The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  He has a nightmare about the upcoming wedding: He finds he’s to be married in a crumbling ruin that bears some resemblance to the chapel at Groton. His old headmaster has rented a basket of dress suits, every one of them much too big, from which the groom is to choose. Collars dangle like life buoys around his neck. An aging French retainer scurries off to find a more suitable costume for the groom. In a sweat of distress and shame, Edgar awakes, reaches for the engraved stationery, confides all to Helen Hope. Oh, the misery!

  “Imagine being married in a dress suit!” he writes.

  He was married in a cutaway that September in a Gothic Revival church with gargoyles carved into the masonry. Helen Hope wore a sleeveless white chiffon gown, trailed by a satin train, and carried a bouquet of orchids and lilies of the valley. Bridesmaids, flower girls, and ten ushers abounded. The church was packed; fall blossoms adorned the pews. When the ceremony was over, the crowd headed to the big house for the reception.

  It’s hard not to wonder what it must have been like to be the offspring of such a match.

  My grandfather longed for a literary life. At Harvard, he’d gravitated to the circle of students around George Pierce Baker, whose playwriting workshop for graduate students, the 47 Workshop, had trained the likes of S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Eugene O’Neill. By the summer before the wedding, he was shopping a drawing-room comedy, set in a Manhattan apartment and a country house on the Main Line, to Milton Shubert and Helen Hayes. In his letters, I find him marooned in Bar Harbor, vowing to devote himself to rewriting the opening act. He’ll rise early and work diligently every morning, he swears to Helen Hope. Instead, he stays up until 2:00 A.M., “drinking sloe gin fizzes and chatting.” He sleeps until noon. More resolutions follow. “Tomorrow morning I start,” he writes, as though putting his intentions in writing will solve all. “I’ll sit at my study desk and write or pace in solitary thought about the study floor piecing together scenes and dialogue.” But dinner dances intervene. So do whiskey, and bridge at 1:15 A.M., and twenty-one guests arriving imminently for tea. The aspiring dramatist scales back his plans. It’s more important, he assures Helen Hope, for him to get in shape for the wedding.

  She counsels discipline.

  “I want you to be a very great playwright, and the only way you can achieve that is by really working,” she writes. In a second letter the same day, she tries another tack: “I want a famous husband.”

  He had a brief run as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia. Then he was an editor and critic for a short-lived theater magazine. Then his financier father-in-law appears to have grown impatient. By 1926, the struggling scribbler unexpectedly turns up on the boards of directors of a gas company in New Jersey and of an oil and coal company in West Virginia. Next, he’s on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as an independent broker. In January 1928, he buys a seat on the exchange, using three hundred thousand dollars of his inherited money plus a loan from the Colonel. A year later, a new stockbrokerage, Montgomery, Scott & Company, opens in Philadelphia. The founding partners: my grandfather and his father-in-law, the Colonel. The offices are in a building on Broad Street owned by the bank where the Colonel’s father-in-law is a director. No coincidence, I suppose, that the bank rents space to the new partners on highly favorable terms—and gives them its brokerage business. Nine months before the stock market crash, the firm opens its doors.

  The partnership, it turns out, had been an enticement. A bribe, you might say. In October 1927, my father’s parents had made plans to embark upon their own circumnavigation. They were imagining a month in Paris, several weeks in Italy, a sailing trip around the Mediterranean, a month in Egypt, a stop in Ceylon, a voyage across India before sailing to Singapore via Rangoon, then onward to Java and Siam, with a detour to Angkor, a motor trip to Saigon, and a boat to Japan via Hong Kong. “From Japan our plans are vague,” my grandfather wrote to his brother, Warwick, that August. “Our mammoth ambition is to get to Peking, and back via Moscow on the Trans-Siberian. If this fails, we shall probably take a boat around Africa which makes many stops.” But Colonel Montgomery seems to have had some uneasiness about his son-in-law’s life prospects. The Colonel, not one to stint on due diligence, must have known of the voyage of the Sagamore and the exploits of his son-in-law’s father at a similar age. So he made my grandfather an offer: If Helen Hope and Edgar would cut the trip in half, he’d make Edgar his partner in a new firm. The couple got only as far as Damascus before returning to New York, where her parents were on hand to meet them. Helen Hope and Edgar were so annoyed, she once told me, they made sure they were the last passengers off the ship. They disembarked drunk, fled to the Ritz Tower, and sent her parents home to the big house.

