3

The house became a ship, slipped its moorings

. . . and after years and years I am again at sea.

 

—George Davis, 1940

 

Despite George and Carson’s enthusiasm for the idea of creating a group home in Brooklyn, the house at 7 Middagh Street required a great deal of work. As the two writers realized on further inspection, the furnace was broken, the banisters wobbled, the floors needed sanding, the walls required plaster and paint, and there was something seriously wrong with the plumbing. Although the separate two-room suites on each floor did provide extra privacy, there were no locks on the doors, and the thin partitions promised to broadcast each housemate’s every movement day and night.

Still, these were minor drawbacks, in their view. More important were the large windows framing views of the leafy neighborhood in front of the house and the distant city to the rear, the plaster rosettes on the parlor-floor ceilings, and the carved wooden moldings—plus the enticing promise of personal freedom and intellectual stimulation that came with the lease. George got busy asking around for the names of plasterers while Carson moved her few belongings into her third-floor rooms.

They had decided that, at least while major repairs were in progress, George would take the front half of the top floor, whose large sitting room and small bedroom faced quiet Middagh Street and the walled rear garden of another brownstone across the lane. Auden took the corresponding two rooms in the back, with their view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan’s skyscrapers. It was a provocative vista, but there was no danger of its distracting the poet from his work, since the sensitivity of his eyes required him to keep the curtains closed while he worked. As he had written years before in his poem “Letter to Lord Byron”:

 

For concentration I have always found

A small room best, the curtains drawn, the light on;

Then I can work from nine till tea-time, right on.

 

Carson, on the other hand, took great pleasure in placing her own writing table directly in front of the large windows of her suite directly below Auden’s. She reveled in the sight of the East River sparkling in the sunlight as she arranged her typewriter, notebooks, pencils, ashtray, cigarette lighter, and china teacup within reach. Shabby as the house was, Carson’s high-ceilinged rooms, soon to be painted Empire green and hung with velvet curtains, seemed like a palace to her. “At last, after all the years of apartment misery I was living in a comfortable, even luxurious house,” she would write. Certainly, it was a far cry from the North Carolina boardinghouse in which she had lived with Reeves, with its plywood partitions so thin that the young couple could never escape the sounds of the sick, wailing baby next door or the arguments, slaps, and weeping of its parents.

It had not been easy to convince Reeves to agree to her decision to move. He resented her abandonment of him at this difficult time in their marriage and did not see why he was not invited to join the group. After all, he knew and liked both George and Wystan Auden, and they enjoyed his company as well. He, too, hoped to write a novel and could benefit from a household designed to facilitate such work. Besides, a group life like the one she described—particularly when run by George Davis—was likely to prove too stimulating for someone as physically frail as Carson. She needed quiet, Reeves insisted, and someone who understood her needs.

It was just the kind of suffocating talk that Carson could not bear, and it only bolstered her determination to begin a new life on Middagh Street. Pointing out how strained their relationship had become, she finally convinced him that a temporary separation would do them both good. On his own, Reeves could perhaps make better progress with his writing or, if he preferred, with finding a job, and Carson would be better able to resume her role as his partner once she had made some headway with her second novel. In the end, Reeves reluctantly helped Carson pack her bags and carry them to Brooklyn. It would not be a complete separation, they agreed. She would visit him in Manhattan, and he could come out to dinner as often as he liked.

Now, a salty breeze wafting in through the windows beckoned to Carson, and she set out to explore her new neighborhood. This was always her first action when moving to a new location. Not only were long daily walks a therapeutic part of her writing process, helping her to sort out her thoughts, but the sights she saw and the people she met never failed to provide new ideas for her writing.

She quickly familiarized herself with Middagh Street, which stretched east for several blocks past a tiny fire station, a red brick parochial school, and a modest candy factory emblazoned with the sign PEAK’S MASON MINTS. Maple trees overhung the sidewalks, their flaming red autumn leaves used by the neighborhood children to build bonfires in the gutters. Carson soon got to know the man living in the house to the left of 7 Middagh, who had agreed to deliver their coal, and the woman to the right, who shared her home with a dozen stray dogs and a pet monkey and who was rumored to be very rich and very stingy. Carson was intrigued to learn that, frail as this elderly woman appeared, she had once been jailed for smashing the windows of a saloon in a temperance riot.

Such local gossip was provided by Mr. Parker, the druggist in the small pharmacy on the first floor of the clapboard house on the corner. He was a shy man with a carefully groomed yellow mustache whom Carson got to know while weighing herself each morning on the pharmacy scale. She had noticed that as she balanced the weights, Mr. Parker would move noiselessly to her side to check the results. He “always gives me a quick little glance,” she wrote, “but he has never made any comment, nor indicated in any way whether he thought I weighed too little or too much.” Carson had already developed a special fondness for him after overhearing through the open windows of his shop his determined efforts to help his uninterested daughter with her schoolwork. Night after night, his patient voice floated down the quiet street—“The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to . . .”—apparently to no avail.

Mr. Parker passed on to Carson many of the old legends of Brooklyn Heights, a number of which she recorded at her desk for later use. She learned about Love Lane, a narrow alley named for an attractive young woman who shared a house on its corner with her two bachelor uncles. The girl was so charming that suitors lingered longingly outside her window every night, writing poetry on the fence and crowding the sidewalks so that the neighbors hardly had room to pass. The girl was long gone now, but the street name remained.

Middagh Street itself had quite a different history, having been dominated for decades by the legendary Miss Middagh, the last matriarch of the Dutch family that had established a mill on this site in the early eighteenth century. Late in life, Miss Middagh had decided that it was wrong for the streets to bear the names of the most prominent residents, so she began slipping out late at night and tearing down the street signs. Each time the signs were replaced, the opinionated Miss Middagh tore them down again until the city gave up and changed the street names to the fruits Carson saw now—Pineapple, Orange, Cranberry Street, and so on. By the time of her death, Miss Middagh’s name was the only one remaining on the street signs of the North Heights. And so she left this earth a satisfied woman.

Carson appreciated the Middagh family’s choice of a hilltop location for their business and home. Another advantage of the site was its proximity to the sea. Carson loved the sight of seagulls overhead and the sounds of shouting workmen that drifted up from the active wharves and warehouses of the waterfront. “Isn’t it wonderful to live in a neighborhood with fresh salt air!” she would exclaim when she returned home from her wanderings. She was likely to be greeted by the sight of George Davis, still in his bathrobe, sleepily directing the work of a carpenter or painter in the parlor or the narrow front hall. A number of workmen had begun repairs on the house, but as their employers enjoyed sitting down with them for a drink or a chat, they made slow progress. One of them, an Italian-American carpenter whom Carson liked for his habit of whistling arias as he worked, brought a bottle of homemade wine to work one day to celebrate the birth of his first son. After they had finished the wine, the carpenter invited Carson to join the festivities at his house at the opposite end of Brooklyn, in Sheepshead Bay. Carson enjoyed meeting his many relatives and neighbors and sampling the local provolone and Italian pastries, along with more of the wine. She was especially taken by the electrician’s grandfather, who “had the face of a charming old satyr,” she wrote, and who said of the new baby, “He is very ugly, this little one. But it is clear that he will be smart. Smart and very ugly.”

