Mr.Michael Henry Adams' Style & Taste

Mulatos, Mammies, Maids and a College President

 

 

 

The greatest sorrow associated with America's still seperate and unequal education system, is the obscene toll of waste it represents. A presisting falicy, is that Blacks and Latinos simply can't compete. Gordon Parks and his classmates, for instance were told by a high school guidance advisor, "I don't want you kids to waste your time, or your parent's money trying to go to college, because, let's face it, you're just going to end-up being maids and porters anyhow..."

 

 

Dropping out of school and working as a Pullman porter until he was 35, Parks, like so any others, dutifully fulfilled these low expectations. Ruth Simmons too remembers from her youth an incessant litany of things she was forbidden to do or which were deemed to be beyond her capability. Poets, painters and an exceptional U. S. President to the contrary, this preception of the inherent limitation of African American ability endures. 

 

 

An avid fan of history, but weary of this false claim, I wasn't at all certain that I'd like the movie that dramatizes "The Help," Kathryn Stockett's 2009 runaway New York Times bestseller.  A contender widely expected to win the best supporting actress oscar, one might well wonder, 'Just what does this film have to do with Brown University's highly esteemed President?'  All will be revealed shortly.

 

 

Sure, the casting was first-rate. Fine black actresses Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Cicely Tyson, LaChanze and Aunjanue Ellis interpret roles of a stature that we have seldom previously had the opportunity to enjoy from them. White performers Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard and Sissy Spacek, seemingly channeling Diane Keaton, were also exceptional.

Much of the movie is also laugh-out-loud funny, with the eye-rolling and antic gestures of Ms. Spencer and the campy cut-ups of Leslie Jordan, easily equaled by Bryce Dallas Howard's pathetic villainy. Yet some black cultural pundits still suggested that this film, in the tradition of "Imitation of Life" or "The Little Foxes," merely perpetuated a host of old harmful stereotypes.

 

 

 

What I worried about was something more sinister. Every African-American family, irrespective of relative privilege or wealth, has had members who worked as servants for whites. So I worried that the "Satan sandwich" of black servitude, so familiar to us, would be sugarcoated and trivialized beyond both recognition or utility.

 

Dr. Ruth Simmons, President of Brown University, recently honored by alumni of color at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, expressed some of the same sort of misgivings.  "What did you think of the movie The Help...", she was ask by arthor and PBS moderator Alison Stewart, 88'.   

 

 

For a woman like Dr. Simmons, a native of race riven East Texas, this was an acute question. The woman who would become Smith College’s first black president, who, moving on to Brown, became the Ivy League’s first African American woman president, was the  youngest of 12 children. She was impressed early on by her parents incessant hard work. While her father farmed, her mother, who died when Ruth Simmons was just 15, had worked  as a maid, doing ‘day work’. “ I would watch entranced as my mother did ironing. It struck me as a horrible, horrible thing to have to do. She was meticulous about eliminating every crease and perfecting the smoothness of each collar and cuff. But, learning to do one’s best, that was a valuable lesson…”

Ruth Simmons, her parents and siblings.  Asked concerning intrasigence and hostility encountered on her arrival at Brown, 'Who could you talk to?' Dr. Simmons replied, "No one! But," she added, "I have 12 brothers and sisters. They could all tell me everything about how to run Brown!" Ask later to name the proudest moment of her tenure at Brown, sighting a memorial to slavery just approved to be erected before the chapel, Dr. Simmons also noted the exilleration she felt at her installation, where her entire family were in attendance.  

 

An individual of exceptional qualities, Ruth Simmons is an educator who embodies all of America's sacred promise.  As an imperfect place, conceived out of oppression and slavery, our nation is redeemed and ever-more-perfected, by the extention of ever-greater and greater opportunity, inclusion and participation. Embarking on a course meant to make this promise and these ideas real, to make them meaningful, too often neglecting her own biological children and friend's she says she avoids so as to evade their charges of being abandoned, Ruth Simmons has evolved into the Roman's true, 'bountiful mother'.

 

 

Arms out-stretched, she has become the golden Alma Mater, beautifully personified by Daniel Chester French.  Certainly this is how some of New York's most talented African Americans who are Brown Alums regard her.   Wherever she travels in fact, across the globe, irrespective of faith, race, gender or class, countless others have come to feel this way about her as well. In retirement, stepping down as Brown's chief, Simmons will assume a professorship in the university's Africana Studies Department. One feel certain that in this role, with her richly varied perspective, Ruth Simmon's relation of the American saga will be similarly abundant and multifaceted. 

 

 

 

On February, 22 2012, State Senator Bill Perkins,  joined by 200 fellow Brown alums of color, gave tribute to retiring President Ruth Simmons  at the renowned Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 

 

 

 Sheila Bridges the prominent interior designer. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 Singer and composer Gordon Chambers.

 

 

 

 

 

State Senator Bill Perkins with his daughter, actress, Margaret Odette.

 

 

 

Conceding that the Help was brilliantly acted,  Dr. Simmons both as  a scholar and as her mother’s daughter issued the critical observation of how in standard Hollywood fashion, it was an a-historic depiction. It gave those women a voice and a courage that would have gotten them killed.!”

 

 

 

 

What lives they led, our recent ancestors who worked in service! The hoops they had to jump through were never-ending, and expectations of their duties defy belief:

"I had to spend half my pay to get my new pea-green hat out of lay-away in order to feel better. I had scrubbed that lady's kitchen floor on my hands and knees, and she said, 'Louise, the floor is not clean. Do it again!' and I had no choice, I had to do the floor over."

 

 

Married at 16, my Father's fun-loving mother, Louise Harris, was divorced and working doing 'day work' by the time she was 18.

 

These words belong to my grandmother, speaking of working in Akron, Ohio during the Great Depression. My mom's Aunt Cora, also living in Akron, in the North, had her stories, too. Like those of my father's great-grandmother, Mama Emma, which had been related to Aunt Cora, the most chilling of their tales involved white men, the sons, husbands, relations and guests of the ladies for whom they worked.

"This was the North, but they simply assumed that, besides cooking, washing, ironing, serving, cleaning, shopping and taking care of children, you were also there for their pleasure!" Aunt Cora exclaimed at lunch, following my great-grandmother's funeral. She was reminiscing with a family friend who had worked for the Firestone family, but I'd taken in every word.

  

 

1944: Aunt Cora and her friends, servants to some of Akron, Ohio's most affluent families, by the way they dressed, through the quality of their lines and menus, were determined to emulate their employers.   

 

What wonderful lemon-coconut layer cakes Aunt Cora learned to make cooking for white folks! Her fruit cakes, aspics, Waldorf salads, lamb chops, chicken à laKing and Lobster Newburg were wonderful, too. As an accomplished cook, Aunt Cora was always in demand, and several friends had fallen out when one, offering better pay and more time off, had "stolen" her from another.

  

 

 

"Married or single, old or young, these men, most men, were always pestering you," Aunt Cora told me when I was only around 5. "It was even worse in the South. That's how your Mama Willie was born."

 

 

Willie Mae Adams, my great-grandmother, known as Mama Willie; her mother, Emma Jones, known as Mama Emma, who's holding me; Mama Willie's son, Alexander Leroy Adams, Sr., who made the photograph and is standing behind her; and Mama Willie's grandson, my dad, Alexander Leroy Adams, Jr. (1956)

With lank, silky, blonde hair and brilliant, china-blue eyes, Mama Willie, my father's grandmother, looked white. She never worked as a maid. Her mother, aunt and grandmother each had, and so did both of my parents' mothers, but not Mamma Willie. Still, she was terribly race-proud, which meant that she was always shocking whites who'd just finished disparaging my dad during some track meet or other athletic contest, by informing them that he was her grandson and how proud she was of him.

 

My dad, Alex Adams, during his abortive term at Moorehouse in 1952, on the basketball court at the University of Akron in 1961 and a year before his death in 2011. 

 

  

 

Brought up on a steady TV diet of "The Flintstones," "Dennis the Menace" and "Leave It to Beaver," I, too, was taken aback one morning.

 

My family, the Adamses, Easter 1962.

"Are you going to be my good little colored boy today, Mike?" Mama Willie had asked me.

"No! I'm going to be your good little white boy!" I'd shouted back. But even at 4, I suspected that there was reason to be defensive about the position I was insisting upon. You see, this was my "doll test," and my loving and adoring Mama Willie, who kept me whenever she could, was my white doll, emblematic of all that was good, true and lovely. Her house on Diagonal Road, with lush flower beds, a cast-iron-railed veranda, a picture window, a working fireplace and Duncan Phyfe reproductions, was the the grandest owned by any member of our family. Better than anyone else, she understood me. She had even defied my dad and given me a beautiful, yellow, toy washing machine, with a wringer that actually worked.

"But Baby, you're colored!" she said.

"No! I'm white, like you!" I implored, rejecting her absurd assertion.

"Baby, I'm not white, and neither are you!" she laughed, intending to defuse my hurt.

 

 

 

But even running home to the comforting arms of my brown-skinned mother, who, with tender patience, wiped away my tears, I'd sensed that Mama Willie was really right. I was not, could not be, clever, cute or precocious like Dennis, Beaver or Oppie. Instead, just like other darker blacks, I'd have to become accustomed to being reviled and despised, dismissed as savage, ignorant, ugly or inept, like Farina, Buckwheat or the natives on "Tarzan."

 

 

  

My still-beautiful mom in 1956 and now!

 

It was this incident that had prompted my great-grandmother to reveal to me that her father had been a white man, that her parents had not been married. Just a few years later I contradicted my own negative expectations of unawareness. Exasperated, Aunt Cora, learning that Mama Willie had taken me with her to visit one of her son's "outside" children, asked me, with outraged indignation, "What's wrong with your grandmother? Why is Willie always claiming these bastard children?"

"Maybe," I responded calmly, "it's because she's one herself?"

Stunned by the wisdom of the innocent, Aunt Cora was so impressed that she exclaimed, "Bless your heart! You're right. You're right!" Then, relating a story told to her years before by Mama Emma, Aunt Cora shared with me the secret of Mama Willie's white father. She started as matter-of-factly as if we were both 60, embellishing the basic story that Mama Willie had already outlined.

At 18, Mama Willie's mother, Mama Emma, had waited table for an Irish-American storekeeper in Columbus, Ga. But Mamma Willie had mentioned nothing about sexual imposition or rape. Aunt Cora, by contrast, conveyed a first-hand account direct from the victim. The young palor maid-waitress was surprised as she walked home from work by her upstanding employer, 73 years old and the father of 12 white children, and mounted on his horse.

"Lie down over there in that ditch, Emma," he told her. "You know what you got to do."

Even as a child, utterly ignorant of sexual mechanics, I'd appreciated the enormity and wrong of what had occurred.

 

 An An African American Rainbow!  My great-grandmother Mama Willie as a girl; her grandmother Bellamay; Mama Willie's aunt Annie; and Mama Willie's mother, Mama Emma.

One way or another, such encounters were a constant hazard for black servants, including the 14-year-old nursemaid mother of actress Edna Lewis Thomas, and Strom Thurman's 16-year-old maid/mistress Carrie Butler. Not bothering to acknowledge this particular menace, "The Help" fails to be all that it might have been.

Additionally, no one's black child, certainly not in the 1960s and probably not even now, would have ever antagonistically barged into the middle of a party where her mama was serving lunch, thereby having her thrown out. Whether living in the North as a college-trained professional, or in the South as a laborer who had left school in the fifth grade, no black child would have ever been so clueless and even cruel, especially given that this character's mama loved her white folks. Not even an Angela Davis would have done that.

However, neither this, nor the ahistorical untidiness of the white hero's hair, nor the movie's anachronistic use of rubrum lilies really matters. Powerfully, affectingly, this film tells a story many blacks and whites would rather forget, how black women stepped up and did what they must to survive. That's a story important enough to make all the story's faults, whether stylistic or more substantive, minor by contrast.

It's also a stranger tale, one about child-rearing and cultivating courage or encouraging hate, a story of the divided and often absent affections of one's parents or caregivers. How ironic that so many white children, those most intimately nurtured, even suckled and loved, by black second mothers still became virulently racist! But is that any different from misogynist sons, simultaneously resentful of and totally dependent upon women? What makes so many sons raised by my most fervently feminist friends so determined to get back at Mommy?

It's been suggested that, in time, Thomas Jefferson came to view miscegenation as the ultimate solution to America's race problem. Perhaps, in centuries to come, he'll be proven right, but thus far, mixing races has been a mixed blessing at best: in some cases it's been a curse whereby certain mixed blacks, coming to believe that education, achievement and social class trump race, routinely lord it over their less privileged, darker brethren. Of course, embracing the fallacy that anything short of actually "passing" can accord the status of being regarded as an honorary white person is sure to bring on disappointment, too.

 

 

What makes the persisting higher status offered mixed-race blacks specious is the way it unavoidably reinforces the deceit of white superiority. All the same, like so many lies, it can be an alluring deception. Even as one comes up against its limitations, it can beguile one insidiously. Sooner or later, limitation upon limitation, following the illusion of possibility and promise, that mind arrangement begins to take its toll.

For my friend Marguerite Marshall Blake, who was well practiced at emphasizing the positive, "mulatto," as she might have been characterized on the 1930 census, was never "tragic."

She died, at age 90. A recipient of plenty of woe, she always embraced joy. One poignant expression of her deep affection toward me occurred not long after we met in the late 1980s. Aware that I was gay but unattached, aware even that I was lonely, she urged, "You might consider getting married, to a woman. I know that you are gay, but lots of gay men have done this. You're so charming, intellectual and elegant, many woman would find you a great catch, and you like children... you'd make a wonderful father..."

