It's been said that one cannot be either too rich or too thin. Petite, prosperous and supremely stylish, my friend Chiu-Ti Jansen, Publisher of YUE Magazine, certainly seems to subscribe to this adage. For she is elegantly as imperially slender as a reed and wears such perfect, beautifully made and accessorized clothes, always, that she gives every appearance of being as rich as Richard Corey!
The divine Ms. Jansen chaneling Sargent's Madame X
So did all her friends last Monday night who gathered as she hosted the magazine’s third anniversary celebration at the Harmonie Club. Designed over a hundred years ago by Stanford White, the venerable association sits serenely aloof on East Sixtieth Street, near Fifth Avenue. It proved to provide the perfect backdrop for the festive black tie gala honoring eight of the most powerful Chinese and Chinese American influencers in the world of philanthropy. This wonderful group included David Henry Hwang, Yue-Sai Kan, Anla Cheng Kingdon, Michelle Kwan, Lang Lang, Richard Lui, Hao Jiang Tian and Shirley Young.
"YUE," is derived from the Chinese rendition of New York. Literally, it means rendezvous and promise. More than a lifestyle magazine, YUE is about building an exciting community around shared ideas and aspirations. "What could be a better way to accomplish this objective than giving back to our communities?" Ms. Jansen remarked: "As we raise a toast to the third anniversary of YUE, we are privileged to honor great leaders in philanthropy and present their accomplishments as a meaningful way to understand that generosity is a time-honored tradition in the Chinese cultural makeup."
In addition to the worthy honorees and their guests, the fun party brought together Chinese and New York elite youth for crispy crab cakes, spring rolls and other delectable hors d'oeuvres accompanied by quite good wine and Royal Salute Scotch whiskey generously provided by Pernod Richard. Fittingly, Royal Salute's brand ambassador, Peter Ly, was on hand to be thanked and also acted as a presenter. Vertu, the presenting sponsor, offered an array of mobile devices featuring unique sound and visual experiences which showcased some of the honorees’ charitable achievements. The attending honorees were bestowed with finely engraved sparkling crystal Baccarat Louxor Obelisks that I coveted. Beijing Council, the associate sponsor, provided additional support for the event.
Notable guests at the gala, in addition to the honorees and senior executives of YUE luxury advertisers, included: Mr. and Mrs. Chen Guoqing, the co-founder of the HNA Group and Hainan Airlines, Datuk Zang Toi the brilliant fashion designer, who wore a glorious orchid,
Geoffrey Bradfield one of Architecture Digest top 100 interior designers, and RenéBelcer a Law & Order producer and Ms. Carolyn Hsu Belcer, among others, who happily and delightfully, included the darling Harlem developeer Diane Eamtrakul, and me! How lucky!
Honoree Lang Lang was a piano prodigy who performed at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. His Lang Lang Foundation promoters classical music education
Honoree Shirley Young is President of Shirley Young Associates; Chair of Lang Lang International Music Foundation; former VP at General Motors Corp, former member of the Business Advisory Council for the US State Department and the Agency for International Development; contributor to New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera
Mrs. Young dazzeled in a spectacular necklace of jadite and pearls
Elegant honoree Yue-Sai Kan, who shimmered in silver, is an Emmy-winning television producer and bestselling author whose programs Looking East and One World introduced the East and West to each other; Chairman of the China Beauty Fund, she advocates for the rights for women and children
The most extraordinary gown among so many exquisite dresses, was inspired by the couture of Worth from a century ago, exhibiting brocaded wisteria
Hao Jiang Tian, seen with his wife, Martha Liao and Harlem's Diane Eamtrakul, is an operatic bass who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera since 1991. He feels strongly about investing in young talent, as a supporter of the Asian Performing Arts Council, and I SING BEIJING, which fosters a Chinese-American exchange
It was a handsome subject, photographed for Geoffrey Holder's 1986 book ,"Adam", intimating intimacy, who first suggested to me that the artistic giant might be gay
Geoffrey Lamont Holder, 1930-2014
Circa 1954: Kindred spirits, handsome and highly talented brothers, Geoffrey and Boscoe Holder. Boscoe had been christened Arthur Aldwyn Holder
A figure study painted by Boscoe Holder.
Like John Singer Sargent, Boscoe Holder painted a large number of dynamic male nudes, boasting a deft spontaneity and fluid sensuality. Not exhibited during his lifetime, apparently, they were painted purely for the artist's pleasure.
"I met Boscoe at a party in Port-of-Spain." said a man who encountered Geoffrey Holder's then still charmingly spry older-artist-dancer brother in 1990. "Afterwards, he invited me to his home for drinks, where I met his wife as well. Besides having some of his paintings on display, his house, in an older, mixed-income section of the city, struck me as a treasure trove of memorabilia."
"Boscoe, was pretty openly bisexual. If you met him, you would assume he was gay. We had lunch a few days later, at which he offered to procure for me as a favor whatever I wished in the way of a male Trinidadian...His attitude towards gayness was what I would call “old school”: It was a recreation, a pleasure, but the idea of a committed gay couple seemed an absurdity to him..."
One hardly overlooks the long and productive marriage, the evident enduring love and commitment of Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade, the beautiful and gifted dancer and choreographer, or their son Leo Holder. But it is this attitude and taste, for casual, recreational homosexual activity, that I believe Geoffrey Holder shared in common with his older brother and many others
Geoffrey and Carmen Holder
Friday Geoffrey Lamont Holder was laid to rest. Some might imagine that raising the question of his sexuality lacks respect and is immaterial to his greatness. But whatever he was, and all that he was, made him the person we so esteem. To hope to alter any part of his makeup is as futile as attempting to hold back the tide at full moon. Still many people, particularly, of a certain age, contend sexuality is of little consequence today. "Gays march nearly naked on parade!", they say, and "marriage equality is well on its way to become the law of the land."
Perhaps. Two years ago a great pal and his wife of 20 years divorced. Most of his friendships, including our friendship, precluded his revealing the cause of his hurt and loss. But he did confide in his cousin, who revealed what had happened to my friend's mother. She told me.
"I'm not happy," my shocked friend's wife had informed him, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, one night following a delicious dinner. "I want a divorce..." she continued. "But, how long? How long have you felt this way?" my friend pleaded. "For about the past 18 years," his wife replied. "But, that's most of the time we've been together!" my friend answered, starting to weep.
Only once they sold their green shingled house in Berkeley, after my friend moved back to Harlem, did he learn that his ex was a lesbian, who married her girlfriend soon after their breakup.
As for Mr. Holder, whatever he was: Gay, straight, bisexual, larger than life, extraordinary, difficult, a joy; unhappy, he was not!
In his final decade, by which time he was a multi-millionaire, without a trace of irony or even a hint that he recognized how ridiculous his denial might appear to many, my friend Bobby Short, who nearly married, more than once, commented
"I have a living to make! I can't afford to march in the Gay-Pride Parade."
None the less, undoubtedly in part motivated from fear of such changes as much as from malice, on Malcolm X Boulevard, in the heart of Harlem, a church displays an enormous sign as hateful as any message ever offered by the KKK. Surmounted by a lighted cross, it's changed periodically, but routinely denounces President Obama and incites, supposedly Biblical based, violence towards "homos." "Jesus would stone homos..." is one example but, "Obama has released the homo demon on the black man, look out black woman. A white homo may take your man.", is my favorite. Reminiscent of sermons I have listened to exasperated, calling out the "sin" of a "man lying with a man" while giving a pass to far, far more pervasive heterosexual "fornicators", it prompted me, well knowing my community, to think, 'what about white women?'
'DL', down low, undercover same sex activity is, all the same, a constant of black life. With the advent of the internet indeed, all manner of unconventional sexual expression has found an outlet to flourish. Transgendered, Islan Nettles, just 21, was befriended by Paris Wilson on Facebook. Some say they started a relationship, that Wilson had reason to be fully aware of Nettles' status. But it's alleged, that gathered with his friends, across the street from PS A6, a public housing police station on Frederick Douglas Boulevard near West 147th Street, things were different. Confidently, he made a pass at his Facebook friend. Once one of his crew announced Islan was a "faggot", transgendered, Paris Wilson, to save face some say, struck her forcefully. Once, and then again, he continued beating after she had fallen to the ground, leaving Islan unconscious, with one eye swollen shut and her delicate face streaming with rivulets of blood. Rushed to Harlem Hospital, falling into a coma, Islan died the following week.
Initially charged with misdemeanor assault, when another man came forward to say he was the culprit, too drunk to remember what exactly had happened, college bound Wilson was let go. Prosecutors declining thus far, to bring either man before a grand jury, the sordid case remains open.
Islan Nettles, fatally attacked by an embarrassed suitor, August 16, 2013
Thinking of innumerable luminaries over the centuries, Oscar Wilde, Stanford White, Adrian, Carry Grant, Patrick Dennis, Countee Cullen, Lorraine Hasberry, Leonard Bernstein, Audre Lorde, David Hicks, Samuel Delany, Carter Burden, Nick Ashford, John Travolta, and many more, youth today, unencumbered by yesterday's shame and stigma, might ponder, 'Why on earth would someone gay pretend they were not gay, even going to the great lengths of marrying someone straight and having their children?' Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston's singular saga's often give rise to this dogged conundrum. Gore Vidal said it might be due to how once men near 50, troubled thoughts of reproducing oneself become most acute.
Differing doctrines aside, almost everywhere around the globe, gays are despised! Demeaning women and hating gays seems to be something all religions can agree on. However weird or odd or scary Michael Jackson became, irrespective of disfiguring mutilations and seemingly aberrant behavior, by the ruse of maintaining he was straight, Michael continued to be loved. Conversely, the contempt of gays is so potent that questioning if someone regarded as heterosexual, might instead to have been gay, is considered by some a libelous condemnation, an unforgivable slur.
However, question one must, the lives of those suspected of seeking to 'pass' undetected. Believing black is beautiful, and gay is good, there is neither judgement nor denigration intended in this exploration: merely a reclamation by which heroes are acclaimed, and gays are redeemed.
With the gay identity of Langston Hughes and George Washington Carver down-played, a concurrent effort to retroactively "straighten out" august gay icons of longstanding, is gaining intensity.
Langston Hughes
George Washington Carver
Experiences in the military and prison show conclusively, that sexual relations between men do not inherently 'betray' a gay identity. They do however show something more valuable, the humanity of those who are LGBT. We posses no malevolent ability, to either diminish or harm heterosexuals, not to any greater degree than straight women or men at least. This is why same-sex exploits enjoyed by colossal personalities like Josephine Baker, Malcolm X, Chester Himes, Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Pottier are so illuminating. Nowadays though, even the bold James Baldwin's sexuality is often obscured, by those out to manufacture a more palatable type of hero.
The inducement of a family fortune helped to influence many white gays like Carl Van Vechten, Harold Vanderbilt, and Cole Porter to 'settle down'.
But apart from ambiguous beauty-products heiress, A'Lelia Walker, who married three times and adopted a teen-age daughter, but lived longest with a paid female companion in a one-bedroom apartment, such considerations seldom applied to African Americans. In some ways one might explain Harlem poet Countee Cullen's first wedding to Yolande DuBois on Easter Monday in 1928, as the outcome of
the extravagant hopes of his father-in-law and certain other blacks, for the formation of an exemplary dynasty of exalted intellectual accomplishment.
Given her own easy-going personality, as incurious as that of many other young people, it's fairly certain that this was not the objective of his bride. Despite any outsized ambition of William Edward Burkhart DuBois, who edited TheCrisis Magazine of America's foremost civil rights organization, the NAACP, his daughter had merely been interested in romantically 'falling in love' with someone who looked nice, and who was a good dancer.
That was why initially, she'd been more encouraging toward his friend, who would serve as Cullen's best man, Harold Jackman. Widely deemed 'Harlem's handsomest bachelor,' though flattered and amused by Miss DuBois' crush, Jackman was uninterested. This is what made Harlem's 'poet laureate' suddenly so much more appealing.
Until her death in 1917, Cullen had lived with his grandmother, Amanda Porter in Louisville, Kentucky. He then moved with the Reverend Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Asbury Cullen, into the parsonage of Harlem's Salem United Methodist Episcopal Church, and soon adopted their name.
Led to their pews on April 9th by ushers, including Langston Hughes, who almost to a man were exclusively gay --- how the fashionable congregation had whispered, one to the other--- "What do you think, does she know?" Completely discounting the couple's week-end wedding trip, when Cullen embarked days later with his father and handsome Harold for Paris on his Guggenheim fellowship, everyone, including Yolande, had thought the worst--- that this was their honeymoon. But they, Harold and Countee, were only friends. Divorced in record time, when he remarried ten years later, in 1940, Countee was more careful to select a more 'suitable' helpmate. Both Ida Mae Robeson Cullen's brother and her first husband were gay, and hence she had to 'know the score.'
"Lithe, handsome, fun and charismatic, sexually, Jimmie was the most responsive lover I ever had! "When aspiring architect Philip Johnson and cabaret song-stylist Jimmie Daniels conducted assignations in the mid-1930's, they occurred most often in a large Harlem apartment, occupied by a black couple and the wife's white lesbian lover. Their apartment in the building at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street was a cooperative unit owned by distinguished actress Edna Thomas,
immortalized by her interpretation of Lady Macbeth in Orson Wells' stage debut in 1934. Lloyd Thomas, her husband, like his wife had started out working for legendary black-beauty-products millionaire, Madame C. J. Walker.
Olivia Wyndham Spencer, Mrs. Thomas' girlfriend, a recovered cocaine addict, was a member of one of England's most distinguished families. Mrs. Howland Spencer's husband made a career of marrying rich women and was also gay. Only he miscalculated in choosing Olivia Wyndham, a great-great-granddaughter of the last Earl of Egremont. Related to Britain's wealthiest aristocrats, she was herself poor, by New York society standards at least. And she too had blundered, imagining Spencer to be much more affluent as well, a trouble-free 'beard,' able to offer both security and propriety.
Jimmie Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmie is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
The life-long lesbian lovers were introduced at one of the phenomenal parties of heiress A'Lelia Walker,
by Edna's husband, Lloyd Thomas. Olivia immediately expressed her pronounced attraction and in un-uncertain terms. Taken aback momentarily, Edna's reaction was an aloof iciness. But, calling to apologize, asking if she might come over to say goodbye, Olivia was not rebuffed a second time. No sooner had Edna related that even her, "initial response had not been as indifferent as I'd pretended," than Olivia had aggressively pounced and ravaged her! Married to a man for the third time, Edna confessed how never before that day had she ever experienced an orgasm.
Married to distinguished black research scientist Elmer S. Imes, who taught at Fisk University, novelist Nella Larsen, was a member of the 'sisterhood' headed by Thomas and Wyndham that centered around intimate weekends parties at Minedo Farm, their country place in Connecticut. Winning the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal in 1929, a few years later, accused of plagiarism, Larson was disgraced and abruptly cut ties to all her former friends including Wyndham, Thomas and the Van Vechtens. Divorced, alone and working as a nurse in obscurity, this writer whose work explored the confused social, sexual and racial boundaries of 1920's Homo-Harlem, died
As for Philip Johnson and Jimmie Daniels, whom the architect later termed "the first Mrs. Johnson", gradually they too drifted apart. Johnson maintained, that when they parted, "I was sadder than I'd thought I might be," and that the passionate youth Jimmie had, "probably left me for someone who was better in bed..."
Johnson's inability to protect his black boyfriend from the indignity of fancy restaurants failing to provide service on account Jimmie's color and his admitted failure to consult, consider, or always include him at parties and on trips, seems a more logical reason for their breakup. Replete with a very rich and encouraging lesbian wife, the acclaimed poet, 'Brynher' [nee Winifred Ellerman] Daniels was more fortunate in his choice of his next long-term lover, Kenneth Macpherson, the Scottish poet.
After the Harlem Renaissance, wayward artist and writer, Richard Bruce Nugent , photographed in the 1950s with his wife Grace, took the precaution to marry, so someone could take care of him
Born in Grants Town in 1902, Paul Meeres, like many Bahamians came to the U.S. as a farm wotker. Without formal training, he developed a smooth dancing style that put him on the international entertainment stage. Strikingly handsome, nicknamed "The Brown Valentino," he married Thelma Dorsetta, an immigrant from Jamaica, who became his dance partner. Billed as "Meeres & Meeres", the 'the Negro Astairs', they had a son and daughter, but divorced in 1930. In the 1940's he opened Chez Paul Meeres, a combined theatre and nightclub in Nassau. Beautiful Paul Meeres, Jr., who also became an entertainer, was a gay as his father
In black America, in 1955, nothing was official until it was announced in "Jet Magazine". Attitudes have also changed since then. Today few patrons could be characterized as "ofay" without incident
"I've been happily married, to Carmen, for a thousand years. We have a son. What do you mean by asking me, if I, am gay?", replied Geoffrey Lamont Holder the first time I asked him directly. Earlier queries had been more oblique, more circumspect: 'There is a nude photograph of you in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale, by Carl Van Vechten.' "You must mean my brother, Bosco?", he'd said. 'No, it's you...I'm amazed at how many people involved in Harlem's artistic past were gay!'
What a pity that Geoffrey Holder's completely nude photographs at Yale are no longer available on-line
"What? How do you make the connection between a photograph, and being gay? ...In earlier times, people did not have the hang-ups they do today. People were artists. One appreciated the beauty of bodies. It had nothing to do with who was gay. If you appreciated a fine body, you ask your friend to photograph, or to paint them. A man, or a woman, it was about beauty, it wasn't necessarily about sex. Everything is not always about sex... "
Just beginning research for a book entitled Homo Harlem: A Chronicle of Lesbian and Gay Life in the African American Cultural Capital, 1915-1995, either as a participant, or as a talisman-like role model, I felt confident that Geoffrey Holder had a place in my story. For, brandishing bravura and poise, the un-Cola Man of my youth appearing on TV to sell Seven-Up soda, had shown an entire generation of questioning boys another way to fabulously be a man.
Until I was 24 and came out to myself, I felt sure I'd marry some beautiful girl. My furtive, fumbling, fugitive and few searches for sexual fulfillment were primarily with young women. Even latter, once I knew the score, friends advised, "why yes you're gay, but you'd make such a wonderful father. You're kind and have so much to offer a woman. There are many who would be understanding, you should get married. It will help to protect you"
For the longest time such advice was widely taken as gospel. The person with whom most gays and lesbians wished to establish a marital alliance in the past, invariably was someone of the opposite sex able to offer plausible deni-ability.
Famed as a booster of Harlem and African Americans, Iowa native, critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten, was emphatically gay.
Yet, he married twice with deliberation. His marriage to his first wife, a long-time friend from home, lasted only a few years, while marriage to the petite actress Fania Marinoff endured for a lifetime, from 1914 until Van Vechten died in 1964.
Affairs, fights, and copious drinking, like many involved in old-style 'gay marriages', the Van Vechtens were, in their way, a deeply dependent and devoted couple.
1955
As they preferred cats to infants, the hook for them, seems never to have involved any hopes of offspring. Instead, it was how the 'respectability' of matrimony made inheriting a million-dollar-plus trust fund more secure. These riches seem to have helped sustain their attraction.
None of Holder's depictions of abstracted naked, men that I've come across, are more than passively erotic
1986: A tappering torsoe, photographed by Holder for "Adam"
Mysterious and exotic naratives, none of Van Vechten's nude and semi-nude portrayals of Holder were as revealing or as blatantly salacious as the images he made to titillate and trade with gay friends. Nor are any of Holder's depictions of naked men that I've come across, more than passively erotic.
Fania Marinoff, Carl Van Vechten's long-suffering but devoted actress-wife
Circa 1940: Hugh Laing cavorts with Allen Juante Meadows
As much as Carl Van Vechten loved to make photographs of the famous and promising, Negros and nude portraits and figure studies were his speciality
There never was a more emphatic denial expressed to me as to his sexuality by Geoffrey Holder. Yet, what actually do artistic sensitivity or flamboyant dandism prove alone? Were it not for the casually tossed off comments of certain friends and acquaintances, people who were Holder's contemporaries, other artistic types who knew him or people who did, I might have abandoned my quest. Alvin Ailey, Henry Van Dyke, Freddie Hamilton, Bobby Short, Walter Nicks, Grafton Trew, Marvin Smith; all had their tales to relate. It was important for me to learn at first, not to probe too much, attempting to discover history that validated gays. Lest my wary informants retreat, it was essential to learn restraint and discretion. For these were men who spent a lifetime strategically hiding, or at least compartmentalizing, their true identities behind a public persona. Resolute not to "hurt" anyone with outing, even when dead, finding my interest appealing and suspect at the same time, to "protect a friend', they were easily liable to amend or even to retract a revelation in its entirety! If seeking out history, discovering those who have come before one, is generally daunting for African Americans, for gay people of color, the task is more perilously elusive still.
Although their mother was from Martinique, a French colony, prodigious brothers Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder were born into a middle-class Trinidadian family. That ultimate emblem of Victorian respectability, a piano graced the Holder's parlor. Both Boscoe and Geoffrey, younger than his brother by ten years, played piano and danced. Inasmuch as Boscoe taught himself to paint, as Geoffrey emulated everything Boscoe did, Geoffrey painted too.
To be gay is still taboo in Caribbean counties. Initially Boscoe's inevitable marriage failed to separate the inseparable pair. Inspired by the western elegance espoused by movies, local folk lore, African rhythms, ritual and music also informed the Holder brother's artistic pursuits. At the forefront of a movement that showcased Afrocentric artistic expression, Boscoe, with his wife Sheila and Geoffrey each left home. Going their separate ways they disseminated a sparkling outpouring of joie de vire and theatrical creativity into the warmly welcoming wider world.
Sheila, Mrs. Boscoe Holder, depicted by her husband
One might say that Boscoe Holder's profusion of gay friends from the theatrical sphere, such as Noël Coward and Oliver Messel, was telling. Geoffrey and Carmen, also darlings of the world of theatre and as prominent and stylish fixtures in fashionable society as Amanda and Carter or Wyatt and Gloria, surly had their quotient of gay friends too. Of Messel, the facile designer who created the fairytale-like stage setting for House of Flowers, also known for his fetishistic enthusiasm for Caribbean men, Holder was adamant: "He was a condescending bitch!" More mixed was his regard for fellow dancer Alvin Ailey.
In a way, one might say that Geoffry Holder could afford to be somewhat sanguine and magnanimous towards Ailey because despite his colleague's early and longstanding friendship, since George Washington Carver Junior High School, with Carmen, she had chosen him to marry and make a home and family. Aware of Alvin Ailey's troubled life as a black gay man, his driven pursuit of countless, endless and empty assignations with youth encountered in pinball arcades and "bookstores", one might doubt that he'd ever wished he was in Geoffrey's place, married to Carmen. While it's uncertain that such an alliance would have brought him the calm of mutual reinforcement, the sustenance of shared admiration and love, it's beyond doubt that Alvin too had wished to marry Carmen. Her rejection left him distraught, dejected and suicidal.
