Early in 1938, George Stevens, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, approached Conney Fiske to ask her if she would like to write an informal profile of her friend, John Marquand. Conney was delighted with the idea. She was not, of course, a professional writer. Had she been one, she would doubtless not have taken the assignment, for most professional writers are reluctant to write about their friends; candor about a friend is an almost certain means of losing him. But Conney agreed and wrote a piece that was warmhearted, feminine—and somewhat indiscreet. Carl Brandt was given the story in manuscript, read it, and was furious.
To this day, Conney Fiske feels that the reason Carl disliked her story was that she was not a famous or a “name” writer. But Carl’s reasons were actually somewhat different. Conney felt—with a certain amount of justification—that she had been among those people who had been influential in guiding John away from writing his strictly commercial romance and spy fiction and had encouraged his turning to novels of satire and social comment. As a result, in her article, Conney Fiske tended to dismiss John’s earlier popular fiction as not “serious” and as having been written mostly with tongue in cheek. She made the point—which she liked to believe was true—that John had written for the mass magazine and motion picture market only as a means to earn freedom to do his important literary work. No one was quicker than Carl Brandt to realize how professionally damaging to John such implications might be. John, after all, was still writing fiction for the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping. In between The Late George Apley and Wickford Point he had brought out two more Mr. Moto novels—Think Fast, Mr. Moto and Mr. Moto Is So Sorry—both of which had been serialized in the Post and sold to the movies. How would Marquand’s magazine editors and motion picture producers enjoy learning that one of their most popular and productive writers was turning out work for them about which he was not even halfway serious?
Conney also implied that John wrote only under a compulsion to make money. Again, there was a certain amount of truth in this—John had an obsession about money and about the rich—but Carl felt that to state this in a public way could do nothing but harm to John’s career, in which Carl had a professional stake. In a long and heated letter to George Stevens, Carl wrote:
No artist that I know is more conscientious or capable than Mr. Marquand is with any work of his that goes in front of the public. To say that he has written pot boiler stuff through the years only to write the Apley or his new books, I for one, and I have been pretty close to him, know not to be the truth. He has taken pride, and rightly so, in the work that he has done for magazines. Out of that work there are things which can stand the test of time to the same extent as GEORGE APLEY or the forthcoming book. To say that he writes only for money is … decidedly untrue. Despite the fact that he, like many another writer, says he would never write another line except for the money in it, he is actively uncomfortable if he does not get an opportunity to do his work. This is particularly true after a long trip or a real vacation.
Perhaps—to Carl—the most distressing aspect of Conney’s piece was that it came right out and stated that the characters in Wickford Point were based on John’s own colorful collection of aunts and cousins at Curzon’s Mill. This fact was something that John had attempted to glide over as gracefully as possible; now it was to be starkly in print. Conney’s article not only left the impression that John wrote autobiographical fiction but also implied that John wrote only about New England. After Apley and Wickford Point—and with a third New England novel already in the planning stages—John’s publishers were already beginning to drop strong hints that he might profit by broadening his canvas somewhat and transporting his central characters beyond a fifty-mile radius of Boston. In his letter to George Stevens, Carl Brandt reminded him that John had written a clutch of Civil War stories and that he had extensively used China as a background, as well as Hawaii, the South Seas, and France during World War I. He had also written a series of short stories with horses and horse racing as subject matter.
In his letter to Stevens, Carl begged the editor to cancel or postpone publication of the article and suggested that another writer—“let us say, Quincy Howe”—be substituted. Carl added, “I am quite aware that I am arrogating to myself the privilege of interfering with your editorial judgment. I ask your forgiveness of this simply on the grounds that John is my oldest friend and it hurts like the devil to see a public presentation of him which I know will not do him justice.” Stevens, however, declined Carl’s request, and the article was published with all the material in it to which Carl objected, including the sentence that described him as “a versatile and prolific writer of fiction for the popular magazines … which has also given him the time to devote to more serious work.”
