The Late John Marquand (33 page)

But John replied that he had revised his article as much as he intended.

Holiday
now returned to its corner, and all was quiet for several months until the publication date for the article approached. Once again, using Carl Brandt as referee—Sions and Marquand never met, never communicated directly with one another—Harry Sions made a last-ditch attempt to get the kind of story he wanted. In a long teletyped message to Carl from his Philadelphia office, Sions explained his objections. The article, for one thing, was too brief. Sions had wanted at least 7,500 words, “the usual length for our major articles,” but John had given him only about 5,000 words. But, said Sions's teletype:

THE CHIEF TROUBLE WITH THE PIECE IS THAT IT SEEMS TO BE WRITTEN OFF THE TOP OF MARQUAND'S HEAD, THAT IT LACKS DEPTH AND PERSPECTIVE.… WHAT WE WANT IS MORE DEPTH AND INTERPRETATION … MATERIAL ON THE CLUBS, LIKE THE ATHENAEUM, THE FAMOUS LIBRARY WHERE YOU CAN ONLY TAKE OUT A BOOK IF YOU ARE A SHAREHOLDER, AND THE SHARES—HANDED DOWN FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION—ARE SOMETIMES SOLD ON MARKET, LATEST PRICE $235 A SHARE. WHAT DO THEY SAY, HOW DO THESE PEOPLE LIVE? HOW HAVE THEY DEVELOPED THE REAL CHARACTER OF BOSTON, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME TODAY, AS MARQUAND POINTS OUT, AS IT WAS IN REVOLUTIONARY TIMES, IN SPITE OF THE IRISH, THE ITALIANS, AND OTHERS WHO HAVE NUMERICALLY DISPLACED THE BRAHMINS. THAT'S THE REAL STORY OF BOSTON AND WE FEEL IT'S THE STORY OF BOSTON THAT MARQUAND REALLY SHOULD TELL AND KNOWS
.

THE PIECE WE HAVE NOW IS A GOOD PIECE BUT HARDLY A DISTINGUISHED ONE, AND FRANKLY A SOMEWHAT LAZY ONE. WE KNOW THAT MARQUAND CAN WRITE A GREAT BOSTON PIECE, EQUAL TO WHITE ON NEW YORK AND FAULKNER ON MISSISSIPPI, IF HE WILL TAKE TIME TO THINK IT OUT AND DO SOME MORE REAL DIGGING
.

As gently as he could, Carl Brandt sifted these somewhat harsh comments through his own intelligence and instincts as an agent and passed a filtered version along to John, saying, “If you feel you cannot do more to make it better in your eyes, then that is that. Quite sincerely and although diffidently, they felt they would be lacking in editorial acumen and good faith to you and to your and their public if they took the easier course and did not put to you their conversation.… Will you give it thought? I have a great desire to have the whole profession talk about ‘Boston' as they do about ‘New York' and ‘Mississippi.'”

But John, perhaps feeling that he had earned the right to be a little lazy, would have no more to do with it, and a few weeks later Harry Sions wrote to Carl to say, “You have done everything in your power, both as a good agent and as a good friend of ours, to try to persuade Mr. Marquand to give us the great piece on Boston that we feel he can and should write. However, we have no way of forcing him to make any changes we suggest, even though we do feel that he is in error.”

The Boston article was eventually published, in November, 1953,
and created no great stir—not the sort of stir, certainly, that
Holiday
had hoped for. Most of John's friends in Boston liked it; perhaps that was why he wrote it the way he did. He had had enough satiric fun with Boston in
The Late George Apley
and
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
—the latter of which had been called a slur on Boston womanhood—so perhaps he felt it was time to atone for all this with a gentle, noncontroversial, “nice” little Boston piece. In any case, that was what he had written. And in the middle of all the commotion that ensued about it between himself and
Holiday
, he had written to Carl Brandt to say that never, under any circumstances, was Carl to agree to have him do an article for
any
magazine, ever again.

He could afford, he felt, to be choosy. With his Little, Brown royalties being paid on a deferred basis—with a fixed annual ceiling, for tax purposes—he had amassed quite a sizable account, something in the neighborhood of $900,000, in Little, Brown's treasury. But no interest was paid on this sum. He brooded about this, until one day Brooks Potter, his lawyer friend, suggested that John might have himself made a director of the publishing house. That way, he could have some say in the company that controlled so much of his funds. John thought that a splendid idea, and at one of the rambling and free-wheeling lunches he liked to have with Arthur Thornhill, Sr., president of the company—lunches sparked with martinis and good cheer—John proposed the directorship possibility to Thornhill. The normally affable face of Arthur Thornhill, a tough-minded, self-made businessman, froze. No mention of that notion was ever made again.

