The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  Harry was a greatly beloved son, and seemed to be living up to all his parents’ high expectations. After graduation from Groton, he went to Yale, where he was on the Yale Daily News board, was a member of Hé Boulé, Psi Upsilon, and Skull and Bones, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Besides his academic and social achievements, he became an excellent horseman and polo player. Handsome — very much like his father — he was energetic, sociable, and popular, with a boisterous voice and a hearty laugh. He differed from his father, though, in one important way: while William had struggled for his money, Harry did not have to. Given all he needed or wanted by his doting parents, he lacked his father’s drive and energy, although at the time he fell in love with Gertrude he was thought to be heading for a brilliant law career.

  No wonder Gertrude was enchanted. In addition to his fine personal qualities and charm, her dream man had more than enough money, a slightly better social position, and a more distinguished genealogy than hers. Gertrude could be sure that Harry loved her for herself. And, to make it all perfect, her parents were delighted with her choice. Only the tiniest hints in some of her writings foreshadow her future dissatisfaction with the life of a lady, give hints of the realization that, despite having money, a husband, and children, she needed fulfilling work as well. No suggestion then that Harry would find most of his satisfactions in sporting activities.

  On August 25, 1896, at the Breakers, Gertrude and Harry were married. Guests were few, only about sixty — mostly family — since her father was recovering from a stroke, but flowers, fountains, and clothes were festive and beautiful. In the grand hall, the Times reported, there were “cascades of fine asparagus and maidenhair ferns, white lilies, hydrangea, pink and white roses, pink and white gladioli, terminating with ruffles of pink and white sweetpeas, and sprays of lily of the valley.” Gertrude’s bridesmaids and her two maids of honor, Gertrude’s ten-year-old sister Gladys and Harry’s nine-year-old sister Dorothy, wore gowns of white silk covered by mousseline with inserts and fringes of lace. The bride’s Doucet dress of white figured satin was trimmed with lace “that had been in the family for years” and she wore her mother’s veil. The brilliant sun, the blue sky, the gentle breeze seemed auspicious.

  These two young people seemed to have the world before them. They were rich, beautiful, intelligent, talented, and in love, with the moral and financial support of their parents. And yet, and yet — with the advantages of hindsight, the differences between them are so apparent. Differences that would become more and more important, dividing them, while love nevertheless remained between them and endured longer than any of their briefer passions for others.

  Gertrude’s parents, despite the family’s immense wealth, had emphasized what we call today “family values”—the responsibilities of money, rather than its more frivolous and pleasurable uses or abuses. The necessity of societal customs and rules, the significance of developing the mind through education and travel, the importance of culture as accompaniment to all else. And always before Gertrude, the examples of those parents, in their relation with each other and with their children, and in their dedication to family, community, and work — in contrast to the original founders of the fortune, for whom work was the first priority.

  Harry, too, had examples before him of dedication and hard work — but since his mother had been unhappy during much of his childhood, he must have blamed his father’s absence, his devotion to his work, for her depression and perhaps even her death. Perhaps the very idea of work was tainted. On the other hand, he was very close to his father, and expected to follow in his footsteps in law, business, and politics. In his pursuit of these, though, he had little of William’s persistence. The talents were undoubtedly there: Dean Keener of the Columbia Law School considered him “one of the most brilliant students I have known.” By 1900, he was working with his father on several projects, including the Guggenheim Exploration Company, the New York Electric Vehicle Transportation Company, and quasibusinesses such as horse racing and rural real estate. John Hays Hammond, a senior executive of the Guggenheim mining company, described in his autobiography a trip to a silver mine in Colorado with three Guggenheim brothers and Harry:

  “He followed me into the mine and all day scrambled nimbly up and down ladders and over piles of rock. His athletic prowess stood him in good stead. … I have never seen anyone make friends more quickly with the miners, prospectors, and other old-timers than Harry Whitney He had a personal magnetism and a disarming friendliness that made him popular in the West as well as in the East. ‘You could beat even Teddy [Roosevelt] if you would go into politics,’ I used to tell him. Harry also had his father’s good judgment and generosity.”

  Besides these work-related activities, Harry hunted, drove four-handed coaches, raced his sloop Barbara, played tennis, fished, and rode — proficiently. His stable was preeminent in both breeding and racing, and when in 1926 his health forced him to give up polo, he bought and raced a seventy-five-foot schooner, Vanitie. Before that, though, he played polo, an amateur sport, at what would now be a professional level, at a time when polo was our national sport — the equivalent of baseball or football today. His English and Irish polo ponies were famously good, and he insisted on fresh mounts for each of the eight periods in a game.

