The Late John Marquand (21 page)

Early in 1941, the director King Vidor purchased
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and invited John to come to Hollywood to work on the motion picture script. John accepted without a moment's hesitation; Hollywood would give him a chance to escape the growing disorder of his domestic life. Before starting the film, Vidor wanted to see Boston, and so he came east and Vidor and John went up to Boston, where John gave the director a full day's tour of his beloved city. They visited old houses along the Charles River and on Beacon Hill, and John took Vidor to lunch at the Somerset Club, where Harry Pulham would have lunched, and treated him to the club's sweet martinis and the third-floor sign reading, “This watercloset for emergency use only; other water-closets available on the second floor.” John showed Vidor the house in Louisburg Square where the Pulhams might have lived and pointed out such Bostonian eccentricities as the quaint phraseology of the public notices, including a sign, at the entrance to an alleyway on the Hill, which to this day reads: PRIVATE WAY. PERSONS CAUTIONED NOT TO TRAVEL THEREON. He took
Vidor to the Boston Athenaeum, the venerable private library at 10½ Beacon, where share-owning members could, until quite recently, enjoy tea or bouillon with three crackers for three cents; with three crackers and cheese, the price was five cents; with one plain cracker and one sweet, three cents; with one plain and cheese and one sweet, four cents; with extra sweet crackers a penny apiece, and extra plain crackers two for a penny. He also told Vidor that the Athenaeum frowned on popular magazines other than the
Atlantic Monthly
, except, a number of years earner, when a discreet sign had been posted that read, “Copies of
Cosmopolitan
are available for the duration of the Coolidge articles.” Another notice in the reading room advised: “Window sashes should not be raised or lowered without prior consultation with the other members.” At the Athenaeum, John introduced Vidor to its imposingly scholarly-looking librarian, Mr. Walter Muir Whitehill (married to a Coolidge) who always liked to remind John of an error he had spotted in
The Late George Apley
. John had had Apley, in a letter to his children written in 1912, point out that an Apley family portrait hung in the Athenaeum's Oval Room. “Highly amusing,” Mr. Whitehill had commented, “but I must point out that this room was not built until 1913.” He had added hastily, “I yield to no man in my appreciation of the book as satire.” In the process of their Boston day, King Vidor and John Marquand became good friends.

Hollywood enthralled him. It was, among other things, so utterly different from Boston. Immediately upon checking into the Beverly Hills Hotel, John realized that his tweedy-seedy Boston-
cum
-London tailoring was all wrong for the film colony, and his first request to Vidor was to get him to a clothing store where he could outfit himself more in the manner of the natives. That done, he went to work on the film script with relish. He was given a large office and a blonde secretary, and he soon found himself falling in love with Hollywood. He was charmed by Hollywood's glittering nuttiness, by the fact that all the living rooms had bars, that life there was as different from Boston as chiffon from sackcloth. He dined out with Dolores Del Rio and Rosalind Russell and Charles Chaplin. At one party, Chaplin spent most of the evening doing hilarious imitations of such people as the King of Denmark and the Lord Chief Justice of the Old Bailey (later John would perfect his
own hilarious imitation of Chaplin imitating the King of Denmark and the Lord Chief Justice.) There were meetings and more dinners with Robert Young and Hedy Lamarr, the film's two stars.

John loved the life on the M-G-M lot and was full of eager questions about film-making. It amused him that a great many of the people involved in the film had never read his book and almost certainly never would. At one story conference, copies of the
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
script was passed around the table, and one bemused casting director, after studying the title, asked, “Is this a story about an over-aged destroyer?” John roared with laughter and said, “As a matter of fact, that's not a bad description of it.”

