Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  In 1897, after several years working at his stepfather’s publishing firm, Page acquired the subsidiary firm of Joseph P. Knight and renamed it “The L. C. Page Company.” He set himself up as president, and installed his brilliant but less dashing brother George as treasurer and head of the manufacturing department. He took over established best-sellers like The Little Colonel (1895) by Annie Fellows Johnston, which became a series. Then he hit the jackpot with Anne of Green Gables in 1908. It was reprinted twenty times by April 1910, and thirty-eight times by 1914 (this May 1914 popular edition was advertised as “limited to 150,000 copies”). Another bestseller in 1913 was Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna. He had started his firm with inherited money but soon was doing very well on his own.33

  In 1910, when Maud first met him, his reputation was well established as owner of one of the more prestigious publishing firms in the United States. Anne of Green Gables had continued an extraordinary success ever since its 1908 publication; by 1911, Page was flush with money from it. Seeking to improve his social stature after bad publicity from his divorce, he partnered with another man to buy a baseball team, the Boston Braves, paying some $100,000. Soon the Boston papers were carrying accounts of his lawsuit to wrest full control of the Braves from his partner. Other skirmishes reflected on his character. He frequented the Boston Club for men, but was eventually expelled for being “insufficiently a gentleman,” after he seduced a young female employee in a brazen manner that the other men could not ignore. Undaunted, he then started a club of his own, according to his cousin and literary executor, W. Peter Coues. Even to Bostonians, he was a larger-than-life figure.

  Located at 53 Beacon Street in Boston, the L. C. Page Company headquarters were in a five-storey brownstone that was exceedingly chic and palatial. In 1914, he bought out his deceased stepfather’s firm, Dana Estes and Company. (His stepfather had died in 1909, and the firm had gone downhill. Page waited until its value dropped, and then bought it.)

  Page cleverly singled out a very good niche market—popular fiction—at a time when literacy was skyrocketing as a result of the promotion of universal education in the United States and Canada. His books were beautifully made, and he took pride in his reputation as the “best book-maker” in the States.

  Maud says in her journals that she did not know the firm when she sent Anne of Green Gables off to them, but she was probably disingenuous. Page had published the famous Maritime poet Bliss Carman since 1902, and Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, another famous Maritimer in 1903. In 1908, Page published Carman’s The Making of Personality, and Ewan gave it to Maud as a gift at Christmas. Later, she claimed that she sent the manuscript for Anne to Page because a friend of hers from Summerside worked for Page who accepted it only because Miss Arbuckle talked it up (July 30, 1916).

  Booksellers across the United States and Canada complained that Page was a hard, and often unfair, businessman. He would deliberately overship, and then refuse to take returns, and then refuse to ship anything more until all old bills were paid, regardless of whether the booksellers had sold the extra books that they had not even ordered. He would arbitrarily deny terms and vary discounts so that booksellers never knew what to expect. Booksellers loathed him, but Maud was so popular across North America that they had no choice but to deal with Page. Although Page published other best-selling books, Maud proved to be his most successful author, and Roger W. Straus projected that she made him more money over his sustained career than anyone else. When Farrar, Straus & Giroux purchased the L. C. Page Company in 1957, Straus and his chief financial officer, Robert Wohlforth, said that they purchased the firm primarily to get the rights to Anne of Green Gables and the other L. M. Montgomery books.34

  Page was not only tough with booksellers. He was a “stern employer,” said one person, and you worked hard there. Within his own firm, there were unusual practices. Almost all of his employees were women. He was notorious for hiring clever young women to work in his firm because he could pay them far less than men. There was no employment equity then, and women often made one-quarter to one-half what men did in the professions open to them.

  He had other reasons for favouring women employees. “He liked women,” his cousin Peter Coues recounted in the 1980s. William Pearce (Peter) Coues was much younger than L. C. Page, and became his executor.35 Page’s personal allure was such that many women employees vied for his attention. Tales of his seductions, occasionally rebuffed but more often successful, were the stuff of legend and titillating amazement in his day. While there undoubtedly were women who worked for him who did not attract his advances—or who managed to escape them—the firm is remembered as having the atmosphere of a harem: it was said to turn alive with excitement whenever he walked through a room. That he kept and managed multiple mistresses at the same time was a source of gossip among women and envy among men. “Women gave him comfort,” as his cousin tactfully put it, “and he took advantage of this.”36

  Page also manipulated his authors. He bought copyrights outright from authors if he could. He also offered smaller royalties than the industry standard, as with Maud.37 In contracts, Page put in his “binding clause” to hold his authors to the same exploitative terms forever (i.e., royalties on the wholesale rather than retail price. Maud got seven to nine cents per book, instead of the nineteen cents that might have been more reasonably expected).

  Page’s widespread reputation as a powerful and vindictive man frightened people. To Page, authors were like common workers in factories, and he rode roughshod over them. A large number of his best-selling authors were women, and women at this time were socialized to be submissive to men. Page was accustomed to getting his way by charm; he used his temper when his charm failed; and if both of these failed, there was the threat of a lawsuit.

