Mary wrote up their findings in an article for The Forum after she’d done some further research among her sons and their friends. One young fellow told her it seemed to him that girls had climbed down off the pedestal to join the postwar whoop-up and their younger sisters had followed their example. He thought a good many men would like to put their sweethearts back on the pedestal, but the girls didn’t want to go.
Mary didn’t believe for one second that any intelligent young woman of the thirties would allow herself to be shoved back into the straitjacketed life that Mamie Roberts had endured as a girl, but she was not ready to stand up and cheer for premarital sex. She referred to the concept of virginity among the unmarried as having suffered a blow and getting worse. Little did she reck that she would soon be paying a short visit to a country where, since the Bolshevik Revolution, social morality as formerly known had been kicked out the window, where churchgoing was officially frowned upon, and where getting divorced was often easier than getting married.
Her family, anxious for her welfare, had arranged a North Cape cruise. Mary would travel with a nurse-companion and theoretically would spend the time while at sea resting in her stateroom. Great was Mary’s surprise when she found out that she was traveling with the Hope diamond. Living in Washington all those years, she’d got to know Evalyn Walsh McLean very well. A notorious lump of blue carbon with a curse on it was perhaps not quite the thing to take on a Nordic cruise, but that wouldn’t have bothered Evalyn Walsh McLean. She always wore her diamond, though she never let anybody else touch it for fear some of the curse might rub off on the toucher. As for herself, her eldest son had been killed by a car, her husband was in a mental hospital, her daughter had committed suicide while still in her twenties. With such tragedies already borne, why should she worry about another?
Mrs. McLean was wearing the fateful necklace on the day she and Mary went fishing in Iceland. Seals bobbed around their little skiff like water spaniels, perfectly friendly and not at all inclined to upset the boat. Even in Moscow nothing awful happened, although Mary did have an exasperating time before she was allowed to go there.
At Stockholm, two agents of what was then the USSR boarded the steamer to check out the passengers. They knew who Mary Roberts Rinehart was, why had she come? Was she planning to write about their country? Would they get to see what she wrote? They kept coming back to ask the same questions, she could only give them the same answer. She would be in Moscow for only a few days, she had no idea whether she would write or not, she didn’t know whether she’d find anything to write about during so short a stay. Eventually they allowed her to go ashore in Moscow, although they did require some of the other passengers, including a British army officer and his wife, to stay aboard while the ship was in port.
The stay-aboards didn’t miss much, from Mary’s point of view. She saw poverty and neglect everywhere, although attempts were made to impress the tourists with the progress that had been made under seventeen years of Communist government. They were met by a fleet of Lincoln cars. Mary found out from American newsmen that these cars were owned by the Kremlin and were, except for the journalists’ few battered jalopies, the only automobiles in the USSR’s capital city. At the hotel she was given a two-room suite. The bath didn’t work, but that may have been on account of some cantrip emanation from her friend’s malevolently inclined diamond.
She and the other tourists were well fed. From the way their Russian guides, all young women, tore into the food, however, it was obvious that Muscovites weren’t faring so well at home. Mary’s guide, a professor’s wife, was paid 400 rubles a month. A ruble was worth about 2½ cents American; a cup of coffee cost eight rubles. The guide was allowed to buy material for only two dresses a year, one for winter, one for summer. She coveted Mrs. Rinehart’s brightly colored silk scarf.
Mary didn’t want to part with her scarf, as she’d only brought the one. She offered money instead, but her guide was afraid to take it. Receiving American dollars smacked too much of being hired as a spy and executions were all too frequent under Stalin’s paranoid regime. Eventually the two women slipped off behind a wall. Mary gave the girl what at home would have been considered a generous tip. There, it amounted to almost a year’s pay. Whether her guide got to keep the money, Mary never knew.
At least the sea voyage had shaken her out of the rut she’d been digging for herself. Mary began to think seriously of pulling up stakes. The Washington she’d known was gone, so were many of her old acquaintances. The New Deal had its good points, but it was attracting too many radical progressives (i.e. Democrats) for her staunch Republican taste. Mostly, though, she was just plain lonesome. In 1935 she moved to an apartment in New York.
