Michael Strange

Blanche Marie Louise Oelrichs, who performed and published under the name Michael Strange, was born on October 1, 1890, in New York, New York, and went on to establish herself as a poet, playwright, and theatre actress. She died on November 5, 1950, in Boston, from leukemia, and was interred alongside her son Robin in the Oelrichs family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Born the youngest of four children to Charles May Oelrichs and Blanche de Loosey, she grew up in proximity to the wealthiest families of the Gilded Age, spending summers in Newport, Rhode Island, among the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and their social circle. Her Austrian mother was the sister of Emilie de Loosey, wife of Theodore Havemeyer. Her sister Natalie, known as Lily, married and later divorced Heinrich Borwin, Duke of Mecklenburg. Her brother Charles de Loosey Oelrichs was the father of Marjorie Oelrichs, who married bandleader Eddy Duchin.

In 1910, Oelrichs married Leonard Moorhead Thomas, the son of a prominent Philadelphia banker and a Yale University graduate who had served in the diplomatic service in Rome and Madrid before earning the Croix de Guerre for his service with the United States Army in Europe during World War I. The couple had two sons: Leonard Jr., born in 1911, and Robin May Thomas, born in 1915. Oelrichs developed what she described as a literary urge in 1914, beginning to write poetry and theatrical plays. Her first collection of poems appeared in 1916 under the pen name Michael Strange, a masculine pseudonym she adopted initially to distance her society reputation from the sometimes erotic content of her work. The divergence in interests contributed to the breakdown of her marriage, and she and Thomas divorced in 1919.

Through actress Cathleen Nesbitt, who had been John Barrymore's leading woman in the 1916 production of Justice, Oelrichs was introduced to Barrymore. After four years of involvement, she married him on August 5, 1920, already pregnant with their only child together, Diana Blanche Barrymore, who was born on March 3, 1921. That same year, Strange published Resurrecting Life, a book of poetry featuring drawings by John Barrymore. The volume's popularity, rather than shielding her from notoriety, amplified it, and she adopted the Strange name permanently from that point forward.

Also in 1921, Strange wrote the Broadway play Clair de Lune, based on Victor Hugo's L'Homme qui rit. The production starred John Barrymore and his sister Ethel Barrymore, and the work was later adapted into a 1932 French film directed by Henri Diamant-Berger. That same year, Strange was among the first members to join the Lucy Stone League, an organization that advocated for women's right to retain their maiden names after marriage. She was also an active participant in the women's suffrage movement more broadly.

Strange spent considerable time in Paris while her husband performed abroad. After returning to New York, she began appearing in live theatre. Her marriage to John Barrymore ended in May 1925, after which she joined a summer stock company in Salem, Massachusetts. She subsequently appeared in two Broadway productions: Easter One Day More in 1926 and L'Aiglon in 1927. A further collection, Selected Poems, by Michael Strange, was published in 1928.

In 1929, Strange married for a third time, to prominent New York attorney Harrison Tweed, who later became Chairman of Sarah Lawrence College. During the second half of the 1930s, she hosted a poetry and music program on New York radio station WOR that attracted a substantial audience. In 1940, she published her autobiography, Who Tells Me True. She and Tweed divorced in 1942, and in 1944 her son Robin died at the age of 29. Strange's will requested that Robin's remains be moved from Indiana, where he had been buried with a predeceased lover, to the Oelrichs family plot so that he could rest with the rest of the family.

Beginning in the summer of 1940 and continuing until her death, Strange maintained a long-term relationship with children's book author Margaret Wise Brown. The relationship began as a mentorship before becoming romantic, and the two lived together at 10 Gracie Square in Manhattan starting in 1943. Strange was a registered communist and, until Adolf Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, participated in the America First Committee's weekly radio program. Her final professional undertaking was a touring program called Great Works with Great Music, in which she read literary and classical works accompanied by music, modeled on a radio program she had previously produced.

Strange named Margaret Wise Brown as her literary executor. Following Brown's death two years after Strange's own, Strange's papers passed to Brown's sister Roberta, who contacted Diana Barrymore. Diana instructed that the papers be burned. Strange's daughter Diana died in 1960 at the age of 38 after years of drug and alcohol addiction. Her older son Leonard, who had married painter Yvonne Thomas, had two daughters, the only grandchildren of Michael Strange. In the 1950s, a Michael Strange Poetry Award was established in her memory.