The success of Point of No Return gave John Marquand what is often regarded as the highest accolade America can give to a man: his face on the cover of Time. It also gave him new confidence in himself and in his craft, and for the first time in his life he began to relax the frantic pace of his living and his production. He had, after all, produced seven of his “serious” novels in a little more than ten years, and between these had turned out four full-length Mr. Moto books plus numberless other serials, short stories, articles, and reviews for the Book-of-the-Month Club News. He had become not only one of the most successful American writers, with an income of $100,000 a year from his writing alone, but also one of the most prolific.
John had been given an even more unusual accolade. His friend and fellow Boston clubman, Bayard Tuckerman (Harvard, 1911), had named one of his racehorses “J. P. Marquand.” The horse, as John had predicted, had had an undistinguished career marked primarily by an ability to lose races, but the idea of having a horse named after him amused him. One evening, when he and the Fiskes were dining together at the Somerset Club, they found themselves confronted with three exceptionally tough sirloin steaks. John summoned Joseph, the head waiter, and ruefully inquired, “Would this by any chance be J. P. Marquand?”
At about this time, he had begun to worry about his health. Though Marquands had generally been a healthy and long-lived lot—John’s father would live to be nearly ninety—John had always been something of a hypochondriac, and now he had become convinced he had an ulcer, even though none of the doctors he consulted could detect anything. All the doctors could suggest was rest, a holiday. And so, the winter after the publication of Point of No Return, John and Adelaide Marquand rented Treasure Island in the Bahamas, a narrow strip of land just four miles long, an hour’s sail from Nassau. Here, away from it all, there would be peace. And there was, of a sort.
Treasure Island had no electricity, no telephone, and no water other than some very dubious-looking rainwater gathered in mossy cisterns. Bottled water for drinking and cooking had to be imported from Nassau. Treasure Island was ringed by tall coral cliffs, with white sand beaches on all sides, and toward the west a watch tower known as the Custom House faced Nassau. It was said that beacon fires could be lighted at the top of the tower in case of disaster. A steep flight of white stone steps led up to the tower from the water, and to a primitive drawbridge that could be lowered for landing parties who arrived from tenders anchored off the shore. A huge black sting ray habitually floated nearby, just below the surface of the turquoise water, and the natives claimed that he was the island’s guardian. All these details John relished, and he approached his proprietorship of Treasure Island as though he were another Robinson Crusoe.
The “Great House” at Treasure Island stood at the end of a palm-shaded walk about a quarter of a mile away from the Custom House Tower. It was low, sprawling, shuttered, and cool, with one high terrace overlooking the sea and, on the inland side, a vine-covered, sheltered terrace with swinging ships’ lanterns overhead and a long refectory table where meals were served. There was a living room which John quickly established as his winter study, and the round mahogany table at the center of the room was soon covered with books, magazines, and undulating mounds of Book-of-the-Month Club galleys, along with a sturdy liquor supply (the Scotch, John used to point out, had been an admirable bargain due to the recent devaluation of the pound). The living room walls were decorated with shells, bits of coral, dried starfish, and sea fans. Beyond stretched dark bedrooms, an ancient bath and water closet, storage rooms, and a kitchen with a gas-run refrigerator, the most important appliance on the island since it was the only source of ice cubes.
Treasure Island required a good-sized staff. There were Captain Sweeting of the boat Windrift and two sailors; there were Josephas, the caretaker, and his wife Lineth; also Josephas’s brother-in-law, Richard; Corinne, a waitress, her husband Eric, and Myrtis, a cook. There were also his own secretary, an ex-WAC named Marjorie Davis, who was placed in a tent called “the collapsible house” nearby, and the shy English lady schoolmistress who appeared on week ends to tutor the three children. Still another member of the Marquand household was Myrtis’s baby, who required its own ragged nine-year-old baby sitter. All these people immediately began referring to John Marquand as “the Boss,” which delighted him. Never in his life, he claimed, had he attained such an exalted position.
As he did with most things, John romanticized and exoticized Treasure Island, turning it into something it never was and never could be, a kind of Eden. There were always guests, some of them famous, like the Lindberghs. Others just old friends, like the Fiskes, who arrived by boat from Nassau, entering the pretty lagoon that was the island’s only harbor through a narrow, wind-swept cut in the coral rock that was passable only at high tide, making their way across the unsteady drawbridge, then up the cliff and down the path to the Great House. There were luncheon parties and dinner parties and fishing parties and cocktail parties. John would dictate for several hours each morning to Marjorie Davis, then join the party, and the rest of the day would be devoted to pleasure. There was swimming at one or the other of the two beaches, one for morning and one for afternoon—though John enjoyed reversing things by going to the morning beach in the afternoon, and vice versa. There were long walks to the far tip of the island, and fishing expeditions, and trips to nearby Rose Island where English friends had a luxurious beach house with fresh-water showers. But overnight stops in such comfortable oases were prohibited, since John felt that this would be disloyal to the spirit of Treasure Island.