Some people are heroic or become famous because of their wealth, their jobs, their husband or their children. The loving and devoted wife for over 40 years of groundbreaking African-American Harlem police detective Warren Blake, none of these factors applied to Marguerite. Apart from being a caring person toward friends and others who came to her for help, especially once a loved one had died, something else made her a notable person.

As a 16-year-old, Marguerite Marshall, who loved the movies, inexplicably, dreamed of helping make people beautiful. Her talented mother danced at the Cotton Club, but she wanted to become a plastic surgeon. Imagine a woman, an African-American woman, becoming a plastic surgeon in the late 1930s!

 

 

Marge also used to walk past the extraordinary, 30-room limestone house at 10 St. Nicholas Place, at the corner of 150th Street, built by circus showman James Anthony Bailey. With her Wadleigh High School friends, Nellie and Edith, she'd dream about what it would be like to live there. One day, she impulsively rang the bell and asked the owner, Dr. Franz Koempel, and his wife Bertha, if she could have the right of first refusal if the house was ever sold. Koempel was famous internationally as a pioneering X-ray specialist. A founder of the Steuben Society, he and his wife spent each summer at their villa in Bavaria.

Several years later a ''For Sale'' sign appeared on the Koempel's lawn, and Marge rang the bell again, reminding the owners of their promise. The widowed Bertha Koempel happily conceded that an understanding existed, but she insisted that any acquisition must also include two shingled houses north of hers, which had been acquired years earlier to protect the house's light and air. The asking price was $86,000, just $6,000 more than the house had cost to erect in 1888. It was an astonishing amount for most blacks of the period.

 

 

 

Marge, her husband and parents, who all worked, pooled their resources. ''There was a lot of scraping around and getting it together, but I got the house,'' she later recalled.

Marguerite Marshall Blake lived there from 1951 until 2007, operating a funeral home on the ground floor since 1955.

This was how one of New York's most extraordinary landmarks was saved from total destruction. Subsequently the Blakes were inundated by offers to buy their house, inevitably from whites. Warren felt that these prospective buyers were often motivated, at least in part, by a feeling that their house was "too good, too special for blacks to own."

  

 

 

This magnificent structure, then, is his and Marge's enduring monument. Thanks to them, generations not yet born will be able to enjoy this gift from our past to the future, and the true hero of this story, of course, is the beautiful, kind and ingenious lady, Marguerite Marshall Blake. All of us who knew her were blessed, and, through her foresight, she blesses everyone, forever!

Jane White, who grew up nearby at Sugar Hill's ultra-desirable Colonial Parkway Apartments at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, was yet another girl who, though never having to consider becoming a maid, nonetheless understood how much race matters. Indeed, the Whites' household, headed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's aptly named officer, Walter F. White, were among that distinct minority of blacks who themselves employed household help.

 

 

What was such affluence and advantage like during Harlem's golden age? I once called actress Jane White at her Greenwich Village apartment to ask for an interview. She was very accommodating, despite being politely reticent. Could I write her a note before we met to talk?

  

 

I never did, so my sense of loss learning that she died, age 88, last summer, was acute. Since then, I have learned that despite a host of steady roles on Broadway and TV and at cabarets, Ms. White felt cheated. Educated at Smith, where Ruth Simmons later became the first African American to lead a Seven Sisters School, her progress represents a milestone of black accomplishment as well. But too dark to be "convincingly" white, while regarded by many producers and directors as too light to be "authentically" black, she was indignant about her limited opportunities. Because of that complex construct, race, the stardom she felt ought to have been hers never came. What else did Jane White feel? What might she have thought about the movie version of "The Help"?

  

 

 

Not knowing convinces me of two things: if we don't want whites to always be the ones who gain acclaim for the daring of telling "our" story, we had better get busy. Moreover, in order to best tell some histories, we had better hurry, as well, before it's too late. Thanks to remarkable Ruth Simmons, both task will be more easily done than before.

 

 

The River Club at New York's Best Address!, 80 Years on, Part IV

Except for having no golf course, the River Club at 447 East 52nd Street is as close to a country club as one could find in the middle of New York City. Headquartered on five levels at the base of River House, in addition to more conventional recreation facilities it once boasted an enormous marina for members' yachts.

If River House is Manhattan's only apartment with its own club, beyond a mere gymnasium, from very early in the city's history, living in a club-like boarding house had greater cachet than taking a flat in an apartment house. In fact, the first cooperative apartment buildings were formed as exclusive associations in the early 1880's. Called 'home clubs', cooperatives were private stock companies. Even now, the size of any given apartment occupied by a shareholder, its cost and the expense of maintaining common upkeep, for services, for taxes and mortgages, remain directly related to the amount of stock one might hold.

 

 

Many of Manhattan's earliest grand cooperatives, The Berkshire from 1881, the Osborne from 1883, or the Dakota from 1884, were explicitly designed to house an aspirant establishment. The idea of varying room sizes and shapes, of creating a series of as many as three different levels in a single suite, much like a house, of including fireplaces and of employing ornate decorations and fine materials, were successful ploys utilized to woo the well-off from their private residences.

Unfortunately, especially at co-ops on the East Side, in close proximity to the mansions of the elite, another tactic calculated to attract the best occupants, was to appeal to their longstanding biases. Here, newcomers and non-WASPs were disdained. Jews, in particular, found they were not welcome at buildings considered to be 'top-flight.' The most fashionable were the most exclusive, emphasizing the notion that people with whom one shared one's roof, ought to share enough general interest and characteristics in common, as members of any well-run club might, ought to be 'nice people', ought to be 'people like us', to be 'people we know!'

 

 

 

River House sought to take the notion of tribal solidarity, which once so characterized New York high society, to a new level, one which, apart from a small building Emily Post built with friends, had seldom before been achieved. To do this, its management adopted the same sort of communal services for meals, entertaining and sports that had initially been employed 50 years before, at residential hotels and long before that, at private clubs. The assumption was that at River House one had a community made up entirely of people who were socially beyond reproach. In fact, just as all guests at any residential hotel were free to make use of all the amenities, so, early advertisements infer that, becoming a shareholder at River House, conferred automatic eligibility on one for River Club membership too.

What a powerful inducement living in a club-like building with an actual club on the premises was, and is. Chartered in 1930, well before New York society's favorite 'family club' had even been completed, the Times could observe in a headline that, ''River Club Interests Society''. They reported on the eventual provision for abundant opportunities for exercise and amusement in the most fulsome surroundings, including: two tennis courts, three squash courts, a gym, and an arcaded pool

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The feature through which the new club most lived up to its dignified sounding name, however, was to be a block-long pier. ''For the convenience of members addicted to their yachts and motor boats." This boat landing, it was stressed, would be strictly "private." The Real Estate Record and Guide seems to have fully grasped the appeal of speedy, easy travel between a country place and town

 

 

 

 

How subtlety conspicuous it was to consume so much energy, so many man-hours, traveling in isolated comfort. All danger of having to forebear the public's vulgar gaze or worse, as on a commercial boat or a train, was eliminated. ''It will be possible to step out of a boat and be whisked immediately by fast elevator to the topmost floor of the building," their reporter predicted.

 

 

 

 

Presenting a diverting and ever changing panorama for lunching or lounging club members, indoors and out, apart from the New York Yacht Club's Wall Street mooring, no other private dock was as active.

 

 

 

Touchingly anticipated for a generation, first by William de Rham's dance classes and then by his widow's, the River Club was a venue for some of the city's most select tea dances, 'small dances' and balls. Bridge games, tennis matches and actual amateur tournaments also became the club's stock in trade, adding luster to an exalted reputation.

"It is possible," boasted one early member with great satisfaction, "to pass through all the major cycles of life -- birth, debut, marriage, anniversaries, divorce and even an affair -- without ever once setting foot outside of the River Club..."

 

 

 

The River Club ballroom, lined in panels of blue glass and silver leaf, was described in Town and Country magazine in 1932, by Augusta Owen Patterson as, "a sapphire with many facets set in platinum..." It was admired as among the most beautiful in the city. Leading up to the Second World War, in 1941, it was the locale of a very different sort of gathering. The threat of socialism, engendered by the Great Depression, saw many German and other European royals and aristocrats make common cause with decidedly déclassé Nazis. So too were a surprising number of uneasy upper class Americans attracted during this dark epoch to authoritarianism.

Isolationism and intensified anti-Semitism were attendant enthusiasms of society figures that were to join the America First Committee at a pivotal meeting held at the River Club. Perhaps their most prominent convert was Charles Lindbergh. Scholar Max Wallace considers Lindbergh to have been "a well-intentioned but bigoted and misguided Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people." And, as for River House or the River Club, as late as 1954 no Jews lived at, or belonged to, either one.

 

 

 

Some suggest that the widely perceived, if unmentioned, partiality at River House and the River Club, so angered powerful New York planning tsar Robert Moses, that he happily eliminated their dockage to construct the East River Drive in retribution. This seems illogical inasmuch as, for all their prejudices, no other fashionable riverside apartment along the roadway's route had a record that was any better.

Indeed, widely divergent compromises were worked out by the city with the affected apartment buildings. On 57th Street, at the co-op One Sutton Place South, almost all of the building's beautifully landscaped back garden was appropriated for the highway. However, through amicable negotiations, it was replicated on a deck over the roadbed, which was leased back to the shareholders.

In distinction, at 10 Gracie Square, at 84th Street, a double-decked highway means that the co-op's first three floors were left facing the blank wall of an unattractive dry moat. So sharp a contrast here is rumored to have arisen out of the unyielding opposition Moses encountered from Vincent Astor.

If, at River House the highway is only on a single level, it is the same level as their original dockside landing. Certainly the city built a high wall separating the River Club garden from the highway. There is ample light and air still found past the large windows of the lounge, even if a once expansive outlook is now highly proscribed with one's view confined to a vine-hung wall and a few gnarled trees and shrubs. Outside this wall, beyond the roaring freeway, neither a new riverside landing, completed in 1940, nor an elevated walkway erected to reach it, could ever make up for the loss of such a romantic scene, so picturesque a situation. Long vanished, this substitute yacht landing apparently saw little use, and the walkway does not appear in photographs from the 1950s.

 

 

 

"The River Club," states historian Christopher Gray, noting its marked diminution, "still exists. But on what is now its garden terrace, where the original landing once sat, one cannot hear the water -- only the sound of tires."

 

Today the largely past difficulty for Jews attempting to live in buildings like River House remains the plight of blacks and some Latinos.

"Just look at how many co-ops up and down Fifth and Park are all white," says Michael Gross, who wrote, 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building. "I would be surprised if there wasn't de facto discrimination going on all the time," he says.

According to a 2008 report by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, the vast majority -- 84 percent -- of co-ops in Manhattan are occupied by households identified as white. City-wide, it's a fast shrinking demographic. Yet, due to the public policy of the past 8 years, encouraging ever more luxury housing, evaluating all five boroughs, it's a category that makes up 60 percent of co-op households. Discrimination hasn't disappeared, many urban planners insist, it is simply more difficult to detect.

 

 

Besides detailing Martin A. Siegel's extraordinary fall from grace, Den of Thieves, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James B. Stewart, also chronicles the once respected investment banker's failed bid to join the River Club. Well before he became embroiled in the notorious insider trading scandals of the 1980's, alongside Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, notwithstanding his prominence at Kidder, Peabody & Co., or his impeccable sponsorship, Seigel's eminence as a takeover specialist struck many members as unduly unsavory.

In the long run, Muriel Siebert was a different matter altogether. In 1976, Ms. Siebert acquired a River House apartment for $115,000, which translated into 320 shares of the building's stock, or almost one percent of the outstanding shares. Doing so, she helped to start to eliminate at least some of most overt discriminatory practices that prevailed there.

 

 

 

In an illuminating memoir, published seven years ago, Changing the Rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick, this diminutive, determined Cleveland, Ohio transplant, who became the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967, relates a fascinating tale about how, both socially and in business, she fought it out with the worst of the 'big boys,' retained her dignity and mostly won!

Seeming, from our current vantage point, perhaps as needlessly oblique, one cannot argue with the effectiveness of Muriel Siebert's strategic course of action. One gambit for dealing with prospective clients whose anti-Semitic jokes at lunch she found unfunny was to send them a card. In an obscure shop once, by chance, she found one that she thought might work and brought them all.

"Roses are reddish, Violets are bluish, In case you don't know (open the card) I am Jewish"

  

 

 

As New York's old-line WASP aristocracy declined in prominence, growing much less rich than it had been before, increasingly, wealthy Jews became less reticent about challenging discrimination. By 1960, even River House and the River Club had begun to open up, if ever so tentatively. In 1985, perhaps 15 out of 80 families who lived here were Jewish, while at the River Club, with 1,000 members, only ten were Jews.

  

 

 

This sort of blatant under-representation, wholly without apology, was far less amusing to Ms. Siebert even than bigoted jokes. For the same reasons as her neighbors who were members, she wished to join the River Club. Despite sponsorship from her friends Robin and Angier Biddle Duke, her proposal was declined.

She had hardly achieved her high position in a male sanctum without some knowledge and appreciation of numbers, naturally. Analyzing figures related to River House stock, it seemed to her that the numbers just didn't add up properly. Occupying a comparatively large portion of the building's square footage, the aloof River Club, ought, by her calculation and by law, to be assessed a greater, more proportionate share of the monthly maintenance. Her lawyers confirmed her worst suspicions. She and other Jewish residents of River House, left languishing for years on a membership waiting list, were in fact subsidizing the River Club!

In accord with the demeanor of any other River Club matron, Muriel Siebert relates what happened next with a certain circumspection, and names no names.

