Bessie and Charmian
Baum
Did you know Bessie London very well?
Martinez
Yes, she was a friend of my mother's and after Jack built the house for Bessie and the girls on our hill, I saw much of her
while the girls were growing up.
There were no autos in the early period of the friendship. Jack and my father were expert bicyclists. When the first "bloomer
girl" outfits were within reach of Bessie and my mother, Jack and my father bought bicycles for them and planned trips together.
So, correctly attired, they agreed to a week-end jaunt to the Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. The first "bloomer girls" in Oakland,
they caused much excitement and were conversation pieces for the shocked Victorians until the vogue for bloomers became respectable.
― 138 ―
Baum
That was quite a trip.
Martinez
Jack was disappointed in Bessie. He had tried to make her an outdoor woman and found he had failed when, on their honeymoon,
she complained of the cold water at Santa Cruz and she proved a poor swimmer. Jack was furious. Then, he resigned himself
to accepting her as she was until the coming of the babies solved the problem neatly. Still, he held against Bessie her lack
of sportsmanship and often ridiculed her, which she ignored despite the hurt she felt.
But Charmian was everything he desired. She'd leap into the Arctic or down into a volcano if he asked her to. She was a good
horsewoman and a daring woman.
Baum
Were your mother and Bessie close friends?
Martinez
Yes, they were very close friends for, I guess, three years. I don't think they saw much of each other after my father left
socialism. I have photographs of them together on the socialist picnics in the album.
However, Bessie was not a warm person. Curiously enough, Charmian was not a warm personality either. But Charmian was gregarious
and gay and fun and loved people in a social sort of a way, and she loved having a house full, which pleased Jack.
Jack was an Anglophile and he hated anything organized - organized religion or organized society. Yet he adored the British
Empire because it was power and he ignored the tremendous organization that held it together. He married Bessie because Bessie's
father was an
― 139 ―
Englishman. That held it together. After their marriage he found she was half-Portuguese, on her mother's side. That's where
Joan got her slightly swarthy complexion.
Jack wanted a son desperately and, when Joan was born, he went out and got drunk and wasn't seen for three days. When little
Bess was born, the second girl, he left Bessie for good, for not to have a son was humiliating to him. He admired Bessie because
he considered her a pure Anglo-Saxon to be the mother of sons. Also, in the beginning of his writing career, she had helped
him with his grammar.
But to go back to Jack: I saw nothing of him in the intervening years until, in 1907, I married Marty. He was a close friend
of Jack's. Jack was very fond of Marty, a picturesque figure he enjoyed. George Sterling, Jack and Marty, the three of them,
were often together. Before long Sterling was dubbed affectionately, "The Greek", Marty, "The Aztec", and Jack "Wolf".
Our rugged individualists - Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Jack London- all considered suicide a noble end, solving their
problems of disillusionment. Bierce, who lamented the passing of the pioneer age; Sterling, whose Greek hedonism was stifled
by the late Victorianism; and London, disgusted with a humanity that would not accept the Marxian panacea for the good of
this world, all committed suicide. Marty had ten friends who committed suicide. The newsmen would ask him, since all were
friends of his, had not there existed a suicide club.
― 140 ―
Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Charles Warren Stoddard, and from the next generation, Jack London, George Sterling, and Marty
continued the development of the personality cult. Rugged individualism, rooted and developed in the pioneer age, faded out
in the age of capitalism and two world wars. We are finding life is fitted into tight patterns now with no place for individualism.
At that time I was with Marty, in the inner circle around Jack, along with the Sterlings. We were friends of Charmian, too.
Jack Partington, the portrait painter, had a beautiful sister, Phyllis, who had graduated from the chorus of the San Francisco
Opera Company into the Boston Light Opera Company. She was a handsome, tall, black-eyed girl, and Jack became very enamored
of her. So, the Sterlings, especially Carrie, were determined that Jack should marry Phyllis. Finally, after a tender scene,
Jack gave her his ultimatum, "I'm going on a lecture tour, and if you'll give up your career, on my return I'll marry you.
She was very much tempted, because Jack was irresistible and a career seemed less important.
At that time, I knew a scheming woman whose daughter was a young poetess with green eyes and red hair. The poetess met Jack
London and lured him into promising to marry her, too. So Jack was entangled and had promised to marry three women
Jack blithely went to New York to start his lecture tour. The day after he arrived there was splashed all over the New York
papers: "Jack London marries Charmian Kittredge of Berkeley, California." Carrie was fit to be tied. The lovely Phyllis wept
a little, then
― 141 ―
consoled herself with recalling the broken hearts she left in Boston and declared she was relieved and thankful she could
go on with her musical career. The little poetess took a jump into the lake, in shallow water, so she'd be rescued, wrote
her heart out, and then slipped into oblivion again. Thirty years later, an alcoholic, she landed in jail and babbled the
story of her ruined life when Jack London deserted her for Charmian.
Charmian's uncle had been a sea captain of ferry boats on San Francisco Bay. They were at Glen Ellen at the estate belonging
to her aunt and uncle and they were honeymooning up there when they originated the plans for the Snark.
Well, anyhow, Carrie Sterling was never going to speak to Jack again after he married Charmian - she was through with Jack
London for good. George brought him back to Carrie and there was a reconciliation. Carrie said to Jack, "Jack, why did you
do that? Why did you marry Charmian?" To which he replied, "Now listen Carrie, when I arrived in New York Charmian was there
to meet me at the train. If a woman wants you that much, why you marry her! Moreover, I married Charmian because she is courageous
and would follow me to the ends of the earth in hell or high water - a woman who could take life in her stride!"
Baum
Did you come to like her better?
Martinez
No. I never liked Charmian. I never saw too much of her, either, after that. I think all of us resented the underhand game
she played on Bessie, using Anna as breaking up her marriage. Irving Stone
― 142 ―
didn't make that clear in his book at all [
Sailor on Horseback]. He had promised all three women to make them heroines in the book, so he was treating them all very gently and Charmian
was still alive.
Baum
Well, would you have liked her otherwise?
Martinez
No, I never would have liked Charmian. She was a man's woman and had little use for her sex, except as a menace to peace of
mind in relation to Jack! But she was what Jack wanted and that's all that mattered. She was eight years older, just like
Bessie. He wanted a boy desperately. Charmian tried but had a miscarriage and it proved to be a girl. So that ended Charmian
trying again to have children.