Remembering how Aunt Sade and Aunt Ella had gone, being the inveterate dramatist she was, Mary almost managed to talk herself into wasting away from cancer. It was in the midst of such gloomy ratiocinations that she decided to write her autobiography, not for publication but for her children to have as a remembrance after she had passed beyond the veil.
Making the notes that would, within the next few years, evolve into yet another best-seller must have been effective therapy. Since so much of the material in this book is derived from Mary’s own record, there seems little point in discussing what she wrote, except to say that it still makes excellent reading. That any literary effort of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s could remain a family secret was a quaint conceit, of course; the book that she called My Story turned out to be a benefit to her children in more ways than she’d intended.
After Ted had overcome his early feeling of obligation to be a doctor and followed his elder brother into publishing, Mary had, as she’d done for Stanley, given him money to buy a small share in George Doran’s company. In 1929, the boys announced that they were leaving the company that was by then Doubleday Doran to join with John Farrar in forming their own publishing house.
It was, and remains, generally believed that Mrs. Rinehart not only set her sons up in business but also was a principal in the company. In fact, she held no office and took no part in the publishers’ operations. The infinitely more important role that she did play for the rest of her life, which would span three more decades despite the pain in her side, was to give the boys exclusive publishing rights for all her future hardcover books.
Farrar & Rinehart’s opening list was an impressive one, carefully eclectic in content to attract a wide span of readers, featuring high-caliber writers of whom, naturally, Mary was one. On hearing her sons’ decision, her first question had been, “What can I do to help?” They’d suggested she write a new mystery; she immediately started one that would be called The Door. Of course The Door could not be got ready for publication in so short a span of time, but the boys did manage to put together a collection of their mother’s short stories that they dubbed The Romantics. This would be followed in 1930 by the Mary Roberts Rinehart Mystery Book, containing The Circular Staircase, The Man in Lower Ten, and The Case of Jennie Brice; all of which had been out of print long enough to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers, and The Confession, a novella last published by Doran in 1917. But the real bonanza was The Door. It had been five years since The Red Lamp, and readers were hungry for a new Rinehart mystery. Astute promoter that she was, Mary also did an article for Publishers Weekly in February of that year called “The Increasing Repute of the Crime Story.”
Whether a publishing house launched just before the crash of 1929 could have survived without the prestige of the Rinehart name and contributions is moot. The fact is that the venture did survive; Farrar & Rinehart kept on turning out successful books. Among the best-sellers were new Mary Roberts Rinehart releases, others were anthologies of Mary’s short stories or reissues of earlier books, three or four bound together in one big volume.
While the sons were cashing in on their mother’s backlist, Mary and the doctor were not doing so well. During the twenties, the stock market had been on a wild upward sweep. Everybody from the plutocrat to the trash collector was getting rich, on paper. Then came that fateful day in November 1929 when the fairy gold faded away.
The crash was not the immediate total wipeout that many have pictured it to be. The Rineharts were not reduced to penury overnight; they were, however, badly hit. Dr. Rinehart, who had in recent years been managing the money that his wife was so good at making and so totally hopeless at keeping, blamed himself bitterly.
Mary wrote in My Story that she felt her husband’s failure to foresee the crisis that also got by so many allegedly expert financiers had been a factor in hastening his death. Perhaps she was right, but it had been a long time now since Dr. Rinehart had been forced to give up surgery because of his arthritis. The disease, for which there is so far no cure and were then few palliatives, had continued its relentless progress. Unlike his wife, who was anything but stoical about her many complaints, Stanley had maintained his stiff upper lip and carried on. Now he was showing all too plainly the effects of his long struggle.
In March 1929, when the goose still hung high and the Rineharts were building a twenty-second room on their Washington house for some reason that may have made sense at the time, they had also bought themselves a twenty-eight-foot twin-cabin power cruiser that they called the Greyhound. Evidently there was still enough in the kitty a year later to afford them the summer rental of what Mary described as a modest house on one of the small rivers that feed into Buzzards Bay, where the boys and their families could visit them on weekends. Stanley’s was still the firm hand on the helm when he and Mary decided in June of 1930 to take the Greyhound to Massachusetts.
