The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  At least the ocean was still there. We walked out the back, across a lawn half as wide as I remembered, toward the beach.

  There was no trace of the old road. And there was no beach. Instead, a concrete seawall, fronted by a pile of riprap boulders, held a perilous line in a war against rising sea and sweeping tides. I stood at the edge of the seawall and looked out into the shallow water, imagining the stretch of sand where I had played with my toy trucks, built campfires with friends, made love for the first time.

  Gone.

  I thanked the woman for her hospitality, knowing it would be the last time I ever saw the house, or wanted to. There’s always a last time for everything, of course, you just don’t always know when it’s arrived.

  Irene had lived on in that house for some months after my grandfather’s memorial service, slowly coming back to herself, but struggling with the precipitous rush to sell off the mortgaged property, first the buffer lots, then the house itself.

  My mother said she kept asking, “How could your father have done this to me?”

  Unfortunately, it couldn’t have been a worse time to sell, a low ebb in Florida real estate. Waterfront acreage that would have been worth millions today was sold off for just enough to pay off the second and third mortgages and build a modest bungalow on an inland canal. There was only enough for that because my father, no longer married to my mother but still very fond of Irene, built it for her at cost.

  Irene had never learned to balance a checkbook—but with my mom’s help, she learned to manage her reduced but stabilized finances. The new house was small but comfortable, wrapped around a pretty screened patio shaded by palms and flowering sea grape trees and overlooking the peaceful tidal canal. This is where Irene set up her easel.

  From time to time I’d drive up from Fort Myers to visit with her. Whatever bitterness she felt seemed to have simply vanished, replaced with a powerful serenity that infected me with calm as soon as I walked in the door. There was something new about her, an agelessness I’d never seen before. We’d sit out by the canal, watching boats drift by. Sometimes she’d paint, but mostly we chatted—more like old friends than grandmother and grandson—sipping the sweet tea she’d spritzed with juice from Key limes that grew just outside the screen. I remember thinking that she might be the sanest person in the family.

  In her mid-seventies then, she was still working at her art, taking lessons with an internationally respected painter in a little cottage studio just a few miles away.

  One June morning in 1982, Irene had been painting in her teacher’s studio when he stepped out for a minute. He returned to find Irene sitting rigidly on the floor, a paintbrush still gripped in her hand. She could talk, but could not stand.

  Tim raced to the studio, helped carry Irene to the car, and drove her to the hospital. She had been planning to fly to New York in two days to visit an old friend. As my mom left her hospital room for the night, Irene said, “This is a hell of a time for something like this!”

  Isn’t it always.

  Sometime before dawn she had another stroke and died.

  I’ve often thought in the years since that, if my grandfather’s death was a model of horror, my grandmother’s may be the best imaginable scenario in an array of unattractive options.

  After the memorial service, I went with my mom to the little bungalow to help sort through my grandmother’s possessions. As I was opening drawers in her bedroom, I came across a note scrawled in Irene’s looping script:

  Vivid dream. Mack had been up

  doing something—he jumped back into

  bed—his top bare—solid chest as when

  young against me.

  A happy dream.

  For the first I could remember, I cried.

  POSTSCRIPT

  In the weeks after I completed the first draft of this book, I had free time on my hands for the first time in nearly two years. So of course my wife pressed me into service to help her sort through the overwhelming collection of junk that accumulates in a basement after fifteen years of family living. We saved the worst for last—the unlit irregular space beneath the basement stairwell, every inch of which was crammed with God knew what. When we finally got it all out—boxes filled with toy soldiers, stuffed animals, paintings that hadn’t seen light in a decade, and miscellaneous mementos that had bled out of all memory, I crawled back into the farthest reaches one last time with my flashlight just to be sure we hadn’t missed anything. In the darkest corner, my hand touched plastic—a ziplock bag filled with papers of some kind. I grabbed it and backed out into the light to inspect the final haul. The first thing I looked at was a yellowed piece of paper beginning “Dear Grandpa.” There were other letters, too, from my grandfather to me, and from me to my grandfather. One of the latter, signed “Tommy,” is undated, but I have no doubt it is from the late 1960s, when I was in my early teens and soon after we had moved to Sarasota.

  It reads in its entirety:

  You have always been a grandfather. Sometimes you brought me presents. Sometimes you told stories. I have given you the love assigned to grandfathers. But you have never been a person until this year. And I am very happy to meet you.

  With the advantage of a half century’s hindsight, I can say now that, though I appreciate the sentiment, I was incorrect in my conclusion. It is only now, after this long labor of love, that I truly know MacKinlay Kantor as the brilliant, selfish, loving, complicated, damaged, unforgettable person that he was. And I am truly happy to meet him.

  The main street of Webster City, Iowa, as it appeared when a young Mack delivered newspapers there.

  My great-grandmother Effie McKinlay in her wedding dress, on the day of her ill-advised marriage to John Martin Kantor in 1899.

