IV. The hardcover dust jacket was tasteful, with a small red heart standing in for the V in Love. But Alice was appalled by a sleazy 1967 Signet paperback that said “A Novel of Musical Beds” on the front. Agent Matson called that one “crass” and apologized but it sold over ninety-seven thousand copies. A 1989 Fawcett pocketbook reprint used the tagline “On the Cusp of Love” instead.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Robert Kendall McNie
— 1964–1967 —
It looked like its pictures only more beautiful. The shingles just turning silver, the leaves of a wild rosebush beside the steps just yellowing. Cynthia felt her face smile automatically, and at the same time she felt a queasy excitement, in some unspecified place.
—Alice Adams, “The Break-In,” To See You Again
“I loved your hope for me that I have someone to be in love with,” Alice replied in a letter to Lucie Jessner at the close of 1964. “I do, but I’m not sure how ‘appropriate’ it is.” It? After that witty grammatical slippage, Alice explains that her love affair is with “an extremely handsome interior decorator, of all things, very sensitive and intense, but—of course—troubled, just ending a 20-year marriage, unbusinesslike, etc. I have an awful tendency to take on the role of therapist as well.”1
The man in question was Robert Kendall McNie. They’d met in June 1964 at a party or on a blind date—which is unclear—drunk together, come home together. They saw each other often—Alice brought Bob to that farewell party when Judith Adams left for Thailand; he took her to North Beach on her fortieth birthday. The relationship seemed complicated. Alice considered, analyzed, revised. She dramatized their first night together in a notebook entry:
“Shall we fall wildly in love?” he asked, coming back into the room with what must have been their fifth drinks.
She was startled, but it was so much what she wanted—she was dying to be in love—that she forgot she didn’t like him & said “Yes.”2
Alice had doubts about Bob when she wrote those notes a year later on a page labeled “Stories.” But had she really not liked him at first? Much of Adams’s fiction explores the irrationality of sexual attraction. Especially after her divorce and after Vasco Pereira, she interrogated her actual and fictional relationships with a “fine satiric eye softened by tenderness toward human desire and frailty,” as poet Susan Wood writes in her review of Adams’s stories.3 So it’s no surprise that her feelings for Bob McNie mixed tenderness with cautious skepticism.
Nevertheless, she was hooked on Bob from the first night. He was tall, strikingly good-looking in a classic Anglo-Saxon manner, flamboyant, entertaining, creative. He had quit smoking in 1957 (well ahead of the surgeon general’s 1964 report) and encouraged Alice to give up cigarettes too. Like her he carried a load of anxiety, and he understood the difficulties of turning imaginative endeavor into income. “Love without liking is anxious because empty… all unreal: similar gaps to be filled,” Alice wrote in her notebook shortly after she met Bob.4 Behind this worry about liking and gaps lurks the always seductive trope that lovers fulfill one another, forming together a Platonic whole. Alice played therapist to Bob in his “restive semi-married state”; later she faulted herself for not asking for what she needed of him: “I often give an impression of needing—demanding less than I actually do. An old trick of mine. I suppose from fear—don’t ask.” She learned that “old trick” from a childhood of shunned emotional demands.5 What Adams did not say, but surely understood, was that an intuitive man like Bob McNie would have resisted explicit requests—as she did herself.
* * *
Alice dropped her architect lover Felix Rosenthal “like a stone” when she met Bob, though she saw other men from time to time.6 McNie engaged her romantic energy and shared her bed during the months she was submitting, revising, and publishing Careless Love. Her professional success and apparent self-sufficiency appealed to him. Unlike most of the men Alice had known, McNie had no family connections or money or college education to ease or direct him in life. At the time they met, he was separated from his wife, Deen, who was also his business partner, and their three teenage children. He planned to divorce Deen but their finances were in disarray; their house in the Outer Sunset could not be sold because of a contractor’s lien on it.
