Overview, Part Four


A 1930 “divorce” exposé found in the William Bullitt archives reveals the reasons Bullitt had for demanding a divorce from Louise Bryant.  Louise was thought to have had a love affair with a French, woman artist Gwen Le Gallienne.  Bullitt, depicted as homophobic by some biographers  was known to be  vindictive towards  and intolerant of lesbians. His “divorce plea” was a sixteen page document depicting the truth of his wrath and intolerance, calling both Bryant and La Gallienne “bitches”--an actual quote.    Over the following six years , until her death, Louise would be trying to defy the misogyny  Bullitt displayed. And.  From the onset of Bullitt’s cagey filing  for divorce, Louise insisted on seeing Anne.    But their daughter Anne was told a different story. That Louise had left them.  This was neither true nor close to the actual circumstances which occurred. But the truth about Louise Bryant’s last six  years of life have been as difficult  for history and biographers as they were for Anne.  Bullitt never released Louise’s writings to the public, never told their daughter the truth of his intentions and actions. Louise’s story, thus elusive.


Bill Bullit with Louise Bryant’s daughter Anne, circa 1955.

Late in her life, at age 58 in 1982 Anne “granted” her  only public  interview about Louise to an Irish Reporter  . At that time Anne  still believed  that Louise had left them in January of 1930 while she was on  an overseas trek to write a piece in Algiers; she was told Louise “was ill and decided she could not live with us”. In fact, Bill Bullitt had filed for divorce just days after Louise left on the agreed upon journey.   Anne  was only six when the eerie set of events began.  Yet through her adult life she was admittedly ill-informed, sadly a victim of her father’s lies.  She knew little of  her mother. Even with access to the same cables and letters written by Louise as are  found here, Anne was not able to grasp the depths of her father’s animosity, his ability to withhold the truth and deny Anne her mother.

 In her  interview Anne innocently, unknowingly reveals the depths of Bullitt’s deceptiveness: Anne explains that  she didn’t know her parents were divorced until 1967,  after her father’s death.  When she found the paperwork.  Her story revealing, heart-breaking and believable.  Bullitt cloaked his chilling distance from  Louise by framing himself as the “good guy”.   Anne explains further to the Dublin, Ireland reporter that she was told her mother had “bouts of rage” which put the child in jeopardy and reluctantly Bullitt agreed to keep Anne from Louise, according to Bullitt,  “at her  mother’s request”.   Apparently Anne, understandably,  was never quite able to unravel the truth from the lies. She was devoted to her father, never quite knew her mother.  One wishes Anne could  read this part of her mother’s story:

 At the end of only six years marriage,  William Bullitt would file divorce papers while Bryant was on her way to a correspondent “job” in Algiers, riding a steamer while courts in Philadelphia, Pa. were readying paperwork to disavow her marriage and motherhood. Bullitt would try repeatedly to have Louise banished from the U.S.  via the divorce he filed while she was on her way to Algiers  to work on a project there. The Bullitts had been “legally separated” not long before Bryant left for her trip,  but Bullitt had already prepared paperwork to file for a divorce—early November, 1929. Leading Louise to believe he was amicable to the separation. That was not true.   Bullitt filed for divorce as soon as she left the country: the paperwork had been prepared even before she boarded ship.   No airplanes, no fast transport, the move was calculated to keep Louise from an honest defense.  In the end even her friend and loyal “nanny” Horteuse, would testify on Bullitt’s behalf, against Louise. She had been close to Horteuse. Louise’s letter regarding this betrayal are the harshest words found in her archives: she lost her daughter because of that testimony. It “proved” Bullitt’s claims as truth.  One can imagine the loss of a job was threat enough to have her claim in court that Louise was “unfit as a mother”.  In fact, it was not Louise’s mothering that was in question, but her sexuality and Bullitt’s feeling of being “jilted” by a Bohemian, a lesbian. This is clear in the stories he wrote for the court, per their divorce.  And the lies he told their daughter.

Though originally promising in his legal communiqués that  Anne would live with both of them-- per Louise’s demands-- Bullitt kept Anne from her mother nonetheless,  telling the child Louise had “abandoned them” and simultaneously moving/travelling with Anne, rarely  notifying Louise as to where her daughter was.

 Despite Louise’s attempts at gaining custody, the struggle for mother and daughter to be together was never resolved: Bullitt’s money and power challenged Louise’s freelance efforts to continue to mother her daughter.
 These classic, tragic,   series of events were unexpected and reprehensible to Louise Bryant. The fact that she had “had an affair with a woman”  weighed heavily against Louise at  each juncture in her fight to know her daughter. Yet  she was neither apologetic nor remorseful, vindictive nor vanquished. Louise  fought with a velvet glove, via her lawyer Arthur Hays,  repeatedly, for access to Anne, who was six years old when her father took her. Louise persisted,  but to no avail. The right to be a mother eluded her legally,  and was scoffed at, made a mockery of,  by Bullitt.

