Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  In the mornings Gene would come down to the kitchen and personally prepare her regular breakfast tray of orange juice, toast, and a pot of tea. When she appeared later, she liked strolling around her garden before beginning work. Writing did not leave time to spare for fretting about laundry and meals. The last thing on her mind was what she was going to eat. At the end of the day she wanted to walk into her dining room “as if it were a restaurant, and say, What a charming dinner!’” On evenings when company appeared, she changed into a trailing silk gown. Cocktails would be accompanied by a Stilton cheese wrapped in a pure white cloth, for Gene was fond of theatrical flourishes. After a leisurely dinner, served as late as ten, she silently slipped away. The poetess tired easily, Gene would tell the guests, and so he had put her to bed.

  Gene looked after everything. It wasn’t just the breakfast tray. He also picked her clothes and shoes, wrote letters, scheduled appointments, administered medicine, and notified friends when she was ill or having “the curse.” As he once wrote Gene Saxton, Miss Millay wanted him to know she had tonsillitis—all she had kept down for three days was “weak tea and morphine.”

  Morphine, Vincent had discovered two summers earlier, was a wonderful drug. While she was hospitalized at Mount Sinai for a dilation and curettage, the doctors gave her all she desired. Ever since then, tea and morphine had allowed her to happily withdraw into her bedroom, with as little regret as Alice dropping down the rabbit hole.

  ONE DAY THAT SUMMER, while visiting friends in Hillsdale, Bunny decided to call on the Boissevains. Since a number of others had stopped in, too, no opportunity arose for private conversation. As always, Gene was bare-chested and jovial, and the local gentry talked about dogs and horses and home renovations. Glancing around the long living room, its windows hung with chintz curtains, Bunny took in the pianos, the comfortable sofas, the bust of Sappho on a marble pedestal. As it began to get dark, before the lamps were lit, the room blurred into half shadows. He glanced at Vincent, sitting quietly in the corner near the window, buried in her favorite chair, immobile. She reminded him of a tiny boat that had paddled into port after being buffeted by rough seas, now safely docked in her own private harbor.

  Bunny, standing to one side, noticed for the first time the exact geometry of Vincent and Gene’s marriage, the nursery scene with the protective parent quietly watching and managing the child. What had happened to his first love, the joyous string bean with her bright green eyes bounding down Macdougal Street, her red-gold hair swinging? Would she end up being meekly led off to bed in her woodland fortress?

  When Bunny drove away that night, he was not to see Vincent and Gene for nineteen years. In the summer of 1948 he and his fourth wife happened to be visiting the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood when he realized the proximity of Austerlitz and made up his mind to pay a call. He found the couple exactly as he had left them in 1929, he would write, together in their artificial paradise, a pair of “deteriorated ghosts” haunting an old farmhouse castle that was sealed off from the world.

  IT WAS AN AUTUMN of great bounties after a summer of flawless weather. From her window Vincent saw teams of horses hauling immense loads down from the dusty oat fields. Her kitchen garden was still ripening into picture-book pumpkins and tomatoes that took her breath away. The damned chickens, which used to drop manure all over the lawn, were fenced inside a yard now. The old crumbling barns had been torn down, and the boards stacked in a tidy woodpile. Every building glowed with fresh paint.

  Their financial situation had never been better. (In the second half of 1928, she earned royalties of $15,000, $156,000 in current dollars.) She was dying to redo the floor of her front hall with the same kind of gray-and-rose slate she had admired in Deems and Mary Taylor’s drawing room. And Gene talked about converting the stone foundation of a barn into a pool, where they could swim naked. These days everybody she knew was living a good life.

  Upstairs in the library, where she kept her Petrarch and Dante, she continued to work on the George sonnets at a mahogany writing desk. She had completed the first draft, fueled by that initial rush of inspiration. Now came the harder work of sharpening each one, picking it to pieces. “This is awful,” she’d think. Or “that’s not so bad.” She played the piano several hours a day and also liked to pick up the latest bestsellers, most recently a powerful war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.

