Throughout his life, John Marquand liked to make the point that much of his childhood and young manhood had been hard and poor. A young man’s struggle, against overwhelming odds, to achieve social and career success is a recurring theme in his books. Marquand was an exceptionally frugal, even tightfisted, man who counted pennies and appeared to hate to spend money, which was odd since he had an obvious taste for luxury and the trappings of wealth. New Englanders are traditionally thrifty, but Marquand’s preoccupation with thrift and spending was almost neurotic—if, of course, one was to take him seriously. He blamed his attitudes on early poverty. “My father’s greatest talent seemed to be a talent for losing money,” he would remind his friends. “When he finally lost it all, there was no more money for anything.”
Outwardly, at least, money obsessed Marquand. He claimed to disapprove of tipping and, when he was required to tip, he did so in miserly fashion. He once had a violent scene with a woman he loved over an air-mail stamp. To keep himself from spending money he adopted the practice, like that of royalty, of carrying no money on his person. As a result, he was a slight annoyance to his friends, who were forever having to make him small loans.
He would arrive from New York for a visit with the Gardiner H. Fiskes of Boston, and he would then have to borrow money from Gardi Fiske for the train fare home. He was forever having to mail the tiny sums back to Gardi—once it was a dollar that Gardi had advanced him for a guppy aquarium that had caught his eye. One evening during those years which he liked to refer to as “The Adelaide Period,” and those were years when both Marquands had plenty of money, he and Adelaide were returning from a costume party on Long Island where they had gone dressed as Bedouins, and neither of them had enough money to pay the toll at the Triborough Bridge. It took some persuasion to get the Bedouins through the gate without paying.
When Marquand traveled, he tried to arrange, wherever possible, to stay with friends, thus avoiding hotel bills. When forced to stay in hotels, he indulged in a variety of petty economies. He would go down in the morning to the hotel newsstand to buy a newspaper because, he pointed out, it cost a dime more to have it delivered to the room.
At the same time, he was able to laugh at the excesses of Yankee stinginess that he observed around him. He liked to tell the story of the Back Bay couple he had watched splitting a stick of chewing gum, the wife saying to her husband, “Save the wrapper. We might find a use for it.” Yet he himself could behave in a way that was every bit as penurious. For several years he and Adelaide owned a winter house at Hobe Sound in Florida, and one chilly afternoon his house guests—the Cedric Gibbonses and Philip Barry—suggested that a fire in the fireplace might be in order. Marquand muttered that firewood was “too expensive” and said that a perfectly acceptable fire could be built using coconuts picked up on the beach. An appropriate number of coconuts was gathered, the fire was lit, and a few minutes later coconuts were exploding noisily and messily all around the room.
Marquand’s divorce settlement with Christina, his first wife, had been acrimonious and ungenerous, and still he complained that Christina had “milked” much more out of him than was her due. After the divorce, when Marquand had moved down to New York to live, he suspected Christina of “shouting around Boston” that he had ill-used her financially. In all, he explained, Christina had extracted from him some $8,400 for alimony and support; at the same time, his father had come to him for another $1,000 to cover the latter’s gambling debts. He felt, he told the Fiskes, almost as poor as when he had first embarked on his writing career.
It was the mid-Depression year of 1936, and he had actually earned over $57,000. The year before he had earned $45,000, and the year before that $49,000. Still, in 1936, he complained of having paid out $15,000 altogether for the two children. That year he also bought and started to remodel a cozy farmhouse at the edge of a salt marsh on Kent’s Island outside Newburyport, even though he bemoaned the fact that the remodeling seemed to be costing him more than twice the amount of the highest estimate. He would smite his forehead and shake his head in mock fury and dismay at the duplicity of women, the extravagances of children, and the cupidity of carpenters, all of whom had helped create what he claimed was his financial plight.
Marquand could work himself up into rages in his mind, just as he could on his feet in the center of a room with an audience of friends. You could tell when one of his explosions was building up inside him because he would sit very still, staring purposefully into space, his lower jaw working slightly and his face reddening. It was always a surprise when he got to the point of blurting out what was angering him, but as often as not the subject had something to do with money. Philip Hamburger, who profiled John Marquand for The New Yorker, spent many hours observing and interviewing him and learned to recognize when one of these inner volcanoes was building up to the point of eruption. Still, Hamburger was completely taken off guard one afternoon in Newburyport when, riding with Marquand in his car, the author abruptly slammed on his brakes, drew the car to a jolting halt in the middle of a country road, and, banging his fist against the steering wheel, cried out, “And God damn it! My wife’s sister is Mrs. John D. Rockefeller the Third!”
John Marquand would perhaps have preferred to have been born John D. Rockefeller III, or so he suggested, and it was the sole fault of his “papa” that he was not—or, again, so he said. Marquand, after all, was a writer of fiction who could view himself as a character in his own fiction. To say that he lied about his past would be unfair, since when has truth had all that much to do with fiction? But, just as he did with his present circumstances and the people around him, he created for himself a semifictive past, turning it into drama, into the stuff of art and dreams and the imagination, removing it in the process from the stuff of life. And in the story as he told it, the villain was most often his father, Philip Marquand.