Mary Phelps Jacob
Encyclopedia
Caresse Crosby born Mary Phelps Jacob (nicknamed "Polly" by her parents), was an American patron of the arts, poet, publisher, and peace activist. At age 19, she invented the first modern brassiere
to receive a patent and gain wide acceptance.
Crosby's parents, William Hearns Jacob and Mary Phelps, were both descended from American colonial families, William from the Van Rensselaer family and Mary from William Phelps
. Her life at first followed convention. In 1915, she married the well-to-do Richard R. Peabody
, whose family had arrived in New Hampshire in 1635. They had two children, but following Richard's service in World War I, Richard turned into a drunk who loved to watch buildings burn. She met Harry Crosby
at a picnic in 1920 and they had sex within two weeks. Their public relationship scandalized proper blue blood Boston society.
Two years later Richard granted her a divorce and Harry and Polly were married. They immediately left for Europe, where they joined the lost generation
of American expatriates. They embraced a bohemian
and decadent lifestyle, living off of Harry's trust fund of USD$12,000 a year (or about $ in today's dollars), had an open marriage
with numerous ongoing affairs, a suicide pact
, frequent drug use, wild parties, and long trips abroad.
At her husband's urging, Polly took the name Caresse in 1924. In 1925 they began publishing their own poetry as Éditions Narcisse in exquisitely printed, limited-edition volumes. In 1927 they re-christened the business as the Black Sun Press
. They became instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many emerging authors who were struggling to get published, including James Joyce
, Kay Boyle
, Ernest Hemingway
, Hart Crane
, D. H. Lawrence
, René Crevel
, T. S. Eliot
, and Ezra Pound
.
In 1929 one of her husband's affairs culminated in his death as part of a murder-suicide
or double suicide
at the studio of a friend. His death was marked by scandal as the newspapers speculated wildly about whether Harry shot his lover or not. Caresse returned to Paris where she continued to run the Black Sun Press. She was friends with many of the eminent authors of her time, including Robert Duncan
, Anaïs Nin
and Henry Miller
. She left Europe in 1936 and bought Hampton Manor in Virginia outside Washington D.C. She married Selbert Young, an unemployed, alcoholic actor sixteen years her junior. She helped Henry Miller by taking over writing pornography for an anonymous Texas oil baron. Her guests at Hampton Manor included Buckminster Fuller
, Salvador Dalí
, Ezra Pound
and other friends from Paris. She began a long-term love affair with black actor-boxer Canada Lee
despite the threat of miscegenation laws
. She founded Women Against War
. She continued after World War II to try to establish a Center for World Peace at Delphi
, Greece. When rebuffed by Greek authorities, she purchased Castello di Rocca Siniblada
, a 15th-century castle north of Rome, which she used to support an artists colony. She died of pneumonia related to heart disease in Rome in 1970.
, she was nicknamed "Polly" to distinguish her from her mother. Her family was descended from a prominent New England family. She was the oldest daughter of William Hearn Jacob and Mary Phelps Jacob and had two brothers, Leonard and Walter "Bud" Phelps. Her family divided its time between estates in New York at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, Watertown, Connecticut
, and New Rochelle, New York. She enjoyed the advantages of an upper-class lifestyle. She took dancing lessons at Mr. Dodsworth Dancing Class, attended Miss Chapin's School in New York City, went to school at Rosemary Hall
prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut
, where she played the part of Rosalind in As You Like It
to critical acclaim. She attended formal balls, Ivy League
school dances, and horse riding school.
In 1914 she was presented to the King of England
at a garden party. Her ancestry included a knight of the Crusades
and the Allardyce family in the War of the Roses. She was descended from Robert Fulton
, developer of the steamboat
, from the Plymouth Colony
's first governor, William Bradford
, and on her mother's side she was the granddaughter of General Walter Phelps
, who commanded troops at the Civil War Battle of Antietam
and the seventh great-granddaughter of Puritan colonist William Phelps
.
Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions," and he lived high. She grew up, she later said, "in a world where only good smells existed." "What I wanted", she said of her privileged childhood, "usually came to pass." She was a rather uninterested student. Author Geoffrey Wolff
wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams." In keeping with the American aristocratic style of the times, she was even photographed as a child by Charles Dana Gibson
.
After her father's death in 1908, she lived with her mother at their home in Watertown. That same summer she met her future husband, Richard Peabody, at summer camp. Her brother Len was boarding at Westminster School and Bud was a day student at Taft School. Approaching her own debut, she danced in "one to three balls every night" and slept from four in the morning until noon. "At twelve I was called and got ready for the customary debutante
luncheon."
ball one evening. As was customary, she wore a corset
stiffened with whalebone and a restrictive, tight corset cover that flattened and jammed her large breasts together into a single monobosom. The stiffened corset cover poked out from under the sheer evening gown
that she had worn to her own debut a few weeks previously and covered her plunging neckline. On this particular evening she threw the restrictive corset cover to the side. Instead, she worked with her maid Marie to fashion two silk handkerchiefs together with some pink ribbon and cord.
Polly's new undergarment complemented the new fashions introduced at the time. When she showed it to friends the next day, they all wanted one. Family and friends almost immediately asked Polly to create brassiere
s for them, too. One day, she received a request for one of her contraptions from a stranger, who offered a dollar for her efforts. She knew then that this could become a viable business.
granted her a the first U.S. patent
for the 'Backless Brassiere
'. Polly related her invention to corset covers which were worn to cover the bosom when a woman wore a low corset. It had shoulder straps that attached to the garment's upper and lower corners, and wrap-around laces attached at the lower corners which tied in the woman's front, enabling her to wear gowns cut low in the back.
Polly wrote that her invention was "well-adapted to women of different size" and was "so efficient that it may be worn by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis." Her design was lightweight, soft, comfortable to wear, and naturally separated the breasts, unlike the corset, which was heavy, stiff, uncomfortable, and had the effect of creating a single "monobosom". In the U.S., patents for various bra-like undergarment
s had appeared as early as the 1860s. The modern brassiere was invented and popularized
by Paris couturier Herminie Cadolle
as early as 1889 and was a sensation at the Great Exposition of 1900
, becoming a fast seller among wealthy Europeans in the decade that followed.
After she married Richard Peabody
, Polly filed a legal certificate with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on May 19, 1920, declaring that she was a married woman conducting a business using separate funds from her husband's bank account. She named the company the Fashion Form Brassiere Company and located her manufacturing shop on Washington Street in Boston, where she ran a two-woman sweatshop that manufactured her wireless brassière during 1922. The location also served as a convenient place to go for trysts with Harry Crosby
, who would become her second husband.
In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, she maintained that she had "a few hundred (units) of her design produced." She managed to secure a few orders from department stores, but her business never took off. Harry, who had a distaste for conventional business and a generous trust fund, discouraged her from pursuing the business and persuaded her to close it. She later sold the brassiere patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport
, Connecticut
for USD$1,500 (roughly equivalent to $ in current dollars). Warner manufactured the "Crosby" bra for a while, but it was not a popular style and was eventually discontinued. Warner went on to earn more than USD$15 million dollars from the bra patent over the next thirty years.
In her later years, she wrote,
were married by his grandfather, Endicott Peabody
, the founder of the Groton School
, and whose family had been one of the wealthiest in America during the 19th century. By the early 20th century a case could be made that the Peabodies
had supplanted the Cabot
s and the Lodge
s as the most distinguished name in the region. They had a son, William Jacob, born on February 4, 1916. Polly found that Dick was a well-educated but undirected man and a reluctant father. Less than a year later Dick Peabody enlisted at the Mexican border and joined the Boston militia engaged in stopping Pancho Villa
's cross-border raids. Less than a year after he returned home, he enlisted to fight in World War I. Their second child, a daughter, Poleen Wheatland ("Polly"), was born on August 12, 1917 but Dick was already in Officers Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery. He became a Captain in the United States Army's 15th Field Artillery, 2nd Division, American Expeditionary Force
. While she had been largely cared for by his parents, he had been enjoying life at the front as a bachelor.
Dick Peabody returned home in early 1921 and was assigned to Columbia, South Carolina
. Polly and the children soon joined him, but when the war ended, Dick found himself left with nothing but a family allowance. He suffered from his war experiences and returned to drinking heavily. Polly found he had only three real interests, all acquired at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase after fire engines and watch buildings burn. Polly's life was difficult during the war years and when her husband returned home, significantly changed, her life soon changed abruptly too.
The catalyst for Polly Jacob Peabody's transformation was her introduction and eventual marriage to Harry Crosby
, a wealthy scion of a socially prominent Boston family and another veteran and victim of the recent war. Harry attended private schools and until age 19 appeared to be well on the path to a comfortable life as a member of the upper middle class. His experiences in World War I changed everything.
In the pattern of other sons of the elite from New England, he was a volunteer in the American Field Service Ambulance Corps
. On November 22, 1917, the ambulance he was driving was destroyed by artillery fire, but he emerged miraculously unhurt. His best friend, "Spud" Spaulding, was seriously wounded in the explosion and Harry saved his life. The experience profoundly shaped his future. He was at the Second Battle of Verdun
. After the battle, his section (the 29th Infantry Division, attached to the 120th French Division) was cited for bravery, and in 1919 Crosby was awarded the Croix de Guerre
. Crosby wrote in his journal, "Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover when it's too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." He vowed that he would live life on his own terms.
After returning from World War I and while completing his degree at Harvard, Harry met Polly on July 4, 1920. Polly's husband Richard was in a sanitarium drying out from another drunken spell. Sensing Polly's isolation, Harry's mother Henrietta Crosby invited Polly to chaperone Harry and some of his friends to a party, including dinner and a trip to the amusement park at Nantasket Beach
. During dinner, Harry never spoke to the girl on his left, breaking decorum. By some accounts, Harry fell in love with the buxom Mrs. Peabody in about two hours. He confessed his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park. Crosby pressed her to see him alone, an unthinkable proposition for a member of Boston's upper crust. She later wrote, "Harry was utterly ruthless... to know Harry was a devastating experience." On July 20, they spent the night together and had sex, and two days later Polly accompanied Harry to New York. He had planned a trip to France to tour battle sites. They spent the night together in New York at the Belmont Hotel. Polly said of the night, "For the first time in my life, I knew myself to be a person."
Polly was seen by her social circle as someone who had perverted the trust placed in her as a chaperone, as an older woman who had taken advantage of a younger man. To the Crosbys, she was dishonored and corrupt. Their scandalous courtship was the gossip of blue-blood Boston
. She was 28, six years older than Harry, with two small children, and married.
In the fall her husband Richard moved back home. His parents supplied a small living allowance and Richard, Polly and the two children moved into a three-story tenement
building. Crosby lived with his father while he continued his studies at Harvard. While Dick Peabody worked at the bank, Harry Crosby sent crates of flowers from his mother's garden to Polly's apartment and brought over toys for the children. They drove to the shore together. Richard volunteered to join the fire department and persuaded the fire chief to wire a fire alarm bell to his home so he could turn out at any hour. The fire chief soon let Richard go, and he retreated into drink again.
Crosby pursued Polly and in May 1921, when she would not respond to his ardor, Crosby threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him. Polly's husband Richard Peabody was in and out of sanitariums several times fighting alcoholism. Crosby pestered Polly to tell her husband of their affair and to divorce him. In May she revealed her adultery to Richard and suggested a separation, and he offered no resistance. Polly's mother insisted that she stop seeing Crosby for six months to avoid complete rejection by her society peers, a condition she agreed to, and she left Boston for New York. Divorce was "unheard of...even among Boston Episcopalians." Peabody's parents were outraged that she would ask for a divorce and at her affair with Crosby. Richard's father Jacob Peabody even visited Harry's father Stephen Crosby on January 4, 1922 to discuss the situation, but Harry's father would not talk to him. Despite his disapproval of Harry's irregular behavior, he loved his son. Stephen Crosby at first attempted to dissuade Harry from marrying Polly Peabody, even buying him the Stutz
he'd been asking for, but Harry would not be persuaded to change his mind. For her part, Polly's former friends pilloried her as an adulteress
, leaving Polly stunned by the quick turn-about in their attitude towards her. Polly later described Harry's character as "He seemed to be more expression and mood, than man," she wrote, "yet he was the most vivid personality I've ever known, electric with rebellion."
founder Bill Wilson
.) Crosby had been working for eight months at Shawmut National Bank. He went on a six-day drinking spree and resigned. In May 1922, he moved to Paris to work in a job arranged for him by his family at Morgan, Harjes et Cie
, the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. Crosby was the nephew of Jessie Morgan, the wife of American capitalist
J. P. Morgan, Jr.
, who was also both Richard Peabody's and Harry Crosby's godfather.