This was the sensible thing to do. Mary would be close to her sons and their families. Living on one floor—a very spacious floor—would save wear and tear on her heart. She’d be rid of the many responsibilities that went with owning a big house. House lover that she was, however, Mary found it heartbreaking to sort over the accumulations of her life with Stanley and their sons. She had trouble deciding what to take, what to pass on to the boys, what to sell, what to dump.
One of the things she vowed to dump were any further invitations to speak in public. Never again, Mary vowed, would she face another insipid fruit cocktail, another rubber chicken, another dab of half-melted ice cream, another chairman of another meeting rising to introduce the distinguished author. It was high time for newer, younger, less incipiently shaky voices to be heard; she’d said enough.
The mail, of course, was a different matter. Mary still carried on the routine that she and her then secretary had developed back in that black-painted X-ray room across from her husband’s office in Pittsburgh. Her last and longest-employed secretary, however, was a man. Amiable, efficient Bill Sladen would be Mary’s faithful assistant for the last thirty years of her life. An entire day out of every week was devoted to whatever the postman brought; they never knew what would turn up. All except the crank letters got answered, but sometimes it was hard to tell which were the cranks. One polite answer to a sensible, courteous letter brought a second missive announcing that the writer had decided to kill Mrs. Rinehart so that she and he could occupy the center of space together.
This one was promptly handed over to the postal inspectors. Investigation revealed that Mrs. Rinehart’s correspondent was a well-known lawyer with a brilliant mind and a happy family. His only problem was an occasional brief attack of homicidal mania. After some such prank as boarding a train, snatching up a knife from the dining car, and chasing a railroad porter down the aisle, the lawyer would be tucked away in an institution for a while. Once boredom set in, he would employ his legalistic skills to argue himself free, and invariably won his case. Since Mary never heard from the lawyer again, she concluded that he hadn’t really meant it about the center of space.
Had she in fact been transported there, she might not have felt much more disoriented than she did in her new Gotham flat. From 1908 to 1923, Mary Roberts Rinehart had been familiar with Broadway and the theater district, but she hadn’t written anything for the stage since those mostly wasted three years in Hollywood when she’d discovered that all she had to do was sign over the film rights to her latest novel and wait for the check to come in. By now, the movies had taken a heavy toll from the legitimate stage. Not only a number of writers but also some of the actors whom she’d known had migrated to the West Coast.
What with her husband’s practice, the family, and her incredible work schedule, Mary had never found time to make many acquaintances among writers. Now that she was linked through her sons with a publishing house, she began to meet some of the authors whose work they were handling: fascinating people like Hervey Allen, Stephen Vincent Benét, and the acerbic Philip Wylie. What intrigued her was that they all loved to talk about almost anything, except their writing.
By late spring of 1935, Mary was fairly well settled into her new apartment. Even the pool table was set
up and ready for business. She was not, however, intending to spend the summer in New York. At the time she’d decided to move, she’d been about halfway through a straight novel called, for reasons not hard to fathom, The Doctor. She planned to finish it during the summer and could think of no pleasanter place to do so than Bar Harbor, Maine, where she would find a number of people whom she knew.
Forbidden to climb stairs because of her heart trouble, Mary booked one of the little cabins attached to a hotel. Finding it too small to work in, she arranged for the use of a big circular table in one of the rooms off the lobby. The heavy plush furniture, dating back to the time when she and Dr. Rinehart had both been young and single, helped her to recall those days at the Homeopathic. She didn’t know how much of what she remembered would get into the book, but at least straight novels were relatively easy to write. Those mysteries that her readers liked so well were the very devil, requiring so much more in the way of setting and character development and action, plus all that convoluted plotting and detecting and tying up of loose ends.
