Mark Twain: Man in White Part 5

Her homecoming went well, though Jean was now thoroughly fed up with life at the sanitarium. She wanted desperately to get away for good and was begging for a change. "Dr. Peterson insists on my staying here for a while at least," she had written in her diary the month before. "I feel as tho' I could not endure the place another week. It is ghastly." Not unsympathetic to her feelings, Dr. Peterson was considering other options for her care, and her one-day reprieve from the sanitarium was no doubt meant to keep up her spirits until the new place in Redding was finished or another temporary home could be found. For his part, Twain continued to defer to Peterson's judgment, whose success with Jean's case seemed beyond question. "How fortunate it was that fortune put you into his hands," Twain said of the doctor in an October letter to Jean. "He expects this improvement to go right along."19 But Jean no longer cared whether staying in Katonah was good for her or not. She just wanted out, and after a year of following orders at the sanitarium, she was ready for a change of any kind. Coming to the old townhouse on Fifth Avenue didn't help to lighten her mood. It only reminded her of how much she missed her freedom and her family, especially when she listened to her sister rehea.r.s.e. After she was back in Katonah, she wrote admiringly of Clara's talent, "My sister sang for me several songs & one oratorio (in Latin) that she will use in her tour. Her voice was really wonderful."20 Though Clara's performance at the YWCA in November was little advertised and was billed as part of a larger charity event, it served a valuable purpose as a trial run for a much more important event. Both Jean and Twain seem to have been unaware of how much was at stake in Clara's rehearsals for her upcoming tour. After singing in so many small places, she was finally ready to take a great leap and face the largest and most sophisticated audience of her career. This momentous event was scheduled for the end of the month, when she was booked to appear before at least a thousand people at Chickering Hall in Boston's Back Bay.

On the night of the concert-Tuesday, November 26-all her hard work paid off. Accompanied by pianist Charles Wark and the young Boston violinist Marie Nichols, she gave the best performance of her career. She was composed and confident, and earned warm praise from the local press. The Boston Globe called her singing "delightful," and the Transcript declared, "Clara Clemens's voice may without exaggeration be termed unusually beautiful and individual." The Globe didn't even bother to add that she was Mark Twain's daughter. For once she had the spotlight in a big city entirely to herself, and she made the most of it, delighting the audience not only with her voice but also with her appearance.

Instead of wearing the kind of demure gown most people expected to see at such events, she took the stage in an outfit almost as striking as one of her father's white suits-a Grecian-styled dress "of brocaded j.a.panese silk with inserts of lace on the bodice and flowing sleeves." Her charm and beauty entranced many in the audience, including one reporter who remarked, "The personality of Miss Clemens became a potent factor in her performance. There is the evident impression of a personal spell."21 This was the effect she had been striving for, and the triumph reinforced her desire to advance her career to the highest levels of professional music. Almost immediately she started planning a spring tour of the South and a round of summer concerts in Europe. As part of the promotional campaign for these tours, the claim was soon advanced that her success in Boston was "decisive" evidence of her popularity in "Eastern cities." Of course, this was a considerable overstatement, but having proven to herself that she could impress an audience in a cultural bastion like Boston, she was eager to test her talent in other large cities and to aim for the day when she could make her name in New York. Suddenly, that day seemed to be approaching faster than anyone had expected.

Meanwhile, her father tried to accustom himself to her long absences, and to refrain from interfering in her career. And he continued paying most of her bills despite a growing awareness-partly fueled by Isabel Lyon's worries-that Clara was spending money too freely. Whatever his daughter's faults, he couldn't help but admire her perseverance, though his pride in her accomplishments was always tinged with a little envy. "In the matter of dethroning me you will find you've got your work cut out for you, my dearest," he had written her in September, giving his usual teasing a defiant tone.22 During the various short periods when Clara and her father happened to be together at the Fifth Avenue house in late 1907 and early 1908, she tended to behave more like a guest than an integral part of the family. She seems to have finally accepted that it was useless to make him abide by her rules for domestic life, and that she could never manage his household. With her career absorbing more of her energy and attention, she now had the perfect excuse to drop in and out of his life at will.

It also left her no choice but to continue letting Isabel Lyon control all the day-to-day demands of family affairs. Though her father would always miss her when she was away, and would always welcome her warmly when she returned, it became clear now that she was enjoying a full life of her own and wasn't likely to be a regular presence at his side again.

As Christmas approached, Jean received the good news from Dr. Peterson that she was hoping for-his permission to leave Katonah. His plan was to send her to a cottage in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she would live with another one of the doctor's female patients, Mildred Cowles, and Mildred's sister Edith. As a companion and nurse for Jean, Peterson hired a young Frenchwoman, Marguerite Schmitt. It was a risky arrangement because the doctor knew that a sanitarium was the safest place for Jean, and he still felt that she should remain in one. It was also obvious that she couldn't bear to remain where she was, and that she had made her wishes very clear to her father.

But if Peterson found it acceptable to move her to Greenwich, why not to 21 Fifth Avenue? Though Jean preferred a small town or a country setting, surely she would have been better off living in the short term at her father's townhouse with his various servants than in a Greenwich cottage with strangers. The answer is that Isabel Lyon had led Peterson to believe that neither she nor Twain were prepared to care for Jean at home. Presumably, she gave old age as Twain's excuse. Hers was that, as a delicate woman of small stature, she was ill-equipped to control a much younger woman whose epileptic seizures left her fearing for her own safety.

Writing in her journal at the beginning of October after a visit to Peterson, Lyon had declared decisively, "Jean must never live with her father again, because her affection might easily turn into a violent and insane hatred and she could slay, just by the sudden and terrible and ungovernable revulsion of feeling." Dreading the possibility of having to supervise Jean at home, Lyon had now convinced herself that the young woman was not merely subject to violent outbursts but was downright homicidal. She even came to believe that Peterson shared her view.

But with the exception of Lyon's words, there is no evidence that Peterson accepted that Jean's disease made her dangerous to others. At Katonah, his favorite therapy for Jean involved intense work in the crafts shop, where her most recent project was an intricate carved figure of herself playing tennis. If Peterson had really shared Lyon's prejudice, it would have been dangerous therapy indeed to leave Jean in possession of sharp carving tools and mallets for hours at a time.23 Twain didn't have any idea that Lyon was so afraid of his daughter-nor that she was firmly set against Jean's return under any circ.u.mstances. She tended to tell him only what she thought he wanted to hear. But by confiding her fears to Dr. Peterson, she was making it almost impossible for Jean to return. As long as Lyon was in charge of Twain's household, the doctor had little reason to feel confident of Jean's care at home, and every reason to believe that both father and daughter would be better off living apart.

