There were few bright moments in Reno. One divorce-bound lady to whom John had taken a particular dislike had been taking riding lessons at a nearby guest ranch, and one afternoon John had the pleasure of seeing her horse throw her and land her very softly in a large pile of horse manure. He told Conney Fiske that another woman had said to him, “Do you know you look quite a lot like John Marquand, the novelist?” He had replied, “It’s curious you should mention it because several people have told me that and you’re right, there is a resemblance.” He bought some boots called Wadis and “frontier pants—made in the West, for the West, and worn proudly by Westerners” in order to identify himself a little more with his environment. But dark thoughts continued to assail him. He worried that Reno’s altitude might give him another coronary, and of his three children by Adelaide he said, “I feel that in a week or so all the kids will be so brainwashed that it will be kinder to them if I see little or nothing of any of them in the future.”
In a few more weeks’ time, however, Adelaide had made the necessary legal moves, John’s case had come to court, and his divorce was granted. The marriage had lasted just over twenty-one years. John was free to leave Nevada and flew to San Francisco, where he was met by Carol. It was autumn, San Francisco’s best time, and the two spent several days celebrating John’s release from matrimony. They flew home together to New York.
Meanwhile, John had asked young Carl Brandt—who was finishing up his studies at Harvard—to go down to the house at Kent’s Island and be there when Adelaide arrived to pack up her personal possessions. It was John’s lawyer’s suggestion, to be sure that Adelaide took away from the house only those articles that had been agreed upon under the separation agreement. Young Carl arrived with books to study and a paper to write and settled himself at a table in the living room. Presently Adelaide Marquand appeared, waved distantly to him, and proceeded with her packing, moving in and out of rooms, up and down stairs. In the years since John had bought his first tiny place, Kent’s Island had grown to a house of considerable size with a big wing added on either end.
Presently, Adelaide strode into the living room, stared hard at Carl Brandt, and said, “You do know, don’t you, that you are presiding over the dissolution of an empire?” She turned and strode out again.
As soon as his divorce was final, John asked Carol to marry him. Before his death Carl had said to her, “When I die, and if you should want to marry John, I think I should tell you that I think you will find him a very cruel and selfish man.” But this was not why Carol said no—and kept saying no, repeatedly, in the months that followed. With Carl’s death, Carol, assisted by her son, had taken over the management of Brandt & Brandt and its many clients, an occupation she thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to continue to enjoy. It was lifeblood to her. Once, at John’s house in Pinehurst—it was during the closing of the movie sale of Stopover: Tokyo, and calls were going back and forth between Carol and the West Coast as details of the deal were being settled—John’s housekeeper, Julia, had asked, bemused, “Mrs. Brandt—who are you?” Carol had smiled and said, “Just a woman who has always worked for a living.” She was and still is that.
Carol treasured her work, and John did not want a wife who worked. He wanted a wife who would keep house and entertain for him in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Carol knew that she could not endure the role John wanted to cast her in, in either of the places he had in mind. He said he would not marry her unless she gave up the agency. She said she would not marry him unless she could be permitted to keep it. And that was that.
“I could tolerate the kind of life he liked to lead for short periods,” Carol Brandt says. “But if I’d had to live it with him—the Somerset Club, the Myopia Hunt, Pinehurst and the golf—I’d have been climbing up the walls in two weeks. And John didn’t really approve of the kind of life I liked. I like writers, and working with them and talking to them. But John didn’t like many other writers. After Carl died, John and I began giving little dinner parties together at my apartment, and there would always be writers there—either clients or friends. And after the guests had left, John would turn to me and say, ‘My God! How can you stand those people?’ Those people were my life.
“And Carl was right. John could be selfish, and he could be cruel. But he could never be cruel to me because he had no claim on me. If he tried to be, I could simply have walked out on him. If I had married him, God knows what it would have been like. As it was, I was the bearer of the lantern. He was the flame, I was the keeper. I could do more for him than any other woman could, or wanted to, in terms of making him comfortable, making it easier for him to write. I loved his dependence on me. If a man is dependent on you, he is closer to you than to any other woman. With John, I had a marriage without a marriage. With Carl, I had a union without a union. It has always seemed to me that with both those men I had the best of both possible worlds.”
