The Biographer and the Family

In her Paris Review interview, Stacy Schiff remarked that an “intense rapport develops between the subject’s family and the biographer. You wind up playing therapist and archivist. By definition you come to know your subject better than he did himself. You also inherit the family dates, feuds and deceptions.” In my interviews with families I often assumed the varied roles of teacher and advisor, apologist and mediator, judge and appraiser, confidant and confessor, guest and spy. I was unwillingly dragged into bitter family quarrels, especially the competition between half-siblings, who had the same father but different mothers and were fighting about money from the lucrative literary estate. Just as one wife would heartily dislike another, if one sibling helped me, the other often would not.

A biographer — an investigative reporter of the spirit — recreates a life as a detective reconstructs a crime. Archival research is essential, but personal contacts help interpret the letters, diaries and texts that the writers and actors left behind. Nothing is more riveting than talking to sympathetic and intelligent people about a person who passionately interests you. After getting to know the relatives, I had to establish trust and evaluate perceptions, unravel the web of memory and discover the truth. Their testimony added a personal and precious dimension to my work. I gained insight into the lives of my biographical subjects not only from my informants, but also from what sort of people they were, from learning how their lives had been affected by talent or genius. All the writers and actors left a trail of emotional wreckage, and their families revealed their private struggles as husbands and fathers.

Wyndham Lewis

The artist and author Wyndham Lewis, who had five illegitimate children, neither supported them nor helped bring them up. Iris Barry, an eminent film critic, was the mother of Lewis’s last two, a boy Robin Lewis Barry (born June 1919) and a girl Maisie Wyndham Barry (born September 1920). Iris, who had an attractive oval face, was poor, arty and ambitious, trying to make her way in London bohemian circles. Lewis soon abandoned her and she abandoned their children. Following every lead in London, I telephoned a man whom I thought might be her son and he eventually agreed to meet me. But he did not want me to identify him in my biography of Lewis, and I could not tell his story until now.

Robin was a tall, thin, handsome, cultured and kind architect, who looked much younger than fifty-nine. Born in Birmingham, he was brought up by Iris’s mother Annie Crump who, as Madame Pandora, told fortunes on the seaside pier of Bognor Regis. Robin lived with Annie until he was four years old, then spent several years, without holidays at home, at a dismal school for “unwanted children” in Woodford Green, northeast of London. A friend once accompanied Iris to visit her six-year-old son in this orphanage. He was a miserable and unhealthy little boy with chilblains, who did not know that “Auntie Iris” was his mother. The visit made her feel horribly guilty for abandoning him.

Between the ages of eleven and seventeen Robin went to a boarding school in Chichester. He then trained in an architect’s office from 1937 to 1939, and served in the army from 1939 to 1945. He wrote an authoritative, frequently reprinted five-volume work, The Construction of Buildings (1958-98) and was a principal lecturer at the Polytechnic of South London. Once married to Zoe Farmer, the divorced first wife of Iris’s friend and patron, the television magnate Sidney Bernstein, Robin was widowed and had no children. He’d lived in his fine house at 84 Vincent Square, Westminster, since 1952.

Robin by his own account was “too busy being a boy and absorbed in his childhood,” and didn’t ask about his father until he was twenty. Iris, ashamed of her illegitimate children, never mentioned Lewis to Robin and Robin never had any contact with him. He defensively claimed that Lewis was boring, though he owned copies of Tarr and The Apes of God, and didn’t go to Lewis’s major art exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1956, when Lewis was blind and close to death.

Maisie had a happier childhood but was more bitter. When she was less than a year old, she was adopted through an advertisement by a wealthy professional family in Burnley. But Iris never agreed to a legal adoption and would sometimes appear, in a bad or bullying mood, and take the girl away for a few disturbing days. When Robin was stationed at Burnley in 1940, Iris told him in an offhand way that he had a sister living there and might like to meet her. They became friends and saw each other regularly from then on. Maisie lived in Banbury, Oxfordshire, was divorced and had two grown children with serious problems.

Robin owned two of Lewis’s exceptionally fine (and hitherto unknown) charcoal and pastel drawings of Iris in 1940, which I immediately recognised when I entered his sitting room. In the blue pensive one she wears a kerchief and places her left hand on her chin; in the red one she tilts her head back. He also showed me Lewis’s World War I identity disc. Maisie, who refused to meet me despite Robin’s recommendation, was much more sensitive about her background. She once, in a fit of anger, damaged a valuable Lewis oil painting — no doubt a portrait of Iris and gift from her — threw it into the dustbin and symbolically killed both parents at the same time.

As a boy Robin had no contact with Iris and never really knew her until 1950, when she left New York, after founding the film library at the Museum of Modern Art. She retired to a village in Provence. Robin disliked his mother, who had “cold eyes.” He felt embarrassed rather than resentful when late in life, to compensate for her callous treatment of him in the past, the old lady tried to become motherly and smothered the middle-aged stranger. Robin couldn’t tell me anything about Lewis, but even so I learned a lot from him. He had inherited the good looks and artistic talents of his parents, their personal courage and capacity for hard work, and he had the grit and integrity to use his gifts despite a wretched childhood.

