It is likely that Kitty Harvey and Mary Perkins first met in Colorado Springs, where their families were both fixtures. The Perkins clan had such a gigantic estate there that when Mary’s father died in 1907, she and her siblings donated to the city almost five hundred acres near the base of Pikes Peak for what became the Garden of the Gods park and nature center. And even though Kitty was seven years younger than Mary, she had been visiting Colorado Springs since she was very young; her Aunt Minnie and Uncle John Huckel had a vacation apartment at the Broadmoor resort, and there was a Fred Harvey eating house and hotel in the local train station.
As Kitty Harvey and Mary Perkins grew older, they saw each other mostly in California, where their family estates were just a few miles apart. They shared a passion for western art and culture. Kitty had been collecting for years. She was just a teenager when she bought her first drawing from a nine-year-old Hopi boy named Fred Kabotie, whom she met in Santa Fe after wandering away from her mother at an art show. Kitty bought a couple of his paintings with her allowance, and then arranged to send Kabotie paper and brushes if he would make her more, which she agreed to buy at the price of $1 per figure. She was initially surprised at Kabotie’s contention that if so much as a character’s finger showed, it should be counted as another figure. But this was all part of her education as a young investor (and it turned out to be a small price to pay when, years later, Kabotie became famous, his work collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History).
Mary Perkins had a growing collection as well, but she was more fascinated with cowboys—she had briefly been married to one as a teen—and Indian fighters. Her passion was buying items that had belonged to George Custer.
Kitty and Mary’s exploits were often covered in the Los Angeles Times society pages, which portrayed the couple as equally comfortable at Southern California garden parties (where Kitty drank Bloody Marys with extra hot sauce) and on fishing trips to Mexico. Both had been taught by their fathers to hunt birds, and they often went out shooting together.
“We’ll warm their trousers,” Kitty was fond of saying as the birds tried to fly away.
But mostly they just enjoyed each other’s company. One of Kitty’s younger cousins recalled a childhood visit to Arequipa where he sat and watched for hours as “the two ladies played cards and smoked and drank wine.” In fact, Kitty and Mary allowed him to have a glass of wine, his first. He came downstairs the next morning not feeling very well.
“They just laughed,” he said.
KITTY’S BROTHER, FREDDY, also kept company with formidable women, so it came as quite a shock when the society pages started linking him romantically with Betty Drage.
A tall, lovely swan-necked girl who was a gifted equestrian, Betty made sense for Freddy in certain ways. Her father was a former British Royal Horse Guard officer and a polo player, and her mother, heir to a major Midwestern grain brokerage, was a social phenomenon. Lucy Christie Drage was known as the first woman in Kansas City society to ever smoke in public, and had perhaps the most-sought-after taste in town—everyone asked for her advice when redecorating, and her opinion on clothes was always the final word.
And everyone knew what Lucy thought about her daughter’s relationship with Freddy. She was appalled. Freddy Harvey was twenty-six. Betty was only sixteen.
When the society columns began speculating on “the rumor of pretty little Betty Drage’s engagement” to a mysterious older man in Kansas City, Lucy Drage dispatched her husband, Frank, to take their teenage daughter immediately to Paris, where the nuns at a convent school could set her straight. Betty “got as far as the door” of the convent, according to the Independent, “but refused to go in.” So Frank Drage hired her a tutor and didn’t let her out of his sight.
Betty turned seventeen in Paris, where her father tried to get her interested in boys her own age, but to no avail. In early July 1922, the Independent reported that the trip had “failed to cure Miss Betty’s symptoms” and the young woman was returning to Kansas City, where her family appeared ready to face the inevitable. In fact, not only was Betty going to marry Freddy Harvey, the dashing flyboy and polo star ten years her senior, but she wanted a wedding as soon as possible, the first order of business in the fall social calendar. So just seven weeks after announcing their engagement, they were married on a Thursday morning at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Because Betty was under eighteen, her father had to sign her marriage license for her.
