The catalogue cover for the Jewish Museum's new special exhibition, shows Helena Rubinstein in 1939 , dressed by Chanel in a dark dress with straw cuffs and wearing a trompe l'oeil braided straw hat, mimicking a coil of hair, by milliner Suzanne Talbot
Much like Iris Apfel today, exemplary of the originality and daring that is exceptional style, Helena Rubinstein is the subject of a small but carefully conceived and beautifully mounted retrospective exhibition. “Beauty Is Power,” will be on view at the Jewish Museum through March 22, 2015. With portraits, sculpture, photographs, cosmetic designs and packaging, clothing and jewels, it explores a life well lived, in which art and refinement were strategically applied to every aspect.
Irrepressible superstar of personal style, 94-year-old Iris Apfel, the subject of Albert Maysles' outstanding documentary, "Iris"
If only great faith makes it possible to fully appreciate George Herbert’s devotional verse, at least one observation of the 17th-century English metaphysical poet is quite easily grasped by any New Yorker: “Living well,” he wrote, “ is the best revenge.”
Agaton Strom for The New York Times
Bust by Elie Nadelman from the remarkable Rubinstein collection
Agaton Strom for The New York Times
A lifetime of portraits of Helena Rubinstein by various artists
The only rub then is all that is required for most who are not born to affluence, to carry on an enviable existence of elegant ease. How striking, in our highly unequal society, that outsiders born in rather modest circumstances sometimes, best pull-off this ultimate objective of doing well as they live and work in the Big City. Indeed the progress of those who start with little or nothing, occasionally exhibits far greater panache and verve than that of those equipped with a legacy of auspicious connections and prodigious means.
Bebeto Matthews
Tuesday October 28, 2014: Mr. Mason Klein, curator at the Jewish Museum, discuss portraits of cosmetics empress Helena Rubinstein, the subject of his special exhibition, "Helena Rubinstein: Beauty is Power"
1957: Graham Sutherland painting, “Helena Rubinstein in a Red Brocade Balenciaga Gown”, which made a mountain-like monument of an artful imp, who stood a mere four feet, ten inches tall
Red Brocade Balenciaga suit
An elegant compact spplied by Helena Rubinstein
1938: Helena Rubinstein portrayed in her New York apartment by Vogue Magazine
Lovely Sheila Stone, who started her advertising career interfacing sometimes with Ogelvy & Mather while working for the "demanding but incredible" Helena Rubinstein, a"role model like no other". How fortunate it was to meet Ms. Stone and her husband at the members' preview of "Beauty is Power"
Helena Rubinstein epitomizes this notion. A Jew from the shtetl she fled Krakow and an arranged marriage in 1902. Migrating from Melbourne, Australia, to London to Paris, drawn inevitably to the land of opportunity, she was safely in America by 1915. Here Helena Rubinstein was at the apex of a group of beauty entrepreneurs dominated by just three women. With Canadian Elizabeth Arden and African American Madam C. J. Walker, Helena Rubenstein both transformed the beauty industry and helped to formulate the very conception of all that American beauty entails.
Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein and Madam C. J. Walker's daughter, partner and heir, A'Lelia Walker. A trio of beauty queens who helped to improve their world, offering countless women hope and enhanced self-esteem
Her adult life of supreme stylishness, its glamorous splendor, a corollary to imaginative vision, great ambition and hard work, was ever like a biblical banquet perfectly prepared for her, as if by providence. Day in and out, it was served lavishly up before all those who had stood in her way. This life unlike that of most, quite closely mirrored the experiences of Elizabeth Arden and Madam C. J. Walker. All three found their way from obscurity to New York City. Through their own efforts, largely unaided, they made there way, living large, as both an advertisement of success and as an affront to oppression. Each held aloft an anointed head, bejeweled and arrayed in haute couture‘s ‘fine linen’, their golden goblets overflowing.
Circa 1909, Helena Rubinstein dressed by Worth
Circa 1911: Rubinstein by Paul Helleu
1924: Rubinstein wears a 1923 Paul Poiret dress
Circa 1936: Rubinstein dressed by Captain Edward Molyneux
Circa 1939: Madame Rubinstein wearing an elephant emblazoned bolero from Elsa Schiaparelli's sensational 1938 'Circus collection'
Helena Rubinstein wears a sequin and bead embroidered Chantilly lace Christian Dior gown and a starfish-shaped, Ecalle-designed ornament dominated by a splendid 84-carat sapphire
1938: Rubinstein by Cecil Beaton, wearing Schiaparelli's sari dress and cape with a massive jeweled cross and a mass of charm bracelets
Selections from a collector's treasure trove, whose vast jewel casket is a small filing cabinet, in which D-stands for diamonds, E-is for emerald, P-is for pearls and R-is for rubies!
An Edwardian diamond and baroque pearl necklace Helena Rubinstein stated was the first of many trinkets she purchased to assuage her rage following spats with her first husband, her "quarrel jewelery "
Renowned Mexican silversmith, William Spratling referred to this necklace as the "Rubinstein necklace" because it was initially designed for Helena Rubinstein. It appeared in Spratling's wholesale catalogues from 1942 until 1945 although the example above was made about 1939
Circa 1912: The second Paris beauty salon of Madame Edward Titus, who was soon to emerge professionally as Madame Helena Rubinstein
Circa 1936: Helena Runinstein's emporium designed by Harold Sterner at 715 Fifth Avenue. Contrasting with severely modern architecture, neo-Baroque and Victorian flourishes of the decor were at the vanguard of taste. The 1830's alabaster vases across from a neo-Classical work by de Chirico, inspired couturier Charles James, who used similar urns with a 'boquet' of a length of silk in his own atelier
Wiener Werkstätte silver flatware designed by Josef Hoffmann for the newly wed Mrs. Edward Titus in 1908
Self-made, reborn, each woman’s carefully crafted self-invention was rooted in an ability to enhance and amplify her own appearance. Elizabeth Arden came from Ontario. Born Florence Nightingale Graham, her mother had died of tuberculosis when Arden was just four years old. Her widower Scottish immigrant father supported his five children by peddling household supplies to farmers. Becoming a nurse after school, luckily, Arden came close to approximating the conventional ideal white Anglo Saxon standard of attractiveness. Scornfully declaring, “Nothing that costs only a dollar is not worth having.”, Elizabeth Arden focused her attentions on helping the elite to achieve the beauty that she believed to be their birth-right. Imperiously she quipped, only half jokingly, “There's only one Elizabeth like me and that's the Queen.” Alternately, she was never smiling when telling employees at her luxurious establishments, “Dear, never forget one little point. It's my business. You just work here.”
Circa 1905: Elizabeth Arden, 1884-1966
673 Fifth Avenue: The oval room of Elizabeth Arden's first New York beauty salon
Circa 1934: TheLos Angeles Elizabeth Arden beauty salon
Yearning for beauty with as much fervent wistfulness as any Astor or Vanderbilt, ignored, “tempest tossed” and formerly enslaved masses were left to Walker and Rubinstein. Workers were hardly their only clientele however. Such was the desire of all women to appeal to others and be admired, that ultimately, the promising nostrums this trio purveyed, found some adherents irrespective of class, age or race. Just as housemaids who lived in Harlem might splurge and buy an Elizabeth Arden lipstick, they had first tried out at work, so too certain dowagers on Park Avenue came to swear by Madam Walker’s preparations that allowed them, at last, to manage their unruly hair.
As though they were indeed royalty, all three beauty queens lived in gracious opulence, conveyed in fine cars, traveling widely and occupying more than one residence throughout the year. Each took care too, that their business premises be appointed to provide well-off customers with surroundings of reassuring refinement, commensurate to their dignity. Those who were less fortunate, they were also treated in such a way as to make them feel welcome, worthy and special. Much as movie theaters were devised as picture palaces, places that flattered even poor moviegoers with deluxe surroundings, the beauty salons of Rubinstein, Walker and Arden were calculated to help momentarily transport customers into a realm beyond the ordinary. For every bit as much as any specific potion, powder or polish, through a hospitable atmosphere, with solicitous and well-trained staffs, eager to please and pamper, they were selling fantasy and wish fulfilment too.
Circa 1908: Madam C. J. Walker, 1867-1919
Circa 1912
Circa 1909 and 1928: Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter, partner and heir, A'Lelia Walker
Born Sarah Breedlove, the only member of her family not born a slave, MadamWalker adopted the name of the second, of three husbands. Her daughter married three times and both died young. Yet whether with architecture or through generous philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, the Walkers utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how they distinguished their brand from every other similar product on the market. For the Walkers, as for Helena Rubinstein, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith
Madam Walker's log cabin birthplace at Delta, Louisiana
1918: The Walker residence-beauty salon, 108-110 West 136th Strret.
How adroit, for architect Vertner Tandy, Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia Walker Robinson, to do just what whites would have maintained they were incapable of. Employing what a century ago was regarded as the epitome of "good taste", they took their cue from the Park Avenue townhouse of Percy Rivington Pyne, II, Esquire, a picture of WASP decorum and rectitude, planned by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1911. Devising a hybrid Walker-townhouse-salon, they combined home and business, in one imposing structure in 1917, well before the idea was adapted by Helena Rubenstein in Paris, or at Bergdorf-Goodman and by Elizabeth Arden on Fifth Avenue
1918: The Reception and tea rooms of the Walker Beauty Parlor, College and Spa
1915: Light filled, with painted furniture, Helena Rubinstein's first New York beauty salon was designed by the Viennese modernist furniture designer, architect, painter, and writer, Paul T. Frankl. How reminiscent of this cheerful space the Walker's somewhat later beauty salon was
In his newest movie “Iris” the celebrated documentarian, Albert Maysles who first gained acclaim with “Gray Gardens”, follows the 94-year-old New York personality Iris Apfel. An interior designer and businesswoman of considerable ability, her remarkably personal fashion-sense has become far more famous than anything she has ever done professionally. Speaking of her budding courtship in the late 1940’s, Mrs. Apfel recalls how Carl Apfel, before they decided to marry, had confessed to a mutual friend, how although he was much taken with her considerable glamour, he felt that she ought to get a nose job. Unwilling to do what so many others did in order to fit in, that confidence might have been the end of things. Only, not long afterward, Apfel called to admire what Iris had been wearing that day, as he’d passed her on the bus. Even from a great distance, the dissimilarity of Iris’ alluring style had reached out to grab him
1918: A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom.
Although the old original mantelpiece and architraves were kept here, decorators Righter & Kolb, much like Stanford White at the Ogden Mills' estate, or Paul Frankl at the Rubinstein beauty salon, made them 'modern', with cream colored paint, matching new painted Louis XVI-style furniture
Madam Walker and Helena Rubinstein’s approach similarly was to encourage women to be their best selves by embracing and accentuating what made them unique. Early in the 20th-century, as now, promoted by modeling agencies, espoused by advertisers and disseminated by Hollywood, great effort was exerted to achieve a universal aesthetic. Not everyone was born with the much praised ’peaches-in-cream’ completion, or flowing, gently waving golden tresses, bright blue eyes, an aquiline or retroussé nose, a cupid’s bow mouth, and an athletic but curvaceous figure. None-the-less, incredulously, many sought through artifice, the very attributes they otherwise lacked. Certainly, neither Walker nor Rubinstein eschewed or ignored their epoch’s ‘ideal’ look. Rubinstein sold blond hair dye just as walker offered skin bleaching ointments. But by incorporating their own distinctive images in advertisements, images with an unambiguously ethnic identity, portrayals of women otherwise largely absent from mainstream media, both downplayed the importance of assimilation. Each emphasized instead, that through diligent grooming, one could cultivate beauty; not by aspiring to look like some iconic film star, but by perfecting who it was that you are.
1928: The Dark Tower, photographed by James Vanderzee
Already living at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue apartment by the mid-1920's, to better utilize the living space at 110 West 136th Street, A'Lelia Walker rented several rooms for private social and civic events, calling this enterprise, "The Walker Studio". Supposedly inaugurated as a gathering place for artists, another part of the house was also rented for gatherings and called the "Dark Tower", in reference to Countee Cullen's evocative poem. The Walker's former drawingroom was dominated in the redecoration by by Paul T. Frankl, Skyscraper bookcase, first produced in 1924. A Viennese furniture designer and maker, an architect, painter, and writer, Frankl was one of Walker's numerous acquaintances from Greenwich Village parties. The gold-stenciled light shade, also represent his smart handiwork
Circa 1928: 8 East 57th Street
Starting with her very first location in New York, Paul T. Frankl, who was also befriended and patronized by A'Lelia Walker, design several Helena Rubinstein salons. Here his famous Skyscraper bookcase dominates the minimalist modern interior he devised for Rubinstein in an elaborate old former town house
Skyscraper bookcase, by Paul T. Frankl
Habitually wearing pink was as close as Elizabeth Arden, a stable owner, whoes horse once won the Kentucky Derby, ever came to developing a notable personal style-sense. Some sources suggest that her two marriages were quite calculating. The first, in 1918, between Elizabeth Arden and Thomas Lewis, gained her American citizenship. Lewis served as Arden’s business manager until their divorce in 1935. His wife never permitted her husband to own company stock. Tellingly, after their split, Lewis went to work for Helena Rubinstein.