De Lavallade was born on March 6, 1931 in Los Angeles, California, to Creole parents from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father, Leo de Lavallade, was a postman and bricklayer. Before her early death Carmen's mother, Grace Grenot de Lavallade, was in ill health. Born between sisters Yvonne and Elaine, it was Carmen's father, and his sister Adele de Lavallade Young, owner of the Hugh Gordon Book Shop, one of the first African American bookstores in LA, who reared her. If Geoffrey had had Boscoe as a model to emulate, immense inspiration was derived by Carmen from her cousin, Janet Collins, who became the first full-time African American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet! Just 14 de Lavallade began ballet training with Melissa Blake, and two years later she won a scholarship to study modern dance with Lester Horton. Joining the Lester Horton Dance Theater de Lavallade became its lead dancer . Besides taking private ballet lessons with Carmelita Maracci, she also studied a variety of dance styles, and took acting lessons with Stella Adler who once lived in the same building where Leo Holder lives on today on Riverside Drive. Carmen won dancing parts in several minor Hollywood movies early in her career. In 1954, Carmen Jones gave her the chance to dance with Alvin on screen and led to their being invited to dance in the Broadway musical House of Flowers by the same choreographer, Herbert Ross. This was how Carmen and Alvin first met fellow cast member Geoffrey Holder.
Determined, tall, talented, persisting, after a four-month courtship Geoffrey Holder wed Carmen de Lavallade, in 1955.
Featured in several exhibitions, Geoffrey Holder is pictured with Museum of the City of New York's Phyllis Magidson, Curator of Costumes and Textiles
Beyond all else, an accomplished couturier, Geoffrey Holder had but one muse, and mostly, one marvelous patron, Carmen!
A good deal more happened after Geoffrey and Carmen married. It's delightfully related in their compelling documentary from 2004, Carmen and Geoffrey.
Their accomplishments have also filled numerous appreciations which quickly followed Geoffrey's passing. Utterly unrelated, it was a piece by a young journalist, Alvin McEwen, called The Erasure of 'Gay' From Black History & the Black Community Must Stop that mostly prompted this blog post. Hidden in the past, gays are also deliberately erased in the present. As most black people know, and all African American gays learn, the most vexing and prevalent form of bigotry at play today, is the passive-aggressive oppression of being dismissed to the point of being ignored completely, as if one did not exist. It's not just the history books, but in the Times Home Section or Style Magazine that this occurs for blacks. Similarly for African Americans who are LGBT, our disappearance is in plain sight. We are everywhere, from church on Sunday, to the football arena on Monday, but officially, we are nowhere. As Mr. McEwen puts it:
As a gay African-American, I've heard the argument about how "you can't compare the gay civil rights movement to the African-American civil rights movement" more times than I care to count. in the black community where LGBT people of color run up against a massive brick wall. There is a pattern of erasure which strips our presence from the majority of black history...
When African-American civic organizations talk about "the state of Black America," we are omitted. We are talked about as examples of how tolerant the black community is becoming...
To some African-American heterosexuals, we are mere sidebars or addenda. We are objects they hurl Biblical scripture at to cover up their own religious shortcomings or soulless reservoirs of salacious gossip holding court in places like beauty parlors...
Morgan Powell, 1973-2014
The crusading activist of Bronx history, culture and landscapes, was found dead in Brooklyn. In a hostile world, confusion and ambivalence about one's identity can prove to be deadly
No matter what, no one ever, nor ever will, ignore a true original, Geoffrey Holder.
Gilded New York, on view at the Museum of the City of New York Through March
As the Nazis surly knew, there is perhaps no more bitter form of discrimination than to be excluded and ignored. Such treatment is at the forefront of dehumanization. Well before deportation to actual death camps, Hitler’s edicts systematically eliminating the participation of Jews accustomed to taking an active and crucial role in German society, certainly took a terrible toll. And today in New York, if one is gay, or African American, to be marginalize, compartmentalize and even altogether banished from sight is fairly routine.
In part this diminishment of blacks and gays derives from skewed reasoning. Even though Americans, we represent, it's felt, a distinct and separate subset of Americans. So, although there are few instances when examining these “subsets”, that one would fail to find whites and heterosexuals offering a context against which to objectively make an evaluation, when it comes to straight whites, particularly those who are rich, however eccentric, it’s a different story.
In a November 21, 2013 New York Times appraisal of these offerings Karen Rosenberg perceptively references how critics and art merchants have attributed recent colossal figures realized for paintings and sculpture at auction, as evidence of the onset of a new Gilded Era: “At such a moment, it may be useful to take a hard look at the old one, the late-19th-century period defined by the aggressive buying sprees of a few newly minted industrialists.” She says. This observation prompts Ms. Rosenberg’s further critique concerning exclusivity, excess, inequality and tastes.
Pendant brooch, ca. 1900, Platinum, diamond, sapphire Tiffany & Co., Museum of the City of New York, Bequest of Mrs. V. S. Young
“ Art lovers, be warned: These shows are about lifestyle, not connoisseurship. Collecting, as seen here, is a particularly transparent form of social gate-keeping. And the exhibitions dutifully guard those gates: They don’t tell us much about the Gilded Age’s extreme disparities of wealth, aside from passing mentions in the glossy catalogs.
They do, however, have much to say about the imbalance of money and taste: that the spending of unfathomable amounts of money on art, fashion, parties and real estate had a tendency to stave off any discussion of taste."
Whether or not one finds the efforts undertaken on behalf of yesterday’s supper-rich class to elevate themselves, either aesthetically uplifting, or in the best taste possible, wrought by exceptional craftsmen with the utmost skill, formed from the finest materials, they certainly still impress. Inaugurating the Museum of the City of New York’s Tiffany & Co. Foundation Gallery, Gilded New York explores the city’s visual culture at the end of the 19th century, the dawn of America's ascendancy as the world's great supper-power. As never before the city’s elite then flaunted unprecedented riches, lavishing a king's ransom on ornate showplace-houses meant to last for centuries as dynastic seats. And, just as Russian, Chinese and Middle Eastern multi-billionaires today pay whatever it takes to acquire the world's most storied art treasures, American plutocrats a century ago, similarly swept up all that was lovely or precious within a wide grasp. One hundred works of art, including elegant attire, jewelry, portraits, and decorative objects, dazzling accouterments created between the mid-1870’s and the first decade of the 20th century, express their bid to be recognized as an aristocracy second to none.
Julian Francis Abele (1881-1950), the first African American to attend le Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, was chief designer of the architectural firm of Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia. Indicative of his role in masterminding the firms later work, beyond the greater refinement of detail and the felicity of design following his arrival, is a remark he once made, "The lines are all Mr. Trumbauer's, but the shadows are all mine..." To anyone familiar with the rigorous training at the French academy, who has viewed a line elevation, versus a drawing articulated and given dimension, by subtle shadows painted with watercolors, this statement speaks volumes.
In 1909, Julian Abele, designed one of the Trumbauer firm's greatest townhouses, a residence for James B. Duke, on Fifth Avenue at 78th Street. The wealthy Duke was an associate of Peter A. B. Widener, and the founder of American Tobacco Company, as well as the benefactor of Duke University. Based on architect Etiene Laclotte's Hôtel Labottière, constructed in Bordeaux in 1773, Duke's house was described by architect Philip Johnson as "perhaps finer than the original."
But not one of the items on display is in any way representative of the heritage or contribution of African American or LGBT New Yorkers. Given that the city’s elite constituted a coterie which excluded Jews, most Irish Roman Catholics, and indeed nearly all Catholics irrespective of ancestry, this mightn't seem surprising. It was after all, as well, an epoch when people were presumed to be heterosexual even when evidence suggested otherwise. Radical, 'confessed' lesbians and gays were deemed dangerously outré, deviant outcasts. Almost universally poor, African Americans were widely reviled, irrespective of accomplishment or even when miraculously wealthy. So the improbability of the inclusion of representations of people so marginalized, even in some tangential way, naturally enough, might be a foregone conclusion.
Yet, considering the exploitation of black labor, know-how and consumption, partly facilitating the riches and lifestyle of utter luxury afforded Gilded Era multi-millionaires helps to enlarge the topic of glittering trappings. Moreover, so potent and original are the gifts of America's perennial outlaws, gays and blacks, that even in the rarefied realm apart of the supper-rich, a vital influence was felt despite every effort to safeguard high society from such 'coarsening' influences.
1883: Peter Marié, Esquire (1825–1903), in fancy dress for the William K. Vanderbilts' celebrated costume ball.
In New York, a distinct majority of the Catholic families accepted into 'good society', had been refugees, fleeing the uprising of slaves at the close of the 18th century, leading to the Haitian Revolution. The scion of such a clan,Peter Marié's maternal grandfather was a planter who owned a large estate. He was assassinated at a banquet being held to celebrate the cessation of hostilities between Haiti's slaveholders and the black revolutionaries. A Roman Catholic, but rather rich, the 'confirmed bachelor' was a popular socialite famous for his courtliness and extravagant entertaining. Undoubtedly gay, 'bachelorhood' did not deter from his tremendous social success.
Between 1889 and 1903,Marié assiduously pursued debutantes and young matrons, not for amorous purposes, but for the sake of their pictures. Beseeching certain ladies for the honor of allowing him to commission their portrait in miniature, his subjects helped him to form a collection immortalizing women in society whom he believed epitomized female beauty.
There was little to fear from 'the help', inasmuch as, after the Civil War among New York's bon ton, African American servants were increasingly avoided. There were of course conspicuous exceptions. Ever since F. D. R.’s stint as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, both as an economy, and as a gesture of charitable helpfulness, Eleanor Roosevelt made a point of exclusively and unfashionably engaging black servants. Customarily black household help were paid much lower wages than their white counterparts. Few love a bargain as much as the rich. Yet outside of the South, in lavish establishments like the Astors’, Vanderbilts’, or Drexels’, more costly white servants, who were mostly Irish and other European immigrants, where hired for the greater cachet they conveyed.
1891: A group of Peter Marié's beauties photographed at Newport by Italian born photographer Louis T. Alman. Second from the right, in the front, is Miss Grace Wilson, who became Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt.
A dandy, an aesthete, a raconteur, and bon vivant, as a consummate snob, Peter Marié was not above allowing exalted social standing and wealth to influence, and at times, to cloud his vision. Often initially commemorated by photographs from which the small group of artists he favored might later captured a painted likeness, this accumulation of nearly 300 watercolor-on-ivory miniatures stands today as a vivid document of New York’s Gilded Age aristocracy.
This remarkable group of images form an arresting aspect of the special exhibition, Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America, at the New-York Historical Society. Yet, by the time of Marié's death in 1903, both on account of the high status of the sitters and due to many being painted from photographs, instead of from life, his once precious miniatures were found lacking. Rejecting Marié's bequest, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Museum asserted, the pictures were not even really art. Not only did he feel it possible to identify on the city's streets, numerous subjects as lovely as Peter Marié's beauties, he ventured in the Times; "some of the miniatures do not even qualify as art, as they are not originals but paintings copied in Europe from photographs taken in the United States."
1891: Sallie J. Hargous by Fernand Paillet, watercolor on ivory. The subject was the daughter of L. S. Hargous of Pittsburgh. She married Lieutenant Duncan Elliott, U.S.A., a cavalry officer, on October 15, 1891.
At their Newport ‘cottage’, "Sherwood Lodge", for instance, southerners Mr. and Mrs. Pembroke Jones, always engaged black help. Proficient at expertly preparing 'down-home' delicacies, their cook indeed, was by far more widely renowned than the French chefs of the area’s most deluxe households. But more typically, nearby at the "Breakers", Anderson Cooper’s great grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, kept only white servants, with the sole exception of their laundresses. Living and working in a sequestered laundry building on the grounds, never seen by family or guests, these black women were responsible for the most arduous job there was associated with running an exacting and elite household. The luxury of fresh linen damask bed sheets daily, new napkins nearly a yard-square for dinners, for each person at each meal, and three changes of what one wore, every day, for everyone in the household, including servants, was not easily achieved.
Demeaned due to their poverty and lack of education, African Americans were viewed as a pervasive joke, permeating American life in innumerable forms, from scurrilous figures of fun in advertisements, to cartoons found even in some of the most lofty journals. To what end, blacks served as a reviled reminder to whites that they were civilized, beautiful, intelligent and superior. As with this cartoon, celebrating African American ingenuity, what the Williams & Walker team took from humor and hate meant to harm blacks, was to always make what was spoofed, far more attractive than ridiculous.
"Recon dis rig 'll done dassle dat common trash"
"Dat gal ain't dressed up lak dis book says"
" Mammy, kin Ah hab dis yer ole pisce ob paw's pants-laig an' dis no-count baskit?"
"Dis now, Miss Stuck-up, jcs gase at what am de berry latest!"
More readily, the more subversive means by which African Americans infiltrated and helped to transform the world of white swells, was via the stage. Imagine, no 'smart phones', internet, or TV. Instead, with many millions to expend, in a nation where most are contented to earn two dollars a day, to amuse themselves, the rich must make do with an endless repetition of the same highly contrived dinners, dances, sport and travel. The ritualistic formality of etiquette imitative of the English nobility and association with the same small group of predictable companions gave this life a certain tedium. The theatre was an approved outlet against boredom as well as a wonderful place to encounter something 'new', something different.
How astute of Aida Overton Walker, a black dancer, choreographer, comedienne, and singer to appreciate the power for positive change she welded, Nichelle Gainer who produces the wonderful website, Vintage Black Glamour, points out. In her 1905 editorial in the Colored American entitled, "Colored Men and Women on the Stage", Ms. Gainer related recently, the chanteuse who popularized the cake walk and hit songs like "I Want To Be An Actor Lady", wrote rebuking African American snobbery.
"Some of our so-called society people regard the Stage as a place to be ashamed of.... In this age we are all fighting the one problem—that is the color problem! I venture to think and dare to state that our profession does more toward the alleviation of color prejudice than any other profession among colored people. The fact of the matter is this, that we come in contact with more white people in a week than other professional colored people in a year and more than some meet in a whole decade."
The Cakewalk!
Bert Williams, born Egbert Austin Williams (November 12, 1874 – March 4, 1922), dreamed of attending Stanford University to become an engineer. Not able to afford tuition, working as a singing waiter instead in hotels in San Francisco, he met and teamed up with George Nash Walker, 1873-1911, then performing in traveling medicine shows. Emulating white duos billing themselves as "coons", Williams and Walker decided to market themselves as the ultimate spooks, the "Two Real Coons." In 1896, they appeared in a Broadway production called The Gold Bug at the Casino Theater and never looked back.
1873then performing in traveling medicine shows. Emulating white duos billing themselves as "coons", Williams and Walker decided to market themselves as the ultimate spooks, the "Two Real Coons." In 1896, they appeared in a Broadway production called The Gold Bug at the Casino Theater and never looked back.
Celebrated African American performers, George Nash Walker and Bert Williams joined forces after meeting in San Francisco, around 1892. Their alliance offered a winning presentation of comic, if stereotypical song-and-dance numbers, dialogues and skits. Derived from early 19th century white minstrels in black-face, such teams persisted late into the 20th century via the antics of Amos and Andy broadcast on television. Ordinarily, dark-skin Walker would be expected to play the stooge. But to their credit, the partners realized that by challenging expectations, and reversing roles, they were much funnier. Slender, taller, darker Walker adopted the slick persona of a preening dandy. Spending copiously all the money he could borrow or trick out of the hapless Williams, a lugubrious, long-suffering fool. While Williams’ half-hearted efforts, large and small, were chagrined at every turn, George Walker, sang and strutted his way into the hearts of a host of admiring women theater-goers.
Both delighted audiences with the refinement of their pretentious manners, contrived speech and elaborate, highly contrasted attire. Exemplary of the age-old slur that blacks were partial to exaggerated, loudly patterned, brightly colored clothes, cut with effete and extreme precision, both in their dress and manner, they nonetheless managed to introduce to their burlesque of stylishness, an element of true elegance.
An opportunity to do their own show was realized with In Dahomey. Williams and Walker teamed up with Will Marion Cook, Jesse Ship, and poet-lyricist Paul Laurence Dunbar to produce the musical comedy, replete with African themes, original ragtime music and elaborate and effective scenery and props. A farce involving a stolen necklace, inept detectives and unscrupulous royalty, the show was a resounding success, touring throughout the United States following a London production with a command performance before Queen Alexandra.
Williams and Walker’s captivated audiences with their brilliant appearance in the musical farce The Gold Bug. It was in this vehicle that their interpretation of the cakewalk so captured the public’s imagination, that for the remainder of their career spanning more than a dozen years, and even afterward, they were so closely identified with this dance, that many regarded the duo as having invented the cakewalk.
Dressed on stage, not 'to the nines', but rather, to the 'eighteens', Williams and Walker worked diligently to equal the production values of white shows. Handling most of the management responsibilities of their productions, they sought to elevate the professionalism in black theater. Toward this end they helped to establish, the Frogs, a social-fraternal quasi union. By 1906, Williams and Walker founded an actual actors' union for African-Americans, called The Negro's Society. Staring in two more successful plays, In Abyssinia and in their final show, Bandanna Land in1907, who can say what they might have accomplished had George Walker not fallen ill?
George Walker began to stutter and forget his cues and lines, touring with Bandana Land in 1909. Like music greats Bob Cole and Scott Joplin, he was afflicted in an era without a cure or even effective treatment, by the final stages of syphilis. George Walker spent his remaining days in sanatoria in Kansas and Michigan, before traveling to New York in hopes of finding helpful treatment for the paralysis resulting from his illness. On January 7, 1911, he died at a clinic on Long Island. Paresis was listed as the cause of his death and Bert Williams, his partner of sixteen years, paid for Walker’s medical expenses and burial at Oak Hill Cemetery in in his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. He was only 36-years old. A mere youth, Langston Hughes attended George Walker’s funeral at the modest Warren (now 9th) Street Baptist Church. Hughes was then living with his rancher-father, but was soon to move to live with his mother in Cleveland where he attended high school. Probably in sketching Aunt Hager's funeral for "Not Without Laughter", the writer was revisiting this event in the tiny church of his boyhood.
"The little Baptist Church was packed with people. The sisters of the lodge came in full regalia, with banners and insignia, and the brothers turned out with them. Hager's coffin was banked with flowers...wreaths and crosses with golden letters on them: ‘At Rest in Jesus,’ ‘Beyond the Jordan,’ or simply: ‘Gone Home.’...They were all pretty, but, to Sandy, the perfume was sickening in the close little church...The Baptist minister preached...The choir sang ‘Shall We Meet Beyond the River?’ People wept and fainted."
Quite willing to wear gauchely over-elaborate costumes on stage for a laugh, off-stage, George Walker and Bert Williams alike, were always impecably attired.
“That’s Why They Call Me ‘Shine,’” dates from 1910. According to Perry Bradford, himself a songster and publisher, the song was written about an actual man named Samuel Johnson, who was with George Walker when they were savagely beaten during the New York City race riot of 1900. "Piping the shine..." is a reference to their assault.
It seems there was a real Samuel Johson who was attacked in the riots. The intro lyric that refers to "Pipe The Shine" is a reference to beatings during the riots - See more at: http://jdurward.blogspot.com/2009/06/manic-monday-thats-why-they-call-me.html#sthash.11Wb2c20.dpuf
The music was composed by band leader Ford Dabney, an associate of James Reece Europe, while the seemingly self-deprecating lyric, which turns out to actually be defiant, was written by Cecil Mack. Born Richard C. McPherson, Mack was perhaps the co-founder of New York's first black-owned musical publishing concern. Both he and his writing partner were African-Americans. Taking over for her ailing husband in Bandana Land, doing his parts in his costumes, Aida Walker made a great hit with George Walker's number Bon Bon Buddie. In 1911, again wearing male drag, "That’s Why They Call Me Shine” was sung by Aida Overton Walker in the Broadway production of “His Honor: the Barber.”
The lyrics were written in 1910 by Cecil Mack who co-founded what was likely the first black owned musical publishing company in New York. The music was by Ford Dabney, a black band leader and long time associate of James Reese Europe. Among the most noted early performers of the song were George Walker and Bert Williams who were probably the most famous black vaudevillians of their day.
It seems there was a real Samuel Johson who was attacked in the riots. The intro lyric that refers to "Pipe The Shine" is a reference to beatings during the riots. Without the intro as originally written, the song appears to be an insult to African Americans when it was actually written to lessen the pain of the name calling and claiming a dignity not afforded to them at the time. The "recorded by" list of the song is virtually every great black performer from 1910 to today as well as some of the best of the white blues performers who took it on as a jazz anthem. - See more at: http://jdurward.blogspot.com/2009/06/manic-monday-thats-why-they-call-me.html#sthash.11Wb2c20.dpuf
The lyrics were written in 1910 by Cecil Mack who co-founded what was likely the first black owned musical publishing company in New York. The music was by Ford Dabney, a black band leader and long time associate of James Reese Europe. Among the most noted early performers of the song were George Walker and Bert Williams who were probably the most famous black vaudevillians of their day.
It seems there was a real Samuel Johson who was attacked in the riots. The intro lyric that refers to "Pipe The Shine" is a reference to beatings during the riots. Without the intro as originally written, the song appears to be an insult to African Americans when it was actually written to lessen the pain of the name calling and claiming a dignity not afforded to them at the time. The "recorded by" list of the song is virtually every great black performer from 1910 to today as well as some of the best of the white blues performers who took it on as a jazz anthem. - See more at: http://jdurward.blogspot.com/2009/06/manic-monday-thats-why-they-call-me.html#sthash.11Wb2c20.dpuf
The lyrics were written in 1910 by Cecil Mack who co-founded what was likely the first black owned musical publishing company in New York. The music was by Ford Dabney, a black band leader and long time associate of James Reese Europe. Among the most noted early performers of the song were George Walker and Bert Williams who were probably the most famous black vaudevillians of their day.
It seems there was a real Samuel Johson who was attacked in the riots. The intro lyric that refers to "Pipe The Shine" is a reference to beatings during the riots. Without the intro as originally written, the song appears to be an insult to African Americans when it was actually written to lessen the pain of the name calling and claiming a dignity not afforded to them at the time. The "recorded by" list of the song is virtually every great black performer from 1910 to today as well as some of the best of the white blues performers who took it on as a jazz anthem. - See more at: http://jdurward.blogspot.com/2009/06/manic-monday-thats-why-they-call-me.html#sthash.11Wb2c20.dpuf
Verse 1:
When I was born they christened me plain Samuel Johnson Brown, I hadn’t grown so very big ‘fore some folks in the town Had changed it ’round to Sambo, I was Rastus to a few, Then Choc’late Drop was added by some others that I knew, And then to cap the climax I was strolling down the line When someone shouted, “Fellers, hey, come on and pipe the Shine.” But I don’t care a bit, Here’s how I figure it.
Refrain:
‘Cause my hair is curly, ‘Cause my teeth are pearly, Just because I always wear a smile, Like to dress up in the latest style, ‘Cause I’m glad I’m living. Take troubles smiling, never whine; Just because my color’s shady, Slightly diff’rent maybe, That’s why they call me “Shine.”
Verse 2:
A rose, they say, by any other name would smell as sweet. So if that’s right, why should a nickname take me off my feet? Why, ev’rything that’s precious from a gold piece to a dime And diamonds, pearls, and rubies ain’t no good unless they shine. So when these clever people call me “shine” or “coon” or “smoke,” I simply smile, and smile some more, and vote them all a joke. I’m thinking just the same, What is there in a name?
Repeat Refrain.
