Marquand generally played golf as a single at Pinehurst’s five courses, accompanied only by caddie Robert “Hard Rock” Robinson. Hard Rock, a charter member of the club’s Caddie Hall of Fame, cheered Marquand’s intermittent good shots. But when the putts weren’t falling, Robinson would lighten the author’s mood by relating tales from his own colorful past. A tap dancer in his youth, Hard Rock appeared in early Fox Movietone films and claimed to have once danced with Gloria Swanson.
Soon after his arrival, Marquand joined The Tin Whistles, a membership society of Pinehurst Country Club’s male golfers formed in 1904. Given Marquand’s golf bashfulness, it is unlikely he made many appearances in society competitions, and there is no record of him having won anything, though he did become a regular attendee at Tin Whistle social occasions. His affability and whimsical humor must have made a favorable impression, since the author was elected to the organization’s board of governors and served on its Audit Committee.
Marquand also joined The Wolves, a men’s bridge club. Friend and fellow Wolves member George Shearwood recalled a game of bridge with John that “died a natural death somewhere around the second deal, if, indeed, it ever even got that far” once Marquand began spinning tales.
Guests at Pinehurst’s cocktail parties experienced Marquand’s stand-up act in its top form. “Give him an audience, however small, and he was off,” marveled Shearwood. “He was a terrific storyteller, the more so with his hand wrapped around a glass, whose contents may have contributed somewhat to his bent for the sardonic, satiric and sometimes almost satanic.”
Marquand made friends with a number of Pinehurst couples, including the Shearwoods, and hosted numerous gatherings at Nandina Cottage. Despite immersion in the village’s social whirl, he did not neglect his morning writing routine, dictating to secretary Marjorie Davis, who stayed in a small apartment over the garage. One novel Marquand partially wrote there, Sincerely, Willis Wayde, contained a Pinehurst reference when Wayde attends a convention at the Carolina Hotel.
He also penned a hilarious spoof of country clubs for Sports Illustrated titled “Life at Happy Knoll.” One character, Old Ned, serves as Happy Knoll Country Club’s bartender. He can’t mix drinks worth a damn, but management fears replacing him because he knows too much. Though a poor mixologist, Ned is an attentive listener and a master at getting overserved members to unburden themselves, hearing more confessions of adulterous affairs than a Catholic priest.
Then there is the club’s golf pro, Benny Muldoon. Having won the state open, he threatens to leave Happy Knoll for more profitable digs at rival Hard Hollow Country Club. Despite his golf chops, Benny is a terrible instructor who never improved a member’s game. He’d rather chase women than teach them. Yet management views it imperative to overpay Benny so Hard Hollow won’t snatch him away.
Enterprising young board member Bill Lawton suggests the club liven up its annual dinner by hiring a “professional drunken waiter” for the evening’s entertainment. A more senior member responds, “Why pay for an artificial drunken waiter when flocks of real ones would be present at no additional cost?” While members at Marquand’s two real golf clubs, Myopia Hunt and Pinehurst Country Club, may have speculated as to whether the author was satirizing them, it’s doubtful he was targeting Pinehurst. He revered the place. “At least it has one thing that other resorts lack,” he wrote, “a consistent and carefully maintained tradition. I know of no other winter resort where money in and of itself counts for so little.”
Though Marquand’s Pinehurst experiences during the late 1950s brought him a degree of tranquility, unsettling events disrupted his personal life. He constantly warred with Adelaide before finally divorcing. His two best friends, Gardiner Fiske and Carl Brandt, passed away. Bouts of loneliness seem to have gripped Marquand, given that he asked both newly widowed Carol and Conney to marry him. Both women declined, though Carol and John apparently did maintain an intimate relationship.
The loss of his close friends caused Marquand to brood. “Just think,” he reflected, “I’ve spent all my life working so I can meet and have fun on their own level with people like the people at Pinehurst, and now all the best ones are dead or dying, and all the rest are nothing but God-damned fools.”
Marquand mitigated his ennui with public appearances and peripatetic travel to far-flung places. The Pilot, keeping track of the whereabouts of locals, reported his excursions to Boca Grande, Florida; Italy; the Virgin Islands; Greece; and east Africa. His six-week visit to the latter destination was made in the company of travel agent George Shearwood,
On July 15, 1960, a few months after his African journey, Marquand died suddenly in his sleep at his summer home in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He was 66. Shearwood summed up his friend’s time in Pinehurst: “John Marquand, in those winters of his life down here, full of prestige, and still strutting in stage center to the enjoyment of all of us and himself in particular . . . a very relaxed, amusing good companion who fitted into the local scene with ease, and perhaps a sense of happy relief at being far removed from the crowded world in which he fought his way to the peak of his profession.”
While Marquand reached the top rank of authors during his lifetime, it is also true that neither he nor his writings achieved the lasting import of a Steinbeck or Hemingway. Perhaps it is because the subjects he generally tackled, though riveting in their time, became passe. He held no illusion that his fame, or that of his novels, would long endure. “When you are dead,” he mused, “you are very dead, intellectually and artistically.”
