Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  My grandparents lived down the street from that house.

  My high school held its prom in that house.

  What happened was that the bottom fell out of everything.

  E.W. lost control of his company. Officially in 1929, though in fact the process started long before that. Marland Oil was famous by this point. Its logo, an upside-down red triangle, was found on hundreds of filling stations across the middle of the country. Its generosity toward its workers, rare for the period—it provided health insurance, as well as affordable housing, literacy training, tennis courts, a golf course—was much discussed. E.W. embraced the role of enlightened lord, as he’d been trained to do: of him to whom much is given, much is required.

  In 1923, J. P. Morgan Jr. invited E.W. to his office in Manhattan, wreathed him in flattery and cigar smoke—what an outfit you’ve built, sir; what a mind for business, sir—and persuaded him to sell the J. P. Morgan Company twelve million dollars in stock. The investment was a crack that widened over the next several years. The Morgans slowly took over. E.W. had always hated bankers, whom he dismissed as “still-faced boys.” He liked gamblers and adventurers, not cautious men who built their fortunes on decimal points. Yet there’s a curious blur around E.W. in this period. As the Morgans moved in on his executive committee, he seems to have been preoccupied with increasingly fantastic distractions. He sent experts to Europe to buy art for his collection. He built his palace. He brought artists to Ponca City to decorate it and to paint whimsical portraits of himself and his children: George as a roustabout, Lydie as Georges Bizet’s Carmen. He briefly became obsessed with rigid airships. He joined a new company that planned to manufacture both military dirigibles and luxurious passenger craft in the style of German zeppelins (Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of his co-incorporators). Once, on a bear hunt in Mississippi, he bought a plantation on a whim for $750,000.

  In 1926, Mary Virginia died. Here the blur grows even deeper. She was forty-eight (maybe forty-nine; her death certificate gives a different birth year from the old Pennsylvania census records). What killed her at such a young age? The official cause of death was listed as pneumonia, and the duration of the illness listed as four days. John Joseph Mathews, however, says she died “after a long illness.” Possibly she had an undiagnosed cancer. For years, there’d been rumors that something was wrong. Stories passed around town that she drank too much (probable: cirrhosis of the liver is listed as a contributory factor on her death certificate), that she drank laudanum, that she made scenes in public. She hated living in Oklahoma, people said, had always hated it, hated the plains and the sky, hated the people, hated the muddy saloon town she’d moved to and the grandiose oil town it became. She was sharp-minded and sour-tempered. “I saw him with a girl!” she is said to have screamed, drunkenly, at a church social, when someone asked why she was crying. We do have some strange details. E.W. had central air-conditioning installed in her room, and only her room, at the house on Grand Avenue. The plans for the new mansion, which were drawn up well before her death, apparently did not include a room for her. So had her death already seemed imminent by 1925? Or was she planning to go on living at the Grand Avenue house while E.W. moved on with George and Lydie? Or something else?

  One of the passengers on the Olympic during the Marlands’ voyage to England was a young man named Edward Donahoe, who came from a prominent Ponca City family. He knew George and Lydie well and he saw Lydie several times in Europe: He was the “Ed” who left her the copy of Evan Harrington. “He dances well,” Lydie wrote in her diary, “& is intelligent also—great combination.” Donahoe went to Harvard, then worked at Alfred A. Knopf for a period in the 1920s. He became a peripheral figure in the Harlem Renaissance, closely associated with Nella Larsen. Later he became a tragic drunk. Somewhere on the threshold between those two states, in 1937, he published a novel, Madness in the Heart, which told a fictionalized version of the history of Ponca City. His story included characters based on the Marlands. The E.W. character is selfish and cruel. The Mary Virginia character kills herself.

  The suicide could have been Donahoe’s invention, of course. He was in a position to know what had really happened, which doesn’t mean he told it straight; Madness in the Heart is a novel, not a biography. Still, this particular story about Mary Virginia’s death has persisted across decades. It has, at least, the virtue of completing a coherent picture. A picture whose parts are individually unconfirmed and unconfirmable, true, but one that, taken as a whole, seems charismatically plausible. An unhappy woman, brought to a strange place; she turns to drink; her powerful husband takes up with other women, or with another woman; her depression and anger are euphemistically called “ill health” by her conservative society; her suicide is covered up. Certainly Donahoe’s book was radioactive in Ponca City. His father, who was close to the Marlands, tried to buy up every copy, and he burned the ones he bought.

