“Estella” went on to ask a related question: “Can an old maid be as great a woman and as much admired as her married sister?” In her reply, Dix cited Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and Susan B. Anthony as examples of highly respected “old maids” from history, and added that thousands more “have given their lives to mothering humanity instead of their own children.” Yet here she departed from Marjorie Hillis, portraying the “old maid aunt” as a selfless servant of her siblings, parents, and the community—“the salt of the earth” and a vital support to other people’s lives. Such selflessness was admirable, no doubt, but if Estella read Live Alone and Like It, she might reconsider her situation—did she really want to devote her life to being the unpaid caregiver for a brood of nieces and nephews? And what did it matter what other people thought of her “greatness” anyway?
Dorothy Dix herself was a keen admirer of Live Alone and Like It, even if she might not have shared all its principles. She wrote to Marjorie’s publishers that she had read it “with chuckles of enjoyment and deep appreciation of its wisdom as well as its wit.” She added that “I get thousands of letters from women on this subject,” and vowed to recommend both Live Alone and its sequel to them. Dix added that the book would “point the way to a happier living for many a poor femme who doesn’t know how lucky she is in being able to live alone.”12 This pointed observation was a personal one. Dorothy Dix (the pseudonym of Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer) had come to her fifty-year career as an advice columnist by accident, and to her wisdom by bitter experience. At age twenty-four, she married her stepmother’s brother: “Having finished school, I tucked up my hair and got married as was the tribal custom among my people,” as she later described it.13 But the experience was miserable—her husband was mentally unstable and unable to work, the couple had no children, and Elizabeth ended up as his nurse and the family breadwinner. A few years into her marriage, she suffered a breakdown, and it was during her recovery that she happened to meet the vacationing owner of the New Orleans Picayune, who hired her as a reporter. Before long, the paper reinvented her as Dorothy Dix, columnist, and she caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst, who brought her to New York in 1901 to write for his New York Journal.
As a child, Marjorie Hillis would have seen Dix’s byline and no doubt read her advice to readers on the relations between men and women. Dix preached what she called “the Gospel of Common Sense” and while she was no feminist, she took aim at many of the lingering Victorian myths about women and family relationships. “It dawned on me that everything in the world had been written about women, for women, except the truth,” she later wrote, and she took both sexes to task for marital troubles. Dix believed men and women should marry for love, not out of fear or under pressure, and she always cautioned against couples marrying too young or too hastily. At her peak, during the late 1930s and into World War II, her column appeared in 273 newspapers, with an estimated readership of sixty million. “People tell me things that you would think they wouldn’t even tell to God,” she said, of the thousands of letters she received every week.14
Marjorie Hillis, in the fall of 1936, was getting a taste of what it felt like to be Dorothy Dix. She quickly became used to answering letters from readers seeking advice on everything from loneliness and marriage problems, to what to serve at parties and where to go on a weekend in New York—questions that would soon furnish material for her newspaper column “Says Marjorie Hillis.” She also faced a backlash from several readers offended by her morals, and also got used to being misrepresented, misunderstood, or read out of context. “Everyone remembers the chapter on liquor and seems to have skipped what I said about it’s being a good idea to go to church on Sunday,” she told an audience in St. Louis ruefully. Parents attacked her as a bad influence, and blamed her for persuading their daughters to leave home for the big city, while husbands complained that their wives “had deserted them for a taste of independence.”15
Most readers, however, got a kick out of the book and its message. “Please permit me to tell you what an uproariously good time I have had with your book,” wrote one fan. “You certainly hit the nail on the head and have sent many shafts through my old maid armor!!” This combination of style and substance also appealed to the majority of reviewers, who responded strongly to the panache of the prose, calling it “smartly written,” “sprightly and not too motherly” with “plenty of punch,” and praising its “joyous flippancy,” “refreshing forthright manner,” and “fruity suggestions, good advice and devastating examples.” That was not to say that it was a mere confection—the same reviewers praised the book for its “sound advice” and “words of wisdom.” The New Yorker, approvingly, called it “Indirectly a black eye for matrimony.”16