"In October 1987, only two days after Black Monday, I went to a meeting of the co-op board and explained the inequity. I don't know if they were all in a weakened condition on account of seeing their investments decimated, but the word Jewish was never mentioned, and everyone behaved like ladies and gentleman. I was elected a member of the club along with other [Jewish] residents of the building," she says.

In light of the building's history of precarious finances, a notice sent to shareholders explaining how the club would hereafter pay its fair share of cost had to be widely welcomed that December. More importantly, this bulletin had outlined how, "Henceforth applications for club member-ship by tenant/owners will be accorded the same priority consideration as is now given near relatives of club members." 

 

 

 

 

"Now," Siebert says with evident pride, politely subdued, "people of all backgrounds are admitted, even those who do not live in the building." Although River House has yet to have any African American owners, by 1987, thanks largely to Muriel Siebert, at least one family belonging to the august River Club, home away from home to Whitneys, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, was that of Edgar Thomas Williams, Jr., who is black.

To be continued...

River House at 80: Still NY's Best Address, Part V

A great deal has changed at 435 East 52nd Street since the River Club lost its yacht basin in the late 1930's. Or, for that matter, since the Times sensationally reported on May 6, 1939,

 

 

"Customs Raid on Ayer Penthouse Brings Seizure of $25,000 in Attire; Clothing and Gems, Allegedly Smuggled by Widow of Surgeon, Taken by Federal Agents on Tip From 'Mary Doe'. "

 

 

 

 

Sounding surprisingly like their tabloid rivals, the ordinarily staid Times and Henry Luce's Time Magazine, among other journals, (Henry Luce leased from Mrs. Bondero Macy, for $7,300 yearly, a River House duplex with 15 rooms, 5 baths and a lavatory.), outlined to scores of readers suffering through the persistent Great Depression how still another 'poor' widow was making unaccustomed economies as well. Only, hers were unorthodox and quite illegal.

 

 

 

 

"A squad of customs agents, trained to spot a gown by Molyneaux without seeing the label, rummaged...through the penthouse of Mrs. James C. Ayer of New York and Nassau, widow of the surgeon and painter, it was disclosed yesterday. They seized jewelry, gowns and lingerie suspected of having been smuggled...agents waited one evening last week outside of River House, swank apartment building on Manhattan's east side, until a limousine drove up and deposited a stately, well-dressed dowager... Colonial Dame and D. A. R. [officer], widow of a distinguished doctor who inherited millions of the American Woolen Co. fortune. The customs men followed her up to the... penthouse...Mrs. Ayer lay prostrate on a couch. An informer whom they would call only "Mary Doe" had told the Federal men where they would find Paris finery worth some $26,000... If Mrs. Ayer is proved guilty, "Mary Doe" stands to make some $15,000--one-quarter the duties & penalties assessed by the U. S. The U. S. Attorney's office refused to identify Mary, but said she was not the accused's maid..."

 

 

As the economy rebounded in the aftermath of the Second World War, the paper of record could announce more happily, on Wednesday, August 11, 1948,

"The tenants of River House, one of Manhattan's outstanding apartment buildings, have purchased the building on a cooperative ownership basis to save themselves from eviction and to prevent the structure from being remodeled into small suites, it became known last night..."

 

One unambiguous indication that things were not idyllic for everyone at River House, however, was a suicide on January 31, 1954. Pictured on the beach with his bride on their honeymoon in 1923,

 

 

 

 

Edwin Howard Armstrong seems to personify contentment and happy days. A court decision in favor of RCA, challenging his authorship of FM radio, had a devastating impact. Stress and unrelenting work helped undermine his once happy marriage. Diving from his 13th floor window, striking the street below, Armstrong died. His widow appealed the court decision and eventually, by 1967, won a substantial award, establishing once and for all her husband as the true inventor of FM radio and other vital innovations.

 

 
Adele Astaire with a necklace she aquired that once belonged to Linda Lee Porter.
 

 

 

Adele Astaire, the dancer who became Lady Charles Cavendish,

 

 

 

Huntington Hartford, the grocery store fortune heir, turned eccentric collector, the violinist Fritz Kritzler, producer Joshua Logan,

 

 

 

 

Dina Merril, the actress, who, in the movie Butterfield Eight, exemplified all that the indictment "New York socialite" once inferred: all the 'best people' continued to move to River House and yet it continued to have finical difficulties.

At least one factor that helped put posh River House on sounder financial footing decades after it opened, is the wildly inflated value of cooperative shares. Now the average price of a Manhattan apartment unit is $1,500,000 and this average figure is for a rather pedestrian apartment at that. Yet, as late as 1970 no apartment sale in New York had ever exceeded $1,000,000. At today's River House, indeed, there is none for less. More importantly, there is a growing insistence on economic exclusivity, roughly proportionate to relaxed barriers favorable to non-Protestant residents, who perhaps have a modest pedigree, but who boast the most opulent resources imaginable.

With a long history of welcoming the socially eminent, River House's co-op board is now extremely selective, using quite different criteria. Once, a few millions and a place in the Social Register were adequate credentials for most who aspired to live here and join 'the club'. But today, maintains Corcoran Group broker Ellen Kourtides, "one needs strong financials for this sort of building," explaining, in upper-class code, that its residents place a high premium on 'privacy'. "We're talking about liquid assets. It can be as much as four to six times the price of the apartment. If financing is allowed, it's not because you need to finance your apartment to move in, it's for tax purposes."

 

 

 

Nibbling smoked almonds with my refreshing goblet of Clamato juice, during my second visit with Marta Raymond at River House, I explained how my anticipated drink with Philip Johnson's younger sister, Theodate, and her husband, Dr. Scott Severns at the Dakota, had been abruptly called off. My special friend, Jeanette Johnson Dempsey, the architect's elder sister, had explained how her sibling was sorry but she had had to move since we talked of my coming! "When the maintenance exceeded $1,000, Theo thought that outrageous," said Mrs. Dempsey. We were sitting in the white carpeted living room of Mrs. Dempsey's lake-front condo in Cleveland, where such a figure seemed even madder.

 

"I must say I found it outrageous also when our maintenance here reached that amount and now it's much more!" Mrs. Raymond answered. What chic she had, wearing deep gray flannel trousers, a tailored shirt, like a man's boiled-shirt for evening wear and her husband's lusciously large pearl shirt studs and cufflinks.

 

A host of current real estate web sites illuminate how dramatically values have advanced at River House, even accounting for 'cost correction' following the 'down-turn'. According to the New York Observer, one River House apartment has fluctuated in price over the last 10 years, between an initial $17,500,000, to 11,500,000, to $29,000,000, following a renovation. Then it dropped to $22,700,000, was lowered further to $18,900,000 and is now, since October, available for $13,900,000.

Alternately, one can purchase an apartment with 3 bedrooms for from $4,900,000 to $10,900,000 (updated 08/01/2009), and 5 Bedrooms for $12,300,000 (updated 09/25/2009).

 

 

 

  

 

  

A constant prevailing throughout River House over 80 years, has been the tendency of luxuriously apointed apartments there to exemplary current fashion.  Some have been suede hung, with tortoise shell and steel mantelpieces, embellished by garnitures of rock crystal.  Others were essays of polite timmidity, filled with tasteful, antique, 'brown furniture', contrasted with safe white walls and posh white carpets.  Yet all the rooms shown here, period or modern, tame or exuberant, are unmistakably evocative of their specific time as the milieu of the monied class during a particular epoch.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In yet another spacious domain, there are 14 rooms including 5 bedrooms, 4 full bathrooms, a formal dining room, and a library. The listing states glowingly, "The apartment's upper level has an entry from a private elevator landing for convenient access. There is a large bay window looking onto the river and two bedrooms with private balconies that face the river. Additionally, there are staff rooms that can accommodate six individuals. The building features a private driveway, a circular drop-off for cars to come and go, and a garage. This space can be had for $13,500,000."

 

 

Three years ago a 16 room apartment, owned by Francesco Galesi, the former WorldCom director, was confidently offered for $50,000,000, It has since come down, now listed for $35,000,000. Replete with a 1,242-square-foot drawing room with 11-foot ceilings, it is described as "A home with sweeping river views, this residence with 4,806 square feet of interior space offers an oversized set-back terrace (735 square feet) off of three [rooms]." Measuring 11 by 11feet, the master dressing room is larger than either of the duplex's maids' rooms. There are 8 additional bedrooms, 7 baths, and a powder room. What's the maintenance here? It's only $12,600 each month.

 

 

How quaint such figures make Gloria Vanderbilt's May 1980 law suit, alleging that River House had refused to sell her an apartment for $1,100,000. She suspected that her rejection was due to racial bias, because of her close friendship with debonair singer Bobby Short, who was African American. The building's board said it wanted to avoid "unwanted publicity."And it's still debated as to whether or not the board genuinely disapproved Ms. Vanderbilt's seemingly serial alliances, mercantile success or her black boyfriend. It's not gay Bobby Short to whom people are referring, of course, but to photographer Gordon Parks, who had a history of romantic intrigue at least equal to Vanderbilt's own.

 

 

At any rate, a month later, Mrs. Cooper, now best known as the news-anchor's mother, dropped her suit, as Bobby Short reported to the Times, "I'm old enough to be sophisticated about these things."

 

 

Why had Gloria Vanderbilt-DeCicco-Stokowski-Lumet-Cooper further risked the opprobrium of her peers in pursuit of a flat? Ultimately the answer seems to be sentiment. Inasmuch as several of her near relations lived here and many more belonged to the River Club, she had been in and out of its revolving door from the time the building opened. Indeed, for several extended periods before her first marriage, and even afterward, she lived here in the tower suite of her cousin, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.

 

 

 

 

Writer William Saroyan got to know this particular apartment well through dating the highly precocious Miss Vanderbilt. A 'naive', 29-year-old Saroyan reminisced about his first date with 16-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt, ensconced in these River House digs, with considerable fondness.

"Gloria...poor little rich girl. Fabulous God-damned apartment. River House is a pretty hintcy place. High ceilings, not like a New York place...She had a two-storey apartment, and in part of it they'd gone right through the ceiling to make what they call a cathedral ceiling. In New York, that's unheard-of." Anyway, so we're making out a little bit on the couch, like kids do [sic, she's 16, he's 29!], and at a certain point, I heard some noise. I said, "What's that? Is somebody here?" She said, "That's Nanny." I said, "What?" Her childhood nurse was living with her. God..."

 

Later instead of Vanderbilt, he married Carol Marcus, the debutante turned actress with whom Gloria in those days haunted the Stork Club. Saroyan professed to 'abhor the limited artificiality of their class.' This didn't, however, prevent him from accepting generous gifts from Marcus' family, nor from leaving his wife, upon discovering that looks notwithstanding, she was Jewish! With memories of such men and of her unusual family imbued in every room, is it surprising that Gloria Vanderbilt so desired a place of her own in the River House tower?

  

 

 

Henry and Nancy Kissinger live here, so do Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and his wife, the blonde American financier, in an apartment designed by the decorator chosen by the Obamas, Michael Smith.

  

 

 
Best-selling novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford and her producer husband Robert Bradford,

 

 

 

 

had their rooms with a salubrious view, as do a select group of carefully vetted bankers, brokers, lawyers and European aristocrats. Once Salomon Brothers' chair, John Gutfreund moved here, into the same apartment that Gloria Vanderbilt so coveted, the River House board might well have wished that they had accepted the outré socialite instead.

The notoriety and disharmony the Gutfreunds brought with them to River House, where they acquired the lower two floors of Marshall Field's old triplex, were often blamed on the aspirations of the glamorous second Mrs. Gutfreund, Susan, a former beauty queen and airline stewardess. Some contend that what they term as Mrs. Gutfreund's 'unbecoming flamboyance' was derived from a desire to compensate for humble origins, driving her to 'try too hard'. "Despite their having $35,000,000 or $40,000,000, that was only a tenth of what some of the people they socialized with were worth," stressed an acquaintance. "That's not so," said a prominent architect, who is a friend of both women. "Her appreciation of lavishness is merely an expression of her passion for beauty; moreover, the Gutfreunds, they're far, far richer than only having $40,000,000, I can tell you!"

 

 

courtesy DPC New York Social Diary

 

Despite her friend's gallant defense, this acquaintance, and others, relished telling of Mrs. Gutfreund's supposed 'pettinesses'. Their criticism was meant to buttress arguments that she and her disgraced husband were somehow déclassé arriviste on the Manhattan social scene.

The lawsuit over the Gutfreunds' insistence on installing a winch on their upstairs neighbors' roof, to hoist a 22-foot Christmas tree up the side of the building and into their apartment, is the stuff of legend concerning 'bad manners' in 'good buildings'. A more mundane financer, Robert Postel and his wife, were the increasingly antagonized couple who dwelled above them. In her diverting book, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FAMOUS: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex,Maureen Orth explains a hostility that arose from slights and poor form, mostly on the part of Susan Gutfreund, including,

  

 

 

" her practice of turning out the light above a door that led to the neighbors' penthouse, apparently because she wanted visitors to think she lived on the top floor -- combined with her habit of telling guests to ''come to the penthouse'' -- led her alienated neighbors, more than once, to encounter strangers, including the designer Hubert de Givenchy, stepping off the elevator into their living room.

 

"We had a procession of masseurs, masseuses, piano tuners, someone delivering two thousand orchids for her ceiling," Robert Postel complained. But nothing quite compared with the 2 a.m. visitation by a group of formally dressed guests, one of them carrying a harp. Postel, clad only in his Jockey shorts, told them, ''Sorry, it's not my time to go."

