The Late John Marquand (37 page)

In 1951, however, a producer named Julian Blaustein had expressed an interest in making a film of
Wickford Point
, and John, with Carl Brandt's persuasion, was quite tempted to pursue the possibility. But there were a few things he insisted on. The price, for one, would have to be high enough to make any further alienation of his family worth his while; he proposed a $15,000 to $20,000 option price against a final price of $150,000 to $200,000. The Hales, furthermore, would have to be “bought off,” he said, and that, he estimated, would cost an additional $15,000 or $20,000. Also, he could not approach the Hales personally, nor should it appear that he was paying off the Hales himself even indirectly. After all, if he paid them, it would be tantamount to an admission that he had used them in the book. Carl offered to approach the Hales for him. He also suggested that Blaustein's lawyers could approach the Hales through their lawyers and get them to sign quitclaims, or agreements promising not to sue. But the price John asked was too high for Blaustein, and the deal fell through. In 1955 it revived, briefly, this time with the producer Sol Siegel. But John demanded the same terms: $150,000 for himself with “payments spread out over five years,” as Carl outlined it to the Hollywood office, “and it would have to be worked in some way that he would be satisfied that the money was put in such a spot that he'd get it no matter what happened to the film in question.” The Hales would also have to sign their quitclaims, and John was certain they would want money for this. Once again, the price he set was too high for the market, and so one of John's finest novels, which, if sensitively done, could have been made into an engrossing film, was never sold.

Today, the Hales laugh at the suggestion that they would have sued over a movie version of
Wickford Point
. “John simply would not understand that we were really very quiet and gentle people,” Robert B. Hale said not long ago. “The only reason why we fought John the way we did in 1949 was that it seemed to us he was trying to take away our summer home—and he was. It is typical of his lack of sensitivity, too, that he would assume we would have to be ‘bought off.' John, of course, had some very strange theories about
money. He thought that the only way to get what you want was with money, and that people never did anything for other people unless there was money in it for them. We Hales were not like that. I suppose that is why we baffled him.”

In the meantime, the
Saturday Evening Post
was in a much more expansive financial mood than the motion picture companies. No sooner had the film sale of
Wickford Point
fallen through than the
Post
came up with an enticing offer. Everyone knew that John and Adelaide had been having their difficulties, that John had been begging for a divorce against her stubborn refusal, and Stuart Rose at the
Post
had recalled how, when John had been having similar troubles with Christina, the
Post
had sent Marquand on a trip to the Far East to gather new Mr. Moto material—with profitable results. Rose's idea was: Why not another Mr. Moto serial? The sibilant-tongued little agent had become a part of the American vernacular, and a new serial about him would surely sell magazines. Why not another Far East trip for its author? Rose offered Marquand $75,000, sight unseen, for the book, plus $5,000 cash expenses for an Orient trip in advance. Little, Brown would publish the result in hard cover after the
Post
's serialization. It was to be written with an eye to a movie sale. Marquand was delighted, and presently—in June, 1955—he and his oldest son, Johnny, were off from Boston to San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, with a two-day side trip to Angkor Wat, then to Colombo, Beirut, and Cairo—first class all the way. From Cairo, John would fly on alone to Milan, where he would meet Carol at Marcia Davenport's villa on Lake Como. From there the two would go to Paris and to Versailles, where they had first met. There they would be joined by Carol's son, Carl, Jr., and there John would begin dictating to Carol the Mr. Moto yarn, working much the way they had worked years ago, under the mulberry tree at Maule. They would go on—for more work, more dictating—to London. It was going to be a glorious and busy summer, with a chance for John to get reacquainted with his son, who was already a promising author and who had written a novel of his own, which Harper had published,
The Second Happiest Day
.

