by Marion Meade
“Understand now about you and S.,” he replied. “Congratulations and best wishes to you both. Don’t you think Paris divorce best plan.”
AFTER A YEAR of brutal work Edna finished Show Boat and treated herself to a European vacation, the tonic that “counteracts all the acid.” Although she packed her typewriter out of habit, she had no plans to use it. That year she and her mother visited Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in Basque country south of Biarritz, and stayed at the charming Golf Hôtel. Golf being the rage that summer, she took lessons and “drove some awfully good balls.” Some days she and Julia went shopping in Biarritz, happily buying antiques and ordering custom-made brassieres, or they rented a chauffeur and car for an excursion to Lourdes. From Biarritz they moved on to Carcassonne and Avignon before traveling to Switzerland, which impressed her as gorgeous but stupid, “the show girl of Europe,” with “no more soul than a birthday cake,” despite the pretty “pink whatnots” on her hotel balcony.
As the picture-perfect days slipped by, however, she found herself getting bored to death. Writing to Aleck, who was traveling in Europe with Charlie MacArthur, she admitted having “got out the old Corona” with the thought of writing a story. Slow Poke, she was delighted to report, had advance sales of “almost 100,%000 (that’s one hundred thousand but I can’t seem to make the Corona write it”). It was a gaudy number, quite unbelievable, but of course all the doing of her publisher. Aleck ought to abandon those “roshers” at Dutton for a really first-class house such as her own. She could not praise the Doubledays enough. They were “simply delightful to deal with, and they sell a lot of books.”
By the time Show Boat was published in mid-August, some 135,000 copies had been shipped to bookstores across the country. Two weeks later Doubleday Page was threatened with a $100,000 libel suit. The complainant was Thomas Taggart, former mayor of Indianapolis, former U.S. senator, former Democratic National Committee chairman, but a public figure best known as the developer of a resort in French Lick, Indiana, a town notorious for its plush gambling casinos. On page 303 one of Edna’s characters says, “In the evening we can take a whirl at Tom Taggart’s layout.” Taggart, who always denied any connection with the casinos across the street from his resort, contended that this reference damaged his reputation.
Almost immediately Doubleday panicked. Without consulting Edna—supposedly not a single person from the company contacted her—Effendi’s son Nelson lost no time in announcing that he had stopped the presses. While nothing could be done about books already shipped, future editions would eliminate all references to the politician. A fictional name with the same number of letters would be substituted. Doubleday was “only too glad” to make the alteration, and “Miss Ferber is likewise agreeable.” Real names in fiction were “bad stuff,” added Nelson Doubleday.
Edna sprang into battle—against her publisher. The libel suit did not upset her half as much as the actions of Doubleday, which had approved the references to Taggart along with a number of other living celebrities (Aleck Woollcott, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne), so many in fact that one critic suggested the book needed footnotes. As an expert in the fiction business, Edna would never have used real names without consultation. In a seething letter she reminded Nelson Doubleday of their correspondence on this very point, how she specifically asked him if she should omit Heywood Broun’s name and “your answer was negative.” Furthermore, she went on, “you had the manuscript of Show Boat in your office six months before the date of publication.” If he opposed the use of real names, “why didn’t you say so at the time?” She was kicking herself for being “a sentimental old fool” who took for granted that she and Doubleday were partners, when they were nothing of the kind.
“Tom Taggart” was changed to “Sam Maddock,” but the fuss did not end. Publicly and privately Edna continued to denounce Doubleday for incompetence, insufficient advertising, and especially gross disloyalty. A more spineless publisher would be hard to imagine, she believed.
After the Tom Taggart episode, another complaint came from the Catholic Church when George Cardinal Mundelein threatened suit over what he perceived as a sexual innuendo, on page 327, against the Chicago archdiocese. This time Edna refused to change a word. “Sue and be damned!” she said.
What heartened her—and it was no small satisfaction—was the books success. Aside from a handful of critics who thought it a mistake to end with Magnolia’s daughter and her career as a Broadway actress in the Twenties, most critics hailed the novel as Mark Twain revisited: unforgettable story and characters, gorgeous river settings, thrilling descriptions of a lost chapter of American history. Not that the reviews, good or bad, mattered, because Show Boat scored a hit at the bookstores.
