True to her word, Mickey began graduate studies at Columbia University in New York in January of 1928. Her older sister Helen was also in town, working as the crossword puzzle editor at the Herald Tribune. She was living with her husband Dwight Haven in an apartment in the suburb of Bronxville. Mickey declined to stay with the Havens and instead rented a hotel room near Times Square.
To help earn her keep, she taught geology two mornings per week at Hunter College for Women. The $500 Mickey earned for the term was enough to pay her bills. What’s more, the experience proved exhilarating, for she now found herself facing a classroom full of young women her own age. “It was a funny feeling to look at them from behind a desk—the bright ones, and the hopelessly dumb ones, and the ones that try to make an impression,” she told her mother. “The first thing they want, of course, was a set definition that they could write in their books and memorize. I keep expecting them to put apples on the desk.”1
When she was not teaching or attending classes at Columbia, Mickey delighted in the adventures of everyday life in the Big Apple. By 1928, New York had eclipsed London as the world’s intellectual and financial epicenter. It was a city bursting at the seams with possibilities, and Mickey was giddy with the excitement of it all. “I have walked around Times Square thousands of times, and lost myself on the subway and seen the Village and the Palace, and the [Broadway play] Connecticut Yankee … oh, and written a sophisticated poem,” she told Hannah.2
At night, Mickey sometimes joined her sister and the throngs of other white revelers who took the “A” train uptown to Harlem. Here they partook of the great black cultural awakening that was under way there. “Harlemania” was sweeping the city; as entertainer Jimmy Durante put it, “You sort of go primitive up there.” Like many other whites, Mickey toured the Jim Crow speakeasies along 133rd Street’s “Jungle Alley.” She danced the Charleston at the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Small’s Paradise. She also attended several of the celebrated mixed-race parties at the apartment of Carl Van Vechten, whom she remembered from his visits to Taos. Van Vechten, a friend of Herbert’s, was one of the first influential white literary critics to hail what was occurring in Harlem as a great American cultural “happening.” Mickey met prominent black entertainers, writers, and artists at Van Vechten’s parties. Among them were the opera singer Taylor Gordon, cabaret crooner Jimmie Daniels, an Ebony magazine editor named Alan Morrison, whom she dated briefly, and writer Walter White, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and author of The Fire in the Flint, one of the first books about the Harlem Renaissance. It was White who introduced Mickey to the legendary W. C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues.” Handy, nearly blind, earned his living as a composer and music publisher. He gave Mickey an autographed copy of a caricature of himself by the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias; the picture became one of her prized possessions. Handy sometimes sang for Mickey, treating her to a new verse he had written for “St. Louis Blues,” one of his most popular tunes. “Let me be your little dawg till your big dawg come (repeat),” the song went. “When your big dawg come, tell him what your little dog done.”
Despite the presence in New York of some old friends, among them Wisconsin drinking buddy Donald Hanson and Chicago-born Melvyn Douglas, who was making a name for himself as a Broadway actor, it was apparent to Mickey that life on the streets of Manhattan could be as mundane and difficult as it was anywhere else. For one thing, she found the cool, damp winter weather disagreed with her. Mickey constantly complained of a sore throat and other assorted health ailments. “It’s the climate,” she told Hannah. “Everybody always has a cold … just like St. Louis. They keep their houses so hot, it’s no wonder. I feel awfully crabby.”3
An even more significant concern was Mickey’s precarious financial situation. When classes ended at Columbia in June, so did Mickey’s job at Hunter College. What she desperately craved—and at the same time dreaded—was the very thing thousands of other young people who flocked to New York wanted: a career. She had no idea what she wanted to do. All she knew for sure was that she was terrified by the prospect of another mind-numbing, life-sapping office job. “There was [Manhattan] waiting for me,” Mickey wrote. “I had only just come and I was a little afraid.… I made a rule never to eat lunch twice in succession at the same place.”4
She applied unsuccessfully for work at the Museum of Natural History, hoping to put her knowledge of geology to good use there. Other applications also proved fruitless. “My sense of humor only works in flashes these days, and I’ve developed the most sickening tendency to tears—any time, any place,” Mickey confided in a letter to Rose and Mitchell back home in Chicago.5
Despite her dark mood, she maintained an active social life. Helen’s presence in New York provided Mickey with a ready-made social circle. She fell in with a crowd of artists, writers, editors, and photographers. Among them was a droll twenty-nine-year-old St. Louis native named David (Davey) Loth. Mickey remembered him visiting the Hahns’ house in St. Louis with one of Mickey’s cousins. “[Davey] impressed me when he was sitting there once,” Mickey says. “Dorothy came in and gave a whoop about something, ‘I’m a new woman! I’m a new woman!’ she yelled. Davey said, ‘Thank God!’ That’s when I first noticed him.”6
After graduating from the University of Missouri Journalism School in 1920, Davey found work as a reporter at the New York World. His dream, he informed Mickey, was to become an author. With that in mind he was working on his first book, a biography of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.7 Over the course of the next six decades, Davey Loth fulfilled his literary dreams, writing or coauthoring nearly fifty books, most notably a history of graft in America and a 1949 analysis of the groundbreaking report by Kinsey on human sexuality.
