Self help messiah, p.39
Self-help Messiah, page 39
A powerful inspiration for Carnegie’s common touch came from his reverence for the rural values of his youth. When he was on the road lecturing and teaching, he would have his driver stop at fruit stands so he could sample the local produce. He would frequent farmers’ markets and exchange stories about rural life with proprietors of the various stalls. While most Americans saw Carnegie as a symbol of modern urbanity, one journalist said he was left with the impression of passing the time with a genial farmer after spending several days in Carnegie’s company. Much of the philosophy in How to Win Friends, the journalist concluded, was merely an outgrowth of “the deep-seated courtesy, the respect for human dignity, the appreciation for the rarely seen and therefore appreciated neighbor which is practiced by country people.”18
Indeed, Carnegie did everything he could to keep in touch with his rural past. He returned frequently to his boyhood stomping grounds in Maryville and Warrensburg, Missouri, throughout the 1940s to give talks and visit old friends. After World War II, Carnegie strengthened his rural ties by purchasing a 1,250-acre farm in Belton, Missouri, where he raised Brangus cattle, a combination of the Brahman and Angus breeds. He hired a distant cousin to manage the place but snuck away from his professional duties every few months to stay for several days. Riding horses, pitching hay, repairing fences, and planting hedges to stop soil erosion, he reveled in the joys of rural life. He liked visiting with neighbors, sitting on a front porch and talking over a Coke. He still felt at home in the country. “Most of my relatives are farmers. My parents are buried on the farm,” Carnegie told Look magazine in 1948. “And when I die, I expect to spend eternity there beside them.” This rural sensibility carried over to his home in suburban New York, where he became an avid gardener and loved to get his hands dirty. One afternoon, after Marilyn Burke spied her boss coming in from planting flower bulbs on a rainy afternoon, happily covered in mud, she came to an important realization. Carnegie was “a very different person from the one I thought I worked for—not the sophisticated New Yorker, the erudite author, lecturer, and educator—but rather a very homey, down-to-earth human being.”19
A love of the outdoors flavored Carnegie’s daily life. He took long walks several times a week in Forest Park, a large tract of tree-filled public land not far from his home. A reporter for Collier’s accompanied him on one of these jaunts and described his habit of “constantly exclaiming over the wonders of nature.” An accompanying photograph showed Carnegie resting on a park bench, dressed warmly in a wool overcoat and holding a tweed fedora, contentedly gazing out at the huge trees, scattered leaves, and stark beauty of a winter landscape. In the 1940s, his love for nature encompassed a new interest: dinosaurs. He became fascinated with paleontology—contemplating vast expanses of time and extinct creatures seemed to have left him in a state of awe—and he pursued the topic with typical enthusiasm. When in Los Angeles, he asked to visit the famous La Brea Tar Pits, and his host listened as he talked knowledgeably about dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, and saber-toothed cats as they rode along Wilshire Boulevard. He even contacted Yale University and purchased a set of dinosaur tracks embedded in shale and stone and installed them in his backyard garden. Carnegie always showed them to visitors, proudly announcing, “I have a letter from the curator of the Peabody Museum, saying those tracks were made 180 million years ago.”20
But Carnegie’s home life would become even more settled in the mid-1940s. On one of his lecture-and-teaching tours, he had an engagement in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a Carnegie Course sponsor. There he met an attractive, charming, articulate young woman. Both felt a spark of attraction, and within a few months a relationship had flourished. A little more than a year after their initial introduction, Carnegie, the confirmed bachelor, took a step that surprised many.
Dorothy Vanderpool did not want to go. She was tired after work and not especially eager to hear the great Dale Carnegie speak in her hometown of Tulsa in the fall of 1943, even though she had graduated from his course. But she and her mother had been invited by Everett Pope, an old family friend and the Carnegie sponsor in Tulsa, and her mother, a forceful woman, insisted on attending the event. So off they went and she found herself captivated. It was “amazing” to hear Carnegie speak as he radiated a quiet charisma and held the rapt attention of the audience, she said. Afterward, Dorothy was taken to meet Carnegie, and she, along with her mother and Pope, ended up joining the famous visitor for coffee. The young woman enjoyed his company and found him interesting and attractive, but thought little of the encounter except to tell friends about her brush with fame.
