All symptoms to the contrary notwithstanding, Mary finished the book and got it off. Cosmopolitan magazine bought the serial rights for $40,000 and George Doran published the hardcover book. This first Christmas in the new house on Massachusetts Avenue began to look brighter. Cornelia would not be there, but all the boys would be at home, as well as young Stanley’s wife and the little daughter whom her parents had nicknamed, for the most reasonable of reasons, Bab. Mary went out and bought Bab a toy drum, not that the child needed one but just because there’d always been a drum under the tree when the boys were small. Locales might shift with the changing times, but family traditions could still remain.
CHAPTER 30
Shipped to the Desert and “Strong as a Lions”
One day shortly before Christmas, while they were wrapping presents together, Mary asked her husband what was the correct garb for riding a camel. The distinguished but forgetful physician, racking his brain over where he’d hidden somebody’s carefully chosen gift, replied vaguely, “What camel?”
Mary didn’t care what camel. Oddly enough, each knew what the other was talking about, they’d been thinking for a while now that a trip to Egypt was just what they needed. Stanley had been through a rough time with the Veterans’ Bureau and his near-fatal accident. Mary was in even worse shape than he. She was finished as a writer. Her brain refused to function, she couldn’t even hold a pen.
Needless to say, that was not how things would work out, as Mary later demonstrated in My Story and in an often hilarious travelogue, some of which is repeated here partly or entirely verbatim through the generous permission of Mary’s grandson, George H.D. Rinehart, and the family of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
They sailed late in January 1925. Stanley, always protective, watched over his wife with tenderness, compassion, and hidden alarm as she, usually so sociable, bullied herself out of shying away from her fellow passengers. When she could no longer keep up the empty chatting and laughing, she would go down to her stateroom and lie there in the dark, fighting a crazy impulse to get it over with. She herself realized what Stanley surely knew, that her mood was largely hysteria. Still, he must have been worrying about a possible suicidal gesture that could have terrible repercussions.
By the time they reached Egypt, however, Mary was beginning to mend. Finding that she could pen a legible letter to her children was a step in the right direction. She was able to discuss rationally with Stanley how they’d manage to get by on their savings now that she could no longer contribute the large sums of money that they’d come to take for granted. Having had it proved to her own satisfaction that they wouldn’t be beggars, Mary sneaked out and bought a notebook. As to what she’d do with the notes, she had no idea. She’d always taken notes on her trips, and it just didn’t seem right not to make any this time.
Once they’d seen the sights of Cairo, the Rineharts had planned to go up the Nile by boat. However, they got invited to a party in the desert to which the guests all arrived on camelback, and that was that. Why loll around on the deck of a dahabeah watching the crocodiles slither off the sandbanks when they might instead be pitching and rolling aboard a true ship of the desert? Camels they must have and camels they got, through the good offices of their invaluable cicerone, whose name was Ashour Abdul Karim El-Gabry. Mary’s desert ship, by happy coincidence, was named Dahabeah. Stanley’s was Missouri because, said Ashour, this camel always had to be shown. They were charmed to come upon this scrap of American folklore so far from home.
The question of what to wear on a camel came up again in Cairo. Ashour suggested that the Rineharts would perhaps be more comfortable in native dress, so they went and bought some. Mary chose a golden sheath to wear under a turquoise silk aba, a yellow head scarf, and a white silk nose veil that she found herself inhaling and exhaling with every breath. Stanley was relatively subdued in a brown undergarment, a green-and-white striped aba, a white turban, a colorful scarf that draped over it, and a gilt cord to anchor the scarf to the turban.
Back at their hotel, they dressed up in their new outfits and stepped out on the balcony, only to be dazzled by each other’s splendor and disconcerted by the stares from passers-by. Perhaps this was not the kind of native garb that Ashour had had in mind for his patrons, though, as Mary commented, it might have suited King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba just fine.
