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The Old G irl Network

ROBERT DARNTON

1 H QUESTION that nearly knocked me off my feet came at aunlikely moment. I had just finished a talk at the Princeton Clu

in New York in 1986. It was one of those occasions when professorlecture to alumni, hoping to soften them up for gifts to the collegand when the old-boy network had prep ared the way by produ cing sympathetic audience. Princeton did not have any wom en graduateuntil well into the 1970s, so I was surprised when a woman stoppeme on my way out. She was tall, slender, very beautiful with brighblue eyes, and, as I later learne d, eighty-n ine years old. Are yoBarney Da m ton's son? she asked.

My father was killed as a war correspondent in the Pacific fothe New York Times in 1942. I was three at the time, and my brother John was eleven m onths old. We have no m emo ry of him.

Yes, I stam m ered. Yes, I am. Did you know him ?Very well. We used to go drinking together in Creenwich

Village in the twenties.W hat was he like? A du m b question, but I was so astonishe

that I blurted it out without thinking, because it went to the heart owhat I most wanted to know: who was the p erson w ho had given thfirst push to my existence? I had a few photos of him, his passporand two or thre e letters. But my experience as an historian m ade mconscious of how little had survived in the way of evidence about hlife. I know far more about many eighteenth-century Frenchmethan I do about my ovwi father.

My mother spoke of him in such emotionally charged languagas to arouse skepticism He was a warm generous human being sh

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before her death in 1968 she informed my brother and me that they

had never been married in the first place. Th ere was som ethingstrange about this couple.

We sat down in a corner of the Princeto n Club . My father'sfriend identified herself as Mildred Gilman Wohlforth, a formercrime reporter for the New York vening Journal who had roaredthrough the twenties and then settled down with a Princeton gradu-ate. He could not come to my lecture, but she did, and she was full

of informationwhere they went drinking, who their friends were,wh at their politics were, what books they read. As to my most urge ntquestion, she could only answer that B arney (his nam e was Byron b uthe w en t by Barney) was nice soft-spoken, gentle , fun-loving, a

handsome man with a great sense of humor.After a while she pau sed , smiled, pa tted m y kn ee and said, You

know, we had no morals at all. I was speechless. Th en , with ano thersmile, she said, Bu t I nev er slept with you r father. She pau sedagain, smiled, and patted m y knee once more : Too bad. Then I real-ly could have told you something.

Mildred gave me the names of thirteen others who had knownmy father and were stifl alive. I contac ted afl of them during th e nextfew months. In most cases, their m em ories had clou ded over, and I

could get nothin g m ore than nice as a description of him. I visitedone of Bamey's fellow repo rters, G eorge Britt, ninety-one, in a nurs-ing home. He was brou ght out, strapp ed into a whee lchair, haircombed, tie neatly kno tted, an em pty smile on his face. W hen I

showed him a photograph of my father, his eyes lit up for a moment,and he raised a finger in its direction, then sank back in his wheel-chair, an incom prehensible gurgle in his throat, and disapp earedbehind the smile.

At that po int, it occurred to m e that nearly all the survivors were

wo m en. Th e m en had dro pp ed off, one after ano ther, victims of hardliving and drink. The women had outlasted them. Many of them

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On e lead took me to another M ildred, M ildred Blake, who wa

MiUy Riorden, married to Vincent ( Speed ) Riorden, when my father knew her They all cam e from Michigan, in Barney's case AdrianMichigan, a farm towTi, where his father was the postmaster. MiUadded some anecdotes to the information I had culled from Barneyobituary in the Times.

Barney was bom on 8 November 1897 in Adrian. He contracted a love for newspaper work as a freshman in high school, when h

visited an uncle, Charles Darnton, who was drama critic for thEvening World in New York. After graduating from high schoolBarney worked for a local bank; then, as soon as the United Stateentered the war, he enlisted in the army. He saw heavy action in thtrenche s from May to Novem ber 1918: the battles ofth e Oise, AisnMeuse-Argonne, and the attack on the Kriemhilde-Stellung Line.