Circa 1927: The Walker's incomperable country retreat, Villa Lewaro
Courtesy of Ms. A'Lelia Bundles/aleliabundles.com
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
The glory that was Villa Lewaro.
The Walker's estate was realized in 1918 at a cost of $350,000.00. Although Helena Rubinstein boasted more dwellings and more resplendent collections, at a time when the average black New Yorker earned just $800.00 annually, Villa Lewaro was seen by African Americans as an otherworldly palace and a singular accomplishment. Disparity based on race in America, meant that Rubinstein at her peak of operation, took in more in a year, than the Walkers earned over a lifetime, yet how prodigiously they expended their wealth
Helena Rubenstein’s initial marriage was also to an American. Only she met publisher and bibliophile Edward Titus, in Paris. This alliance brought Rubinstein two sons and invaluable acquaintance with her intellectual husband’s literary and artists friends. Noted couturier Paul Poiret, for one, became a close friend of Helena Rubinstein. She admired the designer’s innate talent and taste. Both relished his festive bohemian parties alive with good talk and loud laughter, fueled by delicious food and wine. Many of Helena Rubinstein's discoveries, including Chanel and Picasso were made possible thanks to Paul Poiret, who most interestingly would also befriend and design clothes for Madame Walker’s daughter, partner and heir, the exuberant A’Lelia Walker, dubbed the ’Joy Goddess of the Harlem Renaissance’.
Circa 1912: A'Lelia Walker in a toque by her friend Paul Poiret
Courtesy of Ms. A'Lelia Bundles/aleliabundles.com
1926: A'Lelia Walker is shown in a cassock's uniform she purchased for a costume party
Courtesy of Ms. A'Lelia Bundles/aleliabundles.com
Circa 1930
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Well in advance of the Crash, late in the 1920s, Madame Rubinstein sold her company to Lehman Brothers. Shrewdly she retained a sizable block of company stocks. With the Great Depression, it’s value plummeting, she reacquired the outstanding shares to make this suffering enterprise more successful than ever before, After 30, years shedding her first husband, the father of her children, on taking a new mate, when past 60, she asked for and got a prenuptial agreement. Through this union with, still dashing Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, Madame Rubinstein was styled H H Princess Gourielli. Oddly enough, by coincidence, ‘That Woman’, as Madame referred to Elizabeth Arden, responded by wedding another Russian aristocrat, Prince Michael Evlanoff. Alas, where Prince and Princess Gourielli remained together happily until his highness’ death, the Evlanoff’s were rent asunder in less than a year.
For all of Elizabeth Arden’s prowess as the top supplier of beauty potions to the carriage trade, there was a way in which she remained every bit as much an outsider as Rubinstein and even Madam Walker. The relationship she shared with the notable, but notorious, liberal and lesbian literary agent Elizabeth Marbury, is said to have been quite chaste, by some. These same ’historians’ make the same pronouncement about Marbury’s earlier ‘close friendship’ with decorating pioneer Elsie de Wolfe. A well-born friend of mine, whose much older late life-partner had been a member of these women’s circle, refutes such claims. “These girls were human too. Oh yes, Miss Elsie might well to have feigned her utter distaste for being pawed and other earthy and pedestrian pleasures, But Bessie, she was a pistol. There’s no way that she would have countenanced or forborne such unfeeling behavior. None!…” In all events, it was this ‘friendship’ that in the full season of time, brought to Elizabeth Arden, Elizabeth Marbury’s diamond bracelet and her waterfront country place in Maine, which became the first of Arden’s Maine Chance spas for the super rich.
Elizabeth Arden and liberal and lesbian literary agent Elizabeth Marbury, depicted by the great gay artist Arthur Rankin
Drive and the pursuit of opportunity were half of what had motivated Madame Walker. Her only child, Lelia was the other part of this equation. The woman who became famous as A'Lelia Walker always came first where her mother was concerned. Neither possessing the requisite fragility, fair skin, or delicate features deemed necessary to be regarded as a beauty in her day, tall and statuesquely handsome Lelia made an impressive, even a striking appearance. Always the bright lights and good times of the big city beckoned alluringly to Madame Walker's child. In 1913 she had bade her mother to relocate with her from Indianapolis to the new Negro 'promised land' of Harlem, a quarter with as many dance halls, cabarets and saloons as churches, hundreds! The women attending church and bars mightn't be the same women, but Lelia pointed out, that all hundred thousand wanted to get their hair done before they went there.
So off to Harlem they ventured. According to historian Christopher Gray, in 1913 and 1915 Madam Walker bought two old-style brownstones at 108 and 110 West 136th Street. In 1915 she filed plans to completely rebuild the two houses as one with a new facade. This was the same way that many midtown and East Side row houses were being reconstructed. Walker created a hybrid Walker townhouse-salon, that combined home and business long before this idea was ever considered by Helena Rubinstein in Paris, at Bergdorf-Goodman or by Elizabeth Arden on Fifth Avenue.
Circa 1956: Above her famous red-doored beauty salon-day spa Elizabeth Arden had a penthouse apartment
Most of her life Madame maintained flats in London, Paris and New York. She additionally enjoyed two country houses in France and another, in America. It should go without saying, that in accordance with so impetuous a mistress, each residence was kept in perpetual readiness. Obtained on the eve of war, in 1938, her large flat at 24, quai de Béthune, llocated on the historic Île St.-Louis, was perhaps her favorite home. Not infrequently she exclaimed how, "I got it for a song, but the renovations cost me a fortune." Madame, the Princess Gourielli, was of course prevented from inhabiting her enchanting art-filled aerie during the Second World War. Nazis occupying it are said to have used sculptures for target practice, but the marvelous apartment survived.
24, quai de Béthune
Located on the historic Île St.-Louis, designed by architect Louis Süe and crowned with a vast roof garden with arresting panoramic views and an enormous reflecting pool, making it an ideal adjunct to entertaining in warm weather, stood Helena Rubinstein's final apartment in Paris
In Helena Rubinstein’s colonnaded grand salon, Louis Süe contrasted architectural restraint with furnishings fit for a queen. These included a magnificent gout grec Louis XVI center table and gilt chairs, designed by Georges Jacob. Madame’s suite of chairs were exceptional for retaining their still-vivid pictorial tapestry covers
An elevated alcove
Madame's dining room was graced by a Monet seascape and spiraling wall sconces
As often happened with Helena Rubinstein, her passion for the simplicity of Jean-Michel Frank's modernism, ultimately gave way to her enthusiasm for antique grandeur, supplied by the addition of an exuberant Napoleon III carpet and rocco-revival Belter furniture, reflecting the influence of the antiques dealer and decorator Madeleine Castaing
Rubinstein's African art was both of the highest quality and reflected her innovatory couinisureship
In Madame's bedroom Louis Süe covered the alcove walls and doors with pale yellow satin, diapered with gold cord. This was meant to suggest the surfaces of a suite of Charles X, mother-of-pearl veneered furniture, upholstered in white and silver damask
Following Helena Rubinstein's death, in the late 1960's socialite Doris Duke bought her mother-of-pearl clad furniture, for the very different sort of bedroom she occupied, at "Rough Point", in Newport
Madame's winter garden
The view from the center of the universe!
Over the 40-odd years Helena Rubinstein lived a part of each year in New York, she occupied four extraordinary, much-photographed, apartments. By far the most spectacular was her last, 625 Park Avenue, a mammoth 27-room penthouse triplex with 7 wood-burning fireplaces and a series of servants’ rooms on a hidden mezzanine between the 12th and 13th floors. Here she resided and entertained memorably for thirty years. Built in 1931, the decorous building was designed by one of New York’s most adept luxury-apartment-house specialists, architect James E. R. Carpenter.
James E. R. Carpenter's 625 Park Avenue
Informed the management did not lease to Jews, Princess Gouurielli bought the building
The gallery
The oak wainscoated, art-filled drawing room
A commodious pine-paneled dining room
A beautifully laid table
A Russian Easter buffet with roast suckeling pig
A rental when the recently remarried Princess Gourielli first investigated apartment suites there, like the majority of the East Side’s most fashionable buildings in 1941, number 625 Park Avenue refused to lease units to African Americans or Jews. Many, fearful of encountering such biases, avoided the embarrassment of rejection by self-segregating, in enclaves like the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. It comes as little surprise to learn that Helena Rubinstein had little interest in being relegated to anyone’s ghetto. Without hesitation, she bought the entire building and hired architect Max Wechsler of Wechsler & Schimenti to combined three apartments as her new abode, for $500,000.
Drinks on the terrace
A birthday buffet with shrimp, ham, turkey and champagne punch
Madame Walker, anxious to take her place among America’s ‘best society’, at least geographically, was thwarted in acquiring “Bishop’s Court”, a small estate in Queens, in 1917. When next she made a bid to live where the action and richest Americans were, aided by a white attorney, she succeeded. For nearly a century now, Walker’s now threatened “Villa Lewaro”, close to Jay Gould’s “Lyndhurst” and John D. Rockefellers “Kykuit”, has been one of the most conspicuous landmarks of Irvington, New York.
Featuring a 68-foot long oak-paneled living room, Helena Rubinstein’s last New York home brought together much of what she’d collected over a lifetime. One space was devoted to displaying dioramas with miniature rooms filled with diminutive furniture. An anteroom contained a set of Venetian shell-shaped grotto furniture that complimented murals painted by Salvador Dali. Breakfasting in her custom-made illuminated Lucite bed, a regal Madame, like a latter-day queen at her levée, enjoyed presiding over advertising presentations and other business meetings.
A morning conference. Madame's custom lucite bed cost just over $800.00 to make
The suite of lucite furniture included chairs
Madame was not above moving things around when a change suited her
Suzanne Slesin, Rubinstein’s journalist step-granddaughter, called the apartment “unforgettable!”, enthusing over it’s Aladdin’s cave-like treasures: a rare Matisse landscape, early Picassos, powerful Rouault tapestries, dozens of candy-colored Mexican primitive paintings, works by Miro, Chagall, Derain and Modigliani, Chagall, Utrillo and de Chirico; African and Oceanic figures. Indonesian, Louis XIV and American Victorian Belter furniture; Russian icons, opaline glass; hundreds of drawings and prints by Degas, Dufy and Leger, and everywhere, she recalled with nostalgia, smooth, unblemished classical marble heads by Elie Nadelman, purchased from the Polish émigré’s first London showing en bloc, in 1915!
A rare wooden bust by Nadelman on view in the display of "Beauty is Power"
Sadly, after Madame's death, when the building was converted into cooperative apartments, rival cosmetics tycoon, Charles Revson, bought the famous apartment and had McMillen redecorate, reducing all Rubinstein’s technicolor magnificence into a tastefully taupe backdrop not worth remembering. The sister of the Shah of Iran was the next owner. In the mid-1990’s Henry Kravis succeeded her, paying a then newsworthy price of $15-million.
Doing up a new Knightsbridge flat in 1960, Madame engaged the services of the young David Hicks, soon to become the jet set's darling
With one’s curiosity piqued by the Jewish Museum’s masterful exhibition "Helena Rubinstein: Beauty is Power", it’s good to know her eventful and improbable life has been otherwise amply documented. An early most entertaining effort was written by her charming, calm and capable gay secretary-factotum, Patrick O’Higgins. Madame, his bittersweet memoir, among the finest biographies ever written, deftly captures so much of the nuance, style, wry wit, and mad resourcefulness of a woman who reflected on how at 90, she still carried her lunch to work in a brown paper sack, saying, “as a teenager, it embarrassed me. But now I can do what I want. So it seems chic to me to take my lunch to work in a paper bag…”
Helena Rubinstein's charming, stylish, calm and capable gay secretary-factotum, Patrick O’Higgins. who imortalized her with his memoir "Madame", which narrowly missed being made into a film. On her death he was bequeathed $5,000.00 outright and $2,000.00 yearly for life
In Lindy Woodhead’s War Paint, Madame is paired in an amusing mud-slinging match with her archrival beauty queen Elizabeth Arden. Over the Top by Rubenstein’s kinswoman by marriage, journalist Suzanne Slesin, produced by Slesin’s Pointed Leaf Press, is a lavishly illustrated chronicle which has been critically accessed as ‘magnificent. The legacy Rubinstein’s son Roy Titus bequeath to his fourth wife’s children, certainly was munificent, and how fitting it is that it should have provided for the publishing house that produced this worthy tribute.