There had, understandably, been few encounters with the Sedgwicks since John's and Christina's 1935 divorce. But when their daughter Christina became engaged to a young history professor named Richard E. Welch, little Tina begged her father to give her away at the wedding, which was to be at the Sedgwick-studded Calvary Church in Stockbridge, hard by the Sedgwick Pie and Sedgwick House, and where Uncle Theodore Sedgwick occasionally preached. Although John liked young Welch—despite the fact that he had committed a much talked about
faux pas
in Boston by showing up at a black-tie dinner at the Somerset Club wearing brown shoes and green socks with his tuxedo—he was reluctant to re-enter
the Sedgwick domain and asked Tina please to excuse him. But she persisted, and so he agreed to come to the church services but not to the reception.

After the ceremony—in the same church where he had been married, and where many of the same people who had been at the wedding now sat primly and solemnly in the same pews, looking simply a little older—John tried to slip away. But suddenly there was old Uncle Ellery, of the Magazine, infirm now and walking heavily with a cane, who stepped across the aisle to John and seized his arm. “John,” he said, “come back to the house with us. I want you to walk with me through the dog cemetery.” And so there was nothing to do but go back with the old man into the scented past of the old garden and the little tract set aside for Sedgwick pets, with their tiny stones marked in Latin, animals loved by Sedgwicks for a century and longer. John found himself, after the emotional ordeal of his daughter's wedding, very touched and moved as the two men proceeded slowly among the quiet graves, the older man pointing to this stone, then that, with his cane, commenting on each dog as he went. All at once there was a new grave in front of them, with an American flag implanted next to the headstone, surrounded by a small bed of wax begonias. Uncle Ellery peered at the stone and then read its inscription: “To Tubby, the cutest dog that ever was.” Uncle Ellery flung his walking stick at the begonias and cried, “Blasphemy! Blasphemy!”

Chapter Twenty-Five

There were more and more long separations from Adelaide—“escapes” he used to call them. John had taken up golf and had been introduced to the golfer's paradise that is Pinehurst, North Carolina. He fell in love with Pinehurst. He loved the loblolly and the longleaf pines that cover the sandhills, and the picturesque little town itself, with its winding, unnamed streets laid out in a pattern deliberately designed to befuddle interlopers who do not belong in this enclave of the secure and wealthy. Pinehurst is cool and green throughout the winter. Camellias blossom in January, and in early spring Pinehurst bursts into riotous color with the blooms of dogwood, azalea, rhododendron, and spring bulbs.

John joined the Pinehurst Country Club, with its famous “ninety holes of golf” on five eighteen-hole courses, and began taking lessons from the club's professional, Harold Callaway. John loved to tell his friends about Callaway's somewhat unorthodox but effective teaching methods, including the Callaway method of mastering the use of the medium iron: “Imagine a fat man bending over in front of
you. You've got to swing so the head of the club will go straight up his ass.” John commented, “He made it very clear.”

John's golf—like his tennis and indeed all his other athletic endeavors—was never very good. He was self-conscious about this and always went out alone, taking with him just a favorite caddy, a venerable black man named Robert Robinson but always called “Hard Rock.” Hard Rock would flatter and pamper John and on every shot encourage him with, “Very
good
, Mr. Marquand! Very
good!
” On their walks across the course, Hard Rock would entertain John with tales of how he, in the early days of Fox-Movietone films, had once been a tap dancer, had performed in movies and on radio with the likes of Major Bowes, and had once danced with Gloria Swanson.

Pinehurst had the same appeal for John that Boston had, and for good reason. The resort was developed, in the late nineteenth century, by a Boston millionaire, James W. Tufts, of the same family that donated the land on which Tufts University now stands, and, because of this New England connection, most of the resort's inhabitants have New England roots. The architecture follows suit and is New England in flavor; both the sprawling Carolina Hotel and the Pinehurst Country Club—two of the largest structures in town—might be veranda-ringed hotels on the Maine or New Hampshire coast. Houses are New England Colonial, and modern houses are zoned out. Presently John bought a small Colonial house in Pinehurst called “Nandina Cottage”—too small, really, to accommodate Adelaide and the children (which John considered an important point in his purchase)—just a short distance from the golf course, which had a small apartment for his secretary, Marjorie Davis, above the garage behind the house.

