Caresse Crosby Page 8

“Can you get a friend of Dick’s to go with you to my Adirondack camp? And someone to stay with the children?” She assured him that she could. Morgan made two phone calls, putting things in order. His son Junius would see to the railroad tickets. “I’m here whenever you need me,” he added, before the phone beckoned again from the Wall Street office.

  The dreary winter landscape at the Lake was brightened by good company, an open fire, and a library well stocked with books. Mary hoped that clean air and solitude, without the problems of family and commercial life, would heal Dick’s wounded psyche. They took long rides in a fur-piled sleigh and fished through the ice on the lake. But one unfortunate day, a delivery boy smuggled in a bottle of Scotch, and Dick became menacingly difficult again. Mary telephoned Junius. In a last effort to save his life, the Peabody-Morgan alliance rallied to her support and committed Dick to a sanitarium for alcoholics.

  “That was the spring I met Harry.”

  Chapter VI

  LIFE AFTER HARRY

  “If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?”

  —Ecclesiastes 4:11

  On December 13, 1929—as originally planned—Caresse sailed for France on the Mauretania, accompanied by Henrietta. She carried the urn holding Harry’s ashes, wrapped in his red-and-gold Magyar robe, when she boarded, along with Harry’s holograph copy of Sleeping Together, “dreams for Caresse”—the last poems he wrote. On the title page, Harry had inscribed prophetically a verse from Ecclesiastes: “If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?”

  It was bitterly cold on December 22 when Caresse and her mother-in-law arrived in Le Havre. They hurried to reach Ermenonville by Christmas. “There was a fine dry snowfall in the air. The cozy and twinkling appearance of the Mill filled my heart to bursting as we approached . . . I was at home,” Caresse wrote.

  Mrs. Crosby stayed on, and several good friends came as soon as they heard the news. Gretchen and “Pete” Powel, devoted companions on many Paris escapades, stood by to offer support and condolences. Gerard Lymington was dispatched to Cheam to break the tragic news to Billy and to bring him home to the Mill to share his mother’s grief. Bill Sykes, the devoted friend who had smuggled gold pieces in his shoes to pay D.H. Lawrence for the Sun manuscript, went to fetch Polleen.

  “I was at boarding school when Harry died,” Polleen recalled in her memoirs. “I had been awakened before dawn and put on a train from Gstaad, without explanation, on a cold, wet morning. A family friend met me at the station in Montreux and broke the news, not in detail, but in stark reportage, saying that my stepfather had shot himself. I was desolate—not with the feeling of bereavement for a beloved parent, but rather the shattering sorrow of a woman losing an adored lover.”

  “It was a long journey, and when I arrived late that evening I found my mother in tears. We both cried in each other’s arms until I bedded down on the chaise-longue in her room for the night. Just before falling asleep, Mama called to me through the darkness: ‘. . . anyway, I am glad that he is dead because of you’.”

  “To this day,” Polleen wrote, “I do not know how to interpret her statement.”

  I presumed she meant that sooner or later, Harry would have seduced me, too? Or, could it be that she was frantically jealous of the special attention he gave me? His love letters to me—and they were indeed, love letters—she later found and destroyed. She was aware that something was going on between us. Her jealousy led her to steal, one by one, all of the little trinkets Harry had given me—a Cartier watch, books and paintings. (I knew she was doing this, but did not dare face her with the facts.)

  Rivalry for Harry’s affection was so intense between mother and daughter, even before Harry’s death, that Polleen’s childhood admiration soon turned to cold resentment.

  Caresse did not suffer alone in the months that followed. Many devoted friends looked after her.

  “The Aviator” (Cord Meier), one of Harry’s companions from his flying days at Le Bourget, was among the first to appear. He had a handsome, foxy profile, was rich and worldly, and loved to dance, which Harry never did. “He brought beautiful furs, and he asked me on Christmas Day to marry him quickly so that he could protect me from the cruelty of the world,” Caresse recalled. “I’ll never marry again,” was her answer. “I’m still married to Harry.”

  Caresse shut herself away in the Mill to capture in verse the essence of her life with Harry. While the snow fell in deep drifts, she gathered her memories around her in front of a bright fire. The poetry flowed, spontaneous and swift, “almost as though some urgent ghost was providing guidance.”

