Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  In 1894, Edith ventured to Delancey Street’s Guild Hall, on the gritty Lower East Side, to volunteer at the annual reception of the University Settlement Society. The society promoted the novel idea of bringing college graduate volunteers, men and women both, to help the working poor, addressing such basic immigrant needs as jobs, literacy and even bathing—the washed, in other words, assisting the great unwashed. The ultimate aim was to assimilate the polyglot multitudes of the tenements into the amorphous ideal of “life in America.” The volunteers, meanwhile, felt themselves rewarded with a sense of virtue that accompanied the gift of themselves.

  Edith Minturn, then at the height of her world’s fair fame, lent a certain cachet to the event simply by pouring coffee and tea for the eager altruists. The targeted clientele, present only in spirit inside the Guild Hall itself, crowded the tenement-heavy neighborhoods outside its doors. The society gathered the usual suspects of progressive New York. Edith’s mother, Susanna, attended, as did Mary Scrymser, erstwhile chaperone of the mountain-wagon excursions some years before, and some two hundred other socialites. Edith shared her beverage station with the celebrated Richard Watson Gilder, an editor and poet who took an intense interest in social problems, and various other luminaries.

  The talk was, as always in these circles, of tenements. What was wrong with them, the unhealthiness of them, how they might be reformed. Many of Edith’s peers found becoming a wife the ideal opportunity to absorb themselves in the flourishing social life of New York, and the calls, balls, dinners and wardrobe adjustments that were certainly a part of her existence as well. But true to the spirit of a progressive age, Edith had discovered a passion for the needs of the disenfranchised, whether it be women denied the vote, shopgirls denied even a chair on which to sit, or the immigrant poor, whose aspirations to a better way of life became her most acute concern.

  THE UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT Society progressives revered as their patron saint the crusading photojournalist and author Jacob August Riis, who in 1890 had published his shockingly explicit and wildly successful exposé, How the Other Half Lives. Riis’s book combined images and text to place under a magnifying glass every sordid detail of New York ghetto life, from tumbledown shanties and living room sweatshops to basement saloons where the inhabitants of hell drowned their sorrows. Newton was deeply affected by Riis’s groundbreaking work, which seemed tailor-made to grab the attention of a young New York City heir, the comfortable denizen of a world replete with every aesthetic resource imaginable, who was just then beginning to toy with the idea that his newfound passion, architecture, could be a source of social good.

  Columbia University was then located at 49th Street and Madison Avenue. The progressive spirit permeated the school like a wafting breeze. Newton studied under two well-known professors, W. R. Ware (late of MIT) and Alfred Hamlin. His architecture tutor was a burgeoning classical architect named John Russell Pope, who would go on to earn acclaim as the creator of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

  “During this time,” Newton would later remark, “I made up my mind that I was more interested in planning than decorating.”

  Newton took his lead as a fledgling architect from reformers like Josephine Lowell, whom he consulted when he was in graduate school. Aunt Josephine held a sentimental and inspirational role for both Newton and Edith. Newton thought it was possible to significantly improve the plight of the poor by physically altering their habitat. He firmly believed in the necessity of better housing for the poor, remembering later his conviction as a young man that it was “one of the crying needs of the day,” and that it would be his particular mission to address that need.

  “The design and promotion of better housing,” he stated in his memoir, “especially in our large cities, furnished as good an opportunity for useful service as any other profession or field of activity.” The paradox of a man accustomed to wandering through family mansions, yet investing himself in questions of urban squalor, must have been apparent to Newton Stokes, possessed as he was of sharp intelligence and sensitivity. Yet the architect in training wholeheartedly pledged himself to “take up the study of economic planning and construction, especially in its application to the housing of the working classes.”

  BUT THERE WAS always the other side of the coin, too: the young architect considered that he had better get a couple of years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under his belt. An educational trip through Italy would not hurt either. Just in case he might someday be asked to prove his bona fides as an architect at the service of his own social class.

