Who could have shared such incendiary gossip with the Herald? Two possibilities came immediately to Isabel’s mind. Albert Bigelow Paine, alone in New York City at the time, was a likely candidate. Paine and she had been jockeying for months to win Twain’s favor, and while they had not yet suffered a total break in their working relationship, fissures had surfaced due to Isabel’s persuading Twain not to name Paine as his literary executor. Paine had engineered Charlotte Teller Johnson’s banishment when Twain heard his gossip linking the two together and perhaps he thought he would repeat the same ruse. (Paine may have suspected that the bright, literary Charlotte might have designs on becoming Twain’s executrix.) Another likely suspect is Charlotte herself. Her last furious words to Isabel at the end of May were “I’ll get even with you for this!” Perhaps she had figured out a way to settle the score. Years later, Isabel told Samuel and Doris Webster that she thought the rumormonger had been Charlotte, that Charlotte had initially spread the story that Isabel and Twain were intending to marry; apparently Charlotte then made her tale more salacious by telling mutual friends that the two were not going to wed, instead implying that they were having an affair.
Ironically, a little over a week before the reporter’s inopportune question, Isabel and Clara were having apprehensions about Twain’s behavior in England. When he was notified about the Oxford honor at the beginning of May, Twain decided “Colonel Harvey is the mensch to go.” Although by the time of the voyage Ralph Ashcroft accompanied the honoree instead. Paine had lobbied hard to be the one to go along with Twain on his triumphant journey, and as he was the King’s personally selected biographer, his desire to accompany his subject made eminent good sense. Yet Paine suffered from a speech impediment, which Twain apparently considered a handicap in dealing with the British press. “It was a blow to Paine” to be usurped by Ashcroft, and he believed Isabel had promoted Ashcroft over him.
On the day of Twain’s sailing, Paine exacted his measure of revenge. Distraught over Twain’s leaving, an emotionally overcome Isabel had already returned from the pier and was “lying weak and sick” at home. Paine hastened to 21 Fifth Avenue from the dock to tell her that he had seen the King being roughly treated by “a hideous lot of people & a man 1/2 drunk threw his arm around the King’s neck & said he’d known him 40 years ago.” Paine’s upsetting news had its desired effect. “I do hope Ashcroft will brace up & take care of him,” Isabel fretted, “It’s all wrong to let him go off that like—He is going for honors, but he ought to go with the proper protection too.”
Despite Paine’s alarming report, Twain managed to arrive safely in England. Shortly after his landing, to the consternation of Clara and Isabel, disconcerting stories surfaced in the New York newspapers that he had strolled through the lobby of his London hotel wearing only his bathrobe and slippers out into Dover Street to a public bathhouse. Twain “‘scares us to death’ with his inclination for the unconventional,” Isabel fussed. With only Ashcroft to advise him, Isabel was convinced Twain would be prone to do “thoughtless things” that would result in his being “severely criticized” in the press. Clara was so concerned about the situation that she telegraphed her father: “REMEMBER THE PROPRIETIES—AM ANXIOUS.” A defiant Twain cabled back: “THEY ALL PATTERN AFTER ME.”
The Oxford ceremony took place on June 25; the other honorees included General William Booth, Auguste Rodin, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Rudyard Kipling, who was further honored in December of that year with the Nobel Prize in literature. The day after the ceremony, Twain deliberately taunted Clara in a cable: “TRY NOT TO BE JEALOUS. FATHER.” Isabel chose to interpret his message as representative of a “gay little rivalry between them.” Clara returned the volley with an answering cablegram: “MORE WORRIED THAN EVER DOCTOR, REMEMBER THE PROPRIETIES.” Having a distracting newspaper story linking him romantically to his secretary after being fêted by the cream of British aristocracy and receiving the greatest honor of his career must have been viewed by Twain and his daughters as a humiliating social embarrassment.
Twain bid an emotional farewell to England and sailed into New York Harbor on July 22, six hours earlier than expected, on the Commodore ship Minnetonka. Standing at the end of the pier, Isabel spied her King on the lower deck at the end of a long line of passengers. She was relieved by his safe homecoming, and the next day the two left New York City for the peace and privacy of Tuxedo Park. Despite Isabel’s naïve hope that her relationship with Twain would be left unaffected by the very public exposure of their connection, she could not escape the fallout from the Herald’s report.
Within a week of his return home, Twain asked Isabel if she had heard anything from Charlotte Teller Johnson. Isabel responded that she had not, but that she blamed Charlotte as the newspaper’s source for the story about their supposed upcoming nuptials. Twain responded that he suspected the same, and that they could count on hearing “more yet from that devil.” Even while dismissing the gossip, Twain insisted on taking a Miss Herrick with them as a chaperone when he and Isabel went for carriage rides. Twain remarked that he liked “the ‘protection’ of it,” much to Isabel’s dismay. Although the notion of these two needing to be overseen by a chaperone is ludicrous, it is worth contemplating why Twain felt it was necessary. He may have been troubled about public opinion, his daughters’ reaction, or Isabel’s true intentions. Whatever his concerns, Isabel chafed under the constraint and complained in her daily reminder that a subsequent drive the two had taken with Miss Herrick was a “very tiny drive—a thin drive you may say, for the talk was that kind.” Isabel need not have feared, as the chaperoning did not last long. Just a month later, at the end of August, she exulted: “It was Sweet to drive along these lovely roads beside him. Sweet to have him Silent & Smoking. He was tired—the steady roar of the luncheon table exhausted him as I knew it would. & as soon as we reached home he went to bed & after my solitary dinner, I found him lying with his beautiful feet uncovered, & reading Macaulay’s life & letters.”
