Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  Mark Twain and Isabel Lyon’s trip to Bermuda, February 22–April 11, 1908. Left to right: H. H. Rogers, Grace Watson Freeman, Josephine Dodge Bascom Bacon, Mrs. Peck’s mother, Elizabeth Wallace, Mark Twain, Mrs. Peck, Isabel Lyon, Zoeth Freeman

  Of course there couldn’t ever be anybody who could Train him so that he wouldn’t drop away a little back to his wildnesses, & his strengths—But Mrs. Clemens did more than anyone else in the world could do—Mr. Twichell said that Mr. Clemens was so grateful to Mrs. Clemens, & so humbled because she married him. She was this Great Guiding Star.

  In his gentle ministerial way, Twichell was trying to help Isabel realize that lavishing care on Twain was unhealthy for them both, and, more important, to understand that no woman could ever take the place of his friend’s departed wife. Isabel rationalized her smothering in her journal, explaining that it was her express responsibility to keep Twain calm: “He mustn’t be harassed, he mustn’t have unnecessary matters brought to him to fret over, he must be saved in all ways [so] that he can be saved from anxiety—for he has had enough of it in his life.” She was also concerned that the stress Twain felt could endanger his health; “I’m worried since once or twice recently he told me of a vertigo that Surged over him because he was harassed. Years ago it happened too; in Hartford, he got up to turn on the gas, & the vertigo that surged up into his brain made him fall on the floor. When he is tired he is so grey—his face is quite without color.” Isabel’s self-interest, both personal and monetary, was doomed in this environment. Twichell wanted Isabel to understand that the time had come for her to retreat from Twain’s life. This would have been best for Isabel and probably for Twain as well. Yet where was Isabel to go? She had no interest in resuming her former capacity as a governess. By this point she had made such a great investment in a presumed future that she could not turn away. The sad truth was that while Isabel could copy down Twichell’s words, she was deaf to his message.

  Immediately after their return, Twain again threw himself into the social whirl. Between dining with friends, including Helen Keller and Henry Rogers, Twain played ceaseless billiards, some days spending upward of ten hours at the game. Dressed in his white silk coat, made for him at A.A. Vantine’s, and smoking constantly, Twain joked that his main partner, Paine, had vastly improved as a steady companion since he had begun swearing. Isabel played the enthusiastic audience, perching on the arm of a red sofa. After she commented on the delectable quality of the smoke from Twain’s pipe, he happily gave her her own little meerschaum to smoke along with him, joking, “The secretary can do anything she wants to, provided it’s proper.” When Katy Leary witnessed Isabel contentedly smoking, she paused aghast at the sight. But then Katy recovered and commented that Isabel might as well enjoy herself, seeing that she had “missed so much.” After a lifetime of being in service, Katy knew well what it meant to sacrifice personal pleasures in order to appease one’s employer.

  Twain’s interest and energy for the daily dictations had ebbed, and he busied himself with organizing the autobiography material he wanted printed in the North American Review. His winter days stretched long before him and he was often lonely, as his coterie of friends had left town for warmer climes. Isabel scrambled to organize a steady stream of amusements and the two planned what Twain called a “Doe luncheon” for January 14, which included old friends Mrs. Stanchfield, Mrs. Doubleday, Mrs. Collier, and Dorothea Gilder. For his enjoyment as well as theirs, Twain drew pictures of deer for the place cards. Isabel felt a personal sense of failure whenever Twain became restless and bored, and she empathized with his frequent lonesomeness: “When I go to his room to tell him that these people are all otherwise employed—he says ‘It doesn’t matter’ but it does matter; it matters very much indeed.”

  The pressure of her living situation continued to mount for Isabel, and at the end of January she had a graphic and frightening nightmare, which she referred to as her “earthquake dream end of the world.” (She later tried to erase mention of it.)

