Chapter 6
Kay Brainard Hutchins
Page 2
I got George Collar’s phone number from information and I called him right away, and that’s how we got started back and forth. I would write to Hassenpflug and talk to him, and then I would talk to George again.
It was not until four years after the war that they finally identified Newell and said he definitely was killed in action. They still called it "killed in action." They didn’t call it murder. Then they said, "We referred your letter to our military field branch for an examination," and then I heard from them something about a fire in Missouri when a lot of things were destroyed. That’s the only information I could get. But in 1990, I was working in New York. I worked for many years for Douglas Fairbanks Jr. And he didn’t have a secretary in New York that year, so I worked the whole year up there. He went to London for a week, and I decided to go to Washington. My cousin took me to the Archives and said he’d get me later. So I went in and requested the files on the 445th Bomb Group.
They brought out a cardboard box with all these files in it. I started first reading a little here and there, and I would see occasionally where Newell went on a mission. They’d give the pictures even of the formations up in the air. I think it would usually say that it was Carrow’s crew. By then I knew that Carrow had been his pilot. So I get to the file on the Kassel mission, and it was empty. And there was a note in it which said, "This file has been missing since" I think sometime in 1973. Whether somebody had just lifted it who went to look at it, or what the reason was, they didn’t know. By the time the Archives in Washington got them, it was already missing. The next mission, and from then on out, I could read about every mission. But it said nothing about Newell’s last flight.
After I’d been reading for a while, the head of the Archives, who was very helpful, came along and he said, "How are you doing? Are you finding the information you’ve been looking for?" and "Do you need any help?"
I said, "Strangely enough, the one thing I was interested in was this file that’s missing." And I told him a little bit about the story; that I had heard that my brother was killed but I really wanted to find out for sure.
He said, "What you should really have is the burial file." He took me to a telephone, gave me their number, and told me to call and say I would like a copy of my brother’s burial file. It’s in another building or another area. They took down the information and said it would take a few weeks, but they would send it to me.
And they did. I was still in New York when they did. This package comes, and it was an inch thick.
I think there were 118 pages. Some of them were duplicates. I read through them, page by page. But it wasn’t until I got to page 80 – somewhere in the eighties – that I found the one that made it very clear he had been murdered. These are the kind of things they sent:
"United States vs. Josef Ehlen et al." The date of the trial was 5 February 1948, so that’s three years after the war.
"Persons tried: Josef Ehlen, August Viehl, Reinhard Beck, Franz Muller, Martin Baesse and Paul Winkler.
"List of offenses: The accused were tried on two charges and particulars. Both charges were based on the violation of the laws of war. The first particulars alleged that the accused participated in the killing of four unknown American prisoners of war. The second particulars alleged that the accused participated in assaulting two or more unknown American prisoners of war.
"Trial data: Tried by a general military government court appointed by the commanding general of the United States forces, European Theater. Findings were made and sentences imposed as follows: Josef Ehlen, first charge guilty, second charge guilty. Death by hanging. August Viehl, first charge guilty, second charge guilty. Death by hanging. Reinhart Beck, first charge not guilty, second charge guilty. Four years.
"Franz Muller, first charge not guilty, second charge guilty. Six years. Martin Baesse, first charge not guilty, second charge guilty. Six years. Paul Winkler, first charge guilty, second charge guilty. Sentence, death by hanging.
"Evidence: Prosecution – Four unknown American fliers parachuted to earth on 27 Sept. 1944, two in the vicinity of Nentershausen and two in the nearby village of Suess, Germany. The two fliers who landed in Nentershausen were taken to a labor camp in Nentershausen, beaten and then shot. The two fliers who landed in Suess were brought to the Nentershausen labor camp and there taken out and shot. All of the convicted accused except Beck participated in the beating or killing in one way or another.
"Defense – All of the accused denied active participation in the beating and shooting of the American fliers, although all except Beck witnessed at least one of the killings. Ehlen attempted to justify his illegal actions by stating that the Americans had attacked him and the other accused. Beck was involved in the incidents only to the extent that he went into the camp enclosure to collect a bill for bread at the time two of the fliers were being held prisoner.
