CHAPTER ONE
The Dream
Mrs. Barbara Hall had it all worked out. She had raised her only daughter and youngest child, Virginia, born on April 6, 1906, in the expectation of an advantageous marriage. As an ambitious young secretary in the previous century, Barbara had triumphed by marrying her boss, Edwin Lee Hall (known as Ned), a wealthy Baltimore banker and cinema owner, and she never wanted to look back. Her steep social elevation into smart East Coast circles had, at least according to her own family, made her “snooty.” After all, Ned’s father, John W. Hall, may have run away to sea at the age of nine on one of the family’s sailing ships, but he had gone on to marry an heiress and become president of the First National Bank. John’s brother, Virginia’s great-uncle Robert, had been the grandest grandee of the exclusive Maryland Jockey Club. Barbara saw how the senior Halls led a fancy life—the hallway of their opulent Baltimore townhouse was reputedly wide enough to turn around a coach and horses—and wanted the same. But Ned had, to Barbara’s evident frustration, failed to maintain the family fortune let alone enlarge it, and now the Halls’ domestic arrangements were more modest. Ned and Barbara’s country house at Boxhorn Farm in Maryland was genteel, but did not have central heating and pumped its water in from a stream. Their apartment in central Baltimore, although elegant, was only rented. It was Virginia’s duty to haul the family back up to the Halls’ former social heights by marrying into more money.
In Virginia’s old life, Barbara had watched her being chased by well-to-do young suitors with maternal satisfaction. Such was her daughter’s appeal before she lost her leg that Virginia was known to her friends at her posh private high school, Roland Park Country, as “Donna Juanita.” Tall and rangy with sparkly nut-brown eyes and a melting smile (when she chose to use it), she was unusually spirited and presented an irresistible challenge for those young men who dreamed of taming her. Virginia held such displays of male ardor in contempt, however, and would assert her independence by wearing tomboy trousers and checked shirts whenever she could. “I must have liberty,” she proclaimed in her school yearbook in 1924, at the age of eighteen, “withal as large a charter as I please.” Little she said or did accorded with her mother’s great plan.
Virginia took pleasure in defying convention. She hunted with a rifle, skinned rabbits, rode horses bareback, and once wore a bracelet of live snakes into school. It was clear that the fearless young “Dindy,” as her family called her, yearned for adventure, just like her seagoing grandfather. Even if it meant enduring discomfort. The fact that Roland Park Country pursued a Dickensian insistence on keeping its windows open in below-freezing weather—meaning the girls took their lessons in coats, gloves, and hats—seems not to have bothered her at all.
Dindy described herself as “cantankerous and capricious”1—a view shared by her classmates, who nevertheless also recognized her gifts for organizing and initiative. They viewed her as their natural leader and voted her in as their class president, editor in chief, captain of sports, and even “Class Prophet.” Her elder brother, John, studied chemistry at the University of Iowa and then dutifully went to work with his father, as had been envisaged since his birth. By contrast, Virginia liked to explore pastures new, encouraging her classmates to expect from her nothing less than the unexpected. Considered by her peers at school the most “original” among them—an accolade she evidently enjoyed—she admitted that she strove to live “up to her reputation at all times.”2 If Ned was indulgent of this individualistic outlook, then Barbara had quite different views. Mrs. Hall was intent on her daughter forsaking her interest in adventure for the greater prize of a rich husband and a fashionable household. At the age of nineteen, Virginia dutifully became engaged and appeared destined for the confined domestic life of many other society women reaching adulthood in the 1920s.
However eligible her well-heeled fiancé might have been in her mother’s eyes, though, Virginia still bridled at his entitlement and cheating. Yes, young “ladies” such as Virginia had long been expected to defer to their menfolk, but now rebellion was in the air, with the advent in Baltimore as elsewhere of the independence-loving flappers. They were a new breed of young women who broke the Prohibition-era rules on drinking and scandalized their elders by cutting their hair short, smoking, and dancing to jazz. They rejected the one-sided restrictions of a traditional marriage and were taking a more active role in politics, not least because in 1920 (after a century of protests) American women had been granted the vote. Virginia looked around her: home life was stifling, but the world outside seemed to offer enticing new freedoms. And so—to her fiancé’s evident indignation—she ditched him. (It turned out to be the right call, as he later reputedly worked through three unhappy and adulterous marriages.)
Virginia may have shared her mother’s sense of vaulting ambition, but she began to direct it toward a career and exploring the world rather than bagging a feckless husband, however well-heeled. Barbara had had little choice in her youth but to work as a secretary; few other options were open to a single woman of modest fortune in the late nineteenth century. She was mystified by her daughter’s desire for a job away from home instead of a lifetime of married leisure, but Virginia’s regular family trips to Europe as a child and the influence of her crisply-dressed German nanny had inspired a hunger for independent travel. She had excelled at languages at school and dreamed of using them to meet what she termed “interesting” people by becoming an ambassador, apparently undeterred by the fact that such exalted positions had hitherto been reserved for men. Dindy was set on proving herself an equal in a masculine world and to that end, it was her doting father (to whom she was unusually close) who allowed her to spend the next seven years studying at five prestigious universities.
She had begun in 1924 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Radcliffe (now part of Harvard) but the bluestocking atmosphere bored her, and in 1925 she moved to the more metropolitan Barnard College in Manhattan, where she enjoyed the theaters on Broadway. She was still conscious, however, that after dispatching one suitor, she was expected to conform and quickly catch another suitable husband. She failed to find one. Nor did Virginia impress her tutors, who marked her down as “an average student” who failed to participate in campus life or turn up to physical education classes. French and math were her favorite subjects (she loathed Latin and theology), but although she left in “good standing” her grades were mainly Cs and she did not graduate. She knew she required a college education, but was now anxious to begin her life in the real world. Barnard was perhaps still too much like home for her to thrive.
Paris seemed to offer wider horizons and she persuaded her parents that she would do better if only she could go abroad. Like many well-to-do East Coast Americans before and after her, Virginia viewed the French capital as the elegant gateway to liberation. Hundreds of young Americans boarded Cunard liners for Europe every week, sending back word on how fashionable women in Paris—the so-called garçonnes—were positively expected to be independent, athletic, and androgynous in appearance, and to work and love as they pleased. So in 1926, the twenty-year-old Virginia also moved to the other side of the Atlantic, far from her mother’s wearying disappointment, to enroll at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques on the city’s Rive Gauche. At the height of the so-called Années Folles, in place of American Prohibition and racial segregation, she found a thrillingly diverse art, literary, and music scene that drew in such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, and the legendary black dancer Josephine Baker (famous for her Charleston performances at the Folies Bergère and later for her service in the Resistance). In the cafés of Saint-Germain and the jazz clubs of Montmartre, Virginia met actresses, racing drivers, intellectuals, and budding politicians. The adventurous young woman from Baltimore smoked, drank, and danced with them all, far more enthralled by what she learned from her dazzling new friends than from her teachers. Here, at last, she felt free to be herself.