The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Mencken’s choice of a southerner confused those not attuned to his contrarianism, whereby he sought to point out the hypocrisy within everyone: he was just as likely to castigate the American South for its racism as pluck its fairest flower; he was as quick to excoriate African-Americans for what he considered their laziness and Jews for their preoccupation with money. Readers were surprised that Mencken, who had frequently joked about the hopelessness of marriage, was actually taking this step.

  To avoid a spectacle, only their closest relatives and two fellow journalists from Mencken’s Evening Sun attended the wedding, though reporters were three deep on the pavement outside. Sara, carrying a spray of green orchids, wore a beige crepe ensemble and a brown felt cloche hat. Originally, Menck had asked friends to loan him a coat, but after a local minister suggested that the groom might do well to “put on plenty of dog,” he sprung for a pinstriped business suit, much to Blanche’s relief. A few days later, on their honeymoon in Halifax, the benedict wrote Blanche that while Sara was “out combing the beach for shells,” he was writing a piece for The Evening Sun on the malt liquor situation in Quebec. Blanche immediately told Van Vechten that she sensed Sara and Henry were “blissfully happy.”25 From the beginning of their relationship, the two had known when to give each other space and when to create a cocoon for two. In notes to friends, Sara wrote, “I have the one perfect husband.”26

  The new couple missed a slew of parties while they were gone, including a cocktail party given in Manhattan for Blanche by the actress (and later Dame) Judith Anderson, its guests including Condé Nast, Groucho Marx, and Bennett Cerf. And in November, Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize, cause for another shared dinner. The first American winner in literature, Lewis took as his subject American corporate greed and banality, as depicted in Elmer Gantry, Main Street, and Babbitt—though the Nobel committee circumspectly cited his “vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.”27 Before the prize was announced, Lewis had been badgering Knopf for months to take him on. Following his Nobel, Lewis still wanted to publish with Blanche, who was leery of his drinking. Besides, the author expected Knopf to include exorbitant bonuses in his contract. Alfred wrote Mencken that Lewis had “made violent love to him in London” earlier in the year, but Mencken agreed with Blanche that an advance of thirty thousand dollars was too high and would simply tempt the author to “loaf.” Blanche had long observed that Lewis seemed unable to settle down to work.28 After divorcing Grace Hegger, he had married the political newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, a friend of Rebecca West, to whom Thompson had confirmed Blanche’s concern. Nobel or not, the publishers reluctantly decided against bringing Lewis to Knopf.

  Nonetheless, the years that brought the twenties to a close could be said to belong to Lewis and Mencken, its two “most important rebels.”29 Both men wrote with broad strokes, depicting a country they loved fiercely even as they exhorted its citizens to emerge from their stupor. In the end, however different their politics, both writers wanted their fellow patriots to stop slavering and to start thinking. As the journalist Walter Lippmann had said the year before, Mencken was currently “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.”30 And now, with Lewis’s Nobel Prize honoring his critique of an American society that ignored the little guy, the two were arguably the seminal critics of the age.

  At thirty-six, Blanche was at the height of her beauty—a slender body, meant to show off her striking wardrobe, her ginger-colored bob just the right length. Equal to her appearance was her knowledge of her trade and of the world of culture that she moved in. She had many friends—both men and women. She had accepted long ago her lack of a loving husband. What she wanted now was a great love of her own.

  11

  LOVER

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1931, when Blanche was in London, she was afflicted with what Mencken called “a dreadful flu epidemic” she’d carried overseas from the States. After chiding his friend for neglecting her health, Mencken asked, plaintively, “When are you coming home?” He was worried about beginning his new book without her advice.1 She was in no hurry to return, however, as she was tense about juggling her lovers, whom she knew she shared with others—Koussevitzky and Heifetz especially. Perhaps Heifetz reminded Blanche too much of Alfred: the author Robert Nathan, whose novella Portrait of Jennie would be a bestseller for Knopf, recalled the ways in which Alfred resembled Heifetz, both men “egotistical, domineering, indifferent … there was a thing around [them], you couldn’t get through it.”2