I became friends with Robin and dined with him several times on my visits to London. On December 7 1980, two years after we first met and the year my life of Lewis was published, Robin wrote me a rather poignant and charming letter:

“Routledge did send me a copy of The Enemy for which I thank you. I have so far read about a third of the book which I have enjoyed and intend to finish at leisure probably over Christmas. Sadly for me you have not been able to solve the enigma of the man. Maybe this is not possible as he was so much more a poseur than a man that no one will now be able to. Try though I may I cannot comprehend the two who were my parents. Foreign times and foreign people I suppose.

I hope you get the reward both financial and in academic esteem for all the hard work that went into your excellent book. If you were in England the reward of your publications would be a chair.

I hope we meet next time you are here or if I ever can afford to go there. Happy New Year. Love to Valerie and Rachel. Robin Barry.”

Ernest Hemingway

In May 1983 I spent a week visiting Ernest’s three sons, who had followed their father’s footsteps and lit out for the territories in the West. Though Jack and Patrick agreed to see me, I hadn’t heard from Gregory and his Irish wife Valerie. When I got to the airport in Bozeman, Montana, on the first of my twelve trips to that town, I was surprised to find that Val was there to pick me up. Greg was home after being fired from his medical practice in the remote village of Jordan, Montana, and they invited me to stay in their guest cabin.

I first saw Greg as we drove up Bridger Canyon, jogging down the road wearing his underpants (like Superman’s) outside his tights. He had just come out of several bad manic episodes and was taking heavy, self-prescribed doses of lithium, which made him depressed. He looked a wreck: matted hair, stained teeth, scraggly beard, deeply lined face and dirty protruding ears. Though his speech was slurred, he was also quite masculine, lucid and charming. Within minutes we were talking about a subject of great interest to both of us — Martha Gellhorn’s vagina — on which he was something of an expert. Greg said that Martha, Ernest’s third wife, had many abortions and couldn’t have children. At home, Greg spoke openly about his transvestism, his quarrels with Ernest and his feeling of not being loved. He said he’d mellowed somewhat since he published his vitriolic memoir Papa in 1976. Deeply unhappy and heading for disaster, he still had his license and planned to start what might be a dangerous medical practice in Bozeman. Val, used to perpetual crises, was amazingly calm and seemed stable under extreme emotional pressure.

As we discussed intensely personal matters I established a curious and immediate intimacy with Greg and Val. Their marriage was breaking up, and both husband and wife felt a compulsive need to confide in someone. Since I had examined all the Hemingway papers in the J. F. Kennedy Library in Boston and interviewed scores of people, I was familiar with almost everything in Ernest’s life and they apparently felt they could trust me. We talked compulsively for fourteen hours a day, circled back to Ernest’s troubled sexual relations with Martha and to the real story of Greg’s bitter quarrel with his father after the sudden death of his second wife, Greg’s mother Pauline, in 1951.

Around midnight Greg would say goodnight, then pace around the ranch house like a caged panther and return to the living room where, he rightly guessed, Val and I were still talking about him. His attitude toward me took violent turns, suddenly and quite dramatically changing from flattering admiration to intense hostility and back again. He would stare at me and declare, “You have a brilliant mind, you’re a great writer and I respect you tremendously.” Then, almost as an afterthought and forgetting that he’d invited me to interview him for my biography of Ernest, he exclaimed, “You’re a disgusting, slimy, sneaking spy, who’s wormed your way in to my home and is trying to pry out my most closely guarded secrets.”

My visit had other awkward moments. When Val and I were talking about Greg in the cabin behind the main house, he quietly crept up to the door and overheard our conversation. Just as I remarked, “That must have been very difficult for you,” Greg’s disembodied voice said, “Yes, it was!” Like the biographer and “publishing scoundrel” in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, I felt I’d been caught in flagrante and was reduced to strained silence.

After attending the opera with Val and a younger friend, we went out for drinks and he left to talk to some people at the bar. As Val was telling me about the history of her friendship with Ernest while she was his secretary, the music suddenly became very loud and I moved closer to hear what she was saying. Just as I was about to discover the precise nature of her relationship with Ernest, the friend returned and interrupted our conversation. Later on, as our talk inched back to the sensitive subject, I was able to confirm my suspicions and find out what I wanted to know.

When we drove to a picnic at the nearby Gallatin River, Val insisted, more from self-preservation than politeness, that I sit in the front seat of the Jeep and she sit in the back with their daughter Vanessa. Surrendering to his full manic urge, Greg drove at top speed, once through a flashing railroad crossing, then plunged off the road and went straight down and across (instead of along) a very steep hairpin turn to the river. On the way back, he sped flat out on his long driveway, then slammed on the brakes and stopped a few inches away from the concrete wall. Val’s pleas for him to slow down merely incited his mania. “Scared, weren’t you?” he asked, with a satanic grin. I wondered if I’d be killed in the line of duty before I could write a single word of my biography.

Eleven years later, in August 1994, Greg had arranged an expensive fishing trip with his son Sean, who was visiting Montana, but did not inform him about the dates and place. To discover the essential details Sean and I, following a series of clues, tracked him down in Ennis, Montana, sixty miles southwest of Bozeman, where he’d recently bought a new house. The whole experience, with Greg in his supreme manic state, was surrealistic.

