Harrison of Paris

Dashing Democrat Francis Burton Harrison, nominee for Lieutenant Governor of New York, arrived at his home at upper Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, with a broad, Cheshire smile that not even a victory at the polls could duplicate. He stepped off the stump, abandoning his campaign tour upstate, to assume his new office—that of “proud papa” of baby number two. Mr. Harrison, according to the Brooklyn Citizen, had received a telegram which read: “Joy for us. A new voter in the family.”

The smile of supreme satisfaction over this telegram had hardly faded away when there came another telegram reading: “Can’t vote. It’s a girl.”

Mother Mary, first born of Col. C.F. Crocker, was nonetheless thrilled to give birth to her second bundle of joy, Barbara.

Francis was a Congressman in New York’s lucky thirteenth, the swaggerest Congressional district in the United States, that included a sizeable black population, and fashionable Fifth and Madison Avenues.  He was nominated by the Tammany Democrats only a month before the election as a sort of hail Mary pass. Even the most sanguine partisan held out little hope that the Republican gerrymandered district would flip to the Democrats. The 28-year-old newcomer hit the gridiron running and pulled off a surprise victory. Francis was a good mixer. He took 60% of the black vote in spite of the fact that he was from the bluest blood of the “F.F.V.’s”–First Families of Virginia. The most socially prominent plantation families in Colonial Virginia flowed through his veins.

FBH graduated from Yale University in 1895 (he was a member of the secret society Skull and Bones) and from the New York Law School in 1897. When the Spanish War broke out he enlisted as a private in Troop A of the N.Y. Volunteer Cavalry. He was promoted to Captain and Assistant Adjutant General of the U.S. Volunteers.

Mr. Harrison, Sr. was a lawyer, not wealthy but well to do. The young man’s mother, was, as Constance Cary, a prized ornament, a decorous belle of another historic Virginia family. As Mrs. Burton Harrison she became a nationally known author of popular society novelettes and was likely the bigger breadwinner in the family.

Francis was a member of the prestigious Knickerbocker Club which meant he was accepted by New York’s old money class–the “nobs” (which included the Astors, the Goelets, the Livingstons, and the Van Rensselaers). The “swells”–the new money infiltrators were best personified by the Vanderbilt family; they were a sector of upperclassmen besmirched for being hopelessly crass and uncultured, and were therefore only begrudgingly included into polite society.

Francis met Mary when she was 18 during her coming out cotillion at cousin Elizabeth Mills Reid’s residence at 451 Madison Ave. Among the 180 guests was the great and powerful Mrs. Astor, sovereign queen of New York high society. She was Gotham’s chief social arbiter, influencer, and paradise gatekeeper, who, a hundred years after overthrowing King George, worked diligently to create a new monarchy in America with the purest of pedigrees.

Mary brought into the marriage an extraordinary fortune which came from both sides of her family. Coming out for Miss Crocker, who was orphaned a few years before her 18th birthday, meant also legally receiving her windfall inheritance–today’s equivalent of a cool 152 million dollars. Her grandfather Charles Crocker amassed the kind of money that starts timocratic dynasties (he is still considered among the wealthiest Americans in history). Darius Ogden Mills, an uncle on her mother’s side, was once the wealthiest man in California. His daughter Elizabeth married Whitelaw Reid, editor then owner of The New York Tribune. He was also an Ambassador to the U.K. and a Minister to France. His son Ogden married a Livingston. Mary’s maternal cousins became Viceregal leaders in America’s royal realm.

Both Mary’s Uncle George Crocker and Aunt Harriet Crocker Alexander, though decidedly new money swells, made it on to Mrs. Astor’s famous 400 list of America’s coronated and sanctified, with the help of young Mary. Bohemian cousin Aimée Crocker lived on 56th Street, three blocks from the park. She was on the wrong side of the tracks, and after getting a tattoo and marrying for a third time to a man 10 years her junior, would never be accept into Manhattan’s monarchy.

Baby Barbara was taken home to 876 Fifth Avenue, near Sixty-ninth St, facing the Park, a few doors down from Mrs. Astor. It cost, at that time, an exorbitant $500,000. The Harrisons, after they married, had another mansion at Scott Circle in Washington; a winter lodge called Monte Robles, 20 miles from San Francisco, with a 150-acre park; and, a summer lodge–The Sea Urchins–at Bar Harbor, Maine, then considered second only to Newport as the country’s most desirable social resort. Mary was part owner of the glorious St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco. Mr. Harrison purchased the Demarest Building, at Broadway and 57^th St, and Aeolian Hall, on Fifth Avenue, near Thirty-fourth Street, as investment properties after marrying Mary.

With the approval of Mrs. Astor and her chief lieutenants, the Harrisons entered an exclusive social caste not dissimilar to the titled aristocracies of the Old World. The Harrisons would be invited to all of the important social events in both New York and Washington and meet senators, ambassadors, princes and presidents. After Barbara was born, during a visit to Italy, the Royal Harrisons had an audience with the Pope.

Mary couldn’t cast a vote for her own husband, yet she was thoroughly politically engaged. “In Washington I go to the Senate or House whenever there is anything interesting going on, and enjoy hearing the debates,” she told a reporter for the New York Times. The heiress studied the speeches of all of Washington’s and Albany’s “conscientious men of affairs.” She read not only the political news, but the editorial columns.

Mrs. Harrison of course engaged her powerful husband in political discourse. “I make myself familiar with matters he likes to talk about and read about. I like to meet the men he is called upon to deal with.”  She met with both President Teddy Roosevelt, who was running for reelection, and his Democratic opponent Judge Alton Parker during that campaign season to get a full assessment and understanding of the issues and the personalities destined to shape the future of the country.