  At least Blanche had determined how to bring out the best in her husband: she gathered friends with whom he was comfortable—those he felt were his equal but that he could, during the meal he supervised, dominate. And she was pleased that the summer ahead would involve her son. She gave her annual birthday party at Purchase for Pat, Van Vechten, and James Weldon Johnson (the “birthday club” later to include John Hersey), all three born on the same day: June 17. A group photograph taken by Alfred shows Blanche with Ettie Stettheimer, one of a trio of sisters famous for their wealth and their talents, looking with interest at a dog whose tail alone is caught by the camera. Pat gazes straight ahead, while Van Vechten, with Fania; Johnson, with his wife, Grace; and the Knopf poet Witter Bynner, all smile broadly as they stand.3 William Koshland remembered that “[Blanche’s parties at Purchase or Manhattan] were wonderful … she had an instinct, she’d even know if somebody was stuck with somebody. [The salesmen] even liked it better at Blanche’s; she was much easier.” Blanche was so savvy, Koshland said, “she could have made it in another firm,” unlike Alfred’s occasional threat to the contrary. She was as bold as anyone he’d ever met: during an elevator strike, she walked up fourteen flights to her floor, expecting Koshland to follow. He didn’t.4

  Later that summer, when the Galsworthys came to visit, Blanche gathered friends for a late dinner following a Boston Symphony performance in Manhattan, with Heifetz and Koussevitzky both present. Besides possibly Van Vechten, no one knew both men were her lovers, at some level a triumph on Blanche’s part. Even so, there were prickly moments. Van Vechten, dressed in white buck shoes, was taunted by the easily envious Heifetz: “Where do you play tennis?” After Van Vechten sniffed that Samuel Clemens had worn white flannels the last twenty years of his life, Heifetz, never one to concede defeat, replied, “He was, after all, Mark Twain.” Galsworthy quickly changed the subject, compounding the awkwardness by innocently commenting that these days he was finding Americans “noticeably quieter and pleasanter—perhaps as a result of the Depression.”5

  The Depression, however, only exacerbated the hard drinking that many authors depended on for their inspiration. One afternoon in late fall, finishing lunch with Bennett Cerf at ‘21,’ Dashiell Hammett and the equally boozy William Faulkner pleaded with Cerf to get them an invitation to the Knopfs’ dinner party that night, with the guests including a mixed slate from Koussevitzky to Willa Cather, whose Shadows on the Rock had recently sold ninety-thousand copies through the Book-of-the-Month Club.

  Cerf explained that it was strictly black-tie: only half sarcastic, he asked them if they understood. Of course, Hammett assured him, wounded. When Cerf picked up the men, however, they hadn’t even changed their clothes. Appearing in their well-worn tweeds, they promptly got drunk at the Knopfs and then passed out—sliding off the couch onto the floor quietly, as if in deference to Blanche, who had shot them baleful looks all evening.6

  On November 19, to mark the first concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s New York series for the 1931–32 season, with Koussevitzky, naturally, at the podium, the Knopfs took a box at Carnegie Hall, where they served champagne and strawberries at intermission. It was a decidedly romantic program, consisting of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 9 in D Major; Claude Debussy’s “Nuages” and “Fêtes,” from Nocturnes; and Maurice Ravel’s Suite no. 2 from Daphnis et Chloé. Blanche held her traditional dinner in th
e conductor’s honor at her apartment, with the guest list composed mostly of thirty regulars, among them Gershwin, Henry and Sara Mencken, Willa Cather, Judge John M. Woolsey (who would soon be adjudicating the obscenity case against James Joyce’s Ulysses) and his wife, Judith Anderson, Fanny Hurst, and Dashiell Hammett—his invitation conditional, Blanche had admonished him: Was he working regularly on his next book under contract, The Thin Man?

  But in spite of his promises, Hammett continued to frustrate his publisher. At the end of November he again brought Hemingway to one of her parties. Drunk as usual upon his arrival, Hemingway begged to go to a speakeasy, and just before the sun rose, Blanche, a little tipsy herself, relented. With Eddie Wasserman, the “famously homosexual” party man madly in love with Blanche, she tried the neighborhood clubs, but they were still closed for Thanksgiving.7 She and Eddie hauled Hemingway back to his hotel; he couldn’t stand up but could nonetheless conduct a grueling, nonsensical monologue. Increasingly Blanche saw him through Mencken’s lens, in which the writer appeared as an “excessively vain fellow—challenging, bellicose and not infrequently absurd. Anyone who refused to hail him as a towering genius was an evil doer.” What Blanche noticed was what her adoring butler, John Kilar, also disdained: “the powerful odor of alcohol wherever he went.”8