Davey was short and pudgy, with eyes shaded by thick spectacles. Mickey found him agreeable company, and they began spending a lot of time together. As a result, Mickey finally decided to end her long-distance relationship with Noel Steam once and for all. That phase of her life was over; her priorities had changed. Spending time with Davey and the other friends in New York spurred Mickey to take her own writing more seriously. Her lack of purpose had always gotten in the way whenever she had tried to do so in the past. Now, for the first time, Mickey began to consider the prospect of harnessing her creative urges for a far more pragmatic reason—putting food on the table.
She sought encouragement from one of Helen’s Herald Tribune workmates, a heavyset, personable reporter named Herbert Asbury. After reading some of her poems and articles, he urged Mickey to try her hand at freelance journalism. The idea was intriguing. After all, being paid to write, a skill that came to her so naturally, was appealing. Mickey decided to give it a try.
Her first opportunity came the day Davey asked her to cover for him on a story assignment. The task was simple: write a short feature article about a popular singer named Helen Morgan. The prospect of being paid to meet Morgan, one of the stars of the hit Broadway musical Show Boat, was too good to resist. “With Davey’s invaluable aid,” Mickey sold the resulting article to the Sunday World.8 The $25 she was paid for her “professional debut” was as much as she earned in a week of teaching at Hunter College. Furthermore, the editor who bought the article encouraged Mickey to submit others. “It came at just the right time,” she told Hannah. “I was all worked up about what a useless bum I turned out to be, and I was already [sic] to accept that gracefully. I had a mental picture of myself as a picturesque and beautiful beachcomber dying all over Honolulu of a combination of hashish and theosophy.”9
Despite her success, Mickey remained doubtful that she could earn a living with her writing. She thus made plans to return to Santa Fe in the summer of 1928 to work once again as a Harvey Girl. Doing so would also provide an opportunity for some time away from New York, where life had taken an unhappy turn when Helen and her husband Dwight split up. Mickey advised her sister that while it was “none of my business,” Helen should not return to him; he was an alcoholic who got mean when he drank.
Mickey had finalized her travel plans and would have returned to New Mexico to live had it not been for one of her reporter friends, who dampened her enthusiasm when she called him to say good-bye. “What would I do out there [in New Mexico] anyway but play around with a lot of fairies [homosexuals] and wish I was back?” Mickey told Hannah that her friend had demanded. “Whenever things seemed to be breaking right, I ran away, and so forth. He talked very loud. I finally decided I needn’t go just yet, after all. So I spent all day yesterday writing some things which I will now attempt to market. Some of them are good. I’m doing a book, which Herbert Asbury thinks might be good.”10
Asbury, one of New York’s fastest and best newspaper rewrite men, was as deft in his courting as he was with his typewriter. Following Helen’s divorce in late 1928, he convinced her to marry him. “Helen liked to be reassured,” Mickey explained with a knowing smile.11
Mickey recalled that when Helen and Herbert decided to get married, Herbert insisted Mickey accompany them everywhere they went in New York. This was to avoid the possibility that Helen’s estranged husband would name Herbert as a party in the divorce proceedings. One day Mickey, Helen, and Herbert were strolling along the street arm in arm when they encountered playwright Carl Van Doren. “I went away for a bit,” Van Doren laughed, “and came back to find my old friend Herbert married to not one, but two beautiful young women!”12
Mickey later accompanied Helen and Herbert when they traveled to Chicago to finalize Helen’s divorce. Hannah Hahn met her daughters and their new male friend at the train station. As they were walking out to the car, Hannah whispered in Mickey’s ear, “Yes, but whose is he?”13
Mickey acted as Helen’s witness in the divorce hearing, testifying how she had seen bruises Helen suffered at the hands of her estranged husband. “A lie,” Mickey later admitted, “but that’s how people got divorces in Chicago.”14 Committing perjury did not trouble her. Mickey had not seen Helen’s bruises with her own eyes, but she accepted her sister’s word that Dwight had beaten her. Besides, Mickey was keen to have Helen marry Herbert; she was fond of him and admired his writing. Herbert, like Mitchell Dawson before him, grasped that Mickey was an enormous raw literary talent. Mickey welcomed Herbert’s words of praise, for he was someone to whom she could relate. Throughout his life he displayed the same independence of mind and irreverence that fueled Mickey’s own passions. Here was a man who marched to his own beat.