Greg was well known in that small mountain town for dressing up as a woman and getting into fights with the men he tried to pick up in bars and restaurants. But no one knew exactly where he lived. When we drove around and finally found him, he was standing in the driveway and I reminded him that we’d met in 1983. By way of a greeting he asked, “Are you still f***ing my wife?” (a baseless charge that accounted for his hostility) and tried to punch me in the stomach. After this show of belligerence, he calmed down a bit and became relatively friendly. Compact, muscular and apparently indestructible, he was now dressed as a man. But I could see one breast dangling beneath his shirt and heard he’d been trying to borrow six thousand dollars from his brother Patrick to buy another one. Rather than adding a second breast to balance his torso, he expressed his doubts a few years later by having the first appendage removed.

We strolled across his property to a huge airplane hangar and saw a mechanic repairing a small plane that a friend, shooting wolves from the air, had crashed in Alaska. I wondered if the wolves had eaten the pilot. Greg had trashed his new house before he had properly moved in. Furniture was broken, cushions punctured, carpets stained, stove burned, garbage piled up, fixtures hung limply out of the wall. Makeup spilled out of several suitcases and onto the floor, and he ecstatically described the lacy lingerie which he claimed the previous owner had left behind. He showed me a spectacular array of rainbow colored liqueurs — white Grappa, green Crème de Menthe, brown Benedictine, orange Cointreau, red Kirsch and tawny Calvados — and took a generous swig of each one without showing any ill effects from the potent cocktail. He opened a cold beer for me and suddenly became aggressive. Unarmed and vulnerable, I danced around and kept the table between us as he jabbed at my chest with the jagged point of a beer-can opener.

After buying Sean an expensive new watch, Greg had somehow misplaced it. He searched all over the house and finally found it in the glove compartment of his car. He had tested it in the bathtub to see if it was waterproof and found to his surprise that it was not. The now ruined gift looked like a warped Salvador Dalí timepiece. Throughout our tense visit Greg fantasised about his hobby-horses: making high-powered business deals with European pharmaceutical firms, doing scientific research at the National Institutes of Health, inventing a miracle drug that would prevent aging and extend human life. Transposing his own fantasies onto his father, he claimed that Ernest couldn’t sleep at night when dreaming that he was a woman.

Greg persistently invited us to dinner in town, but the restaurants we had questioned while searching for him were wary of his custom. As we made feeble excuses, remembering all that broken glass in the restaurants, and got into our car he cryptically remarked, “As Papa used to say, ‘you look like two nuns in a convent’.” I tried to look suitably saintly as we drove off. But our calm was soon shattered as Greg, reckless as ever, chased us in his car, forced us off the narrow one-lane dirt road and passed us at high speed in a cloud of dust. I was glad to escape, for the fourth time, uninjured. It was sad to see that Greg, devastated by mental illness, had still not come to terms with his father.

Edmund Wilson

In the spring of 1960, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, I saw Edmund Wilson shuffling around Widener Library. I didn’t speak to him and never dreamed that one day I’d write his biography. He was teaching a course in the literature of the American Civil War, which became Patriotic Gore, but I didn’t have the interest or qualifications to take the class.

In August 1993 I spent two days with his daughter Rosalind Wilson, who lived in Edmund’s old house in Talcottville, upstate New York. I was surprised by the vast empty spaces, like the American West, north of Talcottville. An amiable eccentric, at home in the wilderness, Rosalind frequently swam, even in very cold weather, in the local river. She was broad-shouldered and solidly built, rather hysterical and with a shrieking speech in person and on the phone. Speaking with a very loud voice in the local restaurant, she said, “I have a really obscene and disgusting story to tell you,” as the whole room became silent and leaned toward our table to listen.

With Rosalind’s generous and enthusiastic help I was able to reconstruct her life and troubled relations with her father. She was the daughter of Wilson’s first of four wives, the actress Mary Blair. Weakened by the difficult birth, Mary became ill with whooping cough and pleurisy, and Rosalind was taken from the hospital to stay with her paternal grandmother in Red Bank, New Jersey. For her first eighteen years, she was brought up in the same town, in the same household and in the same way that her father had been. Wilson went to Red Bank both to see his motherless daughter and to extract money from his own mother. Rosalind recalled that during her childhood he would read to her and take her for walks. Though she naturally resented the numerous women in his life, she was glad they were looking after him in Manhattan. He wanted to be a good father, but the role did not come easily to him. He once tried to take away Rosalind’s doll house and give it to his mistress’s daughter. Injured and resentful, Rosalind told me that Wilson had “bursts of sadism” and tried to destroy people. He knew he was behaving badly, even when sober, and would say cruel things as if he were possessed. He was intensely critical and treated her as a non-person. It was impossible to please him and nothing she did was right.