These days, Mary was in no shape for one of those marathon bursts during which she’d been wont to toss off a book in a few weeks. The Doctor didn’t get finished until she’d gone back to New York. By then, the boys were insisting that their mother take a winter vacation at the resort in Florida where she and Dr. Rinehart used to go tarpon-fishing. In My Story, Mary drew a nostalgic picture of the palm trees along the shore, the huge turtles swimming past the boat, the thrill of that breath-stopping jerk when the huge fish struck at her hook and only the fact that she was strapped into a chair bolted to the deck kept the ardent fisherwoman from being dragged overboard.
Mary wouldn’t get in much fishing this time. During her Florida stay, she discovered a small lump in her breast. Stanley and his second wife, Fay, were with her; they tried to persuade her that it was nothing to worry about. But it was. Mary checked into the hospital carrying a bottle of ink, some yellow paper, a board to write on, and two-thirds of a short story that she was planning to call The Man Who Killed His Wife. At eleven o’clock that night, she gave her son the finished manuscript to be typed. By the time Stanley got home, she was on the phone wanting to dictate a change in the final paragraph.
The operation was successful. The tumor had been discovered in time. Mary was now cancer-free and would remain so. Moreover, she would excise yet another shibboleth by writing for the Ladies’ Home Journal an accurate account of her personal experience. Until Mary Roberts Rinehart broke the silence, breast cancer had been one of those unpleasant things that were simply not mentioned in print, notwithstanding the huge numbers of women who died from the disease every year. Mary hoped that, by sharing her experience, she might be of some service to other women who were either facing or fearing that same appalling ordeal.
She’d done the right thing. Her editors reported that no previous article ever published in the Journal had generated so overwhelming a public reaction. The Women’s Art and Industries Exposition awarded Mrs. Rinehart a medal for her inestimable service in daring to cast light on a dark area where mistaken prudery had put so many human lives in jeopardy. This would not have been a bad way to wind up a distinguished career, but Mary had no notion of quitting yet. Radical surgery, a permanently impaired heart, the silent agonies of widowhood might make life more difficult, but to her they afforded no legitimate excuse for a working woman to quit her job.
CHAPTER 34
A Story Without an End
Another thing that Mary wasn’t giving up was her long-ingrained urge to get out of town for the summer. She liked Bar Harbor, perhaps because in some ways it reminded her of the old days in Sewickley. Here too, in the summer colony at least, was a rather select enclave of comfortably well-to-do people who golfed, sailed, danced at the club, entertained quietly among themselves, and no doubt spent some of their abundant leisure dipping into the novels of Mary Roberts Rinehart to ascertain whether she was the sort of writer whom one might safely ask over for a rubber of bridge.
In 1936, instead of going back to the hotel, Mary rented a house and took her household staff with her. In My Story she let the reader know that Bar Harbor had never been the millionaires’ paradise it was reputed to be. She cited a camera crew from Life magazine who’d come up to do a photographic essay on the town’s great mansions and gone back to New York empty-handed and disgusted because they couldn’t find any mansions to photograph.
There were, however, big houses, most of them wooden arks still furnished with odds and ends from before the turn of the century. A fair number were up for sale, their owners having been caught in the Crash. It need hardly be said that Mary fell in love with one of these great inflammables, bought it for a relative song, took a closer look at the amount of work her new house was going to need, and realized a little too late that she’d let herself in for a replay of the Bluff.
No matter, she had a house of her own again. Mrs. Rinehart was recognized by her neighbors as a respectable property owner instead of as a mere celebrity. Henceforth she would take umbrage at hearing the tour guide on the sight-seeing boat announce to its passengers that the next house they’d be passing was that of the famous Mary Roberts Rinehart.
This was only umbrage on a small scale, compared to a 1937 event that not only stirred her novelist’s heart but roused her Anglophile’s ire. Edward VIII, the still-uncrowned king who had succeeded to the throne on the death of George V in 1936, had, as one particularly unkind critic put it, abandoned his captaincy of the British Ship of State to become third mate of an American tramp. Some found the situation romantic but, generally speaking, Britons were not enslaved by the twice-divorced Mrs. Wallis Warfield Spenser Simpson, an American and, of course, a commoner.