After the war, he studied for a year at the University of Mich

igan and dropped out in order to join the staff of the Port HuronTimes-Herald wh ere he m et the Riordens, fellow repo rters who toomeals in the same boardinghouse. Port Huron provided good material for crime stories: dmnk lumberjacks on the loose. Bamey wrotenough to attract the attention ofthe Baltimore Evening Sun wherehe joined the staff in 1922 and in tu m was joined by MiUy and SpeedHaving come under the spell of H. L. Mencken, he published somfiction in The Smart Set; bu t he set his sights on a journalistic care erand began to rise through the ranks while changing jobs: first thPhiladelphia Evening Ledger; th en in 1925 a big jum p to the rewritedesk of the New York Evening Post which at that time was a greatpape r with a talen ted staff und er a reno wned city editor, Po pByers; next a move into management at the Associated Press in NewYork, where h e becam e day cable editor, the n city editor; and finallin 1934 the New York Times wh ere he was a top repo rter and workedon special assignments to create the news reports on WQX R and thNews of the Week in Review section of the Sunday edition

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ROBER T DARNTON 159

the Moravian church of Lancaster, Pennsylvania and six years older

than Bamey; he was a womanizer who loved fun and subscribed tothe credos of the M encken boys : It is a m atter of principle to getdm nk on Saturday night and Give us this day our daily crime. Thehoneym oon took place in a ten t in the woods of central Pennsylvania.The marriage lasted barely a year.

The Riordens also migrated to newspaper jobs in New York. In1926, they rented a four-room apartment at 80 MacDougal Street

and invited Barney to move in with them. Earlier he and two otherrepo rters had occupied a tiny flat with only one bed. As they workeddifferent shifts, each got possession of the bed for eight hours a day.Th e M acDougal Street arrangem ent was luxurious by comparison. Itwas not a mnage trois in the sexual sense but rather an attemptamong friends to cope with Greenwich Village rents.

Nonetheless, Milly spoke of Bamey as if something importanthad existed between them. She pulled anecdotes from her memoryand went over them with precise explanations, as though they werephotographs in an album. Bamey had given her a copy of The riary ush by Floyd Dell, a fashionable radical, though Barney's own pol-itics we re moderately liberal: he was a Knickerbocker D emocrat, asupporter of Al Smith and Fiorello La Guardia but not FranklinRoosevelt, at least not when FDR was govemor of New York. Bar-ney, who occasionally covered politics in Albany, once interviewedRoosevelt in Hyde Park. He found the setting too grand, the gover-nor too redolent of squirearchy, Milly said. Jimmy Walker suitedBarney's taste better, despite his rivalry with La Guardia during themayoral election of 1929. Bamey took Milly to see Show oat oneevening when Walker auctioned off a bale of cotton. They went tothe theater often and especially appreciated the one-act plays byEugene O'Neill at the Provincetown Playhouse.

In a not very successful attempt to teach Milly bridge, Bameyonce scolded her by saying, Don't you know that many children are

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always tossing off sardonic remarks. The best known was the witt

cism wrongly attributed to W C. Fields, No man who hates dogand children can be all bad. Ba mey also coined, Hom e is wher e yohang yourself, according to Milly although some attribute it tDorothy Parker.

Their gang favored a hard-boiled style. Few syUables and feweadjectives in writing Cat killed rat, was the example Milly ci tedand no Victorian finery in the way they furnished the ir lives. Barne

and Speed did not tolerate the expression of emotion, MiUy saiThey disliked it when she got upset over the death of her grandmother. Yet Bamey was kind and gentle; and in spite of his philandering, he yearned for a quiet domestic Ufe. Much later, when htook up with my mothe r and she became pregn ant, he was deUghteat the prospect of fatherhood. At one of their gatherings, someonasked Mom whether she preferred to have a boy or a girl. Barne

pa tted he r on the knee and said, You have anything you want.Bamey and the Riordens saw less of each other after 1929

when they moved to 41 Morton Street and he moved up to bettepaying jobs at the AP and the Times Speed remained a courireporter, getting nowhere and drinking too much. Once over drinkat the Minetta Street Tavern, Milly confided to Barney that liwith Speed had become impossible. Barney responded sympathetcally and even said suggestively, If you break up , let me know. Buaccording to Milly's account of the scene, she failed to take the hior did not dare to act on it. Later, in 1935, she told him that she wgetting divorced and was going to marry another man. Bill BlakInstead of congratulating her, he acted angry and hurt and abruptlleft the room.

