Chapter Four
The swimming pool lay in a clearing a quarter mile from the big house. You reached it through a padlocked gate in a high, chain-link fence at the bottom of a steep hill. The mossy paving-stone path wound through a wood to a small bridge over a creek, then climbed toward the light. The pool was long and deep and the bleached blue of a beach towel after many summers’ use. Tall trees hemmed in the glade, littering the surface of the water with leaves. A buffer of ferns grew between the shallow end and the encroaching forest; a terrace extended along one side. If you lay on your back on the heavy wooden bench on the terrace, the patch of sky above, framed by treetops, mirrored the pool’s mattress shape. But because sunlight only briefly struck the pool head-on, the water temperature rarely broke sixty-three degrees. We called it the cold pool—not a pejorative, a term of respect. The cold pool wasn’t one of those oversized bathtubs where other people poached until their fingertips wrinkled. This pool flash-froze your nether parts.
My father, in navy swimming trunks, would balance on the slippery lip of the deep end where water lapped out of the pool into a spillway and ran downhill to the creek. He’d sway in the August heat, sweat trickling down his hairless chest. From a pocket in his bathing suit, he’d remove rubber earplugs and fit them into his ears; he’d swum in frigid Maine water as a boy, and had paid for it, he said, with some fraction of his hearing. Arms outstretched, he’d dive noiselessly, cleaving the water. He’d emerge one-third of the way down the pool, and press on in a methodical front crawl. Hopie, Elliot, and I preferred to fling ourselves out over the deep, limbs rigid, slamming into the surface. In the churn, we’d bob up, gasp histrionically, bolt for the side. Once, when I was small, I flipped upside down in the cold pool in an inflatable ring, like a capsized sailboat—mast underwater, centerboard in the air. My grandfather, standing nearby, fished me out by the ankles. I like to imagine that I remember that moment, though maybe all I remember is the story. A swim at the cold pool wasn’t just a substitute for air-conditioning. It was a test of mettle—preparation, I now think, for the future, including a leap, decades later, into the sea off Greenland, in a bathing suit, just to say I had.
My grandparents were regulars at the cold pool. Sometimes, after my parents had wrangled us into the wayback and driven up the long driveway toward the big house, after we’d turned onto the farm road that descended steeply between pasture and wood, and after we’d left the paved road to rumble across grass toward the gate to the pool, we’d catch sight of one of my grandparents’ cars, parked under an elm beside the post-and-rail fence. They drove Humbers—the car favored by Viscount Montgomery of Alamein in the African campaign. Their cars smelled like leather; their red seats were crazed, like the glaze on old ceramics, by wear and tear. If there was a Humber parked under the tree, my father would slam our car doors, clear his throat, bark orders, rattle the gate in the chain-link fence. Our grandparents, we came to understand, liked to swim naked. Years later, I learned, too, that they’d found a use for the big wooden bench other than keeping towels off the ground.
Helen Hope and Edgar, it was often observed, had a rare sort of marriage. They were one of those couples off whom stories fly like sparks from a fast-moving train. Which of those stories were entirely true, I’m still not sure. They were true enough. In one, my grandmother happens upon her darling in bed with another woman. Instead of taking some more pedestrian course of action, she wedges herself between them, inquiring, “You don’t mind if I sleep here, do you?” I’ve heard it reported that she turned up at a costume party wearing a rooster on her head. She’s said to have entertained dinner guests by wriggling into an antique metal chastity belt—a gift from a congenial friend, repurposed by my grandmother as a cachepot. They made an eye-catching pair, my grandparents did, down to Helen Hope’s black-and-white calfskin coat by Pauline Trigère. (“It’s pure Holstein. I’m afraid I’ve been unfaithful to Ayrshires.”) In a picture taken before a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1938, they stand side by side, camera-ready, at the gangway to the Île de France. He’s in a dark overcoat and a fedora. She’s in a fur-trimmed coat, openwork heels, and a broad-brimmed hat that could well be a Stetson. They look like some Hollywood couple—maybe William Powell and Myrna Loy. If they ever got seriously bored with each other, my guess is few people knew. “To quote Winston Churchill,” my grandfather liked to say, “‘My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.’”
Their union was legendary. After seven decades together, they still talked about how crazy they were about each other. But it wasn’t easy, as a grandchild, to see the inner workings. Once, scanning a bookshelf in their bedroom, I stumbled upon a lead. I took down a small, slim volume with a cartoon in the style of The New Yorker of the 1950s on its tattered cover. A perky-looking housewife, high heels cast aside, feet on a footstool, was sitting at a desk, poring over a ribbon of tape. At first glance, it seemed she was sewing. But, upon closer examination, the tape turned out to be spilling from a ticker tape machine: The lady, phone at her elbow, was studying stock prices. The book was How to Lay a Nest Egg: Financial Facts of Life for the Average Girl, a humorous introduction to investing, by Edgar Scott, published in 1950. The back cover carried testimonials from improbable authorities whose names I vaguely recognized as belonging to my grandparents’ friends—Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Anita Loos. Inside, my grandfather had inscribed the copy to my grandmother, “a friend of the author.” An engraved calling card dropped out. “Darlingest Bee,” he’d written. “One inscription is not enough for You, who are my inspiration in this as in everything else.”
