Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  Nancy tolerated (relished, some said), a great deal of frivolous press attention. In spite of her painfully thin, boyish body and reputation for coldness—“one of those women who have the temperament of a man,” Aldous Huxley said—she delighted in becoming one of the most notorious sex symbols of the early twentieth century. She accepted “blather and ballyhoo” as part of the bargain of being the rebellious only daughter of eccentric Sir Bache Cunard and his wealthy American wife, Maud. But she was a stickler for accuracy. At pains to be taken seriously as a woman writer, she was especially hard on careless journalists. Just before midnight on May 1, she caught wind of the Mirror’s impending story and in her clipped, percussive style marched straight to a cable office, at 11:45 p.m. sending the editor, James Whittaker, a telegram that read, “Racket my dear Sir, pure racket, heiress and Robeson stuff. Immediately correct these. Call Monday one o’clock give you true statement. Nancy Cunard.” She now considered the matter closed. But Whittaker either did not receive Nancy’s telegram or—more likely—chose to ignore it. Nancy Cunard stories sold copies. The column ran in his morning edition.

  Whittaker knew—as Nancy surely also did—that stories about single white women in Harlem would make good copy, especially in 1932, with the Depression deepening. However much other social taboos might be loosening, those against interracial sex remained entrenched. If a reporter could pair a “New Woman” with a “New Negro”—and Nancy and Robeson, respectively, exemplified those categories—so much the better. It was easy to play on the public’s conviction that Harlem was a haven of forbidden pleasures where wealthy white women appeared unaccompanied for one unspeakable reason. That sold papers. Newspapers from Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Duluth, Minnesota, carried Whittaker’s account under headlines such as “Lady Cunard’s Search for Color in New York’s Negro Quarter.” A hastily produced Movietone newsreel depicting “Lady Nancy Cunard” entering a “Harlem Negro hotel” also helped keep the tale alive. The British press eagerly picked up the story under such headlines as “Auntie Nancy’s Cabin Down Among the Black Gentlemen of Harlem.”

  Nancy and Robeson both demanded retractions of what Nancy called the “outrageous lies, fantastic inventions and gross libels.” Robeson’s demand was printed; Nancy’s was not. Nancy wrote to Robeson that she knew “nothing at all of this amazing link up of yourself and myself in the press.” She lamented: “The sex motive is always used. . . . The Hearst publications invent black lovers for white women.” She called a press conference for noon at the Hotel Grampion and wrote up a statement to read to the dozens of reporters attending. “Press Gentlemen, how do you get this way?” it began. She spent the morning pacing, preparing, and strategizing, wondering why the papers could not be sane about race.

  Nancy Cunard at her 1932 press conference with John Banting and Taylor Gordon.

  At noon, dressed for her showdown, she strode into the hotel’s dining room, escorted by her friend the white English artist John Banting. She was a striking figure, “very slim with skin as white as bleached almonds, the bluest eyes one has ever seen and very fair hair,” and her unusual beauty combined “delicacy and steel,” as one of her admirers put it. Her “crystalline quality” made some people think she was “cold to the core.” But her problem was really the opposite: she cared too deeply about too many things, usually choosing things that others—other wealthy whites, at least—cared very little about. On that occasion, what she cared about was being misrepresented.

  Like many highly sensitive people, Nancy liked to appear impervious. She had dressed with unusual care, adopting an understated version of the look that had become her signature. Her hair was wound under a multicolored crisscrossed turban, and she wore a tightly fitted red leather jacket; a dark, narrow, midlength skirt; colored hose; and black, pointed, high-heeled Mary Janes: militarism and girlishness combined. Usually she covered her arms from wrists to elbows in dozens of African ivory bangles. They were her trademark style—her “barbaric bracelets,” her friend the photographer Cecil Beaton called them. That day she sported just a bangle or two on each of her thin, white wrists, barely visible under her leather cuffs. The press had often noted her heavy hand with eyeliner. That day, she rimmed her eyes very lightly in kohl. She wore simple black earrings that hardly reached below her earlobes.