In the summer of 1939, when Wilson’s third wife Mary McCarthy was away visiting her family, the sixteen-year-old Rosalind lived with Wilson, who was teaching at the University of Chicago. She had just graduated from prep school in Connecticut, and spent the summer drinking milkshakes and going to the movies. When Wilson tried to teach her to memorise a poem every day, she stubbornly resisted and they shouted at each other. That fall she entered the bohemian Bennington College in Vermont, waited on tables and won a Mademoiselle story contest. Despite her literary background, she felt restless amid all the arty talk during the war and, against her father’s wishes, left without graduating.

After dropping out of Bennington, Rosalind worked as a nurse’s aide in Bellevue Hospital, at the New Yorker and the New York Post. She then moved to Boston, where she was a reporter for the Globe and, in 1949, joined the publisher Houghton Mifflin. In 1958 she inherited money from her grandmother’s trust, left the firm for a while and then returned. She frequently asked her father for money, even when she had a job, and he usually gave it to her.

On September 4, 1963, two days before Wilson planned to leave for a year in Europe, he flew from Cape Cod to Boston and phoned Rosalind, who made absolutely no sense. He asked what was wrong and she alarmingly replied, “I don’t know what’s real any more.” He then rushed to her “horribly ill-kept and dirty” apartment and found Rosalind, unmarried at forty, “in a strangely exalted state, full of delusions — she thought someone who was going to marry her was communicating with her” through special wiring on the radio. He summoned a doctor who put Rosalind in the psychiatric ward of Massachusetts General Hospital, where she thought all the physicians were actors pretending to be doctors. He later learned that Rosalind had been behaving irresponsibly at Houghton Mifflin and that her work had been deteriorating for many weeks before her breakdown. She could not concentrate on reading manuscripts and her hand constantly trembled. Wilson could be a difficult father, but clearly loved his daughter and helped during the crisis when she needed him.

After my visit to Talcottville, Rosalind took a keen interest in my progress, and sent me dozens of letters and postcards with additional information, diagrams of Wilson’s homes, addresses of people to see, copies of her letters to the biographer Leon Edel, the publisher Roger Straus and Wilson’s fourth wife, Elena, as well as two audio tapes with answers to my questions.

Rosalind was angry about the publication of the last volume of Wilson’s diaries. She wrote that Edel, the excellent editor of the first four volumes, “bowed out when it came to The Sixties [1993] as he felt there were too many living people who would be hurt.” She was critical of the opportunistic editor Lewis Dabney, who’d been “working” on Wilson’s biography for twenty-five years: “Dabney was fluttering around my father for at least a decade before his death in 1972. Yet my father never designated him as either his biographer or his editor.” In my review of The Sixties, which appeared in the New Criterion in September 1993, I listed Dabney’s numerous errors and condemned his hopeless editing. Rosalind agreed with my judgment: “I consider Dabney a wretched academic busybody and refer to him as EL SNIDO… I believe him to be malicious and dishonest… I wake up at night with the horrible thought that Dabney will use all your research and simply paraphrase your book.” In 2005 he did, in fact, provide an extremely boring, second-hand version of my biography, which I’d published on Wilson’s centenary in 1995.

Early on, Rosalind had expressed her fears about our close connection and hoped “we don’t end up hating each other.” But in a late letter of December 6,1994, shortly before my biography was published and after Edel had seen a proof copy and provided a blurb, she offered even more details and ended with a compliment: “EW still cycling when married to Elena; so often 5 of us — moi, [her half-brother] Reuel, [her step-brother] Henry Thornton, Elena and EW — set off to the beach or dinner parties on bikes.

…Had a great letter from Leon yesterday saying outside of some factual errors and not enough attention to To the Finland Station — EW bio — fine. ‘Robust’ with good balance. I’m so pleased. Do let me know when I will see the bio. Edel says ‘best thing [you] have done.’ ”

The biographer should realise that the subject’s relatives may be apprehensive about meeting him. Like most wives and children, Rosalind wanted her view of Wilson to prevail and rejected all versions of his life that disagreed with hers. But she was often quite funny, and burst into raucous laughter when I thanked her as I left, and remarked that she wouldn’t accept my gratitude for hospitality she hadn’t provided. Later on, she said she “found our talks interesting and would have liked to have one more night together.” Finally, she inscribed her memoir, “For Jeffrey — What a relief — you turned out great — Rosalind.”

Robert Frost

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan I had seen Robert Frost, vigorous and handsome at the age of eighty-four, give an impressive reading of his poems. His wife Elinor had died when he was sixty-five, and I didn’t think the energetic and attractive Frost would have abandoned his sex life. After Elinor’s death he published some lyrical love poems, and the received view was that he continued to write about his late wife. But I wondered if someone else were at the center of his emotional and sexual life during his last twenty-five years.

The most likely candidate was Kay Morrison, the wife of Ted Morrison, a tenured lecturer in the Harvard English department and friend of Frost. Kay was Frost’s longtime secretary and manager when he taught at colleges in New England and went on lecture tours. My suspicions were confirmed at the University of Virginia when I read the papers of Lawrance Thompson, Frost’s authorised biographer, whose deletions were far more interesting than his published book. Apparently unglamorous and efficient, in her plaid skirts, white blouses and wool sweaters, Kay had a varied and reckless sexual life, made possible by a complaisant husband and a prim social code that concealed the truth.

