College of One (Neversink)

by Sheilah Graham

  Johnny, far from being upset by all this—I told him nearly everything—encouraged my seeing these men. He was deeply involved with the moneylenders and hoped that one of my admirers would rescue him from his financial troubles. In fact, one married man, a Catholic, to whom I was introduced by Mr. Cochran—a man who prayed for his wife to die so that he could marry me, while I prayed that she would live so he couldn’t—gave Johnny a job in one of his companies. The reason, Johnny convinced himself, for allowing me so much freedom with other men was that they were “gentlemen,” had all been to good universities, and some of it might brush off on me. Unfortunately, culture is not catching, although you can acquire a veneer if you are observant and possess a talent for mimicry. I was soon saying “gel” for girl and “orf” for off; but I was still Lily Shiel, a sow’s ear although I wore silk, courtesy of the enamored Catholic. Poor Johnny. Like Scott, he was always desperate for money. How could he survive except through me?

  I hated the stage with its glaring tinsel, the straining ambition, the exhaustion, although I smiled and went through my paces because there was no escape. I was riding in Rolls Royces with men who admired me, this year’s pretty thing. There would be a new one next year. I was the girl I had envied a few years ago on my trips to the West End to savor how the rich lived, but I wanted to shout at the smug men, “You have made a mistake about me. I am not a tart and never could be.” If Johnny was awake when I came in, he would take me to bed with gentle teeth on the nape of my neck as a mother cat transports her kittens, and there we slept in platonic harmony. His money worries and my late hours—the stage at night, the suppers afterward—and the tiring dancing lessons by day had soon destroyed the husband and wife relationship. He became my child, although he was old enough to be my father, for which he was often mistaken. He was an oasis where it was falsely peaceful. The problems were there, but we ignored them. One night I awakened to find him sprawled across the bed. He had suffered a mild heart attack. “When I came to and saw you, I thought I was in heaven with an angel,” he said. And yet I sometimes wondered, “Would he turn me in to the highest bidder?” I did not judge him. He was as helpless as my mother had been when she had been forced to send me to the orphanage—and as Scott was when he had to work on trashy films in Hollywood. I am different. I am afraid sometimes, but I am not helpless. All my life I have found solutions to situations I dislike. I had the gifts for seizing a lucky moment, the energy to follow through on an opportunity. In his notes on Kathleen for The Last Tycoon, Scott wrote, “This girl had a life—it was very seldom that he met anyone whose life did not depend in some way on him or hope to depend on him.” I had learned early to depend on myself.

  The first glimpse into a different life—and I was aware of its importance—was when I wrote a brief article about the stage and it was accepted by the Daily Express. From my brain, atrophied though it had been, the putting of an idea on paper had earned me ten dollars. It was exciting. To be an author. To be on a different plane, not just a pretty girl. It was also worrying. You had to be clever to be a writer. You must be more educated than I was. Full of the fervor of being in print, I called at King’s College in the Strand, which is part of London University. I realized, I told the young man at the information desk, that I could not attend the regular classes. I did not have the proper background for that—how I envied the young men and women casually strolling around the campus accepting the miracle of being there as an ordinary thing—but were there professors who gave private lessons in English literature? There were. There are always teachers who need money. It would be a guinea a lesson. The money I had earned from the article would pay for two sessions.

  A thin-faced young teacher sat opposite me across the table in a small room at the college. I showed him my article, explaining, “I want to be a good writer. I used to write well in school.” I didn’t mention the orphanage. He gave me Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and asked me to come back the following week with a report. It was a struggle reading the book, and I didn’t know where to start with the report. At the next session he gave me Moll Flanders. After reading it, I asked my tutor, “Are you sure it’s good literature?” It was pornographic—a word I didn’t know then—but I liked it. After a week with Tom Jones, which I also enjoyed, though I couldn’t imagine how it would turn me into a good modern writer, we dropped the lessons. My small joust with English literature affected my journalistic style, and it took several weeks before I was able to return to the salable mediocrity of my articles about the stage. The few pieces in the Express and the Daily Mail made me something of a celebrity in the Cochran chorus. They set me apart from the other girls, and I enjoyed the distinction as I had been proud to be the best student in the orphanage. I was different. I was not content to be what I was, where I was.