  In 1905, a year after fleeing Iowa a step ahead of the law, John Kantor popped up at a leftist think tank and was billed as a lecturer in the organization’s magazine.

  Mack at seven, circa 1911, the year he met his father for the first time.

  Effie, thirty-five here, had been a single mother for ten years. Mack was ten and Virginia fourteen.

  My great-grandfather John Kantor (with cigar in mouth and hat over heart) was among the inner circle of Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson, one of the most corrupt politicians in American history. This rally celebrated the collection of 100,000 pledges to vote for him.

  Mack in 1915.

  Mack and Virginia in 1916.

  Mack in 1921.

  A young Peggy Pulitzer (née Margaret Leech), probably around 1920, in her mid-twenties. Leech would marry the publishing magnate Ralph Pulitzer in 1928 and have an affair with my grandfather in the late 1930s. She went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for history.

  This is a menu for a shipboard dinner thrown by my great-grandfather, allegedly for his first grandchild. But the only guests were his cronies, including John Factor, a historic Prohibition-era gangster and con artist.

  Mack at a bookshop soon after he moved to Chicago in 1925, hoping to become a famous writer.

  A portrait of my grandmother Irene Layne Kantor at age twenty-one in 1926, the year she married my grandfather.

  Irene and Mack in Chicago, probably in the fall of 1926, a few months after they eloped.

  This is the party John Kantor threw for his friends and associates supposedly honoring my grandfather on his twenty-fourth birthday in Montreal. Mack, looking miserable, is seated at the head of the table. Irene, nine months pregnant, is seated to Mack’s right, and John Kantor looms behind him.

  Mack at thirty-one. He always said he was no good at ball sports but was an excellent marksman.

  A publicity photo of Mack in 1936, after his first critical and financial success as a novelist.

  The photo of a sixty-year-old John Kantor that appeared in the Baltimore Sun in December 1938, describing him as a “suspected swindler in oil stock.”

&n
bsp; The Kantor family around 1941. From left to right, my uncle Tim (six), Irene (thirty-six), Mack (thirty-seven), and my mother, Layne (thirteen).

  Grant Wood sent this woodblock to Mack in January 1941, but he titled the image of three apocalyptic horses February as if he knew that he would die just eighteen days after Mack received the note.

  I thought Mack was in the Air Force, and so did he. But actually he was a war correspondent who went native.

  Mack posing with a B-17 he flew in on bombing runs over Germany during World War II.

  A page from a 1946 publicity release for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, based on my grandfather’s novel Glory for Me. Producer Samuel Goldwyn (left) and Mack (right) look pleased with each other, but some accounts and my family’s oral history contend that Goldwyn was apoplectic when Mack delivered the screen treatment in the form of an epic poem.

  Air Force Chief of Staff General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz pins the Medal of Freedom on my grandfather in 1947 for distinguished contribution to the war effort by a civilian.

  My grandparents dancing at my parents’ wedding, held in Mack and Irene’s New York apartment in 1949.

  Ernest Hemingway sent this letter to my grandfather in 1952 after Mack and my parents visited him in Cuba over a wine-soaked luncheon. In the letter, Hemingway begged my grandfather not to fly in any more combat missions over Korea, and promised to send two copies of what he called “just a little book,” The Old Man and the Sea.

  This photo of Irene from the late 1950s or early 1960s, around the time of Mack’s maximum fame, is the “Grandma” I remember.

  Mack and Irene barbecuing on the porch of their beachfront home on Siesta Key soon after the house was enlarged with the huge royalties from Andersonville. The canine is Lobo, who adopted them while they were living in Spain.

  The Lord Calvert whiskey ad featuring Mack, second from left, in 1956, at the height of his fame.

  My grandmother puffs on one of her favorite little cigars while entertaining company on her Siesta Key patio in 1957. The man at right looks to me suspiciously like Ernest Hemingway.

  The photo on the jacket of my mother’s 1957 book, The Four of Them.

  Mack watching me ride my favorite present on Christmas Day, 1959.

  Mack in the late 1950s with Bill Dog, named after my father.

  My favorite photo of my grandfather, as he looked in the 1950s.

  Mack drew this card for me on my fourteenth birthday. “O God!” he wrote. “We fear he may become a writer!”

  My last photo of Mack, in 1976, taken at my first wedding, with my two grandmothers, Mildred Shroder (left) and Irene (right). He would be dead in less than a year.

  In Havana’s Sloppy Joe’s bar on the trip where they visited Hemingway at Finca Vigia. From left, Bill Shroder, Layne Kantor Shroder, Mack, Irene, and Tim Kantor.

  Immediately after discovering a letter in the Webster City library archives attesting to Irene’s pain over Mack’s many affairs, I turned a corner and almost literally bumped into one of her paintings hanging on the wall.

  This is my grandfather’s study overlooking Big Pass in Sarasota, as I remember it.

