Caresse Crosby Read online

  “There is something unyielding in earth,” Caresse once observed. “When I stand on solid ground, I lose my footing.” But Bert loved being Lord of the Manor, and looked the part. He was blond and tall, some nineteen years her junior, and lived up to Caresse’s description: “Handsome as Hermès, militant as Mars.”

  They met in Hollywood when Caresse accompanied Polleen for a screen test with Jerry Rubin at MGM. There was an enchanting night when they watched the moon rise over the Pacific and Bert told her all the crazy, impossible things he hoped to do, places he would go someday. “To me, every word was spellbinding,” Caresse admitted. “From that time on, Bert obsessed me.”

  Bert had no pretentions to acting or literary talent. He never learned to spell her name properly (to Bert, Mary was always “Carress,” or “Mimsy”), There were hints, early on, that he would become a mean drunk. But he swore that his one ambition was to have a place of his own, to farm. Hence, Caresse left Polleen behind under the protective wing of Frieda Inescourt, a seasoned trooper, and on September 30, 1936, Mary J. Crosby wrote to the New York Trust Company to forward some 433 shares of common stock (with a total value of $19,976), to buy a dilapidated manor house and 500 acres of farmland surrounding it—a white elephant on the Depression-deflated market. Deed in hand, Caresse assumed a new persona, the proper Virginian, broke but proud. The anachronistic flood-lit pillars came later.

  Bert and Caresse first took rooms at an inn in Fredericksburg, with a Ford to drive back and forth. It was 25 miles each way, each day, “with headaches at one end, backaches at the other,” Caresse complained. They ordered a registered herd of purebreds from the Hereford Association in Texas. Soon, Bert tired of building cattle slips and drowned his sorrows in Virginia Gentleman. After one particularly embattled exchange, he stormed off to Florida, leaving Caresse the weeds and the mud, the plumbers, the plasterers and electricians to deal with, all by herself.

  Alone on a soggy Thanksgiving Day, she wrote,

  Bert dearest:

  You went away again. I’ve spent too many lonely nights lately, baffled and hurt . . . I still believe that if you could go on the wagon—absolutely, for six months—we could straighten everything out. I would make any sacrifice possible to help. Will you promise, and do you want to try . . . or stay away?

  Your,

  Mimsy

  The rains set in. It was a disappointing life, with no companions within shouting distance, save for a few back-country farmhands. “It would have been fun, if I had not been alone,” said Caresse—who had always been surrounded by a faithful coterie of sycophants and retainers. She never slept alone, if she could avoid it. “At first, I was too proud to write [Bert].” Finally, one dreary night in February, up to her neck in problems, Mimsy broke down and wired, “Come back—and stay.”

  When Bert was sober, he was wonderful in the rough and tumble world of contractors and day laborers. He spoke their language. By March 1937, they were ready to move from the inn in Fredericksburg to the new stable—the house would be finished in April. Caresse’s need to plunge into an “obliterating” relationship was satisfied.

  “We feared and admired each other. We hated and we loved each other. Finally, after months of frustration and hoping, we married each other.”

  A license had been applied for in September 1936, when they visited Bert’s straitlaced Alabama kinfolks, who disapproved, on sight, of the Yankee divorcée who “put on airs” and worse still, was “old enough to be his mother.” In Virginia, March 24, 1937—six months later—when the vows were exchanged, Caresse omitted the promise to obey.

  Like everything else in her life, the third—and last—wedding was unconventional and done on impulse. The bride wore jodhpurs. “In Virginia, jodhpurs are correct for almost any occasion.” The best man was Bob, owner of the Seafood Grill where Bert and Mimsy were eating Chesapeake Bay oysters when they made the decision. A rural clergyman was cajoled into meeting them at the church on half an hour’s notice.

  “My family was appalled, and so were we—everything about our union was unexpected and unbelievable.” Polleen never forgave her mother for this ill-matched alliance. Bert, at 27 only a few years older than Polleen, could be charming when he tried. (He tried very hard on one occasion to seduce her.) In a letter to Caresse, her daughter referred to “a very unpleasant scene in Canada. Surely you haven’t forgotten, even though you have forgiven. I told Bert that I didn’t want to see him again.”

