But Jimmy was a genius, “a sort of genius,” Dinah said, a man of such energy and breadth of mind as to escape prosaic classification. The vivid elegance of his prose, to begin with, remained unmatched among his colleagues in journalism. “No other American correspondent of this century (if ever?),” said one, “has sustainably produced such peerless evocations in English.” Again and again, he wrote novels, which never quite hit home with critics or the public: “He still thought he was a fiction writer. He wrote as though he were Tolstoy or Turgenev or Balzac. It didn’t come out that way.” Journalist, author, mystic, seer, “wild, visionary, and sometimes hallucinated Irishman,” as Dinah said — Jimmy Sheean was all of these things and she never tried to get in the way of his professional pursuits.
“I certainly would never feel that a cause, or an idea that Jimmy felt strongly enough about, should be made to take second place to a personal relationship,” she wrote. “A man who does that does not have my respect.” She regretted while she lived that no biographer came along of the mettle he required, a writer who “caught the spirit,” not just the facts, of Sheean and his enterprise, “someone with the touch of the poet.” Several tried to do it, one of them even before Jimmy died in 1975, an American doctoral student who produced a long, plodding thesis of Jimmy’s life before dying tragically in a car crash. Jimmy called him the “torturer” or the "obituarian." He had trailed the Sheeans in Arolo with a tape recorder running, irritating Jimmy to such a point that he broke an abstinence of some standing and retreated to the bottle. Drink was the catalyst for his crises always. “He was surely alcoholic on top of everything,” Dinah admitted, knowing the same about herself.
She was pregnant almost immediately after their marriage and gave birth to a daughter, Linda, in May 1936. After leaving Salzburg, the Sheeans had gone back to Italy, spent the winter in Egypt and Palestine, and then turned up in Dublin, a rambling way of life that Dinah would need to get used to. Jimmy had wanted to write about Ireland, some great history of the land and its people, but “found its conflicts too destroying to cope with,” Dinah said, and started drinking. And drinking. In July, on the day that civil war broke out in Spain, he suffered a complete mental breakdown, roaring up and down the stairs of a rented house in County Meath with a kitchen knife in his hands and swearing to kill anyone who got in his way. He was “out of his mind,” said Dinah, now nursing a baby and near to panic in a marriage not yet a year old. Straight-jacketed, subdued by male nurses, he was taken to Switzerland on an “air ambulance,” the Florence Nightingale, which made headlines internationally: “SHEEAN’S DASH FROM DUBLIN TO GENEVA.” He stayed for six weeks at Les Rives de Prangins, the same private hospital that had treated Zelda Fitzgerald a few years before. Personal History paid the whopping bill.
"From a scientific viewpoint you should know that I had what the doctors call a `syndrome collapse' in July 1936,” Jimmy wrote later to a doctor in New York. “In that collapse, which received no physical explanation from the eleven doctors who were employed on the case, I lost consciousness for a period of time which I think was five weeks.” He credited his future “visions” and psychic capacities to this breakdown in particular, although for Dinah the experience was merely terrifying. A long convalescence followed in Paris, where Jimmy’s friend Ève Curie found the Sheeans a house while Jimmy translated Curie’s book about her mother, Madame Curie, a giant success of 1937 that did little to raise his spirits. A nurse had come to help with the baby, Elizabeth Burden – called “Burden” always -- without whose “good sense and good humor,” Dinah said, “I probably would not have survived.”
Why did she stay? She had two elder sisters with brief first marriages behind them; a divorce or annulment could never have shocked the Forbes-Robertson clan. Aunt Maxine, the now aging Maxine Elliott, had had two divorces before giving up romance entirely. “Men?” she said. “The best thing I know about a man is his back, going out the door.”
Dinah took Jimmy to meet her family in England not long after their wedding, where he passed muster with her mother and old Forbes-Robertson (who had been “rehearsing his name for weeks in order not to forget it when they met”). Lady Forbes-Robertson – the actress Gertrude Elliott -- was American, born in Rockland, Maine under the name of Dermot, which she and Maxine abandoned as they rose to a fame not normally known to the daughters of seacoast fishermen. The light of Maxine’s celebrity, in particular, shone bright on her nieces’ lives, hotter than they would have liked, Dinah said. Childless herself, Maxine made up for it by “positively smothering” her sister’s children with benefits and favor.
