The Late John Marquand (28 page)

The two men worked on John's manuscript until two o'clock in the following morning, and Streeter gave John over three hundred specific suggestions. Rather typically, Streeter recalls, John did not ever really thank him for what he had done. Streeter had not expected payment for the work he had done for his friend and would not have accepted it if John had offered it. But when
Point of No Return
was published—two years later—Streeter remembers, “This is a mean-spirited thought, but he never even sent me a copy of the book.”

But John could be generous in a perhaps more meaningful way. Edward Streeter had been working on a book called
Father of the Bride
, and John offered to read that manuscript. The next day—he was an extremely fast reader—John said, “I'm only one voice in five at the Book-of-the-Month Club, but I'll back this book if you can put it in shape in forty-eight hours.” Streeter telephoned Cass Canfield, his editor at Harper, the book was typed within the required time for the meeting, and, with John's backing,
Father of the Bride
became the Club's dual selection, along with Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
.

There were personal difficulties, meanwhile, in John's life that were slowing up production of
Point of No Return
. Early in 1948, John's Aunt Greta—Margaret Marquand Hale Oakman—died. (“Suppose … she dies,” Jim Calder had suggested of Cousin Clothilde, the bulwark of Wickford Point.) She had owned a 40 per cent undivided interest in the houses and property of Curzon's Mill, and in her will this property was bequeathed to her six children by Herbert Dudley Hale and their half sister, Renée, her daughter by John Oakman. John Marquand had already inherited another 40 per cent interest, and his aging father, Phil Marquand, owned the remaining 20 per cent. John, meanwhile, had been appointed his father's sole conservator, which gave him control of 60 per cent of the Curzon's Mill property.

Adelaide, with her passion for houses, had long had her eye on Curzon's Mill. In particular, she coveted the lovely old Yellow House, the best house on the property—John once commented that every woman he had ever known had wanted to own the Yellow House
—but over the years Adelaide had begun to have grandiose plans that involved the entire property, including the Red Brick House and the Mill. All three buildings had become even more run down than they had been in John's youth, and Adelaide envisioned remodeling and restoring them completely. John, too, had a deep sentimental attachment to Curzon's Mill and its houses, and soon after his Aunt Greta's death he approached his Hale cousins with a proposition: Since, in a situation of property division such as this one, it was impossible to say which 60 per cent was in John's hands and which 40 per cent belonged to the Hales, John offered to buy out the Hales' share of the estate. His offering price was a fair one—$21,500, along with a certain amount of land across the road from the houses. The entire Curzon's Mill property had been appraised at $33,000, so John was offering two thirds for a two-fifths share.

The Hales politely but firmly declined the offer. At least one Hale already lived at Curzon's Mill and looked on it as her home. Her brothers and sister, along with their wives and children, were always coming and going and regarded the place as their summer residence. Nearly ten years had passed since the publication of
Wickford Point
, but the Hales had not forgotten it, and relations between John and the Hales had remained cool. For this reason, John had turned down a number of offers from motion picture companies to produce
Wickford Point
as a film, not wanting to open up the whole family controversy all over again. The Hales resented John and Adelaide's way of appearing at Curzon's Mill and cavalierly carrying off pictures and pieces of furniture for the Marquands' Kent's Island house, and the Hales were also well aware that John and his lawyers had been pressing their mother, long before her death, to make a settlement with John on her share of the property. Certain of the Hales even suggested that John's legal pestering had shortened their mother's life, though this was probably an exaggeration. Aunt Greta was a doughty Yankee and a fair match for John Marquand, even when she was old and ill. In a letter to “Dear Aunt Greta” written in March of the previous year, John had pleaded for the property, saying, “I have lived on it, off and on, since I was two years old, and I believe I have been there for a longer period than any of your own children. Furthermore, I feel a deep sense of personal responsibility regarding the future of the
place as Aunt Bessie and Aunt Mollie both asked me, in the last years of their lives, to take care of it and not let it go to pieces, as it is in the process of doing now.”