If I want to fathom my father, surely I need a better handle on them.
Their house on Ardrossan was unlike the mammoth houses in which they’d each grown up. It nestled in the folds of the surrounding landscape, instead of eyeing it from above. The rooms were modestly sized and intimate, though the living-room fireplace was wide enough to accommodate dozens of Christmas cards on a string pulled taut between the two ends. A painted wooden carousel horse stood in a bay window, a potted plant on its saddle. Along with the paintings by Degas, Manet, Renoir, Boudin, Cassatt, Corot, and Toulouse-Lautrec, most of which my grandfather had inherited, there was an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story; pewter tankards from a visit to Damascus; a spinning wheel said to hail from some ancestor’s 1772 trousseau; framed cartoons by Charles Addams; and dozens of editions of books by John O’Hara, the novelist and short-story writer, remembered these days for having limned the finest of social distinctions once discernible only to members of a now vanished upper class. My grandfather had met O’Hara at Philip Barry’s house in Easthampton in the 1930s and had become a collector of his books—an avocation in which O’Hara assisted by annotating my grandfather’s copies, and insinuating into manuscripts occasional inside jokes like “a three-gaited bay mare owned by some people called Scott.”
In The Big Laugh, a book Fran Lebowitz once called the greatest Hollywood novel ever written, O’Hara slipped the lesser-known Scotts into a roll call of (real-life) luminaries invited to a (fictional) actress’s imaginary closing-night party—“which was attended by her friends the Lunts, Woollcott, Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic, Noel Coward, Beatrice Lillie, Alice Duer Miller, Philip Barry, Ina Claire, Jack Gilbert, Marc Connelly, Deems Taylor, the Damrosches, Jascha Heifetz, Condé Nast, Carmel Snow, William Lyon Phelps, Charles Hanson Towne, Walter Prichard Eaton, Sidney Howard, Elisabeth Marbury, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Neysa McMein and John Baragwanath, and the Edgar Scotts from Philadelphia.”
O’Hara, not above making a joke of his famously thin skin, told my grandfather, “Now, Edgar, you have to tell me all about that party because, of course, they would never ask me.”
In an era before Rolodexes and Google Contacts, my grandparents had a staggering abundance and variety of friends. There was Henry McIlhenny, the Philadelphia curator and collector whom Andy Warhol is said to have called “the only person in Philadelphia with glamour.” There was Anita Loos and Tallulah Bankhead and Claudette Colbert. There was the British First Sea Lord, Sir Caspar John. There were horse people, cow people, burghers of the Main Line, and successive generations of men who ran Angelo D’Amicantonio & Son, the shoe repair place on Lancaster Pike. Walter Annenberg, the press baron and philanthropist, was the source of the chastity-belt cachepot. Once, when I was backpacking around Europe, my grandparents invited my boyfriend and me to lunch in Venice, where we found them hanging out with Jack Profumo, the disgraced British cabinet minister who’d been forced to resign a decade earlier over an affair with an aspiring model with ties to a Soviet naval attaché. In a pile of condolence letters sent to the family after my grandmother’s death, I came upon one from the Ayrshire Society of Stavropol, Russia. The undersigned remembered fondly how the mistress of the Ardrossan herd had once kissed him and told him he was a very unusual man.
The stories my grandparents told teemed with names I should have known and sometimes didn’t—names like Josephine Baker, the Stork Club, the Duke of Windsor. (My grandmother had persuaded him to stand on his head, it was said, so she could find out what he wore under his kilt.) “I was stuck with Winston Churchill one Christmas on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht,” was the sort of thing she sometimes said (and once did). “I didn’t know what to say. I asked him about the weather and he just grunted. As they handed him a double martini, I said, ‘Sir, I heard it was a very windy crossing at Gibraltar. Were you seasick?’” She had a rollicking narrative style not unlike the voice in Eloise at the Plaza: People in her stories were always throwing a fit, falling right down with apoplexy, going mad. A flight attendant was “a buxom stewardess with a hangover, who looks like a sow”; a man with designs on her was “so tight he could barely dance.” In the service of a laugh, she had few qualms about making herself look preposterous: “He asked me did I know Goya,” she once said, recalling her first encounter with the portrait painter Augustus John. “I was so shy. I said, ‘Yes, I often see him at parties.’ I thought Goya was a gigolo!”