“I don’t really like anything that’s going on in my life right now,” Alice complained as 1964 ended. “Bob at his best is marvelous,” she said, “but too often drinks too much, too often away for weekends with kids, too unresolved in his own life. It’s draining, you know.” Her usual holiday gloom didn’t help. The Steeles who were then still in San Francisco had given “the worst Xmas Eve party [she’d] ever been to, really ghastly… inadequate dinner, freaks sitting around on those kindergarten chairs.”7
Bob shared his $200-a-month apartment in a Victorian on the edge of expensive Pacific Heights with his two older children, and Alice had fourteen-year-old Peter at home. On a typical weeknight, Bob would be nearly asleep with fatigue and drink when he came to see Alice. He seemed to her “an alcoholic of a somewhat original sort: apparently sober, at a given moment which became earlier & earlier in the evening, he would fall asleep—or do something in the area between falling asleep and passing out.” For a while Alice was tolerant, “would somehow get him to bed, busy herself with the dinner dishes & go to bed herself. After a few hours he would wake & wake her. Then there would be intervals of love, of some talk—all of which later seemed unreal (esp if she had taken sleeping pills).”8
Bob warned Alice, “You’re wasting your time with me… eventually I’ll hurt you.” Nonetheless, Alice felt “addicted” to him. “Bob and I seem better and better and better—I don’t know. Sometimes I panic, can’t bear being happy, or something,” she wrote. She was aware of her tendency to wrap “rather simple unneurotic men in infinitely complicated emotions.”9 If he didn’t answer all her needs, he at least held her attention. She wished he would be less flamboyant but found him entertaining, and they looked good together. By spring Alice had picked up Bob’s joke of calling himself an “interior desecrator.” He was, she realized, “the sort of very bright illiterate who learns by osmosis rather than by reading books—terribly aware of currents, fashion…”10 She accompanied him on a photo shoot at the Sea Ranch residential development on the rugged Sonoma County coast, where he was designing furniture for Joseph Esherick’s demonstration houses. Her story “Sea Gulls Are Happier Here” (in which a midthirties socialite meets and marries a younger man) takes its setting from that trip; a spread in the San Francisco Examiner showcased Bob’s designs.11
During the months after Bob entered her life, while she was frustrated by his failure to complete his divorce, Alice thought she wanted “the kind of continuity which is probably only possible in marriage, maybe in an affair with more total rapport.”12 Such continuity was hardly possible in their situation, but Bob’s very unavailability had another benefit. Alice had moments of real clarity: “A possible view: since I don’t want to marry him (which au fond I’m sure is true) his situation helps me; ie. with his children we see each other less, I develop more of another life. I think this is the sanest position. Also, I will be the one to leave, which is important.”13
By late summer of 1965, Alice had determined to break up with Bob but lacked the willpower to do it. As usual, she experimented with the idea in notes for a story: “She sometimes wished he would tell her that he was, after all, going back to his wife. She knew exactly what she’d say: ‘Why don’t you all hold hands and jump off the bridge instead?’ Also, she would start smoking again.”14
She didn’t say that when Bob left her in November as the year was “plunging down to dark rain.”15 Alice felt he wanted her to suffer and beg for him the way Deen was doing. “He uses Deen against me,” she said, “telling me of her misery as though I have caused it; also saying, ‘You see? Everyone wants me, such a prize I am.’ ”16 He didn’t return to Deen and before long he and Alice were seeing each other a
gain. She didn’t resume smoking. “Preconception—an affair that ends in pain rather than marriage is a failure,” she wrote in her notebook.17 With writing and self-analysis she seemed to be developing a life less dependent on love affairs. Her understanding of how Bob might be playing her against Deen was also, perhaps, the dawning of a feminist consciousness.
When she was critical of Bob, Alice wondered if she “subscribed to a form of the Protestant ethic: sin which you don’t enjoy was less sinful.” She tried to work it out in her notebook as some kind of fictional algebra: “the gymnastics which were X’s notion of making love were not love, not fun, had nothing to do with Y.” Be that as it may, when they were apart she missed him sexually (“that long smooth strong marvelous curve”).18
* * *
Bob McNie’s divorce was finalized in September 1966, soon after the publication of Careless Love and about the same time Alice had her hysterectomy. A few months later Bob moved into Alice’s flat on Clay Street. Bob treated Peter Linenthal as a friend, took his art seriously, and brought him gifts of art supplies.