Despite its romantic story, the novel contained two unusual ideas. Magnolia’s charming gambler is an abusive spouse who pawns her wedding ring, gambles away her inheritance, and finally leaves her six hundred dollars with a letter saying he’ll be away a few weeks. “She never saw him again.” More shocking than a villainous leading man was Edna’s particularly sensitive portrayal of interracial marriage and her opposition to antimiscegenation laws. Julie, the showboat’s leading actress, secretly half black, is illegally married to a white actor. As the Mississippi sheriff approaches for an arrest, Steve pulls out a knife, slashes Julie’s arm, and swallows her blood. In this way he turns himself into a person with more than a drop of black blood, the two of them now a black couple.
Show Boat was the first popular American novel to treat sympathetically the forbidden subject of miscegenation. But in the age of Jim Crow, these controversial themes of racial prejudice remained unacceptable. Reviewers and readers alike simply ignored them and concentrated on the love story.
With Show Boat, Edna had another bestseller. That fall, as her rage toward Doubleday slowly receded, she became preoccupied with more important decisions. For instance, to which movie company should she sell the film rights? Edna was becoming an exceedingly rich author.
“OH KING,” Gene wrote in a telegram to Art and Gladys Ficke, “we accept your royal invitation with servile brow in the dust but elated legs in the air. Oh Queen, let your royal horses kick our plebeian posterior that we may know if we are really awake.” The Fickes had invited him and Vincent to New Mexico, all expenses paid. The minute he got a haircut, he said, they would hop the next train.
Once Gene sold his importing company, the family businesses had become poetry and agriculture, neither of which was exactly booming. Meanwhile, Artie was rolling in money after amassing $200,000 ($2 million in today’s currency) in Wall Street. He and his wife had made a comfortable life for themselves in Santa Fe, although of course it was an invalid’s existence. Gladys painted and kept a horse named Loraine. For Artie’s hobby—photographing landscapes, flowers, and nude models—they rigged up a darkroom.
The arrival of the “Darling Kids,” their first visit together in a year, turned out to be a bright spot in Art’s dull routine. “Were there ever four such happy, darling gods as we are?” Gene wondered. Art could think of nobody “who more sincerely and creatively worshiped the act of being alive” than Gene Boissevain.
During their almost two-month visit, Vincent made an expedition to the Grand Canyon and shopped for souvenirs and beads. At a place called Zuni she watched a “thrilling” Hopi Indian dance, she wrote her mother, and loaded up on trinkets. Once they paid a call on Artie’s friend Witter Bynner, the infamous prankster who had left her waiting at the church and who now lived nearby with his companion. Otherwise, everybody was content to stay home on Canyon Road, snapping pictures of each other in the garden, dining on the delicious meals prepared by the cook, Mercedes, and guzzling Artie’s special “pinkey-pink cocktails.” His usual attire was pajamas and dressing gown, and sometimes Vincent slipped into the same.
In an article titled “Wooing the Muse in a Santa Fe Garden,” the New York Times printed a snapshot of her and Artie in robes and slippers and reported that Vincent was completing the li
bretto of a new opera. The fact was that the Metropolitan Opera had already begun rehearsing The King’s Henchman, whose premiere was scheduled for February. To coincide with the opening, Vincent’s publisher planned to release a reading version that would be considerably longer and slightly different from the libretto. Now she continued to make final revisions, and when Artie offered suggestions for changes, she frequently accepted them. He was one of the very few people from whom she would tolerate correction.
In Santa Fe a favorite pastime of theirs was posing for nude pictures in the garden. All his life Artie had disliked his penis, which was circumcised and “too long,” but he felt no embarrassment around the Boissevains because they knew each other so well. One day, while standing between Vincent and Gladys, he was alarmed to see an erection and ran inside, “to the amusement of the girls.” When he returned to the garden, they were still laughing, and the frolicking resumed. “I took some pictures of the two of them having intercourse,” a sight he found amusing because Gladys “would never pose with me for that kind of picture,” he wrote later. Vincent having sex with his wife failed to bother him. Suffice it to say, he considered Vincent a person who simply acted on her “normal, natural attractions,” something that few people had the “courage” to do. The photographs, in any case, were extremely artistic.
