“Gracious” is an adjective that meant more to Eva’s generation than it did to later ones. Eva was always gracious. Hers were talents that did not transplant easily to Philadelphia, nor did they translate well into the 1930s and 1940s, but that was not her fault.
“If there was one person my mother ever really hated,” says her son today, “and I even hate to use the term, it was Doris.” During the Second World War, President Roosevelt appointed James H. R. Cromwell United States Ambassador to Canada, but Doris Duke Cromwell did not care for life in Canada and went to Hawaii, where she embarked upon the building of her famous estate, Shangri-La. After the war, Jimmy Cromwell decided to run for the United States Senate from New Jersey, where Doris Duke also maintained a large place. It was at this point, in the middle of his Senate campaign, that Doris Duke chose to return to the continental United States—pregnant, and accompanied by a new gentleman friend. “Officially, of course, the baby was mine,” says Cromwell, “but everyone knew we’d been separated. Anyway, she lost the baby, but the incident ruined my campaign. I really believe that Doris shortened my mother’s life by what she did. Mother would have loved to see a son in the United States Senate. But Doris saw to it that it didn’t happen. That was the end of my campaign.” The Cromwells were divorced in 1948.
“Of course the divorces saddened Mother,” Cromwell says. “In my generation we became a particularly divorce-ridden family. She was especially upset by my sister’s divorce from Douglas MacArthur.” Louise Cromwell MacArthur, who is now dead, would go on to be divorced from three more husbands. James Cromwell’s older brother, Oliver Cromwell, Jr., who lives in Switzerland, has been married and divorced twice. Jimmy Cromwell’s third wife, the former Maxine MacFettridge, died. He now lives with his fourth wife, the Paris-born Germaine de Baume, in New York. “Mother always thought Doris was a cold person,” he says. “She didn’t approve of the way Doris treated her own mother. When Doris and I were leaving on our wedding trip, she said good-bye to her mother with a little peck on the cheek. And it was Nanaline who was responsible for tripling Doris’s fortune! Of course Mother took our side in all the divorces, but they saddened her terribly, and the Doris thing shortened her life.”
In the spring of 1946, in the middle of the “Doris thing,” Eva Stotesbury had a heart attack at the Palm Beach house. Her doctor telephoned Jimmy Cromwell and urged him to plead with his mother to stay in bed until she had recovered. Eva wanted to be up and about. Cromwell hurried to Palm Beach to remonstrate with her, and he found her, even at the end and bedridden, perfectly groomed and coifed, the Stotesbury pearls looped at her throat, a gracious, regal Presence. “Just as I never saw her angry, never saw her lose her temper, I never saw her let her hair down,” Cromwell says. In appearance she had not changed much from the Douglas Chandor portrait of her, painted in 1926—the same wide eyes, winglike eyebrows, smooth skin, dimpled cheeks, the slightly upturned nose and the pleasantly crooked, almost mocking smile.
Cromwell urged her to follow her doctor’s orders. With a smile she said, “My dear son, I am yearning for my quiet grave. I don’t want any part of your world, Mr. Roosevelt’s world, or Mr. Stalin’s world.” Twelve hours later, on May 31, 1946—little more than eight years to the day after Ned’s death—Eva died. She was eighty-one.
At the time of her death, some of her old acquaintances wondered what Eva was doing in Palm Beach so far out of season. (By then the Palm Beach season had been “officially” extended from February 22 to April 1.) But of course Eva herself—and she surely knew it—had gone out of season. Out of season, too, were the values and concepts she lived by: duty, responsibility, noblesse oblige, character, kindness, dignity, politeness, graciousness, grandeur, luxury, patronage of the arts, serenity, splendor, formality, gaiety. It was a season which would perhaps never pass across the American landscape again, and its fading had left Eva behind, an anachronism. Soon, El Mirasol would crumble before the wrecker’s ball. The Washington house, Marly, Eva’s last real home, would become the Belgian Embassy, all business.
