Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  They also loved to hear of Nate’s youthful exploits. Rebecca’s brothers, Nate Junior and Milton, encouraged their father to retell the story of his running away from home at fifteen to serve as a drummer boy in the Civil War and his time in Andersonville Prison. Rebecca was stirred by Nate’s derring-do. Taking him as her model, she became something of a daredevil, enjoying swimming, horseback riding, and rough-and-tumble games—unlike her sister Rachel, who was named for their mother.

  Nate and Rachel Salsbury with Buffalo Bill (center) and Chief Iron Tail

  Mrs. Salsbury, a trained opera singer, had been the lead soprano in the Troubadours, Nate’s first theatrical company, when this popular group toured the country in the 1880s. After they married, she left the stage and did her best to erase the taint of the theater by maintaining bourgeois standards. Over time, Nate’s management of the Wild West Show made him wealthy and allowed the children to grow up in comfortable circumstances.

  Reading between the lines, one wonders what the Salsbury children made of their parents’ mixed marriage. Born Rachel Samuels in Newburgh, New York, Mrs. Salsbury was the daughter of a Jewish merchant. Little is known of her musical career except that, chaperoned by her mother, she toured with an English opera company before joining Nate’s Troubadours. Although Judaism held that offspring of a non-Jewish father and a Jewish mother should be brought up in the mother’s faith, the Salsburys’ religious training was minimal, like that of many children at ECS. Rebecca, who was named for Nate’s mother, internalized her heritage as a conflict between her maternal line and her father’s “American blood.”

  Early photographs of the twins show how little they resembled each other. Becky, her family nickname, was thought to favor Nate, and Rachel, known as Ray, their mother; Becky was the pretty one and the more high-spirited. (At two, judging by portraits in which a favorite toy, a sock monkey, is clutched first by one, then by the other, the twins were already rather competitive.) Dressed in 1890s finery with their smartly suited brothers, they are the image of the affluent middle-class life for which they were being groomed. Even in snapshots outside their Upper West Side apartment building, the twins are dressed to the nines. Portraits of Rebecca in her early twenties present her as a latter-day Gibson Girl, her dark waves swept on top of her head in a knot, but with a quizzical look in her eyes.

  Knowing that their father was part owner of a Montana cattle ranch, the Salsbury children had a sense of themselves as landed gentry. (The ranch had legendary status for the family because Nate claimed to have invented the Wild West Show there.) While Becky thought of her father and herself as westerners, the family spent holidays in Long Branch, the fashionable resort in New Jersey where Nate bought a “cottage” (a large house with servants’ quarters) in 1895, when he retired from the Wild West Show.

  Family photos show the girls in the care of a lifeguard; Becky became an avid swimmer even in frigid ocean water. Since the resort’s golden era, when celebrities like Diamond Jim Brady spent holidays there, Long Branch had been a destination for influential New Yorkers, and more recently, their Jewish counterparts. The children would have known that Long Branch was called “the Jewish Newport” because of the well-to-do families—Lehmans, Guggenheims, Bambergers, and Bloomingdales—who summered there.

  By 1900, Nate dressed in a three-piece suit and bowler hat, a style suited to his standing after he bought land in Long Branch to build a “select cottage colony.” The local papers hailed him as a public benefactor, and he hoped that the development would ensure his family’s future, given his loss of income from the Wild West Show under the new management. Nate’s wish to secure his legacy is apparent in his names for the colony, known as the Reservation, and its cottages (among them, Shoshone, Cherokee, Iroquois, and Navajo). That these three-story mansionettes each had ten bedrooms, modern plumbing, and butler’s pantries gave them the cachet to justify their status as rentals for those who hoped to live like Diamond Jim.

  While the Reservation increased the family’s resources by creating their own East Coast domain, Nate’s retirement was poisoned, he believed, by worsening relations with Cody, who kept asking for loans to maintain the Wild West Show. In his last years, as his children watched him write the memoir he meant to call “Sixteen Years in Hell with Buffalo Bill,” they absorbed his resentment of Cody and his belief that the show had ruined his health. Salsbury died on Christmas Eve, four days after the twins’ eleventh birthday. His body was taken to New York in a special car, the memorial service conducted by his fellow Masons. The New York Times noted Salsbury’s career “as boy soldier, comedian, and manager of amusement enterprises”; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show opened with its flag at half-mast.

