by Tom Wolfe
All the while, from Hollywood to the Bahamas, he was setting up what looked like such a mixed bag of projects, some of them staggeringly expensive, that magazines spoke repeatedly of his “eccentric whims”: A million-dollar legitimate theater for Hollywood (1953). A handwriting analysis (graphology) institute (1955). A $25-million-dollar conversion of Hog Island, off Nassau, into “Paradise Island,” a resort for refined people (1959). A gift of $862,500 to New York City for a Central Park café and pavilion (1960—still bogged down in law suits). Show, a slick magazine (1961). By 1958 he had paid between $900,000 and one million dollars for an old office building with a mansard slope, a Chevrolet sign and a clock on top of it on an island in Columbus Circle, where Broadway, Eighth Avenue and Central Park South converge. He tore the building down, hired Edward D. Stone, the famous architect, and started building his Gallery of Modern Art.
Just before the museum opened, Hartford came back from Nassau, his winter home, to give a final inspection. At fifty-three, he had lost none of the Hartford air. He was as boyish, shy, athletically graceful and distracted as ever. He was also—once more—as single-minded as a Ganges mystic. As he looked over the museum’s Aeolian-Skinner organ, built into an alcove between the second and third floors, Hartford turned to a visitor and said: “I thought a museum ought to have organ music. You know, it’s really like a church.” The moment someone mentioned his first book, Hartford underscored his own message: “I had a hard time deciding on a title. Before I settled on Art or Anarchy? I had wanted to call it ‘Armageddon of Art,’ Armageddon means ‘the final and conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil.’ ” And in the lobby, on the way out, he turned to the four lines from Kipling on the wall near the elevators:
But each for the joy of the working,
And each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are.
“It says exactly what I want to say,” said Hartford. “Do you know what I mean?”
Kipling! Hartford could scarcely have chosen a more unfashionable writer, of course. British intellectuals began denouncing Kipling in the 1920’s as a kind of P.R. man for colonialism, and ever since he has come to be known as the great Anti-Culture, even among culturati who have never read a line of him. For Hartford, however, there is the voice of the Lord and the voice of Victorian England—and what more is there to be said?
It is impossible to pay any attention to what Hartford has actually been saying about culture over the past thirteen years without noticing how often he speaks of good and evil, godliness, the moral order, sacred values—in short, religion. I mention paying attention, because his trouble is that nobody really has. The intelligentsia just thrill to the gaucheness of his gestures. Yet Hartford has been consistent all the way. First of all there was the odd title of the pamphlet he published in 1951, “Has God Been Insulted Here?”—a quote from Balzac. All through his essays on art, then and since, he has used expressions such as “the spiritual life of our times,” “right and wrong,” “that Deity,” “the Most High,” “a Man Who was once called the Prince of Peace,” “Jesus Christ Himself.” He speaks of his museum as “a church.” He carves a Kipling quotation about “the God of things as they are” on the wall. Yet the subject of all this gospel diction is art. Some of his phrases have a curious 19th-century antique quality about them. “A Man Who was once called the Prince of Peace”—I doubt that there is a minister in all of the Union Theological Seminary who would dare use such a phrase today.
That, however, would not faze Hartford. Much of his thinking is a deliberate return to the mental atmosphere of Victorian England, a Zeitgeist into which he was thoroughly initiated by his mother, Henrietta Guerard Hartford, a Southern gentlewoman.
There is a wonderful photograph of Hartford and his mother that says a great deal. In this picture he is sixteen years old and standing up straight in a double-breasted blazer and ice cream pants with his hair fluffing down over his forehead in golden Gainsborough curves. His mother is standing just behind him looking out from under a great loopy garden party hat with a smile that says, “My Boy.” The atmosphere is that of verandahs in Newport, R.I., singing-rounds in the parlor, croquet on the far lawn, straw hats, piqué fans, iced tea, mint leaves, at-homes on Thursday, Tiffany candlesticks, batik parasols, tennis shirts, Morocco leather, verbena beds, blue flies and green-and-yellow afternoons in the shade; which is to say, the genteel life of about 1880. The picture was taken in 1927, two years before the Depression began.
