Self help messiah, p.33
Self-help Messiah, page 33
Perhaps the clearest indication of Carnegie’s newfound celebrity status, however, appeared with his participation in a prestigious frolic hosted by his old friend Lowell Thomas. In the mid-1930s, Thomas, by now a world-famous radio broadcaster, newsreel narrator, and globe-trotting travel writer, organized a summer softball team at Cloverbrook Farm, his three-hundred-acre estate in Dutchess County about seventy miles north of New York City. But this was no ordinary recreational endeavor featuring local amateur athletes. Thomas’s team, the Nine Old Men, enlisted some of the biggest celebrities in the United States. Casey Hogate, the editor of The Wall Street Journal, manned first base, while other infielders included Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and New York governor, and future presidential candidate, Thomas Dewey. Thomas’s roster also featured heavyweight boxing champion Eddie Eagan, Congressman Hamilton Fish, actor John Barclay, singer Lanny Ross—and author Dale Carnegie.11
Other teams in the makeshift league offered similar lineups. The Ostervelts of Roose Bay, captained by Colonel Ted Roosevelt, son of the late president, fielded a team composed of figures such as cartoonist Rube Goldberg, baseball legend Babe Ruth, sportswriter Grantland Rice, and Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. The Nutmegs, hailing from Connecticut, featured boxer Gene Tunney, journalist Heywood Broun, New Yorker editor Harold Ross, columnist Westbrook Pegler, and composer Deems Taylor. But the Nine Old Men’s most consistent opponent was the Summer White House Team, based out of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s summer home of Hyde Park, about thirty miles away, and managed by the president himself when he was in residence. The team included John Roosevelt, the president’s son; Rexford Tugwell, a key member of his Brain Trust; a few cabinet members; and several athletic, burly Secret Service men as ringers. FDR managed his team from the backseat of his presidential car, which was parked near his team’s bench. According to Thomas’s humorous jab, “The President is a born softball manager. Were he to put his team into professional competition, we are sure he would make money out of it, something that has thus far evaded him in governmental business.”12
Not surprisingly, these celebrity softball contests attracted hundreds of spectators who crowded into the crude bleachers set up around the field at Thomas’s farm. Good-humored banter, clever ribbing, and sharp repartee colored the proceedings more than athletic skill. When Hogate, who weighed around three hundred pounds, dropped by the president’s automobile to exchange pleasantries, FDR quipped, “They tell me, Mr. Hogate, that you have to make a home run to get to first base.” Hogate replied with a twinkle in his eye, “Under the New Deal, American business has to make a home run to get to first base, too.” In another game, Morgenthau retired from the field in favor of a substitute, inspiring one of the Nine Old Men to loudly demand that the secretary be ensconced at the scorer’s table because “anyone who can keep the Government’s books could win any ball game as a scorekeeper.” On a particularly hot summer day, a heavily sweating opponent came out of the game complaining that he had lost twenty pounds, whereupon Broun rose to his feet on the bench, pointed dramatically toward the stands, and proclaimed in stentorian tones, “Go and thin no more!” In a game played at Madison Square Garden in 1939 to raise money for charity, the good-natured humor of the softball competition surfaced in the sham introduction of the competitors. Before thirteen thousand people in attendance, Thomas reported that the teams featured a number of prominent celebrities, including Florence Nightingale, Hannibal, Charles Dickens, Leonardo da Vinci, James G. Blaine, the Warner Brothers, and Zeus.13
Carnegie became a regular member of this elite group. He traveled regularly to Cloverbrook Farm during the warm months and participated eagerly, if clumsily, as an outfielder for Thomas’s Nine Old Men. Having little athletic acumen, he became the subject of much teasing for his stiff maneuvers at bat and in the field. “Carnegie can’t hit, run, or throw, but he loves the game passionately,” Thomas reported. He “has been placed in right field because few hitters will ever hit to him and he is a lonely soul who likes to be alone.” At bat, Carnegie stood awkwardly at the plate, leaning back with the bat perched at a peculiar angle, jaw agape, peering at the pitcher with a desperate hope that he would actually make contact with the ball. After giving way to a substitute, he sat on the bench joking with teammates or wandered genially among the crowd.14
Carnegie’s attire became a subject of mock controversy. While the Nine Old Men featured uniforms of T-shirts and farmer’s overalls, the success author insisted on playing in his overcoat. “That was a history making moment, although we did not recognize it at the time,” joked Homer Croy, another participant, when first spying this odd attire. “But how often do we recognize great events when they are happening?” Carnegie’s teammates jokingly complained about his clothes, causing manager Thomas to rejoin that they should be happy with the situation because he “had seen Dale play with the overcoat and without the overcoat, and he was much better with the overcoat.” A team spokesman replied that he had been misunderstood—what he wanted was “the overcoat to play without Dale Carnegie.” Finally, the author folded under the pressure and jettisoned the overcoat for a uniform of pleated pants, suspenders, and a panama hat festooned with some daisies that usually drooped beside his head in a short time. Even that brought no mercy, as a teammate quipped, upon seeing the daisies, “Are your brains dead only on one side?”15
Carnegie and Lowell Thomas at the latter’s upstate New York farm in the 1930s.