  When she had finished, Hart Crane critiqued what he considered to be her best work, Poems for Harry Crosby. He particularly praised “Invited to Die,” in which Caresse described the Crosbys’ last day together:

  Our eyes were opened to a blaze of Sun,

  Clean sunbuilt dawn the day we owned New York

  I did not guess

  I did not guess

  That madder beauty waited, unaware,

  To take your hand upon the evening stair.

  The poem, “My Heart,” Crane called “another YOU. You are meant to heartbreak people,” he added. “Love ways, pain ways, courage ways. I love YOU.”

  After exorcising the ghosts, Caresse was ready again to say “Yes!” to life. “While I kept the secret place [for Harry] alive and lighted, I trod the hedonistic paths of play and the healing ways of work.”

  “Mama was not one to be defeated by disaster,” Polleen conceded. “A great fighter, she always overcame the many setbacks that came her way.”

  At 37, Caresse was still a beautiful woman. Life at the rue de Lille resumed its heady pace. Polleen wrote: “Mama draped herself in yards of black crepe, wore sheerest black-silk stockings, and donned a little bell-shaped toque. Clutching a bunch of violets, she set out to reconquer man—that is to say, practically any man in sight! Her favorite black whippet Narcisse Noir, in a Hermes morning coat, accompanied her in the long, green limousine of immense chic, a Voisin Coupe de Ville. She was exciting, wildly pretty, and wore elegant clothes that were delivered in shiny white boxes with labels that read: Paquin, Worth, Chanel, Schiaparelli. Frequently I was dragged along to my mother’s fittings—in a blue-serge coat with brass buttons, short pleated skirt, grey socks, and shabby shoes, with long straight bangs I could almost chew! Mama moved fast on those slim, thoroughbred legs, after the first will-o’-the-wisp that caught her fancy, often altering course in mid-flight on some quixotic impulse. Her children were often left stranded in odd places. But I became quite used to this way of life . . .”

  In the spring of 1931, Caresse began the difficult task of editing Harry’s collected poems in four volumes. For each volume, she asked “a distinguished man of letters,” many of whom were former Black Sun authors, to write an introduction: D.H. Lawrence for Chariots of the Sun, T.S. Eliot for Transit of Venus, Stuart Gilbert for Sleeping Together, and Ezra Pound for Torchbearers.

  Throughout their long correspondence about the publication of Ezra’s Imaginary Letters, the Crosbys and Pound had never met. But Caresse liked his introduction best. Ezra wrote that Harry’s was “a death from excess vitality, a vote of confidence in the cosmos.” As his life was “almost a religious manifestation,” so his death was “a magnificent finale.”

  In early spring, “when we Parisians were rigidly pale with winter,” Caresse noted, “Ezra arrived from Rapallo, bronzed and negligé. There was a becoming shabbiness to his beard.” (Polleen’s view of the eccentric poet was quite different. “In his loud checked trousers, looking a bit crazy with his yellow beard in disarray, smelling of booze, he tried to kiss me on the mouth, on the stairs of our flat . . . I was outraged for a week, in fact, I avoided him every time he came back.”

  Ezra wanted to savor the flavor of Paris by night. They went to the Boule Blanche,
a bôite where a band from Martinique was beating out hot, tropical merengues at a frenetic pace. Caresse and Ezra had a ringside table, but because of her broken heart, Caresse would not, could not dance. As the music grew in fury, Ezra suddenly leapt to the floor and seized a tiny Martiniquaise vendor of cigarettes in his arms, eyes closed, chin out, as he began a hypnotic “voodoo prance.” The music grew hotter, as did Ezra, and one by one the dancers drifted from the floor to form a ring to watch “that Anglo-savage ecstasy,” until the music crashed to an end. “From that time,” Caresse recalled, “Ezra and I became the best of friends.”

  “After my stepfather’s death, the list of Mama’s lovers grew longer,” Polleen observed wryly, “and was very inconsistent in quality. There was a Tartar prince, who told me the gory tale—and I believed him—that he cut off the ears of his enemies and strung them on his belt. Perhaps that is why he was soon replaced by the gypsy painter, Manolo Ortíz. Ortíz displayed such fearsome jealousy that often I was taken along on outings to his studio to forestall any verbal or physical assault on Mama, who clearly—he declared—‘had done him wrong.’ With flashing eyes, paint brushes and palette in hand, he stormed around the studio until he ran out of breath.”

