I really want to work hard next winter. I’d like to stay in New York and study and go to lectures and concerts, play the piano a lot and try and learn something. Then next summer coming out and Newport!! Oh!! Vile!!
Flora, then in the Adirondacks, had received a letter from Gertrude, who was in Westbury facing an operation for appendicitis:
“I would like all you girls to sleep in the camp while I am away … [rather than in the row of nearby tents, where the boys would sleep]. You take my place at the table and make everyone behave. Be very careful with the boys. You are older now and you must not be the least immodest or familiar. They will like you all the better for it. Don’t ever let them touch you even jokingly. I know you know them all so well they seem like Sonny, but you are grown up now and you must have more reserve. This is not intended to be a lecture, but only to remind you of your extreme old age!!”
Perhaps these instructions aroused eighteen-year-old Flora’s frustration and anger. But her feelings changed quickly, and by the following summer, in Newport, she confided to her journal:
“IT has happened. … Took Mamma out in motor and told her … oh! Ooh!! Oooh!!!”
She and Quentin Roosevelt, Theodore’s youngest son, had fallen in love. In the many letters they exchanged after Quentin went overseas as a World War I pilot in the American Expeditionary Forces, they copied poems they’d read and memorized together, they sent each other prayers, they fervently sang their love and plighted their troth. Soon after Quentin’s departure in 1917, after dinner at the Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Flora wrote to his mother:
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,
“I tried last night to say what I am about to write but found I could not.
“After I left, you may have said — or thought —: ‘ah, she seems so cheerful, it must have failed to touch her very deeply — and maybe now she will forget.’ So I just want to say this. I never, never could forget for one instant; it has gone deeper than I imagined anything ever could — entirely new lands inside of me have been discovered by it. …
“I could never forget and I will never care the fraction of a feeling less than I do at present — and God knows I could not care more.”
And here’s part of a letter from Quentin to Flora, also in 1917, when he was stationed near Marseilles:
“My dearest of all,
“… the life that I really live over here, the life of my thoughts, is centered in you. What I am doing now, the war and all, the misery and sorrow that it brings, is only a space between two parts of my life. Life became so very wonderful and new to me when I first knew that I loved you. Then I had to leave you, — and it was as if a window had been shut inside me, not to open until I am with you again. … I have no thoughts of the future at all that are not based on you.”
On July 14, 1918, Quentin was shot down and killed in his plane inside the German lines. Flora was devastated. In a sculpture Gertrude made of her at this time, she sits listlessly in an armchair, her head bowed, her face drawn. She drew closer to Quentin’s parents and sisters, finding courage in their quintessentially optimistic response to life — and even to death. And she discovered the traditional solace of work, beginning, as she later noted on a transcribed letter, for Theodore Roosevelt: “First letter written for the Colonel [as she always called him] while he was in the hospital and just before I was to begin regularly to work for him — a very few weeks before he died.”
After this second death, Flora stayed with Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, while working for the Women’s Republican Committee in Washington. In her diary she described the beginning of her adventure:
“Left for Washington on the 1:08 train in a state of suppressed excitement — arrived in a state of complete uncontrolled excitement and fright. Alice met me — it was too sweet of her — and informed me I was to be at ‘work’ at 9:30 in the morning at the Republican headquarters. I’ve only seen Mrs. McCormick [the head of the Committee] twice but immediately fell for her charm — oh I do hope this comes to something, it will just make all the difference in existence — to me.”
Alice expected her to be present at the parties she gave almost nightly, which, while stimulating and fun, lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Mum told me later how astounded and impressed she’d been by the eminent visitors who poured in and out of the Long-worths’ home, but, since she liked a full eight or ten hours of sleep, she also recalled being constantly exhausted.
An old beau and lifelong friend, Thomas R. Coward (who later founded the publishing company Coward McCann), was also in Washington, working for the State Department. He wrote her eloquent and ardent letters, calling her “Dearest Foufi,” sympathizing with her, and giving a glimpse of my mother at that time.