A more problematic appraisal of the mighty Madame comes from a new book, Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L'Oreal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good, by Ruth Brandon. It juxtaposes the rise of self-promoting, assertive, self-taught Polish Jew, Helena Rubenstein with that of social climbing, Nazi collaborator, French chemist, Eugene Schueller, of L'Oreal. The ultimate irony is how notwithstanding Hitler’s defeat and the demise of the National Socialists, it’s been L'Oreal that’s triumphed, both as the owners of Rubenstein’s firm and name and as an iniquitous force sullying everything in its wake. Some scandals associated with the company’s taint are profound, such as corrupt and covert contributions made to former President Mitterrand. Others, like lightening Beyonce's skin tone in a photograph, or engaging a white-only sale force at Macy's are almost farcical.
Yet the point of the book seems to be, two-fold: That even dead, Eugene Schueller‘s malevolence persists. While on the other hand, however heroic a role model Rubinstein might seem, making a place for women in the corporate world, and repeatedly battling misogyny and anti-Semitism, that she was no angle either. She is said to have failed Marc Chagall’s appeal for assistance to flee the Nazis and to have even failed to denounce the Germans before they murdered one her sisters.
Patron of inumerable groundbreaking artists and craftsmen, the benefactress of hundreds of individuals and numerous cultural intuitions around the world, what do even the worst failings of this imperfect but eternally fascinating woman, someone who improbably managed to change the world as she’d found it, matter?
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
Masterful magnate, Madame C. J. Walker, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1917: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1908
Circa 1910
Circa 1912
Near her life's end, Madame C. J. Walker averrrd that African Americans were a race that " has watered your soil with its tears and enriched your soil with its blood". She made an impassioned plea that lynching be outlawed, stating :
"I am asking that this government enact a law that will make mob violence and lynching a federal crime, so that our women will not be hanged from trees in Georgia while they give birth to their babes and that our sons, and our fathers, and our brothers may not be chained to the stake in Tennessee and made human torches of, and parts of their bodies dismembered and taken away as souvenirs, and their heads severed from their charred bodies and thrown into the midst of our august bodies while they are in convention assembled."
Racism, branding America's misbegotten black citizens as lazy, criminal and hedonistic, indifferent and willfully ignorant, is the height of irony. For what group, doing all the tasks no one else would do, has worked harder, or longer towards amassing our country's great wealth? Who has better undertaken and mastered all we pursue, with greater brio and originality? Which servants ever more faithfully enabled a sybaritic lifestyle for more exacting masters with discerning tastes for luxury?
Straight out of bondage some former slaves became doctors, teachers, artists and inventors. Others continued in essential, more menial tasks. Tilling the soil, refining ore, digging ditches, loading cargoes, cooking, nursing, cleaning---everything--- everywhere: We did that. Were we ever well treated or properly paid?
Today, still singled out, we disproportionately pay fines for minor infractions, and in this way and others continue to play a significant role economically. Brilliantly batting, bouncing, driving, slicing, and catching balls, blacks are the unsurpassed gladiators of today's circus. The plaintive songs of black youth, desperate to be loved and admired, exuding bravado and sensuality, wistfully expressing a yearning to be fabulous, to be free, are our national sound track. Yet who, among us, has benefited to the degree of recording studio or ball team owners?
Nothing is as unbearably frightening as blackness. So the controlling surveillance of black people, keeps employed mostly white forces of police and prison guards. From New Orleans to Detroit and beyond, blacks inhabit and give value to substandard, otherwise valueless housing. Then comes the time, when our tax dollars contribute to policies that subsidise gentrification and our dispatch. There is no more dependable TV audience than African Americans. Blacks also prodigiously consume quantities of unhealthily food and drink. Hindered, hobbled, held back, kept perpetually poor and uneducated, all we do makes others rich.
Yet for all we have done, for all we do, unrelentingly we are our nation's scapegoat. If blacks do not quite absolve the ineptitude of the man behind the curtain, reliably, African Americans are a wonderful distraction. Much as in Hitler's Germany, when Jews were systematically persecuted and denied participation in public life, ever-present ridicule and debasement in the media, literature, art, and texts, successfully served to dehumanize African Americas. Blacks were demonized to an extent that made oppression and unjustly punitive sanction accepted, as the distasteful, for some, but essential means of maintaining public order, as indeed, the means of preserving the norms of civilization.
Nowadays we face a subtler, more insidious sort of prejudice. But as the Doll Test shows, to be black in America, is to be dismissed as stupid, ugly and scary, is to be despised. My friend Adam Gopnik asserts further, that even in so enlightened a place as New York City, most comfortably-off, "Middle Class people are willing to dispense with a certain amount of civil liberty, in order to feel safe..."
In the past, political leaders such as William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and academicians like Alaine Locke, helped to stage-manage the "Negro Renaissance". A skillful propaganda campaign of the 1920's, featuring African American cultural accomplishment via dancers, painters, actors, singers, writers and musicians, it was meant to show that blacks merited equality too. 'Race women,' like Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter A'Lelia, who dubbed as the Joy Goddess of Harlem, became a great personality of this period, also worked and lived to affirm the worthiness of African Americans.
Because such efforts sadly remain necessary for black well-being and fulfilment, for black survival, it's fortunate that young intellectuals, film makers and others are at work now to challenge black defamation.
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, is Thomas Allen Harris’s extraordinary new documentary. Produced in collaboration with pioneering photography historian Debora Willis, it is a unique examination of the way black photographers selected and represented their subjects in a way that let them use cameras as a powerful weapon to fight back against alienating stereotypes.
Thomas Allen Harris’s documentary, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, is a compelling examination of the way black photographers effected social change with prideful images
Blackbird, a new feature film made by Harlem's Patrik-Ian Polk, similarly explores how hate and alienation, particularly when internalized, can be terribly destructive. Polk's timely drama centers on a talented teenage singer troubled by adolescent conflict.
Even in a hip spot like Harlem, messages of intolerance and contempt for difference thrive. Uncontested they endanger our children, poisoning the psyche of kids who haven't even discovered who they are, with fear and self -loathing. Worse, they feed the insecurity of some and lead to harm, like the senseless murder of lovely Islan Nettles last year, that took place in broad daylight, in front of a police station.
His faith, family, and friends all dictate that he adhere to a conventional identity acceptable in the sleepy Southern Baptist hamlet where he lives. Like the rest of us, he has to learn to accept and love himself. Turmoil only comes to an end once he stops allowing others to determine who that is.
Begiling and beautiful newcomer Julian Walker, starring in Blackbird with Isaiah Washington and Mo'Nique, manifest the full diversity that enriches America.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time...James Baldwin 1963
May 25, 1911: Laura Nelson and her 15-year-old son L.D. Nelson were lynched in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. In their day, they were Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
Eager to have lynching outlawed, just prior to her death, Madame C. J. Walker pledged $5,000, then the cost of a Cadillac touring car, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's anti-lynching fund. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968
Ever-present danger of degradation, humiliation and physical harm, has long constrained the black condition. Much as in Hitler's Germany, when Jews and others were systematically persecuted and denied participation in public life, ridicule and debasement; in the media, literature, art and texts, successfully served to dehumanize African Americas to an extent that made oppression and unjust punishment, accepted as the distasteful, to some, but essential means of maintaining public order, and indeed, the norms of civilization.
A century ago Madame Walker and others faced a world in which black advancment was threatening to many. African American aspiration and assimilation were caricatured as unknowing impudence.
Today, some contend that racism has evolved, that social strife is based merely on class instead of the color of one's skin. However, as always, with a majority of African Americans experiencing disparate and inferior outcomes compared to whites, class-based biases are a distracting distinction, without difference. Too many examples of discrimination and ill-treatment toward blacks, irrespective of their education, income or attainment, exist to suggest that even now, class trumps race. Indeed, much as with charter schools, where the chosen few are better educated at the expense of the most poorly prepared-many, black success is in fact, often transformed into an indictment. Based on the evidence of the few who beat the odds, those who fail, are frequently condemned as indolent.
1902: AidaOvweton Walker's anthem of upward mobility was savagely parodied as, "A Colored Declaration of Blue Blood"
As exemplified by Madame C. J Walker, or the trendsetting Broadway artist, Aida Overton Walker, (no relation), who preformed before white socialites, British royalty and aristocrats as well as large and appreciative black audiences, Negro High Society, has always constituted a meritocracy. Ancestry per-se, apart from white ancestry, was never accorded the same importance attached to education and enterprise.
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
One can usually get a pretty good result approaching history as one might an over-sized portrait by Pearlstein or a pointillist painting by Seurat. Only finding the proper perspective does apparent chaos coalesce into discernible order. This is how two observations, from different eras, written by two quite different men, converge to perfectly explain a most improbable house.
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sara Breedlove McWilliams Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro", as nice as it is, is hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
Monticello, 1769-1809 by Thomas Jefferson
Introducing the first dome on an American house, counting the cellars, Monticello has around 11,000 square feet of living space.
Ickworth, 1795-1830 designed by Mario Aspurcci, executed by Francis and Joseph Sandy, laocated at Horringer, Burry St. Edmunds. Suffolk, England
Not completed until well after the death of its builder, connoisseur collector Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol, in 1803, Ickworth, with its central rotunda and curving wings, was truly a temple of art. Monticello, by contrast, is not even as large as the servants' quarters here.
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to historic Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madame Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Despised and rejected enough, assailed by sorrows and grief, a little more than a century ago, Madame C. J. Walker surly appreciated the notion of "black rage". But as with some other subjects of outstanding success stories, she determined early on to subdue and submerge fury, translating any inner anger into a passion to succeed.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an 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 distinguished 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.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
Restored and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washinton Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madame Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and welcomed my interest. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madame Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madame C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglas lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to save "Cedar Hill" prior to it being opened to the public, came from Madame Walker
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madame Walker's house into a museum.
Alonzo Herndon residence, 587 University Pl., NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 1910
A former slave raised in a sharecropping family, after the Civil War Herndon owned and managed a string of barbershops. Investing profits into real estate, becoming the largest black property owner in Atlanta by 1900, Herndon next founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, to become Atlanta's first black millionaire. Maintained as a museum, W. E. B. Dubois praised Herndon’s Georgian Revival house as, ‘the finest residence in America owned by a Negro.’ At the time of this statement, naturally, Villa Lewaro had not yet been built.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
Number 1048 Simpson Road, (now Joseph E. Boone Boulevard ), Atlanta, Georgia, erected 1926 by the African American Aiken & Faulkner Construction Co. located on Auburn Avenue: demolished 1962
In 1926, the year he built this house, Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, famed as the "Fighting Georgia Deacon" became the first black boxer to win the world middleweight championship. Less than a year later, cheated out of his title in a rigged bout, in November 1927, at thirty-two, Flowers died. He died in Harlem, undergoing surgery to remove scar tissue above his eye. His magnificent house, featuring a plaster bas relief of a tiger's head above the drawing room door, was demolished in 1962
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madame Walker built.
Stylishly of its time, even the house architect-to-the-stars, Paul Revere Williams built for himself in Los Angeles, in 1951, fails to approach the opulence of Villa Lewaro
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles says, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madame Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madame Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Supporting the burgeoning National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's agenda of empowerment, eager to benefit from the growing circulation of Du Bois' The Crisis, Walker signed on as one of the magazine's earliest advertisers, advising potential customers in a half-page ad: "Your hair will not be beautiful unless it is healthy."
In 1917, following yet another unwarranted assault of blacks by whites, this time in East St. Louis, Walker and James Weldon Johnson were in a small delegation sent to the White House, pleading with President Woodrow Wilson to make lynching a federal crime.
"We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible,"
Walker said.
On July 28, heeding Walker's exhortation, the N.A.A.C.P. staged a "Silent Protest" parade in New York that attracted 8,000 participants marching in silence to the staccato tattoo of drums up Fifth Avenue, arm-in-arm, dressed in white, they did then, what people in Freguson, Missouri are still doing today.
The protest was organized by the Rev. Dr. Hutchens Chew Bishop; the rector of St. Philip's Episcopal Church. In the same year the NAACP was founded, St. Philip's vestry, made up of some of the city's most distinguished African American residents, had sold their church building on West 25th Street.
By 1911 they completed a new Neo-Gothic-style church, at 214 West 134th Street, also designed by architect Vertner Woodson Tandy, in partnership with Cooper Union-trained, George Washington Foster the first African American architect lisenced in New York State . At the same time, eager to participate in the creation of a black Mecca at Harlem, St. Philip's acquired ten six-storey new-law tenement buildings at
107-145 West 135th Street. Costing $640,000, these apartments where filled with white occupants, who were evicted to make way for blacks. This action was envisioned as an investment that would generously endow the 'nation's richest colored church' for generations to come. By far the transaction was the most extensive, involving black capital, up until that date. Currently valued at 20 times their appraisal in 1910, these structures now belong to the Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund, which plans to make them both environmentally friendly and affordable.
