Mr.Michael Henry Adams' Style & Taste

Obama's Empathy Even Before He 'Evolved'!

"That cat, Barack Obama, our first black President, is amazing."

, observed my friend Michael McCollom. This was years ago, we were listening to Obama's poignant speech from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp; a rejoinder to his acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering, given the day before in Cairo.

 

The American executive has charged the world to bear witness to the magnitude of wickedness that occurred at such places giving rise to the establishment of a Jewish state. Recalling this ignoble past, he used it as an example to substantiate the formation of a new Palestine. That's what Michael was applauding, but it was easily enough expected of someone so thoughtful.

 

What President Obama said next, was neither anticipated nor ordinary. In fact, in the realm of the counter intuitive, it almost ranks right there with Jesus Christ's improbable admonition for people to love their enemies, when he said,

"And just as we identify with the victims, it's also important for us I think to remember that the perpetrators of such evil were human, as well, and that we have to guard against cruelty in ourselves.

 

Way before President Obama's embrace of marriage equality, this message said a lot about his empathic humanity.  His exhortation, familiar in holy text and uncommon works of art like the film The Reader is, alas, a hard sell among the President's intended large popular audience. It's a difficult concept to grasp and implement for any audience, irrespective of social class, nationality or size.

Prince Philipp of Hesse laughing with Hitler and Goebbles

Surrounded, in the midst of life, with joy, with beauty, but by the sordid, by desperation and death, we usually imagine, that should we encounter evil, we will recognize it at once. After all, it's vile and inhuman. But, as it turns out, conceiving inequity as stereotypically odious and awful, very often, unknowing, far from withdrawing repelled, we eagerly grasp evil-incarnate tightly by the hand when it arrives.

 

Hitler greets the Duchess and Duke of Windsor

Obedient and insular, utterly defeated, despite their discipline and self-sacrifice, it's easy to understand the appeal among Germany's ordinary masses, of Hitler's absolving Jewish scapegoats. How like the American 'religious' right's demonization of gays, which, with similar irony, asserts that keeping same-sex partners from being married will foster heterosexual unions, forestall divorces and preserve the otherwise faltering 'traditional family'.

What of Weimar Germany's leaders, however? Why didn't a sophisticated and worldly intelligentsia and aristocracy save Germany from Nazi intolerance? Hadn't the debacle of the 'Great War' taught them anything at all?   Fabrice d'Almeida's brilliant book from two years ago, High Society in the Third Reich, goes a  long way toward outlining how the devotion to privilege misled Germany's elite to an extent that inconvenient truths about Nazi evil were was easily overlooked. It's not very different from how Lewis Lapham insists that America's one percent is willing to eschew democracy, so long as their wealth and power go unchecked. 

"You might as well ask why slave masters didn't educate, cultivate and uplift their former slaves," says Stanley Crouch. "If Douglass was correct in contending that, 'Authority concedes nothing without a demand.' I'm here to tell you that having your power curtailed, there's an irresistible reflex to try to get it back. Those who have long held absolute power aren't likely to feel much contrition, as opposed to be ready to blame anyone else but themselves for their losses."

 

One unlikely victim to perish at Buchenwald was Princess Mafalda of Savoy, the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel, III, and sister of Italy's last monarch. Her story is movingly related in Johnathan Petropoulous' engrossing book published by Oxford in 2006, Royals and the Reich.

 

 

 

Puccini had dedicated Turandot to her. As her husband was highly intelligent, artistic and gay, one might without difficulty reason that Prince Philipp of Hesse, whose lovers included famed English anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon,

who had Jewish ancestry, to have been an unlikely spouse for the Roman Catholic princess.

Yet in 1925 this great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the Italian king's daughter were married---eventually producing 4 children.

The same private resume which made Philipp a somewhat startling bridegroom, also made him an improbable if not unprecedented high Nazi administrator. However, not only did he become a part of the Fuher's inner circle, but as an art advisor and an envoy to Mussolini, Philipp, with architect Albert Speer, was perhaps as close as Hitler had to an intimate friend.

Honest enough to satisfy his sexual orientation, Philipp was pragmatic enough to hide these activities from both establishment officialdom and his family. Nonetheless, a whirlwind of multiple and often overlapping, youthful relationships alone, identified him as someone with an unconventional outlook. How then was he deceived by Hitler's exploitation of royalty and aristocrats to lend decorum to his fledgling and sinister movement? For someone who was a true connoisseur and a gifted decorator, a kind friend to Jews, Christians and atheists alike, and a devoted father, what justified his decided moral compromise?

One might ask the same question of any one of thousands of well-educated, well-connected aristocrats who became early proponents of a 'Thousand Year Reich.' Philipp's uncle, Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, determined to outwit the lowly upstart, to restore his family's Hohenzollern dynasty, was only Hitler's highest ranking early staunch supporter. A 'real man's man' the heir of Kaiser Wilhelm, II had married beautiful

 

 

 

 

Duchess Cecilie Auguste Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

They had six offspring and all throughout the horrors of the First World War had built a fantastic palace outside of Berlin called Cecilienhof.

 

 

 

"It has been a trait of megalomaniacs throughout history to use the arts to control thought, gain respectability, bolster their power and memorialize themselves,"

says Frederic Spotts, an historian of modern Germany, in his book "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics." Referencing structures like Munich's 'House of German Art' and Berlin's Chancellery, which recall contemporary monuments in Washington, Delhi and elsewhere, he stresses how Hitler went "beyond the others," to "define and legitimize his rule in cultural terms."

 

 

Rather aptly the fountain in Cecilienhof's garden court personifies Narcissus

Realizing that Crown Prince Wilhelm was Queen Victoria's 'favorite' grandchild makes the quaint 'olde English' atmosphere that pervades Europe's last royal residence at Potsdam less incomprehensible. Incorporating elements from the famous half-timbered English manor house

  

Canted bay window at 16th century Little Moreton Hall

 

 

Canted bay window at Cecilienhof, derived from Little Moreton Hall

 

Little Moreton Hall at Cheshire, Cecilienhof was equally indebted, stylistically,

 

to Edward Ould and Charles Eamer Kempe's Wightwick Manor of the 1890's.

Admittedly bigger than either any of its 16th century vernacular sources or fin de Siècle models designed by Lutyens, George & Peto and their contemporaries, certainly there was nothing ominous about this Arts and Crafts style extravaganza--like ten manor houses and five cottages put together to form a substantial domestic bastion.

Built according to plans by architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, the eclectic interior, which includes a baronial great hall,

 

 

 

a Neo-classical drawing room and a family sitting room in the form of a ship's stateroom, was devised by Paul Ludwig Troost, who originally had designed deluxe steamship décors. Espousing a conservative and luxurious aesthetic that allied fine hand-craftsmanship with cutting-edge technological advances, royal designer Troost was soon patronized by the ambitious Chancellor Adolph Hitler. Brick, with oak timber-framing, Cecilienhof, which includes

 

5 courtyards and 55 carved brick chimney stacks,

should have been completed in 1915, but with construction delayed due to the outbreak of war, the royal couple could not move in until August of 1917.

 

 

Idyllic photographs notwithstanding, Prince Wilhelm's following his father into exile one year later was telling. Crown Princess Cecilie and her children stayed at the palace. Separation only exacerbated estrangement induced by the prince's many recurrent infidelities, which had included an American opera star. The Crown Princess remained steadfast and dignified, with periodic visits from her husband, until she fled from the approaching Red Army in February 1945.

 

 

The setting for the strategic Potsdam Conference where Churchill , Stalin and Eisenhower concluded the Second World War, today Cecilienhof is operated today as an hotel and a museum.

 

Regarded from the first with reservation, in the end Hitler imprisoned his former pal, Prince Philipp, whose nephew, the Duke of Edinburgh is the British Queen's consort. The fate of Prince Philipp's wife was sealed when her father had Mussolini arrested. On the pretext that her husband had sent for her,

 

 

Princess Mafalda was apprehended in occupied Rome and spirited off to Buchenwald. Injured during an allied air raid she died from botched surgery to amputate her arm.

 

A Savoy emerald and diamond brooch

Are bad people only ugly, or black, or white, or Arab, or rich, or poor? Does either their art or architecture ever really betray the propensity that people have to act badly? Can those who imagine that it will create the best result for the greatest number or even ordain God's will, concentrating all power and resources in their hands, solely among people who believe as they do, ever be dissuaded? Voluntarily, will they ever relinquish their weighted influence?

Allowing individuals to make our own decisions guided by just laws, according to the dictates of our conscience, will those who marshal power, allow others to do what they believe to be best for them? Will comprehensive, high-quality education, contraceptives, employment at a living-wage, affordable health care, and housing and any other measure that would eliminate the need for abortion altogether, ever be pursued with the same vigor as efforts to punish people who err according to someone else's standards? Will government for the people, by the people, with liberty and justice for all, ever dictate our united endeavor whoever we are, wherever and however we live?

"Kind Hearts Are More Than Coronets": Trayvon, RMS Titanic and Emily Post

  

 

'How?', one asks, 'does the tragic fate of RMS Titanic a century ago, remind me of Trayvon Martin's death today?'  It's the study in contrast that elicits a connection. Already at 15, socialized to 'man-up', Trayvon ignored his girlfriend's wise advice. Even on her cell phone, sensing the acuteness of his growing anxiety she warned him,"Run!" Already terrified, but not wishing to loose face, even confronting impending danger, Trayvon said, "No. I'll just walk fast."  

 

  

On Titanic 100 years ago, largely rejecting a primal response to disregard the plight of others in order to save themselves, many also had attempted instead to maintain their dignity,  Acting with gallant sang-froid and honor many abided by the age-old convention dictating that women and children occupy lifeboats first. On the whole, as the band famously played on, order and decency prevailed.

 

 

 
 

Only once all the boats had gone, when certain death was imminent, had the abandoned 1,523 souls collectively panicked.  As crisis escalated, desolation had become contagious. Survivors, unable to escape the horrid spectcle as the world's largest vessel floundered, have described how the most  harrowing aspect of their nightmarish escape had not been not knowing if help were near or the bitter cold, but the plaintive cries of those left behind.

  

 

 

 

This is the same affecting horror one feels now, listening to the 911 audio tape, as Trayvon Martin attempts unsuccessfully to evade his armed assailant. With the same sort of mounting desperation, any bravado, the fear of appearing un-manly, of acting in a way that might bring forth the indictment of  'punk!', was set aside.  It is a child crying out in utter terror that we hear, and knowing the stigma associated with expressing fear among young men, only  makes Trayvon's terror all the more real. 

 

 

 

 

1933: Emily Post caricatured in Vanity Fair.

For most of the last century the person who best manifests a code of good form and correct conduct was Emily Post, whose treatise Etiquette, debuted in 1922 as Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home. Well versed in the ritualized nomadic and herd-like conformity of her time and class, Mrs. Post certainly knew her subject. For nearly 40 years she exposed a common-sense approach to 'how to be'. Ultimately, for all its delineation of eating implements, calling cards and hierarchical deference, her credo was rooted in a biblical-inspired courtesy based on local precedent and ordinary kindness. Hers' was a way of comporting oneself in which good intentions mattered so much that they trumped established procedure or the empty observance of mere form.

 

  

This was what gave Emily Post such a far-reaching and authoritative appeal. With the success of her book she regularly spoke on radio programs.  After 1932 Emily Post wrote a column on good taste which appeared daily in some 200 newspapers.

 

 

Establishing a dynastic industry in 1946 with her son Edwin M. Post, Mrs. Post founded The Emily Post Institute. Continuing her work it's now headed by her great-granddaughter Ms. Anna Post. Peggy Post, wife of Emily Post's great-grandson, wrote etiquette advice for Good Housekeeping magazine, succeeding her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Post. Peter Post, Mrs. Post's great-grandson, writes the Etiquette at Work column for the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe. Cindy Post Senning, Ed.D. another great-granddaughter, is a director of The Emily Post Institute. Great-great-granddaughter Lizzie Post addresses life and etiquette for the young at her blog Not Gonna Lie. Like their ancestor, all these Post descendants have written a raft of books related to exemplary behavior. 

 

 

 

  

 

In the 1960's, in most black households, works of art beyond portraits of a white and beatific Jesus, hung along-side the modern martyrs, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, were sadly limited. Similarly, books, beside encyclopedia and a King James Bible, proved exceedingly rare. Some African American brides-to-be however, wanting their big day to be wonderful, saved $4.00 to obtain The Blue Book of Social Usage.

 

How fortunate I was, growing tired of play one sultry afternoon, to stumble upon something so esoteric. Hidden in plain sight, amongst a set of unread, amusingly outdated 1939 World Books, I discovered in my Aunt Lane's bungalow living room, a 1941 edition of Etiquette.   Only nine, I was as delighted as if I'd found a dollar bill forgotten as a bookmark.

 

 

 

The chapter headed Formal Dinners presented a photograph of the sumptuous dining table at Mortmar, at Tuxedo Park, the resort where Mrs. Post lived in season as a child and as a young adult. Demolished in 1938, this was the country house created for Amanda Burden's great-grandfather, Standard Oil partner Richard Mortimer. Completed in 1903, the baronial house with 28 rooms was a skillful re-working of a Victorian mansion. It was not an example of the work of Emily Post's father, the architect Bruce Price however, but a design by Hunt & Hunt. Originally from Baltimore where Emily was born, Price, who designed Tuxedo's gate lodge and earliest houses, had a long and distinguished career.

