by Jill Lepore
Left to right: Byrne, O.A., Marston, Donn, and Pete, at Cherry Orchard in 1938 (illustration credit 21.2)
The year Margaret Sanger won her greatest victory yet and William Moulton Marston held a press conference about Amazonian rule, Olive Byrne was typing his books and raising his children, and Sadie Elizabeth Holloway was supporting him.15 A matriarchy Cherry Orchard was not.
Holloway worked all day. She took the seven o’clock train into the city in the morning, and the seven o’clock train home at night. Marston, for all his energy and all his writing, brought in little income, and none of it was regular. What Olive Byrne earned from Family Circle could not have been much. Counting Huntley, Holloway had seven people to support. In 1936, she filled out a Mount Holyoke alumnae survey:
“Do you administer the household?”
“Yes.”
“Is it your chief occupation?”
“No.”
“How do you spend your time: do you volunteer, are you involved in church, the arts, sports?”
Holloway scribbled a two-word reply: “No leisure.”16
One day, Olive Byrne asked all the children what they wanted to be when they grew up. Pete, who was eight years old, said he wanted to be a writer. Byrne, five, wanted to be a psychologist. Donn, four, wanted to be a mother. And O.A., three, wanted to be a doctor.
One week later, Marston asked O.A. whether she was a boy or a girl. O.A. said, “Oh a boy, I s’pose.”17
The kids knew which of the women was their mother—Pete and O.A. belonged to Holloway (they called her Keets), and Byrne and Donn to Olive (Dots). All of them were told that Byrne and Donn’s father was a man named William Richard and that he was dead. Not all of them believed it. Donn, who looked just like Marston, had his suspicions. And Pete once walked into Olive’s bedroom when his father and Olive were having sex. They told him that Daddy was sick and Dotsie was helping him feel better.18 When the census taker came by, he was told that Huntley was a “lodger” and Olive was a “sister-in-law.”19
If anyone asked about the family arrangements, the children were supposed to change the subject. (“The whys and wherefores of the family arrangements were never discussed with the kids—ever,” Pete said.)20 Everyone understood very well that Olive was Byrne and Donn’s mother, but Holloway, who had adopted them, was their mother, too.21 “This got a little confusing,” O.A. said, not least because she and Donn were in the same grade at school. “How can he be your brother when he’s only six months older than you?” kids would ask her.22 The story that Olive was a servant—the family’s housekeeper—is one that Holloway’s children stuck with, for decades. “She was the housekeeper,” O.A. insisted in an interview, as late as 1999, “and took care of the menial jobs like shopping and things like that.”23 They might have told that story. But that’s not how they lived.
On November 4, 1937, the week before Marston announced to the world the inevitability of Amazonian rule, O.A., age four, said to Olive Byrne, “I wish I was your child.”
“You are.”
“Then you wash me every night & Keetie do Pete.”24
Once, angry with Holloway, O.A. yelled at her, “Oh I wish I had never come out of you—I’d rather come out of Dotsie!”25
It couldn’t have been easy.
“What are Mommies, Daddies, and Keeties for anyway?” O.A. asked.
Olive said, quietly, “I can’t quite say myself.”26
Marston spent most of his time in the study on the second floor. He kept his lie detector there, and a brass ashtray. He mainly worked lying on a daybed, wearing nothing but his underwear, a sleeveless undershirt, and slippers. He liked to nap there. When it was cold, he wore a faded blue wool sweater, stained with cigarette burns, and baggy linen pants. He had grown gigantic. He weighed more than three hundred pounds. (Holloway bought him a copy of a dieting book called Eat and Reduce; it didn’t do any good.)27 When he got up, the floorboards creaked. He smoked Philip Morris cigarettes, from cans of fifty—the kids used the cans to make forts for toy soldiers. He drank rye and ginger ale, morning and night. The piano, on the first floor, was just below his study. If anyone played it, he’d bang the floor and holler, “I’m writing!”28
He wrote for Esquire. He wrote for the Rotarian. In 1939, he wrote an article for Your Life called “What Are Your Prejudices?” It’s an argument against intolerance. “Tolerant people are the happiest,” he insisted, so “why not get rid of costly prejudices that hold you back?” He listed the “Six Most Common Types of Prejudice”:
1. Prejudice against foreigners or races supposed to possess despicable characteristics.
2. Religious prejudices.
3. Class prejudices.
4. Prejudice against sexual frankness.
5. Male prejudice against successful men, and female prejudice against alluring women.
6. rejudice against unconventional people and non-conformists.29
The kids would slip notes under his study door. Marston had a pad of memo paper engraved “Memorandum From the Desk of Dr. W. M. Marston.” He used it to arbitrate disputes. On one piece of memo paper, written in red crayon, he negotiated a truce between nine-year-old Byrne (whose nickname was Whoopsie Doodle, or Dood for short, because he used to love falling off a rocking horse and crying out, “Whoopsie Doodle!”) and seven-year-old Olive Ann (whose nickname was Doggie, because she once played a dog in a school play).
