by Jean Strouse
When the heartsick BB sent a friend to ask Belle whether she was simply making use of his mind without really caring for him—a poignant turn on the conventional female version of the question—she vehemently denied it. “[T]hat is one of the few things you could say that could really hurt me,” she replied, then went on in her disarmingly frank way: “I really had to laugh at your last letter complaining of all the scandal you were hearing about me—I suppose they say everything from calling me the daughter of J.P. à la main gauche, to … the mother of triplets—but what difference does it make?… I’ve come to the conclusion that I really must be grudgingly admitted the most interesting person in New York, for it’s about all they seem to talk about—C’est à rire—You know perfectly well BB … that I get ‘hipped’ on some man, regularly every six months and I suppose it will be so until I die—but I get over it all so very quickly that it does not really disturb the actual current of my life at all—And BB … these men and this talk and all is so stupidly unimportant and irrelevant—the only time I was really ‘scandalous’ was in your own dear company so if I guarantee that I will be really wicked only with you isn’t it alright?… I don’t want to be ‘in society’ and I do want to really know things—so you see I don’t need many people in my life.”
Belle did not see much of Morgan’s family during his lifetime—they bored her “to extinction,” she complained to Berenson, and after her “Big Chief” died she added, “More and more do I understand why JP loved to be away from his ‘nearest and dearest.’ ” Belle’s scorn apparently precluded interest in the one Morgan daughter whose life had anything in common with her own.
Anne had always stood out as more spirited and rebellious than her siblings: Louisa once described her as “irresistibly funny … in spite of her naughtiness,” and Jack had found her puzzling, with ideas and thoughts that came out “at unexpected moments, in the most extraordinary way.” In serving as her father’s official traveling companion, Anne had grown close to Adelaide—they were thrown together constantly, and sometimes met alone for lunch or tea—but she had to keep everything connected with Mrs. Douglas from her mother. She also had to arrange her own life around her parents’ separate demands. When the Henry Fairfield Osborns invited her to join them on a trip to the West in the summer of 1903, Anne told Mrs. Osborn there was not “the shadow of a chance” that she could: “Between Mother’s summer & the yacht races, two things which mustn’t meet & yet both of which I must join in,” it was impossible for her “to make any further plans,” although missing out on the western expedition was “the biggest kind of disappointment I could have.”
Still living at home at age thirty, Anne had an allowance of $20,000 a year and no apparent inclination to marry. At the beginning of February 1904 she met her father, Adelaide, and the Markoes for a tour of Canada (Fanny was in Italy), a stop at Camp Uncas—where it was too rainy to sleigh in—and a train ride home.
She spent much of her time in New York that winter organizing a club for women with her friends Helen Hastings, wife of the architect Thomas Hastings, Helen Barney, daughter of the banker Charles T. Barney, and Daisy Harriman.* They had set out in 1902 to provide themselves and their friends with the same kinds of social resources and athletic facilities that the Metropolitan and Union Clubs afforded their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons—Anne specifically requested a swimming pool and a squash court. They named it the Colony Club, and encountered considerable resistance: a German newspaper denounced it as “the swan-song of the American home and family,” and Grover Cleveland advised that woman’s “best and safest club is her home.”
Anne’s father supported the enterprise, serving on the men’s advisory committee, but its organizers wanted to show the world what women could do on their own. They raised money, bought land at the corner of 30th and Madison, commissioned Stanford White to build a clubhouse, enrolled 550 members, and assigned the interior work to a novice decorator named Elsie de Wolfe. When the luxurious six-story Federal Revival building finally opened, one mother of eminent sons announced: “I’ve waited for this evening all my life. I’ve just telephoned the boys, ‘Don’t wait dinner. I’m dining at my club.’ ”† Anne made full use of the Colony facilities, but what became more important to her than the club itself was a new friendship with Elsie de Wolfe and her companion, Elisabeth Marbury.
