CHAPTER ONE
a “Young-Man-Going-Somewhere” was the way the old-timers at the Chicago Daily News described overeager cub reporters like John Gunther. In 1924, a couple of years out of the University of Chicago, John was dashing between bank robberies, fires, gangster shoot-outs, and Rotary club luncheons. Those were the sorts of stories the lowest guy on the totem pole got assigned at the city’s main afternoon paper, but John had already set his sights much higher: he wanted a job at the Daily News’s bureau in London. He was fed up with America, its hypocrisy, philistinism, and cant: the Prohibition that didn’t really prohibit, the moral regeneration spearheaded by charlatans like the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the corruption and graft bubbling up under the veneer of postwar “normalcy.”
But the postwar disillusionment that had settled over much of American youth was only part of what was ailing John. For more than two years—two fruitless, unavailing years—he’d been trailing around after Helen Hahn, a local belle. He made small talk with her father, ate dinners with her family, sent her letters and books when he was away. John was constant but Helen, a blond stunner, was fickle. Mostly she liked to string him along, touching his arm while they talked, her big blue eyes gazing into his. He’d paid for one of her abortions though the kid definitely wasn’t his, which even at the time struck him as the sort of thing only a chump would do. He knew he had to flee.
The arrival of the British writer Rebecca West in Chicago in November 1923 was a beacon from the sophisticated Old World beckoning to the New. West was Britain’s most notorious modern woman, a novelist, journalist, and feminist who had just wrenched herself free from an affair with the writer H. G. Wells, immensely famous, twenty-six years her senior, and married.
When John and Rebecca met one evening at the University of Chicago, she was a well-seasoned thirty; he a decidedly tender twenty-two. She was on her first American lecture tour, addressing audiences on such racy subjects as polygamy. There wasn’t a man living who could gratify four or five women, Rebecca had insisted: “There are many men who cannot make even one woman happy.”
For years Rebecca had been eager to see America, but when she arrived in New York she wasn’t all that impressed. “This whole place strikes me as a greedy children’s party,” she wrote her sister, appalled by the relentless getting and spending. Chicago was different. In its swagger and newness, it wasn’t like any place she had ever seen. From her room at the Drake Hotel, she marveled at the never-ending lake, its gray-green wintry water tugged by millions of waves. The skyscrapers looked like enormous gasoline cans, stolid but lacking in grace. A wholly new shopping street, Michigan Avenue, had been whipped up as swiftly as a Hollywood set. Between the business district and the miles upon miles of identical brick houses rising raw out of the prairie wobbled an elevated railway north, south, and west.
And the people, with their curious addiction to introspection and self-analysis. It was a Midwestern quality, Rebecca thought: this touching eagerness to take one on a tour of their inner lives. Such a creature was John Gunther. Rebecca nicknamed the young man “John Silence” because he never stopped talking during the weeks she spent in Chicago. John had the “vitality of seven cart-horses,” she later wrote. A “Gothic angel—tall and slender and golden-haired.” That was, she added, until he discovered European cooking. She’d later introduce him to her friends in London by saying: “This is John Gunther who comes from Chicago in fact he is Chicago, he is a moral imbecile but a darling.”
It was all her doing, Rebecca always said, that John finally left his hometown. She didn’t know whether he had any talent at all, but he’d be better off, she told him, if he ceased writing those atrocious short stories and novels and caught a steamer to Europe. Maybe he could earn his living as a foreign correspondent. She thought he was a little in love with her.
John’s bosses refused his entreaties to go to London. He was much too green to be entrusted with a position abroad, his editor informed him. He decided to quit his job and leave anyway; the $150 he’d saved would go further in Europe. He had a clutch of letters of introduction from powerful literary agents and publishers to writers such as Rafael Sabatini and Aldous Huxley. Rebecca had promised to show him the town. He booked his passage on the White Star Line’s SS Olympic, departing New York for Southampton in October 1924.
It was a lucky break that the Prince of Wales was on the same boat, returning home to England from his six-week tour of North America. Now John had a story to sell. With a $100 advance from the United Press, he traded up from steerage to a first-class cabin, a necessary luxury to track the prince’s activities. The palace’s humorless courtiers tried to quarantine His Majesty—“like a Hindu virgin or a case of leprosy,” reported John. The prince needed guarding both from the reporters on board and from ambitious Long Island dowagers with unmarried daughters. Nevertheless, John found plenty to send the UP.
Who was that magnificent girl swathed in furs, who sat alone in the Parisian restaurant the first two nights and was seen with the prince every night thereafter? (John knew: it was a married American newspaperwoman, who caught the prince’s fancy and reported their conversations to John every night.) The whole ship was abuzz, he wrote, with rumors that the prince might renounce his right to the throne. (As indeed, twelve years later, he did for Wallis Simpson.) If there was nothing in the rumor, John noted, the prince’s courtier wouldn’t have bothered to issue an official denial. John’s story ricocheted through the American and British papers.
John was running away from Helen, but still, he saw every sight through her eyes. How she would have laughed at the dress of the Britishers on board. “Mauve spats, taupe knickers wide enough to drive a Ford through, dinky caps, rugs for capes, monocles…” There was the ancient duke who promenaded on deck in his rose-colored bedroom slippers, another who appeared in sparkly purple bow ties. Too bad she wasn’t there to stroll with him through the Olympic’s vast acres of floating grandeur. Did Helen realize that there were palm gardens and swimming pools and tennis courts on the ship? He’d asked the one pretty girl on board to dance. The girl’s family had country houses on Long Island and Rolls-Royces, too; her hair was marcelled and jet-black, her eyes wide-set, and she let him talk and talk.
In those years, the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Americans set off from the New World’s docks to live for a spell on the Continent. The trip from New York to Southampton was a swift five or six days by liner, short enough to return home if a parent became ill or the home office required managing, and with the money you saved over in Europe, where the living was cheap, you could afford plenty of return journeys. American entrepreneurs settled on the Right Bank in Paris, hoping to hook the French on imported sweet corn or shredded wheat biscuits or elastane corsets. American engineers struck out for the brand-new industrial cities proliferating in the Soviet steppes; they’d show Stalin’s workers how to build harvesters and steel foundries. In Europe’s leading cabarets, the music was jazz, and American performers taught the king of Spain and the Aga Khan the latest dance steps. There were American bankers who trumpeted Wall Street’s ever-buoyant securities and American heiresses who husband-hunted among Europe’s titled but hard-up nobility. Everywhere there were American dentists who retailed New World methods for polishing and straightening teeth.