Part way through the filming of
Pulham
, King Vidor was called to take over the direction of
The Yearling
, whose director had just quit. John, during the suspension of work on
Pulham
, made himself happily at home in Hollywood. He trotted around in Vidor's wake, collecting bits of film-making lore. One of the problems of
The Yearling
is that the title “character” is a fawn, and, since fawns only appear at a certain season of the year, production of the movie had to keep stopping to wait for a new fawn to be born who would match the fawns used in previous shots. This sort of detail John relished. He also loved a frantic call that came through to Vidor from the art director of the film, who said, “We've got thirty thousand cans of growing corn! What'll we do?” Vidor replied, “Water it.” John had admired the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings novel (which had won the Pulitzer Prize the year following
Apley
), and John one day went with Vidor to the screening room to watch tests that had been made for the young boy who would play the child lead in the movie. A first test was shown, and John was asked what he thought. He announced that he thought the child was entirely “too Hollywood,” and this got him off on a long harangue about what was wrong with Hollywood films. A second test was screened, and John said, “No comment.” Then a third test was shown, and John leapt to his feet and cried, “That's the one! That boy is absolutely perfect for the part.” There was a pause, and then an assistant director said politely, “Mr. Marquand, they're all three the same boy.”

For a few days' holiday, John suggested that Vidor and his wife join the Marquands for some trout fishing on the Rogue River in Oregon, where Adelaide had discovered a very much out-of-the-way
house. As was her wont, she had bought it. One had to go
up
the rapids to get to it, and the cabin itself was a refreshingly primitive one where you had to fill a basin from an outside spigot to wash your hands, and where there was an outdoor shower. An Indian guide was hired to carry the Marquand party's luggage to this remote spot, and it amused Marquand and Vidor to learn that the Indian suffered from an ulcer, the traditional “Broadway stomach.” John loved trout fishing, but he and Vidor did not have much luck. One day, coming home with nothing at all in their creels, the two men met another fisherman with a long string of shiny trout. Marquand and Vidor made a deal to buy half the other man's catch so that they might not be disgraced in front of their wives. But their deception did not work. The two women, it seemed, had watched the entire transaction through field glasses from the cabin above. It was on this trip that John and King Vidor discovered that they were both, semisecretly, Sunday painters. John confessed that he kept his paintings hidden away in a bottom dresser drawer. Back in Hollywood, he bought Vidor a handsome set of oils and gave him the advice, “Always put in the background first.”

Vidor paid another visit to the Marquands that was less pleasant. He went to spend a few days at their Aspen house, or houses, and today he recalls only “the terrible sense of turmoil and confusion and dissension” that existed there, the quarrels and the silences and the tensions when John locked himself in one of the houses in order to be alone. He had bitterly explained to Vidor that, back in New York, he had to rent a hotel room in which to work. The atmosphere at home was such that it was impossible to work there.

Late in 1941, work on the
Pulham
film was finished, and there was excited talk of a world premiere in Boston. Marquand, after seeing the final cut, was somewhat disappointed in it and began forewarning friends that he didn't consider it much good and that he had not had much to do with it other than write some of the dialogue. Vidor was much more optimistic about the film, and about John as a screen writer. He had enjoyed working with him so much that he suggested that there might be other projects they could undertake together. There was, for example, a story by Clare Boothe Luce called
Pilot's Wife
. A screen writer was needed. Would John be interested? John came to Carol Brandt with a proposal.
She was, after all, herself in the movie business. He had enjoyed Hollywood and the whole style of California life. What, he asked her, if they both moved permanently to the West Coast? They could buy a house in Beverly Hills or in one of the canyons above Sunset Boulevard. He urged this on her as a possible solution to the marital difficulties they were both enduring.

It was during one of Carl's bad periods of drinking, and Carol was at least briefly tempted, though not to the extent that she felt she should mention it to Carl. “It might have been a way to bridge the situation until John could get a divorce,” Carol says, “and we toyed with the idea. We toyed with it for quite a while.” But would Adelaide, who had refused him a divorce for so long, give him one now? If John had moved to California with Carol Brandt, that might have forced her hand. But would John P. Marquand, the distinguished novelist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, member of the Somerset and Tavern Clubs of Boston, the Century and Knickerbocker Clubs of New York, a listee in the
Social Register
, have really gone to California to live with a woman not his wife—even in the enlightened air of Beverly Hills?

