It would be hard work, but Britten looked forward to experimenting with a variety of American musical styles. His conversations with other musicians were inspiring, as reports came in that season of the successful previews of such shows as Lady in the Dark and the new Rodgers and Hart musical, Pal Joey, with Gene Kelly in the lead. It was impossible not to hope that if he, too, could come up with enough popular melodies, Broadway or even Hollywood might call.
Gypsy Rose Lee had already traveled to Philadelphia to see the out-of-town premiere of Pal Joey for herself—and not just because it featured yet another takeoff on her own signature act, called “Zip.” Gypsy had to work hard not to take offense at a song built around the act of repeatedly unzipping zippers when she herself considered zippers vulgar and never wore them. The real reason she went to see the musical was that her younger sister and former vaudeville partner, the struggling actress June Havoc, had landed a featured part as Gladys Bumps—a one-number role that she had managed to build into five. The musical was such a success—and June, in particular, the fantastic new discovery, stopping the show twice—that Gypsy wept with joy as well as, perhaps, just a touch of competitive ire. Congratulating her sister and shrugging off the “Zip” number with, “Anyway, now I’m a writer, to hell with acting,” she returned to New York to reassess her situation and plan her next move.
For weeks Gypsy had been receiving telegrams from Mike Todd, now in Chicago, wooing her with Runyonesque endearments and alluding to a possible job. Gypsy’s attraction to the producer had not waned since their partnership at the World’s Fair. In fact, as the process of writing her novel settled into a routine, Todd’s plans in Chicago became even more alluring. As usual, Todd was thinking big, and, also as usual, his new project incorporated elements that had created the biggest successes in the last one.
Todd’s Theatre Café in Chicago, scheduled to open in late December 1940, was billed as the largest nightclub in the world, with eight thousand seats. Todd had based its design on the quarter-a-ticket Streets of Paris philosophy: you can squeeze a lot more profit out of thousands of “working-class Joes” than from a few dozen “rich snobs.” There would be no cover or minimum at the Theatre Café, dinner would cost seventy-five cents and champagne cocktails a quarter each, and the first show would begin at five in the afternoon. Inside, Todd’s blue-collar clientele would encounter a sight they would never forget: a sixty-foot stage with a dance floor suspended above it, two dance bands working in shifts, a four-hundred-foot bar, and a spectacular show, The Gay New Orleans Review, “straight from 2500 performances at the New York World’s Fair.” It would include a Ben Hur–style chariot race and feature the comedy team of Willy, West and McGinty—and, if she were willing, it would star Gypsy Rose Lee.
It was a tempting offer. No one knew better than Gypsy how talented Todd was at making money, and his new project had all the earmarks of a huge success. No matter how much money Gypsy had accrued over the summer, she got very nervous very quickly when the stream of income began to dry up. “Everything’s going out and nothing’s coming in!” was one of her favorite phrases, and it wasn’t a happy one.
Much as she enjoyed spending time at 7 Middagh Street and working with George, the writing business had turned out to have a serious downside—the necessity for a beginning novelist to finish her book before getting paid. Gypsy loved the process of churning out the chapters with George, but writing had turned out to be hard work—and not having a contract with a publisher was “like being all made up, ready to go on . . . and not knowing what theatre you’re playing.” Despite George’s assurances, it was hard to tell whether her writing was any good. When the tea was just right during her morning work sessions and her business interests were going well, she found that she could write just fine. But “if I have night lunch with a smarty pants like Saroyan,” she wrote, “I want to spit on the whole damned manuscript.”
In short, Gypsy was fed up with the full-time literary life. The continued chaos—increased considerably now that the house was open to visitors—and the squalor of a home shared by so many got on her nerves. Nor did she approve of all the drinking that went on at 7 Middagh. Now, with the refugees arriving by the shipload and Britten playing the piano all day, the house seemed to be turning into a Noah’s Ark, with two of every species, making it impossible to concentrate. Gypsy began to think she’d be better off writing backstage. The sight of her sister having the time of her life in Pal Joey helped make up her mind. She missed the spotlight and she needed more money. And she didn’t want to write any more—or much more—unless she got paid.
A little before Christmas, Gypsy broke the news to George that she had decided to join Todd in Chicago. George, stunned that Gypsy would leave before the book was done, tried to talk her into staying, at least until they had completed a few more chapters. But Gypsy had already packed her bags. In the previous month, she had completed two chapters to George’s satisfaction. She agreed to write a third in Chicago and send it back for editing if he would find a publisher and try to get her an advance.
