1.
“THANKS FOR EVERYTHING”
She wasn’t exactly born with a silver flask in her fist, but when Marion Elaine Stritch made her first entrance on February 2, 1925, at Harper Hospital in Detroit, at the uncharacteristically early hour of 6:30 a.m., it was into a climate of bustling prosperity.
Considering her later struggles, the date would come to seem apt. It was Groundhog Day, which—because of the hit 1993 movie about a weatherman caught in a time loop, later made into a Tony-nominated musical—would become shorthand for living the same events over and over again, an allegory for addiction. It was also the very thick of national Prohibition, of which it was joked that Punxsutawney Phil, the clairvoyant groundhog of Pennsylvania, was threatening sixty weeks of winter rather than the usual six if he didn’t get a drink.
In Michigan the liquor trade had been forbidden since 1917, and the state’s proximity to Canada had quickly encouraged bootleggers, some swooshing across Lake St. Clair on ice skates, their bounty behind them on sleds. That was the year Marion’s mother, Mildred Isabel Jobe (changed from her father’s oft mispronounced “Job”), married her favorite of many beaux, George Stritch. He had acquired a promising new position as a clerk at B.F. Goodrich, in Akron, the Ohio city that had come to be known as the “rubber capital of the world” following the convergence there of Goodyear, Firestone, and the brand-new General Tire. Perhaps Goodrich’s most prestigious commission was supplying tires, gas masks, and other equipment used in the Great War, which the United States had just joined.
The young couple had met growing up in Springfield, where George, gray eyed and gangly—“he was all legs,” said his eldest granddaughter, Sally Hanley—was raised in humble circumstances. Born on April 7, 1892, according to the marriage certificate, he would eventually become the middle child of five. His father, Henry, was a tailor who’d emigrated from Ireland to Louisville, Kentucky, a decade or so after Garrett Stritch, father to the future cardinal Samuel Stritch, followed the same trajectory. Henry told his offspring that he and Samuel were cousins.
It was the seminal gossip columnist Walter Winchell who first trumpeted in 1947 that Cardinal Samuel Stritch of Chicago was Elaine’s uncle, an irresistible piece of publicity repeated by journalists and colleagues throughout her life, though she tried intermittently to correct the record. Eventually she stopped trying. “When you have a lot of relations you don’t call anybody cousins anymore—you call them uncle,” she said on one occasion. “Or at least they did in that family.” After another columnist, Earl Wilson, reported Elaine was the cardinal’s daughter, she went to meet the holy man in person. Ushered in by a nun, she sat down on a red-backed seat with a stool under it.
“Elaine, that’s my chair,” he told her.
“Oh! Sorry.”
She then described her problems in the “mad gay life of powder and paint,” quoting Noël Coward, and asked what she should do.
“Pray to Our Lady,” the cardinal suggested.
* * *
George’s youngest sister died of tuberculosis in early childhood, and throughout his life he would cry when speaking of her. The remaining children all got jobs as soon as they could: the elder son as a bookkeeper, the two other daughters as stenographers. George worked for a textile mill, for the American Seeding Company, and for the Hunkin-Conkey Construction Company. “I don’t think he ever got out of fourth grade,” said Frank Moran, Jr., his eldest grandson.
A childhood friend of George, Bobby Clark, had escaped such prosaic labors by developing a tumbling and clowning routine at the local YMCA with an older boy named Paul McCullough. The two of them left town with a minstrel show, graduating to circus, vaudeville, burlesque, musical revues, and—after they were discovered and promoted by the songwriter Irving Berlin—riotous RKO film shorts with titles like Odor in the Court. Clark, known for his painted-on glasses, got most of the pratfalls and punch lines (“I rest my case … and my feet!”). McCullough was the quieter “straight man,” with a toothbrush mustache, a style that did not yet look ominous. Their trademark pantomime was structured around trying and failing to put a chair on a table. (Yes, these were more innocent times.)
George shared Clark and McCullough’s sense of humor and their ambition, but also was deeply practical. He needed all these qualities to woo the more cosmopolitan Mildred Jobe. Born on August 13, 1893, or so she told the county court, Mildred was distinctly pretty, buxom, and around five feet tall (the name Pettit was in her mother’s lineage), with a long trail of prosperous suitors. “She was a pedestal girl, for sure,” Sally Hanley said.
“The way they did dating then, she had a date every night of the week, and the guy that got Sunday night was number one,” said another granddaughter, Midge Moran. “And my grandfather moved up from seven to one. So she wanted to marry him and her parents thought she was crazy, because they wanted her to marry the banker. But she didn’t. She loved my grandfather.”
Mildred never tired of calling attention to her more rarefied breeding and George’s good fortune. “She picked him over the rest of them, and she reminded him of that all their lives,” said Elaine’s youngest niece, Elaine Kelly.
Mildred’s father, Louis S. Job, known as L. S., was from Monmouthshire, Wales. He owned racehorses and a number of businesses, among them a bakery and an eponymous tavern on South Fountain Avenue in downtown Springfield, not far from where his family lived, a classy one where roast beef sandwiches were served, there was “a private room for ladies,” and men had to stand up at the bar to drink alcohol. The preferred toast over foamy beer tops—“Here’s how we lost the farm!”—would become one of Elaine’s favorites.
