East to the Dawn (51 page)

Amelia had always cherished her freedom, always held a deep-seated ambivalence toward marriage. Swinburne's Atalanta could have still been speaking for her.

Should she or shouldn't she? It was a difficult decision.

Being a wife and mother and pursuing a career would involve trade-offs and sacrifices, particularly in those times when the labor-saving devices now taken for granted were just a promise for the future: fulfilling the duties of mother and wife was a full-time job. Running a home and working (we are talking here of the upper-middle-class home) was like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. A contemporary Radcliffe study of wives who worked would conclude that it was almost impossible. The WEIU did a study of Simmons College graduates in the first quarter of the twentieth century: of the 1,102 who had married, a grand total of 93 were gainfully employed. Even of this small number, eleven were widows and two divorced, which meant that of the more than one thousand married Simmons graduates, only fifty-three managed to work while living with a husband. Even in 1989 historian William O'Neill, in
Feminism in America: A History,
looking at it from a different perspective,
would conclude that “it seems evident that the institutions of marriage and family, as presently conceived, are among the chief obstacles to feminine equality.”

Since childhood, Amelia and Lucy and Katch Challiss had been lukewarm toward the notion of marrying: they were afraid a man would stand in the way of their careers, interfere with their lives. It was of course not an idle fear: men often did. Aversion to marriage seemed to be a common thread running through the women in Amelia's family in her generation. From childhood on, Amelia, Lucy, and Katch had dreamed grand dreams of exciting careers, not exciting marriages. As teenagers they didn't think the two matched up—but on the other hand they liked men, the unsolvable dilemma. It was Katch who had formulated the most specific career plan: she decided she was going to be a newspaper reporter and live in Paris. Both she and Lucy went to college to prepare for their careers, Katch to Kansas State where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Lucy to Wheaton. Lucy, pursued by suitors, had gone off to Paris after graduation and found a job teaching at the American School in Neuilly. There she had a social whirl and taught many children of note, including Prince Phillip of Greece. Lucy, great fun, loved by everybody who “lit up a room,” it was said—so close to Amelia and so attractive—couldn't bring herself to marry, but she also had great trouble saying no to her suitors. Four times Lucy became engaged—twice sending out wedding invitations—and four times she backed out. She took a variety of jobs throughout her life, and she enjoyed an incredibly busy social life—breakfasts, lunches, teas, cocktails, dancing evenings—to the hilt. Extremely competent, at one point in the 1930s she became head of
Vogue's
school directory department. When World War II came, she enlisted in the Red Cross, went to Italy as an ambulance driver, and ended up organizing and running USOs (servicemen's clubs). After the war she worked for a textile design firm in New York City. Her life was still a constant round of activity; she was always on the go, and because she was so charming and entertaining, she was always busy. And always single.

Katch, it was true, had married in 1929, but only after a considerable struggle, and under duress as it were. On the boat to Paris to join Lucy and become a teacher at the American School, Katch had met Bill Pollock, a tall, handsome, wealthy, kind, intelligent student at Yale University who fell head over heels in love with her and proposed. On her way to France to live out her dream, then, she had had the bad luck to meet her dream man. She stalwartly refused him, and he returned to college, but for three summers running Bill returned to Paris to be with her and try and make her change her mind. The fourth summer, when he said he was going to marry someone else if she turned him down again, she had grudgingly accepted.
But all her life Katch was doubtful about the rightness of her choice of committing to marriage, never sure the role of wife and mother was right for her. Her large house, situated in the rolling farm country of eastern Ohio, became a showplace for that part of the world: there she lived out her life as the gracious hostess, the conscientious mother of one daughter, an active participant in all the community philanthropic activities. But in her bones she felt was missing something, stuck out there in Ohio while her sister and cousin went gallivanting around the world, and it made her fretful. Her daughter Patricia could feel it as she was growing up.

Amelia wasn't all that sure that she would have the strength of character to continue her career, as her friend Louise de Schweinitz had done. There was always the possibility that she would gradually succumb to the demands of marriage and throw in the towel, as her smart Phi Beta Kappa cousin Katch had done.

“A woman's best protection is the right man,” says a character in Clare Booth Luce's play
The Women;
perhaps that, in the end, was the overriding reason that decided Amelia.

On February 6 George and Amelia telephoned George's mother Frances Putnam at her house in Noank, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound and told her that they were driving up and would spend the night, and that the ceremony would be the next day at her home. On Saturday, February 7, acceding to Amelia's wishes that there be an absolute minimum of fuss and trappings, they were married in Frances Putnam's cream-colored two-story house—Square House, as it was called. George's description of his bride: “She wore something as simple and forthright as herself, and not new, bought for the occasion. A brown suit, I think, and a casual crepe blouse with a turndown collar and, as I remember it, brown lizard shoes. No hat, of course.” He even adored her matter-of-factness.

