At the time, it was believed that the electroencephalograph might be applied to psychological analysis, and Loomis invited an array of distinguished psychiatrists and physicians to Tower House to observe their work. His experiments had shown that hypnotism was something that actually made the brain behave differently despite the evidence of the senses, and some doctors held out hope that this new technique of determining brain wave patterns could help “tell you what manner of man you are” and have unique importance in psychoanalysis. (This theory was later discounted when it was reported that “similar patterns were produced by an eminent scientist and an English water beetle.”) The breathless style of the New York American captured the thrill of discovery generated by Loomis’ “newest diagnostic aid”:
More than fifty years ago, Joseph Breuer of Vienna cured a 21-year-old girl, Anne, of a paralysis of the right arm by suggestion made after she was in a hypnotic trance. . . . Later on the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna proved amply how unconscious wishes or desires brought about actual physical maladies. He dispensed with hypnotism altogether, and started his “psychoanalysis” method. Perhaps some day scientists like Loomis and his colleagues, Prof. H. Davis of Harvard and others, will employ their brain potential methods to investigate not only hypnotism but also psychoanalysis. What actually happens to brain activity rhythms under psychoanalysis? What is this mysterious thing called unconscious mentality? How is it released or inhibited? Will the new electrical instruments unlock these tantalizing mysteries?
Similar potential or action currents are recorded from nerves. Thus a most remarkable method is now available to probe into the mysteries of living tissues, especially nervous and brain tissues. Science has a new way of diagnosing brain tumors and other diseases, and eventually perhaps mental diseases will be thus investigated. . . .
Throughout this period, Loomis kept up his active exploration of a wide range of fields. In addition to electroencephalography, he was absorbed in measuring very small increments of time and was still playing around with his perfect clocks. He was also fascinated by the new field of high-energy physics and had even tried building a particle accelerator, known as a “cyclotron.” Loomis would attack, with the same boundless enthusiasm he bestowed on the most important projects at the laboratory, innumerable other problems that caught his fancy, whether they were apparently frivolous or on the very fringes of science. He was interested in practically everything, and if he found a problem, at one time or another he probably pursued it, if only to try his hand at making some sort of headway.
“It was always about the next thing, the adventure,” observed Caryl Haskins, who first visited the laboratory in Tuxedo Park in the late 1930s. “He never had one idea. He always had dozens of ideas. There were a lot of people working on things Alfred was directing and suggesting. I thought he was quite remarkable—a unique figure.”
In 1937, Loomis embarked on one of his more curious extrascientific ventures when he collaborated with the innovative Swiss architect William Lescaze on the design of a state-of-the-art modern house. It would be the perfect marriage of form and function—embodying Loomis’ ideal of a compact, climate-controlled, self-sufficient existence. Lescaze, who had arrived in New York in 1920, had made a name for himself designing forward-looking buildings that were influenced by the leading modern European architects, including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and J. J. P. Oud. He was most famous for the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building he designed with George Howe in 1932. The sleek, monolithic thirty-three-story tower, which housed one of the oldest and most conservative banks in the country, created a huge controversy, with critics divided as to whether it was an eyesore or heralded a brilliant new era of architecture.
Either way, the result was arresting, and by the mid-1930s, Lescaze had emerged as the leader of the new international style. A sunny stucco box with a steel frame he designed in a wooded enclave in New Hartford, Connecticut, had caused a sensation, particularly since his client, a young Vanderbilt heir named Frederick Vanderbilt Field, had demanded that the house represent a complete break from the dark, ornamental mansions of his childhood. Lescaze’s structure was hailed as a modern classic, and architecture magazines of the day devoted pages to it. In 1934, Lescaze designed a Manhattan town house and office for himself and his family and was the first to incorporate sheer glass block walls and a built-in air-conditioning system in American residential architecture. The stark white house with its horizontal strip windows stood out from the dowdy row of brownstones like a bright beacon of the future, and with its spare interior design and custom furniture and cabinetry, it was as brilliantly functional inside as the cockpit of a plane.
