The Lady with the Borzoi

by Laura Claridge

  Blanche had assumed the event would benefit both pioneers. They would conduct a dialogue, perhaps even inspiring a series of conversations to be published later. Beauvoir, however, behaved rudely to Mead, possibly out of insecurity around the celebrated anthropologist. During their preliminary prelunch discussion, in front of the increasingly befuddled Mead, Beauvoir had flirted relentlessly with the “prettier women” assistants instead of speaking to the famous American. Blanche was furious, finding such behavior unforgiveable, and from that point on she and Beauvoir loathed each other. Apparently, however, Beauvoir didn’t object to “Blanche’s personality”; she disapproved of Blanche’s “violently anti-communist” beliefs. The following year, in 1951, after meeting with the publisher in Paris, Beauvoir wrote to her Chicago lover, the writer Nelson Algren, that “perhaps [Blanche’s plane] will crash” on her way home.24

  In April 1950, after visiting Elizabeth Bowen in Ireland (Bowen reciprocated that August, staying at Blanche’s West Fifty-Fifth Street apartment), Blanche sought the novelist’s help convincing Carson McCullers to leave Houghton Mifflin. McCullers was clearly displeased with her publisher. Unlike poaching, following up on news of an unhappy author was entirely ethical, Blanche decided. Upon returning to the States, she wrote to Bowen, whom she knew McCullers admired: “Once she is completely clear of them, we want very much to publish her … If you could give me a hand with her, I would be grateful. I think she is a beautiful writer and I honestly think she wants to come with us, and she should be on our list. Anyway, I leave it all to you.” Whether or not Bowen intervened, McCullers stayed with Houghton Mifflin in the end.

  Similarly, though eager to approach Colette, whose writing Blanche enjoyed and with whom she’d become friends in Paris, she waited to court the Frenchwoman until Farrar, Straus seemed uninterested in renewing Colette’s contract. But then Alfred stepped in, telling Blanche that since the other secretive publisher (whose identity Alfred withheld) set to compete for Colette was a friend of his, he insisted Knopf not pursue her. The fuss was for naught: the writer returned to Farrar, Straus after all—a great disappointment to Blanche—and Alfred conceded that he’d been wrong to interfere. (He would do so again in 1954, when he refused Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park, despite Blanche’s ardent wooing of the author.)

  In June Knopf released John Hersey’s six-hundred-page novel The Wall, selling 97,860 copies with an additional Book-of-the-Month Club distribution of 230,000. The Wall concerned the fate of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto. Like Hiroshima, the book was infused with a powerful sense of humanity and was a major bestseller.

  By September, Blanche was back at Claridge’s. She had missed seeing Ed Murrow in London, and now wrote pleading letters to the reporter to give her a book on his coverage of the Korean War. Finally home, Murrow, who was tired, wanted to recycle a cache of old essays instead. While Blanche was still abroad, Murrow and the Knopf editor Harold Strauss corresponded, Blanche hoping Strauss, who was one of their best, could make it all work. Strauss wrote:

  Dear Mr. Murrow,

  As you know, Blanche is still in Europe, but I have hastened to read your seven Korean broadcasts which you sent over at her request.

  I had heard three of them on the air, and I am glad to say that they read as well as they listen.

  Nevertheless, he reluctantly explained:

  [I can’t quite sanction] reprinting the old broadcasts, wonderful though they were, just to make a bulky enough book. I know you sent these transcripts over because Blanche asked for them, and this does not necessarily imply that you yourself think there is a book here. As to that, I am sure that Blanche still feels and will continue to feel, as she wrote you on July 24th, that “If you write a book I want to publish it and have always wanted to…” Blanche will see all this material when she comes back, but meanwhile, if there is anything more you want me to do, or if you have tangible plans for a book about which I don’t know, please let me know.25

  Blanche’s actually being able to see the material was unlikely, given the rapidly diminishing state of her vision. According to one assistant, “We used to dread watching her go across Madison Avenue for lunch. God was with her half the time. She walked right out into the middle of the street, never looked up or down [or left or right]—always straight-ahead.”26 Various treatments for her “burnt” eyeballs and her cataracts were tried, but her eyes only worsened. Defiantly, she pretended she could still see as well as always, remembering her mother’s lesson that presentation was an important part of success.

