As Boston’s new patroness of art and artists, Belle soon acquired one of her first big plums, the semiexpatriate American novelist Henry James. Belle had first met James in London—though their paths may have crossed earlier in Boston, when he was a still-unknown student at Harvard—and now, by 1882, James was a periodic guest at Belle’s salons. He was working on a dramatic version of Daisy Miller, which at that point had been his most successful novel, and he spent two afternoons and evenings alone with Belle in her sitting room, reading the play aloud to her. She pronounced it brilliant (later, the critics would not). James, admiring the rapt attention she gave to his reading, and obviously enjoying her critical reaction, developed a kind of schoolboy crush on Belle and wrote her effusive letters in which he spoke of “the harmony of your presence” and “the melodies of your toilet.” During these evenings à deux with Henry James, Belle’s servants were instructed that the mistress of the household was not to be disturbed. Word of these “pretty little evenings,” as James called them, reached the rest of Beacon Hill through backstairs gossip—the Irish servants of Boston all knew one another—and, naturally, there was talk.
It began to be noted that, while many of Mrs. Gardner’s little gatherings contained members of both sexes, many more were attended by gentlemen only. It was further noted that Mrs. Gardner much preferred the company of younger men. There was the young actor, for example, who gave her private instruction in voice projection—he was young enough to have been her son. Henry James was also younger (though in fact only three years younger), and also quite apparent was the fact that Mrs. Gardner’s husband didn’t seem to mind.
The location of the Gardner salons had a lot to do with the talk. Rather wickedly, Belle always referred to the upstairs sitting room as “my boudoir.” In Europe a sitting room can be called a “boudoir,” but in Boston a boudoir was a bedroom, nothing else. Even though Belle’s Beacon Street “boudoir” contained no bed, it was on the second floor of the house, where the principal sleeping rooms were, and it was considered just a few short steps from the tea table to the four-poster.
All this remained idle chatter and speculation, of course, as long as Jack and Belle Gardner continued to appear together at the Germans and other social functions. It was clear from Jack’s admiring expression, as he watched his dainty wife glide across the dance floor in the arms of other men, that he was proud of her popularity and accepted her flirtatious ways. His business was continuing to prosper, and he was now beginning to shower her with important jewels—a long rope of pearls with a ruby pendant, a pair of large diamond clips that she often wore in her hair. Every year he replenished her wardrobe with expensive new gowns from Worth of Paris. It seemed obvious that he adored her.
In the case of Henry James, of course, Boston need not have worried. A lifelong bachelor, devoted to his mother, James had an absolute terror of predatory women, and his only women friends were chosen from the ranks of the securely and comfortably married. James, if not a homosexual, was an asexual creature. But in 1881 quite a different sort of man appeared on the Boston scene. He was Frank Marion Crawford—six feet tall, athletically built, matinee-idol handsome, brought up and educated in libertine Italy. Crawford was also enormously vain, and was often observed carefully posing in front of mirrors, admiring his face and his oarsman’s physique. He had no visible means of support, but was well connected in Boston. An aunt was Julia Ward Howe, who wrote, among other things, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Crawford had journeyed from Europe to visit his American relatives and to pursue some vaguely defined career, and it wasn’t long before he was a regular figure at Belle Gardner’s boudoir afternoons. He also appeared on outings with her in her carriage. The two picnicked together in the Public Garden and lunched together in restaurants, where each seemed to have much of intense importance to discuss with the other. Many of their little confidences, furthermore, were communicated in Italian, to everyone’s frustration since no one knew what they were talking about. Again backstairs gossip told of long do-not-disturb afternoons in Mrs. Gardner’s boudoir, and the servants told one another of secret letters that were carried back and forth. Frank Crawford was twenty-seven. Belle Gardner was forty-one.
Up to now there had been just sly talk of Belle’s “flirtations.” But this was quite, quite different. Belle, of course, insisted that Frank Crawford was another of her “finds,” a talented protégé whose gifts would one day take the world by storm, a budding artistic genius of some sort. To the gossips of upper-crust Boston, it seemed quite simple. Mrs. Jack Gardner was having an affair.