 

    
 

 

In such a traditional interior as this, apart from shades on the candles, very little changed from the 1922 first edition of  Etiquette and the edition published on the eve of the Great Depression. 

 

 

Completed in 1903, Mortmar, at Tuxedo Park was designed by the partnership of Richard Morris Hunt's two sons, Hunt & Hunt. Demolished in 1938, this was the country house created for Amanda Burden's great-grandfather, Standard Oil partner Richard Mortimer.  

 

 

 Bruce Price: 1845–1903

   

 

 

 

 

 

One of the residential works which helped to make Emily Post's father famous was his design and laying out of Georgian Court, the neo-Georgian residence on the estate of indulgent father George Jay Gould.  Surrounded by a woodland of pines at Lakewood, New Jersey, it was completed in 1896.

 

 

 

 

 

Price's friend John Massey Rhind's monumental 'electrical' fountain was a birthday gift in 1902 from Gould to his wife.

  

 

 

 

 

Price joined with Clarence Luce to design a yellow and white row house group combining neo-Georgian and Renaissance ornament for David King's innovative model development. Still prized as Harlem landmarks they were completed in 1893. 

 

 

One of a series of hotels and train stations Bruce Price built for the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Château Frontenac in Quebec City of 1893 is his best known work.

 

 

 

Completed in 1903, Price's Francis Robert Schell house at Northfield, Massachusetts, was demolised 60 years later.

  

One migh mtistakenly imagine that Mortmar was the sort of house where Emily Post, the author of Etiquette, might have lived. Indeed, in 1892, she had  married prominent banker Edwin Main Post, with whom she had two sons and he certainly would have enjoyed living so lavishly.

 

  

  

 

  
 



  

 

   

The early roles of Emily Post: As an infant in her mother's arms in 1874. Ca. 1888, Miss Emily Price, daughter of Josephine (Lee) Price of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and noted architect Bruce Price, as a debutante. Mrs. Edwin Main Post, a dotting mother to her sons Edwin Main Post, Jr. (1893) and Bruce Price Post (1895), and as a budding author. Mrs. Price Post, the worldly divorcee, in1905, painted by Emil Fuchs, painter to King Edward VII.

 

 

 

 

 

  
 
 

 

Had it not been for business collapses exacerbated by affairs with chorus girls, leaving him the target of blackmail and leading to the Posts'  divorce in 1905, they might well have abided by the former yachtsman's love of fashionable flamboyance. But opulence and ostentation were not Emily Post's style. Declining alimony in acknowledgment of her ex-husband's reversal of fortune, inhabiting a milieu where a woman's identity was either an extension of her father's or her husband's, she helped to codify a new convention, by calling herself Mrs. Price Post. Emulating the example of her acquaintance Edith Wharton, who was also divorced, to supplement her parents' allowance, she also turned her hand to writing.  

 

 

 

 

Shown in her carriage in New York and at the Newport Casino with her daughter Mrs. Edwin M. Post, Jr., Mrs. W. Goadby Loew was the daughter of Morgan banker George Baker. She was also Emily Post friend from Tuxedo. In 1920 Miss Barbara B. Loea Loew had married First Lieut. Edwin M. Post, Jr. at St. Thomas' Church on Fifth Avenue. An aviator serving with General Pershing's Expeditionary Force he had been cited for gallantry.  After his brother Bruce Price Post's death in 1927, Edwin Post with his son William Goadby Post, became the primary focus of Emily Post's affection.  

 

Producing pieces on architecture and interior design, Emily Post's stories and serials appeared in the same magazines that that published Edith Wharton's work, such as Harper's, Scribner's, and The Century.  Lacking the poetry and profundity of Wharton, Post's novels: Flight of a Moth (1904), Purple and Fine Linen (1906), Woven in the Tapestry (1908), The Title Market (1909), and The Eagle's Feather (1910) explored similar themes and were very well received.

 

 

 

The death of her mother in a car crash on the Harriman estate near Tuxedo, provided both an ample bequest and a beloved new home. An alternative retreat from summer's heat was soon discovered too. At Edgartown, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard Island, she acquired, remodeled and refined a modest 170-year-old shingled house, where henceforward she would spend most of her summers for the rest of her life. An avid gardener, who for a time, worked producing models that architects used to make clients understand what they were planning, Mrs. Post relived stress more from working jig-saw puzzles, as opposed to playing bridge. A superb hostess who loved the clear soups, terrapin, boiled hominy, and canvas-backed duck esteemed in her youth, she deplored bad service and unclean silver.  Her help, whom she made a point of treating with respect and consideration, were excellent and very loyal. 

 

 

 

 

What a difference a door makes! Undoubtedly, had she been a man, Emily Post would have become an architect like her revered father. She loved the problm-solving involved in re-doing her Edgartown country house, which provided illustrations for her book The Personality of a House. A great plantswoman, she is pictured below consulting with her gardener.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once she decided to abandon her family's Washington Square and Tuxedo houses, Emily Post was unsatisfied with the apartment suites she was shown.  So over lunch at the Coleny Club she induced friends to join her in developing their own co-op apartment building at 39 East 79th Street on Madison Avenue. Carefully  collaborating with architect Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, who had worked with her father, Emily Post planned her home at number 9B exactingly to meet her perfectionist requirements. Architectural historian Christopher Gray explained in a piece in the Times how every resident of the 14-storey venture was listed in the New York Social Register. Mrs. Post's neighbors, Gray relates, in some cases gave up rather nice digs to live here. 

 "Bessie White, Stanford White's widow, moved from an old brownstone at 25 East 81st Street; Victor Morawetz, a railroad lawyer who took the massive 12th- and 13th-floor duplex with double-height windows, moved from the apartment building at 907 Fifth Avenue; Murchison moved from his own town house at 49 East 63rd Street."  

Furnished with well proportioned old family furniture, Mrs. Post's apartment perfectly reflected her philosophy about dress. Of its time, it is nonetheless not exactly typical. A profusion of flowers, both ever-changing cut bouquets, floral chintzes and wall paper, the quality of interesting ornaments, Chines jade lamps from Edward Farmer, Bow china figurines, and old silver urns and candlesticks, the generosity of the untrimmed silk curtains, two fireplaces in constant use during cold weather, the contrasting colors of her bed hangings, all these things contributed to a subtle distinction, in the same way that Post recommended fine tailoring, elegant jewels and perfect grooming could. 

 

 

Deciding around 1925 to abandon her family's Washington Square house, Emily Post found no apartments that suited her.  she was shown.  With friends she developed her own cooperative building at 39 East 79th Street on Madison Avenue. Carefully  collaborating with her architect son Bruce Price Post and his employer Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, who had worked with her father , Emily Post planned her home at number 9B to meet exacting requirements.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

  

 

 

  

Afternoon tea as a formal reception, with candles lighted and curtains drawn. 

 

 

Two of Emily Post's lunch tables. The one at top features roses in a silver vase as a centerpiece. More economically, the Depression era table below displays silvered fruit in a silver bowl.

 

 

 

 

Dying at home in bed in 1960 at the age of 87, Emily Price Post perhaps exemplifies the adage of  Logan Pearsall Smith,  "There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail."  Both in stories and with Etiquette, Post applied the lessons and heartache of a lifetime of good living to amusing her fellows and enlightening the uninitiated. Birth, betrothal, death, a night at the opera: one reads with rapt fascination  of both the travails and moments of triumph lived by all Emily Post's friends, brilliantly encapsulated into  her fittingly named protagonists and supporting players, Hastings, the Worldlys' butler, Mrs. Three-in-one, who has no servants, Bobo Gilding, Mrs. Highbrow,  the Wellborns, Onceweres, Toplofties, the Oldnames and the Kindharts. To one degree or another, most were the beneficiaries of adequate incomes and could spare $4.00. But if faced with some situation of moment, what did handsome incomes and good manners avail them?  

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond its appeal as a useful analogy of humankind's heedlessness, brazenly steaming along, ignoring warnings of icebergs ahead, it is these poignant juxtapositions that most attract one to Titanic's tragedy. For all the ways, good and bad, in which human behavior, custom and manners have evolved over the past century, Titanic shows how, fundamentally, people remain the same.

 

 

 

 

 

Mining millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim might well to have read the passage in Emily Post's first novel, where a character says that the worst sin is in "being found out".   Father of modern art patron Marguerite 'Peggy' Guggenheim, at Titanic's end he acted impeccably.  After placing his French mistress and her maid into a boat as a final beau geste, accompanied by his valet, he went below. Both hastily changed back into the evening clothes they'd recently taken off to retire. "Tell my wife that we behaved like gentlemen",  Guggenheim said to a passenger who survived.  

  

Progressive people today endorse the equality of men and women. Similarly, distinctions based on social class are sufficiently looked down on, that even many very rich and highly privileged people, like Governor and Mrs. Willard Mitt Romney, feel compelled to sometimes contend that they are just like everyone else.  So from a modern perspective, where women serve in Afghanistan and jeans are no longer unusual attire at the county club, what is it that makes the cool selflessness of many among Titanic's male passengers and crew seem so admirable? Why isn't it instead deemed as merely sexist and condescending? In the kind of dire 'everyone for themselves' free-for-all aboard the sinking Titanic, what made putting on whatever drag worked to enable one to board a lifeboat's safety, shameful? 

  

 

 

 

 

The physical and material advantage that most men had in terms of strength and cash is undeniable. They could have quite easily trampled and overpowered encumbered women and defenseless children. But they didn't, not on the whole. 

  

 

 

  

In first-class 97 % of women passengers survived. In second-class, it was 86% of the women. In steerage, slightly less than half of the women emigrating for a new life in America's land of promise were saved. That of the men traveling first-class, 34% lived, versus 13% of men traveling in steerage is certainly unfair.  But squeezed, four abreast, into our diminutive seats in coach, do we really imagine that in a crash we would receive as much assistance or fare as well as the folks up-front?   As now, a century ago an equal percentage of first-class men surviving as did children traveling in steerage, was seen as monstrous. So most men who escaped death that night never lived down the 'scandal' of having been punks enough to to live.  

 

 

 

But can one blame these men for wanting to live, anymore than wives and mothers, sisters and lovers, who refused to row back once the Titanic had disappeared to rescue submerged loved ones, for fear of being swamped?  Faced with the temptation of Bernard Madoff to so effortlessly enrich ourselves beyond our wildest dreams, would we demur? Who can truly say, given a chance to be a Nazi, a slaveholder, or an African, Middle Eastern or an American dictator, that they would walk away from absolute power? Surely, faced with certain death, the stakes are raised.  Most people, I think, facing such situations, might experience a quandary at least for a moment or two. But I hope, were it a matter of my life or that of a poor child's, I'd recall all that my mom, grandma, Mama Willie, Aunt Cora and Emily Post had taught me and be able to do the right thing.   

Images provided courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Emily Post Institute, and Georgian Court College. All others comprise the author's collection... 

 

 

 

Like Bayard Rustin: Black, Gay and Out-loud Proud!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the holidays, there's recently been lots to celebrate in Harlem. Better still there are more and more new places to celebrate in.   A decade ago Congressman Charles Rangel's persuading President Bill Clinton to locate his office here, gave all sorts of people, black and white, a sign it was safe to come uptown again. 

 

 

 

 
 

 

Everyone in the swing and in the chips goes to the new Red Rooster!

 

 

Today inveterate fashion plate Marcus Samuelson's hot Red Rooster  restaurant encourages the once reluctant to come as well. Settepanni, Native, Spoonbread, Cederick's, Lido, Chez Lucienne and Lenox Social all also offer excellent eats in Harlem. In between attending a spate of lectures, screenings, book signings and museum openings over the past couple of weeks one has had to think hard about where one might like to go afterward to prolong a wonderful evening.  

 

 

 

 

Toasting Gordon Easley happy birthday with Donald at Lenox Social! 

 

 

 

 

Having dinner by the Chez Lucienne bar.

 

 

A marvelous night out on March 29th began at the Studio Museum in Harlem's exhibition reception.   For me Sisters, a selection of images movingly juxtaposed on diptychs,  obtained by the museum, from Lorraine O’Grady’s 1994 photo-installation Miscegenated Family Album,was the varied show's highlight.

 

But insofar as one sees in addition to talented museum director Thelma Golden, so many more chic friends one is longing to see, the reception itself is gratifying as a fun-filled event.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
  
 



   

Dynamic sculptor Ousmane Gueye, born in Dakar, Senegal in 1956 was the featured artist at Renaissance Fine Art's frenzied opening the next night.  I met  Gueye, who first began making art with the aide of an ordinary hammer and screw driver at the age of 6, when he lived and worked in Harlem. None other than Pablo Picaso, impressed by his efforts, had encouraged him to pursue a career in art. Known for his meticulous selection of marbleand alabaster from far flung quarries around the globe, his abstracted figures glow with an inner luminosity.  “The more I work with the stone, the more the stone tells me what it wants to be”, M. Gueye likes to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, apart from seeing the beautifully presented sculpture, I had to miss the impending scene in order to make it to  the packed El Museo del Barrio. 

 

 

 

Like 250 other fans I had come to hear creative culture-mavens Isabel and Ruben Toledo, discuss  Isabel’s new book with her friend Nina García, the renowned fashion director of Marie Claire.  Written by Isabel, Roots Of Style, Weaving Together Life, Love and Fashion, was illustrated by Ruben, her husband and in all things, her inevitable, constant collaborator.  People adore the adorable Toledos.