Eva Stotesbury had made only one trip back to Philadelphia between Ned’s death and her own. This was in 1939, to view the installation of the Stotesbury Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She had arrived from Washington twenty-seven years earlier in Ned Stotesbury’s private railroad car. Now she was conveyed northward from the capital in an ordinary Pullman chair. On Fiske Kimball’s arm she toured the Collection and pronounced herself satisfied with its new home. The two reminisced briefly about the glorious epoch of Whitemarsh Hall. No, she did not want to be driven out to see the house. She thanked Fiske Kimball for past kindnesses. Then she glanced at her watch. It was time to catch the train back to Washington. “This will be my last visit to Philadelphia,” she told Kimball. “I never want to see it again.”
And she kept that promise. Her will directed that she be buried in Chicago, with her parents and the other Roberts relatives.
PART TWO
New York Belle Among the Brahmins
5
“A TERRIBLE CUT-UP”
“Are you a happy woman?” someone had the temerity to ask Mrs. John Lowell Gardner of Boston.
She froze her questioner with a look. “If I were not happy, do you think I would tell you?” she replied.
Those not familiar with the two cities often assume that Boston and Philadelphia are very much alike: ruled by a stiff-necked social aristocracy in which, if one cannot trace one’s ancestry back to the Landing of the Mayflower, one is forever an outsider and a newcomer. Actually, the two cities are quite dissimilar in attitude and, even more important, in tone. Philadelphia, near the Mason-Dixon line, has always displayed some of the mentality of the Old South. Boston is a resolutely northern, Yankee city, toughened and made wisely cynical by icy winters and cold winds off the North Atlantic. Philadelphia is a city of marble and white columns. Boston is a city of weathered red brick.
There are other differences. Boston, replete as it is with all sorts of institutions of higher learning, is an intellectual city. Education and culture count for more than money. Wits count for more than pearls. As such, Boston is also a remarkably liberal city, and unconventional behavior is tolerated as long as it is accompanied by a certain amount of intelligence. This applies to sex as well, which is treated in a sensible way as nobody’s business besides the persons’ involved in it. Boston’s many colleges and universities make it a particularly youthful town—the quest for knowledge seems to fill the streets. And so, compared with Philadelphia, Boston is sophisticated, tolerant, wicked—Bohemian, almost.
One of the most vivid exemplars of the Boston spirit was the late grande dame Mrs. Robert Homans, née Abigail Adams. She was a direct descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, the second and sixth Presidents of the United States, respectively, as well as a niece of both Henry Adams and Brooks Adams, and until her death at near the century mark she was the reigning dowager of the ancient and distinguished Adams clan whose first American forebear immigrated to New England in 1636. She was a lady so free of the restraints of fashion that when she died she had not changed her hair style for over fifty years. “When it comes to style,” she once said, “Boston doesn’t have much. We all have what we call a hat. You know, they cover your head. My daughter makes me burn them now and then.” Though Abigail Homans liked to call herself “the last of the old Adamses,” she always insisted that Boston had “a regular society, a regime under which you live and do the things you ought to do.” (Among the things she felt she ought to do was spend some time every day turning over her money to cultural, educational, and philanthropic causes with very little fanfare.) But the existence of such a regime never prevented Abigail Adams Homans from doing exactly as she liked. She once said, “If I stood in the Common on my head, people’d say, ‘Oh, that’s just Abigail Adams.’ They wouldn’t pay any attention. We’re conventionally independent.”
“Conventionally independent” is an interesting way to describe Boston.
Mrs. Homans did not make it clear whether she meant independent by convention or independent of conventions, but she probably meant a little of both. She was certainly able to plunge forthrightly into situations that would daunt lesser folk. Once, when Beacon Street had become impassable in a blizzard, Mrs. Homans directed her taxi to stop in front of her husband’s club, the stately Somerset on the lower slope of Beacon Hill, and requested a room for the night. The club politely explained that it had a rule against giving rooms to unescorted women, whereupon Mrs. Homans said, “Very well. In that case, I’ll go out and get my taxi driver to share it with me.” The story, which Boston loved to retell, contained just the right amounts of spunk, quick thinking, and naughtiness. Needless to say, Abigail Homans got the accommodations she wanted.