Undoubtedly, the holiday distracted Vincent from her headache, now in its second year and increasingly the subject of rumors. Even in faraway Santa Fe, Art heard malicious gossip about the source of her trouble: tuberculosis or syphilis contracted from Gene. Such notions were “utterly ridiculous,” he thought, but even so sometimes he could not help wondering if her health problems were not as much emotional as physical. Might psychoanalysis be worth a try? But Vincent absolutely rejected such an idea.
At this time Arthur certainly remained under Vincent’s spell. Had anyone asked him to describe her, he would have said “impossible, utterly impossible.” She may have been “a genius, a bitch,” but he felt privileged to know “this strange, bold, beautiful spirit.” It was also true that his feelings about her and her poetry were beginning to change.
WHEN VINCENT and Gene left for Santa Fe, Cora returned home after having spent a year at Steepletop, and she could hardly wait to get out of there. Kay, driving her back to Camden (where the sisters had chipped in on a cottage), knew enough to keep quiet and let her rant. “I have calmed her down little by little,” Kay reported to Howard, “and not let her cuss Gene too much, but mostly let her get it off her chest.” During the months on the farm Cora had a chance to get acquainted with her son-in-law, who everyone said could charm the birds out of the trees. But if Gene’s quirks supplied some of the pleasures of a good vaudeville act, they failed to amuse Cora.
In the mornings he would appear at her bedroom door with coffee and a slice of rye toast, a poor breakfast to her way of thinking. To her face he was polite and respectful. Behind her back, however, he made plenty of jokes at her expense because Cora, as high-strung as her daughters, only shut up when asleep. “Pray for Ugin who has not murdered his mother-in-law as yet,” he wrote Artie. One time he joked about locking Mother Millay alone in the house and shutting off the plumbing. “Having Mother Millay with us all the time” cramped his style and made privacy impossible. How could he snap nude photos of Vincie when they couldn’t run around the house “naked and abandoned”?
In her diary Cora began mentioning “unpleasant wrangles” over, for example, religion. Evidently Gene, who had never set foot in a church in his life, delighted in signing letters blasphemously—“We love you and Jesus”—and he also regularly took the Lord’s name in vain: “Good God, and good Devil, please send [U.S.] Steel Common up to the boiling point.” After one nasty quarrel she got angry enough to leave and stay with Norma for a week. All this aggravation grated on Vincent’s nerves, and she had to ask for meals in her room.
Cora naturally never blamed Vincent. The problem, she later told Kay, was the three of them “being together for so long,” a mistake she did not intend to repeat. The truth was, she thought Gene was the problem.
Mindful of posterity, Cora every now and then liked to muse about how she planned to bequeath this or that of her belongings “to my first grandchile and failing that to my first great grandchild,” as she told Kay. However, living at the farm made her realize the unlikelihood of Vincent’s having children with Gene, who behaved like a mother with a young child. Come bedtime, he would bundle her off to bed while he retired to a separate room. For that matter, neither Howard nor Charlie had any interest in siring children, which suited Kay and Norma just fine. (Kay’s marriage to Howard seems to have been virtually sexless, while Norma, a lesbian, had coupled with a man said to be asexual or, most likely, homosexual.)
THE WEATHER in Paris had grown chilly. It was clear to Dottie that her relationship with Sewie was also cooling, a turn of events that she was reluctant to face. There came a day in November, however, when a showdown could no longer be avoided. Of course she was “the swellest person” he’d ever known, Sewie told her.
Didn’t he love her?
“Very much.”
In their sitting room at the Hôtel Lutetia, Sewie was busy throwing on the brakes and making a U-turn.
Didn’t he want to marry her?
No, he said, how could he know she wanted to get married. No, the reason was that he couldn’t make her happy. It had nothing to do with how well they got on. And no, this was not a recent decision. When they first met, he took her for a tough cookie. As a matter of fact, he remembered actually saying to himself that “this is the safest thing in the world.” He would be “a temporary anodyne” for a writer he’d always venerated.
