What impressed people most about Henry Field’s pedigree, however, was his great-uncle, the department store magnate Marshall Field. As a student at Oxford, Henry Field had done extensive anthropological fieldwork in the Near East. In 1926, a year after graduating, he moved from England to Chicago. He assumed the position of Assistant Curator of Physical Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, founded and run by his family.6
The young anthropologist escorted the woman from the Equatorial Africa pavilion to a taxi, waiting with its top down in the morning sun. They sat side by side in the backseat. Field was tall, tweedy, with a patrician’s forehead and strong chin. The woman wore her hair in braids tightly woven along her head. With her left hand, she held up her lower lip, which extended ten inches from her mouth.
The taxi headed west, toward the center of Paris. The streets and sidewalks were crowded with summer traffic. At the Bastille they turned onto the rue de Rivoli and drove its length, with the Marais on their right, Notre Dame and the Île-de-France on their left. At every stoplight, there was pandemonium. In cars, on foot, Parisians cheered and saluted the Ubangi woman. She started jabbing Field with her right elbow and talking at a rapid clip. Field could not understand her but assumed that she was “chatter[ing] like a magpie” to express her pleasure. “Like all beautiful women,” he wrote, “my companion did not remain oblivious to this attention.” He was certainly enjoying the moment, something he would remember decades later with “mingled amusement and embarrassment.” The great fashion designers of Paris might create distinctive and original looks, he thought, “but my companion had the biggest lips in France!”7
After the Louvre and Tuileries, they turned left, skirting the ChampsÉlysées as they drove straight through the place de la Concorde and across the shimmering Seine. Past Bonaparte’s tomb and the Eiffel Tower, they plunged into the Fifteenth Arrondissement, winding their way to the rue de Vouillé and the Villa Chauvelot. It was a humble neighborhood, and there was little commotion at the woman with lip plates. The neighbors had grown used to the procession of unusual people: Nepalese princes and princesses, a student from Shanghai, Malays, Hawaiians, a boy from Madura, off the Javanese coast.8
Field brought the woman to a quiet stone building. A fountain built into its outside wall was adorned with small North African tiles, black and turquoise. By design, one black tile was missing from the pattern; otherwise, perfection would attract the evil eye. They entered the building and went upstairs. They were greeted by a startled Siamese cat. Behind him was an open studio cluttered with clay models and plaster casts: heads, feet, legs, hands. A “haughty and extremely handsome” woman with long gray hair tied in an elaborate bun, flowing green smock, artfully draped scarf, and oversize black tam approached Field and his find. Her handshake was firm.9
While her assistants shaped approximations of full-length bodies around wire and wood frames, Malvina Hoffman—Auguste Rodin’s disciple and Henry Field’s protégée—was endowing the rough clay with life, proportion, and a sense of movement. A New Yorker, Hoffman had been based in Paris for the entirety of the Colonial Exposition. Nearly every day she would “kidnap” native workers from the Bois de Vincennes. The exposition provided a wealth of splendid subjects. The Ubangi woman was hardly the first Hoffman had met. The sculptor had spent years traveling through Africa; while in the Congo, she had drawn a portrait of a woman with lip plates. The sculptor may have offered her new subject a cigarette, having seen Ubangis smoke through long hollowed reeds. Hoffman agreed with her patron that the Ubangi he had chosen was ideal for the vast project that he had commissioned. 10
WHEN FIELD STARTED WORK in Chicago in 1926, he had proposed to his curator an entire exhibition hall devoted to what he called “the principal racial types of the world.” Alongside more traditional exhibits that “would illustrate the bases on which mankind may be divided,” dozens of sculptures—full bodies, busts, heads—would populate the hall. It would represent the latest knowledge of physical anthropology through the work of “the finest artists in the world.” The curator, Berthold Laufer, a German brought to the United States by the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas, embraced the idea, and the museum’s president, Field’s cousin, told him to plan it “without regard to space, time, or cost.” It would open in time for the 1933 world’s fair.11
