Madeleine, circa 1944
Madeleine turned in her revision of The Small Rain in the fall of 1944 and joined the touring company of The Cherry Orchard. She was still in charge of Touché, and still an understudy. Since the Broadway run of The Cherry Orchard had been a box-office disappointment, the casting had been rethought and an actor named Hugh Franklin was now playing the role of Trofimov. He was tall and slim, and Madeleine was startled by his bright blue eyes. However, in her experience, men who got leading roles tended toward arrogance, so she assumed that she and Hugh were not going to be friends.
Hugh Hale Franklin, circa 1944
It turned out, though, that she was enchanted by him and he was equally enchanted by her. They soon found they had much in common. Both struggled with feeling like outsiders, both felt uncomfortable with the sometimes frantic social life of the theater crowd, and both loved Tchaikovsky—in particular his ballet Swan Lake—and they would use the music as a private signal between themselves.
But in many ways they were also opposites. Although Madeleine strove for emotional equilibrium, more often than not she was unable to maintain a stoic façade. Subject to moods and tempers, she was impulsive, sensitive, and demonstrative. Hugh kept a cool head during arguments and was much more reserved, private, and relaxed. Their life experiences were completely different, too. Hugh had grown up in Oklahoma with devout Baptist parents—no dancing, drinking, or cards—but he had studied at Northwestern University, north of Chicago, and had street smarts. Madeleine had a more cosmopolitan upbringing—with her childhood in New York, her early adolescence in France and Switzerland—and was going to be a published writer, but she was also naïve and gullible.
Sensing that Madeleine had no idea what life was like in places outside her own experience, Hugh teased her with stories about how the streets of Tulsa had only recently been paved, and how his mother only wore shoes when she went to church on Sundays. Madeleine’s willingness to believe such things became a standing joke between them.
However, they had both chosen lives other than the ones expected of them (for Hugh’s Baptist family, acting was quite scandalous), and both had grown up in families whose fortunes had changed drastically during the Great Depression following the stock market crash in 1929.
The theater company was watching their romance closely, perhaps too closely. Hugh, a very private person, was embarrassed by his fellow actors’ scrutiny. He distanced himself from Madeleine and stopped sitting next to her on the train. Madeleine was hurt, but she didn’t say anything. When Hugh gave her a pair of socks at Christmas, when the tour was over, instead of something more romantic, her hurt expanded into wounded pride, and she believed the relationship was over. As she had done with other disappointments, she tried to hide her pain from the world, channeling it instead into her writing and taking a break from Miss LeG and the theater company.
“A warm, lovely story.” —Ruth Blodgett, Book-of-the-Month Club News
The Small Rain was published in January 1945. Reviews were good; most of the reviewers gave lots of encouragement to her as a young writer who had published her first novel.
When Madeleine visited her mother in Jacksonville that winter, she was finally able to look at her relatives with pride, confident in the choices she had made.
Back in New York, Madeleine moved into a smaller apartment by herself on West Tenth Street, living alone for the first time.
In April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died. Madeleine knew that Hugh was a great admirer of the president, and impulsively she called him. They spoke, but the conversation didn’t lead anywhere, and she was again disappointed.
She threw herself back into her work, taking the play she had worked so hard on for Miss LeG, Ilse, and turning it into a novel with the same title (though now spelled as Ilsa). Set in Jacksonville, the story was a very uncomplimentary portrait of the South in the first half of the twentieth century, some of it based on Madeleine’s own experiences with her extended family there. She submitted it to Vanguard, and it was accepted for publication.
That fall, shortly after the end of World War II, Hugh called. He was in town between shows—would she like to have dinner? Yes, she would. They saw a great deal of each other over the next few months, but they kept it private. Not even Mado, who visited for Madeleine’s twenty-seventh birthday in November, was aware of how serious the two were.
Hugh proposed to Madeleine, with Swan Lake playing in the background, a few days after her birthday.
Very softly last night Hugh said the first two lines of that lovely poem of Conrad Aiken’s.
[Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.]
We are going to be married.
I would like to be able to write about this but somehow there aren’t any words.
When her mother called to say she had arrived back home safely, Madeleine casually broke the news of her engagement. Hugh also telephoned his parents and then sent them a letter.
December 4, 1945
Dear Mother and Dad,
I should have written all this before telephoning you so it wouldn’t have been such a great shock, but I must say it sounded like less of a shock to you than I thought it would. But I wanted you to know as soon as possible and I also wanted you to mail the ring right away so Madeleine could have it by Sunday. Funny about the ring—when I told her that you had a ring, Mother, that you had always said would be mine when I found the right girl, she said “Well, I want an old-fashioned one with a diamond held up on prongs” and I told her that was exactly what this one was as I remembered it.
I can assure you you’ll love Madeleine as much as I do. She’s not a Miss America by any means but she has more personality than any Miss America ever had. If you have found a copy of The Small Rain you’ll see a picture of her on the cover. She’s quite tall—I think almost 5'9'' and has always been self conscious of it—she needn’t be now. She’s always worn flat heels but is now wearing high ones! She’s not so much blond as light haired, has a high forehead which she camouflages with bangs. Her eyesight is not good but she hates to wear her glasses, consequently can’t see very well. I think that’s why she picked me.
Hugh was about to go on tour with A Joyous Season, and Madeleine auditioned for an understudy part. “Don’t give it to her on my account,” Hugh told the producer. Madeleine, capable of getting the job on her own merits, was hired.
Hugh and Madeleine, January 26, 1946, at Saint Chrysostom’s Church in Chicago
Their engagement was brief, only eight weeks, and they married on January 26, 1946, in Chicago.
No family were able to come on such short notice, but a friend from the company stood up for them in church. When the theater tour was over, Hugh moved in with Madeleine in the apartment on West Tenth Street.