The society pages did not dare to hint that Freddy and Betty’s marriage was anything but joy and frivolity. But some family members believed their life together was no longer so cheery. “I always wondered how well they were getting along, since I thought Betty was a little flirtatious,” recalled one Harvey grandson. “They fought a lot,” said a great-grandson. “She was apparently a tigress of the first order.”
As for Kitty, since she shuttled back and forth between the family homes in Kansas City and California, her exploits were well detailed in the society columns in both places. The Kansas City Star was fascinated by a monthlong “camping and wandering expedition” she and Mary Perkins took through the Navajo country in Arizona. (They chose such challenging, hazardous routes that three of their eight pack mules fell over the side of a narrow trail; one died.) And the Los Angeles Times often covered Kitty’s life in Southern California, as she entertained more often at Arequipa.
The family estate had award-winning gardens, constantly upgraded by their gardener, who experimented with plants and flowers in the large greenhouse. The property had two large California Mission– style buildings and a small house for the staff. The main house featured large formal rooms, an industrial steel-clad kitchen, and an elevator; the family’s art collections covered almost every available inch of wall space, with each room separated by theme. They contained everything from Native drawings and drums to antique six-shooters, Frederic Remington statues, and a painting of the Grand Canyon that Thomas Moran had signed “To my friend, Ford Harvey.” Since Arequipa was almost ten miles from the ocean, Kitty followed the trend of other Montecitans and had a separate beach house built in the Sandyland beach colony. Mary Perkins built her own Sandyland cottage nearby.
EVEN IN ECONOMIC hard times, Fred Harvey restaurants did not lose their ability to dazzle those diners who could afford the culinary entertainment. In late October 1934, the flamboyant chef at Kansas City Union Station, Sylvester Bonani, invited one of his best customers, county prosecutor W. W. Graves, to indulge in a favorite dish of Henry VIII: He was going to crush him a duck.
A friend of the prosecutor’s had brought freshly shot ducks to the Fred Harvey restaurant for preparation, and Chef Sylvester decided to recreate the classic dish. The ducks were roasted in the oven for just four minutes, then placed on silver platters and carried dramatically into the dining room. As the chef sharpened his carving tools, he called out, “Away my knaves … fetch me the duck press!” It was, according to the Kansas City Post food writer who attended the dinner, probably the only duck press in the region and one of the few in the country: a massive solid-silver contraption over two feet high with a large wheel on the top.
Chef Sylvester delicately sliced the breast meat and leg meat from the very rare ducks and placed it in a chafing dish. Then he put the uncooked carcass of one of the ducks in the press, turning the wheel until they could hear the bones crunching—followed by a trickle of blood and other juices dribbling from the silver spigot into the chef’s saucepan. He then stirred in “many things … the maestro’s secret”—the dish normally includes butter, cognac, and the ground and seasoned liver of the duck—and created a stunning sauce that was poured over the warming duck meat.
A half hour after the table-side ritual had begun, the prosecutor and his party were served. Awestruck at his own creation, Chef Sylvester thumped his chest in pride, whispering loudly enough for everyone to hear: “What a regal bite.”
BY 1935, THE DEPRESSION seemed as if it might be starting to lift, in response to a barrage of economic innovations from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was entering its second phase. Some of the New Deal programs became permanent parts of the American economy, such as Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FDIC, which insured bank deposits. Others had lasting impact, like the Works Progress Administration, which among its many jobs programs created public art all across the country. And some were experiments that ultimately failed, including the price and wage controls attempted under the short-lived National Recovery Administration (NRA), an attempt to create a “code of fair competition” for each industry. While declared unconstitutional in 1935, some of the NRA rules lived on in the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act, which made “fair trade” the law of the land, prohibiting discount prices or rebates of any sort.
