Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott

Di Marsha Gordon

"Makes an excellent case for Parrott as an unjustly forgotten historical figure."—The New Yorker
"Remind[s] us of the brazenly talented women sidelined by convention."—New York Times
The riveting biography of Ursula Parrott—best-selling author, Hollywood screenwriter, and voice for the modern woman.  

Credited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife establishes Parrott's rightful place in twentieth-century American culture, uncovering her neglected work and keen insights into American women's lives during a period of immense social change.
 
Although she was frequently dismissed as a "woman's writer," reading Parrott's writing today makes it clear that she was a trenchant philosopher of modernity—her work was prescient, anticipating issues not widely raised until decades after her decline into obscurity. With elegant wit and a deft command of the archive, Marsha Gordon tells a timely story about the life of a woman on the front lines of a culture war that is still raging today.

• Lingua: Italiano
• Editore: University of California Press
• Data di uscita: 25 apr 2023
• ISBN: 9780520391550

Marsha Gordon

Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a former Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award. She is the author of numerous books and articles and codirector of several short documentaries.

Anteprima del libro

Becoming the Ex-Wife

After the publication of her first book, Ex-Wife, in 1929, descriptions of Ursula Parrott always led with her marital status and often with her parental status as well, as was the case when she published Meeting at Midnight in Liberty’s May 23, 1931, issue.

Becoming the Ex-Wife

THE UNCONVENTIONAL LIFE AND FORGOTTEN WRITINGS OF URSULA PARROTT

Marsha Gordon

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Kenneth Turan and Patricia Williams Endowment Fund in American Film.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Marsha Gordon

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gordon, Marsha, 1971– author.

Title: Becoming the ex-wife : the unconventional life and forgotten writings of Ursula Parrott / Marsha Gordon.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022026738 (print) | LCCN 2022026739 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520391543 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520391550 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Parrott, Ursula, 1899–1957—Biography. | Authors—20th century—Biography. | Women—Social conditions—20th century.

Classification: LCC PS3531.A666 Z68 2023 (print) | LCC PS3531.A666 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/005—dc23/eng/20220927

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026738

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026739

Manufactured in the United States of America

32   31   30   29   28   27   26   25   24   23

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

A Note on Name Usage

Introduction: Maxims in the Copybook of Modernism

1 • The Limited Life of a Dorchester Girl

2 • At Radcliffe: A Pushy Lace-Curtain Irish Girl from Dorchester

3 • First Husband, Lindesay Parrott: Strange Moments of Tenderness and Pretty Constant Dislike

4 • Modern Parenting

5 • Greenwich Village: The Path to Becoming a Self-Sufficient, Independent, Successful Manager of Her Own Life

6 • Hugh O’Connor: High Felicity on the Road of No Rules

7 • New Freedoms in the Era of the One-Night Stand: The Ex-Wife Is Born

8 • Ursula Goes to Hollywood

9 • Second Husband, Charles Greenwood: The Stupidest Thing I Ever Did in My Life

10 • Extravagant Hell

11 • The Business of Being a Writer

12 • Third Husband, John Wildberg: The Faint Resemblance of Stability

13 • The Monotony and Weariness of Living

14 • Fourth Husband, Alfred Coster Schermerhorn: Two Catastrophes Should Be Enough

15 • Saving Private Bryan: The United States vs. Ursula Parrott

16 • Her Breaks Went Bad

17 • Black Coffee, Scotch, and Excitement

Afterword: Remembering a Leftover Lady

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Notes

Published Writings by Ursula Parrott

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Ursula Parrott photo and biographical sketch accompanying Meeting at Midnight

