by Jim Bernhard
She married Colonel Archibald Christie in 1914 and worked in the local hospital as a nurse and pharmacy assistant while he was at war. It was there that she learned about the poisons that would figure prominently in many of her murder mysteries.
Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, featured a detective named Hercule Poirot and established her as a major mystery writer. Most of her other works featured Poirot, Miss (Jane) Marple, or Tommy and Tuppence Beresford as detectives. All told, they have sold more than two billion copies in more than a hundred languages.
In 1926, Christie herself was the subject of a mystery when she vanished for eleven days. Her husband had asked her for a divorce, saying he was in love with a mutual friend named Nancy Neele. This evidently unhinged Agatha, and she left home in her Morris Cowley car, which she abandoned in a chalk pit in Surrey. She then took a train to the seaside town of Harrowgate in Yorkshire, where she registered at a hydropathic spa under the name Theresa Neele. Her husband instigated a nationwide search for her. Police were baffled, and even such fellow mystery writers as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers tried to find her. When guests at the spa recognized her, her husband was summoned to bring her home. It was presumed that she was suffering from some form of temporary memory loss, but there was also speculation that she had intended suicide and planned to frame her husband’s mistress for her murder.
The Christies finally divorced a year and half later. He married his mistress, and Agatha married the noted archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, who was fifteen years younger. She divided her time between traveling with him to far-flung archeological digs and writing no more than one bestselling mystery per year—limiting her output reputedly in order to avoid excessive income tax. Among her many feats is authorship of the longest-running play in history, The Mousetrap, which has had more than 25,000 consecutive performances in London since 1952. In 1971, Christie was made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
In her works, Christie reveals nothing about her religious beliefs or views of death. She was a nominal member of the Church of England, and some critics have viewed her mysteries as Christian allegories of good versus evil. She makes it clear that the Belgian detective Poirot is a devout Catholic, and she had enough interest in religious liturgy to sign a petition to Pope Paul VI asking for continued permission for the Latin mass to be said in Great Britain.
Dame Agatha died at the age of eighty-five on January 12, 1976, at her country home, Winterbrook, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire. Death came “peacefully and gently,” according to her husband, and was attributed to unspecified “natural causes,” very likely pneumonia resulting from a stubborn cold.
She is buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Cholsey, in Oxfordshire. Her estate was valued at only £106,000, since she had shrewdly transferred most of her vast wealth before her death in order to minimize taxes.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Dorothy L. Sayers hoped that her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy would be her most lasting work, but as fate would have it, she is best remembered for her mysteries featuring the insouciant amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, whom her readers found less daunting than Dante. Also a playwright, poet, essayist, literary critic, and Christian apologist, Sayers was an only child, born on June 13, 1893, in the headmaster’s house of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford.
Her father, the chaplain there, tutored precocious little Dorothy in Latin when she was six. Dorothy grew up in the village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdonshire, where her father became rector. She won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, and took first-class honours in modern languages and medieval literature—although regulations prevented women from receiving degrees until 1920, when Dorothy belatedly became one of the first women to be awarded an Oxford M.A.
She went to work for a London advertising agency, where her clients included Colman’s Mustard and Guinness stout, for whom she created this jingle to accompany the image of a toucan and two glasses of Guinness:
If he can say as you can
“Guinness is good for you,”
How grand to be a Toucan,
Just think what Toucan do.
When she was thirty, Sayers took up motorcycle riding and became infatuated with a fellow biker and car salesman named Bill White, with whom she had a son. She farmed the boy out to a cousin to raise, passing him off as her nephew. She began to write mystery novels, beginning with Whose Body? in 1923, followed by a dozen more, including Clouds of Witness, Strong Poison, Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, and Gaudy Night.
In 1926, Sayers married Captain Oswald Atherton Fleming, a Scottish journalist, and moved to a flat in Bloomsbury, where she lived the rest of her life. Fleming suffered from war injuries and tippled too much—but he was an accomplished cook, and Sayers was an avid appreciator of his cuisine.