  The only shadow across her life was George, whom she had not seen for months. In emotional letters, raging and crying, she threatened to “lie on the floor and kick and howl” because she needed him. Alternating, she bossed, scorned, praised. Remorseful, she apologized. Scolding him was wrong of her, she knew—probably he figured she was crazy—and she told herself that she must be more patient. In the grip of her love, George felt as if she were sinking her teeth into him, he told a friend.

  If the sonnets of the winter radiated fever and euphoria, the autumn poems began to reflect the precise state of her illusions, punctured, released, spilling every which way, leaving her deflated. Mind you, she had not given up. Sooner or later she would bring him to heel.

  THE CITY COOLED, the leaves began to drop, the chestnut men advanced over the Queensboro Bridge and fired up their stoves on Fifth Avenue. Edna sat by herself in a new East Side penthouse, thinking of the lawless Oklahoma Territory with its land runs and oil millionaires, a man named Yancey and a woman named Sabra, who is elected to Congress. In the home stretch of a new novel, she kept the characters curled up in her head as they went about their business.

  From her terrace, on the nineteenth floor of the Lombardy, could be seen a silver-and-pale-gold landscape: the dome of Grand Central Station, and beyond that loomed up the mighty ribs of the tallest buildings in the world, the almost-completed shaft of the Chrysler Automobile Company, topped by a sublime stainless-steel spire, and still farther downtown just starting construction a colossus of concrete and steel that would tower 102 stories over the biscuit-box office buildings on Thirty-fourth Street. But these days Edna had no time to admire the skyline. Her book was going to end in the town of Bowlegs, a “one-street wooden shanty town, like the towns of the old Territory days, but more sordid,” with Yancey, a rumpled drunk dying in Sabra’s arms, quoting Peer Gynt’s last speech to Solveig. Was Ibsen a touch overblown? Perhaps she would have to change the last scene. Even better than knowing how a book would end was knowing when. Having hit her stride, she just might be done in a month, perhaps as early as November 10 if she could keep her nose in the typewriter. Then she absolutely had to do something about her mink. This year they were wearing furs short—long coats looked so sloppy—and she feared appearing frumpy. Her furrier promised to see what could be done. He also agreed to make a collar for her red suit.

  Each day she watched nervously as news of the stock market dominated the front pages. After the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record 381 in early September, the headlines became extremely confusing. One day professional optimists were predicting “Stock Prices Will Stay at High Level for Years to Come,” the next pessimists were warning the opposite, calling the market a “Creeping Bear” and talking in measured tones of recessions and crashes, slumps and readjustments. Even in the best of times, the market had always been a mystery to Edna. But at tiny moments something made her feel particularly suspicious, and she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was when the fool of an elevator boy in her building began talking market tips as they ascended to the penthouse.

  Time had passed, almost two years since The Royal Family and Show Boat opened on Broadway. Not only was Edna wealthy, but she’d proved it was possible to be both a hugely successful writer of commercial and literary fiction and a decent dramatist. But after fighting her way to the top, she had no work. What about the rest of her life?

  With nothing to do except recuperate from success, she spent months busying herself with her home. After six years on Central Park West she transported her lemon chintz curtains and her grand piano to an apartment on East Fifty-sixth
next door to her friend Richard Rodgers; in fact, she and Dicky shared the spacious terrace. The new place, with its grand views and wood-burning fireplace, was splendid, but she could not twiddle her thumbs indefinitely. In the spring of 1928 she had left town and drifted out west, to visit Bill and Sallie White in Kansas. Each day began when she and Bill strolled down Emporia’s Commercial Street to the Gazette, where the office brought back memories of her first job on the Appleton Daily Crescent. Sitting in the Whites’ big front room every night, she was able to drop all pretenses. No, she said sourly, she never went by to see how her shows were doing. They were ancient history, stale as old bread crusts.

  Bill and Sallie were full of enthusiasm about a motor trip they had taken to Oklahoma. The place had turned out to be fascinating, they said, and its history could not be stranger. Edna listened politely. Oklahoma was somewhere south of Kansas, she believed, but that was the extent of her knowledge about the state. The Whites could not stop talking about the settlement of the territory, the famous land runs of the 1880s and 1890s, when thousands lined up to take ownership of free property. They told stories about Indians penned like cattle on reservations, which turned out to be the richest oil land in America, and about these very same Indians in blankets later riding around in Pierce-Arrows.

