The Late John Marquand (3 page)

Chapter Two

Throughout his life, John Marquand liked to make the point that much of his childhood and young manhood had been hard and poor. A young man's struggle, against overwhelming odds, to achieve social and career success is a recurring theme in his books. Marquand was an exceptionally frugal, even tightfisted, man who counted pennies and appeared to hate to spend money, which was odd since he had an obvious taste for luxury and the trappings of wealth. New Englanders are traditionally thrifty, but Marquand's preoccupation with thrift and spending was almost neurotic—if, of course, one was to take him seriously. He blamed his attitudes on early poverty. “My father's greatest talent seemed to be a talent for losing money,” he would remind his friends. “When he finally lost it all, there was no more money for anything.”

Outwardly, at least, money obsessed Marquand. He claimed to disapprove of tipping and, when he was required to tip, he did so in miserly fashion. He once had a violent scene with a woman he loved over an air-mail stamp. To keep himself from spending money
he adopted the practice, like that of royalty, of carrying no money on his person. As a result, he was a slight annoyance to his friends, who were forever having to make him small loans.

He would arrive from New York for a visit with the Gardiner H. Fiskes of Boston, and he would then have to borrow money from Gardi Fiske for the train fare home. He was forever having to mail the tiny sums back to Gardi—once it was a dollar that Gardi had advanced him for a guppy aquarium that had caught his eye. One evening during those years which he liked to refer to as “The Adelaide Period,” and those were years when both Marquands had plenty of money, he and Adelaide were returning from a costume party on Long Island where they had gone dressed as Bedouins, and neither of them had enough money to pay the toll at the Triborough Bridge. It took some persuasion to get the Bedouins through the gate without paying.

When Marquand traveled, he tried to arrange, wherever possible, to stay with friends, thus avoiding hotel bills. When forced to stay in hotels, he indulged in a variety of petty economies. He would go down in the morning to the hotel newsstand to buy a newspaper because, he pointed out, it cost a dime more to have it delivered to the room.

At the same time, he was able to laugh at the excesses of Yankee stinginess that he observed around him. He liked to tell the story of the Back Bay couple he had watched splitting a stick of chewing gum, the wife saying to her husband, “Save the wrapper. We might find a use for it.” Yet he himself could behave in a way that was every bit as penurious. For several years he and Adelaide owned a winter house at Hobe Sound in Florida, and one chilly afternoon his house guests—the Cedric Gibbonses and Philip Barry—suggested that a fire in the fireplace might be in order. Marquand muttered that firewood was “too expensive” and said that a perfectly acceptable fire could be built using coconuts picked up on the beach. An appropriate number of coconuts was gathered, the fire was lit, and a few minutes later coconuts were exploding noisily and messily all around the room.

Marquand's divorce settlement with Christina, his first wife, had been acrimonious and ungenerous, and still he complained that Christina had “milked” much more out of him than was her due.
After the divorce, when Marquand had moved down to New York to live, he suspected Christina of “shouting around Boston” that he had ill-used her financially. In all, he explained, Christina had extracted from him some $8,400 for alimony and support; at the same time, his father had come to him for another $1,000 to cover the latter's gambling debts. He felt, he told the Fiskes, almost as poor as when he had first embarked on his writing career.

It was the mid-Depression year of 1936, and he had actually earned over $57,000. The year before he had earned $45,000, and the year before that $49,000. Still, in 1936, he complained of having paid out $15,000 altogether for the two children. That year he also bought and started to remodel a cozy farmhouse at the edge of a salt marsh on Kent's Island outside Newburyport, even though he bemoaned the fact that the remodeling seemed to be costing him more than twice the amount of the highest estimate. He would smite his forehead and shake his head in mock fury and dismay at the duplicity of women, the extravagances of children, and the cupidity of carpenters, all of whom had helped create what he claimed was his financial plight.