Memorandum From the Desk of Dr. W. M. Marston:
Dear Dood—I do not care who did what. I only wish that our Doggie shall be made happy by sitting on the couch as she wishes. Please accommodate! Yours, Daddy.
On the back of the memo, Byrne wrote back:
Okay! If you will tell her to stop arguing with Pete and quit bothering me. Byrne Marston.30
Marston wrote a poem for Pete: “Moulton Marston hurried home / An hour late for dinner / Dotsie said, ‘You’re just in time / To get a little thinner.’ ”31
The Marston children were fiercely loved. Olive doted on them; Holloway was proud of them. Huntley’s incense-filled room in the attic was a place they could go when they needed quiet. Marston made the rules.32 His diaries and letters are filled with stories of birthday parties, presents, and trips to schools, watching Byrne turn somersaults at the age of six and play the trumpet at age eight. He carried O.A. around on his shoulders.33 “Seven good night hugs OOOOOOO and one good night kiss X,” Marston wrote, signing off a letter to Byrne, away at summer camp. “I’m whispering, ‘I love you.’ ”34
“Spent evening putting together O.A.’s dolls house,” Marston wrote in his diary on Christmas Eve 1938. In the morning, the children woke up at seven and opened their stockings, hung in the library. After breakfast, they opened their presents, under the tree. “Pete likes his skiis best,” Marston wrote in his diary, “Dood his puppets, Donn his farm animals (and his punching bag almost equally) and O.A. paid not the slightest attention to her dollhouse. Happy day.”35
Marston was devoted and passionately affectionate, maybe too affectionate. Every night, he insisted that O.A. enter his study, say, “Goodnight Daddy,” and kiss him on the mouth. Every night, she re-fused. “For Christ’s sake,” Olive would say, “just run in there and kiss him quick and get it over with.”36
On weekends, Holloway worked in the garden or took O.A. to the city, shopping, or to the ballet. “Keets is plugging along at learning to ride a bike and she uses O.A.’s only she forgets that she’s putting on the brakes and she took a looper Saturday,” Olive wrote to Byrne one summer.37
Sundays, Marston held what he called the Sunday Five Club. Instead of sending the kids to church, they debated the meaning of life.38 Marston convened the first meeting of the Sunday Five Club on June 23, 1935, when the children were seven, four, three, and two, but only the oldest, Pete and Byrne, said anything.
“Asked them what God was,” Marston wrote in his diary.
Byrne: “A great big sprocket.”
Pete: “All the laws there are.”39
This went on for years. “We all hated it,” Byrne later wrote. “The women rounded us up and pushed us, dragging our feet into Dad’s study.” It was less debate than indoctrination. “The purpose of the meeting was to instill Dad’s principles and theories, especially the love vs. force one,” Byrne said. The kids, naturally, fought and hit each other, and their father’s insistence that they should love one another—that O.A. ought to answer a poke in the ribs with a kiss—didn’t go over well.40 Still, they took it in, his hodgepodge of Aquarianism and psychology and feminism. “It was the philosophy that the laws of the planet earth are forces bound by love, and love is bound by wisdom,” O.A. said, and that “women could have more control by using force with love around it or love with wisdom around it.”41
Marston administered IQ tests to each of his children. “IQ 173!” he wrote about Byrne in his diary. He promptly informed the children of their scores, which descended, by rank, from Byrne to Donn to Pete to O.A. and caused everyone no end of grief. He decided Byrne ought to skip two grades.42
The children defended themselves from these forces of division by forging a bond. In the summer of 1939, when they were eleven, eight, seven, and six, they started a family newspaper called the Marston Chronicle. Pete was the editor in chief, Byrne was the arts editor and staff artist, and Donn and O.A. covered the news. (Olive Byrne did the typing.) The lead stories were reported by Donn:
BYRNE LOSES TOOTH
Rye, July 18. Byrne lost a front lower tooth and he is hoping the fairies will leave ten cents under his pillow tonight.
DOG FIGHT
Lucky, our new dog got bitten in a dog fight by some dog. We took him to the Vet’s who said the wounds are slight.
Pete wrote a story called “First Come, First Served,” about a kid who wants to go to the World’s Fair; O.A. contributed a cartoon. And Byrne wrote a comic strip, of twelve frames; “The Adventures of Bobby Doone” featured his alter ego, a boy who goes on a car trip to his grandmother’s house in Massachusetts, where he plays with his great-grandfather’s bayonet and gets into very big trouble when he breaks it.43 That would be Captain Moulton’s Civil War bayonet, kept in a closet in William Moulton Marston’s childhood home, in Cliftondale.
