A woman has to look out for herself.
—PLAUTUS
Though Clare parted amicably from her husband—he sent her farewell orchids—she felt less than sanguine about leaving little Ann with him for the three months she was going to have to spend in Nevada. The best she could do was make sure the child would be in the hands of a competent mademoiselle. Dorothy Burns, with whom she visited in Chicago on her way west, could see that she was worried as well as unhappy. “She thought she was marrying George for keeps.”1
Her train arrived in Reno at 4:30 A.M. on Wednesday, February 6, 1929, in a fierce blizzard. Clare’s mood turned as bleak as the weather when she discovered that her reserved apartment at the Riverside Hotel (a red brick building between the Truckee River and the courthouse) was occupied and that she would have to settle for a “cubbyhole” of a room for the first three days.2
In a coincidence foreshadowing the Reno scene in The Women, Nanny Brokaw, George’s aunt by marriage, was also in town for a divorce. Her husband wanted to marry his nurse, and she was insisting on a $5 million settlement. Clare’s prospect of less than half a million seemed paltry in comparison. Through the long days ahead, she would have plenty of time to ponder how much more she might have negotiated had George left her.3
Forced now to live on $30,000 a year, instead of the $400,000 to which she had been accustomed, Clare braced herself for a severe diminishment in standards as well as style. That applied, first of all, to hotel bills. She began doing her own laundry and mending. For the first time in her adult life she prepared her own breakfasts and lunches of French toast, omelets, salads, and coffee in a tiny kitchen. During her stay her weight would drop temporarily to a svelte 117 pounds.4
Back in New York, gossipmongers were saying that Clare Boothe Brokaw would soon make a brilliant match. But she had no such immediate plan. Six years of access to a large fortune had not brought her contentment. Besides, “rich men are notoriously unattractive,” she wrote her mother. Having “gone through hell” once with one, she had no intention, at twenty-six, of tying herself down again except for a real love. “I’m not living my life for anybody but myself from now on.” George’s alimony gave her the freedom to look for both love and money until the age of thirty. After that she might have to marry for money alone.5
In most respects, Reno was a typical western town with one stop-go traffic light, a five-and-ten, and several gas stations, movie houses, and speakeasies. Its Chinese and Italian restaurants did a lively take-out business, thanks to the approximately two thousand transients who annually swelled the indigenous population. Some of these women had considerable means. Others worked their way to decrees as cooks, waitresses, chambermaids, and croupiers. Together they contributed $3 million a year to the “City of Broken Vows,” otherwise known as “Cupid’s Graveyard.”6
Those who could not afford the casinos spent their evenings playing cards. Clare, while not averse to bridge, tried to improve her receptive mind. She took French and Spanish lessons, and read Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, L’Abbé Dimnet’s The Art of Thinking, and Stephen Vincent Benét’s verse narrative “John Brown’s Body.” For exercise she walked and rode. But a strange anemia plagued her. At first she imagined it to be the effect of high altitude, but when her head started spinning and her legs cramped, she saw a doctor, who prescribed injections of iron.7
In the beginning Clare saw the barren, colorless Nevada landscape as a reflection of her own physical and emotional dereliction. Then, as the weeks went by, she felt her jaded spirit being soothed by the stark hills, the subtle beiges, tans, and coppers of the terrain, and the blazing blue of the sky. Feeling a return of adventurousness, she rented a car and drove alone over the mountains to Virginia City. The once-prosperous site of the Comstock Lode mines was now a ghost town. Where previously three thousand inhabitants had panned for gold, phantom buildings and skeleton mine shafts were being bleached by the unrelenting sun. Only the Crystal Bar remained open, selling beer, chewing gum, and postcards.8
Though geographically distant from George, Clare still felt attached to him as her provider and father of her child. She needed to know whether he was keeping sober, solvent, and faithful. Evidence of drunkenness, profligacy, or adultery would be crucial in any future dispute over money and custody. So she instructed her lawyer to hire detectives to watch him. Word soon came that George was back on the bottle, having difficulties in the stock market, and dating a young woman.9
Adamant as she had been about wanting this divorce, Clare now blamed everything on her husband. In the first of a series of self-pitying letters to Ann, she listed her grievances, and hinted at an intriguing arrangement that might have kept them together.