Confined to her bed due to failing health, on May 5, 1919, a critically-ill Madame Walker sent word to the NAACP's Anti-Lynching Conference at Carnegie Hall:
She would pledge $5,000 to the group's efforts to combat mob violence. This largest pledge the Association had ever received created a sensation. Madame Walker's announcement electrified 2,500 assembled delegates, inspiring over the course of the convention, primarily from black delegates, $4,400 in additional pledges. Three weeks later, on May 25, says her great-great-granddaughter and biographer A'Lelia Bundles, Walker died at her imposing estate at Irvington-on-Hudson, Villa Lewaro.
Reading of her earlier travels as a sales person, to Cuba, the Caribbean, and in Central America, one marvels at Madame Walker's stamina. Attempting to follow her cross-country progress from Mississippi to St. Louis, to Denver, to Pittsburgh, before settling and building her factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, all in the space of less than a decade, is downright exhausting. Walker's Vegetable Shampoo, Wonderful Hair Grower, Temple Grower, Glossine and a prepairation called Tan-Off, the inevitable skin bleach, were produced at the Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company factory in Indianapolis. In response to orders cases were shipped for distribution by a wide network of sales agents and beauticians. The arrangement worked wonderfully for Madame Walker. Reportedly, she was happy living in Indianapolis as well. Why then, did she leave?
How adroit, for Vertner Tandy, Madame C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia Walker Robinson, to do just what whites would have maintained they were incapable of. Employing what a century ago was regarded as the epitome of "good taste", exercising disciplined restraint, they used Charlston's renowned Nathaniel Russell house and Boston buildings built from the 1790's through the early 1800's as the model for their hybrid Walker townhouse-salon, that combined home and business long before it was ever considered at Bergdorf-Goodman or Elizabeth Arden.
Ambition and opportunity were half of what had moved her. Her only child, Lelia was the other part of the equation. The woman who became famous as A'Lelia Walker always came first where her mother was concerned. Frequently she was cross about her extravagance, yet, repeatedly, Madame Walker indulged her child. She was also ambitious for Lelia, for whom she desired to provide all that she had missed, including Paris hats, travel abroad and an education. That rarest of rarities, a Negro heiress, her mother was right to fear that some would attempt to take advantage of her daughter. However, her daughter also made Madame Walker proud. Neither possessing the requisite fragility, fair skin, or delicate features to be regarded as a beauty in her day, tall and statuesquely handsome Lelia always made an impressive, even a striking appearance. Moreover, true intelligence and common sense underlay Lelia's impulsiveness and occasional self-indulgence. Always, not unlike Sportin Life in Porgey n' Bess, the bright lights and good times of the big city beckoned alluringly to Madame Walker's child. In 1913 she had bade her mother to relocate with her to the new Negro 'promised land' of Harlem, a quarter with as many dance halls, cabarets and salons as churches, hundreds! The women attending church and bars mightn't be the same women, but Lelia pointed out, that all hundred thousand wanted to get their hair done before they went there.
So off to Harlem they ventured. According to historian Christopher Gray, in 1913 and 1915 Madam Walker bought two old-style brownstones at 108 and 110 West 136th Street. In 1915 she filed plans to completely rebuild the two houses as one and give them a new front, in the same way that many midtown and East Side rowhouses were being reconstructed
Window in blind arch at the Nathaniel Russell house
On the second floor, the main level of Madame Walker's residence. drawings show a double-size drawing room stretching the full width of the building. Three "chambres" occupied the remainder of the second floor. A billiard room and other additional bedrooms were found on the third floor.
When the Walkers next decided to build a country house, neighbors were horrified, first seeing 'the dressed up Negresses with their comically aloof airs in a chauffeur-driven automobile' pull up. But her white lawyer had secured the deed for Villa Lewaro's acreage, fair and square!
Ultimately, devising a combination residence-spa-beauty salon-school for the Walkers, Vertner Tandy took his cue from the townhouse of Percy Rivington Pyne, II, Esquire. Bowing to the Federal style prevailing during the early republic, it is a picture of WASP decorum and rectitude. Planned by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1911, it stands on the north-west corner of Park Avenue, at 68th Street, serving as the Americas Society.
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.
Madame C. J. Walker's residence, numbers 108-110 West 136th Street, with the Walker chauffeur-driven Lincoln touring car.
Once A'Lelia Walker moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 80 Edgecombe Avenue, she transformed her mother's grand abode into a deluxe catering hall, the storied Dark Tower, where the best parties were always the ones she gave.
The Reception Room of the Walker Beauty Parlor, College and Spa.
Two photographs staged to show styling, care and wig making techniques in the Walker'sLelia Beauty College manual.
In reality, the Walker's clients were groomed and styled in private, curtained booths. While awaiting an appointment, one could take tea or play a hand of cards.
Drawing room, Madame C. J. Walker residence
For bedrooms and other lesser interiors, architect Vertner Tandy economically retained the configuration and old-fashioned Victorian woodwork original to the two 1890's row houses combined to form the Walker townhouse-beauty salon. However, for this space and other formal reception rooms, every component was newly built.
A grand piano, an 18th-century French tapestry fragment and an allegorical statuette were among the elegant elements of decorators, Righter & Kolb's chic decor.
Madame Walker and her daughter so admired this depiction of Terpsichore, the muse of dance and chorus, that it was moved and given place of honor in Villa Lewaro's white and gold music room
Equipped with a Chickering piano, a phonograph and serviceable, comfortable tufted-leather seat-furniture, including a platform rocking chair, the Walker's living room was meant for relaxation.
Retaining Victorian mahogany wood work, complimented by richly colored walls, the Walker living room also prominently displayed a tapestry depicting a battle scene from African history
A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom
Although the old original mantelpiece and architraves were kept here, Righter & Kolb, much like Stanford White at the Ogden Mills' estate, made them 'modern', with cream colored paint, matching the painted Louis XVI-style furniture
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured in A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom, later moved to the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
Initially disdainful of Madame Walker, as he and many were, of all women seeking political influence, Washington's rebuffs provoked Walker's equivalent of Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman? speech. Learning in this way of Walker's wealth and charity, the most notable black man in America soon conceded that Madame Walker was surly the nation's foremost black woman.
Walker's retort on being discouraged from addressing the National Negro Business League Convention, over which Washington presided in 1912, might to have been etitled "And, Am I Not an Unqualified Success!?" It went in part,
“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations….I have built my own factory on my own ground...”
1928: The Dark Tower, by James Vanderzee
Already living at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue apartment by the mid-1920's, to better utilize the living space at 110 West 136th Street, A'Lelia Walker rented several rooms for private social and civic events, calling this enterprise, "The Walker Studio". At a dinner featuring spaghetti, for which she was acclaimed, Walker announced to assembled artists, who included Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurmon, and Richard Bruce Nugent, that she would inaugurate a gathering place for them, a club-tea shop. It was to be called the "Dark Tower", in reference to Countee Cullen's evocative poem. In due course a local sign painter emblazoned the drawing room walls with the Cullen poem, as well as Hughes' "The Weary Blues". Unfortunately, although a popular venue for parties hosted by the well-off, Harlem artists could neither afford the rent, nor, according to Nugent, even the price of refreshments.
Skyscraper bookcase, by Paul T. Frankl, first produced in 1924
A Viennese furniture designer and maker, an architect, painter, and writer, one of Walker's numerous acquaintances from Greenwich Village parties, Frankl contributed to the Dark Tower's decorative scheme. Both a variant of his well-known bookcase and the gold-stenciled light shade, represent his smart handiwork.
1926: A'Lelia Walker is shown in a cassock's uniform she purchased at Wanamaker's in New York, for a costume party at Webster Hall
Number 80 Edgecombe Avenue
Her mother ill, soon to die, A'Leia Walker had been about to remarry in 1919. She planned to move to a corner house she'd acquired for her new husband, Dr. Willey Wilson, at 138th Street on Strivers' Row. Even subsequent to her third failed marriage, A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy instead lived here, in a one bedroom walk-up apartment with her friend, driver and companion, Mayme White
Even Madame Walker's heiress daughter was adversely impacted by the Great Crash in 1929. Forthwith, 108-110 was leased to the city, for a much needed Harlem health clinic. A year later, it was sold outright. By 1947, the one-time home to the rollicking Dark Tower, was no more. It was replaced by a public library branch, ironically, named for A'Lelia Walker's friend, poet Countee Cullen.
How much, one dares to wonder, might it take to restore, on the outside, Vertner Tandy's elegant architecture of such rare refinement?
The trek from Reconstruction, to the dawning of the "The New Negro" and the "Negro Renaissance," had been one long sojourn, from far away. One sometimes wonders, having been treated as bestial, or as child-like property, just how did former slaves and their young, learn to live and think and thrive in the world; to be human again, like our ancestors? Most of all one is filled with wonderment, that so many who started as field hands, accomplished so much.
Sara Breedlove, born December 23, 1867, to sharecroppers, Owen and Minerva Breedlove, had a youth filled with hardship. Her girlhood home, a ramshackle cabin at Delta, Louisiana, lay just across the Mississippi from the bustling port of Vicksburg. Her parents and siblings were slaves on Madison Parish Plantation owned by Robert W. Burney. Alone among them, her parents, sister and five brothers, Sara was born 'free'. Orphaned at the age of six, her sister and her sister's husband, Willie Powell, had taken her in. At age fourteen, she married a much older Moses McWilliams, a move motivated in part, out of eagerness to escape the cruelty of her wicked brother-in-law. Her daughter Lelia McWilliams (A'Lelia Walker) was born three years later. Only twenty, Mrs. McWilliams' husband died, prompting a move to St. Louis where three of her brothers lived, working as barbers. What limitations women endured. Black women, like black gay men, constituted a 'double negative.' The Widow McWilliams' brothers were barbers, but she could only manage to obtain employment as a lowly washer woman. Yet it was in this capacity, as a laundress, that she was exposed to luxury at an early age: her arduous work took her inside some of the South's most stately houses.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Long after her escape from poverty, Madame Walker enthralled audiences with her recollections of perseverance and faith. She would recall how she had asked herself while laboring over a washtub: "What are you going to do when your back gets stiff and you are old? Who is going to look after your little girl?"
She said the answer came in a dream in which a secret hair-conditioning formula was revealed to her. This had all occurred with the World's Fair as a backdrop, circa 1905. Not long after she became a sales agent, offering products on commission for African American hair care entrepreneur Annie Malone, she also remarried. Charles Joseph Walker was a Denver newspaper advertising salesman.
Walker wasted no time in persuading his wife to go into business for herself. Paralleling Helena Rubinstein, as Madam C. J. Walker, she trained other women, working for her, to become "beauty culturists" and as she had done, and to master the art of selling. Traveling throughout the southern and eastern United States with her husband, Madame Walker rapidly expanded her business. Once Walker became complacent and self-satisfied, his wife reluctantly left him behind.
Retaining the name her hard work had made into a brand, Madame Walker was inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, to organize her sales agents into local and state clubs. By 1917 she convened her first annual conference of the Madam Walker Beauty Culturists in Philadelphia.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Already providing black women with something difficult to imagine, interesting work with good pay, that allowed creativity, and an alternative to the limited options of nursing, prostitution, teaching or domestic service, she now gave more. Prizes were awarded, but not only to the women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new sales agents. Those who had contributed the most to charity and to their communities, were rewarded as well.
Walker's business instincts were brilliant: she realized that black women, while welcoming a way to adapt their hair to the prevailing fashion, were nevertheless proud of their racial identity. She always advertised her hair straightener as a "hair grower." Through Walker College, she offered opportunities that not only increased company profits but trained hundreds of women to take control of their destinies.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 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.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a Colored person. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Mme. Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
The Villa Lewaro mansion Vertner Tandy designed for Madame Walker in exclusive Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, started to be restored in the 1980s by Ingo Appel. In the following decade this comendable undertaking was completed by Harold Doley, shown here with his wife Alma and their son. A native of New Orleans, Mr. Doley was the first black to buy an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
Madame C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madame Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madame Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
From Villa Lewaro's garden elevation, where an elevator bulkhead seems to have been added to the roof-line, three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while the archway leads into the kitchen light well and a service entrance.
Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Bol
Madame Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid disonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the center table in Villa Lewaro's living room was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
Two steps down, entry into the living room from the entrance hall was planned so that the arrival of each new guest joining a group, could be clearly observed.
At pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies, Tandy cut corners for Madame Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber. The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons gracing the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madame Walker's generous philanthropy.
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apearently was employed by Righter & Kolb. The formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Thirty other rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madame Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam New, newspaper, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner service, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
Villa Lewaro, the living room in recent years
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madame Walker, was engraved with her second husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
Villa Lewaro, dinning room in recent years
Villa Lewaro, the library
1904: The East Room at the White House offerd inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and publi: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madame Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed. Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches.