Surely, such an experience was worth the delay in getting the stairs fixed. And even if the repairs were taking longer than expected, the house had begun to come together in other exciting ways. George’s former colleagues at Harper’s Bazaar had been thrilled to hear about his new experiment and were quick to show their support. A flood of housewarming gifts arrived from Manhattan in what Carson described as a kind of “multiple bridal party.” The cover illustrator Marcel Vertes sent George watercolors for the walls, Diana Vreeland donated a grand piano for musical evenings in the parlor, and other friends contributed piles of curtains, dishes, and kitchen appliances. A new gramophone arrived as well, allowing George to play selections from his prized collection of French music hall records and Carson her recordings of Schubert and Bach. Meanwhile, George’s own furniture was delivered, and several unused rooms were soon stuffed with mahogany bookcases, glass-fronted cabinets, S-shaped loveseats, oil lamps, gilt-framed mirrors, and an apparently infinite array of unusual American objets d’art for the house once the repairs had been made.

This accomplished, George could devote himself to what he considered the most enjoyable part of moving into a new home: hunting down additional necessities at the Curio Shoppe on Manhattan’s Third Avenue, Miss Kate’s junk shop on Brooklyn’s trolley-rattled Fulton Street, and other such mysterious emporiums where he preferred to spend his time. Carson, too, became enchanted by this world, seemingly frozen in time, when she accompanied George on his expeditions. Miss Kate, the Brooklyn junk store proprietor, was a “lean, dark, and haggard” woman, Carson wrote, who slept in her shop most nights “wrapped in a Persian rug and lying on a green velvet Victorian couch.” She had one of the handsomest faces Carson had ever seen, but also one of the dirtiest. A neighboring merchant remarked admiringly that Miss Kate was a good woman, but “she dislikes washing herself. So she only bathes once a year, when it is summer. I expect she’s just about the dirtiest woman in Brooklyn.”

 

By the time Auden arrived on the first of October, Carson and George felt they had made a great deal of progress toward rendering the place habitable. A number of George’s motley collection of companions, including eighteen-year-old Victor Guarneri, who worked part-time as a stevedore on the Brooklyn waterfront, and Frankie Abbe, George’s former secretary, who had recently separated from her husband and now spent much of her time at the house, had helped move furniture, hire repairmen, stock the kitchen, and otherwise get the house working. Still, Auden was alarmed to see the chaotic state of his new home. While it was true that George had carefully arranged the piano and other furniture in the parlor, for example, the repairmen were still working there, and the room was filled with construction debris and plaster dust. Half-eaten meals were abandoned on the piano or wherever else they had been wolfed down, and dirty dishes piled up not only in the kitchen sink but in the ground-floor bathtub as well. George’s knickknacks seemed to cover every flat surface, chairs and tables were stacked everywhere, and aside from the hasty placement of a table and chairs near the kitchen door, the rear garden had been left overgrown with ivy and weeds. Worse still, since the furnace had not yet been repaired, the house had no heat or hot water, nor did the toilets always work.

Perhaps it was simply how Americans lived. Auden and his fellow expatriates had already learned to adjust to life with people who manipulated their eating utensils in strange ways and dined on remarkably odd combinations of food (“insane salads,” Auden would comment), who said “a quarter of five” instead of “a quarter to five,” and in general behaved in uncivilized ways. Auden himself did not object to a high level of physical disorder in his domestic life. He was well known for living in dimly lit rooms littered with books and papers, overflowing ashtrays, and dirty martini glasses, all lightly dusted with cigarette ash and half-hidden by the cloud of smoke that generally surrounded him.

But now, when he hoped to focus on his work with special intensity, the poet urgently required a quiet space and a predictable routine. In his apartment on Columbia Terrace, he had been able to adhere to his preferred schedule of several daily writing sessions interrupted only by meals, afternoon cocktails, and bedtime at ten o’clock. At 7 Middagh, he found that at ten o’clock George was just beginning to gather energy for his favorite part of the day. Heading into Manhattan to gather friends from the theater and Midtown restaurants, George spent the night touring New York’s nightclubs, bars, and brothels, and then stumbled home with friends in tow for several alcohol-soaked hours of soul-searching before dawn. After his guests left or passed out in their chairs, he would turn to his clacking typewriter, writing the long, confessional, self-dramatizing letters so familiar to his friends. On many occasions, when Auden came downstairs in the morning, he would find George Davis passed out on the sofa, fully dressed. There he would remain through breakfast and much of the morning until nearly noon, when one was likely to glimpse him stepping naked over the plumber, murmuring sleepily, “Vex not his ghost: O let him pass!” from King Lear on his way to the bath.

The daytime work hours were not much better, with the kitchen often full of chattering photographers, actors, artists, and other curious visitors. Throughout the afternoon, George could be heard talking on the telephone with his many friends in Manhattan, opening each conversation with “What’s going on?” in his warm, teasing tone. Then he would go on to report the day’s gossip, honing with every call his descriptions of the “ruin” he had rented and the adventures he had been having as a result. Carson, too, seemed to find it hard to concentrate; she clattered down to the kitchen several times a day to refill her thermos with a mixture of hot tea and sherry she had affectionately nicknamed “sonnie boy.” Most alarming to Auden, meals turned out to be equally casual. Carson enjoyed playing chef, but her menus were limited to such dishes as meat patties, canned green pea soup with wienies, and a concoction she called “Spuds Carson”—mashed potatoes mixed with onions, cheese, or whatever she found in the larder. Even these were often burnt to the consistency of charcoal, since Carson tended to wander off and forget that she was cooking. George, while capable of throwing together a delicious dinner, preferred to dine out at one of the sailors’ hangouts in the neighborhood, such as Lottie and Jack’s on Pineapple Street, when not with friends in Manhattan.

It was ironic that Auden should find himself in such a situation, since he had been considering at length, in both his recent essays and in the long poem “New Year Letter,” the ideal conditions necessary for creating good works of art. If it was the artist’s job to perceive and tell the truth, and if this duty appeared to have become especially important in light of recent events, how could it be best facilitated? Long before arriving at Middagh Street, he had discarded the romantic idea that unbridled bohemianism was likely to lead to the creation of anything worth reading, looking at, or listening to. The fundamental premise on which bohemianism was based—the idea that “‘good’ equals what the bourgeoisie do not do”—was self-evidently false. Regular meals and quiet work hours were required for efficiency in every realm, and just because factory owners relied on them should not prevent artists from doing so as well.