And Carol, though she loved John, knew that he would never be happy anywhere very far from Boston. No matter where he went, he always went back there. Carol herself was a New York creature, just as Marvin Myles was. Carol knew that she could not endure in Hollywood, just as Marvin Myles had known that she could not have possibly endured in Boston. Carol had seen another side of Hollywood that John had been a bit too dazzled to see, just as Marvin had seen a side of Boston that Henry Pulham had been too close to recognize.

And so “going to live in California” became a kind of charming fantasy, a fiction that diverted and amused them both, and distracted them from the reality and certain anguish of their personal situations. They would chat about it for hours, imagining what it would be like, and when, and how soon, and wherever. Neither of them, Carol now feels, really believed that it would ever happen. “Deep down, I always knew that I could never leave Carl, and Carl knew it, and I'm sure John knew it too,” she says. Still, for a moment at least, it was perhaps a possibility, another possibility that was lost.

Chapter Seventeen

The dichotomous nature of his literary output worried John more than most people realized. He was, after all, turning out two different kinds of fiction, and he sometimes wondered if the two were having the effect of canceling each other out. It was not quite as simple as Conney Fiske had made it seem in talking about “serious” novels as opposed to those that were not serious. Both varieties of book took equal time and attention and effort and had to be undertaken with equal seriousness. It was not a case of one kind of writing being easier for him to do than the other. He did seem to be writing for two different kinds of reading audiences, but even that was becoming very difficult to gauge. It was not just his spy and detective novels that were being serialized in the big magazines; his so-called “quality” novels were also being run in places like the
Saturday Evening Post
, though in cut or otherwise speeded-up versions. So the interrelated questions continued to plague him: Did serialization of novels like
Wickford Point
and
Pulham
help him lose serious readers, and did the fact that his Mr.
Moto stories appeared in the same periodicals damage him with critics? It was certainly true that those critics whom John sneeringly characterized as “the deep thinkers,” who wrote for the highbrow literary quarterlies, had very little that was kind to say about John P. Marquand, whom they tended to regard as a successful hack. “Don't take yourself too seriously, and don't worry too much about your art,” he would say to beginning novelists who sought him out for encouragement or advice. “Write the way you feel and what you want to write. Writing is the loneliest occupation in the world because it is entirely up to you.” But these calm sentiments were only part of his façade. He took himself quite seriously, and he worried a great deal about his art.

These questions were very much on his mind during the early months of World War II because he had, after publishing
Pulham
, turned to another Mr. Moto novel. It was an idea that automatically had a certain amount of box-office appeal. Mr. Moto was a Japanese. America was now at war with the Empire of Japan. If John Marquand involved Moto in a yarn concerning Germans, Japanese Intelligence, stolen aircraft parts, and the American Navy, in which Moto was outwitted in the end, both the story and the character immediately became more exciting. John thought the idea had merit, but there were difficulties with Adelaide. Adelaide had very little use for Mr. Moto in any of his incarnations, and said so. She considered John's return to Mr. Moto a regression, and said that also. She was more ambitious for her husband. And so now, for John, there was no longer the problem of writing “something nice” for Uncle Ellery Sedgwick, but instead the more galling one of having to write something nice for Adelaide, whose name appeared next to his own as joint copyright holder of his books.

Carl Brandt, in the meantime, had been urging John to write another Mr. Moto. There was always a ready market for Mr. Moto books, and Carl knew how much John enjoyed doing them. Plotting a spy-detective story was a thing John liked to do almost as a form of mental exercise. Adelaide had no appreciation of this, and also tended to take a disparaging view of Carl Brandt's efforts as her husband's agent. Perhaps she regarded Carl as a bit too money-grubbing. In any case, in her letters to Alfred McIntyre, Adelaide
had begun inserting small snide references to the Brandts, as well as to Bernice Baumgarten.