At that time, Barney's own life was falling apart. His marriagto his second wife, E leanor ( PoUie ) Pollock, was bankrup t: tomuch infideUty on both sides. Bam ey liked wo men, he reaUy dib t th d k id t it Mill t ld H ft b k

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settled happily into her marriage with Bill Blake. But things could

have taken a different tur n in 1935. Although Milly did no t say so,I left her feeling that she and Barney had really loved each otherand that the scene in the M inetta Street Tavern was one of thosemoments when broken lives could have been pieced together in adifferent pattem. But that didn't happen. Milly seemed to look backacross a great distance to her nonmarriage with my father and try totell me, without saying it, that she could have taken the place that

my mother occupied, or that things need n't have be en w hat theybecame. I won dered as I left Milly, then ninety years old, frail, and awidow, whether the past, which in retrospect appears so irm andfixed, is a jumble of contingenc ies, paths crossed or not taken orclosed off by unexpected intermptions, like the shrapnel that killedmy father. Am I lapsing into sentimentunrequited love in themidst of bohemia? Would Bamey have considered me inadequatelyhard-boiled or perhaps too m uch of an egghead? After all, I am a col-lege professor, and he received much of his education in the trench-es. When I think of my father, I often call up Melville's fine: A whaleship was my Harvard and my Yale.

Bamey once roamed the sidewalks outside the halls of Yale.According to a letter I received from Dorothy MacKaye, the widowof Bamey's best friend, Milton ( Mac ) MacKaye, he and Mac hap-pened to be in New Haven one day when Yale's exclusive clubs were tapping new m em bers. They went up and dow n the crowd edsidewalks outside the Evening Post tapped the prettiest girls on theshoulder and whispered: 'Go to my room.' Nobody called the police.They got a lot of laughs, and so did the girls. Whether they collectedany phone num bers I can't tel l you.

Mac died in 1979, before I set out on my trek of interviews, bu tI got a chance to talk with Dorothy. I found her in a nursing home

in Washington, DC in 1986a sweet but skeletal old lady sufferingfrom the last stagesof decre pitude . Wh en they wheeled her out ,

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herself back into the twenties and thirties, when Mac and Bamey

were inseparab le, Hke Gastor and Pollux. At times a cloud wouldcome across her face and she would lapse back into semiconsciousness. But then her memory would revive, the sun would reappear,and she would recount incidents, such as the time Bamey visited hein the hospital after she had given birth to her son Bill. He walkedinto he r room with a bouquet a seven-foot dogwood tree , havingknown that dogwood was her favorite flower

Mac was four years younger than Bamey, too young to fight inWorld War I. Unlike Bamey, he graduated from college, SimpsonGollege in Iowa, but in other ways they were very similar: midwestem er s, who shook off the ir religious background (Mac s father was anitinerant Methodist preacher; Barney was raised as a Catholic by histrict, Irish mother), took up newspaper work (Mac began at theKansas City Star and moved to the New; York Post where he met

Barney in 1925), and especially took to drink and women. They hadliterary ambitions, but abhorred the literary names foisted on themso Milton and Byron became Mac and Bamey.

They made bathtub gin at homedistilled alcohol plus juniper berries, sometimes mixed with orange juiceand dranktheir way together through favorite speakeasies and (after the repeaof Prohibition in 1933) bars: Squarcialupi, Jack Delaney s, BarneyCalant, Lee Chumley s. Nearly everyone slept around, especiallyMac and Bamey, who were known on the Post as the chasers. ' Heneve r prom ised to be faithful, and I neve r expected it, Doroth y saiof M ac. They loved parties, where they often played the game, kind of charades, and got dmnk while cracking jokes and doing jigsaw puzzles. Many in their crowd, notably the young reporters fromthe Post did occasional freelance writing for magazines like theSaturday Evening Post and the New Yorker. Some wrote fiction andeven chu rne d out scripts in Hollywood. I didn t recognize most of thnames that Dorothy mentioned; but when I looked them up later

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Beebe, Cene Fowler, Nunnally Johnson, St. Clair McKelway, Stanley

Walker, Joel Sayre. Occasionally Bamey and the MacKayes mixedwith writers whose names have survived: James Thurber, Edna StVincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis. They used to joke by quoting Mil-lay s overdone alliteration at each oth er: I'll be a bitter berry inyour brew.

I found only one example of my father's own a ttem pts at writingfiction. My moth er had told me that M encken encou raged him to try

his hand at short stories, so I called u p a com plete ru n of The Smart

Set from the shelves of the Fireston e Library in Princeton . Theyarrived in an enormous pile on a trolley. I went through th em , oneissue after the other, and halfway through the pile, I came upon Haro ld C. Mills by Byron D arn ton . It appeared in th e issue ofOctober 1922 in the company of pieces by Dashiell Ham m ett ,Mencken, and Ceorge Jean Nathan. It is a slight piece , only fourpages long, about the boxed-in life of an assistant ban k clerk in asmall Michigan town. The plot can be reduced to a paragraph:

After twenty years of clearing checks, Harold C. M ills un de r-stood that he would never get anywhere, not even into the City Club,where the local elite gathered under the leadership of the bank'spresident. Harold's wife Myrtle was the cross he bore. She naggedhim, pushed him, bossed him around in a never-ending attemp t toclimb up the social hierarchy. When at last a dinner invitation came

from the bank president, she instmcted him to imitate the way thepresidential family handled their knives and forks. Everything wentwell at the dinner tableso well that the president put the questionthat M yrtle had been hoping to hear for years: W ouldn't H arold jointhe C ity Club ? Then came Harold's m om ent of rebellion. To Myrtle'shorror, he stuffed some m ashed po tato into his m ou th and said, I'llconsider it in a m anne r perfectly designed to disqualify himself

Harold C. Mills is a well-written story, sparse in its ph rasing,sardonic in its view of the w ar betw een the sexes in Main-Street

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which had been published two years earlier Perhaps Bamey chose

wisely in deciding to remain a newspaperman.Mac decided differently. He took up freelancing fufl time in

1932, did several stints in Hollywood, and published a half dozenbooks, among them The Tin Box Parade about the Seabury Inves-tigation of 1930, which exposed cormpt practices in the magistrate courts of New York. Dorothy wrote a great deal herself although shehad no literary pretensions and kept to murder mysteries. All the

writers of their group inserted their friends into their books, she toldme. Bamey appeared in one of hers. The Seventeenth Letter. I laterread it, bu t learned little about him, because he ente red the text onlybriefly at the beginning and then disappeared, the victim of a crimethat was solved by a sharp-witted couple, who were clearly Macand Dorothy.

But two of the books by Bamey s friends revealed a great dea

about his world, even though he did not figure in them: Ex-Wife byUrsula Parrott and Ex-Husband anonym ous bu t probab ly by Ursula s ex, Lindesay Parro tt. The books sat tog eth er on a shelf in Ghum ley'speakeasy, and, although fictitious, they told part of the story behindBamey's second marriage. I pieced it together, as well as I couldfrom remarks by Dorothy and others in the network.

Lindesay Parrott belonged to the fast-living, hard-drinking, andgifted group of reporters on the old New York Evening Post wherehe becam e a friend of Bam ey's. Having won an impressive repu tatioby covering the Lindbergh kidnapping for the Post he moved on tothe Moming World the Intemational News Service, and in 1937 theNew York Timesa trajectory that parafleled Bamey's. Along theway, he married and divorced Ursula.

Divorce in the 1920s was still somewhat unusual and shockingUrsula made the most of its shock value by relating her experiencein thinly disguised fiction, and Lindesay compounded the shocks breplying in a book of is own Fm not certain about his authorship of

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ROB ERT DARNTON 165

For my pari, I found Ex-Wife an impressive novel. It moves fast

and conveys a convincing picture of a fast-moving crowd in the JazzAge (in one chapter it intersperses accounts of their love lives withmusical annotations from Rhapsody in Blue ). Although it has a con-trived and unconvincing ending, it leaves one with a haunting senseof sympathy for its central character, the narrator, who is clearlyUrsula Pa rrott herself M arried at nin etee n, divorced at twenty-four,she stumbles in and out of affairs without really meaning to and with-out clinging to anything soUd in the way of principles or a sense ofdirection. She dresses styUshly, drinks constantly, and recounts heradventures in unsentimental straight talk, which probably bad enor-mous appeal for readers in tbe twenties and thirties. The book wentthrough nine editions when it first appeared in 1929. It eventuallysold more than a hundred thousand copies and was tumed into amovie. Ursula Parrott rode the succs de scandale for the rest of herUfe, a succession of books, movies, and husband s. She m ade and spen tseveral fortunes and died destitute in 1957, an incurable alcoholic.

The characters in the book belong to the world of newspaper-m en and women (usually referred to as girls ) in the advertisingbusiness. Ursula dedicated it to Hugh O'Gonnor, a reporter withLindesay Parrott and Bamey on the New York Times. An old handfrom the Times, Murray Schumach, told me that O'Gonnor was thereporter-lover described adoringly as Noel in Ex-Wife. Another sur-

vivor from the 1930s at the Times, a sporiswriter named LesterBro mberg, said that Lindesay had often a ppeared drunk, late at nightin the city room , swaggering, ribbing the early rewrite men andretelUng his latest war with Ursula. Ex-Husband was the ultimateretelling, if indeed he wrote it. It has the same opening scene asEx-Wife and goes over the same ground, from the husband s pointof view. It, too, was a success: ten printings in the first four months

after its pubUcation in November 1929. But it reads as a bloodlesssequel to Ex-Wife, or even as a parody of it ratber than as a testimony

