1
THE BROKEN HOME
1926–38
Light strikes the little boy. Shining, backlit, his brown hair is a halo. He leans at ease into the lap of his father, the tycoon, who is fully playing the part, barrel-chested and rakish, leaning on his left arm to support them both, in the corner of his mouth a cigarette, the breeze stirring his whitening hair. They gaze to one side across the pool they sit beside with matching grins. Dressed all in white, they seem made of one sunny substance. Jimmy is just three: short pants, ankle socks. Someone has supplied a cushion to keep his backside clean. He is as feminine and delicate as the Old Man is bluff and hearty, but they are equally assured.
The photo was taken around Christmas 1929. Black Tuesday, October 29, when the Dow Jones lost 13 percent of its value, is very recent history; soon the Great Depression will grip the nation. Here, by the reflecting pool behind Charles Merrill’s house on Brazilian Avenue in Palm Beach, the bank panics and breadlines to come, like the winter cold, are very far away. Charlie had the insight to foresee the stock market crash that brought the Roaring Twenties to a bitter, sudden close. He had restructured the brokerage firm he cofounded in 1915, Merrill Lynch, to focus on investment banking rather than the retail sale of stock, and he urged his clients to get out of the market. He put his own money in Safeway supermarkets, the chain of grocery stores he created through a massive merger in 1926. He closed the deal himself in one heroic, headlong session of accounting. The company took off before the Crash and survived it with considerable momentum. By 1932, when its growth finally leveled out, Charlie would be the de facto boss of some 3,400 stores, making Safeway America’s second-largest grocery chain, after the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., and the largest west of the Mississippi River. Relaxing with his son in Florida in 1929, both of them in spotless whites, he has the easy swagger of an unchallenged ruler, slightly overweight. For the moment, he has nothing to prove.
It wasn’t always so. Charlie was a born competitor. He insisted on playing bridge for money, if only for small stakes, just to make it interesting. After college, he spent a summer as a hustling semipro baseball player—Class D, but the team was the best entertainment in that corner of Mississippi, and he was paid for playing. When he read books, they were mainly military history. He volunteered to fight in World War I and became a test pilot and flight instructor. At thirty-one, “Pop Merrill” was the oldest man in his company, and he was never sent overseas to fight. Even so, his service would remain a source of pride for the rest of his life. Having asked to be buried in his military uniform, he entered heaven dressed for battle.
It had been his basic attitude in life. A short man, he joked about his charter membership in the “Everybody Over Five-Feet-Six is a Sonuvabitch Club.” When, on one of his regular returns to his alma mater, Amherst College, after drinks, dinner, and more drinks, he rose to speak as the national president of the Chi Psi Fraternity—an office as important to him as any he ever held—his fraternity brothers, knowing how to get under his skin, would roar, “Come on, Charlie, get up off your knees!” Jimmy’s childhood photo album shows his father hoisting the infant onto a pony. In other photos, he lifts his son onto a barrel. Evidently the first lesson to be learned was how to get on top and ride; it mattered less on what.
Drawing puzzled looks or smirks, James Merrill liked to say he was glad he was born to “poor parents,” by which he meant people whose values were formed before they had money. True: although he was never “poor,” except by the standards of the rich, the fact that Charlie had grown up without much money, and lived among people who had less, deeply shaped him. It meant that—what Jimmy had in mind—Charlie valued common people, commonsense frugality, and practical industry. But it meant much more than that: not having money, the kind of money the rich relied on, was a wound and a stain, a parlous state that mingled with his memories of growing up in the defeated South.
Charles Edward Merrill was born in 1885 in Green Cove Springs, Florida, the county seat and a resort town with a year-round population of 350 situated up the St. John’s River about thirty miles south of Jacksonville in the northeast corner of the state. He was the first child and only son of Octavia Wilson and Charles Morton Merrill; sister Edith followed in 1892, Mary in 1902. His father was a doctor and a pharmacist who tended not only to his neighbors in Green Cove Springs but also—it was why he located there in 1882—to wealthy winter visitors from the North. Along with citrus farming, the town depended on those tourists, who came for the mineral springs and mild weather, swelling the population from January through February, and giving the Merrills a glimpse of how rich people lived. In the 1880s and early 1890s, with paddle-wheelers steaming on the broad river and travelers arriving from as far away as Europe, Green Cove Springs was no mean backwater but, in Charlie’s words, “an up-and-coming potential Carlsbad of America.” But its heyday was brief. Severe, back-to-back freezes hit in 1894 and 1895; the citrus crop failed; and tourists began to explore points further south, beckoned by the expanding railroad system.
“Economic conditions in the south had been so bad for years,” Charlie said, “that most Southerners just took it for granted that the ‘going was rough.’ So far as I knew, the going had always been rough.” Two stories he told about his childhood suggest how those conditions affected him. The first came from when he was a small boy. His mother brought him out onto the porch to show him the full moon. Charlie pointed, shouted, “I want it! I want it!,” and threw a tantrum when he couldn’t get it. “Thereafter,” as Robin Magowan, his grandson, relates, “Octavia had him believing that anything he wanted—even the moon—could be his, if he wanted it badly enough. Over and over, as he saw her despairing over some unpayable bill, he would promise, ‘Don’t worry, Mama, when I grow up I’ll buy you rubies and diamonds.’ ”
Charlie recounts the second story in a letter to his son Charles in 1940. Attempting to impress a “sense of responsibility” on the young man, who was twenty, Charlie recalls events of 1906, when he himself was coming of age:
My mother and father and Edith were living in West Palm Beach Florida; it was a sad year for us all for in January my sister Mary died [of diphtheria at the age of three]. Had the family been living then in Jacksonville my father could have saved her life, but there was no hospital then in West Palm Beach, and he did not have available the proper tools of his trade. The fact that my father knew how to save his daughter’s life, and yet, because of limited finances, did not possess the equipment, crushed him. Money, [of] course, is not everything, but, my friend, emergency after emergency comes up in this world of ours in which for a few brief moments, at least, and maybe longer, money is the equivalent of everything.
Mary’s death was the last and worst in a line of calamities that began in 1898 when the Merrills left Green Cove Springs. They moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, a boom town; but the doctor set up shop in a working-class area, and business was slower than expected. So he moved his family back to Florida, this time to a comfortable address in Jacksonville, the largest city in the state, but there was more rough going ahead. In 1901 Jacksonville was devastated by fire. The business district burned, and a third of the city’s 25,000 residents were left homeless. Although the Merrills’ home survived, the city schools were damaged, and Charlie was sent to Stetson, a boarding school one hundred miles away. Then, in 1902, shortly before Mary was born, Dr. Merrill was robbed, severely beaten, and left on the street in a coma. His recovery was slow and only partial; for a time, he was confined to a wheelchair. When he recovered enough to return to work, he moved to West Palm Beach in 1903 and tried to rebuild his practice where the tourists had gone. He opened another pharmacy; now Octavia not only worked behind the counter, but opened two boardinghouses, while caring for a small child. In short, Charles Morton Merrill was wounded—economically and physically—even before Mary died. It was not so unreasonable for his son to decide that money was the “equivalent of everything.”
Charlie’s future lay in the North. When he got the news of Mary’s death, he was enrolled in Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. From there he progressed—an uninspired but passing student—to Amherst for two years and then the University of Michigan for a year, before he broke off his studies without completing a degree. That his parents would send their only boy away first to boarding school in Florida, then in distant Massachusetts, in the midst of a family financial crisis, indicates how much they staked on his education, and specifically his education in the North, which they expected to equip him for a professional life.
Dr. Merrill’s family had roots in the North. His parents, carpetbaggers, came to Jacksonsville from Ohio in 1870; he trained as a medical student at the University of Michigan and served as a surgical intern in Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where he took his medical degree. He’d met Octavia Wilson, a Mississippi girl, when they were both students at Maryville College in Tennessee. Their fathers had fought on opposite sides in the Battle of Vicksburg. It was unusual for a young woman to be sent to college, even, as in this case, for a year. Octavia’s father taught her Latin and the classics; she read Shakespeare and poetry; and her mother was a reader: Miss Emily, as she was known, introduced her grandson to books of history and to J. M. Barrie’s novel Sentimental Tommy—a work of literature, one of the few, that Charlie swore by in later life. Miss Emily was the force behind his enrollment at Michigan. Feeling he was destined to be a lawyer, for which Michigan was top-notch preparation, she raised money from her hard-pressed Wilson relatives to pay his tuition.
His two years at Amherst had a much greater effect. Amherst was known as a conservative, small-town alternative to Harvard, safe from the free thinking of the university and loose living of the big city. He arrived on campus with savings from a summer job and a $300 scholarship from the college. For Charlie, Amherst would be a way into the moneyed Northeast society from which the college drew most of its students. Like all of the best schools, Amherst was an elite WASP institution. There were few Catholics, only “non-practicing” Jews, and no blacks; women were enrolled at nearby Smith and Mount Holyoke. Charlie came to campus with, he joked, “four strikes” against him: he was short and small, he was from the South, he had no money, and he had his mother with him. For Octavia hovered while he got settled, because he’d had a tough time of it at Worcester Academy, where he had been ridiculed for his southern drawl and inferior academic preparation, and assigned to live in cramped quarters shared with an “octoroon”—which he took as a deliberate insult.
He quickly found his place at Amherst by joining the Chi Psi Fraternity. Fraternity boys were sworn brothers. Indifferent to their studies, they played sports, acted in plays, and partied hard, aware that their fortunes depended less on their grades than on the friendships they were forming with each other and on the possibility that one of their dates might turn into a favorable marriage. Charlie was the consummate fraternity man. “I never studied,” he said, “because I was a damn conceited cuss and knew I could cram in a few days before exams and thus ‘get by.’ ” In Chi Psi, he flashed what was already being called his “million-dollar smile.” He ingratiated himself with his brothers while making money by arranging for the fraternity’s food and drink at a local rooming house and selling fine clothes to collegians on commission from a Springfield tailor, who, to advertise his wares, kept Charlie himself dressed in the latest styles, so that he didn’t look like a poor boy.1
He was off and running. His time at Michigan proved only that he had no gift for the law. Business was less prestigious, but there was money in it, and he had a job waiting for him in New York as a credit manager for Robert Sjostrom, a textile manufacturer and the father of a Smith girl to whom Charlie was engaged for several years before she broke it off and he left her father’s firm. In the meantime, he’d learned accounting, and become an expert in buying and selling credit. He went to work next for Burr & Co., a small bond house dealing in low-grade investments. He opened his own office with a staff of one (a secretary whom he kept on for decades, longer than any of his wives) and started out as a securities broker and investment banker. He added as a partner the hard-nosed Eddie Lynch, who was good at negotiations and at reading the fine print. They were a strong team at work and sidekicks after hours. Pinching pennies, they headed out late once a week to posh watering holes where they relieved elderly gents of their escorts, who were well fed by that hour and ready to “stay out the balance of the night with a couple of young blades who were fun and who could dance.” By horning in on Wall Street’s securities business, they were playing another trick on the old guard. Merrill, Lynch (there was a comma between the names at first) broke the code of silence that made the stock market an insider’s club, pulling back the veil on investment by experimenting with direct-mail advertising and detailed prospectuses and earnings reports to show their clients what they were buying.
These techniques, novel in the 1910s, were essential tools when Charlie directed an aggressive expansion of the firm in the 1940s—without his partner Lynch, who died suddenly at the age of fifty-two in 1938. Working, during the war years and after, to reestablish the discredited reputation of Wall Street, Merrill Lynch put in place many policies new to the industry: no service fees, expanded advertising, an emphasis on research, profit sharing and training for employees, and salary rather than commissions for account executives. With such strategies encouraging public trust in financial services and promoting personal, small-scale investment for the expanding middle class, the firm emerged as the nation’s leading retail broker during the postwar decade. By the end of his career, when the number of individual stock-market investors reached more than 7.5 million across the United States, Charlie had transformed how Americans think of finance. He had brought “Wall Street to Main Street.”2 He was “We, the People’s Boss.”
Preoccupied in his final years with his own myth, he commissioned official biographies of himself, but none came to fruition—not surprisingly perhaps, since his story was fascinating, but not easy to sum up. In business, Charlie rode—often he was out in front of—the waves of commerce transforming daily life for millions. He’d seen that chain stores, with centralized purchasing and warehousing and national advertising, would displace the independent retail store, and that shoppers would follow en masse—above all women shoppers, for Charlie’s knack for pleasing women in his private life was part of what he did at work as well. Before Safeway, he was the underwriter who helped build McCrory’s, the five-and-dime store chain, and Kresge’s, ancestor of Kmart. He and Lynch went into the movie business when they bought Pathé films, the future RKO Pictures, which they sold at a profit to Joe Kennedy, a Democrat with dynastic ambitions of his own, whom Charlie came to despise. In all that he did, he was aware of the figure he cut. He was the banker as Jazz Age celebrity in plus fours or a double-breasted Van Sickle suit, a confessed hedonist and the hardest worker going. He was an innovator in business, always ready to try out a new idea, who loved the Old South and English aristocracy. A southern gentleman and a Yankee entrepreneur, he stepped on toes and took pride in his handsome apologies. Bent on making money, he gave it away freely to friends, family, and institutions; though he never graduated from the college, he became one of Amherst’s leading donors. He traversed the nation restlessly, looking in on his several homes and multiplying interests, kindling old flames and sparking new ones, a ladies’ man and a devoted family member. He was a defender of the underdog and an outspoken anti-Semite. He believed in the American Dream, and he filled his house with a staff of black servants. He was a charmer at work who was feared for his rages at home. A loyal friend, he divorced three wives. “I am,” he said, “a mixture of Santa Claus, Lady Bountiful, the Good Samaritan, Baron Richtofen, J. P. Morgan, [and] Casanova[.] I am tender as a woman, brave as a lion, and can fight like a cat.”
