All the Time in the World

by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

  Sampling tasty, strange fruit and basking in the glasshouse’s sultry breezes was a wintertime delight for the well-to-do. In France, Empress Joséphine installed a nursery to house three hundred pineapple trees at Malmaison in 1800, often serving her guests fresh pineapple, mangoes, and bananas for dessert. “There is an inherent wonderful fascination in being able, in the middle of winter, to open the window of a salon and feel a balmy spring breeze instead of the raw December or January air,” Napoléon’s niece, Princess Mathilde de Bonaparte (1820–1904), noted years later. “It may be raining outside, or the snow may be falling in soft flakes from a black sky, but one opens the glass doors and finds oneself in an earthly paradise that makes fun of the wintry showers.”

  It began as a riff on the simple nineteenth-century English children’s game called “paper chase,” in which two “hares” tore across the countryside laying a paper trail for the “hunters” to follow. But the treasure hunt, invented in the early 1920s by London’s socialite sisters Zita Jungman (1903–2006) and Teresa “Baby” Jungman (1907–2010) and their oh-so-sophisticated friends, was an instant hit with the city’s Bright Young Things. At first, tracking down clues and chasing one another across the city offered a way for the bored girls to “amuse ourselves on blank afternoons,” a friend explained. “None of us had much money so we went by bus or underground as speedily as we could.” Soon enough, however, the game became evening entertainment for the social set, and “the hunts got rather out of hand with Rolls-Royces jostling each other down mewses and people fighting for the clue.” Zita convinced the owner of a Hovis bread factory to bake clues into loaves of brown bread for one hunt. For another, she asked William Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Evening Standard, to print a special edition with sham headlines and clues hidden in the text.

  When police apprehended the young Honorable Lois Sturt during a hunt in 1924, the group’s antics became international news. In hot pursuit of treasure, she’d sped through a Stop sign in the Regent’s Park at 51 mph. The hunters that night included actors, actresses, socialites, Lady Diana Manners, and the Prince of Wales. Clues were tacked on lampposts, tucked away on fire escapes, and hidden in the cloisters of St. James’s Palace and at the foot of Cleopatra’s Needle. The last—and best—treasure hunt of the season began at 2:00 a.m., after a costume ball, and ended with the costumed revelers slumping in the coffee stalls for breakfast.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Manhattanites picked up the game in 1925, baffling the city’s policemen as three hundred well-heeled guests flooded down the streets in their limousines and in taxis during a treasure hunt party. “Traffic policemen were well-nigh speechless and Fifth Avenue shoppers were amazed,” wrote a reporter for The New York Times. Police gave two warnings during the scrum, and the damages incurred included a flat tire and a shattered taxicab window. “Chauffeurs got gray hairs” as the hunters urged them onward, the writer noted. “But the competition was terrific.”

  By the early 1930s, treasure hunts were passé in the United States, but scavenger hunts were in. The legendary American party planner Elsa Maxwell (1883–1963) introduced the newer game in 1933, challenging New York’s glamorous partygoers to search for hard-to-find items on her ridiculous laundry list, which included a live goat, the city’s most beautiful woman, and one of actor Jimmy Durante’s shoes. No one could refuse her. The hunters set off from the Waldorf-Astoria. One man couldn’t find a goat, but returned to the party with a bear cub he’d found at a Broadway nickelodeon instead.

  As with the treasure hunt, the scavenger hunt encouraged quite a few traffic violations. Some players counted on it. In 1935, reveler Michael J. Ferron of Evanston, Illinois, was pulled over for speeding during one such game. “That’s just what I needed!” he excitedly told the policeman issuing him a ticket.

  As early as the thirteenth century, English castles were guarded by nightwatchmen who piped out the hours. But by 1400 small bands of guards patrolled towns across England, while taking on a variety of musical duties as well, waking certain people at appointed times by playing outside their doors, and providing through the night a little street music for the townspeople. The musicians/guards, called “waits,” typically played the hornpipe or the shawm, an oboe-like instrument, as they marched through the dim streets, looking out for fires and for robbers. (The musicians, the music they played, and their instruments were all called “waits,” from the Old English wœccan, “to be awake,” and the antiquated German wachten, “to watch.”)

