The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  John went on to talk about the happiness it would give to his old father, who was Aunt Greta’s brother, to live on the old family place knowing that it was all, once again, in a Marquand’s hands. He offered Aunt Greta the Mill as a residence—he would completely refurbish it for her—for the rest of her life, and enough land for her heirs to build a new house of their own, in return for her share. In her no-nonsense reply to John—which she never got to mail before she died—Aunt Greta said, “Here is a letter to you. Now why don’t you stop all this damn law stuff and just take the Mill as a share of your share and use it for whatever purpose you can use it and do anything you want to do about making it more attractive for you and later on if you still want to arrange things differently, take the matter up with whoever I leave my share of the place to.” John and Adelaide had also gone through all the houses at Curzon’s Mill, placing tags marked “J.P.M.” on various pieces that John considered his. The tags soon fell off, but nonetheless this sort of behavior from their celebrity cousin quite annoyed the Hales.

  The Hales rejected John’s offer through their lawyer, Thomas Shaw Hale, another cousin, of the New York law firm of Hale, Grant, Myerson, O’Brien & McCormick. There followed several long talks between Thomas Shaw Hale and John, during which John increased the size of his offer. Still the Hales were adamant. Legally, the term “undivided interest” means that the people who own a piece of property must agree on its use; otherwise, it must be turned over to the courts, who will then rule how the property should be divided, or whether it should be sold and the proceeds of the sale divided proportionately among the owners. In a case such as this one, the judge usually finds it simpler to rule that the property be sold, rather than attempt to divide it physically, and the Hales were aware of this. They also knew that if the property were sold, John, since he outweighed them financially, would buy it. So Thomas Hale approached John with an offer. John could have both the Yellow House and the Mill, and the Hales could keep the Red Brick House and a parcel of land across the road. John agreed to this but said that he would have to ask Adelaide about it.

  The next day, Thomas Hale had a telephone call from Adelaide Marquand, who wished to see him. When Hale got to the apartment, Adelaide explained that she would agree to no arrangement that gave the Hales anything but money. She increased the offer to $40,000. She explained that she felt strongly that Curzon’s Mill had to be treated as an entity. If it were going to be restored, it made no sense to restore it in bits and pieces; it had to be restored in its entirety. During the course of the conversation, Thomas Hale got the distinct impression that Adelaide didn’t think much of the Hales as neighbors, that she regarded them as eccentric nuisances and would really prefer to get them off the property altogether. Faced with this, there was nothing for the Hales to do but let the matter go to court and hope that the judge might be prevailed upon to divide the property, even though to do so would be highly unusual since most pieces of property cannot really be divided.

  During the summer weeks that followed, as word got out that the famous novelist had become involved in an intrafamily legal battle, with lawyers on both sides furiously preparing briefs, the press descended. Life magazine sent reporters and photographers to Newburyport, and Murray Davis of the New York World-Telegram began gathering material for a series of dispatches centered on the fascinating fact that here, at last, were characters from a popular novel stepping out into real life. Soon readers were devouring John’s and Aunt Greta’s exchange of letters throughout the entire Scripps-Howard chain. Thomas Hale had, in his youth, worked for a while as a newspaper reporter, and he offered his cousin clients a piece of advice: Be nice to the press. The Hales decided to be more than nice; they decided to be utterly charming.

  “After lampooning us as characters in his book he now wants to boot us out,” declared Robert B. Hale to one reporter. “He is using the proceeds of ‘Wickford Point,’ indirectly perhaps, to put us out as characters. We are going to ask John if he isn’t using the proceeds of the book to kick out his cousins. We spent all our childhood summers at the Mill—John and the rest of us. And we’ve always liked John. We still do. He has as much right there now as we have. He has relatives buried up on the hill. We have a right to be there too. We have relatives buried up on the same hill. When he offered money I countered with an offer to take one of the houses. His answer to that was just to offer more money. We judge everything on the heart, John on the dollar. If we thought of it from a financial standpoint we’d take his offer, for it was much more than our share was worth. But we weren’t thinking of that. We were thinking of the place. It is beautiful beyond description. You get a feeling of it in the novel. John wrote it at the mill.”

  The Hales proved to be a newspaper interviewer’s dream. As for Wickford Point, Robert Hale went on, “John combined some of us with other people he knew, but we were pretty easily identified. I’m Sidney in the novel—a bad character. Mother was a pretty clear picture, although done a little bit on the dirty side. We thought about a suit, but only casually, for we liked John. We still like John. Mother held the place together. She was fond of John and he was fond of her, but even before she died John began trying to get the property. She wanted us all to have it. Now she’s gone. Her passing is what brought this action.” Robert Hale pleaded his case to the delighted reporter. “We’ll take any one of the buildings—we just want a foothold,” he said. “If mother had died last we’d have given John a house. Now he has us absolutely. If he can throw the place up for auction he has the money to buy it in. We can’t compete with him. We want it because it has been a part of us for so long. And when you get old you want to go back to the beginning. You want security—the security that we have in the mill. The family has always lived there. The weddings are always there. The family has always gone back there to die—and be buried on the hill.”