  The lean and nervous Banting, wearing a light-colored three-piece suit, white tie, and two-tone shoes, escorted Nancy into the garishly decorated hotel dining room. He felt “half sick with horror” as they faced a roomful of reporters, notebooks at the ready. “I need not have been [afraid],” he soon realized, “for she stood up to the barrage smilingly in her bright armour of belief and her quick wit . . . expertly batting off the more stupid and destructive questions fired at her.” Fending off both honorifics and inquiries about Robeson—“it is NOT ‘the Hon[.] Nancy,’ it is Nancy Cunard”; “I met him once in Paris, in 1926,”—Nancy patiently explained that she’d been “disinherited” and that she had business in New York’s black neighborhood. She proudly told the reporters that her American ancestors had come out against slavery as early as 1680. Then she deftly steered the conference away from her private affairs and into the politics of race in America. She asked the assembled reporters to contribute to the Communist Party’s Scottsboro Defense Fund and demanded that they encourage their readers to weigh in on the question of why Americans are so “uneasy of the Negro Race.” The best answers would be reprinted in her upcoming Negro anthology, she promised.

  Nancy was a single British woman trying to tell American newspapermen what to do. She did not get what she asked for. Rather than report that she was spearheading the British campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys or that her literary and political efforts had earned her many important friends in Harlem and the status of a Harlem insider, the newspapers continued their ridiculous Robeson story. It fitted perfectly with the “taxonomic fever” of the times: a cautionary tale for those who tried to step across race lines. Letters piled up at the Hotel Grampion’s reception desk. But they were almost all hate mail, of an unusually vicious sort.

  As she later put it, “race-hysteria exploded.” By May 4, the beleaguered hotel staff found themselves with more than five hundred letters addressed to Nancy Cunard. These arrived from all across the nation: some typed, some handwritten, some scrawled with thick pencils, some merely unstamped envelopes weighted with slugs for which Nancy would have to pay postage. The letters insulted her, threatened her, and offered—in a variety of ways—to save her from herself. The letters called her “insane or downright degenerate,” “depraved miserable degenerated insane,” “a dirty low-down betraying piece of mucus,” and “a disgrace to the white race.” She was warned that she should “give up sleeping with a nigger” or be “burned alive to a stake. . . . Unless you leave America at once you will certainly be put on the spot and bump of[f] quick.” Most people would have destroyed these letters. Nancy saved them. She read them aloud to her friends. She published some of them in an essay entitled “The American Moron and the American of Sense—Letters on the Negro,” wanting others to see what she considered an “extraordinary” American display.

  Such threats were not the worst of it. She kept but did not reprint even more violent and pornographic letters, unsettling testimony to her observation that “any interest manifested by a white person [in blacks] . . . is immediately transformed into a sex scandal.” “To stir up as much fury as possible against Negroes and their white friends,” she added, “the sex motive is always used.” Those “ornate and rococo outbursts . . . unsigned and threatening . . . sex-mad and scatological” combined violent homicidal fantasies with pornographic ones, fellatio and bestiality especially, making painfully clear the extent to which race-crossing was considered both unnatural and exciting. While calling her a “lousy hoor” with “insane uncontrollable passions” and a “nigger lover,” the letter writers begged for a meeting: “I am the one whit[e] man who would have my cock sucked by you, you dirty low down b
um,” a typical one declared. Many proposed marriage: “I’m white, let me take you away and stop all these wagging tongues.”

  Images of rebellious “New Women” saturated magazine and newspaper ads when a devil-may-care style was needed to sell perfume, clothing, upholstery, or exotic vacations. But the responses to Nancy Cunard’s presence in Harlem show that being a New Woman was not fancy-free. Those who crossed race lines, as she did, faced a violent, ugly backlash. Nancy Cunard was the sort of person who always went “too far,” carrying everything to extremes. That makes her racial experimentation, and responses to it, especially valuable to us now. She saved the “crazy letters, these frantic eructations,” because they demonstrated so vividly the combustible mix of hate, fear, desire, envy, disgust, and longing that powered racism then and still powers it today. They showed just what white women were up against if they forayed into Harlem. The letters demonstrated the way race and sex become linked, and they spotlighted how much she was braving. They raised a question that she never answered: what reward could possibly have been worth such a price?