 

As originally conceived 80 years ago, a collaboration among architects William Lawrence Bottomley and Sidney Wagner, decorator Ernesta Beaux, South African muralist Jan Juta, (who also worked on the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth and whose wife was a sister of the first Mrs. Marshall Field and of Brooke Astor's second husband), plasterer Dan Hopkins, blacksmith George H. Bergmann, and innumerable others, River House was a vision of supreme elegance. That not everyone is an admirer of this elegance, or of the elitism it represents, is indisputable. Even some residents, feeling wealth and ownership trump every other consideration; seem sometimes not to value what they have. Despite ample means, enough to make sensitive alterations, instead, sometimes occupants have marred this landmark's gracious loveliness with inappropriate single-light 'picture windows' or unsightly openings for air conditioners.

 

 

 

As for Ms. Laura Pels, profiled in the New Yorker, complimented on her apartment's East River view, all she can think to mention is,"... a shock she had a few years ago when she looked out a window and saw a corpse floating by."

Not I. If, like most people, I will never live there. I will at least retain a cherished memory coming unexpectedly upon a world that I had read about but never experienced previously. Saying she would like to buy one of my drawings,

 

 

 

 

Mrs. Raymond asked me to come for dinner the night following our second meeting. "It will be informal", she said to my relief, meaning that I needn't wear evening clothes. Mr. Raymond, wheeled in from his room, did wear a dinner jacket and black tie, as I imagined he must have most nights for a lifetime. His stately mate, however, wore a variation on her daytime attire, only her shirt and trousers were silk, instead of wool and organdy. She also wore enormous earrings with marquise diamonds and rubies.

 

 

 

The only other guest was a Swedish lady, somehow connected to the Museum of Modern Art Library. Mrs. Raymond's French cook made some wonderful chicken dish accompanied by a white sauce and an apple Charlotte with stiffly whipped cream. My kind hostess insisted that I have a second helping of everything! There were also several wines and I tried them all.

The windows were opened to the summer night, and as the Raymonds lived on a lower floor, above the highway's hum, one could hear the garden fountain. My moment of utter triumph was just prior to desert. Not before or since have I encountered a finger bowl dining out, but taking the vessel and its doily off the desert plate, I'd known exactly what to do. Unfortunately, this was just about when I began to feel that I might slip beneath the table.

 

 

 

Disdaining coffee heretofore, on this enchanted evening, of gin and tonic, vintage wines and green Chartreuse, how welcomed was the tiny cup of steaming black liquid, stirred with a golden spoon.

I have seen grander apartments. There have been more festive nights since, and even meals with more elaborate menus. But, much as with a first kiss, however awkward, with some early object of one's desire, I will always recall my dinner with the Raymonds, as magic, and think of River House, as Ali Baba's cave!

 

River House at 80, Still NY's Best Address, Part III

 

At River House, a glittering cosmopolitan tenancy helped to attract rich, self-made owners and mid-Westerners alike to aspire to live there.

 

 

 

 

Clare Booth and Henry Luce, Walter Hoving and his richly-widowed, older wife and Frederick W. Patterson of

 

 

 

Leaving an old-word manor house in Ohio after a bitter divorce, at River House Frederick W. Patterson and his new wife ask dynamic modernist Donald Deskey, to come up with something completely different.

the National Cash Register Co. of Dayton, Ohio had each moved here by mid-decade. From 1935 until about 1945, so anxious were shareholders about a growing deficit that they had authorized apartments to be rented with an option to buy. In 1938 a 6 room suite with four baths, four maids' rooms, a kitchen, pantry and servant's hall could be purchased for just $20,000!

That's just what George Perkins and Marta E. de Cedercrantz Raymond did in 1937. A compendium of 30's elegance with a collection of drawings by friends like Porter Woodruff and Jared French and a sophisticated mix of European and American furnishings, theirs was one of the more modest available in the esteemed building.

 

 

 
Mrs. Raymond in a gown called ''La Sirene'' (''the Mermaid''), designed by the audacious American couturier Charles James in Paris in 1938.

 

A former model and fashion editor whose father was a lawyer for the king of Sweden, Mrs. Raymond made what could have been a conventional decor into a smart personal environment.

Both living in Paris since the late 1920's, the Raymonds had met at a party, in 1931. Six-foot, one-inch tall, she spoke six languages and resembled Marlene Dietrich. A widower, he had been quickly smitten. Indeed, so impressed was the foot-shorter aspiring concert singer from Akron, whose Perkins grandfather had made him a beneficiary of a $3,000,000 spendthrift trust derived from investments in the B. F. Goodrich Tire & Rubber Co., that, that very afternoon, he made a note in his diary. Concerning a party he was to host the following week, it read "invite tall Swede."

Married on August 29, 1932, five years later, they moved to New York with Mr. Raymond's two children from his previous marriage. Stylish without being ostentatious, and traditional without being oppressive, encapsulating every aspect of a gracious and social way of life, River House was the Raymond's first choice for a base in the city, Marta Raymond told me at our first meeting.

 

 

Drain's "Jazz" screem was the focal-point of Mrs. Bradford Norman's green, white, silver and black Music Room.  The photo obove shows the popular hostess in 1933, outside of her Newport cottage. 

 

 

In the image above, from the October 1933 issue of Vogue, Drain's "Jazz" screen forms a luxe backdrop as Mrs. Norman entertainsMrs. Averell Harriman, Mr. Edward McIlvan Jr. and Mr. John Kennedy.
 

 

 

 

 

Reminiscent in its eclecticism to the Raymond apartment, the River House home of one-time dancer Mrs. Bradford Norman featured a music room with two pianos for impromptu concerts. This room also displayed the most arrestingly beautiful mirrored screen ever made, which was the work of French designer and portrait painter Etienne Drian. To learn more about the facinating history of the remarkable eglemoise "Jazz" screen, please rush to read the post of connoisseur par excellence, Aestheticus Rex at, Monday, May 23, 2011 .

 

Offered Clamato juice and salted almonds, I delighted over mahogany Empire furniture from the Stone House, silvered, shell-form grotto chairs, an array of monochrome Chinese porcelains, fancifully molded glass bottles and colored cut overlay glass decanters on the lacquered sideboard, mirrored commodes and the mirrored jambs and soffits of the windows reflecting sky and water.

 

Reverently eoccoativ, the River House pied-à-terre Joseph Mullen designed for Mr. and Mrs. William Robertson Coe, exhibited exactly the kind of excessively derivative style people like Marta Raymond or Mrs. Norman were trying to get away from.

 

1938

Yachtsman Jay Holmes, was a grandson of yeast magnate Charles Fleishman and  the son of noted physician Dr. Christian R. Holmes. The multi-millionaire's stylish River House apartment, boasting glass andirons, satin upholstery, indirect lighting and fir panneled walls, exuded Hollywood-influenced glamor as well as Mr. Holmes Swedish heritage. 

If River House had bewitched me with its enchantment from my first encounter, Tom Hoving, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's most dynamic director of all time, who during a respite as Parks Commissioner helped to stop Columbia from building a private gymnasium in a public Harlem park, regards it rather differently.

In a memoir posted onlineat artnet, entitled Artful Tom, that's every bit as compelling as Hoving's earlier bestseller Making the Mummies Dance, he relates how the opulent apartment occupied by his father, who variously headed Lord & Taylor, Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Co., came to embody all of the remoteness and false values he saw in his father and his second of three wives.

"My first meeting with my stepmother," Hoving recalls of River House, "is seared into my memory. The building had a large iron gate and a circular drive. The entrance was a revolving door and Nanny let me push it around a few times as the doorman looked on sourly.

My instant impression of the interior was yards and yards of black and white polished marble floors through long, wide corridors. The entrance opened up onto a spacious, elegant hall with a series of glass doors looking out over a small garden. In all the years I visited River House I was never allowed to enter that garden, which became for me the symbol of needless exclusivity. I wonder if this prohibition led to my egalitarian tendencies. I couldn't understand why I couldn't play there. And to this day I have been contemptuous of the trappings of wealth like gated communities that exclude anybody but the privileged."

 

 

 

Hoving's father and stepmother, Walter and Pauline , he explains, lived on the ninth floor. "The apartment door was open and two uniformed maids were standing there. One maid took our wraps and another guided us through a nearby door, which led into an oval library where my father and stepmother Pauline were standing... The library..., had a large fireplace on one side. Straight ahead was a bay window looking out over the East River and I stood for several minutes, entranced, as tug boats cruised by and that would become my favorite place in the apartment. The East Side highway was under construction and I spent hours watching the work. I remember a huge illuminated sign across the river, "Uneeda Biscuit."

The library gave way onto a long, rectangular salon filled with overstuffed sofas and chairs upholstered in gold and silver satin. Pauline smiled stiffly and said, "Little boys and girls must never put their fingers on this upholstery."

 

The room contained a concert piano (I never heard it played) with another fireplace (which I never saw used). I don't recall ever being invited into that grand salon. Chic late Impressionist paintings adorned the main wall -- they were by a fashionable painter of the early Twentieth century, Suzanne Eisendieck. One was a lovely, sweet woman dressed in a frilly white costume holding some white flowers on a whitish ground - she looked like the upholstery. Over the years I'd sit on the floor beneath the painting and look at it for hours. She was nicer than Pauline.

 

 

Formidable matron Pauline Hoving in her River House Drawing Room consults with inovative decorator William Pahlmann.

 

The salon entered into a spacious dining room. We were then taken through the bedrooms. Pauline's was a suite of three rooms, including a walk-in closet with a large safe with trays for her jewelry, which fascinated me. My father's suite had two rooms.

In the back were more family rooms and the servants' quarters. One room had a massage table and a stationary bike. I wanted to give the bike a try, but Pauline said it wasn't for "little boys." I never did use it. At the end of the corridor was a spacious, impeccably decorated room with twin beds, a dressing room and bath. This would be where I was sequestered the rare times I ever stayed overnight."

 

To be continued...

 

River House at 80: Still NY's Best Address, Part I

How odd that Harlem's leading inn of the 1850's-1870's, River House, stood above the banks of the East River. What an ironic coincidence that the architect for the 1930's most deluxe tower for the affluent also led the team that planned the Harlem River Houses, some of the nation's first federally subsidize housing for the poor, built in response to the Harlem race-riot of 1935.

 

 

 

Odder still is how I, an unknown from the provinces, black and gay, first found myself at lofty River House. The short answer is easy, it was a fortunate accident. I had wanted to find and explore the refined building since first seeing an article announcing its opening in the January 1932 issue of Arts & Decoration. This edition was among hundreds of old magazines in my friend Laura Schellschmidt's attic. Most now reside at the University of Akron's Bierce Library Archives, but I still have that number, so significantly featuring River House.

 

In 1982, newly 'out', coming to New York for the first time as an adult, my main objective was to meet direct descendants of the Perkins family who had founded Akron, Ohio in 1825 and built its imposing Stone House in 1837. Mrs. James Kellum Smith, the wife of an architect, was a member of the Lowman family, who were close Perkins relations. I was completely bowled over by her apartment in the Studio Building, by Charles Adams Platt, with its enormous double height dining room. Given a pleasant lunch of chicken salad with cool, dry white wine, beguiled by a fascinating exchange of Perkins lore, inevitably I was late for my meeting with her unknown cousin George Perkins Raymond and his wife Marta, a Swedish aristocrat.

 

 

I so lamented leaving such a nice and unusual talk that I momentarily even thought of calling to say I'd been unavoidably detained. Anyhow I had no idea, then, where East 52nd Street was in relation to Lexington Avenue at 66th Street. The only thing certain in those pre-cell phone days was that having just 20 minutes to reach my appointment, I was obliged to take a damned cab which, I could ill afford!

 

 

Loaded with one of my drawings, books and photo copies showing deceased Perkinses, using the interval to straighten my tie and organize my props; the ride had taken no time at all, and cost just $5.00.

 

 

    

Passing through the iron gates, before pulling into the cobbled forecourt, I hadn't even noticed the East River.

 

  

 

The tranquil River House Lobby and interiors of the River Club were designed by socialite Mrs. Samuel L. Barlow, who decorated under the name Ernesta Beaux. She began her career as Harry T. Lindeberg's in-house interior designer and was painted several times by her brilliant aunt, Cecilia Beaux. Mrs. Barlow was ably assisted by her friend, the English-trained South African painter Jan Juta. Heir to a publishing fortune, related to the Astors, Juta supplied an elegant eglemosie Mexican-fantasy landscape to adorn the apartment entrance. It is as surreal as it is decorative. To learn more about the well-connected artist, please see the insightful post of Aestheticus Rex, here,  Thursday, April 22, 2010 .  Inside the swell-egant lobby, like a drawing room from a Noel Coward farce, racing towards the indicated elevator, I'd just glimpsed the silver-gray ribbon of water beyond the garden through the opened windows.

 

 

 

 

 

I'd already begun to thank providence for preventing me from missing this so recently regretted commitment, when I spotted the seahorse, above the elevator opening. 'A seahorse,' I'd thought? 'Is this River House,' I exclaimed to the man at the desk? "Yes sir," he responded with an inferred, 'of course it is!'

The New York Times, October 13, 1929, Sunday:

"HUGE RIVER APARTMENT; Will Rise 25 Stories on East Side and Cost $11,000,000. Plans have recently been completed for improving the block front between Fifty-second and Fifty-third Streets on the East River frontage with a towering cooperative apartment structure to be known as River House..."

That President Barack Obama's achievements to date do not match either his intentions or potential, is nothing unusual; not at least for one who embodies such high hopes among many, who harbors such great expectations of himself. Similarly, having neither secured major legislative reform, nor universally changed prevailing attitudes about race and class, when awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Martin Luther King was nonetheless a worthy recipient. If in terms of bringing full civil rights and equal opportunity to all, King might correctly even be termed, in some ways, a failure still, the importance, sincerity and transformative impact of his efforts remain commendable, nonetheless.