Conventionally independent also describes Mrs. John Lowell Gardner. Like Eva Stotesbury, Isabella Gardner came as an outsider to the city in which she gained her fame. As had not happened to Eva, Isabella Gardner would be warmly clasped to her adopted city’s bosom. Unlike Eva, too, Mrs. Gardner was far from beautiful. In fact, she was altogether plain. Her hair was a hard-to-describe rusty color, and her eyebrows were sparse and pale. Her nose was long and crooked, and her face was long and thin, and tapered to a pointed chin. Her skin was chalky white—so white that the least exposure to the sun caused it to redden and freckle. She was a tiny woman, and in her childhood calisthenics had been prescribed by her family doctor as a remedy for her diminutive size. The calisthenics had made her spry and wiry, but they did not make her tall. Her eyes were her best feature; they crackled with intelligence and mischief. She was also proud of her slender arms and small, dainty hands, and, when it became fashionable for a woman to bare her back, Isabella Gardner proudly did so. “My back is flawless,” she declared. And she could dance. Being small, weighing barely ninety pounds, she seemed to float like a feather in a dancing partner’s arms. It was said of Isabella that she “danced her way into the hearts of men,” and Isabella liked men.
She was born Isabella Stewart in New York City on April 14, 1840. Her father, David Stewart, was a second-generation Scottish American, an “importer of linens and laces.” Not long after Isabella’s birth, however, sensing the coming of what was called the Age of Iron, David Stewart founded the Stewart Iron Company. In iron, he prospered, and the family progressed to a series of more fashionable addresses in Manhattan. Isabella’s grandmother Stewart, after whom she was named, was also a woman of property, who owned a large farm on Long Island and who, after her husband’s death, managed her affairs shrewdly and became a moderately wealthy woman in her own right. Years later Isabella Stewart Gardner would enjoy telling friends of childhood visits to her grandmother’s Long Island “plantation,” where Grandmother Stewart “kept slaves.” This cannot have been true, since slavery was abolished in New York State in 1841, but Grandmother Stewart probably did have a number of servants. In any case, young Isabella was a woman whom one never knew whether to believe or not.
Her mother’s side of the family, meanwhile, was decidedly humble. Mrs. Stewart, the former Adelia Smith, was the daughter of a tavern keeper and stable owner. Isabella was able to get much more mileage out of her Stewart family connections. When she eventually arrived in Boston, a city which she knew placed great weight on ancestry, Isabella Stewart hired a “genealogist” to prepare an elaborate Stewart “family tree.” The genealogist knew perfectly well what Isabella had in mind, and produced an imposing document, a long parchment scroll illuminated with gold leaf, which attested to the fact that her Stewarts were “The Stewarts of Appin,” descended from King Fergus I, a contemporary of Alexander the Great. The family tree carried the Stewarts back to the twelfth century, and showed that Isabella shared an ancestor with Mary Queen of Scots. Again, no one quite knew how seriously to take all this, or even how seriously Isabella took it herself. Once, to a Boston dowager who was discussing her pre-Revolutionary ancestors, Isabella commented, “Ah, yes. I gather they were much less strict about immigration in those days.” Still, if anyone questioned her antecedents, Isabella could produce her illuminated scroll, and there they all were: King Fergus, Robert the Bruce, Queen Mary, the martyred Charles I, and Isabella.
Despite her regal first name, Isabella Stewart was always known in the family as Belle (though in later years she would sometimes fancifully sign her letters “Ysabella” in imitation of Isabella of Spain, or simply “Y”). She was educated in a private girls’ school in New York, where she was taught all the subjects deemed proper for a young woman of the period: music, dancing, etiquette, the art of the curtsy, needlework, and French. She was quick at all her studies, and showed a particular aptitude for languages. It was this which prompted her parents, when she was sixteen, to take her to Paris for a year of study. Later it would be said of her that she “climbed out a window of a French convent and eloped with Jack Gardner,” and Belle never denied stories like this. As the legends about her grew, she encouraged them. “Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth,” was one of her favorite maxims. In fact, the school was a Protestant one and not a convent, and Belle’s mother had had serious doubts about educating her daughter in a Catholic country. Before departing for Europe, she had read The School Girl in France, published in 1850, with its warnings about “the snares, pitfalls, and innumerable perils of a Popish school.”