A devout high-church Anglican, Sayers wrote influential theological works, lectured extensively, and served as a churchwarden in her parish, St. Thomas-cum-St. Anne’s in Soho. She devoted the last years of her life to her magnum opus, a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, of which Hell appeared in 1949, Purgatory in 1955, and Paradise, completed by her colleague Barbara Reynolds, posthumously in 1962.
A heavy woman who relished her food and drink, and a smoker who often used a clay pipe as a cigarette holder, Sayers fell victim to heart disease in her sixties. On December 17, 1957, she was found by her gardener in the front hall of her London home, dead of a massive coronary thrombosis at the age of sixty-four.
At her funeral service, the eulogy was delivered by her friend and fellow Christian writer C. S. Lewis. Her ashes were interred beneath the tower of her parish church. Sayers left her entire estate to the son she had never acknowledged.
DOROTHY PARKER
Once the queen of quips at the Algonquin Round Table and the wisecracking toast of New York’s literati, Dorothy Parker died alone and financially strapped in a rented room, with only her poodle for company. Born on August 22, 1893, in Long Branch, New Jersey, where her parents had a summer cottage, Parker grew up on New York’s Upper West Side. Her father was a garment manufacturer named Rothschild (unrelated to the banking family), and her mother died shortly after she was born. Dorothy’s staunchly Catholic stepmother sent her to school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament.
After graduating from Miss Dana’s Finishing School, Dorothy worked at Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines and published her first book of poems, Enough Rope, which became a bestseller. She moved on to the New Yorker magazine, and with her pals Robert Benchley, Robert E. Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, and others formed the witty circle at the Algonquin Hotel known as the Round Table. A cynical Parker later called the legendary Algonquin wags “just a bunch of loudmouths showing off.” Author of several books of poetry and numerous short stories, Parker is said to have coined such terms as “ball of fire,” “with bells on,” “birdbrain,” “face-lift,” “doesn’t have a prayer,” “scaredy-cat,” “the sky’s the limit,” and “wisecrack.”
In 1916, she married a Wall Street Banker named Eddie Parker, whom she divorced in 1928. Despite her celebrity status, Parker led a troubled life in the 1920s. She drank heavily, had a string of affairs, underwent an abortion, and attempted suicide three times.
In the 1930s, she went to Hollywood, married a writer-actor named Alan Campbell, and made pots of money writing screenplays, including the 1937 A Star Is Born and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 Saboteur. Parker became identified with liberal political causes, including civil rights and anti-fascist groups.
Her marriage to Campbell, who drank even more than she did and also enjoyed the frequent favors of other women, was stormy, and they divorced, remarried, separated again, then reconciled once more in 1961, remaining together until Campbell died of a drug overdose in 1963. The day he died, a solicitous neighbor came to offer condolences and asked if she could bring the grieving widow anything. “A new
husband,” said Parker. The stunned neighbor stammered a shocked response to such irreverence. “All right, then,” said Parker, “how about a ham and cheese on rye, and tell them to hold the mayo.”
Although half-Jewish, half-Scottish, and educated by Catholic nuns, Parker never practiced the religion of Abraham, of Calvin, or of Rome—or any other. She did ponder death on occasion, but always with sardonic humor. She proposed several epitaphs for herself, including “Excuse my dust,” “This is on me,” and “Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”
After Campbell’s death in California, Parker moved back to New York with her poodle Troy (short for Troisième) into a two-room suite on the eighth floor of the Volney Hotel on East 74th Street. When she turned seventy, she said, “If I had any decency, I’d be dead. All my friends are.” On June 7, 1967, a hotel housekeeper found Parker in her bed, dead of a heart attack at the age of seventy-three, with Troy in attendance.