Thomas Jefferson was an 18th century uncle on his mother’s side and Francis claimed that the Harrisons were Democrats since the party was founded. As a Jeffersonian Democrat he believed in the fullest measures of personal liberty, in freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and a wall of separation between church and state (though he did not completely adopt Jefferson’s anti-monarchy/anti-aristocracy, defend the yeomen revile the industrialist part of his manifesto).

FBH and his running mate Judge D-Cady Herrick lost handily in a nationwide Roosevelt Republican wave.

Mrs. Reid’s Ball

Mary Crocker Harrison was also a good mixer, genial and generous and down to earth. Outdoorsy, Mary was profiled in the press as having the complexion and the unrestrained buoyant countenance of a young woman who spent a lot of time in the open air. As a girl, Mary enjoyed hiking and camping in the Sierras and on Mount Shasta in the Cascade Range with her father. She could ride, fish, shoot, and swim. After their marriage, Mrs. Harrison was known as a crack shot with a rifle and one of the best “automobilists” among the women of her set. Frequently she drove her brother Templeton’s 40-horsepower car at high speeds, acting as her own chauffeur. As with all of the Crocker children she was taken abroad at an early age, and received an education both in New York and Paris. Mary was a woman of strong individuality. Her friends would say she had a decidedly original way of seeing and saying things.

Francis turned on his fool-proof, full-scale charm offensive at Mrs. Reid’s ball and five months later Mr. Harrison and Miss Crocker were married upstate in Tuxedo Park at St. Mary’s Episcopal church. Mary sadly lost her mother at five, her father at fifteen; she was walked down the aisle by her plutocratic Great Uncle D.O. Mills.

Mary wore an ivory satin gown with trimmings of lace and chiffon and sprays of California orange blossoms. The sleeves and yoke were made entirely of fine rose point lace. Sprinkles of orange blossoms were also used to great affect in her bride’s bouquet of white orchids, and her coiffure. A long veil of point de gaze lace from Brussels enveloped the bridal gown.

“On dit” whispers circulated that the exquisite point lace used in the making of her gown alone cost $20,000.

Frank Lyon Polk (later first U.S. Under Secretary of State) was best man. The ushers included Archibald Harrison, brother of the bridegroom; Albert T. Fairfax, his cousin; (12th Lord Fairfax of Cameron), and pulp fiction writer Gouverneur Morris, also a cousin, who was named after his great grandfather and one of the country’s Founding Fathers (the one who wrote the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution).

It was the wedding of the century, or, at least the wedding of the season.

Barbara Harrison entered the world amid surroundings calculated to put her out of sympathy with the swarming multitudes.

Thompson’s Hill

Mobile riding was part of Mary Harrison’s program for entertaining out of town guests Mr. and Mrs. Laurence I. Scott. Her brother Templeton left his studies at Yale to meet up with the jolly trio. They rode in a sophisticated French touring car, a “Richard Brasier” model, along Thompson’s hill–a wide, smooth thoroughfare and a favorite speedway for automobiles heading from New York to the Hempstead colony on Long Island.

At about noon, the French chauffeur, Constant Ravert, turned around in his seat and remarked that something was wrong with his steering gear. In the midst of Templeton’s map reading and Mary’s merriment, without warning, the tire on the front right wheel exploded. The car swerved to the right over the cycle path into a stretch of sand. It then skidded and slid some 168 feet finally striking a telegraph poll and flipping into a ditch.

Mrs. Harrison was thrown under the car, her head pinned down. Beside her, also pinned down by the car, was her brother, but he was not severely injured and was able to free himself. Templeton tried desperately to lift the car off of his sister. He suffered two broken ribs. Mr. Scott sustained a fracture of one rib and internal injuries, Mrs. Scott was painfully bruised, and the chauffeur’s shoulder was dislocated. Passersby helped pull the car off of young Mary who was then lifted gently into the vehicle of banker R. F. Dimmock, along with Mr. and Mrs. Scott and Mr. Crocker, and they were conveyed back to St. John’s Hospital a mile away.

Mrs. Harrison died in the automobile before the hospital was reached.

Francis Burton Harrison, the brilliant young congressman, was racked by unutterable woe. Mary was 24-years-old at the time of her death, the same age as James Dean when his Porsche crashed into a Ford on a lonesome highway in California. As with the doomed actor, Mary’s untimely demise became a national story that left the whole country shocked and in mourning.

Mrs. Harrison’s two children Virginia Randolph and Barbara would receive two thirds of the residuary estate when they came of age, and the other third was given to her husband absolutely. After Uncle George Crocker died four years later, the girls received an additional million dollars a piece (34.6 million dollars today).

After his 1904 gubernatorial loss, FBH again ran successfully to be a N.Y. representative becoming a member of the 60th to the 63rd congresses. He resigned in 1913 when Woodrow Wilson assigned Harrison the seat of Governor General of the Philippines, one of the imperial spoils of the Spanish American war.

A little over a year after suffering the painful loss of his lovely wife Mary, Francis remarried. Barbara and her sister were raised by nannies and wicked stepmothers, a governess or two in New York, chaperones at the palace in Manila, the mother superior at a monastery in France, and the headmistress at the all girls Foxcroft School in Virginia, where she studied among the daughters of corporate titans and congressmen.

Summers and vacations were sometimes spent at Uncle Templeton’s grand mansion in Hillsborough, California, or with Princess Poniatowski, the sister of a Crocker wife, at her home in Paris.

Barbara made her debut in ’22 at Great Aunt Harriet’s mansion. She didn’t land a handsome husband like her mother. She instead matriculated into Oxford University’s St. Hilda’s College. In 1920, women could, after 60 years attending the legendary university, finally get awarded a degree just like the men.