  “The Guilt of Our Immunity”: Growing Up an “Exquisite Specimen”

  She was of course a born fighter, and once again, a good hater.

  —Charles Burkhart

  In 1940, a Trinidadian poet named Alfred M. Cruickshank published a poem that asked why Nancy Cunard would forsake her privileges and status to throw in her lot with blacks. “What was it, Madam, made you to enlist / In our sad cause your all of heart and soul?” his poem “To Miss Nancy Cunard” asked. Nancy’s response, published a few months later, is telling. “My friend,” she wrote,

  Our lives are wars—You ask

  “Why love the slave,

  The ‘noble savage’ in the

  planter’s grave,

  And us descendants in a

  hostile clime?”

  Cell of the conscious sphere,

  I, nature and men,

  Answer you: “Brother—

  instinct, knowledge, and then,

  Maybe I was an African one

  time.”

  That was Nancy’s central notion: that one could not only identify with others but also be—or become—them.

  For most of our history, when identity has been central to political struggles, the demand has been to acknowledge others’ religious, ethnic, race, gender, sexual, or other identities and respect their intrinsic value. Rights claims have insisted on such recognition. Appeals to identification—to leaving behind “our own” identities to take on those of others—on the other hand, tend to inhabit the literary and artistic, rather than political, realms. The arts teach us to identify with others, to sympathize. For Nancy Cunard, identification was not just a means but a goal. Her notion was that identity itself, not just our regard for others’ identities, should be fundamentally reshaped and experienced as fluid, voluntary, open, alterable. That politics of identification was an idea born of privilege—the social mobility that comes with wealth—but what made Nancy Cunard so interesting was how heedless she was of leaving that privilege behind.

  The idea of becoming others was nothing that anyone in her family would have propagated or even countenanced. Indeed, it was an idea that nothing in her background or her childhood could have foretold. But from a very early age, for no reason that she could explain, she was convinced that “maybe I was an African one time.” When she was six years old, she wrote, her thoughts first “began to be drawn towards . . . ‘the Dark Continent.’” She had “extraordinary dreams about black Africa,”

  with Africans dancing and drumming around me, and I one of them, though still white, knowing mysteriously enough, how to dance in their own manner. Everything was full of movement in these dreams; it was that which enabled me to escape in the end, going further, even further! And all of it was a mixture of apprehension that sometimes turned into joy, and even rapture.

  It is hard to imagine a more unlikely setting for these dreams than Nancy’s childhood home in Leicestershire, England: Nevill Holt. A photograph taken there in 1902 is shot across a wide expanse of gravel driveway to the estate’s massive gray stone entrance. A crenellated roof is visible over the doorway, as are small arched stained-glass windows and bell pulls used to summon the servants. The shadows are long, and the front door, two stories high, fades back into darkness. Standing in a small sunlit portion of the doorway is six-year-old Nancy, wearing black laced boots, a white skirt, a dark jacket, a white blouse, and a large white hat. The photo captures no one but her—no groundskeeper, governess, or housemaid. She gazes out from the doorway as if she were the only person in that colossal, shadowed world.

  Nancy’s father, Bache Cunard, was a squarely built social conservative, a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin and the grandson of the founder of the Cunard shipping line, a business in which he evinced no interest at all, preferring to live an English gentleman’s life of sports and hunting. It surprised nearly everyone when, at the mature age of forty-three, he suddenly married a wealthy twenty-three-year-old Californian named Maud Alice Burke, a lovely young woman who was passionate mostly about socializing and the arts. Maud’s family settled the marriage for a $2 million dowry (equivalent to roughly $83 million in today’s currency), a not uncommon arrangement during the “heyday of Anglo-American society marriage.”

  The house to which Bache took Maud was “darkly paneled and full of armor, old swords, hunting prints and trophies and stuffed heads” and Maud hated it only slightly less than she hated the country life that it represented. The “incompatibility of the couple’s tastes and ways” became “local lore.” Maud considered motherhood “a low thing—the lowest.” But Nancy, their only child, was born, nonetheless, at Nevill Holt, on March 10, 1896, less than a year from the date of her parents’ marriage. It was an indifferent start.