You are the one moving force in my life … don ‘t marry someone else on practical grounds. It would kill me. … Oh, Foufi, I am so sorry you are so unhappy. I know exactly how you feel and work is the only solution.
Why are you, you? And what constitutes your appeal. I think it really is partially your being a child with a woman’s sophistication and cleverness. And then, of course, you are a delight to look upon and to hear. That voice!
I believe utterly and entirely in your humanity, your generosity, your inability to be mean or petty, your fineness of perception — in a word your essential bigness of soul. If I had time I could relate that to the queer streak of the child in you which is so fascinating. It is at once your greatest charm and safe-guard.
But my mother moved back to New York, already committed to Roderick Tower, a Harvard graduate who had served in the army, and the son of Charlemagne Tower of Philadelphia, formerly United States ambassador to Russia and to Germany Rod had been friendly with Quentin, and it seems likely that Flora married him in part because he could preserve her connection to Quentin. He was an oilman whose business ventures, after their marriage in 1920, took them to live in Los Angeles, where they had two children, my half-sister and half-brother Pamela and Whitney. Flora had always wanted to dance, and now she took dancing lessons at O’Dennishawns; met and dined with Pavlova, and watched her dance every night for a week, including a performance of The Awakening of Flora; attended dances by her mother’s friend and teacher, Ruth St. Denis; and visited Douglas and Mary Fairbanks and Mary Garden. Despite these pleasures, she was lonely, as she wrote in her Line-a-Day, and delighted when an old friend, Alice Davison, came to visit: “We dined alone and talked till nearly 12 — mostly religion and sex!” She listed many books read, and kept notebooks of geology courses she took in order to share Rod’s interests. But he was increasingly unstable, temperamental, and withdrawn. Flora spent more and more time in New York, and finally, in 1924, sought a separation and then a divorce. An essay she wrote then gives some clues to the problems in her marriage:
“If married people were more intimate — more openly honest — more willing to allow the other to participate in innermost thoughts — there would be a better knowledge of human nature and therefore less misunderstanding. Sex would help and not hinder the relationship for it constitutes a supremely alive and vital portion of married life and can be regarded as a tie to a closer intimacy rather than perpetuating an estrangement.”
Flora got her divorce quietly in La Bourboule, in the Auvergne region of France, and then, with her children, spent the summer of 1925 in her mother’s studio in Paris. She began to sculpt there and subsequently in New York, exhibiting her work at the Society of Independent Artists and in the Whitney Studio Club’s Tenth Anniversary Exhibition. She lived in New York and also in a house her parents built for her near theirs, in Old Westbury, Long Island.
Later in 1925, she met a charming bachelor, who was a talented artist and businessman: George Macculloch Miller, known as “Cully.” His Miller, Hoffman, Murray, Lindley, and McKeever forebears were different from Flora’s — they were even-tempered, solid citizens from Scottish, Swedish, and English stock, with American roots in Morristown, New Jersey,
and New York. Not extremely wealthy, but very comfortable, these families distinguished themselves as professionals and businessmen, and took an active part in community affairs.
Martinus Hermanzen Hoffman, the first of my father’s paternal ancestors to emigrate to America, arrived from Sweden in 1657, married Emeentje Claesen de Witte, and settled up the Hudson near Kingston and Rhinebeck. Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of their direct descendants, a Hoffman was dean of the General Theological Seminary, and yet another was a fine architect who designed the Villa Viscaya in Miami. Elizabeth Ogden Hoffman married an earlier George Macculloch Miller; they were my great-grandparents.
