After the Miracle, page 18
Money concerns had, in fact, long weighed on the duo, despite the fact that Helen had earned vast sums since she graduated from Radcliffe—more than enough for the average American to live comfortably many times over. Although Andrew Carnegie had died a year earlier, she was still receiving the $5,000 annuity he had bestowed as a life trust. She also received income of more than $800 a year from a trust established before she entered Radcliffe, plus significant royalties from The Story of My Life along with a smaller trickle from the sale of her other books.15 In addition, she and Annie were receiving dividends from various investments totaling thousands of dollars per year. Their earnings in 1920, in fact, were more than six times the average household income in the United States.16 And yet it was never enough.
A complete picture of their finances is still murky, but there is evidence that the financial problems led directly to John Macy. It had been more than five years since John left Annie for good in early 1915. Annie had steadfastly refused to grant him a divorce, although there were reports that in the years since their separation John had taken up with a “deaf-mute sculptress” named Myla and was supporting a child he had with her out of wedlock.17 Annie had taken the separation hard and was still grief-stricken by the breakdown of the marriage. Taking full advantage of the situation, Macy had been bleeding Annie dry for years—well aware that Helen had always shared her vast financial resources with Teacher and that Annie considered herself a partner in Helen’s enterprises. “The genius is hers, but much of the drudgery is mine,” Annie wrote a friend in 1905 explaining their financial partnership.18 She was from all indications a soft touch, unable to say no to the husband who had abandoned her.
Helen expressed her frustration in a letter to her mother in 1920 updating Kate about their financial troubles. “We don’t see John now,” she wrote. “I was really disgusted with him, mother. He kept asking, dunning Teacher for money. Now, you know it is money I am trying to earn to provide for Teacher, not to waste on John.”19 In a letter she sent to her sister, Mildred, she explained that the income the two had earned on the lecture circuit before the war had been “largely spent improving our house in Wrentham and paying debts incurred by John… I am telling you all this, Mildred, to show you that we had a hard row to hoe most of the time. No doubt, we might have managed better if we had had ‘business sense.’ I do not have to tell you that Teacher and I do not know anything about money, except to spend it.”20
To protect their dwindling finances, as well as Annie’s fragile emotional state, Helen appears to have finally made the decision to cut John off from their lives for good, despite the fact that there were continued business-related matters relating to The Story of My Life, which he had coauthored, and two other books for which he had acted as literary agent. Helen and Annie had long since sold the Wrentham house and moved to Maine for a period before buying a house in Forest Hills, New York, in 1917—seemingly without leaving him a forwarding address.21 His frustration is reflected in a series of revealing letters he wrote during this period, which provide important clues about both John’s character and the nature of his complicated relationship with Helen.
Despite his estrangement from Annie, John persisted in writing to Helen on a wide range of topics ranging from the political to the mundane. Most of these letters went unanswered, but it did not stop him from begging her to meet. Two years after he left, Macy had written an acclaimed history of the US radical movement titled Socialism in America—siding with the militant wing of the party. It should have cemented his place as a leading light of the movement. Years earlier, the trio of John, Annie, and Helen had entertained many of the best-known figures of the American Left at their lively Wrentham home. The conventional narrative suggests that these figures were part of John’s circle—friends he had cultivated since he first joined the Socialist Party. In the years that followed, however, many of these high-profile radicals had maintained strong friendships with Helen rather than John, as evidenced by her voluminous correspondence with figures such as Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, Horace Traubel, Arturo Giovannitti, and Joseph Ettor. The letters from John during this period provide a strong clue as to his attitudes around her political activities. They are in turn condescending, insulting, and petty, while revealing him to be vain and tremendously insecure.