At its inception, my grandparents’ union looked to some like an unlikely coupling. At Harvard my grandfather Edgar had been a student of the nineteenth-century French comedy of manners and had translated a period play into English verse for its first American production. His circle of acquaintance included young writers and playwrights like the Algonquin Round Table regular Robert E. Sherwood. One of his former girlfriends was Helen Hayes (who my grandmother liked occasionally to suggest was the real love of his life). My grandmother Helen Hope was the product of a less cosmopolitan, somewhat more provincial upbringing. After an initial encounter, my mother’s Boston Brahmin father pronounced her “ravishingly beautiful and spoiled rotten.” Her future husband once wrote to her, “I realize what an overwhelming responsibility you’re going to be—if, every minute you’re alone, men dash up and converse with you! (It’s nice, though—and, in a funny way, makes me proud.)” In an unsigned list of their respective personality traits, preserved in a scrapbook, I find my grandfather characterized, in his midtwenties, as sensitive, adaptable, altruistic, even-tempered if moody. His young wife is gay and hospitable but also hot-tempered, competitive, intuitive, tenacious, with an appetite for power. When Maisie Sturgis Scott learned that Helen Hope Montgomery had taken Maisie’s eldest son out for a ride, she deduced that he had to be in love. If he weren’t, she told his sisters, he’d never have been caught dead on a horse.
“According to Mom,” one of their nephews told me, “everybody gave that marriage six months.”
But my grandparents were magnetized by a ferocious mutual attraction. As a child, I couldn’t have appreciated the high-voltage current that leaped between them; but, long after their deaths, I witnessed its traces, still sparking on the page. My grandmother saved the vast majority of the written communication that passed between them—hundreds of love letters, sonnets, postcards, humorous poems, erotic poems, erotic cartoons, cablegrams, scribblings on menus. “My keen, glorious, desirable, and desirous, and perfect woman,” he writes. “My arms—and everything else—just ache for you!” Their ostensibly chaste nine-month engagement practically killed them. Over seven decades of marriage, their correspondence was amorous, adoring, reproachful, ravenous, jealous, penitent, aching. They tantalized and tortured each other with the specter of other lovers—bewitching theater companions, lascivious train conductors, old flames imagined and real. “The wolves seem to sniff your absence,” she writes to him, away on business. “Wright has been frantically trying to get here all last evening.” My grandfather to her: “You’re much too attractive to be a thoroughly safe proposition in spite of your A1 loyal-type heart.” They imagined the worst, hungered for reassurance, begged forgiveness. “A confession, darling,” he writes. “I did kiss her—on the cheek—very brotherly.” They engaged in outlandish flattery. “Your telegrams almost made me jump out of my skin with excitement,” she writes, “but I got so lonely that I almost chewed the sheets and blankets—and really seriously thought of calling the conductor.” Beware stallions! he warns. Behavior excellent but dangerously lonely! she reports. “The train is a flop,” she writes. “No one has accosted me. Could I be slipping?”
The summer before their wedding, I find her spending several weeks as a houseguest of her future mother-in-law in Bar Harbor. Her sixteen-year-old sister, Mary Binney, has been sent along as chaperone, a mission impossible. When Helen Hope boards a sleeper train at Ellsworth, Maine, for the trip home in late July 1923, she and her betrothed are facing a month-long separation. As the train barrels south, she fires off letters and telegrams from every station—Bangor, Waterville, Portland, and beyond. Upon arrival at home, she dispatches a special-delivery letter in an envelope plastered with stamps: “It seems like a year and it’s only yesterday at quarter of four that I left you.” He sleeps with her letters in his pajama pocket; she keeps his under her pillow. If a day passes letterless, they panic, fear the worst, telegram for relief. “I imagined someone had kissed you all of a sudden,” he writes, “and you didn’t know how to tell me.” Her letters are full of wild hyperbole: Life is disgusting without you! You are engaged to a perfect lunatic! Please miss me like the devil and have a rotten time! His are ardent, steamy: “O, I just want you, want you, want you with every inch of me!”
A thousand wedding announcements and invitations sailed off that summer to addresses as remote as Argentina. Orders went out for initialed cuff links for the ushers, monogrammed luggage, calling cards for the soon-to-be Mrs. Scott. The scene in the big house in those weeks bore an unmistakable resemblance to the opening scenes of The Philadelphia Story. Tables sagged under the weight of wedding presents delivered daily—silver platters, engraved pitchers, volumes of Ibsen, a complete set of Shakespeare. Helen Hope dedicated herself to writing thank-you notes—when not rushing to the train station to intercept incoming mail from Maine. Newspaper reporters, idling through August, telephoned for wedding news. Old boyfriends, said to be bent on blowing up the engagement, dropped in; some stayed for a ride, a game of bridge, a swim in the pool. Mary Binney warned her older sister that regaling her fiancé with tales of her socializing in his absence would soon leave her “minus a husband.” But Helen Hope had no patience for a premarital cloister: “Otherwise, it’s so, so lonely and I think I would go mad.” My grandfather, in Maine with Mamma, had little choice but to agree. “But please, my Angel, love me best.”
He has a nightmare about the upcoming wedding: He finds he’s to be married in a crumbling ruin that bears some resemblance to the chapel at Groton. His old headmaster has rented a basket of dress suits, every one of them much too big, from which the groom is to choose. Collars dangle like life buoys around his neck. An aging French retainer scurries off to find a more suitable costume for the groom. In a sweat of distress and shame, Edgar awakes, reaches for the engraved stationery, confides all to Helen Hope. Oh, the misery!
“Imagine being married in a dress suit!” he writes.