By the time Barbara came of age in 1925, when she received her windfall inheritance from a mother she never knew, the world was reworked top to bottom. In the aftermath of the Great War, four empires collapsed, old countries were abolished, numerous new nation-states were created, boundaries were redrawn, international organizations were established, independence movements in Europe’s colonies had risen, and a diversity of new and old ideologies were assimilated into government policies and personal philosophies. Twenty million people died, military and civilian. It was a cataclysm that darkened the world’s view of humanity and its future.

While the young heiress was in grade school, four amendments were added to the constitution: Senators would be elected by the people instead of the state legislatures; income taxes could be levied by the feds (which would pay for Progressive programs); prohibition of the making, transporting and selling of alcohol became the law of the land… And the 20th amendment gave women the right to vote.

A Bachelor Maid

Barbara’s grandmother Constance Cary Harrison wrote about “the woman question,” the encroachment of liberated modern women in society, back in 1894, with her novel A Bachelor Maid. It would become a helpful playbook for Barbara and her generation.

The dilemma of the plot occurs when beautiful and wealthy Marion Irving, infected by women’s rights agitation spreading among her caste’s members, breaks her engagement to upright rising lawyer Alec Gordon, who she suspects may too closely resemble her overbearing father. She wants to pursue a “mission above matrimony.” This sparks a debate about women’s suffrage among the characters. Defenders claim that she was “stifled by the life she’s been leading as a polite slave of the 19^th century in America.”

Marion, the bachelor maid, “can’t compromise with her conscience to sacrifice to the petty duties of home. Her mental powers must be tested and exercised on a wider playing field…She must have time and opportunity to gratify her longing for a certain independence of thought and action… [she must] find out for herself the values and prizes of life before she settles down to the task of being a wife and mother,” according to the author.

Daddy Issues

By the time Barbara came of age, Father Francis would take a third wife, Elizabeth, and would have six more children to raise. (Six wives and 10 kids would be the final count). And he would live in a castle in Scotland.

Dean Clarence Wrentmore, head of the Engineering College of the University of the Philippines, armed with a shotgun, threatened to kill 45-year-old Francis Burton Harrison when he asked for the hand of his teenage daughter Beth. Six years later he married Margaret, Wrentmore’s other, younger daughter. Beth was only three years older than Barbara when they married. His final three wives would be younger.

Les années folles

When Barbara got her inheritance, as an empowered, liberated, extremely wealthy woman, she elected to leave Oxford University before graduating and live as a Lost Generation dropout in expatriate Paris. While America was suffering from a bad case of prohibition, Paris was frenetic and uninhibited. The 1920s were les années folles, “the crazy years,” and a time of creative revolution. Surrealism, cubism, and Dadaism emerged, with artists like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Henri Matisse in residence. “Empress of Jazz” Josephine Baker danced herself silly at at the Folies-Bergère. Authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein wrote of disillusionment and doom after World War I. And the great Bohemian Aimée Crocker took her fifth husband, a Russian prince, when she was 60 and he was 26, and lived in a fine residence in the Passy-La Muette district of the 16th arrondissement, near the Bois de Boulogne. The press dubbed it the “House of Fantasy.” One reporter claimed, “It is without exaggeration, the strangest house in Europe.”

In an act of youthful exuberance, following the example of her famous expat cousin Aimée Crocker, Barbara got a tattoo on her back–of a cockfight.

Another act of rebellion by the young Bohemian in training, which only scholars of Greek tragedy and Freudian psychoanalysis could begin to decipher, was an affair that she had with a much older friend of her father. Just how much the heiress engaged the various components of herself–her heart, her mind, her soul and her body–with this particular man, is anybody’s guess.

Walter Burton Harris

The Times of London’s Morocco correspondent Walter Burton Harris’s life story reads like a tale from The Thousand and One Nights. He dropped out of Cambridge as a teenager to travel on merchant ships that his father built to destinations like Madeira, Malta, Athens, Egypt and Constantinople.

In 1887 he joined a mission to Marrakesh with British Minister to Morocco Sir William Kirby-Green. In Tangier he learned Arabic and Berber. Walter’s linguistic skills and physical appearance enabled him to pose successfully as a native Moroccan, and to travel to other parts of the country off-limits to foreigners.

A witness and actor in the political intrigues, rebellions and foreign interventions that marked the end of Morocco’s independence, Harris was decorated with the French Legion of Honour.

Far from modest about his achievements, a friendly editor wrote that Walter “loved to make his own part in any yarn he was telling into a hymn about his own cleverness, cunning, bravery, popularity, and importance.” With his over-vivid imagination, “All his geese had to be swans.”

Harris achieved folklore hero status when, in 1903, he was captured and held hostage in Zinat by mountain chieftain and bandit Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni of the Jebala tribal confederacy. He regained his freedom mostly through his own guile, after three weeks, by negotiating a prisoner exchange. He later befriended the chieftain and wrote fondly of him.

Harris wrote a number of well-regarded books and articles on his travels in Morocco. Further explorations followed: to Arabia and the Maghreb, and as far south as the Yemen and the Atlas Mountains, which led to other successful publications.

Breakup in Bali

In November of 1927, tired and sick of the cruelties of the Rif War in mountainous northern Morocco, 61-year-old Harris set out on a journey to Southeast Asia and the Dutch Archipelago with 23-year-old ingénue Barbara, and a chaperone/friend Bernardine “Dina” Szold.

Bernardine was lured away from her literature studies at Cambridge with a promise to visit Bali. A year earlier she worked for The Chicago Evening Post, sometimes given feature stories: an interview with Sarah Bernhard, a story about the Chicago opera…

Traveling through the Far East was a family tradition among the Crockers. Great grandfather Charles, builder of the Transcontinental Railroad, was a very early around-the-world traveler, completing his odyssey in 1873. Grandfather Charles Frederick girdled the globe in ’94. Great Aunt Hattie was 23, like Barbara, when she went ’round the world in 1883, years before American journalist and famous female traveler Nellie Bly made her record-breaking trip. Uncle Templeton and Cousin Aimée would write best selling books about their traveling adventures.