 

 

 

 

This also applies to lots of other, far more mundane things, the relative disparity between hope, hype and realization. Take for instance something like the reputation of River House as the most prestigious, desirable, decorous and elegant place to live: not just on Manhattan Island, but in the entire world. Wondering what motivates bankers, brokers and trust officers to insure dubious assets; to sell toxic financial instruments, to issue subprime, uncollateralized mortgages and the like, one need look no further. A River House apartment is that ultimate prize of material success, 'the face that launched a thousand ships,' 'the Golden Fleece' and 'the land of milk and honey,' all rolled-up into one.

 

 

  

  

 

 

When completed in 1931 this structure epitomizing "swell" living was in a 'slum' district which still teemed with factories and tenements. A humble cigar factory and commercial cabinetmaker had stood on the site where it would rise. The disquieting juxtaposition was mildly mocked in the famous and popular 1936 movie, Dead End that was Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Sidney Kingsley's play. The play and movie, which starred Humphrey Bogart, focus on the not always communal coexistence of the rich in their spectacular tower of luxury and the poor swimming alongside yachts and speedboats moored in the adjacent river off the dead end street.

 

The stair hall, library, drawing room, dining room and bedroom of Mr. Coe, in the River House duplex of Mr. and Mrs. William R. Coe.

 

 

 The River House aesthetic...

 

As designed by Bottomley, Wagner & White, the U-shaped plan of 435 East 52nd Street consists of 14-story wings and a 26-story tower on a 200 by 200-foot plot that runs through to 53rd Street. It originally called for only 64 apartments. Widely designated as Georgian-revival, but actually combining baroque, Regency, and art deco elements, stylistically the innovative building is far more complex than some tame tribute to 18th Century good taste. According to Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins' book, New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism between the Two World Wars, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987, River House was, "a critical milestone in the evolution of the skyscraper apartment house type, synthesizing for the first time the tower and the courtyard palazzo base..."

 

 

 

This is the East Side building where Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kissinger live, the one offering what was called in July, 2009, the $28,000,000 most costly apartment marketed in the city. Conceived on the very eve of the last great economic upheaval that crippled the world 80 years ago, by every measure River House ought to have been, from the start, the most tranquil dwelling place imaginable, representing the most stable investment obtainable.

Ironically then, inhabited from the moment it opened in 1931 by some of the nation's richest capitalists, those with the most to lose due to fiscal calamity, instead several times during its glamorous history, River House has been on the brink of spectacular mayhem.

 

 

Not unlike some of today's lavishly appointed, newly completed luxury towers, it was greatly feared that an only partly leased building would remain half-empty for an extended and unsustainable period. Certainly it was competitively marketed, with 'small' single-floor units comprising 6 rooms, costing $30,000-$35,000, while those with 9 rooms, ran $37,000-$65,000, (maintenance was 10 percent). It was also skillfully promoted with a spate of decorating, architectural and society features extolling the building's superior qualities from the moment it was contemplated.

 

 

 In 2010 novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford offerd her 15 room apartment for sale for almost $20 million.

 

"Valentine Everit Macy Buys Apartment in River House" the Timesnoted on July 15, 1930, "20-Room Suite in River House Purchased by Edson Bradley", they would herald on August 15, 1930.

 

 
Edson Bradley's River House drawing room

 

Yet even with purchases by big-name socialites from 'top-drawer' families, the problem of vacancies persisted.

 

 

 

On Tuesday July 15, 1941, the Times announced,

"RIVER HOUSE SALE ORDERED BY COURT; Foreclosure of Big East Side House and River Club to Follow Mortgage Default DATE IS NOT YET FIXED Prudence Securities Corp. Is Plaintiff With Claim of $1,717,951 Now Due..."

Temporarily, this predicament was averted, through the quick intervention of a few shareholders who were only moderately affected by the Depression. Even worse news was yet to come though, and on Friday, May 21, 1948 a Times Headline read,

"LUXURY DWELLERS FACE MOVING CRISIS; RIVER HOUSE SOLD, Buyers Set to Split Up 79 Apartments to Double the Capacity NOTABLES ARE AFFECTED Present Tenants Will Receive Priority for Altered Suites, of Four to Six Rooms. Seventy-nine families, including many well-known in society, politics and the business world, face loss of their apartments in River House...as a result of a sale and reconstruction plans announced ...for the property."

 

 

Inhabited by august residents boasting vast numbers of interlocking, favorable relationships, the tide was bound to turn for River House. In 1944, and again in 1948, the burdensome property tax liability was greatly reduced. So it was that in the end, although most triplexes were reduced to duplexes, no one living at the world's best address had had to suffer the indignity of being confined to so few as four rooms.

To be continued...

River House, at 80, Still the Best Address, Part II

Even now, in the midst of the 'Great Recession', there are at River House, many quietly detailed duplexes and an intact triplex maisonette, commanding superlative views and phenomenal prices. Some apartments, however, are not quite as grand as others and none as improbable as the long subdivided suite at the building's summit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Privileged William Rhinelander Stewart, Jr's 'ground-floor' flat at River House boasted the piano on which Gershwin composed the "Rhapsody in Blue," an Italian marble mantelpiece, from his ancestral home on Washington Square, a carpet woven with his family crest, and a secret door in a library bookcase.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marshall Field's English Georgian library at River House was adorned by superb Impressionist paintings such as Claude Monet's Boulevard des Capucines.  

Surmounted by a ballroom in the tower's graceful cupola, this most palatial apartment at River House was a triplex occupied by the family of sportsman and publisher, Marshall Field, III. On Sept. 28, 1943, at 50, he inherited the bulk of the $140,000,000 fortune his grandfather had established in his famous department store and grounded in Chicago real estate.

However, even as an Eton schoolboy, Marshall Field was already 40 times a millionaire. In 1917, following Cambridge, he'd helped to initiate a reputation as a progressive by returning to the States to enlist as a private in the army. Returning from France a cavalry captain, despite his connections, Field next became a lowly brokerage salesman; destined to pile success upon success.

He was wed to New York debutante Evelyn Marshall in 1915. Her brother, Charles H. Marshall, would marry Brooke Russell Kuser and become stepfather to the eventual Mrs. Astor's notorious son, Anthony Dryden Kuser, who took his name. By 1925 the Marshall Fields had left Chicago for New York's greater business opportunities and social prospects. Naturally, given Field's English background, English style houses were felt to be in order. Buying a 2,000-acre estate at Lloyd's Neck on Long Island, he built a magnificent Georgian mansion overlooking Long Island Sound. At Caumsett, a Georgian stable, numerous cottages and barns, a boathouse, a power plant, and a 20-car garage complimented the 'big house'.

 

 

 

In Manhattan, Chicago's most revered residential architect, David Adler, designed for the couple another lavish neo-Georgian residence, at 4 East 70th Street. One of the largest and most elaborate private houses ever built in the city, it stood for a mere 10 years.

When his first wife divorced him in 1930, Marshall Field gave her an uncontested $1,000,000-a-year income and custody of their three children. Two weeks later he acquired an English-born wife to preside over his English style abodes. God-daughter of King Edward VII, Audrey James Coats was a socialite and widow of a British Army captain.

 

 

Mrs. Diego de Suarez, the first wife of Marshall Field, is advised by her decorator, Eleanor McMillen Brown. Mrs. de Suarez's double-height Drawing Room was designed by her husband in collaboration with Mrs. Brown.
 

If in the aftermath of their divorce Field's second wife returned to England and 'civilization,' the publisher, his children, his first wife, and her new husband, Diego de Suarez an architect, were happy enough to live conveniently apart, but close by, at River House. And, offering solid proof of the building's unmatched social connections, when Field and his best friend's former wife Ruth Pruyn Phipps were married in 1936, the ceremony and reception took place in her parents' River House apartment.

 

Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who twice defended (won) the America's Cup, also invented contract bridge

 

 

 

Long after leaving Yale, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney remained a keen rower.

 

 

 

The splendid Harold S. Vanderbilts, the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitneys, the James A. Burden, Jr.s, the Harry Cushings, the William Rheinlander Stewart, Jr.s,

 

New York City congresswoman Ruth Baker Pratt, and three of the city's leading architects, including William Lawrence Bottomley, who designed River House, Maurice Fatio and ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the subject of an exceptional monograph by Susan Hume Fraszer, William Lawrence Bottomley, was born and reared in Harlem. He designed River House in close association with his partner Sidney Wagner. Seen above is an engraved moonstone and diamond pendant Bottomley designed for his wife and the staircase, (forged by Hunt Dietrich), and Drawing Room of their River House triplex, which the Depression would force them to divide.

 

Archibald Manning Brown, whose second wife Eleanor was the founder of the distinguished decorating firm, McMillen Inc., all helped to give the building a very patrician character indeed.

 

Architect Archibald Manning Brown, with his first wife,  Caroline Helen Parrish Brown, was all set in 1932, to move into a new sun-filled, duplex maisonette that opened directly onto the River House garden. Representing the height of fashion, the Browns' apartment was a tribute to Scandinavian proto-modernism. 

 



 

But after so much planing and anticipation, tragically,  for her husband and their children, Mrs. Brown died. Worse still, afterward, the Browns could not afford to live there. Happily remarried in 1934, to Eleanor McMillen, the well known interior designer, Brown reluctantly moved into his wife's apartment at 447 East 57 Street. One imagines that the pair likely met when she decorated the abandoned River House flat?

 

 

 

Long after the Browns left, their duplex was owned by pharmaceutical heiress Mary Lea Johnson Richards, who clearly had more conservative taste than her predecessors. 

 

   

 

As the images above and below clearly show, over 80 years the decor here has changed dramatically. 

 

 

 

 

The Reception Room, before and after! 

 

 

1932

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 1932

 

 

1893: The Brown  siblings, Charles S Brown Jr, Lathrop Brown, Lucy Brown, and Archibald Manning Brown. '

Charlie', went on to head the family’s real estate firm – Brown, Harris Stevens, became a congressman and presidential confidante; 'Lucy', who married artist William L’Engle, became a famous painter and 'Archie',  became a highly regarded architect.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Lathrop Brown

 

 

 1934

 

 

 

Engaged in his family's New York real estate business, Archibald Manning Brown's younger brother, Lathrop Brown, also served  a United States Representative. Friends since their time at Groton, he was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's college roommate at Harvard. 

 

 

 

 

1934

 

 

 

 

 

As Lathrop Brown and his wife Helen Chamblet Hooper Brown, were quite rich, not only did they take over the apartment his brother could no longer afford, but they hired his wife to redecorate it. In addition, they commissioned Archibald Manning Brown to design a large modern country house at St.James on Long Island. Now the Knox School, they never inhabited it.

 

 

 

Even featuring several theatrical neo-classical antiques, the Lathrop Browns' decor was far less retrograde than the Richards'.

 

2010

1932

1934

 

 2010

Indicative of the importance mirrors, curtains and architectural elements lend to defining an environment, the dining room, in what started as the Brown apartment at River House, seen in these views from over the years, hardly seems to be the same space!  To be continued...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Equality is Comming, Why Whitney Should Have Waited

 

 

Rather often one hears activists, with the best of intentions, invoking the 1960's Civil Rights Movement, which started to meet out equal treatment to blacks, as the model for gay Civil Rights. For several reasons, in several ways, these struggles are not comparable, and so, they're not analogous either.

 

 

Thinking about it, it seems to me that the movement for Womens' Suffrage, of a century ago, is quite symmetrical.  Imagine, right up to the end, many men felt so threatened by the notion of 'allowing' women to vote, they felt the world might end! They must have reasoned that given a chance, women would castrate them all and take over. But it was not just women who were responsible for prohibition, not by a long shot.  It's the same for LGBTpeople now.

On the one hand, being gay is God's condemnation, yet it's supposed to be some supper kind of kick; try it just once, it's irresistible, one will forswear staid, burdensome heterosexuality forever! Have you ever taken that approach with a perspective 'date? 'Whereas, legalizing gay marriage, that's a showcase that spotlights the whole cool gay lifestyle, you know 'two homes', foreign sports cars, gourmet meals every day, sex each night, designer clothes, smart well-accessorized kids and chic pets, with a nanny! Damn straight, no sane person is going to go back to the old-fashioned ordinary way after sampling the full excitement and beauty that is LGBT and SGL too! Can I get a witness?

 

 

High Society iconoclast, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont led the fight for women's rights a century ago.

 

This is how some people really think. Fortunately then, just as ever greater inclussion of women is mostly accepted today, so too are gays in a better position concerning 'tolerance' than ever before. Employing the example and tactics of Suffragettes, one day, we will all reach the mountaintop together.

 

 

 

How hopeful one felt on that lovely day last year, on the way to Central Park, to hear, one wished, history made as a dimming star was reborn with even greater brilliance. It was not to be. From someone else, the singing would have been deemed fine enough. 'Why if they put her into a studio, with all that voice-shop equipment around nowadays, she'd be sure to be ok!' That was how one looked at this much-hyped come-back, as something decent enough, for some new unknown somebody, but, woefully, utterly, unworthy of a living legend who gone to the mountaintop.

How trying it must be, not to misstep or slide backward, once one has reaced the summit. Is it any wonder that wonderfully gifted Whitney Huston made so many unfortunate and destructive choices? For generations in America, to say that someone was gay, was deemed comparable to identifying them as a bigamist or in some way criminal. And even today, young people admiring one's sweater, lest any unintended inappropriate hook-up be inferred, end their compliment with the disclaimer, "no homo." In the recent past, the 'bad old days' before gay liberation's Stonewall rebellion in 1969, or marriage equality's passage in New York last year, many well-off, or high-profile gays and lesbians were as much on the DL as young closeted queers in the hood are today.