I married a weak, stupid drunkard with nothing to recommend him beyond a pleasant smile, money, and a fairly equitable disposition. I brought him youth, beauty, intelligence, and a lovely child … in the first three months of my marriage, he shattered every illusion I ever had, and made a physical and mental wreck of me. His family tormented and maligned me … I entertained his friends, brightened his life, made him a person of some importance. I stood by him in all his squabbles with his brothers. I was nurse to him, counsellor, housekeeper, mother, wife, and friend. I tried with all my soul in the beginning to make him happy and to be happy myself. He cheated me physically, let me down mentally and spiritually at every turn. He drank, acted disgracefully, made me the object of scorn and pity before his friends. And when the time came for me to leave, treated me like a thief and a gold-digger … I lost my health and my looks playing the game. And when I gave my affection to someone else, it was because I cared for that someone else, and not because I wanted to leave him and improve my position. I offered to stay on the most civilized of terms, and he refused to have me. He told me he loved me better than anything in the world and made no effort to keep me … and now he sits in his house, with his servants, cars, and more money than he ever had, with the ghost of my five loveliest years about him … This is my Nicaragua, and I am paying as David paid for Speculating in Marriage.10
The “someone else” Ann evidently knew about was a young stockbroker named Jean, to whom Clare had entrusted “a small amount of money.”11 The inescapable truth seems to be that she wanted to be free to indulge herself sexually while continuing to live with George. Her husband’s refusal to tolerate this “civilized” détente was the ultimate cause of the break between them. In marriage, as in other aspects of life, Clare wanted to have everything her own way.
Flowers for his estranged wife notwithstanding, George continued to deny Ann Austin access to his house. She was obliged to see her granddaughter in Central Park or a hotel. “If only that man would die in the next three months,” Ann fumed, “things would be easier all around.” George was “a quitter, an alibier, a gloater, a sulker, a bum … Dumb.”12
Roused, she went on to castigate her daughter, too. For some time she had been feeling used rather than loved. She noted that “when things were clear sailing,” on Fifth Avenue and in Newport, Clare had wanted to see little of her. “You were in my home to visit three times in one year and that was only on your own business.” Now, not only was she having to keep an eye on little Ann but she was expected to hunt for an apartment to house Clare in the fall and even sell off her daughter’s surplus furs and jewelry for cash.13
Ann complained that her personal income of $21,000 a year (most of it contributed by Joel Jacobs) was barely enough to cover expenses. This annoyed Clare, who wrote back to remind her that 90 percent of Americans managed on a lot less, and that her own alimony would amount to little more. Ann countered with further woes. All of Riggie’s stocks had dropped in value, his own company had only $80 left in the bank, and he himself was $65,000 “in the hole there.” Clare wrote back more sympathetically to say that Ann need never worry about money. Jean had made several thousand for her in investments (so much for her protestations to Ida Keables). If Joel Jacobs lost his fortune and became intolerable, mother could come to daughter. “I’ll not annoy you half as much.” Or if Dr. Austin should die, they could live together in Sound Beach quite comfortably.14
The passing reference to Clare’s stepfather shows how completely he was disregarded by both women as a means of support. After years of tolerating Ann’s continued intimacy with Riggie, Dr. Austin had become aloof. “Life with ‘Doctor,’ ” said Ann, “is like a curtain on the stage, sometimes he draws it aside and lets me see the show, and then again I never know when that will be.”15 Menopausal resentment of his work and political interests would fester into paranoia in the coming months, damaging their marriage.
