It's much to be regretted, not being able to locate photograps of any of Harbor Hill's twenty or so bedrooms, except for Katherine Mackay's. Even with the private sanctum of the queen, nothing new has been uncovered, at least no so far as locating new images beyond the few which have been reprinted repeatedly.
Harbor Hill's superb oak staircase, like the wainscoting, far, far darker than shown here, occupied the entirety of the lower levels of the south-east pavilion. No more so than in the great hall, with its pendant ornamented molded plaster ceiling, did the staircase, with parapets of luxuriantly scrolling, pierced arabesque, remotely reference "Louis XIV and Henri II precedents." Instead, it had an English pedigree, derived from seventeenth century Sudbury Hall and Cassiobury Park.
Depicting King Herod's slaughter of the inocents, the large Flemish Tapestry seen in this image dated to the late sixteenth century. François Boucher, the celebrated French painter who lived from 1703 to 1770, as director of the Gobliens' factory, sometimes supplied cartoons for tapestries. No "Boucher tapestry", could possibly have been made, before his birth. That would be required, if this had been a "Boucher tapestry", as Wilson and Craven both say
Sudbury Hall's early seventeenth century staircase, along with the late seventeenth century stair from Cassiobury Park, were models for what was done at Harbor Hill. The latter stairway is today installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 28, 1906: The New York Times. Difficult to make out, the heraldic tapestry showing the Bourbon arms, was on the order of the one shown below. French and dating to the eighteenth century, it indeed might have been designed by Boucher. Whether it was or not, this must be the tapestry mentioned in a number of letters by the creators of Harbor Hill
French heraldic tapestry, 1760's
1904
What's new then and rather exciting, is a fresh knowing look and analysis of what many have gazed on, seemingly, without seeing.
Our journey to this sacred precinct begins downstairs. How clever of Katherine to have so imposing a grand staircase erected. What a picture she must have made, in her graceful descent, dressed in some filmy silken stuff, flashing with jewels. Thanks to the upper windows, more than abundant light made the spot at the foot of the stairs, perfect as a place to grow plants. Ferns and palms were used mostly. The plain antique oak of the wainscot, undecorated except by a simple Virtruvian scroll, half-way up, was a wonderful foil for the virtuoso carving of the stair's parapet. Similarly, the velvet-weave, deep-pile carpet, with a damask pattern, running along the entrance and up the many treads, the same claret color as the curtains, related beautifully to the important tapestry always hung here. What trouble Katherine had caused, attempting to change the color to green after it had already been approved, woven and laid. Victor Twiss, who lived on 144th Street near Hamilton Terrace, saved Davenport & Co. through the careful paper trail of authorization he was able to produce. Such thorough record keeping, no doubt, he leaned was an essential strategy for surviving, when working for the Mackays.
1902
Absent to begin with, by 1909 more and more armor was placed here abouts. Across from a formidable mounted suit of jousting armor, stationed at the start of the staircase, was the discreet door into the electric lift. Provided with a cushioned seat and lined in mauve silk with a large panel of mirrored glass, here heralded by Katherine's signature color, was ones initial intimation of some special destination above.
Circa 1910
The armor of a jousting knight placed at the bottom of Harbor Hill's staircase
Executed by H. F. Davenport & Co. the Harbor Hill staircase was a tour de force of virtuoso carving. Where is it now, or was it destroyed?
1902
Is anyone ever fully happy with their lot in life? Marie Antoinette, the anointed queen of France, in pursuit of the wholesome existence advocated by Rousseau, was only really following the folly of fashion. The cows she and her ladies milked, had been pre-washed, curried and combed in anticipation to royal ministrations. The dairy where they clotted cream, to eat with wild strawberries, were marble lined. The containers they used, were made from Sevres porcelain. Katherine Mackay, was in more ways than one, the tragic French consort, in reverse. She rellished the balls and social ritual that queen had disdained. Queen Marie Antoinette had a low-ceiling suite of private, intimate, cozy rooms in which to live. Even the king asked permision to visit her there. Returning daily to act out the public spectacle which ritualize each aspect of royal life, to apartments of state, she lived to momentarily escape the duty of decorum that was the destiny she was born to. By Contrast, Katherine reveled in reliving the games of her childhood come true. She'd happily taken her ease on a thrown-like divan, elevated on a dais, draped in regal ermine. She bathed in a sunken tub, carved from a single block of marble. Her's were all apartments of state. She slept on a bed raised on a platform and her chest of drawers were on platforms as well.
1902: The ante room into Katherine Mackay's suite
1903: Dressed in an ermine collared tea gown, Katherine Mackay assumes the affect of a queen, enthroned on a chaise, elevated on a dais in her orchid colored boudoir
Imported highly figured French walnut boiseries, with furniture supplied by Allard en-suite, were both upholstered with panels of mauve damask, woven with a custom pattern of cherubs disporting amongst flowers. Vessels as desperate as small steins, Chinese baluster vases and cut glass beakers, mounted in gold, all held bouquets of the orchids that Katherine adored.
Orchids and a photograph of a mother with her daughters. Katherine Mackay once ordered what a newspaper called the most expensive photographic ever made. Showing the two Katherine's, mother and baby daughter, framed, the photograph measured five x seven feet!
An orchid in a small vase and silken cherubs at play
Among photographs of friends, gold writing implements and potted ferns, were still more orchid
Besides the romantic games of girlhood, that Cinderella named Alva Vanderbilt must have encouraged Katherine's fascination with royal fantasy. At Marble House, Alva's palace by the sea in Newport, she had just the sort of bedroom Katherine dreamed of inhabiting. Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, it was produced by Allard, who would construct Katherine's rooms at Harbor Hill. It boast the same sort of bed upon a dias and lavender-colored figured silk wall hangings Katherine would use. But, as to the French walnut furniture and the polar bear rug, one must search further afield for that precedent.
1902
Visiting London in 1900, the Mackays had stayed mostly at Carlton House Terrace, with Clarie's mother. However, they were also entertained by and asked to stay with, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Examining the duchess' bedroom, imagining the ceiling height reduced, by half, how much Katherine's room at Harbor Hill resembles it. The fur rug, the 'royal' platforms, the dark shining rocco furniture, so many parallels, hardly seem coincidental. Then, quite suddenly, by 1905, it had all changed! Why?
Circa 1899: The room redone by the Ninth Duke of Marlborough for his rich American bride, prepared more in terms of his ideas of suitable surroundings for a future duke's birth, than a young bride's comfort
A glimpse of the bedroom mantelpiece
A dias for everything
Alva Vanderbilt's bedroom at Marble House in Newport, prefigured Katherine Mackay's at Harbor Hill also, in part, probably influenced its alterations
For just what reason was Kathrine's room completely changed, with new wall hangings, no daises and all that beautifully finished French walnut, walls and furniture alike, painted over, a cream color, in 1905? Most likely these drastic steps had been motivated by an article published by House Beautiful, early in the new year. The piece was the second in a series. The first had dealt with the Bradly Martins' eclectic townhouse, where it was complained that expensive and exquisite art works, sat side-by-side with gleanings from the junk shop. The scathing series, frankly described as "sermons", were entitled "The Poor Taste of the Rich ". Singled out for especial scorn, was the queenly suite of Katherine Mackay. Of her bed room the journalist concluded:
It is fussy and trifling. It shows that a room may be luxurious and yet lacking in comfort: that it may contain costly things, and yet be commonplace. There is nothing livable about the apartment and it is devoid of charm. Individuality, on the one hand is absent and historical accuracy on the other. It fails lamentably from both aspects...
1905: Transformation! If the fitting out of Katherine Mackay's room, had first been influenced by the Duchess of Malbrough's, Katherine's 1905 renovations, that scrapped exalting platforms and brightened her orchid-colored palette overall, seems to have been copied in turn, by the duchess! Please observe below
Circa 1910: The Duchess of Marlborough's bedroom at Blenheim
Grisaille painting of cherubs in overdoors similar to Katherine's at Harbor Hill
Katherine's bath drew even harsher disparagement:
If the bedroom is a notable example of poor taste what can be said of the bath and dressing room---rather what cannot be said of it! This astonishing room room must cause the presiding genius of house decoration hours of anguish...It is, properly speaking, not a bath-room, but an over-decorated and over-furnished room in which a bath-tub has been placed. Puzzel: Find the tub!
The bath-dressing room floor was covered in a carpet made from mountain sheep pelts. The space contained a fireplace, dressing table, chaise lounge, books potted palms and a sunken tub. Difficult for the House Beautiful writer to locate, the three-feet deep tub, carved from a single block of marble had alone cost of $6, 300,00
Cracked glass! Had this picture frame been thrown?
Clareie and Kitty
A bisquite clock is introduced
How many carved rosewood Chinese tables were there at Harbor Hill?
A reported commented on the gold toiletries arrayed on tables in Katherine's bath
She had prided herself so far as matters of the best taste were concerned. Yet, the artistic sensibility for which she was frequently complemented, had been questioned. All the lovliness of her queenly abode was belittled as "common place" So Katherine took action. In her bath, beyond a new paint job and new hangings, plants and books with fine bindings, were swept away. Still other alterations, substituting dark velvet walls, new carpets and old tapestries were to come later, until finally. Katherine had gone herself.
1905
In terms of decoration at least, she would seem to have accomplished, all she'd set out to. Was this not enough? No, of course it had'nt been. Next we will consider the question of the inquiring: Why?
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
Clarence Mackay’s father habitually had given his mother orchids. This was an epoch when a regular workman earned a dollar per day. American Beauty Roses also commanded a dollar. But a single exotic, flamboyantly showy orchid cost five dollars: nearly an entire weekly wage, as much as dinner for two with champagne at the Plaza. Charmingly imitating his father, by showing his wife and the world how he felt with expensive orchids, Clarence Mackay was well matched by Katherine Duer. During their courtship, when he wagered he could give her more orchids than she could wear, he’d lost. Becomingly, after pining bunches to her waist and bodice, she ornamented her hat with the remainder. By the time she married, Katherine Mackay adopted the orchid as her personal talisman.
With an 80,000-square foot interior, Harbor Hill ended up costing $830,000.00. This figure is exclusive of the remarkable art collection, painstakingly gathered to fill it, like important and historic gem stones, meticulously gathered and matched, to fill an exquisite new platinum setting by Cartier. Contemplating and accessing the lost value of a 1900 dollar however, is rather complicated. To multiply by one hundred is often useful. A skilled laborer, working on the construction of Harbor Hill, eared $2.00 per day, unskilled, $1.00. Were they earning the equivalent of $100-$200.00 per day? No. Did a dollar have the purchasing power of $100.00 then, at the grocery store? No again. It seems reasonable, to imagine that one could reproduce a house like Harbor Hill today, for $ 83-million. But, the $5.00 or so the finest a la Carte dinner at Sherry’s Restaurant cost, that seems preposterous now, at $500.00? Perhaps, a nice wine is included?
1902
1924
Why, one might wonder, was this great house ever built? The answer to this question has to do with the ambition and self-image of the patrons who commissioned and oversaw its painstaking execution. An exceptional dwelling, Harbor Hill, is a place some have called, "Heartbreak House". From completion, to destruction, it lasted just forty-five years!
Like others before, and since, they captured the public's imagination. Gertrude and Harry Whitney, Nancy and Charles Gibson, Linda and Cole Porter, Constance and Kirk Askew, Ernesta and Samuel Barlow, Eleanore and Archibald Brown, Amanda and Carter Burden, Katherine and Clarence Mackay. They were their epoch's golden couple.
Clarence Hungerford Mackay, Esquire, (1874-1938), was a gentleman-sportsman-farmer-philanthropist-captain-of-industry-connoisseur. He surely saw his beautiful wife as a thoroughbred. Her children, his children, would be thoroughbreds too. Katherine Alexander Duer, (1880-1930), was allied to the city’s oldest and most prominent families. As a spirited girl, she’d been a darling of the ‘best society.’ As his wife, he would crown her, queen of New York. He would give her the world and build a castle befitting of her loveliness, a palace worthy of the wealth and wisdom that made him invincible. He envisioned Harbor Hill as a dynastic seat, one which, thanks to Stanford White’s genius and his careful supervision, would be as stately as any historic pile in far-off England, or in France. By distinction, Harbor Hill, in addition to a superb setting and the requisite collection of priceless treasures, was to be outfitted with every technological marvel, every provision for convenience and comfort, conceivable.
It would be passed on to Mackays, generation after generation. And, in the fullness of time, matured, mellowed, further refined, burnished ever more brightly, to a wonderfully satisfying glow, its fame would shine down through the ages. As Clarence Mackay pictured his house, for centuries to come, from Harbor Hill would emanate a portion of the Mackay family’s lustrous stature for all the world to admire.
Exposed to the elite, to thoroughbreds, aristocrats and blue-bloods, all his life, despite great affluence and a fine education, Mackay had always just missed fully belonging to the ‘best society.’ For her part, his wife, by birth, was fully a creature of that world. But she’d also been painfully aware of the limitations imposed upon her, for lack of great means, to fully enjoy all her world afforded.
So if Clarence Mackay had intended for Harbor Hill to be a show place on a summit, a castle where she would be a queen, while he benignly ruled, Katherine Mackay was in perfect accord with such a vision.
1904: In her bid to join the Roslyn School Board, Katherine Mackay entertained 500 local children and their parents at a fete that became an annual event for a time
Why then, one wonders, did she not covert, and become a Roman Catholic? At the time of her engagement it was much talked about in the papers. There were suggestions that she was taking instruction, from a Jesuit priest, that her embrace by ‘the church,’ was imminent. Conversely, well aware that the Episcopal faith, was the religion of English-speaking aristocrats everywhere, why had Clarence Mackay insisted on rearing their children as Catholics? Certainly, for his father, religion had never been any imperative whatever. But his mother on the other hand, French heritage made the Catholic church more central to her. Having survived crushing poverty, distress and want, in large part through the sustenance and comfort availed of a God-focused life, she’d endeavored to make Catholicism important to her children too. As for the younger Mackay’s faith, in the long run, as events would reveal, to them, orthodoxy was more symbolic and affiliation more flexible, than any youthful adamancy might have indicated.
