The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Afterward, everyone went back to Kent’s Island and gathered there, and drinks were served. At first everyone was solemn and sympathetic, but soon there was laughter and, Ed Streeter recalls, people were saying, “I say, this is a jolly good party, isn’t it?” and thinking that John would have approved.

  Most shattered of all, perhaps, by the news of John’s death was secretary Marjorie Davis, who had told friends that she expected to become the third Mrs. John P. Marquand before long. An autumn “honeymoon” cruise in the Aegean had even been booked and planned. There are several of John’s friends, however, who think that something would have prevented him from taking the young woman who had occupied an apartment over his garage into his house. The Greek Island cruise, these friends point out, was to be taken with another couple, and John had traveled with Marjorie Davis before in an unmarried state. Still, John and Brooks Potter, who had married a woman several years his junior and who had become John’s close friend during and after the divorce, often talked late into the night of the problems and the rewards of marrying a younger woman.

  Carol Brandt received the news of John’s death on July 16 in England, when her son telephoned her there. She had gone to England to be married—at her friend Enid Bagnold’s house—to a widowed New York lawyer, and her wedding date was just twelve days away. She was to be married to a man of whom John approved, indeed they were friends, and though she was deeply saddened by the news she did not change the date. It struck many people as uncannily coincidental that John should have died just a few days before Carol was due to embark on a new life of her own. It added one more of those odd fictive notes to John’s life. The year 1960, though it marked the beginning of a happy new marriage, was also a year of loss for Carol. That Thanksgiving, her daughter Vicki was killed in a plane piloted by her husband, a French aviator. It crashed while they were bound for the Bahamas and a holiday.

  John’s will, when it was read, seemed a rather harsh one. After certain specific bequests to servants and secretaries, three quarters of the residue of the estate went to his daughter Christina and one fourth to John, Jr., with the will saying that the “unequal division was not intended in any way to reflect a difference in my affection for them,” but “my daughter is and always will be in greater need of assistance than my son John.” No money at all went to his children by Adelaide, though they were bequeathed the house at Kent’s Island. Adelaide’s money, after all, had helped turn Kent’s Island into the showplace it had become.

  Adelaide continued to live at 1 Reservoir Street and at a New York apartment. In New York she gave little parties at which she tried to gather together groups of John’s old friends, as though she felt it her duty to keep John’s memory alive. She invited Philip Hamburger, who had written the New Yorker profile, to one, and he remembers her sad and disheveled appearance.

  In Cambridge, she continued to indulge her interest in music, toiling as best she could for various musical causes. The house at 1 Reservoir Street grew stranger as Adelaide added Benjamin West paintings, all of Mozart’s musical scores framed and hung on the wall, and two stuffed leather pigs in front of the fireplace. She had a Nova Scotian couple working for her, but they weren’t, she complained, very good, and she ended up doing most of the housework herself. To ward off loneliness, she invited Harvard and Radcliffe music students to come and live at her house. They were supposed to do chores—cut the grass, shovel the walks—in return for their board and keep, but the students did little work, raided her larder and liquor closet, and otherwise took advantage of her.

  She tried to control her drinking and would have extended periods of relative sobriety. She and Anne Pusey, the wife of the then president of Harvard, ran an exercise class on the third floor of Adelaide’s house where they and several other ladies tried to lose weight. But once, when drunk, she fell through a low plate-glass window and slashed her abdomen. Such friends as she had were deeply worried.

  Two of these friends were Peggy and Roy Lamson, she a novelist and he a professor at M.I.T. Roy Lamson, an excellent amateur clarinetist, had once played in Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and a shared interest in music had brought them together. Roy had borrowed a book from Adelaide—Matthiessen’s book on the New England renaissance—and one autumn evening in Cambridge the Lamsons ran into Adelaide at a cocktail party at the Puseys’, and Adelaide mentioned that she would like the book back. After the party—since their houses were only a few short blocks apart—Roy Lamson strolled over to Adelaide’s house with the book.

