AROLO, ITALY
september 1971
jimmy had driven an hour to meet that awful woman at the Milan airport, though in retrospect, why he had bothered with that particular act of chivalry, he didn’t know. He’d risen in the morning to get to the airfield on time. He’d even put on a tie, which in 1971 counted as a declaration of old-fashioned gallantry. While he and Dinah waited for Mrs. Marion Sanders’s plane to arrive, he’d had some brandies at the airport bar, it was true, but he wasn’t the slightest bit foggy or out of sorts. At least not until Mrs. Sanders opened her mouth.
Yes, yes, Jimmy conceded, the woman had done plenty of research about Dorothy Thompson for her so-called authorized biography and god knows, Dorothy left masses of eye-popping papers for an impertinent idiot like Mrs. Sanders to paw through. She could tell you who Dorothy had an affair with in 1923, as if that mattered, and she had spotted every piddling flaw in her subject’s character. But as for the truth about Dorothy? Mrs. Sanders hadn’t the beginning of a clue.
The day after she left, Jimmy shot off a letter to Houghton Mifflin, Mrs. Sanders’s publisher and his own as well. This is going to be the worst book Houghton ever published, he warned. How could someone like Mrs. Sanders—a “Manhattanese coolie,” he called her—possibly fathom the nobility of Dorothy? She didn’t understand the first thing about Dorothy’s Christianity, had called her beloved father “a nothing, a nebbish,” and couldn’t imagine anyone doing anything except for profit or ambition. Mrs. Sanders would never understand that what Dorothy had wanted—the only thing Dorothy had ever wanted—was to save the world.
In a scrawled postscript, Jimmy fumed that Mrs. Sanders had broken the needle on their gramophone. “She’s a meddler as well as a clown, dolt and imposter.”
Mrs. Sanders reported to her editor that the stay with the Sheeans had been a total disaster. Jimmy never stopped drinking, not for a moment. Either he was gibberingly incoherent or he clammed up entirely. Sheean had been Dorothy Thompson’s friend for decades and lived with her for years at Twin Farms. He had even written his own book about her. Why then, Mrs. Sanders wondered, was he completely incapable of offering up any information? To make matters worse, they were trapped for three days in the Italian sticks because Jimmy’s dog was sick. Imagine living without a telephone! And you should have seen how small their icebox was.
“Poor Jimmy—he’s finished, I’m afraid” was the talk at Houghton Mifflin, to whom he owed a long-planned sequel to Personal History.
Dinah set about trying to repair the damage. Mrs. Sanders’s visit was the “misfire of the century,” she acknowledged in a letter to the Houghton editors. Jimmy had wanted to be helpful. But almost immediately Mrs. Sanders and Jimmy had gotten off on the wrong foot. Based on a comment Mrs. Sanders made, Jimmy suspected she was a Zionist and hated him for his well-known sympathies for the Arabs. And then he held it against her that she hadn’t suggested a trip to Milan to see the Poldi Pezzoli Museum or the Last Supper or the Cathedral. And when Mrs. Sanders suggested that Dorothy had taken the part of the Palestinian Arabs after the war because she was bought off by American oil companies, well, that was the final straw. Imagine anyone believing that Dorothy could be bribed!
Jimmy was not, Dinah insisted to Houghton, “a lost cause.” His book was coming slowly but she was certain it would be his best yet. Yes, he’d been drunk much of the time Mrs. Sanders was there, but that wasn’t so very hard to understand, was it? He really dreaded talking about Dorothy and he was terribly shy and self-conscious, which was why he drank in the first place. Plus, he suspected that Mrs. Sanders was trying to egg Dinah on to leave him. Jimmy was “expendable” but Dinah could still save herself was the unwelcome message of liberation that Mrs. Sanders came bearing.
All that fall of 1971, Jimmy walked around the house, lamenting: “My poor Dorothy, my poor Dorothy, your bones will be desecrated.”
—
the biggest irony, of course, was that he was the one still alive to receive the sorry parade of biographers. Who’d have imagined that Sheean would survive them all? John Gunther, with his astounding vitality, and Frances, brighter than hell, both dead now. Knick dying an honest-to-god foreign correspondent’s death. Hemingway a suicide, without in fact bequeathing Jimmy the manuscripts of the thirty-seven different drafts of the last page and a half of A Farewell to Arms he’d once promised. (Jimmy should take more pains revising, Hemingway jibed.) And Dorothy. Despite two big coronaries, she drank like a fish and smoked fifty cigarettes a day, so apparently she’d had a death wish, too.