Clarence Mackay, was the second son of John William Mackay, one of the four men, famous as the Bonanza Kings, who struck it rich with the discovery of an expansive and remarkably pure vein of silver and gold ore. It was known as the Comstock Lode. Joining forces with James Gordon Bennett, John Mackay parlayed his windfall into the Commercial Cable and Postal Telegraph Company, laid cables across the Atlantic, and broke the Western union monopoly, to amass still more millions!
This was how his son had become a box-holder, patron and chairman of the Metropolitan Opera, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. A decorated layman of the Roman Catholic Church, Mackay used every advantage at his command, to make himself into a full-length portrait of the prefect gentleman.
With a wedding gift of six hundred rolling acres from his father to Katherine, joining various Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Morgans, and others with names synonymous with ‘many millions,’ the Mackays proceeded to build. The idea of their group was to transform the sleepy farming community round about Roslyn, in Nassau County, into a realm of privilege and pleasure for their rarefied class, not so different from parts of Sussex. Their headquarters would be the Piping Rock Country Club, although many provided sports facilities on their properties, graced with houses and gardens based on villas, Colonial neo-Palladian houses, chateaux and manors, exceeding the offerings of any club. Among all their grand houses, it was readily acknowledged that Harbor Hill was unsurpassed for luxury. Of all the fine places from this period, along the north shore of Long Island’s ‘Gold Coast,’ Harbor Hill was held by many to be the most opulent and beautiful. Sadly, this coterie which built landed estates meant to endure through the ages, enjoyed but the briefest optimistic season before their gilded dream came crashing down around them.
If costly clipped bay trees, requiring wintering in a cold green house, were widely employed as a status symbol, orange trees like these were only found at the most palatal places
Who today is comparable? The young, lovely and impulsive Gloria Vanderbilt comes to mind, so does Stephanie Seymour, Paris Hilton and even Kim Kardashian. She was so very young, so very rich, so resolute, to have what she wanted, how she wanted it, when she wanted it. Katherine Mackay had posted over one hundred, mostly commanding, letters to Stanford White, to make sure, that he knew what she wanted too. Clarence Mackay, with fewer, more tactful memoranda sent to both of the principal collaborators with whom he created Harbor Hill, White and Katherine, kept things in check.
What sort of dwelling would the Mackay castle on a hill be? Katherine was adamant on the subject: “a very severe house…based on Louis XIV and Henri II precedents…” It fell to Clarence to alternately agree to all sorts of alluring extras, seductively suggested by Stanford White, only to then demur, complaining, once he had grasped just how much the game trophies proposed for the billiard room, or a sunken bath, carved from a single block of marble, would cost. In repeated missives he was at pains to remind White about money being a serious consideration, once even going so far as to remonstrate with White, ‘ I will tell you right here that I would not think of paying such an absurd price as 100,000 francs for any mantelpiece, unless I had the income of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie!..’ Of course, in a way, he did have such an income! To be sure, in fairness, only after his father's death, in 1902, was a stupendous income his absolutely. But, before then, his close relationship with his parents was such, that he had had access to all the Mackay money, as much as if it had already been his. That this availability was not at first official, allowed Mackay to play a kind of game. Nor did it help that he was well aware of Whites insolvency.
September 4, 1904: Katherine Mackay leaving Harbor Hill to arrange for the fair she staged there, for the benefit of the Nassau Hospital
Few houses Stanford White designed are as straightforward, so seemingly conventional as this, his last house. Some are quick to dismiss Harbor Hill as a result of the derivative nature of its facade from the specific source of Masions-Lafitte. What such un-analytical critics fail to perceive is how much in adaptation, White has refined, manipulated and otherwise striven to 'improve' his model. He has admirably transformed something grandiloquent and overblown, not suitable at all, as a setting for the family and social life of early twentieth century inhabitants, into a gracious residence. In stripping away extraneous ornament and elements meant merely to overawe, he left what's essential to evoke the famous chateau, minus its burdensome excesses decreed by courtly convention and etiquette. Today of course, someone seeking to do likewise, as adeptly, would be reduced to adapting Harbor Hill's water tower, on just ten acres as a country retreat. None the less, what White accomplished, was to transfigure Mansart's work in such a way as to made it like New York neo-Renaissance style towers admired by Corbusier: "better", more functional, taunt and disciplined, than the original.
Misleadingly the date "1902", does not refer to the disposition of Harbor Hill, but only to the time it was deemed "complete."The cause of tremendous confusion, this is a revised floor-plan, made for the publication of Mckim, Mead & White's monograph, in 1915. The large room in the south-west pavilion, with three windows, on both the south and the west, was, from 1902, to about 1905, the library, Harbor Hill's French oak paneled-principal living room. Transformation of this space into the"stone room", a salon that served exclusively as a space for entertaining, required that the billiard room, be made into a new, more intimate library. By 1925, thanks to Joseph Duveen finding a nearly complete French gothic room, the new library was redone, a third time and rechristened, the "gothic room". Twenty years earlier, the billiard room had been relocated, in the casino.
None of the dramatic mystery, with which Sir Edwin Lutyens invigorates his erstwhile conventional houses, with the unexpected, is present. Instead, one entered-into a broad long gallery, twenty feet-high and one hundred feet long, that acted as the entrance hall.
1904
Harbor Hill's interiors, conceived by the Mackays and White, working together, were realized by three different well established firms of decorators. A. H. Davenport & Co., with showrooms in Boston and New York, had worked with Stanford White since his start in the office of Henry Hobson Richardson. Due to exacting skill shown over a long association, they participated in many Mckim, Mead & White projects, including the White House 'restoration'. In 1914, the firm merge with Irving & Casson, continuing in business until 1974.
Beginning his salutary career working for Herter Brothers, not surprisingly William Baumgarten, in establishing his own firm, continued to be patronized by the bon ton.
Jules Allard et Fils, a flourishing concern in Paris since Louis Philippe‘s reign, was another supplier of “complete furnishing, decorations, cabinetry, sculpture, seats, tapestry and drapes.” Jules Allard’s son Fernand Allard maintained the company until 1919. Allard’s collaboration with ’showplace’ builder Richard Morris Hunt, starting in 1880, led to his phenomenal success in America. It was following Hunt’s advice that Allard opened an office in New York, where the demand for aristocratic surroundings from the decorator of the Emperor of France, knew no bounds. Coordinated by White, his decorators and an army of subcontractors, miraculously formulated a harmonious result.
Lengthy, lofty, utterly impersonal when newly completed, Harbor Hill's entrance suggested the elegantly arid anonymity of some rather smart, public accommodation, like the Ritz. Some enthusiasts of great houses from the period of of Harbor Hill, find fault with most of its interiors for this reason, characterizing its rooms as "unappealing, with a heavy Edwardian grand hotel..." cast.
1927
It's instructive then to examine both the long gallery-entrance hall and Harbor Hill's other interiors, over the course of the house's evolution. From the start, no matter how complete, nor even how handsome some room might be, as my post strives to show, all rooms and their details were subject to the whims of the Mackays' and repeated alteration. In the case of the entrance hall, what a difference and warming effect, the introduction of shining armor, colorful banners and richly detailed tapestries made.
1930
Mediated only by a columnar screen, Harbor Hill's impressive great hall occupied most of the center of the house. No more so than the staircase, with parapets of luxuriantly scrolling, pierced arabesque, derived from seventeenth century English examples at Sudbury Hall and Cassiobury Park, does either room reference solely “Louis XIV and Henri II precedents…” Each space instead was articulated by pilasters, corresponding to the composite columns of two screens. Leading at either end into the great hall, they de-marked the entrance hall and front door and the passage separating the library and dining room, with a 'back door' exit onto the south terrace. Their capitals, were hung with pendant garlands, a feature not unknown in the seventeenth century, but in 1900, by far, more associated with Louis Seize mode, the revival of which, was coming to the forefront of architectural fashion.
1930
By means of vivid word pictures, photographs and numerous drawings, White effectively bewitched the Mackays into making of their house and its enormous great hall, thirty-eight feet high, forty-eight feet wide and eighty feet long, far more than even they had dared imagine. The rendering below, replete with antique choir stalls, silken heraldic banners and an array of armor, indicates what he had had in mind. It shows the same sort of historicist and highly atmospheric, but eclectic flair for which White was famous. It was a personal style that Incorporated many fashion status symbols of the time, lion, tiger and polar bear rugs, potted palms, antique furniture, lustrous textiles and flowers and ornaments in profusion. Concurrently, for the Mackay's Roslyn neighbor and friend, William Collins Whitney, at his palatal Fifth Avenue house, White was completing rooms that epitomized his style. The Mackays knew the Whitney project well and frequently referenced it, hoping for something similarly fine.
Certainly Clarence Mackay, who, the legendary art dealer, Joseph Duveen, helped to further infect with the collecting bug, was susceptible to inducement, to build better than he'd set out to. The merchant of masterpieces who became baron Duveen of Milbank, wrote of their mutually beneficial association,
Visiting Clarence Mackay at his manor, Harbor Hill, in Roslyn, soon after making his acquaintance, my gaze took in certain tapestries on the walls. Those tapestries, my dear Mr. Mackay, are very good, but they are not good enough for you. I can't bear you to have them in your chateau. I'll buy them from you, as I have a customer they're good enough for. I'll pay you thirty-five thousand dollars for them...
His host, agreed, without hesitation. Duveen's check arrived promptly the next day as Mackay incredulously shipped off the tapestries, for which he had only paid a fraction of what the dealer offered.
Duveen in fact, had had no client awaiting the hangings. They went directly into storage in the vast basement of his showroom. Yet through this sound investment, Mackay had been ensnared, to became one of Duveen's best customers. Moreover, in cultivating Mackay's taste, Duveen was able to help him to elevate his house, a house as good as the John S, Phipps' place at Westbury, to the stratispheric aesthetic level of Mrs. Gardner's Fenway Court.
Stanford White's compelling illustration of his intentions for Harbor Hill's great hall, amply justified his assurances to Clarence Mackay, that he would be getting a house which, with the exception of Hunt's Biltmore, was without peer
One might easily imagine that the four, Four Season Arras tapestries in the following pictures, are the ones Joseph Duveen disparaged? Acquired in Paris for his clients by White, identified as of Gobelin manufacture, the early eighteenth century allegorical works had come from the collection of the Princesse de Sagan. Enhancing the provenance, attribution and manufacture of artwork and objet de vertu, was nothing unusual for high-end purveyors like White and Duveen. In all events, Clarence Mackay having zeroed in on making the great hall the focal point of the interior of his home, led to change. He sought to give it greater cohesion and continuity, telling his architect in 1902, 'My heart is wrapped up in making a success of that hall...' This meant, tapestries appropriate to the ballroom the great hall seems to have started out as, were moved.
1902
'Summer'. Removing the Season tapestries into the salon, which made it better accord to the first state room at Blenheim Palace, also made the hall more purely an expression of fused medieval and Renaissance tastes. This might be seen as a promotion as it were, but eventually, the Arras tapestries were relegated to Katherine's boudoir, before being sold. The two smaller panels from the set, Summer and Autumn, ended up in Akron Ohio, at the estate of rubber baron, F. A. Seiberling, Stan Hywet Hall.
1902
Harbor Hill's prized pierced and repousse brass Venetian lantern. Soon enough, the time would come for its banishment
The great hall's gallery, above the entrance hall, acted as the second floor's cross corridor. Pierced strap-work, reminiscent of a purdah screen, helped to supply light into room
Designation of Harbor Hill's hall as a showcase for fifteenth through the seventeenth century armor, also called for removal of the entryways' green Connemara columns with white marble bases and capitals. What trouble and discord they had caused. Angelo Fucigna, the stone mason, in the end was unable to supply either monoliths, or the perfectly matching shafts specified. Yet foolishly, he had installed them anyway, leading to rejection, and, for him at least, ruinous litigation. Piccirilli Brothers did the job properly. But the changed direction of the hall meant that their columns too were removed, replaced by Davenport & Co., with fluted oak pillars that matched the pilasters they had also made.
1902
Viewed between the lost columns, the front door's 'cantonniers' or valances, were made from the fruit and flower festooned top and side borders of a 17th century Flemish tapestry. One of two, by 1914, they had made their way from in the great hall at Harbor Hill, to the Stan Hywet Hall's music room in Akron, Ohio
Stan Hywet Hall, Akron, Ohio, the residence of rubber baron Frank A. Seiberling, showing the music room stage, framed by a 'cantonnier' from Harbor Hill. A large house with sixty-five rooms comprising nearly 50,000 square feet, Stan Hywet, as the photograph indicates, lacks Harbor Hill's more monumental scale
Following White's unexpected death in 1906 and Katherine Mackay's equally abrupt 1914 flight to Paris to her husband's friend and doctor, the Harbor Hill hall grew ever more elaborate and filled furniture and armor. Always, in the hall as well as the rest of the house, there was a process of the weeding out of the indifferent and upgrading at work. In this way, a formerly much esteemed Venetian lantern, Davenport lounge chairs, floridly carved rosewood Chinese stools, used as plant stands and other unremarkable accumulations were displaced by arms and armament, paintings, sculpture and furniture of the highest order.
1908
Circa 1915
A rare Levantine shield that once helped to form a trophy of arms in Harbor Hill's great Hall
Circa 1925
Circa 1925
Circa 1930: Harbor Hill's hall chimney-piece, composed from sixteenth century elements
Mackay would gather together the world's finest private armor collection
Finally, just as White would have wished Clarence Mackay, whom he had helped to tutor, was acclaimed as a major connoisseur. His collection of superb Medieval tapestries, was as celebrated as his armory, praised by visitors as diverse as Edward, Prince of Wales and the great art critic and friend of Stanford White, Royal Cortissoz. In the December 1929 issue of the International Studio, the critic's tribute was fulsome"
I cannot forbear glancing at the character of Harbor Hill as a whole. Across the threshold one steps into a corridor that runs almost the length of the house. Traversing it the visitor finds himself in a vast hall or chamber of lordly dimensions, with a ceiling more than thirty feet high. Gothic tapestries enrich the walls. Against them are ranged some of the most famous suits of armor in the world... Vast shadowy and splendid, the whole room breathes of history, as it does of consummate art and craftsmanship. Color is everywhere, in the rosy glow of the Chaumot tapestries, in those faintly moving banners, and in scattered incidents of ruby velvet. And the marvelous thing is the manner in which the myriad objects here assembled from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance all "pull together," making one superb effect and creating one harmonious atmosphere. It is the atmosphere of beauty. It was an axiom of Stanford White's that the work of any period would go with the work of any other period---if both were of superlative quality. Mr. Mackay has worked on the same conviction, maintaining the high standard which validates it... This Collector has not only specialized in architecture, painting, sculpture, tapestry and furniture but has specialized in so fusing them as to produce a collection in itself a work of art..."
