Though the Great War had ended with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, Maud was engaged in an epic battle of her own.
In 1917, she had gathered the courage to bring her first lawsuit against the L. C. Page Company of Boston. She was now positive that Page had been cheating her. For nearly a decade, she would fight him through five separate suits and countersuits, until the final decision in 1928.
“If Page is not honourable I am no match for him,” Maud had written nervously in her journal on July 26, 1915. She had been hearing troubling tales about his business practices ever since 1911, the year after her visit to his home in Boston. By April 12, 1916, Maud had confided in her journal, “I am afraid of Page.”
She had very good reason to fear this Boston Brahmin. She had already seen that he was a cunning manipulator. She would learn that Page was also a man of astonishing arrogance, able to crush others through mere intimidation. He was a bully with very deep pockets, not to mention a love for litigation. Maud’s instincts warned her that he was also vindictive. Had she known beforehand just how spiteful he could be, her courage to take him on might have failed.
There were many tales about Page from those who had done business with him. Gossip travelled fast and far: he was both a colourful personality and a high-profile publisher. Maud had asked her cousin Bertie McIntyre in Vancouver to check out his reputation with some booksellers in 1916, and she later reported that the tales that came back were so “ghastly” that she could not confide specific details even to her journals. Another of Page’s best-selling authors confided Page had cheated her, and she had left him, unfortunately leaving her best copyrights behind. Marshall Saunders had more to say. Clippings and gossip about Page’s private life were circulated throughout Canada and the United States among the author-publisher-bookseller community, with details supplied by the many salesmen and office staff who had worked for him and left, often in disgust or following unfair treatment. Mr. McClelland, who had angled to become Maud’s Canadian publisher, eagerly passed along every tidbit to Maud.32
Lewis Page was the first-born son in one of Boston’s most privileged families. His father, Charles A. Page, chief war correspondent for the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley, later became U.S. Consul-General in Switzerland. Lewis’s mother, Grace Darling Coues, was descended from Elliott Coues, the famous ornithologist who had founded the American Ornithological Society. Lewis Coues Page was born in Switzerland in 1869. His father died, leaving his widow and several children: Lewis, Charles F., Charlotte, and George.
In 1884, Grace married again, this time to widower Dana Estes, co-owner of a prominent publishing firm in Boston. Estes had been instrumental in founding the International Copyright Association in 1887, and counted Lord Tennyson among his acquaintances. With Estes as a stepfather, Lewis Page learned at an early age about high society, books, business, and power.
Lewis Page attended private schools and graduated from Harvard in 1891, where he was a track letterman. Tall, athletic, handsome, and suave, he was considered one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors. He would marry three times. His first wife died. He then married the beautiful and charming Kate (“Kitty”) Stearns, daughter of James P. Stearns, a prominent fixture in Boston financial circles. After several years of marriage, Kitty hired a private detective to shadow her philandering husband. She divorced him in 1904 and won a rich settlement. Kitty was a much respected and admired Boston society woman, and public sympathy went to her. The other party in the divorce was one of Page’s employees, Mildred Parker—the wife Maud met in 1911. Lewis married Mildred in May 1904, soon after his divorce, and built the elegant “Page Court” home. (When Maud stayed at “Page Court” in Boston, she did not know Page’s marital history. She was given to understand that Mildred Page was his second wife, not his third.)
In 1897, after several years working at his stepfather’s publishing firm, Page acquired the subsidiary firm of Joseph P. Knight and renamed it “The L. C. Page Company.” He set himself up as president, and installed his brilliant but less dashing brother George as treasurer and head of the manufacturing department. He took over established best-sellers like The Little Colonel (1895) by Annie Fellows Johnston, which became a series. Then he hit the jackpot with Anne of Green Gables in 1908. It was reprinted twenty times by April 1910, and thirty-eight times by 1914 (this May 1914 popular edition was advertised as “limited to 150,000 copies”). Another bestseller in 1913 was Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna. He had started his firm with inherited money but soon was doing very well on his own.33
In 1910, when Maud first met him, his reputation was well established as owner of one of the more prestigious publishing firms in the United States. Anne of Green Gables had continued an extraordinary success ever since its 1908 publication; by 1911, Page was flush with money from it. Seeking to improve his social stature after bad publicity from his divorce, he partnered with another man to buy a baseball team, the Boston Braves, paying some $100,000. Soon the Boston papers were carrying accounts of his lawsuit to wrest full control of the Braves from his partner. Other skirmishes reflected on his character. He frequented the Boston Club for men, but was eventually expelled for being “insufficiently a gentleman,” after he seduced a young female employee in a brazen manner that the other men could not ignore. Undaunted, he then started a club of his own, according to his cousin and literary executor, W. Peter Coues. Even to Bostonians, he was a larger-than-life figure.
Located at 53 Beacon Street in Boston, the L. C. Page Company headquarters were in a five-storey brownstone that was exceedingly chic and palatial. In 1914, he bought out his deceased stepfather’s firm, Dana Estes and Company. (His stepfather had died in 1909, and the firm had gone downhill. Page waited until its value dropped, and then bought it.)
Page cleverly singled out a very good niche market—popular fiction—at a time when literacy was skyrocketing as a result of the promotion of universal education in the United States and Canada. His books were beautifully made, and he took pride in his reputation as the “best book-maker” in the States.
Maud says in her journals that she did not know the firm when she sent Anne of Green Gables off to them, but she was probably disingenuous. Page had published the famous Maritime poet Bliss Carman since 1902, and Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, another famous Maritimer in 1903. In 1908, Page published Carman’s The Making of Personality, and Ewan gave it to Maud as a gift at Christmas. Later, she claimed that she sent the manuscript for Anne to Page because a friend of hers from Summerside worked for Page who accepted it only because Miss Arbuckle talked it up (July 30, 1916).
Booksellers across the United States and Canada complained that Page was a hard, and often unfair, businessman. He would deliberately overship, and then refuse to take returns, and then refuse to ship anything more until all old bills were paid, regardless of whether the booksellers had sold the extra books that they had not even ordered. He would arbitrarily deny terms and vary discounts so that booksellers never knew what to expect. Booksellers loathed him, but Maud was so popular across North America that they had no choice but to deal with Page. Although Page published other best-selling books, Maud proved to be his most successful author, and Roger W. Straus projected that she made him more money over his sustained career than anyone else. When Farrar, Straus & Giroux purchased the L. C. Page Company in 1957, Straus and his chief financial officer, Robert Wohlforth, said that they purchased the firm primarily to get the rights to Anne of Green Gables and the other L. M. Montgomery books.34
Page was not only tough with booksellers. He was a “stern employer,” said one person, and you worked hard there. Within his own firm, there were unusual practices. Almost all of his employees were women. He was notorious for hiring clever young women to work in his firm because he could pay them far less than men. There was no employment equity then, and women often made one-quarter to one-half what men did in the professions open to them.
He had other reasons for favouring women employees. “He liked women,” his cousin Peter Coues recounted in the 1980s. William Pearce (Peter) Coues was much younger than L. C. Page, and became his executor.35 Page’s personal allure was such that many women employees vied for his attention. Tales of his seductions, occasionally rebuffed but more often successful, were the stuff of legend and titillating amazement in his day. While there undoubtedly were women who worked for him who did not attract his advances—or who managed to escape them—the firm is remembered as having the atmosphere of a harem: it was said to turn alive with excitement whenever he walked through a room. That he kept and managed multiple mistresses at the same time was a source of gossip among women and envy among men. “Women gave him comfort,” as his cousin tactfully put it, “and he took advantage of this.”36
Page also manipulated his authors. He bought copyrights outright from authors if he could. He also offered smaller royalties than the industry standard, as with Maud.37 In contracts, Page put in his “binding clause” to hold his authors to the same exploitative terms forever (i.e., royalties on the wholesale rather than retail price. Maud got seven to nine cents per book, instead of the nineteen cents that might have been more reasonably expected).
Page’s widespread reputation as a powerful and vindictive man frightened people. To Page, authors were like common workers in factories, and he rode roughshod over them. A large number of his best-selling authors were women, and women at this time were socialized to be submissive to men. Page was accustomed to getting his way by charm; he used his temper when his charm failed; and if both of these failed, there was the threat of a lawsuit.