1 Ruth Burns, Living Up to the Title of Her ‘Best Seller’

2 Leftover Ladies

3 Margaret Towle (a.k.a. Madge Tyrone)

4 Lucy Inez Towle in the 1911 Simmons College yearbook

5 Students at the Boston Girls’ Latin School, 1916

6 Katherine Ursula Towle in the 1920 Radcliffe College yearbook

7 Lindesay Parrott in the 1921 Princeton yearbook

8 Lindesay Parrott and Katherine Towle Certificate and Record of Marriage

9 Katherine Towle Parrott passport application

10 Courtenay Terry Terrett

11 Mary Donahue (a.k.a. Dado)

12 Ursula Parrott and her son Marc

13 Hugh O’Connor passport application photo

14 Advertisement for serialization of Ex-Wife

15 Gray Strider, Sex and the Talkies

16 MGM advertisement celebrating Norma Shearer’s Best Actress Academy Award

17 Parrott and other writers in Paramount’s 20th Birthday Jubilee campaign

18 Parrott photo and biographical sketch accompanying Gentleman’s Fate

19 Parrott in Hollywood

20 Parrott renaming Betty Grable Frances Dean

21 Parrott’s Nice People Don’t Eat

22 Parrott at a literary tea

23 Charles Greenwood obituary

24 Parrott’s story featured on the cover of the American Magazine

25 George Bye passport application

26 Parrott in the opening credits of The Woman Accused

27 John J. Wildberg

28 Parrott disembarking in New York from the SS Berengaria

29 Parrott featured in Universal publicity for Next Time We Love

30 Promotion of movie theater publicity stunt for Next Time We Love

31 Connecticut Nutmeg pictorial spread

32 Parrott cohosting a Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fundraiser

33 Parrott and Alfred Schermerhorn after their courthouse wedding

34 Parrott promoting her novel Heaven’s Not Far Away

35 Private Michael Neely Bryan

36 Parrott and her lawyers during the Private Bryan trial

37 Parrott during the Private Bryan trial

38 The back cover of Dell’s 1949 mapback edition of Ex-Wife

39 Clipping from Parrott’s alumni file, Radcliffe

40 Advertisement for Ursula Parrott’s New Series on Men as Marriage Killers

41 Header for Parrott’s You Call That Work?

A NOTE ON NAME USAGE

Katherine Ursula Towle went by many names over the course of her life. In the first part of the book, I refer to her as Kitty (her lifelong nickname) or Katherine. After she married her first husband, Lindesay Marc Parrott, in 1922, I use Parrott, Katherine, or Kitty. When she began publishing in late summer 1929, her middle name became the name by which she was known to the public, so I use Ursula or Parrott thereafter (her intimates continued to call her Kitty). Even though she adopted some of her later husbands’ last names in her personal life, she always used Parrott as her publishing name, so that is the surname I use throughout, even in the earlier part of the book.

INTRODUCTION

Maxims in the Copybook of Modernism

Her words are important to the modern woman.

She faces squarely the vital problems of this new existence.

August 1931 Photoplay profile of Ursula Parrott, Should Women Work?

In mid-August 1929, the soon-to-be-very-famous author Ursula Parrott reached nearly one hundred years into the future to offer her advice on the writing of the book you are now reading. She wrote her message just after her first novel, Ex-Wife, was published and less than three months before the diametrically opposed coincidences of the stock market crash, which triggered the United States’ slide into the Great Depression, and the arrival of the novice author’s first big paycheck. Her letter had a purpose: to convince her lover not to end their affair. But halfway down the first of seven singlespaced pages, Parrott took a detour, declaring, If I, by accident became sufficiently important, ever, to have a biographer, he might say about me, ‘The publication of her first book coincided with the final rupture of her heart.’ (Providing he was writing in a sentimental decade that took things that happen to the heart, seriously.) ¹

Although I was not the intended recipient of this letter, I am sympathetic to Ursula Parrott’s ambitions to become sufficiently important as well as to her anguish—more so, it seems, than the man for whom these sentiments were intended. Parrott stands at one end of modernity, struggling to find her way during its untrodden novelty stage, and I stand at another, with a road made easier because so many, Parrott among them, forced the culture to reckon with women defying tradition and emerging from the confines of the home to explore what Parrott described as the wide, wide world.

The publication of Ursula Parrott’s first book coincided not only with her personal heartbreak but also with a cultural rift: a fault line dividing the Victorian age, into the tail end of which she was born, from what we might call the modern age. Parrott’s formative years were colored by the traumatic upheavals of the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918 and the Great War, which endowed her generation with a sense of life’s fragility, easily evidenced in the omnipresence of death from every daily paper’s casualty lists, as the narrator puts it in her sixth novel, Next Time We Live. In the postwar era, she observed her generation indulging in a host of hedonistic impulses, squeezing life out of every waking moment in case tomorrow never came. Those who lived by this ethos, Ursula eventually among them, often found that their pursuits were a recipe for exhaustion as they muddled through missteps made in the spirit of free living.