The writers who went to Europe, though, had a different purpose in mind. They’d sell the experience of the Continent—the condoms advertised in every druggist, the sewage stink of Naples, the Tanqueray cocktail, the long creamy sticks of French bread, the azure waters of the Riviera, the anti-colonial politics, the charred battlefields of Belgium—back to an America that was scandalously isolated, moralized, and teetotaling because of Holy Rollers, and raised on canned food and the Bible. John had gone to Europe because of Helen and maybe because of Rebecca and definitely because of his family. For those reasons, and because he wanted to write.
—
“always i had dreams of Europe,” he wrote later, when recounting this part of his life. “These must have started (my mother’s influence) when I was a child.” In the roomy kitchen of the old house on Chicago’s North Side, John’s mother would read Keats, propping her book open with one hand and stirring the soup with the other. She cut a stately figure, tall and shapely, with soft, lovely hair, and elegant long fingers. Lizette Schoeninger’s family was cultivated, solid, German. The women played bridge in the long afternoons, had heavy, well-polished silver tea sets, and their houses smelled of beeswax and warm coffee strudel. For Christmas they gave each other stacks of leather-bound books, and their trees glittered with hundreds of candles.
Why had she married Eugene Gunther? It was a mystery to John. Could his mother really have loved his father? Eugene had once been handsome, even a little dashing. She was nearly thirty, getting old to be a bride. John supposed she must have once been fond of him.
But later, how she suffered the shame of the man. Eugene had one disreputable job after another: peddling cigars and fake liquor; fishy dealings in real estate; and, worst of all, managing a garage, home every night with grease-stained pants. He was a cheat in poker as in everything else, and a glad-hander, the type who in low-down bars made a show of bonhomie by throwing his arms around the bartender. Crooked through and through, Eugene was nonetheless a stickler for decorum: he did not tolerate curse words at the dinner table and condemned the new fashions in underwear; funerals had to be arranged according to his rigid sense of correctness.
The house was outwardly peaceful, but the tensions within were impossible to ignore. Lizette cultivated herself and her children, John and his sister, Billi (but especially John), not just as defense but as a weapon against her husband. To the Art Institute or to improving lantern lectures at the local public library they went, sailing out of the house the three of them, Lizette and her two children, irreproachably attired. She read the Iliad to John and they cried together over the death of Hector.
Lizette kept John at home with her until he was nine. He couldn’t go to school yet because of his asthma, she said. There was never enough fresh air in his childhood, he thought in retrospect. His hobby was writing encyclopedias: drawing up entries for battleships and his favorite poems, for momentous dates in history and the animals of the world classified species by species. When his mother finally enrolled him in school, he worried that he would address his teachers as “Mama.”
As a small boy, John had pined when his father was away. “Papa, do you like me?” he wrote when he was five and Eugene was traveling. “I wish you would come home.” He sent samples of the colors of his Crayola box and listed all of the animals he could think of. But more and more, he took on his mother’s fastidiousness, shuddering when his father mispronounced names or repeated his old stories. He saw that his father was a braggart who couldn’t stand to be wrong and didn’t want to be outdone by his son. Eugene used his pudgy fingers to push food onto his fork. He chewed his ice cream. He got heavy and ill with dropsy, chain-smoking cigars, so corpulent that he could no longer cross his legs.
One evening, when he was twelve, John broke the still surface of a family dinner to declare that he wished he had been born an Englishman. Not an American. His father stormed away from the table, detecting Lizette’s influence over the boy. To be English was to be high-toned, cosmopolitan, literary, better than Chicago. Eugene started to accuse his wife of turning the children against him. Like other German Americans caught between pride in their heritage and loyalty to the United States, the family’s claim to Americanness was fraying. The Guenthers, as they were known then, were too close for comfort to the Kaiser’s Germans, with their spiked iron helmets and their rape of Belgium. A year or so after the dinner table incident, Eugene and Lizette changed the spelling of their surname. During the First World War, the Germanic Guenthers became the unobtrusively American Gunthers.
“You must be a success, a success,” John’s mother urged him. By high school, John was devouring books, one every few days, an appetite that encompassed Edna St. Vincent Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles as well as Keeping Fit at 50, with plenty of cowboy stories and worthy classics in between. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four was “one peach of a book” and Scott’s Ivanhoe was the sort of story that “suits me better than any other sort.” Tom Sawyer, by contrast, didn’t live up to Huckleberry Finn. George Eliot’s Silas Marner was “almost as bad” as Dickens’s David Copperfield, both dust-dry. “Shaw may be pessimistic, unclean, too cynical for youthful minds, but believe me, I’m going to read him,” he pronounced after a first encounter with the author of Pygmalion. “Conrad at last!” he noted on reading the novel Victory. “I never before imagined that such a concentrated, awful force of action could be wholly transmitted to the printed page.”
He had his own opinions but the ones that mattered, he knew, belonged to other people: the scathing Chicago critic, Burton Rascoe; the dramatist George Nathan, editor of The Smart Set, the literary magazine for fashionable youth; and most important, H. L. Mencken, the iconoclast of Baltimore, who flayed the sham moralism of the American “booboisie” and the pettiness and provincialism of what passed for culture in the United States. To the young literary striver, devotion to Nathan and especially Mencken was as essential as a porkpie hat and a long raccoon coat. Even measured by that rigorous standard, John’s apprenticeship to his idols was notably systematic. Alongside a forty-six-page loose-leaf list of obscure words he’d plucked from the dictionary (“triune,” “hypocaust,” “systolic”), he recorded Mencken’s judgments (Conrad’s short story “The Return” was “no good”) and listed Nathan’s likes (the curmudgeonly comic, W. C. Fields, the Ziegfeld Follies) and dislikes (Tosca, the movies).
By his final year of high school, John figured he was finally making something of himself. His stock of clippings, information filed away to be made use of, was accumulating. He started taking notes on 5 x 7 filing cards, methodical in his drive for self-knowledge. Observations about his family members, about his personal emotions, about his friends, about fraternities and sororities. Lists of original phrases, of epigrams, notes on plots for novels, lists of dresses, cards about girls. “Growing realization that I was meant for something big,” he put down on a Personal Emotions card. Already he had plans to write his autobiography. It would have to be ruthlessly frank, everything bared, but he would write it in the third person.
