Pitzer College president tells the little-known story of Mark Twain mystery woman

When Mark Twain was born in 1835, Halley's Comet lit the night. That’s the story he liked to tell anyway. When the great American writer and humorist passed away a hundred years ago this April, the comet supposedly crossed the sky again.

Twain's often tumultuous final years are the subject of a new book by Pitzer College president Laura Skandera Trombley called "Mark Twain's Other Woman." It details the relationship between Twain and his much younger female assistant. A relationship that burned as brightly as any comet.

In Trombley's Pitzer College office hangs a large, framed photograph of Mark Twain standing close to the "other woman" - Isabel Lyon. It is one of the few times they were photographed together.

“Twain entrusted her with everything from keeping the public at bay to managing his increasingly unmanageable daughters,” says Trombley. “She did everything for him including bathing his feet with iodine when he suffered from gout.”

Twain hired Isabel Lyon in 1902, shortly before his wife Olivia died. She became Twain's social secretary, bookkeeper and even his literary muse. Lyon was an attractive single woman in her 30s. "38 by the almanac," said Twain but "17 in ways and carriage." Twain was in his 60s and one of the biggest celebrities on Earth. Laura Skandera Trombley says Twain and Lyon grew very close.

“I think emotionally they were very deeply involved in that he really needed a woman to come and care for him,” says Trombley. “Sexually, I have never been able to find anything that conclusively proves that they indeed had a physical relationship. If they did, that is probably a secret I will never be able to figure it out. It might be the only one!”

But clearly there was mutual affection, as reflected in Lyon’s own diaries. “This summer is so exquisite that sometimes I am afraid to speak into the silence fearing to break the magic spell,” Lyon wrote wistfully, shortly after Twain read her drafts of his short story "Eve's Diary."

"Mr. Clemens read tonight, and Eve sums up all the reasons why she could love Adam, but doesn't. It's something else. It's because he, is hers. Dear little Eve."

Trombley says Lyon’s attachment to Twain was obvious. “Did she want to marry him? I think that she clearly did. You have to remember at the turn of the century the reasons why women married. They married for economic security, they married for status,” says Trombley.

“Romantic love was not as emphasized as it is today. Isabel was looking at leading a live of service or, perhaps she could regain all of the social status she had lost with her father's death and have a wonderful measure of economic security. That was not going to happen however.”

Instead, Lyon married Twain's business manager Ralph Ashcroft. That kept her close to Twain, but also further deepened daughter Clara Twain’s animosity toward her. Clara was jealous and resentful of Lyon’s relationship with her father. She believed Ashcroft and Lyon were out to fleece the Twain estate. She also believed Lyon knew far too many family secrets that could come back to haunt the Twain brand. That includes knowledge of Clara’s forced marriage to a man she didn’t really love, and the affair she was forced to abandon.

“She was every much her father's daughter in terms of her need for vengeance,” says Trombley. “And so she made it her mission that she was going to destroy Isabel.”

In her diaries, Lyon writes about Clara’s efforts to sabotage her relaitionship with Twain, whom she called “The King”. In this excerpt Lyon derisively calls Clara, then in her early 30s, “the child,”:

“My anxieties. … have all been misinterpreted. The child says I am trying to ignore her! All my effort has been to please her,” wrote Lyon. “The King has resented my being out of his house so much until I have told him that I only seem neglectful and that all my days are only for his interest.”

Clara Twain eventually wore her father down, convincing him that Lyon was a schemer and an embezzler. No such evidence was ever uncovered. Lyon had devoted seven years to Twain, when he fired her. But he was unable to put her out his mind, or his heart. Lyon became the core of Twain’s last great manuscript: great in its volume - more than 400 pages - and great for its level of its vitriol.

Twain called Lyon a thief, a drunk and a "salacious slut." He claimed she hypnotized him and tried to seduce him by laying about the house in silken underwear. The manuscript was to be published if Lyon aired the Twain family's potentially scandalous dirty laundry, like the fact that daughter Clara was prone to violent outbursts.

“When you have your daughter in her late 20s screaming; ‘I’m going to kill you because I can’t take it anymore!’ …This is a family with some issues. And Twain was absolutely determined no one was ever going to find out,” says Trombley. “He was obsessed with his image. He was a very narcissistic person. So this was very much a shut-up document.”

But Trombley says it's likely that Twain secretly mourned Lyon's absence. He died a year after firing her. So why then pen a 450-page screed against her? Maybe that can be answered best in Mark Twain's own words.

"Let others lie. But let you and me make it the rule to lie for revenue only."

Laura Skandera Trombley says the manuscript was the great writer’s last gasp, as his health and writing abilities failed him.

“He had really by that point lost his gift of narrative. He had written himself out.” He had, says Trombley, simply run out of stories. “But this was a story. He's crafting a tale: how she hypnotized him and lay about in silken dainties trying to seduce him, ‘but I refused to succumb to her wiles,’ he says. 'It sounds like fiction but it isn't!’ Well actually, It was fiction.”

But, fiction with real life implications. Isabel Lyon struggled after she was banished from Twain's world. She divorced Ralph Ashcroft, worked as a secretary for a time and lived in a small New York apartment where she died alone in 1958. Before she died, Lyon gave all of her Twain-related writings and memorabilia to a literary editor in effort to reinstate her good reputation and no longer be one of the mysterious shadows darkening the hem of Mark Twain’s tightly controlled biography.

"The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant encumbrance,” wrote Twain. "How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"

Twain scholar Laura Skandera Trombley may have done just that with her dual biography of Isabel Lyon and that “other man” in the sharp white suit.