The Briar Club — Historical Note

Historical Note

For the very first time, I’m starting my author note with a warning: for readers who like to jump to the back and read the author note first, read no further. Reading this first will ruin The Briar Club’s big twist.

For those who have finished, read on . . .

“Where did you get the idea?” is one of the first questions asked about how a novel came to be. The Briar Club came together out of a pandemic- year mishmash of inspirations: a Laurie Colwin essay, an Instagram photo, a Japanese Netflix series, and a footnote from my husband’s undergraduate days.

In “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant” from the superb essay collection Home Cooking, food writer Laurie Colwin wrote with humor and heart about her years as a broke twentysomething living in a broom-closet- size apartment in New York, managing to feed her equally broke friends from a kitchenette consisting of a minifridge, a hot plate, and a dish rack parked in the bathroom. I reread that essay a lot during the pandemic, whimpering—I’d have happily cooked on a hot plate and drained spaghetti in my bathtub if I could be surrounded by loved ones, scraped plates, and half-empty bottles of wine. Could this be a book? I thought. Stranger comes to town, pulls housemates together with weekly dinners in her tiny apartment? Pretty low stakes for a Kate Quinn book, though; nobody getting bombed, arrested, or shot.

The idea wouldn’t go away. It kept talking to me when I stumbled across an Instagram photo of a glorious green-walled room, all slanted ceiling and quirky angles, which had been painted over with riotous vines and flowers:

the belfry room in the Sleeper-McCann House in Massachusetts, if you want to google it. That’s the room, I thought. The mysterious newcomer paints the vine when she arrives! The idea really came to life when I started Netflix’s Midnight Diner series, where an enigmatic Tokyo cook observes the problems of a series of clients to his late-night café: Each chapter could be a different woman in the boardinghouse—and there could be recipes!

Still not much of a plot, though.

And then my husband—whose undergrad work was in International Relations/Foreign Security and Intelligence, with a focus on post-WWII eastern Europe through the post-Soviet bloc—casually dropped a tidbit while I was watching an episode of The Americans. He said the deep-cover moles played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell would in real life quite possibly have ghosted their mission. “You know how many deep-cover agents the Soviets lost that way? The ones who got sent over, looked around, realized they had it pretty good over here, then quietly disappeared so their handlers never found them? Until maybe their grandkids got tested on Ancestry for fun and wondered why half their DNA was Russian when Grandma and Grandpa supposedly never left Iowa?”

Record scratch. I hit pause on the TV, light bulbs exploding inside my

head. “Tell me more.”

A book was born.

Grace

It’s difficult to determine exactly when the Soviets began their deep-cover program in which young Soviets with impeccable loyalty and language skills were trained in fake towns mocked up to look like midwestern cities.

Such towns apparently existed: trainees practiced their English and knowledge of American life until they could pass flawlessly as Bob and Betty from down the street, then were inserted (sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs as married couples) into the US to collect and pass information. Grace is fictionalized, so I gave her a background—first as a woman of Ukrainian descent whose family died in the Holodomor, the horrific man-made famine that killed millions in Ukraine; then as a survivor of the Leningrad siege, a three-year period in which over a million people died of starvation, disease, and shelling—that formed a logical foundation

for her to join the percentage of deep-cover agents who decided a fake life in America was better than a real life as a Soviet spy. It’s impossible to know how many made that decision, because the facts (even after the widespread recovery/sale of information following the fall of the USSR) remain incomplete. Bad news was frequently not reported internally because of the shoot-the-messenger mentality that pervaded the KGB; the very idea of deep-cover moles who had abandoned their mission was an embarrassment that would have been swept under the rug, even in the deepest reaches of the KGB’s files. Perhaps 20 to 30 percent of deep-cover moles went rogue but that number may be higher—in the words of a similar defected agent in the nineties comedy Sleepers, extolling his new life in the West: “I earn three hundred thousand quid a year; I’ve got a flat in town, a cottage in the country, a string of girlfriends, and half a bloody racehorse— you think I’m going to give it all up for a bowl of red cabbage and a bedsit in Vladivostok?” I have written about bad Soviet spies (The Rose Code) and I have written about bad women hiding in white-picket-fence America (The Huntress), but here I have written about a good woman in hiding who quits spying for ordinary suburban life and regrets nothing.