I interviewed Anne Morrison in Amherst, Massachusetts to find out about her mother’s early life and her secret relations with Frost. Born in Nova Scotia in 1898 and twenty-four years younger than Frost, Kay was the daughter of a clergyman, grew up in Scotland and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Frost’s devoted mistress, astringent amanuensis and affectionate muse was refined and stylish, with a slim build and bright auburn hair. After his wife’s death Frost exaggerated his helplessness, Kay’s maternal quality and his own rejuvenation when he wrote: “I owe everything in the world to her. She found me in the gutter, hopeless, sick, run down. She bundled me up and carted me to her home and cared for me like a child, sick child. Without her I would today be in my grave.”

Intensely puritanical but with a strong sexual impulse, Frost dreaded a public scandal. He was astonished that Kay, who behaved so conventionally, could be so wild sexually and felt, “Here’s a lady who’s willing, why not let go?” He talked brilliantly to Kay, describing his family tragedies — the illnesses, deaths and suicides — and he loved her that she did pity them. One day, walking in the woods, they came to a place that Frost thought sufficiently secluded “for either rape or murder.” As they sat on the warm earth and continued their intimate talk, Frost began to make love to her. All he had to do was take off her drawers and consummate the long-suppressed urge that seemed mutual. But Kay brought out the cruel as well as the tender side of his character. For many years he punished her — quite irrationally — with harsh criticism and unreasonable demands, for sleeping with him, for taking his wife’s place, for refusing to marry him and for the guilt he felt about betraying his friend.

Frost’s relations with Kay were complicated by her surprising involvement with at least three other men who were close to him. Stafford Dragon (whose very name was irresistible), the hired man on Frost’s Vermont farm, played the lusty Mellors to Kay’s Lady Chatterley. She was also involved with Ted Morrison’s “best friend,” the porcine littérateur Bernard De Voto. The University of Virginia papers revealed that the “incredibly attractive” Lawrance Thompson, on the scene and eight years younger than Kay, was Frost’s sexual rival. In an extraordinary and volatile situation, he was also sleeping with the apparently strait-laced but wildly promiscuous Kay. Thompson’s liaison with Kay allowed him to participate in and even change the course of the life he was writing, and he often replaced her as Frost’s companion, keeper, nurse and body-servant.

I was able to confirm all this when I interviewed Anne. As she led me into the living room she startled me by saying, “I’ve been waiting all my life for you to come!” At last, she felt, someone writing about Frost had read the unpublished papers and knew the basic facts. She was now free to tell her part of the story. Anne remembered many journeys from Cambridge, Massachusetts, up to Frost’s farm in Vermont. The twelve-year old girl would watch from the back of the car as Ted drove, staring rigidly ahead, while Frost had his amiable arm around Kay, who sat between them and leaned on his shoulder. When our long and emotionally charged interview was over, Anne exclaimed, “I knew this would all come out some day!”

Ted worshipped Frost, tolerated the affair as long as it was kept secret and there was no scandal, and managed to suppress his volatile mixture of resignation and rage. These New England puritans had been brought up to keep up appearances, maintain superficial propriety and preserve the husband’s precarious dignity—no matter what passions thrashed beneath the surface. The suppression of emotion, the preservation of decorum, the denial of intolerable reality had all been portrayed by Henry James. When I suggested this interpretation to Anne, she said she’d spent years immersed in James’s novels, especially What Maisie Knew, the story of an innocent child in a treacherous world. But she had never quite understood, until that moment, why she had been so strongly attracted to them.

None of the two dozen friends of Frost whom I spoke to about Kay realised that she had been Frost’s lover. They were deceived by the calm surface and seemed quite surprised when I told them about it. The poet Richard Wilbur recalled that Kay “told me once that there had never been an ‘affair’ between her and Robert, and I believed her. When Frost ‘let on’ to the contrary, as he sometimes did, I thought it was an old man’s vanity talking.”

Frost wrote Kay about five hundred letters, but she destroyed most of them and only nineteen fragments have survived. In his letters and poems he struggled between concealment and revelation. Frost wanted Lawrance Thompson to tell the full story of his relations with Kay. But the biographer-lover died in 1973. When his third volume was completed by another writer, Kay and Ted, still very much alive, excised all traces of her intimacy with Frost.

My startling discoveries completely changed the traditional view of Frost’s public persona as a homespun rustic and celibate sage. It also revealed the throbbing sexual themes in The Witness Tree (1942), the first volume to appear after he began his liaison with Kay. This book featured sexual imagery that had never been noticed before: orgasmic waterfalls and powerful bucks crashing through the underbrush in “The Most of It.” Frost’s love poem “The Silken Tent” describes with the greatest possible delicacy the conflict between Kay’s bondage and freedom as she is pulled loosely by Ted in marriage and tightly by Frost in love:

And its supporting central cedar pole…
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought.

Kay was ecstatic about this tribute, and agreed that this poem described the two men and two ties of love that drew her in different directions.

