October 23, 2017 • 23 mins
We chronicle the life and times of Louise Bryant and her husband, John Reed, two Greenwich Village Bohemians who ended up at ground zero for the greatest revolution the world has ever known.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Why media productions. It's October. Louise Bryant stands at the
head of a solemn procession that winds through the streets
of Moscow to Red Square. She's racked with fatigue and grief.
Her husband, her partner, and art, journalism and revolution is gone.
(00:23):
Bryant spent the past three weeks nursing Jack Read day
and night in an overcrowded Soviet hospital until he died
from typhus at thirty two. The Russian leaders revered Read,
and now they give him a hero's funeral in Moscow
with all the pomp and circumstance the young socialist nation
can muster. So it was there was a big funeral, Cortes,
(00:45):
I mean it was. It was a big deal. Jack Read.
Biographer Robert Rosenstone would have seen, you know, all the
leaders there, with Lennon and Trotsky and the other members
of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and um
lots of Red Guard. They take Read's casket to the
Kremlin Wall to bury him next to other Soviet revolutionary heroes.
(01:07):
It's perhaps the most honored spot in Russia. Only a
handful of Americans are buried there, and Jack Reid is
the first. Louise Brian is too grief stricken to process
any of this at the funeral, says her biographer Mary Dearborn.
That was a terrible moment for her because there she
is alone in Moscow and he's dead. Louise basically collapsed
(01:31):
while she was standing there. It was a terrible shock
and it took her a while to recover. It's more
than Bryant and her weary heart can take. She recounts
the traumatic events surrounding Reid's death, and I let her
home a few weeks later. All that I write now
seems part of a dream. Jack's death and my strenuous
underground trip to Russia and the weeks of terror and
(01:54):
the Typhus hospital have quite broken me. At the funeral,
I suffered a very of your heart attack. Specialists have
agreed that I have strained my heart because of the
long days and nights I watched besides Jack's bed, and
that is enlarged and may not get ever well again.
(02:24):
I'm Sean Braswell and This is the Threat a podcast
from Ozzie Media where we examine the interlocking lives and
events of history. We turned back the clock one story
at a time to reveal how various strands get woven
together to create a historic figure, big idea, or an
unthinkable tragedy. Our season started with the murder of John
(02:45):
Lennon and how his killer, Mark David Chapman, was obsessed
with a novel, The Catcher and the RYE. J. D.
Salinger might not have written that novel if he had
never met the dazzling Una O'Neill, and Una might not
have existed if her father, their Eugene O'Neil, hadn't lost
the love of his life. If you take away one connection,
(03:08):
history changes. John Lennon might be celebrating his seventy seventh
birthday this month if just one of these links had
been different, we'll never really know. This episode, we continue
our thread with Louise Bryant, the woman who captured the
heart of Eugene O'Neill and could have changed it all.
If you're joining us for the first time, please go
(03:30):
back to episode one and start our interconnected story from
the beginning. It's very hard to tell it in linear fashion.
Her life wasn't very linear. Mary dearborn again, We'll take
her queue and start at the end of Bryant's life.
Imagine the streets of Paris three. It's thirteen years after
(03:53):
the death of her husband, journalist Jack Read. Bryant is
forty seven, so she says she's thirty nine. In some ways,
she's still living in the past. But I've been looking
at this photo of her on the back of my
book jacket while we're talking. She's wearing these clothes that
she brought back from Russia that are just amazing. These boots,
(04:15):
she has a Russian fur cap, and she's wearing this
sort of tunic. Bryant married again in Paris. This husband
was a controlling diplomat named William Bullet. He convinced her
to stop writing and give up her career to become
a mother. Things started to spiral from there. Bryant was
(04:40):
overcome by a rare and excruciatingly painful illness that caused
tumors to grow all over her body. Her only relief
was alcohol. She drank more and more, and before long
her alcoholism is battling with this terrible disease, and she
went into the tailspin. Meanwhile, Bullet started gathering his forces.
(05:05):
He divorced Bryant and took her only child, Anne. There
was an ugly custody battle. Bullet took their six year
old and swept her away on his diplomatic missions. Bryant
was left behind in Paris, desperate and miserable. Louise was
really living a chaotic life in Paris, drinking too much,
and her daughter Anne was sort of the the last
(05:27):
dream she had left to hold onto. One day, Bryant
read in the newspaper that Bullet would be passing through
Paris by train. She suspected that he would have their
daughter with him. She went to the train station. She
had a bottle of red wine with her and was
reviewing her life as she's waiting for the train and
(05:48):
just hoping that she can get a glimpse of Anne.