Joining their company in 1898 Ada Overton (14 February 1880 – 11 October 1914), of New York married George Walker a year later. Becoming their leading lady the versatile performer soon became famous in her own right, both as a droll comedienne and as a graceful dancer. As a choreographer and as a dancer alike, her modification of the cakewalk and other dances were warmly received. By 1903, Ada Overton was reborn as Aida Overton Walker.
Ca. 1900
Although she bewitched early-20th-century theater audiences with her original dance routines, Aida Overton Walker started under the impression that she was not a good singer. Only as the expedient replacement of an ill company member was it discovered she indeed possessed an enchanting singing voice. Mrs. Williams allied her loveliness not only with devastating talent, but a fashion-sense as developed and appealing as white stage stars like Lillian Russell and Lily Elise. Her reinterpretation of the low-down cakewalk into an elegant dance, made it her own. Her stardom and cakewalking fame helped open the door to the ‘Four Hundred’; making the cakewalk respectable, a generation ahead of Josephine Baker or Florence Mills, Aida Walker was frequently engaged by the leading hostesses of New York, London and Paris to instruct guests in the mysteries of a dance that had originated among black slaves on Southern plantations.
1907: Possessed of Paris inspired gowns and precious gems, Aida Overton Walker nonetheless retained an African American identity. Eschewed by whites between 1800 and 1930, she proudly wore hoop, or 'slave' earings, only not of plain gold, but paved in diamonds.
What made the cakewalk so appealing to white members of high society? Success stemmed from the same duality so often at the center of the appeal of African American cultural contributions, the contradiction of familiarity and difference.
Since the Renaissance, at royal and noble courts all across Europe, grandees have engaged in quadrilles, contredanses, German Dances, and the cotillion; types of patterned social dances, reminiscent of nothing, so much as bees or today's 'ELECTRIC SLIDE'. What's unknown, is the true origin of such activity. Were such dances adaptations of romp-like reels, the wedding dances of peasants depicted by Peter Brueghel, or did they originate instead as courtly dances in stately great halls? In the United States the square dance, where "figures" are called aloud by the caller, or a cotillion leader evolved from the working class retaining the ceremonial dances abandoned by those better off, or did it? The name cotillion still conjures up social fan-fare. The word is from the French cotillon, or "petticoat ". The term is thought to have been suggested by frequent and flirtatious glimpses of underskirts as the changing partners turned.
Be it a quadrille, a German, a square dance or a cotillion, each dance involves ‘competitive couples’ and a concluding ‘grand ’march’. With the arrival of such dances in America, via a ruling class eager to identify with their European counterparts, it was not long before black slaves, who served at such elaborate entertainments, in the 18th century, took them up too. Dance for the slaves became a means of emulating, and even perhaps, of mocking their masters.
As Aida Overton Walker explained it, "The cakewalk is characteristic of a race and in order to understand it and appreciate it and to become adept in it, it is necessary to keep your mind upon the judges, your partner, and especially upon what the cakewalk really is—a gala dance…"
Gay men certainly inhabited New York’s most exclusive precincts in the past. Among those who never married some were quite easy to spot. The Sun, Thursday, March 15, 1891 observed of such unencumbered gentlemen:
The wealthy bachelor is the most luxurious resident of fashionable Gotham as well as the most popular man in society. His morning begins at 11 o'clock when the average run of humanity has finished a half day's work. He lunches between 2 and 3 o'clock at his favorite club or a swell cafe d. He dines between 7 and 8 o'clock and he has his super at midnight, when the city has given itself over to Morpheus. He is as welcome at an evening party, dance, or soiree musicale as he is behind the scenes of the big theatres. The wealthy bachelor is as generous as he Is regular. The head waiter in one of the largest of the most fashionable restaurants said: "The unmarried men in society spend three times as much as the married men.
Edward M. Curtiss was thought an interesting single-hearted epicure. At sixty, he was regarded as "just as young as he used to be." He had some odd notions as to his old-fashioned dress, holding onto stock, and wearing straps under his trousers, until they were long out of vogue and he was laughed at. Once, attending a ball with a yard of his mother's rare point lace made into a ruffled shirt front, from that date on he was known as "Point lace" Curtiss.
During an epoch when rich single men described as elegant or ‘epicene’ were among the most popular hosts in society, Messrs. James V. Parker and Peter Marie, fairly pride themselves on being the oldest entertaining bachelors in town. Valued for conspicuous gallantry and as extra men for dinners and dancing at balls, their unattached state was generally viewed as highly ‘unusual’.
By the end of the 1880’s, a new generation of fashionable ‘confirmed’ bachelors came to the fore. Young men like Llspenard Stewart, not only were adept at helping hostesses, by selecting the most exquisite cotillion favors and leading and planning the cotillions for their dances, they also gave jolly and unconventional entertainments of their own, such parties to see vaudeville performances, proceeded by dinners and followed by suppers.
Although millionaire Robert Hargous, known as ‘Bobbie’, had French ancestry, his father had made the family’s fortune in Mexico. With his three sisters, Bobbie Hargous was noted for an olive completion and dark good looks. Yet he was also said to have a high-pitched voice and to be effeminate. He was also recognized for being, “ the one bachelor of New York who entertains on an elaborate scale.” It became his habit to give very intimate teas in his bachelor apartments at the Cumberland. There, each room was said to be a symphony in cream, rose or pale- blue satin and silver. Dexterous in the use of a chafing dish, Hargous was assisted by a valet, Shoto, brought back from a journey to Japan, along with a collection of porcelain, prints, suits of armor, robes, brocades, silk embroideries, and carpets.
1904: Aida Overton Walker. Photograph by Cavendish Morton in London
Such was the scale of Williams & Walker's London run of "In Dahomey" that they were as inundated with request for cakewalk lessons as John Singer Sargent was with demands for portrait commissions. The Walkers, ragtime and the cakewalk were the latest thing, and everyone who was anyone in London wished to be initiated in the marvelously suggestive and rhythmic mystery, able to be imparted by just three dark souls. Mrs. Walker adored the experience of being in demand. She particularly cherished the following
letter inviting her to give Lady Constance Mackenzie private lessons at one of the most stupendous palaces in the world.
Dunrobin Castle, Sutherland. Lady Constance Mackenzie will' be very much obliged if Mrs. Walker will give her a dancing lesson on Monday at five o'clock in the evening. She is sorry she was unable to have them before. Please let Lady Constance know if Mrs. Walker cannot come, otherwise she will expect her at Stafford House, St. James, at 5 on Monday next
As to his exacting attire, “ When it comes to collars,” wrote a reporter from the Daily Leader, April 9, 1892, “I think no one man of fashion can quite equal the taste or the lavish display in styles of that prince among men of fashion, ‘Bobbie' Hargous. If ever "Collars and Cuffs," the lamented English prince, had a peer in his realm of peculiarity and idiosyncrasy it was in Bobby Hargous. And now, of course, Bobbie may be said to have come into his kingdom, all his collars and cuffs are made to order and in every possible variety permitted by the dictates of fashion…”
1912: Twice Aida Overton Walker portrayed the sensual Oscar Wilde heroine, Salome to acclaim
Mrs. Walker's diamond necklace could be converted into a tiara
The impact of Aida and George Walker's assured style, both regarding dancing, shoes and wardrobe was far reaching and certainly not lost on later husband and wife dance teams like the Chastles
1916: Vernon and Irene Castle
1904: George Walker, his wife dressed as a child, Bert Walker and Mrs, Walker on the end, appearing in "In Dahomey"
1904: George N. Walker in 'In Dahomey', tweaked fashion with just enough exageration to take it over-the-top yet still kept what he wore alluring
1911:In costume when she performed with the Smart Set Company's production of His Honor the Barber
Taking leave of New York and Newport early in the 1890’s Bobbie leased the Gothic Palazzo Contarini-Fasan in Venice on the Grand Canal, known as the house of Desdemona. Tradition, maintained that Shakespeare's heroine was born and died there, but the palace surely never witnessed anything comparable to the young connoisseur. Usually in residence during the summer, attended by gondoliers liveried in white, traveling in a white gondola, Bobbie Hargous was a great favorite among ordinary people and Venetian society alike, both of whom referred to him the "American prince."
Bobbie Hargous leased Desdemona's Gothic style Palazzo Contarini-Fasan in Venice
As a languid dandy, as a faithful subscriber to the Bachelors Ball, well polished and easily drolleries, cotillion skills and largess, Robert Hargous was well thought of.Before the assent of Harry Lehr around 1900, he was the most sought after gay man in New York society. But finally, effecting what one newspaper termed “the Café au Lait Waltz”, just proceeding Lent in 1903, Bobbie Hargous who had mildly titillated society for decades, finally actually shocked some. “Mr. Hargous,” insisted one journal, “ is so perfectly so au fait in the entertaining line that he scarcely requires, any feminine aid, though fortunately his three sisters. Mrs. William Appleton, of Boston: Mrs. George B. de Forest and Mrs. Duncan Elliot of this city, ably assist him.” On March 7, 1903, according to the next day’s New York Herald Mrs. de Forest played the part of her brother’s hostess. Their party numbering about twenty, was seated at a round table placed at the end of the palm garden, of Delmonico’s. The table, cut off from the main room by a screen of palms, was laden with a great mass of growing spring plants In full bloom.
Delminicoe's
Bobbie Hargous guest of honor; Mrs Arthur Paget, later Lady Paget, née Mary (Minnie) Paran Stevens (1853-1919) was the daughter of a wealthy American hotelier, Paran Stevens, who died in 1872 leaving his daughters the fantastic sum of ten million dollars. Her husband was General Rt. Hon. Sir Arthur Henry Fitzroy Paget (1851-1928), a soldier, diplomat and grandson of the 1st Marquis of Anglesey. Lady Paget was one of the tiny group of advantageously married American heiresses in the Prince of Wales's set. As a fabulously wealthy member of London society, with a London residence in Belgrave Square, she was recived in fashionable circles worldwide.
Ostensibly, the dinner was held to honor the departure from the city of a well-born local girl who had done quite well for herself. Mrs Arthur Paget, later Lady Paget, née Mary (Minnie) Paran Stevens other guests included Mrs. Frederic Neilson, Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont, Mr. and Mrs. William Jay, Mr. James V. Parker, Mr. Charles M. Robinson, Mr. Elisha Dyer, Jr., Mr. Stuyvesant Le Roy, Mr. and Mrs. T. J. Oakley Rhinelander, Mrs. George Law, Baron Kap-Herr and, remarkably, Mr. and Mrs. Jules S. Bache.The presence of the Jewish financier and art collector on the list is significant.This was the very beginning of acceptance in society of a tiny influx of exceptionally rich and cultivated Jews. Harry Lehr, the man who succeeded Bobbie Hargous as socity's pet gay 'thing', is said to have been there. What about his wife, the very rich Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, or his patron, the ascerbic but witty social leader, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish? Otherwise, dinning on the usual fare of diamond-back terrapin, with celery salad and canvas-back duck, with hominy, accompanied by champagne, the excellent dinner was standard for a repast hosted by Hargous. Only after dinner was over, moving on into the adjoining Winter garden, where his guests treated to something rather special. It was not unheard of to have performers in from some popular musical to entertain one’s guests after dinner.
Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont, formerly Mrs. William H. Vanderbilt of Newpore's "Marble House"
At Newport by now, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish had already delighted her company with a black ragtime band, replete with ‘pickaninnys’ cradled in hollowed-out watermelons."In Dahomey" had only opened in January, but it was already acclaimed as a winner. But to engage Mr. and Mrs. George Nash Walker, stars of the first all African American production to appear on a Broadway stage, to bid them to come to sing and dance the cakewalk, this was unique! Equally unprecedented was the Walker’s gracious reception. After they danced, and had taken refreshment, the host and his guest of honor, danced in turn with the pair. Compared by some papers to the recent White House dinner where Theodore Roosevelt entertained Booker T. Washington, the educator, Bobbie Hargous dinner was by far more subversive. For no sooner had their host and Mrs. Paget completed their spins with the Walkers, than other guestS clamored for an opportunity to challenge a taboos of longstanding. Such interracial intimacy certainly existed in the cafes of the Tenderloin, among black and white 'sports', consorting with actresses and prostitutes, but 'mixed' dancing on Fifth Avenue, was radically new!
Harry Lehr, in drag and out, the man who succeeded Bobbie Hargous as socity's pet gay 'thing'
Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, whoes fortune made it unnesicarry for her gay husband to work
Jules S. Bache
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish
1903: Mr. and Mrs. George Nash Walker
"In Dahomey" was a rollicking farce involving a stolen necklace, inept detectives and unscrupulous royalty. The Walker's were astute enough to exploit its resounding success, directing their press agents to spread the news of their participation at Bobbie Hargous' select dinner dance at Delmonicoe's widely. Unfortunately, the invidious nature of prejudice one suspects, caused some guest to regret having their name's in the paper in association with having danced and socialized with 'Negros'. This must account for the contradiction of some white journals suggesting that ladies had objected and the party rapidly broke up, after Bobbie Hargous was Mrs. Walker's partner, versus black papers emphasis of the excitement and enjoyment this elite group had had with the black performers. So delighted was the host for one, that one account says he insisted on sending the Walkers home in his carriage. "Thank you sir. That's very kind of you. But we prefer to take our own, if you don't mind...," Aida Walker is supposed to have responded. TheSaint Louis Republic March 14, 1904 noted,"the following day Mrs. Walker was the guest of the dinner dance's guest of honor Mrs. Arthur Paget at the Waldorf-Astoria, that night she was the guest of Mrs. George Law of 10 East 54th Street at a second dinner for Mrs. Paget."
Rather reminiscent of some media today concerning President Obama, and even his family, for some journalist Aida Walker could do no right. Even offering accolades for talent, business acumen and success, their temptation to snidely sneer, invariably proved irresistible.
107 West 132nd Street, the house that the Cakewalk bought!
NY PRESS JUNE 24 1903 Through The Lorgnette
When Mrs. Aida Overton Walker, the Negro dancer, referred to Mrs. Arthur Paget last winter as "my friend Mrs, Paget," everyone smiled and pitted the Negress for her confidence in the whims of a great woman of fashion. Mrs. Walker insisted that "her friend" would play sponsor to her professionally when she reached London just this service, too, seemed Incredible. But the laugh is on the doubters. Mrs.Walker has triumphed, and at the wave of Mrs. Paget's hand Mrs. Walker attained the goal for which all mummers strive. She was "commanded" to Cakewalk before the King. In all history no singer or dancer of this order has ever been exalted by one of the "royal commands," and because Mrs. Walker is of dusky tint the honor Is magnified. Nor was this all. A future King, little Prince Edward. shook hands with the black dancer, "it was a very nice dance." murmured the little Prince, and those words will-forever be treasured by the woman whose forefathers labored in cotton field's.
Cakewalks at $100 Apiece
It is only natural and almost pardonable that Mrs. Walker should be conscious of her own importance. Those achievements have brought with them a shower of wealth as well as laurel wreaths and Mrs.Walker's "lugs" are astonishing. Soon after she was exploited as Mrs. Paget's protege a Fifth Avenue girl decided she would like to join the cake-walking throng, and she sent for Mrs. Walker to discuss terms for lessons. Mrs. Walker call. She was driven in her own modest brougham and a white footman scampered In front of his swarthy mistress With the manner of a duchess the dancer sauntered into the girl's drawing room. She wielded her Jeweled purse with the air of a Western millionairess and her plantation accent was swallowed Up by the mellifluous "burr" peculiar to Englishwomen. "My terms," said Mrs. Aida, "are $100. for four lessons. After these you will know how to Cakewalk gracefully." But the Fifth avenue girl was gasping with surprise, and determined to learn this famous step from a person of lesser importance.
Touring throughout the United States following a London production with a command performance before the Royal Family, owning a house in Harlem, keeping a private conveyance, owning beautiful clothes and flashing jewels, the Walkers were in a class by themselves, compared to most blacks. For some, indicative of the potential and possibility kept fettered among African Americans, such outstanding exceptions proved to be unbearable.
Romantically born on St. Valentines Day, Ada Overton had gotten her start touring with Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, known as Sissieretta Jones, who was born January 5, 1868 or 1869-June 24, and died in 1933. The African-Americansoprano, who sang in Europe before monarchs, was quite famous as "The Black Patti", referencing the great Italianopera singer Adelina Patti. An inspirational model for Overton, both in terms of the way she presented herself, as a true diva, Jones also eventually influenced Overton in terms of the variety of her repertoire. Jones' repertoire included grand opera, light opera, and popular music. As she matured as an artist, Aida Overton Walker sought the same kind of challenges, hence her efforts to make the cakewalk both elegant and respectable. This also no doubt spured her desire to take up 'serious' dance, preforming Salomme.
Although Aida Walker originally became famous through partnership with her husband and Bert Williams, her popularity was olny flourished all the more in the years following George Walker’s death. The Williams and Walker troupe might have disolved, But Mrs. Walker's work with the Smart Set company was launched.. Subsequently, as leader of her own vaudeville company, she remained widely acclaimed. Several of the lady-like troupe members lived with her, in her Harlem home, a brick and brownstone row house at 107 West 132nd Street. Aida Yes, Aida Overton Walker firmly maintained her position as the reigning female talent in black vaudeville and musical theater after 1911. Many critics contended that she was only just apporching the zenith of her carreer At the time of her death in 1914. How gauling it must have been to see the Vernon and Irene Castle so thoroughly appropiate the popular ragtime dance craze she'd helped to initiate. A century ago, it was so easy to sicken and die. There were and are many ways to contract the kidney disease that killed her, but was it connected to her husband? Lying in state in the new St. Philip's Episcopal Church, thousands passed her bier, she was widely mourned and only 34.
If no one has any concern for the deprived or desperate childhoods of some, is there really any hope for America?
For the vast majority of white Americans the amount of wealth they might reasonably expect to accumulate over a lifetime still greatly outstrips the expectations of most people of color. Since 1963, when many could reasonably contemplate a well-paying job with only a high school education, increasingly numerous whites have become like so many blacks: underutilized at low-wage, dead-end jobs or worse, unemployed.
1790: Print after a painting of George Washington and his family by Edward Savage. Billy Lee, shown standing behind Martha Washington, was the long-time valet to Washington. He was the sole slave of Washington’s to be
immediately freed upon his death because of his services throughout the American Revolutionary War. The remainder were to be gain freedom after their mistress's death. Wisely Martha Washington set them free immediately.
To enumerate every ill remaining unchanged since the historic March On Washington half a century ago remains a pretty sobering exercise. As noted already, some situations like the high incidence of Americans living in poverty, seemingly, have gotten much worse since Dr. Martin Luther King lamented, “The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
During the War of 1812, when British troops set the Capital ablaze, First Lady Dolly Madison saved Gilbert Stuart’s famed portrait of George Washington with the help of a trusted house slave. Paul Jennings, 1799 – 1874, served as valet to President James Madison. Purchasing his freedom in 1845 Jennings published the first White House memoir by a staff member, in 1865, “A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison”.
Living in Washington, D.C. from 1837, Jennings was assisted in his struggle to be made whole by Senator Daniel Webster . In the 1850's, Jennings traveled to Virginia, seeking his children, who had grown up on a plantation neighboring the Madison’s Montpelier with his late wife Fanny. With the commencement of the Civil War their three sons gallantly joined the Union cause.
It's easy to understand how many have come to despair of ever experiencing 'a more perfect union', since fifty long years after the march, and a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, so much remains to be done to achieve ever elusive equality. Yet a great deal has changed, with many highly significant improvements accomplished since Dr. King delivered his soul-stirring 'I Have a Dream speech'. King’s eloquence thrilled an expectant throng of hundreds of thousands demonstrating for justice and jobs on the Washington mall. It’s been wonderful too, to see scores of folks return to the Capital to relive and renew an exultant moment of impactful activism.
1871: State dinner
1872: Members of the domestic staff during the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes
But today, anyone wishing to fittingly commemorate the march, need not journey all the way to Washington. Far more conveniently, those seeking to easily understand just how much has transpired to allow us to hope on and to fight on for the United States' redemption, need only sojourn as far as the closest movie theater. Across the nation, Lee Daniels' The Butler, a highly entertaining morality photo-play, justifiably, is leading in box office receipts.
1888: State dinner
1903: State dinner
White House doorman-footman and presidential messinger, Samuel C. Jackson wrote of his 40 years of service for the June 1949 'Ebony Magazine'. Jackson points out changes to the newly renovated edifice to co-workers, Robert Goodloe, Thomas Johnson and John Broadley
It is an inspirational tale all about what it means to triumph over adversity, movingly outlining the career of a diligent black manservant who works at the White House during eight presidential administrations. Some have unfavorably compared ‘The Butler’ to Forest Gump, another old-fashioned block-buster that lyrically uses a broad arc of history to propel the lead character’s personal storyline of quiet grace.
Alonzo Fields supervises a stag dinner given by President Franklin Roosevelt
Alonzo Fields sees off President and Mrs. Truman
My friend designer Michael McCollum, for one, insists, “'The Butler’ hasn’t got either the magic of Forest Gump, or the soul of The Color Purple!” Most often, despite our different outlooks, I largely agree with Michael. But not now. Against a sweeping backdrop of momentous historical incidents, the mundane and modest life of the movie’s African American White House servant is thrown into dramatic relief.
Alonzo Fields lights the candles in the Family Dinning Room
White or black, older and, particularly anyone younger, who previously ever wondered about what the big deal is concerning President Obama’s election, seeing ‘The Butler’ should now have a better understanding of that historic election’s larger meaning. ‘The Butler’ relates the all-encompassing, often ugly historic narrative that made Barack Obama’s accomplishment seem so improbable, a context of toil and trouble that makes it exceptional even in retrospect!
With a luminously all-star cast, including Forest Whitaker, Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Robin Williams, John Cusack, Mariah Carey, Vanessa Redgrave, Clarence Williams, III, [Linc on "The Mod Squad"] and Lenny Kravtiz, ‘The Butler’ presents in the fictional Cecil Gaines a composite of at least two long-term members of the White House staff. Eugene Allen, and to a lesser degree, Alonzo Fields, provided the model of deference, tact and professionalism that inspired the movie.
What makes Mr. Allen’s story most moving is the extent of progress he witnessed. In the White House when he started work, whites were paid more than blacks for performing identical tasks. But before Allen died at 90, in 2010, he was not only able to vote for a black President, he was honored as an esteemed special guest at his inauguration.
The witness, Eugene Allen with Mrs. Eisenhower in the 1950's and in 2008 at the Obama inaugeration
As in Europe, the tradition in America was to employ male servants to perform the most ceremonial duties, such as answering the door and conducting guests to be received or serving meals. According to a 1913 report in the New York Times, the White House staff consisted of a housekeeper, a custodian, three butlers, four men cleaners, three housemaids, one of whom acted also as a lady’s maid, a cook and an assistant cook, two kitchen maids, six laundresses, four doormen, one footman and three chauffeurs. Omitted from this list are the ancillary posts of electrician, plumber, carpenter and seamstress. Mention of a single footman is interesting, inasmuch as the White House's doormen, liveried in dark blue, with silver buttons, in an ordinary great house, would also have been accorded the designation, footmen.
Harold Hancock, elevator operator
Forty-three years latter the Times' Bess Furman revealed how the staff had grown. The Eisenhowers started office with a maître d’hôtel, four butlers, a valet, one pantry man, six cooks, five doormen, only one laundress, six housemaids, seven operating engineers, five electricians and six carpenters.