As her executor, Parker had named playwright Lillian Hellman, who arranged a funeral at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. About 150 people attended, including actor Zero Mostel, who spoke, saying, “Dorothy didn’t want a funeral service, and if she had her way I suspect she wouldn’t be here at all.” Parker’s good friend Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper was unable to attend, since she was recuperating from having given birth to her son, Anderson. She had, however, furnished the designer dress in which Parker was laid out.
Hellman arranged for Parker’s cremation, but neglected to tell the crematory what to do with the ashes, which remained on a shelf for six years, when they were sent to Parker’s lawyer, Paul O’Dwyer, in whose filing cabinet they sat for another fifteen years. Finally they were given to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which became the beneficiary of Parker’s will after the death of her primary beneficiary, Martin Luther King, Jr. The remains were buried in 1988 at the NAACP national headquarters in Baltimore. Parker’s estate consisted of a mere $20,000—but also included future royalties on her work, which still go to the NAACP.
JAMES THURBER
“If I have any beliefs about immortality,” James Thurber once said, “it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.” He didn’t say if he thought he was one of the few. Along with Robert Benchley, one of the two leading American humorists of the first half of the twentieth century, Thurber was the son of a frequently unemployed political clerk and an eccentric mother named Mame, whom Thurber called a “born comedienne.” Born on December 8, 1894, in Columbus, Ohio, he lost vision in one eye when his brother accidentally shot him with an arrow while playing at “William Tell.” Because the eye was not removed, as modern medical practice would indicate, he later lost most of the sight in the other one as well. Thurber attended Ohio State University, but his vision prevented his participation in compulsory ROTC, so he failed to get a degree.
He worked for the American Embassy in Paris, then became a newspaper reporter, first in Columbus and then in New York, while beginning to freelance with pieces of wry humor and whimsical cartoons. Through his friend E. B. White, he met Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, who hired him as a staff writer. Thurber and White collaborated on Is Sex Necessary?, a spoof of sex manuals, which established Thurber’s reputation as a major humorist and cartoonist.
He married Althea Adams in 1922, they had one daughter, and they divorced in 1935, when Thurber married his second wife, Helen Wismer, who also became his editor, manager, and caretaker until his death.
Among Thurber’s notable works are such books as The 13 Clocks, My World and Welcome to It, The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments, The Thurber Carnival, The Wonderful O, My Life and Hard Times, The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, Fables for Our Time, and The Years With Ross. Some of them are collections of stories that include the classics “The Unicorn in the Garden,” “The Day the Dam Broke,” “The Night the Bed Fell,” “University Days,” “The Catbird Seat,” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” With Elliott Nugent, Thurber also wrote a successful Broadway play, The Male Animal, and his stories provided material for a revue, A Thurber Carnival, in which he sometimes played himself uncredited during the Broadway run.
Very much a man of the world, Thurber was not much given to speculation about an afterlife. His biographer Harrison Kinney observed, “Thurber had never allowed his probing, restless mind to settle on any single theological insurance policy concerning the possibilities of the hereafter. He remained an agnostic.”
Although never an actual member of the Algonquin Round Table, Thurber frequently strayed into its gatherings to lift a glass and trade stories with Benchley, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and others. A hearty drinker who was especially fond of martinis, Thurber was ejected from more than one New York bar. “One martini is all right,” he said, “two are too many, and three are not enough.” Also a ladies’ man, he prided himself on what he thought of as his sexual prowess into his later years.
Such a rough-and-tumble high life did not result in longevity, and on October 4, 1961, Thurber was stricken with a blood clot of the brain and underwent emergency surgery. As often happens, he developed an infection while in the hospital, lingered several weeks, and died of pneumonia on November 2, at the age of sixty-six. According to his wife, his last intelligible words were, “God bless . . . God damn.”
In a graveside service at Greenlawn Cemetery in Columbus, Thurber’s ashes were buried in a family plot. His friend and A Thurber Carnival director Burgess Meredith attended, along with Thurber’s wife, daughter, two brothers, his literary agent, and some forty relatives, friends, and colleagues from Columbus and New York. The Reverend Karl Scheufler, pastor of Columbus’s First Methodist Church, read some short prayers.