  Around the time of Mary Virginia’s death, the blur extends to cover Lydie.

  More rumors, more uncertainties.

  She took several trips with E.W. alone, as the townspeople said, which means something or it doesn’t.

  She was hospitalized in 1927, as The Ponca City News said, or else she wasn’t.

  She had a baby in secret and gave it up for adoption, as The Saturday Evening Post said, or else she didn’t.

  On January 6, 1928, the following headline ran on the front page of The New York Times:

  E. W. Marland to Marry Adopted Daughter; Oil Man Plans Wedding Within a Month

  Then four days later, on page 26:

  Marland’s Adoption of Fiancee Annulled, Clearing Way for Marriage to Wife’s Niece

  There was no doubting the accuracy of these reports: E.W. himself announced the engagement. Lydie spoke at the court hearing to have the adoption annulled. E.W. was fifty-three; Lydie was twenty-seven. The story of the tycoon who fell in love with his own daughter caused a national media frenzy.

  News of the engagement of her daughter, Miss Lydie Miller Roberts, to Ernest W. Marland, oil millionaire, came as a shock to Mrs. George F. Roberts, who refused to discuss the coming marriage, at her home on Old Mill Road, in Flourtown, late today. She broke down and wept when she learned of the engagement, regretting particularly Mr. Marland’s reference to the adoption of the girl. She refused to discuss her daughter’s reasons for leaving her parents.

  In February it was reported that the wedding had been delayed because Lydie was hospitalized with anemia. In July it was reported that the wedding had been further delayed because Lydie was suffering from what the press called a “nervous ailment.”

  Having recently opened his $2,000,000 mansion in Ponca City, Okla., E. W. Marland, oil financier, was reported yesterday to be on his way to New York on a mission which he refused to discuss when leaving his home town.… Mr. Marland’s friends believe he is coming to visit his fiancee, who is said to be in a sanitarium near New York.

  On July 14, 1928, E.W. and Lydie were married at the Roberts house in Flourtown. Her parents had opposed the marriage, or at any rate reporters said they did. But her father gave her away, and her younger brother, the son they had named Marland, was one of the attendants.

  There were five guests at the wedding.

  After the honeymoon, the new couple returned to Ponca City and moved into their new mansion, which, the Times reported, “is said to rival in splendor the sumptuous manor houses of old England.”

  In October 1928, three months after the wedding and a year before the stock market crash, the bankers succeeded in forcing E.W. out of Marland Oil.

  The fortune was gone before 1930.

  Lydie’s old life ended, then ended again and kept ending.

  5

  The fairy tale. The palace. The drowned city.

  The entrance to the Marland Mansion lies through a pair of arched wooden doors. The doors are studded with iron. Across from the doors stands the entrance to the hedge maze. The hedge maze is in fact not a maze but only a fo
rmal garden whose ornate pattern of paths creates a mazelike effect. The hedges (though this is visible only from the upper windows) form the shape of a gigantic, stylized M. The hedges are cut low, so it is possible from outside the garden to see the statue of George Marland at its center. George Marland, who was at various times Lydie’s brother, nephew, and stepson. Rendered in white stone as a young scion, a sporting Yale man of the 1920s, in riding boots and an open-collared shirt. White stone hand slipped into a white stone pocket.

  In the mansion’s early days, the garden around the statue of George Marland was larger and more open, less labyrinthine. In those first years, the estate was itself larger, was in fact immense, a barony with three lakes, an Olympic swimming pool, woods, fields. A secret tunnel led from the mansion to the boathouse. Only later, after the crash, when the mansion passed into the hands first of an order of monks and then of an order of nuns, did the margins begin to collapse, the woods to disappear. Two of the lakes and the swimming pool were filled in. Outlying lands were sold to developers. Houses went up just outside the walls, on Monument Road.

