That’s the most asked question by beta readers critiquing the manuscript. Why? Because Clara Durant hardly ever gets mentioned. Well, so what about her? And why is she hardly ever mentioned?
Billy Durant’s main passion in life was not women (there’s no record of even a hint of any affairs). Nor was it family. Other than his mother, he doesn’t appear to have reserved any affection or attention to any members of his extended family.
Billy’s main passion was business. He usually worked 18-20 hours a day, not because he had to, but because he liked to. Not only did he work a lot, he was gone most of the time. If we wasn’t buying a varnish company in Alabama he was recruiting a dealer in Maine. If there was a train going anywhere chances are its porters knew Billy Durant by name. And when he was home, the list of people who had been waiting to see him was as long as your arm. They crowded the Durants’ family room till well past one in the morning. Nobody, as they say, is perfect and Billy’s imperfections lay in the realm of fatherhood and husbandhood (if that’s a word).
It didn’t start out that way, of course. As Billy entered adulthood he followed ‘the done thing,’ i.e. buy a house, marry and start a family. By the time he was 23 the insurance brokerage he owned with Wixom Whitehead had grown to become the largest in Central Michigan, largely due to Billy’s irrepressible drive, wooing customers and buying other brokerages all over the region. That enabled him to buy a house and contend for one of the prettiest girls in Flint, Clara Pitt. Her father was a station master (a respectable position in the society of the day) for the Pere Marquette railroad, one of the bigger ones in the region.
Bring able to buy a house in your early twenties was a big deal in those days. They didn’t have FHA loans like today, so he had to buy it cash. So, for a pretty young woman he was a catch. It started out well enough, one assumes, even though Clara was not too impressed with Billy’s energy and focus on his business(es). He spent evenings solving problems for businesses he had a part ownership in, but at least he came home every night. Or, if he traveled, it was rarely more than a hundred miles or so.
However, once he entered the vehicle business, Billy’s absences escalated to a whole new level. You can’t come home every night when you’re in Chicago, New Orleans or New York. Not when trains are the only mode of transportation. In order to maximize every trip, Billy would stop at multiple places along the way. In other words, he was gone for weeks at a time.
As any member of the female persuasion can attest, that is not the healthiest foundation for a successful marriage. Once their children were raised, Clara filed for divorce. Apparently their wasn’t any animosity, and Billy gave her a generous enough settlement and she never wanted for money afterward.
The only two women with whom Billy seemed to have any real relationship were his mother Rebecca and his daughter Margery.
Rebecca Crapo was one of 9 children. Her father (and Billy’s grandfather) was Henry Crapo, a lumber millionaire and governor of Michigan. Crapo had only one son, William, who stayed in Boston and became a Congressman (and incidentally was president of the railroad that employed Clara’s dad). The other 8 children were all daughters, and they married civic and business leaders in Flint… except Rebecca, Billy’s mother.
Rebecca, while in Boston, married William Durant Sr., who apparently turned out to be a flake and a drunk. He evidently speculated on one wild-eyed get rich quick scheme after another, until the governor stepped in. “Divorce the bum and move back to Flint,” he told his daughter. For the mid-1800s that was a pretty radical step, but she did it. And Billy grew up with a single mom. Today we don’t think twice about it, but at that time it was eyebrow-raising, to say the least. Perhaps that left him without a good role model for being a husband and father, or perhaps those issues weren’t as important as they are today.
The contrast between the sterling Crapo genes and those of the ne’er do well Durant couldn’t be more stark, and because of the unusual way Billy was raised, many observers in his sphere of acquaintances constantly wondered, some aloud: which genes would triumph? No surprise, then, that one of the threads running through the book is Billy’s internal struggle: will he end up successful like the Crapo side of his family, or a failure like the Durant side?
Margery, Billy’s daughter, married the family physician, Dr. Ed Campbell. Campbell was Billy’s age and the two became good friends. More than that, Campbell left his medical practice and in many ways became Billy’s right hand man as he transitioned from horse-drawn to motorized vehicles.
As Billy and Clara became estranged, Billy pretty much moved to New York, and whenever he was in Flint he would stay at the Campbells. Margery would act as his chauffeur and had a guest room permanently set up for her father, who promptly turned the Campbells’ living room into his Flint office. Margery grew up with that, so it wasn’t unusual for her at all.
Margery, married to an older guy, had a good friend her age, Catherine, to whom Billy took a shine and it wasn’t long before they married. It had to be interesting, two men of the same age married to two younger women of the same age. Catherine, unlike Clara, knew what she was getting into. Between what she saw and what she heard from Margery, she knew Billy was not the stay at home type. So she was fine with his wandering ways. Most of the time she traveled with him, happy to stay in whatever hotel Billy would choose as his domicile for the night.
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During the time after GM’s bankers cut Billy loose, he finally put down roots in New York, getting an apartment on Fifth Avenue, close to Central Park. And after the great comeback he finally succumbed to the business titan ‘done thing’ and bought a mansion.
Back to the question. I guess the more accurate version of is ‘why do I never read anything about his wife in the book?’ The answer is: she didn’t matter to Billy, his business life (or even his life in general, for that matter). And what better way to convey that than to leave her out of the story? I’m a romantic and that pains me to do it this way, but hey, we can’t have everything in life we want. Right? 🙂