John went on to talk about the happiness it would give to his old father, who was Aunt Greta's brother, to live on the old family place knowing that it was all, once again, in a Marquand's hands. He offered Aunt Greta the Mill as a residence—he would completely refurbish it for her—for the rest of her life, and enough land for her heirs to build a new house of their own, in return for her share. In her no-nonsense reply to John—which she never got to mail before she died—Aunt Greta said, “Here is a letter to you. Now why don't you stop all this damn law stuff and just take the Mill as a share of your share and use it for whatever purpose you can use it and do anything you want to do about making it more attractive for you and later on if you still want to arrange things differently, take the matter up with whoever I leave my share of the place to.” John and Adelaide had also gone through all the houses at Curzon's Mill, placing tags marked “J.P.M.” on various pieces that John considered his. The tags soon fell off, but nonetheless this sort of behavior from their celebrity cousin quite annoyed the Hales.

The Hales rejected John's offer through their lawyer, Thomas Shaw Hale, another cousin, of the New York law firm of Hale, Grant, Myerson, O'Brien & McCormick. There followed several long talks between Thomas Shaw Hale and John, during which John increased the size of his offer. Still the Hales were adamant. Legally, the term “undivided interest” means that the people who own a piece of property must agree on its use; otherwise, it must be turned over to the courts, who will then rule how the property should be divided, or whether it should be sold and the proceeds of the sale divided proportionately among the owners. In a case such as this one, the judge usually finds it simpler to rule that the property be sold, rather than attempt to divide it physically, and the Hales were aware of this. They also knew that if the property were sold, John, since he outweighed them financially, would buy it. So Thomas Hale approached John with an offer. John could have both the Yellow House and the Mill, and the Hales could keep the Red Brick House and a parcel of land across the road. John agreed to this but said that he would have to ask Adelaide about it.

The next day, Thomas Hale had a telephone call from Adelaide Marquand, who wished to see him. When Hale got to the apartment, Adelaide explained that she would agree to no arrangement that gave the Hales anything but money. She increased the offer to $40,000. She explained that she felt strongly that Curzon's Mill had to be treated as an entity. If it were going to be restored, it made no sense to restore it in bits and pieces; it had to be restored in its entirety. During the course of the conversation, Thomas Hale got the distinct impression that Adelaide didn't think much of the Hales as neighbors, that she regarded them as eccentric nuisances and would really prefer to get them off the property altogether. Faced with this, there was nothing for the Hales to do but let the matter go to court and hope that the judge might be prevailed upon to divide the property, even though to do so would be highly unusual since most pieces of property cannot really be divided.

During the summer weeks that followed, as word got out that the famous novelist had become involved in an intrafamily legal battle, with lawyers on both sides furiously preparing briefs, the press descended.
Life
magazine sent reporters and photographers to Newburyport, and Murray Davis of the
New York World-Telegram
began gathering material for a series of dispatches centered on the fascinating fact that here, at last, were characters from a popular novel stepping out into real life. Soon readers were devouring John's and Aunt Greta's exchange of letters throughout the entire Scripps-Howard chain. Thomas Hale had, in his youth, worked for a while as a newspaper reporter, and he offered his cousin clients a piece of advice: Be nice to the press. The Hales decided to be more than nice; they decided to be utterly charming.

“After lampooning us as characters in his book he now wants to boot us out,” declared Robert B. Hale to one reporter. “He is using the proceeds of ‘Wickford Point,' indirectly perhaps, to put us out as characters. We are going to ask John if he isn't using the proceeds of the book to kick out his cousins. We spent all our childhood summers at the Mill—John and the rest of us. And we've always liked John. We still do. He has as much right there now as we have. He has relatives buried up on the hill. We have a right to be there too. We have relatives buried up on the same hill. When he offered money I countered with an offer to take one of the houses. His
answer to that was just to offer more money. We judge everything on the heart, John on the dollar. If we thought of it from a financial standpoint we'd take his offer, for it was much more than our share was worth. But we weren't thinking of that. We were thinking of the place. It is beautiful beyond description. You get a feeling of it in the novel. John wrote it at the mill.”

