The Reverend William Telfer MacArthur wasn't really a
minister. On his Pennsylvania farm he watched his threshing machine burn and
decided, then and there, that he'd been called by the Almighty. Ordaining
himself a minister, he abandoned the farm and went from community to community,
state to state, to preach the evils of the world and the glories of the
hereafter.
The Reverend William Telfer MacArthur was a
fire-and-brimstone preacher, a Bible-spouting, prayer-murmuring evangelist who
saw wickedness everywhere. He believed the Gay Nineties were a presage of doom,
and he strove with might and main to save souls. Except for the Bible, all
books were instruments of Satan. Tobacco and Demon Rum were abominations.
Dancing was the last straw of decadence which would break society's back.
The Reverend MacArthur never had a parish. He saw himself as
a brave and lonely crusader carrying the Word wherever evil existed. He
journeyed to the farming towns of Pennsylvania and Massachu-setts, the urban
centers of New York, the growing metropolis of Chicago. He was a one-man road
show, a tall, gaunt, black-maned autocrat with a booming voice. Street corners
and matrons' parlors, city parks and country schoolhouses, soap boxes and
hastily constructed wooden platforms, his own home or a disciple's, these were
his churches. Victorian-raised old ladies and reformed male reprobates were his
congregations.
William Telfer MacArthur was a first-generation American. He
was born in New York City, the sec-ond and last child of parents who were four
days off a boat from Aberdeen, Scotland, and who were on their way to live with
relatives in Saskatchewan, Canada. William Telfer MacArthur was the product of
a background that taught sin and guilt and evil and damnation. His father was a
self-ordained minister, as was his grandfather. So it was natural that he
embrace the life of the traveling evangelist, for his parents had warned that
not only must he keep himself pure in God's eyes, but that he had a duty to
show others the way. After the threshing machine burned he set out with
missionary zeal to save souls, undaunted by the pressing needs of a wife and
six children.
Georgiana Welstead was one of twenty-two chil-dren of an
English officer who had served in the East India Army. She was a soft-spoken,
gentle woman, attractive and witty, sensitive. She loved to read, though her
husband frowned on everything except the Bible, and sing, though only religious
hymns were permitted, and laugh, though she was berated for being frivolous
when "the times call for sober reflection on God's vengeance."
Georgiana Welstead MacArthur had a remarkable sense of humor and a ready smile
for the many hardships her unbending husband called on her to endure in His
name.
William Telfer MacArthur never earned an in-come after that
fateful day his threshing machine burned. The contributions he received from
his disciples were handed over to the poor. Georgiana even had to beg to let
the family keep donations of food. "Think not of unimportant earthly
problems such as how to get along and make ends meet," the Reverend
MacArthur often counseled his followers. "I never think of such
unimportant things."
And indeed he didn't. "The Lord will provide," he
said, but it was Georgiana who did the providing. The six children seldom had
adequate food, clothing or shelter. Home was wherever William MacArthur could
find an audience and was always temporary because he felt compelled to spread
God's Word far and wide. Georgiana hunted, made clothes, gardened, accepted
handouts. But the family was always hungry. Mainly because where they lived was
where the Reverend MacArthur's disciples lived, because what they had the disciples
shared. Often Georgiana had to stretch a cabbage to cover twenty plates, water
a quart of lemonade to fill twenty glasses, rearrange a small house to
accommodate twenty bodies. There were always abundant hosannas—but little food
and less room.
Once, Georgiana, driven to desperation by her children's
lack of nourishment and the family's wretched living quarters, defied her
husband and refused to feed the freeloaders. Her plan was to starve them into
more gainful pursuits. The Reverend MacArthur fumed and raged, screamed and
threatened. Then he saw that his disciples were still praying, despite their
lack of food, and he was overcome with joy. "It's a miracle," he
proclaimed proudly. "A miracle brought about by my good work."
Such was hardly the case, as Georgiana discovered when she
found large caches of food secreted under the disciples' beds—food they had not
seen fit to share with the near-starving MacArthur children.
William Telfer MacArthur had a curious way of interpreting
God's will when it came to raising children. He considered himself an earthly
stand-in for his heavenly master, a divinely appointed enforcer of the
Almighty's commands. When he wasn't off to street corners and meeting halls, he
was thundering at his offspring from morning till night. Often he would line
them up, dance about mystically, chant "Repent," and "Forgive
them, Lord," and "Where have I failed?" Then he would uncover
their backs and flail them black and blue with a leather strap. He soaked the
strap in vinegar to imprint God's will more effectively.
Georgiana would protest, but she was no match for her stern
husband. Bellowing that he was sole monarch of his own brood, quoting the Bible
to prove his sovereignty in family matters, and accusing his wife of a dozen
sordid schemes to undermine him, the righteous divine subdued any opposition
Georgiana could summon the strength to furnish.