As for the patient herself, she wasn't inclined to question the reasons for her move to Greenwich. She was simply grateful for the change. After she received the good news from home on Christmas Day, she wrote Nancy Brush, "My joy is indescribable."24 (Left): Evelyn Nesbit's name was made infamous by the scandalous tales that emerged from her husband's two trials for the so-called Crime of the Century. (Right): After spending an hour discussing s.e.xual freedom with the outspoken novelist Elinor Glyn-who later coined the phrase "the It girl"-Twain observed, "It was one of the d.a.m.nedest conversations I have ever had with a beautiful stranger of her s.e.x, if I do say it myself that shouldn't."

ELEVEN.

Manhattan Melodrama.

I, like all the other human beings, expose to the world only my trimmed and perfumed and carefully barbered public opinions and conceal carefully, cautiously, wisely, my private ones.

Mark Twain.

WITH ALL THE GOOD MATERIAL he was collecting on his subject, Albert Bigelow Paine was growing increasingly confident that he could produce the kind of epic biography Twain was expecting. The only major problem so far was that he was having to spend a lot of his own money on the research for the book. Though Twain was generous whenever they were together, the biographer was expected to pay his own way to such places as Elmira, Hannibal, Hartford, and other far-flung locations. With a family to support and a modest income, he needed to keep his expenses low until he could finish the book and begin earning royalties. It helped that he was good at economizing. When he went up to Hartford for a few weeks to do interviews and collect doc.u.ments, he enlisted the help of kindly Reverend Joseph Twich.e.l.l, asking him to find a respectable boardinghouse where he could stay at a reasonable price. He was happy to have the Reverend's recommendation of an establishment run by a Miss Ryan, who offered room and board for as little as nine dollars a week.2 But Paine was such a hard worker that he didn't mind taking on extra work to keep his finances in order. Even by his demanding standards, however, the additional job he accepted in 1908 was almost too much, and would surely have overwhelmed many others in his position. Early in the new year he was contacted by a wealthy Texan looking for an established writer who could tell the story of the state's most famous lawman, a fifty-six-year-old captain of the Texas Rangers named Bill McDonald. Grizzled and lean, with a commanding voice and steely gaze, McDonald had made his name in the 1890s by almost single-handedly bringing order to the wild region of the Panhandle, where he and a dozen subordinates were responsible for enforcing the law in an area the size of West Virginia.

Captain Bill arrested so many cattle rustlers and train robbers that a gang formed with the sole purpose of killing him. When three of the gang confronted him on the street in his hometown, he held them off in a b.l.o.o.d.y gunfight, killing the leader and scattering the others despite suffering wounds to his arms and shoulder that forced him to c.o.c.k his gun with his teeth before he could return fire.

Besides his courage and his talent with a six-shooter, McDonald was also celebrated for his extraordinary ability to put down riots and disperse lynch mobs. The story was often told of the day he received a dispatch from Dallas asking him to bring his company of Texas Rangers to the city to stop a riot. When he arrived alone at the train station, the nervous mayor asked, "Where are the others?" To which Captain Bill replied, "h.e.l.l! Ain't I enough? There's only one riot."3 One of McDonald's old friends was Colonel Edward House, an influential political figure in Texas who would later become important in national politics as President Woodrow Wilson's closest adviser. It was House who contacted Paine with the suggestion that he write the legendary lawman's biography. As House later admitted, Paine wasn't his first choice. Initially, he invited William Sidney Porter-otherwise known as O. Henry-to do the book as a collection of twelve stories, "each representing some incident in Bill's life." But in a twist worthy of a tale by O. Henry, House's letter went astray and didn't reach its recipient for weeks, by which time Paine had been contacted and had accepted the job. When the letter finally came to Porter, he gave an enthusiastic response, saying he would do it as "a labor of love," but he was too late, and House had no choice but to turn him down.4 Incredibly, Paine was able to continue working on his biography of Twain while also writing 100,000 words on McDonald. In less than a year he would manage to finish the entire job, submitting his completed ma.n.u.script to the publisher at the end of 1908 after interviewing Captain Bill at length and researching a great many old newspaper articles and official doc.u.ments. For Paine, this exciting tale of Western adventure was so good that he couldn't pa.s.s up the chance to tell it. And he could easily justify the project as both a potential moneymaker and good practice for creating the more complex narrative of Twain's life.

He was thrilled when the chance soon arose to introduce his two subjects to each other. Not long after agreeing to do the book, he was able to coax McDonald into coming to New York to be interviewed. The old lawman showed up at the New Amsterdam Hotel in his cowboy boots and Stetson, a six-shooter under one side of his coat and an automatic pistol under the other. "I explained to Paine," House recalled, "that Bill had to carry his artillery in this way to be thoroughly ballasted-that he would have difficulty in walking without it."5 Predictably, Captain Bill didn't feel comfortable in crowded Manhattan after all his years of roaming the empty Panhandle. Automobiles in particular seemed to put him on edge. As he was being driven around the city, he growled to the driver, "Look here, you'll get me killed, yet, in a place like this. I don't know the game." He cheered up after a visit to Coney Island, where he happened to witness a street brawl and was able to break it up and send the dazed thugs home with a warning to behave themselves.

Before he could get away from New York, he accepted an invitation to dine at 21 Fifth Avenue. Twain was curious to take the measure of the man whose life was temporarily commanding the attention of their shared biographer. It wasn't easy to predict how they would react to each other. For one thing, McDonald wasn't much of a conversationalist, having always preferred action to words. He also wasn't the easiest man to entertain because he had no interest in cigars or alcohol-indeed, he avoided stimulants of any kind, including tea and coffee.

Impressed by Captain Bill's self-discipline, Paine had asked why he followed such a strict regimen. "Well, you see," came the reply, "sometimes I have to be about two-fifths of a second quicker than the other fellow, and a little quiver, then, might be fatal."6 Though the dinner at No. 21 went well, there was a little tension between the host and his special guest at the beginning of the evening. Twain seems to have felt that he had something to prove to the lawman, as though their status as legendary figures from the West made them rivals. At least that was the impression created in the mind of Colonel House, who accompanied Paine and McDonald to the dinner. In his memoirs he recalled being treated to the spectacle of Twain trying to outrun Captain Bill on the stairs leading up to the billiards room: "Clemens ran and Bill ran after, as if to catch him, but did not do so. Bill winked at me and said, 'I believe the old man really thinks I could not catch him.'"