On the other hand, naturally, it was also possible to go too far in the direction of the aesthetically sublime. Auden had conveyed the appeal of the orderly environment in a brief but memorable portrait in “New Year Letter.” Written in the form of a thank-you letter to a friend after a visit to her home, he had recalled their experience of listening to music together during the week that the war in Europe began—enjoying the benefits of a civilized life even as it was threatened. He had then added:

 

To set in order—that’s the task

Both Eros and Apollo ask;

For Art and Life agree in this

That each intends a synthesis,

That order which must be the end

That all self-loving things intend

Who struggle for their liberty,

Who use, that is, their will to be.

 

The hostess to whom the poem was addressed was Elizabeth Mayer, the wife of an émigré Jewish psychiatrist and mother of two adult and two adolescent children, at whose home Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears had been living intermittently for more than a year. The Mayers had come to America from Munich, where Elizabeth, who had been trained as a pianist, had held one of the city’s most successful salons, attended by many of Europe’s most talented writers, artists, and musicians. Now living in a small cottage on the grounds of a sanatorium in Amityville, Long Island, where her husband served as medical director, Elizabeth continued to invite dozens of artist friends to spontaneous large dinner parties and for overnight stays, despite her small quarters.

Britten had described Elizabeth in a letter as “one of those grand people who have been essential through the ages for the production of art; really sympathetic & enthusiastic, with instinctive good taste.” Indeed, the formidable Elizabeth seemed to devote more attention to her guests than to her children, whom she would send to an empty patient’s cottage if necessary (to their wry amusement) to make room for another musician. When Auden came to visit, Elizabeth set up a writing table for him at the end of the living room, opposite Britten’s place at her Bechstein piano. She would then move between the two all afternoon, supplying Britten with food—she considered him too thin—and Auden, in his cloud of cigarette smoke, with cups of tea. After dinner, they would listen to recordings on the gramophone or, even better, Britten would play the piano for them and Pears would sing.

Britten and Pears, whom the Mayers playfully referred to as “the geniuses,” considered the house in Amityville a kind of paradise. Auden, too, as his poem demonstrated, found great pleasure in the reliability and comfort of the life there. But in his poem he had explored the idea that such highly nurturing environments could also harm the artist because they were essentially closed. By limiting the possibility of change and access to the unknown, they prevented the artist from encountering the ambiguous or difficult elements that would spur him toward true creativity and expression. Without the random interloper that interferes with his perfect vision, Auden suggested, an artist becomes stagnant and only repeats himself in a cosseted, self-reflecting cycle. One could even say that at times the Devil himself served God’s purpose, then, by luring the artist toward inauthentic paths and thus revealing to him, by contrast, what his true path had always been.

At 7 Middagh Street, Auden saw an opportunity to create a viable balance between the closed domestic perfection of a home like Elizabeth Mayer’s and the romantic, bohemian chaos that he had discovered on moving in. Rather than living apart as separate individuals in “a crowd of lost beings,” they could create a true community—a rational society united by their common values and passions that left room for the unexpected.

Granted, even by mid-October they were far from having achieved that goal. Auden’s friend, the writer James Stern, and his wife, Tania, were surprised to find, when they dropped in one afternoon, “George naked at the piano with a cigarette in his mouth, Carson on the floor with half a gallon of sherry, and Wystan bursting in like a headmaster, announcing: ‘Now then, dinner!’” Even Britten and Pears had been unable to hide their shock and disappointment when they had visited their future home at around the same time, only to discover the workmen still at their task and the house itself squalid almost beyond belief. “They’re incredibly slow! Don’t you believe that this country is so marvelously efficient!” Britten wrote of the workmen after he and Pears had hastened back to Elizabeth Mayer’s house with the promise to return for another inspection in about a month’s time. But despite this evidence, Auden believed that a healthy group life was possible. All they needed were some rules.

It was clear now, and should have been clear from the beginning, that George Davis was not the one to provide them. As brilliantly as the editor acquitted himself at both the high and low extremes of New York life, he was also, of all the people Auden knew in the city, perhaps the least able to manage the conventions and requirements of everyday living. Everyone knew, for example, that the editor’s odd apparel, borrowed from friends or rescued from thrift shops, resulted from a horror of the ordinary so pronounced that he would do almost anything rather than enter a department store. Banks so discomfited him that he preferred to beg the assistants at Harper’s Bazaar to cash his paychecks for him. And, as Auden now discovered, the furnace remained broken because George had run out of funds but could not force himself to bring up the subject of money with his housemates. He believed that as writers, Carson and Wystan should not have to think of such things.

Finally comprehending the situation, Auden approached it with characteristic good humor. A group house like this one required a firm guiding hand, he told George, and for this job he nominated himself. He was thoroughly familiar with the requirements of communal living; he had attended boarding schools for years and served as an English public school teacher with sufficient skill and enthusiasm to have been nicknamed by his students “Uncle Wiz.” Now, taking his place at the head of the table, he announced with relish that several goals must be attained before 7 Middagh Street could become the catalyst for creative productivity that they all desired. First, they must agree on a schedule of regular hours for work and for socializing, and during work, silence must be maintained. Second, a list of chores must be created and divided among the residents as best suited their talents and needs, and these tasks must be completed. Third, they must find a way to raise money to pay for necessary repairs and then invite others to move in as quickly as possible to facilitate the payment of rent. Auden himself would be responsible for collecting the rent, paying bills, and scheduling repairs. It would be excellent if they could afford a cook as well, eventually. He and Isherwood had had a cook named Elizabeth at their apartment in Manhattan, and he still recalled with great pleasure her pleasant company and “civilized meals.”

Carson and George responded enthusiastically to Auden’s efforts to take charge. Carson volunteered to wash dishes and provide wine for dinner when she could afford it, and George got on the telephone to solicit magazine work for all three of them. In the meantime, Auden improvised for himself a schedule of early-morning work sessions in his room (before any workmen arrived) and a second session, beginning at 10:30 A.M., at a corner table at a nearby cafeteria. Sending one of his poems to Harry Brown, a fellow poet and admirer who worked at The New Yorker, he added a note: “Dear Harry, PLEASE sell this to the New Yorker as I am VERY VERY VERY poor . . . I STILL HAVE NO HOT WATER I STILL HAVE NO HOT WATER. I shall go crazy.”

It was thrilling to George and Carson to watch this intelligent, inquisitive, critical poet—whose focused energy was so different from their own—bring their domestic lives into order. Clearly, Auden enjoyed organizing other people’s lives and could be depended on in every way, in MacNeice’s words, to be “getting on with the job.” By the end of the month, they began to see results. George’s networking efforts garnered commissions for both Carson and Auden for work to be published in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as well as an offer from his friend Louise Dahl-Wolfe to photograph Carson in Central Park, where she had taken pictures of Auden and Isherwood two years before. Auden would supplement his own income through a number of essays and book reviews for Common Sense, the Nation, and other journals in the coming weeks, while George, who had not yet gotten around to beginning his novel, considered writing some New Yorker profiles instead. Until the checks started to arrive, they would have to make do with the money they had. But at least Auden and Carson were enjoying regular work hours again, and George had enlisted Victor’s help in throwing together occasional evening meals.