Perhaps there was still another reason why they did not marry. In every relationship there comes a moment when the opportunity to move forward into another area, onto another level, must be seized or let go. The crucial moment rarely if ever returns. Also, it may have been the strains and pressures of their respective marriages that held John Marquand and Carol Brandt together, but their affair may also have helped both marriages to last as long as they had. Now that they were both free, the affair seemed somehow less important. The crucial moment had passed.
John was deeply saddened by Carl Brandt’s death. It struck him as bitterly ironic that now he was free, and had sufficient money to be able to enjoy life—to play a bit and not work quite so hard—the playmates he would have most enjoyed, the old friends, were departing, one by one, leaving him stranded and alone. He felt this way even about Pinehurst where, in the beginning, he had had so many good times at the Pinehurst Country Club, the Tin Whistle, and the Wolves. “Just think,” he said once, “I’ve spent all my life working so I can meet and have fun on their own level with people like the people at Pinehurst, and now all the best ones are dead or dying. And all the rest are nothing but God damned fools.”
Chapter Thirty
They were legally divorced, but still Adelaide would not let go of John. John had even had her name removed from the copyright assignments of the four jointly copyrighted novels, H. M. Pulham, Esquire, B. F.’s Daughter, Repent in Haste, and Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. Still she tried to remain a part of his life. John was back at Kent’s Island working quietly and steadily on a new novel, pouring himself into this book with more gusto, perhaps, than he had done with any previous book. The telephone would ring, sometimes late at night, sometimes early in the morning, and it would be Adelaide, and she would begin one of her long harangues. At times she would scream and scold. At others she would weep. If Carol happened to be at the house when these calls came through, John would hand the telephone receiver to her, saying, “Listen to this—you won’t believe what is happening.” Carol recalls, “Those calls were perfectly appalling. One really did get the impression of a madwoman on the other end of the line. It did no good to hang up on her, for then she just called back again. If you didn’t answer, she would let the phone ring and ring. The only way John could handle these calls was to let her continue until she was finished or too exhausted to go on. He would plead with her, saying ‘Please, please … just leave me alone.’ He never liked to use four-letter words, either in his fiction or his conversation. But other than use profanity with her he was as firm as he possibly could be—but it did no good.”
There was a terrible moment when John learned that Adelaide had communicated with the Boston Social Register to have his name removed from its listings. John cared about such things as being in the Social Register, and it infuriated him to think that Adelaide could have his name dropped from it because of the divorce. He flew into a dreadful rage and could talk of nothing else for days. Actually, in fairness to Adelaide, her intention may have been to advise the Social Register that John no longer r
esided at 1 Reservoir Street, as the 1958 edition of the little book had it, but John refused to look at it that way and insisted that she had acted out of malice and spite. In any case, he saw to it that his name was back in the 1960 edition, with his address given as Pinehurst, North Carolina.
But aside from these interruptive episodes, the pace of John’s life had eased and his friends commented that he looked happier and healthier than he had in years. There were fewer of those explosive moments when his normally pink skin became poppy red, reminding those who knew him, uneasily, of his previous heart attack. A few months before undergoing the divorce proceedings, he had published a small book called Life at Happy Knoll, which was a collection of pieces about the goings-on at a fictitious country club, all of which had been originally written for Sports Illustrated. The idea had come from an encounter John had had with Time, Inc., publisher Roy Larsen several years earlier at a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers, of which John had been made a member. Larsen’s idea had been for John to write a series of letters such as might come from a member of a country club to the president of the club or the chairman of the house committee, and these letters would comprise, as Larsen put it, “a rather satirical taking off of the things that are funny and annoying about all country clubs.”