  From the shade of the porte cochere, you pass through the heavy doors into the deeper shade of the vestibule and then, through an elaborate archway, into the gloom of the grand foyer. The purpose of the foyer is perhaps less to embody any particular beauty than to tell you in unmistakable terms what kind of house this is. This is the kind of house where footsteps echo. This is the kind of house where the quantity of stone, the depth of shadow, the massive height of the ceiling, create an effect calculated less to please than to overwhelm. This is the kind of house where wall sconces take the shapes of satyrs. This is the kind of house where the stair rails terminate in wrought-iron dragon heads. This is the kind of house where the ceiling of the loggia is muraled in hand-painted chinoiserie canvas and where the ceiling of the ballroom is coffered in gold leaf. This is the kind of house in which one repeats the familiar real-estate terms—forty-eight thousand square feet, fifty-five rooms—as if they retained any meaning in the presence of a dining room whose pollard oak paneling was cut “by special permission from the royal forests of England.” There is a secret room, concealed within the mansion’s third kitchen, where a secret door designed to look like a safe leads to a cavernous cellar in which whiskey was once kept hidden from Prohibition agents: That is the kind of house this is.

  It is the kind of house that requires vast sums not only to build but also to inhabit. E.W. and Lydie managed to live here for a little over two years. In 1931, they found they could no longer afford to heat the ballroom, to light the satyr-head sconces, to pay the large domestic staff necessary to man the three kitchens and keep the royal oak paneling free from dust. They moved, first into the artist’s studio E.W. had built on the estate and then into the chauffeur’s cottage. They opened the mansion for special occasions. Political events, for instance. Broke but still famous in Oklahoma, E.W. ran for Congress in 1932 and won. He ran for governor in 1934, on a platform of bringing the New Deal to Oklahoma. He won again. He turned the mansion into a political headquarters. He strode through the halls, signing papers. He threw an inaugural ball in the ballroom, under the gold leaf.

  Lydie became First Lady of Oklahoma. She filled the role for four years, though in fact she seems to have taken little part in E.W.’s administration in Oklahoma City. In fact by this time—after the mysterious hospitalization, the rumored pregnancy, the newspaper frenzy, the wedding, the change, the crash—she seems to have started down the path toward the anxious reclusiveness of her later years. She still smiles, in photos from this period, but her smile is different.

  Less steady somehow.

  Uncertain somehow.

  She was too shy to speak at political rallies. She stayed in Ponca City. Read her magazines. Read her books.

  E.W. lost two bids for a Senate seat. He tried to start a new oil company, but the world had changed, and he failed.

  In 1941, a few months before he died, E.W. sold the mansion to the Discalced Carmelite Fathers for sixty-six thousand dollars.

  In 1948, a few years before Lydie disappeared, the monks sold it to the Felician Sisters for fifty thousand dollars.

  The nuns occupied the estate for twenty-seven years. They were there in 1950, when Louis Cassel first knocked on the door of the chauffeur’s cottage. They were there in 1953, when Lydie drove away in the green convertible.

  They were there for twenty-two years after that.

  In 1975, three things happened.

  The first is that Ponca City bought the mansion from the Felician Sisters for $1.4 million. The city’s aim was to restore it, open it to the public, turn it into a tourist attraction. Half the money was raised through a special one-cent sales tax. The other half was put up by the company that had once been Marland Oil. In 1929, shortly after E.W. was forced out, Marland Oil acquired a smaller outfit, Continental Oil, and because the bankers, the still-faced boys, wanted E.W. entirely out of the picture, they used the latter name for the newly combined operation. Continental Oil later became Conoco, which in 2002 would merge with Phillips Petroleum to form ConocoPhillips, which eventually split into separate companies whose combined revenue in 2016 was more than $111 billion. But even by the mid-1970s, Conoco’s prosperity had sufficiently softened its attitude toward its own founding drama for it to agree to match the proceeds of the sales tax.

  The second thing that happened in 1975 is that the gates were opened at Kaw Dam and Kaw City was submerged under the lake.

  The third thing that happened in 1975 is that Lydie Marland came back.

