54. Dare Wright and The Lonely Doll Series

AMY: Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode everybody! I’m Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner and BFF, Kim Askew…

KIM: ...Hi, everybody!...

AMY: So Kim, I’m wondering what’s your official position on old dolls: do you find them comforting or creepy?

KIM: I'd say a little bit comforting depending on the doll. I just ordered a Raggedy Ann doll that looked like the one that I had when I was a kid for my daughter. But most of the time kind of creepy, maybe. 

AMY: Yeah, I think it can be a combo of both for sure. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Today, we’re going to be talking about a lonely doll today, and if you are a listener who already knows that reference, I’m sure you are stoked for this episode. If, however, the phrase “The Lonely Doll” does not register for you at all, then Kim and I are so excited to introduce you to a children’s book that I think is going to become your new obsession. Or maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. Kim, are you fascinated by Dare Wright and her “Lonely Doll” series?

KIM: Yes, absolutely. I think I was introduced to Dare Wright and her books through Lauren Cerand, who was one of our guests in the past. And also my sister had somehow I think, gotten them for her daughter, Chloe, and I read them to her when Chloe was young. Yeah, which, you know ... they were definitely interesting and unforgettable.

AMY: Everybody will have their own opinion about whether or not these books are appropriate to read to children today or not. And we’ll get into that.

KIM: Absolutely. So for those of you that don’t know, it’s a midcentury-era children’s book series (there are 10 books, total) and it’s about a pretty little doll named Edith who is sadly on her own in the world until she meets two teddy bears (Mr. Bear and Little Bear) and they agree to adopt her into their family. Edith and Little Bear usually get up to all sorts of mischief in the stories, which are told through these amazingly creative black-and-white photographs typically taken in and around New York City. Mr. Bear is their stern, yet-loving protector. We, as the readers, get an almost voyeuristic look into their lives together. 

AMY: Yeah, and I came across these books when my daughter, Julia, was very young. Her babysitter had taken her to the library and they came home with a few of these books. I’d never seen or heard of them before, but I was so charmed by the photographs in them. They have a very retro, kind of a noir-ish feel, and the way these inanimate objects are arranged in the shot, they very much come to life. So there’s a shot where the doll, Edith, is tumbling down off a ladder, for instance and somehow, it’s almost cinematic. You feel like she’s really falling, you know? They feel real and they feel alive. 

KIM: They absolutely do. And there's something also very dark about them. So I love that you said almost noir-ish. There's a feel of something maybe kind of sinister going on in them. And they're very striking for that reason.

AMY: Yeah, I think it could be the way that the tableaus are kind of lit (There’s this play of light and shadow) and then you combine that with the narrative of Edith’s fear of abandonment and rejection. (That’s kind of a throughline through all of the books.) And then there are the spanking scenes.

KIM: Oh, yes, the spanking scenes! And there are a few of those, right, across several different books?

AMY: Yeah. When Little Bear and/or Edith take their mischief too far, Mr. Bear disciplines them by taking them across his knee to administer spankings. This definitely shocked me when I first encountered it — totally inappropriate for a children’s book in this day and age — but obviously when the books were published (in the late 50s and 60s) it wouldn’t be seen as any big deal. So I know there are parents who probably wouldn’t want to expose their kids to it, and I understand that, but there’s also just too much to love about these books. (Frankly, even if you don’t have kids, you should totally check these books out. They’re that terrific.) Yet for as adorable and creative and brilliant as these books are, they are somehow unsettling, like you said, Kim. I mean, there’s one of the sequels called Edith and Big Bad Bill. Big Bad Bill is a bad bear. He winds up kidnapping her and gagging her and tying her to a tree. So yeah, you know… maybe not for kids.

KIM: Right. I see them as more art books, almost, now. Amy’s right about that scene. And it takes us back to the creepy/cute paradox of dolls. And I know a lot of people have said the darkness that seems to lurk in the periphery of these books springs from the author’s own tragic life.

AMY: I think you could rightly say that the author, Dare Wright, was a bit of a “lonely doll” in her own right. She had some issues, which we’ll get into, and there was a lot of sadness in her life, but there was also a lot about her life that was utterly fantastic. She literally lived a fairy tale existence in some respects. So let’s get to the bottom of it all. 

KIM: Nice pun, Amy. Let’s go for it. 

AMY: Okay, so let’s dive in here. There are a couple of great biographies out on Dare Wright, which I would definitely recommend you guys check out. One is called The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, by Jean Nathan. That’s the one I read in preparation for this podcast. But then there’s also a biography written by Wright’s own goddaughter, who is now the heir to her estate. That’s a woman named Brook Ashley. And that book is called Dare Wright and the Lonely Doll. 