  But she was undeterred from planning her annual holiday event in December. Kilar (who, late in life, would recall Blanche in her “black riding suit” as “very sexy, her figure like Goldie Hawn”) had found an eggnog recipe that would take on a life of its own.9 Asked by a friend for the formula, Blanche passed it on, until the recipe reached the food critic Craig Claiborne, who would immortalize it as “Blanche Knopf’s Eggnog.” The recipe called for twelve raw eggs; one and a half cups of powdered sugar; a quart of pure cream; a fifth of cognac, bourbon, or whiskey; a cup of dark rum; and orange, lemon, and nutmeg for good health, a concoction, Blanche joked, to ensure that everyone would leave her party happy. But she herself drank only bourbon, straight.10

  As 1932 progressed, a commercial dry spell would plague publishers. It was as if the Depression had finally caught up with the Knopfs, and Joe Lesser was forced to tighten production budgets.11 The stock market had lost almost 90 percent of its value, and Simon & Schuster developed a system that year that allowed booksellers to return unsold copies of books for credit against future purchases, an arrangement that would become the standard for the industry. Blanche and Alfred were pleased to elect Mencken to Knopf’s board of directors, where Sam, too, held a seat. (After Sam died, the board would include Henry, Blanche, Alfred, Sidney Jacobs, William Koshland, and Joe Lesser.) Mencken welcomed his new role with the firm, and the additional income that came with it.

  What the Knopfs couldn’t yet see was the Depression’s real effect on their balance sheet. It took a blizzard in February for Blanche to understand the difficulty they were in. Examining the recent financial records she had brought home from the office, she was reminded of the misfortunes of her wealthy butcher grandfather, who had gone bankrupt in an earlier financial calamity. Possibly motivated by fears of a similar disaster befalling Knopf, she started allowing the annoying Eddie Wasserman to hang around her more often: Knopf might need new sources of financing. John Kilar later recalled how Pat Knopf had been upset by Wasserman, who was “clearly in love with Mrs. Knopf.” Not that Kilar blamed Wasserman: according to him, Blanche was irresistible to anyone she set her sights on. Though she could be a “demanding businesswoman,” when she asked you “to do something you hated doing, you did it—with pleasure. She just asked in such a way you couldn’t refuse.” After her death, Kilar recalled that when she ran into him at the St. Regis hotel, where he eventually took a job, she always introduced him to her guests, saying “something very beautiful about me, even to [the Nobel Prize winner] Sigrid Undset.”12

  Though he assumed the attitude of the “three monkeys: no see, no hear, etc.,” the butler observed Eddie Wasserman staying over “frequently” when Alfred was away. In contrast, he noted, Alfred was discreet, “Mr. K” inviting the occasional woman friend to Purchase for what was nothing more than “a friendly visit.” Yet it was Blanche he respected: “She was a strong-willed woman but with a heart. I admired her as I admire a tiger … She got everything she wanted.”13

  She didn’t, of course. A marriage that had apparently devolved into one we would today call “open” wasn’t at all what she’d hoped for seventeen years before. Now, on June 11, 1932, Blanche’s seventy-year-old father-in-law died suddenly of a heart attack, with his last action in the name of Knopf that of “winding up” the long-defunct London office.14 Mencken, who had been friendly with Sam Knopf for ten years at least, had recently recognized that the current financial problems of The American Mercury largely resulted from the “extravagant and indeed almost insane management of Knopf’s father … I came to the conclusion that the elder Knopf was hopeless.”15 In large part due to his capricious management, Knopf nearly went bankrupt after Sam died: Alfred and Blanche’s combined salary for 1934 was $35,000, with $20,000 for Alfred and $15,000 for Blanche, the couple waiving $13,333.33 of their year’s pay (to keep the firm solvent).

