Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  He no longer knew what to say to her, Bunny moaned.

  That made two of them, she said. “What would you like me to write?”

  Another morose lover was John Bishop, who had spent the spring attempting to lure Vincent to his midtown apartment as often as possible. At their last meeting she breezed in late and did not hesitate to admit that she had just come from another man’s bed. What’s more, she was pressed for time because she was meeting someone else (her third sexual encounter of the day). Where two-timing treatment of this sort might have cooled most men, it only stoked John’s ardor. (She behaved like a man, he decided.)

  She had barely unpacked when he pleaded to visit. Her suggestion of the Fourth of July brought no reply, however. Obviously he was being ornery. “Damn it, gimme a little information, boy.”

  John turned up at the end of July and hung around for a week. No sooner had he left than Bunny arrived.

  BUNNY’S WEEKEND got off to a shaky start. Stepping from the train at Wellfleet, he found a cart and driver willing to transport him to Truro, but, inexplicably, the man made a detour and dumped him some distance from the cottage. Night having fallen, lost and hungry, Bunny was left to stumble around in the dark, dragging his suitcase through a field of scrub oak.

  Apparently, no preparations had been made for his arrival, but a bottle of whiskey and something to eat were set on the table. Inside the house it was stifling and noisy with the Millay women talking relentlessly. Bunny, seeing for the first time the entire family together, thought that the three sisters—a redhead, a blonde, and one exotically dark—were extremely attractive. The scene recalled Little Women, but in contrast to Alcott’s fictional creations, and rather incongruously, these sisters behaved like high-strung children who lapsed into baby talk and addressed each other by silly nicknames: Titter Binnie or Sefe (Vincent), Hunk (Norma), and Wump (Kathleen).

  Of the four women, however, the mother (variously called Mothie, Muvver, Muddie, or Mumbles)—a bespectacled little old lady—seemed most unusual to Bunny. Cora, to whom Vincent bore a strong physical resemblance, appeared older than her fifty-five years, and Bunny imagined that she must have had a hard life. Sitting up ramrod straight in her chair, like a New England schoolteacher taking attendance, she followed the conversation with a stern expression as she sipped her whiskey. The schoolmarmish air and the granny glasses proved deceptive, however, because she soon began making “raffish” remarks to him. She used to be such a “slut,” she said between drags on a cigarette, so it was no wonder her girls should be, too. A mother styling herself a prostitute! He nearly died.

  To escape the chaperonage of Cora and the sisters, Bunny and Vincent went out to huddle in the dark on the porch rockers but were soon driven inside by flurries of wicked mosquitoes. In addition to bug bites, he would suffer during the weekend from a variety of afflictions, including diarrhea and eczema. He was not prepared for the lack of modern conveniences—the outhouse, the makeshift outdoor shower, the oil lamps. No proper meals were served except suppers, and those were slapdash. Poor boy, the Millay women began to cluck, poor Bunny.

  Being alone with Vincent was not easy, but he finally found an opportunity to sit her down and bring up the subject burning in his mind. Like the young gentleman he was, he asked her formally to be his wife. To his dismay, she threw cold water on the proposal. Even her promise to think about it rang false, and afterward he could not help remembering her exact words.

  “That might be the solution,” she said.

  Her withering remark, with its mercenary implications, flustered him more than he cared to admit. Probably it was the idea of marriage that bored her, he decided, and not him.

  Next morning, nothing more was said about marriage, and they decided to go to the beach. Still upset, Bunny tried to keep the conversation bright. As they were coming back to the house, he kissed her behind a bush, and she grinned and gave him a “summer girl smile.”

  “By the time we’re fifty years old, we’ll be two of the most interesting people in the United States,” he said.

  “You behave as if you were fifty already,” she answered.

  Bunny left Truro on Sunday close to tears. In a rush of misery, he confided to John his problems being a guest of the Millays, making clear how unnerving he found the lack of plumbing. Not surprisingly, John replied that he knew exactly how Bunny felt. As a matter of fact, he had “stopped defecating” for a whole week. After leaving Truro, he immediately checked into the YMCA in Boston and took a bath.

