Caresse Crosby

  —Caresse

  On a picture postcard of Roccasinibalda, Caresse jotted this message to Charles Olson:

  This is my latest abode. Just put on a new roof, guaranteed for 500 years. I have a 30-year Plan developing—Humanist and Utopian—come and help me—

  “I knew that was where I had to live . . . It seemed to me it was just the thing I had been waiting for all my life,” she said of the Grimm’s Fairy Tale castle topped by crenellated turrets where she was living out her last years. Michelangelo’s competitor, the great Baldasarre Peruzzi, designed the dramatic eagle-shaped fortress palace, its walls rising out of sheer slices of solid rock and “strategically impregnable,” Caresse said. “It may be the only spot that will survive atomic war.”

  Some 30 years after she arrived on the scene, a barone with all the resources Caresse lacked restored the castle and the relics of its historic past—cinquecento armor, carved armoires, and musical instruments—in the tradition of the original castellani. But in the ’50s, when Caresse “religiously made a bid for [Roccasinibalda] every spring,” the Vatican was using the shell of a castle and its grounds as a boys’ camp. “I was unable to buy until it had almost fallen into ruins, and I had to replace not only the roof, but many of the battlements and floors as well.” The 72 rooms were uninhabitable for some five or six months of the year, and in summer, the sun streamed through the paneless windows. The north wing was a regal succession of large, empty spaces with coffered ceilings and handsome fireplaces, its frescoes whitewashed over with arsenic to prevent the contagion of a 17th-century plague.

  At the beak of the eagle a hanging garden lies on three levels with towering cypresses and a swimming pool. The V-shaped tail of the eagle, or coda, forms a covered terrace where Caresse and her guests used to gather at sunset for cocktails to view the spectacular panorama of the valley where the Turano encircles the mountain. In the quiet of the morning and at night, one can hear its rush.

  The castle rises above the clouds, and in the early morning she awoke with a sense of being on a floating island. The bedroom that she chose for her own had one large window opening onto the valley to the west. It was connected by a narrow passage to the bathroom, where—in her time—a tub was attached to a primitive boiler, with water heated by a fire kindled from chunks of wood. (Each bath required fresh kindling.) Water was no problem. Rain from the battlements fell into a great cistern under the courtyard, and the water supply was carried in Etruscan-shaped jars balanced on the heads of village women. As Caresse wryly commented, “What a man could not carry in his hands was loaded onto the head of his wife or the back of his mule.”

  Her day began when she heard the bray of donkeys as the men of the village left for the fields. At sundown, she was tormented by the swooping and darting of bats around the four corners of her room—bats that strung themselves, heads down, on the canopy of her bed until midnight, when they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. Caresse learned that, for her, eight to ten hours of sleep were no longer necessary; from midnight to sunrise was quite enough.

  There was much to be done. In the bedroom during breakfast and while she was dressing, she confronted whatever conundrum the day might bring with Margharitta, the Italian housekeeper. Margharitta was tall, slender, dignified, and forever faithful to Caresse. She was extremely competent in running the day-to-day affairs of the castle, and was always at her side, “like the shadow of a medieval nun.” Caresse admired Margharitta’s simple country dignity. Margharitta’s father, a “noble peasant,” looked after the garden.

  Caresse’s idealistic dream was for the castle to be self-sufficient—to grow vegetables for the table, to harvest “fish from the river, snails from the vine, figs from the trees.” Inspired by her father’s Utopian community in Texas, she planned to make use of its natural resources, “to encourage flax-growing and the weaving of linen, to cultivate the vintner’s art and wine-making, to start olive oil production from the trees in the valley. No man [or woman] should live well while his neighbor starves,” she said, and as the new American neighbor, she set about practicing what she preached, to improve the quality of life for the villagers. Out of a population of some 500, there were 190 people on the dole of 400 lire a month (then roughly $1.75 a week). Every cent had to go for food and necessities, with very little left for “the trimmings of life.” She wrote to Robert Meyer, chief of the CARE mission in Rome, asking his help under the Food Crusade program: “If packages could be directed here to me or to the Secretary of the Commune for distribution, they would have the greatest moral and physical effect. I am doing what I can on the spot, but my own funds are limited.”

