A little more than a century after its founding as the frontier outpost called Fort Dearborn, the city of Chicago was still hustling for respect. Chicago in the third decade of the new century bristled with ferocious, unbridled energy. The city of Al Capone was also the home of a world-renowned symphony and the site of the world’s first skyscraper, built in 1885 by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. “I will” became the city’s unofficial motto—or as newspaper columnist Mike Royko quipped: “I will, if I don’t get caught.”
All roads converged at Chicago. A steely spider’s web of railway tracks that spanned the western half of the continent in the late nineteenth century terminated in the city’s sprawling rail yards. Chicago’s wharves, factories, and grain elevators hummed with activity. The South Side stockyards and slaughterhouses were the world’s largest and busiest. Poet Carl Sandburg’s “City of Big Shoulders” exerted a magnetic pull for people hungry to savor the fruits of the American dream; three out of every four residents were either foreign-born or first-generation Americans.
None of this escaped the attention of Isaac Hahn and his business partners at S. A. Ryder in St. Louis, three hundred miles to the south. Hoping to take advantage of “a golden opportunity,” the company opened an office and warehouse in Chicago in 1920. When Isaac agreed to act as manager, he and Hannah sold their house in St. Louis and moved north. Isaac left for Chicago in January, leaving Hannah, Mickey, and Dauphine behind to finish out the school year. They lived for a few weeks in a hotel, then stayed with Mannel and his wife Nancy.
The Hahns’ move to Chicago came as a jolt both to Mickey, who had just turned fifteen, and to Dauphine, now thirteen. Dot was away at college in Wisconsin; Mannel was married and working; Rose was studying psychiatric social work in Boston; and Helen was attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Mickey and Dauphine had the family home to themselves, and they enjoyed being free of what Mickey termed “the crushing mass of sisters.” For Mickey, who was finally starting to feel comfortable at Soldan High School, a move could not have come at a worse time. She had started making friends and dating. She was also becoming more intent on writing.
Mickey’s literary interests led her to strike up a friendship with Ralph Crowley, a University of Wisconsin student who she met through her sister Dot. Although “The Kid,” as he had dubbed himself, was a few years older than Mickey, the two of them had a lot in common. Ralph, too, had attended Soldan, spent summer vacations in Wisconsin, and loved books and writing. Mickey and Ralph began corresponding in the autumn of 1919. “Send me your story,” he had urged in response to a query in one of Mickey’s letters. “I’ll send you some as I write them. (I’ve given myself the task of writing one each week.)”1
Mickey’s surviving correspondence from this period indicates that by now she was asking family and friends to read and critique her writing. She had sent several humorous articles to Dr. Miner Evans, one of Rose’s teachers in Boston. In a note dated December 7, 1919, Evans offered praise. “I have read [your] articles with interest and think they are very clever,” he said.2
Such encouragement gave Mickey the confidence to continue her literary endeavors; she needed it. For all her feistiness and independence of spirit, at heart Mickey was no different from any other teenage girl. She lay awake nights wondering if she would ever grow up. She was acutely, painfully conscious of her appearance. She was also emotionally vulnerable and utterly lacking in self-confidence. “I was what they still call young for my age,” she once recalled, “not boy-minded, and well padded with puppy fat.”3 Mickey was certain she could never be as pretty or as popular as her older sisters; visions of beautiful, popular Helen lingered in her mind’s eye.
Many years later, Rose would remember Mickey as the “chubby and serious” girl in the family. That assessment was revealing, for it indicated how adept Mickey was at masking her emotions and her true temperament, even where her own family members were concerned. When she took pen in hand, or sat at her mother’s old battered manual typewriter, the “chubby and serious” girl exhibited a precocious and deliciously naughty wit. Writing became an outlet for her adolescent emotions.