—
in the fall of 1918, when he was seventeen, John enrolled at the University of Chicago, “that mountain range of twentieth-century Gothic near the shores of Lake Michigan,” as Jimmy Sheean, a fellow student, described it. The campus in Hyde Park was barely two decades old, an arriviste university decked out in full medieval regalia, its gray limestone buildings arranged in quadrangles and studded with gargoyles, topped with crenellated towers, and draped with the requisite ivy. It was as if a dignified assortment of Oxford or Cambridge colleges had been muscled onto a transatlantic liner and deposited several miles south of the central business district. The oil money of John D. Rockefeller had built the new campus, and Chicago’s ambitions for a world-class university to rival the East Coast propelled the scheme forward. The idea was to combine the best of the German university tradition, with its emphasis on graduate education, with the hustle and bustle of the American college. From its founding, in 1890, the university, like many other Midwestern institutions of higher education, was coeducational.
That fall, most of the male students were in army khaki though German troops were deserting their regiments en masse and the war, everyone knew, was nearly over. John wasn’t in uniform as he was still too young to enlist. He was working his way through college. His father disapproved of the University of Chicago in particular and college in general as a waste of time; he couldn’t have afforded the tuition anyway. To save money, John was living at home and commuting to campus, a trip that often took two hours on the train each way. In the student popularity contest otherwise known as fraternity rush, he was therefore at a double disadvantage. A couple of fraternities offered him bids, but according to the anxious hierarchies that regulated such things, both were “bad,” so he accepted neither—becoming a “barbarian” (or “barb”) as opposed to a fraternity man.
He knew of Jimmy Sheean, who was a year ahead of him at the university. But as Jimmy would later say, John was “a real barb in those days,” and they didn’t have much to do with each other.
John studied chemistry in his first years at the university, a major he had elected for practical reasons. That proved a mistake as he had no aptitude for it. What rescued him was literature—in particular, the extraordinary set of American books published in 1919 and 1920: James Branch Cabell’s sex-steeped Jurgen, Carl Sandburg’s gritty Smoke and Steel poems, Sherwood Anderson’s psychological portraits in Winesburg, Ohio, and of course always Mencken, whose defense of the pungency of Americanisms in the English language was followed by two volumes of his collected essays in Prejudices. “I was inflamed by them as by a case of malaria,” John wrote. In a sketch of himself titled “Original Portrait of a Young Man,” John tried to boil down his personality into a series of wise-cracking, semi-lacerating one-liners.
“He likes to talk about books to his mother, who knows more about them than he does.” “He has decided, with Mencken and most of the great writers of the world, ‘that life, after all, essentially, is meaningless.’ ” “He frequently becomes so obsessed with an idea, that he almost can think coherently of nothing else for days & days & must needs tell everyone else about his great discovery.” “He makes few friends, but he is fairly affable & easy to get along with. Very few people, however, really like him.” “It is his invariable luck that the mother of the girls he takes out like him better than the girls themselves.” “He is as yet a virgin. It is neither religion, nor ideals, nor self-respect, nor the thought of another girl, nor the thought of future marriage, that has left him chaste, but merely fear of possible infection.”
That fear—of gonorrhea, specifically—came from his mother, but there was plenty in what John found at the University of Chicago to reinforce Lizette’s lurid warnings on the subject. Girls these days, a fellow student told him, were ashamed of not being kissed. Too much hair below the waist, a student named Marj informed him, was a “big handicap” to a girl. The casualness about petting (three-quarters of Northwestern University girls did it on a first date, Marj said), the easy espousal of free love as an ideal, was not at all what he had been expecting, and the notes he took on his Girls cards attest to his bewilderment. This was not the prudery that Mencken had been decrying. He had nearly fainted, he recorded, when a prim, demure coed named Lucile dropped the word “intercourse” nonchalantly into her conversation. “Girls in halls talk constantly about ‘it’,” she said to John. “Why, you didn’t think this was the first time I talked about this.”
The chemistry major now abandoned for the study of English and history, a room near campus secured, girls to kiss: John increasingly felt himself superior to the mindless copycats in the fraternities on campus. What originality had they with their Oxford brogues, their loud scarves, snug coats, and droopy trousers? John managed to get himself appointed to the college newspaper, the Daily Maroon, as its first ever literary editor. When the literary magazine The Smart Set went looking for an undergraduate to anatomize the University of Chicago for a series on college campuses, he landed the assignment. The other articles in the series ranged from the affectionate—Gilbert Seldes’s portrait of Harvard—to the unabashedly worshipful (John Peale Bishop’s account of Princeton). John, by contrast, took out his knives and set to work.
With its brightly polished doorknobs and its hankering after tradition, the University of Chicago, John began, could be accused of a certain vulgarity. There was a standing order that the windows in the Harper Quadrangle were not to be washed, he wrote, in order that the building might rapidly acquire the grime of distinction. Never refer to the University of Chicago man as a Chicago University man: anything less than the university’s full title he would receive as an affront. Then there were the girls who occupied the peak of the social pyramid, successfully pledging the clubs that, with the fraternities, ruled over social life. What did they learn in their exclusive societies? To dress in “clothes that fit tightly as frankfurter skins” and—a shocking claim—the latest birth control techniques.
The article made John infamous on campus. It was an exercise in score-settling by an outsider who wanted in. The depiction was “unfair” went the murmur, and certainly in bad taste. But now everyone knew John Gunther’s name. That summer, he wrote to the editors of the Midwestern newspapers, sending out more than a thousand queries, asking them if they’d like to syndicate the weekly literary column he wrote in the Maroon. Three papers agreed, and that tactic, together with the Smart Set piece, landed him a regular job on the Daily News when he graduated. He didn’t bother to attend the university convocation, for after a year of terse entries in his pocket diary, crossing off the days, there was finally something worth recording: “i am going to europe this summer.” He’d signed on to work on a cattle boat bound for Southampton. He’d be back in the fall, to start his job on the Daily News.
—
anxious as john was to leave, Chicago was—in the view of his hero Mencken—the “Literary Capital of the United States.” The atmosphere was one of experimentation, of striving after an authentic, modern American form that was as close to the soil as thousands of dusty Podunk towns and as virile and raw as the city’s slaughterhouses and blast furnaces. What was known in retrospect as the “Chicago Renaissance” encompassed an astonishing efflorescence of talent: the novelist Theodore Dreiser, whose Sister Carrie (1900) was the first really important novel to be set in urban America, and the poet Carl Sandburg, who gave Chicago the moniker “City of the Big Shoulders”; the reporter, playwright, and later screenwriter Ben Hecht, whose comedy The Front Page paid homage to the rollicking newsroom, its hard-boiled characters, and the quick double knocked back in a bar at midnight; the novelists Sherwood Anderson, Edna Ferber, and Edgar Lee Masters, author of Spoon River Anthology.