Page had a working business relationship with his brother, George, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, but even with his own family members, Lewis could be a bully. George was the physical opposite of his brother—shorter, softer in appearance, and less imposing. Maud believed that he was a much nicer man when she met him, and her opinion was shared by others who remembered the Page brothers. George and Lewis quarrelled a great deal, according to the employees. It is the general consensus that in every difference of opinion, Lewis dominated.
Page was a sportsman who liked the trappings of wealth, the high life, and especially gambling. His gambling debts were often substantial. In 1913, when Anne of Green Gables was in its thirty-seventh printing, making big money for Page, he made the papers with yet another lawsuit: he brought suit against a New York gambling house to stop payment on a $1,500 cheque written at 5:00 a.m. to cover some money he had lost during the evening. He asserted in his court papers that when he sobered up the next day, he discovered he had been “cheated,” being too drunk to be in possession of his faculties. He used good lawyers, and won his case.
Tales of Page’s life in the fast lane spread rapidly; in 1916, his third marriage started unravelling in an ugly public fight. Mildred told the court that Page had ordered her out of their home, and when she and her baby daughter returned against his will, he closed her accounts, shut off the gas and electricity so that she had to use candles, and forced her to sell her jewellery to buy food, at a time when his yearly income was $35,000. (In the same year, the Canadian prime minister made $14,500, Ewan made $900, an average working Canadian man $800, and an average woman $400.) Mildred obtained a settlement for $4,400 a year in alimony, plus $50 a month for an infant named “Mildred.”38 Page’s second wife (Kate Stearns) was already receiving $1,600 per year in alimony, which meant that between the two women, he was liable for $8,200 per year to his two former wives (not the $10,000-plus figure Maud heard through the grapevine).
Hearing all this gossip about Page’s divorce and business practices, Maud certainly realized that Page would be a tricky adversary. Between his gambling debts, his need for alimony money, his expensive social life, his purchase of baseball teams, his founding of clubs, his generosity to mistresses, and his love of costly wines and food and attractive female servants, Lewis Page had a great need for more cash, and, as Maud noted later on, a need to “cheat his authors.” According to Mr. Wohlforth, the publishing world was full of stories about Page, “who contrived a lot of stress in everybody.” In the 1980s, Roger W. Straus, of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, characterized L. C. Page as one of the most colourful characters in the publishing world over a sixty-year period.39
In the ensuing decade there would be five lawsuits and countersuits between Maud and the L. C. Page Company. These lawsuits would cost Maud a small fortune. The lawsuits cost Page even more, as well as the reputation of his firm. The terrible irony is that he was able to finance his legal cases against Maud easily out of the profits he made from selling her books and, later, from the movie rights to Anne of Green Gables.
If Page had thought that Maud was just a country lass from a small Island province, easily intimidated because she was a woman and somewhat shy, he certainly misjudged her. She came to the Page fight in 1917 with no small amount of residual anger. After a childhood with difficult, bullying men, Maud had a strong sense of herself as a person—she was, after all, descended from the prominent Senator Donald Montgomery and Speaker Macneill. She may have been over-sensitive and emotionally fragile, but she also possessed a toughness and determination that was equal to Page’s meanness. Nothing pulled her out of a depression more quickly than a worthy opponent. And Page was certainly that.
The legal action between Maud and Page started after the contract that bound her to Page had expired, and she chose John McClelland of McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart (founded in 1906) as her new publisher and literary agent. Mr. McClelland had taken her new book of poetry, The Watchman, which Page had refused. Although she had originally wanted McClelland to let Page have the American rights to her next new novel, Anne’s House of Dreams, Page’s threats to sue her and McClelland if they did not give him these rights worked against him. McClelland sold the American rights to the Frederick Stokes Company. Stokes, in turn, granted the New York firm of A. L. Burt reprint rights for this same work.
Page, enraged that Maud had had the gall to offer the poetry book he had refused to another publisher, and then to switch publishers (which was within her rights, of course), continued to threaten her and McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart with lawsuits if they did not give him the American rights to Anne’s House of Dreams. Page cunningly sent Maud an advance on her next set of royalties; she cashed this cheque, thinking it was for his royalty payments on her other books (December 31, 1916). Later, when she read the cleverly worded letter more carefully, she discovered that it included payment in advance for Anne’s House of Dreams, which allowed him to argue that her cashing the cheque constituted proof that he was in his rights to assume he would get those rights. Then, in February 1917, Page, angry that the rights had gone to Stokes, wrote Maud that he had discovered an “error” in accounting from three years earlier, and thus was withholding $1,000 from the royalties due her. This was a barefaced lie— she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and would be furious. This was his way of being spiteful, and of giving her a threatening warning at the same time. There was no way for her to get the money except to take him to court. Both knew that it would cost her far more than $1,000 in expenses to get that $1,000 out of him. She realized that he was trying to intimidate her into returning to him, and she was not going to buckle.
L. C. Page proceeded to sell reprint rights for a cheap reprint edition of Anne’s House of Dreams to Grosset & Dunlap. This action was astonishing, considering that the rights to publish this book had gone to Stokes. Page’s arrogance in selling property that was not his is incomprehensible, but he covered himself through the “advance” he had sent, tricking her. If he did not have a legal right to something, Page apparently intended to bully and bluff. He had sufficient money and clout that other publishers, as well as booksellers, feared him.
It is an unfortunate fact, both then and today, that people’s legal rights are only as good as their ability to enforce them. Page knew this very well. He had a deep purse, and Maud (like most authors) did not. He knew that Maud would have to sue him in his jurisdiction, adding yet another expensive burden for her. Where would she even get a lawyer? He banked on Maud expecting that if she started a lawsuit against him and won, it would cost her more in expenses and legal fees than she would get out of it. On the other hand, if she lost, she would have to pay damages, as well as her own court costs and possibly his. This could ruin her financially. Since she had moved to another publisher, Page did not care if he destroyed her, or at least worried her so much she could not write.
Maud knew, too, that the stress of the lawsuit would keep her in constant turmoil, and affect her writing and work, as well as her pleasure in her children and social life. However, if she did not sue, she knew she would stew and smoulder and hate her victimhood. It was a no-win situation. Page knew that, too, and he did not expect her to sue him.
Page not only threatened Maud with lawsuits, he also kept threatening Stokes, her American publisher, and McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, her Canadian one. While they all believed he was bluffing, they were nevertheless nervous, given his power base and reputation. They heard through the grapevine—for the Canadian legal world was very small—that he had engaged the Toronto firm of Blake, Lash, & Cassells to represent him in Canada. This frightened both Maud and McClelland.
What L. C. Page did not anticipate was Maud’s incredibly strong sense of justice. Truth was a very strong component in her moral code, and when angry, she became much tougher. Page must have been surprised when he learned that in May 1917 she had engaged a lawyer in the United States through the American Authors’ League and had entered suit against him in the Massachusetts Court of Equity.
Maud was suing for two things: the $1,000 in royalties he had withheld on the reprint of Anne of Green Gables; and damages for fraudulently selling Grosset and Dunlap the rights to Anne’s House of Dreams. She expected to lose the second point because she had made the mistake of cashing the cheque he had sent her for the Grosset and Dunlap sale.
The first lawsuit was heard between January 11 and 22, 1919, in the Suffolk County Court in Boston by Judge Charles Francis Jenney. Frank Nelson Nay represented the Page Company and Weld Allen Rollins represented Maud. As anticipated, the judge gave the second point to Page, but he gave Montgomery the first point, ordering Page to pay her the $1,000.
Knowing the value of her work, Page then offered Maud $10,000 for her rights. She refused. She had seen enough of Page by this time—his bullying and his mendacity, even in a court of law where he had sworn to tell the truth—that she wanted no further association with such a man. She had been startled, for instance, to discover that when John McClelland’s firm sold her books in Canada, a very small market, comparatively, the Canadian orders were for thousands more copies than Page had reported selling in the United States. This indicated a longtime fraud in their accounting. She estimated that she had lost some $50,000 to him from his beggarly royalty on the “wholesale” rather than the “retail” price, alone. (Stokes was giving her 20 percent of the retail price, instead of Page’s 10 percent of the wholesale price.) She began to wonder how many more thousands she had lost if the Pages fiddled their books.
This all made Maud give serious thought to how much money she should ask for, for the sale of her rights, and she came up with the figure of $18,000. After some dickering and bluffing, Page agreed to the sum of $17,880, with a condition: that she allow his company to publish one more book of “Anne” short stories, the stories that had been left over after they had made their selection for Chronicles of Avonlea. This new book would be called Further Chronicles of Avonlea.