It was a frankly frivolous undertaking, but John had been amused by the idea. His protestations to the Brandts to the contrary, John was easily tempted back to his old medium, the magazines. Working with Richard Johnston and Sidney James at Sports Illustrated, he had dashed off a number of Happy Knoll pieces. They were fun to write, were intended to be fun to read, and John had had considerable background as a clubman—particularly as a member of the Pinehurst Club and the Myopia Hunt Club outside Boston—to draw on for material. Sports Illustrated paid him $2,000 for each piece, plus an expense allowance, and John, with his shrewd New Englander’s feelings about money, had even worked out an arrangement whereby the magazine paid his Myopia Club dues and golf charges. In submitting his Myopia bills to the magazine, John was careful to instruct that they be paid to him, direct, so that he could then pay the club out of his own account—lest any member of the club get the notion that he was using members as models for his little Happy Knoll sketches. He was, of course, doing just that, and there had already been some grumbling in corners at both of John’s golfing places, and complaints to the effect that he was exploiting his relationship with members and club officers in the process of putting private clubs into commercial fiction. One can imagine with what consternation the Myopia Hunt Club’s treasurer would view John’s golf bill paid by a check from Sports Illustrated.
Now a gathering of the pieces was between hard covers, and the book, with humorous drawings by John Morris, was selling well. Critics were quick to point out the book’s slightness. The reviews ranged from the Dallas Morning News, which said, “This is Marquand in a lightsome, unimportant mood. But even at pot-boiling John P. remains one of the best of our writers,” to Harper’s Magazine, which called the book “moderately entertaining.” There are indeed some amusing moments. One of the most successful letters is an elaborate rationalization of why the golf pro is a genius and must be kept on in the club’s employ at any cost, despite the glaring fact that he has never in a single instance been known to improve a member’s game by a single stroke. Another reveals how an aging Negro bartender at the club, long past any point of competence at his job, uses information gathered from members when they are in their cups to blackmail the club into keeping him on its payroll. To readers who wanted a chuckle at the vagaries of country club life, the book seemed worth its modest price of $3.75. And John himself, clutching his forehead in mock anguish at the demonstrated stupidity of all reviewers, cried, “It is fun and games, the book was written as fun and games! Can’t they understand that? Must everything I write be so bloody serious? Aren’t I entitled to some fun and games at my age?” He was sixty-three.
Meanwhile, though Carol continued gently to put off his proposals of marriage, she took up the tasks of substitute wife to help him put his new bachelor’s life in order. An extremely organized person herself, she also had a well-trained office staff to call on, and after John’s divorce the Brandt & Brandt letterhead not only contained matters of literary business and contracts—including a nice $71,000 advance extracted from Ladies’ Home Journal for the Marquand novel-in-process—but also shopping advice, household management suggestions, as well as confirmations of hotel and airplane reservations as John continued his restless travels from one part of the globe to another. It was a far cry from Adelaide’s disheveled housekeeping as Carol—writing to John, who was redecorating and furnishing his Pinehurst house—helped cut through domestic red tape:
There has been sent to Miss Pleasants a set of three glass pitchers, two of which will do for martinis—one for a larger party, one for just two or three people—and a third as a water pitcher. The set of three cost under $9. But I think they’re useful and rather pretty. You undoubtedly have a long slender-handled spoon which will serve as a mixer.
I’ve bought you a dozen finger-bowls with matching glass plates—white, of course. The matching plates will serve as dessert plates or else with a doily will serve to terminate a luncheon meal when you are not serving fruit or anything else.
I’ve also, of course, bought very plain, useful lace finger-bowl doilies.
I’ve bought bathroom wastebaskets, Kleenex boxes and wastebaskets that will do for all the bedrooms and the library. They couldn’t be plainer or cheaper.
I’ve also bought a number of ashtrays. I couldn’t remember what you had in the house or what you may need. One always needs more of them.
All of these things have gone from Altman’s, and I trust in due course Miss Pleasants will take the time to acknowledge that they have arrived. I enclose a copy of my letter to her.
Adelaide had trouble catching trains and was forever making John late for appointments, but Carol kept John on schedule:
Your Pan American flight is due in at 11:15 from Rome. I came in by jet from London on Sunday and it was right on the button. What I shall do is find out if your flight is to be on time and if so will meet you with Paul Reilly or one of his chauffeurs. If it’s late, I’ll simply have the car meet you.