"We liked it that way. Our lives, like everyone else's, were much more dignified then: appreciating one's own sex was like belonging to an exclusive and select private club. It was far more interesting and exciting..."

 

The speaker was my friend, Alexander C. Robinson, III. The late dean of Cleveland's architectural community, Alex was well past 80 and I was 20 when we first met in 1976. Newly a widower, the father of three daughters, with nearly a dozen grandchildren, he was 'privately' gay just the same, persistently offering attentions as un-welcomed as they were astonishing, coming as they had, from a great-grandfather!

Fabulously rich Leonard Hanna, photographer Jerome Zerbe, Cleveland Art Museum Director William Milliken and several other socially prominent residents of the Western Reserve were also 'gay blades'. But if they were reasonably discrete, unlike Winsor French, Kenyon Bolton or Alec Robinson, they hadn't resorted to the expedient of marrying or having children. Instead they either moved to, or lived a part of each year in, Europe and New York, meeting and befriending in the process other young pilgrims escaping the intolerant provinces.

 

 

Newspaper and magazine journalist, Winsor French married Margaret Frueauff in 1933. A Broadway actress whose stage name was Margaret Perry, within months, she inherited $675,000 from her utility-magnate father.  A great big chunk of change during the Great Depression, this timely bequest enabled the newly-weds to forgo living with French's family in Cleveland, and to reside instead in New York, on the most fashionable strech of Park Avenue. Inasmuch as, of the 14 ushers directing at their wedding in St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, at least four were openly homosexual, the longevity of this betrothal may have seemed doubtfull to some of the guests. French's gay wedding quartet included art patron and collector Leonard Hanna, Roger Stearns who would later become French's' longtime companion', his friend the photographer Jerome Zerbe and actor Roger Davis. When their married life ended, the former Mrs. French said, "It was sure fun while it lasted..."

 

 

The lure of the relatively greater freedom offered by Gotham continues. Relocating to Manhattan in 1985, three years after I'd come out, to myself, I immediately met a succession of celebrated men whom I'd read about in books and magazines. 
 

It began with the still raffish Mr. Zerbe, who regaled me with gay tales of glamorous old New York. Like perfect pearls strung on a grand necklace, one marvel leading to the next, Jerry's friendship led to my meeting Luther Greene, which coincided with my calling and introducing myself, as a fan, to Mario Buatta. It's thanks to both Mario and Luther that I went to work as a cook for incomparable interior designer Tom Britt. Oh, how I wish I'd taken better notes when I was young.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sequestered in a subterranean railroad flat on the eastern end of 58th Street near Sutton Place, Luther Greene's home might have gone totally unnoticed by passersby. To prevent the tragedy of anonymity though, this Virginia-born-and-reared mid-western transplant, who was first a brilliantly innovative theatrical producer-director, and then a creative landscape architect and florist, took decisive action. 

Beyond the the entrance and the living room all decked out with Delftware, behind his vermilion-walled bedroom, at the very back of the apartment, he spent ten years creating a sea shell-encrusted grotto with a pool and waterfall, where he liked to serve meals to awe-struck guests.

      

Patently illegal, the greenhouse addition that Greene erected on the façade of the one-time tenement where he lived, encroached well into the public right-of-way. It's been removed since his death in 1987. But how ingeniously it helped to illuminate otherwise gloomy digs. It also dramatized one's descent into the special, eclectically decorated realm of a gifted artist: across a stream, past a waterfall, amidst a jasmine-scented semi-tropical garden.

The first Mrs. Luther Greene was painted by Salvador Dali, the director-producer's good friend. Greene's lesbian second wife, Judith Anderson, is best remembered for a series of first-rate performances in movies that have become gay-cult-classics. "Big Mama",

in Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and "Ann Treadwell", in Otto Preminger's Laura, each stands out, but it was

 

as "Mrs. Danvers", one of the screen's most memorable and sexually ambiguous female villains, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, that the Australian stage actress achieved true Hollywood stardom.

 

Appreciating what extreme snobs some gays can be, it hardly comes as a shock that among his well-turned-out wives, and a host of furtive short-term companions, of the type sometimes referred to derisively, as 'twinks', the great love of Luther Greene's life was a genuine royal prince, a son of exiled King Amanullah of Afghanistan. Prince Hussein, a younger son, born of a second wife, grew up in London where he was known teasingly as, "Princess Anne." Married as a youth, he had a large family.

When I knew Hussein, he lived on Fordham Road in the Bronx and worked giving test drives to VIP-customers of Budget-Rent-a-Car. In two small rooms adorned with framed invitations to the coronations of every British monarch from Victoria to Elizabeth, he lived with six rescued formerly stray cats. A one-time boy friend, too fat and too old at thirty, lived next door with his young wife and kids. But none of this, and nothing else from an eventful life grown quite ordinary, was ever permitted to interfere with either Hussein's steady pursuit of muscular young men or his unfailing commitment to the steadfast Luther.

It was because I wanted to write that Mario Buatta persuaded me 
to go to work for Thomas Britt. Mario had met the artsy, brazen and antic native of Kansas City while both were students of indomitable aesthete, connoisseur,

 

 

 

 

and decorative arts scholar Stanly Barrows. When their class at Parsons went abroad to study in Paris in 1956, Tom Britt met Julie Creveling. They were later to marry at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

 



Slender, brunette, demure but elegant, Julie Britt was descended from early Dutch settlers who had immigrated to New Jersey in the 17th century. Creatures of their time, the ultra-smart Britts became darlings at Studio 54 and at the private club at the Hotel Sherry-Netherland, called Doubles.

 

 

 

  

       

    

 

Tom Britt's East 63rd Street apartment in a century-old town house is as grand as his country house at Watermill, Long Island is serenely simple

Despite ups and downs, including alcoholism and drug addiction, they are still very close. "Our friendship is hard to describe," said the editor, who worked for Glamour (where she put an unknown teenager named Cheryl Tiegs on the cover) and Harper's Bazaar. She was also a stylist for Richard Avedon. A couple of years ago Julie explained her unexpected life in New York to Mitchell Owens in a Time's profile. Recalling the intensity of their courtship, she reflected how, like a latter-day Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, they too, had cavorted in a fountain and danced as Karl Beiter's personification of abundance drenched them in an allegorical shower of 'gold'. Smiling, with what? Yes, incredulity, Ms. Britt said of her former husband to Owens, 

"He changed my whole life."

 

While he was born in West Helena, Arkansas opra singer and teacher William Warfield grew up in Rochester, New York, where his father was called to serve as pastor of Mt. Vernon Church. He gave his recital debut in New York's Town Hall on 19 March 1950.Warfield performed in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess during a tour of Europe sponsored by the U.S. State Department. He played opposite the opera star Leontyne Price, whom he soon married. Blaming the demands of two separate careers with too little time together, they divorced in 1972. As for those mad stag sories, her husband allegedly gave while his wife worked, where some simply could not resist trying on the gowns and lingerie of a real diva, how does one verify such 'wilde' and intriguing tales?

 

      

 

Scion of one of America's first families James Biddle, who insisted on always being addressed as Jimmy, seems a typical candidate for an old-fashioned 'lavender marriage'. This seems even more to be the case, as his wife, the mother of his heirs, Louisa Copeland Biddle was the daughter of DuPont president Lammont du Pont Copeland. "Alas," confides an old friend, one might wish that it was so straightforward. But nothing, ever, was exactly straightforward, not where Jimmy was concerned".

 

 

 

 His wife, as well as many of their friends, several different sources stress, was well aware that he was 'different'. "Only his family, particularly his parents, retained complete and deliberate ignorance. That was how he inherited Andalusia, his family's remarkable estate that was built from 1794 to 1836," insists his friend, "It's a superb house, like a Greek temple above the Delaware River in Bucks County.

"When one is gay, as we are, one so strives to please and inspire admiration. It's a feminine trait we aren't afraid to show. In our case it included making an advantageous match, producing descendants and saving the ancestral family homestead, should one be fortunate enough to possess one that's still worth saving. On the other hand, one often acts out somehow, just because one can sometimes, it shows one is a man to be defiant. I suppose that was what Jimmy's black 'friend' must have been all about?"

The 'friend' in question, just a 'boy' when he came to Andalusia long ago to clean the pool, and met Jimmy, is now a popular dinner guest, attentive host and retired dentist. "He simply knocked me out, I could hardly help myself" Jimmy said as I listened in disbelief. I was seated beside the immense Gothic revival mahogany four-poster bed where he reposed in his high ceilinged-room in Andalusia's dower house, the imposingly large Gothic Cottage. The only black guest at a house party, I was stunned by this revelation, but not a bit surprised that neither Jimmy's marriage nor his then-controversial black lover had worked out.

Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing, Jimmy went on to lead the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

"Exquisitely garbed, always in gowns, jewels and furs carefully selected by her husband, Louisa Biddle, ever gracious and smiling, played the part of a curator and philanthropy director's wife, one on the lookout for needed funds, to absolute perfection,"

Remembers their friend.

"Toward the end, relinquishing those beautifully tailored Saville Row suits he'd sported as dutifully as any prisoner wears his uniform, Jimmy ultimately graduated to custom-made attire that resembled a cross between a caftan from the Levant, and a shift from Lilly Pulitzer in Palm Beach. In the end, no longer sublimating his flair for fashion by dressing Louisa, he was finally, mostly, done with pretending, I think.

"

  

How much was the marriage of Calvin and Kelly Klein a game of let's-pretend? Quite apart from the 'style magnate's' gift to his wife of superb pearls that had previously belonged to the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Mary,

 

did Klein regard Kelly much as some adoptive gay parents treat their children, like a doll or a must-have new accessory? Will we ever really know for sure? As with many lavender unions, now the principals have 'called it a day.' Acquired for nearly $800,000, the duchess's pearls were sold by Ms. Klein for more than five times as much.

In a press release prior to the sale, Kelly Klein is quoted as saying that she hoped the pearls might be "given again, as they have been in the past, as a gesture of love and worn often and proudly." It's a nice sentiment, isn't it? Yet I, for one, hope that the next owner will not be a mere trophy, indicative of how enough money can buy all things, including a beautiful wife or a handsome husband, whose very presence shouts loudly and clear, 'Hell, no, I'm not gay, only, my, you do have a great ass---no homo!

 

"Let's Do It!": Homos in High Society Before Gay Marriage.

 

 

Ms. Whitney Houston, 1963-2012.

 

How does one learn who among people who lived long ago was gay? That investigating our history, determining who in the past was queer is hardly an easy matter, is at least one way in which gay may be legitimately regarded as the 'new black.'

 

 

 

 

First came the King of Pop's tragic end, and cynical-seeming nuptials, and now we have the early demise of the matchless Whitney Houston to endure.  Each, it seems, offers a cautionary tale of epic proportions. Denying who one is, living a lie, can help lead to an early death. Yet neither Ms. Huston's nor Michael Jackson's example of so much needless misery is likely to end the old fashioned kind of 'gay marriage'. Homosexuals and lesbians will still sometimes wed straight spouses they can't love. Their suffering will prove no more of a disincentive to those desperate to appear 'normal,' than Bernard Madoff's isolated prosecution and unforgiving sentence are inclined to deter the unbridled greed that leads to widespread, monumental, and unregulated theft.

 

 

 

Architect Thomas Hastings did it, in 1900, with Amazonian-sportswoman Helen Benedict, an heiress, of whom the the New York Times said, "It was not thought that she would marry..."

 

At 49, Harold Stirling Vanderbilt did it with Gertrude Conway, not the lad on the right. An acclaimed yachtsman, he defended the America's Cup three times, he is also remembered as the inventor of the rules for contract bridge, which won him the nickname "professor" from his mother. 

 

 

Scion of a Boston Brahmin family descended from Jefferson, Eleanor Sears was a superb all-around athlete who believed that women would never be able to play team games effectively until they abandoned their skirts. In 1909 she strode onto the polo ground at the Burlingame Country Club wearing jacket and trousers and asked to be allowed to join in a match against a team from England. Turning down several proposals, she never did it! 

 

"It was very tempting, and everyone urged me to do it," says a wonderful friend who is a prominent decorator, "but ultimately, I resisted and didn't change my name or get married either. Me, with a properly waspy name like 'Sterling Bradford Perkins' and married, to a woman: imagine what a mistake that could have been!"

Of a certain age, my friend maintains that 'conforming' as family and associates pressured him to, would have meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income from potential clients who had actively shunned him.

"They adored the look I was known for, decorous and aristocratic, while fun and colorful; but found me unattractively "ethnic", solely because of my name, mind you, and too outré, because I was queer."

'How had they known you were gay,' I asked?

"Well, except for a couple of the husbands; as cute as the dickens and very butch my dear, naturally, flattered by their attentions, I slept with those men, but otherwise people didn't know, not really, not apart from tittle-tattle. And so long as one 'toed the line' and got married, as they all had, one at a time, but as often as one wished, they didn't really care either. Irrespective of what that bunch did, of course one exhibited the proper discretion, one 'behaved', naturally. But oh, it was the original 'don't ask, don't tell,' you know, when I was young. Back then, this town was an absolute hive of hypocrisy."

 

 1901 

In New York, where the practice of advantageous alliances of one sort and another is as old as the city, perhaps the most spectacular lavender marriage ever, occurred at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, in 1901. Heiresses, Elizabeth Drexel and her sister Lucy had earlier married the Dahlgren brothers. Their father was J. P. Morgan's partner. Still attractive and young when widowed with a son in 1898, lonely

 

1888

 

1894 above and 1899 below.

  

 

 Harry Symes Lehr

 

"Bessie" was instantaneously captivated when Edith Gould introduced her to amusing Harry Symes Lehr. Tactful, but entertaining, the bachelor from Baltimore had a decided flair for drawing out unsuspected talents or any mild irreverence latent in others. Son of a once-well-off tobacco importer, like fellow southerner Ward McAllister he had assiduously made entertaining rich people and identifying what was fashionable or not, into his entire career.