As befitted the best-dressed family in Kansas City, the seventeen-year-old bride wore a floor-length gown of ivory panne velvet, with bodice and sleeves of Irish Carrickmacross lace, a matching cap with full tulle veil, and a court train of velvet lined with pale blue georgette. Her mother complemented her beautifully in a periwinkle blue crepe de chine dress and a striking brown hat trimmed with an ostrich feather.
Kitty was the maid of honor. Freddy’s best man and groomsmen were mostly flying buddies, Bostonians he knew from the air service, along with his weekend pilot and polo pals from Kansas City and his cousin Byron Jr. After the ceremony, there was a lavish British-style breakfast reception and dancing at the Drage mansion, Stony Glen.
The wedding presents were “magnificent, with few duplicates,” according to the Independent. “Besides the quantities of silver and glassware,” there were “a full set of Wedgwood china, rare tapestries from Russian palaces, a ball watch set in onyx with a chain, several rare paintings in oil, antique furniture and a great chest of jams and preserves,” as well as the signature gift for the “dry” 1920s—a huge silver tray with martini glasses and a large shaker.
“The clever bride wrote her notes of thanks for each gift as it arrived so she might at the last leave for her wedding trip with no task undone,” the society page reported. Young Betty Drage simply could not wait to become Mrs. Freddy Harvey. Besides planning the wedding and their extensive honeymoon trip to Europe, she and her mother had chosen fabrics and furnishings for the new house Ford bought the couple, just around the corner from his own home. All the decorating was done while the newlyweds were away. When they returned, Betty’s new life as a grown-up was perfectly in place.
The same was true for Freddy. He returned to a new home and a new executive position at Fred Harvey. But, perhaps more exciting, the airfield he and four aviation buffs had been building, the first in Kansas City and one of the first in the country, was open for business.
Within a few months of the wedding, Betty Ann reported in her Audacious Tattlings column, with even more incredulity than usual, that “the big white stork” would soon be visiting the young couple.
“It is rumored that lovely Betty Drage Harvey is joyously inspecting layettes,” she said. “Perhaps Betty is buying them for doll clothes. It hasn’t been long since she played with dolls.”
Unfortunately, soon after, Betty lost the baby. It was the first—although given the abruptness of the wedding, it may actually have been the second—of many failed attempts to produce the next Fred Harvey.
CHAPTER 30
THE ROAR OF THE TWENTIES
AMERICA’S CITIES EXPLODED AFTER WORLD WAR I, BUSTLING and churning to the sound of ragtime becoming jazz and the spiritual becoming the blues, as two of the nation’s busiest train junctions, Chicago and Kansas City, became centers of cultural cross-pollination. While Chicago was larger, Kansas City was freer, because the leaders of the Democratic political machine—still dominated by the Pendergast family, cement magnates in their second generation of controlling the local economy—made it clear they had no intention of enforcing the rules of Prohibition (which went into effect on January 16, 1920) or any other rules they didn’t like.
Fearless Freddy Harvey and his teenage bride, Betty, with her trendy flapper haircut and pouty lips, were stars in the new, youth-driven, all-hours social life of Kansas City. They cut a fine figure on any dance floor and held lavish parties. Freddy continued his daredevil exploits in the air and on the polo field—where
his achievements, and occasional injuries, always made the papers. And, like everyone else in Kansas City, they might be found, at any time of the day or night, eating breakfast at the Fred Harvey restaurant in Union Station. Since it was open round the clock and was known for the most indulgent comfort food, the restaurant became a center for a diverse group of Kansas Citians whose days and nights ended at different times. Besides regular mealtimes, there were those who came after the theater to end their evenings, and then a younger crowd who came near midnight, their evenings just beginning. While Kansas City’s burgeoning jazz and blues clubs—which were spawning the likes of Count Basie—were concentrated farther east and north, they were just a streetcar ride away from the place that most people had taken to calling “Harvey’s.”