  In 1894, Newton embarked, with Professor Joseph Howland Hunt, son of the powerhouse architect Richard M. Hunt, and seven of his former Harvard classmates, to spend “three delightful months” on the Continent. The young men whiled away their mornings walking among important buildings, sketching, measuring, drinking it all in, then took the afternoons for sightseeing and the evenings for dissecting one another’s work. A restorer in charge of mosaics at St. Mark’s in Rome horrified them when he shared his knowledge that many of the works had been finished off with a roller to smooth them out, ridding them of the precious irregularities of the hand-set work. A distinguished archaeologist, Rodolfo Lancianni, had the flooded subbasement of the Forum pumped out for Newton and his friends, so they could better examine the building’s ancient foundation.

  Newton’s primary regret was not taking home a carved marble mantel he saw in a shop and coveted—having been given money by his father for a “suitable purchase”—because his peers counseled him against lugging it from Florence onward. For a month, the men resided in the Palazzo Dario on Venice’s Grand Canal, with a private gondoletta and their own gondoliere. Right next door, at the Palazzo Barbaro Wolkoff, lived the singing sensation Eleonora Duse, whom they observed, all pale face and burning dark eyes, as she skillfully threaded her own gondola through the traffic of the dense green canal.

  In October, Newton reached Paris, taking an apartment on the fifth and top floor of 176 Boulevard Saint-Germain, on the Left Bank. He hired a manservant named François, formerly a batman to a French military officer. François could not only keep house competently but service his master’s bicycle as needed. Five-course dinners for twelve were not out of the ordinary at Newton’s apartment, with François attending in immaculate livery.

  Entry to the École des Beaux-Arts eluded Newton. On the entrance exam he made a bad showing. In preparing to retake it, he entered the atelier of Henri Duray, an architect who specialized in the design of apartment houses. This at least was somewhat akin to the “people’s housing” Newton knew he wanted to produce. He also attended lectures at the École, and even completed assignments given at the school.

  While in Paris, Newton decided to find out firsthand how it felt to be part of the world he had pledged to better. He spent a night at Fredin’s, a flophouse or “night retreat.” Wearing an old suit, a peaked cap and a red bandanna around his neck, with mussed hair and a face smeared with charcoal, the Madison Avenue–bred young man descended a steep flight of steps from the dimly lit street. In the cellar, the Fredin residents sat on benches drawn up to plain wood tables. Each man had a straw-stuffed canvas bag that he folded his arms around to use as a pillow. When soup was distributed in dirty bowls, Stokes decided he could probably wait to eat back at home.

  At the same time, the social season was on in Paris, and that meant fancy-dress balls, or in Newton’s case, balls attended by the artists and architects with whom he associated. Most of the people Newton knew attended the Bal des Quat’z’Arts. École des Beaux-Arts students banded together every year to put on the rowdiest spectacle possible, partying in the name of everything aesthetic and bohemian. Their antics were designed to shock the non-artistes, who watched the parade of decadent floats and displays as they made their way after midnight from the Moulin Rouge into the surrounding neighborhoods.

  Revelers and spectators could expect un trop de exposed flesh, with gold and silver paint slapped on
for emphasis. People were still talking about the efforts of the preceding year’s ball, in 1893. One float had depicted the last days of Babylon, with a nude blonde borne on a black velvet litter by a dozen stalwart “blackamoors,” followed by camels and more nearly naked women. Who knew what would happen at the ball in 1894?

  Newton, though not officially enrolled at the École, nabbed a coveted ticket and wrote home to get a costume shipped to him. He asked for the black velvet dress of his mother’s that he’d worn for a costume ball at 229 Madison Avenue the previous winter. He was not a stranger to drag.

  Edith Minturn and Newton Stokes. Two no-longer-so-young New Yorkers, their parallel lives surprisingly similar in their central sustaining beliefs. Shaping their selves so that when they were finally ready to meet as adults, they would make an engagingly synchronous couple. But at first, the two parts whittled so uncannily for a fit did not seem to match at all.

  7. Grand Mistakes

  The New Year’s holiday, 1894–95. The second day of Edith Minturn’s visit to the new Stokes cottage in the Berkshires. Newton was there, back from Paris, hosting a grand party with his parents, everything lit up and lively and full of great expectations, as befitted hosts who held one of the largest fortunes in New York.