  The door to Adelaide’s house was standing ajar, but the house seemed dark and empty. There was no response to the bell, and the Nova Scotian couple were nowhere in evidence. Roy Lamson became concerned. The Lamsons had found her passed out in her house once before and had carried her into bed, and so, after calling several times, he went into the house. There was a light in the upstairs hall and, as he mounted the stairs, a light from under the bathroom door. He knocked, several times, then opened the door. He entered the room with the huge sunken marble tub and the steps leading down, and there floated Adelaide in the tub, naked, face down. Lamson pulled her with difficulty—she was a heavy woman and it was a dead and slippery weight—out of the tub and covered her body with his coat. Then he called the police. The scene of that discovery still returns to him in nightmares. The coroner’s verdict was not suicide. She had been preparing for her bath and perhaps had slipped or passed out. There was excessive alcohol in her blood stream. She died leaving $3,000,000 to her children.

  Other lives go on.

  Conney Fiske still lives outside Boston in her house with its pretty pool and private jumping course, and goes south to Southern Pines in the winter with her horses, where she rides in the hunt—sidesaddle, as always. She is rather glad she could not dine with John that last Friday night, for if she had been in the house at the time of his death there would have been unpleasant publicity for both herself and her old friend. She continues to treasure the memory of John’s longest and closest friendship, and the recollections of those evenings with just the three of them, John, herself, and Gardi. Like Carol, Conney was away from Boston at the time of the funeral and could not attend. “Were you in love with him?” Conney Fiske was asked not long ago. She thought for a moment and then said, “I don’t know. There were people in Boston, of course, who thought I might marry John after he divorced Christina, even though that would have meant divorcing Gardi.” Carol Brandt, happily married, lives in New York and runs Brandt & Brandt with her son. John’s children, all married and in one case remarried, are scattered here and there.

  Sedgwick House still stands in Stockbridge, an imposing residence. John’s children by Adelaide still go back to Kent’s Island now and then. His children by Christina still summer at Curzon’s Mill with the Hale cousins in a state of uneasy truce.

  After John’s death, “Nandina Cottage” in Pinehurst, where he had enjoyed his final winters, was sold to a Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Gary. The house has not been changed much, with the exception of a black rubber doormat which has been placed outside the front door, and which reads, in large white capital letters:

  THE GARY’S

  If the dead do spin, even slightly, in their graves over the follies committed by the living upon the things the dead once loved, then surely John must have winced—in amusement, in mock dismay—just winced, or turned a little, beneath the soft soil of Sawyer Hill, at this last touch that had been applied to his old house. It is not so much what he would have had to say about the use of “personalized” doormats. But to John, such a stickler for proper punctuation and such a foe of the overuse of it, the misused apostrophe on this particular doormat would have struck him as the final comic capstone of his life. He would certainly have used it in a story.

  A John P. Marquand Check List*

  Symbols: N, novel; SN, serial novel; SS, short story; NF, nonfiction; MP, motion picture; P, play. The titles of the major published books are given in capital letters; their titles as magazine
serials, if different, follow in parentheses.

  1915

  PRINCE AND BOATSWAIN. SEA TALES FROM THE RECOLLECTION OF REAR-ADMIRAL CHARLES E. CLARK. As related to James Morris Morgan and John Phillips Marquand, NF.

  1921

  “The Right That Failed,” Saturday Evening Post, July 23, SS.

  1922

  “The Unspeakable Gentleman,” Ladies’ Home Journal, February,

  March, May, SN.

  THE UNSPEAKABLE GENTLEMAN, N.

  “Only a Few of Us Left,” Saturday Evening Post, January 14, 21, SN.

  “Eight Million Bubbles,” Saturday Evening Post, January 28, SS.

  “Different from Other Girls,” Ladies’ Home Journal, July, SS.

  “How Willie Came Across,” Saturday Evening Post, July 8, SS.

  “The Land of Bunk,” Saturday Evening Post, September 16, SS.

  “Captain of His Soul,” Saturday Evening Post, November 4, SS.

  1923

  FOUR OF A KIND (“The Right That Failed,” “Different from Other Girls,” “Eight Million Bubbles,” “Only a Few of Us Left”), SS collection.

  “The Ship,” Scribner’s Magazine, January, SS.

  “The Sunbeam,” Saturday Evening Post, January 20, SS.

  “By the Board,” Saturday Evening Post, March 17, SS.

  1924

  “The Jervis Furniture,” Saturday Evening Post, April 26, SS.

  “The Black Cargo,” Saturday Evening Post, September 20 through October 18, SN.

  “‘Pozzi of Perugia,’” Saturday Evening Post, November 8 through 22, SN.

