Mary Bancroft, a Boston Brahmin colleen who cut a coquettish swath through 20th-century history, bewitching men of power even as she did brilliant work as an American spy in Switzerland in World War II, died on Jan. 10 at her Fifth Avenue apartment. She was 93.
If Mary Bancroft had not existed, a hack novelist would surely have invented her, or tried.
Dime-store fiction could undoubtedly have accommodated her cliche origins as the daughter of a patrician, Harvard-trained lawyer and a distinctly declasse Irish girl, who died in childbirth, setting up her father’s marriage to a disapproving, if not quite wicked, stepmother.
And a Dickens could even have contrived for her father’s second wife to be the stepdaughter of Clarence Barron, the short, rotund powerhouse owner of The Wall Street Journal who encouraged his step-granddaughter to meet and study people of all walks of life.
But it would have taken a remarkable visionary to have imagined Miss Bancroft’s later life as an accomplished spy, a woman with such penetrating intelligence, infallible intuition and boundless verve that her intellectual, emotional or romantic conquests included Carl Jung, Woody Allen and Henry R. Luce.
Her relationships were often platonic, apparently – and surprisingly – including even her postwar fling in New York with Luce, the Time Inc. founder and a legendary ladies’ man.
But as her own 1983 book, Autobiography of a Spy, makes explicit, her wartime romance with Allen Dulles, the American spymaster who laid the groundwork for the CIA, was as torrid as they come.
By far her most important work was with Hans Bernd Gisevius, a top officer of German military intelligence, who was not only a key figure in a vast plot to kill Hitler and set up a civilian democracy but who, well in advance of what turned out to be a bungled assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, had supplied a manuscript detailing the conspiracy.
Miss Bancroft was entrusted with translating the manuscript into English.
