by Marion Meade
To a businessman? Bunny could not accept the idea.
That annoyed Vincent. Gene was as “irresponsible” as the next person, she scolded. He was no different from Bunny.
Only when it was time for him to go did Eugen Boissevain come in. As Bunny reported afterward to John Bishop, he seemed to be “a very nice honest fellow,” although not “overwhelmingly clever.” Bunny, struck by Vincent’s “withdrawal from the world,” left the house feeling faintly disturbed. Despite what appeared to be a complete reversal of fortune, she gave him the distinct impression of being a princess in a tower, so grateful for a clean, well-lit cell with kindly jailers that she failed to notice the bars. John, however, far less romantic, thought she had made a practical choice. This amiable nobody would make possible all the luxuries “for which she longed in the old days.”
ON THE EIGHTH floor of the Prasada, Edna gazed around happily at the floral arrangements. Her living room resembled the dressing room of an Italian diva, because there were bouquets of roses next to half a dozen huge poinsettias, no fewer than twenty potted plants. For all her considerable pessimism about the new book, she felt “popular and happy.” Among her Christmas gifts that year was a velvet bed jacket, much too grand for bed, but it would look stunning over a black evening dress. And somebody gave her one of those dog-collar necklaces that were all the rage, just the thing with her newly bobbed hair.
On New Year’s Eve she attended Ruth and Heywood’s annual party on West Eighty-fifth Street, where a mob had gathered as usual. Presiding over the big punch bowl, ladle in hand, stood five-year-old Woodie Broun, happily slopping gin and orange juice into cups. Most of the evening Edna spent with Frank Adams, who for months had been turning to her for advice—not that she had any to give—about whether he should divorce Minna. It was a painful decision, made even more difficult because some of his friends were taking Minna’s side and blaming him for succumbing to a rich young adventuress. In his column that very week, in an unusually personal comment, he admitted feeling “as low hearted as ever I was in my life.” At the party, however, he did not appear particularly guilty. Giddy, making bad puns, one funnier than the next, he looked positively boyish in his tuxedo, Edna thought.
Good heavens, he looked as if he’d just been confirmed, she told him.
“I am a confirmed admirer of you,” he replied.
All things considered, it would have been one of her best Christmases had it not been for Selina, now retitled So Big. There was nothing to do now but wait and worry. Luckily, Woman’s Home Companion had accepted the novel for serialization, but there were ominous signs: the typist had returned the last batch of pages of her final draft without a single comment, confirming Edna’s worst fears that the story was tiresome.
Before sealing the manuscript package, she enclosed a rather unusual note: Doubleday, Page should not expect too much, she warned. It was possible that So Big would harm her career because nobody would read it. In that case she would prefer not even to publish the book. Several days went by before Russell Doubleday replied. She was dead wrong about So Big, he told her. It was wonderful. As for himself, he cried.
A weeping publisher? Edna could hardly have been happier.
ON A RAW MORNING in January, Edna was trotting around the reservoir with Frank Adams. Was something wrong? he asked. What made him think something was wrong?
Because she looked awfully low. What happened?
Nothing happened.
What was the matter, then?
Well, she had no ideas.
Frank was quick—too quick—to laugh. Was that all? Her situation was nothing compared with his. He had a daily column to fill. If she had no ideas, nobody knew it except herself, and “when I have none it is patent to a vast number,” he said.
Frank ought to have at least tried to understand. “No ideas” were two of the scariest words in the English language to Edna.
In the months that followed, she continued to feel spent as she waited to learn the fate of her novel. Doubleday, Page, which promised a big spring push with marketing and publicity, was betting it could reasonably expect to sell as many as fifty thousand copies. Yet she remained skeptical.
When So Big finally appeared in bookstores that spring, readers and critics alike were more enthusiastic than Edna could have imagined. The Tribune’s Burton Rascoe said that he could only “genuflect in homage,” while the Times called it “a novel to read and to remember.” One admiring reviewer wrote that the book was a sterling effort but was likely to sink without a trace by Christmas, a remark that enraged Edna given her insecurity about the subject. For several months, however, from March to September, So Big continued to sell. But Edna was frustrated and cranky, and her head was empty of ideas.