“He was a gentleman’s gentleman,” Frank Moran, Jr., said, albeit one who would have not been out of place in an Edward Hopper painting. “He’d sit up till the last customer went home, then he’d lock up and go over to the railroad station and chew the rag with the night clerk until the sun came up and the early morning express roared through Springfield,” Elaine wrote in 1955, in a guest column for another of Winchell’s competitors, Dorothy Kilgallen, by way of accounting for her own pronounced nocturnal tendencies.
Louis’s wife, Sarah, nicknamed Sallie, was said to be a descendant of French Huguenots in Virginia, giving her an air of refinement taken on by her only daughter. A son, Howard, eight years older than Mildred, started out as a traveling salesman, married a woman named Onita Albert, and settled in North Carolina, where he became a vice president at Adams-Millis, a hosiery manufacturer.
Mildred had neither need nor expectation of entering a particular profession, even as the women’s suffrage movement gathered momentum across the country. But she pursued excellence nonetheless: elected president of the class in her finishing school, College of St. Mary of the Springs in Columbus, Ohio, she wrote a prize essay comparing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with The Tempest; analyzed Sir Walter Scott as a member of the Philomathean Society; and played Liszt on the piano, her specialty, while also learning the trumpet and drums. She also acted in plays and contributed a poem to the 1912 yearbook that began, with unyielding optimism:
The world ain’t half so dreadful
As lots of people say!
It’s just the way you take it—
Why life’s just what you make it—
Smile, and the world’s your mirror any day.
A subsequent stanza proposed a defense against sour, gossiping people. “Well, if lemons come, just squeeze them.”
Mildred was the only young lady in her set to have her own horse and buggy, but she rarely if ever drove the family car after she had married, preferring instead to direct from the front passenger seat. (“Okay, George, it’s clear on the right…”) In the miniature theater of the automobile, and with little urging at parties, the couple would continue a custom of singing together in close harmony that they had begun in courtship. “They were lovers from day one, throughout their entire life,” Midge Moran said. “It was a love story.”
For their honeymoon, the newlyweds traveled to a hotel in Detroit where, nervous about the gangs that had begun to menace the area since Prohibition began, they decided to barricade the door of their room with a dresser. Mildred proceeded to the bathroom, shut this door as well and didn’t emerge for an hour or so, whereupon George began to knock.
“Midge, come on out,” he called.
“No, I don’t want to,” she said in a small voice.
“Please.”
Finally his young bride emerged, wearing a lacy negligee, a stark contrast to the opaque scapular she used to be given by nuns for baths to prevent her from looking at her body. Tears were running down her face.
“What’s the matter?” her groom asked.
“I’m afraid!”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Onita told me what you’re going to do to me!”
“Oh, Midge, forget about that. Let’s just go to sleep,” George said.
Mutual trust and consideration having thus been firmly established, the marriage was consummated the following night.
In the seventy subsequent years together, it would often be said of Mildred that she “ran the show.” In October 1918 she gave birth to a daughter, Georgene Frances—named not after her husband, Mildred hastened to tell those who assumed, but because a classmate had had the name and it struck her fancy. George, who had claimed a physical exemption on his draft card the previous year, was with an infant now virtually assured deferment. A month afterward, anyway, the war ended, and not long after he was transferred to B.F. Goodrich’s offices in Detroit. The family lived in a series of duplex apartment houses, where they often took in boarders for extra cash. On February 24, 1921, another daughter arrived: Sally Jobe, named for Mildred’s mother. Were they hoping a third child would be a boy? “They wanted three boys,” Sally Hanley said. “He had names: Michael, William, John. He wanted three boys and they had three girls. And he adored them.”
Civic government then could have a benevolent, even jolly air. “Dear Baby, We Hope You Will Grow Up to Be a Fine, Strong Citizen,” read the form for the birth certificate typed up after little Marion came in 1925. “We Shall Do All We Can to Make This Possible. Sincerely Your Friend, the Detroit Department of Health.” But the clerk botched her surname, foreshadowing a lifetime of misspellings and mispronunciations, to the Germanic-sounding Steich, and left off the “Elaine,” a Frenchified version of Ellen or Eleanor, as Marion was of Mary. After nine months, George wrote to amend both, and the middle name was the one that stuck.
Lainey, as she was called, was a blonde and bonny baby, with blue eyes that quickly acquired a mischievous expression. “When Elaine was born, the chandeliers shook, and they never stopped,” Georgene became fond of saying, though if there were chandeliers at this juncture they weren’t terribly grand.
But after George was promoted at Goodrich the family bought a modest house at 2250 Tuxedo Street for around $9000, dispensed with the lodgers, and hired a live-in African American nanny and cook, Carrie Jones, whom Stritch would later tell of running into at a “black and tan” club downtown when she was a rebellious teenager. Dinner could be a clamorous affair. “They’d be talking and the conversation would be advanced,” Elaine Kelly said. “Elaine would get so fed up with all that chitchat that didn’t involve her she would pull herself up out of her high chair and stand on it and fold her arms and say ‘No! Me!’”