  “A Friend of the Family,” Saturday Evening Post, December 13, SS.

  1925

  THE BLACK CARGO, N.

  LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER OF NEWBURYPORT, MASS., NF.

  “The Educated Money,” Saturday Evening Post, February 14, SS.

  “The Big Guys,” Saturday Evening Post, February 21, SS.

  “The Foot of the Class,” Saturday Evening Post, March 21, SS.

  “Much Too Clever,” Saturday Evening Post, April 25, SS.

  “The Old Man,” Saturday Evening Post, June 6, SS.

  “The Jamaica Road,” Saturday Evening Post, July 4, SS.

  “The Last of the Hoopwells,” Saturday Evening Post, December 5, SS.

  1926

  “Fun and Neighbors,” Saturday Evening Post, February 20, SS.

  “A Thousand in the Bank,” Saturday Evening Post, May 1, SS.

  “The Tea Leaves,” Saturday Evening Post, May 8, SS.

  “The Blame of Youth,” Saturday Evening Post, May 29, SS.

  “The Spitting Cat,” Saturday Evening Post, July 3, SS.

  “Good Morning, Major,” Saturday Evening Post, December 11, SS.

  1927

  “The Artistic Touch,” Saturday Evening Post, February 19, SS.

  “The Cinderella Motif,” Saturday Evening Post, March 5, SS.

  “Once and Always,” Saturday Evening Post, April 9, SS.

  “Lord Chesterfield,” Saturday Evening Post, June 18, SS.

  “The Unknown Hero,” Saturday Evening Post, July 30, SS.

  “The Harvard Square Student,” Saturday Evening Post, December 10, SS.

  1928

  “The Last of the Tories,” Saturday Evening Post, March 24, SS.

  “As the Case May Be,” Saturday Evening Post, June 16, SS.

  “Do Tell Me, Doctor Johnson,” Saturday Evening Post, July 14, SS.

  “Three Rousing Cheers,” Cosmopolitan, August, SS.

  “Aye, in the Catalogue,” Saturday Evening Post, August 11, SS.

  “The Good Black Sheep,” Saturday Evening Post, August 25, SS.

  1929

  “Warning Hill,” Saturday Evening Post, March 23 through April 20, SN.

  “End of the Story,” Collier’s, April 6, SS.

  “Oh, Major, Major,” Saturday Evening Post, April 27, SS.

  “Mr. Goof,” Saturday Evening Post, May 4, SS.

  “Rain of Right,” Saturday Evening Post, May 11, SS.

  “And Another Redskin—,” Saturday Evening Post, May 18, SS.

  “Darkest Horse,” Saturday Evening Post, May 25, SS.

  “The Powaw’s Head,” Saturday Evening Post, July 20, SS.

  1930

  WARNING HILL, N.

  “Bobby Shaftoe,” Saturday Evening Post, February 8, SS.

  “Leave Her, Johnny—Leave Her,” Saturday Evening Post, March 15, SS.

  “Simon Pure,” Collier’s, July 5, SS.

  “The Same Things,” Saturday Evening Post, August 2, SS.

  “The Master of the House,” Saturday Evening Post, September 27, SS.

  “There is a Destiny,” Saturday Evening Post, November 8, SS.

  “Rainbows,” Saturday Evening Post, December 20, SS.

  1931

  “Golden Lads,” Saturday Evening Post, February 14, SS.

  “All Play,” Woman’s Home Companion, April, SS.

  “Upstairs,” Saturday Evening Post, August 8, SS.

  “Tolerance,” Saturday Evening Post, October 17, SS.

  “Gentlemen Ride,” Saturday Evening Post, November 7, SS.

  “Call Me Joe,” Saturday Evening Post, November 28, SS.

  1932

  “Ask Him,” Saturday Evening Post, January 23, SS.

  “The Music,” Saturday Evening Post, February 6, SS.

  “Deep Water,” Saturday Evening Post, February 20, SS.

  “Sold South,” Saturday Evening Post, March 12, SS.

  “Jine the Cavalry,” Saturday Evening Post, April 16, SS.

  “Jack Still,” Saturday Evening Post, June 11, SS.

  “Far Away,” Saturday Evening Post, August 13, SS.

  “High Tide,” Saturday Evening Post, October 8, SS.

  “Dispatch Box No. 3,” Saturday Evening Post, November 5, SS.