1927: Miss Katherine O'Brien in the Great Hall at Harbor Hill, Sir John Lavery ( 1856-1941). The sitter was the Mackay's granddaughter
With a 'backdoor', opening onto the south terrace, the passage between the library-'stone room' room and the dining room, faced the hall, to which it was an extension. For a time, it obviously acted as an auxiliary sitting room. As such, it was comfortably furnished by Katherine, with easy chairs, tables laden with new books and magazines, glass lamps, with pictorial paper shades and potted ferns. Assisted by Joe Duveen, so adept in locating more loot, Clarence Makay soon made it back into a formal space. It proved ideal for the display of his outstanding parade armor and stuffed steeds dressed in the proper trapping of the tournament .
January 28, 1906: The New York Times
Circa 1925: Harbor Hill's south passage
A German knight's Maximilian Armor, made in 1525 and seen at the feft, in the passageway photograph above
To begin with, the salon at Harbor Hill was an almost perfunctory Allard & Sons rendition of Louis Quinze taste. There was no great glistening central chandelier, no pile carpet on the basket-weave parquetry floor. The only memorable feature in fact, was the life-size, full-length portrait of an eighteen-year Katherine, painted by Edmund Cartran. Desire for authentic, pristine, important French furniture has not yet been prompted in 1902, so Allards reproductions will do.
1902: Harbor Hill's salon
Clarence Mackay’s eighteen-year old fiancée was painted by Edmund Cartran holding an orchid in her hand. Still others ornamented the corsage of her white satin dress and more still, a cascading coiffure. In short order, Mrs. Clarence Mackay, a socialite-celebrity, due to wealth, beauty, literary ambitions, philanthropy, her work on the local school board and for the suffragist's cause, came to write in purple ink, on pink, lavender and orchid-colored letter paper. In building Harbor Hill, she’d employed her favored mauve thoroughly, in the color scheme of her suite of rooms upstairs, while here, in the salon, the bright white walls were softened with mauve lines
Had discontent with the notion of a largely 'gilt-free', pristinely white, salon, occurred once the Mackays saw the state rooms at Blenheim Palace, that Allard probably had had a hand in redecorating?
1904: Blenheim Palace, the first state room
Redecorated with other 'show rooms' by the ninth duke of Marlborough immediately following his marriage to Katherine Mackay's friend, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Blenheim's first state room probably inspired the introduction of a carpet and tapestries in the salon at Harbor Hill.
January 28, 1906: The New York Times , Harbor Hill's salon
Was the decision to move and then sell their Four Season tapestries, based on the Mackays purchasing a finer set, four silk and wool panels of Gobelins manufactory, made between 1770 and 1773? With a narrative the exploits Don Quixote, based on the highly popular romance novel by Miguel de Cervantes, the designs were derived from paintings by Charles-Antoine Coypel.
Sancho’s Feast on the Isle of Barataria from The Story of Don Quixote series, 1770–72, woven at the Gobelins Tapestry Manufactory now owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, it had come from the collection of Clarence Mackay. This tapestry and three related hangings, perhaps hung in Harbor Hill's salon.
Frustraitingly, the ability to only find two images of this room, seperated by just four years, makes it difficult to say how it changed. It's facinating to considor the changes that occured over those few early years. Were they indicative of any subsequent rethinking, the salon might have come to look dramatically different. The tapestry above, like the chair below, could not have easily been in other rooms at Harbor Hill. Unfortunately however, they would have suited the townhouse he acquired at number three East 75th Street quite well.
One of a set of six exceptional Louis XV fauteils with tapestry covers that were owned by Clarence Mackay. Today in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, they were a bequest of Mackay's friend Forsythe Wicks
In the era prior air-conditioning, an important provision for any country house, be it cottage or summer palace, was a shaded porch, piazza or terrace. At Harbor Hill, naturally, one might enjoy all three. Because the 'glass piazza' had double-pane wondows, in addition to serving as a summer living room, it also acted as a lush winter garden, filled with palms, ferns and blooming plants, including prized orchids.
Having moved to New York, the innovative Valencian architect and builder, Rafael Guastavino, was granted a US patented for his “Tile Arch System” for making structural vaults, in 1885. Such ceilings were capable of supporting a load much greater than ordinary wooden joists. Using interlocking terracotta tiles, laid in a herringbone pattern, with layers of mortar, they’d been appropriated from traditional Roman building. The system formed taunt, resilient, fire-proof, thin and light-weight ceilings that White’s firm exploited often to form unobstructed spaces.
Used in the casino, for the plunge and other rooms, Guastavino vaults were extensively employed in Harbor Hill’s service wing as well, for pantries, the two servant’s halls and most notably, for the gleaming kitchen. The only application in the ‘show’ part of the house, was in the ‘glass piazza, where the tiles formed a shallow saucer dome that seemed weightless.
In 1902 an attraction of the Mackay's glass piazza was a ping pong table. That year the fast-paced past time had taken the nation by storm. However, after November of 1904, the conservatory-like 'glass piazza,' gained a far more unusual item of interest. Traveling in style, in his client-friend's private railway car, White and Clarence Mackay had visited the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis. When too red-blooded club-men attend a world's fair together, one has no idea just what is liable to strike their fancy. For Mackay and perhaps for White too, it was a brazen whore, beautifully made up and bedecked with a quantity of gold colored barbaric jewelry, including a necklace of tiger's claws.
January 28, 1906: The New York Times
"Cornith" portraying a priestess of Venus, a ritual prostitute, is a late work of the painter and sculptor Jean-Leon Gerome. Whether depicting the first Thanksgiving, a victor in the Roman arena, Christian martyrs or orientalists scenes of fantasy, his oeuvre was academically researched and polished, sensual and imbued with theatrical bravura. White had known the artist, who'd just died. He owned at least two of Gerome's history paintings. The son of a goldsmith, Gerome had only taken up sculpture after turning fifty. After a while, causing great controversy, using wax bases pigments, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, he began tinting his marble figures. Hence the popular title the 'Tinted Venus.' Done in several variations, much regarded as the artist’s “Most spectacular testament,” it was also his last creation.
November 1, 1908: New York Tribune
One of several variations, this version of French painter and sculptor Jean-Leon Gerome's 'Cornith,' is owned by the Getty Museum. But lacking a jewel-mounted bracelet, it is not likely to be the sane one Clarence Mackay brought home from the 1904 World's Fair.
Famous for helping clients to disavow their youthful folly, had Duveen been able to banish Mackay's Gerome? All things considered, as focal point of the conservatory, it must have been disconcerting for many much as the portrait of his wife, Stephanie Seymour, that Peter Brant commissioned. More than anything, one wonders, what did Katherine think?
By the late 1920's Harbor Hill's west portico was enclosed by glass to provide still more space for entertaining
On the first floor, the large room occupying Harbor Hill's south-west pavilion, had three windows, on both the south and the west sides. This in part, it what makes it possible, to positively assign it, in a house where change was not infrequent. From 1902, to about 1905, as accords with the drawing below, dated 1899, this was the library, Harbor Hill's principal living room, paneled in French oak, outlined in old gilt. Its woodwork, chimney-piece, curtains, wall hangings, carpet and furniture, were supplied by Allard and Sons.
They are magnificent books. The breath and depth of new research undertaken by Wayne Craven with his, Stanford White: Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiques, published by the Columbia University Press, in 2005 and Professor Richard Guy Wilson's more recent offering, Harbor Hill: Portrait of a House, produced by the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, through the auspices of the Norton Press, in 2008, is absolutely prodigious. Quite little of what I relate here would have been possible without the great help and many clues to the history of Harbor Hill both contain. I have not had the advantage of personally plowing through the hundreds and hundreds of letters, invoices, drawings, news clippings and other varied materials related to this history.
Even doing research from journals, photographs and newspapers on-line, together with consulting their work, as well as Elizabeth and Sam White's, Paul Baker's and Mosette Broderick's, has been daunting. How, might one order, organize and keep un-jumbled, so much information and a host of imperative dates? Invariably, almost unavoidably, despite all one's fine plans, writing a book, on gets something, not quite entirely right. Mr. Craven and Professor Wilson have, as regards Harbor Hill's short-lived, original library.
1902: Harbor Hill's original library. This image is from a Mckim, Mead & White office album owned by the New York Historical Society. Wayne Craven contended; "The library at Harbor Hill was located on the first floor, directly behind the main hall, although for unknown reasons it does not appear in the plans."
Reading this, made perfect sense, as no illustrations showing a room with book shelves appears in the 1915 monograph. The photo above however was used in articles published to announce Harbor Hill's completion. They include one from the New York Herald on Sunday, August 10, 1902 and "The Founding Of An American Estate" in the August 16, 1902 issue of Town and Country magazine. The 'stone room,' is nowhere to be seen, but, perhaps the library could have been behind the hall. Where would the service wing's stores and offices have been located though, if that had been so? It's the laws of physics make this explanation impossible
Their error is easily understood. Given the state of records concerning White's firm, located in three different institutions, given the changeable nature of the Mackays, one can hardly see how it came about. Indeed the discovery that something was amiss, only occurred due to their worthy efforts. Foremost, the culprits are Katherine and Clarence Mackay.
Professor Richard Guy Wilson, like Wayne Craven, shows no illustration of Harbor Hill's libraries, one and two in his book, only the billiard room. He's definite enough about the billiard room metamorphosing into the library, but discusses the library-'stone room,' as a contest between the strong wills of Katherine and Clarence. In his telling of the saga of this room, Clarence Mackay wins, but it seems that events unfolded differently
It is very difficult to believe indeed, that a pair who so often complained about escalating costs, the disruption of changes and the inconvenience of construction, could have done it. There was their fine library, complete, comfortable, homey and welcoming, outfitted in strict accordance with the the express, detailed, wishes of Mrs. Mackay and after just two years, it was completely redone!
What had been her directives? With much the same vehemence shown in determining the style and form of her house, she had decreed a Louis Quatorze style library. Just a few of Katherine's requirements included a high wainscot, of carved French oak, highlighted with gold. Green silk covered the walls above the wainscoting. It was to be a velours, woven with alternating velvet and satin stripes. The chimney breast was also paneled in oak, but the modillion bracketed cove at the top of the walls, that appears to be oak, was not. Just as the marble cove of the dining room at marble house, was not marble, here a trompe l'oeil painted finish skillfully imitated oak. Allard's estimates of 1899 outline many of these particulars, shown in the photographs that follow:
We will hang the walls with green stripe velours as per sample submitted, we will manufacture and put up window draperies, as per design submitted, using same velours as for walls... We agree to furnish and put up eight electric brackets---Louis XIV, Two ceiling fixtures as per design submitted...
1902: Harbor Hill's gemütlich library
There are the gilded bronze light brackets, shaded and recalling an hotel. In a house with few chandeliers of any kind, not surprisingly, the ceiling fixtures seem to have been eliminated. Indeed, all about the room, along with pairs of shaded candlesticks, glass kerosene lamps with pictorial paper shades are found. Used latter in the passage between this room and the dining room, which Katherine furnished as a sitting room, they'd been electrified, although rather than drilling the glass cords dangled from the sockets. Of little intrinsic value, might these lamps have belonged to Katherine's mother, who had died so soon after her marriage?
Very like the drawing room mantel of her girlhood friend, Cornelia Martin, who became the Countess of Craven, the red veined marble Louis XIV style mantelpiece had been much discussed. It was not to have a shelf, on this Katherine was most definite.
The fireside in Harbor Hill's original library
A portrait of the founder of Harbor Hill's sybaritic feast, Clarence Mackay's father, John William Mackay. had a prominent place of honor above the library's shelf-less mantelpiece. The ornate gilded frame was carved by an Allard craftsman
1902: The velvet draped writing table
Was it nostalgia that caused candles and kerosene lamps to be used in Harbor Hill's first library?
A wedding gift often given by grand friends, not rich or intimate enough to give jewels, was gold; objects such as gold vases, like the two unmatched beakers on this bureau plat. One can just glimpse as well, a leg of the tiger skin hearth rug
Confusing as hell, but understandable, was the tendency of those involved in transforming the 'private' Harbor Hill library in a 'public' space, meant for display and entertaining, to persist in referring to it as the. 'library', well after every book had been removed. Till now, this has tricked every scholar examining the house. Both the billiard room and the new 'stone room' had antique stone mantelpieces. Wilson, in speaking of the billiard room's alterations, tells how: "Robert Fisher's carvers modified the original, antique mantle and placed on it a bust of Voltaire copied by Piccirilli Brothers from Jean-Antoine Houdon's famous portrait." This did all occur of course, only, not in the billiard room, but the 'stone room.'
It is difficult to picture the 'stone room's' bust of Voltaire, surmounted by a painting of John William Mackay, as Professor Wilson and Wayne Craven outline discussing the evolution of Harbor Hill's library
Voltaire, by Jean Antonine Houdon
Although other work, in anticipation of the elimination of Harbor Hill's original library might have already started, the over-mantle design drawing shown above, with other plans for the 'stone room,' are dated 1904, two years after the house was officially completed
January 28, 1906: The New York Times: Harbor Hill's 'stone room,' first appears in the press
Both Craven and Wilson when speaking of tapestries and an order that "no color" be introduce into "my library," instead should have been discussing the 'stone room'. "I will not have tapestry anywhere but in the library...hung on the windows as I said and i wish it hung this week," Katherine stressed, meaning, the former library that was becoming the 'stone room'. Clarence Mackay himself clears things up, writing to White: "I wish some time you would take a run down to Harbor Hill in your automobile and see how that new room is progressing. It is a very important piece of work, and I should be very much obliged if you would..." The "new room" mentioned, is not the new library, progressing in the former billiard room, but the new 'stone room', made from the former library.