  In 1909 Harry’s team wrested the America Challenge Cup from England, which had held it since 1886. As captain of “The Big Four,” as the team was called, Harry was featured daily on the front pages of British and American newspapers. Living with his teammates and his family in a rented castle, Oakley Court, Gertrude, Harry, and the children were particularly close that summer. Gertrude was involved and encouraging about the matches, even setting up a system of “nurses” for each player, while she took the part of “chief nurse,” as Harry testified in engraved letters below the gilded image of a polo player on a silver pillbox. They punted on the Thames — at the foot of their lawn — they received and were received by the King and Queen and other members of the British aristocracy, and they had fun together. My mother told me of her happy memories of that summer, still vivid after more than sixty years. She kept her first diary that year, and recorded the Big Four’s moment of triumph:

  “Papa’s side won. The score was 8 to 2. After the game the American players had to go on a platform where the Queen sat to get the cup. They all had to drink something out of the cup.”

  Yes, Harry was a recognized hero. Gradually, sports took precedence for him over business, law, and politics. Why was this? In part, I believe, because of his natural abilities and his preference, but also perhaps because his parents made life easy for him. In correspondence, it sometimes appears that William wanted Harry to have all the benefits of his fortune without the effort of acquiring it. Was the money Harry inherited in 1904 when his father died, about $25 million, a deterrent to working? The money was plenty to live on, even if it wasn’t the huge sum his brother and sister inherited from their uncle, Oliver Payne, a partner in William Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. That story bears telling:

  Oliver had adored his sister. He had showered Flora, Will, and their children with gifts and affection. When Flora died, although William waited almost four years before marrying again, Oliver was terribly angry, taking the remarriage as an insult to his sister. He broke his close, brotherly relation with William, and asked the four children, who at the time were surprised and hurt because their father hadn’t prepared them for his new marriage, to choose between their father and himself. Two of them, Payne and Pauline, chose their uncle and became the heirs to his immense fortune, which still today provides their descendants with great wealth. Harry stuck by William, and Dorothy, who was only nine at the time, adored their father and stayed with him, too.

  For whatever reasons, the fact is that Harry didn’t fulfill his early promise, and this certainly contributed to the problems between him and Gertrude. Gertrude feared that her own life would become as empty as she felt Harry’s to be, and in 1901, when she was only twenty
-six, she wrote in her journal:

  “I pity, I pity above all that class of people who have no necessity to work. They have fallen from the world of action and feeling into a state of immobility and unrest … the dregs of humanity.”

  One of Harry’s nicknames was “Moody,” and indeed he was. Perhaps, like several members of our family, he had bipolar syndrome. He was often ill; he was plagued, as his father had been, by headaches and depression; and despite his outdoor athletic life, his health deteriorated steadily, in part because of heavy drinking — quite usual for men in his social world. In 1930, at only fifty-eight, he died.

  In 1903, pregnant and ill with Barbara, their third child, Gertrude wrote Harry a letter to be opened only in the event of her death. I found this sealed letter among her papers while doing research for her biography, and couldn’t bring myself to open it right away. I finally decided that if she had kept it all her life, she must have wanted it to survive. Here is part of it.

  Dearest,

  One never knows what may happen in the way of an accident when one is ill most of the time and, as I don’t want to die without you knowing a few things, I am writing this for you to read … not being ‘noble’ but only very weak and human, I have succumbed to the temptation of telling what in life I struggled madly to hide.

  It seems so long since I have known that you did not care for me that I can hardly fix a time when I began to realize it. … Over and over again I would cheat myself into the belief that it had not all gone. I don’t mean all affection, but all love. At any rate, to proceed with a story which you already know, I must say the realization that you cared for someone else was what in the end made me believe that as far as I was concerned all was over. See how quietly even clearly I have written that and yet for weeks the dim thought of it was such agony that I could not stand it.

  She wrote about the pain Harry’s affair had caused her when she became certain of it.

  If I could not hold you I had only myself to blame. … Much as I have always cared for you I was able for a while to frivol with Jimmie (Appleton.) You have always known that that was only frivoling and that you always have been the only person I have cared for … when you read this and all the little things have been swept away and only the great truths remain you will be glad that I have said it even though you know it. I really think, my dear boy, that this is the best thing that could have happened. Could I have gone on without that for which I pine the most? I doubt it and been a good woman. I love love and I need it as we all do and perhaps I would have taken it even if I could not give it, rather than starve forever.

  I know you must have suffered but after this blow is softened you will be happy and you are not so old. After all you did care for me a good deal and we were very happy.

  For heaven’s sake remember that Flora [their daughter, my mother] is horribly sensitive. Give her lots of love and bring her up to be strong and good. She has the possibilities of lots of unhappiness in her, poor little tot, and she is closer to me today than anyone in the world. She will be moody and fanciful and inclined to think too much about things which will only make her unhappy, guard against these tendencies. Let her have lots of companionship. …

  Good-bye dearest — remember I do not blame you. I believe that you could not help it. I only know that I had so much more love to give than you wanted that it used to choke me and that now I have confessed all and you can start fresh.