  Back in New York, Bunny reflected that his amorous achievements had been limited to a single kiss. Edna St. Vincent Millay had turned him into putty, he told himself. Yet he continued to pine for her.

  . . .

  IF TRURO proved an ordeal for Bunny, it was becoming a struggle for Vincent too. The summer started off splendidly, but her concentration fizzled. So did her writing. Although she bobbed her hair and learned to drive a car, it turned out to be mostly a fruitless period in which she treaded water with Nancy Boyd potboilers banged out quickly for cash and entertained visitors from New York. Eventually her family also began to get on her nerves, especially the snakebites of sisterly jealousy.

  For Vincent’s youngest sister, Kay, the summer had been “stupid, hot, lonesome.” Tormented by mosquitoes and a miserable cold, she wrote grouchy letters to her boyfriend, Howard Irving Young. Otherwise she spent her time sniffling and sulking and watching Titter Binnie play games with John and Bunny. (They were not the only visitors. The editor of Ainslee’s also appeared.) For the first time, despite an abundance of clues, Kay understood that the interest of the New York editors was not entirely professional. Shocked, she concluded that Vincent must have plotted to figure out “who was the editor of what magazine,” and then “deliberately met and slept with him until he published her work and then she went on to the next editor.” Sister was not a poet at all, only “a very clever woman with a definite gift for jingle,” she thought.

  Kathleen Kalloch Millay, twenty-four years old, a budding writer of grace and some small talent, felt underappreciated. For as long as she could remember, her mother doted on Vincent, even bestowing a theatrical name custom-made for applause. With the household organized around little Vincie’s genius, Norma and Kay took for granted that she owned all the space, artistic and otherwise. Kay, at the age of sixteen, worshiped “my Vincent,” and when influential women generously arranged her sister’s Vassar education, Kay whooped for joy. “Glory Be!” she wrote in her diary. “Did ever such fairy-tale-like things happen to anyone before?” But living in her sister’s shadow eventually became onerous, and now, behind Vincie’s back, Kay sarcastically called her “Edna St. Jesus.”

  Kay griped mostly to her boyfriend, a personable young man from Rutherford, New Jersey, who planned to become a playwright. Howard Young worked as a production manager at Famous Players–Lasky movie company, which occasionally allowed him to write a scenario but otherwise paid him pennies. Hoping to further his career by rubbing shoulders with important people, Howard had turned into an enthusiastic partygoer and name-dropper. His letters to Kay were full of news about various celebrities he’d met: George Jean Nathan at his Royalton suite playing pop tunes on the piano; F. Scott Fitzgerald and his engaging wife, whose name escaped Howard; Henry Mencken, with whom he had just dined. As Howard was quick to inform Kay, Mencken had raved about Vincent as “the only worthwhile poet” published by The Smart Set. Wasn’t that incredible?

  When Vincent returned to New York in September, she was pleased to find that her prestige had grown. Village bookshops were selling A Few Figs from Thistles, her collection of saucy peep-show verses that pictured all-night sprees on the Staten Island Ferry, candles burning at both ends, lovers discarded like yesterday’s papers. Thanks to Bunny, Vanity Fair ran an entire page of her verse and called her “the Most Distinguished American poet of the Younger Generation.” It was thrilling to see herself becoming “very famous,” she confided to a friend. All over town
everybody was talking about Edna St. Vincent Millay. To another Edna—Edna Ferber—fame was a motion picture, about none other than herself, in which she was portrayed as a raving beauty.

  OVER THE SUMMER Edna Ferber had gone to Hollywood, where Universal was shooting the film version of her second novel, Fanny Herself, a book so autobiographical it might have been called Edna Herself. (The movie would eventually be titled No Woman Knows.) While secretly pleased that she was being played by a gorgeous young actress (Mabel Julienne Scott), Edna sniffed at the vulgarity of the movie capital, which struck her as both boring and offensive. Hiking around Beverly Hills, she noticed that she was the only person on foot. From their windows people peered as if she were “some strange animal loose in the streets.” Relieved to leave an unreal place where “the sun came up, day after day, day after day,” she continued her traveling summer with trips to Chicago and San Francisco to attend the Republican and Democratic political conventions. With Bill White and Jay “Ding” Darling, the Iowa cartoonist, she’d been hired to supply team coverage for United Press. In August she turned thirty-five (all she admitted to was thirty-two), and in September she was back at the Hotel Majestic. Soon she was immersed in her regular routine: writing in the mornings, meeting various editors at the Cosmopolitan Club, and looking ahead to Christmas and wondering what she could buy her friends (a trombone-flute might be the thing for Frank Adams). There was no better city anywhere than New York in winter, she thought.