This was bohemia with hayseed in its hair and dirt under its fingernails: cheap lodgings behind batik curtains, dinners in a goulash house or a greasy spaghetti joint, the evening passed in a gambling parlor. Meanwhile, Chicago’s more decorous citizens sustained its coarser elements without trying to tame them. At Harriet Monroe’s poetry evenings, the genteel founder of Poetry Magazine coaxed modernistic verse from her acolytes, among them Sandburg—his stony Swedish face and chopped-up white hair, a leather cap in all weathers, and his cigar chewed pulpy. “You know my city, Chicago triumphant—factories and marts and the roar of machines—horrible, terrible, ugly and brutal,” declaimed Anderson, who’d abandoned his paint business and family in Elyria, Ohio: “Can a singer arise and sing in this smoke and grime?” The chief merit of the Midwestern school of literature, according to Anderson, “was that it had made fucking respectable in fiction.”
For the literary types who gathered in Towertown, the district near the old stone Water Tower that had survived Chicago’s Great Fire, the lack of refinement was the point. Squeezed between the limestone mansions of the Gold Coast and the crime-ridden Italian slums of “Little Hell,” they’d made this neighborhood their own; the bootleggers and the gangsters followed them there. Towertown’s haunts included the Dill Pickle Club, entered off an alley, through an orange door, above which was scrawled danger, with two arrows jutting downward. “Step High, Stoop Low, Leave Your Dignity Outside” was the motto on the door. If you took the flight of stairs down, as a clientele that included anarchists, Gold Coast socialites, and tourists did, there would, depending upon the evening, be a debate about the evils of private property or the ecstasies of free love under way in the cavern below.
The catalyst for Chicago’s literary renaissance was its newspapers. They offered a steady income for writers: Sandburg, Hecht, Ring Lardner and Nelson Algren, among many others, all earned their living by working as reporters. But more important still was the role that reporting played in fashioning the trademark Chicago style: irreverence tempered by disdain and married to a genuine curiosity about the variety of types—the mob boss and the numbers-runner, the Ukrainian and the Galician—to be found in this Midwestern boomtown with its population of more than 3.3 million.
Reporters poked their noses into the ossuary of city life and learned how to extract the marrow from the bones. A few hours later, they wrote it up in the wise-guy style: the man in Colosimo’s restaurant with a knife stuck in his belly, the society dame jumping to her death from the top of the Masonic Temple, racetrack rackets, embezzlement schemes, graft, and swindlers. The trick was to find the right blazing image, words that shone a torch in a few sharp sentences. Cynicism looked a lot like literary realism. The newspaper was the place, according to the Chicago Daily News’s editor Henry Justin Smith, where a man could get more of life than anywhere else.
Among Chicago’s dozens of papers in the 1920s, the biggest was the Tribune, with a circulation of 450,000 daily and 800,000 on Sundays. For the Tribune’s proprietor, Colonel McCormick, the paper served as a vengeance-extracting megaphone. Then there were the weeklies, such as the Black paper, the Chicago Defender, with its pioneering investigations of subjects, such as lynching and segregation, which the white press largely ignored. But the most storied and literary paper was the Chicago Daily News, which could claim Hecht and Sandburg among its veterans. The Daily News’s style was akin to a “daily novel,” said its editor. Its old building was on North Wells Street, a warren of fun-house rooms serviced by an unreliable elevator. To reach some floors, you had to go up three steps and down two. The sooty newsroom was ninety feet long and thirty wide, with room for forty or so men, their typewriter cylinders banging back and forth and the ceaseless buzz of the telegraph and the din of the linotypes echoing in the background. Starting at seven a.m., the beginning of the workday, the phones never stopped ringing.
In 1922, John was the kid whom the tobacco-chewing veterans joshed mercilessly. On his first day, he’d asked to change a quarter to make a call in the newsroom not knowing it was free. Yet they slapped his back when his story about the insane fireman who saved his fellow inmates the night the Dunning Asylum burned was named one of the nation’s best news articles. John tagged along when the reporters dined out at Schlogl’s, a block away from the Daily News building, where a literary roundtable gathered. Schlogl’s was always choked with smoke from pipes and cigars. A cut-glass chandelier illuminated the murky green of the tin ceiling, casting a dull glare on the gloomy oil paintings of wine-drinking monks, and the Bernkastel lithographs. The reporters crowded around a big round black walnut table in a corner. No one ever ordered the owls on the menu, but there was plenty of sweet white Rüdesheimer to drink and you ate what the waiter served up, especially the stewed chicken and the hamburger steak fried in butter. Unlike the more famous New York Algonquin Hotel roundtable frequented by Dorothy Parker, the literary circle at Schlogl’s was for men only.
Despite Mencken’s praise, Chicago’s literati had a chip on their shoulder. They boasted about the Muses that coughed and hacked their way to authenticity in what Hecht called the “chewing gum center of the world.” New York, by contrast, according to Hecht’s short-lived Chicago Literary Times, was a “National Cemetery of Arts and Letters,” which evoked Art mournfully, decorously, “as if it were their dead grandmother.”
To a whippersnapper like John, all that protesting gave itself away. He sold an article about the collapse of Literary Chicago to Mencken’s new publication, the American Mercury. Chicago’s writers—John alleged—had gone soft. They’d lost their vigor, indulged in “excessive experimentalism,” or, still more damning, sold out in pursuit of bigger audiences. They’d arrived in the city riding rough on freight trains and were now departing in sumptuous Pullman sleeping cars. Mrs. Monroe’s best years were behind her; Carl Sandburg’s “sociological” preoccupations (with the labor movement, with poverty) had choked his “purely lyrical strain”; the talents of Ben Hecht, it turned out, were best suited to the newspaper business; Sherwood Anderson had gotten self-conscious and long-winded. One by one, John shoved all the idols off their pedestals. But then he talked up the article so much that Mencken caught wind of the gossip all the way in Baltimore and refused to publish it. By “blabbing,” Mencken rebuked John, “you gave away the whole substance of it.” For John, it was shattering, like a chastisement from God.
Chicago wasn’t in fact finished, though Hecht himself was preparing to decamp for New York and, a few years later, for a career in a place he despised even more—Hollywood. There was another renaissance afoot in Chicago, this one in the African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, of which Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright would become the most famous exemplars. At Hecht’s going-away party at Schlogl’s in 1924, however, Chicago’s Black Renaissance was a world away. Nineteen white men are captured by the camera, a few bow-tied, all in suits, fedoras suspended from hooks in the alcove, bottles of Lea & Perrins cluttering the table. There are broad smiles to commemorate the moment, stogies in hands. John is solemn-faced and in profile, as if he weren’t really part of the festivities. He would be going away soon enough himself, to New York first and then on to London.