Mark Twain receiving his honorary doctorate of letters degree at Oxford University, June 1907
Despite returning to their companionable drives together, a new distance began to insert itself into their interactions, and over the course of the next few months Isabel would bemoan the absence of the King she knew and loved. This change in their personal intimacy was underscored in January 1908, when she noted with surprise that in conversing with Twain during dinner “he was very Sweet, very delicate, & like his old self before warring outside things came in to harshen him up—& make him rude to me.”
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An additional worry for Isabel was the continuous starting and stopping of the construction of Twain’s Redding home. After approving spending for the planning of the estate in August 1906, just five months later Twain panicked and halted all efforts when he learned that the North American Review was reducing its total number of pages for each issue. He feared that this reduction might lower the amount he would be compensated for the twenty-five installments from his autobiography, and doubted that he would be able to support the expense of construction. Nevertheless, four days later, on January 20, 1907, he felt confident enough to sign a construction contract after receiving a personal visit from Colonel Harvey, who pledged that his friend would be paid $2,000 a month “until the one hundred thousand words [of the autobiography] have been turned in, & that will provide the needed amount to build the house at Redding.”
Clara accompanied Isabel on the train to Redding for the informal groundbreaking in May 1907, but had turned back due to spring rain. Isabel continued with H. A. Lounsbury and Mr. Turner, two construction contractors, and met a group at the site consisting of John Howells, Paine, and William R. Coe (husband of Mai Rogers, Henry Rogers’s daughter). After an elegant luncheon prepared by the Brevoort Hotel and delivered to the site, each person had in turn dug a small shovelful of earth; then, to Isabel’s surprise, “they poured in some whiskey—I wonder why?”
While Isabel welcomed thei
r impending move to the country, the King was now less sure about living so far away from friends and society. Possibly the idea of being trapped in a grand hall with the servile and high-strung Isabel constantly fussing over him gave Twain serious pause. In August 1907, just a month after his return from England, construction of the Redding house was halted at his order. Ever sensitive to public opinion, he may also have been reluctant to contribute to the possible perception that he was constructing a home where he would live openly with his mistress. He realized that it was highly unlikely that Clara would ever opt to spend much time with him and that Jean’s illness might prevent her from ever returning home. Twain directed Isabel to contact John Howells to determine if there was a way to abandon the project without losing money. After numerous phone exchanges with Howells, the upshot was that the house would have to be finished for rent or sale, otherwise “the loss would be a big one, fully fifteen thousand dollars, or half of the price of the finished house.”
Twain’s decision not to live in the house meant that Isabel’s rosy future was threatened, and her health spiraled downward in consequence. While grimly attending to the Angelfish Twain kept inviting to Tuxedo Park to keep him company, she suffered from frequent headaches that rendered her nearly insensible. In Isabel’s view, the King’s health (and hers) would best be served if the Angelfish were banned. Twain, on the other hand, in the midst of a social afternoon’s discussion about the pleasures of hobbies, gleefully announced to Isabel and assorted guests that his intention was to collect schoolgirls. By February 1908 Isabel resignedly observed, “The King’s interest in children increases—his interest in little girls. He can spend hours & hours with them & finds them such good company.” Apparently Twain was finding Isabel a bit of a bore compared to the fun he was having with his bevy of little girls.
Declining both physically and emotionally from the strain of trying to keep Twain and his Angelfish amused, as well as from uncertainty about her future, by the end of August Isabel felt “savagely ill” with “crashing, crackling pains in the back of my head.” After suffering from a painful bout of “neuritis in my left neck & arm & shoulderblade,” earlier in the summer, she began to rely upon the painkiller Phenacatine (commonly spelled phenacetin) for relief. Phenacetin had become available in 1887 and was widely used as an analgesic. Her health and her utility to Twain were always Isabel’s twin worries, and she was very much aware of his harsh views concerning illness and his staff’s concomitant usefulness to him.
On one occasion during the summer of 1907 when Twain witnessed Isabel feeling poorly, he expressed his “entire dissatisfaction in my condition.” Visions of his casual suggestion of discarding of Teresa Cherubini when she was sick must have passed through Isabel’s head, and she often wrote about having to continue her duties despite feeling unwell. In January 1908, Isabel wrote about receiving an irritated message from Twain when she didn’t emerge from her bedroom. In a note he gave to Katherine the maid to deliver to her, Twain demanded to know if she was ill. If she was not, she was expected to immediately start telephoning people. Isabel instantly “hopped out of bed, & put on a wrapper & a shawl & went down. He was crossish—as the King has never been before—& pounded the bed.”