It is evident from reading the letters she received from friends and from her own writings many years later that the prospect of moving to Chicago left Mickey distraught and angry. Her reaction was as understandable as it was predictable. With its population of 2.7 million people—about four times that of St. Louis—Chicago was terrifyingly large, violent, dirty, and threatening. Initially, at least, Mickey did not want to live there. “I had never dreamed that it would be necessary to like that city, much less live in it,” she wrote in Kissing Cousins. “We had always sniffed scornfully when we passed through Chicago on our way to or from the summer in Michigan. A horse-drawn cab took travelers from one railway station to the other, and above the smell of the horse and the straw you could often detect the stockyard stink. The downtown streets were big and noisy enough to terrify provincial children.”4
However, there was another uncertainty in the move, one that went un-articulated for reasons that were unique to the Hahn household. Public schools in St. Louis were racially segregated, and whites did not socialize with “coloreds.” Not so in Chicago. When Mickey’s schoolmates learned she was moving there, some of them began teasing her. “Some of the children said, ‘Mickey’s going to live in Chicago, and she’ll have to sit next to niggers,’” she remembered. “I cried.”5
These concerns were not ones Mickey dared raise at home, where racism was not countenanced. By any measure, her parents’ attitude toward blacks was more tolerant than that of their white neighbors in St. Louis. Being Jewish had sensitized both Hannah and Isaac to racism, and they refused to subscribe to the bigotry that was inherent in Southern racial mores of the day. For example, they did not hesitate to scold their children “for minding about Negroes,” as Mickey said. “We weren’t at all typical Southerners where race was concerned.”6
Where most whites shunned blacks socially, the Hahns harbored no such reservations—although the opportunities for interaction in St. Louis were admittedly limited. Neither Mickey nor her siblings actually knew very many blacks. Not so in Chicago, where the Hahns’ liberal views were put to the test. There had also been violent race riots in Chicago in the summer of 1919, during which hundreds had been injured and entire neighborhoods looted and burned. On one memorable occasion, Rose came home for Sunday dinner accompanied by a handsome young “colored” man. Jean Toomer was a poet who hailed from Washington, D.C. Born to a well-to-do family, his father had been a mulatto who “passed” for white. His dusky-skinned son struggled with his racial identity, describing himself as having been “born of chaos dressed in formal attire.”7 In 1923, Toomer’s first book, a dazzling collection of verse entitled Cane,8 would lead some people to compare him favorably to fellow poet and friend Sherwood Anderson, who praised the book. One black critic went so far as to praise Toomer as “a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature.”9 Unfortunately, the author of Cane never lived up to his early potential. In large part that was because he could not deal with the ambiguities in his life nor accept the fact that in some people’s eyes he was not white. Hannah and Isaac Hahn and other family members treated Rose’s guest cordially. However, their black maid adamantly refused to wait on him. “That was a great scandal in our house,” Mickey recalled.10
When school ended in June 1920, Mickey went with Mannel and his wife Nancy to New York, where Helen was living after having dropped out of college. Mickey then spent the rest of her vacation at a summer camp in Michigan. The holiday was anything but relaxing; Mickey’s correspondence from this period reveals her continuing anguish over her family’s move to Chicago. She poured out her resentments in letters to former boyfriends and classmates back in St. Louis.
Mickey was surprised to learn that she and Dauphine were not the only family members unhappy in Chicago. Isaac Hahn had not consulted with his wife when he leased a flat in a redbrick apartment building at 841 Lawrence Avenue, a busy commercial street on the city’s north side. Hannah hated the place, and she let her husband know it. So the family moved at least twice during its first two years in Chicago, each time to a slightly more spacious quarters. The one constant in their lives was that Mickey and Dauphine attended Nicholas Senn High School.
Being in her junior year, Dauphine fit in more easily than Mickey, who was two years older and more set in her ways. Nonetheless, it was a struggle for both the Hahn girls to make new friends. Dating was a major concern. At age thirteen, Dauphine was too young to go out with boys in St. Louis. Things were different in Chicago. Isaac grumbled, and Hannah growled. Initially, Mickey looked on in awe. Then, she too began “going out.” It all seemed so perfectly natural.
This Side of Paradise, a first novel by a young Princeton University dropout, had appeared in bookshops in April 1920. The book created an instant sensation because it chronicled the coming of age of the so-called Lost Generation—the disaffected and confused young people who came to adulthood in the years just after the First World War. “I read and loved it,” Mickey recalled. “Here, I thought, was a writer who really knew the score!”11
Most adults were much less impressed. In fact, many older people were appalled by Fitzgerald’s depiction of America’s changing sexual and social mores. The same socioeconomic forces that had given rise to the movement for an end to discrimination against blacks had also fueled demands for gender equality. The suffragette campaign, in full swing at the time, culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment by Congress in August 1920.