Jimmy always called him Daddy. The ordinary intimacy (or the longing for it) expressed in that name is touching, given the stiff, self-conscious quality of their relations as demonstrated on both sides of their correspondence over the years. It would be hard to invent a father and son apparently more unlike each other than Charles and James Merrill. “The Broken Home,” Merrill’s poem about his parents’ marriage and divorce, includes a portrait of his father that counters the man’s blunt drive and reckless appetite with spinning puns and precise rhymes, his hot temper and soppy sentiments with his son’s rhetorical and emotional cool. Writing after his father’s death, Merrill gets the last word, but he takes little pleasure in it:
My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.
Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.
Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.
He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.
For the son, the father posed a nice problem. On the one hand, Daddy was permanently and massively in the way: Jimmy would feel compelled to journey far and wide in order to establish his own credit, beyond the reach of his father’s reputation. On the other hand, his father was never very present to him. Charlie saw the boy little even before he divorced his mother, as Charlie himself realized with regret near the end of his life. And for his part, if Jimmy needed to get away from his father, he was in search of him too, to judge from the qualities of the Old Man (his masculinity, his drinking, his adventurousness, his storytelling, his grandiosity, his temper) that Jimmy found in varying quantities in his lovers.
But in fact he had only to look in the mirror. For Jimmy was no less of a competitor than his father and no less hungry for public recognition. And his poetic career was not a repudiation, so much as a subtle transposition, of his father’s career in finance. Charlie could have used for his motto Wallace Stevens’s adage, “Money is a kind of poetry”—it was that magical, that plastic in his hands. Jimmy turned that proposition around, substituting the transformative powers of language for his father’s faith in capital: through metaphor, he would discover equivalents for everything, including money. The money that came from his father, meanwhile, he would use in the service of art, both his own and, through the grants administered by his personal foundation, many other people’s creativity. And even as he worked very hard every day, sweating to make his verbal magic, James Merrill would live a libertine’s life of the senses that rivaled his father’s—the sultan’s queer heir inventing his own seraglio.
The photo of them lounging together in the Florida sun in 1929 tells the truth. They shine and flow into each other. In just a moment, however, the man will stand and take a call from New York. His valet has mixed a daiquiri for him to enjoy before lunch. The boy will be sent away to play, or delivered into the arms of his mother.
The fact is, it’s easier to bring James Merrill’s father into focus than his mother. It’s not simply that Charles Merrill was a colorful, well-documented public man. He is easier because he stands at a relaxed distance from his son’s poetry—a bemused benefactor who was secure in his own achievements and therefore had no great stake in his son’s, much as it gratified him to see Jimmy succeed in his chosen field. Whereas with his mother, Jimmy was so closely, so privately, and so ambivalently identified, it is hard—it was hard for the two of them—to say where the boundaries were, where one began and the other ended. “[O]f course she’s here / Throughout,” Merrill says of his mother in The Book of Ephraim, the first book of his Ouija board trilogy, in which she is otherwise unmentioned. He means that her presence, her pulse, can be felt everywhere in his poetry—in “the breath drawn after every line, / Essential to its making as to mine[.]” It’s a poignant acknowledgment of a debt as fundamental as life itself, beside which his father’s money was easier to calculate.
It’s not clear, however, whether he really believed that, or whether he merely felt the need to cover for his mother’s absence in the poem, lest it prompt one of “her passionate, tragic scenes.” The mention of his mother in The Book of Ephraim needs to be placed in the context of certain other references to their relationship. At sixty, for instance, he recorded two dreams in his journal: “Dream A: Arms round my old mother (my young father roaming in the background) I tell her I love her. It is hard as pulling a tooth to do so. B: I am fighting to get free of her—biting, scratching, anything. She has locked us in. I wake trying to pry the key from her.” Feeling his mother’s presence in “the breath drawn at the end of every line” must have made it hard for him, at times, to breathe. Then he had to bite and scratch to get free.
His mother is the subject of a poem he wrote at the age of six, probably his first. The date of composition was October 29, 1932.
LOOKING AT MUMMY
One day when she was sleeping
I don’t know who
But it was a pretty lady
That knows me and you.
So, one day when she was sleeping
I took “Mike” a-peeping
The “do-not-disturb” was on the door.
And I looked around the room and floor
Then I looked to the bed
Where that pretty head lay
And the hair was more beautiful
Than I could say.
The poem feels like a fragment from a fairy tale or myth. The boy follows Mike (his father’s red setter, Michael) to an upstairs bedroom. A “do-not-disturb” sign on the door protects the lady of the house while she sleeps off a late night. The boy enters anyway, transgressing. There, after some flirtatious suspense, he is granted a vision. It’s “Mummy” he is looking at, but only the title lets on: the boy, like Oedipus, doesn’t seem to know to whom he’s drawn. She is mysterious specifically because she’s sleeping: motionless and unaware of being looked at, she might be a goddess in repose—or Sleeping Beauty, and her son the prince come to kiss her awake. She’s unguarded, alone; the place beside her is free. Here the story pulls up short, leaving the boy simply, safely admiring. Meanwhile, Jimmy has made something for which he will be admired—a poem in rhyme and a loose ballad meter, like one of the children’s poems he was already memorizing. The poem’s technique and the will to charm that it serves heighten the coy, theatrical quality of his innocence—an effect that, very much refined, of course, would become a trademark tone of the mature poet. It seems that, though only six years old, and absurd as it sounds to say so, Jimmy Merrill has found his voice.
But is that his voice? Although the poem is signed “Jimmy Merrill” across from the date, he hasn’t signed it: the writing is in Hellen’s hand. She has made a copy of the poem, dated it, and signed her son’s name to it. Well tutored, Jimmy’s handwriting was legible at six; Hellen must have wished to preserve the poem and felt it needed to be tidied up. She wanted to “publish” it by sharing it with family and friends, and printed the words, with the date and author’s name, in a way that makes it look like a poem on the page of a book or magazine. Showing Jimmy’s compositions around, something she would do for the rest of her life, was a way for Hellen to show off, inviting praise for her son’s cleverness and indirectly her own (and for her beauty, in this case). Besides copying the poem, moreover, she may have helped compose it. Did she suggest rhymes, correct grammar? Whose idea was it to write a poem in the first place, and a poem on this theme? Whose wish does it express? The son’s or the mother’s?
In “The Broken Home,” Merrill returned to and rewrote “Looking at Mummy”:
One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,
Blinds beat sun from the bed.
The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos,
Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,
And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old
Engravings where the acid bit.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness—was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.
Composed thirty-two years later, these lines turn the early poem into a Gothic daydream, playing variations on Freud’s Oedipal plot. Michael, Charlie’s red setter, is again the chaperone, a guide to instinct showing the boy where he wants to go, or where from a normative developmental perspective he is supposed to go (that is, precisely where he’s not supposed to go, toward a woman “clad in taboos”). The parental bed, where again the woman is alone, becomes a sadomasochistic scene. While “Blinds beat sun from the bed” (a weird sentence whose implications it would take a long time to tease out), the room “throbs” like a hangover or a battered woman’s body. Mummy, objectified, eerily inanimate in the childhood poem, is deathly here: a mummy? When she opens her eyes (“strange and cold”) and reaches for the boy, there is no longer any lingering wondering at the inexpressible beauty of her “undone, outspread” hair. He realizes he’d better get out of there.
This woman so admired and feared by her son was born in Jacksonville on August 14, 1898, to Annie Beloved Hill and James Willmot Ingram. Mis’ Annie, as Mrs. Ingram was known in the family, had grown up in Fernandina, a beach town north of Jacksonville. Her father having died when she was small, Mis’ Annie was especially close to her mother, establishing a pattern that would be repeated in Hellen’s relationship to her and in Jimmy’s relationship to Hellen. James Ingram, a Tennessean by birth, had come to Jacksonville as a young boy, completed high school there, and then worked in a bank and as a bookkeeper. After the Jacksonville fire, he and his brother formed the Electric Supply & Construction Company and made a profit when the city converted to electrical lighting. Later, he was the primary owner of the memorably named R. I. P. Sprinkler Company. A Mason and an Elk, twice called to serve as “Exalted Ruler of the Lodge,” Mr. Ingram was, by the time of Hellen’s birth, a pillar of local society. The Ingrams were a churchgoing family who lived on “Holy Hill” behind the Episcopal church that would later become St. John’s Cathedral.
Hellen was named after her father’s mother, Hellen Kasson Willmot, whom Hellen spoke of proudly as a woman of distinction. Though unable because of her sex to pursue a career as a doctor, Hellen’s namesake “interested herself in medical subjects” and was perhaps “the first woman ever to address the American Association for the Advancement of Science” when in 1877 she delivered a scientific paper on “Atmospheric Concussion as a Means of Disinfection”—her proposal being to kill mosquitoes by exploding gunpowder. Genealogical papers that Hellen copied and preserved note that her grandmother, though born in New York State, was “an earnest and ardent advocate of the Confederate cause,” who was arrested for smuggling quinine across the border to aid wounded Southern soldiers. She became a teacher with “a national reputation” and “literary ability,” which she demonstrated as an editorial writer and society editor of Jacksonville’s Florida Times-Union. Hellen would emulate her grandmother, whom she never met, in specific ways.
Her parents doted on their only child. Mis’ Annie called her daughter “Baby” throughout her life. Recognized as a beauty very early on, Hellen was the six-year-old maid of honor at a Tom Thumb wedding held by the Jacksonville Women’s Club in 1905: a stunning junior ingénue, dark eyes, a model’s open mouth, curled hair tied up on top, a bouquet of roses, and a two-foot train of white ruffled silk. A popular teenager known among her friends as “Pink,” Hellen was the maid of honor at the Twenty-fourth General Reunion of the United Confederate Veterans in Jacksonville in 1914. She attended Jacksonville schools, including Charlie’s high school, Duval, where she was chosen to be Mascot of the class of 1916, and, fifty years later, Mistress of Ceremonies at the class reunion.
Directly after graduation, on the strength of her English teacher’s recommendation, she was invited to become “society editor” of the Metropolis, Jacksonville’s evening newspaper. When she expressed doubts about her ability—she didn’t even know how to type—the editor told her to rent a typewriter and teach herself: “besides, you know everyone in town.” Hellen was a quick study, and in her role as society journalist, she became a local fixture. By 1922, she was confident enough to strike out on her own in the Silhouette, a weekly social chronicle published through the winter, twenty-six times a year, and so named because, to cut costs, the paper substituted silhouettes for photos of the notables whose balls and marriages it reported. Hellen was a one-woman newsroom and journalistic entrepreneur: “I sold ads, wrote the copy, corrected proof, pasted up the ‘dummy,’ rolled the magazines for mailing, and carted them to the P.O. to send them on their way to subscribers, taking leftovers to local news stands for sale.” In 1924, she brought the Silhouette to Miami, the newest tourist mecca. Growing in size from eight to thirty-two pages, the paper was distributed in the hotels lining Miami Beach, and spunky Hellen was hailed as “the youngest Owner-Editor-Publisher in the U.S.A.” Shrewdly, she arranged to stay for free at the Flamingo in exchange for advertising in the Silhouette. Over the summers, when the hum of social life subsided in South Florida, she put her paper on hold and enrolled in journalism and fiction-writing classes at Columbia University. In New York, she made friends with one of her teachers, Condé Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair and Vogue. At his Manhattan parties, she mixed with a glamorous, altogether new level of society.
Hellen and Charlie had met when she interviewed him for her paper. Having learned from a mutual friend that he was separated from his wife, Hellen took a chance and called him when she came north in 1924. Soon Charlie was courting her. Over that fall and winter, after she headed back to Miami, he discovered business reasons to be in Florida. They had a great deal in common, beginning with the mores and manners of middle-class white Jacksonville. She had ambition and ingenuity to rival his, in potential. She knew business; why, she was a businesswoman herself. And Charlie knew something about journalism, he fancied, on the strength of having delivered newspapers as a boy (he liked to tell stories about the route, which took him into Jacksonville’s red-light district), and later on having worked in a Florida newsroom over the summer during college.
As a society reporter, Hellen had had an opportunity to survey the marriage market from Miami to New York. She would have seen Charlie as a catch, a bona fide big fish: gallant and rich, this one had come a long way and meant to go farther, just as she did. True, he was divorcing and had two small children, but he lived in a hotel, and his family was not in evidence. An adopted “aunt” of Hellen’s advised her to be wary: Charlie “was older than any suitor I had ever had and he was a ‘bad risk,’ having one matrimonial failure chalked up against him.” Charlie knew exactly how to deal with the situation. “When ‘Aunt’ Babe was up north for a fall visit,” Hellen remembered, “the matter finally was clinched when an orange tree, heavy with fruit, was delivered to her hotel room. She later said no Southern woman could resist an orange tree in New York.”
