The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  The story involves a great deal of dominance and submission. “Oh, my adored Master!” characters cry. Marston devotes lavish attention to describing slaves’ chains. “The ceremonial chains used in Roman spectacles were heavy and elaborate. They were intended to symbolize utter subjection of the conquered ruler or other captive of distinction; yet also to ornament and emphasize the beauty or importance of the prisoner thus exhibited,” he writes. “Besides leg and arm bands, with connecting chains, Florentia wore a heavy golden collar and belt of gold, with graceful, looping chains of hand-carved links falling from neck and waist to wrists and ankles.” The story is an autobiographical erotic fantasy—Marston, hiding stories about his life in fiction—with Olive as Florentia, the cloistered “young girl who quivered with ecstasy at his every touch,” and Caesar as a mouthpiece for Marston’s psychological theories. When a former slave complains of her slavery, he replies, “The slavery part of it didn’t hurt you, in my opinion. I have a notion it’s really rather good for people to be compelled to submit to others.”13

  Venus with Us sold for $2.50, had a lurid cover, and was hardly noticed.14 Marston had tried science. He’d tried law. He’d tried Hollywood. He’d tried advertising. He’d tried fiction. And yet: he still hadn’t quite found the medium for his message: love binds.

  FICTION HOUSE

  ON MARCH 1, 1932, twenty-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., Little Lindy, the son of the aviator, was stolen from his crib. H. L. Mencken called it “the biggest story since the Resurrection.” Everyone had a theory. Marston suspected the kidnapper was a woman desperate for a child. “The normal woman needs and desires children,” he told the press. Keen to aid the search, he offered his services: “I wrote to Col. Lindbergh, placing the Lie Detector and my experience with it at his disposal.” Lindbergh did not reply. In May, the baby was found dead.

  Leonarde Keeler, who’d replaced Marston at Universal Studios in 1930 and had been granted a patent in 1931, was selling polygraphs to police departments all over the country. When Marston wrote to Lindbergh offering to help and presenting himself as the inventor of the lie detector, he was staking a claim. He was also trying to burnish his credentials as “the world’s first consulting psychologist,” which, with a nod to Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, was what Marston liked to call himself. There was every reason to believe that Little Lindy’s kidnapper was a woman, he explained to reporters, because every woman longs for a baby: “Her arms ache for babies in the same way that a born sculptor’s fingers itch for clay and a naturally gifted artist’s hands become restless for pencil or brush.”1

  Marston felt he knew a good deal about that ache. In 1932, both Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Holloway were pregnant. Olive gave birth to a boy, Donn, on September 20, 1932. Five months later, on Febru-ary 22, 1933, Holloway, forty years old, gave birth to a girl named Olive Ann; everyone called her O.A. Marston took a photograph of his ladies. The three women, wearing pale dresses, sit on a wicker garden bench. In her lap, Olive holds Donn; in hers, Holloway holds O.A.; and in her lap, Huntley holds a baby doll. Huntley had had a hysterectomy.

  Left to right: Olive Byrne (in bracelets) holding Donn; Elizabeth Holloway Marston, holding Olive Ann; and Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, holding a doll, in 1933 (illustration credit 19.1)

  Marston had nicknames for the women in his house. He called Holloway “Cutie,” Olive “Docile,” and Huntley “Yasmini.” Even the nicknames had nicknames: Keetsie, for Holloway; Dotsie, for Olive; and Zaz or Yaya or Zara, for Huntley.2

  Holloway went back to work right after O.A. was born. She’d taken a job at Metropolitan Life Insurance as assistant to the vice president in charge of farm mortgages.3 Olive Byrne now had four children to care for; the youngest two were only five months apart. It must have been very much like raising twins.

