Leopold Stokowski, director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, guest conducted the New York Philharmonic each year as well. After seeing him on the podium for the first time in 1924, Blanche began holding an annual mid-December lunch for him. Stokowski was a physical conductor who, with his “twist of a wrist or an eyebrow,” elicited a musician’s maximum effort on the maestro’s account.39 From 1923 to 1926, the charismatic playboy was between famous lovers and wives (to include Greta Garbo and Gloria Vanderbilt), and the local women found him “free and unbridled” in bed—though controlling and cold outside the sheets.40 Stokowski, with his Olympian detachment, liked to be in command—much like Alfred. The conductor’s first rehearsal in Philadelphia was legendary: “Guten Tag,” he had called out almost before reaching the podium. “Brahms! First movement!” Slashing his baton downward, he caught most of the orchestra off guard, and they struggled to catch up with what is usually a “monumental opening.” Stokowski stopped and started again, without a word. A member of the orchestra recalled, “It was if we’d been given some magic potion—[we] had never played so well.”41
Stokowski was a musical showman of the first degree, from throwing the sheet music on the floor to prove he didn’t need a score, to experimenting with lighting in the dark concert hall, to finding ways to cast dramatic shadows of his hands and head. Soon after arriving in Philadelphia, he began conducting without a baton, with his freehand style becoming his trademark. Blanche enjoyed his showmanship, while Alfred was more of a traditionalist. By the time William Koshland was hired in 1934, Knopf’s well-heeled office manager (later to be Knopf’s president and chairman) would notice how the Knopfs no longer arrived or departed together from Stokowski’s performances in Manhattan, and Koshland alone would often take Blanche to Philadelphia, where she attended the maestro’s early season instead of waiting for his Manhattan concerts.
The quiet girl at the bottom of the stairs turned out to enjoy not only the symphony hall but the nonstop social engagements that her husband disdained. A ceaseless party shored up with booze and endless conversation circulated through New York City in the twenties, and Blanche’s increasing access to important social figures made her one of the era’s fixtures, appearing wherever the action was—including throwing her own parties, occationally up to four times a week.
Certainly she looked the part: she had become thin enough that her racy, above-the-knee flapper “rags” hung straight down, just as they were meant to, no undergarments necessary. She loved her pale lavender chiffon, its sequined cloth like the fluid jewels she’d seen long ago at the San Francisco world’s fair, its color shifting as night turned into day. With vermillion lipstick that harmonized with her short reddish hair, her sultry eyes lined in kohl, Blanche reminded more than one spectator of the exquisite covers of a Knopf book. Moving among her guests, she trailed the scent of Caron’s dirty-sweet perfume Narcisse Noir, a one-two-three punch of the most “deviant and reprobate of all smells”—orange blossoms and civet, sanctioned for either sex to wear. Carl Van Vechten had even perfumed the air of his 1923 novel The Blind Bow-Boy with the “odour of Narcisse Noir.”42 The period’s best young writers, no matter their current publishers, continued to be at the center of Blanche’s parties. A usually drunken William Faulkner was repeatedly ushered into a taxi in front of her apartment during the small hours. During the fall of 1924 Blanche herself was drinking hard, at least for her, substituting shots of whiskey for food: the previously slender and well-proportioned petite woman suddenly began to look as abnormally thin as the Chanel models abroad had become.
However much Blanche enjoyed traveling to scout books for the company, she also was exhilarated at the clothes the trips enabled her to buy in Paris salons. At home, good-looking ready-made dresses were easily obtained at stores such as B. Altman’s and Henri Bendel (Saks Fifth Avenue would open in 1924), but she had started yearning for clothes made just for her (though an off-the-rack theater dressing gown created by the stage designer Erté would become a lifelong favorite). She envied the elegance and self-possession of Parisian women, and, having left her measurements with French couturiers, she allowed herself the luxury of buying bespoke clothing for the first time in her life. Narcisse Noir would give way to the more astringent and costly My Sin, when it premiered in 1925, a bouquet of lemon, clove, jasmine, vetiver, civet, and musk, with its flacon designed by Baccarat. During the twenties and thirties, Blanche commissioned fashions from Elsa Schiaparelli, replaced by Christian Dior in the forties. Occasionally, since at times she fit a size 2 perfectly, she’d buy a sample reserved for her by the designer, something previously worn to publicize the season’s collection.
