The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Julia Gardner had never made much of the fact that she had two unmarried brothers, Joseph and John Lowell Gardner, Jr. Both were bachelors, waiting for the right cousin to marry, and both were handsome—particularly John, whom the family called Jack. He was six feet tall, slender, with dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a drooping black moustache that gave him a brooding, poetic look. He was twenty-one years old, and after two years at Harvard he had entered the family business, where he had begun to show great promise. His father, in fact, while in Europe with his wife and daughter, had left young Jack in charge of things.

  Both boys were immediately smitten with Belle. In the little Memory Album that Belle Stewart carried about with her, in which she pasted invitations, calling cards, and notes from friends, Joe Gardner wrote, “May your own path in life be always strewn with flowers as gay as those which spring up everywhere around you under the vivifying influence of your sunny glance.” Even more smitten was his brother Jack. He danced with Belle. He strolled with her in the Common and on Beacon Hill. He showed her where land was being reclaimed from the Charles River, which would become Back Bay and an extension of Beacon Street, and where he intended to build a house. Then he proposed to her.

  A moment should be taken, perhaps, to explain why this extremely plain young woman should have exerted such a strong allure to the opposite sex. For one thing, there was her petite figure. American fashion was in a period of furbelows and flounces, bustles and hoop skirts, and the yards of bombazine seemed designed to deny the fact that women had breasts and hips and legs. In Paris, Belle’s father had taken her to the ateliers and couturiers and bought her a number of expensive dresses from designers who were creating clothes that clung to women’s bodies. Belle also liked to show off as much of her arms, throat, shoulders, and back as she could get away with. A friend once wrote, “Saw Belle last night … saw a lot of her!” And one of her many admirers, Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, wrote to her, saying he missed her and adding, “As it is, there seems to be no alternative but to sit … and think of the way your dress fits.” For young men accustomed to dancing with partners in hoop skirts, the sensation of dancing with a woman in a slinky dress was evidently overpowering.

  Then there was the matter of her wit, which would prompt yet another admirer to say, “Everyone who has ever talked with her declares that she is the most brilliant, charming, and attractive woman on earth”—high praise indeed. To be sure, Belle’s European experience had enabled her to talk intelligently with men on many subjects, but that may have been secondary to her quick delivery. She may not have said things which, repeated, were actually funny, but her ripostes were so fast and blunt and opinionated that they provoked amusement. Once, for instance, when she was asked to contribute to the Boston Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary, she replied, “I didn’t know there was a charitable eye or ear in Boston.” Later, another Boston woman tried to take credit for this comment, and Belle, hearing of this, announced, “The mot was mine. I will not give it up!”

  In addition to her vivacity, she exhibited stubbornness and willfulness—qualities which came as a distinct surprise in an era of Victorian propriety and seemliness. She once said that the only person she envied was the Dowager Empress of China because, when someone displeased her, she could order, “Cut off his head.” Finally, she loved mischief and scandal—even when it involved herself—and was known as “a terrible cut-up.” Some of Belle’s capers do not, in retrospect, seem very scandalous, but in their day they were enough to shock. For example, she liked to stay in bed until noon, something that in the 1860s was considered unladylike to the point of slatternliness. Once, too, when she was walking down the street, her shoes began to hurt so she simply took them off and continued in her stocking feet, unheard-of behavior. Finally, there was the shocking fact that she smoked. In Paris she had developed a fondness for Turkish cigarettes. Obviously she considered herself a free spirit, unbound by convention. Obviously too, for a girl who would never be remotely pretty, Belle Stewart had learned to make the most of what she had.

  On the matter of marriage, however, she was conventionally prim. Jack Stewart, she told him, would have to ask her father. And so Jack journeyed to New York to ask David Stewart for his daughter’s hand in marriage. David Stewart consented, and announced that his wedding gift to the couple would be to build them the house Jack Gardner envisioned in Back Bay. Isabella Stewart and John Lowell Gardner, Jr., were married on April 12, 1860, in Grace Church, New York City. Two days later, the bride would be twenty.