At the time, Hobart, who needed a larger residence for his growing family, hired Lescaze to build a modernist stucco house in Tuxedo Park. During the architect’s frequent trips to the area, he struck up a friendship with Loomis, and the two men found they had much in common. Lescaze, like Loomis, was a fierce perfectionist and was always redesigning common objects—everything from burglar alarms to pool tables—when he found their original form unsatisfactory or, as was more often the case, unsightly. Rather than let it spoil his plans, he redesigned the offending object. Once, when drawing up plans for a new school, he included a sketch of a “dustless blackboard eraser.” Inevitably, the designs he worked out were simpler and more practical. Enthralled by their discussions of industrial design and new advances in technology, Loomis decided to collaborate with Lescaze on the design of a futuristic glass-and-steel house behind the laboratory. According to Lescaze’s notes, the fundamental scheme of the house was dictated by Loomis’ desire “to experiment with a novel system of heating and air-conditioning” and to be able to conduct these tests over a longer period than laboratory research allowed and “in ordinary living conditions.”
The Glass House was to be the antithesis of the medieval Tower House, with its gloomy wood-paneled rooms, cathedral ceilings, and old-fashioned leaded windows. In typical Lescaze style, almost all of the structural components were made by machine, including the steel framing, cork flooring, and metal skylights. The single-story building’s central section opened onto a large living room and conservatory, and from it sprouted a wing with two bedrooms and baths, and a second wing that consisted of a kitchen, utility rooms, air-conditioning room, terrace, and garage. Although the plan included two maids rooms, the Glass House was designed for a “servantless existence” and boasted the ultimate in modern conveniences, some of which Loomis designed himself. “It had built-in tubes for vacuuming, and the first dishwasher I think I had ever seen,” recalled Evans. “I don’t think Alfred ever wanted to see another one of his wife’s meddling housemaids.”
The most remarkable, and probably unique, feature of the structure was its double exterior walls and roof, so that in effect it consisted of one house built entirely within the shell of another house. The space between the double walls was approximately two feet, creating a corridor of air, or “shell space,” that could be heated independently of the inner house. Since much of the house featured large glass panel windows and walls, the temperature of the shell space, if no heat was added, would be only slightly less than halfway between the outdoors and indoors. The object of this construction, according to Lescaze, was so Loomis could maintain a high temperature and humidity within the inner house without creating condensation on the glass. Loomis apparently wanted to try to re-create the balmy conditions of his home in Hilton Head, and according to Lescaze, one of the purposes of the experiment was “to investigate the effect of living in such an atmosphere during the winter season.”
The Glass House was equipped with a special air-conditioning system, including an all-year unit for the inner house and a separate heating unit for the surrounding shell space. The complex duct system, which allowed return air and fresh air to be mixed and thermostatically controlled, and the oil-burning water heater and water cooler were worked out by Loomis and Lescaze and Leslie Hart
, a consulting engineer. Owing to the “house within a house” construction, and heavy insulation used to deaden the sound of the mechanical equipment, the interior rooms were virtually soundproof. The worst Tuxedo rainstorms were barely audible within the building. Loomis boasted that the Glass House cost “only $125 a year to heat,” a fraction of the sum he squandered annually to keep the drafty Tower House at a habitable temperature.
In his novel, Richards lampooned Lescaze’s creation, which Loomis spent $125,000 to build, and another $25,000 to furnish, as a trumped-up “garden hot house.” Apparently both architect and scientist forgot to allow for the fact that the miracle of modern air-conditioning could break down—as it often did during the summer months—turning the structure into a veritable oven. Because the double glass windows could not be opened, it took the rooms “days to cool off.”