The first ancestor I know of on the Miller side was George Macculloch, born in 1775 in Bombay, where his father was a British major in the East India Company. Orphaned at nine, he was sent to live with his Scottish grandmother in Edinburgh, who arranged for his excellent education, including fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Italian. A businessman, he traveled widely in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1800 he and fifteen-year-old Louisa Edwina Saunderson had their first child. After the birth of their second child, they married — in an unusual sequence of events, for those days — and two years later, emigrated to America and settled in Morristown, New Jersey. Arriving with substantial means, they built an imposing brick home, Macculloch Hall (now a museum), on twenty-five acres facing what is now called Macculloch Avenue. George soon added to the house in order to open a school in it, which he ran for fifteen years. Macculloch Hall became a gathering place for the community, where George and Louisa gave dinners and led lively discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion. George wrote articles for newspapers and magazines on such subjects as slavery, debtors’ prisons, freedom in Greece, and the political attitudes of Jérôme Bonaparte, and he especially enjoyed entertaining foreign visitors — no wonder, with all his languages! Realizing that the economy of the area was dependent on the iron mines and smelting furnaces, which, however, were devouring local forests for fuel, he designed and raised money for the Morris Canal, which for ninety years remained the principal route for bringing coal from Pennsylvania, and greatly furthered New Jersey’s industrial development.
Their daughter, Mary Louisa, and her husband, Jacob Welsh Miller, a lawyer and politician, lived in Macculloch Hall with their nine children. Their fourth child, George Macculloch Miller and his wife Elizabeth Ogden Hoffman, had a son, Hoffman Miller, who married Edith McKeever, and my father was their oldest son. My paternal grandparents died before I was born, and my father didn’t talk about them much — I wish I’d asked him more about his family, especially his mother’s side, the McKeevers, about whom I know little.
I remember being intrigued by my father’s paternal aunt, Edith Macculloch Miller, who left me in her will “one of my pins given to my great great aunt, Miss Murray, by General Washington, being a miniature of Washington set in pearls and with his hair.” It lies in its original red leather case until, occasionally, I lift it from its surprisingly well preserved creamy satin cushion to look at the familiar countenance, to glimpse strands of chestnut hair in the minute pearl-mounted locket below, and to ponder my many-times-great aunt, Mary Lindley, who married Robert Murray and lived in the Murray house, Inclenberg, on Murray Hill in New York City (commemorated by a bronze tablet in the street at Park Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street). Mary Murray entertained Lord Howe at a tea party while General Putnam made good his escape from New York — and I suppose Washington sent her the locket to thank her for saving his army. She must have had courage, intelligence, and charm to succeed in such a risky affair. Robert Sherwood commemorated it in a play, Small War on Murray Hill Staying with Aunt Elizabeth in her Brookline house at seventeen, on a trip with my future husband to a Harvard football game, I’d never seen anyone so old and fragile. With her powdery face small black-clad frame, and houseful of mementoes, Aunt Elizabeth gave me a sense of our family’s reach back into America’s history that was entirely different from the more prodigal family tales I’d heard from my mother. Rather than their forbears’ money, Aunt Elizabeth emphasized their lineage, community service, and education: she spoke of teachers, ministers, lawyers, a few businessmen. They took pleasure in their families. The women stayed at home and cared for their husbands and children. Divorce was unknown. My father took pride in the generations of his family who had done well at St. Paul’s School, a boarding school patterned on the English system in Concord, New Hampshire — one or two had even taught there after graduating. He and his two younger brothers had been known for their musical talent, and had sung together in the choir and in performances.
When Flora and Cully fell in love, my Miller grandmother, fierce and conservative, wasn’t happy about her son’s choice. The marriage would never last! My beautiful mother, as a divorced woman from a wealthy and notable family, spelled unhappiness for her beloved son.
As it turned out, she was wrong.
My mother was ecstatic, as she wrote in her journal: “Haven’t been so happy in months and months and more months. Lay in bed all morning and drifted on a lovely pink cloud. I hope he lets me stay there just for a little while.”