Seeing John off at the train station, his mother cried, but reconciled herself to his departure by considering it the culmination of all her efforts. He would send her word sketches of places they’d read about. She and her son would correspond about literature. Which Henry James novel to try next? she’d asked him. (Not Wings of a Dove, she hadn’t liked it.) Maybe she would even save up her money and come to see him—and Europe. That would be something to dream about.
“All the things I have longed to do, you are doing,” she wrote him. “You are the dearest thing in the world to me.” And: “By the way, I wish you’d notice the spelling of receive and leisure!” Unless he wanted to get fat like Papa, he would have to watch his diet. Cut out the bread and potatoes. Take more exercise. Weigh himself and send her those numbers.
Her letters reached him at American Express in Paris and Rome or the poste restante boxes in Jerusalem and Damascus. “What a store of memories you are laying up!” his mother exclaimed. A store of memories, presumably, for when he returned to Chicago to scale the heights of the Tribune or the Daily News, steward the papers to Pulitzers, drum up more advertisements, sweat over the accounting ledgers. Perhaps she hoped that one day he would have a gray stone house in Lakeview down the street from where he’d grown up, and blond, stocky children to whom she could read the Iliad.
She was a remarkable woman, a passionate woman, John recorded on one of his cards. “Complete & absolute sympathy & understanding & love of mamma—always.” She was, he’d note, the “Biggest infl. in my life,” as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to write out the word “influence” in full. He wasn’t ever coming back to Chicago.
—
like john, jimmy sheean lived in his books. As a boy, he built himself a seat up in a silver maple not far from his house and there he took his apples and his books. He read one author at a time—George Eliot when he was ten, George Meredith when he was twelve. By the first year of high school, he’d ingested all of Shakespeare, all of Stevenson, then all of Austen and all of the Dickens he could find in Pana, Illinois, a coal town in the south of the state, population 7,500, a half day’s train journey from Chicago. Enough books to choke a horse, as Jimmy put it. When it was too cold for the maple, he sat on a wooden box in the parlor next to the potbellied stove. After school, he liked to impart his knowledge to classmates, a “gang of midwestern small-town molluscs,” as he later described them. Walking backward like a tour guide, he told them, inter alia, that Queen Elizabeth was one of the first to have false teeth and related the latest news of the pope. Jimmy knew the meaning of more words than he could pronounce.
For Jimmy, the characters in books, fictional or historical, were as real as his family. More real, in fact: he barely noticed the death of his grandmother but hung on the drama of poor, persecuted Marie Antoinette. His mother encouraged him in his reading. His Irish family had much in common with John’s Germanic upbringing. His father was a commercial traveler who sold flavoring extracts, had to be dragged out of saloons, but was a stickler for church attendance and other people’s propriety. William Sheean was crueler than Eugene Gunther, too. One Christmas he gave Jimmy, the youngest of his four sons, a newfangled toy train, only to smash it to pieces when it made too much noise. He bestowed upon his wife leather-bound books only to rage when she dared to read them, rather than to entertain her husband, in the evenings.
Jimmy’s mother left his father on a few occasions, once taking Jimmy and his older brothers back to Denver where her relations lived. There, she had everything she desired: theater, opera, quiet, the company of Jimmy, who invented an imaginary Balkan country when he was six and proceeded to fill out the details. But then she returned to Pana to try the marriage again and her health broke down. Now she was stuck. “Something of the flat disaster of his mother’s life penetrated early,” wrote Jimmy in an autobiographical story.
Father Fox, an Irish priest in Pana who had studied at the seminary in Tours, took it upon himself to teach the boy French; Jimmy learned Italian from the local Sicilian fruit merchant, to which he added a smattering of German from a Lutheran pastor. When he was a junior in high school, a young woman named Helen Mills—unkempt, unfashionable, nervous—arrived from the University of Chicago to teach English. Jimmy was tall and gangly, with long blond hair that hung down, greasy and uncombed; his conversation ranged from Moses to the theosophist Madame Blavatsky, from Tolstoy to the Jacobite Bonnie Prince Charlie. Miss Mills told him: “Your second-hand information is so far ahead of your first-hand knowledge that if you spend another five years like the last you’ll be ruined so far as doing anything real is concerned.” He spent evenings with Miss Mills, whom he learned to call Helen; they stayed out in the park until one a.m. despite the rain. The principal of the high school demanded that they stop seeing each other. When Miss Mills defied the principal, he fired her.
Having become the center of small-town gossip, Jimmy sought to live up to the romantic part. In his senior year of high school, he cut his hair and became the editor of the school newspaper. He wrote a prize essay on literature that won him a scholarship at the University of Chicago. When Jimmy left Pana, Father Fox prayed for him every day for the next five decades.
—
jimmy’s was a provincial upbringing, not unlike that of other men who distinguished themselves as foreign correspondents in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading lights of international reporting didn’t come from the boarding schools of the East Coast or the Ivy League. Rather, they hailed from America’s Babbitt towns and the rich agricultural plains of the Midwest, the provincial heartland. The revolutionary changes in technology and transport that brought Model Ts to rural America also delivered mail-order books, those cloth-bound sets of Shakespeare and Dickens, as well as the big-city papers that traveled hundreds of miles through the night to be delivered before breakfast.
For young people chafing at the rounds of Sunday sermons and ice-cream socials, those papers and books represented an escape, or the promise of escape. Yet even after they’d left Pana, Illinois, or Dowagiac, Michigan, or Velva, North Dakota, they never forgot the open skies and narrow horizons of their birthplaces. Or the audience back home. They had the finely honed sense of the recently arrived for the sort of stories Americans would want to read. The Mowrer brothers, Paul and Edgar, both of whom won Pulitzer Prizes for their foreign reporting, came from Bloomington, Illinois, not far from Pana. Junius Wood, with his shaved head and corncob pipe and his talent for vexing the Soviet secret police, was the son of a watch factory machinist in Elgin, Illinois, whose farthest travel from home was a single visit to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Bill Shirer, a little younger than John and Jimmy, grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, bridling at the stultifying combination of chapel and Chamber of Commerce.
When Jimmy arrived at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1917, his sights were already set on the pantheon of campus celebrity. First, though, he had to acquire some firsthand experience of life. He’d never, for instance, met a Jew except in books. That was how he came to pledge a so-called Jewish fraternity without realizing it was Jewish. When a girl he knew explained that choosing a Jewish house would ruin his reputation, he fled in the middle of the night and surrendered his membership by letter the following day. Next he tried the Poetry Club, but he couldn’t help sniggering at the spectacle of Wisconsin farm boys spouting unintelligible modernistic verse to an indulgent Harriet Monroe.
