Jean Edmunds was born 100
years ago today, 13 December, in far Northern Maine.
Her
family owned a lot of farmland, and grew plenty of potatoes. Like
their community, they were white, Protestant (Episcopalian), and
Republican.
Jean
attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts. After graduating, she
learned that the Chinese Ambassador, T.V. Soong, and his wife were
seeking a Wellesley grad as live-in governess.
The
Chinese said of T.V.’s sisters, the famous Soong Sisters: “One
loved money, one loved power, and one loved China.” One married a
wealthy New York banker. One married Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,
leader of the Chinese Nationalist forces supported by the U.S. The
third sister, Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, leader of the 1911
Revolution and first President of the Chinese Republic. (Later Soong
Ching-ling leadership positions in the People’s Republic.)
Jean
took the governess position. She grew
to love Madame Soong
and the Soongs’ three
daughters.
Madame Chiang, who
always urged
her sister that Jean should eat with the help, less
so. Jean
kept a diary about the
interesting people she met
–
until the
evening she
came home and found the family
reading
aloud from it at the dinner
table.
World
War II was in full swing. General Joe Stilwell visited
often. Jean
went out with Stillwell’s
top aide, a Hawaiian-born
Chinese, who eventually
proposed to her. They didn’t marry, but stayed
good friends. (In
the diary she railed about
white Americas’
prejudice against such a
marriage.)
In
1945, Jean
met a Marine pilot, back from flying bombers in the Pacific. Early
on, when she visited her parents in Maine, he borrowed a plane
and flew to Fort
Fairfield to surprise
her.
Her family
liked him; they
respected his war record,
and his bridge-playing;
but when Jean
said they planned
to marry, her parents stayed up all night talking
it
over.
Her suitor was
Jewish.
In the morning her
parents gave
their blessing.
The newlyweds
moved to Manhattan, where he wrote for Time
and they saw lots of theater. Jean
loved the city
life, but when she became
pregnant, they moved to a suburb.
For
years, Jean
played the female lead in all
the amateur theatricals. At parties, she played the
piano and
sang, while everyone
gathered around to sing with her, including
the dog. Commercial
artists sometimes used
her as a model. Mostly
she devoted herself to her husband and their
children. Much later,
those children wished for her that she had
pursued her own career,
but were grateful for
the full-time attention
of such a talented and intelligent person.
The
first years, they lived on a winding country lane where they
were surprised to learn that most
neighbors were Communists. (At
the height of McCarthyism, a
top U.S. Communist Party
leader
lived across the street.)
The
neighbors thought
it odd that Jean
wanted to start a Cub Scout den, which
she did, including
two boys of color. When
all the
town’s dens
got together, some of the adults sniffed at seeing
two nonwhite boys in her
den.
Jean
and Warren stayed married
until her death from
cancer in 1994. By then,
life
was wildly different from what she’d known in her
Maine childhood. But
she’d weathered the
changes, staying imaginative and caring.
How
I wish we could put 100 candles on a cake and eat it with her! Even
a
Zoom-style party couldn’t
dim
the brightness of the
first eyes
I remember.
-
30 -
[The
above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 13
December
2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on
the newspaper's website
(where I do not
select the headlines) and
KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the
week on KRWG (90.7)
and KTAL-LP.
(101.5 –
http://www.lccommunityradio.org/),
and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]
[The
column sparks mixed feelings in me. Its subject doesn’t. But
putting that kind of personal stuff in a newspaper column does. So I
won’t add much.
The
Soong Sisters, and now-forgotten T.V., are an interesting study.
Mother hated Sterling Seagrave’s book on them, The Soong Dynasty, because she loved
Madame Soong. However, history judges them harshly, except perhaps
Soong Ching-ling. Here’s an account of a newer book on the "infamous" sisters, which
I haven’t yet read. When I lived in Taiwan, forty
years later,
Madame Chiang was still alive and her soon was Premier of “the
Republic of China” on Taiwan.”][I mention my grandparents' concern about Mother marrying Father, a Jew from Brooklyn. It's a story they told me much later. As a kid, I experienced a stern but loving Grandfather and a soft and loving Grandmother, who doted on us. I believe they like Father fine; they sure seemed to, from this kid's vantage point. However, I think they worried about how we'd all be treated by others in the U.S. Note that the film, Gentleman's Agreement came out in 1949, and that the book was a best seller in 1947. Both explored anti-Semitism through the eyes of a protagonist who pretends to be Jewish in order to write a magazine article on the subject, and finds the consequences pretty unpleasant.]