Philip and Elizabeth from The Americans are involved in more flashy and lethal operations than most deep-cover Soviet moles, who operated quietly as information gatherers, and they were inserted into American society in the sixties and worked through the eighties—but I didn’t want to tread on that territory. The 1950s interested me much more as a backdrop: what better (or worse) time for a Soviet mole to try to disappear into the States than in the early days of the Cold War, when the USSR was the big bad enemy lurking on the horizon of the American public’s consciousness, when Lockheed Martin and Edwards Air Force Base were indeed involved in top- secret aviation projects racing the Soviets toward the stars, and when McCarthy was thundering in the press about Communists infiltrating American life? Thus the Red Scare became the backdrop of this book: that period when the junior senator from Wisconsin waved many lists of supposed Communists and the resulting effort to root them out destroyed countless lives, most of them utterly innocent. Loyalty oaths and background checks for suspected Communist sympathizers were nothing new (the Loyalty Program was instituted in 1947 by the Truman administration), but under McCarthy—a demagogue and a bully with a frightening ability to whip up public hysteria—the witch hunts reached their

peak. Innocent people in the entertainment industry, educational system, and the government were pressured to swear loyalty and report on their colleagues; those who did not faced loss of work, blacklisting, and jail time.

Even a fleeting past interest in Communism or Socialism could spell doom, despite the fact that such censoring of personal beliefs was and is utterly against the Constitution. McCarthy was eventually brought down by his own inability to back up his claims, by the concerted efforts of principled souls like CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, who worked tirelessly to expose his lack of credibility, and by the televised trials where the famous words were spoken: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” It became clear to the nation that he did not, and he soon slunk under a rock, censured by the Senate, his power base gone, but he left behind a word—McCarthyism— that forever symbolizes the use of illegal and unscrupulous tactics to persecute the innocent.

Pete & Lina

Pop culture would have it that there was no better time in America to be a kid than the 1950s. (A white middle-class kid, at least.) But behind the root- beer floats and sandlot baseball games that mark our idealized view of fifties life, there were less placid currents. World War II lingered like a hangover, the civil rights movement was gathering momentum, and the atomic bomb was changing the face of science, politics, and the world.

Hence the corresponding fifties urge to bury heads in sand and keep eyes firmly on the pleasures of the present: family life, entertainment, and pretending to enjoy some truly bizarre culinary dishes like Candle Salad and Chipped Beef De Luxe. Washington, D.C., seemed a great setting to examine the 1950s—far from the sophisticated capital it is now, it was then a rather sleepy southern town where segregation ruled, cops and criminals alike flocked to Pete Dailey’s for beer, and senators and judges gathered at Martin’s Tavern (still extant, with its booth where JFK reportedly proposed to Jackie!) for martinis. Boys like Pete grew up fascinated by Mickey Spillane, whose hard-boiled prose sold like hotcakes; by Wernher von Braun’s promises that man would soon land on the moon; and by the silver screen where William Holden played war heroes and Lucille Ball racked up more viewers than President Eisenhower. Girls like Lina were glued to The

Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, absorbing the image of the ideal suburban family run by a loving mother in apron and heels—and culinarily inclined boys and girls dreamed of entering the Pillsbury Bake-Off. Long before Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood mesmerized modern viewers on The Great British Bake Off, Pillsbury ran its yearly contest that glorified home bakers, feting a rigorously chosen hundred contestants (including a handful of juniors in the 12–17 division) in New York to compete for the fifties version of Star Baker. Competition, then as now, was fierce: no soggy bottoms!

Nora

Washington, D.C., wasn’t a mob city like New York or Las Vegas, but it had its share of organized crime: namely, the Warring family of Foggy Bottom, who ran the booze racket during Prohibition, then the numbers racket in the forties and fifties. Xavier Byrne is a fictional composite of two very real men. The first of them is Joe Nesline, a cool-nerved professional cardplayer who worked for the Warrings and frequented several D.C. bottle clubs (after-hours clubs that provided entertainment and alcohol fixings, but no alcohol). The second is Emmitt Warring, the soft-spoken tough-as-nails brains of the family who wore a five-carat diamond solitaire, lived on Macomb Street with a Great Dane named Duke, and was robbed in his home at gunpoint by George “Mad Dog” Harding in 1951. Harding worked briefly for the Warring family but was fired for lack of control (he was arrested for kidnapping and assaulting his girlfriend, then trying to break into her hospital room with flowers—a story described by the press as “Caveman Wooing”). Harding’s revenge in robbing Emmitt Warring was short-lived; he was shot in a club by Joe Nesline, who was acquitted of murder but served a year for carrying a deadly weapon. Nora is based on two women: Mary Healy, a Foggy Bottom girl who achieved the position of personal secretary to the executive officer of the National Archives, and who was threatened with losing that job if she did not break off a romantic entanglement with one of the Warrings (which she did), and Emmitt Warring’s long-term girlfriend, who lived with him nearly thirty years but kept her own apartment, her own name, and her own legal status separate from him throughout their long romance. In my mind, Nora will do the same—although Nora will get to become the first female chief of Building

