The Late John Marquand (25 page)

My only reason for going into the thing at such length is that I find myself at the present time being exposed to the West. This epistolary novel is a California western piece of work. Westerners, I discover, are becoming arrogant. When in the West you have to wear Pendleton Round-up shirts, and high-heel boots, so that you may look like a Texas ranger. We must even understand the culture of the U.C.L.A. We must be patient with them, because the West is the growing part of our community, and, with the oil wells, they get 27 per cent off their income tax. Therefore, they are superior to all of us, and now they know it. This piece of work is a complete example of this. It is hideous, and they should all be put in their place.…

He was frequently sarcastic about the works of Sinclair Lewis, whose
Main Street
had been cited by critics as the perhaps-model for
The Late George Apley
. But when John finally met Lewis, he rather liked him—particularly the madcap and unpredictable behavior that often overcame Lewis when he was in his cups. The two men had first met at Carol Brandt's apartment, on a night when Lewis was on his way to the film premiere of
Arrowsmith
, and when he was already far from sober. He demanded Scotch, and when Carol handed him a glass he shouted, “Do you call
that
a drink?” and, with a few profanities, seized the bottle and poured himself a tumblerful. Immediately Lewis put himself and John on a first-name basis, Red and John, and, though there were editors and
publishers and agents in the room, Lewis launched into a violent tirade against the publishing profession, clutching Marquand by the lapels and saying, “Come on, John, I want to talk to you, let's get away from these lousy bloodsuckers, these goddamn hucksters, these fucking exploiters.” For several alcoholic hours—the premiere had long since started—the two were inseparable; whenever anyone suggested that he should be at the theater, Lewis would shout, “Let me alone, let me alone, I want to talk to John here. John and I understand each other, we know what a writer is. Keep these goddamn bloodsuckers away from me, will you?” And then, “Come on, John, I want to talk to you, I want to talk to you about your writing, John. Listen, come to Detroit with me! We'll disguise ourselves as waiters and get jobs in some joint. Will you, John? What do you say? Detroit! Waiters! How about it?” Presently Lewis was singing John a selection of Methodist hymns.

John P. Marquand and Sinclair Lewis never got to Detroit disguised as waiters, but this sort of thing vastly entertained John. It appealed to his sense of the grotesque in life, and he and Lewis became friends, though he could not abide Lewis's wife, Dorothy Thompson, who, whenever she was around, insisted on doing all the talking and would never let her husband say a word. Lewis's erratic behavior helped John understand another situation in which a fellow writer, who had been an alcoholic, reformed and went on the wagon, at which point his wife, who had seldom taken a drink before, suddenly became a hopeless drunk. “After all,” Marquand commented at the news, “you can't live with all that excitement going on around you and then all at once start spending a series of evenings playing crokinole.” Sinclair Lewis—who genuinely admired Marquand's work—also, in a more rational moment, suggested to John that his three big New England novels,
Apley, Wickford Point
, and
Pulham
, should be published in a single volume called
North of Grand Central
, for which he, Lewis, would write an introduction. (At the time, Little, Brown was not interested in the idea, but the book was later published in 1956—after Lewis's death—with an introduction by Kenneth Roberts.)

John's work with the Book-of-the-Month Club took him regularly away from Adelaide, but it did nothing to improve their
relationship. And so, one day in her office, Carol was surprised to hear John's voice on the telephone. Their separation, John said—it had gone on for nearly two years—made no sense. He begged to see her again.

“Of course I agreed,” Carol Brandt says. “I only insisted that this time he must tell Adelaide what was going on. I didn't want there to be any more lies. If John was going to be with me at my apartment, I wanted her to know it. I was determined to have us behave as much like adults as possible. Ending the separation was a great relief for
all
of us. Being apart and unable to communicate with each other had been terribly painful for both John and me, and it was also ridiculous—having Carl, who would see John on business, come home to me and say, ‘John sends you his love,' and so forth. Carl had thoroughly disapproved of the separation and thought John was being stupid to let his wife lead him around by the nose like that. When John and I became lovers again, everybody was happier for it. My children were overjoyed to have John back. It was as though he had rejoined the family.”