Earlier the drama editor of the New York Times had complimented her on a short story about a man whose residence with his son and daughter-in-law breeds predictable friction. The funny geezer in “Old Man Minick” might make a good comedy, remarked George Kaufman, who wrote for the theater in his spare time. Would Edna like to try to work together?
No thanks, she said without hesitation. Who’s going to watch a play like that? But another story of hers, “The Gay Old Dog,” might be suitable.
No kidding, Kaufman insisted, the old man is a play. His new show, Beggar on Horseback, had recently opened at the Broadhurst to excellent reviews. Edna thought about that. George had been around the block a few times. Could he be right about Minick?
. . .
IN HER COSTUME of royal green silk, her halo of bronze hair, and the flame-colored scarf she draped around her neck, Vincent had the look of some exotic specter from the bygone times of the troubadours. Her audiences were dazzled. In mid-January she felt strong enough to embark on a monthlong road tour of twenty cities—as far west as Omaha—to promote The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, which had been issued by her new publishers, Harper & Brothers. The secret of surviving such a horrible trip, she wrote Kay from Columbus, Ohio, was resting as much as possible. Gene, who needed to remain in New York for business, felt lost without Vincie and turned to Kay for companionship. “Call me up and have dinner, tea, or a cocktail” because “I’m as lonely as hell.”
Vincent was lonely, too. Traveling from Chicago to Cedar Rapids, squeezed into a parlor-car chair, she hated every minute of the six-hour ride, which reminded her of the IRT subway line when “it comes up for air at 137th Street,” she wrote Gene. In Chicago she was insulted to discover that one of her bookings was in a private house in Evanston because a bunch of rich people wanted to see what she looked like. Feeling like a prostitute, she went through with the reading as scheduled but kept repeating to herself, “Never mind—it’s a hundred & fifty dollars.”
Despite such unpleasant moments, the tour was worth any amount of discomfort in that it helped to establish her reputation as a leading poet. Onstage, Vincent grabbed her audience like an opera star reaching for a high C. Making a sensational entrance, using her considerable acting talent, she began to declaim in a highly dramatic manner more suited to theater than to literature. Between recitations she dropped the stagy British accent and began to chat smooth as butter with the audience. A few minutes later, however, she could frown and turn into a lofty prima donna, making a scene over a latecomer or a cougher. Her adoring public loved it. Invariably, the climax of the performance would be the celebrated “Renascence,” in which she pulled out all the stops, followed by an encore of her greatest hits, the naughty little verses about burning her candle and riding the ferry, which her audiences knew by heart. Reading engagements were nothing new for poets in need of money, but Vincent figured out how to transform bookish library oratory into literary entertainment.
Back home, a final reading was planned for a Sunday evening at the Plymouth Theatre. Filling a Broadway house was not easy. To ensure a sellout, Gene began scrambling weeks in advance to round up customers. “Tell as many people as you can,” he urged Kay, “and make them buy tickets.” He was thinking about
giving up his business so that he could devote himself full-time to managing Vincent’s career. As a start, he proposed raising her reading fee to six hundred dollars.
When Frank Adams asked Edna Ferber if she’d care to be his date, she eagerly accepted because her favorite things were “lamb chops and money and ambition and Edna Millay and the rosettes on my curtains.” The night of the performance she cooked supper for Frank, who would rave to his readers about her sausages as the best he’d ever eaten: no wonder she wrote so brilliantly about food when she was such a splendid cook. As it turned out, he enjoyed Edna’s sausages a good deal more than Vincent’s theatrics. Notwithstanding his enormous affection, he criticized her for using unnatural speech “with too little variation of tone, using, meseemed, a range of only three notes.” Reading her verse was better than listening to her mannered poetry voice, he advised. Afterward he and Edna stopped by the home of George and Beatrice Kaufman on West Fifty-eighth, where they ran into Dottie Parker and spent the remainder of the evening playing cards and gossiping.
