DOROTHY AND RED by Vincent Sheean. 363 pages. Houghton Mufflin. $6.95.
This memoir begins in the breathless manner of a modern Ouida. The place: Berlin. The time: 1927. The occasion: the brilliant polyglot birthday party of a great lady shining with the glamour of international journalism in an age of prima donna correspondents.
At 33, Dorothy Thompson was at the beginning of her later fame, and at the bitter end of her marriage to Josef Bard, a sponging Hungarian cad whom she had mistaken for a genius. Despite the presence of a former Prime Minister of Hungary, the "momentous guest" was a 42-year-old American novelist—Sinclair Lewis. After dinner, the guest wasted no time, cornered his hostess and asked her to marry him (he neglected to mention that he was already married). Replied Dorothy: "I don't even know you, Mr. Lewis."
Wet Lip. Biographer Vincent Sheean did, and what he did not know then he later learned as house guest of the Lewises at Barnard, Vt., and from the Dorothy Thompson papers at Syracuse University. "Jimmy" Sheean was "too pretty" and had "a wet lower lip," his friend Dorothy noted in her diary, but there was nothing the matter with his eyesight; his book about the private and public life of Dorothy and "Red" Lewis is an extraordinary thing. Involving as it does the privacy of two people recently dead and known to thousands of others who are still living, it has an awful fascination.
The fascination comes chiefly from Dorothy's letters and the excerpts from her diary; Lewis' letters are relatively short and humorously impersonal. Some of Dorothy's entries are almost embarrassingly intimate, such as the entry for Sept. 21, 1927, eight months before they were married. "A dreadful night . . . At 8:30 he phoned. His voice was thick. 'I'm shot . . . come here, darling.'" She found Lewis passed out on his bed. "I cried terribly. Something in me collapsed." She bathed his face. He woke, and "lifted me into his bed, clasped his arms around me, and went fast to sleep again on my breast." For the next few hours, Lewis alternately woke and slept. "All the time I was sobbing. I saw how everything is going ... I saw that being a woman has got me, at last, too . . . All the time he was making love to me. Feebly, but tenderly." Lewis got up, lurched into the night, and returned with a bottle of cognac, which he could not manage to open. "Suddenly he looked at me. His eyes were like red moons. He started to whimper. 'I cannot ruin your life . . . you are wholly good . Get up—you mustn't stay here—I will take you home . . . Tomorrow I will go away . . . You will never see me again. I am finished . . .' I saw he could not take me home . . . And so I went back to bed, and he held me close to his heart, and slept softly."