WRITER'S RETREAT
By Bill Case
In 1938 John P. Marquand’s breakthrough novel, The Late George Apley, won him the Pulitzer Prize. From 1939 until his death in 1960 at age 66, six Marquand novels cracked the top 10 in annual sales. No author, including Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, surpassed his output of bestsellers in that time frame. During Marquand’s heyday, he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines, and Life magazine labeled him “the most successful novelist in the United States.”
Thus Pinehurst was abuzz in early 1956 when it was learned the famed author was staying in town for the winter. Convinced there was more October-like weather during colder months in Pinehurst than anyplace else, Marquand rented a house for the season — Nandina Cottage —and would purchase it three years later. He described its location as “the first house on the right after the double road becomes a single road, coming in from Southern Pines.”
The writer became enamored with the Sandhills during monthlong visits in 1954 and ’55 when he lodged with old friends Gardiner and Conney Fiske, Bostonian patricians who wintered in Southern Pines. The Fiskes’ home, called Paddock Jr., was in horse country. Conney rode in hunts (sidesaddle, no less) with the Moore County Hounds. Friends since 1912, John and Gardiner met as undergrads at Harvard University, where Marquand wrote for The Harvard Lampoon and Fiske served as the magazine’s business manager.
Though the Sandhills constituted a relaxing change of scenery for Marquand, he did not curtail his writing. His early morning hours in Pinehurst were invariably spent working on new pieces. “As of this week,” noted a reporter who interviewed the author for The Pilot in February 1956, “he has just finished a serial for the Saturday Evening Post — which required a trip to the Orient last year. He has ‘almost finished’ an introduction to novels of his that are being reprinted; he is doing a couple of pieces for Sports Illustrated magazine; and he’s getting ready to start a new novel: subject undisclosed.”
For roughly 10 days each month, family matters and business dealings necessitated Marquand’s departure from his “fairly quiet life” in Pinehurst for trips to Cambridge, Massachusetts and/or New York City. He owned a home in Cambridge, where his second wife, Adelaide, spent the bulk of her time, sans John. On visits to New York, Marquand conferred with representatives of his publisher, Little, Brown and Company. While in the city, he generally bunked in with longtime friends Carl Brandt and his wife, Carol.
Brandt, Marquand’s literary agent since the early 1920s, helped jumpstart his client’s career by arranging for regular placement of his early short stories in the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and other magazines. Both Carl and Carol (also a literary agent) contributed to Marquand’s climb to the top rung of authors by encouraging him to write novels. Carol also assisted John’s writing by persuading him to orally dictate his musings to a secretary.
Marquand’s most successful novels, including his Pulitzer Prize winner, contained heavy doses of satire. Several targeted the perceived foibles of New England’s old guard upper crust — the pomposity, clannishness, snobbery, excessive focus on family history and devotion to exclusive social clubs. While Marquand’s characters also shared some redeeming qualities, Boston Brahmin types nevertheless resented his portrayals.
When asked whether he might someday be tempted to write unflatteringly about Pinehurst and its residents, Marquand responded that the prospect seemed unlikely, adding that he “could perhaps some time write a book about Pinehurst — but then I’d probably not be able to come back here again.”
On the surface, Marquand seemed to possess the same deep roots of the very bluebloods he satirized. He came from old-line stock, his ancestors arriving in the Colonies in 1732, settling in Newburyport, Massachusetts. There was family money, at least at first. The early generations of Marquands operated a thriving shipping business, so successful that John’s great-grandfather worried his wealth had become an embarrassment to his Puritan nature.
The writer’s grandfather, also named John P. Marquand, made his mark as a New York stockbroker and investment banker. When he passed away in the 1890s, each of his six children, including the author’s father, Philip Marquand, inherited approximately $100,000, a tidy fortune at the time.
With the proceeds of that bequest, Philip purchased a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and life was luxurious for Philip, wife Margaret, and young John in their spacious Rye, New York, home. The Marquands employed a cook, maid, coachman and a nanny. But when the Panic of 1907 upended financial markets, Philip lost everything, including his seat on the exchange. The family’s upscale lifestyle came to a screeching halt. As John remarked later, “I was just a little boy living comfortably with my parents, and the rug was pulled out from under me.”
Philip, having been trained as an engineer, decided his best chance for a financial rebound was to seek employment on the West Coast, but he and Margaret concluded it was not financially feasible for their son, then 13, to accompany them. Thus it was arranged in 1907 for John to live with his two maiden aunts (Bessie and Mollie) and grand-aunt (Mary) in Newburyport at Curzon Farm, a family homestead built by the prior generation. It had survived tough economic times thanks to the frugality of the aunts, who, perhaps, lived a bit too parsimoniously, since the dilapidated Curzon Farm was in dire need of repairs throughout Marquand’s residence.