As his father had done before him, the second son had to take over the rulership to which his elder brother had been destined, and would make a cracking good job of it. Mary could never have stayed away from such a spectacle as the Coronation. She had plenty to say about it afterward but her report of the event in her autobiography never once alluded to either King George VI or his lovely and wholly suitable consort, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
Mary did mention her delight at seeing Queen Mother Mary wearing the same jewels that were shown in the photograph she had received from Her Majesty after that never-to-be-forgotten visit to Saint James’s Palace during World War I. Now another war was looming. This was no time for the head of an empire to have backed away from his hereditary responsibilities even if Edward VIII was small, unimpressive, and had shown no sign that he might be capable of leading a great people through a cataclysm such as the next war inevitably would be.
As for her own family, Mary could not feel the same anguish that had racked her when Stanley Junior and Alan had gone overseas. Her sons were too old for this one, her grandsons still too young. Heart trouble would bar Mary herself from taking any active role. Now that she had another white elephant to feed, she would have to keep her nose to the grindstone, hardly a graceful posture for the grande dame she had by now become.
Mary’s grandson George, whose German nanny had been such a martinet when he was a baby and was by this time probably holding down a fairly important job in the Third Reich, remembers his Grandmary queening it at Bar Harbor in flowing chiffons and picture hats. Dr. Howard Gottlieb, curator of special collections for Boston University, recalls going downtown with his own grandmother, a long-time Bar Harbor resident, and seeing her mouth silently form the words “that’s Mrs. Rinehart” when a lady majestic as a square-rigger with all sails set glided by, perhaps on her way to buy another bottle of ink.
The Wall, which Mary considered one of her best mysteries, came out in 1938, the year she’d bought her last house. The Saturday Evening Post must have agreed with her appraisal of the work, for they paid $65,000, the highest amount she appears ever to have received for serial rights. No doubt she found plenty of places to put the money. In 1939 she was able to move into her new house. Here was no lon
ger a dusty relic of a former time but a spacious, airy blending of light pastel walls and pale carpets in blue, platinum, or white, accented by splashy floral printed slipcovers on the furniture.
Mary must have had little time for writing that year; she published only one piece, for which she got $1,500 from the Post. Its title was “Writing Is Work,” a statement to which all professional writers wholeheartedly subscribe and which no layman ever believes for a minute. The article also came out that same year in a nicely bound hardcover edition from The Writer, the Boston company that still publishes the magazine of that name along with a good many other works.
Mary was particularly eloquent on the subject of the mystery, which she rightly considered the hardest kind of novel to write well and which was until recently the least apt to be regarded as anything more than a few hours’ worth of mental relaxation. As readers have become more discerning, the mystery novel has come to dominate the fiction market. Those authors whom Mary Roberts Rinehart helped to educate in producing the traditional novel of manners with criminous overtones and a satisfying denouement do not always capture the limelight, but they continue to outsell the rest of the field by an impressive margin. Among the steady sellers is Mary Roberts Rinehart. Her early hardcovers are still being snatched up by Rinehart afficionados and collectors, her latest paperback reprints leaving the bookshops in the hands of yet another generation of Rinehart readers.
The same cannot be said of Mary’s straight novels, or for most other straight novels of yesteryear, including erstwhile bestsellers (though the story goes that one bookseller many years ago was able to unload his dusty overstock of David Harum by advertising it as David’s Harem). What is special about the Rinehart novels is that they were written over a span of half a century by an indefatigable wordsmith who could catch the tempo and flavor of life as it was happening; who had the ability to meld what she saw and felt and imagined into stories that pinned down with sometimes painful accuracy the moods, the mores, the essence of each generation as it passed. The pieces Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote, always in a rush, dipping her fountain pen in the inkwell because its tiny reservoir couldn’t keep the flow coming fast enough for all the words she must put down before they got away, are now fertile browsing grounds for cultural anthropologists as well as for readers with nostalgic yearnings who like to treasure hunt in old libraries and secondhand bookshops.
Had She But Known Page 32