"Discussion: Each of the accused except Beck was present at a killing, and although each denied that he killed or beat any flier, the court was justified in arriving at the findings of guilty to the respective charges since there was ample evidence to show that all of the accused except Beck were eager principals in the beatings or killings and not merely curious bystanders, as each accused contended he was. The evidence was sufficient to support the findings and sentences except as to accused Beck.
"Summation: The court had jurisdiction of the accused and of the offense. Examination of the entire record fails to disclose any error or omission which resulted in injustice to any of the accused except Beck."
This is the "Report of Burial." It says, "Murdered. Brainard, Newell, 700 Bomb Squad, Nentershausen, Germany, 27 Sept., 1947." This says 1947. Maybe it was a typographical error.
"1) Previously buried as unknown X-1535 at St. Avold. Identified through exact comparison of tooth chart obtained for X-1535 and that for Lieutenant Brainard.
"2) Estimated height and color of hair for X-1535 in agreement with that for Lieutenant Brainard.
"3) Clothing of X-1535 marked ‘Brainard.’
"4) Estimated date and place of death for X-1535 in agreement with Missing Air Crew Report for Air Crew 42-110022 of which Lieutenant Brainard was a crew member.
5) German Dulag record KU-3079 indicates that Lieutenant Brainard was killed in the area from which X-1535 was disinterred."
They buried him first as an unknown, and then after they did all this investigating, they went and brought him back. Newell had had a head injury – I got all this information from Hassenpflug – evidently either he was injured by flak or hit his head when he jumped out of the plane or when he landed. [Ray Carrow, Newell’s pilot, says the plane was on fire when Newell bailed out. Carrow jumped moments later, and the fire burned off all his hair.]
They first took Newell to somebody’s house, and the lady of the house was concerned about his head injury and had a nurse sent in – a Red Cross nurse from the town – and she bandaged his head. But then he was taken away from that house. He was supposed to be turned over to the military authorities, but somehow or other he got mixed in with this group. There were four at first and then one came in from another area; whether Newell was that one or not I don’t think they ever knew. But the person that they turned him over to – I don’t know who did or how they made the mistake, but he was running a slave labor camp, and they said that anybody who was in charge of slave laborers was a tough guy to begin with, and so rather than turn them over to the right military people, he just beat them up and killed them. And then they removed all of their identification, they thought. There were no dogtags, no insignia, no uniforms. So when he was brought back the second time, for identification, that’s when the teeth and so forth proved who it was, to a certain extent, but not definite enough for Walter’s work on it. He found out that there was a bandage on the head, and he knew that Newell had been to this woman’s house and that they had bandaged him – so that’s how they said, "That must have been Newell." And they also claim to have found a mark on his undershirt that had his name on it. But the thing that convinced them was the fact that the bandage was still around the skull.
Hassenpflug told me that the woman who bandaged him was in a nursing home. She was very elderly. He was hoping that we could get together, but she wasn’t in that town anymore. She was probably ten or more years older than I am.
Newell was always very responsible. He and Bill both tried out to be pilots. Bill you would have thought, "No doubt about it. Fighter pilot." He didn’t make the grade. Newell, who was down to earth and more – I don’t know the words to use, but he was not the personality kid – he had no trouble becoming a pilot.
Bill ended up being a waist gunner and radio man. Later in the war, if you flunked out of flying school they would send you to bombardier or navigator school, but that was after Bill had already been sent to gunnery school.
Bill was full of life, and he’s been very changed. Since the war he’s never been as gregarious as he was as a young man. He was very good-looking. He was voted the best-looking kid in his graduating class. He was full of fun. Bill and Newell were very close brothers. They double-dated because we had one car between the three of us. I used it for work during the day. They used it for their dates. I’d put in a quarter’s worth of gas in so I could get to work and they’d put in a quarter’s worth to use the car at night. We had all three chipped in and bought this second-hand car.
The car was a Ford. There are so many things I could tell you that are interesting but not for your book. During the early years of the war – the war was going on in England, but not here yet; before Pearl Harbor in other words – a woman and her brother rented rooms from my mother, when she had the guest house. We had a room over our garage – a garage apartment they called it – one big room and bath is all it was. That’s where they stayed. And they liked the Palm Beaches so much. They were English and walking was nothing for them; they would walk everywhere. They didn’t have a car, but Roland was an excellent mechanic; he knew all about automobiles, and this Ford would stop on us every once in a while and we couldn’t get it started, and we would have to leave it where it was and go someplace and call Roland and say, "The car is on such and such a street; would you see if you can get it running?" And he could always do it. He was a young, tall, handsome kid, and he was eager to be at war.