During that time yet another aunt, Margaret (aka Greta) Hale, frequently visited Curzon Farm along with her six children. Greta was the wife of Herbert Hale, the son of Unitarian theologian Edward Everett Hale, author of a classic 1863 short story, “The Man Without a Country.” Coincidentally, Edward Hale also had connections to Pinehurst. At the behest of village founder James Tufts, he conducted nondenominational church services, a religious forerunner to what would become The Village Chapel.
Marquand befriended his Hale cousins, but quickly became aware of the economic disparity between them and himself. Enrolled at prestigious private schools, the cousins enjoyed vibrant social lives. By contrast bookish and shy, John attended the local Newburyport High School and had few social outlets. His tight-fisted aunts exacerbated his discomfiture by informing him he would never be able to afford life’s niceties.
Marquand was a good enough student to earn a scholarship to Harvard University, beginning in the autumn of 1911. Though he aspired to be a member of one of the university’s famous social organizations, such as the Porcellian Club, founded in 1791, none asked him to join.
Marquand would later satirize the Harvard clubs for their pretentiousness, but by the same token, he grudgingly admired the traditions and sense of kinship the clubs promoted — an ambivalence reflected in his novels. Though later referring to himself as a “poor social outcast” at Harvard, Marquand’s time there could not have been all bad. Writing for the Lampoon carried weight on campus.
After graduating in 1915, Marquand landed a position as a reporter with the Boston Transcript newspaper, earning $15 a week. He fell in love with and devotedly courted the beautiful Christina Sedgwick, progeny of a legendary Boston family — the very sort Marquand would later skewer. The young man was awestruck upon learning that Christina’s uncle, Ellery Sedgwick, was editor of Atlantic Monthly. He could not imagine a lowly hack reporter like himself ever writing anything worthy of publication in Uncle Ellery’s highbrow magazine.
Perhaps to impress Christina, Marquand joined a local National Guard unit — Battery A of the Massachusetts Field Artillery. In June 1916, his unit was ordered to Mexico to pursue the bandit Pancho Villa. Marquand made more friends in three months in Battery A than in his four years at Harvard. During his time on the border, he developed a gift for oral storytelling. His histrionic and comic presentations induced sidesplitting laughter from fellow soldiers.
When America was drawn into World War I, Marquand joined the Army. In contrast to his Mexican experience, bloodshed and death surrounded him on the fields of France, though he managed to return from the war physically unscathed.
After discharge from the Army, Marquand headed to New York with hopes of earning an income that would persuade Christina to marry him. To save money he lived with his Hale cousins. Following a brief stint as a Sunday feature writer for the New York Herald, Marquand entered the field of advertising, pitching slogans for Yuban Coffee and Lifebuoy Soap. But he despised the ad world and began considering whether he could make a living as a writer.
After observing that many fictional pieces appearing in the post-war magazines were “about a man of low social standing who falls in love with a girl who’s socially above him,” Marquand submitted a short story with that theme to the Saturday Evening Post. To his surprise, they bought it. To build on this triumph, he retained Carl Brandt, who assisted in placing more stories, generally for $500 apiece. Eventually Marquand segued to the writing of mystery stories, featuring Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent specializing in solving international crimes.
Marquand asked Christina to marry him several times during their seven-year courtship, though she, concerned they could not live comfortably on his writing income, put him off. When Marquand (with Brandt’s aid) sold a serialized novel in 1922 to Ladies Home Journal for $2,000, she consented. The newlyweds settled on Beacon Hill, Boston’s high society section, and would parent two children.
The marriage encountered turmoil almost from the start. Christina was needy and John was impatient with her, particularly when she interrupted his work. So that he could write in peace, he rented a small room on Charles Street. To further avoid his wife, Marquand frequently bivouacked with the Fiskes at their Beacon Hill apartment.
Christina’s mother compounded the couple’s conflicts, disparaging her husband’s writing, labeling it cheap pulp fiction — hardly writing at all! “Why,” she wondered out loud, “can’t John write something nice for Uncle Ellery at Atlantic Monthly?” In fact, the Atlantic paid its contributing writers a pittance compared to the sums other publishers were doling out for Marquand’s potboilers.
John and Christina divorced in 1935. By then, Carl Brandt had married Carol. Marquand’s best friends were now two married couples — the Fiskes and the Brandts. In his biography The Late John Marquand, Stephen Birmingham writes that Marquand “enjoyed being the third point in a triangle that included a happily married couple . . . In these triangles he felt safe, comforted, loved — and assured of free lodgings, which he definitely appreciated.”
It was during the breakup of his marriage that Marquand began work on The Late George Apley, his satirical portrait of Boston’s upper class. To make sure he was headed in the right direction, he sought critical advice from Conney Fiske. Her insider’s knowledge of Old Boston and awareness of both the frivolities and positive attributes of her class helped temper Marquand’s occasionally derisive tone. Conney would continue to play a sounding board role for Marquand throughout his career.