By his junior year, Jimmy had managed to become the sort of individual whom people talked about, eccentric enough to merit singling out, but (unlike John) still clubbable. An invitation to join Phi Gamma Delta, a “good” fraternity, followed the Jewish fraternity debacle, his hometown now identified as Denver, Colorado, rather than Pana. He wrote dramatic plays—“The Lady with the Midnight Hair”—and comic opera. His opinions figured in front-page headlines. He deemed the new student magazine worth reading: “Phoenix Deserving of Attention Says J. Vincent Sheean.” His fellow students told stories about him. He’d come up to college clutching a typewriter under each arm. He was just like the egotistical hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. The tremblings on campus? That was the sound of Jimmy Sheean dropping a course, reported the Maroon.
In a notebook from those years, which survived Jimmy’s habit of forgetting suitcases on trains or throwing things away, he recorded his friendship with Fred Millett. He’d met Millett, a graduate student in English, through his high school teacher, Helen Mills. Millett’s rooms were dimly lit, with red-painted bookcases; he read Edward Carpenter and Compton Mackenzie. Millett’s favorites soon became Jimmy’s own: “analysis, analysis, emotions, books, poetry, emotions, analysis, sensation—the round has not let me much alone,” Jimmy wrote. “Should I be sorry? I do not know. It is a world. To be in a world is better than to be standing at the threshold of all the world with no key to enter.”
For those with the keys, the Carpenter and Mackenzie volumes were a giveaway: Fred’s was a world of men who loved men. Jimmy sang Laurence Hope’s “Indian Love Lyrics”—“Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar”—and Fred accompanied him on the piano. They went to Jane Addams’s Hull House to see amateur theatricals and slummed in Halsted Street, touring through the crowded enclaves of Jewtown and Little Italy. Millett became the repository for Jimmy’s confidences: his crushes (some reciprocated) on various Phi Gam boys; a visit to a brothel; a love affair with a gruff fellow student, a banker’s son, who detested demonstrativeness and “went in for the masculine stuff.”
Jimmy would have had his eyes opened anyway, he said later, “but the fact is that Fred B. Millett did it.” Millett committed his own portrait of Jimmy to his diary. The boy was a wreck: “emotionally, he has the fluidity of dry sand; nervously, he is a chameleon; intellectually, he is a prodigy.” In addition to the young men who came to Jimmy’s room, talking for hours about “love, and the world, the Flesh and the Devil,” Jimmy squired around debutantes, who asked him to tea dances and concerts. According to Millett: “He is brilliant socially; he can be, and usually is, very charming but his egotism and his heartlessness make him frequently and thoughtlessly brutal to people.”
From the standpoint of book learning, Jimmy’s college years were a bust. He rarely bothered to attend class. Intellectual developments on campus—most prominent among them the “Chicago School” of sociology, which probed the relation between the individual and the mass, self and society—passed him by. There was an exception or two: he immersed himself in a course on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, fascinated by the personage of Ibn Saud, who preached holy war for a purified Islam and would become the founder of Saudi Arabia and its first monarch. But on the whole, Jimmy treated the place like a country club, enrolling in classes that he could ace without trying. “Snaps,” they were called then.
Later on, when he came to reflect on his time at the University of Chicago, what struck him was how insulated he’d been from world events. In that sense, he was a typical American young person of the era, he supposed. He learned to fox-trot but knew nothing of the Bolshevik revolution that erupted his first year at college. As the war’s victors gathered in 1919–20 at the Paris Peace Conference to dispose of the problems of defeated states and broken empires, Jimmy was composing “Barbara, Behave!” for the Blackfriars’ annual student revue. It was still alarmingly easy to live your life ignorant of the world’s affairs.
In 1920 Jimmy considered breaking off his education because he’d run up piles of debt and didn’t see the point any longer. He left to work, first for the Detroit Times, then as the tutor to the son of a Chicago meatpacking tycoon. He’d write a novel, he decided, and had a long talk with the publisher Alfred Knopf, who urged him to be quick about it as “the novel of youth by youth happens to be tremendously in vogue now.” He would title the book, The Passionate Years: A Book of Preludes.
His mother wanted him to return to the university and sold the last of her shares in Colorado oil stocks to fund another couple of terms. But she hadn’t been well for some time, and in January 1921, she died. The cause of death was anemia; she was fifty-two. The night of her death, Jimmy locked himself in her sitting room and pounded out on the piano Liszt’s transcription of the Rigoletto quartet again and again. At her funeral, he remained standing during the prayers, refusing to kneel. Everyone in Pana was shocked by Jimmy’s behavior. Years later, whenever he heard the first verse of the Illinois state song—“By thy rivers gently flowing, Illinois, Illinois”—he broke down in tears.
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the new york paper that hired Jimmy in 1921 was a fledgling enterprise with a people-pleasing idea. Give the masses the stories they want, the more ghoulish or titillating, the better. Lead with pictures—plenty of them, especially on the front page. A murderess, masked and strapped into the electric chair at Sing-Sing. Spice up the look with thundering typography and cracking headlines (Dead!, with a baseball bat–sized exclamation point). And advertise the novelty of the venture with a new format: a newspaper that the ordinary straphanger could read on the subways, its pages little more than half the size of the standard broadsheet.
Founded in 1919, the New York Daily News was America’s first tabloid. The idea that sensation sells wasn’t, of course, new in the 1920s. From the 1880s, the buccaneers of yellow journalism—Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst—had been trading shrieking headlines. For those theorists who’d hoped that newspapers would foster a national intelligence, the advent of the tabloid, on the heels of the yellow press, proved a worrying development. If newspapers were the medium through which people experienced the world, then what sort of world did the sensational press offer its readers? Part brothel, part variety show, part advertising gimmick, answered its critics. Rather than educating the public to be responsible citizens, the tabloid played on people’s worst instincts.
From the start, the Daily News had its detractors but it soon had many more imitators. By 1926, the paper was selling more than a million copies a day, and new tabloids were mushrooming across the country. Unlike most of its Victorian yellow press predecessors, the tabloid had staying power with a mass readership. Personalities were the thing, the more dazzling the better: Babe Ruth’s gargantuan sexual appetites, the gangster “Legs” Diamond’s skill in bullet-dodging, the shameless graft of Chicago’s mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, and New York’s Jimmy Walker. Within the decade, tabloids had become as essential a part of urban life as the jazz band, the cocktail, and the skyscraper.
