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Chapter 6 Russian Interlude, Literary Salons, and Challenge Dorothy West met the theatrical agent Elisabeth (Bessy) Marbury (1856–1933) and her partner, the interior designer Elsie de Wolfe (1865–1950), shortly after her arrival in New York. The two women, who belonged to a circle of wealthy, socially conscious, unmarried women such as J. P. Morgan’s daughter Anne, and Anne Vanderbilt , were to influence West in many ways, both personally and professionally. Either Zora Neale Hurston or Fannie Hurst, both clients of Marbury’s literary agency, introduced West. Marbury, who had promoted the career of bandleader Lt. James Europe, was an early supporter of African Americans in the arts and, according to West,“one of the few whites who met with [the] wholehearted approval” of the pricklyWallace Thurman.1 SinceWest’s first interest was in playwriting,it was natural that she meet Marbury, considered by Dorothy Parker (whom West also met and liked) and the Algonquin group of writers to be one of the most influential agents in the world. As West told an interviewer, “Elisabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe were Americans who went to Paris, and they were involved with literary matters, and they had a salon and the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and all would come.”2 That West perfectly understood the relationship between Marbury and de Wolfe, and hoped to model her own literary, sexually tolerant salon on theirs, is clear from a letter she wrote to Countee Cullen upon her return from Russia:“It has long been my dream to preside over a small salon. . . .There is so much I want for my friends. . . . I have in mind an experiment. . . . [Guests] will love my friends because they love me . . . and since there is no deception in my world, they will gradually learn and accept.”3 During the late 1920s and early 1930s,West, Johnson, Hurston, Hurst, and Marbury formed a loosely affiliated circle of financial and emotional 130 support. Hurst had offered Dorothy a job after Zora’s departure for the South. Although Johnson felt optimistic for her cousin, sure that “something splendid [would] come out of it,” the job turned out to be domestic in nature, and West quickly let Hurst know that she had crossed an invisible social line and that West, unlike Hurston, would not “put on an apron . . . that was Zora’s background. It was not my background.”4 Meanwhile, Zora hired Helene to help with her research, though it was to remain secret. “No that mysterious woman, Zora’s boss, does not know I’m working for Zora. Will let you know how it turns out,” Helene wrote to Dorothy. Hurston knew West and Johnson’s family and was invited to Martha’s Vineyard and to Boston for Thanksgiving. According to Helene, Zora’s younger brother Everett, a postal worker in Brooklyn, was madly in love with Dorothy and had broken off his engagement because of her.5 In January 1931, Dorothy wrote to Zora from Boston with a “proposition” that she board with her at West Sixtysixth Street. Hurston readily agreed, on the conditions that “#1. Please don’t expect me to keep a very tidy kitchen. I aint that kind of a person. #2.That you just feel at home & dont expect to be company.”6 Dorothy clearly knew Elisabeth Marbury well in 1929, for when she gave a reception for Rose McClendon shortly before Porgy left New York for London, Marbury sent roses for the party.7 By midwinter, Dorothy was living with Edna and Lloyd Thomas, and she often visited Marbury on Sunday afternoons before attending Zora’s weekly soiree. “Would you like to go to Zora’s Sunday night?” she asks Countee Cullen, informing him that she would go to Zora’s after seeing Marbury. “She’d so love to have you. And she has millions of marvelous anecdotes .”8 On one of her visits, Marbury told Dorothy that what she liked best about her was that she had never asked her for money. West was appalled that the thought should even have occurred to Marbury, since “I had an art.”9 In fact Marbury provided West with a far greater service than cash: she and Fannie Hurst persuaded the literary agent George Bye, who also represented Eleanor Roosevelt, to take West as a client. Bye in turn convinced the Daily News to give her a regular story column that sustained her through the 1940s. In January 1931, Marbury got involved in the Mule...

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