John Marquand the clubman also admired Pinehurst's traditions and institutions, such as the Tin Whistle Club, which he also joined, and which was a men's drinking club so named, according to legend, because a tin whistle had once hung from a tree near the approach to the ninth hole on one of the golf courses. When the whistle was blown, drinks were served. The club's headquarters, aggressively male, were a book-lined room in the one corner of the country club. Then there was a men's bridge club called the Wolves, and John joined that. His bridge was no better than his golf, but he loved to drop over to the little Wolves Clubhouse late in the afternoon to
talk to whoever was there and to break up, with his funny and highly gesticulated stories, whatever bridge playing might be going on, just as he could—if not checked—break up Book-of-the-Month Club meetings. At the Wolves Club, the half-joking cry soon came to be, “Well, here comes John Marquand—that's the end of the bridge game.” Once when he took young Carl Brandt, Jr., then a student at Harvard, along to the Wolves Club with him, the young man found himself being scrutinized by an elderly and crusty gentleman. “Is it true that they're now letting a lot of Jews into Harvard?” the man wanted to know. (As a resort, Pinehurst has long shown a decidedly anti-Semitic cast.) Carl replied that as far as he knew the old quota system had disappeared from Harvard a long time ago. Muttering, the older man walked away, and John, with a sigh, said to Carl, “Well, you've just cost Harvard twelve million dollars.”

But the best thing of all about Pinehurst, perhaps, was that Gardi and Conney Fiske had a house in Southern Pines, less than half a dozen miles away, where Conney wintered her thoroughbred horses.

Adelaide had begun drinking heavily, and when she and John were together there were terrible scenes. When she got drunk at parties, she would come out with vociferous political opinions, loudly stated, and defenses of her position on the America First Committee. When sober, and asked to expand on these opinions—always considerably right of center, politically—she could not remember what she had said. There were midnight telephone calls to Carol Brandt when Adelaide would scream at Carol and accuse her of stealing her husband and breaking up her marriage. Although everyone knew of Conney's single-minded devotion to Gardi, Adelaide assumed, as she did of every woman John liked, that Conney Fiske was also having an affair with John and that it had become an accepted thing with the Fiskes just as it had with the Brandts. When John stopped at the Fiskes in Boston to spend an afternoon chatting with Conney and to look in on his ailing old friend, Gardi, who was then gravely ill, under sedation much of the time, and with round-the-clock nurses, Adelaide said to John when he came home, “I don't see how you can make love to your best friend's wife in the drawing room while he is dying in a bedroom upstairs!” Or so John told Carol Brandt.

Once, when John was staying at the Brandts' Fifth Avenue
apartment, Adelaide telephoned late at night and demanded to speak to her husband. Carl, who had picked up the phone, explained that John had gone out to walk the Brandts' poodle, Beau, and would not be back for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. Adelaide said, “Give him just one message. He won't walk
my
dog, and tell him he can walk that poodle of yours around and around and around the block until they both drop dead!”

Marjorie Davis was similarly under suspicion as a love interest. John avoided these confrontations in a characteristic way, by walking away from them and searching for places where Adelaide wasn't. “Nandina Cottage”—though John thought the name ridiculous—became one of these refuges. Life at Pinehurst settled into a pleasant routine. Day began with breakfast in bed, served by Floyd Ray, his chauffeur-houseman who had formerly worked for John's Pinehurst neighbor, General George Marshall (about whom John was always asking questions), and whose wife, Julia, had become John's cook. Then there were a few hours spent dictating to Marjorie, then down the road to a few holes of golf at the club with Hard Rock, followed by drinks at the Tin Whistle and lunch at the club. After lunch, John read and edited what he had dictated that morning, penciling in corrections before final-typing, then strolled over to the Wolves for a rubber of bridge and an afternoon drink. Then, perhaps, dinner with the Fiskes, in their pleasantly child-free, well-staffed, and well-run house, or with one or another of the comfortably-off couples who wintered in Pinehurst, such as the John Tuckermans of Boston, the Wallace Simpsons, the George Shearwoods, the Donald Parsons—he was writing a book on bridge, and John offered to do an introduction—or the John Ostroms. John Ostrom's pretty wife, Kitty, was a talented interior decorator, and when John, referring to a previous decorator, wailed to Kitty Ostrom, “Miss Pleasants has painted me entirely in ice blue,” Kitty Ostrom took on the job of helping him redecorate. From time to time the Brandts, either separately or together, sometimes bringing one or the other of their two children, came down to Pinehurst to visit him.