After the book was published, I received a gratifying letter from Anne’s ex-husband, whom she did not want me to meet. He said, “I was on the scene, and I was there with Ted and with Kay, the husband and wife, and I was there with Robert Frost, and I was watching it every day, and I knew something was going on, and I never understood until I read your book what was actually happening.” Kay Morrison, an unconventional and seductive married woman, stayed with the widowed Frost till the end. Frost expressed his sexual desires with characteristic wit, “If I had a beautiful studio, I’d never paint. I’d have ladies visiting. Might as well be candid.”

Gary Cooper

It was infinitely more difficult to locate people in the days before one could find them instantly on the computer. On March 30, 1996 I wrote cold to Maria Cooper, daughter of the actor, giving her some idea of the biographer’s work: “Finding you took all my skills as a researcher. I tried many futile leads: the Gambian Permanent Mission to the United Nations (inexplicably mentioned as Byron Janis’ contact address in the 1988-89 Who’s Who), International Creative Management, Curtis Management, Screen Actors Guild (Estate Department), Warner Communications in New York, Warner Bros. in Burbank, Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Southampton Long Island telephone directory, pianist in Nova Scotia, film scholar in the Midwest. Finally, a kind woman in New York, whom I know only slightly and was married to a professional musician, called a member of the New York Philharmonic, who knew a student of Byron Janis and gave her your address.”

In a phone conversation on April 12, 1996, Maria said she’d never before helped anyone with previous works about Cooper nor given her permission to quote unpublished manuscripts or reproduce photos. But she would be glad to cooper-ate with me, and let me use her name when writing for interviews and requesting material from libraries.

I first met Maria — who was wearing a Russian fur hat and Zhivago coat — in November 1996 in a wintry Catholic cemetery in Southampton, where Gary Cooper had been moved from his grave in Los Angeles to be near the summer home of Maria and his widow Rocky. Maria, Cooper’s adored only child and childless herself, was born in 1937. Strikingly beautiful and rather formal, she was married to the older, Jewish concert pianist Byron Janis, a high-maintenance husband. Though very religious, she was strangely obsessed with parapsychology and introduced me to the charlatan spoon-bender Uri Geller. Rocky had had several strokes and could only answer “yes” or “no,” but wanted to meet me. I was pleased that I was able to chastely kiss the three women closest to Cooper: Rocky, Maria and his lover Patricia Neal.

Maria became an enthusiastic participant in my research. I read her papers on a small table set up in the lobby outside her Park Avenue apartment while Byron practiced his instrument and saw pupils inside the sanctum. She helped me in many ways, investigating Cooper’s years at Grinnell College, showing me her files, scrapbooks and inscribed copies of Hemingway’s books, sending videotapes and photographs, introducing me to his family and friends, his priest and doctor, answering fully and frankly many hours of questions during our meetings in Manhattan.

When I was working on Cooper’s life, Maria, an ardent Catholic, suggested that we visit a Benedictine convent. Though I could not guess how this would further my research, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. She was glad to get away to a place where she’d often found peace and I looked forward to quiet talks with her about her adored father. In November 1996 we drove from Manhattan to the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, and Maria introduced me to her best friend, Mother Dolores Hart. A popular starlet in the late 1950s, Dolores had appeared in several Elvis Presley movies. In 1963, at the age of twenty-five, she gave up her acting career to take the veil. Maria still believed in Gary the Good and had enlisted Dolores as her ally.

Cooper was an inveterate philanderer who slept with many of his leading ladies, including Grace Kelly during High Noon. I asked Dolores how she could reconcile the promiscuous side of his nature with her idealised image of him. She frankly acknowledged his many adulterous affairs. But she charitably — and jesuitically — resolved the moral issue by explaining that Cooper had an extraordinary capacity for love. He could love many women intensely, even several women at one time. Dolores viewed Cooper’s affair with his co-star Patricia Neal as a protracted struggle that ended when he decided not to break up the family, valued his old way of life, couldn’t bear to lose Maria and wanted Rocky even more than Patricia. I was reluctant to leave Dolores’s convent — connected to an unbroken tradition that went back to the Middle Ages — that had the self-enclosed quality of a world within the world and still retained all its mystery. According to Maria (whom I doubted), her father rarely discussed his Catholic conversion with his family, and neither she nor Rocky put pressure on him to join the faith for their sake.

On December 16, 1996, a year after our first meeting, I told Maria that I’d completed my research at twelve libraries and conducted sixty-five interviews. On June 5, 1997, as I was writing the biography, Maria protectively asked about my approach to her father: “I find myself wondering what you — the author — feel about this person — what is your emotional reaction to the man — the hero — the human being — with all the same human elements in him as in all of us?” When Maria asked to see my typescript before the book was published, always a risky moment for the biographer, I knew she would surely try to censor certain passages and was extremely reluctant to show it to her. Still, she convinced me that she could give me even more help and did make many useful additions.

She also wrote a most perceptive letter about Cooper’s traumatic conversation with Rocky in 1951 when he was torn between his wife and his lover. This was a crucial moment in Maria’s life, aged fourteen, not eleven as she recalled it: “They had clearly, to me, been talking over serious matters that afternoon. My mother knew the obvious tension was telegraphing itself to me, and she felt that the ‘unknown’ was a far worse pain for me than knowing the truth. (That part of it that an 11-year-old could handle.) So later in the day she called me into their rooms — my father was in a sitting room adjoining — and she told me that ‘he thought he was in love with Patricia Neal.’ She then made it very clear that this difficult family time had nothing to do with me, or their love for me, and she gave me a kiss and sent me into the other room where he was staring out the window.”