If you were a close friend of Freddy and Betty’s, you might even qualify to have Harvey’s brought to you. Fellow polo player Frank Baker, whose family was powerful in the grain industry, had a bachelor pad downtown where he threw many elaborate dinner parties—all discreetly catered by the Fred Harvey chefs at Union Station. Sometimes the chefs sent live lobsters or fresh mountain trout, prairie chicken or venison, to be prepared in Frank’s small kitchen, but often they just cooked all the food at the restaurant and it was delivered to the apartment by car.
SOME OF THE GLAMOUR of the Fred Harvey restaurants—not just in Kansas City, but all along the line—was generated by the more than occasional presence of movie stars dining among the locals. The Santa Fe was the preferred railroad to Hollywood, and had been since the first films were made there in 1910, by New York directors and actors seeking a place to shoot outdoors in the winter. The relationship between Fred Harvey and Hollywood was cemented in 1912, when directors D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett stopped in Albuquerque on their way home from California, set up shop at the Alvarado, and made two silent pictures there in ten days. Griffith shot an Indian melodrama called A Pueblo Legend. Sennett directed his girlfriend, the budding young film comedienne Mabel Normand, in The Tourists, a slapstick comedy about sightseeing in which a tourist named Trixie becomes so engrossed with buying pottery at the Indian Building that she misses her train. To kill time, she and some friends visit a pueblo, where the “Big Chief” shows them around until “Mrs. Big Chief” gets jealous, and soon the “Indian Suffragettes” are on the “warpath,” brandishing clubs. Trixie hides in an Indian blanket, but eventually she and her friends are chased back to the train, which the Indian “squaws” beat on with their clubs until it pulls away—with Trixie waving her handkerchief, smiling.
Neither picture went on to be taught in film schools. But movie people did get to know Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe, and they all realized the opportunity for cross-promotion. Some actors, directors, and executives preferred to keep a low profile while traveling, but others took full advantage of the exposure. In many ways, the railroad publicity machines were bigger and better established than those of the growing silent-film studios. The Santa Fe wanted to be seen as the railroad to the stars, who were only too happy to benefit from their relentless public relations efforts. So, it was no coincidence that when a well-known actor was riding toward any major Santa Fe city, a remarkably well-informed story about the trip would appear in the local newspaper.
“The biggest thrill I ever had was when William S. Hart, the famous western silent-movie star, came into the dining room,” recalled a Harvey Girl from the El Garces in Needles, California. “He sat at one of my tables and when I served him he said, ‘I’d like to stick you in my pocket and take you home and let you play with my ponies.’ He patted me and left. I looked under the plate after the train had gone and found a silver dollar … Sometimes you’d get someone who was needy—Groucho Marx was like that. The coffee wasn’t hot enough, the service not enough, nothing pleased him. We’d give those people special attention, but otherwise, everybody was treated the same.”
Humorist Will Rogers was a frequent train traveler and a regular at many Harvey restaurants. “All the girls knew who he was and used to go and stand on the porch of the Harvey House to watch him perform in the street,” recalls one Harvey Girl posted in Amarillo, Texas. “I became the Harvey Girl he always requested serve him. We became great friends. He’d call me by name when he came into the Amarillo dining room and then he’d say, ‘Bring me some of that corn bread and red beans and some of those delicious ham and eggs!’ Everybody knew what he wanted; and he’d get it, even at dinner time. He was a great favorite.”
In fact, Hollywood columnists would learn to pump Harvey Girls for information about traveling stars. After hearing that Carole Lombard had just said goodbye to Clark Gable at the Santa Fe station in Los Angeles, a reporter asked a busy Harvey Girl to help him out with some fashion details.
“What’s that Carole Lombard is wearing so I can tell my wife?” he asked.
“It’s a beige dress,” she said, hustling to clean away dishes.
“What kind of hat is that?” the reporter wanted to know.
“Listen, big boy,” the Harvey Girl shot back. “I’ve got five hungry men here screaming for food. I’m busy. Get yourself another stylist.”
While the motion picture business had been growing for some time, vying with theater and concerts to become the entertainment mainstay in cities large and small, the biggest postwar media explosion was on the airwaves. Commercial radio began to be viable in the early 1920s, which meant that companies were investing in broadcasting and families were buying huge living-room radios.