Barbara’s voyage was filled with eye-popping, life changing experiences. The jubilant trio witnessed an erupting volcano on Stromboli Island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily. They visited the palace of the biblical Queen of Sheba in the British Protectorate of Aden on the Arabian Peninsula. They stopped at the gruesome Tower of Silence, a burial grounds for the Parsee where bodies are left on elevated slabs to be devoured by vultures. They saw pilgrims bathing, meditating, and praying at the banks of the Ganges. B and B were struck by the jewelry worn by Indian women–ankle bangles, toe rings, nose rings…

At the most pleasant Fatehpur Sikri Fort they saw fertile fields and fat cattle. They were entertained by a terrifying bear fight and dancing monkeys dressed in swirling skirts. They marveled at the Taj Mahal and the Viceroy’s palace in New Delhi.

Harris, Harrison and Szold traveled 1500 miles up the Irrawaddy River on a mail steamer and visited Rangoon, Mandalay and Bhamo. On board they met Shan Chief Mr. Tao who gave Barbara and Bernardine earrings that were to be worn only by Shan princesses.

In Mergui they were fascinated with the Salong village on the waterfront. It was inhabited by one of the most primitive races of people known. Bernardine wrote, “They go about, speaking a strange kind of jargon, wearing almost no clothing, shy and savage, they associate with none except their own tribe. Their homes are like little chicken coops, perched up on tall piles.”

The travelers spent a day visiting Kek Lok Si, the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. In Bangkok they were fascinated by a tribe of real river people that they presumed were half fish and half human.

Later the three adventurers saw, randomly, a Boy Scout festival in Bangkok with tens of thousands of boys from all over the country, which was attended by the king and queen. Barbara and Dina made friends with their nieces. Walter was giddy watching the parade of young scouts.

In Bali they came across a single file procession of hundreds of women along a sacred grove. Each wore a sarong and carried a basket on her head, some balancing them hands free.

Barbara fell ill in the Dutch East Indies and was sent to Singapore to meet an old doctor friend for treatments. In her convalescence, she pondered her relationship with Walter. Wires were definitely being crossed, affections were alienated. Generational differences were coming into focus.

Barbara didn’t fully grasp that though Harris could engage emotionally, intellectually and spiritually with a woman much younger than him, physically he was more attracted to men, and the younger the better. Walter was briefly married to Lady Mary Savile, the daughter of the 4th Earl of Mexborough from 1898 to 1906, but in Morocco he lived an openly homosexual lifestyle, which at the time was of little hindrance in his social milieu.

Barbara and Bernardine gave Walter the slip on her return to Bali. She left him a wire which read, “I am going away. We could not have gone on as we were–our relations were impossible. If I have hurt you in any way with my foolishness, disloyalty and arrogance, please try to forgive me. Perhaps we shall meet again someday and be friends.”

This debacle romance set the stage for other misfires in Barbara’s love life.

After further health issues in Shanghai and a stay in Peking the young women returned to Paris via the Transsiberian Railroad. They kept company with some amorous Russian soldiers on that long journey through the Soviet Union back to Western civilization.

The Boys

Back in Paris Bernardine introduced Barbara to three dear artist friends–bachelors–two college dropouts like herself, and a mostly unemployed publisher. Just how much Dina filled Barbara in on her knowledge of the love lives of the eligible handsome gents, or how much they were informed of the heiress’s vast wealth at that time, is unclear. They all hit it off. Sparks were flying, synapses were firing, blood was rushing, and Cupid was shooting arrows in every direction. All the gods of love and lust were on the playing field with these clever, creative mortals…

This meeting would cause a tectonic shift in the life of the beautiful young heiress.

Glenway Wescott took Paris by storm when new novel The Grandmothers was released with critical acclaim and won the Harper Prize Novel Contest. Novelist and critic Lewis Bromfield called the work, “one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read,” while a New York Herald Tribune review headline proclaimed Glenway a celebrity at 26. He had become one of the top American expatriate writers of his day. Book critic Bruce Bawer wrote about Wescott’s sensitively drawn characters, his witty and perceptive eye for detail, and claimed The Grandmothers to be “a prose of wonderful almost Flaubertian control, elegance, and penetration, and above all, a rare delicacy and honesty of feeling…”

Dina met Glenway while attending a writer’s group at Tower book shop, when she was a reporter for The Chicago Evening Post, and he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago (he later dropped out after falling ill during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918). He dedicated his illustrated book of poems Natives of Rock to Bernardine back in ’25. Glenway would dedicate three books to Barbara on down the line.

Wescott grew up poor on a hundred acre farm near Kewaskum, Wisconsin. He was sensitive, a prodigy, and out of place among the barns and the livestock. The family bred mostly pigs because they couldn’t afford horses or cows.

Wescott had become a threatening literary rival to Ernest Hemingway, who took a jab at him in his classic The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway’s mother Grace admitted to her son that she found Wescott’s writing more to her liking. The future Nobel prize winner remarked, “No doubt Grace wished that her son Ernie were Glenway Wescott or some other highly respectable Fairy Prince with an English accent and a taste for grandmothers.”

Dina’s man friends had been living in Villefranche, a coastal suburb of Nice at the quaint Hotel Welcome where they met and became close friends with down-the-hall neighbor Jean Cocteau. Guests included Isadora Duncan, Paul Robeson, Igor Stravinski, and Pablo Picasso.

Back in 1920, Monroe Wheeler, the second in the triumvirate, a budding bookbinder, published Wescott’s first work, a poetry “chapbook” The Bitterns, on his home press. The limited edition of two-hundred small booklets featured a silver foil-stamped design by Frederick Nyquist. Its pages were bound together by a black silk braid, and its paper cover was velvet-black. In launching Wescott’s career, he had launched his own.