And I know the story now. The end of the story is that they were not brother and sister. She was his mother. I guess they had come over here to see the United States, and I often wondered if the family looked down on the fact that she had gotten pregnant and had this boy … but they passed as brother and sister for years. It wasn’t until late in the war that he finally became an American citizen and got into the service, probably around the Battle of the Bulge. Because of his eyes he couldn’t get into the Air Force but he was in the infantry. And he stepped on a land mine and was killed.
Eventually I met his mother in London. I spent a couple of days with her, and she told me that she was into spiritualism – I guess she had been so devastated when he was killed. She thought it was all her fault. But she said that the spiritualism had helped her a great deal. And incidentally, she told me that Roland had seen Newell and everything was fine up there. But the spiritualism brought her back to ordinary living, and I thought, "Well, whatever it takes."
My mother ended up taking her own life. Not immediately, but in 1957. I had two boys and I wanted a girl very badly, and I finally had a girl, and she was only three months old. My mother had angina, which I now have, but at that time they couldn’t do anything about it. And she had very high blood pressure which I do not have. And she had eye trouble, probably cataracts, that they didn’t know how to handle at the time. So she couldn’t watch television. She couldn’t read anymore. She couldn’t drive a car. Life to her was over. And Jack and I had just built a house. We had the house but we had no furniture, and I’ve often wondered if she had this in mind, among other things that she was tired of living; she didn’t think she was living actually. My sister was very good. Betty bought her a house. Betty bought the car. Betty bought the TV. She did everything. She had a job that she had worked at since she was right out of high school, and she became a buyer for this shop and ran a big business. She had more money than the rest of us. But I think that the whole business of Newell entered into it, and my father’s illness; my mother never married again. She never had a date with anybody. Never seemed to object to that. She never longed for that.
She was just shy of 70. She had a gas stove, and she just closed herself in the kitchen and turned the gas on. I think she also planned that, because we had a colored girl, as we called them at that time, who came every Friday, and had been with her for years, and when she came the door was locked, so she looked in the kitchen window and she could see Mother on the floor. She called my sister, and Betty called me. It’s a tragedy, but if you knew my mother, it was her way of handling things.
I married my first husband on the rebound, so to speak, after getting a Dear John letter from an officer I had dated overseas. I didn’t realize it was on the rebound. I went out to California to visit Mary Jo, my dear Red Cross friend, who married one of the pilots on our base who I introduced her to. She and I both had to go to Germany when the war was over. She was one of the first Red Cross girls to be assigned to Berlin. We didn’t get home until 1946, while almost everybody else came home in 1945. We hadn’t done the two years we volunteered for, so we were assigned to American Red Cross clubs in occupied Germany.
When I came home, I had numerous job offers. I decided to work for a law firm that was very well known in Palm Beach, but I said before I start work I’d like to take a little time off. It was the middle of the summer, so they said that was fine, why didn’t I wait until September to start?
In July, Mary Jo called me from California, and we both felt out of place. All our friends were living it up and drinking and having fun, and we’d been living in these completely destroyed areas. Aschaffensberg, where I had been stationed, was 70 percent destroyed. Aschaffensburg is about 30 miles from Frankfurt. I was so depressed there that I asked for a transfer, and I was transferred to Erlangen, which was right outside of Nuremburg. Erlangen was a hospital city so it wasn’t as badly beat up. But then we came home and everybody was living it up. "Got a new car, got a new Cadillac, $3,000!" Can you imagine? Then Mary Jo called me and she said, "Whit’s going to come down and visit" – he lived in Northern California – "why don’t you come out and visit at the same time? My brother’s just gotten out of the Navy and I think you should meet him."
So I flew to California. Mary Jo lived in Santa Barbara, and they met me in L.A.
The brother was a nice guy, but we didn’t hit it off. Her cousin Jimmy came over, though, and the four of us – Mary Jo and Whit and Jimmy and I – we all had a wonderful time. We had so much in common. Jimmy had a sister a couple of years younger; she was going steady with a boy, and we just all had fun together. I ended up thinking I was in love with Jimmy and he was in love with me, and Mary Jo and Whit were going to get married. Sissy and her boyfriend were going to get married. I had to come home after five weeks – but I’d already told Jimmy I would marry him. And my mother – that was the only time I ever saw her really unhappy about who I was going with. She didn’t know Jimmy at all, but I guess she thought I was doing this on the rebound, and I didn’t think of it as that. She knew me better than I knew myself.
