One of the great influences in Belle’s early life was her paternal grandmother and namesake, Isabella Tod Stewart, a formidable character. A longtime widow, Grandmother Stewart lived on a large farm in Jamaica, Long Island, where Belle spent summers. The youngster ran away from the farm one day after she’d been told she couldn’t attend the traveling circus in the nearby town. Her grandmother’s tall black butler, a very dignified figure in Belle’s memory, tracked her down and swooped her up just as she was crawling under the circus tent. She was dragged home, wailing, her will thwarted.
Belle’s mother had less success than the butler in subduing the willful Belle. Her mother sought advice from a clergyman on how to handle her headstrong daughter. He supplied two Bible storybooks, both of which proved useless. One day Belle was spanked after she took off her shoes and walked home in her stocking feet from the very grand, very high-society Grace Church on 10th Street and Broadway where the family worshipped. Belle’s action was considered an unpardonable breach of decorum; the young girl couldn’t care less.
The Stewarts lived in a three-story brick home on University Place that included a room dedicated to gymnastics. Belle was tutored in calisthenics and learned how to do cartwheels and handstands. The unfulfilled hope was that the calisthenics would stretch the young girl and make her taller. When she heard the sound of drums coming from around the corner at Washington Square Park, then called the Parade Grounds, she knew that the Seventh Regiment was marching. With or without her parents’ permission, she’d dash over to see the splendid pageant. Young boys flocked to the edge of the grounds, mimicking their swashbuckling heroes. From an early age, Belle got the message that boys had more freedom, more fun.
Like other upper-class girls in New York, Belle was educated by private tutors and in the parlors of respectable women. She learned dancing from a Frenchman, and other refined skills such as piano playing and drawing. At sixteen her parents brought her to Paris for finishing school. There she could acquire the sheen of Old World sophistication, an important ingredient in attracting a suitable marriage partner. After Paris, Belle and her parents traveled to Italy, where Belle studied Italian and flirted shamelessly with her young teacher. In Milan she found inspiration in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, a palace featuring a private art collection. She told a friend that if she ever acquired enough money, she would do the same, filling a house “with beautiful pictures & objects of Art, for people to come & enjoy.”
The European interlude worked its magic. Shortly after her return to America, Belle became engaged to the brother of an American schoolmate she had in Paris. His name was John Lowell “Jack” Gardner Jr., scion of one of the wealthiest and most socially prominent families in Boston. Over six feet tall with a dark, drooping mustache, Jack was considered the most eligible bachelor in Boston. Young women all over Beacon Hill gnashed their teeth over the interloper from New York scooping up such a prize. They never forgave her.
Not having been born into their society, Belle would never be able to count herself a true Bostonian. When she was eighty-three years old and had lived in Boston for over sixty years a friend wrote to Belle in jest, “How do you like Boston anyway?” as if she were new to the place. The so-called Brahmin class in Boston—the WASP aristocracy that dated back to colonial times and whose lives centered around Harvard, a few choice clubs, and people who shared a handful of bloodlines—was extremely insular and considered themselves superior to even the richest New Yorkers. In their estimation, New York was all about money, excess, and ostentation. Boston, however, was the “Hub of the Solar System” (thus christened by the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.) and the “Athens of America.”
The Proper Bostonians, Cleveland Amory’s classic dissection of Brahmin society, opens with an illuminating story. Bank officials in Chicago, considering a young Bostonian as a possible employee, contacted the venerable investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Co. for a letter of recommendation. The Boston firm sent a glowing report, citing the young man’s peerless lineage: his father a Cabot, his mother a Lowell, his bloodlines intertwined with Peabodys, Saltonstalls, Appletons, and other grand Boston families. The young man couldn’t be better qualified. Not long after receiving the recommendation, the Chicago firm replied that they were grateful for the response, but that they were seeking a different sort of information in evaluating the prospective employee. After all, they wrote, “we were not contemplating using Mr.—for breeding purposes.” That in a nutshell was Boston.