7
FLINGS
Frank Marion Crawford’s name today, as a novelist, does not cause gasps of recognition. In Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations he is given only a footnote, for having written, “What is charm? It is what the violet has and the camellia has not.” Few people today read the swashbuckling, romantic, and purple-prosed novels that he produced in the 1880s and 1890s—Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India, Dr. Claudius, and Children of the King—but it is thanks to Isabella Gardner that these volumes were written.
When Crawford first met Belle, he talked of becoming an opera singer. He had a pleasant voice, but the trouble was that he could not stay on key. What he enjoyed most was going to parties, and his Boston relatives worried that his popularity and heavy social schedule would make him “too sensual.” They also fretted about what seemed an unusual fondness for alcoholic stimulants, and blamed his lack of productivity on the fact that he had a key to his aunt’s wine cellar. Belle’s influence, to her credit, would change all that. During the early part of their two-year relationship, she noticed that Frank’s drinking was causing him to gain weight. Belle herself disliked alcohol, but she disliked fat even more. Under the strict regimen of diet, exercise, and total abstinence from liquor which Belle put him on, he slimmed down. It was also Belle’s suggestion, since he did not seem cut out for a career in opera, that he try his hand at writing a novel. The result was Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India, a shortish work designed to capitalize on the popularity of exotic romanticism. It was completed in the spring of 1882, promptly sold to Macmillan, and published in December of that year. Crawford gave Belle the first printed copy of the book, with a handwritten sonnet on the flyleaf. At the time he wrote to her, “I think of it as someone else’s work; as indeed it is, love, for without you, I should never have finished it.”
Obviously it was thrilling for Belle to think of herself as the inspiration for a young novelist’s first book. And Crawford possessed other attributes that attracted her to him. He flattered her, fawned over her, showered her with compliments and flowers. It is possible, too, that she saw him as a kind of surrogate for her dead son. As for Crawford, his feelings toward Belle are harder to fathom. His letters and notes to her were full of “love,” and “my love,” and “my dearest lady,” but it is important to remember that this sort of effusiveness was fashionable at the time, and was perhaps not intended to be taken seriously. On the other hand, Crawford had grown up in Italy, where affairs with married women were not uncommon and no cause for alarm, provided they were managed discreetly. In Boston, noting the quaint custom by which married ladies received bouquets from other male admirers, Crawford may have assumed that Boston ladies routinely took lovers. Or he may simply, and rather cynically, have seen Belle as a lonely woman whose husband spent most of his time at his office and club, and found that she made a convenient sponsor who happened to like his work. Certainly he spent a great deal of time under her roof, eating her meals. When she made him expensive gifts—among them a gold watch—he accepted them. He had himself, it might seem, a good deal. As we shall see, there are indications that Frank Crawford was not a very nice fellow.
As to how Jack Gardner felt about the situation, there is no telling. On the surface, at least, he seemed unperturbed. No change in his behavior or demeanor was noted, though there are hints that he was growing a little tired of having Crawford almost constantly underfoot in
his house. At one point Jack Gardner offered Crawford a job in his company, possibly to give the young man something to do besides read aloud to Belle from works in progress—Crawford immediately launched into a second novel—but the offer was refused. And whether Belle and Crawford ever had a sexual relationship is also a matter of conjecture. When Belle and her husband were “told” by her doctor that she could have no more children, this did not mean that a hysterectomy or other sterilizing operation—unknown in those days—had been performed. It simply meant that the doctor had advised the couple to refrain from activities that could result in childbirth. Assuming this, and assuming that Belle believed that if she conceived again it could cost her her life, her sexual frustration in a passionless marriage, and in an unconsummated new romance, might easily have added to her passion for Frank Crawford. Because passion it was on her part—it was obvious to everyone who saw them together. Clearly, Belle Gardner had fallen head over heels in love.
