"JULIA" AND MURIEL GARDINER
Lowe, David Garrard
Many of our readers will remember that Muriel Gardiner, together with her husband Joseph Buttinger, a leader of the Austrian Socialist underground in the 1930s, were among the early and then...
...Muriel laughed, a deep, husky laugh...
...The telephone rang and Muriel went into an367 other room to answer it...
...We had a mutual friend, Wolf Schwabacher...
...Now, however, several more recent friends have again asked, "Are you Julia...
...The strong profile, the powerful hands—large for a woman—the shock of short-cropped white hair all gave a sense of vitality...
...Anna telephoned me one day and said, 'Muriel, you're Julia.' I said, 'Who's Julia?' `Oh,' she replied, 'haven't you read Lillian Hellman's Pentimento?' I said, `No.' `Well,' she went on, 'you must read it, because I think you're Julia.' Of course I was curious and when I read it I was indeed struck by the strong similarities in our lives...
...To begin with," she said, "there were our backgrounds: my father's father, Nelson Morris, founded Chicago's Union Stockyards...
...It was Muriel's way of avoiding saying that, like Julia, she had been born very rich...
...After Oxford I went to Vienna, hoping to be analyzed by Freud, who however, referred me to a pupil of his...
...I had gone out to interview Muriel Gardiner at her farm in Pennington, near Princeton, New Jersey...
...Mack, who had become my analyst, said that if I wanted to be a psychiatrist, which I did, I would have to go to medical school in order to practice in the United States...
...Brookdale Farm, RR1—Box 264 Pennington, New Jersey 08534 Dear Miss Hellman, Ever since your beautiful book Pentimento appeared, friends and acquaintances have been asking me whether I am Julia...
...Muriel looked at me...
...This conversation was conducted in the late spring of 1984...
...What are they...
...Ruth Mack...
...If Muriel had been reticent about speaking of the wealth which had surrounded her Chicago childhood, she was perhaps even more so when it came to speaking of her heroism after the Austrian fascists and later the Nazis had taken over Austria...
...It was quite dark by now...
...Many of our readers will remember that Muriel Gardiner, together with her husband Joseph Buttinger, a leader of the Austrian Socialist underground in the 1930s, were among the early and then continuing supporters of Dissent...
...My ambition had been to be a teacher, so I thought that I should do graduate work...
...Muriel answered that after she began living in Vienna and saw what the Social Democrats, who then controlled the city, were doing in the way of building good apartments for workers, improving the school system, planting gardens for the people, she thought: "If that's what's meant by 'socialist,' then I am a socialist...
...The "similarities" between Muriel's life and Julia's were undeniable...
...Yes, in the fall of 1932 or '33...
...It was late April or early May, 1926, when I went to Vienna," Muriel said picking up the thread...
...Was there ever a time when you were afraid...
...I have never shown it to anyone...
...When Muriel returned, I observed that after Lillian Hellman's character leaves Oxford, she goes to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Freud...
...And like Julia you also went to medical school...
...There it was again, the word "similarities...
...A year after I graduated from Wellesley, I went to Oxford...
...Left alone, I glanced about...
...Were you a socialist when you went to Vienna...
...Later, Hellman did call Muriel in Pennington and the two spoke briefly on the telephone...
...I wrote a note to Freud asking whether he would see me...
...I had been to Wellesley before that, and there had become a Socialist (though I did not call myself that) and had brought Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin and others to Wellesley to talk to our Student Forum...
...It was late afternoon and she was sipping vodka and lemon juice...
...Miss Hellman denied that she had ever heard of or from Muriel Gardiner...
...My parents were rich Americans, who travelled a great deal...
...But slowly, deliberately, as the room grew darker, she recalled her deeds under the code name of "Mary," told of hiding Joseph Buttinger in her Vienna apartment, of getting money and affidavits for those wanting to leave Austria, of procuring false passports...
...I was in Oxford from the fall of 1923 until June of 1925...
...It was during my second year at the Vienna Medical School that the fascist problem became really serious...
...She took another sip and then said in her very precise manner: "I have never claimed to be Julia...
...After the publication of Muriel's memoirs, Code Name 'Mary," by the Yale University Press in 1983, Hellman was questioned concerning the many parallels in the lives of Julia and Muriel...
...and I have seen and admired many of your plays and enjoyed your books...
...After my father's death, in my childhood, 368 my mother married an Englishman...
...I hope you do not find this letter an intrusion...
...I was not quite 17 years old...