What Conney caught very well was John’s habit of self-dramatization. He enjoyed crises, and, to hear him tell it, his life consisted of nothing but narrow escapes and near disasters. Something terrible was always happening, or had just taken place, and urgent help from friends was always required. “According to himself,” Conney wrote, “he has always found it extremely hard to cope with the ordinary mechanics of living. He has no ability to catch trains, he usually has no money in his pocket, his sheep on his farm in Newburyport have developed some strange and sinister disease, he has recently been mistaken for a forger of travelers’ checks at Abercrombie & Fitch, and has escaped being thrown in jail by the narrowest of margins. He engages in various sports earnestly but awkwardly, and although he has taken lessons from professionals in golf and tennis, he is always prepared for failure.” She described him at Kent’s Island as leading the life of “a rather distracted country gentleman, followed by dogs who do not obey him very well,” but pointed out that “his apparent ineffectiveness disguises a keen appreciation of fundamentals. He can sum up any situation or personal equation with incisiveness, with tenderness, and always with a strong flavor of that disturbingly amusing cynicism that is Yankee humor.”
John rather liked Conney’s article and tended to dismiss Carl’s objections to it. But it continued to rankle with Carl. It created a rift between Carl Brandt and Conney Fiske that never completely disappeared. It was fortunate they lived in different cities, and that John could continue his friendship with both people. In clashes of this sort, John usually came out the winner, or at least the nonloser. It was one of a series of collisions that would result, directly or indirectly, from the two kinds of fiction that he had taken it upon himself to write.
He had also, since the publication of The Late George Apley and the Pulitzer Prize—both of which roughly coincided with his marriage to Adelaide—become excessively preoccupied with the sales figures and royalty statements for his books. The Late George Apley had sold something over 50,000 copies in the hard-cover edition. Wickford Point appeared not to be doing quite as well, largely due to the highly unstable condition of the book market in those darkening prewar days of 1939. On April 30 of that year, Wickford Point reached the number-one position on the New York Herald-Tribune’s list of fiction best sellers, but John’s editor, Alfred McIntyre, wrote to him to warn him against excessive optimism, saying, “I wish I could tell you that this meant lots of reorders, but the fact is that the jobbers and most of the larger booksellers have not yet sold out their initial orders.” The novel had been serialized before publication in the Saturday Evening Post, and—though the Post had presented only a condensed version—McIntyre speculated that prior circulation might have hurt the book’s hard-cover sale; readers who had read it in the Post were not buying the book.
This has long been an unanswered and probably unanswerable question in publishing. Book publishers tend to believe that previous serialization in a magazine reduces some of the impact of a book’s appearance. Magazine publishers argue that, on the contrary, publication in condensed form in a magazine merely whets the reader’s appetite for the full book and helps get the book talked about before it appears. There is evidence to support both arguments. Authors and their agents, of course, prefer to hope for the best of both worlds—prepublication sale of a book to a magazine, followed by a successful hard-cover sale. In his letter to John, McIntyre added, “We are still advertising it and still hoping for a long continuing sale, but it looks now as if our earlier views as to the likely sales … would not be realized.”
McIntyre’s less than hopeful tone put John in a dark and discouraged mood. Thanking McIntyre for publishing a book that appeared to be, as John saw it, “a financial flop,” John told McIntyre that Wickford Point’s career convinced him that he would never be able completely to break away from his slavery to the big-paying magazines and that, with his current financial obligations, it looked as though it would be a long time before he could afford to tackle another serious novel. Perhaps he could never afford to do so. Instead, he was immediately going to begin another of his Post serials. So much for the Great American Novel.
Sensing that his letter had seriously damaged John Marquand’s self-confidence, McIntyre dictated a second, gentler letter reassuring him. “Naturally you are discouraged by my letter, but a book that sells over 40,000 copies is not a ‘financial flop,’ and we haven’t given up hope that ‘Wickford Point’ will sell a good many thousand copies more. Whatever may happen to ‘Wickford Point,’ we haven’t really yet tested the fate of a serious novel by you on the basis of your ‘breaking away from the Post.’ We don’t know how many readers of the Post read ‘Wickford Point’ in its columns instead of in book form.”