  It was only indigestion, I am convinced now, but the Queen’s doctor, called by my titled admirer, ordered “an immediate operation.” I didn’t know it then, but my stage career was over. Recuperating in the South of France with a carefree Johnny, staying at the expensive Hotel Eden at Cap d’Ail, I decided to go all out for a career in journalism. It would be less agonizing than the stage, the late evenings with officers in the Guards, the undergraduates who drank too much, and the strain of pretending to enjoy the suppers at Ciro’s and the Embassy Club with the sex-hungry, tongue-tied, frustrated young bloods who wanted a night on the town with a real actress, who fumbled inexpertly and sometimes couldn’t control themselves. I hadn’t the faintest idea what to say to them. It was easier to let them kiss me in the taxi taking me home to Johnny, who would sometimes awaken briefly to ask, “Did you have a good time?” It seems incredible that such a marriage could exist. Not only did it exist, but even with the divorce in 1937, after I had packed up and gone to the United States, the father-daughter, mother-son love we had for each other lasted until his death in January 1965.

  Through his uncle, Captain the Honorable Jack Mitford, I met Tom Mitford. Jack had married a princess of the Krupp munitions dynasty shortly before the First World War. The princess had dissolved the marriage during the war at the insistence of the German government. Jack, a loyal Englishman, had fought against the Germans with his regiment in the Life Guards, as Tom (who had admired Hitler with his sisters Unity and Diana) fought the Germans in the Second World War. Tom was killed on the very last day of the war—blown up by a land mine, his cousin Randolph Churchill told me later in Hollywood.

  Randolph and Tom were the first visible intellectuals among the people I had met through a society girl, Judith Hurt, who lived in Scotland with her family. During the London season they occupied the apartment above ours in Wigmore Street, and we had become friendly after meeting several times on the stairs. I had gone ice skating with Judith and she had introduced me on the rink to Captain Mitford. At this time I also met young Bill Astor, whom Randolph detested. He despised him along with all the “Cliveden set,” believing they were Nazi sympathizers. He sneered at Bill’s “American mother,” although his own grandmother was American.

  I hadn’t any idea of what being a Nazi meant, though I had been enamored of a blond blue-eyed Bavarian I had met with Johnny in Garmisch-Partenkirchen near Munich early in 1931. Over his garage door he had proudly painted “Eustace the Nazi.” Tom and Randolph were the best-looking men I had ever seen, and I was flattered that they seemed to enjoy my company. They were young and detested the bluestocking type. I was decorative, safely married, and my role was to listen while they settled the affairs of the world. Tom was a brilliant pianist, and I was uncomfortable while he played the works of composers whose names I didn’t dare pronounce—Chopin, for instance, I would have called Chopp-in. I was afraid he might draw me into a conversation about music, but he never did. He read Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to me. I liked the line, “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss,” but I did not understand much of the rest and would not have dared to ask for an explanation. Tom probably knew where I stood in the realm of education, but woul
d never have embarrassed me with a direct question. Randolph recited poetry and quoted from books I had never heard of. I smiled while squirming at the possibility he might want me to comment on the readings, but he was too enraptured with the sound of his beautiful voice. The glow lingered on his handsome face in the silence afterward. Randolph, like his father, Winston Churchill, was passionately interested in politics. His father was considered too impetuous politically at this time and had been rejected by the electorate. His son would pound the air and talk vehemently of “when my father returns to power.” His good friend Brendan Bracken was sometimes along. They were always planning to bring the senior Churchill back to his rightful place in the government.