We didn’t get married until October, and the longer we were apart, the more I wasn’t really too sure we should get married, but I thought, well, I told him I would and he’s driving all the way across the country to get married, and my sister said, "You got yourself into this, now you’d better go ahead and get married." So I did. Jimmy and I moved back to Santa Barbara for a while, and then we moved to Los Angeles, and I thought when we got to Los Angeles I’d go to work. I was already sure I wasn’t going to stay married. It wasn’t his fault at all, it was my fault, the whole thing. And darned if I didn’t learn the first week I was in Los Angeles, which was three months after we were married, that I was pregnant. So I knew I was going to have to stay longer, and I did. I lived with Jimmy for four years, and when Kim was three years old I decided I was coming back to Florida. Jimmy wasn’t very happy about that, but he knew that I wasn’t happy in California.
When I was in Paris on my way to Germany, I had met a captain who was a year younger than I. Some Red Cross girls were sightseeing the first day we were in Paris and as we walked past one of the outdoor cafes near the Opera House, these GIs were sitting at a table and they called out, "Parlez vous Francais?" and other silly remarks. They said, "Come have a drink with us." There were four or five of us girls and five of them, and I just happened to sit next to this Jack Hutchins. One of the guys in the group was from Jacksonville, Florida. They were in Paris on a three-day pass. They were headed home. We were headed to Germany.
Jack took an immediate liking to me. He was very attractive and nice, so I didn’t mind when he said, "How about a date tonight? The whole group of us are going to go out."
I had already made a date on the train from Dover into Paris. I was in one of those old clipper cars that held six people in a compartment. It seems to me there were two black officers, Air Force, I think, and this white officer and me, and one other Red Cross girl. One of them, a very nice guy, was with the military, OSS or something, and stationed in Paris. He didn’t make any pretense of not being married, but he said, "How about having dinner with me tonight and I’ll show you Paris from the roof garden." I guess I knew he was married but I thought that sounded nice; he was going to take me to dinner at the Maurice – in fact I think he lived at the Maurice; if you’ve ever been there, it’s one of the top hotels in Paris.
And then I met Jack. So I did something we used to do at the University of Florida when I visited up there. I said, "I’ll have a ‘late date’ with you. I’ll be back at the Red Cross hotel by 10 o’clock, because I’m just going to dinner with this very nice person."
Well, my date did take me to dinner, and then he took me up to the top of the Maurice – from there you could look out all over the city and it was beautiful – but I told him, "I’ve made some plans to go out with a group at 10 o’clock."
He said, "Okay, I’ll get you back."
It was about 10 after 10 when I got back, and dammit, they’d been there and gone. I was mad as hell. Well, that’s a fine thing, they couldn’t wait ten minutes!
Anyway, some GI was in the lobby and he played the piano, and we had a whole group singing songs, so I got over my anger. And early the next morning I got a call from downstairs saying, "There’s somebody down here to see you." It was Jack Hutchins.
He told me that they went to the Moulin Rouge, and did things I would have loved to have done, but I missed out on it. But from then on we were arm in arm and walked all over Paris. He and his friends would stay with us so late that then they couldn’t find a place to stay, the beds were all taken, and they slept in the lobby of the hotel one night. Then they had to go back before we left for Germany.
I took some pictures, and they didn’t come out very well, but I sent some of them to Jack, and I never heard from him. So I thought, "Oh well, that’s the way it goes."
Mary Jo and I arrived back in New York on Easter Sunday, April 26, 1946; it was a very late Easter. We stayed a few days, then Mary Jo left for California. I had a cousin who lived in New York that I was very fond of, so I spent a few days with him. And a Navy fellow that I had met many years before was in New York and knew I was there somehow – maybe I called him – I went out to lunch with him, and when I got back to my cousin’s apartment, I left to catch a train to Hartford.
When I got to Hartford, my uncle said, "You had a call from a Jack Hutchins. He said he’d call back."
I said, "Jack Hutchins?"
He said, "Yes. Don’t you know a Jack Hutchins?"