As instructed by Katherine Mackay tapestry hangings framed the 'stone room' openings
One intrusion of color into the 'stone room', was provided by a second portrait of Katherine Mackay.
One of the qualities of Katherine Mackay which perennially drew praise, was her originality. Her costume for the fancy dress ball of James Hazen Hyde, was no exception. Called the ball of the century, in January of 1905, it caused a maelstrom of controversy, such was its extravagance. Katherine Mackay’s costume however prompted delight in all, even Stanford White.
At a great fete meant to evoke the charm an ancien régime court at Versailles, Katherine assured distinction by portraying Adrienne Lecouvreur, the famous actress of the eighteenth century. Only, she did not powder her hair and wear a ruffled gown, as others did. Instead, she was Adrienne in her great role of the mythical Greek queen, Phedre from Racine’s play.
1906: Katherine Mackay as "Phedre", by John W. Alexander
Her dress was of silver cloth studded with turquoises, with a silver tunic and skirt. From her shoulders fell a long train of silver cloth. It was carried by two young black page boys in costumes of pink brocade with sandals. She wore a tiara of turquoises and pearls, a necklace of the same jewels and carried a crystal scepter in her hand. Her little pages followed her everywhere throughout the evening. But they do not appear in her portrait by John W. Alexander, commemorating a night of social triumph. Stanford White designed a Renaissance style frame for this work destined for the ’stone room’.
Stanford White designed a Renaissance style frame for John W. Alexander's portrait
1908
Circa 1920: The 'stone room' has a chandelier as well as tapestry at the door
Rhapsodizing about Harbor Hill and its sumptuously appointed great hall, art critic Royal Cortissoz had not neglected the 'stone room', by now dubbed the Renaissance room, writing:
The same glamour envelopes the stately Renaissance room in which most of the pictures are housed.
Among the most cherished objects in Mackay's collection, was this celebrated painted terracotta bust of Lorenzo de' Medici, made in Florence at close of the 15th, or at the start of the 16th century, probably after a model by Andrea del Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi. Today owned by the National Gallery, in the photograph found below, de Medici has displaced the reproduction bust of Voltaire
Circa 1924: Purchased in 1920 for a staggering $40,000.00 Clarence Mackay's Mannerist chest, discussed below, can be seen in the image above, positioned to the left of Renaissance room's door
Being cheated is perhaps the worst fear of the rich. Fashioned by some brilliant but unknown French workshop in about 1580, this monumental, intricately decorated cabinet had cost Mackay $40,000.00. Some questioned its authenticity and he was desperate to know for sure. Finally, on the advice of a leading expert, Mackay returned it to Duveen. The dealer was furious, but abided by a policy that today only exist at luxury retailers like Bergdorf Goodman, a dissatisfied customer, may return anything, at any time, for a credit equal to an item's purchase price. Mackay's rejection made the mannerist masterpiece impossible to sell. The Getty Museum got it on most reasonable terms. Their research however determined that, while it does indeed include late-19th-century additions, on the whole, the cabinet that was sent back, is quite genuine.
A Mannerist French cabinet, made circa 1580 from Walnut, oak, paint, brass, and iron; with a linen-and-silk lining
Velvet hangings, velvet sofas and easy chairs, oak wainscoting and a trabeated ceiling all contributed to making a bastion of masculinity. But what really imparted a a sense that this was an exclusively male preserve where the ranks of elk and stag hunting trophies that encircled one with with unblinking stares. A leaping fire, old brandy and cigars are all that's left to start the tall tales and braggadocio flowing and Clarence Mackay and Stanford White have provided for each.
1902: Harbor Hill's original billiard room
Transformation of the library, into the"stone room", a salon that served exclusively as a space for entertaining, had required that the billiard room, be made into a new, more intimate library. These first adjustments had been rather restrained. The ceiling, with molded plaster panels between oak beams was retained. So were the curtains, wainscot and velvet wall hangings. The Times photograph from 1906 shows how initially at least, even the hanging light fixture over the billiard table with four fringed pleated silk shades, was kept, to light the central library table. The costly hunting trophies, whereby which the room gained much of its character also stayed in place at first.
January 28, 1906: The New York Times
Bigger interventions were in store. The billiard room's Italian Renaissance chimney piece moved to the dining room, while the silver sconces around that room's walls, came here. The panoply of stuffed heads vanished, recalled by but four elk sculls. A portrait of daughter Kay and some majestic Louis XV seat furniture rounded things out.
Circa 1920
By 1915, the dining room's silver sconces moved to the library
What mantelpiece was used here, the dining room's antique mantle, the old library's Louis XIV style example? Over the course of events incremental change saw the reuse of a two tiered table from the first library here.
A two tiered Allard table from the first library
CIRCA 1906: Clarence Mackay with his daughters, Ellin and Katherine in Harbor Hill's second library which had formerly served as the billiard room. He is seated in a reused billiard room chair. Behind him atop the hastily improvised glazed bookcases, are the mantle clock and candelabra originally in thr dining room, To the right is a two-tiered table that Allard had supplied for the first library.
By 1925, thanks to Joseph Duveen coming upon an available and nearly complete French gothic room, from a church in Burgundy, the new library was redone a third time. The introduction of Duveen's Medieval salvage required that the library by rechristened, the "gothic room". Twenty years earlier, the billiard room had been relocated, in the casino.
There is, for example, a little gem of a room at the end of the corridor aforesaid, a Gothic room with ancient boiserie and stained glass, and a renowned group of marble pleurants sending the imagination straight back to the heroic tombs of Phillippe le Hardi and Jean sans Ouer at Dijon, in the heart of the old Burgundian tradition. It is a distinctly individualized key. But it is, in its beauty, akin to... the Sassetti, some more armor and divers other treasures, one is conscious of the unity to which I have referred, of an organized purpose seeking the perfection in the specific object and in the grand alliance of all the objects together. Exacting taste tells in every detail of arrangement, even to the placement of a bowl of yellow roses before just the sculpture that invites its presence.
Circa 1926: The Gothic room
1927: Tea Time in the Gothic Room at Harbor Hill, Sir John Lavery ( 1856-1941). Clarence Mackay, his son John William Mackay, and his mother, Louise, Mrs. John William Mackay take tea. Long a noted society leader in London and Paris, in 1920 Mrs. Mackay moved back to the US. Living with her son, at Harbor Hill, Palm Beach and on East 75th Street, she acted as his hostess and as a chaperon for her grandchildren
The flamboyant door into the Gothic room from the entrance hall
Like the billiard room as originally built, architecturally, Harbor Hill’s dining room was hardly striking. The molded plaster ceiling and oak wainscot made the room seem vaguely Elizabethan. Otherwise, an antique continental marble mantelpiece, that was exchanged soon enough, dominated the enormous space. Dinner for forty, was not uncommon. Size gave the dining room versatility. Two round tables of twenty-five were used for dinner in 1907, one of several, over the years, where the Duchess of Marlborough was guest of honor. The centers of the glistening white damask cloths displayed masses of roses and orchids, partly enveloped maiden hair fern and bathed in soft light from shaded candles. Six delectable courses, expertly prepared by the Mackay’s French chef, were passed by the butler assisted by nine footmen.
1902
Contemplating such an occasion, let’s turn the clock back, to 1904-1929. Step through the front door of Harbor Hill, follow the elegantly liveried butler. He’s leading to the west terrace, before the fountain where four allegorical bronze equestrian figures represent ever flowing rivers, the Rhine, Seine, Volga and Mississippi. Or perhaps we’re being taken to the ‘stone room’, to sit beside the fire? In any case, once there, we’ll meet the family and be given an aperitif. After a little while it’s time to link arms and with our hosts and fellow guests, enter the glowing dining room. Here, at last, we will fully experience the consummation of Harbor Hill and all such places.
1904
Why had the charming Mrs. Clarence Hungerford Mackay been so impatient. Demanding that a chateau materialize, she’d insisted that it ought appear overnight and be perfect. Partly, she was motivated by the example of her friend Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough’s mother. A dynamo of intelligence, determination and ambition, Alva Erskine Smith was born in Mobil. She’d been as focused acting to escape the genteel poverty of her girlhood as Katherine was to escape her far less dire situation. Marrying a Vanderbilt, then divorcing him, forcing her daughter Consuelo into a loveless match with one of England’s premier nobles, Alva Vanderbilt had next established an important president. Marring a second rich husband, Oliver Belmont, she managed something no one had believed to be possible. In the process of remarrying, though divorced, she’d ably managed to maintain her lofty position as a social force.
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
In between, and afterward as well, to assert her position as Mrs. Vanderbilt and then as Mrs. Belmont, she had entertained. In Fifth Avenue’s first house worthy of any claim of being comparable to the finest residences of London or Paris, in Newport at lavish “Marble House”, she hosted dinners, dances, teas and luncheon parties. The thing each entertainment she gave shared, was the attention she paid to detail. No cost was spared. Her meals were more delicious, beautifully presented and indeed in every way, better than anyone else’s. So was the orchestra chosen for a dance, the flowers selected for a lunch table.
1927
One of a serries of 'grotesque' late seventeenth century Beauvais tapestries, 'The Offerings of Bacchus' that formed an apropos decoration for Harbor Hill's dining room
Katherine had observed how after coming to New York unknown, that Alva Smith had fashioned for herself, a station of invincibility. Marshaling the Vanderbilt fortune entreating, she identified and created an important role for herself, as a leading hostess. With Mrs. Belmont and her mother-in-law as role models, Katherine Mackay was anxious to start having guest in the impressive setting of Harbor Hill, and in doing so, to create a well-lived life of her own.
A properly laid dinner table of the sort that persisted at Harbor Hill until the end
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
Is anything so nearly perfect, so reliably, repeatedly sublime, that it deserves to be preserved, as-is. for people yet unborn to experience the same joy that we know now? Can one fix some exquisite entity, as it were, in amber, immune from changing fashion and unsusceptible to the contamination of the whims of the insistent rich? Must someplace, anyplace, however satisfying, grow and change, or die. Is even Falling Water unsafe from threat?
As we grow older, inevitably, one or another of two opposing biases deepens: either one becomes inclined to trivialize the lasting value of all things, as ephemeral and replaceable, like youth and beauty, or one becomes ever more hardened toward having special places one loves, arbitrarily altered and diminished.
This then I suppose must be what accounts for the depth of my despair, anger and disgust over dramatic changes at Fenway Court, the Venetian palace-like museum devised by Isabella Stewart Gardiner in Boston, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and most critically, at the Barnes Foundation gallery, built in 1925 at Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania from designs by notable architect Paul Cret.
Dr. Albert Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation
Celebrated among aesthetes, the Barnes Foundation comprises a private collection groaning with manifold treasures among which are found African sculptures, Asian prints and Native American ceramics. The foundation even owns an early American farmhouse replete with regional vernacular decorative arts. A surrounding 12-acre arboretum is lush with rare exotics from around the world. Low-scaled, the Barnes' subdued neo-Classical exhibition building takes the form of a 16th Century Mannerist palazzo with striking African ornaments at the entrance.
However, it is iconic post-Impressionist and early Modernist paintings, 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 46 Picassos 59 Matisses, Modiglianis, Degases, Manets, Monets, Van Goghs and others which account for the fabled status of this unique institution. Esteemed objects of such quality, in so great a quantity are no less unusual than their individualist collector's purpose. Barnes' varied assemblage was meant to be the mainstay of a school promoting a philosophy of the universality and transformative nature of art, high and low, irrespective of time or space.
For a very long period, every significant American accomplishment was measured against what was done, or what had been done, long before, and far-away, by Europeans. Artistically, even after most commercial, industrial and engineering practices in the United States surpassed anything found abroad, deference to an assumption of old-world superiority persisted. A hundred years ago conservative well-to-do Americans indeed, often went to the extreme of creating houses and museums evocative of exceptional foreign examples from the distant past.
They had been taught that an aristocratic tradition underlying venerable French chateaux, Italian villas and English manor houses, made the architecture of such buildings impossible to equal in aesthetic terms, with anything new, produced here by Americans. Going so far as to emulate manners and mores derived from a noble heritage, many also imagined that by approximating some centuries-old British or continental landmark, that they could help to enlighten and elevate the intellects of ordinary people who would never travel to see the world's architectural wonders first hand.
Convinced of the pre-eminence of European culture though they were, not unlike18th Century English imperialists, eager to emulate the glory that was Rome, America's business class of a century ago was certain of their epoch's technological advance. Moreover, they felt that anything worth-while from the past could be acquired or replicated, and often, in the process, greatly improved.
This role of art and architecture, not merely as a celebration of the Gilded Age equivalent of princes and other grandees by way of power, but of edifying everyday citizens and workers, most impacted me through Stan Hywet Hall, the onetime home of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company founder, Frank A. Seiberling. Completed in 1915, today this 65-room homage to Elizabethan estates serves as a house museum. Starting at age 13 I was a volunteer tour guide there for 8 years. Endlessly exploring this unlikely 'mansion' and so meeting various Seiberlings, awakened me to a more nuanced appreciation of a world I had previously only known in movies and books.
Irene, Mrs. Milton Whatley Harrison, the Seiberling's eldest daughter, lived in the gate lodge. Our birthdays were both February 25, except she was born in 1890. "Mr. Adams knows so much about history," she announced by way of explanation once, "that he must have lived before, in Tudor times!" How proud I felt having her say this.
Distraught by matrons embarrassed by fringed lampshades like their grandmothers' and eager to help perfect Stan Hywet via their own taste, more refined than the Seiberlings they imagined, I found it difficult to always be tactful. In danger of destroying Stan Hywet through misguided efforts to improve it, the ladies of the curatorial board certainly didn't think this adolescent Negro had some special knowledge due to a past life.
Thirty miles north, the Cleveland Museum of Art was the quintessential Greco-Roman temple, dedicated to Apollo, the muses, all that was lovely and sacred. Removed from the noxious atmosphere of industries that brought Northeastern Ohio fabulous wealth, the glowingly inviolate white marble structure stood isolated within a garden, designed by Olmstead Brothers, beside a small lake. All the buildings around this 'lagoon' similarly envisaged the triumph of Western cultural traditions. But, they and the garden were no more than a transitional prelude, like the exquisitely wrought golden setting of some rare, mammoth and magnificent multifaceted jewel, awaiting one within. At the base of the entry-stairs sat Rodin's Thinker like a sentinel secular deity.
