3. Mary Alricks Steele(2) was born on Oct 26 1921 in New York City. She died on Jan 19 1967 in Boston, Massachusetts. Mary Steele's life was, to a large extent, dominated by an ultimately losing battle with alcoholism. Possessed of great beauty, wit, and charm, she won the hearts of almost everyone, including many who were shrewd judges of character. But she lacked an ability to see her own virtues or to depend on her own talents, which were many. This led to an increasing dependence on alcohol to obtain self-esteem, and her physical intolerance for it led directly to her death at age forty-five.
Mary Steele attended the Chapin School in New York. In 1939, the year she graduated, the city's society columnists named her "debutante of the year," and she both endured and enjoyed an avalanche of publicity. Her year in the limelight has been preserved in a scrap book that was assembled by her mother. It is in my possession, a fascinating glimpse into a vanished world.
Her marriage to Richard Gordon was not a success and they were divorced in 1948. After the end of her marriage she worked for Oscar Hammerstein II as his personal assistant and secretary until the end of his life and was present at the creation of some of the most famous Broadway musicals ever written. She married his brother, whom she had known earlier, but that marriage also ended in divorce in 1958.
Her last marriage, to Goodwin Dillen, another alcoholic, was troubled by her increasing illness. She bought a house in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, and was living there when her final illness began and she was taken to Boston for better, but still unavailing, medical care.
It is rare for an historian to find an epitaph personally selected by someone. But Mary Steele chose hers, although to be sure unconsciously, and it illustrates at one and the same time both the cause of her tragedy and the unfathomable mystery of her self-destruction. On the end paper of a copy of Samuel Hoffenstein's Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing, beneath the author's inscription to her--for they were good friends--she wrote in her own hand a quote from another of his books of verse, Pencil in the Air.
Everywhere I go
I go too.
And spoil everything.