As a toddler, Lainey learned quickly to clap a straw boater hat on her golden curls and imitate Maurice Chevalier to get attention. At age five, during a visit to New York she was buttoned into a taffeta dress and Mary Jane shoes, given a box of chocolates and taken by her uncle Howard to see The Band Wagon. Mesmerized by the elegant dancer Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele, singing “We play hoops!” with French accents, she was disappointed later to find that number eliminated from the movie version.
But the Stritch family didn’t need to travel east for lavish entertainments. The old vaudeville houses near Detroit’s Greektown neighborhood were increasingly being superseded by ambitious construction around Grand Circus Park. There was the Cass Theater, a newly air-conditioned home to “legitimate” plays that hosted Hollywood stars like John and Ethel Barrymore, Boris Karloff, and Bette Davis; and the Shubert Theater, owned by the publisher of the Detroit Free Press. This was boom time for elaborate movie palaces—the beaux arts Capitol, the “oriental” Fox, the Spanish gothic United Artists—with glowing neon marquees and grand staircases designed by renowned architects. Particularly sumptuous was the Michigan, open since 1926: a French Renaissance confection by the Rapp brothers from Chicago, with more than four thousand seats and sculptures, ferns, and a pianist in the lobby. When Elaine asserted later that she had moved to New York for “higher ceilings,” she was speaking metaphorically.
Americans then were mad for automobiles the way they now are for iPhones, and Detroit, the center of car production, was the fourth-largest city in the country. Along with many of his peers, George was investing in stocks, and despite considerable losses on Black Tuesday in October 1929, he still had the wherewithal to upgrade to a two-story brick house at 18210 Birchcrest Drive; purchased for about $16,000, it had a sunken living room on the left, library on the right, kitchen and dining room in the back, and four bedrooms upstairs.
“Eighteen plus twenty-one ends in zero” was how George taught his girls to remember the number, a warning about settling down too early. Mildred furnished the place traditionally and the family added two little bulldogs: the lethargic Rudy and the peppier Biff, who would jump up on the glass door and bark and scare visitors. Of these there was a constant stream. The area was filling with upwardly mobile families, bracketed reassuringly as it was by institutions representing three stages of adult life: the University of Detroit, the Detroit Golf Club, and Woodlawn Cemetery.
Though many companies floundered in the aftermath of the crash, B.F. Goodrich continued to be on the up-and-up and going places. Net sales in the first six months of 1930 were over two and a half million dollars more than they had been in the same period of the previous year. George got another promotion, to sales manager.
Still, from within their cocoon of material comfort, the sense that money was hard-won and that one’s circumstances could change overnight was not lost on the young Stritch girls. “My father was a self-made man so it was laborious” was how Elaine described their circumstances. “It was one step at a time … Of course that’s what I admired so much about my father. But what I think I secretly wanted to be—you know how Katharine Hepburn would play rich women in movies, and she’d have a scene with her father having a brandy in the library with the guy coming in with the tray? I swear, that’s the kind of rich I wanted to be. And it wasn’t so much rich, it was that style of living.”
She would develop a vexed relationship with money: at intervals parsimonious and profligate, ignorant and canny, generous and withholding. Possessions might be obsessively collected, fiercely guarded, and then renounced overnight.
“Elaine was tight,” Frank Moran, Jr., said. “She was so tight she squeaked.”
But then again: “Elaine went reckless for years with money, oh my god,” Midge Moran said. “She was so reckless with money you couldn’t believe.”
* * *
All happy families may be alike, as Tolstoy wrote, but families with three sisters seem to have extra crackle, inspiring as they have dramatists from William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov to Wendy Wasserstein and Woody Allen. In Elaine’s youth, in one of American pop culture’s periodic whimsies, musical groups composed of three sisters happened to be very popular. There were the Boswell Sisters, who sang “The Object of My Affection”; the Pickens Sisters, who moved from Georgia to Park Avenue; the Andrews Sisters (“Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”); and the Gumm Sisters, the youngest of whom would transmogrify into Judy Garland. The Stritch girls, distinct but loyal, had their own harmony.
Nicknamed Genie by family and close friends, Georgene Stritch was beautiful, studious, and quiet outside the home. “She had a great wit and she was fun—she liked reading, she liked history, she liked literature,” her daughter Midge Moran said. “But she was never showy at all. She was not narcissistic.” When Elaine was little, she would climb into Genie’s bed at night for company, enduring pinches from the older girl as she fidgeted.
Sally Stritch, the middle daughter, was graceful, a little neurotic, and pious. “My mother was a real breast-beater, a very guilty Catholic,” Sally Hanley said.
Marianna Sterr, née Walsh, a friend of Elaine since their elementary-school days, regarded Georgene and Sally with awe. “They were lovely. Perfect, perfect ladies,” she said. “And she was just a little dickens.”