“She told me how upset he was too — and to give him a hug & kiss and be understanding. Somehow those words of hers helped me deal with the situation and there was great relief for me in at least knowing what was going on.” In my biography I later wrote, “Though Cooper wanted to marry Patricia, he would not do so if it meant losing Maria’s love and respect. He told Patricia, ‘You know, baby, I couldn’t have hurt Maria for the world.’ Maria believed that she was, in some ways, his moral guide and conscience.” Through Maria I glimpsed a less known side of Cooper’s character: his passionate nature, his awareness of being trapped in his star status, his resistance and eventual capitulation to his emotionally stronger wife.

In return for Maria’s generous assistance, I agreed to delete Rocky’s anguished reaction to Cooper’s affair with Ingrid Bergman, while they were filming For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1943, and promise of sexual pleasures when he came home. But I defended my book in a phone talk with Maria on June 5, 1997 and told her, “It’s always hard for the biographer to please the family, who have their own strong views on the subject. Cooper was a difficult character to portray. He was inward and laconic, “meager of utterance,” and no one ever remembered him saying anything. Every time, at your request, I made a sharp word dull through euphemism or sanitised a sensational event, my book became weaker and less interesting. I must quote other interpretations, even if they don’t match yours. Though you will not agree with everything in this work, I hope it proves worthy of your trust.”

John Huston

Zoe Ismail, born in Lucknow, northern India, in 1939, was the exotically attractive long-time lover of John Huston and mother of his actor-son Danny Huston. My English editor introduced me to Zoe, who felt neglected, was eager to tell her side of the story and wanted to emphasise her importance in Huston’s life. When I wrote to introduce myself, she immediately answered: “I would really like to talk to you about the book you plan to write, as I am so disappointed with the usual false conception that people have of John. I would love to meet. I feel it would be important. Whenever you are ready, please send me your phone number and I will call you. It would be of great importance to me before I die, to know that in the world there exists an honest portrayal of John. I know you will do him justice in your book.”

The first of a dozen transatlantic phone calls between Zoe in London and me in Berkeley — most of them initiated and paid for by her, and lasting as long as ninety minutes — took place right after I wrote to her. Zoe mentioned the recent suicide of Danny’s ex-wife and their six-year-old, troubled daughter, whom she had to take care of while Danny pursued his acting career. We spent a lot of time discussing where to live with the child and the best way to bring her up.

In her five-page, single-spaced, complete and honest answers to my questions, Zoe wrote that “my father was a successful industrialist and we enjoyed a very privileged life style.” She left India when civil war broke out after the Partition of India and Pakistan, arrived in a drab and cold England in 1948, and was educated at the elite Cheltenham Ladies’ College. In 1961 she read that Huston was casting his film based on Sigmund Freud and immediately left for Paris. She obtained the address of Jean-Paul Sartre, who was writing the screenplay, boldly knocked on his door and got Huston’s phone number at the Lancaster Hotel. She then phoned Huston, said she wanted a part in his film and was invited to meet him. When Huston asked her to come to Ireland, she impulsively decided to accept: “I went back to London after a wonderful weekend. Our feelings were still premature and unspoken, and I had no idea at that point where my life would lead. John did not have to seduce women; his charm, eloquence and exquisite bearing did it for him. . . . That is how we met.”

The twenty-two-year-old virgin was delighted to get pregnant: “nothing in the world could have made me happier.” She was innocent and unfamiliar with contraceptives: “It just happened and was meant to be.” Zoe moved to Rome, where Danny was born in 1962, and lived there for twenty years. She also explained why they didn’t get married: “John had been living a separate life from his wife Ricki for years before I met him. However, when John wanted a divorce from Ricki so we could be married, she refused. Her demands for money, if she were to agree, were so unreasonable that it made things impossible. But John was an extraordinary father to Danny, and I considered him a great husband.” When Ricki died in a car crash Zoe hoped to marry John, but the compulsive satyr lost interest in his sweet and somewhat mystical lover, as he did in all his women, and lapsed into habitual infidelities.

The photogenic Zoe had played Ava Gardner’s handmaiden in Huston’s “The Bible” and remarked that she was blocked by Huston’s fifth wife: “I was going to play the Indian Princess in “The Man Who Would Be King” [1975], but Cici threatened John [“you’re damn right I did”] that if I acted in the film she would leave him. At that time he was trying hard to salvage the marriage.” So the part went to Michael Caine’s Indian wife. After that disappointment, she had a miserable three-year marriage to a German-French banker — “better to forget and not mention it” — and an “unpleasant” affair with the English film director Michael Winner. In June 2010 Zoe told me that the last twenty years in London had been the unhappiest of her life. John died, Danny grew up and left, she was burdened with his daughter, had an unhappy marriage and despite her striking appearance and charming personality she had no close friends.