With her Cupid’s-bow lips and cool, fashion-model poses, her hair pulled back tight in the helmeted style of a flapper, Hellen was pretty and proud. It appealed to Charlie that she smoked and drove a car: she was a Florida girl, but a modern woman too. Fourteen years his junior, she was youthful enough to flatter him, as a trophy wife should, but she was also experienced and independent, in no way shy, with a warm, conspiratorial, seductive charm that, as she leaned forward, placing her hand on a companion’s arm and squeezing for emphasis, made her a hit at parties. She and Charlie both liked to be the center of attention. They both liked to drink and dine and entertain. She took an interest in a class of people—musicians, actors—whom he didn’t know much about and perhaps thought he should. With a girlfriend she had already made a tour of must-see sights in Europe. So she promised to increase the level of culture in his life. But their chemistry was not a matter of calculation. Hellen spoke of the “rapture” she felt with Charlie, and he must have felt something similar with her. She had a force of personality, an animal vitality that everyone who knew her remarks on, and that would last uncannily the rest of a very long life. Here, Charlie must have sensed, was a woman who could stand up to him. In fact, in heels, she was slightly taller.
Pressed by her suitor, Hellen agreed to marry him immediately after his divorce was decreed. The wedding ceremony was performed by a Congregational minister in the Ingrams’ Jacksonville home on February 19, 1925. It was a small gathering: Charlie’s sister Edith and two of Hellen’s girlfriends attended; Eddie Lynch served as the best man. For a honeymoon, Charlie took his bride to Paris—“to study merchandising methods abroad,” as the purpose of the trip was announced in The New York Times (Charlie didn’t want his clients and competitors to think he was taking a vacation). The newlyweds returned to set up their home in a brick, four-story nineteenth-century town house at 18 West Eleventh Street, a quiet, tree-lined street not so far away from Wall Street and a short walk to Washington Square. The elegant house was snug in the middle of old New York, Henry James country; but the people in it were shiny and new, like the Veneerings in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.
The Silhouette published its last number in March. Hellen had left the ranks of society journalists to become a society news item herself; henceforth reporters would be keeping tabs on Mrs. C. E. Merrill. Charlie gave her $50,000 to furnish their home (a huge sum for that purpose) as well as a free hand to select styles, fabrics, colors, and furniture, instructing her only “NOT to leave a single room half-decorated.” They hired a butler, a cook, and a maid, all of them black, as Hellen wished it. They joined the Church of the Ascension, an Episcopal congregation with a history of charity, housed in a splendid Gothic Revival building around the corner on Fifth Avenue, where Charlie served on the vestry and passed the offering plate. By the middle of the summer, the Merrills had climbed to a high perch in New York society, and Hellen was pregnant.
Dr. Hildreth announced, “You have a fine baby boy, weighing 5 lbs. 10 oz.” Hellen gasped, then pleaded with the man: “Please, please, this is embarrassing. Can’t you say 6 lbs.?” She was not impressed with her son’s looks, either, he being “so teeny, rather shriveled.” “I exclaimed to my nurse, ‘He’s not very good looking,’ ” to which Jane replied, “Maybe not, Mrs Merrill, but he has personality!” Jimmy came home three weeks later on March 25. It was a long hospital stay by today’s standards, but not so unusual at the time; Hellen and Jimmy stayed as long as they did because of his size and because the Merrills could pay for the custom care. His weight picked up (Hellen recorded it weekly through December), and he began to look as his mother had expected when he was born. Still, she would remain anxious about his weight for years to come. In her eyes, Jimmy would be undersized throughout childhood and different from his peers because of it. Already his birth introduced a question about whether or not he was meeting her expectations and how his appearance reflected on her. These would be important, permanent themes.
In A Different Person, his memoir published in 1993, Merrill describes discovering, in his sixties, the “little book bound in pink quilted moiré” in which his mother noted his week-by-week weight gain and other facts from his earliest days. What struck him was the list of gifts he received at birth. “The ‘five shares of stock’ from my father’s partner, the inevitable silver spoons (nine of them), the six pairs of ‘silver military brushes’ and the upright masculine life these recommended, were lost in an avalanche of dainty apparel and accessories—lace and net pillows; monogrammed carriage robes; embroidered dresses; a ‘pink crêpe de chine coat’; a ‘silk shawl and sacque’; caps of organdy or lace; gold diaper pins, blue pins, pink-and-pearl pins; rattles and bootees and yet more dresses. I counted over a hundred such items”—chosen by the givers to please his mother, “Pink.” Those gloriously frivolous goods say a lot about the social world into which this newborn was gently placed. The environment of 18 West Eleventh Street was silky and soft, clean and cozy, insulated, very expensive, and decidedly feminine. His first nurse, who took over when Old Jane went home, was British and (Hellen noted) “royally-trained”; she and Jimmy occupied the fourth floor of the house. Pampered—it hardly describes the cooing over his crib, surrounded by all that fluffy, monogrammed tribute. Implied too by that list of gifts was a dense web of entitlements and obligations, including the more than one hundred thank-you notes that Hellen used her list to produce that spring.
CEM had little part in these goings-on. No man of his era was likely to involve himself in child rearing, and Charlie was no different—unless he was away from home even more than most. “During the week,” Hellen wrote in 1953, remembering their marriage without explicit resentment, “the urgency to make money was all that mattered. Charlie never let anything interfere with business. He was working on his first important deal, […] when his mother telephoned him to come at once because his sister [Edith] was critically ill. He replied, ‘I can’t come, Mama. If I leave this deal now, we won’t even be able to pay for the doctor.’ ” In 1926, Charlie was occupied with the Safeway acquisition, his biggest deal ever, which took him to the West Coast for long stretches. The new company’s stock went on offer in November.
He was also busy with the purchase of the Orchard, which would become the Merrill family’s showpiece summer and weekend home and at times their primary residence. He bought the property on Hill Street in the Long Island town of Southampton for $350,000 in October 1926, when Jimmy was seven months old. It was characteristic, Hellen noted, that once Charlie had decided to buy the place, “he could not wait until business hours to close the deal. Papers were brought to a Broadway theater, where he signed the contract between acts.” He used an entity called Merchard Inc., merging “Merrill” and “Orchard” in the name, to buy it for cash. He must have written the purchase off his taxes as a business expense; he put the property in his name when the portmanteau company, Merchard Inc., sold it to him for a dollar in 1935.
Situated on the grounds of an old farmhouse and apple orchard, the house had been built for James L. Breese. Breese was a stockbroker, born in 1854 and thus one of the Wall Street old guard, though not of the usual kind. The idea of owning Breese’s house in particular must have excited Charlie, who flirted with the man’s daughter, an actress, after he bought Breese’s home. Besides being very rich, Breese was a prizewinning photographer, a race car driver, and a collector of the finest automobiles. He’d been the host of a bohemian salon known for its bacchanals. “The Carbonites,” as they called themselves, referring to a process for developing photographs, included the painter John Singer Sargent, the chorus girl and artist’s model Evelyn Nesbit, and her lover, Stanford White, the eminent architect and Breese’s best friend. It was the Beaux-Arts firm of McKim, Mead & White that collaborated with Breese on the design of the Orchard. White had charge of the interiors and the ornamental touches in the gardens—until he was shot dead at Madison Square Garden Theater by Nesbit’s millionaire husband. In 1907, the “Trial of the Century” was front-page news as the final touches were being applied to the Orchard’s music room.
The grace and scale of this scandal-scented home were intoxicating. A short drive led to the house from a white picket fence on Hill Street, the main thoroughfare from New York City to Montauk. Broad lawns unrolled on either side of the drive, with huge squat boxwood hedges for sentinels and wistful, champagne-glass-shaped elms shading the gravel circle at the front door, which faced south. “One might not have been surprised to have looked in upon it through some old Virginia hedge,” observed House & Garden in a feature on the Orchard. Modeled on George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon, the house’s two-story columned portico nodded to colonial-era plantation homes. The wood construction, slim columns, and white paint gave the building delicacy despite its enormity. Symmetrical wings fanned out, and wings off of those wings. Inside were more than twenty bedrooms, a dining room, a blue-tiled conservatory, a billiard room, a studio, and a library.
If the exterior was Old South, the interior was Old Europe: chandeliers, seventeenth-century oil paintings, Flemish tapestries, and Magna Carta shields on the leaded casements and bay windows. The music room featured a giant Milanese fireplace, wood-paneled walls, a coffered, twenty-foot-high ceiling, four gilt, spiraling wood pillars in the corners, and an organ whose pipes filled the upper half of one wall. “Stanford White put his heart into that room,” one Southampton socialite remarked of the late, valedictory commission. Breese had added decorations of his own: the heads and hides of bison, deer, antelope, and a lion, all of which he’d shot; Hellen, modernizing, donated them to a local social club in the mid-1930s. Behind the house were a formal garden with herringbone-patterned brick paths, flanking Doric pergolas, statuary, a burbling fountain, and an abundant rose garden. Trellised walkways and tree-lined avenues led to a small village of outbuildings and then acres of open fields beyond. In charge of the plants were a Scotsman, who had toiled for royalty at Balmoral, and the eight gardeners under him. A hedge surrounded the whole of the sixteen-acre estate.
On the first page of James Merrill’s childhood photo album are pictures not of himself, nor of his parents, but of the Orchard. One is of the big house as seen from the drive. The other is of the entire property taken from an airplane. It is an exalted, breathtaking view: the house and gardens are extravagant in extent, exactly ordered, and crowded by no neighbor. This was the formative setting of Merrill’s childhood. The Orchard taught the boy the power of interior space and the pleasures of ornament. It showed him that a house could be a self-enclosed world, expressive of its owner. It left him both attracted to and resistant to everything that was grand. It tended to shrink even the outsized figures of his parents, whose marriage would come to stand for in his imagination. It was the home he thought of when he spoke of “The Broken Home.”
It was also the setting where, over the summers that they spent together, Jimmy came to know Doris and Charles, the children from his father’s first family. For before there was Hellen, there was Eliza Church, and her daughter and son, his half-siblings, were an important part of his life from the first. Charlie had married Eliza in 1912. Doris was born in 1914, and Charles in 1920—so they were twelve and six years older than Jimmy. The Church family had made its money in Pennsylvania railroads and the steel industry. Eliza’s father, Samuel Harden Church, the author of a biography of Oliver Cromwell, plays, and a novel, was the long-serving president of the Carnegie Institute Board of Trustees. He was also a powerful Republican and an advocate of the pseudoscience of eugenics, which called for enforced sterilization of blacks and other minorities. Charlie, although not a eugenicist, was a Republican with convictions, and, marrying Eliza, he must have felt he had arrived among people with the right ideas and the right genes.
But they were ill-matched. Eliza might have been a fitting choice had he aspired to be “a Montclair banker,” as his son Charles puts it, referring to the rented home in suburban New Jersey where he and Doris lived when they were small. Eliza, whose mother had left the family when she was nine, was a modest woman, a homebody who was “sensitive to criticism” and unhappy in the Manhattan parties and Long Island tennis weekends to which Charlie was soon bringing her. She was also a serious, convent-educated, Irish Roman Catholic. When her daughter was ten, Eliza arranged for Doris to receive her first communion as a Catholic—while Charlie was away on business (as he often was), since he wouldn’t have approved. Once he found out, he was outraged, not only by the communion, but by the fact that Eliza had gone around his back to accomplish it. The argument escalated. When he didn’t relent, Eliza declared, “I want a divorce. I can’t stand these horrible rages of yours.” Charlie must have been waiting for the opportunity, because he took advantage of it and vowed to divorce her. When Doris saw her mother that day, she looked “absolutely awful, […] as if her life had ended. Which in truth it had.”
Jimmy met Eliza Church only once. She moved every few years from one apartment to another in New York City, sustained by Charlie’s alimony checks and by contributions from her children once they came of age (she had agreed to use Charlie’s lawyer during the divorce and the settlement was unfavorable to her). The breakup had been well prepared for by the mismatch in temperaments and by Charlie’s infidelities on the road. But for Doris and Charles, who continued to live with their mother, it came as a baffling, violent blow. The results for Doris, the fought-over, were ambiguous, since she’d kept her father’s regard—he made that clear—just when her mother hadn’t: Eliza’s defeat was, in this limited sense, Doris’s triumph. But it was also a warning about what might happen to her if she opposed her father’s will. She settled into the position of the favored first child of a powerful father with whom it was best not to misbehave. For Charles, the matter was different. He was the second child from a rejected bed, who had less to lose of his father’s regard because he’d started with less. Even in his childhood and adolescence, the fact that he was named after CEM underlined their differences, rather than the opposite. He never adopted the “Jr.”
Charles remembered meeting his stepmother and baby brother for the first time when he visited West Eleventh Street more than a year after his father married Hellen, and he found her nursing her son in bed. “I had never witnessed that procedure before,” he explained, “and was even more disconcerted to be informed that the baby was my brother.” “He’ll look up to you,” Hellen told him. “You can teach him all sorts of things, like how to play baseball.” But Charles was no more of a baseball player than Jimmy would turn out to be. He was shy and brooding; he tended to look down or away rather than meet other people’s eyes. In the nursing princeling on West Eleventh Street, his father’s new son, there was plenty for him to resent, and it took a long time, decades even, for the two brothers to become good friends. Hellen, by contrast, was easy for Charles to warm to. “Pretty,” “interesting,” and barely old enough to be his mother, she treated “Carlos,” as she called him, as if he were older than he was—“like an adult.” In fact, “Hellen was the first rational adult I’d met,” he recalled. When he threw his father’s newspaper into the fire (it was something he would keep doing, symbolically, for much of his life), Hellen calmly reasoned with him, as his father never would have. He went home and asked his mother, “Why don’t you like Hellen?”