In order to commence the project, Field first had to determine what he meant by the “principal racial types of the world.” Of course, there were three principal groups—he could ask just about anyone walking down Lake Shore Drive, and they would give the same answer: white, yellow, and black. Within those groups, Field knew there were important subgroups that could be determined by analyzing “the form, color, and quantity of the hair; the color of the skin; the shape of the head and face; and the character of the nose, eyes, mouth, and lips,” as well as stature. For years Field covered “yards of paper” with notes, waking from sleep to write down ideas and interrupting his reveries at the Thursday-night symphony. He inspected more than a million pictures of representative types from galleries, photo services, and museum collections across the United States and in more than a dozen cities in Europe, creating a Library of Racial Photographs with twenty thousand prints. Consulting with Laufer, with anthropologists at the Smithsonian, Harvard, and the Museum of Natural History, and with leading scientists in England, France, and Germany, Field developed a list of 164 racial types, from Kalahari Bushmen to Basques to Blackfoot Indians.12
The next step was to find “one single artist with the talent and physical endurance” to travel the world and sculpt all 164 types. Field’s cousin, Marshall Field III, suggested Hoffman. The anthropologist traveled to Hoffman’s New York studio and was particularly struck by an “amazingly lifelike” sculpture of Anna Pavlova as well as two oversize heads of Nubians that showed “the most delicate realism combined with a strong dramatic sense.”13
In February 1930 Field commissioned Hoffman for the years-long project. To keep costs in control after the stock market crash, he deleted some of the “less important types” from his list of races, culling it to an even one hundred. That summer the sculptor set up her Paris studio. Field and his colleagues helped her establish other studios around the world and provided her with dozens of letters of introduction for upcoming trips through Europe, India, Africa, Asia, and Australia. From the start she was working at “concert pitch,” sculpting from live models all day and from memory at night. At a Paris foundry, sixty men were employed in creating plaster and sand molds and casting her statues in bronze. Hoffman supervised the patina work closely, “to suggest the variety of tones and textures of all the races.”14
In September 1931, after several months of sculpting workers at the Colonial Exposition, Hoffman left Paris and began traveling around the world, from New York to San Francisco, Honolulu and Yokohama, to Hong Kong and the Philippines, Bali and Batavia, Singapore and Calcutta and Ceylon. She sailed in forty types of ships, from ocean liners to outriggers, slept in castles and huts, donned pith helmets and crossed jungles and dosed with quinine. As she traveled around the world, she found models, sketched portraits, and shaped a mountain’s worth of heads and bodies out of clay and plaster of Paris. Eight months later she was back in Paris, enjoying “spring blossoms . . . peace and fertility, balanced temperature and modern plumbing.” By the end of 1932 the finished sculptures were in Chicago: twenty-seven life-size, twenty-seven busts, and fifty heads. When the Hall of the Races of Mankind opened in May 1933, the sculptures would make her famous, and they became one of the signal triumphs of Henry Field’s long and distinguished career. 15
HENRY FIELD HAD BEEN estranged from his father for years. His parents had divorced in 1907, before he turned five, and a year later his mother had married an Englishman. They moved from Washington, D.C., to Baggrave, his stepfather’s country house in Leicestershire. Field enjoyed an aristocratic upbringing, digging up fossils on the family estate as a boy, then went on to Eton and Oxford. By the time he heade
d back to Chicago to take his job at the Field Museum, he had dropped his father’s family name and assumed his mother’s.16
Like Malvina Hoffman’s sculptures, Field’s father, Preston Gibson, was broadly representative of a certain type of man—dark and dashing, the quintessence of privilege in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Randall Lee Gibson’s youngest son had been twelve when he was orphaned, a sad, lonely boy with an inheritance worth millions. According to the terms of his father’s will, he had no guardian, just four trustees of his fortune. Preston moved a few doors down the street from his father’s mansion in Washington to the house of his mother’s sister Leita. Within months Leita had married Preston’s trustee Edward Douglass White, who had been recently appointed a Supreme Court justice. 17
Soon after his appointment Justice White cast his vote with the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding a Louisiana statute that required railroads to segregate their cars by race. When he was not addressing issues of national importance, Justice White tried to establish a home for his new wife and nephew that embraced simplicity and order. Preston and his uncle took silent afternoon walks through the city, nodding to passersby; spent late nights in their private library, reading about George Washington and John Marshall; and enjoyed frequent visits from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Baltimore. White often entertained his nephew with stories that featured “old colored m[e]n” he had run across in New Orleans and Washington. The justice assumed their accents and idiosyncratic diction for comic effect. 18