It's the only thing that makes sense to her anymore.
And the train thundered by without even slowing. Bryant died
penniless on the stairs of a seed Paris hotel three
years later. No fancy funeral, no processions, no marching bands.
(06:13):
Louise Bryant may have died without fanfare, but her life
was a series of remarkable adventures. She was really amazingly beautiful.
She was incredibly bold and ready to take risks again. Bryant.
Biographer Mary Dearborn, she really came from nowhere, and she
wanted to be kind of an actor on a world stage,
(06:37):
and so Bryant struck out for Oregon, where she graduated
from college. She had a penchant for reinventing herself and
had total confidence she could attract any man she wanted
an acquaintance. Once lamented she had no right to have
brains and be so pretty, so she pushed, you know,
and um, she was so beautiful and slipped me that
(07:01):
whatever she wanted she tended to get. And what she
wanted first was a comfortable middle class life in Portland,
married to a handsome dentist. But soon that wasn't enough.
She felt like she was living in a provincial backwater.
She wanted someone to open the door to the bustling
cities of the world, a true adventurer, and that someone
(07:24):
soon arrived at her doorstep. Jack Read was a six foot,
curly haired, green eyed giant of American journalism. In nineteen fourteen,
at the age of twenty six, he made a name
for himself as a brave and fearless reporter. It was
his revolution brewing in Mexico and all the American reporters
were gathered in El Paso when nobody was going over.
(07:49):
They were kind of reporting the stories from the tales
of people who were fleeing Mexico. Read biographer Robert Rosenstone. Again.
He advised actor and director Warren Beatty on the film
Reads about reading Bryant, and read was the only American
who got himself on a donkey and rode off into
Mexico and found Pancho Villa, who was one of the
(08:12):
great revolutionary leaders, and rode with his troops for six
or eight weeks. Reid's reporting from Mexico made him a
rock star, so he became at that point the highest
paid journalist in America. Portland, Oregon, was Jack Reid's hometown,
and in December nineteen fifteen, the acclaimed reporter returned to
Portland to give a series of lectures railing against the
(08:34):
American class system. Bryant attended one of those speeches, she
was entranced. The two met on the street a few
days later, and Bryant invited him up to her loft
to read poetry. She kept a studio in downtown Portland,
and she asked him back to her studio. You know
(08:56):
and and she wrote about how they just sat there
in the glow of the stove, and you know, the
rest is left here imagination. Read returned to New York
and made arrangements for Bryant to follow, and so on
New Year's Eve nineteen fifteen, Bryant said goodbye to her husband,
(09:20):
got on a train, and went to New York to
join Read in Greenwich Village to start a new adventure.
Greenwich Village was paradise for Louise. Like minded artists and
writers talked about social change all the time. It was
a period of experimentation, indulgence, and cheap food and drink.
(09:42):
Bryant told a friend that her relationship with Read was
so beautiful and so free. We don't interfere with each
other at all. We feel like children who will never
grow up. They carried that spirit to Provincetown on Cape
Cod in the summer of nineteen six. Louise was there
with John Reid. They shared a house with Reed's friends
(10:04):
from Harvard and a lot of local sort of artists.
Of course, Louise was living with him, but they were
committed to the idea of free love, so nothing was
holding them back. The same romantic impulse that had led
Bryant to Read also drew her to other men, including
Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill was a genius, a playwright, was striking
(10:27):
good looks in a brooding disposition. Bryan and O'Neill had
a passionate affair that would impact O'Neill for the rest
of his life. The magical summer on the beaches of
Cape Cod came to an end. Louise Bryant and Jack
Read got married in New York that fall, but Bryant's
romance with O'Neill continued to smolder. She felt that she
(10:49):
had carte blanche to sleep with whoever she wanted, and
of course, to be consistent, she said Jack Reid did too,
but in fact he had all kinds of affairs, and
that really heard her. So whenever Jack we went out
of almost out of her sight, she'd take up with
(11:12):
somebody who is nearby. As soon as Red left town,
Bryant reignited her affair with O'Neil, But Bryant felt stifled
in New York. She wanted to travel the world and
report on the biggest stories of their generation. Up next,
Bryant takes on a new challenge, one that will lead
her to ground zero of one of the greatest revolutions
(11:32):
in history. Louise Bryant had lived in the shadow of
Jack Read ever since she arrived in Greenwich Village. She
was determined to forge her own career to make her
own name as a journalist. World War One was raging
across Europe, so Bryant left behind her new husband and
(11:54):
her playwright lover to cover the war. Bryant was the
only reporter on the front line. American soldiers greeted her
with delight, but she had trouble getting published back home.