  A few blocks from the Hotel Majestic, Dottie and her husband were preparing to abandon their apartment on West End Avenue and Seventy-first. After months of agonizing, they were going to spruce up their wartime marriage by giving it what amounted to a fresh paint job and new curtains. Eddie had just lately pulled out of his morphine addiction (he still drank heavily) and returned to work at Paine Webber. They rented an apartment the size of a teacup on the top floor of a redbrick building at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue. To brighten it, they bought a canary and a dog. The building, full mainly of artists’ studios, stood adjacent to a branch of the Sixth Avenue El, and so the apartment quaked every time a train rumbled by. The real problem was the Boston terrier, Woodrow Wilson, who had never been housebroken. Nobody remembered to walk him, and the hardwood floors soon began to warp.

  A short stroll from the Parkers lived Zelda and Scott, who had left Westport for a brownstone apartment on Central Park South. The Fitzgeralds were now conveniently located a few doors down the street from the Plaza, their favorite hotel. Sometimes they ran up extravagant tabs by ordering meals from the hotel. When they were broke, however, they dined on homemade olive sandwiches washed down with Bush-mills whiskey. Working furiously on his novel, Scott was periodically forced to stop and knock out short fiction. Still, money remained tight, and he once borrowed a hundred dollars from Dottie, only to find that the cash mysteriously disappeared. Considering the turmoil in his relationship with Zelda—there was a bruised eye and a broken door—the money could easily have been lost or misplaced in any number of ways. Scott, though, blamed his wife. Of course she took it, he muttered, because she wanted to squander his earnings on clothes. There was no way to prove this theory one way or another. But that fall, she did have her sights on a darling squirrel coat.

  AFTER WINNING a hundred-dollar poetry prize for “The Beanstalk,” Vincent decided to spend every cent of it on clothes. She splurged on “the sweetest new evening gown you ever saw, and shoes with straps across them and stockings with embroidery up the front.” The new outfit was devilishly sexy. Unfortunately, it did nothing at all to help her work or lighten her mood. Back in the city, she began to feel “sad so much of the time.” The obvious solution, she thought, was to shake free from her family and find a place to write without the watchful gaze of her mother or the sound of Norma’s sewing machine whirring in the next room. Soon thereafter, she took a lovely big room in a brownstone on West Twelfth Street, a block from the hospital for which she was named. That the building frequently ran out of hot water didn’t bother her a bit. She simply arranged to bathe over at Bunny’s, raising the eyebrows of his roommates the first time they saw her sail naked out of the bathroom. She was in her new home only a few weeks when Kay spoiled things by moving into a room down the hall. And her mother, still puttering around the Truro house by herself, kept pushing problems on her. What should she do with the kittens? Who was going to pay the summer bills? Vincent “better settle with the gas company by money order.”

  Her family was not the only distraction. As usual, she simply could not escape the men who interrupted her work. She had begun seeing a cherubic English writer, Llewelyn “Lulu” Powys, who whipped himself into a lather over her. In one of his swooning letters he likened himself to “some wretched child under a spell.” In addition to Lulu, there was the besotted John Bishop continuing to trail at her heels like a dog begging for table scraps. “For God’s sake, Edna,” he implored, “don’t forbid my seeing you this week—I can’t stand it.” After dinner one night Vincent found herself entangled on her daybed with John and Bunny and playfully began making love with both of them. To be fair, she assigned her upper half to John and gave the bottom to Bunny, who amid the giggling decided his was the “better share.” Vincent was hugely entertained by the sexual theatrics of the Princeton Brahmins, whom she dubbed “the choir boys of Hell.” By one of her lovers—the choirboys, Lulu, someone else—she became pregnant in November and had to have an abortion. The cause was more carelessness than ignorance; she had just recommended a Margaret Sanger birth-control manual to Kathleen’s boyfriend. To make matters worse, she wound up with an incompetent doctor who botched the abortion.