Although she is almost entirely unknown today, Ursula Parrott spent a high-profile career exploring what she called maxims in the copybook of modernism. ² From the late 1920s through the late 1940s, she published twenty books, several of them best sellers, and over one hundred short stories, articles, and novel-length magazine serials. Parrott made and spent astronomical sums of money during the height of the Depression through the post–World War II years, some of which she earned during brief but lucrative stints in Hollywood. Her movie and book deals, as well as her divorces and run-ins with the law, regularly generated newspaper headlines. She was a world traveler, a partner in a rural Connecticut newspaper, an informant in a federal drug investigation, and a pilot in the Civil Aeronautics Administration during World War II. She navigated a wildly fluctuating career and personal life, including four husbands and as many exes. For the most part she was a single—or unmarried, as it was usually termed—mother with strong beliefs about child-rearing, which she shared with the reading public whenever given the opportunity to do so.

Starting with her debut best seller in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote thousands of pages about modern life and especially about the modern woman, probing the perplexing times in which she lived. Her experiences—with marriages, divorces, and raising a child; with career ambitions and loneliness; with birth control and abortions; with alcohol and depression—made their way into the pages of her stories, which are about how women broke with much of what had previously both constrained and protected them. Ursula frequently bemoaned her imperfect balancing acts as she tried to find the right mate to copilot the ship of life while balancing a demanding writing career that supported her unconventional family and lifestyle. She became a voice of alarm about what was happening to women like her—white, educated, city dwelling, and economically privileged by birth, career, or marriage—who were caught between a push for equal everything, as she put it, and an uphill battle to succeed on so many fronts at a time when men’s interests were often at odds with women’s ambitions. I’m not important, she once declared; but the story she was writing at any given moment might be a comfort to her readers. ³ She described the sticky situations in which women found themselves with the hope that greater understanding would lead, eventually, to less disappointment, especially if and when men accepted women’s new existence on equal terms with what they expected for themselves.

After publishing Ex-Wife—a bold book about a young married woman who becomes, against her wishes, a divorcée—the exploration of male-female relations became Parrott’s raison d’être. Parrott’s autobiographically inspired first novel also became the blessing and curse that defined her, personally and professionally, for the rest of her life. When it was published in 1929, the New York Times credited Parrott with creating the category of the ex-wife, which they described as a new descriptive tag to the American language. Although the term ex-wife had been in circulation for years, Parrott endowed it with a vivid new life at a moment of widespread curiosity about what was happening to society in an age of marital impermanence. Many years and marriages later, the Boston Herald proclaimed that ‘Ex-Wife’ is more than a best seller to Ursula Parrott; it’s a state of mind!, and the Los Angeles Times called her the logical candidate for the presidency of the ‘Ex-Wives’ Association of America. ⁴ Ursula’s debut novel branded her in ways that were simultaneously profitable and impossible to shake (see figure 1).

FIGURE 1. The profile that ran in Parrott’s hometown newspaper nicely sums up her public persona, including her association with the subjects of marriage and divorce, her outspokenness about modern methods for raising her son, and her commitment to writing about the plight of women in a changing America. Living Up to the Title of Her ‘Best Seller,’ Boston Herald , March 5, 1939.

Parrott became known as a specialist in ‘the maladjustment emotionally’ of women whose marriages had gone on the rocks at a time when the number of women who fit this description was growing. If a journalist in the 1930s was writing an article about women’s careers or the institution of marriage, they often called Ursula Parrott for an expert opinion, as Helen Welshimer did for What the Best Known ‘Ex-Wife’ Thinks of Marriage, one of many like-minded (and like-titled) articles published in this era. ⁵ Ursula became a spokeswoman about life in a period of dizzying change in part because she expressed the contradictions of her own moment with great candor and lucidity.