Here, the Page deviltry becomes very complicated. Maud wanted to sever all relations with the Page company, but they had reminded her about these leftover stories, saying that since most had been published in Canadian magazines, no copyright had been taken out on them in the United States. Therefore, any American publisher could hunt them up and publish them without her permission, or without paying her any royalties whatsoever. This threat was blackmail.
Maud was aghast. This meant Page could bring out this book, falsely packaging it as a new “Anne of Green Gables” book, in a year when she was bringing out a truly new “Anne” book with Stokes in the United States and with McClelland and Stewart in Canada. Because Page’s name was so well known as her publisher, people would buy his book, assuming it was her newest one, and undercut her sales with her other publishers. The new publishers would be justly annoyed. To tie the Page Company down to bringing this book out in a year when she was not bringing out another “Anne” novel, she agreed to let them have these stories and the copyright. But she imposed conditions: that the book would not be fobbed off as another “Anne” book. The name “Anne” or “Anne Shirley” and Anne’s picture were not to appear on the cover, and in the promotion they were not to advertise the collection as an “Anne” book, although they could say it was by the author of “Anne.” She stipulated various other conditions, as well.
Here the plot becomes even more complicated: in 1912, when Maud had prepared the collection for Chronicles of Avonlea, she had used many stories, many which had already been published in periodicals. To satisfy Page, who was trying to make Chronicles look like another “Anne” book, she had revised these stories, inserting the character or name of Anne wherever she could. She had sent these off to Page, who made the selection for Chronicles of Avonlea and then supposedly returned all the typescripts and magazine clippings of the stories to her. In the days before photocopiers, when the only way to make a copy of something was to reproduce it by typewriter or by hand, Maud assumed that they had not kept copies of the rejects. She was wrong.
The Pages had actually typed up their own copies of all these stories before returning them to her, and secretly kept these copies in their vaults. If they had admitted to having these copies with “Anne” inserted throughout, Maud would have flatly refused to let them publish a second book entitled “Further Chronicles of Avonlea,” knowing full well that they would market it as another new “Anne” book.
Instead, Page led her to believe that he did not have copies of the stories. He asked her to retype all the material from her original magazine copies. She was willing to undertake this work for three reasons: because she knew the name “Anne” did not appear often in the magazine versions and she could remove it if it did; because she knew she could cut out the descriptive material she had used elsewhere; and because this would prevent Page from bringing out a book in a year that she had another book coming out.
So on January 22, 1919, Maud signed an agreement in which Page purchased all rights to the income from contracts for Anne of Green Gables (April 22, 1907), Anne of Avonlea (February 16, 1909), Kilmeny of the Orchard (February 14, 1910), The Story Girl (November 15, 1910), Chronicles of Avonlea (April 26, 1912), The Golden Road (July 18, 1913), and Anne of the Island (January 26, 1915) for $17,880. (Technically, they had always held the copyright, but they’d had to pay her royalties. What they bought now were the entire “rights,” so that they could keep all income from the books.) This agreement specified that the L. C. Page Company also secured the copyright to sixteen individual short stories that would become Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Montgomery was to furnish them with copies of these stories that she would type up from her originals. Page retained the right to make small editorial changes in the stories, but agreed not to insert the name “Anne” in any stories where it was not already, or to use the name “Anne” on the subtitle, or to put a picture of “Anne” on the book to lead the public to think it was another “Anne” book.
Maud signed the agreement, thinking it meant that she would be free of the Page firm forever. She also thought that the public might eventually get tired of her older books. And, being pragmatic, she thought “a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.”
She returned home and began preparing the sixteen stories, which took two months of non-stop typing and correcting. On March 20, 1919, she sent Page the retyped stories, having taken out references to “Anne” and various descriptive materials. She considered the matter finished.
She was in the dark about other actions behind the scenes. She did not know that Page had been negotiating the sale of film rights to Anne of Green Gables long before the January 22, 1919, contract was signed. The minute they had her signature on the document giving them the full rights to her books for the $17,880, they finalized the film deal, collecting $40,000 for themselves. The movie was finished by Realart in summer 1919. Evidently it had been under production while she was still negotiating with Page, and before she had signed the contract. Maud did not find out about the movie, and the loss of what should have been her share of the income ($20,000), until December 1919, after the film had been released, and had begun showing, to wild acclaim, in movie houses across America.40
There was a further jolt in store when the galley proofs of Further Chronicles came for her to check in January 1920. Not only was there an introduction that linked all these stories to Anne of Green Gables, but Page had ignored the 1919 versions she had sent. Instead, they had used the old 1912 versions that she had prepared for them when they were still on good terms, and into which she had inserted Anne’s name wherever she could—copies they had not admitted that they still had.
Maud wrote them a furious letter, saying they could not use those 1912 versions. They informed her that since the stories were already typeset, they were going to use them, whether she liked it or not. They stated further that although the contract specified they could not add Anne’s name, in the 1912 versions she herself had added Anne’s name. Unfortunately, this was true.
Maud saw she had been tricked. Page had let her spend two months of tedious work typing and revising the 1919 copies in order to mislead her into thinking that his company did not have copies of the 1912 stories. They knew that she would eventually find out that they had had the copies all along, but letting his enemies know that he had bested them apparently gave Lewis Page particular pleasure. He figured that after the book was published, it would be too late for Maud to do anything about it.
It is perhaps a small mercy that Maud did not learn about another offensive manoeuvre by Page: on April 10, 1919, Page wrote the immensely popular Canadian poet and performer Bliss Carman—who had already published with them—asking if he would write the introduction to Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Carman was always in need of money, and Page would have expected him to jump at the opportunity, not only because being asked to write an introduction was an honour, but also because it paid well. However, Page showed his sleaze in the final paragraph of the otherwise fine letter, and Carman must have balked:
My Dear Bliss:
Would you like a commission of $25. to write an appreciation or foreword (on the lines that you did a while ago for Annie Fellows Johnston’s TRAVELLERS FIVE) for a new collection of stories by your compatriot, L. M. Montgomery, author of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, etc?
I recall that you have always been a real admirer of this writer, going back to the time when you said of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES something to this affect [sic]:—“It is a real tribute to the merit and charm of this story, that while the young people of the house are making a clamouring search from cellar to attic for the missing volume, they cannot appease their desire because the master of the house has taken the book to finish the reading on the way to town.”
The new book is to be entitled FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA, Avonlea, of course, being the charming little village in Prince Edward Island where the author lived, where Anne Shirley was created, and where the author resides and wrote of all of the characters she has pictured—from real life. In the forthcoming volume Anne Shirley only appears incidentally, the same as in the previous volume, CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA, but the atmosphere and charm is there, and I want this brought out in the appreciation, and I know that you can do it.
…
It is possible, also, that we might arrange to let you do a little retouching or polishing of the stories if they need it, in which case we would pay $50. instead of $25.
Very sincerely yours,
[signed] Lewis C. Page41
Bliss Carman was an odd personality, but he was no fool. Why would L. M. Montgomery not polish her own stories? It is likely that Carman, well connected to the literary gossip of the day, had already heard of people’s legal woes with Page. To Carman’s credit, he did not touch this assignment. The introduction was done instead by Nathan Haskell Dole, a prolific American writer, editor, and translator, who was eminent in the Boston social and literary world that Page was part of.
George Page wrote Maud saying that their lawyer had advised them that they had every right to publish the 1912 versions since they had been “found” in the vaults after all. He added a postscript saying that he was acting under his lawyer’s directions, which Maud interpreted to mean that he was uncomfortable with the way she was being treated. She speculated that he had to compromise his own integrity under pressure from his forceful older brother. Later events suggest she was right.
Maud instructed her American attorney, Weld Allen Rollins, to file suit, if necessary, to stop Page from publishing the 1912 versions, and another letter to the Pages telling them that they were to direct all further correspondence to her lawyer. Three days later, Rollins wrote Page that he was seeking an injunction against the publication of the book. George Page wrote back the next day that the Page Company believed it was acting within its legal rights. Five days later Rollins responded that the Page Company would be liable for heavy damages if they proceeded. On March 14, 1920, Page notified Maud that he was publishing the 1912 versions over her objections, and on April 8, the book appeared. Maud wired Rollins to proceed with litigation. Two days later she received her “author copies” of Further Chronicles of Avonlea and discovered that, although it did not have the same picture of “Anne” on the cover, it had a red-haired girl who looked very similar to the other pictures of “Anne.” Page had won the first round by ignoring the injunction, but the fight was not over.
