The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  To care for the acreage of her house and its contents, Edith had her staff—among them a first and second butler, two parlor maids, a coachman, footman, houseman, and no fewer than six detectives. One man’s daily duty was simply to polish the silver. Another’s was to wind the clocks. Edith’s personal maid had an assistant, called the sewing woman, and the sewing woman had her own assistant, called the mending woman. Another woman only arranged the flowers. In the kitchen were a chef and a sous-chef to work at the big coal stoves—Edith would not permit the use of gas—and any number of scullery helpers. Perhaps because of the sheer logistics of the problem, Edith McCormick refused to learn any of her servants’ names. Nor would she speak to any of them, nor were they permitted to speak to her. In fact, she would speak to only two members of her staff—her chief steward and her personal secretary. All instructions were then channeled down through the chain of command. When she ventured out in her car, the full schedule of stops, times, and pick-up points would be typed out for the chauffeur in advance, thus eliminating the need for any communication between Mrs. McCormick and her driver.

  Only once was the unalterable rule, that no member of the staff should ever interrupt Mrs. McCormick during dinner, broken. This was when her oldest child, John Rockefeller McCormick, was ailing with scarlet fever at the family’s country place in Lake Forest. After much discussion in the servants’ quarters, it was decided to whisper to Mrs. McCormick during dinner that the little boy had died. Mrs. McCormick, appearing more annoyed by the interruption than by the news, merely nodded and the dinner party continued.

  Though Edith Rockefeller McCormick may often have seemed an extraordinarily cold—if not totally unfeeling—woman, there was no doubt about her devotion to the opera, and to uplifting the musical tastes of her adopted city. (To be sure, it might be argued that, on the evening of her son’s death, she felt that her first obligation was to her dinner guests, who were still living, rather than to her child, who was past help—but still, one wonders.) Her pre-opera dinner parties were particularly harrowing. For these occasions the hostess kept a small jeweled clock beside her place at the head of the table, along with a printed card listing the number of minutes she expected each course of the meal to take—“Soup: six minutes; fish: seven and one half minutes,” and so on. The purpose of this was to ensure that the McCormicks and their guests would be in their seats at the opera house punctually for the opening curtain. Guests on opera nights had to be on their toes, or half-eaten plates of food would be snatched away from them by the efficient servants because Mrs. McCormick had signaled that the allotted time for the course was up. She got away with it because—well, because she was a very rich woman who was used to getting her way, and because there was no one of sufficient audacity around to challenge her.

  She hated anything that smacked of scandal, and was exceptionally sensitive to public criticism of anything in which a whiff of immorality was involved. But her tastes in opera were quite modern, and she was influential in bringing Mary Garden to Chicago to sing the title role of Salomé, the relatively new Richard Strauss opera based on a verse play by Oscar Wilde.

  Mary Garden, to begin with, was herself controversial. By all accounts she was as much a performer as a singer—a kind of early-day Maria Callas. One went to see Mary Garden more than to hear her. She was a genius at generating publicity about herself, and cared little whether the publicity was good or bad, as long as Mary Garden’s name was mentioned. She was a legendary beauty, and was said to have scattered broken hearts across the map of the United States and Europe. It was said that she had lovers by the score. It was said that she had once given birth to an illegitimate child. Whenever a new rumor about Mary Garden’s freewheeling private life appeared, she called a press conference to deny it, thereby creating more columns of print. She had become, in the process, an enormous box-office draw, and she translated her flamboyant living style into flamboyant performances on the operatic stage. For all of this, there were some people in Chicago who felt that Mary Garden was stuff too strong even for the tastes of “red-blooded Chicagoans.”

