The Late John Marquand Read online

  And yet the book made a powerful impact in a lingering and cumulative way. Though the number of copies sold was not outstandingly large, it seemed that these copies were being bought by a different sort of reader than John had been able to reach before, a more sensitive reader, perhaps, better educated and more articulate—not the kind who had found much that was appealing in John’s other tales of romance and derring-do. These readers found John’s insider’s view of Boston utterly fascinating, and they talked about the book and passed it around among themselves. Publishers used, more than they do today, to distinguish between a mass market and a class market for their books. The Late George Apley, ignored by the former, became the darling of the latter. These were people who, just as Marquand was weary of his environment, were weary in 1937 of a national Depression, of a controversial man, Franklin Roosevelt, in the White House, of bread lines and apple peddlers in the streets, of the Spanish Civil War and of John L. Lewis, of the rash of government acronyms coming out of Washington, or reading about Stalin and Hitler in Europe and a Dust Bowl in the Middle West. To these readers, The Late George Apley brought, among other things, assurance that somewhere—in Boston, specifically—life went on in an unchanging pattern, generation after generation, with those values and amenities and manners that were specifically upper class still observed religiously, where a world could be found where there was, if nothing else, seemliness and order.

  An anonymous critic in the “Notes and Comment” section of The New Yorker, in an obituary tribute to John Marquand, wrote of The Late George Apley that it was “the best-wrought fictional monument to the nation’s Protestant élite that we know of” and added that the book is “the finest extended parody composed in modern America … a detailed Valentine to a city—Boston—such as no other American city can expect to receive.”

  In the spring of 1938, when the judges of the Pulitzer Prize Committee announced their awards, the prize for the best book of fiction published in the previous year went to John P. Marquand for The Late George Apley.

  The title was carried on, through a successful Broadway play and motion picture adaptation with Ronald Colman in the title role. For some reason, Hollywood decided to drop the crucial role of Mary Monahan. Bosley Crowther, then the film critic for the New York Times, claimed that The Late George Apley had been “botched, but good” by Twentieth Century-Fox. He complained that Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s screenplay and Ronald Colman’s performance had turned George Apley into a kind of Boston “swell” and had given the story an artificially happy ending. Nonetheless, the words George Apley—as a name and as a symbol—had entered the American language.

  At the time of the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize, Conney Fiske wrote to John in New York to tell him how happy and proud she was for him. She remembers how, in his reply, he told her that he thought that she and Gardi, for their help and moral support throughout the book, should have received the prize instead of him.

  The success of The Late George Apley taught John a somewhat more bitter lesson. There is, in the novel, an episode some twenty pages long concerning George Apley’s efforts to bring a crooked Boston-Irish politician with the not uncommon name of O’Reilly to justice; Apley says, “Before I have finished, this man O’Reilly will face the jury of the criminal court.” In many ways, the episode is hilarious. In others, it is chilling in its exposure of the Boston Establishment’s bigotry and anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bias. Quite often, in these pages, it is quite clear that Apley’s sentiments about O’Reilly have less to do with O’Reilly deeds than with his faith and country of origin. For example, Apley says, “This O’Reilly cannot be very popular as many persons in every walk of life are anxious to have him punished. I have looked up his record. He went to the Boston Latin School which proves that I was right in always thinking that this school has been losing its grip since my father’s time.” Horatio Willing calls O’Reilly “a lawyer and a faithless civil servant,” an “unscrupulous Irish politician,” and—in the course of the twenty pages in question—a great deal else that is either snobbish, unpleasant, or downright insulting.

  John Marquand failed to reckon, quite clearly, with the existence of a Boston-Irish lawyer-politician who, rightly or wrongly, saw himself as the object of Apley’s fictional attack. Mr. Peter M. O’Reilly of Boston promptly filed a libel suit against Little, Brown & Company claiming “pecuniary damages and loss of business,” saying that he had been “greatly injured in his reputation in his profession” and that the book had caused him great losses in his “earning capacity, his credit and his good name.” The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of Suffolk County, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on February 4, 1938.