In her own copy of the Page first edition of Further Chronicles, Maud inserted furious comments. She bracketed the first three paragraphs of “Tannis of the Flats,” saying that these three paragraphs were a Page interpolation. She was embarrassed that many of the descriptive passages from stories in Further Chronicles had since come out in other books that she had published with Stokes, and she bracketed these. No author would want to appear to be recycling her own material, as if her creative wells had run dry.
On April 24, 1920, Rollins filed a “bill in equity” on behalf of Maud in the Suffolk County Court requesting an injunction to prevent the Page Company from further printings of the Further Chronicles and an accounting of profits and damages for loss of reputation. This was Maud’s second lawsuit against Page, and it dragged on until December 1928.
She had to make a trip to Boston, in May 1920, for the courtroom showdown. She soon received a brutal lesson in how simple matters can become unbelievably complex in a court of law. For nearly two months, the Pages and their lawyers nitpicked over details in the contract to obfuscate the real issues and to draw things out, creating more expense for Maud. Because the Pages had breached the 1919 contract’s terms forbidding them from marketing the Further Chronicles as another “Anne” novel, this was one of the contentious points. Maud wrote:
Those three grave lawyers and myself wrangled all day over the question of the exact colour of “Anne’s” hair and the definition of “Titian red.” Ye gods, it was funny! The big table was snowed under with literature and prints to prove or disprove. Years ago, when I sat down in that old kitchen at Cavendish, that rainy spring evening, and dowered “Anne” with red hair, I did not dream that a day would come when it would be fought over like this in a court room. It would be deliciously amusing—if it were not so beastly horrible. French [Page’s lawyer] was determined to prove that Titian hair was dark red and that I knew it was dark red. I didn’t. I always supposed Titian-red was a sort of flame-red and I stuck to it through all his badgering. Rollins dug up an encyclopedia in which Titan hair was defined as a “bright golden auburn” and the Master said it had always been his impression that Titian hair was the hue of burnished copper! And so on! (June 18, 1920)
For a person who by nature avoided direct conflict in her life, Maud stood up well in the trial. Her fighting spirit was aroused in the heated cross-examination, but her nerves fell apart as soon as she left the court. She could not sleep at night. She took prescribed Veronal and bromides to help calm her nerves. When she finally got back home on July 10, 1920, she was so agitated that she cried on and off for days. She had missed Chester’s eighth birthday for the sake of the trial, and yet nothing had been resolved—wrangling continued long after her own testimony was finished and she came home.
In the meantime, Page decided that the best method of fighting Maud’s first lawsuit was to counterattack. In a third lawsuit registered in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in October 1920, Page sued Maud for libel, alleging that she had impugned his business practices. The case was dismissed in that court on August 11, 1921. Not to be thwarted, Page then appealed it to the United States Supreme Court, where the same thing was argued on March 13, 1923. It was again denied in a judgment by Mr. Justice McKenna on April 9, 1923.
Page surely did not expect to win such frivolous libel suits, but he knew that while the case dragged on he would have the pleasure of harassing Maud now that swords were openly drawn. He was probably astute enough to know that although she could put up a tough front, she would have many sleepless nights of worry. For her part, she was realizing how easy it was to go to law, but how hard it was to extract yourself once there. Worse, she had to pay her lawyers every single day that the case dragged on. Rollins kept reminding her, too, how unpredictable the results of any lawsuit could be. Maud had also seen how convincingly a dishonest person could lie in court and how easily a smart lawyer could obfuscate the truth. Rollins periodically lost his own courage and urged her to settle. She flatly refused each time.
Her second lawsuit against Page (which had started in 1920) continued to drag on and on. From time to time she sent Mr. Rollins payments for several thousand dollars. Page was now represented by an exceptionally able and aggressive lawyer named Asa Palmer French, who had been the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. He had an aggressive style, like Page: he was insulting, unpredictable, and intimidating.
This second suit was very complicated, and the conflicting statements (or “lies,” as Maud called them) made it difficult to follow. As a result, the case was handed over to a “Master,” whose job was to sort through all the documentation and file a report for the judge. This Master’s report, handed down in August 1921, was largely adverse to Maud. By this time, she had paid Rollins $6,000 on the case, and nothing had been determined. However, Rollins was able to appeal and secure a more favourable report from the Master. What had seemed to Maud a simple case of bullying and fraud had turned into something incredibly convoluted.
Maud, Mr. Rollins, Stokes’s attorneys (who were helping Rollins), and John McClelland were given an unexpected boost in the middle of this dreary litigation. Maud learned in late March 1922 that Wanamaker’s—the most prestigious department store and book-selling chain in America at that time, and certainly Page’s best customer—had shut down all its accounts with the Page Company. This was an astonishing move, and a devastating financial blow to Page. John Wanamaker was fed up with Page’s unethical business practices and simply refused to deal with him any more. Mr. Wanamaker was a formidable businessman with a huge fortune of his own, and he was one of the few who could stand up to Lewis Page.42 Being dropped by Wanamaker’s damaged the L. C. Page Company’s reputation, as well as hurting their bottom line. This was big news in the American book world—the biggest retailer and book chain in American dropping one of the most powerful publishers of popular books.
The Wanamaker’s cancellation began to empty Page’s deep pockets. (When Maud received the typed evidence from the trials in late 1928, she learned that without Wanamakers the Page firm receipts had dropped from close to half a million dollars in 1921 to roughly $250,000 in 1926.)
By now, the strife that Page had brought into others’ lives was starting to take a serious toll on his own firm. Lewis and his brother were fighting more. The milder and less litigious George Page saw the larger picture: that his brother’s bullying ways were costing the firm enormously, both in profits and reputation. Maud did not know this, however. She simply saw in Page a man who seemed impervious to destruction. She lived in a constant state of tension, without the alleviation provided by a stable and sympathetic husband’s commiseration. Ewan was preoccupied with his own problems.
On April 14, 1923, Maud received joyous news from her attorney: Judge Hammond had given a favourable decision on the second lawsuit after three years. He wrote that although Page had thought he was within his rights in publishing the book from the 1912 versions of the stories, he did not in fact have these rights, and as a result Page was directed to pay Maud all the profits from Further Chronicles of Avonlea.
Page, not one to capitulate easily, instructed Mr. French, his lawyer, to appeal Judge Hammond’s findings. Maud and her lawyer found this bizarre: typing and printing up all the material for the appeal would cost Page more than the judgment against him. But Page still had money, and even if his lawsuits were eventually dismissed, he clearly intended to harass and perhaps destroy Maud as they dragged along to their conclusion.
Incredibly, Page next flatly asserted that there were no profits whatsoever from Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Everyone knew that there must have been profits, but to prove this Maud’s lawyers would need to examine the L. C. Page financial books, which would involve more expensive litigation. Weld Rollins was quite sick of the Page firm, and now he had to nickel-and-dime with Page, who was charging up all the expenses they could find against the gross profits.
This delaying tactic did not promise Page any success in the end. There were profits and they would be dug out. But Page knew that Maud would have to keep paying her lawyer while an expensive forensic accountant located the profits. Maud understood by now that Page would rather pay his own lawyer $10,000 than pay her $1,000. Rollins saw that she was going to be paying so much for his services that he again suggested she simply settle at this point. She would not. All her Presbyterian rectitude stiffened her resolve. She believed that injustice should not go unpunished. She could not fight the demons in her own husband’s mind, but she could battle the devilish Page.
In January 1924, Page and his lawyers took another step: they moved their ongoing (but thus far unsuccessful) libel suit against Maud into a New York jurisdiction. This started the fourth of their lawsuits. In December 1925, after two more years of wrangling, Page appealed the case all the way to the New York Court of Appeal, but this decision came down against him. Still, Page knew that if he wasn’t winning, he was nevertheless wearing out his adversary and draining her bank account into her lawyer’s pocket. Page often said that he wished he had been a lawyer himself.
Page’s purchase of all of Maud’s rights in 1919 had been a good move: it now gave him plenty of money to continue funding lawsuits against her. In the post-war 1920s, her books enjoyed a surge in popularity. The early L. M. Montgomery titles owned by Page had the pre-war pastoral Prince Edward Island charm in them. By the end of 1914, Anne of Green Gables alone had been reprinted thirty-eight times. All the sequels that he had bought were also being reprinted. In 1920, Page—ever the skilful merchandiser—brought out a new edition, filled with pictures of the silent movie featuring film star Mary Miles Minter.
