Stock Holder Chapter 3

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.