Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Geraldine Elizabeth SIEBOLDS
Jerry, the original Ernie Pyle fan, began to suffer from what one Pyle biographer described as "sinister moods." Pyle's constant traveling to war zones in the 1940s did Jerry and Ernie little good. Jerry's ailments eventually were recognized, biographers wrote, as side effects from her alcoholism and mental illness. Ernie dealt with the breakdown of his marriage, in part, by having at least two adulterous affairs.
Once, Ernie wrote to his best friend that Jerry had gone "completely screwball" and he didn't know what to do. The Pyles tried doctor after doctor and treatment after treatment but little was known about ways to treat mental illness and alcoholism in the 1940s. in The Story of Ernie Pyle by Lee G. Miller, that the Pyles had gotten divorced.
According to Miller, Ernie wrote a friend that the divorce was "an experiment on the gamble that it might shock her into realizing that she had to face life like other people." He hoped that if Jerry could "cure herself, we could some day be remarried."
Cure herself? With the benefits of modern science 50 years later, I know this was impossible. But the wisest writer of them all didn't have a clue.
Ernie was on the other side of the world, making a name for himself as the biggest byline in journalism. Jerry suffered another breakdown and, a friend observed, "aged a decade."
The Pyles remarried in 1943, but Ernie wasn't there. At the ceremony, a friend filled in for him. Jerry had begged him to come home, but Ernie was still off at war writing columns about the soldiers in the foxholes that made him America's favorite.
"We'll live simply when I get back," he promised Jerry in a letter. The little white house awaited. But Ernie never returned for that simple life.
He died April 18, 1945. Jerry died seven months later. They were buried 4,500 miles apart.
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