...The late afternoon sun, slanting through the westward-facing windows, fell upon the record of an extraordinary life: a white marble bust of Muriel when she was 25, a bronze one of Joseph Buttinger, an award for help given to the Hungarian freedom fighters, illustrated books on the cities she adored: Vienna, Venice, Rome, Prague...
...I went because Dr...
...The following interview with her was conducted by her former private secretary.—Eds...
...Do you have any idea of how Lillian Hellman might have heard your story...
...I received a reply promptly, informing me that he was not taking any new patients and referring me to a pupil of his, Dr...
...I asked...
...As for the possibility that I am, there are those similarities between my life and Julia's life...
...Muriel had recently been operated on for a cataract and she could not tolerate much light...
...But they never met...
...In the course of an interview I conducted with her a few months before her death in February 1985, she recalled the first inquiry: "I first learned about Julia from Anna Frank, who had once been married to Karl Frank, a leader in the anti-Fascist German underground...
...After you read Pentimento, did you ever try to contact Miss Hellman9" "I sent her a letter...
...Muriel's use of the word "similarities" allowed me to go to the heart of the matter: "Do you think that you were the model for Lillian Hellman's Julia...
...She reached for a manila folder on the couch next to her and handed me two pieces of paper...
...Muriel told me that it was by the Russian sculptor, S. T. Konenkov, who had also done the busts of her and Joseph Buttinger...
...Shortly after the publication of Lillian Hellman's book Pentimento in 1973, Muriel Gardiner began hearing from friends who asked if she were "Julia," the heroine of the story of that name in the volume...
...Mary," Bulletin of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, June 1972.] Some of my loving friends even think your descriptions of Julia apply to me, and wonder whether she could be a composite of several persons...
...and one called me, having cried himself to sleep after reading your moving story...
...Sincerely yours, Muriel Gardiner Muriel Gardiner never received a reply from Lillian Hellman...
...He was my lawyer and he was the attorney who defended the producer of Hellman's play, The Children's Hour, after the play had been banned in Boston...
...There were volumes of poetry, some by her old comrade, Stephen Spender, and books by and about Sigmund Freud...
...I took it, walked over to the lamp, and read: October 26, 1976 Muriel M. Gardiner, M.D...
...I remember that it was a pretty polite letter...
...There was a jumbled collection of mice of every material given to her over the years by friends who knew of her affection for the creature...
...But many other things in Julia's life agree with mine...
...As she spoke, my eyes fell on a small wooden bust of Lenin...
...Plenty of times...
...Yes," she answered without hesitation...
...my mother's father, Gustavus Swift, was the founder of the Swift meat packing company...
...She was well into her eighties, but there was no sense of age about her...
...The interview took place in the house that she had built in the 1960s for herself and her husband, Joseph Buttinger, the well-known Austrian Socialist...
...There is no need to answer it...
...At twenty-one I went to Oxford to study English literature...
...I do not at all think so, but cannot help wondering that I never—as far as I know—met Julia...
...I asked her about her exploits in the socialist underground in the 1930s, exploits which had led Anna Freud to praise her "helpfulness and compassion...
...Here it is...
...The two women with their strange bond died within months of one another: Hellman in midsummer of 1984, Gardiner in the winter of 1985...
...She was in the process of leaving this house and moving into a retirement home some twenty miles away...
...Do you remember what you said...
...Unlike your Julia, I amobviously —still alive, and I have not been wounded and my daughter lives with her family in Aspen, Colorado...
...I first went to Wellesley, about two months before the end of the First World War...
...Wishing to become an analyst, I studied medicine at the University of Vienna, and eventually got my degree there—under Hitler in 1938...
...He told me a good deal about Lillian Hellman and I think it possible that he told her something of me...
...Nor have I met you, though I heard of you often from our good friend, Wolf Schwabacher, with whom we shared a two-family house in Pennington for many years...
...369...
...Afraid...
...One lamp burned across the room...
...I often thought of writing you before, but did not want to bother you...
...Looking about the living room where we sat, it was obvious to me that the comfortable but comparatively modest house with its contemporary furniture, its fieldstone fireplace, its broad expanses of glass, was a conscious break with Muriel's opulent, Edwardian childhood...
...I had been inactive politically in Europe until February, 1934, but from then on was very much involved in anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi work...
...And like Julia you went to Oxford...
...I enclose a little essay my husband wrote about me for a psychoanalytic journal containing "tributes" to me on my seventieth birthday...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