I said, "I had a few dates in Paris with him, but I haven’t heard from him since."
Well, he called back and he told me he was walking on the streets in New York with his wife – which I didn’t know he had – "and I saw you walking with a Naval officer on the other side of the street." He and his wife were there for lunch on business of some kind; he was from Pittsburgh. And I had a very easy address to remember, 25 Currie Crescent; he’d never forgotten that. So he went to a telephone and called for the number of the Brainards in West Palm Beach, and my mother answered the phone.
In those days, you called through a long-distance operator, and she would stay on the line forever if you wanted her to. It was a person to person call, so the operator said she was calling for Kay Brainard.
My mother said, "She’s not here."
"Do you know where we can get in touch with her?"
"She’s in New York."
"Do you know where she is in New York?"
"She’s at her cousin’s house."
"What’s her cousin’s name?"
"Frank Brainard."
"Do you have his telephone number?"
"No," she said, "but I can probably find it." She finds Frank’s number and the operator calls it, and a roommate of Frank’s says, "She just left for Hartford."
The operator says, "Do you know where she’s going in Hartford?"
"She’s going to see her uncle."
So the operator gets Uncle’s name, and that’s how Jack tracked me down. When he finally got me he wanted to know if I was coming back to New York, and I said, "No, I’m going from here to Washington. I have to check out of the Red Cross."
He said he’d like to see me.
And I said, "I’m sorry, I’m not going to be there."
Of course, since he said he was with his wife, I didn’t really care one way or the other. But seven years later, he calls Currie Crescent again, and this time my brother gets the phone. And Jack says, "I’m calling for Kay Brainard. Is she there or is she living in Alaska or where is she? Is she married now?"
And Bill said, "She was married but she’s divorced, and she has her own apartment."
Bill gave him my number, and he called me, and he said, "I’ve got two weeks’ vacation. I’m separated from my wife, and I’d like to come to Florida. Is that all right with you? I’d like to see you."
I wasn’t dating anyone specifically at the time. I remembered he was nice and a lot of fun, so I said, "Okay."
He said, "Can you get me a place to stay?"
I said, "I’ll find you a place to stay."
Which I did. And then he said at dinner the first night, "You are going to marry me, aren’t you?"
I didn’t say yes or no, but that started the romance all over again, and we wrote letters back and forth. Oh, I said, "You’d better write to me this time around."
He said, "I’m not very good at writing letters."
And I said, "Then let’s forget the whole thing."
Well, he started writing letters and pretty soon every day when I came home from work there would be a special delivery letter waiting for me. That only took overnight and it cost 20 cents in those days.
After six months of flying down here when he had a holiday weekend or something, he gave up his job up in Pittsburgh and moved down to Florida, and then his divorce was final. I had been divorced a couple of years.
My son Kim was living with me. He was five or six years old. He started school the year we got married. He visited his Dad every summer. He told his classmates he had "two daddies." Jimmy and I stayed very good friends and his sister and I still communicate. And all the neighbors we had I still correspond with and see when I go out to California. Kim started school, and then I had my other two children by Jack.
I found out after a while that Jack was an alcoholic. So my life with him was a little difficult because he hated to pay bills. Somebody had to pay the bills. He didn’t drink at home. The children never saw him drunk.
And so I wanted to go to work. Carole was two and a half. I hadn’t been doing any work up until that time, and Jack’s mother came down and was spending a month or so with us, so I thought that she could take care of the kids. There was another girl who was what’s called a social secretary, and worked for people in Palm Beach. You work maybe for half a dozen different people. I asked her how she got her job and she told me how she lucked into it somehow or other. And I said, "If you hear of anything let me know."
She called me later and said, "I’ve got one woman that wants me more hours than I can give her. She’s hell on wheels, a real bitch, but if you want to try her, why, you can." I ended up working for her for twenty years. I’d quit every once in a while, and then I’d have to go and train a new person for her, who would soon quit. So I’d go back to work.
Her name was Lily Blabon, and she was a member of the Anheuser-Busch family. She married the man whose grandfather "invented" Linoleum, which was called battleship linoleum to begin with. So he’d never worked in his life, and she being the granddaughter of Augustus Busch, she never worked either.