Journalist Janet Flanner assessed Monroe’s character: “[He] has an excellent raconteur’s mind, memory, vocabulary and tongue, brings in a story just at the right time, in the right manner, serves his anecdotes perfectly either piping hot or ice-cold as tragedies…. The bases of his success with people are the nourishing quality of his enthusiasms and his connected recollections in conversation.”

The youngest in this triple threat of heart-breakers was George Platt Lynes. He was initially sent by his minister father to Paris to stay with cousin Kate Hardy while he took Latin courses, which would fulfill requirements both for prep-school graduation and for his admission to Yale. It so happened that the Hardys were Gertrude Stein’s neighbors. They took young George with them one day to her famous artist salon at 27, rue de Fleurus for tea.

Their colorful exchange set the stage for discussions of Lynes’ s proposal to publish a work by Stein as an installment in his “As Stable Pamphlets,” a venture he had started while a student at the Berkshire prep school in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Stein acquiesced sending him a short piece, “Descriptions of Literature,” which would be accompanied by a drawing by the Russian émigré artist Pavel Tchelitchew, who would later be a prominent adjunct in their artist circle. George then published Rene Crevel’s “1830” with a drawing by H. Phelan Gibbs, and future behemoth author Ernest Hemingway’s first play “Today is Friday,” with a cover drawing by already famous enfant terrible Jean Cocteau.

He was nineteen.

George had met Bernardine Szold in the fall of 1925, in Paris, at Stein’s salon. Gertrude and Alice B. Toklas had little regard for Wescott and his work (He has a certain syrup, but it doesn’t pour), and less for the lipstick wearing Bernardine and chum Zelda Fitzgerald, but they loved George instantly.

Barbara may have had more luck with Stein, who had great respect for her uncle William Crocker and his wife Ethel, the owners of the most talked about art collection in San Francisco. Gertrude and her brother Leo had seen and admired their controversial piece “The Man with the Hoe” by Jean-François Millet back in the 90s. (She would visit them again in the thirties).

When Miss Harrison met the young and adorable Lynes, he had abandoned his writing and publishing ambitions, dropped out of Yale and then Columbia with no immediate game plan other than to spend time with the boys in France. George did have a bit of a safety net should things go awry. The Lynes family was successful and well connected. Their home in Englewood, N.J. had 18 rooms, plus they had a fully furnished home in the country.

All three men had charisma and prowess. The heiress rapidly became friends and before long they were a frolicking foursome. They spoke feverishly about the arts and traveling, and began brainstorming about collaborations. Barbara saw in each an oasis of sharp intelligence and pure gold nuggets of creative genius. She shared their zealous love for music, painting, architecture and literature. The men saw that Harrison wasn’t just wealthy but also a sophisticated, free-spirited Bohemian, with world perspectives and a sense of humor that matched their own.

Harrison, Wescott, Wheeler and Lynes clearly weren’t just open-minded, open-hearted, spirited friends engaging in intellectual intercourse. There was definitely a battalion of sexual tensions and erotic energies bouncing about that Barbara got swept up in. The center of the celestial maelstrom seemed to be Monroe who exuded a rare and raw magnetism. Barbara, unskilled as she was in deciphering romantic cues, saw some indicators that the happy trio as a group may have had homosexual inclinations, but with Monroe the individual there appeared to be some wiggle room.

They all spent Christmas 1928 together at Barbara’s outer suburban home in Rambouillet, which would become a favorite spot for both whiskey parties and chill weekends.

Rambouillet

In 1929 Barbara hired Adrianne Górska, a graduate of Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Montparnasse and sister of the well-known Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, to renovate her French farmhouse in the village of Rambouillet in the modern style. Górska collaborated with Madame Sara Lipska, who was a painter under Léon Bakst for the Ballets Russes, and a dressmaker who designed her own show rooms on the Champs-Elysées. Barbara met Madame Lipska through her uncle Templeton who commissioned her along with Jean Michel Frank and Jules-John Dunand to create the interiors of his glamorous apartment on Russian Hill in San Francisco. In August of 1929, Vogue Magazine named it “the first large and luxurious apartment to be done completely in the modern manner in the United States,” and declared, “it is, perhaps, one of the most beautiful apartments in the world.”

The former stables were converted to a grand, open living/dining room with chestnut rafters gothically pointing up 25 or 30 feet, a loft bar, buff-colored walls, and a fireplace made of oak and brick. One third of the rear wall was replaced by two great panes of glass for a view of a splendid English garden, with no formal flower beds, a pond, and a park beyond them. There were paintings on the walls by Courbet, Gauguin, Derain, and Picasso (possible obtained through her Stein connections); antique French sofas and chairs upholstered in beige and green; and an Aubusson rug that was a daring chartreuse hue. President Gaston Doumergue’s “French Summer White House,” Chateau de Rambouillet, was next door.

In keeping with the modern movement, bedrooms in the home were spartan and functional with simple stripped-down beds and desks. The water closets were the opposite. The floor and walls of one bathroom were covered with orange, yellow, and gold mosaics with fixtures in yellow copper. Its sunken bath, fitted with built-in padded elbow rests, was lined in blue mosaic. Another bathroom was a veritable jungle of Raoul Dufy-like exuberance with a mural wall depicting an elephant, palm trees, and coconuts. When George visited, he took a room that was silver and green and glass, with a Van Gogh hung above the bed, and fish swimming behind a panel in yet another exotic bathroom.

Rambouillet would be immortalized by Glenway Wescott ten years later as the setting for his highly acclaimed and frequently reprinted masterpiece, The Pilgrim Hawk, which fictionalized a real day in Harrison’s Rambouillet home with Barbara, Glenway and some Crocker guests.