  Anson and Helen Stokes had invited dozens of New York’s finest families to christen their immense new ballroom. The descriptive label “cottage,” applied to the roughly seventy-five new mountain mansions of the elite, typified the kind of dry, sly understatement that delighted the upper crust. The Stokes family cottage had one hundred rooms. The ballroom measured two thousand square feet. Shadow Brook was a cottage in the sense that Marie Antoinette was a dairy maid.

  Such was the celebrity of the Berkshires social scene that the Times devoted itself, in a December 30 article, to the Stokeses’ seasonal festivities. Newton’s younger brother Anson Junior invited his classmates from Yale, and the Times reporter breezily noted that the crew had “enough young society women to entertain them.” Entertainment in Lenox revolved around the type of innocent, energetic activities that appealed to “children of all ages.” Partygoers took toboggan slides down a gradual half-mile slope from the Stokes greenhouses. There were, applauded the Times man, “plenty of toboggans for all.” A blowy, magical winter snowstorm had come in.

  The four splendid Minturn girls duly presented themselves at the fete, accompanied by Susanna and the Minturn brothers. Their grace and good manners gave them entrée into this and other social events, with beautiful women welcome whatever the venue. The Minturns’ being old family friends made them more than welcome in the ballroom, not to mention their continuing role at the center of society. All the girls had come out by now, and none had married.

  That snowy December 30 morning, the scion of the host family invited Edith for an outing later that afternoon. They were the same age. Later, Newton would recall the runs he had made in her direction before.

  He had called on her just once during college, with a friend along for security, and had once invited her to dance at a fancy-dress ball at his boyhood home, 229 Madison Avenue. That night they glided across the white marble in silence, as if they had not been acquainted with each other for their entire lives. And the longer they knew each other, strangely, the more distant it seemed Edith grew. Two or three times he sent her red roses, armloads of them, delivered in the sort of gargantuan bouquet that demanded a gargantuan urn to showcase them. The Minturn household, of course, with its four marriageable daughters, had no lack of flower urns. But Newton never heard back.

  Now she said she would come out with him, and he hoped to have more success.

  Below the absurd, massive family cottage, the view ran down over white-blanketed slopes to pretty, ice-covered Lake Mahkeenac. Children played on the hillside. That afternoon, other couples were up and about. Newton was nervous. He chattered on about the sleigh they were to ride in, a light cutter, and especially about the horse. A prize gelding, he said, by the name of Makinac. He made a great deal of the fact that the horse had been imported from the Stokes family’s Dingley estate in England.

  Imagine, thought Edie, making a sarcastic note in her own mind, an imported horse. She was never much impressed by animal flesh. Now Newton was gabbing on about Dingley. That it lay in Northamptonshire. Had Edie ever been there? No. No encouragement. Undeterred, Newton gamely plunged onward. The enormous hall at Dingley, he said, had been built in medieval times as a preceptory for the Knights Hospitaller. Newton and his father regularly sailed across the Atlantic for the purpose of riding the Dingley grounds.

  Such was the Newton Stokes brand of lovemaking. She knew him well enough to know what she thought of him. A regular stiff, self-conscious and gangly, not exactly ugly but still somewhat ill favored. She remembered his ears from way back in her Staten Island girlhood.

  Not that looks mattered much. Edith’s suitors thus far had not all been Adonises. Though usually they were not dressed so . . . amusingly. For the sleigh ride, Newton assembled an outfit that he had bought in England, which he thought fetching in a faux-bohemian sort of way—a flat, flaring navy-blue tam-o’-shanter and a blue-and-white-speckled waistcoat. He looked, Edie thought, “a perfect scarecrow,” as he put it later in his memoir. Well, she liked men who made her laugh.

  Off they went with a jerk of the sleigh. The ride, at least, was spectacular, the frosted blue-green flanks of the Berkshires showing themselves splendidly across the valley. The snow was still fresh from the night before, the evening of their arrival day. In front of them, harnessed to the cutter, Makinac the prize-gelding-from-Dingley-in-Northamptonshire-England snorted clouds of frosty breath. Newton had thrown a wool blanket across both their laps. It was romantic in a rustic, western Massachusetts kind of way.

