Sinclair Lewis Remembered

95. Fanny Butcher

95 / Fanny Butcher Just as she had recognized the problems in Lewis’s first marriage, Butcher recognized the problems in his second one. Source: Fanny Butcher, Many Lives—One Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 393–94. Perhaps poor Hal was never designed for marriage and fatherhood. His second marriage, to Dorothy Thompson, internationally famous as a commentator on the state of the crumbling world, ended, as did his first, in divorce. Their son Michael was not beside his father when he died, in a foreign country, as lonely as the last pine standing in a forest fire. ­ Sinclair Lewis repaid Dorothy by making her the talking woman in Ann Vickers . He told me once, after their marriage had been “Reno-­ vated,” to steal one of Walter Winchell’s favorite lines, that being waked up in the middle of the night by the telephone and having Dorothy reach across him to talk to Winston Churchill65 made him feel as if he were married to the State Department. ...