  Years later, John Marquand would caution beginning novelists to be sure—if they did nothing else in their fiction—that there were no people with similar names, in similar occupations, and living in similar towns as their fictional counterparts. “Before you name a character, look him up in the local telephone book,” Marquand warned.

  * John Marquand agonized over the production of this novel as he had done before over no other piece of work, endlessly querying his friends and literary advisers—in the publishing fraternity and out of it—as to the “wisdom” of doing such a book. Needless to say, the opinions he received were varied, but Alfred McIntyre’s reaction, since it carried the weight of Little, Brown with it, was certainly the one he valued most. As a result, for many years after the publication of The Late George Apley Marquand used his letter to McIntyre, and McIntyre’s response, as a prime weapon in the novel’s defense. He allowed Edward Weeks to quote from this exchange of letters in his book The Open Heart, and when Kenneth Roberts, in 1956, was writing his introduction to Marquand’s North of Grand Central: Three Novels of New England, Marquand gave Roberts the letters to publish again.

  Chapter Eleven

  There was a theory in the nineteen thirties that if a well-to-do American mother couldn’t marry off a daughter, one thing she could do was send the girl to Peking. In Peking in those days there were all sorts of eligible marine and naval officers, embassy officials, and attachés, many of whom hadn’t seen an unattached white girl in months or even years, to whom the sight of any woman—particularly a rich American one—was welcome. A girl traveling to Peking wouldn’t expect to meet an American novelist, but that was what had happened to Miss Adelaide Hooker in 1935 when she met John Marquand—wearing shorts and a pith helmet—on a beach on the Gulf of Chihli on the Yellow Sea. Adelaide was traveling with her sister Helen, who was en route from Tokyo to Ireland to marry Ernie O’Malley, the Irish revolutionist. A third sister, Blanchette, had already married John D. Rockefeller III, while a fourth Hooker girl, Barbara, like Adelaide, was unmarried. At first, the Hooker girls mistook John Marquand for an Englishman. Adelaide, who was Vassar Class of 1925, had been out of college for ten years, and John Marquand, who was forty-two, was touring the Orient for material for his Mr. Moto stories. At home in Boston, his marriage to Christina was in its final throes.

  The Hookers were an altogether extraordinary family. Adelaide’s father, Elon Huntington Hooker, was a direct descendant of Thomas Hooker, who founded Hartford in the early seventeenth century and drafted the constitution of the State of Connecticut. By Elon Hooker’s generation, the family was rich; he not only headed his own electrochemical manufacturing company but was also chairman of the board of the Research Corporation, chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Industrial Conference Board, and a director of the American Association of Manufacturers. An unreconstructed Republican who considered F.D.R. anathema, he had been Deputy Superintendent of Public Works under Governor Theodore Roosevelt. He was also a strident and devout Prohibitionist, though apparently he enjoyed pleasures other than drink. John Marquand liked to tell the story that when Hooker died a drawer in his desk was opened and found to contain nothing but dozens of unused condoms. He also liked to devise curious entertainments for his friends. Once he gave a stag dinner party at an office in d
owntown Manhattan. The men all showed up in dinner clothes and, since there would be no drinks served—Hooker being a teetotaler—their host advised that there would be a special diversion. At a signal, a stage curtain went up, and behind it stood a row of girls in skin-tight panties and bras. A big barrel of cotton snowballs was then produced, and Hooker announced, “Now you may throw the snowballs at the girls.”

  He was an overpowering father, more than a bit of a bully, and he stressed sports for his four daughters. Tennis, golf, riding, calisthenics, and other forms of athletics were part of their upbringing. So avid was Hooker about the importance of tennis that for a number of years he kept a full-time tennis professional on his household payroll. As children, his daughters were trotted all over the countryside to tennis tournaments; Adelaide, by the time she met John, said that she had become so sated with tennis that she could not bear the game. Mrs. Hooker, meanwhile, was a gentle lady who founded the Women’s University Club and, with her sister, Mrs. Avery Coonley, gave Vassar College the Alumnae House on its campus. Mr. and Mrs. Hooker divided their time between their estate, called “Chelmsford,” in Greenwich, and their large apartment at 620 Park Avenue in New York.