Riding boots and breeches, while appropriate for horses, didn’t work well on camels either, they found. Stanley settled for his golf knickers and Mary, all else having failed to satisfy, wore her best tailor-made suit and a pair of bedroom slippers. She remarked that her tailor in New York had taken great pains with the “expression” of the skirt, but that after a few days in the desert, its expression was both pained and shocked.
Ashour noticed early on that Mrs. Rinehart was not in the best of shape, he assured her that after having slept in the desert she would be “strong as a lions.” Mary was all for being a lions; this experience was to be a far cry from any camping trip that Howard Eaton had ever put together. She and Stanley rode ahead on their camels. Both animals were females, which were alleged to have better dispositions than the males and to give a softer, smoother ride despite the looks of hatred that Dahabeah kept casting toward Mary.
Ashour came next in line, on a gray donkey named Gazelle. The cook and the butler traveled on foot, as did the men in charge of the four huge male camels that carried their handsomely decorated tents, their iron camp beds, springs, mattresses, pillows, and bedding; the washstands, bowls, pitchers, bathtub, dishes, stove, kitchenware, water tanks, dining table, folding chairs both straight-backed and steamer length, food in Lucullan abundance, assorted beverages, oriental rugs to keep the sand out of the tents, and a variety of other items that Mary forgot to mention. This would be something to tell the boys at the ranch, if they ever got back to Eaton’s.
After a day’s ride, the three tents were immediately set up and tea and cakes served to the intrepid travelers. Two hours or so later, after Mary and Stanley had refreshed themselves with cooling sponge baths and either a restful lie-down on a comfortable bed or a pleasant flop in a steamer chair with a book and a scotch and soda for company, dinner would be served by candlelight on an elegantly appointed table. A typical meal would be an excellent soup, an entree, roast meat with vegetables and appropriate wine, salad with roast quail, and dessert followed by Turkish coffee and assorted sweetmeats out under the stars.
If the Rineharts didn’t eat everything set before them, the cook’s feelings might be hurt but the food wouldn’t go to waste. Anything their entourage couldn’t finish would be rolled into a package and left for any needy wanderer who might come along; the dry heat of the desert would keep it from spoiling. All this opulence may seem like excessive coddling, but after a day on camelback, an exercise much like shooting the rapids in a cranky canoe without a paddle, Stanley and Mary must have felt that they’d earned all the luxury they could get.
They could even have used a little more coddling. Flu had been prevalent during their stay in Cairo; after they’d been in the desert for about a week, both Mary and Stanley came down with it. Riding a camel on a long day’s trek while running a fever, running at the nose, and running out of clean handkerchiefs proved too much for Mary. As soon as the men had got her tent and cot set up, she crawled into bed still wearing her by now thoroughly disgruntled skirt, and refused to budge.
Stanley was no gentle patient either. As his temperature mounted, so did his ire. Ashour prayed with ever-increasing fervor for the speedy recovery of his patients and most fervently of all for the improvement of Dr. Rinehart’s disposition.
When they reached Fayum, the first oasis in the Libyan Desert, the two invalids spent a blessed day in bed, working crossword puzzles and ignoring the snarls and grunts of Dahabeah and Missouri outside their tent. This respite must have been just what the doctor ordered; as his fever subsided, his temper improved. Mary, though not yet quite ready to take on lions, was recovering from more t
han her touch of influenza. The vast silence of the desert had brought her a deep sense of peace, of acceptance and thankfulness. It had also brought back her urge to write.
Nomad’s Land, the book that would come out of her automatic note-taking, turned out to be Grade A number one Rinehart, lively and merry, meticulously observed and expertly told. After 124 pages of Egypt, the text moves on to Baghdad. Mary called that segment of the book “Hunting Trouble”; her opening sentence compared the joys of that mystical city to a toothache, a punctured tire, or waking up to find burglars in the house. Back in the states, their friend Douglas Fairbanks was having a great run in The Thief of Baghdad. Mary waxed acerbic about how all he’d had to do was romp around the set all day, then go home to a hot shower, a good dinner, and Mary Pickford.