An enthusiastic but unathletic Carnegie at bat in one of the celebrity softball games at Lowell Thomas’s farm.
Carnegie’s recent book earned him a torrent of friendly abuse. Thomas joked that the real Dale Carnegie was “a charming, utterly business-like gentleman who is obviously a repressed insurance salesman. Frustrated in his efforts to peddle policies and cast out into a world which despises insurance sellers, Dale wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People. This was, as the Freud boys say, sheer compensation.” Far from being a charismatic personality, Thomas continued, Carnegie was a “natty, eye-glassed businessman, absolutely timid and lonely, standing off by himself at the edge of the crowd, utterly disregarded by everyone.” While his book made him a fortune, Thomas concluded, “it had failed to net him any friends. Softball, he hoped, would succeed where the book had failed.”16
From early in his career, Carnegie had recognized that the power of personality was creating a celebrity culture in modern America. The country was obsessed with the personal lives of famous figures, he told his students in 1926, and the dividends could be enormous. In Carnegie’s words, “Tomorrow there will be millions of conversations floating over fences in the backyards of America, over tea tables and dinner tables—and what will be the predominating note in most of them? Personalities. He said this. So-and-so did that. He is making a ‘killing,’ and so on.” With How to Win Friends, Carnegie again stressed the significance of celebrity in modern life. In the preface, he claimed that he had interviewed “scores of successful people, some of them world famous—Marconi, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Owen D. Young, Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Martin Johnson—and tried to discover the technique they used in human relations.” Then throughout the text he lionized a host of rich and famous individuals, using their lives as inspiring examples of success. Now Carnegie himself, cavorting with presidents, cabinet officers, media magnates, sports legends, entertainment icons, and the giants of journalism, had become just such a figure. Things would never be the same.17
Carnegie’s newfound celebrity status changed nearly everything about his life in the late 1930s. Irrevocably, it altered his daily endeavors as new opportunities and demands came cascading into the heretofore relatively calm existence of a teacher of public speaking and occasional author. With the astonishing success of How to Win Friends, Carnegie found his professional activities, his interactions with others, and his relationship with his work pushed in new directions by unfamiliar pressures. Enjoying the benefits of fame, he gradually realized that they demanded a significant price.
The cost of celebrity appeared first in a new round of activity that simply dwarfed anything he had ever experienced. “How to Win Friends succeeded in a way that seems incredible,” he noted, “[and] after the book came out, I found myself living under a strain I had never dreamed of before: radio, lecture institute expanding, many people wanting to see me about this or that. I never want to live through another year like 1937–38. Hurried, rushed, tired.” His schedule of speeches, appearances, and teaching became so hectic that even the smallest opportunity for respite was cherished. “Worked in garden today for two hours. Seemed like a real luxury just to be able to do for two hours what I wanted to do,” he wrote. “Spent the evening reading Reader’s Digest. This is perhaps the third time in six months that I have sat at home by myself reading. Always rushing here and there. ‘To what end?’ ”18
Facing these unfamiliar pressures, Carnegie found himself rushing madly about the country for appearances in various cities and towns, where he would do book signings or speak about his magic formula for success outlined in How to Win Friends, or often both.