Despite her abrupt departure and George’s sharp disappointment, there was no denying that each had profited considerably from their brief partnership. Gypsy’s presence had lent a unique twist to the household and attracted the most sought-after names in cultural New York—people who George was certain would continue to travel out to Brooklyn. And Gypsy herself was leaving not only with the completed chapters and the material for others but with an address book full of impressive new names. During the weeks she spent among the Brooklyn literati, Gypsy had formed warm and lasting friendships with Janet Flanner, Carson McCullers, Louis Untermeyer, Pavel Tchelitchew, Cheryl Crawford, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, and the noted biographer Carl Van Doren. Marcel Vertes was now peppering her with charming cartoon letters that transcended his limitations in English. Gypsy, recognizing an opportunity when she saw one, sweetly requested the rights to a sketch he had made of her: she was sitting at a dressing table in a pink negligee and high heels, typing madly on her Underwood with a cigarette between her lips. Vertes gallantly agreed to the gift, and Gypsy used the image as her personal logo for the rest of her life. “Dammit, I love furriners!” she wrote jokingly to a friend. “Aside from the hand kissing they really make like gents.”
Gypsy’s departure in December left not only an empty suite on the third floor of 7 Middagh but an equally empty hole in George’s life. Over the winter, George had grown as dependent as Carson on Gypsy’s sympathetic ear and bracing, no-nonsense attitude. He dutifully wrote to her a number of times as he carried on with his duties as nominal landlord—providing all the juicy details on the holiday party: their cook, Eva, “got plastered, but not objectionably,” and both Chester Kallman and Susie the maid became very friendly with a group of visiting British sailors. But George felt let down by Gypsy’s refusal to stick it out at 7 Middagh until she fully understood the writer’s craft. By deciding that she had learned what she needed to know and moving on, he felt, she was giving up her best chance to escape the destiny her mother had handed her. “You have learned that there are other things in life worth acquiring—and for the time being it seems to you that they can be bought with the same coin, pushed once across the counter,” he wrote. “It isn’t so, but you won’t discover that until the mask is forever off, and you will no longer be Illusion.”
With Gypsy’s departure, George gave up on his own novel as well. Called “The Victim,” the novel had intended to tell the story of a woman who has always expected a terrible tragedy to befall her—and then one day it does. But, as George admitted to Gypsy in a letter, his progress on the book had been negligible and he saw no point in trying to continue. “There’s no use making a tragedy of it,” he wrote. “I simply am not one of those people who must write. Carson is, Wystan is, I’m not. I should have thought of that when I made my high handed decision to leave the Bazaar. Week by week since then I have bogged deeper in despair; I’m all but paralyzed by it now.”
Like Gypsy, George was tired, too, of “everything going out and nothing coming in.” “That talk about being bohemian and that God will provide was just a little tune that I was whistling in the dark,” he wrote. By Christmas week—having received a generous year-end bonus from Carmel Snow, who despite their differences had followed his experiment with great sympathy and interest—he was negotiating to return to work on a freelance basis for Harper’s Bazaar. That, along with his work on Decision and the responsibilities of the Brooklyn house, would keep him busy for the time being.
In the days before Christmas, Carson agreed to return home with her mother for a recuperating stay. It would be a temporary absence, Carson assured George, just long enough to get her strength back. Within days, Marguerite had packed Carson’s bags and taken her home. Their train was filled with “Dixie Darlings,” soldiers from the eastern seaboard shipped south for basic training. Carson knew what a shock it would be for some of these Yankees to experience the South for the first time, with its routine treatment of Negroes as animals, and the periodic lynchings matter-of-factly reported in the newspapers. It was an odd situation, to say the least, for young men preparing to fight fascism overseas. Carson, who detested and denounced bigotry wherever she saw it, found for this reason especially that on most occasions, the moment she stepped off the train and was greeted by her father was the same moment that she began longing to return north.
“Being home again has been rather like a strange and broken dream,” Carson wrote to Muriel Rukeyser, who had lately been spending a great deal of time helping Klaus Mann with Decision. Perhaps her retreat had been a good thing; maybe now she would make some progress on her novel. She wouldn’t be gone long, she assured her friend—just a few weeks, a month at the most. In the meantime, her rooms at 7 Middagh were available. Muriel was welcome to use them if she liked.
For Christmas, Carson sent George an antique clock, along with a fruitcake baked by her mother. When she learned that George would be alone for Christmas, she offered to send the train fare for him to join her in Georgia, but he declined. He liked knocking about the “fantastic old house,” he wrote, with the cats, Sophie and Boy, their eyes blazing as they roamed from room to room, and the ghosts that he still insisted roamed the halls.
Ben and Peter were spending Christmas at the Mayers’ house on Long Island. Auden was also absent, visiting friends. Golo Mann had decided he could suffer being reunited with his clan for the duration. Gypsy remained in Chicago, preparing for her opening on December 27 as she sent pages to George along with grumbles about the cost of postage. Bending to her will, George had met with Lee Wright, the editor of the Inner Sanctum Mystery Series at Simon and Schuster, on Janet Flanner’s recommendation. Using all his talents as a literary impresario, he created a glorious picture of the kinds of promotion a performer like Gypsy could contribute—and left behind the novel’s first two chapters. All they could do now was wait for a response.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, George sat up late, writing letters at the secretary near his bedroom window, listening to the news on the parlor radio, and growing increasingly depressed. “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now,” warned President Roosevelt in his first Fireside Chat since his reelection. “The United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace on the part of the aggressor nations.” That same week in London, Trinity Church and eight Christopher Wren churches had been destroyed or severely damaged by the Luftwaffe. And nearly buried in the war news was the report that, a few days earlier, Francis Scott Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack. Another light in George’s constellation, forged in the heat of 1920s Paris, had burned out.