Mildred Stritch, the queen of this vest-pocket castle, held her trio of princesses to high standards of deportment and bearing. “My grandmother instilled in all those girls that they were Something,” Midge Moran said. Some thought Mildred a too stern disciplinarian and that her youngest in particular suffered from what could be a certain chilliness or focus on externalities. But Elaine could not help but fix her with an adoring gaze. “My mother absolutely fascinated me,” she wrote in the 1955 Kilgallen column. “She always looked like nine million bucks. Her hair was always done beautifully, she loved hats and wore them with marvelous aplomb. Her bedroom looked and smelled like a garden. She was terribly feminine and seemed to revel in it.”
Few third children are reciprocated with such fascination, even in well-to-do households that have plenty of help. Once, shut out on the porch to play and at a loss for how to amuse herself, Elaine fatally swatted enough flies to spell out her name. “It was her way of supposing her name in lights,” according to her friend Julie Keyes.
“And that’s what billing is about,” Elaine told her. “Dead fucking flies.”
* * *
She made her first communion on May 21, 1933, at the nearby Gesu Catholic Church with sunlight streaming through kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows bordered by gray stone. A card printed with blue script commemorated the occasion:
May He bring thee many blessings,
Keep thee true and pure as now,
Through the long day of the future
When life’s furrows deck thy brow
Life’s furrows were writ large across the nation at the moment, the nadir of the Great Depression. Two months before, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed the Cullen-Harrison Act legalizing the sale of beer, and the repeal of Prohibition followed in December. Despite the images of flappers and gangsters merrily tippling from contraband tucked in garters during the 1920s, the use of alcohol among settled, churchgoing upper-middle-class family men could seem seedy and rather shameful; George had concealed a bottle of scotch in his bottom drawer at the Goodrich offices to offer to clients. But now booze was suddenly a sanctified daily indulgence, something to sink into along with the settee cushions with an “aah” at the end of a long day’s work.
Though Mildred herself regularly sipped at an old-fashioned, she kept a watchful eye on her husband’s intake, having witnessed how drink had held her father in thrall and outright ruined some of his customers. It was in Akron, where she and George had begun their married life, that the group that would become Alcoholics Anonymous began forming in 1935, partly through the efforts of Henrietta Seiberling, a daughter-in-law of Goodyear’s founder. Its inaugural tenets included complete abstention from alcohol, the pursuit of spirituality, and regular meetings to share experiences.
“My grandmother was hell-bent,” Sally Hanley said. “I always thought that she was an ‘adult child of an alcoholic’ as they call them in AA.” And yet George “didn’t abuse alcohol at all. He loved to have a couple of drinks and enjoy himself. But she would be a wreck. She had cocktails, but she was always worried about him.”
Once, when George tarried at the office, drinking with his colleagues, Mildred removed her wedding ring, left it on the dresser, and took their three small daughters riding on a Detroit streetcar until it shut down for the night. The ring remained on the dresser for a year in silent, shiny rebuke, and George never stayed out late again.
Elaine found engaging deeply with Mildred difficult. “She was a very straightforward, glamorous woman,” she recalled years later. “Meaning she didn’t discuss things. She just lived her life moment to moment, day at a time. We didn’t have psychological discussions after dinner. If it was a political thing about Roosevelt at the table, Mother would just say ‘I don’t like him’ and that would be the end of her contribution. And it was awfully strong. Or someone’s marriage: ‘What in god’s name he sees in her I will never, never know,’ and you never went on with it like ‘Mother, you know, I…’ No! You don’t go there at all! She said it, it’s finished, and that’s law.”
George was more interested in discussion, with a fundamental lack of snobbery. When Elaine was twelve years old, the president of General Motors came to dinner. “And I watched my father with him,” she remembered. “And then I watched his behavior again the next day with the newsboy who delivered the Detroit Times. Same thing. No difference.” In Elaine’s adult life, her father’s democratic impulses warred perpetually with her mother’s entitlement.
* * *
The Stritches were committed but not strict Catholics. According to Sally Hanley, her grandmother Mildred converted from Protestantism, and only Sally Stritch cared very much about the rituals. “They’d go to Mass on a Monday. Sunday was too busy, for family or something,” she said. “They just wrote their own rules.”
Georgene, the elder Sally, and Elaine were all enrolled at the all-girls Academy of the Sacred Heart Convent, which bills itself as the oldest independent school in Michigan. Tall and tomboyish, Elaine was cast as the male lead in a school production of Hansel and Gretel. “That afternoon I experienced a tiny bit more attention, respect, maybe even admiration,” she wrote in notes for an unpublished memoir. “Not only at the convent after the curtain came down but also most definitely at the dinner table the following evening—nobody told me to finish my broccoli.”
Outside of school there was a hubbub of social activity largely organized toward the securement of future mates. It began chastely enough, with Ping-Pong tournaments, scavenger hunts, horseback riding, and roller-skating derbies; later there were “frosh frolics” and “loafer leaps,” football dances and fraternity cruises.
As George became more established in business, he and Mildred joined the Detroit Athletic Club, commonly referred to as the DAC, downtown across from the Music Hall and with a gently arched natatorium; he also joined the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, with golf on verdant hills, and the Recess Club, in the Fisher Building with its roof tipped in gold. It was at these formal but familiar venues that Elaine began performing in front of a larger audience. Diane Wenger Wilson, another friend since school days, remembers going to the DAC for “family night” on Fridays. “Elaine would get up and sing with the band, even when she was ten, eleven years old,” she said. “She had a great deal of pizzazz, even as a youngster.”
