Sue Edmond Lawson, would occasionally get into physical fights with Powell. “After all the heavy drinking,” he said, “inhibitions would slip away and they’d start in on each other’s shortcomings. My mother more than once punched Dawn in the face. I always thought that Dawn wished my father had married her instead of my mother.” In a diary entry of December 5, 1933, Powell wrote that she “didn’t want to go anywhere with the Lawsons now that I see they are really dangerously insane so far as I am concerned” (Diaries, 78), though she did not explain further. But she would recall violent altercations with Sue Lawson even into the 1950s; one letter to Wilson tells of a surprise visit from an understandably upset Sue, her husband having been imprisoned for failing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Suddenly she hauled off and started beating up Canby,”37 then choking Margaret De Silver.38 As Powell tried to pull Sue off Margaret, she “got a sock in the face.” She added, parenthetically, “I gave [Sue] a good kick personally and pushed her into a chair where she sat with insane blazing eyes, face distorted with hate” (169–70). The younger Lawson concurs that his mother was “probably an alcoholic, flighty and temperamental, though very different and sort of sad in the afternoons when she was sober.” Though Powell and Sue Lawson had a stormy relationship, Lawson recalls that his mother “seemed to be fascinated by her: I remember her standing outside of Scribner’s whenever we were in New York, looking at the Dawn Powell books stacked in pyramids in the windows,” despite the fact that he also remembers Powell referring more than once to his mother as “a Southern bimbo, or something like that” (personal e-mail, July 24, 2012).
Powell also likely had an affair with travel writer, translator, and editor Coburn “Coby” Gilman, born on September 3, 1893, in Denver, Colorado.39 But Joe, too, was known to indulge in the occasional fling; as Page puts it, both of them “enjoyed a succession of lovers on the side” (Bio, 44). The marriage was a rocky one, after time, yet despite serious financial difficulties and painful misunderstandings, Powell’s drinking and persistent health problems,40 Gousha’s alcoholism, the above-mentioned infidelities on both sides, and sometimes lengthy separations, Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha would remain married until his death. Following a long battle with cancer during which she dutifully cared for him, Joe died in St. Vincent’s Hospital on Valentine’s Day, 1962. The marriage had lasted forty-two years. After his death Powell would fondly reflect, “He was the only person in the world I found it always a kick to run into on the street” (Diaries, 436). Never fully recovering from his death, she often meditated on the loss in her diaries and would follow him in death just three years later.
A beloved, astonishingly smart little boy
—Bio, 50
On August 22, 1921, when Powell was twenty-four years old, her only child, a boy, was born. From her bed at St. Luke’s Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue, Dawn wrote a letter to her sisters, Mabel and Phyllis, about the difficult birth: “I had a terrible time and it was just as hard on the baby. He is awfully husky but being born was a tough business for him and just before he came out his heart went bad.” Further, Powell said that she “didn’t dilate at all” (Letters, 46). The infant would suffer a blood clot on his brain and bruising caused by the doctor’s forceps, she wrote. Even while having to deliver such terrible news, Powell’s trademark humor surfaced in the next lines: “Doctors said I should have had my babies five or six years ago. That would have been awkward, as I would have had some difficulty in explaining them” (46).
Despite the difficult birth, the young mother went on lovingly to describe her child: “He has coal-black hair and big blue eyes and a tiny little nose and a beautiful mouth and one ear flat and the other sticks out. He is unusually tall. Got that from me.41 He has a fat little face—looks just like a Chinese mandarin but very very beautiful” (47). Obviously, Dawn Powell was a proud new mother.
Sadly, Joseph Jr., who would always be called Jojo, suffered from a disability perhaps caused, at least in part, by his difficult birth. From about the time he turned three years old, it became apparent that something was terribly wrong. Though there was never any clear diagnosis, he was sometimes thought to be suffering from schizophrenia, sometimes mental retardation, sometimes cerebral palsy, often a combination of the three (Bio, 49). Edmund Wilson in The Fifties referred to the “defective” (435) boy as Powell’s “spastic son” (637); a cousin, Phyllis Poccia, remembers him as something of “an idiot savant” (Bio, 49); even Gore Vidal, as late as 1996, described him as “retarded” (“Queen,” 18). Today one might refer to the boy’s condition as autism, though the disease was not understood then and not even named until the 1940s. Powell friend Matthew Josephson described Jojo’s case effectively. Soon enough after the boy’s birth, he wrote, Dawn and Joe “discovered that their child was ‘retarded,’ had weak motor impulses, moved awkwardly, spoke with difficulty, and would need attention and help all his life. He was a borderline case, not feebleminded, but giving evidence of having been brain-damaged at birth” (35). Josephson went on to say, quite movingly, “After having suffered tragedy in childhood and then having won a modicum of happiness and security, Dawn Powell suffered new sorrows over her Jojo, whom, in spite of everything, she greatly loved” (36).
Jeffrey Lawson was five years younger than Jojo. He remembers the older boy as “strange; I was afraid of him. He never spoke to me or paid me any attention. He would walk with his arms held out, mumbling to himself. But it was clear that Dawn loved him very much.” During our first telephone call, Lawson remembered Dawn as maternal, even to him, saying, “She would always look at me with a certain kind of love, I think, probably because she was in love with my father. She would talk to me and treat me as if I mattered to her. I recall her, in the early 1930s, as zaftig, feminine, soft, and kind, very serious and intellectual, but witty and often laughing” (August 25, 2012).
Jojo was in many ways brilliant but antisocial, stubborn yet loving, serene one moment and fierce the next. Throughout his life he would almost always require medical attention and often institutionalization; as a child he would often stay up “howling” all night long, in “inconsolable tantrums” (Bio, 49), to the chagrin and mystification of his parents. Difficult always and sometimes violent, throughout his youth he was in and out of mental hospitals, treatment clinics, psychiatrists’ offices, and given one therapy after another, including shock treatments.42 Unfortunately, nothing worked. The cost of his care was enormous, and Powell wrote madly, trying to keep up with the doctor bills that kept her and Gousha in a perpetual state of anxiety and often, especially in later years, almost homeless and very near poverty.
As much as the young family needed money, however, Dawn Powell was a proud young artist with standards that she refused to compromise. Although Hollywood often came calling, she at first wanted nothing to do with it, refusing offer after offer. Many of her friends, acquaintances, and contemporaries, including John Howard Lawson, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald,43 Robert Benchley, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and others famously did time there, but Powell found the idea less than appealing and in fact found Hollywood and the huge sums of money it offered poisonous to the creative spirit.44 In March 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, she was offered $500 a week to go West for three months but declined, writing in her diary, “We need money but that stuff is not in my direction and life is too short to go on unpleasant byroads” (14). A year later she sold her play Walking down Broadway to the films for $7,500.00, a huge sum in 1931, though she was disappointed to find that the resulting movie, retitled Hello Sister, had almost nothing at all to do with her play. In the early months of 1932, Powell did do some screenwriting in Hollywood but found the work distasteful. Later still she turned down both Paramount’s offer to pay her $1,500 a week in the summer of 1934 and United Artists’ invitation to work on a screenplay of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Bio, 142). Finally, in 1936, her resolve having weakened, she agreed to go out and work with Samuel Goldwyn Studios for one month. Once there, she was offered a three-year contract and hefty paychecks, but, she wrote, “This quick money ruins every writer in the business” (Letters, 94). Further, she said, “I quaver at signing away years like that” (92), for if ever she were to do so, “New York [would] become only an interlude between jobs.” She knew too that churning out the melodramas