Everyone was happier except Adelaide. Though John had asked her several times for a divorce, and she had refused to grant him one, she responded to the new development with hysteria. Once more she took up her verbal attacks against the Brandts, this time concentrating her comments on her own growing children. To them she depicted Carol Brandt as a brazen harlot, a home wrecker, a whore. She was so successful in her characterization that when John took one of the children to the Brandts' house for dinner, the child was astonished to find not the scarlet creature their mother had depicted but a tall, elegant, handsome woman who wore well-made dresses, who combed her waving and graying hair gently back in a simple style, and who entertained graciously in an antique-filled Fifth Avenue apartment. Their father's mistress, his children were amazed to learn, was a lady.

Adelaide did hold one trump card, a small one perhaps, but one she decided to use. It was the joint-copyright arrangement—worked out by lawyers for tax purposes—under which John received, starting with
Pulham
, 75 per cent of the royalties and Adelaide 25 per cent. She would not, she announced, have her royalties paid or her contracts negotiated by the Brandt agency. Her refusal
presented something of a dilemma, but Carl was quick to see the way out of it. He suggested that John, in his book contracts, deal directly with Little, Brown; the Brandt office could continue to handle magazine serialization and motion-picture rights. The change was a wrench for both men. As Carl Brandt wrote to John, “Even if I suggested this break in our business relationship, it makes me very sad that something which had endured so long should end.… It is my hope, and a sincere one, that you will find this a happier condition of affairs.”

There was nothing more that Adelaide could do.

John began to play the role of Carol's literary mentor, and he was forever suggesting good books for her to read. “I remember one winter when he was snowed in at Kent's Island,” she recalls, “and could only get in and out on snowshoes. He told me that he had this fantasy of the two of us going off to live in some cabin in the north for perhaps six months, completely cut off from everybody and from the outside world. The cabin would be equipped with certain luxuries, of course. John liked comfort. And I remember that among the luxuries he would have brought along were certain books, and I was to read them aloud to him by the Primus stove while he fixed the rabbit snares or jerked the venison, or whatever one does in a cabin in the north woods. He used to refer to me as the literary huckster, and the books were to be read primarily for my profit in addition to my enjoyment. I remember the books were to be primarily Shakespeare, the Bible, an early translation of Tacitus, a good Thucydides, Plato's
Republic
, some Fielding, some Jane Austen, Thoreau, Emerson, but not a single one of what he used to refer to as ‘the goddamned Russians.' All this was intended to be literary therapy for me, to give me something to read other than what he considered the generally lowly output of my clients, including Willie Maugham, and to give me the basis of some solid literary opinions. Needless to say, we never made it to our cabin, but it was a wonderful fantasy.”

While John Marquand was snowed in alone in Newburyport, Adelaide and the children were off in Hobe Sound. In Hobe Sound there was another problem, another embarrassment. The Marquands had had a small house there for several years which John
had christened “Nervana.” Nearby were John's friends the George Mercks, and Philip Barry, the playwright, lived down the road. The president of Du Pont lived on one side of the Marquands, and the president of Morton Salt lived on the other, and little Ferry once asked, “Daddy, are you the poorest man in Hobe Sound?” But the resort—developed by Adelaide's friend from Greenwich, Mrs. Joseph Verner Reed—had a definitely anti-Semitic cast, and there had been an episode involving Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger of New York, the distinguished publisher of the
New York Times
, when the Sulzbergers had been politely told that they would be welcome at Hobe Sound but that they could not bring any guests. In the hubbub that ensued over this, John and Adelaide Marquand drew criticism for staying at Hobe Sound, and the whole business of the Lindberghs and America First came back under attack. John had at first enjoyed Hobe Sound, despite the fact that Adelaide had somewhat whimsically decided to furnish the place with some maids' furniture she had found on sale, and which she thought an amusing touch. But after the Sulzberger incident, John confided to his friend and Hobe Sound neighbor, George Merck, that he could no longer live there comfortably. After all, he pointed out, he had to deal professionally with a number of Jews, including the Sulzbergers, Max Gordon, the producer, and his fellow Book-of-the-Month Club judges, Clifton Fadiman and Amy Loveman, and the Club's head, Harry Scherman. He could not face any of these friends and associates if he continued to keep a house at Hobe Sound.

