The Late John Marquand (15 page)

But perhaps the greatest difficulty that pervaded John's marriage
to Adelaide from the beginning was Adelaide's feeling that she could be some sort of assistant to her husband in his work. She saw how Carol Brandt—or any other crack secretary—could help John by taking down the novels, how Carl Brandt could help him cut and edit them, and how Conney Fiske could serve him as a consultant in subtler matters of taste and themes. It wasn't that Adelaide was jealous of these other people's positions in her husband's creative life, exactly, but she could not see why she herself couldn't also be given some sort of supporting role. She was, after all, artistic, and had done some writing. And so she saw no reason why she should not be permitted to go into his manuscripts, read them, and then come forth with proposed changes and revisions, substitutions and deletions. These efforts of Adelaide's to improve her husband's output were particularly galling to the man whose bailiwick this had long been, Mr. Alfred McIntyre, John's editor at Little, Brown. McIntyre, a shy and timid-seeming little man until he had consumed his customary six martinis for lunch—at which point he became brilliant and quite extroverted, to say the least—had worked successfully with John for a number of years. John had the highest respect for McIntyre, and for his wife, Helen, who worked with him as sort of a team. (McIntyre's literary assessments were highly personal and typically idiosyncratic. “If a story can make me cry after four Scotches,” he used to declare, “it's good.”) McIntyre complained bitterly to John about Adelaide's interfering efforts, but when John tried to dissuade her from them she protested, “But I want to feel a part of your work, John!” At last a solution was proposed to Adelaide: She could be useful as a sort of copy editor—in other words, she would be in charge of correcting spelling errors, punctuation, syntax, and the like. Adelaide agreed to this. But it was next to impossible for Adelaide Hooker Marquand—a woman not accustomed to confinement—to restrict herself to these areas alone.

In the meantime, two of John's best and oldest friends, Gardi Fiske and Charley Codman, from the days in Battery A, had been planning something for him that would mean more to him, perhaps, than anything that had thus far happened to him in his life—more than his financial and critical and popular success, more than the Pulitzer Prize, more than being married to John D.
Rockefeller III's sister-in-law. Quietly but firmly the two men had been promoting John's membership in the Somerset Club, Gardi as proposer, Charley as seconder. In the spring of 1938 they were successful, and John received a notice that he had been accepted into the most exclusive club in the most exclusive city in the country. He had made it. Upper-class Boston had accepted him at last. He had made it, furthermore,
in spite
of having written
The Late George Apley
, which many of the Boston Old Guard would always resent. He could now go to the elegant old club on Beacon Hill, sit in its deeply buttoned black leather chairs, sip its famous sweet martinis, nibble on its special muffins called corn dodgers—not as a guest, but as a member.

He was overwhelmed with the news. Surely, he said, the club's and Boston's standards must be slipping badly. “However,” he wrote to Gardi Fiske, “this in no way dims my gratitude for the trouble you have taken in accomplishing a feat which was almost gargantuan.” John Marquand, at the time, was forty-four years old.

On one of his early visits to his new club, John Marquand commented to an elderly member that he had heard that old Mr. Sears—whose town residence the gray brick mansion that houses the club had originally been—had required his daughters, when he received them in the drawing room, to walk backward from Mr. Sears' presence when it was time for them to depart. The older member's comment was, “Times have changed since then.”

Chapter Thirteen

John Oakman (the pleasantly ne'er-do-well “artist” from Springfield who never painted much of anything, who had married John's Aunt Greta, and who became John's secret drinking companion during his teens at Curzon's Mill) gave his wife a daughter, born in 1911, whom they named Renée. Both Oakmans were Francophiles. “My father decided to name me either for a French queen or a prostitute,” Renée Oakman used to explain. It is also likely that she was conceived in Paris; the Oakmans used somewhat coyly to refer to her, as a child, as “our little French baby.” Renée, though not technically a Hale, joined the small band of Hale cousins who were always dropping in and out of the various houses at Curzon's Mill, which they considered home.