 

 

   

 

They are that devoted in-cync couple we should all like to be, together since middle school, more affectionate, thoughtful and inspired than ever. Self-made successes, the Cuban immigrant couple's saga reads like a modern fairy tale. Only apart, perhaps, for Castro, whose revolution  turned their lives upside down, there are no villains nor witches to impede their struggle towards a  triumph which seems predestined. What is their secret for happiness?  It's to do with who they are, both as individuals and together too.  There is Isabel, vivacious yet serene, while Ruben is  playfully creative and always exceedingly smart.  Both are warm, outgoing, generously charitable, irreverently witty, and outrageously attractive.

 

 

By being  attentive to the smallest detail of their appearance, knowing "details make perfection", by knowing that  an arresting smile is the most effective and inexpensive accessory, they present an enviable picture of perfection. Observing them, even the conventional ideal of marriage with children seems questionable.  One knows so well, quite dear friends, who with the arrival of children and new responsibilities no longer call. Prolonged absences become more and more frequent and ever rarer meetings are prone to be distracted by an unseen presence, no less real for not being physically present. 

 

Some couples once little ones appear, feel perfectly at ease to let themselves go.They come to neglect how they look and one another, as well as you and other friends.  One can't possibly imagine  such a fate befalling the Toledos.  And, admiring their sure style as much their endearing connectedness, they inspire us as much as they motivate each other.  Dale Dobson, Michela Angela Davis,  Marilu  Menendez and her elegant sister: a score of one's most fashionable friends were on hand to celebrate a sublime partnership and to have our books signed. 

 

 

 

  
 
  
 

 

 

Another night,  Friday, March 30th , at the Schomburg Center brought quite a different experience that was just as rewarding.  The American Constitution Society for Law & Policy presented a panel in celebration of Bayard Rustin’s 100th birthday.  Celebrated by some as a civil rights trailblazer, a passionate advocate for equality, and an early activist for LGBT rights, in a better world, Rustin would have have all the renown of Dr. King, who he so ably tutored. 

 

 

 

 

 

1963.

 

 

Early in the Civil Rights Movement, it was Rustin who identified issues of attaining social and economic equality, as  essential “human right”. But the second phase of the Civil Rights Movement pursued with Dr. King never took hold. That's what Ida E. Jones, Ph.D., National Director of the Association of Black Women  Historians, Burt Neuborne, Professor of Civil Liberties, at NYU's Law School, and Legal Director of the Brennan Center for Justice, and my old friend Kendall Thomas, Professor of Law at Columbia and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture, all expertly moderated by Cathy Albisa, of the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative concluded with captivating eloquence. 

 

 

  

 

Walter Nagel at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, with Alicia L. Young, Assistant Director and Professor Kendall Thomas.

 

 

Compared to the Toledo talk the audience was sparse. But how choice and stimulating the exchange was. NaturallyTrayvon Martin's death and the vulnerability of black youth was discussed.  Juxtaposing this with the extra burden of uncoventional sexuality, Kendall pinpointed the bleak outlook relating the experiences of a friend who teaches elementary school. Itwas a grotesque twist of the 'Doll Test'.  "He ask his kids to draw pictures of themselves as they expect to be in 10 years.  The boys mostly produce self-portraits that show them behind bars, or even occasionally, in a coffin." When it was noted how being gay and out was used against Bayard Rustin and still is, I ask if his double persecution, for being a double negative, black and gay, didn't really turn out to be a transcendent positive: a triumph, like the Toledo's flight from Castro and Christ sacrifice on the altar of the cross, as accessed by George Herbert or John Donne?  

 

Long before the Occupy Wall Street movement, Bayard Rustin stood as a forthright beacon of progressive causes. I never knew him alas. But meeting and befriending his lover and heir Walter Nagel, as good and dear a friend as one could wish for, I have come to feel as if we were brothers cruelly separated across generations. As Sigmund recognized Sieglinde, as Ruben Toledo reconized Isabel, so I see in Rustin, someone worthy of emulation, both as a dedicated freedom fighter and a connoisseur with refined catholic tastes for beauty, tradition and excellence in all things. By the way I dress, in my way of pragmatically treating décor, my political posture and most ways of expressing myself are indebted to his excellent example.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 
 

 

 Number 63 Hamilton Terrace.

 

 

 

An sro room on Hamilton Place. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Number 21 West 122nd Street.

 

 

 

"For the time, he was almost 'out-loud' out and gay.  Bayard liked to enjoy himself as much as he liked to work hard. He derived pleasuse from giving pleasure to others. He was a wonderful lover and a superb man... "  So said the late Davis Platt, Bayard Rustin's onetime lover, whom he met when Plat was 19 in 1940. 

 

  

 

 

 

  

In 1960, Rustin was dispatched by black labor leader Asa Philip Randolph to organize demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican party nominating conventions. “Adam Clayton Powell tried to kill protest planned for the Democratic convention by telling King if he didn't stop 'we’ll say you’re having an affair with Bayard Rustin'.”

 

 

 

 

 

  

1963: Bayard Rustin with A. Philip Randolph.

  

  

In the foreword to I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters edited by Michael G. Long, Civil Rights leader Julian Bond recounts Rustin’s singular achievements beyond the transformation March On Washington he brilliantly master-mined. He was also, says Bond a, "theorist and strategist for Martin Luther King...an activist opponent of racial discrimination since he was a child and a supporter of gay rights as he grew older...nonviolent direct action, the fight against nuclear weapons, the struggles for prison reform, trade unionism, an end to colonial rule in Africa," were with pacifism in the face of war, Rustin's life-long mission. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Rustin resigned from King’s staff. “The demonstrations went on, but didn’t have the impact they would have had they been run by an organizing genius,” Walter Naegle has said, remembering Rustin's undiminished  regret.

Particular as to his dress, an avid patron of flea markets and thrift shops, Rustin lived at Penn South, built in 1962 by The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. President Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt presided over dedication of the sprawling complex of modernist towers.  Well-constructed affordable housing” built by the labor movement, in aesthetic terms there was little beyond simplicity to recommend his unfurnished home. But of course, no more than some new digs of mine, did it remain unfurnished for long.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Inspired, just as I have been, by the Frick, the Gardener and the Wallace Collection, Bayard's modest flat soon became a treasure trove, brimming with Chinese porcelains, bronzes, figures of the Buddha, African carvings, icons, Christian saints, Madonnas, crucifixes, Wedgwood Jasper ware, eaststern carpets, Elizabethan furniture, Renaissance paintings and a remarkable array of walking sticks.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walter Naegle met Bayard Rustin one afternoon on a Times Square street corner in 1977. Naegle was 27. Rustin was 65.  “He was never without his stick,” Walter has recalled, “except on the day I met him. Even though I was very interested in the Civil Rights movement and in the man I'd spotted looking at me, I wasn’t sure it was Bayard Rustin without his stick.”

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Even being of age and no longer living at home, Walter remembers he was still nervous about telling his mother of his new boyfriend.  He first sailed through the preliminaries stating: “I’m gay."  In rapid order he added:  He’s black. And he’s older than you.”

 

Utterly dissimilar in terms of it's parameters and mechanics from Isabel's and Ruben's relationship, Water's and Bayard's was identical to theirs as a committed partnership, rooted in mutual abiding regard, admiration and friendship.  "He loved “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman. He’d relax while listening to Bach. He sang in the chorus in a Broadway production of “John Henry” starring Paul Robeson.  Whatever he did, he did well." recalls Walter, who says that no subsequent relationship has even come close to what he shared with Bayard.

 

 

 

  

 

 

1930-1940 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ca. 1950

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
 

 

 

 

 

1948 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

By the time Bayard died a decade after they'd met and moved in together, Rustin had taken the precaution to legally adopt Walter. In the years before marriage equality this was the only way for gay couples to establish a legal relationship.  “If we could have been married, we would have,” says Walter. 

 

What a tremendous job he does of sustaining Rustin’s legacy as executive director of the Bayard Rustin Fund. He helped select essays for the anthology of Rustin’s essays, I Must Resist, and in addition to forums keyed to Bayard’s 100th birthday, like the Schomburgh's, he has assisted in organizing special exhibitions such as the Museum of the City of New York's exhibit on activism opening in May that will feature Rustin. Next year the Smithsonian in is planning an extensive exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

  

 

So, no, Bayard Rustin has not yet received recognition and acclaim commensurate with the dramatic social transformations he helped to bring about, but by way of a measure of compensation, he met someone who so complemented and completed him, that he is still at work burnishing his memory. One could hardly ask for anything more wonderful than that.

 

  

 

A Queen for Today: Elizabeth II's Royal Jubilee!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still reigning, still smiling, after 60 long years!

 

 

 

The Glorious Queen Elizabeth Rose

 

 

 

 

 

 

What well worn words might suitably portray, a gallant monarch, fitting for today? With lovely scent to pleasure every nose, who can tell whence England's beauty, so like a lushious, living rose , grows and grows and grows and grows, that once blushing bud awakening in May, now defying trials, though unavoidably nearer repose, ignoring pain defying change and gray, beyond cruel killing frost, outside the snowy part,  protected by the warmed walls of one's heart.

 

 

 

As for tomorrow, just who is so impertinent as to say, shall a sovereign's splendors slowly pass away? Will a winter's desolation succeed autumnal chill, or instead, the hopeful renewal and warmth of spring? Who pretends to ever know this sort of thing, what kind of queen tomorrow then might bring?   

 

 

 

Still reigning, still smiling, after 60 long years!  Who has worked harder or better, and so long, at a tiresomely thankless job, and still done nothing wrong, but the lovely Queen of England, HM Elizabeth II; not the show of lyric poetry, but sustaining as great prose, her elusive omnipresence like the fragrance of a rose?

April 21, 2012, is Queen Elizabeth's 86th birthday, (as opposed to her "official birthday", celebrated on the first, second or third Saturday, in June not in April, never in May).

 
 

All her life the Queen has worn memorable hats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What on earth might one get, to recognize someone held so dear, someone special who, for all intents and purposes, I fear, already possesses everything?

 

 

 

To edify her regal deeds, she's lots of ropes of lustrous beads, enhancing equally, silks or tweeds, no matter what she wears. No long blond wigs, or weaves, or rats, the Queen has many lovey hats. Hats, which from in her early youth, she's worn throughout the year in truth, to lend events, in open air, where one might wish to spare one's hair or shade one's eyes from blinding glare, a jolly spot of welcome cheer, her's are distinct, beyond compare. Handsome handbags also, it's most excellently clear, are indispensably favored as proper queenly gear.

 

 

 

 

In 1949, then Princess Elizabeth, and Prince Philip Mountbatten had been married for two years and already produced, 'an heir and a spare', Prince Philip and Princess Anne.

She wed her distant cousin, a Royal Prince of Greece, though devoid of Greek ancestry, and without a golden fleece. As with any other mother, as with any other bride, her young family and smart Clarence House, were sources of great pride.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neither squandering her pounds nor holding tight her pence, Her Majesty has had, as it were, so many mansions since. Each boast iron gates decked out in gold, and there are fully four all told. With its Rockingham, and Sevres, with old Minton and fine Spode, oh so elegant, Buckingham Palace is her most famous abode. Designed by Sir Aston Webb, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

finely faced-with Portland stone, set on Green Park quite alone, at the summit of the Mall, is this still unbroken spell that's the setting of the throne. Here, on any viewing day, all are free to come to pay and how happily some roam, thinking how they'd like to stay; but her silken standard flying, lets one know to go away. One would hardly want to roam, when it's plain the Queen's at home!

 

 

 

 

 

She has guards with scarlet tunics and bearskin hats behind the gate, who assure the best security

 

 

for splendid rooms of state.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sequestered beyond grand ante-rooms, where the family seldom dwells, are intimate apartments where the heating never fails.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the White Drawing Room of Buckingham Palace a secret door, concealed by a large looking glass and table, give access to the queen's private apartments, one of which is shown above. The queen wears one of the world's largest pink diamonds. Mrs. Obama wears a frock by Isabel Toledo.

 

 

 
 

Balmoral is in Scotland, a stout realm of Godly deeds and

 

 

 

 

Sandringham is in Norfolk, in its garden without weeds.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Behold the Goya tapestry, what splendid Faberge, from ever-lasting flowers, to long lost Royal pets at play. 

 

     

 

Mrs. Keppel gave grand presents, she was such a dear old thing, her cigar case with pave' diamonds, shows a serpent, serpentine and biting its tail. See it slither in blue enamel, with a luster that won't pale, as each picture tells a story, every present, tells a tale. There's a rooster and a jaunty hen, her chick beneath her wing,

  

 

1910: Gifts to King Edward VII, the Queen's great-grandfather, from his mistress, Alice, Mrs. George Keppel, included the dog Caesar, shown following his master's coffin .

there's a little crystal vase and a small dog on a string. The inscription on his collar might even charm an austere scholar who reads, "My name is Cesar, I belong to the King." In short, at Sandringham her Majesty has out all on display a most glittering array of everything by Faberge!

 

 
 

Queen Elizabeth has also always had dogs, her family of Corgies is famous.

 

 
 

Her Majesty delivers her Christmas message to the Commonwealth from Sandringham.

 

 

 

 

 

Great Windsor is a castle, with a tower, on a hill, and sterling silver furnishings adorn its chambers still! Nearby is 
 

 

 

 

Royal Ascot, where the Queen too, owns the course, and she sometimes backs a winner as she often runs a horse. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Spectators always wear their best attire in Royal style, and the Queen, so complemented, always

 

 

smiles her warmest smile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She has her dogs and horses, she has a golden coach, she does not want for fine jeweled necklaces,

 

 

 

 

 

 antique earrings, nor one more smashing brooch.

