Caresse Crosby Read online

  Dear Ernest:

  . . . Do you remember that torrential day in Spain last August . . . when we all foregathered after the corrida, you, your wife, Jacques and I and the boot-black . . . in the little posada behind the arena? The place was full of English and Americans; you and Charlie [Chaplin] were the focus of many admiring eyes and I felt very jealous of you. . . . I wanted to do something as you two had done something; I wanted to make something out of all this Anglo-Saxon alertness and zest for discovery of new things in ancient lands.

  The barrier that separates us and always will . . . is the difference in language. Local color, bulls and blood are all very well, but one wants to know what the people are saying and thinking . . . that is what I was thinking of, across the din and pageantry of that afternoon—my thoughts were revolving round a new idea, to give all these eager travelers a glimpse into the minds of the people they were visiting; something more than local color, rather the racial consciousness that makes and mixes the color, as the painter mixes the paints of his palette.

  I am beginning the collection with an American book, your book, because I admire it and because I know I am not the only one to admire what you write; a few million others do, too. I am going to publish books that I like, that have merit, and that interest me, amuse me personally . . . the colors of the titles should match the countries . . . green for the Torrents of Spring in honor of Diana and the woods of Michigan!

  . . . you and those Miura bulls are, between you, responsible not only for this edition of Torrents of Spring, but for many CCE’s to come.

  Good fishing, and again, many thanks.

  The summer romance with Porel intensified in the fall. In October, Jacques wrote to say that his break with Anne-Marie might be a permanent one:

  Yes, I was wise in leaving. . . . I have now to decide whether I shall ever live again in Laurent Pichet or not. I can’t very well be all my life going from place to place, and the exchange of letters between Anne-Marie and myself does not show that things are going to an end of any sort. Anne-Marie seems to think quite natural to go on living in my things, with my child, without taking the slightest care of whatever happens to me. . . .

  His ardor for Caresse increased, in spite of this November message: “I received yesterday a cable saying that I was father of a magnificent boy and that he and his mother were as well as could be. I don’t know how much he weighs, or how he will be called . . . Life is strange.” Characteristically, he added the only other important news—in his view—of that day: “I lunched yesterday at Dolly Radziwill and played croquet the whole afternoon.”

  Jacques, who had always been dependent upon his wife or mother for support, added a note in the margin to his new benefactor: “You have been a dear about that Impremir . . . How can I thank you? I shan’t thank you, because you are always like that . . . you are made like that.” Caresse was the quintessential “giver,” but the men in her life were more often “takers.” They left her emotionally exhausted and financially exploited, and in the end, wrung out like a discarded sponge. Her daughter deplored that in spite of the many acclaimed artists and writers Crosby discovered, “She died without a bob [shilling].”

  Later in the fall, Caresse traveled to Berlin to buy inks and fine papers for the press, while Jacques’ letters remained constant. He was exceptionally perceptive of her nature:

  Caresse, you don’t understand me, and I understand you so well and you are such a dear and I am so fond of you . . . I like your letters because they’re like you, spontaneous and childish. You are more clever than the women I know who are stupid, conventional . . . I only find beauty in what might happen, in that lyrical and deep interior of a clever mind. You find me dull, funny, incomprehensible, because you are much more “in life” than I am and you want to be happy, as young people want to be sailors or diplomats, and I consider it an accident, not a vocation. . . .

  I can see you from this silly little room with a beautiful view, surrounded by dogs, friends, servants and other impedimenta . . . and lots of talk will take place.

  Again in January, when Jacques was in the U.S. visiting a married sister while trying to sell Crosby Continental Editions to New York publishers, he wrote from the St. Moritz Hotel:

  Sweet darling,

  I have already written this morning, but I want again to write tonight. . . . It was wonderful hearing your voice from the middle of the ocean . . .

  Darling, you are a wonderful little woman, and I kiss you all over, all around everywhere, and I love you and your little thing of which I am thinking often and often. I am writing from my bed . . . I want to be alone with my little woman against a wall with sun and shade and heat and make love to her with that wet noise that excites me, and for H’s sake, no bloody fools, . . . either of the Ritz or Montparnasse!!

