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These types of stories, she wrote, should not be confined to the home page, but should be carried throughout the paper. She asserted that she had made strides in the right direction, so much so that that three other newspaper publishers had sent editors to see how it was done.

  It is my belief that The New York Times, through necessity since the paper was so behind the times on women, has been on the verge of developing a significant new convention in newspapering. Just as sports, business news, financial, drama and the arts are special departments, the women’s news department has blazed a trail in coverage of news of interest to women, at a time when women are more conscious of their responsibilities in the world than ever before.… Also, on pain of being misunderstood, I think I should warn you that we have already built up a fan public of some extent so that if the news they have come to look for is obviously once more ignored, they are apt to resent it and accuse the Times of returning to an outmoded policy of “clothes and cosmetics,” insulting to women readers.

  And then, in a surprising couple of paragraphs at the end, she said she wanted to “step out”—resign. The bad blood—especially between herself and Markel—had reached the point that “no matter how I worked, or attempted to work, he would soon again become dissatisfied, so that again I would be under personal attack that would make it difficult to do a job and be troublesome all around for the people who work on the paper.” She saved the original letter in her files. A copy turned up in James’s file, which I held in my hands sixty years later. On it, he had scribbled at the top, “no reason for all this,” and, in the margin of a paragraph in which she’d outlined the problem, he wrote, “exactly wrong.” She was prevailed upon to give it another try, and she did, but she lasted only another three months before leaving the Times.

  She then took the job abroad—the one that caused my brother to miss her so terribly—and went to postwar Paris. There, from August to December of 1945, she edited a magazine called Overseas Women, which was aimed at women in the armed forces. When she returned, she was struck by a forceful idea: Since there was such an apparent hunger for women’s news of a serious bent, not just in New York but everywhere, why not come up with a vehicle to satisfy it? Together with her former deputy, Ms. Crowley, she founded just such an organization. It was called Women’s National News Service, a syndicate with its own reporters and editors to specialize in news by and about women. They would offer their service to every newspaper in the country. They would treat women as intelligent adults, bypassing the usual fare of beauty hints, recipes, and advice to the lovelorn and instead concentrating on serious news developments and revealing feature stories.

  WNNS began in 1946. It was partly financed by our mother, who put in the insurance money from Barney’s death and an additional settlement payment from the Times. Exactly how much this amounted to, I have never been able to determine, but looking through a deteriorating file of bits and scraps of paper, I see that savings bonds were issued to her for $24,225, a princely sum in those days. These were cashed in. Initially, the venture looked promising. She beat the bushes and in the first year signed up some twenty-two papers to receive the service, including the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Baltimore Evening Sun, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and the Cincinnati Enquirer. They paid as much as $150 a week and in return received a package of twenty news stories and ten features. The stories were assembled by half a dozen editors and writers who often rewrote files sent in by freelancers and seventy-two stringers, of whom ten were in Tokyo, London, Paris, and other cities abroad. Sometimes the New York writers lifted stories from the wires, placing calls to flesh them out. Fashion and beauty columns were held to once a week and struck a practical, no-frills tone. One column on spring clothes for children, for example, said, “nicest … we’ve seen for many a spring [but] unfortunately price tags pose a pretty problem for non-millionaires.”

  In the first year, the service carried stories about housewives exerting pressure to bring prices down, debates in the Senate on school aid, and the arrest of three women who were testing draconian antistrike laws in New Jersey. There were also pieces about the attitude of Japanese women toward a plan to substitute UN rule for U.S. rule (they were against it) and the attitude of Soviet women toward American broadcasts (they liked them). The staff was well chosen and professional, almost all of them women, and it was varied. Among them was a twenty-one-year-old Hunter College graduate, a West Indian–American named Marjorie Marsie-Hazen, still amazed, sixty-two years later, that “these two ladies employed a ‘colored’ neophyte.”

