The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  Marston conducted some of his work for Laemmle in a laboratory of his own making, at the University of California, Los Angeles. In one experiment, he showed Universal’s 1929 film The Love Trap to one thousand students, except without the final scene, or “tag,” that was later appended to it, in which our heroine, a chorus girl who has been spurned by her husband’s well-heeled family, enjoys the satisfaction of humbling them. He wanted to know how audiences handle movies that end badly.21

  Marston had views on sound in films, too. “Sound and talking undoubtedly increase the entertainment value of a picture,” he told a Hollywood reporter. “There is a distinct conflict, however, between pictorial and sound elements, which cannot be entirely avoided until third dimensional pictures are made.”22

  Marston urged Laemmle to hire Walter Pitkin as a story editor. “So to Bill, bless him, I owe an everlasting debt for having taken five years off my age,” Pitkin later wrote, “and to Uncle Carl an equal debt for clipping off another five years. I was fifty-one when I went to Hollywood. I couldn’t have been more than forty-one when I left, some six months later.”23

  Marston liked to tell a story about a producer calling him into his office and asking for his help in raising $10 million for a new film. Marston said he’d need a few months to set up some meetings with wealthy New Yorkers. An hour and fifteen minutes later, the producer called back.

  “Never mind, Marston, about that plan we discussed,” he said. “I have the money and we don’t need you in the picture.” Pitkin had gotten the money by sending a two-foot-long telegram to a friend on Wall Street.24

  Marston and Pitkin decided to write a book together. The Art of Sound Pictures was published in November 1929.25 “The talkies are the only art that would attract Leonardo da Vinci were he alive to-day,” Pitkin and Marston wrote. This art, they explained, “is a baby giant, as clumsy as all babies are.… We don’t know what the baby will be doing and saying when it grows up. But we are sure it will make its mark in the world.”26

  Much of the book is advice for would-be screenwriters. “Probably nine out of ten stories which fail to sell in Hollywood contain some serious defect in emotional handling,” Marston explained. And, because “no successful screen story can contain a universal emotional appeal unless it is highly flavored with erotic passion,” would-be screenwriters needed to understand the psychology of sex, and to know that every story ought to demonstrate what he described as psychological laws: the facts that “woman possesses the superior love power,” that love always vanquishes force, that “passion is predominantly a male emotion, and that submission in love belongs to the man and not to the woman.”27

  Much of The Art of Sound Pictures is a guide to eluding censorship. Marston and Pitkin dedicated a great deal of their attention to explaining, point by point and state by state, what could pass the censors and what couldn’t. Branding—“Scene showing branding iron in fire, if application of it is not shown”—okay in New York, Ohio, and Virginia, not allowed in Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Kansas. Sex—“Man and woman (married or unmarried) walking toward bedroom, indicating contemplated intimacy, if they are not shown after the door closes on them”—depends on action. Homosexuality—“Action of characters, indicating they are perverted, as scene showing women kissing each other, if shown in long shot”—generally, not allowed.28

  Although the book was advertised as “the first complete, practical book on how to write for the talkies,” the New York Times dismissed it: “What there is in sound pictures to attract the attention of two eminent psychologists is one of those things that nobody can ever understand.”29

  At Universal Studios, Marston had a hand in films like Show Boat, in 1929. He also helped get films past the censors, including All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1930. When Carl Laemmle’s son, Junior Laemmle, took over Universal, he turned it into a specialty shop for horror films: Marston’s theory of emotions lies behind the particular brand of psychological terror in Laemmle’s Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and The Invisible Man (1933). Before Marston left Hollywood, he also worked for Paramount. For Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), he tested audience reaction by strapping viewers to blood pressure cuffs while they watched the rushes.30

  Marston ran his contests, offered his advice, strapped up audiences to his Love Meter, and pottered around from one studio lot to another, drinking with Pitkin, criticizing directors, and giving actors psychological advice. A lot of people thought he was selling hokum.31 One film Marston worked on, before he was fired from Universal, was a silent film about a fortune-teller. It was called The Charlatan.32

  Marston never got that five-year contract. In 1930, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America adopted what came to be called the Hays Code. It prohibited films from depicting anything that would “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” including nudity, childbirth, and homosexuality. The code wasn’t much enforced until 1934, but, by then, Carl Laemmle’s son and successor had found a better “mental showman” than Marston to vet Universal’s films.