  * * *

  She was now an old woman. She had been gone for more than twenty years and the years had been hard ones. Her teeth had fallen out. She wore a scarf wrapped around the lower part of her face to hide her mouth. She wore a long black dress and sometimes a long raincoat and a plastic hood and she wore bulky tennis shoes, and in warm weather she walked around town dressed like that. In press reports from the period, she is compared to a scarecrow, a witch, a ghost. She wanders the grounds of the mansion, in accounts of varying believability, at one and two in the morning. Her letters, the few that survive, from the time of her return to Ponca City stress the shock, the strain, the exhausting struggle of nerving herself to see the old places again.

  The nightmare of my life since I left there—I’m a humiliating physical wreck—and dread seeing you, and the impulse is to put it off.

  The neat handwriting of 1921 is now a wobbly scrawl, and she nearly always writes in red ink, possibly because it is easier for her to see.

  I’ll try to be brief, to keep my mind on the facts (altho facts are surface things, and never tell the story).

  She is haunted by suffocating guilt (over what isn’t clear) and by a sense that the insurmountable complexity of every situation makes decisions tormentingly difficult.

  Some days I long to let it all go and let others unravel a tangled-up mess. It would be just one more way I failed E.W. and everyone who ever liked me (my brother).

  Perhaps what appears to be right and wrong is just cause and effect.

  She does not reveal where she has been since 1953, although there have been sightings through the years. More rumors. She was spotted at an antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s; she showed up in California; once, in Arkansas City, Kansas, two reporters staked out her post-office box. When they approached her she fled and hid in a supermarket. She is obsessed, in the letters, with the idea that she has been followed by journalists and spies ever since she left town. Perhaps she is paranoid, or perhaps she is still traumatized by the newspaper furor over her engagement. Perhaps she is right; I simply do not know.

  The invasion of and exploitation of one’s private life is being called “The New Cannibalism”—and it is that—psychological cannibalism. I was never a “missing person,” I have spent years trying to evade the relentless surveillance, and never succeeding.

  The cottage was falling apart; her money was gone. Her return to Ponc
a City had been facilitated by community leaders, there were bank presidents and lawyers and oil executives interested in her welfare, but when they tried to help her, she either stalled or refused outright. She would not let them sign her up for Social Security, because she would not take money from the government. She would not let them sell her things, because the strain of deciding to sell them was too great. Their letters to each other grow increasingly bewildered.

  Howard, Mrs. Marland never makes a decision today that she can put off until tomorrow. She continues to live a deprived existence but is almost impossible to help. If you have any ideas, I would appreciate your sharing them with me.

  Somehow she managed to acquire a house on South Fourth Street that was within walking distance of the grocery store and the drugstore, and in the winter, when the cottage became uninhabitable, she lived there, keeping KFC buckets in the refrigerator, hanging blankets over the windows.

  Why arm myself for rain & wind when doing the same thing for a dinner dance is so much more invigorating.

  I cannot remember a time when I did not know this story.

  I grew up knowing this story.

  I was born in 1976, the year after Lydie returned to Ponca City. That was the year the mansion opened to the public. The year water began to pour through the last-completed gates at Kaw Dam. As a child I would sometimes see her, in her long coat, in her long scarf, shuffling on the sides of roads. We would drive past her. Look, there’s Lydie, out for a walk. Most often near my grandparents’ house, because she stayed in the old cottage during the warm months. My grandmother might point her out. Lydie, who had lived in the mansion. Lydie, who had disappeared and no one knew where she had gone.

  Perhaps what appears to be right and wrong is just cause and effect.

  We did not know what to make of her. No one did. It was not merely her eccentricity that baffled us; it was also the dark unintelligible fact she lodged in the heart of our founding narrative. Our town existed because of the oil industry. E. W. Marland had built the oil industry. E. W. Marland was revered. Maintaining the status of E. W. Marland as a great man was a matter of civic importance. A statue of E. W. Marland seated, almost throned, stood outside city hall. The story of E. W. Marland was a story of frontier conquest, of civilization building. This was our history, or we said it was. This was our story, or we wanted it to be. Yet E. W. Marland had done this one viscerally shocking and unaccountable thing: He had married his own daughter. Now, fifty years later, the daughter-wife wandered the streets in a long black dress with a scarf wrapped around her mouth. She couldn’t be written out of the narrative. She was right here. Yet she offered no explanations, either of the distant past or of her own mysteriously shattered present. From the car window, she eluded all interpretation. How could we make the pieces fit?