Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War by Deborah Cohen

Author:Deborah Cohen [Cohen, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780525511199
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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John worried that Frances would never give him a divorce. In the interest of her causes—the Hindus and the Jews—she’d want to remain “Mrs. John Gunther.” Before he left for North Africa, she came over to his apartment. They sat together at the glass dining table and tried to talk over the past. You make me cry, she told him. He cried, too.

He’d been in love with her at the start, he said—a declaration that took her aback. Living on her own had made her realize, she said, how difficult she was to live with. She wished she could be like Dorothy, who was always giving of herself and never defeated. Dorothy would certainly marry again. “I went. I went from myself,” Frances told him, explaining how thoroughly she’d lost herself in their marriage. She was crazy but so logical about it, John thought. Of course, she assured him, she’d give him a divorce.

While he was away, his lawyer worked up the divorce papers. Together, they took Johnny to Deerfield that fall, and returned on separate trains. He watched as Frances’s train left the station. “You bastard,” she mouthed, and made a V for Victory sign. A couple of weeks later, he went to Amagansett to help her pack up the house she’d been renting. She signed the divorce agreement without any fuss, and on the way back to the city, they stopped at a roadhouse inn for dinner. A steak for two and warm, tender conversation. “I have never been fonder of her,” John wrote in his diary.

The one condition for giving him the divorce was that he had to go to Reno to get it. After the new year, 1944, he set out for what the gossip columnist Walter Winchell called a “Reno-vation,” a quickie divorce. It took just six weeks to establish residency in Nevada; the grounds for divorce were among the least onerous in America. In uncontested cases such as the Gunthers’, Reno judges didn’t insist on embarrassing and public cross-examination. Unlike in many other states, the divorcées could marry again immediately. An entire infrastructure had shot up around the Reno divorce industry, from local lawyers with connections to the white-shoe East Coast firms to luxurious nightclubs where one could while away the cool evenings, waiting for the decree to come through.

The formal cause for the Gunthers’ divorce was desertion. Three years earlier, in 1941, John’s complaint read, Frances had left him. Although she denied the charge, she didn’t contest the divorce, a common enough, face-saving way to manage these matters in Reno. While in the Gunthers’ circle a marriage that ended in divorce was more the rule than the exception, there was nonetheless something shameful about it. A divorce was a defeat, as Frances saw it. For John, it was a source of guilt. Frances didn’t want any alimony, she insisted, though what she’d live on he didn’t know, so he included a monthly stipend in the divorce papers. She was livid about that.

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