He was married in a cutaway that September in a Gothic Revival church with gargoyles carved into the masonry. Helen Hope wore a sleeveless white chiffon gown, trailed by a satin train, and carried a bouquet of orchids and lilies of the valley. Bridesmaids, flower girls, and ten ushers abounded. The church was packed; fall blossoms adorned the pews. When the ceremony was over, the crowd headed to the big house for the reception.
It’s hard not to wonder what it must have been like to be the offspring of such a match.
My grandfather longed for a literary life. At Harvard, he’d gravitated to the circle of students around George Pierce Baker, whose playwriting workshop for graduate students, the 47 Workshop, had trained the likes of S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Eugene O’Neill. By the summer before the wedding, he was shopping a drawing-room comedy, set in a Manhattan apartment and a country house on the Main Line, to Milton Shubert and Helen Hayes. In his letters, I find him marooned in Bar Harbor, vowing to devote himself to rewriting the opening act. He’ll rise early and work diligently every morning, he swears to Helen Hope. Instead, he stays up until 2:00 A.M., “drinking sloe gin fizzes and chatting.” He sleeps until noon. More resolutions follow. “Tomorrow morning I start,” he writes, as though putting his intentions in writing will solve all. “I’ll sit at my study desk and write or pace in solitary thought about the study floor piecing together scenes and dialogue.” But dinner dances intervene. So do whiskey, and bridge at 1:15 A.M., and twenty-one guests arriving imminently for tea. The aspiring dramatist scales back his plans. It’s more important, he assures Helen Hope, for him to get in shape for the wedding.
She counsels discipline.
“I want you to be a very great playwright, and the only way you can achieve that is by really working,” she writes. In a second letter the same day, she tries another tack: “I want a famous husband.”
He had a brief run as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia. Then he was an editor and critic for a short-lived theater magazine. Then his financier father-in-law appears to have grown impatient. By 1926, the struggling scribbler unexpectedly turns up on the boards of directors of a gas company in New Jersey and of an oil and coal company in West Virginia. Next, he’s on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as an independent broker. In January 1928, he buys a seat on the exchange, using three hundred thousand dollars of his inherited money plus a loan from the Colonel. A year later, a new stockbrokerage, Montgomery, Scott & Company, opens in Philadelphia. The founding partners: my grandfather and his father-in-law, the Colonel. The offices are in a building on Broad Street owned by the bank where the Colonel’s father-in-law is a director. No coincidence, I suppose, that the bank rents space to the new partners on highly favorable terms—and gives them its brokerage business. Nine months before the stock market crash, the firm opens its doors.
The partnership, it turns out, had been an enticement. A bribe, you might say. In October 1927, my father’s parents had made plans to embark upon their own circumnavigation. They were imagining a month in Paris, several weeks in Italy, a sailing trip around the Mediterranean, a month in Egypt, a stop in Ceylon, a voyage across India before sailing to Singapore via Rangoon, then onward to Java and Siam, with a detour to Angkor, a motor trip to Saigon, and a boat to Japan via Hong Kong. “From Japan our plans are vague,” my grandfather wrote to his brother, Warwick, that August. “Our mammoth ambition is to get to Peking, and back via Moscow on the Trans-Siberian. If this fails, we shall probably take a boat around Africa which makes many stops.” But Colonel Montgomery seems to have had some uneasiness about his son-in-law’s life prospects. The Colonel, not one to stint on due diligence, must have known of the voyage of the Sagamore and the exploits of his son-in-law’s father at a similar age. So he made my grandfather an offer: If Helen Hope and Edgar would cut the trip in half, he’d make Edgar his partner in a new firm. The couple got only as far as Damascus before returning to New York, where her parents were on hand to meet them. Helen Hope and Edgar were so annoyed, she once told me, they made sure they were the last passengers off the ship. They disembarked drunk, fled to the Ritz Tower, and sent her parents home to the big house.
A feature of my grandparents’ farmhouse, by the time I knew them, was their collection of work by Augustus John, the Welsh-born bohemian who was as fashionable a portrait painter in his time in the 1920s as John Singer Sargent had been in his. A four-foot-high John portrait of Helen Hope hung in the living room above a library table stacked with books. In the dining room, there was another he’d painted eight years later. There was a drawing of my grandfather, done in London in 1950, and a landscape of Connemara, inscribed in one corner, “Hope from Augustus.” Images by John of women were all over—women alone, women with children, nude women, a woman in peasant clothing, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat, a girl in red harem pants. There was a painting of John’s muse, Dorelia, the mistress he’d insinuated into his married life. There was a self-portrait, too, titled Portrait of a Bearded Man. Red mustache, graying Vandyke, a slight scowl: The artist seemed to glare from the painting. From time to time, my grandmother alluded fleetingly to various adventures that had taken place the summer when they’d first met—stories that seemed to involve illegal whiskey and the artist’s fondness for his models, not least of all her.