Hannah Hahn watched these developments with interest, for she was a keen supporter of the right of women to vote. As Mickey recalled, “I remember Daddy saying to Mother, ‘But don’t you realize that if you vote for him’—I don’t recall who him was—‘you are simply cancelling my vote?’ Mother actually did realize it, and she liked the fact. She just smiled.”12
The same people who railed against female suffrage were adamantly opposed to the demands of the new breed of free-thinking women known as “flappers.” Flappers smoked in public. They drank alcohol, used lipstick and rouge, and flaunted their sexuality. What’s more, they dared question the traditional “double standard.”
Despite parental objections, many of Mickey’s female classmates at Senn were aspiring flappers. In July 1920, a fashion writer for the New York Times observed that “the American woman … has lifted her skirts beyond any modest limitation.” Mickey and Dauphine had caused a stir in St. Louis by wearing knickers to school; now, just a few years later, the sisters marveled at how some schoolgirls in Chicago wore skimpy black satin dresses, silk stockings rolled to the knee, and “painted their faces.” Mickey’s only bow to bohemianism was a beret she had taken to wearing (“Because artists wore berets, that’s why!”). She remembered her mother musing aloud about why her daughters no longer brought any of their schoolmates home to visit, as they had in St. Louis. Mickey could only chuckle to herself, for she had no doubts where her peers went after classes. “It was my private opinion that they were out cracking safes somewhere or rolling around on the floor of some opium den,” she wrote.13
Begrudgingly, Mickey began to fit in at Senn. She joined the staff of the student magazine, ate lunch at the same lunch counter where the “glamor boys and girls” hung out, and slowly made friends in what had seemed initially like a closed society. Still, she was not happy. She often spent her allowance on solitary rides on the city buses. What she liked most about her new city was Lake Michigan, with its sun-dappled expanses that stretched away to the eastern horizon. The autumn breezes blowing in off the lake were scented with a heady aroma of distant places. The lumbering lake freighters and passenger ships that came and went from the port of Chicago were a source of endless fascination, for they fed dreams of one day sailing away. “Even I could not claim that there was something like [the lake], but better, in St. Louis,” Mickey wrote. “Even I could not imagine anything better to do at dusk than bowl along by Lake Michigan in the front seat of the top of a double-decker bus. The wind from the great sea was never quite like ordinary air. It had a delicious foreign smell. But the most enchanting thing about the lake was that you couldn’t see to the other side.”14
One Friday evening, she ran away from home after one of her frequent disagreements with Hannah. Mickey emptied out a box of coins that she had saved and went to spend the weekend at the home of a girlfriend. It was not until Saturday evening and after many anxious telephone calls that Hannah Hahn tracked down her wayward daughter. When she did, she was livid. “Come home right now!” she demanded. Mickey did. As she wrote many years later, “There was no reason not to go home. Mother was right about that. I had escaped. I’d had my wish.”15
That one fleeting taste of freedom was the balm needed to soothe Mickey’s restless spirit. After the experience of “running away,” she grew more amenable to her new life in Chicago. For one thing, Mickey was reassured to learn that her English teacher, Miss Peterson, “knew a thing or two about poetry.” For another, she discovered the joys of a downtown bookshop named Kroch’s, which had a wider selection than anything she had ever seen before. Then there were other appealing aspects of life in Chicago: the Art Institute, the lakeshore, the awesome architecture, and the reassuring sense that Chicago was not some sleepy provincial backwater, but rather a place where important things were happening. “Little by little I gave in,” Mickey wrote in Kissing Cousins. “Even if Rose hadn’t come back home and met and married Mitchell Dawson, I would have got used to Chicago. Mitchell only speeded it up.”16
When Rose Hahn returned home from the East after studying to be a social worker, she found work in north Chicago. Mickey could not help but notice that Rose and Hannah now quarreled more than ever. Both were headstrong, opinionated women. None of that mattered to Mickey. What was important was that her favorite sister had returned. Her mere presence was reassuring and soothing.
As Rose began to look up old friends from her university days, a steady stream of gentlemen callers appeared at the door of the Hahns’ apartment. One of them was a thirty-year-old lawyer named Mitchell Dawson. What Mickey remembered most about him was his red hair and soft-spoken manner.
Born in Chicago on May 13, 1890, Mitchell was the third of the four sons of Eva (Manierre) and George Dawson. Mitchell’s eldest brother, George Jr., had drowned at age seventeen, and his younger brother, Lovell, died in his early twenties of spinal meningitis. The two surviving Dawson boys achieved distinction in their chosen fields; Mitchell’s older brother Manierre became a painter of some renown, and Mitchell became an attorney. He earned his B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1911 and a law degree two years later. He then went to work in his grandfather’s thriving law office where he earned a comfortable living. But Mitchell had other ambitions. In his spare time he wrote poetry and prose for various literary journals.
