Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War

Chapter 2. Born to Be a Ham

21 2 Born to Be a Ham Over forty years after his birth on April 4, 1896, Robert Sherwood ’s mother still recalled how happy she was on the day he arrived, when her artist’s eye took in the heaps of white snow on a maple tree “covered with scarlet tassels” outside her window and heard the doctor say, “This is the biggest baby I ever saw.”¹ Indeed, even in his adulthood, Sherwood’s height, thinness, and slight stoop were noted in almost every newspaper article, memoir, or speech in which he was mentioned and remained a cause of his constant self-consciousness. As a small child entering the Jay Kindergarten in Westport, New York, his height already marked him. Posie wrote her sister Lydia that it was amusing to see her little boy tower over all the other “little Jays,” unable to fit his long legs under the classroom tables but looking “perfectly happy” nonetheless.² Just two years later, at the age of seven, Bobby (as he was affectionately called) was insecure about his height, despite the example of his own father, a tall six feet two inches. Upon hearing about the “freaks” in the sideshow of a visiting circus, he stunned his mother by saying: “I do hope to goodness I’m not going to be a freak. I suppose the only kind of a freak I could be would be a giant, & I hope I’m not going to be that.” Young Bobby felt “sorry for the poor French Giant” he had seen. It frightened him to think that this man whom everyone laughed at “was once just a simple boy—quite big for his age, but just a simple French boy going out with his sled to slide down hill like any other boy!”³ An average boy, just like him. Being a member of a financially successful family presented Bobby with enough opportunities so that not every waking moment was consumed by worrisome contemplation about his height. His attentive and artistic mother encouraged his obvious talent and interest in literature and the arts, and he was a quick learner. After his first year in New Rochelle, the family moved to Manhattan, where his world was filled with relative luxury. Arthur made sufficient money on Wall Street to support a house, a nanny (Delia Gilligan), housekeeping help, private boarding schools, a social life that included appreciation of all the arts, and then, for the boys, college at Harvard. Within a few years, it also included a summer home near Lake Champlain in upstate New York. There was nothing the Sherwood children lacked in terms of 22 Act One material needs, and the free-spirited Posie saw to it that their days were filled with interesting and pleasurable learning experiences. Arthur Jr., born in 1888, was the first Sherwood child, followed by Cynthia in 1889 and Philip in 1891. Fourth came Bobby, and then, finally, Rosamund about three years later, in 1899. For a woman of thirty-three to begin such a large family and not complete her childbearing until the age of forty-five must have been exhausting. This was certainly not a common pattern at that time, but Posie was never one to follow custom or to lack energy and enthusiasm for life, and she had lots of help. Not only were there Delia, Lydia, and Jane, but also the sisters’ mother, Julia, did as much as she could until her death in 1908, and Arthur proved a happy and lively father in spite of his long, boring hours as a stockbroker and his busy social role as a prominent Harvard alumnus. It would almost be an understatement to say that Bobby Sherwood was an active child. Even when he was a mere seventeen months of age, his Aunt Jane, then a young and strong twenty-four-year-old, found it difficult to keep up with him. “He is without exception the most vigorous manly child I’ve ever seen of his age,” she wrote Lydia. “He runs me off my feet and is perfectly tireless and tumbles down and violently bumps his head and struggles up again without turning a hair.” Jane likened Bobby to “a young lion cub, an infant Hercules.”⁴ Whenever Delia had a day off from tending the Sherwood family, Posie would practically collapse from exhaustion, largely from running after Bobby. Jane told Lydia that Posie was “almost dead” by the time she arrived to help out with her...