Caresse Crosby Page 13

  This is to confirm our verbal agreement concerning the house at 918 G Place, N.W., on which we hold a joint lease. As you know, I would prefer to take it all over myself, but as you wish to live there and operate a gallery, and as I can operate my gallery uptown, I am willing that you should take over the entire place for one year from this October paying the rent and upkeep and utilities. . . . If, however, you are drafted or for any reason do not wish to live there, I am to have the option of taking it all back, making some proper arrangement with you for the protection of your interests. In no case shall any third party be allowed to take over without my approval and consent. . . . I will vacate the gallery by October 1st and take away my personal belongings by October 5th. It is understood that your gallery will be called the David Porter Gallery as we agreed, and any bills running in the name of the G Place Gallery will be taken care by us jointly before January 1st. The furnishings which we bought jointly will be divided between us.

  Caresse again resolved “never [to] have regrets.” She looked for—and found—a suitable venue near Dupont Circle. The address was 1606 20th Street, a corner building with an English basement large enough for a printing press, a gallery on the second floor with high windows and good light, living quarters above. She settled in to make another Crosby Gallery of Modern Art the intellectual and artistic headquarters of wartime Washington.

  Coping on a day-to-day basis became more difficult as the Capital went all out for the war effort. Wherever Caresse went, Salar, the Afghan hound, was her constant companion and a good excuse for a walk. And walking—because of gasoline shortages—was the preferred means of transportation. It was difficult to make one’s way along crowded Connecticut Avenue. When Caresse stopped at Larimer’s Market, women of all ages, sizes, and colors were drawing numbers from a spindle on the countertop, patiently waiting their turn with the butchers, “like high priests in a pagan ceremony,” she said, “dispensing a leg-of-lamb, a pound of hamburger.” The military messes took all the choice cuts. At I. Miller’s, there was always a long queue for shoes—one pair to every adult customer with a ration coupon.

  Caresse’s son, Billy, because of his fluency in the language, had been an interpreter for the Free French. Now he was on home leave from the Navy before being shipped out to his next post. He accompanied his mother to many Washington gatherings and was a frequent co-host at the Gallery openings. She continued to launch new discoveries every month, with martinis—donated from the PX by generous friends—very dry. Members of the military, the government, and the diplomatic corps came to the new gallery; indeed everyone who was of any importance in the Capital found his way to 20th Street, even then-Vice President Henry Wallace.

  On December 29 after a quiet Christmas, Caresse presented to the public Samuel Rosenberg, a young Surrealist from Cleveland, then working in Washington as a photographer for the Office of Strategic Services. War brought Rosenberg into an office with Jo Mielziner, the stage designer, and Eero Saarinen, the renowned architect. Both liked his drawings and suggested to Caresse that she might consider his work. His structures and forms had a psychoanalytical bent, taken from his early environment, where he had been intermittently an iceman’s helper and a grocery clerk in his mother’s store; he was always intrigued by the sadistic paraphernalia in a butcher shop next door. Vice President Wallace returned a few days after seeing Rosenberg’s work at the opening, saying, “I was very disturbed by the drawings, and I wanted to look at them again.”

  Henry Kaiser, owner of the booming shipyards in San Francisco, was in Washington overseeing the war effort. A husky, domineering man, not used to having his authority questioned, Kaiser came into the Gallery and said to the artist, “I don’t understand a damned thing about your Surrealist drawings.” Rosenberg, pretending to be offended, challenged the industrialist to a mock wrestling match. They grappled each other on the floor for a few minutes, while the other guests looked on with delight. The Crosby Gallery was that kind of place—a place where notables who had never met before became friends; a place where Pietro Lazzari, who enjoyed being outrageous, pulled a wine glass from his pocket to offer “a little vino” to the genteel Duncan Phillips, founder of the more sedate gallery up the street.

  Caresse herself liked to be noticed—and remembered. She prepared a stage set worthy of Mielziner. One wall was covered with a textured purple paper, on which she hung copper plates. According to one of her guests, her hair—then tinted a copper color—and a long, flowing copper-colored skirt provided a striking contrast to the purple walls. She hung a large Japanese-style lantern in the window and created an informal ambiance that made everyone feel at ease.

