Such class-crossing excursions seemed to intrigue King, providing a kind of inverse of his own experience as a man of substance drawn to a working-class world. On one occasion, he introduced himself to the Honourable Maude Stanley, “founder of the first Working-Girls’ Club” in London, and announced that he wished to provide her charges with a memorable day. King “arranged every detail,” Stanley recalled. He took one hundred girls by train from Waterloo to Windsor, where each spent half the day on a carriage ride around the park and the other half out on a river launch. At midday they all joined together for an elaborate multicourse dinner in the Town Hall, “in a splendid room hung round with pictures of kings and queens,” where King gave each girl a specially printed menu to take home as a souvenir.60 Lady Stanley, a friend of Hay’s noted, became “quite as charmed with Frascuelo [King] as the barmaids.”61
KING FELT ATTRACTED TO the girls and curious about their lives, but by playing the host he reaffirmed the vast class difference between his world and theirs. In his frequent nighttime visits to London’s bars and pubs, however, he often concealed his background in order to grasp a more immediate experience of working-class life. Bronson recalled King’s stories of “chaffing bar maids with Bret Harte,” and Henry James drily noted after King’s departure, “The British barmaid mourns his absence.”62 To justify himself to his friends, King announced he intended to write a book with ten stories about women from the depths of London life. But most perceived what he was up to. “Think of it Hay,” one friend wrote to King’s old confidant. “He goes down to the lowest dive at Seven Dials, chirps to the pretty barmaid of a thieves’ gin mill, gives her a guinea for a glass of ‘bittah,’ [and] gets the frail, simple clean thing gone on him. Then [he] whips out his notebook and with a smile that would charm a duchess asks her to tell her story. Naturally she is pleased and fires away in dialect that never saw print, which the wily geologist nails on the spot. Of course, she is a poor, pitiful wronged thing who would have been an angel if she had been kindly treated and taken to Sunday School when she was a child—they are all so, you know.”63
“Let us hope,” concluded Hay’s correspondent, “that King is walking through all these narrow slippery places upright and unstained as an archangel.”64
King joked with Raymond about his afternoons with the working girls. But perhaps sensing King’s true attraction to the women and his deep ambivalence about the privileges of class, Raymond imagined “something dearer and deeper in it than its sparkling surface.”65
BUSINESS AFFAIRS OCCUPIED LITTLE of King’s time in Europe. In the late summer of 1883, more than a year after his arrival, he finally sealed a deal with a group of British investors for the purchase of the Yedras mine and told friends he would be sailing home in December. But the newly capitalized Anglo-Mexican Mining Company ran into financial difficulties of its own, leading King’s American investors to worry. King delayed his return.66
Writing from London in the summer of 1884, after two years abroad, King adopted the bemused stance of an expatriate. “All the phenomena of a sudden, unfinished civilization such as yours,” he wrote to James Hague, “will afford me the greatest amusement and keenest study.” He meant to provoke a smile. But he sounded anxious about returning home to resume his expected social station and hinted that he intended to hold himself apart as an observer, a kind of tourist in his own country. If he could stand on the outside looking in, perhaps he could avoid the suffocating crush of his old social world. “I do feel very much like an early Briton,” he told Hague, “and approach the idea of America with intense curiosity.” He joked that having become accustomed to “our well regulated and orderly methods of politics, I shall take a great interest in observing the passionate activity, and the frank corruption of your system.” And he confessed to a certain curiosity about the American social scene. “I am anxious to see what your Broadway and Fifth Avenue look like,” he wrote, “and whether the vaunted beauty of the American girl approaches that of her calmer and heavier sister over here.”67
King’s friend Henry James had immortalized the “American girl” in his 1878 novella Daisy Miller. She was pretty and fresh, audacious and charming, more high-spirited and frank than her Old World counterpart.68 From Europe, King could imagine her allure. But in America, her imagined attractions faded.
King sailed for home with his crates of treasures in September 1884.69 Once there, he quickly lost the hopeful optimism of a tourist who finds the charm in every unfamiliar scene. New York felt oppressively familiar. “The rush and whirl of New York life,” King wrote to his old Yale acquaintance Daniel Gilman, “the detestable social pressure of the place are so thoroughly antagonistic.... But for the crime of forsaking one’s own country, I should live in London without hesitation.”70
King lived out of a trunk. He stored most of the art collection he had amassed in Europe in a dark room in the old Studio Building on West Tenth Street and lent some pieces out to friends. “It pleased him to have others enjoy what he had not the time and the place for,” John La Farge recalled.71 From time to time, King dazzled his friends with a Millet or a Turner pulled out of a chest, but most of his European treasures remained hidden away, along with the paintings acquired from friends like Albert Bierstadt, La Farge, and R. Swain Gifford.72 King fantasized about an “abiding home” for his collection. There would be a decorative frieze of scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy wrapping around a grand room, high up above the doors and windows, and light would pour in through stained-glass windows to illuminate the space like a jewel.73
But it was all idle talk. There would be no grand homes for Clarence King, only a series of furnished hotel suites and the secret homes in Brooklyn and Queens of which his closest friends would know nothing.