Polly had previously traveled to England to visit her cousins, where Crosby visited her. From May through July, 1922 they lived together in Paris. In July Polly returned to the U.S. In September, Crosby proposed to Polly via Transatlantic Cable
, and the next day bribed his way aboard the Aquitania
bound for New York.
, numerous affairs, and plenty of drugs and drinking.
At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name. They briefly considered Clytoris before deciding on Caresse. Harry suggesting that her new name "begin with a C to go with Crosby and it must form a cross with mine." The two names intersected at right angles at the common "R," "the Crosby cross." They later named their second whippet
Clytoris
, explaining to Caresse's young daughter Poleen she was named after a Greek goddess.
In July 1925, Harry had sexual relations with a fourteen year old girl he nicknamed "Nubile," with a "baby face and large breasts," who he saw at Étretat. In Morocco during one of their trips to North Africa, Harry and Polly took a 13-year-old dancing girl named Zora to bed with them. Harry had sex with a boy of unspecified age, his only homosexual dalliance.
In 1927, in the midst of his affair with Constance, he and Caresse met Russian painter Polia Chentoff. Harry asked her to paint Caresse's portrait, and he soon fell in love with her. In November Harry wrote his mother that Polia was "very beautiful and terribly serious about art she ran away from home when she was thirteen to paint." He was also in love with his cousin Nina de Polignac. In June 1928, he met Josephine Rotch at the Lido in Venice
while she was shopping for her wedding trousseau, and they began an affair. In her autobiography, Caresse minimized Harry's affair with Josephine, eliminating a number of references to her. Harry told Polly that Constance and Josephine wanted to marry him.
lifestyle of the artists gathering in Montparnasse
. They settled in an apartment at 12, Quai d'Orléans on Île St-Louis, and Polly donned her red bathing suit and rowed Harry down the river to the Place de la Concorde
where he walked the last few blocks to the bank. Harry wore his dark business suit, formal hat, and carried his umbrella and briefcase. Caresse rowed home alone, and in her swim suit her generously endowed chest drew whistles, jeers and waves from workmen. She later wrote that she thought the exercise was good for her breasts, and she also enjoyed the attention.
Harry enjoyed betting on the horse races. They had first experience smoking opium in Africa, and when their friend Constance knocked on their door late one evening, they jumped at her invitation to join her at Drosso's apartment. Ready for bed, Caresse quickly put on a dress with nothing underneath. Invitations to Drosso's were restricted to a few regulars and occasional friends. The Drosso's apartment had been converted to an opium den, subdivided into small rooms filled with low couches and decorations befitting an Arabic setting. After that introduction, Harry dropped in at Drosso’s frequently and sometimes stayed away from home for days at a time.
After about a year, Harry soon tired of the predictable banker's life and quit, fully joining the lost generation
of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the restrictive atmosphere of 1920s America. They were among about 15,000–40,000 Americans living in Paris. Harry wanted as little to do with Polly's children as possible, and after the first year, her son Billy was shipped off to Cheam School
in Hampshire
, England.
The couple cared little for the future, spending their money recklessly, never trying to live on a budget. This was in part because they had pledged a mutual suicide pact
, in which they planned on October 31, 1942, when the earth would be closest to the sun in several decades, to jump out of an airplane together. This was to be followed by cremation
and dispersal by another airplane.
Spending freely, Harry bought his silk button-hole gardenia from an exclusive tailor on rue de la Paix. Caresse bought hats from from Jean Patou
and dresses from Tolstoy's, an exclusive fashion house. On special occasions she wore a gold cloth evening suit, featuring a short skirt, tailored by Vionnet
, one of the most important Parisian fashion houses. It was chic by Paris standards but completely unacceptable to the cousins and aunts who lived in the aristocratic neighborhood of Faubourg
in Paris.
Polly and Harry purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then two more in April 1925. They rented a fashionable apartment at 19, Rue de Lille, and obtained a 20-year lease on a mill outside of Paris in Ermenonville
, France, from their friend Armand de la Rochefoucauld for 2,200 dollar gold pieces (about $ today). They named it "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun"). In the first year there, they made friends with the 32 students who attended l'Academie des Beaux Arts, located at the end of their street. They invited Harry and Sally to their annual Quartre Arts Ball, an invitation the couple embraced with enthusiasm. Harry fashioned a necklace of four dead pigeons, sported a red loincloth, and brought along a bag of snakes. Caresse wore a sheer chemise to her waist, a huge turquoise wig on her head, and nothing else. They both died their skin with red ochre. The students cheered Caresse's toplessness and she was carried around on the shoulders of ten students.
In January 1925 they traveled to North Africa
where they first smoked opium
, a habit to which they would return again and again. In 1928, they traveled to Lebanon
to visit the Temple of Baalbek
.
In 1928, he inherited Walter Berry
's considerable collection of over 8,000 mostly rare books, a collection he prized but which he also scaled back by giving away hundreds of volumes. He was known to slip rare first editions into the bookstalls that lined the Seine. Caresse took on lovers of her own, including Ortiz Manolo, Lord Lymington
, Jacques Porel, Cord Meier, and in May, 1928, the Count Armand de la Rochefoucauld. But behind closed doors, Harry applied a double standard, quarreling violently with Caresse about her affairs. Occasionally they strayed together, as when they met two other couples and drove to the country near Bois de Boulogne, drew the cars into a circle with their headlights on, and changed partners.
met Henri Cartier-Bresson
at Le Bourget
, where Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant had placed him under house arrest for hunting without a license. Crosby persuaded the officer to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days. They found they both had an interest in photography, and they spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil. Harry later said Cartier-Bresson "looked like a fledgling, shy and frail, and mild as whey." A friend of Crosby’s from Texas encouraged Cartier-Bresson to take photography more seriously. Embracing the open sexuality offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse, Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her. In 1931, two years after Harry Crosby's suicide, the end of his affair with Caresse Crosby left Cartier-Bresson broken-hearted and he escaped to Côte d'Ivoire
within French colonial Africa.
in Boston. This was the only time they used another publisher. Crosby later wrote that Harry's cousin, Walter Berry
, suggested that Houghton Mifflin would publish Caresse's poetry because "they have just lost Amy Lowell
." Crosby's poetry remained relatively conventional, "still rhyming love with dove," by her own admission. A Boston Transcript reviewer said her "poetry sings" and a Literary Review contributor admired her "charming" child poems and French flavor. But a critic in the New York Herald Tribune wrote that "[f]or all its enthusiasm there is no impact to thought or phrase, the emotion is meager, the imagination bridled."
In April, 1927, they founded an English language
publishing company, first called Éditions Narcisse, after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. They used the press as an avenue to publish their own poetry in small editions of finely-made, hard-bound volumes. Their first effort was Caresse's Painted Shores in which she wrote about their relationship, including their reconciliation after one of his affairs. Her writing matured somewhat and the book was more creatively organized than her prior efforts. In 1928, she wrote an epic poem which was published as The Stranger. The writing is addressed to the men in her life: her father, husband, and son. In an experimental fashion she explored the various kinds of love she had known. Later that year Impossible Melodies explored similar themes. The Crosby's enjoyed a positive reception from their initial work and decided to expand the press to serve other authors.
They printed limited quantities of meticulously produced, hand-manufactured books, printed on high-quality paper. Publishing in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s put the company at the crossroads of many American writers who were living abroad. In 1928, Éditions Narcisse published a limited edition of 300 numbered copies of "The Fall of the House of Usher
" by Edgar Allan Poe
with illustrations by Alastair
.
In 1928, Harry and Caresse changed the name of the press to the Black Sun Press in keeping with Harry's fascination with the symbolism of the sun. Harry developed a private mythology around the sun as a symbol for both life and death, creation and destruction. The press rapidly gained notice for publishing beautifully bound, typographically flawless editions of unusual books. They took exquisite care with the books they published, choosing the finest papers and inks.
They published early works of a number of avant-garde
writers before they were well-known, including James Joyce
's Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (which was later integrated into Finnegans Wake
). They published Kay Boyle
's first book-length work, Short Stories, in 1929, and works by Hart Crane
, D. H. Lawrence
, Ezra Pound
, Archibald MacLeish
, Ernest Hemingway
, Laurence Sterne
, and Eugene Jolas
. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. In 1929, she and Harry both signed poet Eugene Jolas
' The Revolution of the Word Proclamation which appeared in issue 16/17 of the literary journal transition
. After Harry died in a suicide pact
with one of his many lovers, Caresse Crosby continued publishing until 1936, when she left Europe for the United States.
on Cape Cod
in 1690. Josephine would inspire Crosby's next collection of poems called Transit of Venus. Though she was several years his junior, Harry fell in love with Josephine. In a letter to his mother, dated July 24, 1928, Crosby wrote:
Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until she married, when it temporarily ended. However, Josephine rekindled their affair, and in the late fall of 1929, Harry and Josephine met and traveled to Detroit where they checked into an expensive, USD$12 (about $ today) a day hotel as husband and wife. For four days they took meals in their room, smoked opium, and had sex.
On December 7, 1929, the lovers returned to New York where once again they attempted to end the affair, and Josephine agreed that she would return to Boston and her husband. But two days later she had delivered a 36-line poem to Crosby who was staying with Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem read: On December 9, Harry Crosby wrote in his journal for the last time:
Harry was found at 10pm that night in bed at Stanley Mortimer's studio in the Hotel des Artistes. He had a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple next to Josephine, who had a matching hole in her left temple. They were in an affectionate embrace. Both were dressed but had bare feet. Harry sported red-painted toenails and tattoos on the bottom of his feet. The Coroner said the Josephine had died at least two hours before Harry. There was no suicide note, and newspapers ran sensational articles for days about the murder or suicide pact—they could not decide which.
by Caresse's friend Bill Sykes, Billy was brought home from boarding school by another friend,, and the family and friends spent some time at the Mill. Polleen stayed with her mother for a few months, refusing to return to school. Billy returned to Choam, and in 1931 returned to the U.S. to attend the Lexox School.
After Harry Crosby's suicide, Caresse dedicated herself to the Black Sun Press
. She also established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture, Crosby Continental Editions, to publish paperback books. Their friend Hemingway offered her a choice of The Torrents of Spring
or The Sun Also Rises
as their debut volume. Caresse unfortunately picked the former which was less well received than the other volume. She followed Hemingway's work with nine more books in 1932 included William Faulkner
's Sanctuary, Kay Boyle
's Year Before Last, Dorothy Parker
's Laments for the Living, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery
's Night-Flight along with works by Alain Fournier
, Charles-Louis Philippe
, Paul Eluard
, George Grosz
, Max Ernst
, and C. G. Jung. After six months of sales the books had only grossed about USD$1200. Crosby was unable to persuade U.S. publishers to distribute her work, as paperbacks were not yet widely distributed and they publishers were not convinced that readers would buy them. Her paperback books, an innovative product in the 1930s, were not well received, and she closed the press in 1933.
Crosby pursued ambitions as an actress that she had since her 20s, and appeared as a dancer in two short experimental film
s directed by artist Emlen Etting
, Poem 8 (1932) and Oramunde (1933). The Black Sun Press broadened its scope after Harry's death. Although it published few works after 1952, it printed James Joyce's Collected Poems in 1963. It did not officially close until Caresse's death in 1970.
despite the threat of miscegenation laws
. They had lunch uptown in Harlem
at the then new restaurant Franks where they could maintain their secret relationship. By the 1940s, Lee was a Broadway star and featured in the nation-wide run of the play Native Son
. But the only restaurant in Washington D.C. where they could eat together was an African restaurant named the Bugazi. Unlike so many of her lovers, he didn't ask for money, even when his nightclub The Chicken Coop had a difficult time. When Crosby's brother Walter expressed his dismay at their relationship during a dinner in the early 1940s, Caresse was offended, and had little contact with Walter over the next 10 years. Crosby and Lee's intimate relationship continued into the mid-1940s and contributed to her world-view. Crosby wrote a never-published play, The Cage, transparently based on their relationship.
Without a job, he convinced Caresse he just wanted to own a farm and they decided to look for land on the east coast. They drove into Virginia looking for an old plantation house smothered in roses. When their car broke down, she accidentally discovered Hampton Manor, a Hereford cattle farm with a dilapidated brick mansion on a 486 acres (196.7 ha) estate in Bowling Green, Virginia
. It had been built in 1838 by John Hampton DeJarnette from plans by his friend, Thomas Jefferson. John Hampton was the brother of Virginia Legislator Daniel Coleman De Jarnette.
On September 30, 1936, she wrote to the New York Trust Company and instructed them to send 433 shares of stock that she used to buy the property, which was in need of renovation. They were married in Virginia on March 24, 1937. Bert was always asking Caresse for money, he crashed her car, ran up the telephone bill, and used all her credit at the local liquor store. Bert ended one bout of drinking with a solo trip to Florida and did not come back to Virginia until the next year.
. When he returned to the U.S. in 1940, he confessed to Caresse his lack of success in getting his work published. Miller's autobiographical book Tropic of Cancer
was banned in the U.S. as pornographic, and he could get no other work published. She invited him to take a room in her spacious New York apartment on East 54th Street
where she infrequently lived, which he accepted, though she did not provide him with money.
Desperate for cash, Miller fell to churning out pornography on commission for an Oklahoma
oil baron at a dollar per page, but after two 100-page stories that brought him USD$200, he could do no more. Now he wanted to tour the United States by car and write about it. He got a USD$750 advance, and persuaded the oil man's agent to advance him another $200. He was preparing to leave on the trip but still had not provided the work promised. He thought then of Caresse Crosby. She was already pitching in ideas and pieces of writing to Anaïs Nin
's New York City smut club for fun, not money. In her journal, Nin wrote, "Harvey Breit
, Robert Duncan
, George Barker
, Caresse Crosby, all of us concentrating our skills in a tour de force, supplying the old man with such an abundance of perverse felicities, that now he begged for more." Caresse was facile and clever, wrote easily and quickly, with little effort.
Caresse accepted Henry's proposal. She wrote at the top the title given her by Henry Miller, Opus Pistorum (later republished as Henry's work as Under the Roofs of Paris), and started right in. Henry left for his car tour of America. Caresse churned out 200 pages and the collector’s agent asked for more. Caresse's smut was just what the oil man wanted, according to his New York agent. No literary aspirations, just plain sex. In her journal, Nin wrote, "'Less poetry,' said the voice over the telephone. 'Be specific.'" In Caresse the agent had found the basic pornographic Henry Miller
.
Caresse spent some of her time while her husband, Bert Young, fell into a drunken stupor every night churning out another 200 pages of pornography. In her diary, Anaïs Nin observed that everyone who wrote pornography
with her wrote out of a self that was opposite to her or his identity, but identical with his desire. Polly or Caresse grew up amid the social constraints imposed by her upper-class family in New York. She had a doomed and troublesome romanticism with Harry Crosby
. She participated in a decade or more of intellectual lovers in Paris during the 1920s.
and his wife, who were long-term guests, during which he wrote much of his autobiography. In 1934, Dalí and his wife Gala attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by Crosby. Other visitors included Buckminster Fuller
, Anaïs Nin
, Ezra Pound
, Henry Miller
, Max Ernst
, Stuart Kaiser and other friends from her time in Paris. She had a brief affair with Fuller during this time. By 1941, having divorced Bert, Caresse moved to live in Washington D.C. full-time where she owned a home at 2008 Q Street NW from 1937 to 1950, and she opened the Caresse Crosby Modern Art Gallery, what was then the city's only modern art gallery, at 1606 Twentieth Street, near Dupont Circle
.
In December, 1943, she wrote Henry Miller
to ask if he had heard about her gallery and asked if he would be interested in exhibiting some of his paintings there. In 1944, she spent some time with at his home in Big Sur
, and later opened his first one-man art show at her gallery.
Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly
, in which she sought to continue her work with young and avant-garde
writers and artists. She printed issues 1, 3, and 5 in the U.S. The second issue was published in Paris in December 1945, less than seven months after the end of the war. It featured primarily French writers and artists; the fourth issue was published in Rome and focused on Italian writers and artists; and the last issue was focused on Greek artists and writers.
During World War II and for some time after, paper was in short supply. Caresse printed the magazine on a variety of different sizes, colors and types of paper stock printed by different printers, stuffed into a 11.5 inches (29.2 cm) by 14 inches (35.6 cm) folder. Caresse printed 1,000 copies of each issue, and as she had done with the Black Sun Press, gave special treatment to 100 or so deluxe copies that featured original artwork by Matisse, Romare Bearden
, and others. She secured contributions from a wide variety of well-known artists and writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre
(The End of the War), Robert Lowell
, Albert Camus
(Letter to a German Friend, his first appearance in an English-language publication), Henri Matisse
, Weldon Kees
, Paul Éluard
, Pablo Picasso
, René Char
, Henri Cartier Bresson, Louis Aragon
, Kay Boyle
, Gwendolyn Brooks
, Sterling A. Brown, Charles Bukowski
, Albert Camus
, René Char
, Paul Éluard
, Jean Genet
, Natalia Ginzburg
, Victor Hugo
, Weldon Kees
, Robert Lowell
, Henry Miller
, Eugenio Montale
, Anaïs Nin
, Charles Olson
, Francis Ponge
, Kenneth Rexroth
, Arthur Rimbaud
, Yannis Ritsos, Jean-Paul Sartre
, Karl Shapiro
, Stephen Spender
, Leo Tolstoy
, and Giuseppe Ungaretti
. After the sixth issue, she ran out of funds and sponsors. This was her last major publishing effort.
flying boat
, the sole civilian passenger, hand-carrying her Elsa Schiaparelli
hat box that contained Pietro Lazzari
's drawings of horses, and Romare Bearden
's Passion of Christ watercolor series.
She learned after the war that Nazi troops set up base in her home "Le Moulin du Soleil," the French Mill. Caresse was upset when she learned that the German troops had painted over the wall of the home that had doubled as her guest book. Ironically, along with painting over the signature of Spanish painter Salvador Dalí
(he intertwined his name with that of a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer), D.H. Lawrence (who drew a phoenix), they also painted over the signature of Eva Braun
. She signed her name when she visited Harry and Caresse along with an Austrian big game hunter she was dating.
and Citizens of the World, which embraced the concept of a "world community
" which other activists like Buckminster Fuller
also supported. Caresse continued her work to establish a world citizen's center in Delphi
, Greece, where in 1942 she bought a small house that overlooked the Grove of Apollo. In 1950, she divorced Selbert Young. In October 1952, she attempted to visit her property, but she was met by armed guards at Corfu as she got off the ferry from Brindisi. The police placed her under house arrest in the Corfu Palace Hotel, and after three days she was told she was not welcome in Greece, and ordered to leave. The American consul told her that the Greek government thought she was still "considered dangerous to the economy and politics of Greece." When this failed, she sought to create the "World Man Center" in Cyprus, which was to include a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller
. This effort too came to naught and she continued to search for a center for her world citizen project.
In 1953, Caresse wrote and published her autobiography, The Passionate Years. She wrote it mostly based on her personal recollection rather than a specific set of sources. It contained "many amusing and intense anecdotes... but precious little about what was going on with him [Harry] is revealed."
. He and his wife Josette had a small third-floor walk-up apartment on rue du Bac that they heated with a fireplace and a stove. On January 25, 1955, Billy died in his sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning
, while Josette was found unconscious and revived. Caresse traveled to Paris for his funeral between appearances at colleges where she talked about her life and the Black Sun Press.
70 kilometres (43.5 mi) north of Rome in 1949 during a tour of Italy. Designed by Baldassare Peruzzi
and built between 1530 and 1560 for Cardinal Alessandro Cesarini, in the 1950s she rented and later paid USD$2,600 (about $ today) for the estate. It came with the Papal title of Principessa (Princess). She paid to electrify the castle and thus brought electricity to the neighboring village. She told a reporter that the castle had 320 rooms, "at least that's what the villagers tell me." (The deed listed 180 rooms.) Many of the rooms had 21 feet (6.4 m) ceilings and the palace was virtually impossible to heat. "I wouldn't live here if you paid me," she told a reporter.
The residential portion of the palace contains three main apartments and two courtyards. The walls of the main hall are decorated by fresco
es from the 16th century. She used the castle to support various artists, including poets' seminars. Henry Miller described Rocca Sinibalda as the "Center for Creative Arts and Humanist Living in the Abruzzi Hills." Other artists visited for a weekend or an entire season.
In 1962, filmmaker Robert Snyder made a 26 minute documentary about Caresee's history and her plans for the castle. The short film, Always Yes, Caresse took the viewer on a tour of the castle, led by Caresse. At one point in the film, she pulled down her blouse to reveal her ample bosom. He learned about the writer's retreat when he was in Rome filming a documentary on the Sistine Chapel
, The Titan; The Story of Michelangelo.
Caresse for a time divided her time between Rocca Sinibalda, which in the winter was too cold and unlivable, Hampton Manor in Bowling Green, Virginia
, a home in Washington, D.C., a sprawling apartment at 137 East 54th Street in New York City, as well as a residence in Rome. In 1953, Alvin Redman published her autobiography, The Passionate Years. She put Rocca Sinibalda up for sale in 1970, shortly before she died.
. She died from complications from pneumonia
in Rome, Italy on January 24, 1970, aged 78. Time
described her as the "literary godmother to the 'lost generation
' of expatriate writers in Paris." Anaïs Nin
described her as "a pollen carrier, who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships."
But she lived long enough to see many of the aspiring writers she nurtured in the 1920s become well known and accepted authors. The bra she invented went through a number of transformations and become a standard undergarment for women all over the world. Her first two husbands and her son Bill preceded her in death. She was survived by her daughter Polleen Peabody de Mun North Drysdale and two granddaughters.
optioned Andrea Berloff's first screenplay Harry & Caresse. Lasse Hallström
was initially attached to direct and Leslie Holleran was attached as a producer.
This article was originally based upon material originally written by Brian Phelps and licensed for use in Wikipedia under the GFDL
.
Brassiere
A brassiere is an undergarment that covers, supports, and elevates the breasts. Since the late 19th century, it has replaced the corset as the most widely accepted method for supporting breasts....
to receive a patent and gain wide acceptance.
Crosby's parents, William Hearns Jacob and Mary Phelps, were both descended from American colonial families, William from the Van Rensselaer family and Mary from William Phelps
William Phelps (colonist)
William Phelps was a Puritan Englishman who immigrated in 1630 to the American Colonies. He was one of the founders of both Dorchester, Massachusetts and Windsor, Connecticut, foreman of the first grand jury in New England, served most of his life in early colonial government, and played a key...
. Her life at first followed convention. In 1915, she married the well-to-do Richard R. Peabody
Richard R. Peabody
Richard Rogers Peabody Richard Rogers Peabody Richard Rogers Peabody (13 Jan 1892 (Boston, Massachusetts) - 26 Apr 1936 (New York City, New York) grew up as a member of the upper class in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Groton, where his grandfather was headmaster, and later enrolled at Harvard...
, whose family had arrived in New Hampshire in 1635. They had two children, but following Richard's service in World War I, Richard turned into a drunk who loved to watch buildings burn. She met Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....
at a picnic in 1920 and they had sex within two weeks. Their public relationship scandalized proper blue blood Boston society.
Two years later Richard granted her a divorce and Harry and Polly were married. They immediately left for Europe, where they joined the lost generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
of American expatriates. They embraced a bohemian
Bohemian
A Bohemian is a resident of the former Kingdom of Bohemia, either in a narrow sense as the region of Bohemia proper or in a wider meaning as the whole country, now known as the Czech Republic. The word "Bohemian" was used to denote the Czech people as well as the Czech language before the word...
and decadent lifestyle, living off of Harry's trust fund of USD$12,000 a year (or about $ in today's dollars), had an open marriage
Open marriage
Open marriage typically refers to a marriage in which the partners agree that each may engage in extramarital sexual relationships, without this being regarded as infidelity. There are many different styles of open marriage, with the partners having varying levels of input on their spouse's...
with numerous ongoing affairs, a suicide pact
Suicide pact
A suicide pact is an agreed plan between two or more individuals to commit suicide. The plan may be to die together, or separately and closely timed. Suicide pacts are important concepts in the study of suicide, and have occurred throughout history, as well as in fiction.Suicide pacts are generally...
, frequent drug use, wild parties, and long trips abroad.
At her husband's urging, Polly took the name Caresse in 1924. In 1925 they began publishing their own poetry as Éditions Narcisse in exquisitely printed, limited-edition volumes. In 1927 they re-christened the business as the Black Sun Press
Black Sun Press
The Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby , American expatriates living in Paris...
. They became instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many emerging authors who were struggling to get published, including James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle was an American writer, educator, and political activist.- Early years :The granddaughter of a publisher, Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, Hart Crane
Hart Crane
-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
, D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, René Crevel
René Crevel
René Crevel was a French writer involved with the surrealist movement.-Life:Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Crevel...
, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, and Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
.
In 1929 one of her husband's affairs culminated in his death as part of a murder-suicide
Murder-suicide
A murder–suicide is an act in which an individual kills one or more other persons before or at the same time as killing himself or herself. The combination of murder and suicide can take various forms, including:...
or double suicide
Suicide pact
A suicide pact is an agreed plan between two or more individuals to commit suicide. The plan may be to die together, or separately and closely timed. Suicide pacts are important concepts in the study of suicide, and have occurred throughout history, as well as in fiction.Suicide pacts are generally...
at the studio of a friend. His death was marked by scandal as the newspapers speculated wildly about whether Harry shot his lover or not. Caresse returned to Paris where she continued to run the Black Sun Press. She was friends with many of the eminent authors of her time, including Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
, Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
and Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
. She left Europe in 1936 and bought Hampton Manor in Virginia outside Washington D.C. She married Selbert Young, an unemployed, alcoholic actor sixteen years her junior. She helped Henry Miller by taking over writing pornography for an anonymous Texas oil baron. Her guests at Hampton Manor included Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
, Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and other friends from Paris. She began a long-term love affair with black actor-boxer Canada Lee
Canada Lee
Canada Lee was an American actor who pioneered roles for African Americans. A champion of civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s, he died shortly before he was scheduled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He became an actor after careers as a jockey, boxer, and musician...
despite the threat of miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws, also known as miscegenation laws, were laws that enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races...
. She founded Women Against War
Women against war
Women Against War is the name of two organizations of women opposed to war.-Women Against War, 1960s:Mary Phelps Jacob founded an organisation following an article, during the 1960s.-Women Against War, Delmar New York:...
. She continued after World War II to try to establish a Center for World Peace at Delphi
Delphi
Delphi is both an archaeological site and a modern town in Greece on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus in the valley of Phocis.In Greek mythology, Delphi was the site of the Delphic oracle, the most important oracle in the classical Greek world, and a major site for the worship of the god...
, Greece. When rebuffed by Greek authorities, she purchased Castello di Rocca Siniblada
Rocca Sinibalda
Rocca Sinibalda is a comune in the Province of Rieti in the Italian region Latium, located about 50 km northeast of Rome and about 15 km southeast of Rieti....
, a 15th-century castle north of Rome, which she used to support an artists colony. She died of pneumonia related to heart disease in Rome in 1970.
Early life
Born on April 20, 1891 in New Rochelle, New YorkNew Rochelle, New York
New Rochelle is a city in Westchester County, New York, United States, in the southeastern portion of the state.The town was settled by refugee Huguenots in 1688 who were fleeing persecution in France...
, she was nicknamed "Polly" to distinguish her from her mother. Her family was descended from a prominent New England family. She was the oldest daughter of William Hearn Jacob and Mary Phelps Jacob and had two brothers, Leonard and Walter "Bud" Phelps. Her family divided its time between estates in New York at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, Watertown, Connecticut
Watertown, Connecticut
Watertown is a town in Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 21,661 at the 2000 census. The zip code for Watertown is 06795. It is a suburb of Waterbury. It borders the towns of Woodbury, Middlebury, Litchfield, Plymouth, Bethlehem, and Thomaston.-Founding History:More...
, and New Rochelle, New York. She enjoyed the advantages of an upper-class lifestyle. She took dancing lessons at Mr. Dodsworth Dancing Class, attended Miss Chapin's School in New York City, went to school at Rosemary Hall
Choate Rosemary Hall
Choate Rosemary Hall is a private, college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school located in Wallingford, Connecticut...
prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut
Wallingford, Connecticut
Wallingford is a town in New Haven County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 43,026 at the 2000 census.- History :Wallingford was established on October 10, 1667, when the Connecticut General Assembly authorized the "making of a village on the east river" to 38 planters and freemen...
, where she played the part of Rosalind in As You Like It
As You Like It
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility...
to critical acclaim. She attended formal balls, Ivy League
Ivy League
The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States. The conference name is also commonly used to refer to those eight schools as a group...
school dances, and horse riding school.
In 1914 she was presented to the King of England
George V of the United Kingdom
George V was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 through the First World War until his death in 1936....
at a garden party. Her ancestry included a knight of the Crusades
Crusades
The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...
and the Allardyce family in the War of the Roses. She was descended from Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the first commercially successful steamboat...
, developer of the steamboat
Steamboat
A steamboat or steamship, sometimes called a steamer, is a ship in which the primary method of propulsion is steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels...
, from the Plymouth Colony
Plymouth Colony
Plymouth Colony was an English colonial venture in North America from 1620 to 1691. The first settlement of the Plymouth Colony was at New Plymouth, a location previously surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. The settlement, which served as the capital of the colony, is today the modern town...
's first governor, William Bradford
William Bradford (1590-1657)
William Bradford was an English leader of the settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, and served as governor for over 30 years after John Carver died. His journal was published as Of Plymouth Plantation...
, and on her mother's side she was the granddaughter of General Walter Phelps
Walter Phelps
Walter Phelps Jr. was an officer in the Union Army throughout the American Civil War, ending the war as commanding general of the First Iron Brigade...
, who commanded troops at the Civil War Battle of Antietam
Battle of Antietam
The Battle of Antietam , fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek, as part of the Maryland Campaign, was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Northern soil. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with about 23,000...
and the seventh great-granddaughter of Puritan colonist William Phelps
William Phelps (colonist)
William Phelps was a Puritan Englishman who immigrated in 1630 to the American Colonies. He was one of the founders of both Dorchester, Massachusetts and Windsor, Connecticut, foreman of the first grand jury in New England, served most of his life in early colonial government, and played a key...
.
Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions," and he lived high. She grew up, she later said, "in a world where only good smells existed." "What I wanted", she said of her privileged childhood, "usually came to pass." She was a rather uninterested student. Author Geoffrey Wolff
Geoffrey Wolff
Geoffrey Wolff is an American novelist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. Among his honors and recognition are the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Berlin , and the Guggenheim...
wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams." In keeping with the American aristocratic style of the times, she was even photographed as a child by Charles Dana Gibson
Charles Dana Gibson
Charles Dana Gibson was an American graphic artist, best known for his creation of the Gibson Girl, an iconic representation of the beautiful and independent American woman at the turn of the 20th century....
.
After her father's death in 1908, she lived with her mother at their home in Watertown. That same summer she met her future husband, Richard Peabody, at summer camp. Her brother Len was boarding at Westminster School and Bud was a day student at Taft School. Approaching her own debut, she danced in "one to three balls every night" and slept from four in the morning until noon. "At twelve I was called and got ready for the customary debutante
Debutante
A débutante is a young lady from an aristocratic or upper class family who has reached the age of maturity, and as a new adult, is introduced to society at a formal "début" presentation. It should not be confused with a Debs...
luncheon."
Attends debutante ball
In 1910, at age 19, Polly was preparing to attend yet another débutanteDebutante
A débutante is a young lady from an aristocratic or upper class family who has reached the age of maturity, and as a new adult, is introduced to society at a formal "début" presentation. It should not be confused with a Debs...
ball one evening. As was customary, she wore a corset
Corset
A corset is a garment worn to hold and shape the torso into a desired shape for aesthetic or medical purposes...
stiffened with whalebone and a restrictive, tight corset cover that flattened and jammed her large breasts together into a single monobosom. The stiffened corset cover poked out from under the sheer evening gown
Gown
A gown is a loose outer garment from knee- to full-length worn by men and women in Europe from the early Middle Ages to the 17th century ; later, gown was applied to any woman's garment consisting of a bodice and attached skirt.A long, loosely-fitted gown called a Banyan was worn by men in the 18th...
that she had worn to her own debut a few weeks previously and covered her plunging neckline. On this particular evening she threw the restrictive corset cover to the side. Instead, she worked with her maid Marie to fashion two silk handkerchiefs together with some pink ribbon and cord.
Polly's new undergarment complemented the new fashions introduced at the time. When she showed it to friends the next day, they all wanted one. Family and friends almost immediately asked Polly to create brassiere
Brassiere
A brassiere is an undergarment that covers, supports, and elevates the breasts. Since the late 19th century, it has replaced the corset as the most widely accepted method for supporting breasts....
s for them, too. One day, she received a request for one of her contraptions from a stranger, who offered a dollar for her efforts. She knew then that this could become a viable business.
Patent for the brassiere
She filed for a patent on February 12, 1914 and on November that year the U.S. Patent OfficeUnited States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification.The USPTO is based in Alexandria, Virginia,...
granted her a the first U.S. patent
for the 'Backless Brassiere
Brassiere
A brassiere is an undergarment that covers, supports, and elevates the breasts. Since the late 19th century, it has replaced the corset as the most widely accepted method for supporting breasts....
'. Polly related her invention to corset covers which were worn to cover the bosom when a woman wore a low corset. It had shoulder straps that attached to the garment's upper and lower corners, and wrap-around laces attached at the lower corners which tied in the woman's front, enabling her to wear gowns cut low in the back.
Polly wrote that her invention was "well-adapted to women of different size" and was "so efficient that it may be worn by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis." Her design was lightweight, soft, comfortable to wear, and naturally separated the breasts, unlike the corset, which was heavy, stiff, uncomfortable, and had the effect of creating a single "monobosom". In the U.S., patents for various bra-like undergarment
Undergarment
Undergarments or underwear are clothes worn under other clothes, often next to the skin. They keep outer garments from being soiled by bodily secretions and discharges, shape the body, and provide support for parts of it. In cold weather, long underwear is sometimes worn to provide additional...
s had appeared as early as the 1860s. The modern brassiere was invented and popularized
History of brassieres
The history of brassieres is inextricably intertwined with the social history of the status of women, including the evolution of fashion and changing views of the body.Straps on the bra can be adjusted to fit the shoulder of the woman wearing it...
by Paris couturier Herminie Cadolle
Herminie Cadolle
Herminie Cadolle was the inventor of the modern bra and founder of the Cadolle lingerie house.Herminie was a close friend of the French insurrectionist Louise Michel, and it was this connection that lead her to leave for the safety of Buenos Aires...
as early as 1889 and was a sensation at the Great Exposition of 1900
Exposition Universelle (1900)
The Exposition Universelle of 1900 was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from April 15 to November 12, 1900, to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next...
, becoming a fast seller among wealthy Europeans in the decade that followed.
After she married Richard Peabody
Richard R. Peabody
Richard Rogers Peabody Richard Rogers Peabody Richard Rogers Peabody (13 Jan 1892 (Boston, Massachusetts) - 26 Apr 1936 (New York City, New York) grew up as a member of the upper class in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Groton, where his grandfather was headmaster, and later enrolled at Harvard...
, Polly filed a legal certificate with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on May 19, 1920, declaring that she was a married woman conducting a business using separate funds from her husband's bank account. She named the company the Fashion Form Brassiere Company and located her manufacturing shop on Washington Street in Boston, where she ran a two-woman sweatshop that manufactured her wireless brassière during 1922. The location also served as a convenient place to go for trysts with Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....
, who would become her second husband.
In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, she maintained that she had "a few hundred (units) of her design produced." She managed to secure a few orders from department stores, but her business never took off. Harry, who had a distaste for conventional business and a generous trust fund, discouraged her from pursuing the business and persuaded her to close it. She later sold the brassiere patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport
Bridgeport
Bridgeport is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Connecticut.Bridgeport may also refer to:-Places:In Canada:* Bridgeport, Nova ScotiaIn the United States:* Bridgeport, Alabama* Bridgeport, California, in Mono County...
, Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
for USD$1,500 (roughly equivalent to $ in current dollars). Warner manufactured the "Crosby" bra for a while, but it was not a popular style and was eventually discontinued. Warner went on to earn more than USD$15 million dollars from the bra patent over the next thirty years.
In her later years, she wrote,
Marriage and divorce
In 1915, Polly Jacob and Richard ("Dick") PeabodyRichard R. Peabody
Richard Rogers Peabody Richard Rogers Peabody Richard Rogers Peabody (13 Jan 1892 (Boston, Massachusetts) - 26 Apr 1936 (New York City, New York) grew up as a member of the upper class in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Groton, where his grandfather was headmaster, and later enrolled at Harvard...
were married by his grandfather, Endicott Peabody
Endicott Peabody (educator)
The Reverend Endicott Peabody was the American Episcopal priest who founded the Groton School for Boys , in Groton, Massachusetts in 1884. Peabody served as headmaster at the school from 1884 until 1940, and also served as a trustee at Lawrence Academy at Groton...
, the founder of the Groton School
Groton School
Groton School is a private, Episcopal, college preparatory boarding school located in Groton, Massachusetts, U.S. It enrolls approximately 375 boys and girls, from the eighth through twelfth grades...
, and whose family had been one of the wealthiest in America during the 19th century. By the early 20th century a case could be made that the Peabodies
Peabody (surname)
Peabody is a surname, and may refer to:* Elizabeth Peabody , a United States educator* Endicott Peabody , a United States politician, Governor of Massachusetts...
had supplanted the Cabot
George Cabot
George Cabot was an American merchant, seaman, and politician from Boston, Massachusetts. He represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate and as the Presiding Officer of the Hartford Convention.-Early life:...
s and the Lodge
Henry Cabot Lodge
Henry Cabot "Slim" Lodge was an American Republican Senator and historian from Massachusetts. He had the role of Senate Majority leader. He is best known for his positions on Meek policy, especially his battle with President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 over the Treaty of Versailles...
s as the most distinguished name in the region. They had a son, William Jacob, born on February 4, 1916. Polly found that Dick was a well-educated but undirected man and a reluctant father. Less than a year later Dick Peabody enlisted at the Mexican border and joined the Boston militia engaged in stopping Pancho Villa
Pancho Villa
José Doroteo Arango Arámbula – better known by his pseudonym Francisco Villa or its hypocorism Pancho Villa – was one of the most prominent Mexican Revolutionary generals....
's cross-border raids. Less than a year after he returned home, he enlisted to fight in World War I. Their second child, a daughter, Poleen Wheatland ("Polly"), was born on August 12, 1917 but Dick was already in Officers Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery. He became a Captain in the United States Army's 15th Field Artillery, 2nd Division, American Expeditionary Force
American Expeditionary Force
The American Expeditionary Forces or AEF were the United States Armed Forces sent to Europe in World War I. During the United States campaigns in World War I the AEF fought in France alongside British and French allied forces in the last year of the war, against Imperial German forces...
. While she had been largely cared for by his parents, he had been enjoying life at the front as a bachelor.
Dick Peabody returned home in early 1921 and was assigned to Columbia, South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina
Columbia is the state capital and largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The population was 129,272 according to the 2010 census. Columbia is the county seat of Richland County, but a portion of the city extends into neighboring Lexington County. The city is the center of a metropolitan...
. Polly and the children soon joined him, but when the war ended, Dick found himself left with nothing but a family allowance. He suffered from his war experiences and returned to drinking heavily. Polly found he had only three real interests, all acquired at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase after fire engines and watch buildings burn. Polly's life was difficult during the war years and when her husband returned home, significantly changed, her life soon changed abruptly too.
Meets Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....
, a wealthy scion of a socially prominent Boston family and another veteran and victim of the recent war. Harry attended private schools and until age 19 appeared to be well on the path to a comfortable life as a member of the upper middle class. His experiences in World War I changed everything.
In the pattern of other sons of the elite from New England, he was a volunteer in the American Field Service Ambulance Corps
AFS Intercultural Programs
AFS Intercultural Programs was established in 1915 by A. Piatt Andrew, a onetime economics professor at Harvard University and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury...
. On November 22, 1917, the ambulance he was driving was destroyed by artillery fire, but he emerged miraculously unhurt. His best friend, "Spud" Spaulding, was seriously wounded in the explosion and Harry saved his life. The experience profoundly shaped his future. He was at the Second Battle of Verdun
Battle of Verdun
The Battle of Verdun was one of the major battles during the First World War on the Western Front. It was fought between the German and French armies, from 21 February – 18 December 1916, on hilly terrain north of the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in north-eastern France...
. After the battle, his section (the 29th Infantry Division, attached to the 120th French Division) was cited for bravery, and in 1919 Crosby was awarded the Croix de Guerre
Croix de guerre
The Croix de guerre is a military decoration of France. It was first created in 1915 and consists of a square-cross medal on two crossed swords, hanging from a ribbon with various degree pins. The decoration was awarded during World War I, again in World War II, and in other conflicts...
. Crosby wrote in his journal, "Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover when it's too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." He vowed that he would live life on his own terms.
After returning from World War I and while completing his degree at Harvard, Harry met Polly on July 4, 1920. Polly's husband Richard was in a sanitarium drying out from another drunken spell. Sensing Polly's isolation, Harry's mother Henrietta Crosby invited Polly to chaperone Harry and some of his friends to a party, including dinner and a trip to the amusement park at Nantasket Beach
Nantasket Beach
Nantasket Beach is a beach in Hull, Massachusetts. The shore has fine, light gray sand and is one of the busiest beaches in Greater Boston. At low tide, there are acres of tide pools.-Name:...
. During dinner, Harry never spoke to the girl on his left, breaking decorum. By some accounts, Harry fell in love with the buxom Mrs. Peabody in about two hours. He confessed his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park. Crosby pressed her to see him alone, an unthinkable proposition for a member of Boston's upper crust. She later wrote, "Harry was utterly ruthless... to know Harry was a devastating experience." On July 20, they spent the night together and had sex, and two days later Polly accompanied Harry to New York. He had planned a trip to France to tour battle sites. They spent the night together in New York at the Belmont Hotel. Polly said of the night, "For the first time in my life, I knew myself to be a person."
Polly was seen by her social circle as someone who had perverted the trust placed in her as a chaperone, as an older woman who had taken advantage of a younger man. To the Crosbys, she was dishonored and corrupt. Their scandalous courtship was the gossip of blue-blood Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
. She was 28, six years older than Harry, with two small children, and married.
In the fall her husband Richard moved back home. His parents supplied a small living allowance and Richard, Polly and the two children moved into a three-story tenement
Tenement
A tenement is, in most English-speaking areas, a substandard multi-family dwelling, usually old, occupied by the poor.-History:Originally the term tenement referred to tenancy and therefore to any rented accommodation...
building. Crosby lived with his father while he continued his studies at Harvard. While Dick Peabody worked at the bank, Harry Crosby sent crates of flowers from his mother's garden to Polly's apartment and brought over toys for the children. They drove to the shore together. Richard volunteered to join the fire department and persuaded the fire chief to wire a fire alarm bell to his home so he could turn out at any hour. The fire chief soon let Richard go, and he retreated into drink again.
Crosby pursued Polly and in May 1921, when she would not respond to his ardor, Crosby threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him. Polly's husband Richard Peabody was in and out of sanitariums several times fighting alcoholism. Crosby pestered Polly to tell her husband of their affair and to divorce him. In May she revealed her adultery to Richard and suggested a separation, and he offered no resistance. Polly's mother insisted that she stop seeing Crosby for six months to avoid complete rejection by her society peers, a condition she agreed to, and she left Boston for New York. Divorce was "unheard of...even among Boston Episcopalians." Peabody's parents were outraged that she would ask for a divorce and at her affair with Crosby. Richard's father Jacob Peabody even visited Harry's father Stephen Crosby on January 4, 1922 to discuss the situation, but Harry's father would not talk to him. Despite his disapproval of Harry's irregular behavior, he loved his son. Stephen Crosby at first attempted to dissuade Harry from marrying Polly Peabody, even buying him the Stutz
Stutz Motor Company
The Stutz Motor Company was a producer of luxury cars based in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. Production began in 1911 and continued through 1935. The marque reappeared in 1968 under the aegis of Stutz Motor Car of America, Inc., and with a newly defined modern retro-look. Although the company is...
he'd been asking for, but Harry would not be persuaded to change his mind. For her part, Polly's former friends pilloried her as an adulteress
Adultery
Adultery is sexual infidelity to one's spouse, and is a form of extramarital sex. It originally referred only to sex between a woman who was married and a person other than her spouse. Even in cases of separation from one's spouse, an extramarital affair is still considered adultery.Adultery is...
, leaving Polly stunned by the quick turn-about in their attitude towards her. Polly later described Harry's character as "He seemed to be more expression and mood, than man," she wrote, "yet he was the most vivid personality I've ever known, electric with rebellion."
Divorce from Richard Peabody
In June 1921, she formally separated from Richard, and in December he offered to divorce her. In February 1922, Polly and Richard Peabody were legally divorced. (Richard subsequently recovered from his alcoholism and in 1933 published The Common Sense of Drinking. He was the first to assert there was no cure for alcoholism. His book became a best seller and was a major influence on Alcoholics AnonymousAlcoholics Anonymous
Alcoholics Anonymous is an international mutual aid movement which says its "primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety." Now claiming more than 2 million members, AA was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio...
founder Bill Wilson
Bill W.
William Griffith Wilson , also known as Bill Wilson or Bill W., was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous , an international mutual aid fellowship with over two million members belonging to 100,800 groups of alcoholics helping other alcoholics achieve and maintain sobriety...
.) Crosby had been working for eight months at Shawmut National Bank. He went on a six-day drinking spree and resigned. In May 1922, he moved to Paris to work in a job arranged for him by his family at Morgan, Harjes et Cie
Morgan, Harjes & Co.
Morgan, Harjes & Co. was a Paris-based investment bank founded in 1868 by John H. Harjes, Eugene Winthrop and Anthony J. Drexel as Drexel, Harjes & Co. In 1871, with the formation of Drexel, Morgan & Co., together with J...
, the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. Crosby was the nephew of Jessie Morgan, the wife of American capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
J. P. Morgan, Jr.
J. P. Morgan, Jr.
John Pierpont "Jack" Morgan, Jr. was an American banker and philanthropist.-Biography:He was born on September 7, 1867 in Irvington, New York to John Pierpont Morgan, Sr. and Frances Louisa Tracy. He graduated from Harvard in 1886, where he was a member of the Delphic Club, formerly known as the...
, who was also both Richard Peabody's and Harry Crosby's godfather.
Polly had previously traveled to England to visit her cousins, where Crosby visited her. From May through July, 1922 they lived together in Paris. In July Polly returned to the U.S. In September, Crosby proposed to Polly via Transatlantic Cable
Transatlantic cable
Transatlantic cable may refer to:* Transatlantic telegraph cable* Transatlantic telephone cable* Other transatlantic submarine communications cable...
, and the next day bribed his way aboard the Aquitania
RMS Aquitania
RMS Aquitania was a Cunard Line ocean liner designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown & Company in Clydebank, Scotland. She was launched on 21 April 1913 and sailed on her maiden voyage to New York on 30 May 1914...
bound for New York.
Move to Paris
On September 9, 1922 Harry and Polly were married in the Municipal Building in New York City, and two days later they re-boarded the Aquitania and moved with her children to Paris, France. Harry continued his work at Morgan, Harjes & Co., his uncle J. P. Morgan's family bank in Paris.Flirtations, affairs, drugs and drinking
Polly's bubble in Paris burst when she learned shortly after their arrival that Harry had been flirting with a girl from Boston. It was the first of many flirtations and affairs that Polly would learn to live with. In early 1923, Polly introduced Harry to her friend Constance Coolidge, the Comtesse de Jumilhac, and they soon began a sexual relationship. Polly began to accept her husband's unconventional behavior, she soon had her own courtiers, and at least outwardly tolerated Harry's dallying. In her journals, she privately worried about Harry's continued loyalty to her. When preparing her autobiography years later, she read letters between Harry and Constance in which, shortly after they married, Harry proclaimed to Constance that he cannot continue with Polly or meet her demand that he "love her more than anyone else in the world." Their glamorous and luxurious lifestyle soon included an open marriageOpen marriage
Open marriage typically refers to a marriage in which the partners agree that each may engage in extramarital sexual relationships, without this being regarded as infidelity. There are many different styles of open marriage, with the partners having varying levels of input on their spouse's...
, numerous affairs, and plenty of drugs and drinking.
At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name. They briefly considered Clytoris before deciding on Caresse. Harry suggesting that her new name "begin with a C to go with Crosby and it must form a cross with mine." The two names intersected at right angles at the common "R," "the Crosby cross." They later named their second whippet
Whippet
The Whippet is a breed of dog in the sighthound family. They are active and playful and are physically similar to a small Greyhound.- Description :...
Clytoris
Clitoris
The clitoris is a sexual organ that is present only in female mammals. In humans, the visible button-like portion is located near the anterior junction of the labia minora, above the opening of the urethra and vagina. Unlike the penis, which is homologous to the clitoris, the clitoris does not...
, explaining to Caresse's young daughter Poleen she was named after a Greek goddess.
In July 1925, Harry had sexual relations with a fourteen year old girl he nicknamed "Nubile," with a "baby face and large breasts," who he saw at Étretat. In Morocco during one of their trips to North Africa, Harry and Polly took a 13-year-old dancing girl named Zora to bed with them. Harry had sex with a boy of unspecified age, his only homosexual dalliance.
In 1927, in the midst of his affair with Constance, he and Caresse met Russian painter Polia Chentoff. Harry asked her to paint Caresse's portrait, and he soon fell in love with her. In November Harry wrote his mother that Polia was "very beautiful and terribly serious about art she ran away from home when she was thirteen to paint." He was also in love with his cousin Nina de Polignac. In June 1928, he met Josephine Rotch at the Lido in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
while she was shopping for her wedding trousseau, and they began an affair. In her autobiography, Caresse minimized Harry's affair with Josephine, eliminating a number of references to her. Harry told Polly that Constance and Josephine wanted to marry him.
Expatriate life
From their arrival in 1922, the Crosbys led the life of rich expatriates. They were attracted to the bohemianBohemian
A Bohemian is a resident of the former Kingdom of Bohemia, either in a narrow sense as the region of Bohemia proper or in a wider meaning as the whole country, now known as the Czech Republic. The word "Bohemian" was used to denote the Czech people as well as the Czech language before the word...
lifestyle of the artists gathering in Montparnasse
Montparnasse
Montparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail...
. They settled in an apartment at 12, Quai d'Orléans on Île St-Louis, and Polly donned her red bathing suit and rowed Harry down the river to the Place de la Concorde
Place de la Concorde
The Place de la Concorde in area, it is the largest square in the French capital. It is located in the city's eighth arrondissement, at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées.- History :...
where he walked the last few blocks to the bank. Harry wore his dark business suit, formal hat, and carried his umbrella and briefcase. Caresse rowed home alone, and in her swim suit her generously endowed chest drew whistles, jeers and waves from workmen. She later wrote that she thought the exercise was good for her breasts, and she also enjoyed the attention.
Harry enjoyed betting on the horse races. They had first experience smoking opium in Africa, and when their friend Constance knocked on their door late one evening, they jumped at her invitation to join her at Drosso's apartment. Ready for bed, Caresse quickly put on a dress with nothing underneath. Invitations to Drosso's were restricted to a few regulars and occasional friends. The Drosso's apartment had been converted to an opium den, subdivided into small rooms filled with low couches and decorations befitting an Arabic setting. After that introduction, Harry dropped in at Drosso’s frequently and sometimes stayed away from home for days at a time.
After about a year, Harry soon tired of the predictable banker's life and quit, fully joining the lost generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the restrictive atmosphere of 1920s America. They were among about 15,000–40,000 Americans living in Paris. Harry wanted as little to do with Polly's children as possible, and after the first year, her son Billy was shipped off to Cheam School
Cheam School
Cheam School is a preparatory school in Headley in the civil parish of Ashford Hill with Headley in the English county of Hampshire. It was founded in 1645 by the Reverend George Aldrich in Cheam, Surrey and has been in operation ever since....
in Hampshire
Hampshire
Hampshire is a county on the southern coast of England in the United Kingdom. The county town of Hampshire is Winchester, a historic cathedral city that was once the capital of England. Hampshire is notable for housing the original birthplaces of the Royal Navy, British Army, and Royal Air Force...
, England.
The couple cared little for the future, spending their money recklessly, never trying to live on a budget. This was in part because they had pledged a mutual suicide pact
Suicide pact
A suicide pact is an agreed plan between two or more individuals to commit suicide. The plan may be to die together, or separately and closely timed. Suicide pacts are important concepts in the study of suicide, and have occurred throughout history, as well as in fiction.Suicide pacts are generally...
, in which they planned on October 31, 1942, when the earth would be closest to the sun in several decades, to jump out of an airplane together. This was to be followed by cremation
Cremation
Cremation is the process of reducing bodies to basic chemical compounds such as gasses and bone fragments. This is accomplished through high-temperature burning, vaporization and oxidation....
and dispersal by another airplane.
Spending freely, Harry bought his silk button-hole gardenia from an exclusive tailor on rue de la Paix. Caresse bought hats from from Jean Patou
Jean Patou
- Early life :Patou was born in Normandy, France in 1880. Patou's family's business was tanning and furs. Patou worked with his uncle in Normandy, then moved to Paris in 1910, intent on becoming a couturier.-1910s - World War I and later:...
and dresses from Tolstoy's, an exclusive fashion house. On special occasions she wore a gold cloth evening suit, featuring a short skirt, tailored by Vionnet
Vionnet (company)
Vionnet is a haute couture label founded by the French couturier Madeleine Vionnet. Established in 1912, the house of Vionnet closed in 1939 before to be formally resurrected in 2006.-From 1912 to 1914:...
, one of the most important Parisian fashion houses. It was chic by Paris standards but completely unacceptable to the cousins and aunts who lived in the aristocratic neighborhood of Faubourg
Faubourg Saint-Germain
The Faubourg Saint Germain is an historic district of Paris. The Faubourg has long been known as the favorite home of the French high nobility and hosts many aristocratic Hôtels particuliers...
in Paris.
Polly and Harry purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then two more in April 1925. They rented a fashionable apartment at 19, Rue de Lille, and obtained a 20-year lease on a mill outside of Paris in Ermenonville
Ermenonville
Ermenonville is a small village in northern France. It is designated municipally as a commune within the département of Oise.Ermenonville is notable for its park named for Jean-Jacques Rousseau by René Louis de Girardin...
, France, from their friend Armand de la Rochefoucauld for 2,200 dollar gold pieces (about $ today). They named it "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun"). In the first year there, they made friends with the 32 students who attended l'Academie des Beaux Arts, located at the end of their street. They invited Harry and Sally to their annual Quartre Arts Ball, an invitation the couple embraced with enthusiasm. Harry fashioned a necklace of four dead pigeons, sported a red loincloth, and brought along a bag of snakes. Caresse wore a sheer chemise to her waist, a huge turquoise wig on her head, and nothing else. They both died their skin with red ochre. The students cheered Caresse's toplessness and she was carried around on the shoulders of ten students.
In January 1925 they traveled to North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
where they first smoked opium
Opium
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...
, a habit to which they would return again and again. In 1928, they traveled to Lebanon
Lebanon
Lebanon , officially the Republic of LebanonRepublic of Lebanon is the most common term used by Lebanese government agencies. The term Lebanese Republic, a literal translation of the official Arabic and French names that is not used in today's world. Arabic is the most common language spoken among...
to visit the Temple of Baalbek
Baalbek
Baalbek is a town in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, altitude , situated east of the Litani River. It is famous for its exquisitely detailed yet monumentally scaled temple ruins of the Roman period, when Baalbek, then known as Heliopolis, was one of the largest sanctuaries in the Empire...
.
In 1928, he inherited Walter Berry
Walter Van Rensselaer Berry
Walter Van Rensselaer Berry was an American lawyer, diplomat, Francophile, and friend of several great writers.-Biography:Berry was born in Paris, a descendant of the Van Rensselaer family of New York. After attending St...
's considerable collection of over 8,000 mostly rare books, a collection he prized but which he also scaled back by giving away hundreds of volumes. He was known to slip rare first editions into the bookstalls that lined the Seine. Caresse took on lovers of her own, including Ortiz Manolo, Lord Lymington
Gerard Wallop, 9th Earl of Portsmouth
Gerard Vernon Wallop, 9th Earl of Portsmouth , styled Viscount Lymington from 1925 until 1943, was a British landowner, writer on agricultural topics, and politician.-Early life:...
, Jacques Porel, Cord Meier, and in May, 1928, the Count Armand de la Rochefoucauld. But behind closed doors, Harry applied a double standard, quarreling violently with Caresse about her affairs. Occasionally they strayed together, as when they met two other couples and drove to the country near Bois de Boulogne, drew the cars into a circle with their headlights on, and changed partners.
Affair with Henri Cartier-Bresson
In 1929, Harry CrosbyHarry Crosby
Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....
met Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography...
at Le Bourget
Le Bourget
Le Bourget is a commune in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.A very small part of Le Bourget airport lies on the territory of the commune of Le Bourget, which nonetheless gave its name to the airport. Most of the airport lies on the territory of the...
, where Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant had placed him under house arrest for hunting without a license. Crosby persuaded the officer to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days. They found they both had an interest in photography, and they spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil. Harry later said Cartier-Bresson "looked like a fledgling, shy and frail, and mild as whey." A friend of Crosby’s from Texas encouraged Cartier-Bresson to take photography more seriously. Embracing the open sexuality offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse, Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her. In 1931, two years after Harry Crosby's suicide, the end of his affair with Caresse Crosby left Cartier-Bresson broken-hearted and he escaped to Côte d'Ivoire
Côte d'Ivoire
The Republic of Côte d'Ivoire or Ivory Coast is a country in West Africa. It has an area of , and borders the countries Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana; its southern boundary is along the Gulf of Guinea. The country's population was 15,366,672 in 1998 and was estimated to be...
within French colonial Africa.
Publish poetry and new writers
Caresse and Harry published her first book, Crosses of Gold, in late 1924. It was a volume of conventional, "unadventurous" poetry centering around the ideas of love and beauty and her husband. In 1926, they published her second book, Graven Images, through Houghton MifflinHoughton Mifflin
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an educational and trade publisher in the United States. Headquartered in Boston's Back Bay, it publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers and adults.-History:The company was...
in Boston. This was the only time they used another publisher. Crosby later wrote that Harry's cousin, Walter Berry
Walter Van Rensselaer Berry
Walter Van Rensselaer Berry was an American lawyer, diplomat, Francophile, and friend of several great writers.-Biography:Berry was born in Paris, a descendant of the Van Rensselaer family of New York. After attending St...
, suggested that Houghton Mifflin would publish Caresse's poetry because "they have just lost Amy Lowell
Amy Lowell
Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.- Personal life:...
." Crosby's poetry remained relatively conventional, "still rhyming love with dove," by her own admission. A Boston Transcript reviewer said her "poetry sings" and a Literary Review contributor admired her "charming" child poems and French flavor. But a critic in the New York Herald Tribune wrote that "[f]or all its enthusiasm there is no impact to thought or phrase, the emotion is meager, the imagination bridled."
In April, 1927, they founded an English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
publishing company, first called Éditions Narcisse, after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. They used the press as an avenue to publish their own poetry in small editions of finely-made, hard-bound volumes. Their first effort was Caresse's Painted Shores in which she wrote about their relationship, including their reconciliation after one of his affairs. Her writing matured somewhat and the book was more creatively organized than her prior efforts. In 1928, she wrote an epic poem which was published as The Stranger. The writing is addressed to the men in her life: her father, husband, and son. In an experimental fashion she explored the various kinds of love she had known. Later that year Impossible Melodies explored similar themes. The Crosby's enjoyed a positive reception from their initial work and decided to expand the press to serve other authors.
They printed limited quantities of meticulously produced, hand-manufactured books, printed on high-quality paper. Publishing in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s put the company at the crossroads of many American writers who were living abroad. In 1928, Éditions Narcisse published a limited edition of 300 numbered copies of "The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque...
" by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
with illustrations by Alastair
Alastair (Baron Hans Henning Voigt)
thumb|Illustration from [[Harry Crosby]]'s book Red Skeletons published in 1927.Alastair was a German artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator. Mysterious, flamboyant, enigmatic and attractive to many people, he was born of German nobility in Karlsruhe. In his youth he joined...
.
In 1928, Harry and Caresse changed the name of the press to the Black Sun Press in keeping with Harry's fascination with the symbolism of the sun. Harry developed a private mythology around the sun as a symbol for both life and death, creation and destruction. The press rapidly gained notice for publishing beautifully bound, typographically flawless editions of unusual books. They took exquisite care with the books they published, choosing the finest papers and inks.
They published early works of a number of avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
writers before they were well-known, including James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (which was later integrated into Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
). They published Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle was an American writer, educator, and political activist.- Early years :The granddaughter of a publisher, Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio...
's first book-length work, Short Stories, in 1929, and works by Hart Crane
Hart Crane
-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
, D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
, and Eugene Jolas
Eugene Jolas
John George Eugene Jolas was a writer, translator and literary critic.-Biography:Eugene Jolas was born in Union City, New Jersey, but grew up in Forbach in Elsass-Lothringen , to which his family returned when he was two years old. He spent periods of his adult life living in both the U.S...
. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. In 1929, she and Harry both signed poet Eugene Jolas
Eugene Jolas
John George Eugene Jolas was a writer, translator and literary critic.-Biography:Eugene Jolas was born in Union City, New Jersey, but grew up in Forbach in Elsass-Lothringen , to which his family returned when he was two years old. He spent periods of his adult life living in both the U.S...
' The Revolution of the Word Proclamation which appeared in issue 16/17 of the literary journal transition
Transition (literary journal)
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...
. After Harry died in a suicide pact
Suicide pact
A suicide pact is an agreed plan between two or more individuals to commit suicide. The plan may be to die together, or separately and closely timed. Suicide pacts are important concepts in the study of suicide, and have occurred throughout history, as well as in fiction.Suicide pacts are generally...
with one of his many lovers, Caresse Crosby continued publishing until 1936, when she left Europe for the United States.
Harry's suicide
On July 9, 1928, Harry met 20 year old Josephine Noyes Rotch, whom he would call the "Youngest Princess of the Sun" and the "Fire Princess." She was descended from a family that first settled in ProvincetownProvincetown, Massachusetts
Provincetown is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 3,431 at the 2000 census, with an estimated 2007 population of 3,174...
on Cape Cod
Cape Cod
Cape Cod, often referred to locally as simply the Cape, is a cape in the easternmost portion of the state of Massachusetts, in the Northeastern United States...
in 1690. Josephine would inspire Crosby's next collection of poems called Transit of Venus. Though she was several years his junior, Harry fell in love with Josephine. In a letter to his mother, dated July 24, 1928, Crosby wrote:
Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until she married, when it temporarily ended. However, Josephine rekindled their affair, and in the late fall of 1929, Harry and Josephine met and traveled to Detroit where they checked into an expensive, USD$12 (about $ today) a day hotel as husband and wife. For four days they took meals in their room, smoked opium, and had sex.
On December 7, 1929, the lovers returned to New York where once again they attempted to end the affair, and Josephine agreed that she would return to Boston and her husband. But two days later she had delivered a 36-line poem to Crosby who was staying with Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem read: On December 9, Harry Crosby wrote in his journal for the last time:
Harry was found at 10pm that night in bed at Stanley Mortimer's studio in the Hotel des Artistes. He had a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple next to Josephine, who had a matching hole in her left temple. They were in an affectionate embrace. Both were dressed but had bare feet. Harry sported red-painted toenails and tattoos on the bottom of his feet. The Coroner said the Josephine had died at least two hours before Harry. There was no suicide note, and newspapers ran sensational articles for days about the murder or suicide pact—they could not decide which.
Later work
Harry left Caresse USD$100,000 (about $ today) in his will, along with generous bequests to Josephine, Constance, and others. His parents Stephen and Henrietta had it declared invalid, but reassured Caresse that she would receive USD$2000 (approximately $) a year until she received money from Walter Berry's estate. Upon her return to Europe, Polleen was brought from ChamonixChamonix
Chamonix-Mont-Blanc or, more commonly, Chamonix is a commune in the Haute-Savoie département in the Rhône-Alpes region in south-eastern France. It was the site of the 1924 Winter Olympics, the first Winter Olympics...
by Caresse's friend Bill Sykes, Billy was brought home from boarding school by another friend,, and the family and friends spent some time at the Mill. Polleen stayed with her mother for a few months, refusing to return to school. Billy returned to Choam, and in 1931 returned to the U.S. to attend the Lexox School.
After Harry Crosby's suicide, Caresse dedicated herself to the Black Sun Press
Black Sun Press
The Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby , American expatriates living in Paris...
. She also established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture, Crosby Continental Editions, to publish paperback books. Their friend Hemingway offered her a choice of The Torrents of Spring
The Torrents of Spring
The Torrents of Spring is a novella written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926. Hemingway's first long work, it was written as a parody of Sherwood Anderson...
or The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel written by American author Ernest Hemingway about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received...
as their debut volume. Caresse unfortunately picked the former which was less well received than the other volume. She followed Hemingway's work with nine more books in 1932 included William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's Sanctuary, Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle was an American writer, educator, and political activist.- Early years :The granddaughter of a publisher, Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio...
's Year Before Last, Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles....
's Laments for the Living, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , officially Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry , was a French writer, poet and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of France's highest literary awards, and in 1939 was the winner of the U.S. National Book Award...
's Night-Flight along with works by Alain Fournier
Alain Fournier
Alain Fournier was a computer graphics researcher.- Biography :Alain Fournier was born on November 5, 1943 in Lyon, France. He was married twice, first to Beverly Bickle and later to Adrienne Drobnies, with whom he had one daughter, Ariel.Fournier's early training was in chemistry, culminating in...
, Charles-Louis Philippe
Charles-Louis Philippe
Charles-Louis Philippe, French novelist, was born in Cérilly, Allier, Auvergne, on 4 August 1874, and died in Paris on 21 December 1909.- Life :...
, Paul Eluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, George Grosz
George Grosz
Georg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...
, Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
, and C. G. Jung. After six months of sales the books had only grossed about USD$1200. Crosby was unable to persuade U.S. publishers to distribute her work, as paperbacks were not yet widely distributed and they publishers were not convinced that readers would buy them. Her paperback books, an innovative product in the 1930s, were not well received, and she closed the press in 1933.
Crosby pursued ambitions as an actress that she had since her 20s, and appeared as a dancer in two short experimental film
Experimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
s directed by artist Emlen Etting
Emlen Etting
Emlen Etting was a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and member of Philadelphia’s elite Main Line Society. He attended schools in Lausanne, Switzerland, and St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island. After graduating from Harvard in 1928, he studied with the artist Andre Lhote in Paris...
, Poem 8 (1932) and Oramunde (1933). The Black Sun Press broadened its scope after Harry's death. Although it published few works after 1952, it printed James Joyce's Collected Poems in 1963. It did not officially close until Caresse's death in 1970.
Affair with black actor
In 1934, she had begun a love affair with black actor-boxer Canada LeeCanada Lee
Canada Lee was an American actor who pioneered roles for African Americans. A champion of civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s, he died shortly before he was scheduled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He became an actor after careers as a jockey, boxer, and musician...
despite the threat of miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws, also known as miscegenation laws, were laws that enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races...
. They had lunch uptown in Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
at the then new restaurant Franks where they could maintain their secret relationship. By the 1940s, Lee was a Broadway star and featured in the nation-wide run of the play Native Son
Native Son
Native Son is a novel by American author Richard Wright. The novel tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, an African American living in utter poverty. Bigger lived in Chicago's South Side ghetto in the 1930s...
. But the only restaurant in Washington D.C. where they could eat together was an African restaurant named the Bugazi. Unlike so many of her lovers, he didn't ask for money, even when his nightclub The Chicken Coop had a difficult time. When Crosby's brother Walter expressed his dismay at their relationship during a dinner in the early 1940s, Caresse was offended, and had little contact with Walter over the next 10 years. Crosby and Lee's intimate relationship continued into the mid-1940s and contributed to her world-view. Crosby wrote a never-published play, The Cage, transparently based on their relationship.
Marries again
While taking her daughter Polly to Hollywood where she aspired to become an actress, Caresse met Selbert "Bert" Saffold Young, an unemployed aspiring actor and former football player 18 years her junior. When he saw her staring at him in a restaurant, he immediately came over and asked her to dance. She described him as "handsome as Hermes" and "as militant as Mars." Her friend Constance Coolidge described Bert as "untamed" and "entirely ruled by impulse."Without a job, he convinced Caresse he just wanted to own a farm and they decided to look for land on the east coast. They drove into Virginia looking for an old plantation house smothered in roses. When their car broke down, she accidentally discovered Hampton Manor, a Hereford cattle farm with a dilapidated brick mansion on a 486 acres (196.7 ha) estate in Bowling Green, Virginia
Bowling Green, Virginia
Bowling Green is an incorporated town in Caroline County, Virginia, United States. The population was 936 at the 2000 census.The county seat of Caroline County since 1803, Bowling Green is best known as the "cradle of American horse racing", the home of the second oldest Masonic Lodge, and the...
. It had been built in 1838 by John Hampton DeJarnette from plans by his friend, Thomas Jefferson. John Hampton was the brother of Virginia Legislator Daniel Coleman De Jarnette.
On September 30, 1936, she wrote to the New York Trust Company and instructed them to send 433 shares of stock that she used to buy the property, which was in need of renovation. They were married in Virginia on March 24, 1937. Bert was always asking Caresse for money, he crashed her car, ran up the telephone bill, and used all her credit at the local liquor store. Bert ended one bout of drinking with a solo trip to Florida and did not come back to Virginia until the next year.
Writing pornography
In Paris during 1933, Caresse had met Henry MillerHenry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
. When he returned to the U.S. in 1940, he confessed to Caresse his lack of success in getting his work published. Miller's autobiographical book Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer (novel)
Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the...
was banned in the U.S. as pornographic, and he could get no other work published. She invited him to take a room in her spacious New York apartment on East 54th Street
54th Street (Manhattan)
54th Street is a two-mile-long, one-way street traveling west to east across Midtown Manhattan.-West Side Highway:*The route begins at the West Side Highway . Opposite the intersection is the New York Passenger Ship Terminal and the Hudson River...
where she infrequently lived, which he accepted, though she did not provide him with money.
Desperate for cash, Miller fell to churning out pornography on commission for an Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
oil baron at a dollar per page, but after two 100-page stories that brought him USD$200, he could do no more. Now he wanted to tour the United States by car and write about it. He got a USD$750 advance, and persuaded the oil man's agent to advance him another $200. He was preparing to leave on the trip but still had not provided the work promised. He thought then of Caresse Crosby. She was already pitching in ideas and pieces of writing to Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
's New York City smut club for fun, not money. In her journal, Nin wrote, "Harvey Breit
Harvey Breit
Harvey Breit was an American poet, editor, and playwright. He was married to poet and playwright Patricia Rinehart. He co-wrote the play The Disenchanted with Budd Schulberg, an adaption from Schulberg's novel of the same name, about the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Breit adapted other novels for...
, Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
, George Barker
George Barker (poet)
George Granville Barker was an English poet and author.-Life and work:Barker was born in Loughton, near Epping Forest in Essex, England, elder brother of Kit Barker [painter] George Barker was raised by his Irish mother and English father in Battersea, London. He was educated at an L.C.C. school...
, Caresse Crosby, all of us concentrating our skills in a tour de force, supplying the old man with such an abundance of perverse felicities, that now he begged for more." Caresse was facile and clever, wrote easily and quickly, with little effort.
Caresse accepted Henry's proposal. She wrote at the top the title given her by Henry Miller, Opus Pistorum (later republished as Henry's work as Under the Roofs of Paris), and started right in. Henry left for his car tour of America. Caresse churned out 200 pages and the collector’s agent asked for more. Caresse's smut was just what the oil man wanted, according to his New York agent. No literary aspirations, just plain sex. In her journal, Nin wrote, "'Less poetry,' said the voice over the telephone. 'Be specific.'" In Caresse the agent had found the basic pornographic Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
.
Caresse spent some of her time while her husband, Bert Young, fell into a drunken stupor every night churning out another 200 pages of pornography. In her diary, Anaïs Nin observed that everyone who wrote pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
with her wrote out of a self that was opposite to her or his identity, but identical with his desire. Polly or Caresse grew up amid the social constraints imposed by her upper-class family in New York. She had a doomed and troublesome romanticism with Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....
. She participated in a decade or more of intellectual lovers in Paris during the 1920s.
Political and artistic activity
Although her husband Bert was often drunk and infrequently home, Caresse did not lack for company. Caresse extended an invitation to Salvador DaliSalvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
and his wife, who were long-term guests, during which he wrote much of his autobiography. In 1934, Dalí and his wife Gala attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by Crosby. Other visitors included Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
, Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
, Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
, Stuart Kaiser and other friends from her time in Paris. She had a brief affair with Fuller during this time. By 1941, having divorced Bert, Caresse moved to live in Washington D.C. full-time where she owned a home at 2008 Q Street NW from 1937 to 1950, and she opened the Caresse Crosby Modern Art Gallery, what was then the city's only modern art gallery, at 1606 Twentieth Street, near Dupont Circle
Dupont Circle
Dupont Circle is a traffic circle, park, neighborhood, and historic district in Northwest Washington, D.C. The traffic circle is located at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue NW, Connecticut Avenue NW, New Hampshire Avenue NW, P Street NW, and 19th Street NW...
.
In December, 1943, she wrote Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
to ask if he had heard about her gallery and asked if he would be interested in exhibiting some of his paintings there. In 1944, she spent some time with at his home in Big Sur
Big Sur
Big Sur is a sparsely populated region of the Central Coast of California where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. The name "Big Sur" is derived from the original Spanish-language "el sur grande", meaning "the big south", or from "el país grande del sur", "the big...
, and later opened his first one-man art show at her gallery.
Publishes Portfolio
She also published under the Black Sun PressBlack Sun Press
The Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby , American expatriates living in Paris...
Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly
Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly
Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly was a cross-disciplinary literary journal published between 1945 and 1947. It was edited by Caresse Crosby and published through her Black Sun Press. Only six issues were published, each totaling about 1000 copies. Each issue was a series of loose sheets...
, in which she sought to continue her work with young and avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
writers and artists. She printed issues 1, 3, and 5 in the U.S. The second issue was published in Paris in December 1945, less than seven months after the end of the war. It featured primarily French writers and artists; the fourth issue was published in Rome and focused on Italian writers and artists; and the last issue was focused on Greek artists and writers.
During World War II and for some time after, paper was in short supply. Caresse printed the magazine on a variety of different sizes, colors and types of paper stock printed by different printers, stuffed into a 11.5 inches (29.2 cm) by 14 inches (35.6 cm) folder. Caresse printed 1,000 copies of each issue, and as she had done with the Black Sun Press, gave special treatment to 100 or so deluxe copies that featured original artwork by Matisse, Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...
, and others. She secured contributions from a wide variety of well-known artists and writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
(The End of the War), Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
(Letter to a German Friend, his first appearance in an English-language publication), Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, Weldon Kees
Weldon Kees
Harry Weldon Kees was an American poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, jazz pianist, and short story writer...
, Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
, Henri Cartier Bresson, Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
, Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle
Kay Boyle was an American writer, educator, and political activist.- Early years :The granddaughter of a publisher, Kay Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in several cities but principally in Cincinnati, Ohio...
, Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.-Biography:...
, Sterling A. Brown, Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...
, Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
, René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
, Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
, Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg née Levi was an award-winning Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize...
, Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, Weldon Kees
Weldon Kees
Harry Weldon Kees was an American poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, jazz pianist, and short story writer...
, Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
, Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.- Early years :...
, Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
, Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
, Francis Ponge
Francis Ponge
Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
, Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
, Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
, Yannis Ritsos, Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, Karl Shapiro
Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.-Biography:...
, Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...
, Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, and Giuseppe Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic and academic. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as Ermetismo , he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned...
. After the sixth issue, she ran out of funds and sponsors. This was her last major publishing effort.
Visits Europe
Having left Europe in 1936, she yearned to visit her daughter Polly who had been living in London the entire time. Civilian travel was still very restricted after the war ended, and she reached out to Archibald Macleish, now Assistant Secretary of State, who helped her make travel arrangements and obtain a Visa. She traveled aboard a military British Overseas Airways CorporationBritish Overseas Airways Corporation
The British Overseas Airways Corporation was the British state airline from 1939 until 1946 and the long-haul British state airline from 1946 to 1974. The company started life with a merger between Imperial Airways Ltd. and British Airways Ltd...
flying boat
Flying boat
A flying boat is a fixed-winged seaplane with a hull, allowing it to land on water. It differs from a float plane as it uses a purpose-designed fuselage which can float, granting the aircraft buoyancy. Flying boats may be stabilized by under-wing floats or by wing-like projections from the fuselage...
, the sole civilian passenger, hand-carrying her Elsa Schiaparelli
Elsa Schiaparelli
Elsa Schiaparelli was an Italian fashion designer. Along with Coco Chanel, her greatest rival, she is regarded as one of the most prominent figures in fashion between the two World Wars. Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli's designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like her collaborators...
hat box that contained Pietro Lazzari
Pietro Lazzari
Pietro Lazzari was an Italian artist and sculptor.An influential sculptor, painter, illustrator and printmaker Pietro Lazzari received his formal education from the Ornamental School of Rome . After the end of the First World War Lazzari joined the Italian Futurist movement and exhibited with such...
's drawings of horses, and Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...
's Passion of Christ watercolor series.
She learned after the war that Nazi troops set up base in her home "Le Moulin du Soleil," the French Mill. Caresse was upset when she learned that the German troops had painted over the wall of the home that had doubled as her guest book. Ironically, along with painting over the signature of Spanish painter Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
(he intertwined his name with that of a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer), D.H. Lawrence (who drew a phoenix), they also painted over the signature of Eva Braun
Eva Braun
Eva Anna Paula Hitler was the longtime companion of Adolf Hitler and, for less than 40 hours, his wife. Braun met Hitler in Munich, when she was 17 years old, while working as an assistant and model for his personal photographer and began seeing him often about two years later...
. She signed her name when she visited Harry and Caresse along with an Austrian big game hunter she was dating.
Post-war activity
She became politically active again and founded the organizations Women Against WarWomen against war
Women Against War is the name of two organizations of women opposed to war.-Women Against War, 1960s:Mary Phelps Jacob founded an organisation following an article, during the 1960s.-Women Against War, Delmar New York:...
and Citizens of the World, which embraced the concept of a "world community
World community
The term is used primarily in political and humanitarian contexts to describe an international aggregate of nation states of widely varying types. In most connotations, the term is used to convey meanings attached to consensus or inclusion of all people in all lands and their...
" which other activists like Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
also supported. Caresse continued her work to establish a world citizen's center in Delphi
Delphi
Delphi is both an archaeological site and a modern town in Greece on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus in the valley of Phocis.In Greek mythology, Delphi was the site of the Delphic oracle, the most important oracle in the classical Greek world, and a major site for the worship of the god...
, Greece, where in 1942 she bought a small house that overlooked the Grove of Apollo. In 1950, she divorced Selbert Young. In October 1952, she attempted to visit her property, but she was met by armed guards at Corfu as she got off the ferry from Brindisi. The police placed her under house arrest in the Corfu Palace Hotel, and after three days she was told she was not welcome in Greece, and ordered to leave. The American consul told her that the Greek government thought she was still "considered dangerous to the economy and politics of Greece." When this failed, she sought to create the "World Man Center" in Cyprus, which was to include a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
. This effort too came to naught and she continued to search for a center for her world citizen project.
In 1953, Caresse wrote and published her autobiography, The Passionate Years. She wrote it mostly based on her personal recollection rather than a specific set of sources. It contained "many amusing and intense anecdotes... but precious little about what was going on with him [Harry] is revealed."
Billy's death
In the winter of 1954-55, her son Billy Peabody was in charge of the Paris office for American Overseas AirlinesAmerican Overseas Airlines
American Overseas Airlines was an airline that operated between the United States and Europe between 1945 and 1950. It was headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.-Early history:...
. He and his wife Josette had a small third-floor walk-up apartment on rue du Bac that they heated with a fireplace and a stove. On January 25, 1955, Billy died in his sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide poisoning occurs after enough inhalation of carbon monoxide . Carbon monoxide is a toxic gas, but, being colorless, odorless, tasteless, and initially non-irritating, it is very difficult for people to detect...
, while Josette was found unconscious and revived. Caresse traveled to Paris for his funeral between appearances at colleges where she talked about her life and the Black Sun Press.
Supported artist's colony
She was first introduced to a run-down castle named Castello di Rocca SinibladaRocca Sinibalda
Rocca Sinibalda is a comune in the Province of Rieti in the Italian region Latium, located about 50 km northeast of Rome and about 15 km southeast of Rieti....
70 kilometres (43.5 mi) north of Rome in 1949 during a tour of Italy. Designed by Baldassare Peruzzi
Baldassare Peruzzi
Baldassare Tommaso Peruzzi was an Italian architect and painter, born in a small town near Siena and died in Rome. He worked for many years, beginning in 1520, under Bramante, Raphael, and later Sangallo during the erection of the new St. Peter's...
and built between 1530 and 1560 for Cardinal Alessandro Cesarini, in the 1950s she rented and later paid USD$2,600 (about $ today) for the estate. It came with the Papal title of Principessa (Princess). She paid to electrify the castle and thus brought electricity to the neighboring village. She told a reporter that the castle had 320 rooms, "at least that's what the villagers tell me." (The deed listed 180 rooms.) Many of the rooms had 21 feet (6.4 m) ceilings and the palace was virtually impossible to heat. "I wouldn't live here if you paid me," she told a reporter.
The residential portion of the palace contains three main apartments and two courtyards. The walls of the main hall are decorated by fresco
Fresco
Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...
es from the 16th century. She used the castle to support various artists, including poets' seminars. Henry Miller described Rocca Sinibalda as the "Center for Creative Arts and Humanist Living in the Abruzzi Hills." Other artists visited for a weekend or an entire season.
In 1962, filmmaker Robert Snyder made a 26 minute documentary about Caresee's history and her plans for the castle. The short film, Always Yes, Caresse took the viewer on a tour of the castle, led by Caresse. At one point in the film, she pulled down her blouse to reveal her ample bosom. He learned about the writer's retreat when he was in Rome filming a documentary on the Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel is the best-known chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City. It is famous for its architecture and its decoration that was frescoed throughout by Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio...
, The Titan; The Story of Michelangelo.
Caresse for a time divided her time between Rocca Sinibalda, which in the winter was too cold and unlivable, Hampton Manor in Bowling Green, Virginia
Bowling Green, Virginia
Bowling Green is an incorporated town in Caroline County, Virginia, United States. The population was 936 at the 2000 census.The county seat of Caroline County since 1803, Bowling Green is best known as the "cradle of American horse racing", the home of the second oldest Masonic Lodge, and the...
, a home in Washington, D.C., a sprawling apartment at 137 East 54th Street in New York City, as well as a residence in Rome. In 1953, Alvin Redman published her autobiography, The Passionate Years. She put Rocca Sinibalda up for sale in 1970, shortly before she died.
Death
Suffering from heart disease, she received what was then still-experimental open heart surgery at the Mayo ClinicMayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic is a not-for-profit medical practice and medical research group specializing in treating difficult patients . Patients are referred to Mayo Clinic from across the U.S. and the world, and it is known for innovative and effective treatments. Mayo Clinic is known for being at the top of...
. She died from complications from pneumonia
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...
in Rome, Italy on January 24, 1970, aged 78. Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
described her as the "literary godmother to the 'lost generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
' of expatriate writers in Paris." Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
described her as "a pollen carrier, who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships."
But she lived long enough to see many of the aspiring writers she nurtured in the 1920s become well known and accepted authors. The bra she invented went through a number of transformations and become a standard undergarment for women all over the world. Her first two husbands and her son Bill preceded her in death. She was survived by her daughter Polleen Peabody de Mun North Drysdale and two granddaughters.
Legacy
In 2004, Fine Line FeaturesFine Line Features
Fine Line Features was the speciality films division of New Line Cinema. It produced, purchased, distributed and marketed films of a more "indie" flavor than its parent company...
optioned Andrea Berloff's first screenplay Harry & Caresse. Lasse Hallström
Lasse Hallström
Lars Sven "Lasse" Hallström is a Swedish film director. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for My Life as a Dog and later for The Cider House Rules .-Life and career:...
was initially attached to direct and Leslie Holleran was attached as a producer.
As author
- Crosses of Gold Éditions Narcisse, Paris, 1925
- Graven Images, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1926
- Painted Shores Black Sun Press, Paris, 1927
- The Stranger Black Sun Press, 1927
- Impossible Melodies Black Sun Press, 1928
- Poems for Harry Crosby Black Sun Press, 1930
- The Passionate Years Dial Press, 1953
As editor
- Portfolio: An Intercontinental QuarterlyPortfolio: An Intercontinental QuarterlyPortfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly was a cross-disciplinary literary journal published between 1945 and 1947. It was edited by Caresse Crosby and published through her Black Sun Press. Only six issues were published, each totaling about 1000 copies. Each issue was a series of loose sheets...
Six editions, Washington, D. C.
External links
- Phelps Family History
- Mary Phelps Jacob Inventor of the Week Archive November 2001 (December 2003)
- "Caresse Crosby, Infield." Cosmic Baseball Association, 1998 (December 2003)
- Mary Phelps Jacob, Inventor of the Modern Brassiere
- Caresse Crosby Papers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale Special Collections Research Center
- The Crosbys: literature's most scandalous couple
- Caresse Crosby from "Always Yes, Caresse," 1962 (Video)
This article was originally based upon material originally written by Brian Phelps and licensed for use in Wikipedia under the GFDL
GNU Free Documentation License
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and...
.