In the meantime, Page and his lawyer developed another devious scheme—they persuaded the courts to freeze Maud’s U.S. royalty payments (up to the total of $30,000) from Stokes. The argument was that if they won the libel judgment, the money would be there to pay them. Page’s motive was to strangle Maud’s income. Then he would have her where he wanted her— she would be without any funds to pay her substantial legal bills for fighting him. Any savings she had would soon be exhausted. Maud wrote: “There is no end to the deviltry the Pages will attempt and no end to the kinks in U.S. law that enable them to do it. It is an iniquitous law that allows a person’s property to be attached before a case is even tried” (January 5, 1924). But there was nothing she could do about it.
Poor John McClelland, Maud’s gentlemanly Canadian publisher, who was accustomed to civility, decency, and honesty, was horrified and not a little frightened by the wrath of Page. When Mr. McClelland himself had gone down to testify on her behalf he had become so addled on the stand that Maud and her lawyers doubted that he helped her case. Now, fretful about Page, McClelland told Maud that he was sending her the Canadian royalties in advance in case Page should try to “attach” them in Canada. This was the last straw for Maud: she did not think Canadian law would allow such a thing, and wrote McClelland (“who ought to know” she fumed on February 4, 1924) to find out for sure whether the Pages could reach up to Canada to attach her royalties.
Maud had one very tense week waiting for clarification from McClelland. He had bothered her for nothing: he found that the Page Company could not attach her royalties in Canada. But the fact that they believed that Page was urging a Canadian firm to act against them nevertheless lingered as a threat with both Maud and John McClelland. They feared that the lawyers might still come up with some other damaging plan.
Maud’s American publishers began to develop cold feet as well. Frederick Stokes thought Page outrageous and corrupt, but his firm was fed up with this costly fight. They were also afraid they might lose, given the fabled unpredictability of the courts. So once again Maud received a letter from her American attorneys suggesting she settle. She refused, knowing that if she capitulated because she was intimidated, she could not live with herself.
In October 1924, she received a blithe letter from the Page Company asking for her help in putting out a booklet on her life and career. “I can’t understand the psychology of those men,” she fumed. “Here they have been hounding me through the U.S. courts for years and at this very moment have a suit against me in New York—a mere ‘spite’ suit—and have tied up my royalties and have worried me half to death. And yet they coolly ask me to help them get up something solely for their own benefit and convenience—for I get nothing out of it” (October 30, 1924). Page knew his victim well. This was just another form of harassment, and it worried her out of more sleep. Maud was very alarmed about her husband’s mental health at this point, too.
The Pages continued to do very well with all their L. M. Montgomery titles. In April 1925, they gave an exclusive licence to George Harrap & Company of London, England, to supply eight of Maud’s works to the British market. They received $9,000 for this licence—and Maud nothing, since she no longer owned any rights. But she had to keep paying her own attorneys, and in May 1925, Rollins sent her another bill for $1,000, with a warning that he would be spending a lot more time on the case before it was over.
In October 1925, she heard that the New York libel case (the fourth lawsuit) had gone against the Pages, by a unanimous ruling. In December 1925, Frederick A. Stokes finally sent her the cheque for all her royalties that they had been forced to withhold.
The battle with the Page Company was not over, however.
While Maud was battling Page in American courts, Ewan was drawn into a local lawsuit that was equally enervating. His troubles started in 1921, escalated into a court case in late 1922, and dragged on for a long time after that.
When the Macdonalds first moved to Leaskdale, cars were still a novelty; when villagers heard the noise of an approaching car, they ran to the window to watch. But by 1917, many in the village owned cars. In 1918, when Maud’s royalties came in at $45,725, she decided that the time had come to purchase a car, and that Ewan could assume the role of chauffeur for his family. She had wanted a car since her first ride in Lewis Page’s in Boston. So the Macdonald family purchased a five-passenger Chevrolet from Mr. Ivor Law in Zephyr, who had set up a business selling both cars and gas in that village. At age forty-eight, Ewan found himself learning how to drive, and a new world opened up to the Macdonalds.
Ewan was maladroit when it came to anything practical or mechanical. Still, he learned how to crank the car to start it, then hustle back to the driver’s seat very quickly to keep the motor from dying. His family grew accustomed to lurches when he tried to get the car moving forward without killing the motor. Like many other drivers at that time, he had trouble remembering that the car was not a horse, and if he needed to stop quickly, his first impulse was always to yank backwards on the steering wheel, as if he were holding the horse’s reins, and yell “Whoa! Whoa!” Some found this endearing, others found it funny, but his young sons found it very embarrassing. Since Maud never learned to drive, a car was the one place where Ewan felt superior to his talented wife. A drive often blew the cobwebs of Predestination and damnation out of his mind, making him feel the distinguished family man he had it in him to be.
Early automobiles were quite unpredictable objects. They sputtered, jerked, and died, and all too often their wheels or entire axles fell off while being driven. But there were few drivers on the dirt or gravel roads, and cars did not go very fast. At top speed, they might achieve a burst of thirty miles per hour. (Just ten years earlier, in 1911, the world’s speed record for an airplane was set by a U.S. Army aviator who went 106 miles in two hours and seven minutes.)
Ewan’s difficulties with his automobile had resulted in several minor accidents. Maud soon decided that their jumpy Chevrolet was inferior. On May 12, 1921, Ewan traded the Chevrolet for an elegant Gray-Dort touring car that they christened “Lady Jane Grey.”
A month after the purchase of the new car, the real trouble started. On June 12, 1921, after church on a fine bright Sunday in Zephyr, the Gray-Dort was loaded down—with Ewan, Maud, Chester, Stuart, parishioner Mrs. Jake Meyers, and her young daughter, all on their way to the Meyers’ house for tea. Ewan stopped at Ivor Law’s gas bar for fuel.
Zephyr was not much more than a crossroads, with Mr. Law’s establishment located in the middle of the little village. Unfortunately, the crossroad had a blind corner. After purchasing gas (something a minister should not have done on a Sunday, some might have said), Ewan looked to see if anyone was coming before he started onto the road again, but he didn’t take a second look—as usual, he was focused on moving the car forward before the motor sputtered and died. As they turned out into the road, Maud yelled for him to stop—a car was coming. Ewan did not hear her. “Lady Jane Grey” often jerked and died for no reason at all, but this time she took a lively lurch straight into the path of an oncoming car. There was a noisy crash. Fenders crumpled. Glass flew.
The driver of the other car, a Chevrolet, was Marshall Pickering, an elder in the Methodist Church. His wife, Sarah, had a cut on her face that produced much blood but proved superficial. No one in the Macdonalds’ heavier car was at all injured, despite the fact that the impact had whirled their car around into the opposite direction. The Laws, who had witnessed the crash, ran to help.
When the dust settled, it was clear that both cars were damaged. “Lady Jane Grey” had a bent axle, smashed fender, and broken lamp-post (repairs costing fifty dollars). The Pickering Chevrolet, a lighter car, sustained eighty-five dollars in damage. Maud thought that they were equally to blame: Ewan for careless driving (pulling out without looking a second time), but Pickering for speeding. Moreover, Pickering had not been on his own side of the road, as he should have been. He also admitted that he had seen the Macdonald car before crashing into it. (He reasonably expected Ewan to stop, but Ewan instead pulled into the road.) Normally people drove in the middle of these old dirt roads unless someone else was coming. Then they moved over. Cars were so few that road signs weren’t yet necessary. There were some rules of the road, however, including that a driver should slow to twelve miles per hour and toot the horn before proceeding around a blind corner. And drivers were always supposed to look twice before proceeding onto a road. It indeed seemed that both drivers were at fault.
The day after the accident, Mrs. Ivor Law called the Macdonalds to tell them that Marshall Pickering had been taken to the hospital that morning for “stoppage of urine.” She noted that he had had several of these attacks before. In fact, he had had prostate trouble for a number of years, but had told people in the community that he had put off having the operation because his father had died as the result of a prostate operation (before antibiotics, patients often died from post-operative infections).
Ewan visited Mrs. Pickering to commiserate the next day. She made snappish remarks about Ewan’s bad driving, but she did not link her husband’s prostate trouble to the accident. Shortly after that, Ewan paid Marshall Pickering a courtesy call in the hospital where he was recovering from a successful operation. While there, Ewan met Pickering’s son Wellington, who, in the course of an amiable chat, told him that his dad had intended to have the operation the following week, and had written him four weeks ago to come home for the summer to look after the farm while he was recuperating.