It was her father, the Colonel, who’d chosen John for his eldest. He prided himself on the portraits in the big house. “Not only have I some really beautiful family portraits of different generations dating back for many years,” he boasted, “but I have also kept up this generation more completely than anyone of my acquaintance.” In the mid-1920s, he’d invited a British society portraitist to move in and paint him, his wife, her unmarried aunt, and her father. An earlier subject of that painter had been Queen Victoria. Twice, the Colonel traveled to Spain to prevail upon an elusive Basque painter to paint Mary Binney (recovering in Paris, at the time, from a breakdown precipitated by her parents’ blackballing of Stokowski). To paint Aleck, his only son, the Colonel enlisted the most prolific of the official artists sent to the western front during World War I. For Charlotte Ives, he hired a Hungarian-born painter of aristocrats and royals, who painted her seated on a horse. At seventeen, the Montgomerys’ spirited youngest couldn’t sit still. The painter is said to have enlisted a model as a body double.
A figure of mythic magnetism, Augustus John was as famous for his insatiable womanizing as for his draftsmanship and the originality of his early work. When he appeared at the Café Royal in Piccadilly, it’s said, young models had to be carted away, fainting; by the end of his life, he was rumored to have fathered as many as one hundred children. “He seems to regard the world as a magnificent house party, rich in gypsies, intellectuals, artists, celebrities and, above all, aristocrats,” a Time magazine journalist once wrote. Influenced by Whistler and Rubens, he’d spent much of the 1920s painting writers, public figures, and celebrities from James Joyce to Tallulah Bankhead. His portraits were admired for their psychological insight. “I don’t know if that’s what I look like, but that’s what I feel like,” Thomas Hardy is supposed to have said of John’s painting of him. Not every sitter, however, was enchanted with the final product. The founder of Lever Brothers sliced the face out of his. Gerald du Maurier, the actor and a friend of the artist, put his portrait up for sale. “The best description of the thing was made by a woman friend of mine who said it showed all the misery of my wretched soul,” du Maurier was quoted as saying. To hang it in his house, he said, “would drive me either to suicide or to strong drink.”
In the summer of 1930, Helen Hope and Edgar, at twenty-six and thirty-one, set off for the west coast of Galway where the moody, beguiling artist was holed up in a rural hotel with an entourage of artists, admirers, and comely young sitters. His American subject and her husband barreled across Ireland in a black limousine—metamorphosed, in my grandmother’s telling, into a hearse. She was anxious: If John disliked her, she professed to believe, he might refuse to paint her. “When we drove up in the late afternoon, there were his two eyes shining out of the ground-floor window where he had his studio,” she’d say later. “The car door was flung open, and I fell out on my head.”
Lively, bored, indulged, and self-dramatizing for humorous effect—she complained bitterly in letters home to her mother. “You ought to see this dump we’re in, it is the most god-forsaken hole in the world!!” she wrote. Ten days into the visit, she declared she was “sick to death of the picture and more than sick of old John, and his temperament, and he is even sicker of me.” But there was tango music on a purloined hotel Victrola, whiskey, and outings with the artist and Oliver St. John Gogarty, the poet, playwright, and surgeon whom James Joyce had reinvented as stately, plump Buck Mulligan. Painter and subject warmed to each other, and then some. “We were shy on meeting for the first time, but this soon wore off,” John wrote in a memoir years later, “for Mrs. Scott proved to be as sympathetic as she was beautiful.” He painted her twice that summer, and a third time in London eight years later. When the first portrait was exhibited in a gallery in New York in 1931, a critic wrote, “Choicest of all its elements is the sweetness of expression. John seldom permits himself, as here, to celebrate the sweetness of life.”
Asked long afterward about talk that John had painted her naked, Helen Hope smiled opaquely—an expression her inquisitor told me he took to mean, “I’m not confirming or denying. But I don’t want you to think it wasn’t a possibility.”
In the heavy bottom drawer of a cupboard in the big house, I come upon the scrapbook in which Helen Hope preserved a record of the attachments that formed on the windswept fringe of Connemara that summer. I pore over the scattered puzzle pieces of that never-forgotten visit—letters from John, cablegrams, postcards, photographs, magazine articles, exhibition catalog pages, newspaper clippings. In grainy snapshots taken that summer, John is in his early fifties, leonine and brooding. Out there on the edge of the Atlantic, he’s costumed in a homburg, a three-piece suit, and a caped coat like something worn by Sherlock Holmes. In one series, he stands apart, watching members of the house party, half his age, cavort on a lawn. Helen Hope is barefoot, in midair when the shutter snaps. In other photos, the two of them sit together in the bow of a wooden boat. “I was 26 and had been married seven years,” she writes to John’s biographer four decades later. In the years that followed, she stuffed the scrapbook full of mementos, including newspaper articles written at the time of John’s death in 1961. “His personal legend, also his flair for elegant bohemianism and wit, remained undiminished throughout his life and remains undiminished now that he is dead,” reads one clipping. “His portraits gave this same immortality to the people who were fortunate enough to be painted by him—the immortality not of remembrance through record, but of perpetual vigor.”
I come upon a sonnet in John’s handwriting, ending with the lines,
But armed only with my staff
I’ll leap my darling’s trenches,
And in my fury tear in half
The last of her defences.
Till I achieve the utmost Prize
And force the Doors of Paradise!