  Then, in a paroxysm of jumpiness, Newton managed to flip the sleigh over and dump them both in the snow. Edie Minturn floundered in a snowbank, unhurt, while a flustered Newton struggled to apologize. She helped push the sleigh upright. She laughed it off, and suggested the skittish gelding might be more upset than she. They brushed the snow from themselves and climbed back into the cutter.

  Off again. After an awkward silence, unbowed by this obvious sign from the betrothal gods, Newton began. Edith, would you . . . ?

  No, she would not.

  Later, Newton would drily note that his proposal of marriage “did not meet with an enthusiastic reception.” He recalled being nonplussed by the rebuff, “which I am not sure that I anticipated.”

  For the eight long, tortured miles back to the cottage, Edie and her disappointed swain kept the subject of discussion safely on art, with an occasional scintillating foray into the precincts of architecture.

  SHADOW BROOK, THE new house, had been Anson and Helen’s labor of love after they finished feathering their three other family nests, at 229 Madison in New York City, at New Brighton on Staten Island, and at Birch Island in the Adirondacks. Over the years, Stokes père and mère acquired a taste for lavishly appointed houses in places that were somewhat off the circuit for most Manhattan millionaires. It was Anson and Helen’s mild version of nonconformity.

  By the early 1890s, most members of the 400 had set up their rockpiles on upper Fifth Avenue, along the park, the houses instantly identifiable by their yardage of sparkling white stone. The millionaires’ residences shared so many features that they could almost be products of a zoning code. Outside, each house featured Baroque embellishments all across the façade. A formal entrance with a creamy, outsize pour of marble for steps. Inside, perhaps a three-story atrium, set off by swirls of iron railing ascending twin curved staircases. An upstairs parlor, where ball guests could primp before embarking upon a fabulous cotillion.

  The Stokeses certainly had the money to relocate to a Fifth Avenue address if they so chose. Instead the family elected to remain in their modestly adorned brownstone in Murray Hill, a neighborhood whose cachet had precipitously faded.

  Anson was once again an early adopter in the Lenox
-Stockbridge area, which already had a number of summer residents but had not yet become a bastion for the wealthy. When Newton’s parents broke ground in 1892 their somewhat outré choice of location made them pioneers among the New York big-money set.

  For two years before construction commenced, purposefully but without revealing his hand, Anson bought up estate parcels and farmland on the west side of Lake Mahkeenac, a pristine, mist-shrouded body also known as the Stockbridge Bowl. He ultimately managed to assemble nearly one thousand acres of undeveloped forest land. Then Anson and Helen dedicated themselves to erecting a rambling stone castle, which upon its completion in 1894 became the largest private residence ever built in America. The rumored $1 million the Stokeses paid for their new Berkshires abode would be roughly $25 million today.

  On September 2, 1893, as Shadow Brook rose from its canyonesque foundations, a New York City gossip rag called Town Topics reported that the “arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes at Lenox is proof positive that it is now quite the proper thing for the seaside throng to stray toward the mountains . . . I understand this mansion is a wonder in its way, and that the only things approaching its mammoth size are some of the buildings on the World’s Fair grounds.”

  In July 1894, Town Topics previewed the Stokes cottage for its readers: “To appreciate the size of this house, it may be told that the house is four hundred feet front by one hundred deep, that in walking around it you walk something over a quarter of a mile, that there is an acre of space on each of the four floors.”

  Ever the Anglophile, Anson produced a Tudor castle cum royal hunting lodge of locally quarried marble and half-timbered stucco, crowned by a roof of rough-hewn, deep brown tiles punctuated with twelve chimneys. As she had with the camp at Birch Island, Helen played a central role in conceptualizing this creation. The couple hired a construction crew of five hundred for roughly two years of labor. A photograph that documents the immigrant, mostly European men who erected Shadow Brook shows three dozen of the stoic-faced crew, crouched between a pile of rubble and the soaring, nearly finished structure.