Born to Be Posthumous. Mark Dery
English blend of snug domesticity and penny-dreadful horrors. “Sinister-slash-cozy,” Gorey called it.32
Christie became the infatuation of a lifetime, and her take on the tea-cozy macabre is a pervasive influence. Gorey’s devotion to the Queen of Crime was absolute, impervious to the passage of time and undeterred by snobbish eye rolling. “Agatha Christie is still my favorite author in all the world,” he said when he was pushing sixty.33 By the time he’d reached seventy-three, he’d read every one of her books “about five times,” he reckoned.34 Her death left him desolate: “I thought: I can’t go on.”35
On top of all that, he grew up in Prohibition-era Chicago—Murder City, in newsroom patois. For much of Gorey’s childhood, Al Capone and his adversaries made the mental life of Chicagoans look like one of those spinning-headline montages in period movies. The horror of bloodbaths like the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which hit men lined gangsters up against a garage wall and raked them with machine-gun fire, reverberated in the mass imagination.
Given the time and place he grew up in, and his father’s days on the police beat, it’s hardly surprising that Gorey, asked why “stark violence and horror and terror were the uncompromising focus of his work,” replied, “I write about everyday life.”36
Ted with his father, Edward Leo Gorey, in Wilmette, Illinois, circa ’34–36. Gorey is somewhere between nine and eleven.
(Elizabeth Morton, private collection)
Sometime around April 16, 1934, the Goreys moved from 1256 Columbia Avenue, in the North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park, to the snug, tree-shaded North Shore suburb of Wilmette. (Little is known about Ted’s time on Columbia Avenue beyond the fact that he spent fourth grade at Joyce Kilmer Elementary School, a short walk from the Goreys’ red-brick apartment building, and that he received straight Es—for “excellent”—on his progress report.)37
This change of address was weirder than most, since his father had just landed a new job, not in Wilmette but in downtown Chicago. In 1933, he’d reinvented himself as publicity director of two luxury hotels, the Drake and the Blackstone. Both were bywords for elegance, playing host to champagne-by-the-jeroboam high rollers, backroom deal makers, and even presidents. Why Gorey’s father moved his family farther from his workplace, to the suburbs north of the city, is a puzzler.
Maybe he wanted a better life for his family, a piece of the gracious living advertised by North Shore realtors. The Goreys’ rental was “a cube shaped elephant grey stucco house” at 1506 Washington Avenue in West Wilmette, with “an upstairs sunroom that managed to have windows on all four sides,” as Ted recalled it.38 In the fall of ’34, he enrolled in the sixth grade at Arthur H. Howard School, a cross between an elementary and a junior high school that spanned kindergarten through eighth grade. He was nine years old. How he managed the trick of skipping fifth grade we don’t know; presumably, he tested out of it. As in Bradenton, Ted fit right in. “He does very superior work … with apparent ease, and socially he is well adjusted,” his homeroom teacher, Viola Therman, noted on his spring ’35 report card.39 She was, she wrote, “anxious to see what he will accomplish with an activity program in the form of the puppet play [he is] now planning”—a revealing aside in light of the puppetlike nature of Gorey’s characters and his fascination, near the end of his life, with puppet shows, which he staged in Cape Cod theaters with his hand-puppet troupe, Le Théâtricule Stoïque.
As of June ’36, the Goreys had moved across town to the Linden Crest apartments at 506 5th Street, a block from the 4th and Linden El stop.
That September, Ted enrolled in the eighth grade at a nearby junior high, the Byron C. Stolp School, a shorter walk from his new address than Howard. Gorey, famously not a joiner as an adult, was the quintessential joiner in junior high: alongside his photo in the 1936–37 edition of the Stolp yearbook, Shadows, he’s listed as assembly president as well as a member of the typing club, the Shakespeare club, the glee club, and, not least, the art club.
Gorey’s art teacher at Stolp was Everett Saunders, a former WPA painter and dedicated mentor to would-be artists. Saunders oversaw the art club, whose ranks included Warren MacKenzie and, improbably enough, Charlton Heston. MacKenzie would grow up to be a master potter whose Japanese-influenced clayware is prized for its understated beauty. Now ninety, he remembers Heston as “a real poser,” a characterization confirmed by Heston’s Stolp yearbook photo, in which the man who would be Moses, sporting a budding pompadour, gives the camera an eighth grader’s idea of a smoldering gaze. (What can it mean that “Gorey always claimed with a straight face,” according to his friend Alexander Theroux, that “Charlton Heston was ‘the actor of our time’”?)40
MacKenzie, who coedited the 1937 Shadows, recalls Gorey’s “really funny” cartoons for the yearbook’s club pages. Ted executed nine full-page line drawings, among them a picture of a cat in an artist’s smock and beret holding a palette and a dripping paintbrush (for the art club); a cat in an eyeshade, sweating bullets, up against a deadline from hell (for the journalism club); and a feline Romeo in a Renaissance cape, tearfully pacing his balcony under a crescent moon (for the Shakespeare club). They’re cute in a Joan Walsh Anglund meets Harold and the Purple Crayon way that clashes with our image of what’s Goreyesque.
At the same time, they do foreshadow the Gorey we know in their careful attention to costume—his fondness for patterns (plaids, checks, stripes) is already in evidence—and in their shading, where there’s no mistaking his preference for neatly parallel lines as opposed to smudged effects or solid blacks. There’s a naive charm to Gorey’s illustrations, off-set by a self-assurance that’s remarkable in a twelve-year-old. “His things all had a common feel about them,” MacKenzie recalls, “and the instructor who was in charge”—Saunders—“said, ‘Well, [his drawings are] going to be the theme of the yearbook this year,’ and they were, and they were wonderful.”
No one seems to know exactly when Helen and Ed Gorey divorced, though just about everyone agrees it happened in 1937. Betty Caldwell, then Betty Burns, a friend Ted had made at the Linden Crest apartments, recalls the “sad day” when she had to tell him, “‘Ted, I can’t see you anymore. We’re going on a vacation; we’re going to be gone for two weeks.’ And he said, ‘Betty, it’s worse than that. My mother’s divorcing my father. We’re moving to Florida.’” On October 7, 1937, having graduated from eighth grade that June, Ted left for Florida with his mother.
Then and ever after, Gorey was silent on the subject of his parents’ divorce. Beyond a passing remark that he saw more of his parents after the divorce than before, he took the Fifth on the whole business, especially on any psychological fallout he experienced as a kid. “I don’t think I had even noticed they parted,” he claimed, preposterously, in a 1991 interview.41 In four years’ worth of diary entries, he doesn’t so much as mention his father, perhaps because they weren’t in touch, possibly because they’d never been that close, or maybe because Ed Gorey’s departure was clouded by scandal.
Corinna Mura in Casablanca (1942). (Warner Bros./Photofest, Inc.)
When he left Helen, sometime after June ’37, it was for another woman: Corinna Mura, a guitar-strumming singer of Spanish-flavored torch songs. She was thirty-five; Ed was thirty-nine. It seems likely they met at the Blackstone: Mura played the nightclub circuit when she was in town. In addition to her career as a nightclub chanteuse, she was an occasional movie actress. There she is, about a half hour into Casablanca: the raven-haired singer in Rick’s Café, strolling from table to table, troubadour-style, as she gives “Tango Delle Rose” her throbbing, emotion-choked all. And there she is again, a coloratura soprano amid the citoyens in the rousing scene where everyone belts out “La Marseillaise.”
On screen and on recordings such as “Carlotta” (from the