If the 1915 scandal took its toll on Reverend Hillis’s health, he didn’t show it by slowing down his exhausting schedule. If anything, when America finally entered World War I, he traveled and lectured even more. Finally, in the fall of 1924, he collapsed in the middle of a church meeting with a cerebral hemorrhage, and his doctors insisted that if he wanted to live, he would have to retire. He and Annie duly left their home in Brooklyn Heights, three blocks from the church, for the bucolic, buttoned-up suburb of Bronxville, just north of the city, where their son Richard had settled with his wife and daughters.
When her father retired, Marjorie, now in her midthirties, was living alone in an apartment building on Columbia Heights, an elegant street running along the Brooklyn waterfront. It was the middle of the reckless 1920s, and a good time to be a single woman about town. A new weekly magazine, The New Yorker, was about to launch, showcasing the speakeasy-hopping antics of its pseudonymous female columnist “Lipstick,” and the press was full of stories of flappers gone wild. But Marjorie was no flapper, and staid Brooklyn Heights no Manhattan playground. She would later describe the person she was in 1924 as the “minister’s daughter”—shorthand for a frump and a prude, who had never had a sip of hooch and had no idea how to run her own life.
Marjorie’s status as the old maid of the family was cemented shortly before her father’s retirement, when he officiated her younger sister’s lavish wedding, at their brother and sister-in-law’s summer home in Kennebunkport. Nathalie Hillis was more than a decade younger than Marjorie, born just after her family settled in Brooklyn, making her just as old as the century. She did not have a job like her sister, but was a picture-perfect debutante, who made an even more picture-perfect society bride at her June wedding. The Brooklyn papers gushed over her satin gown, trimmed with lace from her mother’s wedding dress, her four bridesmaids in powder-blue chiffon, and the two little flower girls, her brother’s daughters, who trotted in front of her in yellow dresses carrying bouquets of pansies. Marjorie, as the maid of honor, wore a dark-blue gown that emphasized her maturity and singleness among all that frothy pastel.29 After the wedding, Nathalie settled in Albany with her new husband and a year later gave birth to a daughter, Patricia, nicknamed Polly.
With her parents up in Bronxville and traveling often, and her siblings busy with their families, Marjorie was left more alone than she’d ever been, and began to think about what she really wanted to do with her life. She signed up for a course in playwriting at Columbia University and saw her three-act comedy, Jane’s Business, staged at a local amateur theater. The story took the plot of Jane Eyre and dropped it in a modern office, where a philandering boss is temporarily blinded and marries his plain but loyal secretary—at her proposal. When he recovers his sight, the boss sets out to divorce her, before realizing he cannot live without her after all.30 An arrangement of inequality turns into a marriage based on free choice and companionship, reflecting modern matrimonial ideals and celebrating virtues that would define the Live-Alone philosophy—along with the more personal idea that a woman’s physical appearance mattered less than her character.