Jimmy had always assumed he’d die young. But when he reached the biblical age of seventy, he had to admit that perhaps he’d in fact wanted to live. Out in the evening on Lake Maggiore in a boat, belting out arias with the local fishermen, drinking red wine, and throwing the bottles (always empties, Dinah noted) in the lake, he was content enough. But back at his desk, working late into the night as he’d always done, he felt superannuated. He’d written a book on King Faisal of Saudi Arabia that his publishers had rejected and Holiday magazine said his article on the Iranian city of Isfahan wasn’t the sort of thing that tourists would want. “I’m so old! I no longer can write for the American market!” he wailed to Dinah.
Of course Jimmy is discouraged, the playwright Thornton Wilder, an old friend, advised Dinah. Like Scott Fitzgerald or “much less sympathetically” Ernest Hemingway, Jimmy had been the very incarnation of Youth for an awestruck world. “He lived it; he shone it; he bestrode it,” judged Wilder. To represent the spirit of an age and then to be irrelevantly carrying on decades later—that was the sort of thing that finished people off.
Too bad you didn’t in fact die young and earn yourself a small part in the memories of Americans who can read, Rebecca West had told Jimmy.
—
as dorothy saw it, journalism was their era’s “most representative form of letters.” What the play was to the Renaissance or the novel to the nineteenth century, reporting was to the 1920s and 1930s, she’d claimed in 1939. Novelists such as John Steinbeck, whose Pulitzer-winning Grapes of Wrath was published that year, drew on the techniques of reportage. The influence was mutual, for facts needed interpretation if they were to mean anything. Having an imagination, Dorothy noted, had become as important to reporters as it was to novelists. Dorothy and her friends had abandoned what she called “the field of pure reporting” for the sort of subjective analysis—the interrogation of personality, the interpretation of causation—necessary to understand the truth.
By the mid-1950s, their breed of foreign correspondents—“congeries of eccentrics and prima donnas,” the New Yorker called them—seemed nearly extinct. The sort of freewheeling go-where-I-please attitude wasn’t possible any longer once foreign correspondence became a professional job for corporate men who’d put in their time in the home office. The advent of the jet made it possible to drop in on hot spots around the world, then depart just as swiftly. As the United States sought to exert its dominance globally, remaking the world to suit, foreign correspondents became more entangled in that project, either as critics or as sympathizers. Drawing bright lines—deciding what the “truth” was—became a much more difficult enterprise absent Hitler and his lot. And so, the ideal of objectivity was re-enshrined.
In his debate with John that evening at the Stork Club in 1946, Jimmy had been right: their heyday was over. The generation of newsmen who directly followed them would recognize their influence. It was because of Personal History, said Walter Cronkite, that he’d become a reporter. By contrast, the New Journalists of the 1960s, who followed their lead in disdaining the notion of impartiality and putting themselves in their stories, didn’t acknowledge the paternity. If Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe read Sheean, Thompson, and the rest, they didn’t credit them. In all the hoopla that surrounded so-called Gonzo journalism, it was as if they’d created the genre from whole cloth.
Dorothy for one had never been under any illusion that her influence would endure. There was the ephemeral stuff she wrote and then there was Art: Red’s novels or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s totemic verses, which came to stand for the twenties in the way that Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (rather than John’s Inside Europe) did the thirties. Eight publishers vied for Dorothy’s memoirs. She started gathering materials: interviewing Fodor, writing old friends from the women’s suffrage campaign. Soon enough, though, her “me and the twentieth century” book bogged down in ill health and the daunting scale of the undertaking. She didn’t get much further than 1903, the year she turned ten. “Mighty pretty country and centuries removed from today,” she explained to a friend.
It wasn’t just Dorothy. None of them found it possible to sum up what their lives had meant. Jimmy stewed over his memoirs fruitlessly—his “terminal” book, he insisted on calling it. In Jerusalem, Frances began a new project that she entitled “Theopolitics,” trying to work out the balance between the political, the theological, and the personal in global affairs. It was in part a treatise on international relations, in part an autobiography. For years she labored on the manuscript, writing a little, revising a lot. Even John, rarely stymied, hardly made a start on the autobiography he’d planned since he was twenty. When he wrote fiction, he made free use of his life, but his autobiographical venture didn’t extend beyond a few pieces in Harper’s magazine about the writing of the “Inside” series. He accumulated piles and piles of notes in folders marked “Save for Autobiography” but that was as far as it went.