  A contemporary photo of the house where my grandfather grew up in Webster City. It is little changed after 110 years.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would be remiss if I didn’t first thank the Library of Congress, its curators and the staff of the manuscript reading room for storing, indexing, and preserving my grandfather’s papers with such uniform professionalism. I also want to thank my cousins Lydia Whitney and Melissa Pop-Lazarova, my brother Michael, and my sister Susan, my coheirs to my grandfather’s literary estate, for blessing, encouraging, and actively assisting in this project. I need to add a special note of gratitude to my sister for having the foresight to insist on keeping and storing multiple bins filled with hundreds of letters, files, and photographs when I might have, in the name of decluttering, consigned them to oblivion. Not only did she go to the trouble of boxing and storing the material, but she also graciously hosted me when I finally recognized them for the treasures they were.

  Exploring the entirety of a life that ended forty years ago is a daunting project. I was lucky to have a leg up thanks to the poetic 1988 memoir My Father’s Voice, written by my late uncle, Tim Kantor, also a gifted photographer whose portrait of my grandfather and a five-year-old me graces the frontispiece of this book. Paul Juhl’s meticulously researched volume MacKinlay Kantor’s Webster City, Iowa was also a great resource.

  I also want to thank April Witt for not only taking my photo for the book jacket but reading an early draft of the book and offering great encouragement, as did my old friend David Klein, my beautiful, brainy (and long-suffering wife), Lisa Shroder, and my daughter, Jessica Shroder. And then there’s Gene Weingarten, who got me started on the whole shebang with a simple request: “Write me one paragraph on what you know about your grandfather.”

  I owe a special debt of gratitude to the city and the people of Webster City, Iowa, for their loving efforts to keep my grandfather’s memory alive, and specifically to Paul Juhl, Nancy Kayser, and Angie Martin-Schwarze, who showed me I was a Midwesterner after all, and proud of it.

  Finally, this book never would have happened if my publisher, David Rosenthal, hadn’t instantly seen the potential in a casual conversation over Mexican food, and it would not have been the book it is without the inspired advice and direction of my editor, Sarah Hochman. Last and certainly not least, I am forever indebted to my dear friend and agent, Gail Ross, without whose understanding, support, and superlative instincts my career would almost certainly be moribund.

  INDEX

  The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

  Page numbers in italics indicate the Kantor family tree.

  Academy Award (“Oscar”) winners, 1, 2, 271, 277, 336, 355

  Accomplishment, 306

  Acid Test (Shroder, T.), 275

  Alexander, Jack, 220–21

  Algonquin Round Table, 244, 245

  Alonso, Harriet Hyman, 276–77

  American Flyer, 116, 124, 131

  American Gothic (Wood), 138, 139, 140, 141

  American Revolution, 364, 365

  Anderson, Sherwood, 137

  Andersonville (Kantor, M.), 1, 11, 16–17, 21–22, 23–24, 26, 245, 290, 293, 294, 295, 297–98, 299–300, 302, 303, 304–6, 308, 310, 311, 312, 314, 315–16, 317, 322, 326, 335, 336–37, 338, 339–40, 341, 342, 343, 346, 353, 354–56, 358, 363, 364, 366, 367, 373, 378

  Arouse and Beware (Kantor, M.), 245, 290

  Associated Cemeteries, 220–21, 224, 225

  atomic bombing of Japan, 200, 351

  Author’s Choice (Kantor, M.), 71–72, 93–94, 94–95

  B-17s, 262, 264, 265–67

  Bad Day at Black Rock (movie), 257

  Bailey, William R., 262–64, 273

  Baker, Carlos, 315

  Band of Angels (Warren), 315

  Barrymore, Lionel, 209

  Beatles, the, 54

  Beatty, Warren, 256

  Beauty Beast (Kantor, M.), 358–60, 361

  Beidler, Philip D., 273, 274

  Bell, Joshua, 98

  Benét, Stephen Vincent, 2

  Bernstein, Carl, 91

  Best Years of Our Lives, The (movie), 1, 270–71, 275, 277, 278, 342

  bicycles, 40–41, 42, 43, 68–69, 188, 388

  “Biggest Liar in Eagle Falls” (Kantor, M.), 154–55

  Bogdanovich, Peter, 257

  “bomb them back into the Stone Age,” 6, 24, 25, 140, 353–54

  Bone, Addison (Evalyn’s brother), 204

  Bone,
Evalyn (Effie’s mother), 73. See also McKinlay, Evalyn

  Bone, Joseph (Effie’s grandfather), 73, 75, 200–201, 201–2, 203–4, 205, 379

  Bone, Moses (Evalyn’s brother), 204

  Bone, Rachel Bryan (Evalyn’s mother), 201, 202, 203

  Bone, Samuel (Evalyn’s brother), 204

  Bone, Thomas (Evalyn’s brother), 204, 205, 290

  Bonnie and Clyde (movie), 256

  Book-of-the-Month Club, 302, 338, 339

  Boy Scouts, 56, 57, 349

  Bright, John, 52, 53

  Broun, Heywood, 244

  Brown, Francis, 315

  Bruce, Toby, 329

  Buchenwald, 19–23, 26, 290, 370