Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant

Escaping what she saw as her bourgeois existence as the wife of an Oregon dentist, Louise Bryant (1885-1936) ran off to New York City's Greenwich Village with radical journalist John Reed, who became her second husband. They preached and practiced free love, although her affair with Eugene O'Neill led to explosive quarrels. In revolutionary Russia, while Reed wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, Bryant produced Six Red Months in Russia, a highly sympathetic account of the Bolshevik coup and the communist attempt to mold a new society. Reed died in Moscow in 1920, and four years later, Bryant, a leading Hearst reporter, married William Bullitt, formerly President Wilson's assistant secretary of state. Their move to Paris introduced Bryant to a lesbian subculture, and her affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne led to a bitter divorce in 1930, with Bryant denied custody of her daughter, Anne. Bryant's long, tragic decline was marked by heavy drinking, paranoia, mental confusion and weight gain, all of which are associated with Dercum's disease, a rare disorder with which she was diagnosed in 1928. Dearborn (The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller) is much too uncritical of Bryant's role as cheerleader for the Bolshevik cause, and she seems caught up in the romantic saga of her subject's life. Even so, this is a vivid biography of a charismatic woman. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)