I’ll “do” you, John joked to Jimmy. John had been amassing materials for a book on Dorothy, Jimmy, and Mickey. We’ll see about that, Jimmy retorted. It depends on who kicks the bucket first.
The first to go was Red Lewis, in 1951, either from alcoholism or a heart attack, depending upon whether one took the long or the short view. When the biographers started to appear at Twin Farms, Dorothy was pragmatic as ever. What was the “essential conflict” in Red that produced his work? That was the question that the biographer authorized by the Lewis estate asked her. There wasn’t one conflict, she maintained, but many. And some of them worked at violent cross-purposes.
Dorothy’s ability to separate herself from the events of her life, to reflect upon them with detachment, struck Red’s biographer as nothing short of astounding. She’d been emotional about the things other people approached analytically and was analytical about her own emotions. Red’s biographer gave over large sections of his book to her analysis. If his book had a heroine, he said, it would be Dorothy herself, not least for the Olympian perspective she’d provided on her marriage.
The truth, Dorothy confided in Rebecca, was that their union was such a catastrophe that she had blocked it all out. She wasn’t about to undertake a psychoanalysis just so she could interpret Sinclair Lewis’s neuroses. Nevertheless, in a long Atlantic article published nearly a decade after Red’s death, she made a start on it, puzzling out the familial dynamics that had made the man, airing stories of his own disastrous relations with his sons. To a reader who wrote her, incensed about the revelations, she replied simply: “Lewis was an American genius and a personal tragedy.”
“I hope I can get through this without having a bloody big statue of Red stuck up on my lawn,” Jimmy told John before he met Red’s biographer. To talk of a “central conflict” was inanity, Jimmy said. Rebecca, it turned out, had already volunteered that Red’s central conflict was “suppressed homosexuality,” which Jimmy thought damn cheek given that she raised hell if anyone so much as breathed a word about her liaison with H. G. Wells. That was the start of the plague of “obituarians.” Mrs. Sanders was followed by a young man writing about John Gunther and a still younger man who wanted to take Jimmy himself as the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. The “Tormentor,” Jimmy nicknamed him when he turned up in Arolo and trailed behind Jimmy, room after room, tape recorder in hand.
They would “do” themselves or other people would “do” them. When Dorothy died in 1961—“like saying goodbye to a lifetime,” Jimmy said—he and John talked about a book about the Lewis-Thompson marriage. John had been thinking about it since Red’s death. He didn’t talk to Red’s official biographer because he intended to save his stories for his own book. In the end, though, Jimmy got there first. The title of the book would be Dorothy and Red, he told John. It would be a personal history, he acknowledged, because that was the only kind he knew how to do.
—
most of dorothy’s papers had ended up in the vaults of the “House of Morgan,” the old limestone corner building on Wall Street belonging to the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. Three big filing cabinets at Morgan, boxes and boxes more at Twin Farms: Dorothy seemed to have saved everything. Houghton Mifflin’s first choice to write Dorothy’s biography was Rebecca West, but after expressing interest, she turned the project down. She wasn’t even writing her own autobiography, Rebecca explained. She was so cutting about her old friend Dorothy and everyone else that the editors at Houghton felt relieved they hadn’t entrusted her with the papers.
Jimmy was Houghton’s second, maybe even third choice. By the early 1960s, he’d built up something of a sideline in “necrology,” as he referred to it; he’d published a short, perceptive memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and had books about his friends Marian Anderson and Ethel Barrymore in the works. But do Dorothy? He didn’t have enough of his own life left to write her biography, Jimmy declared. That would take another two full existences. Moreover, he didn’t give a damn what the Polish assistant minister for commerce had once told Dorothy about the trade balance. The book he instead proposed to Houghton—an insider’s account of Dorothy and Red’s relationship—was, to say the least, unorthodox. Writing about one’s own marriage (or marriages) was daring enough, the sort of things that the occasional actress or chorus girl might venture. But to dissect in print the marriage of one’s friends? Jimmy was practically inviting the charge of vulgarity and disloyal opportunism.