Carnegie, however, found much more in this casual get-together. He pressed Pope for details about Dorothy after her departure and secured her address. After returning home, he began sending her letters that were, in her words, “not romantic exactly, but they were a little warmer than business letters.” After several weeks of correspondence, he invited her to New York to join his organization doing secretarial work as well as some ghostwriting for him. She accepted, moved, and took up her new duties in January 1944. Dorothy and Dale began to date and developed a serious relationship throughout the spring and summer before announcing their impending marriage in the fall. “I used a puppy’s method to win her,” Carnegie joked later. “You know, a puppy shows an interest in you and that makes you get interested in him.”21
Dorothy Price Vanderpool came from a heartland background that appealed to Carnegie in a visceral way. In fact, he told a magazine writer that her mother had boarded briefly with his parents at their farm in Missouri when he was a very small boy. Dorothy was born on November 3, 1912, the only child of Henry and Victoria Price. He worked as a minor public official in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, a small town in the northeast corner of the state, and the family soon moved to Tulsa. Henry was a quiet, gentle man whom Carnegie later would memorialize in one of his books as someone who “tries to live by the Golden Rule; and he is incapable of doing anything mean, selfish, or dishonest.” Victoria, on the other hand, was a tough, strong-willed, outspoken woman who ruled the Price household with a firm hand. Her daughter would inherit many of these qualities.22
By her teenage years, Dorothy, an intelligent and popular girl, had developed varied interests and joined many clubs at her high school. In particular, she had thrown herself into journalism with the hopes of someday becoming a writer. By the time she was a senior at Central High School in 1930, she had become involved in the Press Club, School Life Club, Quill and Scroll, Junior Honor Society, and Advertising Board. In the yearbook she was described as “An imaginative personage with inclinations toward vagabonding and pencraft.” Slender, pretty, with auburn hair and a determined look frequently on her face, she was also very tall—she stood about five foot ten—and this often left her, with typical teenage angst, feeling awkward, “like a giant.”23
After graduation, Dorothy began taking classes at a local college when she met Louis Vanderpool, a handsome, blond-haired young man who was a student at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. A whirlwind romance resulted. Dorothy got pregnant, dropped out of school, and the couple married. A daughter, Rosemary, was born on July 2, 1933, in Norman while the young parents worked as caretakers of a university fraternity house over the summer. The marriage lasted only a short time. Louis drank enthusiastically and wanted to socialize while Dorothy had career ambitions, and they separated and divorced. She would later describe it as “one of those unfortunate teenage marriages.” Cut adrift, Dorothy and her infant daughter moved back home to live with her parents in Tulsa.24
Motherhood proved to be an awkward fit. Dorothy nurtured strong aspirations in the working world and showed scant interest in being a single parent. She found a job in the Tulsa office of the Gulf Oil Corporation and began to climb the corporate ladder. Her efforts eventually landed a position as senior secretary in the executive suite, a promotion no doubt aided by her completion of a Carnegie Course under Pope. The communication skills she learned there, along with her outgoing personality and forceful manner, won her the presidency of Tulsa’s Young Republicans Club. She began to give “humorous-type talks to men’s civic club luncheons,” she recalled later. “They even got reported in the papers.” At the same time, Dorothy largely turned over the raising of her daughter to Henry and Victoria, who became surrogate parents for the girl. Rosemary always called her Dorothy, never “mother” or “mom” or “mommy.” Dorothy had a conflicted attitude. Later she commented that her daughter’s habit had been encouraged by Victoria, and that it hurt her. At the same time, Dorothy would always say, “she had a name and Rosemary should use it.” In either event, the maternal role proved difficult. Straining against the confines of her life, the young career woman desperately dreamed of leaving her hometown for a bigger arena.25