  * * *

  . . .

  In 1903, when the Wild West Show began to deteriorate, Rachel Salsbury sold her husband’s shares to safeguard his investment. The family continued to live in their Upper West Side apartment (at 30 West Ninety-sixth Street), the children attending private schools while their mother dealt with the lawsuits that plagued the show’s shareholders. With her siblings, Rebecca pored over their father’s scrapbooks, which detailed his theatrical ventures (including the first troupe of black performers in the United States) and reread his letters, written in the joshing style that reinforced their family feeling. She and Milton planned to publish Nate’s account of the events that had brought them prosperity but shortened his life. In 1920, about the time that Rebecca met Paul Strand, Mrs. Salsbury sold the Reservation. The family fortunes continued to prosper; after Ray and Nate Junior both married, Rebecca continued to live with her mother, who kept close watch on the purse strings and discouraged her daughter’s wishes for a less conventional way of life.

  Dressed in a ruched and pleated high button blouse with a bow in her hair, Rebecca looks back at us from a contemporary portrait that marks a contrast to her accomplishments as gymnast, creator of theatricals, and author. She seems suspended in the atmosphere of her mother’s household—the overstuffed parlor that symbolized all that she yearned to escape. When she and Paul met, he would have been struck by the dissonance between her background and her potential. Like him, she had absorbed the ECS ethos; like his aunt, she had put this into practice in the kindergarten movement. Despite bouts of low spirits, she revived in like-minded company. That the Salsburys were wealthy would not have gone unnoticed; more important, Rebecca’s supple form made her a promising subject.

  The Salsburys. Seated: Rachel, Nate Junior; standing: Milton, Mrs. Salsbury, Rebecca

  Their courtship began in the winter of 1919, when Paul, at twenty-nine, was struggling to find work as a commercial photographer, and Rebecca, who had just turned twenty-eight, was living at home. He took her to concerts and art exhibitions, among them a Marin retrospective (his Woolworth Building series made her feel “half-drunk”). During the day, when Paul’s house was empty, they found privacy in his room, whose sparse furnishings struck Rebecca as the antidote to her mother’s decor. They exchanged books (Conrad, Nietzsche, volumes of verse) and read each other’s manuscripts. Paul told her to keep writing. He spoke of his admiration for Stieglitz but did not introduce them until later, a brief meeting in which his mentor joked about the ennui of travel in the grand style—as practiced by his wife and her mother.

  At this time, when Paul was photographing advertisements for such things as ball bearings and pharmaceutical products, he began a project with his friend Charles Sheeler. They hoped to capture the spirit of the city with Sheeler’s 35mm movie camera. In practice, this meant gaining access to the upper floors and rooftops of the skyscrapers from which they photographed. Over the next six months, they took shots of the crowds disembarking from ferries or rushing to work in Wall Street’s canyons, along with semiabstract views of Manhattan punctuated by smoke rising from locomotives and steamships. Strand called their portrait of the city in motion “the scenic.”

  Inspired by Alfred
’s portraits of Georgia, he also began what would become an extended portrait of Rebecca, for whom the walk from West Ninety-sixth Street to his home on West Eighty-third was a trip to another world. He photographed her with her hair down, her face showing the strain of trying to relax, and her dark hat shading her eyes. Although Paul’s prints moved her to want “to see more deeply,” she was concerned that they caught the “shadows and frets” that she kept hidden—the “neurosis” caused by being told repeatedly that her youth was slipping away. Paul was helping her “to get that notion by the throat.”

  Alone in Paul’s room, he and Rebecca became intimate, and in time, lovers. She teased him about their lovemaking, his knotting her garters on a trip to Coney Island, their availing themselves of a remote park bench that left horizontal stripes on her winter coat. Although she was not used to housekeeping (the Salsburys had servants), she joked that she would learn the skills needed as a poor man’s wife—in her view, an act of defiance that would meet with her mother’s disapproval.