  Next H. Dudley Hale, Robert Hale’s brother, came forth with a lengthy interview. “We all dislike the idea staring us in the face of having our old home shot out from under us by force. It seems wrong that, because of death, nineteen people may have no roof over their heads while fate, through wills, can give that property to someone who already is land poor.” Dudley Hale announced that he was Harry Brill, the social climber in Wickford Point. “I’d say I was Harry, physically,” Mr. Hale explained, “but heaven knows I was no social leader at Harvard.”

  Laura Hale, one of Robert and Dudley’s two sisters, who had married a man named Patterson Hale (no relation), revealed that she was the novel’s Mary Brill, poor Mary who always loses her men to beautiful Bella. “John is fond of my husband, Pat,” Laura Hale said. “But I’m afraid this legal thing will end everything. John says this will not make any difference, that he’ll still drop by and see us. I don’t think so, and I told him that.”

  “I’m Bella the Bitch,” announced Renée Oakman Bradbury, then thirty-seven and at that point four times married and living in Long Island, who allowed herself to be photographed in a low-cut dress cuddling three of her large collection of dogs and other pets, which included five birds, among them a talking blue jay. “He really talks,” she explained, speaking in a style very similar to that which Marquand had given Bella in the book. “He imitates things. He’s a very, very strange bird. He fell out of a nest, you see. We took care of him. But that Bella business—I even named my little Crosley Bella the Bitch. It burned up about a month ago right in front of the gas station. The talk at Curzon’s Mill is bad enough, but it is nothing compared to what happens around here. Nothing good seems ever to happen!” Of John’s lawsuit, Renée said, “I see no reason why John should have the whole hog. There’s no reason why he should have the entire family place. I don’t know why he must be so possessive. We’ve always been fond of John and he liked us. He was always fond of me. Whenever it was necessary for someone to go down to his place at Kent’s Island to bring back some old family portrait that he had stolen out of the mill, it was always little old Renée who had to do it. But hon
estly, I didn’t like his making Mother’s last days so difficult, trying to get the place, and I told him so. Even so, he has always been very fond of me. I went to Kent’s Island and asked him to leave my mother alone, that she didn’t want to divide up the place or sell it to him. It was rather hopeless, though.” As the date of the trial approached, Renée announced to the press, “I’ll be there! I promised Greta I’d fight to the last ditch to keep our part of the place, for that was what she wanted. John should have his share and we should have ours. I’m going to get a black hat for the hearing.”

  On and on the Hales talked, with the press loving and recording every word they said. John and Adelaide and the three children, meanwhile, had disappeared to their house, or rather houses, in Aspen. John, when reached there by telephone, behaved somewhat oddly. He had once worked as a newspaper reporter, just as had Thomas Hale, and should have known, too, the value of establishing good press relations. But when the reporter asked him his feelings in the case, he replied somewhat stiffly and stuffily, “I am not accustomed to try legal cases in newspapers.” That was his only quote. Beyond that, he had no comment.

  The result of all this was that as the case moved toward trial the Hales had built up a considerable body of sympathy behind them, and public feeling was running strong in their favor and against John. Much was made in the press of the disparity between the Hales’ economic situation and John’s, in which the tables had been oddly turned since the days of John’s boyhood, when he had come to think of himself as a poor relation compared with the “rich” Hales. The Hales were portrayed as gentle, sweet innocents—and the underdogs—while John was depicted as a selfish bully who, very likely, had an exaggerated opinion of his own importance due to the fame of his books, and who, though he already had a number of houses and apartments—in New York, Newburyport, Hobe Sound, Aspen—wanted more, including everything that belonged to his poor cousins. It was in this highly charged atmosphere that the case came to the Salem, Massachusetts, Probate Court on October 21, 1948, Judge Phelan—a Boston Irishman—presiding.

  Here again, John seems to have been somewhat naïve in his approach to the case. His attorney was a Mr. F. Murray Forbes, Jr., of the distinguished Boston firm of Welch, Brown, Forbes and Welch. Thomas Hale, though masterminding the proceedings for his cousins from New York, kept his own name—and that of his Manhattan firm—completely out of the case and, instead, engaged a young lawyer from Salem named James J. Connelly to try the case. Connelly, representing the Hales, had the appeal of a local boy on his way up; he was also a relative and attended the same church as the judge. John’s lawyer, on the other hand, came down to little Salem from the big city wearing a cutaway and a silk hat. Before the proceedings got under way, everybody had been wondering what old Phil Marquand felt about it. When the little group gathered in the courthouse it was noticed that Phil was sitting on the Hales’ side of the room. Outside, John Marquand was being photographed by Life on the courthouse steps looking handsome, prosperous, and confident.