They were growing up in the golden age of comic books. Comic strips, or “funnies,” had begun appearing in the pages of newspapers in the 1890s. But comic books date only to the 1930s. They’d been more or less invented by Maxwell Charles Gaines (everyone called him Charlie), a former elementary school principal who was working as a salesman for the Eastern Color Printing Company, in Waterbury, Connecticut, when he got the idea that the pages of funnies that appeared in the Sunday papers could be printed cheaply, stapled together, and sold as magazines, or “comic books.” In 1933, Gaines started selling the first comic book on newsstands; it was called Funnies on Parade.
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, in Jumbo Comics #20 (October 1940), printed by Fiction House, where Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack, was an editor (illustration credit 21.3)
At first, comic books were just cut-and-pasted strips; soon they got to be something else. Gaines understood comic books as a wholly new art form whose relationship to the newspaper comic strip was not unlike that of the early motion pictures to photographs.44 Comic books were a kind of motion picture, too.
Detective Comics first appeared in 1937. Superman, written and drawn by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, made his debut in Action Comics #1 in June 1938. Superman was unstoppable; soon Gaines was selling a million Superman comics every month.45
At Fiction House, Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack, started printing comics, too, beginning with Jumbo Comics in September 1938. Its inaugural issue included a character created the year before, in London, by Will Eisner and S. M. Iger: Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a female Tarzan. Jack Byrne’s Fiction House became known for its powerful, invincible female heroes. At a time when many publishers had none, Fiction House employed more than twenty women artists.46
The popularity of comics soared. Gaines, who did not tend to hire women to do anything except secretarial work, began publishing All-American Comics in 1939. That same year, Superman became the first comic-book character to have an entire comic book all to himself; he could also be heard on the radio.47 The first episode of Batman appeared in Detective Comics #27, in May 1939. Three months later, Byrne Holloway Marston, staff artist for the Marston Chronicle, drew the first installment of “The Adventures of Bobby Doone.”
From “Amazona, the Mighty Woman,” Planet Comics #3 (May 1940), also printed by Jack Byrne’s Fiction House (illustration credit 21.4)
By 1939, almost every kid in the United States was reading comic books. A form of writing that hadn’t existed just a few years earlier seemed to have taken over the country. Comic books were cheap—usually ten cents an issue—and children could pay for them with their own money. They were sold everywhere: at grocery stores, newsstands, and drugstores. Kids traded them. They read them by the dozens. Their parents were dumbstruck.
In March 1940, Jack Byrne’s Fiction House published “Amazona, the Mighty Woman,” in Planet Comics. It tells the story of a “woman of surpassing strength and unmatched beauty” named Amazona: “She and her people are the last survivors of a super race that perished during the period of the last ice age.” She is discovered by an American reporter named Blake Manners, the lone survivor of a polar expedition. She falls in love with him: “Amazona, fascinated by the handsome stranger, does not want him to leave.” But he wants to go back to the United States. “She finally convinces Blake to take her back with him to civilization.” She frees his ship by using her “amazing strength” to lift the ice away from its hull. In America, she turns out to be ferocious and easily irritated. When a cabdriver calls her a “sweet gal,” she clouts him, then leaves his cab a wreck, telling him, “I’ll show you how sweet a ‘babe’ I am!”48 Amazons were on the rise.
“I know from observation in my own household that children read the so-called funnies morning, noon, and—unfortunately—night,” wrote Olive Byrne. She counted eighty-four different comic books that the kids read and traded.49
Reading comics was a way to have a moment of quiet at Cherry Orchard; quiet was usually hard to find. Marston was big and he was loud and he drank and he thundered when he was angry. One night at the dinner table, frustrated, he shouted, “At least I can still get an erection!”50
He was the loudest person in the house, but he was also the most ridiculous. “Now, Bill,” Holloway would say when Marston got started on a rant. And then she would wait, in silence, for him to shut up.
The kids read the comics. Holloway earned the money. Huntley burned incense in the attic. Olive took care of everyone, stealing time to write for Family Circle. And William Moulton Marston, the last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle, the lie detector who declared feminine rule a fact, was petted and indulged. He’d fume and he’d storm and he’d holler, and the women would whisper to the children, “It’s best to ignore him.”51
PART THREE
PARADISE ISLAND
From “America’s Wonder Women of Tomorrow,” Wonder Woman #7 (Winter 1943) (illustration credit p3.1)
SUPREMA
IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DC’s editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.1
Batman had debuted in Detective Com-ics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ow
nership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsman’s organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDR’s solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.2
From “The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom,” Detective Comics #33 (November 1939) (illustration credit 22.1)
With war devastating Europe, the disarming of the dark knight was Detective Comics’ deferral to a cherished American idea about the division between civilian and military life. Superheroes weren’t soldiers; they were private citizens. And so, late in 1939, one of Batman’s writers drafted a new origin story for him: when Bruce Wayne was a boy, his parents had been killed before his eyes, shot to death. Not only did Batman not own a gun; Batman hated guns.3 Hating guns is what made him Batman.