Unable to resist a little Taylor reference for the title, and I apologize not.

So, I’m back really quickly, because I have another find. The subject matter has absolutely nothing to do with my last article, but the situation in which I find myself is similar, because once again, I have access to source material that was in the possession of Clara Rhoades (has her handwriting on it and came from the holdings of the Jeanette MacDonald International Fan Club), that is basically identical in nature to an interview conducted by Sharon Rich. Both “sides” of people in charge of directing Jeanette’s legacy in the decades following her death had, actually, a lot of overlap in material, but what they chose to do with it was quite different. Last week’s article about Susan Nelson was one such example, and here’s another:

While I was looking through stacks and stacks and stacks of letters last week, searching for the one we have from Mary the housekeeper, I ran across this letter, dated November 1, 1979, from a lady named Jean Johnson, to Clara, and it’s about a character in her life known as Aunt Kitty. My understanding from the letter is that Kitty is not actually Jean’s aunt, but rather a close friend and neighbor of her mother’s so she grew up knowing her as “Aunt Kitty.”

In the letter, Jean describes Kitty as a beautiful relative of Jeanette’s with “flawless white skin” and “big blue eyes” who had a “similar face shape” to Jeanette’s, and says Kitty is the mother of two redheaded daughters, whom she took to visit Jeanette in California, and to whom Jeanette sent shoes and clothes. This letter also discusses the hoards of relatives who wanted to connect with Jeanette whenever she came east on concert tour, and how chaotic that was. (I have always known there were a lot of relatives, but I really can appreciate that now, having spent some time this week exploring the genealogy. Good grief there were a lot of people to see if one came back the Philly area!) Jean says she was told that Gene Raymond was nice to the girls on their visits, and she herself definitely comes across as a Raymond fan and there’s no doubt that she found the right group of folks to associate with, lol. Here’s a photo of the letter:

You’ll notice that Clara, in her inimitable fashion, has scrawled all over the envelope. “About Aunt Kitty” caught my attention at once, and it’s what made me open the envelope while looking for something totally unrelated. This project is nothing if not an everlasting series of bunny trails! So, curiosity piqued, I wondered who Aunt Kitty is and what’s in this letter about her? The fact that Gene can’t remember her, that there was an “Aunt Sally” (yes, Anna’s sister) but he can’t remember anyone else, and says to ask Emily, hmm. (Are they your in-laws or Emily’s, Gene?)

So I got interested and looked. And then my eyes real big:

I also remember Aunt Kitty telling us (one day after church) that Nelson Eddy wanted to marry Jeanette but she listened to her mother and married Gene. Jeanette’s mother much preferred Gene over Nelson. According to Aunt Kitty she (Mrs. Mac) said Nelson was too chintzy, whatever that means.

Wait, hold up, WHAT NOW????? Here’s a source from Jeanette’s family, saying that this relationship got to the point of getting married (which, it did and then some, but try getting any of these people to acknowledge that..!) and then saying that Jeanette didn’t marry Nelson because her mother wanted her to marry Gene. Also very true.

But instead of learning more, opening this up for discussion, saying hey, it’s possible that there’s more to this than we know, what exactly DID go on between Nelson and Jeanette? We go straight to the discrediting place. Even though Gene knew and was visited by these people, Gene “can’t remember,” and we have no data on Emily’s thoughts. Did Clara even ask Gene? Or did she simply decide what his answer would be because she didn’t like the content of the letter? I can tell you that this was summarily discarded along with everything else this woman disagrees with and certainly not given any credence.

And let’s unpack this chintzy comment for a second… Nelson Eddy was a wealthy man before he came to Hollywood. He had already made great, great money singing, and indeed the whole idea of coming to Hollywood to begin with was to enhance his concert career. Nelson was also demonstrably, provably a generous guy. For Anna MacDonald to think he’s chintzy (cheap or stingy) there’s got to be a reason, and that reason is that she can see the seriously powerful nature of the relationship between Nelson and her daughter, and she believes that it is powerful enough that Nelson will turn Jeanette’s head in such a way that support for Anna’s extremely comfortable lifestyle dries up. Gene Raymond found a very happy and willing ally in Anna MacDonald: he never cared that Jeanette out-earned and out-worked him ten to one. He mostly never cared that he was essentially a freeloader being kept by a wealthy woman, and he was never out to bring about any disturbance in the way the household was being run before he joined it. When he did care, he was an insecure asshole about it who took up where Anna left off with the emotional abuse and manipulation, to the extent that Jeanette felt like she had to, for example, turn down the opportunity to originate Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway to stay home and placate Gene’s ego by keeping house for him while he banged around working on projects nobody cared about because he couldn’t get his footing in Hollywood after the war and he made her life miserable because of it. That’s just one example of a career-damning choice she made out of guilt or because she was trying to assuage her mediocre second-stringer of a husband, so ultimately Gene, the man she married, ended up hurting her career far more than Nelson ever would.