The attractive, talented, and interpersonally adroit Stritch sisters were becoming boldface names of the community. By the mid-1930s, Georgene’s name began to appear in Detroit’s then copious society pages as she dived off the springboard of the pool at the Pine Lake Country Club “in a lovely suit of white trimmed with red” (George also sometimes brought home rubber bathing costumes from B.F. Goodrich for the girls and their friends), sang “Happy Birthday” at a surprise party at a classmate’s home on Chicago Boulevard, or helped host a “handkerchief shower” for a bride-to-be. Domesticity came naturally to Georgene. “Her mother ran a spotless household; Georgene helped a lot,” Sterr said. “I remember being over there and Georgene was vacuuming. A song would come on the radio and Elaine wanted to dance with Georgene. So Georgene would put aside her vacuum cleaner, and away they’d go.”
Sally, though, was the really proficient and enthusiastic dancer, studying and eventually teaching at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio at the Hotel Statler on Washington Boulevard, which gave lessons in the rumba, fox-trot, shag, tango, and a hybrid step called the “swinguet.” She performed tap at local functions and practiced ballet in the basement of 18210 Birchcrest, where George had a mirror and barre installed. The Detroit Free Press’s “Chatterbox” columnist cited Sally as among the enviable disciples of Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure skater, one in that rare breed who, rather than complaining of sore ankles, “give the old tootsies a pat and then whiz around the rink with an impressive amount of aplomb.”
Elaine was an accomplished dancer as well, but she was more inclined to hop on a bike—hers or the back of a boy’s, without telling her parents where she was going. “My mother always thought she was a bad influence on me,” Sterr said. Their houses were a few blocks apart but Marianna could cut through two lawns from her backyard to the Stritch place. To liven up the fifteen-minute walk to school, they’d terrorize the merchants on Twelfth Street—“you know, run through their stores and make a fuss.” In class, when they were instructed to memorize poetry, Elaine would stand and theatrically mug her way through stanzas when the teacher left the room.
“I have a lit-tle sha-dow that goes in and out with me,” she recited once, waggling her hips.
“Elaine! What are you doing?” gasped the teacher upon returning.
“She was a thorn in the nuns’ side, I’ll tell you,” Sterr said. One nun told Mildred that Elaine was a born leader—the only problem being that she was leading all the other girls in the wrong direction.
One summer, the two friends were skinny-dipping while staying at a cottage on Gratiot Beach in Port Huron, when the host’s parents, a Mr. and Mrs. Healy, walked by and saw their clothes and underthings laid out on the beach. “We were frantic, but they just laughed,” Sterr said. “We had so much fun together—I can’t tell you how much fun that girl was. Those were lovely days. Nothing to think about but what boy you were going to see…” Before they were old enough to date properly, she and Elaine befriended two contemporaries, Richard and Buddy, and took to going to church with them, where they’d sit in the balcony pew, giggling and whispering.
Diane Wenger Wilson remembered a crowd of friends gathering to listen to programs on the radio (Goodrich distributed the popular Mantola model) like The Lone Ranger, which premiered on a Detroit station, WXYZ, just as Adolf Hitler was being named chancellor of Germany. “We were glued to the radio,” she said, though they left Roosevelt’s fireside chats to their parents. For a long time, Elaine’s favorite song was “I Only Have Eyes for You”; “Are the stars out tonight / I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright…” She was sent into the hall outside her classroom for imitating Bing Crosby crooning “Pennies from Heaven.”
Though not often heard on the radio, among the performers to pass through the Cass and Shubert were George Stritch’s old pals from Springfield, Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough, whom a local reviewer called “a couple of super-zanies,” adding that “the management might just as well provide a remedy for aching jaws, because the customers will have laughed so repeatedly that their smiles set after a while.” Clark and his wife often stayed with the Stritches when he was in town; and once, playing a doctor in a sketch and knowing their youngest was in the audience, he responded onstage to a nurse’s knock on the door with the line: “If that’s Elaine Stritch I’ll be right there.” She was thoroughly enchanted.
For a few years, Clark and McCullough were headliners. In the early thirties, they came to Detroit with Strike Up the Band, a revision of a 1927 Gershwin musical, and then Here Goes the Bride, a new musical comedy written by the naughty New Yorker cartoonist and gadabout Peter Arno, based on his experiences in a Reno, Nevada, divorce colony. The book and score proved fatally flawed, but one drama critic had lavished the entire fifteen paragraphs of his column on Clark’s performance. “Count on being regaled as you never have been regaled since Mr. Groucho Marx went hunting for his horse in the breakfast room of a Long Island mansion,” he wrote, declaring the production “Mr. Bobby Clark’s show first, last and all the time. Nothing else matters. There is no need for anything else to matter.”
