Maggy Gould

Maggy Gould (b. Natchez, Mississippi, 31 October 1915; d. Manhattan, New York, 10 November 1980)

Marguerite Goodman was the first child of Howard Wells Goodman (1887-1960) and Dorcas Walters (1893-1931), who were married in Jefferson, Tennessee, on 27 September 1913. She had a brother who died in infancy, and a younger sister, Louise, who became a fashion model n New York. 

Little is known of her early life, beyond that she resided for a time with her aunt and uncle in Mount Ulla (near Salisbury), North Carolina. Her family moved to Macon, Georgia, when Maggy was in elementary school. She later attended Miller High School before going to the Fassifern School (for girls) in Hendersonville, North Carolina.  She met the man who would become her husband, Willis Elden Gould Jr. (1918-1991), when they were both drama students at the University of North Carolina. He became an actor, a theatrical director and stage manager, for some seasons with the Barter Theatre, a travelling repertory which included his wife as one of the actors. Maggy Gould also appeared with other repertory groups.  They were married in 1943, and their daughter Ann was born in 1948. As "Maggy" or "Maggie" Gould, she acted in at least three Broadway plays, Men to the Sea (1944), Season in the Sun (1950) and Faithfully Yours (1951). Gould called playwriting her first love. In April 1944, she and a collaborator Howard Richardson submitted to the Copyright Office a dramatic production South to the Morning, as by "Rome Dixon." It was based on the novel Un Vie (1883) by Guy de Maupassant.

As Maggy Gould she published her sole novel, The Dowry (New York: William Morrow) in August 1949. The blurb on the rear flap notes that she was living with her husband and daughter in Greenwich Village; that she had acted in the South, in California, and in Boston; and that she had written a number of plays, some optioned for Broadway, but apparently none were ever performed. 

The Dowry is the story of Robbie Gilmore,a youngish woman married to the middle-aged art critic Laurentz Gilmore. When Robbie meets the talented young painter Jonathan Reizel, a love affair begins, and Robbie leaves her husband, who puts a curse upon Jonathan. The book was reviewed mostly positively.  The Library Journal called it a "morbidly fascinating book" (July 1949), while Kirkus Reviews noted "some shocking stuff here which you may find absorbing, if you indulge in the genre" (15 July 1949). August Derleth reviewed it in The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) as a "better-than-average study in suspense with supernatural overtones in a first novel which shows much promise and some achievement. That Miss Gould should be successful with a Gothic theme in a setting so modern and sophisticated is a tribute to her skill, for she is successful with it, and she compels belief within her own set boundaries" (1 October 1949). (Derleth expanded on this review in The Arkham Sampler, Autumn 1949.)

A UK edition was published by Allan Wingate in September 1950. When the novel was reprinted by Pyramid Books in 1975, the author's first name was spelt "Maggie."  Interestingly, "The Dowry" is also a short story by Maupassant telling of marital betrayal. 

Gould planned a second novel, about which she said "in the next book I will do what every southerner must--lay the scene of it in the South" (The Charlotte Observer, 18 September 1949), but she seems never to have gotten round to writing it. 

By 1951 Gould had written six plays. In September 1957, Gould registered with the Copyright Office Sweeney's Island: A Play in Two Acts.  It was never printed and may have been unproduced. 

Gould and her husband were divorced, and both remarried in 1961. Maggy's second husband was Eugene Feraldis (1900-1983), a former admiral in the Greek navy who had immigrated to New York at the end of W.W. II.  In January 1962, she registered with the Copyright Office Bamboula: A Musical Romance, by Gould, Walter Bishop and Fred Norman, with the note that it was "a complete rewrite of the script with new lyrics added." She had shopped Bamboula around after first finishing it in 1951, but producers feared it would cost too much to produce, with a huge cast and fabulous settings. It told the story of the birth of the blues in the swamps of cotton country. The rewrite also does not appear to have been produced. 

In 1980, Maggy Gould Feraldis died of  cancer at the Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, aged 65.