Back home in Pennsylvania, Helen Hope trained, hunted, and showed horses, hers and others’. She ran her own stable, sometimes two. Newspaper reporters chronicled her exploits: I find her wrapping up a sixteen-jump course in one show, in record time, to wild applause—only to return on a second horse, turn in another flawless round, and walk away with first and second place. Her smashups added to her local renown. Thundering toward the finish line in a point-to-point race in the 1930s, she’s thrown from her horse in a head-on collision, rolled on by the horse, knocked unconscious, and carried off on a stretcher. By the mid-1930s, she’s developing a paying sideline as a horse-show judge. She shuttles between capitals of the horse world—Middleburg, Virginia; Aiken, South Carolina; Saratoga Springs, New York.
Anyone who rode with Helen Hope was expected to meet her exacting standards. Never hurry, never take shortcuts, never overwork a young horse. If you’re exercising one while leading two more, all three horses must trot evenly, never breaking stride. If the horse you’re mounting fails to stand absolutely still, God help you. During foxhunting season, she was up at dawn; she lunched in her kitchen on Campbell’s soup and a few leaves of lettuce. If she was at the theater in New York in the evening, she’d take the last train home in order to be up to hunt the next day. Pushing herself to the point of exhaustion, she had a tendency to be harder on other people’s mistakes than on her own. When a younger protégé, maneuvering a horse trailer backward into the garage from behind the wheel of a Jeep, scraped the trailer against the side of the garage, “You might have thought I’d burned the place down,” the woman told me, laughing. “. . . There’s nobody that your grandmother didn’t bring to tears.”
My grandfather, meanwhile, mastered the legalities of the brokerage business. He had the kind of memory that might have enabled him to recite much of the stock exchange constitution by heart. He was good at managing the relationships that stockbrokering entailed, and he became a governor of two exchanges. He was not, however, perfectly cut out for investing itself. Instead of buying, for example, General Motors, he’d be swept off his feet by the likes of Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, mass-producible houses, invented by Buckminster Fuller, which tanked when postwar home buyers turned out to have no appetite for sci-fi yurts. From his letters, I find him in Washington in February 1934, a supernumerary in the New York Stock Exchange’s campaign against President Franklin Roosevelt’s stock-exchange reform bill, introduced after the 1929 crash. Intended to protect the individual investor and help stabilize the economy, the bill had become the target of what Sam Rayburn, the Texas congressman, later called “the biggest and boldest, the richest and most ruthless lobby Congress had ever known”—the New York exchange. Edgar dined with bankers, met with senators, socialized with assistant secretaries of the treasury during those weeks in Washington. He was awed by the industriousness of Tommy Corcoran, the young New Deal strategist who’d helped draft the bill. “A capacity for work I never saw among my contemporaries,” he marveled tellingly in a letter home. Even higher praise went to the vice president, “Cactus Jack” Garner, said to have once called the vice president’s job “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
“The VP is divine,” Edgar wrote to Helen Hope. “You would love him.”
No doubt.
Their marriage was not uncomplicated when my father was young. During an especially bitter fight during the thirties, his father heaved a kettle across the kitchen. If Helen Hope was the target, Edgar missed. But, shocked by his own behavior, he swore off alcohol for a decade. Ten years into their marriage, I find angry references, in Helen Hope’s letters to Edgar, to “your affair with R.” There’s a tense standoff over his intention to take out a woman while Helen Hope is away. “If you need a screw for goodness sakes get it, if you think it will straighten you out and make you happy,” she writes. A fight erupts over his refusal to reconsider his intention to take another woman to the opera.
“Darling,” she begins sweetly, leading into an explosion of upper-case expletives. “I am sorry that I was so upset and made such an issue. . . . If you have it in your heart to take Jean to the theater, go ahead and do it. I do not want to feel that I asked you not to. . . . It seems extremely unlucky to me that I am taken away at this time as it associates this great pleasure that the opera’s given you with someone other than me. And I am jealous of someone else’s sharing it with you—especially as it seemed to mean so much to you when I suggested not taking her. You used to love to go alone, so you said, but now you say she is the only one you like to go with. So if it means that much go ahead. . . . I feel very sorry for myself. Please be extra strict with your system.”
She wakes from a dream in which he’s told her he no longer loves her. She’s out of town, her bed is damp with tears. “I do hope you still love me,” she writes sadly. He writes back, “If I have done any foolishnesses, or badnesses, you’ve always understood it had no effect on my adoring you. . . . And, to come to cases, I have done nothing at all naughty since you left.”
BEHAVIOR PERFECT, she telegrams two days later. HOPE YOURS SAME.
Third day: TELEPHONE ME THIS EVENING ANY TIME MISS YOU TERRIBLY.
Day four: She’s aborting her trip and catching the first flight home.
RIDICULOUS THINGS OF NO IMPORTANCE SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY, reads her final cable in the series. MUST BE COMPLETELY CHANGED OTHERWISE MANY PEOPLE HURT.