It must have been one of those deceptively halcyon days when they started out. Amateurs that they were, they didn’t think to check the weather reports, though one might have thought that the doctor’s rheumatics would have given him a twinge of what was coming. They were still in Chesapeake Bay when the hurricane struck. While far bigger vessels went bottoms up, the Greyhound wallowed around in the dark, seeking only to avoid being swamped by the tumultuous waves.
Somehow, Stanley’s steering and what Mary later referred to as the luck of fools and amateurs got them through. The family parrot, which they’d brought along to give a Long John Silver touch to the expedition, became terribly seasick but the manuscript of My Story, what there was of it at that stage, didn’t even get damp around the edges. Mary noted that they burned out a motor in the Delaware River, got stuck on a sandbar off New Jersey, ran out of gas in New London, found Buzzards Bay all right, but wound up somehow in one of the tiny harbors that were considered unnavigable to powerboats.
Somebody or other piloted them safely out of their impossible berth to the modest cottage, and the clan began to gather. Mary drew a gallant picture of the family’s soldiering on in the teeth of adversity, grandchildren crowding aboard the Greyhound to be taken for rides around the bay, everybody gathering to watch Reyes the cook, a tall, quiet man from the Philippines who was married to Peggy the parlormaid, carving the ham and filling the plates in his tall chef’s cap, white coat, and impeccable apron.
During one of these weekends, a daughter-in-law who’d been reading some of the Rinehart books remarked that Mary didn’t seem to like women. It’s easy to see where she got the idea. A surprising number of the Rinehart novels contain perfectly awful female characters, and the longer Mary wrote, the rottener they got. The Swimming Pool, her very last mystery, features a woman who’d have made Medea look like Anne of Green Gables.
A psychologist could draw all sorts of interesting conclusions from this, and no doubt some of them have. What a fellow writer sees is an experienced professional who was also a dramatist of the first water, introducing bitchy wives and rapacious mothers to ginger up her plots and give her feisty young heroines a chance to shine by contrast.
Mary could hardly not have realized while she was writing My Story that she herself had been a lifelong role-player, and that she’d always, ever since her childhood playlets, chosen to be the star. This Leonine propensity to shine would inevitably have attracted many people to her, even if she hadn’t welcomed their approaches. According to family members still living, Mary also kept in touch with her own relatives, no matter how busy she was. There is an interesting parallel here to Queen Mary of England, writing solicitously and warmly to far-flung relatives even while she was up to her neck in helping King George to rule Britannia’s waves.
At this stage, in My Story, Mary claimed not to have told anybody what she was working on, or even that she’d gone back to work. Conditions were not just then ideal for dredging up memories. Stanley Junior had left Mary’s old friend George Doran, his too-young marriage to Doran’s daughter was falling apart. Little Ge
orge was staying with his grandparents. One afternoon, Grandmary had just finished tucking the baby in for his afternoon nap when a New Bedford taxi rolled into the dooryard. Its passenger was a young man whom Mary immediately recognized as Arthur McKeogh, sent by his boss, Mr. Bigelow of Good Housekeeping magazine, to find out whether there was any truth in the rumor that M.R.R. was writing her autobiography. McKeogh had been brash enough to bring a big suitcase and trust that the Rineharts would have a bed for him.
Along with his skill as a cadger of free lodging, McKeogh was an expert nagger and bully. After considerable hounding, he managed to extract from Mary an admission that the rumor was grounded in fact, and even persuaded her to let him read the messy, handwritten first draft of what she’d accomplished so far. This was enough. After spending a day or so picking his way through the scratchings-out and puttings-in, McKeogh wheedled Mary’s promise of first refusal. Ultimately, Good Housekeeping would buy the serial rights for $45,000, to the expressed chagrin of the Saturday Evening Post.
Once the cat was out of the bag and a contract signed, Mary’s reaction was one of relief at having a substantial sale locked up. What with the deepening Depression and her own sense of befuddlement, she had been concerned as to how much longer she’d be able to keep not just the Greyhound but the whole Rinehart menage afloat.