  “Then there was Mother’s lover who lived on a barge in the Seine, Franz de Geetere. He was a wild-looking Dutchman, very tall and wiry, with the extraordinarily beautiful hands of a painter—which he was, by profession. (I discovered folio upon folio of erotic drawings in a wooden trunk on the barge!) More interesting to me at that time was the fact that he also made kites, and when the breeze was right, we would fly them from the deck. . . .”

  “Mama was always partial to titles, especially the British,” Polleen confided. Gerard Lymington (later to become Earl of Portsmouth) she had known from the earliest days, when the Black Sun Press published his poetry, Spring Song of lscariot. Lord Lymington—poet and peer—Harry and Caresse had formed a special trio. Now there were two.

  On May 23, Gerard wrote: “Will you be in Paris or at the Moulin if I come over next Thursday? Let me know if you don’t want me. Bless you, Caresse. You know so much that lies between these lines, so I won’t say [it].” Even after Gerard’s presumably happy marriage, Caresse often visited the Lymingtons at Farleigh-Wallop, their country estate near Portsmouth. He never failed to end his letters to Caresse, “With my dearest love and devotion,” even through the last year of her life.

  “I don’t know why he loved my mother so faithfully for so long,” Polleen commented, “since he was sorely neglected, and in those early years, often was left alone with me and one of my dreadful governesses. On such evenings, he would put on his pajamas and go out for a walk; perhaps by so doing he felt part of the crazy Bohemian world of the Left Bank. (Meanwhile Mama, in widow’s weeds, was dining and dancing with someone else!)”

  “It was not until spring that I came alive again,” Caresse recalled later, “after I met Jacques Porel, son of the famed French actress, Réjane . . . that is, I remet him for the first time since he separated from his beautiful wife Anne-Marie, and I became a widow.” She was calling for her mail in the Morgan Bank in the Place Vendôme, and Jacques was there changing francs. “We met in the revolving doors and revolved together out into the brisk sunshine. So off we went down the rue St. Honoré to Le Crémaillière, the most fashionable small restaurant in Paris, and once inside that revolving door, I realized the die was cast.” Jacques and Caresse were the hottest gossip item of le tout Paris.

  There was an amorous evening when they took the Bateau Mouche down the Seine to a riverside café beyond Versailles. There was love in the afternoon after a thunderstorm at Melun, with Roquefort and burgundy and a mechanical piano that played “Et puis ça va,” over and over again.

  That summer, Caresse and Polleen were invited by the Philip Barrys for a holiday on the Côte d’Azur. The Barrys were old friends who had accompanied Caresse on the Mauretania to France with Harry’s ashes. They had taken a villa in Cannes for the season with the royalties from Barry’s Animal Kingdom, a resounding hit on Broadway, and offered their quiet retreat with a garden and view of the sea for Caresse’s recuperation.

  But soon after Caresse arrived, she was besieged with letters from Jacques, writing from the Pavillon Henri IV in St. Germain-en-Laye: . . . It’s three o’clock . . . my bed is still undone, . . . I feel like having you here in my room . . . if you were here, I should take off your clothes (I have got none) one by one and stand hard against you, kissing your neck, near your hair and your ears . . . and then I would push you smoothly on the bed . . . and come so near you that we would make only one. But I should watch those eyes—when kissing your little mouth—to see in them that grey cloud moving . . . and hear that wonderful and imperfect song you sing . . . Come back to the Mill and let me have you in my arms again, and kiss you everywhere—and let me remain long in you like I did during those marvelous days in Primavera.

  Caresse, who could never be quiet for long, succumbed and invited Jacques to come down. Soon, they shared cold lobster and vin rosé on a balcony overlooking an indigo sea, with the shadow of ochre sails dotting the harbor at Marseilles.