  Initially, WNNS was located on West Forty-fourth Street, but it later moved into the seventh floor of the Times building. Occasionally, Bob and I would visit there, pausing in the lobby to look at a large plaque to our father and Robert Post, a Times correspondent lost in an air battle over Germany. I recall the exciting bustle of the office, the head-clearing smell of mimeograph machines, and the piles of rough yellow copy paper perfect for drawing on. I knew, in the stealthy way that children acquire such knowledge, that my mother was the co-proprietor and that I was expected to behave in order to do her proud. I disliked planting kisses on Mrs. Crowley’s cold cheek, a ritual greeting I was forced to observe, but I enjoyed visits to the telephone switchboard upstairs, where the operators made a fuss over me and gave me wooden pencils with rotating balls on the top for easy dialing. Just around the corner was Times Square, with the Camel billboard smoker blowing giant smoke rings, where we saw the first-run performances of South Pacific and The King and I.

  At the beginning, Mom traveled around the country for speaking engagements at women’s clubs, using these occasions to talk about the status of women and their humanistic take on important issues. Women had different, perhaps even deeper, concerns, she told the Woman’s Club in Dayton, Ohio. “Men are interested in fires and epidemics. Women are concerned with the serum that may prevent the epidemic.” Only the Russians seemed to understand the importance of wooing women with promises of a better future, she told a federated women’s club group at a tea in Birmingham, Alabama.

  She also engaged in the sort of broad-humored high jinks that press clubs of that time indulged in. She traveled down to Washington to appear in a “Bittersweet” Valentine skit at the Statler in 1952. The conceit was to match up famous lovers. As Mom strolled out in a general’s uniform, with dark glasses, a corncob pipe, and a hat with a visor thick with the golden oak leaves called “scrambled eggs”—a ringer for General MacArthur—out from the opposite wing strolled an exact double.

  But WNNS began to lose money. For a long time our mother tried to interest her former bosses at the Times in subscribing to it. Signing up the premier paper in the country would open the floodgates to new clients, she believed. But her erstwhile superiors would have none of it. In January 1947, she pitched the idea directly to Mr. Sulzberger. She began by saying that she hadn’t wanted to capitalize on her prior association with the Times. “We wanted very much to stand on our own feet, to prove ourselves.… Well, now we would seem to have made good.” She said WNNS had a network of seventy-four string correspondents, both in the United States and abroad, and that they often turned up stories before the Times did. As a result, her client newspapers, she asserted, “are beating you throughout the country.” There was no need to settle the issue of what constituted women’s news: that had been obscured by “a lot of theoretical hogwash—so why not just think of it as a catch-all category for news about family, children, health, education and welfare?” Pointedly, she summed up: “It would mean a great deal to us to have you as a client and, frankly, we think you need us, too.” She suggested sending over a week’s worth of stories for evaluation. Her letter prompted internal memos from both James and Markel, who said they had no need of such a service but agreed, reluctantly, to take a look at it over the course of a week. James, galled by the assertion that her little outfit was more nimble than his mighty enterprise, ended his memo on a sarcastic note. “I am just as bearish on it as when I
told Mrs. Darnton we would not want it.” Not surprisingly, after a week’s worth of stories, WNNS failed the test.

  From that point on, the fate of WNNS was sealed. It might have failed anyway. Using the mail to deliver the stories was an anachronism even then, when most other news was dispatched by Teletype. The system was simply too slow. Every evening, a young man traipsed over to the post office on West Forty-second Street with story packets. Hours were lost in sorting them and routing them, two or three days in sending them, a couple more hours on the other end in the newspapers’ mailrooms. That meant that the stories couldn’t contain breaking news, and even when they were trend stories about significant issues, they ended up sounding like features. Meanwhile, papers everywhere had started hiring women’s editors, generating their own coverage. All these factors tended to make the service seem like a frill, valuable enough when times were flush but the first thing to be dropped when they were tight.

  Nonetheless, the subjects of interest that WNNS dealt with—the readjustment to life at home, the successful raising of children, juvenile delinquency, family problems, the growing divorce rate—all went to the heart of the pressing social concerns in 1950s America. So the idea at the core of the news service made sense, even if the business model couldn’t support it. For my family’s sake, it would have been better if WNNS had gone belly-up right away. But as it was, it limped along until 1954, and my mother kept pumping money in, trying to keep it afloat. “It was always a struggle,” recalled Henry Stern (later New York City’s parks commissioner), who worked there as a City University undergraduate in 1952. “I remember Orvil Dryfoos, who was publisher in training, coming down to ask for the rent whenever it was past due—one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. He looked sheepish. Sometimes your mother and Ms. Crowley would hide if they knew he was coming.”

