Percy Crosby - Personal Life

Personal Life

Crosby's marriage to Gertrude Volz had become strained during the 1920s, and after a few years of legal separation the two were divorced in 1927. She received custody of Patricia, their only child. Crosby later dated the torch singer and stage-musical actress Libby Holman and became friends with such actresses as Colleen Moore, Elsie James and Marilyn Miller. But during this time, making the rounds of speakeasies and night clubs, Crosby began developing an alcohol addiction. Crosby was a member of several private clubs—the Players Club, the Salamagundi Club, the Dutch Treat Club and the Coffee House Club at the Hotel Seymour, where he lived, dining with George Abbott, Jerome Kern, Ring Lardner, John Barrymore, Rube Goldberg, Heywood Broun and Frank Crowninshield. After nights at these clubs, he sometimes would awaken with no recollection of the previous evening.

Regardless, Crosby continued to explore numerous creative realms, writing Skippy prose vignettes for Life that led to a Skippy novel for G. P. Putnam's Sons. He fell in love with the secretary assigned to him, Vassar graduate Agnes Dale Locke, and the two were married on April 4, 1929. While on vacation in Europe, Crosby stopped drinking alcohol, becoming a teetotaler for the next seven years. Weathering the stock market crash of that fall, Crosby and his wife moved to McLean, Virginia, where Crosby bought an estate called "The Beeches". They later moved to an even larger estate in the area, "Ridgelawn". The couple would have four children: son Percy Jr., nicknamed Skippy, the eldest, and daughters Barbara Dale, Joan, Carolyn and Carol, who were, respectively two, three and four years younger. During this time, Crosby patented a firearm that incorporated a pistol in the stock of a rifle. With his wife and an agent handling his business affairs, Crosby oversaw a Skippy empire that included a radio show, three novels, a series of 34 posters for Standard Oil, and the aforesaid movie and a sequel, Sooky. To assist him on the Skippy strip, Crosby hired an old friend, artist Richard Reddy, who continued with him through the end of Crosby's career.

In the late 1930s, Crosby began drawing more overtly political and philosophical Skippy strips. Following his third Skippy prose-fiction book, the essay collection Skippy Rambles, Crosby began using his writing as primarily a vehicle for his beliefs. His 1931 memoir A Cartoonist's Philosophy was found to be too polemical for eight publishers, and Crosby published it himself, in a money-losing venture; his future books were all privately published under his own name or Freedom Press, which he founded in 1936. Life dropped him when Crosby agreed to do humorous cartoons only if the magazine agreed to publish his political work as well; the rival magazine Judge obliged. Of the nine books and pamphlets published from 1932 on, only Sports Drawings (1933) and the poetry collection Rays (1937) were not political or philosophical. Speeches, articles and cartoons would appear as paid ads in the Washington Herald, the Washington Post, The New York Times and the New York Sun.

Although he had voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 U.S. Presidential election, Crosby opposed Roosevelt's controversial Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937. Crosby's vitriolic editorials called the president "crazed for power", and referred to Roosevelt's Fireside Chats as "talking from the Moscow room of the Spite House". He also fired editorial broadsides at the gangster Al Capone. When the Internal Revenue Service brought a tax claim against Crosby and his corporation Skippy, Inc., for more than $67,000 in 1937, Crosby—who fought the decision for years, ultimately unsuccessfully—claimed it was in retaliation for his political writing.

The previous year, Crosby had begun drinking again, and his behavior became increasingly erratic. His marriage suffered, and after a violent episode in February 1939, Crosby left for Florida for two weeks. When he returned, repentant, his family had decamped, and his wife had filed for divorce. He never again saw his children, then aged five to nine. A devastated Crosby moved back to Manhattan and eventually entered Presbyterian Hospital for an extended stay for exhaustion and an infection. There he met nurse Carolyn Soper, whom he took on a first date to the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. The two were married in May 1940, and they honeymooned in Venice, Florida.

About the same time, a California food packer, Joseph Rosefield, began to sell his newly developed hydrogenated peanut butter, which he labeled "Skippy" without Crosby's permission. Years of expensive litigation followed, which Crosby's heirs have continued into the 2000s.

His finances dire due to tax claims, the divorce settlement, legal fees, and alimony, Crosby sold Ridgelawn for a fraction of its value; his 1,500-acre (6.1 km2) farm and other Virginia real-estate were awarded to his second wife. His beloved strip Skippy suffered; as his biographer, Jerry Robinson, wrote:

The occasional diatribes in the Skippy strip became more frequent, more surreal. Some days were almost solid dialogue. In the past, Crosby had been able to move from one discipline to another—painting, writing, cartooning, and politics. Now, under extreme mental stress, the boundaries became blurred, and one intruded into the other to the detriment of all. ... fter long negotiations, Crosby and King Features were unable to agree on a new contract. On December 8, 1945, Crosby's fifty-fourth birthday, Skippy, aged twenty, died.