Talking with some of her author friends after the crash, Mary had found them all experiencing the same feelings of emptiness and confusion as she was. Since writing fiction in such an atmosphere seemed all but impossible, she’d allowed the Ladies’ Home Journal to talk her into doing a year’s worth of editorials, the first of which appeared in May 1931 under the headline THOUGHTS. The $2,500 that she was getting for each “thought” disturbed her a good deal; with her brain in its current shape, she didn’t feel capable of thinking up $2,500 worth of anything. It was a relief—at least she claimed it was—when, in April 1932, the Journal felt the fiscal pinch so badly that they lowered her fee to $2,000.
In the meantime, Reyes kept on slicing ham until, in September 1930, Grandmary and “Maje,” as his grandchildren had dubbed Major Rinehart, went back to Washington. Here, it was all too easy to notice that Mr. Herbert Hoover’s exhortations about prosperity’s lurking just around the corner and now being the time to buy were not falling on receptive ears. As yet, the long lines soon to be a familiar sight outside employment offices were not forming; but the freight cars rolling south were loaded with men and boys hoping to find work in a kinder climate.
Mary got the bright idea of offering these no doubt hungry transients meal tickets, to be given out by policemen and redeemed at one or another of a local restaurant chain at her expense. Her noble gesture proved a dud; Mary thought that other charities must be filling the hobos’ needs, or else they just weren’t getting off the trains in Washington. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that the transients might be steering clear of cops on general principles, or that the designated restaurants were not eager to encourage an influx of unwashed, unshaven indigents who’d probably scare away their paying customers.
Everybody in the District, it seemed, was walking around with a chip on his shoulder. Political wrangles could suddenly turn into fistfights. Those elegant dinner parties that had laid so many pitfalls for Washington hostesses were no longer being held. Mary missed them; now she had no place to wear that ridiculously expensive diamond necklace her husband thought she should have had more sense than to buy. She never told Stanley that she’d bought it as an act of rebellion against his strenuous efforts to keep some kind of rein on her reckless spending, though he might have guessed.
Anyway, owning the extravagant bauble afforded Mary little real pleasure. It stayed in a bank vault most of the time and was a source of apprehension on those rare occasions when she took it out to wear. Eventually she decided to sell the overelegant bone of contention; but even this became a long, tedious pain in the neck. After hawking her great mistake around for a few years without success, Mary finally got a bid for about a third of what she’d paid, and took it.
Any anxiety over the necklace would have been a mere flea in the mink; Mary’s overwhelming concern was Dr. Rinehart. Early in 1931, it became obvious to Mary that her husband’s physical condition was worsening to an alarming degree. The coming of spring brought on increasingly acute bouts of pain from his arthritis, the sweltering humidity of a Washington summer would exacerbate other disturbing symptoms that may well have stemmed from his heavy smoking. They decided to rerent the house at Buzzards Bay.
New England’s morning fogs and unpredictable east winds were probably not the best medicine. Mary tried to keep her husband comfortable but he battled his infirmities as savagely (her word) as he’d carried on his lifelong guerilla warfare with inanimate objects. Strong men didn’t get sick, there was nothing the matter with old S.M. He just wished his wife would quit projecting her nervous fancies on him and go write a book or something.
Stanley did, however, spend an unprecedented amount of time that summer stretched out on the living room couch. He’d take Mary for a short spin in the Greyhound or go crabbing with her in the marshes, then he’d struggle back to the house looking gray around the gills and flop down again. For all his bravado, Dr. Rinehart was too astute a physician himself to put up much of an argument when Mary begged him to stop in New York on the way home and get examined by an expert specialist.
The results of this examination were, at the outset, highly reassuring. The boys were there to lend their father moral support, they said there was really no reason for their mother to hang around New York. Mary was willing to leave, she had a “Thought” to write for the Journal. Moreover, after all these arid months, she felt the preliminary tingle of a plot coming on. The house in Washington was getting its prefall housecleaning, and Mary no longer had a downtown office to go to. She took a two-room suite at the Homestead in Hot Springs and requested a big desk in her sitting room.