The editors who took on Jimmy figured (correctly) that the handsome young man with the curled lip would prove an asset in courting the confessions of murderesses and philandering wives. Not long after he started at the Daily News, the quarrel between a prominent New York banker and his wife made its first appearances in the headlines. Mrs. Stillman was a sweet-faced society beauty with notably slim ankles who had made the bandanna her trademark headdress. Her husband James was a millionaire and president of the National City Bank of New York. Stillman alleged that the couple’s toddler son was in fact the progeny of a Mohawk guide whom his wife had met at the family’s lodge in the Quebec wilderness. Mrs. Stillman countersued, accusing her husband of maintaining a stable of hennaed mistresses and having his own illegitimate offspring.
It didn’t take long for Jimmy to win Mrs. Stillman’s confidence. Her pictures didn’t begin to do her smoky hair or haughty prettiness justice, he reported. He was soon filing exclusive interviews with her, dispatches from a Hudson Valley wheat field and the subdued, tasteful drawing room of her Fifth Avenue apartment. My husband is worse than a Bolshevik, she insisted. Just look at the damage he is inflicting on American morality and family life. In Jimmy’s telling, Mrs. Stillman was a charming innocent, a demure and devoted mother, emblematic of all the women done wrong. He so thoroughly championed her side that there was talk that he, too, would be named a co-respondent in the trial.
The final act in the drama was a twist Jimmy’s readers could not have anticipated. On a trip into the North Woods of Canada to try to clear Anne Stillman’s name, Jimmy became friendly with the Mohawk guide. The man had in his possession four love letters that proved the affair beyond a doubt. Now Jimmy switched sides, acting on behalf of the wronged husband. Following a hasty series of conferences called in a Montreal hotel room, he purchased the letters from the guide and turned them over to Stillman’s private detective. Mrs. Stillman’s lover wanted $25,000 for the letters but Jimmy bargained him down to $15,000. Even for a tabloid reporter acting in what the New York Times called “a purely personal capacity,” it was a cool piece of betrayal. In the spring of 1922, Jimmy left in a big hurry for Paris.
—
why not go? in the early 1920s, that was the question that many young women in America were asking themselves. For the previous generation, it would have been nearly unthinkable for a young lady, on her own say-so and unchaperoned, to catch a steamer bound for Europe. But after the war, American girls were piling into high schools and then proceeding to colleges. They cast ballots. Some of them also jettisoned their corsets, bobbed their hair, drank Manhattans, and procured cervical caps. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission to go where they wanted.
It was in that spirit that twenty-six-year-old Frances Fineman left New York in the summer of 1924, bound for Moscow via Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Unlike John and Jimmy, her trip was something of a return journey. Frances’s parents were Russian Jews who had immigrated to America several decades earlier. The story of her family, Frances said, was transplantation, upheaval, and an unavailing search for soft earth into which to plant their roots. Every time, including in America, they’d hit stone instead, and clung on, buffeted by the storms.
Frances was born in New York City on the thirteenth of September, 1897, but her mother, Sonia, fearing the date unlucky, insisted that her father register the birth three days later. Sonia Fineman had fled her village south of Kiev after the Cossack raiders had jeered that they’d be back to take the blond Jewess. Sonia had eyes that were blue as the dawn, and, like Frances herself, smooth, pale skin and curly hair the color of pale amber. Into her trunks Sonia packed her goose-down pillows, not trusting in the bedding of the New World. Her elder sister, the village bluestocking, accompanied her to America.
Sonia met her first husband, Frances’s father, in New York. He loved her; she tolerated him. She was vital and vigorous, practically illiterate but a capable businesswoman. In her fabric store on Second Avenue and 102nd Street, she sold the finest silks and muslins and velvets; customers traveled all the way from Madison Avenue for one of Mrs. Fineman’s bargains. Frances’s father was a mustachioed dreamer, a chaser of utopias: he’d come to America because he’d read of Emerson and the Transcendentalists at Brook Farm. He ought to have married Sonia’s sister, a fellow intellectual—she was actually in love with him—but he wanted the younger girl. On the night of her marriage, Sonia had prayed to her dead father, a rabbinical scholar, to watch over her.
“Papa is a philosopher. You must always have respect for your papa,” insisted her mother when Frances was a child. He didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble. But his children could tell that he considered them an encumbrance: “I like the cow, but I don’t care for the calves,” he said. Her parents divorced when Frances was three and her brother, Bernie, was five. The children trundled between their parents’ shops: his, in a poorer district far uptown, sold cigars, newspapers, and candy. All day long, her father sat, smoking Sweet Caporals and reading the newspapers, his chair in the doorway. He lived in a room at the back: a table and two chairs, a bed, a gas stove. He made the children lunch, scrambled eggs with pink rounds of wurst. Frances wanted to talk to him but never could.
Her mother had three rooms behind her store. Until Frances was thirteen, she slept in the big double bed with her mother, her back against Mama’s soft body. “Do you want to go back into Mama’s belly?” her mother would ask. Frances’s answer was always yes. One night she awoke to find her mother gone. In the next room, there Mama was, stretched out, asleep, on a makeshift bed made of the parlor chairs. Sleeping beside her was a strange man. Soon enough, Frances had a stepfather.
—
for frances and her friends, the lives of their mothers appeared unfathomable. What did those careworn women have to show for themselves? Thirty years of married life, with two husbands, and yet never any pleasure, her mother admitted to her. What Sonia knew of the sex act was far worse than ignorance would have been, Frances noted. She had been told it was for men to enjoy and for women to suffer through. Was there a woman of her own generation, Frances wondered, who had questioned her mother about sex and not been appalled by the answers?
When her mother moved the family to Texas to join her new husband, Frances finished high school in Galveston. But at the very first opportunity, she was on a midnight train back to New York. She enrolled at Barnard College in the winter of 1916. Like the University of Chicago, Barnard was a relatively new institution, founded in 1889 after Columbia’s board of trustees refused to admit women who had petitioned for higher education. Unlike the University of Chicago, Barnard was poor, as were all women’s colleges then. The college’s first class of students, all nine of them, matriculated in a four-story brownstone on Madison Avenue, taking their lessons in makeshift classrooms fashioned from bedrooms and making do with a couple of shelves of books in a front room in place of a library. A few decades later, when Frances and her 150 or so classmates arrived at Barnard, most of the trappings of collegiate life were in place, though the facilities still didn’t bear comparison to those at nearby Columbia. There was now a small campus in Morningside Heights and a library with tens of thousands of volumes. Barnard students were even permitted to attend Columbia classes. The college had developed traditions such as the Greek Games, at which the freshman and sophomore classes, wearing billowing togas, competed in chariot racing, discus throwing, poetry composition, and other classical arts. A roster of student clubs vied for members, among them the Socialist Club and the Journalism Club, both of which Frances joined in her first year.