At Houghton, Jimmy’s insistence that he’d write exactly what was in Dorothy’s papers—holding nothing back—caused a certain amount of consternation, especially when they saw what he’d produced. Red’s impotence, his alcoholism as a cover for sexual puzzlement, Dorothy’s lesbianism, the tortured back-and-forth in their letters, Red’s mistreatment of their son: it was all there, unexpurgated. Dorothy’s affair with Christa Winsloe, Jimmy admitted, had come as a shock to him. Red apparently knew about it, and so did Dorothy’s sister, but he learned about it for the first time in Dorothy’s diaries. Nevertheless, it had to go in—Christa’s smooth cheek, the kisses. That was what Dorothy would have wanted. Her sister, her executors, and John Gunther all agreed. Had she managed to write her autobiography, it would have been just as forthcoming.
Whatever hesitation Houghton had about the seemliness of the endeavor was put to rest by publication day. “It may well be the frankest revelation of a marriage ever published,” the press touted, its editors’ unease transformed into a selling point. Some reviewers, predictably, condemned it as the worst sort of tattle. Sheean, rebuked Time, had done an “extraordinary thing” by invading the privacy of two well-known, recently deceased people; one read the book with “awful fascination.” Just as many, if not more, praised Sheean’s forthright handling of subjects that had been swept under the carpet. It was the real-life version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the play by Edward Albee then running on Broadway.
The point that Jimmy made again and again in interviews was that Dorothy and Red’s marriage wasn’t at all unusual. “It is the story of virtually every marriage,” he maintained. Granted, the two of them were extraordinary people. However, the experiences that had riven their marriage—impotence, jealousy, affairs, drinking—were normal enough. Why, then, shouldn’t such subjects be talked about? It was the same question that John had broached in writing about Johnny’s illness and death. Nothing that was human should be off-limits.
Jimmy acknowledged that there was some pathos in the fact that he was cashing in on his friendship with Dorothy and Red. He soothed his conscience, though, with the idea they’d have heartily approved. Sometimes he wondered if they hadn’t been writing those diaries and letters not simply for posterity, but for him in particular to read. As Dorothy and Red went into a second, third, and fourth printing, friends and acquaintances leapt in with corrections. No, the weather was not rainy on the Semmering, John insisted, and Helmuth James von Moltke had been among the party; Laura Knickerbocker’s hair was black, not red. Knickerbocker was a much more important journalist than Dorothy, contended “A Mrs. Joseph Something of Nyack, N.Y., who turns out to be Agnes,” Jimmy hooted to John. From London, Dorothy’s first husband, Joseph Bard, threatened to sue Time for describing him in its review of the book as “a sponging Hungarian cad.”
The big surprise was Rebecca’s reaction. She liked the book immensely, she wrote Jimmy. She’d frightened him for nearly forty years, and finally, at a word of praise, he was wagging his behind “like a surprised spaniel.” When Dorothy and Red made the bestseller lists, Jimmy felt vindicated. “A little late for my vices, just in time for my virtues perhaps if I can remember them, but at any rate perfectly accommodated to my comforts,” he pronounced with satisfaction.
—
on his way to see Gandhi in 1947, Jimmy had stopped in Rome. He went to have cocktails with the American ambassador there. Jimmy was going on in his usual way in those days—talking of the necessity of peace, One Worldism—when the ambassador interrupted him. “When are you going to abdicate?” the ambassador demanded.
What on earth could the man possibly mean? Jimmy wondered. “This is a question I have not been called upon to consider,” he replied.
“You must abdicate. You cannot rule the world. You cannot improve it. You cannot do anything whatsoever to it. It will remain just as it is,” the ambassador persisted. “Why do you have to have treaties, especially peace treaties? You and Dorothy Thompson!”
It was, as Jimmy saw, only half a joke. Through the 1950s and 1960s, he went on renouncing public life and then, when American foreign policy seemed too much to tolerate from the sidelines, charging back into the fray. It didn’t escape him that the global view he’d urged on his readers had helped to justify American expansionism. An anti-imperialist to the last, he reported sympathetically from the Bandung Conference, barraged Nehru and successive American administrations with letters, appointed himself Adlai Stevenson’s foreign policy expert, converted to Hinduism, became a vegetarian, and refused to kill flies. He wrote a biography of Nehru and planned for his ashes to be shipped to the prime minister, to be deposited in the Ganges. He wore a white Nehru cap and homespun dhoti. His neighbors in Vermont pretended not to notice. He half-believed in UFOs. “People never do look up,” he pointed out.