Male readers were not immune to the charms of the book. May Cameron of the New York Post revealed that “Almost no book I have read during months of commuting has caused such neck-craning among the Connecticut commuting gentry.”17 Bobbs-Merrill was initially convinced that even though men might enjoy it, they couldn’t be expected to buy it. This quickly proved false. One male reader wrote to ask for Marjorie’s assistance in a romantic scheme, in the hope, perhaps, that his love would ultimately reject the book’s advice: “Will you autograph the copy of your book that I purchased, so that I may present it to probably the most charming young lady in the world, to whom, and for whom, you wrote at least one chapter without knowing her?” By the end of the summer, no less a male than the president of the United States had jumped on the bandwagon. “Reporters swarming on to the afterdeck of the Potomac during President Roosevelt’s recent tarpon fishing trip, found the President reading a copy of Live Alone and Like It,” the publisher gloated. “In doing so they uncovered a phenomenon well known to America’s booksellers, namely, that a good share of the buyers of Marjorie Hillis’s best-seller has been men.”18
This combination of high-profile readers, strong reviews, and the innovative department store campaigns helped to establish Live Alone and Like It as a cultural phenomenon, with a life that reached well beyond its pages. In newspapers, department stores ran full-page advertisements quoting from the book, targeting the Live-Aloner as a discerning, budget-conscious shopper. The value for the stores was enormous. Those that had survived the worst of the Depression needed to entice frugally minded customers with the notion of “investment” in products that would last, while at the same time encouraging indulgence in inexpensive pleasures—a combination fully in line with Marjorie Hillis’s philosophies. Furthermore, by cultivating the loyalty of the young Live-Aloner now, they could keep her coming back after she married and began making larger purchases for her home and family.
The author played an enthusiastic part in these department store promotions wherever she could. In late October, she made an appearance at Halle’s department store in St. Louis and directed a fashion show aimed at the Live-Aloner. “In a smart black felt beret with its green quill stuck at a rather mad angle and her black broadcloth dress with green triangular buttons marching down the front, she looked exactly as she wants to look: like a gay and independent person,” wrote the local Star Times newspaper of the visiting author.19 Marjorie would later describe herself as “undeniably plain,” but she had one essential fashion lesson to share with the ladies of St. Louis, which had led her to that black dress with the green buttons and matching beret: your natural-born looks were nothing without confidence. In Live Alone, she didn’t tell her readers what to wear, beyond advising that they collect a few smart “street costumes,” “at least one nice seductive tea-gown,” and “some evening clothes with swish.” The specifics mattered less than the spirit behind them—the very last thing a Live-Aloner could afford to do was give the impression that she wasn’t single by choice. “There is no reason why the woman who lives alone should look any different from the woman who doesn’t,” Marjorie warned, “and every reason why she shouldn’t.”20
Some reporters expressed surprise that the author of such a wi
tty book could be, in person, so mature and sensible; in St. Louis, Dorothy Coleman ran a large and unflattering photograph of the author under a headline that marveled “Author of Live Alone and Like It Human, Even Companionable.” Perhaps misled by the pert figure in the book’s irreverent illustrations, Coleman reported in surprise that Marjorie was “not especially good-looking,” nor as young and petite as she expected. “She must be nearing the 40 mark, and if Schiaparelli dressed her you wouldn’t know it.” But Marjorie turns out to be much friendlier and more down-to-earth than expected. “She’s the sort with whom you could walk through Scotland, antique hunt in New Orleans and actually enjoy a cup of tea anywhere, any afternoon.”21
Despite all the publicity stunts and energetic peddling of negligees, the Live-Alone message was an earnest one at heart, and Marjorie Hillis took her role of guru seriously. She believed in the transformational power of her message, and like many self-help writers, she saw her own life as irrefutable proof that her theories worked. That meant that she also knew the emotional costs of living alone: having no one to rely on when you were tired, sick, or sad, and having to become exhaustingly self-reliant. “When you live alone,” she wrote, “practically nobody arranges practically anything for you.”22 Nevertheless, Marjorie proudly told the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph that she considered it “a forward step in civilization” that women no longer needed to marry just to avoid becoming “maiden aunts and barnacles.”23 Behind that quip hovered the awareness of a bullet dodged: just six years before, it looked as though she was headed for just that dependent fate.