KING SEEMED AT HOME everywhere, thought Henry Adams, ever admiring of his friend’s chameleon-like ability to blend in when he traveled. “Where was he ever a stranger?”74 But where, one might also ask, was he ever at home? King could settle with ease into Clover Adams’s Washington drawing room or chat for hours with the British barmaids, but he seemed unable to create a home of his own. He professed to envy his friends’ settled domesticity. “If I were married, how I should delight in buying the house you are now living in and remaking it a little to suit my need,” he wrote to Adams soon after his return to the United States. “But I am human and could not bear the exasperating spectacle of your and Hay’s domestic happiness.”75
At the start, when he returned to New York in the mid-1870s to finish his survey reports, King tried to maintain his own lodgings, renting rooms and employing a succession of male and female servants as befit a man of his standing.76 But he later came to prefer residential hotels. And these institutions, as much as the city’s segregated housing patterns and the anonymity of the crowded urban streets, helped make possible his double life.
When King moved back to New York in the spring of 1881, after leaving his job in Washington as director of the United States Geological Survey, he took up residence at the Brevoort Hotel, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, about a block from his old survey headquarters on lower Fifth Avenue. The Brevoort boasted a reputation as one of the city’s “most elegant hotels” with “a fine view of the beau monde.”77 As one guidebook explained, the hotel’s “quiet and refined” surroundings coupled with “the superior excellence of the cuisine department” helped it attract a “cultivated class of patrons.”78 A decade earlier, when an African American senator from Texas and his wife tried to obtain a room by requesting reservations in advance and announcing their race, the Brevoort turned them away.79 It sought a different clientele. King shared the hotel that spring of 1881 with a stylish set: the Danish chargé d’affaires from Washington; the secretary of the French Legation; the painter John La Farge, his old friend; and the Duke of Sutherland, who delighted the royalty-conscious Americans by “chatting” with them in the reading room.80
The Brevoort and New York’s other residential hotels filled an
important niche in the urban housing market by accommodating both short-term guests and long-term residents. Members of the middle and upper classes could find in hotel living a kind of instant social prestige, a domestic simplicity free of the burdens of housekeeping or the supervision of servants, and—as King would discover—an anonymity that made it possible to live a private life far from the gaze of neighbors or family. One might embrace the convivial social life of the lobby, the reading room, or the dining rooms and count on a casual exchange with the maids, a friendly wave to the desk clerk, or a brief chat with the doorman. But especially as the hotels embraced the new European style of pricing that allowed guests to take their meals elsewhere—leaving the older, all-inclusive American meal plans for “persons of regular life, who can command their time”—one could keep one’s own hours without attracting the notice of the other residents.81 No one would notice whether you ate dinner at the hotel or what time you came home at night. An absence of days or even weeks might go unobserved by any but the paid staff: neither darkened windows nor uncollected packages would attract the attention of curious passersby. For someone like King, who would eventually direct his friends to write to him at his gentlemen’s clubs, there would not even be a growing stack of mail to signal his whereabouts. He could just shut up his hotel suite if he needed to go off to Newport to visit his mother, head west to check out a mining prospect, or go down to Washington to visit with friends. When he left for Europe in May 1882, he could simply put his few personal belongings in storage or lend them out to friends, turn in his hotel key, and leave.
When King returned from Europe in the fall of 1884, he again made his residence in a hotel. He took rooms at the Brunswick, a seven-story brick building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, whose top two floors, arranged in “retreating stories, turned back to catch the sun,” evoked the “picturesque” mansard roofs of Paris.82 Its “beautifully frescoed” dining room rivaled the celebrated restaurant Delmonico’s, which stood across the street. Together, the two establishments anchored this stretch of Fifth Avenue, dubbed “the Belgravia of the American metropolis, the center of its fashion and splendor, the home of its merchant-princes.”83 The Brunswick, too, operated on the European plan, so King had no obligation to take his meals in the hotel’s formal dining room. If he did not wish to find refreshment in the hotel café or bar—a gathering spot for the “jeunesse dorée who are interested in sport”—he could just walk out to the street and head elsewhere.84
Like the Brevoort, the Brunswick housed a mix of long- and short-term guests. For about $2 per night guests could have a single room with “gas, service towels, etc.,” but long-term residents paid as much as $40 per night for the suite of rooms and “extra privileges” that made hotel living a comfortable substitute for domestic life.85 The New York City directory for 1890 listed a host of business types as residents of the hotel: the architect George Edward Harding, soon to win attention for his design of the new Postal Telegraph-Cable Company building; Thomas Bullock, president of the Prescott and Arizona Central Railroad; and theater impresario Edward “Ned” G. Gilmore, the manager of Niblo’s Garden, a venue for amusements ranging from highbrow ballets to “dangerous theatrical feats” performed by children.86
The Brunswick offered King a steady flow of social diversions. As the urban headquarters for “coaching,” a “favorite diversion of the wealthy people of the city,” it served as the departure point every morning during the late-spring season for an old-fashioned English coach that carried paying passengers north through Central Park and Harlem to Pelham Bridge and returned them in the late afternoon in time for drinks. On sunny spring afternoons, members of the city’s fashionable coaching club could be seen driving their own four-in-hands out in front of the hotel, dodging the other horse-drawn carriages and delivery wagons along Fifth Avenue. (Prankster Ned Gilmore once slipped a mule-drawn coach into the procession.)87 And on Coaching Day, the last Saturday in May, they would all gather in front of the Brunswick with their brilliantly decorated coaches—“their boxes filled with richly dressed women flashing in silks and jewels”—to move out in parade formation up Fifth Avenue and through Central Park before returning to the Brunswick for their annual banquet.88
A broad swath of the city’s social and business elite passed through the Brunswick meeting rooms and banquet halls: the Lost Cause sympathizers of the New York Southern Society; the Goethe Society; the Rockaway Hunting Club; and the National Electric Association, whose work, claimed King’s old friend, now mayor, Abram Hewitt, would “revolutionize the world and regenerate society.”89 King lived on the periphery of this social world. His life at the Brunswick was intensely private. If anyone ever called on him upstairs in his private rooms, he left no record.