  A feature of my grandparents’ farmhouse, by the time I knew them, was their collection of work by Augustus John, the Welsh-born bohemian who was as fashionable a portrait painter in his time in the 1920s as John Singer Sargent had been in his. A four-foot-high John portrait of Helen Hope hung in the living room above a library table stacked with books. In the dining room, there was another he’d painted eight years later. There was a drawing of my grandfather, done in London in 1950, and a landscape of Connemara, inscribed in one corner, “Hope from Augustus.” Images by John of women were all over—women alone, women with children, nude women, a woman in peasant clothing, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat, a girl in red harem pants. There was a painting of John’s muse, Dorelia, the mistress he’d insinuated into his married life. There was a self-portrait, too, titled Portrait of a Bearded Man. Red mustache, graying Vandyke, a slight scowl: The artist seemed to glare from the painting. From time to time, my grandmother alluded fleetingly to various adventures that had taken place the summer when they’d first met—stories that seemed to involve illegal whiskey and the artist’s fondness for his models, not least of all her.

  It was her father, the Colonel, who’d chosen John for his eldest. He prided himself on the portraits in the big house. “Not only have I some really beautiful family portraits of different generations dating back for many years,” he boasted, “but I have also kept up this generation more completely than anyone of my acquaintance.” In the mid-1920s, he’d invited a British society portraitist to move in and paint him, his wife, her unmarried aunt, and her father. An earlier subject of that painter had been Queen Victoria. Twice, the Colonel traveled to Spain to prevail upon an elusive Basque painter to paint Mary Binney (recovering in Paris, at the time, from a breakdown precipitated by her parents’ blackballing of Stokowski). To paint Aleck, his only son, the Colonel enlisted the most prolific of the official artists sent to the western front during World War I. For Charlotte Ives, he hired a Hungarian-born painter of aristocrats and royals, who painted her seated on a horse. At seventeen, the Montgomerys’ spirited youngest couldn’t sit still. The painter is said to have enlisted a model as a body double.

  A figure of mythic magnetism, Augustus John was as famous for his insatiable womanizing as for his draftsmanship and the originality of his early work. When he appeared at the Café Royal in Piccadilly, it’s said, young models had to be carted away, fainting; by the end of his life, he was rumored to have fathered as many as one hundred children. “He seems to regard the world as a magnificent house party, rich in gypsies, intellectuals, artists, celebrities and, above all, aristocrats,” a Time magazine journalist once wrote. Influenced by Whistler and Rubens, he’d spent much of the 1920s painting writers, public figures, and celebrities from James Joyce to Tallulah Bankhead. His portraits were admired for their psychological insight. “I don’t know if that’s what I look like, but that’s what I feel like,” Thomas Hardy is supposed to have said of John’s painting of him. Not every sitter, however, was enchanted with the final product. The founder of Lever Brothers sliced the face out of his. Gerald du Maurier, the actor and a friend of the artist, put his portrait up for sale. “The best description of the thing was made by a woman friend of mine who said it showed all the
misery of my wretched soul,” du Maurier was quoted as saying. To hang it in his house, he said, “would drive me either to suicide or to strong drink.”

  In the summer of 1930, Helen Hope and Edgar, at twenty-six and thirty-one, set off for the west coast of Galway where the moody, beguiling artist was holed up in a rural hotel with an entourage of artists, admirers, and comely young sitters. His American subject and her husband barreled across Ireland in a black limousine—metamorphosed, in my grandmother’s telling, into a hearse. She was anxious: If John disliked her, she professed to believe, he might refuse to paint her. “When we drove up in the late afternoon, there were his two eyes shining out of the ground-floor window where he had his studio,” she’d say later. “The car door was flung open, and I fell out on my head.”