  Adelaide Ferry Hooker, when John Marquand first met her, was not as heavy as she eventually became, but she was on the plump side. It was almost as if—though now in her thirties—she still retained some of her baby fat. She had a round and pleasant face, and thick and curly blondish hair. She was an ebullient woman with a quick and hearty laugh, generous to a fault. She loved to buy presents for her friends. At school, nicknamed “Tommy,” she had been known as a good sport, athletic, a good organizer. She had had a proper New York girl’s schooling, had graduated from Miss Spence’s School and Vassar, had been presented to society in the customary manner, and had joined the Cosmopolitan Club and the New York Junior League. She had done a routine amount of travel. On the surface, for a woman of her position, it was all very ordinary.

  But the unusual thing about Adelaide was that all her life she had a restless passion to do something creative, to be someone on her own, to be something other than a commonplace rich man’s daughter. Early in her girlhood she determined to be “different,” to stand out from the crowd, and she chose a variety of means in her attempt to do so. She professed a disdain for fashion and, instead, got herself up in costumes—Indian dresses, peasant dirndls, Scottish kilts, dangling beads and bracelets, boots and sandals. She wore ballooning lounging pajamas and slacks long before they were fashionable. She once showed up at a party with a stuffed bird perched in her hair. She espoused off-beat causes and, at Vassar in the early days of Fascism, she went about campus making speeches in praise of Mussolini. She also considered herself artistic and struggled to find outlets for her artistic urges and, if they existed, her talents. But for the most part her efforts were met with frustration and failure.

  She had a pretty singing voice, and she had thought that there might be a career for her on the concert or operatic stage. After college she had gone to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and had earned a Master of Arts degree. She had also had a disastrous love affair with a music teacher. After that, she had gone to Germany, where she spent several years studying voice under Lilli Lehmann. At one point she decided that if she could not find success as a singer she would try composing, and she wrote the entire first movement of a symphony before abandoning that idea. Still without a career, she came back to New York and, as a bachelor girl, kept at her endeavors determinedly. She took up writing. She wrote the program notes for the Women’s Symphony Orchestra and short pieces of music criticism for various of the “little magazines” that flourished in the twenties and thirties. She wrote a few travel articles. One of the things that undoubtedly attracted her to John Marquand was that here was an actual living, producing writer, a working artist, and so much more a creative personage than her music teacher.

  In New York, Adelaide worked industriously to gain a reputation as a hostess who gave “interesting” parties that were filled with creative people—not just ordinary society people, but people who were doers and movers in the world of the arts and sciences. Some of her parties were indeed unusual. Inviting friends to one of her evenings, she once excitedly announced, “Two marvelous explorers are coming, and they’re going to bring a giant panda!” The explorers arrived with the panda, which was carried in on a sedan chair. The huge owl-eyed beast was solemnly borne around the dining room in the chair and presented to each guest at the dinner table. One of the explorers gave a short dissertation on pandas, their habitat and mating patterns. Then the animal was carried upstairs and placed in a bathtub for the rest of the evening.

  After John and Adelaide made their separate ways back to New York in 1935, and after John’s marriage to Christina had been terminated that same year, his name appeared with increasing frequency on Adelaide’s guest lists for her parties. Soon it was noticed that he was escorting her to other affairs. Marquand was now dividing his time between a bachelor apartment in the East 70s, where he was tended by a Filipino manservant named Pete, and the summer place he was building for himself at Kent’s Island in Newburyport. But there were week ends at Adelaide’s parents’ big place in Greenwich—week ends which John disliked since they were aggressively nonalcoholic. There were little dinners in Tarrytown with Adelaide’s sister and brother-in-law, the Rockefellers. These John tended to enjoy more because—well, here was the poor little boy from Newburyport High School having dinner with the Rockefellers! It was a fictional situation.