This pair, who lived together at 122 East 17th Street, opened up to the well-traveled but relatively sheltered Anne a wide new world. Unlike most of the women in the Morgans’ circle, they worked for a living. Elsie—slender, chic, vain, and socially ambitious—had spent years trying to build an acting career on little talent. Town Topics referred to her as “Miss de Lamb,” and in 1887 ran a fictional sketch called “After the Matinee,” in which Maud asks her friend Ethel as they leave the theater, “What did you think of Miss de Wolfe?” Ethel: “I thought she was splendid in the second dress.” At the turn of the century, Elsie was becoming the first woman to make a career in interior design. She had fallen in love with the decorative arts of eighteenth-century France on summer trips abroad, and sent home trunks full of inexpensive furniture, mirrors, dishes, and lamps. Heavily influenced by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s 1897 Decoration of Houses (Mrs. Wharton hated the “sumptuary excesses” of the Gilded Age, and saw its overstuffed interiors as a branch of dressmaking), Elsie began clearing out New York’s Victorian clutter and opening rooms up with sunlight, chintz, white paint, and fresh air. One of her first notable achievements was the sunny, trellised tearoom at the Colony Club.
She had been living with the mannish, deep-voiced, thoroughly unfashionable Elisabeth Marbury, called Bessie, since 1892. They made an unlikely couple—Bessie as heavyset and plain as Elsie was lithe and attractive—and according to Elsie’s biographer, Jane Smith, were “almost certainly” lovers. The literary editor of McClure’s said of Bessie, “If she chewed tobacco she would be complete.” Henry Adams after a dinner party in Paris described the Misses Marbury and de Wolfe as “the only men of the lot.”
Like Anne Morgan, Bessie came from a prominent New York family. She had grown up on Irving Place, spent summers at Oyster Bay, and traveled abroad with her lawyer-father, Francis F. Marbury.‡ As a child she read Horace, Kant, Plutarch, Tasso, Shakespeare, and Ruskin, gave lectures on the solar system to her friends (admission: 5¢), and converted to Roman Catholicism. Early on she decided that people were either wasters, mollusks, or builders—and that she was a builder. She had a brief, successful run as a poultry breeder on the third floor of her parents’ house, and once said she had missed her true vocation by not becoming a grandmother.
She was wrong. She found her true vocation as a theatrical agent, and by 1895 had offices all over Europe. She represented Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, Beerbohm Tree, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Wing Pinero, Victorien Sardou, Rostand, Feydeau, Halévy, Richepin, and the entire French Society of Dramatic Authors. “Rapacious Elisabeth Marbury,” complained the Socialist Shaw: “What do you want me to make a fortune for?… The next time you have so large an amount to remit, please send it to me by installments, or you will put me to the inconvenience of having a bank account.” After Wilde’s sensational trial and imprisonment on charges of “gross indecency” in 1895, Bessie tried to save his American royalties for his family, and in 1898 sold American syndication rights for The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde told his British publisher that he knew “as much about business as a chrysanthemum!” but had “full confidence in Miss Marbury, a brilliant delightful woman, who is anxious to help me.”
Elsie decorated their town house at 17th Street and Irving Place in the style of 18th-century France, and there she and Bessie—called “the Bachelors” by their friends—held court. Henry Adams told Mrs. Cameron in 1901: “I went to see the Marbury salon and found myself in a mad cyclone of people.… I was struck blind by the brilliancy of [Elsie and Bessie’s] world. They are grand and universal.” Mrs. Astor, head of “the 400,” decided
to upstage these new rivals with a “bohemian” party of her own. Asked whom she planned to invite, she provoked hilarity in the Bachelors’ set by replying, “J.P. Morgan and Edith Wharton.”
Elsie flirted with men—Berenson once described her hugging and kissing him “in a way that was not exactly sisterly”—and in 1926, at the age of sixty, she married Sir Charles Mendl, an Englishman attached to the British embassy in Paris. Bessie, however, was interested only in women—specifically, in 1904, in Anne Morgan.
When Anne sailed for Europe as usual that April with her father, Adelaide, and Charles Lanier, she arranged to meet Bessie in Paris. Her party stayed in London about a week, celebrating Pierpont’s sixty-seventh birthday at Princes Gate—it was on this trip that Langton Douglas showed him through the Sienese exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club—then went on to Paris, where Anne reported in her diary, “Miss Marbury ill bronchitis.” She had lunch with John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, visited her aunt Mary Burns, tried on dresses at Worth’s, and spent every free minute with “E.M.”: “Afternoon saw Miss Marbury … Quiet dinner with Miss Marbury … lunch E.M.”