Parrott published her stories in commercial magazines—the likes of Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, American Magazine, and Good Housekeeping—which had enormous circulations and paid extravagantly, even during the Depression. Her words became, as Hollywood’s Photoplay magazine put it in 1931, important to the modern woman: she told tales about failed marriages, work-life balance, the dilemmas of single motherhood, and the seemingly incompatible desires for independence and security. Parrott dramatized contradictions about modern life that remain unresolved, especially regarding women’s roles at work and at home. She exposed dilemmas that Betty Friedan would describe in The Feminine Mystique in 1963, that Helen Gurley Brown would imagine pushing past in Having It All in 1982, and that Sheryl Sandberg would encourage women to transcend in her 2013 Lean In. She wrote about women stumbling through frustrating rituals of modern courtship and proto hookup culture; paying bills and keeping things together when their lovers or husbands failed to hold up their end of the bargain; raising children whose fathers were absent because their liberated views allowed them to shirk responsibility; and numbing themselves from the miseries of modernity with alcohol. It is easy to see reflections of her life in her fiction; she wrote about what she knew.

Her stories rarely have happy endings. After pages that point to numerous paths to contentment, Parrott’s smart and savvy female characters leave or are left, accept their loneliness with resignation, compromise their moral standards to have affairs instead of marriages, soldier on unaccompanied, or die. If they are not disillusioned on the first page, they are almost always disappointed by the last. Her stories regularly conclude with an emptiness reminiscent of her contemporaries, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, delivered with the kind of wisecracking wit practiced by Dorothy Parker. Like these benchmark figures of twentieth-century American literature, Parrott was committed to writing with terrible honesty, the phrase historian Ann Douglas uses to describe the ethos shared by New York writers of this period. Parrott wrote about romance but was not just a romance writer, though she was widely perceived as one during her lifetime. She did, however, write about the consequences of romance and sex in a newly liberated age. Parrott once said that she confined her literary attention to women who understand the meaning of life, possessed of real-world problems and survival skills built on a track record of letdowns, as well as sexual experience, often outside the safe confines of a marriage. ⁶

Feminists in the early years of the twentieth century advocated for things that liberated women from the limited options of marriage, family, and home. Margaret Sanger inadvertently led the way as an advocate for birth control, which made it possible to imagine cleaving sex from reproduction. This was amplified by easy—though, of course, not legal—access to abortionists, at least in a metropolis like New York City, where Parrott lived most of her adult life. Ursula availed herself of their services numerous times, with serious physical and psychological consequences, and knew firsthand what it was like to risk her life for the felicities, as she referred to them, of sexual intimacy. She saw women’s sexual liberation as a mixed bag, characterizing some of her own encounters as a tawdry business, mixed up with permitting one’s self to be mauled in a taxi-cab, and others as a very beautiful thing. Her stories depict what women living in a less rulebound age often had to face alone: pregnancies, decisions to have abortions or not, childbirth, and child-rearing. As she would have known from her father’s recounting of the postchildbirth death of his first wife, pregnancy was risky. In the late 1920s, more women in the United States died each year as a result of childbirth than all other causes outside of tuberculosis. ⁷

Ursula Parrott blamed the "Equal-Everything feminists for many of her generation’s difficulties. I am not a feminist, she told an interviewer. In fact, I resent the feminists—they are the ones who started all this. I wonder if they realized what they were letting us all in for. She believed that young women of her generation inherited a drive for equality—for the vote, at first, but subsequently in the realms of education, work, and marriage— that made their lives harder, and her stories dramatized the consequences of this unwanted bequest. She was twenty-one when women got the vote in 1920, so she was aware of the fight it took to earn the right. However, by the mid-1920s, with the suffrage victory behind them, a sense of battle fatigue for the old guard of the women’s movement set in just as a younger generation started to reject many of the movement’s ideals. Some ex-feminists began speaking out about their husbands’ resentment toward them, debunking the optimism that carried them through the suffrage years; what they had fought for in theory, they could not execute with satisfaction in practice. Scholar Elaine Showalter describes this postsuffrage era as a feminist crash. Women who wanted to work, marry, and have children were finding that such a life was still unattainable, and they interpreted their inability to find exciting jobs and reliable child care as personal failures, rather than challenging the patriarchal assumptions of American society." ⁸

