Here the plot becomes even more complicated: in 1912, when Maud had prepared the collection for Chronicles of Avonlea, she had used many stories, many which had already been published in periodicals. To satisfy Page, who was trying to make Chronicles look like another “Anne” book, she had revised these stories, inserting the character or name of Anne wherever she could. She had sent these off to Page, who made the selection for Chronicles of Avonlea and then supposedly returned all the typescripts and magazine clippings of the stories to her. In the days before photocopiers, when the only way to make a copy of something was to reproduce it by typewriter or by hand, Maud assumed that they had not kept copies of the rejects. She was wrong.
The Pages had actually typed up their own copies of all these stories before returning them to her, and secretly kept these copies in their vaults. If they had admitted to having these copies with “Anne” inserted throughout, Maud would have flatly refused to let them publish a second book entitled “Further Chronicles of Avonlea,” knowing full well that they would market it as another new “Anne” book.
Instead, Page led her to believe that he did not have copies of the stories. He asked her to retype all the material from her original magazine copies. She was willing to undertake this work for three reasons: because she knew the name “Anne” did not appear often in the magazine versions and she could remove it if it did; because she knew she could cut out the descriptive material she had used elsewhere; and because this would prevent Page from bringing out a book in a year that she had another book coming out.
So on January 22, 1919, Maud signed an agreement in which Page purchased all rights to the income from contracts for Anne of Green Gables (April 22, 1907), Anne of Avonlea (February 16, 1909), Kilmeny of the Orchard (February 14, 1910), The Story Girl (November 15, 1910), Chronicles of Avonlea (April 26, 1912), The Golden Road (July 18, 1913), and Anne of the Island (January 26, 1915) for $17,880. (Technically, they had always held the copyright, but they’d had to pay her royalties. What they bought now were the entire “rights,” so that they could keep all income from the books.) This agreement specified that the L. C. Page Company also secured the copyright to sixteen individual short stories that would become Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Montgomery was to furnish them with copies of these stories that she would type up from her originals. Page retained the right to make small editorial changes in the stories, but agreed not to insert the name “Anne” in any stories where it was not already, or to use the name “Anne” on the subtitle, or to put a picture of “Anne” on the book to lead the public to think it was another “Anne” book.
Maud signed the agreement, thinking it meant that she would be free of the Page firm forever. She also thought that the public might eventually get tired of her older books. And, being pragmatic, she thought “a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.”
She returned home and began preparing the sixteen stories, which took two months of non-stop typing and correcting. On March 20, 1919, she sent Page the retyped stories, having taken out references to “Anne” and various descriptive materials. She considered the matter finished.
She was in the dark about other actions behind the scenes. She did not know that Page had been negotiating the sale of film rights to Anne of Green Gables long before the January 22, 1919, contract was signed. The minute they had her signature on the document giving them the full rights to her books for the $17,880, they finalized the film deal, collecting $40,000 for themselves. The movie was finished by Realart in summer 1919. Evidently it had been under production while she was still negotiating with Page, and before she had signed the contract. Maud did not find out about the movie, and the loss of what should have been her share of the income ($20,000), until December 1919, after the film had been released, and had begun showing, to wild acclaim, in movie houses across America.40
There was a further jolt in store when the galley proofs of Further Chronicles came for her to check in January 1920. Not only was there an introduction that linked all these stories to Anne of Green Gables, but Page had ignored the 1919 versions she had sent. Instead, they had used the old 1912 versions that she had prepared for them when they were still on good terms, and into which she had inserted Anne’s name wherever she could—copies they had not admitted that they still had.
Maud wrote them a furious letter, saying they could not use those 1912 versions. They informed her that since the stories were already typeset, they were going to use them, whether she liked it or not. They stated further that although the contract specified they could not add Anne’s name, in the 1912 versions she herself had added Anne’s name. Unfortunately, this was true.
Maud saw she had been tricked. Page had let her spend two months of tedious work typing and revising the 1919 copies in order to mislead her into thinking that his company did not have copies of the 1912 stories. They knew that she would eventually find out that they had had the copies all along, but letting his enemies know that he had bested them apparently gave Lewis Page particular pleasure. He figured that after the book was published, it would be too late for Maud to do anything about it.
It is perhaps a small mercy that Maud did not learn about another offensive manoeuvre by Page: on April 10, 1919, Page wrote the immensely popular Canadian poet and performer Bliss Carman—who had already published with them—asking if he would write the introduction to Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Carman was always in need of money, and Page would have expected him to jump at the opportunity, not only because being asked to write an introduction was an honour, but also because it paid well. However, Page showed his sleaze in the final paragraph of the otherwise fine letter, and Carman must have balked:
My Dear Bliss:
Would you like a commission of $25. to write an appreciation or foreword (on the lines that you did a while ago for Annie Fellows Johnston’s TRAVELLERS FIVE) for a new collection of stories by your compatriot, L. M. Montgomery, author of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, etc?
I recall that you have always been a real admirer of this writer, going back to the time when you said of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES something to this affect [sic]:—“It is a real tribute to the merit and charm of this story, that while the young people of the house are making a clamouring search from cellar to attic for the missing volume, they cannot appease their desire because the master of the house has taken the book to finish the reading on the way to town.”