Bessie had just bought an abandoned villa on the Boulevard Saint-Antoine in Versailles, the “Villa Trianon,” built in the early nineteenth century by the French royal family, but left vacant after the Revolution of 1848. The outbuildings of this elegant ruin dated to the eighteenth century, and were full of associations with Marie Antoinette, the ancien régime, and the Trianon palaces at Versailles—Pierpont might well have bought it for Adelaide. The “Bachelors” had discovered it in 1903 while renting a house nearby from Alice Mason, and Elsie decided she couldn’t live without it. The indulgent (and solvent) Bessie paid $13,000 for the house and two acres of land in the winter of 1904, and took Anne to see it on May 1. Anne wrote in her diary: “Versailles with E.M.!! Villa Trianon—drive through park. Short walk. Tea reservoir heavenly drive home. Beginning of perfect things.”
Anne had to go to Aix with her father and Adelaide on May 3. On the second she saw Sarah Bernhardt perform and spent a “perfect afternoon with E., even with leaving—tea talking a joy.” (“E.” in Anne’s diaries is Bessie; when she meant Miss de Wolfe, she wrote “Elsie.”) She lunched with Bessie on the third—“All happiness except that it is the end of Act I”—and left at 2:00 P.M. At Aix, her mood rose and fell with the reception of news from “E”—“perfectly satisfactory letter to think over … no letter rather depressed till wire came … better letter than ever. Father and Mrs. D. in auto to Cluny.” She accompanied her father and Mrs. D. to northern Italy in mid-May, found “wonderful letters waiting” when she returned to Paris, and was ecstatic to meet up again in London with “E!” in early June. They lunched, dined, went to the theater, and took an overnight trip to Oxford: “Colleges all morning,” wrote Anne, “afternoon … rain … Quiet and happiness.” At the end of June she returned to New York with her father and Adelaide—Bessie must have stayed abroad, for she does not appear in Anne’s diary again until October.
Anne was in love. She had been spurning marriage proposals for years, apparently resigning herself to the difficult task of tending both parents as the price of independence. It is impossible to say what she had known of her sexuality before she met Bessie, or what went on behind closed doors once she did—probably what goes on behind closed doors between most people who are passionately drawn to each other. Under the tutelage of the astute E.M., who was seventeen years her senior and bore distinct physical and managerial resemblances to Pierpont Morgan, Anne began to escape from the strictures of Madison Avenue spinsterhood to a brilliant international demimonde of aesthetic appreciation, social activism, and female independence.
The domestic arrangements at Irving Place appear not to have been disturbed by the addition of a third party. In the fall of 1904 Anne took walks, drives, and teas with E.M., but often noted the presence of “E. de W.” as well. She spent much of her time at 17th Street when she was in New York, and in summers at the Villa Trianon the three women became known as the Versailles Triumvirate. Anne eventually bought land for the Trianon gardens and added an entire “Morgan Wing.” The erotic intensity of her new alliance appears to have passed unnoticed at 219—an unmarried daughter would inevitably spend most of her time with other women, and Fanny welcomed the addition of the Misses Marbury and de Wolfe to her cloistered world.
Anne continued to travel with her father. In September 1904 Fanny stayed at Cragston while Pierpont, Anne, and Adelaide entertained the archbishop of Canterbury in Maine. Morgan had persuaded the leader of the Anglican Church to come to Boston for the Triennial Episcopal Convention that fall, and had been planning the arrangements for months. On Friday, September 9, he and Anne escorted Archbishop Randall Davidson and his wife to Bar Harbor. Adelaide was already there, as was Corsair.
Early Sunday morning, Morgan took a large party by yacht to Northeast Harbor, where the archbishop was to give the morning sermon. Bishop Lawrence and his family boarded at 8:30 A.M., joining Adelaide, Anne, the Davidsons, and several other Morgan friends. Marian Lawrence, the bishop’s daughter, noted in her diary that she and her parents had already had breakfast, and “would have liked to have sat on deck and enjoyed the lovely sail, the fresh air, and fine day, but fate and Mr. Morgan decreed that we were to go down into the close dining room where a sumptuous repast of nine courses was set before us. Mr. Morgan [ate] it all heartily and slowly, from melons, oatmeal, eggs, and bacon to buckwheats and fruit again, and all the time I was getting dizzier and more of a headache. Pride alone kept me to my seat. Papa … sought the deck and fresh air about half way through, and none of us [ate] a thing except a nibble of toast and coffee.”