  For several months, Caresse waited hopefully for the Lord of the Manor to take hold. While Bert hunted and gallivanted, “it was I who, on frosty nights left a warm conjugal bed to help a princeling Domino into the world—and it was I who drove the harvest truck to market.” That was Caresse’s version of the stormy days and nights they weathered. Fascination and frustration always played equal parts in their relationship.

  Soon, the simple, bucolic life Caresse professed to long for was punctuated by visits from exotic friends. From Park Avenue and Paris, the guests who came for dinner inevitably stayed on—all summer long. In 1940, Anaïs Nin recorded an idyllic interlude in her Diary. Caresse was supervising the tying up and loading of the wheat sheaves when Anaïs arrived, and as the bundles were thrown into a truck, “the wheat dust flew around her, lighted by the sun, like a gold Venetian halo. She wore a huge straw hat, and moved in her typical way, with airiness and freedom.” Anaïs viewed the manor house—”white, classical and serene”—as “the first place of beauty I have seen in America, the first hearth, the first open house.” It was as if Caresse had transposed the Moulin du Soleil to the Virginia countryside, a haven for another generation of practicing and potential artists.

  Anaïs’s old friend, Henry Miller, also appeared one day without warning, walking insouciantly up to the kitchen door. His plan was to complete his Greek opus, The Colossus of Maroussi, under Caresse’s patronage. He signed the guest book facetiously: “Henry Miller, originally of Brooklyn, New York, late of Athens, Sparta, Delphi—with him ‘in spirit’ come his good friends George Seferiades, George Sarantides, George Theotokas, and Lawrence Durrell, all of Greece.”

  Caresse wrote of her first encounter with Miller: “Henry came to my Black Sun Press in Paris when he was very hard up—Henry was nearly always hard up in those days. I came down from my little rue Cardinale office—I had to climb backwards, down a ladder—and Henry was sitting there, huddled in the corner with a manuscript on his knees, looking hopeful. At that moment, I forgot something and dashed out into the street, and forgot all about Henry Miller. Afterwards, he came back and finally got the manuscript into my hands. I was horrified! I wouldn’t publish it now, either,” she said of the classic Tropic of Cancer, then barred from entering the U.S. by Federal censorship. (Either Caresse’s memory failed her, or this version of their meeting is pure fiction. According to Anaïs—and corroborated by Henry—they met for the first time when he and Anaïs visited Caresse’s East 53rd Street pied à terre in New York the winter of 1940. Later, when a small back apartment in the same building was vacated, Henry moved in.)

  Caresse, the sensual woman, could never understand Henry’s enthusiasm for explicit, raw sex. But Henry in the flesh was far different from the violent exaggerations of his writing. Slender and lean, not tall, “he looked for all the world like a rosy-skinned Buddhist monk, with a partly-bald head aureoled by lively silver hair and a full, sensuous mouth. His laughter was contagious, and his voice, caressing and warm, like one of the Negroes,” Anaïs observed.

  Meanwhile, young John Dudley, suffering from an excruciating writer’s block, “penniless and nowhere to go,” had settled in at Hampton Manor with his wife, Flo. Tall, lean and handsome, with curly blonde hair, brilliant blue eyes, a rich voice and sensitive hands, Dudley had a well-earned reputation for captivating women. He spun tall tales of his Scottish ancestors who owned Kenilworth Castle; it was easy to believe that he was a descendant of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite,
Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. He was creative—in art, writing, and jazz music—but for the moment, his Muses had failed him. (According to Henry, he was “gestating.”) When he had nothing else to do, he sharpened all of his pencils, and sometimes went out to raise the hood of his 1926 Ford, to see if any of the vital parts were missing.

