Archives West Finding Aid

When Averell Harriman and the Union Pacific Railroad opened the Sun Valley ski resort outside of Ketchum, Idaho, in 1936, one of the very first guests to visit and ski was Clara Spiegel of Chicago, Illinois. The wife of mail-order magnate Frederick W. Spiegel, Clara was precisely the kind of visitor the resort hoped to attract: wealthy, outdoorsy, and socially well-connected. To establish its reputation as a destination for the smart set, the resort courted celebrities. Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper were among the early visitors who put Sun Valley on the map; so did bandleader Glenn Miller and Olympic skater Sonja Heine, who starred together in the 20th Century-Fox film, Sun Valley Serenade (1941). Clara Spiegel soon came into the limelight herself as the author of best-selling novels in the 1940s, but unlike the celebrities lured to there for publicity purposes, or the short-term visitors drawn by its snow and glamour, Spiegel eventually settled in Sun Valley, moving into a house she built to her specifications on a hill overlooking Ketchum. There, for more than 40 years, she enjoyed the outdoors life -- fishing, hunting, skiing, and horseback riding -- and established herself as one of the pillars of the town's social life. "No one...entertains with more style and élan than Clara Spiegel," wrote Town & Country magazine in a 1983 profile of the resort town, characterizing her as "a dynamic, highly independent woman...whose exuberant spirit of adventure personifies much of what Sun Valley is about" (Laton McCartney, "Sun Valley Summer", Town & Country, July 1983, p. 160 (Box 1, Folder 13)).

Clara Elizabeth Gatzert Spiegel was born on December 6, 1904, in her parents' home at 4915 Washington Park Court on the south side of Chicago. Her father, August Gatzert, born in Germany, was a clothing manufacturer, active in industry groups and the Chicago Association of Commerce; her mother, Isabel Rosalie Florsheim, was a Chicago native whose father, Simon Florsheim, was a corset manufacturer. He also was born in Germany. Clara's aunt Dolly (her mother's sister) lived on the same block on Washington Park Court; grandfather Simon and grandmother Elizabeth Florsheim lived on the next street over. The Gatzerts were more far-flung; her grandmother Gatzert and an aunt still lived in Germany, and another aunt in Paris. Her parents spoke English, German, and French, and Clara learned each of those languages as a child. (Clara Spiegel's autobiographical writings (Box 1, Folders 2-5) and archivist's research (Box 1, Folder 0)).

Young Clara grew up with an older brother, Walter, and a governess, Maria Antonia Paulina Plaff, who lived with the family in a room adjacent to Clara's. To Clara, she was a beloved figure, known as "Fraulein." The household also included a waitress, a cook, a housemaid, and a houseman. Although her family moved away to a larger home when she was only six, Clara Spiegel retained vivid memories of Washington Place Court. She remembered the gypsy vans that plied the alleys, as well as the lamp lighter, the scissors sharpener, and the organ grinder and his monkey, who would dance for a penny. She remembered her neighborhood as one of brick and grey stone houses, "of nameless architectural styles which like their owners were pleasant, unobtrusive, and unpretentious." "Beyond the sidewalks on each side [of the street] were ten-foot strips of lawn running to the curbs and spaced with shade trees which in summer umbrella'd the walks and porches from the direct sun. It was over the tops of these trees that I saw Halley's Comet for the first time, held up in my father's arms as he pointed out the star and its brilliant long, wide tail... 'One only sees this once in a life-time,' he told my brother and me, 'so remember it well.' He did not know nor suspect that 75 years later I would see it again from very far away..." ("Bequest," 1st draft, pp. 5-6 (Box 1, Folder 4)).

Washington Park Court, as Clara remembered it, was ethnically and religiously diverse. "There were Irish Catholics and German Jews and French Protestants and mostly Anglo-Saxons of whatever religion. It was a typical upper middle class, upper middle income, upper middle culture residential area where the inhabitants were neighborly neighbors and acquaintances but not necessarily friends" ("Bequest," 2nd draft, pp. 4-5 (Box 1, Folder 3)). The Gatzerts were of Jewish origin, but if religion played a large role in their lives, it is not reflected in Clara Spiegel's writings. She did write in general terms on the discrimination Jews faced in Chicago high society ("a conglomeration of the newly-rich") in the years before World War I: "No Jew, however cultured or however rich, was ever considered for a position on a museum or orchestral board. No Jew, however good a horseman, was ever considered for membership in the local hunts or the local polo clubs. Jewish young women were not nominated for membership in the local Junior League, much less invited to join it. And no Jew's name ever appeared in that new and formidably ludicrous publication known as the Social Register" ("Story about E.R." written in blank book (In My Own Write) in Box 1, Folder 5. For a general history of Jews in Chicago, see The Jews of Chicago: From Shetl to Suburb, by Irving Cutler (University of Illinois Press, 1996)). As to any personal instances of discrimination, her papers are silent.

