The Woman Who Fell From Grace

by David Handler

  Partly, Oh, Shenandoah was the story of how the American Revolution shattered forever the privileged lives of colonial Virginia’s landed British gentry. But mostly it was a love triangle, heavy on the violins. Flaming-haired Evangeline Grace, the beautiful, headstrong young daughter of a wealthy tobacco planter, was torn by her love for two men. John Raymond, handsome son of the colonial governor in Williamsburg, was a brilliant law student, a sensitive poet, a budding statesman. The other, a dashing, hot-blooded Frenchman named Guy De Cheverier, was a fearless adventurer, a ruthless brigand reviled by polite society. It was their story. It was the story of the great Virginia plantations — of colorful horse races and grand balls, of velvet waistcoats and powdered wigs, and smiling, happy slaves. And it was the story of the Revolution. De Cheverier would become a daring war hero who time and again led his brave, loyal men into victorious battle against the Redcoats. Raymond would break with his English father to become an architect of the Revolution at the side of his William and Mary law classmate Tom Jefferson. Real figures from American history were sprinkled throughout the novel — George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, James Madison. Alma Glaze did her homework. She drew her portrait of Shenandoah Valley plantation life from local historical records and supposedly, her own family’s illustrious past. Still, it was the love triangle, the battle between Raymond and De Cheverier for Vangie’s hand that carried the reader’s interest across so many pages. Which one would she marry? In the end, she couldn’t decide, and since neither was willing to bow out gracefully, the two of them fought a duel for her hand, Vangie to marry the winner. Who won? Alma Glaze never told us. All she left us with was that famous closing line: “As one man fell, Evangeline stepped forward, eyes abrim, breast heaving, to embrace both the victor and the new life that surely promised to be her grandest adventure.” For fifty years, readers had been arguing over what the hell that meant. That’s why there was so much interest in the sequel.

  Naturally, it’s hard to read it nowadays without seeing the faces of the actors who played the roles in the lavish Sam Goldwyn production, the only movie in Hollywood history ever to sweep Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Screenplay (Robert Sherwood), as well as Best Actor and Actress. Warner Brothers loaned Goldwyn Errol Flynn to play De Cheverier. For the coveted roles of Evangeline Grace and John Raymond, Goldwyn cast the gifted young British stage performers Sterling Sloan and Laurel Barrett, who also happened to be husband and wife in so-called real life. Neither had appeared in an American film before. Sloan was fresh off his acclaimed Hamlet in London’s West End and bing touted as the new Olivier. The fragile, achingly beautiful Barrett, the woman who beat out every top actress in Hollywood to play Vangie, was a complete unknown. Both won Oscars for Oh, Shenandoah. Sloan’s, of course, was awarded posthumously. He dropped dead of a ruptured brain aneurysm only hours after wrapping the film on location in Virginia. His death at age thirty-two destroyed Barrett. She suffered a nervous breakdown soon afterward. She was in and out of institutions for depression right up until she died in 1965 at the age of fifty-two, her life made, and seemingly unmade, by her Oh, Shenandoah triumph. She wasn’t alone in that.

  Alma Glaze herself encountered outrageous swings of fortune, good and bad. A small, rather flinty woman given to wearing orthopedic shoes and severe hats, she was the only child of the Shenandoah Valley’s most distinguished old family, and wife to a successful local banker. She began work on her first and only novel one summer while she was recovering from pneumonia. She spent seven years on it. When she finally finished it, she gave it to a childhood friend who taught literature at Mary Baldwin, a small, proper nearby women’s college. The friend sent it on to his brother, an editor for a New York publishing house. The rest is publishing history. Oh, Shenandoah sold an incredible one million copies in its first six months, sometimes as many as sixty thousand copies in one day. Still, Alma Glaze wasn’t able to savor its success for long. The day she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature was the same day her husband died of tuberculosis, leaving her a forty-two-year-old widow with three children. She sold the film rights to Sam Goldwyn for the then-whopping sum of $100,000. And though the movies success would surpass even that of the book, she was again unable to enjoy it. The week after it premiered, she was run over by a hit-and-run driver while she was crossing a street in Staunton, Virginia, her hometown. She died instantly.