Mitchell Dawson was also an avid reader. He brought the Hahns the latest books by popular American authors; Mickey adored him for it. She liked him, too, for his reaction on the day when he found her reading a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. If Mitchell was surprised to find Mickey reading such difficult material, he did not show it. Nor did he laugh, as many adults might have. He asked Mickey if the book was “a good translation.” Then he recommended that she look at Schopenhauer as an introduction to Nietzsche. “So I trotted downtown and bought Schopenhauer,” Mickey recalled. “It was intoxicating being treated as an equal by such a man, and the delightful sensation was repeated over and over because he and Rose took to including me in their dates.”17
Mickey and Mitchell became fast friends. It was not long before she was asking him to read what she was writing. He was eager to do so, for he had sensed her talent. “I once wrote a poem that went, ‘People who can say things make me sick,’” Mickey remembered. “[Mitchell] read it and said, ‘Well me too, and you’re one of them!’”18
Mitchell and Rose encouraged Mickey’s literary dreams. They took her to plays, concerts, and poetry readings. They also let her come along on visits with Mitchell’s friends in the Chicago literary community. These friends included poets Marion Strobel, Glenway Wescott, and future Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sandburg, who was in the early 1920s the unofficial poet laureate of the American Midwest. Like many people who met Sandburg, Mickey was mesmerized.
Beetle-browed, with unruly thatches of white hair that hung down over his ears and collar, Sandburg was his own man. He usually wore a battered old baseball cap from his days as a semi-professional ballplayer. On his feet were a pair of half-laced, stub-toed shoes that had been out of style since long before the turn of the century. When he socialized or attended poetry readings, Sandburg took along his banjo or guitar, which he loved to strum as he crooned the American folk songs that he collected.
Like many others who met him, Mickey was puzzled by Sandburg’s verse. “‘Hog butcher of the world,’ indeed,” she mused. “What a peculiar way to write poetry! But I liked it.”19 Mickey also liked the giddy sense of freedom she got from being around Mitchell and his literary friends. Her life in Chicago no longer seemed so unbearable.
In the spring of 1923, Helen returned home from New York. Her reappearance upset the routine the Hahns had settled into. Helen was a presence to be reckoned with. “Talented as she was at bowling over adults, our young men didn’t stand a chance. It was hell, but I would never admit that it was hell for me,” Mickey wrote. “I would say indignantly, ‘Dauph’s so young, it isn’t fair. A kid like that can’t possibly hold her own against an older woman like Helen.’”20
Helen had no shortage of gentleman callers, which provided her younger sisters with a couple of unexpected benefits. For one, it brought a steady stream of promising young men to the door. Mickey would remember two of them well. One was an aspiring young actor named Melvyn Hesselberg. He went on to achieve great things on Broadway and in Hollywood as a dapper leading man named Melvyn Douglas. Mickey sometimes dated his younger brother Lemarr, who was one of her high-school classmates at Senn.
The other was an energetic Chicago Daily News reporter named John Gunther. Big, fair-haired, and gregarious, he had been born in 1901 on Chicago’s north side. Gunther approached courting with the same exuberance with which he approached all things in life. He announced that he planned to marry Helen. Although they dated seriously for about a year, she had already decided she had no interest in becoming his wife. In the fall of 1924, Helen broke the news. Gunther responded by running away to Europe. He was intent on becoming a famous foreign correspondent and then returning to claim Helen’s hand. It was not to be; Helen was already married by 1936, when Gunther wrote an international best-seller entitled Inside Europe. That book, the first popular look at the European dictators who were edging the world toward war, became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. The term “inside” subsequently became a part of the world’s lexicon, and Gunther went on to write a series of “Inside” books. In the process, he earned what a writer for The New Yorker once described as an exalted place alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh, “one of the half dozen or so international celebrities of the day.”21
Dauphine Hahn remembered how Gunther continued to call on the family whenever he was in Chicago. One New Year’s Eve he came by, and finding neither Helen nor Mickey at home, he invited Hannah out for a drink. “Daddy had been resting, and he came and asked me, ‘Where is your mother?’” Dauphine recalled. “I told him John Gunther had come by and they’d gone out for a while. He looked at me and said, ‘Let me hang on to you, baby, or he’ll take you, too.’”22