At the billiards table, however, Twain had the last laugh. It seems that McDonald's long experience with firearms was a bad influence on the way he handled a cue. "It was amusing," House remembered, "to see Bill sight his cue as if it were a rifle and, three times out of four, send his ball off the table. It entertained Mr. Clemens immensely."7 For Paine, having two such colorful characters as subjects was an embarra.s.sment of biographical riches. Since he had the exclusive right to tell each man's story, he didn't need to worry about compet.i.tion. Given all his advantages, it seemed he couldn't fail with either project. Yet there was trouble ahead. The very fact that he was doing so well in his work and was on such good terms with his subjects was enough to stir up jealousy in the mind of the one person who was spending more time in Twain's company than anyone else-Isabel Lyon.

THE NEW YEAR started off badly for Twain's secretary. She came down with the flu and remained in bed for a couple of days at the very beginning of the month. Clara was at home and spent some time at Lyon's bedside, trying to comfort her. But Twain didn't seem to take her illness seriously, and she was hurt when he failed to give her the sympathy she was expecting. It upset her to think that, after all their time together, her well-being meant less to him than his did to her. Though she was constantly fussing over him, he usually showed only a slight interest in her personal affairs.

But such was her devotion to him that she could usually hide her moments of disappointment and bring herself to forgive any perceived slight. Writing in her journal, she complained that he had been rude to her while she was ill, then quickly shrugged it off with the words, "But I do not really care. He had many things on his mind to exasperate him."8 In a few days, her flu was gone, and she felt so much better that she had only good things to say about life at No. 21. Grateful for the attention Twain's daughter had shown her, she was overflowing with praise for "dear Santa" (Clara). After listening one afternoon to her perform in the parlor for a small group of friends, Lyon wrote of the experience as though she had been entertained by a G.o.ddess, remarking of Clara, "The very air must love to caress her as she pa.s.ses through it."

Caught up in this rhapsodic mood, she didn't even mind that the enchanted air of the performance carried not only Clara's sweet tones but also the faint sound of billiard b.a.l.l.s clicking. "The King," Lyon noted, "didn't come down until the music was over, for he doesn't like a drawing room performance." Now that she was feeling better, she returned to her old habit of uncritical wors.h.i.+p. The King could do no wrong, and she was as full of compliments for him as for Clara, calling him "the lovablest creature."9 In a few days, however, Twain became the next member of the household to fall ill. He came down with a bad head cold, but tried to pretend it would soon go away. When it didn't, he turned to an old-fas.h.i.+oned remedy-liberal doses of strong whiskey. One night he stayed up late with a quart of Scotch at his side while he played cards with Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft. He didn't go to bed until three in the morning, by which time the cards were scattered over the floor, the quart was empty, and he and his two companions were thoroughly drunk.

The next day-Friday, January 17-he decided that the alcohol was doing its job because he was feeling a little better. To finish the cure, he stayed up late again and drank some more. Lyon couldn't keep up with him this time and went to bed early, leaving him at the billiards table with Paine, who had come from Redding to have dinner at the house and was spending the night. Around two in the morning Lyon got up to check on Twain and found him in bad shape. He was still at the table with his cue in hand, but his cold had returned, and he was "reeling" from the effects of being both congested and intoxicated. She tried to persuade him to get some sleep, and when he refused, she took a seat and said she wouldn't leave until he agreed to go to bed.

At first, Paine stood by in silence. Always an obliging companion to Twain, he seems to have made a valiant effort to help him finish off the new bottle of whiskey. As a result, when Lyon wouldn't leave the room, the usually polite and una.s.suming biographer did something under the influence of alcohol that he would never have done otherwise. He lashed out at her, ordering her "to clear out." When she held her ground, he didn't know how to respond and left the room in anger. Only then was she able to talk Twain into surrendering his cue and going to bed.10 "Mark Twain Sick," a newspaper headline said two days later, "Under Care of Physician at Home." After trying so hard to avoid admitting that he was ill, Twain finally was forced to accept defeat and send for his doctor, Edward Quintard, who prescribed the usual cold remedies of the day, including a mustard bath. Lyon took charge of his daily care, making sure that he stayed in bed, and supplying him with hot food and healthier liquids than whiskey.11 His convalescence lasted more than a week, and he wasn't an easy patient. One day a concerned neighbor sent over a dish of extra large oysters from a nearby restaurant, thinking it would make a good meal for him. In the evening a servant took it to his room, but when Lyon came by a little later to check on him, he had already sent the dish back. Didn't he like the oysters? she asked. "No," he answered, "they looked and tasted like a fetus."

One day it snowed, and he felt well enough to go downstairs and sit at the window where he could watch the flakes drift to the street. Worried that too much cold air was coming through the "leaky loose" window, Lyon made sure that he didn't sit too close to it, then wrapped a green afghan over his shoulders. As darkness came and the snow continued to fall, she sat at the orchestrelle and played sad music until he grew sleepy and "gently" went up to bed.12 Lyon knew how to calm Twain, but she also knew how to stir him up. While he was feeling weak and out of sorts during his convalescence, she suddenly planted the suspicion in his mind that someone close to him might be taking advantage of his trust. The person she implicated was the man whose drunken outburst a few nights earlier had deeply offended her pride. Apparently, she wanted to do something that would, at the very least, force Paine to think twice before he tried ordering her around again.

So she suggested to Twain one night that his biographer was taking too many liberties with the collection of ma.n.u.scripts and letters at the house, making copies without asking permission, and borrowing things and not returning them. Moreover, she stated darkly, he was creating a separate collection of his own by persuading Twain's old friends to hand over their correspondence to him.