  Many of Gertrude’s journals also mentioned Harry’s affair, and her need for love. In another long, unmailed letter to Harry in 1913 she suggested coming to an “understanding” very different from the first joyous one on the Palm Beach piazza:

  It seems very obvious that we are drifting further and further apart and that the chances of our coming together are growing remote. I say this for several reasons — there is no inclination on your part to have explanations which might lead to understanding. Also our mutual indifference to the pursuits and pleasures of the other is leading us constantly to have less even to talk of and forms no bond on which we might try to bridge our difficult moments. Of course for a very long time we have done absolutely nothing together because we wanted to. … I am not going to throw the rest of my life away. I am going to face things and understand as much as I can, and then build on a solid foundation for I am tired of the sand that crumbles and will not hold my poor little house.

  But the next year, in another unmailed letter to Harry, she wrote:

  “After this long time, dearest, I am going back to you and there is no joy in me, only depression. I shall be very happy to see you again, I care for you as much as ever, but dear, going back means so many things I hate. It will pass and after a while my spirits will come back, but now it is as if the world was on my shoulders. … I will at least try to be honest with you.

  “I went back for a little time to a man who has loved me for three years and besides that I became infatuated with another man and I let him make the most desperate love to me. I loved you all the time but I was excited and unnatural and it did not seem to me to be very bad.”

  In a letter to William Stackpole, a long-term beau, she wrote in 1913:

  “I gave the big, unselfish love once in my life and I guess it is not there to give again.”

  Undoubtedly, she meant Harry. They had so very little in common, it seems to me — neither interests nor work — and yet their bond lasted. Why? A strong sense of tradition. The binding ties of family and religion. And something else, I feel sure — a powerful physical attraction.

  And Harry? How did he feel about Gertrude, as time passed? The only real clue is a note to her in 1919, in a large hasty scrawl.

  Dearest,

  I am nearly crazy. I have not slept a wink all night.

  By the worst luck in the world — I would give ten million dollars if it had not happened — I ran across your Stackpole letters last night in the country.

  You are the only person I have ever really loved. The only person that means more to me than anyone else, man or woman.

  I believed in you & trusted you because you are true & big.

  I told Harry (Davison) on Sunday that Monday was our 23rd anniversary & that we loved each other better than anything else in the world.

  Now the bottom is knocked out of life. It’s all lies. Are you all a lie? Are you all false? Is nothing real? I love you too much to let today go by, because I think it is your body & not your heart that did it all.

  I have got to know how many men — of course I know Jimmie kissed you on the Sheelah [a boat they sailed on in the Mediterranean in 19011 — but I don’t want names — I want you.

  Harry

  What happened? Did they finally have that open conversation for which Gertrude had wished? We can only know that they remained loyal to each other in times of need, illness, and pain. When, for instance, Harry’s beloved father died in 1904, or when Gertrude’s favorite brother Alfred was lost on the Lusitania, sunk by a German submarine in 1916. When their younger daughter Barbara, pregnant with her first baby, was emotionally and physically ill. When their second child, Cornelius (known as Sonny), was threatened with a paternity suit while at Yale. When Flora, after marrying Roderick Tower and having two children, decided to get a divorce. Always, they worried and worked on solutions together. A few weeks after his discovery, in a letter from Montana, Harry wrote:

  “I wish I were home. Feel lonely and depressed. Even with such a bad wife, home is pretty good. Love, Harry.”

  And Gertrude wrote affectionately to Harry, with news that Sonny was ill, and that Flora wanted to marry Roderick Tower. Gertrude wasn’t pleased, and wished he were there to help. “Love, dearest,” she ended her letter, “& for heaven’s sake come home soon. I can’t handle all these family matters alone.”

  Near the end of his life, Harry’s investments had lost money. If his children were to have a substantial inheritance, he realized that he must act, and in his most adventurous investment he developed a huge tract of land in Fl
in Flon, Manitoba, into the Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Company, the large Canadian producer of precious and industrial metals. This daring speculation was his most successful, and it replenished his finances enough to leave money in trust for his children and grandchildren. Still, at his death, the newspapers were surprised by his estate’s small size: about $75 million, compared to his brother Payne’s $240 million — this because of Oliver Payne’s bequest, of course.

  I believe that these two people, despite all, loved each other best. Still, it was a turbulent marriage, and Gertrude’s frequent misery impelled her to focus more intensely on her interest in the fine arts. Unlike Harry, she worked hard — on her sculpture, on getting commissions, and on her patronage — for many years in near obscurity, despite ambition and persistence. Surprising as it was for a woman in her position to work at all, she began thinking about it early. She remembered later how she had felt in 1898, after only two years of marriage:

  “I couldn’t free myself from certain feelings. I wanted to work. I was not very happy or satisfied in my life. … I had always drawn and painted a little, now I wanted to try modeling. My memory brings back a dream I had at this time, very distinct. I was in a cellar and modeling the figure of a man. There were a great many difficulties connected with my getting forward with the work.”