by Nancy Moses
Perhaps part of her agreed with her critics, for soon after Pearl picked up the prize in Sweden, she moved more aggressively beyond the writer’s desk to the world outside. She became a sort of secular missionary, fearlessly championing the causes she cared most about: humane treatment of the mentally retarded, equal rights for African-Americans, the plight of children abandoned by their American soldier fathers and Asian mothers, pay equity for women. She shared the stage with birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. When she spoke, a surprising number of people listened, especially to her opinions about China. Pearl’s familiarity with all classes of Chinese and her fluency in many vernaculars gave her an insider’s view of the values that underlay the rhetoric on all sides of a conflict.
In 1940, she and Walsh announced the formation of the China Emergency Relief Committee, which soon led to an invitation to serve as chair of the United China Relief, an umbrella organization for the Chinese Emergency Fund and six other charities. Its success, in turn, led Walsh and Pearl Buck to establish the East and West Association, an organization that promoted cross-cultural understanding. By the middle of World War II, this secular missionary was serving as guest writer and editor of a newly revamped Asia magazine, leading three charities, and speaking out on behalf of China throughout the nongovernmental sector. Pearl’s many crusades and social engagements left little time for a home life: while she and Walsh adopted or fostered seven children, they later recalled spending very little private time with their celebrity mother.
After World War II, the humanitarian work continued with the founding of Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. Pearl also continued to express her views on social issues: British resistance to India’s independence, the peacetime draft, the expansion of the military. Over time, as the Cold War began, she grew increasingly out of step, and her popularity and royalties declined.
In 1953, Richard Walsh suffered a massive stroke. While he survived as an invalid for another seven years, the stroke ended his and Pearl’s remarkable partnership. His death in 1960 was anticlimactic; by that time, she had moved on.
Walsh’s stroke left Pearl without her protector. From then on, she made all her decisions herself. Not all of them were good. In 1963, she met a man who would trigger the most controversial years of her often-controversial life.
It began innocently enough, when Pearl called the local Arthur Murray dance studio to secure a teacher for her daughters. The charming young man whom the studio sent to the house, Theodore Harris, essentially never left. He was forty years her junior. She made Harris her coauthor, director of her foundation, and constant companion. He also became her greatest liability.
Harris entered the picture just when Pearl was launching yet another charity, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, to provide scholarships for Amerasian children in their home countries. She had assembled a blue-ribbon board that included Dwight D. Eisenhower, Joan Crawford, Princess Grace of Monaco, Sophie Tucker, Robert F. Kennedy, and two neighbors: David Burpee, founder of the Burpee Seed Company, and real estate developer Herbert Barness. Ted Harris, she decided, was just the person to serve as president of the new Pearl S. Buck Foundation, despite his lack of a college degree or experience in philanthropy. She rented a large townhouse for the organization in Philadelphia’s elegant Delancey Place, filled it with antiques, and installed Ted Harris. Soon his staff included a cook, a houseboy, and Harris’s long-time companion—all financed by Pearl.
With Harris’ encouragement, Pearl resigned from many public commitments, updated her wardrobe and makeup, and joined him on a twenty-city tour to raise funds for the new foundation at Pearl S. Buck gala balls. People began to express concern over Pearl’s infatuation, Harris’ obsequiousness, and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation’s predilection for spending more on Harris and his entourage and less on scholarships for Amerasian children. When David Burpee realized that “Arthur Murray people” were dominating the foundation, his letter of resignation urged that Pearl proceed with caution. She answered it vigorously: “David, please don’t worry about me. I have always done what people said was impossible. . . . Publishers and literary agents once told me that I could never make a success at writing about Chinese people. I thought of that the day I stood before the King of Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize!”[13]
In 1966, she and Ted Harris coauthored For Spacious Skies, generally considered one of her weakest books. That is where we first learn that the only extant copy of the typescript for The Good Earth has vanished. “The devil has it,” Pearl writes. “I simply cannot find it.”[14] A year later, on the eve of her seventy-fifth birthday, Pearl updated her will to bequeath her entire estate, estimated at some seven million dollars, including Green Hills Farm, to the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, and left with Harris on an extended tour of Asia.
In 1969, the gossip swirling around Pearl Buck and Harris went public when Philadelphia Magazine published “The Dancing Master:” “Famed novelist Pearl S. Buck has been waltzing into a heartbreaking story,” it began. The extensive, damning expose detailed Harris’ flamboyant lifestyle and his unorthodox management of the Pearl Buck Foundation. Soon after the story appeared, Pearl, Harris, and their retinue moved to Vermont, where she died in 1973 at the age of eighty.