  Then there was the problem of Salomé. Richard Strauss was a hugely popular composer, but the name of Oscar Wilde had fallen under a definite cloud. Wilde had come to Chicago in the early 1880s, and Chicago had not been impressed with the fey young man who lolled about on sofas swathed in fur lap robes and silk scarves and who sniffed a nosegay of fresh lilies while he talked incomprehensibly about “the new aesthetics” and “art for art’s sake.” Wilde’s timing for his Chicago visit was also unfortunate, in that he arrived at the same moment as John L. Sullivan, who had just won the world’s heavyweight title. The newspapers made much of the contrasting styles of the two visiting celebrities—Sullivan, the shining example of American manhood, and Wilde, the epitome of European decadence. One paper called Wilde an “ass-thete.”

  Then, in 1895, Oscar Wilde had unwisely chosen to sue the Marquis of Queensberry over allegations concerning Wilde’s relationship with the Marquis’s son Lord Alfred Douglas. The papers of the day had been very dainty about reporting the exact nature of this untidy matter—so dainty, in fact, that most American readers had no clear idea what it was that Oscar Wilde had been accused of doing. Even the word “pederasty” was considered too strong for print, and so readers were required to use their imaginations about what had been going on. All that was clear was that it was something “unnatural” and vile, that Wilde had been carried off to Reading Gaol for his part in the nastiness, and that Wilde was a degenerate and an enemy of decency and morals.

  Thus it was an incendiary mixture that Edith McCormick was planning to bring to the stage of the Chicago Opera Company, but, needless to say, tickets for the opening-night performance sold extremely well. Mary Garden had made a special study of the dance in preparation for her Salomé because, as she said at the time, “I want the Dance of the Seven Veils to be drama and not Folies Bergère.” And her opening night was nothing if not dramatic. She threw herself into the role with as much histrionics and frank sensuality as she could muster, and red-blooded Chicago, which published its “Sporting and Club House Directory,” was scandalized. Of Miss Garden’s fiery Salomé, the music critic Percy Hammond, calling Miss Garden “the feminine colossus who doth bestride our operatic world,” wrote that her performance was “florid, excessive, unhampered tour de force, lawless and inhuman.”

  The reaction of Police Chief LeRoy T. Steward, who had also been in the opening-night audience, was more specific. “Miss Garden wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip,” he announced. “There was no art in her dance that I could see. If the same show were produced on Halsted Street the people would call it cheap but over at the auditorium they say it is art. Black art, if art at all. I would not call it immoral. I would say it was disgusting.” Chief Steward then announced that he was sending his head censor, Detective Sergeant Charles O’Donnell, to see the second evening’s performance and deliver an opinion. Still another custodian of public morality was Arthur Farwell, who, though he had not seen Salomé, denounced it generally. Miss Garden, Mr. Farwell said, was a “great degenerator” of public morals, and he would not see the opera lest his own morals undergo degeneration. “I am a normal man,” he said, “but I could not trust myself to see a performance of Salomé.”

  Miss Garden was outraged, and shot off one of her famous ripostes. “I always bow down to the ignorant and try to make them understand,” she said, “but I ignore the illiterate.”

  The controversy drew long lines at the box office, and the second performance quickly sold out.

  Detective O’Donnell’s report was also negative. The show was an affront to decency. Though Chief Steward was willing to compromise if Miss Garden would “tone down the head business”—in which Salomé dances with the severed head of the prophet—Miss Garden refused to alter a single gesture or bit of business. Inevitably, the opera’s great patroness, Edith McCormick, was drawn into the fray, and in her memoirs Mary Garden
directly blames an uncharacteristic attack of spinelessness on Edith’s part for the closing notice of Salomé that was posted the following day. According to Miss Garden, Mrs. McCormick sent for her and said, “The truth came to me after your third performance … I said to myself, Edith, your vibrations are all wrong.” And so the opera that had promised to be the most successful of the season was closed. Edith’s “vibrations,” of course, came from her intense dislike of any scandal. But the closing of Salomé was also, as Emmett Dedmon put it in Fabulous Chicago, “a recurrence of Chicago’s unpredictable puritanism—which tolerated the nation’s largest vice area on the edge of its business district but rose up in horror over a sensuous work of art.”