Elsewhere, Marjorie began to rehearse the theories that would eventually become Live Alone and Like It. In November 1924, at the fall luncheon of the Junior League, she gave a talk on “The Independence of the Business Woman to Whom Marriage Is No Longer a Necessity and Need Not Be Entered into as a Compromise.” Years of listening to her father’s powerful preaching had clearly paid off, as reports of the event praised Marjorie’s poise and ease of delivery. As she climbed the masthead at Vogue, she was often invited to lecture on fashion and style. In April 1927, during a speech at the Ritz-Carlton in praise of simple, practical clothes for children, she raised eyebrows by declaring that a fussily dressed infant “is one of the most effective arguments for birth control.”31
But this public speaking role, which she relished, was soon interrupted. In March 1928, just a month after Marjorie had lectured the Junior League on “Taking Fashion Seriously,” her father collapsed again, this time on a train in Florida, where he was spending the winter for his health. A tour of the Holy Land that he’d planned to lead had to be abruptly canceled, and the reverend returned home an invalid. Less than a year later, in February 1929, he died at home in Bronxville, at age seventy. The funeral service at Plymouth Church was packed, and the faithful Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that the mourners, who had regularly heard the minister praise the promise of heaven and “crack the whip of scorn at materialism,” were in no doubt that Reverend Hillis had gone to a better place. After the service, his body was cremated and his ashes buried in a cemetery in the aptly named Westchester village of Valhalla. Even in death, he had something to teach. The practice of cremation was still controversial, as it challenged the Christian belief in bodily resurrection—but as Marjorie explained to the Eagle, it had been the long-held wish of her father, who saw the practice as practical, hygienic, and modern.32
In upstate New York, meanwhile, Marjorie’s little sister’s marriage was no longer quite so picture-perfect. The young family moved several times, from Albany to Plattsburgh, where her husband’s parents lived, and then to the tiny village of Peru. Nathalie came back to the city frequently to attend the weddings of her Brooklyn school friends, and after her father’s stroke in the spring of 1928, she had a reason—or an excuse—to make her home in Bronxville for the foreseeable future. By June, when she was matron of honor at a friend’s wedding on Long Island, the Eagle identified her as “of Bronxville.” The following year, she was living at home with her parents and four-year-old daughter, having taken the irrevocable step of divorce.
In early twentieth-century America, divorce was still a shocking step for a married woman to take, and rare by contemporary standards—in the 1920s, rates stood at 1.6 per thousand (versus 3.6 today), or around 170,000 splits per year nationwide. But those rates were rising rapidly, in part because divorce was far less punitive than it had been at the turn of the century, and was slowly shedding its fearsome stigma.33 Crucially, mothers like Nathalie would no longer lose custody of their children if they left a marriage. “No-fault” divorce was a long way off, however, and couples who agreed to separate could be accused of collusion or even prosecuted for fraud. An accusation of adultery, painful though it was, was usually the easiest path to divorce. Couples could discreetly enlist the services of a professional “co-respondent” like one Dorothy Jarvis, who in a 1934 tell-all confessed to the New York Sunday Mirror that she had played the “unknown blonde” in more than one hundred divorce cases.34
When Marjorie and Nathalie were growing up, both of their parents had sounded dire public warnings about the evils of divorce. Their mother’s 1911 advice book—which she dedicated to her daughters, then ages twenty-one and eleven—railed against the changing social values of the new century and the independent young women it was producing. There was a “new kind of woman very much in evidence in the city,” she wrote, who was “self-centered” and held an “exaggerated idea of her own importance.”35 Mrs. Newell Dwight Hillis (as she was credited) was firm in her belief that the roles of wife and mother remained “the career for which every true woman hopes in her inmost heart,” and her book was essentially a plea—despairing at times—for the unbroken continuity of nineteenth-century feminine virtues into the modern world.36
Several years later, the local newspaper interviewed Marjorie Hillis and contrasted the advice of mother and daughter to single women. Where Annie “warned girls of the danger of moving picture houses” and “suggested that the single woman living alone would best find relaxation at the YWCA,” her daughter showed them how to mix cocktails and handle solo male guests. “Mother was an up-and-coming woman in her day,” her daughter said, loyally, “but fancy handing out advice like that today. Social standards have marched on.”37
When it came to divorce, however, Annie Hillis’s advice was not just charmingly old-fashioned—it was downright cruel. She reasoned that because t
he home was the wife’s “peculiar province,” it was also her particular responsibility to keep it together. Even in cases of desertion, cited at the time in two-thirds of divorces, Annie still blamed the wife: Being abandoned was surely evidence that she was “absolutely incompetent” at housekeeping. She counseled unhappy wives to redouble their devotion to hearth and home, to have more children, and to consider the public consequences of their actions: “For the sake of Society and the State a very great amount of personal suffering should be endured before a woman decides upon the extreme measure of dissolving the marriage tie.”38 Whatever suffering Nathalie endured during her marriage, it was bad enough to drive her to that extreme measure after just five years, Society and State (and Mother) be damned.