Zoe read and praised my book, but disliked Cici’s description of her as “a handmaiden and a convenience.” She unconvincingly claimed that she never wanted to marry John, only wished to be in love with him. Zoe and Danny came to his estate in Ireland on holidays and John supported them, but they were essentially on their own. When I asked if she were content to see him on rare visits to Rome, she maintained, “I wouldn’t have seen much more of the wandering John if I had been married to him.”

The egotistical and assertive Celeste (Cici) Shane, born a year later than Zoe, was the temperamental opposite of her gentle and sensitive rival. They came from wealthy backgrounds, though Zoe no longer had money, and were not intellectual. Both had unhappy marriages, and were devoted to their only son. Zoe had no career and lived alone, Cici was a successful horse breeder and had a young lover. Zoe worshipped and adored John, Cici came to loathe him. But after Ricki died Zoe was outmaneuvered by the more sophisticated Cici, and by his last nursemaid, Cici’s Mexican servant Maricela Hernandez. Zoe was vitriolic about Cici’s cruel and despicable behavior as well as Maricela’s sinister control and greed. She was astonished and hurt to learn that Cici got many love letters from John and she didn’t get any at all — though they always kept in touch by phone.

When I first wrote to Cici she responded enthusiastically: “If you need to contact me for any help I may offer, do not hesitate, BUT do know that I am honest to the core and will NOT hide anything. You will be entertained if nothing else, meeting me, as I am quite entertaining… I have a rare thing indeed — my love letters from John in his hand. You must must must give a call, as we can share wonderful stories. Briefly I have been married to three geniuses seriously and mistress to a fourth,” the great film composer Maurice Jarre. John “was a man of great mystery and as complicated as any human being ever, which made him exciting, interesting — and frightening… He would screw anything that wasn’t nailed down, just to notch up another triumph.”

Cici was the only woman who’d ever left Huston — she couldn’t tolerate his infidelities, especially his humiliating liaison with Maricela — and he was bitter about the breakup of their marriage when he was nearly seventy. She was strong-willed and rebellious, uninhibited in dress, speech and behavior. She wore provocative clothes, used coarse language and had a sexual frankness — outrageous, bawdy and wild — that shocked Huston’s friends. John remarked that he was not absolutely certain, but thought she had once read a book about horses — National Velvet. But she mightily impressed him by riding a real lion in Arizona.

Cici had a bad press, mainly because Huston called her a crocodile and venomous sea-snake. But when I interviewed Cici on her horse ranch north of Santa Barbara and heard her side of the story, the reasons for their marriage and for the disintegration of their love became more compelling than his condemnation of her character. I found her an amusing, capable and kind-hearted woman, who’d put up with a lot of trouble from Huston. She answered almost all my questions, but when I boldly asked her to explain her “sexual tricks” that had so beguiled John (Zoe preferred not to think about them), she coyly refused by saying, “trade secrets!”

Huston was immediately attracted to her youthful exuberance, luscious sensuality and defiant behavior. Worried about Cici’s reputation, her mother insisted, “You’re not going to be that Huston man’s mistress. You must be married.” Cici told me, “I was 34 years younger, was twice divorced and had a severely sick son from lack of oxygen at birth. John, divorced four times, was a heavy drinker, in poor health and a well known womaniser. Prospects were poor,” but their marriage lasted for five years. In one of his intensely emotional love letters to Cici, Huston wrote: “You have such a free and open way. I hear your voice as I read your letter. But those echoes aren’t enough. I long, long for your presence & to feel your touch.”

Ceci recalled that she was amused by one of Huston’s crude jokes. He disrobed, got into the hot tub as she was entertaining her lady friends and shocked his captive audience: “Some of us noticed this brown chunk floating in the water. None of us wanted to say anything about it, because we couldn’t believe our eyes! I was horrified and screamed and grabbed it just in time as the brown chunk headed straight for the mouth of one of my friends! John’s contribution turned out to be only a piece of orchid bark with a remarkable resemblance to a piece of sh*t.”

Cici hated St. Clerans, Huston’s isolated Irish estate that was teeming with his mistresses and thieving servants. When summoned for duty by the Master, she exclaimed: “F*ck him! I’m upset. My kid has gone to my ex-boyfriend’s house with my ex-husband. Maricela is gone; I’m all alone; and no one here likes me.” It’s amazing that Cici’s maid outfoxed her mistress and wound up as Huston’s caretaker and heir. When I suggested that it would be amusing to have a photo of the homely Maricela next to the glamorous Cici, she replied in huge wavy letters: GREAT. Pleased with my book, she exclaimed, “I am so glad I met with you. This is brilliant! You have done what no other dared to do. You have captured the true essence of John Huston.”

***

It was fascinating to interview rather lonely and wildly contrasting characters: Robin and Gregory, Rosalind and Maria, Anne and Cici. Most of these brilliant but self-absorbed men had a cruel streak and were pretty poor husbands and fathers. They had several wives and lovers, and were often distant from and critical of their children. I was lucky that all the people I interviewed liked my biography and remained on good terms with me after it was published. People’s reputations depend not only on what they did, but also on how biographers — who are writers on oath and have the last word — judge them.