The Hales proved to be a newspaper interviewer's dream. As for
Wickford Point
, Robert Hale went on, “John combined some of us with other people he knew, but we were pretty easily identified. I'm Sidney in the novel—a bad character. Mother was a pretty clear picture, although done a little bit on the dirty side. We thought about a suit, but only casually, for we liked John. We still like John. Mother held the place together. She was fond of John and he was fond of her, but even before she died John began trying to get the property. She wanted us all to have it. Now she's gone. Her passing is what brought this action.” Robert Hale pleaded his case to the delighted reporter. “We'll take any one of the buildings—we just want a foothold,” he said. “If mother had died last we'd have given John a house. Now he has us absolutely. If he can throw the place up for auction he has the money to buy it in. We can't compete with him. We want it because it has been a part of us for so long. And when you get old you want to go back to the beginning. You want security—the security that we have in the mill. The family has always lived there. The weddings are always there. The family has always gone back there to die—and be buried on the hill.”

Next H. Dudley Hale, Robert Hale's brother, came forth with a lengthy interview. “We all dislike the idea staring us in the face of having our old home shot out from under us by force. It seems wrong that, because of death, nineteen people may have no roof over their heads while fate, through wills, can give that property to someone who already is land poor.” Dudley Hale announced that he was Harry Brill, the social climber in
Wickford Point
. “I'd say I was Harry, physically,” Mr. Hale explained, “but heaven knows I was no social leader at Harvard.”

Laura Hale, one of Robert and Dudley's two sisters, who had married a man named Patterson Hale (no relation), revealed that she was the novel's Mary Brill, poor Mary who always loses her men to beautiful Bella. “John is fond of my husband, Pat,” Laura
Hale said. “But I'm afraid this legal thing will end everything. John says this will not make any difference, that he'll still drop by and see us. I don't think so, and I told him that.”

“I'm Bella the Bitch,” announced Renée Oakman Bradbury, then thirty-seven and at that point four times married and living in Long Island, who allowed herself to be photographed in a low-cut dress cuddling three of her large collection of dogs and other pets, which included five birds, among them a talking blue jay. “He really talks,” she explained, speaking in a style very similar to that which Marquand had given Bella in the book. “He imitates things. He's a very, very strange bird. He fell out of a nest, you see. We took care of him. But that Bella business—I even named my little Crosley Bella the Bitch. It burned up about a month ago right in front of the gas station. The talk at Curzon's Mill is bad enough, but it is nothing compared to what happens around here. Nothing good seems ever to happen!” Of John's lawsuit, Renée said, “I see no reason why John should have the whole hog. There's no reason why he should have the entire family place. I don't know why he must be so possessive. We've always been fond of John and he liked us. He was always fond of me. Whenever it was necessary for someone to go down to his place at Kent's Island to bring back some old family portrait that he had stolen out of the mill, it was always little old Renée who had to do it. But honestly, I didn't like his making Mother's last days so difficult, trying to get the place, and I told him so. Even so, he has always been very fond of me. I went to Kent's Island and asked him to leave my mother alone, that she didn't want to divide up the place or sell it to him. It was rather hopeless, though.” As the date of the trial approached, Renée announced to the press, “I'll be there! I promised Greta I'd fight to the last ditch to keep our part of the place, for that was what she wanted. John should have his share and we should have ours. I'm going to get a black hat for the hearing.”

On and on the Hales talked, with the press loving and recording every word they said. John and Adelaide and the three children, meanwhile, had disappeared to their house, or rather houses, in Aspen. John, when reached there by telephone, behaved somewhat oddly. He had once worked as a newspaper reporter, just as had Thomas Hale, and should have known, too, the value of establishing
good press relations. But when the reporter asked him his feelings in the case, he replied somewhat stiffly and stuffily, “I am not accustomed to try legal cases in newspapers.” That was his only quote. Beyond that, he had no comment.