  21

  A WEDDING AND OTHER RIBBONS

  FOR HER SUCCESS in fostering intercultural relations between the Americas, Blanche was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross on Thursday, November 2, 1950. She was cited for her “outstanding work in the editorial field in promoting a better knowledge of Brazilian culture in the United States” by publishing English translations of “outstanding Brazilian literary works.” The publisher was one of a distinguished list of recipients that would over the years include Dwight Eisenhower, Librarian of Congress James Billington, Marshal Tito, Václav Havel, and Che Guevara—august company for the bookish girl from the Upper West Side. After the ceremony in Washington, Ambassador Mauricio Nabuco held a reception for Blanche at the Brazilian Embassy. Oddly, though the New York Herald Tribune covered the occasion, the title of their article was “Brazil Honors Mrs. Knopf: Makes Publisher’s Wife a Chevalier in Order of the Southern Cross.”

  Back in New York, Blanche was trying to decide whether to bring out Beauvoir’s book as one volume or two. The question had been bounced back and forth between sales and publicity, with the concern eating into Blanche’s time. She was thrilled to relax with Elizabeth Bowen when the writer stopped in Manhattan to see her publisher and friend and praised the appearance of Blanche’s apartment, where Bowen stayed. After the novelist returned home, Blanche wrote her that “I can’t tell you the blank there was at 24 West after you left. I really felt completely bereft.”1

  The decor might have impressed Bowen, but it was certainly not to the British writer’s taste, her own home seeming to envelop Blanche and other guests in its warmth. Blanche’s apartment at 24 West Fifty-Fifth Street was designed for entertaining, most often drinks and dinner with “French publishers and certain other industry figures, among her favorites The New Yorker’s fiction editor William Maxwell and his wife, Emily,” remembers Pete Lemay, hired a few years later. “It was a very pleasant, tastefully decorated rather large room, most comfortable for conversation and book talk.” The publicist and his wife also had many lunches in Purchase, where “it was not as easy an environment as Blanche’s apartment,” due perhaps to the tension Alfred usually contributed to the conversation. No matter who the guests were, “Alfred,… at home as in the office, seldom permitted conversation to stray from himself … I did see his upstairs study occasionally and it was no more cheerful than the rest of the rather intimidating mansion. I must add that we never really enjoyed the meals at Alfred’s but always appreciated Blanche’s graciousness and skill with her authors and colleagues, and looked forward to her invitations.”2

  Midway through June in 1951, seventy-six-year-old Serge Koussevitzky died in Boston, leaving his legacy, the Tanglewood Music Festival, in Lenox, Massachusetts. Blanche wasn’t surprised—she had said her goodbyes the previous season, when it was clear he was ill—but she must have been nostalgic for their shared past. Robert Nathan remembered that “she wore Koussevitzky like a little corsage on her shoulder.”3 But Blanche had never been one to dwell in sorrow; she was wont to feel great pain at her losses and then determinedly resume her life.

  In July a cordial letter arrived at 501 Madison Avenue from Dwight Eisenhower, who was supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, thanking Blanche for the cartons of books she had recently donated to the military commanders. She had carefully chosen what she thought might complement their interests. Probably she had included advance copies of August releases, their reissue o
f Ford Madox Ford’s World War I novel The Good Soldier as well as Nicholas Monsarrat’s World War II novel The Cruel Sea, which would sell 169,000 copies and be made into a movie within a few years. The Cruel Sea followed the lives of a group of Royal Navy sailors fighting the Battle of the Atlantic, each of its seven chapters describing one year during the war.

  The two books proved the market for war stories hadn’t been saturated yet. General Eisenhower wrote to Blanche:

  Colonel Lawrence has told me of your generous gift to the SHAPE Library. Your selection includes books which will be invaluable to our staff, drawn from ten nations. It is my hope that this headquarters will be a model for international understanding, and I look upon good books as a very important avenue toward this goal.

  On behalf of SHAPE, I wish to thank you for your fine contribution to our effort.4

  That fall, her energies returned to the Beauvoir text, which she was determined to publish while the French version was still selling. After talking over Beauvoir’s expectations with Jenny, Blanche accompanied her friend to the Cote d’Azur, the two making their way to the agent’s house in Antibes, where they relaxed for several weeks. When Blanche returned to New York, Alfred was still touring out west.