The new book is to be entitled FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA, Avonlea, of course, being the charming little village in Prince Edward Island where the author lived, where Anne Shirley was created, and where the author resides and wrote of all of the characters she has pictured—from real life. In the forthcoming volume Anne Shirley only appears incidentally, the same as in the previous volume, CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA, but the atmosphere and charm is there, and I want this brought out in the appreciation, and I know that you can do it.
…
It is possible, also, that we might arrange to let you do a little retouching or polishing of the stories if they need it, in which case we would pay $50. instead of $25.
Very sincerely yours,
[signed] Lewis C. Page41
Bliss Carman was an odd personality, but he was no fool. Why would L. M. Montgomery not polish her own stories? It is likely that Carman, well connected to the literary gossip of the day, had already heard of people’s legal woes with Page. To Carman’s credit, he did not touch this assignment. The introduction was done instead by Nathan Haskell Dole, a prolific American writer, editor, and translator, who was eminent in the Boston social and literary world that Page was part of.
George Page wrote Maud saying that their lawyer had advised them that they had every right to publish the 1912 versions since they had been “found” in the vaults after all. He added a postscript saying that he was acting under his lawyer’s directions, which Maud interpreted to mean that he was uncomfortable with the way she was being treated. She speculated that he had to compromise his own integrity under
pressure from his forceful older brother. Later events suggest she was right.
Maud instructed her American attorney, Weld Allen Rollins, to file suit, if necessary, to stop Page from publishing the 1912 versions, and another letter to the Pages telling them that they were to direct all further correspondence to her lawyer. Three days later, Rollins wrote Page that he was seeking an injunction against the publication of the book. George Page wrote back the next day that the Page Company believed it was acting within its legal rights. Five days later Rollins responded that the Page Company would be liable for heavy damages if they proceeded. On March 14, 1920, Page notified Maud that he was publishing the 1912 versions over her objections, and on April 8, the book appeared. Maud wired Rollins to proceed with litigation. Two days later she received her “author copies” of Further Chronicles of Avonlea and discovered that, although it did not have the same picture of “Anne” on the cover, it had a red-haired girl who looked very similar to the other pictures of “Anne.” Page had won the first round by ignoring the injunction, but the fight was not over.
In her own copy of the Page first edition of Further Chronicles, Maud inserted furious comments. She bracketed the first three paragraphs of “Tannis of the Flats,” saying that these three paragraphs were a Page interpolation. She was embarrassed that many of the descriptive passages from stories in Further Chronicles had since come out in other books that she had published with Stokes, and she bracketed these. No author would want to appear to be recycling her own material, as if her creative wells had run dry.
—
On April 24, 1920, Rollins filed a “bill in equity” on behalf of Maud in the Suffolk County Court requesting an injunction to prevent the Page Company from further printings of the Further Chronicles and an accounting of profits and damages for loss of reputation. This was Maud’s second lawsuit against Page, and it dragged on until December 1928.
She had to make a trip to Boston, in May 1920, for the courtroom showdown. She soon received a brutal lesson in how simple matters can become unbelievably complex in a court of law. For nearly two months, the Pages and their lawyers nitpicked over details in the contract to obfuscate the real issues and to draw things out, creating more expense for Maud. Because the Pages had breached the 1919 contract’s terms forbidding them from marketing the Further Chronicles as another “Anne” novel, this was one of the contentious points. Maud wrote:
Those three grave lawyers and myself wrangled all day over the question of the exact colour of “Anne’s” hair and the definition of “Titian red.” Ye gods, it was funny! The big table was snowed under with literature and prints to prove or disprove. Years ago, when I sat down in that old kitchen at Cavendish, that rainy spring evening, and dowered “Anne” with red hair, I did not dream that a day would come when it would be fought over like this in a court room. It would be deliciously amusing—if it were not so beastly horrible. French [Page’s lawyer] was determined to prove that Titian hair was dark red and that I knew it was dark red. I didn’t. I always supposed Titian-red was a sort of flame-red and I stuck to it through all his badgering. Rollins dug up an encyclopedia in which Titan hair was defined as a “bright golden auburn” and the Master said it had always been his impression that Titian hair was the hue of burnished copper! And so on! (June 18, 1920)
For a person who by nature avoided direct conflict in her life, Maud stood up well in the trial. Her fighting spirit was aroused in the heated cross-examination, but her nerves fell apart as soon as she left the court. She could not sleep at night. She took prescribed Veronal and bromides to help calm her nerves. When she finally got back home on July 10, 1920, she was so agitated that she cried on and off for days. She had missed Chester’s eighth birthday for the sake of the trial, and yet nothing had been resolved—wrangling continued long after her own testimony was finished and she came home.
In the meantime, Page decided that the best method of fighting Maud’s first lawsuit was to counterattack. In a third lawsuit registered in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in October 1920, Page sued Maud for libel, alleging that she had impugned his business practices. The case was dismissed in that court on August 11, 1921. Not to be thwarted, Page then appealed it to the United States Supreme Court, where the same thing was argued on March 13, 1923. It was again denied in a judgment by Mr. Justice McKenna on April 9, 1923.