Blanche’s determination to “go French” and become thinner than ever was aimed at least in part at Alfred: she might run off if he continued to mistreat her, or maybe she’d waste away altogether. With Pat in boarding school, she became the complete focus of Alfred’s erratic rages, which were too violent to call temper tantrums. At this juncture, Alfred was furious that she was devoting so much time to her new passion, foxhunting, for which she woke at dawn if she’d not been partying the night before. It’s unlikely that he considered his own role in her resolve to drive to Greenwich, Connecticut, or to Goldens Bridge in northern Westchester. There she joined in the camaraderie and exhilaration of the hunt, returning to the office in time for meetings and to work through the afternoon into the night, all alone, this peaceful, solitary work compensating for the time she spent riding to hounds.
Blanche seemed unwilling to pause long enough to think hard about her life. Living episodically, bouncing from one moment to the next, she was assured an endless run of excitement bereft of much contemplation. If she ran fast enough, life would take care of itself.
Her foxhunting was yet another way to avoid seriously confronting her personal life. It was also the extent to which Blanche wished to engage with the country. Alfred would recall that “when we had an opportunity to rent an almost ideal house, quite near the stables where she kept her horse, she decided against our taking it if it meant, as it would have meant, giving up the New York apartment.” Blanche’s “excess sociability,” wherein Alfred sometimes didn’t even recognize the gate-crashers at his own party, furthered her husband’s determination to leave urban life behind. When he was offered the perfect property by his lawyer friend Jim Rosenberg, he couldn’t resist and was soon planning his grand country house.43 By the end of the decade, Alfred would be comfortably ensconced at 63 Purchase Street in Purchase, currently in Harrison, New York, his daily commute to Grand Central Terminal around forty-five minutes by train. He would read The New York Times while he rode the train to the city and sometimes look over manuscripts, though not voraciously as he had before.
Once again, Sam was there for the financing. He made an unspecified but undoubtedly large down payment on the Purchase house, an investment that over time would include money for lush landscaping and Italian tile for the pool—as well as the pool itself.44 Blanche had agreed with Alfred that she would occasionally entertain their authors at the estate, though she was put out at its rough interior. A local designer whom she approached for decorating ideas sniffed and declared it a hovel. Bennett Cerf, hearing Blanche’s story (and knowing how much both Knopfs liked Random House’s signature design), convinced the artist Rockwell Kent to draw them an ironic colophon based on Random House’s logo, with the Knopfs’ house captioned “the Hovel.” Nothing about the home said “Blanche,” and she never enjoyed staying in its dark environs, the lack of light remarked on by countless visitors.