And the trouble was, it was not discreet. They rode together, strolled together, danced together, went to the opera and concerts together. Town Topics, the New York gossip sheet, soon got wind of the Boston romance, and began writing about it. Cleverly, to steer clear of libel, the paper referred to Belle as “a married belle.” Everybody in Boston, of course, knew whom the paper was talking about.
Now, early in 1883, there were new plans afoot. A journey to the Orient was being planned, and the travelers would be Belle and Jack Gardner—and Frank Crawford. Picking up the tab for Crawford’s ticket and expenses, naturally, would be the Gardners. At first Crawford seemed genuinely excited about the prospect of the trip, and he approached his uncle, Sam Ward, and invited him to join the jolly party and make it a foursome. Ward, however, sensing trouble ahead, was dubious about the whole idea, and declined. He had already expressed concern about what he called, in uncertain French, his nephew’s “affaire du coeur.” The next news was that Jack Gardner would not be accompanying his wife and Crawford to the Far East. Some sort of crisis seemed to be brewing, and Crawford asked his cousin, Maud Howe, to join the tour as his and Belle’s chaperone. Maud was also apprehensive, and the plans for the grand voyage remained in abeyance.
Meanwhile, in a number of hushed Back Bay drawing rooms, secret family discussions had begun. Matters were being weighed, arguments put forth, priorities considered. And in the course of these, while Belle Gardner was planning her wardrobe and packing for the trip with her young swain, Frank Crawford would be persuaded not only to withdraw from the tour but to slip out of Belle’s life entirely, without warning and without adieu, and under cover of darkness. In one of his letters to Belle he had written, “There is only to be one goodbye between us, and I do not think it will be spoken aloud, nor written, for it will come when one of us two reaches the end, and it will be very long before that. Goodnight then, and sweet dreams.…” Now, however, he was planning a very different sort of departure.
In her biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Louise Hall Tharp hints that Jack Gardner may have issued some sort of ultimatum to Crawford which prompted him to behave as he did. There is, however, no real evidence of this. To have threatened Frank Crawford in any way would not have been Jack Gardner’s style. Jack Gardner’s position in Boston society was unassailable. So was his wife’s. The Gardners were invulnerable to gossip. Jack Gardner knew he had married a spirited filly, and he had long ago given her her head. More than a domestic crisis in the Gardner household would be needed to understand why Frank Crawford chose to walk out on his adoring patroness in such an ungallant fashion.
To begin with, it is necessary to understand the new relationship that was developing between artists and American society. America in the 1880s was going through what would later be described as an artistic Renaissance. In the years immediately following the Civil War, the men who had made great fortunes—and their wives—had turned for Culture to Europe, where the great castles and châteaux and collections were systematically looted of the art treasures they contained. There was ample criticism of this, and new-rich American collectors were depicted by journalists almost as cartoon characters, waving sheaves of money in exchange for European Old Masters to decorate their mansions. The rich responded to the critics defensively. Breast-thumping patriotism was trotted out. America, it was argued, was now becoming the most powerful nation in the world. It was America’s right, its Manifest Destiny, to acquire the finest things that the world had to offer, including art from Europe, where fortunes were declining. The architect Stanford White, when reproached for importing so much European art to adorn the houses he was designing for moneyed Americans, would use this argument, claiming that “In the past, dominant nations had always plundered works of art from their predecessors … America was taking a leading place among nations and had, therefore, the right to obtain art wherever she could.”
Edith Wharton was also sensitive on this issue, and in The Custom of the Country she used the forced sale of Boucher’s famous Saint-Désert tapestries as a literary symbol for the transfer of power from a decadent old European aristocracy to the muscular new American plutocrats. Thus the looting was justified. America was merely taking what was justly her due.