Nelson, on the other hand, reckoned that Blossom was the only other member of the family “worth two cents” and he never was a great one for pretending to like someone he didn’t. He didn’t like Anna, ostensibly because he could see the dynamic even when Jeanette couldn’t, and he knew it was bullshit. Anna didn’t like him because she’d been sized up properly, and she was worried that she was going to be exposed. (In fairness, I don’t believe that Nelson would have interfered in Jeanette’s care of her mother with her money. I do think Nelson then would also expect Jeanette’s mother to not interfere in his marriage, and if she had been unable to do that, then I think he’d have gotten grumpy about her cushy lifestyle being sponsored by the daughter whose happiness she was ruining.) Bottom line, Anna didn’t like Nelson because Nelson saw exactly what was going on (and it cost him everything on the personal happiness front, though he never stopped loving Jeanette), and if he gave her the impression of being chintzy, it’s because he wasn’t about to have Anna benefit from his money, nor was he going to stand by and act like he didn’t notice while she manipulated Jeanette’s emotions, and hell, maybe he DID think that someone who treated their daughter like that didn’t deserve to be kept in luxury by said daughter.

REGARDLESS, ONCE AGAIN, HERE IS A FAMILY SOURCE WHO KNOWS THIS RELATIONSHIP WAS AT THE POINT OF MARRIAGE BEFORE ANNA INTERVENED.

Not Mayer. Look, Mayer was a sonofabitch, but a MacDonald/Eddy marriage would have been outrageously popular at the box office. There’s not a great financial reason to say otherwise, and Mayer is, at the end of the day, a money guy. Ultimately, if they’d done it first and asked questions later (which Nelson wanted to do, but conscientious Jeanette wouldn’t go for it), he’d have backed them. He’d have had to. Mayer is a problem, for sure, and Mayer had personal feelings about Jeanette, and Mayer made it necessary for them to be extremely careful, but Mayer is not the main heavy in this story, and it’s an oversimplification and a general misunderstanding to say that he is. He only controlled them for the first third of their relationship. There are bigger components at play that all worked together to create this shitshow, and Mayer is one of them, perhaps, but he’s not the only one.

Not Nelson’s temper or demands (although they both had moments when they were the most immature pair of twerps in the 1930s and they both said shit they didn’t mean and weren’t always great at expressing what they did mean). I have never shared the opinion that Jeanette didn’t marry Nelson because he wanted her to give up working and raise his children. Even if he said something along those lines, I would wager that that is his childhood trauma talking, and that a wise woman would know better. Nelson’s father abandoned him and his mother. They were desperately poor, and a lot of the time it must have seemed like them against the world. He saw his young, beautiful mother struggle. He was a sensitive child who grew into a sensitive adult and this made an impression on him. He knew how it felt to live that with her. He wanted his wife to have better than he witnessed his mother get. He wanted to provide, to make it so Jeanette didn’t HAVE to take care of herself — that’s a separate thing from stopping her from doing something she loves and wants to do. I don’t think that was ever Nelson’s intention. He’s a typical Cancer man, valuing home and family. That’s not a crime. That said, Jeanette is maybe the only person in his life who really GOT IT — the level of talent, the perfectionism, the ambition, the drive, the coming up poor and having to claw your way up the ladder at an early age with hangers-on that you’re suddenly in charge of. He was in awe of her stature when he first came to Hollywood, and so completely respectful of it, always. He loved and respected her talent. “The times” or not, I cannot envision a world in which he has any desire or reason to believe that he can convince her to plausibly give that up. Even if he clumsily said something like that, she’d have told him he was hilarious and moved on. And like, just as an example of how he felt about her as a fellow artist, when they were on the radio together, Nelson was always about to die from sheer pride that she was there with him; he gloried in how much the fans loved her, and can be heard muttering things like “pure talent!” in the background when she finishes a solo. Zero chance he would have actually done anything to try to keep her from doing something she loves so much, and that he loves doing with her! I think we all say a lot of dumb shit when we are young and stupid; I do not consider that this was any great holdup preventing Jeanette from marrying him. She loved the guy. Loved him in a way that threatened her control of herself and her regimented, organized, breadwinning life. And — from her earliest childhood, Jeanette KNEW that she wanted children. She wanted children, and cited not having them as her greatest regret, multiple times. Nelson wanted children. Nelson wanting her to be the mother of his children is not a reason to not marry the man, just the opposite.

