Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [1]
DuBose returned to Charleston without me because my play Nancy Ann was about to open in New York. That set the Lowcountry jungle drums thumping like mad! Where was his wife? And who was she anyway? From Ohio? She writes plays? A lady in the theater? Well, I had to do the work I was being paid to do! But I knew enough about Charleston to know I’d better watch my step, so early on I adopted the zippered lip posture and took my lead from DuBose. It was his reputation we had to protect and he was so much smarter about those things than I was.
Oh! There is so much I want you to know. This was a crazy time in the world. The economy was going down and hemlines were going up. Women were bobbing their hair, throwing away their corsets, and kicking up their heels, doing the Charleston, especially in Charleston! And in the arts? In Charleston? Well, DuBose and his friends decided that big nasty misunderstanding with the Yankees was behind them and they had to look to the future. I mean, please! Charleston was spared a visit from Sherman but sentiments still ran so strong sixty years after the war ended? Honey, the way people whined and carried on, you’d think old Sherman barged into every lady’s house on the Peninsula, broke all her china, stole her daughters, and punched her husband in the nose! Just ridiculous. I mean, people moaned and moaned about how much better things were before . . . wait, do you know the story about Oscar Wilde? No? Well then, listen to this. Oscar Wilde came to Charleston sometime around 1885, the exact year is a little fuzzy to me, but anyway, there’s Oscar standing on the High Battery with a Charleston gentleman admiring the full moon. Oscar says, My word, would you look at that extraordinary moon! The Charleston gentleman says, Ah, you should have seen it before the war! So now you see, Charleston was reluctant to embrace the future if it meant deemphasizing the past one tiny iota. DuBose and his cohorts wanted to hold on to all the glories of the past but have their work reflect their observances of their present day and their hopes for the future.
God, I loved that man. We’re not talking about moonlight and magnolias here. This is about the magic of a spectacular marriage and how it fueled our creative life and shaped our worldview.
There have been so many stories about DuBose and me and all of them are wrong. Not diabolically wrong, but just skewed at an off angle, enough to make our lives seem like something other than what they were. In public we were both extremely quiet, especially DuBose. In private we laughed about everything and argued loudly over every issue of the day. Well, maybe I was the one who provided the volume. The point is, very few people really knew us.
Maybe my words will be kind of a memoir of the Charleston Renaissance. I don’t know. But someone has to paint the mood of the time and set the record straight. I guess that will have to be me, the spitfire from Ohio who was never afraid of the truth. Or passion. Not that DuBose was afraid of passion or of the truth. He was never a coward. It’s just that his heart pumped the holy blood of old Charleston. Let me tell you this, old Charlestonians would just as soon be caught in their birthday suit walking down Murray Boulevard as reveal their hearts to outsiders. But in Canton, Ohio, we ladies were perhaps more inclined to gently speak our minds.
DuBose and I may not ever have earned a lot of money at one time, but ah well, such is a writer’s lot in life.