Yet for all the love Preston Gibson claimed to feel for his aunt and uncle, the teenage boy brought constant disorder into their lives. Aunt Leita found him to be “unruly and disobedient . . . reckless . . . [and] unfortunately depraved.” “It is impossible to compel him to tell the truth on any subject,” she complained. “The exposure of one falsehood after the other seems only to excite a sense of amusement in his mind when spoken to on the subject.” Preston’s “tendency to dissipation” was matched only by his “irresistible tendency to theft,” from which no family member, houseguest, or servant was safe.19
Instead of being sent to a reform school, as his aunt would have wished, Gibson wound up at Yale. He was popular on campus, a pitcher on the baseball team and a secret society inductee, idolized by classmates for his role on the football squad that held an undefeated Harvard to a zero- zero tie just before Thanksgiving in 1899. He gained national notoriety two months later when he eloped with Marshall Field’s niece Minna, a seventeen-year-old debutante boarding at the Misses Masters’ School in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Despite their scandalous union, the couple was embraced by her mother and stepfather, the prominent novelist Thomas Nelson Page, whose tales of “ole Virginia” reflected a national nostalgia for vast plantations, belles and gallants, and happy slaves. It was an attractive version of the past at a moment when legislatures were enacting Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs were murdering hundreds of men and women every year. Preston Gibson could certainly find common ground with Page in conversation. Typical of his generation, the rakish Yalie enjoyed nothing more than a minstrel show, and he was becoming an accomplished teller of “Kentucky Negro stories.”20
From the time he married Minna Field, Preston Gibson became a fixture of high society. His life whirled among Chicago, Washington, and New York, a dozen exclusive clubs, and resort destinations from Georgia to Maine, Paris to Cairo. It was a world governed by elaborate rules and rituals, yet its denizens lived to flout conventional morality—smoking, drinking, gambling, engaging in all-night revels and love affairs. “A new scandal is like a Parisian model,” Gibson would write. “It wants to air itself every afternoon.”21
Gibson’s life revolved around cotillions and turkey trots, roulette, bridge and mah-jongg, polo matches and baseball games. He socialized with Astors and Vanderbilts, presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices, counts and princes and foreign ambassadors. When Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice visited Chicago, the iconic “New Woman” stayed with the Gibsons. Preston hosted balls that began at the stroke of midnight, was admired for swimming the Rhode Island Sound from Narragansett to Newport, and won a $500 bet when the catcher for the Washington Nationals, Gabby Street, caught a baseball that Preston had thrown from the top of the Washington Monument. Regarded by the society pages as one of the best dancers in his circle, he once revealed his secret to doing a successful Argentine tango: “the lifting of the body and holding it as the negroes do in the cake walk.”22
After briefly working for his wife’s family, Preston turned his attention to higher pursuits. By 1905 he was contributing pieces to newspapers and establishing himself as a playwright. His plays were a garish parade of socialites, bounders, frauds, thieves, and gold diggers. Unhappy husbands tried to hang themselves. Long-lost lovers were reunited. The embraces were always “passionate,” the kisses unfailingly “violent.” A pistol placed on the mantel on page six was fired by page thirteen.23
Some of his work was performed with amateur actors from his social circle, providing them an excuse to don fancy costumes and grope one another, but several plays were produced on Broadway. The reviews were never positive. His most successful play, The Turning Point, merged highsociety comedy with Appalachian melodrama, as a member of the old Virginia gentry refuses to sell a railroad right-of-way to a Northern businessman intent on mining the area’s coal, forms a competing company of his own, and then wins the heart of a fetching New York City heiress. The play also borrowed some of its best lines from Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband . As controversy raged, Gibson took the stage during one performance and addressed the audience, attributing any similarity in language to “the result of uniform human experiences” and comparing himself to Shakespeare and Rostand.24
