The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In the car going over to Cambridge, he continued his verbal assaults on, and imitations of, Adelaide—Adelaide who was now drinking more than she should, who had allowed herself to become much too fat, who could never seem to get herself anywhere on time, though John was a stickler for punctuality; Adelaide who dressed all wrong for her size, who got herself up in Indian costumes and peasant skirts with ruffled gypsy blouses, puffed sleeves, and little lace-up vests coming apart at the seams; Adelaide who had never been exactly pretty to begin with, and whose wild mass of ash-blonde hair now never seemed to be properly arranged. “Listening to John attack Adelaide that afternoon was like watching a woman being buried alive,” Carol Brandt said later.

  All over again, because he didn’t mind repeating himself, John told the Brandts his story about Adelaide in New York at the Colony Club. It seemed that John and Adelaide had arrived at the Colony Club for some function, and Adelaide, who had made them late as usual, had dismounted from the taxi and, as was her habit, marched imperiously toward the front door without waiting for her husband to offer her his arm. The doorman had stepped quickly toward Mrs. John P. Marquand, wife of one of America’s foremost novelists, sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller III, daughter of a multimillionaire industrialist and a direct descendant of Thomas Hooker, seventeenth-century founder of Hartford, Connecticut, and said to her, “Sorry, lady, the service entrance is on the side.” It was one of John Marquand’s favorite stories about his wife.

  Now the three friends were all in the front hall of 1 Reservoir Street, Cambridge, and Marquand had already seen enough. He wanted no more. The physical ugliness of the house repelled him. How could Adelaide possibly have found such a place remotely attractive? Because of his heart attack, he announced, he didn’t want to climb the stairs to see the rooms above. Carl Brandt, who suffered from emphysema, also said that he didn’t care enough to go up to the upper floors. And so Carol Brandt, who decided that John ought at least to know what the rest of the house was like, started up the stairs alone.

  “There was a great curving staircase that went up from the center of the hall,” Carol Brandt recalled later, “and on each floor there were balconies and overhangs. The upstairs rooms were all arranged around this central stair well. As I went up and around and into the various rooms, I would come back to the stair well and call down to the men below, trying to describe, as a journalist would, what was up there.” Carol Brandt, a tall, striking woman then in her forties, is a woman of precision and efficiency. She is also a woman of extraordinary effectiveness. For a number of years, she herself was a literary agent with a distinguished list of clients and, following that, she was the highly paid East Coast story editor for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the then studiohead, Louis B. Mayer. Mutual friends of Marquand and Carol Brandt have long insisted that she was the real-life model for the beautiful and well-organized advertising lady, Marvin Myles, in Marquand’s novel H. M. Pulham, Esquire—at which assertion Carol has always smiled and said, “John took many of his characters from the people he knew.”

  Of the Cambridge house that afternoon she has said, “The house was so grotesque that even though I tried to be very accurate about what I found in each room, the two men downstairs simply wouldn’t believe that what I was telling them was the truth. There was a gun room on the third floor, for instance, and though the house was enormous there was a curious shortage of bathrooms. As I recall, there were only three. One of these had an enormous sunken marble tub that one had to climb down three steps to get into. And as I described each of these rooms and features of the house, John and Carl below kept calling back, ‘No! You’re joking! There couldn’t be a sunken bathtub.’ I couldn’t convince them that I was absolutely serious.”

  All the way back to Boston, John Marquand kept muttering about the absurd house, absurd Adelaide, and the whole absurdity their marriage had become. The previous winter he had gone off alone to his island retreat in the Bahamas, just to be away from her, and now she had bought this hideous piece of real estate as some sort of gesture of conciliation. For some reason, of all the details of the house the sunken bathtub struck him as the worst, the most atrocious example of her tastelessness, of her pretentiousness, of his wife in one of her triumphs of mischief-making and of making him look ridiculous. “There couldn’t be a sunken bathtub,” he kept repeating. “Carol, promise me you were teasing about the sunken bathtub.”