John invented elaborate games and contests to amuse his guests that were devised exclusively for Treasure Island. He would paint numbers on the backs of land crabs and, with each guest assigned a number and a beast, there would be crab races. There were shelling contests for which John and Henry Seidel Canby, another frequent guest, drew up complicated rules with prizes for such categories as the “Most Worthy Sea Fan,” the “Best All-Round Coral,” the “Most Unusual and Desirable Shell,” and the “Shell Most Likely to Succeed.” The most ironclad rule of all was that no shell was to have been purchased in one of the shell shops in Nassau. The servants, perhaps because they could not read or write, tended to overlook some of the strictures of the contests and, since they made the daily shopping trips to Nassau, won most of the prizes, to the disappointment of the children, who had spent hours walking the beaches with bowed heads looking for rarities.
Toward evening, the cocktail hour became a ritual with strong drinks John had concocted out of rum and Falernian, and a mysterious and particularly potent secret recipe he christened “Island Magic.” It cast its spell efficiently, and, on the lamplit, sheltered terrace, with just the trace of a soft tropic breeze, John would tell his famous stories seated in a chair beneath an ancient wooden sign which proclaimed, “I am Monarch of All I Survey.” Some of John’s favorite stories were about his friend Gene Tunney who, for all the roughness of his trade as a prize fighter, had an elegant, almost mincing speaking style of which John was an excellent mimic. “Charming” was a word Tunney used frequently, and John loved to tell of Tunney’s account of lunching in Havana one day with Ernest Hemingway, whom Tunney pronounced as “perfectly charming.” Hemingway had served, according to Tunney, some “charming martinis,” and then, after a “charming” lunch, a great many more “charming martinis” which, as Hemingway downed them, had the effect of making the author somewhat less charming. He became, in fact, quite belligerent. John’s version of what happened then went like this:
“Gene told me that Hemingway had these Siamese cats, and that even the cats were drinking martinis. Hemingway would kick off his slippers and scratch the cats’ backs, and then he began talking about foul blows in boxing and began to demonstrate them on Gene. Gene said, ‘Ernest knows a lot about boxing, but perhaps I know a bit more about it than Ernest. Ed Fink, who was Al Capone’s bodyguard, was my teacher. And all of a sudden Ernest came at me and started swinging. He came up and cut me across the lips, and there was blood, and then he jabbed me in the left elbow. I said to Ernest, “Do stop it, please, Ernest,” but he kept right on punching. I didn’t want to get on the outside—I really pride myself on my in-fighting—and I thought to myself: what Ernest needs is a good little liver punch. There’s a little liver punch, and it has to be timed exactly, and when I saw the moment I let him have it. I was a little alarmed, if I do say so! His knees buckled, his face went gray, and I thought he was going to go down. But he didn’t, and for the next few hours Ernest was perfectly charming.’”
John was the master of stories like that, stories which involved not only imitations and gestures—he told this story on his feet, dancing about with his impressions of the two pugilists—but which rambled along in that fashion and, as Charles Lindbergh describes them, “Stories that had no real point or punch line, but which were amusing all the way. He was a teller of tales.”
Those were happy days. Anne Lindbergh also remembers Adelaide’s humor blossoming at Treasure Island. “Because at the end she was such a tragic and distraught figure, one tends to forget her ‘all-fellows-well-met’ gaiety. The over-all impression was of exuberant good spirits. Her particular brand of free-wheeling extravagant humor—often directed against herself—was the perfect foil for John’s dry, urbane satire. And there is no doubt she intentionally played up to him and his stories, and that he responded enthusiastically, and their friends or guests were marvelously entertained’ and amused, and a splendid evening resulted for all concerned. It was a marvelous show that was put on by both of them, in collaboration, and one had the impression that no one enjoyed it more than the two actors themselves.”
No one troubled to dress up at Treasure Island in anything more than an open-collared shirt and khaki shorts or slacks, and after a leisurely dinner on the terrace there were more stories, more talk, or perhaps John would read aloud to his guests in his big voice. Of course one of his favorite readings was from Stevenson’s Treasure Island, savoring such celebrated lines as Ben Gunn’s “many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly—” and
Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Then, as coffee was being served, Josephas, the caretaker, would silently enter the room with his guitar, and he would sit and sing island songs. Some of the songs were bawdy, some sentimental; Josephas had the calypso singer’s gift of taking the names of the guests around the room and weaving them into the verses of his songs. “He picks the songs up in Bay Street,” John would murmur fondly. Josephas’s last song of the evening, inevitably, was “I love you but Jesus loves you best, Bid you good night, good night, good night,” naming each guest in turn. It was a signal that the evening was over, that it was time for bed in the Great House and the guest house and for sleep with sounds no more disturbing than the noise of land crabs scuttling for each other’s shells along the dark paths, a noise like the quiet grinding of teeth, and the rustling of the furry coconut rats that lived high in the crowns of the palm trees, the clicking of palm leaves in the breeze, and the distant repeated rush of the sea across the sand.