Often, a dinner prepared for four or five would have to be stretched to serve six, seven, or more, when friends stopped by to spend the evening: Reeves McCullers, Chester Kallman, Frankie Abbe, James and Tania Stern, Lincoln Kirstein, Klaus Mann, back from California, Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach occasionally, and even Carson’s friend from Bread Loaf, the Brooklyn native Louis Untermeyer, on one or two occasions. These feasts, while still held in primitive circumstances with an understocked kitchen and amateur cooks, proved lively as Auden’s housemates discovered that the poet was not as conventional as he liked to pretend. Wolfing down his food, taking big swallows of cheap Chianti (“I have the digestion of a horse as you know,” he later admitted), he tossed out opinions almost faster than his listeners could take them in. He did not particularly like teaching college students, he might remark, because he felt that by their age they should be teaching themselves. Or he might begin the dinner conversation with, “There are two things I don’t like—to see women drinking hard liquor and to see them standing at bars without escorts.” If he could come up with a more provocative or outrageous opener, he would make it. And if George or Reeves or Louis Untermeyer ventured an insufficiently interesting response, Auden was likely to fix him with a look that the poet Joseph Brodsky later described as that of “a physician who is interested in your story though he knows you are ill.” He would then veer into a lively discourse on Rilke, a word game such as Purgatory, in which one chose two people who would least like to be stuck with each other in that realm for eternity, such as Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde, or the loud recitation of his own or another’s poetry.

Carson listened in fascination to Wystan’s pronouncement that detective stories were virtually the only type of novel that he cared to read. Most other kinds, particularly American novels, lacked interest in his opinion. He disliked Steinbeck’s work, for example, since he did not believe that novels could successfully deal “with inarticulates or with failures.” Moreover, he was struck by the utter loneliness of American literature. Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, James—American literature was “one extraordinary literature of lonely people.” That was not necessarily a criticism. It was the destiny of all Western nations, as the machine age developed, to lose their traditions, their connections, their allegiances. America was just ahead of the rest of the world in highlighting man’s aloneness, his real condition.

Auden spoke so rapidly that his tumbling river of words became incomprehensible at times, particularly as the wine thickened his tongue. The Americans were interested to note that he seemed especially attracted to theories that involved organizing concepts into categories, especially if they applied to human behavior. Jung’s typology approach to personality, for example, delighted him, with its neat classifications of individuals into Introvert or Extrovert and those who operated primarily through Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, or Intuition. Auden, for instance, was a Thinking and Intuition type, weaker in the areas of Feeling and Sensation. This meant that he apprehended his life experiences through his intellect rather than his emotions, and only after a considerable delay did his feelings come into play. As a result, contrary to what others often assumed, he learned from such experiences with more difficulty than most, and grew more slowly as a result. Nineteen-year-old Chester, on the other hand, was a Thinking-Sensation type, which enhanced his understanding of music and certain other arts but implied a tendency toward narcissism. What was needed, Auden advised with all the prescriptive self-confidence of a physician’s son, was to learn one’s missing skills from others who had them. Chester could develop his emotional side through his college friend Elsie, for example, who had once been in love with him, and intuition from Auden himself.

Chester Kallman hardly needed Jung to illuminate either Auden’s personality or his own. Now in his final year at Brooklyn College and living at his father’s apartment in Manhattan, he visited Auden nearly every afternoon after classes, occasionally staying the night. As his partner of more than a year, Chester was familiar enough with Wystan’s theories to slough them off without comment. Still influenced, perhaps, by his early flirtation with the psychologist Homer Lane, for example, Auden was always insisting that virtually all illness was psychosomatic, the result of the suppression of natural impulses or other unnatural psychic or emotional activity. Rheumatism and arthritis sprang from a stubborn personality. Physical deformity was the product of a struggle between instinct and will. Frustration in love led to boils, and one could get cancer by stifling the creative urge. Auden’s own chain-smoking, he liked to point out, was the result of insufficient weaning, while those with bad breath wanted to be left alone. One took a risk arriving at the table with any mild malady, such as a cold, for Auden was likely to pounce with a diagnosis and not let up until the victim agreed with him.

As for the much-vaunted Jungian personality types, Chester had known even before he met Auden that the poet’s weakness lay in the realm of feelings or emotions by analyzing his poetry and discussing it with Harold Norse. When confronted, Auden admitted that his poems lacked feeling (though many of his readers would have disagreed) and added that the only way he could evoke emotion in his writing was by first processing it through his intellect, by putting it on the table and analyzing it.

Like most college poets, Chester placed a high value on the convincing expression of emotion and found this form of dry analysis deplorable. He believed, too, that it led to stunning errors in perception. Chester had once described to Norse a time when he and Auden were riding the subway to Chester’s grandmother’s home and began to argue over which psychological roles they played with each other. As the other passengers looked on in disbelief, Auden shouted over the roar of the train, “I am not your father, I’m your mother!” and Chester yelled back, “You’re not my mother! I’m your mother! . . . You’re my father!” “But you’ve got a father!” Auden countered. “I’m your bloody mother and that’s that, darling! You’ve been looking for a mother since the age of four!”

He was referring, of course, to the fact that Chester’s mother had died when he was that age. And it was true that Chester liked to tell the story of how he fell in love with his aunt Sadie after his mother’s death. His passion for Sadie became so strong that he begged her to marry him when he grew up, and the young woman playfully assured him that she would. The result was that when she prepared for her real wedding a year later, young Chester felt utterly betrayed. He pitched such a fit that his befuddled family finally told him that he could marry Sadie, too. Thus, Chester stood with Sadie and her groom beneath the wedding canopy and danced with them at the wedding reception until, exhausted, he fell asleep. When he woke, he found the couple gone and himself again unforgivably abandoned. Not long afterward, his father married a woman who would torment him for the rest of his childhood.

This incident proved, as far as Auden was concerned, that Chester still longed for a mother, and he was more than willing to play the part. But Chester just liked to tell the story of Aunt Sadie because it was a good story. In actuality, he was significantly more preoccupied by a longing for the father who, while physically present, had emotionally abandoned him to a sadistic stepmother. Chester chalked it up to emotional blindness when Auden failed to realize that his sexual preferences leaned decidedly toward the punitively paternal.

It amused the Americans to observe how Chester played the untamable foil to Auden’s demanding schoolmistress. The teenager’s willingness to goad his partner into flights of pique, or to taunt him from across the table with invented bits of verse, kept the conversation raucous and entertaining. Auden himself, stirring an after-dinner martini with his pinky, laughed along with the others when Chester recited such lines as:

 

Wystan is like the fire

That licks along the wood

Wystan is the desire

Of mankind for the good

Wystan is the poet

That makes the trees to grow

The trees don’t know it

But Wystan thinks so.