Before he was divorced, Bob had been sensitive about keeping up appearances as a father and discreet about his relationship with Alice. Now he introduced his children to her. Morissa and Robbie were on their own, receiving little financial support from their father, while Joch (Winky) stayed with his mother. Robbie remembered meeting Alice when he was about sixteen: “She was an interesting looking woman, handsome in all regards. She wasn’t beautiful, her teeth weren’t perfect, but she had a lot of character. And she was rather statuesque, large busted, voluptuous, in a sophisticated slinky black knit dress with pearls, very elegant. She was sedate but she was a Leo and there was a kind of lionesque quality about her.” Morissa believed that Alice did not have “an exciting life. She sequestered herself in the mornings to write and then went to a doctor’s office and greeted people. She was shy and dressed very frumpily.”
Bob began to decorate the apartment soon after he moved in with Alice, adding finds from Cost Plus at Fisherman’s Wharf, which was like a huge exotic marketplace: Chinese ceramics, Indian embroideries. And he recommended beautiful, simple, elegant clothes for Alice. From a tailor, she ordered dresses made “exactly like shirts”: “a long sleeveless grey flannel, short long sleeve grey flannel, short offwhite silk pongee, short blue & white polka dot—all shirts,” she wrote Max Steele, recommending that “Miss D.” (Diana Steele) would be “smashing in a yellow satin shirt, very narrow with button down collar.”19 Bob’s Pygmalion effect on Alice was balanced by the transformation that took place within her when Careless Love was published.
Even though the initial response to Careless Love had been exactly as quiet as David Segal had led her to expect, becoming a published author rather than an aspiring writer made a huge difference to Alice. Around that accomplishment, the rest of her life began to fall into place, with Robert McNie as partner in this change. He was “a show in and of himself—ascots, big sweeping statements, he loved entertaining… he was ahead of his time in ideas and color combinations,” their young friend Deborah Sparks remarked. “Dinner with Bob and Alice was always elegant, with a silver candelabra on the circular table. Wine and conversation flowed.” And photographer Fred Lyon recalled, “We all urgently need to laugh. Alice could make fun of herself. I can still hear her voice and her laugh.” To Lucie Jessner, Alice wrote, “We seem to get along best when playing house. In fact we get along increasingly well. If, as an astute friend of mine remarked, we only don’t louse it all up by getting married.”20 Luckily marriage was an endeavor and a formality that neither Alice nor Bob wished to repeat.
* * *
An only child born in Long Beach in 1925, Robert McNie was raised by his divorced, Scottish-immigrant mother, Helen Kyle, in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. He served in the US Merchant Marine before the end of World War II, then returned to San Luis Obispo to marry his high school sweetheart, Davideen Ball (her father wanted a boy), who was now a beauty queen at the nearby state agricultural college known as Cal Poly. Both eager to leave the small town behind, the McNies arrived in San Francisco in 1945. The city was then full of young people, especially ex-navy and merchant marine personnel beginning their postwar lives. Bob first sold encyclopedias for a New York firm, then furniture at the Union Furniture Company. Architect Mario Gardano noticed Bob’s taste and suggested he open his own business. He called his tiny shop downtown Studio Contemporary. Deen worked as a telephone operator, kept the books for Bob’s business, and did upholstery work for his clients. Julio Gallo, a founder of the Gallo Winery, and his wife, Aileen, hired Bob to furnish their new home next to a vineyard in Modesto. The Gallos “kind of put him on the map,” Morissa McNie said, but “they would call him at eleven at night to do something like drive two hours to Modesto the next day and help them decide about an ashtray. It wasn’t easy.” When he worked with architects and clients to design interior spaces, Bob’s quick, detailed ink drawings and watercolor renderings would sell a scheme quickly. “He knew what he wanted on every level and it was all independent—he would have things made—so his drawings were really loved by the workmen who had to carry out his plans, from ironworkers to seamstresses.”
