by Roland Perry
She had been planning to come to Paris to be part of the Conference at the president’s request, but instead she stood at Willard’s grave in the war cemetery at Suresne. Later she went to Langres Cathedral seeking some communication with her dead husband. They had once had a telepathic experience when he was there and she was in the United States. On returning home, she turned more to Christian Science and her own spirituality, even going to séances held by a Maryland medium. Her notes show that she believed that she made contact with Willard through the medium. He told her he had been “there” with her on several occasions.
Dorothy asked him for guidance on raising and educating the children. His responses, via the medium, appeared reassuring.2
Whitney, he told Dorothy, would stand out as a good character and businessman, who would work and play tirelessly; so, he should be encouraged along those paths. Beatrice, on the other hand, would be more challenging for her parents and would develop later in life, probably in some creative area because she had “artistic talent.” Michael would be more intellectual and would need instruction on overcoming hurdles. He would have a literary bent; so, he should be guided into social and economic education and work.
The response from Willard through the medium proved to be prescient for the three children, then only six, four, and two years.
One of Michael Straight’s earliest memories was of being taken by a nanny to his mother in Willard’s study where she had shut herself on learning that he had died. The two-year-old was meant to bring comfort but was struck by terror when he saw her at a desk, head in her hands. Michael was removed from the scene, kicking and screaming. It was one black spot in an otherwise good memory of his early life.
Later in life Straight hinted that Dorothy buried herself in her work after her husband died rather than finding solace in her children. Trendy child-rearing experts at the time suggested mothers should not be overly affectionate to their children. Michael had a British governess, May Gardner, but maintained that he and his siblings where shown love only in their limited quality time with Dorothy. Nevertheless, Straight’s upbringing seemed happy, healthy, and normal, allowing for the privileges he experienced. He was sent to Lincoln, a progressive school near Harlem, which had a mix of social backgrounds.
Another childhood memory was being chauffeured to school in a Packard limousine. The chauffeur would open the car door; Straight recalled then being set upon by his less privileged classmates. Yet Straight, a talker rather than a fighter, coped well enough. There were many pleasant memories from home and at Old Westbury on the weekends.
May Gardner reinforced the young Straight’s sense of superiority over the staff on the estate. Yet their proximity and the fact that there were few little boys of his own age nearby on Long Island meant he could not remain remote from the chauffeur’s son, Harry, or Jimmy Lee, the second son of the head gardener at Old Westbury. These working-class sons were Straight’s age, and both became playmates. They knew their place and were reminded of it in a milieu more akin to upper-class England than the mythological egalitarianism of early twentieth-century America.
Miss Gardner remained the constant in Straight’s early formative years to age nine. She was the victim of his earliest recorded deception. The diligent nanny gave him daily doses of cod-liver oil to correct a vitamin D deficiency. He pretended that it made him sick. Miss Gardner was sympathetic. This resulted in her reading aloud to him and bringing him supper in bed.
A few years after Willard’s death the occasional suitor would come to Old Westbury seeking Dorothy, who although in her 30s was still one of the most attractive prospects in the United States. If anything, her checklist for a suitable partner had increased after Willard. She found most of the hopefuls pale imitations of him. She would discourage them by always having other guests in their company.
In 1920, Leonard Knight Elmhirst, a Cambridge history graduate, came, not seeking her hand but a donation to save the Cosmopolitan Club at Cornell University, of which Leonard was president. Leonard wanted $80,000 to keep the club—which included students from twelve nations—afloat. Dorothy went to Cornell the following year and had a look. She was impressed.
“Of course I’m going to help,” she told the cheerful Englishman, seven years her junior. She found herself curiously attracted to this tall, smiling idealist whose polite charm was engaging. He had a few characteristics similar to Willard, such as a good tenor voice, the ability to quote verse at appropriate times, and an interest in Asia. And he was not rich. Yet that was where the similarities ended. Willard had a grand design to get rich in China. Leonard wanted to help the starving masses in India by increasing their agricultural productivity.