Marquand could work himself up into rages in his mind, just as he could on his feet in the center of a room with an audience of friends. You could tell when one of his explosions was building up inside him because he would sit very still, staring purposefully into space, his lower jaw working slightly and his face reddening. It was always a surprise when he got to the point of blurting out what was angering him, but as often as not the subject had something to do with money. Philip Hamburger, who profiled John Marquand for
The New Yorker
, spent many hours observing and interviewing him and learned to recognize when one of these inner volcanoes was building up to the point of eruption. Still, Hamburger was completely taken off guard one afternoon in Newburyport when, riding with Marquand in his car, the author abruptly slammed on his brakes, drew the car to a jolting halt in the middle of a country road, and, banging his fist against the steering wheel, cried out,
“And God damn it! My wife's sister is Mrs. John D. Rockefeller the Third!”

John Marquand would perhaps have preferred to have been born John D. Rockefeller III, or so he suggested, and it was the sole fault of his “papa” that he was not—or, again, so he said. Marquand,
after all, was a writer of fiction who could view himself as a character in his own fiction. To say that he lied about his past would be unfair, since when has truth had all that much to do with fiction? But, just as he did with his present circumstances and the people around him, he created for himself a semifictive past, turning it into drama, into the stuff of art and dreams and the imagination, removing it in the process from the stuff of life. And in the story as he told it, the villain was most often his father, Philip Marquand.

Chapter Three

Philip Marquand, whom everyone called Phil, was a small, trim, athletic man—he had been featherweight boxing champion of the Class of 1889 at Harvard—who cut quite a dashing figure as he walked about town swinging a gold-tipped walking stick. In his prime, Phil Marquand had been a great favorite with the ladies, but he also had an intellectual side and a serious bent for scholarship. At Harvard, he had been a splendid student and had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was, to every outward appearance, the perfect Victorian gentleman, cultivated, correct, respectably affluent.

In terms of breeding and pedigree, which matter greatly to men like Phil Marquand, his credentials were faultless. There had been Marquands in New England, Phil would remind his only son, since 1732, when Daniel Marquand had arrived in the seaport town of Newburyport from the Isle of Guernsey. Daniel Marquand had prospered. So had his son, Joseph Marquand, who developed a large and successful fleet of privateer vessels that plied the Atlantic in the years before, during, and after the American Revolution. It
was said that Joseph Marquand became so rich that his wealth became an embarrassment to his Puritan nature. He would pray, “Lord, stay Thine hand, Thy servant hath enough.” Perhaps as a result of this entreaty his prayers were answered, and he lost his entire fortune.

The Marquand family affairs had taken a turn for the better by Phil's father's generation. John Phillips Marquand, John Marquand's grandfather, after whom he was named, was a prosperous New York stockbroker and investment banker. One of the stories in the family was that Grandpa Marquand was a man who placed such a high price on dignity and grandeur that, when he realized that his death was at hand, he summoned his valet and requested that he be dressed in evening clothes, saying that he did not intend to meet his Maker in anything less than formal attire.

This elegant gentleman married Margaret Curzon—the Curzons were a family of New England Brahmins and intellectuals—and there were six Marquand children: Joseph, Mary—whom everyone called “Aunt Mollie'—Elizabeth (“Aunt Bessie”), Phil, Russell, and Margaret. After John Phillips Marquand had been presented, properly attired, to the Almighty, and his will was read, it was discovered that he had left an estate amounting to about half a million dollars, which in the year 1900, before income or inheritance taxes had even been thought of, was a princely sum. The six Marquand children each received equal bequests, but the deceased's will directed that the boys were to get their inheritance outright, while the girls were to receive theirs in a trust that has remained unbroken to this day. Phil Marquand took his money and headed immediately for Wall Street, where he purchased a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Within a year, he had lost both—the seat and most of his inheritance. John Marquand was a boy of eight.

Phil's problem was that he was a gambler. Gambling had come to possess him the way drink can possess the alcoholic. Why Phil's father had never noticed the self-destructive trait in his son's character, and had not tied a few precautionary strings to his son's inheritance, is a mystery. There had certainly been enough warning signals. For a while before his death Phil's father had tried to set his son up in the bond business, where Phil displayed a steady losing streak. He would lose because, whenever he won, he would pool
his winnings into one big speculative venture, and then the winnings would be gone. Phil Marquand seemed aware of his unfortunate habit and would shrug off his losses philosophically enough—and then immediately embark on another get-rich-quick scheme.

