Isabel Moore

Isabel Moore in 1962, age 51

Isabel V. Walsh was born in New York City in 1911 to native New Yorkers George and Isabel (they named their son George); her father was a chauffeur and the family lived in what is now Harlem at W 143rd Street. She wrote her first story, a detective story, when she was ten, and “it was not very good,” she remembered. In 1930 when she was 18, she married Charles Lee, and they had a daughter Elaine seven months later.

It is likely about this time that she “decided she ‘simply had to have’ a job as a secretary in a publishing concern,” reported one early profile that came out at the time of her first novel, which was published in Cosmopolitan Magazine. “She knew no shorthand, but in characteristic fashion, when she applied for the position she made her background and education fit the requirements of the occasion. Yes, of course she knew shorthand! She could do 120 words a minute! It was before the advent of typing, shorthand and spelling tests, therefore her convincing manner sufficed. For three long, harrowing months she took dictation in abbreviated longhand, used a complete notebook every day, lived in utter fear of being absent one day and having another stenographer discover her ‘system.’ Each day, moreover, she insisted to her employer, that the dictation (which she never read back) was transcribed exactly as he had expressed it. In the evenings she studied layout work and advertising at Columbia University. As might have happened to a heroine in a story, Mrs. Moore submitted a proposed layout for a client, had it accepted, and the three-month state of hysteria ended with her safely ensconced in the layout and publicity department. She remained in this field for two years, joined ‘Advertising and Selling’ in the sales promotion department, later joined an advertising agency.”

In 1934 she divorced Charles Lee and married Don Moore. He at that time was highly successful; after graduating second in his class at Dartmouth in 1925, he had moved to Florida (where his parents were living) to work for newspapers there, then went to the Bahamas where he founded the Nassau News Bureau. He returned to New York in 1930 to work as an associate editor for Argosy All-Story magazine, which published adventure, detective and mystery stories; ultimately he became editor in chief of that magazine. He then moved to Cosmopolitan in 1934, where he was an assistant fiction editor. After marrying, Isabel and Don moved to New Rochelle, NY. That same year he was hired for $25 a week to write the comic strip Flash Gordon, which was just getting off the ground, and though he penned the strip until 1954, his work made him neither famous nor wealthy (some have suggested this was because the artist, Alex Raymond “was a prima donna”). He eventually moved to the screen, working as a story editor for Warner Bros. and RKO Pictures while remaining based in New York. The pair had a daughter Pamela in 1937, their only child together. 

Isabel had begun writing seriously in about 1932, and over the course of a year in the evenings after her day job wrote a novel—but when she showed it to a friend who worked as a literary agent, she was advised that though she wrote well, the book was not fit to be published. In 1936 she decided to quit her day job and write for a year—and if she did not succeed, she would abandon writing. She was able, however, to sell her first story, “Two Loves Have I,” and so continued writing full-time with success. Her first published novel, Career Girl, was initially published in Cosmopolitan as a serial that debuted in January 1939—one has to wonder how much her husband had a hand in that deal. She continued to sell short stories to Cosmo, McCall’s and American magazines, among others, for the next decade or so, while raising her children; her daughter Pamela later described her childhood as “hectic and uncertain,” though she added that “few children had more love and affection lavished on them than I did.”

In her spare time, in 1941 Isabel had been inspired by her older daughter Elaine’s horseback riding—among other prizes, the girl won the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden—and decided to take up the sport herself. She began taking lessons at a nearby stable owned by Gordon Wright; she had “never tried her hand at jumper competition until she watched her daughter riding the difficult course. Mrs. Moore has become so proficient that she now competes against male riders,” in team and pair events.

In 1946, the Moores divorced, and so prominent a writer was Isabel by that time that the news was disseminated in gossip columns across the country. Nine months later she married her riding instructor Gordon Wright. In the late 1940s the market for short stories was drying up, so she began working in Hollywood and wrote screenplays and served as a story editor for Howard Hughes and RKO Pictures. Working for Hollywood wasn’t always easy; her daughter Pamela recalled one trip of her mother’s to California in about 1952: “My mother, a well-known magazine writer and novelist, had gone to Hollywood on a studio writing assignment. The assignment never materialized. Meanwhile, the studio had installed her at an expensive hotel, assigning her to a cottage on the grounds at $800 a month. On the day she learned the writing assignment would not be forthcoming, the hotel management learned that the studio had no intention of paying the bill. By the time she got back from the studio, there was a lock on the door. All her clothes were on the inside of that door and she was on the outside. She took a cheap room in downtown Los Angeles with money borrowed from her agent. She worked day and night, writing articles and stories, until she had enough money to pay the hotel bill, get our things, and come East.” In 1956 Isabel worked as editor of Photoplay, one of the first American film fan magazines, for a year. In that capacity she was said to have been “a close friend of Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Cary Grant” (though it’s likely that these claims are exaggerated); after leaving the magazine she seems to have worked as a freelancer writing stories about movie stars for fan magazines.

Pamela Moore in 1956, age 18

Also in 1956, at age 18 her daughter Pamela—a bit of a prodigy who had attended boarding school in Connecticut and then dropped out to enter Columbia University-affiliated women’s college Barnard at age 16—published a novel called Chocolates for Breakfast, a story of a 15-year-old girl living a rather debauched life in California and New York—though touching on serious themes such as depression, homosexuality and gender roles—which offered Pamela financial success (the book ultimately sold a million copies in 11 languages) as well as fame (or notoriety), her name subsequently appearing in national gossip columns. A newspaper article that came out when the book did depicted her as drinking Dubonnet and “talking without almost interruption” at the mid-day interview in the Plaza Hotel bar; in early January 1957 Pamela was reported as missing “somewhere in Europe” by her “frantic” mother, though she soon turned up in Paris “in a worn-out raincoat, baggy black sweater, scuffed shoes and somewhat grimy fingernails.” Pamela wrote in her diary at the time that though she believed her mother was proud of her success, she sensed “jealousy + an outsized sense of her own defeat + failure,” quoting her mother as saying, through tears, “I can't live vicariously, you know that.”

By 1958 Isabel had left California and was living in New Rochelle again, though alone; she and Gordon divorced the following year. In 1960 she became director of the Famous Writers School in Westport, CT, a correspondence school for would-be writers that was ultimately brought down by an article published by Jessica Mitford decrying shady practices—and not aided in their cause when school instructor and widely known writer Faith Baldwin declared, “Anyone with common sense would know that the fifteen of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in.”

Isabel moved to Cooperstown, NY, in the winter of 1961 to be near her older daughter. Perhaps taking a page from Pamela, Isabel had started writing pulp sex novels with titles like Love Now Pay Later, The Infidelity Game, and Suburban Affair, ultimately turning out about seven of them under the pen name Elaine Dorian. “You start your book with a bang, a shocker,” she explained in a newspaper article, describing her writing process. “The first chapter is sex, then every other chapter is sex. Those in between can be concerned with the business world, society, retrospect or what have you. But don’t forget the sex.”

Then in September 1962 she published a novel called The Sex Cure that borrowed heavily on the scandals of the Cooperstown locals; the town residents, eager to impress the worldly Manhattanite, had apparently kept back little in regaling her with tales of the townsfolk. “Some people here are so hungry for recognition they tell all about themselves,” Moore noted later. In a New York Magazine article about the scandal, author Callie Wright describes one thinly disguised character in The Sex Cure: “‘Mary Stevens Memorial Hospital,’ owned by local landowner ‘Cyrus Stevens,’ sounded dangerously like Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, established by Cooperstown’s Stephen Clark Sr.—philanthropist, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, and founder of the Baseball Hall of Fame—whose family had altruistically supported the town for more than a hundred years. Moore described her character Cy Stevens as a ‘tyrant’ ruling with an ‘iron hand,’ and she sent a collective shudder through the village on page 100, when, in an apparent copy error, ‘Cy Stevens’ simply became ‘Clark Stevens.’ The 70-year-old Cy Stevens, whom Moore describes as ‘sexually impotent’ with a heart condition, still wants women, however, ‘to fondle and possess and look at.’ He pays a nurse from his hospital $100 to take off her clothes and sit on his lap, where she rocks back and forth until suddenly realizing Mr. Stevens has had a heart attack.” (This character should sound very familiar to those who have read her only VNRN, A Challenge for Nurse Melanie.) Ironically, the book would likely have attracted little attention had Isabel’s house not been vandalized on Halloween, and the resulting newspaper story was picked up by the Associated Press, ultimately garnering far more attention nationwide than the book’s release had, warranting the release of a second edition.

For her part, Isabel explained to the press that she was just giving the public what it wanted. “No one wants to write this sort of trash, but we’re driven to it,” she said in a newspaper article. “The publishers are always screaming for more books just to keep up with the demand. I hate this system, but I have to live somehow.” (Of note, she did manage to publish A Challenge for Nurse Melanie in 1963, the year after The Sex Cure, so she was clearly able to write books that were not driven by sex.)

Though she shrugged off the unflattering attention at the time, at least in public, the trial for a libel suit filed against Isabel and her publisher was delayed in 1964 because “Mrs. Moore is under psychiatric care in New York City,” according to her publisher’s attorney. A month later, tragedy struck when Isabel’s daughter Pamela, then just 26, killed herself; she had been writing a novel called Kathy, about a has-been female celebrity contemplating her professional decline, and the last pages that Pamela wrote included a character discussing marital difficulties and suicidal tendencies. After this point Isabel, only 52 years old, essentially disappeared from the public eye. She published three more books (not about sex) in 1970 and 1971 under her own name, bringing her total number of published stand-alone books to 19, as far as can be determined. She died in Holyoke, MA, in 1989 at the age of 77.

Early in her career, when Isabel was 28, she had been described as “a modern young woman, possessed of an impatience born of ambition, a ‘wake up and live’ attitude, a career, a home, and a practical, realistic approach to life and its problems. A human dynamo with an intense, boundless curiosity about people and their activities, a confirmed eavesdropper who follows people on the street for two or three blocks … Mrs. Moore crowds as much activity and work into an average day as many people do in twice that time.” Isabel Moore does seem to have had a very lively life, and one can only hope that the shattering events she experienced did not ultimately break her spirit.

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