INTERLUDE: the loneliest doll in the world
fear, fantasy, and the magical mind of artist dare wright.
After going down a rabbit hole this morning, incited by finding a 1957 ad for a doll and book package set on Tumblr1, I found myself suddenly thrust into the cryptic life of children’s book author Dare Wright. It’s hard not to be intrigued by what little we know. Accounts about the darkness in her life are conflicting. Wright’s website, written by her beloved goddaughter, gracefully avoids the potential implications of Wright’s “childlike” mental state. A biography published posthumously, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: the Search for Dare Wright, tells a different— and much more tragic— story. But I digress.
The facts, as objective as I can get them, are these. Dare Wright was born December 3rd, 1914, the second child in a marriage that was already beginning to fracture. Her father took her five-year-old brother, Blaine, and left the family’s Toronto home to move to New York when she was two. She never saw her father again. Dare was left with her portrait artist mother, Edith “Edie” Stevenson Wright, who moved them to Ohio soon after her husband left. As a child, Dare became enthralled by various aspects of creativity— sewing, painting, drawing, carpentry, writing— and, encouraged by her mother and the fairy tales she read, developed a fantastical imagination. She moved to New York to study painting when she was eighteen, and with the help of her unearthly looks and a bit of drama school, scored an acting gig in a production of Pride and Prejudice. Soon after, she became a model. 1941 saw the reunion with her missing brother, who soon became one of Dare’s closest friends.
In the late 40s she was briefly engaged to wartime pilot Phillip Sandeman, but he broke it off in 1948 for somewhat unknown reasons and died in a plane crash three years later— the only evidence we have regarding the reason for their break up is a letter from him to her saying that she wasn’t a “real woman”, which reportedly haunted Dare for the rest of her life. Marriage proposals arrived throughout her adulthood from an uncountable amount of suitors, but all were denied. In the mid-1950s, Dare and her goddaughter began posing and photographing one of Dare’s childhood dolls with two teddy bears, constructing elaborate sets and stories to accompany the photographs. These were eventually constructed into a book called The Lonely Doll, which was published in 1957 and became a best-selling children’s book. Nine more books in the Lonely Doll series were published, along with ten other unrelated titles that also revolved around dolls. Intensely private, Dare’s interviews were few and far between. She died in 2001 after a long hospitalization.
Dare’s personality— or what made her personality like that, at least— is up for debate. Brook Ashley, the aforementioned goddaughter and website author, describes her as having a childlike curiosity paired with the intelligence of an adult and a sylphic, almost nymph-like presence. In the section of Dare’s website titled Dare’s Magical Connection With Children, Ashley wrote that she “often seemed more of a fairytale wood sprite than a flesh and blood person”, a fascinatingly parallel statement to ex-fiance Sandeman’s declaration that Dare wasn’t a “real woman”. Ashley’s description of Dare is almost akin to that of an imaginary friend— all the stories I can find revolve around tea parties or sleepovers or half-invented magical adventures, some of which inspired Lonely Doll books. The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll, that biography I brought up earlier, has no mention at all on the official Dare Wright website.
I’m deliberately trying to lead you down the same path of discovery that I followed so you can understand the information the way I did. The first thing I found on Dare was her website, which I explored thoroughly. The second thing was The Lonely Doll2 itself, which is where we are right now in my exploration of her life. I haven’t read all ten books in the series yet, as I can’t find some of them online, but for the sake of keeping this relatively short, I’ll just be focusing on the first book, The Lonely Doll.
Our main character is Edith, a childhood doll of Dare’s that she named after her mother. Edith (the doll) is lonely. She’s really, really lonely. So lonely that she prays every night for friends and begs the pigeons she feeds to stay and talk to her, which they don’t. One morning, though, two bears appear in the garden, here to be her friends forever— Mr. Bear, who’s fatherly and stern but affectionate, and Little Bear, who’s playful and mischievous. Of course, they all become fast friends and go on several adventures together, like going to the beach or park.
These are only touched upon briefly, because the main conflict of the book happens when Mr. Bear leaves Edith and Little Bear home by themselves. Although he tells them not to get into any trouble, Edith and Little Bear soon get bored and find a dressing room in the house, full of fun costumes and jewelry and makeup. A marvelous game of dress up ensues, but Mr. Bear finds them soon after. Admonishing them for making a mess, he gives them both a spanking— it’s the 1950s, after all— and makes them clean it up. This makes Edith burst into tears. When Little Bear asks what’s wrong, she tells him she’s scared.
Nothing bad happens in this story, though— once they clean up the mess and apologize, Mr. Bear forgives them easily and promises Edith that him and Little Bear will be here for her forever and ever so she won’t be lonely again. Happily ever after. Yay!
At this point in my investigation, I hadn’t figured out that there was an entire tragic biography on Dare but I knew the general gist of her life. Reading the book itself was indicative to me that there was something darker beneath the surface, or at least a little more going on than her goddaughter let on. Yes, it is a very sweet children’s book. There’s also a fear of abandonment in it that’s so intense it had to have come from an emotional place in the author. Looking closer at the story itself, it runs an eerie parallel to Dare’s life, almost serving as a means of wish fulfillment. Dare never saw her father again after he left and took her brother with him; in The Lonely Doll, a father and a brother appear in her life and promise not to leave her, even when she messes up. Most people’s fear after they misbehave, as children and as adults, is punishment, not abandonment. One does not come to the conclusion that they’ll be abandoned, much less write it into a story, unless they struggle with feeling abandoned. Of course, my initial reaction to the story being that there’s underlying issues doesn’t really mean anything, but the similarities are undeniable.