Bryant returned from France by ship to New York, and
Jack Reid was waiting for her on the docks. He
had a very exciting proposal for her. Four days later,
(12:16):
they returned aboard another ship, and Louise was headed back
across the Atlantic with her husband, headed toward another brewing war.
These four days are essential to our thread. If the
timing had been different, if Bryant had stayed in New
York for weeks instead of days after returning from France,
then everything would have been different. But more on this later.
(12:37):
Just keep these four days in mind. Read and Bryant
sailed for Russia because Russia was falling apart. The czar
had abdicated his throne, ending the nation's monarchy. Those in
power vowed to hold elections once World War One had finished,
(12:57):
but one radical political faction, known as the bulsh Shoviks,
did not want to wait for elections. The Bolsheviks had
a secret weapon, a stocky bald man with a powerful promise, peace,
land and bread. His name was Vladimir Ilyich Ullanov, but
everyone knew him as Lenin. Read and Bryant followed the
(13:18):
events in Russia very closely. They knew that revolution was coming,
and they made sure that they were there when it happened.
They arrived in Petrograd modern day St. Petersburg after a
long journey. John Reid had a real capacity for kind
of ecstasy, and he was just a real fountain of energy.
(13:40):
Mary dearborn again, and he was so overcome with joy
when they got into Petrograd and found that it was
all happening. Bryant and Reid met with workers unions, They
attended political gatherings, they heard speeches by revolutionary leaders. They
were in the middle of it, and they were writing
about it. And you have it at the time that
(14:01):
it seemed like this was going to trigger a world revolution.
They were devoted socialists, and the noble experiment in Russia
really drew them in. They thought this was wonderful. Everywhere
they went. There was a question crackling in the air
who would lead the new Russia. The tension grew and
(14:23):
the system burst in late October. The Bolsheviks quickly swept
into power. In the end, there was very little violence.
Most people didn't know what had happened until they read
leaflets announcing the news From a platform in Petrograd. Lenin proclaimed,
now begins a new era in the history of Russia,
(14:44):
and Briant and Reid were on the ground to record
the whole thing. So Jack was writing away and Louise
was writing away, and they each wrote a book about
their time in Russia. Bryant's book Six Red Months in
Russia paints a vibrant picture of daily life during the revolution.
And went along always looking for the happy youngsters to
(15:05):
whom the bright toys and the shop windows now dust covered,
should belong. I came to realize with horror that everybody
in Russia has grown up those young in years whom
we still called children, had old and sad faces, large
hungry eyes burned forth from pale countenances, wretched, worn out shoes,
(15:26):
sagging a raggy little garments accentuated they're so apparent misery.
But Russia was changing rapidly. The new government nationalized the
banks and declared men and women equal. To Bryant, it
felt more free than the United States, where women didn't
yet have the right to vote. Everyone began addressing each
(15:48):
other as comrade. In the streets. Brant and Red met
and befriended Vladimir Lenin himself. In the weeks and months
after the revolution. The two Americans were spell bound by Linen.
Reid described Lenin as a strange, popular leader, a leader
purely by virtue of intellect, colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached,
(16:11):
but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms.
Bryant and Reid were convinced that Lenin was going to
change the world. The Soviet experiment felt like the next
chapter in human civilization. In Russia, the socialist state is
an accomplished fact, Louise wrote in her book, we can
never again call it an idle dream of long haired
(16:33):
philosophers Louise Bryant and Jack Reid returned home from Russia
in the spring of nineteen eighteen. Bryant was high on
revolution and filled with a new sense of possibility. She
was determined to rekindle her affair with Eugene O'Neill. Louise
(16:54):
got in touch with the O'Neill, who was in Province
Town bryant biographer Mary dear worn. And he said, look,
I'm married now, I've married this woman, Agnes Bolton. And
she said, oh, please meet me in Fall River, which
was midway between Provincen and New York. And he was
very tempted too. For months, the love sick playwright had
(17:16):
drunk himself silly while Bryant was overseas, turning back clocks
and proclaiming his despair across Greenwich Village. This is where
those four days come, in the four days between Bryant's
journey home from France and her departure for Russia. If
Louise Bryant had stayed in New York just a little
longer before leaving to report on the revolution, she would
(17:38):
have almost certainly resumed her romance with O'Neill, and he
would have never met Agnes Bolton at the hell whole bar.