For over 50 years the White House doorman, by 1977, Preston Bruce devised an angled table on which to organize place cards
December 27, 1961: Preston Bruce with his family, before the Kennedy's Blue Room Christmas tree
1977: Preston Bruce in the State Dinning Room
Supervising the White House staff throughout the 20th century, was the factotum called 'the chief usher'. In addition to the appointment of an assistant chief usher, occasionally other male servants, the butlers, doormen and footmen under him, were also referred to as ushers. Not until the Bush administration recruited Rear Admiral Stephen W. Rochon, was the complex job of chief White House usher held by an African American. Today, under the Obamas it is held by the first woman chief usher, Angela Reid.
In 2007 the Bush administration recruited Rear Admiral Stephen W. Rochon to serve as the the White House's first African American chief usher
2011: Angella Reid, pictured in front of the White
House became the first woman to serve as chief usher overseeing day-to-day operations at the President's house. An hotel industry veteran, Ms. Reid was born in Jamaica.
At the turn of the last century, black or white, the staff ate meals together, segregated only by the status of their position. Since the preeminent places were held by men, there were separate meals for black and white upper servants, who dined on the president’s leftovers. Under President Taft two sittings were initiated for meals, based no longer on rank, but on race. Eleanor Roosevelt, in renovating the service quarters, provided for a large space where all the help could take their meals together.
A reticent man, Eugene Allen somehow survived Ertha Kitt telling the Johnsons just what she thought about poverty, too little provisions for youth programs and the war
Born in 1919, in Scottsville, Virginia, Eugene Allen first worked as a waiter at a Virginia resort and then at a Washington, D.C. country club. He came to the White House in 1952. After starting as a ‘pantry man’, primarily responsible for washing and storing dishes after large gatherings, Allen ultimately advanced to succeed to Alonzo Fields’ post as the White House maître d’hôtel. In this capacity he oversaw more than a dozen butlers, cooks and other workers supervising all the planning of the varied social functions hosted at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The length of Allen’s tenure even exceed that of his predecessors. Allen and his wife had one child, a son. Allen he retired as the chief butler in 1986.
The Regans had Eugene Allen and his wife to dinner with the German Chancellor
Alonzo Fields joined the presidential household during the administration of President Hoover. If his departure from White House service in 1953 happened rather quietly, Fields had arrived there under circumstances of far greater poignancy.
Alonzo Fields started life in 1900, in the small, all-Black community of Lyles Station, Indiana. His father, a grocer, led the town's colored brass band, instilling an early and pronounced musical influence on his son’s life. One of a tiny number of African Americans to then aspire to careers as a classical musician, in 1925 young Fields enrolled in Boston's prestigious New England Conservatory of Music. “He had a lovely voice,” recalls a relation, “ deep, rich, almost a baritone, but not quite." The success of contemporaries in Boston, like singer Roland Hays and pianist Justin Sandridge must have affected Fields’ decision to sing opera, to master and teach serious music.
Alonzo Fields, the six-foot-two-inch tall tenor who became the White House's first black chief butler
Initially, during the height of the ‘Negro Renaissance’ this seemed to be a fine plan. Everything was going wonderfully at the beginning. Dr. Samuel Stratton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, engaged Fields both as his butler and acted as his patron. “I confess I didn't relish the thought of being a house servant,’ Fields would write, but it was pointed out that, “if I ever did reach the heights as a concert singer, these [social] conventions he was teaching me would give me a background of good breeding.” Alas, his stardom and success as a singer were not to be.
Marriage, a stepdaughter, the onset of the calamitous Great Depression and Dr. Stratton’s untimely death, in 1931 were to all converge as a tragic blow. Without a job and Stratton’s sponsorship, Fields was forced to discontinue his rigorous education as an operatic tenor.
Alonzo Fields prepares for tea in the Red Room
Going to work at the White House, through the intercession of Mrs. Herbert Hoover, was originally only meant to be a temporary stratagem. Not long before her death in 1934, Hollywood actress Marie Dressler attested to Fields' good looks. Famed especially for her memorable role as a world-weary, one-time beauty in Dinner at Eight, she'd been much taken, after only a brief encounter with Alonzo Fields. Dressler, who left a sizable fortune to her own black servants, was a brilliantly assured comedienne. Years afterward Fields still recalled how, while a guest at the Executive Mansion, the movie star had remarked about how she found him so handsome that he should act in pictures. This was hardly the first time that charm figured in a servant’s steady employment and helps to explain Mrs. Hoover's motivation to recruit Fields for the presidential staff.
Stills of Hollywood actress Marie Dressler with Jean Harlow from "Dinner at Eight". Miss Dressler approved
Accordingly, upon learning of her friend Stratton's death, First Lady Lou Hoover had been quick to inquire about his imposingly tall and attractive young butler. 'Fields' had attended her so amiably during a visit to the university administrator’s well-run house. At the White House, his very first year presented Fields an immediate lifetime highlight. He was able to sing in the East Room in 1932 at the servants’ Christmas party.
Eugene Allen in his daytime white coat worn in summer
Though finding his duties a compelling and rewarding challenge, Alonzo Fields still must have meant to leave soon, once the time was right. But after serving under the Hoovers, he’d then met and admired President and Mrs. Roosevelt. That his respect for the Roosevelts was mutual, is indicated by his rapid promotion. Not long after the Roosevelts' arrival he became the first African American chief butler in White House history.
Following his father's funereal, with Eugene Allen in attendance, John F. Kennedy, Jr. celebrates his third birthday
Ever since F. D. R.’s stint as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, both as an economy, and as a gesture of helpfulness, Eleanor Roosevelt had made a point of exclusively and unfashionably engaging black servants. Customarily black household help were paid much lower wages than their white counterparts. Few love a bargain as much as the rich. Yet outside of the South, in lavish establishments like the Astors’, Vanderbilts’, or Drexels’, more costly white servants, who were mostly Irish and other European immigrants, where hired for the greater cachet they conveyed.
The State Dinning Room ready for action, under Presidents Taft and Nixon
At their Newport ‘cottage’, “Sherwood Lodge”, for instance, southerners Mr. and Mrs. Pembroke Jones, always engaged black help. Proficient at expertly preparing ‘down-home’ delicacies, their cook indeed, was by far more widely renowned than the French chefs of the area’s most deluxe households. But more typically, nearby at the “Breakers”, Anderson Cooper’s great grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, kept only white servants, with the sole exception of their laundresses. Living and working in a sequestered laundry building on the grounds, never seen by family or guests, these black women were responsible for the most arduous job there was associated with running an exacting and elite household. The luxury of fresh linen damask bed sheets daily, new napkins nearly a yard-square for dinners, for each person at each meal, and three changes of what one wore, every day, for everyone in the household, including servants, was not easily achieved.
Eugene Allen with his assembled force, ready for duty in the Kennedys' private dinning room
Even at the president’s house the dramatic disparity in the pay of black and white workers performing similar chores persisted until the 1970’s. Partly to foster greater harmony by eliminating this stark juxtaposition, the Roosevelts filled all but the most senior staff supervisory posts of the chief usher, chef and housekeeper of their household with African Americans.
An idea of what working at the White House entailed, is given by a few in-house statistics. In 1939 alone, nearly 5,000 people came to a full meal there, another 9,311 took tea, and 14,056 were entertained at receptions, while 323 people were house guests of the first family.
Alonzo Fields stressed that President Harry Truman, whom he chose to stand beside him in his portrait, distinctly had treated him, not like a servant, but like a man. No doubt his interaction with Truman helped Fields to see the essential importance of his proficient service.
“As I always told the Negro servants and dining room help that worked for me,” Fields wrote, “Boys, remember that we are helping to make history. We have a small part, perhaps a menial part, but they can't do much here without us. They've got to eat, you know.”
Alonzo Fields at the center of a 1940's party during off-time with his colleagues and their friends
Retiring at last, in 1952 during the Eisenhower administration, Alonzo Fields, like so many talented African Americans, diverted by limited opportunity, never did complete his college education, or become a noted singer. Instead he moved to West Medford, Massachusetts, where his wife Edna was in and out of hospitals with thirteen operations over the next two decades. Following her death in 1973, from extensive notes he’d taken, Fields wrote memoirs recounting his White House adventures. My 21 Years in the White House was published in 1960. Characterized by a sense of tact and loyalty hard to imagine in our time of tell-all openness, Fields' account of his White House experience was hardly a best seller. But, as he told an interviewer, 'I have no regrets.' In 1980 Fields married Mayland McLaughlin. He died in 1994.
Eugene Allen waiting at table for the Carters and the Reagans
With a wealth of such vivid, everyday White House history to draw on and contrast with the evolving Civil Rights Movement, it’s no surprise that Lee Daniels' The Butler, has turned out to be so diverting. And still, such is the negative knee-jerk response to race in Hollywood, that the country’s most seminal history continues to be ignored and avoided. That’s why Lee Daniels had such a difficult time financing his project initially. It’s also why the movie was injuriously produced on the cheap.
Of course accomplishing greatness from little, delicious chitterlings from pig’s guts, high fashion style with an idea and a needle, typifies the black experience. ‘The Butler’s’ 41 producers and executive producers, its investors, [some of whom are anonymous], put up a total of $16 million in private equity. The remainder of the $30 million price tag was covered through $6 million in tax rebates, $6 million in foreign pre-sales and $2 million in gap financing. “It's a huge achievement,” boasted Harvey Weinstein Co. COO David Glasser, adding “This is not your typical independent movie. It's spectacular how fierce these investors were in their quest to get this movie made. Harvey and I love it when a group of unknown people come together like this.” Lee Daniels underscored these struggles for funding, stating of those who made his film possible, “They put their money on the table when the studios wouldn't. It's a story that's a movie within itself.”
The saddest part of that Lee Daniels’ effort would surely show something of the high costs, the unfortunate and unintended consequences of inadequate resources. In the ‘The Butler’ low funds mean that White House sets, sets meant to communicate the elegance and stateliness of one of the most iconic places in America, are pallid and impressionistic at best
L. B. J. working from bed, in 'The Butler' and...
For real!
But worse by far are the inexact liveries provided for butler Cecil Gaines and his colleagues by Ruth Carter. The Oscar-nominated costume designer whose credits include Amistad and Malcolm X, said of her task, "The challenge was to make sure we were accurate...There's nothing worse than a historical piece that's inaccurate." With Ms. Carter's interpretation of White House 'liveries', i.e. uniforms, so fundamentally wrong, it's impossible not to agree with her statement.
Gloves, white waistcoats, watch chains and an exposed abdomen? At the White House!...
Certainnly not under the Kennedys!
Firstly, as Emily Post outlined in her famous book of etiquette, which first appeared in 1922, “A butler never wears gloves…”
Is this what Ms. Carter and Lee Daniels had in mind?
Below the Mason-Dixon Line, white gloves for black male house slaves had been dictated as a precaution against notions of poor hygiene and a lack of fastidiousness among African Americans. Like slave labor, white gloves had been employed at the White House prior to the Civil War. But despised by black servants due to so slurring an implication, by the 1890's they’d been dispensed with. Carter and Daniels, doubtlessly familiar with the prominent role white gloves played in minstrel shows, have their White House butlers incorrectly gloved over succeeding decades throughout the movie.
Or was it this?
Surely Eugene Allen never failed to button his coat!
Gains’ open coat during the day as he serves President Kennedy, and his white waistcoat, worn with a tailcoat for a state dinner, are equally erroneous. And what makes these errors all the more lamentable, is that the black waistcoat properly worn by a formally dressed butler, wouldn’t have affected the film budget.
Adamant and immutable, Emily Post’s dictates regarding butlers bears stating. At the time of her girlhood, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, men servants with whiskers, butlers dressed in their ‘dress suit’ during the day and gentlemen wearing black and white waistcoats interchangeably with evening clothes, had all been acceptable. Both at the White House and at many other elegant houses, rules about watch chains and mustaches, over the years, came to be relaxed.
Without a doubt, he never wore a white waistcoat, not while formally attired on duty at the White House
“In fashionable houses, the butler does not put on his dress suit until six o’clock. The butler’s evening dress differs from that of a gentleman in a few details only: he has no braid on his trousers, and the satin on his lapels (if any) is narrower, but the most distinctive difference is that a butler wears a black waistcoat and a white lawn tie, and a gentleman always wears a white waistcoat with a white tie, or a white waistcoat and a black tie with a dinner coat, but never the reverse.
Ca. 1908: A footman's and a butler's livery, with gloves! Oh my!
Unless he is an old-time colored servant in the South a butler who wears a “dress suit” in the daytime is either a hired waiter who has come in to serve a meal, or he has never been employed by persons of position; and it is unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache! To have him open the door collarless and in shirt-sleeves is scarcely worse!
A mustache!
A butler never wears gloves, nor a flower in his buttonhole. He sometimes wears a very thin watch chain in the daytime but none at night. He never wears a scarf-pin, or any jewelry that is for ornament alone. His cuff-links should be as plain as possible, and his shirt studs white enamel ones that look like linen.”
Yet more gloves!
‘Can any of this really matter?’ one might ask. It primarily does because otherwise the movie is so very good. There were ways to get around constructing admittedly quite costly, more accurate White House sets. Getting the attire right, ought to have been child’s play. As it is these important details strike a false note as discordant as if music from the wrong time period had been added to the effecting score, much as in the off-putting The Great Gatsby.
As an historian, having found myself between college and graduate school working as a ‘house man’, an occupation combining the duties of butler, cook and char, the efficacy of illustrating big-H events through small-h lives seem refreshingly admirable. Highly isolated by wealth, position, and power, many a sovereign, president or magnate has had their closest brush with humanity through interaction with subordinates whom they rely upon. Since most of us figure among the subordinate class, certainly it's instructive to examine great figures and events from our point of view, too.
1986: Readied for a dinner on Park Avenue.
Today many African Americans seem to have succumbed to hopelessness, giving up on substandard schooling as pointless, as pointless as the attendant promise of sustaining and fulfilling employment for anyone willing to work hard. That’s a promise which too often seems an illusory lie. On the other hand, even when they, or family members, rely on social safeguards to get by, some whites repudiate affirmative action, unions, and public investment in education, health care, and affordable housing, as profligate 'special-interests' scams, utterly devoid of broad public benefit.
As to race relations, in some ways, they seem to have sunken to new depths. With the two elections of Barack Hussein Obama, for some whites one knows they are thinking; 'You all have a black President now. Won't you people ever be satisfied?'
More readily one still hears all sorts of confused takes on race and fairness. Many confuse the issue of cause for effect and effect for cause. How often has one heard poor diet and obesity, violent behavior and lawlessness, illogically decried as the cause of black poverty, as opposed to being seen as symptomatic of America's chronic joblessness?
Once women were deemed unworthy to wait at table
Many are quick to prescribe ‘American democracy’: justice, jobs and prosperity, as the sure cure of rebellion and terrorism in Iraq or Afghanistan. But why is it seemingly impossible for these same people to appreciate how this very remedy would prove equally effective in East New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Watts or Detroit?
Today's equal opportunity is welcome, but not onyx-set shirt studs
Black or white, rich or poor, young or old: seeing Lee Daniels' The Butler might not necessarily alter your world-view. What it is likely to do however, is to prompt thoughts about just how things got the way they are and how the world might be made better.
Is anything so nearly perfect, so reliably, repeatedly sublime, that it deserves to be preserved, as-is. for people yet unborn to experience the same joy that we know now? Can one fix some exquisite entity, as it were, in amber, immune from changing fashion and unsusceptible to the contamination of the whims of the insistent rich? Must someplace, anyplace, however satisfying, grow and change, or die. Is even Falling Water unsafe from threat?
As we grow older, inevitably, one or another of two opposing biases deepens: either one becomes inclined to trivialize the lasting value of all things, as ephemeral and replaceable, like youth and beauty, or one becomes ever more hardened toward having special places one loves, arbitrarily altered and diminished.
This then I suppose must be what accounts for the depth of my despair, anger and disgust over dramatic changes at Fenway Court, the Venetian palace-like museum devised by Isabella Stewart Gardiner in Boston, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and most critically, at the Barnes Foundation gallery, built in 1925 at Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania from designs by notable architect Paul Cret.
Dr. Albert Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation
Celebrated among aesthetes, the Barnes Foundation comprises a private collection groaning with manifold treasures among which are found African sculptures, Asian prints and Native American ceramics. The foundation even owns an early American farmhouse replete with regional vernacular decorative arts. A surrounding 12-acre arboretum is lush with rare exotics from around the world. Low-scaled, the Barnes' subdued neo-Classical exhibition building takes the form of a 16th Century Mannerist palazzo with striking African ornaments at the entrance.
However, it is iconic post-Impressionist and early Modernist paintings, 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 46 Picassos 59 Matisses, Modiglianis, Degases, Manets, Monets, Van Goghs and others which account for the fabled status of this unique institution. Esteemed objects of such quality, in so great a quantity are no less unusual than their individualist collector's purpose. Barnes' varied assemblage was meant to be the mainstay of a school promoting a philosophy of the universality and transformative nature of art, high and low, irrespective of time or space.
For a very long period, every significant American accomplishment was measured against what was done, or what had been done, long before, and far-away, by Europeans. Artistically, even after most commercial, industrial and engineering practices in the United States surpassed anything found abroad, deference to an assumption of old-world superiority persisted. A hundred years ago conservative well-to-do Americans indeed, often went to the extreme of creating houses and museums evocative of exceptional foreign examples from the distant past.
They had been taught that an aristocratic tradition underlying venerable French chateaux, Italian villas and English manor houses, made the architecture of such buildings impossible to equal in aesthetic terms, with anything new, produced here by Americans. Going so far as to emulate manners and mores derived from a noble heritage, many also imagined that by approximating some centuries-old British or continental landmark, that they could help to enlighten and elevate the intellects of ordinary people who would never travel to see the world's architectural wonders first hand.
Convinced of the pre-eminence of European culture though they were, not unlike18th Century English imperialists, eager to emulate the glory that was Rome, America's business class of a century ago was certain of their epoch's technological advance. Moreover, they felt that anything worth-while from the past could be acquired or replicated, and often, in the process, greatly improved.
This role of art and architecture, not merely as a celebration of the Gilded Age equivalent of princes and other grandees by way of power, but of edifying everyday citizens and workers, most impacted me through Stan Hywet Hall, the onetime home of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company founder, Frank A. Seiberling. Completed in 1915, today this 65-room homage to Elizabethan estates serves as a house museum. Starting at age 13 I was a volunteer tour guide there for 8 years. Endlessly exploring this unlikely 'mansion' and so meeting various Seiberlings, awakened me to a more nuanced appreciation of a world I had previously only known in movies and books.
Irene, Mrs. Milton Whatley Harrison, the Seiberling's eldest daughter, lived in the gate lodge. Our birthdays were both February 25, except she was born in 1890. "Mr. Adams knows so much about history," she announced by way of explanation once, "that he must have lived before, in Tudor times!" How proud I felt having her say this.
Distraught by matrons embarrassed by fringed lampshades like their grandmothers' and eager to help perfect Stan Hywet via their own taste, more refined than the Seiberlings they imagined, I found it difficult to always be tactful. In danger of destroying Stan Hywet through misguided efforts to improve it, the ladies of the curatorial board certainly didn't think this adolescent Negro had some special knowledge due to a past life.
Thirty miles north, the Cleveland Museum of Art was the quintessential Greco-Roman temple, dedicated to Apollo, the muses, all that was lovely and sacred. Removed from the noxious atmosphere of industries that brought Northeastern Ohio fabulous wealth, the glowingly inviolate white marble structure stood isolated within a garden, designed by Olmstead Brothers, beside a small lake. All the buildings around this 'lagoon' similarly envisaged the triumph of Western cultural traditions. But, they and the garden were no more than a transitional prelude, like the exquisitely wrought golden setting of some rare, mammoth and magnificent multifaceted jewel, awaiting one within. At the base of the entry-stairs sat Rodin's Thinker like a sentinel secular deity.
And, even here, beyond the purely ceremonial domed rotunda, two additional ritualistic spaces enabled the novitiate-visitor time to cast-off the travails of the world-of-worry without, in order to be more receptive to holy mysteries of a higher realm inside. The most crucial, down a few steps, was the brick-lined, top-lit garden court, suffused with light and furnished by an iron balcony and a scattering of architectural fragments enveloped by palms, ferns, ivy and rubber plants. A shallow pool at the center provided the echoing sound of tinkling water. Not long after the room's completion a large symphonic pipe organ was installed atop the arcaded loggia at the far end, so that sonorous, other-worldly music wafted through the galleries.
Obviously this retreat was modeled after sculptor George Gray Barnard's cloisters in New York City's Washington Heights at 190th Street, which were eventually purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and moved. It was also indebted to Mrs. Gardner's glassed atrium at Fenway Court, where colorful potted flowers and scented blooming shrubs have always augmented the greenery.
Ironically, it's the ego of today's most acclaimed 'starchitects' that has adversely impacted both places. Rafel Vinoly is the culprit in Cleveland. Much like the crass and shortsighted destruction of the Holden Gallery's programmatic neo-Renaissance embellishments a half-century ago, now it was the Garden Court's time to give way to 'greater artistic objectivity'. Vinoly's expansive envelopes made 'transparent', via enormous volumes of glass, are many of them meant to do double-duty as venues for fund-raising galas. In this regard they are all-but prophetic of vast operations deficits to come, as the museum trustees grapple with a guarantee of gargantuan heating and cooling costs that might have
been avoided.
In Boston, Gardner officials boast that the museum is "unchanged but not stagnate." Thanks to Renzo Piano this is an understatement at best, since the very way one enters the museum and circulates has been totally altered. How well I remember my first time leaving the brilliant summer's sunshine, the noise of a baseball game in progress, entering into a low, relatively cool and hushedly quiet place...walking toward the softly splashing sound of water, brushing past an enormous tree fern, how exhilarating to see a sight that had made even proper Bostonians gasp with delight a century ago, one that makes me gasp now too, after half a dozen visits, over a distance of 25 years. Moreover, there were paintings upstairs of opulent grandeur, set off against remnants of Mrs. Gardner's old ball gowns . My favorite?...Titian's incomparable allegory with an unexpected crease down the middle. How reassuring it used to be knowing that Mrs. Gardiner's will stipulated that nothing at Fenway Court could be loaned, moved or changed.
In a letter, Robert Venturi, perhaps the nation's first 'starchitect', decries the $200-million project to move the Barnes' Foundation Collection to downtown Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway. He criticizes it as what it is, "an indiscreet and ridiculous waste of money."
Albert Coombs Barnes (January 2, 1872 - July 24, 1951) was an American inventor and art collector. As a youngster, he attended Methodist revivals and 'Negro' camp meetings with his devout mother. Exposed in this way, so early, to black gospel and spiritual singing, Barnes developed a life-long appreciation for African American culture and creative expression.
Born into deep poverty, Barnes' struggles to better himself were incessant. In order to attend the University of Pennsylvania he even fought in boxing matches. In 1899 with a German student named Hermann Hille, Barnes developed a mild antiseptic to combat venereal disease in newborns. It was an immediate financial success, enabling him, soon after the turn of the century, at the age of 35, to buy out his partner and become a millionaire. A shrewd sense of timing meant he later sold his company before the stock market crash of 1929. However, he was hardly infallible.