“I’m sitting here in the parlor alone,” George wrote to Gypsy in the hours before dawn.
There is a wonderful deep, wet fog outside, and the house creaks like a ship under way . . . At sea, Gypsy! That little phrase makes my heart leap high; why should I have ever been fool enough to want to be anywhere else? My happiest memories are of the sea, and so are my cruelest . . . I was lonely, I loved, I was lonely, I loved; the alternation is familiar, God knows, and often I think it is a sort of shabby arrogance on my part to believe that I brought to that alternation a unique talent, my own compound of courage and generosity and tenderness. But as I sit here now, in this ramshackle ship’s parlor, I dare believe just that . . . I am, oh believe me, these few days before the New Year, where I belong: at sea in Brooklyn.
Seven Middagh had been a nurturing home for George and Carson, a literary incubator for Gypsy, a working studio for the three British émigrés, and the first stop in a new life for countless European refugees. After only three months, it had become a new world, a free zone, for so many. In a sense, the ramshackle Brooklyn house was developing into a miniature culture in its own right. It was America—but not yet.
6
Ideas vibrate, pulsing against each other . . . and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.
—Carson McCullers
In the wake of Roosevelt’s December 1940 Fireside Chat, Americans were faced with the need to make their own decisions, their own “correct choices,” and they began passionately debating the issue of the country’s involvement in the European conflict. The split in opinion fell largely along class lines as socialites in Seattle held bingo parties for Britain and the First Families of Virginia threw a Relief Ball at the Hotel Jefferson while ordinary families saw their drafted sons off to basic training camps for “peacetime military service.” In December, two hundred “prominent Americans” dispatched a telegram to the president, beseeching him to join the war. On New Year’s Day, the No-Foreign-Wars Committee urged the “common people [who] provide the cannon fodder and pay for the wars” to dispatch their own telegrams against engagement; more than thirty thousand messages were sent.
It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that Roosevelt had already made his decision. Stymied by isolationist legislation that forbade U.S. banks to lend money to “belligerents”—a means of assistance that the nation had given Britain in World War I—Roosevelt made a detour around the law by introducing the Lend-Lease Bill into Congress. This legislation would allow the government to lend enormous amounts of arms and other supplies to Britain in exchange for its promise to repay the United States after the end of the war. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” Roosevelt insisted. “We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same urgency . . . as we should show were we at war.”
Roosevelt continued to claim that he wanted to implement this aid as a way to avoid actual engagement, but most Americans rightly saw his actions as leading the country ever closer to the conflict, and this affected the national mood. The New York Times reported an increase in the New Year’s revelry as a result of the “war gloom” overtaking the United States. The city’s hotel occupancy increased fifty percent, and Times Square overflowed with Americans indulging in what many guessed might be their final holiday fling. “This year is going to be one of the most decisive periods of the twentieth century,” Isherwood, in California, wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day. “Nearly everybody is now convinced that we shall be ‘in it’ very soon.”
In journals, magazines, and books across the country, the 7 Middagh Street residents had begun to contribute to the debate. Carson had regained her health sufficiently to return briefly to Brooklyn. She arrived for a two-week visit in early January, pleased to find “Night Watch over Freedom,” her meditation on the Battle of Britain, in that month’s issue of Vogue. Meanwhile, Auden’s poem “New Year Letter,” which had appeared that month in the Atlantic under the title “Letter to Elizabeth Mayer,” focused on the American perspective:
All our reflections turn about
A common meditative norm,
Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.
Even Gypsy’s political views were expressed in a photograph in the January 6
issue of Life magazine, in which she performed a striptease for the Star Spangled Ball, a white-tie war relief banquet at New York’s Astor Hotel. The photograph provoked a wave of outrage, due not only to Gypsy’s state of undress, but also to Life’s friendly coverage of high society’s increasingly visible support for the war. The mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, barred that issue of Life from the newsstands of his city; Life’s readers fired off letters expressing their approval.
Increased emotional involvement in the war had its effect on Decision’s mailbox, too. Putting together the March 1941 issue, Klaus Mann included one letter to the editor praising the courage and faith of the refugee contributors and applauding his own efforts to mobilize the nation’s intellectuals to speak out about the war. Another letter, which had been scrawled in the margins of a Decision publicity brochure, began: “One glance at the prize collection of Anglophiles, Union-with-Great Britainites, Warmongers and Refugees which head this letter should convince any thinking American not to support what will so obviously be a propaganda sheet to involve uninformed Americans in another European War.” The author-playwright William Saroyan sent in his comment that “all culture up to August 31, 1939, is now finished, and that, within the chaos, another culture is coming into being. Good or bad, one thing is sure; a new world and a new inhabitant of the world is getting ready to be born. Now is the pregnancy.”
February House Page 19
