Caresse Crosby Read online

  “Harry loved bed. He loved to write in bed, to eat in bed, to entertain in bed,” Caresse noted, with a hint at double entendre. Caresse rarely complained when Harry read in bed until one o’clock.

  “Our bedroom light was very bright, but I learned to sleep in spite of it,” she recalled years later, with a sense of déjà vu. “Sometimes Harry would get up and dress and go out mysteriously, alone. I was never invited. But he was always there when I awoke in the morning.”

  The nightly ritual was a game they played, in which Caresse conspired. Caresse and Harry always had enthused about the same people. It was Caresse who discovered the beautiful Bostonian, Constance Crowninshield Coolidge Atherton (more recently, Comtesse de Jumilhac), at a ladies’ luncheon, an event Caresse was loathe to attend. “From the moment she hurried in late, all sparkle and flutter, I was captivated. All through the Paris years, she was my most formidable antagonist, but I could not help immensely admiring her.” She had lived in a temple, raised Mongolian ponies, and defied convention as the wife of an American ambassador to China.

  On the surface, at least, the glamorous “Lady of the Golden Horse” did not penetrate Caresse’s armor. “One marries a man because one likes him as he is, not as he will be whipped into some other shape,” was Caresse’s philosophy. “Harry made me believe that my children balanced our account . . . I had to play both the lead and the sustaining role in our drama, very exacting and dissimilar parts—a saint and sinner combination.”

  Harry’s frequent, transitory flirtations, in addition to permanent belles amies, were assigned code names in the diary: “The Sorceress,” “Nubile,” and later, “The Fire Princess.” “All were substantial props to the poet’s dream . . . I was jealous of only one rival, the imaginary ‘Jacqueline’.” (Harry had become enamored with a Zorn etching—a shepherdess, “Val Kulla”—whose coincidental likeness was most extraordinary.) “Jacqueline” was Harry’s ideal Princess, the only one he could never touch, save in his dreams. Caresse knew very well that she was the Favorite: Among many Princesses, there was only one “Cramoisy Queen.” On his 30th birthday, Harry had written, “Our One-ness is the color of a glass of red wine.”

  “Harry and I were free to do as we wished—alone, if not together—but alone was never really as good as together,” Caresse wrote. She had a healthy appetite for men, and early on, determined that what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose, particularly in the moveable feast of France. That summer, restless under the strains of Harry’s search for clandestine fires, Caresse went off to Cannes with Manolo Ortíz, the painter described by Polleen as “Mama’s Gypsy Lover.” In the diary, Harry jotted: “Caresse believes that woman is the equal of man; I, that woman is dependent and the slave of man.”

  Kay Boyle described Caresse’s sexual promiscuity as “not anything she herself wanted or enjoyed. It was one of the demands Harry made upon her. She talked to me, almost in guilt, about these things, trying to make them funny . . . gallantry and humor were part of her courage.”

  Harry was always ready to seduce her back home. Few wives have received a letter of equal intensity on their seventh anniversary as this one from Harry:

  I have been feeling very physical. I hope you feel the

  same way. We don’t make love often enough. I wish we

  were making love together. . . . I think we are absolutely

  and entirely made for each other. I know it . . . I wish my head right now between your legs. I love kissing you more than, anything in the world. I am all strong and excited thinking about it . . . I kiss you and kiss you.

  Nights when they entertained at home were “a merry round of madness,” Caresse wrote. When it was time to change from daytime gear to deshabille, Harry wore his regal Magyar robe, embroidered with red and gold to match Caresse’s dressing gown. Both wore gold bracelets and gold necklaces they had purchased in a bazaar in Cairo—from King Tutankhamen’s tomb, they claimed. Half-moon tables were set up around the bed, on the bear- and zebra-skin scatter rugs. When astonished dinner guests arrived at eight—if novices, in formal evening dress—they were ushered into the bedroom by the parlor maid in full uniform with fluted cap and apron.

  First caviar and champagne were served, followed by a simple American dish—perhaps chowder and corn pone. Guests were invited to bathe after dinner in the Pompeian tub. This divertissement was welcomed by even inhibited newcomers from the Latin Quarter, when bathtubs were more often down the hall or didn’t exist.