 

 

 

And then there is the apogee of splendor and Royal grace, when magnificent tiaras surmount the monarch's face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Such ornaments of olden-days, before our days of haste, are unparalleled in great delicacy, unequaled in good taste, usually. 

 

 

As Barack and Michelle Obama

 

 

 

assuredly did so very well, who knows what unsuitable adornments the Queen might concede to consign for sale?

 

 

Ah yes, I know, I know, like so much melted dirty snow, many had hoped, with President Obama, for us malcontents to cheer, never, never, ever again to have to stop to hear of reparations!

But recalling the marvelous fun that I had giving presents on a birthday past, I mused what wonderful joy it would be if the wonderful Queen were at last, to apologize? Might Her Majesty to pay into a special fund to elevate and allay, to compensate a little, descendants of many Africans all along the sullied way, where her Royal ancestors issued patents, stealing blacks without their say? Would a few 100 billion pounds be so much then to atone, for the taint of slaves and empire that still compromise the throne? Oh what a victorious, glorious, splendidly uproarious celebration that might be Royal liberation, Elizabethan Jubilee!  

 

 

 

For a long time, disturbed that so much exquisite architecture in America was marred by slavery, I looked to England as an earthly paradise of beauty. How naive it was of me to absolve the originators of the colonial empire that most caused the African slave trade to flourish. Many, many of Britain's stately houses are as closely derived from slavery and misery as any Southern or Caribbean plantation house.  

Coat of arms of a merchant grown rich from 'the trade', emblazoned with an appropriate crest. 

 

 

How beguiled I was by Houghton with its corner domes and 'more mahogany used in its interior than any house to that date, 1722-1732'. Duly impressed, where did I imagine that mahogany, and the money to buy it with, had come from? How, other than through the lucrative sugar trade, over several extensive gruesome Caribbean plantations staffed by African slaves, did I figure that handsome William Beckford inherited a fortune which made him England's richest commoner?

  

 

 

 

A portrait of Sir William Young and his large family shows a picture of 18th century wealth in a fashionably bucolic setting. A "conversation piece", this depiction was meant to tell a story. The artist, Johann Zoffany, helped develop this type of piece, positioning the sitters as if they are actors.

The family is wearing a type of fancy dress, 17th century costumes inspired by century-old portraits by Sir Anthony Van Dyck . This type of nostalgia was extremely popular in Britain around 1770. Like the dress and music-making the enslaved servant is a prop in the Young's elegant play-acting.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who invented the 'picture hat' which she is wearing. ( from Chiswick House), writing to her mother, circa 1790, 

 

'Dear Mama, George Hanger has sent me a black boy eleven years old and very honest, but the Duke don't like me having a black.... if you like him instead of Michel I will send him, he will be a cheap servant and you will make a Christian of him and a good boy; if you don't like him they say Lady Rockingham wants one.'

  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because, just as I'd suspected William Beckford was Gay, naturally one never suspected that his fortune was obtained from West Indian sugar plantations. In his time, there was little else that was as profitable.  At Beckford's fantastic house, Founthill, the tower collapsed spectacularly, shortly after he sold the estate.

 

 

Jean Marc Nattier's portrayal of Mademoiselle de Clermontat, at her bath, is just one among many indicators of the universal fashion for enslaved servants during the 17th and 18th centuries. The ultimate status symbol, pet-like exotic, dressed-up black pages presisted in grand noble and Royal households as late as 100 years ago. 

 

 

 

 

Missing Martha: The Absence of the Essence

 

 

Entertaining Mrs. Astor for tea, a Rockefeller one New Year's Eve, Wycliff Jean, Erica Badu and Eartha Kitt in between, she always stayed down-to-earth, maintaining a common touch, retaining an infectious, French-accented laugh and a subverting sense of humor.

One way she maintained her allure, was by being responsive to adoration. In widowhood her daughter and, especially her son, came first. There were other women too, who loved her dearly, as did her daughter-in-law and her grandaughter who she took to Paris for the first time.  But, the men, the men they were always her weakness and her heart's delight.   Her brothers, Harold, Justine, Larry, Lenn, Russell, her son's college friend Charlie, Bob, her neighbors Jim and Axel, Bill Perkins and others, gay, straight, black, white, Arabian, Mexican, European, men too numerous to enumerate, were all her avid suitors and she loved that.

 

 

 

 

 

Harold and Donna Dolly 

 

 

 
 

Charlie, Larry and Axel, just a few of Matha's 'young' admirers.  

 

 

Where are Harlem's high society party-givers and regal grand dames of yesteryear? 

 

 

  

 

Until the early morning of April Fool's Day, at 2:o'clock, when she quietly died, the tradition of open-handed festivity established here by gracious ladies from the past, endured in Martha's memorable back-yard barbeques and Friday-night suppers, which thanks to their hostess' efforts, already figure among local legend.

It's exceedingly rare to encounter someone who can be depended upon to mean and do what they say. But Martha Chandler Dolly was just that rarest of persons. "When I am rich, you will be rich!" Who knows how many people she repeated this improbable-sounding boast to? What made it so affecting is that in the way she lived, comporting herself with élan and deep consideration, Martha Dolly was 'rich', and so too, as a consequence, were those who knew her.

This isn't meant to suggest, as her imposing Harlem townhouse or prodigal entertaining or elegant wardrobe might have indicated, that Martha possessed great material wealth. Notwithstanding generous financial support offered to family and friends, to causes she believed in, by New York standards her fortune was modest. She cooked; she sewed, and entertained superbly. Moreover, by dint of spirit, verve, considerable creativity, and style, she was able to project an aura of bounty and éclat, more ample and sparkling than most billionaires.

 

  

 

Having a smashing good time with Martha was hardly confined to dining at her house. Unlike some hosts, desperate to establish absolute control, directing everyone and everything and so, utterly miserable as one among several 'disadvantaged' guests, Martha on the other hand, adored other people's celebrations as well as her own. A dashing presence, useful in helping to spice up even the dullest occasion, made her highly sought after.

 

That expansive personality of Martha's was much of the basis of her friendship with Anne Rockefeller, who enjoyed Martha's exuberant shindigs in Harlem and also liked to add her to parties of her own at the luxurious 'playhouse' at Kykuit. 
 

 

 

 

 

More humble repasts were equally welcomed. Once, with unexpected consequences, she and two friends accompanied me to a buffet supper given by the then young architect, Kevin Wolfe. Kevin, a fellow preservationist, is a great friend. Feeling he would find it instructive to see Martha's magnificent house, I hadn't actually thought that he and Martha might click so readily. But, I ought not to have been surprised, as they both appreciate the same slyly clever humor. As if to assure his favor in Martha's eyes, Kevin had astutely complimented her choice of such "sexy boots".

His apartment was on the Upper West Side twenty years ago. Quite nicely designed, it was a studio and rather tiny. What's more, Kevin had invited at least fifty other 'close friends'. Inasmuch as this promoted the very type of free-spirited intimacy she strove for at her own entertainments, Martha was delighted.

If we four from Harlem were the party's only African American guests this mattered not in the least. That is it might not have mattered had our 'difference' not been noted by innumerable, nonstop inquiries as to, "How do you know Kevin?" The oldest guest in attendance, besides being black, I'm afraid to say that the lion's share of this investigative small talk was directed Martha's way. However, more than equal to such slightly uncomfortable episodes, she decisively took charge of the situation. To the next inquisitor she responded in a stage whisper,

"Ah, that Kevin, don't you know we've been ["messing"] around for years!"

Only as it was mischievous Martha, a very different term than "messing" around had been used. In all events, the resultant eruption of contagious merriment effectively put a stop to any further questioning and Martha's saucy sally not only saved, but made, what Kevin and others still recall as one of his best parties ever!

The theater, the movies, the ballet, the opera, they all beguiled her. But after going out Martha most preferred ending up at her favorite restaurant, theatrical but intimate Chez Josephine. It's presided over by our friend, Jean-Claude Baker who is as dedicated to dispensing hospitality in the name of his adoptive mother, Josephine Baker, as a priest in his shrine is to performing the sacraments. No matter how crowded it was and irrespective of reservations, smothering her with effusive kisses, Jean Claude always made Martha welcome. 
 

 

 

As with many aristocrats, among Martha's fondest pursuits was tending to her special garden. A Concord grape vine, wending its way from a backyard down the block, reliably produced a luscious crop against the back wall. A mulberry, enmeshed by interwoven ivy, became more each year, like a lofty lattice, instead of a tree. Honeysuckle that grew there, not only scented the outdoors all summer long, but eventually several tendrils crept through her bedroom window to perfume even Martha's dreams.

 

 As unconventional a garden as the woman who planted and watered and weeded and nurtured it, Martha's refuge was a study in contrast: cool-colored blue and violet hydrangea, with large dark, heart-shaped leaves, were juxtaposed with hot-hued, variegated, polychromed, spotted or striated, exotic foliage plants called crotons, 

 

 

which are native to Haiti. Hostas and phlox, roses emitting heady fragrance and named for French courtesans, lilies and fuchsia all coexisted in an unlikely evocation of paradise.

With meals served on a small paved patio adjacent to the house, this was the setting of Martha's most renowned fetes. Here guests, as varied as the plantings, imbibed and talked and ate too much and drank enough to sing spirituals at midnight. Above all they were sure, to never forgo an invitation to Martha's.

Recounting a narrative of a young friend in love who had been so overjoyed with happiness that she was transformed physically, from plain to beautiful, Martha was at her subtly amusing best, relating a complex double entendre.

"I told her, 'Ah, you are so happy and pretty now, I would like to capture the essence of what has altered you and put it into a bottle, to give to others...'A few weeks later my friend's lover had left her for someone else. She did not look well at all! 'What's happened to so-n-so?' someone asked me, 'She was so happy and so pretty, but looks horrible now, what can she be suffering from so terribly?' 'Ah, I answered,' said Martha, 'it is the absence of the essence!'' 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That elusive essence, the elixir of loving kindness that makes it possible, notwithstanding pain or sorrows, to enjoy life to its fullest, to give great pleasure to others...this is something that Martha Dolly most assuredly had, and seemingly in endless supply. But she didn't keep it bottled-up, out-of-site or out-of-reach. Rather, she lavished its marvelous powers over everyone she came across. Delighting in her company, one felt not the usual fatigue and ennui of everyday disappointment, but transformed by happiness into some better incarnation. If only momentarily, being with her caused ordinary people to assume the same sort of exuberant buoyancy, and even a mild version of the uproarious wit that she exuded all the time, naturally.

 

 

 

  

 

 Born October 26th, 1923, in Haiti, Martha was raised in a section of Port-au-Prince called Bolosse. In her well-run household and beyond, Martha's mother, Maria Bijoux exerted a profound influence over everyone. Understandably, her young awe-struck daughter was no exception to the determined force of will. How Martha loved to watch as she sat at her dressing table, adorning herself for the evening; what a privilege it was to be allowed to brush her mother's lustrous hair.

 

 

 

In addition to her mother's petite stature, Madame Chandler imbued this only girl in a brood of boys, with a shrewd discernment, courtesy and tolerance.

How Martha could laugh, telling how her mother, as if it were the most reasonable request in the world and without a second thought, automatically indulged a young gay servant who wished his wages for the next month to be paid in the form of a bottle of Joy perfume and a length of rose-colored silk for a new dress. In her self-deprecating way Martha would also laugh at the admonishment of her step-father, who told her, "Unlike your mother, you are not pretty, little girl, but if you end up with just half of her charm, you will be alright!

 

Unusually for the period, Martha Dolly employed neither her inestimable charm, nor her sometimes unacknowledged loveliness, to make her way in the world. In the early 1950's she attended Dillard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

University in romantic New Orleans, where she trained as a nurse. Graduating at the top of her class she was selected to direct the Department of Nursing for all of Haiti. But frustrated by the harsh inequalities and poverty of her country, restless to see more of the wider world, Martha soon moved to New York for graduate work at Columbia.

When a new school friend introduced Martha to her reserved-but handsome-brother, at first she thought nothing of it. She had met other handsome men before and marriage and a family were not in her immediate plans. Yet quite soon she found herself seriously dating Harold Dolly, an NYU student studying social work. From her room at International House, Martha could see the light from Harold's room in his house in the valley below, on 122nd Street. He could see her light too and soon was signaling Martha to let her know he'd reached home following their nights out. A talented pianist, fond of romantic composers, sometimes Harold would play Chopin sonatas by candlelight just for Martha.

 

 

 

  

 

Natives of Trinidad, Harold's farther, Dr. Cyril Dolly, his mother Ida, brother Cyril and their sister June, were all prominent members of New York's vibrant, tightly knit Caribbean community. It was this prominence which led to Dr. Dolly's appointment as physician to Father Divine and his followers. Earlier, during the Great Depression, he'd served as an activist against abusive landlords, as an executive member of the Consolidated Tenants League. In 1950, commended by Mayor O'Dwyer, he led a group of a hundred Harlem doctors who pooled their resources to purchase and operate Mount Morris Hospital.

 

 

It was Dr. Dolly's acquisition in 1943 of an impeccably intact Victorian row house on West 122nd Street for $12, 000, that would most affect Martha and Harold's destiny together. This was the time of Harlem's second large-scale race-riot, which started when a white police officer shot a black soldier. It was a period when fewer than 500 of New York's African American population of approximately 500,000, owned their own homes. 