 But why such vindictiveness?  It is clear that Louise wondered at this, after Bullitt’s “dear Child” gentle courtship. She was still lovers with Bullitt, bi-sexual and devoted to trying to make the marriage work.  What had happened? 

Within some cables and communiqués to Arthur Hays and inside the archives of Jack Carney , who was a lover to Louise in the 1930’s-- many of his letters kept by Louise-- there lie perhaps a partial  answer to her concerns.   Carney’s Papers reveal some clue as to what might have been happening:  six pages of Military Intelligence Department (MID, an early incarnation of the FBI) files about Louise Bryant and undercover operants.   The  Carney find  confirms  Louise was “under surveillance”. And the Freedom of Information Act in the 1970’s released her FBI files, exhibiting the extent to which she was considered a threat, and “followed”.  Her cables expressed concern, if not fear, Carney’s archives make surveillance of Bryant undeniable. And her query to Bullitt in Jan. 1930 from Algiers is clear: “there are five men here who say you hired them to follow me” (LBP: cable Jan. 1930). In Louise’s 1930   cable regarding Bullitt’s  plan to divorce her,  she pleas to her lawyer, Arthur Hays: “ Ask Bill please recall four persons claiming they are his detectives watching me for nearly eight weeks New York, boat, Paris here working me” . Searches through both of their archives (Bullitt and Bryant) reveal many such pleas by Bryant but only one response from Bullitt, saying her notion was “ridiculous, there are no such men”. 

Certainly it is possible these were the gestures of a jealous, angry husband.

 But Bullitt  had already filed for divorce and had his terms “indignities to the person” accepted by the court via his sixteen page description of Louise’s “behaviour”.  Why would she be followed by men Bullitt hired?  That was her question. A clear answer from Bullitt never came.    He insisted the men were liars. Yet. Louise’s concerns were warranted.  Louise felt she was being “followed” and had generated an understandable paranoia about her own, personal safety. Was he complicit in a more sinister scheme to undermine Louise’s writing and personal life?  She had times of deep doubt.

Whether Bullitt knew or was a part  of surveillance, aware of undercover agents monitoring Louise Bryant  is unknown. What is clear, however,  is the fact that Bullitt repeatedly insisted Louise “not reside in the U.S.” as part of the “divorce settlement”.  She rarely complied. Yet tried to endlessly to be civil. And Louise had reason to be suspicious of  “spies”.  In the 1920’s journalist were being followed, recruited and participating in spy activity for the United States.

Mrs. Harrison is a perfect example.  She was married to a Thomas Bullitt Harrison (unclear if he was a William Bullitt relation) and soon after his death she began working as a spy for the U.S. , in Russia. A journalist turned “undercover agent”.  Thus, Louise was used to being followed, under surveillance and/or implicated in being “anti American”.  Harrison herself would mock Bryant in a 1930’s  book she wrote about Russia.  

At the time of Reed’s death and for years after,  the “red scare” was taking hold. And the fact that Louise Bryant herself  was under investigation by the MID weighed heavy on her.   Bullitt had begun “pursuing” her just months after Reed died in Moscow. Mutual friends including Louise’s fellow reporter Jack Kelley were among those being  harassed. Undercover operations were common at the time.   When Bullitt began courting Louise he had just left a junket with the Dept. of State. He had met Reed two or three years earlier,  perhaps helping intervene in having confiscated papers returned.   And Bullitt was active in Treaty of Versailles protocol. But Bullitt  “left” these government positions rather suddenly,  around 1920,  under unclear circumstances. Her questions to Arthur Hays about surveillance persisted.

The certainty of  wild speculations about William C. Bullitt’s  role in Intelligence activity may never be known.  But his vindictive, misogynist vendettas are fact. Keeping Louise from her daughter was his enacted wrath. Lying to their daughter Anne about the circumstances of those years are the proof that his intentions were meant to harm.  Deceitful, passive, aggression.


Louise continued writing to Anne though received no communiqués from her daughter arrived—one lone postcard from 1932 the exception.   The Bullitt Papers at Yale are full of Anne’s writings, letters to her husbands, letters to her father beginning at age 8 and communiqués as a grown women to  varied biographers. This plethora of letters  depict her attention to detail and Anne—and her father’s-- desire to “archive” her  writings. One lone postcard to Louise, from Anne, is, quite honestly, out of character.  Why were there not Anne letters “to Muds”?