And, even here, beyond the purely ceremonial domed rotunda, two additional ritualistic spaces enabled the novitiate-visitor time to cast-off the travails of the world-of-worry without, in order to be more receptive to holy mysteries of a higher realm inside. The most crucial, down a few steps, was the brick-lined, top-lit garden court, suffused with light and furnished by an iron balcony and a scattering of architectural fragments enveloped by palms, ferns, ivy and rubber plants. A shallow pool at the center provided the echoing sound of tinkling water. Not long after the room's completion a large symphonic pipe organ was installed atop the arcaded loggia at the far end, so that sonorous, other-worldly music wafted through the galleries.
Obviously this retreat was modeled after sculptor George Gray Barnard's cloisters in New York City's Washington Heights at 190th Street, which were eventually purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and moved. It was also indebted to Mrs. Gardner's glassed atrium at Fenway Court, where colorful potted flowers and scented blooming shrubs have always augmented the greenery.
Ironically, it's the ego of today's most acclaimed 'starchitects' that has adversely impacted both places. Rafel Vinoly is the culprit in Cleveland. Much like the crass and shortsighted destruction of the Holden Gallery's programmatic neo-Renaissance embellishments a half-century ago, now it was the Garden Court's time to give way to 'greater artistic objectivity'. Vinoly's expansive envelopes made 'transparent', via enormous volumes of glass, are many of them meant to do double-duty as venues for fund-raising galas. In this regard they are all-but prophetic of vast operations deficits to come, as the museum trustees grapple with a guarantee of gargantuan heating and cooling costs that might have
been avoided.
In Boston, Gardner officials boast that the museum is "unchanged but not stagnate." Thanks to Renzo Piano this is an understatement at best, since the very way one enters the museum and circulates has been totally altered. How well I remember my first time leaving the brilliant summer's sunshine, the noise of a baseball game in progress, entering into a low, relatively cool and hushedly quiet place...walking toward the softly splashing sound of water, brushing past an enormous tree fern, how exhilarating to see a sight that had made even proper Bostonians gasp with delight a century ago, one that makes me gasp now too, after half a dozen visits, over a distance of 25 years. Moreover, there were paintings upstairs of opulent grandeur, set off against remnants of Mrs. Gardner's old ball gowns . My favorite?...Titian's incomparable allegory with an unexpected crease down the middle. How reassuring it used to be knowing that Mrs. Gardiner's will stipulated that nothing at Fenway Court could be loaned, moved or changed.
In a letter, Robert Venturi, perhaps the nation's first 'starchitect', decries the $200-million project to move the Barnes' Foundation Collection to downtown Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway. He criticizes it as what it is, "an indiscreet and ridiculous waste of money."
Albert Coombs Barnes (January 2, 1872 - July 24, 1951) was an American inventor and art collector. As a youngster, he attended Methodist revivals and 'Negro' camp meetings with his devout mother. Exposed in this way, so early, to black gospel and spiritual singing, Barnes developed a life-long appreciation for African American culture and creative expression.
Born into deep poverty, Barnes' struggles to better himself were incessant. In order to attend the University of Pennsylvania he even fought in boxing matches. In 1899 with a German student named Hermann Hille, Barnes developed a mild antiseptic to combat venereal disease in newborns. It was an immediate financial success, enabling him, soon after the turn of the century, at the age of 35, to buy out his partner and become a millionaire. A shrewd sense of timing meant he later sold his company before the stock market crash of 1929. However, he was hardly infallible.
Notwithstanding the preoccupation art patrons like Henry Clay Frick had with reproducing on home ground antique European splendors, Barnes was attracted to the new. This resulted from his friendship with a former high school classmate, the painter William Glackens. At his friend's behest Glackens obtained 20 'modern' paintings in Paris that were to form the core of Barnes' collection.
In 1912, during a stay in Paris, invited to the home of Gertrude Stein, Barnes first met Matisse and Picasso. During the great Depression Barnes' excellent eye, expert advisors and ample funds enabled him to acquire important works at bargain prices. His first Picasso, for instance, was bought for under $100.
Barnes' antagonism toward orthodoxy and art history, which he said "stifles both self-expression and appreciation of art" were loudly stated and widely known. The initial public showing of his collection in 1923 elicited a response not very different from that befalling New York's Armory Show a decade earlier. Critical denouncements and brickbats only intensified a disdain for the art establishment and elite art connoisseurs. Barnes created his foundation and school, he said, not for the benefit of art historians, but for that of the students. Happy for interested but ordinary people to view his treasures, Barnes' policy of restricted hours at an out-of-the-way location were deliberate safeguards of a vision now due to be completely ignored. Requring two dozen plane trees to be felled, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects' new facility, occupying four times the area of the original, packed with noisy and indifferent tourists, will be utterly at odds with the self-selecting audience of inquisitive art lovers Dr. Barnes sought to cultivate.
Opposed to curatorial and scholarly barriers between artwork and viewers, Barnes had his collection hung according to his own novel ideas. Identification was kept to a minimum, while paintings, furniture and finely crafted metalwork were juxtaposed in such a way as to reinforce highly original aesthetic relationships one might otherwise never have considered.
Beyond merely thumbing his nose at Main-Line Philadelphia philistines, Dr. Barnes decision to give humble, black, Lincoln University control over the governance of his foundation was due to a friendship he established late in the 1940s with Horace Mann Bond, Lincoln's first black president, and Julian Bond's father.
"About all that's missing from The Art of the Steal, observed Manohla Dargis in a review published in the Times on Friday February 26, 2010, of the dynamic documentary he says is about a high-cultural brawl, "is a hot woman with a warm gun."
Memorably it features freedom fighter Julian Bond, speaking poignantly of his father and Dr. Barnes' mutual respect. How bewitchingly beautiful Julian Bond was once, transcending race, class, gender and time with his classic appeal. How affecting he is now, outlining aspects of the divisive mess that's ensued since the deaths of Doctors Bond and Barnes, in this engrossingly sad indictment of power gone awry, directed by Don Argott serving as his own cinematographer.
In New York, one of the outings that never fails to gladden the soul is a trip to our version of London's Wallace collection, the Frick Collection. Central Park and the Conservatory Garden offer New Yorkers all the pleasures attendant to a Gilded Age multi-millionaire's country estate. So the Pittsburg steel-man's palatial house provides a telling glimpse of the grandest type of townhouse built here then. Despite horrifying noises about further additions and alterations to this nearly flawless gem, mostly recent efforts at the Frick have been taken to restore early 20th century down filled, velvet sofas and Chinese porcelain lamps with shirred-silk, fringed shades. It's these 'pedestrian' elements and the status symbol Aeolian organ which impart such period charm to the business of touring someone's home filled with priceless paintings and ornaments.
At Stan Hywet Hall a new positive receptiveness to Gilded Era taste has seen elements as detested as canvas awnings and Virginia creeper restored along with altered landscapes and a long lost greenhouse. As at the Frick, the continuity of descendants of the donor among the trustees who are only slightly less assertive than their important forbear has been decisive.
This was a bulwark against challenges to his intentions that the childless Barnes lacked.
"Contracts can be broken, wills challenged, legacies dismantled. And in the years after Barnes' death, the collection became the focus of a fascinating fight among an array of interests. Much of the louder part of the battle involved its location: some wanted it to stay put, thereby honoring Barnes' wishes. Others wanted it moved to Philadelphia, where it would be more accessible and, of course, could become a desirable, lucrative tourist attraction,"
asserts Dargis in the Times.
All too aware of how treachery is an equal-opportunity defect, none-the-less, as an African American, I still feel especially saddened by the pivotal role blacks played in implementing this tragedy. Have we no honor, no sense of duty, beyond the short-term pittances or self-serving deals with piddling pay-offs? Of course former Philadelphia mayor John F. Street and Barnes Foundation president Richard Glanton only mimicked the sordid deeds of whites like Pennsylvania's 'bullish' governor, Edward G. Rendell, the Hon. Walter Annenberg and Pew Charitable Trust officers, to name just a few.
Giddy with the entree and notice his position lent him, Glanton set the Barnes' demise in motion, however. Oblivious to the foundation's ability to enhance Lincoln University academically, like a real-life character from an August Wilson drama, he saw only the blinding dazzle of dollar signs. Claiming that extensive repairs to the aging Barnes' gallery were imperative, he set about breaking key terms of the foundation's indenture. From 1993 to 1995, he sent a selection of 83 French Impressionist paintings to be exhibited on a world tour, the proceeds of which were to pay for these 'over-due renovations'. The works attracted large crowds in numerous localities.
In retaliation for his dismissal as the foundation's head, Glanton leaked evidence of Lincoln's president's extremely lavish home-decorating projects, which ultimately revealed various misappropriations of university funds. Taken together such minor venalities by ambitious blacks made them ripe for manipulation: initially being co-opted and finally, being replaced and disregarded. With such easy marks, maneuvering to relocate the Barnes Foundation to Philadelphia amounted to child's play.
If Don Argott doesn't feign disinterest in The Art of the Steal, then neither do I. How is it legal, in America, to accept someone's gift, only to discard their expressed wishes as to the gift's disposition? Whether in Cleveland, Boston or Philadelphia, such actions may be possible, and might even, for a while, be able to be 'legalized', but they are always immoral just the same. In the case of the Barnes, the engineering of this process having been largely accomplished through the connivance of several large and bountiful foundations, philanthropist Lewis B. Cullman's idea seems to be the ideal prescription: charitable foundations ought to be mandated by law to disperse their assets in no longer a span than a human lifetime.
One acquaintance laughed, "You are always swishing in a parade because you are one real queen!" An older and wiser friend has said, "One definition of being gay is an irresistible attraction to the unobtainable!" Giving credence to both notions is the elusive, but ever more compelling desire I, and others who are gay have, to be ourselves, out-loud proud and unashamed.
For me, self-discovery and acceptance have been an interesting if sometimes arduous journey, made along a circuitous route as unpredictable as Langston Hughes' perilous staircase. Even after my first boyfriend, an alcoholic interior decorator in Shaker Heights, broke up by informing me, "I can't be with you anymore, my white friends don't understand.", I still pursued young blonds who were mostly unresponsive. My second boyfriend, black, seeing me with my first, resolved, he said, 'to take me away from that white man.' Working at Mr. Henry's, Cleveland's most popular black gay bar, seeking a third boyfriend I still went out on my night off looking for white boys.
Concentrating on my work, I never gave a second glance to patrons eager to buy me drinks. The situation was not so different from the blue-eyed beauties I vainly asked to dance. But what was it about the man from L. A. that manifested an epiphany, enabling me to see beauty I'd refused to see before? He was tall, dark, slender, but muscled and lovely; a bus driver. He ignited a spark. I would never dismiss black men again, realizing in an instant, that the same forces that made me not want to be gay were the same forces that had made me not want to be black!'
I'd learned about some of those powerful forces in a Middle Eastern Cultural Traditions course, studying the three great monotheistic faiths originating in the valley at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. That class had been transformative too. It outlined how more than anything else, the Abrahamic religions share disdain for women and gays and contempt for non-believers so great, that it is convert, or else.
Among close friends and my lesbian sister I acknowledged being gay for a year before coming out to my parents. Although we held a reverence for history, I was an aesthete and my father was a jock. So my dad and I, forever dissapointed that one did not embrace enthusiasms loved by the other, were frequently at odds, hurting each other over and over again. Mom and I appreciated plenty of interests in common. We both loved flowers, good food, pretty clothes and making each other laugh. My folk's role reversal, that blustery morning, was what was hardest to take. We were conferring in their room, with the door closed, something that had never occurred before. After a series of false starts, to avoid chickening out yet again, I'd mailed mom and dad a confessional letter. Because they still hadn't replied after four days, I'd used a sudden blizzard as an excuse to venture the blocks from my basement apartment 'to help shovel snow at home.' My usually distant dad had started, noting,
"Well, as you suggest in your letter son, there's very little in life that's ever really secret. I guess we've always known... But I hope you know, that knowing, your mother and I don't love you any less now than we always have..."
This was the most wonderful thing my father would ever say to me. It was delivered with a directness and honesty that made it clear that he believed what he was saying. But it's an indication of just how tenuous and combative my relationship usually was with my father, that my immediate response to this dramatic announcement was to wonder to myself in silence, 'Really, just how much is that?'
I knew better of course than to give voice to any question of the sincerity of dad's affection. Whereas, with my mom, I was stung. What she said made it seem that she didn't love me, just as I was. But the depth and duration of our intimacy was such that I had no hesitation whatever in challenging her logic. I addressed her suggestion that with divine intervention, I might fix myself, with:
"I have prayed, for twenty-five years I've asked God to help me, and I'm still black, I'm still poor and I'm still gay!"
The other day recalling all this I wondered besides, 'Whyaren't the people trying to change or control those of us who are different,heterosexuals, whites, whatever, not better able to empathize, to understand that all we want is what they already expect and enjoy: mostly, love and freedom? What possibly is ever the compelling public purpose of discrimination? Whether directed against blacks or gays, whomever, discrimination amounts to nothing more than a means of maintaining oppressive authority.' This was the preamble to my communal rejoicing, thinking, ‘ Hooray!’ At last the spurious ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ has been overturned. However distressed I felt due to the Supreme Court's ill-advised evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, like all right-thinking people I rejoiced nonetheless.
I had marched here three times before making my big move to Harlem late in the summer of 1985. So Sunday, June 30th, marked my thirtieth New York City Gay Pride Parade. It’s always an exhilarating experience, joining an exuberant throng of hundreds of thousands celebrating self-assertion. A decade ago I hit on the idea of tossing roses to spectators as I make my progress. Done with the help of friends, distributing floral tokens of affection is a wonderful way to engage with fellow revelers, who always seem about as pleased with a rose as if it were a gold coin.
But oddly enough, as anyone living in New York knows, even in the middle of a multitude one can still be alone. Certainly promenading and throwing flowers left lots of time to think, to consider and analyze some of the momentous pronouncements that made this year's march bigger than ever before.