 

 

 

 

Living with one's family can be another kind of recipe altogether. It's often one that bubbles up on the verge of boiling over, before finally erupting in disaster. The ingredients were all assembled for such an outcome; it seemed just a matter of time. Except, all the while, biting her tongue, Martha had been methodically, purposefully, saving her money and biding her time. When a break with Ida, and perhaps as a consequence, a rupture with her own husband, seemed impending, Martha was at the ready. Purchasing her own house, at number 21 West 122nd Street, with her own money, she not only preserved her marriage and family, she, in time, even came to enjoy "the Queen's" company, in spite of the grand old lady's many quirks.

 

 
 

 

 

Two adored children arrived, Cyril H., called Harold, and Monique, addressed by the diminutive, Momo, who, like her mother, became a nurse. Before she knew it, Martha said, they had become adults and married as well. It was her grandchildren, Justin Harold Robert and his younger sister Ania Dolly, so like a miniature version of her doting 'grandma', whose appearance, Martha stated, "...crowned a life filled with more joy than I'd have ever imagined possible." From the time Justin was an animated infant, being admired as Martha wheeled him through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or in Central Park, how Martha had admired him, too. 

 

  

 

Unfortunately, no life is immune from suffering or death. Following his lengthy illness, losing her husband was expected and so patiently-borne with characteristic grace. It was the loss of her grandson Justin, four years ago, so senselessly and abruptly, that marked the start of Martha's own decline.

After a year off, about to begin his senior term at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a friend was driving Justin in Justin's car. It was October 6, 2005. Cruising around in the early evening the two were chatting, aimlessly, as youth will talk of sports and girls and school. Using money from an inheritance, Justin was already on his way to a life of success, having acquired several rental properties close to Morehouse that he was starting to renovate. "Suddenly", his friend said, "he wasn't talking anymore." It had only taken moments to determine that Justin had been shot, but it must have seemed an eternity. Already doomed by a rap sheet as long as his arm, the young black assailant who murdered Justin, confessed how he hadn't been his intended target; it was all a terrible mistake and he was really sorry.

Considerate, promising, good looking and at 22, so young, Justin's death, a grievous blow for his grandmother, helped to give Martha greater appreciation of her daughter-in-law Donna's strengths. As Justin's mother, Martha saw, having a fine only son taken away from her, was a far greater tragedy for Donna to endure than anything that she herself might suffer.

 

 

What does one make of such a person, one who loves single-malt scotch, and vintage champagne, who, when required, will gladly drink ginger beer or even Taylor port instead? Cognizant of the superior quality of French and American haute couture, which she was occasionally able to buy, in a pinch she'd whip up a credible copy of something she'd seen that she liked in Vogue. What a wonder was Martha; she wore rhinestones as if they were diamonds and her pearls as if they were paste. Because she was who she was, many were deceived into imaging that even her most extravagant costume jewelry was actually composed of mammoth precious stones. As for Martha, so long as such raiment served the ultimate purpose of being glittering, of being beautiful and appropriate, why should she care about how valuable they were or weren't? She once explained her outlook about such matters, saying, "Whatever it cost or doesn't cost, I am just as likely to lose it anyway! Ah, but while I've got it I am going to do my best to enjoy it as much as I can!" 

 

Friday night hospitality in Martha's kitchen.

 

It's quite some credo to revel in whatever one might have to enjoy at the moment. This confident attitude of Martha's some maintained to be the biggest part of the secret to her winning stylishness. No less a fashion authority than Bill Cunningham of the Times was impressed enough to once enthuse to her,

"Some of these other people, oh brother, they haven't got a clue about what to wear or how to wear it. But you! You've got taste dripping out of your mouth lady!"

 

A devotee of Bobby Short's singing, what in her youth were thought of as naughty songs, like Cole Porter's Katie Went to Haiti, Martha was equally enthusiastic about the Neville Brothers' rendition of Porter's In the Still of the Night. The Autumn Leaves and Besame Mucho, poignant love-laments, were also among Martha's favorites, but so was a collection of militant or melancholy hymns such as, Onward Christian Soldiers, Jacob's Ladder and A Balm in Gilead, by Harry Burleigh.

 

 

 

Recollecting the mad fun of guests ending nights in her lush garden by singing these old anthems, so loudly that she'd feared certain neighbors might call the police, Martha sighed, not long ago, and said how she had had a beautiful life, 

"I have wonderful children and many friends. My friend from girlhood, Luce, went to live in Paris and became an acclaimed artist. I visited her there several times and I've traveled to most places that I really wanted to go to. I have Charlie's laughter, Axle's affection and the boys bring dinner now and clean before they go. I have even lived long enough to see my adopted country elect our first black president, Barack Obama. I sent him a little money, and he is magnificent."

Asked, "Have you no regrets? "she joked, "Regrets? I've had a few, would one not wish to be young again, and have more to share, to be tall and bottylicious too? Sure! But as my mother used to say,'Love, be content, life is short and there are people in hell who want iced water, you know!'"

Great Houses of New York: Louis Tiffany's Treasure Trove!

 

 

 

Positioned diagonally across the avenue from the imposing Waldo Mansion that houses Ralph Lauren's flagship store today once stood a more exhilarating building, among the most notable that ever existed in the city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Previous economic downturns affecting alike the meager lives of workers and the grandiloquent imaginings of plutocrats offer ample proof of how little has fundamentally changed over past generations. In 1882, Charles Lewis Tiffany, a founder and principal owner of New York's preeminent jewelry dealers, Tiffany & Company had engaged the new partnership of McKim, Mead & White to design his unique residence on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and 72nd Street. 

 

 

  

     

 

Friends: Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White. 

From the start it was his brilliantly artistic youngest son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who assumed control of the project. Working intensively with his friend and sometime associate, architect Stanford White, Tiffany drew up a schematic elevation that was adapted to make the 57-room mansion one of New York's most beautiful and unusual works of architecture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

It was completed 1885, a year after the death of Louis Tiffany's first wife, Mary Woodbridge Goddard. This tragedy left the sensitive Tiffany a distraught widower with four small children. Plunging into ever more work, he attempted to dispel overwhelming grief. Inasmuch as both palatial structures were, in effect, glorified multiple dwellings, in terms of organization the Tiffany house echoed the McKim, Mead & White firm's contemporary effort for journalist and railroad magnate Henry Villard, on Madison Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The groundbreaking Villard Houses. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

The vaulted marble Hall. 

 

 

 

Marble mossaics and inlay. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The MusicRoom. 

 

 

 

 

 

The Villard Drawing Room. A long interior,with two fireplaces, this space featured oak wainscoting with elaborate ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light bulbs in the Villard Drawing Room, were clad in covers made from faceted cut-glass. This was a favorite decorative expedient of Stanford White's. 

 

 

  

 

 

Beginning around 1901, the Villards' house was remodleded for Whitelaw Reid abd his wife, Elizabeth Mills Reid. This efforts saw the Drawing Room totally transformed with a marble dado and columns. Otherwise, only the ceiling and frieze; gilded, bronzed and silvered, and the fireplace mantles remained. The inlayed oak wainscoting was reused at the Reids' country house, Opier Hall at Purchase, New York.  

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

 

Stylistically, these remarkable groups diverged completely. An evocation of a Renaissance Roman Palace, the U-shaped Villard houses were heavily indebted to the restrained aesthetic sensibilities of the partnership's young associate, Joseph Wells. The Tiffany's baronial brick and sandstone pile, combining aspects of Romanesque and Queen Anne architecture, on the other hand, was something else. It was the culmination of all that Stanford White had mastered as an apprentice to the great Henry Hobson Richardson, who had taught his gifted pupil about how to best manipulate precedent and form, to bring to a logical plan, the most picturesque composition obtainable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surely Richardson's Trinity Church Rectory in Boston was a point of departure that led to New York's Tiffany House. 

 

  

Generally referred to as Louis Tiffany's house, 27 East 72nd Street was, in fact, four separate houses. Quite unlike the complex of unified individual residences created for Villard, as with apartments, except for 898 Madison Avenue in this ensemble, here the separate houses were stacked around a courtyard, one atop the other. Number 898 Madison Avenue was initially home to Charles Tiffany's married daughter, Mrs. Alfred Mitchell. Of the apartments, the first, on the ground, first and second floors, had been intended for Charles Tiffany and his wife, Harriet Olivia Avery Young. Obstinately, modestly, they were never to occupy it and remained in Murray Hill at 255 Madison Avenue. Taking up the third storey, a second apartment was meant to be occupied by their unmarried daughter, Louise Tiffany, who, instead, remained downtown with her parents. Below a massive gabled roof, covered in pan-tiles and lighted by quaint windows, dormers and skylights, the fourth and fifth floors were reserved for Louis Comfort Tiffany and his family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Highly complex, the interior volume that contrasts low and high, connected, loft-like spaces in Tiffany's apartment, were surfaced with humble, mostly unembellished concrete. The exposed I-beams of steel framing were another radical departure from common practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Much as in any modern setting, the uniform masonry backdrop was an effective foil for displaying concentrated decorative assemblages. Ornate stained glass, cleverly wrought Japanese sword guards, antique lacquerware, collections of porcelain, intricate Indian carvings , woodblock prints and other extraordinary ornaments, were all ingeniously disposed like elements in a marvelous, color-filled mosaic. It was by this means, artfully juxtaposing old and new, rich and plain, by which the occupant made his home a revealing and arresting work of art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The studio, on the uppermost level of Louis Tiffany's duplex, was actually the equivalent of three or four conventional stories in total height. It featured a mammoth, open space directly under the roof. At its center was a sculptural, four-hearth fireplace. This focal point rose from the floor in an Art Nouveau flourish, culminating in a tree trunk-like concrete chimney.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suspended from the sloping ceiling was a veritable constellation of decorative ironwork, brasses and iridescent glass pendant lamps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every sensuous constituent conceivable was enlisted to contribute to an eclectically exotic atmosphere of mystery and delight. Perfumed by a profusion of frequently changed blooming hothouse plants, enlivened by leaping firelight, from driftwood, chemically treated to produce different colored flames, Tiffany's environment was also amplified by haunting music from a large pipe organ.

 

 

 

 

 



















 

 

 

 

Assisting Louis Tiffany in decorating the entire house was the incomparable team of Stanford White, Lockwood de Forest, who manufactured carvings in India, textile specialist Candice Wheeler, glass worker John La Farge and the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Members of the Associated Artists, a firm of interior designers, they had recently collaborated on the inventive Seventh Regiment Amory's Veteran's Room. Decorations they devised for spaces originally planned for Tiffany's parents, on the lower stories, were no less creative than their work upstairs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the mosaic-floored stair hall, sheathed in panels of delicately veined white marble, they wrapped a broad flight used by family and guests, around the unseen, partly-enclosed staircase for servants. Including dramatically changing floor levels, varied perspectives and vistas, making one's way via either route, a succession of surprises lay in store. Emerging from, or entering into an enclosure of translucent glass, or a screen of slender columns, leaving or approaching, comparative dark at the bottom and cascades of glistening light from the top, made taking the stairs, unexpectedly, into an aesthetic adventure, as opposed to a merely mundane necessity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Not unlike the decorative introduction of sea shells, pebbles and glass shards White used in exterior stucco-work,  this sumptuous composition of opaque, irredesient and translucent mosaics, was highly effective but relatively, inexpensive. 

  

Crowned by an enveloping stenciled barrel vault, that must have made visitors feel as though they were inside of a fantastic, vast lidded casket, or trunk, the 'Charles Tiffany' dining room focused on the fireplace wall. Divided into three distinct sections, highlighting the hearth, an over-mantle frieze and a surmounting clock, it was embellished by glass mosaics, basreliefs, and stenciled rosettes. Ordinary, to the point of approaching the pedestrian, the room's brass gas chandeliers were transformed into atmospheric luminars by mismatched red glass globes. Across the hall, the lengthy music room similarly employed unexceptional elements in a novel way, to create a distinguished décor reminiscent of the finest output of Norman Shaw and William Morris in London.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bankrupted for a second time by the mid 1880's, it was to these wonderful spaces, intended for the Charles Tiffanys, to which Henry Villard moved with his family at a favorable rent, (Happily, at the time of his death in 1900, Villard was quite wealthy once more.) By 1895, the entire complex, with the exception of 898 Madison had been acquired by J. P. Morgan's personal lawyer, Lewis Cass Ledyard. The acclaimed attorney and his family occupied the portion of the house intended for Charles Tiffany that had been leased by Villard. Louise Tiffany's intended third storey base was leased to friends, who in 1912 included Miss Caroline de Forest, (cousin of Louis Tiffany's partner, Lockwood de Forest), Mrs. N. Newlin Hooper, Mrs. Frances Isabel Morris, and Miss Mary R. Callender. By 1909, supervised by architects Janes & Leo, Louis Tiffany divided 898 Madison Avenue into five units which were afterward occupied by family and friends, as well.

 

 

 

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

 

At Laurelton Hall, Tiffany pulled out all the stops of his innovatory gift.  Column capitals of materialistically glazed faience strike as brilliant a note of originality as does the spider's web of chains, trained with vines, meant to create a green, lacey canopy above the forecourt. 