Despite her alleged disregard for feminism, challenging patriarchal assumptions turned out to be Ursula Parrott’s specialty. She observed what we would now call structural inequalities, complaining that women don’t earn quite as much as men despite the fact that it costs them just as much to live (savings in food offset by greater clothes’ expense), so they’re more likely than young men to be in recurrent jams. She called out instances of sexual harassment, describing her first publisher, Jonathan Cape, twenty years her senior, as a white-haired sturdy ambitious man who mauled [her] between calls. He’s a grand person, Parrott proclaimed flippantly and with a qualifier, if he’d keep his hands where they belong. She was even more indignant when a banker told her she should always borrow from his bank, by suggesting payment in kind-ness. I refused to do anything about it, Parrott proudly declared, and he never suggested it again, the outcome of which was that I pay ‘em six percent interest, like all the men who borrow from them. ⁹ Had she been alive today, instead of writing letters in which she complained about these matters privately, Ursula might have Tweeted about them with the #MeToo hashtag and the rallying cry Time’s Up.

Parrott’s stories collectively offer an argument about how much women’s lives were changing during the first decades of the twentieth century, and what a bad job men were doing dealing with these changes. Her male characters tend to be fragile and insecure, falling apart in the face of women who are more independent and ambitious than they are. These men try to marry ambitious women away from their work or lash out at their girlfriends and wives when they are more successful, as is almost always the case. They drink themselves into oblivion and sexual misconduct, seeking out other women, young or without career aspirations, to make them feel powerful after their wives or lovers outpace them in talent, fame, or fortune. They shield themselves from self-scrutiny by blaming their demise on women who are unerringly—and sometimes embarrassingly—dedicated to them. Virtually no Parrott heroine overcomes the disequilibrium between them and the men who come to resent them. An advertisement for the 1936 movie based on Parrott’s novel Next Time We Live, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, sums up the dilemma that Parrott saw as the pathology of her age: What happens to romance when the wife becomes the breadwinner and the husband becomes the housemaid? ¹⁰ Spoiler alert: it does not go well.

Ursula Parrott came out of the publishing gate with an argument about what was wrong with modern life: while men had never had it better, these were confusing and anxious times for women. In her first nonfiction article, published in December 1929, Leftover Ladies, Parrott summed up the crisis with an unexpected twist: her generation are all Free Women, free to work, to vote, to experiment with alcohol and extramarital arrangements, or what they choose. And their grandmothers had more actual freedom than they have (see figure 2). In comparison to past generations when men were, for the most part, husbands and economic providers and women were, for the most part, wives and mothers, impermanence had become the governing principle of the times, inseparable from its inherently negative twin, instability. As one of Parrott’s pitiable male characters says to the successful woman he’s convinced to be his mistress instead of his wife, So few things or people in the world we know are really permanent. It’s—it’s almost impossible to be permanent about anything. ¹¹

FIGURE 2. On the heels of Ex-Wife , Parrott published her first magazine article and coined a new concept, Leftover Ladies, in The Mentor ’s December 1929 issue. (Author’s collection.)

Without indulging in naïve enthusiasm or uncomplicated nostalgia, Parrott argued that women of earlier generations who had little choice except to focus their energies on the home had a sense of clarity and security that was now in short supply. Since women of her generation could have careers and earn their own wages, men no longer felt obliged to care for them, freeing husbands from so many restraints and responsibilities. As she put it, New Freedom for Women left men free to leave. The legs were being pulled out from under the venerable institution that relied on an oft-spoken phrase uttered by millions of people who casually proceeded to defy it: as long as we both shall live.

Of course, that pertained only to those who opted for marriage, which was not always the case now since sex was no longer restricted to the postmarital bed. Young women of Ursula’s generation were torn between the uncertainties of behaving adequately modern or the embarrassment of clinging to prudish, Victorian-era sensibilities. When a female character experiences jealousy in Ex-Wife and mocks herself by declaring that she is being 1880, Parrott draws attention to something that the character needs to get over to survive in the twentieth century, despite it being an otherwise perfectly understandable reaction.