Herbert Asbury burst onto the American literary scene in 1926, when a short story he wrote for H. L. Mencken’s magazine American Mercury was banned in Boston after a complaint by the moralists of the Watch and Ward Society. “Hat Rack” told the story of a small-town prostitute who serviced her Protestant clients in the local Roman Catholic cemetery. When Mencken went to Boston and sold a copy of the magazine with the offending story, he was promptly arrested. When sales of that issue of the American Mercury soared, the author of the controversial story became an instant celebrity.
Asbury shocked America again with a series of books on criminal gangs, murders, bootlegging, and prostitution. His best-known book was The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld,15 which he wrote in 1933. Two years later, director Howard Hawks and screenwriters Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, both of whom had worked alongside Asbury in the newspaper business, used the book as the basis for a movie starring the young Edward G. Robinson, one of Hollywood’s hottest new stars.
Taking her cue from Herbert’s irreverence, Mickey began writing a satirical “how-to” handbook on the principles and practices of the art of seduction. The book consisted of a series of nineteen seduction scenarios, each one described and footnoted as a scientific experiment. “The idea actually came from Herbert,” she explained. “I dropped by Helen’s office one day to pick her up for lunch, and he happened to overhear me talking about some of the boys I’d been dating. ‘Why complain about them?’ Herbert asked. ‘Write about them!’” Mickey realized he was right. She put her technical education to use, formulating a set of scientific rules and regulations. “You see, I have four sisters, and we used to talk about [such] things,” Mickey later told a newspaper reporter who asked her about the genesis of the book. “We discovered that the same methods had been practiced on us time and time again. The man who’s successful with women is the one who can but doesn’t—you know what I mean. The least successful is the fellow who pretends to be so wicked. The most primitive is the cave man who uses brute force.”16
Mickey’s book also included a bibliography, albeit one with a difference. She invented the names of some of her “sources.” Others were actual books with such intriguing titles as An Elementary Treatise on Curve Tracing and How to Get a Good Position. While the humor was at times crude, even sophomoric, Mickey’s choice of subject matter had been shrewdly calculated. In an era long before television talk shows and supermarket tabloids, seduction was not a subject that was commonly addressed in public, let alone probed or made light of—especially not by a woman. Seduction was one of those things about which every adult thought, yet that propriety dictated no one should discuss in mixed company. Satirizing the masculine libido was the literary equivalent of a tweak of the nose—or some other appendage of the male anatomy. Mickey knew this; she also knew her book would attract lots of media attention.17
She spent the next several months working on the manuscript, portions of which Mitchell and Herbert read and critiqued. The writing began in New York and continued that summer in New Mexico, where she went for a holiday with Harry Block, a boyfriend who worked as an editor with Bobbs-Merrill, and with Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias and his girlfriend Rose Rolando. The foursome spent a memorable August in Taos, renting novelist D. H. Lawrence’s house. Unfortunately, the trip ended in acrimony when Rose, “a fiery Hispanic,” became convinced Mickey was trying to “bewitch” Miguel. “Honest, I wasn’t,” she said. “I just listened to him talk. I was surprised by all the fuss.”18
Upon her return to New York in September, Mickey resumed her relationship with Davey Loth. She moved in with him in his apartment on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village. The arrangement was to save money, not because they were romantically involved.19 If Mickey told her parents about her new accommodations, it is not evident from her correspondence; the issue was not even raised. That was just as well, for Mickey soon realized that dating Davey was preferable to living with him. However, she agreed to go along when he offered to pay her way to Italy if she would help with research for his biography of the Brownings. Mickey had no job and had finished work on her own book. The editors at Brewer Publishing in New York were considering the manuscript on October 3, 1928, the very day that she and Davey sailed for Europe aboard an Italian freighter.
Their ship reached Lisbon the evening of October 10. The next day at about noon, eight days out of New York, the vessel passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the placid blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Mickey was fascinated to discover that just by walking from one side of the ship to the other she could view two continents—Europe and Africa. To the port side, Spain looked arid and mountainous, not much different from the New Mexico landscape around Taos. On the starboard side, the African coastline loomed “dark and bumpy,” and Mickey strained her eyes looking for the jungles. Common sense told her that they were “too far away” to be seen with the naked eye.20 For a few minutes, at least, that fleeting glimpse of Africa revived in Mickey’s mind the crazy plans she and Dorothy Raper had devised to visit Lake Kivu in central Africa.