They had a beautiful home in Palm Beach. And she weighed 300 pounds. But she didn’t drink beer. She drank about a quart of scotch a day. She ended up liking me and I put up with her foolishness. If I got mad, I’d just take my purse and go home, and by the time I got home she’d be on the telephone, "Oh, Kay, you know I didn’t mean that. Now come on back!"
That was off-again, on-again. But she only stayed in Palm Beach five or six months out of the year. Then she began staying longer and longer, and one year she said, "I’m going to start staying year-round in Florida." And I thought, "I can’t take this year-round." So I decided to retire. My husband had just died, and left me some insurance. Even though we had divorced – well, I left him one time, and when I did he went into AA and he did get over drinking, but he began to run the AA all over the state, and he ended up wanting to marry a very rich woman who was also in AA, and I said, "Be my guest." But we did live together actually twenty years.
So I retired. And nine months later, I didn’t have a baby but I had a telephone call from a guy who I knew did part-time work for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., because he was also in the catering business. He was one of the workers, not the owner of the business. But it was a very lucrative job in Palm Beach. Not only are you paid well for the hours you work but those people always tip you very well. So Caleb loved that kind of work. Caleb was a good worker, and he also could type, and he was helping Douglas with his autobiography. Caleb called me and said, "I’ve just written a book." He liked to write too. And he said, "I’m going to stay up here in New York because I want to have my book published if I can," which he never did, and so he said, "I was wondering if you had enough time to do some work for Douglas Fairbanks?"
"Well," I said, "it just so happens I don’t work for Lily Blabon anymore, and that sounds good. I’m tired of doing nothing. My kids are in college."
So Caleb said, "He’s going to call you. He’s coming down in a couple of days."
The next day I got a call from Mr. Fairbanks. They had a home in Palm Beach. And he asked me if I could come over for an interview. I said, "Not today. I’m having my family for dinner tonight. But I can come tomorrow."
He said okay. When I arrived, Mary Lee – Mrs. Fairbanks – was talking on the telephone. So Douglas said, "Excuse her, she’s talking to one of my daughters in England."
When Mary Lee hung up the phone, she came to join us. So, just making conversation, I said, "What part of England does your daughter live in?"
She said, "Oh, it’s just a little town. I don’t think you’ve ever heard of it. It’s Sudbury, Suffolk."
I said, "That just happens to be where I spent the war years." So right away we had something in common, and furthermore Douglas and I got along fine. So he said, "Can you start work tomorrow?"
I said, "Okay."
What you do as a social secretary is different than sitting in an office, although you have to have a place to do it. In Lily Blabon’s house I had a lovely room that they made into an office. But at the Fairbanks’, the office was his bedroom. He had two bedrooms upstairs connected with a bath. So he made one of them into a dressing room, and the other into his bedroom/office, where his single bed was, and his desk and many, many books. He was a book lover. I started work the next day.
And his work was a little different from Lily’s. For Lily, I had to call up her friends to ask them to play bridge this afternoon, and just all kinds of social stuff; she was a marvelous party giver. Loved to give parties. Loved costume parties. I could write a book about her but I never kept any notes. I didn’t have time. I was working too hard. When I started out, I was supposed to just work mornings. I put Kim in a nursery school. It just went until noon. And then she started saying that she needed me longer hours. She just liked having me there. Her husband was alive at that time, and he was sort of a grouchy person. He said, "I don’t know why you have to stay here all day. There shouldn’t be that much work to do."
And I’d say, "Well, your wife seems to think there is."
They both had money, but she was the one that was paying me.
Lily Blabon’s husband liked to go fishing, and finally he bought himself a boat; I think it was 37 feet long. And he had a captain, who Mrs. Blabon used to yell at all the time. But they went deep-sea fishing and they were in the Gulfstream, I think it was that far out, just the captain and Mr. Blabon. He had just caught a beautiful dolphin, and was real happy. This is a gorgeous fish, and he and the captain decided to celebrate, and sat down to have a beer. I suppose a Busch beer. And when they did, George suddenly had a heart attack. The captain didn’t know CPR, so he radioed that this man who was his client was having a heart attack and that he was coming in immediately, and they had the doctor waiting at the dock, but it was too late. He was dead. And the funny thing about it, if anything could be funny about that, is that he brought back this beautiful dolphin, and Lily took it to a taxidermist and had it mounted in all its glory. And she put it over the mantelpiece. Well, everybody thought it was beautiful, but they said, "There’s the fish that killed George." After a while even she began to think the same thing. So she moved it out to the pool house. I don’t know where it ended up.