In early 1927, Flora and her children, Pam and Whitty, sailed to Egypt with Gertrude, who wanted to study Egyptian monuments before beginning to sculpt the model for her immense stone Columbus Memorial that stands proudly in Palos, Spain. A note from Cully followed Flora:
“Oh it’s so hard to have you go my dear one. But of course when one can look forward to seeing you and seeing you and seeing you in only a month one should be grateful and patient — and I am, dearest. My ‘tummy’ is all going round inside first because you’re leaving me and next because I am so happy at the thought of marrying you. Take care of your precious self — don’t smoke too much please — in fact don’t do too much of anything dear bad one.”
Cully soon followed her to Cairo, where they were married, on February 24, with an elephant hair for a ring. After a romantic cruise on a dahabeah on the Nile, and travels through Europe, they settled down in New York, where Cully and his old friend Auguste Noel founded an architectural firm, Noel and Miller. Although my father never made working drawings or became an architect, he conceived of and drew many buildings, mostly houses, and concentrated more and more on painting. My younger brother Leverett and I grew up with Pam and Whitty — we were one family, as far as I could tell. My sister always said that she was closer to my father than to her own. She wrote about him in “Flora,” the memorial scrapbook created after my mother’s death by her friends to celebrate her life.
“My stepfather Cully Miller spread fun and humor wherever he was — never at the expense of others, but always ‘hitting the nail on the head.’ I was very conscious of those ‘vibes’ between my mother and him. They were strong!!! He was just so devoted, patient, and supportive of her that it was a wonder. And, of course, she basked in the luxury of living with someone who gave so much. I feel lucky to have had such a stepparent, as he never interfered, except when asked, and gave us all mountains of laughs and fun.”
I often look at a photograph of my father taken at about this time. He’s in the Adirondacks, sitting on a wooden bench in the cabin he and my mother had built on the shore of Little Tupper Lake, looking west, down the lake, toward the often spectacular sunsets. Bliss, they named it. What happy memories that photo brings!
Camp Bliss sat in the middle of about 100,000 acres in the heart of the wilderness of the Adirondacks. William C. Whitney had bought and developed this property, managing it ecologically with Frederick Law Olmsted’s advice, and building several camps for the family’s use. My parents loved to go there, and they took us to the camp we children used, Togus, every August until we had gas rationing and took volunteer jobs during World War II. In the picture, my father looks peaceful and ever so young — it must have been taken right after he was married. One leg is flung up casually on the bench supporting the magazine he’s reading, he has a full head of dark hair, and he wears trouse
rs, plaid shirt, v-necked sweater, and moccasins. In one hand he holds a cigarette, probably an “MM,” a snappy gold-tipped brand made with Turkish tobacco and imported to sell in the Park Avenue store where he was a partner, also called “MM.” Behind him, leaning on the massive stone fireplace (where a fire is laid), are two aluminum cases that hold my parents’ bamboo fishing rods. These were a clue to the reason for the lovely setting of Camp Bliss: it was close to Charlie Pond Stream, the very best trout fishing river in the world. That’s what I grew up to believe, anyway. Hanging from a pole on that same bench I see my father’s fishing hat, stuck all over with flies that he’d put there to dry after using them — little creations of feathers, fur, and tinsel, representing the bugs and nymphs the fish were eating at a given time. They remind me of my learning to make them, at ten, with the doctor who often fished with my parents, Carnes Weeks, and also with the eminent authority he arranged for me to meet, Elizabeth Gregg, who sold her creations to commuting fisherfolk from a little room at Grand Central Terminal cluttered with her materials. Since I was ambidextrous and could use scissors with either hand, I could tie flies without using a vise, a feat much admired by those in the know about such things, and this ability was definitely a feather in my cap. Carnes would bring me gorgeous feathers from his travels, especially during the war when he was posted to India, Burma, or China, and I can still visualize him spilling out fabulous bits of golden pheasant, brilliant silks, or tiger fur for me from his worn leather bag.
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 8