  * Julia Gardner’s mother was a Peabody “of Salem,” where it was said, “You are either a Peabody or a nobody.”

  6

  A PATRONESS IS BORN

  The first few years in the Massachusetts capital were not especially happy ones for the new Mrs. Gardner. Not long after her marriage to Jack, she began to enjoy, as they said, poor health, and for the rest of her life she would have a reputation for periodic bouts of sickliness. This was all very odd, because she was a strong and athletic young woman who would rather run than walk, who was an excellent figure skater, who loved to dance, and who was an accomplished horsewoman. Her ailing was even odder because doctors could find nothing whatever the matter with her. In the beginning, of course, she may have been suffering from homesickness, and there were several protracted visits to her family in New York, from which her husband would have to journey southward to retrieve her. But it was also true that Belle was a woman who liked to take, and keep, the center of the stage, and her illness may, unconsciously or not, have been her way of indicating that Boston was not paying enough attention to her.

  In Boston the matrons of society made their ritual rounds of visiting, dropping off the required numbers of calling cards, in the morning. But Belle’s habit of languishing in her bed till lunchtime meant that she was never “at home” to receive the ladies when they called, and this the women of Boston—who were not about to alter the custom of a lifetime to suit Belle, even if she was Mrs. John Lowell Gardner, Jr.—found off-putting. And there were some social activities from which Belle was excluded. By local custom also, each year’s crop of debutantes formed, at the finish of their coming-out season, a Sewing Circle. The Sewing Circles sewed, ostensibly, for the poor, even though the most arduous tasks involved rolling hems on handkerchiefs. Belle, not having been a Boston debutante of any year, was ineligible to join any of the Sewing Circles. Later, to be sure, she would find a way to use this exclusion to her advantage. By simply adding eighteen to the year of any woman’s Sewing Circle, it was possible to calculate her age. Belle’s age—though she annually celebrated her April fourteenth birthday with a party—would always remain her secret. While the other women of Boston aged, Belle would manage to grow younger. Once, when asked about her memories of the Civil War, Belle replied, “Oh, but I was much too young to remember it”—though she was twenty-one at the time of the Battle of Bull Run.

  Belle’s health always markedly improved during the winter season of the Boston Assemblies, or Germans, at which elaborate cotillion figures were performed, interspersed with waltzing. At these dressy gatherings Belle Gardner quickly became a star. While waltzing, there was a practice that was known as “chandeliering.” Chandeliering meant that the most accomplished couple on the floor maneuvered to the center of the ballroom, directly beneath the chandelier, and there proceeded to perform—their deepest dips, their most spectacular twirls—while the other guests moved back a little distance to admire the show. Belle Gardner was an expert when it came to chandeliering.

  She was also always careful to arrive at the Germans late, so as to make a dramatic entrance in one of her clingingly revealing Paris gowns. Soon, other women were arriving late as well, but somehow they never managed to upstage Mrs. Jack Gardner, who always seemed to appear a few minutes later. Her trick, it eventually turned out, was to conceal her tiny self in the cloakroom behind the coats until all her rivals were accounted for on the dance floor. That was her cue to appear. There were other qua
int traditions involving the Germans. A married woman, for instance, was expected to have only one brief “duty dance” with her husband. The rest of the evening she spent with other partners. In advance of each gala women received notes from gentlemen requesting that their names be placed on the women’s dance cards. If a woman accepted a gentleman’s request for a dance, custom dictated that the gentleman should send the lady a bouquet of flowers. The women then carried their bouquets of flowers to the dance, and a woman’s popularity could quickly be ascertained by the number of floral offerings she carried in her arms.