No Bolton, no Una, no threat. But by the time
Louise returned from Russia the following year, it was too late.
He was fully involved with Bolton. Bryant demanded to know
(18:01):
if he still loved her. O'Neil was torn, but ultimately
stayed with Bolton. His wife, Agnes Bolt laid down the law. Meanwhile,
Jack Reid moved from intrepid reporter to full fledged communist.
He traveled the country to foster the growing American communist movement.
(18:22):
Reid returned to Russia in the fall of nineteen nineteen
to visit Lenin and other Russian leaders and enlist their help.
He promised Bryant he would only be gone for a
few months, but Read's second trip to Russia was not
as magical as the first, and when he tried to
return to America, u S authorities blocked him, so he
sent for Bryant to join him in Russia, and after
(18:44):
a long and harrowing journey, Bryant finally arrived in Russia
for a second time, and she and Reid reunited in Moscow.
Jack ran into Louise's hotel room when he heard where
she was, and they were. It was a very romantic
time for him. But Louise asked Jack about his experiences,
and she said she found him older and sadder and
(19:08):
grown strangely gentle. Reid told Bryant about the famines, epidemics,
and chaos that plagued Russia. The glowing socialist dream had
turned into a nightmare. He grew increasingly disillusioned. His health faltered.
Not long after his reunion with Bryant, he was diagnosed
with the deadly typhus fever and rushed to the hospital.
(19:29):
Louise nursed him around the clock. People were sick in
the whole city and there was no room in the hospitals.
Jack was on a cot in a hallway and Louise
was nursing him because they were nurses had no time,
or barely any time to even stop, and Louise um
sort of watched the life drain out of John Reid.
(19:54):
Reid died one month after their reunion, just five days
shy of his thirty third birthday. Russian workers carried his
body on their shoulders from the hospital to the Temple
of Labor. Lenin and the other Soviet leaders honored their
friend and comrade, with an elaborate funeral that filled the
streets of Moscow. Bryant had a heart attack at Read's funeral,
(20:15):
but she recovered. She went on many more reporting adventures
in Russia and elsewhere. Bryant took up flying near the
end of her life before she succumbed to illness and despair.
She liked to wear her flight suit in Parisian cafes,
but her life never again reached the height of those
five extraordinary years with Jack Read. Her heart may have
(20:36):
recovered after Red Square, but in many ways it remained
in Russia with Read. Now we've reached the end of
our thread. We're done traveling back in time, so let's
trace it beat by beat from Lenin to Lenin. Here
(20:56):
we go. Vladimir Lenin starts a revel Ouian in Russia.
Louise Bryant will miss the window to rekindle her affair
with Eugene O'Neill in order to report on that revolution.
Her absence from O'Neill's life will overshadow his marriage and
family for years. He will abandon that family and devastate
his young daughter Una. UNA's marriage to Charlie Chaplin will
(21:20):
in turn rock JD. Salinger's world before the trauma of
combat destroys it. The fruits of Salinger's suffering, the Catcher
in the Rye will influence millions, including the sociopath Mark
David Chapman, all culminating sixty three years later when Chapman
murders John Lennon at the Gates of the Dakota. This
(21:46):
episode marks the end of our Thread, but it's not
the end of our season. Next week, in our final episode,
we tie together some loose ends and discover a few
more surprising connections between our characters. The Thread is produced
(22:07):
by Meredith Hotnut, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell. Our
editors are Carlos Watson and samir Raw. Meredith Hottnot engineered
our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowland's
special Thanks to Cindy Carpian, David Boyer, Tracy Moran, Sean Colligan, Sun,
Jeeve Tandon, Alexa Bolton, Cameo, George, and k A. L. W.