Parrott used Leftover Ladies to issue a complaint: there was now relentless pressure to behave like women of their time with marriages, divorces, children, careers, and even dalliances that drove them to physical, mental, and moral exhaustion. In the past, husbands might have had affairs, but wives knew the solid ground on which they stood since they were wives for life with no need to worry about paying bills, suffering from perpetual loneliness, or buckling under the pressure of trying to look forever twenty-one to facilitate the next stroll down the aisle. Between skillful makeup to hide any ravages of time and disillusionment, flippancy to serve her in the place of sincerity, and gaiety instead of kindliness, Parrott described women of her generation, herself included, turning to the bottle as a fairly sure solace against taking anything too seriously.

Parrott strongly believed the deck was stacked against women like her, especially when it came to marriages. Not only has a wife to be a combined Madonna and Cleopatra, but she has often to be a business woman, sharing a fifty percent economic burden with her man, as well as a fairly good athlete, a perfect listener, and—if she hopes to hold her man, she must also put on a ‘clinging vine’ act. She must never appear too capable or self-sufficient. It would take over thirty years for Helen Gurley Brown to put a different spin on this situation in Sex and the Single Girl, which celebrated unattached working women: Economically she is a dream. She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum. She is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser. ¹² Brown’s message was that women should enjoy being single, wait to marry, and enjoy having it all; but Parrott had no confidence that such a happy outcome could come to pass. Instead, she saw a growing number of Leftover Ladies, divorcées as well as unmarried career women, struggling to navigate a significantly changed world.

With its catchy title and often counterintuitive messaging, Leftover Ladies was typical of Ursula Parrott, who became both a symbol of her freewheeling age and a determined slayer of its fictions. She signed off her awareness-raising manifesto wondering if Leftover Ladies—may become a Great Moral Lesson yet, Lesson to a still younger generation—that freedom in itself is just a word that a good many people have used recklessly, that it may mean something very wonderful—or just something very wearying.

Ursula Parrott became sufficiently important, and then she was forgotten. Widely read and highly sought after in her heyday, she suffered the fate of many women authors of her time, dismissed as a money-writer churning out romantic pablum for undiscerning female readers. Yes, she wrote many a romantic storyline—but she used most of these to critique a culture unwilling to grant women real equality, or to point out how impossible it was for women to try to do it all. While she also wrote to earn money, especially during financially exigent times, so did all writers of her time who had to survive without inherited wealth or patronage; after all, she had a family to support. ¹³

Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott tells the story of this once-famous woman. It also explores how readers and moviegoers were introduced to new ideas about marriage and divorce, ex-wives and unmarried mothers, and career women. Once the best-known ex-wife in the United States, Ursula Parrott participated in a larger conversation about the modern woman during a rocky transformative period, a conversation taking place on pages and movie screens, in barrooms, bedrooms, and courtrooms. Writing to her longtime literary agent, George Bye, about a missed deadline, Parrott blamed one of those GREAT TRAGEDIES which seem to punctuate the lives of female authors (and may be traced in their plots, a couple of years after the event, for thus the young women turn life’s losses into life’s gains, which is damn sensible of them). ¹⁴ True to this witty remark, Ursula Parrott made a career out of turning her experiences and observations into salable tales about women’s uncertain fate in a complicated age.

ONE

The Limited Life of a Dorchester Girl

Katherine Ursula Parrott was thirty years old when she published Ex-Wife and became a public figure, but nobody outside of her closest family members would have known. Like many women of her generation, she was extremely age-conscious and considered thirty to be well past the peak of life. In fact, when New York began its 1925 state census, Secretary of State Florence Knapp—who, as a woman herself, was wise in such matters—appealed directly to all residents to give their ages honestly, inspiring one newspaper to only half-jestingly editorialize, Does she really expect the ancient flappers to enumerate all the long, hard winters? ¹