  Late in 1936, John Marquand had begun to admit privately that he intended to marry Adelaide Hooker. Friends like the Brandts and the Fiskes were somewhat surprised. “What do you see in her?” Conney Fiske asked him outright. John hesitated and then said, “She’s very good-natured.”

  Good-natured or not, she was certainly nothing at all like Christina. The breeds of Christina Sedgwick and Adelaide Hooker had been developed at opposite poles. Where Christina was all gauzy softness and indecision, Adelaide was iron-hard determination and gumption. Christina was gentle, Adelaide was strident. Christina was feckless and vague, Adelaide was energetic and ambitious—with an energy and an ambition that would be a good match against John’s, his friends noted uneasily. Having failed with a Tinker Bell, he was now going to take his chances with a Brünnhilde. Certain of John’s Hale cousins, who knew both ladies, commented that Adelaide reminded them of John’s mother. Their engagement was formally announced on February 26, 1937. The Late George Apley had just been published and had made its way onto the bestseller list. Prominent notice of the announcement was taken by the Boston and New York newspapers. It was big social news.

  It was, of course, still another way of getting back at the Sedgwicks. The Hookers’ New England lineage was as good as, if not better than, the Sedgwicks’. Furthermore, the Hookers were ever so much richer. It would not exactly be fair to say that one of the reasons John wanted to marry Adelaide was for her money. He was making, for a Depression year, quite a lot—$55,000 in 1937, and the following year, due to the success of The Late George Apley, his earnings would jump to $73,000. Adelaide at the time, mostly from shares she had been given of Hooker stock, had a small independent income of about $7,500 a year. But she also had, in the phrase of the day, great expectations. And John Marquand had, as was becoming apparent as he became successful, an acquisitive side to his nature. He not only disliked spending money, he was like a magpie; he enjoyed collecting it and storing it away in banks. Adelaide’s money was certainly something he had not overlooked when asking her to marry him. But there was more to it than that. “Poor Adelaide,” one of the Hales remarked later, “never realized that she was being used as an instrument of revenge.” John would make further use of her, of course, as a plot device.

  Their engagement wasn’t very old before John’s stubbornness began to collide with Adelaide’s intransigency. John, for example, had not wanted a formal announcement made of the engagement. Considering their a
ge, and that it was a second marriage for him, he thought that even to be “engaged” was a little silly—or so he said. When Adelaide won out, and the announcement was made, he cannot have been too displeased with the New York Times headline that read “Adelaide Ferry Hooker Will Become Bride Of John Phillips Marquand, Noted Author.” Next, Adelaide wanted a diamond engagement ring. If she was going to become engaged and married, she wanted what other girls had—even though she was no longer a girl herself. John also protested this detail, which he considered ludicrous. But Adelaide would have her way, and so John, who knew nothing whatever about stones or settings, telephoned Carol Brandt, who enjoyed jewels and had already started a small collection. Together they went out to shop for Adelaide’s ring. When John presented the ring to Adelaide, and when she was exclaiming over the size and beauty and luster of the stone, he remarked casually that he was glad she liked it and that Carol had picked it out. He did not understand why Adelaide seemed less than pleased at this news.

  Adelaide had wanted a large church wedding, which John did not, and she was finally willing to compromise here. The wedding was large, but it was not held in a church. They were married in Adelaide’s parents’ apartment at 620 Park on April 16, 1937, rather in the fashion in which John and Christina had been married at Sedgwick House. Adelaide wore a coronet of flowers in her hair. The Marquands’ was considered one of the most important society weddings of the season, and John and Adelaide Marquand moved to an equally important social address: 1 Beekman Place, a large and airy duplex apartment, overlooking the East River, which had formerly belonged to Gertrude Lawrence. The artists were in residence.