Mother Mary

Nothing foreshadowed the coming tragedy. Monday, September 10, 1929, was a warm day, still smelling of summer, although the cloudy sky heralded an approaching storm. Barbara and her chauffeur were driving with her interior decorator Madame Lipska and another friend Mrs. Larefure. At about 4 p.m., the car passed the Bois de Boulogne and headed along Focha Avenue towards the center of Paris. They were coming home from Rambouillet and getting dropped off to their respective city apartments. It was an exhausting day and they had an hour-long return journey but they were in good spirits. The work at the farmhouse was proceeding without delays, and the effects were impressive.

Minutes from their first stop, they got hit head-on by a truck pulling a fully-loaded trailer, which flipped the car onto its roof. The driver and the passengers were trapped inside the demolished vehicle, writhing in pain until an emergency team came to rescue them.

The chauffeur, Mrs. Larefure and Madame Lipska were seriously injured. Sara was immediately taken to the American hospital in Neuilly. Her condition was life-threatening, and she had to undergo immediate head surgery. The chances of her surviving the brutal crash were slim. However, she did pull through, though it was an excruciatingly long, painful and complicated recovery. Her life was spared, but she lost her exclusive boutique, which she was forced to neglect, on the avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was her pride and the fulfillment of her dreams. She also, strangely, temporarily lost the ability to speak French, and was subsequently denied citizenship.

Only Barbara escaped the accident unscathed, miraculously. What did not escape her was that she was the same age as her young mother when she died in a similar car wreck back in 1905. Mary, the phantom figure that showered her with riches, was that day Barbara’s guardian angel. Damages to the sensitive heiress’s psyche were as yet undetermined.

Ménage à Quad

In no time Barbara was hooked, really addicted to the comradery she felt around these brilliant young men. To Wescott she wrote, “I’d like you and Monie to be nearer to me, I mean geographically. Glenway, you are so extraordinary with all your strength (I mean the essence of you) and your comprehension and the proud grace with which you move through life–you allow so many people and things and circumstances to touch you so profoundly. They all come to you for help. They make demands on your power, your goodness. It is because they know you to be understanding and moral.”

It was at one of their Rambouillet weekends that Monroe and Barbara became consorts, in business. She agreed, even as the New York Stock market was crashing, to finance a private bibliophile press and call it Harrison of Paris. The publishers would work out of a home office in her small two story city house at 32, rue de Vaugirard, in the 6th arrondisement, on the fashionable side of the longest street in the Left Bank. Monroe was the art director and business manager. He would make the design choices. Glenway was a literary advisor. Barbara, as producer, issued notes throughout the creative process and gave final sign-offs on both business and creative decisions.

In the spring of 1930, Wheeler and Harrison released a lavish prospectus, introducing the company, which would publish Éditions de Luxe books in the finest French decadent tradition, using superior typography, paper, and binding materials, and the work of legendary authors and renowned illustrators.

Between 1930 and 1934 they produced 13 amazingly beautiful titles of well-known books such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a rarismme edition of Aesop’s Fables, with original drawings by Alexander Calder; and Fydor Dostoyevsky’s A Gentle Spirit. There were two new original titles by Glenway Wescott in the Harrison of Paris catalogue, two works by Pulitzer Prize winning author Katherine Anne Porter, and the first English translation of the memoirs of Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature the year before, entitled A Sketch of My Life.

The 13 books were all hard cover works of art, often in slipcase, with rare typefaces and beautiful stock from Madagascar, Japan and China, some using Pannekoek pure-rag, hand-made Maillol paper, and Montgolfier Annonay vellum. The best of the best.

H of P received rounds of applause from critics on both sides of the Atlantic. The London Times referred to A Gentle Spirit as “an extremely elegant piece of book production. It is a pleasure to contemplate the pages.” The New Yorker called Harrison’s publications “the best of the year’s issue” and added that “for papers, print, and price, they are extraordinary as collector’s items in any land.”

Giorgio and Monie and Glen and Bobby

Barbara did in fact have competition for the affections of Monroe. Both Glenway and George were completely, obsessively in love with Wheeler, so much so, that they empathized with each other for being his tortured lovesick playthings. Jealousy wouldn’t be tolerated and Monroe would not choose one over the other mind, body and spirit completely. They had no choice but to form an amicable triangle and live with shifting sexual preferences and secondary love affairs.

No one knew how to communicate intimately with artists, with their fragile sensitive egos, better than Monroe Wheeler. He groomed Westcott through the process of being a writer of chapbook poems to being a best selling, critically acclaimed author. Their bond was undeniable, their sexual compatibility not always obvious. Monroe, early on had affairs with women, notably Elly Ney, a famous female pianist and interpreter of Monroe’s favorite composer, Beethoven.

George had fallen in love with Wheeler at first sight ten years after “Glen” and “Monie” became a clandestine couple. Wheeler saw some raw talents in George lovingly nicknamed “Giorgio” that needed nurturing.

According to biographer Anatole Pohorilenko, “He was fascinated by this beautiful and confident gay man, not yet 20, who took his physical appeal for granted and his accepted homosexuality so naturally.” This was rare in an era when their behavioral proclivities were considered antisocial, pathological or even criminal. Monroe was magnanimous and wanted desperately to compartmentalize his homosexual life; he worked hard at being accepted in straight society.

George reluctantly went back to New York. He took a studio around the corner from the Village’s Washington Square Arch, living with Glenway’s younger, ruggedly handsome brother Lloyd, who confused and frustrated him for his “tyrannical cocksure” moments, and for being vague and vacillating. “He thinks that he is strong, but he wilts so,” he confided to Monroe.

After the funeral of his minister father,  the overtly heterosexual, salt of the earth, loving and kind Lloyd had sex with his roommate George. Promises of loyalty and fidelity forever to Monroe were betrayed.