“[She] adored us,” Dinah wrote, “planned for us, built nurseries for us, … lavished presents on us, and when she died endowed us for life.” But she was clumsy with children, autocratic in her manner, and “incapable of understanding our sudden shyness or rapid retreats when she asked us to perform parlor tricks before strangers. She was indulgent without thought.” Having retired from the stage, Maxine now devoted her time to managing her investments and her lofty company, entertaining hordes of celebrities at her palace on the Côte d’Azur, the Château de l’Horizon, specially built for her in Golfe-Juan, not far from Cannes. Completely white, it was set into the rocks of the coastline and boasted the largest swimming pool on the Riviera, famously equipped with a water slide that led directly to the sea. Here you might meet anyone from Charlie Chaplin to Pablo Picasso, the Duke of Windsor, the Mitford sisters, or Winston Churchill, who came every year to paint on Maxine’s terrace. Her hospitality knew no distinction as to class or social position. Notoriety was all she looked for.
“I'm not ashamed to say that it scares me green,” Jimmy wrote to Jamie Hamilton before his first trip to Maxine’s fairyland in 1935. “What on earth can I say to Winston Churchill? Aside from Yes Sir and No Sir? … You and Dinah will have to give me aid and sustenance -- except that I gather Dinah is just as scared as I am, or more so."
She was, not of Maxine so much as her atmosphere, with crowds of people filling the château at all times and a resulting need to be always on form. “Droves came for swimming,” she remembered, “droves for lunch; there were always dinner parties for small numbers, and always at least six or eight people staying in the house.” It was exhausting work, the ordeal made worse by Maxine’s critical eye for fashion and demeanor. “I will get hell,” said Dinah in a letter to a friend, “because I have got so much fatter and she will complain all the time about how horrible I look in a bathing suit, and then kick up a great row if I don’t put one on and hurl myself without stopping down her water chute. Jimmy says that to shut her up as far as he is concerned, he will appear once in a pair of bathing trunks, and then she’ll never ask for a second look.”
Maxine Elliott at the height of her career, 1901
But she gave the Sheeans an apartment in Paris – at 8, rue St. Honoré d’Eylau, in the 16th arrondissement – to provide a proper address for her niece. No one should marry a writer, Maxine declared. Paris would be the Sheeans’ home base in Europe until the outbreak of World War II, through the ups and downs of world events and Jimmy’s multiple “episodes” and breakdowns. Dinah credited the “continual excitement” of her husband’s life for her determination to stick with him through repeated bouts of depression and derangement – the “beglamourment,” she called it, “the general excitement I got out of planes leaving for distant parts, big talk, and the 'people who did something in the world.’” They dropped by casually: Gertrude Stein, Henri Bergson and Ève Curie, Chaliapin, Duncan Grant, princes and grand dukes of bygone empires, and “Ernest,” the mighty Hemingway, who in 1937 “got Jimmy all riled up” about the now raging war in Spain. Jimmy’s health was still uncertain, and Hemingway took the moment to strike.
“You stay here and be comfortable, kid,” he said; “I’ll go to Spain for you.” Another collapse ensued, and more drinking, until, in February 1938, the Sheeans departed for New York. It was Dinah’s first trip to the United States and a commotion from start to finish. There were parties every night, cocktails and dinners, receptions, interviews, news photographers, and endless “speech-making.” She was introduced everywhere as “Jimmy’s wife” and had little to do but look on as he veered to the edge of “shemozzle and shebang.” Eventually he was hospitalized for “neuritis,” a general inflammation of the nerves. It gave Dinah a little relief.
“It’s something to do with coming here,” she wrote, “with the effect that his own place has on him, and the effect that he has on people here – they are very silly about him, lionize him terrifically, and fuss over him, and that terrific self-consciousness of his starts getting fed.” She loved New York and said that she could stay there forever, but felt inferior among the crowds of journalists and writers, irrelevant, and “silly.” Her theatre heritage, fortunately – the name of Forbes-Robertson – won her friends among actors and Broadway luminaries, some of whom even bowed to her on presentation. Apart from playwright Philip Barry, she became close to Thornton Wilder, whose Our Town had just premiered; and to Dorothy Parker, a friend of Jimmy’s already, with whom she enjoyed getting drunk without Jimmy on the scene. Dinah’s letters from that year reflect her complete bewilderment about the man she had married:
It is a confusing business, because sometimes I get so sure that if I could only stop him from drinking, then everything would be all right, and then he drinks for long periods at a time when he is not particularly fit, and everything is prepared for a first rate crack up, and he remains absolutely all right, and throws all my ideas out of gear. … You can’t argue with a drunken man, and you can’t argue with a man the morning after when he has a hell of a hangover and agrees heartily with every word you say. … Of course drink is not the main cause of his trouble, but it certainly makes the business about twenty times as hard. … I don’t seem to be able to do a thing. … I am sorry that I always return to this subject, but of course it is of the very vitalest importance to me, it is really a case of whether life can go on or not.