(22:29):
Check us out at ausy dot com, that's o z
y dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. To learn
more about The Thread, visit ausi dot com Slash the
thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
the thread on Apple podcasts. If you love surprising, engaging
stories from history like this one, look no further than
(22:50):
the flashback section of AZZI. Thanks for listening. One
Why media productions. It's October. Louise Bryant stands at the
head of a solemn procession that winds through the streets
of Moscow to Red Square. She's racked with fatigue and grief.
Her husband, her partner, and art, journalism and revolution is gone.
(00:23):
Bryant spent the past three weeks nursing Jack Read day
and night in an overcrowded Soviet hospital until he died
from typhus at thirty two. The Russian leaders revered Read,
and now they give him a hero's funeral in Moscow
with all the pomp and circumstance the young socialist nation
can muster. So it was there was a big funeral, Cortes,
(00:45):
I mean it was. It was a big deal. Jack Read.
Biographer Robert Rosenstone would have seen, you know, all the
leaders there, with Lennon and Trotsky and the other members
of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and um
lots of Red Guard. They take Read's casket to the
Kremlin Wall to bury him next to other Soviet revolutionary heroes.
(01:07):
It's perhaps the most honored spot in Russia. Only a
handful of Americans are buried there, and Jack Reid is
the first. Louise Brian is too grief stricken to process
any of this at the funeral, says her biographer Mary Dearborn.
That was a terrible moment for her because there she
is alone in Moscow and he's dead. Louise basically collapsed
(01:31):
while she was standing there. It was a terrible shock
and it took her a while to recover. It's more
than Bryant and her weary heart can take. She recounts
the traumatic events surrounding Reid's death, and I let her
home a few weeks later. All that I write now
seems part of a dream. Jack's death and my strenuous
underground trip to Russia and the weeks of terror and
(01:54):
the Typhus hospital have quite broken me. At the funeral,
I suffered a very of your heart attack. Specialists have
agreed that I have strained my heart because of the
long days and nights I watched besides Jack's bed, and
that is enlarged and may not get ever well again.
(02:24):
I'm Sean Braswell and This is the Threat a podcast
from Ozzie Media where we examine the interlocking lives and
events of history. We turned back the clock one story
at a time to reveal how various strands get woven
together to create a historic figure, big idea, or an
unthinkable tragedy. Our season started with the murder of John
(02:45):
Lennon and how his killer, Mark David Chapman, was obsessed
with a novel, The Catcher and the RYE. J. D.
Salinger might not have written that novel if he had
never met the dazzling Una O'Neill, and Una might not
have existed if her father, their Eugene O'Neil, hadn't lost
the love of his life. If you take away one connection,
(03:08):
history changes. John Lennon might be celebrating his seventy seventh
birthday this month if just one of these links had
been different, we'll never really know. This episode, we continue
our thread with Louise Bryant, the woman who captured the
heart of Eugene O'Neill and could have changed it all.
If you're joining us for the first time, please go
(03:30):
back to episode one and start our interconnected story from
the beginning. It's very hard to tell it in linear fashion.
Her life wasn't very linear. Mary dearborn again, We'll take
her queue and start at the end of Bryant's life.
Imagine the streets of Paris three. It's thirteen years after
(03:53):
the death of her husband, journalist Jack Read. Bryant is
forty seven, so she says she's thirty nine. In some ways,
she's still living in the past. But I've been looking
at this photo of her on the back of my
book jacket while we're talking. She's wearing these clothes that
she brought back from Russia that are just amazing. These boots,
(04:15):
she has a Russian fur cap, and she's wearing this
sort of tunic. Bryant married again in Paris. This husband
was a controlling diplomat named William Bullet. He convinced her
to stop writing and give up her career to become
a mother. Things started to spiral from there. Bryant was
(04:40):
overcome by a rare and excruciatingly painful illness that caused
tumors to grow all over her body. Her only relief
was alcohol. She drank more and more, and before long
her alcoholism is battling with this terrible disease, and she
went into the tailspin. Meanwhile, Bullet started gathering his forces.
(05:05):
He divorced Bryant and took her only child, Anne. There
was an ugly custody battle. Bullet took their six year
old and swept her away on his diplomatic missions. Bryant
was left behind in Paris, desperate and miserable. Louise was
really living a chaotic life in Paris, drinking too much,
and her daughter Anne was sort of the the last
(05:27):
dream she had left to hold onto. One day, Bryant
read in the newspaper that Bullet would be passing through
Paris by train. She suspected that he would have their
daughter with him. She went to the train station. She
had a bottle of red wine with her and was
reviewing her life as she's waiting for the train and
(05:48):
just hoping that she can get a glimpse of Anne.