"My children's wickedness has come from you," he
would thunder. Occasionally he would turn the strap on Georgiana to demonstrate
the futility of dissent.
William Telfer MacArthur also had bizarre ideas about the
causes of illness. He considered sickness a punishment inflicted by God on
those who incurred His displeasure. MacArthur reveled in his robust health,
cited it as proof of personal virtue.
His son Charles, at age seven, developed a boil on the neck,
which rapidly grew into an ugly, festering sore. Georgiana started to take the
boy to a doctor, but was intercepted by her husband.
"My son has been afflicted for his sins," was the
Reverend MacArthur's diagnosis. "I shall gather our people to pray for
him."
"He needs medicine, father," Georgiana pleaded.
"Only prayer can cleanse the poison from this sinner's body."
"Please. He's very sick."
"I won't be contravened by you."
"Please. . . ."
Each night for a week the young sinner found himself and his
mushrooming neck on a platform under naphtha flares while the faithful prayed
for him to be forgiven. Finally the hot flames caused the abscess to burst, and
pus poured from the boy's body. The Reverend MacArthur was beside himself with
glee. He ordered a celebration. Late into the night the disciples praised God's
mercy. All his life Charles carried a scar on his neck.
The Reverend MacArthur believed he had a private hot line to
the abode of the Deity. When Georgi-ana asked him to shovel snow, or stoke a
fire, or repair a leaky roof, he would reply solemnly : "I don't think the
Lord wants me to do that."
One of MacArthur's most effective sermons railed against the
shamefulness of drink. Yet he could excuse his own not infrequent tippling with
: "Even the Savior enjoyed an occasional glass of wine."
Georgiana bore seven children. One of them-Roderick—was
killed in a freakish shotgun accident, his head half blown off by his brother
Alfred, who had thought the gun unloaded. As Georgiana cradled the dead
five-year-old in her lap, her husband was carried into the house on a stretcher
by his disciples. He had fallen from the pulpit, had suffered a broken leg. His
reaction to his son's death was that God had exacted the last measure of
repayment for the youngster's sins. He failed to recognize, or at least to
acknowledge, any parallel with his own injury.
Almost everything was immoral to the Reverend MacArthur. To
him sin was everywhere, and every-where were sinners. He often observed that
pleasure was the devil's invention and that anything pleasur-able was evil. He
taught his followers and his chil-dren that whoever yielded to temptation would
burn forever, and his dramatic descriptions of hellfire were terrifyingly
vivid. To him, anything that the individual enjoyed doing was a sin that
merited God's everlasting enmity.
William Telfer MacArthur lived to be eighty-eight. In his
later years he was supported by his sons, who donated five hundred dollars a
month to a missionary home in exchange for its letting him lead evening
prayers.
The Reverend MacArthur's only avowed misgiving was the paths
his offspring followed when it came time to sever family ties. He could find
little in their make-up to indicate they had embraced his values, was dismayed
that his teachings weren't mirrored in their conduct. :But; he didn't look deep
enough. For the heritage he bestowed on the six MacArthur children who grew to
adulthood remained, to a greater or lesser degree, indelibly stamped on their
souls. Frightening visions of hellfire and the im-possible demands placed on
them to avoid it; cruel lessons on how to fend without a father ; beatings with
the vinegar-soaked strap ; remembrances of inadequate food and shelter, of a
nomadic existence, of a mother dead too young—all these factors and more shaped
the destinies of the poverty-stricken minister's children. In his last years
the Reverend MacArthur was fond of opining, "They have all failed."
Not everyone shared his sentiments.
Alfred MacArthur, the oldest of the children, was born in
Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1885, but the family soon moved to Pittston, where his
father created his first ministry. It was Alfred who acci-dentally killed his
brother, and visions of what had happened haunted him his entire life. Alfred
was more like his father than any of the others, perhaps because the Reverend
MacArthur took a special interest in him, groomed him from earliest boyhood to
carry the evangelistic tradition into a fourth generation.
Occasionally Alfred was allowed to administer the
leather-strap whippings, and he embraced the task with considerable enthusiasm.
When his father was away on speaking engagements—which was often—Alfred took
disciplinary responsibilities on himself. Lining his brothers and sisters up
with an efficiency that would have done William Telfer proud, he would ask :
"Who am I?"
If the answer wasn't Alfred the Great, and if it wasn't
forthcoming speedily enough, the punishment was severe.
Alfred was tall, like his father, and imperious. Any
altercation between him and his mother was arbitrated by the Reverend MacArthur
in favor of the son, further compromising Georgiana's influence
over her children.