  In the years after the death of her elder son, Edith McCormick seemed to grow odder. She became more interested in the occult and the supernatural, and in reincarnation. She paid $25,000 to have her horoscope charts written. She became even more autocratic and demanding. Now even her three surviving children had to make appointments through her private secretary in order to see her. She built a huge forty-four-room mansion in suburban Lake Forest called Villa Turicum, but never moved in. Barrels full of French china were shipped to Villa Turicum but never unpacked. Antique French and Italian pieces of furniture were arranged in the principal rooms, but were never taken out of their packing crates. Thirteen master bedrooms of identical size and shape were completely furnished with identical pieces—only the colors of the walls were different—but no one ever spent a night in any of them. Gardens were filled with topiary and hothouses with flowering plants, but their only use seemed to be to supply fresh flowers for 1000 Lake Shore Drive, and these were delivered daily in a lavender truck.

  At about the same time, in New York, Edith’s cousin Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge was beginning to do similarly strange things. She built a large and exceptionally ugly house on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street in Manhattan, filled it with dark, heavy furniture and hangings, and, like Edith, never moved in, though she bought adjacent pieces of property as soon as they became available until she owned most of the north side of the block between Sixty-first Street and the Knickerbocker Club on the Sixty-second Street corner, and between Fifth and Madison Avenues. This acreage she let become overgrown with weeds and scrubby trees. The purpose of this, she explained, was to provide a “woods” for her dogs, even though, like her, the dogs never came. For years the Rockefeller-Dodge mansion remained New York’s mystery house—shuttered and dark and forbidding, illuminated only by a faint light from behind a barred caretaker’s window. People wondered especially about the erratic and helter-skelter placement of the exterior windows: the reason was that the upper floors of the house had been designed as a giant kennel—a kennel that was never inhabited by man or beast. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge’s peculiarities were also blamed on the death of a son, her only child, who was killed in an automobile accident just after his graduation from Princeton.

  In Chicago meanwhile, Edith McCormick continued to preside over the Chicago Opera Company and her grand, stiffly regimented dinners. She was becoming a creature of habit. She would invariably open a conversation at dinner by asking the gentleman on her right, “What has been interesting you lately?” Then, when it was time to “turn the table,” her right-hand partner would hear her ask the identical question of the gentleman on her left. Her other interests included walking, and she took the same walk, carrying the same muff, every day. She established a zoo, and pronounced herself particularly partial to the giraffes. Her astrologist had told her that she had her own Christmas, which she celebrated “by the stars” on December 15. She studied philosophy. “My object in the world,” she once said, “is to think new thoughts.” And in the Beyond she communicated with Ankn-es-en-pa-Aten, Tutankhamun’s bride, her previous incarnation. She also took up song writing, and at least six of her sentimental love songs—including “Love,” “Between,” “Thou,” and “It Is Spoken”—were published.

  But close friends—and she actually had a few—had begun to suspect that, for all her wealth and social power, Edith Rockefeller McCormick was a seriously unhappy woman. A scandal in her own family life was brewing, and she knew it. Already there were whispers. It involved her husband, Harold McCormick, a short, balding, bespectacled man with the figure of a pouter pigeon. It appeared that though he seemed genuinely to love Edith, and that though she seemed almost passionately to love him—all the love songs, she said, were written to him—Harold McCormick had, as they put it in the delicate language of the day, “an unfaithful nature.”

  Today we would no doubt diagnose it as satyriasis, combined with a taste for easy women.

  * At 1980s gold prices of $500 an ounce and more, that would work out to at least five and a half million dollars’ worth of flatware.