Of course, Paine was doing all these things. It was necessary to his research, and he had never made a secret of it. Until now neither his methods nor his honesty had been questioned. From the very beginning he had been allowed to dig into Twain's papers without any restrictions, and had even won Lyon's praise for taking the extra time to organize them. In 1906 she wrote of him, "He is doing the very thing that I longed to have some wors.h.i.+pping creature do with Mr. Clemens's papers. ... He is bringing the ma.s.s into order, reducing the great chaos that I have always longed to be able to touch but have never found time for."13 In his early months as Twain's biographer, Paine had earned not only Lyon's admiration but also her trust and affection. For a while she had regarded him in a romantic light, heaping praise on him in her journals as a man of great character and promise. She would take long walks with him, and they would often confide in each other. One day she curled up on a couch and listened raptly as he "walked up and down the room, smoking cigarettes and talking about the King and the Biography." He told her of his great ambitions and revealed some of the details of his humble beginnings. She was fascinated to learn that his current wife was not his first. He explained that he had been married once before in Kansas when he was very young. The marriage began "in romance," he told her, but had soon ended in the "tragedy" of divorce.14 Over time, as it became clear to Lyon that her friends.h.i.+p with Paine wasn't going to develop into something more serious, she settled into an uneasy professional relations.h.i.+p with him, regarding herself as his equal in their service to Twain. But so different were their jobs and personalities that they soon came to see themselves as rivals, each growing increasingly suspicious of the other. Part of the problem was that Lyon didn't think Paine understood Twain as well as she did. She was convinced that he lacked the kind of pa.s.sionate nature that was necessary to appreciate the great man's genius. She blamed this deficiency on his Midwestern roots. As she explained many years later, she thought he suffered from "a flat prairie-like vision" that made him incapable of understanding "emotional depths & pinnacles." With evident bitterness, she dismissed his emotions as "thin & fict.i.tious."15 On that cold January night when Paine thoughtlessly told Lyon "to clear out," he touched a raw nerve and brought into the open the various tensions between them that had been building for months. After he had gone home to Redding, she seized the chance to teach him a lesson by using her influence with Twain to undermine his work. If her boss had been feeling better, her professed doubts about Paine's trustworthiness might have made little impression on him. But the head cold and the aftereffects of alcohol muddled his thinking and created just enough suspicion to make him worry that his chosen biographer was h.o.a.rding papers and hiding the fact from him.

To exert her influence in this matter, Lyon seems to have relied on suggestion rather than accusation. "My anxiety," she wrote at the time, "had projected itself into his mind." But in later years she took a more cynical view of the ease with which Twain's opinions could be manipulated: "Mr. Clemens ... could always be swayed by the last person coming to build up a prejudice or to break one down."16 Whether or not he was easily swayed in this case, Twain wasn't eager to raise the problem directly with his biographer, and allowed Lyon to convey the message that he now wanted more control over his papers. He did, however, dash off a letter on January 22 to Howells, requesting that his friend check with him first before giving any letters to Paine. Noting that he was "sick abed, these days," he didn't hint at any mistrust of Paine, but said that he didn't want to see too much of his private life revealed in a biography that might appear before his death. "A man should be dead," he wrote Howells, "before his private foolishnesses are risked in print."

When this letter reached Howells, he was in Europe and couldn't understand why Twain had sent him such a request. He replied that he had already given some letters to Paine and thought it was the right thing to do. "I saw Paine on such intimate terms with you," he wrote, "that I should not have hesitated to offer him all your letters." Even though Howells didn't know the circ.u.mstances that had prompted Twain to write, he felt compelled to put in a good word for the biographer's integrity. He said there was no reason to withhold information from him, declaring forcefully, "I don't think Paine could abuse the confidence put in him."17 When Paine himself was told that there were questions about his use of letters and other papers, he was shocked. Then shock gave way to indignation, and he wrote Lyon a powerful letter defending his actions and threatening to abandon the biography if he couldn't command the trust of Twain and his circle.

Given all the time and money he had put into the project, his show of defiance was risky. He told Lyon that she was free to show the letter to both Twain and Clara, but he was probably betting that she wouldn't. His threat to quit seems to have been directed solely at her, whose part in creating the problem must have been readily apparent to him. Essentially, his letter challenged her to back away from a confrontation or accept responsibility for sabotaging the biography.

"If I am to be handicapped by concealments, and opposition, and suspicion of ulterior motives," he wrote her; "if I am to be denied access to the letters written to such men as Howells and Twich.e.l.l; in a word, if I am to become not the biographer but simply a, biographer-one of a dozen groping, half-equipped men, then I would better bend my energies in the direction of easier performance and surer and prompter return."18 Such a statement seemed to demand an immediate answer. But Paine's future as the biographer would take some time to resolve. Though tempers soon cooled and peace was restored on the surface, Lyon's relations.h.i.+p with him suffered permanent damage. As for Twain, as soon as he was his old self again, he was able to smooth over any differences and continue his relations.h.i.+p with Paine as before. He had grown too close to him to do otherwise, and had no evidence of wrongdoing to justify a break in their friends.h.i.+p.

WHILE STILL RECOVERING in his sickbed, Twain dictated a letter to a beautiful woman he had recently met. She was Elinor Glyn, an English author in her early forties whose racy novel Three Weeks was causing a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. When the American edition appeared in September 1907, it received rough treatment from literary critics, who derided its sentimental romanticism, and from moralists, who condemned its sympathetic treatment of an adulterous affair between an older woman and a younger man. But ordinary readers loved it and made the novel a runaway hit, with sales averaging fifty thousand copies a month during the fall and winter.

As a writer, Elinor Glyn wasn't much better than Marie Corelli. But apart from sales figures and a fondness for purple prose, they had little in common. Whereas Corelli had a talent for making a fool of herself in public, Glyn managed her celebrity status with wit and great confidence. Her own family background was solidly middle-cla.s.s, but she was so stunningly handsome that she never had any problem gaining entry to the upper levels of English society. Though married and the mother of two children, she didn't care much for domestic life and spent her free time pursuing love affairs with various aristocrats.

When she came to New York in the fall of 1907 for a long visit to promote Three Weeks, she brought along several trunks full of clothing and sixty pairs of shoes. Reporters outdid each other trying to come up with adjectives for her physical features. One referred to the "glorious halo of her hair," and another described her in a black gown with a hat that cast "delicate shadows on her white skin, red golden hair and dark eyes." Most observers agreed that the contrast between the rich color of her hair and the fairness of her complexion was the most striking aspect of her appearance, especially when she wore gowns with low necklines that revealed a bosom of "snowy amplitudes," to use one biographer's phrase. In Three Weeks the heroine, who resembles Glyn, is described as having a complexion as white as "a magnolia bloom."19 Twain's first encounter with this remarkable woman was suitably dramatic. It took place at the end of 1907 while he and Isabel Lyon were attending a private dinner hosted by the producer Dan Frohman in the luxurious upstairs ballroom at Delmonico's Restaurant on Fifth Avenue. At the beginning of the event everyone's attention was focused on Frohman's young wife, the popular actress Margaret Illington, who made a grand entrance wearing a new gown that accentuated her statuesque figure. "But, suddenly," Lyon would recall, "she was eclipsed by a woman with milk-white skin, tawny red hair & green eyes; her gown a sea-green soft silk & she wore a strange oriental chain, as her only ornament."20 Neither Lyon nor Twain recognized the mysterious beauty, but her arrival created such a stir that the question of her ident.i.ty was quickly answered when other guests began pointing and whispering, "Elinor Glyn."

