As soon as they got to Versailles and settled at the Trianon Palace Hotel, John started dictating to Carol. Of these happy summer days, Carol Brandt recalls, “It was a perfect example of how Carl, John, and I worked together as a team and as a family. Back home in New York, Carl had set up all the arrangements, worked out all the business details. John was doing what he liked to do best of all, writing, and I was there with him in a pleasant place, helping him get his book down on paper. Carl junior was with us, with this or that young girl friend of the moment, and the young people provided John and me with pleasant company at dinner—John loved talking with young people. It wasn’t just a civilized arrangement. It was wonderful.”
By August 23 Carl Brandt in New York was able to report to Stuart Rose at the Post:
I’ve heard from Versailles and the report is that John is at work. He goes out with Button [their nickname for Carl, Jr.] for an hour’s walk and commences work at 10. Then luncheon and a walk. It doesn’t sound like much but Button says they are run ragged. If it kills them off, they’ll get Junior [their nickname for John, Sr.] to do that hour of work in the afternoon.
As of last Friday, he seemed to have been on the beam with it. There’s a block to cut out and he’s maybe not as far along as his 45 pages lead him to think. But he is adroit and a pro and they find it fun to watch the wheels work. He asked me to tell you not to worry—John has a good story, subtle and adult as well as strong and deadly, timely and knowledgeable. It will be laid in Tokyo and Cambodia. That’s the end of my news.
And, a week later, Carl wrote to John: “I’m delighted and so is Stu Rose (I saw him yesterday afternoon) with the progress you have made on MOTO. I’m also pleased at the reports your typist gives me of your mastery of your medium! When you get that lady enthusiastic you really have got something! Keep up the good work. To say that I am burning up with curiosity is to put it mildly.”
The little party moved on, at the end of August, to London and ensconced itself at Claridge’s, where the work went on. Carol Brandt recalls, “Everything that John wrote he wrote with enormous joy—that was to me one of the special things about his writing, that he never wrote about anything he disliked—but this Mr. Moto book was a special joy for him because it was returning to an old character he had always loved, and applying to it all the skills and subtleties he had acquired since the last Moto. The book just zipped along, with John loving every minute of it. You could tell how much John enjoyed what he was doing by watching the expression on his face. As he dictated, his upper lip and mustache would curl with pleasure. It was wonderful to watch a man get such a kick out of his own words and sentences.”
There were pleasant diversions, other than work, in London. John had been complaining, off and on, about the amount of American income tax he had had to pay and reiterating his belief that writers were taxed unfairly; a piece of work might take several years to complete, but its earnings were all taxed within the calendar year of its publication. But one afternoon John’s blue eyes had lighted up, and he said that he suddenly felt like doing something completely extravagant, “like buying a solid gold chamber pot.” Taking young Carl Brandt with him, he marched out into St. James’s Street in search of such a purchase. The two had often gone duck-shooting together at Kent’s Island, and when they passed the window of an elegant gunshop John took Carl by the arm and led him inside. The first thing John looked at was an antique Purdey shotgun, which was priced at a thousand guineas, or about $3,000. Murmuring that he didn’t think he wanted that much of a solid gold chamber pot, he settled on a fine old Atkins, for $1,700 and promptly presented it to the young man. “How is the gold chamber pot working?” he would always ask Carl, later on.
It was in London that summer that John received word of the death of his old friend, Gardi Fiske. Gardi had suffered so long with the strangling torture of emphysema that his death was, in a real sense, a release from terrible pain—and a release for Conney too.
Still, Gardi’s death put John in a dark mood. The day the news came marked the first and only time he raised his voice against Carol Brandt in anger. John hated to have to handle money, and whenever he traveled someone else—a secretary, a companion—was always delegated to take care of John’s finances. On this trip, it was young Carl whose job it became to hire cars, pay bills, deal with taxis and waiters and bus boys and concierges. Now John had written his letter to Conney Fiske and all at once found himself in the lobby of the London hotel with no stamp with which to mail it. He could, of course, simply have handed the letter to the room clerk, who would have stamped it, mailed it, and put the charge for the stamp on the bill. But this did not occur to John, and he flew into a rage because no one had thought to provide him with postage stamps. Carol and young Carl were upstairs having breakfast in the suite they all shared when the telephone rang. It was John, from below, shouting and cursing. “The fact that he didn’t have a stamp suddenly became very much our fault and nobody else’s fault,” Carol recalled later. “He was shouting at me so over the telephone that there was no way to answer him, no way to reason with him. Finally I took the phone away from my ear and just let the receiver dangle by the cord until it stopped making those terrible noises. Then I picked it up and said, ‘And darling, what time shall we meet, and what shall we do today?’”
The first draft of John’s Mr. Moto yarn was finished in slightly over six weeks’ time—431 triple-spaced pages. But the editors of the Saturday Evening Post were not entirely happy with the results of that summer’s hard work when they received the manuscript, which John had titled Stopover: Tokyo, that fall. The ending, the editors contended, was too downbeat. Couldn’t John lift it a little and close the story on a brighter note? After all, mystery and spy-story tradition practically demands that a book end with all villains either dead or fittingly punished, and heroes rewarded and ready to live happily ever after. In Stopover: Tokyo John had had the nerve to kill off a “good guy” or, in this particular case, girl. John, however, felt that this unusual ending was important to the over-all honesty of his book and refused to change it. Furthermore, he was in a position, if the Post would not publish the tale as written, to refund the magazine its money. Reluctantly, the Post capitulated.
