Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

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Carol in front of her childhood home in San Jose, 235 South Sixteenth Street. This is probably her eighth grade graduation; she would then enter San Jose High School, graduating in 1924. Carol’s parents lived in this house until the early 1960s. John and his red pony, Jill, in the front yard of his Salinas home on Central Avenue, circa 1907. John was given the pony when he was four years old. (Photo from Carol’s scrapbooks.) “John and Carol gathering cephalopods.” Carol is playing the accordion, an instrument that she purchased from Carlton Sheffield, Steinbeck’s college roommate, for one cent. Her playing drove Sheffield to distraction. (Drawing from Carol’s scrapbooks.) Carol, John, and Ritchie Lovejoy, mid-1930s. Ritchie and his wife, Tal, were close friends of John and Carol’s throughout the 1930s. Ritchie was an artist, designer, journalist, and writer. In 1940, Steinbeck gave him the one thousand dollars from his Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath. John and Carol with duck in photo booth, mid-1930s. His friend Bo Beskow felt that John was fun loving, but he also recognized the profound sadness in the man. Carol, he insisted, understood him completely. (Photo from Carol’s scrapbooks.) Woodcut of John by Ritchie Lovejoy, mid-1930s, from Carol’s scrapbooks. Carol on the deck of the SS Drottningholm in 1937, bound for Denmark. John insisted that he was restless all his life. The trip to Europe in 1937 was the first time overseas for both of them. facing page: Top: Carol in Mexico City, 1935, with the maids Candelaria and Appolonia, whose nicknames were “Candy” and “Apple.” John and Carol rented an apartment in Mexico City for several weeks from folklorist Frances Toor. Bottom: Carol, mid-1930s. “Carol was a plain dresser,” insisted the butcher in Los Gatos. It was about this time that she registered as a Communist in Santa Clara County (November 8, 1938), but she changed her affiliation to Democrat in 1939. Carol at the Dickey Wells Club, New York City, 1938. Wells was a jazz trombonist. Carol loved jazz and went to clubs in the city in January 1938, when she took a train east to see the Broadway play Of Mice and Men. John stayed in California. John, late 1930s. The photo was taken by Sonya Noskowiak, Edward Weston’s assistant in Carmel. Brush Road ranch, Los Gatos. As John was writing The Grapes of Wrath in the summer of 1938, Carol found a lovely piece of land to buy in the Santa Cruz Mountains, forty-seven acres that overlooked the Santa Clara Valley. They built a home and moved there in late 1938. For a couple of years, John and Carol were happy on the ranch, where visitors included Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and, of course, Ed Ricketts. Carol and Elsie Ray with rattlesnakes , Brush Road ranch, circa 1939. Carol had gone to high school in San Jose with Elsie Ray. According to Elsie’s husband, Martin, Elsie repeatedly insisted that Carol hire help for housecleaning. She was, he said, trying to do it all on the ranch— wash clothes and bedding as well as entertain. Edward F. Ricketts, 1930s. In Ed’s copy of Cannery Row, John wrote: “With all the respect and affection this book implies, John Steinbeck.” From 1930 to 1948, marine biologist Ricketts was Steinbeck’s closest friend. (Courtesy of the National Steinbeck Center.) Page from one of Carol’s scrapbooks: photo of Carlton Sheffield, Steinbeck’s Stanford roommate; a photo of Moonlight, John’s father’s horse in Salinas; a few lines from Robinson Jeffers’s “Roan Stallion”; and a photo of one of the Steinbecks’ dogs, Joggi. Carol’s drawing from the sportswomen series “The Diver.” Another friend called the series her “Rosey Nymphs.” Carol also made small and whimsical clay sculptures, “cartoons in clay,” she said, when voted into the Carmel Art Association in 1942. Gwen Conger, publicity photo, circa 1938. Gwen was born in Wisconsin in 1917 and died at age fifty-eight in Boulder, Colorado. John’s...