Page surely did not expect to win such frivolous libel suits, but he knew that while the case dragged on he would have the pleasure of harassing Maud now that swords were openly drawn. He was probably astute enough to know that although she could put up a tough front, she would have many sleepless nights of worry. For her part, she was realizing how easy it was to go to law, but how hard it was to extract yourself once there. Worse, she had to pay her lawyers every single day that the case dragged on. Rollins kept reminding her, too, how unpredictable the results of any lawsuit could be. Maud had also seen how convincingly a dishonest person could lie in court and how easily a smart lawyer could obfuscate the truth. Rollins periodically lost his own courage and urged her to settle. She flatly refused each time.
Her second lawsuit against Page (which had started in 1920) continued to drag on and on. From time to time she sent Mr. Rollins payments for several thousand dollars. Page was now represented by an exceptionally able and aggressive lawyer named Asa Palmer French, who had been the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. He had an aggressive style, like Page: he was insulting, unpredictable, and intimidating.
This second suit was very complicated, and the conflicting statements (or “lies,” as Maud called them) made it difficult to follow. As a result, the case was handed over to a “Master,” whose job was to sort through all the documentation and file a report for the judge. This Master’s report, handed down in August 1921, was largely adverse to Maud. By this time, she had paid Rollins $6,000 on the case, and nothing had been determined. However, Rollins was able to appeal and secure a more favourable report from the Master. What had seemed to Maud a simple case of bullying and fraud had turned into something incredibly convoluted.
Maud, Mr. Rollins, Stokes’s attorneys (who were helping Rollins), and John McClelland were given an unexpected boost in the middle of this dreary litigation. Maud learned in late March 1922 that Wanamaker’s—the most prestigious department store and book-selling chain in America at that time, and certainly Page’s best customer—had shut down all its accounts with the Page Company. This was an astonishing move, and a devastating financial blow to Page. John Wanamaker was fed up with Page’s unethical business practices and simply refused to deal with him any more. Mr. Wanamaker was a formidable businessman with a huge fortune of his own, and he was one of the few who could stand up to Lewis Page.42 Being dropped by Wanamaker’s damaged the L. C. Page Company’s reputation, as well as hurting their bottom line. This was big news in the American book world—the biggest retailer and book chain in American dropping one of the most powerful publishers of popular books.
The Wanamaker’s cancellation began to empty Page’s deep pockets. (When Maud received the typed evidence from the trials in late 1928, she learned that without Wanamakers the Page firm receipts had dropped from close to half a million dollars in 1921 to roughly $250,000 in 1926.)
By now, the strife that Page had brought into others’ lives was starting to take a serious toll on his own firm. Lewis and his brother were fighting more. The milder and less litigious George Page saw the larger picture: that his brother’s bullying ways were costing the firm enormously, both in profits and reputation. Maud did not know this, however. She simply saw in Page a man who seemed impervious to destruction. She lived in a constant state of tension, without the alleviation provided by a stable and sympathetic husband’s commiseration. Ewan was preoccupied with his own problems.
On April 14, 1923, Maud received joyous news from her attorney: Judge Hammond had given a favourable decision on the second lawsuit after three years. He wrote that although Page had thought he was with
in his rights in publishing the book from the 1912 versions of the stories, he did not in fact have these rights, and as a result Page was directed to pay Maud all the profits from Further Chronicles of Avonlea.
Page, not one to capitulate easily, instructed Mr. French, his lawyer, to appeal Judge Hammond’s findings. Maud and her lawyer found this bizarre: typing and printing up all the material for the appeal would cost Page more than the judgment against him. But Page still had money, and even if his lawsuits were eventually dismissed, he clearly intended to harass and perhaps destroy Maud as they dragged along to their conclusion.
Incredibly, Page next flatly asserted that there were no profits whatsoever from Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Everyone knew that there must have been profits, but to prove this Maud’s lawyers would need to examine the L. C. Page financial books, which would involve more expensive litigation. Weld Rollins was quite sick of the Page firm, and now he had to nickel-and-dime with Page, who was charging up all the expenses they could find against the gross profits.
This delaying tactic did not promise Page any success in the end. There were profits and they would be dug out. But Page knew that Maud would have to keep paying her lawyer while an expensive forensic accountant located the profits. Maud understood by now that Page would rather pay his own lawyer $10,000 than pay her $1,000. Rollins saw that she was going to be paying so much for his services that he again suggested she simply settle at this point. She would not. All her Presbyterian rectitude stiffened her resolve. She believed that injustice should not go unpunished. She could not fight the demons in her own husband’s mind, but she could battle the devilish Page.
In January 1924, Page and his lawyers took another step: they moved their ongoing (but thus far unsuccessful) libel suit against Maud into a New York jurisdiction. This started the fourth of their lawsuits. In December 1925, after two more years of wrangling, Page appealed the case all the way to the New York Court of Appeal, but this decision came down against him. Still, Page knew that if he wasn’t winning, he was nevertheless wearing out his adversary and draining her bank account into her lawyer’s pocket. Page often said that he wished he had been a lawyer himself.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 30