Even so, the whole Post episode nettled John considerably. It would not have happened, he told Carl and Carol Brandt, in the good old days of George Horace Lorimer. John was not the sort of writer, he insisted, who could turn out machine-made fiction to order, according to an editor’s preconceived plot idea or plan, with a guaranteed happy ending every time. Some writers might do that, but not he. Besides, the Post’s attitude had made him feel as though they regarded him as simply another Post employee, a journalist on assignment. (In the Post’s behalf, it should be noted that, by accepting the generous expense account, John had put himself somewhat in that position.) For all the diversion the trip and writing the book had provided, he told the Brandts that he wished to be involved in no further writing tasks of this sort.
Carol’s first big piece of business for the Brandt office (which she had joined a few months earlier to help her ailing husband) was to sell Stopover: Tokyo to Twentieth Century-Fox for $65,000, plus a number of attractive escalator clauses, to be made into a film starring Robert Wagner and Joan Collins. This news, along with the well-known fact that John had written the spy thriller on a commission from the Saturday Evening Post, caused book reviewers—who often seem to be of the theory, Sedgwickian in its feeling, that only trash makes money—to be waiting for Stopover: Tokyo with freshly sharpened knives when it was published in 1957. They leapt on the book with glad little cries and wrote enthusiastically unfavorable reviews.
Orville Prescott, retired daily book reviewer of the New York Times and a Marquand admirer, has said that he considers the book “an embarrassing potboiler.” But Mr. Prescott missed the point. Stopover: Tokyo was written partly for fun and partly out of a sense of nostalgia, to find out if perhaps you can go home again, back to the old days with Ch
ristina and pounding out those precision-smooth spy stories for the Saturday Evening Post, days when life was simpler, people were kinder, and editors knew what they wanted—or seemed to. John had plenty to keep his pot boiling, and the pot was made of gold.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
During one of the bad periods of Carl Brandt’s drinking, a number of their friends, including Carl’s psychiatrist, had urged Carol to divorce her husband. She had told him this. Because he always felt that he expressed himself better on paper than orally, he wrote to her one of his characteristic letters, in pencil, on sheets of yellow legal paper:
The important thing is what you said tonight—that it’s almost all worthwhile just to find out that what we have kept of our closeness is not synthetic but an inviolate welding. I have felt it all along but, being so woefully in the wrong, I could not call the piper’s tune. I had to trust in the end result. I did and have.
I shall not—in fact I cannot—do anything to try and crack that weld. The weld, like the scar of a wound, is always stronger than the adjacent uncut surfaces. I may be a giddy goat, having a hell of a time hopping from crag to crag, trying to believe you are still with me. It may be change of life. I dunno, but I do know I love you most, have more fun with you, trust you utterly (no matter what crags you leap lightly and gracefully between), admire you beyond all women (with good cause) and am proud of you beyond the power of words to say and tongue to tell.…
I fear for myself should you, in fate’s hands, become Blithe Spirit. Not for you—you’d reorganize and dust out all the corners of hell (I trust you’d have no interest in heaven?) And you’d find a reason to justify and dignify bad luck. I, very simply, would not know how to envision life without you. That I fear, of that I’m so truly terrified that it physically hurts—it’s the whole truth, lady.…
Make up your mind what you want most. You are the arch priestess of that religion. I’ll help you get it when you’re sure. I love you that much, no matter what it does to me. Count me out of your figuring—that is, what it’ll do to me. I’ll be strong enough, I reckon.
But remember there’s this to be said, that few people could love you as I do or want you as consistently. I know you better than anyone else. We’ve had more together than can be jettisoned with a “skip it.” There’s a hell of a lot no one can ever touch, particularly what you have suffered for and from me.
But I love you—and want and need you—now and always.
Carl
Think hard, lady!
And she did think hard, and in the end she decided that too much had been spent and invested in her marriage in terms of time and caring to let it all go. She could not let it go.
The last decade of Carl Brandt’s life were years of triumph. Not only did he prosper in a business sense but he also conquered the alcoholism that at one point had threatened to undo him altogether. He did this with the help of a psychiatrist who suggested a new approach. Always before, after one of his prolonged drinking bouts, Carl had been placed in the luxury of Doctors’ Hospital or Connecticut’s Silver Hill, an expensive sanitarium that seems not to be one and is run along the lines of a comfortable country inn. The New York doctor proposed that Carl be placed, just once, under lock and key in a West Side “snake pit” for alcoholics. After his last bout he was committed to such a place, and during three days there he saw many aspects of himself that he had never seen before. He never had another drink and was sober for the last eight years of his life. But the drinking years had taken their toll on his health, and, like Gardi Fiske, he developed that most frightening of diseases—one must struggle for every breath—emphysema.