Should I be asleep by any hideous chance upon your arrival, pound loudly on the door and we’ll have a bottle of champagne.
Miss Pleasants, handling the details of the house from the Pinehurst end, was no match for Carol’s efficiency and thoroughness. Carol wrote to her:
Now that the time for John Marquand’s arrival is close at hand, I want to make doubly sure that the large carton of sheets and pillow cases addressed to him in your care arrived safely from Gimbel Brothers in New York.
I had hoped there would be word from you on my desk upon my return from a month’s trip to Europe.
Thank you for an early reply.…
In addition to a new novel, John was working on another, very personal project. It was to be a complete rewriting of a biography John had written in 1925 called Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Mass., and which Minton, Balch had published (before John’s final and permanent alliance with Little, Brown). Lord Timothy Dexter—he conferred the title on himself—was a rags-to-riches New England eccentric who started life as a tanner and ended up in an implausible mansion surrounded by statuary in the center of town, and who even employed his own poet laureate. Dexter’s extravagant career had always fascinated John, who enjoyed the grotesque—the wild contrast, for example, of Dexter’s flamboyant life and house in the middle of staid, quiet, and conservative Newburyport—but John’s earlier treatment of this character had been a noticeable publishing failure, perhaps because readers found Dexter’s outlandish antics simply impossible to credit. There are some creatures, after all, who are too grotesque to stomach. John was rewriting the biography for a number of reasons. First, he had reason to suppose that one reason for the first book’s failure to reach a wide audience was t
hat its author in those days was relatively unknown. In 1925 there was no ready-made readership for John P. Marquand’s books and, in a way, the rewritten Dexter would be a test of that readership’s loyalty. Also, he assumed that thirty-five years later he was a better writer and could therefore give Dexter a better portrayal. But woven into both of these reasons like threads in the tapestry of everything he was doing was John’s wish, once more, to return to the past, to go back to the old streets of Newburyport of his youth and to see, in the process, what had happened since.
Little, Brown was not at all happy about the Timothy Dexter project—it seemed a rehashing of a tired subject that had perhaps been not much good to begin with—and his editor, Alexander Williams, who had succeeded Stanley Salmen, told John so as gently as possible. But John was Little, Brown’s favorite author, and since they had to indulge his whims they agreed to publish it. Even more dubious about the Timothy Dexter book was Carol Brandt. She considered it an utter waste of time and told John so frankly and firmly. At one point, John told Williams, “I’m thinking of dedicating the Dexter to Carol, simply because she says it’s no damn good.” He did not do this, but he forged stubbornly ahead with the book.
He had begun to complain that the Book-of-the-Month Club was working him too hard, giving him too many books to read and review and requiring him to attend too many meetings. He had, after all, been with the club for nearly fifteen years, and much of the freshness and stimulation of the judges’ meetings had worn off. Specifically, he asked to be excused from the January, February, and March meetings—these were his Pinehurst months—unless his attendance was considered “urgent”; otherwise, he would handle the details of these meetings by telephone. This would leave him with six meetings a year, and he also wanted to be free to travel abroad in this period, keeping in touch with the club and keeping up on his reading by mail, telephone, or cable. In addition, he asked that he be given no more than eight books a month to read and that he be asked to do no reviews for the club News unless he felt genuinely enthusiastic about the book in question and volunteered to do so. In the process of airing his grievances, John added that he felt Book-of-the-Month Club meetings too often stressed the commercial possibilities of the books in question, and not the judges’ opinions. Finally, he complained that Harry Scherman, the late chairman of the Book-of-the-Month Club, took too active a part in the meetings of the judges, and tried to influence the selections. In return for a lightened work load, John agreed to accept a cut in salary and, naturally, Carol was delegated to meet with Scherman and Meredith Wood, the club’s president, and state John’s position. Carol did so, tactfully not stressing John’s waning interest in the club and mentioning instead his heart condition. Both men were happy to give John whatever he wanted. And of course there would be no reduction in his salary.
The Late John Marquand Page 30