He threw off his provincial upbringing to study acting in New York City, and went on the road with a professional touring company. In the years after World War I, he married a divorced “countess” and bummed around Europe, running a traveling exhibition about Lawrence of Arabia, living on an island in Budapest and doing that classic Lost Generation thing: writing a novel about how stultifying things were back home. When that marriage broke up, he returned to the States where, in time, he entered into an affair with a brilliant Jewish woman — married, but with a husband willing to look the other way, a man he eventually befriended. He always believed he had fathered her daughter.
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