The cruelest blow of all to William Telfer Mac-Arthur came
when Alfred shunned the ministry to work for Central Life Insurance Company in
Chicago; it was then the differences between oldest son and father became
abundantly evident. While the Reverend MacArthur had scorned worldly
accom-plishments and material possessions, his oldest son had an uncommon drive
to accomplish and acquire. Hard work and honesty—two qualities Alfred's father
had beaten into him—impressed A. M. John-son, Central Life's president. For
years Johnson had been investing company money in a gold mine that an Old West
character named Death Valley Scotty kept insisting was about to return huge
dividends. Johnson commissioned Alfred to track Scotty to California, where
Alfred learned the gold mine was a myth. Johnson was grateful, especially so
when Alfred kept his discovery to himself and away from inquisitive
stockholders.
Back in Chicago Alfred pursued a more orthodox road to
success. In fact, the California venture was probably the only unorthodox thing
he ever did, for he was strait-laced, like his father, and had stringent
personal standards to which he always adhered.
Alfred rose rapidly in the insurance business be-cause his
compulsion to achieve drove him to work sixteen and eighteen hours a day, and
because he was scrupulously honest, a quality most insurance executives admire.
At times he was a pompous preacher, an arrogant zealot, a boorish plutocrat,
"The Kipling of LaSalle Street," as he was often called.
But he was also a man of unquestioned integrity. And
unquestioned energy and ability, too. He was made agency director in charge of
Central Life's sales force in 1913, was appointed vice president in 1928 and
president a year later. In 1939 he engineered the purchase of Standard Life of
Pennsyl-vania and merged the two companies into what is today Central Standard
Life Insurance Company. In 1951 he was made chairman of the board. The
origi-nal Central Life, a struggling operation in the Twen-ties, had acquired
assets of more than $100,000,000 by 1957. By 1957 Alfred MacArthur had acquired
seventy-five percent of the company's stock. He had also acquired the respect
of every knowledgeable person in the business because his company, besides
pioneering a number of progressive reforms in the industry, was a model of what
good practices are all about.
Like his father, Alfred would admit to only one misgiving in
his life : his brother John. "The darkest day in insurance history was
when my brother entered the business," he said, early in John's career. No
words passed between the two brothers from that day on.
Alfred MacArthur was a financial wizard. Stories of his
investment coups still make the rounds of LaSalle Street. When he died in 1967,
his estate was valued at $175,000,000.
Marguerite MacArthur, William Telfer's second oldest, got
off to the best start of any in her father's eyes. She married a minister. But
the marriage didn't last. A beautiful woman, she became as interested in
material rewards as Alfred. She went into business, is alive today, and through
investment and inheritance is a wealthy woman.
Telfer MacArthur, the second oldest of the Mac-Arthur sons,
had an advantage denied Alfred and Marguerite : he was graduated from high
school. Telfer went to Chicago in 1902 with his father, refused to leave in
1909 when the elder MacArthur heard the call of a distant flock.
Success came to Telfer more quickly than it did to Alfred,
because he had more imagination, just as much energy and fewer inhibitions. At
age nineteen Telfer founded a newspaper, The Observer, in suburban Austin. The
paper consistently lost forty dollars a week, and Telfer had to moonlight on
two jobs to keep it going, but it proved to be his stepping stone to a meteoric
rise. The Observer was in direct competition with Pioneer Publishing Company's
hitherto profitable Oak Leaves, and the competition rapidly proved to be
financially suicidal. Telfer was persuaded to join Pioneer Publishing Company
as business manager when he was twenty-one. When he was twenty-two he was the
company's president. At age twenty-five he owned Pioneer.
Telfer MacArthur was a top-flight journalist. He had a flair
for writing, for management, and especially for hard work. Under his guidance
Pioneer grew into a multimillion-dollar publishing empire printing a dozen
influential newspapers.
In 1951—at age sixty-two—Telfer fell in love with a woman
less than half his age. He was married and had been married for more than
thirty years, but he was determined to live with the younger woman. His
brothers, especially John, pleaded with him to reconsider. John offered to
procure the full-time services of a "class broad" for three hundred
and fifty dollars a week. "Ass is ass," he explained. "If you
want young hair I'll buy it for you, but for God's sake don't throw everything
away."
John's well-intentioned advice was ignored, and a breach
developed between the two brothers that never narrowed.
As John had predicted, the price for Telfer's freedom came
high : Pioneer Publishing Company.
Telfer MacArthur was short—five-four—stocky and combative.
Many people thought he carried a lifetime chip on his shoulder, attributed it
to his small stature. Certainly he was a human dynamo, efficient, energetic,
inventive. He died in 1956, five years after his second marriage. His Pioneer
Publishing Company still flourishes, run by his first wife.
A gap of seven years separated the births of Telfer
MacArthur and Helen MacArthur. Like Marguerite, Helen was a beautiful woman.
She married early, helped her stockbroker-husband become wealthy. She lives
today in exclusive Barrington, Illinois, on the family estate.
