Golden Honeymoon

Golden Honeymoon (See front cover)

This week, with the publication of her fiftieth book,* Kathleen Norris celebrated the golden honeymoon of her marriage to her art, her craft, or whatever the turning out of three or four high-priced serials a year may be called. But just as one day in her native California is much like another, even when it comes to anniversary days, so her fiftieth book, Woman in Love, resembles all the other Kathleen Norris books. It has the usual Cinderella heroine, with nice looks, good impulses, a warm heart and high-minded scruples.

This time Cinderella is called Tamara Todhunter. Convent-bred (Mrs. Norris is a Catholic), Tamara goes forth into a wicked world with resolutions about life that do not stand up when a honey-tongued cinemactor comes a-wooing. Trouble arrives with the child of their illicit union, but virtue triumphs when Tamara gets herself an honest-to-goodness husband named George who is willing to be a father by proxy.

Mrs. Norris writes pattern stuff that always moves, however circuitously, to the happy end. "The reason why people like my books," she says, "is that I write of life as I want it to be." Since Mrs. Norris follows the dictates of her Church, the heroines in her stories can never get divorces, never practice birth control. As a result of this strict plot limitation, only the death of any who block her heroine's way can lead to a happy ending. And death stalks the pages of Mrs. Norris' novels as grimly and certainly as in a Greek tragedy. Two have to die in Woman in Love. First Tamara's seducer, Mayne Mallory, kills his wife. Then, after he has tried to blackmail Tamara's George, a lawyer, into taking his case through the courts, Mayne gets his own come-uppance when his victim's husband knocks him down, inadvertently killing him. Jail for manslaughter separates George and Tarn for a period, but California Justice appears more kind to Mrs. Norris' hero than to Tom Mooney.

Tamara is the type of all Norris heroines, who are so alike that not even their creator herself can recall all of them. Little ladies, they usually begin without money. Life treats them roughly, and more than one of them has had to cope with the burden of bearing an illegitimate child. But they are never defiled by pitch; they always sin through kindness or trustfulness; they ultimately marry. They improve their minds by studying French, Italian, music, cooking. Model girls, they are just what Mrs. Norris' large, enthusiastic audience of older women, young stenographers, people of circumscribed life and mothers of young girls want--and would like to be.

Author-Actress. Mrs. Norris says of her life, "It's just neutral." Yet she certainly fits no stereotyped category as a producer of literary lumber. A charming, friendly, incredibly busy woman, she is a concocter of treacly yarns, a romantic who laps up travel literature (Arctic exploration, mountain climbing), a sophisticated and often rampageous wit and practical joker, an amateur actress of talent, a deadly croquet player, a dynamo of energy that can leap from typewriter to cooking pot to evening dress and back again, a wife, a mother, a chatelaine, all in one highly individual bundle.

Mrs. Norris is the joy of her family, a delight to the most successful wits in Manhattan, whose books, plays, columns or magazines may deride the very qualities Kathleen Norris' novels champion. George Kaufman, Harold Ross, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott are doting friends. She remains abstract in any crowd, never gives the appearance of listening. When Corinne Roosevelt Robinson tried to tell her once that her brother liked her book, Mother, Mrs. Norris vaguely got him confused with a doctor in Buffalo, made a mental note that it was probably the obstetrical parts of her story that appealed to her medical admirer. Later she was told that Mrs. Robinson's brother was President Theodore Roosevelt.*

She is an endless conversationalist, at her best when she takes off in a nonsensical plane of pretense. Her favorite jape is to pose as an abandoned woman who is living in sin with her author-husband, Charles G. ("Ceegee") Norris (Bread, Brass, Salt). This tomfoolery runs on & on, like a Chinese play, with "Kay" Norris ringing all the changes on her alleged state of total depravity.

Last autumn her talent for mimicry and histrionics was displayed before an admiring hometown audience, in the amateur theatre of the Palo Alto Community Players. Asked to take the part of the Widow Cagle in Lula Vollmers play of southern mountaineer white trash, Sun-Up (see front cover), Mrs. Norris was worried because the role required a series of hearty pulls on a corncob pipe. She had never smoked in her life, thought herself at 54 too old to begin. But her stage director was adamant. So, experimenting first with cubebs, later with cubeb tobacco stuffed into the bowl, she eventually learned to keep the corncob puffing. She now confesses to enjoying a smoke, is having difficulty breaking herself of the habit.