It is one thing to be second banana and another to be regularly squashed underfoot, especially if you suffer from severe depression, as McCullough did. On March 23, 1936, after leaving a Massachusetts hospital where he’d been treated for a nervous breakdown, he stopped in the town of Medford for a shave, grabbed a razor from the barber, and slashed his own throat and wrists, dying two days later.
If Elaine was told about the grisly suicide, she suppressed the memory, at least from the press; or perhaps, like the critics, she only had eyes for Bobby Clark, who returned to the Cass playing opposite Fanny Brice with a traveling production of the Ziegfeld Follies in 1937. Ziegfeld had himself died five years before, and his widow, Billie Burke, who before long would be iridescently immortalized as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, produced the extravaganza, which also featured the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.
About to turn fifty, Clark was mourning not just his partner but the waning of burlesque, to which he imputed a certain morality. “Remember how the girls in the chorus had to wear opera-length stockings on the stage?” he reminisced to a Detroit journalist. “There couldn’t be any profanity, or smut as it is known today. And you know what would have happened to a girl who attempted a striptease act. Nothing less than the patrol wagon.”
In fifteen years Elaine herself would be mock-stripping onstage, playing a reporter describing what it was like to interview Lee. She never fantasized about being a Ziegfeld girl parading mutely and smiling in glittering costume and elaborate headdress. She could more readily imagine herself rather delivering punch lines and wisecracks, like the rubber-faced Brice. “As a kid I was not particularly pretty,” she said. “I was the girl who sang the songs and told the jokes because I figured the only way to make people love me was to be a million laughs.”
Elaine took the lead in a school operetta; played a Hollywood debutante in a “Merry Go Round” revue, and did a trick stunt as a mermaid in a school circus. In a production of Quality Street, a play by J. M. Barrie, who’d written Peter Pan, she took the role of Valentine Brown, a male suitor, “because I was taller than the other girl that played the heroine.” Her voice was also lower than that of most of her friends, a rich alto that lent her songs a maturity beyond her years.
At the Masonic Temple for a musical presentation held by the Junior League, on the cusp of fourteen and wearing a powder-blue chiffon dress, Elaine performed “Thanks for Everything,” a hit for Artie Shaw in January 1939: “Thanks for everything / For bringing me moments like this…”
The response was overwhelming. Driven back home by her parents, sitting in the back seat, she felt that “a kind of unbelievable excitement was going on inside of me,” as she wrote years later. “It topped Hansel and Gretel, that’s for sure.”
She pretended to be asleep as the trees swayed in the wind outside, as if in approval. “My god, Mildred,” she overheard her father whisper to her mother. “She can do it. She can really do it.”
Elaine couldn’t remember later in life whether she’d also had some red wine that evening. “I’m not sure but if I did it wasn’t because I was afraid,” she wrote. “I sang ‘Thanks for Everything’ before I knew I needed to drink in order to sing it.”
* * *
From junior high school on, Elaine’s life would be measured out not in coffee spoons like J. Alfred Prufrock’s, nor even in wineglasses, but in newspaper column inches.
Early the next year she made her own first appearance in a Detroit Free Press gossip feature called “Who Goes Where,” written by the anonymous “Passerby,” after attending a supper dance held to welcome home a son from prep school in another state. “At Christmas, the girls who came from wealthy families would give lovely parties,” Sterr said. “I remember one when they had tables set up through the living room and the dining room and the music room, with maybe six at a table and the girls wearing long dresses and the boys wore tuxedos and then after dinner we would go downstairs. They had a small ballroom with a marble floor, and one wall was all mirrored, and it was like a movie.”
The young people were generally served Cokes, but Elaine was intrigued by the similar but mysterious substances that she’d long seen glinting in the grown-ups’ glasses, and for that matter in the movies, accented by the musical clink of ice cubes and the curving waft of cigarette smoke above.
One night in the sunken living room of 18210 Birchcrest her father, likely a little tipsy himself, offered her half a whiskey sour. If the Drink Me potion imbibed by Alice in Wonderland had a shrinking effect, this had an opposite, expansive result on Elaine. Swallowing the second half in the pantry, she felt suddenly like “Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Ethel Merman, Gertie Lawrence, and Fanny Brice” in one, as she put it in her one-woman show, taking “a trip to the moon on gossamer wings” (a quote from the Cole Porter song “Just One of Those Things”). “I couldn’t get my breath, it was so wonderful.”
Sharing liquid courage with one so young might seem reckless parenting in retrospect, but like the Wizard of Oz himself, George was a mere ordinary mortal; in the mid-1930s, many believed that demystifying alcohol in the home would encourage youthful moderation. Devoted to him, Elaine came to associate drinking with affection and authority, as one might do with medicine. Sips and then actual servings of liquor helped expand the contours of her world. Red wine in particular “seemed so elegant, so feminine, so ladylike—and besides, I needed that,” she said in her show. “I was scared to death.”
Half a bottle of Beaujolais-Villages helped steel her for her first prom, with a date named Bill Rice who was not much more than her five foot seven. Elaine faked a sprained ankle so she could wear ballet slippers rather than high heels with her mother’s dress selection, tulle and “with more bows than a symphony orchestra.”