KIM: Yeah, and to really understand Dare Wright, you have to first know about her mother — because the two women really go hand-in-hand. It makes me think of Little Edie and Grey Gardens.

AMY: Oh, yeah, that’s a good comparison.

KIM: Yeah, her mother’s name was Edith Stevenson (she went by Edie) and she was a very well-known portrait painter. She was from Youngstown, Ohio and was later based out of Cleveland. For decades she was highly sought out by the region’s (and later the nation’s) wealthy and distinguished art patrons. She went to the White House to paint President Woodrow Wilson (that painting actually, though was was ruined in a fire, sadly); She also did a portrait of Winston Churchill (from a photograph) which apparently still hangs at the University of Bristol in England. Greta Garbo later commissioned her to paint her portrait. So she was kind of big-time.

AMY: Yeah, she was a big deal. Really talked about and written about. Actually, in terms of her popularity as an artist, Edith Wright (the mother) she reminds me of the fictional Dallas O’Mara from Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel So Big, which we talked about back in July. She was this well-respected painter; she had boundless confidence and chutzpah and she was always promoting herself and her achievements. She loved publicity. She was very mendacious, too, because she could fib a little to make herself sound more impressive, and she did that a lot. But she was able to earn a decent amount of money for herself painting.

KIM: She had to hustle for that money, actually though, because she was a single mom. Her marriage to Ivan Wright had fallen apart and by 1920, Edith and her five-year-old daughter, Dare, were out on their own.

AMY: And this is where the story gets pretty weird. So Dare had a brother who was two years older than she was. His name was Blaine. And in a series of strange events, when the parents split, Blaine ended up moving to New York with his father, and then Dare went with her mother, and it was sort of never spoken of. Edie used to tell people her husband had died, and she never mentioned having a son (let alone did she correspond with him). So it’s kind of like the set-up from the old Parent Trap movie, where you’re thinking, “How could the parents do this?” Like, how could they separate these siblings?

KIM: Absolutely. I was completely thinking of The Parent Trap movie. That’s exactly right. And not only was Dare ripped away from the older brother she had loved very much, but her mother was basically all-consumed with her career. She would leave Dare home alone to fend for herself, or she would give Dare strict instructions that she must not be disturbed. 

AMY: As a result, Dare found comfort and companionship in her dolls, including one she’d been gifted by her mother:  It was an Italian-made doll from the Lenci company. It had a felt face and curly hair, and Dare and her mother, Edie, decided to name her Edith: (which, given how truly self-absorbed her mother was, this is so par for the course that she was like “Why don’t you name her MY name?”) But this doll would eventually be the doll that takes center stage in the books, The Lonely Doll series, but not before Dare had given it a significant “glow-up.” We’ll get to that later. 

KIM: Wow, the psychology going on here. I mean, a psychiatrist would have a field day with all this. Anyway, eventually, Edie sent Dare, when she was around 12-years-old, to a boarding school that was right down the street (just to get her out of the way, basically). And everyone at school knew that Dare was the daughter of the famous painter, but Dare struggled to fit in there.

AMY: When Dare was in the presence of her mother (which was infrequent around that time, but) she was often a subject for her portraiture. So Edie wound up painting dozens of oil paintings of her daughter, from childhood through adulthood. It was almost as if Dare was a prop for her mom’s painting just as her own doll would later become her prop. And needless to say, Dare was growing up to be quite a beautiful woman. I would encourage you to Google photos of her. She was stunning and glamorous — she reminds me of a lot of, like, Lady Gaga or a Barbie doll, even. I mean, her waist was the size of a napkin ring. (I do think she did have some eating disorder issues on-and-off). But she was really tiny, and she had the most killer fashion sense.

KIM: So it’s no surprise that in her early adulthood, after a failed stint as an actress, Dare got into modeling. The camera loved her, as you can see by the many photographs of her. (And we’ll post them on our Instagram, too.) Today, she would have certainly been a phenomenon on Instagram.She was just visually arresting.

AMY: Yes, and the biography by Jean Nathan that I read, it’s just LOADED with photos of both her and her mom. It’s really gratifying. So like you said, Kim, the camera loved her, but she also loved the camera. She enjoyed experimenting with taking pictures and she eventually decided that photography was the career path she really wanted to pursue, especially since she wasn’t an attention-seeker by nature. (She was kind of shy.) Her connection to magazines as a model helped her ease her way into that world. She started doing photography assignments for Good Housekeeping magazine.

KIM: And then, meanwhile, around this time, her brother re-emerged in her life. An uncle decided he was going to reunite the siblings, and when they finally met again in their 20s, they were almost smitten with one another. 