This was her situation when Carnegie arrived for his fateful visit. Smitten immediately, he convinced Dorothy to move to New York where the infatuation evolved into something more serious. Throughout 1944, they gradually fell in love, and the nature of their mutual attraction was obvious. For Carnegie, the young woman offered obvious physical enticements with her tall, lithe figure and good looks. But her intellectual qualities proved equally important—a sparkling intelligence, a gift for writing, an irreverent zest for life, and a tough-minded determination to succeed. She was a Midwesterner like him, someone with whom he instinctively felt comfortable. And unlike Frieda Offenbach, she was not entangled in a complicated marriage but was available for a deeper relationship. As for Dorothy, she embraced a suitor who was famous, charming, mature, and wealthy, someone with a kind and generous spirit who seemed ready to settle down to domestic life at the age of fifty-six. He also offered her an opportunity for escape to an exciting life in the cultural, social, and economic hub of the nation’s largest city. So in addition to the personal spark between them, Dale and Dorothy very much met each other’s broader emotional needs.
Their courtship, not surprisingly given the two strong personalities at play, was sometimes tempestuous. Most of the time, Dale was his amiable, considerate, and solicitous self while Dorothy used her wit and intelligence to great effect. But occasionally, as often happens with two willful individuals, tensions turned into conflicts and arguments erupted. According to one observer, a crisis threatened as “Dorothy once quit her job after a spat with Carnegie and started to pack and go home, only to have him turn on the how-to-win-friends charm and influence her into staying.” By the fall of 1944, the couple decided they were right for each other and sent out an official wedding announcement in October, which was picked up by newspapers all over the country. It also appeared in Time magazine, along with Dale’s quip that even after writing How to Win Friends “it took me eight years to influence a woman to marry me.”26
Dale and Dorothy married on November 5, 1944, in Tulsa at the Boston Avenue Methodist Church with a small group of family and friends in attendance. Before the ceremony began, Harry O. Hamm, serving as an usher, was with Dale in the groom’s room as they heard selections from the musical Oklahoma being played in the church sanctuary. According to Hamm, “Dale Carnegie turned to Everett Pope and me and said, ‘If they play “People Will Say We’re in Love,” I’ll just cry.’ Well, they did play that song but Dale managed to stay dry-eyed. How? He was so excited about marrying Dorothy that he never even heard the song.”27
After the ceremony, Dorothy moved into Dale’s house on Wendover Road in Forest Hills and the couple settled into domestic life. Dale continued to work at home, a fact that made for a difficult adjustment for his new wife. In an advice book for women she wrote a few years later called How to Help Your Husband Get Ahead in His Social and Business Life, Dorothy included a chapter entitled “How to Keep from Going Crazy if He Works at Home.” “Any woman who must gear her entire home routine around a man who is constantly underfoot deserves a special award of merit,” she wrote. “Imagine having to tiptoe around that closed room where your lord is at work, having him ask you to turn off the vacuum when you are only half through, or never being able to entertain your friends at luncheon because the cackle disturbs the master.” Nonetheless, Dorothy urged the wife to accommodate her work-at-home husband’s needs, make him comfortable, forget his presence and go about your own daily tasks, assume a good-humored demeanor, and avoid interrupting him. She added, “For eight years of our marriage, my husband did all of his work at home, so I know whereof I speak.”28
The wedding of Dale Carnegie and Dorothy Vanderpool in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on November 5, 1944.