  And now it was a raw March morning fifty years later, and I was squeezed into a tiny, stuffy De Havilland Dash four-prop that was riding the turbulence on down to Charlottesville from New York, by way of Baltimore. My complimentary honey-roasted peanuts and plastic cup of warm orange juice were bouncing around on the tray before me. Lulu was on the floor under me, making unhappy noises. My mind was on how I never expected things to turn out this way. This wasn’t me. This was someone else sitting here getting airsick. Not me. Never me.

  If you’re a serious fan of the gossip columns, and of American literary trivia, you may remember me. It’s okay if you don’t. It has been a while since the New York Times, upon reading my first novel, Our Family Enterprise, labeled me “the first major new literary voice of the ’80s.” Ah, how sweet it had been. The best-seller list. The awards. Fame. Marriage to Merilee Nash, Joe Papp’s hottest and loveliest young leading lady. The eight art-deco rooms overlooking Central Park. The red 1958 Jaguar XK150 convertible. The gaudy contract for book two. But then there was this problem with my juices. They dried up. The creative kind. All kinds. Merilee got the apartment and the Jag, the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. Briefly, another husband, too, that fabulously successful playwright Zack something. I got Lulu, my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and my ego, which recently applied to Congress for statehood.

  My juices did come back. Somewhat. There was a slim second novel, Such Sweet Sorrow, which managed to become as great a commercial and critical flop as my first was a success. Merilee came back, too. Somewhat. These days we’re two intelligent semiadults who are content not to ask questions anymore and to just go ahead and make each other miserable. Actually, we get along fine as long as we’re not together. I still had my apartment. She still had her eight rooms on Central Park West and her eighteen acres in Hadlyme, Connecticut, where right now she was busy playing in the mud while the offers rolled in. No plans for a merger. We know better than that.

  I’d just spent the last three months in a small boat on the Aegean, subsisting on grilled fish and iced retsina and fasting from the neck up — no books, no magazines, no newspapers. No ideas, except my own. Slowly, a third novel had begun to take shape. But it would take me a good three years to write, and I had no publisher for it and no money left. That meant I had to fall back on my second, decidedly less distinguished calling — pen for hire. I’ve ghosted three celebrity memoirs so far. Each has been a best-seller. My background as a writer of fiction certainly helps. Good anecdotes are vital to the success of any memoir. The best way to make sure they’re good is to make them up. It also helps that I used to be a celebrity myself. I know how to handle them. The lunch-pail ghosts don’t. That’s why the Glaze brothers had turned to me.

  On the downside, ghosting has proven hazardous to my health. Not to mention the health of others. People have this way of dropping dead around me. Consider yourself warned. Also consider this before you get any ideas: If you’re in trouble, if you need help, if you don’t know who to call, don’t call me. I’m not a hero. Besides, you can’t afford me.

  We left the storm behind as we flew further south. There was nothing but blue skies over Virginia. I was one of four men who got off at Charlottesville, and the only one who wasn’t wearing mint-green golf slacks. The air was softer and more fragrant than in the North, the sun bright and hot. I was halfway to the small cinder-block terminal when I suddenly realized I was alone. Back across the runway I went and up the steps into the plane.

  She was still under the seat, trembling as badly
as she does when she’s about to get a s-h-o-t. She flat out didn’t want to get off the plane. She does like to fly. In fact, she’s already amassed enough frequent-flyer miles to qualify for a free coach flight all the way from New York City to Lansing, Michigan. This, however, was a little much. I asked her what the problem was. All I got in response was whimpering. I told her to come. She refused. I’m bigger. I dragged her out from under the seat, hoisted her up, and carried her, thrashing and moaning in protest, out the cabin door.

  “Terrible twos,” I explained to the stewardess.

  My rented Chevy Nova smelled as if somebody had once stuffed it full of Styrofoam peanuts. I stowed my gear in the trunk, tossed my trench and Borsalino in the backseat, and took off the jacket of the gray cheviot-wool suit I’d had made for me in London at Strickland’s. I shoved the driver’s seat back to accommodate my legs and rolled down the windows so Lulu could stick her large, black nose out and wail unhappily at the parking lot. I reminded her I’d gone to a lot of trouble to get her invited along, and if she wasn’t going to behave, “she could spend the next three months in a kennel with a lot of strange, mean pit bulls. She shut up.