A tough cookie?
Now he understood how “helpless” she really was. What she needed was somebody, such as her sister, to protect her from herself.
But he loved her.
Yes, he did, but he was not right for her. If he had given her false hopes, he was sorry.
Dottie went over to open a window: did she plan to jump? From her wrist she slipped off the Cartier watch and flipped it into the Boulevard Raspail. Without a backward glance she walked away from the window. The whole thing took a second. Sewie, once he’d realized what she had done, became hysterical. No woman he’d ever heard of threw away a Cartier as carelessly as a banana peel. She was a maniac. To try to save the watch, he ran down to the street and picked it out of the gutter. When he came back upstairs, he handed her the watch. It was still running.
Dottie was on her way home before the week was out. Among the friends helping her make a quick getaway was Ernest Hemingway, who thoughtfully presented her with a stack of books for the trip. In a thank-you note she expressed appreciation for both the reading material and his “sweetness and sympathy.” As for Ernest, unknown to Dottie, he had written a poem about her, “To a Tragic Poetess—Nothing in Her Life Became Her Like Her Almost Leaving of It.” One night at Archibald MacLeish’s apartment, with the intention of entertaining, he read it aloud to the MacLeishes and Don and Beatrice Stewart. “Oh thou who with a safety razor.”
As it happened, Ernest had converted Dottie’s confidences into verse. There was the Charlie lover who had left her pregnant, the fetus’s little hands, the razor blades and sleeping powders she “always vomited in time and bound your wrists,” the men in Spain who “pinched the Jewish cheeks of your plump ass.” Safely in Paris, her “ass intact,” she sat in the Hôtel Lutetia writing shallow poetry for The New Yorker and talking about how much she loved doggies.
Ernest’s poem failed to get any laughs. It was “viciously unfair and unfunny,” said Don Stewart, who would never speak to him again.
Whenever Dottie thought of Sewie, who had remained in Paris, she felt ashamed of herself. Of course the split was all her fault. Expecting marriage from a man who said he loved you was bad judgment. He had always been exceedingly kind to her, always a gentleman, and now he probably would never want to see her again. Eager to apolo
gize, and ask for his forgiveness, she cabled, “Don’t hate me.” Never would she forget the “loveliness” he had brought to her life. “Helen has watch for you.” If only she hadn’t made a scene about the damned watch.
IT WAS A LOVELY TIME, Dottie said. After ten months, happy to see old friends, she paid a surprise call on Frank Adams at his World office. What was the news of Paris? he asked. How old is this Hemingway fellow?
How would she know. “All writers are either twenty-nine or Thomas Hardy.”
At Tony’s, with her Scottie in tow, she tossed off one-liners left and right and managed to keep everyone in stitches.
How was the crossing?
“Rough,” she said. “The only thing I could keep on my stomach was the first mate.”
All week long she managed to stay busy celebrating her homecoming. Several evenings she hung out at Tony’s with Bunny, who, quick to notice details, thought she looked “bloated” and her ragged bob stringy. She accompanied Thornton Wilder to a concert of English ballads and made herself the life of the party at Ruth and Heywood’s house. On the spur of the moment she composed an entertaining ditty that she titled “Despair in Chelsea”:
Osbert Sitwell
Couldn’t shit well.
His brother, Sacheverell
Doubts if he ever’ll.
Everything was fine until the weekend, when her ability to make wisecracks dried up, just like that. She could feel herself slipping. Before previous suicide episodes she had not revealed her state of mind to anybody. This time, however, she did. On Sunday morning she got dressed and went downtown to the Village. There was only one person who might listen—without exhibiting horror or disbelief—and that was Elinor Wylie. (In Elinor’s family, a brother, sister, and ex-husband had taken their own lives.) Outside 36 West Ninth Street, Dottie pressed the bell for Benét/Wylie. From the second floor Elinor came down to see who could be ringing at that early hour. Dottie announced quickly the reason for her visit: She was tired. Her life was meaningless.