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madame Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
2012
1995
From the music room, through the door into the Villa Lewaro solarium, can be glimpsed stained glass windows added to make the demilune space into a chapel
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
Villa Lewaro's master bedroom today
Madame Walker initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madame C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerrie Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
It is all like the birthday party a minor royal prince staged for his beloved daughter and only child, a century or so ago.The widespread gardens where the event was celebrated were strewn with an endless, but tangled length of silken ribbon. The beginning was placed in the girl's expectant hand and she followed it, until she came upon a pile of rose petals. Hidden at the bottom she discovered a diamond ring. Uphill and down, the ribbon continued. Intermittently it led to new hiding spots, each revealing its bijoux; from necklace to bracelets, from rubies, to emeralds, the connection continued, with each new discovery, more precious than the last.
After A'Lelia Bundles, perhaps Nichelle Gainer is our most recent precious prize? For her wonderful blog posts have already let us know just how marvelous her soon-to-be delivered book, Vintage Black Glamour is certain to be.
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with Egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madame Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madame Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 12,275 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some at the top.
Madame C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Mme. Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. She started out as Madame Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, in this way she could learn and expand her vocabulary.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerrie Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmy 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. Jimmy is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
Circa 1914: 'Babs,' Irene Gibson, (1899-1973), the daughter of famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and the renowned beauty Irene Langhorne, she became Mrs. John J. Emery in 1926
Circa 1922: John J. Emery, (1898-1976)
Based on his commissions to modern artist, Alexander Calder, Saul Steinberg and Jean Miro, for embellishments for the eighth floor lobby of his Terrace Plaza Hotel in downtown Cincinnati, John J. Emery’s, (1898-1976), residence might come as a surprise. For Peterloon, his 1,200 acre estate at Indian Hill, had beyond question, the handsomest, most commanding Georgian revival house ever built in Ohio. It was completed after two years, at the start of the Great Depression, in 1930. During construction, the Emerys occupied a specially built smaller Delano & Aldrich house nearby.
Circa 1929: Peterloon
2014
Restrained but hardly severe, in terms of an imposing scale and outstanding craftsmanship, Peterloon easily rivals earlier, more ornate examples of this acclaimed firm’s better known country houses on the East Coast.
2014
At least two certainly figured in their selection as architects by the Emery’s in the first place. Ultimately becoming a close family friend, in 1924, William Adams Delano had designed a unique, partially moated house. Chelsea, on Long Island, was built for John Emery’s sister, Alexandra Emery Moore. Mirador, in Virginia was an extensive remodeling done three years earlier. The girlhood home of Mrs. Emery’s mother, who was also named Irene, it had been transformed by her cousin, Nancy. Nancy Tree, as Nancy Lancaster, from 1944-1994, while a silent partner in the design firm Colfax & Fowler, would help to establish the classic English Country House style of decoration.
Orphaned in 1914, then, Nancy Perkins, she had been taken in by her aunt Irene, who was married to Charles Danna Gibson, the famous illustrator. Thereafter Nancy and her young cousin Irene Gibson became like sisters: with all of the emotional complexity that this entailed. Bowing to society together each subsequently served as the maid and matron of honor in, what proved to be the other’s first marriage. Newly-wed Irene had built a grand country house far larger than Nancy‘s. But the house that Nancy lived in, the ancestral family place, gave her higher standing in a lifelong contest as to who could have the best clothes, jewels, horses, children, cars, servants and houses.
First married to the stockbroker grandson of architect George B. Post, George B. Post, Jr., as a divorced mother of two, in 1926, Irene Gibson Post, wed John Emery, a First World War veteran educated at Groton, Harvard and Oxford. Although both had partly grown up in New York, two years previous to their wedding, Emory moved to Cincinnati.
Almost a century before, emigrating from England, his family had established a candle making concern here that evolved into Emory Industries and a real estate development firm. Here too, Delano & Aldrich played a part, as the designers of two innovative commercial projects undertaken by young Emery, that still add distinction to the city‘s skyline.
Abandoning Virginia in 1924 for England, where her second husband entered parliament, Nancy soon acquired a country seat that only helped to fuel the "sibling rivalry" with Babs, as cousin Irene was known. Surely, the involvement of William Delano at Kelmarsh Hall had only helped to make him all the more attractive as a designer for Peterloon.
Embellished by a dolphin on a shell, the finial of the broken scrolled pediment of Peterloon's baroque style stone door-case, is a reoccurring motif. So are the crossed arrows of the transom light. Illusions to hunting and love, inside arrows support the curving staircase railing.
U-shaped, Peterloon has a rectangular main pavilion of seven bays. Five levels are artfully disguised as two and one-half stories. Holland brick, stone quoins, a projecting, three-bay, pedimented center block and attenuated chimneys, are all reminiscent of Kelmarsh, strongly suggesting a comparison that was neither accidental nor unconscious. So too, do twin, two-storey service and guest wings. Bordering the deep, graveled fore court, they are connected to the principal section of the house by arcaded, one-storey hyphens. All and all, the house boast 36 rooms, 21 bathrooms and 19 fireplaces.
Matching pavilions and arcaded wings flank Peterloon's dignified forecourt
More dolphins
Planned by Albert Taylor of Cleveland who had started his career at Stan Hywet Hall, the undulating setting at Peterloon was as carefully balanced as a symphonic orchestration. Architectural organization and hauteur, wilderness and soaring, surprise vistas, all have a place.
Positioned along a shallow, formally paved terrace, the garden front sits atop a broad, semi-elliptical, grassed plateau. Both house and lawn overlook a lower balustraded terrace with a round swimming pool. The woodland landscape beyond, surrounds a seven acre lake.
September 1980: Emery-style entertaining on the terrace
Peterloon's broad grass terrace
Peterloon's round terrace pool
In fenestration, Peterloon’s front and this elevation are nearly identical. The most significant departure occurs above the high, first floor French doors. Corresponding windows on the façade are surmounted by aligned octagonal openings. At the rear, these unusual windows, which light a service-mezzanine, are substituted with sandstone tablets, modernistic bas reliefs that portray farm animals.
An exception is the double-height stair hall. To the right of the main entrance, its gracefully winding flight has spare iron and brass arrows that support the curved railings.
The stone mantelpiece in the entrance hall at Peterloon is a rare Renaissance example
The reception room
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Peterloon's service stair and a mezzanine window
Located facing the garden, the principal reception rooms, the dining room, library, and drawing room, each occupy a story and a half, measuring 16 feet. This extra height eliminates the space that’s devoted on the front to the mezzanine. One reason for the exceptional height of these spaces, devoted to entertaining, was the reuse at Peterloon of antique, English paneled rooms.
Complete with an arcaded over mantle, the oak gunroom dates to the end of the 1500’s. Adorned with floral festoons, gamboling putti, and crossed palm fronds, the drawing room, which measures nearly 30x40 feet, dates to the 1680’s. Salvaged from Lord Bath’s demolished Carolean style mansion, Stowe, in Cornwall, it was moved to Cross, at Little Torrington near Devon, around 1739. Like the somewhat latter dining room, it’s carved from Scandinavian pine. In accordance with a widespread fashion established at the beginning of the 20th century, when installed here, the originally painted paneling was left stripped and waxed.
The Tudor gun room
A'dressing room', the washroom reserved for lady guests
Peterloon's notable English drawingroom dates from the 1680's
Peterloon's drawing room is hung with portraits of the Emery's children by their grandfather, famed illustrator Charles Dana Gibson
Peterloon's dining room
A portrait of Irene Emery painted by her father graces the dining room
If Irene Emery was keenly competitive with her cousin in nearly every other regard, concerning décor she deferred to Nancy’s more developed and grandiose sense of style. Adhering to Mirador’s example, of an elegant semi-asceticism, she decorated Peterloon in a way that seemed deliberately undecorated. Well-pedigreed but largely unexceptional antiques, comfortably overstuffed sofas and chairs with floral chintz covers, family portraits by her father and John Singer Sargent and a profusion of flowers from the garden and greenhouses, were all elements of her creation. Not-with-standing such orthodox ingredients; she was not above employing a long outmoded Victorian bedstead for her own use.
In as much as, in addition to the children from her earlier marriage, she and Emery had had four more, for a total of six, making Peterloon a child, animal, family and friend-friendly place ,was a priority given precedence over cultivating an environment of great élan.
Peterloon's quixotic French Provincial Louis XV library is most unexpected
The bedroom passage
The master bedroom
Yet, still, given the Emery’s prominence as horse breeders, patrons of the Scouts, and of the Cincinnati Art Museum, which now houses the Terrace Plaza’s modern masterpieces, this was but one aspect of the life lived here. Thanks especially to illustrious visiting relations, like Irene Emery’s aunt, Lady Astor and John Emery’s sister Audrey, who wed the Russian Prince, Grand Duke Dmitri, a glittering, cosmopolitan existence also flourished at Peterloon amidst an aura of idyllic domesticity
In a way, this uncommon duality is best symbolized by Delano’s whimsical detailing. What, from a distance, appear to be conservative, wholly predictable, elements of Neo-Classical ornament, on closer inspection turn out to be highly-personal flights of fantasy, utilized to articulate the familiar in an extraordinary way. S- Scrolled volutes, utilized as brackets, emerge as giant snails, while a basket of flowers surmounting the garden-entrance to the guest wing, up a pair of curving stairs, is in fact a basket of beautifully carved limestone, Spaniel puppies.
Long before their Ohio home has passed the century mark; John and Irene Emery are each dead. But thanks to their family’s generosity, open to the public, with 82 acres, as the Peterloon Foundation, this remnant of a gracious, vanished way of life, endures much as they envisioned it.
Contained in a separate wing, built at a smaller more human scale, more familiar to us today, the service wing at Harbor Hill, truly was a realm apart, across a slender line.
Four footmen. Their silken liveries are ornamented by silver buttons and their shoes, by silver buckles
From an extraordinary article written by Grace Fowler entitled, 'The Servant Question at Harbor Hill', published in 1904, in Harper's Bazaar, we know an amazing amount about the first rate service facilities provided at The Mackay‘s country house. Servants are indispensable for the smooth operation of the house. But due to technology, the staff comprising around 103, is far smaller than the retinue required to keep up the admittedly larger chateau it was modeled after a couple centuries earlier.
Not surprizingly, the silver miner's son had masses of plate and flatware. To retard oxidation it was stored in felt-lined drawers and boxes, and on shelves behind heavy felt curtains
After 1920, when Clarence Mackay's mother moved to Harbor Hill to act as his hostess, she brought with her the famed Mackay, Tiffany & Co. silver. Her husband had sent a half-ton of ore from his own mine for it. Awarded a prize when exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878, the dinner and desert service for 24, comprised, 250 pieces. It included as well hollowware and centerpieces. Flower-encrusted with thistles, shamrocks, and blossoms native to American, the unique creation took two years and 200 craftsmen to complete
We have arrived at a date when an internal and outside telephone network were found to be useful. Electrically powered lighting, elevators, mangles and refrigeration are also a given, at least in so affluent a household. A central vacuum-cleaning system, gas fueled clothes’ dryers and fireplace ‘logs’, are similarly, standard equipment.
Outside gasoline powered lawn mowers, rollers, water hoses and sprinklers save on labor. So do hoses and drains in the stable, a grease pit and turntable for cars, in the garage. Coal, for heating and for cocking, burned by the freight train car-load, have not yet been dispensed with however. In a house dedicated almost entirely to princely hospitality, there is always a great deal of preparation, clean up and service that’s demanded of the staff. Much as the garage has twelve cars, two vans and three trucks, in the big house, the sun around which all activity revolves, there are a dozen guests rooms and twenty-two bathrooms. Bed room water pitchers and wash basins, fireside hip-baths and chamber pots, may have all disappeared, but an unending amount of work in at so enormous an establishment, remains to be done.
Like a diminutive separate domain, Harbor Hill's service wing was made compact by fitting four rooms and more, into the space occupied by one in the main house. To further obscure this vital necessity, from guests and employers who felt that the most superior service, was all-but invisible, behind a screen of shrubbery, the service wing was sunken into a well for deliveries.
Four levels devoted to the enterprise of service, disguised as two
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. However now, even at the White House and at many other elegant houses, rules about watch chains and mustaches, have come to be relaxed to such a degree, they are not even remembered. “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.
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!
Emily Post naturally, discusses race very little regarding servants. That’s because, in the communities she frequented, like their employers, most servants were white. After the Civil War among New York's bon ton, African American servants had been increasingly, deliberately, avoided. There were of course conspicuous exceptions. 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 the Mackays’, more costly white servants, who were mostly Irish and other European immigrants, where hired for the greater cachet they conveyed.
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.