  Belle Gardner invariably made her entrance to the German with an armload of blooms. On at least one occasion an entire box at the ball had to be given over to Belle Gardner’s collection of bouquets. She had, however, one rival who threatened to outdo her. After a dance at which Belle and her competitor appeared to be running neck and neck, bets were discreetly placed among the gentlemen as to which lady might prove to be the winner at the next. The odds were running in Belle’s favor, but no one could be sure, and the next gala was the subject of much excitement and anticipation. Somehow, Belle Gardner, who always had her ear to the ground when it came to gossip, got wind of the wagers. The night arrived, and the competition appeared, so overburdened with nosegays that it seemed likely she had added to her collection out of her own purse. The suspenseful minutes passed, while everyone waited for Belle. Then she appeared, in form-fitting black, her bare white arms outstretched to receive her courtiers, carrying not a single blossom.

  One reason for Belle’s periodic ailments was that she desperately wanted to have a child. Her Gardner in-laws were all proving remarkably fecund, and the Gardners had let it be known that they expected John Lowell Gardner, Jr., to produce John Lowell Gardner III, who would eventually produce John Lowell Gardner IV, and so on until the end of time. In those days, pregnancy, though regarded as a blessing, was also treated as an embarrassment and an illness. The minute the tiniest bulge began to show, a woman went into seclusion in her home, and if she had to go out did so only when swathed in shawls and lap robes to conceal her “delicate condition.”

  Every month, in her new house at 152 Beacon Street, Belle Gardner took to her bed to await that delicate condition. Month after month, she was disappointed.

  Finally, in November 1862, after nearly three years of marriage, the condition appeared to manifest itself. When it was confirmed, Belle was overjoyed. She immediately went into her retirement; a nurse was hired and a nursery prepared. John Lowell Gardner III was born on June 18, 1863. The birth was difficult—Belle’s small frame was not well suited to childbearing—but the baby was healthy and Belle recovered nicely, and for the next two years both Gardners doted on their little son, boasting to all who would listen of Jackie’s latest accomplishment. The child learned to talk early, and Belle was convinced that Jackie was going to be a genius. Then, in the late winter of 1865, when he was not quite two, Jackie came down with a cold, which developed into pneumonia, and on March 15 he died. Belle was devastated. Moreover, part of the price paid for Jackie’s hard birth had been her capacity to have another child. Belle would let no one touch her dead son, and bathed him and dressed him herself for his funeral. For the rest of her life she would refuse to speak of her son, though she kept a miniature of him, with his dates and a lock of his baby hair tucked in the back of the frame, in a closed case on her writing table. Later, when one of her relatives asked if she could name her baby John Lowell Gardner III, Belle assented, but only on the condition that the parents promise never to use the nickname Jackie. For her there was only one Jackie.

  There followed two years of despondency and depression, and Belle was said to have suffered a “nervous breakdown.” In those days it was almost fashionable for women who had endured tragedies such as Belle’s to take to their beds more or less permanently and spend the rest of their lives in bed jackets, assisted feebly from bed to chaise longue and back to bed again by servants and long-suffering, indulgent husbands. It was an era, among other things, of the stylish invalid. Whether Belle Gardner would actually have taken to this sort of life seems, in retrospect, unlikely, and it is probable that, though she enjoyed all the care and sympathy that were lavished upon her for a while, she eventually grew bored with it. She was further prodded out of her torpid state by her doctor, who, in a common-sense way, pointed out to her that there was nothing really the matter with her, and that a great many women managed to live interesting and useful lives without children. The doctor prescribed a European trip and Belle assented. Still, Belle’s sense of the dramatic was such that she could not depart Boston for Europe without creating a certain amount of fuss. An ambulance was summoned to 152 Beacon Street, and Belle was lifted into it, to be driven to the ship that was to carry the Gardners abroad. From the ambulance she was carried up the gangplank on a mattress. Interestingly, no mattress was required ten days later when the Gardners debarked at Hamburg, nor was an ambulance.