Doris might have seen Hellen as a rival. Hellen had already taken her mother’s place, and she meant to be loyal to her mother: “I will always be nice to Hellen,” she wrote in her diary, “yet she must not win me over.” Hellen won her over soon enough, however. Doris was six years closer in age to their stepmother than Charles was, and Hellen approached her as a mentor, inviting a girlish, big-sister intimacy. Hellen wrote to Doris, not to Doris and Charles, to confide that she was pregnant and to assure Doris that she wouldn’t be replaced by the new baby: Doris was her father’s “beloved first-born daughter and he cherishes you more than you can imagine,” Hellen wrote. On her twelfth birthday, three days after Jimmy’s birth, Doris visited the baby in the hospital. Skinny and knock-kneed, but prepared to learn the social game, “Dorrie,” as Hellen called her, could model herself on her stepmother in her approach to this infant brother.3 She was big enough to hold him on her lap with a smile (“he was so sweet and his fingers were so small”) while waving for the camera; she went home carrying a bouquet of flowers “from him.” In photos of Doris and little Jimmy, pride and gentle amusement show on her face, whereas when Charles is required to pose with his brother, it’s wariness and discomfort that we see.
Doris and Charles visited the baby and his parents rarely during the school year. The two of them appeared on West Eleventh Street one Sunday per month for lunch and then a matinée at the music hall or the movies. It was at the Orchard over the summer months that these three children and their father and Hellen lived together as one family. The Southampton Press indicated Mr. C. E. Merrill among those in residence in its annual summer “Cottage List” for the first time in 1927 (the great homes owned by the town’s wealthy summer visitors, even the Orchard, were called “cottages”). By New Year’s 1928, Doris’s diary listed both her mother’s address and the Orchard as home.
There was more than mere class snobbery in these invented insignia and the family identity they expressed. In 1951, Jimmy held a cocktail party for his mother at which he introduced her to some of his friends, including an African American couple; afterward he found her in a funk, bent over her needlepoint. Hellen was stitching the Merrill and Ingram crests, which she planned to give her son to remind him “of the kind of people you come from.” “Do you know,” she went on, explaining her angry, suddenly urgent project, “that this is the first time in my entire life that I’ve had to meet coloured people socially?” She was sure her son would never subject his father to the same indignity. Jimmy challenged her with the memory of her own nurse: “Didn’t you ever sit down in the kitchen with Old Jane?” Hellen replied, “We’re not talking about servants, son. I loved Old Jane more than anyone in the whole world. […] But never, never would you have seen me shake her hand.”
The white clothes Charlie favored and that Hellen dressed her son in, fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s, conveyed a message about class: they were summer garb whose wearers could afford to keep them clean and had the leisure for a contrasting tan, even in winter. Like the big white house in Southampton, however, the style also conveyed a message about racial identity, reinforced by the discreet presence of those black servants, whose job it was to keep the Merrills well fed, on time, and clean and white. The help included Jackson, a reserved head butler, aware of his importance; kind, imposingly handsome James, the chauffeur, who handled the fireworks on the Fourth of July; Irving, another driver, his legs wounded by shrapnel taken during World War I, when he served in a black regiment; William, a flamboyant cook who served fried chicken, black-eyed peas, okra, corn, and other southern dishes; and the head maid, Emma Davis. The family referred to their servants only by first names. Their relation to these people beside whom they lived was like Hellen’s to Old Jane: intimate but remote, mutually dependent but securely hierarchical, with the family in command and their employees careful to remain in the shadows. Charlie’s valet, Louis LeRoy, who had served Eddie Lynch in the same role, became a Leporello to the aging Don in the 1940s. Crossing the Atlantic by ship, Charlie introduced the brown-skinned man as a banker from Cairo so that they could travel together first class, sharing the same cabin while enjoying bourbon and smokes in the saloon. Yet the tactful servant resumed his post in private, and he made a point of never using his master’s toilet.
Charlie’s and Hellen’s attitudes toward race were formed in the Jim Crow South of their youth, where whites and blacks lived in closer proximity, with more interaction and familiarity, but also with more potential for violence, than was common in the North. Racial segregation became the law across the South when the “separate but equal” doctrine was elaborated in 1890. A phase of savage white reaction took hold in reply to the economic and political gains won by blacks during Reconstruction. The lynching of African Americans escalated, especially in the Cotton Belt states from Georgia to Texas, but also in Florida. As a boy in Green Cove Springs, Charlie attended the “the first legal hanging [of a black man] in Clay County.” His family’s relationship with “Negroes” or “coloreds” was complex. The men who robbed Dr. Merrill and left him for dead in 1902 were dark-skinned; so was the Good Samaritan who discovered him and saved his life. While he recovered, one of the rooming houses that Octavia managed was for whites, the other for blacks. Dr. Merrill always treated patients without regard to race or whether they could pay (he had treated the unfortunate man whom little Charlie saw hanged). The family took pride in the charitable work of his parents, northern-born Abigail and Riley Merrill, who taught both black and poor white children to read and write.
Charlie’s family also took pride, however, in his mother’s Mississippi heritage. Octavia Wilson had grown up on Round Hill Plantation, a prosperous cotton farm whose total property, comprised of 350 acres and five black slaves, was valued at $17,000 in 1860, the end of the boom years that led up to the Civil War. In the decade after the war, with abolition and the collapse of local land values, those assets were reduced by a full three-quarters when Octavia’s father died at the age of forty-two, leaving her mother, Miss Emily, in charge of the farm and her eleven children. The Wilsons managed, although their reduced circumstances fed anger at the outcome of the war and a feeling of deprivation both actual and symbolic. It also promoted a nostalgic, “moonlight and roses” vision of the Old South, which Charlie, born twenty years after the end of the war, absorbed not only from his mother but from the rest of her family during the summer visits he made to Mississippi as a child. Slavery was the foundation of the lost society he learned to dream about, and there were signs of the South’s “peculiar institution” all around. He met the freedmen who worked the farm under the mocking names given to them as slaves, probably by Octavia’s father, the Latinist: Caesar, Scipio, Cicero, Hannibal. A hunchback named Sherman, in allusion to the Union’s hated general, carried Charlie around on his hump. Green Cove Springs and Jacksonville were influenced in the 1890s by commerce with the North. In Mississippi, Charlie was in the Deep South, and it made a deep impression on him.
Buying the Orchard entailed for him a return in fantasy to Round Hill Plantation. But he wasn’t done with the idea. In October 1927, just a year after purchasing Breese’s house, Charlie paid $500,000 for the real thing, a plantation called Wildwood in the Mississippi Delta. “Wildwood,” The New York Times reported, no doubt alerted to the story by Charlie himself, “has for three-quarters of a century been a famous landing place for steamboats. It is one of the few ante-bellum plantations left intact. The big Colonial house facing the river is a fine specimen of Southern architecture. There are 4,690 acres in the tract. The new owner, it is said, intends to restore Wildwood to its former grandeur.” The plantation was close to Round Hill, Charlie had visited it as a boy, and, to complete the family connection, he installed a Wilson relative to manage his cotton fields. The address of the post office—it was actually called Money, Mississippi—must have been irresistible. He planned to make it a winter retreat from New York, but the first visit that he and Hellen made was “a fiasco,” she recalled. The place so little resembled what Charlie remembered, and he and Hellen had so little experience of bragging roosters and 6 a.m. calls to work, that they were glad to leave it, and “we never went back.” Even so, Charlie held on to the place for a decade. He sent his sons there, on their own, for an unhappy vacation in 1936. He gave up and sold it for a sharp loss in 1938.
Charlie and Hellen preferred Palm Beach, where a smart café society with hotels and clubs had transformed the quasi-sanatorium air of the place during Charlie’s youth. In 1933, he replaced his modest winter home on Brazilian Avenue with a second remarkable estate. Called “Merrill’s Landing,” the property stretched from Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean. The house and grounds designed by Howard Major featured a second-floor library with a sunset view over the lake (this, like the library at the Orchard, was a room for cocktails, not reading), curved verandas and louvered doors for cool air, a garden under tall palm trees, a strong-smelling but reputedly healthy sulfur spring that flowed into a long swimming pool, cabanas on the beach for family and guests, and a boathouse with a yacht for deep-sea fishing. In contrast to the Orchard, Merrill’s Landing was modern and chic in an Art Deco style. This and the big house in Southampton would have to do for Charlie’s dreams of owning a plantation.
His early schooling was unsettled, therefore. He went to first grade at St. Bernard’s School in New York, then to the Palm Beach Day School, then to the Southampton Day School, and back to Palm Beach, private schools all of them. He spent two winters, 1936 and 1937, at the Arizona Desert School in Tucson, while returning to St. Bernard’s for the rest of those school years, when he was ten and eleven. He stayed on an extra year at St. Bernard’s, not because his grades were poor—they were good—but, his mother felt, “because he was small for his age + would be outsized physically” when he moved to boarding school in grade nine.
As that comment suggests, Hellen continued to worry about her son’s size and physical strength. When she took him to Tucson in 1931, it was “on the advice of doctors” because “he suffered from ear problems + bad head colds.” Once a doctor camped in the room next to Jimmy’s for three days because of “the threat of a mastoid infection,” which, it was feared, might damage his brain. Jimmy’s health required close monitoring by his mother and the attention of the best doctors, although there was no obvious basis for ongoing concern. This too was a pattern set for the future: once Jimmy was an adult, both his letters and his mother’s comment on his health and hers and exchange tips on treatments for one or another health concern. Even on his visits to her as a middle-aged man, he was regularly treated by doctors his mother recommended.
Contributing to the sense of Jimmy’s delicacy was poor eyesight. When drawing, his favorite early activity, he had no difficulty. But it was hard for him to focus on an object in a shopwindow, and, Hellen noted, “Charlie, never known for an excess of patience, would simply tell Jimmy that he wasn’t paying attention and not trying to see what Daddy was calling attention to.” It was his first-grade teacher at St. Bernard’s who grasped the problem and moved the boy to the front of the schoolroom so he could see the blackboard. Thick dark-framed glasses followed; these were “more of a distress to me,” Hellen recalled, “than to Jimmy, who felt a tad more intellectual wearing the ugly things.” The glasses meant that he was, as his mother put it, “seriously handicapped athletically.” He struggled to keep them on when he ran, or he took them off and became muddled. One reason he loved to swim (the only sport he ever tolerated) was that he didn’t have to keep his eye on a ball.
Jimmy hardly knew his grandfathers: Charles Morton Merrill died in 1929 at seventy-two and James Ingram in 1931 at sixty-two. Hellen’s father’s death was sudden and a shock, and Jimmy absorbed his mother’s distress as translated into her worry about him: it was during the “scary time” of her father’s death when she feared a mastoid infection might carry her son away too. Death—or, rather, the afterlife—would be a major preoccupation of his life and poetry, and there are signs of his brooding on mortality already as a young child. “Transfigured Bird,” a poem from college, recalls an incident from childhood when he found a robin’s egg with a dead bird’s claw protruding from it. The boy took it as a sign that “there should be nothing cleanly for years to come, / Nor godly, nor reasons found, nor prayers spoken”: it was a brute worldly fact giving the lie to the sweet consolations offered up in Sunday school. (The incident also figures in one of Jimmy’s adolescent stories and in a play he wrote in college; he spoke about it with his friend Frederick Buechner, who was sufficiently struck by the anecdote to put a version of it in his second novel.) A story that Hellen told about her son, though cute and comic, shows the little boy working through the same idea. Jimmy came to his mother one day to ask her what the word “ephemeral” meant. “Living a very short time—there are even insects that are born and die in one day,” she told him. Jimmy thought about that definition overnight and was relieved when he woke up and found himself still alive. He rushed into her bedroom the next morning, exclaiming, “Oh Mama! I’m so glad I’m not ephemeral!”
Octavia, Charlie’s mother, who was in her sixties when Jimmy was born, saw him only on his winter visits to Palm Beach. Mis’ Annie, however, from his birth forward, was a familiar presence in her grandson’s life. The Merrills visited her in Jacksonville on their way to and from Palm Beach, where she was sometimes a guest, as she was at the Orchard. After her husband’s death, she moved to New York City, where she bought an apartment at 164 East Seventy-second Street. This modest flat in a dowdy brick building on a busy street became a basic reference point for Jimmy and, in the 1980s, his primary address. (He never stopped marveling at how little his grandmother had paid for it: just $3,000.) Mis’ Annie was devoted to him, as his mother was, but without Hellen’s worrying and insistent, overbearing identification. Small, with a smiling, dried-apple face, long fingernails painted red, and a blue-tinged pompadour, Mis’ Annie was funny, feisty, and opinionated, and not very intellectual or cultured, although she was glad to dress up for a fine dinner or an evening at the opera. As Jimmy grew into a teenager, his grandmother would be his dependable date at the Metropolitan Opera.
One of Jimmy’s first letters is a thank-you note to Mis’ Annie (addressed as “Dan Dan,” his name for her when he was small), written just after his seventh birthday. He thanks his grandmother for her presents, a “lovly book” and a jigsaw puzzle, and reports that he’s been taken to see “Alice” (a Broadway adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, directed by Eva Le Gallienne) and an Italian marionette performance of “Japanease operaetta” (probably a version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado). Already his interests lie in art and intellectual things, rather than in sports or another clearly masculine pursuit. Already he is attending theater, and the musical theater in particular; already he has a taste for the miniature, the lighthearted, and the foreign.