By the time of Nathalie’s divorce, however, more had changed than the law. The model of marriage that Annie Hillis praised in 1911, of endurance, forbearance, and a commitment to the public good over “selfish” personal happiness, was already looking like a relic, especially now that women had won the right to vote. The new twentieth-century ideal of the companionate marriage saw husbands and wives as equals and friends, sharing interests, aspirations, and emotional support. Happiness was on its way to becoming modern America’s defining virtue, and it was easier than ever to end a marriage that didn’t supply it. Unhappy people could no longer be shocked or shamed into staying married, so those who wanted to prevent divorce—including moral leaders like Reverend Hillis and his wife—had to look for new ways to help people stay together.
Just as Nathalie’s marriage was ending, a new German practice known as marriage counseling was beginning to gain a foothold in the United States. In 1930, Paul Popenoe, a horticulturalist who would later become be a household name for his efforts to preserve the nuclear family, founded the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles. The institute and other, similar programs helped to popularize the notion that unhappiness within marriage could be solved by discussing it with an expert. The principles underlying marriage counseling were closely related to those that would go on to drive the Depression-era self-help boom. Both movements saw happiness as a matter of choice, rather than as a spiritual blessing or simple luck, and preached that with enough sustained effort, it was possible to talk oneself into or out of it.
The people and theories behind early American marriage counseling overlapped with the eugenics movement, a popular and mainstream movement at the time for general social improvement—and one which Marjorie’s father, Reverend Hillis, keenly supported. Along with several prominent senators, professors, and social reformers, including Booker T. Washington, he attended and served on the Executive Committee for the first annual Conference on Race Betterment, convened in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1914 by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg—populariser of vegetarianism and breakfast cereal, and fiery campaigner against masturbation. At the heart of so-called race betterment lay the belief that the health, strength, and happiness of the population could be improved by encouraging its “fit” members—white, able-bodied, and middle class—to breed. The definition of “fit” and the methods for achieving this goal ranged widely. Some eugenicists advocated improved health care, birth control, sanitation, slum clearance, better diets, and a ban on tobacco—while others in the movement pushed for racial segregation, immigration bans, and forced sterilization of the mentally disabled and members of “unfit,” non-white races. At the Race Betterment conference, Reverend Hillis spoke on “Factory Degeneration,” but his address had less to do with the working conditions of the urban poor than with the lurid horrors of modern life, the spread of disease, alcoholism, and “the breakdown of character among our wealthy classes, with their debauchery, their divorces and their unending scandals.”39
Little more than a decade later, his own daughter would be divorced, but Hillis did not live to witness the defining upper-class scandal of the early twentieth century. On the heels of the release of Live Alone and Like It, in the fall of 1936, that scandal forced Americans to reckon anew with the morality of divorce and the meaning of marriage, in a story that brought modern attitudes into conflict with ancient tradition. In the middle of Marjorie’s nationwide tour promoting her paean to the single life, Baltimore-born socialite Wallis Simpson filed for divorce in England from her husband Ernest, on the only grounds that were permissible in that country: adultery. But not hers, although her affair with the recently crowned king of England was an open secret. Mrs. Simpson, called “Wally” or “Wallie” in the press, had already been married and divorced once, and her second husband didn’t contest the split. Over the next few months, through her divorce, public romance with the king, and his subsequent abdication of the throne, Simpson received intense scrutiny that threw into question what it meant to be a modern woman, a moral woman, and a queen.