I would arrive in the early morning, after a night’s sleep in the Pullman car of some railroad, to be met by a deputation from a bookstore, whisked to my hotel to change into fresh clothing, and then hurried to the store. I would sit from ten until twelve, autographing copies of How to Win Friends for the people attending the sale. Another car would pick me up at the bookstore and take me to a Rotary luncheon at a nearby hotel. I would barely have time to finish my talk before another car and driver would be ready to take me over to the Women’s Club where I would lecture on How to Win Friends for an hour. If I was lucky, I would have time for a short nap before attending a banquet of some sort in my honor, and then I would be running for the train.19
Increasingly, Carnegie found this schedule overwhelming. Abbie Connell became responsible for organizing his schedule and, the picture of conscientiousness and efficiency, would provide her boss with elaborate itineraries listing every detail of his comings and goings. “But even with these to follow, I sometimes lost track of myself,” Carnegie noted ruefully. Once, leaving New York City, Connell accompanied him in a taxi as they rushed toward the bus station on East Fiftieth Street. They barely made it as the author dashed from the car and toward the bus, which was about to pull out. “I started up the steps automatically and then realized that I had no idea where I was going,” he reported. “I reached the top step and turned, in near panic. ‘Where am I going?’ I called down just as the door started to close. Abbie yelled back, ‘Look in your pocket. It is all there.’ I was already on my way across New York City before I even knew where I was going.” Such frantic activity gradually took its toll. “I had been on this merry-go-round for months,” Carnegie recalled later. “I began to lose weight and energy. And more important than that, my health.”20
Another, more subtle problem also began to torment the beleaguered author. The hype surrounding his creation of the charismatic, confident, sympathetic personality who could win friends and influence people with ease began to weigh heavily. Increasingly people expected him to personify this ideal type, and such expectations proved impossible to meet. While friendly, sympathetic, and naturally drawn to people, Carnegie also maintained a considerable portion of his native Midwestern reticence. As someone who never graduated college but was now moving among national elites, he also harbored some embarrassment about his minimal education. Feeling increasingly insecure about his celebrity, he wrote a poignant memo in the late 1930s asking his staff to carefully screen the hundreds of invitations that were pouring into his office. “Before I wrote the book, How to Win Friends, people did not seek my company. I was just Dale Carnegie, teacher of adult education classes, and in no way sought after,” he explained. “Now that I have written the book and it had such a phenomenal sale, people expect me to be something ‘out of this world,’ someone different. But when strangers meet me and begin to get acquainted, they find that I am just like their next door neighbor, that I am not someone with a dynamic personality. Then they feel let down. I sense that feeling and then I am embarrassed.”21
Despite such emotional difficulties, Carnegie’s newfound fame and affluence brought many practical boons to his life. He was able to lend financial assistance to old friends who had struggled during the Great Depression, such as Homer Croy, hiring him to do research for his radio broadcasts and sending him a check for $125 with the joking aside, “This is all in the world that I owe you, except a debt of gratitude.” He refurnished and remodeled his two-and-a-half-story house in Forest Hills, filling it with elegant French and Queen Anne furniture, antique furnishings, Oriental porcelains, and lush Persian rugs. He expanded the scenic backyard garden and installed a patio with lovely wrought-iron furniture, a rose garden, bushes, and a small cement pond with koi and lily pads. A special project involved refurbishing both his and Connell’s offices, which sat in a converted attic suite that ran the length of the house, with antique office furniture and fashionable Japanese wallpaper. Connell described the results as “breathtaking.” She recalled an incident not long after the remodeling when one of her fountain pens malfunctioned, sending a squirt of ink onto the new wallpaper. Horrified by the large, ugly splotch, she went home for the night uncertain what to tell her boss. To her immense relief, there was a gracious note from Carnegie sitting atop her typewriter when she returned the next morning. “Martin Luther once hurled an ink well at the devil,” it read. “If there have been any little devils hovering around here bothering you—let ’em have it. Meanwhile, let’s get another roll of the Japanese wallpaper.”22