It was a one time offering by Lloyd that George felt compelled to write about to Glenway. To Monroe he wrote, “He is so good and so beautiful; Perhaps I’m a little in love with him,” and also, “I have sometimes amused myself with the idea that Glen’s relations with women are such that any one of them would consider an affair with Lloyd in the realm of incest.”

There was a strong gravitation pull between Georgio in New York and Monie in Paris. And whenever it was possible, George, a proud transatlantic cosmopolitan, left his homeland to live with the dropout expats in Europe. For four years the fearsome foursome adventured together traveling around Europe on holidays and business trips. On the road George began honing his photography skills, a new passion for him. At home, George’s father purchased a camera and darkroom equipment for his ambitious son. His photos were beginning to impress friends and acquaintances. In time he began to imagine himself having a career as a professional photographer. Lynes was urged to submit “plein air” slum scenes and snow scenes, to be possibly included in an exhibition at the H. T. Leggett Gallery. He filled the gallery instead with portraits the following year in his first solo show.

Lynes visited Stein and Toklas at their leased 17th century home in Bilignin, France in the early summer of 1931. He took a now iconic photograph of Stein looking out over the Rhône Valley, which was featured on the cover of Time magazine two years later.

Fear and Trembling

Later that summer, Barbara, nicknamed “Bobby” and the boys took an automobile trip through Germany and Austria in her huge, second hand Renault touring car driven by a chauffeur. They saw an opera in Salzburg, stopped in Colmar to see Grunewald’s Crucifixtion, and toured extraordinary baroque and rococo churches in Bavaria, before spending a few days in Vienna.

George had a good eye. He photographed the striking European architecture and landscapes and by the end of the summer and his return to New York he had taken nearly 2000 photos.

In October, Wescott began what was to become a collection of essays compiled later into a three-hundred and seventy-page book Fear and Trembling. He discovered early on during the tour of militarized Germany that the alarming things that he observed needed serious consideration, which could not be contained in a single essay. His new book would be a pronounced shift in his work, away from homespun yet majestic novels set in Wisconsin to whole hearted, weighty commentary and analysis of European tumult.

Wescott, accurately reading the tea leaves, set forth that if something were not done immediately, Western civilization—Christendom, as he called it—would destroy itself, probably in another Great War. The omnibus book was ejaculatory and had an almost maniacal sense of urgency. English historian Arnold Toynbee concurred with Wescott’s grim outlook. He called 1931 the “annus terribilis,” a time when people around the world considered the possibility that the Western system of society might break down.

The quad discovered a Germany whose banking system had completely collapsed. Unemployment skyrocketed to 22%. Hitler’s criticism of the reparation regime resonated with voters, and he was able to profit from the crisis. That same year Stalin’s reign was gaining strength. ‘Kulaks’, the “rich” peasants, and those who used hired labor on their farms, were resettled in Siberia or sent to Gulags. Soviet authorities integrated a ration cards system within the whole USSR, and the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow was demolished.

Fear and Trembling was a condensation of Wescott’s understanding of human history’s lessons, and his personal grasp of Truth, Reality and Consciousness. In biographer William Howe Ruecker’s analysis, Wescott’s message was that “public ills which plague the modern world could best be cured by less preaching and sermonizing, by less peddling of ideals in the market place, and by more living in accordance with the nature and demands of the self and reality.”

The book wasn’t taken seriously. There were few reviews, and almost all of them were extremely harsh. The New York Time wrote, “The book is only intermittently well-written. There is a good deal of padding, a good deal of pretentious, prima donna phrase-making.” Ruecher reported that it was one of the biggest disappointments in his writing career. “No man, drunk or sober, has this many truths to hand out,” he dismissively commented.

Only the “very urbane and somewhat effete” A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers, his next book published by Harrison of Paris, was received and reviewed more severely. Meanwhile Ernest Hemingway’s classic American war novel A Farewell to Arms became a well reviewed best-seller which made him financially independent. Glenway would live in his shadow everafter.

After a failed attempt at a love affair with another boyfriend of Glenway, a sophisticated Frenchman named Jacques Guérin, the relentless and hopeful Bobby again turned to her publishing partner with dreams of romance. After Monroe had to be operated on after a gallbladder attack, Barbara whisked him away to Caux, Switzerland, for a quiet period of convalescence, and for some alone time. At the end of 1932, Barbara took Monroe to Asia stopping in Ceylon, Singapore, and Hong Kong then Shanghai to visit Bernardine.

George wrote Monroe in a panic. Bernardine had married in China and he feared that Monie would do the same. He confessed his pains: “I am not unmindful of the fact that trips to China sometimes turn out to be steps towards matrimony. I should hate that, although I should agree. But why I should be writing to you anything except that I want you to be in my arms, now and forever, is scarcely understandable.” He pledged his love and devotion in several other letters confessing also, “Perhaps the one thing in the world I could bear less well than any other is to be definitely cut off from you erotically.”

Bobby gave up finally on any kind of traditional romance with Monroe after their journey, but had no intention of severing the cherished bonds that they all built with so much love and dexterity. She was relegated to being more so one of the boys. She had to accept the Monroe doctrine that their love though deep and meaningful would be sporadic, incomplete and mostly unrequited.

Glen, Monie, Bobby and George had a real talent for networking across the artistic beau monde of the times. Beyond the ménage à quad, an interdependent, unorthodox family was beginning to form out of this core group, a truly convoluted web of collaborators, patrons and supporters, half-siblings and secondary lovers. Barbara’s new, very close (sometimes incestuous) chosen family was becoming a collection of complex algorithms.