When John was a young man in the 1920s, just beginning to get himself launched as a writer of popular fiction, Renée Oakman was a budding adolescent—and a budding beauty, at that. More than her name seemed alien in a family where women had always straightforwardly been called Margaret, Laura, Elizabeth, and Mary.
The Hales had never been much on looks, being of stolid and plain-faced Yankee stock—the Hale men almost Lincolnesque—and so Renée, as a presence, struck an odd and somewhat disturbing note in the family. She was almost dismayingly beautiful, with fine, soft blonde hair and lavender eyes. A newspaper reporter once described her as “orchidaceous,” and she acquired, by the time she entered her earliest teens, a habit of making men fall in love with her. Like most beauties, she early became aware of what she possessed and learned from the beginning to make the fullest use of it. Renée was, at the same time, like her Hale half brothers and sisters, to say nothing of her cousins and aunts, something of an eccentric, with a fey wit, a mercurial temperament, and some unlikely notions. She believed, for example, that she could communicate with wild animals. All this, of course, merely added to her strange allure.

There was no question that John Marquand was captivated by—even, perhaps, in a way in love with—this eighteen-years-younger first cousin, this exotically gorgeous sport that had appeared in an otherwise homely family. There was even a period when John considered giving Renée an elaborate coming-out party for her eighteenth birthday—a lovely dream of giving the loveliest party for the loveliest girl, the land of party John had never been invited to during the years at Harvard. He would turn Renée into one of his debutante heroines. In fact, Renée even got him to promise to give her such a party, though it was a promise he never managed to keep. John eventually soured on Renée somewhat or, rather, realized how flirtatious and fickle she was. Once, at a Newburyport party, when Renée was nineteen going on twenty, she disappeared with the young son of Dana Atchley, John's doctor. They were gone for hours. The boy was only thirteen. Also, by that time, Renée Oakman had settled upon a more practical career than that of a debutante. She had gone to New York and had quickly been signed up by John Robert Powers, who ran what was then one of the largest modeling agencies in the country.

Although
Wickford Point
, the novel that John began working on soon after his marriage to Adelaide, carried the customary disclaimer, “All the incidents in this novel are entirely fictitious, and no reference is intended to any actual person, living or dead,” it was quite clear, once the novel was published, that the character
of Bella Brill bore more than a glancing resemblance to Renée Oakman and that other members of the fictional Brill family could find awfully close counterparts among the real-life Hales. Wickford Point in the novel, in fact, sounded in its description exactly like Curzon's Mill, and a number of people wondered why John had bothered to change the name of the river from the Artichoke to the Wickford.

The Hales, furthermore, saw themselves portrayed as a family of barmy nitwits, all unemployed and probably unemployable. In
Wickford Point
, Greta Hale Oakman recognized herself in the character of Cousin Clothilde, a lovable if daft creature who spends her mornings in bed summoning members of her family to her side for long and aimless conversations, smoking their cigarettes, and borrowing their money whenever she can. Then there was the character of Sid Brill, perennial sufferer from stomach pains and tinkerer with useless inventions, who, when his car runs out of gasoline, siphons some out of a cousin's automobile, always thoughtfully careful to leave “a little bit” in the tank, at least enough to get it to the service station. There was, the Hales decided, more than a little of Robert Hale in this character. Robert Hale's brother, Dudley, reminded several people of Harry Brill in the novel, the Harvard snob who was always sure that his family connections plus the influential people he knew would get him an address on Easy Street without any effort on his part, and who regularly attended parties to which he had not been invited on the theory that not to invite Harry Brill must have been merely a careless oversight on the part of his hostess. Cousin Mary Brill in the novel—who relentlessly chases every man she meets, only to lose him in the end to her beautiful sister Bella, “Bella the Bitch”—seemed perilously close to the real-life Laura Hale, half sister of the beautiful Renée Oakman. Great-Aunt Sarah in the book, dotty and living in the past, who insists on reading aloud from Pepys's
Diary
night after night, cannot have been based on other than John's Great-Aunt Mary Curzon. Cousin Clothilde's second husband, meanwhile, a shiftless and unsuccessful muralist named Archie Wright who never quite gets the commissions he wants, sounds not unlike Aunt Greta Hale's second husband, John Oakman. And the specter who looms over the entire Brill family in the novel, John Brill, the father of Cousin
Clothilde's first husband, is a minor nineteenth-century pastoral poet whom the family takes very seriously and refers to as “the Wickford Sage.” Surely John Marquand cannot have meant this character as anything but a cruel parody of Edward Everett Hale, from whom all the Hales descended and whom all the Hales did indeed take very seriously.