Nor was there any way of possibly knowing. But McIntyre and a Little, Brown vice-president, Roger Scaife, came up with a promotion idea that was daring and—considering that Little, Brown had always been known as a traditional and conservative Boston firm—surprising. They placed a large newspaper advertisement for Wickford Point with a headline that read: TO ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU “I’M READING IT AS A SERIAL.” The copy went on, in effect, to attack the Saturday Evening Post’s serialization of the novel and to assure readers that there was much more to enjoy and discover in the finished book than in the hacked-up Post condensation. In publishing, Little, Brown’s ad created an immediate furor. Nothing like it had ever been done before.
The ad also drew an immediate and angry response from Stuart Rose of the Saturday Evening Post, who advised Alfred McIntyre that his advertising broadside was a serious attempt “to interfere with our business” and that the Post’s lawyers considered the ad “actionable.” Furthermore, Rose warned, if Little, Brown persisted with such tactics, the Post “will notify all authors and agents concerned that we are no longer interested in their manuscripts … there is no point in our paying large sums for literary material only to submit to deliberate public attack.” He added:
I am afraid that your whole strategy is based upon the fallacious idea that Post serialization will injure your hook sales. Were your premise sound there might be some point in what you are doing, but I think you’d find yourself in difficulties if you attempted to demonstrate that premise. Take, for example, Walter Edmonds’ DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK. This novel appeared in part in The Saturday Evening Post, yet as a book it sold four or five copies for every one of any previous novel by Walter Edmonds—and none of Edmonds’ previous novels were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post either in whole or in part. I could cite numerous more or less parallel cases.
Mr. Rose, in passing, took a swipe at John Marquand, saying that although the Post had not published all of Wickford Point, nonetheless “We, as editors, might easily assume the position that we published all of the manuscript that was, in our opinion, publishable.”
Little, Brown apologized for its ad, and Mr. Rose and others at the Post eventually simmered down. But it would remain a dilemma for Marquand—and for Carl Brandt as his agent—whether to accept a serialization offer, which might run to as much as $75,000 in those still-depressed days, or to refuse on the chance that the hard-cover book would earn that much and more as a result. For this reason as much as any other, John Marquand was continually badgering his publishers for sales figures. Each thousand copies more or less that each book sold became a matter of terrible importance. Biweekly and even weekly sales reports to the author were required, and in between there were harried telephone calls between John, wherever he happened to be, and Boston. He was also convinced that his having won the Pulitzer Prize for Apley should have had some impact on the sales of this book as well as his others. Actually, the awarding of literary prizes—unless they are surrounded by violent controversy—has never had much effect at the bookseller’s cash register. But Marquand felt otherwise. For a new edition of Apley that Little, Brown brought out in 1938, John wanted the words “Pulitzer Prize” placed on the book jacket in large boldface letters, but when he saw the result he was dissatisfied. He complained to Bernice Baumgarten that the book would certainly sell more copies if the words “Pulitzer Prize” were set in heavier type. What about a band diagonally across the jacket? Somewhat wearily, Miss Baumgarten passed along Marquand’s thoughts to Alfred McIntyre. But two weeks later Marquand was still unhappy with the jacket, and Miss Baumgarten wrote to McIntyre again, saying, “the Pulitzer Prize line on the bottom of the jacket does not stand out at all. Can we persuade you to put a two-inch band around the book, with Pulitzer Prize Winner in large letters on it? John seems very much concerned about this.”
Not long after the publication of Wickford Point, John and Adelaide’s first child, a daughter, was born to the somewhat middle-aged parents. Adelaide was thirty-seven, John forty-seven. They named the little girl Blanche Ferry Marquand, after her maternal grandmother, but since neither John or Adelaide cared much for the name Blanche, she was called by the pretty name “Ferry.”