  Marston dabbled in all sorts of work. He was willing to give psychological advice to anyone who’d pay for it. “My real job, however,” he said, “is trying to bring up four youngsters in the four different ways they should grow.”4 The apartment in the city was crowded, but Holloway couldn’t leave New York; her paycheck was supporting the whole family. So Marston, Olive, and the four children went to Massachusetts and moved into the house Marston had grown up in, on Avon Street in Cliftondale, where Marston’s mother was living alone. (His father had died in 1923.) Marston told his mother that Olive was the family’s widowed housekeeper.5

  Left to right: Olive Byrne; Marston holding O.A. and Donn, with Byrne in front; Holloway; and Pete, in Cliftondale, 1934 (illustration credit 19.2)

  They spent summers on Cape Cod, in a barn next to Ethel Byrne’s house. They didn’t stay at Ethel’s house because, as Olive’s son Byrne later explained, his father and his grandmother “didn’t always see eye to eye.” Ethel had never liked Marston. Olive’s brother, Jack, and his wife, Helen, spent summers in Truro, too. Jack Byrne adored his sister, but, like his mother, he didn’t trust Marston. “Your Dad is a great ladies man,” he once told his nephew Byrne, “Watch him.”6

  Jack Byrne was a writer and editor of pulp fiction. (A “pulp” is a magazine printed on cheap, rough paper, as opposed to a “slick,” a mag-azine printed with a glossy finish.) In the 1930s, Jack Byrne was the editor of Fiction House, a New York–based publisher of pulps—westerns and detective stories, especially. He published Action Stories, Fight Stories, and Detective Book Magazine. “We want fast-moving yarns,” he told writers. “Woman interest is permissible, but must not overshadow action-adventure elements.”7 Marston gave that some thought.

  The family at Truro in 1935. Olive Byrne is wearing the bandanna. (illustration credit 19.3)

  In February 1935, when Olive Byrne’s sons Byrne and Donn were four and two, Holloway and Marston adopted them. The boys took Marston’s name. Byrne Holloway Richard became Byrne Holloway Marston, bearing all three of his parents’ names.8 Becoming Marstons didn’t weaken the boys’ ties to their mother’s side of the family, but it’s possible that neither Margaret Sanger nor Ethel Byrne knew that Olive had given up her rights as a parent. The year of the adoption, Olive’s family felt that she was hiding herself away.9

  She relinquished her legal rights as a parent out of concern for her children’s security. The Marstons’ adopting the boys—giving the family legitimacy—may also have played a role in Holloway’s parents’ decision to help them out financially. In the summer of 1935, the whole family moved to Rye, New York, to a large wooden house on a lot covered with old cherry trees and surrounded by forty-eight acres of farmland. It was big enough for a family of seven or, when Huntley was there, eight, and close enough to the city that Holloway could live there and take the train to work every day. They named the place Cherry Orchard.10

  The house had two full stories and an attic. There were three bedrooms in the attic: one for O.A., one for Huntley, and one that Donn and Byrne shared. Huntley’s room was under the eaves; she hung beads in the doorway, filled the room with crystals, and burned incense inside. Pete’s bedroom was on the second floor, along with Marston’s study, where Marston kept a daybed: he liked to write lying down. There were three others rooms on the second floor: Holloway’s bedroom, a bathroom, and Olive’s bedroom; these three rooms were adjoining. Marston could get from one bedroom to the other by walking through the bathroom. He slept in both.11

  Cherry Orchard, the Marstons’ house in Rye, New York (illustration credit 19.4)

  Margaret Sanger visited Cherry Orchard whenever she came to New York.12 And Olive took the children—hers and Holloway’s—to visit Sanger at Sanger’s house in Fishkill. (The kids all called Sanger “Aunt Margaret.”) In August 1935, Olive wrote to Sanger to postpone a visit. “Just at present I’m trying to land a writing job—interviews—for a magazine.”13

  She did land that job, as a staff writer for Family Circle, a weekly women’s magazine that began appearing in grocery stores in 1932.14 It was a giveaway; its publisher made money by selling advertising space to the groce
ry stores that stocked it at checkout counters. It soon became the sixth of what would eventually become known as the Seven Sisters of women’s magazines, a group that included Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s. Family Circle’s audience was American mothers, who, in hard times, were shopping thriftily. Its circulation soon reached well over two million readers, nearly all of them women, nearly all of them mothers—homemakers—looking for advice about how to take care of their children and their husbands and their houses.15

  Olive Byrne’s first article for Family Circle, a cover story written by “Olive Richard,” appeared on November 1, 1935. It was a profile of William Moulton Marston.