It's the only thing that makes sense to her anymore.
And the train thundered by without even slowing. Bryant died
penniless on the stairs of a seed Paris hotel three
years later. No fancy funeral, no processions, no marching bands.
(06:13):
Louise Bryant may have died without fanfare, but her life
was a series of remarkable adventures. She was really amazingly beautiful.
She was incredibly bold and ready to take risks again. Bryant.
Biographer Mary Dearborn, she really came from nowhere, and she
wanted to be kind of an actor on a world stage,
(06:37):
and so Bryant struck out for Oregon, where she graduated
from college. She had a penchant for reinventing herself and
had total confidence she could attract any man she wanted
an acquaintance. Once lamented she had no right to have
brains and be so pretty, so she pushed, you know,
and um, she was so beautiful and slipped me that
(07:01):
whatever she wanted she tended to get. And what she
wanted first was a comfortable middle class life in Portland,
married to a handsome dentist. But soon that wasn't enough.
She felt like she was living in a provincial backwater.
She wanted someone to open the door to the bustling
cities of the world, a true adventurer, and that someone
(07:24):
soon arrived at her doorstep. Jack Read was a six foot,
curly haired, green eyed giant of American journalism. In nineteen fourteen,
at the age of twenty six, he made a name
for himself as a brave and fearless reporter. It was
his revolution brewing in Mexico and all the American reporters
were gathered in El Paso when nobody was going over.
(07:49):
They were kind of reporting the stories from the tales
of people who were fleeing Mexico. Read biographer Robert Rosenstone. Again.
He advised actor and director Warren Beatty on the film
Reads about reading Bryant, and read was the only American
who got himself on a donkey and rode off into
Mexico and found Pancho Villa, who was one of the
(08:12):
great revolutionary leaders, and rode with his troops for six
or eight weeks. Reid's reporting from Mexico made him a
rock star, so he became at that point the highest
paid journalist in America. Portland, Oregon, was Jack Reid's hometown,
and in December nineteen fifteen, the acclaimed reporter returned to
Portland to give a series of lectures railing against the
(08:34):
American class system. Bryant attended one of those speeches, she
was entranced. The two met on the street a few
days later, and Bryant invited him up to her loft
to read poetry. She kept a studio in downtown Portland,
and she asked him back to her studio. You know
(08:56):
and and she wrote about how they just sat there
in the glow of the stove, and you know, the
rest is left here imagination. Read returned to New York
and made arrangements for Bryant to follow, and so on
New Year's Eve nineteen fifteen, Bryant said goodbye to her husband,
(09:20):
got on a train, and went to New York to
join Read in Greenwich Village to start a new adventure.
Greenwich Village was paradise for Louise. Like minded artists and
writers talked about social change all the time. It was
a period of experimentation, indulgence, and cheap food and drink.
(09:42):
Bryant told a friend that her relationship with Read was
so beautiful and so free. We don't interfere with each
other at all. We feel like children who will never
grow up. They carried that spirit to Provincetown on Cape
Cod in the summer of nineteen six. Louise was there
with John Reid. They shared a house with Reed's friends
(10:04):
from Harvard and a lot of local sort of artists.
Of course, Louise was living with him, but they were
committed to the idea of free love, so nothing was
holding them back. The same romantic impulse that had led
Bryant to Read also drew her to other men, including
Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill was a genius, a playwright, was striking
(10:27):
good looks in a brooding disposition. Bryan and O'Neill had
a passionate affair that would impact O'Neill for the rest
of his life. The magical summer on the beaches of
Cape Cod came to an end. Louise Bryant and Jack
Read got married in New York that fall, but Bryant's
romance with O'Neill continued to smolder. She felt that she
(10:49):
had carte blanche to sleep with whoever she wanted, and
of course, to be consistent, she said Jack Reid did too,
but in fact he had all kinds of affairs, and
that really heard her. So whenever Jack we went out
of almost out of her sight, she'd take up with
(11:12):
somebody who is nearby. As soon as Red left town,
Bryant reignited her affair with O'Neil, But Bryant felt stifled
in New York. She wanted to travel the world and
report on the biggest stories of their generation. Up next,
Bryant takes on a new challenge, one that will lead
her to ground zero of one of the greatest revolutions
(11:32):
in history. Louise Bryant had lived in the shadow of
Jack Read ever since she arrived in Greenwich Village. She
was determined to forge her own career to make her
own name as a journalist. World War One was raging
across Europe, so Bryant left behind her new husband and
(11:54):
her playwright lover to cover the war. Bryant was the
only reporter on the front line. American soldiers greeted her
with delight, but she had trouble getting published back home.