Barbara invited a relieved George to Paris. The foursome went to Frankfort, Germany, to make arrangements for the printing of one of the Harrison of Paris books. Barbara sold her Renault and bought a very American Ford. Roughing it without a chauffeur, George happily did the driving  On that trip Barbara gave George a Rolleiflex, the new snapshot camera. From Frankfurt they traveled up the Rhine and then to Holland. George wrote home of their visit to a zoo, “I lost my heart to a silver gibbon. Barbara threatened to import one for me in Java.”

On a visit to New York in 1934, Glenway, Monroe and George decided to rent a flat together, with seven rooms and six windows on 89th St. and Madison Avenue. Giorgio and Monie were coupled in one bedroom. Glenway was the odd-man-out, bunking across the hall, subjected to sex turbulence and loneliness, old desires and ever-changing new codes.

The Letter

Bernardine sent Barbara a rambunctious, tempestuous, gut wrenching letter (on Garden of Allah letterhead) that seemed to stem from a heated discussion with her best man friend Glenway about her closest and dearest woman friend Bobby. Dina remarked to Wescott that she hoped Barbara would marry. “I thought it would make you healthier, happier, greater.” Glenway protested so strongly that Bernardine was not just taken aback but frightened; she was “cold with dread.” Dina feared that Bobby was planning to move in with the men in their seven room flat in New York.

Bernardine prefaced her long, searing, four-page, single space rant with a please-destroy-the-letter-after-reading-lest-it-fall-into-the-wrong-hands clause. She pointedly damned the quad’s “hopeless tangle”:

[Glenway] looks on at George and Monie and pretends that he finds his happiness in theirs–if he had money and I were god I’d separate them tomorrow and Glenway would be writing a book a year… it’s a worn out relationship, it exists only because of G’s passionate tormented wildly dramatic and overwrought insistence.

Dina wanted Monroe to be coupled with George and Glenway to live productively with his brother Lloyd. She condemned Barbara’s passive pliability, for allowing herself “to be taken by the hand so long as its tender.” In their foursome, “the advantages were all for them, not for you,” she interjected sternly.

Bernardine wanted desperately to shake Barbara out of her “strange curious trance” and take her away from her “terrifically intimate life” with the boys. She saw Glenway as demonstrative, running too many people’s lives, and Barbara’s future with all of them as hopelessly unfulfilling, “Bobby if you have the strength, do make a fight for a personal life of your own. [You must begin] developing your own essentially female life, I mean as a woman in heart and spirit and function.”

While their New York gay lifestyle “produces a fabulous sensibility about many things,” it was still “all so terribly abnormal.” Bernardine warned outright that Barbara could become, “so warped and deformed that your chances will be over, and you will turn into one of the several kinds of interesting but very strange creatures we have seen and always see around the kind of groups we know.”

While “Glenway’s life was set,” there was still hope for Barbara.

Miss Harrison, of Paris, the lovely, generous and beautiful heiress and Governor’s daughter, did follow Glen and Monie to New York. There was a life altering surprise waiting for her when she arrived.

 

This is part one of a series.

 

A million thanks to the Biddles, Peter Harrison, and Jennifer Ellsworth, as well as authors Joe Salvatore, Jerry Rosco, John Stevenson and Susan Blumberg-Kason for their contributions and guidance in researching this most challenging essay.

 

Selective Resources

“A Winner in Politics, The Sun, Aug 21, 1904, p2.

Allen Ellenzweig, George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye, Oxford University Press (November 9, 2021).

Anatole Pohorilenko and James Crump, When We Were Three: The Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, and Glenway Wescott 1925-1935, (Arena Editions, 1998).

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library > Glenway Wescott papers (YCAL MSS 134) > Series I: Correspondence > GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE > Lynes, George Platt

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library > Glenway Wescott papers (YCAL MSS 134) > Series I: Correspondence > THIRD-PARTY CORRESPONDENCE > Szold-Fritz, Bernardine to Wescott, Barbara

Bernardine Szold Fritz, “It Seems Like Yesterday,” unpublished manuscript courtesy of her family and Susan Blumberg-Kason.

“Burton Harrison Weds Mary Crocker,” San Francisco Call Jun 8, 1900.

Charles Wilbur de Lyon Nichols, The Ultra-Fashionable Peerage of America. An Official List of Those People Who Can Properly Be Called Ultra-Fashionable In The United States. With a Few Appended Essays on Ultra-Smartness, (New York: George Harjes, Publisher 1904).

Claire Bonney, First Annual Milka Bliznakov Prize Final Report, (Basel Switzerland, July 2002).

“Congressman FB Harrison’s views,” The San Francisco Examiner, May 3, 1903, p7.

Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937-1955, edited by Robert Phelps and Jerry Rosco (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990).

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“Engagement announced,” New York Times, Apr 22, 1900, p2.

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“Harrison-Crocker…” The Sun, Jun 8, 1900, p7.

“Harrison is a Daddy,” The Brooklyn Citizen, Oct 28, 1904.

“Helping Mr. Harrison Run,” The Sun, Oct 10,1902, p3.

John Chamberlain, “Glenway Wescott’s Own Dilemma: In ‘Fear and Trembling'” New York Times, May 15, 1932, pBR6.

“Literary Men in Politics,” Stevens Point Journal, Nov 8, 1902, p3.

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“Two children and husband share estate,” San Francisco Call and Post, Dec 18, 1905, p1.

“Value Said to be About $1,000,000,” New York Tribune, Nov 5, 1902, p7.

Walter Harris, East for Pleasure: The Narrative of Eight Months’ Travel in Burma, Siam, the Netherlands East Indies and French Indo-China, (London: Edward Arnold & Co.,1929).

“What is Doing in Society,” New York Times, Nov 22, 1902, p9.

William Howe Rueckert, Glenway Wescott, (New York : Twayne Publishers, 1965).

“Woman in the Game of Politics,” New York Times, Sep 25, 1904, p28.