George was too rich and prominent to go to the mortuary where we all go, so Lily had him in her home. She had a bay window that looked out on the lake, on Tarpon Cove, a beautiful place. So the casket stood on something or other a little bit high and one could look into it. George lay in state in the window and in the sun. A lot of people came from St. Louis for the funeral. Lily’s daughter came home from school; she was in college at the time. And Lily was having this big dinner party, which she had on the lanai with beautiful rattan furniture; there were maybe 20 people there for dinner. And George was in the living room. So in the middle of dinner, Lily gets up to go and look at poor George, sorry that he wasn’t having dinner with them. And all of a sudden she lets out this big scream. Everybody comes running in to see what’s the matter. George had been sitting in the sun too long and all the things that you get put in you when you’re in the mortuary had drained out. And George was a wrinkled mess. The funeral was to be at 11 o’clock the next morning. So they had to call the mortuary to come and get him and take him back and they had to do it all over again.
Oh, there was never a dull moment! I ought to write a book about her. "Leave it lay where Jesus flung it," she used to say. She was so heavy. She had all her clothes made to order, and was very well-dressed. There was one doctor who we called the society M.D. He was very well liked. He had a great personality, was invited to a lot of the parties in Palm Beach. Took care of everyone, didn’t mind making house calls. And he died very suddenly, because he stayed up all night a couple of nights with some guy who was dying and I guess he overdid it. Mrs. Blabon was out having her hair done when she heard about him and she came back and she was crying as she came in. I said, "What’s the matter?"
And she said (I can’t remember his name now) "Dr. Joe Blow died." And she said with tears coming down her cheek, "He always called me Old Fat Ass." She just hated to lose him.
Anyway, working for Douglas was a marvelous experience. He and I both have a chip on our shoulder because neither of us got to go to college, but he was tutored by somebody in France who was a history buff, and Douglas can tell you anything about the history of the world, but particularly England. And he knows everybody in royalty. He gets a Christmas card every year from Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother. Everywhere he went he made friends. And he and I became very close. He stood in for Jack, who was long dead, when my daughter Carole got married. We got an extra day off; we were traveling for American Movie Classics at the time, so we went to San Francisco for Carole’s wedding. That was her second wedding.
Douglas and Mary Lee were a devoted couple in a strange way. He traveled all the time, always going back to New York, or he had to go to Timbuktu. It’s unbelievable how his schedule ran. But he called Mary Lee every night, and before he left he always left a note under her pillow. Every trip. And this went on year in and year out. They ended up being married 49½ years.
I had only been there a few days when he handed me – it was obvious I had become his confidant – he handed me a letter and said, "Will you make me six copies of this?"
It was this long hand-written letter, and eventually I found myself reading it. I thought, I guess I’m not supposed to, I wasn’t sure, he didn’t say "Read this," but why does he want six copies?
It was from a woman who was breaking up with somebody he’d known for a long time. And I was to send a copy of it to David Niven, and his co-worker when he was in London, Tommy Clyde, and his accountant. These people are close friends; that’s his life. He had no sons; he just had three daughters.
So that’s how it started out. And I knew his wife had never had any affairs. But she had a friend, I’ve written about it, a true story. There was one man, the husband of one of their good friends that was always invited to their parties – his name is well-known; they have plenty of money. So occasionally he would come down on his own for business reasons I suppose, and he would always get in touch with Mary Lee, or with the Fairbanks, and either go with them to dinner but if Douglas was on one of his trips to New York, he’d take Mary Lee out to dinner. So he was in town one time, and she told me before I left that day, "I’m going out to dinner with John." And the next day she said, "You know, I can’t have any fun. Last night, when we came home from dinner, I sat in the car with John for a while," in the circular drive, and Giuseppi – who worked for them for many years as a man of all things, did everything in the house – she said, "We were sitting there having an interesting conversation, and Giuseppi opened the door and yelled, ‘When are you coming in? I want to close up the house!’ " So she said she couldn’t have any fun. But that’s about the extent of her dillydallying.
Mary Lee died of cancer in 1988, and in 1991 Douglas married one of his old friends who he used to see in New York a lot. She was 30 years younger than he.