  To keep up with the events of the day, I read the Daily Telegraph; the Times was too much for me, although I joined the Times Book Shop on Wigmore Street. I have always loved books, always enjoyed touching good bindings and found pleasure in expensive paper and good print. After my marriage I spent many afternoons staring at the rare books in the Bond Street shop windows, regretting I could not own them. The books I read were mostly biographies of famous people. A reviewer of Lady Asquith’s autobiography, Margot, stated that other women could learn from the book. I rushed to buy it and was disappointed at not being turned overnight into an intellectual. Later, in America, I heard that Dorothy Parker, reviewing the book, had quipped, “The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.” During the war, after Scott’s death, when I wrote about the women’s effort in England for my syndicate, I decided to interview Lady Asquith, whose husband had been Prime Minister at the beginning of the First World War when I was an ugly duckling at the orphanage. She suggested we lunch at the Savoy. “I hope you’re rich,” she said, “because the food here is very expensive.” I was fascinated at the way she polished it off. She told me her husband had left her only three hundred pounds. I wondered how she managed the big car, the chauffeur, and a house in Scotland. She kept calling me up, trying to get another lunch or dinner.

  In those earlier days it became essential for me to learn French. It didn’t matter about German. Not too many of the English people at the winter sports in St. Moritz spoke German, although the Mitfords, with whom I went, used it as easily as they did English. But they all knew French, and lack of this language could betray my lack of education. Johnny learned of a Catholic order near London where unmarried French girls came to hide from the scandal of motherhood. They were allowed to stay a year and usually lived with a family to teach the children French. I applied for an unmarried mother, and the prettiest young lady rang my bell one day, with a suitcase, ready to stay. She had been engaged to a count and all the lingerie in her trousseau had been embroidered with her new initials, but he had abandoned her a week before the wedding. The baby boy “avec ses yeux si gros” was with her embarrassed mother in Paris.

  My friends were not as enraptured with Raimonde as I thought they would be. I kept her secret, of course, but while the men understood French, most of them preferred to speak English with English girls. When I had sufficient mastery of the French language, I brought Raimonde with me on the weekends in country homes. I’m fast at languages, as my daughter is, and I jabbered happily with Raimonde, convinced that I sounded like a girl who had actually attended a finishing school in Paris or Switzerland. Raimonde had her own insecurities and wanted to belong to these charming people as much as I did. One weekend in the country, she insisted on riding a frisky horse with us. Johnny had had me taught to ride at the Cadogan Riding School in Belgravia, and I sat my horse well, although I was afraid and expected the beast to throw me off, which it did frequently. Raimonde had never been on a horse before, as I realized at once. The horse went into a wild gallop, and she fell off, and broke her two front teeth. To this day I can hear her wailing, “Mes dents! Mes dents!”

  I was moderately successful as a free-lance journalist, but my horizon was limited. I had met A. P. Herbert at a charity matinee and he had advised me, “Write only about what you know.” My articles were about a young girl married to a middle-aged husband—I was paid eight guineas for that one—or about the young society people I knew and what an enchanting life theirs seemed to be. Which was preferable, a baby or a car? I was quite a celebrity in my circle, a blonde who had brains enough to write. Sometimes I wondered what these confident boys and girls had learned at their schools and universities. It was considered bad form to flaunt too much knowledge, and so I was able to participate in the conversations and the parties and the tennis. Johnny had me taught tennis and squash at the Queen’s Club. I became so expert at squash that I was number three on the team of five women who played for the International Sportsmen’s Club. At this time I met the Marquess of Donegall, who captained the men’s squash team.

  The surface of my life was delightful, but, a notch below, there was always great anxiety. I was afraid that in my present life I could be exposed at any time as someone who didn’t belong. When I had interviewed Viscountess Rhondda for The Sunday Chronicle, she had asked sharp questions that I was unable to answer. I felt undressed, all my ignorance revealed. I wanted to be the brightest girl in the school again. I was exhausted from the continual worry. America was a new country. It had something called syndication. You wrote an article and it appeared in hundreds of newspapers. With Johnny’s urging and blessing, I made my first trip to New York in 1931 with what I thought at first was resounding success.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SWIMMING UPSTREAM

  JOHN WHEELER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN Newspaper Alliance liked my articles. He signed a letter stating we would share in the proceeds from them. Elated, I sent cables to my friends in England with the news that from now on I would be making a hundred dollars a week—I had asked a newspaperman how much I could earn from syndication. I had to keep impressing people with my cleverness. What else did I have to offer? Only Johnny believed there was something more than a pretty face. But I didn’t believe in Johnny.