King’s social life took place, instead, at his clubs, and he collected memberships like calling cards. New York boasted more “first class clubs with mansions of their own” than London, a reporter noted in January 1887, and they struggled to maintain their distinctive character in the face of pressure to admit the “business element” that could support those luxurious clubhouses. 90 Within a few years of returning to New York from Europe, King belonged to at least seven groups. He moved among the “gilded youth” of the Knickerbocker, and the “men of great wealth” at the Metropolitan. He found the artsy set at the Century, the elite literary enclave founded in 1847, and chatted about the outdoor life with the hunters and fishermen at the exclusive Tuxedo. King could count on finding like-minded Republicans at the Union League Club; old college friends at the Yale Club; fellow adventurers at the American Geographical Society, the only one of his clubs to admit women. King’s membership fees totaled at least $455 a year, an expensive way to keep up social appearances.91 But the clubhouses were an extension of his living quarters at the residential hotels; they became his library and living room, his dining room and study.
King received and entertained friends at his clubs, dealt with his mail there (the postal service even added a late-night delivery to accommodate the clubmen), and used the club rooms to tend to the business arrangements that would keep him flitting from one mining venture to the next during the 1880s and ’90s.92 His public life in the clubs, the illusion that his entire life transpired there, helped ensure that what happened elsewhere unfolded beyond the notice of friends or neighbors, colleagues or associates. By switching his primary base of operations from club to club—he might ask friends to direct his mail to the Century Association or the Knickerbocker, might greet friends at either the Century or the Union League—King could keep even his closest associates wondering where he really was.93
The clubs enabled King’s peripatetic life. But as Edith Wharton wrote in The Age of Innocence (1920), her novel of manners about 1870s New York, “the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.”94 Even the club life came to seem confining to King.
KING COULD BE MADDENINGLY elusive, and not simply because he was often away from New York, chasing down problems at the Sombrerete mine or dashing off to Texas and California in search of equipment and financing.95 Even in the city he seemed hard to find. His friend James Hague noted that King’s many friends often called him to account “for neglected letters, unkept engagements, broken promises and similar offences,” though five minutes of his presence seemed to assure complete forgiveness. “Many of his promises and engagements remained unperformed because it was a physical impossibility to keep them,” wrote Hague. “In his friendly and obliging way he recklessly made many conflicting and interfering appointments, which, without the gift of ubiquity, he could not possibly keep.”96 Family duties, unpaid bills, uncertain business prospects, and chronic illnesses all made it difficult for King to meet his obligations.
At some point, he began to imagine a different life.
The late-nineteenth-
century American city offered a stage for social reinvention: a place where freedpeople could reimagine their lives without the shackles of slavery; European immigrants could refashion themselves as Americans; small-town migrants could embrace all the new possibilities of urban life. “Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!” enjoined the New York poet Walt Whitman.97 One could be one person at home; another on the streets or in the workplace. A fair-skinned person of mixed race might live with her black family at night and pass as a white worker during the day. A dutiful wage earner might live with his wife and children but pursue secret homosexual assignations after dark. The immigrant youth might speak her native tongue at home but use English to fit in at school. In New York such double lives were enabled by the sheer numbers of people on the streets, the ways in which one could travel about on public transportation, the distinctive character of different neighborhoods, the continual influx and outflow of residents. One could shed one’s personal history like a snake sheds its skin, to emerge new, unmarked—with a different name, an invented past, an imagined story—ready to glide into a future of endless possibilities. “In a great city,” the memoirist “Earl Lind” wrote at the close of the century, “the temptation to a double life is exceptional.”98 “Far stronger,” he said, “than in a village.”99
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