  Page had a working business relationship with his brother, George, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, but even with his own family members, Lewis could be a bully. George was the physical opposite of his brother—shorter, softer in appearance, and less imposing. Maud believed that he was a much nicer man when she met him, and her opinion was shared by others who remembered the Page brothers. George and Lewis quarrelled a great deal, according to the employees. It is the general consensus that in every difference of opinion, Lewis dominated.

  Page was a sportsman who liked the trappings of wealth, the high life, and especially gambling. His gambling debts were often substantial. In 1913, when Anne of Green Gables was in its thirty-seventh printing, making big money for Page, he made the papers with yet another lawsuit: he brought suit against a New York gambling house to stop payment on a $1,500 cheque written at 5:00 a.m. to cover some money he had lost during the evening. He asserted in his court papers that when he sobered up the next day, he discovered he had been “cheated,” being too drunk to be in possession of his faculties. He used good lawyers, and won his case.

  Tales of Page’s life in the fast lane spread rapidly; in 1916, his third marriage started unravelling in an ugly public fight. Mildred told the court that Page had ordered her out of their home, and when she and her baby daughter returned against his will, he closed her accounts, shut off the gas and electricity so that she had to use candles, and forced her to sell her jewellery to buy food, at a time when his yearly income was $35,000. (In the same year, the Canadian prime minister made $14,500, Ewan made $900, an average working Canadian man $800, and an average woman $400.) Mildred obtained a settlement for $4,400 a year in alimony, plus $50 a month for an infant named “Mildred.”38 Page’s second wife (Kate Stearns) was already receiving $1,600 per year in alimony, which meant that between the two women, he was liable for $8,200 per year to his two former wives (not the $10,000-plus figure Maud heard through the grapevine).

  Hearing all this gossip about Page’s divorce and business practices, Maud certainly realized that Page would be a tricky adversary. Between his gambling debts, his need for alimony money, his expensive social life, his purchase of baseball teams, his founding of clubs, his g
enerosity to mistresses, and his love of costly wines and food and attractive female servants, Lewis Page had a great need for more cash, and, as Maud noted later on, a need to “cheat his authors.” According to Mr. Wohlforth, the publishing world was full of stories about Page, “who contrived a lot of stress in everybody.” In the 1980s, Roger W. Straus, of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, characterized L. C. Page as one of the most colourful characters in the publishing world over a sixty-year period.39

  In the ensuing decade there would be five lawsuits and countersuits between Maud and the L. C. Page Company. These lawsuits would cost Maud a small fortune. The lawsuits cost Page even more, as well as the reputation of his firm. The terrible irony is that he was able to finance his legal cases against Maud easily out of the profits he made from selling her books and, later, from the movie rights to Anne of Green Gables.

  If Page had thought that Maud was just a country lass from a small Island province, easily intimidated because she was a woman and somewhat shy, he certainly misjudged her. She came to the Page fight in 1917 with no small amount of residual anger. After a childhood with difficult, bullying men, Maud had a strong sense of herself as a person—she was, after all, descended from the prominent Senator Donald Montgomery and Speaker Macneill. She may have been over-sensitive and emotionally fragile, but she also possessed a toughness and determination that was equal to Page’s meanness. Nothing pulled her out of a depression more quickly than a worthy opponent. And Page was certainly that.

  The legal action between Maud and Page started after the contract that bound her to Page had expired, and she chose John McClelland of McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart (founded in 1906) as her new publisher and literary agent. Mr. McClelland had taken her new book of poetry, The Watchman, which Page had refused. Although she had originally wanted McClelland to let Page have the American rights to her next new novel, Anne’s House of Dreams, Page’s threats to sue her and McClelland if they did not give him these rights worked against him. McClelland sold the American rights to the Frederick Stokes Company. Stokes, in turn, granted the New York firm of A. L. Burt reprint rights for this same work.

  Page, enraged that Maud had had the gall to offer the poetry book he had refused to another publisher, and then to switch publishers (which was within her rights, of course), continued to threaten her and McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart with lawsuits if they did not give him the American rights to Anne’s House of Dreams. Page cunningly sent Maud an advance on her next set of royalties; she cashed this cheque, thinking it was for his royalty payments on her other books (December 31, 1916). Later, when she read the cleverly worded letter more carefully, she discovered that it included payment in advance for Anne’s House of Dreams, which allowed him to argue that her cashing the cheque constituted proof that he was in his rights to assume he would get those rights. Then, in February 1917, Page, angry that the rights had gone to Stokes, wrote Maud that he had discovered an “error” in accounting from three years earlier, and thus was withholding $1,000 from the royalties due her. This was a barefaced lie— she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and would be furious. This was his way of being spiteful, and of giving her a threatening warning at the same time. There was no way for her to get the money except to take him to court. Both knew that it would cost her far more than $1,000 in expenses to get that $1,000 out of him. She realized that he was trying to intimidate her into returning to him, and she was not going to buckle.

