Four Fascinating Women Done In by Faulty Storytelling

Here is a group portrait of four women that promises to be as much fun as Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd” but turns out to be nearly as impenetrable as “Finnegan’s Wake.” It’s not that the author, Alfred Allan Lewis, set out to produce a Joycean linguistic experiment expanding the boundaries of meaning and form. No, what Lewis set out to do, undoubtedly, was write a juicy and readable popular biography surveying the often-intertwining lives of four prominent figures in the elite circles of late 19th and early 20th century America. Sadly, indeed frustratingly, the book is so poorly put together that it becomes almost impossible to follow the various stories as they develop.

This is a pity, because the material is potentially so absorbing. Elisabeth “Bessy” Marbury (1856-1933) was the first American woman to become a literary and theatrical agent. Her clients included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham. She was also a producer of Broadway musicals and an early promoter of Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. She took an active role in Democratic politics as a supporter of Al Smith and a fierce opponent of Prohibition. Marbury’s companion and protegee, Elsie de Wolfe (when she died in 1950, no one knew for sure how old she was, so often had she lied about her age), made a name for herself as America’s first female interior decorator. She was instrumental in transforming many a dark, musty, cluttered Victorian chamber into a bright, fresh and open modern living space.

Both women were friends with the public-spirited Anne Morgan (1873-1952), the daughter of financier J.P. Morgan. Anne championed the needs of working-class women, inspecting factories and backing the shirtwaist-makers’ union. In the first and second world wars, she was a prime mover in organizing relief efforts for France. Her friend Anne Vanderbilt, nee Harriman, also played a leading part in French relief efforts and in combating the social problem of drug addiction back in America.

Figures from the colorful worlds of theater, the arts, society, fashion, philanthropy, social reform and politics throng these pages--everyone from Stanford White, Emma Lazarus and Edith Wharton to Bernard Berenson, Noel Coward and Eleanor Roosevelt. But like some vast, overcrowded cocktail party where you are introduced to one person, only to be whisked away to meet another and yet another, Lewis’ relentlessly jaunty, disjointed narrative soon becomes a blur.

Owing, presumably, to the interconnectedness of the four women’s lives, Lewis has chosen not to portray them each in four separate sections: a perfectly defensible strategy. But in attempting to write about all four at once, he becomes mired in a labyrinth of highways and byways with few if any signposts. One minute, we’re reading about Bessy Marbury’s girlhood, the next about Mrs. Astor’s galas, then about Bessie’s acting career, Bessie’s chicken farm, Anne Morgan’s friendship with Emma Lazarus and then, suddenly, about Anne Harriman’s first marriage (it is only several chapters later that Lewis makes it clear that she’s the one who becomes Anne Vanderbilt).

As if it were not bad enough that Lewis is so lacking in the ability to shape his narrative, he has not even seen fit to provide his chapters with titles, which might at least have clued us in about where the story is headed. There are not even any family trees to help us see at a glance who’s related to whom. Indeed, although Lewis thanks three different editors, this book shows every sign of not having been edited at all.

On the plus side, Lewis shows good judgment in recognizing the difficulty of assessing the nature and significance of what once were called “Sapphic” relationships. It is possible such close and loving friendships usually included physical gratification, but also possible they did not. And, indeed, so many interesting things went on in these women’s lives that precisely what they may or may have not done in bed is simply not as interesting.