SECOND GENERATION

2. Richard Haden Gordon was born on Mar 30 1919 in New York City. He died in Nov 1977 in Honolulu, Hawaii. After his death, his younger sister described Richard Haden Gordon as "the golden boy and the man who never was." It is an apt description.
The first son of an aspiring family, as a youth he swept all before him. His academic career at St. Bernard's in New York and St. George's in Newport, Rhode Island, were rich with prizes both for sports and for studies. He went to Princeton University and graduated as a member of the class of 1941, although he did not receive his degree until 1946 because of the Second World War. He was a member of the Union Club and Squadron A.
In the Army, he rose from private to major and had the separation rank of lieutenant colonel. He fought in North Africa and in the Italian campaign from its inception until the end of the war. Although he spent most of his military career as a staff officer, attached to the staff of General Mark Clark, he earned a purple heart for being wounded in action and two bronze stars for bravery in the face of the enemy. He commanded the detail that liberated the town of Livorno, where he was severely wounded in the knee. Like many men who have fought in a great war, it was an experience that affected him more than any other in his life and was the period of his life when he felt most alive, most intensely engaged with great forces.
His life after the war, however, was largely one of failure. His first two marriages soon ended in divorce and his attempts to become a screen writer in Hollywood in the late 1940's and a television producer in the early 1950's did not work out. His third marriage was a happy one, but his business interests in the French and British West Indies also failed and he retired to Hawaii.
Disengaged as a father, his greatest gift to his children, perhaps, was his passion for the printed word. He devoured books on all subjects, reading them at an astonishing speed. He was married to Mary Alricks Steele on Mar 31 1942 in New York City.

3. Mary Alricks Steele⁽²⁾ was born on Oct 26 1921 in New York City. She died on Jan 19 1967 in Boston, Massachusetts. Mary Steele's life was, to a large extent, dominated by an ultimately losing battle with alcoholism. Possessed of great beauty, wit, and charm, she won the hearts of almost everyone, including many who were shrewd judges of character. But she lacked an ability to see her own virtues or to depend on her own talents, which were many. This led to an increasing dependence on alcohol to obtain self-esteem, and her physical intolerance for it led directly to her death at age forty-five.

Mary Steele attended the Chapin School in New York. In 1939, the year she graduated, the city's society columnists named her "debutante of the year," and she both endured and enjoyed an avalanche of publicity. Her year in the limelight has been preserved in a scrap book that was assembled by her mother. It is in my possession, a fascinating glimpse into a vanished world.

Her marriage to Richard Gordon was not a success and they were divorced in 1948. After the end of her marriage she worked for Oscar Hammerstein II as his personal assistant and secretary until the end of his life and was present at the creation of some of the most famous Broadway musicals ever written. She married his brother, whom she had known earlier, but that marriage also ended in divorce in 1958.

Her last marriage, to Goodwin Dillen, another alcoholic, was troubled by her increasing illness. She bought a house in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, and was living there when her final illness began and she was taken to Boston for better, but still unavailing, medical care.

It is rare for an historian to find an epitaph personally selected by someone. But Mary Steele chose hers, although to be sure unconsciously, and it illustrates at one and the same time both the cause of her tragedy and the unfathomable mystery of her self-destruction. On the end paper of a copy of Samuel Hoffenstein's Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing, beneath the author's inscription to her--for they were good friends--she wrote in her own hand a quote from another of his books of verse, Pencil in the Air.

Everywhere I go
I go too.
And spoil everything.

Children were:

i. Richard Haden Gordon was born on Jan 9 1943 in Medford, Oregon. He died on Nov 23 1995 in Taos, New Mexico.
1 ii. John Steele Gordon.

Return to Table of Contents