At about this time, Adelaide became interested in the activities of that curious pre-World War II phenomenon known as the America First Committee. From its inception in the summer of 1940, America First had attracted a number of prominent American names, headed by General Robert E. Wood of Chicago, board chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and including in its membership such people as R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., General Hugh S. Johnson, Kathleen Norris, Chester Bowles, Norman Thomas, Henry Ford, Sr., Eddie Rickenbacker, Lillian Gish, and Edward L. Ryerson, Jr. America First was composed not only of pacifists, like Kathleen Norris, but also of outspoken isolationists such as General Wood, and the Committee had been created specifically to counteract the activities of William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which advocated coming to the aid of Britain in her struggle against Nazi Germany. The America First Committee was only too happy to welcome on its board Mrs. John P. Marquand, wife of the celebrated novelist. It was already a panel of imposing names. In April, 1941, America First had acquired none other than Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh.
Adelaide pitched into America First work with her customary vigor and enthusiasm. She pinned to her shoulder the little American flag that was the badge of America First and was quick to pick up the America First slogans and repeat them. “We can’t solve the age-old feuds of Europe” was a particular favorite, and she was once overheard to observe, “Some Americans are more American than others.” She took to signing all her letters, whether business or social, with the words, “Yours for better Government.” John was first amused with America First and Adelaide’s involvement, and then appalled.
One of the disturbing aspects of the America First Committee was the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in some of its members. An effort had been made to avoid any public confrontation with this issue when the Committee had placed—at General Wood’s insistence—Lessing J. Rosenwald, a prominent Chicago Jew and another director of Sears, Roebuck, on the executive committee. But when Henry Ford—who had led an anti-Semitic attack in his Dearborn Independent in the 1920s with the publication of the spurious document “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”—was announced on the committee in the same news release, the outcry among American Jewry was so great that Mr. Rosenwald was forced to resign in embarrassment. A huge rally for America First was arranged to be held at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1941, and at it the notorious Joe McWilliams, a Jew-baiting Christian Mobilizer, made a dramatic appearance. On the speakers’ dais were Colonel Lindbergh and, in a flowing white gown, Adelaide Marquand.
The bleakest moment for America First came on September 11, 1941, when Lindbergh appeared before an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, and declared, “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” These “war agitators,” he continued, “comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence.” He went on to deliver the only faintly veiled threat, “Instead of agitating for war the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.… Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” In the shocked reaction that followed, the Lindberghs found themselves cut off by a number of their oldest friends and admirers. But Adelaide Marquand announced that she heartily approved of everything Colonel Lindbergh had had to say. One night at a party Adelaide got into a violent and not altogether sober argument with some other guests over Lindbergh and America First. Later, John’s friends labeled it “The Night of Horror.”
Privately, Carl Brandt approached John. Adelaide, he pointed out, was in the process of doing him irreparable harm in terms of his reputation and his reading public. Couldn’t she, instead of making her announcements as “Mrs. John P. Marquand,” call herself Adelaide H. Marquand, or even employ her maiden name, Adelaide Hooker? Wearily, John said, “I wish she would, but she is my wife, and that is her name.”
Before she married Carl, Carol Brandt had been warned both by his brother, Erd Brandt, and their friend Samuel Hopkins Adams, that Carl had a serious drinking problem. When one is in love with a man it is easy to ignore such warnings. The trouble had started during Carl’s first marriage, and it expressed itself in a unique way, if indeed every case of alcoholism is not unique. Carl would go for weeks, even months, able to drink in a normal, comfortable, social way, and it would be possible to believe that nothing was out of order at all. Then, for no discernible reason—not because of any visible career or emotional upset—he would disappear from sight, be drunk for days, and then return, or be found, shaken and ill and ready to be committed to a hospital or sanitarium. Carol had tried various means to cope with and even control this behavior. She had scolded, had withdrawn, had tried to reason with him during his sober periods.
“Through all these bad times,” Carol Brandt recalls, “John was a wonderful comfort to me. He’d come over to the apartment to see me and to visit with the children, who adored him. I used to be terribly angry, furious with Carl for his behavior, but John would always urge me to be calm, to be more sympathetic and understanding. He always believed that Carl was a schizophrenic and should be treated like a person with a mental illness—not ranted at as I tended to do. During these times, John was like a rock for me to lean on.”