Notwithstanding the preoccupation art patrons like Henry Clay Frick had with reproducing on home ground antique European splendors, Barnes was attracted to the new. This resulted from his friendship with a former high school classmate, the painter William Glackens. At his friend's behest Glackens obtained 20 'modern' paintings in Paris that were to form the core of Barnes' collection.
In 1912, during a stay in Paris, invited to the home of Gertrude Stein, Barnes first met Matisse and Picasso. During the great Depression Barnes' excellent eye, expert advisors and ample funds enabled him to acquire important works at bargain prices. His first Picasso, for instance, was bought for under $100.
Barnes' antagonism toward orthodoxy and art history, which he said "stifles both self-expression and appreciation of art" were loudly stated and widely known. The initial public showing of his collection in 1923 elicited a response not very different from that befalling New York's Armory Show a decade earlier. Critical denouncements and brickbats only intensified a disdain for the art establishment and elite art connoisseurs. Barnes created his foundation and school, he said, not for the benefit of art historians, but for that of the students. Happy for interested but ordinary people to view his treasures, Barnes' policy of restricted hours at an out-of-the-way location were deliberate safeguards of a vision now due to be completely ignored. Requring two dozen plane trees to be felled, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects' new facility, occupying four times the area of the original, packed with noisy and indifferent tourists, will be utterly at odds with the self-selecting audience of inquisitive art lovers Dr. Barnes sought to cultivate.
Opposed to curatorial and scholarly barriers between artwork and viewers, Barnes had his collection hung according to his own novel ideas. Identification was kept to a minimum, while paintings, furniture and finely crafted metalwork were juxtaposed in such a way as to reinforce highly original aesthetic relationships one might otherwise never have considered.
Beyond merely thumbing his nose at Main-Line Philadelphia philistines, Dr. Barnes decision to give humble, black, Lincoln University control over the governance of his foundation was due to a friendship he established late in the 1940s with Horace Mann Bond, Lincoln's first black president, and Julian Bond's father.
"About all that's missing from The Art of the Steal, observed Manohla Dargis in a review published in the Times on Friday February 26, 2010, of the dynamic documentary he says is about a high-cultural brawl, "is a hot woman with a warm gun."
Memorably it features freedom fighter Julian Bond, speaking poignantly of his father and Dr. Barnes' mutual respect. How bewitchingly beautiful Julian Bond was once, transcending race, class, gender and time with his classic appeal. How affecting he is now, outlining aspects of the divisive mess that's ensued since the deaths of Doctors Bond and Barnes, in this engrossingly sad indictment of power gone awry, directed by Don Argott serving as his own cinematographer.
In New York, one of the outings that never fails to gladden the soul is a trip to our version of London's Wallace collection, the Frick Collection. Central Park and the Conservatory Garden offer New Yorkers all the pleasures attendant to a Gilded Age multi-millionaire's country estate. So the Pittsburg steel-man's palatial house provides a telling glimpse of the grandest type of townhouse built here then. Despite horrifying noises about further additions and alterations to this nearly flawless gem, mostly recent efforts at the Frick have been taken to restore early 20th century down filled, velvet sofas and Chinese porcelain lamps with shirred-silk, fringed shades. It's these 'pedestrian' elements and the status symbol Aeolian organ which impart such period charm to the business of touring someone's home filled with priceless paintings and ornaments.
At Stan Hywet Hall a new positive receptiveness to Gilded Era taste has seen elements as detested as canvas awnings and Virginia creeper restored along with altered landscapes and a long lost greenhouse. As at the Frick, the continuity of descendants of the donor among the trustees who are only slightly less assertive than their important forbear has been decisive.
This was a bulwark against challenges to his intentions that the childless Barnes lacked.
"Contracts can be broken, wills challenged, legacies dismantled. And in the years after Barnes' death, the collection became the focus of a fascinating fight among an array of interests. Much of the louder part of the battle involved its location: some wanted it to stay put, thereby honoring Barnes' wishes. Others wanted it moved to Philadelphia, where it would be more accessible and, of course, could become a desirable, lucrative tourist attraction,"
asserts Dargis in the Times.
All too aware of how treachery is an equal-opportunity defect, none-the-less, as an African American, I still feel especially saddened by the pivotal role blacks played in implementing this tragedy. Have we no honor, no sense of duty, beyond the short-term pittances or self-serving deals with piddling pay-offs? Of course former Philadelphia mayor John F. Street and Barnes Foundation president Richard Glanton only mimicked the sordid deeds of whites like Pennsylvania's 'bullish' governor, Edward G. Rendell, the Hon. Walter Annenberg and Pew Charitable Trust officers, to name just a few.
Giddy with the entree and notice his position lent him, Glanton set the Barnes' demise in motion, however. Oblivious to the foundation's ability to enhance Lincoln University academically, like a real-life character from an August Wilson drama, he saw only the blinding dazzle of dollar signs. Claiming that extensive repairs to the aging Barnes' gallery were imperative, he set about breaking key terms of the foundation's indenture. From 1993 to 1995, he sent a selection of 83 French Impressionist paintings to be exhibited on a world tour, the proceeds of which were to pay for these 'over-due renovations'. The works attracted large crowds in numerous localities.
In retaliation for his dismissal as the foundation's head, Glanton leaked evidence of Lincoln's president's extremely lavish home-decorating projects, which ultimately revealed various misappropriations of university funds. Taken together such minor venalities by ambitious blacks made them ripe for manipulation: initially being co-opted and finally, being replaced and disregarded. With such easy marks, maneuvering to relocate the Barnes Foundation to Philadelphia amounted to child's play.
If Don Argott doesn't feign disinterest in The Art of the Steal, then neither do I. How is it legal, in America, to accept someone's gift, only to discard their expressed wishes as to the gift's disposition? Whether in Cleveland, Boston or Philadelphia, such actions may be possible, and might even, for a while, be able to be 'legalized', but they are always immoral just the same. In the case of the Barnes, the engineering of this process having been largely accomplished through the connivance of several large and bountiful foundations, philanthropist Lewis B. Cullman's idea seems to be the ideal prescription: charitable foundations ought to be mandated by law to disperse their assets in no longer a span than a human lifetime.
In an abjectly racist America, without the advent of extraordinary women like Madam C. J. Walker, Dr. Jane Wright Jones, Ophelia DeVore or Rose Morgan, would the idea that “Black is Beautiful” have ever become reality? It’s hard to see how.
1950: Rose Meta Morgan
It's a full century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation. Fifty years have passed since Dr. King's March on Washington; forty three, since Essence was started.
Josehpine, Pam, L'Tanya!
Under the superlative editorial direction of the acclaimed Gordon Parks, photographer, film-maker, writer, Essence Magazine debuted in 1970. Watched over and nurtured during three years of gestation by Parks, provided with a forthright African-American derived aesthetic and outlook, Essence focused on uplift, enhancement and empowerment. A successor to the Inter-State Tattler, Ebony, Jet, Our World, Copper, Hueand other more general magazines for African-Americans, Essence rapidly assumed the role of America's foremost journal for black women.
When venerable, 'mainstream'Time acquired 49 percent of Essence Communications in 2000, and adsorbed the remainder by 2005, some felt foreboding. Any number even worried that no longer black-owned, there might just be a high price to pay. The grim extent of the blow to come was beyond the imaginative powers of most. The first shoe to drop, it now turns out, was actually kicked off. The abrupt departure of long-time editor-in-chief Susan L. Taylor, who all but embodied the Essence ethos, was a wrench. A loyal readership, which in the days before the Internet amounted to a sisterhood, was left distressed and disbelieving.
Susan L. Taylor, who embodies the Essence ethos
Now,less than two years after she was hired with fanfare, Constance C.R. White, the latest Essence top editor, has disclosed that her departure was also not a voluntary move. Rather, following repeated clashes with Martha Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., she was finally dismissed. Ms. Nelson, who is of European descent, sought to limit the way black women were portrayed, Ms. White says. She even went so far as to second-guess what it was that African Americans 'wanted and needed.'
Constance C.R. White, the former Essence Magazine editor-in-chief
"This is a magazine where the central DNA was laid down by Gordon Parks...I went in there with passion and excitement and high expectations." White lamented, concluding, "Essence is the last place where black women should be demeaned and diminished."
Meanwhile, as to 'mainstream' outlets of, and for, the 'mainstream', don't look too quickly, or you will very likely conclude, as I did in youth, that blacks do not exist. Now, one hardly means this literally, well, at least not most of the time. It's only that we are still rigidly segregated; over-representation in the metro section, among stories to do with crime and despair, in most newspapers, and given, at best, a minimal presence in the style, house and home and fashion sections. African American materialism is known enough that usually, even in Vogue, advertisements include a smattering of black models. But other than on those exceptional occasions when President and First Lady Obama, or Oprah, or Will Smith and Jada Pinkett are featured, from New York Magazine to Elle Decor, there is scant representation of African Americans in glossy journals. The most recent T-Magazine, profiling former Princess Lee Radziwill, on February 17, represented perhaps a new low of white exclusivity: there were in this issue no non-white writers, photographers, subjects of features, nor even among myriad advertisements, a single model of color. A colleague at the Times explained such prejudice as stemming from the profitability of the Times Fashion Magazine. "It's filled with adds!" he explained.
What can one say except, "Am I not a man and a brother-consumer of high fashion? "
My friend the historian Deborah Willis’ exhibition “Framing Beauty,” on view at Washington's International Visions Gallery through April 13, is a welcome antidote to the new racism's tendency to distort, dismiss and disappear blackness. It relates aspects of how African-Americans still struggle in portraying who we are, and how we see ourselves, in relation to the wider world.
Historian Deborah Willis
First confronting, controlling, constructing, composing, refining one's identity and image, was a 19th-century miracle. Black beauty cultivation through photography, helped blacks to discover our true selves. Looking away from the white way of being beautiful, which black efforts helped whites achieve and maintain, we slowly learned to see in our own visage, the image of God. With the scourge of slavery still a living memory, eventually blacks began to disseminate our approving sense of self into the world. Positive, becoming, beguiling imagery of African Americans in black journals, did far more than just help to foster black self-esteem. Helping as well to counteract the effects of centuries of hateful, demonization and disfigurement, the healing message such photographs conveyed, favorably impacted everyone.
One wishes it were impossible to recall how universally attributes of ‘blackness’ were once thoroughly reviled. Sometimes today one forgets. It’s easy to overlook what happened in the past, what even occurs in the present, given how 'big butts', full lips, ‘healthy color’, and for that matter, the flair and style associated with African Americans is so widely and highly esteemed. Yet all over Africa, and even here, skin bleaching with lye-based nostrums, weaves of long straight hair and peroxide-induced blond coiffures persists.
Ca. 1944: Joan Crawford
Ca. 1944: Lena Horne
The pride fair-skinned African Americans once derived from a semblance of whiteness, the advantage derived from fine hair and an ability to assume the prevalent standard of beauty, was heretofore incalculable. Not so long ago, it was an almost indispensable element of regard and success. Generally, among African Americans, to have 'kinky hair', to be dark and denigrated as ‘dingy’, ‘rusty’, blacky, spook, blue-black, ashy, inky, or dirty, was regarded as a misfortune. Whereas for whites, though dreaded, despised, deplored or pitied, Africa Americans and our blackness, proved indispensable. We were for whites, a conspicuous, an ironical and omnipresent reassurance of dominion and superiority.
This was why enslaved African servants were such status symbols in the 17th and 18thcenturies. Beyond mere utility, their presence announced at once, a slave owner's wealth. Moreover, like the black substance Ralph Ellison’s hero in Invisible Man witnesses was added to white paint, making it all the more brilliantly white, black ‘otherness’ made white masters and mistresses feel both more comely and noble.
A English princess offered coral and pearls
So it was with American culture in days gone by, before the civil rights movement. Whether as comical minstrels, insolent bucks, licentious wenches or docile and slow-witted servants, a panoply of stereotypically inferior blacks routinely figured in plays, journals and literature. They also liberally peopled movies, the radio, TV, and even advertisements, solely to remind whites, of how in all ways and things, they were better. It only followed that, deservedly so, whites were also much better off.
Understandably then, however elusive well-chiseled features, thin lips, bright blue eyes, flowing blonde tresses and a pink-tinged but otherwise etiolated completion, attributes of whiteness indicative of inherent privilege, were as prized by blacks as by whites.
Black America has always enjoyed a fair share of near-white beauties. Memorable among their ranks were Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridgeand Blanche Dunn, who famously responded when a downtown Manhattan waiter pronounced, “We do not serve Negros!”, “I don’t blame you. Now please, take my order!” Perversely, Miss Dunn’s retort underscores something of the isolation and inadequacy inherent in being deemed neither ‘truly’ white, nor ‘authentically’ black. Inevitably better educated, employed and housed than their darker brothers and sisters, ‘light skinned’ blacks both accepted and deplored the advantage stingily dispensed by their white relations. In the case of actresses, like Edna Thomas, Horne, Dandridge or Dunn, it meant a greater likelihood of being cast in the small set of black roles offered. But it also meant having to wear dark makeup and over-elaborate costumes, and reciting jargon-filled, accented dialogue. The imperative was that there be no mistaking whatever, ‘the maid’s’ or 'the hussy's' black identity.
Ca. 1944: Jennifer Jones
Ca. 1944: Blanche Dunn
All the same, for such fortunate women of mixed-race ancestry, their beauty was beyond question. But what of the issue of identity and self-esteem for others? The majority of America’s women of African descent were routinely reminded, in the media and by society, of their wanting beauty and their utter lack of attraction, even as the sexual harassment and abuse of men, black and white, ought to have indicated otherwise. The ugliness of the 'black bitch', was even often offered as justification for the maltreatment of African American women in the past, even as today it is offered as an excuse, demanding of them lewd and unseemly attire.
"Madam C. J. Walker, my, my, she was an extraordinary person! She taught us how to be beautiful!"
So said one of the renown black beauty business entrepreneur's elderly agents in Stanley Nelson's captivating documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream, that chronicles her life. Born to former slaves shortly after the end of the Civil War, once her arduous, stress-filled life caused her hair to fall out in patches, she resolved to take action. Walker was able to so successfully make others beautiful, to teach and inspire self-reliance and appreciation, because she had been forced to discover both for herself.
Ca. 1950: How much did my mom's awareness of her own charm owe to a message of black beauty and empowerment espoused by the Walker women and Rose Morgan?
Madam Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire. She made her fortune through the manufacture, promotion and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks. Her clientele were not ordinarily mulattoes, women able to use pale face powder, who had no trouble adhering to fashions devised for whites. Rather, mostly, they were darker, women like herself, and her daughter Lilia, working women, whose hair had to be straightened and Marcelled to form a proper pompadour or a chinginon.
Through great thrift, causing her to demand a refund on determining she was being overcharged by half of a penny, for each box of the thousands of boxes of hairpins she ordered each year, shrewd Madam Walker grew ever richer. Her wealth was beyond the imagination of most blacks. Yet, as a one-time laundress, painfully aware of the value of a dollar, she always sought quality and never spent money just for show. Her Harlem townhouse, that occupied two remolded brownstones above her beauty parlor, spa and school, was dignity itself, but far less costly than a completely new structure would have been. Along with her even more ambitious country retreat, a mansion on a compact estate overlooking the Hudson, it had been designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy. A Cornell graduate, he was New York State's first registered African American architect. By engaging him Walker was only complying with her desire, whenever possible, to employ blacks. Both house designs, derived directly from contemporary residences built for rich whites, impeccablyrepresented aesthetic orthodoxy.
The Walkers and Rose Morgan helped initiate a revolution. They effected the revelation of black beauty!
Providing women otherwise often untrained, the ability to engage in non-menial work or farm labor, Walker helped to dramatically change the known world of many. Without Madam Walker and her daughter, or legions of agents selling Walker products, practicing Walker methods, spreading a gospel of black beauty, that even many blacks initially regarded as heresy, would women among the black masses have independently discovered their worth and allure? Without Walker in her day, and Rose Morgan latter on, might not many arresting African American Aphrodites, have lived life convinced of their ugliness?
Some brown-skinned beauties, who might never have been recognized without the innovative efforts of Madam Walker or Rose Morgan.
If thanks to the Walkers, Morgan and others, black was finally acceptable around 1948 when this photograph was made of Elizabeth Pinkney, it took until the 1970's for all to be glad to say "Black is beautiful!", "I'm black and I'm proud!"
Miss Cheyney State had met and married Edward Pinkeney to love and live with, happily ever after. When she died, suddenly at age 55, she was still teaching second grade, in the same school where she had educated students for over 30 years. Her death stunned everyone. But, one could tell from the funeral that she touched many.
In the absence of vendors of black beauty like the Walkers and Rose Morgan, would the beauty and stylishness of even First Lady Michell Obama be as influential today?
How well black women wear hats!
Ca 1900, 1910 and 1912: Masterful magnate, Madam C. J. Walker
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting a regal image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguish her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Madam C. J. Walker's business acumen was prodigious. Living large, projecting as fabulous an image and aura as she could afford, she appreciated that this was a shrewd advertising strategy. Her distinguished 108-110 West 136th Street beauty salon-residence was designed by black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy.
By combining her home and business in two converted brownstone houses, made into a single building, Tandy maximized the grandeur of both.
Ca. 1928 and 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
After inheriting her mothers famed estate, A'Lelia Walker lived and entertained here periodically, until just age 46, she, too, died, in 1931.
Whether through advertisements for black dolls or through portraits of an array of well-groomed and well-dressed black womrn, the Crisis Magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also sought to inculcate appreciation for a black-based aesthetic and all-around African American excellence.
1923: Black or white, the world was agog over the "Million Dollar Wedding" of Madam Walker's adopted granddaughter Mae to Dr. J. Gordon Jackson.
How many are aware that the pioneering oncologist who helped make chemotherapy a cure instead of the start of the cancer patent's finish, was black, and a woman, Dr. Jane Cooke Wright Jones? A Harlem native from a tiny elite where each member was well-known to all, both she and her younger sister Barbara took the unusual step to become physicians. In part both must have been inspired by the example of their father, the distinguished and well regarded Dr. Louis T. Wright, among the first blacks to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first African American doctor appointed to the staff of a New York City hospital. Their grandfather had also been a healer and was an early graduate of what became the Meharry Medical College, established in Nashville in 1876, which was the first medical school training blacks in the South. Beyond adherence to tradition, a strong sense of duty, an obligation to help others, also motivated the Wright sisters. Each observed the propriety of making a formal bow to society in the late 1930's, but a shallow fashionable existence held Little attraction for either.
Ca. 1923: Sisters, Barbara and Jane Wright.
Assisting her father, Dr. Jane Wright began her career as a researcher working at the cancer center he established at Harlem Hospital. When he died in 1952, his daughter took over as director of the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. By 1955, married to a lawyer, the graduate of Smith College had joined the faculty of the New York University Medical Center as director of cancer research. It perhaps goes without saying that Dr. Wright was the only African American and woman among seven colleagues who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncologists. In 1967, Dr. Wright became head of the chemotherapy department and associate dean at New York Medical College. “She was part of the group that first realized we needed a separate organization to deal with the providers who care for cancer patients. But beyond that it’s amazing to me that a black woman, in her day and age, was able to do what she did.” said her successor. As for the demure Dr. Wright she only commented for a 1967 New York Post interview, “I know I’m a member of two minority groups...but I don’t think of myself that way. Sure, a woman has to try twice as hard. But — racial prejudice? I’ve met very little of it..It could be," she added, "I met it — and wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize it.”
Survived by her daughter Jane Jones and her sister Dr. Barbara Wright Pierce, Jane Wright Jones died , suffering from dementia, February 19, 2013 aged-93.
Initially David King's speculative 1892 development failed, and many still unsold houses were transferred to the ownership by the Equitable Life Assurance Society, which had financed the project. By this time, Harlem was being abandoned by white New Yorkers, but the company refused to sell the King houses to blacks. As a result, they sat empty, seeming all the more desirable because they were forbidden. When they were finally made available to black residents, for $8,000 each, the inventive machinations of the ambitious householders they attracted, which included taking in boarders by even the most prominent residents, gave the houses their current somewhat derisive name, "Strivers' Row".
Residents of Strivers' Row, Dr. Louis T. Wright and his doctor daughters, Dr. Barbara Wright Pierce and her elder sister, Dr. Jane Wright Jones
Lana Turner called the Savoy dance hall, 'the home of the happy feet'.
In every age, Harlem has been home to many marvelous cars like this high-powered Cord.
If the Wright sisters represented an African American aristicracy, Rose Morgan, did not. If thanks to groundbreaking work by Stanley Nelson and A’Lelia Bundles, many are aware of the triumphant, if brief, lives of Madam Walker and her daughter, who today has ever heard of Rose Meta Morgan? Born in Edward, Mississippi in 1912, this curious, clever brown-skinned girl grew up in Chicago. By 1942 she owned and operated the largest African American beauty parlor in the world. Emulating the example of Madam Walker and the business acumen of her father, industrious one-time sharecropper Chaptle Morgan, Rose Meta Morgan got her start as a schoolgirl making artificial flowers.
Rose Meta Morgan
In 1938 she styled the hair of the great Ethel Waters. Did these two ladies, much talked about because of girlfriends, perhaps share a romance? Impressed by Morgan's deft touch, Waters invited her to New York City as her guest. Impressed herself, by Walters' glamour and by New York's sophistication, Morgan moved to Harlem and within 6 months attracted enough customers to open her own beauty shop. Soon she hired 5 stylists and signed a 10-year lease on a vacant mansion owned by Dr. Charles Ford. This savvy adaptive use of an existing structure has a direct correlation with Madam Walker’s practice.
Charles N. Ford, a dentist from Trinidad had arrived in Harlem in 1919. Branching out into real estate he would also help start and run New York’s largest black-owned insurance company.
By 1946 the Rose Meta House of Beauty at 401 West 148th Street, had a staff 29 strong, including 20 hairstylists, 3 licensed masseurs and a registered nurse. Morgan operated her modernistic beauty salon, offering massages, hairdressing, facials, manicures, body building and health-food lunches, in partnership with Olivia Lee Dilworth Stanford, who much like her was a transplanted Harlemite, born in the deep South.
The Saint Nicholas Avenue row house group including 401 West 148th Street, which housed the Rose Meta House of Beauty
Stanford
and Morgan not only created their own line of beauty products,
expressly formulated for African-American women, but they expanded their
business into shops around the city, and across the country.
The
Rose Meta House of Beauty was exactly for black women what Elizabeth
Arden’s was to white women. The radical idea behind its rapid growth and prosperity was
no different than Madame Walker’s. Morgan and Stanford accepted African
features, their own and their clients'. Broad noses, full sensuous lips,
dark skin and even ‘kinky’ hair, were not looked at as loathed defects.
These women saw their mission, not as an effort to disguise or diminish
‘blackness’, but they sought instead to celebrated African Americans
with products and services meant to enhance their beauty. The first step
in this process was to indicate to black women something of their
worthiness, to show that their patronage was valued, by providing first
class care in luxurious surroundings.
The Mimo Club
Embarking with her 'secretary and traveling companion' Gwendolyn Pannell, for a six-week study course in Paris, at L'Academie Scientifie De Beaute, in 1950, Morgan sailed on the Queen Mary. Her partner Libby Clarke Stanford and their aviator-friend, Col. Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, were dock-side to bid bon voyage. Planning a series of side trips, Morgan relished the idea of exporting her mission,
"To glorify the woman of color," throughout the world. Paris Match described her as one of the richest
businesswomen in New York.
