Sinclair Lewis Remembered

89. Fanny Butcher

89 / Fanny Butcher Lewis’s gift for mimicry apparently impressed the actress Helen Hayes, with unfortunate results. Source: Fanny Butcher, Many Lives—One Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 394–95. One day, when he was in town [Chicago] very briefly, he asked Dick and me to stop in for a drink with Helen Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur.48 Hal had never met Helen Hayes, although she had played the heroine of Arrowsmith brilliantly in the movies. (He once told me Dr. Sondelius was his favorite of the characters he created.) Charlie was an old friend of mine from his Tribune days, and of my husband’s from their Rainbow Division days together in World War I. The ebullient Charlie rushed over to give me a smack and Dick a smashing pound on the back. In the doorway Helen waited, a tiny Griselda reluctant to intrude on what must have looked like old home week at dear Aunt Liza’s. His enthusiastic greetings over, Charlie remembered Helen and said heartily, “Meet my squaw.” Soon Hal became, to the life, a real-­ estate man trying to make a deal with a woman for a four-­ room apartment, over her complaints about too little closet space. The realtor was privately gloating over his success in closing the deal, when the potential tenant casually mentioned her ten children. Hal put on a superb act, spurred to epic achievement by the presence of the great Helen Hayes. It is almost inevitable that everyone says to an incomparable mimic (as he was that night), “You ought to be on the stage.” When those words were spoken with authority by Helen Hayes he accepted them as coming from on high—and I always thought that the reason ­ Sinclair Lewis turned actor was the direct result of that brief encounter. ...