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Temple Bailey—Ace of Hearts
There
are some people who set a record one generation, and are forgotten the
next. Such was the case of Temple Bailey, who in 1933 made more money
than any other writer in the world, bar none. For that single year, she
was paid more than such heavyweights as H.G. Wells, Dashiell Hammett,
Agatha Christie, and of course the formidable Faith Baldwin.
Irene
Temple Bailey, to give her full name, though born in Virginia, spent
almost her entire life in Washington D.C. No one knows her exact date of
birth. When she died in 1953, the best anyone could estimate was that
she was somewhere in her seventies. Like so many other romance writers
of the Old School, she was both a Presbyterian and a Republican. She
never married, and resided in the stately Wardman Park Hotel most of her
life. (This establishment was the setting for her 1935 novel, Fair as
the Moon.)
Her
writings were her children; and these “offspring” were often in the
bestseller list. How she started writing remains obscure, but her first
novel, Judy, aimed at young girls, was published in 1907. Apparently her
most well known book was Contrary Mary (1915) of which she always wanted
to do a sequel, but never got around to it. An old advertisement put out
by her publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, lists a potpourri of novels from her
early career up to 1930, including:
SILVER SLIPPERS (1919)
Days
of delight and disillusionment until Joan Dudley’s knight actually came.
PEACOCK FEATHERS (1924)
Jerry, the idealist, loves Mimi, a beautiful spoiled rich girl. A
conflict of wealth and love.
BURNING BEAUTY (1929)
Beautiful Virginia Oliphant is loved by two men; one tempts her with
millions, and the other tempts her with nothing more than his devotion.
WILD
WIND (1930)
A
girl’s sacrifice for the children of her sister is the keynote of this
heart-stirring love story
Obviously Bailey had a good reputation with readers if her books were in
such constant print back then. The critics, by and large, took a dim
view of her. One called her fiction “high-flown romance with a bland
disregard for realities.” But as the New York Times noted, “Whatever may
be the secret of the popularity of these innocuous, virginal novels, the
fact of their popularity is unquestioned.”
So
great was this popularity, that in 1933 she set her famous record,
making $385,000 for her writings--$325,000 from Cosmopolitan for three
serialized novels and some short stories, $60,000 from McCall’s Magazine
for another serial. In the height of the Great Depression, this was more
than any author was making, anywhere, at any time.
In
1942, the Christian Century gave her more credit than most: “Temple
Bailey always writes a good novel, agreeable in tone, smooth in style,
sound in construction, never so tense in its situations as to subject
the reader’s nerves to serious strain.”
That
same year, in The Pink Camellia, one of her last novels, Bailey added
elements of suspense to her writing skills. Brisk, fast-paced, it has a
plot similar to those of the 1960s Gothic romances. Cecily Merryman
takes a position as servant in the big, rambling home of the Marburg
family, where everyone is suspicious of everyone else. Despite all the
wrangling and back-stabbing she finds around her, Cecily takes a liking
to Blair Marburg, master of the house. Unfortunately, Blair is dating
the unstable Gypsy Tyson, and at odds with his invalid mother, who wants
him to hurry up and settle down. Making matters worse, Cecily’s old
boyfriend Peter Chilton, a Hollywood screenwriter, shows up and tries to
get back into her good graces. There’s a plane crash and a few other
complications before everything gets straightened out and true love
prevails
Despite this development in her talent, Bailey went into semi-retirement
for the remainder of her life. Bringing out only one more novel in 1945,
Red Fruit, she concentrated on her short stories. One of these, A Candle
in the Forest, is a delicious Christmas treasure, and the favorite of
many older readers.
Today, she is the most forgotten of all the Old School romancers, and
her works are the hardest to locate on the Internet. It’s even hard to
know when her books went out of print. But she did inspire a recent
Pulitzer Prize winner, E. Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News, who
in her youth read Bailey’s novels. If writing this books helps to keep
the memory of sweet little Temple Bailey alive, that alone makes it well
worth the effort.
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