  In May 1940, Caresse shot off a letter to her old friend Salvador Dali:

  I am counting on you and Gala visiting me at my country place in Bowling Green, Caroline County, Virginia. Your rooms are ready and waiting for you . . . it will be a tranquil place for you to work. I hear that you now have enough material together to start the book of memoirs that I am planning to bring out this fall. It is absolutely necessary that you be here during the summer months to work on this with me.

  Dali’s editor at Dial Press had written to Caresse:

  Maybe with your help and persuasion, and with his own desire to express himself, Dali will be able to learn enough English to put those finishing touches on the copy.

  Theirs was, in truth, a friendship of long standing. “Dali used to come down to the Mill every Sunday, just after he met his wife. Dali and Gala were that quiet couple who sat against the wall.” (The legendary Gala—former wife of Paul Eluard and belle amie of Max Ernst—discovered Dali in Cadaques and brought him back to Paris.) “He was very young and naïve, really, and very, very hard up at the time. Myself and one or two others contributed so much a month towards an allowance,” Caresse recalled. “Julien Levy, just starting a gallery in New York, came to the Mill to see me. I said, ‘Now this is one man whose work you must look into.’ Levy saw the paintings and was very excited about the new ‘Surrealism.’ He promised to give Dali a show. The question was, would Dali go to America? I was going over, so I said I would take them under my wing.” According to Caresse, Dali was scared to death. He didn’t know if he dared to take his paintings—or himself—across the ocean.

  “In those days, there was always great to-do when one arrived at the Port of New York, and the little tug came along with the press on board. I happened to be in the news at the time, and the reporters came up and asked if they could take my picture,” Caresse recalled. “‘You’re wasting your time,’ I said, ‘The person you ought to interview is Salvador Dali.”’

  Later that year, at the Coq Rouge restaurant, where the Dalis ate every day, Caresse concocted a “Dream Ball” to recreate the halcyon days of the Beaux Arts. She invited two hundred of her most intimate friends (and their spear carriers) to come dressed as their most recurrent dream—mantic or Freudian. Gala led the pack. To her face clung bits of mold and leaves, and around her neck wound a procession of ants, painted by Dali.

  What horrors awaited the guests! A bathtub of smelly fish, tilted at an angle, appeared to be sliding down the stairs. In one corner reclined the carcass of a dead cow, its skull wrapped resplendently in a white wedding veil. In the hollow where its stomach had been was a gramophone grinding out current French love songs. “The effect was disgusting absolutely—but the party was a tremendous success!” Caresse wrote to a friend in Paris. Every newspaper in New York carried the story. “Surrealism” was defined and became a household word overnight—thanks to Caresse.

  Now the notorious Dalis were en route to rural Virginia, and Henry Miller was dispatched to meet them in John Dudley’s Tin Lizzie. He brought them back with all their belongings intact, even the bird cage and musical inkwell. From the beginning, Miller referred to the artist, disdainfully, as “that nut Dali.” Caresse bedded them down on opposite sides of the Jeffersonian hallway. For Henry, the Dalis supplied the worm in the apple of Arcadia.

  Soon, the household was functioning for Dali’s well-being. Even Anaïs complained, “We were not allowed to enter the library, because [Dali] was working there.” She described Gala as “a little faded,” as indeed she might be after such a colorful and eclectic past. Gala never raised her voice—only seduced and charmed. “Quietly, she assumed we were there to serve Dali—the great, indisputable genius.”

  When the small-boned Dali appeared for breakfast, Anaïs saw him as “drawn with charcoal, like a child’s drawing of a Spaniard, any Spaniard—except for the incredible length of his moustache.” “I have a bigger one, an artificial one, to wear over it on special occasions,” Dali retorted. “The artificial one goes on the real one with artificial glue. You spray it with a little humidity, and it moves. It moves slowly for fifteen minutes. I reserve it for dinner and receptions. I myself move very little. I rarely leave the Costa Brava.”

  Anaïs liked Dali’s strange talk. He lost his shyness when she appeared. “He was so full of inventions and wild fantasies.” But John Dudley pondered: “Is Dali truly mad? Or is it a pose? Is he spontaneously eccentric—or calculatingly so?”