Although she was born on March 26, 1899, Katherine Ursula Towle—Kitty to her intimates—was so successful at the art of age reduction that even her Federal Bureau of Investigation file, which she earned later in life, incorrectly recorded her birth year as 1902. Her father, Henry Charles Towle, hailed from Paterson, New Jersey, born in 1853 to Irish immigrant parents. His father was a blacksmith who moved his family from New Jersey to Boston’s South End, where Henry grew up a few miles away from where he later raised his own children. Henry deepened his family’s roots in Boston with the benefit of social progress that had been hard won by Irish Americans over the course of the nineteenth century. As was often the case with children of European immigrants, he had greater opportunities than his father, starting with education, which provided a path away from the trades: thirteen-year-old Henry entered Jesuit-founded Boston College in 1865, just one year after it opened and at a time when it was customary for students to obtain many years of education within the school’s walls. He was part of the college’s first graduating class in 1877 and went on to obtain an MD degree from New York Medical College. ²

Dr. Henry Towle, who was described in the press as one of the last of Dorchester’s old family doctors, spent his life working as a physician in the predominantly Irish neighborhood of Dorchester, a six-square-mile suburb that was incorporated into Boston in 1870, located a few miles south of the Boston Common. Ursula Parrott (the name she would adopt under the combined influences of her first husband, who gave her the name Parrott, and her first publisher, who preferred her middle name over her first) characterized her father as having what amounted to two practices: one a small very high-hat practice as a consultant and obstetrician alongside a large G.P. [general practitioner] practice among the Irish poor, who adored him, but seldom paid him. ³ In addition to serving the poor and working-class Boston Irish community, Dr. Towle was active in the Catholic church and was a founding member of the Irish Clover Club.

Dr. Towle’s first marriage, to Boston-born Elizabeth Lizzie Mooney on April 12, 1883, was short-lived for reasons that were typical in the era. Almost nine months after their wedding day, on January 5, 1884, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, Margaret, named after Dr. Towle’s mother. Two days after the delivery, Elizabeth developed a severe fever that persisted for two weeks before she died of cardiac failure at the age of twenty-seven. Her death must have been especially devastating given Dr. Towle’s work, which eventually included the delivery of almost 6,000 babies. ⁴ The young doctor was now a widower with a baby girl.

It seems unlikely that Margaret was brought up under the same roof as the children of Dr. Towle’s eventual second marriage. Perhaps Dr. Towle sent Margaret—who as an adult looked every bit a Towle, with dark hair, oval face, fair skin, and delicate lips—to live with relatives or in a Catholic home. Even though they appear to have had little, if any, relationship with one another, Margaret’s life both dovetailed with and diverged from her half-sister Katherine’s in a number of intriguing ways.

Margaret had a flare for drama and unconventionality. She was an ardent suffragist who married in 1916, divorced in 1919, and cast off her birth name to become stage actress Madge Tyrone, keeping only her initials intact (see figure 3). After a slow but steady ascent on the stage, Madge made the leap to the silver screen, acting in movies until undertaking work as a scenarist and movie editor with Louis B. Mayer, the future founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Deemed one of filmdom’s cleverest subtitlers, Tyrone wrote for silent films less than a decade before her half-sister arrived in Hollywood. ⁵ Tyrone’s film career was, however, interrupted by an accident in which she sustained a severe injury when her automobile skidded and turned turtle in an attempt to avoid collision with another car. ⁶ One of several car accidents experienced by people in Katherine’s circle, the future author became so obsessed with automobile wrecks that they occur in almost two dozen of her stories, usually with fatal consequences.

FIGURE 3. Katherine Ursula Towle’s older half-sister Margaret looks every bit a Towle in this portrait taken circa 1912 during her theatrical stage career as Madge Tyrone. (Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections.)

Almost four years after his first wife’s death, Dr. Towle married Mary Catherine Flusk on September 27, 1887. The Towles purchased a house at 1428 Dorchester Avenue in an area known as Fields Corner, where they lived for the duration of their marriage and where Dr. Towle resided until his death. Dorchester, and other neighborhoods like it, had become a sign of Irish ascension in Massachusetts as well as a refuge from discrimination. When Dr. Towle was raising his children, downtown Boston shops still displayed signs that read No Irish Need Apply. ⁷

Their first daughter, Lucy Inez Towle, was born within a year. Lucy was studious and well positioned to take advantage of new opportunities available for young women coming of age at the turn-of-the-century. After graduating from Dorchester High School, she enrolled at nearby Simmons College, a women’s college whose doors had been open less than a decade. In her college yearbook picture, Lucy looks like a textbook young Victorian woman, as