  “Caresse Crosby was ‘poor gentility’ in so many ways,” Desmond O’Grady, one of the young Irish poets who visited the castle, observed. “She was able to live like a principessa in Italy, but she did so in a modest way, with much more style than the equivalent ‘lady’ in England. Like many women of ‘a certain age,’ she lived frugally when alone, but she did her best for invited guests. She always put on ‘high face’ and ‘high table,’ even if there was little to eat. She could make a Renaissance meal out of a package of soup and a poetry reading.”

  Guests who could afford to, paid their own way. Those working or teaching in Rome, who came out on weekends and holidays to write or to paint, brought staples for the kitchen—boxes of pasta and rice, poultry, and cheap wine, with special treats for Caresse. “We ate well, the same as any Italian peasant down the hill,” O’Grady remembered.

  Soon she began to renovate the jail at the bottom of the hill—a dependency of the Castello—for use as a boy’s club. With her usual flair, she had the cell-bars painted pink and the walls whitewashed, and let the boys exercise their creativity in decorating the walls with murals. She hoped to keep the young people out of the bars. The boys’ club was a grand success, especially when the girls came around in the evening to dance, even though the doors closed at a respectable 11:00 p.m.

  An article in the Daily American, Rome’s newspaper for expatriates, noted that the fine arts and literature program was flourishing at Roccasinibalda. Robert Snyder, in Rome to film a documentary about the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, stopped by to pay homage to the Principessa, who was becoming a legend in her own time, surrounded by an international coterie. Snyder proposed to add Caresse and her Center to his series featuring Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and other contemporary artists.

  Caresse was not a novice before the cameras, she told Snyder. After her youthful attempt to star as “Valerie Marno” for Myron Selznick, she appeared in Emlen Etting’s surrealist epic, Poème, filmed in part on the lawn of her mother-in-law Henrietta’s house, “The Apple Trees.” Etting, who knew both Crosbys in Montparnasse in the ’20s, chose as his theme the three faces of Eve: the sports-loving girl next door, the intellectual, and “passion plus,” a role well suited to Caresse. “I was supposed to be a rather extraordinary woman,” Caresse commented. “There were dahlias in the garden, and I was supposed to eat the dahlias.” (She could not, at the time of the interview, remember what dahlias tasted like.)

  Snyder’s Always Yes! Caresse is a long string of reminiscences of the “passionate years” in Paris, New York, and Roccasinibalda. In the opening, Caresse explained how she first came to the castle with Bill Peabody. “My son, who was rather protective of me, thought it a crazy idea, and everybody else said, ‘My, you have a lot of courage.’ But I was in need of a place to help others and to express my ideas . . . and it seemed to me vast and empty and ready to be filled with activities . . . I’ve never had enough empty rooms in my life.”

  Caresse said “Yes!” to the castle, with the idea of using the vast rooms to exhibit paintings and sculpture by resident artists. She took the Snyder camera crew on a tour, including “the room where we play chess . . . Marcel Duchamp says, and I believe, that one can fight one’s battles across the chessboard without getting bullets and bombs to do it. The best man—the
best idea—wins; that is the way the world should be.”

  Life at Roccasinibalda—as observed and reported by O’Grady, who came to the Castello from Rome on weekends with his family—was “Cistercian/Benedictine, not in a religious sense, but a spiritual and intellectual one.” This comfortable monastery even accommodated offspring, though Caresse, like many older ladies not fond of small children, “tolerated them because she thought it was good for them.” The accommodations were simple—country-style rooms with a bed, one chair, a table, bookshelves, and a bathroom down the hall. Another resident guest, Sy Kahn, remembers his turret room with a fine vista and an old wooden desk, over which Caresse thoughtfully hung a photograph of Dylan Thomas.

  “What you did during the daytime was your own business, whether it was to think, to read, or to dream, but the common cause was to create,” O’Grady recalled. There were no restrictions of any kind. Caresse only wanted those staying at the Castle to be engaged in creative work—and to hear about it at dinner. Old friends and visitors followed the same monastic routine as everybody else.