  L. C. Page proceeded to sell reprint rights for a cheap reprint edition of Anne’s House of Dreams to Grosset & Dunlap. This action was astonishing, considering that the rights to publish this book had gone to Stokes. Page’s arrogance in selling property that was not his is incomprehensible, but he covered himself through the “advance” he had sent, tricking her. If he did not have a legal right to something, Page apparently intended to bully and bluff. He had sufficient money and clout that other publishers, as well as booksellers, feared him.

  It is an unfortunate fact, both then and today, that people’s legal rights are only as good as their ability to enforce them. Page knew this very well. He had a deep purse, and Maud (like most authors) did not. He knew that Maud would have to sue him in his jurisdiction, adding yet another expensive burden for her. Where would she even get a lawyer? He banked on Maud expecting that if she started a lawsuit against him and won, it would cost her more in expenses and legal fees than she would get out of it. On the other hand, if she lost, she would have to pay damages, as well as her own court costs and possibly his. This could ruin her financially. Since she had moved to another publisher, Page did not care if he destroyed her, or at least worried her so much she could not write.

  Maud knew, too, that the stress of the lawsuit would keep her in constant turmoil, and affect her writing and work, as well as her pleasure in her children and social life. However, if she did not sue, she knew she would stew and smoulder and hate her victimhood. It was a no-win situation. Page knew that, too, and he did not expect her to sue him.

  Page not only threatened Maud with lawsuits, he also kept threatening Stokes, her American publisher, and McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, her Canadian one. While they all believed he was bluffing, they were nevertheless nervous, given his power base and reputation. They heard through the grapevine—for the Canadian legal world was very small—that he had engaged the Toronto firm of Blake, Lash, & Cassells to represent him in Canada. This frightened both Maud and McClelland.

  What L. C. Page did not anticipate was Maud’s incredibly strong sense of justice. Truth was a very strong component in her moral code, and when angry, she became much tougher. Page must have been surprised when he learned that in May 1917 she had engaged a lawyer in the United States through the American Authors’ League and had entered suit against him in the Massachusetts Court of Equity.

  Maud was suing for two things: the $1,000 in royalties he had withheld on the reprint of Anne of Green Gables; and damages for fraudulently selling Grosset and Dunlap the rights to Anne’s House of Dreams. She expected to lose the second point because she had made the mistake of cashing the cheque he had sent her for the Grosset and Dunlap sale.

  The first lawsuit was heard between January 11 and 22, 1919, in the Suffolk County Court in Boston by Judge Charles Francis Jenney. Frank Nelson Nay represented the Page Company and Weld Allen Rollins represented Maud. As anticipated, the judge gave the second point to Page, but he gave Montgomery the first point, ordering Page to pay her the $1,000.

  Knowing the value of her work, Page then offered Maud $10,000 for her rights. She refused. She had seen enough of Page by this time—his bullying and his mendacity, even in a court of law where he had sworn to tell the truth—that she wanted no further association with such a man. She had been startled, for instance, to discover that when John McClelland’s firm sold her books in Canada, a very small market, comparatively, the Canadian orders were for thousands more copies than Page had reported selling in the United States. This indicated a longtime fraud in their accounting. She estimated that she had lost some $50,000 to him from his beggarly royalty on the “wholesale” rather than the “retail” price, alone. (Stokes was giving her 20 percent of the retail price, instead of Page’s 10 percent of the wholesale price.) She began to wonder how many more thousands she had lost if the Pages fiddled their books.

  This all made Maud give serious thought to how much money she should ask for, for the sale of her rights, and she came up with the figure of $18,000. After some dickering and bluffing, Page agreed to the sum of $17,880, with a condition: that she allow his company to publish one more book of “Anne” short stories, the stories that had been left over after they had made their selection for Chronicles of Avonlea. This new book would be called Further Chronicles of Avonlea.

  Here, the Page deviltry becomes very complicated. Maud wanted to sever all relations with the Page company, but they had reminded her about these leftover stories, saying that since most had been published in Canadian magazines, no copyrigh
t had been taken out on them in the United States. Therefore, any American publisher could hunt them up and publish them without her permission, or without paying her any royalties whatsoever. This threat was blackmail.

  Maud was aghast. This meant Page could bring out this book, falsely packaging it as a new “Anne of Green Gables” book, in a year when she was bringing out a truly new “Anne” book with Stokes in the United States and with McClelland and Stewart in Canada. Because Page’s name was so well known as her publisher, people would buy his book, assuming it was her newest one, and undercut her sales with her other publishers. The new publishers would be justly annoyed. To tie the Page Company down to bringing this book out in a year when she was not bringing out another “Anne” novel, she agreed to let them have these stories and the copyright. But she imposed conditions: that the book would not be fobbed off as another “Anne” book. The name “Anne” or “Anne Shirley” and Anne’s picture were not to appear on the cover, and in the promotion they were not to advertise the collection as an “Anne” book, although they could say it was by the author of “Anne.” She stipulated various other conditions, as well.