By the time father and son had circled nearly the entire circumference of the globe—they left Boston on June 25 and arrived in
Cairo at the end of July—there had been at least one mishap, or misunderstanding, and when John joined Carol at Lake Como he was still bristling about it. The argument was over an Oriental rickshaw boy to whom John had given an order; when the boy had not obeyed speedily enough, John had shouted at him harshly. His son had taken the attitude that this was not the way to speak to another human being, to which John had answered, “Who knows the Far East better—you or I?” He explained that rickshaw boys expected to be shouted at, that this was the only way to get them to do what they were supposed to do. One of the stories John loved to tell was of how, on another trip to the Orient with his friend Walter Bosshard, their car had become stuck in the mud in Mongolia, and Bosshard—who knew the Orient even better than Marquand—had ordered some Chinese peasants to push the car out of the mud. When the peasants had balked, Bosshard had said to John, “Hit them!” And John, after at first demurring, found himself whacking peasants in the stomach to get them to do as they were told, and they eventually did. He had even made the anecdote a part of one of his Tuesday Night Club papers in Newburyport. But John, Jr., was still unconvinced of the propriety of such treatment of peasants and menials and said so, and the argument became heated and bitter. Son accused father of being autocratic and arrogant, and father accused son of being romantic and naïve. John—as he always did when he was certain that he was in the right—kept going back to it again and again, and it was still with him when he got to Europe. For days he could talk of almost nothing else.

As soon as they got to Versailles and settled at the Trianon Palace Hotel, John started dictating to Carol. Of these happy summer days, Carol Brandt recalls, “It was a perfect example of how Carl, John, and I worked together as a team and as a family. Back home in New York, Carl had set up all the arrangements, worked out all the business details. John was doing what he liked to do best of all, writing, and I was there with him in a pleasant place, helping him get his book down on paper. Carl junior was with us, with this or that young girl friend of the moment, and the young people provided John and me with pleasant company at dinner—John loved talking with young people. It wasn't just a civilized arrangement. It was
wonderful
.”

By August 23 Carl Brandt in New York was able to report to Stuart Rose at the
Post:

I've heard from Versailles and the report is that John is at work. He goes out with Button [their nickname for Carl, Jr.] for an hour's walk and commences work at 10. Then luncheon and a walk. It doesn't sound like much but Button says they are run ragged. If it kills them off, they'll get Junior [their nickname for John, Sr.] to do that hour of work in the afternoon.

As of last Friday, he seemed to have been on the beam with it. There's a block to cut out and he's maybe not as far along as his 45 pages lead him to think. But he is adroit and a pro and they find it fun to watch the wheels work. He asked me to tell you not to worry—John has a good story, subtle and adult as well as strong and deadly, timely and knowledgeable. It will be laid in Tokyo and Cambodia. That's the end of my news.

And, a week later, Carl wrote to John: “I'm delighted and so is Stu Rose (I saw him yesterday afternoon) with the progress you have made on MOTO. I'm also pleased at the reports your typist gives me of your mastery of your medium! When you get that lady enthusiastic you really have got something! Keep up the good work. To say that I am burning up with curiosity is to put it mildly.”

The little party moved on, at the end of August, to London and ensconced itself at Claridge's, where the work went on. Carol Brandt recalls, “Everything that John wrote he wrote with enormous joy—that was to me one of the special things about his writing, that he never wrote about anything he disliked—but this Mr. Moto book was a special joy for him because it was returning to an old character he had always loved, and applying to it all the skills and subtleties he had acquired since the last Moto. The book just zipped along, with John loving every minute of it. You could tell how much John enjoyed what he was doing by watching the expression on his face. As he dictated, his upper lip and mustache would curl with pleasure. It was wonderful to watch a man get such a kick out of his own words and sentences.”

There were pleasant diversions, other than work, in London. John had been complaining, off and on, about the amount of American income tax he had had to pay and reiterating his belief that writers were taxed unfairly; a piece of work might take several
years to complete, but its earnings were all taxed within the calendar year of its publication. But one afternoon John's blue eyes had lighted up, and he said that he suddenly felt like doing something completely extravagant, “like buying a solid gold chamber pot.” Taking young Carl Brandt with him, he marched out into St. James's Street in search of such a purchase. The two had often gone duck-shooting together at Kent's Island, and when they passed the window of an elegant gunshop John took Carl by the arm and led him inside. The first thing John looked at was an antique Purdey shotgun, which was priced at a thousand guineas, or about $3,000. Murmuring that he didn't think he wanted
that
much of a solid gold chamber pot, he settled on a fine old Atkins, for $1,700 and promptly presented it to the young man. “How is the gold chamber pot working?” he would always ask Carl, later on.