and Grounds for the National Archives, unlike Mary Healy, who as a woman was denied the top job. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence reside in the National Archives to this day for public viewing.

Reka

“Why didn’t you just leave?” is the frequently thoughtless question asked of German Jews, Socialists, and other survivors of targeted populaces as Hitler’s Third Reich began to make their lives miserable in the thirties—but as I have attempted to show through the fictional Reka, emigration was not easy. Not only was it difficult to leave a city that had before Hitler been known for vibrancy and tolerance, but other countries including the United States often required money and sponsorship from asylum seekers. Once across the water, refugees struggled with language barriers and anti- immigrant prejudice—and that’s without the possibility that unscrupulous sponsors might strip them of their valuables, which did happen. The Sutherland family is fictional, but their sins are not: some US soldiers committed war crimes on their post-Normandy drive toward Berlin, such as the shooting of unarmed prisoners—and sponsors of many nations took advantage of the refugees they were supposed to be helping. Reka’s experience is partially inspired by the history of a family friend whose Jewish relations sent valuables ahead of them halfway around the world, as encouraged by a South Africa–based sponsor, but the sponsor died in an untimely accident and their children made the decision to keep the entire shipment of valuables for themselves, send no further aid, and condemn an entire family back in Germany to the camps. Reka at least manages to escape with her life and recover her stolen belongings: her sketches are based on some real drawings Gustav Klimt made in preparation for his much-heralded (also much-condemned) Faculty Paintings. The paintings were reportedly burned at Schloss Immendorf in 1945 by retreating German forces; if they survived, they have never been seen again and exist now only in a few sketchings and photographs. As for Reka’s own artistic career, it might seem absurd that the CIA funded modern art in a blow for the culture war against the USSR, but it is very true: government funds sent a sensational collection of abstract expressionist art called The New American

Painting on a tour of Europe, comprised of works by Pollock, Rothko, and many more. One woman artist was represented in the collection—Elaine de Kooning, who specialized in abstract portraits, including a famous depiction of JFK in the sixties. Reka’s work is based on hers.

Fliss

For all that World War II dominates the entire decade of the forties, the Korean War was treated with a collective national shrug by many Americans of the 1950s—except for those who had loved ones involved.

Doctors were in particular demand, resulting in the so-called Doctor Draft, and those sent to man M.A.S.H. units or more permanent hospitals on bases in Korea or Japan might go years without seeing their families. As a navy wife I’m no stranger to long separations and deployments, but wives like Fliss didn’t even have regular phone calls—a tough situation for any military spouse, much less one suffering from depression and feeling even more like an outsider during the baby boom for wanting to stop at one child.

Fliss thus became the perfect set of eyes to examine one of the decade’s greatest advancements: the birth control pill. Fertility suppressants had been debated and studied for decades, but medical trials were finally carried out in the fifties when the extraordinary Dr. John Rock was recruited to the cause: a fertility specialist who did indeed state that religion made a very poor scientist and whose Catholic faith didn’t interfere with his belief in contraception as an aid to women’s health. The birth control pill was not created without controversy—the involvement of Margaret Sanger and her embrace of the eugenics movement; the enrollment of institutionalized women in trials by their supervising doctor without their consent; the Puerto Rican trial subjects recruited without the knowledge that they were receiving an experimental drug—but Dr. Rock joined the project in the full belief that access to contraception was critical to women’s overall health and happiness. Inserted here as a relative to the fictional Fliss, he ran early trials for what would become the modern birth control pill, outwardly labeled as fertility trials to get around Massachusetts law. As a result of those trials, women like Fliss and Sydney could opt out of the birth explosion for which the fifties is famous. As an English outsider, Fliss was also a good set of eyes to examine American segregation—Britain was

certainly not without racism, but it was not institutionalized in the same way as the American system. Men like Claude Cormier (I made him a veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen as a tip of the hat to one of the bravest and most decorated all-Black fighter groups of WWII) served their country with honor, were lauded in Europe, then went home to be treated like absolute garbage. Sharp-eyed readers might also have noticed that English Fliss’s aunt Beth is one of my heroines in The Rose Code!