  The Gardners embarked on an ambitious touring schedule that would keep them busily moving from capital to capital for months. They spent weeks in Sweden, more weeks in Norway, and more in Denmark. Then it was on to Russia—to St. Petersburg and Moscow—and from there to Vienna and night after night at the opera. From Vienna they went to Paris for two more months, filled with opera, theatre, museums, and shopping to replace the old couturier wardrobe. At one point Jack Gardner wrote home to say that all the travel had left him quite exhausted, but that Belle had recovered her energy to such an extent that she never seemed to tire at all.

  In many ways, that year, 1867, was a watershed year for Isabella Stewart Gardner. Had her son lived, she might have become just another conventionally independent Boston matron, seeing her son through Harvard and then on into State Street law or finance or the family business. But with Jackie’s death, the realization that she would never be a mother again, followed by the boredom of being an invalid, followed by the blood-stirring trip to Europe, she seemed to discover that her life had to point in some direction, that she had to do something to justify her existence. She was twenty-seven years old, getting too old to worry about how many bouquets she received from admirers at a party. She had to devote herself to a cause, an important cause, a cause that would last beyond her lifetime. The cause she chose was art, or, rather, Art.

  In the back of her mind, a grand scheme had begun to appear in outline—vague at first, but more specific the more she thought about it. There had long been patrons of the arts in Europe, but they had all been men. The men of the European aristocracy, after all, had time and money on their hands. In their leisure, they could become connoisseurs. In America it was just the opposite. America’s was a business aristocracy, and it was the wives of the rich who were idle. If great institutions of art and culture were to be developed and supported, patronesses of the arts would have to do it, and one of these was what Belle Gardner had decided to become. Her grand scheme, furthermore, included building her own museum, filling it with art, and giving it to the city of Boston. Her museum would be more than a great civic benefaction, a gift that would “uplift” and “inspire” the general public as, in those days, art was supposed to do. It would also insure that, long after she had gone, Boston would be reminded of her existence. Years before it became a reality, she had picked the name for it: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  Returning to Boston in the autumn of 1867, Belle embarked upon a serious program of self-improvement. She set off across the Charles River to attend lectures at Harvard. She read avidly—in English, French, and Italian—anything she could find on the subject of art and artists. She read Dante in the original. She hired a young actor to give her speech and elocution lessons. In her upstairs sitting room at 152 Beacon Street, over tea, she began conducting what amounted to a salon, to which visiting painters, writers, and musicians were invited. All this was quite new to Boston, which still tended to believe that no writer was worth reading, no painter worth hanging, and no composer worth hearing u
ntil he had been respectably dead for a number of years. Belle Gardner actually had “finds”—young people of no particular fame or distinction, but whom she considered promising—whom she included in her intellectual afternoons. In London, she had met James McNeill Whistler, who was considered a very controversial and radical painter at the time. Whistler had sketched Belle in pastels, and titled the portrait A Little Note in Yellow. At the same time, she had bought another Whistler sketch called Violet Note, a female nude. The pictures were the same size, and rumors circulated on Beacon Hill to the effect that Whistler had painted Belle in the nude. Though the nude had actually been a Whistler model, Belle liked the story and, to emphasize the point, hung the sketches side by side. By 1873, Belle was ready to buy her first important painting, by Emile Jacque of the French Barbizon School—a genre that was considered daring because it moved from interior still-lifes and formal portraits to the out-of-doors, to rural scenes of peasants and livestock, with much emphasis on sunlight and the weather.

  Belle Gardner’s approach to collecting was very different from Eva Stotesbury’s. For one thing, Belle had nowhere near as much money to spend. For another, she was not buying art to feed the expanding ego of a husband who considered himself a latter-day Maecenas. For still another, she had no Duveen constantly trying to stuff her rooms with his wares. Eva, to be sure, also read art history books and periodicals, but only after the fact, becoming an authority on English antiques only to familiarize herself with what she had just bought. Of necessity, Belle Gardner bought selectively and carefully, only laying down her money when she was sure of what she wanted, sure of what she was getting, and sure that the price was right. If Eva Stotesbury bought indiscriminately, Belle Gardner tried, at least, to buy intelligently.