  When Universal began screening the rushes of Junior Laemmle’s Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, it brought in a rival lie detector developer, Leonarde Keeler, of Keeler, Inc., to test audience reactions. During the war, Marston’s colleagues on the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council had found the detection of deception lacking in scientific credibility. In Frye v. United States, the courts had roundly rejected its admissibility as evidence in criminal cases. But in 1921, John Larson, a police detective who had earned a PhD in physiology from the University of California, read one of Marston’s scholarly papers—“Physiological Possibilities of the Deception Test”—and decided to figure out how to apply the technique to police interrogation. He hired Keeler, a Berkeley high school student, as his assistant. In 1925, Keeler tried to patent what he sometimes called the Emotograph or the Respondograph but eventually settled on calling the Keeler Polygraph (“poly” because it recorded different kinds of things—blood pressure, heart rate, and so on). After Larson moved to Chicago, to work with the Chicago police, Keeler followed him there, to work at the Scientific Criminal Detection Laboratory, the United States’ first forensic laboratory—founded by John Henry Wigmore. In 1931, with adjustments to his original design, Keeler was awarded a patent for his polygraph.33

  Marston, Holloway, Byrne, and baby Pete, along with Walter Pitkin, went back to New York. Marston and Pitkin decided to start their own motion picture company: Equitable Pictures Corporation. Marston, named vice president, owned 15 percent of the stock. Pitkin always had a thousand projects going on, all at once. (“When you walk into a man’s house expecting to discuss the financial details of a business deal and find him sitting at the piano with a pencil and musical score composing a symphony it is likely to prove disconcerting,” Marston once wrote about him.)34 He had a lot of story ideas. Once, on Encyclopaedia Britannica letterhead, Pitkin scratched out an idea for a film whose plot was to revolve “Around Bill Marston’s thesis: How can a woman love & yet make a living? How be economically independent & also erotically independent?” Its point would be to “Show that free love isn’t the solution.”35

  Marston wanted to make that film, a film about the dilemma of the New Woman. He wanted to call it either “Brave Woman” or “Giddy Girl,” after his ladies: Holloway and Byrne. He couldn’t choose which.

  Equitable Pictures was incorporated in October 1929, with ten thousand shares of common stock. Days later, the stock market collapsed.36 So did Equitable Pictures. A woman, one woman, who could be both economically and erotically independent, would have to wait out the Depression. She’d have to have been a superhero, anyway. And superheroes hadn’t been invented yet.

  VENUS WITH US

  OLIVE BYRNE married William K. Richard of Los Angeles on Novem-ber 21, 1928, when she was twenty-four years old.1 She took his name and became Olive Richard. Their first son, Byrne Holloway Richard, was born on January 12, 1931. Another boy, Donn R
ichard, was born on September 20, 1932. Shortly after that, she told her sons, their father died. William K. Richard had been a very ill man: he had been gassed in the war and suffered from lung problems, from which he’d never recovered. Oddly, she didn’t have a single photograph of him.2

  Olive, with bracelets, with Pete and baby Byrne in 1931 (illustration credit 18.2)

  She had no photograph because there was no William K. Richard. “Olive Richard” was a fiction. (From here on out, I’ll call her “Olive,” to avoid confusing her with her son Byrne.) Byrne and Donn’s father was William Moulton Marston. The wedding date, though, wasn’t a lie. In November 1928 Olive Byrne began wearing a pair of close-fitted, wide-banded bracelets. She never took them off. Wonder Woman wears the very same bracelets.

  Marston and Olive Byrne celebrated November 21, 1928, as their anniversary. As in many families, it often slipped their minds. She wrote in her diary for November 21, 1936: “Anniversary. Which we forgot entirely.” And again, on November 21, 1937, bitterly: “Again forgot anniversary which is just as well.”3

  On December 6, 1928, two weeks after the wedding, Marston sent an extraordinary letter to the alumni office at Mount Holyoke College, trumpeting Holloway’s accomplishments.