  How very dramatic, Edna agreed.

  For heaven’s sake, Bill said, there might be a good book in all of it.

  Oh, a novel about Oklahoma sounded like a fine idea, she said. But she didn’t believe she could write it. Wasn’t it a man’s story? Anyway, she was through with family sagas and river epics. From here on she was going to write little plebeian stories about “two people in a telephone booth.”

  On Edna’s next visit to Emporia, however, Bill persuaded her to visit Oklahoma. He even ferried her to Tulsa, where he more or less dumped her out before heading home to Kansas. Once he had gone, finding herself an “unwilling prisoner” in a high-rise luxury hotel, she went around talking to old-timers who had made the 1889 run. With her notepad, she sat on front porches and asked questions just as she had done in her reporter days. She sifted reminiscences for the telling details: the red clay, the rattlesnakes, the sturdy brick brothel next door to shanties, the oil millionaires in mansions the size of Versailles.

  Oklahoma in summer was hot, windy, and maddening. She was not crazy about the miserable weather, and she certainly did not appreciate the swaggering arrogance of the Oklahoma men either. In the one-horse town of Bartlesville, at a dinner party, local encyclopedists attempted to ram down her throat a condensed course in state history. Arms folded across their chests, the pontificators wanted to make sure she got her facts straight, although they mainly held forth to show off their knowledge. One particular eminence droned on sonorously until Edna could barely control her irritation. Having too many facts could be a nuisance, she told him. Her business was writing fiction, meaning she imagined events and created characters as she saw fit.

  Madam, the man replied, if she wished to appear ridiculous in the eyes of the world, that was her affair. But she would do well to heed people who knew a thing or two. His name was well respected in the state of Oklahoma.

  His name? Listen, bub, she said angrily, people would be reading her novel long after his name was forgotten.

  She wasted no more time in Oklahoma than absolutely necessary: only a few days in Tulsa with scrapbooks of old newspaper clippings and a few more in Oklahoma City, where the state library agreed to sell her a set of historical pamphlets containing original diaries and letters. It was a thin reporting job, one she could not have got away with in her days on the Daily Crescent, but she decided not to worry about hard facts. Realizing she had collected all she required in two weeks came as a tremendous relief to her. She hauled her research materials to the Broadmoor Hotel in the clear, brisk air of Colorado Springs, where she proceeded to renew herself in a luxury suite with a sleeping porch. There she began organizing her notes.

  By the time she got home, the skeleton of a heavyweight novel, with big themes and gigantic characters, had begun to emerge. Its subject dealt with greed and corruption, and its dark tone evoked materialism triumphing over righteousness—in other words, some of the same ground she covered in So Big. The characters were typically Ferber: women with steely backbones (whom life transforms from sweet adolescents to tough grandmothers), puny-souled men (who die or run off and never come back), and anemic sons. In 1889 an adventurer by the name of Yancey Cravat sets out for the Oklahoma Territory with his wife, four-year-old son, and a printing press. Despite primitive conditions in the town of Osage, the Cravats and their children prosper until the day Yancey runs off to another land giveaway, leaving behind Sabra to run the Oklahoma Wigwam and fend for herself. Edna was calling the novel Cimarron.

  That summer she was dragooned into renting a house next door to Louis and Mary Bromfield in Socoa, France. Nestled on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the property had its own private beach. A Spanish cook and a housemaid were engaged for the cozy bookish paradise, in which she and Louis wrote from early morning to noon. For the remainder of the day they indulged themselves in overeating baby langouste and wild strawberries, washed down with bottles of golden Vouvray. The summer might have been quite pleasant were it not for an individual who cropped up in her diary as “dear Mary” or “that Bromfield woman,” more often the latter. Even though Edna made a specialty of creating stalwart fictional women, strong-willed types based on herself and her mother, she seemed fated to live among jellyfish and frankly did not bargain for three months in the Basque country with “dear Mary” and her odious scenes. Only a surprise visit from Noël Coward brightened her mood. Unable to keep her mind on Cimarron, she made irritable entries in her diary—little work done, frightful headaches, damnable quarrels.