  In January 1945, the Gallery previewed the work of Jean Hélion, a French abstractionist and recent escapee from a Nazi internment camp. After the opening, Caresse and Hélion were invited to speak to the students at Howard University, the major institution of its kind for blacks, on “Modern Art in Paris in the 1930s.” Caresse said, “My tongue ran away with me, as it always does,” telling tales about her early experiences with Brancusi and Calder and other then-unknown artists. Not long after, she was called upon by the principal of Dunbar, the segregated black high school in Washington, to address the graduating class.

  Like Eleanor Roosevelt, she spoke out strongly against inequalities in the segregated South, especially in the capital of a country then fighting to “make the world safe for democracy.” She decided to flout local laws and customs by staging Othello at the 20th Street Gallery, with Canada Lee in the title role, Harry Moore as the devilish Iago, and herself as a luminous Desdemona. Later, she tried to purchase or rent an abandoned movie house on 9th Street to open a theater for blacks to rival the National—then the only theater in segregated Washington—but was unable to do so. Ironically, her attempt was 30 years ahead of its time. Her long-standing friendship with Canada Lee no doubt inspired her, but her life-long crusade for desegregation was also rooted in Yankee values and fostered by an idealistic father.

  In 1932 Caresse lunched uptown with Lee in the first of the “meetings [that] were wondrous secrets, jealously guarded,” as she wrote in her memoir. “I felt strange the first time, going by myself to a rendezvous in Harlem with a man I had met but once to a place I’d never heard of—but from the moment that Canada and I talked together at a party in the crazy atmosphere of ‘Jimmy’s Uptown’ I wanted him for a friend.” Caresse again said “Yes!” to a long and devoted relationship that ended only with Lee’s death in 1952.

  Born Lionel Cornelius Canegata in New York City, Lee had a childhood far different from Caresse’s “crystal chandelier” background on the Upper East Side. He began his career as a child prodigy violinist at age seven, but ran away from ambitious parents at 14 to become a jockey at Saratoga and Belmont. He soon grew tired of the racetrack life and entered the prize ring, in which he lost the sight of one eye, but won the national lightweight title before giving it up to run away again. He was working on the docks, down on his luck, when he was discovered as a “natural” actor and given the title role in Stevedore. Success followed when he was cast as Banquo in the Federal Theater’s Macbeth with an all-black cast.

  In the segregated days when blacks could be arrested if seen in the company of a white woman below 110th Street, Caresse and Lee had to use subterfuge to meet. Those nights in Harlem Caresse remembered as “among the happiest of my life.” Often they would meet in an underground jazz den, or backstage in the noisy, overcrowded theaters where Lee was appearing. “Into one’s home as guests, blacks were admitted only rarely and apologetically, to hotels, never,” Caresse recalled. When Mary Jacob, her mother, a woman of liberal views for her time, invited Lee to tea at her apartment on East 72nd Street, Lee was ordered by a pompous doorman to use the service elevator.

  Anaïs Nin recorded in her Diary the first visit, with Caresse, to Lee’s apartment on the river:

  I first heard his warm voice say, “Come in! Come in! Hang your coa
t.” I seemed to hear for the first time, since I have come from Europe, a warm voice which means what it says wholeheartedly. Canada was a generous, warm-hearted host. He seemed to be whipping up excitement and expansiveness, creating a sumptuous, creamy evening. His warm voice immersed you, his warm hand led you here and there, linking people. The place is crowded. Half-white, half black. People from the theater. Left intellectuals. Artists, doctors, sculptors, architects. Warm, cordial, natural, spontaneous. There is talk, laughter, and a physical tenderness. People embrace, they touch each other. No deadpan faces, no silence, no closed faces . . . there is much laughter, vibrations, flow, humor.

  As the friendship progressed, Caresse became Lee’s devoted “camp follower” (her own phrase). At the opening of Stevedore in Chicago, Caresse stayed at a black hotel near the theater and gave a party there organized by Lee, the star. “We laughed more than I have ever laughed before,” Caresse remembered. “I was sad only once on that visit, but that is a story that cannot be put into print for perhaps another hundred years.” She had not counted on the social and sexual revolutions of the ’60s and ’70s that made all things acceptable. When she said good-bye on Monday to return to a Park Avenue apartment, Caresse wrote that she felt like a “pallid flower that had been plucked from a gorgeous garden plot to be transferred to a lonely vase on a varnished stand.”