  Each of London’s wards had its own company of six to eight waits. By day, as part of their duties, they piped any illustrious visitor from the town gates to the door of his lodgings, while at night they played tunes and announced the time and weather conditions as they strolled and patrolled. “Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning,” one called out, startling diarist Samuel Pepys as he sat up writing one winter night. They were “a parcel of strange hobgoblins, covered with long frieze rugs and blankets, hooped round with leather girdles from their cruppers to their shoulders, and their noddles buttoned up into caps of martial figure,” reported a writer who crossed paths with a pack of waits in the early eighteenth century.

  Their presence offered, if anything, a psychological sense of security, and even in the sixteenth century, the waits’ security detail was far less important than their musical duties. The troupes often took private commissions to serenade young ladies. “As the custom prevails at present, there is scarce a young man of any fashion in the corporation, who does not make love with the town-music,” noted an eighteenth-century observer. “One would think they hoped to conquer their mistresses’ hearts as people tame hawks and eagles, by keeping them awake, or breaking their sleep when they are fallen into it.”

  The waits were more active during the dark months, often starting at two in the morning and sometimes playing on until daybreak, performing seasonal tunes, and, on the day after Christmas, waking each household on their route by name, while angling for tips. At St. Mary’s Convent, for example, they sang out: “Good Morning to the Lady Abbess! Good morning to the nuns! Good morning to the young ladies! Three o’clock in the morning: a fine morning! Good morning to the chaplain! Good morning to all! Good morning! Good morning!” No one seemed to mind the ill-timed greeting, and the tradition continued until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. “The music of the Waits—rude as may be their minstrelsy,” observed American writer Washington Irving, “breaks upon the mid-watches of the night with the effect of perfect harmony.”

  Greeks and Romans of ancient times spent the night in temples dedicated to the healing god Asclepius, where they were awakened periodically by priests, who analyzed their dreams and used the findings to formulate medical diagnoses. Famous physicians including Hippocrates and Galen prescribed cures based on dream imagery, involving the weather, for instance. Occasionally, however, their services weren’t needed, as, according to the dreamers, Asclepius put in a personal appearance within the dream and healed the dreamer there on the spot.

  Similarly, the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822–1892) had himself woken up throughout the night with the hope of extracting sense from his dream visions, which he recorded beginning at the age of thirteen. The aristocratic French scholar especially liked to ponder the dreamer’s moral quandary: As an upright gentleman of standing, how could he maintain his willpower, refraining from doing anything sinful or unseemly while asleep? Hervey de Saint-Denys was convinced that through pre-sleep autosuggestion, the elevated dreamer could practice dream control, keeping himself within polite bounds.

  But he was also intrigued by the faint geometric visual hallucinations that swirl when one’s eyes are closed, just on the cusp of sleep, and he filled twenty-two notebooks with the dots of color and tiny suns that swam through his inner vision. “White smoke passes like a cloud driven before the wind,” he wrote of one night’s reverie. “Flames shoot out in spurts impinging painfully upon my retina. Soon they hav
e dissolved the cloud, their explosiveness subsides. They spin, forming broad blooms, black in the center, orange and red at the edges. After a moment they open gradually from the center becoming a thin golden ring, a sort of frame in which I see the portrait of one of my friends.”

  His passion for dreaming was matched some decades later by that of English psychologist Mary Arnold-Forster (1861–1951), who, like Hervey de Saint-Denys, used autosuggestion during her waking hours to train herself to remember her dreams and to develop lucid control over them, which she called the “art of happy dreaming.” Dreams were a new frontier, offering “the same kind of quiet pleasure that we feel when journeying through an unfamiliar country, when each little hill we surmount and each bend of the road that we turn reveals to us something new,” she wrote.