She and Stanley were experiencing a genuine Baghdad, complete with clouds of mosquitoes, squalor galore, and Panzer divisions of small birds who swooped in through the unscreened windows to steal the dreadful food that the Rineharts were trying to choke down for want of anything more palatable. There was nothing to do except shop for things they didn’t want and go to outdated movies with scrambled subtitles in various languages that they couldn’t understand. Mary gave Baghdad only forty-two pages containing few good words.
One thing that Mary mentioned in My Story but omitted from Nomad’s Land was a brief return to Cairo during which they met the king of Egypt, but not the queen. She, like every respectable Egyptian woman, led a life of sequestration. The Rineharts didn’t dare mention that their Royal Highnesses’ daughter, married to the first Egyptian minister to America, would inevitably find it not only impractical but downright impossible to retain her veil and her privacy in Washington. When Mary met her later on, the princess confessed that wearing Western clothes and appearing unveiled at mixed gatherings had been an ordeal at first. She’d got over it, however, and had become an important asset to her husband in his new role; Mary doubted that the king ever knew what a diplomat the princess could be.
Mary and Stanley might have stayed in Egypt a little longer had they not received a cablegram from Alan. He was engaged to be married. The formal announcement would be delayed until his parents got home, but he wanted to know if it was all right with them.
Of course it was, and it was high time they went back to tell him so. The night they arrived in New York, Alan brought his fiancée to their hotel suite. The poor girl was understandably nervous. It must have been a strange introduction, seeing her future in-laws sashaying around in their Egyptian finery and Alan’s brothers rigged out in whatever grotesqueries they could contrive from the materials at hand, all the Rineharts making, as usual, a tremendous racket.
Mary and the doctor heard the romantic story of how Alan’s love affair had begun. They also solved the mystery of how a window had got broken in their Washington garage shortly before they’d sailed for Egypt. Alan and a charming debutante whom he’d recently met and been eager to know better had slipped away from a ball to go for a ride. Alan had sneaked the girl into his family’s drawing room to wait while he got out one of the family cars, having surmounted the minor obstacle of a locked garage by smashing a pane of glass with the leather heel of his dancing shoe.
The girl was Gratia Houghton, daughter of a co-owner of the Corning Glass Company and niece of Alanson Houghton, who was at that time America’s ambassador to the Court of Saint James. The wedding took place in a private chapel on the Houghton estate, but the bride and bridegroom were barely noticed in the society column writeups. Whereas Stanley Junior’s marriage had been headlined DAUGHTER OF PUBLISHER MARRIES SON OF NOVELIST, Alan’s came out as SON OF NOVELIST MARRIES NIECE OF AMBASSADOR. Several years later, Ted’s wife, Betty, would complain on the birth of their daughter Cornelia, Mary’s fifth grandchild, that from the way the papers wrote up the story, readers must have drawn the conclusion that it was Grandmary, as she’d come to be known to her grandchildren and daughters-in-law, who had produced the latest Rinehart.
A family as close-knit as the Rineharts can too easily become a juggernaut that overwhelms the more personal relationships within its various components. At this point in their lives, there was no special reason why Mary and the doctor could not have moved to New York and enjoyed themselves playing full-time patriarch and matriarch. They chose the wiser course, stayed in Washington, and built themselves a poolroom.
They’d had one in Sewickley; everybody from the children’s friends to guests at their allegedly formal dinner parties had tended to wind up at the pool table there, having a glorious time. They would see nothing strange in some Washington VIP’s showing up in swallow-tailed coat and top hat, only to be found a while later in his shirtsleeves, chalking his cue and casting a calculating eye at the corner pocket.
Mary and Stanley often played pool when they were alone and not too busy with more serious matters. She had been deeply embroiled for quite a while with a novel that reflected a phenomenon she’d noticed on various occasions at the dude ranch. She called her new book Lost Ecstasy. It dealt with a rich society girl from the East who had fallen madly in love with a handsome young cowhand. In real life, these romances usually come to nothing; Mary’s heroine, however, was foolish enough to marry her dream man. Once the stardust was out of her eyes, she would wish desperately that she hadn’t.