John Marquand immediately and categorically denied that there was any kinship whatever between the Brills of his novel and the Hales, his cousins, and his denials may have been particularly vociferous because, in the first few months after
Wickford Point
was published in 1938, there were mutterings from certain Hale quarters about lawsuits for libel and invasion of privacy. Though these died down as the Hales—probably wisely—decided that the publicity attending a legal action would only focus more attention on them and on John's book, John continued to claim that the book was “at least eighty per cent a figment of imagination,” and to profess amazement that Wickford Point could be construed to bear “any close resemblance to real estate in Newburyport, Massachusetts.” He admitted, with writing
The Late George Apley
, that “For almost the first time in my life I had written about something that I thoroughly understood. I had translated something of myself and my own experience into
The Late George Apley
, and I had achieved through my experience an unforeseen depth and reality.” And he confessed that
Wickford Point
was an attempt to further plumb his own experience, past, and territory he knew well But as for the characters in the book, he wrote—in a preface to a later edition—“When someone utters the trite remark that truth is stranger than fiction, he might as well be saying that truth always is very awkward in the fictitious world. A fictional character, for example, is always a combination of observed traits drawn from an indeterminate number of people. I doubt whether any individual of one's acquaintance, no matter how vivid his behavior, could effectively stand alone in print.”

All this, of course, cut very little ice with the Hales. But the fact was—and this was at the heart of the trouble—that John was right. It would indeed have been awkward to have portrayed the Hales as “truth.” So he had taken the Hales' skeletal characteristics and distorted them, twisted them, heightened them, and exaggerated
them. He had fictionalized the Hales, which is to say falsified them, in order to turn them into creatures of comedy. He had intended the comedy to be gentle enough, but the Hales found it a decidedly unpleasant experience to see themselves projected into this new dimension in which they saw certain facts about themselves, and yet not really.

John had worked harder on
Wickford Point
than on
The Late George Apley
. He was determined to prove, to readers as well as critics, that he was now a writer of “serious” fiction—fiction that made significant social comment—and not just
Post
and
Journal
potboilers. He was aware that his second “serious” work would be judged much more harshly, by much more meticulous standards, than his first, and that book reviewers—not always an overly generous lot—would be waiting eagerly for the follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize Novel to be an artistic disaster, for Marquand to prove himself a “one-book author.” John wanted
Wickford Point
to be accurate in every detail, and he fussed endlessly over the manuscript—not only polishing scenes and dialogue but making certain that not the tiniest fact or social nuance could be labeled as false or incorrect.

He was worried, for instance, that some of his readers might feel it was wrong to have the Brills eat salmon in August; perhaps it should have been shad. When one entered an ocean liner, he asked Alfred McIntyre at Little, Brown, did not one customarily come off the gangplank onto the promenade deck? From there, did one go up, or down, to B Deck? Marquand spent a great deal of time worrying about the word “pants” in connection with Bella Brill. In a scene in which Bella skips into an automobile, her mother notices that she is not wearing pants. Alfred McIntyre wondered whether the word shouldn't be “panties.” John, however, having surveyed his women friends, was convinced that women of 1937 thought of these garments as
pants
, not panties.

He worried for fear his Brill characters called each other “darling” too much, and he asked McIntyre to have his staff recheck the manuscript for repetitions of the word. He wondered whether the character of Pat Leighton—the love interest of the narrator, Jim Calder, in the novel—was perhaps awkwardly or artificially introduced. Pat Leighton, a New York career girl who is an early likeness of the
celebrated Marvin Myles of
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
, does not come on stage until fairly late in the narrative, and so, to introduce her and establish her as a character in the story, Marquand had Jim Calder receive a letter from Pat Leighton—a letter that draws comment from Cousin Clothilde. Marquand feared that the letter was an obvious plot device. (It was, but not one that most readers would notice.)