Leonard was the second of eight sons of a modest Yorkshire parson landowner whose forebears had cultivated the same land in West Riding since 1320. He had been expected to follow his father into the pulpit, but the war and the loss of two brothers in it had shaken his faith.
Leonard had gone to the United States to study the advanced methods of farming at Cornell. He liked Dorothy’s looks and charm, grace and bearing. Unlike the others, who saw an easier life through marriage to her money, he was more intimidated by it than attracted. It made him conscious of his impoverished state as he washed dishes to pay his way through university and struggled to find something other than a frayed shirt for visits to Old Westbury. Dorothy was aware of his circumstances and encouraged his friendship.
When Leonard graduated from Cornell, he took off for India to join the spiritual leader, Rabindranath Tagore, in rural reconstruction work in Bengal. Tagore commissioned Leonard to train students at the leader’s International University and carry out research. Inside two years, in a remarkable pioneering achievement, he was able to leave his project in the hands of an all-Indian staff. Leonard’s confidence grew through this period as he reported his progress to Dorothy in a steady stream of letters, to which she responded with money for the project. He returned to Cornell as a man with missions in life, and he advised Dorothy on the design of a union building at the university, which would be her memorial to Willard. It was opened in 1924.
Leonard’s experiences with Tagore had determined his own career ambitions, which would include agriculture in England. He was bursting with radical ideas for rural development and education—in fact, a utopian community. This dedication and his selfless efforts in India on behalf of the poor attracted Dorothy and paralleled her own self-imposed destiny of social responsibility. She became even more impressed when he assured her his brave new world would include experiments in her passion—the arts. Leonard had matured. He seemed more at ease, so much so that he proposed marriage.
She rejected him, but he persisted. Leonard needed her for his dreams to materialize. She finally accepted. They were married in the garden of Old Westbury in April 1925.
Leonard Elmhirst had certain parameters in mind in April 1925 when he began his search for an English base for his utopian dream. Some were provided by Rabindranath Tagore, who urged him to look for a spiritual place because “the practical work of craftsmen must always be carried out in partnership with the divine spirit of madness, of beauty, with the inspiration of the same ideal of perfection.”
This was in accord with Dorothy’s desires. She too wished to experience a center with soul, even a mystical past. It shored up Leonard’s own shaken faith. He saw a London real estate agent.
“It must be beautiful, we’re starting a school,” Leonard told the man at Knight, Frank & Rutley. “We expect to make farming pay, it must have a reasonably productive soil and climate, and as much variety as possible, woods, forest, orchards et cetera.”
Leonard had the agent’s attention.
“See if you can give me all those,” he added, “and historical associations thrown in. Yes, and in Devon, Dorset, or Somerset.”
Unsaid was the fact that Tagore had suggested Devon first. It had deep, rich soil, rolling plains, and narrow valleys. Winding, tight lanes gave it a sense of s
eclusion, which evoked a timeless separateness from busy, overcrowded London or England’s industrial heartlands. The region could attract “some budding poets,” Tagore suggested, “some scapegoats who no one else dares to acknowledge.”
The agent gave Leonard a list of forty-eight estates in the West Country. He looked at and rejected a “dull” Georgian Manor in Exeter, and then turned his attention to the second location on the list. It was South Devon’s Dartington Hall, a Tudor manor of the late fourteenth century. He inquired about the area prior to the 1390s when John Holand built it into a fine country house laid out as a double quadrangle on an acre.
Dartington, or Homestead of the Meadow by the River Dart, was first mentioned in the registers of Shaftesbury Abbey of 833. Leonard learned of its acquisition after 1066 by William de Falaise, one of the companions-in-arms of William the Conqueror. In 1113 it belonged to the Fitzmartin family, who added the property to their possessions in Wales and the southwest, leasing it as small manors and homesteads. They erected the first stone church and buildings above the archway of the north end courtyard. In 1290, a banqueting hall was added.