Clara attended the Faulkner School, a private school for girls in Chicago, from kindergarten through high school. She also attended ballet school and rode with her father every day before breakfast, conspiring with him to keep from her mother any news of the many times she was thrown from the horse. When it came time to go to college, she journeyed East to enroll in Vassar College in New York. She studied at Vassar just one year before returning to Chicago, where, on December 1, 1923, a few days shy of her nineteenth birthday, she married Frederick W. Spiegel. Together they settled into a home in Glencoe, Illinois, one of Chicago's North Shore suburbs. Frederick Spiegel was an executive with his family's mail-order business, Spiegel, Inc.; during World War I he had driven ambulances with Ernest Hemingway in Italy and was counted among the novelist's personal friends. Clara Spiegel settled into a life centered on her home, charity and community work, a busy social life with her husband, and eventually, their children. The Spiegels had two sons, Andrew and William. Much of their early social life centered on the Lake Shore Country Club, a Jewish country club in Glencoe. Clara served on the committee that organized the club's annual musical skit in 1925 and chaired the committee in 1926. The printed program for "The Lake Shore Worries of 1926" credits her as one of three writers of the music and lyrics; Frederick was the stage manager. She also took up fox hunting and apache dancing. (For these and other reminiscences of her childhood and young adulthood, see chapter one of her African safari memoir, One Woman Safari (Box 34, Folder 1). Information on Frederick Spiegel's friendship with Ernest Hemingway is found in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (Scribner, 1969). The programs for the Lake Shore Country Club skits are in Box 32, Folders 5 and 6. Irving Cutler (The Jews of Chicago, cited above) characterizes Lake Shore as a Jewish country club).

In 1928 the Spiegels went on a two-month cruise to the Mediterranean. They sailed first to Spain, then on to Morocco, Italy, and France. "We rediscovered Europe, quite on our own, very young, green and enthralled with everything we saw and did. We found we could break the rather rigid mold in which we had been raised and expose ourselves to ways of life as foreign to us as the countries and the people" (One Woman Safari, page 4 (Box 34, Folder 1)). The letters Clara wrote home describing Vigo, Rabat, Rome, and other places they visited are among the earliest writings represented in her papers. Her developing literary style is evident even in these letters, and they represent the first of a lifetime's worth of letters and journals chronicling her travels.

During the 1930s, Clara began collaborating with Jane Mayer, a friend and classmate from her Vassar days who lived about a mile away from her, to write stories. During the summer of 1932, at Jane's home in Glencoe, they completed an eighty-nine page typescript entitled "Guardian of the North," an adventure-romance set in the Canadian wilderness. It was published in Five Novels Monthly in August 1933 under the joint pseudonym Janice Claremont (The typescript is found in Box 22, Folder 12). Janice Claremont's literary career was a brief one, however, for she soon was supplanted by Clare Jaynes. Over the next decade, using the Jaynes pseudonym, Clara Spiegel and Jane Mayer successfully placed more stories in other magazines, both British and American, including Mademoiselle, The Tatler, Liberty, and most notably, The New Yorker ("Visitors for the Soldiers," April 17, 1943). They also contributed book reviews to Chicago newspapers. Their story "The Coming of Age," published in Story magazine, was one of the O. Henry Memorial Award prize stories of 1942.

It was the appearance of their first novel, Instruct My Sorrows, published by Random House in 1942, however, that first brought widespread recognition to the literary partnership. The story of a wealthy young widow (from the fashionable suburbs of Chicago) forced to redirect her life after her husband's sudden death, the book became a best-seller and attracted favorable reviews in newspapers across the country. "A very fine first novel, written with verve and sensitive awareness," wrote the Boston Herald; "a novel that is entertaining and...definitely superior to most stories of this kind," according to Bess Jones in the Saturday Review of Literature. Despite a negative review from the Des Moines Register ("not much ahead of the dozens of sentimental agony serials with which the radio titillates the housewife"), Instruct My Sorrows caught Hollywood's eye, and in 1946 Warner Brothers sent it to the big screen as My Reputation, starring Barbara Stanwyck (Reviews found in Instruct My Sorrows scrapbook in Box 27).