  After a month’s absence, the correspondence from the St. Moritz remained ardent:

  Just one week now and I shall be sailing again towards you. How wonderful it will be to meet again . . . I will hold your hand, kiss your mouth repeatedly and caress your hair (not forgetting looking into your eyes!) I hope you are well, not too tired, and taking care of yourself. I hope that Polleen business is coming off alright. We spoke of it, Mrs. Stuart and myself, the other evening, and she seems to think also that the child . . . who stayed in the country with her and talked . . . needs a more regular life. Be firm, . . . I am afraid you have to. If not, this is also going to be an awful mess, like the one that was made of my stepdaughter.

  Polleen, for her part, was not taken in by her mother’s elegant Parisian lover. “I believe that Mama was truly in love with Jacques. He was on the scene much longer than most. The servants hated him, because his conduct was truly outrageous. He spent most of his time flirting with anyone in sight, including myself and my classmates when they came home with me. I myself felt that he was using my mother and all of her glittering entourage, rather than truly caring for her as he pretended. But he was good looking and clever; he had a sort of seductive charm, even if he was a bit of a pic-assiette:” [The closest English equivalent for this French idiom is “sponger.”] “After one particularly stormy encounter, Mama was ensconced for some time in Lady Carnavon’s smart nursing home in London with a heart ailment . . . whether there was any connection between Mama’s malaise and Jacques’ behavior, I could only guess.”

  Polleen guessed rightly. Caresse’s illness followed a particularly stormy exchange, in which Jacques had written to Caresse “dans sa langue maternelle” to better express his true feelings. The line “Je ne vous ai pas trompée” [I have never deceived (or cheated on) you] was ill chosen. Caresse returned that page of the letter to Jacques, with the phrase underlined in red pencil. In a marginal note, she added: “Why? This is rather beastly and has made me feel physically sick.”

  A telegram from Jacques followed: “Terribly hurt by your letter.”

  By the next post, a note without salutation was dispatched to London:

  Caresse:

  I have one more word to say. If you are a woman capable of writing what you wrote to me in that short note, because there was one page in one of my letters that did not please you, it means for me to have to regret completely all that happened between us . . . I am quite unwell here, doped with veronal and tobacco—in an awful state of nerves.

  Thank you for this last American punch.

  Caresse, who had fled to England in an attempt to forget Jacques by enjoying the London season, was stricken with the first of the crises cardiaques that plagued her for the rest of her life. She was attending a gala showing of Siegfried Sassoon’s collection at Lymington’s London townhouse. “As I mounted the great ancestral staircase . . . the stairwell whirled like a spinning top and I quietly wilted down beneath the spangled slippers and heels of polished boots. . . . My heart seemed to suffocate inside the bodice. . . . I tried to pull open the high-boned collar at my throat—and then, all wa
s oblivion. . . . When I came to, a white-capped nurse and other unfamiliar faces hung above me. . . .”

  Jacques did not rush to her side.

  So your doctor says you have done too much and must not. Well, darling, there is no doubt, you do much too much. You go here and there, and fuss a lot. All that is terribly bad for your heart. It’s all very fine to say it is . . . on account of me, but what about the wrong food, the wrong drink, that life of a movie star, and those dresses and fur coats, and [between the lines] . . . all those attractive boys!

  Caresse recovered sufficiently to return to New York for Christmas, with Jacques following soon after. Spirited and full of charm, he became the most sought-after man about town. “He still possessed a key to the Press, but it no longer fitted my heart,” Caresse reported wryly. “When I sailed away, Jacques stayed on as the cavalier of a much-publicized New York matron.”

  Some six months after its launching, Crosby Continental Editions had taken in profits amounting to only $1,200. The question uppermost in Caresse’s mind was whether to continue the series, and if so, for how much longer. She wrote to Kay Boyle, whose opinion she respected, for advice and encouragement.

  Kay’s response was quick and positive. “Consider how many years it takes to build up most publishing houses, and you have started off with an almost unprecedented publicity bang. . . . I should think you would simply have to give it another year’s trial.”

  In reply, Caresse confessed: “I find it discouraging to have to wait on time. If an idea could not materialize at first trial, I move on to another and another, getting no further in the end. I hate to compromise. I’d almost rather give up.”