In Manhattan, as though to counter what she complained to Mencken was Alfred’s near obsession with leaving the city altogether—possibly even moving Knopf’s offices as well as his residence to the suburbs—Blanche worked on making ever more contacts and solidifying the old ones. By late 1924, she was routinely holding parties at the Knopfs’ apartment for her musical friends, in particular the pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Benno Moiseiwitsch, Jascha Heifetz,
of course the conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski, and, always, George Gershwin. No doubt she meant to impress New York society and to dazzle her husband with her quick success in “his” field, great music.45
But aside from using the celebrities to enhance her own stature, Blanche felt comfortable with such men. Even with their oversized egos, they possessed a passion for something outside themselves. Their ardor was fixed on their music, just as hers was centered upon publishing. Sex with such men must have suited her perfectly: they all thrived on her praise and expected little else but an hour of her lovemaking.46 Without fail, as if marking them, she gave each of her lovers a solid-gold Dunhill cigarette lighter and case, monogrammed, though there is no record of Blanche having received such gifts from the men. As sensitive as they were to the unspoken, perhaps they realized that she preferred holding the upper hand.47
Given the era she inhabited, Blanche’s affairs were not as shocking as they might have been earlier or even later in the century. After Blanche’s death, the still beautiful retired actress Florence Vidor Heifetz, divorced in 1946 from Jascha Heifetz, told interviewers that she had realized her husband (a notorious womanizer) and Blanche were having an affair, even as all three remained close. Assuming Alfred’s coldness had practically propelled Blanche into Jascha’s arms, Florence was disgusted that the publisher had never given his wife “the credit she deserved. Alfred had a power complex … Blanche was an enormously clever woman … [but] she denigrated her own achievements, would talk discouragedly about them.” Florence encouraged her friend by saying, “Blanche, all you have to do is go into Brentano’s and look at your publishing [feats].”48
The people Blanche really admired, however, were women like Florence Heifetz and Mildred Oppenheimer, the soon-to-be second wife of Alfred’s brother, Edwin. To Florence, Blanche praised the “wonderful” women who “blended home, family and career, instead of just being a career woman,” like herself. She wasn’t fishing for a compliment but acknowledging aloud the failure of her family life.49
At the office the couple’s professional separation served them well. Both Knopfs stuck to subjects that interested them, with Alfred’s enthusiasms ranging from geology and history to fine wine, to which Blanche paid as little attention as her husband did to fiction and poetry and current events. Nor did Alfred share his wife’s growing obsession with Van Vechten’s Harlem scene. Carl had explained how an earlier set of African-American writers and their works—James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poems, and the writings of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois—were crucial to the energy currently circulating. Authors past and present seemed to speak to one another comfortably, as the canon was relatively small.
Certainly Blanche had been quick to appreciate the “Negro revues,” starting with Shuffle Along in 1921, and she agreed with Van Vechten that Gershwin’s music had its roots in black culture.50 For people like Blanche, Shuffle Along had been a cultural turning point, alerting New Yorkers to the African-Americans’ new status. Carl knew intuitively that his friend would surely find the day’s “Negro talent, Negro beauty, [and] Negro humor” rejuvenating, so long as the nonstop revelry did not wear her out.51
Unlike many middle-class white women of her generation, Blanche felt no hesitation about mingling with people of various races and sexual orientations: for her, this was part of the very definition of being modern. Her clothes and maquillage grew ever more extreme, with her bob slightly wavy and still vampish red-brown, a style that remained her signature for decades, and her makeup as dramatic as Marie Antoinette’s: her red lipstick became glossier, her rouge more obvious, and her eyebrows plucked more severely into the popular pirouette arch. She wore an amethyst stone that matched her perse eyeshadow. Blanche was “sexing up” her look, as the magazines called it. Everyone, including Blanche, was electrified over sex.
Manhattan’s 1924–25 theater season continued the trend of sex everywhere—after the autumn shock of Paul Robeson’s performance in Eugene O’Neill’s play about miscegenation, at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Blanche was impressed by All God’s Chillun Got Wings. The drama had created plenty of steam during its previews when a black man kissed a white actress’s hand, an action that caused police to guard the playhouse on opening night. Van Vechten, determined to help break down the color barrier, confided that he was trying to convince George Gershwin to cowrite a serious jazz opera for African-Americans, but that the composer insisted he wasn’t ready for the challenge. As if working out issues of his own sexual identity, gossiped about for some years, at one of Blanche’s parties the composer played his song “The Girl I Love,” which he now retitled “The Man I Love,” rendering gender as variable as race was starting to seem.
6
BOOKS OF THE TWENTIES
IN 1924 D. H. LAWRENCE ACCEPTED for a second time Mabel Dodge Luhan’s invitation to the writers’ colony she had established in Taos, New Mexico, in 1919. The Knopf poet Witter Bynner, who had moved to Santa Fe in 1922 when Lawrence first visited the colony, now encouraged the Englishman to contact Blanche. After all, Thomas Seltzer, Inc., Lawrence’s six-year-old American publishing house, was already shutting down—primarily for having published Lawrence’s Women in Love. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had pursued Seltzer relentlessly, driving him into bankruptcy.
