Mildred had thrown her earlier gifts for acting into entertaining Edwin’s celebrity friends in Hollywood, her success resulting in a cookbook Knopf would publish in 1950. With 650 recipes, The Perfect Hostess Cook Book was a look at “how the privileged class in New York City and California entertained, and what they ate.” According to the four rules stated on the vividly colored book jacket—“Enthusiasm, Pride in what you serve, Confidence in yourself and Confidence once again!!”—a recipe existed to enhance the perfect host as well as her food.9 Blanche had clearly learned much about giving parties from her sister-in-law in the early days of Mildred’s marriage.
Back in New York, Blanche found herself seated next to a fascinating guest at a friend’s dinner. Before long, she was chatting with the stranger about the “City of Angels” she had just visited, even as she lamented not being able to go to Paris because of the war. If visiting her talented sister-in-law made Blanche feel deficient, her trips to France were always uplifting. Surprising her by responding in French, her dinner partner said quietly: “Perhaps one day we will visit together.” Whether the gentleman meant Paris or Los Angeles, Blanche was smitten with the elegant Hubert Hohe, referred to as “Hohe” by Blanche and her associates throughout his life. According to Toni Pasquale, “He was one of those foreign charmers, average height but tan.”10 An émigré from Germany ten years earlier who was now a supposedly successful Manhattan stockbrocker, he would never seem entirely trustworthy to Blanche’s friends, yet he would become the love of Blanche’s life.
A large part of Hohe’s attraction for Blanche was his complete separation from Alfred and the publishing world. Soon she invented a reason to return to California, this time with her beau at her side. In high spirits, she took Hohe to meet the Heifetzes, who were vacationing nearby—appalling Florence with her flagrant disregard of proprieties. Then she took Hohe to meet Alfred’s brother and sister-in-law, expecting Edwin and Mildred to welcome them for an overnight visit. Shocked by Blanche’s behavior, the Knopfs did not. The couple stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel instead.
* * *
Exactly who Hubert Hohe was and what his intentions were remain uncertain, but he swiftly became a magnet for Blanche. To Florence Heifetz, the Frenchman seemed “a gigolo.” Ruth Levine Nasoff remembered Hohe as a “gaunt, pallid” man, “far less attractive than Alfred.” Yet, after only a few months, Blanche decided she would finally leave Alfred and marry her lover—until Hohe “realized” his own divorce wasn’t final yet.11
Blanche confessed to Ruth, now a confidante, that at forty-five she had fallen in love for the first time. As if instinctively, the Francophile publisher was acting the part of Balzac’s A Woman of Thirty (La Femme de Trente Ans), born again through romance for which she was willing to risk disaster. Florence Heifetz, among others, remembers Blanche proudly “showing Hohe off” at Rockaway Beach in Queens, and at the Heifetzes’ dinner parties in Manhattan. “Frankly, I just don’t understand … Blanche doted on him.”12
Clearly Alfred knew of his wife’s latest affair. For the Knopfs’ celebration of their twenty-fifth year of publishing, he set up separate parties: for Blanche, he arranged a luncheon on December 18, 1940, at the Dorset Hotel at 30 West Fifty-Fourth Street, where the Knopfs were now living (Alfred’s room upstairs and Blanche’s below). He held a separate party at a club, unspecified in his records, for himself and guests. At Blanche’s lunch Robert Nathan recited a poem he wrote in her honor, and Thomas Mann, in his eccentric English, gave a tribute acknowledging her importance to Knopf. Mann had always appreciated Blanche’s kindnesses to him, dating from their first meeting. When Knopf signed him, he had known no English, so he and Blanche had spoken French (his second language). Formal in prose and in nature, Mann still seemed to Blanche the quintessential old-world European.
Mencken spoke in carefully chosen words that were flattering to both Knopfs, attempting to balance on a very fine wire. He, Anne O’Hare McCormick, and Fannie Hurst were the hosts, the women among Blanche’s good friends by now. McCormick, whose book Blanche wanted to publish, was one of the most distinguished women in the country, the first female journalist to receive a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. Blanche prized Hurst for her ability to spin a tale, and for her moral courage as well: she used race relations as the theme for her most famous novel, Imitation of Life. A champion of Zora Neale Hurston, she had hired the writer briefly as her live-in secretary in 1925.