At her French finishing school, meanwhile, one of Belle’s classmates was a Miss Julia Gardner of Boston, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Lowell Gardner. Like Belle’s parents, the Gardners had come to Europe to chaperone their daughter and protect her from Popish ways. The girls, it seems, had a much better time in Paris than their elders. Neither the Stewarts nor the Gardners spoke much French—Mr. Gardner always referred to the Bois de Boulogne as “the Boy”—and, naturally, the two American couples spent a good deal of time with each other. Belle Stewart and Julia Gardner also became close friends.
There was a uniquely American kind of mission involved here. In nineteenth-century America fortunes were being made on a scale that had never before been imagined, and that were difficult even for the men who made them to comprehend. The country was leaving the gentle Age of Innocence of which Edith Wharton wrote, and was entering what James Truslow Adams labeled the “Age of the Dinosaurs.” The Dinosaurs, of course, were clumsy creatures, all mass and power and no grace. And, though new millionaires like David Stewart had learned to plow through the underbrush of commerce and finance to scavenge whatever plunder they could find, their progress was not always a pretty sight. It was clear that something was lacking, and that something was capital-C Culture.
Moreover, America seemed to offer little of it. Even in “artistic” Boston there was as yet no symphony orchestra, no art museum of any importance. Opera companies visited the city periodically, but the grandly named Boston Opera House was more often the setting for minstrel shows and vaudeville acts involving performing seals, bears, dogs, and monkeys. And so, for culture, rich Americans turned to Europe. In terms of education, England became the model, and private boys’ boarding schools were springing up all over New England carefully fashioned along the lines of such British “public” schools as Harrow and Eton. England’s example was also followed when it came to architecture, and English manor houses that had graced the hills of Kent and Sussex were copied and deposited, often incongruously, on the flatlands of Chicago. For art and music, however, the French and the Italian were most favored. Men like David Stewart and his wife may have realized that they would never really acquire Culture—in his case, the making and managing of money had left too little time for other pastimes, and in hers she was getting too late a start—but they were determined that their children, particularly their female children, should acquire this intangible asset. After all, Culture marked the difference between a woman and a lady. What the newly rich Dinosaurs were doing in the years just before, during, and after the Civil War, though they may not have realized it, was creating a cultural matriarchy that would dominate the
American artistic community for nearly a hundred years.
In Belle Stewart’s case, the mission was particularly successful. She was a quick study, and during her European sojourn she not only perfected her French but became equally fluent in Italian. She visited all the museums, castles, and cathedrals, listened to concerts and recitals, attended performances at the theatre and Paris Opéra, and became knowledgeable about European painting, sculpture, and music from the Renaissance onward. When the Stewarts sailed home to New York late in 1858 (Mother Stewart was pregnant again, and it was unthinkable that her child should be born on alien soil), Belle was eighteen, and considered herself a thoroughly cultivated, even sophisticated, young woman. There was a rumor, in fact, that she had enjoyed a “flirtation” with her young Italian instructor.
Belle Stewart had been more or less out of touch with her friend Julia Gardner when, early in 1859, an invitation arrived from Julia asking Belle up to Boston for a visit with her family. Belle’s parents, who had found the Gardners “nice,” agreed to let her go. In Boston, however, the Gardners were something a little more than “nice.” They were not only socially prominent themselves, but were also dizzyingly well connected, through marriages, to other prominent families: the Peabodys,* the Endicotts, the Lowells, the Cabots, the Parkmans, the Lawrences, the Higginsons, and the Lees, whose cousins married other cousins. The Gardners of Boston were not to be confused with the Gardiners, another important New England family. To differentiate between the two, the Gardiners were known as “the one-eyed Gardiners,” and the Gardners were “the blind Gardners.” Naturally, each family claimed that the other “spelled it wrong,” each insisting that the other’s ancestors had had a lesser mastery of spelling. Both, meanwhile, claimed direct descent from the original “gardeners,” Adam and Eve. The blind Gardners were in banking and shipping, and they were well fixed. (In Boston it was not considered proper to describe any family as “rich.”) The family owned merchant vessels, had profited discreetly in the slave trade, and controlled a sizable amount of Boston real estate.
The Grandes Dames Page 6