Most people who check in at health resorts are inclined to ask for bridge tables or wheelchairs, so the only generous work space Hot Springs could provide was a nine-foot banqueting board propped up on trestles. That would do. Mary unpacked the necessities: a quart bottle of ink, a stack of yellow paper, and her ever-trusty fountain pen. From out of the mists of time had come floating back to her a cap, an apron, a nurse’s uniform, and a name snitched from the redoubtable Pinkerton men.
When Mary filled her fountain pen and took the first virgin sheet from her stack of paper, all she could remember from two short stories she’d written back in 1914 was that Miss Hilda Adams, nicknamed Miss Pinkerton, had been a trained nurse who took private patients with dark, mysterious secrets and worked undercover with an inspector of police. What more did she need? The rest would come.
The way Mary told it, for three weeks she never left those two rooms, eating meals brought up on a tray and admitting a masseuse once a day to rub away the writer’s cramp. One of the letters cited by Jan Cohn in Improbable Fiction mentions an allusion to shopping for her winter wardrobe, but Mary probably did most of her work in a nightgown and robe. Not getting dressed is a double benefit for a writer; it allows the ideas to flow without such irritating constraints as a tight waistband and also keeps the author from traipsing off on some pretext or other instead of sitting there doggedly dredging up the elusive mot juste and getting it down on paper before the slippery syllables slither away.
At the end of her three-week stay, Mary staggered forth wan and trembling, on the brink of a nervous collapse, a poor advertisement for a spa but a triumphant author. She’d achieved her “Thought” and would carry back to Washington a complete first draft of Miss Pinkerton. There was life in the old brain yet, the creative spark could still be fanned, prosperity had crept a step or two closer to the corner. In 1932, Miss Pinkerton earned $50,000 from the Saturday Evening Post for the serial rights, $30,000 from Warner Brothers for a film starring Joan Blondell and George Brent, and provided Mary’s publisher sons with a golden op
portunity to cash in on their mother’s unorthodox rest cure.
CHAPTER 32
Crossing the Great Divide
Preparing Miss Pinkerton for publication took longer than Mary had expected. She’d hoped the Post might pay her as much as $30,000 for a novella; the $50,000 they actually paid meant having to expand her original draft to full book length. That was fine with the author; doing the extra work helped to keep her mind off the country’s steadily worsening economic situation and her husband’s noticeably failing health. The dauntless doctor was still not willing to give in, however; he insisted on traveling by himself to the West Coast. Alan was working as a scriptwriter for Paramount; Stanley wanted to visit him, Gratia, and their two daughters before Christmas.
Mary was heartened by her husband’s show of enterprise; she was still trying to convince herself that his illness stemmed in part from financial worries. In 1929 he had insisted on using his personal savings to cover his wife’s market losses, for which he’d somewhat quixotically felt himself responsible. Mary decided that her Christmas gift to him would be enough money to cover his own stocks. She thought a dose of prosperity might be Stanley’s best medicine, that and a little quiet cheerfulness in the Musgrove family manner as described by Jane Austen.
Back from his visit to sunny California (as it was then), Stanley felt well enough to escort his wife to Vice President Charles Curtis’s dinner for President and Mrs. Hoover. Mary served as one of Lou Hoover’s ladies-in-waiting at a Christmas tea. The Rineharts gave a tea of their own. In a letter to his son, Stanley was feeling merry enough to explain that “tea” was poetic license for more potent beverages.
Alan and Gratia didn’t come east for the holidays, but Stanley Junior was there on Christmas Day with Bab and George. So were Ted and his beautiful Betty, the only one of the three boys’ original wives who would not only stay married to a Rinehart but outlive her husband by a good many years. Mary had arranged a surprise for the major: a portable bar that could fold up to look like a small table. While the rest were at Christmas-morning breakfast, Stanley Junior and Ted were to sneak into the music room and set up the bar beside the tree, with the proper accoutrements. After breakfast, when it was time to open presents, the Head would find Reyes there in his white coat, shaking up some poetic license behind the bar.
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