It was in London that summer that John received word of the death of his old friend, Gardi Fiske. Gardi had suffered so long with the strangling torture of emphysema that his death was, in a real sense, a release from terrible pain—and a release for Conney too.

Still, Gardi's death put John in a dark mood. The day the news came marked the first and only time he raised his voice against Carol Brandt in anger. John hated to have to handle money, and whenever he traveled someone else—a secretary, a companion—was always delegated to take care of John's finances. On this trip, it was young Carl whose job it became to hire cars, pay bills, deal with taxis and waiters and bus boys and concierges. Now John had written his letter to Conney Fiske and all at once found himself in the lobby of the London hotel with no stamp with which to mail it. He could, of course, simply have handed the letter to the room clerk, who would have stamped it, mailed it, and put the charge for the stamp on the bill. But this did not occur to John, and he flew into a rage because no one had thought to provide him with postage stamps. Carol and young Carl were upstairs having breakfast in the suite they all shared when the telephone rang. It was John, from below, shouting and cursing. “The fact that he didn't have a stamp suddenly became very much our fault and nobody else's fault,” Carol recalled later. “He was shouting at me so over the telephone that there was no way to answer him, no way to reason with him. Finally I took the phone away from my ear and just let the
receiver dangle by the cord until it stopped making those terrible noises. Then I picked it up and said, ‘And darling, what time shall we meet, and what shall we do today?'”

The first draft of John's Mr. Moto yarn was finished in slightly over six weeks' time—431 triple-spaced pages. But the editors of the
Saturday Evening Post
were not entirely happy with the results of that summer's hard work when they received the manuscript, which John had titled
Stopover: Tokyo
, that fall. The ending, the editors contended, was too downbeat. Couldn't John lift it a little and close the story on a brighter note? After all, mystery and spy-story tradition practically demands that a book end with all villains either dead or fittingly punished, and heroes rewarded and ready to live happily ever after. In
Stopover: Tokyo
John had had the nerve to kill off a “good guy” or, in this particular case, girl. John, however, felt that this unusual ending was important to the over-all honesty of his book and refused to change it. Furthermore, he was in a position, if the
Post
would not publish the tale as written, to refund the magazine its money. Reluctantly, the
Post
capitulated.

Even so, the whole
Post
episode nettled John considerably. It would not have happened, he told Carl and Carol Brandt, in the good old days of George Horace Lorimer. John was not the sort of writer, he insisted, who could turn out machine-made fiction to order, according to an editor's preconceived plot idea or plan, with a guaranteed happy ending every time. Some writers might do that, but not he. Besides, the
Post
's attitude had made him feel as though they regarded him as simply another
Post
employee, a journalist on assignment. (In the
Post
's behalf, it should be noted that, by accepting the generous expense account, John had put himself somewhat in that position.) For all the diversion the trip and writing the book had provided, he told the Brandts that he wished to be involved in no further writing tasks of this sort.

Carol's first big piece of business for the Brandt office (which she had joined a few months earlier to help her ailing husband) was to sell
Stopover: Tokyo
to Twentieth Century-Fox for $65,000, plus a number of attractive escalator clauses, to be made into a film starring Robert Wagner and Joan Collins. This news, along with the well-known fact that John had written the spy thriller on a
commission from the
Saturday Evening Post
, caused book reviewers—who often seem to be of the theory, Sedgwickian in its feeling, that only trash makes money—to be waiting for
Stopover: Tokyo
with freshly sharpened knives when it was published in 1957. They leapt on the book with glad little cries and wrote enthusiastically unfavorable reviews.