In 1949 Mrs. Stanford, then called Olivia Clarke, met a New York real estate developer named Donald Stanford. Both were sensitive, affluent business people who had survived earlier unhappy unions. Naturally, they married. In-so-far as it's possible to, they lived happily ever after, only parted by death.
Olivia Lee Dilworth Stanford
Rose Morgan who had also been briefly married and divorced, was a different story. How among the hundreds of young, vivacious women romantically linked to the ‘Brown Bomber’, did this handsome, if dark, nearly middle-aged woman-of-the-world ‘catch’ this ‘heart-throb’ of a generation?
Young Joe Louis
Louis had gained his boxing title dramatically in a 1937 rematch with Max Schmeling of Nazi Germany. The bout lasted just two minutes and four seconds. Disgraced, having suffered defeat at the hands of a black man, ironically, Schmeling, the symbol of Aryan might, went on to become a Coca Cola executive and a multi-millionaire. Louis, by contrast, mismanaged by manipulative handlers and dogged by tax charges, died a physical wreck, seldom successful in overcoming crushing debt.
Still, Joe Louis' epic saga is legend. He holds the distinction of having defended his title more times than any other heavyweight in history, knocking out five world champions. Joe Louis will remain an icon of athletic prowess for all time.
Alas, Rose Morgan, whose appeal for a financially desperate Louis, in part at least, must have been her unusually ample means, has been completely forgotten.
In 1948 ever-increasing gains saw Morgan open a new House of Beauty in an existing but new building. Joe Louis’ deluxe bar and restaurant, with the ‘world’s largest oval bar’, fashioned from mahogany and rosewood, was planned by engineer Sidney Frieman. Opened with the same frenzied excitement that greeted bars opened by other sports heroes, in 1946, it close abruptly. in 1947. How fortuitous for Louis that Morgan could take this costly albatross off his hands. How lucky too for Miss Morgan, to find so stylish and up-to-date a venue for her expanding enterprises, that by now included regular fashion shows featuring black designers like Mildred Blount, Stefan, Willard Winter, La’Tanya and others.
1946: Joe Louis signing autographs from behind the bar at his swank 11 West 125th Street restaurant and lounge
The Joe Louis bar and resturant from 1945-1946, 11 West 125th Street was brilliantly adapted to become the second Rose Meta House of Beauty in 1947.
1946: Joe Louis pointing out his mural of black worthies
In the 1940's, even in Akron, Ohio, people like my Aunt Cora, seen at the far right, servants who tried their best to emulate the hauteur of their white employers, all knew about Rose Morgan.
Economically featuring employees and customers as models,
fashion show extravaganzas the House of Beauty staged at the
Renaissance
Casino and the Rockland Plaza, attracted thousands. Choreographed to
swing music, the ladies sporting luxurious furs, fantastic hats and
splendid dresses, walked the runway escorted by Harlem's most dashing
men. As an added lure, lavish balls followed for the enjoyment of the
well dressed throngs. "The people had seen
nothing like it...All the girls loved the shows
because there was nowhere else they could show themselves off like
[white]
high-fashion models.", Morgan recalled years afterward. Morgan's
customers, like the designers who worked with her, were drawn from
across the nation.
Stefan Young participated in the Rose Meta fashion shows. Adancer, who evolved into a hat maker and dressdesigner, a man who came to have but one name, who married and adopted a daughter, but was as gay as they come. What does one make of the enigma that was STEFAN!
The little known story of Mildred Blount's rise to acclaim is a trajectory quite familiar to many African Americans, and to many others too, who have both talent and ambition without prominence. As an, at first, unknown worker, Blount's brilliant efforts brought her white employer riches and renown.
A native of Edten, North Carolina, where she was born in 1907. Mildred Blount after her parentss' death had moved in with family members. Attending New York public schools she'd dreamed of becoming an interpretive and ballet dancer, as well as a costume designer. Pursuing all these goals Mildred attended Hunter College and Cooper Union. Completing school, from the time of its inception, she worked for the John-Frederics' firm. Serving ten years at the Manhattan salon, in 1939 she was assigned to open their Los Angeles branch. Going on her own in 1943 she proceeded from success, to success.
1950: My friend, the wonderful Willard Winter, who in the late 1930's came from Boston to New York to design the most smashing hats, started by showing at the House of Beauty.
Circa 1948: Gerrie Major in a willard origional
An associate of Mildred Blount's, Bernice L'Tanya Griffin was perhaps the first African American artist known by a single name. Another transplant to Los Angeles, throughout her professional life she continually cross-crossed the country to show and sell her designs at charity fashion shows of the kind staged at the House of Beauty.
Ca. 1956: Dorthy Dandrige dressed by L'Tanya
No sooner had she scored a hit, had Rose Morgan begun to look for a more modern salon than 401
West 148th Street. Morgan anticipated investing $250,000 to renovate the
building purchased at 507 West 145th Street. Seeking a $25,000 loan
from her bank, a bank where she had deposited millions, she was refused, a rebuff that planted the seeds of her own banking ventures to come.
On a rainy day in February of
1955, with the mayor's wife cutting a big pink ribbon, 10,000 people came to the
opening of Rose Morgan's new House of Beauty. Cologne was regularly sent wafting through the air conditioning, to make the House of Beauty rose scented. The fast growing popularity of wigs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, saw Morgan open a wig salon, with a
pickup and delivery service. In this way, a busy client could have her coiffure washed, perfectly styled and discreetly returned.
Vertner Woodson Tandy, the dean of Harlem architects
John Lewis Wilson, was the first African American enrolled at the Columbia University School of Architecture to graduate.
1955: The new Rose Meta House of Beauty at 507 West 145th Street was designed by John Lewis Wilson.
By 1955, the first location at 148thStreet closed. But not before a new International Style Rose Metta
House of Beauty, designed by Columbia trained black architect John
Lewis Wilson opened. Young Wilson had begun his career as a draftsman
for Vertner Woodson Tandy, Madame Walker's architect, who was the first black registered in New York State. Located at 507 West 145th
Street near Amsterdam Avenue, the House of Beauty was an ideal setting for a day of pampering and included a dressmaking department and a charm school in
addition to the usual hair salon facilities. In the early 1960s, Morgan
added a wig salon. Over time, she employed and trained over 3,000
people.
Rose Morgan with her expert business partner Miss Olivia Clarke, shown in some of their numerous press clippings. In 1949 Clarke became Olivia Stanford.
Morgan and Clarke hard at work
1938: Joe Louis with his first wife, the former Marva Trotter.
1949: A 'happy' family, soon to dissolve
Ever generous, Joe Louis loved the trapping of the high life.
The first Mrs. Louis, nee Marva Trotter, was only 17 when she married. She shared with her husband a love of glamor.
1955: Rose Morgan was hardly the woman the public and pundits choose as Joe Louis' mate, once his marriage, divorce and remarriage to Marva ended. Then and now, some wonder, had he seen her only as the most expedient means of extricating himself from financial ruin?
Christmas day 1955: Whatever motivated the Morgan-Louis nuptials, surely no bride ever appeared more happy!
Louis' and Morgan's Christmas day wedding and reception were held at Rose Morgan Louis' home, at 175-12 Murdock Avenue in the Addisleigh Park section of Saint Albans, Queens. The first suburban New York community opened to blacks, Adisleigh Park rapidly became the suburban equivalent of Harlem's Sugar Hill and home to greats like Lena Horne, Count Basie, Roy Campanella, Ella Fitzgerald, Illinois Jacquet and Jackie Robinson.
Pictures of wedded bliss
Rose Morgan’s marriage to Joe Louis was amicably annulled after 3 years in 1958. In 1965, Morgan was one of the founders of New York's only black-owned commercial bank, the Freedom National Bank. She retired in the mid 1970’s. I met Miss Morgan about 1989 and she once attended a party I gave. Interested in talking to others, this faultlessly turned out matron was also interesting to listen to. She said how she continued to exercise every day and to assiduously care for her health. Our mutual friend Alma Rangel also enjoyed listening to Morgan’s tales of her eventful life. “We were at a house party together in Florida, and she kept us spellbound, late into the night with her story telling.”
What a pity that this extraordinary lady, so fastidious and concerned with every detail, who prided herself on giving as much attention to ordinary, unknown customers as to star clients like Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Sara Lou Harris, Katherine Dunham or Miriam Bruce, never completed the memories she was determined to record. Had she succeeded it’s doubtful a woman who accomplished so much, would have died with almost no notice taken whatever, unmentioned in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, or even the New York Amsterdam News.
Morgan client Hazel Scott, the second Mrs. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., an accomplished singer and jazz pianist
Sara Lou Harris, a House of Beauty patron, was the first African American model featured in a major national advertising campaign.
Marian Bruce, born in 1920, was a cabaret singer noted as an elegant stylist. During her career in show business, in the 1940's and 1950's, she starred in the first all-black show ever presented in a Miami Beach nightclub. Beautiful, and always beautifully dressed, she was also popular abroad on the continent. One element of this popularity lay in her dry wit and sharp repartee. "It was truly something, to hear such unexpected and expert cussing coming from the pretty mouth of this pretty lady..." observed Taylor Gordon and Jimmy Daniels, among others.
Never afraid to take a stand for justice, or to be photographed, Miss Bruce appeared in the illustrations of at least two news stories for Ebony and Our World magazines, covering the new House of Beauty salon opened by her dear friend Rose Morgan. In both, Bruce, most decoratively, poses clad only in a towel during strenuous exercise and a subsequent massage. Black journals from this period were hardly adverse to introducing a little titillation among their pages. The only thing surprising about these pictures at all, is how perfectly they portray an aspecet of the scandal that engulfed Morgan and Bruce almost immediately after they were taken.
Residing at the Rodger Morris Apartments at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, Miss Bruce was not alone. Her roomate at Harlem's famed 'home of the triple nickle', was man-about-town, designer and artist, Art Harris. In August of 1948 the handsome couple had attend a party at the House of Beauty. Morgan and her partner each had small apartments on the two top floors of 401 West 148th Street. Missing his companion Harris went searching for her. He found her easily enough, she was with Rose Morgan. They were in the rub-down room. They said that they were giving each other a 'massage'.
Marian Bruce
Today, this readily sounds like the thin plot of a trite porno movie. The lengths gay people once went to, to establish some plausible cover was considerable. Only in this scenario, Harris had not joined the naked girls he'd walked in on. Nor had he even caused a scene, not at first. "They quietly returned home," explained photographer Marvin Smith half a century later. "Marian thought she had gotten over, that they would both pretend that nothing had happened, as she often had regarding other women involved with him. Harris encouraged her hopeful delusion. As she undressed, he was in the bathroom. The only thing that was odd was his sharpening his razor. Why shave again, after the party, just to go to dinner? Then it happened. She knew him enough to know he was not kidding when he came after her with that razor in his hand snarling, 'I will kill you both' That's why it's true that she did run out of their apartment and into the streets, bare-assed-naked! The next day my brother and I took her to the beach, Reese Beach, to get away from the scandal."
Marriage and family was the most drastic subterfuge used by gays to cover their tracks in the past. In no time at all Marian Bruce and Rose Morgan both found husbands. But not before Miss Bruce, with defiant satisfaction, sued Harris for assault, for an award of $ 2, 990.00.
Bruce married first. Her husband was widower Arthur C. Logan, the personal physician to both Duke Ellington and his brilliant gay collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. It was in great part due her marriage that Mrs. Logan would come to focus her opposition to discrimination, joining her husband to become a major NAACP activist, Democratic campaign worker, and civil rights movement fundraiser. These activities were culminated by Mariam Logan being named to head New York City's Commission on Human Rights, from 1977 to 1979. A widow for over 20 years after her husband's suicide, Mrs. Logan died in 1993.
Langston Hughes and friends enjoy the hospitality of actor Canada Lee at a party for Hilda Simms. The celebration was held at Lee's 555 Edgecombe Avenue apartment around the time when Marian Bruce also lived at the Rodger Morris.
Marian Bruce
Talented, polished and fashion-conscious, Marva Trotter Louis never denounced her two children's womanizing, profligate father. Then: remarrying Mrs. Spaulding, as a singer and an icon of style, was once almost as recognizable as her famous first husband. In the 1940's she performed around the country, appearing with top band leaders such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Kay Kyster. But by the time she died, the fickle world had passed her by.
African American style, as innovative and spontaneous as jazz, as bad-assed as hip-hop, more admired than ever, is still fraught in a controversy for acceptance and legitimacy. Some mourn the lost past, contending that yesterday was an era of more elegance, that people once took greater trouble with their appearance and with their attire. However much one might dislike the tattoos, jeans and boots that have for most occasions supplanted the obsolete formality, it hardly follows that people today do not care about fashion. On the contrary, by the way they wear, what they wear, people show as much concern as ever about how they appear to the world. Only now, thanks to women like the Walkers, Morgan, Willis, Taylor and White, they are better able to present themselves on their own terms, more than ever before in history.
Tuesday, November 28, 2000, succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, Marva Louis Spaulding, 85, a one-time stenographer and big band singer died forgotten. Twice married to Joe Louis 'the 'Brown Bomber', she was a gracious and glamorous aspirational personality, who had once been as fortunate and famous, by association, as Cinderella.
After her marriage to Joe Louis ended, Rose Morgan married a third time. Following the failure of her union with lawyer Louis Saunders after two years, she was determined to write her life story. Rose Morgan returned to Chicago in 1999 to tend to her ailing sister. When she died in 2008, despite two major biographies of Joe Louis released at the time, almost no one noticed.
Surely, it must have been a criticism directed at William Collins Whitney, the excerpt below from Munsey's Magazine of November 1901:
It would be discouraging to national pride, if America considered originality in architectural and decorative matters of moment, to realize how complete is our dependence upon the old world whenever we wish to make a brave show or to erect a worthy and enduring building. It is better, of course, to copy the good than to achieve originality only through atrocities; but there are times when one not necessarily a jingo could wish to hear that Mr. Croesus was putting up an American house instead of reproducing a Venetian palace; or that some decorative artist had made a mantel so beautiful and so perfect that it was not necessary for the latest millionaire to ransack an old French chateau to discover something to his liking.
Whitney is said to have inspired Henry James' Adam Verver, from the psychological masterpiece The Golden Bowl. Ververis a fabulously wealthy widower American industrialist and art collector, living abroad with his devoted daughter, systematically amassing treasures. As methodical, as complicated and as dashing as Verver, Whitney was also widely regarded as wickedly clever, quite charming and terribly attractive. Yet according to some, these attributes only made the prominent American political leader and financier, an all-the-more accomplished rake and rogue. When he died in 1904, a few even speculated that Whitney was murdered, knowing as they did, of his former friend, Yale-roommate and brother-in-law, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne’s threat to ruin him!
In 1875 millionaire Frederick W. Stevens commissioned architect George Harney to design the city residence for his family at number 2 East 57th Street. Filled with European spoils and antiques, after Stevens died his widow remarried and sold the property to Oliver Payne. Most generously, Col. Payne presented the turreted pile to his sister Flora and her husband William C. Whitney. The Whitneys commissioned Stanford White to remodel their house. This was a commission executed with such lavishness and care, that it was imagined that the fastidious owner would never wish to move. Yet, in 1893 Flora Whitney died from a heart attack. After her husband remarried and moved to 871 Fifth Avenue, another staid Victorian mansion entrusted to White for renovation, he gave his former townhouse to his son Harry Payne Whitney and his wife Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Mrs. Harry Whitney was the girl next door as it were, her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, II, lived across the street.
On the left, the Whitney mansion, and to the right, the magnificent abode of Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, II.
Harry and Gertrude Whitney contentedly lived near her widowed mother for some time. In addition they lived at "The Reefs" their cottage in Newport, had a plantation for hunting at Aiken, South Carolina, and a sizable country estate at Old Westbury. Saddened at the thought of the all the splendors his father had created in coolaboration with Stanford White being dispersed, in 1907 the Harry Whitneys moved to William whitney's 'palace of art'. Developers made quick work of demolishing their previous home, replacing it with a massive skyscraper that towered over Gertrude Whitney's childhood home across the way, which in a short dozen years or so, was razed as well.
Secretary of the Navy in the first Grover Cleveland administration, William Collns Whitney primarily made his fortune as a streetcar magnate. Expertly manipulative, his stock-watering, it is said, would make today’s colossal mortgage-backed derivatives, seem by comparison, like an amateurish undertaking. That he had married his roommate-friend’s sister, Miss Flora Payne, of Cleveland, daughter of Senator Henry B. Payne of Ohio, certainly proved to be useful. A brilliant academician interested in science, if no beauty, the first Mrs. Whitney was very rich! Her devoted brother, who was named treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, was richer still. The Whitneys had five children.
Social leaders in New York as well as in Washington, the couple lived at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Across the intersection stood the imposing winter residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt, II. Following two years spent mourning after Flora Whitney's death in 1893, Whitney was married to an elegant widow named Edith Sibyl Randolph. Out to impress the world with his ever-increasing riches, Whitney turned again to his friend Stanford White, of McKim, Mead and White, challenging White to fashion a magnificent residence in the Italian Renaissance style out of the mundane Stuart house at Fifth Avenue and 68th Street.
William Collins Whitney, 1841-1904
Edith Sibyl Whitney
William Schickel's conventional brownstone mansion for the sugar magnate Robert L. Stuart, was utterly transformed for William Whitney into a 'palace of art'.
As so often was the case with Robert Adam, many of Stanford White’s most brilliant successes resulted from the remodeling of an existing house. Between 1896 and 1902, White moved heaven and earth to transform the enormous, but ordinary four-story brownstone mansion, designed in 1884 by William Schickel for the sugar magnate Robert L. Stuart, into a palace, a ‘palace of art’!
Employing such extraordinary antique elements as the gilt-iron and bronze gates from the Palazzo Doria in Rome in the Whitney’s porte cochère and Louis XVI boiserie from a château near Bordeaux in their second floor ballroom, then the largest private ballroom in New York, it’s estimated that White spent $4,000,000 converting 871 5th Avenue. Alas, before she had a chance to enjoy these splendors, on May 6, 1899, Edith Whitney died. Grievously injured in a riding accident in the south, she been brought home, never to regain consciousness.
Whitney's reworking of the Stuart house was only sedate outside.
Coinciding with his loss was the blow of estrangement from Col. Payne. Beyond vowing to cause Whitney’s financial and social ruin for insulting his sister’s memory by remarrying, Payne had brought his considerable wealth to bear, to divide him from two of his children.
Harry Payne Whitney, the traction king’s eldest offspring remained loyal to his father. He had married Cornelius Vanderbilt's daughter, Gertrude, the girl next door, sort off.
A rather conventional multi-millionaire-industrialist-sportsman, in time Harry Payne Whitney grew apart from his wife, who was as unusually gifted as his mother had been. More and more, as time passed, the pair lived apart, leading distinctly separate lives. If money was ever a bit tight between Uncle Oliver’s efforts of retribution and William Whitney’s prodigal extravagance, soon enough, money was again no serious barrier to infinite gratifications. With William Whitney’s death his palatial city house had been sold furnished. When the new owner, James Henry ‘Silent’ Smith unexpectedly expired age 56 on his honeymoon trip in Japan, out of sentiment the family house was re-acquired by the Whitneys.
Harry Payne Whitney.
A distinguished sculptor of great sensitivity who had trained with Rodin, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney increasingly lived in a converted Greenwich Village mews, where she had a studio. When the occasion demanded, she dutifully put in an appearance at Fifth Avenue, but drag balls and night clubs in Paris and Harlem came to offer far more appeal for her than staid society functions. She is all but notorious today, for the hard role she played in having her sister-in-law declared an unfit mother and thereafter taking charge to raise her young niece, Gloria Vanderbilt. Courtroom intimations that little Gloria’s mother engaged in lesbian relationships seem cruelly ironic as, since girlhood, whispers of Gertrude Whitney’s varied passions for men and women had swirled all around among bon ton New York and Newport.
Ca. 1912: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney adorned by a good portion of her extensive collection of jeweled ornaments, was the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Ca. 1892: Cornelius Vanderbilt's daughter Gertrude Vanderbilt who married her neighbor on 57th street Harry Whitney.
Gertrude and Harry Payne Whitney's Newport cottage.
1897: Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney and son Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.
1902: Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney by Howard G. Cushing.
Ca. 1912: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bedecked in a good portion of her extensive collection of jeweled ornaments.
1920: Three generations of Vanderbilt women.
1940: Anderson Cooper's mother, Gloria Vanderbilt with her Aunt Gertrude.Scars from her custody trial and separation from her mother, have never faded. Mrs. Cooper is one of the few New Yorkers today who experienced Willam Whitney's 'Palace of Art'.
Gilt-iron and bronze gates from the Palazzo Doria in Rome.
Antique Venetian lanterns lighted the iron and glass vestibule.
The marble Entrance Hall had Chinese carpets.
An Entrance Hall view made durring the extensive renovations.
The first of many antique marble mantelpieces stood in the low-ceilinged ground-floor Hall.
One of Stanford Whites favorite conceits was to adapt antique sarcophagi as receptacles for palms and ferns.
Mirrored panels in Whitney's Louis XV Reception Room en-framed skillful copies of royal portraits. Nothing here however hinted of the array of riches in store upstairs. For the cost of such reproductions, one might have had Monets instead.
Whitney and White operated under the notion that "more, is more!" Where one sarcophagus is grand, many are deluxe!
Antique fragments supplied the design of the intricately carved and pierced foliated stair balustrade.
The stairway to paradise perhaps?
An unrivaled assemblage of 17th-century Flemish stained glass contributed to the celestial atmosphere of William Whitney's white marble staircase.
A bay window.
Mr. William Whitney's superlative Hall!
The marble floor, interlaced with colored tesserae, was covered both with remarkable Persian carpets and by lion skins with mounted heads.
In the Hall, as in the other principal reception rooms, the ceiling was salvaged from a Renaissance villa.
WilliamWhitney's carved limestone fireplace in the Hall was made in the time of Henri II for a chateau at Aigues-Mortes.
Much as in the Drawing Room, tapestry was used as drapery at the Hall's openings.
Open log fires, made superfluous by an industrial scaled central heating plant, added greatly to the ambiance of earlier times that White and Whitney were after.
A Mannerist masterpice!
Has any other architect or decorator ever displayed the most stumptuous tapestry obtainable, with such sure nonchelance and effective eclat as White did? Today on view at the Metropolitain Museum of Art, the glorious "The Drowning of Britomartis" is the first tapestry up the stairscase.
Diana, at the center of the tapestry, a crescent above her fair brow saves the day, sort of. In the middle distance, Minos, king of Crete, stands looking with astonishment. Young and lovely Britomartis, disdaining his ardent blandishments and hot pursuit, preferring to perish in the depths of the sea, raises one Lilly-like hand as she drowns.
To make the poor maid's memory immortal, the goddess Diana invented fishnets and snares, with which her lifeless and unsullied body was was retrieved to be brought to a holy place. Ever after the Greeks and other fishermen have referred to the unfortunate girl who's death so benefited humankind as Dictynna, meaning "fishnet".