Anyone who had seen a newspaper in the last few weeks would have known the name. Though it was Glyn's novel that had made headlines first, the novelist had also become a subject of controversy. Indeed, as Twain later said of her, "She has come to us upon the stormwind of a vast and sudden notoriety." One week she outraged New York literary critics by calling them "idiots." A few weeks later she became involved in a public feud with a women's club called the Pilgrim Mothers. Some of its members had been rude to her at a luncheon, condemning her as a wicked person whose open att.i.tudes toward s.e.x were a threat to marriage and the family. Refusing to accept such treatment, Glyn had gone to the press and entertained them with ridicule of the "preposterous" Pilgrim Mothers, declaring that the group "really reminded me of a lot of sparrows chattering under the eaves."

Shocked by Glyn's unladylike willingness to fight back, one member of the club commented, "I thought she was a high-cla.s.s Englishwoman-but I didn't know she had claws."21 Those claws were fully retracted on the December night that she met Twain at Delmonico's. At the end of the dinner she rushed to his side and sweetly requested a private meeting at a time and place of his choosing. She gave the impression that she had some urgent business to discuss with him, yet he was wary of her intentions and declined her offer, making polite excuses. Not one to give up easily, she wrote him a note pleading to see him, and he reluctantly agreed. One afternoon near the end of the month she arrived at his door and was greeted by Isabel Lyon, who showed her into the parlor and then went upstairs to tell Twain that his visitor was waiting to see him.

When he joined Glyn, they sat down together on a large divan, and Lyon left the room. But the secretary took a last glance on the way out and would always remember what an extraordinary pair they made. "I have a mental picture of them as they sat there," she wrote thirty years later. Twain was "in his usual pure white," and Glyn wore a dress of "brown velvet, with soft sables slipping from her shoulders," and a small hat "banded with the same fur." They looked like actors in costume waiting for the curtain to go up. And both seemed to know from the start that afterward they would create their own versions of what had transpired between them.22 Each was impressed with the other's appearance. Glyn liked Twain's "white silky hair" and his "fresh face." Staring into his eyes, she decided that they resembled those of a child who looks "out on life with that infinite air of wisdom one sees peeping sometimes from a young pure soul." A youthful look was also something Twain found in her face and figure, expressing disbelief when he learned that such a "faultlessly formed and incontestably beautiful" woman had a fourteen-year-old daughter.

But he wasn't under any illusions about her character. Ambitious and opportunistic, she had come to enlist his support for her book. He guessed as much from the start, so he wasn't surprised when she admitted it. What drew her to him, she explained, was his reputation as an unconventional thinker who seemed to enjoy exposing hypocrites. Having read his attacks on the sanctimonious Mary Baker Eddy, she considered him just the man to defend her novel against its moralistic critics. Because he was so "very brave," she said, she would be proud to have him as her champion. Such praise from a beautiful woman wasn't easy to resist, yet Twain later insisted that it didn't affect him, admitting only that it might "have beguiled me when I was very very young."

All the same, he must have been beguiled a little, because he stayed on that divan chatting with her for an hour and a half. In fact, he had already gone to the trouble of buying her novel and reading it from cover to cover. In their conversation he showed a detailed knowledge of the story, especially the seduction scene in which the heroine and her young lover agree to abandon convention and to obey only the laws of nature. "They get to obeying them at once," Twain later said of Glyn's characters and their desires, "and they keep on obeying them and obeying them, to the reader's intense delight and disapproval."

The most controversial scene in the novel featured the heroine demonstrating her sensual nature to her lover by lying on the floor and pa.s.sionately rubbing her body against a tiger skin. It marks the point in the story at which, as Twain said, "business begins." Many contemporary readers found the scene shocking not only because it was unashamedly erotic but also because a woman had dared to write it. In the end, though, Twain rightly surmised that most readers would feel torn between "delight and disapproval." The lighter side of this conflict found expression in a memorable verse by an anonymous wit of the period: Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger-skin?

Or would you prefer To err With her On some other fur?23 Though Mark Twain and Elinor Glyn only talked about sin, they did so with remarkable candor. For ordinary men and women of the time, it was inconceivable that questions of s.e.xual desire, seduction, and adultery could be openly addressed in polite conversation. Yet, as Twain noted proudly afterward, he discussed these matters with "daring frankness" in his talk with Glyn, "calling a spade a spade instead of coldly symbolizing it as a snow shovel." Even so, the experience was more than a little unnerving for him at his age: "It was one of the d.a.m.nedest conversations I have ever had with a beautiful stranger of her s.e.x, if I do say it myself that shouldn't."

He told her that he shared her sympathy for the lovers in her novel. They weren't to blame for following their desires, he said. They were only "obeying the law of their make and disposition," which meant that their Maker was the real one to blame for the trouble. Twain had held such a view for a long time and had discussed it at length in an unpublished portion of his autobiography. "G.o.d ingeniously contrived man in such a way," he had said in a dictation two years earlier, "that he could not escape obedience to the laws of his pa.s.sions. ... [And is] beset by traps which he cannot possibly avoid, and which compel him to commit what are called sins."24 Glyn was thrilled to hear that Twain understood her point of view, and she promptly asked him to declare his support in print. But he refused, explaining that society wasn't ready for an open debate on s.e.xual morality, and that he didn't want to be dragged into such a debate. When she protested that it was his "duty" to speak out, he answered that in such cases his opinions were his own, and that he didn't have a duty to share them with anyone.

Their exchange was friendly, and they parted on good terms. But Glyn didn't want to take no for an answer, so she prepared some notes of their conversation and sent a typed copy to Twain for his approval. It arrived just as he was getting ready to go on one of his quick trips to Bermuda, and though he had many other demands on his time, he read it carefully and gave her his opinion.