  Lively, bored, indulged, and self-dramatizing for humorous effect—she complained bitterly in letters home to her mother. “You ought to see this dump we’re in, it is the most god-forsaken hole in the world!!” she wrote. Ten days into the visit, she declared she was “sick to death of the picture and more than sick of old John, and his temperament, and he is even sicker of me.” But there was tango music on a purloined hotel Victrola, whiskey, and outings with the artist and Oliver St. John Gogarty, the poet, playwright, and surgeon whom James Joyce had reinvented as stately, plump Buck Mulligan. Painter and subject warmed to each other, and then some. “We were shy on meeting for the first time, but this soon wore off,” John wrote in a memoir years later, “for Mrs. Scott proved to be as sympathetic as she was beautiful.” He painted her twice that summer, and a third time in London eight years later. When the first portrait was exhibited in a gallery in New York in 1931, a critic wrote, “Choicest of all its elements is the sweetness of expression. John seldom permits himself, as here, to celebrate the sweetness of life.”

  Asked long afterward about talk that John had painted her naked, Helen Hope smiled opaquely—an expression her inquisitor told me he took to mean, “I’m not confirming or denying. But I don’t want you to think it wasn’t a possibility.”

  In the heavy bottom drawer of a cupboard in the big house, I come upon the scrapbook in which Helen Hope preserved a record of the attachments that formed on the windswept fringe of Connemara that summer. I pore over the scattered puzzle pieces of that never-forgotten visit—letters from John, cablegrams, postcards, photographs, magazine articles, exhibition catalog pages, newspaper clippings. In grainy snapshots taken that summer, John is in his early fifties, leonine and brooding. Out there on the edge of the Atlantic, he’s costumed in a homburg, a three-piece suit, and a caped coat like something worn by Sherlock Holmes. In one series, he stands apart, watching members of the house party, half his age, cavort on a lawn. Helen Hope is barefoot, in midair when the shutter snaps. In other photos, the two of them sit together in the bow of a wooden boat. “I was 26 and had been married seven years,” she writes to John’s biographer four decades later. In the years that followed, she stuffed the scrapbook full of mementos, including newspaper articles written at the time of John’s death in 1961. “His personal legend, also his flair for elegant bohemianism and wit, remained undiminished throughout his life and remains undiminished now that he is dead,” reads one clipping. “His portraits gave this same immortality to the people who were fortunate enough to be painted by him—the immortality not of remembrance through record, but of perpetual vigor.”

  I come upon a sonnet in John’s handwriting, ending with the lines,

  But armed only with my staff

  I’ll leap my darling’s trenches,

  And in my fury tear in half

  The last of her defences.

  Till I achieve the utmost Prize

  And force the Doors of Paradise!

  Back home in Pennsylvania, Helen Hope trained, hunted, and showed horses, hers and others’. She ran her own stable, sometimes two. Newspaper reporters chronicled her exploits: I find her wrapping up a sixteen-jump course in one show, in record time, to wild applause—only to return on a second horse, turn in another flawless round, and walk away with first and second place. Her smashups added to her local renown. Thundering toward the finish line in a point-to-point race in the 1930s, she’s thrown from her horse in a head-on collision, rolled on by the horse, knocked unconscious, and carried off on a stretcher. By the mid-1930s, she’s developing a paying sideline as a horse-show judge. She shuttles between capitals of the horse world—Middleburg, Virginia; Aiken, South Carolina; Saratoga Springs, New York.

  Anyone who rode with Helen Hope was expected to meet her exacting standards. Never hurry, never take shortcuts, never overwork a young horse. If you’re exercising one while leading two more, all three horses must trot evenly, never breaking stride. If the horse you’re mounting fails to stand absolutely still, God help you. During foxhunting season, she was up at dawn; she lunched in her kitchen on Campbell’s soup and a few leaves of lettuce. If she was at the theater in New York in the evening, she’d take the last train home in order to be up to hunt the next day. Pushing herself to the point of exhaustion, she had a tendency to be harder on other people’s mistakes than on her own. When a younger protégé, maneuvering a horse trailer backward into the garage from behind the wheel of a Jeep, scraped the trailer against the side of the garage, “You might have thought I’d burned the place down,” the woman told me, laughing. “. . . There’s nobody that your grandmother didn’t bring to tears.”