Set in the 1930s, The Late George Apply is the story of a wealthy gentleman, John Apley, who asks the undistinguished Boston author Horace Willing to write a no-holds-barred biography of John’s recently deceased father, George Apley. The request presents a dilemma for the fictional Willing, having been a friend of the deceased and thus naturally reluctant to disclose any unflattering details of Apley’s life.
Willing tells the story in epistolary fashion, quoting correspondence from his friend’s personal papers. Against all mores of upper crust (and Protestant) Bostonians, Apley courts a lovely Irish Catholic girl, Mary Monahan. This sort of departure from the natural order of things is, however, doomed on Beacon Hill. Apley is unable to resist societal pressures and abandons the relationship. Willing, a bigger snob than his deceased friend, unsurprisingly approves of this decision, characterizing the dalliance as “a youthful lapse” on George’s part.
In a telling letter quoted by Willing, Apley admonishes his Harvard student son, John, that nothing, including the achievement of good grades, is more important than joining a prestigious club — an obvious reference to Marquand’s own Harvard experience.
In the letters the Beacon Hill elite stick together, travel together and attend the same schools. They tend to avoid contact with outsiders — even wealthy ones — if they lack a Back Bay connection. Though pointing out the pomposity of all this, Marquand subtly expresses admiration for the positive qualities of George Apley: strong support of public and charitable activities, adherence to tradition, and unflinching loyalty.
While the book was no potboiler, it brought Marquand to the attention of more intellectually inclined readers than those of his Mr. Moto series. When he was announced the winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize — besting Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men — his ex-mother-in-law must have been aghast.
In the same year he divorced Christina, Marquand met Adelaide Hooker on a visit to China. He was immediately attracted to her and, presumably, to her family legacy as well. Her direct ancestor, Thomas Hooker, founded Connecticut. Adelaide’s father headed an electrochemical manufacturing company, and her sister was the wife of John D. Rockefeller III. John and Adelaide would marry in 1937 and parent three children. However, Adelaide’s personal ambitions and insistence on involving herself in John’s business affairs aggravated him. She, in turn, suspected John of unfaithfulness, and not without cause. Over their 22-year marriage, mutual bitterness increasingly characterized the couple’s relationship. As he had with Christina, John sought escape, often in the companionship of the Fiskes and Brandts.
Though domestic tranquility proved largely illusive for Marquand, financial success was not. His follow-up novel, the New England-themed Wickford Point, placed fourth on the bestseller list for 1939. Though cast as fiction, the book appears to be a thinly veiled satirical reprise of Marquand’s childhood experiences at Curzon Farm. The members of the novel’s Brill family are recognizable stand-ins for John’s quirky, shabbily gentile aunts, and legacy-conscious Hale cousins. The book’s protagonist, Jim Calder, seems a dead ringer for John.
Marquand turned to the ominous backdrop of World War II to frame his mid-1940s novels. So Little Time, published in 1943, ranked third in the bestseller list that year. The story deals with Americans who could not bring themselves to confront the likelihood of war in the uncertain period leading up to Pearl Harbor. The author followed this success in ’46 with another sales hit, B.F.’s Daughter, in which the rebellious daughter of a conservative tycoon (B.F.) leaves her good-guy boyfriend to marry a left-leaning scholar. Enhancing the melodrama is the former boyfriend’s death in the war. Conflicts galore follow.
When World War II ended, many returning G.I.s chose business careers to achieve success and financial security. Marquand, observing a downside in climbing a company’s organizational ladder, authored Point of No Return in 1949. The plot centers around the question of whether the fictional Charles Gray will win a promotion to vice-president of the bank. While his wife, Nancy, desperately wants it to happen, Charles is ambivalent. Disillusioned by the rat race and feeling looked down upon by the town’s elite, he is certain that obtaining the vice-president position will not lead to happiness. Nevertheless, when he ultimately receives the promotion, Gray dutifully accepts it. Life goes on, albeit unsatisfactorily. Marquand’s rather dreary ending suggests that the Charles Grays of the world are powerless to resist society’s expectations, and it is futile for them to try.
Marquand novels were made into movies (and later television dramas) featuring major Hollywood stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Susan Hayward, Kirk Douglas, Ronald Colman, Robert Young and Hedy Lamarr. Peter Lorre played a recurring role as Mr. Moto in eight films. Enhancing Marquand’s income from novels and films were commissions earned from his stream of short stories, which magazines continued to snap up. He also became a Book of the Month Club judge, a gig paying $20,000 annually. By 1950, his combined annual income from these assorted ventures topped $100,000, remarkable for the time.
His success led to other perks. With Gardiner Fiske greasing the skids, he joined Boston’s Somerset Club, the preferred club of Boston Brahmin families. He played golf at another aristocratic haunt, Myopia Hunt Club. Harvard welcomed its newly discovered favorite son with open arms. Literary critic Terry Teachout noted that Marquand “bought his way into society with money made by writing stories and novels satirizing the world that had initially spurned him.”
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.”