This very strongly affected John Huckel’s division at Fred Harvey, which, like most major retailers, had always charged magazine publishers and candy manufacturers extra for preferential shelf placement. Until Robinson-Patman, companies just had to play hardball to avoid those payments: When the president of Chicago-based Mars candies was told what it would cost to make sure his Milky Way and Snickers bars got premium display at Harvey newsstands, he pulled fifty carloads of sugar and chocolate off the Santa Fe until the railroad pressured Huckel to relent.
Still, taken together, all of Roosevelt’s economic initiatives appeared to be having an impact, and companies were beginning to respond. Both the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey started new projects with guarded optimism.
The railroad began investing in its future. Because of the dust storms in the Southwest, the Santa Fe decided it needed air-conditioning in its dining and passenger cars, and to keep up with the higher speeds that technology would make possible, the railroad ordered new diesel engines. To attract more travelers of all classes, the Santa Fe expanded its luxury services, but also beefed up its economy services. These upgraded trains, and the dining cars they required, were primarily handled through Byron’s offices in Chicago.
In Kansas City, Freddy, John Huckel, and Mary Colter started spending much of their time on a big project at the Grand Canyon: the new Bright Angel Lodge. Just down the path from El Tovar, it was the company’s first attempt at creating a more affordable experience at the South Rim. Bright Angel was a long, low stone-and-log ranch building with thirty-nine hotel rooms and fourteen separate cabins around it. Most of the complex was fairly utilitarian and remarkable only in its small touches, but the entrance had two memorable Colter creations: The main lobby was a Tinkertoy maze of interconnecting logs, and in the adjoining room she crafted a particularly ingenious fireplace. It was built from rocks carefully chosen layer by layer to mirror the various types of stones found along the walls of the canyon. In its ten feet from floor to ceiling, Colter provided a brilliant geology lesson about the Divine Abyss—which could be seen in all of its splendor through large picture windows on either side of the fireplace.
Bright Angel Lodge was the last of the major projects that Ford Harvey had envisioned before his death—finally meeting the challenge he raised at those early Interior Department meetings to make sure the national parks equally served visitors from all walks of life. It was also a showcase for Freddy’s growing abilities as a leader. While John Huckel had been doing a fine job holding the Kansas City operation together after Ford’s death, he was now well into his sixties, and his health was becoming unsteady, in part because of a drinking problem. While he and Freddy were both on-site during the Bright Angel construction, it was Freddy who was sent to Washington to discuss the project with the Department of the Interior, and to lobby for an exemption to the new hotel tax being contemplated as part of the New Deal programs. He was talking to the same politicians who had been close to Ford, many of whom had watched him and Kitty grow up at the canyon’s edge.
Aunt Minnie and Uncle John had high hopes for their nephew as the next leader of the company. Freddy was well liked and he had inherited his father’s and his grandfather’s gift for making staff members feel part of a family, remembering names and faces and telling details about employees all along the line. One reporter noted the way he “took a special interest in the younger men with whom he worked. If they were in any sort of personal difficulties they instinctively turned to Mr. Harvey and his sympathetic counsel was at their service.” He may not have focused enough on the day-to-day particulars of the business, but he clearly had the politicking down. With his natty doubl
e-breasted suits, trim mustache, and charm, brimming with enthusiasm, he was becoming more and more presidential.
Even Freddy’s obsession with the passenger airline industry looked as if it might finally become more than an expensive hobby. Transcontinental Air Transport had gotten off to a rocky start, and the business had unfolded differently than expected. But planes could now fly at night, and they were fast enough to carry passengers from either coast as far as Kansas City in a single day, so TAT no longer needed trains to supplement its air services. Also, a scandal had rocked the industry in the early 1930s—after the government encouraged the passenger airlines to merge with the airmail companies, the Roosevelt administration came in and declared the deals suspicious. But that was behind them at last. TAT had merged with postal carrier Western Air, and then reorganized again under a new name: Transcontinental & Western Air became TWA.