For years, Fannie and Blanche had traded news of the latest diet crazes, not to mention pills, until Fannie penned a book, No Food with My Meals (1935), that, through humor, condemned the cult of skinniness. Hurst candidly discussed body issues that remain current today. She decried the “ideal weights” assigned adults in their mid-thirties as “usually those of underdeveloped boys,” and describes becoming “nasty in spirit” while she starved herself.13 Forcing upon her guests platters of rich food, she prayed that they gained weight. “I schemed for the obesity of my lean friends,” she wrote.14 Hurst’s book struck Blanche as gospel truth, and for a few years she weighed ten pounds more than she had on her diet pills.
Inevitably in those months, no matter how determined the gaiety, conversation turned to the war. Blanche and Mencken were unable to meet without discussing the conflict that they, along with most Americans, felt sure their country would join. A few days before Christmas, Blanche wrote to Myra Hess, who, in an effort to boost the national morale, had organized low-cost concerts at Britain’s National Gallery: “Dearest Myra, England is doing a superb job and I think we over here are now girding our loins and really getting underway ourselves … You see, a public has to be made conscious and you know how long it took England to realize what was going on. It is taking us not quite as long perhaps but it is taking a lot of time.”15
As 1941 rolled along with President Roosevelt’s third inauguration, Blanche was impatient to get William Shirer’s book back from the printer. Its subject—anti-Semitism and Nazi tyranny in Berlin, where Shirer remained from the Anschluss until late 1940—was obviously time-sensitive. She wanted it out quickly.
Frustrated by the limits imposed on her going overseas, Blanche took a trip west. She trekked to Texas with Alfred, then traveled to New Orleans to meet with Henry Miller to discuss the possibility of Knopf publishing his letters (they didn’t). Finally, “the Baroness,” as Van Vechten wrote to Langston Hughes, using the appellation her close friends employed, went to Los Angeles to do deals, check on Thomas Mann, and talk yet again with Raymond Chandler about Farewell, My Lovely. Always pleased to see Mildred Knopf, even for coffee, Blanche was aware of how disapproving she was of her relationship with Hohe, who stayed behind this time. The women stuck to safe topics.
Once home, Blanche became involved with The Mind of the South, by W. J. Cash, an editor of the progressive Charlotte News, who was writing extraordinary features on the world crisis, for which he would later receive a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Published on February 10, 1941, The Mind of the South was praised lavishly by sources ranging from the NAACP to The Saturday Review of Literature and The New York Times. Most well-respected southern newspapers would eventually share the opinion of Time magazine: “Anything written about the South henceforth must start where [Cash] leaves off.”16 The book ended: “Proud, brave, courteous, personally generous … sometimes terrible, in its action—such was the South at its best. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas [and] above all … a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values … remain its characteristic vices today.”17
There turned out to be little time for Blanche or her writer to revel in the book’s reception. Tragically, on July 1, in Mexico City, where Cash was due to speak at a university, he was found hanging from a doorknob by a tie, his death an apparent murder staged as a suicide by a North American Nazi group. Instead, long a depressive, Cash had in fact killed himself.
Another signal of the times appeared with the arrival of the publishers Kurt and Helen Wolff, who
fled Germany and immigrated to Manhattan. The American journalist Varian Fry, later called the Oskar Schindler of France, arranged the couple’s escape—along with at least four thousand other refugees. The following year the Wolffs founded Pantheon Books, which specialized in European literature. Regardless of her company’s strength, Blanche must have been wary of the “new Knopfs” in town. Her approach was to befriend them at once, inviting them frequently to Purchase dinners, according to the Knopf editor Henry Carlisle.