Such weighty stuff naturally was bound to be interspersed with some froth, observations of mine amounting to a preoccupation, such as: ‘What an adorable child!, I don’t remember that fine old Federal house being here before?,' or, ‘How cute is that one, over there!’ But prevailing hoopla, infusing almost everyone and then overhearing a young man who'd just gotten married, exclaim of himself and his partner, 'Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God almighty, we're free at last!', the entire overheated atmosphere, it all brought me around.
'How?' I mused, while smiling at the cheering, jubilant, rainbow flag bedecked and waving mob, 'How did we ever get here? How are some able to downplay the slap-in-the-face setback to people of color, to witness dismemberment of the Voting Rights Act, unmoved and to march exultant, only concerned with a great leap forward for gays? How have so many arrived at feeling that the civil rights of blacks are so far less pressing today than what seem to me to be the far less critical travails of the LGB and T’?'
Those were the lines along which my wondering went, leaving me feeling a little alone in a crowd overjoyed with the downfall of 'DOMA'.
The ‘Defense of Marriage Act’was determined to be in violation of Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which protects against abuse of government authority in a legal proceeding.
A similar decision handed down by the Court a short forty-six years ago, June 12, 1967, when I was an inquisitive eleven-year-old, dismissed the Commonwealth of Virginia's prohibition against whites or blacks marrying persons of another race. Hearing the aptly named Virginia v Loving, the High Court then ruled citing a quite different section of our Bill of Rights, both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Chief Justice Earl Warren's opinion for a unanimous Court held that:
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man, [read humankind] fundamental to our very existence and survival...To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
Understandably enough the Court concluded that racist anti-miscegenation laws had been enacted to perpetuate white supremacy:
There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose, independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain white supremacy.
With the example of this shining precedent, why was hateful heterosexual superiority not dispatched as readily as white supremacy? Moreover, why now is the Court's confrontation and dismissal of bigotry no longer universal, but decided only with the narrowest majority?
Even worried about growing efforts to suppress the political power of 'minorities', unavoidably, I joined in applauding the defeat of Proposition Eight and 'DOMA'. Yet for all the real hardship gays may undergo here, I for one, do not feel our suffering is analogous to the enduring woe faced by blacks. No, in America, no matter what Bayard Rustin or Coretta Scott King might have said in response to apathy about our raging HIV/AIDS epidemic, 'gay' is not the 'newblack'!
_
How can it be? How can living in poverty, being unable to get a good education, being poorly housed, inadequately employed, unemployed, untrained, unhealthily fed, uninsured, entrapped into usurious home loans, even when qualified for long-term, fixed-mortgage rates, liable to be stopped and frisked, likely to be arrested and convicted, likely to be shot by police or gang members, prone to receive far harsher sentences than whites, so easily disqualified as a voter, most impacted by HIV/AIDS and a host of diet-induced maladies, disillusioned, or having a paucity of any and all of the opportunities enabling others to succeed, be equated with even the worst anti-gay prejudice America offers, even the inability to marry the person of one’s choice?
Of course, there is a caveat. Outside of America, outside of the West, an open gay life can be an assured death sentence. No sane person would wish to be born in places were gay delirium amounts to a national sport.
No one ought imagine that I, black and gay, a ‘double negative’, I used to feel, trivialize in any way the hate, attack and murder, endemic to American gays of late, even in New York. Gay bias today is indeed sometimes quite grim. The brazen shooting of 32-year-old Marc Carson in the heart of gay Greenwich Village, early in the morning on May 18th, however horrendous, was nothing unique. Before, and since, a score of gays have been attacked and even slain. Back around 2002,for instance, three gay homeless African American teenagers were killed in Harlem; their deaths are still unsolved. In 2008, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, Ecuadorian immigrant brothers, Jose and RomelSucuzhanay, heterosexual, but walking arm in arm, following a night on the town, were brutally attacked by three tall black youths. Hurling a barrage of ethnic and anti-gay abuse, the black men also wielded against their defenseless victims an aluminum bat and a broken beer bottle. As a result of this assault, Jose Sucuzhanay was declared brain-dead and then died. His murderers who were charged with 'manslaughter', claimed that their victims had disrespected their car, by kicking a wheel after they were insulted.
Those were some interesting times back at the close of the Bush era. This was a moment when so much seemed lost, with so much at stake, that the people of the United States made history, electing Barack Obama, as our first African American president. In the same election, in 'liberal' California, blacks voted disproportionately to support a ballot imitative meant to curtail the civil rights of fellow citizens. Through the infamous Proposition Eight, the perilous struggle for human dignity and mutual respect was recklessly prolonged.
Such incidents, the murder of brothers, mistakenly id-ed as gay, sensational and violent, and the mundanely political, latest California ballot initiative, were but the two sides of the same coin. Like torture and terrorism, the one the cause of the other, they are insuperable incidents of ignorance and intolerance.
If ignorance is a key problem, the solution is a hard one. Just pass by any playground and you're sure to hear why. How pervasively the taunt of, "faggot" or "gay" is applied, by even the littlest kids, to each other, along with 'nigga' in black neighborhoods, as the most contemptuous terms they know. Moreover, out of fear, not of stupidly, but of "acting white", of appearing effeminate, of isolation, many boys reject education altogether as a stigmatizing burden.
Black Californians were not motivated solely out of mean-spiritedness or hate, no more than the European capitalists of long ago who sold Africans into slavery, or Germans who persecuted Jews. Now, as in the past, most people in search of a scapegoat usually feel a large measure of righteously indignant justification of the kind that fosters anti-gay hysteria in Africa, the Levant, Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia.
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'. 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 bared pursuing, became a cautionary tale about the dire threat blacks posed to American society, a detriment of doom more than justifying separatism, fear and loathing.
David Wilson
James Baldwin
Edward Perry
Gladys Bently, Bobby Short, Billy Strayhorn, Bricktop and Claude Marchant
In days past, black gays and lesbians spent as much effort evincing excellence, to belie negative stereotypes, as they did obscuring their true identity from a hostile world.
Historically, condemned as members of a criminal class, those voting for Proposition Eight felt moved by 'virtue'. Exhibiting one’s own piety through an attack on reviled reprobates, was hardly difficult for people whose ancestors appropriated the foreign religion used as a means of their enslavement. Christianity became a tool that African Americans turned into a powerful liberation movement. Striking out at a group even more despised than blacks, black voters in the 'SunshineState' wounded gays and lesbians in a critical way that avoiding blood and gore, could blithely be categorized as Christian.
"Gays," Colin Powell insisted until rather recently, for instance, "wrongly try to compare themselves to blacks. Their mistake is that we don't choose the color of our skin," he said. Clergy, like the Reverend Floyd Flake, have similarly denounced the "immorality of homosexuality," as comparable to the irrationality of "intentionally eating out of the toilet bowl."
With such arguments, often eerily reminiscent of old rationales for black oppression, gays and lesbians certainly are widely under attack, seemingly by all and sundry, but particularly from blacks offended that oppression links us. This hounding of homosexuals, a backlash against ever greater gay liberation, includes many people who ought to know better. Professing Christians would do well to recall how their own first adherents were also routinely and casually crucified for an unpopular and nonconforming identity.
The problem eternally besetting blacks, is our perennial inability to pass. Even long-loathed gays, now that AIDS is better under control, what with gay marriages, designer gaybys, highly respected, well-paying professions and excess disposable incomes, do a better job at assimilation than we, the darker brother, eternally angry and feared. Now I know this is merely a skewed characterization offered of my gay tribe. Certainly there is only the smallest participation of the gay gentry who summer at Fire Island, P-Town and the Hamptons at any gay rally or march. And one has only to attend a gay pride celebration like New York's, to appreciate the true rainbow-like diversity, in terms of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, role-playing and social class, that America's gay community actually represents.
But the perception of a well-off, fastidious and fabulous gay populous persists. Broke Back Mountain was one break-through, suggesting that gay men were not necessarily easily detected nelly queens, that some gays, look like straight movie stars. The Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Ellen, Anderson Cooper, John Lemon-inspired notion of gayness, emerging of late, is as new as it is ill-informed. But then so is the Cosby Show, Oprah Winfrey, Collin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Williams Sisters, Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, Clarence Thomas, Beyoncé, Kanye West vision of black transcendence and triumph. It was encapsulated by the election of Obama, that focal figure of America's post-racial deliverance.
The always eloquent John Lemon
This, too, to be sure is, it's impossible to say otherwise accurately, is plain BS. As evidence, one may take one’s pick. It's hard to say which example is more deplorable, George Zimmerman's hunting down, then self-righteously executing unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, or New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who sanguinely justifies the more than one million men stopped and frisked over the past two years. Ninety percent were black and Latino, but not, the mayor says, on account of racial profiling. "I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.", says he. The rationale for this contention, approving an even more draconian intervention among young men of color? His Honor explains it's because, "A disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder are minorities."
New York City Council Member Brad Lander, for one, was quick to respond. A major supporter of two bills to oversee and better regulate the policy of massive stops and one offering citizens the ability to sue if they felt they've been fingered solely based on religion, sexual orientation, or race, Mr. Lander offered Mayor Bloomberg a mathematics lesson. Contending of those stopped last year, fifty-eight percent of blacks and Latinos were frisked but just forty-four percent of whites, he stated that twice as often, it was whites who were armed with guns!
Whichever indicator one picks to underscore the tragi-comic persistence of race-based animus and a lack of either empathy or compassion in America, both bring to mind journalist Brittney Cooper's succinct look at the problem through the distorting lens of national holidays,
"And that is the thing about American holidays: All too frequently they misdirect the focus and confuse the narrative, so that the villains are seen as benevolent and the victims are seen as the aggressors. Thanksgiving, the day that the nation memorializes the genocide of Natives, while giving thanks for generations of wealth built on the plunder of their lands, is a case in point"
Hear, hear! In exactly the same way, Mayor Bloomberg and New York's Finest are cheered by many for keeping us safe. But what's likely to be made clear through pending judicial findings, is that not only have fewer than ten percent of the millions stopped to date, been at fault, but that even the guilty, the majority of whom were charged with possession of small amounts of marajuna, as opposed to firearms, have themselves been crime victims! To stop and search someone without cause, except that they are black, male and young, even if some, or even were most crimes committed by black male youth, violates the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution! Were whites stopped in the vicinity of Wall Street, think of the insider trading and cocaine bust ! Yet Whites stoped in such numbers, or even at a proportionate rate, would cause such an outrage, that the Stop-and-Frisk policy would be suspended overnight.
And what if a black man had followed, hounded and shot dead a white teenager? Inasmuch as George Zimmerman is white, and Trayvon Martin was black, some are able to suspend disbelief, and imagine the one as vigilant, a good neighbor who stood his ground, defending his community and life. Trayvon is easily viewed as a terrifying suspect, who was killed through some awful accident. Were the races of these two reversed, who would not see Zimmerman, as Trayvon, terrified and screaming did, as a manic and menacing 'creep', cruising him or otherwise up to no good?
About a year ago my ailing father died. We were never as story-book close as we might have liked to be. But thanks to our mutual devotion to history and justice, we remained connected until the last. Dad was sure that my forthcoming gay and lesbian history, Homo Harlem, would turn out to be a best seller.
My mother took great offense that I had ever prayed not to be black. For me, I tried to tell her, that though I loved watermelon, fried chicken, Diana Washington and her just as much as always, I also wanted an easier, happier, more rewarding life. Because she is a Christian who believes salvation and eternal life incumbent on following the word of God, including prohibitions condemning being gay, because she is heterosexual, twenty-two years ago, my mother couldn't accept who I am. But my mother loves me, as well as Jesus, who said;
Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek me: and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you. A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. John 13:33-35
So over the years, my mom though no less devout, has gown more empathetic. For me, still black, still poor and still gay and for others like me, I hope that one day, that all the world becomes more like my mom.
In an abjectly racist America, without the advent of extraordinary women like Madam C. J. Walker, Dr. Jane Wright Jones, Ophelia DeVore or Rose Morgan, would the idea that “Black is Beautiful” have ever become reality? It’s hard to see how.
1950: Rose Meta Morgan
It's a full century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation. Fifty years have passed since Dr. King's March on Washington; forty three, since Essence was started.
Josehpine, Pam, L'Tanya!
Under the superlative editorial direction of the acclaimed Gordon Parks, photographer, film-maker, writer, Essence Magazine debuted in 1970. Watched over and nurtured during three years of gestation by Parks, provided with a forthright African-American derived aesthetic and outlook, Essence focused on uplift, enhancement and empowerment. A successor to the Inter-State Tattler, Ebony, Jet, Our World, Copper, Hueand other more general magazines for African-Americans, Essence rapidly assumed the role of America's foremost journal for black women.
When venerable, 'mainstream'Time acquired 49 percent of Essence Communications in 2000, and adsorbed the remainder by 2005, some felt foreboding. Any number even worried that no longer black-owned, there might just be a high price to pay. The grim extent of the blow to come was beyond the imaginative powers of most. The first shoe to drop, it now turns out, was actually kicked off. The abrupt departure of long-time editor-in-chief Susan L. Taylor, who all but embodied the Essence ethos, was a wrench. A loyal readership, which in the days before the Internet amounted to a sisterhood, was left distressed and disbelieving.
Susan L. Taylor, who embodies the Essence ethos
Now,less than two years after she was hired with fanfare, Constance C.R. White, the latest Essence top editor, has disclosed that her departure was also not a voluntary move. Rather, following repeated clashes with Martha Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., she was finally dismissed. Ms. Nelson, who is of European descent, sought to limit the way black women were portrayed, Ms. White says. She even went so far as to second-guess what it was that African Americans 'wanted and needed.'
Constance C.R. White, the former Essence Magazine editor-in-chief
"This is a magazine where the central DNA was laid down by Gordon Parks...I went in there with passion and excitement and high expectations." White lamented, concluding, "Essence is the last place where black women should be demeaned and diminished."
Meanwhile, as to 'mainstream' outlets of, and for, the 'mainstream', don't look too quickly, or you will very likely conclude, as I did in youth, that blacks do not exist. Now, one hardly means this literally, well, at least not most of the time. It's only that we are still rigidly segregated; over-representation in the metro section, among stories to do with crime and despair, in most newspapers, and given, at best, a minimal presence in the style, house and home and fashion sections. African American materialism is known enough that usually, even in Vogue, advertisements include a smattering of black models. But other than on those exceptional occasions when President and First Lady Obama, or Oprah, or Will Smith and Jada Pinkett are featured, from New York Magazine to Elle Decor, there is scant representation of African Americans in glossy journals. The most recent T-Magazine, profiling former Princess Lee Radziwill, on February 17, represented perhaps a new low of white exclusivity: there were in this issue no non-white writers, photographers, subjects of features, nor even among myriad advertisements, a single model of color. A colleague at the Times explained such prejudice as stemming from the profitability of the Times Fashion Magazine. "It's filled with adds!" he explained.