  Another incident that stood out in Caresse’s memory of her relationship with Lee was a charity ball for the Harlem Children’s Hospital. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning were there with Caresse in the box of honor, when she observed that all the black guests were in evening dress. Caresse felt that she and her friends were conspicuous in “Monday tweeds, like sparrows in a peacock cage . . . I suffered and was miserable . . . I have never regretted, as so many females have, that I was not born a male—but I have regretted that I was not born a negress,” she wrote in envy of her exotic companions.

  On March 24, 1941, Orson Welles staged Richard Wright’s famed best seller, Native Son, which became an instant financial and critical success, the first of that season to win Broadway’s top four-star rating. Lee was chosen by Welles over much competition for the role of Bigger Thomas, which has since become metaphor for the alienation, anger, and fear in the urban ghetto. Even the name “Bigger” is a rhyming reminder of the black’s hated epithet.

  In cultivated, artistic handwriting that belied the memory of stevedoring and prize-fighting, Lee wrote to Caresse:

  Everything in the world have [sic] been happening to me. First! I am “Bigger Thomas” . . . I’ve been rehearsing day and night. You should see me this very minute. I’m in bed nude, lying on my side, writing to you, and wanting you so badly. What have you done to me Caresse, my darling. Ever since I first knew you, and that seems all my life, you’ve been here in my heart, having closed out all the other people I’ve ever known in my life. It seems I’ve always loved you. From time immemorial when I was an Egyptian prince and you were a Saxon slave girl. [emphasis added]

  Write me soon, and pray God I keep both things, restaurant and play, for I shall die if I lose either.

  Your own,

  CL

  The prospect of financial success in Native Son enabled Lee to buy a popular Harlem restaurant and nightclub, which he called “The Chicken Coop.” Again he wrote to Caresse: “Last week was one of our biggest weeks—thank God!” After mentioning all the financial difficulties in keeping the restaurant solvent, he added, “The only sunshine and softness in my life is you—and Native Son.”

  In early 1941, before and during the run of the play, Lee found time to write love letters to Caresse:

  Dearest my love—

  I just got your letter . . . Gee! it’s wonderful to know that you’re mine, all mine. Aren’t you dear? The real opening after several postponements is Monday 24th . . . After the show everybody is coming to the Coop and celebrate. I want you among them. You’re the most thrilling person in the world. I do love you so much. Do you think we can find some sort of happiness and contentment, somehow, somewhere? This play may mean just that, my dear. So keep your fingers crossed—mine are. Ville vous couche avec mois [sic] . . . How’s that?

  Dearest my baby:

  Every day I say I’m going to write to you and every day I come home late from rehearsals with just enough energy to take off my clothes and get into bed . . . I don’t mind it though, honey. I just hope that I can be as successful as I want to be. It can mean so much to us—you and me. If I’m successful we won’t have to hide so much honey, and we can get a little of the happiness that I have wanted with you in this life. Oh, honey, it’s too wonderful to be true. I love you so much Caresse—There are two tickets at the box office for you. You’re my guest, my lover. I wish you were at my birthday party last Monday. It was wonderful. I wanted you so much Darling. I’m getting to be an old man. Isn’t it terrible?

  (At 34, Lee was 14 years Caresse’s junior.)

  One can only speculate whether, by taking a black lover, Caresse was making a political statement about sexual freedom, or whether it was Lee’s great animal magnetism that drew her to him. He was undoubtedly one of the most unusual and outstanding men of any race in his time. Brooks Atkinson, the famed New York Times critic, wrote: “The quality of life Mr. Lee imparts to a scene is overwhelming—partly physical, partly magnetic.”

  Vera Zorina, who acted with Lee in The Tempest, wrote in her autobiography that Lee was “an immensely touching and kind and gentle man, with a sad, ugly face. As an actor, he gave a raging power, when he had to, spitting out his venom, but also a very moving quality.”

  Anaïs Nin, who went to the opening of Native Son with Caresse and afterward joined their friends at the Chicken Coop, described Lee’s “warm, orange-toned voice, his one unclouded eye glowing with tenderness, and joy, his stance loose-limbed, natural; in life, relaxed, in music and in acting tense, alert, swift, and accurate as a hunter.”