  Caresse religiously observed the cocktail hour on the terrace at the coda of the eagle. “The cocktail hour was for banter, gossip, scandal, and ‘scallywaggery,’ and Caresse took the lead,” according to O’Grady. “She could be sparkling, serious, sometimes silly during cocktail hour, but never ridiculous.”

  Dinner was the high mass of the day, when all gathered around the large refectory table, with Caresse or a distinguished guest at the head. Margharitta served, or oversaw the serving of the peasant who did the cooking. Dinner conversation was for artistic theory, criticism, evaluation, controversy. Caresse loved the high art talk, and always surrounded herself with poets and artists voicing conflicting opinions. She would contribute with anecdotes of Joyce or Pound or other significant literary lights in Paris in her day. Though she spoke less in her later years, she never missed a point.

  “After dinner, we entertained each other over wine,” O’Grady remembered. “We all drank our share. Caresse didn’t approve of drunkenness, but enjoyed natural tipsiness and gaiety. She was Elizabethan rather than Puritanical about this.” There was no radio or TV—not even a record player—at the castle. Guests read poetry and prose aloud in English, French, or Italian—Finnegan’s Wake or Dylan Thomas or Pound or Lorca. “There was much story-telling, reminiscences, and literary criticism, opinionating. . . . Sometimes we dressed up and played charades.”

  Others O’Grady remembered at table were Robert Fitzgerald, poet and translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Eamon Grennan, and Patrick Kavanaugh—all young Irish poets. Kavanaugh could be difficult with people he did not like, but he got along famously with Caresse. When she told tales of Man Ray, Dali, and other creative spirits of her youth in Paris, Kavanaugh retorted, “My Dublin was never like that.” The Spanish poet Rafael Alberti also partook of Caresse’s table, as did the English poet-translator Patrick Creagh and his wife, Ursula—D.H. Lawrence’s granddaughter. One summer Peter O’Toole, in Europe after a film, visited Roccasinibalda and fell under the spell of the Principessa like everyone else.

  During the castle years, Caresse began to feel a great need for an expression “beyond the actual excitement of the moment. I felt that the world was teetering, and that what we needed was a new vision . . .” Her goal was:

  To create a symbolic rallying point. . . . where no barriers to race, creed, color or nationalism exist . . . to be administered by Women of the World as a challenge against war and a symbol of the Four Freedoms: freedom from fear, from prejudice, from injustice and from want.

  Here the arts and crafts will be given full value as assets in a new order. . . . Here the matriarchal system of social welfare will be revised as an experiment in World Democracy. . . . a haven for civilized living.

  Henry Miller commented from California: “Women will soon rule the world after man has destroyed it. He can’t destroy the earth or kill the stars, thank God.” Miller regretted that he could not be with Caresse at the Center for Creative Arts and Humanist Living in the Abruzzi Hills, “[where] people from all parts of the world wander in and out.”

  Anaïs Nin described Caresse at this time as “the chargée d’affaires of the heart of the world . . . Her short, softly waved hair is white, but her stance, her responsiveness is young. She has lively and gay blue eyes, a constant sparkling laughter, a short humorous nose, a warm manner which wins everyone and a gift for making friends. She never commands, but whatever she asks is immediately accomplished.” If her grand scheme to found an Italian Yaddo Colony seems naïve, the fact remains that Caresse had an undeniable talent for acting as catalyst in the lives of young artists.

  Irene Rice Pereira, a friend of long standing from New York, came to the castle with a reputation firmly established. She was deeply involved with some of the complex intellectual currents of the 20th century through her study of space, time, optics, and light. Caresse facetiously said, “We call her Miss Spacey, because she believes in the expanding universe. . . . She writes with great insight and vision of the future.” Caresse planned to publish an introduction to Rice Pereira’s works in a special Castle Edition of the Black Sun Press.

  For her part, Rice Pereira thought that the impressive-looking castle left much to be desired. The plumbing was pure 15th century, and often when it rained, water poured into the bleak, sparsely furnished rooms. Rice Pereira soon fled to the relative comforts of Rome to prepare for an exhibit.