The letter contains a sketch of the marionettes. Jimmy drew a box around them as if to say: a work of art requires a frame, a formal border. Mount Fuji is in the background; in the foreground are figures in kimonos, a costume to which he would be attracted for the rest of his life (and dressed in after death, in contrast to his father in his military uniform). Jimmy concentrates on the puppets’ costumes and the strings that control them, which fill the picture. Another child might have been annoyed by the visible artifice, or failed to notice it, whereas this one focuses on it. As an adult, Merrill would take as his aesthetic ideal what he called “transparently sustained illusion,” suggesting that technique and the acknowledgment of it were necessary to both the magic and the truth in art. Also noteworthy: one of the figures manipulated by strings from unseen hands above, like gods, is a small, dark-haired boy.
Any child might feel like a puppet in the grasp of his or her parents, but how much more so this boy who was subject to the commanding, frequently unseen parents he had. Puppets always fascinated Merrill; they were a ready metaphor for the human condition, since all of us are motivated, he came to feel, by forces beyond our power to recognize or understand. He played with marionettes as a child, and he created his own puppet theater at the Orchard. An elegantly printed program announced the public performance in August 1937 of Dickens’s children’s story The Magic Fish-bone by “The Jimmy Merrill Marionettes,” given on behalf of the Southampton Fresh Air Home. The Magic Fish-bone was an ambitious production: six scenes, eight characters. A crowd of rapt children and their minders pressed close to the small proscenium, intent on the action. The eleven-year-old Jimmy took charge of “Script direction” and manipulated and gave voice to the puppets King Watkins I, the Queen, and Jerry the Announcer. Other people helped, including “Madame ‘Zelly,’ the famous couturier,” who was credited with the costumes.
Zelly was Lilla Howard, or “Mademoiselle,” as Jimmy was at first not quite able to address his governess. Over the summer, on weekends and after school, or while living with the family in Southampton and Palm Beach, Mrs. Howard was the boy’s playmate and first confidante. Because of the many interruptions in his early schooling, she was his most important early teacher. She was hired in 1933 and dismissed in 1938, but they stayed in touch until she died in 1977. “I worshipped this kind, sad woman,” Merrill wrote in 1982: “her sensible clothes, her carrot hair and watery eyes, the sunburnt triangle at her throat, the lavender wen on her wrist.” Zelly gave him his first book of foreign postage stamps, and fussed over his ever-expanding collection with its scent of faraway places. In a curling, womanly cursive, she copied prayers and poems for him to read and memorize. She stitched costumes for his marionettes, told him stories, and helped him to make up his own.
He puzzled over her origins; she was the first of several older women whose obscure European backgrounds stimulated his fantasies and speculation. Despite the “Mademoiselle,” she wasn’t a spinster but a widow whose teenage daughter, Stella Maris Howard, was often in evidence (Stella managed one of the puppets in The Magic Fish-bone). “Neither was she French,” Merrill recalled, “or even, as she led us to believe, Belgian, but part English and part, to her undying shame, Prussian.” She taught Jimmy bits and pieces of both French and German. She helped him to write to “Lieber heiliger Nikolaus” with his Christmas wish list (he wanted a set of watercolors) and to Mis’ Annie to wish her “une joyeuse fête de Thanksgiving.” She taught him to say the Lord’s Prayer in French and to sing the words to Carmen’s “Habanera.” She tucked him into bed bilingually: “Schlaf wohl, chéri.”
This early introduction to French and German had an effect on the child. Learning to move between one language and another made language itself feel foreign, uncertain and tricky, but also intriguing, mysterious, and available for play. There were consequences even for his experience of English:
By the time I was eight I had learned from her enough French and German to understand that English was merely one of many ways to express things. A single everyday object could be called assiette or Teller as well as plate—or were plates themselves subtly different in France and Germany? Mademoiselle’s French and Latin prayers seemed to invoke absolutes beyond the ken of our Sunday school pageants. At the same time, I was discovering how the everyday sounds of English could mislead you by having more than one meaning. One afternoon at home I opened a random book and read: “Where is your husband Alice?” “In the library, sampling the port.” If samples were little squares of wallpaper or chintz, and ports were where ships dropped anchor, this hardly clarified the behavior of Alice’s husband. Long after Mademoiselle’s exegesis, the phrase haunted me. Words weren’t what they seemed. The mother tongue could inspire both fascination and distrust.
Puns, anagrams, and wordplay of all kinds are a key to the imaginative play of his poetry, and Zelly put it in his hand.
Jimmy’s brother Charles recalls her as “a mix of intellectual seriousness and kindness, which Jimmy wasn’t getting from Hellen,” who was more exacting, less well read, not at all international, and not, like Zelly, always at the boy’s disposal. Even when she wasn’t attending to him, however, Hellen at her desk was an image of dutiful application that influenced her son’s conscientious habits as a writer. (That was one of Doris’s lasting memories of her stepmother: Hellen sitting down every day to compose her thank-yous, send out invitations, answer letters, and pay bills.) And she contributed to her son’s creativity in other ways. For example, like Charlie, in whom the oral culture of the South was deep, she knew how to tell a story to effect, and she could dramatize a situation in such a way as to recruit a listener to her side. Hellen was also a rhymer who wrote doggerel to please family and friends throughout her life, and she played rhyming games with her son when he was small.
Jimmy early on acquired, and as a mature poet he never gave up, the notion that a poem was writing in rhyme and meter meant to impress and entertain. In adult life, with the ease and sophistication of a Cole Porter, he wrote his own version of his mother’s occasional poetry: clever rhymes for birthday cards, invitations, and inscriptions accompanying gifts. In the serious poems he collected in his books, light verse remained a resource and touchstone used to moderate his seriousness and to remind his readers of the origins of art (or at any rate his art) in children’s play.
Of course, in Merrill’s poetry, rhyme and meter are essential techniques that amount to much more than light verse. The mature poet’s unparalleled virtuosity was the result of long training and labor. But there’s an uncanny, instinctive quality to his facility that was evident from the beginning, as “Looking at Mummy” suggests. A grasp of rhythm and an ability to listen for complicated structures of sound show in the child’s appreciation of classical music. That was encouraged by Zelly and by Jimmy’s piano lessons, which taught him the discipline of practice and performance.
Another gift, his memory for poetic language, was developed by St. Bernard’s. The Upper East Side school for boys offered a superior education, dignified and Episcopalian, with British-born masters steeped in English literature, and the memorization of poetry was a hallmark of the curriculum, starting early. For getting by heart one hundred lines of Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Jimmy and the rest of his first-grade glass each received an apple. He later worked up for school recitation long swaths of Longfellow’s Evangeline, choice bits from As You Like It, and “The Chambered Nautilus.” The pinnacle of a student’s career at St. Bernard’s came in the eighth grade, when it was customary for the graduating class to mount a Shakespeare play, suitably abridged.
These assignments in reading, memorization, and recitation taught students to recognize and articulate the unfolding of sense across lines of verse, modulated by meter and underlined by rhyme. The theatrical potential in reciting someone else’s words excited the young Jimmy, who responded so sympathetically to puppets. In “The School Play,” a poem that he wrote decades later about his eighth grade’s Henry IV, Part 2 (Jimmy was “the First Herald, ‘a small part,’ ” but “I was small too”), Merrill describes the transformation he and his classmates underwent. These “skinny nobodies” emerged onstage “[v]ivid with character” because they’d done as they were told and learned to speak the deathless verse, putting themselves “into the masters’ hands”—“the masters” being both their teachers and the poets they’d memorized.
Jimmy also wrote poems of his own. Two sentences, arranged as a rhyming quatrain, were printed in Junior Home Magazine when he was eight. This first published poem went: “Pushing slowly every day / Autumn finally makes its way. / Now when the days are cool, / We children go to school.” Like “Looking at Mummy,” this is a strikingly precocious poem from the point of view of technique and diction. That last phrase in particular, ending the poem in bland affirmation of what is customary, in which young Jimmy sees himself from a distance as part of a general category (“We children …”), is hardly an idiom typical of a child. Along with the poem, he submitted a sketch of a schoolhouse. The windows were perfectly straight: he’d used a ruler to make sure. When it appeared in print and the boy saw that the magazine’s editors had “corrected” his effort by inserting crooked lines in place of his neat ones, “as befitted a child’s drawing,” he was dismayed. The lesson, Merrill remembered, “sank in: one must act one’s age and give people what they expect.”
The poetry he was reading, in 1935, included “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” Lord Tennyson’s “Lady Clare,” and Scottish ballads such as “Sir Patrick Spence” and “Lord Randal.” Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel Little Lord Fauntleroy is the first book noted in a catalog he made in the same year of “Books that Belong in My Library.” These are mainly the sort of thing we’d expect to find on a boy’s bookshelf: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Wind in the Willows, Kidnapped, The Deerslayer, The Travels of Marco Polo, Tom Sawyer and (one of his father’s favorites) Huckleberry Finn, Robinson Crusoe (a gift from his mother that he gave to Allan Gurganus at the end of his life), and a couple of dozen more titles in handsome illustrated editions. They are notable only for being almost exclusively adventure books. In his school notebooks, we find synopses of the Siegfried legend, The Song of Roland, The Cid, Don Quixote, Rip Van Winkle, Lohengrin, “An Indian Legend,” and John Ruskin’s popular Victorian fable “The King of the Golden River.” All his life he quoted fairy tales.
The curious can scan these for clues to his literary or psychological development. The main point is generic: the boy was immersed in romance and legend—the dream side of the self—to which his father, schooled in “moonlight and roses” and J. M. Barrie by his mother and grandmother, also was drawn. Charlie was perhaps ready to see his son indulge the imagination on his behalf, at least up to a point. His sponsoring influence shows itself in a typewriter given at Christmas 1934, when Jimmy was eight. But it’s Hellen to whom the boy dedicates his compositions. His school notebook in English for the year 1935–36 bears a mock-formal title page: “Adventures in Writing / Illustrated by the author / Volume I / Dedicated to my best friend, my Mother / by Jimmy Merrill.” Volume II is dedicated again to “the best Mother / in the world / by”—more formal this time—“James Merrill.” Already, if only in a spirit of play (but what other spirit does he know?), Jimmy is thinking of himself as a writer. He sees the act of writing as an adventure, a romance, and the romance is with his mother.
So it’s striking that, as an adult, he remembered his childhood as painfully lonely. That feeling may have developed after his parents’ divorce. Or it may have been present already—the loneliness of a young mind engaged with private thoughts of mortality, puppets, and romantic legends. With older half-siblings who lived elsewhere most of the year, Jimmy was essentially an only child. It’s also true that his family’s traveling discouraged him from forming close attachments. The playdates and parties that punctuated his weekends and school vacations, which required planning in advance and deportment when they came, were compulsory ceremonies. His precocity made him expert in interests hard to share with other children. Moreover, most of the people who cared for him were paid to do so, which he must have noticed even when he was small.
His parents were leading hectic social lives. In Manhattan, there were frequent formal dinners as well as grander occasions—for instance, the dinner dance and bridge tournament hosted by the Merrills at the Plaza Hotel in honor of Mrs. Edmund Lynch, which was a party for one hundred. It was the Gatsby era, and a very heady time. Looking back on it, Hellen would recall moments of sheer exhilaration: the pleasure of standing naked in the rain on a hotel room balcony that overlooked Central Park, or the excitement of racing to a nightclub in a chauffeured car through late, deserted city streets. Part of the thrill was the experience of privilege itself, especially after the stock market crash brought so many even of the wealthy low. “I know I shouldn’t be saying this,” she remarked, “but if you had the money, New York could be lots of fun.”
The Orchard was the center of the Merrill family’s entertaining. Charlie preferred hosting to being hosted, and Hellen made all the arrangements. A note in the Southampton press gave her high marks:
One of the most gracious women in all of Southampton is Mrs. Charles Merrill […]. Pretty and chic, and with a delightful Southern manner and Southern drawl, Mrs. Merrill is a prime favorite in the younger married set, and is to be noted wherever the more notable younger matrons are foregathered. “The Orchards” is beautifully adapted to the giving of entertainments, and Mrs. Merrill makes a charming hostess.
That “delightful Southern manner and Southern drawl” were exotic in Southampton, a farming and whaling town made over in the later nineteenth century as a blue-blooded resort on the crashing Atlantic, where the Orchard, though the most central and spectacular, was only one of many grand homes. The cool summer and mild autumn of the Long Island climate and the fact that Southampton was less than three hours by train from Manhattan made it the preferred retreat for the Wall Street–connected families of bankers and lawyers who came on Friday night and left by Monday (this in contrast to the older money and greater gentility of a more distant resort like Newport, Rhode Island, where husbands might settle in for a period).
Southampton was founded in 1640 as the first English colony in what became New York State, a fact that fed into the place’s snobbery as a rich WASP enclave. Jews, with whom Southampton’s wealthy did business from Monday through Friday in Manhattan, were few in town, since they were excluded from membership in the local social institutions: the Beach Club, the Meadow Club for tennis, the Riding and Hunt Club, and two prestigious golf clubs, the National and Shinnecock Hills (where Charlie became a “founder member” in 1928). With her middle-class Jacksonville origins, Hellen might have been looked down upon by her northern neighbors, but she used her southernness to advantage. She hosted gatherings around the barbecue pit and became known for her southern storytelling. Some of these tales were sentimental, like her account of the gospel harmonies that surged up spontaneously from the grateful black former pupils at the funeral for Charlie’s grandmother Abigail. She also had a repertoire of “black jokes,” some of them quite naughty. To deliver them, she slipped into dialect as if donning blackface, no doubt titillating “the more notable younger matrons.”