AMY: Yeah, the biography I read says that they actually toyed with the idea of marrying and pretending they weren't siblings. I'm a little bit skeptical of this claim, and if it was true, it was just very brief — the first few weeks of knowing each other, but needless to say, they adored one another.

KIM: Though Blaine (for the rest of his life) had no real love for Edie, the mother who abandoned him. At one point, Blaine was annoyed to find out that Dare had never been given a teddy bear growing up. He rectified that situation by going out and buying her a Steiff bear that would later have a starring role as Mr. Bear in the books. (Dare bought Little Bear herself.)

AMY: And Blaine may have held a grudge toward his mom, but Dare did not. The older she got, the closer she and Edie became, but they developed a very codependent relationship with one another. In some ways their love for each other was so sweet, but in other ways it was unnerving. And their dynamic kind of reminded me a little bit of Mommy Dearest, you know? There wasn’t physical abuse, but this attention-seeking mom just being focused and obsessed with her daughter. And you know, she neglected Dare when she was young, later on, but as Dare grew up and became beautiful, Edie was really needy. (Edie Needy!), and she was just a permanent fixture in Dare’s life. It seems like she kind of smothered her, you know? They were best friends. They were travel partners. They were playmates (and I say that literally because they liked to play dress up.) Outsiders would say like, “Yeah I saw them together and I just found them off.” There was just something a little weird about them, you know, but they did make an impression wherever they went. And even for the decades they lived in two different cities (because Edie remained in Cleveland once Dare moved to New York City) they still saw each other constantly. They were always flying back and forth every few weeks. They often slept in the same bed when they were visiting each other. They were just connected at the hip.

KIM: Yeah, they also loved to sunbathe naked together on their summer vacations. Their favorite destination was a place called Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Edith would also help Dare stage nude photographs of herself. She was very comfortable posing nude for her own private photo collection, but at that same time, she had also pretty severe sexual hangups.

AMY: Yeah, given how gorgeous she was, it’s no surprise that Dare had many, many suitors or people, you know, that were trying to date her. She was even briefly engaged to a British pilot who was a friend of her brother’s. But true intimacy was something that terrified her. She was very diffident and emotionally stunted — she liked flirting with men, but would literally run away from anyone who tried to make a physical pass at her. There’s actually a really heartbreaking story about a divorce lawsuit that Dare had gotten dragged into. So there was a socialite woman who wanted to divorce her husband, but he was refusing. So she basically baited Dare. She saw this attractive younger woman… she arranged for her husband to start helping Dare with her dark room photography stuff, but then sent a private eye to watch the husband going in and out of Dare’s apartment. So of course, the private eye thought they were having an affair. Dare was dragged into court (and the newspapers) because of all this as “the other woman” which was really tragic and mortifying because she was apparently a virgin. There was nothing going on. He truly was just helping her in the dark room. It was just a total trumped-up accusation of adultery, and the defense lawyers for the husband, they had a last resort plan — that they were going to give medical evidence of Dare’s virginity in court to help their case. But the husband wound up settling, so it never came to that.

KIM: Oh my gosh. And can you imagine if that happened now, in today’s day and age? I mean..

AMY: Nobody should be put through that. Her name was all over the newspapers. It must have been horrible.

KIM: I know, and for somebody who already had a lot of issues about intimacy and shyness and stuff like that, it must have been agony for her.

AMY: Yeah, so sad. So everyone who knew her described her (despite her glamorous and fashionable persona) They said she was ethereal and childlike and “not of this world,” and she was also damaged. So think of, like, a fairy with broken wings. That’s the best way to think about her. She’s also described as the sort of person you either instantly loved or found exceedingly odd. 

KIM: So how did the Lonely Doll books actually come about?

AMY: Yeah, so she had started to play around at home with her old doll, Edith and the two stuffed bears. By this time, she’d given Edith a makeover, because she was extremely creative and crafty. She was a genius at sewing clothes, she was an amazing interior designer; she was into carpentry; she was a great sketch artist. So she could transform almost anything. So she had sewn the little doll, Edith, a bunch of new doll clothes and she sewed one of her own blonde hair pieces onto the doll’s head. And then suddenly the doll is here looking remarkably like Dare, herself, you know? So she started to set the toys up in and around her Manhattan apartment on W. 58th street  — and like the many photographs she took of herself — she never intended on showing the doll pictures to anyone. But through happenstance, a friend of a friend in publishing had seen one photo that Dare had taken of a little boy (a family friend) with a teddy bear that she had given to him, and the publisher was like, “You know, there’s something here. I like the idea with the photographs.” That was all Dare She showed up with an entire outline for a book featuring Edith and the two teddy bears. The idea got greenlit and the little doll, Edith, suddenly became her muse. 