  It was that remark of his which set me dreaming last night & went this way: I’d been dining alone at the Brevoort, & as I started to leave the place, the floors began to heave & slant away up to the night, so that I had to hurry along in the angle made by the meeting of the wall & floor. But I couldn’t hurry, for it suddenly became dark—a blue black dark—with flashes of blue light & crashing of falling buildings all about. I got into the street—& leading north was a very narrow path—& up that I flew struggling to get my breath, for the air seemed to be going & terrible gas filled its place—up & the path I went—calling “Oh the King—the King—” (I seemed to know that mother was all right.) & in the blue blackness & the Terrible crashing I saw in the distance the Times Building & the Flat Iron, topple toward Each other—(they alone were white in the Terrible blackness) & strike each other with a terrific crash & then came blackness again & wakeful I was awake.

  Isabel’s vision of Armageddon reflected her deepest fears and insecurities. Her failure to find her King in the ruins of New York underscores that on one level she knew that her time with Twain was nearing its end. Yet, again, she refused to heed the message. The one source of security in this menacing darkness is her mother, Isabel’s one constant in terms of love and acceptance. With her dream world in ruins, feeling attacked on all sides and with her King lost, her year had the bleakest of beginnings.

  Isabel was not the only member of the household having visions. In January, Twain visited two psychics to have his future read. On the twenty-third, he sat with a clairvoyant by the name of Professor Bert Rees, who informed his skeptical client that he would live to be “98 years ten months & 2 days old.” Twain responded that he’d be willing to “Swap off some of those years & months & days.” Three days later, he visited “Fletcher,” a palmist, who assured him he would reach the century mark and advised him that he should hang on to two investments “connected with the Ground,” for at least two years. Twain received Fletcher’s savvy instruction in high humor, thankfully disavowing any intention of following his advice.

  The circle of people around the King shrank that winter with the departure of Paine in February to spend four months researching Twain’s early years out west. Clara spent six weeks on the road, resuming her singing tour on February 19, with stops including Elmira, Hartford, and Utica, and concluding the tour at the end of March. When she returned home, Isabel marveled at her improved spirits: “She is a made over creature with happiness & Success & music running rampantly through her veins. What a creature she is. & how beautiful.” Clara believed that her career was finally proving to be successful. However, while she might have triumphed in terms of personal esteem and confidence building, financially the tour was a loss. Twain, normally hypersensitive around money matters, when told by Isabel that the deficit for Clara’s tour was at least $2,500, resignedly responded that the bills should be paid and that Clara could go ahead with her plan to continue touring for another month. While scraping away at his face during his morning shave, he rationalized the tour’s cost to Isabel saying that Clara was “learning her trade. & the only way she can learn it is to know how to sail her ship in adverse winds—he said that if she had come home with twenty thousand dollars in her purse it would not be of the value to her that this experience has been; the big enthusiastic audiences are not the ones that are of greatest help—but the smaller cold audiences that you win over are the ones that help you most.” Twain’s generosity meant Clara’s immediate departure, and she spent her time that spring traveling from place to place, occasionally visiting Jean in Katonah.

  After a second lightning-quick visit with Isabel to Bermuda in mid-March, where they spent only one day ashore before returning to New York, Twain displayed more typical wallet-tightening behavior in his bargaining for a summer lease on a home in Tuxedo Park, New York, a resort community for the wealthy on the Ramapo River approximately thirty miles from Manhattan. Twain refused to return to desolate Dublin, New Hampshire. After an ex
tended negotiation with William Voss, the owner of the Tuxedo residence, the cost of the lease was reduced from $2,400 to $1,500. As summer approached, Isabel was kept busy managing the household at 21 Fifth Avenue as well as organizing their upcoming stay in Tuxedo and planning the construction of the Redding house. She noted in her daily reminder how much of her time was spent trying to appease the needy members of the Clemens family:

  Here am I missing the Sweetest of all Sweet Chroniclings—the daily life of the King. But I have been so busy, for there is … Santa to love & be with when she was here & do for—& Jean to be anxious over & to help if I can, & her doctors to see, & the King’s social life to look after. for in these days he is very [crossed out: lonely] & reaches out for people—& people he must have—so now I’m planning parties for him.