  Until I met Fitzgerald, no one had cared to probe far enough to learn how much I was suffering because of my inadequacies. Johnny was concerned only with my social behavior; otherwise he considered me perfect. It did not occur to him that what I needed most in the world into which he had plunged me was to return to school. To him it was more important for me to look as though I belonged and to be able to function in the realistic world of earning money.

  Before Johnny, I had not cared about being anything but what I was, a girl from the East End who found delight in looking at the West End but who could never be part of it. Now it was all jumbled, and I didn’t seem to belong anywhere, certainly not with the new batch of society people in New York—the Astors, the McAdoos, the Bakers, the Donahues, the Cosdens, the Lawrences—to whom I had letters of introduction and who invited me for weekends to their country homes, where I felt out of place and uncomfortable. I preferred my visits to Judge Smith’s family, who lived on the Philadelphia Main Line. I had met Sam Smith in England; he had been at Oxford with my friends the Ian Bowaters. Sam’s brother Ludlow Smith was married to Katharine Hepburn, but I didn’t meet her then because she was in a play in New York. The Smiths had colored servants, and this enchanted me. Biscuits were called cookies. I liked that. Sam’s mother, a gracious lady, took me to lunch at the home of a friend who collected rare manuscripts, chiefly of Doctor Samuel Johnson. They were in glass cases and on stands and must be handled with the utmost care. While I was in Philadelphia, I visited the Philadelphia Ledger and sold them a story for their Sunday magazine comparing English and American society girls, I who was an impostor with both. I went to the offices of The Saturday Evening Post and received a tentative commission to write a piece on Lord Beaverbrook, but nothing came of it except meeting him.

  I loved New York. Half the people I met had been millionaires before the 1929 crash and were now broke; the Josh Cosdens had been worth two hundred million dollars. They still had the penthouse overlooking the East
River, but when they had entertained the Prince of Wales the servants went on strike in the middle of dinner for their unpaid wages. Lee Orwell had been vice-president of the National City Bank. All he had left was his beautiful New York town house, which he was desperately trying to sell. Gerry Dahl, who had been the head of the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation, a New York subway company, didn’t have a dime to his name. “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was the popular song of the day. Men were selling apples on all the street corners, it seemed. Tim Durant, married to the daughter of Marjorie Post, took me to Wall Street and talked of the stockbrokers who had been wiped out overnight. It was all on such a big scale that I found it oddly exciting. In 1931 the depression was worse than ever, but people were still saying, “It will soon be over.” When I returned in 1933, they were reconciled to it.

  I had hoped to find a rescuer in New York, in what I had first imagined was a city of millionaires. But the millionaires were poor and the rescuer had not materialized. I left New York in the evening, which made it more depressing. Two acquaintances with whom I had dined at the Plaza dropped me off at the boat when they discovered I was going alone. From my cabin on the Aquitania I could hear the gay parties and happy shouts. On deck Rosa Ponselle was singing “The Star Spangled Banner”; then came her cry, “To the next President of the United States!” Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was on board with his son Elliott. They were going to Paris to visit his mother. I was full of self-pity and wept uncontrollably.

  In London I was more restless and dissatisfied than I had ever been. Waiting impatiently for sales and checks from John Wheeler, I decided to write a book, the story of my life as fiction. The title, Shadow Leaves, was from a poem by Edith Sitwell. (Scott’s first story at Princeton was titled “Shadow Laurels,” one of the many coincidences of our lives.) I had met Miss Sitwell briefly on a country weekend and my hostess had given me her new book of poems. In the verses of “Shadow Leaves,” whenever the wind blew the leaves shifted to a different pattern. My life had been like that, changing with every wind. In the part of the book concerning my marriage, the husband was a weakling. Johnny recognized himself, and it made him unhappy.