"If you had put upon paper what I really said," he wrote on January 24, "it would have wrecked your type-machine. I said some fetid & over-vigorous things, but that was because it was a confidential conversation. I said nothing for print. My own report of the same conversation reads like Satan roasting a Sunday school."

In fact, her account wasn't so different from his, but he was trying in a humorous way to impress on her that his words belonged to him and that he didn't want to lend them out for a cause that wasn't his. At the same time, it was obvious that she was determined to make their conversation public, and Twain didn't expressly forbid it. He may even have been secretly hoping that she would. You didn't discuss s.e.x for an hour and a half with Elinor Glyn and expect her to keep quiet about it.

But if she ever did speak out and overstate his case or create too much of an uproar, his letter was fair warning that he wouldn't admit to anything in a report he didn't write. No matter how much merit he may have found in her views, he wasn't in the business of helping her sell books or reforming moral att.i.tudes. "I am not here," he told her, "to do good-at least not to do it intentionally." And with those words, Twain let the matter rest-for the time being.25 ...

AS BOTH GLYN AND TWAIN were well aware, January 1908 was a particularly difficult time in New York to take a public stand in favor of greater s.e.xual freedom. It was the month in which the question of guilt in the most notorious s.e.x scandal of the young century was being decided in a Manhattan courtroom. On the last day of the month a jury began deliberating the fate of Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw, who was undergoing his second trial for committing what the newspapers called "the Crime of the Century." All the talk of romantic intrigue in Three Weeks was nothing compared with the tales of violent pa.s.sion recounted in Thaw's sensational case.

He was charged with murdering famed architect Stanford White, shooting him on a warm night in June 1906 at the rooftop cabaret of Madison Square Garden (a structure designed by White himself). The crime occurred in full view of the audience while a group on stage performed a musical number called "I Could Love a Million Girls." Without any warning, Thaw approached White's table and fired three times, pointing the pistol so close to the architect's face that he left it blackened by powder burns.

In the first trial Thaw's attorneys argued that their client had become enraged after learning that his new bride-twenty-two-year-old Evelyn Nesbit, a former model and showgirl-had been seduced by White when she was single and still in her teens. They claimed that this past wrong had led Thaw to kill White in a fit of temporary insanity. Though the trial lasted more than two months-allowing the defense ample time to paint a detailed portrait of the wealthy architect as an unfaithful husband and a debauched middle-aged playboy who preyed on young girls-it ended in a hung jury. It wasn't until the beginning of 1908 that officials were able to commence the second trial.

Like most New Yorkers, Twain followed the case in the newspapers, but his knowledge of the facts went far beyond what ordinary people knew. The chief defense attorney in the second trial was Twain's friend Martin Littleton, who lived across the street from him and would often come over in the evening to play billiards or chat. Paine was present on some of those occasions and recalled that Littleton-a garrulous Texan-enjoyed discussing the case with Twain: "It was most interesting to hear from him direct the day's proceedings and his views of the situation and of Thaw."26 To save his client from the electric chair, Littleton argued that Thaw's fit of insanity wasn't an anomaly, but was part of a lifelong struggle with mental disease. Despite the fact that Thaw's mother had said in the first trial that there was no history of insanity in the family, Littleton managed to produce a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The defendant, he told the jury, suffered from "a clear case of insanity born in generations before him and still existing." The lawyer's talent for turning a phrase was one of the things that Twain admired about him, and it seems the jury also found his words impressive. The second trial ended with a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, and Thaw was sent to a mental inst.i.tution instead of to a prison cell for life or the electric chair.

Besides defending Thaw, Littleton went out of his way to speak up for Evelyn Nesbit's reputation, which had suffered considerable damage in the first trial. Published accounts of her affair with White were considered so salacious that President Roosevelt had wanted to prohibit them from being sent through the mail. For the rest of her life, Nesbit would be remembered as a rich man's s.e.xual plaything. She was called "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing," a reference to the fact that White kept a large swing at one of his elaborately equipped love nests and liked to have a nude Evelyn sit in it while he pushed her higher and higher.

But in the closing argument to the jury, Littleton portrayed her as little more than a child when White began taking advantage of her, and he lamented that there was no "guiding hand" to protect her from the predatory designs of the older man. It is tempting to think that he may have rehea.r.s.ed this argument with Twain earlier, for it reflects a similar view expressed in the author's autobiographical dictations. Twain firmly believed that Nesbit was the victim of a remorseless seducer who used age and experience to exploit her innocence. And he was disgusted by the fact that the public seemed to derive a voyeuristic thrill from her ordeal. Moreover, he worried that graphic reports from the courtroom might incite more men to prey on vulnerable young women.

Mark Twain's good friend and New York neighbor Martin Littleton (left) served as defense attorney in the second trial of Harry K. Thaw (right), who was accused of shooting architect Stanford White in a jealous rage. White was the former lover of Thaw's wife, Evelyn Nesbit.

In October 1907 he wrote, "Although we do not allow obscene books and pictures to be placed on sale either publicly or privately, or sent through the mails, we exploit our Thaw trials in open court and place the l.u.s.t-breeding details, per newspaper and mail, under the eyes of 60,000,000 persons, per day, young and old, and do not perceive the curious incongruity of it. A 'wave of crime' quite naturally and of necessity follows, throughout the land, resulting in hundreds and hundreds of atrocities that come to light, and those of thousands that are concealed, out of shame, by the victims and their friends, and do not reach the light."27 Oddly enough, if it had not been for his friends.h.i.+p with Littleton, Twain might have been required to be part of the jury selection for Harry Thaw's second trial. In her journal entry for Sat.u.r.day, January 4, Isabel Lyon noted that Littleton had visited No. 21 that night and had revealed that the name of Samuel L. Clemens was on the list of prospective jurors ("Mr. L. said that the King's name had been down as a juryman for the Thaw trial"). Thanks to Littleton, the name was removed.

In the Thaw case, Twain was probably the last man in New York who should have been considered for jury duty, and it wasn't simply because of his celebrity or his friends.h.i.+p with the defense attorney. Another factor came into play. As it happened, he and Evelyn Nesbit had a mutual friend. Among the many men who had been attracted to her when she was a young showgirl in New York was Robert Collier.