 

 

 

 

On November 9, 1886, Louis Comfort Tiffany married Louise Wakeman Knox. Ultimately having one son and three daughters, in 1905 the couple built a new country house for their 'blended family' at Oyster Bay. Formerly they had summered there, inhabiting an old farm house. Luxurious and unusual, Laurelton Hall, even better than Tiffany's house in town, represented a highly personal self-portrait of its builder, where he would utilize every aspect of his considerable genius.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presciently anticipating the abstraction and simplification of modernism, by the close of his productive career, Tiffany's decorating operation, the Tiffany Studios, was reduced to planning largely derivative designs and schemes, exactingly based on historic period examples which were increasingly fashionable after 1900. How unfortunate that he was unable to embrace the new movement. How criminal that, despite careful planning, the Great Depression of the 1930's, contributed to the destruction of both of his still-memorable houses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pattern for Laurelton Hall's distinctive Dining Room carpet, was also uses by Edith Rockefeller McCormick in the Winter Garden at VillaTuricum, her lakefront country house outside Chicago.  

 

Louis Tiffany died in the 72nd Street house in 1933. His family's great mansion was demolished in 1936. It was replaced by a large apartment building, 19 East 72nd Street. Designed by Mott B. Schmidt with Rosario Candela, it's adorned by sculptural reliefs around the principal doorway by C. P. Jennewien. Where the gabled and turreted Tiffany House, with its multiple balconies and portcullised arched entry, was as eye-catching, in its way, as the Guggenheim, this tasteful structure, as handsome as it is, more modestly aspires to little beyond anonymity. In the wake of financial hard times such reticence was deemed to be far more 'polite' and even more 'distinguished', than Louis Comfort Tiffany's artistic bravura. 

 

 

 

 

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER: 100 YEARS AFTER TITANIC SINKS, WHY SHOULD WE STILL CARE? PART III

 

 

Why are there no jewels as lovely as these in Downton Abbey?

 

A necklace left behind by Eleanor Elkins Widener. 

 

 

 

 

Who, one wonders, was the AMY to whom this bracelet once belonged? 

 

 

One enduring indicator, suggestive of the beauty and riches that RMS Titanic represented, is the small,  still sparkleing cache of bejeweled ornaments, pictured above, remarkably recovered from the ocean's depths.  What handsome jewels were made a century ago to adorne the elite. Even as elderly and unasuming a woman as Mrs. Isidor Straus, habitually wore, as her photograph shows, a long and delicate chain of platinum and diamonds.

 

 





 

 

Still another testament of lost Belle Epoch opulence, can be seen in Stefano Papi's spectacular new book, Jewels of the Romanovs: Family & Court, published by Thames & Hudson. Could it possibly be, that such material splendor always portends sorrow and retribution?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whether diminutive or massive, the finest jewels made during the Edwardian era, by Tiffany & Co. Cartier or Boucheron, blazed with diamonds and shimmered with pearls. Set most stylishly in platinum, they were designed withintricate settings evolcative of Louise XVI festoons and classical wreaths. Certainly, they not always feature jet, as Downton Abbey might lead one to believe. Moreover, in order to make an impression, married women were all too happy to wear a far greater quantity of jewelry than many would countenance today. Although there would not have been been any tiaras worn on Titanic, jeweled fillets and diamond dog collars, like the one owned by Madeleine Astor, would not have been out of the ordinary. 

 

 

 
 

 

Appropriate night or day, by far, pearls were the most ubiquitous jewels of the era. 

 

 

 

 

No one on board ship would have been as bejeweled as Grace Vanderbilt is in the photograph above. 

 

 

Why are there no jewels as lovely as these in Downton Abbey?

 

 

 

Even in mourning,  Madeleine Astor wore the diamond dog collar and pearls her husband had given her.

 

 

 

Why is there no jewel as lovely and evocative as this in Downton Abbey?

 

Was jet ever so pervasive? No! But, diamonds were. 

 

 

 

Titanic's collision occurred at 11:40 P.M. on Sunday, April 14, 1912. Prior to disaster, merry-making of a high order of refinement occurred. A superb meal, in a splendid setting, demanded fine clothes. Arrayed mostly in evening dress, Titanic's first-class passengers were up to the challenge. At the start of the new century, when society ladies at Sherry's had dared to wear gowns exhibiting decolatage, as they did for dinner at home and in private houses, as opposed to high-cut dinner dresses, they'd been asked to leave. On Titanic, neither this, nor ladies so bold as to smoke in public was any problem.  

 

 

A dinner to remember! 

 

 

 

 

 

Large muffs and fox stoles were in vogue during the Edwardian era. Gloves were de rigueur.

 

 

Made between 1910-1913,  gowns simular to the exqusite frocks seen hereafter, might plausably to have been worn on board Titanic. That is, except for, the flowered dress pictured imediately below. Like the day dress above, it was meant for warm weather wear.

 

 

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

Sometines those who seem to have everything to make us wish that we were in their place, actually lead quite sad lives. John Jacob Astor, IV, born July 13, 1864, was an heir of the 18th Century German immigrant John Jacob Astor, I, whose colossal fortune had been made in opium, furs and real estate. Titanic's wealthiest passenger, Astor had attended St Paul’s School and Harvard University. His mother, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, was the undisputed queen of New York and Newport society, said to consist of just 400 members, as that was the number Mrs. Astor's private ballroom accommodated. 

 

1894: Colonel John Jacob Astor, IV.

 

Intrigued by mechanics and technology, Astor also loved horses, fast cars, tennis and yachting. In 1891 he married Alva Lowle Willing, of Philadelphia. Considered one of the great beauties in society, their alliance was seen as ideal. Both, particularly Astor, were thought quite fortunate. A bridge fanatic, who shared none of her husband's interests, Alva Astor openly mocked him.  Just the same they had had two children, William Vincent and Alva Alice Muriel. As a break from matrimonial discord, Astor saw action in the Spanish American War, earning the rank of Colonel.

 

 

1892:  As the years passed, Alva Astor seemed only to grow in beauty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sharing houses with his mother, in New York on 5th Avenue, at Newport and near Rhinebeck, on the Hudson, Astor took pleasure in the technical aspect of building; be it the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria, resulting form a family quarrel, a double-house in the city or a sports-playhouse based on Versailles' Grand Trainon, at Rhinebeck, designed by Stanford White.

 

 

 

Even the fabulously rich have their economies, Richard Morris Hunt's imposing double house on 5th Avenue at 65th  Street, had a common ballroom. It was shared by Col. Astor with his mother , wife and children. On inheriting it, the Colonel quickly made the houses into a single dwelling. 

 

 

 

1909: William Vincent Astor  and his dad.

1911 and 1925: Alva Alice Muriel Astor, the poor little rich girl who married and divorced 4 times, before committing suicide.

 

 

 

 

Col. Astor in one of his numerous cars, at Ferncliff.  

 

 

The Playhouse at Astor's estate, Ferncliff, at Rhinebeck, New York. 

 

Free to divorce after his mother's death in 1901, Astor waited until 1909.  He then wasted no time before, at the age of 47, he married 18-year-old Madeleine Talmage Force, who was a year younger than his son Vincent. Recalling the scandal of his sister's divorce and remarriage, Astor thought it expedient to take his new bride abroad. The couple's extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt was only cut short when they learned Madeleine was expecting. Among the few Americans who had not spurned them outright was Margaret Brown, "The Unsinkable Molly Brown". She accompanied the Astors to Egypt and France and, by coincidence, was called home to the U.S. at the very time the Astors also had decided to abbreviate their touring.

 

 

 

Madeleine Astor, with her hair dressed in the fashionable  Psyche knot coiffure. In the period from 1912, to around 1918, this graceful hair style swept up everyone, from Mrs. Astor to Consuelo Vanderbilt, including heiress A'Leia Walker. Failure to have adopted this style is yet another example of Downton Abbey's inability to grasp fully, nuances which once defined an epoch of elegance. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1911: The J. J. Astors driving and out walking their Airedale, Kitty. Those who knew him were in agreement, Col. Astor had never before seemed so happy, as he did after marrying Madeleine. 

 

 

 

J. J. Astor's yhact Nourma. As an experienced sailor, once Titanic had stuck an icebreg, Col. Astor  could have had no doubt whatsoever, as to what lay ahead. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Roused passengers forgather to go on deck, as portrayed in A Night to Remember.

 

 

 

Ragtime tunes were all the rage and so the band had playrd on, to encourage calm. 

 

 

 

Rockets were fired to summon help. But... 

 

 

 

 

Rockets were of  no avail, as help never arrives.

 

 

 

Sickened by the desperate echoing cries for help from imperiled loved ones and fellow passengers, those in the lifeboats, numbed by cold and loss, rowed and rowed, nearly till dawn.

 

 

 

 

In no time at all, in the bitter chill of a moonless night, below a canopy of stars, billions and billions, all is eerily quiet, time seems frozen, as the earth stands stilled by the night's cold emptiness. 

 

 

  

 A few who were saved.

 

 

 

 

Col. John Jacob Astor, IV left $72-million of his $150-million fortune to his eldest son Vincent. He also left Vincent his estate in Rhinebeck and his yacht, the Nourma. To his wife Madeleine, as long as she did not remarry, he left the incone from  a $5-million trust fund, as well as use of his New York house and his Newport house, Beechwood.  Daughter, Alice who lived with her mother in England, got the income from a $10-million trust fund.  On August 14, 1912, when Madeleine Astor gave birth to, John Jacob Astor, VI, he was due to come into a fortune as well.

 

 

 Young Jack Astor is shown a picture of the Titanic.

 

 

For some, a suitor from a family as prominent as the Astors, even today, would  be considered to be a sterling catch.  Little'Jack Astor', Vincent Astor's half-brother, born after their father had gone down on the Titanic, and after the birth of their English cousin, John Jacob Astor, V, was to grow up willfully spoiled and indolent. Even accompanied with a $3-million trust fund, one which had greatly accrued funds since it was established, it might have been best, to have thought twice about Jack.

 

 

Just seventeen, at the time of her engagement to the 'boy next door', who lived across Sixty-Fifth Street from her Grandmamma Sherman, my friend Eileen Gillespie said that she was bedazzled, at first!

 

 

 

 

 

It's pretty evident that today the cost of everything has become grossly inflated. Money was worth far more during the Great Depression.  This had meant in effect, with an annual income of just under $200,000, when he came of age in 1933, John Jacob Astor, VI was able to live in a way that, in the halcyon 1920's, would have demanded many times as much!  Indeed, with only a relatively small fortune, Jack Astor managed to live almost as lavishly as his father had. Requiring, a city address equal to his status as an Astor, on 91st Street, he had been able to lease the enormous, fully furnished Burden house, and to staff it with 25 servants, at around $15,000 a year. For summers, at Newport, one of Horace Trumbauer's most lovely 'cottages', Chetwolde, was purchased for a mere $150,000.

 

A fleet of ten cars, including a yellow Brewster-bodied Rolls Royce, a private railway car and a steam yacht followed. His engagement ring was an Astor heirloom, reportedly worth $100,000. Previously, it had belonged to the consort of Napoleon III, the Empress Eugenie.

 

 

 

 

 

Tall, tanned and good looking, as well as rich, the daunting and unavoidable issue seems to have been that Jack Astor was unbalanced. Even today, amidst swirls of speculation, no one seems to know absolutely what precipitated Mrs. Slocum's canceled engagement. It happened mere days before her scheduled wedding. Whatever it was, it must have been sensational. From what other motivation do well mannered, reticent WASP families, people like the Gillespies, discuss private family matters, publicly and in the New York Times?

 

 

Across 65th Street from Jack Astor's house was the 5th Avenue residence of Elieen Gillespie's widowed grandmother, Mrs. William Watts Sherman.

 

 

However unsure the press might have been as to the full story, they had had a field-day anyway. Innuendo and recriminations abounded, concerning everything from Astor's letter of apology to the fate of his fabulous ring. So it was that ordinary people, being ground into the dust by desperate times, were kept distracted from hunger, misery and fear, for days on end. The level of widespread public interest Mrs. Slocum's broken engagement drew, today would surely require the most outlandish antics of Madonna, Paris Hilton, some sports hero or the Obamas. Such was the intensified star-power of socialites, that Miss Eileen Gillespie's and Mr. John J. Astor's tame foibles had helped to sell dozens of daily newspapers in hundreds of extra editions to tens of thousands, eager, for five cents, to be thrilled vicariously, to the core of their being.

 

Initially subject to dispute, the diamond ring, ironically, went to Eileen Gillespie's best friend.  At Newport's historic Trinity Church, Ellen Tuck French, who was to have been a bride's maid at Eileen Gillespie's betrothal, ended up as the first of Jack Astor's three wives.

 

 

 Much transpired in the aftermath of Eileen Gillespie's big break-up with Jacck Astor so long ago. Not the least occurrence was her happy union with John Jermaine Slocum in 1940.

 

Judging by Jack Astor's diminished looks, my friend got lucky away by breaking their engagement.  

 What happened, whatever was the matter, I once asked Eileen Slocum, "I don't exactly know what it was. I think it was the curse of the Titanic." she replied. "When one is with child, and suffers the blow of such a loss, as she, [Madeleine Astor] did, the trauma, the whole tragic experience, it's bound to effect the mother and impact the child as well..." 

 

 

From design, to realization, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's Titanic Memorial lost something.   Dedicated to the heroism of the men of Titanic, errected in Washington, D. C., it was emasculated by censors. Gertrude Vanderbilt had grown up just a few blocks away from Col. Astor's house on 5th Avenue. 