  A balance sheet from that year, 1952, tells the story. Assets: $4,138.34. Liabilities: $107,581.23. Total cumulative deficit: $168,182.93. An accompanying folder in a pile of material kept in an attic these many years tells the same sad tale. It is bulging with scribbled notes, letters from my mother pleading for money and bankbooks documenting a gradual accretion of savings and a precipitate withdrawal of the entire sum.

  All of this made me realize in a visceral way, like a punch to the stomach, that she must have been suffering on all those nights when she didn’t come home in time and all those Sunday mornings when we jumped into her bed and demanded her full attention. In her attempts to fulfill the dual roles—the provider and the nurturer—she was failing at the one and not doing so very well at the other. The knowledge of this, had she been able to admit it head-on, would have been insupportable. In later years, she used to joke about a cavalier attitude toward financial security, saying, “Money is something you throw off the back of a speeding train.” But I knew the attitude was a pose, a defense. On a deep level, she was oppressed by the weight of her failure as a businesswoman.

  Nothing that happened to her while she was at the paper hurt her as much as what occurred on November 28, 1954. On that day, the Times ran a Sunday book review of The Children Grew. She had been counting on the book, in her unrealistic, Micawber-like, something-will-turn-up fashion, to bail us out of penury. She must have envisioned a strong, sympathetic review, which would set off waves of rave reviews elsewhere and turn her failure at WNNS into a moral and aesthetic triumph. It did not work out that way. The Book Review editor assigned the review to Shirley Jackson, the author of, among other works, “The Lottery,” the misanthropic short story about a town whose citizens achieve civic serenity by holding a lottery each year to choose one of their own to stone to death. The editor undoubtedly thought of Ms. Jackson because she had written a book about bringing up her children—its acerbic tone captured by its title, Life Among the Savages. In any case, the matchup turned out cruel. Ms. Jackson panned Mom’s book. It was a heartless piece of writing. “Mrs. Darnton brings to her children—and to her book as well—a good deal of soap-opera courage, a fair amount of sentimental mysticism and only the smallest edge of humor.” One observation was certainly accurate, if not terribly perspicacious: “Mrs. Darnton’s boys live with the image of their hero-father constantly before their eyes.” But what followed cut my mother to the quick because it turned the thing she was proudest of—her fortitude—inside out by suggesting she was wallowing in self-pity. “One has the uncomfortable feeling that although it is impossible to quarrel with Mrs. Darnton for her devotion to her husband, her book would be easier to read with just a little less of the last-letter-to-my-sons kind of thing. What may well be courageous, self-sacrificing and noble in the doing can readily become self-indulgent and tear-jerking in the telling.”

  After that review, Mom, sinking ever deeper into alcoholism, rarely spoke about her book.

  In some ways, I suppose, my mother was a visionary. In 1974, six years after she died, my wife and I were invited to spend a Sunday at Hillandale, the Sulzberger estate in Stamford, Connecticut. It was a place of rolling hills and ample forests, cut through by paths that had benches placed at intervals, complete with wooden boxes into which servants had placed copies of that day’s Times. There we met Iphigene Sulzberger, the grand old lady of the family dynasty. As she was then—the daughter, wife, mother-in-law, and mother of the four successive publishers—she was the not-so-secret power behind the scenes and the keeper of family lore. We got to know her well over the following years, but I remember most vividly that first meeting. She received us in the splendor of the mansion. Nervously, we managed to intercept our three-year-old daughter, Kyra, as she tried to pull priceless vases off the antique tables and pour juice on the carpets. Happily, we all withdrew outside to lounge beside the swimming pool. There Mrs. Sulzberger knelt down as we talked, surrounded by a blanket of grass. She began sifting through it with her aged fingers, picking out crabgrass and putting it in a little pile, as if she were expelling uninvited riffraff. “Amazing how difficult it is to get rid of it,” she said. “Why is it that the weeds are always stronger than the flowers?”