Bob and Deen dressed elegantly and attended events such as the Opera Ball, where Bob met future clients. His severe profile became more handsome as he aged; Deen lightened her hair and her dramatic features began to look haunted. They took up skiing and she designed a line of skiwear, DEEN San Francisco. “Bob had such energy,” photographer Fred Lyon said of those days. “He was one of the prettiest skiers I’ve ever seen—that was more important to him than being an accomplished skier.” After the winter Olympics in Squaw Valley in 1960, they purchased five acres and a rustic early-century house near Lake Tahoe. Built with the timbers of an old logging flume, the house sat on the edge of the Truckee River, surrounded by meadow and forest. From this base, McNie continued his social climbing and expanded his business, becoming known as the “only heterosexual decorator in San Francisco.”I
While Bob’s business flourished, Deen was increasingly at home with her sewing machine and the duller tasks of making ends meet and looking after their three children—Morissa (Missy), born 1947; Robert Kyle II, 1950; and Joch Allin (Winky), 1951. Deen’s isolation was magnified by the winning, flirtatious personality by which her husband engaged his clients. As Bob was appearing in newspaper photos in company with San Francisco society women, Deen made the mistake of falling in love with one of their husbands and telling the man so. Rebuffed, she became despondent. She made black curtains for their house—which was already draped in fog most days—because she wanted it dark inside.
During the time Bob was pursuing a divorce, Deen threatened suicide and asked Bob to come back to her. He was “very torn at the time,” Alice recalled. But in his divorce settlement, Bob kept their mountain house and Deen received only $25 a month in alimony. “I think the judge didn’t like that woman,” Alice commented.21 Later Deen had a mental breakdown and received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Her daughter, Morissa, and her friend the therapist Deborah Sparks later theorized that Deen had not been schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill “but rather that she was a frustrated housewife of the fifties who became increasingly controlling.”
* * *
Curiously, Adams barely mentioned Bob McNie in her notebooks after he moved into her apartment. Almost every entry pertains to a novel (called “Mothering”) or stories in progress. Such notes as there are suggest contentment, even happiness and pleasure: “Bob—that gently sensual motion of his wrist.”22
“Every time we met for lunch,” Sandy Boucher recalled, “Alice had to tell me how handsome he was. Her message was I am so lucky because I am homely and he is this beautiful creature.” Alice recognized Bob’s flaws but excused them because “if you fall in love with inferior men you can’t then blame them for being inferior.”23 His dandyism, self-involvement, and habit of nodding off at the dinner table were hard to miss.
In one line she summed up his vanity: “I’ve a surprise for you—himself in a new suit.” Not the least of Bob’s vanities was pride in his genital endowment, noted by Alice as “their shared adoration of his sex.”24
Bob shuttled about the city, down the Peninsula, and across the bridges in a big black Ford station wagon that he named Black. It was crammed with materials he had scavenged, bought, and stored for projects. His studio, a former butcher’s storefront on Powell near Washington Square Park with a bedroom and office in the back, also overflowed with finds. Jane Kristiansen had her graphic design studio next door, and Alice was jealous of Bob’s closeness to Kristiansen until he invited her to dinner. Then they all bonded over Alice’s cats, especially Fergus—Ferg—a haughty Manx. When Kristiansen met her life partner, Patty O’Grady, they celebrated with another dinner. After a lot of wine, Alice began to giggle when she learned that she and Patty and Jane went to the same dentist. When this dentist leaned over his patients “his private parts would be right there, almost in your face,” Jane recalled. “It turned out we’d all three had the same vision of just grabbing him by the balls! So we were all rolling on the floor laughing, but Bob was stone-faced—that was not funny to him.” Patty said, “Alice was a shy snob, but it was different after she got to like us.”
* * *
Bob was extremely proud of his house on the Truckee River, which he’d decorated in the roughhewn style that was his trademark. Though it was poorly insulated and had difficult-to-access upstairs sleeping rooms, the house had a massive stone fireplace, a large hand-painted dining table, and a kitchen facing the stream.25 Alice shared Bob’s pride: “This weekend we are going up with some of the children to his house in the mountains; it’s really the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. Completely simple, completely elegant.” As her story “The Break-In” illustrates, Alice worried that loving this house so much would require her to become “more concerned with owning and taking care of things, better at cleaning up.” In fact, she was taking bulbs to plant around the house. “I think it’s terribly funny that at 41 I suddenly find that I just want a lot of children [meaning the teenagers] and a garden—a far cry from any notions I had at 20.”26
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