Four decades later, Herbert Mitgang’s New Yorker account of the Wolffs seems a peculiar revision of history, given that at the time of the new firm’s formation in 1942, Alfred A. Knopf had already become a legendary house. Sixteen years after Blanche’s death, in 1982, Mitgang would write that in the early forties, Helen Wolff, with her husband, Kurt, had “transformed the nature of publishing in this country by introducing first-rate foreign writers”—a description taking no account of the similar Knopf trajectory preceding the Wolffs’ by more than twenty-five years. Also like the earlier publishers, the Wolffs put out “only what they considered worthwhile, refusing to compromise or to be diverted by commerce”—language long invoked to describe Knopf.18
* * *
In 1941, the year that the war relocated the Wolffs to America, Knopf brought out Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose: A Story of Dunkirk, an O. Henry Award–winning novella about the horrors of battle—and, finally, Berlin Diary. Shirer had told the Knopfs that he needed a ten-thousand-dollar advance, half up front, and he never forgot Alfred grumbling: “Only H. G. Wells ever received such an advance.” After all, Shirer was “only a journalist, not a writer.”19 When Alfred balked, Blanche had to remind her husband of her meetings with Shirer in Berlin, Paris, and London, of her years of relentlessly pursuing Shirer’s book. She was certain that Knopf would recover its expenses.
Her persistence paid off: although higher bids came in, Shirer wanted Blanche to publish his book, and Alfred relented. Knopf sent Shirer his check due on signing, which paid for the writer’s rent and expenses at his house in Chappaqua, New York, where he sat down with “paste and scissors” and “tried to make a book out of the diaries,” just as Blanche had advised. Worried that his daily writing wasn’t “that interesting,” with Blanche’s reassurance he plowed forward, finishing the book that April and “lugging it to Knopf.” Blanche handed him the second half of his advance before she even read the manuscript.20
Berlin Diary was optioned by the Book-of-the-Month Club within twenty-four hours of their receiving a copy, enabling the Knopfs to recoup their advance immediately, as Blanche had predicted. Shirer later joked with friends about how Alfred became an instant pal, suddenly calling Berlin Diary a “grand book.”21 The timing was perfect: Germany was about to sequester and devastate Russia. Soon Edward R. Murrow and James Reston, the young New York Times reporter, were working on books for Knopf as well.
Both The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune gave Berlin Diary front-page reviews. Smaller papers throughout the country published excerpts from the book, such as Shirer’s account of the German army entering Belgium on May 20, 1940:
Here for the first time we suddenly came across real devastation. A good part of the town through which we drove was smashed to pieces. The railroad station was a shambles; obviously hit by Stukas. The railroad tracks all around torn and twisted; cars and locomotives derailed. One could—or could one?—imagine the consternation of the inhabitants. When they had gone to bed that Thursday night (May 9), Belgium had been at peace with the world, including Germany. At dawn on Friday the German bombers were levelling the station and town—the houses in which they had gone to bed so peacefully—reduced to a charred mass of ruins.22
Time magazine claimed that the Diary was “so sound and so illuminating that it should be read by every American.” The Book-of-the-Month Club’s Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker, “No matter how carefully you have followed the news … you will find Berlin Diary compelling reading.”23 Fadiman’s review pointed to one reason for the book’s success: though Shirer, firsthand, had “carefully … followed the news,” even he was not prepared for its initial shock, narrated as it occurs, when more or less ordinary Third Reich days turn into days of horror. He learns, for instance, of Nazi doctors releasing to soldiers and scientists mentally ill patients to use for experiments, on the grounds that the “mentally deficient,” and even those “suffering temporary derangement” or “plain nervous breakdown,” weaken the German races. “If the insane are killed off…,” the Nazis realize, “there will be plenty of hospital space for the war wounded should the war be prolonged and large casualties occur.”24
But the book also elicited menacing anti-Semitic phone calls to the author, and Shirer had to unlist his phone number. By summer, the book had climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. Between the Knopf and the Book-of-the-Month Club editions, Berlin Diary eventually sold nearly a million copies.25
Bill Koshland believed that Berlin Diary was responsible for moving the firm from the “realm of the boutique to the big time.” At the beginning of the war, Knopf consisted of Blanche, Alfred, and Joe Lesser, “with maybe 39 other employees,” and at the end it was twice that.26
During the summer that the Diary was published, Pat Knopf was on break from Union College and working as a bartender in Schenectady. He’d seen enough movies “to know [he] didn’t want to be in the trenches.” Having already registered for the draft, he was provisionally accepted into the Army Air Corps in Albany, if he was needed. Blanche tried to relax about her son, but by the fall she was so tense with worry that her neck was stiff. The brief respite from marital hostilities afforded by the success of Berlin Diary had already given way to the habitual rancor. Pat recalls such anger in the house when he visited Purchase that “there was no peace at home [if Blanche was there]. Alfred used to get in the car at midnight and drive off somewhere … [We] never discussed this.”27
When Blanche finally gave in and called Mencken yet again to discuss her son, he managed to reassure her, before redirecting the conversation to his own concerns: How were the sales of Newspaper Days, his new book? At least Blanche could deliver good news on that front: 6,260 copies had sold in two weeks, with 300 on order.28 There were other reasons for professional optimism as well: Knopf was publishing Mildred Pierce, another of Blanche’s mystery novels by her author James M. Cain. Centered upon incest and infidelity, the noir novel would at first be deemed too risky for Hollywood. But a few years later, it was simply recast as a murder mystery told in flashback, thereby eliminating its most objectionable scenes.