Chapter Twenty

The Late George Apley
opened on Broadway in November, 1944, with the beetle-browed Leo G. Carroll in the title role, and was an immediate critical and popular success. It would run two years and would earn John Marquand an additional $30,000 a year in play royalties. At that point, at the peak of his powers and career, he was very likely the highest paid novelist in the world.

During the out-of-town tryouts of the play, John had been eager to have the Fiskes—particularly Conney—see it in performance, since Conney had been so important in encouraging, and in some ways even inspiring,
Apley
as a book. Conney admired the play—Gardi still felt somewhat dubious about the whole
Apley
business—but she had several specific suggestions to make. Nobody knew her Boston better than Conney, and when on opening night she spotted a French brocade sofa in the set of what was supposed to represent the Apley's Beacon Hill drawing room she protested that such a stylish piece of furniture would never be placed in a proper Boston house. It was all wrong. The play's producer, Max Gordon,
took her at her word and had the sofa replaced with a more genteelly shabby piece. She also said that she did not feel that the Boston accent of the English-born Mr. Carroll rang true. When this was presented to Carroll, he protested, “I've already been taught fourteen different Boston accents!” But he did spend some time talking with Conney, listening to her speech and studying the broadness of her A's. After catching another performance, somewhat later, Conney reported a marked improvement.

John, of course, would never admit it because of Adelaide, but he had become a writer who could work well with a collaborator and who, at times, even needed the help of collaboration. There was the happy experience with George Kaufman, for instance, and there were the editorial taste and guidance of Conney Fiske. He had begun the habit of using his friends as sounding boards for his ideas, buttonholing them with questions about their careers and lives which he would then employ in his fiction. If a character were to be a bond salesman—as in
Pulham
—John would huddle for hours with Gardi Fiske, learning details of a bond salesman's business day. If the character were to be a banker, John would turn to his banker friend and former Harvard schoolmate, Edward Streeter, of the Fifth Avenue Bank.

Then there were the professional editors with whom John discussed his story ideas and who frequently came to him with ideas of their own. First and most important had been George Horace Lorimer of the
Post
. After Lorimer's death, the editor in New York whom John had come to respect the most was Herbert R. Mayes, who for many years headed two large Hearst magazines,
Cosmopolitan
and
Good Housekeeping
. Mayes, seven years younger than Marquand, came, like George Kaufman, from a background quite alien to John's—New York City-born, Jewish, educated at city public schools, a self-made success. And yet the two men, though they never became close friends, had early established a strong and productive author-editor relationship, and each had great respect for the other's views.

Although John disliked Maugham personally, he found Herb Mayes's working arrangements with him fascinating. John tended to regard Maugham as his literary counterpart in England—Maugham was also vastly successful, a man whose books and short
stories became lucrative plays and movies—and saw him, somewhat warily, as his chief competition in the marketplace of American fiction. John, for example, was always trying to find out how much Mayes paid Maugham for his stories—and Mayes was always careful to keep this figure a secret, since he often paid Maugham as much as $10,000 for a short story, while he paid John Marquand about half this amount. John, having written a story, disliked making revisions. So do all writers, but John was particularly stubborn about it. John and Mayes had disagreed about a story of John's called “Sun, Sea, and Sand”—the same story in which Conney Fiske had taken exception to the dress with the printed cocktail glasses. When the story came to Mayes's desk he sent it back, saying that he thought the story took too long to get under way and that he thought the name of the leading character, Epsom Felch, was absurd. He asked John to change it, but John refused. Mayes then told John about the trouble he had had with a Somerset Maugham story called “A Woman of Fifty.” Mayes had told Maugham that he would not accept the story unless Maugham eliminated a long section that did not seem to belong, and after a certain amount of grumbling Maugham made the requested cut. John was astonished at this.
Why
, he wanted to know, would Maugham—a man of such stature—agree to this? Herb Mayes shrugged and said that he supposed Maugham needed the money. John shook his head and said, “I could believe that about almost any writer other than Maugham.” Yet he still would not cut “Sun, Sea, and Sand.”