  I worked the Nova out of the airport and through the outskirts of Charlottesville, seat of Albemarle County, lush Eden where Jefferson built Monticello and Monroe built Ash Lawn, and where the haves still breed horses and cattle and themselves in plush country comfort.

  Spring came earlier here. The cherry trees were already blossoming a gaudy pink. The tulips and daffodils were open, the grass was thick and green, and the forsythia bushes were explosions of mustard yellow.

  I picked up Route 64 outside of town and coaxed the Nova up to eighty, where it handled smooth as a Maytag in the spin cycle. The highway climbed through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Then it tumbled down and before me spread the valley with its gently undulating patchwork quilt of fertile green farmland and red clay soil, its tree-shaded brick manor homes, its calm. Clumps of cattle munched away on the grass and the Alleghenies rippled endlessly across the sky. There may be prettier places on earth than the Shenandoah Valley, but I haven’t seen one.

  I got off the highway at Staunton, the historic little town where they don’t pronounce the u and where two world-famous celebrities, Alma Glaze and Woodrow Wilson, were born. It’s a gem of a place — steep, hilly streets of turreted Victorian mansions shaded by magnolias and redbuds, a restored turn-of-the-century business district, and a pleasing absence of the Yushie influence. Nary a sign of the young urban shitheads in their spandex workout togs. No take-out stir-fry emporium called Wok ’n’ Roll. No singles Laundromat called dirtysomething. The tallest building in town was the Hotel Woodrow Wilson, and it was built in 1925. Eleven stories, not counting the neon sign on the roof.

  It was just past five. Workers were streaming out of the office buildings and the Augusta County Courthouse for their cars. They were smiling and laughing. No scowls. No snarls. No one was riding on my tail. No one was blasting his horn. They must put something in the water.

  The Glaze brothers’ directions took me through town on Beverley Street past the Dixie Theatre, the vast, fabled, old silent-picture palace where Oh, Shenandoah had its original worldwide premiere. Workmen were busy sprucing the place up. A newly restored 70mm print of the film classic was being screened there in a few weeks as part of the fiftieth anniversary celebration. It was going to be a major deal. Surviving cast and crew members were even going to be flown in. Not that very many biggies were still around. The three stars and Goldwyn and Wyler were long gone. So was most of the all-star supporting cast. Raymond Massey, who played Thomas Jefferson. David Niven, who was the smug British colonel, Edgerton. Ethel Barrymore, Donald Crisp, Walter Huston, Linda Darnell. About the only surviving cast member I could think of was Rex Ransom, who played James Madison. I was hoping Rex came. I wanted to meet him for reasons that had nothing to do with Oh, Shenandoah and everything to do with my childhood.

  I turned onto a narrow country road outside of town that twisted its way back through poultry farms and fenced pasturage. Fields of winter rye were being plowed under for fertilizer. The air was redolent of loamy soil and cow pies. Some black Angus grazed alongside the road. Lulu barked gleefully at them, secure in the knowledge they couldn’t catch her as we sped past. Such invincibility did not, however, extend to her sinuses. Her hay fever was already making her sniffle. I’d have to give her a pill when we got there. I didn’t want her developing breathing problems again. She snores when she has them. I happen to know this because she likes to sleep on my head.

  Occasionally, a blue sign assured me I was on the right road for Historic Shenandoah. After about ten miles, the road came to an end at a white paddock gate, which was closed, and another blue sign, a big one. I had arrived. Historic Shenandoah was open for guided public tours Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from nine to three and all day Saturday. The public was not welcome at any other time, such as now. The closed gate and the six-foot brick wall topped with electrified barbed wire made that quite clear. So did the surveillance camera. There was a phone at the gate. I picked it up and got a recording that told me everything the sign told me, then told me that if I had any other business to please hold on. I held on. The stirring Muzak version of “Vangie, My Love,” from Max Steiner’s Oh, Shenandoah movie score, began tickling my ear.