Her choice of clothes for her wedding was amazingly similar to that of her mother, thirty-six years before: both wore brown traveling suits, brown shoes, and stockings. It was also remarkably similar to what she wore every day. Following the ceremony, Amelia, as her mother had a generation before, donned a brown hat and a brown fur coat.

The New York Times
had an article on the event, probably supplied by George himself—it has his touch.

Just before the ceremony, Amelia's fear of finding herself tied down by marriage resurfaced. She borrowed some of Mrs. Putnam's stationery, slipped off by herself, and put her thoughts down for George. The resultant letter doesn't seem to have bothered him:

George hid the letter away, only revealing its existence after she died, then writing that it was “a sad little letter, brutal in its frankness, but beautiful in its honesty. At length I have decided it has a place, contributing to these pages something of the structure of a character and a gallant inward spirit.”

He may have hoped, that morning of the marriage, that she didn't mean what she wrote—that it was an excess of apprehension and plain fear that drove her to make such a dramatic statement. He may well have thought that, for his later analysis—that it was a sad little letter—is so far off the mark: there is nothing sad about demanding sexual freedom. It was
in fact a breathtakingly independent statement, couched in diplomatically acceptable terms, which George accepted.

Amelia wanted to make sure that George didn't take her to be an ordinary bride. The letter is not so much a declaration of the rights of a married woman, as a declaration that although married she would continue to behave as if single—when it pleased her. It is hard to believe that any bride or groom, when handed such a letter the day of the ceremony, would go through with the ceremony. But George did. Her career first, over him, she wrote: marriage may “shatter” chances in work “that mean so much to me,” so he better watch out. Sexual freedom was obligatory—a fascinating and radical notion: she demanded the right to be unfaithful. He acceded, of course, at what cost to himself one can only guess. For the rest, she demanded that each had their own spheres of work and play and if everything became too much, she might need a private bolt hole.

It is an extraordinary statement. It rips her mask off and shows her as a much stronger, much more fearless, much more self-assured person than she let on. It shows the steely hand in the velvet glove, the raw power that lay at the heart of her soul; it shows that her emotional courage was the equal of her physical courage. It becomes apparent at this point that she in fact really didn't know the meaning of fear. Of failure, yes, but not of fear.

Some of her biographers maintain that Amelia's and George's was not a love match from the start, that she had simply married her manager, as Gore Vidal phrased it. But as her wedding statement makes clear, nothing could have been further from Amelia's mind than the thought that she was entering into a marriage of convenience—a “smart” marriage. Far from assuming that one of the pluses to matrimony would be having George's constant professional help, she was afraid that his constant presence (read: demands) would “shatter” her career. And if she wasn't marrying him for practical reasons, then she was marrying him for love. Certainly, to agree to such terms, George had to be truly mesmerized. He was a man who loved women, who loved the marital state—he had married at a young age, divorced and remarried, was single long enough to attract Amelia, remarried eighteen months after she disappeared, and remained happily married till he died, but for Amelia he abdicated the ordinary male role and put up with the conditions she imposed.

A companion gesture to Amelia's written declaration of rights—a small gesture but equally significant—was her refusal to wear her wedding ring. She never wore the platinum band that George put on her finger at their wedding.

And yet with it all—her unusual strength of character, her deeply
feminist beliefs—she still managed to be the likable, supportive, gutsy, intelligent person that everyone wanted as their friend. Carl Allen would describe her admiringly as “a curious mixture of boyish naivete and feminine guile.” As their lives meshed, George became the fall guy of the team. He was the one who had to keep her on schedule, who fended people off to give her space and a little peace and quiet, who was delegated to say no. That was one reason he was nowhere near as well liked as she, but there were plenty of others. Where she was reserved, he was bold; where she was thoughtful, he was careless; photographers noticed that he always tried to put himself into the pictures they took; reporters noted that he was always trying to manage the angle of their stories and then get rid of them, while Amelia, left to her own devices, would like as not invite them to share a meal with her. George loved celebrities above ordinary people; her friends disliked him on that score. He was forever (brusquely) rushing her off from one event to another. The result was that whenever anything went wrong, he was assigned blame. What was true was that the irrepressible George couldn't seem to leave her alone: he was always getting involved in her affairs. But she was the one in control.