The new airline chose Kansas City as its national headquarters, and Freddy was named to the board of directors. When the TWA board, led by Henry DuPont, met for the first time in Kansas City in May 1935, the Harveys invited them all to their home for an elegant soiree. It was heady company for the young executive, and got even headier several months later when the controlling shares of TWA were sold to Lehman Brothers brokerage firm and the Atlas investment trust. The deal was negotiated by Lehman Brothers partner John D. Hertz, who had already made two fortunes recognizing unique transportation needs: He started the Yellow Cab Company in Chicago, franchising it nationwide, and then created the “Hertz D rive-Ur-Self System,” which became “Hertz Rent-a-Car.” As a broker, he had recently helped finance the reorganization of Paramount Pictures.
People like Hertz intrigued Freddy. He couldn’t help but wonder if the family business might outgrow its Santa Fe eating house roots when the economy turned around. For that to happen, Fred Harvey would probably have to borrow a lot of money—something both Fred and Ford had always been reluctant to do—or the company would have to go public, with the help of a large national investment banking house such as Lehman Brothers. With that kind of capital, they could think about a variety of bold strategies for the future.
Fred Harvey could open multiple locations in cities where the company was well established—signature full-service family restaurants, diners, or coffee shops. It could also enter the promising “roadside” market as the highway system expanded. With financing, Fred Harvey could consider expanding into other union stations and other national parks, and could make sure it controlled the business of caring for air travelers as it had for train passengers—starting in the West, and perhaps expanding across the country. Not only could Fred Harvey serve food on more and larger planes—the original male stewards replaced by flying Harvey Girls—but it could also run the restaurants and hotels that would eventually spring up in and around airports.
IN LATE JANUARY 1936, Freddy flew his wife and a whole lot of luggage to New York so he could see her off at the pier. Betty had more bags than usual because she had been shopping for baby clothes and toys for weeks. She was about to become an aunt.
Her brother had recently married, and her new sister-in-law was seven months pregnant. Betty had been unable to get to England for their wedding or, several months later, for the funeral of her father. But she was not going to be deprived of the chance to be part of this Drage family event. She intended to stay in England until she was able to hold that little baby—the next generation of her family.
On her arrival, Betty went directly to Somerby Grove, Leicestershire—deep in horse and hunt country about a hundred miles northwest of London—where her brother, Charles, and his wife, Rowena, lived on a large horse farm. She immediately connected with her new sister-in-law, an English country girl amazed by the urbanity of this Kansas City socialite who overwhelmed her with expensive gifts.
Early in her visit, Betty wasn’t feeling well, and Rowena asked her family physician, Dr. Harold Furness, to make a house call. When Betty told him about her epic fertility problems, he said he knew someone who might be able to help her—an old medical school friend in London, Dr. Gertrude Dearnley.
An eminent obstetric surgeon in her early fifties, Dr. Dearnley had set up the first fertility clinic in England at the Royal Free Hospital in London. It was a full-service clinic, but Dearnley was known among her colleagues for championing one procedure there that some considered too risky—an abdominal myomectomy, in which benign fibroid tumors were removed from the uterus without compromising fertility. The operation was Betty’s last hope to have a child, and she wanted it done immediately. Four days after hearing about it, she was sitting in Gertrude Dearnley’s office in London being prepped for surgery. Everything went smoothly, but the first month of recovery was extremely difficult. The incision was painful, and the bleeding was so heavy that it was almost more dangerous than the operation. To slow the blood flow, patients were given regular injections of ergotamine, a milder form of the active ingredient in LSD (without the hallucinatory effects). Betty had six injections over the next month.
To deal with the discomfort, she indulged herself. She twice had a manicurist from Elizabeth Arden sent after hours to her hospital room. And after she returned to her brother’s home to convalesce, she had Norah Crampton, a top London fashion designer who had a store in London’s Berkeley Square, bring clothes to her so she could shop from her sickbed. In the first weeks after Betty’s surgery, Crampton traveled the hundred miles up to Leicestershire twice—once with a selection of tea gowns (Betty bought one green and one gold) and the second time with handbags.