  In one last attempt to sell the idea of paperbacked books—20 years ahead of its time—to American publishers, Caresse returned to New York. Even the editors she knew best (including Dick Simon of Simon and Schuster, with whom she had traveled the route enchantée to the Côte d’Azur and shared “adjoining balconies”) advised that the American public would never buy paper-covered editions as Europeans did, at any price.

  In May 1933, Caresse reluctantly replied to Kay Boyle that the Crosby Continental Editions “had not one cent of working capital” and would not accept any more manuscripts. She explained the reasons for her decision to cease publication in a letter to Ezra Pound:

  About CCE . . . I am completely discouraged in that particular form of publishing. I lost lots of money and didn’t have any really good fun out of it. I only did one book that hadn’t been done before, Bob MacAlmon’s (that one you advised), and it was a complete flop. I must sell 3,000 to pay expenses, and I’ve only sold 800 of Bob’s. I’ve not had one book completely sold out yet!! So I’ve definitely abandoned the CCE. But I have not given up the Black Sun Press . . . and a wonderful new scheme is in the air. . . .

  Between publishing ventures, Caresse concentrated on the Parisian social scene. Her activities were picked up by William Leeds, who reported for the Universal Wire Service:

  Caresse Crosby, alone, is carrying on the publishing tradition [of the Black Sun Press]. . . . It is the reality behind her flashing social success of which everyone here talks so much.

  It has been said of Mrs. Crosby that she is herself a poem. At any rate, . . . these poems of hers account for her present position, without parallel in the history of society in this capital of art and letters and pleasure. . . . Mrs. Crosby has become one of the great hostesses. . . . Even the French speak of her “salon” with awe: It has never been done before by any American, or by any foreigner—except the mother of the Empress Eugénie [emphasis added]—for the French, outwardly hospitable to money spenders and tourists, close their doors to any stranger seeking to cross the threshold into their inner circle.

  There are many explanations . . . the simplest being that she is very pretty and a very charming woman. . . . But fortuitous circumstances also have played a part in the metamorphosis of this society butterfly into a welcomer of the great who come as callers, to create that impressive entity known as a salon.

  Even when surrounded by a retinue of admirers, Caresse never ceased her quest for new adventures. Of a typical evening at “Le Jokey” (the famed Jockey Club), Caresse wrote: “We were six . . . all of us old friends, sitting at the best table, receiving the best attention from the lofty proprietor down to the lady of the lavabos. We always did receive the best everywhere, and we were the gayest, the most lavish, the most envied in Paris that season. Extravagant in talk and action, I was often the center of an exhilarating group.”

  On such a night, she spotted a very young man, tanned a deep brown by the southern sun, whose wide black eyes looked contemptuously in her direction. He drew a pipe from his pocket, lit it, and flung the match beneath her table with an insolent gesture. Leaving the glittery crowd, Caresse excused herself to use “the telephone.” She searched for her chauffeur, patiently waiting outside, and ordered: “Follow that young man, Victor. Offer to give him a lift wherever he is going. I want to find him again . . . tomorrow,” (Polleen observed that “Mama’s chauffeurs . . . often rebelled at waiting for hours outside the bôites, not to mention the daily assignations.”)

  The next day, Caresse was wearing a blue denim apron-dress with a cartwheel straw hat as she waited at one of the sidewalk tables of La Rotonde. She had packed a picnic basket, with patés and cheese, fruit and a rare bottle of Cointreau. The youth approached, leading a large black-and-white Dalmatian—a perfect excuse for conversation. In the bright light of morning, he looked even better than the night before.

  “Wouldn’t such a fine dog like a romp in the country this balmy spring day?” Caresse suggested.

  Years later, she reminisced that “The picnic was a success, à la limité. I shall never forget the moist high grasses matted with poppies and cornflowers, nor the drone of the ancient mill wheel. Nor Robert—made of mahogany and the sea—so strong, so gentle.”

  That spring season, Surrealist painters and avant-garde writers rubbed shoulders with le tout Paris at Le Moulin du Soleil, where Caresse enthusiastically welcomed them. She brought life again to the abandoned Mill. “I was Queen Mistress of my own small realm.”

