The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Blanche wasn’t sure that Alfred would see her through the difficult days ahead. He had rarely been sick himself, and he might not be up to dealing with physical suffering. Remembering how, as a boy, he had hid under his sheets when he heard his mother writhing in pain, Blanche understood his possible reticence.

  If Blanche was becoming a little more forgiving of herself as well as of others, she was particularly pleased that Random’s Bennett Cerf and his associates clearly respected her. And surely, regardless of how sparing she was with her praise, Blanche must have been proud of her son’s success: in less than a year, in January 1965, he would publish Theodore White’s The Making of the President, 1964, which covered the Kennedy assassination.

  After recovering from several rounds of radiation, Blanche flew to France for a month’s stay with Jenny. Just before she left New York, she sent Muriel Spark a telegram to have a happy Easter: “Joyeux Paques Love Blanche.”21 Then, in July 1964, she and Alfred returned to South America for three weeks, having a “fascinating time,” according to a letter Blanche wrote to Scotty Reston in September. Reston and his wife, Sally, were by now Blanche’s good friends, and she wanted to congratulate him on his new job as associate editor of The New York Times. Blanche had bet well on him during the war with his book Prelude to Victory: Scotty had gone on to win two Pulitzers. Teasing while at the same time prodding him, she reminded Reston that this new position at the Times—a safe desk job for a change—would give him a chance to finish the manuscript he had long been working on.22

  That fall, Knopf released a first novel by Anne Tyler to high praise. Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times that If Morning Ever Comes was “a brilliant first novel … so mature, so gently wise and so brightly amusing … If it weren’t printed right there on the jacket, few readers would suspect that Mrs. Tyler was only 22. Some industrious novelists never learn how to write good fiction. Others seem to be born knowing how. Mrs. Tyler is one of these … Her people are triumphantly alive.”23 Tyler would always remember the oddity of her first lunch with Blanche, who had “spent the entire meal discussing her little lap dog. She said she was thinking about getting her dog ‘married.’ She kept pondering what sort of ‘husband’ would be most satisfactory.”24

  Somehow, at the end of September, Blanche squeezed in another trip to Paris. According to a letter to Muriel Spark, who had remained in New York, she “caught her heel in one of those holes on a mat at the top of three steps” at the Paris Ritz and injured her hip yet again. As soon as she was “seeable and not in too much agony” she looked forward to visiting her friend. By November, at least Blanche was strong enough to attend a ceremony in her honor at the Brazilian embassy in Washington, D.C., where she received a second decoration on behalf of the Brazilian government.

  She healed in time to take a trip with Alfred to Puerto Rico in early December, where they met Pablo Casals (from whom they hoped to pry a book). Blanche managed to stay away from home until the last days of the month, writing Spark again of her sense of sadness at the Christmas holidays, which was worse than ever this year. According to Grace Dadd in London, in spite of her brave front, Blanche was terrified of cancer, which she believed the publisher “never admitted she had to anyone or to Eleanor French back home.” Joe Lesser thought she was in denial. Even after her death, Alfred, like most people of that era, refused to utter the “C” word. Instead, he told people “the machine just broke down.”25 If she needed any further memento mori, she got home from their trip in time to mourn Carl Van Vechten’s death on December 21, 1964. Carl had arranged for his eighty-four-year-old body to be “cremated and his ashes scattered in the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park,” the memorial service two days before Christmas.26

  * * *

  In early January 1965, Blanche finally managed to have dinner with Muriel Spark at La Grenouille, a restaurant frequented by the publishing crowd at 3 East Fifty-Second Street. It had been open “about a year [it was closer to three] and [was] quite good. I have been there once and everyone speaks well of it,” she assured her picky friend, seeming to be in fine fettle even as she secretly suffered.27 The following month Publishers Weekly published an interview with Blanche in which, like others before her, the journalist could hardly contain her enthusiasm: “The word ‘chic,’ appropriately a French word, could have been coined to describe Blanche Wolf Knopf. [Her] apartment study’s walls and flat surfaces are uncluttered … [with the owner’s] fondness for clean fabric and polished wood.”28

  By the end of March, with Spark back in London, Blanche wrote her that colleagues had been reading the proofs of The Mandelbaum Gate and were “wildly enthusiastic.”29 Admittedly, Blanche said, the readers knew how much the book meant to its publisher, but she correctly believed the staff thought it a “beautiful and important book.”30 A love story centered upon the dangerous division of Jerusalem between Palestinians and Jews, Spark’s political fiction displayed “muscular writing” and boldness, according to most reviewers, though the novelist Doris Grumbach found it muddy and boring.31 Sales didn’t reach the numbers the author had wanted, and Blanche found herself reassuring her friend, as other publishers had before her, that Muriel just had to give Knopf more time.