As Dorothy grew accustomed to her new life, she quickly became an efficient manager of a household that included two secretaries and a housekeeper. As a magazine article noted, however, the housekeeper “gets little chance to demonstrate her Middle European cuisine because the Carnegies prefer Middle Western dishes.” Settling into marriage, Dale and Dorothy knit together their interests to create a contented, harmonious life. He remained an avid backyard gardener and she shared this enthusiasm, eagerly working in the yard and becoming a specialist in growing tulips and irises. The couple shared a love of the theater, regularly attending performances in New York. They loved to travel and took numerous trips to the Canadian Rockies, the ranch country of Wyoming, and Europe, where they toured England, France, and Italy. In general, Dale and Dorothy manifested an enthusiasm for life that made their relationship congenial. Lee Maber, one of Carnegie’s secretaries, who along with her husband joined them for dinner in New York’s Chinatown, recalled a memorable ride home on an elevated train. “The car we were on was deserted and one of us started to sing a song about New York,” Maber reported. “Suddenly Dale said, ‘Let’s go!’ and waltzed Dorothy down the aisle. George and I joined them and we all continued to sing together. We had a wonderfully light-hearted time.”29
Now established in an affluent suburb of New York, Dorothy pursued a wide array of interests that revealed the breadth of her intelligence, talent, and enthusiasm for life. She loved to read, with mysteries quenching her lighter tastes and Shakespeare becoming a passion. She pored over the Bard’s many plays, and eventually became president of the Shakespeare Club of New York City, an organization with which she maintained close ties for the rest of her life. “My wife is entranced with the study of Shakespeare and his plays,” Dale wrote proudly; “she says old age has no terrors for her because it will give her more time for study.” Dorothy became an avid cook, although her culinary skills never quite matched her ardor, and played the piano with gusto, gathering friends and family around the keyboard to sing carols during the Christmas season. Influenced by her Oklahoma background, she was a skilled horsewoman and a crack shot at the rifle range. She became interested in fencing and for a time was a member of a fencing team in Forest Hills.30
Dorothy proved adept at handling her husband and establishing a position of equality in the relationship. She came to understand his occasional dark moods. When he appeared sour and uncooperative, an observer noted, she would jokingly recall that she “once spent $76 to take the [Carnegie] course, laughingly demands her money back, and this usually straightens him out.” This tactic occasionally failed. A visitor once observed Dale stalking about the house quietly seething in anger, and described Dorothy’s roguish reaction: “ ‘There,’ said Mrs. Carnegie, arching an eyebrow, ‘goes the man who wrote The Book.’ ” But Dorothy, a confident and outspoken woman, did not shrink from standing up to her famous husband when she felt it necessary. “She never backed down from an argument, and that included Dale,” observed a family member. “Abbie [Connell], who was Dale’s secretary, and then later Dorothy’s, told me there were times that their arguments would increase to yelling, but always by the end they would have some resolution. They were a very normal married couple.” Carnegie, who came to accept and appreciate his wife’s assertive nature, would joke about how the realities of marriage forced an alteration of his human relations principles. A colleague once adopted Carnegie’s tactic of “avoiding the acute angle” during a dinner party when his wife strongly expressed a controversial opinion and he commented, “Dear, you could be right.” Immediately, Carnegie chimed in with a laugh: “No, no, no! When it is your wife, you say, ‘Darling, you are absolutely right!’ ”31
While determined to carve out a position of equity in their marriage, Dorothy also worked to accommodate her husband’s enthusiasms and activities. For example, although a bit mystified at first, she quickly accepted his close friendship with Homer Croy. The two spent every Sunday afternoon together horsing around, going to low-rent eateries, telling jokes, and sharing old memories. Dorothy came to enjoy Croy’s rambunctious personality, as well as the company of his wife, Mae, and to appreciate his salutary influence on her husband by helping him to unwind. In 1945, as a good-natured joke, Dorothy even composed a satirical poem about Dale’s best friend after The New York Times pilloried Croy in a book review as a “professional rube.” She sent the verses to be published in the Maryville Forum just as the two men were making a joint appearance in their hometown:
HOMER, SWEET HOMER
or
THE BAREFOOT BOY WITH CUSTOM-MADE SHOES ON
By Dorothy Carnegie