All of this led me to wonder: could there be a connection between the appearance of Ted Harris in Pearl’s life and the disappearance of the typescript for The Good Earth? The two incidents seemed to have happened around the same time. Perhaps there were some clues at Pearl Buck’s home. So, on a raw January morning, I drove the hour from Philadelphia to rural Bucks County. I traveled down long serpentine roads flanked with fields, forests, old farmhouses, and new housing developments to a Pennsylvania Commonwealth historic marker dedicated to Pearl Buck, and a blue and white road sign that reads, “Pearl S. Buck International, Opening Doors to the World, Gift Shop.” I turned into Green Hills Farm and followed the road past her gravesite, marked by an odalisque inscribed only with her birth name, “Pearl Sydenstriker,” as if she had shed her first and second husbands for all eternity. The road ended in a parking lot flanked by the three buildings. Pearl Buck has morphed into a nonprofit conglomerate called Pearl S. Buck International, an umbrella organization for three charities: the Pearl Buck House National Historic Landmark, Welcome House, and Opportunity House, which provides sponsorships for mixed Asian-Caucasian children in their home countries. The Pearl S. Buck Foundation, the charity Ted Harris ran as president, is gone.
Curator Donna Carcaci Rhodes met me in the spacious lobby of the Welcome Center and led me past the gift shop and into to the Pearl S. Buck Trophy Room, packed with awards, honors, photographs, and memorabilia. In case you’ve never seen one, the Nobel Prize is a gold medal approximately three inches in diameter with a silhouette of Arthur Nobel in relief, and the Pulitzer Prize is a framed certificate issued by the Trustees of Columbia University. Nearby, a glass case held Absalom Sydenstriker’s sermon book from 1888—small enough to fit into his coat pocket—and a photograph of him as an old, gaunt man standing on the steps of the Buck’s house in Nanjing, where he lived after his wife died.
I followed Rhodes out of the Welcome Center and down a path to the nineteenth-century fieldstone farmhouse that Pearl transformed into a large and rambling family home and offices. “This is now a house museum, and it’s set in the 1935–1938 period when Green Hills Farm was most active,” Rhodes explained as we entered. We walked through the original front door into a living room with worn, wide plank floors covered with blue Chinese rugs, sturdy furniture, and walls enlivened by paintings and prints. “Mr. and Mrs. Walsh were early collectors of illustrations,” said Rhodes, pointing to two dramatic Chinese scenes painted by famed illustrator Charles Edwards Chambers. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of Pearl as a demure missionary wife with cornflower blue eyes and soft brown curls. “Ms. Buck never liked the portrait,” said Rhodes.
We walked over to the old Royal typewriter that
Pearl Buck used to type The Good Earth. It was sitting on her carved Chinese rosewood desk in front of the Chinese rosewood chair that Pearl had imported from Nanjing. “This is where The Good Earth typescript was displayed in 2009 after it was recovered,” said Rhodes. “Then Edgar Walsh, Ms. Buck and Richard Walsh’s adopted son, took it back. He’s the executor of his parents’ estate, so controls the typescript. He lives in Connecticut and keeps the typescript in a secure vault.”
We sat for a moment while Rhodes reconstructed the recovery of the typescript. She had received the call from David Bloom from Freeman’s auction house asking whether the Pearl Buck House was interested in purchasing The Good Earth typescript. Rhodes knew she had to work carefully and quickly or this precious treasure might disappear.
“I need to check with my supervisor,” Rhodes told Bloom. “Do you think you can send me visual proof?”
Fifteen minutes later, an email arrived from Freeman’s. Attached to it was a jpeg of a single page. “I printed out the document, walked from my office into this house, went to this desk, and put on my white cotton curator’s gloves. I then carefully inserted a sheet of paper in this, Pearl’s Royal typewriter, and typed the first sentence of the jpeg.”
With a jeweler’s loupe close to her eye, she compared the two pages. They were virtually identical. After forty years, Rhodes was holding proof of the long-missing document in her hand.
Rhodes shared the good news with her bosses at Pearl Buck International and they called the FBI. Soon she was on the phone with Robert Wittman, senior investigator with the FBI’s Art Crime Team, telling him about the typescript and the call from David Bloom. Wittman called Bloom, who immediately referred him to Susan Shaddinger Dempster, the woman who had appeared in his office with the typescript. Wittman then called Dempster, who was shocked to hear from the FBI: she thought the typescript and other documents in the hatbox actually belonged to her mother, Helen Shaddinger, Pearl Buck’s secretary. Within a matter of days, The Good Earth typescript was with the FBI.
“The typescript was yellowed with age. It was wrapped in paper and put inside a red and white box. Then, the box was wrapped and placed in a woven leather suitcase from the 1950s,” remembered Rhodes. The box also contained a manila file, labeled “Famous People,” with about a hundred letters to Pearl Buck from President Harry Truman, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and other major figures of Buck’s day. There were also a number of letters from 1933 between Pearl and Richard Walsh, her then-publisher and later husband, including the correspondence from the 1930s when she assigned him ownership of The Good Earth typescript, and he wrote back an acceptance letter.
All evidence pointed to Pearl Buck’s secretary. I wondered why she was never prosecuted for the theft.
“Call Bob Wittman,” Rhodes suggested. “He’ll fill you in on the details.”
“No one was arrested or prosecuted for the theft of The Good Earth typescript. Can you tell me why?” I asked Wittman when I reached him a few days later. He had retired from the FBI and written a book about his exploits and was happy to provide a tutorial in criminal law.