Maud wrote in her diary a week later, on June 16, 1920: “Everywhere we go we have to talk of it [the accident] and explain. A hundred exaggerated reports have gone abroad concerning it.” But talk died down, Pickering recovered, and that was the end of the affair—or so everyone thought.
In early December, Maud reported having one of her “queer ‘symbolic’ dreams,” and this worried her. She dreamed that she had come home from a trip to find that Ewan had been hanged but had come back to life after being cut down (February 28, 1922). She thought this presaged trouble.
Some ten days later a letter came to Ewan from Pickering stating that the operation would not have been necessary had it not been for the accident, and that Ewan should pay $500 of the $1,000 it cost. This was one-third of Ewan’s yearly salary (which had risen to $1,500 in 1921) for his combined charge of two churches. But of course Pickering knew that Ewan’s wife was “rich”—her royalties had paid for the fancy Grey-Dort.
The Macdonalds were outraged, particularly by the demanding tone of Pickering’s letter. They knew that enlarged prostate glands were a problem that came on over time, not as the result of a single car accident, and they knew that he’d needed the operation well before the accident. However, Maud observed that “he didn’t know we knew that … not having heard his son’s conversation with Ewan. I suppose he thought it could ‘put it over us’ quite easily” (February 28, 1922).
The Macdonalds felt there would have been some justice in Pickering’s asking that they pay for his car repairs, for he’d already been in the road when they’d pulled in front of him. However, if he had been on his side of the road, the accident would not have taken place. Similarly, if he had slowed and beeped at the corner, as a driver was supposed to, then they would not have collided. But they balked over the medical bills.
Ewan wrote back to Pickering that they were both at fault for the accident and that it was therefore fair that they each pay their own expenses. He told Pickering that many people had heard him talk about his need for the operation before the crash. Maud observed: “Probably this put Pickering into the rage of a man who has tried to do a detestable thing and has been found out. He is a very conceited, arrogant, bumptious man who cannot brook contradiction in anything” (February 28, 1922). His wife (a third wife) she had already characterized, quite critically, as a “very ignorant, insolent, vulgar woman.” Maud does not soften the punches in her private diary—an understandable reaction, perhaps, for someone who always had to be impeccably polite in her public role as a minister’s wife.
The Macdonalds heard nothing more for over two months. On February 28, 1922, when they assumed that the matter was over, they were surprised to get a response. According to Maud, Marshall Pickering’s letter to Ewan Macdonald “raved … abusively through several very badly written and badly spelled pages,” saying that he had never been sick before, could prove by doctors that the accident had both caused his prostate problem and necessitated the ensuing operation, and demanding that Ewan pay $500 within the month or the matter would be “settled” in the courts. At the beginning and the end of the letter, he wrote boldly “Written Without Prejudice.” Clearly he had composed the letter himself—as the spelling and grammar revealed—but that he had consulted a lawyer was evident through his use of the specialized legal term.
Maud wrote: “I suppose he imagines that Ewan, being a minister, will submit to blackmail rather than be dragged into the worry and notoriety of a lawsuit. If so he does not know either of us. We will not be frightened into paying his bills.” Maud was still fighting her own lawsuits in the United States and the letter upset her. “Ewan never worries over anything—except eternal damnation—but I do.… Just as soon as one thing passes, or grows easier, something else comes” (February 28, 1922).
For once, Ewan did not dither over what to do: he flew into action. By April 2, 1922, he had met with a lawyer, Mr. McCullough of Toronto, who told them that if they could prove that Pickering had planned to have the operation before the accident, the case would be easy to win. Ewan would have to find witnesses to disprove Pickering’s statements in the letter.
On April 25, 1922, the Macdonalds received an official letter from Pickering’s lawyer, Mr. Willard W. Greig, of Uxbridge, demanding “$1,500 under threat of a writ.” Greig was a young lawyer at the beginning of his long and successful career in Uxbridge.43 The letter from Pickering’s lawyer gave Ewan a focus for action.
Galvanized into action, Ewan was tireless in his search for testimony to support his case. He saw himself as the victim of a greedy opportunist, and he wanted to believe, like his wife, that God favoured those who steadfastly fought injustice. Ewan covered immense amounts of ground looking for people to testify that Pickering had talked about his need for prostate surgery before the accident. He was quite successful: Marshall Pickering was a garrulous man who travelled far and wide in his car.
Ewan was very good at canvassing, and he showed ingenuity and excellent networking skills. People embraced the opportunity to talk to him because they welcomed a chance to hear more details about the accident. And when he went farther afield, everyone knew his wife was a celebrity. Interesting gossip was hard to come by, and tales of this affair had spread for many miles around, even as far as Kingston, Ontario.
Ewan’s manner was amiable and homespun but gentlemanly, so people welcomed him into their homes. Pickering, by contrast, was often arrogant: even in his own church, many people found his attention-seeking irritating. A well-dressed and handsome man, he was said to be too aware of the fine figure he cut. He had a habit of coming to church after the minister had started the sermon and tiptoeing ostentatiously up to his pew in the front, grimacing for comic effect as each step elicited creaky squeaks from the floor. Expecting the performance each Sunday, children giggled in expectation and parents gritted their teeth.
But whatever his faults, Pickering was also a substantial citizen. His family had been early settlers in the area, and he farmed one hundred acres right outside Zephyr. He had been on the building committee when the Methodist church was established, and he remained a significant force in its management. He was a great talker, a talented singer, and a cocky show-off—a quality the Macdonalds loathed. At age sixty-two, Marshall was still a vigorous man behind the wheel. He was much more alert than Ewan, who would be fifty-one in 1921. Whatever these personality differences added to the affair, in a rural community where lawsuits were exceedingly rare, the entire Leaskdale-Zephyr community and the surrounding counties were mesmerized by the spectacle of a public altercation between a Presbyterian “man of the cloth” and a well-to-do farmer who was a powerful force in the Methodist Church.
Maud was delighted to see Ewan rouse himself to action after the prolonged mental distress following his May 1919 breakdown. Relieved that he was taking up his cudgel against injustice, she was nevertheless skeptical. She had already had enough experience in the American courts to know how convincingly people could and would lie.
The stakes in this lawsuit kept rising. On September 25, 1922, the Macdonalds learned that Pickering was now suing them for $8,000: $1,000 for his operation; $5,000 for his sufferings, and $2,000 for his wife. Now there was a new charge: he alleged that Mrs. Pickering had developed “sugar diabetes” as the result of the accident. Old-timers interviewed in the 1980s said that Marshall Pickering was not a sophisticated man for all his “snap,” and they did not fault him for thinking that if he had stoppage of urine after an accident, there was a connection. Nor, they said, would he and his wife have understood what caused diabetes. She claimed she had had to keep her daughters home from paying jobs in order to keep house for her. Maud knew that a lawyer often sued for more than he hoped to get as a strategy for getting part of it, but the inflated amounts were still worrying, especially since Maud was already deeply concerned about her American lawsuits. The sum of $8,000 also stunned this rural community. One man gasped, to Maud’s delight: “Eight thousand!! It’s more than his whole damned carcass is worth, let alone his prostate gland” (October 1, 1922).
On September 27, 1922, Maud opined that “poor Ewan has begun his task of getting all possible evidence.” Mr. Law was willing to give testimony that “Pickering was in the middle of the road, did not turn out, did not sound his horn, [and] was going very fast and was equally to blame.” Two “respected and reputable” men at Mt. Albert agreed to testify that Pickering had told them after the operation that he had needed the operation anyway.
The lines of battle were drawn, but the pressures that would come to bear on the outcome were many, complicated, and insidious. In a community in which the Pickerings were long established, a subtle force was enacted through the bonds of kinship, marriage, and community entanglements. Although many people had casually mentioned to Ewan that Pickering had talked about his need for the prostate operation long before he had it, and promised to testify to this, they backed out when they realized what testifying actually meant. Ewan would then discover that a potential witness’s uncle or brother was married to someone who was a distant cousin or sibling of someone related to the extended Pickering family. In Cavendish, Maud had always been an “insider”; she would have understood instinctively how these tangled webs would affect testimony. In Leaskdale and Zephyr, the Macdonalds were effectively “outsiders.”