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II
Oscar Hammerstein II is often thought of simply as the second half of “Rodgers and Hammerstein,” but he had a major career as author and lyricist before he teamed with Richard Rodgers. Hammerstein (it’s “stine” not “steen,” as he often pointed out, usually in vain) contributed more than any other single person to the development of American musical theatre. A quintessential New York theatre man, he was born July 12, 1895, in New York City. His grandfather, the first Oscar Hammerstein, was an opera producer who had a Broadway theatre named for him. Young Oscar’s father, William, was the manager of a Manhattan vaudeville theatre, and his Uncle Arthur was a Broadway producer. Although his father was Jewish, Oscar’s Scottish Presbyterian mother had him baptized in the Episcopal Church.
Oscar got a law degree at Columbia, but abandoned that career for theatre soon after graduation. His first collaborators were composers Herbert Stothart and Vincent Youmans and librettist Otto Harbach, with whom he wrote the book and lyrics for his first Broadway musical, Wildflower, in 1923, followed by Rose Marie with composers Stothart and Rudolf Friml. With Jerome Kern, the Harbach-Hammerstein team wrote Sunny, and with Sigmund Romberg and Frank Mandel the classic operetta The Desert Song.
In 1927, Hammerstein without Harbach teamed with Kern again to create a show that was a watershed in the development of musical theatre. Show Boat, based on a novel by Edna Ferber, was a revolutionary musical with an epic plot dealing with such issues as racial and social bigotry, miscegenation, poverty, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, and prostitution. It was also innovative in melding the musical numbers, including such classics as “Ol’ Man River,” “Make Believe,” “Why Do I Love You?,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” and “Bill,” organically into the plot. The next important Broadway musical that would advance the art form was Oklahoma!—also Hammerstein’s creation, in 1943, with his new partner, Richard Rodgers.
In between Show Boat and Oklahoma!, Hammerstein had a varied career with Kern and others, turning out both hits and flops on Broadway, and writing lyrics for songs that are now standards, such as “Lover, Come Back to Me,” “All the Things You Are,” “I’ve Told Every Little Star,” “The Song Is You,” and
“The Last Time I Saw Paris.” His lyrics were typically optimistic, full of hope for better things to come in a basically wholesome world.
By the 1940s, however, Hammerstein’s career was fading, so he eagerly accepted an invitation to team with composer Richard Rodgers, who had lost all patience with his alcoholic and often absentee lyricist, Lorenz Hart. Rodgers and Hammerstein produced Oklahoma!, which realized Hammerstein’s goal of integrating all the elements of a musical—book, music, lyrics, dance, and setting—into a unified whole. After that came more R&H smash hits—Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and Hammerstein’s last show, The Sound of Music.
In 1959, several weeks before The Sound of Music was to open on Broadway, Hammerstein was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Friends were shocked at his illness, since Hammerstein was the epitome of good health and salubrious habits; a non-smoker, he drank little and exercised regularly on the tennis court.
Following his surgery, Hammerstein rejected more aggressive treatment and returned to his Bucks County home, Highland Farm, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to await the end. He lived several months, and his protégé Stephen Sondheim recalls a lunch at which Hammerstein gave him a photograph of himself, which he had signed, “To Stevie, my pupil and teacher.” Hammerstein and his wife, Dorothy, slept side by side in their bedroom, with his morphine doses steadily increasing, until the night he died peacefully, August 23, 1960, at the age of sixty-five.
Hammerstein was cremated and the ashes buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, after a brief ceremony attended by family and close friends, including his collaborator Rodgers. The Reverend Donald Harrington of New York City’s Community Church said prayers and read some lines from Hammerstein’s “Climb Every Mountain,” and actor-playwright Howard Lindsay, coauthor of The Sound of Music, delivered a eulogy.