Even New Yorker Elizabeth Chanler Chapman, an Astor by birth, found Brahmin society slightly daunting and claustrophobic. In 1923, she wrote from ultrafashionable Prides Crossing on the North Shore, near one of the many Gardner houses:
Sweet Son—
Here we are in the heart of the New England nobility. Everybody related to everybody else. “Weave a circle round them thrice, to keep his holy stock in-bred” . . . In listening to their conversation one never hears a last name mentioned. It is always Aunt Fanny & Cousin George. As a result, we have in Boston as bona fide an aristocracy as exists anywhere in the world,—a definite Court Circle—. . . These people are an absolutely unmixed race. Their voices, glances, gestures, modes of thought resemble those of no other race in the world. And, my! aren’t they distinguished! . . .
Others took a slightly dimmer view of the Brahmin set. Nineteenth-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson found herself surrounded by Bostonians in Venice and discovered that they had an “immense security about themselves” but that they were as a rule, “cold, cold, cold. . . . They are stiff. They never gush, and hate gush. They have an inborn belief that Boston ‘ways’ are by far the best in the world, and secretly they think all other ways vulgar.”
On April 10, 1860, four days before her twentieth birthday, Belle married Jack and moved to Boston. Her mother gave her a copy of A Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility, which Belle promptly ignored. As a wedding gift, her father bought the newlyweds a lot on Beacon Street and built them a house. Belle and Jack were pioneers in the trendy new neighborhood of Back Bay. At the time it was also the epicenter of construction and noise. The area, literally a tidal bay—hence its name—was still being filled in with gravel. All day long, railcar after railcar dumped rocks to create new real estate.
Belle’s entrance into Boston society was chilly, to say the least. All the Brahmins gathered in the autumn of 1860 for a gala ball honoring the visiting Prince of Wales. Belle, a wonderful dancer, was not shy about showing off her skill—or her sense of style. The day after the ball, a description of her outfit—a green moiré dress, a velvet headdress, and flashy diamond jewelry—appeared in a Boston newspaper. What would have been a coup in New York was social death in Boston. Drawing attention to oneself was considered very bad form in this New England culture.
The young New York bride was conspicuously not invited to join a single “sewing circle,” a Brahmin version of an exclusive sorority—in this case, a group of women clustered around a particular debutante. The elect would gather to lunch and gossip, and maybe even sew a few stitches. (During the Civil War the sewing became more serious.) The hierarchy of sewing circles absolutely defined social status in Boston. The New York Times ran an article about that “peculiar social institution” in 1888, noting: “From time to time, as strangers come to town, by marriage or otherwise, they are, if judged worthy, admitted to the sewing circle which is deemed most appropriate to their age and standing. Not to be admitted to these mysterious coteries is a species of social ostracism of which the severity is perhaps fully appreciated only by the native-born Bostonian.” Belle fell into the “unworthy” category, barred from entry.
Belle endured this social slight, despite the fact that the Gardner family boasted some of the bluest blood in the Hub. Jack’s mother was a Peabody; his brother married a ninth-generation descendant of John Endecott (also spelled Endicott), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were related or intermarried with some of the grandest names in Boston: Lowe
ll, Russell, Loring, and Sears. The Gardner men, of course, all went to Harvard, though Jack didn’t make it through, dropping out after his sophomore year. (Harvard belatedly conferred a BA degree upon him in 1898, forty years after he should have graduated.) The family shipping business owned a large fleet of sailing vessels with names like Arabia and Nabob that ventured to the East Indies, China, and Russia, returning with precious cargoes of tea, ginger, saltpeter, shellac, indigo, and cloth. Pepper from Sumatra was a particular specialty. The Civil War, with its Union blockade and Confederate privateers, turned shipping into a risky business.