In a memoir she wrote in the 1930s Nesbit affectionately recalled the attention paid to her by "Bobby" Collier when he was a young man-about-town and she was a fresh-faced beauty in her late teens. Many of the rich men who chased after her were old enough to be her father, but Collier was just eight years her senior, and not only treated her with respect but was so infatuated with her that he asked her to marry him. He wrote her love poems, showered her with gifts, and even offered to send her to art school in Europe, telling her that she was wasting her time in show business.

His offer wasn't an empty gesture. As he demonstrated to Twain in the case of the children's theater, he was a generous man. He was constantly helping his friends, and sometimes the results were remarkable. He changed the life of his college roommate, Conde Nast, by giving him a job at Collier's Weekly, where Nast learned so much about the business that he was soon able to strike out on his own and take charge of a struggling periodical called Vogue. (Robert Collier also gave Mark Twain's nephew, Samuel Moffett, a well-paying job at his company.) It isn't clear how close Collier's relations.h.i.+p with Nesbit became, but over dinner one night it reached a decisive point. Looking at her "with absorbed, tender eyes," as Nesbit recalled, he tried to explain how "seriously fond" he was of her. She a.s.sumed that he was leading up to a proposal, yet she refused to take it seriously. Already under the spell of Stanford White, she resolved not to encourage Collier. The decision to spurn his effort to make her his wife was something she would regret for the rest of her life.28 Handsome, athletic, and fun-loving, Collier was one of the most eligible bachelors in New York. Upton Sinclair-who published some of his research for The Jungle in Collier's Weekly-described the young publisher as "a picture of health, florid and jolly, a polo-player, what is called a 'good fellow.'" Like Twain, he had a boyish spirit and loved games. He certainly knew how to have a good time and was famous for his elaborate parties with humorous themes.

At one attended by Twain in 1908, he hired a couple of ballrooms, decorated them to look like Spanish palaces, then staged a midnight ballet for his guests in which the dancing was done by several chorus girls, half a dozen trained dogs, and the prima ballerina of the Manhattan Opera House. So many taxis were used to transport the girls and the dogs to the party that the neighbors became alarmed and called the police, who barged in expecting to find "some terrible doings," but who went away laughing at the innocent celebrations. After the ballet, the dogs ("Collies for Collier") roamed free, and one was later seen eating ice cream at the table where Mark Twain and Ethel Barrymore were seated. The festivities lasted late into the night, and the next day Twain reported that he "enjoyed it thoroughly till 4:05 A.M., when I came away with the last of the rioters."29 Restless and impulsive, Collier didn't need much time to recover from Evelyn Nesbit's rejection. Not long after his disappointing dinner with her, he threw himself into a whirlwind romance with a twenty-one-year-old Newport heiress-Sarah Van Alen. They wed a few weeks later in a hastily arranged ceremony announced only three days before the event. He continued to keep in touch with Nesbit, however, and would remain her loyal friend long after the Thaw trials ended. Though not many people were aware of Collier's personal interest in Nesbit, it was widely known that he played an important part in promoting her modeling career. After all, it was his magazine that had published her best-known portrait, The Eternal Question, a line drawing by Charles Dana Gibson in which her long, luxuriant hair is made to resemble a question mark.30 During the Thaw trials it was in the interests of both Collier and Nesbit to keep quiet about their friends.h.i.+p. The prosecuting attorney was keen to prove that doe-eyed Evelyn wasn't as innocent as she looked, and that Thaw didn't deserve the jury's sympathy for trying to defend his wife's honor. The aim was to demonstrate that her honor wasn't worth defending because she had been involved with "dozens of men." According to Nesbit's memoir, detectives worked the sidewalks of Broadway for days trying to dig up details about her past relations.h.i.+ps, offering money to showgirls and stage-door Johnnies for incriminating information.31 Regardless of whether Collier had been merely an admirer or a lover of Nesbit, his reputation would have suffered if the prosecution had decided to drag his name into the trial and to present him as another rich playboy like White. He was spared that ordeal, but only because Ethel Barrymore's good-looking younger brother gave the prosecution a much better target. In court John Barrymore was revealed to have had a long and pa.s.sionate relations.h.i.+p with Nesbit. He was portrayed as a l.u.s.ty young man who was obsessed with the model, but who had been driven out of her life by a jealous Stanford White.

Expecting to be called as a witness, he managed to avoid appearing at the trial by pretending to be ill. At the outset of the proceedings, he had been advised by a friend to "get sick quick" and had retreated to a clinic in Maine, from which he sent word that he wasn't well enough to travel. He said he was "threatened with pneumonia."

Unable to get his hands on the actor, the district attorney asked in frustration, "Who goes to Maine in February to combat pneumonia?"

As soon as the trial ended, Barrymore made a quick recovery, but the newspapers had already printed numerous allegations against him, including the claim that "Mr. Barrymore was a little bit crazy."32 It is easy to see why Twain took an interest in the Thaw case. Having Martin Littleton, Robert Collier, and Ethel Barrymore as friends, he was in a good position to know some of the personal histories behind the headlines, and to see how much trouble could be stirred up when a big scandal revealed the enormous discrepancy between what people said in public and what they did in private. How much he knew of Collier's relations.h.i.+p with Nesbit isn't clear, but he may have learned more about the case from the well-versed defense attorney than from anyone else. Throughout the trial Littleton always seemed to be one step ahead of the prosecution, partly because the Thaw family had enough money to employ private detectives to do their own investigation of witnesses.

Even if Twain had been willing to join Elinor Glyn's crusade for s.e.xual candor, it's unlikely that he would have made a good spokesman for it. He liked joking about s.e.x or satirizing the guardians of public morality, but he didn't have much experience explaining the pa.s.sions and complications of s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps. In his books romantic love is usually a vague sentiment that inspires either mild respect or good-natured mockery. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Hank Morgan's relations.h.i.+p in Camelot with young Sandy gets both treatments. When Hank falls in love with her, his feeling is described as "a mysterious and shuddery reverence." Yet, after they marry, the great joke on her is that she innocently names their child after the cry that Hank often utters in his sleep-"h.e.l.lo-Central," a reference to his lost love from nineteenth-century Connecticut, the telephone operator Puss Flanagan.

