for. Though it was some time since he’d been the family’s chief breadwinner, Stanley Marshall Rinehart was still, when it counted, the Head.