When President Lincoln called upon the young men of Boston to volunteer for the Union, neither Jack nor his two able-bodied brothers took up arms. Boston was a hotbed of abolitionism—not so in the Gardner household. Their business interests led the Gardners to take a rather conciliatory view of the South; they had been among the minority in Boston who opposed Lincoln during the presidential election. They had southern connections: Jack’s grandfather had lived for a time in South Carolina; Jack’s sister married Joseph Randolph Coolidge, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson. All three Gardner brothers managed to avoid the war even when a draft was put in place. An August 23, 1864, letter from Jack to his younger brother George notes the new enterprises the family was expanding into—railroads and manufacturing companies—and also assures George that the family had procured a substitute to fight in his place. He doesn’t mention how much the mercenary cost (though a Gardner in-law recalled paying $785—about $15,000 in today’s money—for the privilege of sitting out the war), but he assures George that his replacement “is safe on board the receiving ship.” Avoiding the draft while other young Bostonians, including many Harvard men, were fighting and dying for their country put the Gardners in a rather awkward position. Belle, though in her twenties during the war, later claimed to have absolutely no memory of the conflict. Perhaps it was a case of selective memory.
The fact that the Gardners remained on the sidelines during the war certainly did not help Belle’s social status. Shunned by the first families of Boston, the once-vibrant firebrand turned inward. But the woman who had once run off to the circus showed flashes of her old self—skating gracefully in the Public Garden, riding horseback at the Gardners’ summer place in Brookline, and, on the rare social occasion, still attracting too much attention on the dance floor.
And then she became pregnant. On June 18, 1863, she gave birth to a son, John Lowell “Jackie” Gardner III. A photograph depicts a smiling Belle nuzzling the neck of nine-month-old Jackie. By November 1864, the proud mother boasted of her toddler’s growing vocabulary and clear diction. Four months later, Jackie died of pneumonia; he was not quite two years old. Before he was buried, Belle dressed him for the last time and brushed his hair. A lock of Jackie’s fair-colored hair was saved and kept with a miniature portrait of him, which was inscribed with the dates of his birth and death. As the years went by, Belle never mentioned her son, though she’d go into seclusion on the anniversary of his death. Within months of Jackie’s death she became pregnant again, but miscarried.
Weighed down by a prolonged depression, Belle turned to her doctor for advice. Get away with Jack, he advised her. Try to forget. In the spring of 1867, Belle—still such an invalid that she was brought downstairs on her mattress—was transported to the dock by ambulance, and carried on board ship. New worlds now opened up for her.
Belle and Jack arrived in Germany on June 10, 1867, and then pressed on to Scandinavia, where they ventured north to the edge of the Arctic Ocean to see the midnight sun. On they went to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, and Paris. Two months in Paris transformed Belle’s look, and also Belle. She found her way to 7 Rue de la Paix, the salon belonging to Charles Worth, the designer who virtually invented haute couture, the artisan whom Empress Eugénie dubbed “le tyran de la mode,” the marketing genius who probably introduced designer labels on dresses. The most fashionable women in the world rushed to his doors in liveried coaches. He was quite autocratic—“half merchant, half Venetian doge”—and would snub anyone he didn’t fancy. Emerging from his workroom in a dressing gown, Worth took one look at Isabella, sized up her eager-to-please husband with his very deep pockets, and decided that she would make a fine client. She might be plain, but her figure was pleasing. He had a soft spot for American millionaires—he dressed Vanderbilts, Astors, Carnegies, and their ilk. They were, according to him, “the best customers he has—far better than queens. They ask the price; American women never do. They simply say, “Give me the best, the most beautiful, the most fashionable gown.’ ” One of his ball gowns could cost ten thousand dollars—and would be worn only once.
Returning to America, Belle now appeared around Boston in her new Worth creations. No more hoop skirts for her, though that cage-like costume, designed to hide the fact that there was even a body beneath it, was still in vogue in the Hub. Instead, Belle wore a shocking new walking suit that accentuated her figure, revealed six inches of leg, and showed off her handmade kid shoes and colored stockings. Boston matrons frowned. Tongues wagged over her provocative, low-cut gowns. One evening a staid old Brahmin crossed paths with Belle as he was leaving a party and she was arriving fashionably late to make a dramatic entrance. At the sight of her he reportedly blurted out, “Pray, who undressed you!” And she countered, “Worth. Didn’t he do it well?” This was just the sort of conspicuous display of wealth—and flesh—that New York millionaires reveled in, and from which Boston Brahmins recoiled. If New England society didn’t approve of her and the way she dressed, all the better in Belle’s view. She became a fixture at social events and a favorite dance partner for eligible bachelors and not-so-eligible married men.
