I will give only the names of the gifted people known to me who fell into the grip of John Barleycorn: Jack London, George Sterling, Eugene O’Neill, Scott Fitzgerald, O. Henry, Stephen Crane, Finley Peter Dunne, Isadora Duncan, William Seabrook, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Cram Cook, Dylan Thomas, Sherwood Anderson, Horace Liveright, Douglas Fairbanks, Klaus Mann. Most of these persons I knew well; the others I knew through friends. At least four took their own lives. Not one reached the age of eighty, and only three got to seventy-one of these, Seabrook, because he reformed.
And I will add one more name, which will be a surprise to many people: Eugene Debs, six times candidate of the Socialist Party for president of the United States. Gene was one of the noblest and kindest men I have had the good fortune to meet. He was a tireless fighter for social justice. He was one friend of the poor and lowly who stood by his principles and never wavered. In his campaigns he went from one end of the country to the other addressing great audiences. I was one of his pupils.
I heard him first at a huge mass meeting at Madison Square Garden. I was a young writer then, and he greeted me as though I were a long-lost brother. Many years later when he came out to Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of driving him from an afternoon meeting in the Zoological Gardens to an evening meeting in the Hollywood Bowl. Theodore Dreiser was there in a front seat, I remember, and he shouted his approval.
Gene fought against the fiend all his life, and his friends helped him. I personally never saw him touch a drop of liquor, but I got the story from George H. Goebel, who had been appointed by the party leaders as the candidate’s official guardian. It was Goebel’s duty to accompany him on every lecture trip and stay with him every hour, morning, noon, and night. That was an old story to me of course. Many times, as a lad, I had been appointed to perform that duty for my father. But, alas, I was not as big and strong as George Goebel.
13
Some Eminent Visitors
I
Albert Einstein came to America in 1931 to become a professor in the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He had been world-famous for a dozen years or so, had been awarded the Nobel Prize, and was a doctor honoris causa in fourteen of the world’s great universities. His coming was a prestige matter to Cal Tech and had been announced weeks in advance; reporters swarmed around him, the newspapers made front-page stories of his arrival, the institute gave a banquet in his honor, and one of the town’s many millionairesses contributed ten thousand dollars for the privilege of tasting that food.
I had been corresponding with Einstein for some years. He had read some of my books and had written me: “To the most beautiful joys of my life belongs your wicked tongue.” He had promised to come to see me; and soon after his arrival in Pasadena, Craig’s sister Dolly came in and reported, “There’s an old man walking up and down on the street, and he keeps looking at the house.”
Craig said, “Go out and ask what he wants.” Dolly went and came back to report, “He says he’s Dr. Einstein.” Craig said, “Go bring him in,” and called to me.