But after ten years of marriage and two children—a son and a daughter—she had toughened herself to endure these terrifying episodes and to recognize a few if not all of the advance warning signs. She had also had to accept the fact that Carl’s drinking had brought him to the point of sexual impotence.
It had, at least, in terms of his relationship with his wife. He could, he confessed to her, achieve sexual satisfaction with other women, but with her no longer. It was a painful thing for Carl to acknowledge, a difficult period for them both. Theirs had from the beginning been an uncommon sort of marriage. The second marriage for them both, they had entered into it with a full awareness that a perfect relationship between two people is almost never possible to achieve. They had married fully prepared to adjust, to make exceptions, to adapt to situations, to compromise. At the same time, though they were not at all alike, their temperaments balanced. Both were ambitious and in a true sense self-made people, with successful careers they had carved for themselves. Both were tough-minded and humorous about life and its possibilities, but while Carol was strong and taut, Carl was gentle and malleable. “He was the kindest man I’ve ever known,” Carol has recalled. “It was his extraordinary kindness that first drew me to him. I have always believed that it’s a man’s world, but I don’t believe in a woman getting kicked in the teeth for it. Carl’s nature was such that he hated to hurt anybody. I’m a little short on kindness myself, and so I treasured that quality in him.” The Brandts’ marriage had reached another point when one of a series of assessments had to be made. Sometimes these assessments could be made together, and at other times, because of Carl’s disappearances, Carol had to make them on her own. This time, discussing their marriage over a quiet dinner at home, they decided once more to try to make it last.
When, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombs came raining down on Pearl Harbor, Carl and Carol happened to be staying with friends in Washington who heard the news even before it went on the air. Immediately Carol telephoned John in New York, who said something like, “I want to see you and Carl the minute you get back to New York. I don’t think I can live like this any longer, with what’s going on.” To Adelaide, he said, “I want to be with the two people who understand how I feel about this,” and, as soon as the Brandts returned to the city, John went to stay at their apartment.
It wasn’t many days later that Carl—perhaps it was the pressure of the war news, who knew?—disappeared again, and when he was found he was taken to the Silver Hill Sanitarium near New Canaan, Connecticut, for prolonged rest and treatment. Carol and John, both lonely, unhappy, dissatisfied with the courses their lives were taking, found themselves alone together.
They had been alone and unhappy in New York at the same time once before, it turned out—but they had been apart. Neither had known the other was there. It had been in 1930, right after Drew Hill’s death. Carol had been a young widow working in the city and John, during one of his periodic separations from Christina, had taken a small bachelor apartment. The friendship that had begun four years earlier in Paris might have continued during that year, and if it had their respective lives might have taken quite different turns. It was interesting to speculate, they both thought, about what might have happened in 1930, before each had committed himself in a different direction. But for some reason, though they had several friends in common, neither had learned—in 1930—that the other was living just a few city blocks away.
Now, in 1941, they rather ruefully admitted, as two mature people, it was somewhat late to ponder over lost possibilities. But it was something to think about just the same. And so, in those unsettled days at the beginning of the Second World War, it was in this way—hesitantly, at first, and then with great seriousness—that they became lovers.
“It was more than the physical attraction, which was great,” Carol Brandt recalls, “or the fact that I have always liked older men, and John was ten years older than I. It began to seem as though this was an inevitable extension of our days together in Paris in the twenties, when, as I look back on it now, I first fell in love with him, almost without knowing it. But the main thing was that I have always loved writers, and found them the most fascinating people in the world. John was simply the most important literary figure I had ever known. I was impressed by him. All writers need help and support, and Lord knows he was not getting that from Adelaide. He had great admiration for Conney Fiske’s literary taste, but she was not as aware as I was of the difficulties of the writing process. Carl could help John in important ways as an agent. But John always felt that Carl was too concerned with making money. I knew I could help John in small and practical ways, as well as with love and sympathy and understanding, and perhaps even help him grow as a writer in some small way. I wanted him to depend on me.”