The immaculate kitchen, with a gleaming Gustavino vaulted ceiling and a coal range imported from France
Copper pots and vessels for every preparation possible. Note the top row's molds for mouses, souffles, ices and aspics
One observer marveled over Katherine Mackay’s punctilious practice of having a daily change of fresh bed linen. If a look at her Harbor Hill household as enumerated by the United States Census in 1910 is instructive, unfortunately, it fails to reveal which of fourteen women working in the great house was responsible for laundering mountains of wash weekly. None at any rate are African American and like their male counterparts they are mostly classified with the vague designation “servant.”
Despite a phalanx of copper-ware, a battered enameled tin pot still has its place
Near the bottom of the heap in the pecking order was Edward Tumblin, the ‘odd man’. Born in New York, he was forty-years old. Englishmen, William Warndy at thirty-six was near the top of the heap. He was the fastidious Anglophile Clarence Mackay’s valet. Only identified as ‘house servants’ the other young Englishmen in the household might to have been footmen. There was twenty-three-year old Edwin Frost Agate, twenty-six-year old William H. Hulse, twenty-one year old Arthur Tuppen and twenty-four-year old John Walker. Henry Schlagel, thirty-two, was a New Yorker. Where employing a French chef was thought to be the ne plus ultra so far as providing for the pleasure of guests at one’s table, the Mackay’s cook, twenty-eight-year old John Domenico, was Portuguese, though assuredly French-trained.
Harbor Hill's servant's hall, where meals were taken and breaks spent
The dining room reserved for the small group of upper servants with supervisory responsibilities
At forty, Catherine Thompson, born in Scotland was the housekeeper. This was a time when whether married or not, housekeepers were addressed for the sake of their dignity and authority, as Mrs.---. At Harbor Hill in 1910, there are thirteen women servants who fall under her supervision. Elizabeth Prondboot twenty-nine and Isabella Macintyre twenty five, are also from Scotland. Twenty-five-year old Margaret Mcluse was born in Ireland. Theresa Stafutti, born in Austria, is twenty-one and Agusta Wesner from Germany, was thirty-seven. Rudolpha Rigelson, twenty-two years old, hailed from Belgium. Margaret Sweeney, thirty-six, is the only one of these women born in New York. Minnie Carson, a chambermaid is twenty and like thirty-six-year old Hilda Olsen, she was Swedish.
The butler's den. On the left, notice a cast-off rattan chair and whitw painted settee from the glass piazza
The housekeeper's bed-sitting room. Her bed sheilded behind a screen, the housekeeper had plenty of space for a comfortable office-sitting room, with plants, floers and a pet bird in her quarters
Cedar-lined, the linen room had glass doored shelves that made it possible to readily inspect the supply available
Away from the more boisterous servants hall, maids could sit talking together doing mending in the top lit sewing room
A maid's room at Harbor Hill. Only in the servant's rooms did wash basins and slop jars presist
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.
Courtesy of A'Lelia Bundles/Madam Walker Family Archives
No group consistently dresses so well and with as much creative flair as African Americans. So it's disheartening this fashion week, 2013, to hear the familiar refrain of under-representation by blacks among shows and on the runway.
Auldlyn and E. T. Williams, 1961, and some others who stylishly tied the knot.
For, to most African Americans, even when the attenuated form of a model is an elusive accomplishment, every day, and any situation can be the occasion for a fashion show. But few events hosted by African Americans are such gala fashion parades as the Evidence Dance Company's On Our Toes in the Hamptons summer benefit. Fashionable weddings are perhaps the sole exception to this rule of thumb today. Throughout time "jumping the broom" becomes the occasion for exhibiting finery and stylishness of a higher order.
Courtesy of A'Lelia Bundles/Madam Walker Family Archives
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.
One of the most elaborate black weddings occurred during the 'Jazz Age', in November of 1923. A’Lelia Walker’s ultimate social triumph, set at her mother's estate, the Vila Lewaro, was a great day for fashion. It was a reception celebrating the Harlem wedding of her adopted debutante daughter, Mae Walker, to Dr. Gordon H. Jackson, the grandson of a Cincinnati coal dealer, who had been one of the 19th century’s wealthiest black businessmen. The festivities comprising a week of parties and ceremony, are said to have cost $42,000. America, especially black America, had never seen anything to match such splendor. As race-proud and astute to promotion opportunities as her mother, A’Lelia Walker, even in the midst of her second divorce, had it announced in the press that "every item of the brides trousseau was made and supplied by colored-owned concerns."
Nine thousand invitations were issued, and the "Million Dollar Wedding", set to take place at venerable St. Philip's Episcopal Church, was on. So what if the bride-to-be was made to forsake a beau she loved, that also like Consuelo Vanderbilt, who 20 years before had been coerced by her mother to marry the ninth Duke of Marlborough, Mae actually disliked her bridegroom. To all but a privileged few, this news was unknown, and inconceivable. To a mighty throng of thousands grouped outside the church in the cold, delighting to see "us" do something as spectacular and correctly as any white person, it counted as a great day for collective pride.
The bridesmaids wore retro, but extremely chic, full skirted robe de style, supported on panniers of the sort worn in the 18th-century. The robe de style was a signature design of Parisian couturier Jeanne Lanvin, but these had been supplied by a black seamstress. So had the twisted silver tissue coronets Mae Walker's attendants wore. Remarkably, they had been entrusted to an unusual 17-year-old named Mildred Eliza Blount, and presaged her career of tremendous success.
Fast-forward, it's Easter Sunday, 1948. Nat King Cole marries singer Maria Hawkins Ellington at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, with the handsome Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., officiating. The wedding gown is exquisite. It cost $700, as much a car! Guests seek to out-do one another with the glory of their attire. That same year, to help them in such quests, Miss Wynn opened her own shop on Broadway at 158th Street.
Maria Cole's wedding gown was a present from her aunt, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who in 1902 had started North Carolina’s Palmer Memorial Institute, an elite African American preparatory school.'Ice-blue', was the name of the $700, Zelda Wynn Valdez original. The rites were performed with magnificence on Easter Sunday, at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, by the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Powell, who represented Harlem in congress, and was accompanied by his wife, the great jazz-singer Hazel Scott.
Nearly a decade latter, when Joyce Elizabeth Burrows, daughter
of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel L. Burrows of 441 Convent Avenue, became the bride of debonair
David Norman Dinkins of Trenton, the New York Amsterdam News writer was understandably impressed.
The impressive
double-ring ceremony was performed at fashionable St. Martin's Episcopal church
on Sunday afternoon, August 17. The Rev. John H.
Johnson, rector, assisted by the Rev. John A. Edwards of St. Luke's Church officiated. More than 1,000 guests attended the wedding
and reception held immediately following the ceremony at Renaissance ballroom. The radiant
bride entered the chapel of St Martin's on the arm of her father. She was
attired in a Gladys R. Davis creation of white silk satin and imported Aleneon lace
re-embroidered with silver thread. The low-cut fitted bodice was accentuated
by bouffant skirts on the detachable train were appliques
of petite nylon pleated tulle fans and a horseshoe of Aleneon lace
re-embroidered with silver thread. A three tier, finger tip veil of French
illusion cascaded from a Juliet cap of Aleneon.
The bridal gown was gift to the bride
from her uncle, Henry F. Nelthrop. She carried a bouquet of white Stephanoti
and white Orchids. Her Jewels were a
necklace and matching
earrings of cultured pearls, the gift of the bridegroom.
A center piece
of white roses, smilax, gladioli, pom-poms and individual candelabra extended
the length of the bride's table. The wedding cake of four tiers raised on
columns and topped by the traditional bride and groom.
Joyce Burrows was the younger daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel L.
Burrows, was graduated June, 1953, from Howard university. She was a member of Delta
Sigma Theta sorority before the birth of her children worked at her father's real estate firm.
David Dinkins was also a graduate of Howard, class of 1950. He was a member of the venerable Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity
and earned a law degree from the Brooklyn College Law school.
June 26, 1955: Acclaimed Dancers Carman de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, attended by Ms. de Lavallade’s sister, Elaine de Lavallade and Emery Lewis. A garden reception was hosted by theater legend Lucille Lortel at her estate in Westport, Connecticut. Guests included notables like Diahann Carroll, Josephine Premice, and Carl Van Vechten. Photographs were taken by Mr. Van Vechten’s assistant, Saul Mauriber.
Living in the city presents all sorts of challenges and many conflicts. Some take the form of social obligations, rendered impossible to fulfill, due to a prior commitment. For eight, of ten years, I've attended and covered the Evidence On Our Toes gala. To me it is always a highlight of summer. So an invitation to help celebrate the 60th wedding anniversary of former New York mayor David Dinkins and his charming wife, Joyce, to be held at Gracie Mansion, seemed wonderful. At least it seemed wonderful until I discovered that, it too, was planed for the evening of August 17th.
How was I able to decide to keep my previous engagement? Apart from striving to be well mannered, only partly so as to more legitimately censure others guilty of bad behavior, I wanted to watch people dance and to dance myself!
Ms. LaToya Morgan in bright pink and Ms. Kelli Muse in red-hot orange charm.
Stalwort Evidence patrons, Brie and Alicia Bythewood
Young patron committee co-chairs, Curtis D. Young and Brie Bythewood
Young patron committee co-chairs, Brie Bythewood and James Nixion
Ken Smaltz and Maurice Scott
TV host with the most, Ms. Congac Wellerlane squired by Count Vladimir Ibadov, 'Count Valdi'!
Damon Culcleasure with David Cmpbell, both superbly turnerd out
David Cmpbell
Spencer Means, Kirk Hudson and Curtis D. Young
Sophia Jiang and Alison Yang
Mr. Erin Perry, a young dancer
Mr. Curtis D. Young, a bon vivant many regard as the 'pocket Adonis' of New York, is seen below with Jamar Bogan
Mallika Ayesha Bhargava
Kirk Hudson, a friend and Luzerne V. McAllister, II
Diane Clear and Edward Wilkerson
A happy family: Katherine Verdier, Dr. Ancy Verdier and their daughter Hazel
The perfect shirt
Another perfect shirt
The handsome legs and perfect shoes of Kyrha Ruff and Dannielle Brown
Jamila Justine Willis and Noelle Kenel-Pierre
Pretty in a pink silk sheath and great green trousers, Ms. Shanta Bryant Gyan and Kirk Hudson
Reginald Canal, Donna Williams and Spencer Means
Ms. Gail Monroe Perry, Mr. Spencer Means and Ms. Donna Williams
Perfect earrings
Cortney Sloane, a pal and Cheryl R. Riley show how it's done
Robert Perry and Nicole Adell Johnson
Reginald Van Lee and Corey Harris
Phyllis Hollischats with Javier R Seymore
Susan L. Taylor, a Sag Harbor resident and Editor Emerita of Essence Magazine and Khephra Burns
Margo Lewis, Deborah Chapman and Khephra Burns
Andrea Jones-Sojola
The highlight of Evidence's On Our Toes gala, which has evolved into the apex for African
Americans of the Hampton's season, is always the performance by company director Ron Brown's
talented dancers. Ron wore green trousers.
Prima ballerina Fana Tesfsgiorgis
Patrick L. Riley and Anthony Harper
Anthony Harper, MHA and Patrick L. Riley
Daughter and mother, Kaylani and Faye Balbosa
Hey?
Mr DJ!
Lovely! Liz Clardy
Dance!
Dance Susan!
Dance!
Dance!
Kelli M. Muse and Javier R Seymore
Dance!
Tonya Beard
At Evidence events, be they summer, winter, spring or fall, all present make an effort to be on their toes and to put their best foot forward where style is concerned!
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.
Where today might one find the allure and gentel ambiance of yesterday's Hamptons? Even at the B & T, certainly not on the beach.
Happily then, on Sunday July 27th at Sag Harbor, the vivaciously blond Diversity Affluence founder Andrea Hoffman hosted that group’s fourth annual brunch and awards ceremony. These gala festivities never fail to uphold the ne plus ultra of sophistication. The event was again held at the harbor-side B. Smith’s Restaurant. It honored Vista Equity Partners Chairman and CEO Robert F. Smith, lovely and reed-slim, high fashion model-turned-philanthropist, Alek Wek, and the eloquent Sphinx Organization Founder Aaron P. Dworkin.
A picturesque water view from the deck of the harbor-side B. Smith’s Restaurant in Sag Harbor.
What is Diversity Affluence? It's the remarkable research, marketing communications and business development consulting firm Ms. Hoffman runs with her partner Noel Hankin, the esteemed former Moet Hennessy executive. They assist corporations with multicultural marketing, an enterprise that was inspired by Hoffman's book Black Is The New Green: Marketing to Affluent African Americans.
In short, Diversity Affluence has as its mission, one small but important part of the varied aspects of social and economic justice sought by Dr. Martin Luther King, Lena Horne, Bayard Rustin and others when they presided over the March On Washington for "Jobs and Freedom" half a century ago.