Twain once told Isabel Lyon that he wasn't good at writing plays because they required a "love element" that he found difficult to handle. As Lyon put it, "He never knew what to do with the woman."33 In a few months he would discover-not entirely to his surprise-that his protests had not deterred Glyn from making their conversation public. She wanted to keep readers talking about her and Three Weeks for as long as possible. What she wrote about him, and how he responded, are subjects for another chapter. But, in the meantime, it is worth noting that when she said goodbye to America in the spring, some members of the press were already weary of her efforts at self-promotion. The New York World's photo of her boarding the Lusitania for England shows her figure only from behind, with the caption "Thanks for back view of Elinor Glyn," and the headline "Mrs. Glyn Goes Away from Here, but She Threatens to Come Back."34 On visits to Bermuda, Twain enjoyed the hospitality of Mary Peck (center, with her arm around Twain), who is shown here at her home on the island with other guests, including Henry Rogers (far left) and Isabel Lyon (far right).

TWELVE.

Tourist Trade.

It's doubly tainted: taint yours, and taint mine.

Mark Twain, answering a question about the "tainted" wealth of H. H. Rogers.

"I N BERMUDA A SICK PERSON gets well in 3 days, & strong in a week," Twain wrote on a quick visit to the island in late January 1908. "You only need the Bermuda air to make you weller than ever you were in your life before." In his estimation, the warm climate promptly cured what was left of his winter cold and made him feel as good as new again. When he returned to New York in a few days, he decided that one winter escape to Bermuda wasn't enough. He wanted to go back at the end of February and take Henry Rogers with him. It would do them both a world of good, he said.2 To his delight, Rogers agreed. As the Wall Street Journal had reported in January, Rogers was starting to look like his old self again and had resumed his busy routine at the office. "Mr. Rogers," the paper noted, "shows a remarkable improvement in health over the last several weeks." By the middle of February, he was sufficiently pleased with his business affairs to decide that he didn't need to risk overworking himself again. He could afford to take a few weeks off and tend to his health.

Though many businesses were still struggling to recover from the financial turmoil of October and November, Standard Oil was awash in money, showing a record profit of nearly $90 million at the end of 1907. Despite the fact that the federal government was continuing to work methodically in the courts to break up the business, the petroleum giant was making so much money that the Wall Street Journal joked there must be a new economic phenomenon at work-the "prosperity of the prosecuted."3 And so it was big news on Wall Street when h.e.l.l Hound Rogers let it be known that various a.s.sociates and a.s.sistants would be overseeing his millions while he and Twain went off to Bermuda to relax for a while. One reaction was disbelief. Given Rogers's fondness for secrecy, there was some suspicion that the trip was merely another one of the tyc.o.o.n's elaborate tricks. It was easy to imagine that he might want rivals to think he was on a remote island while he hatched some new business scheme elsewhere. Perhaps fueling this suspicion was the fact that even though he owned one of the world's largest and most powerful yachts, he was going to leave it behind and travel with Twain on the regular steamer to Bermuda. (In fact, it was a much safer plan, since the voyage could be very treacherous in late winter.) When Rogers boarded the Bermudian in New York on the cold Sat.u.r.day morning of February 22, he wasn't surprised to find several reporters eagerly waiting to witness his departure with Twain and to quiz him about his intentions. Wearing a black derby and a matching overcoat with a rolled-up newspaper shoved into the pocket, he met the press on deck. But with the exception of giving an upbeat forecast for the economy, he didn't offer much information because Twain came to his rescue and distracted the questioners with a lot of jokes.

"Well, I see that we're discovered," Twain said. "That's what I get for being in bad company."

Rogers laughed and told his friend, "Well, you've got no edge on me. Some of my methods may be bad. The public says so, at least. But they are no worse than your jokes."

It didn't take long for the two friends to begin sounding like a vaudeville act. "Two Jokers; One Deck" was the clever headline that one paper gave to its report of the Rogers-Twain routine.

"I'm going because Mark is paying my fare," Rogers announced, adding, "I'm broke again."

"Yes," said Twain, playing along, "I'm paying his fare, but I'm $2 shy. I'm going to shake him down for that $2 when we get out to sea."

"That's one of his jokes," Rogers shot back, "but it isn't worth $2, is it?"

"You don't mean to say," a reporter asked Twain, "that Mr. Rogers has had grave reverses of fortune, do you?"

"Yep. Rogers hasn't any more money than the Swiss navy has s.h.i.+ps. I'm the good Samaritan in this affair."

"Why are you going to Bermuda, then?"

"Oh, just to keep old Rogers here straight. He's a sly one, is Rogers, and he needs a chaperon. If he behaves himself, maybe I'll beat it back to New York in a few days after we inflict our celebrated persons on the citizens of Bermuda."

When Rogers mentioned that he might stay away for three weeks, Twain managed to spice up the conversation with a reference to another celebrated person he knew-the unforgettable Mrs. Glyn.

"Yes," Twain chuckled, "Rogers is going to make three weeks of it and write a book."

"Not that kind," Rogers responded promptly.

When reporters asked the pair to pose for photographs, they obliged, but not before Rogers stipulated that he would do so "only on the condition that Twain will promise not to pick the photographer's pocket when the cloth is over his head."

Twain took a few puffs of his cigar before responding, "I'm rather particular about who poses with me."4 In one of the surviving pictures of this occasion, Twain is looking upward with a bright-eyed expression, his face bathed in light and appearing as innocent as an angel while one hand opens up Rogers's overcoat, presumably to reach inside and find the two dollars he wanted.

Despite all their joking, it is obvious from the photograph that illness had taken its toll on Rogers, whose body may have been on the mend, but whose face looked haggard. Isabel Lyon, who had been invited to join the trip this time, thought that he looked like "a grey feeble man" when he boarded the s.h.i.+p. Some of the journalists also remarked on his weak appearance. As one observed, "The captain of the Rockefeller industries was somberly clad in black, and made a rather dismal figure beside the radiant humorist."5 Bantering with the reporters was fun for Twain, but he was also anxious about his old friend's health and didn't want him to be pestered by anyone asking tough questions. The pair's comic routine was so good that most of the newspapermen soon forgot about more serious matters. That was not the case, however, with the earnest reporter from the New York Tribune, who complained afterward that he had wanted to "talk seriously on financial matters," but "neither traveler would do aught but joke."6 Though it was true that the voyage was primarily for pleasure and had no hidden purpose, Twain had been around Rogers long enough to know that he liked to safeguard his privacy as much as possible. The proud businessman wouldn't have wanted to admit even the possibility that his health was still weak or that it might be improved by taking a long vacation. It was better to keep everyone guessing about his real intentions, and to remind the world-as Twain took the trouble to do-that Rogers was "a sly one" who kept his cards close to his chest.