  Arnold-Forster’s true midslumber delight, however, was the flying dream. “I found that if I steadily thought about such a dream as the flying dream it would soon come back,” she trilled. Since childhood she’d dreamt of being able to hover midair by fluttering and flapping her hands like little wings. “It was a long time before I could fly higher than five or six feet from the ground, and it was only after watching and thinking about the flight of birds, the soaring of the larks above the Wiltshire Downs, the hovering of a kestrel, the action of the rooks’ strong wings, and the glancing flights of swallows, that I began to achieve in my dreams some of the same bird-like flights,” she wrote.

  Again, the power of autosuggestion gave her new lift. “After I had thought long and often about flying over high trees and buildings,” Arnold-Forster explained, “I found that I was getting the power to rise to these heights with ever lessening difficulty and effort.”

  The actress-artist and bohemian Beatrice Wood (1893–1998) was twenty-four years old when she met French artist Marcel Duchamp, then twenty-seven and basking in the glow of his provocative painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Duchamp (1887–1968) agreed to take Wood under his wing and into his studio, where he critiqued her sketches. She fell for him right away. He had “penetrating blue eyes that saw all,” she wrote. “When he smiled the heavens opened.”

  A bathtub in the center of his studio, used for his frequent ablutions, a visitor remembered, was situated an arm’s length from a hanging rope, which allowed him to open the door without getting up. The place was strewn with clothes and canvases, and utterly undone, down to its unmade bed, allowing Wood an escape from the “crowded luxury” of her parents’ San Francisco home in 1916. American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) could hardly stand the thick grime covering the surfaces in Duchamp’s studio. “I was so upset over the dusty place,” she said after a visit, “that the next day I wanted to go over and clean it.” Wood, on the other hand, seemed to find the scene alluring, noting that the place “gave the impression of being in various stages of undress.” After working all afternoon together, she and Duchamp would go out to dinner. “Except for the physical act,” wrote Wood, “we were lovers.” (And from Wood’s account, it seems he wasn’t interested in pursuing a physical relationship.)

  Duchamp was on the jury for the Society of Independent Artists exhibition the next year, a show that, unlike others of its kind, promised to accept any and all work. The idea was that the artist, not the critics, would decide what art was. Duchamp advised Wood on her Un peu d’eau dans du savon, a racy painting of a nude in a tub with a piece of soap glued in the “tactical” position (Duchamp’s touch). Meanwhile, under the name R. Mutt, he submitted Fountain, his iconic found-object urinal. It would become one of the most influential works in the history of Western art, but in 1917 Fountain was too far-out for the other jury members, and no one had ever heard of R. Mutt. For the duration of the exhibition, the piece was hidden behind a partition, out of sight. “I didn’t know where it was,” Duchamp later recalled. “I couldn’t say that I had sent the thing, but I think the organizers knew it through gossip. No one dared mention it.” He resigned from the organization, but a small magazine he coedited with friends, The Blind Man, ran an article in defense of the piece titled “The Buddha of the Bathroom.”

  To celebrate the magazine’s efforts, and Duchamp’s edgy artwork, a wild “Pagan romp”—the Blindman’s Ball—was unleashed at Webster Hall in Greenwich Village that summer. Wood drew the poster, a marching stick figure thumbing his nose at the world. Guests came in the most eccentric costumes they could muster. Artist Clara Tice was costumed as a steam radiator, while her friend came as a hard-boiled egg. Poet Mina Loy was a strange Pierrot. Duchamp arrived in a woman’s dress. Wood, wearing a Russian peasant costume, did a folk dance. “Marcel climbed up on a chandelier,” Wood remembered. “Joseph Stella had a duel over me, though I never found out why.”

