Dangerous Ambition:
Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power
By Susan Hertog
Ballantine Books, 512 pages

Before the late 1960s, when Gloria Steinem invented repression, there were some women of superstar status, among them Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, journalists-to-the-world and friends of long standing. They are paired now, after death, in Susan Hertog’s engrossing new book, Dangerous Ambition, in which Hertog (author of a biography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh) plots their joint trek through the 20th century, in war and peace, marriage and misery, good times and bad.

Born Cicely Fairfield in 1892, the daughter of a brilliant polemicist, sometime thief, and full-time philanderer who deserted his family when she was eight, Rebecca changed her name to that of a heroine from an Ibsen play and descended on literary London at the age of 19 after an attempt at becoming an actress. She wrote for the suffragist journal Freewoman, devoted to female empowerment and social reform. One of the her first reviews was an attack on the H.G. Wells novel, Marriage, which led to an interview with the author, which led to an affair, during which she lived with Wells as a sort of mistress en titre and he divided his time between her and his legitimate family, his wife Jane and two sons.

She became the second young girl to bear him a child (the first having been Amber Reeves, in a notorious scandal), and their son, Anthony, was born on August 4, 1914, the day England entered World War I. Told his mother was really his aunt, Anthony was sent to boarding school at age three and to another at age seven, which he called later “the sort of place where the inconvenient, the unwanted, and the illegitimate middle-class child was…dumped.” (Told the truth at age eight, he was also told to conceal it, which he religiously did.) By this time, Rebecca, worn down and depressed by her second-class status, had moved on from Wells to an independent career as a novelist, story-writer, critic, and journalist and to a series of unhappy affairs that eroded her confidence.

On a parallel track, Dorothy Thompson had built a career and ended a marriage and was looking to take her next step. Like Rebecca, Dorothy was a self-propelled rocket, a woman of the world if ever there was one—prepared, as the world’s first great female journalist, “to pounce on the next big story, scavenge a revolution, and feed on the carcasses” of people and things. Arriving in Europe in 1920 with uncertain plans and $150, she worked her way up through a series of coups to a post based in Berlin as first female head of a major news bureau, covering eight different countries. In 1925, when she connected there with Rebecca, she was eight years away from the start of her fame as an anti-Fascist crusader and two years away from her meeting with Sinclair Lewis, the best-selling American novelist who was ending his own first marriage (and who, in his reverence for Rebecca’s ex-paramour, had named his first child Wells).

Then 42, Sinclair was a world-famous man and a “shell of a person,” alcoholic, scarred by having been mocked for his odd looks as a child, and riddled by doubt. “Writing was his sole lifeline—a way out and above the eternal quagmire of human relations,” Hertog tells us. “Everything good about him went into his books.” In 1928, two years before Rebbeca married Henry Andrews (“a solid, conventional, job-holding Englishman”) in a search for tranquility, Dorothy married Sinclair, who was as driven, ambitious, and self-centered as she was—their relationship was more like that of Rebecca and Wells.

Seeking stability at Twin Farms in Vermont (and a house in Bronxville, New York, that bordered the home of Joe and Rose Kennedy), the marriage was immediately under strain caused by her travels, his drinking, and the demands of two big careers. They had a son, Michael, who was handed off to nannies and nurses as they pursued their ambitions. The arc of the marriage began to resemble A Star Is Born, in which the elder, male celebrity starts losing his fame and powers while the young female figure begins her ascent.

The rise of Hitler and the Fascists in Europe was the story of the age, if not the millennium, and one that both Dorothy and Rebecca were born to write. Rebecca’s masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), was a full-bore assault on the death wish in Britain and Europe: Claiming their people could not bear to be winners, Britons and Europeans, out of guilt over the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, turned a blind eye to Nazi aggression, betrayed Czechoslovakia, and made war inevitable by tempting the Nazis through their own weakness.

But it was Dorothy, the minister’s daughter, who became the face and voice of resistance to Hitler, and as the menace rose, so did her fame. With a three-days-a-week column, a radio newscast, and lecture tours all over the country, she was a “one-woman army…the voice required to waken America” to the terrible danger without. Sinclair resented her prominence, wondering “why in hell he had to marry a Roman senator” and saying he would name Hitler as a correspondent if they ever divorced. The nadir arrived when she was thrown out of Germany by Hitler himself and was seen off at the train station by the British and American press corps, who drowned her in roses. At the same time, her Nobel Prize–winner of a husband was home at Twin Farms, trying to manage a passel of children, scolding the youngsters, and coping with staff.

Sinclair left her and she married again, this time happily, in the sort of domestic tranquility Rebecca had hoped for with Henry and had failed to obtain. But by the end of the war, Dorothy had become largely irrelevant. “Politically,” as a friend put it, “she was like a great ship left stranded…after the tide had gone out.” Rebecca by contrast went onward and upward, covering the Nuremberg trials, churning out books and novels, becoming Dame Commander in 1959. Private life, however, made her boil and seethe. “I feel I am in some extraordinary zoo, circus, freak show of a destiny,” she wrote of her family. “I am terribly lonely. I have put too much into my marriage. I have sacrificed my friends…to my husband, and Henry is old before his time.” Actually, Henry suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and a fondness for what we would now call bimbos, both of which enraged his wife.

But the banes of both women’s lives were really their children, who suffered from knowing they had been afterthoughts to their parents and who inherited all of their self-absorption without their talent and gift for hard work. “Mike and Anthony [need] a gimmick that will make them as much noticed by the world as their parents,” Rebecca wrote Dorothy. Mike, she said, was a “beatnik” (he was an actor and alcoholic), and Anthony had “his hatred of me.” She was thunderstruck in 1955 when he published a novel called Heritage that included an attack of her as an ego-mad actress who sacrificed her son and her husband to her career.

“I could not feel more astonished and horrified if he had in fact raped some children,” she said, bringing suit to prevent publication in England. “Inflicting pain is the only happiness he knows,” she said of her child. In her dotage, Rebecca imagined Anthony at night in her garden, “lying in wait to attack and kill her,” Hertog writes. “According to her unpublished memoir, he had told her he would torture her until the day he died, and [she] never doubted his intent or his ability.” When she died at 90 in 1983, Anthony did not go to her funeral. Four years later, he died.

Dorothy had died in 1961 at the age of 68, in Lisbon, where she had gone to spend Christmas with her son’s first wife and their children, whom he had left, to his mother’s distress. There she suffered a heart attack the day after New Year’s, and had been hospitalized for nearly a month when she checked herself out on January 30. She was found dead in her hotel the next morning.

Two days after Dorothy’s death, Rebecca got a letter from her asking to join her in Lisbon. “She knew she couldn’t get well unless she rested and with the family situation as it was, she couldn’t rest,” Rebecca wrote to their mutual editors.

“There is nothing wrong with my heart except that it is broken,” the letter from Dorothy said.