Gardi and Conney Fiske spent three months with John and Adelaide at Treasure Island during that first winter there, in 1950, and remembered it afterward as one of the happiest times of their lives. They were given a one-room shuttered house with lumpy iron beds a few minutes’ walk from the Great House, where they shared outdoor plumbing—marked by a sign reading “El Retiro”—with secretary Marjorie Davis. The two families seldom met before lunch-time cocktails, with John working diligently through the morning on a new novel, and there were a few upheavals between John and Adelaide, but not many, and none of such importance as to make the guests feel uncomfortable. There were exciting moments, such as the night when Josephas’s brother-in-law, Richard, who drank, nearly burned down Josephas’s house, and John Marquand, shouting commands in the manner of a wartime general, organized guests and staff into a bucket brigade to save the building. Once, puzzled by the increased nuisance of flies in the kitchen, John announced that he and Gardi were organizing an expedition “to investigate conditions in the interior” of Treasure Island, where many of the native staff lived and where, John was certain, no white man had ventured. They came back, several hours later, muttering and shaking their heads sadly. “Worse than the jungle,” was all John would say.
The Fiskes had brought with them a battery-powered radio which, when he heard of it, thoroughly irked John. The whole point of Treasure Island, he explained, was to get away from the reach of the outside world. He spent an entire evening inveighing against radios and communications in general, and there was a terrible scene when another guest revealed that Josephas himself had a powerful radio receiver and that it was from this that he picked up the latest songs, not “in Bay Street” at all. He could not believe it, John said, it was so incompatible with his dream. But it was not long before John was making daily trips to Josephas’s house to catch the B.B.C. newscasts.
There was excitement when John’s friend from Hollywood, Cedric Gibbons, art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, arrived on a luxurious chartered yacht. Gibbons had once been married to Dolores Del Rio, and his wife of the moment was a starlet named Hazel Brooks. The Gibbons party and crew came ashore, and there was a bibulous evening—the crew, it turned out, had brought their own rum—which ended with Marjorie Davis having to flee her tent and seek protection in the Fiskes’ cottage from an overamorous sailor. In the morning, Eric’s hands shook visibly while serving breakfast, and Richard did not reappear for over twenty-four hours. John labeled it another “Night of Horror,” and, as always, these episodes became the topics of dinner-table conversations for nights to come and of stories that always ended in laughter. But for all the comings and goings, their happiest times seemed to be when a “dry rage” set in, with high tropical winds that made the sea too heavy for the Windrift, the yawl that went with the island, to enter or leave the lagoon, and when the four friends could enjoy perfect isolation, with no visitors and no way to escape. They picnicked on the special island chowder John had discovered, a spicy stew made with fish, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, and Bourbon whiskey. At times like these, John seemed most at peace.
At last, when it was time for the Fiskes to leave—a few days before the Marquands—everyone gathered at the drawbridge to say good-by, grasping their hands and begging them to return. Conney Fiske wept a little as Josephas, guitar in hand, sang his farewell song to her and altered the lyric to “good-by, Mistress Fiske” instead of “good night,” as he had done so many evenings past As she stepped into the Windrift, Josephas handed her a polished pink conch shell, telling her to keep it and “put it to your ear and you can always hear the island’s waves.”
John had urged the Fiskes to come back to Treasure Island the following winter, and they had agreed to come. They had been planning on it, in fact, when Adelaide wrote Conney a stiff and rather chilly letter, mentioning, as Conney recollects it, something about “the necessity of our privacy” and rescinding the invitation. Conney was both disappointed and hurt by Adelaide’s letter. She had long suspected that Adelaide didn’t really like her; Adelaide, after all, didn’t like any of John’s women friends, all of whom she assumed without question were having love affairs with him. Conney was also certain that John was unaware of the letter and would be furious if he knew about it But Conney was too much a lady to make an issue of it or mention it to John.
John invited the Fiskes a third time, the next winter. But by then Gardi Fiske had developed emphysema, as Carl Brandt had, and his health had begun to fail, and his doctors told him he could not go to such a remote place. And so the winter of 1950, like all the happiest and sunniest moments in like and in books, would never happen again.