But by the 1880s it had begun to seem possible that America could contribute artists of her own. This was a much more exciting notion than one that depended, abjectly, on borrowing taste and talent from across the Atlantic, and now, in another burst of patriotism, there was talk of the New American Masters in the arts. The rich were quick to jump on the bandwagon and to find, in the vision of an American Renaissance which would surpass anything that had occurred in Imperial Rome, Renaissance Florence, or Bourbon Paris, an outlet for any guilty feelings they might have had. The result of the new vision would be increased patronage of public buildings, monuments, painting, sculpture, poetry, and letters by American artists and writers. In the course of this Renaissance, the artists and writers themselves, especially if they were “attractive,” would find themselves swept into the highest circles of perfumed society. Celebrities such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Cassatt, and Cecilia Beaux were already socially well placed. But under the new rules more raffish types such as John Singer Sargent, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens were also asked to all the best parties.
In Boston, the aristocratic Wards and Howes were particularly concerned about what was happening to the reputation of their cousin, Frank Marion Crawford. He was now a published novelist, which gave him the credentials of a serious artist. But the affair with Belle Gardner had gone on too long, and too many tongues were wagging. Furthermore, the gossip was not damaging Belle’s social position—it was damaging his. By continuing in the public role of protégé of a wealthy older woman, Frank Crawford was in danger of not being taken seriously by Boston society. He was becoming a laughingstock, the butt of lewd jokes. Cousin Maud was particularly emphatic to her relative on this point. His position in society was something Frank Crawford cared more than a little about, and her arguments were obviously persuasive. Thus the plot evolved for Frank’s secret escape from Boston.
If he even considered a farewell meeting with Belle, or a message to her, he was dissuaded from both courses. A meeting would have meant a confrontation and a “scene,” and a message would have left Belle with something in writing that she might have used against him. He should leave, Cousin Maud told him, like a man, if not exactly like a gentleman, without a farewell or an explanation, and abandon Belle in the fashion of a bride left jilted at the altar.
On the night of May 12, 1883, dressed elegantly in dinner clothes, Crawford and Cousin Maud sat in her library hastily correcting proof for A Roman Singer, a magazine serial he had dashed off a few weeks earlier; Belle had assured him it was the finest thing he had ever written. That done, Frank and his belongings—including the various gifts from Belle—were hurried out into a waiting taxi and driven through the night to the pier, where he boarded a midnight boat that would carry him back to Italy.
The next afternoon, Frank and Belle were to have met at four, their customary hour. When he had not appeared by five, Belle sent her coachman out to make inquiries. She was told that Frank Crawford had left Boston “permanently”—she was not immediately told where he had gone—and would not be back.
She was devastated. Then heartbreak gave way to rage. She took his departure not only as an insult but as an act of cowardice and treachery. She felt betrayed. She immediately collapsed into another “nervous breakdown,” and closed her door to all visitors.
Her husband, as he had done before—and as he would do many times again throughout their married life—came to her rescue with updated plans for extensive foreign travel. Within weeks, the Gardners had boarded a train for San Francisco, where they sailed for Yokohama. Then on to China, Cambodia, Java …
A kindly man, he wanted to give her something to repay her for her loss.
One of the lessons Belle Gardner might have learned from all this was that it was unwise for a patroness of the arts to let herself become emotionally involved with the artist she was patronizing. The lesson was certainly there, but it was one, alas, that she would never learn. Jack Gardner once patiently described his wife as “a little girl who never grew up,” and this was accurate enough. Girlish she remained—her age always something of a mystery—and subject to schoolgirlish crushes. In London, in 1886, through Henry James, the Jack Gardners met John Singer Sargent. Sargent had already had a number of successful exhibitions at important salons in Europe, had been acclaimed as a major artistic talent, and was receiving commissions from prominent people for portraits. He had also, through no fault of his own, become notorious. In 1884 he had exhibited a portrait of Madame Gautreau in Paris under the title Madame X. The trouble was that everyone recognized Madame X as Madame Gautreau—who was fond of a particular lavender shade of face powder—and she was the mistress of the French Republican leader Gambetta. The portrait was not a flattering one. Madame Gautreau had been made to look, it seemed, like a whore, and Sargent had been accused of painting an anti-Republican political cartoon. The French press had raged at him for weeks over this, and, in the end, the controvery caused Sargent to angrily close his studio in Paris and move to England.
The Grandes Dames Page 8