But it did, as it would. The Sheeans both got to Spain later in 1938, Jimmy doing some of his finest reporting as the Republican government fell and Dinah finding unknown talents and courage in herself while raising funds and making radio speeches for the relief of Spanish children in the war. They were in Vienna that summer after the Nazi Anschluss and in Prague a few months later, when Hitler’s armies annexed the Sudetenland. These places were beloved by them both, and the atmosphere of defeat, the swastikas everywhere, and “the feeling of suspicion and fear” were more than Dinah could put into words.
“I just feel utterly sick with hatred of this beastliness,” she wrote, “something that for heartrending and agonizing distress I’ll never see equaled.” A return to America saw them in Vermont, ensconced in the “Old House” at Twin Farms. Jimmy was back and forth from Europe and Dinah was pregnant again, giving birth to a second daughter, Ellen, just after Hitler invaded Poland. They left the baby with Burden, the nurse, and went to Italy in the spring of 1940, then to Paris to pack up their belongings and ship them to England while there was still time. Paris fell to Hitler in May, and at Jimmy’s insistence Dinah went back to the United States without him. She spent the summer in Maine and then, on Jimmy’s return, they rented Dorothy Thompson’s house in Bronxville, north of New York City, which in February 1941 burned to the ground with them in it – rather, as they leaped out of second and third floor windows with bruises, sprained limbs, and isolated burns, flinging the children to Burden on the lawn.
This was news. Dinah remembered mostly how fast the fire had spread. She had gone to bed while Jimmy listened to a recording of Kirsten Flagstad in Götterdämmerung. She actually heard Flagstad singing Brünnhilde’s Immolation, then woke to smoke and flames around five in the morning, “calm and lucid” as she gathered the children, noting how each piece of furniture in their rooms seemed to have been set alight separately, as if individually with a match. Her left arm and leg were burned as they fled but she didn’t notice it until later. Jimmy aimed for a clump of bushes and landed in a concealed areaway that let light into the basement of the house, escaping with a scorched nose and “singed hair,” according to news reports.
Lost in the blaze were the children’s cocker spaniel, “oil paintings by Matisse, Braque and Picasso,” hundreds of books from Dorothy Thompson’s library, and “expensive furnishings,” for which Dorothy, as Dinah noted dryly, was “beautifully insured, of course.” There were “ridiculous goings-on with Dorothy as a landlady,” and when she – Dorothy – bought a new house in New York, she threatened to put up a plaque that read, “Dorothy Thompson owns this house thanks to the Sheean family.” The manuscript of Jimmy’s next novel, Bird of the Wilderness, was rescued intact from a desk: “Although flames had gutted the room, they had not eaten through the desk drawer to the sheaf of papers.” Later another fire destroyed a second Sheean residence in New York, leading Dinah to conclude that “permanent domiciles” were not her thing: “There seems to be a jinx on having a home.”
She was writing a book of her own at that time, a novel, which may have been the genesis of her theatre story, A Cat and a King. She began and abandoned so many manuscripts that it’s difficult to separate one from another, but she liked this one and was encouraged by the work as it progressed.
“I have no idea whether it is good, bad or indifferent,” she reported to Louis Fischer, a particular friend she had made among Jimmy’s “journalist lot,” “but I work easily without great effort, and enjoy it. … I am sure that the only hope for a piece of work is for it to be taken seriously by its creator, and at first, I had a deprecatory and apologetic point of view about anything I wrote, as you know, but that is going, and soon I am going to be talking about ‘my art’, you just see if I’m not.” With Roger Straus, Jr., then editor of Current History magazine, she produced a volume of War Letters from Britain, then went to London herself, without the children. It was there, in the Blitz, that her eyes opened fully to a marriage that had broken down, thwarted, she believed, by Jimmy’s enduring neglect of her need for physical love and affection. She had had an affair with Straus.
