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125 Chapter 7 “It was a curious collaboration” Early in 1923 Hale did something that would bring her great pleasure but seemed the height of folly. She bought ninety-four acres of infertile land—complete with an eleven-acre shallow lake, two dilapidated houses, and a barn—about eight miles north of Stamford, Connecticut. Inhabited by a family of squatters and several dozen chickens, the larger house was almost two hundred years old and sagging severely from age, neglect, and the rotting wooden pegs that (barely) held its hand-hewn beams in place. The second house was in almost as sorry shape. Broun thought this was a dubious investment and refused to contribute to its purchase, so Hale paid for it with her own savings, telling him he could visit as her guest. She was “buoyed by her delight in a place of her own,” Woodie wrote, “a place where she hoped to achieve the deepest and most impossible of her dreams, independence.”1 She immediately named it Sabine Farm after the Roman poet Horace’s elegant retreat, although Woodie noted that “it looked as Horace’s place must have looked after the Goths, Gauls and Vandals had passed over it several times.” That spring, the squatters and chickens were evicted from the farmhouse and many of the interior walls dividing the first floor into tiny rooms were demolished, causing the ceiling to sag and necessitating the construction of expensive hidden supports. The resulting structure had six very small upstairs bedrooms and, downstairs, a­ medium-sized bedroom and a large living room with a huge stone hearth. Attached to the back wall was a kitchen shed with a cast iron kerosene stove, wellhead , and dirt floor.2 In midsummer she moved in with Woodie and Mattie Hester, who said the kitchen shed reminded her of the kind of place she had come north to escape. Much was lacking, including electricity, indoor plumbing, and any source of heat beyond the fireplace. A hungry population of rats also was in residence. Nevertheless , Broun came to visit, as did Dorothy Parker, Ed McNamara, and other New York friends. Three more friends stayed in the barn for the rest of the summer, making the long walk to the house for meals that Hester somehow was expertly producing in spite of the unpredictable stove and necessity of drawing water from the well in a bucket. By summer’s end Hale was certain that her purchase had been a wise one, and she added to her pleasure of proprietorship by naming her pond Hale Lake.3 It apparently was Broun’s desire to visit Sabine Farm that led them to hire Earl Wilson in 1923. Phobic about the closed spaces of trains and too nervous to travel in a car driven by Hale (although she enjoyed driving and was proud of doing it 126 Anonymous in Their Own Names well), Broun’s solution was to hire a chauffeur. Wilson drove his tense passenger back and forth to Connecticut and delivered his columns to the Stamford Western Union station to be sent to the World. Later that same year he married Mattie Hester (who became Mattie Wilson) and moved into her West Eighty-Fifth Street room with her.4 He was not terribly busy as a chauffeur in the summer and did little driving during the rest of the year since Broun kept a cab driver on call in the city, so he soon became the family’s houseman, a role for which he was perfectly suited. He had been raised in an African American middle-class Indiana family, attended college for a year, and, Woodie recalled, “had a rich baritone voice and the features of a leading man.” He also was another patient, agreeable caretaker for the boy, helped in the kitchen, and served as a handyman. But he most enjoyed putting on a white coat and offering food and drinks to their famous guests, many of whose names he already knew.5 They in turn were impressed with his good looks, regal bearing, and the fact that, as Woodie put it, “he was the only person in the house who met Ruth’s standards of speech.” Like her, he spoke perfect stage English.6 Around the same time Wilson joined the household, Hale decided it would benefit from one more addition. Still a bit of a country girl, she wanted a dog. At Manhattan’s Speyer Animal Hospital she asked to see the most miserable...

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