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A Physiological Guide to Mating published under a pseudonym,

Kate Townsend, in 1936. Although it is not a novel, it presents thesame, disabused view of relations between men and womenoragain in th e language of the thirties, boys and girls. A tong ue-in -cheek, pseudoscientific introdu ction , Stream lining Your Love Life,explains that ou r characters are dete rm ined by the juices secreted byour glands. The book therefore offers advice on how to seduce or toresist seduction by detecting glandular types, and it describes each

typethe postpituitary, adrenal, hyperthyroid, and so onin aseries of chapters, which read as a running commentary on them ating gam e. Hav e no illusions, it wa rns. Know what you want andget it by manipulating your prey through your knowledge of glandular determinism.

Th e stalking and seducing take place in a world of young, una ttached adults very much like that described in Ex-Wife. They spend

m oney freely on cham pagn e and orchids, drive roadsters to swankhotels for supper dancing, and have no illusions. Thus the excessivepostpituitary type:

Here's a little lady who can't get sex off her mind. All becausethe postpituitary gland is overactive, either continually or spo-radically, in her postpituitary-centered personality. The littleclinging vine who demanded a proposal in the moonlight is

transformed into a gal who deals in high-voltage love. . andis not in the market for any proposal that would tie her downtoo much.

At that moment, my mother was twenty-nine and had alreadyseduced Barney behind her husband's back. Could Bamey havebe en the mo del for the thyroid-dom inant type? He's got a highdomed forehead, beneath which burn warm extraordinary eyesHis face is oval. His nose is high a rch ed and d elicate. Just likeBarney M oreover He's extremely susceptible to wo m en but so

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ROBERT DARNTON 167

though he fikes to go on trips and parties in a crowd. .so you

m ight as well try your luck on him. Mom tried it, and th re e yearslater I was bo rn.

But perhaps I should beware of evidence in books. I dependedon the interviews to reconstruct the intersecting, overlapping lines inthe lives of Barney's friends, concentrating on the most elusive char-acter among them, Lindesay Parrott. After his very pubUc divorce,Lindesay continue d to m n after wo me n. The one he caught and held

on to long enough for them to figure as an item (a W alter W inchellexpression from that era meaning unmarried lovers) was another ex-wife, Elea nor Pollock, known as PoUie, who the n was working for theMathias Advertising Agency. At this point, my mother entered thestory. She had quit the University of Pennsylvania in order to marry,escape from her conventional, middle-class family in Philadelphia,and take up a more glamorous life in New York. He r husban d,Clarkson HiU, got a j ob in banking, and she wro te copy in theMathias Agency, where PoUie became her best friend. They weresaid to res em ble each o the r so closely that they could have be ensisters. They even had the same first name, Eleanor, which theyreplaced with similar nicknames: Tootie in my mother's case. PoUieand Tootie, like Mac and Bamey.

Barney, a close friend of Lindesay's, cam e into the p icture som e-time in 1928. Lindesay had been assigned to the Moscow bureau ofINS. Barney escorted PolUe to see him off at the sailing party. Afterkissing PoUie good-bye , Lindesay said to Bamey, Take good care ofher until I return. He r e turned a yea r later. B arney an d PoUiew ere on the dock to greet him, and the greeting was: W e're get-ting married.

The marriage did not occur until 1932, although Bamey andPoUie had been an iteiri since 1929. It lasted until 1939, when it wasundone by my mother. Clarkson Hill , as she later de scribed him,was nice but boring and Bamey was fascinating handsome witty

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several years, until my mother got pregnant with me. Barney then

demanded a divorce. PoUie complied, and he set up house in West-port with my mother, who gave birth to me in May 1939 and to mybrother in November 1941.

I learned these details from my mother, not from Dorothy inthe nursing home. When I saw her, Dorothy mainly talked aboutBamey and Mac, their friendship' and their characters. Bamey wasmild mannered and never known to get angry, whereas Mac was

m ore of a spark plug: He liked to make a party go. At one of theirriotous, bathtub-gin parties in the 1920s, Dorothy went to fetchsomething from the kitchen. When she opened the door, she sawMac passionately kissing a friend. She closed it and said to herselfas she recou nted it to me, carefully choosing he r words: I did nothave to open that door. If it had remained closed, I would not haveseen anything. I vw not let that door dete rm ine the co urse of my lifeI did not open it. It didn 't happen. But it did hap pen. I thou ght th aI could see through he r thin body to the inner wound, still unhe aleda half century later.