Bryant returned from France by ship to New York, and
Jack Reid was waiting for her on the docks. He
had a very exciting proposal for her. Four days later,
(12:16):
they returned aboard another ship, and Louise was headed back
across the Atlantic with her husband, headed toward another brewing war.
These four days are essential to our thread. If the
timing had been different, if Bryant had stayed in New
York for weeks instead of days after returning from France,
then everything would have been different. But more on this later.
(12:37):
Just keep these four days in mind. Read and Bryant
sailed for Russia because Russia was falling apart. The czar
had abdicated his throne, ending the nation's monarchy. Those in
power vowed to hold elections once World War One had finished,
(12:57):
but one radical political faction, known as the bulsh Shoviks,
did not want to wait for elections. The Bolsheviks had
a secret weapon, a stocky bald man with a powerful promise, peace,
land and bread. His name was Vladimir Ilyich Ullanov, but
everyone knew him as Lenin. Read and Bryant followed the
(13:18):
events in Russia very closely. They knew that revolution was coming,
and they made sure that they were there when it happened.
They arrived in Petrograd modern day St. Petersburg after a
long journey. John Reid had a real capacity for kind
of ecstasy, and he was just a real fountain of energy.
(13:40):
Mary dearborn again, and he was so overcome with joy
when they got into Petrograd and found that it was
all happening. Bryant and Reid met with workers unions, They
attended political gatherings, they heard speeches by revolutionary leaders. They
were in the middle of it, and they were writing
about it. And you have it at the time that
(14:01):
it seemed like this was going to trigger a world revolution.
They were devoted socialists, and the noble experiment in Russia
really drew them in. They thought this was wonderful. Everywhere
they went. There was a question crackling in the air
who would lead the new Russia. The tension grew and
(14:23):
the system burst in late October. The Bolsheviks quickly swept
into power. In the end, there was very little violence.
Most people didn't know what had happened until they read
leaflets announcing the news From a platform in Petrograd. Lenin proclaimed,
now begins a new era in the history of Russia,
(14:44):
and Briant and Reid were on the ground to record
the whole thing. So Jack was writing away and Louise
was writing away, and they each wrote a book about
their time in Russia. Bryant's book Six Red Months in
Russia paints a vibrant picture of daily life during the revolution.
And went along always looking for the happy youngsters to
(15:05):
whom the bright toys and the shop windows now dust covered,
should belong. I came to realize with horror that everybody
in Russia has grown up those young in years whom
we still called children, had old and sad faces, large
hungry eyes burned forth from pale countenances, wretched, worn out shoes,
(15:26):
sagging a raggy little garments accentuated they're so apparent misery.
But Russia was changing rapidly. The new government nationalized the
banks and declared men and women equal. To Bryant, it
felt more free than the United States, where women didn't
yet have the right to vote. Everyone began addressing each
(15:48):
other as comrade. In the streets. Brant and Red met
and befriended Vladimir Lenin himself. In the weeks and months
after the revolution. The two Americans were spell bound by Linen.
Reid described Lenin as a strange, popular leader, a leader
purely by virtue of intellect, colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached,
(16:11):
but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms.
Bryant and Reid were convinced that Lenin was going to
change the world. The Soviet experiment felt like the next
chapter in human civilization. In Russia, the socialist state is
an accomplished fact, Louise wrote in her book, we can
never again call it an idle dream of long haired
(16:33):
philosophers Louise Bryant and Jack Reid returned home from Russia
in the spring of nineteen eighteen. Bryant was high on
revolution and filled with a new sense of possibility. She
was determined to rekindle her affair with Eugene O'Neill. Louise
(16:54):
got in touch with the O'Neill, who was in Province
Town bryant biographer Mary dear worn. And he said, look,
I'm married now, I've married this woman, Agnes Bolton. And
she said, oh, please meet me in Fall River, which
was midway between Provincen and New York. And he was
very tempted too. For months, the love sick playwright had
(17:16):
drunk himself silly while Bryant was overseas, turning back clocks
and proclaiming his despair across Greenwich Village. This is where
those four days come, in the four days between Bryant's
journey home from France and her departure for Russia. If
Louise Bryant had stayed in New York just a little
longer before leaving to report on the revolution, she would
(17:38):
have almost certainly resumed her romance with O'Neill, and he
would have never met Agnes Bolton at the hell whole bar.