Melissa Fields, Earl Graves, actress Tichina Arnold, Andrea Hoffman and Carl Nelson
As with benefits sponsored by Chief Audience Development Officer Donna Williams at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, much like galas hosted by the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center, or the Evidence and Alvin Ailey Dance Companies, one is always assured of two things at the Diversity Affluence party. Firstly, it is a dependably fun occasion, composed of a cosmopolitan, inter-generational, multi-racial crowd. Secondly, those in attendance at this by invitation only event, always exhibit drop-dead glamour.
Dark and lovey, reed-slim, high fashion model-turned-philanthropist, Alek Wek spoke of being the seventh of nine children!
With her wining wit, blond bombshell Andrea Hoffman, the dynamo who started Diversity Affluence, wowed the crowd, reading letters from Ethel Kennedy & Diane von Furstenberg, then introducing an amazing video from President Bill Clinton!
A charming friend with affable Emil Wilbekin.
Last March, I Asked of Curtis D. Young, an always impeccably dapper young man-about-town whom some regard as New York's 'Pocket Adonis': " Is it really permissable to wear a white dinner jacket befor Memorial Day, nowadays?" Clearly, just as President Obama does, Mr. Young makes his own rules.
Dale Dobson, the elegant Corbis executive, wore silver slippers and a collar with a ruffled edge sprinkled with 'diamonds'!
MHA
But does it matter, stylishness and élan, versus the substance of committed activism? Photographs from that sultry high Summer day 50 years ago and the illustrations of Diversity Afflunce’s 2013 award ceremony help show fairly conclusively, that the tradition for African Americans is, that wearing ones best, is a crucial element of what bearing witness for change is all about.
August 28, 1963: Dr. King speaks as Dorothy Height looks on
Daisy Bates was always beautifully dressed
From the hope and change of yesteryear, to today's strum und dram, jobs which have failed to materialize remain a key component of American justice.
Like all other Americans, African Americans, are highly aspirational. Making a new way, from no way, is, as they say, in our DNA. In all things we seek and want the best obtainable. Because of a unique history as descendants of a long line of slaves, laborers and servants, people whose very well-being relied upon their ability to produce at a high standard for demanding 'employers', most black Americans innately appreciate quality, much as we highly value originality and display. Indeed, generation after generation, blacks have contributed mightily to innovatory fashions that, despite having originated among working people, have eventually swept the nation. As American influence is so dynamic, ultimately such trends have had an impact world-wide.
There have always been certain obstacles to black creativity. In the Colonial era Puritants passed sumptuary laws which forbade the non-elite from wearing vibrant colors, silks or gold. It goes without saying that in 17th century New England lowly slaves were officially proscribed from adopting lavish attire. But responsible for the maintenance and sometimes even the creation of finery for white masters, blacks inevitably found means of emulating the latest styles as well.
Fashion and self-expression, versus conformity and assimilation, are ever in conflicted tension in America. Short skirts and closely cropped, 'bobbed' hair for 1920'swomen, for instance, were just as contentious as extravagantly draped zoot suits originating with black jazz musicians in the late 1930's. Mexican Americans sporting zoot suits prompted rioting in 1940s Los Angles. Not that long afterward, black people lost jobs and were dishonorably discharged from the military for wearing their hair in cornrows and Afros.
Hope Dworaczyk from Celebrity Apprentice wore a bewitching hat
Why? Such restrictive actions were all measures of control. Youth, disaffected or not, readily understand how much what they wear or how they wear it, provoke old conservative folks. Black youth appreciate especially how any black-identified fashion, particularly those difficult to be followed by whites, annoy the authorities, no end. This is the power of such subversive fashion statements. And today’s youth, by adopting sagging trousers, a look derived from prison, shrewdly have identified a fashion statement that dramatically communicates and underscores the depth of their alienation: ‘You call us thugs, punks? You repress and revile us? You want subversion? We’ll give you subversion!’
Noel and Gwendolyn Hankin with their friend Donna Williams who wore a classic yellow cardigan.
Yes, true enough, there are people who might dismiss employees attired so, people who from the get-go, would not even engage blacks based on racial biases, including non-conforming fashion choices. But what black youth know, what makes this threatening sounding prospect irrelevant, is that for a long time now, our public schooling has been a shambles and the well-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs our grandfathers obtained often without so much as a high school diploma, today no longer exist.
Not only are there no longer sufficient jobs for all those in need of work, but who are unprepared, there is not even enough work for a much, much smaller group, among those who are well trained. So even if all youth tomorrow inexplicably became preppies, dressed by Bill Blass and Brooks Brothers, replete with degrees from Harvard or Smith, there still would be a shortage of rewarding work.
Absent good schools, good jobs, examples of success that look like them, people from beleaguered neighborhoods often view a prison stint as a rite of passage and real and legitimate opportunity as illusory. It's hardly surprising then that African American fashion, derived from prison and expressive of defiance against a rigged system that automatically discounts and discards so many, finds favor among all races, right around the oppressed and fed-up globe!
Even the helpful and courteous staff at B. Smith'sResturant are attractively dressed. Earl Graves is pictured with everyone's favorite server.
Quite soon it will have been seven years since The Museum of the City of New York's director Susan Henshaw Jones ask me to produce the groundbreaking exhibition Black Style Now with my friend the designer Michael McCollum. It opened on September 9, 2006 and ran through February 19th of 2007.
Our show was an attempt at documenting the diverse, bold, soulful, athletic, sexy and colorful black style of the streets that so transformed fashion. As style conscious devotees of fashion, African Americans are always on the lookout of the next new thing. So already the hip hop gear and urban wear that inspired Black Style Now are on the wane. It follows then, that just as the influential abbreviated shorts black basketball players and other athletes wore in the 1970s have given way to voluminous, skirt-like ‘shorts’, so too will African American young men, sooner or later, ‘pull up their pants.’
Angela Bronner Helm
In any case, observers like my friend Willard Winter insist,
Our constitution affords us the liberty to wear whatever we wish, even to name our children as we please. African or African sounding names, ought to be no more offensive than the European, French or French sounding names that songs, plays, books and movies caused people to adopt in the past, or the aristocratic British names chosen by working class mothers 100 years ago.
Don lemon , the CNN anchor who admonishes African Americans to pull up our pants and otherwise get our act together, has scores of friends who provocatively sag their shorts and trousers at will in Chelsea, at P-Town and on Fire Island. At work the gay elite might be more circumspect, but privilege gives them choice and freedom unavailable to most black youth. The tragedy is that numberless and nameless, a generation certain to include other Obamas, Tiger Woods, Skip Gates and Oprah Winfreys, is consigned to hopelessness due to an invidious racism and elitism that still infects and harms our entire nation. At best the superior plaudits of Cosby and Lemon might indeed save a few capable of surmounting barriers. But swelling the ranks of "The Talented Tenth" will do nothing for discarded masses whose misery underpins the wealth and position of an infinitesimal aristocracy.
On the left, my journalist friend Audrey Bernard of the New York Beacon
Karla Zelaya of Wider Yachts wore a becommig cherry-red tunic from India
Gifted and gracious, actor Malik Yoba acted as master of ceremonies at the Diversity Affluence brunch. Guests were sated by a commodious spread that included seared tuna, crab coquettes, Eggs Benedict, exquisite lobster rolls and golden colored waffles, accompanied by Moet & Chandon champagne and other select spirits.
An avidly sought invitation, the celebration attracted notables who included Black Enterprise founder Earl Graves, who summers nearby in the shore-front house built for Harlem’s Dr. Binga Dismond in the late 1940s, that was designed by his friend Vertner Tandy. Tichina Arnol delighted all with a musical selection. Emil Wilbekin, Calcie Cooper, Geneva S. Thomas, Raval Davis, distinguished Reginald Van Lee, Erana Stennette, the Bloomberg LP Corporate Giving Officer, my journalist colleague Audrey Bernard of The New York Beacon, all helped make up a truly stellar throng.
Tichina Arnold in the baddest running pants on the planet with Carl Nelson
How commendable is their effort, highly focused at this event, but also acted out in myriad small ways in everyday life too, to make our society, its arts and commerce, more expansively inclusive, and hence more robustly flourishing and competitive. This is a group representative of black America’s best dressed, most highly educated, cultured, refined and well mannered. All are successes. Yet ironically, the very existence of Diversity Affluence, is a kind of indictment, of how very far we still have to go pursuing equality in America.
Watching a visibly moved Alex Wek, one could scarcely avoid contemplating how there are still so few black models at her level and none epitomizing, as she does, the notion that ‘Black, is indeed Beautiful!’
Supper model Aek Wex, unambiguously black and beautiful!
Alek Wek with winsome Connie Tsang of IMG
Aaron Dworkin’s observations of the paucity of African American principals in symphony orchestras, “fewer today than thirty years ago, at a time when there are more black graduates from conservatories of serious music than ever.” , was equally chastening.
Aaron Dworkin life story is the quintessence of American multi-culturalism!
Film star-handsome John Utendahl, the Vice Chairman of Deutsche Bank and Gwendolyn Hankin
The paradox of America’s first black president and a backlash eroding black progress, is as simple as the trajectory of power exploiting weakness in order to assert dominion to perpetuate privilege. Enslaved, then freed, into a new kind of bondage, African Americans, have been politically victimized, inadequately prepared and economically hobbled. Even so we are told to get over ourselves, to eschew government assistance or remedy, and to thrive! Some fortunate enough to overcome adversity and prosper, irrationally insists, out of subconscious guilt one suspects,‘I made it and so can others, if they want to.’ Some even contend that the millions of black men who don’t have jobs, are unemployed merely because, ‘They refuse to work.’
Kristine Friend of Marriott International was smashing in a lemon yellow sheath
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the esteemed Director of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in his excellent book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, carefully explains the plight of how African Americans, following slavery, came to be demonizedas the locus of laziness and criminality. Eugenics, criminal justice training and laws based on skewed scholarship: every apparatus of public and private policy, were marshaled in the effort of making black people into the very embodiment of what it was to be the outlaw 'other'.
Joyce Mullins-Jackson in a frilly shirtwaist
That consumate gentelman, Reginald Van Lee, Esquire
As a mythic pathology of black failure in the “land of plenty” arose, much as in Nazi Germany, the very conditions resulting from persecution were deemed as justification for added ill treatment. Prodigious arrests and imprisonment, disproportionate rates of disease, poverty, unemployment, a lack academic attainment, the very symptoms of odious and unrelenting repression, were interpreted by many whites, even by some blacks, as proof positive of black inferiority. The inability of blacks to assimilate and succeed, the very dream we were barred from pursuing, became a cautionary tale about the calamitous threat blacks posed to American society, a detriment of doom more than justifying separatism, fear and loathing.
Karen Proctor of Harbour Workshop in a delightful straw hat and colorful sandals sat with shyly smiling Ivanna Bond of Black Gives Back
Clad in Pucci, Erana Stennett, the Bloomberg LP Corporate Giving Officer stands with her visiting sister, on the left
“Arbeit Macht Frei”! Greeting new arrivals above the gateways to many Nazi concentration and extermination camps, was the slogan, “Labor makes one free.” It was most famously displayed over the main entrance at Auschwitz , Dachau and the ‘model’ ghetto at Theresienstadt. Not every camp exhibited the false motto, which more aptly might have been the maxim Dante inscribed above the entrance to hell in hisThe Divine Comedy: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
This, the warning William F. Buckley wished to be tattooed on the backsides of gay men as a caution to unsuspecting ‘straight men?’, would have surely proven to be more instructive to those interred in the camps. Similarly, it would be an appropriate notice to provide to most who are born black in America today.
Perfection is no detail, but attention to details make for perfection, as seen here!
For when examining the camps and America, the construct, if not the magnitude of the black condition, where after all there was an incentive for slave owners to care for those who provided their wealth, is much the same. The utter disregard of the Nazis to utilize forced labor as a beneficial tool as opposed to first and foremost, yet another means of effecting their “Final Solution” of murder, indeed supports regarding the Holocaust as the modern world’s most heinous crime. In the camps a small elite ruled and ravage with impunity. This is not to say that by forming interpersonal alliances, based on exchanges of sex, or for services like expert tailoring, that a few prisoners were not able to get somewhat better treatment; a little more soup, a few crusts of bread, a pair of boots or a job inside sorting looted clothing, minute mercies that meant survival over death. But on the whole, to be a Jew living in the Third Reich meant, that no amount of work, nor even distinction, provided one freedom as it was appreciated and enjoyed by the tyrants who called themselves ‘Aryans’.
So it is that even today, black Americans labor constrained by enduring privation and abuse. In our society whites with lesser qualifications than blacks nonetheless more readily excel, while whites committing more dire crimes than blacks, are routinely treated more leniently. Against such a backdrop, presently, no African American, irrespective of ability and effort, ever knows freedom, justice or attainment equal to what whites experience, and few blacks ever feel that their accomplishment, however great, might not have been greater still had they been white.