  “Do you know,” he asked, that “Betty (you used to call her Sadie)”

  1. Was Managing Editor of Child Study Magazine, for year 1925–6.

  2. Wrote many interesting and successful trade articles, “broadsides”, etc. etc. for the Policy Holders Service Bureau, Metropolitan Life Ins. Col., 1926–7, and was offered many inducements to stay with them when, in 1927 she left to become a member of the Editorial Dept. of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, handling psychology, anthropology, medicine, physiology, law, and some biology?

  3. Worked as editor and wrote article on “Conditioned Reflex” (to appear as signed article in forthcoming Britannica) until Aug. 21, 1928, when she left to have a large sized infant son, Moulton Marston, weighing 8 lbs. [torn] oz., on August 26?

  4. That said son now weighs 11 lbs. 10 oz.? (That’s most important!)

  5. That she moved her family to the country, to wit, Darien, Conn., for benefit of His Nibs? where we all now reside with varying degrees of resignation, commuters at last.

  6. That Betty has been doing graduate work at Columbia, in psychology, for her Ph.D. degree?

  7. That she collaborated very largely with her somewhat soft-witted husband in writing EMOTIONS OF NORMAL PEOPLE, published recently in New York and London, Kegan Paul and Harcourt Brace?

  8. That she is now working as joint author, with same aforesaid person, on a General Psychology, to appear next Fall, published by Prentice-Hall?

  9. That Betty, Esq., has been an Instructor in Psychology at Washington Square College, New York University for a couple of years—and still is such?

  10. That she’s the best wife and mother who ever lived?4

  Marston, right, conducting experiments with Olive Byrne, behind the screen, with bracelets (illustration credit 18.3)

  The family arrangement, in which Marston had two wives, one to work and one to raise the children, involved the promotion of Holloway’s career. Olive Byrne had the best possible modern-day psychological training necessary for the modern, scientific management of children. Her staying home with Holloway’s baby allowed Holloway to lead the life of a professional woman, unencumbered by the duties of motherhood. And Holloway’s income supported Olive’s children, when they came. Marston had never been able to hold a job for more than a year. He needed Holloway’s income, too.

  Left to right: Marston, Huntley, Pete, Holloway, and baby Byrne, in 1931 (illustration credit 18.4)

  “Many classmates can testify with me that it is very hard to earn a living; the only thing to do is to have a wife, like mine, who will go to work to support you,” Marston reported to Harvard in 1930, on the occasion of his fifteenth reunion, when Holloway was working as an assistant editor at McCall’s magazine. “With the idea of helping her out, I have taught psychology at Columbia and New York universities, and practiced as a ‘consulting psychologist’—you know, one of those bennies who tells reluctant business men what the public really thinks of the stuff they’re trying to sell, and listens to the confessions of disappointed brides.” For a time, Marston occupied offices at 723 Seventh Avenue.5 But, mostly, in the 1930s, he was out of work.

  The census for 1930 records Marston and Holloway, both thirty-six, living at 460 Riverside Drive with Pete, age one, and Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, age forty; Huntley is listed as a “roomer.”6 Huntley was a member of the family, but she came and went; she was restless. She lived, in the course of her life, in thirty-five cities. For a long time, she was a librarian at the Metropolitan Hospital, New York.7 Neither Olive Byrne nor “Olive Richard” is listed as part of the Marston household in the 1930 census. When she got pregnant, she must have moved out to hide her pregnancy.

  Olive’s first baby was a towheaded boy. She kept a journal in which she chronicled his childhood. On the cover she wrote, “Byrne Holloway Richard, Jan. 12, 1931 at 7:57 PM.” She gave him her name and Holloway’s, too, stitching the family together. She was a doting, loving mother. Her book about Byrne is part baby book, part laboratory notebook, a record kept by a woman who wanted to be a doctor and who had trained as a nurse and a psychologist. It is an epitome of scientific motherhood. During baby Byrne’s second year: “About Jan. 25. Began handing objects back to adult or putting object back in place.… Feb. 7. Paid marked attention to French words spoken to him by W.M.M.—laughed at them, and tried to say ‘adieu.’ ”8

  Olive also kept diaries, in which she used secret codes. “The only practical emotional re-education consists in teaching people that there is a norm of psycho-neural behaviour, not dependent in any way upon what their neighbours are doing, or upon what they think their neighbours want them to do,” Marston had written in Emotions of Normal People. But the problem with the way the Marstons lived was that their neighbors would have considered it abnormal. Olive believed the truth was best kept secret: in particular, she didn’t want her children to know about it, ever. But keeping up the story required layers of deception. So she invented William K. Richard, a fictional husband. In her diary, when she wrote about Marston, as Holloway’s husband, she referred to him “W.M.M.” When she wrote about him as her sons’ father, she referred to him as “R” or “Ri,” for “Richard.”9

  As Olive Byrne’s life became more hidden, Margaret Sanger’s became more visible. While the Marstons were keeping their family arrangements as secret as possible, Sanger was reaching new levels of fame as the international leader of the birth control movement. In 1931 she testified in Congress on behalf of what she called a “Mothers’ Bill of Rights.” Awarded the medal of the American Women’s Association, Sanger was celebrated in the New York Herald Tribune: “Mrs. Sanger deserves this honor; she deserves more honors than a world against whose darkness of mind she has fought bravely and consistently for twenty years is ever likely to give her. Mrs. Sanger has carved, almost single-handed and in the face of every variety of persecution, a trail through the densest jungles of human ignorance and helplessness. She has been many times arrested, assailed and covered with mud—which remains perhaps the most substantial tribute to her pioneering genius.” She published an autobiography called My Fight for Birth Control. One reviewer wrote, “Margaret Sanger is one of our generation’s world-changers.”10

  Marston patched together odd jobs. He taught courses in psychology here and there: at Long Island University, the New School, the Rand School, and, finally, at Katharine Gibbs. In 1931, he talked to a reporter about coeds. “He believes the sexes have changed their professional status,” the reporter said, “that the hunted has become the huntress, that men students have more ideas about women than about themselves and that a majority of men prefer to be ‘unhappy masters’ rather than ‘happy slaves.’ ”11 Maybe it was Marston who was, in those years, an unhappy master.

  He founded a
firm called Hampton, Weeks, and Marston. It failed. He explained that failure this way: “I started an advertising agency at the wrong time, lost my last dollar, and was laid low by appendicitis and complications following and took to writing while recovering.”12 He decided to try his hand at fiction.

  Olive, with bracelets, is holding Donn, with Holloway, pregnant, behind her. Byrne and Pete are at right. Christmas 1932, the year Marston published Venus with Us (illustration credit 18.5)

  In June 1932, Marston published a novel, Venus with Us: A Tale of the Caesar, set in ancient Rome. The plot concerns Florentia, a sixteen-year-old vestal virgin. “Youth surged within her slender body like a velvet flame.” She’d grown up in ancient Rome’s version of the convent schools where Olive Byrne was raised: “When she was a little girl, just before her eighth birthday, her mother had brought her to Vesta’s Shrine.” Before meeting the beautiful Gaius Caesar, who, in the course of the novel, spurns that name to become Julius Caesar, Florentia had known much of women but nothing of men: “Accustomed as she was, from childhood, to the soft beauties of the feminine forms about her, Florentia beheld in Gaius a delicacy of face and figure equal to that of any of her companions.” Meeting him, she is overcome by passion. “Her mouth became suddenly dry, her legs trembled beneath her. A creeping fire swept under her skin from her ear tips to toes.” Their love is thwarted by Metala, a woman from the island of Lesbos, who keeps Florentia bound in chains. As the story unfolds, various women are abducted and taken to Lesbos. But Caesar and Florentia are helpless before the power of their forbidden love: “They had found each other; and whatever the world might say about it, each felt that their relationship was quite as sacred as the Altar of Vesta.” When Florentia has a baby by Caesar, she names her Dorothea. Dorothy was Olive Byrne’s favorite name.