Hartford was brought up in Newport, which in 1927 was already a period piece, left over from the fin de siècle. Hartford had the sort of isolated upper-class childhood that most Americans get a glimpse of only in Marquand novels. His father, Edward Hartford, was one of three sons of George Huntington Hartford, who founded the A&P. The other two, George L. and John, went into the business and ran it after the death of “The Old Gentleman,” as he was called. Edward, who was more the sensitive introvert, branched out by himself, invented a shock absorber and made a small fortune of his own. He died when Hartford was eleven. Hartford remembers him chiefly as a quiet figure who was always in his study with his back to the door and his face to the desk. So Hartford grew up with millions of dollars but without the slightest knowledge of or taste for the atmosphere of strong men using their fortunes as instruments of power. His uncles, George L. and John, lived and breathed the A&P and had little to do with him. The person who fashioned Hartford’s entire style of life was his mother.
The boarding school she sent him off to was not likely to insinuate much of the din of the outside world into his life. It was St. Paul’s, which, like all the best Eastern boarding schools, was a kind of country rector’s Emersonian version of an English public school. The place was calcimined and bleached with the good odor of 19th-century sententiae and precepts concerning God, gentility, noblesse oblige and the virtues of active sport. In an astounding confessional piece he wrote for his Harvard class of 1934 in 1959, Hartford told how St. Paul’s molded him into a miserable, self-effacing “mouse.”
At Harvard, Hartford had the money to cut any figure he wanted. But his classmates seem to remember him chiefly as this boy who was said to be fabulously rich and who stayed in his rooms reading Thackeray, Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. This was in 1930, at a time when—the literary histories assure us—all Harvard boys were reading Hemingway, Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Santa Barranza!—Sir Walter Scott!
Writers like Thackeray, Dickens and Scott were American Victorian fin de siècle ideals in Culture. They were British, which gave them the right cultural cachet. They had established their reputations a good fifty years before. They were diverting, but with a tendency toward the profound. They were morally sound; which is to say, they exposed the evil of man without trifling with the social order. The same set of names—British writers and painters favored as cultural idols by the American genteel classes from about 1880 to World War II—turn up again and again in Hartford’s life. He named his yacht Joseph Conrad. In his living room at 1 Beekman Place he has a bust of Conrad and leather-bound sets of Scott, Thackeray, Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson. The play he wrote and produced was an adaptation of Miss Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Many of the eighty paintings he has collected, at a cost of about $2.5 million for the lot, are by 19th-century British painters long out of fashion, such as Burne-Jones, Constable, Millais, Sir Edwin Henry, and Paul Gustave Doré—whose drawings illustrate those lush editions of the classics wealthy matrons gave their children fifty years ago.
In his second year at Harvard, Hartford married a girl named Mary Lee Epling, who is now Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The marriage may have been some sort of rebellion against the hold his mother had on his life—she had moved to Cambridge to be near him while he was in college—but he never lost his devotion to her style of life and intellectual ideals. For example, after Harvard, he went to work for the A&P but quit after a year, part
ly because his mother found the idea of his going into “commerce” repulsive.
The idea that no gentleman should be a businessman was left over from the British feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages, but has governed the thinking of many American millionaires, especially on the Eastern seaboard, once the money has been made. In the old aristocratic scheme the eldest son took over the property and assumed the dynastic power. For a younger son three acceptable careers were open: warrior, diplomat or clergyman above the rank of vicar. Many American millionaires’ sons have become diplomats, of course, and some, W. Averell Harriman for one, have wielded great influence. As for the role of warrior, the American armed forces are so highly bureaucratized and so lacking in style—the shabbiest South American colonel has a better-looking uniform than an American general—that the military is out. This category has hazed over into the general area of government service. An elected position is acceptable, so long as it is governor or better; Congressman is too lowly. A Cabinet or “Little Cabinet” appointment in any branch of government will do, or even assistant secretarial rank in the older branches, State Department (diplomat) or Defense (warrior).