What can one say except, "Am I not a man and a brother-consumer of high fashion? "
My friend the historian Deborah Willis’ exhibition “Framing Beauty,” on view at Washington's International Visions Gallery through April 13, is a welcome antidote to the new racism's tendency to distort, dismiss and disappear blackness. It relates aspects of how African-Americans still struggle in portraying who we are, and how we see ourselves, in relation to the wider world.
Historian Deborah Willis
First confronting, controlling, constructing, composing, refining one's identity and image, was a 19th-century miracle. Black beauty cultivation through photography, helped blacks to discover our true selves. Looking away from the white way of being beautiful, which black efforts helped whites achieve and maintain, we slowly learned to see in our own visage, the image of God. With the scourge of slavery still a living memory, eventually blacks began to disseminate our approving sense of self into the world. Positive, becoming, beguiling imagery of African Americans in black journals, did far more than just help to foster black self-esteem. Helping as well to counteract the effects of centuries of hateful, demonization and disfigurement, the healing message such photographs conveyed, favorably impacted everyone.
One wishes it were impossible to recall how universally attributes of ‘blackness’ were once thoroughly reviled. Sometimes today one forgets. It’s easy to overlook what happened in the past, what even occurs in the present, given how 'big butts', full lips, ‘healthy color’, and for that matter, the flair and style associated with African Americans is so widely and highly esteemed. Yet all over Africa, and even here, skin bleaching with lye-based nostrums, weaves of long straight hair and peroxide-induced blond coiffures persists.
Ca. 1944: Joan Crawford
Ca. 1944: Lena Horne
The pride fair-skinned African Americans once derived from a semblance of whiteness, the advantage derived from fine hair and an ability to assume the prevalent standard of beauty, was heretofore incalculable. Not so long ago, it was an almost indispensable element of regard and success. Generally, among African Americans, to have 'kinky hair', to be dark and denigrated as ‘dingy’, ‘rusty’, blacky, spook, blue-black, ashy, inky, or dirty, was regarded as a misfortune. Whereas for whites, though dreaded, despised, deplored or pitied, Africa Americans and our blackness, proved indispensable. We were for whites, a conspicuous, an ironical and omnipresent reassurance of dominion and superiority.
This was why enslaved African servants were such status symbols in the 17th and 18thcenturies. Beyond mere utility, their presence announced at once, a slave owner's wealth. Moreover, like the black substance Ralph Ellison’s hero in Invisible Man witnesses was added to white paint, making it all the more brilliantly white, black ‘otherness’ made white masters and mistresses feel both more comely and noble.
A English princess offered coral and pearls
So it was with American culture in days gone by, before the civil rights movement. Whether as comical minstrels, insolent bucks, licentious wenches or docile and slow-witted servants, a panoply of stereotypically inferior blacks routinely figured in plays, journals and literature. They also liberally peopled movies, the radio, TV, and even advertisements, solely to remind whites, of how in all ways and things, they were better. It only followed that, deservedly so, whites were also much better off.
Understandably then, however elusive well-chiseled features, thin lips, bright blue eyes, flowing blonde tresses and a pink-tinged but otherwise etiolated completion, attributes of whiteness indicative of inherent privilege, were as prized by blacks as by whites.
Black America has always enjoyed a fair share of near-white beauties. Memorable among their ranks were Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridgeand Blanche Dunn, who famously responded when a downtown Manhattan waiter pronounced, “We do not serve Negros!”, “I don’t blame you. Now please, take my order!” Perversely, Miss Dunn’s retort underscores something of the isolation and inadequacy inherent in being deemed neither ‘truly’ white, nor ‘authentically’ black. Inevitably better educated, employed and housed than their darker brothers and sisters, ‘light skinned’ blacks both accepted and deplored the advantage stingily dispensed by their white relations. In the case of actresses, like Edna Thomas, Horne, Dandridge or Dunn, it meant a greater likelihood of being cast in the small set of black roles offered. But it also meant having to wear dark makeup and over-elaborate costumes, and reciting jargon-filled, accented dialogue. The imperative was that there be no mistaking whatever, ‘the maid’s’ or 'the hussy's' black identity.
Ca. 1944: Jennifer Jones
Ca. 1944: Blanche Dunn
All the same, for such fortunate women of mixed-race ancestry, their beauty was beyond question. But what of the issue of identity and self-esteem for others? The majority of America’s women of African descent were routinely reminded, in the media and by society, of their wanting beauty and their utter lack of attraction, even as the sexual harassment and abuse of men, black and white, ought to have indicated otherwise. The ugliness of the 'black bitch', was even often offered as justification for the maltreatment of African American women in the past, even as today it is offered as an excuse, demanding of them lewd and unseemly attire.
"Madam C. J. Walker, my, my, she was an extraordinary person! She taught us how to be beautiful!"
So said one of the renown black beauty business entrepreneur's elderly agents in Stanley Nelson's captivating documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream, that chronicles her life. Born to former slaves shortly after the end of the Civil War, once her arduous, stress-filled life caused her hair to fall out in patches, she resolved to take action. Walker was able to so successfully make others beautiful, to teach and inspire self-reliance and appreciation, because she had been forced to discover both for herself.
Ca. 1950: How much did my mom's awareness of her own charm owe to a message of black beauty and empowerment espoused by the Walker women and Rose Morgan?
Madam Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire. She made her fortune through the manufacture, promotion and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks. Her clientele were not ordinarily mulattoes, women able to use pale face powder, who had no trouble adhering to fashions devised for whites. Rather, mostly, they were darker, women like herself, and her daughter Lilia, working women, whose hair had to be straightened and Marcelled to form a proper pompadour or a chinginon.
Through great thrift, causing her to demand a refund on determining she was being overcharged by half of a penny, for each box of the thousands of boxes of hairpins she ordered each year, shrewd Madam Walker grew ever richer. Her wealth was beyond the imagination of most blacks. Yet, as a one-time laundress, painfully aware of the value of a dollar, she always sought quality and never spent money just for show. Her Harlem townhouse, that occupied two remolded brownstones above her beauty parlor, spa and school, was dignity itself, but far less costly than a completely new structure would have been. Along with her even more ambitious country retreat, a mansion on a compact estate overlooking the Hudson, it had been designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy. A Cornell graduate, he was New York State's first registered African American architect. By engaging him Walker was only complying with her desire, whenever possible, to employ blacks. Both house designs, derived directly from contemporary residences built for rich whites, impeccablyrepresented aesthetic orthodoxy.
The Walkers and Rose Morgan helped initiate a revolution. They effected the revelation of black beauty!
Providing women otherwise often untrained, the ability to engage in non-menial work or farm labor, Walker helped to dramatically change the known world of many. Without Madam Walker and her daughter, or legions of agents selling Walker products, practicing Walker methods, spreading a gospel of black beauty, that even many blacks initially regarded as heresy, would women among the black masses have independently discovered their worth and allure? Without Walker in her day, and Rose Morgan latter on, might not many arresting African American Aphrodites, have lived life convinced of their ugliness?
Some brown-skinned beauties, who might never have been recognized without the innovative efforts of Madam Walker or Rose Morgan.
If thanks to the Walkers, Morgan and others, black was finally acceptable around 1948 when this photograph was made of Elizabeth Pinkney, it took until the 1970's for all to be glad to say "Black is beautiful!", "I'm black and I'm proud!"
Miss Cheyney State had met and married Edward Pinkeney to love and live with, happily ever after. When she died, suddenly at age 55, she was still teaching second grade, in the same school where she had educated students for over 30 years. Her death stunned everyone. But, one could tell from the funeral that she touched many.
In the absence of vendors of black beauty like the Walkers and Rose Morgan, would the beauty and stylishness of even First Lady Michell Obama be as influential today?
How well black women wear hats!
Ca 1900, 1910 and 1912: Masterful magnate, Madam C. J. Walker
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting a regal image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguish her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Madam C. J. Walker's business acumen was prodigious. Living large, projecting as fabulous an image and aura as she could afford, she appreciated that this was a shrewd advertising strategy. Her distinguished 108-110 West 136th Street beauty salon-residence was designed by black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy.
By combining her home and business in two converted brownstone houses, made into a single building, Tandy maximized the grandeur of both.
Ca. 1928 and 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
After inheriting her mothers famed estate, A'Lelia Walker lived and entertained here periodically, until just age 46, she, too, died, in 1931.
Whether through advertisements for black dolls or through portraits of an array of well-groomed and well-dressed black womrn, the Crisis Magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also sought to inculcate appreciation for a black-based aesthetic and all-around African American excellence.
1923: Black or white, the world was agog over the "Million Dollar Wedding" of Madam Walker's adopted granddaughter Mae to Dr. J. Gordon Jackson.
How many are aware that the pioneering oncologist who helped make chemotherapy a cure instead of the start of the cancer patent's finish, was black, and a woman, Dr. Jane Cooke Wright Jones? A Harlem native from a tiny elite where each member was well-known to all, both she and her younger sister Barbara took the unusual step to become physicians. In part both must have been inspired by the example of their father, the distinguished and well regarded Dr. Louis T. Wright, among the first blacks to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first African American doctor appointed to the staff of a New York City hospital. Their grandfather had also been a healer and was an early graduate of what became the Meharry Medical College, established in Nashville in 1876, which was the first medical school training blacks in the South. Beyond adherence to tradition, a strong sense of duty, an obligation to help others, also motivated the Wright sisters. Each observed the propriety of making a formal bow to society in the late 1930's, but a shallow fashionable existence held Little attraction for either.
Ca. 1923: Sisters, Barbara and Jane Wright.
Assisting her father, Dr. Jane Wright began her career as a researcher working at the cancer center he established at Harlem Hospital. When he died in 1952, his daughter took over as director of the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. By 1955, married to a lawyer, the graduate of Smith College had joined the faculty of the New York University Medical Center as director of cancer research. It perhaps goes without saying that Dr. Wright was the only African American and woman among seven colleagues who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncologists. In 1967, Dr. Wright became head of the chemotherapy department and associate dean at New York Medical College. “She was part of the group that first realized we needed a separate organization to deal with the providers who care for cancer patients. But beyond that it’s amazing to me that a black woman, in her day and age, was able to do what she did.” said her successor. As for the demure Dr. Wright she only commented for a 1967 New York Post interview, “I know I’m a member of two minority groups...but I don’t think of myself that way. Sure, a woman has to try twice as hard. But — racial prejudice? I’ve met very little of it..It could be," she added, "I met it — and wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize it.”
Survived by her daughter Jane Jones and her sister Dr. Barbara Wright Pierce, Jane Wright Jones died , suffering from dementia, February 19, 2013 aged-93.
Initially David King's speculative 1892 development failed, and many still unsold houses were transferred to the ownership by the Equitable Life Assurance Society, which had financed the project. By this time, Harlem was being abandoned by white New Yorkers, but the company refused to sell the King houses to blacks. As a result, they sat empty, seeming all the more desirable because they were forbidden. When they were finally made available to black residents, for $8,000 each, the inventive machinations of the ambitious householders they attracted, which included taking in boarders by even the most prominent residents, gave the houses their current somewhat derisive name, "Strivers' Row".
Residents of Strivers' Row, Dr. Louis T. Wright and his doctor daughters, Dr. Barbara Wright Pierce and her elder sister, Dr. Jane Wright Jones
Lana Turner called the Savoy dance hall, 'the home of the happy feet'.
In every age, Harlem has been home to many marvelous cars like this high-powered Cord.
If the Wright sisters represented an African American aristicracy, Rose Morgan, did not. If thanks to groundbreaking work by Stanley Nelson and A’Lelia Bundles, many are aware of the triumphant, if brief, lives of Madam Walker and her daughter, who today has ever heard of Rose Meta Morgan? Born in Edward, Mississippi in 1912, this curious, clever brown-skinned girl grew up in Chicago. By 1942 she owned and operated the largest African American beauty parlor in the world. Emulating the example of Madam Walker and the business acumen of her father, industrious one-time sharecropper Chaptle Morgan, Rose Meta Morgan got her start as a schoolgirl making artificial flowers.
Rose Meta Morgan
In 1938 she styled the hair of the great Ethel Waters. Did these two ladies, much talked about because of girlfriends, perhaps share a romance? Impressed by Morgan's deft touch, Waters invited her to New York City as her guest. Impressed herself, by Walters' glamour and by New York's sophistication, Morgan moved to Harlem and within 6 months attracted enough customers to open her own beauty shop. Soon she hired 5 stylists and signed a 10-year lease on a vacant mansion owned by Dr. Charles Ford. This savvy adaptive use of an existing structure has a direct correlation with Madam Walker’s practice.
Charles N. Ford, a dentist from Trinidad had arrived in Harlem in 1919. Branching out into real estate he would also help start and run New York’s largest black-owned insurance company.
By 1946 the Rose Meta House of Beauty at 401 West 148th Street, had a staff 29 strong, including 20 hairstylists, 3 licensed masseurs and a registered nurse. Morgan operated her modernistic beauty salon, offering massages, hairdressing, facials, manicures, body building and health-food lunches, in partnership with Olivia Lee Dilworth Stanford, who much like her was a transplanted Harlemite, born in the deep South.
The Saint Nicholas Avenue row house group including 401 West 148th Street, which housed the Rose Meta House of Beauty
Stanford
and Morgan not only created their own line of beauty products,
expressly formulated for African-American women, but they expanded their
business into shops around the city, and across the country.
The
Rose Meta House of Beauty was exactly for black women what Elizabeth
Arden’s was to white women. The radical idea behind its rapid growth and prosperity was
no different than Madame Walker’s. Morgan and Stanford accepted African
features, their own and their clients'. Broad noses, full sensuous lips,
dark skin and even ‘kinky’ hair, were not looked at as loathed defects.