Though Lawrence was sorry for his doting publisher, he thought Seltzer unbusinesslike, a worrisome trait in a publisher who now owed his author five thousand dollars in back royalties. Storm Jameson, the Knopfs’ agent in London, was on top of things, ensuring that Blanche knew when to step in and make an offer. Upon the urging of Bynner, and with the encouragement of Lawrence’s friend Aldous Huxley, in 1925 Lawrence signed with Knopf as his new American publisher.1
Lawrence’s third novel, Sons and Lovers, appeared in 1913. Though the novel and its successor, The Rainbow, would eventually be voted among the hundred most important novels of the twentieth century, the third of the triumvirate, 1920’s Women in Love, was denounced soundly by at least one reviewer: “I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven.”2
While Blanche had appreciated Lawrence’s earlier novels, she believed his prose was too often self-aware: when describing mine workers, for instance, the author felt always present, Lawrence’s ofttimes feverish emotion calling attention to itself instead of to the story. However, she found the novel’s frankness about previously unspoken sexual relationships between men and women invigorating.
By May 2, 1925, Blanche and Lawrence were already corresponding about the proofs for his novel St. Mawr, the publisher reassuring the tense writer that “the St. Mawr proofs did very well, and all that had to be done was done by you.”3 Lawrence had moved to Del Monte Ranch in Questa, approximately sixteen miles from the writers’ chatter at Taos and from Mabel Dodge Luhan’s determined friendship as well: “Please tell your clerk that the address is Questa, not Taos,” he would write Blanche toward the end of the month.4 Living in New Mexico for two years, Lawrence completed three books for Knopf: in 1925, St. Mawr (with Luhan the model for Mrs. Witt, “who destroyed all the men she met”); in 1926, The Plumed Serpent (with Lawrence’s take on Mabel’s “degrading marriage” to the Taos Pueblo Indian Tony Luhan); and in 1927, Mornings in Mexico, a series of short essays about the colorful life of New Mexico and Mexico in the 1920s.5
Barely noticed by American readers, with reviewers for the most part uninterested (though often praising Lawrence’s graceful style), the books gained no traction in England, either. The novel that would prove legendary, however, was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the story of a gardener and his rich lover—which Blanche dared not publish. She had delicately gone back and forth with Lawrence about the cuts Lady Chatterley’s Lover must undergo in order to appease the government censors, but he, equally polite, refused. Finally Lawrenc
e published it in 1928 with a small Italian press, the Tipografia Giuntina. Italy approved of the author’s sexual bounty, and the novel’s sales were higher than those of any of his previous works, earning the writer more than he’d ever made in his life, “more than all his other books combined.”6
Also in 1925, even as Blanche tended to the demanding Lawrence, she was competing hard with other publishers to sign Clarence Darrow to Knopf, imploring him to write a book about the upcoming Scopes “Monkey Trial.” She invoked Mencken’s name as an enticement, aware that Darrow knew the literary crowd (including Blanche herself) from all the parties the lawyer had attended in Manhattan. Though the book never came to fruition—“[It] is a long way off,” Darrow wrote her—he promised to stop by and see her when he was “down again” from Chicago. He closed his warm response by commending the Knopfs for the literature they were “getting out” and for the “good work” being published in The American Mercury.7 With Knopf’s financial backing, in February 1924, Mencken and the writer George Jean Nathan had printed the first copy of their new high-toned monthly, born of Mencken’s conviction that since the Armistice, the country had undergone extreme changes. The Ku Klux Klan, for instance, had increased from a few hundred members before the war to more than four million by the 1920s.8 If the “Jazz Age had no interest in politics at all,” as Fitzgerald claimed, then The American Mercury was conceived by Mencken as an antidote. The nation’s blustering confidence, “a veneer on top of confusion and conflict,” called out for redress.9
The Lady with the Borzoi Page 10