The Saturday Evening Post gave Mary Roberts Rinehart $50,000 for the serial rights and didn’t lose a penny on the deal. Response to the book was overwhelming. Mary noted with surprise that fully half the fans who wrote to her were male: doctors, lawyers, ranchers, all sorts and conditions of men, all of them praising her work to the skies. The critics were less gracious. Some of them were downright bitchy, following the pattern set by Edgar Allan Poe, who never reviewed a book unless he could bolster his undernourished ego by ripping it to pieces.
Mary lamented the bad reviews, but her husband told her that in his opinion (he seems actually to have said “humble” opinion, but he probably didn’t mean it) reviews didn’t amount to a hill of beans because books were sold primarily by word-of-mouth recommendation. Dr. Rinehart was absolutely right. As every author should know, word of mouth is still the best advertising. Doran bought the hardcover rights to Lost Ecstasy for an undisclosed sum and Mary sold the movie rights for another $15,000. Naturally, Hollywood changed the title. I Take This Woman, starring Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard, was released in 1931.
Mary had started the book back in March; its progress had been fraught with difficulties. In April, Stanley Junior’s wife had had to undergo surgery and Grandmary got to ride herd on little Bab. By early summer, Mary was heading for the ranch where she could find a quiet place to write. Stanley Senior joined her a few weeks later. He’d picked the wrong time to come.
Even the carefully bowdlerized version of her married life that Mary presented in My Story makes it obvious that the union had never been roses all the way. How could perfect harmony ever have been possible? Here were two well-nigh irresistible forces, sometimes working together, too often pulling in opposite directions, driven each by a personal demon to perform at the peaks of their separate powers. Both were charismatic characters who’d never lacked admirers, but only one was an international celebrity. Only one was raking in money by the millions, only one had to deal every week with sacks of mail from adoring, scolding, begging fans and nonfans, people with bushels of importunings to speak, to shine, to donate to worthy and unworthy causes, to serve on government committees. Paradoxically, that was the one who required long stretches of peace and quiet in which to do the work that had brought fame, fortune, and the constant strain of having to sparkle and slave for a relentlessly worshiping public.
But what of the other one? The surgeon who’d had to quit operating because of his own increasingly troublesome medical problems, the successful head of a flourishing tuberculosis clinic who’d resigned to serve his country as an army doctor and never got beyond the rank of major, who had been given an important government position only to hav
e the rug pulled out from under him by a high official who’d turned out to be a self-seeking rogue? Now, if ever, Stanley Marshall Rinehart needed some tender, loving care, but where was he going to get it?
Too bad, but there it was. Just what they fought about, Mary never said. All we know is that, after a major battle, Stanley got back on the train for Washington.
Whoever was at fault, whatever the provocation, this was not the end. Mary and Stanley had worked hard and long at keeping their marriage together despite the many strains to which it had been subjected. Their love had survived too many storms, their need for each other was far too deep, there were their sons and their grandchildren to think of. Diplomatic negotiations were opened, with sighs of relief at both ends. By the time Washington cooled off, so had the Rineharts; October found them back in the social swing and happy to be there.
Dinner at the White House was no longer a great thrill, just another excuse for Mary to wear a far too expensive diamond necklace that Stanley had told her she was crazy to buy. The Rineharts had dined with Warren G. Harding and his Duchess before he escaped the full force of the deluge by dying on an Alaska cruise; now they dined with the Coolidges. There was a legend around the District that Mrs. Rinehart had once actually succeeded in making Silent Cal crack a smile.
CHAPTER 31
A Time to Remember
Despite the popular outpouring of kudos for Lost Ecstasy, 1927 hardly seems to have been Mary’s happiest year. During the winter, she and Stanley had taken a trip to Hawaii. On her first day there, she’d slipped in the hotel bathroom and broken a rib. The injury didn’t bother her at first so much as the unromantic way in which she’d hurt herself. Later on, however, she developed a chronic pain in her side that kept her on the chaise longue a good deal.
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