  From the outset it was clear that young Jim Connelly was conducting the hearing beautifully. He pulled out all the stops, and his rich Irish voice quavered with emotion as he described how the powerful rich man was trying to take away his cousins’ property. Quietly he reminded the Court that these gentlefolk, the Hales, were the descendants of Edward Everett Hale, the great author. “And today,” Connelly intoned, “we are witnessing Mr. John P. Marquand trying to make these people men without a country.” There was hardly a dry eye in the courtroom, while the color rose on the back of John’s neck.

  John did not make a particularly good witness when he got to the stand. His usually resonant voice failed him, as did his own theatrical ability. He muttered and mumbled replies to questions. His heart seemed to have gone out of it, and in all likelihood it had. It was, after all, not he but Adelaide who had got them all into this position; just as he had defended her during the America First period, he stood by her through this. On November third, after hearing just a little over a week of testimony, Judge Phelan decided the case. Curzon’s Mill should be divided, he declared “in metes and bounds”—into appropriate divisions, to be determined by the land commission, between the opposing parties. The Hales had won.

  Adelaide was furious. So were John’s Boston lawyers. At first the land commission gave the mill to the Hales—the Mill House that John himself had wanted most of all—along with some land. John’s lawyers took an immediate appeal on the technicality that the place split was not worth as much as the place whole. Finally an agreement was reached; John was given the Yellow House, which Adelaide wanted, and the Mill House, which he wanted, while the Hales were given the Red Brick House and the parcel of property across the road. It was, of course, exactly the division which had been suggested to John, and which he had agreed to, in the first place, before Adelaide had begun insisting that Curzon’s Mill not be divided. It was like the neat and ironic denouement of a John Marquand novel. And once the case was settled there was no more dropping in, or even any speaking, between John Marquand and the Hales. Cousin Laura Hale had been right.

  All this litigation had seriously interrupted John’s work on the new novel he was trying to write about a banker. During the ordeal, he made frequent trips back to New York, where he would arrive unannounced at Carol Brandt’s office at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She would turn off the telephone except for West Coast calls, fix him a drink, and listen to him as he paced up and down her office, complaining that he could not understand his cousins, why they were putting him through all this. Now John and Adelaide were off for Europe—to London, Rome, and Athens. Adelaide wanted the trip, she said, to “heal some of the wounds” their marriage had suffered. John just wanted to get away. Adelaide was hopeless when it came to details and planning, and so John had asked Carol to wire ahead to London to reserve a car and a suite at Claridge’s. John and Adelaide were seated on deck chairs on the high seas bound for England when a cablegram was delivered from the manager of Claridge’s, saying that all arrangements had been made for the arriving Marquands according to Mrs. Brandt’s instructions. John started to crumple up the cable and toss it over the rail, but Adelaide snatched it from him. There followed a stormy shipboard scene. As John told Carol later, it was one instance where Carol’s famous efficiency had backfired on them.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “The typical Marquand hero reaches the point of no return when he draws his first breath,” wrote a reviewer in Time in a survey of John’s work. Marquand heroes are always looking back, wondering where it all went wrong, what turn, if taken, might have changed the course of everything. They are always trying to go home again, back to where it all began, and, when they arrive at that polarizing place, they discover that, even though things did not turn out quite the way they dreamed they would, there is little chance that anything could have turned out differently, and that is that. A settlement is reached, a compromise; that is the best a man can hope for. John Marquand himself was just this sort of man. He had wanted to go home again, to Curzon’s Mill, and yet he knew—must have known—that he couldn’t really. Had he let Adelaide push him into a court battle with the cousins he had grown up with, roomed at college with, just to watch a Marquand fictive situation spin itself out in real like? Perhaps, and now he was faced with the inevitable bitter result: Curzon’s Mill was divided, an armed camp, with a family, once close, no longer on speaking terms with one another. And yet—in the Marquand novels, at least—this sort of thing had to happen from the moment one passed the point of no return, which in this particular case might have been that moment when John Marquand encountered the Hooker sisters on the beach at the edge of the Yellow Sea. If he had turned and walked the other way, would it all have been different? Perhaps, but it was too late to wonder now. “In the end … you always drove alone.”

  There is a great deal of this feeling of futility and fatalism in John’s “banking” novel, Point of No Return, which was published in the year following
the trial and which, at the time, was greeted by many critics as John’s finest work. The book is, indeed, much more than a book about a banker and banking. It is a book about love and marriage, about the nature of success and the American dream. The banking details are rich and, with Ed Streeter’s help, convincing: “The depositors’ room off the vaults had just been re-finished and redecorated and Tony Burton had called the conference there because he wanted to see how everything looked,” John had written. “… There was an efficient smell of oil on all the glittering steelwork.” But the problem that besets Charles Gray could find him in any career. He has reached the point of no return in life where he cannot turn back, where he must, even though he no longer has any real taste for it, compete against his colleague, Roger Blakesley, for the vice-presidency of the staid old Stuyvesant Bank in New York, a position that is about to become vacant. He must compete because that is what he started out doing. Having set his course, Charles Gray must complete the journey, end as it may, as it was charted.