  Then the conversation turned personal and she began reminiscing about my mother. She said she was “a remarkable woman.” And she added, “I followed the goings-on at the paper from a distance. In terms of women’s rights and what women wanted to read, she was way ahead of her time. I wish she could have lived today to see herself vindicated.”

  I thought for a moment of telling her how hard it had been for my mother and how badly she thought the paper had treated her. But I didn’t. Mrs. Sulzberger’s remark seemed to come out of nowhere, a non sequitur, like my mother’s warning about the Times delivered on that beach so many years before, and it was difficult to know how to respond to it.

  CHAPTER 10

  In the summer of 1953, Bob and I were sent to stay with our uncle and aunt and their four children in Media, Pennsylvania. At the time I had no idea why we were being sent there, but I didn’t question it. Our three male cousins were close to us in age, and so it seemed natural enough that we should go for a visit. Only years later did I figure out that we were on a forced sabbatical to give Mom a chance to dry out.

  The summer passed in suspended animation. David Choate, my mother’s youngest brother, and his family lived in one of the early houses in a Levittown-type development in Delaware County, twelve miles west of Philadelphia. It was a small, squat brick house of low ceilings and thin walls, three rooms downstairs, three rooms upstairs. Outside were a newly seeded lawn, a curving black tarmac road set off by high curbs, and one or two baby trees tethered to rubber leashes, as if they wanted to run away. It was a vast flatland still under construction. On either side, as far as the eye could see, were similar brick houses; two blocks away the wooden frames of other houses were going up, and two blocks beyond that, the foundations were being dug, and beyond that, more tarmac was being laid down by road crews. It was the kind of place depicted in scores of cartoons: identical men leaving identical houses carrying identical briefcases down identical
walkways.

  What I remember most about that summer was the consistency and regularity, a soporific boredom. Every day at noon, our aunt served us children lunch: chicken noodle or tomato soup and bologna or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread. At six o’clock, dinner at the same oval table with the faux walnut veneer—chicken or hamburgers—except now Uncle Dave was there, a quiet man with a long, melancholy face. Beyond mealtimes, there was little to do. We rarely went anywhere. We hung around in the backyard, waiting for the afternoon start of Bob Horn’s Bandstand on Channel 6 (the forerunner of Dick Clark), a new dance show out of Philly that made me nostalgic for the girls of Westport, since we had just started boy-girl parties and what passed for dating at the movies. The high point came when my cousin and I figured out how to make some pocket money by carting around a wagon of Kool-Aid and selling it to the construction workers. Bob picked up some cash working as a caddie at a nearby golf course.

  The days were hot; the hours ticked by in slow motion. I felt as if I were on a moonscape, a bland, moribund place on the periphery of everything I cared about. And yet I got along with my cousins, and my aunt and uncle were friendly. Eventually, I came to realize that in the midst of all that boredom was something positive. The day-to-day rhythm of the humdrum was medicinal. There was something to be said for consistency and regularity—they made life seem secure. Toward the end of our stay, Uncle Dave took Bob for a stroll to have a talk. He told him that he realized things were tough at home but that there was not much he could do to help us over the long run. At one point he said that the two of us might have to go to foster homes. We should prepare ourselves. Bob didn’t tell me this until many years later.

  We returned home at the summer’s end, to find that our house had come alive. The lawn was cut, fresh lemonade was in the refrigerator, and Mom seemed revivified. She was happy, full of plans and promises, and, most of all, her eyes were large, as if they had popped open. They seemed to crackle with her old animation. I asked her if she had been “groggy” lately and she said, no, not to worry—those days were over; she was feeling much better. And she had discovered the cause of her grogginess. It was the house’s well water, which had never been properly tested. It contained some unhealthy minerals. To prove the case, she showed off a watercooler she had bought and installed in the dining room, giant bottles of pure mineral water. We would all drink it from now on. I was overjoyed to learn that our bad days were behind us.