In April the Boissevains set out on their belated wedding trip, journeying first to San Francisco, then boarding a ship bound for Honolulu and the Far East. After nine months of marriage Vincent was happily luxuriating in security she could scarcely have imagined. The care of their house was entrusted to Kay and her husband, who were living in New Jersey with his parents. Free rent did nothing to alter Kay’s dislike of Titter Binnie’s dollhouse, which she found claustrophobic and uncomfortably drafty. The wind “whistles around these floors like the deck of a ship.”
The success of Vincent’s poetry readings was not lost on her mother, who wondered if she might do something similar in Maine. While Vincent was away, Cora made her lecture debut in Belfast, her birthplace, a shipbuilding town of waterfront wharves and Victorian mansions. The Belfast Business Women billed her as the mother of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
To open her program, Cora recited “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” the poem that had pained her so much in 1921, before turning to her own poetry, which she called “of an entirely different nature.” She read from a series of poems about a small boy, Little Otis, who after visiting Europe comes home to live on his grandparents’ farm. Her plan, she said, was newspaper syndication followed by book publication. Cora turned out to be an entertaining speaker. Adopting Vincent’s technique of digression, she talked intimately about her married daughters, who kept their own names, girls who had grown up to be poets, novelists, actresses. She called them “talented and artistic” and described how once all four of them lived together in Greenwich Village. Just as Vincent’s stage ensembles conveyed an image of Renaissance style, Cora, too, devised a novel look for herself, but about as far removed from fancy dress as one could get. She attired herself as a male, with a tie, shirt, and trousers; she wore rimless glasses, and her brown hair was severely cropped. Even for the businesswomen of Belfast, this masculine Cora must have been startling to behold.
Her very first lecture yielded an enthusiastic account in the Portland Sunday Telegram, followed by publication two weeks later of a poem about Indian summer in the Rockland Courier-Gazette. By the time Vincent returned from her trip, Cora had begun to assemble her own file of clippings.
. . .
IT WAS PRACTICALLY NOON when George Kaufman appeared at Edna’s door. Looking like a businessman on his way to the office, which was actually the case, he was nattily dressed, as always, in an expensive suit and tie. He was a good-looking man, sexy, tall, and supple as a stalk of celery, with a leafy pompadour of dark hair. In the course of six years he had co-authored a half-dozen successful plays, fattened his bank account, and acquired a sprawling apartment near Central Park. Something of a dandy, he owned a collection of gorgeous ties that rivaled the shirts in Jay Gatsby’s closet. Nevertheless, every afternoon he continued to show up at the New York Times, where he performed his duties and collected a paycheck of less than seventy-five dollars a week. George at thirty-four behaved like a clerk saving for a rainy day.
To the amusement of his friends, he was scrupulous about keeping his two jobs separate and refused to give special consideration in the Times to his own projects or to their stars. In the case of To the Ladies the frustrated press agent asked him what he must do to get a story printed on Helen Hayes. “Shoot her,” George said.
George, insecure about working alone, had always collaborated with Marc Connelly, the Pickwickian balding reporter who covered show-business news for the Morning Telegraph. A pair of transplanted Pitts-burghers who had wound up on the theater beat, Kaufman and Connelly made a perfect team. But despite their successes (Merton of the Movies, Beggar on Horseback), the partnership was heading for the rocks. Unlike George, miserable unless every hour of his day was full, preferably with work, Marc was a carefree type who quit his newspaper job after their first hit. All he wished to do was take it easy, have a good time, and travel to Europe with his mother. Although George remained friends with Marc, who would win a Pulitzer in 1930 for his biblical drama The Green Pastures, he could never resist making digs about his ex-partner’s purported laziness. When a Charles Dickens novel was published posthumously, he said sarcastically, “Charles Dickens, dead, writes more than Marc Connelly alive.”