  Fiona Dudley arrived from London to uncover and restore the valuable frescoes (attributed by some experts to the school of Raphael), and Professor Benalla came from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to verify their origin. Caresse was searching for a foundation or a private patron of the arts to fund the fresco project. She wrote to Edward Bigelow, trustee of her estate at the State Street Bank in Boston:

  Dear Ned:

  The very welcome extra dividend arrived. I’m going to put it to use immediately in organizing a fresco class at the castle to uncover the many . . . cinquecento frescoes that have been hidden from view for over 300 years. . . . I have never quite enough in the till to engage a professor from the Belli Arti to arrange for young artists to come out and do the work. I am sure Mrs. C. [Henrietta Crosby] would have been interested in the project. . . . Do let the word be known. There are so many exchange programs and art projects going on between here and there . . . that I hope this one will be a success.

  At the time of the Snyder film, young talents of many nationalities were living and working at the castle. Jacques Gabriel, a Haitian, and his wife Sandra came to Caresse through Matta Echaurren. (Caresse discovered Matta, a young unknown Cuban, in Paris and later displayed his work at the Washington gallery.) Gabriel—another unknown—first designed surrealist collages that verged on pop art, but after his stay at the Center, created paintings that “had value far beyond anything [he had] done before.” Raymond Panas, a sculptor-in-residence from Athens who worked in both metal and wood, decorated the hearth with “Angels of Peace” carved from logs found on the property. His angel with outspread wings salvaged from scraps of tin and bronze became the chandelier for the salon. Panas was so intent on his work that he didn’t say much of anything one could understand, occasionally muttering a gutteral French patois. Wyatt Osborne, who arrived via the circuitous route of Madrid and the Costa del Sol, was a native of Caresse’s state, New York. He was inspired by Panas’s “Angels” to invade the workshop and turn out metal figures of his own.

  There were always young men in her retinue—a third generation of them. To the end of her life, Caresse was subtly and mildly flirtatious with men. In later years, those who knew her well insist that she was too urbane, too decorous, too much the lady, to act out her fantasies. But among the young, she continued to have a few slavish attendants.

  Bill Barker first came to the castle in 1950, with Caresse’s son. “He was looking, I think, for some interesting point-of-view; a
life in Europe,” Caresse said of Barker, just out of the army after World War II. He continued to keep in touch, wiring after the tragic death on January 25, 1955 of Caresse’s beloved Billy:

  —Stunned—frightful news—writing—I know this cannot help much, but please remember you have another son—Love, Bill

  After the War, Billy followed his mother’s footsteps to Paris, where he lived with his Brazllian-born wife Josette in an antiquated Left Bank apartment. One night a gas leak developed, and both lost consciousness. Josette had the telephone receiver cradled in her hand when the concierge and the gendarme arrived. They revived Josette, but were too late for Billy. The official coroner’s report read “Death by Asphyxiation,” but suicide was suspected. For some years, there had been signs of a troubled marriage. It was rumored that Bill had problems with his sexuality, that he could not satisfy Josette’s fiery Latin temperament, that she had taken lovers.

  Caresse was too fond of her daughter-in-law to listen to rumors. They remained friends throughout the years, even after the widowed Josette married Jacques Spiero. For a long time after Billy’s death, Caresse might have asked herself, “Where did we go wrong, in those years on the rue de Lille?” After a prolonged period of mourning, she came back to life through the dark tunnel.

  Billy’s friend, Barker, was back again at Roccasinibalda, as chauffeur and confidant. In the mornings, Barker would often spend several private hours in Caresse’s boudoir, planning the day’s activities. But no one could misconstrue the relationship, particularly since Barker brought with him a beautiful young woman—tall, blonde, and given to “drifting like pale smoke through the stone corridors of the castle,” Sy Kahn remembered. “Her gown, like a scrim, did not hide, only blurred, her dazzling body.” Sometimes she would sunbathe nude on the battlements on a sunny afternoon with other members of the entourage, scarcely exchanging a word.