  At three in the morning, Duchamp, Wood, and a few game friends wound up at someone’s apartment, snacking on scrambled eggs and wine. Then, at dawn, Duchamp and a pack of revelers who were too tired to go home went back to his place, piling into his bed “like a collection of worn-out dolls,” Wood wrote. Loy took the bottom of the bed, pressing against actress Arlene Dresser. Painter Charles Demuth draped himself at a right angle to the pair, flinging a leg over the side and revealing a garter. Duchamp squeezed in against the far wall, and Wood wedged herself in next to him, “an opportunity of discomfort that took me to heaven because I was so close to him,” she remembered. “Lying practically on top of him, I could hear his beating heart and feel the coolness of his chest. Divinely happy, I never closed my eyes to sleep.”

  THE LORD OF MISRULE, KNOWN ALSO as the Master of Merry Disports, ignited the Christmastime festivities from the late thirteenth through the early seventeenth century in England’s grand households. These mock officials were voted into service or chosen by the head of the household, and charged with delighting one and all during the winter season, arranging “fine and subtle disguisings, masks and mummeries, with playing at cards for counters, nayles and points, in every house, more for pastimes than for gain,” a reveler noted. There were feasts, concerts, silly plays, and dancing.

  And with great pomp, the Christmas lords made it their duty to incite chaos. Dressed in fool’s baubles, and riding canvas hobbyhorses, they commanded all residents of the house. In 1551, courtier George Ferrers (1500–1579) played Lord of Misrule for Edward VI’s lavish holiday parties. Wearing a gold robe trimmed with fur, he rode into London with a troupe of trumpeters, then thundered on to spend more than £500 on entertainment, which included a Drunken Masque, a joust, and a mock Midsummer Night party. In the early seventeenth century, Sir Richard Evelyn gave his friend and trumpeter an equally free hand as Lord of Misrule, drafting a document to ensure that the temporary regent would hold sway in Evelyn’s house, insisting “every person or persons whatsoever, as well servants as others, to be at his command whensoever he shall sound his trumpet or music, and to do him good service, as though I were present myself, at their perils.” No one was spared the man’s merriment. “I give full power and authority to his lordship to break up all locks, bolts, bars, doors, and latches,” Evelyn went on, “and to fling up all doors out of hinges, to come at those who presume to disobey his lordship’s commands.”

  Beyond castle walls, villagers elected their own Christmas lords, who seemed especially prone to interrupting church services, usually accompanied by a raucous band of partiers dressed in scarves and laces, with jangling bells tied to their legs. The merry crew would storm in, “their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the throng.” Then they danced—a tradition that dated back to the ancient Roman Saturnalia, when similar rituals turned the everyday world upside down, with masters acting as servants while the servants ruled the day. Zealous seventeenth-century Puritans were appalled, of course, railing against the “reveling, epicurisme, wantonesse, idlenesse, dancing, drinking, stage-plaies, masques, and carnall pompe and jollity,” as one grumb
led, and against all else that accompanied the fanciful season of “Christmas disorders.” Everyone else had a fine time.

  Harlem’s jazz musicians of the early 1940s traveled downtown to play West Fifty-second Street’s nightclubs, but that big band swing didn’t leave a lot of room for experimentation, and midtown’s uptight bandleaders didn’t suffer showy solos. At closing time—3:00 a.m.—virtuoso musicians such as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Kenny Clarke, pianist Thelonious Monk, and saxophonist Charlie Parker rushed back uptown for some fun. Bebop was the new style that emerged during their late-night jam sessions, as each flaunted an inimitable personal flair, warping traditional tempos and tweaking old techniques. It wasn’t about entertainment or danceability. Bebop was strange, aggressive, and intentionally hard to play.

  In the wee hours, they met at Minton’s Playhouse on West 118th Street, a swanky supper club owned by Henry Minton, who, luckily, was also a delegate to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. The 802 tried to keep musicians from playing in venues where they weren’t getting paid, such as after-hours clubs. Wandering delegates shadowed musicians leaving work, trailing them to any place where they might jam. “There were big fines for playing jam sessions,” Gillespie (1917–1993) remembered. “So we were taking a big risk.” Those caught were charged a $100 to $500 fine. Minton’s union position kept his club off-limits, so the musicians could do their thing.