March 4, 2007
Marjabelle Young Stewart died today. She was 82 years old. She died in a nursing home with no adoring fans around her and no audience to applaud her performance as she bowed out.
I’m not sad that Marjabelle died. She was ready. She told me she was dying two years ago and asked me to write her obituary. I did, and she loved it. She loved it because I wrote about her difficult childhood - living in orphanages, then with relatives, in foster homes, and finally with her mother and stepfather in the back room of a lawn ornament shop. I told how she met the young scientist, Jack Young, at the county fair, married him and moved with him to Washington D.C. where he did top-secret work for the Navy, how she began a glamorous career as a top model, had her own TV show and became the toast of Washington society before writing her first book on manners with the help of Mrs. Art Buchwald. That’s when she became more than a beautiful young socialite. That’s when she became a real celebrity, appearing on every talk show on television, dining at the White House with four Presidents and being dubbed the "Empress of Etiquette" – by TIME Magazine. Newsweek called her the Queen of Couth. Another called her the Princess of Polite. Every description included a reference to royalty, because everyone who met her felt that they were in the presence of nobility.
She divorced Jack Young and married Bill Stewart, a lawyer and career politician from Kewanee, Illinois and moved to his hometown. She didn’t like the Hog Capital of the World that much. And it didn’t like her. Marjabelle drank to overcome the pain of her early abandonment and her feeling that she was never good enough. And in Kewanee, Illinois, one doesn’t hide the fact that one drinks too much. She hurt people when she drank – her friends, her family and people that felt demeaned by someone who acted so uppity after they had seen her drunk in the middle of the Hog Festival.
Marjabelle lived her life in pain. She was beautiful. She was extraordinarily successful. But she never stopped hurting from the rejection of her parents. And she never stopped trying to rise above her beginnings in the Christian Children’s Home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. She had an entire room in her house devoted to her fame. The walls were covered with newspaper clippings of Marjabelle with Presidents, Marjabelle with Oprah, Marjabelle surrounded by adoring fans as she autographed her latest book. If she didn’t really have a celebrity coming to visit her mansion in Kewanee, she would make one up. "Oh, my dear," she would say to me on the phone, "I must go. Tom and Nicole are at the door." Maybe the Cruise’s really were at her door, but I doubt it. There were too many instances of major celebrities "dropping in" at her home in Kewanee.
Real life just wasn’t good enough for Marjabelle – even as the most published author of etiquette books in the world. She tried and tried to make reality a place where life was as delightful as it was in her fantasy world. Marjabelle greeted every person she met with the same flamboyant, yet utterly charming and polite manner. In fifteen years of friendship I never heard her say a bad word about anyone. And I never saw her be anything but the "Empress of Etiquette" in every situation she was in.
More than anything she wanted to make children happy, helping them love themselves by giving them an education in manners – "the happy way of doing things" as she often quoted Emerson. We wrote a book for children together, and I titled it Princess Marjabelle Visits Lollygag Lake – one more tribute to her regal demeanor. We produced a video called Table Manners for Kids in which Marjabelle encouraged children to expect to be invited to the White House someday, and taught them how to dine appropriately when they got there. She wanted every child to feel that they fit in – in a way that she never did. It broke her heart to see any child feeling awkward or out of place. Each time I saw her reach out with extraordinary kindness to a child who didn’t fit in - the little boy who showed up for a shoot with his fly open, or the little girl whose sleeve dragged in her soup - I felt that she was reaching out to little Marjabelle – the five year old girl who waited for her mother to pick her up at the orphanage and never gave up her hopeful, positive attitude, even though her mother didn’t come.
I’m not sad that Marjabelle died. I’m only sad that much of the world judged her so harshly. I’m sad that there was never enough comfort for the little girl that lived inside the flamboyant, bigger-than-life celebrity. I wanted her to feel loved. I wanted to visit her often after she had lost her ability to dress the part of the Princess and entertain like royalty. But the more she lost her elegance, the more she shut me out. "Oh, my little boogy-boo," she would say, "I'm just a little tired to have company today. Maybe next week. I love you, my darling."
As her health failed her family told me they couldn’t get her to stop drinking. And, as it happens with families of those who don’t drink well, some of them turned their backs on her as her behavior became more and more erratic.
Her final days were filled with pain both physical and emotional. I wish I could have been there to ease her pain a little by listening to her stories of her days in the sun – how she dated John Kennedy and a Spanish Count, and how the great Perle Mesta insulted her for wearing a strapless gown to a formal dinner. "My dear," she had said to a young Marjabelle, "you never wear a strapless gown to a formal dinner – you look naked behind the flowers."
I wish now she could know that hundreds of the students who once filled her etiquette classes are flying to Kewanee, Illinois, the Hog Capital of the World, to pay tribute to her. I wish she knew what a hole her death has left in the hearts of all of us who were inspired by the determination that took her from an orphanage to national celebrity, and the love in her heart that made her reach out to children everywhere to make them feel that they were worthy and accepted. But most of all I hope the little girl who spent her life trying to make up for her years of loneliness and rejection has finally found an audience large enough to give little Marjabelle the applause an Empress deserves.