  She wrote Jenny, “I do not see why I came back, and would much prefer being in apartment 71 at the Ritz; you remember that was my reaction when I left … I miss you more than I can say and it is ridiculous, but what I want to do if I can manage is to come to Nice as we agreed.” After her “dreamlike” visit to Antibes, where she “was surrounded by thought and kindness and affection,” she registered the paradox of being lonely at home though always busy, adding that she “somehow” felt much more lost in Manhattan “than I do at the Place Vendome.”5

  Surely Blanche’s eyesight problems were depressing her, as she found herself almost totally dependent upon her assistants, whether for travel or at the office or even working at home. When she didn’t use a magnifying glass, she asked her assistant to be her eyes. “She trusted me and depended on me,” her secretary (and later copy editor) Shirley Chidney recalled.

  I kept her files, did her errands, called up 10,000 people … I had to read all the letters—to me and then to her. I read each letter out loud to her. She kept different colored folders so she’d know without having to read anything what it was. I could speak French. Once she told someone she knew there was an apartment empty in her building because she saw them taking the coffin out that A.M. Said it in French, surprised I understood. She thought that was even funnier.

  When she had a secretary who could do the job that she liked, they stayed 10 years; there were only two of us over a period of 20 years. [But] some stayed only a few days or weeks—they couldn’t take the demands of the job.6

  Shirley felt that Blanche treated her as an equal, leaving her in charge when she was away—as she had with Ruth. The secretary found Blanche interesting and generous, though often unaware that her quirks made work more difficult for others: Blanche “kept a rubber stamp of Tapiola’s paw print in her desk,” for instance, often requiring Shirley to apply it to friends’ correspondence. Blanche’s beloved pet had been killed by one of Alfred’s dogs, grieving her doubly because she hadn’t been around to intervene. From this point on, she began bringing her well-trained terriers or poodles to the office.

  Blanche allowed herself to be vulnerable around Shirley—again, as she had with Ruth, occasionally openly crying at home, especially when she felt she’d been disregarded at the office. After the war, Pat had joined Knopf as secretary and trade books manager; he often aggressively sided with Alfred during office disagreements—causing Blanche to reveal her emotions to the trustworthy Shirley. At times the assistant even found her employer amusing, as when she sent Shirley “to Abercrombie to buy a lot of dog candy. She sent it out as Xmas presents, showing off that she knew some people called her a bitch.”

  Shirley accepted gratefully the slightly used Dior and Balmain suits Blanche gave her, which the assistant still had twenty years later. She especially appreciated the delicacy with which Blanche offered them, careful not to offend through largesse. The British agent Grace Dadd would appreciate such bounteousness as well: “[Blanche] was very, very generous. Clothes were part of her life. She had to keep changing. I know she sold some [of the designer fashions], she told me. I was a book agent wearing nothing [normally] in Piguet and Balenciaga … I’d have ten Paris suits in my wardrobe, beautiful evening dresses. I didn’t let anyone know where I obtained them.”7

  Though preoccupied with the continuing difficulties of translating the Beauvoir book, Blanche was determined to spend more time with her son, hoping to grow close again, as they’d been before the war—and before Hohe. It seemed clear to her that Pat was imitating the other men in the office, siding with Alfred against her, because it was obviously safer to do so. By the end of December 1951, she had decided to reactivate her dance lessons with Pat: she wanted to see her son married, and she knew she’d have to work hard to convince him to listen to her advice. Before the new year began, however, Pat assured her that marriage was, as a matter of fact, part of his plan as well. Then, at the start of 1952, Pat proposed to Alice Laine, his secretary at Knopf, and she accepted. Astounded at his decision, Blanche eventually learned from Frances Lindley that when Pat lunched with her some months before, he had launched into a tirade, telling Frances that “one reason I’m going to marry [Alice] is that she’s not one goddamn bit like my mother.” Frances could never figure out what “changed him” into a young man with “a long list of indictments of his mother.”8 (It seems unlikely that she knew that Pat had walked in on Blanche with Hohe.)