  Disinterested in the dictations, personal friends away, daughters gone, and his billiards partner absent, the easily bored Twain determinedly set about creating a set of new relationships to occupy his time. He had always delighted in the company of children and in his autobiography openly mourned the maturation of his daughters. He claimed that one day when Olivia was still alive, the two had discussed how their children had been lost from their lives forever—“as little children.” He made it clear that he preferred his daughters as girls, rather than as the estranged, ill, and disagreeable women they had become. Twain reflected that after Olivia’s death he felt a terrible loneliness that his daughters could not alleviate, disingenuously excusing them as being “busy with their studies and their labors.” He found his salvation with the realization that he needed grandchildren: “I had reached the grandpapa state of life; and what I lacked and what I needed, was grandchildren. … In grandchildren I am the richest man that lives today: for I select my grandchildren.” And that was just what Twain did, beginning in December 1905, when he met fourteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin as he was leaving Carnegie Hall. He and Gertrude struck up a friendship, and Isabel jealously noted in March 1906 that before Twain went onstage to speak to an audience of “Y.M.C.A. men” at the Majestic Theater the only thing he appeared to care about was whether Gertrude would be there to see him.

  The two regularly visited and corresponded, and when Gertrude turned sixteen in April 1907, she was crestfallen to learn from Twain that he had decided that this birthday marked her departure from childhood and therefore she had to exit from her “grandfather’s” life. The under-occupied Twain, however, wasted no time in locating several replacements. Over the next three years, he developed friendships with a dozen little girls (including Paine’s oldest daughter, Louise) whom in 1908 he nicknamed Angelfish, and who had their own club manifesto and angelfish pins. (Clara was also given a pin.) He apparently seized upon the name Angelfish because he liked the idea of having a bright and colorful aquarium of girls and because he had met several of them while vacationing in Bermuda. He composed approximately three hundred letters during this period, and the last letter of his life was to thirteen-year-old Helen Allen, written while returning from what would be his final trip to Bermuda. Twain delighted in the innocence of these little girls, and they proved deeply comforting at a time when he was often lonely and depressed.

  Isabel’s reaction to Twain’s Angelfish friendships was mixed. While she definitely preferred that he spend his time with females who were not her rivals, it fell to her to organize the logistics of the girls’ travels to visit Twain and to entertain them while they were in residence. In August 1907, Dorothy Quick came with her mother to visit Twain in Tuxedo for a few days. Upon her arrival, after a seventy-mile car journey from her home in New Jersey, Twain swept his pretty little angelfish off to tea at an acquaintance’s home, while Isabel was left to serve tea to Mrs. Quick and awkwardly engage her in small talk. It was with considerable relief that Isabel “dispatch[ed] those people [Mrs. Quick and her driver] off to Plainville again.” She was equally pleased four days later when she saw eleven-year-old Dorothy off at the train station with her new turtle, named Lyon, to return to her mother in New Jersey.

  Isabel’s anxiety about keeping Twain occupied abated in early May when he received a cable from his old acquaintance the novelist Whitelaw Reid, former editor of the New York Tribune and current ambassador to Great Britain, forwarding a message from Lord Curzon, Oxford University’s chancellor, inviting him to receive an honorary doctor of letters (D.Litt) degree at the end of June. An awed Isabel pronounced the award “too splendid,” and an ecstatic Twain immediately began pouring his energy into planning his triumphant return to England.

  Mark Twain and Dorothy Quick, July 1907

  Four days after receiving the notification, Twain and Isabel relocated to Tuxedo. Twain was most pleased with his choice of residence for the summer, and on his first afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Harry Rogers, the son and daughter-in-law of Henry Rogers, held an afternoon reception to honor him. Isabel marveled at Twain’s enthusiasm for his new surroundings: “He is in love with Tuxedo—Today as well as yesterday when we were driving around making calls, he was like a young Creature who had been caged for years.” For the same reason that Twain found Tuxedo appealing, namely its bountiful social distractions and the plethora of wealthy, well-known people who welcomed him into their midst, Isabel was dissatisfied. She did not like having to spend her summer among New York society, forced to abide by all the rules demanded by that elite stratum and constantly reminded of her inferior status.