 

Tania Stern was glad to see Chester win the approval of the table—particularly of Auden, who continued to advise the boy not to try to publish his poetry yet and critiqued his work only on technical grounds, showing little of the outright enthusiasm that young writers crave. Auden acted this way with the best of intentions; he himself regretted having to live with his own published juvenilia and hoped for better for Chester. When critiquing he did not consider the topic of a poem his business as much as its execution, but his limited support inevitably irritated and worried Chester. Auden seemed oblivious, too, Tania noted, to the look on Chester’s face when he insisted that it was “not your place” to relate an anecdote about one of his friends or when he abruptly turned his back, shutting Chester out of the conversation. For a boy whom Auden himself had fondly called a “portrait of pure pride,” such insensitive treatment boded ill.

In general, however, it hardly mattered whether or not one agreed with Auden. Either way, MacNeice would write, one “came away from his presence always encouraged; here at least was someone to whom ideas were friendly—they came and ate out of his hand—who would always have an interest in the world and always have something to say.” Carson, far from being offended by his lack of interest in novels, drank in his remarks about American literature and thought a great deal about them, both at the dinner table and later in her room. By now she had given up on trying to write about the émigré and his friendship with a black man in the South and had returned to The Bride and Her Brother, the novel about the adolescent girl with which she had been struggling for nearly a year. Its twelve-year-old, tomboyish protagonist, whom Carson had named Frankie Addams (a nod, it would seem, to her new friend, Frankie Abbe), could be considered precisely the type of “inarticulate” whom Auden claimed could not be represented in fiction. Half-formed and drifting, Frankie dreamed of faraway places, longing in her southern environment to experience snow. She was, in many ways, the embodiment of the loneliness to which Auden referred when he talked of Emerson and Hawthorne. And it was precisely the nature of this inchoate yearning on which she wanted to focus in this novel even more intensely than she had in her previous one.

Carson’s own such experience had reached its apogee in the grief she felt as a teenager when Mary Tucker, her piano teacher and first adult friend, moved away. In The Bride and Her Brother, Frankie would suffer a similar sense of abandonment when she learned that her brother planned to marry and leave town. Contrary to Auden’s opinion, Carson felt that, in a sense, inarticulates and failures may be the only people worth writing novels about. But she also knew that their inability to formulate their feelings made it difficult to portray them. She had to find a way to put Frankie’s undefined yearning into a form that could be grasped by the reader and fully understood.

Despite Auden’s tendency to dominate the conversation, others managed to have their say as well. Carson, a consummate storyteller, delighted her housemates with her descriptions of life in Georgia. She might recount, her slow drawl growing more pronounced the more she drank, the kinds of nicknames that Southerners give their family members—Brother Man, Little Bob, sister, baby-child, honeybunch, and her favorite, “King the Beauty,” still used for her young cousin, now grown. She could list the descending social categories of the South, from “plain” to “common” to “common as pigs’ tracks,” or describe the hot summer nights she used to spend with her five cousins on the wide sleeping porches back home and the homemade ice cream they used to make and eat every Sunday. Her new friends especially liked the southern phrases she recalled from her childhood, such as her father’s remark that “if I hadn’t sold that Coca Cola stock I could just sit and pat my foot.”

Klaus Mann, too, captured the others’ attention with a description of the rescue from France of his younger brother, Golo, and his uncle Heinrich Mann—both now safely recovering at Thomas Mann’s house in Princeton. Lincoln Kirstein added a certain gravity to the group that could even charm when lightened by the presence of one or more of his dancers. And George Davis, as always, was able to recount the most tragic news or bit of theater gossip in a manner so studied and mock-sincere as to leave the others weak with laughter. As November drew near, these intimate dinners at 7 Middagh became an almost nightly festival of “gobble and gossip,” providing precisely the balancing element of intellectual stimulus that Auden had hoped for.

 

With the parlor still a shambles, the group frequently went out for their after-dinner drinks—often downhill to the decadent Sands Street district bordering the Brooklyn waterfront. “Hell’s Half Acre” was the nickname Sands Street had been given by the local population. Hell or not, the brawling bars, tattoo parlors, and male and female brothels adjoining the piers were known around the world as the place any right-thinking sailor would want to go when he died. Naval officers in uniform tended to congregate uphill at the St. George Hotel, where elegant dining, dancing, and more discreet assignations were available, but George was convinced that this seedy district’s cruising sailors, cheap liquor, and barroom imbroglios made for better entertainment.

That autumn of 1940, the Brooklyn waterfront had become an increasingly exciting destination. While the war had virtually ended the luxury liner traffic between Europe and New York, emptying many of Manhattan’s piers, Brooklyn’s docks served primarily cargo and were now benefiting from a frantic rerouting of world trade. African and South American freighters brought their aromatic spices, coffee, and other goods to Brooklyn instead of Britain or France, picking up American automobiles and manufactured goods for the journey home. By October, sixteen steamship lines serving South America were docking in Brooklyn, while six New York companies provided weekly sailings to Capetown and other African ports. The few British and Dutch ships that arrived slipped into the docks with their guns and camouflage paint like harbingers of doom—the British freighters fetching food for their beleaguered homeland while the struggling Dutch maintained a single route between Brooklyn and the East Indies.

The new ships brought an exotic flavor to the run-down district, whose only other income came from the thousands of blue-collar workers at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard. The mix of immigrant laborers, their numbers expanding weekly to fill new orders for the coming war’s fleet, with thousands of footloose sailors and the kind of drifters who gravitate to waterfront life, created a rough-and-ready, Wild West atmosphere that the Middagh Street crowd found irresistible.

The writers soon became regulars at such places as Tony’s Square Bar, known as the toughest sailors’ bar in the world. “All the bars exploded into fisticuffs. It seemed to be a navy tradition,” recalled one enthusiastic patron, but Tony’s had the reputation for maximum excitement at a minimal price. In other taverns down the block, Carson wrote, one could observe the “vivid old dowagers of the block who have such names as The Duchess or Submarine Mary. Every tooth in Submarine Mary’s head is made of solid gold—and her smile is rich-looking and satisfied.” These two older prostitutes had a stable list of sailor clients “and are known from Buenos Aires to Zanzibar. They are conscious of their fame and don’t bother to dance or flirt like the younger girls, but sit comfortably in the center of the room with their knitting, keeping a sharp eye on all that goes on.”

The area no doubt stimulated Carson’s memories of the riverfront shantytowns she had explored in her childhood and reminded George of Detroit’s Greektown and Auden of the alleys of Shanghai. But George most enjoyed bringing along guests who were either the least likely to come across the district on their own—Columbia professors, editors from Vogue—or who could by their presence step up the intensity of the show. Among the latter was one of his closest friends and America’s best-known burlesque star, Gypsy Rose Lee. The sight of this bejeweled, ermine-cloaked stripper descending on Sands Street after a Broadway show always created a gratifying stir among the sailors.