On summer weekends, Hellen brought in Broadway: the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, for instance, or the actresses Helen Hayes and Gloria Swanson (the latter became Hellen’s good friend). In the music room one morning, she listened while Gertrude Lawrence and George Gershwin (for Jews were welcome as guests and entertainers) worked up the hit song “Oh, Kay!” Charlie’s invitations went to business partners, prospective clients, Amherst men, and old friends from the South. Harry Evans was the editor of Family Circle, a magazine that Charlie created to be distributed free of charge in Safeway stores; he was a regular at the house, a lively bachelor Hellen had known as a sportswriter in her Jacksonsville journalism days, perhaps gay, who was good for pairing up with the unaccompanied female. One weekend, little Jimmy shook hands with Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who captured John Dillinger, the scariest of Depression-era bank robbers (Jimmy wrote a theme about it for school). Charlie had other prominent associates, such as John M. Woolsey, the judge who ruled in 1933 that James Joyce’s Ulysses was not obscene and thus could be imported and sold in the U.S. In his landmark decision, Woolsey referred to two unnamed men of the world to whom he’d shown the book to test its effect on them. One of them was Charlie, who evidently gave Ulysses the thumbs-up.
For Jimmy, Charles, and Doris, the summer meant a round of lessons. There were lessons for everything: golf, tennis, languages, music, horseback riding (which Doris particularly loved), and boxing for the boys—when Charles would take the opportunity to punch his kid brother freely. In the afternoon, Jimmy and Charles splashed in the surf, the single activity in which there was no question about whether they were doing the thing correctly. More often, though, when he was not in a lesson or playing with Zelly, Jimmy was left to his own devices. He read and wrote, or wandered the grounds of the Orchard, where he was separated from the nearest neighbors by a busy street and acres of lawn, with the blank-eyed stone gods in the garden for company.
“Dad,” Charles remembered, “arrived at the Orchard on Friday with the weekend guests, and immediately life became more interesting and a bit more dangerous.” Typically Jimmy saw his father briefly when he appeared washed and scrubbed to be introduced in the library where Charlie and Hellen and their guests gathered for drinks. The little boy took most meals either with Zelly or by himself in his room. But he was present for lunch with the family on Saturday and for, as Charles experienced them, “those large deadly Sunday lunches” following church on Sunday. The table talk meandered among bridge parties and golf scores, invective about the New Deal, Civil War battles, old Mississippi personalities, and the newest fashions. Mention of anyone’s illness, accident, or misfortune was forbidden. Though lulled by this sort of conversation, the children had to remain on their toes, for they might have to tell a story or make an account of themselves in front of the assembled.
Or they might be taken to task. “Charlie,” Hellen observed, “was never able to reprimand his children in private,” but only “before an audience.” Sunday lunches were suited to this. There had been a late night on Saturday; Monday and the workweek approached; tension was building. Mostly Charlie’s blowups were trivial. Jimmy carried enough uneaten spinach to his room “to astound even Popeye.” (He would let the green stuff slide off his plate out the window, or flush it down the toilet. For a while he stuffed it behind the radiator, until it began to stink.) There was always a risk of Charlie’s temper getting out of hand, however. His father had once whipped him when he was caught smoking in the barn; Charlie’s own reprimands were verbal, and he was soft-spoken, not a shouter. But the exchange could be cutting.
Sunday lunches were preceded by highballs, accompanied by new wines with each course, and polished off with cordials—all on top of whatever had been tossed down the night before and would be consumed in the evening to come. Charlie led the way in this demanding regimen, but Hellen held her own. The pace of drinking was not unusual in an era credited with the invention of the cocktail party, and nobody was falling down drunk. But there was always a good deal of alcohol in the house, even during Prohibition (Charlie’s favorite bootleg scotch was known as “Heart’s Blood”); and during the meals and cocktail hours when Jimmy most often saw his father, the man was often slightly, or more than slightly, lit.
Drinking partly explains why life for the children was “more dangerous” with the Old Man around. The drinks fed his unpredictable alterations of mood: now merry, now combustible, now maudlin. In his mid-sixties, Merrill recalled his father approaching him “with tears in his eyes” to warn the nine-year-old boy against “the glass in his hand.” Jimmy heeded Daddy’s advice, insofar as he learned to drink in moderation. But he was attracted to people who drank heavily. He’d had training in how to deal with them. To bear up as a child living in range of his parents’ liquored emotions, he had learned to keep cool and swallow his own strong feelings, if they ever arose. The strategy worked, and, as he got good at it, he learned to appreciate exciting, volatile behavior, to the point of seeking it, or at any rate tolerating it, in people close to him, including several of his lovers, but also good friends such as Chester Kallman and Elizabeth Bishop.
Doris responded to the same pressure in a related way, trying, as best she could, to be a perfect daughter. Perfectionism of one kind or another was encouraged by the environment. All those lessons were one symptom. Another was the premium placed on presentation. Charlie and Hellen and the children were used to posing with an appropriate expression for portraits by photographers and painters; a sculptor named Lazlo made a bronze head of the six-year-old Jimmy. On their twelfth birthdays, the children all received increased allowances, which rose to $100 per month at fifteen. From these funds they were expected to choose and buy their own clothes (evening clothes and coats came as Christmas and birthday gifts). Style, cleanliness, and good repair were expected from them. So was the right garment for the hour and activity. Charlie held that being well outfitted had been a key to his success in society, and he passed the idea on to his children. Over the course of a day at the Orchard, the children, like the adults, might change clothes several times, subject to Father’s approval.
He was particularly strict with Doris. A chauffeur and a maid chaperoned her at parties, and Charlie inspected her himself before she went out. If a dress was wrinkled or judged wrong for the occasion, Doris went back upstairs to change. Her son Robin writes, “Charlie Merrill did not spend his lifetime courting an array of luscious women without also seeking to turn his daughter into one […]. It was a control all the more insidious in that he was so good at it. He knew exactly what fabrics, colors and styles looked best on her and bought her the most stunning outfits himself. […] She had it in her to be the Miss It he desired: pretty, popular, successful, and a good girl. But at the key moment her nerves invariably failed her and the pretense of being Charlie’s Doris showed its insecure face. She took bad pictures not because her nose was slightly too large or her bottom teeth overcrowded, but because she had too much at stake.”
Doris attended the Spence School on East Ninety-first Street and Ethel Walker, a girls’ boarding school in Connecticut. She made lifelong friends wherever she went, but her grades were weak, especially in math, and school was a struggle. Charlie consoled her in a way that laid out the path ahead: “I feel confident your future husband is not going to want to see your report card when he proposes matrimony.” In 1932, at the bottom of the Depression, her father gave her a coming-out party for approximately one thousand guests under tents on the lawn of the Orchard. At seventeen, she was sent to a finishing school in Florence. She returned from this happy phase to work for the Junior League and study silver connoisseurship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was already an exceptionally graceful, gracious young woman, a fine dancer, with brown hair, pert chin, long neck, and blue eyes like her father’s. At a dinner dance in March 1934, which Charlie hosted at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach to celebrate her twentieth birthday, Doris met the man whom she would marry.
Robert Magowan was not part of Southampton society. He was born in the mill town of Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1903. He came from modest means; his father, a descendant of Scots immigrants, was the stationmaster in town. He used a postgraduate year at the Kent School to get himself into Harvard. (A neighbor paid for that year at Kent, and Robert emulated the favor in later life by helping to fund the education of his employees.) In college, he helped support his ailing father, mother, and younger brother by taking odd jobs; he went into journalism as a stringer for the Boston Globe, announced Harvard football games on the radio, and became an editor of the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper. He got a job after college at Macy’s in New York through a college classmate, and then became the store’s foreign buyer based in Paris. When he didn’t get the raise he wanted, he went into advertising. The man Doris met in Palm Beach was thirty-two years old, and had already amassed personal wealth of about a quarter of a million dollars.
The wedding took place in Southampton in June 1935. The ceremony was performed at St. Andrew’s Dune Church on the beach, a fanciful wooden house of worship with Tiffany windows, perfect for a fairy-tale wedding. The church was so close to the Beach Club, you could hear the cocktails tinkle when you emerged from a service. Beneath a photo of the bride, The New York Times devoted a paragraph to Doris’s tulle and satin gown and (all was white that day) her gardenia and lily of the valley bouquet. Charlie and Hellen greeted more than six hundred guests in the music room of the Orchard, while an orchestra played on the east porch for dancing. Hellen, who had been married in her parents’ parlor with a handful of guests, pitched in with enthusiasm to help Doris plan the grand occasion and make the necessary decisions, acting in place of Doris’s mother. In fact, Hellen pointedly didn’t invite Eliza Church to the reception. “What would Southampton think of me?” she asked, as if the town might disapprove and that somehow mattered more than what Doris thought and felt. Jimmy, nine years old that June, presented the wedding couple with a ballad. The poem, his most polished effort from childhood, ended in a spirit of cheerful, inane redundancy: “When they were married, they were glad, / And very glad were they. / I am sure they will always remember, / Their joyful wedding day.”
Some marriages remove the bride from her family. This one brought the groom into the bride’s. In Robert Magowan, Doris gave her father a son prepared to serve the Old Man in ways his own sons would never be. (Jimmy and Charles might have resented him for taking their place at Charlie’s side, but in the long run they would be grateful to him.) He was known in the family as “Bobby.” His monogram was RAM. He had a sharp, thin nose and a square, determined face, with blue eyes like Charlie’s. He was taller than Charlie, but not by much. When he served in tennis at the Meadow Club, he made a comic impression by jumping with both feet off the ground, turning red in the face, and grunting. He was brisk in everything he did. He expected those around him to be as decisive, speedy, and efficient as he was, whether at home or the office, and he barked when they weren’t. He was honest, direct, prudent, and just as hard a worker as Charlie, without Charlie’s penchant for playing the rake or the rascal. Like Charlie, he believed that business was the business of America, and it was a virtuous thing to turn a profit. Like Charlie, Bobby made anti-Semitic remarks, and he would fight long and hard against unionized labor when he had to. He was made to be Charles Merrill’s lieutenant.
Bobby joined Merrill Lynch after his honeymoon in Cuba. He and Charlie bonded on trips to distant branches of the firm; they shared hotel rooms out of companionship more than convenience, and sent jointly signed letters back to New York. Then Charlie set the newlyweds up in a home high atop Nob Hill in San Francisco; Bobby was sent across the bay to Oakland to work for Safeway—where, ultimately, after returning to Merrill Lynch for a long period as a senior partner, he would become the grocery chain’s CEO. Robin, who was born to Bobby and Doris in 1936, sums up the merger that had taken place: “One can see those two men, with their not dissimilar backgrounds, conspiring while the heiress was sold, or rather transferred from one ledger to another.” It was so, except that the heiress had had a hand in the deal. For the marriage served her purposes as well as theirs. By marrying Bobby, Doris not only pleased Charlie. She had chosen a man who would help her and her father remain as close as possible.
Jimmy’s delight in the dogs’ loud, unruly, free-flowing affection hints at how much pressure he felt to be on good behavior, and how restrained the adults around him normally were. The servants, leading their lives out back or just down the hall, made for an intriguing contrast with his family. Looking for food and attention, Jimmy liked to wander into the kitchen where they congregated. These people were as familiar to him, and as trusted, as anyone in his young life. Emma often took care of him; he would remember her strong arms, her dark skin, and the steaming soups she carried to his room when he was sick. In a sad, rather stiff poem from the 1980s called “The Help,” Merrill recalls being “the white / Small boy” on her lap: rich with “common scents. Starch, sweat, snuff, they excite / Me still.” Other sensations were impressed on him in the garage when he saw good-natured James, the chauffeur, return from a fistfight with his shirt off and blood streaming down his broad back.
While Zelly introduced Jimmy to foreign languages, the servants made him conscious of his race and class and curious about theirs. Allowed backstage, he watched them arrange themselves in a tableau of purposeful activity whenever their employers appeared, showing that they “Knew Their Place.” He could sense if not explain the power of the “Gods they lived by”—for instance, “the Numbers Man” standing “Supremely dapper in the porchlight” as he waited to collect their bets. These people weren’t particularly mysterious, however. In fact, the opposite: cooking and cleaning or driving a car were practical activities a boy noticed and appreciated, as opposed to Daddy buying and selling at the office, or Mama writing place cards at her desk. And the servants always made time for him. They were “physically warm, instinctive, real.”
Not that Jimmy felt more at home in their quarters than he did in the rest of the house, or that he ever came to know the inner lives of Emma, James, and the rest. But the experience of growing up on terms with them made him aware of parallel societies and the clashing perspectives produced by class, each with its claim to the truth. It prepared him for the high/low, upstairs/downstairs comedies to which he would be attracted in Mozart, Shakespeare, and even some aspects of the Ouija board—and which he would create his own version of in his household arrangements in Stonington and Athens. It equipped him for the “double life” he would lead as an adult who, without ever giving up the social position he was born into, often sought warmth, acceptance, and companionship, indeed love, from people of a lower social class.
The household that his parents had constructed gave him an intimate view of social inequality and racism. He never shared his parents’ strong racial prejudice. Yet he never challenged it in his own choices except in so mild a way as to make a few African American friends over the course of his life. This was in contrast to his brother Charles, who made racial justice a major theme of his life’s work, and in contrast to Jimmy’s partner David Jackson, for whom racial equality was a deeply felt political concern. Still, it was not an accident that the psychiatrist Merrill relied on in the turbulent last decade of his life, Jeanette Aycock, was black and a woman.