  Acres of wild strawberries were in full flower in June 1933, when Caresse sent out invitations to one of her fabulous parties. It was to be a ball, in matelot and matelotte costume. Harry’s cousin Nina de Polignac replied that she would transfer the necessary magnums of champagne from the cellars at Rheims to the springhouse at Ermenonville.

  “For how many people?” she queried.

  “About a hundred,” Caresse guessed.

  Eighty magnums of Pommery Nature soon arrived as a family contribution from the Polignacs. Max Ernst, the birdlike doyen of the Surrealists and a noted gourmet, agreed to help with the food. He traveled down to Marseilles to buy lotte, the necessary prime ingredient of a good bouillabaisse. Armand, now the Count de la Rochefoucauld—“sandy-haired and full of love and the devil”—acted as master of ceremonies. Elsa Schiaparelli produced the prizewinning costume—an above-the-knee skirt over fishnet stockings, with a maribou boa draped rakishly around her shoulders.

  “I invited the most amusing Parisians, regardless of society’s approval, and a few friends from home—among them Louis Bromfield, the writer, and ‘Bunny’ Carter (Harry’s former chief, president of Morgan et Cie.), Both men arrived without their wives: “I was told later that the ladies were afraid to risk their Boston reputations.” With her usual gift for exaggeration, Caresse reported that “We had royalty from England and Spain, princes of India by the score, not to mention Afghanistan. There was only one large bathroom for everyone to share . . . I caught royalty off guard as I went to brush my teeth.”

  After all the guests were gone, she sank down on a cushion by the hearth “where I could look up through the chimney into the sky that was filling with stars, just as a theater fills with people—one by one, two by two, until the place is a sea of nodd
ing heads—and now the stars above me were crowding the heavens that way. Are they the audience and we the actors? I wondered. If so, then night is the time to play our part to perfection.”

  An Eastern religious sect—brothers of the Hare Krishna—has replaced the Crosbys and their glittering entourage at the Chateau at Ermenonville; shaved Yul Brynner-like heads bow in contemplation and leather-thonged sandals flip-flop across the cobblestones. Parisians on motorcyles and tourists in small rented voitures come out on holidays and Sundays to picnic. They have pulled up the Lilies of the Valley by their roots, and there are no more carpets of wild flowers in the Forest of Senlis.

  Chapter VII

  HAMPTON MANOR

  “When I stand on solid ground, I lose my footing.”

  —Caresse

  Europe was on the brink of another war. With the peripatetic years behind her, Caresse was drawn back to her roots, her homeland. Her son, Billy, enrolled in Williams College in Massachusetts, and daughter Polleen, after a New York debut, determined to follow her mother’s aborted career as an actress. Caresse sold the Moulin du Soleil, left Roger Lescaret as caretaker of the Black Sun Press, and headed home—for the duration.

  A Greek revival-style manor house that Thomas Jefferson designed for his friend, Colonel de Jarnette, stands today in the heart of Virginia’s Historic Homes district. Three dimes, with the date 1937 inscribed beneath FDR’s profile, are firmly set in concrete on the third-from-the-top of the stairs, near the arched entrance. To one side of this symbolic talisman, the acrostic M/Y was etched for good luck. Caresse linked her baptismal name of Mary with the surname of Selbert (“Bert”) Saffold Young, her third husband. That stormy alliance lasted only three years, but during that time, Caresse was the chatelaine of Hampton Manor, a Virginia planter’s wife.

  The sound and fury that once accompanied the persona non grata “dam’ Yankees” long since has died; the De Jarnette post office is boarded up. To the North, the A.P. Hill Military Reservation gobbled up whatever land it could acquire from the impoverished gentry. But Hampton Manor is still firmly anchored to the spot, more or less as Caresse described it. It is not knee-deep in honeysuckle, and the elms that once stood “like glorious sentinels” developed blight and had to be cut down. The pond once “enchanted” by Salvador Dali—overstocked with the poetic nénuphars that Caresse loved—was dredged out by descendants of the original de Jarnettes, who reclaimed the property and considered the water lilies a nuisance. The giant oak—Caresse’s “Green Hat Tree,” so-called after Michael Arlen’s fantasy—still marks the fork in the road at Oak Corner. But it no longer boasts the bathtub-white lacquer band with which Caresse circumscribed it to protect from intrepid motorists—and Bert Young, when he speeded home drunk.