No Bolton, no Una, no threat. But by the time
Louise returned from Russia the following year, it was too late.
He was fully involved with Bolton. Bryant demanded to know
(18:01):
if he still loved her. O'Neil was torn, but ultimately
stayed with Bolton. His wife, Agnes Bolt laid down the law. Meanwhile,
Jack Reid moved from intrepid reporter to full fledged communist.
He traveled the country to foster the growing American communist movement.
(18:22):
Reid returned to Russia in the fall of nineteen nineteen
to visit Lenin and other Russian leaders and enlist their help.
He promised Bryant he would only be gone for a
few months, but Read's second trip to Russia was not
as magical as the first, and when he tried to
return to America, u S authorities blocked him, so he
sent for Bryant to join him in Russia, and after
(18:44):
a long and harrowing journey, Bryant finally arrived in Russia
for a second time, and she and Reid reunited in Moscow.
Jack ran into Louise's hotel room when he heard where
she was, and they were. It was a very romantic
time for him. But Louise asked Jack about his experiences,
and she said she found him older and sadder and
(19:08):
grown strangely gentle. Reid told Bryant about the famines, epidemics,
and chaos that plagued Russia. The glowing socialist dream had
turned into a nightmare. He grew increasingly disillusioned. His health faltered.
Not long after his reunion with Bryant, he was diagnosed
with the deadly typhus fever and rushed to the hospital.
(19:29):
Louise nursed him around the clock. People were sick in
the whole city and there was no room in the hospitals.
Jack was on a cot in a hallway and Louise
was nursing him because they were nurses had no time,
or barely any time to even stop, and Louise um
sort of watched the life drain out of John Reid.
(19:54):
Reid died one month after their reunion, just five days
shy of his thirty third birthday. Russian workers carried his
body on their shoulders from the hospital to the Temple
of Labor. Lenin and the other Soviet leaders honored their
friend and comrade, with an elaborate funeral that filled the
streets of Moscow. Bryant had a heart attack at Read's funeral,
(20:15):
but she recovered. She went on many more reporting adventures
in Russia and elsewhere. Bryant took up flying near the
end of her life before she succumbed to illness and despair.
She liked to wear her flight suit in Parisian cafes,
but her life never again reached the height of those
five extraordinary years with Jack Read. Her heart may have
(20:36):
recovered after Red Square, but in many ways it remained
in Russia with Read. Now we've reached the end of
our thread. We're done traveling back in time, so let's
trace it beat by beat from Lenin to Lenin. Here
(20:56):
we go. Vladimir Lenin starts a revel Ouian in Russia.
Louise Bryant will miss the window to rekindle her affair
with Eugene O'Neill in order to report on that revolution.
Her absence from O'Neill's life will overshadow his marriage and
family for years. He will abandon that family and devastate
his young daughter Una. UNA's marriage to Charlie Chaplin will
(21:20):
in turn rock JD. Salinger's world before the trauma of
combat destroys it. The fruits of Salinger's suffering, the Catcher
in the Rye will influence millions, including the sociopath Mark
David Chapman, all culminating sixty three years later when Chapman
murders John Lennon at the Gates of the Dakota. This
(21:46):
episode marks the end of our Thread, but it's not
the end of our season. Next week, in our final episode,
we tie together some loose ends and discover a few
more surprising connections between our characters. The Thread is produced
(22:07):
by Meredith Hotnut, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell. Our
editors are Carlos Watson and samir Raw. Meredith Hottnot engineered
our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowland's
special Thanks to Cindy Carpian, David Boyer, Tracy Moran, Sean Colligan, Sun,
Jeeve Tandon, Alexa Bolton, Cameo, George, and k A. L. W.
(22:29):
Check us out at ausy dot com, that's o z
y dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. To learn
more about The Thread, visit ausi dot com Slash the
thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
the thread on Apple podcasts. If you love surprising, engaging
stories from history like this one, look no further than
(22:50):
the flashback section of AZZI. Thanks for listening. One
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