Contrary to popular belief, the rich don’t always sleep easy. That class difference carried creeping danger with it was brought home to Jimmy as a young boy after the kidnapping of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” the national hero who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic. The child was snatched from his crib in New Jersey in March 1932 (two days before Jimmy’s sixth birthday) and found nearby, murdered and dismembered, two months later. The case obsessed the nation and New York in particular. Reports about real and fake ransom notes and the search for the kidnappers unfolded in the newspapers as a terrible public melodrama. There was thought to be a kidnapping ring at work in the New York region, and they, or copycats inspired by them, might strike again with another prominent family as their target.
The case especially affected the Merrills because Charlie and Hellen were friends with Dwight Morrow, a J. P. Morgan banker, diplomat, and Amherst man, and his daughter Anne, who was Mrs. Lindbergh. The privileged isolation of the Orchard, which might have made the family feel safe, made them feel vulnerable instead, and they took precautions against kidnappers. The groundskeeper carried a revolver. Charles and Jimmy slept in the same room, although twenty others were available, and neither boy was allowed to go out alone. For a time, Charles attended the Arizona Desert School in Tucson, where he was sent for a taste of outdoor life, with saddles to polish and a cowboy hat and chaps to wear. Jimmy was sent there too, the idea being to put him somewhere safe for the winter, far from the shadowy agents plotting to steal the boy and force Daddy to pay—that is, if Daddy really loved him.
What his parents taught him to fear, Jimmy learned to desire. Or so Merrill himself decided, looking back on the way that the Lindbergh kidnapping fanned the flames of his youthful fantasy life and the adult eroticism that grew out of it. “Days of 1935,” written in 1970, is a long, canny, comic exercise in self-analysis. It recalls how as a boy Jimmy dreamed of being plucked from his home and held for ransom by a gangster and his moll. Like the servants, Floyd and Jean gratify him simply by paying attention to him. (Floyd has an easy time grabbing the child because his parents are “out partying.”) It’s not hard for him to be a prisoner: he’s used to taking orders and sitting quietly. He listens in fascination to the kidnappers’ 1930s, working-class, cops-and-robbers slang:
“Gimme—Wait—Hey, watch that gun—
Why don’t these dumb matches work—
See you later—Yeah, have fun—
Wise guy—Floozie—Jerk—”
A fresh, vital way of being emanates from this rough-edged talk, which was forbidden to the boy Merrill had been (busy learning his French and German) but was nonetheless familiar to him from the radio, the movies, and New York City streets. As expressed in their speech, Floyd and Jean have a no-nonsense approach to everything they do, which is limited to the basics: sleeping, eating, and sex. The boy, lying awake on the floor beside the crooks’ bed, overhears this last in arousing detail.
Jean is considerate of him, and likes to listen to his stories. But “Lean, sallow, lantern-jawed” Floyd is the prime object of his interest—rough and powerful, with masculinity to spare, as represented by his pistol and cartridge belt, by the “prone tango” he performs on top of Jean, and by the bruise he leaves on her cheek after a slap to the face. One night, while Jean snoozes, Floyd lies down next to the boy, cuddles up to him, and masturbates. Before the situation can get any worse (that is, any more exciting), the hoodlums are caught, put up for trial, and, when he sits down in the witness box, betrayed by the boy who had fallen in love with them: “You I adored I now accuse …”
It’s unlikely that all of this ran through Jimmy’s head at nine, but bits and pieces of it must have, and Merrill used them much later to explain the direction his adult desires took. The poem suggests that, even as Jimmy was drawn to his mother with the sort of submerged sexual excitement we see in “Looking at Mummy,” the depth of his identification with her left him feeling a lack in another department, a deficit in masculinity that was expressed in his attraction to Floyd, who is both the coarse, working-class opposite of Charlie and merely Charlie in disguise. The poem reminds us too that Jimmy grew up with a problem that he would always have: his wish to be loved was bound up with the question of what he was worth. The fantasy kidnappers were hardly the only ones to put the question in terms of cash. Plenty of friends, throughout his life, would eye him in the same way.
Merrill sets the poem in 1935 rather than closer to the time of the Lindbergh kidnapping. The case had dragged on for two years by the time that a culprit, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, stood trial for murder in 1935; when his appeals failed in 1936, Hauptmann was electrocuted. So the crime remained in the news throughout the middle 1930s, which is reason enough for Merrill to have set the poem in 1935. But the year was significant for the Merrill family, as the time of Doris’s wedding. The buildup to that event preoccupied the household for months, and Doris was Jimmy’s adored older sister. In school at the time, he was learning about the ballad—the verse form he used when he wrote his wedding poem presented to Bobby and Doris, “the prince and princess.” Merrill returns to the ballad form in “Days of 1935,” making it a revision of that well-behaved childhood effort; it focuses on the themes of love and money, power and desire, that were kept out of sight in the grand white wedding, and yet underlay it. “Days of 1935” also suggests that, when he fit himself into the heterosexual, fairy-tale scenario that his sister and her fiancé were extravagantly playing out, Jimmy didn’t imagine himself as the shining knight, but as the damsel in distress. In “Days of 1935,” Floyd gags the little captive with his hand, and carries him off “Trailing bedclothes like a bride.”
In “Days of 1935,” the kidnapped boy sees photos of his parents in the newspaper: his mother is armored behind her fashionable accessories (“gloved, / Hatted, bepearled, chin deep in fur”) and Daddy is “glowering.” Speaking for his young self, Merrill asks about his father, “was it true he loved / Others beside her?” It’s hard to say exactly when the question first came up for Jimmy. In the early 1930s, Charlie carried on a dalliance with Dottie Stafford, Hellen’s best friend in Southampton, who was widowed when her husband killed himself after the Crash. Hellen discovered her husband in bed with Mrs. Stafford when Mike led her to the room, just as the red setter had led Jimmy to hers. Whether or not there were other infidelities, Hellen lived with the threat of them. “Women friends were a necessity to Charlie Merrill,” she wrote in her 1953 memoir. “He always had more women friends than men friends. He was naturally attractive to them, and when it came to ‘courtin’,’ he was unsurpassed.” Charlie was never one to keep a secret in this or any other department of life, and he bragged about his catnip-like charm—for example, to his son Charles: “Women go wild, simply wild over me.”
There were other tensions at work in the marriage. In “The Broken Home,” Merrill imagines overhearing his parents talking after a party on the gravel drive outside the Orchard. “They love each other still”:
She: Charlie, I can’t stand the pace.
He: Come on, honey—why, you’ll bury us all!
It’s a conversation between two runners in a killer race. Probably their life together felt like that, and appeared that way to their son. Charlie and Hellen were both competitors—a quality that drew them together; but they couldn’t help competing with each other too. After dinner at the Orchard with nothing else planned, Charlie would tell Hellen to stir up company, and, after a few telephone calls, the Merrills and whoever was free at the last minute would play bridge far into the night. They played cards as partners in Southampton bridge tournaments and often brought home a “silver matchbox,” the first-place trophy. But Hellen, who was more experienced and had more time to hone her skill, was a better player than Charlie, which she didn’t try to conceal. Low-level rivalry also showed at the dinner table. When Charlie was telling a story, Hellen would interrupt him—“No, you’re telling it wrong”—and then show their company how to tell it right.
Doris learned her taste in interior design from Hellen; Hellen might have learned from Doris that it was wise not to contradict Charlie. Hellen was no suffragette, but she was too proud to be at ease in the subordinate role of an important man’s wife; and even as he was attracted to her modern ways, Charlie was irritated by them too. They’d always kept a certain distance from each other. In his notebooks at nine and ten, Jimmy drew up plans for houses, ones he lived in and others he dreamed up; his parents each have their own bedroom, which is what he was used to. In one of his architectural sketches, Daddy gets a “sleeping porch” next to Mama’s bedroom. Did that arrangement represent for Charlie a greater-than-usual intimacy with his wife, or did it mean the doghouse? In any case, their adjacency is the point. In Jimmy’s childhood photo album, there are very few pictures of his parents together.
After their marriage had fallen apart, Hellen wrote to Charlie regretting “how miserably unhappy you must have been the last 6 yrs. we were together.” She didn’t say how she felt during the same period, or why he might have been so miserable. For his part, Charlie complained about Hellen’s “shell.” Probably he meant the regal front seen in her formal portraits; she must have retreated behind that practiced pose, mustering all her dignity, after her discovery of his affair with Dottie Stafford. In any case, by the mid-1930s, there was serious trouble in the house. “A marriage on the rocks,” Merrill calls it in “The Broken Home,” inviting us to picture his parents clutching their highballs, as the ship foundered. Charlie and Hellen both had a theatrical side, and there were scenes. During their divorce proceedings, they argued over why Charlie had once locked Hellen in a closet, not whether he had.
They were on the way to repeating the fate of Charlie’s first marriage, only this time in a more florid, gossip-worthy form. In 1936, Hellen found a perfumed note on her husband’s dresser. It had come from a petite brunette named Kinta Des Mares. Kinta was a belle from New Orleans, just Hellen’s age, as sultry as Charlie now found Hellen cold, and he fell violently in love with her. During May and June of that year, Miss Des Mares took a room in the New Weston Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where Charlie visited her daily between three and four in the afternoon; he would return to the hotel in the evening, and they would go out to a nightclub. These and other details of their routine came to light when Josephine Skraback, the day maid on the nineteenth floor of the New Weston, was deposed by Hellen’s lawyers. “I really regarded KINTA DESMARE and MR. MERRILL as an extremely happy couple,” Mrs. Skraback explained.
Hellen summoned her eleven-year-old son into her bedroom to show him his father’s letter. Having already been to the theater enough to suppose he knew how to act in such a situation, Jimmy read it, then let the page float from his fingers to the floor. “Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Hellen scolded, who had her own ideas about how to act. As recounted by Merrill decades later, the scene is more comic than tragic. But no one was smiling at the time. In their shared desertion, Hellen and Jimmy were left to face each other in her bedroom, abandoned to a charged, stagy intimacy.
Of course, however precocious an actor he may have been, Jimmy was still a tender child who didn’t wholly grasp the situation. He wondered why his father had left him without saying goodbye and “why he cried and acted so strangely.” “Mummy,” he asked, “does Daddy like someone better than he does you?” Hellen had been “tortured and tormented for so long” over the state of her marriage that she could hardly answer. As angry and aggrieved at Charlie as she was and had every right to be, she tried to keep those feelings in check for the sake of her son and for her stepchildren and the future of her relationships with them. She wrote to Doris,
Your father has not meant to hurt me and he is truly sorry for all that has happened these past several years. And I would be willing to take not only my share, but all of the blame if by so doing, he could be happy. I loved Charlie so completely for twelve years and never caused him the slightest embarrassment where another man was concerned, but fidelity is old-fashioned and doesn’t seem to count any more.
You both [Doris and Bobby] have been close to my heart for a long time now and I want you to remain there. And God spare you from such a tragedy as this.
Relaxing on board ship, Charlie addressed his son:
At Sea, July 2, 1937
Dear Jim:
And among my most pleasant memories are those of our breakfasts together at Palm Beach when all the gang had fled.
I like to think of the strides forward you have made this year and I wish that you could have been spared the strain of watching hearts break.
But, as I told you, it is your duty to play a man’s part even though you are only a little boy in some respects.
Boys, no older than you have carried messages in times of war and at a great peril of their lives.
You can do anything and be all that is fine and brave and good if you set your mind to it. This is the time for you to show the stuff you are made of.
So please be of good courage and especially loving and kind to your mother.
And keep an open mind about your daddy for that is only fair. My mistakes have been errors of judgment, not of the heart. Surely you can understand that.
I hope you will have a nice summer and I know you will love inspecting your nephew, seeing Doris and Bobby and having fun with them.
My love to Zellie and a great big hug and kiss to you.
Your loving Daddy
Although he usually called him “Jimmy,” Charlie chose the more grown-up “Jim” here. Requiring a premature heroism from the boy and telling him to soldier on was a way not to deal with him emotionally and allow that he might have a legitimate complaint. Charlie later thought sufficiently well of this composition to send a copy to Jimmy (who hadn’t kept the original) to be placed in the scrapbook that Charlie expected him to keep. How could a child react to such a message, except to conclude that he was more alone in the world than he had thought?
Summer 1937: Jimmy was busy preparing for his marionette performance of The Magic Fish-bone, which must have kept him from thinking too much about anything else. But it wasn’t merely a distraction: Dickens’s fairy tale suggested a fantasy resolution to the Merrill family’s problems. Manipulating King Watkins, who is out of money and unable to feed his family, and the Queen, who is ill and must be cared for by her eldest child, Jimmy pulled strings for a husband and wife fallen on hard times. The story turns on a magic fish bone good for granting wishes in an emergency and then the arrival of a kindly godmother (Mis’ Annie? Zelly?) who sets everything right. It was meant to cheer up handicapped children in Southampton belonging to a charity in which Hellen was active, but her son needed consolation too. He was powerless to keep his family from falling apart, but he could write a script for his puppets, and make them do what he wished. “Art. It cures affliction,” Merrill wrote in the late lyric “Farewell Performance.” Already, at eleven, he was testing that cure.