Becoming the Live-Aloner
In 1932, the prolific self-help author Walter B. Pitkin published a book whose title would become a bedrock cliché of the decade’s cult of optimism and self-reinvention, not to mention an evergreen greeting-card slogan: Life Begins at Forty. For Marjorie Hillis, give or take a year or two, the line was perfectly apt. She was past forty when she moved into her Tudor City apartment, finally free to focus on the work of creating a life she could cherish and champion. Up until then, through her teens and twenties and well into her old-maidhood, she lived as the dutiful unmarried daughters of her class always had—at the beck and call of her family.
The Hillis family demanded more of its members than most. As the head of Brooklyn’s famous Plymouth Congregational Church, Marjorie’s father was a public figure, and his job absorbed the time and energy of his wife and three children. His daughter later described the ministry as “the only business I know in which a whole family is expected to work for one person’s salary.” But being a part of that family brought abundant rewards. The Hillises were not wealthy, at least not by Gilded Age standards, but they had a secure and respectable place in rather dull Brooklyn society. They traveled a lot, had a house full of books, and family life was full of “variety and interest and fun,” Marjorie later wrote, because her father “had great stores of all three.” Nostalgically she recalled that her family “laughed more than most people seem to.”24
The Reverend Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis was dedicated to the intellectual, social, and spiritual improvement of his sizable congregation. Every Sunday he preached a sermon extemporaneously from the church pulpit, then on Monday, working from skeleton notes, preached it again to a stenographer in his study, for publication in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. There were church and social events every day of the week, and Dr. Hillis was a tireless traveling lecturer and the author of more than forty books and pamphlets. He established an educational institute at the church and conceived an ambitious plan for the beautification of his adopted borough. In his zeal for the improvement of his congregation, he was a self-help guru in his own right, preaching self-reliance and drawing inspiration from successful public figures, like his hero and friend Teddy Roosevelt, as well as from religious models and upstanding characters in novels.
Born in 1858 in Magnolia, a small town in western Iowa, Reverend Hillis grew up during a wave of Protestant religious fervor known as the Third Great Awakening, which gripped the country in the second half of the nineteenth century and fueled the abolitionist and temperance movements. Preachers drew huge crowds eager to hear a modern gospel emphasizing education, social welfare, and missionary work, and by the time he was called to the pulpit of Plymouth Church, Hillis was thoroughly steeped in this morally and socially improving ministry. In 1899, just before his fortieth birthday, he moved his wife Annie and his children, eleven-year-old Richard and ten-year-old Marjorie, from Chicago to the east coast. Their new home, the formerly independent city of Brooklyn, had just been swallowed up into the five-borough metropolis of New York City, in what disgruntled locals called “the Great Mistake of 1898.”