My grandfather’s literary life was now strictly extracurricular. He read voraciously, in English and French, and met with other men to read Shakespeare aloud. He wrote thank-you notes in rhyming couplets. In his Christmas Eve poems, he’d include a tip of the fedora to every in-law, horse, dog. In one of my grandmother’s scrapbooks, I happened upon a learned paean, in my grandfather’s hand, to female genitalia—which turned out not to be the work of E. Scott, playwright manqué, but that of a British humorist, A. P. Herbert. My grandfather, I’m told, would occasionally rise from the table during some convivial dinner and, to the ostensible delight of his guests, recite this version of Herbert’s poem aloud.
The portions of a woman which appeal to man’s depravity
Are constituted with considerable care,
And what appears to you to be a simple little cavity
Is really an elaborate affair.
And doctors of distinction who’ve examined these phenomena
In numbers of experimental dames
Have made a list of all the things in feminine abdomina
And given them delightful Latin names.
There’s the vulva, the vagina and the jolly perineum,
The hymen that is found in many brides,
And countless other gadgets you would love if you could see ’em,
The clitoris and God knows what besides.
What a pity then it is that when we common people chatter
Of the mysteries to which I have referred,
We should use for such a delicate and complicated matter
Such a very short and unattractive word.
I come upon a scrapbook of my grandmother’s labeled “Miscel letters and funny letters for old age!!” Inside the front cover, she’s pasted a studio photograph of a man I’ve never seen. Receding hairline, soft face, full lips. I find nothing unlikable—or especially likable—about his looks. He’s in military uniform, circa World War II. On the following pages, I find hundreds of letters, postcards, telegrams, and phone messages—mostly from the same man. “Hopey honey darling,” he begins. He signs off, “I adore you my sweet.” The recipient, I notice, has dated phone messages, after the fact, in her looping hand: July 27, 1944; August 14, 1944; September 12, 1944. “Major Burden called,” many of the messages read. “Please call Major Burden when you come in.” I imagine the housekeeper who must have taken the messages, standing at the phone in the pantry, in her white uniform and white shoes. What went through that housekeeper’s head? Would Helen Hope have cared? The correspondent’s sense of humor is in sync with hers: He sends postcards of the Empire State Building, Nelson’s Column, other marvels of upright engineering. “Looking forward to seeing you Friday with vast anticipation,” he writes from New York City. Or, “Looking forward to seeing you again on Friday with constantly renewed anticipation.” His stationery is as fine as his Park Avenue address. But I find nothing clever about his letters. Because of their frequency, I entertain the fantasy that my grandmother, in her thirties, had a psychoanalyst on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Is it possible she had a shrink named Major Burden?
A more plausible explanation, of course, is that Major Burden was arranging assignations with the woman we called Granny.
That nickname was never a perfect fit.
By the early 1940s, Major Burden is writing or calling weekly or biweekly. “So please, please manage to come up here next week,” he implores. “I need you and want to see you so badly.” Another week: “Honey darling . . . Looking forward to seeing you on the 17th all agog.” He tells her he’s recently encountered “the author of the rumor that I am violently in love with you, which I at once admitted.” My grandfather, it becomes clear, is acquainted with his wife’s admirer: Respectfully, the man addresses his Christmas cards to Mr. and Mrs. Scott. My grandfather writes home from Midland, Texas, “My best to Jimmy.” He tacks on a cautionary send-off: “Goodbye, good luck, good habits.” But by the late 1940s, I sense, the major’s star is waning. “Darling, Your crushingly disappointing wire received,” he writes. Or, “Darling. Your wire received last night but what were you still doing in Philly on Tuesday if you left for West Virginia Monday PM?” It’s as if, he complains, “some annoying demon or Nemesis” is interfering—some nemesis whose “initials are not ES, as they normally are.” Helen Hope, meanwhile, is reassuring Edgar. JIMMY BEEN AND GONE VIRTUE INTACT LOVE AND KISSES, she reports in a telegram. And, in a letter: “Jimmy remained in perfect control and didn’t even get his toe in my door.” A year or two later, Burden is writing from Paris. “Brace yourself for a shock,” he tells Helen Hope. She’s to keep the news secret until the announcement arrives, which it does, a few days later, addressed to both missus and mister. Everyone is pleased with “the new dispensation”—Burden’s phrase. Two weeks later, he and his bride, fresh from Paris, arrive in Villanova for a cozy weekend with honey darling and her husband.
For their twentieth wedding anniversary, Helen Hope and Edgar checked into a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. I study the paper trail, including a Playbill from the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! Their marriage had proved, as people would describe it to me decades later, durable enough to survive conflict and whatever else happened along. Asked, near the end of her life, about the “secret” to their long marriage, my grandmother would give a deceptively simple answer, the complexities of which I’ve barely plumbed. “Both of us wanted to stay married,” she’d say. Their twentieth-anniversary letters to each other survived in a scrapbook. Hers was exuberant, all superlatives. His was a love letter.
“Temperamentally, spiritually, physically you have been the perfect companion—captivating, devoted, passionate,” he wrote. “In the small things as in the great you have charmed my senses, possessed my thoughts and inspired my actions. . . . If during the next twenty years one of us dies, let the other remember gratefully and humbly the magic of our time together. The most important thought will be, not that it has ended, but what it was while it lasted.”