There was, of course, a Fred Harvey connection to this new business. Byron Harvey’s brother-in-law John Daggett became one of the first major stars in radio broadcasting. He was known to listeners as far as KHJ radio’s signal would carry—which, on most nights, was all the way to Chicago—as “Uncle John,” whose “Children’s Hour” was the last thing most kids remembered hearing before falling asleep. He came on at 6:30 p.m. and offered a gentle combination of musicians, actors, and comedy, before reading America’s youngsters a bedtime story. Uncle John was also the station manager at KHJ—which was owned by the Los Angeles Times, where he was a reporter. The Times got into radio to extend the brand into a new electronic medium and reap whatever profits this new technology might be stealing from print.
At the height of his fame, Uncle John, then in his early forties, was married on the radio to a seventeen-year-old whose high school glee club had appeared on his show. His young wife, Marguerite Daggett, became a character on the show, “Pal O’Mine,” but their marriage later imploded as famously as it began. During their front-page divorce, Uncle John accused his wife of having an affair with Michael Cudahy—the meatpacking magnate whose family had been friendly with the Harveys for decades—and she claimed he drank, cheated on her, and encouraged her to have sex with other men while he watched because he was too old to satisfy her.
It was the kind of scandal that the Harvey family had always successfully avoided. But for all their serious-mindedness in business, it was impossible to completely dodge the giddy media frivolity of the 1920s. One morning Ford Harvey was appalled to find in his morning mail a clipping from a front-page story in the Los Angeles Examiner with the headline “Diamond-Studded Toothbrush Stolen From Harvey’s Daughter.” The story claimed that “Fred Harvey’s daughter” had been robbed while staying at the Plaza Hotel in New York, with bandits making off with $50,000 ($629,000) in jewelry and precious stones—including the bejeweled toothbrush. In fact, the robbed woman wasn’t a Harvey at all; she was Kansas City socialite Dorothy Clendening, whom Ford and Judy knew from the country club, along with her husband, a prominent physician and medical writer. According to Ford, her closest connection to the Harveys was that he had called his friend Fred Sterry, who ran the Plaza, to make sure she got a nice room.
“Mrs. Clendening is a very dignified, attractive young matron who has no more idea of ‘a diamond-studded toothbrush’ than you or I,” Ford wrote angrily to his brother, Byron, after seeing the clipping. “Many will form an erroneous
and unfavorable opinion of the Fred Harvey family from this … [which] demonstrates how helpless we are against the misrepresentations of a newspaper reporter.”
FORD WAS NO HAPPIER with the ongoing national coverage of the company’s bizarre battle with an Oklahoma state official who decided that the long-standing policy of requiring men to wear jackets in Fred Harvey dining rooms was actually un-American—and had to be stopped. Campbell Russell, the excitable chairman of the state’s corporation commission, went to the Harvey eating house in Purcell for dinner one hot August night, removed his jacket, and was stunned when the maître d’ told him he needed to put it back on—or take his meal in the lunchroom, where the same food could be had à la carte in more casual surroundings. Russell refused to put on his jacket, so he was refused service.
Several days later, he called a public hearing of his commission—which controlled business practices in the state—to take sworn testimony on the coat rule, which had been in place, in states with climates as warm as Oklahoma, as far back as the 1880s, long before Fred Harvey eating houses even had electric fans. Besides calling in various Oklahomans for their opinions, the commission compelled representatives of the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey to come to Oklahoma City and testify. Ford sent Freddy to explain why the company had the rule, and how they provided loaner jackets free of charge to any man who didn’t have one. The Santa Fe sent a vice president who challenged the commission’s jurisdiction in the matter.
A week after the hearing, Campbell’s commission declared that men absolutely could dine in Harvey eating houses in Oklahoma without jackets. Ford’s lawyers immediately challenged the ruling in court. Naturally, newspapers and radio commentators across the country had a field day.
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