Despite a heart-shaped face, a Cupid mouth, thick hair, enviably long legs, and a well-developed bust, she continued to be insecure about her appearance. Her friend Marianna didn’t understand this. “She was adorable-looking,” Sterr said. “And she had clothes that nobody else had,” often bought originally from the Saks Fifth Avenue on Lothrop Road for Georgene or Sally, with their father’s charge plate. “Elaine wore her little velvet coats with the fur collars and I had on my little cloth coat,” Sterr said.
If the wardrobe wasn’t handed down of free will, it might be raided. “In the old houses there would be a little door by the side door. The milkman would come and put the milk in there, and then you’d open the door, get it out, and put it in the icebox,” Sally Hanley said. “So Elaine wore her clothes, took Genie’s clothes, and put them in the milk chute. The idea was when the boy came to pick her up, she would go around, get Genie’s clothes out of the milk chute, and change in the car or whatever and go to the nightclub—places she wasn’t supposed to go.” Once, Elaine went to get the hidden bounty, opened the door, and found with a start Georgene’s face staring reprovingly up at her.
Elaine loved to recount her capers from those years, some of which sounded like daffy plots for a future situation comedy. When she wanted to date an older boy her parents disapproved of, she had a more age-appropriate one come and pick her up with the undesirable crouched hidden in the back seat. But once George Stritch had an errand. “Oh, would you give me a ride with the dog?” he asked the young man. “Then I’ll walk the dog home.” Panic ensued as Biff got in the back seat, jumping all over the stowaway, but they got away with it. In Elaine’s junior year, she pretended she had a local Halloween party to go to and instead snuck off to rendezvous with a boyfriend in college at Ann Arbor more than an hour away, buying favors at Woolworth as part of her cover-up.
As Georgene matriculated at the University of Detroit, where she would major in history, and with Sally preoccupied by dance and church, Elaine continued refining her act. At the next supper dance, the Passerby found her again; “a vision in white net” entertaining seventy-odd guests with impromptu renditions of Benny Goodman’s “Always and Always” and Harold Rome’s “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones,” a song about naming one’s child after the president, of enduring enough popularity that Judy Garland would sing it in the movie Babes on Broadway, wearing blackface, two years later.
Like most American teenagers (a relatively new concept helped along by the automobile’s invention), Elaine was concerned less with government affairs than those of the heart. “Dance is this Friday. Date: Rice. Hot damn,” she wrote Diane Wenger at her prep school, after returning from an unsuccessful semester away in Albany, New York, at the Kenwood Academy. She was “in gobs of trouble,” with half a dozen boys having called “to find out where they stood.” After a “honey” of a fight, Rice had told Elaine that he loved her. “And no joke that was ‘music to my ears,’” she wrote. “Gosh, he has changed—much more forward (thank God). I really do think the world of him Diane. I think this is it.”
Despite the near universal goal of going steady and then entering the covenant of marriage, Elaine continued to play the field, far more energetically than many in her peer group. “She was so popular with the boys, they were scared to ask her to dance,” Sterr said. “I found the girls loved her but hated her too because she stole their boyfriends whenever she had the chance. All she had to do was look their way and they’d fall all over themselves. She even did it to me! She had no compunctions.”
A few days before Christmas in 1940, the Stritches gave a large party of their own. A rotating music box sat atop the piano in the living room, “tinkling away for all its worth” at Mendelssohn’s wedding march, recorded the Detroit Free Press’s society columnist, with a male and female figurine in formal dress rotating upon it. As their faces turned to the crowd, it became evident they were miniatures of Georgene Stritch and her beau from the University of Detroit, Frank Sullivan Moran of Grosse Pointe, whom she had known since she was fourteen.
They were married the next month at Gesu at 10:00 a.m., with ostrich feathers on Mildred’s hat and Sally as maid of honor in a white wool suit. Recently photographed dancing a new step, the Lions’ Lope, with Cotton Price, a running back for the city’s football team, the middle sister was now attending the University of Detroit herself and was active in the Junior League of Catholic Women.
Spared returning to the Kenwood Academy because of persistent strep throat, the youngest Stritch sister maintained her frantic dating pace. In Elaine’s orbit were more Bills than just Rice, a Bob, a Brad, a couple of Jims, a Chuck, a Darius, a Reid, a Pete, and a Jack Bolton, the brother of Sally’s future fiancé, Thomas. Elaine most enjoyed being in a crowd that paid no mind to the legal drinking age, which was twenty-one in Michigan. “Lately it seems we always go places in a huge bunch,” she wrote Wenger. “It’s really swell.” There were trips to see Gone with the Wind in a red Chevrolet convertible, a dance where the African American bandleader and jazz singer Cab Calloway performed (“he was just wonderful”), and a friend’s wedding to a former star left tackle on the football team where, Elaine confessed, “No kidding Diane, I was plastered. Well, what do you expect when they feed you champagne like water? Went out with Bill that night. As for his condition, I was surprised we got where we were going.”