  Though Alfred didn’t think the choice of a wife so important, Blanche must have been devastated that Pat was marrying a retired police officer’s daughter who didn’t even seem particularly genial. She elected to skip her January trip to Europe after all, deciding instead to accompany Alfred out west. The director of the National Park Service personally made all of the Knopfs’ arrangements at Yellowstone. Smiling wanly in photos at Carlsbad Caverns, Blanche is swaddled in layers of wool, while Alfred is dressed in the winter as if for a perfect spring day.

  Aware of Pat’s desire to keep his wife and his mother completely separate in his life, Blanche assumed that with time relations would be better between her and the young couple. When Pat insisted that the parents not meet one another until the wedding, Blanche and Alfred demurred, finding such behavior rude. Alfred demanded that the three of them take the three Laines to dinner. The event proved at best listless, since Mr. Laine’s profession encouraged little interaction, Alfred would later say, and “there wasn’t much common ground on which Blanche and Mrs. Laine could meet,” either.9 While Alfred lacked a talent for small talk, Blanche had taught herself to socialize with anyone, and she probably rose to the occasion. Alfred would recall the dinner somewhat condescendingly: “As a matter of fact, the young people proved extremely discreet about this [the class difference], and I don’t believe either of us laid eyes on the Laines again except, perhaps, at the wedding. They turned out to be perfectly good people and served Alice and Pat well for a long time as baby-sitters” for the three children who would be born within a few years—Alison, Susan, and David.10 Bill Koshland would remember Alice as “a little on the dull side” but felt that she “made something of herself,” and she “wasn’t snowed under by Pat.”11

  On July 27, 1952, the wedding took place in a small Catholic church in Carmel, New York, roughly an hour and a half north of Manhattan. In the catty mode that some women adopted when discussing Blanche, Betsy Johnson, a family friend, interviewed in 1990, claimed that “Blanche wore a black dress to the wedding and as the vows were taken she turned around to wiggle her finger [hello] at friends, undercutting its solemnity.”12 The socialite Georgia Glin confirmed the story that Blanche wore “a black Balenciaga dress to Pat’s wedding—the epitome of spite. A wedding in the country in the kind of dress you’d wear to an ambassado
r’s tea party in Paris. To show Alice, who has many qualities, but not chic.” Alice, however, was adamant: Blanche’s mother-of-the-groom dress was turquoise, and she wore a “large green hat.” Pat concurred. He told Peter Prescott that his mother was in green or turquoise. “And Betsy Johnson wasn’t even at the wedding!”13

  If mothers of sons tend to have fraught relationships with their sons’ wives, Blanche clearly tried to get along with Alice. But Pat’s ambivalence about his mother made Alice wary of her mother-in-law. Undeterred, Blanche suggested books for Alice to read and offered to buy her designer clothes or to pass on her own, which until now she’d given to others. But Alice refused such gifts, preferring to read her own books and to shop at middlebrow Peck & Peck. When the young couple’s children were born, Blanche gave them fancy Parisian outfits in which Alice never dressed them, even to show Blanche how adorable they looked. Once she brought back from France a beautiful embroidered smock for their firstborn, Alison, but it was tossed aside with an excuse. When Alison was two, with Blanche hoping to choose a gift everyone would like, she brought her a “terribly expensive doll” from Paris, appropriate, Pat later recalled, for a six-year-old. “Alison didn’t know what to do with this and screamed in terror when she saw it.”14

  Pat would admit, after Blanche’s death, that Alice never felt badly treated by her mother-in-law, though she didn’t appreciate Blanche’s ill-conceived attempts to teach her how to dress. What “destroyed any hope of a decent relationship between me, Alice and Blanche,” Pat later said, was a trip the couple had made to Purchase. Supposedly, Blanche took Alice aside to ask what Pat had said about her and added, “They’re a pack of lies.” When Alice told Pat, he was “furious. It was a hell of a way to greet your new daughter.”15 Alice and Pat rented an apartment in Manhattan for the first four years of their marriage, until, in 1956, without asking his parents for help, Pat unaccountably borrowed five thousand dollars from Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, acquaintances of some years at Random House, to build a house in Westport, Connecticut, embarrassing Blanche and enraging Alfred.16