  “We liked to experiment with bath oils and bath salts, rose and geranium,” Caresse wrote. A Boston friend was shocked to be invited by Harry to watch—through a concealed peephole—Caresse sponging off in the bubbly tub!

  Not everyone was intrigued by these nocturnal fêtes. Some never came back. Harry described the dissenters as bourgeois bores, and thereafter, expendable.

  But for mischief and spectacular hijinks, drunkenness and fornication, no private party could equal the Quatre Arts Ball, marking the end of the academic year at the École des Beaux Arts. When spring came around, the Crosbys and others began preparations for the orgy. Held in the huge halls at Luna Park or the Porte d’Auteuil, as many as 3,000 artists and models and ladies of the evening (if French) or well-connected ladies slumming (if American or British), joined the students in the confetti and confusion.

  The motif in 1924 was Incan, a memorable first to be followed by many others. Costumes consisted of not much more than body paint and loin cloths, with an elaborate headdress. Harry, always macabre, rubbed down with red ochre paint and around his neck, festooned a necklace of dead pigeons. He was carrying a bag of live snakes. Caresse, as mascot of the atelier, recalled that she “was hoisted into our paper dragon’s jaws, my long blue wig flowing over painted shoulders, proudly displaying my nichons, as on the prow of a New England whaling ship . . . we marched undraped and wholly uninhibited up the Champs Elysées.”

  While back at the hall, all hell broke loose, if one can believe Harry’s diary: “At one o’clock, it was WILD . . . men and women stark naked dancing . . . from our loge, I opened the sack, and down dropped ten serpents . . . Later in the evening, I sat next to a plump girl who was suckling one of them!” Lord Lymington, lance in hand, was dancing savagely with Caresse, when “one brave knelt in my path, embraced my painted knees, and covered them with kisses. I felt deliciously pagan! Stepping over entwined bodies, returning ardently the kisses of passers-by, I reached home before Harry, and found him with three pretty girls soaking in pink bubbly soapsuds together, scrubbing off paint. That crazy night, our bed slept seven, not counting Narcisse. We never knew who the seventh was. He wandered in, in a loincloth, and pushed us over. He left early the next morning, pinning a note to the pillow, ‘Had to get to the Department by nine.’ What Department? We never saw him again. I wonder if he arrived at his desk in the loincloth?”

  During this era on the rue de Lille, Polleen came to know the servants well and depended on them for survival, “like a passenger depends on a lifeboat in a sinkling ship.” Downstairs, on the other side of the green baize door, there was a bell system: one ring for the personal maid, two rings for the parlor maid, three rings for the chauffeur, and four for the children. “Four rings were seldom heard,” she recalled wistfully, “but I never stopped listening for the extra buzz.”

  Louise, the cook, with the figure of a stevedore and a splendid moustache, shared a room off the kitchen with Henriette, the parlor maid, who giggled when Louise pinched her bottom. (Les Chansons des Bilitis, required on Harry’s reading list, enlightened Polleen about their lesbian relationship.) The lady’s maid (who answered the No.1 bell) was the Downstairs stool pigeon. “I hated her! I used to call her ‘La Reine’ because she gave herself superior airs when Mama visited friends or relatives, clutching the keys to the suitcases, carrying the expensive boxes and parcels that accompanied them. But it was rumored in the attic quarters where the footmen were
lodged that she was not so dignified.”

  Caresse’s secretary was a pathetic woman who came in by the day, her limp hair framing a pale face that registered her many disappointments in life. “She had dreamed of being a ballet dancer on the Opera House stage, instead of spending her days banging the typewriter and walking the dogs . . .”

  The daily bonne à tout faire, Hélène, was a pretty girl with bright eyes and a tantalizing derrière—Polleen’s favorite, and Harry’s, too. He dallied with Hélène while her husband worked the night shift at the Champs Elysées restaurant, and Caresse soon dismissed her.

  Turnover was also great among chauffeurs, assigned a daily list of expendable chores on a few francs, and fated to long waits. Victor, the most memorable, was the shortest in stature and longest on patience. He could barely be seen over the steering wheel of the “green dragon,” a magnificent 1920 Coupe-de-Ville Voisin, with spare tires encased on the running board, an open box in the forefront for two footmen. The two black whippets, in Hermès designed coats and gold collars, sat inside with the passengers as befitted their rank. (Narcisse had acquired a mate, which Harry christened “Clitoris,” telling Polleen the bitch was named after a Greek goddess. It was several years before his stepdaughter caught on to the origin of the name.)