The play dedicated to them, The Philadelphia Story, had opened on Broadway four years earlier. My grandfather and Philip Barry had met at Harvard after Barry’s arrival as a graduate student in 1919 to study playwriting under George Pierce Baker. A newly minted Anglophile, Barry had worked for the State Department in London during World War I, after being rejected from the ambulance corps and the military because of poor eyesight. “He was partial to palaces and to the people who dwelt in them,” Brendan Gill would write of him later; and he was even “more partial to people who might have lived in palaces and who chose instead to live in pavilions and pleasances, accepting with light hearts the responsibilities that their good luck imposed on them.” In the years after Harvard, Barry was a regular visitor to Ardrossan. Of the twenty-one plays of his that were produced on Broadway, the most successful were drawing-room comedies set in what a character in the play Holiday called “a general atmosphere of plenty with the top riveted down on the cornucopia.” The day before The Philadelphia Story opened in an out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia, a theater critic reported in the Philadelphia Record, “We understand that ‘The Philadelphia Story’ is concerned with a Main Line family who ‘manage their vast modern estate, hunt, fall in love and laugh much.’”
I’d been foraging in the ironing-room papers for months before it occurred to me to read the play itself. I started scribbling notes and page numbers inside the back cover of the actors’ edition. Soon, to my amazement, a list of recognizable details was spilling backward into the dialogue, littering the margins. The setting of the play is a country estate on the eve of the wedding of the eldest daughter of “the Philadelphia Lords.” There’s a dairy and stables, like the Colonel’s, and a gatehouse built “for a summer place when they all lived in Rittenhouse Square,” as had the Scotts. The curtain rises on the sitting room, “a large, comfortably furnished room of a somewhat faded elegance containing a number of very good Victorian pieces”—a solid description of the sitting room at the big house. “I suppose that’s contrasted to the living room, the ballroom—the drawing room—the morning room—the—,” the interloping reporter in the play remarks. Glass doors open onto a porch—again, like the big house; a portrait by a famous painter hangs over the mantel; cardboard boxes are strewn about, “indicating an approaching wedding,” as in the summer of 1923. The bride’s father is in finance—with a controlling interest in the company that employs his future son-in-law. Ring a bell? His eldest, Tracy, has been writing thank-you notes. Her younger sister—fifteen, not yet in school—spouts off dreamily about, yes, Leopold Stokowski. “She’s out schooling a horse somewhere,” the reporter remarks. “It’s the horses that get the schooling hereabouts.” There’s even a swimming pool in a grove of trees. Late in the play and late at night, Tracy ends up undressed and in the pool—with the reporter, not the man she’s about to marry.
For the last thirty years of my grandmother’s life, she was often reported to have been the original Tracy. “The real-life model,” said Vanity Fair. The Sunday Telegraph called her “the inspiration”; a slightly confused local paper alluded to “the role of Mrs. Scott.” Yet, Tracy is priggish in a way Helen Hope never was. For much of the play, Tracy is judgmental, scornful, intolerant of weakness. “You’ll never be a first class woman or a first class human being, till you have learned to have some regard for human frailty,” her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter Haven, whose weakness is drinking, tells her. Her father, who’s having an affair with a Broadway actress, is a target of Tracy’s scorn. Only after she drinks too much champagne, ends up naked in the pool with a stranger, and has to be carted off to bed on the eve of her wedding does she become capable of appreciating that, as Barry puts it, “the occasional misdeeds are often as good for a person as—as the more persistent virtues.” That wouldn’t have been news to Helen Hope.
Even she, it turns out, may not have believed she was the original Tracy. Barry had taken the idea for the play to Katharine Hepburn, who was in need of a comeback, having been branded arrogant and “box office poison” after a string of flops. Together, they made the character of Tracy the booster rocket for Hepburn’s redemption. “Make her like me but make her go all soft,” Hepburn is said to have told Barry. Tracy became a redheaded graduate of Bryn Mawr College, like Hepburn, with an ex-husband idling on the outskirts of her life, like Hepburn. “Indeed, Tracy Lord is Kate Hepburn,” A. Scott Berg wrote in Kate Remembered. Donald R. Anderson, in a book on Barry’s plays, said, “There is no question that Tracy Lord was not only designed for Hepburn but also shaped by her.” The play became the most enduring of Barry’s plays, running for more than four hundred performances in New York, plus two years on the road. It was revived in New York in 1980, in London in 2005. The movie, starring Hepburn and Cary Grant and released in 1940, is an American classic. Tracy Lord and Hepburn had made Helen Hope “almost famous,” my grandmother wrote years later. Occasionally, though, she’d say the character might have been based on her youngest sister. She was even quoted, on at least one occasion, saying, “I don’t really think Tracy Lord was much like me.”
But for feature writers, the story was too good to check. And their subject, it seems, never went out of her way to correct the record.
Why not? I asked my uncle Ed.
He shrugged.
“She started to value the importance of being ‘Mrs. Philadelphia Story.’”