  Determined to squelch any rumors of bad health, at the end of May, on the arms of Alfred and Bill Koshland, Blanche attended the opening session of the International Publishers Congress in Washington. But within weeks, to everyone’s shock, Alfred was the one who needed propping up. He suffered a severe heart attack, which would keep him in the hospital for an entire month, including seven days in intensive care. There had been no warning except for an ominous quotation embedded in a Newsweek interview, commemorating Knopf’s fiftieth anniversary several weeks before, in which Alfred spoke as if he were ancient and the Arcadia of publishing he once inhabited long gone: “a Golden Age before the decline of just about everything.” Only once in the long article did Alfred allude to Blanche, who was still acquiring books for Knopf and who had come up with the borzoi as their colophon: “We wanted something that would set us off from other publishers.” By “we,” the reporter explained, Alfred meant him and his wife, Blanche, “who has worked closely with him throughout their joint career.”32

  As he recovered from his heart attack, Alfred talked to anyone who’d listen about Blanche’s devoted care. She traveled to White Plains Hospital virtually every day—as she had done when her exigent son was hospitalized for his appendix. As she did with herself, she disclosed as little medical information about Alfred as possible, assuring their authors that Alfred was fine: “It was just a little angina.”33 Initially, Blanche didn’t even tell Pat about his father—which angered their son more than ever. Instead, from the hospital, Alfred wrote to friends about the wine trip he and the cardiologist Hy Tarnower planned to take soon. Confident that Alfred was on the mend, Blanche went to France for a week in July, unhappy about getting professionally sideswiped again by what was her husband’s carelessness at best. In the July 23, 1965, issue of Life, the authors whose photographs appeared in an article on Knopf were Conrad, Mann, Camus, Sartre, Stevens, Mencken, Bowen, Hersey, Updike, and Richter, all said to be Alfred’s, though they were in fact Blanche’s authors, with the single exception of Judith Jones’s Updike.34

  In early August, Blanche spoke on the phone with Jascha Heifetz, who was now living in Beverly Hills, and she told her friend of Alfred’s heart attack. She wrote him afterward, to say that their phone conversation had brought her “so much joy.” Jascha had provided her with a litany of his recent successes and his plans for new recordings. Though she praised him for his upcoming teaching assignment in Los Angeles, her deepest interest was in the tapes he’d be making: “This is very important and there is much still missing that needs to be heard again and again.” Turning to her own life, she explained that Alfred was due home from the hospital shortly. She herself would be confined to New York through September caring for him, and Jascha must let her know if he’d be in Manhattan d
uring that period or later, at the end of October: “I long to see you again,” she wrote.35

  She regretted having few books to send him, except for The Mandelbaum Gate, set in the Middle East, “and you know … that part of the world well. To me it is a great book.” She signed it, “Much love et a bientot, Blanche.” In London at the end of September, she told Grace Dadd that she had “kept a record of every book she’d considered on her trips to England,” and she’d asked Dadd to read the list aloud to her. The agent got the feeling that “this would be Blanche’s last visit.”36

  Grace was shocked to see the frail woman at work in her hotel room in the early morning and not in bed before 2:30 a.m.37 Caught off guard in London, Blanche told Grace that she was “scared of dying,” Grace gently assuring her that such fear was normal.38 Recalling her employer during an interview conducted after Blanche’s death, Dadd remembered “walking into the room at Claridge’s one time when Alfred was there—saw him looking down at her—thought went through my mind ‘My God that man still loves her!’”39

  Before Blanche had left for Europe, the overbearing Herman Tarnower announced to Alfred that “we’re going on that vineyard trip—this [heart attack] isn’t going to spoil it.”40 After all, the cardiologist would be there as his personal attendant. Indeed, with Blanche already overseas, Alfred, Tarnower, and the doctor’s current “lady” friend, Lise Dolfi, would go to Strasbourg, France, where they would meet up with Blanche. In the end, with the help of a French maid, she stayed in Europe for a month and a half more, often using a wheelchair against her will.