Jack’s mother was impressed, if somewhat guardedly, by Belle’s nonstop socializing. “She is every day and evening in Society,” she wrote to another son, “[her] powers of endurance are beyond anything I imagined.” Mrs. Gardner Sr. tried to put a good face on the rather shocking fact that Belle went to theater parties and other events in the presence of young men—but without her husband: “I think it is a real blessing that J [Jack] is spared some of the demands upon his time and powers of digestion that Belle is required to perform.” Indulging in such a frenetic social life would interfere with his business obligations. That sanguine view of Jack wasn’t shared by onlookers, however. Belle surrounded herself with a group of young male aesthetes, most of them gay. One of them wrote of Jack as a kind of “subordinate, comic, errand-boy” for Belle. Though he was an important personage in his own business world, he and his wife’s lives were quite separate, “like royal spouses occupying opposite wings in a palace, they had their own exits and entrances, their own hours and their own friends.”
More travel beckoned. A trip abroad might last a year or more in the era of steamships. Though prone to seasickness on the open ocean, Belle willingly endured the weeks of shipboard misery. Jack on the other hand, savored the ocean crossing itself as a respite from business and other cares. To his brother he described cold, foggy weather—not much different from Boston in April—adding, “there has been no storm to interfere with my happiness.” Perhaps he did not mean typhoons but the storms of his wife. With Belle sequestered in their stateroom, Jack enjoyed life on deck, reading, relaxing, chatting at dinner with the other passengers and the captain, who remembered his brother from a previous journey. Jack was almost disappointed as they approached landfall during one trip abroad, fearing “the best part of the fun is over.”
For Belle the fun was just beginning. She loved the sensation of travel—the sights, the sounds, the colors, the fragrances; the religious ceremonies so different from the pallid church services in Boston; the native art, decoration, and costume; and the people themselves. She became a student of the world, creating elaborate journals of her travels—twenty-eight volumes of them, chronicling the various trips she took from 1867 until 1895. In addition to her running text, the travel albums burst with illustrations and ephemera: be
autiful watercolors Belle painted of papyrus reeds, lotus flowers, ancient Egyptian ruins, and sailing vessels on the Nile; commercial photographs of famous temples, sumo wrestlers, a tattooed man, geishas plying their trade, and a photograph from Texas of two men hanging from a gallows that she captioned “San Antonio Justice”; pressed flowers and leaves; menus, theater tickets, and pamphlets she picked up along the way. Everything was of interest to her. She had an insatiable impulse to explore life and to curate beauty.
Belle and Jack kept parallel journals of their four months in Egypt in 1874 and 1875. Jack, convivial but hardly a romantic, focused on such things as the distances they covered each day on their Nile travels and the troublesome fleas in their hotel in Cairo. He’d brought a camera but couldn’t quite make it work. Belle, the romantic one, fell into enchantment with the land of Cleopatra—its dreamlike colors, its silent desert, its camels and donkeys, its storied past, and its people who seemed to have “stept out of the ‘Arabian Nights.’ ”
“Oh the grace and beauty of the men and oh their gorgeous clothes!” she wrote. “From the Princes of Persia to the barber’s son, what graceful languor and what perfect postures.”
In mid-December Belle and Jack took a carriage to the Pyramids at Giza with three women travelers. To Belle’s annoyance, additional carriage loads of mainly American tourists were at the site as well as an Arab guide. When they moved on to the nearby Sphinx, she separated herself from the crowd and found an isolated spot. Fully dressed in Victorian garb, Belle lay down on the sand to soak in the whole atmosphere. It was at that moment, she wrote, that “solemnity and mystery took possession and my heart went out to the Sphinx.” She scooped up some sand and saved it. Afterward, she reported, they had lunch “with 40 centuries looking down upon us.” She shared some of her food with the dogs and the begging children who trailed after them.
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