 

 

Since the death of Millvina Dean, May 31st of 2009, there are no longer any living survivors of the Titanic tragedy. Millvina Dean was just nine weeks old at the time of the Titanic's sinking.

 

 

Eileen Slocum who died at 92 at Newport in 2008, was as close as I ever came to the Titanic. She knew Madeleine Astor whose son she almost married, and I knew her. As a child, my great-grandmother twice introduced me to people who were born slaves in America. I have known several people who fought in the First World War and a few survivors of the Holocaust as well. I ought not to be surprized at how people who can connect me with these past tragadies are gone from the scene or are rather rappidly departing, but I'm schocked actually. I'm reminded of how many questions I ought to have asked of Mama Willie, my great-grandmother, of Mrs. Slocum and of others about Titanic, slavery, the rise of Hitler and lots of things. Why? Because although Logan Pearsall Smith was not exactly right, George Santayana, he certainly was.

 

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience. "





 

 

 

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER: A BLACK MAN AND HIS FAMILY SAIL ON BOARD THE TITANIC, PART II

 

 

Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche, his wife Juliette Marie Louise Lafargue and  their daughters, Simonne, born on February 19, 1909, and Marie Louise, on July 2, 1910. 

 

Long before the advent Kate Winslet's and Leonardo Dicaprio's triumph in James Cameron's 1997 Titanic, growing up in Akron, Ohio, I first became aware of the dramatic tragedy of April 15, 1912, by watching two much older but wonderful movies.  Hollywood's engaging and theatrical Titanic, staring Barbara Stanwick opposite Clifton Webb, premiered in 1953.   More sedate and more accurate, the English adaptation of Walter Lord's nuanced book,  A Night to Remember, under the same title, opened two years later. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Several times in the company of Mama Willie, my Dad's grandmother, who remembered the sensational news from her girlhood, I watched these films again and again. Both captured much of the pathos and irony of the sinking. In the English movie, the ship's officers and staff were so gallant and brave.  I always wept near the end, as a lost child is told by an ancient steward, "we'll find mommy..." It was clear they hadn't a chance. How effecting, to dramatize the fate of 1,509 doomed souls through two who were so especially vulnerable.

 

Barbara Stanwick's glamorous wardrobe and Clifton Webb's sparkling and acid repartee were what stole the show in the the earlier movie. Unhappily married, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Ward Sturges are about to call it quits.   As compelling as their private dramatics seem at first, soon enough, they receded from the forefront as mere trivialities.

 

Richard Sturges: You crazy woman. You're talking about the most important thing in my life. I have plans for Norman.
Julia Sturges: What plans? That he should grow up to be you?
Richard Sturges: Possibly. I'm satisfied. Is it so extraordinary that I should want to have some hint, some portion of myself survive?
Julia Sturges: Some portion of... Oh yes, I forgot, the best dressed man of his day. That's what they're going to put on your tombstone. Well, that may be all right for you, but I won't have it for Norman. He stays with me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Julia Sturges: Before you go down and eat and drink, you'd better know how things are going to be. I've given up on Annette. Her standards will always be the chic club, the best table, the royal enclosure, and that's her decision. She's almost of age. But, Norman is still a child. I'm not taking any chances with him. He stays in America.
Richard Sturges: Now wait a minute, Julia. What is this all about?
Julia Sturges: I should think it would be perfectly clear. I'm not going to see Norman thrown away. He stays with me. And if you try to interfere, I'll be as common as you think I am! I'll fight you tooth and nail! I'll take you to the courts!
Richard Sturges: [closing the cabin door] Could you be common in a slightly lower voice.
Julia Sturges: I'll say it in any tone you want! I'll whisper it. I'll write it down, but that's the way it's going to be! He stays with me! 

 

 

 

 

Richard Sturges: [after Richard and Julia have been quarreling over who will have custody of their son] My dear Julia, I've been around enough bridge tables to recognize someone who's holding a high trump - play it now if you will.
Julia Sturges: We'll discuss it later.
Richard Sturges: Now!
Julia Sturges: All right, Richard. One question first?
Richard Sturges: If it's about Norman, you know the answer. No court in the world, no power in the heavens can force me to give up my son.
Julia Sturges: He is not your son.

 

 

 

 

A marvelous microcosm of the human condition, the actual Titanic story is indicative of the limitations of Logan Pearsall Smith's observation, "

"There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail."

 

Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche, desperately desired the good income that talent and training ought to have assured him, rewards which racism prevented. Born in Cap Haiten, Haiti, on May 26, 1889, his family had been affluent for two centuries and M. Laroche's uncle, Dessalines M. Cincinnatus Leconte, was president of Haiti. At the age of 15, Laroche left the tiny republic to study engineering in Beauvais, France. In Villejuif, he met Juliette Lafargue, a wine merchant's daughter. Once Laroche had received his engineering degree, the pair wed, in 1908.  Frustrated by his failure to find employment in France, the young farther of two daughters, with a son on the way, determined to take his wife and children and return home to Haiti.

 

Eager to be reunited with her son, to meet his wife and to see her grandchildren, Laroche's mother had sent first-class tickets for a French ship that prohibited childern from dining with their parents.  This was how they happened to be traveling in second-class, having switched to Titanic at the last minuet possible. Despite unkind comments and stares, the unusual interracial couple, with their lovely daughters, attracted favorable attention as well.  They easily made friends and seemed to be enjoying themselves.  

 

Like so many families rent by Titanic's sinking, the Laroche women seemed to have been permanently affected. The engineer's widow never remarried and though quite young in 1912, neither daughter ever wed either. Instead, the three seemed to invest most of their emotion and affection in the miraculous reincarnation of Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche, the son he never knew who was also called Joseph.

 

 

 

 

 Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche.

 

 

A second-class stateroom. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stanley J. May, his sister Lily Odell, their brother Richard May and nephew Jack Dudley Odell strolling on deck.

 

 

 

 

 

 April 11, 1912: Author Jacques Futrelle smiles from the boat deck.  

 

 

 

 

A Titanic dog show. 

 

 

 

 

 

A Broadway star and movie actress, Dorothy Gibson was also a fine singer and dancer.

 

 

 

 

Father of art patron Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim,  Benjamin Guggenheim, the fifth of mining operator Meyer Guggenheim 7 sons, had shrewedly married Florette Seligman, daughter of James Seligman, a senior partner in the firm J & W Seligman. The Guggenheims who had 2 daughters in addition to Peggy, were nonetheless not happy. Consequentially, he was traveling with his French mistress and not his wife.  As a final beau geste, Guggenheim, accompanied by his valet, hastily changed back into the evening clothes they'd recently taken off to retire. "Tell my wife that we behaved like gentlemen", he said to a passenger who survived. 

 

 

 

 German immigrants, Isidor and Ida Straus refused to be parted, or to enter a lifeboat together. When the  co-owner of the Macy's department store served as a U. S. representative, the devoted couple had written one another daily. 

 

 

 

 

 

 Sister of notorious romantic novelist Elinor Glyn, Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff Gordon, was a leading fashion designer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, best known by her professional name "Lucile".   After Charles Frederick Worth, she was Britain's first designer to achieve international renown, as the innovator of the "mannequin parade", a precursor to the modern fashion show, liberating slit skirts and alluring, pared-down lingerie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Famous in Titanic lore for insistence that a steward retrieve her 'lucky' pig, which played a tune when the tail was wound, Miss Edith Louise Rosenbaum, 33, was better known as Edith Russell.  She was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio. A journalist reporting on French fashions for Woman's Wear Daily, returning home to New York, she had booked two first-class staterooms. One was meant merely to hold all her new Paris clothes! Enroute she wrote to her secretary back in Paris.

My Dear Mr Shaw:
This is the most wonderful boat you can think of. In length it would reach from the corner of the Rue de la Paix to about the Rue de Rivoli.

Everything imaginable: swimming pool, Turkish bath, gymnasium, squash courts, cafes, tea gardens, smoking rooms, a lounge bigger than the Grand Hotel Lounge; huge drawing rooms, and bed rooms larger than in the average Paris hotel. It is a monster, and I can't say I like it, as I feel as if I were in a big hotel, instead of on a cozy ship; everyone is so stiff and formal. There are hundreds of help, bell boys, stewards, stewardesses and lifts. To say that it is wonderful, is unquestionable, but not the cozy ship-board feeling of former years. We are now off Queenstown. I just hate to leave Paris and will be jolly glad to get back again. Am going to take my very much needed rest on this trip, but I cannot get over my feeling of depression and premonition of trouble.

How I wish it were over!
Yours sincerely, Edith

 

 

 

 

 

 

With mixed results, Margaret Tobin Brown, Mrs. James Joseph Brown of Leadville and Denver, Colorado, aspired to social succces as a great hostes. Directly as a result of Titanic's sinking, she gained her greatest acclaim after it the public learned how she had exhorted the crew of Lifeboat No. 6 to return to where the ship had sunk to look for survivors.  Dubbed afterward, 'the Unsinkable Molly Brown', in fact, during her lifetime, she was not ever called Molly. Devoting herself to fund-raising for causes like education and women's rights, even taking up acting, to  friends she was always Maggie Brown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Heir to a British textile fortune, widowed Charlotte Wardle Drake Cardeza, lived at Germantown, Pennsylvania with her only child. In 1912 she and her son were, returning from a safari in Africa and a visit to Thomas Drake Martinez Cardeza's hunting reserve in Hungary. The Cardezas and their servants all survived the shipwreck. Not so their possessions, which included a jewel chest, 14 trunks, 4 suitcases and 3 crates of baggage, valued at £36,567. 2s.

 

 

 

  

 Thomas Drake Martinez Cardeza, who married a descendant of Jean Racine, had no children, leaving $5-million for medical research. Showing above his waistcoat, he wears a 'slip'. Could the salvaged spectacles below have been a spare pair?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

George Dunton Widener who married his father's partner's daughter, Eleanor Elkins, was heir to the Fidelity Trust Company of Philadelphia, the bank that controlled the owners of the White Star Line. He also owned a street-car line.   

Today, they are never worn, except by a few dedicated sartorial traditionalist, where once, they were an indicator of distinction. So one of the minor faults of Downton Abbey, which starts with the Titanic's sinking, is the absence of men's slips. These were a flourishing, but utterly plain, edging of white linen, attached inside the waistcoats of the most fastidious, from the 1890's up to 1939.  

 

Initially, slips were actual under-waistcoats extending above the outer one, to provide the wearer with an added contrasting flourish.

 

Magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan, depicted by Sorolla, shown wearing a slip.

 

President William Howard Taft wearing a slip.

 

Col. John Jacob Astor who perished with the Titanic, wearing a slip.

 

    

 

 

 

A bibliophile of discernment, Harry Elkins Widener became a some-what popular businessman as well.  It was as a collector that he'd gone to England, accompanied by his dotting parents, to purchase new rarities.

 

 

 

 

With the loss of her husband and their favorite child, Eleanor Elkins Widener devoted her life to charitable work. As her lifeboat was lowered she had witnessed an officer shooting himself in the head and the entire tragedy was a trial she fought hard to overcome. One of the first things she felt duty-bound to do, was to see to completion the Newport house she had planned with her husband. As her son has loved rare books, she contributed  funds to help build Harvard's Harry Elkins Widener Library. Both structures were designed by Horace Trumbauer. At the library opening in 1915, Eleanor Widener met geographer Dr. Alexander Rice, whom she later married.

 

 

 

 

1916: Miramar, Newport, Rhode Island. 

 

 

 

 

 

 Harvard's Harry Elkins Widener Library.

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps one of the Wideners was wearing these recovered links and studs? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By all accounts, those crossing on Titanic in first-class, whatever their circumstance or background, were having a wonderful time on the newest biggest most marvelous floating palace ever known. As day passed into night, as one day succeeded the next, the myriad pleasures planned for their expressed amusement had piled delight upon delight.  And then there was the fourth day. Dinner was scrumptious, it was the best day so far, many thought. At its close, whether sipping after-dinner coffee in the lounge, drinking excellent brandy at the bridge table, strolling one last time along the deck or already settled contentedly in their warm and cosy beds, every privileged passengers aboard RMS Titanic the night of April 14, 1912 was speeding on a course for a apointment with another reality. It was a harsh rekoning of a type most had never previously experienced.

For the moment, all was calm, even the sea. So the laughter and joy had continued and the great ship hurried along. But, by and by, time and for some, luck and good living too, would run out at last. The ordeal, the agony the plight of many, for all the vast resources ordinarily at their command, now would be little different from that of a Haitian man, a man despied for being black. That trapped feeling most blacks know, that one is damned, whatever one does or doesn't do, they knew that night too.  The reversal was profound, such that long afterward, nothing  exactly, ever again, would seem quite the same ...To be continued!    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Forgotten Gay Great: William Bruce Ellis Ranken, 1881-1941!, Part II

 

1899: William Bruce Ellis Ranen, his sisters and their Mother.

 

1904.

 

 

 

1927. 

1937.

 

 

1918: 'Pipe Practice.' 

 

 

 

1926: 'The garden door.'

 

 

 

 

1933: 'Hall at Warbrook.' 

 

 

Ca. 1922: 'Hibicus Flower' and 'An Anglo-Indian Student.'  Who was this young man?