  There was nothing homey about Nevill Holt. Behind an iron gate and stone piers bearing a bull’s head and crown—the Nevill arms—the estate oversaw 13,000 acres of fields and rolling hills. It was a great mass of crenellated stone towers and battlements, occupying more square footage than the New York Public Library and without as much warmth. With roughly forty servants at work at any given time—gardeners, coachmen, grooms, maids, cooks, nurses, and governesses—it was more a small village than a family house, with grounds so vast that staff used bicycles to move about. The furnishings were museum-quality in every sense: “men in armour in the [Great] Hall . . . four types of tournament armour still in use in the reign of Henry VIII.” Nevill Holt’s stone and timbered interior was impossible to heat adequately, and even though Nancy’s bedroom was freezing cold, her “odious” governess, Miss Scarth, insisted that she take a cold bath daily, summer or winter. Nancy’s mother hosted frequent, extended house parties. During those, Nevill Holt was more like a very large resort hotel than anything else. Between parties, the enormous staff catered to the three Cunards so completely that they never had any great need of one another. Often they did not see each other for days. “It seems fantastic,” Nancy later wrote, “to think of the scale of our existence then, with its numerous servants, gardeners, horses, and motor cars.”

  Nancy Cunard’s photograph of her childhood home, Nevill Holt. The estate was so vast that servants had to get around by bicycle. In spite of cutting all ties to her family, Nancy kept this photo of Nevill Holt with her until her death.

  Nevill Holt was not only massive, cold, and dreary; it was also isolated. “Not allowed a step out of the grounds alone,” Nancy “had almost no contact with the land-people,” she complained. She “longed for friends of her own age.” Her parents were unusually ill suited to child rearing. Mostly, they ignored her. “Like most Edwardian society parents, Maud was content to leave her offspring in the care of nurses, tutors and governesses.” Nancy grew up “a strange, solitary child,” one friend remembers. “Somehow I felt—and was—entirely detached from both [parents]. She was, she wrote, a “sullen-hearted” child. Between her absent parents and her remote, i
solated mansion, “my capacity for happiness was starved,” she concluded.

  Nancy was trained in music, French, and literature and exposed to many of the successful writers of her day at her mother’s parties: “the nearest thing to a Salon that London has,” according to the British press. Maud (later known as Emerald) Cunard counted many brilliant, influential men among her friends and lovers, including George Moore, W. Somerset Maugham, W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Lenin, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Thomas Beecham. Her circle did also include some women—Violet Manners, the Duchess of Rutland; Pansy Cotton; Lady Randolph Churchill (the former Jennie Jerome); and later Wallis Simpson and Diana Mitford Mosley—but no one who could model for Nancy the kind of life she was seeking.

  For years, however, that seemed not to matter. Nancy grew into one of the “fashionable beauties” of her time and seemed to accept that she would take her place in society. She happily teased the press, flirting with her growing image as a trendsetter. The papers predicted that she would stay “sweet, fresh, baby . . . dollish . . . and full of fun.” “Her hobby in life will probably be dogs,” one reported. Undergoing the traditional coming-out rituals of her class—“one ball succeeded another”—she performed ably as “[an] exquisite specimen of English girlhood.” She did a bit of private chafing, complaining that it was all “silly” men and “vapid conversation.” Nevertheless, in 1916 she made a traditional marriage to a socially suitable young man. Sydney Fairbairn was athletic, unliterary, good-looking, and pleasant. Twenty pounds heavier at her wedding than she would ever be again, Nancy presented herself as a “goldy bride” and a contented young woman.

  It did not last. Fairbairn was every bit the mismatch for Nancy that her father had been for her mother. Nancy “went through with it all,” she later explained, as the only way “to get away” from “Her Ladyship,” as she always called her mother. But after twenty miserable months—which taught Nancy to give up ever trying to do what was expected of her—she determined to go her own way and to make, or find, a community that made more sense to her than the one she’d grown up in.