  “Fourth Down,” Saturday Evening Post, November 19, SS.

  1933

  HAVEN’S END, N.

  “Number One Good Girl,” Saturday Evening Post, October 14, SS.

  1934

  “‘Winner Take All,’” Saturday Evening Post, January 20 through February 17, SN.

  “Davy Jones,” Saturday Evening Post, March 3, SS.

  “Blockade,” Saturday Evening Post, March 24, SS.

  “Step Easy, Stranger,” Saturday Evening Post, April 14, SS.

  “Lord and Master,” Collier’s, April 21, SS.

  “Time for Us to Go,” Saturday Evening Post, April 28, SS.

  “Take the Man Away,” Saturday Evening Post, May 12, SS.

  “Back Pay,” American Magazine, August, SS.

  “Ming Yellow,” Saturday Evening Post, December 8 through January 12, 1935, SN.

  1935

  MING YELLOW, N.

  “Mr. Moto Takes a Hand,” Saturday Evening Post, March 30 through May 4, SN.

  NO HERO (“Mr. Moto Takes a Hand”), N.

  “Sea Change,” Saturday Evening Post, May 25, SS.

  “A Flutter in Continentals,” Saturday Evening Post, June 8, SS.

  “You Can’t Do That,” Saturday Evening Post, June 22, SS.

  “What’s It Get You?” Saturday Evening Post, July 13, SS.

  “Yankee Notion,” Saturday Evening Post, November 2, SS.

  1936

  “Thank You, Mr. Moto,” Saturday Evening Post, February 8 through March 14, SN.

  THANK YOU, MR. MOTO, N.

  “Hang It on the Horn,” Saturday Evening Post, March 21, SS.

  “No One Ever Would,” Saturday Evening Post, April 7, SS.

  “A Young Man of Great Promise,” Liberty, June 13, SS.

  “Put Those Things Away,” Saturday Evening Post, June 20, SS.

  “The Road Turns Back: The Author in Search of Earthly Paradise,” Forum, September, NF.

  “Think Fast, Mr. Moto,” Saturday Evening Post, September 12 through October 17, SN.

  “Don’t You Cry for Me,” Saturday Evening Post, November 21, SS.
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  “Troy Weight,” Saturday Evening Post, December 5, SS.

  “The Late George Apley,” Saturday Evening Post, November 28 through January 9, 1937, SN.

  1937

  THE LATE GEORGE APLEY, N.

  THINK FAST, MR. MOTO, N.

  “The Marches Always Pay,” Saturday Evening Post, January 30, SS.

  “The Maharajah’s Flower,” Saturday Evening Post, March 27, SS.

  “‘3-3-8,’” Saturday Evening Post, April 10 through May 15, SN.

  “Just Break the News,” Saturday Evening Post, July 3, SS.

  “Pull, Pull Together,” Saturday Evening Post, July 24, SS.

  “Think Fast, Mr. Moto,” screenplay by Howard Ellis and Norman Foster, August, MP.

  “Everything Is Fine,” Collier’s, October 9, SS.

  “Thank You, Mr. Moto,” screenplay by Willis Cooper and Norman Foster, December, MP.

  1938

  “‘Castle Sinister,’” Collier’s, February 12 through March 26, SN.

  “Mr. Moto’s Gamble,” screenplay by Charles Belden and Jerry Cady, March, MP.

  “Shirt Giver,” Saturday Evening Post, April 30, SS.

  “Mr. Moto Takes a Chance,” screenplay by Lou Breslow and John Patrick, June, MP.

  “Mr. Moto Is So Sorry,” Saturday Evening Post, July 2 through August 13, SN.

  “Mysterious Mr. Moto,” screenplay by Philip MacDonald and Norman Foster, October, MP.

  MR. MOTO IS SO SORRY, N.

  1939

  “Wickford Point,” Saturday Evening Post, January 28 through March 11, SN.

  “Mr. Moto’s Last Warning,” screenplay by Philip MacDonald and Norman Foster, January, MP.

  “Mr. Moto in Danger Island,” screenplay by Philip Milne, April, MP.

  “Beginning Now—,” Saturday Evening Post, April 8, SS.

  “Do You Know the Brills?” Saturday Review of Literature, April 29, NF (humor).

  “Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation,” screenplay by Philip MacDonald and Norman Foster, July, MP.