  In her Diary, Nin noted that:

  Caresse seemed to think that the only authentic life of emotion and warmth seemed to be right there at that moment, with the jazz and soft voices, the constant sense of touch between them. We feel more restrictions, less freedom, less tolerance, less intimacy with other human beings. Except here in Harlem. The place is a cloud of smoke, the faces very near, the hypnosis of jazz all enveloping and even at its most screaming moments, dissolving the heart, throbbing with life.

  Caresse’s friendship with Lee continued for many years, even after the romance cooled. Later, when it was possible for her to travel to the Continent again, Lee joined Mark Marvin to form a theatrical production company. They were showing a controversial play about segregated housing, On Whitman Avenue, at the Cort Theater, directed by the renowned Margo Jones. In a letter typed on business letterhead, Lee asked Caresse to find a French translation of Othello for him, and added somewhat wistfully, “hope you’re really having fun.”

  Fortunately, I can write that the show has not closed. The wilting summer heat has been rather cruel, but we will do our best to hold it through the summer until Broadway becomes itself again. If we do, and I have every reason to believe we shall, On Whitman Avenue should become the hit of the ’47 season. It has what it takes, I have no doubt of that.

  As always, he ended his letter with “Love.”

  In October, the Crosby Gallery of Modern Art was once again involved in controversy. Eleven Surrealist paintings had caused a stir at the Knoedler Galleries on 57th Street in Manhattan after Mayor Curley of Boston called the exhibition an “insult to the Catholic Church” and the Copley Society banned it. The show was the result of a competition to choose a painting for publicity for the highly-touted Loew-Albert Lewin film based on a Guy de Maupassant novel, Bel Ami. The most daring display of nudity, which barely squeezed past the U.S. customs officials, was a painting by Paul Delvaux, a Belgian, featuring three pink ladies not making use of fig leaves or hands to hide their most obvi
ous assets.

  There was even some debate about whether the juxtaposition of the early Christian monk and undressed womanhood in itself was appropriate. Some cited as proof the writings of St. Athanasius, troubled by temptations and assailed by the devil, who sent wild beasts, women, and soldiers to torment him. Dorothea Tanning, who expressed “the temptations” more symbolically than Delvaux in her entry, and at 30 was the youngest member of the Surrealist group, insisted that “a man like St. Anthony with his self-inflicted mortification of the flesh would be most crushingly tempted by sexual desires.”

  Salvador Dali’s entry had erotic fountains, obelisks, and a half-nude or two, with St. Anthony thrusting a Cross defiantly toward a procession of white horses and elephants with spidery legs. But Max Ernst took the $3,000 prize with a work that showed the Saint writhing in a morass of nightmare creatures, about which the Washington Post reviewer quipped: “You haven’t seen such creatures since your last warm beer and cottage cheese midnight snack.” The exhibit was widely covered by the national media, and the Crosby Gallery packed in the crowds from one o’clock until six o’clock daily (nine o’clock on Thursdays). Caresse was at her flamboyant best as hostess.

  Also adding to Caresse’s media coverage in that era was the forthcoming trial of her old friend, Ezra Pound. Pound had been sitting out the war in Italy, where Fascism—in his view—was the second coming of Jeffersonian democracy. He often broadcast this revelation over Italian radio.

  In May 1945, when the Americans occupied Rapallo, Pound was taken into custody and charged with treason for the broadcasts. In November of that year, he was returned to Washington and temporarily confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where a series of sympathetic psychiatrists were trying to convince the authorities that Pound was insane, unfit to stand trial.

  Dr. “Tiny” Zimmon, assistant to Dr. Overholser, director of St. Elizabeth’s, called on Caresse as Pound’s former publisher to help assess his condition. She joined the steady stream of visitors to inmate No. 58102 at the red brick hospital across the Anacostia River, among them literary artists, biographers, students—even Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Allen Ginsberg traveled several thousand miles from California to sit at the master’s feet. Ginsberg recalled that after he got there, Pound said almost nothing . . . “The silence for a poet like that is a profound apology.” But the scene could be bizarre. On a typical day, T.S. Eliot and Pound could be found sitting on a bench talking and lifting up their feet, one-by-one, as one of Pound’s fellow inmates “vacuumed” the floor with an invisible machine!