At this point, I searched for a little more information on Dare. I quickly discovered that journalist Jean Nathan had written an entire book on her in 2005, four years after her death, and although I wasn’t able to get my hands on the text itself, I did find multiple articles summarizing it, specifically this one from Book Riot. As I expected, things were not as idyllic as they seemed, but it was worse than I thought.
The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll features interviews from several of Dare’s friends and family, all which say something similar— she was beautiful, she was childlike, and she was stuck in some sort of arrested development. Although Nathan’s timeline matches with the one Ashley gave, there’s a significant amount of details that are added. First and foremost, Dare’s mother Edie was an almost psychosexual level of overbearing. After they moved to Ohio, Dare was apparently in near-complete isolation with Edie from ages six to nine, causing them to develop their own world through dolls, fairy tales, and make-believe. In Dare’s adult life, Edie continued seeking to keep her isolated, destroying her acting career by trying to give risque photos of Dare to the press and constantly trying to persuade Dare from spending time with people who weren’t her, including Dare’s brother and Edie’s other child, Blaine. Even when Dare was well into her 40s, Edie refused to paint her as anything but a teenager.
Dare and Edie reportedly shared a bed for the majority of Dare’s life until Edie’s death in 1975, at which point Dare’s decades-long collapse started— she drank more than she ate, escaped rehab twice, dressed in rompers that were more appropriate for a toddler than an elderly woman, and began going on walks late at night and returning bruised and battered. Only two more books were published after Edie’s death. According to a nurse that took care of her, Dare had a habit of walking through Central Park and bringing “street people” home with her. Although it was believed to be her childlike innocence and loneliness at play, another nurse had to be hired to watch Dare on the weekends, who came in one morning to find a ransacked apartment and Dare on the floor in shock. After a trip to the hospital, it was determined that Dare, who was almost eighty years old, had been sexually assaulted. She never recovered— her last years were spent in hospice, and she died when she was 86. Her life and identity had been so thoroughly dependent on her mother that she lost almost all purpose and sense of self without her.
Dare’s relationships with others were equally unstable. Aside from her goddaughter, her closest companion was her brother. When they reunited in 1941, both were delighted that despite growing up separated, they shared a similar childishness. On Dare’s website, Ashley describes them as “[sharing] the same dry sense of wit, [speaking] in similar clipped cadence, and unconsciously [mirroring] each other’s gestures and facial expressions”. Nathan tells it a little bit differently, saying that they spoke in “baby talk” with each other, teased each other, and gave each other gifts of toys and games as if they were children. Other adults around them found this deeply disturbing. Dorothy, a friend of Dare’s and a girlfriend of Blaine’s, once accompanied them to a toy store— upon watching them play with teddy bears, speaking in imaginary bear voices, she was so horrified that she insisted they put the several bears they were planning on buying back. Blaine kept a bear as a gift for a friend’s child, and Dare kept a small one for herself. Eventually, Blaine gifted Dare the same type of bear he gave to the child, and with the small bear she already had, this duo eventually starred in her Lonely Doll series as Mr. Bear and Little Bear.
Dare was terrified by sex and generally clueless in her romantic relations. Although it was never confirmed, Sandeman is thought to have broken off their engagement— and said she wasn’t a “real woman”— because of her refusal to have sex. Other boyfriends had similar complaints. One man said that she was so scared of sex she ran out of his apartment, going so fast that she lost both her shoes on 57th Street. Another man, Anthony Palermo, pursued her for two years before giving up completely, saying she “lived in a fantasy world”, had “inner dilemmas”, and that her mother “ruined her”. She never married and never had children, determined to live out the rest of her life in the comfort of adolescence. Despite her fear of loneliness and abandonment, Dare forever remained a lonely doll.
Finding Dare’s work felt like striking gold to me. Even though I had never seen her photographs or stories before this morning, it was like a homecoming. It was like listening to David Bowie while high out of your mind and realizing that the song you were listening to saved someone’s life, someone like you, and all the people that the song saved suddenly stretched out behind you in a trailing history of past lives. I recognized parts of myself in her— the isolation, the fairytale inner world, maybe even the same dark, ugly hole that sits in the heart. Nobody believed in her capacity for harming herself or others because she was so innocent and childlike; I recently got away with lying on a psych evaluation because the therapist said I was so lovely to talk to that there couldn’t be anything concerning happening. By no means are we the same person— she was braver than me for being able to externalize that inner world without fear, and I’m braver than her for (hopefully) letting myself grow up— but there are enough similarities that I can’t help but feel a certain kinship with her. Even if she just serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when you give yourself over to your imagination and craft so thoroughly, even though it’s literally been less than a day since discovery at the time of publishing this, I know I’m going to carry her with me.
Somewhere out there in the world, there’s thousands of lonely dolls eating breakfast alone, feeding pigeons alone, going to sleep alone, just waiting for a friend to appear in their garden who’s guaranteed to love them forever, no matter what they do. They face the same rainy-day boredom, the same contrition, the same desire for kinship.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s all of us. One day, though, this story will not be lonely.
All images courtesy of https://darewright.com.
this is like a strange mixture of grey gardens and whatever happened to baby jane.....terrifying and poignant and sad. wonderful wonderful wonderful!
wow a girl and her mother fr .. this was so interesting and well written, thank you for telling us ab her !!