[My
parents had no clue that “the Colony” on Mt. Airy, in
Croton-on-Hudson, probably had more Communists and leftists per
capita than anywhere in the country. (Croton was notably artsy: I played in some ruined barns where Isadora Duncan had danced, and in the movie Reds, it's where John Reed and his wife go to live.) Mother, used to Fort Fairfield,
was astonished when the family across the street never came over to
welcome the new neighbors. One winter morning she decided she would
go and introduce herself to them. She may not have known that they
were Mr. and Mrs. Alexander
Bittelman and that he was a high official in the Communist Party
U.S.A. The only sense they could make of this WASP lady appearing
at their house was probably that she was spying on them, so Mrs.
Bittelman sat with my mother on the outdoor porch, in freezing winter
weather, until my mother decided sitting longer probably wouldn’t
be good for her infant, Peter. It didn’t help that early one
morning my father spotted a car parked by our mailbox on the country
lane. (It was called Memory Lane, had fewer than a dozen houses on
it and no street numbers, and dead-ended in the words.) Suspicious,
he went out and found two men. When they got out of the car, he
recognized one, from the Marines. The guy now worked for the FBI,
Bittelman had had a big party that night, so they were there
observing, and writing down license-plate numbers. My father told
him to come in and have coffee afterward, which probably looked a
little suspicious to some of our neighbors.]
[I
recall seeing my mother starring in amateur productions of The
Warrior’s Husband,
playing the Amazon Queen (and wearing a long, blonde wig), and Dial
M for Murder. I’m
told that at the cast party after the latter, I was not very friendly
to the actor who played the man who tries to murder my mother’s
character, but whom she manages to stab with a pair of scissors. I
was old enough to know it was a play, but I’d just seen him try to
strangle Mother! I’m also told that at some production I yelled
out “That’s my mother!” during the play. After one of my own
first acting roles, Mother claimed that she had yelled out, “That’s
my son!” but I didn’t hear it. I did not yet exist at the time of one production, or was too young to be taken to watch: in Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, ten people are lured to an island and killed, one by one, in retribution for situations where they killed someone in a way the law couldn't reach. Each guest knows the killer must be one of the other guests; but guests keep disappearing, in ways tracking a nursery rhyme. The last two guests are a governess (there because two of her charges drowned, perhaps because of her negligence) and a veteran of World War II (whose speeding sportscar, if I recall correctly, had run down a child). They have been falling in love, but now each is sure the other is the killer. How I should have loved to see Father and Mother play the two leading roles!]
[Particularly in the larger house we moved to when I was 12, Mother singing with many cocktail-party guests singing along is a pretty common memory. At one point, an Afghan dog appeared at the house. She took him to the animal shelter, thinking to adopt, but when she learned that a nice young man who worked there had wanted to adopt the dog, she switched plans such that the dog lived with her until the young man was ready to take the dog. He took the dog; but some months later, apparently, he had abused it badly, and it returned to the shelter. They informed my mother, so Czar came to live with her. When she played the piano, he came and sat by it and howled. Singing along. After awhile, uncertain whether perhaps Czar was howling in pain, she tried putting him outside when she practiced piano, but he came as close as possible to the front door and howled. This became a huge hit at cocktail parties, of course. Czar would come sit by the piano and sing along with everyone. One night a famous concert pianist was at the party. After watching Mother and Czar, he asked politely, "Do you suppose he would do that if I played?" Mother laughed and said that Czar sang when anyone played. "Do you mind if I try?" the pianist asked. He sat down and played. Czar sat quietly and respectfully, watching him.]
[Apparently
Mother shared a birthday with George Schultz, former cabinet member
under several U.S. presidents. This morning I read an op-ed
by him in the Washingon Post, published on his 100th
birthday. One of his main points was how essential trust is, whether
in families, diplomacy, or most any other endeavor. I agree. He
notes that a good leader trusts his people, and thereby engenders
their trust in him.]
[One evening in a bar in D.C., my cousin Frank and I got trying to figure out what would be the deepest divisions between categories of human beings. Deeper than Catholic-Jew or white-black. Man-woman is rather obvious. Some vets would argue "between those who have served in a war and those who have not," and I respect that possibility. What we came up with, eventually, was "whether or not, as a child, you ever doubted you were truly loved." If you think about it, I think you'll conclude that it's huge. I did not ever doubt that I was loved, although I sure gave them a hell of a hard time.]