Spiegel and Mayer followed up on the success of their first novel with three more, These are the Times (1944), This Eager Heart (1947), and The Early Frost (1952). Their literary success brought numerous invitations to speak at book clubs and writers' forums, and the two were featured in full-page profiles in Wilson Library Bulletin and Current Biography. In their joint talks, in particular, they outlined their collaborative writing process. They tried to work five to six hours together while their children were at school, in an office hideaway with no phone and no interruptions. "We discuss plot and characters until to us the characters have taken on the forms of actual people. We write a full outline of our plot. Then we divide this outline into episodes and one of us writes one episode while the other does the subsequent one. We then revise each other's drafts and continue in this manner, until the manuscript is complete." Their preparation before actual writing was extensive: developing full biographies of every one of their characters, with more detail than ever appeared in their books, to the point of drawing maps of the places the characters would frequent, and, on paper, decorating their homes and filling their wardrobes. The pair generally tried to work every weekday, save for during World War II, when they both devoted their Wednesdays and Fridays to volunteer work. Both Clara Spiegel and Jane Mayer contributed their time to the Red Cross (From a talk entitled "Working Scheme for Collaboration," page 4 (1943) in Box 1, Folder 18).

Locales familiar to Spiegel and Mayer figure prominently in their writings. Part of their first novel, Instruct My Sorrows, was set in Sun Valley, Idaho, a place Clara Spiegel was becoming increasingly familiar with since her first visit in early 1937. Though raised in the city, and well accustomed to big city culture and amenities, she fell in love with the Idaho outdoors. Her writing and travel journals (which begin in 1936) are silent in regard to her first visit, but in a much later memoir she looked back on her early experiences there. She discovered that "I could live two lives, the urban one of operas, theatre, exhibits, concerts and parties [in Chicago] and the equally wonderful one of the outdoors. I had found an outlet for my interest in hunting by learning to bird shoot and I had taken up skiing. I fell in love with the softly folded hills of Idaho and the sport they offered me and I spent several months each year there...My sons broadened too -- in their shoulders and their brains -- working on the trail crews which built the ski runs at Sun Valley. We fished and hunted and rode and camped and skied. We began to know something of what communion with a true wilderness can do for the soul" (One Woman Safari, page 6 (Box 34, Folder 1)).

On one extended visit in to Sun Valley and Ketchum in 1939, Clara Spiegel became better acquainted with her husband's friend Ernest Hemingway, who was there to hunt, fish, and finish up his novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. As Clara recounted to Hemingway's biographer Carlos Baker, she helped him handle a backlog of mail by taking dictation for more than fifty letters; he reciprocated by offering advice on writing. Years later, she recalled some of Hemingway's advice to her in commentary she herself prepared for a friend's manuscript: "Long ago when H read a mss of mine to help me with my writing, he asked me how I liked a certain [paragraph]. I said I'd never been happy with it but couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. He knew. His advice was 'Clara, don't say it. Make it.' It's the best advice any writer could receive" (Editorial suggestions to Barney (Box 32, Folder 2)). Their work together in 1939 became the basis of a friendship of their own. Clara Spiegel and Ernest Hemingway dined, drank, and hunted together until the end of his life, and she became good friends with his wives Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh Hemingway and his sons as well.

In 1949, Clara and Frederick Spiegel divorced. She maintained an apartment in Chicago for many years, but spent more and more of her time away. In 1952 she purchased two lots on the corner of Sixth and Walnut Streets in Ketchum, where she built a house of her own. She immersed herself in the social, recreational, and philanthropic life of the Ketchum-Sun Valley community. She hunted, fished, rode horses, and skied; she entertained several nights a week; she devoted herself to community causes, notably the Ketchum Community Library and the Ballet Foundation. The town's lack of a library was a drawback to many of its newer residents who were drawn there by the resort lifestyle but felt culturally isolated in the small mountain town without a bookstore or library. The story goes that in September 1954, on the seventh green of the Sun Valley golf course, Clara Spiegel and two friends resolved to create a library (Wendolyn Spence Holland, Sun Valley: An Extraordinary History (Idaho Press, 1998) page 358). A few months later, seventeen women met to found the Community Library Association and began raising funds. They operated a thrift shop, organized benefits, solicited private contributions, and engaged the men of the community to assist their efforts. An architect volunteered his services to design a building, and in 1958, on a lot donated by the Union Pacific Railroad in the heart of Ketchum, they opened the library in a striking 2800 square-foot structure filled with 3,000 volumes. The library eventually outgrew those quarters and moved, but it is still operated by the association founded by Clara Spiegel (Clara Spiegel, "The Library That Faith Built" (Box 30, Folder 13)).

