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But Sheean found Dorothy formidable. His image for her is Boadicea, militant queen of the ancient Britons, who cut men down to size by affixing scythes to the wheels of her war chariot. In her letters to Josef (some of them never sent), she recited all his infidelities like a great divorce lawyer. She reproached him: "I was a girl and you made me a woman, a woman and you made me into a man." She developed a theory of marriage and love that could occur only to the unhappy.
She proclaimed that men were getting worse and women better, and therefore men were unfit to dominate women. It was clear, her letters and diaries tell, that she could love no one but a philosopher-king of preternatural beauty who was also kind to children.
Clown v. King. Sinclair Lewis can only be pitied for having sponsored himself to fill this tremendous bill. On one count he did: he was the most famous American writer of the decade. But philosopher he was not, and in public he was more clown than king. His genius worked only when he was alone—and sober. And he was to prove very unkind to children—especially his own.
As for beauty, Dorothy had fallen for Josef's dark looks, and learned beauty was deceptive; she was prepared to settle for Red's mottled ugliness and honest gaucheries of manner. Sheean, however, finds heavy significance in Lewis' "disastrous" complexion—lumps and pustules which he called "hickeys" and left untreated (with occasional exceptions: he got cleaned up by electric needles to receive the Nobel Prize). The hickeys produced an "awful involuntary humility."
""His sexual nature suffered to the very brink of impotence through this physical humility," writes Sheean, though how he could possibly know this is not made clear. This gratuitous bit is typical of other bits of amateur psychoanalysis that Sheean attempts throughout the book. He is more diffident about including evidence that Dorothy—while demanding all of a man—had divided sexual loyalties herself. Her diaries do indeed confess to emotional engagements with other women. Especially bizarre is the fact that one of the women involved was the Baroness Hatvany, strapping authoress of that classic of the schoolgirl crush, Mādchen in Uniform. But, overall, the relationships did not seem to amount to much. "Have no fears, I ain't thataway," Dorothy wrote Lewis once.
Back to Babbitt. The Lewises spent their honeymoon rattling romantically by "motor caravan" over idyllic English and Scottish countryside, Sinclair diligently working on his next novel, Dodsworth, and Dorothy reporting the sights for U.S. readers. The trip was marred by Lewis' occasional outbursts of bad temper, but the marriage did not begin to run into real trouble until after Red and Dorothy returned to the U.S. in 1928. They found the country subtly but profoundly changed, and the change affected the precarious private balance between them. Mrs. Babbitt, whom Lewis had invented, had joined a women's club to listen to Dorothy Thompson. From her pulpit in the New York Herald Tribune, Dorothy became the most novel and formidable of a new kind of popular leader—the political commentator. As her fame rose, Red's receded, eclipsed by a sophistication he had helped to create.