  My grandfather, meanwhile, mastered the legalities of the brokerage business. He had the kind of memory that might have enabled him to recite much of the stock exchange constitution by heart. He was good at managing the relationships that stockbrokering entailed, and he became a governor of two exchanges. He was not, however, perfectly cut out for investing itself. Instead of buying, for example, General Motors, he’d be swept off his feet by the likes of Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, mass-producible houses, invented by Buckminster Fuller, which tanked when postwar home buyers turned out to have no appetite for sci-fi yurts. From his letters, I find him in Washington in February 1934, a supernumerary in the New York Stock Exchange’s campaign against President Franklin Roosevelt’s stock-exchange reform bill, introduced after the 1929 crash. Intended to protect the individual investor and help stabilize the economy, the bill had become the target of what Sam Rayburn, the Texas congressman, later called “the biggest and boldest, the richest and most ruthless lobby Congress had ever known”—the New York exchange. Edgar dined with bankers, met with senators, socialized with assistant secretaries of the treasury during those weeks in Washington. He was awed by the industriousness of Tommy Corcoran, the young New Deal strategist who’d helped draft the bill. “A capacity for work I never saw among my contemporaries,” he marveled tellingly in a letter home. Even higher praise went to the vice president, “Cactus Jack” Garner, said to have once called the vice president’s job “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”

  “The VP is divine,” Edgar wrote to Helen Hope. “You would love him.”

  No doubt.

  Their marriage was not uncomplicated when my father was young. During an especially bitter fight during the thirties, his father heaved a kettle across the kitchen. If Helen Hope was the target, Edgar missed. But, shocked by his own behavior, he swore off alcohol for a decade. Ten years into their marriage, I find angry references, in Helen Hope’s letters to Edgar, to “your affair with R.” There’s a tense standoff over his intention to take out a woman while Helen Hope is away. “If you need a screw for goodness sakes get it, if you think it will straighten you out and make you happy,” she writes. A fight erupts over his refusal to reconsider his intention to take another woman to the opera.

  “Darling,” she begins sweetly, leading into an explosion of upper-case expletives. “I am sorry that I was so upset and made such an issue. . . . If you have it in your heart to take Jean to the theater, go ahead and do it. I do not want to feel that I asked you not to. . . . It seems extreme
ly unlucky to me that I am taken away at this time as it associates this great pleasure that the opera’s given you with someone other than me. And I am jealous of someone else’s sharing it with you—especially as it seemed to mean so much to you when I suggested not taking her. You used to love to go alone, so you said, but now you say she is the only one you like to go with. So if it means that much go ahead. . . . I feel very sorry for myself. Please be extra strict with your system.”

  She wakes from a dream in which he’s told her he no longer loves her. She’s out of town, her bed is damp with tears. “I do hope you still love me,” she writes sadly. He writes back, “If I have done any foolishnesses, or badnesses, you’ve always understood it had no effect on my adoring you. . . . And, to come to cases, I have done nothing at all naughty since you left.”

  BEHAVIOR PERFECT, she telegrams two days later. HOPE YOURS SAME.

  Third day: TELEPHONE ME THIS EVENING ANY TIME MISS YOU TERRIBLY.

  Day four: She’s aborting her trip and catching the first flight home.

  RIDICULOUS THINGS OF NO IMPORTANCE SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY, reads her final cable in the series. MUST BE COMPLETELY CHANGED OTHERWISE MANY PEOPLE HURT.

  * * *

  —

  My grandfather’s literary life was now strictly extracurricular. He read voraciously, in English and French, and met with other men to read Shakespeare aloud. He wrote thank-you notes in rhyming couplets. In his Christmas Eve poems, he’d include a tip of the fedora to every in-law, horse, dog. In one of my grandmother’s scrapbooks, I happened upon a learned paean, in my grandfather’s hand, to female genitalia—which turned out not to be the work of E. Scott, playwright manqué, but that of a British humorist, A. P. Herbert. My grandfather, I’m told, would occasionally rise from the table during some convivial dinner and, to the ostensible delight of his guests, recite this version of Herbert’s poem aloud.