  13

  MRS. McCORMICK DEPARTS

  In a way, the tragedy of the McCormick marriage was that both Edith and Harold McCormick had too much money. The legendary “joining of two great American fortunes” has not happened all that often in American history, but it had happened in the McCormicks’ case, and the result was that there was no way one partner in the union could bring financial pressure to bear upon the other to bring the other into line. Edith, enormously rich, could do what she wanted to. Harold, enormously rich, could do the same. Edith was nowhere near as pious a person as her churchgoing, Bible-spouting father, but she did, she often said, see marriage as a sacred commitment, and the idea of divorce appalled her. At the same time, though she was too much of a grande dame ever to speak of it, the awareness of her husband’s increasing infidelities must have been both painful and embarrassing for her.

  Edith, furthermore, was not the kind of woman who could easily confide her troubles to another. Even the women in Chicago whom she considered her friends were hardly intimates. The friendships were always very formal and polite, and the ladies addressed each other as “Mrs. Pullman,” “Mrs. Armour,” and “Mrs. Swift,” hardly ever relaxing to the point of first names. For one of these dowagers to have touched a luncheon companion’s arm and said, “My husband is having an affair—what should I do?” would have been an unheard-of breach of etiquette, a shocking lapse of taste.

  In Europe, however, two men were beginning to be talked about in the United States for the new kind of help they were trying to offer people. They were Sigmund Freud and his sometime colleague Carl Jung, and what they were practicing and theorizing about was psychoanalysis, or, as it was called at the time, “synthetic psychology.” Freud’s special bailiwick seemed to be sexual psychotherapy, and some of his theories about Oedipus and Electra complexes—and phrases such as “penis envy”—were regarded as very startling. Dr. Jung seemed less sexually oriented, more focused on problems above the waist, on the entire individual. Jung seemed to many people more rational, less revolutionary, more liberal and practical in his approach. It was to Carl Jung in Switzerland that Edith McCormick—unhappy in her marriage, no doubt bored and depressed by her surroundings—decided to commit herself. When she departed from Chicago, it was assumed that she would be gone only a few months. Her stay under Dr. Jung’s auspices would last eight years.

  Before leaving, Edith assured Chicago that her husband would be “in charge” of the Chicago Opera Company in her absence. Unfortunately, he quickly turned out to be a poor choice as her deputy. Whether Harold McCormick actually had an affair with Mary Garden is unknown, but one of the things he did was to install Miss Garden as director of the Chicago Opera Company, which she agreed to be provided her title on the program be listed as “directa,” the proper feminine form of director, as she saw it. McCormick had said something to her about this being his last season connected with the opera, and had indicated to his new directa that he wished to depart in “a blaze of glory.” Miss Garden decided to take him at his word, and in the process she very nearly succeeded in scuttling the entire company. She engaged more artists than there were evenings for them to perform, and ran up enormous bills fo
r elaborate costumes, props, and scenery. When Miss Garden had completed her year of directaship, the Chicago Opera Company was a million dollars in the red, but this fazed the glamorous directa not at all. In her book, Mary Garden’s Story, she wrote of the whole experience: “The newspapers said that the company lost one million dollars during the season I was director. I don’t know because I had nothing to do with the business end of it. It was news to me. I do know we finished the way Mr. McCormick wanted us to finish—in a blaze of glory. That’s what he asked for and that’s what he got. If it cost a million dollars, I’m sure it was worth it.”

  Harold McCormick, meanwhile, was busily pursuing other interests. He was nothing if not fun loving. He was also very much a dandy, fond of jeweled cuff links and stickpins and rings, bright striped shirts with contrasting collars, embroidered waistcoats and gray mohair spats. The newspapers usually referred to Harold McCormick as “the rich playboy,” a term he rather resented. After all, he pointed out, hadn’t he done all the right things? He had graduated from Princeton, married John D. Rockefeller’s daughter, fathered children, gone to work for his father’s company, toiled in behalf of such respectable causes as the Chicago Opera. Still, he admitted that he was justly regarded as something of a nonpareil with the ladies, and when he spoke of himself it was often in the innocent manner of Shall-I-compare-me-to-a-summer’s-day?*