The Denver Woman's Press Club
Lucky, lucky Denver has the
Denver Woman's Press Club at 1325 Logan Street, where
visitors as diverse as Mae West and H.G. Wells have stopped by. Who can resist a
club where the charter includes warnings like, "A total deficiency of brains
shall constitute an insurmountable obstacle to membership" and "Members shall
avoid referring to any woman's beauty in print?"
Founded in 1898 by Rocky Mountain News reporter Minnie Reynolds, the club has
been on Logan Street since 1924 when it took over the studio home of Colorado artist
George Elbert Burr, and it still serves as a vital networking outpost
for killer-smart women writers who make Denver their home. On our tour today,
let's celebrate Mary Coyle Chase, perhaps the leader of the killer-smart pack.
Mary Coyle Chase: Inventing a Whole New White Rabbit
Unlike every other writer featured in this tour, Mary Coyle Chase (1906-1981) was a
Denverite from her first breath to her last. Raised in a house on West Fourth Avenue
and a graduate of West High, Chase began her writerly life as an 18-year-old cub
reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, where she spent the next seven years covering
everything from tabloidesque domestic quarrels and society fetes to picket line
disputes and boxing matches.
Writer Dorothy Parker - no slouch herself when it came to witticisms - met Chase in
Denver in the 1920s and called her "the greatest unclaimed wit in America."
By all accounts a unique and extremely talented character, a newspaper colleague
remembered her fondly as, "...insubordinate, impatient of authority, perfectly
willing to make and abide by her own rules." After meeting and marrying another
journalist on the News staff, Chase made the choice routinely made by millions of
American women at the time: she decided to stay home and raise her three sons.
Unlike the other millions, though, Chase pushed herself to carve out private
writing time in the family house on St. Paul Street. In love with the theater
from an early age, she began to craft plays that caught the eye of Broadway
producers, even if the plays - initially - failed to charm Broadway audiences.
Despite one "whopping flop" in 1937, Chase persevered as she chain-smoked like
crazy, staved off creditors and raised her children. Five years later, with
World War II less than a year old, Chase, then 37, watched a neighbor woman who
had lost her only son to a Pacific battle, go about her daily routine with a dazed,
paralyzed look on her face.
"I wondered if I could ever write anything that would make her smile again," Chase
later remembered, and in a daydream of sorts, she envisioned, "a big white rabbit
following a psychiatrist. I had to figure out why a man-sized rabbit would be
following a psychologist."
That morning, with captivating forebears like Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit and
Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, Mary Coyle Chase created Harvey, a 6-foot-1-1/2
inch white rabbit and imaginary pal to a drink-addicted character named Elwood
P. Dowd.
Opening on Broadway in 1945, Harvey became one of the era's longest-running plays
(with 1,775 performances), and Chase was awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for the
play she hammered out on at 14th Avenue and St. Paul. She was the first Coloradan
to win the prize.
Like sensitive people before and after, Chase was rattled by the sudden fame and
prosperity that descended when her "life exploded." In less than a week, the
Chase household income rocketed to 30 times its usual weekly level; annual
royalties totaled over $100,000 in 1940s dollars; and Universal Studios paid
a then-record-setting $1 million for the rights to the film, which starred
Jimmy Stewart, and can be seen on almost any video store's "classics" shelf at
this very moment.
Momentarily adrift and distracted, Chase grappled briefly with something she
called "the whisky and soda route," but emerged to soberly create two more
popular plays. She used her royalty income to found the House of Hope,
an extraordinary, early experiment in creating a rehabilitative shelter for
female alcoholics that grew into a model for later government efforts.
Writing poignantly in the '50s for a national magazine, Chase wrote, "The
things you see by the flares of sudden fame are shattering and terrifying:
the glittering eye of Greed, the distorted faces of her sisters Envy and Malice.
These witches always come to the feast. They chill your heart and leave you
alone in the world. But you can't sit and stare at them always. And you can't
go around forever mumbling, 'Forgive me, forgive me.' So you begin the gradual
process of unraveling it."
One weekend when you feel like doing your own bit of unraveling by way of
some healthy, rueful laughs, rent Harvey and let an invisible, invincible
white rabbit help you while your cares away.
DENVER'S LITERARY LANDMARKS DRIVING TOUR