David’s impending return from Central America added to Ann’s troubles. With the help of an influential friend, she had secured his release from the Marines on the ground of ill health. He would have to work for a pittance in the Philadelphia Paymaster’s Department while waiting for his official discharge.16
After seeing him for the first time in over a year, Ann described him to Clare as thin and haunted-looking. “That boy has suffered.” During just one weekend leave in Sound Beach, David had drunk all the liquor in the house. On another occasion she found him on his bed, crying “as if his heart would break.”17
As usual he claimed to be short of cash. Yet he went to New York for overnight stays whenever he felt inclined. Ann complained that her son had lived off her for most of his twenty-seven years and continued to do so. “I keep him clothed and fed, his laundry and pressing in order, and $20 to $30 each week to help him out,” she informed Clare. It was time for him to contribute and help Clare pay back her two-year debt to Robert Beal, $15,000 of which was still outstanding.18
David wrote Clare somewhat disingenuously that he would be happy if “mother won’t look worried when I offer to pay one of her bills.” If he could only refund his sister “what I took, that would outshine everything.” Instead, he suggested moving in with her “for the next three years.” He would need only “a few clothes for the necessary ‘front’ ” and would be glad to substitute at dinner or cards whenever she was a man short. Otherwise he would be compelled to look for a wife. “I must have something even if it’s only a victrola.”19
Fathoming what to do about her brother became a preoccupation for Clare as she languished in Reno. “If there hadn’t been Riggie’s money and mine and George’s he wouldn’t have been tempted … If he had pulled the thing off, he would have been smart, but since he didn’t, he’s a fool, and a thief, and stupid. So you see, his life and mine have been a vicious circle of troubles, beginning with the desire for money, and ending with the loss of things far more precious.”20
Clare instituted her divorce action on March 20. Marriage to Mr. Brokaw had affected the plaintiff’s health, her lawyer argued, rendering continued cohabitation “unbearable and unsafe to her.” Two months later she was granted a decree on the ground of “extreme cruelty.”21
Neither relieved nor optimistic, Clare returned east on May 24. Faced with a summer of full responsibility for her nearly five-year-old daughter, she took the little girl to Sound Beach. The rooms of Driftway, which just ten years before had seemed so spacious, now appeared cramped and confining.
Next day Ann Austin sailed to Europe for a six-week vacation as the guest of a friend—her way of saying that she was not a permanent child minder. Clare, lonely after her mother’s departure, could hardly turn to Dr. Austin for light relief. Nor did she want to revive her relationship with Jean. She had already distanced herself from him by entrusting the management of her financial affairs to the firm of Louis and Theus Munds. Each month they purchased blue-chip stocks with her $2,500 alimony check. This made her feel more affluent, if not more secure.22
Other adjustments were not so easily made. She had no inclination to resume her old life of dress fittings, gargantuan dinners, all-night dances, speakeasies, racing, yachting, and golf. What, she wondered in sudden panic, was to take their place? Sinking rapidly into despair, Clare decided to do the fashionable thing and seek the help of a psychiatrist.
Dr. Dorian Feigenbaum was a middle-aged Viennese therapist on the faculty of the Institute of Neurology at Columbia University. As a Freudian he predictably diagnosed that Clare’s problems were rooted in repressed childhood conflicts. From infancy she must have been challenging her mother for her father’s love. Failing to win, she had then tried to compete with her brother by behaving like a boy.
Skeptical of these interpretations of her malaise, Clare became alarmed when the therapist suggested that all art was merely sublimated sexual atavism, and that she must transfer her affections to him before he could “cure” her.
After several months of feeling “more vile by the hour” on his couch, she began censoring what she told him. Then she abruptly ended the therapy. “I had not consciously planned to do any such thing,” she wrote later. “But one day, right in the middle of a dream I was inventing, having long ago run out of real dreams … I jumped up … and told him the business was finished.”
Dr. Feigenbaum warned her that breaking off now meant carrying “psychic scars” to her grave. But it was clear to her that if neurotic suffering is artistic creation gone wrong, what she really needed was a job.23