  In the happiness of their new relationship, they wrote songs and poems for each other. (Like Paul’s letters to her, his poems have not survived.) One of Rebecca’s depicts the couple in Paul’s room: “How tenderly / The breeze parts our snowy curtains / Eager to wake,— / Yet fearful / Lest it intrude.” Each object testifies to their rapport: “Your open book / Touches my gloves / In rapt communion/….There is no need / For us to speak.” Rebecca called the poem “My Photography.”

  This free-verse declaration of love was included in a letter posted after Rebecca went to Niagara Falls with her mother at the end of May, the start of a long trip to Chicago, Montana, Canada, and Maine. Obliged to serve as Mrs. Salsbury’s traveling companion, she already had “mental indigestion.” For the next three months, Rebecca would cling to the idea of communion with Paul as the remedy for the rage she felt in such circumstances. On occasion, even thoughts of him did not suffice: “I wanted to write to you yesterday, but was not able to—I could not seem to push my surrounding and people far enough away to give me space enough to find you.”

  Still, she clung to the thought of his “camera magic.” And she looked forward to her two-week break from “Mummer” at her father’s ranch. Once in Montana, Rebecca asked for more portraits of herself and sent Paul a poem that imagines their love “consummated / First in pregnancy—Then—In rapt maternity.” In the same missive, she wrote, “It is curious to read your letters way out here. They are so full of contacts with other people, while here—there is only the language of the hills.” Then she pleaded, “Come out and loaf and laugh and lounge with me.” Her request (which echoes Georgia’s letters to Paul three years earlier) would become a motif in the couple’s relations and shape Rebecca’s sense of what was possible for herself.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Fine Companionship

  1920–1921

  The Red Menace preoccupied many Americans in the months leading up to the presidential election. The Socialists’ nomination of Eugene Debs, still in prison for his antiwar activities, along with the fear that an economic downturn could foment revolution, created major unease. The Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding, argued that the situation required a “return to normalcy”—the old ways of living forsaken in recent years.

  To progressives who deplored Harding’s stance (along with his neologism, normalcy), the thought of a return to prewar days meant the rejection of all that they had worked for. From Lake George, Stieglitz wrote to Dove, “With the quiet of the morning it is hard to believe that there is greater Hell in the world than during the War—& that sooner or later something must ‘happen.’ ” That summer, while he and Georgia stayed at the lake and Rebecca traveled with her mother, Paul continued to work on the “scenic,” which had, in a way, developed from his photograph of Wall Street’s canyons. He left for a vacation in Canada just before something happened that would persuade a majority of the electorate to vote for Harding.

  On September 16, a bomb filled with metal and dynamite went off across the street from the Morgan Trust building, killing thirty-eight people and injuring hundreds. (The timing, soon after the indictment of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, made it seem like a protest against their imprisonment; the case was never solved.) Official reaction was swift. Palmer stepped up the surveillance of radicals; the New York police formed a unit to monitor suspicious elements.

  Under the circumstances—the sense of postwar dislocation, growing antiradicalism, and the rise of xenophobic nationalism—groups like the United Americans called for a new order based on the Ten Commandments. Writing in The New Republic, a banker worried that America was entering “a maelstrom of bad times”; a businessman opposed to both unions and immigrants claimed that the United States was “in the hands of labor agitators, politicians and fruit peddlers”—by which he meant Italians, like Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Members of the Stieglitz circle would Americanize in their own way—as “workers” who would save America’s soul by portraying it in terms attuned to its own shapes and colors. The younger men who had recently joined Strand to gather around Stieglitz—Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, and Herbert Seligmann—shared his messianic view of the arts, a secular version, some said, of their middle-class Jewish outlook. Theirs was “the first generation of Americans consciously engaged in spiritual pioneering,” Frank wrote in Our America, a kind of group manifesto. 291 had shown the way toward America as “a promise and a dream.” Now writers like Sherwood Anderson and Van Wyck Brooks, artists like Stieglitz and Charlie Chaplin, and poets like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg were making art that would reinvigorate the country: “We all go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her.”