Isabel would have to wait five long nerve-wracking months before Twain would finally begin to “feel that he wants to live” in his new Redding home. Her dream of having a home of her own and of having Twain to herself might be realized after all. Certainly his changed attitude brought a measure of relief; however, as might be expected, the planning and construction of the house provided its own drama. On a quick trip to Redding in June 1907 to check on the progress, Isabel found to her horror that someone had moved its location. She found the change unacceptable and immediately halted work. She returned to Redding a week later with John Howells, and the two decided that the house had to be moved back to its original site.
Tiptoeing around Clara and Jean’s competing needs and egos concerning the size and location of their rooms within the new residence also took its toll. Although the amount of time Clara had actually logged under her father’s roof during the previous few years had been minuscule, it would have been a fatal mistake to infer that a smaller room would be acceptable. An alarmed John Howells told Isabel that when he had met Clara for dinner to discuss the plans, she had made clear her expectation that a suite of rooms would be installed for her express use. Clara’s demands (the second-story bedroom suite, a music room with Japanese burlap and grass cloth for the walls, and a ground-floor wing added for her pleasure, featuring a loggia) resulted in a $4,100 increase in the overall project cost.
Jean, too, was ever sensitive about how her presence would be represented in her father’s new home and was quick to find personal slights in the planning efforts. She had initially opposed the entire project because the idea of a country location other than Dublin meant she would no longer be in close proximity to Gerry Brush. However, she gradually warmed up to the idea, and Isabel gladly noted that by spring 1907 she was finally “full of plans for the future home in Redding.” Twain’s youngest daughter was instantly offended by any indication that she was an afterthought, as she already felt distanced from her father with her self-imposed confinement at Hillbourne Farms. Distressed, she raised objections after seeing from the blueprints that she had been provided with a small bedroom that the maid would have to walk through in order to exit from her quarters. She commented bitterly that neither her father nor her sister had noticed the inconvenience and lack of privacy, and she credited Isabel with correcting the problem.
The turmoil the project generated was reflected in the multiple names suggested for it. Isabel had initially called it Autobiography House, and in March of 1907 the Sun newspaper published a clever letter signed by an anonymous “Scrivener” suggesting various sobriquets.
to the editor of the sun—
Sir: I notice that Mark Twain is going to build a country house at Redding, Conn. What name will he give it? Will It be “The House of Mirth,” or “The House of Seventy Gables,” or “Freak House,” or “The House with the Green Candles,” or “The House of a Thousand Shutters,” or “The House on the March,” or—maybe somebody else can suggest a better name. A house anywhere along the Sound without an appropriate name isn’t a house at all. It is merely a residence. P.S.—What’s the matter with “Twain Towers”? He does, doesn’t he?
SCRIVENER.
NEW YORK, MARCH 26.
Twain entered the naming fray long enough to change the name from Autobiography House to the (unintentionally) satiric Innocents at Home. Clara rejected Innocents because of what she perceived as a reference to the Angelfish. Twain sarcastically remarked that the name had to be changed because “the task of providing enough innocence to justify the name fell entirely upon him and proved a burden beyond his strength. None of the other members of the family had any!”
Ultimately Clara had the final say. She christened the residence Stormfield, arguing that it was thanks to the Harper’s Magazine publication of Twain’s essay “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” and its accompanying revenue that the house could be completed. (The revenue from “Extract” covered the cost of the additional suite that Clara had demanded for her personal use.) Twain acquiesced; he agreed to calling the house Stormfield because, due to its location at the summit of a hill, the view allowed him to see any approaching storms.
Twain’s decision to move to Redding meant that Isabel could actually take possession of the house located on the piece of property that he had given to her. Overjoyed with Twain’s gift, an act of rare largess, Isabel understood that this house would afford her and her mother a permanent home. “She could do what she like[d] with it,” Twain said in reference to his gift, and while Isabel wished he would officially deed her the property and asked him if he would be willing to do so, he responded, “Nothing needs to be in writing between you and me.” It appears though, that at a later date Twain did deed the property to Isabel
. Five days after Twain informed her that he was giving her the land and house, Isabel visited Redding and surveyed her assets. Upon entering the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse, she was dismayed to find a dead swallow on the floor. “Poor prisoner—I had a strange little sense of fear.”
Shaking off her foreboding, Isabel declared her property “the mos’ bes’ nize house in the world.” The view from the hill was beautiful, and Isabel was “filled with happiness over it—Real happiness.” The farmhouse would prove a welcome distraction from Twain’s maddening vacillations and his daughters’ incessant demands. Over the course of 1907 and 1908, Isabel would happily describe in her daily reminder all the work taking place. In September 1907, she reported that Eugene Adams, who was renovating the farmhouse, and H. A. Lounsbury, in charge of heavy labor, had installed “triple windows” and that “the shingling is 2 parts done & when Adams tore off the plaster from the ceiling in the long room, he revealed what will be a most beautiful oak ceiling, for beams are splendid & the flooring above is a darling color. It is going to be glorious.” A wing was added for a new kitchen, and the old kitchen with its big fireplace had been turned into the living room. The farmhouse also boasted a study and an upstairs bedroom, for a total of twelve rooms.
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