Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, December 29, 1941

              /?.  Monday morning, December 29  Last evening I had the best time since I've been here:  dinner with Peter Godfrey AND HIS NEW MISSUS,, of four  months standing, and an extremely nice couple, an Englishman, pretty Americanized, named Frank Butler,, who  is one of the §2000-a-week script-machines at RKO,but  a charming and amusing fellow.  I think Peter and his girl are the happiest people I've  seen in this lovely but overstrained place. She is named  Renee Haal (Holland-Dutch family) on the screen. She is  tall, dark, very charming and easy, and while she would  never be a complete mistress of that Theory of Monkeylsm  and Now I'm Mad, in which Peter is such an adept that  he rivals-you and me, yet she would understand it. But  she's pretty old for him. She's 22.  They have a darling house: not in Beverly but high in  the Hollywood hills, on the edge of7a sharp escarpment,  looking over the whole town. And you go downstairs to  go to bed in it, because you enter the living-room floor  from a street up on the hills.  Peter spoke of you with proper glowing ---that is, he  spoke of my Niece Marcella,, whom I took to be you. When  I taxed him with it, he admitted that he owed;you l/2r  cent per month rent on the yacht you rented to him —  oo.o^  *>y now, fddriS--- and promised to send it to you.  And then I came home, to find a darling letter from you,  about Christmas and little Lispenard and her so traditional  marriage,....I wonder if her grandmother remembers-now  having explained to us that she told the poor, innocent,  unworldly little Japs that they really ought to do some  propaganda?  And in the afternoon, before going to Peter's, I went to  Edgar Helwyn's,.and saw Micky Merrill,  She looked extremely well; quite normal. She says she is  jup and about everywhere now.  I liked her, but I think  7cUj I t^ia""t Soothe very much grown-up young lady might find her  just a little Insipid, though God knows, really nice*  She is fond of you SHE BETTER BEI  And yesterday noon I went again to Cedricc? s for breakfast-  lunch. Lothar there, and a newly arrived-Englishman, very  excited about the naughtiness of Lindbergh (and I don't  blame him) and at last, Gedric's wife, whom I hadn't -  seen for several years.^  Poor kid,T she is a slightly washed out little blonde,  most amiable and friendly, but not in Cedric's class-. I  think they are busting up for keeps, and apparently she  is going back to England.  Remember how gloomy I felt abt Florence Ryerson's bland  desire to murder all the Germans— she who has-never  seen a peashooter fired in anger? Well here is Cedric,  English of English, who served 3 or 4 years in the last  war.  He always has Lothar Mendes,,who is German off