Another complication was the denominational rivalry between the Presbyterians and the Methodists. Ewan could not count on any Methodist testifying publicly against Pickering, no matter what people were willing to tell him privately. Presbyterian ministers like Ewan came and went, but Marshall Pickering and his family would stay in the community. Proving the truth would be more difficult than they had anticipated.
The community speculated on every aspect of the situation. “Many people in Zephyr think that it is Mrs. Pickering that put Pickering up to this,” Maud wrote in her journals, but “other people think it is Greig” (September 30, 1922). Many more were horrified that a minister was being sued, and observed that the lawsuit would never have come to pass if Ewan had not had a “rich wife.” Because there were many people on a rural telephone party line, everyone flew to the phone to listen in whenever anyone’s phone rang. Generally, the Methodists rallied against the Presbyterians, but there were always splits and defections. The only thing most people agreed on was that both men were bad drivers—Pickering went too fast and Macdonald went too slow. Even Maud admitted that Ewan was a poor driver.
In preparing for the trial, Ewan remained focused and determined. He not only canvassed everyone to whom Pickering had spoken, he also checked out all the doctors in the area. He found a Dr. Boynton in Sutton, whom Marshall Pickering had consulted about his enlarged prostate long before the accident. Dr. Boynton was willing to testify to that effect. But as soon as Pickering heard through gossip that the doctor was going to testify, he confronted him, boldly claiming that the consultation had never taken place. Taken aback, Dr. Boynton showed Pickering his notes, with Pickering’s name and the details of the visit. A quick thinker, Pickering paused, then shot back that it must have been his young nephew, another “Marshall Pickering.” Fortunately for Pickering, that nephew was no longer around, so this could not be confirmed. Although the doctor knew that prostate problems were not a young man’s ailment, he backed out of testifying because he said that he had to admit that he could not honestly remember Marshall Pickering’s face.
Next, Ewan talked to the doctor who had diagnosed Mrs. Pickering’s diabetes prior to the accident, and had sent her to Toronto specialists. Since insulin had just been discovered by Drs. Frederick Banting and Charles Best (and John Macleod and James Collip) at the University of Toronto in the winter of 1921–22, it should have been easy to discredit Mrs. Pickering’s claim that her diabetes had been caused by a car accident—especially given that the diagnosis of diabetes had already been made before the accident.
Maud groused on November 16, 1922, that as the trial drew near, their lawsuit was the talk of the communities for a twenty-mile radius. “I can’t exactly blame people. The fact of a minister being sued is a dramatic event to them—a veritable god-send in their humdrum, colourless lives. It is only natural they should make the most of it. But it is hard that Ewan and I should be butchered to make a Roman holiday! I feel all raw and bleeding, mentally and physically” (November 16, 1922). Her own Page lawsuits were still pending, but no one in her community knew anything about them.
The Macdonalds were not aware that Marshall Pickering had hired a new Toronto lawyer, Thomas N. Phelan, to assist Greig. Phelan was one of Canada’s sharpest lawyers in the emerging field of automobile law. A King’s Counsel (K.C.), Phelan was very prominent in the Toronto legal community. He suggested a trial in front of a judge, not a jury. The Macdonalds happily agreed to this, thinking that a jury might be prejudiced against an educated clergyman with a rich wife, and would feel more sympathy for Pickering, an unsophisticated farmer. They did not think of the fact that the impressive Phelan was, of course, well acquainted with all the judges where the case would be heard, and a top-flight lawyer would command respect in the small legal world of Toronto.
The trial was set for November 23, 1922, in the Assize Court in Toronto. Maud noted that Ewan had been well throughout the entire fall, although he looked very tired by the time of the trial. “I think if we win the trial the sense of success will scatter that dark complex of inadequacy in his subconscious mind which I believe is responsible for much of his trouble,” she wrote hopefully in her journal on November 21, 1922.
The Macdonalds expected to win, with both facts and medical evidence on their side. Maud worried that Ewan’s lawyers, brothers named McCullough, were more affable than sharp, but Ewan had done a good job gathering all the evidence. Even if many witnesses had fallen away, he still had found several courageous people willing to testify that Marshall Pickering had said he needed the prostate operation long before the accident. As well, the Macdonalds had doctors to testify that enlarged prostates and sugar diabetes came from pre-existing conditions, not from car accidents.
The courtroom was stuffed with people from Leaskdale and Zephyr, which boosted the Macdonalds’ morale. Some, of course, came out of curiosity, but most were there in sympathy with the Macdonalds. Even those who were afraid to testify wanted to see justice served. There was also a reporter from the Globe at the trial.
The judge presiding over the case, the Honourable Justice William Renwick Riddell, was one of the most eminent legal lights in Toronto, if not Canada. He was a Scot who proudly claimed ancestry, as Maud herself did, from a knight who had accompanied William the Conqueror to Britain. Justice Riddell, the son of a prosperous farmer in Cobourg, came with impressive credentials. Winner of the Gold Medal of the Law Society of Upper Canada, he had been called to the bar in 1891, at age thirty-one. He had married the wealthy Anna Crossen, whose father owned the Cobourg Car Works, which manufactured railway cars at the time of Canada’s railway expansion. By age forty-one, William Renwick Riddell and his wife had acquired a fine house next to Sir Oliver Mowat’s home where they entertained elegantly. In 1906, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Ontario, where he served until 1945. He had been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and would receive, by his death, eleven honorary degrees from all over North America.
Riddell was part of Toronto’s elite society. An accomplished orator, he was much in demand as a speaker in Canada and the United States. He hobnobbed with the best and most powerful in the legal and political world, counting among his acquaintances Sir Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon MacKenzie King, both prime ministers of Canada. He was very well versed in history and law, and had written the first history of Canadian jurisprudence. He wrote prodigiously on a range of topics, medical and literary: venereal diseases in the Middle Ages, hiccups, Virginia Woolf’s books (he didn’t like them), ancient dentistry, Freemasonry, Ontario history, insomnia, legal matters, and so on. Justice Riddell seemed a perfect judge for the Macdonalds, considering his Scottish background, his attraction to famous and successful people, his extensive knowledge of medicine, and his wide experience in law.
Maud gives a blow-by-blow account of the courtroom testimony in her journals. Judge Riddell’s handwritten notes have survived to confirm her account, and they shed even more light on the dramatic proceedings and astonishing judgment.
The trial began on a Thursday afternoon. Maud had watched Justice William Renwick Riddell through the morning and had misgivings. Intuitively, she sized him up as a “colossal egotist … who thinks his own judgment quite infallible” (November 26, 1922), and for once in her life, she may have been understating the case.
Marshall Pickering was the first to testify. He had said in discovery that he had seen the Macdonalds’ car some one hundred rods away, but he changed it now to twenty rods, saying he had been mistaken before. Maud acerbically comments that if he was “mistaken” in this, one would assume he might be “mistaken” in other things. He swore he was going only twenty miles per hour, and that he had sounded his horn four times (witnesses denied both those assertions). He said that he was operated on for a “congested” prostate gland, not an “enlarged” one, and he swore that he had never spoken of having prostate trouble before the accident occurred. When he was cross-examined by McCullough (Ewan’s lawyer) who cited names of their witnesses who would testify that he had spoken beforehand of the need for an operation, he admitted that he “might have said he had a burning sensation at times” when urinating.
When McCullough asked if Mrs. Pickering had ever been treated for diabetes (which everyone in the community knew she had), he said, by Maud’s journal account, “She had a little of it a few years ago but she got some medicine from the States that cured her.”
McCullough next elicited an admission from Pickering that if he had slowed to twelve miles per hour at this blind corner, he could have avoided the accident. When McCullough confronted Pickering about tampering with a witness, Judge Riddell cut off the questioning, saying it didn’t matter. When Pickering’s testimony was finished, Justice Riddell advised McCullough not to call Ewan’s witnesses—the ones who would testify that Pickering had told them before the accident that he needed an operation—because he would “give very little attention to such evidence.” When McCullough explained that he wanted to call them to “test the credibility of the witness,” Maud reported that Justice Riddell replied, “Oh, I believe the witness. He is an honest man.”
Riddell then asked McCullough to call some of the doctors. Dr. Johnson, Pickering’s own doctor, said he had found some “congestion” in the gland, and supposed the accident had caused it. Dr. Robinson, a pathologist at the University of Toronto who had dissected the gland after the operation, testified there was no congestion in the gland at all, and he “had the section of the gland there to prove it.” Further, he stated that the “operation would have been necessary in any case in two or three months.” Two more experts in kidney disease testified “that diabetes was incurable” and the accident would not have caused Mrs. Pickering’s diabetes.