  Reading Frank’s Our America during her travels that summer, Rebecca was stirred by the author’s zeal (and perhaps pleased to know that he came from Long Branch). “Strando” having recommended the book, it struck her as the last word on “this business of being oneself.” At her father’s ranch in Montana, she indulged in behaviors she thought of as “hell-raising”—wearing pants to go horseback riding, peppering her speech with the ranchers’ “god damns,” and “building up a lot of badly needed character.” Photos taken there show her attempts to Americanize, western-style: Seated squarely on her saddle, she is the partner of her new idol, Bill Sullivan, the ranch manager. Meeting up with her brother Milton, who had been working in the mines, she listened to his tales of the Wobblies and was awestruck to meet the populist hero William Jennings Bryant.

  Paul sent books to assist in her project of self-discovery. Writing from her Lake Banff hotel, where Rebecca spent the rest of July with her mother, she said that she had just “met” Paul’s idol Sherwood Anderson in the pages of Our America and saw him, Dreiser, and Stieglitz as models of the kind of free thinking she admired: “It seems as if no outward circumstance or pressure can dominate this force of self and its expression.” She tried to keep this thought in mind even in dark moments (as when taking tea with her mother in her Sabbath garb, a white satin dress trimmed with lace).

  Correspondence with Paul provided Rebecca with a weapon against self-doubt. “No one can help as you do,” she wrote after imagining him by her side on a walk. Considering herself “a person of more than mediocre artistic ability,” she felt that she needed “some force or call it person [to] stimulate the ability into a flash of something fine.” Paul was that person. To demonstrate her talent, she sent him drawings, love poems, and verbal snapshots; to show her faith in him, she asked if he was not “absorbing too much of Stieglitz.” She added, “No man’s life parallels another’s exactly and you have enough personality of your own not to envy anybody.”

  Bill Sullivan and Rebecca on horseback, Square Butte, Montana, 1921

  Meanwhile, Rebecca tried not to think about what she would do after fulfilling her obligations. Paul offered to put her in touch with Waldo Frank’s wife, Margaret Naumberg, who had studied with M
aria Montessori before founding the Walden School in Manhattan to promote the development of young children through artistic self-expression. But Rebecca was reluctant to go back to teaching. Above all she looked to her relationship with Paul. She sent him a poem that began “Sometimes / You are so much in me / That I am you,” then received one from him that read “And you are far away— / Yet—very close— / No / Right inside of me.” Their accord gave her “a feeling of oneness—of perfect communion.

  By then, Rebecca’s sense of spiritual pioneering had deepened her scorn for formal religion as practiced by her mother. Absorbing Paul’s values (and by extension, Alfred’s), she echoed their talk about the importance of “seeing”: Paul’s photographs revealed the essence of his subjects—whether people, bowls, or landscapes. Just when she was on the verge of giving in to the plush life she was leading, a letter from him had the effect of “justif[ying] the other self and strengthen[ing] it.” But by August, when Rebecca returned to New York with bronchitis, she feared that she was “dying—spiritually.” To strengthen her commitment to “seeing,” she went to the Metropolitan Museum to revisit the paintings they had looked at together.

  “The circle is complete again,” Rebecca wrote from the Long Branch hotel where she had gone to convalesce—though it was odd to find a “kosher” family residing in the house her father had built for them. Old friends welcomed her; she joined a reading group of “well-fed ladies in irreproachable summer frocks” while continuing to devour works on Paul’s reading list, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and a volume of Nietzsche, both in favor in the 291 circle.

  By then, an emotional shorthand had developed between the couple based on their being Ethical Culture graduates and secular Jews. Rebecca’s allusions to her coreligionists assume that Paul shared her view of the people at the hotel where she and her mother spent September. It was “filled with F.F.P’s (First Families Palestine),” she wrote. On Yom Kippur, she went swimming, “to the consternation of the ladies of the house, who consider me slightly deranged.” She added, “I’d rather swim in the ocean than atone all day in a synagogue!” She asked Paul to send her his recent portraits of her—“I truly feel that they will be a source of health, strength and beauty.”