When Betty had just about recovered, her sister-in-law went into labor, and on March 2, 1936, delivered a baby girl. As Betty held her new niece in her arms for the first time, she was told the baby was being named for her, Elizabeth.
Giddy with excitement about the baby—and the possibility that she and Freddy could finally have one of their own—Betty went to London on a shopping spree, buying lovely things for her sister-in-law and herself. In one day at Norah Crampton’s shop she bought a black wool dress with a floral top, a black chiffon evening dress, and a violet evening dress; a gray tweed cardigan suit, a mauve tweed jumper suit, and a black and white tweed suit; a mauve tweed swagger coat, a gray coat, and a brown coat with two matching skirts; a white satin blouse, a white shantung blouse, a brown jumper, a black scarf, and a strand of pearls. The next time Betty returned to the shop, she bought bags and hats—four felt sports hats, three leather bags, three tweed bags, and three evening bags—and then evening wear: a blue georgette dress with a cape, a blue tweed dress and coat, a tea gown with a blue lining, a blue-and-white-checked dress, and, just as an indulgence, a fox cape. Over the next two weeks, Betty bought thirteen more dresses, ten more hats, fourteen pairs of stockings, a parasol with a rose quartz and enamel handle, and a mink stole. Her bill was $4,484.09 ($69,656), and that was just at Norah Crampton.
Betty also shopped for the baby, buying exquisite clothes and elaborate prams and cribs. And she bought a few other things that she needed, including riding clothes and, of course, a new puppy. It was an Australian terrier, a breed of tiny working terriers that was becoming popular in England but had yet to catch on in America.
But most of the time she spent in Somerby, playing dress up with her new sister-in-law and baby niece. She hadn’t felt this happy, this hopeful, in years.
BACK HOME, FREDDY was doing some shopping of his own. He decided to buy the plane that every private flyer coveted, the Beechcraft Staggerwing—the first aircraft ever designed specifically for the rich aviator market, the progenitor of today’s Gulfstream and Learjet planes. The Staggerwing was considered the most beautiful plane ever built (and still is today, with a model hanging in the Smithsonian). It was named for its elegant and unusual wing design: The top wing was staggered farther back than the bottom, for better visibility, and the two were joined by a sculptured piece of metal that curved out dramatically on either end. Each Staggerwing was custom-built with interiors of rich leather a
nd mohair, and the planes had the first-ever pneumatically retractable landing gear, which explained the exorbitant price of $17,000 ($264,000). The Staggerwing was the ultimate aviator status symbol, and Freddy bought the fastest one they made: the B-17 model with the special nine-cylinder, 420-horsepower engine that could fly over two hundred miles per hour, nearly twice as fast as his old plane.
His uncle was predictably upset about Freddy’s new toy. At age seventy-two, John Huckel was approaching his fortieth anniversary with the family business and knew his health wouldn’t allow him to remain the day-to-day leader much longer. He had lived much of his career in the shadow of Ford Harvey—who had spent a lot of time deliberately hiding in the shadow of Fred Harvey. So Huckel had never really received the credit he deserved for being the driving force in the company’s retail operations and hotel management, the overseer of the Indian art and crafts business, and both enabler and babysitter to Mary Colter and Herman Schweizer. His wife, Minnie, had tried to get him a little attention on his last birthday, sponsoring an Indian art show in his honor that displayed for the first time his amazing collection of watercolor reproductions of Navajo sand paintings. But overall, Huckel was an underappreciated force within Fred Harvey.
In mid-March 1936, as Freddy anxiously awaited delivery of his plane, John Huckel was stricken with the flu. Eleven days later, he was dead.
Byron came in for the funeral, which he hoped might mark the end of Fred Harvey being run from Kansas City. In fact, he had already told his sons he planned to move all operations to Chicago. But his sister Minnie made it clear that the main office would be moved only over her dead body. To her, it was high time for Byron, who was about to turn sixty, to officially pass the torch to Freddy.
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