Plymouth Church was a prestigious and somewhat notorious appointment. Its first pastor had been the renowned abolitionist and equally renowned adulterer Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who at the height of his career could fairly be called “the most famous man in America.”25 Beecher invited speakers including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Frederick Douglass to his pulpit, and staged mock slave auctions in front of huge crowds to rally support for the abolitionist cause. Hillis took this media-savvy predecessor as a role model and, like him, preached a politically and socially engaged form of Christianity. When he was appointed to the post at Plymouth, the local Brooklyn newspapers profiled the preacher effusively, drawing attention to his piercing eyes and his boundless energy, and he rapidly became a local legend. “Brooklyn residents are beginning to look upon Dr. Hillis as something of a wonder,” wrote one newspaper soon after he arrived. “He can ride a bicycle, write poetry, punch a bag, and preach a series of sermons that sets all the other clergy by the ears.”26 In an unpublished memoir of her early life, Marjorie wryly noted that her father’s enthusiasms, like his passion for bicycling, could be short-lived: “When the fad waned, he bought a horse.”27
When World War I broke out in Europe, Reverend Hillis followed Teddy Roosevelt’s lead in advocating for American entry into the war. He traveled to the war zone in France and Belgium and published a pair of lurid pamphlets condemning German atrocities in the war zone, drawing on the widely circulated propaganda accounts of the invading army’s treatment of the Belgians. Back in the United States he lectured, traveled, and used his pulpit to urge the government to take up arms in the fight: a position that gained strength after the New York-bound British liner Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo in May 1915, numbering 128 Americans among its victims.
There were also powerful forces pushing against the war, not least the fact that many Americans were getting very rich by staying out of it. After the fighting began in late summer 1914, American investors had stepped up to feed the industrial and technological beast, and were making huge profits—the markets rose by more than 50 percent in the first year of the war. Although he was a clergyman, Reverend Hillis saw no objection to reaping some of the profits of that upswing—after all, he was a public figure with a status to maintain, and it was part of his mission to enrich his church, his congregants, and his family. In 1915, however, he went too far.
Marjorie was in her early twenties, still living in Brooklyn and closely entwined with her family, when her father was caught up in a public scandal that would shape her understanding of men and money. Hillis’s former business manager and church trustee, Frank L. Ferguson—along with the reverend’s nephew—accused his boss of using his powerful position “to draw admirers into speculation.” Ferguson claimed that Hillis had begged him not to reveal the full details of his “vast and involved business affairs,” out of a concern for the health of his wife and son (perhaps his daughters were more robust or, more likely, they were considered irrelevant to matters of business). After Ferguson ignored Hillis’s pleas, refusing to be intimidated, Hillis fired back, accusing his business manager of embezzlement and dismissing his accusations as “a small percentage of facts, mixed with a large percentage of explosive falsehood.”28
As a financial scandal, even one that i
nvolved stock-market gambling, the affair was much less lurid than the one that had engulfed Reverend Hillis’s predecessor Henry Ward Beecher in the early 1870s, when the muckraking feminist publisher and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull accused him of seducing a married member of his congregation, precipitating a sensational libel trial. Yet Reverend Hillis’s scandal, also dragged out in the newspapers, was as much a sign of its times as Beecher’s sexual hypocrisy had been in his day, raising questions that would become urgent in the rollercoaster 1920s, about the morality of stock market speculation. Like Beecher’s affair, too, the Hillis scandal turned on the relationship of trust between a clergyman and his congregation. The reverend was forced to admit to his flock that he had crossed a line into materialism for its own sake, and to beg their forgiveness. They rallied round with promises of moral and monetary support, and although the legal wrangling continued, the mess at least faded quickly from the newspapers.
For the adult but still dependent Marjorie, her father’s financial scandal, with its taint of corruption and humiliating public exposure, only confirmed her suspicion that men could not be trusted to do as they pleased with a family’s money. It was one area in which she agreed with her mother. Four years earlier, Annie Hillis had published a generally conservative advice guide, The American Woman and Her Home, in which she argued that it was a part of a wife’s duty to understand and control the family purse. Any woman who allowed herself to be placed on a pedestal above sordid financial realities, she cautioned, had only herself to blame when her husband cratered the ship. Annie was the devoted manager of her husband’s busy working life, which stretched far beyond the pulpit of the church, but it was a role in life that was entirely dependent on her husband’s good standing in the community and his continued trustworthiness in the eyes of his congregation.
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