But no matter how far the lines hazed, there was nothing in it for Hartford. First of all, he never had the slightest interest in politics or the exercise of temporal power. Second, even if he had, there would have been nobody to appoint him; his loyalties, when he felt them, were conservative Republican, and from his twenty-second to his forty-second birthday, there were nothing but Democrats doing the appointing in Washington. Besides, by his forty-second birthday, Hartford had already given up his dilettante-ish meanderings and entered the only sphere left open to him: religion.
Anyone who takes the trouble to read Hartford’s first manifesto, “Has God Been Insulted Here?,” will realize immediately that while the subject is arts and letters, the pamphlet is a religious tract. His thesis is that the artist, as “the spokesman for mankind,” has great power. But the modern artist, particularly in literature and paintings, has become the tool of barbaric forces that would destroy civilization through fear, despair, vulgarity and rebellion. He sees the modern artist as a man “engrossed with evil and the destruction of life,” wandering off “to some streamlined inferno in which he has burned in effigy the normal people of the earth. Nor have the people always objected, for it is often interesting to watch the devil at work, and a good bonfire is fun to see, even if it happens to be your own spirit that is going up in flames.” He exhorts America’s artists to reform. “A tremendous task it is!—the regeneration of the spiritual life of our times. Among all classes and all walks of people, the burden of this responsibility falls most weightily upon the shoulder of the artist.”
The tone of this manifesto is excruciatingly naive, even allowing for the old-fashioned Ruskinian rhetoric, and yet its argument is not unsophisticated. Plato makes much the same case in The Republic, arguing that poets who stress man’s despair and play up to his weaker passions, his faintings, his fallings, his swoonings, should be banished from the state.
Even the religious rubric of Hartford’s writing, for all its archaic flavor, is curiously appropriate. For by the time the pamphlet appeared, 1951, Culture was already becoming the new religion of America’s intelligentsia, not figuratively but quite literally. For example, it was no happenstance that the 1961 Presidential Inaugural ceremonies included a succession of Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Greek Orthodox clergymen reading prayers, followed closely by Robert Frost reading a poem. For untold thousands of intellectuals today Culture, not church, is the favored form of religious rejection of the world. Young men and women may be seen riding to work on the subway every morning in New York with volumes by Rilke, Rimbaud, Hermann Hesse and LeRoi Jones or somebody like that in their laps as if to say, This filthy train, this filthy office, this rotten Gotham and this roaring rat race are not my real life. My real life is Culture. Prints and paintings are on every wall today like ikons. Renoirs are virtually unobtainable; they are clutched like Columbus’ bones. Bach, Mozart, Monteverdi and Schoenberg issue forth from the hi-fi with liturgical solemnity.
Hartford, then, is a curious combination of the shockingly old and the startlingly new. He arrives as a Martin Luther to reform modern Culture even before its religious nature has been generally recognized. Like Luther, he comes from out of nowhere with a manifesto decrying the evil and corruption of the established religion, i.e., modern art. Like Luther, he calls for a reformation, a return to a simpler and more blessed age. He has an age in mind: Victorian England—which the cultural religicos regard as the most reactionary phase of cultural history. They would, says Hartford. To go back “to the much-despised Victorian era might do less harm than the artists of our day believe,” he wrote in “Has God Been Insulted Here?”
That pamphlet, like Luther’s opening blast, the “95 Theses,” was addressed to the high priests of the religion; in Hartford’s case, artists and curators of Culture. Getting nowhere with the hierarchy, Hartford, like Luther, appealed directly to the people. He published his second big manifesto, “The Public Be Damned?,” in daily newspapers.