Did Anne receive her mother’s letters and never reply?

In fact,  Anne, it appears, did perhaps write to her mother. But the letters she  wrote to her mother,  as a young girl, were never mailed to Louise Bryant.  Or so the story goes.   According to Ashfield “lore” and an anonymous source , William Bullitt, Anne’s father kept her  letters to Louise, unposted, never mailed. They were found in a bundle in the Conway, Mass.  Bullitt home. Soon before Anne died in 2007. The house had been empty for years and was finally being renovated by local folks under the “supervision” of the Bullitt Estate. Anne’s unmailed letters to her mother were found by a local “William Bullitt friend”,  the story shared with me by a member of the Ashfield Historical Society: “They were letters from Anne to her mother.  They had never been mailed.”.    Those letters, though I have tried repeatedly to have access to them,   have not been released to either Bullitt or Bryant’s archives.  I did send a request to both the Ashfield  Historical Society and the Bullitt estate for information.  No reply ever arrived. Letters from Anne were something Louise often sought.  The quest appears ancient. The propensity for Bullitt to banish, undeniable. 

 Despite the callous arrangements William Bullitt had demanded, Louise, in all her  letters I located at Yale, did not waver in her belief that Bullitt would find a generous resolve. She did not resort to slandering him or retaliating, in kind,  with threats. In fact, she often expressed her compassion for his struggling with his own personal “demons”.

This is no more evident than in a statement Bryant wrote, in 1933,  to her old news service people when they questioned Bullitt’s intent with Russia. And her correspondence about the events to Bullitt.  She was on all fronts,  a loyal lover of family.  Her efforts to continue to help the Bryant’s--her family out West-- persisted despite her financial situation being precarious. 

 By the 1930’s the atmosphere of the “red scare”  had certainly settled in and very few people wanted to “take a risk” with Bryant due to her history of Socialism/Bolshevik ties in the past. She couldn’t find a job, but kept on writing.  Bryant also  continued an active interest in Tom Mooney’s plight  (as indicated in her correspondences with Jack Carney) and continued writing. Despite  working to maintain her health per Dercum’s Disease and being emotionally strained by the Bullitt dynamic and loss of contact with her daughter, Bryant continued attempts to  contact  former employers and newspaper editors and was working on at least two book projects during the final six years of her life: the Biography of Jack Reed and a book about Irish activism and Resistance.

 Neither was found in her archives, not a reference or page of annotated notes. Mention in one of her cables regarding “stolen manuscripts” from her hotel in Paris might be the reason. Though, through a serious of synchronicities I was able to locate at least part of her “Reed work”, which is included in Part Five.  According to Wambly Bald, a reporter for the Paris newspaper who interviewed Louise last, it seems, her Reed project was “under contract with Harrison Smith”.  Smith was a big name in publishing in her era.   Unlike her unfair legacy, as perpetuated by associates of hers/Jack Reed, in the years after Reed died Louise Bryant did not decline, was not a drunkard forgetting her art in her last years of life. Emma Goldman spitefully began the longstanding slanderous sentiments against Louise Bryant in a letter to Alexander Berkman:
"The last time I saw her was at the Select when two drunker Corsican soldiers carried out of the café.  What  a horrible end. More and more I come to think it is criminal for young Middle-class American or English girls to enter radical ranks.  They go to pieces. And even when they do not reach the gutter, as Louise did, their lives are empty...of course Lincoln Steffens was right when he said about Louise {that] she was never a communist, she only slept with a Communist” 

 Lincoln Steffens was never fond of Louise Bryant, and she not his fan, either.  But why Goldman chose to think so little of Louise, neither mentioning nor cognizant of her ailment nor continued writings/work, is only speculation.

 No matter. For that wrongful  Bryant legacy is now, finally dispelled. 

  Jack Carney’s letters and love represent those last Louise  years well: his words  to  Louise, always playfully, nudging her into   resilience, as a mutual friend of Jack Reed,  even calling her “honey” as Reed did...to be certain she kept on with her work. And she did. Her “lost work” on Reed—in Part Five—were being written during these tumultuous times of separation from her daughter and are testament to her resilience and claim of being her own woman, not a mere sex object nor “lost cause” who fell to pieces.  Quite the contrary.  Louise Bryant died fighting for her beliefs: to preserve her work and that of Jack Reed, to regain custody of her daughter and live life on her own “terms”, just as she had done from the time she left the dusty towns of Nevada in search of freedom from the tethers of ancestry and oppression.