Somewhat divergent from the most authoritative classical accounts, primarily this refined wall handing was meant toglorify the woman who commissioned it, the legendary Diane de Poitiers, portrayed in the guise of her goddess namesake. She was the mistress to King Henri II of France. Even the elaborate tapestry borders are emblazoned by the Greek character delta and other symbols of Diane. Part of a set of richly colored and beautifully designed tapestries, originally it likely decorated the main halls of the Château at Anet, built for the royal favorite from 1557 onward.
Furnishings represented every epoch...
And many modes.
There were cassone in abundance.
And many large palms.
There werecartouchesbearing noble arms.
Circa 1900.
The Library hung with crimson velvet ducal banners embroidered in gold.
Another fine Renaissance marble mantle.
A silver oil lamp.
William C. Whitney's Fifth Avenue Drawing Room Frenchtapestries and English portraits..
Sir Anthony van Dyke's superlative portrait of the dashing Henri II de Lorraine, who not long after he was painted became 5th duc de Guise in 1640. When William Whitney aquired it in 1900 for a record price, it was thought to portray William Villiers, Viscount Grandison. In 1947 Harry and
Gertrude Whitney's son Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney presented it to the National Gallery.
In William C. Whitney's damask-hung, art-filled Drawing Room, tassels hanging from the ceiling concealed light bulbs used to illuminate paintings.
Ca. 1901: Installation of the great Franco-Flemish 16thcentury chimneypiece in Whitney's commodious Dining Room. The wonderful trio of escutcheons Stanford White married to theovermantle to give it the greater scale demanded of the space has not yet gone into place.
White’s treasures collected for William Whitney were legendary. So it’s not unexpected to learn that even objects with an indefinite lineage, like the handsome Franco-Flemish 16thcentury chimneypiece from the dining room, found good homes when New York’s finest Renaissance palace was destroyed. Rid of embellishing flourishes so typical of White, it landed at Harvard’s venerable Fogg Museum. But not for long.
William Whitney's baronial Dining Room.
When I discovered that Darryl Pinckney and James Fenton were selling a lovely old farm near Oxford, in order to buy and restore Harlem’s old John Dwight house, I was pleased. ‘At last, the unimaginable, restoration of a great landmark, will actually happen!’ I thought. Long Leys farm, where James has made a garden of enchantment, is the real estate agent’s pictures reveal online, quite a pretty place, of just the sort where one might like to retire. A wreck when they bought it, in addition to the great garden, it was augmented by a wing with a great room of two stories.
Lined with dark canvases teeming with people, Whitney's Dining Room stood at odds with the 'home-like quality' he insisted to the Times in 1904, that had so recommended Italian Renaissance decoration and architecture to him.
Difficulte to make out in the image above, the center the sliding door of the Dining Room, featured the marquetry panel shown below. A representation of the Last Supper, it had been made by Fra Damiano da Bergamo for a 16-century altarpiece.
Fra Damiano da Bergamo's Last Supper, is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I knew at once that their antique mantelpiece seemed strangely familiar. Because the William Whitney house was razed so long ago, an ocean away, it seemed unlikely that it had somehow supplied this stunning souvenir of Stanford White’s weakness for old-world grandeur. But of course, by the oblique route of the saleroom, as a cautionary testament to impermanence, the vagaries of tastes and the fecklessness of museum collections, it was.
The massive Whitney fireplace in the Great Room of Long Leys Farm.
Currently installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Franceso Orlandini's marquetry panels were originally made in 1547 for the Chateau de la Bastie d'Urfe. Notwithstanding their religious imagery, Stanford White utilized them for William Whitney's Ballroom Passage, seen below.
Supremely beautiful, the mirrored screen overlain in ormolu in William Whitney’s ballroom, had started life as two, of a set four doors, ordered by Giacomo Filippo Carrega for the Galleria Dorata, Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi, in Genoa. Sublimely shimmering, they were designed by Lorenzo de' Ferrari 1680-1744, a painter. Devising all the gallery’s appointments; paneling, mirrors, consoles and seat furniture, between 1743 and 1744, Ferrari adopted an aquatic theme, replete with mermaids, scallop shells and dolphins, devices which typify the decorative repertoire of the exuberant Genoese rococo style.
William C. Whitney's splendidBallroom, measuring63 feet x 45 feet.
Stanford White evidently lengthened Giacomo Filippo Carrega settees from the Galleria Dorata in the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi, in Genoa. The ravishing pair, offerd for sale at auctin in london by Sotheby's on July 6, 2011, handsomely realized 1,721,205 GBP, or $2,763,639. This was a
record at auction for Italian seating furniture, over three times the pre-sale high estimateof 400,000-500,000 GBP.
Whitney's chairs by Giacomo Filippo Carrega from the Palazzo
Carrega-Cataldi, were latter owned by the late Yves Saint Laurent and
Pierre Bergé.
The WhitneyBallroom utilized as a banqueting hall. The oval table is banked with palms, and Bosten ferns. Befor the party rosese and orchids were added, according to the Times.
Acquired directly from the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi by Stanford White, Ferrari's ‘screen’ from the Galleria Dorata, joined by settees from the same source, were exported to New York expressly for William Whitney’s showplace. Following Gertrude Whitney’s death in 1942, the golden screen was sold to Baron Cassel and Baroness Cassel van Doorn. They, in turn, sold it in 1954, in Paris, to the dealers Serge Roche & J. Rotil, and it remained in their stock until at least 1956. Elinor Dorrance Ingersoll, who summered at lovely Bois Doré in Newport, must have acquired the screen about then, for it was sold from among her effects at Christie's September 27-28, 1977 house sale, for $14,500, to Miss Doris Duke. At nearby Rough Point, where it remains, divided into two sections, of two panels each, it seems almost unbelievable that these one-time doors were not there always.
Stanford White's mirrored screenby Lorenzo de' Ferrari 1680-1744.
Almost as difficult to fathom, is that there are any additional, identical, mirrored and gilt-bronze doors. These second two pairs were retained by Stanford White for himself and incorporated into the opulent decoration of his own city house at 121 East 21st Street, facing Gramercy Park. I have always so admired that White felt entitled to the same splendors he afforded for his much, much richer clients.
Panels from Lorenzo de' Ferrari mirrored screen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sold for $1,250 in 1907, upon the architect’s sordid murder, the screen was obtained by shipping heir Frederick E. Guest, of Old Templeton on Long Island. For the same price, at the time one could have gotten a nice Rolls Royce. Sold to Whitney Warren, Jr. by the Guests' son, Winston Guest, the panels realized $11,000. An acclaimed and discretely gay host and aesthete, after forming a magical backdrop for parties in his Nob Hill apartment, the panels were bequeathed by Warren to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
That was in 1986. By 1989, as lot 115, these precious panels were sold for $181,500 to Alexander & Berendt Ltd., London, from whom they were acquired for an undisclosed price, which, whatever it might have been, was well worth it, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1991.
Beyond this unparalleled screen, for Whitney’s ballroom, White also amassed a far more eclectic, yet still related assemblage, one which even included a Victorian rococo revival sofa of the 1840s. Yet much like Ferrari, he intended to rival other magnificent spaces, both great historic European interiors of the past and the grandest rooms of his own time, too. The perfect finishing touch, the group of rock crystal-hung 18th century chandeliers White located for this space were finally hung just in time for New York's first cotillion of the new century, early in 1901.
William Whitney had chosen to open the ill-fated house that was to have been a shrine to his new wife, with a debutante ball. The honoree was Whitney's niece, Miss Helen Tracy Barney. Some 700 invitations were issued. On the snowy night of January 4 1901 society danced the night away in a splendid space lined with genuine Louis XV carved oak boiserie, highlighted in gold. They partook of a delectable supper of canvas-back duck and terrapin, not only in Whitney's baronial dining room, but at little tables set all about the rooms of the piano nobile. Among those who enjoyed the festivities in what was described as Whitney's Venetian Palace' that night were Mr. and Mrs. Stanford White, Charles Follen McKim, "ablaze with diamonds" Mrs. William B. Astor, Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor IV, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Mackay, Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Mrs. Herman Oelrichs, her sister Virginia Fair and her husband William Vanderbilt Jr., Willie Jr.'s father William Vanderbilt, Baron and Baronesse Raymonde de Seillière, Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Prince Trobetskoy, and Prince Ruspoli. Edith Wharton with her husband were also among the glittering throng that crowded the great house not in the least.
Among the guests favored to attend the Whitney house-warming- debutante ball was the Baronesse Raymonde de Seillière. She was connected
by marriage with the wealthy Talleyrand-Périgord family, whose fortune was derived from truffles. Stepdaughter of
the New York
banker John O’Brien, the Baronesse
married banker Charles Livermore, who left her a widow with
two children. She then married the Baron
de Seillière, the son of a Frenchman who had been
ennobled by Napoléon III. A tall
distinguished looking woman with snow white hair, the had a handsome Hôtel in Paris,
and entertained the fashionable world of Europe
and America
combined, her guests being not only Duchesses and Princesses, but such
well-known women as her Newport neighbors Mrs. Potter Palmer and Mrs. Astor.
New York's first ball of the new century, January 4, 1901, featured a cotillion with three jockeys who distributed riding crops as favors. They were 'mounted' on toy steeds representing the high-stake-wining champions of William Whitney's famed Greentree Stable.
A well-cushioned tapertried recess.
For sitting out dances removed from the chaparones' gazes, a conservatory was de rigueur.
Plants in profussion...
Were essenctial to the conservatory's charm.
William Whitney's Sitting Room.
At least this bedroom proves that there were opportunities to escape granduer at the 'palace of art'.
Thank goodness for the relative high standard of popular culture during my youth. Otherwise, it surely would have taken far longer for me to become familiarized with the overblown personality and the opulent architectural and decorative out-pouring, of Gilded Age architect Stanford White. White was the genius of an epoch, who taught the elite to love the lavishness of historic European design and the finer points of aristocratic life. Better than anyone else of his generation, he could successfully apply his prodigious artistry to make anything more elegant and interesting than it might have been otherwise. Whether designing a magazine cover, great buildings or a table setting, his decisive Très Riche taste was thought impeccable and he was avidly sought after.
My introductory breakthrough was a late-show movie, watched with my great-grandmother, Mama Willie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. Released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1955, the year before I was born, the film was originally planned with Marilyn Monroe in mind for the title role. In Monroe’s place director Richard Fleischer secured the services of the more appropriately brunette Joan Collins, making her Hollywood début.
Just 22, Joan Collins,The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.
The film vividly relates the story of teen-aged femme fatale Evelyn Nesbit. At the turn of the last century, a bit less than 100 years ago, Miss Nesbit was a virginal-looking, dreamy-eyed artists’ model and actress. Ever the acquisitive connoisseur concerning all things beautiful, White must have thought the 15 year-old quite a find. Bidding his time, he paid her dental bills, bought her becoming frocks and had her educated at a finishing school run by Mathilda DeMille, the mother of the soon to be noted film director, Cecil B. DeMille. He took special pains to ingratiate himself with Evelyn’s appreciative and trusting mother. Imagining he was the ancient goldsmith Pygmalion, how White must have enjoyed his slowly seductive, transforming metamorphosis. Certainly, however debased his intentions might have been, he had preferred to view his motives as strictly honorable and even charitable.
However she might be pictured today, either as an earlier version of “My Fair Lady” or “Pretty Woman”, eventually Evelyn Nesbit became embroiled in what some have termed “the Scandal of the Century”, the scandal surrounding the June 1906 murder of Stanford White, her former lover, by her erratic husband, rail and coal tycoon Harry Kendall Thaw.
Bewitching Evelyn Nesbit.
For the sake of authenticity, grown grandmotherly by 1955, Miss Nesbit served as a technical adviser on the rather bowdlerized bio-pic, which stared Ray Milland, as White and Farley Granger as Thaw.
1955: Farley Granger as Harry K. Thaw with Joan Collins, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.
My next lucky encounter of Stanford White occurred a few years later, in September of 1966, when I was 10 and far more sophisticated. This was when a pictorial essay on White’s architectural practice and his many marvelous monuments appeared in Life Magazine. The architect's numerous photogenic descendants, evocatively posed at each location, not only made White's creations come to life, but enhancing the beauty of each backdrop, were made to appear all the more beautiful in turn themselves. Whether young Jerome Buttrick sitting on the heart-shaped staircase at Rose Cliff, or a throng of family gathered on the lawn at Box Hill, the White country house at Saint James, Stanford White's progeny, by their attitude of élan and a slight aloofness, suggested they were rarified denizens of a more decorous realm of graciousness. In these illustrations by a pioneering woman photo-journalist, Toni Frissell, their environments devised specially by White, seems to edify and uplift its inhabitants. This touch that White had, of creating surroundings as flattering to a patron as a couture evening dress, or of a well-tailored suit, was what had made him so in demand.
For a long time I could not recall if The Splendor of Stanford White: The Great Landmarks of the Architect Who was Society's Darling at the Turn of the Century, had appeared in Life or Look. Both regularly included stories related to historic preservation. If this hardly matters, what does, is that living in a modernist America, a land obsessed with a minimal aesthetic of pragmatic functionality, this introduction to McKim, Mead & White’s diverse oeuvre was a revelation. It really was a personal discovery, even an epiphany, confirming that the more sensual and comprehensible arts and decoration of the past, were an alternative to alienation often inherent in contemporary design. The pictures in this journal similarly established that for people like me, people for whom ‘more is more’, alternatives to convention and the ordinary, would always beckon as alluringly as they did for Stanford White.
Decorations conceived by Stanford White for a dinner hosted by his friend, patron and financial adviser, Charles T. Barney .
According to at least one historian, at the start of the 1890's, while working on the New York Building for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, a fatherly Stanford White advised a young man, the would-be architect Author Acton, that an independent income was imperative to an architect's success. In circumstances like his own, White is supposed to have counseled Acton, it was best to make a favorable marriage. Having himself taken the precaution of wedding twenty-two-year-old heiress Bessie Springs Smith in 1884, the older architect, Acton might have concluded, must have known what he was talking about. The Junoesque Mrs. White hailed from a socially prominent Long Island family. Her ancestors were early settlers of Smithtown, New York, named after them and her father was a judge. Moreover Bessie Smith White and her sisters were heirs to the fortune of their aunt, the widow of department store magnate A. T. Stewart. Seemingly Acton followed the advice of the more experienced and already acclaimed White, inasmuch as not long after this chat he was promptly betrothed. Mrs. Acton, in time Lady Acton, was a Chicago girl, Miss Hortense Mitchell, the daughter of John J. Mitchell, the President of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank.
1884: The Junoesque Bessie Springs Smith on her wedding day in 1884.
"Running through the world of McKim, Mead & White was a sense of the exploration of life's pleasures. A circle of bisexual and homosexual entertainment can be traced within the office,"
maintains Mosette Broderick in her sensational and compelling book, Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age.
" The circle included Stanford White, [Augustus] Saint Gaudens, Joseph M. Wells, Frank Millet, Whitney Warren, Thomas Hastings and probably [William R.] Mead, and many others. Aline Saarinen, while working on her proposed biography of White over thirty years ago, came to the conclusion that White was homosexual. It seems clear that White was bisexual, but there are batches of letters unmistakably revealing times in his life when he was part of an active gay circle---evidence that is still present despite the sharp obscuring blade of his son Larry White.”
Recovering one's composure after such a spectacular bombshell, it's impossible to agree with such a conclusion made by the writer that White's sexual identy, does not matter. Fortunately then, Ms. Broderick can't help but contradict herself. All throughout her unflinching examination of some of late 19th-Century America's most notable artist, architects and patrons, she suggest how crucial to the development and outcome of commissions, friendships and inter-personal interaction was the very shared sexual orientation she so cavalierly dismisses at the start as, 'of no importance'. Thomas Wilmer Dewing, White’s painter-friend, connoisseur and industrialist Charles Lang Freer and James L. Breese the magnate-turned-amateur photographer and White client, are each purported to be gay as well.
What can it mean, gay men who married and lived as straight men? Were series of serial encounters with under-age girls, only a kind of denial, an ostentatious cover for someone gay in a day when one dare not admit to so utterly outlawed a sexual preference? Truly, like some LGBTSGL men who came after him, White and his coterie thought themselves part of some ultra-smart, wickedly fun sort of secret society. Anywhere they ventured, around the world, their members were legion. Yet, the question remains: Are we today even capable of divining such long hidden aspects of history so vehemently denigrated and so deliberately masked?
As a wedding gift for Stanford White and his wife, his close friend and possible lover, Augustus Saint-Gaudens produced this arresting bas relief. Bessie White is shown adjusting her wedding veil. The gilt frame is among innumerable examples designed by White, who also turned his hand to book covers, furniture and decorations for special events like gala performances at the opera.
A rented farmhouse that he later purchased, Stanford White’s country place, started out as an exceedingly modest affair. Quite near where his wife grew up, from a hilltop site it enjoyed a lovely vista over the glittering waters of Smithtown Bay. Box Hill was named for old boxwood White transplanted from Virginia that was to flourish on the grounds. With the birth of the White’s son, Lawrence Grant White in 1887, their country retreat increasing became the center of Mrs. White’s cosseted existence. For her husband however, it was more than just home. Much like the brownstone house he rented on Gramercy Square as a house in town, ever increasingly, Box Hill was also a showplace. As much from a desire to emulate the privilege, ease and elegance of clients, who were often enormously rich, as from the need to express himself as an artist, White was continually altering and improving his houses. This was even the case with rooms he rented for private liaisons. Workshops at which he might experiment to perfect his deluxe sensibility, White’s environs were calculated to entrance his friends and prospective patrons with the idea of what was possible under his insightful guidance. Rooms White devised for himself seemed to say to others, if he might live in so princely a manner, under somewhat limited means, what might the ideal client, one with more abundant recourses, achieve?
Ca. 1891: The happy family: Stanney, Bessie and Larry White with a monkey!
Utterly unprepossessing, Box Hill as Stanford White found it.
Proximity and indeed intimacy with the richest in the land made Stanford White long for wealth. All his life, it seems, White yearned for greater resources for himself, for the possibility of affording his superior tastes, free reign. Very likely laboring furiously to gain great affluence, not only by maintaining an enormous workload, but by borrowing from his wife, friends and acquaintances, to speculate on stocks and investments, purchased on margin, he miscalculated. For not unlike Robert Adam before, so much of White’s most inspired effort resulted from proscription and limitation. Like Adam, for instance, his reworking of existing houses always produced brilliant results. White’s particular genius lay in his ability, with artful success, to repeatedly cobble together disperate elements, which were very often of divergent quality. He liked to combine together cherished fragments scavenged from aristocratic European sources, and similar, newer, fabric salvaged from the demolition of early American landmarks. Such assemblages might also be complimented by art and custom hand-crafted elements produced by his friends and protégés. The technologically advanced construction and systems forming the gem-setting-like matrix in which his old and new treasures shown forth, were sometimes relatively inexpensive. In many cases, steel I-beams, electric lights, concrete or terra-cotta, were even frankly employed without disguise.
Ca.1901.
Stanford White as a gentleman-architect and Mrs. White as the lady bountiful.
Box Hill's aggrandizement was a gradual process, only curtailed by lack of funds.
Such juxtapositions invariably combined old elements in a novel and original way. And it was the boldness of his invention and treatment, which make it impossible to mistake what Stanford White created, for something which had ever existed before.
With oil jars and sarcophagi used as planters, the serpentine drive of Box Hill was lined with standard bay trees, bonsai, flowering potted plants, and quaint topiaries.
Ca. 1901: Box Hill.
Ca. 1904.
Comfortably furnished, Box Hill's extensive porchs served as summer living rooms in the open air.
Even after losing its shutters, multi gabled Box Hill, with two-over-two windows characteristic of a farmhouse and a frieze of Chinese fretwork indicative of the grandest Colonial mansion, remains highly distinctive. Stucco embedded with beach pebbles was a typical White touch that added interest inexpensively. This was an economy that to White's way of thinking, permitted the indulgence of an Italian well-head and Grecian herms, used to form a formal fouuntain and forecourt at Box Hill's entrance.
Mrs. White, her sisters and their brother acting as muses at Box Hill's wooden excedra.
As the focus for Box Hill's postage stamp size formal garden, a reproduction Crouching Aphrodite adorned a lily pool.
White's Century plants, oleanders and bay trees required a greenhouse.
White's pergola assumed the form of an Ionic temple.
Commissioned by Stanford White, as a weather-vane for his Madison Square Garden, a variant of "Diana of the Tower” by his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens was place on Box Hill's highest point. White had talked his close friend and possible lover into creating the statue's initial version for free!
Nominally Colonial Revival, Box Hill was entered via a center hall at the heart of the house, extending from the front entrance to the back door. Both portals were salvaged early Greek Revival examples with leaded glass sidelights. The quarry tile floor was both impervious to the wet shoes and muddy boots associated with an active country life of sport, as well as an effective contrast for Eastern carpets.
Sensually twisting, exuberantly carved, gilded and painted, bold Baroque Solomonic columns, entwined by fruited grape vines, were a delightful, almost talismanic lite motive which White avidly employed for himself and clients alike. As a contrasting background, White used inexpensive honey-colored split-bamboo matting, commonly used as porch sunshades. Mats were stretched across the walls of of Box Hill's Entrance Hall, the Stair Hall beyond it and in the Drawing Room.
How dearly White loved the display of antlers and of animal pelts with mounted heads. Polar bear skins were especially fashionable, but as on the seat beside Stanford White's simple stairway with a stepped, mat-covered parapet, a brown bear skin might do as well. Tigers, lions and leopards were similarly sacrificed in the pursuit of beauty.
Starkly unachitectural and largely unembellished, Whites's rooms at Box Hill, like Louis Tiffany's at Lauralton Hall, were meant to showcase antiques and works of art. A profusion of plants and flowers helped to tie such assemblages, carefully considered to form satisfying color harmonies into a pleasing, picturesque uniform whole. Producing uniformity out of such diversity and abundance was White's strong suite.
Discovering a pair of partly-gilded 16th-Century North European lion carvings he admired, White had no compunction about reproducing more, so that he might enjoy them at both of his houses.
Almost a cult in High Society, the fashion for animal skin rugs with mounted, snarling heads, was made sensational not only by photographs White and others commissioned showing Evelyn Nesbit reclining invitingly on a bearskin, in her kimono or nude. Three Weeks, a romance by English novelist Elinor Glyn, relating how "it" occurred on fur rugs before the fireside, gave rise to charming doggerel that helped sear tiger skins and the like, in association with "it", indelibly on public consciousness:
"Would you like to sin? With Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin? Or, would you prefer to err with her on other fur?"
Paired with a Eucharistic relief as an over-mantle, White's antique stone inner Hall chimney-piece, supported by bearded atlantes, is unabashedly pagan.
Made possible by the introduction of a steel I-beam, which White judiciously left exposed with carved wooden escutcheons appliqued as decoration, the Drawing Room at Box Hill was the largest space in the many-gabled house. Here, even the broad ceiling was covered with split bamboo matting.
Essential among the mostly 18th-Century furniture in Box the Hill Drawing Room, was a much-used piano and harp.
White chose as the principal light for his Drawing Room a figural painted wood and antler chandelier from the Black Forest, a "Lusterweibchen", with a mermaid.
1966: Portrayed by Toni Frissell an elegant Stanford White descendant at Box Hill admires the handiwork of an ancestor made newly famous by the photo essay in Life Magazine.