 

 

 

 

 

Like Sargent, Ranken was unmarried. Like Ranken, his friend and mentor, John Sargent, was proablly also gay. So were a good number of  the artist's patron-turned-friends, including composer Cole Porter, writer Violet Keppel Trefusis, Miss Anne Morgan, daughter of the famous financer, decorator Elsie de Wolfe, her lover, the dynamic literary agent Elizabeth Marbury, Henry Davis Sleeper, the collector, actor Ernest Thesiger, who married Ranken's sister Janette at his behest, and most significantly, William Lygon, Earl Beauchamp, and his middle son, the Hon. Hugh Lygon, the model of Sebastian Flyte, the catalyst in Evelyn Waugh's most famous novel.

 

 

 Ca. 1933: Cole Porter, Esq.

 

 

 

1917: Violet Keppel. Daughter of last mistress of King Edward VII, she became the reckless lover of Vita Sackville-West. Her great-granddaughter is the current Duchess of Cornwall.

 

 

Beyond pain and pathos, treachery and backbiting,in lovely or memorable surroundings, the story of the Lygon family's tragedy, relates an ongoing struggle for tolerance. High status and exceptional gifts, far from protecting them, instead render each Lygon more vulnerable for attack. Targeted as outcast, they were cruelly scapegoated by people considered upstanding and good, which is to say, those most inclined to be most intolerant. 

Highly honored, vastly rich, the father of seven children, and the husband of Lady Lettice Grosvenor, sister of England's richest subject, William Lygon, the 7th Earl of Beauchamp, the master of Madresfield Court, made for an unlikely outlaw.

 

 

Like so many aristocratic English men, he had first discovered his sexual variance at school. So did his second son, Hugh. So had a great friend of Hugh Lygon's, with whom he would have an affair while at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh. The noted writer would eventually abandon homosexuality, marrying twice, but the Earl and his son, whose noble status and cultivation Waugh idolized, never changed.

Famously, in Brideshead Revisited, Waugh utilized his closeness with the Lygons to create an elegy to England, as it was imagined to be before the Second World War. He depicts a dynasty set apart, on account of their Catholicism, one that's shunned, because the patriarch is conducting a shameful affair with some foreign adventuress.

Diverting as it is, Waugh's saga was written at a time when it was impossible to more closely reflect the truth. This didn't prevent the discriminating from reading between the lines, but that 'awful truth' had to wait until now, to be completely revealed. The consummate researcher, Ms. Paula Byrne, in Mad World, Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, offers much material that's new with the masterful flair of a popular star-novelist. Setting the record straight, she has done an incredible job.

 

 

As only a few abbreviated excerpts from his wife's divorce petition indicate, Beauchamp's disgraceful downfall was colossal: 'THAT the Respondent is a man of perverted sexual practices, has committed acts of gross indecency with male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy. THAT throughout the married life ...the Respondent habitually committed acts of gross indecency with certain of his male servants, masturbating them with his mouth and hands and compelling them to masturbate him...THAT from the month of May 1909 to the month of April 1912 in the Chauffeurs rooms at 13 Belgrave Mews, West, the Respondent frequently committed sodomy with the said Samuel John Scown...1924...Respondent committed sodomy with a man named Cook... 1927...Respondent committed sodomy with a man whose name is unknown to Your Petitioner...'

 

Lord Beauchamp died of cancer in 1938 at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotle, at 66. He was succeeded in the earldom by his eldest son, William. Lady Beauchamp, who abandoned her home, forsook her 6 older children and divorced their father once his secret emerged, died in 1936,  just 59. She had taken her youngest son with her when she fled. His younger daughter, the Hon. Lady Morrison lives at Madresfield today.

 

With the collapse of a spectacular façade of deceit, following a brilliant career, Lord Beauchamp's life changed abruptly. At the behest of his King, and on the insistence of his embittered, dissipated brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, he was forced to flee the country he'd only recently help to rule. His alternative was to face arrest and certain imprisonment, for being gay. Beyond the loss of earthly splendor in a luxurious domain all his own, one displaying costly treasures and superb workmanship: a balustrade of glass spirals, surmounted by heraldic beasts, a rainbow-hued chapel, presented to Lord Beauchamp as a wedding gift from his wife, showing the peer and his countess, with all their children, blissfully penitent in an idealized garden, the earl relinquished in exile, much more. Cast out, in circumstances which could hardly be called 'outer darkness', his suffering was all the same, real enough. Lord Beauchamp's children had spurned their mother's selfish betrayal and flight to her bullying brother. Except for their eldest brother, they remained loyal to and protective of their father. But on all sides the break-up of a happy and nurturing home-life took a dire toll.

 

 

 

 

1924: Ranken portrayed Lord and Lady Beauchamp and their family gathered in the staircase hall at Madresfield. 

 

 

 

1927: The Hon. Hugh Lygon, the model of Sebastian Flyte. His father's favorite, he was killed by fallng drunk and fracturing his skull on a curbstone while visiting the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.  

 

 

 1928: Lady Mary Lygon, later the Princess Pavlosk. Known by her family and friends as 'Maimie', or 'Blondie', Lady Mary's desent due to her father's scandal, was precipitous.

 

1939: 'His Highness Prince Vsevolode Ivanovitch of Russia', painted by Ranken and signed and inscribed "To Mary". Tsar Nicholas II's nephew, he was the last imperial prince born in Russia. Derided by Lady Mary's friends when they married, as her  'pauper prince', his work as a wine salesman aided and abetted growing mutual dipsomania and dissipation, proceeding divorce.   

 

1938: Mona, the new and last Countess Beauchamp. A Danish widow, some years older than her second husband, she already had a 19-year old daughter, but was unable to have a son to inherit the now extinct earldom.

How nice, with the death of King George V, the disgraced earl was permitted to return to enjoy once more the beauties of home, that the warrant for his arrest was withdrawn. An avid and professionally instructed embroider, the earl also took up knitting to pass away hours spent sitting in the sunlight of his glorious gardens. How sad that he instructed his former servant and lover, to whom he left a handsome bequest, to destroy his personal papers. His tendency seems to have been to engage gay servants, artisans and, a physician, to make gay friends and associations whenever he could. Someday we may come to know how, in Ranken's case, this came about, learning more and more about the accomplishments of gay greats who dared to challenge the system merely by being themselves. 

 



 

 

A Forgotten Gay Great: William Bruce Ellis Ranken, 1881-1941!

 

 

New Yorker Magazine stalwart Mary Petty, 1899-1976,  my favorite cartoonist of all time, had a delightful way of poking gentle and genteel fun at the 'gratin'. Her drawings effectively let hot air escape from souffle-like lives holding the elite apart and aloft.  Some of what makes her teasing, intricate portrayals of polite pathos so effective, was the infinite care she took. Petty observed her rarefied subjects with the same exactingness that Audubon applied to documenting birds. She knew New York high society and its subsets of graded strata so well, that for all of her work's sparkling hilarity it captures a particular time, milieu and atmosphere with expert precision. Moreover, she shows how, ever adapting to change, so as to best preserve status, position and wealth, the underlying tastes, attitudes and prerogatives of the privileged have persisted from generation to generation.   

 

1948: A Mary Petty New Yorker heroine selects heirloom ornaments which have contributed to her family's social cachet for many generations.

 

The artist William Bruce Ellis Ranken, who painted Mrs. Samuel L. M. Barlow, the decorator Ernesta Beaux, in 1933, was equal to Petty in his ability to nail the exact pose, coloration and detail definitive of his time. He was born in Edinburgh in 1881, the second son of Robert Burt Ranken, a prosperous lawyer, and his wife Mary. Educated at Eton and The Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, Ranken, like the Adam brothers before him, emerged in London as both a painter and a gentleman. His first one-man exhibition was at the Carfax Gallery there,  in 1904.  It was a gallery much favoured by Sargent at that time, whom in quick order, he befriended. Moving in a circle of Edwardian aesthetes, Ranken also became acquainted with the eminent artist Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn.

  
  
 

 1933: Mrs. Samuel L. M. Barlow, the decorator Ernesta Beaux.

 

 

 

 1923: Queen Mary.

 

 

 1938: Queen Elizabeth.

 

 

 

 1901.

1902. 

 1904.

 

 

 

 

Only doors away from Sargent's studio in Tite Street, by 1914 he was living at 14 Cheltenham Terrace, Chelsea, in a rather chic studio with an elegant Palladian window. Terribly attractive, as well as terribly talented, the polished painter also counted Baron Adolph de Meyer, the innovative photographer, composer Roger Quilter and Ernest Thesiger, the stage and film actor, as intimates. 

 

 

 Ranken's London studio, 14 Cheltenham Terrace, Chelsea.

 

Suffering from polio as a child, William Ranken escaped the carnage of the First World War. Instead of fighting he traveled to America, armed with a commission and numerous invitations, secured through Sargent, who accompanied him.  In Boston, where he had his first American show, Sargent introduced Ranken to the legendary art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, who acquired his watercolour 'In a Turkish Garden' for 'Fenway Court', her palace of art, comparable to the Wallace Collection.  A solo exhibition at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in New York followed, along with a spate of highly profitable commissions from Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Havemeyers and other socially prominent sitters.  

 

1928: 'Higher and Higher.' New York seen from Ranken's window, with the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue looming in the distance.

 

Highly romantic, an antiquarian and a collector, Ranken exhibited equal skill whether working in oil,  watercolour or pastels. A born portrait artist, his likenesses were not limited to either the upper class, or even merely to people.  Characters from fiction, interiors, both palatial and rustic,  landscapes, cildren and flowers all inspired his creative impulse. Fresh from his American success Ranken's subjects increasingly included members of the British Royal Family and aristocracy.  It was thanks to his success in America, as well, that enabled Ranken to acquire Warbrook House at Eversley in Hampshire, a charming 18th-century neo-Classical dwelling set within an extensive and picturesque estate. While many English connoisseurs collected Adamesque, French and Georgian furnishings, few would have combined them with a Native American basket as Ranken did.  

 

 Warbrook House, Hampshire.

 

 Ranken's Drawing Room.

 

Ca. 1912: Roman Gardens at Nîmes.

 

 

 

1904. 

 

 

1910: 'Water-lillies.' 

 

 

Travelling widely throughout his life, with France being a particularly favored destination, Ranken seems to have discovered fresh material and ready patronage wherever he ventured. Repeated trips to America, were always fruitful. That is, they were until the Great Depression struck.  Returning to England, feeling forced to sell his beloved Warbrook, Ranken moved to the south wing of the nearby Farley Hill Place.  Even grander than Warbrook, Farley Hill Place was the seat of one of his sisters who had married into the family of the Earls of Elgin and Kincardine.

 

 

 

1907: 'Olga Alberta, Baroness de Meyer.' 

 

Ca. 1909: Mrs. Emile Mond.

 

Ranken died suddenly in London in 1941 and was buried near his beloved Warbrook, in the churchyard at Eversley.  Besides Mrs. Gardener, Ranken's America enthusiast, had included some of the nations' most discerning art lovers, such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Mrs. Lars Anderson, Otto Kahn, Mrs. Dave Hennen Morris, and Mrs Ector Munn. In January 1943 a group of his important patrons organized a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Ferargil Galleries in New York.  Despite a very active life in society and among artists, despite the sparkle and verve of his productive output, William Ranken's name is scarcely remembered today at all. 

 

 1914:  Eliza Doolittle From Shaw's Pygmalion.

 

1939: 'Fountains at Versailles.' 

 

 

1927: 'Throne Room, Royal Palace, Madrid'

 

 1930: 'Tea Room , Stadtschloss, Potsdam.'

 

 Ca. 1916: 'The Saloon, Blenheim Palace.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1925.

 

 

1925: The two watercolor studies shown above were made by Ranken to illustrate 'Colour and Interior Decoration', written by the influential interior designer Basil Ionides and published by Country Life in 1926.

 

 

 Ca 1931: Mrs. Vincent Astor's Drawing Room at Ferncliff. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1927: Two rooms at Beauport, the seaside house of decorator Henry Davis Sleeper, seen as a young man in the photograph above. 

 

 

 1928: Brick House Farm, Pleasant Valley, Duchess County, New York.

 

 

1932: Mrs. Conelius Vanderbilt, II and her daughters, Gladys and Gertrude, having tea in the libtary at the Breakers Newport, Rhode Island.

 

 

 Ca. 1916: Lady D'Erlanger.

 

 1917: 'Mrs. Kelsey in Pink.'

 

1925: ' Mary Irene Curzon, Baroness Ravensdale.

 

 

 

 

1931: 'Magnolia' 

 

 

1933: Mrs. Edwin D. Morgan, Jr., nee Elizabeth Winthrop Emmet , was known to her family as 'Lybba' or 'Liba' .  Her mother, Alida Beekman Chandler, was the youngest of the famous Astor orphans. Like her mother's sisters, Mrs. Morgan, shown draped in long strings of rose quartz and jade beads, was an artist as well as a socialite.  Deemed a professional beauty, she was painted and photographed by everyone of note. Just one year after this magnificent  portrait was completed at the age of 36, Elizabeth Morgan sadly died of chronic leukemia.

 

 

 

 1936.

 

 

1937. 

 

 

 

 

 

1930: 'Elephants, Warbrook.' How one would like to be able  to paint like Ranken! Even to be able to arrange a variety of flowers with such facility would be a joy.

 

 

1917: 'The Raphael Room at Lynnewood Hall.'  The Widener's idea of filling a sarcophagus with a bright array of spring flowers is inspired! 

 

 

 

 

 

1935: 'Cymbidium Orchids.' Indicative of the fashion in flowers for greater simplicity that arrived with the 1930's, this bouquet of cut orchid stalks might have been arranged just yesterday.