“I wanted to see you… but you were not in the phone book,” he wrote Helen in January 1918. “I don’t know what Annie’s ideas are now or how clearly she sees things. Perhaps she will not trust my judgment. But it is very good, because I am in constant communication with two or three wise men.”22 Helen had continued to write political essays in the radical press and John was evidently following them closely. “As for your writings, ‘The Invincible Revolution’ is right in spirit, and will do good,” he wrote her. “But you go up in the air and say things you can’t back up, can’t make good. For example, my dear, you say, ‘Read the literature of France, Germany, and Russia the last sixty years and you will be convinced.’ Then you mention a string of people, three of whose names you misspell. And then, how much of the European literature of the last sixty years have you read?”23
After Helen wrote President Wilson pleading for the release of her IWW colleagues rounded up under the Espionage Act—a letter widely reprinted in the socialist press—he wrote again, admonishing her:
Your letter to the President might be useful as an open letter to be published in the Call for the sake of propaganda. But don’t send it to the President. It is too much like his own way of thinking! Forgive me for saying that, but it is true. And you put impertinent things. For example, “a Bolsheviki mind.” Bolsheviki is plural, and you would not say an Englishmen mind. And besides, what the dickens do you know about the Bolsheviki? I cannot tell you what to do with your letter. It is admirable and adorable in spirit as you are, but regarded as a useful intellectual production, as something I should like to see under your signature, no, it won’t do. Irony is not your strong suit. You don’t know that game at all.24
One of their longtime mutual friends was John Reed, a socialist comrade who had traveled to Russia to cover the revolution and had spent time with many of the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and Trotsky. Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power, Helen sent Reed money to book a return passage to America, where he would soon publish his landmark work, Ten Days That Shook the World, about the October Revolution. Learning about her patronage of their old friend, Macy sent Helen another letter chiding her for her support. “I don’t like your having sent money to Jack Reed,” he wrote in February 1918. “He is able to take care of himself. Besides, it makes no difference whether he stays in Russia or comes home or is stranded on the remotest South Sea island. No difference, I mean, to you or any idea or cause or principle that you are interested in. NO American correspondent who doesn’t know Russian can tell us anything of value… You will also get much out of Trotsky’s book… but Jack Reed is not worth ten cents, except to himself, in Russia.” And in an inappropriately controlling turn, he requested that “if anyone asks you for money, you might let me know. I have many excellent sources of information and the steadiest of advisers.”25
In another missive complaining about her public support for her IWW comrades, he implies that she has a messiah complex:
If you could do any practical good now by coming out in support of the IWW, I should cheer you on, no matter what the cause or sacrifice. But you can do nothing, precisely because you are you. You will alienate sympathy and rouse increased resentment against the IWW, which will be accused of having misled your dear innocent soul… The worst possible person to plead for the IWW now would be Jesus. Besides, don’t you see that it will be a good thing to send a few men and women to jail now? It will strengthen the organisation. The victims can stand it, but YOU KEEP OUT.26
Aside from providing a rare window into his own personality, these letters offer some revealing clues to John’s feelings about Helen’s status as a celebrity of the American Left. Even as he desperately craved acceptance in radical circles, he had repeatedly found himself overshadowed by Helen and her fame. With this in mind, we might also reevaluate the circumstances surrounding his resignation as secretary to Mayor Lunn shortly before Helen’s scheduled arrival in Schenectady in the fall of 1912. Could Mayor Lunn’s unexplained failure to offer Helen a post on the Board of Welfare—after previously announcing his intention in the press—have a different explanation than Helen had been led to believe? Could John have, in fact, derailed the job offer in a fit of jealousy after her imminent arrival became national news?
Whatever his private motivations, there is no question that his profligate spending and debts were the primary reason Helen agreed to exhibit herself on the vaudeville stage, which she would later explain as her desire to protect Annie. She feared Teacher would be left “destitute” if Helen predeceased her.27 “Years later when Teacher and I did ‘exhibit’ ourselves in Vaudeville, we had no other means of support. My writings had not brought in enough,” she wrote. “At first everything seemed to be against us. We had gambled for big stakes at Hollywood and lost… I almost lost heart when I reflected that if I failed, I knew that Teacher would suffer even more from the snarl of the tiger and the tooth of the wolf that constitute part of man’s nature.”28
In the 1890s, Arthur Keller, mired in debt, had been approached by a vaudeville promoter to feature the teenage Helen on the circuit at a staggering salary of $500 per week, but Annie had refused to entertain the prospect at the time. Now, Helen was once again being offered vast sums of money to display herself in a “dignified” fashion, and this time the offer was too good to pass up.
The act was built around a drawing room set. Annie launched the show with a twenty-minute description of Helen’s life beginning with the miracle at the water pump followed by her acquisition of speech, her graduation from Radcliffe, and her friendship with Mark Twain. At this point, Helen herself would enter the room, walk toward a piano onstage, and declare, “It is very beautiful,” followed by a demonstration of lipreading, finger spelling, and a mawkish speech. “Alone we can do so little,” she addressed the audience. “Together we can do so much. Only love can break down the walls that stand between us and our happiness. The greatest commandment is: ‘Love ye one another.’ I lift up my voice and thank the Lord for love and joy and the promise of life to come.”29
The press and the public ate it up. “Before she had been on the stage two minutes,” wrote one New York paper, “Helen Keller had conquered again, and the Monday afternoon audience at the Palace, one of the most critical and cynical in the world, was hers.”30
Many reviewers were especially struck by Helen’s “bright blue eyes,” which one paper wrote had “the deceptive appearance of being unusually strong and clear.”31 This was the first time most of the audience had ever seen her in person. Few realized that one of those eyes had been implanted years before to replace a protruding eye, presumably resulting from the original childhood ailment that left her deafblind. As a result, for most of her early life, Helen was almost always photographed from a strategic angle to avoid portraying what must have been considered a “deformity.” In 1911, she had paid $10 to a Boston optician for an artificial left eye to prepare her for public display on the lecture circuit.32
Although the first half of the show followed a carefully conceived script, the highlight for many audience-goers was Helen’s impromptu responses to audience questions following the main performance. “Miss Keller displayed a pretty wit in reply to some questions asked by the audience,” wrote one reviewer, “and she ‘came back’ several times with a quickness and good humor that the keenest of experienced monologists might well have envied.”33
A year before Helen made her vaudeville debut at the Palace, a group of writers and show business figures had begun meeting at the nearby Algonquin Hotel, where their wit would earn them a glittering reputation as they traded fast-paced repartee and gossip—exchanges that would often find their way into the columns of New York newspapers. Helen, in fact, would later befriend three of the most prominent denizens of the famed Algonquin Round Table—writer Dorothy Parker, drama critic Alexander Woollcott, and film star Harpo Marx.34 Harpo would later tell a reporter that he often found it difficult to keep up with Helen’s droll sense of humor, despite his own reputation as a comedian and member of the celebrated Marx Brothers. “I’ll best her yet!” he vowed to one reporter. “I’ll learn a new joke.”35
Judging by Helen’s responses to some of the questions posed to her onstage during her vaudeville career, she would not have been out of place herself at the Round Table. A sample of the questions and answers during these sessions provides a good example of the lightning wit that often left the audiences roaring with laughter.36
Q: (During Prohibition). What do you think is the most important question for the country today?