  Back in the cool elegance of the Ritz-Carlton, drinks were quickly poured. John Marquand liked to drink. So did the Brandts. All three loved the Ritz, and John had often marveled over the Ritz’s charming eccentricities, such as the curiously worded sign over the main entrance to the hotel which read, in large crimson letters, “NOT AN ACCREDITED EGRESS DOOR.” This particular week end an awed assistant manager had explained to John Marquand that the suite he was occupying had recently been used by Mrs. Frances Parkinson Keyes; she had lived there while working on one of her bosomy best sellers, and the hotel manager proudly showed John a plaque that had been placed within the suite attesting to this signal honor. Mrs. Keyes, not one of his favorite authors, was among the three-named lady novelists whose styles John could parody. Could anyone imagine, he wanted to know, a more incongruous juxtaposition than Frances Parkinson Keyes and the Boston Ritz-Carlton hotel?

  John Marquand had a characteristic gesture. He would seize his drink, curve his fist around it, and then begin swinging the glass in rapid, determined circles in front of him as he spoke. Talking now, swinging his glass, taking the center of the stage once more—as, of course, he rather liked to do—he was back on the subject of the Cambridge house all over again, doing a parody of Carol’s description of the rooms. Soon everyone was convulsed with laughter. Suddenly John paused dramatically, as he was very good at doing, and announced to the little group, “I will—never—never—ever—ever live in that house, so help me God.” And he flung his hand heavenward.

  But of course he did live in the house—though never for very long, and never very happily. His marriage to Adelaide would survive another five stormy years. Life is full of failed promises and the need to compromise, as characters in Marquand’s novels are repeatedly discovering. One must, as Marquand heroes are forever reminding themselves, learn to adapt and adjust to circumstances, and in most cases such adjustments are solitary ones, and solutions are second-best. In John Marquand’s last and most autobiographical novel, Women and Thomas Harrow, the title character makes, in a final scene, an abortive, half-unconscious, half-intentional attempt to commit suicide by driving his automobile—a Cadillac—off the road and over a high cliff above the sea. Tom Harrow does no more than crush a front fender against a fence post. While quietly congratulating himself, just as Marquand might have done, on the value of driving an expensive car, Harrow confronts a state trooper who witnessed the accident. The trooper asks Harrow if he can drive home alone. Harrow answers that he can, thinking wistfully, “In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone.”

  But having to agree to live, after all, in the house of his wife’s folly must have seemed to the late John Marquand a form of surrender, much like other situations and moments in his life when the very things he wanted the most (Adelaide, for one, to say nothing of his first wife, the beautiful Christina Sedgwick) had a way, once he attained them (his great financial success, his popularity, the Pulitzer Prize) of rising up against him, and mocking him, and defeating him.

  Chapter Two

  Throughout his life, John Marquand liked to make the point that much of his childhood and young manhood had been hard and poor. A young man’s struggle, against overwhelming odds, to achieve social and career success is a recurring theme in his books. Marquand was an exceptionally frugal, even tightfisted, man who counted pennies and appeared to hate to spend money, which was odd since he had an obvious taste for luxury and the trappings of wealth. New Englanders are traditionally thrifty, but Marquand’s preoccupation with thrift and spending was almost neurotic—if, of cour
se, one was to take him seriously. He blamed his attitudes on early poverty. “My father’s greatest talent seemed to be a talent for losing money,” he would remind his friends. “When he finally lost it all, there was no more money for anything.”

  Outwardly, at least, money obsessed Marquand. He claimed to disapprove of tipping and, when he was required to tip, he did so in miserly fashion. He once had a violent scene with a woman he loved over an air-mail stamp. To keep himself from spending money he adopted the practice, like that of royalty, of carrying no money on his person. As a result, he was a slight annoyance to his friends, who were forever having to make him small loans.