It is my belief that Anna probably didn’t even have to work too hard at this juncture. She had raised Jeanette to feel that she wasn’t good enough (even though Jeanette objectively is far and away the highest performer in the family, and Blossom runs a solid but distant second); she had, from earliest memory, called Jeanette an accident, “Father’s Final Feminine Disappointment” and let her know that her very presence, over which she had no control, was a financial strain on the family. She raised her youngest daughter to be fundamentally guilty. She kept her love conditional and her approval just out of reach. She kept Jeanette jumping for it, just wanting her mother to love her. That is absolutely central to the adult that Jeanette became. When she fell in love with Nelson, she was already multiple romantic relationships into her adult life, but this one was different. This was a tidal wave. This was potent, powerful, forever type stuff. This had Isabel Eddy telling Anna MacDonald that Nelson was talking at home about what fun marriage might be (and Jeanette put that in her book!). This was a loss of control, something Jeanette had highly prized since becoming the family breadwinner in her mid teens, and something she has a documented life history of needing to feel. This was something Jeanette wanted, that Anna likely had to do very little to poke full of holes, to make Jeanette feel guilty for wanting it, to cast doubt on this shining, beautiful thing in her daughter’s life. All Anna had do to was create the doubt. Jeanette’s subconscious would do the rest. Jeanette was a law-abiding citizen, deeply conscientious and, while she was -usually- good at sticking up for herself in terms of her career, she tended to put herself last when making personal decisions. She took care of a great number of people. She had a ton of responsibility. She let the notion of “not letting people down” guide her, instead of standing squarely on her own two feet and going after what SHE WANTS. We see this over, and over, and over again in her life. We see it in how she chose to handle the fans, and the court of public opinion. And here’s Gene: the safe option; the non-threatening option. The option she likes but is not wild about, the option that likely will not tempt her to make rash decisions. And Jeanette knuckled under. This was an easy win for Anna, and it, understandably, made zero sense to Nelson. It is the first great disaster of their lives together.

I mentioned this letter to Sharon, and she said yes, she knew who Kitty was, and had interviewed her! She was the one who talked about how Anna MacDonald would write what was for dinner on the blackboard in the kitchen — something Jeanette also talked about, and yes, Kitty was of the opinion that Anna is why Jeanette married Gene. Sharon said she was quoted in Sweethearts, so I went to have a look. “If Anna had approved, Jeanette might have married Nelson,” is what Kitty — Katherine Elizabeth Rice Pickens — said on the record to Sharon (page 195, 2014 edition). Sharon interviewed Kitty in 1983, four years after Clara received the letter about Jean’s Aunt Kitty.

But before I went and published this, I thought I’d better do some due diligence and verify that this indeed was a legitimate relative, and make sure that I could prove that Gene/Emily are at best incorrect and at worst deliberately omissive. This search led me on a most fascinating hunt, and I want to pause here to acknowledge and thank Beth Fagiani for her really valuable genealogical expertise and all the time she put in helping someone whom she has never met, but who is friends with her daughter. Thank you, Beth!!

Katherine “Kitty” Elizabeth Rice Pickens was born in 1911 and is Jeanette MacDonald’s second cousin on her father’s side. Kitty’s mother, Katherine McDonald, is the daughter of Daniel McDonald’s brother Charles. Katherine’s mother, Mary, died in 1903 when Katherine was 13, and her father, Charles, died in 1906. When Katherine wanted to marry Sydney Rice in 1910, her uncle, Daniel, signed the consent form for his niece and “ward” to get married. See that address? Yeah, two days earlier at that house on Arch Street, the seventh birthday of Miss Jeannette Anna McDonald (original spelling) had been celebrated. ❤

This is the marriage that produced Aunt Kitty, or Cousin Kitty, eight years Jeanette’s junior, who grew up knowing Anna MacDonald’s style of meal planning and Anna MacDonald’s opinions on Nelson vs. Gene. She’s a real person, with real thoughts and observations, and with a traceable history, not someone who gets to not exist because Gene Raymond didn’t remember her or because Clara wanted to discount her. Her memory and contribution to this story as an additional family member (besides Blossom) who knew what was going on and spoke about it, is not only invaluable, but deserves to be highlighted and recognized.