Then it was discovered that he had cancer. Early in October, 1957, Carl Brandt was taken to Roosevelt Hospital where, from pain and from the drugs prescribed to control the pain, he soon became delirious. John Marquand came down from Newburyport to join Carol for the ordeal of waiting for the end, which came at last on October 13. He was sixty-eight years old.
Carl’s and Carol’s had been a strong marriage, though not without its share of anguish. Not a perfect marriage, and never a conventional one, it nonetheless had represented two people bound together by powerful ties of respect and love, a respect and love shared by their two children, Carl and Vicki. Perhaps because John Marquand had come into that marriage at an early stage he had, in joining it, in a sense strengthened it. It was as though each point in the triangular relationship had served to strengthen the other two. As John’s relative Buckminster Fuller has often pointed out, the triangle is the strongest geometric form in nature.
As for John and Adelaide, there were long separations and reconciliations of sorts, vituperative letters and telephone calls followed by extended silences, pleas for the freedom of a divorce, but still the marriage dragged on, bearing with it the heavy burden of two unhappy people, with Adelaide stubbornly refusing to quit her role as Mrs. John P. Marquand. At one point, Adelaide announced that she was taking her children on an extended trip to Egypt, and John’s lawyers had to threaten her with a restraining order to keep her from taking the children out of school. To their friends, watching them together had become an experience that was ghastly—John, with his skill at sarcasm and ability to make his wife look foolish, and Adelaide, who had let herself become fat and yet who still insisted on bedecking her heavy body in bizarre costumes. There were repeated meetings between Adelaide’s and John’s lawyers in which they attempted to get her to sign the separation agreement necessary to proceed to the divorce, and after one of these sessions, Brooks Potter’s secretary put in a memo to John: “If anyone wants my opinion of Mrs. M, I think she is a candidate for McLean.… She seems to have an aversion to telling the truth.”
But at last, in 1957, not long after Carl Brandt’s death, John’s lawyers did seem to be wearing down Adelaide’s resistance, and it looked as though she would sign the necessary documents. John was advised that he could go to Reno to wait out the customary residence requirement. He checked in at the Riverside Hotel, using an assumed name so that Adelaide could not reach him. But Adelaide, in the process of going over the papers John’s lawyers wanted her to sign, discovered his whereabouts and alias and flew to Reno, where she appeared in the lobby of the Riverside, demanding to see him. He refused to let her come up to his room but did go down to the lobby and told her, “If it takes me a divorce in every state of the Union to do this, and if it takes me the whole year to live out the period of time necessary in Nevada, I will do all of these things, and this divorce is going through.”
Adelaide’s trip to Nevada was ill-advised for another reason. By physically setting foot within the boundary of the state where John was pressing his divorce action, she made herself subject to being served. Discovering that she could be served, she submitted to the jurisdiction of the Nevada courts, and it was then possible for the divorce proceedings to go ahead, and for John’s residence to be limited to just six weeks. “The minute she came to Reno, we nailed her,” Brooks Potter says.
She flew back to Boston and telephoned Carol. “She asked me if I would intercede with John,” Carol remembers. “She asked me to say, ‘Please don’t do this, it’s not good for anybody.’ But as far as I could see, at that point, it could do nobody any good to live in this atmosphere of terrible hate and bitterness—not for the children, certainly not for John’s work, not for anything. John hated her so much at that point—I’ve never witnessed such hatred in a man.”
John also hated Reno. Topographically it reminded him of Aspen, which he had also grown to hate. He hated, he advised Carol, the entire West—hated it, in all probability, simply because Adelaide liked it. His letters from Reno grew increasingly irascible, the longer he was required to stay. He referred to Reno as “this Sodom and Gomorrah” and complained bitterly that nobody but Carol gave him any news of home. He fidgeted during the days, drank too much in the evenings, and tried to busy himself with Book-of-the-Month Club reading. He moved from the Riverside Hotel to a guest ranch near Carson Cit
y whose letterhead depicted a bucking bronco, and he amused himself by doodling generally vulgar details in pencil here and there about the horse’s body. He complained that he couldn’t understand what his lawyers were telling him. At one point, they told him he could probably leave Nevada in ten days to two weeks, and at another he was told that he might have to take up permanent residence in the state—a thought that appalled him. The whole proceedings, he told Carol, seemed to him humiliating in the extreme and was destroying his faith in American jurisprudence, his manhood, and the human race.
He could not sleep at night without a Nembutal, but his doctor, Dana Atchley in New York, would not prescribe them for him, and so Carol was required to bootleg them to him in Nevada. Also, Carol had heard that some of John’s neighbors in Newburyport had been critical of her occasional presence at his house there, and she told him that she felt she ought not to go to Newburyport again. John begged her to reconsider, blaming the trouble on small-town gossips. He complained that he felt exhausted, sick, and old. His hair seemed to be falling out faster than ever. In the mirror he was shocked by the face he saw. A photograph of himself in the Herald-Tribune made him look terrible. He felt, he said, ready for a wheel chair. Meanwhile, the divorce inched its way through the courts.
The Late John Marquand Page 29