  He would arrive from New York for a visit with the Gardiner H. Fiskes of Boston, and he would then have to borrow money from Gardi Fiske for the train fare home. He was forever having to mail the tiny sums back to Gardi—once it was a dollar that Gardi had advanced him for a guppy aquarium that had caught his eye. One evening during those years which he liked to refer to as “The Adelaide Period,” and those were years when both Marquands had plenty of money, he and Adelaide were returning from a costume party on Long Island where they had gone dressed as Bedouins, and neither of them had enough money to pay the toll at the Triborough Bridge. It took some persuasion to get the Bedouins through the gate without paying.

  When Marquand traveled, he tried to arrange, wherever possible, to stay with friends, thus avoiding hotel bills. When forced to stay in hotels, he indulged in a variety of petty economies. He would go down in the morning to the hotel newsstand to buy a newspaper because, he pointed out, it cost a dime more to have it delivered to the room.

  At the same time, he was able to laugh at the excesses of Yankee stinginess that he observed around him. He liked to tell the story of the Back Bay couple he had watched splitting a stick of chewing gum, the wife saying to her husband, “Save the wrapper. We might find a use for it.” Yet he himself could behave in a way that was every bit as penurious. For several years he and Adelaide owned a winter house at Hobe Sound in Florida, and one chilly afternoon his house guests—the Cedric Gibbonses and Philip Barry—suggested that a fire in the fireplace might be in order. Marquand muttered that firewood was “too expensive” and said that a perfectly acceptable fire could be built using coconuts picked up on the beach. An appropriate number of coconuts was gathered, the fire was lit, and a few minutes later coconuts were exploding noisily and messily all around the room.

  Marquand’s divorce settlement with Christina, his first wife, had been acrimonious and ungenerous, and still he complained that Christina had “milked” much more out of him than was her due. After the divorce, when Marquand had moved down to New York to live, he suspected Christina of “shouting around Boston” that he had ill-used her financially. In all, he explained, Christina had extracted from him some $8,400 for alimony and support; at the same time, his father had come to him for another $1,000 to cover the latter’s gambling debts. He felt, he told the Fiskes, almost as poor as when he had first embarked on his writing career.

  It was the mid-Depression year of 1936, and he had actually earned over $57,000. The year before he had earned $45,000, and the year before that $49,000. Still, in 1936, he complained of having paid out $15,000 altogether for the two children. That year he also bought and started to remodel a cozy farmhouse at the edge of a salt marsh on Kent’s Island outside Newburyport, even though he bemoaned the fact that the remodeling seemed to be costing him more than twice the amount of the highest estimate. He would smite his forehead and shake his head in mock fury and dismay at the duplicity of women, the extravagances of children, and the cupidity of carpenters, all of whom had helped create what he claimed was his financial plight.

  Marquand could work himself up into rages in his mind, just as he could on his feet in the center of a room with an audience of friends. You could tell when one of his explosions was building up inside him because he would sit very still, staring purposefully into space, his lower jaw working slightly and his face reddening. It was always a surprise when he got to the point of blurting out what was angering him, but as often as not the subject had something to do with money. Philip Hamburger, who profiled John Marquand for The New Yorker, spent many hours observing and interviewing him and learned to recognize when one of these inner volcanoes was building up to the point of eruption. Still, Hamburger was completely taken off guard one afternoon in Newburyport when, riding with Marquand in his car, the author abruptly slammed on his brakes, drew the car to a jolting halt in the middle of a country road, and, banging his fist against the steering wheel, cried out, “And God damn it! My wife’s sister is Mrs. John D. Rockefeller the Third!”

  John Marquand would perhaps have preferred to have been born John D. Rockefeller III, or so he suggested, and it was the sole fault of his “papa” that he was not—or, again, so he said. Marquand, after all, was a writer of fiction who could view himself as a character in his own fiction. To say that he lied about his past would be unfair, since when has truth had all that much to do with fiction? But, just as he did with his present circumstances and the people around him, he created for himself a semifictive past, turning it into drama, into the stuff of art and dreams and the imagination, removing it in the process from the stuff of life. And in the story as he told it, the villain was most often his father, Philip Marquand.