Another Knopf publication that year was of a far different caliber from the company’s typical fiction. A Western called The Blood Remembers, it was written by Helen Hedrick, a sturdy woman from Oregon, one of the wide-open states out west that Alfred increasingly found magical. Hedrick, who battled rattlesnakes with her bare hands, eventually wrote for quality magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Liberty, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post, and won an O. Henry Award for a short story, though she would never write another novel.29 She would, however, become the second Mrs. Alfred A. Knopf, less than a year after Blanche died.
17
GOING OVERSEAS
BLANCHE HAD BEEN PLANNING A SCOUTING TRIP to England since early 1941, when it seemed that the Battle of Britain was over. One of her authors, the journalist Ben Robertson, offered to help her get permission to enter the country. Robertson’s I Saw England, published just before William Shirer’s book, had proved a timely and hopeful adjunct to the Berlin Diary, and Blanche—as had everyone, it seemed—had grown to love the young, ever-gracious writer from South Carolina. More reflective than Clare Boothe’s Europe in the Spring, released by Knopf in 1940 (and a book Dorothy Parker would call “All Clare on the Western Front”),1 I Saw England was praised for Robertson’s “facility for picking up what the men and women are feeling, thinking, saying, in all classes,” conveyi
ng a “real vitality” and a sense of true life.2
Recounting the stories of Dunkirk he heard from ordinary citizens, Robertson had a down-home style that elevated the common citizen to a sage, quietly reinforcing the drama of war stories: “At the cigarette store a gnome-like man, who looked as if a rabbit would scare him, told us about going out in a boat to bring the men home from France. Like Lady Astor, he believed it was God who had stilled the English Channel. ‘It was a miracle.’”3
Pleased at the chance to help Blanche get to Europe, Robertson, reporting on the war from Australia at the time, cabled Brendan Bracken, the British minister for information, urging him to allow the publisher into England. But by the time plans were made, the Blitz had begun, a nine-month period of air attacks on sixteen British cities, with London the chief objective. On September 23 Blanche wrote Robertson to thank him for his efforts. “Confidentially,” she said, “[the trip] is for me, of course, [not for war-related projects,] but I don’t want anyone here to know about it at all until I am gone, if I do get there.”4 While Robertson worked with Murrow covering the war, Blanche ended up “calling off England,” disappointed to bypass what her comrades were now routinely enduring.5 She would try again the following year, she assured Robertson.
On December 7, Blanche was in New York City when she, along with millions of other Americans, heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked at 1:55 p.m. EST. Three weeks later, Pat Knopf would be inducted into the Air Corps (then part of the U.S. Army) and deployed to Alabama.6 His mother was terrified that she’d never see him again (Mencken wondered the same in his diary). When the Knopfs next dined with their neighbors Peggy and Howard Cullman, he variously chairman of the Port of New York Authority and owner of Benson & Hedges tobacco, Blanche kept returning to the topic of her son. Preoccupied with Pat, she failed to be the gracious guest she usually was, and instead tried to joke about her boy flying into battle before long. Peggy, always jealous of Blanche, assumed she was being callous.7
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 20