  Back in New York City, when the Knopfs celebrated their half century of publishing, Blanche was at last treated, virtually, as an equal. The couple held a reception and dinner at the Hotel Astor on October 29, 1965. On the dais with them were seventeen colleagues and dear friends, including the Bennett Cerfs, the John Herseys, Elizabeth Bowen, Langston Hughes, and Fania Marinoff, or Mrs. Carl Van Vechten—Carlo dead now ten months. Among those seated at the tables were the Pforzheimers, Muriel Spark, the Updikes, and Paul and Julia Child.

  A reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle remembered that Blanche “under that harsh light, looked like a decaying movie actress, Gloria Swanson—she was grotesque.”41 As if to assure herself that she had plenty of time left despite her diagnosis, Blanche went forward with the massive redesign of her new apartment. (She would still be at West Fifty-Fifth Street when she died.) In December, Alfred reported to Edwin that relations among him and Pat and Blanche had warmed “considerably.” Even though Blanche’s bad hip kept her in bed much of the time, Alice and Pat and the two girls “came to lunch at Purchase with Blanche and me, and everything went off very well.”42

  Ensuring such good will was also Alfred’s knowledge that RCA was buying Random House/Knopf for $40 million in stock (no cash), the sale in January 1966 signaling a new age of corporate mergers and acquisitions in publishing. In Alfred’s personal files at the Ransom Center is a booklet sent to Random House shareholders asking for their input on the RCA merger, in which it was stated that “shareholders of Random House will receive .62 of a share of RCA Common Stock for each of their Random House Common Shares. The Directors believe the rate of exchange is fair and equitable.”43

  A more dramatic contrast to Knopf’s beginnings some fifty years earlier would be hard to imagine, but Blanche, who had always been one to welcome change (though she had still never watched television, according to Pete Lemay), was too sick to care about figuring out this new publishing world.44 Alfred released a press statement reassuring the reading public that Knopf’s integrity would not be diminished: “I’m quite satisfied that the merging of RH into the Radio Corporation of America … will not in foreseeable future affect in any way whatever the day to day operations of AAK Inc.” Random House and Knopf would continue as separate entities, Knopf “with complete editorial autonomy … and no changes in its present personnel and management.”45 Somehow, Alfred had also managed to intimidate the historian Charles A. Madison into making major revisions to his book published by McGraw-Hill, Book Publishing in America. The naïve Madison had sent Alfred a draft, which the publisher immediately pronounced inaccurate, especially the accounts Pat gave Madison about founding Atheneum.

  Happy to get away, in mid-February, Alfred, his recovery already complete the previous fall, convinced Blanche to take a month’s trip with him to South America, on a cruise ship that would naturally provide her with a bed. Alfred recorded in his diary, “Blanche in stateroom all day [lying down]. Blanche unable to eat.”46 She stayed in Brazil for much of the time he spent touring the continent. Blanche’s needs for rest and comfort were kindly tended to by writers who revered her, and now, seeing her deeply valued, just as he had when she received the French citation, her husband behaved graciously in their presence. Nonetheless, it must have seemed odd to some observers that two people either ill or recently so were traveling far from home.

  Back in Manhattan, walking on the street—always with a companion—Blanche wore wigs, due to the increasing side effects of radiation therapy. Though she had long gone to Elizabeth Arden, at this stage, Clark “Lyonel” Nelson, one of Manhattan’s best hairdressers, came to Blanche to do her hair daily. “She and I were friends by then,” Lyonel recalls, “through a wild coincidence. On a cold nasty day in February, maybe 1961, on my way to the salon on 54th and 5th, I couldn’t get a taxi; they were all going super slow due to snow and ice, so I decided to walk the eight blocks to work.” Halfway there, he saw “a frail woman walking through three inches of slush and I helped her up some stairs. She said, ‘Aha, so you’re a gentleman,’” and they both entered the Waldorf and went their separate ways. A few weeks later, Lyonel was asked to do a customer’s hair, and “the lady turned out to be Mrs. Knopf.” Her hair had been damaged by a permanent, and the “extremely meticulous” Blanche was thrilled that Lyonel could fix it. From then on, he was her hairdresser. “I worked up a medium blond shade with highlights, nice soft look, and she was very happy.”47 He remembers her fondly and in detail, even today. “She wore beautiful fabrics, with her French Legion of Merit award always present on the lapel of her suit jacket. [And] two large-linked gold chain bracelets with precious stones from Seaman Schepps.” And of course, her nails were “long, almost talon-like, always perfectly painted with a fire red lacquer.”48 Blanche had to see the manicurist several times a week because her nails, which broke easily, needed constant repair. Her poor diet had created distinctive claws, surely reminding her and Alfred of the bird girl in Green Mansions.