A: How to get a drink.
Q: Do you approve of giving every man a job to fit his brain?
A: I’m afraid if we tried to do that, it would throw too many people out of work permanently.
Q: Do you think women are men’s intellectual equals?
A: I think God made woman foolish so that she might be a suitable companion to man.
Q: Do you think all men are born equal?
A: I think all men are born equally stupid.
Q: What is the slowest thing in the world?
A: Congress.
Q: Does Miss Keller think of marriage?
A: Yes, are you proposing to me?37
While her radical political opinions had been excised from Deliverance, over which she had little creative control, vaudeville offered a chance to share her beliefs about politics and disability issues. The audience was often taken aback by her fiercely held convictions, many of which hold up remarkably well today:
Q: What do you think of capitalism?
A: I think it has outlived its usefulness.
Q: Do you think that all political prisoners should be released?
A: Certainly. They opposed the World War on the ground that it was a commercial war. Now everyone with a grain of sense says it was. Their crime is they said it first.
Q: What did America gain by the First World War?
A: The American Legion and a bunch of other troubles.
Q: Do you think the voice of the people is heard at the polls?
A: No. I think money talks so loudly that the voice of the people is drowned.
Q: Who are the three greatest men of our time?
A: Lenin, Edison, and Charlie Chaplin.
Q: What is the greatest obstacle to universal peace?
A: The human race.
Q: What do you think of Soviet Russia?
A: Soviet Russia is the first organized attempt of the workers to establish an order of society in which human life and happiness shall be of first importance, and not the conservation of property for a privileged class.
Q: What do you think of Harvard College’s discrimination against the Jews?
A: I think when any institution of learning applies any test other than scholarship, it has ceased to be a public service institution. Harvard, in discriminating against the Jew and the Negro on grounds other than intellectual qualifications, has proved itself unworthy of its traditions and covered itself with shame.
Q: Which is the greatest affliction, deafness, dumbness, blindness?
A: None.
Q: What then is the greatest human affliction?
A: Boneheadedness.38
The tour was lucrative, sometimes paying as much as $1,000 for a single night’s appearance. For a time, vaudeville provided the much-needed financial security that the two women had been seeking. More importantly, Helen appeared to be enjoying herself immensely, even if Annie found the experience decidedly unpleasant. “My teacher was not happy in Vaudeville,” she later recalled. “She could never get used to the rush, glare and noise of the theatre, but I enjoyed it keenly… I found the world of Vaudeville much more amusing than the world I had always lived in, and I liked it. I liked to feel the warm tide of human life pulsing around me.” Employing the figurative language she often used to describe experiences vividly communicated to her by her companions, she added, “I enjoyed watching the actors in the workshop of faces and costumes.”39
As lucrative as the vaudeville circuit was, there were those who did not approve of Helen displaying herself for entertainment purposes. “At first it seemed odd to find ourselves on the same bill as acrobats, monkeys, horses, dogs, and parrots,” Helen recalled, “but our little act was dignified and people seemed to like it.”40 Dignified or not, Helen’s four-year vaudeville career is another aspect of her life that hasn’t held up well under the harsh light of history. Disability historian Susan Crutchfield has noted that vaudeville was often noted for featuring “freak acts,” and that the marketing of Helen’s performances was often indistinguishable from other such attractions. “Reviews continued to place her routine in the freak act category by means of language one might expect to hear from a sideshow barker luring his audience into the tent,” Crutchfield writes. “Thus, these reviews illuminate the freak show appeal of her act, the degree to which its interest turned on Keller’s unique persona rather than her unique talents.”41 She cites one ad that illustrates this phenomenon:
