George Randolph Chester

Biography

George Randolph Chester’s name still rings loudest through the fast-talking adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford, the smooth con man he let loose in *Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford*. A Cincinnati newsroom hustler at the start, Chester had never considered fiction until his wife, Elizabeth, a grade-school teacher with a red pencil and sharp ear, nudged him to turn his street-smart reporting into stories and then served as one-woman editorial staff—proofing pages, taking dictation after supper. The couple’s northward jump to New York City ended in scandal: Elizabeth, certain her husband was romancing Lillian Hauser (the illustrator who gave his characters their sly faces), walked out. On 12 October 1911 she won an interlocutory divorce decree. Chester and Lillian, sightseeing through Europe when the papers caught up with them, cabled congratulations to themselves and married on the spot. Homecoming brought a comic-legal jolt: the decree was still ninety days shy of final; technically he remained a married man. Counsel calmed him—foreign ceremony, no American bigamy headache—and the new partners plunged ahead. From a Manhattan brownstone to Hollywood back lots, George and Lillian wrote shoulder-to-shoulder until 1924. He swore she slipped the brightest barbs into his dialogue; critics swore the later work sparkled. Between deadlines they lived out of trunks, chasing eclipses in Egypt or carnival lights in Rio. Wallingford and his sidekick Blackie Daw kept multiplying—novels, Broadway hits, flickering one-reelers—while life off the page gave Chester two sons by his first marriage: George Randolph Jr. (1896-1979) and Robert Fay (1904-1975).