  In midsummer, Jacques and Caresse motored back to Paris from Cannes, leaving Polleen behind under Ellen Barry’s watchful eye. They first visited friends at Biarritz, and while there, impulsively decided to cross the Spanish border into San Sebastian to see the American bullfighter, Sidney Franklin, make his debut. They had heard that Ernest Hemingway planned to be there. He was researching a book (later to be titled Death in the Afternoon).

  For Hemingway, bullfighting was the emotional substitute for war, “the only place where you can see life and death, i.e., violent death, now that the wars were over, and I wanted very much to go to Spain to study it.” In his view, the so-called “self-hardening process” was necessary to the experience of a developing writer.

  Caresse arranged to meet the Hemingways at a cafe frequented by the toreadors, on a corner near the bullring.

  Hemingway, Pauline, and his eldest son—a boy of about six—were there already. The child, Bumbi, was being given lessons in the handling of the cape by one of the elderly bullfighters. We found Hemingway straddling a chair in a far corner, the old Spaniard explaining an intricate maneuver. The boy had to repeat it again and again; his father was a difficult taskmaster.

  Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway’s second wife, was seven months pregnant, and they were hurrying back to the States so that the child would be native born and eligible to become President. Ernest was one of the few men who did not succumb to Caresse’s charm. From the beginning, the chemistry was not right, and future encounters between the two would be difficult and stormy. Their first meeting was marred by an unfortunate mishap. When they left San Sebastian, Pauline forgot her bag with the passports in the back seat of Caresse’s car. The fact that Caresse did not discover the loss until she had crossed the French border started the relationship on an uneasy footing. Caresse attempted to compensate by offering to pay for their return passage to New York in exchange for a manuscript.

  But when the promised manuscript arrived at the Black Sun Press, “It looked like a discarded passage from Farewell to Arms,” Caresse complained. “The whole thing amounted to about 1,000 words mostly one-word lines of four-letter words—nothing to do with toreadors. I was so indignant and disappointed, I wanted to cry,” she later admitted. Instead, she impetuously composed a letter to the author, noting at that price his prose was “mighty precious.” In reply, Ernest fired back that no one could call Hemingway “precious” and get away with it!

  The Hemingways were back in Paris, stopping at a small Left Bank hotel halfway between the rue Cardinale and the rue de Lille, when Caresse finally located them. She hurried over, manuscript in hand, to demand the return of their advance passage-money in exchange for her “precious” package. Taken by surprise, the Hemingways were still in bed. Ernest muttered something about “that bitch
,” but on the verge of departure, he was willing to negotiate. With some reluctance, he promised rights to reprint Torrents of Spring as the first Crosby Continental Edition.

  That autumn—in the library of 19 rue de Lille where the Black Sun Press was conceived in 1927—Caresse and Porel planned to transform the Black Sun from a small press specializing in finely printed limited editions into a commercial firm in direct competition with the prestigious German publisher, Tauchnitz. At that time, it was the only firm on the Continent reprinting English classics. Caresse was optimistic that there was an even larger market for inexpensive editions of the best of the young expatriate American writers and avant-garde European authors.

  She wrote to Ezra Pound about her new publishing venture:

  They say they have a big demand for English printed books . . . not to exceed 20 francs each, preferably 15 francs each. . . . [I plan] to do an edition of two books per month to begin with at least 2,000 copies each. The first few books must be good sellers . . . after that, [I have] . . . carte blanche. Hemingway promised me three stories . . . I’ve just seen him in Spain . . . I am going to call it:

  The Crosby Library European Editions

  -or-

  The Crosby Continental Library

  Crosby Collection Continental Editions?

  I think Torrents of Spring the best book to do because, to many people, it will look like something new, as few of Hemingway’s admirers have read it, and it has not been reprinted.

  Ezra soon replied with wise counsel and encouragement. Thanking him, Caresse wrote: “Your wonderful and enthusiastic letter about bucking Tauchnitz gave me a thrill, for if you really will help, I’m sure we can do wonders.” (She appeared to be unaware that Torrents of Spring was a satirical, and to many, an unflattering portrait of Sherwood Anderson; she selected it to “get hold of a public.”)

  Never one to hold a grudge, Caresse mended fences with Hemingway in an Open Letter (which became the Introduction to Torrents of Spring, the first Crosby Continental Edition):