Bea

As anyone who has watched the movie or TV series A League of Their Own knows, women baseball players were called up during WWII to form the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, keeping the populace entertained while male baseball players went off to fight. The AAGPBL continued on past the war, but by the early fifties attendance was petering out and televised baseball meant that more people were watching from home than in the stands. Nineteen fifty-four spelled the end of the league, and I have always wondered how that affected the women who had to hang up their cleats. Bea’s ambition to become a scout is no pipe dream: despite the fact that professional sports was and is such a masculine enclave, ex- baseball and softball star Edith Houghton became major league baseball’s first female scout in 1946, traveling around Pennsylvania signing talent for the Phillies. And on April 17, 1953, Mickey Mantle really did hit one of the biggest home runs in baseball history in a Griffith Park game against the Senators!

Claire

Inside the Red Scare, another persecution was taking place: the Lavender Scare, where LGBTQIA+ citizens were persecuted with nearly the same enthusiasm as were Communists. Gay men made up the bulk of the accused, but lesbians lost jobs and livelihoods, too. Claire is fictional, but her background echoes the desperate struggle for survival of many families after the Wall Street crash. Like countless young women of the time, she

flocked to Washington, D.C., in pursuit of the white-collar government jobs made available to young women during and after the war, helping create the image of the city-living career gal. City-living but often still parochial and prejudiced: E. Frederic Morrow, adviser to the Commerce Department and later the first Black man to hold an executive position at the White House, commented that most of the white secretaries in the office steno pool refused to work for him, even as he was routinely insulted and sidelined by the administration supposedly soliciting his opinion. He would go on to become the first Black vice president of Bank of America and write several books, including Black Man in the White House. Claire’s other employer, Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, is an equally impressive historical figure. A lone voice to speak out on the Senate floor against McCarthy, she delivered the famous Declaration of Conscience outlining four basic principles of Americanism: the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to hold independent thought. An enraged McCarthy did his best to destroy her, but she outlasted him, remaining a senator until 1973. It was remarked that if a man had delivered the Declaration of Conscience, he would have been the next president.

Arlene

Did the US Army really stage massive war games in the Texas heartland, simulating the Communist invasion and then the retaking of the town of Lampasas? Yes, it did: Operation Longhorn, a mock occupation complete with mock propaganda, mock arrests, and mock media broadcasts. As Arlene comments, it is truly amazing the stupid things our nation’s army managed get approved, get funded, and then implement with completely straight faces.

As always, I have made small changes to the historical record in order to serve the story. The murder of George Harding and subsequent trial of his killer was moved up to compress the timeline. Two sources conflicted as to the precise date of Dr. Rock’s birth control trials; I chose the earlier one as it suited the story better. The riot at Chickland Club occurred as I described it (a riot erupting at a mixed club, police reluctantly escorting several

interracial couples to safety, COMMUNIST scrawled on the windows) but a year earlier; similarly, the Lampasas town invasion happened somewhat later than I have implied here. The art show Reka attends in New York was very real, but it took place in June not October. I was not able to determine whether an Englishwoman would have been allowed to join the United States Cadet Nurse Corps or not, so Fliss’s admission to those ranks is guesswork on my part, and Claire’s under-the-counter job as an atomic pinup girl is another educated guess. Pageant winners competed to be crowned “Miss Atomic” and burlesque dancers posed in skimpy bathing suits and mushroom-cloud headpieces, but human nature being what it is, there were undoubtedly more X-rated versions. Finally, a few details of the 1954 Pillsbury Bake-Off have been changed to suit the story: in reality it took place later in the year, and I wasn’t able to determine if friends and family could watch their loved ones compete in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom.

Most of the writers I know, myself included, have a pandemic book—the book into which we poured all the uncertainty, upheaval, and darkness we were feeling during lockdown. I like to think of The Briar Club as my postpandemic book, a novel that erupted out of a desperate need for light, for connection, for friendship. A need (like Grace’s) to gather round the table, to feed, and to fix. I hope you enjoyed the results.

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