NOT long after the construction was completed in 1938, Loomis fell hopelessly in love with Hobart’s twenty-nine-year-old wife, Manette. The Glass House, originally intended as guest quarters for visiting scientists, became their secret hideaway. Over time, it became Loomis’ home away from home. Ironically, the house with translucent walls proved ideal for private rendezvous. Tucked away behind the laboratory on a secluded bluff overlooking Tuxedo Lake, and shielded on the other side by tall pines, it was protected from the prying eyes of neighbors. More than one of the lab’s eminent guests was known to bring a mistress there for a “naughty weekend,” according to Kistiakowsky’s second wife, Elaine. “It became quite the place for wild parties, and it was not uncommon for people to bring out their girlfriends and have quite a good time without their wives being any the wiser for it. They were all young, and quite good-looking, and they worked hard and played hard. And I gather they drank like fish.”
Apart from visitors, Loomis allowed only trusted members of his laboratory staff access to the house and instructed his own wife that it was off limits both to her and to her legions of servants. “He left strict orders that no one was ever to go in there to tidy up, supposedly because of all the special equipment that was lying about,” said Evans. “I don’t know if Ellen knew what was going on or not, but she always hated that house.”
Loomis went to great lengths to ensure he and Manette were not discovered, even developing a signaling system that he used to communicate with her from the windows of their respective homes. The Hobarts lived on the opposite side of Tuxedo Lake, and Lescaze had situated the house perfectly on the cliff so that its windows faced the water and offered a fine vista of the mansions on the other side, including the Tower House, rising from the top of the highest hill in the park. Loomis taught Manette how to manipulate a small mirror to catch the light and worked out a series of simple signals they used to alert each other at the appointed hour that the coast was clear. No matter how many times she heard the story, Loomis’ granddaughter Jacqueline Quillen was always struck by the image of the two lovers secretly flashing messages to each other across the lake. “It was a very passionate love affair,” she said, adding, “and despite all the trouble it caused, it remained that way to the end.”
Manette was the daughter of R. W. (Billy) Seeldrayers, a prominent Belgian lawyer and sports promoter, who became head of the Belgian Olympic Committee. She grew up in a world of jocular athletes and, by her own account, learned at an early age “to enjoy male company far more than women’s.” Her father pushed her to excel at a wide variety of sports, and she received instruction in everything from tennis, golf, and field hockey to soccer and even a little cricket. She became an accomplished tennis player and figure skater and briefly competed at the amateur level before giving it up to study music and art. Her family had lost most of their savings during the First World War, and her mother, ambitious for her only child to make a good marriage, tried to introduce her to “better society.”
Manette met Katherine Grey Hobart in Brussels while the latter was on a European jaunt, and when the granddaughter of a distinguished American vice president invited her to return home with her, Manette’s mother packed her bags. The Hobarts were exceedingly wealthy and divided their time between Carroll Hall, their elegant city residence in Paterson, New Jersey, and Ailsa Farms, the family’s 250-acre country estate in Haledon. The Hobarts employed an army of servants, and the household staff alone included a cook, a kitchen maid, a parlor maid, a houseman, a butler, a laundress, an assistant laundress, two chauffeurs, and several chambermaids. They hosted “fancy dress” parties year-round at their stately forty-room mansion, and their table sparkled with Venetian glass and precious Fabergé Russian enamelware that had been designed for the czar. For twenty-two-year-old Manette, who had grown up in war-deprived Belgium and could still bitterly recall having a winter coat cut from the green felt cover of a billiard table, it must have seemed positively idyllic. In the space of a year, her betrothal to the Hobart’s only son and heir was duly accomplished. They were married in Brussels in 1931 and divided their time between Ailsa Farms and Schenectady, before settling permanently in Tuxedo Park.
Never were two people more ill suited than the taciturn Hobart and his bright, athletic, puckish young bride. Garret Hobart was “pathologically shy,” according to family members, and led a quiet, almost cloistered existence. He was quite content in his own little world, and the couple never entertained and had virtually no life outside the laboratory. While his neighbors considered him a bit queer but harmless, they steered clear of his “foreign” wife. Tuxedo Park was very provincial in those days, and anyone with an accent was seen as suspect. Manette’s English was less than perfect, and she retained a thick Belgian accent that lent her a decidedly exotic air that the wives in the young smart set found most offputting. As a result, she had few friends and spent much of her time on her own. A talented artist, she spent her days working on her painting and sculptures, but it could not have been easy. “It was all very new to her, and she didn’t really know a soul or how to get on,” said Paulie Loomis. “I think the early years of her marriage must have been very lonely.”