KIM: Right, and the first book, simply called The Lonely Doll, came out in 1957 and it was an instant hit. The book was just flying out of bookstores and getting tons of national publicity, and so sequels were quickly lined up. The year it came out The Lonely Doll landed at number 14 on the New York Times Children’s Best Sellers list (The Cat in the Hat was number one). And thanks to her dazzling looks, of course, Dare was an instant star. She didn’t love all the attention because she was so shy, but she loved creating the books. Dare’s mom told a reporter that Edith and the bears were being insured by Lloyd’s of London. Dare began keeping them in a safe deposit vault. And so for almost two decades she worked on sequels, some of which also featured live animals, including The Doll and the Kitten, Edith and the Duckling and Edith and Midnight, which featured a pony. Some were shot in the countryside where Dare’s brother lived, but my favorites are the ones set in New York City, and I love that you get to see Dare’s own apartment as the backdrop for so many of the tableaus.

AMY: Yeah, and a lot of people think the books were Dare’s way of working through her own issues, that little Bear and Mr. Bear represent the brother and father Dare lost as a child. You could do a psychological deep dive, I think, but also, Dare was just so freakin creative. I think she was really just using her imagination to tell these stories that she thought would charm people. (And they do!)

KIM: Yeah, and Amy, why did the books sort of fall off peoples’ radar… and what ultimately became of Dare Wright?

AMY: I’m not completely sure why the books originally went out of print. I mean, maybe changing tastes I guess? She did switch publishers at one point; she felt she was being denied creative freedom at Doubleday. So maybe that had something to do with it, I don’t know. But the books have subsequently been reissued, but even still, it’s not easy to get your hands on all of them. And I think maybe the spanking stuff didn’t help…. It’s not exactly the sort of gift you’re going to give to a young child given those cringe-y elements. You know, it’s not a “new baby” gift or anything like that. (Parents would freak). But as for the rest of Dare’s story, it’s definitely really tragic. First off, she went on to create some different children’s books after The Lonely Doll series, including one called Lona, A Fairy Tale, which features Dare, herself, in the photos. She’s dressed up as a cursed fairy princess named “Lona” (which is a play on the word “Alone,” or “Lonely,” a lot of people think). She was nearing 60 when she did this book, and my god, if you look at pictures from it, she still looks unbelievable! She looked like she was in her 30s when she was pushing 60! It’s really hard to believe.) But after the death of her mother and then the death of her brother, Dare quickly started to spiral. She went downhill; she was more lonely than she had ever been. She became more erratic; she became an alcoholic and very self-destructive. She ended up befriending transients in Central Park and would give them access to her apartment to sleep in, and as a result, some very bad things happened to her, which I won’t get into, but you can probably imagine… you find out more about that in Jean Nathan’s biography. It’s truly, truly, heartbreaking to read about Dare’s final two decades of life. It really leaves you feeling empty.

KIM: It's so tragic. I mean, to think of that, and then also knowing that these books are actually really a beautiful work of art. So let's instead try to remember all the glorious photographs she took and appreciate them and her amazing Lonely Doll books.

AMY: I agree. I mean, some people say the story of Dare Wright’s life is a tragic one, but I do think she really lived a charmed life in many ways. She always found beauty and magic and sparkle in the world around her. She had so many amazing adventures, and in her own eccentric way, I think she lived a celebratory life. I think her story also would make an amazing movie or television show. I can picture someone like Anya Taylor Joy playing Dare (especially now that she has her platinum blonde — she looks…)

KIM: Oh, that would be perfect!

AMY: And actually, I recently read that a musical about Dare Wright is in the works. So the playwrights behind that are named Tasha Gordon-Solmon and Faye Chiao. (I don’t know how to say her last name).

KIM: That sounds really amazing. Especially in this Instagram-age where photographs are everything, it seems like she is more relevant than ever before. 

AMY: For sure.

KIM: So Dare Wright had her “dolly,” and the protagonist of next week’s novel has a “Dolly” of her own — a character by the name of Dolly, we should clarify. 

AMY: Yeah, and like Dare and Edie Wright’s relationship, this book involves a beautiful ingenue who is dependent on a manipulative “maternal figure.”

AMY: That’s exactly right, and her actions have consequences. We’ll be discussing Moths, a classic from 1880 by the prolific English author Ouida, which is the pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé. Until next week, don’t forget to sign up for our Lost Ladies of Lit newsletter to keep up to date on all the future authors we’ll be covering. And if you have a moment, please give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast.

AMY: Those five-star reviews really help. So long everybody! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.