Acting, however, is not the grand passion of Mrs. Norris' life. Her paramount pastime is croquet, at which she excels. The Norris summer ranch, La Estancia, at Saratoga, Calif., is virtually built around the croquet court, which is lined with floodlights for night games. The Norris croquet is an invention of their own, combining features of billiards and golf. Played with no boundaries, it is a matter of composition rubber balls, mallets of snakewood made in Manhattan. Mrs. Norris can get inordinately angry at her croquet partners when they are bad. Guests on the 200-acre estate are not chosen for their proficiency at the game, but it is an unfortunate guest who plays a bad game of croquet with the expert Norrises.

La Estancia was originally acquired as an escape from devoted readers who "just couldn't go home without seeing Kathleen Norris." It is a rambling, comfortable house with 14 small guest cabins by a ravine, 14 acres of decorative prune trees, broad lawns, flowers, a swimming pool, a theatre with a 7-foot stage for family theatricals, loud speakers by both croquet court and pool. The ranch is under the special care of "Ceegee," who does the hiring, firing and ordering. Of a week-end there will be from ten to 25 guests at La Estancia. Harpo Marx came for a day, stayed a week. Two Chinese cooks, a butler, a second man, a maid for the cabins, take care of the guests, except at luncheon, which is prepared by Mrs. Norris herself in a picnic grove cookhouse.

Luncheon dishes are usually washed by the children. And there have been plenty of children around. Mrs. Norris has brooded over as many as 17 nephews, nieces and sons (one real, one adopted) at a time. At the moment, she is highly exhilarated at the prospect of an expected grandchild. She had two little girls of her own and lost them both. Her motherly proclivities have enabled her to take care of the three children of Poet William Rose Benet, who married Mrs. Norris' sister, the late Teresa Thompson; the children of another sister, Margaret; the children of her three brothers, Joe, Fred and Jim. Most of the children are growing up to high school and college ages. Brother Joe, an atheist, is divorced from his first wife, and has remarried; Husband "Ceegee" is a "black Protestant." Catholic Kathleen, however, gets along frictionlessly with them both. When "Ceegee" is not at his own 6-hour daily writing stint, he is apt to be shopping for "Kay." He buys all her clothes which she regards as a boon, not a presumption.

Serial Queen. Mrs. Norris looks like Queen Elizabeth, without the red hair. With no England to rule, she is sovereign in her own sphere, that of the magazine serial. She can sit down and write, any time, any place, with no inhibitions, whether after breakfast, before the theatre or after midnight. Individual authors have received more for a single serial than Kathleen Norris (Temple Bailey's top price is supposedly $85,000), but as a steady money-maker Mrs. Norris tops them all. Her present contract with Crowell Publishing Co. probably brings her $75,000 apiece for three stories--some $225,000 a year. She regularly begins a serial in Collier's in July, in The American in October, in Woman's Home Companion in April.

Mrs. Norris' novels have earned her more than a million dollars, and her articles, short stories and newspaper features (she is currently covering the Hauptmann trial for North American Newspaper Alliance) have helped to swell the pot. Her career as a big money-maker began with Mother, published by Macmillan in 1911. Mother has sold more than 900,000 copies. Until after the World War, authors made most of their money out of book sales, with Gene Stratton Porter, Harold Bell Wright and Winston Churchill leading the way. After 1920 women's magazines commenced to attract big advertisers and the prices offered for serials were so huge that Porter and Wright gave way to that form of mass production. But Mrs. Norris was already a leader in the field. Mother was serialized by Ladies' Home Journal after publication as a book, but the later Norris novels went into the magazines before book publication. Mrs. Norris turns her serials out with such speed that although she publishes three books a year she is still some five or six novels ahead of her publisher at the present moment. And her books go on selling: Sophisticated book shops sell few of Mrs. Norris' books in $2 editions, but each new one finds some place on the lists of best-sellers and always lands first on the list of best renters compiled by circulating libraries. Her 75-c- reprints go like hot cakes.

Her decision to go in for money-making mass production probably came after the relative failure of her one really serious novel, Certain People of Importance (1922), which she wrote when critical friends told her that her serials were spoiling her as a writer. On Certain People of Importance, which was not serialized, $25,000 was spent in advertising, but it was not a success. Mrs. Norris has since been well-paid for letting art go hang. With her frankly commercial short stories, her articles, her popular books, her second serials, her moving picture rights, her lectures, her household hints and miscellaneous works, she makes close to $300,000 a year, probably more than any other woman in the U. S. today.

*WOMAN IN LOVE--Kathleen Norris--Double-day, Doran ($2).

*Roosevelt I boosted Mother, as he did many another book when in office. When Penrod appeared he allowed his picture, taken reading a copy of the book in a train, to be used in advertising.

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