  Everything about her life Olive Byrne at once hid and, like Marston, almost compulsively exposed. She titled her article about him “Lie Detector.” She pretended she had never met him before. “Olive Richard” was a widowed mother of two. Eager to help a friend whose young son is an inveterate liar, she’s curious about a device she’s heard of, called a lie detector: “So I made up my mind to meet the man who invented it—Dr. William Moulton Marston, psychologist and lawyer.” She writes him a letter. “A week later I boarded a train, keeping safe in my bag the gracious letter which I’d received from this famous man inviting me to come and see him. I arrived at his large rambling house set high on a hill.” She didn’t mention that she lived there. Approaching the house, she describes the scene:

  On the spacious side lawn four children and two cats were jumping hurdles. The hurdle was held by an enormous man with a shock of gray hair standing up on his head. He was shouting directions and helping the game along by suiting the height of the hurdle to the length of each contestant’s legs. The children spied me first and drew back as children do in the presence of a stranger.

  She didn’t mention that she was the children’s mother.

  Then the big man saw me and smiled a welcome.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  She didn’t mention that she’d known him for ten years and lived with him for nine.

  “You know, you aren’t at all the sort of man I expected to meet! I’ve seen a good many psychologists, but—”

  “I know,” laughed the doctor. “Lean, long-faced fellows, with high I.Q.’s and lots of academic dignity. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it’s hard for a fat man to be dignified.”

  And here—here, of all places, in the pages of a women’s magazine—her love for him comes through. Maybe that’s how she’d first seen him, the first day she walked into a classroom at Tufts and saw him standing at his desk, or the day she walked into a clinic for desperately unhappy students. He was tubby and undignified and funny and warm. She found him wonderful.

  This noted scientist is the most genuine human being I’ve met. He isn’t fat—that is, in the ordinary way. He’s just enormous all over. We walked through the garden and about the grounds. The doctor asked me about my work and myself, and I told him more in 15 minutes than I’d tell my most intimate friend in a week. He’s the kind of person to whom you confide things about yourself you scarcely realize.

  She must have felt, from the moment she first met him, that he knew her, that he understood her, that he cared about her.

  In the story, he takes her to his study, on the second floor of the house, with windows overlooking the garden.

  “May I see the lie detector?” I asked.

  “You’re looking right at it,” laughed the doctor, “or at him.”

  He explains the science of lie detection to her, insisting that telling a lie changes a person’s heart rate and raises the blood pressure.

  “That doesn’t seem possible,” I protested. “I couldn’t feel the slightest change in my heart-beat if I were to tell you that my mother’s name is Grace instead of Ethel.”

  “Want to try it?” asked Dr. Marston.

  Marston then attaches a blood pressure cuff to her arm—the machine that, in the experiments they conducted together, Olive Byrne usually took charge of.

  “Tell me what you did last evening—truth or lie, just as you like.”

  I thought for a minute. Then I decided to be clever. I’d mix truth and falsehood and see if he could tell which was which.16

  Nearly every story Olive Byrne wrote for Family Circle follows this formula. A problem presents itself. Our intrepid reporter decides to visit the world’s most famous consulting psychologist. She takes a train to his house. She spends an hour or two with him, Watson to his Holmes. Then she peppers her account of her time with him with true facts—Marston had four children; Olive’s mother’s name was Ethel—but these are only so many islands of truth in an ocean of lies. I’d mix truth and falsehood and see if he could tell which was which.