  Until there was a click and a woman’s voice: “Help ya?”

  “Stewart Hoag. I’m here to see Mavis Glaze.”

  “Y’all want to drive right on up past the gift shop to the main house. Somebody’ll be there to meet ya.”

  The gate swung open. I drove through. It closed behind me automatically. Evenly spaced ash trees lined the drive on both sides as it snaked up through fenced pasturage for several hundred yards before it arrived at a parking lot. There were picnic tables here and rest rooms and a log-cabin gift shop, where the people who were willing to spend five dollars a head to see the house where Oh, Shenandoah was filmed could spend even more on Oh, Shenandoah picture postcards, pens, pins, plates, peacock feathers, place mats, paintings, and posters, on Oh, Shenandoah cuff links, candlesticks, cookie molds, and cookbooks, on the many different renditions of “Vangie, My Love,” which had been recorded through the years by everyone from Bing to Burl to Billy. Idol, that is. The parking lot was empty now, the gift shop closed. A pair of black custodians were sweeping up. They didn’t look up at me as I drove past. The drive worked its way through some dense forest now, climbing as it did. Then the trees opened out in a huge semicircular forecourt of crushed stone, and there it was before me, up on a terraced rise so it could look down on the valley. Shenandoah was a mid-Georgian mansion of red brick built in the 1750s in the Palladian style. In fact it was considered the finest Palladian mansion of the British Colonies still intact. The main house was two stories high with a two-tiered portico and a mansard roof. Smaller, matching two-story dependencies flanked it in the forecourt and were connected to it by covered arcades. Broad stone steps led up to the front door, the one where a sobbing Vangie embraced De Cheverier after his bloody triumph over Edgerton. A short, massively built woman in her sixties stood there waiting for me in a pastel-yellow pantsuit that wouldn’t have looked good on Elle Macpherson. On her the effect was that of a banana that had two Bosc pears stuffed inside it. She had curly white hair and Popeye forearms and so many jowls her chin seemed to be melting into her neck. She came down the steps to greet me, her skin flushed with perspiration. She was squinting at me.

  “Welcome to Shenandoah, Mistuh Hoag,” she said, her voice surprisingly high-pitched. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Fern O’Baugh, the housekeeper, cook, whatever.”

  We shook hands. She nearly broke mine. A lot of her may have been fat, but her forearms weren’t.

  “Make it Hoagy.”

  “As in Carmichael?”

  “As in the cheese steak. The one they don’t do in Buffalo.”

  She squinted up at me curiously. Then a big jolly laugh erupted from he
r and she began to shake all over. “My, my,” she gasped. “I do love a man with a sense of humor. Y’know, I’ve read about you many times, Hoagy, in People magazine. All about your stormy marriage to Miss Merilee Nash, the woman who has everything except love.”

  “More fiction than fact, I assure you.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said brightly. “Because, honey, you come across in print like a real beanbag.”

  “Fern, I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

  She erupted into another laugh. Then she took two steps toward my suitcases, tumbled right over Lulu, and sprawled heavily to the ground with an “Oof.” I gave her my hand to help her up. My knees buckled but somehow held.

  “My, my, I’m sorry, darlin’,” she said, squinting down at Lulu. “I’m blind as Mistuh Magoo without my glasses. Should be wearing ’em, but they’re such a bother.” They were on a chain around her neck. She put them on and peered down at Lulu, who peered back up at her. “I do declare,” Fern cried, astonished. “You’re a little puppy dog! I thought you just had to be a big ol’ puddy cat. Sure do smell like one.”

  “She has rather strange eating habits.”

  “But what’s that there blue pancake she’s got on her head?”

  Lulu snuffled, insulted.

  “A present from her mommy,” I explained.

  “Now, Hoagy, I must have your word she’ll stay off the north lawn. She riles the peacocks and Mavis’ll shoot her and me both.”

  “Not to worry.”

  “Good.” Fern snatched up my suitcases as if they were empty and started up the steps with them. She was quite light on her feet for someone so round. “Too bad you didn’t get an earlier flight,” she said to me over her shoulder. “You just missed her.”