They had great parties, but they inflicted terrible suffering onthemselves and one another. Life in bohemia was hard. In 1953,Doroth y began writing a colum n, Can this M arriage Be Saved? forthe Ladies H ome Journal She based it on interviews with coupleswho were trying to understand their problems with marriage counselors and who were willing to talk, if prom ised anonymity. Th e column was a great success. It continued for thirty years. After endingit, Dorothy wrote a retrospective essay in which she singled out themain cause for the break up of marriages: lack of communication the single greatest pitfall of all times.

During her career as a reporter, Mildred Wohlforth wrote dozens of stories about crimes of passion and broken marriageswhich she collected in a book entitled Sob Sister I wonder howmuch she communicated to her own husband He was present

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with very old people is an extraordinary experience. They don't

bother with small talk. They cut to the heart of things.But ano ther of the old girls was mu ch more circum spect.

Edith Haggard, known as Eddie (pronounced Ee-dee), knew Bameywefl. She met him and Mac in 1929, drank with them at Ghumley's,bu t lived uptowm and, although an ex herself did not becomeentangled in the affairs of Greenwich Village, which her father called a lepers colony. ' She knew it from the inside , however, because sherepresented many of the writers as their literary agent. When Ireached he r nam e on my list, I telephon ed and asked if I could m eether. She replied with an invitation to drinks in her apartment. Sheoffered to invite another woman who had knowTi Bamey, EdithEvans Asbury, and my brother, too. When John and I arrived atEddie's elegant apartment at 205 East 63rd Street, the two old ladiesserved us champagne and hors d'oeuvres. The conversation mean-dered around stories about waiters and watering places, gettingnowhere in particular; and every once in a while Edith said to Eddie, Gall Pollie. Gall Pollie. Eventually E dd ie gave in. She went to thephone, dialed a long-distance number, and said into the receiver, Pollie, Bamey Damton s son is here, and he wants to speak withyou. She pu t the receiver in my han d, and I found myself talkingwith my father s second wife.

It is an odd sensation to speak with a woman who had been mar-ried to a man who was your father and whom you never knew. On he rend, Pollie seemed prepared for the conversation. She was theneighty-six and living in Arlington, Virginia. All I could manage to saywas that I soon would b e giving a lecture in Washington. G ould I takeher out to lunch?

When I arrived at the Jockey Glub two weeks later, she wasalready seated. She dev oured me with her eyes. I felt shy about look-

ing at her, but I could see at a glance that she had a striking resem-.blan ce to Mom . I know all abo ut you, ' she said. I've followed your

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Princeton and the New York Times He had retired from the Times

after a long career as a foreign correspondent, first in the Pacific,where he had succeeded my father in covering the war, then as headofthe Tokyo bureau, and finally as bureau chief at the UN. By May1986, when I met PolUe, he was in poor health (he died a year later)and did not want to talk.

PoUie, however, was willing to discuss the paston her ownterm s. Ask any thing you want, she said. If I don t want to answer

I won t. It s be tte r for you no t to know som e things. As I told Dorothythe re m ust be a Umit on the nee d to know.I felt tongue-tied. Although I had interviewed many people in

my shori career as a new spaper reporier, I couldn't think of anythingbe tter than the irrepressible first question about Barney: W hat washe Uke?

Good-looldng, she said. Very good-Iooldng. Witty, intelligent,but not very deep, not a refiective man. He never talked aboutphilosophical issues or the Big Questions. He was well read, inter-ested in literature. After we moved up to our Fifth Avenue apari-ment, we often ran into Uterary people. Edna Millay, Thurber. Weplayed poker with Thurber.

Would you say you were bobemians? I asked. Sure, but Barney was conve ntional un de rne ath it all. He

loved women, was always chasing after them, but be wanted tbemto stay in their place, at home. You would caU him a male chau-vinist pig today. But it was a different wo rld the n. W e w ere am oral.All that switching of partners hurt, but we wanted to have a goodtime, as much fun as possible, and to hell with the stuffed shirts.Drinking was important, especially when Prohibition put it outsidethe law.