During this battle, the British press and political establishment, representing everything that was retrograde, stuffy, and absurd, refused to cover or comment on Mrs. Simpson’s divorce. By contrast, it received daily coverage in American newspapers, which printed verbatim transcripts at the end of October of the seventeen-minute divorce trial. “He kept me alone and often went away for week-ends,” Simpson revealed, before her lawyers produced evidence of Ernest’s assignation with another woman in a hotel in Bray, a village on the Thames outside London. The hotel’s waiter was called as a witness, and testified that he had served Ernest breakfast in bed with another woman, and that the bed was indeed a double.40 These intimate details raised larger questions about how husbands and wives ought to treat each other, and what were acceptable grounds for separation (not to mention the limits of what the newspapers ought to print). Marjorie’s readers were eager to know what she thought, but whether she was sick of the press’s prurience, or old-fashioned enough to believe it was none of her business, she told an interviewer in October that she would discuss anything—her grandmother, her home life, her love life or lack of it—“But I won’t open my mouth about Mrs. Simpson.” Adding that she was soon to go to England to publish the British edition of Live Alone, and that “maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get a glimpse of her,” she nonetheless didn’t want to get drawn into the debate. “I’m not getting into any story arguments about whether or not King Edward would or should marry Mrs. Simpson,” she declared firmly, just a few weeks before he announced his intention to do just that, whether it cost him his throne or not.41
Even though she refused to discuss this particular scandal, Marjorie Hillis was much more sympathetic to divorce than either of her parents, with her beliefs no doubt shaped closer to home, in her sister’s unhappy experiences. Whatever gossip and judgment Nathalie endured in her small town when she returned there a single mother, she had a staunch ally in her older sister, in whose books divorce appeared as an unpleasant but practical solution to domestic unhappiness, with no hint that women who left their husbands deserved to be punished or pilloried. In later years Marjorie would often hold up the Duchess of Windsor, the erstwhile Wallis Simpson, as a glamorous role model. The “case studies” who suffered the most in her books were always women who valued social status over personal happiness and stuck with a brute of a husband simply because he was rich, or out of fear of what the neighbors would say.
After her father’s death in early 1929, Marjorie sacrificed some of her tentative independence and moved to Bronxville to live with her mother, sister, and niece in a mock-Tudor mansion on Ellison Avenue, near her brother Richard’s home. The suburb was quiet and affluent; among the Hillises’ neighbors were Joseph P. Kennedy and his nine children. Every morning, the husbands and fathers of the town assembled at the train station for the thirty-minute ride into Manhattan, with Marjorie a rare woman among them. Despite the family turmoil, she refused to give up her job at Vogue, which she had held for twenty years, thus staking her claim to independence and a continued connection to the city. Heels clicking on the marble floor, she would march every day along the passageway connecting Grand Central Station to the hulking Graybar Building on
Lexington Avenue, which housed the Condé Nast offices, and her particular version of freedom.
Nathalie also began to stretch her wings and rebuild her life after divorce and her father’s death. A talented amateur singer, she enrolled in the fall of 1929 at the prestigious American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, for a course of voice training, apparently with the goal of performing professionally. But that charming dream quickly evaporated. On the morning of Tuesday, October 24, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle blared a headline that would herald the end of an era: “WALL ST. IN PANIC AS STOCKS CRASH.” In their wealthy suburb, among bankers and lawyers whose fortunes were suddenly wiped out, the Hillis women joined the rest of the country watching the news unfold in horror. In the ensuing days, banks failed in their hundreds as desperate citizens demanded access to suddenly valueless savings. Some years later, F. Scott Fitzgerald would remember the collapse as though it were actually audible, a crash reverberating as far as Africa and echoing in the “farthest wastes of the desert.” 42
The turn of the year brought no improvement. Spring gave way to a brutally hot summer as dust storms swept the Great Plains, lending the crisis an apocalyptic shade. In Bronxville, the Hillis women weathered the financial turbulence as best they could, adjusting to a straitened reality, but Annie was unmoored without her forceful husband by her side. In the end, she outlived him by less than two years. On an unseasonably warm morning in mid-November 1930, mourners gathered once again at the house on Ellison Avenue. Annie Louise Hillis had died at age sixty-eight, and would be buried (though not cremated) in the same cemetery where her husband’s ashes were scattered. This staunch advocate of marriage and motherhood left behind two single daughters, a spinster and a divorcée, to shift for themselves in a household without a man.
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