There was no Personal History II, though he inevitably threw his own shadow over Dorothy and Red, not least in what he had to say about the dynamics of love and booze and sex in a marriage. He and Dinah remarried in 1949, only to separate again in a conflagration of mutual recriminations a few years later. In 1970, she returned to him, and they moved, for good, to Arolo. In those last years, they traveled to India and China, they went to the opera, and they talked and talked. “Jimmy is a hazard in my life but a necessary one,” was the way Dinah explained it.
They came to New York a final time in the fall of 1974 after Jimmy was diagnosed with lung cancer. After a few months of treatment, he returned to Italy to die, as he’d always said he would. His last weeks passed in a semiconscious reverie, no pain, his mind full of fun. He composed music through the night, talking all the while. The remarkable thing, Dinah wrote their friends, was that he was finally free. Not one single word about the “state of the world.” Instead, he heard an orchestra in his head and imagined a Chardin still life of a bowl sitting on a windowsill and a satchel hanging nearby. He and Dinah laughed together about all the funny things in life.
POSTSCRIPT
frances gunther traveled to India in 1950, staying with Nehru in the prime minister’s official residence. His coolness toward her, and the picture of Edwina Mountbatten in his study, put an end to her thoughts of a future together. Back in Jerusalem, she struggled with her memoir and wrote articles about Arab-Israeli relations that she kept to herself, fearful (as she put it to Dorothy) of the “wrath of the Israeli fathers.” In her Jerusalem apartment, she held a salon to try to reconcile her Israeli and Palestinian friends. She died in 1964 of cancer, leaving her papers to a childhood friend of Johnny’s.
marcel fodor made it out of Europe after the collapse of France, arriving in the United States in June 1940. He, his wife Martha, and their young son stayed for the summer with Dorothy at Twin Farms, then moved to Chicago, where Fodor—thanks to the intervention of John and Dorothy—taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and wrote a column for the Sun. After the war, Fodor worked for the American Occupation forces in Berlin, editing the U.S. military-sponsored paper, Die Neue Zeitung.
jimmy sheean insisted to the end of his days that his watch had stopped permanently the moment Gandhi was assassinated. “What you need are new watches,” jawaharlal nehru remarked. Jimmy and Nehru continued to correspond, contentiously, about every subject from Kashmir to the nature of happiness. Of course, Nehru believes he’s been happy, Jimmy wrote John, but he’s “just got into a rut and he thinks it’s the Milky Way.” Be prepared to receive my ashes, Jimmy advised Nehru. Sometimes Jimmy said he didn’t want a funeral, other times he planned the pallbearers who’d carry his casket: Dorothy at the head, Dinah at his foot, his friends Clare Boothe Luce and Agnes de Mille on one side and Greta Garbo and Marian Anderson on the other. Nehru died in 1964, a decade before Jimmy.
john gunther died in 1970 while working on his final “Inside” book about Australia. He and Frances had kept up a regular correspondence, New York to Jerusalem, affectionate and newsy on his end, alternately loving and recriminatory on hers. He married Jane in 1948, and they later adopted a son. Death Be Not Proud is the only one of Gunther’s books still in print. It has been translated into German, Spanish, Danish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, and Japanese.
In the fall of 1942, as the Red Army collared the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad and the Royal Air Force stepped up its bombing raids on northern Germany, joseph goebbels devoted his evenings to Knickerbocker’s new book, Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? It was a “typical” piece of journalism, judged the propaganda minister, brilliant in style but extraordinarily superficial. It deserved to be pitched in the trash can. As if continuing the conversation with his old adversary, Goebbels concluded his diary that night on a defiant key. “And by the way, only statesmen and military men make world history. Not journalists.” Goebbels and his wife Magda murdered their six children, aged four to twelve, before committing suicide on May 1, 1945.
rebecca west lived until 1983, a regal figure in a caftan issuing withering remarks about old friends and enemies alike from her South Kensington apartment. “I was never sure whether he was intelligent or stupid,” she told a young man who came to interview her about John Gunther. “I’ve nothing good to say about Frances except that she was very pretty,” West offered. “Can’t think why John married her.”
mickey hahn outlived them all, writing for the New Yorker until her death, at ninety-two, in 1997. Her fifty-two books included one about D. H. Lawrence’s relations with women, a volume on animal communication, and a series of memoirs politely referred to at the time as “candid.” Of her startlingly frank China to Me (1944), her future husband admitted he wished very fervently that page 238 had never been published. “I don’t care what you write about me,” Mickey informed her biographer, “as long as it’s the truth.”