  After Mme. Doursenaud, governesses came and went, not because of Polleen’s behavior, but because the pay was stingy, the atmosphere so Bohemian “they were consistently shocked by my parents’ life-style, from which they half-heartedly attempted to protect me.”

  Polleen caviled that on the rare occasions she was invited upstairs, it was likely for a dinner of corned-beef hash—or coconut cake with homemade ice-cream, churned in a wooden bucket immersed in crushed ice and sea salt. Downstairs—whether to suit the servants’ tastes or the meager kitchen allowance—meals were more imaginative. Caresse took pride in “making the coppers glow,” her euphemism for pinching pennies on household expenses. “I never balanced a budget in my life, unless I added the necessary heading of Experience or Fun,” she boasted.

  Polleen learned to savor the servants’ gourmet fare: pigeons stuffed with olives and bread, fish flavored with herb-spiced sauces, pigs’ “trotters” and—to her horror—pigs’ ears, flattened with a hammer and cooked in bread crumbs.

  But all was not fun and games in the nursery. Once, when Polleen became very ill, the resident doctor called on his little Choulette. When he left, he kissed her tenderly on the forehead, and was very grave.

  Sometime later, Harry appeared, squeezing along a narrow passage used to stack the musty tomes he inherited from Cousin Walter’s library to the child’s tiny cubicle. He entered brandishing a glass of champagne. “Here,” he said, “drink this, my Wretched Rat. The doctor said you might die, but this might help you!” He disappeared as miraculously as he had come, not lingering to explain.

  From that time, Polleen adopted the “Wretched Rat” as a term of endearment. In her eyes, Harry could do no wrong. (Polleen had very exceptional eyes, and learned at an early age to use them.) “Even when I was very young, I understood that my stepfather’s flirtations with me were very different from the normal love of father for daughter. I was passionately in love with Harry. He alone was allowed to kiss me on the mouth, which he did frequently, hiding under the rug at the back of our Voisin so the chauffeur could not see, or sometimes in the nursery when no one was about. It was a deep secret between us, and remained so until he died.”

  Harry had an incredible talent for make-believe, and could talk anyone into indulging his wildest fantasies. Total strangers fell under his spell. Polleen recalled that he read Hans Christian Andersen and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and told stories of his own creation, in which he played his part with utter conviction.

  One evening, I was dressed for bed, in my pajamas and robe, when he spontaneously decided to pretend he was the Prince and I was the Princess. Grabbing a bag of pennies he brought home from the Bank, he took me by the hand and rushed into the street, hailing one of those old-fashioned taxis with a rolled-down top. He told the driver to take us to Le Marais. In those days (before the Centre Pompidou of course), Le Marais was a very poor quartier of Paris. There we were, sitting on the folded roof of the taxi, throwing coins to our startled “subjects”!

  “Harry was mad, no doubt about it . . . in a sort of extravagant, glorious way. He had a child’s mind. I could understand his sort of madness.”

  When Harry entertained Polleen’s brother Billy on infrequent school vacations, the two of them dropped beer-filled balloons from the balcony onto the heads of passers-by on the rue de Lille, to the delight of Billy’s school chums.

  Billy was always on a more formal footing with his mother. Perhaps because during his first Easter vacation, he climbed into her bed and “fell asleep on my pillow, almost before his head touched it. While I was still drowsing in the morning,” Caresse wrote, “I felt his fingers combing my hair at the nape of my neck, as he cuddled close.”

  “I love you,” Billy whispered.

  “I love you, too,” Caresse answered. Frightened of—or unwilling to acknowledge—the latent sexual attraction a mother has for her young son, she jumped up and fled into the bathroom.

  “Time to get up, Billy,” she called over her shoulder, slamming the door shut behind her.

  “I never dared unfathom half my love,” she said. But through the years, they were good friends and conspirators.