That Frances would attend university had never been in doubt. Opting for a university education was no longer the flame-throwing or even eccentric decision that it had been for an earlier generation. By 1920, nearly half of the college students in the United States were women, a development decades in the making. Having kicked over some of the barriers to a full life, the others seemed surmountable. A few months after arriving at Barnard, Frances addressed the Journalism Club on the subject of Rabindranath Tagore’s play Chitra, the story of a warrior princess who finds love without surrendering anything of herself. Over late-night mugs of cocoa, Frances and her classmates swore that they, too, would live for themselves. Their galoshes unbuckled, stockings rolled down, hair clipped close, they would partake of all the forbidden experiences. Half of the brainpower of the world was still a virtually untapped resource.
Compared to the other women’s colleges, Barnard had a reputation for radicalism. By 1916, debates about American neutrality were sparking up on campus. Should the United States take sides in the conflict engulfing Europe? In February 1917, after Germany and the United States broke off diplomatic ties, Columbia’s men approved a resolution calling for the university to put its full resources at the disposal of the American government. Barnard’s women retorted by passing a measure condemning war. They “had been taught to think,” noted the college’s official history, “and thinking is painful in wartime.”
Once the United States entered the war, 80 percent of Barnard’s women came around to the cause. They labored on farms, bringing in the summer harvest; they raised money for the Red Cross and a Columbia ambulance unit; they rolled bandages. But not Frances. By now the secretary-treasurer of the Socialist Club, reading Marx and Lenin, she was attending meetings, agitating against militarism and for world peace. She was also consorting with radical professors at Columbia, whose anti-war activities would lead to their dismissal.
In the spring and summer of 1917, the campus in Morningside Heights was awash in protest. Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, suspended academic freedom for the duration of the war, one of the few university leaders to do so. Butler defined pacifism as sedition: “What had been folly, was now treason,” he declared. Students and faculty members gathered on the steps of the library to rally against the university administration. Soon there would be a wholesale purge of pacifist faculty, they cried. The renowned historian Charles Beard resigned his position in protest, denouncing Columbia’s leadership as “reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion.”
That June, Nicholas Murray Butler himself insisted on Frances’s expulsion. She was one of five Barnard troublemakers whose presence on Morningside Heights the dictatorial Butler could no longer abide. The Barnard dean, Virginia Gildersleeve, a protégée of Butler’s, tried to save her. Frances, Dean Gildersleeve pleaded, was merely irresponsible and had been led astray by others. She wasn’t “guilty of any overt act serious enough to actually warrant our dropping her from College.” Better not to wait around until Miss Fineman did something outrageous, Butler retorted. It was unwise to waste a Barnard education on such an “undesirable person.” Frances was booted out.
Getting expelled from colleges would become something of a point of pride for Frances. She enrolled for a year at the Rice Institute in Houston, near her mother. She was tossed out of Rice when the president there learned more about the circumstances of her dismissal from Barnard. That was fine, Rice didn’t suit her. So many inane rules: “Tennis shoes shall be put on and taken off in the building and not on the Quadrangle. Students must not go off the College grounds without hats on…” It was as if they’d admitted women to colleges only to corset them more tightly than ever before.
Still, Frances wanted an education and managed to talk her way into Radcliffe, where the dean extracted a pledge of good behavior in exchange for admission on a trial basis. She made this allowance because of the very promising nature of Miss Fineman’s academic work. “You will enjoy talking with her if you take her in,” Dean Gildersleeve had written her Radcliffe counterpart. “She is rather conceited, decidedly clever, and a somewhat interesting character.”
In a series of tiny leatherette, college-issued diaries, Frances kept track of the ways that life might sweep her away. At Barnard in 1916, Mr. Laidlaw of the International Socialist Society—she was a regular at the Wednesday evening meetings—spoke winningly to her over the telephone. Three years later, there was the little navy ensign from Yale. He announced to her: “You arouse my natural instinct—I want to spank you.”
Then there was the boy who told her he’d ceased to love her, chiding: you can’t hold on to a man’s love.
“Perhaps—I don’t care to?” she replied.
She wrote love letters to the journalist Lewis Gannett whom she’d known in New York and received in return, a poem from his new bride:
Frances, whom I’ve never seen
Gray-eyed maiden of nineteen…
For he who should write verse to me
Spends dawns on gray eyes, not on brown.
Her height, Frances recorded, was five feet, one inch, her weight was 110. She needed to acquire a black georgette dinner dress and a pair of black satin pumps.
A night with the socialist Dorothy Day, luncheon with the bestselling novelist Fanny Hurst, an interview with Mrs. Vincent Astor, a socialite. Frances’s days were a whirl. The Labour Party intellectual Harold Laski, who was teaching at Harvard, took a shine to her. Tea at the Laskis with a handful of other students, “all very stiff and formal and stupid,” she judged. The Radcliffe Magazine wanted an article from her.
Working on a play, Turgenev with a twist: “First Love & Well What Are You Going to Die For.” Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. A marvel! How perfectly a Princeton boy of twenty-three had understood the psychology of the flapper. “If I could only turn out something like that this summer.” One night very late, a soul-to-soul with a Radcliffe friend. “I’ve been evading such encounters—they eat me out.” The friend had a sharpness about her and understood Frances better than anyone else. “There’s something masculine about her,” Frances reflected. “She kissed me good night a lot.”
Frances would later claim she’d gotten kicked out of Radcliffe, too, but there’s no evidence of that in her student file. Instead, after her trial year in Cambridge, she moved back to New York. Dean Gildersleeve quietly reinstated Frances as a student at Barnard College in the fall of 1920. A formidable advocate for women’s advancement, Gildersleeve had been toiling to open Columbia’s professional schools to women, a battle she eventually won (everywhere but the Engineering School) when she offered to handpick the female matriculants herself. Now women college graduates could go to law school or medical school, train as architects, engage in the field of public policy. Among Frances’s fellow students at Barnard were Margaret Mead, who would become the most important anthropologist of her generation; Freda Kirchwey, who later became the editor of the left-wing weekly, the Nation; and the actor and politician Helen Gahagan Douglas, the first woman Democrat elected to the Congress from California. Theirs was the first generation of college-educated women who could fail professionally because they had the chance, however slim, to succeed.
When Frances finally graduated from Barnard in 1921, at the age of twenty-four, she had a battle cry: “Muddle-headedness is the only immorality.” And an aim: “Life’s ultimate goal: love in a cottage.” But first she’d see the great Soviet experiment for herself.