'Every bird builds its nest.', Haitians say and slowly, by fits and starts, change accrues. A great deal has changed to improve the lives of so many Americans since the 1963 March on Washington. And, in years to come, thanks to the concerted efforts of numerous dedicated modern freedom fighters, black and white, young and old, we will come to perfect America's promise of inclusion, equality and affluence all the more. Wonderful people like Andrea Hoffman, Aaron Dworkin, Alex Wek, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Emil Wilbekin, Calcie Cooper, Geneva S. Thomas, Raval Davis, Reginald Van Lee and many, many others are busy at work every day to help make the world better.
Andrea Hoffman, her proud parents and Reggie Van Lee
The angel who produces the always superb Winter Antique Show, launching New York’s season, is Eula Johnson. Last night she was serenely gowned in gray.
Last night, as per usual, in the company of Stefan Handl, the proprietor of Harlem Flo, I attended the Young Collectors’ Night of the 59th annual Winter Antique Show. One of two to-dos connected with the week-long exhibition of mostly European and American antiques and artwork, it benefits the East Side House Settlement, located in the South Bronx Is there any other occasion in town where one enjoys so marvelous a time virtuously aiding good works? One imagines not. At both festivities there’s always plenty that’s good to eat and drink, but best of all, there are always lots of people one knows, or because they are so striking, elegant or good looking, so many people one would like to know better.
'Let's get this party started!'
More than at almost any other party, people make an effort to ‘dress to impress’. Neither regarding the fabulous antiquities offered, nor in terms of the fastidious attire of fellow guests, am I ever let down. Indeed so exceptionally are many shod, it occurred to me, ‘perhaps it should be renamed, the Winter Antique Shoe?’ On the other hand, dreamed up and spearheaded by Mario Buatta to help improve life in the city among those in need, whatever it's called, for 50 years now, it's been the greatest show on earth!
Charissa Craig-Jordan.
Renauld White on Thursday the 25th, He's pictured below, on opening night, with a friend.
As wonderfully welcoming as Mrs. Johnson are her devoted volunteers. Included among this group are luminaries like fashion legend Renald White.
Students who benefit from the East Side House Settlement's scholarships also figure among the Winter Antique Show's helpful attendants and ticket takers. Their warm welcome, on a cold night, helps to make sure that that the gala private viewings are always a memorable experience. One thing distinguishing the show, is that its parties more closely than any others, reflects the city’s true diversity.
Tony and Freddy Victoria, the father and son team who run the eighty-year-old firm, Frederick P. Victoria & Son, Inc, established by Tony's father. It's the scrupulous vetting of authorities like Toney, which makes the Winter Antique Show so respected a world-venue.
The faithful patronage of addicted collectors like Martha Stewart keeps the Winter Antique Show going strong, year, after year.
Martha wore the most marvelous abbreviated boots.
Winter Antique Show galas are always embowered by flowers.
Like many who attended both of the Antique Show dos, Stefan Handl, Harlem's most fashionable florist, was decidedly more relaxed in his atitre for the Young Collector's night.
Fortunately, for tradition's sake, this was not universally so.
Bon vivant Larry Bentley, seen with his handsome friend Daniel Bianchi at the opening preview party for this year's Winter Antique Show, sported a necktie of Japanese brocaded silk.
A 'dressed-down', but still unerringly chic Larry Bently at the Young Collector's night in Jean'Paul Gaultier. Men's haute couture being unfamiliar to some, one inevitably heard echoes of Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham repeated.
The intersecting curves of Emily Israel Pluhar.
Nate Berkus and Kipton Cronkite admirably exhibiting modern urbanity.
Unstoppable, the man for whom Winter Antique Show guests dress to impress, Bill Cunningham of the still great New York Times. Despite having seen so much that he might reasonably regret, Mr. Cunningham remains hopefully appreciative of originality and suitability.
New York Magazine's Design Editor Wendy Goodman chairs the Young Collector's Night Design Council proceedings. No coat among 1,000 was more stylish than her polka dotted confection ornamented with antique star brooches.
As for me, a perennial delight of the Winter Antique Show is running into old friends. Some take the form of objects or paintings, like the ravishing Boldini extravaganza behind me. It depicts Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, who later married the Irish peer, John Graham Hope de la Poer Beresford, 5th Baron Decies, becoming, Lady Decies.
The portrait is owned by the Preservation Society of Newport County, which also owns a dozen remarkable historic houses it operates as museums. The Preservation Society were this year's Museum partner for the Antique Show.
With H.R.H., the Prince of Chintz.
With H.S.H., the Prince of Harlem.
There are certain extraordinary people...
Possessed of such brio...
And panache, one wishes one knew who they are? Who is Ms. Lana Smith, who has such nice yellow shoes?
Paul César Helleu's bravura etching of Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, hanging in the Preservation Society of Newport County's installation, has been a friend since I was 12 and read her insightful memoir, The Glitter and the Gold. Interestingly, in the Associate Artists firm's booth across the way, a chair from the reluctant Duchess's grandfather's Fifth Avenue Drawing Room was on display.
As it's the 100th anniversary of the opening of Grand Central Terminal, it's worth noting that Helleu was also the artist responsible for the landmark's starry night-sky ceiling painting.
The side chair referred to: made by Herter Brothers around 1882 of gilded wood lavishly inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
William Henry Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper's great-great-grandfather turned the fortune he inherited of nearly $100,000,000., into nearly $200,000,000. by the time died as the world's wealthiest man, in 1885. The triple brownstone-faced house he erected for himself and two of his daughters at 640 Fifth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, was planned by architect Charles B. Atwood of the Herter Brothers design studio. It is accessed by historians as a marvel of Aesthetic Movement exuberance on a scale never before attempted in the United States.
1885: The Drawing Room, 640 Fifth Avenue.
Fashioned from choice hardwoods, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, semi-precious stones and polished metal, gilded and intricately carved, William Vanderbilt's furniture, supplied by Herter Brothers, still impresses connoisseurs with the originality of its conception.
A side chair, commode and bronze mounted jeweled alabaster columns from William Vanderbilt's Drawing Room at 640 Fifth Avenue.
I failed to notice the asking price for the Vanderbilt side chair, but, the easy chairs above, from the same suite of custom designed furniture, sold a year ago for $250,000. They had been estimated to fetch a mere $10,000-$20,000.
Antique Show dealers, such as Ms. Lesley Hill, a principal of Hill-Stone, always set a good example by dressing impeccably.
John Singer Sargent, Cicely Alice, Marchioness of Salisbury, was one of three well-born sisters he drew in 1923.
Frederic, Lord Leighton, The Sluggard.
Chicago dealers, Taylor B. Williams, L.L.C., are well-known specialist in American and English furniture, English enamels, European ceramics, and glass. Since the death of his partner the firm has been owned by David J. Bernard. As if his matchless offering of early nineteenth-century French, Creil earthen-ware, glazed yellow and green beneath transferred designs in black, were not inducement enough to linger, no matter when one turns up, this knowledgeable gentleman is always flawlessly turned out.
Peter Finer's Maximilian suit of armor, though a composite, is splendid! Mightn't just such armor to have inspired the statuette below?
Sir Alfred Gilbert, R. A. St. George, The statuette is a variant of one of the saints encircling the operatically romantic tomb of Queen Victoria's ill-fated grandson, Prince Edward, Duke of Clarence.
A Tiffany Studios' decanter and beakers.
A gold, enamel and mother-of-pearl Faberge sedan chair.
A South African bronze of a boxing champion.
A fetching green necktie.
Esteemed and elegant interior designer James Andrew.
Mr. Scott Houston Mcbee, a gifted decorative artist in the tradition of Robert Winthrop Chanler or Porter Woodruff. Mr. Mcbee and Mr. Andrew are spouses.
As with the trend-setter James Andrew, the evening's most popular accessory was a mobile telephone and the texters were quite active.
An artful tied scarf worn by Michael Arguello.
Lovelies in lace and sparkles.
A flash of silver.
Time moves on, more silver, and everything grows more like everything else?
Some among us still appreciate making some occasions special by wearing something unusual. Olivia Wright, festively garbed, accompanied by gallant Gary Alexander.
Wearing exceptional clothes, to mark a gala occasion, was certainly true for all the young smartly attired people shown above.
Timeless beauty.
Cheryl Green with long and lean Larry Bentley.
'Garcoon, s'il vous plait...Oh dear, one thought...'
It was not just women who donned red trousers.
Red trousers, like patent leather shoes were definite trends observable at the Antique Show parties.
A paisley patterned gown dotted with glinting tiny paillettes was extremely pretty.
Whether working or pretending, the Antique Show has the most attentive waiters!
Proof positive, that diamonds really can be a girl's best friend. at any rate, far more real than most on Facebook.
The one that got away! A whimsical chandelier from a line created by my designer friend Eddie Zajac, of Zajac & Callahan, that came from the decorator's apartment. It was priced at $14,000, far more than the $3,500 it realized at auction last Spring. Whoops, my bad!
Mr. Jamie Drake, the decorator par-excellence of our age.
Lindsey Harper, Jay Lohmann, and Beth Holman.
Serious jewelry, significant décolletage and boldly patterned dresses, with metallic embellishments are all nice enough, but is any accessory as desirable, or admired as much as, a sweet smile and a dashing companion in a cashmere scarf?
An expert hair-cut even helps to enhances the appearance of someone as terribly attractive as this gentleman.
How astute of this young lady of fashion, to understand how effectively a little scarf and the right shoes, can allow for an effortless transition, from everyday, to an enchanted evening.
The Winter Antique Shoe?
Lauren Chisholm, a skilled goldsmith from Darien, wears her own orbiting creation.
A young friend joins restaurant and club owner, Brian Washington-Palmer for a cocktail.
Shall it be a scarf...
Or a cravat? Either way, smiles rule.
Great minds, they say, think alike!
Our hostess, as it were, Mrs. Johnson in a cunning sleeveless grey dress.
Sinje Ollen and Stefan Handl pose with two gentlemen who have correctly chosen to don four-in-hand neckties. Ms. Ollen is wearing one of her own complexly made crocheted sweaters .
Sheila Maniar, Stefan Handel, Dale Dobson and John Reddick.
Refinement personified, Dale Dobson with MHA.
Éclat, underlined in coral-red! Please say the muff is back?
Most of us could never pull off dressing so casually and still looking well.
Two well-tailored swains. Imagine, just a short 50 years ago, after six o'clock, no gentleman in New York would be caught without a cravat, nor in a shirt that wasn't white, ironed and starched.
Subtlety shimmering.
A dealer in Modernist antiques shows a modernist sense of chic.
Black and vibrant color: each employed to great advantage.
An apparition of impossible splendor, Ms. Keita Turner, in yellow, pearl-beaded silk shantung, with purple slippers.
Saint Valentine's Day is on the way.
Believe it or not, some attending the Young Collectors' party, are indeed, rather young!
Insofar as we are able to understand it, perfection.
Besides these two stylish lads, I counted ten other men wearing patent leather shoes .
The most delicious little cocktail dress!
The beauty of black, nothing basic about it!
Jean Shafiroff, a pert, petite snappy dresser and a special friend of Mario Buatta.
Black and blue can be beautiful, too.
Nicolette Balmer, who keeps things jumping at the Red Rooster, and a friend, both wore black, from head to toe, including smart short boots.
Joshie Armstead, still as alluring as when she was a teen-aged Ikette, laughing with Larry Bentley and Cheryl Green.
Finding the right adornment can be key.
Double breasted coats can be so becoming.
Charissa Craig-Jordan, a friend and Bob Phillips, take time to catch up.
Miss Sheila Maniar with MHA.
Black lace.
Once Michael Jackson started singing, the Antique Show was all over. Right there in the decorousaisleit was on to the Winter Antique Show Discotheque!
Some choose to sit it out.
The pause that...
Refreshes.
A backward glance from a lovely lady in the most exquisite silk dress. It's printed with a pattern derived from the embroideries of eighteenth-century imperial Chinese robes.
A most charming and distinguished couple. They said I reminded them of '' Frolic'' Weymouth that, 'I should know him.' Alas I am not acquainted with Mr. Weynmouth, a du Pont heir, who paints and is a conservationist and devotee of coaching, as in a four-in-hand closed carriage. Of course, we might meet...for, anything is possible at the Winter Antique Show.
Today, anything is beginning to be possible in America.
Ms. Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz the leading dealer in historic wallpapers, particularly examples from the famed manufacture Joseph Dufour et Cie, with her friend, New York's preeminent francophone and patron of French culture, Elizabeth Stribling. The flair for invention and attention to detail of each lady makes one happily anticipate their next ensemble. They never disappoint.
Miss Sadie Kargman, simply arrayed in lustrous velveteen, the youngest, 'young collector', on opening night at the 59th annual Winter Antique Show.
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