He said, “Why not? You’re smarter than a monkey,” and told me to go to the newsstand on the corner and ask for his copies of the Herald, the Globe, the Advertiser, and the American. “Write about any gathering of respectable females and look at the pictures. Sometimes you can get an item out of a caption. Just make sure you spell the names right.”
That was my first newspaper assignment. It wasn’t exactly a stop-the-presses moment, but I was excited. As I started to put it together, I realized that there was a strict pecking order to the lists of names. You always began with the very First of the First Families: Adamses, Cabots, Lodges, Winthrops, and such, followed by other well-known names, then club officers, married women, unmarried socialites, and at the bottom of the heap, spinsters of a certain age such as—and there she was—Miss Edith Chevalier.
I felt a shiver go up my spine when I saw her name and finally understood why people were so keen on reading those columns. Knowing Miss Chevalier meant that I was somehow connected to important goings-on in the city. It made me feel like a real Boston girl.
I made sure I got everybody spelled right and turned it in before the deadline, but Flora handed it back without even looking at what I’d written. Some big advertisements had just come in and they had to add a whole page to the section. “I don’t suppose you could possibly give me six more inches in the next half hour?” She obviously didn’t think I could, so I said it wouldn’t be a problem.
The first thing I did was add the names of all the lecturers and what they talked about. In my opinion, it made the whole column much more interesting. The president of the League of Women Voters talked about “Why Aren’t Women Voting?” An English professor from Smith College explained “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot. A lady doctor spoke about Sigmund Freud’s sex theory. Miss Chevalier had been at a gathering where a retired schoolteacher talked about her trip to Egypt, “with magic lantern illustrations.”
But even with all that, I was still short and there was nothing left to steal. I was not about to go back to Miss Flora with my tail between my legs, so I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with the main branch of the Boston Public Library.
Miss Chevalier was surprised to hear from me. When I told her I was writing about her club meeting for the Boston Evening Transcript, she sounded delighted and was glad to tell me about the lecture.
She said she’d been “transported.” The speaker was a seventy-five-year-old woman who had traveled all over the world by herself. Egypt was her most recent adventure. “I wish you could see the pictures of that spry old lady sitting on a camel in front of the Great Pyramids.”
I had been taking down everything she said and asked if I could put some of her comments into my story. I said I didn’t have to use her name. It could say, “According to one of the ladies in attendance . . .” But Miss Chevalier didn’t mind if I quoted her as long as I included her full title: Supervisor for Circulation at the Central Branch of the Boston Public Library.
After I was done that day, I stood at the back door of the Transcript building and stopped the first paperboy who walked out with a stack of newspapers, which were, honest to goodness, “hot off the press.”
I tore open a copy and found my story just the way I had written it, including Miss Chevalier’s comments, word for word, right there in Seen and Heard by Miss Henrietta Cavendish.
I must have known I wouldn’t get credit. It couldn’t have come as a surprise. But I still remember feeling like a little girl whose lollipop had just been snatched out of her hands.
| 1925–26 |
Nice turn of phrase.
I didn’t expect anyone but a few friends and Miss Chevalier to notice she’d been mentioned in the column, but I was wrong. The next morning there were at least a dozen phone calls from women wanting to know why Mrs. Taylor’s book group had gotten special treatment. Mrs. Taylor herself called to ask why Miss Cavendish had spoken to “that librarian,” when she’d had a Miss Saltonstall in her parlor.
The publisher was happy about the attention and told Mort to keep up the good work, which meant more work for Cornish. The other papers weren’t running quotations, but they started a few weeks after us.
Cornish was not pleased. “I’m not going to talk to those damned bluestockings and you don’t want me to. Do I sound anything like Miss Henrietta Goddamn Cavendish?”
Mort told Cornish to get Flora or Katherine to do the interviews, but for the first time anyone could remember, they said no. Miss Katherine said either he was joking or he was playing with fire. Miss Flora said this was the straw that would break the camel’s back. They were masters of the cliché, those two.
And that’s how I became Henrietta Cavendish. Cornish saw his chance and handed me not just the interviews but responsibility for the whole column. “You’re a bright kid,” he said. “You understand how this works. Just keep the publisher happy and everyone leaves us alone.”
Cornish was right when he’d said a smart monkey could put the column together. It wasn’t hard. If Cornish was in the building when I turned it in, he’d give my pages a quick once-over and Katherine did a final edit. It didn’t occur to me how much I’d bitten off with writing a column twice a week on top of the typing and errands and phone calls. It didn’t occur to me to ask for a raise.
I was over the moon.
I spent every spare moment—and not just when I was at work—trying to make the column as interesting as I could. Clubwomen started sending biographies of their speakers and lists of their guests in advance; sometimes they included the menu and I even got a few engraved invitations. Well, Miss Cavendish got them.
There were days I felt like I was in over my head, like when there were too many invitations and every lecture was about flower arranging. If Flora and Katherine hadn’t helped me sift and sort, I would have been sunk. But they appreciated hard work and they knew I had no one else to turn to.
I wouldn’t ask Cornish for the time of day. He treated the three of us like we were servants or children and only talked to me if word came down from upstairs that the publisher wanted a particular friend or relative mentioned.
Sometimes that meant I had to write about the stupidest things you can imagine. The worst was “The Scientific Evidence That Fairies Exist.” I am not making that up.
I had been writing the column for a month when Miss Cavendish got a note directly from the publisher telling her to attend the next meeting of Harvard faculty wives, which was being hosted by his sister-in-law.
“Doesn’t he know that there is no Miss Cavendish?” I asked Cornish.
“Kiddo, I’d bet a week’s salary that he’s never even looked at our chicken scratches.”
Then he told me to tell the sister-in-law that Henrietta was coming down with a terrible cold and she was sending me, her secretary, to take notes for her. To me, it sounded like a great adventure. I couldn’t wait.
The meeting was on a Friday afternoon in a part of Cambridge I’d never been to, and I felt like a tourist. The mansions on Brattle Street were just as big as the ones in Rockport, but older.