The Fitzmartins sold Dartington to the Audeleys in 1348. Because the Audeleys had no heirs, the property reverted to the Crown. In 1384, Richard II granted it to John Holand, his half-brother, whom he later created Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter. The Holands lost Dartington in the mid–fifteenth century during the War of the Roses. For the next one hundred years it was tossed back and forth between a disinterested Crown and several ambivalent owners.
In 1559, Sir Arthur Champernowne purchased Dartington, and his family remained its owner for the next 366 years—until Leonard arrived from London in a newly bought Talbot car. The Champernownes had Dartington on the market for some time. Its sad state of disrepair, which featured broken arches and buildings—minus the odd roof—as well as its placement in a small sea of mud, left a long line of unprepossessed potential buyers. But not Leonard.
He felt a nervous tingle bumping along a narrow road of the estate beside the river Dart until a path upward brought him to the Hall. Instead of an ugly skeleton ready for a bulldozer he imagined the beauty of its construction when the Holands set up the first rectangular court—the north wing with its archway, the barn, and extended Fitzmartin buildings; the east and west wings containing the lodgings of the private battalions of armed retainers; and the south wing including the banqueting hall, the tower, the kitchens, the serving quarters, and the private apartments.
Leonard had done his homework. He appreciated the civilizing development that the Champernownes had achieved when the feudal system ended and there was no longer need for the rural aristocracy to keep armies and maintain a grand, fortified residence. The private apartments had been converted into a gabled mansion and the solar story had been reconstructed. The sunken garden for jousting tournaments enjoyed by John Holand had been turned in part into an Italian garden. The Champernownes had also put in a bowling green in about 1675, when it was fashionable.
Leonard was enchanted with the estate. He told Dorothy he worshipped the beauty of the property. It combined a natural setting with the work of “generations of men” who attended to its appearance. He saw it as a suitable home for the family and for her, “a squire’s wife.”3
Whether Dorothy, the heiress and fighter for women’s rights, saw herself quite this way is not recorded, but she was captivated by her husband’s optimistic vision. She came to Dartington and loved hearing what he would do to the courtyard and banqueting hall to make it suitable for her ideas. They encompassed singing, music, lectures, ballet, theater, and art.
Herbert Croly was one of several advisers who did not want Dorothy to migrate to England. He thought it would be a retrograde step for the three children. But Leonard won her over by informing her that the community they would create would include a progressive school.4
With their first child on the way, Dorothy returned to Westbury to prepare Whitney, Beatrice (“Biddy”), her friend Nina, Michael, and May Gardner for their big move. The boy Straight said his good-byes to his friends with the mixed feelings of a nine-year-old. Fate would draw one of them, Jimmy Lee, the gardener’s second son, into his life at a pivotal time four decades later.
Young Straight awoke early in mid-June 1925 as the ocean liner George Washington scythed through the Channel’s calm seas and approached Plymouth Harbor. Despite his misgivings, it was an exciting moment to be met by Dorothy, Leonard, and Whitney, now 14 years old, to commence a new life.
Straight claimed he was different from his 14-year-old brother and 12year-old sister. They already knew what they wanted to do in life. Whitney, the gallant adventurer, wanted to race cars and fly, and he took advantage of Dartington’s intention of a progressive, liberated education to do exactly what he wished. Beatrice wanted to be an actress. Even at 10 she was directing plays, with all the hired staff in the United States forced to watch her performances whether they wished to or not. But Michael, like most people his age, had little real idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He may have imagined it, but the governess seemed to him to be setting him apart from everyone else. She almost bossed him into keeping a diary, and it forced Straight into thinking he might actually develop as a creative author.5
Straight assessed all the children’s relationships with Leonard, the alleged interloper in his eyes. He claimed that Whitney’s removal from the United States put him at cross purposes to Leonard. But this was contradicted by Whitney’s liberation at Dartington and his being able to do as he wanted—dash around in fast transport on the ground and in the air. Beatrice spent six years at Dartington getting useful training as an actress, leaving at 18 to become a successful thespian. But she did return to begin a theatrical school under Michael Chekhov. Straight reckoned he was too young at 10 to be hostile to Leonard.