  The hundred attendees at Sam’s funeral somehow got translated by The New York Times into “more than six hundred persons” present at the Beth-El Chapel of Temple Emanu-El. Alfred gave no eulogy, but the rabbi, who hadn’t known either Knopf, effused over the relationship between “Mr. Knopf and his son Alfred as ‘extraordinary and beautiful.’” Sam’s “friendliness, sympathy and generosity” were deserving of “especial tribute.” The energetic Samuel Knopf would not retire but was at his office the day before his death, dying “like a soldier at his post.” Alfred, who displayed little emotion at his father’s death, immediately took George Bellows’s portrait of Sam to hang in his own bedroom.16 Like Blanche’s parents, Sam was buried at Salem Fields Cemetery.17

  By the end of September, Blanche was more than ready to get away. Setting sail for London on the SS Bremen, she arrived to find several dozen writers seeking a publisher. She visited favorite authors and friends, from the Galsworthys to Knopf’s money-making novelist Warwick Deeping, to Rebecca West, with whom Blanche shared Fannie Hurst’s friendship. Now West was preoccupied with mother-son disagreements over her boy Anthony’s father, H. G. Wells. She talked to Blanche about the perils of mothering a boy alone—or with a partner with whom one was at complete odds—and about her painful decision to grant custody of Anthony to Wells. The conversation surely reminded Blanche of her frustration over Pat’s parenting. Then, in Paris, she spent days soothing André Gide’s easily ruffled feathers. Gide felt ignored of late, and Blanche reassured him that the Knopfs always had him in their sights—that Alfred, too, was reading Gide and praising him, even though she knew her husband wasn’t interested in such literature.18

  With perfect timing, the reporter Anita Block, who had helped found one of the first socialist newspapers in the United States, The New York Call, contacted Blanche, hoping to interview Mrs. Knopf about marriage. Blanche agreed to participate in one of a four-part newspaper series published by a western syndicate. Its subject was the irrelevance of marital fidelity in the modern age.

  12

  BECOMING FREE

  THE INTERVIEW WITH ANITA BLOCK seemed an open letter to Alfred, through Blanche’s answers to Block’s questions about “outgrowing” both marriage and monogamy. “Why,” Blanche asked rhetorically, “do we extract a model of monogamy [from the ‘social structure’ of marriage] where a man and his wife … become Siamese twins?… the matter of fidelity in the relationship count[s] for far less than others think.”1 Boldly, if a bit defensively, Blanche went on the record for open marriage. If her marriage had turned out the way she’d expected—and, from all indications, wanted—Blanche’s opinion wouldn’t have been sought. Instead, as a result of the relationship she got, she now meant to send her husband a message: they were both free to sleep with anyone they wanted, as long as they were discreet. And
Alfred, who seemed to many acquaintances sexless, had recently renewed interest in several women from his past, though it remains unclear to what ends. Pat later remembered three such “girlfriends,” the son claiming his father “got so lonely living out there [in Purchase].”2

  Blanche’s April interview, titled “Holds Monogamy and Marriage Are Different Institutions,” makes it clear that multiple partners were fine by her. “Marriage is a useful institution for society, especially where there are children,” the publisher maintained. “But other than caring together for their offspring, marital partners should be free to go their own way.” Blanche concluded the interview: “When I was very young Joseph Hergesheimer once said to me: ‘The most important thing in any marriage is the ability to shut the door against the rest of the world, and have someone with you.’ But that shut-in space must be a sanctuary, not a prison. Otherwise the inmates will hate it.”3

  Seven weeks later, Blanche wrote Mencken about her need to talk with him confidentially. To his response that he would visit her in a week or so, she wrote: “Thanks for your letter and I hope it is frankly all right with you regarding the tenth and eleventh [of June]. Let us have our private session and let us make sure with Eddie [Wasserman] on the thirteenth so keep that definitely. If Sara comes it will be absolutely perfect. If she does not, let me know. There are a lot of things I want to talk to you about privately and we might have a further dinner chez moi alone.”4

  Since the Knopfs were rarely speaking to each other outside work in those days, Blanche may have wanted to discuss divorce with the only friend both Knopfs trusted. She also may have sought unbiased information on the financial state of the company from a board member who owned Knopf stock. Book sales, in step with the Depression after all, seemed to be dropping everywhere and would continue to do so till the end of the thirties. Though Alfred remained steadfast in his conviction that publishing was a gentleman’s business—if they “went under, they would do so with grace”—Blanche felt her life would be worth little if they lost the company. In contrast, her husband believed that money sullied the publishing world, causing people to think of it as a business instead of a blessed vocation.5