Charles MacArthur, the most widely known of William Telfer's
offspring, was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, in 1896. Besides Telfer, Charles
was the Reverend MacArthur's only child to enjoy a high school education. He
left his father in 1912 and went to work for brother Telfer at Pioneer
Publishing Company as a reporter.
Charles married the First Lady of the American Stage, Helen
Hayes, but not before he himself was a success. The most sensitive and artistic
of William Telfer's children, and Georgiana's favorite, Charles was deeply
affected by his father's authoritarian attitudes and by the treatment accorded
his mother. His rebellion was total : he embraced everything Reverend MacArthur
abhorred. Charles' life was excitement, glittering lights, beautiful women,
rivers of scotch.
Charles was one of the most gifted men of his day. He left
Telfer to go to Mexico to chase Pancho Villa, was a reporter for Stars and
Stripes, enlisted and saw service during World War I. His antics as a young man
were exceeded only by his exploits as an adult. While working for Telfer he
decided to crack a murder case that was making headlines in Chicago. A wife and
her lover had been killed, the police had the husband in custody and were
convinced of his guilt. But they couldn't prove it. Dressed as a Catholic
priest, Charles visited the accused man and heard his confession. The next day
Pioneer had an exclusive.
During World War I Charles was close to then Colonel Douglas
MacArthur, a first cousin of William Telfer. Colonel MacArthur urged Charles to
make the military his career, but Charles saw army life differently. Four times
he was promoted to sergeant, four times he was busted for intentionally
committing some outrageously insubordinate act.
At age twenty-three Charles wrote a book, A Bug's-Eye View
of the War, which was hailed by the literati as a masterpiece. In the early
Twenties he worked for the Chicago Herald Examiner, the Chicago Tribune and the
New York American, but his most lasting renown came from his co-authorship
—with Ben Hecht—of The Front Page, a brutally truthful play about American
journalism which became a great Broadway hit in 1928. Three days after the
opening of The Front Page he married Helen Hayes. Her love for him never
dimmed, nor did his for her. It was the second and last marriage for Charles,
who, Broadway buffs said, "had screwed every broad in the Ziegfeld
Line."
For Charles, the First Lady of the American theatre gave up
the Catholic faith, which she had always contended was the most important thing
in her life. The story of the first meeting between Helen Hayes and Charles
MacArthur has become Broadway legend. It was at a party on Fifty-Seventh Street
in Manhattan. Charles was standing near a bowl of peanuts when the beautiful
Miss Hayes made her entrance. "Want a peanut?" he asked. "I wish
they were emeralds."
Twenty years later—in a moment of pique—he dropped a bowl of
emeralds in her lap and said : "I wish they were peanuts."
Charles MacArthur was a prolific writer. He teamed with Ben
Hecht to do The Front Page in four weeks, Twentieth Century in five weeks and
The Scoundrel in ten days. He was also a screen-writer, and co-authored The Sin
of Madelon Claudet, which was written especially for Helen Hayes' movie debut
and for which she won an Academy Award.
In 1929 Charles signed a five-year,
two-hundredand-fifty-thousand-dollar contract to produce scripts. His screen
credits include Rasputin, in which the three Barrymores appeared, Gunga Din,
Barbary Coast, Rip Tide, Crime Without Passion and Wuthering Heights.
Charles loved to fight, and drink, and love. His world was
the glamorous and his friends were among the most talked-about personalities of
the day: Robert Benchley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alexander Woollcott, John
Barrymore. Charles was witty, suave, charming, an enormously gifted
conversationalist.
But even Charles could not escape his upbringing. "The
genius with which my friend was born," Ben Hecht wrote, "had an enemy
looming beside his crib. It was an enemy that roared of `guilt,' sin,' and
'bend the knee.' Charles needed a cohort against this enemy. It's why he always
wrote with a collaborator. Sin and fear of punishment kept his mind from
wandering too far."
John MacArthur, for one, disputes Ben Hecht's explanation for
Charles' needing a collaborator. He contends that Charles was a procrastinator,
that he needed someone to nag him and that Ben Hecht was a very effective prod.
Whatever, Charles' hatred of his father was well-publicized.
The Reverend MacArthur reciprocated. The first time he met Helen Hayes he
pointed a bony finger at her and roared : "You are a sinner !"
Charles MacArthur died April 21, 1956, and Time magazine
wrote: "Everybody always loved Charlie MacArthur. And their love killed
him. He had a personal radiance few could resist. His conviviality knew no
bounds. But his heart and kidneys did."
Charles died of nephritis.
Which leaves John. When Ben Hecht wrote Charles MacArthur's
biography, he mentioned John's name only once, and then to say he was Charles'
brother. Yet John is perhaps the most re-markable of the remarkable MacArthurs.