Spiegel's absence from Chicago most of the time brought an effective end to her literary collaboration with Jane Mayer. The Early Frost (1952) was their last novel together, though they remained lifelong friends. In 1954 Spiegel signed a partnership agreement with ski instructor Fred Iselin (from whom she had purchased the Ketchum property) to produce motion picture and television scripts. They did write synopses and scripts for at least three ski and resort-related films, but none ever made it into production. Spiegel continued to write on her own, however, contributing occasional articles to Bon Appetit, Chicago Sun-Times, and other publications during the 1960s, and to local Sun Valley publications as late as 1990. She also wrote two unpublished novels (both set in resort locations) and an unpublished cookbook ("The Indolent Gourmet"), as well as a number of articles and an unpublished manuscript on a new passion, African big game hunting.

Clara Spiegel made her first visit to sub-Saharan Africa in 1957. In Tanganyika she reconnected with Patrick Hemingway, whom she had known when he was a child but had not seen for many years. He lived there as a big game hunter and guide, and in September 1960 Spiegel returned for a month-long safari with him, his wife, their infant daughter, and a twelve-man crew of native trackers and bearers. This was the first of several safaris she took in the 1960s, and she decorated her Ketchum home with her big game trophies. She chronicled her African experiences in a manuscript she entitled "One-Woman Safari" and wrote several articles about them, two of which were published, one in the Chicago Sun-Times' Sunday magazine, the other in the journal The Reporter. Spiegel's second safari, taken in 1962 with her friend Mary Hemingway, was the subject of an article Hemingway wrote for Life magazine in 1963, a memoir of their experiences as well as a reflection on the Africa that Ernest Hemingway had so loved.

Spiegel traveled widely in the 1970s and 80s, visiting friends and exotic locales, and documenting her travels in her journals and personal scrapbooks. In 1981 she made her first visit to New Zealand, which, after Chicago and Idaho, became a third home for her. She returned every winter (summer there), spending at least a month, and often more, based in Queenstown, where she fished for trout, attended horse shows, and visited and entertained New Zealand friends. She was in New Zealand in 1986 when she saw Halley's Comet for the second time in her life ( "Bequest," 1st draft, page 6 (Box 1, Folder 4)). Her fishing exploits were chronicled in the January 1993 issue of the New Zealand publication Southern Fishing. She shared her perspectives on aging with the Queenstown Mountain Scene: "You have those geriatric things that happen whether you like it or not, but I don't believe in dwelling on them." As to a formula for long life, the eighty-eight year old Spiegel had none. "I don't do anything that's good more me! I drink all sorts of things that are bad and stay up late"( Roy Moss, "Two Veterans Perform With Distinction," Southern Fishing, January 1993 (Box 1, Folder 14); quote from "Amazing Angler," Mountain Scene, February 3, 1993 (Box 1, Folder 1)

Only when she hit 90 did Clara Spiegel begin to slow down. Even so, she continued her visits to New Zealand until 1996 and was still seen fishing in the streams around Ketchum. In July of 1996 she was a panelist at a Hemingway conference at Sun Valley sponsored by the Hemingway Society and the University of Idaho. She was one of the speakers at a panel entitled "Remembering Hemingway," where she contradicted her fellow panelists who said Ernest Hemingway was at heart a shy man. "I'm afraid I disagree with the other authorities," she said. "He had a great sense of personal dignity. He was not shy" ("Fond Memories," Lewiston Tribune, August 4, 1996 (Box 2, Folder 27)). She also shared her recollections in "Hemingway in the Autumn," a documentary produced by a Boise television station about his life in Idaho, and in the A&E Biography, "Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling with Life."

Clara Spiegel died at the Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum on October 20, 1997, at the age of 92, just a few months after the death of her younger son William. "She was unbelievable," remarked her son Andrew to the Chicago Tribune. "Two weeks ago she caught a 23-inch trout while sitting in her wheelchair. Her partners and friends had included Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper. She somehow was able to draw a lot of people to her" (Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1997 (Box 1, Folder 1)). She was survived by her son, five granddaughters, and three great grandchildren.