“Jimmy knew he wasn’t equipped for it,” she explained to me, “mentally or emotionally. He just wasn’t made that way. And I was.” He was reporting for The Saturday Evening Post while Dinah worked with Robert Capa on their book about wartime London. Did she sleep with Capa then or later? Is this when she met her longtime paramour, her on-and-off companion and suitor, the Hungarian Dr. Tibor Csato, scientist, philosopher, musician, and socialite, who worked in the war with her brother-in-law at a college for young aviators in Reading? She certainly began an affair with “Wild Bill” Donovan not long after -- William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II -- a "stocky little grey-haired bundle of energy," as she described him to me, for whom she also worked as an agent under the codename “Mary Forbes.” Dinah told me nothing of what her OSS activities had entailed, remembering her time with Donovan only in personal terms. He was, she said, “a dynamic lover.”
Obviously, her marriage couldn’t go on as it was. At age 42, Jimmy enlisted in the Army and was posted with Air Intelligence to North Africa. “He preferred light to darkness,” a commentator wrote, “freedom to slavery, and he firmly believed that each person had a responsibility to contribute something to insure liberty on the earth.” But military life bored him to tears. He too hoped to work in espionage with Bill Donovan, who kept promising him an assignment in the OSS and failing to deliver, doubtless over confusion about Dinah. Jimmy definitely didn’t know about Donovan’s affair with his wife, or Capa’s, although his suspicions of Dinah’s unfaithfulness sent him into fits and would be a theme of their dissension for many years. He reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Army but felt wasted in the sands of Tunisia and Morocco and came back to the United States in 1944 “feeling singularly useless,” “agitated beyond measure over the moral bankruptcy” he saw emerging from the world fight against tyranny: “The war years were over and the glory was beginning to fade from Jimmy’s life. … His name, once magic, was slipping out of coinage. The long winter was settling in and he found himself morose and alone.”
Dinah, meanwhile, had been working for The New York Post, reprinting “items of interest” from various magazines for “what I pretend is a column,” as she put it. “It isn’t really at all, but it fills the space that a column does, and looks like a column, the only trouble is it isn’t a column.” She was much noted and interviewed in the war years – “daughter of the famous Forbes-Robertson” – sounding perfectly featherbrained in society columns, chirping about parties and “the duty of women to maintain their femininity” in difficult times. “I am absolutely for women plunging into war work and doing everything possible to help,” she said, “but I think they sometimes lose sight of the fact that they are women.” She had gone to the “21” club “and noticed a woman in uniform smoking a cigarette from a long holder. It just seems inappropriate. We would think it odd if our maids went out in uniforms after hours, wouldn't we?” Dinah added that she wore “evening clothes” every night, fixed her hair and put on makeup, whether she was going out or not. But she was mostly going out.
And the marriage, by that time, couldn’t be saved. There was “a delightful summer” in Maine after Jimmy got back, but the gulf between the Sheeans had grown too deep. Jimmy set off on a lecture tour and Dinah, before long, was in Reno, establishing residency for a quick divorce. She did it without telling him first. She had become her own person, bright and accomplished, and had developed a drinking problem separate from her husband's.
“I fell for Jimmy originally because he seemed to be following a star,” she wrote, “and it wasn’t the drinking etc., that broke me down, it was the disillusion at finding that the fight to save humanity could break the human beings nearest by.” She charged him with mental cruelty and told reporters that she had nothing else to say about it: "It is a private matter between two friendly people." Jimmy paid no attention to the proceedings and only learned that he was single from Time magazine, where Dinah was described as “beauteous” and he as a “bird of passage.” He took it badly. “Marriage is a sacrament,” he had said, and “he never really accepted” that they were divorced.
For some material on the Sheeans and their marriage I am indebted to the late Carl Johnson, whose doctoral thesis, A Twentieth Century Seeker: A Biography of James Vincent Sheean, contains quoted letters from Dinah Sheean and other points of detail and comments on the Sheeans’ lives.
Yes, there was alcohol (a lot of alcohol) and breakdowns and complicated sexuality and all the rest. But you can’t deny that they sure did LIVE.
What a story is right! And what drama! What is it. T creative people and alcohol addiction??!!