Although his plays revealed some capacity for self-awareness, Gibson seemed unable to avoid becoming the kind of person he wrote about. He divorced Minna Field in 1907, moved back to Washington, and married another heiress in 1909. His best man was Reginald Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s grandson, and among the notables in attendance were Justice White, Senator Elihu Root, and Admiral Dewey. After six years, two children, a dozen plays, hundreds of tea dances, and a series of publicly aired indiscretions involving a young woman in Baltimore, Gibson divorced again.25
As Gibson’s second marriage dissolved, he found a new source of focus and meaning in his life: the war in Europe. He raised money for French and Serbian relief, and after a German U-boat sank the Lusitania in 1915, he underwent training in trench warfare at Plattsburgh, New York, with a group of prominent New York, Philadelphia, and Boston businessmen. In early 1917 Gibson headed to France, volunteered for the ambulance corps, and found himself on the Western Front in the Aisne Valley, sixty miles from Paris, just as the French were mounting a major offensive. Through the “stupendous disemboweling roar of the artillery,” the “cauldron of blood and mud,” Gibson worked ninety hours at a time without sleep, bringing the wounded to surgeons he described as “literally dripping.” The soldiers he saw had holes in their heads, chests, guts, and limbs; they could not stop crying from the mustard bombs and were coughing and vomiting blood from other gas attacks that clouded the valley. The shelling knocked him down and dented his helmet. While Gibson and a French soldier watched a dogfight overhead, “a piece of shrapnel about as big as a saucer simply cut [the Frenchman’s] head off as he stood facing me, just as though an axe had done it.”26
Occasionally Gibson thought of his previous life. Firing antiaircraft guns at German spotter planes reminded him of “shooting quail in South Carolina.” But most of his experiences were entirely new. Many of the soldiers participating in the offensive had come from Senegal and other African colonies, rushing from the trenches armed only with grenades and long knives. “It seemed so curious, in a way, to go up to one of these fellows, a black Algerian, covered with mud, who had fallen or slipped down and help him up and have him put his arm over your shoulder,” Gibson wrote. “At the moment one only thought of him as on
e of your own.”27
Like his father, Gibson returned from war a hero. The French awarded him the Croix de Guerre. Back in the United States, he refused an army captain’s commission and in 1918 enlisted in the Marines as a thirty-eight-year-old private. Working as a recruiter, he broke records by convincing 3,200 men to enlist during a two-week drive; a speech he gave at a New York theater raised $163,000 in Liberty Loans. A major press published his war memoir, Battering the Boche, which received the best reviews of his literary career.28
Poised to leap from society to substance, Gibson instead reverted to form at war’s end. In 1919 he eloped to Greenwich, Connecticut, with a Standard Oil heiress who dreamed of being a movie star. Two years later she sailed to Paris and divorced him, complaining that she had married a “flock of outstanding bills.” Sued by creditors and auctioning his possessions, hair receding, mustache gray, Gibson spent years abroad, in Zurich and Deauville, cruising the Mediterranean. By his fourth marriage in 1925, he was a running joke in the society pages. “Preston Gibson gets his name in the headlines again,” wrote one wag. “You guessed it—Boston girl. He knows beans!”29
Gibson and his wife announced their intention to live in Paris, but they worked their way around the world. Like a character in one of his plays, Gibson resorted to writing bad checks when he was short on cash in Shanghai. He and his wife fled China but were arrested in Vancouver. Over the next year Gibson’s Shanghai fraud and the protracted legal battles that followed provided fodder for his last great burst of national publicity, at least until his fourth divorce in 1928.30
Gibson spent the next decade languishing in a furnished room in New York, old, sick, and poor. He had outlived his two older brothers, one of whom had suffered years of mental illness and the other a bankrupt. He did not know any of his children. Two sons, one of whom was Henry Field, changed their names. When his daughter married in 1934, her stepfather gave her away. In 1937, at age fifty-seven, Gibson died at a veterans hospital in the Bronx. He was remembered as someone who “packed ten lives into one,” a “man with the fatal gift of charm.” Gibson was not a wit, wrote one reporter, nor did he have a “mellifluous voice.” What made him the embodiment of the Smart Set was simple: “Preston Gibson [was] never a bore.” He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.31
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