Carson, too, thrilled to meet a star like Gypsy, and it was a good time for the burlesque star to be out celebrating. Although only twenty-six (or perhaps twenty-nine—due to her mother’s habit of forging her children’s birth certificates, Gypsy could never be sure of her age), she was enjoying the highest peak yet in an extraordinary career. That summer she had starred in The Streets of Paris, a wildly popular revue at the New York World’s Fair, where the producer Mike Todd had not only paid her $4,000 a week but had posted her image forty feet high—“larger than Stalin’s”—on the front of the Hall of Music. With that success behind her, Gypsy was now appearing on Broadway opposite Bert Lahr in the Cole Porter musical Du Barry Was a Lady when not posing for photographs for Harper’s Bazaar, attending parties on Park Avenue, or otherwise getting her name mentioned in New York’s gossip columns. Over the past decade, such activities had helped expand Gypsy’s fame as a performer from the tawdry, post-vaudeville strip club circuit of the Depression to the classier burlesque “opera houses” of New York, Chicago, and other large cities and finally to the more legitimate stages of Broadway, Hollywood, and the World’s Fair.

One sign of her success was the extraordinary number of Gypsy imitators who populated New York’s bars and nightclubs in the early 1940s—from the “sepia Gypsy” in a Harlem cabaret, to “Gypsy Voga Lee” in a traveling “Cavalcade of Girls,” to “Our Very Own Gypsy Rose Lee,” who provided entertainment for a program put on by the Young Communist League. The female impersonator Billy Herrero, wearing a brassiere filled with birdseed for that natural look, billed himself as the “Brazilian Gypsy Rose Lee,” while Hubert’s Museum on Forty-second Street featured a “Gypsy Rose Flea.”

Gypsy maintained a game attitude toward most of this activity. “Money in the bank” was her attitude. Not only was imitation the highest form of flattery, she would remark while tossing back a gin and tonic (not so easy to get these days) and lighting one of the 150 Turkish cigarettes she smoked each day, but it meant free publicity for her. Anyway, she could thank God she wasn’t one of the carbon copies.

Certainly, Gypsy was an original. Long-legged, radiantly healthy, and remarkably self-possessed, she lacked the blond-bombshell looks that were popular in Hollywood but had a powerful, statuesque beauty all her own. Small-breasted and large-hipped, she designed and often sewed her own costumes to emphasize the long neck, elegant profile, and creamy, glowing skin that her public had grown to love. Her auburn hair, too flyaway to be worn loose, was usually arranged in an elaborate coiffure, and her signature six-inch heels added glamour to her five-foot-nine-inch frame. But her greatest charm lay, George felt, in the athletic, almost tomboyish stride that belied these ladylike accoutrements—a holdover, perhaps, from a childhood spent playing the male parts opposite her prettier younger sister in vaudeville. In every way—from her sophisticated manner of handling the ogling crowds to her half-joking, almost British-sounding contralto with carefully pronounced French phrases (punctuated occasionally with an American curse word or two)—Gypsy gave the impression of a smart, ambitious, self-made young woman with a well-developed sense of humor. This persona had been born more than a decade earlier, at about the time Gypsy and George had met.

Crammed around a Sands Street table, the residents of 7 Middagh listened, entranced and amused, as Gypsy told the story of the day she first set eyes on George Davis. It was just after Gigolo, her pet monkey, strangled to death in Omaha in a coat she’d sewn for him from the scraps of some old hotel blankets, she told them. Gypsy, known then as Louise Hovick, was thirteen years old at the time—an awkward, overweight adolescent resentfully touring with her sister, June, in the care of her mother, Rose, and Rose’s manager-boyfriend, Gordon. Louise had left Gigolo in his coat overnight to keep him warm, but he had twisted the cloth around his neck until he couldn’t get free. It was the first real tragedy of her life, but they had to move on. They disposed of the monkey and traveled to Detroit, where the miserable teenager’s nights were spent onstage and her days cooped up in the Dixieland Hotel, listening to the grownups argue.

But Louise had a secret. Next door to the hotel she had discovered a magical place—her own special retreat—the Seven Arts bookstore. Even June didn’t know about it or the hours that Louise spent there. Gypsy described it as “a strange, wonderful place with batik scarves on the walls and small tables and chairs placed in the dimly lighted corners of the room. Candles, stuck in bottles, threw flickering lights on the bookshelves.”

Louise had always loved books, but she was even more attracted to the people sitting at the bookstore tables, so unlike anyone in her daily life. During the late afternoons they would crowd into the shop, looking “almost alike with their shaggy haircuts and low flat shoes,” talking eagerly about F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. Eavesdropping on their conversations, Louise browsed through the bookshelves, pondering what to buy with the allowance she had saved. She had to be careful about the books she chose. Not only were her funds limited, but she was allowed just one trunk for all her books and her sister’s toys. Whenever she bought a new book, she had to let an old one go. Already she had replaced A Child’s Garden of Verse with Boccaccio’s Decameron and The Wizard of Oz with The Rubdijydt of Omar Khayyam. “In the candle-lighted bookshop I hesitated between a copy of Firbank’s Flower Beneath the Foot, which had a lovely picture on the faded gray cover, and Marius the Epicurean,” Gypsy wrote years later. “I knew if I bought either one I would have to make room for it in the trunk. I was wondering more about which of my old books would have to go, when the manager of the store spoke to me. ‘Have you read Shakespeare’s sonnets?’ he asked, offering me a slender cloth-covered book.”

The manager, of course, was George Davis, then a teenager working to earn enough money to get out of Detroit. Gypsy could still picture how he looked that day, she claimed. He handled the books gently, and his voice was gentle, too. He didn’t seem to mind that she hadn’t yet bought anything, though she had been in the shop every day for a week. No one else seemed to be buying books either, she noted, at least not often. All they were doing was talking about them.

Young Louise didn’t particularly want a book by Shakespeare, but she did want to be a part of that world. In her most sophisticated voice, she told George that since she worked in the theater she didn’t care much about reading plays. “These are poems,” George explained kindly.

Louise bought the sonnets and never forgot George’s generosity—or his apparent instant understanding that her search had been not just for a book but for a different way to live, a different person to be. A decade later, the two met again in New York and soon became close friends. By then, Louise had weathered her initiation into burlesque at the age of sixteen, earning $75 a week to strip for men with newspapers in their laps. Desperate to escape this show business ghetto of red-lit clubs and noting that girls with a gimmick got paid a lot more than ordinary strippers, she had developed a burlesque act of her own based on a piece of advice from her mentor, Tessie the Tassel Twirler: “You don’t dump the whole roast on the platter. Always leave them hungry for more.”