Phil Marquand must indeed have been a trial, but he was blessed in at least one regard. He had a wife who was strong-willed, tough-minded, devoted to him, and above all loyal. She was the former Margaret Fuller, named after her aunt, the celebrated feminist and Transcendentalist who later became the Marchioness Ossoli. New England's Fuller family is ancient and eminent. For generations, the Fullers have provided Massachusetts with scholars, statesmen, and scientists (including R. Buckminster Fuller, the engineer who created the geodesic dome), and have decorated the New Hampshire coastal resort of Little Boar's Head with their stately summer homes and the beautiful Fuller Gardens, a public park. From the social standpoint, which mattered so much, the Fullers were even better connected than the Marquands. Margaret Fuller Marquand was a woman with an enormous intellectual drive, a capacity to endure hardships without faltering or complaint, and the aristocratic ability to rise to occasions.

For the first few years of John Marquand's life, particularly those first seven prior to his grandfather's death, the little family's existence was comfortable, pleasant, servant-protected, and seemly. There was still all that money in the background. To be sure, there were a number of moves about the American landscape as, in addition to the bond business, Phil's father tried pointing him in other career directions. After Harvard, Phil had taken an engineering degree at M.I.T., and so there was a period during which he worked as a civil engineer for the American Bridge Company in Wilmington; that was how John Marquand happened to be born there and not—as he often said he
should
have been born—in Boston. Then there were subsequent moves, first back to Newburyport, next to a house on Pinckney Street in Boston, then to Concord, then to a house at 51 East 30th Street in New York's fashionable Murray Hill. Then there was a big house on the then-fashionable Boston Post Road in suburban Rye, a house that still stands and has become a nursing home. Rye was a far cry from the split-level, commuter-bedroom town it has become. It was a heavily wooded
village of big estates that overlooked Long Island Sound, and among the Marquands' neighbors were the aristocratic Stuyvesants, Wainwrights, and Roger Shermans.

The growing-up years in Rye must have been particularly pleasant. Certainly they seemed so in retrospect to John Marquand since, as in any retrospective view, it was always possible to edit the vision, to concentrate on the hours that were comfortable and happy, and to erase from the canvas any ominous storm clouds that may have been gathering on a not-too-distant horizon. There was a big barn behind the house, and a horse called Prince, and a carriage and coachman to drive Phil Marquand, the Westchester squire, to the railroad station in the proper style.

There was a nurse for little John—no other children to share her attentions—and there was a cook in the kitchen to prepare the meals, a waitress to serve, and a lady's maid for Mrs. Marquand. There was a man in the garden to rake the graveled walks and driveways and to trim the tall hedges. Automobiles were a rarity in those days, but Phil Marquand had one, a two-passenger Orient Buckboard with its motor placed up behind the driver's seat. So there were Sunday drives, frightening all the horses along the way as they went, causing the neighbors to look up from their verandas and say, “There go the Marquands!” There were trips to the American Yacht Club to watch the week-end sailing races, or to the beach club for tennis or a swim or a stroll among parasoled ladies who nodded and smiled and acknowledged the attractive family. There was tea with honey in a gazebo, and a sense of gaiety and luxury and permanence that one might easily have supposed would last forever. Phil Marquand was losing money, but there was seemingly a bottomless supply.

It was an era so recent and yet so far past that it seems quaint in the description. It was a time in which certain things counted, and in which one counted on certain things. It was a period that was very English Colonial in feeling, and where the concept of Society, in the English sense, was not only accepted but stressed. One talked seriously of who the people of Quality were, who were gentry and who were not. Both blood and breeding mattered. Anything English was admired. Harvard was considered socially better than Yale because Harvard was designed along the lines of an English
university and laid out in a town called Cambridge along a tree-lined river that looked very much like the Cam. To prepare for Harvard, there was Groton, which had been developed just a few years earlier in an unabashed attempt to copy such English public schools as Eton and Harrow, to educate the sons of American ladies and gentlemen, to sift the gentlefolk from the proletariat.