  Polleen, like Billy, spent much time away—at Chalet Marie Jose, a hôme d’enfants, or other boarding schools—“23 between the ages of 5 and 15” (if her diary is reliable)—perhaps because of Caresse’s jealous fears about Harry’s clandestine liaisons with his stepdaughter. Harry had forwarded to her schools precocious reading material: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, the poets Rimbaud and Baudelaire. “He wrote the most beautiful love letters, which I read, hidden away in the gymnasium, also learning vicariously about sex, love and romance from books hidden in plain brown wrappers. It was frustrating to be so young, to be stuck away in school, unable to enjoy such diversions,” she wrote.

  But despite such unconventional upbringing Polleen was not a withdrawn, wistful child. To the contrary, the headmistress reported that she was: “plus emancipée, plus independente . . . lovable et loved . . .” more than the other girls in her class. She had a lovely face and carried herself well, like her mother. All of the children wanted to dance with Polleen, to sit with Polleen; Polleen had the rare ability to count each one special.

  On May 20, 1927, the historic date when Lindbergh arrived in Paris, Harry, Caresse and Stephen Crosby (who was visiting at the time) were among the thousands converging upon the Route de Flandres, the highway over which Marshal Joffre had led his taxicab army to stop the Germans at the Marne in 1914. Their friend, Major “Pete” Powel, a World War I ace, had gotten passes through the police cordon onto Le Bourget field.

  A $25,000 prize was offered for the first transatlantic flight, but four American and two French pilots had already lost their lives in pursuit of it. Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year-old mail pilot from St. Louis, was making the latest attempt to fly 3,000 miles over treacherous seas in a Ryan monoplane with wooden wings. There was no radio communication to guide him, no backup team of Mission Control. He took with him a bedraggled kitten for company, a thermos of coffee to keep awake, and a half-dozen ham sandwiches: “If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more either.”

  At the military field where the Crosbys waited, the afternoon crowd of 45,000 had swelled to 150,000 by nightfall, when the kleig lights were trained on the runways; police and airport personnel were erecting barriers to keep the growing crowd at bay. Anxious and confusing reports came through—the lone airman had gotten off course, was forced down in Ireland. Then someone who knew announced that Lindbergh had been sighted over the Eiffel Tower and could not seem to locate Le Bourget.
Caresse reported:

  My ears, which are unusually keen, of a sudden picked out a delicate hum of lightest calibre away up in the clouds, which were now scudding across a misted moon . . . a small clear burring as of a toy, and then it was lost. . . . Suddenly, there was a silver flicker like the fin of a darting minnow out of one cloud into another.

  “He’s circling the field. C’est lui!”

  “C’est Lindbergh!” the cries grew.

  Suddenly, from the nearest cloud the bright wings flashed and veered downward, straight and sure to the waiting lane of flare-lit faces. He hit the runway precise and clean.

  When Lindbergh climbed down from the cockpit to be hoisted onto the shoulders of the waiting crowd, Caresse reported that he looked boyish and tousled and very much like Harry. “I heard a Frenchman say, ‘C’est n’est pas un homme, c’est un oiseau.’” For his part, Harry would have given his life to change places with the Lone Eagle for that brief moment of triumph.

  Chapter III

  MOULIN DU SOLEIL

  “What thunder and fire for breakfast!”

  —Harry

  In the early spring, Caresse was growing restless for the smell of country air, real countryside where one could bask in the sun and evoke the muse. It was in this frame of mind that the Crosbys discovered the Moulin du Soleil, a dilapidated mill on the property of the Chateau at Ermenonville, which Armand de la Rochefoucauld had inherited on his twenty-first birthday. Armand, whose mother was a Radziwill, was the most sought-after young man about Paris in the late 1920s; his scrapes and peccadillos were legendary among the beau monde.

  The Crosbys attended Armand’s housewarming, and Caresse immediately fell under the Mill’s spell. Jean Jacques Rousseau had lived there when he was enamored of the Duchess of Montmorency. It was rumored that Cagliostro, in retreat at the nearby abbey, devised his magic formulae beside the mill stream. Varda, the mystery-loving Greek painter in the Crosby entourage, offered the theory that if one establishes one’s dwelling on ground beneath which water flows, one will have a touchstone with magic. Indeed, from the “enchanted” mill stream, Caresse observed that little fish leapt mysteriously several feet in the air and landed safely in the pool above. Some 500 years before, sand had filled the hollows in the surrounding forest of Senlis, creating a mer de sable, a phenomenon that still exists. (Atlantis receding beneath the waves was Caresse’s explanation.)