Carnegie’s celebrity also prompted an expansion of his social life. Always interested in the vast cultural offerings available in Gotham, he now became something of a man-about-town in the late 1930s. “He loved the city for its plays, museums, businesses, and restaurants,” one observer explained. “He felt that New York City had made room for Dale Carnegie lovingly.” Traveling into the city by subway or train, he attended numerous plays, musicals, films, art shows, receptions, and eateries, usually accompanied by a good-looking woman. As an eligible bachelor standing prominently in the national spotlight, he had little trouble attracting a number of comely females and he relished the opportunity to squire them about the vibrant city he had come to love. As he wrote to Thomas, “We are looking forward with great pleasure to seeing Dead End [a popular, long-running play about gangsters and slum life, by Sidney Kingsley] with you soon.” Carnegie noted that he planned to bring his two nieces to the event, because they both wanted to be able to tell their families “that they went to the theatre with Lowell Thomas.”23
On the family front, Carnegie’s affluence proved to be a mixed blessing. His parents had led quiet lives in Belton, Missouri, where his father did some farming and his mother devoted herself to church work. By the 1930s, however, they were growing elderly and frail and struggled increasingly to live on their own. Dale provided generous monetary assistance, sending his parents a monthly stipend and additional injections of funds as needed. Brother Clifton, along with his wife, Carrie, moved into the parental home to help care for them. This situation seemed to work well, and in early 1938 Dale wrote a heartfelt letter to his “Darling Mother.” He thanked her for her loving care during his childhood and declared, “you have been a great, grand mother. I thank God for giving me such wonderful parents.” He also expressed his happiness at their comfortable situation, noting that “you now have excellent care with Mrs. Bidwell [a housekeeper], Carrie, and Clifton.”24
But this harmonious situation fell into discord over long-standing tensions between the brothers that now were exacerbated by the younger sibling’s great success. For many years, while Dale had moved forward slowly but surely as a teacher and author, Clifton had flailed about in search of a career. Flitting from job to job, he ended up back home caring for his parents while Dale became a national celebrity in New York. Gradually, Clifton’s jealousy grew. Due to his brother’s sporadic inability to support his family, Dale spent generously on his nieces and nephews, taking Clifton’s daughter, Josephine, into his Forest Hills home and hiring her as one of his staff, while also paying for her two brothers’ college educations. In addition, he also paid Clifton and his wife, as well as the housekeeper, a monthly salary as caregivers.
This unequal status eventually caused a strain. Dale, believing that money had been left over in November 1939 from his various checks, asked Carrie to use the surplus for expenses in December. Subsequently, he sent smaller amounts that month. This reduction triggered an angry letter from Clifton that, somewhat illogically, accused Dale of being a wealthy cheapskate, on the one hand, and an absentee bigwig who thought he could cover his lack of care with money, on the other. Dale replied artfully. He granted that it was “easy to understand how disturbed you were when you wrote me on Dec. 22” and expressed sympathy for his brother’s frustrations in dealing with elderly parents. But then he vented his own impatience. “Your letter especially hurt me, Clifton, because of what I have done in the past,” he wrote. Dale noted that he had given Clifton several thousand dollars during a crisis many years ago; that he had responded to a later missive claiming that his family would be living on public charity with a monthly stipend of $100; that he had spent thousands trying unsuccessfully to establish Clifton as a teacher of public speaking; that he had then used connections to get him a supervisory job with the Civilian Conservation Corps; that he even sent Carrie’s mother a monthly check for $15 to help her. “Does a brother who has done that deserve a letter like you wrote?” he asked. But then Dale, trying to follow his own principles, concluded by offering an olive branch. He sent Carrie a string of pearls and told Clifton, “If I have hurt your feelings, I am sorry and ask you for forgiveness. Won’t you please tell me what you want me to do? How much money do you need and for what?”25