To replace Marc, George scrambled to find a workhorse like himself, man or woman, and he began canvassing the Round Table. The first person he approached was Dottie, whose wit was unmatched but who was obviously not going to work eighteen hours a day at anything. Their collaboration, limited to a one-act play (Business Is Business) presented live with the film version of Beggar on Horseback, proved to be an experience he did not care to repeat. Aside from Dottie’s habit of showing up late, or not at all, there was her annoying practice of pretending to be a WASP when she was half Jewish. At the Round Table one day, when Aleck made an anti-Semitic remark in jest, George threw down his napkin and exclaimed that he was disgusted enough to walk out. He expected Dottie to “walk with me—halfway.”
Naturally, the Round Table poked fun at the new Edna and George coupling—a literary roll in the hay, somebody called it—but Edna was not amused. She could not possibly be interested in a man so neurotic, so borderline pathological, that he made Aleck Woollcott seem almost normal. George was a simple hypochondriac, an advanced phobic, and a food fetishist who ate mainly meat and candy. For six years he had not slept with his wife, Beatrice, not since she gave birth to a stillborn son and he became incapable of getting an erection with her. Even more curious, marital celibacy had not derailed their marriage, each had extramarital romances, and now they were talking about adopting a baby.
George had no shortage of women. Edna, however, was never his type. “I’m fond of her,” he told Marc Connelly, but that didn’t mean he liked her very much.
Professionally, it was another matter. (“Daddy and Edna got on,” said George’s daughter, Anne.) George would show up punctually at Edna’s, and they would head for her office at the back of the apartment. After a few minutes of gossip she rolled paper and carbon into the typewriter, which was the cue for him to untie and tie his shoelaces, whether they needed it or not. While they worked, he paced. He jiggled the curtain cord, played tunes on his cheek with a pencil, flopped on the couch, wandered about the apartment. He constantly fussed with his shoelaces. At one-thirty on the dot, they stopped for sandwiches and coffee.
All this hyperactivity didn’t bother Edna a bit; she was having too much fun. The only thing that provoked her annoyance was George’s disagreeable habit of reading her mail. No letter or telegram, not even a page of manuscript, was safe, and scolding had no effect. It was harmless curiosity, she guessed, but decided to punish him anyway. On a Western Union form she typed a message—“GEORGIE KAUFMAN IS AN OLD SNOOPER”—and slid the telegram under a stack of papers on her desk.
IN THE HOPE THAT a change of scenery might improve their lives, Zelda and Scott were preparing to leave Great Neck. The paraphernalia they’d accumulated during twenty months at Gatewa
y Drive formed a pyramid of seventeen pieces of luggage, several crates full of Encyclopaedia Britannicas, and copies of Scott’s books bound in pale blue leather with gold lettering. At the last minute they tucked in a hundred-foot roll of copper screen in case of flies. Six months of hard labor, working on “trash,” Scott told Bunny, had not only extricated him from debt but also produced a surplus of seven thousand dollars and the freedom to work on serious fiction. In early May Scott and Zelda sailed for Europe, previously scorned but enticing again because of the favorable exchange rate. Their destination was the south of France, where living cheaply could make their nest egg last a long time. Whether this plan would work remained to be seen.
June found them settled in Saint-Raphaël, a seaside town of red-roofed pastel buildings and an especially good beach, the swimming facilities always an important consideration for Zelda. On a hill two miles above the town they leased a cream-colored villa facing the sea for seventy-nine dollars a month. Villa Marie, nestled in a terraced garden scented with roses and honeysuckles, overlooked the town Fréjus, with its crumbling Roman aqueducts. Nightingales sang in the umbrella pines. Two cooks were included in the rent, along with a gardener who insisted on addressing Scott as “Milord.” On the gravel driveway Scott posed for a snapshot swinging a golf club and wearing a classic Brooks Brothers wool suit with vest and knickers. Zelda dressed in cotton dresses and straw hats, attire a good deal more appropriate. To complete the picture, they purchased a beat-up Renault—a French Ford, Scott called it—for $750.