“Pearl S. Buck’s former secretary, Helen Shaddinger, is the person we think had the typescript,” Wittman said. “The problem was that she had passed away, so we couldn’t interview her—or Pearl Buck, who was also dead. When Susan, Helen’s daughter, found The Good Earth typescript in the basement, she thought it might be a copy. That’s why she took it to David Bloom at Freeman’s. No one can prove any criminal intent.”
No criminal intent means there’s no crime. One part of the case of the missing typescript has been solved. We know who took it: Pearl’s long-time secretary. But, why? What led her to remove these documents from Pearl Buck’s home and hide them away?
“What is your opinion?” I asked Donna Carcaci Rhodes on my next visit. “Why did Helen Shaddinger take the typescript?”
“I believe the motivation was protection, not thievery,” she replied, “Pearl Buck and Ted Harris had a relationship for ten years. That was enough time for someone to remove things if he or she felt it was important to remove things to protect them.”
That made sense. Helen Shaddinger took and hid The Good Earth typescript and other documents to keep them safe from Ted Harris. At the time the manuscript disappeared, Pearl was ready to sell it to finance the Pearl S. Buck Foundation.
“Pearl Buck was making a conscious effort to say, ‘what’s going to help these Amerasian children with their need?’ She was asking herself, ‘why do we have these manuscripts lying around when they could help people?’” said Rhodes. “She was not going to let anything of value remain as a ‘dust collector.’ Ted Harris was saying, ‘let’s establish your house and your foundation.’ She was handing things over to him as a business matter; she saw him as a business partner. Until she died, she defended Ted Harris as helping her and helping children.”
I thought this over for a while and realized the story of the document actually posed an ethical question that went something like this: What is more ethical, allowing an owner to sell property that has significant and irreplaceable social value, or taking the property from the owner to protect it for posterity? Removing a possession without the owner’s approval is against the law. In the case of this iconic document, the question is: do ethics trump the law?
Let me complicate things a bit more. What if you believe the owner of this iconic document cannot think straight because she is under the sway of someone else? Does this make taking her property more ethical? Or, here’s another question. What if your perceptions are wrong and the owner is not under anyone’s sway, but rather acting independently, though imprudently? Does that affect the ethics of this situation?
You can see how complicated this can get.
So, in the interest of clarity, here’s my ending to the case of the missing typescript. First, while I don’t buy the view that Pearl Buck saw Ted Harris as just a “business partner,” I also don’t believe she was an addled old lady, swept away by a charming and conniving swindler. I think she had control of her faculties. I think she was aware of Harris’ antics, but chose to ignore them because they didn’t matter to her. She wanted to enjoy life and assure that her final gift to the world, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, would survive. Pearl Buck always used her royalties to live exactly as she wished, including supporting Harris and his staff in a luxurious townhouse. The proceeds from the sale of The Good Earth typescript would save Amerasian babies, send them to school, and assure them a better life. If the world failed to understand her . . . well, it never really understood. The damning article in Philadelphia Magazine was just another example.
After forty years’ absence, the precious typescript of The Good Earth had finally been found—and hidden again. It is in a vault, safe but unavailable. No one can visit it; no one can study it without Edgar S. Walsh’s permission. Legally, he can do anything he wants with it. He can sell it to the highest bidder, and if that bidder is a private individual, he or she can move it from Walsh’s vault to his or her own. Or, the buyer can sell or donate it to the Pearl S. Buck House or any of the other six institutions located in the United States, China, and Korea that connect to Pearl’s past or carry her legacy.
That would be a fitting tribute, a fitting result. Edgar’s father, Richard, didn’t want such a “valuable manuscript . . . sold for a profit.” He wanted it “turned over to a collecting institution.” That’s what Richard wrote to Pearl when she placed the document in his hands.
After being discounted for decades, Buck is now being rediscovered. The Good Earth is a perennial favorite, translated into at least sixty-five languages, and has held a permanent spot on many high school reading lists. In 2004, it was selected for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club—a twenty-first-century version of the-Book-of-the-Month Club; the selection sent it back to the bestseller lists. Peter Conn receives a steady stream of young Chinese scholars interested in working with him, as well as invitations to scholarly conferences about Pearl Buck’s w
ork and influences in Nanjing, where she and Lossing taught.
“Chinese scholars are taking great interest in Pearl,” he told me. “Her books are uniquely valuable: they’re the only record of life of the peasant.”
Pearl Buck spent the first half of her life in the Presbyterian missionary world in China and the second half as a secular missionary in the United States. Her perspective on China was unique; it can never be duplicated. But she was always an outsider.
I remembered what Peter Conn had told me the day I visited his office: “The key to Pearl is her unique existence in two separate cultures and her difficulties in coping with either of them. She was not in two worlds, she was between two worlds, never comfortable in either of them.”
Pearl Buck never quite understood American society, and it never understood her. And, at the end, many saw her as a pathetic old woman caught in a predator’s web, when all she wanted was to go out dancing in the arms of a charming young man.
Notes
1. Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record (New York: The John Day Company, 1954), 71.
2. Ibid., 8.
3. Ibid., 75.
4. Ibid., 76.
5. Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2010), 81.
6. Ibid., 127.
7. Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck, A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101.
8. Spurling, Pearl Buck in China, 187.