Elaine’s own high jinks did not stop her from passing judgment on those whom she perceived as truly out of control. “All of those gals are so damn cheap and wild—no joke, they just act terrible at dances,” she wrote of another group. “Helen really went the limit when she had five Tom Collins…” Her own set was comparatively decorous. “I’m so in love I could die,” another friend confessed. “Promise not to tell anyone but one thing led to another and I kissed him—I couldn’t help it.” Elaine and her friends exchanged “T.L.’s,” short for trade-lasts, or overheard compliments. “Bill said he thought you were a wonderful dancer and had a swell personality,” Marianna Walsh wrote to her. “Jimmy said he thought you were one of the best-looking girls he’d ever seen.”
On the evening of December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, newsboys came pouring along the streets of Detroit, crying out “War is declared! War is declared!” In bed, young Marianna cowered as she heard the shouts. “It scared me to death,” she said. “I got up and asked my mother about it and she said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not here.’”
But ripples were beginning to appear along the smooth surface of the young people’s lives. Georgene had become pregnant, and after she gave birth to Frank Jr. in 1942, her husband joined the navy and she moved back to her childhood home. Elaine chafed at the new strictures this setup necessitated. “When people spend a long time in a mossy damp basement to find records they oughta be allowed to play ’em,” she scribbled petulantly in red wax crayon on pages torn from a datebook that year. “When people sit home night after night at 18210 without a damn thing to do, they ought to be able to hear a little jive!”
A response—Georgene’s?—came in a more careful hand: “If people at 18210 would spend less time on the cuttin’ of the rug and more time on delving into the classics they might be invited out more after!”
Elaine retorted: “It is my ardent desire that no individual interested in the classics will ever invite me out—Go to hell!”
Her marriage prospects were being winnowed considerably as the local young men enlisted and were shipped off to training camps. One wrote her from barracks at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, quarantined due to an outbreak of spinal meningitis and complaining about the beer: “so bad that I have quit drinking. It really has to be bad for that.” Others begged for pinup photographs of Elaine as if she were Rita Hayworth.
Elaine wasn’t pining for anyone in particular; indeed, a mounting restlessness was causing her to disappoint certain suitors. “You certainly surprised me when you talked about not being able to find a guy who has what you want,” remarked a correspondent stationed at the Army Air Force Technical School in Chicago. “I thought sure as hell that Lee had everything you like.”
Lee was James Lee—of all the young men in Elaine’s life at this moment, the one most likely to synchronize his plans with hers. Two years older and from nearby Pleasant Ridge, he would attend Harvard after his service, move to New York, and become an actor and then, failing at that, a playwright who would work on Roots. Given this literary bent, not particularly common in their set, he was probably the “Jim” who wrote to Elaine, in a firm cursive, that he was reminded of her by “songs mostly” and the movie You’ll Never Know, calling his love for her “a fluctuating, hot and cold, up and down the toboggan slide affair,” and declaring finally, “without you it’s just cakes and ale.”
If the last sentence was a reference to Twelfth Night or W. Somerset Maugham, Elaine may have missed it. Her final marks at the Academy of the Sacred Heart Convent reflected a certain indifference to her schoolwork. “I passed Caesar on red wine, Cicero on white wine,” she told the talk-show host Dick Cavett years later. By senior year she had given up Latin and stopped paying attention to science. Her marks in courtesy, order, and penmanship were dismal; she barely passed Christian doctrine and observance of school rules. She did slightly better in history, diction, and composition.
“I heard about you skipping school,” Marianna Walsh wrote sternly to her friend. “Too bad you got caught but you just can’t get away with that anymore.” Marianna remembered George and Mildred buying their youngest daughter a watch as a graduation present.
“Take back the watch,” Stritch declared at the DAC. “I want to go to New York.” A nun had told her about a finishing school affiliated with the Sacred Heart that she could attend while exploring the dramatic arts. “I wanted to split and go see what was really going on. It was sort of my French foreign legion,” Elaine said years later. “I was okay, I was a funny kid, I was laughing all the time, I had a wonderful time and then I grew into total fear and misery for some reason. I was looking for a bunch of people that wanted to get together and do something.”
To find herself, she would have to not only diverge from the paths that had been previously trod but in essence disappear entirely into other characters. “One life wasn’t enough for me,” she proclaimed once. “I wanted to be a nurse, a doctor, a whore, and a queen.” Another time, more subdued: “I wasn’t too hung up on myself and I wanted to be everyone else I could think of.”
* * *
It has long been part of the Stritch mythos that she hopped on the Detroiter train all alone, and that a lecture from her father about how she was “not the same after two martinis” sent her caroming straight to the bar car. But in fact she had several companions, and a chaperone who probably did not let her get too out of hand. On September 26, 1943, the women’s page of the Detroit Free Press announced that a Mrs. Albert F. Wall would be taking her two daughters to the Duchesne Residence School, a Catholic finishing school in New York. Accompanying them would be Mary Bartemeier and Elaine Stritch, aged eighteen. Elaine was in search of an Emerald City, but also a vocation, as practical in its way as stenography.
Having observed her friend’s repartee with George, Mildred, Georgene, and Sally for many years, Sterr thought this course of action entirely logical.
“They all seemed to be on stage all the time,” she said of the Stritch family. “Each one trying to be wittier than the last.”
Copyright © 2019 by Alexandra Jacobs