  * * *

  To Lyonel, who was a hairdresser to the stars, including the Rockefellers, Kennedys, and many more, his association with Blanche was “one of the great privileges of my career,” with Mrs. Knopf taking a genuine interest in his background and work.49 Before long Blanche had remarked on his fascinating story of becoming a success right off of a midwestern farm, and she began urging him to write a book. In the meantime, they soon developed a routine to deal with her cancer treatments: Lyonel waited at her apartment door every morning at 9:00 a.m. to brush her wig upon her return.

  Though she looked like a scarecrow, she refused help getting out of the cab, taking stuttering steps from the taxi to Lyonel’s strong grip. “She never said a word about her disease or treatment, she just encouraged me to tell tales about my experiences as a hairdresser to the rich and famous. And every so often she’d surprise me with a box of books Knopf had published that she thought I’d like. She was always suggesting that I write about the delicious stories of the society ladies” (which he eventually did; From Farm to Fifth Avenue was self-published in 2014).50

  Determined to continue her mother’s long-ago lessons about the importance of self-presentation, Blanche, mercifully, didn’t realize (or acknowledge to herself) what the ravages of her illness had wrought. A Knopf assistant noticed that the publisher’s legs were so thin that her stockings wrinkled into rivulets on her legs, eventually sagging into bags at her ankles
. Bill Koshland remembered how “you could practically see through her ankles. You could see there were bones and some skin covering the bones and there was nothing inside. How could those things hold what little there was to hold?”51 Stanley Kauffmann less kindly recalled her “almost opaque eyes (due to glaucoma), [which] with her wrinkled skin gave her a hint of the reptile.”52 Another office assistant saw her on Fifth Avenue with a giant blob of powder on her face. “Let me wipe your cheek for you, Blanche,” she said gently. “I know it’s there,” Blanche said proudly. “I want it that way.”53

  Improbably, a few days into June, Blanche gave a dinner for Pete Lemay and his wife. “I remember fondly her asking me, several weeks earlier, who Dorothy and I would most like to spend an evening with, and we told her William and Emily Maxwell, two dear friends of ours and Blanche’s as well.” They had convened years earlier and enjoyed themselves immensely. This time, however, Blanche ended up lying on the living-room sofa, moaning softly, struggling to survive her body’s last rites. The Maxwells and Pete “knew she was at the end.” Pete realized they’d never see her again, noting her “waxy pallor, her knees drawn to her sunken chest.” It was a “sweet evening nonetheless.” The guests hoped for a pentimento, a reminder of the old Blanche, and they got it with the only story she told that night: the fantasy that her father had taken her to France. “She went on and on about it, but she was in agony,” Pete says. As he told her goodbye for the last time, he thought again of a secret conviction he had long held: “The accomplishment at Knopf was Blanche’s—to have made a mark of that dimension—London ’39—Freud. All of it.”54

  Nine days before she died, she still had her secretary take dictation for her, sending a letter to Cornelius Ryan congratulating him on The Last Battle, which he’d published with Simon & Schuster. After referring to her own trip to the area in 1945, she said only that she’d been flat with a bad back of late. Eleanor set up appointments with the architects to finish the work on the apartment that was, remarkably, meant to be shared with Alfred, but she kept having to cancel them. Blanche wrote her old friend the designer Mainbocher that life was “getting more complicated and more difficult for less reason than I have ever understood—my feeling is that I have been around much too long.”55 Certainly she had served her cause well: by now, twenty-seven Knopf writers had won the Pulitzer Prize, and sixteen the Nobel.