  Mr. Clemens is carried away by the loveliness of this place—He says he has never seen so beautiful a place in all his travels. To me it is the expression of artificiality & great wealth. And I’m beginning to feel a hampering—a great quiet longing for Dublin & the upper pasture & the road leading to the Raynor Cottage. There I was almost-a-free creature of the hills—Here I am a gloved & card-cased thing.

  Despite the snobbishness of Tuxedo, Isabel believed that her relationship with Twain was strengthening, and she was allowed extraordinary access to him in all his most revealing moments. At the beginning of June in the early morning, Twain slipped up to her room wearing only his “silk underclothes … such a beautiful man he is” to share with her an invitation he had received from Mary and Harry Rogers. More significantly, shortly after he and Isabel had arrived in Tuxedo, an astonishing legal document was drawn and witnessed by Ralph S. Hull, an attorney, giving Isabel complete control over Twain’s affairs and the authority to manage his property:

  POWER OF ATTORNEY

  S.L. CLEMENS

  to

  S.V. LYON

  May 7, 1907

  Know all men by these presents, that I, Samuel L. Clemens, of the city and state of New York, have made, constituted and appointed, and by these presents do make, constitute and appoint Isabel V. Lyon of the same city, my true and lawful attorney for me and in my name, place and stead, to exercise a general supervision over all my affairs and to manage all my property both real and personal and all matters of business relating thereto; to lease, sell, and convey any and all real property wheresoever situated which may now or which may hereafter at any time belong to me … to make repairs to any buildings thereon … to demand, collect and receive all dividends, interest and moneys due and payable to or become due and payable to me; to satisfy and discharge all mortgages; to sell, assign and transfer any and all stocks, bonds and mortgages belonging to or which at any time belong to me … to draw checks or drafts upon any banks, banker or trust Company. … In witness thereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this 7th day of May, 1907 Samuel L. Clemens

  In presence of:

  (signed) SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.

  (signed) Ralph S. Hull.

  Isabel now held the financial reins for all the Clemenses firmly within her gloved hands. There is no record that Twain discussed this document with either of his daughters before drawing it up to be signed, and they go unmentioned in it. Isabel’s lot improved even more a month later when, on June 8, the same day Twain sailed to England, he informed her that he was giving her a parcel of land and a house
from his Redding, Connecticut, property. Eureka! Isabel’s dreams of financial solvency and security had finally been realized. The demon of Calamity appeared to have been vanquished.

  10

  Good fortune should have been Isabel’s constant companion during the spring of 1907—a welcome friend offering a rosy future filled with security and plenitude. Yet by the third week of June, she presciently scribbled in her daily reminder, “It is going to be a Strange Summer.” She seemed to sense that something was in the air, something intangible and unsettling, even though many of her greatest desires seemed to have been realized: a future 10 percent share of the royalties resulting from coediting Twain’s letters, financial control over his affairs, property ownership in Redding, and an apparent rapprochement with Clara.

  But Isabel’s uneasy premonition proved true just days later, on July 1, with a single question asked by a curious reporter at the Halifax Hotel in Nova Scotia, where she and Clara were staying on their first vacation together. The reporter had received a telegram from The New York Herald, a large-distribution newspaper based in New York City, “linking the name of the King with that of his secretary.” Shocked by the reporter’s inquiry, Isabel tartly commented, “the King would be as pained as his secretary to hear of any such report.” Isabel’s adamant denial only served to whet the reporter’s appetite for sensational news. Three days later the Herald claimed that there would be a marriage. The following day it ran Twain’s emphatic refutation, sent from London. “I have not known, and shall never know,” Twain thundered, “any one who could fill the place of the wife I have lost. I shall never marry again.” Halifax was intended to be a stopover on an excursion to Newfoundland. The reporter’s question and the subsequent newspaper report, however, halted the women’s journey, and five days later Isabel noted that the two had “decided to go home by rail,” forgoing the remainder of the trip. In Boston, they parted.