That expedition was forgotten anew when the ship put in at the Adriatic seaport of Trieste the morning of October 17. From there, Mickey and Davey took the train west to Venice, traveling second class as a prelude to eventually moving into the even more frugal third-class carriages. So exhausted from the journey was Mickey that she fell asleep aboard the train and awoke to find an Italian lady staring at the inside of her mouth.
Mickey and Davey paused for four days in Venice, behaving like typical tourists. They rode in a gondola, and they gawked when they encountered Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini on the street. Despite the sights and the beauties of Venice, relations between Mickey and Davey continued to deteriorate. Mickey later admitted, “I treated him badly—neglect and worse.” She reported in a letter to her mother how she “was always yipping” at Davey and had told him “to stop following [me] around.”21 To escape him, she rose early each morning and went for a long walk. The rest of the time, she closeted herself in the hotel to work on her novel. She did little research.
Although her own writing went much better after they settled into a small hotel in Florence, the city where Davey hoped to do most of his research on the Brownings, Mickey’s disposition did not improve. She complained about the cold and about chilblains, which made it painful for her to type. Mickey amused herself by visiting the Medici chapel and other tourist attractions or horseback riding with an English girl she had met. “I couldn’t get any boots in a hurry because they’re all made to order here. I bought puttees and high shoes. Now from the knees down I look like a Fascist,” Mickey said.22
In late November, she traveled solo to Paris to visit John Gunther. In March of 1927 on impulse he had married a twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker named Frances Powell Fineman. Mickey had Thanksgiving dinner with the Gunthers and with the wife of John’s boss, Paul Mowrer, head of the Chicago Daily News’s European service. Mrs. Mowrer invited Mickey and Frances to visit her, but when Frances fell ill, Mickey stayed in her hotel room and wrote. “John is in London, which is rather a relief,” she informed her mother, “for [Frances], too.”23
Having decided Paris was to her liking and being in dire need of money, Mickey found temporary work as a tourist guide. She made $100 that first week. It was enough to pay for a room where, as she put it, she “could read poetry aloud or stand on my head or anything else that might occur to me without my neighbors staring aghastily.”24 Before long, Davey had joined Mickey in Paris, and the pair spent a couple of relatively carefree weeks there. They hung out at the cafés frequented by American expatriates. Here they met several interesting people through the Gunthers. One of them was the English writer Rebecca West, with whom John Gunther had had an affair soon after his 1924 arrival in London. Mickey had read West’s book The Judge (1922) and wrote to John telling him how much she enjoyed it. When John showed the letter to West, she told him, “If that young woman ever comes to London, have her look me up.” West was fascinated by Americans, and despite their thirteen-year age difference—Rebecca was thirty-six and Mickey just twenty-three—the two women became friends.
Rebecca, a journalist-turned-author, had made a name for herself with her novels and literary criticism. Her stormy relationship with H.G. Wells, at that time one of the world’s best-known writers, had been the talk of London’s literary salons. Being an outspoken feminist, Rebecca cared little what the gossips said. She encouraged Mickey, too, to think for herself.
Mickey was flattered to receive Rebecca’s attention and was in awe of the older woman’s wit, although she was taken aback by the verbal cruelties that Rebecca and her sixteen-year-old son Anthony hurled at each other—and at anyone else who incurred their scorn. Mickey and Rebecca developed a fondness for one another that was sustained by mail and by periodic visits. In the late 1940s, when both were living in England, they began having lunch regularly. Rebecca confided in Mickey the details of her bitter family problems. Outwardly, Rebecca was a formidable personality; in reality she was a vulnerable, lonely woman. A chronic insomniac, her mind raced in the wee hours of the night. As she grew older, Rebecca filled those long, empty hours by pouring out her soul in the rambling letters she wrote to Mickey and other friends. On one occasion, Rebecca implored Mickey, “For goodness sake burn this letter. I have an awful feeling that my epistolary sins will find me out.”25 Mickey and Rebecca remained close friends until Rebecca’s death in 1983.
Mickey bid adieu to Paris and her friends there on December 17, 1928. She and Davey sailed from Italy on Christmas Eve aboard a French ship bound for Southampton, England. From there, they traveled on to New York aboard the RMS Ausonia. Mickey was relieved to be returning home after three months abroad. She was tired, homesick, and broke. Even a few days’ stopover in the North African city of Tunis was of little interest to her. “This town is full of red caps and palm trees and dirty feet,” she wrote Hannah.26
Any joy that Mickey felt at heading back to New York was dulled by a rough midwinter crossing of the North Atlantic in spartan steerage accommodations. What’s more, the prospects of being unemployed and penniless again did not inspire optimism. Nor did the uncertainties in her personal life. By the time the Ausonia sailed into New York Harbor on the morning of January 24, 1929, Mickey’s mood matched the cool, gray weather. It was not a happy homecoming.