  Yet, “with all of us sitting around her table, [Caresse] was happy,” Anaïs wrote. “Her gift for friendship was the central link. She seemed innocent of all diplomacy or ingenuity, her face burned by the sun, flicking her small pink tongue with epicurean delight, interested in all our projects and activities.” Caresse, she observed, resembled very much Max Ernst’s surrealist portrait: “an abstraction composed of a curled, frilled flower heart . . . the heart of a sea shell . . . the yielding flower heart which drew everyone around her.”

  From time to time, Bert Young—the rolling stone—returned to the scene. Forever jealous, he did not approve of Caresse’s constant caravanserai of artists. Witnesses to more than one battered-wife sequence observed that the dark smudges below Caresse’s grey-blue eyes were not cosmetic interventions. To the Southern neighbors, the Youngs had long been persona non grata. There were conjectures about her: Why would a strong, seemingly self-reliant woman put up with the likes of Bert (“regardless of his prowess between the sheets”)? Looking back, “I must have felt the absolute necessity of assuming responsibility for some baffled soul,” Caresse admitted.

  One night, Bert arrived quite late—as always without notice—stumbled about, opening all the doors and windows, turning on all the lights. Alas, no orgy in progress. The Dalis were asleep in one room, Flo and John Dudley in another. Henry across the hall, and Caresse in her own bed. Undaunted, Bert shouted drunkenly for everyone to leave. This time, Caresse firmly ordered him off the place. And she meant it.

  But that was not the last to be heard from Bert. A brief letter in schoolboy scrawl and Bert’s inimitable style arrived at the De Jarnette post office:

  Dear Carress:

  As when all things of import happen to me, I want you to be the first to know. I was sworn in the United States Army today. I have 14 days furlough, then I report to Camp Beauregard then to Officer’s Training Camp.

  I would like to spend part of that 14 days with you, if you have and [sic] old bus ticket rush it airmail special and we’ll see if we can find a few laughs in what remains of my civilian life.

  Strange, isn’t it, that this is what I’ve been looking for all along.

  Please answer this mail, for as I now have a career, I’m on pins and needles waiting to see you.

  This letter evoked the old hypnotic pull on her strong maternal instincts. Caresse liked to say, “Yes!” She made the predictable and spontaneous decision to follow Bert.

  One can only imagine what happened during that passionate—and stormy—fortnight in New York. The next correspondence was posted by Caresse from Omaha, aboard the Los Angeles Limited:

  Darling:

  I’m on my way without you. I learnt that you’d “pulled a fast one” on me in New York—and I found that after I paid $136 for the week in NYC ($187 overdraft at the bank) and the interest on the note in Bowling Green, I had only about $500 of the $1,000 left to get started on. So I knew the only thing to do was to start at once, the cheapest way—this is it! I’ll have to get a less expensive attorney when I’m out here, but everything should go through without a hitch . . . I’ll stay at one of the less gaudy ranches
and not speak to a soul! I am traveling alone except for Salar [the Afghan hound]—He is a great comfort . . . I have a roomette and they allow me to keep him folded up with me!

  But now, dearest, what about YOU. I worry and dream and wonder about you. Hoping you are in the right branch of the service, that you are happy in your decision . . . and that you keep out of trouble.

  I’ll never love anyone but you—and my dream is that one day everything will come right again for us—You can do anything you want to do. I know it! So the (our) future is in your hands—But I’m tired of subterfuge and false promises—You’ve forced me to go thus far—but I pray you will find us a way back—

  I always miss you in every mile I cover—no fun without you.

  Your Mimsy

  Legally separated, and filing for divorce, Caresse settled into a pied à terre on University Avenue in Reno, and enrolled in a course in Animal Husbandry. Her after-hours conduct was—of necessity—exemplary. For the first time in her life, Caresse was temporarily without friends and without funds. She had never preferred the exclusive company of women and as she looked back, she remembered only the good times—with Bert.