 

 

Harry Symes Lehr dressed to entertain at a party. Ordinarily, he only led the cotillion.

 

Not just any old millionaires either were the beneficiaries of Harry Lehr's charming singing, skilled piano playing, faultless tastes, shrewd advice, incessant drolleries and talent for taking feminine roles at amateur theatricals.Harry's patrons and 'friends' were drawn almost exclusively from among the best of the bon ton. Encountering Mrs. Astor, wearing a white dress, he scolded her with endearing impish impertinence,

"You've too much white on! You look like a ghost! Here!"

he said and thrust an American Beauty rose from a nearby vase into her hand, making an instant conquest. In short order, he was hired as her 'social secretary'; henceforward, Harry's social position was all but unassailable.

 

 

 

An exception to grand 'friends' were those attractive and rich outsiders, slightly suspect on account of their unseasoned affluence, humble origins or Catholicism, who Harry and his mentors felt, 'might just, rather usefully, be 'put over''.

When he had first taken Mrs. Dahlgren as his fiancée to lunch with the most faithful of his supporters, society's reigning sovereign, Mrs. Astor and her court of heiresses-apparent, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Mrs. Herman Oelrichs, and Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont, Harry held his breath fearfully lest they disapprove.

 

 

 

 Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish at James Hazen Hyde's notoriously costly fancy-dress ball of 1905. Accompanying her are Staford White, who will be murdered in less than a year, James Henry 'Silent' Smith and Norman Whitehouse.

Mrs. Fish, who shared Harry Lehr's mocking sense of humor, was perhaps his best chum.

"Have you seen Cousin Alice?"

he would ask her a few years later, of his wife's bold relation by marriage, Alice Troth Drexel. "Cousin Alice," was viewed by many as a "climber" and a figure of fun, at least behind her back. Immense riches, and her self-important personality, made her too dangerous to criticize openly, particularly as the combination of her absurd pronouncements and lavish entertaining made her especially popular among Europe's royal houses.

  

 

Alice Troth Drexel. "Cousin Alice,"festooned with a fortune in pearls.

Described privately as "looking like a trussed fowl," exclaiming at dinner once how she 'dare not wear her valuable Turquoises against her bare skin as her perspiration was so alkaline', her elaborate households were impeccably run by an impeccable gentleman. Of good birth, William Hude Neilson, who managed "Cousin Alice's" houses and servants, addressed as her social secretary, was widely believed to be her not so secret lover. This was what made Mrs. Fish's response to Harry's innocent seeming inquiry,

"Have you looked under the secretary?"

seem so malicious to most. But to those few aware of Alice Drexel's condescending treatment of Neilson, because his lineage was superior to hers and because he was gay, the bon mot had greater relish still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the 190 debut of her daughter Elizabeth, Mrs. Drexel turned  to Horace Trumbauer to add a smart Ballroom with Louis XVI trelliage and mirrors to 'Fairholme', her Newport cottage. This oceanfront house was later owned Annenberg heir Gilbert S. Kahn, a gay opera patron who adopted his lover to assure his inheritance.

Harry need not have been so anxious about his future wife's acceptance. As society's 'court jester', expertly arranging his patrons' parties, choosing the flowers, leading the cotillion, selecting lovely favors, advising them on their attire, jewels and troubles, he had rapidly grown indispensable. Accessing Bessie, they'd been mindful of how this comely, quiet woman's largess would at last make their favorite's life financially trouble-free. So of course they had happily given him their blessing and announced,

"We will make her the fashion. You need have no fear."

 

Heretofore Wetzel had made Harry's natty suits for free. Yet despite his renown as a trendsetting dandy men's clothes, apparently, had left him indifferent. In his diary he wrote:

"I went to Wetzels and ...did the very best I could to hide how it bored me. Oh, if only I could wear ladies' clothes; all silks and dainty petticoats and laces, how I should love to choose them. I love shopping even for my wife..."

 

 

 

              

But instead of frocks from Redfern's, Kaskel & Kaskel gave him the latest designs in shirts and underwear, and only asked that he let it be discreetly known where he got them. Ditto for jewelers Black, Starr & Frost, or elegant Sherry's, where he successfully persuaded Mrs. Astor, for the first time in her life to dine in a public restaurant. Now through a simple expedient all this distasteful trading on his unique social position was to be at an end. However, if Harry Lehr's difficult days of living by his wits, as an authoritative promoter of luxury goods, apparel and exclusive places, compensated in clothes, accessories, meals and accommodation was over, for Bessie, greater sorrows were just about to begin. 
 

  

 

By Giovanni Boldini, 1905

 

 By Philip de Laszlo, ca. 1936

 

 

 
 

1942

Lady Decies photographed with her friend , and fellow lover
of diamonds, Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh, at the Red Cross Ball and the Metropolitan Opera's 60th season.

 

 

 

 By Weegee 1943

Harry Lehr died following an operation for a brain tumor in 1929. His widow became Baroness Decies on May 25, 1936, by marrying the Irish peer, John Graham Hope de la Poer Beresford, 5th Baron Decies. Widowed for a third time, Lady Decies died in 1944. 

Joyfully she had promised her betrothed a princely marriage settlement: $25,000 a year and her agreement to bear their entire household and travel expenses. Eager to re-live the delights of her previous union, she took considerable pains on their wedding night to assure that both she and her new mate would, as she said, "Remember this evening all our lives"

Alluringly gowned in rose colored brocade, adorned by a new diamond brooch, she had ordered the dining room, and her bedroom in their large suite, filled with highly fragrant sheaves of crimson roses. Caviar, quails in aspic, champagne, cigars, she omitted nothing that might contribute to a night of sheer bliss.

After a courtship of perpetual pleasantries, solicitations and endearments, Bessie summoned to Harry's room was callously informed, that he had married her solely for her money, that he did not and never would love her, that she, like all women was indeed physically repulsive to him. Stunned, his bride recoiled, but with scant empathy from the now secure Harry.

"After all," he had stated coolly, "Have you so much to complain of? At least I am being honest with you. How many men in New York, how many among our own friends, if it comes to that, have entered their wives' rooms on their wedding night with exactly my state of mind?" 

  

  

 

According to Elizabeth Lehr, this painting of Robert Gould Shaw, II, depicted as 'Little Billie' from George du Maurier's 1894 novel 'Trilby', by Harper Pennington, hung in Harry Lehr's room.

 

 

Harry Lehr was rechristened 'King Lehr',by his pal the imperial Russian Prince, Grand Duke Boris, after he amusingly impersonated the Tsar  at a party given by Mrs. Fish.

 

"There have been quite a few as it turns out," said the late Stanley Barrows, chuckling over an exquisite glass of pale old sherry in his apartment near Sutton Place a couple of decades ago. "My, my, practically all the married decorators and several of the best architects were 'that way,' to say nothing of some of the handsomest husbands in society. Ogden Codman, I suppose, falls into all three categories? "

 

 

If one has seen Clifton Webb portray a dying, elitist, Elliott Templeton, having procured a coveted ball invitation through trickery, peacefully expire while dictating an imperious R. S.V. P., "Mr. Elliott Templeton regrets that he must decline Her Highness's kind invitation due to a previous engagement with his maker...", then one has observed Ogden Codman too. Codman was offended enough by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wish to alter his already 'perfect' villa while foregoing a security deposit, to write "I am sorry that the house of Codman is unable to do business with the house of Windsor!" Similarly, resignedly taking to his bed, he lived on chocolates during the Second World War, when Nazi officers requisitioned the smaller of his two country houses, a 17th century chateau.

More discerning and intelligent than most of his fellows, as much of a wag and a dandy as Harry Lehr, even during his far less aware era, Codman must have been viewed by many with a certain circumspection. His intended, six years older than the gifted architect, Leila Griswold Webb, the widow of a railroad magnate, had 2 sons.

One journalist audacious enough to register astonishment at this unforeseen match said of the 41-year bridegroom,

"It had been supposed that he would die a bachelor..."

 

 

 

 

In all events, so obliging and supportive was the socially prominent new Mrs. Ogden Codman, that within six years she had died, leaving her widower husband, financially and otherwise, utterly independent.

 

 

Harper Pennington's magnificent present to Ogden Codman in 1901 portrays a blond youth.

Sharing such a fevered passion for the superior art and atmosphere of Europe, Codman and his devoted friend Edith Wharton were by far more truthfully a kindred pair. Together, they enjoyed little better than commiserating on the "dullness" of nearly everyone else whom they knew at Newport and in New York. Stereotyping aside, their eventual falling-out, from hindsight, seems inevitable.

 

Yet it had been Wharton who was instrumental to his great success. She had introduced Codman to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who hired him in 1894 to design the bedroom floors of his new Newport cottage. The Breakers was decorated by Codman, assisted by a brilliant draftsman, previously employed by Richard Morris Hunt, named Emery Roth, who was an immigrant from Hungary and Jewish. Their décor reflected the neo-classical style of eighteenth century France and Italy. This early high-profile commission led to numerous successes, until armed with his ample inheritance, Codman created a house of his own on the Côte d'Azur to rival anything that Newport might offer.

 

 La Leopolda rises above the sea like a dream, as anyone who has seen Moira Shearer mount its heroic garden stair in The Red Shoes will attest. Contemplating its grandeur, it comes as little surprise to learn that Codman consumed much of his own fortune and, illegally, much of his stepsons' inheritances as well, to realize such loveliness. Wouldn't Codman have been proud to know that today his house is billed as the most costly in the world, having recently sold for 500,000,000 Euros to a mysterious Russian!

 

Homo-Harlem-Hook-Ups!

Ms. Whitney Houston, 1963-2012.

The brilliant Ms. Huston has passed from the scene, leaving one saddened to wonder, 'why?'  Certainly, it's not the total story, saying that living a lie can kill one, but, undeniably, it's a key part of it.  

In his final decade, by which time he was a multi-millionaire, without a trace of irony or even a hint that he recognized how ridiculous his denial might appear to many, my friend Bobby Short once commented

 

"I have a living to make! I can't afford to march in the Gay-Pride Parade."

 

'Why on earth would someone gay pretend they were not gay, even going to the great lengths of marrying someone straight?' you ask. Well the whole moving and nostalgic pageant put on to say farewell to Michael Jackson gives us at least a partial answer to this dogged conundrum. Gore Vidal said it best when he observed how once men near 50, it doesn't seem to matter however 'regal' one is, troubled thoughts of reproducing oneself are almost inevitable. Recall Michael Jackson's weeping, lovely children, now there's a compelling reason for someone to reject being gay.

Almost everywhere around the globe, call it jealousy or feelings of inadequacy all one wishs, we gays are despised! Differing doctrines notwithstanding, demeaning women and hating gays seems to be something all religions can agree on. However weird or odd or scary Michael Jackson became, irrespective of his disfiguring mutilations and seemingly aberrant behavior, by the ruse of maintaining he was straight, Michael continued to be loved.

What's more, even as a weird, scary, self-mutilated 'straight person', Michael was accorded the privilege to do what most who are gay still cannot do: to marry whomever he wished.

For the longest time, the person whom most gays and lesbians wished to establish a marital alliance, was someone of the opposite sex able to offer plausible deniability.

 

Famed as a booster of Harlem and African Americans, Iowa native, critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten, deftly examined by scholar Emily Bernard in the Yale Press'es new offering,  Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White,

 

was emphatically gay.  Yet, he married twice with deliberation. His marriage to his first wife, a long-time friend from home, lasted only a few years, while marriage to the petite actress Fania Marinoff endured for a lifetime, from 1914 until Van Vechten died in 1964.

 

 

Carl Van Vechten loved to make photographs, especially nude portraits and figure studies, his wife loved to be photographed!

Affairs, fights, and copious drinking notwithstanding, like many involved in old-style 'gay marriages', the Van Vechtens were, in their way, a deeply dependent and devoted couple.

 

As they preferred cats to infants, the hook for them, seems never to have involved any hopes of offspring. Instead, it was how the 'respectability' of matrimony made inheriting a million-dollar-plus trust fund more secure, that seems to have helped sustain their attraction.  Follow Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance on Facebook.

The inducement of a family fortune helped to influence many white gays like Carl Van Vechten, Harold Vanderbilt, and Cole Porter to 'settle down'.

But apart from ambiguous beauty-products heiress, A'Lelia Walker, who married three times and adopted a teen-age daughter, but lived longest with a paid female companion in a one-bedroom apartment, such considerations seldom applied to African Americans. In some ways one might explain Harlem poet Countee Cullen's first wedding to Yolande DuBois on Easter Monday in 1928, as the outcome of

the extravagant hopes of his father-in-law and certain other blacks, for the formation of an exemplary dynasty of exalted intellectual accomplishment.

 

Given her own easy-going personality, as incurious as that of many other young people, it's fairly certain that this was not the objective of his bride. Despite any outsized ambition of William Edward Burkhart DuBois, who edited the Crisis Magazine of America's foremost civil rights organization, the NAACP, his daughter had merely been interested in romantically 'falling in love' with someone who looked nice, and who was a good dancer.

That was why initially, she'd been more encouraging toward his friend, who would serve as Cullen's best man, Harold Jackman. Widely deemed 'Harlem's handsomest bachelor,' though flattered and amused by Miss DuBois' crush, Jackman was uninterested. This is what made Harlem's 'poet laureate' suddenly so much more appealing.

 

 

Until her death in 1917, Cullen had lived with his grandmother, Amanda Porter in Louisville, Kentucky. He then moved with the Reverend Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Asbury Cullen, into the parsonage of Harlem's Salem United Methodist Episcopal Church, and soon adopted their name.

