The Golden Ladder*

The Golden Ladder* Mr. Hughes Gives a History Lesson

The Story. Betty Bowen Jumel Burr--famous or infamous as you choose--started life in the gutters of Providence when that town was noted mainly for its smells of whale-oil, rope, duck, slaughterhouses and rum made from molasses. Aside from these industries, it busied itself right patriotically, when the time came, with turning out muskets and cannon -"cannon to stand still for the Rhode Island defenses and wheeled cannon for the troops of Washington to lug about with them in their everlasting retreats." To be exact, Betty "arrived in America in 1775, along with the Goddess of Freedom, and with as little prospect of success." Her family's savory reputation left her little choice of a career. Her mother was the town scandal, and a boom had scraped her no-account father off his boat into the harbor of Newport and eternity. So Betty trafficked her only wealth--her beauty-- wherever a likely purchaser appeared, and rose through a succession of what one might euphemistically term "protectors," through the advancing agencies of drunken sailors, a seacaptain, a social parasite, a wealthy French merchant, a U. S. Vice President. That in the two latter cases, Stephen Jumel and Aaron Burr, she actually achieved matrimony, is eloquent testimony to her skill and resource. To be sure, it was during Burr's eclipse, when that precious knave was a doddering old gallant of 78, and his eyes were fixed as much on Betty's fortune as on her face.

Nevertheless, it enabled her, some 16 years after she had divorced him and some 50 years after he had been Vice President, to ride regally through France on the glory of his title. Once, on a country road, when her carriage was checked by some marching soldiers, the indomitable old bluffer stood up in her carriage and cried: "Place a la veuve du Vice President des Etats-Unis!" And the awe-struck military, not being expected to be conversant with so much American history, promptly stood at attention as she drove imperially past.

Throughout the black squares in Betty's checquered career, she had always, paradoxically, the urge to be "respectable." Though she got no further than the urge, she has graciously left us the record of a colorful ascent, blazing her trail through stiff-necked, whale-oil Providence, through outwardly outraged but inwardly envious New York, through the magnificently indifferent French Imperial Court. She knew the horrors and cruelty of the French Revolution and the chaos of the subsequent Restoration; she mingled with French Royalty, later owned the sapphire coronet Napoleon had placed on Josephine's head and the emerald rings that had twinkled on that lovely Creole's toes; she dispensed hospitality in the stately Jumel Mansion in old New York, where once was Washington's headquarters; she drove her gay coach-and-four through the gaping streets of Saratoga Springs in the heyday of its glory; she built up a fancy fairy-tale of gentility to account for her origin and bulwarked it with cunning lies and deceit. But she never became really respectable. And who shall blame her? At all events her picture, in all this historic frame, glows astonishingly meteoric and lifelike and hangs smiling in the timeless, inglorious gallery of the Du Barrys, the Maintenons, the Pompadours.

The Significance. As literature, Mr. Hughes' story is, regrettably, not pure gold. But as a cracking good yarn strung on historical data, it deserves mention. In its pages are fascinating glimpses of early American history, revitalized. Days of the sprawling growth of the bristly, sturdy little Nation, days of triumph for Washington, of jealousy between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, ended so tragically on the bluffs at Weehawken, days of wickedness and glamour in the dazzling French Court, days of snobbery and naivete in awkward little New York, days of the fizzing of "the waters" at Saratoga and the journeys thither of troupes of the gentility, some driving up from as far as Virginia, their black slaves making camp by the roadside by night and lighting the darkness with their campfires and the mournful, exotic cadences of their African songs. All this, as background to the career of one lovely lady who was at once a termagant and a belle, an alluring little vixen and an unconscionable idiot.

The Author. Born a Missourian in 1872, Rupert Hughes has been writing prolifically almost ever since, except when he was an Army Captain during the Spanish-American War, and serving on the Mexican border in 1916. Among his novels and plays: The Whirlwind, We Can't Have Everything, Cup of Fury, Beauty, Souls for Sale, Excuse Me, What Will People Say?

*THE GOLDEN LADDER--Rupert Hughes-- Harper ($2.00).