I am quoting PoUie as if I had preserved her words on a tape

recorder. In fact, I may have got them wrong. I didn't dare takenotes but as soon as I left her for the train back to Princeton I wrote

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ROBERT DARNTON 171

Whatever the exact phrasing of her words, I'm sure that Polly

insisted on one term: Bam ey's restlessness. He could never behappy , she said. He was nev er satisfied. Take a you ng Catholic boyout of the Midwest, throw him in the wa r he could never be thesame. He wore a Saint Christopher's medal in the trenches, shesaidand threw it away after th e a rmistice. (A mistake , I've oftensaid half seriously to myself: they got him in World War II, wh en hedied by friendly fire at the Battle of Bun a.) W hen Barney accep tedthe assignment from the Times to cover M acArthur in the Pacific,M ac ph on ed Pollie to tell he r the news. I just laughed, Pollie toldm e in recoun ting their conversation. 'It was so like him,' I told M ac.'He got Tootie. He got the boys. He got a house in the country. Nowhe's running off to Australia.' Mac hung up on me

I asked whether it was true, as I'd hea rd from oth ers, th atBamey never talked about his experience of W orld War I. Almostnever, she replied, but there were mo m ents when his feelingsshowed through. In 1929 he took he r to see Journey s End, a play byRobert Cedric Sherriff that had some powerful scenes about the war,and Barney could not keep from weeping. My mother had told methat during a battle Bam ey's com pany advanced to a river near thefront and, desperately thirsty, threw them selves into it, gulping downthe water. Th en they foflowed it upstream around a ben d and foundthe rotting corpses of several horses in the middle of the water, a

hideous sight, which made them all vomit. Milly Blake told me thatBamey had recounted one incident from his seven months in thetrenches. By chance, he got an unobstructed view of a German sol-dier sitting peacefully in a tren ch across no man's land. Barney d idn'tshoot him. I decided to declare a perso nal armistice, he exp lainedto Milly, although she had the impression that that he had killedmany men on the other side.

Pollie did not produce any such war stories. But she had plentyto say about my mother. I sensed that she was trying to censor her

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172 R RIT N

I could see, at least at first, was her striking similarity to my moth

Both were short, energetic, and full of Ufe. They smoked and dra lot, although my mother outdid Pollie and everyone else, excperhaps Ursula Parrott, when it came to drink. PolUe talked fast wrapid gestures and lots of costume jewelry flapping in the aAlthough there was something proper about her accent adem eanor, she talked tough, just as Mom had do ne . She used exp rsions like Fo r Christ's sake and H e was a shit. She claimed to

the first wom an in the 1920s to say shit.I adm ired PolUe's effort to avoid running dow n my mother. AI felt strangely timid. Instead of probing into sensitive territoryasked questions about their miUeu. Polhe hved with Bamey for years, from 1929 to 1939. Throughout most of that period, thinhabited an apartment at 43 Fifth Avenue, then moved to 43 W10th Street and later to 52 West 12th. They spent a lot of timespeakeasies, especially Chumley's and Squarcialuci, althouLindesay Parrott had once lived on the floor above it. They mplenty of bathtub gin and sometime bought booze from HeRosanno, one of the few bootleggers who delivered. Jack Delaneon Charles Street was another favorite place. When there weremany custom ers. Jack and the b arte nd er w ould sing Irish songs. Awh en Jack thought a raid was coming, he warned the m with a sig Get out. Johnny Torreo is in town. Th e Steam Club was the pferred speakeasy of the Post reporters, but it did not allow womenDorothy Ducas, a friend of Barney's from the Post broke the g enderbarrier there but only by wearing men's clothes. Pancino's watougher watering hole. It was run in a back room of a grocery stby a hairy guy who dressed in his undershirt and served whiskeycoffee mugs. Occasionally they went to Harlemthe Cotton Clthe Savoy Ballroombut never north of 116th Street, a ldnd of c

tural barrier. On the night that Prohibition ended, they celebratedthe Saint Regis with the MacKayes. It was a great m om ent. T he m

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ROBERT DARNTON 173

Soul and Can't We Be Frie nd s? It was new, we w ere young,

and things w ere happen ing, Pollie explained. I can 't wave a wandand m ake you see Ruby K eeler tap dancing 'Th e Stars and Stripes' atTexas Guinan's and Texas greeting everyone with 'Hello, Suckers.'

They also read a lot. The Sun Also Rises was a decisive book forthe ir gro up . It revolutionized everyone's way of writing, Pollie said.Bam ey devo ured everything by Hemingway, and he read a great dealof Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Sinclair Lewis, o ne of Ed die Haggard'sauthors. Pollie's references confirmed some of my inferences fromthe few copies of my father's books tha t I inherited, including a 1922edition of The Waste L and with Byron D arnto n inscribed on th efirst page. B ut I found no m arginalia or un derlin ing any wh ere, a frus-trating experience for someone like myself, who tries to study the his-tory of reading. Polly could not tell me how Bamey read, althoughshe stressed that reading served them as a way to rid themselves ofeverything Victorian. They wanted new ideas, new morals, or nomoral constraints at all.