By the time Morgan finished his breakfast it was time to land. Miss Lawrence continued: “the church was overflowing but the front seats had been kept for our party.… Directly behind us was Mr. Morgan singing lustily. Of course they were the observed of all observers. North East was simply agog with curiosity and excitement.”
After the service, the archbishop greeted parishioners “while Papa & J.P. Morgan &c stood aside!” reported Marian. The men went on to lunch with Northeast Harbor’s Bishop Doane, while Marian and her sister “were expected to lunch on the Corsair with Anne Morgan, Molly Coles, Mrs. Douglas & Mrs. Wright. I didn’t jump at the idea of another meal in that rolly, stuffy cabin.” She escaped. Over the next few days Anne lunched with Adelaide, and played tennis with Marian Lawrence, Adelaide Randolph, and Sybil Douglas while her father occupied himself with the bishops. There were receptions and dinners every night.
On September 22 Morgan took Archbishop Davidson to Washington to dine with Roosevelt at the White House, and the next day back to New York for a Corsair cruise and a visit to Cragston. Herbert Satterlee found the Davidsons “very unprepossessing—not at all distinguished looking, & badly dressed, but agreeable.”
At the beginning of October the “unprepossessing” couple and Morgan’s other guests—this time including Fanny—went to Boston for the convention. As usual, Morgan rented a house with full staff, and put Louis Sherry in charge: he had fifty-six people to dinner one night. Another night, Fanny joined her husband for a small dinner with Bishops Lawrence, Davidson, Potter, and Doane. What the clergymen made of the alternating presence of Mrs. Douglas and Mrs. Morgan they did not record. Fanny attended a convention session on divorce.
Morgan’s overbearing generosity did not always take into account the actual preferences of his friends, as Marian Lawrence’s description of the Corsair breakfast suggests. Bishop Lawrence one day asked the Davidsons whether they would like a rest, a walk, or a drive. “Oh, a walk,” they eagerly replied. “Mr. Morgan has carried us everywhere, and we have not felt the American soil!”
After Anne returned from Bar Harbor in the fall of 1904 she saw Bessie Marbury virtually every day, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. She took her to lunch with Adelaide at the end of November, to Boston with Fanny in early December, and to Uncas with
Pierpont and Adelaide early in the new year. On March 1, 1905, the day she was to leave with her father on their annual trip to Europe, she spent the morning at 17th Street, and two weeks later was exultant to find “flowers from E.” waiting at her Paris hotel. In mid-May, returning from two months of Morgan/Douglas travel, she arrived in Paris early one morning—“lunched Versailles! dined alone Father [Café] Anglais—long talk.” Perhaps in this long talk she asked permission to stay on in Paris, for her father took Adelaide and Sybil Douglas to Aix without her. The next day Anne wrote in her diary: “E. arrived to spend night. Mr. [Henry] Adams to dinner.” Anne spent most of that summer in Paris and Versailles with “E.” They took motor trips through France, and entertained Adams, Edith Wharton, Sardou, Pierre de Nolhac (the curator at Versailles who was undoing Louis-Philippe’s atrocious modernization and advising Elsie on decorative art), and Count Robert de Montesquiou, the orchidaceous aesthete/dandy who was one of the models for Baron Charlus in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Late that fall, after Anne and her father had returned to the United States, another French aesthete was mesmerizing the New York art world. Morgan hired this man, a Monsieur de Beauvoir, to give private art lectures for two at Adelaide’s house on 46th Street. De Beauvoir was also giving evening classes at the residence of Ogden Codman, Edith Wharton’s collaborator, for “everybody interested in art in New York.” Roger Fry described him as a ruined French aristocrat “who knows everything, [and] has the most perfect taste and manners of the Ancien Régime. Instead of being my rival, and he was already installed as arbiter elegantiarum when I came, he has done all he can to befriend me and been in fact all that one doesn’t expect from a cher confrère.”§
Elsie de Wolfe, persuaded by a friend to see de Beauvoir for ten minutes, gave him two hours: “He thrilled me,” she reported, opening up “vistas of knowledge of all the things I was trying to learn about.” She, Bessie, and Anne entertained M. de Beauvoir early in 1906, and Fanny gave a dinner party for him.