The point was, Louise realized, that men didn’t really want to see another naked woman—they’d rather imagine what was under her clothes. This concept appealed to her innate modesty as well as to her love of a good show. Pursuing the idea, she changed her stage name to “Miss Gypsy Rose Lee,” a name that prepared the audience with just the right bump-and-grind rhythm each time it was announced. Then she designed, as costumes, a number of comically modest, ankle-length dresses with shirtwaists, broad belts, and mutton sleeves, all held together by black-tipped dressmaker’s pins. Slipping demurely onstage, looking freshly scrubbed and blooming, she recited lighthearted song lyrics filled with double-entendres, accompanied by a few musicians in the orchestra pit. As she recited, she smiled primly at the audience, slowly removing the pins, one by one, and dropping them insouciantly into the tuba player’s horn as the drummer emphasized its landing with an exaggerated thump. Making a great play out of discovering yet another pin, Gypsy would allow the larger pieces of clothing to gradually fall away.

As she pretended to greet the loss of part of her clothing with shock and dismay, her audience responded with laughter and calls to remove the rest. “Darlings, please don’t ask me to take off any more, I’ll catch cold!” she would plead, ducking behind the curtain and peeking out in mock terror. “No, please, I’m embarrassed! . . . No, honestly, I can’t. I’m shivering now.” Then would come more toying with the dress, another exit, and another teasing entrance until the dress was completely off and the patrons were sure that they would finally catch a glimpse of Gypsy’s entire frame. But no. At the last moment, with the sleight of hand of a practiced magician, she managed to drape the remaining bits becomingly over one hip or pull a bit of the curtain in front of her—either way, offering just a glimpse of a G-string but otherwise preserving her modesty. By 1935, when she turned twenty-one, Gypsy had refined her motto to a frank, funny, “Make ’em beg for more—and then don’t give it to them!”

It was her good luck to make her debut on New York’s burlesque stages just as it was becoming fashionable for the city’s intelligentsia to attend the shows. Gypsy had never lost her desire to count herself among this crowd—a group she might have joined had fate handed her a different childhood and some education. Once she spotted the artists and writers in the back rows of the clubs, she began tailoring her performances just for them. Whatever made them laugh stayed in her act, and she took advantage of every opportunity to invite them backstage. Through Eddy Braun, her socially prominent but married paramour, Gypsy had been introduced to the sophisticated lyrics of Dwight Fiske, a piano player at the Savoy-Plaza. Back downtown, at her own Irving Place Theater—“America’s oldest home of refined burlesque”—Gypsy presented the same sly double-entendres (“Like Eve I carry round this apple every night / Looking for an Adam with an appetite”) to an audience oblivious to its high-camp intentions but more than appreciative of her girlish charm. “Come on, Gyps, take it off, we know ya!” they would yell—always in vain, however, always in vain.

Soon after her reunion with George, to whom Gypsy still looked up with a reverence typical of the hard-working autodidact, he wrote an elaborate tribute that appeared in Vanity Fair and helped establish Gypsy’s name and image in the consciousness of mainstream America. A burlesque star like Gypsy “need not know how to sing, she need not know how to dance,” wrote George, “though, if she wishes, she may take a stab at both.” What she needed was attitude, and Gypsy had plenty of that.

Davis described her efforts to take part in the city’s Intellectual Life by filling her Gramercy Park apartment with modernist paintings and Empire sofas, devouring books by Proust, Kafka, and Marx, and cocking her head self-consciously mid-conversation to ask, “Whither the New Negro?” If she erred occasionally—calling a new book “skintillating” or falling into overly enthusiastic shop talk with her chorus girl friends—no one could accuse her of not trying her best. She was a whirlwind of energy, nearly all of it aimed at self-improvement.

“The great thing about Gypsy Rose Lee is her gayety. It is a force with her,” George wrote. Gypsy possessed a rare “sparkle, an honest-to-God joie de vivre.” But he felt obliged to warn readers about her irresistible attraction to men with bald heads. “I don’t know what it is about baldheads,” she was quoted as saying thoughtfully, “but they have been a lifetime habit of mine. I have been chasing them ever since I first started in vaudeville, when I was six.” And chasing them she still was, George added. “‘Darling! Sweetheart!’ she screams, ecstatically, when she spies one in a box or in the front row of the orchestra. ‘Where have you been all my life!’ Everything stops until Gypsy has ornamented his few remaining locks with a bright ribbon, or at the least left the imprint of a kiss on his gleaming pate. If he fights her off, Gypsy’s ardor is only doubled.” No doubt, George concluded, Gypsy’s talent and intellectual bent would soon lead to an affiliation with the highbrow Theatre Guild, the producers of Porgy and Bess and dozens of other groundbreaking shows. “Only, one word of warning to their box-office,” he wrote. “Don’t sell any first row seat in the orchestra to a baldheaded man.”

Since that time, Gypsy had demonstrated her show business acumen in more ways than were possible to count. She had appeared at the opera in a cape made entirely of orchids; had protested after a police raid, “I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight”; had headed the grand march at Columbia University’s senior dance; had encouraged journalists to call her “the bohemian stripper”—a phrase later transmogrified into “the naked genius”; and had had herself photographed half-submerged in a bubble bath while chatting with a reporter about the portrait she planned to commission from Max Ernst. After landing a starring role in Ziegfeld’s Follies along with her friend, the comedienne Fannie Brice, Gypsy left the show without a backward glance when offered a Hollywood contract for $2,000 a week and pretended to ignore the ad—“Experience not necessary”—that an angry Ziegfeld ran for her replacement.

Hollywood turned out to be Gypsy’s biggest mistake. She had no talent for acting—and even if she had, the mothers’ clubs, church groups, and Legion of Decency would never have allowed “the undisputed queen of the New York strippers” to become an American movie star. The first blow came when the Hays office forbade her employer, Twentieth Century-Fox, from using Gypsy’s stage name in her films. The second came when the studio head, Daryl Zanuck, lost his nerve after receiving four thousand letters of protest and asked her to play down her burlesque background. In a regrettable effort to pacify “the virgins,” as twenty-three-year-old Gypsy called her outspoken opponents, she very publicly married Bob Mizzy, a dental equipment salesman. It was a stillborn marriage, however, and Gypsy’s mother, Rose, hammered a final nail into the Hollywood coffin when she appeared in Zanuck’s office in an old coat she’d once worn for milking cows, complaining that her daughter had left her to starve and begging for a bowl of warm soup. Accustomed as he was to stage mothers’ shenanigans, Zanuck had no problem ignoring Rose, but there was no way to save Gypsy’s film career. Without her famous name, she was useless to the studio. He assigned her to a series of five forgettable movies and declined to renew her contract at the end of the year. “I’m a Hollywood floppo, that’s what I am,” Gypsy told her sister when she returned to New York sans husband in 1939.

Fortunately, Gypsy was the kind of trouper who could easily start over. She rented a small, ground-floor apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street and accepted George Davis’s offer to help fill it with Victorian lamps, carnival memorabilia, antique music boxes, porcelain cherubs, and other collectibles with which they were both obsessed. Having made a new home, she signed up for classes at the New School for Social Research and renewed contact with a widening circle of New York artists and intellectuals. Gypsy’s original blend of earthiness and intellect, which still drew plenty of admirers, inspired more than one of her friends to suggest she try her hand at theatrical social satire or even serious drama. Gypsy knew her limitations, however, and passed these opportunities on to her sister. In return, June introduced Gypsy to the nightclub impresario Mike Todd.