  The week before Christmas, still weak from loss of blood, Vincent arrived at the Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue to attend Kathleen’s wedding to Howard Young. It was a modest affair witnessed by only the sisters and Howard’s roommate. Standing next to her bridegroom, Kay appeared unusually jittery, as if she were having second thoughts. (Several photographers had approached her about modeling, and she had prospects, she said later, but “I gave it all up to marry you.”) Unquestionably “Lil Ho’wid,” as Vincent called him, was cookies and milk, as sweet as the boy next door. Yet he did not seem to be especially well equipped for a successful career, and neither did Charles Ellis, a sexually confused actor whom Norma had met at the Provincetown and was thinking of marrying.

  To Vincent, who was twenty-eight, nearing the dreaded age of thirty, Kay’s choice of a husband was a little upsetting. Was marriage, even to a nice but weak man such as Lil Ho’wid, better than being single?

  Several days after the wedding, she wrote her mother to say she’d been “quite sick.” There was a bout of bronchitis and “a small nervous breakdown,” but she was on the mend now. She then lobbed a piece of startling news at Cora: she was going to Europe in two weeks. Vanity Fair had made her a foreign correspondent, and she naturally accepted, as would any “business woman” ambitious to see the world, and not because of “any love affair, past or present.” For another thing, Crownie agreed to pay a regular stipend for the Nancy Boyd stories she had been selling to Ainslee’s. Anticipating that Cora would throw a fit while reading the letter, Vincent emphasized that the new job was too exciting an opportunity to pass up.

  Besides, she went on, she desperately needed to get away. New York drained her of artistic inspiration, making her feel old and “sterile.” In a place like Paris or Rome everything would be different. She longed for a drastic change, ideally a castle with a moat and a drawbridge, where she could be alone and find “fresh grass” to feed her muse. In short, she had made up her mind to go, and nothing Cora might say could stop her.

  Impatient to embark on her new life, she began packing her trunks with her favorite things: a pair of fur-trimmed velvet galoshes, a blue silk umbrella, and her Corona of course. She could hear the clock ticking.

  “I’ll be thirty in a minute!” she told Bunny.

  ON CENTRAL PARK WEST, palm tr
ees rustled in the vast plush lobby of the Hotel Majestic, while outside the park was covered with snow. It was a gray Wednesday afternoon, and Edna Ferber came home from shopping with bunches of jonquils and new candles, “tall, thin, greasy looking dark blue ones,” for her pewter candlesticks. The yellow blossoms, arranged so prettily on a table in the parlor, gave her an idea. Why not invite Aleck Woollcott for cocktails and a candlelit meal? That evening, with her mother out for dinner and the opera, she would be alone. Company would give her an opportunity to dress for dinner. But when she telephoned, there was no answer.

  Disappointed, she scribbled a note to Woollcott instead. Daffodils and beautiful candles helped to banish the wintry gloom, she said, but he of course was the one she had really wanted to see. Too bad, although they’d probably have quarreled.

  Alexander Woollcott and Bunny Wilson came from the same hometown, Red Bank, New Jersey. Not only that, but Bunny’s maternal grandfather, a homeopathic physician, had delivered Aleck. This coincidence, however, did not alter Bunny’s view of Aleck as a “disagreeable” fellow with an “uncomfortable” personality.

  It was just as well because had Aleck been a little more agreeable—a little less uncomfortable—Edna might have fallen in love. (Aleck, a bachelor, was evidently still a virgin because, he said, a case of mumps had left him sexually impotent, but some people didn’t quite believe it.) Edna met him through Frank Adams (the two men served together during the war on the Army newspaper the Stars and Stripes) and liked him at once, even though Aleck was extremely high-strung and they were often at odds. Soft and pudgy, wearing owlish spectacles, he walked like a tubby auntie, a “New Jersey Nero” in a pinafore, Edna teased. He hated exercise and sports (except croquet) and favored fatty, creamy food washed down with more than forty cups of coffee a day, habits that caused a physical-fitness zealot like Edna to shudder.