That same summer, Jimmy was introduced to the art form that, besides poetry, would mean the most to him. In the music room at the Orchard one morning, a new friend of Hellen’s, Carol Longone, sat him on the bench beside her at a grand piano (one of two in the room) and played through the score of Leoncavallo’s verismo opera Pagliacci, while making comments on the music, the drama, the staging, and the interaction of these elements. It was his first taste of grand opera, and it captivated him. The story concerns a troupe of comic actors. In the prologue, to a melody that Merrill would always find “unspeakably beautiful,” the clown Tonio addresses the audience. Although he and his fellow players perform stock roles, he warns the operagoer not to think their tears artificial: “We have human hearts, beating with passion!” As the opera proceeds, sexual desire and jealousy erupt when the actors put on a comic play about adultery (a foolish husband, a young rival for the wife’s affection), the real takes over, and one of the clowns murders his wife and her lover. Pagliacci involved comic types Jimmy knew from the puppet theater, but it was closer to the drama his parents were living than to The Magic Fish-bone.
Jimmy had a high-level guide in Carol Longone. A Floridian by birth, she had an intriguing, operatic story of her own, having been married to an impresario and “Lived Abroad.” She was a skilled pianist who had been on tour as an accompanist with premier artists like the soprano Rosa Raisa and the tenor Beniamino Gigli. She was best known for her “capsule concentrate” versions of grand operas called “Operalogues.” Presented in hotels and clubs from New York City to the hinterlands, these events were a “fitting prelude to the literature of opera, an enticement to those who would learn of opera without travail,” the Toledo Blade wrote. “Mrs. Longone explains and plays, cues in her singers”—the mostly young but expert singers she collaborated with—“and calls upon the imaginations of her audience to engender the scenes she describes.” This is what she did with Jimmy, who began weekly piano lessons with her that fall. Longone meanwhile became a friend to Hellen and Jimmy both. After the death of Charlie’s sister Edith, who had been Jimmy’s godmother, she took on that role.
When the fall season of the Metropolitan Opera opened, Jimmy had a seat for every production. Looking back on his youthful fandom, Merrill wrote, “[O]pera was from the start an education less musical than sentimental. […] Why else had we paid (or our mothers paid for us) to hear Violetta suffer, Wotan turn upon his wife, and Gilda disobey her father?” The sentiments he was experiencing were vivid, even wildly passionate, but expressed through stylized roles, long rehearsed, and performed with poise and discipline before an audience for applause. As in the case of Pagliacci, opera made him aware of art’s potential to give voice to the most powerful feelings—and aware of the rhetorical, performed nature of any expression of such feeling. It was a way to study, within the safe frame of the proscenium, the passions and intrigues that his parents had set before him at home. Opera’s people were prey to primitive, dreamlike violence, but always as an effect of visible artistic choices (stage business, lighting, props), and their characters were safely caricatures—larger than life, just as his puppets were smaller.
With Carol at the keyboard and Hellen or Mis’ Annie as his escorts at the Metropolitan, opera was for Jimmy a woman’s world, and he was drawn to the strongest women on the stage. In Wagner’s Ring cycle, he was fascinated not by the sword-wielding Siegfried, but by Brünnhilde, whom Siegfried awakens from the circle of fire in which she sleeps (the Sleeping Beauty story again). Jimmy heard a twenty-five-year-old Erich Leinsdorf conduct Die Walküre at the Met in 1938. Kirsten Flagstad sang the heroine’s role. According to the Herald Tribune, the Norwegian blonde was “the greatest singer in the world.” She immediately became Jimmy’s favorite, and merged in his mind with this role. Brünnhilde is the Valkyrie who gives up immortality for human love, which she perceives as her father Wotan’s will, though he opposes her, and her actions will bring about his downfall. In A Different Person, Merrill looks back on his early infatuation with this woman warrior: “Her love threw a wrench into the entire celestial machinery; when the flames died down and the Rhine subsided”—at the end of the cycle in Götterdämmerung—“nothing was left but the elemental powers that prevailed long before the gods (narrow-minded nouveaux riches, like the people we knew in Southampton) sprang up to embody them.”
As that remark about Southampton nouveaux riches suggests, there were analogies for young Jimmy to draw, if only subliminally at this point, between Wagner’s people and his own family, who were blessed and cursed by their gold. Flagstad’s Brünnhilde was an ambiguous figure for the boy to identify with—a rebel who would burn down her father’s house (Valhalla), but redeem it too, singing all the while. To admire her as fiercely as Jimmy did was a not-so-covert gender rebellion. “Next to the powers of such a woman,” he continues in A Different Person, “all male activity—Siegfried’s dragon slaying, Einstein’s theorizing, the arcana of password and sweat lodge—seemed tame and puerile. I longed throughout adolescence to lead my own predestined hero, whose face changed every month, into music’s radiant abyss.”
That cautiously homosexual fantasy lay somewhat in the future. Just barely advancing on puberty, Jimmy tried on various identities, like any eleven- or twelve-year-old. On the Upper East Side after school on Tuesday and Friday, he wore the uniform of the Knickerbocker Grays, the society cadet corps in which he learned to march in step with other boys of good families. At the Arizona Desert School over the winter, he donned a cowboy hat and spats and rode among saguaro cactus. In Florida over spring break, he went deep-sea fishing—a thrill for him—and he displayed his impressive catch, a little Hemingway.
All that year he’d seen his father only once, for a lunch in New York. He wrote to CEM in Florida after his twelfth birthday:
Dear Daddy:
This Saturday I am going to “Carmen” at last. It will be my 18th opera. That ends the winter season at the Metropolitan. Then I’ll have to go to the Hippodrome. My first there are “Cavalleria Rusticana” + “Pagliacci.”
I got some swell stamps with the 12 dollars.
School is getting along O.K. I shot a bulls eye at shooting class.
Sunday I am going to an Operatic Program in commemoration of Martinelli’s 25th year with the Met. (I think I told you that before.)
Much love to you, Doris, Bobby, Charles.
Jimmy
Despite the bull’s-eye, Charlie wasn’t pleased by his son’s progress. In reply he enumerated for Jimmy the many small jobs he’d held by the time he was twelve. “There never was a time when I did not have my own money, in my own pocket. By my own money, I mean money that I worked for, and earned by my own efforts.” Jimmy showed no interest in making money or in any number of other activities his father felt a boy ought to like. Charlie wrote to Ed Wilson, a Mississippi relative living in New York, asking him to spend time with Jimmy. “I’m particularly anxious to have someone develop Jimmy’s interest in things that most boys like—hockey, football, boxing, sightseeing, visits to Museums, the Aquarium”—Charlie gathered momentum as he thought about it—“the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb, and the many wonderful and interesting things there are to see and learn in and around New York City. Jimmy has plenty of people who can take him to the Opera, and encourage the development of his aesthetic side, but he has no one who will kick him around, and make a man out of him.”
While wanting to make a man out of Jimmy through this proxy, Charlie worried that his son had somehow gotten “the fool idea that I don’t love him.” In preparation for the boy’s summer visit to the Orchard in 1937, which would be reduced to a month this year, Charlie wrote to Charles, “[P]lease keep in mind that this particular summer Jimmy Merrill is the family’s problem child. I am very hopeful that between all of us”—the Merrills and the Magowans—“we can handle this boy without him ever knowing it, to the end that he will have had a grand four weeks visit on the one hand, and will have been set on the right path on the other.” This didn’t mean he wanted “to have Jimmy love his mother less,” only that “I want him to be at ease with me, and to be on affectionate and good-natured terms with all the other members of the family.” Whether or not Jimmy loved his father was involved now with the question of his interests, and Charlie came back to it: “I am glad that Jimmy likes music, books, painting, the opera, etc., but I think his routine is bad because it is not well balanced. […] I think a balanced regime, for a normal boy of twelve, should be about one part for the aesthetic side […] and three parts outdoors bumming with other boys.”
Behind Charlie’s anxiety about his son’s gender identity, and the confusion Jimmy himself must have felt about his alliances with his parents, was the tug-of-war of a raging divorce. In fall 1937, when she and Jimmy left the Orchard for the Carlyle Hotel, his mother arranged for furniture and other items to be trucked from Southampton to the city; when Charlie’s lawyers challenged her about this action, she itemized her haul and justified each entry. Next, she served Charlie with papers suing for a separation on grounds of his “cruelty and habitual intemperance”—the first step toward divorce. Charlie responded with a notice in a New York newspaper saying he would no longer be responsible for his wife’s bills. Then, trying to turn the tables on Hellen, he enlisted the help of the FBI man Mel Purvis and had his wife spied on, with notation made when she met with a man. This research, leaked to the newspapers, produced public speculation about her relations with one Henri di Sabour and “an unnamed Brazilian diplomat.” Meanwhile, Emma had gone with Hellen to serve her and Jimmy. But Emma was in Charlie’s pay and reported to him on Hellen’s mail and her comings and goings; when Hellen caught her at it, she fired her. Emma would later confess all in a tearful scene witnessed by Jimmy.
In the midst of these maneuverings, Charlie asked Hellen to permit Jimmy to visit him at Merrill’s Landing in spring 1938. Jimmy was being used by Hellen, though she denied it, as a bargaining point. She replied to Charlie,
It is no more my desire now than it has ever been to keep you and Jimmy apart. The fact of the past eight months would indicate that you have no particular wish to see Jimmy since you have only requested to see him once despite your frequent visits to New York at which times you have not even telephoned him.
Now that you request to have him visit you in Palm Beach during his Easter vacation, I feel that it is only natural for me to prefer to keep him with me. You told him in a recent communication that he was now “the head of the family.” I regard him in this light. I find myself more completely alone than I have ever been in my life and am reluctant to part with him. However, I would not be so unwilling if you and I could come to some understanding, exclusive of legal advice, as to where this sordid mess is to end.
Hellen was willing to let Charlie see Jimmy in New York, but not to send him “1000 miles away from me to visit you and whomever you might have staying with you at the time.” She continued, “Since I have assumed practically all of the financial responsibility of Jimmy since you deserted me in June […] and ALL of the moral responsibility of his upbringing, I feel that I am justified in keeping him with me.”
Charlie filed his countersuit for divorce with its flimsy charges of infidelity in May 1938. Around this time Eddie Lynch died of a sudden heart attack in London, and Charlie, deeply grieving, lost his appetite for a battle he knew he wasn’t going to win. He started communicating with Hellen, she changed her tone, and eventually their lawyers drafted child custody and financial arrangements agreeable to all parties. Doris quietly intervened to assure that Hellen’s settlement was better than Eliza’s had been. Hellen and Jimmy appeared in a photo—she smiling, he openmouthed as if dazed—in the Daily Mirror on February 23, 1939, under the headline “Awarded Custody of Her Son” in a story misleadingly titled “Friendly Divorce Parts the Merrills.” In the New York Journal-American, the society pundit “Cholly Knickerbocker” wrote,
Now that the final curtain has been rung down, in the Florida courts, on the Charles Merrill domestic drama, you can expect “Charlie” Merrill to select another wife, while Helen [sic] Merrill, who won her divorce decree—and complete vindication—will devote her time to the Merrill son, whose custody she has. The Merrill divorce was, indeed, a tragic happening. Here were two people who came up from the ranks to achieve a pleasant position in the Southampton set, only to spoil everything when the green-eyed monster reared its ugly head. The charges and counter-charges in the Merrill case scandalized all those who had welcomed the Merrills into the social ranks. And wrecked everything the Merrills had struggled to obtain.
Charlie was indeed ready to “take another plunge into the matrimonial seas.” He wedded Kinta almost as soon after his divorce from Hellen as he’d married Hellen after his divorce from Eliza.4 Jimmy was not invited to the ceremony. Sounding, at thirteen, immensely older than the boy who’d written about the opera season and his bull’s-eye a year before, he congratulated his father in a frank but forgiving letter. Charlie could have dictated it, and Hellen probably did:
Daddy, I do wish you happiness, because I have always felt that you have never gotten your full share of it. And now, you are taking a third try at life and I hope you will be successful.
You refer to me taking this like Doris in 1925. In 1925 there were totally different proceedings, but now that the battle has worn off, I have no hard feelings toward you. I can only wish that you will at last, be happy and that you will not regret anything.
Hellen emerged from her ordeal smiling for the newspapers but with her social capital much diminished. When she visited her son in Southampton in the midst of her divorce proceedings in July 1938, it merited a notice in the New York World-Telegram: “Mrs. Charles E. Merrill is arriving here today to be the guest of Mrs. Goodhue Livingston. Society interprets this bit of news as a great personal triumph for Mrs. Merrill. Mrs. Livingston is acknowledged the social arbiter of Southampton.” Even so, society didn’t rally around Hellen. She discovered that for twelve years she’d been hosting at the Orchard not her friends but her husband’s, or people who now hoped to remain his friends: she could do nothing for them but give them a chance to prove their loyalty to him by snubbing her. Her “black jokes” and barbecue pit were things of the past.
In September, Hellen drove up the gravel to the Orchard to collect her son. If there was a moment when James Merrill’s childhood ended, this was it. They drove back to New York—Hellen herself took the wheel these days—through increasingly furious rain, the windshield wipers flailing, the two of them anxiously peering ahead, alone together in the car. Only the next day did they learn that they’d driven through the 1938 hurricane. The most devastating storm ever to strike the region, with twenty-foot waves and winds gusting over 150 miles per hour, the hurricane drove water and sand through the walls of the Beach Club and St. Andrew’s Dune Church, sweeping away organ and pews, destroying the sanctuary where Doris and Bobby had been married. The property damage and loss of life across eastern Long Island and the New England coast were terrible and historic. Yet, before long, with the money to manage it, the Beach Club and St. Andrew’s would be beautifully repaired.