  Maybe the problem she brings is her own shyness. “Olive Richard” tracks down Dr. Marston, summering on Cape Cod.

  The Doctor, who had taken off thirty pounds and put on a deep tan, greeted me with his usual heartiness. “So you’re worried about shyness,” he said when I had told him what was bothering me. “How lucky you are! Shyness is a great personality asset if you use it right.”

  She mentioned her own timidity—“Talking to anybody I didn’t know was a horror”—but she didn’t mention that his pet name for her was “Docile.” She only mentioned how he made her feel.

  No one can feel shy in Dr. Marston’s presence. He is the sort who brushes away social artificialities and makes you feel completely at ease. I said, “You’re the most baffling person.”17

  Maybe the problem she brings him concerns a girl who doesn’t know how far she should go with a man before marriage.

  Dr. Marston dug a pipe out of a cluttered drawer, stuffed it, and burned three matches to get it going. “How far should a girl go?” he repeated. “I don’t know. I’m neither a vice-squad detective nor a glamour girl. But I can give you a rough idea of how far I’d like to have my daughter go when she gets to the man-capturing age.”

  “That will do nicely,” I agreed, amused at the thought of how the Doctor’s daughter will handle Pop when she gets a few years older.

  (O.A. was only three.)

  “Well, first the girl should understand how far there is to go, and the consequences of each step. Then she must decide how far she has to go with a particular man to make him feel her challenge, and at what point she must stop to keep him from thinking she’s submitting to him.”18

  Maybe the problem was a woman who was having “husband trouble.” To discuss this dilemma, our reporter meets Dr. Marston for lunch at the Algonquin Club.19 Or maybe the problem is love itself. No matter what the dilemma “Olive Richard” brings him, Dr. Marston charms her, endlessly and utterly.

  Much of what Olive Byrne wrote for Family Circle is puff (“Puff Richard,” her brother Jack called her).20

  So many of you have made inquiries about Dr. William Moulton Marston’s books that I thought I’d better read his “Emotions of Normal People” again to freshen my memory. Dr. Marston, the FAMILY CIRCLE psychologist, is, as you may know, probably the greatest authority in this country on the analysis of emotions, having writ-ten the article on that subject for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.21

  Some of it, though, is penetrating, in its wily way. There were many ways Olive Byrne could have taught herself how to write for a magazine. She’d written for the college newspaper at Tufts. She was a quick study. She’d probably read Walter B. Pitkin’s How to Write Stories. She’d typed Marston’s magazine articles. She’d also talked to her brother. She even wrote a profile of him, for Family Circle. “Olive Richard,” keen to write pulp fiction, goes to visit Jack Byrne, editor of Fiction House, to ask him for writing advice.

  “Well now,” drawled Mr. Byrne, a surprisingly young and good-looking New Yorker with an Irish twinkle in his blue eyes, “can you take it young lady? The pulp world is inhabited strictly by he-men and gals have to know their place.”

  He then explains to her that two hundred pulps are published a month, of which forty
-three are detective-story magazines, forty-one are westerns, and five are love-story magazines, though even that many romances, he thought, were too many.

  “The pulp world is going sissy,” Mr. Byrne lamented. “Even I now have to admit that during the past five years the love interest in stories has become an integral part of our formula. It’s a terrible change. Nevertheless, the chief appeal of our magazines is to he-men, who like their drama strong, fast, and straight from the shoulder; their heroes brawny and bold; and their heroines winsome, worried, and weak.”

  The piece includes a boxed-out feature, listing his rules for writing: “SO YOU’D LIKE TO WRITE FOR THE PULPS! Okay—then take the advice of Jack Byrne, chief Editor of Fiction House.” Our reporter never mentions that her subject is her brother. But she does allow, in a wink to him, that he’s full of malarkey.