As her husband had no interest in sports, Manette took to playing tennis and golf with the young research scientists at Tower House, and more than a few became quite smitten with her, including Bill Richards. Very petite and slender, she had a superb figure that she displayed to full advantage. Although she was only passingly pretty, her emphatic sexuality made her captivating to the opposite sex. “Oh, she had a real way about her,” recalled Evans, speaking with the authority of a southern belle who turned plenty of heads in her day. “She had wonderful legs, and always showed them off in little tennis skirts and golf shorts. She knew what she was doing. She was a real flirt.”
Manette had a talent for making men fall in love with her, as her marriage to the unlikely Hobart attested, and she was not above using her sexuality to attract the fifty-year-old Loomis. “She absolutely seduced him,” said Quillen. “I think it was about great sex, which would have been a scarce commodity in his first marriage. I think for Alfred it was an incredible, all-encompassing discovery. She gave him such enormous pleasure, and he absolutely adored her.”
It is impossible to say exactly when the affair began. Both Manette and her husband were an integral part of the Loomis household and remained that way long after their relationship began. After Alfred made Garret Hobart his assistant, Ellen Loomis had taken his young wife under her wing and regarded her almost as a daughter. The two men worked together by day, dined together with their wives on a regular basis, and frequently took their families on holiday together. The Hobarts’ first child, Garret Augustus Hobart IV, was born in 1935, followed by another boy, who was born in August 1937. Manette named her second son Alfred Loomis Hobart, after his beloved godfather.
According to Paulie Loomis, both Alfred and Manette were deeply unhappy for years before they became involved. “I know she was mad about him for a long time,” she said. “Alfred was a wonderful-looking man, and very courtly and gentle. He could be hard to talk to unless he liked you. But once
you got to know him, he was fascinating. He could explain the most complicated things and make them simple and understandable. He could unlock the secrets of the world, and it was magical. Manette was nobody’s fool. Here she was married to poor Hobart, who was really an odd duck, and quite pathetic. She knew Alfred had no one, because his wife had taken to her sickbed long before that. And she knew he was the kind of man who just had to be with somebody. So she became his mistress, and she stayed married to Hobart. That was the cover-up, and I think it went on that way for a long time.”
There is a striking black-and-white photograph of Manette and Loomis in a canoe that was taken in the summer of 1938 or 1939. She is happily reclining in the middle of the boat behind Loomis, who is paddling. The photo has been crudely cropped with scissors, cutting out the other oarsman, but in all likelihood it was Garret Hobart. The picture was taken at the Hobart family compound in Rangeley, Maine, the last time they were all on holiday together. “I am only guessing, but I don’t think, at the time, my dad had a clue what was going on,” said Al Hobart. Ellen Loomis’ letters during this period reveal that she was lately “so hampered by illness” that she was not able to get out much or see friends, and it is possible she was unaware of the romance or simply chose to turn a blind eye to it. However, her condition became quite perilous again the following winter, which may have been her way of coping with the competition. As she wrote to Stimson in February 1939: “All my fever seems over now, and I know Alfred has given you the news. There is no cause for worry about me, as you always understood. . . .”
Garret Hobart never talked about the affair between his wife and revered mentor that eventually broke up his marriage. Only once, many years later, in a moment of frustration, did he betray a hint of the anger or bitterness he must have felt. “We were in Maine, and we were getting ready to go fishing, when he said, out of the blue, ‘Alfred Loomis broke the tip off my fly rod,’ ” recalled Al Hobart, who was seven years old when his mother finally left his father to run off with Loomis in 1944. “That was it. Just that one outburst. But I caught the whiff then of a fairly strong resentment.”
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