In testimony the next day, Mrs. Pickering denied that she had ever been treated for diabetes before the accident, even though her husband had said the opposite on the previous day, and their doctor (Dr. Johnson) had also testified that he had diagnosed her diabetes and sent her to a specialist in Toronto before the accident. In cross-examination, she admitted that she had not consulted a doctor after the accident. McCullough picked up these discrepancies and questioned her further about seeing the specialist before the accident. Maud reports that Judge Riddell cut him off by saying, “I don’t believe she ever had diabetes or if she had she is cured.”
More people testified. Finally, Ewan and Maud testified and were cross-examined. The Macdonalds’ lawyers did not put on the rest of their witnesses, for fear of antagonizing the impatient Riddell. They believed that on the basis of testimony already given he could do nothing except find in Ewan’s favour anyway, given that experts had contradicted the Pickerings’ testimony and that the Pickerings had contradicted themselves. Maud, however, was not so sure.
She was right. Justice Riddell incomprehensibly found in favour of the Pickerings, awarding Marshall Pickering $1,000 for his operation, $500 for his suffering, and Mrs. Pickering $500, plus expenses (which amounted to over $1,000). Ewan’s lawyers and many from the community who had witnessed the trial were astonished. Maud reported that the court clerk had indiscreetly confided to the Macdonalds before the judgment came down that anyone could see “it was just a conspiracy to get money out of” them.
How could such an eminent judge as Justice Riddell—an undisputed polymath, president for twenty-five years of the Health League of Canada—have come to such a conclusion? He had written widely on medical matters— ranging from a translation of a sixteenth-century work on syphilis to articles on the history of medicine.44 Clearly, the Macdonalds were at a disadvantage in having the case tried in Toronto, where the judge did not know the community standing of the various witnesses—who was truthful, and who was not. However, cross-examinations had revealed lies in testimony, so that should not have mattered. A man of such substantial wealth as Riddell could not have been “bought off.” Nor could Pickering have offered him enough to make an under-the-table handshake worthwhile.
There are other explanations, none of which occurred to Maud and Ewan.
First, Judge Riddell’s own notes, taken during testimony at the trial, reveal factors that may have influenced his judgment. At the time of the Macdonald trial, Justice Riddell was in his seventieth year, and the notes he took indicate that he was hard of hearing.45 In 1922, there were no hearing aids, and he simply could not hear all that was said in the courtroom, and may have been too proud to admit this. His notes are riddled with errors: Pickering’s Uxbridge lawyer, Willard F. Greig, he recorded as “Gray”; Dr. McClintock he called “Clintock”; Dr. Stevenson he called “Stephens”; Mason Horner becomes “Mason Marner.” The sketchy notes appear to be taken by someone having a hard time keeping up with the testimony.
The transcript also suggests that Riddell simply was not listening attentively. Perhaps he was tired or bored. Or he had already made up his mind, and only heard selectively. For instance, he did not record the actual detailed testimony of any of the specialist doctors who testified on the Macdonalds’ side—he just entered their names—but he did record the testimony of the Pickerings’ local doctor. And he recorded only the part of Dr. Johnson’s testimony that was in the Pickerings’ favour. For instance, he wrote “prostate enlarge[d] and congested by blow.” Yet, he did not record the University of Toronto pathologist’s expert testimony and note the final clinical report that the prostate was not congested and that the enlarged prostate itself was not caused by the blow. The expert testimony should have trumped a country doctor’s initial diagnosis.
In the case of Mrs. Pickering’s diabetes, Riddell records no medical testimony at all, especially none of the specialists’ comments that contradicted her allegations. Nor does he record the discrepancy between her and her husband’s testimony in respect of the onset of symptoms. It is possible that Phelan, a Toronto lawyer who would have known that Riddell was hard of hearing, had advised his witnesses to speak softly. But other factors may also have come into play.
Riddell’s notes show that he was very much aware of the reputation of the lawyers presenting the cases. He wrote clearly in his notes that T. N. Phelan was a “King’s Counsel” lawyer, a designation of importance. Older lawyers like Riddell saw Phelan as an up-and-coming power in the legal world.79 The McCullough brothers were competent but undistinguished. The “old boy” network was strong in law, just as in other professions, and Riddell had a long history of cultivating connections within it for reasons related to his own personal agenda. He still powerful ambitions for himself. Riddell had basked in the limelight of power through his truly distinguished career, and now, late in life, he lusted for much more recognition. He needed the support of the old-boy legal network, especially of outstanding lawyers like Phelan, to get it.
In 1923, the year after Judge Riddell decided the Macdonald-Pickering case, he wrote to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, asking for appointment to the position of Chief Justice in the Supreme Court of Canada. His not very subtle letter, dated April 1923, read: “Unless my claims receive sympathetic consideration from yours, my loss of three-quarters of a million [dollars] and seventeen years faithful—I think I may add successful as well as honourable— service go for nothing.”46 But the appointment he so coveted was never to be his, and at age ninety-one, he was still writing to Mackenzie King, begging for recognition. One final letter stated that a friend of his “assures me that it requires but a hint from you to Churchill to have me made a Member of the Privy Council,” and a little later he says, “Or I would take a Knighthood.”
Maud was fond of saying, “The mills of the Gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.” She puzzled in her journals over Riddell’s decision—one that changed her life immeasurably for the worse. In her bewilderment, she rescued Riddell’s name from the obscurity he feared, but not in the way he might have liked: her journals gave him a spicy page in her own life story, even though he made Pickering the courtroom winner.
As Maud herself knew all too well, winning a legal judgment and obtaining the payout were two separate matters. The Macdonalds felt rage and injustice after the judgment. But there was more fallout. When they read the Globe account of the trial, Ewan found himself identified as “husband of the novelist better known as L. M. Montgomery.” Ewan rarely took strong positions, but this time he set his foot down: since he himself did not have the money to pay the judgment, he informed Maud that he would not allow her to use a penny of her savings to pay it for him. He had been driving the car, not she, so the judgment was against him, not her. The car was registered in his name, not hers. Fortunately, Maud had always kept her money separate from Ewan’s, an unusual practice for a woman of that era. There was no legal recourse for Pickering, to his and Greig’s disappointment, for they could not extract money from Maud’s own bank account. Ewan’s Presbyterian congregations were likewise outraged by the judgment. They rallied behind him and arranged to pay his salary in advance so it could not be garnisheed.
As so often happens with lawsuits, all participants would be losers. Pickering earned nothing but frustration. Rather than obtaining any money, Pickering had to lay out money himself to keep bringing Ewan to court over the next few years to testify that he, Ewan, was still unable to pay the judgment. Pickering knew that many villagers were snickering behind his back, and others in the community shunned him. They were unwilling to testify against him, but they knew that his condition had existed before the accident. Shortly after the trial was over, he himself developed diabetes, prompting Maud to comment wryly in her journals that it was enough to make one believe in “judgements from God.” Pickering died in 1930.
The consequences of Riddell’s judgment followed the Macdonalds to their graves. Maud had hoped that winning would dispel Ewan’s feelings of “personal inadequacy.” When he did not win, despite working so hard, Ewan took it as one more sign that he was an outcast from God. Before long, he sank into depression again. After the trial, gloom began to hang on him, and his posture and manner gave it away. He needed medications once more. The cheerful, sweet man that Maud had married was again replaced by a sad, morose one.
Maud’s equilibrium was also upset by the Pickering affair. The case had poisoned the community atmosphere. Still, she managed to write all of Emily of New Moon between August 1921 (two months after the accident) and February 15, 1922 (before the trial came up in court). She wrote, “I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables” (February 15, 1922). One can only be amazed at her discipline, and be thankful that she found exhilaration in writing fiction.
But as always in Maud’s life, more was going on than was visible on the surface. Years earlier, the entrance of Ewan Macdonald as a promising suitor had fuelled the creation of lovable “Anne.” Now, Maud put the same energy into Emily of New Moon that she had put into Anne of Green Gables, and felt the same intense pleasure in writing it. But it was not because of Ewan’s presence this time. Now, the attention and admiration from another man helped bring “Emily” into being. That man was the Reverend Edwin Smith, now called “Captain Smith,” a returning World War I war hero.