In keeping with the intent at Dartington, Straight was given a small garden, which he had to upkeep himself. While he hoed it one day in that first Dartington summer, May Gardner came to say a tearful good-bye. Straight felt liberated. He would no longer have her stand over him while he said his prayers each night before bed. Straight was relieved to be free from the burden of religious obligations, especially when the governess demanded that he kneel by his bed each night where he had to say a prayer he found repugnant:
If I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take . . .
With Gardner’s departure, he stopped praying altogether, leaving a belief vacuum. By his teenage years at the radical Dartington, he had supplanted the concept of a religious god with a Pantheon of political gods. Foremost among them were Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.
Straight wished to give the impression of being a child adrift and therefore vulnerable to other influences that would fill the vacuum that he said he had when compared to his siblings. Straight and these influences were about to embrace each other.
3
MARX AND SPARKS
Despite their wealth and background, Leonard and Dorothy did not plan to ride to the hounds or open up the great banqueting hall to the local gentry, who would have seemed at home in a Jane Austen novel. Instead they strove to integrate the impoverished surrounding villages in their grand experiment in education and the arts. Their aim was the union of the best elements of town and country and the development of agriculture and industry.
They made themselves unpopular with the gentry by shutting off Dartington’s 800 acres to the foxhunters. Much to the chagrin of the local rector, The Reverend J. S. Martin, the Elmhirsts did not plan to patronize the local church on the main road. They preferred the privacy of their own home. Martin, Leonard noted, seemed to think from then on that the devil had moved his headquarters from Moscow to Dartington Hall. Perhaps most of all, the locals resented Dorothy, a wealthy American. She didn’t quite conform to the protocol of socializing with wives of the surrounding estates and the local aristocracy. She had her own workload and was as busy with her plans to create a suit
able household and to develop the arts as Leonard was in putting up structures to house them.
In the first couple of years, the Elmhirsts and their strange goings-on alienated the local community leaders. Dartington became the focal point of gossip over such trivialities as the children bathing nude in the river or mixed-sex showers in the school dormitory.
Outside reaction led the newcomers to turn inward. Leonard brought his three brothers, Pom (who became Dartington’s legal adviser), Vic, and Richard, from Yorkshire to cut down trees, clear the undergrowth, remove the Victorian shrubberies and weeds, and strip away the formal flower beds from the sunken garden, or tiltyard. A dramatic landscape of terraces emerged from beneath a worn out surface and blended into a wider river valley. The great trees planted by the Champernownes stood tall and grand. Sweeping views materialized. The gardens were shaped to blend with surrounding countryside. The industrious Elmhirsts and experts from England and the United States helped in the rebuilding. Roofs went on, walls were fortified, new structures erected. The combined effect of Leonard’s vision and Dorothy’s garden creations was to establish an estate that had more grandeur than at any time in its thousand-year-plus history.
In 1927, the Elmhirsts put on their first major play at Dartington, The Unknown Warrior, which had achieved success in London. It was performed in the solar, the restored meeting room near the equally restored great hall.
In between inviting actors, musicians, artists, dance troupes, philosophers, and writers to visit and “perform” at Dartington, Dorothy managed to have two children with Leonard, Ruth in March 1927 and Bill in February 1929. She also worked with Leonard on education plans, which were set out in a rather lofty, philosophical prospectus, where learning was to be associated with practical experience. For instance, a teenager could learn about the business of poultry farming in a poultry project. It was called learning by doing. The “school” was to be self-governing. There was to be no discipline—a reaction to the rectitude that both Dorothy and Leonard experienced at school. The curriculum was to flow from the children’s own interests, which turned out to be haphazard and less rewarding than supposed.