These women saw their mission, not as an effort to disguise or diminish
‘blackness’, but they sought instead to celebrated African Americans
with products and services meant to enhance their beauty. The first step
in this process was to indicate to black women something of their
worthiness, to show that their patronage was valued, by providing first
class care in luxurious surroundings.
The Mimo Club
Embarking with her 'secretary and traveling companion' Gwendolyn Pannell, for a six-week study course in Paris, at L'Academie Scientifie De Beaute, in 1950, Morgan sailed on the Queen Mary. Her partner Libby Clarke Stanford and their aviator-friend, Col. Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, were dock-side to bid bon voyage. Planning a series of side trips, Morgan relished the idea of exporting her mission,
"To glorify the woman of color," throughout the world. Paris Match described her as one of the richest
businesswomen in New York.
In 1949 Mrs. Stanford, then called Olivia Clarke, met a New York real estate developer named Donald Stanford. Both were sensitive, affluent business people who had survived earlier unhappy unions. Naturally, they married. In-so-far as it's possible to, they lived happily ever after, only parted by death.
Olivia Lee Dilworth Stanford
Rose Morgan who had also been briefly married and divorced, was a different story. How among the hundreds of young, vivacious women romantically linked to the ‘Brown Bomber’, did this handsome, if dark, nearly middle-aged woman-of-the-world ‘catch’ this ‘heart-throb’ of a generation?
Young Joe Louis
Louis had gained his boxing title dramatically in a 1937 rematch with Max Schmeling of Nazi Germany. The bout lasted just two minutes and four seconds. Disgraced, having suffered defeat at the hands of a black man, ironically, Schmeling, the symbol of Aryan might, went on to become a Coca Cola executive and a multi-millionaire. Louis, by contrast, mismanaged by manipulative handlers and dogged by tax charges, died a physical wreck, seldom successful in overcoming crushing debt.
Still, Joe Louis' epic saga is legend. He holds the distinction of having defended his title more times than any other heavyweight in history, knocking out five world champions. Joe Louis will remain an icon of athletic prowess for all time.
Alas, Rose Morgan, whose appeal for a financially desperate Louis, in part at least, must have been her unusually ample means, has been completely forgotten.
In 1948 ever-increasing gains saw Morgan open a new House of Beauty in an existing but new building. Joe Louis’ deluxe bar and restaurant, with the ‘world’s largest oval bar’, fashioned from mahogany and rosewood, was planned by engineer Sidney Frieman. Opened with the same frenzied excitement that greeted bars opened by other sports heroes, in 1946, it close abruptly. in 1947. How fortuitous for Louis that Morgan could take this costly albatross off his hands. How lucky too for Miss Morgan, to find so stylish and up-to-date a venue for her expanding enterprises, that by now included regular fashion shows featuring black designers like Mildred Blount, Stefan, Willard Winter, La’Tanya and others.
1946: Joe Louis signing autographs from behind the bar at his swank 11 West 125th Street restaurant and lounge
The Joe Louis bar and resturant from 1945-1946, 11 West 125th Street was brilliantly adapted to become the second Rose Meta House of Beauty in 1947.
1946: Joe Louis pointing out his mural of black worthies
In the 1940's, even in Akron, Ohio, people like my Aunt Cora, seen at the far right, servants who tried their best to emulate the hauteur of their white employers, all knew about Rose Morgan.
Economically featuring employees and customers as models,
fashion show extravaganzas the House of Beauty staged at the
Renaissance
Casino and the Rockland Plaza, attracted thousands. Choreographed to
swing music, the ladies sporting luxurious furs, fantastic hats and
splendid dresses, walked the runway escorted by Harlem's most dashing
men. As an added lure, lavish balls followed for the enjoyment of the
well dressed throngs. "The people had seen
nothing like it...All the girls loved the shows
because there was nowhere else they could show themselves off like
[white]
high-fashion models.", Morgan recalled years afterward. Morgan's
customers, like the designers who worked with her, were drawn from
across the nation.
Stefan Young participated in the Rose Meta fashion shows. Adancer, who evolved into a hat maker and dressdesigner, a man who came to have but one name, who married and adopted a daughter, but was as gay as they come. What does one make of the enigma that was STEFAN!
The little known story of Mildred Blount's rise to acclaim is a trajectory quite familiar to many African Americans, and to many others too, who have both talent and ambition without prominence. As an, at first, unknown worker, Blount's brilliant efforts brought her white employer riches and renown.
A native of Edten, North Carolina, where she was born in 1907. Mildred Blount after her parentss' death had moved in with family members. Attending New York public schools she'd dreamed of becoming an interpretive and ballet dancer, as well as a costume designer. Pursuing all these goals Mildred attended Hunter College and Cooper Union. Completing school, from the time of its inception, she worked for the John-Frederics' firm. Serving ten years at the Manhattan salon, in 1939 she was assigned to open their Los Angeles branch. Going on her own in 1943 she proceeded from success, to success.
1950: My friend, the wonderful Willard Winter, who in the late 1930's came from Boston to New York to design the most smashing hats, started by showing at the House of Beauty.
Circa 1948: Gerrie Major in a willard origional
An associate of Mildred Blount's, Bernice L'Tanya Griffin was perhaps the first African American artist known by a single name. Another transplant to Los Angeles, throughout her professional life she continually cross-crossed the country to show and sell her designs at charity fashion shows of the kind staged at the House of Beauty.
Ca. 1956: Dorthy Dandrige dressed by L'Tanya
No sooner had she scored a hit, had Rose Morgan begun to look for a more modern salon than 401
West 148th Street. Morgan anticipated investing $250,000 to renovate the
building purchased at 507 West 145th Street. Seeking a $25,000 loan
from her bank, a bank where she had deposited millions, she was refused, a rebuff that planted the seeds of her own banking ventures to come.
On a rainy day in February of
1955, with the mayor's wife cutting a big pink ribbon, 10,000 people came to the
opening of Rose Morgan's new House of Beauty. Cologne was regularly sent wafting through the air conditioning, to make the House of Beauty rose scented. The fast growing popularity of wigs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, saw Morgan open a wig salon, with a
pickup and delivery service. In this way, a busy client could have her coiffure washed, perfectly styled and discreetly returned.
Vertner Woodson Tandy, the dean of Harlem architects
John Lewis Wilson, was the first African American enrolled at the Columbia University School of Architecture to graduate.
1955: The new Rose Meta House of Beauty at 507 West 145th Street was designed by John Lewis Wilson.
By 1955, the first location at 148thStreet closed. But not before a new International Style Rose Metta
House of Beauty, designed by Columbia trained black architect John
Lewis Wilson opened. Young Wilson had begun his career as a draftsman
for Vertner Woodson Tandy, Madame Walker's architect, who was the first black registered in New York State. Located at 507 West 145th
Street near Amsterdam Avenue, the House of Beauty was an ideal setting for a day of pampering and included a dressmaking department and a charm school in
addition to the usual hair salon facilities. In the early 1960s, Morgan
added a wig salon. Over time, she employed and trained over 3,000
people.
Rose Morgan with her expert business partner Miss Olivia Clarke, shown in some of their numerous press clippings. In 1949 Clarke became Olivia Stanford.
Morgan and Clarke hard at work
1938: Joe Louis with his first wife, the former Marva Trotter.
1949: A 'happy' family, soon to dissolve
Ever generous, Joe Louis loved the trapping of the high life.
The first Mrs. Louis, nee Marva Trotter, was only 17 when she married. She shared with her husband a love of glamor.
1955: Rose Morgan was hardly the woman the public and pundits choose as Joe Louis' mate, once his marriage, divorce and remarriage to Marva ended. Then and now, some wonder, had he seen her only as the most expedient means of extricating himself from financial ruin?
Christmas day 1955: Whatever motivated the Morgan-Louis nuptials, surely no bride ever appeared more happy!
Louis' and Morgan's Christmas day wedding and reception were held at Rose Morgan Louis' home, at 175-12 Murdock Avenue in the Addisleigh Park section of Saint Albans, Queens. The first suburban New York community opened to blacks, Adisleigh Park rapidly became the suburban equivalent of Harlem's Sugar Hill and home to greats like Lena Horne, Count Basie, Roy Campanella, Ella Fitzgerald, Illinois Jacquet and Jackie Robinson.
Pictures of wedded bliss
Rose Morgan’s marriage to Joe Louis was amicably annulled after 3 years in 1958. In 1965, Morgan was one of the founders of New York's only black-owned commercial bank, the Freedom National Bank. She retired in the mid 1970’s. I met Miss Morgan about 1989 and she once attended a party I gave. Interested in talking to others, this faultlessly turned out matron was also interesting to listen to. She said how she continued to exercise every day and to assiduously care for her health. Our mutual friend Alma Rangel also enjoyed listening to Morgan’s tales of her eventful life. “We were at a house party together in Florida, and she kept us spellbound, late into the night with her story telling.”
What a pity that this extraordinary lady, so fastidious and concerned with every detail, who prided herself on giving as much attention to ordinary, unknown customers as to star clients like Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Sara Lou Harris, Katherine Dunham or Miriam Bruce, never completed the memories she was determined to record. Had she succeeded it’s doubtful a woman who accomplished so much, would have died with almost no notice taken whatever, unmentioned in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, or even the New York Amsterdam News.
Morgan client Hazel Scott, the second Mrs. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., an accomplished singer and jazz pianist
Sara Lou Harris, a House of Beauty patron, was the first African American model featured in a major national advertising campaign.
Marian Bruce, born in 1920, was a cabaret singer noted as an elegant stylist. During her career in show business, in the 1940's and 1950's, she starred in the first all-black show ever presented in a Miami Beach nightclub. Beautiful, and always beautifully dressed, she was also popular abroad on the continent. One element of this popularity lay in her dry wit and sharp repartee. "It was truly something, to hear such unexpected and expert cussing coming from the pretty mouth of this pretty lady..." observed Taylor Gordon and Jimmy Daniels, among others.
Never afraid to take a stand for justice, or to be photographed, Miss Bruce appeared in the illustrations of at least two news stories for Ebony and Our World magazines, covering the new House of Beauty salon opened by her dear friend Rose Morgan. In both, Bruce, most decoratively, poses clad only in a towel during strenuous exercise and a subsequent massage. Black journals from this period were hardly adverse to introducing a little titillation among their pages. The only thing surprising about these pictures at all, is how perfectly they portray an aspecet of the scandal that engulfed Morgan and Bruce almost immediately after they were taken.
Residing at the Rodger Morris Apartments at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, Miss Bruce was not alone. Her roomate at Harlem's famed 'home of the triple nickle', was man-about-town, designer and artist, Art Harris. In August of 1948 the handsome couple had attend a party at the House of Beauty. Morgan and her partner each had small apartments on the two top floors of 401 West 148th Street. Missing his companion Harris went searching for her. He found her easily enough, she was with Rose Morgan. They were in the rub-down room. They said that they were giving each other a 'massage'.
Marian Bruce
Today, this readily sounds like the thin plot of a trite porno movie. The lengths gay people once went to, to establish some plausible cover was considerable. Only in this scenario, Harris had not joined the naked girls he'd walked in on. Nor had he even caused a scene, not at first. "They quietly returned home," explained photographer Marvin Smith half a century later. "Marian thought she had gotten over, that they would both pretend that nothing had happened, as she often had regarding other women involved with him. Harris encouraged her hopeful delusion. As she undressed, he was in the bathroom. The only thing that was odd was his sharpening his razor. Why shave again, after the party, just to go to dinner? Then it happened. She knew him enough to know he was not kidding when he came after her with that razor in his hand snarling, 'I will kill you both' That's why it's true that she did run out of their apartment and into the streets, bare-assed-naked! The next day my brother and I took her to the beach, Reese Beach, to get away from the scandal."
Marriage and family was the most drastic subterfuge used by gays to cover their tracks in the past. In no time at all Marian Bruce and Rose Morgan both found husbands. But not before Miss Bruce, with defiant satisfaction, sued Harris for assault, for an award of $ 2, 990.00.
Bruce married first. Her husband was widower Arthur C. Logan, the personal physician to both Duke Ellington and his brilliant gay collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. It was in great part due her marriage that Mrs. Logan would come to focus her opposition to discrimination, joining her husband to become a major NAACP activist, Democratic campaign worker, and civil rights movement fundraiser. These activities were culminated by Mariam Logan being named to head New York City's Commission on Human Rights, from 1977 to 1979. A widow for over 20 years after her husband's suicide, Mrs. Logan died in 1993.
Langston Hughes and friends enjoy the hospitality of actor Canada Lee at a party for Hilda Simms. The celebration was held at Lee's 555 Edgecombe Avenue apartment around the time when Marian Bruce also lived at the Rodger Morris.
Marian Bruce
Talented, polished and fashion-conscious, Marva Trotter Louis never denounced her two children's womanizing, profligate father. Then: remarrying Mrs. Spaulding, as a singer and an icon of style, was once almost as recognizable as her famous first husband. In the 1940's she performed around the country, appearing with top band leaders such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Kay Kyster. But by the time she died, the fickle world had passed her by.
African American style, as innovative and spontaneous as jazz, as bad-assed as hip-hop, more admired than ever, is still fraught in a controversy for acceptance and legitimacy. Some mourn the lost past, contending that yesterday was an era of more elegance, that people once took greater trouble with their appearance and with their attire. However much one might dislike the tattoos, jeans and boots that have for most occasions supplanted the obsolete formality, it hardly follows that people today do not care about fashion. On the contrary, by the way they wear, what they wear, people show as much concern as ever about how they appear to the world. Only now, thanks to women like the Walkers, Morgan, Willis, Taylor and White, they are better able to present themselves on their own terms, more than ever before in history.
Tuesday, November 28, 2000, succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, Marva Louis Spaulding, 85, a one-time stenographer and big band singer died forgotten. Twice married to Joe Louis 'the 'Brown Bomber', she was a gracious and glamorous aspirational personality, who had once been as fortunate and famous, by association, as Cinderella.
After her marriage to Joe Louis ended, Rose Morgan married a third time. Following the failure of her union with lawyer Louis Saunders after two years, she was determined to write her life story. Rose Morgan returned to Chicago in 1999 to tend to her ailing sister. When she died in 2008, despite two major biographies of Joe Louis released at the time, almost no one noticed.
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