  Dominating her New York social life were friendships with a number of married couples: not just the Bromfields but also the Ameses (Winthrop and Lucy), the Kaufmans (Georgie and Bea), the Kerns (Jerry and Eva), and the Lunts (Alfred and Lynn). With most of these couples, it was a case of attraction to the gifted husbands and bare toleration of wives who were largely Alice-sit-by-the-fires, although Edna would never admit it.

  In New York, after Labor Day, the weather continued sultry. Out on her sunny terrace Edna lined up pairs of shoes in rows. Honestly, some of them looked as bad as old Ziegfeld dancers, she was annoyed to notice. She needed a few good things and scheduled fittings for a sport suit, a blouse, and a corset. And her mind was made up on the red-velvet evening coat. It definitely needed a band of fur attached to the bottom. Once Cimarron was finished, she planned to get out of the market and invest in “good old United States government bonds and live happily ever after.” A firm believer in fiscal prudence, Edna operated by three simple rules: never buy on credit, never borrow or lend, always save for a rainy day. But like everybody else’s, her rainy-day money was in the market.

  At the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday, October 23, began quietly. By early afternoon, however, a sharp sell-off of automobile stocks had suddenly sent the market into a tailspin, and during the final hour of trading an outlandish 2.6 million shares changed hands. When the gong sounded, the Stock Exchange had lost $4 billion, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had tumbled twenty points (the biggest loss in history), and the overwhelmed clerks were unable to clear the transactions until 5 a.m.

  Of course the next day was bedlam. At ten on Thursday, October 24, hell broke loose as the market took off like a bolt of lightning, a stampede to unload that would end in a 12.9-million-share sell-off. Friday and Saturday saw investors dazed or frightened, or both. Since nobody easily understood what the bloodbath was all about, there was the hope that it would simply disappear. But the scene was like one of those hallucinatory massacres from bygone days, when there is no time to count the bodies. Over the weekend, though, people started to grasp the extent of the carnage. By the morning of Monday, October 28, almost everybody had become hysterical. Some who’d been wild to buy stoc
ks priced at 349 only a few weeks ago had to sell at 23.

  The Dow Jones would keep on sliding until it bottomed at 198 on November 13, a drop of 39 percent since October 23. During this period after Black Thursday, Edna lost more than half of her savings. “This should have depressed me,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It didn’t. I wasn’t disturbed for a moment—or for very little more than a moment, at least. Money lost is money lost.” That was that.

  Before Christmas there was an unseasonably mild week when just about everybody came down with laryngitis or colds and had to drink hot whiskey with lemon and sugar. By this time plenty of investors had come to believe they had figured out the trouble: the economy had suffered what amounted to a flat tire. It just needed to be fixed, that’s all. Somebody would know how to do it—change the currency, remodel the banking system—somebody would fix the flat. Remember what President Hoover said: the system is sound.

  AGAINST HER BETTER judgment, Edna fired off a threatening letter to the rich kid running The Bookman. “Dear Editor,” she wrote Seward Collins. After twenty years as a writer she understood that “yammering” over a bad review was a waste of time. But what in the name of God could he be thinking.

  After getting wind of a Bookman review of Cimarron, Edna was seething. The review was not only extremely impertinent; it was also patronizing, as if she were a rather inept first novelist. Who was this person named Edward Donahoe, anyway? To satisfy her curiosity, she snooped around and learned that his only qualification for reviewing her book was his birth in Oklahoma as the son of a man who had participated in the first land run; and further investigation revealed this Donahoe to have no connection whatsoever with publishing. In fact, he was employed by an East Side antiques shop, of all things. She decided to call this travesty to the attention of Seward Collins.

  Wasn’t she entitled to a review by a peer or a recognized critic? If she recalled correctly, The Bookman did not commission the nonentity son of a traveling Kansas evangelist to review Elmer Gantry, nor did the magazine assign Death Comes for the Archbishop to the son of a Mexican priest. “This fellow is not a critic; he is not a writer; he is not a lecturer or teacher. He is an interior decorator and, incidentally, a rather nasty little cad.” What kind of an idiot editor would publish such a review?