 

 

 

Led to their pews on April 9th by ushers, including Langston Hughes, who almost to a man were exclusively gay --- how the fashionable congregation had whispered, one to the other--- "What do you think, does she know?" Completely discounting the couple's week-end wedding trip, when Cullen embarked days later with his father and handsome Harold for Paris on his Guggenheim fellowship, everyone, including Yolande, had thought the worst--- that this was their honeymoon. But they, Harold and Countee, were only friends. Divorced in record time, when he remarried ten years later, in 1940, Countee was more careful to select a more 'suitable' helpmate. Both Ida Mae Robeson Cullen's brother and her first husband were gay, and hence she had to 'know the score.'

"Lithe, handsome, fun and charismatic, sexually, Jimmy was the most responsive lover I ever had! "When aspiring architect Philip Johnson and cabaret song-stylist Jimmy Daniels conducted assignations in the mid-1930's, they occurred most often in a large Harlem apartment, occupied by a black couple and the wife's white lesbian lover. Their apartment in the building at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street was a cooperative unit owned by distinguished actress Edna Thomas,

immortalized by her interpretation of Lady Macbeth in Orson Wells' stage debut in 1934. Lloyd Thomas, her husband, like his wife had started out working for legendary black-beauty-products millionaire, Madame C. J. Walker.

Olivia Wyndham Spencer, Mrs. Thomas' girlfriend, a recovered cocaine addict, was a member of one of England's most distinguished families. Mrs. Howland Spencer's husband made a career of marrying rich women and was also gay. Only he miscalculated in choosing Olivia Wyndham, a great-great-granddaughter of the last Earl of Egremont. Related to Britain's wealthiest aristocrats, she was herself poor, by New York society standards at least. And she too had blundered, imagining Spencer to be much more affluent as well, a trouble-free 'beard,' able to offer both security and propriety.
Introduced at one of the phenomenal parties of heiress A'Lelia Walker,

by Lloyd Thomas, Olivia immediately expressed her pronounced attraction and in n-uncertain terms. Taken aback momentarily, Edna's reaction was an aloof iciness. But, calling to apologize, asking if she might come over to say goodbye, Olivia was not rebuffed a second time. No sooner had Edna related that even her, "initial response had not been as indifferent as I'd pretended," than Olivia had aggressively pounced and ravaged her! Married to a man for the third time, Edna confessed how never before that day had she ever experienced an orgasm.

 

Married to distinguished black research scientist Elmer S. Imes, who taught at Fisk University, novelist Nella Larsen, was a member of the 'sisterhood' headed by Thomas and Wyndham that centered around intimate weekends parties at Minedo Farm, their country place in Connecticut. Winning the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal in 1929, a few years later, accused of plagiarism, Larson was disgraced and abruptly cut ties to all her former friends including Wyndham, Thomas and the Van Vechtens. Divorced, alone and working as a nurse in obscurity, this writer whose work explored the confused social, sexual and racial boundaries of 1920's Homo-Harlem, died in 1964

 

As for Johnson and Daniels, whom the architect later termed "the first Mrs. Johnson", gradually they too drifted apart. Johnson maintained, that when they parted, "I was sadder than I'd thought I might be," and that the passionate youth Jimmie had, "probably left me for someone who was better in bed..."

Johnson's inability to protect his black boyfriend from the indignity of fancy restaurants failing to provide service on account Jimmie's color and his admitted failure to consult, consider, or always include him at parties and on trips, seems a more logical reason for their breakup. Replete with a very rich and encouraging lesbian wife, the acclaimed poet, 'Brynher' [nee Winifred Ellerman] Daniels was more fortunate in his choice of his next long-term lover, Kenneth Macpherson, the Scottish poet.

 

 

After the Harlem Renaissance artist and writer, Richard Bruce Nugent , photographed in the 1950s with his wife Grace, took the precaution to marry, so someone could take care of him

Unexpectedly Finding Paradise!

 

Dashing, he was widely regarded as wickedly clever, quite charming and terribly attractive. Yet according to some, these attributes only made William Collins Whitney, 1841-1904, a prominent American political leader and financier, an all-the-more accomplished rake and rogue.  When he died in 1904, a few even speculated that Whitney was murdered knowing of his former friend, Yale-roommate and brother-in-law, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne’s threat to ruin him!

 

 

 

 

Secretary of the Navy in the first Grover Cleveland administration, Whitney primarily made his fortune as a streetcar magnate. Expertly manipulative, his stock-watering, it is said, would make today’s colossal mortgage-backed derivatives, seem by comparison, like an amateurish undertaking.   That he had married his roommate-friend’s sister, Miss Flora Payne, of Cleveland, daughter of Senator Henry B. Payne of Ohio, certainly proved to be  useful. A brilliant academician interested in science, if no beauty, Mrs. Whitney was rich. Her devoted brother, who was named treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, was richer still. The Whitneys had five children.

 

 William Collins Whitney, 1841-1904

 

Social leaders in New York as well as in Washington, the couple lived at Fifth Avenue and 57^th Street. Diagonally across the intersection stood the imposing winter residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt, II.  Following two years spent mourning after Flora Whitney's death in 1893, Whitney was married to an elegant widow named Edith Sibyl Randolph. Out to impress the world with his ever-increasing riches, Whitney turned to McKim, Mead and White, commissioning them to build for his new wife a magnificent residence in the Italian Renaissance style at Fifth Avenue and 68th Street.  

 

 Whitney's new house was only sedate outside.

 

As so often was the case with Robert Adam, many of  Stanford White’s most brilliant successes resulted from the remodeling of an existing house. Between 1896 and 1902, White moved heaven and earth to transform the enormous, but ordinary four-story brownstone mansion, designed in 1884 by William Schickel for the sugar magnate Robert L. Stuart, into a palace, a ‘palace of art’!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



The stairway to paradise? 



 

Employing such extraordinary antique elements as the gilt-iron and bronze gates from the Palazzo Doria in Rome in the Whitney’s porte cochère and  Louis XVI boiserie from a château near Bordeaux in their second floor ballroom, then the largest private ballroom in New York, it’s estimated that White spent $4,000,000 converting 871 5th Avenue. Alas, before she had a chance to enjoy these splendors, on May 6, 1899, Edith Whitney died. Grievously injured in a riding accident in the south, she been brought home, never to regain consciousness.





                                

Edith Sibyl Whitney



 

Coinciding with his loss was the blow of estrangement from Col. Payne. Beyond vowing to cause Whitney’s financial and social  ruin for insulting his sister’s memory by remarrying, Payne had brought his considerable wealth to bear, to divide him from two of his children.  

 

Harry Payne Whitney, the traction king’s eldest offspring remained loyal to his father. He had married Cornelius Vanderbilt's daughter, Gertrude, the girl next door, sort off.

 

A rather conventional multi-millionaire-industrialist-sportsman, in time Harry Payne Whitney grew apart from his wife, who was as unusually gifted as his mother had been. More and more, as time passed, the pair lived apart, leading distinctly separate lives. If money was ever a bit tight between Uncle Oliver’s efforts of retribution and William Whitney’s prodigal extravagance, soon enough, money was again no serious barrier to infinite gratifications.  With William Whitney’s death his palatial city house had been sold furnished. When the new owner, James Henry ‘Silent’ Smith unexpectedly expired age 56 on his honeymoon trip in Japan, out of sentiment the family house was re-acquired  by the Whitneys.

 

 Harry Payne Whitney.

 

James Henry 'Slient' Smith's abode, before he moved into 871 Fifth Avenue, had been the Wilbraham. At 282-284 Fifth Avenue or 1 West 30th Street, it was built in 1888-90 as a bachelor apartment-hotel.  Its "bachelor flats" each consisted of a bedroom and parlor, with bathroom but no kitchen; the communal dining room was on the eighth floor.

 

 

A distinguished sculptor of great sensitivity who had trained with Rodin, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney increasingly lived in a converted Greenwich Village mews, where she had a studio.  When the occasion demanded, she dutifully put in an appearance at Fifth Avenue, but drag balls and night clubs in Paris and Harlem came to offer far more appeal for her than staid society functions.  She is all but notorious today, for the hard role she played in having her sister-in-law declared an unfit mother and thereafter taking charge to raise her young niece, Gloria Vanderbilt.  Courtroom intimations that little Gloria’s mother engaged in lesbian relationships seem cruelly ironic as, since girlhood, whispers of Gertrude Whitney’s varied passions for men and women had swirled all around among bon ton New York and Newport.

 

 

Ca. 1912: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bedecked in a good portion of her extensive collection of jeweled ornaments. 

 

The founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

1934: Scars from her custody trial and separation from her mother, have never faded. Gloria Vanderbilt with her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt.

 



1940: Gloria Vanderbilt with Aunt Gertrude.

 

The artist's studio.

 

 

Supremely beautiful, the mirrored screen overlain in ormolu in William Whitney’s ballroom, had started life as two, of a set four doors, ordered by Giacomo Filippo Carrega for the Galleria Dorata, Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi, in Genoa. Sublimely shimmering, they were designed by Lorenzo de' Ferrari 1680-1744, a painter.  Devising all the gallery’s appointments; paneling, mirrors, consoles and seat furniture, between 1743 and 1744, Ferrari adopted an aquatic theme, replete with mermaids, scallop shells and dolphins, devices which typify the decorative repertoire of the exuberant Genoese rococo style.

 

 

 

 William C. Whitney's Fifth Avenue Drawing Room

 

For Whitney’s ballroom, White amassed a far more eclectic, yet still related assemblage, one which even included a Victorian rococo revival sofa of the 1840s.  Yet much like Ferrari, he intended to rival other magnificent spaces, both great historic European interiors of the past and the grandest rooms of his own time, too. The perfect finishing touch, the group of rock crystal-hung 18^th century chandeliers White located for this space were finally hung just in time for New York's first cotillion of the new century, early in 1901.

 

In William C. Whitney's damask-hung, art-filled Drawing Room, tassels hanging from the ceiling concealed light bulbs used to illuminate paintings.

 

 

 

Acquired directly from the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi by Stanford White, Ferrari's ‘screen’ from the Galleria Dorata, joined by settees from the same source, were exported to New York expressly for William Whitney’s showplace.  Following Gertrude Whitney’s death in 1942, the golden screen was sold to  Baron Cassel and Baroness Cassel van Doorn. They, in turn, sold it in 1954, in Paris, to the dealers Serge Roche & J. Rotil, and it remained in their stock until at least 1956. Elinor Dorrance Ingersoll, who summered at lovely Bois Doré in Newport, must have acquired the screen about then, for it was sold from among her effects at Christie's September 27-28, 1977 house sale, for $14,500, to Miss Doris Duke.  At nearby Rough Point, where it remains, divided into two sections, of two panels each, it seems almost unbelievable that these one-time doors were not here always.

 

William C. Whitney's splendid Ballroom. 

 

 

Almost as difficult to fathom, is that there are any additional, identical, mirrored and gilt-bronze doors. These second two pairs were retained by Stanford White for himself and incorporated into the opulent decoration of his own city house at 121 East 21st Street, facing Gramercy Park. I have always so admired that White felt entitled to the same splendors he afforded for his much, much richer clients.  

Stanford White's mirrored screen.

 

 

 

Sold for $1,250 in 1907, upon the architect’s sordid murder, the screen was obtained by shipping heir Frederick E. Guest, of Old Templeton on Long Island. For the same price, at the time one could have gotten a nice Rolls Royce. Sold to Whitney Warren, Jr. by the Guests' son, Winston Guest, the panels realized $11,000. An acclaimed and discretely gay host and aesthete, after forming a magical backdrop for parties in his Nob Hill apartment, the panels were bequeathed by Warren to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

 

 

 A drawing by Lorenzo de' Ferrari 1680-1744

 

 

 Two of four of Lorenzo de' Ferrari panels in Doris Duke's Rough Point Drawing Room.

 

 

 

 

 

That was in 1986. By 1989, as lot 115, these precious panels were sold for $181,500 to Alexander & Berendt Ltd., London, from whom they were acquired for an undisclosed price, which, whatever it might have been, was well worth it, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1991.

 

 Whitney Warren, Jr.'s Nob Hill apartment.

 

 The young aesthete. Whitney Warren, a Whitney and Vanderbilt relation, was always discretely gay.

 

Mr. Warren entertains for Miss Audrey Hepburn.

 

 

White’s treasures collected for William Whitney were legendary. So it’s not unexpected to learn that even objects with an indefinite lineage, like the handsome Franco-Flemish 16^thcentury chimneypiece from the dining room, found good homes when New York’s finest Renaissance palace was destroyed. Rid of embellishing flourishes so typical of White, it landed at Harvard’s venerable Fogg Museum. But not for long.

 

 William Whitney's baronial Dining Room. 

 

 

When I discovered that Darryl Pinckney and James Fenton were selling a lovely old farm near Oxford, in order to buy and restore Harlem’s old John Dwight house, I was pleased. ‘At last, the unimaginable, restoration of a great landmark, will actually happen!’ I thought. Long Leys farm, where James has made a garden of enchantment, is the real estate agent’s pictures reveal online, quite a pretty place, of just the sort where one might like to retire. A wreck when they bought it, in addition to the great garden, it was augmented by a wing with a great room of two stories.

 

The Great Room at Long Leys Farm.

I knew at once that their antique mantelpiece seemed strangely familiar.  Because the William Whitney house was razed so long ago, an ocean away, it seemed unlikely that it had somehow supplied this stunning  souvenir of Stanford White’s weakness for old-world grandeur. But of course, by the oblique route of the saleroom, as a cautionary testament  to impermanence, the vagaries of tastes and the fecklessness of museum collections, it was.