He exhorts the multitudes: “Ladies and gentlemen, form your own opinions concerning art. Don’t be afraid to disagree—loudly, if necessary—with the critics. Stand up and be heard. And when the high priests of criticism and the museum directors and the teachers of mumbo jumbo begin to realize that you mean business you will be astonished, in my humble opinion, how fast they will change their tune.”
Hartford’s attempt to take his Reformation to the people had actually begun in Los Angeles. He had hit upon the idea of holding a huge art exhibition—requiring the cooperation of Los Angeles’ leading museums and galleries—in which the critics would select the paintings they liked best and the public would vote for the paintings they liked best. Hartford felt sure the discrepancy in taste would be crushing to the critics. In any case, he says, the project was blocked at every turn by the museum directors and he began to sense the extraordinary power of the museums in the art world. In New York, he says, the situation was even more dictatorial. One museum—the Museum of Modern Art—was determining the whole course of American painting, and much of European painting, through an extraordinary control over reputations and publicity. The strategy of his Gallery of Modern Art was to provide a counterforce to the Museum of Modern Art, even to the point of insisting on the same phrase—Modern Art—in the name.
Meantime, many of the other Hartford projects, his “eccentric whims,” have actually been integral parts of the same religious crusade. His art colony was an attempt to create a benevolent environment in which a non-bitter, non-despairing, non-destructive generation of Thackerays, Constables and Sir Walter Scotts might develop. A legitimate theater he bankrolled in Hollywood was an attempt to plant wholesome Culture in the heart of the evil movie industry. Paradise Island, the resort, has been Hartford’s idea of reintroducing the fin de siècle, Victorian gentility of Newport, R.I., into the lives of influential Americans who might want to loll in the Bahamas. His Central Park pavilion scheme has much the same idea behind it. He founded Show magazine with the idea of re-creating Vanity Fair, an elegant cultural magazine of the 1920’s. Hartford could appreciate the photographs he saw in bound copies of Vanity Fair, often of polished-looking men in wing collars, wide foulard cravats and double-breasted waistcoats exuding an air of leisurely British drawing room grace.
Throughout, Hartford has been far from the mild millionaire with “whims” that he is often depicted as. He has been a plunger. He has taken risks that would make an oil millionaire flinch. By his own estimate, he has gone through certainly a fourth and perhaps as much as a half of his $70 million fortune, although the figure could go back up if certain investments, such as Paradise Island, pay off. He has devoted himself to his chosen field—the religion of Culture—with a zealous and enduring disdain of the cultural Establishment. And if the culturati still do not fathom his Luther role, even with this white marble
tower on Columbus Circle to illustrate it, Hartford will not be downhearted. He is taking the long view. For as it says in the rest of the Kipling poem, “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” whose last stanza is on the wall down there by the elevators, someday even the youngest critic will be out of the picture:
When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two.
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.
And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from—Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all.
Chapter 14
The New Art Gallery Society
PICASSO’S GOAT! LITTLE Alexander, with a glass of Scotch whiskey in one hand, lolls on the base of Picasso’s immortal bronze goat. His other hand is hooked like a coat hanger over the nose of the goat as if he intends to hang forever from this baggy-dugged milestone of Culture in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. It is sacrilege, God knows. This is Picasso’s goat. The occasion is the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum was closed for certain renovations, and the building of a new wing. All it took was six months. But, my god, the reopening of this place turns out to be a stupendous occasion. Everybody who was invited came—except Salvador Dalí—and only big donors, big socialites, big politicians, big artists and a few satellites were invited. Thousands, literally thousands, about six thousand, are caroming around the place, careening, ricocheting amid a lot of 1930-Modern rectangles and a yellow haze like the Ninth Avenue end of the Port Authority bus terminal. They are all wearing dinner clothes and high-waisted gowns and glaring at Little Alexander, who dangles from Picasso’s goat and stares back. How insolent! How epicene!