As June wryly remarked later, Gypsy’s meeting with Todd was “money at first sight.” Well known in New York’s show business circles as one of the country’s most promising new producers—basing his formula for success on the idea that a great show for a cheap price would always sell out—the tough-talking theater tycoon was putting together four shows for the New York World’s Fair’s second summer season in 1940, and he still needed a knockout star for one of them. What he was looking for, he had told June, was a flamboyant female crowd-pleaser—a Sally Rand type who could light up the New York fair the way Rand had Chicago. When June suggested Gypsy, Todd laughed and remarked, “That’s a notalent broad worth a million bucks on any midway.”

While “no-talent” rankled, “a million bucks” caught Gypsy’s attention. Sick as she was of doing midways, the failure of her Hollywood adventure had scared her. She wanted money—in fact, after the childhood she had survived, it was quite possible that she could never have enough. For $4,000 a week, double what she’d made in Hollywood, Gypsy agreed to star in Mike Todd’s extravaganza The Streets of Paris. Six times a day, all summer long, she stalked down a runway in a black Schiaparelli sheath with a padded fishtail for a train (donated by Diana Vreeland) singing “Robert the Roué from Reading, P.A.” Not surprisingly, The Streets of Paris quickly became the fair’s most popular show.

Mike Todd made Gypsy an enormous amount of money that year and took her to new heights of success, but his tough-guy, cigar-smoking persona—he called women “dames” and sometimes regretted his inability to “make with the words”—proved almost as exciting to Gypsy as a bald head. “I like my men on the monster side,” she wrote the following year, only half in jest, to a friend in New York. “A snarling mouth, evil eye, broken nose—if he should happen to have thick ears, good! And I like a little muscle, hair on the chest, none on the head. A nervous tic excites me and if with all these things he wore green suits—BANK NIGHT!”

Todd and Gypsy came from the same world—two smart, ambitious, self-educated survivors of a devastating Depression. But Todd was not only married, he had a girlfriend as well. Gypsy wanted to play it smart this time around. That year at the fair, Todd had produced or managed not only The Streets of Paris and a number of other full-length shows, but also a ten-acre replica of the New Orleans French Quarter, a Dancing Campus where twelve thousand people danced to the music of Harry James and Les Brown, and some smaller, quarter-a-ticket attractions. For the moment, at least, Gypsy preferred a piece of this action to a place in Todd’s bed.

It was impossible, as Carson, George, and their friends lingered in the smoky bars of Sands Street, listening to Gypsy’s stories and laughing at her jokes, not to remark on what a wonderful writer she could have been. They were as amused as anyone else by the half-condescending references to Gypsy in the press as “a classic paradox: an intellectual stripteaser,” but Gypsy clearly did possess both a lively imagination and a wonderful sense of narrative. No one could deny the remarkable mental acuity with which she ran her one-woman industry, juggling stage appearances, licensing agreements, film cameos, modeling sessions, and a host of lawsuits and countersuits in which she was always involved. With the money she had earned, she now owned a farmhouse in the country, where her mother tended an assortment of ducks, chickens, goats, pigs, and Gypsy’s pet monkeys; paid the rent on her Manhattan apartment; collected modern art and Victorian antiques; contributed to numerous left-wing arts organizations; and supported her indigent relatives in Seattle, her hometown. How hard could it be for someone like Gypsy to write a novel, too?

As her friends soon learned, Gypsy had already been working on this question, and as usual George Davis had helped her. It had all started several months earlier, when a nervy public relations associate of Walter Winchell’s had the bright idea of writing a guest column while Winchell was on vacation and signing it with Gypsy’s name. Gypsy retaliated by writing her own guest column the next time Winchell left town—and found that despite the difficulty of typing with three-inch fingernails, she enjoyed the experience. A few weeks later, she followed up with a fifteen-page description of a funny incident that had happened backstage. It was just a bit of burlesque atmosphere, but it gave her a taste for writing stories, and she decided she wanted more.

As a show business veteran, she already had an idea of what kind of story she could sell, as well as a title that would be sure to capture attention. She’d write a murder mystery set in the world of burlesque, she had told George. The murder weapon would be a chorus girl’s G-string. She would call the book The G-String Murders. She was sure it would make a fortune and enhance her reputation as an “intellectual stripper”—if she could only get it written.

This was in August, when George was preoccupied by his struggle with Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar, but the idea amused him. The trouble was, Gypsy didn’t know how to write a novel, and George didn’t have time to teach her. Instead, he suggested she hire his new secretary, Dorothy Wheelock, to write a first draft. Though only in her early twenties, Wheelock had already published one paperback mystery and written another. A short story of hers would appear in the magazine’s October issue . Following her boss’s orders—and being too new to the magazine business to know whether it was part of the job—she began churning out chapters for Gypsy Rose Lee.

But Gypsy found that no matter how hard Dorothy worked, the material failed to satisfy her. Each time the young secretary arrived at her apartment clutching another sheaf of papers, Gypsy could hardly finish reading them before racing to her typewriter to rewrite the entire section from the start. Dorothy didn’t know anything about burlesque—she did! And who knew better how to build up suspense before the final revelation? It was obvious to the younger writer—and finally clear to Gypsy as well—that calling herself an author wasn’t enough. She wanted to write the book as well.

When Gypsy heard about the household George was creating at 7 Middagh Street, she was intrigued. As in her adolescence in Detroit, she continued to find herself drawn to those “strange, wonderful places” in the world where people talked passionately about books. Serious artists like Auden and McCullers impressed her deeply, despite her own considerable fame. That year, she could afford to take time off to satisfy a desire she had had all her life. Why not join the group at Middagh Street and write a book? George needed money. She could pay him to teach her. And she could rent one of the two-room suites as her Brooklyn atelier.

Lighting a cigarette, she placed the proposition before the others. They responded precisely as she wished. If her idea for a detective novel was brilliant, the idea of writing it at 7 Middagh Street was even more so. Carson in particular had already become wholly addicted to Gypsy’s stories, and the idea of sharing a house with this warm and lively entertainer was a more exciting development than she could have dreamed up.

Before they shook hands, however, Gypsy imposed one more condition. She could not tolerate the chaotic conditions of life at 7 Middagh Street, she told the others. If she was going to spend time there, her cook, Eva, would have to come, too. She recommended that they hire a maid as well. In fact, they were all so short of money, she would give them a loan. Two hundred dollars should get the parlor finished and the furnace repaired.

It was a perfect arrangement for everyone. George would have a job and enough money on which to live. Carson would have Gypsy sharing the third floor. Auden would be most grateful for the services of a professional cook. And Gypsy would finally write her novel. Civilization had come to Middagh Street; now the real work could begin.