If panels of Persian tiles survive above windows flanking the fireplace in the Drawing Room at Box Hill, besides a quantity of furniture and assorted ceramics, more ephemeral elements that contributed to a magical atmosphere, Venetian lanterns, standard bay trees and sofa cushions covered with Indian silk sewn with bits of mirror, are gone forever.
Already at the start of the White's residence at Box Hill, Stanford White had definite ideas for his Dining Room. Throughout decades of experimentation, gleaming silver, a fireplace covered with Delft tiles and a collection of Majolica plates, arranged decoratively around the walls, remained a constant here,
The two most original and most memorable features of the Whites' Dining Room are opposing wall of glass and Delft tiles, each running the entire length of the room.
Mahogany Chippendale chairs and a Federal sideboard laden with gleaming silver, standing below an American Empire convex mirror, these conventional elements of Box Hill's remarkable Dining Room, effectively act as a deceptive foil. Delft tiles might well have been used in part as a celebration of New York's Dutch Colonial heritage. The massive bay, with its inviting window seat, may have been inspired by Georgian precedent, but the room demonstrates how for White at his best, as here, the past is always only a point of departure.
As in the Stair Hall of the Ogden Mill's house at Stattsburgh, instead of having expensive wood paneling, White made do with a highly affordable substitute, in this case, Lincrusta.
White was so pleased by his idea to create a fireplace with a mantle shelf and Delft tiles cladding an entire wall, that he repeated the idea at least three times more.
White's large collection of tin-glazed earthen ware, both Majolica and faience, was on display all around the room.
Crowned by a frieze of tin-glazed plates encircling the room, Box Hill's Dining Room bay window was curtain-less from the start!
In addition to geraniums in pots and bouquets of flowers lined up along the window sill, flame-sticthed cushions enlivened the Dining Room at Box Hill.
A salvaged door with leaded sidelights allows direct, ready access from the White family's sunny Dining Room, to the outdoors.
Externally, Box Hill's long, low bay widow, was a definitive expression of the airy Dining Room.
MR. AND MRS. STANFORD WHITE
121 EAST TWENTY-FIRST STREET
Number 121 East Twenty-first Street, Mr. and Mrs. Stanford White's much-remodeled city residence. By eliminating the old-fashioned high stoop to the principal parlor-floor on the first storey and by adding a ground-floor entrance, White had greatly enhanced the size and usefulness of his Drawing Room.
Across the nation, Stanford White was to help to establish the fashion for iron and glass front doors like his own . His work also helped to popularize the adaptation of ancient sarcophagi as planters.
Guests ushered into the White's ground-floor Reception Room found a magnificent Persian carpet fragment, an 18th-Century sleigh chair and a milles fluers tapestry depicting a courtly hunting scene.
The over-scaled, ill-proportioned, too short Corinthian pilasters used in White's Hall and Drawing room, were suggested by examples from late 1830's row houses. Paired with the marble columns imported from Italy, of the kind White customarily used to screen stairs, they represent his favored form of neo-Classical synthesis, one hardly at odds with twisted balusters of the railing to the second floor. The dramatic draping of the stair with tapestry was a recurrent idea adopted by White.
Stanford White's city Drawing Room was, as historian Christopher Gray says, "practically a salesroom for European decorative arts..." The walls were hung with antique crimson silk-velvet. The marble mantelpiece, imported for a New York row house in the 1820's, was surmounted by a looking-glass overlain with an elaborate gilt triumphal arch, flanked by twisted Solomonic columns, entwined by fruited grape vines.
Stanford White's investments in art and antiques, destined for eager clients were by far more successful than his speculation in the stock market. The early 18th-Century painted ceiling of his Drawing Room, from an Italian villa, was eventually acquired by William Randolph Hearst after White's death for his palace at San Simeon. As in many English country house collections, religious art, as employed by White to decorate interiors, managed never to suggest piety so much as a celebration of material success and earthly attainment.
A refreshingly unexpected touch in White's city Drawing Room, was his use of the same tied-back ruffled organdy curtains others used in ordinary spaces. Cut flowers and a profusion of plants were another hallmark of the masterful designer.
Eliminating the high stoop outside not only enabled White to widen his Drawing Room, he was also able to add in one corner, in place of the old front door, a bright, plant filled oriel window.
In every possible spot, White enlivened his Drawing Room with dynamic figures, frozen in motion, carved from marble, cast in bronze and made from gilded wood.
If the Hall's Vitruvian Scrolled frieze lends a light-hearted note to the space, the fireplace, crowned by a bust of Henry IV of France, though richly ornamented, is correspondingly sober. Composed from at least three different components, White's mantelpiece was untied by tone, texture and antiquity. A provincial French chair drawn beside the fire is in its humble simplicity, even more disarming than either the Bengal tiger skin or the tall palm trees.
As a convivial setting for superb meals, White's Dining Room featured eagle supported console tables which were the basis for those made for the White House State Dining Room, a columned screen and ceiling imported from Europe, a cassone utilized as a sideboard, ala Hitchcock's Rope, and towering rubber trees.
What did it matter, to an originator like Stanford White, if his over-mantel's scrolling volutes failed to fit on the chimney breast? The bronze on the mantel shelf is a reduction of Frederick MacMonnies' Bacchante that public outrage had banished from the courtyard of the Boston Public Library. The Levantine pierced brass censors, recalling Sargent's painting, were doubtlessly used to perfume festive banquets.
As in some swank restaruants of today, from a marble basin presided over by a marble figure of Silenus emptying a water bottle, the Whites' guests were able to select swimming trout to dine on. Besides a varied panoply of candles and oil lamps, as in Henry Villard's Drawing Room and elsewhere, White uses electricity. He has hung six glass bead covered light bulbs at strategic intervals around the room; what must the effect have looked like?
Over half a dozen harps and various other antique musical instruments adorned White's white and gold Louis Seize Music Room.
Supported by columns and a mermaid queen, once owned by Rome's noble Colonnas family, Stanford White's early 18th-Century harpsichord was particularly fine.
The fountain in the Stanford White residence on Gramercy Park North and Lexington Avenue. Formed from a Renaissance lavabo set against a wall of Hispano-Moresque tiles, it features a modern bronze figure amid well-chosen plants like the cast-iron plants on the terrazzo stairway's marble parapets. The essence of the appeal of these groupings is the authority with which an unrelated collection of parts from different periods and of different types, are made into a 'new' and pleasing whole.
Added to the end of an ell, White's third-floor picture gallery had a beamed, skylighted ceiling and a Baroque Spanish doorcase with a broken pediment and Solomenic columns. White’s collection of Renaissance and contemporary art was, with a few exceptions, was less superlative in terms of artistic quality, than it was decorative. As prized as classic neon trade signs of the 1930's-1950's are today, were the painted and guilded, iron and copper figuerative shop signs White collected. Note the ubiquitous tubbed bay trees and the imaginative idea of having a border, cut from a tapestry, hung from three pairs of stag antlers, as a window valance.
Arranged so as to promote guests' conversation and interaction, even empty White's antique chairs animated his rooms.
Flanked by heraldic marble lions, White's 16th-Century Henry II stone mantelpiece, carved with a strapwork interlace, displays no less than six frolicsome gilded boys as well a surreal-seeming mounted moose head. Through White's influence, both big game trophies and antique fireplaces became much admired elite status symbols.
Exuding intimacy, White's green sitting room displayed an eclectic collection of art made by his broad circle of friends. These works included Robert Van Vorst Sewell's redition of a bacchante above the wooden Federal mantel, graced by bouquets of peacock feathers.
With a nod to Santayana, many feel that history's greatest lesson is the ability it can afford one to travel back in time, to discover one's self, in the past. Regrettably this is not an experience open to all equally.
Former New York Governor David Paterson perhaps best expressed this aspect of alienation among those who are marginalized. Speaking in favor of protecting Harlem's threatened historic buildings, he once noted, "If a Polaroid picture was made of those assembled, what would everyone do as soon as they were handed a copy of the photograph? We would all look to find ourselves," he said.
Patterson continued by observing , "For those who have been undervalued traditionally, for African Americans and others, the problem has been, that, however hard we look, we can't find our image embodied in buildings, or books, or anything associated with 'our history'. We have been excluded from the picture."
This is how it's been for LGBT people, as well. We haven't easily been able to locate ourselves in records documenting great deeds and high accomplishments, either. All too aware of an important part we've played in history, frequently the evidence of our contributions is difficult to discern and even more tricky to interpret.
As a young viewer, for instance, I hardly appreciated that on one level, "Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte", besides being a wonderfully entertaining movie, was an early plea for preservation. Assuredly, in a work so often dismissed as a lurid soap opera, I failed to recognize one of the greatest movie scenes emblematic of liberation, including gay liberation, of all time.
No more readily, on my initial reading, had I seenBrideshead Revisited, for all that it is. This includes a subtle and sensuous seduction, intent on Roman Catholic evangelism. Surprisingly, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, turns out to be the same sort of multifaceted jewel. It is an element of the canon of artistic efforts which should be part of a required curriculum for all those who profess to be either L, G, B, or T.
So ought three biographies, which are among the finest I have ever read: Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30.00), The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings (Random House $35.00), and Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead,by Paula Byrne (Harper Collins, $25.99) .
Like Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, these thoughtful books are far more than merely pleasurable. They all share, as well a good deal beyond superb writing or the promised revelation of hitherto hidden scandals. They restore to people little known, long forgotten or only partially appreciated, the full glory of their greatness in three dimensions.
They are so exceptional that even the rare error only makes one lament the passing, in our time, of more capable editors. A proper grey top hat, which is always made from felt, described as a "gray silk hat", or a baronet's wife identified as "Lady Beryl," as opposed to Lady Rose, even Alice Roosevelt Longworth's, designation as Eleanor Roosevelt's "niece", as opposed to her cousin, can hardly mar volumes which establish such a distinguished continuum of LGBT themed scholarship.
Secret Historianis a painstaking reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. It's been drawn from the encoded, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and records of a novelist, poet, and university professor-turned tattoo artist and pornographer. Promising Samuel M. Steward, an intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas, a lover of Thornton Wilder, maintained a subversive sex life from childhood on. Stewart exhaustively documented these experiences with brilliantly vivid, sometimes quite funny style which, as he aged, grew more painfully poignant.
Overjoyed to be befriended and taken seriously by pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, until today Steward's many identities have been known to only a few. In addition to meticulously recording every particular of his sex life, Steward dared to write about gay subjects in academic work, poetry and other literary endeavors. These, along with taking the trouble to sleep with wayward Lord Alfred Douglas, were all rudiments of the difficult task he set for himself, to enhance the sequence of gay attainment.
In order to establish an historic link, Steward slept with the aged Lord Alfred Douglas who had so disastrously bewitched Oscar Wilde.
The more resistant society was to his exertions, the less oblique and more immediate Stewart was in relating that aspect of his life which he felt to be most important. Only after his death in 1993, did an extraordinary cache of Steward's long lost papers surface. They are the basis of Mr. Spring's unusually compassionate and penetrating life.
Steward embellished letters to pals like George Platt Lynes, and his modest apartment, with his own accomplished Cocteau-inspired drawings
One mightn't think that Samuel Steward, the Earl of Beauchamp, or W. Somerset Maugham, would have had anything at all in common, not apart from their 'inversion'. Ironically, to some degree, this indeed is what most closely links them together. But they were not bound solely in terms of mere sexual taste. Rather, as different as these men were, the books they read, the poetry they wrote and even the people they knew in common, made them a part of an international brotherhood, as richly endowed with secretive rituals and terms of expression, as widespread and influential as the freemasons.
Oddly enough, in a era when few people shared non-clandestine interracial relationships, this fraternity also included black people. Today some call gay, 'the new black'. To some degree that's due to how many African Americans once sought acceptance through a calculated evisceration of the self, too, doing all that they could to emulate the mores and manners of privileged whites. Such a stratagem, they felt, would earn them acceptance.
Similarly, many gay men and women who knew better, including the Earl of Beauchamp and Somerset Maugham, once routinely entered into conventional alliances with spouses of the opposite sex. Some of these arrangements even included children in obligatory picture-perfect houses. Erecting façades of plausible decorum and seeming conformity, many made a bid to arrange for a secret space in which to be themselves. Even Stewart, the renegade, was to consider this option, to seek greater freedom by leading a double life.
My dear friend Sophie Johnson Charles, who died in 2011 at 93, was one who made such a bargain, only with a fascinating twist. Black and lesbian, a 'double negative', she was a charter member of New York's African American Couples Club, founded in the 1940's.
Composed of committed gay and lesbian partners, attending club outings and dances at members' apartments, offered every semblance of respectability. Seeking greater security still, Sophie and her lover Miriam, engaged in an even more dramatic ruse. By legally marrying a club member, a man with a young boyfriend, and then adopting this young man, Sophie's odd ménage offered unassailable cover.
1947
Before Sophie met Miriam, "the love of her life", a painter, presented her with this wonderful self-portrait, painted in1948.
An acquaintance of mine, Bill Blizzard, was still another member of this club. Bill's lover was John Leaphart. Not long after Samuel Steward introduced Leaphart to famed photographer George Platt Lynes in 1952, Leaphart introduced Bill Blizzard to both. Initially concerned if these African Americans were hustlers who would expect money, Lynes, reassured by Stewart, was delighted to discover that the charming beauties were as amiable as they were hot. After completing just 40 pages, while communicating my admiration to Justin Spring for his innovatory success, and discussing Leaphart and Blizard via E-mails, Price speculated that sex, among gay men, might historically have been the ultimate equalizer.
"The point Price has," an older friend who knew Steward, Lynes, Leaphart and Blizzard observed, "is that sex across the color line, in addition to being fun because it was exotic, was defiant and viewed as progressive as well. But if it was a step toward equality, in which, whatever his status or income, a white man could never be as cool and knowing as a black man, could never have as huge and ferocious a dick, he still had that all-important social superiority. I attended Yale, but white men, like Lynes or Steward, still always gave one 'car fare' or put a couple dollars on the bureau for the 'laundry'."
Bill Blizzard.
1952: John Leaphart and John Leaphart with Buddy McCartny.
Other Couple's Club members included Royden Bigelow and his friends, Royden is wearing the smart pale blue dinner jacket
At a party Quentin Crisp once explained the gay penchant for working-class men as having to do with a human need to experience difference. While I have never discriminated between a beautiful white party waiter or a beautiful black student, the popularity of uniforms, tattoos and 'rough trade', has always struck me as strange.
Certainly the desire the three men under discussion felt for 'underlings' must have had something to do with a wish to retain masterful control, even as one surrendered to passion or domination. Beyond doubt each man disdained the effeminacy with which gays were stereotyped. The misogynist impulse that inspired the Panthers to denounce homosexuality as an imposition of white degeneracy on blacks, was possibly alive in each. By the 1960's, having fond hopes for many enjoyable times when he moved near black Oakland, Stewart was to be bitterly disappointed.
Replete with formal gardens, Spanish moss-draped-trees and an epic ax murder, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte,a late film vehicle for Bette Davis and Olivia De Havilland, is a magnolia-scented melodrama. Action is set within the environs of a handsome, colonnaded plantation house, scheduled for demolition. Corrupt county officials are hell-bent on building a new super highway, one that might easily have gone elsewhere. An aggrieved and envious poor relation, professes to want to help save the ancestral homestead. But actually, the Olivia De Havilland character can't wait to manipulate the situation and have her revenge, by stealing her petted and pampered cousin's 'undeserved' fortune!
Beyond pain and pathos, treachery and backbiting in lovely or memorable surroundings, this film and these three books exemplify an ongoing struggle for tolerance. High status and exceptional gifts, far from protecting their subjects, instead render each more vulnerable for attack. Targeted as outcast, each is 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, 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, inBrideshead 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. Ms. Byrne, the consummate researcher, offering much material that's new, but with all the flair of a popular star-novelist, 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...'
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.
W. Somerset Maugham as The Jester by Sir Gerald Kelly 1911. Kelly, who painted some 30 likenesses o of his friend , was loathed by his wife, who banished this superlative characterization which Maugham presented to the Tate
The focus of a half dozen earlier books, an acclaimed author and playwright with numerous works adapted into Hollywood movies, W. Somerset Maugham is the only person among this newly chronicled group who we think we already know quite well. Married to a fashionable decorator, and in spite of their little girl, Maugham was able to attend stag dinners where one could meet attractive, ambitious young men. Such events were hosted by other married gay toffs of Maugham's circle. One friend of this sort was Robert Tritton, American architect Ogden Codman's former secretary. Following his former employer's example, Tritton married a wealthy widow, became a noted antique collector, and never worked again. He even engaged his old boss to design his elegant country house.
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tritton at tea Godsmersham Park, Kent, by Rex Whistler, 1935
Waugh's second lover was met on an evening spent at Triton's table. Initially, Alan Searle had been merely a casual 'trick'. Compared by Maugham to a 'youth painted by Bronzino', Searle had already been kept by other older, affluent men. And this kind of indiscriminate fling was fine, so far as Mrs. Maugham was concerned. What utterly incensed Syrie Maugham was someone like Gerald Haxton, the dynamic, some said demonic, American, with whom her soon-divorced husband lived openly in a relationship not so different from her own, as his wife. Moreover, while Maugham adored and indulged Haxton, he was only fond of, then tolerant toward, and finally maddened by, the insensitive Syrie.
Cherishing a desire for fame and fortune, longing to be left unmolested in a way then impossible for exposed gays, Maugham's unhappy marriage is explained, in part, by his wish to be accepted. Unfortunately, it is also explained by the torment and rejection he suffered from a male lover, on whom he would base the character of Mildred in Of Human Bondage. Of his disastrous liaisons with various men and women, he wrote: "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me, I have been embarrassed... In order not to hurt their feelings, I have often acted a passion I did not feel."
Anyone who has viewed it, easily recalls the scene of Olivia De Havilland's, and her doctor-lover, Joseph Cotton's champagne-swilling. We suspect that their celebration is premature and we are right. For a fortnight this diabolical duo has been employing psychotropic drugs and every conjurer's trick in the book to make Davis relive the horror of her married fiancé's murder on the night of her debutante dance. It is a murder, which it turns out, she didn't commit, and they both know it.
Sadistically, they reinforce the guilt of her 'original crime', suggesting she has committed it anew. Moreover, at the end of their torments, the corpse, laboriously buried at midnight, will not rest, and it reappears by dawn.
Had she not been so inured by years of self-medication to salve her guilt, so heavily-doped was Davis that she might not have awakened so soon after her hellish ordeal. Hearing laughter on the piazza below, the scene of such recent gruesome events, she didn't comprehend at first that the very people she had so trusted, people doing their best to drive her insane, were laughing at her expense.
Davis wasn't long on the uptake. 'Can you see poor Cousin Charlotte's face when you, whom she has killed and buried, come walking in to sign her commitment papers?' a laughing De Havilland ask her dancing partner and partner-in-crime, Cotton. We see her face and the shock of realization so similar to, but different from, her earlier bewilderment.
For the briefest moment the co-conspirators, beneath Davies' perch on the gallery glimpse her reaction, too. They see it just as she shoves the ivy-planted cast-iron urn from its plinth, before it crushes them.
Beset by cruel advisories, Bette Davis in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, has only an oversize urn with which to stop their tortures. Thanks to Justin Spring, Selina Hastings, and Paula Byrne, the still benighted LGBT populace has three new masterful tomes among growing thousands, with which to less violently defend ourselves. Because of the dedicated labors of this trio, and other scholars who include Barbara Smith, George Chauncey, Martin Duberman, David Leddick, Thomas Wirth and Steven Watson, we can redeem our history, deliberately defamed and dismissively distorted, with a far more positive force, that's just as deadly decisive.
Wherever one ventures, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Akron, everyone knows, or knows of, her. “Another closing, another show!’ mused my friend, dance diva Sylvia Waters regarding her departure from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as the longtime artistic director of Ailey II, effective June 30, 2012. Wednesday evening the school hosted a goodbye cocktail reception honoring the glorious danseuse, who all agree is a brilliantly gifted teacher. She has lived all over the globe, including on Cabrini Avenue. A Harlem girl, born and bred Sylvia now lives Uptown close to her ever-young 90-plus-year-old mother, in the same building where I live, the St. Agnes, on Convent Avenue.
We met when I was about to enter Columbia to study Historic Preservation in 1987. I’d been living-in, on Park Avenue, working as a cook for Larry Silverstien and his family. The ground floor flat in the Convent Avenue townhouse Sylvia then owned was a perfect place to live, in part because besides being a divine, compassionate lady with innumerable interest, Sylvia is a superb cook and an unexcelled host!
She had grown up in a building around the corner on 148thStreet and attended nursery school in the Victorian mansion built by Nicholas Bensiger. In junior high school a gym teacher who wore suits and high heels and a girlfriend from the neighborhood both encouraged her nascent interest in dance. Continuing her studies Sylvia attended the New Dance Group on scholarship, The illustrious faculty included Alvin Ailey, Sophie Maslow, Donald McKayle, Muriel Manning, Jane Dudley, Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade. While earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Dance at The Juilliard School, Sylvia had lessons with Antony Tudor, Martha Graham, Alfredo Corvino, Ethel Winter, Helen McGhee, Bertram Ross and Mary Hinkson. Juilliard led to a scholarship at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance and also performances with Donald McKayle’s dance company.
Touring in the European company of Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity Sylvia subsequently moved to Paris. There, in every way imaginable, she fell in love. She appeared regularly there on television and worked with Michel Descombey, then director of the Paris Opera Ballet, and almost got a movie part that went to instead to Cicel Tyson.
Back home by 1968, fortuitously reconnecting with Alvin Ailey, Sylvia joined his company and achieved acclaim and stardom. In 1974 Alvin Ailey chose Sylvia to lead his junior troupe, the so-called Second Company, which even now acts as an incubator-like training ground neutering raw talents into great dancers. “Mr. Ailey gave me the greatest gift imaginable when he created a second company and asked me to take charge of it.”, said Sylvia, obviously touched so many decades latter.
In this teaching role Sylvia has guided and trained innumerable fledgling dancers who have gone on to glory, including Ms. Jasmine Guy and Robert Battle, the Ailey Company’s new artistic director. The roster of Sylvia’s students also includes dynamic Troy Powell. First enlisted to join the Ailey School through its outreach program, when he was only eight-years-old, by Alvin Ailey himself, Troy who served as Sylvia’s associate artistic director for Ailey II since 2003, now becomes her successor. “I congratulate Troy on a new role that I know means the world to him, and that he richly deserves. I can’t wait to see all the new ways that Ailey II will flourish with Troy’s inspired innovatory leadership”, Sylvia said.
Tributes from Ailey board members, from Robert Battle, from Sylvia’s friend and colleague , grand dame and Alvin Ailey Director Emeritus Judith Jamison, and from Troy Powell were all tearfully poignant. Love and warm wishes were all around and every kind of beauty was in the house. As Sylvia is celebrated for her distinctive élan, no one dared to half-step so far as their attire was concerned. Toilets were as inspired as they were varied. It was a marvelous party. So it was impossible to just go home afterward. My pal Val Bradley and I continued our merriment with dinner at a nearby Brazilian restaurant before going on to the Red Rooster. And then I went on to No Parking. It was a dark and sexy night. Thank you Sylvia!
Recent Comments