Polly's talk was beginnin g to sound like the conven tional view ofthe Jazz Age. Were the standard books to be tmsted? I asked. Someof them, she said. Frederick Allen had got it right in Only Yesterday:An Informal History o the Nineteen Twenties I should read TheVicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table by M argaretGase Harriman and Boojum by Charles Werienbaker and Rackety

Rax by Joel Sayre, a tremendously talented writer and a good friendof theirs, cut down by drink . Also Beau James by Gene Fowler,another friend, and Finnley Wren by Philip Wylie, the most brilliantwriter of their group.

Are the textbooks right, then? I asked. Was it basically bo he -mianism? That led us back to the subject of sex, which did notbo th er Pollie at all. I'm eighty-six, she said. Too old to catch AID S

and even Alzheimer's. I remembered that on a rare occasion wh enPolhe's name came up. Mom had said that she slept around a lot

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174 * RAR ITAN

regained he r equilibrium . As she said later in a letter, it all took p lace

a half century ago: I enjoyed m eeting you, although I was not sure Iwould. But as it says in The Jew of Malta that was in another coun-try, and besides the wench is dead.

Then she shifted to the subject of sex and Bamey. She told meabout a trip that Bam ey took with M ac to Nassau in the Baham as. Itwas a kind of two-man bachelor s party or a last fling for the two chasers just before she and Bam ey married. On the way ho m e,

both men pursued an attractive young woman. Barney won.Meanwhile in New York, Dorothy had suggested to Pollie that theytake a boat ou t to gree t the ship before it docked. Pollie refused. Ijust didn't want to surprise Bamey. There was no telling what mighthave happened on board. And I was right. Moreover, that was fourdays before we got married.

A similar scene took place on th e eve of Barney's supp osed m ar-

riage with Tootie. Clarkson HiU telephoned Pollie, as Bamey's for-mer wife, to say that the wedding was imminent; and at that verym om ent, Pollie learned from ano ther sou rce, Bam ey was in bed witha woman w ho was having an affair with Clarkson.

The stories didn't horrify me. I was not bothered by what myparents did fifty years ago, and I felt no urge to pass judgment onthem. But one question kept troubhng me: Why had they nevermarried? When I put it to Pollie, she rejected the premise.

Of course they married, she said. Bam ey wanted to. H e wasbasically bourgeois and desired nothing more than a wife and kidsand a house in the country. I hurried through the divorce so that themarriage could take place on time. After all, Tootie was pregnantwith you.

Why then did Mom tell John and me that they had never married? I asked .

I don t know, Pollie replied. Bu t tha t wo uld have be en justlike Tootie

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ROBERT DARNTON 175

Tootie was content w ith love as glandu lar fever and reconciled to liv-

ing with a thyro id who was difficult to land. .permanently. Butwhenever she talked abou t my father, she described w hat sounde d tome like love. Not sentimentality but deep feelingthe kind ofthingthat he could jest about in earnest with tough talk from the twenties: By the stars of Orion, wiU you be m ine? he wrote to her in one ofhis love letters. Every time I look at Orion, I think of their love.

When I did the arithmetic, however, I realized that PoUie had

lived with Bamey much longer than Tootie didten years asopposed to Tootie's th ree . PolUe's years were those when he cameinto his own, moved to the New York Times and sat in the irst rowof the city room next to the othe r top repo rters, Ray DanieU andMike Berger. PoUie had dmnk with him, slept with him, and quar-reled w ith him w hen he was at the top of his form. She could take hismeasure. I could not, although I once had tried. I cUmbed into the

attic and put on his army correspondent's jacket. To my surprise, itwas much too small.

Bamey loomed big in my nonmemory, but that had been fasb-ioned by my mother. She always talked about his devotion to democ-racy and th e integrity of his craft. Th at was why he went to th e Pacificin 1942, she said. She never m en tioned restlessness.

Why did Bamey go off and get himself killed, leaving a widowwho would fail to cop e with life after his death ? Was their love aniUusion? Would it have lasted? W ho was Ba m ey D am ton , after all?When I reached the last strand of the old-girl network, I still did no tknow. I nev er w ill.

They are all dead now. MUly W ohlforth died in 1994, at the ageof ninety-seven. Milly Blake died in 1990, at ninety-three. DorothyMacKaye died in 1992, at eighty-eight. Eddie Haggard died in 1995at ninety-two. PoUie died in 1991, at nine ty-one. W hat Uttle I had

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