  Chapter Three

  Philip Marquand, whom everyone called Phil, was a small, trim, athletic man—he had been featherweight boxing champion of the Class of 1889 at Harvard—who cut quite a dashing figure as he walked about town swinging a gold-tipped walking stick. In his prime, Phil Marquand had been a great favorite with the ladies, but he also had an intellectual side and a serious bent for scholarship. At Harvard, he had been a splendid student and had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was, to every outward appearance, the perfect Victorian gentleman, cultivated, correct, respectably affluent.

  In terms of breeding and pedigree, which matter greatly to men like Phil Marquand, his credentials were faultless. There had been Marquands in New England, Phil would remind his only son, since 1732, when Daniel Marquand had arrived in the seaport town of Newburyport from the Isle of Guernsey. Daniel Marquand had prospered. So had his son, Joseph Marquand, who developed a large and successful fleet of privateer vessels that plied the Atlantic in the years before, during, and after the American Revolution. It was said that Joseph Marquand became so rich that his wealth became an embarrassment to his Puritan nature. He would pray, “Lord, stay Thine hand, Thy servant hath enough.” Perhaps as a result of this entreaty his prayers were answered, and he lost his entire fortune.

  The Marquand family affairs had taken a turn for the better by Phil’s father’s generation. John Phillips Marquand, John Marquand’s grandfather, after whom he was named, was a prosperous New York stockbroker and investment banker. One of the stories in the family was that Grandpa Marquand was a man who placed such a high price on dignity and grandeur that, when he realized that his death was at hand, he summoned his valet and requested that he be dressed in evening clothes, saying that he did not intend to meet his Maker in anything less than formal attire.

  This elegant gentleman married Margaret Curzon—the Curzons were a family of New England Brahmins and intellectuals—and there were six Marquand children: Joseph, Mary—whom everyone called “Aunt Mollie’—Elizabeth (“Aunt Bessie”), Phil, Russell, and Margaret. After John Phillips Marquand had been presented, properly attired, to the Almighty, and his will was read, it was discovered that he had left an estate amounting to about half a million dollars, which in the year 1900, before income or inheritance taxes had even been thought of, was a princely sum. The six Marquand children each received equal bequests, but the deceased’s will directed that the boys were to get their inheritance outright, while the girls were to receive theirs in a trust that has remained unbroken to this day. Phil Marquand took his money and headed immediately for Wall Street, where he purchased a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Within a y
ear, he had lost both—the seat and most of his inheritance. John Marquand was a boy of eight.

  Phil’s problem was that he was a gambler. Gambling had come to possess him the way drink can possess the alcoholic. Why Phil’s father had never noticed the self-destructive trait in his son’s character, and had not tied a few precautionary strings to his son’s inheritance, is a mystery. There had certainly been enough warning signals. For a while before his death Phil’s father had tried to set his son up in the bond business, where Phil displayed a steady losing streak. He would lose because, whenever he won, he would pool his winnings into one big speculative venture, and then the winnings would be gone. Phil Marquand seemed aware of his unfortunate habit and would shrug off his losses philosophically enough—and then immediately embark on another get-rich-quick scheme.

  Phil Marquand must indeed have been a trial, but he was blessed in at least one regard. He had a wife who was strong-willed, tough-minded, devoted to him, and above all loyal. She was the former Margaret Fuller, named after her aunt, the celebrated feminist and Transcendentalist who later became the Marchioness Ossoli. New England’s Fuller family is ancient and eminent. For generations, the Fullers have provided Massachusetts with scholars, statesmen, and scientists (including R. Buckminster Fuller, the engineer who created the geodesic dome), and have decorated the New Hampshire coastal resort of Little Boar’s Head with their stately summer homes and the beautiful Fuller Gardens, a public park. From the social standpoint, which mattered so much, the Fullers were even better connected than the Marquands. Margaret Fuller Marquand was a woman with an enormous intellectual drive, a capacity to endure hardships without faltering or complaint, and the aristocratic ability to rise to occasions.