On the Today show one morning they interviewed the librarian from Radcliffe, and she said that they would like to hear more experiences from women involved in World War II. I thought, "I wonder if that would include me." I had already taken all of my mother’s letters that were handwritten and typed them into a manuscript, so I wrote a letter to the librarian, and I included several samples from my 360 pages of letters I had written to my mother.
I received a note from her right away: "Yes, we are very interested. We would love to have your typescript, as well as the actual letters." And then just a little over a year ago I got an invitation to attend a luncheon in Palm Beach. It was from Radcliffe. I thought, it’s probably a fundraiser for Radcliffe, coming to Palm Beach and giving luncheons. So I didn’t know whether to regret it or not. And then I thought, what the heck, it’s at a nice place in Palm Beach, I’ll go. So I went. And everybody was given this kind of chain sort of thing with a card on it that said a name and "Radcliffe 19-whatever," all their graduation dates. There must have been 30 or more people there, and a few of the girls – of course, Radcliffe was a girls’ school – some of them had their husbands with them. And everyone was very friendly and nice. And they’d read my name tag and say, "Oh, they didn’t put the year." And I would say, "Actually, I didn’t go to Radcliffe."
"Oh?"
I said, "I’m just a guest." I didn’t go into it any more. Actually, at the luncheon – well, before the luncheon, as you came in the butler asked you if you wanted water, tea, Coke, orange juice, champagne, whatever. So we stood around and talked with each other for forty minutes or so before we had lunch. And it was very nice; some of them knew each other but a lot of them didn’t.
Finally I was standing next to the librarian. The president of the college and the head librarian were both there. And she looked at my name tag and said, "Oh, you’re the one from the Red Cross!"
So she started talking to me. She said, "Did you continue to work with the Red Cross after the war?"
And I said, "I’ve always done some volunteer work for them but I didn’t really work on a steady basis. The most interesting job I’ve had lately is I’ve worked for the last ten years with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr."
She said, "Oh, that must have been fascinating!"
And I said, "Well, yes, it was.
She said, "Why don’t you write what it was like to work for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.?"
So I did, but I have left out a great deal that I could have put in there, but I wouldn’t. He has written two books and he says they would have been much more successful if they’d been, as they call them in Hollywood, the kiss-and-tell books. He told them ahead of time he was not going to write a kiss-and-tell book and wouldn’t change his mind, and I wasn’t going to do it either.
I used to talk to Douglas quite often when he was in New York. In fact, he always reimbursed me for phone calls. I got a little money for the Palm Beach office every month. He wanted me to call him; he loved to talk, and find out what I was doing. We were very close friends. And after Mary Lee died I traveled all over the country with him when he represented the American Movie Classics cable company.
I never wrote anything down about Lily Blabon, but when I was growing up I used to have diaries. And I have all kinds of memorabilia. I’ve written a family history, and by the time I got to World War II I realized I was writing about myself more than anything else because I didn’t know what my brothers and sister were doing but I knew what I was doing.
Newell was in the same bomb group as Jimmy Stewart. Stewart had left it before he got there, but he still showed up sometimes. I don’t think Newell met him, but he wrote, "Nice to see Jimmy Stewart once in a while," something like that.
My oldest son is named after my brother, but he’s never asked me any questions about him. Kim is an artist. So was his father – an interior designer. We call him Kim. We don’t call him Newell.
This is a picture of Sandy Sanborn. That’s a Spitfire that he named Kay 4. He was flying in the Royal Air Force before Pearl Harbor. That’s another story. I met him when he had come home to recover from some burns; his plane had caught fire. And we were both waiting to get a train. I was coming home from visiting in Chicago, and we both needed to have a train ticket. He was going back to South Carolina, and I was coming home. We happened to be standing in the line together, and they said, "We have no more room on the train. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow."
He said to me, "Do you know much about Washington?"
I said, "Well, I was born here but I left here when I was so young I don’t remember anything." I hadn’t been with the Red Cross yet – this was 1943.
So he said, "Let’s get a taxi to drive us and we’ll go sightseeing."
We spent that day together in Washington, and then met the next day and went home on the same train and sat together. He got off in South Carolina, and I went on to West Palm Beach. When he went back he started naming his Spitfires after me. He survived the war. I saw him once in New York, in 1944. …
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