Foote's Marriages
During his lifetime, Shelby Foote was married to three women and had two children. In 1944 at the age of twenty-eight, he married his first wife Tess Lavery of Belfast. He began seeing Tess when he was stationed in Ireland, and once he returned to the United States, he began to figure out a way for Tess to come to the U.S. so that they could marry. Foote and Tess decided to get married very early in their relationship, which caused an unstable marriage. They both were incredibly nervous on their wedding day, and the ceremony had to be paused two different times because Tess would not stop crying.[1] Shortly after the wedding, they moved from New York to live in Greenville, Mississippi.[2] While in Greenville, Foote began to focus in on his writing, which caused problems with his relationship. Foote was working diligently on his first novel Tournament at the time. He became withdrawn from friends and family and since Tess did not fit in with the Foote’s friends or the people of Greenville, she began to feel alone. Tess finally decided in February of 1946 to go forward with divorce proceedings, which were finalized in March, making their marriage less than two years long.[3]
When Foote married the second time, he was thirty-two years old and better-known as a writer. He began seeing a beautiful blond woman by the name of Marguerite "Peggy" Desommes. Peggy’s family was very well known around the Memphis area and Foote saw the family had much social prestige.[4] Not long after they started their relationship, Peggy became pregnant with Foote’s first child, Margaret. Foote asked Peggy to marry him, but Peggy’s father despised Foote and threatened to cut Peggy off if she married him. She ignored her father and the two moved in with Foote’s mother in Greenville. Foote and Peggy soon began to experience problems. Foote became so enthralled in his work that he began to cherish the times when Margaret and Peggy would be away. Peggy later suffered from mental illness and would scream for long periods of time and would be unable to get out of bed for multiple days. It got to the point where they neither cared nor loved each other anymore. Foote then began to be unfaithful to Peggy who filed for divorce and took Margaret with her to Memphis. Foote figured out when Peggy had taken Margaret and moved to Memphis so that he would be close to his daughter.
Foote’s third and final marriage was to Gwyn Rainer. When they met in Memphis, Tennessee, she was twenty-five years old and married to a very successful Harvard medical graduate named John Shea. After moving to Memphis with her husband, Gwyn began to secretly see Foote in 1956. This soon enough left her with a decision to make, and she decided to leave John so that she could marry Foote.[5] The two worked well together, because, unlike the first two women, Gwyn was attracted to the dedicated lifestyle of a struggling author. On November 13, 1961, Gwyn gave birth to Shelby Foote’s son, Huger Foote. After Huger's birth, Foote devoted more time to his family. The marriage of Gwyn and Foote lasted until Foote died in 2005. Both his children are alive today. Huger Foote is currently a photographer in New York. [6]
Footnotes
[1] C. Stuart Chapman, Shelby Foote: A Writer’s Life (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 91.
[2] Ibid., 94.
[3] Ibid., 111.
[4] Ibid., 128.
[5] Ibid., 169-170
[6] “Huger Foote,” accessed June 15, 2016, <<hugerfoote.com>>.