by Jean Strouse
“And this you see is how I know him, and love him and reverence him and ache with pity for him,” she wound up, lapsing back into humbuggery. “He is the hero of my soul and the child of my heart. It may seem queer and hysterical and far fetched to you … who know him as the Power to whom all, even kings, bow down—& whose path seems to be strewn with roses—and to whom all joys seem to come—It is because of my knowledge of him that I can’t bear to have you sneer at him in his relation to art.… For the things he stands for, are not his art collections, be they good, bad or indifferent—they are after all but his amusement, as are his yachts, his Belles-dames, his game of solitaire and his game of finance.”
What he actually stood for she did not say, but portrayed the hero of her soul as the ultimate symbol of humanity, bound to a perpetuity of pain with a Christlike genius for suffering.
Belle’s peroration temporarily silenced Berenson’s scorn. After calling at Princes Gate a month later, he reported to Mrs. Gardner that he found Morgan “as usual affable, simple, as proud and eager as a nice schoolboy, and a thoroughly life-enhancing person.”
When Morgan returned from Europe that August, he took Belle, Charles Lanier, and a couple named Dixon to Newport and Bar Harbor on Corsair. Belle explained to Berenson that Dr. George Dixon was Morgan’s “attending physician” whenever Jim Markoe was unavailable. She pronounced Lanier “a dear & comfortable friend … 70 or thereabouts & one of my ‘senile’ lovers”—and Mrs. Dixon “an incomparable bore … & as such a superb chaperone.” Fanny Morgan was already at Newport: “thank God I am stopping with a crowd which knows her not. She bores and irritates me continuously which is of course to my discredit as she is famed for being good as gold and tries to be kindly but I am certain that if I were a man and tied to her I should commit all sorts of indiscretions.”
On the subject of Morgan’s indiscretions, Belle was generally amused, taking a line of high detachment that pointed up her own superiority. “Why is it,” she rhetorically asked BB, “that every woman who comes within a mile of JP immediately loses her head, all sense of dignity and becomes, to all appearances desperately enamoured of him & a willing candidate for the harem[?] He seems to bowl them over completely[;] they lose all sense of discretion modesty & even common decency. It disgusts me thoroughly with my sex. It surely is not his fault, for all he does is to sit like a reviewing general & they flock to him all day long in rapid and sickening succession. Each one pluming her feathers and thinking she is the hen pheasant, when in reality she is forgotten before her successor appears.”
At other moments, however, she professed herself disgusted by her Chief’s amorous adventures, reporting that “all his wonderful points seem to fall away & this one festering sore seems to fill one’s vision.” Like Scheherezade in the stories Berenson had given her, Belle embellished her tales for reasons of her own, and mixed splashes of fiction in with the facts. Still, the picture she draws is of an indefatigable Don Juan.
Early in 1910, she described Lady Alan Johnstone, the former (American) Antoinette Pinchot, as “extremely attractive. The Big Chief thinks the same.… Needless to say she sees that her attractiveness is properly rewarded—but I do not blame her and really prefer her to most of the others, besides she is neither fat (which I loathe) nor a fossil. What I can never understand is how any one of them can feel flattered since as all the world knows of the others they must also. I never could see much distinction in sharing the delights of a harem. It is a truly discouraging aspect of the dear man that I am so fond of.…”
A few months later she complained that Morgan was running her ragged with meetings “all day long of his different interests. I wonder if there will ever come a time when I can be left alone for an hour a day even, with my beloved books and not be bothered with financiers, dealers and ladies—the last named bother me more than all the rest—they are such damned fools.…”
Lady Johnstone reappeared that fall: “I had an awfully funny time getting her to see JP,” Belle reported. “Three of his other pets were in the library at the same time & he laughed heartily over my attempts to keep them away from each other.”
In the spring of 1911, Belle told Berenson that Morgan was not buying much art in Europe, “as he wrote me the other day that he had not seen anything (except a couple of dames) that interested him. I wrote him in reply to stick to the dames and avoid the masterpieces of art.”
Morgan had taken a tour of Egypt early that winter with a scholar who might have said much the same thing. When Albert Lythgoe could not escort the banker through the Nile Valley in 1911, the job fell to his assistant, Herbert Winlock. An unusually gifted young archaeologist who had been Lythgoe’s student at Harvard, Winlock would succeed his mentor as the Met’s curator of Egyptian art in 1929 and become director of the museum in 1932. His letters to Lythgoe are frank, self-assured, and witty—Winlock shuddered when he learned of his assignment to Morgan’s 1911 tour, and hoped a financial crisis would forestall it. He had been digging for a year in the ruins of the palace of Amenhotep III at Thebes, and Lythgoe had warned him that Morgan was “not interested the least little bit” in that site. The twenty-six-year-old Winlock wanted to concentrate on his work, not play factotum to a visiting tycoon.
The first few days on the Nile in a rented dehabiyeh went “splendidly,” Winlock reported to Lythgoe: Morgan, traveling with Mary Burns and his friends the Morton Patons, was “in very good health & spirits” and “sometimes quite jolly—the other night at dinner he recited reams of French poetry—and he usually has a joke on hand about something.” Still, the archaeologist objected to the financier’s extravagance. When Morgan bought two Persian walking sticks for $2,500, Winlock said nothing, though he thought them not worth nearly that much. He did veto an Armenian book and a Ptolemaic bronze cat, and found his judgment accepted “without a murmur—to my great surprise!” He approved of several other Morgan purchases, including a black granite bust of Rameses II: “He says with a twinkle in his eye he arrived in Egypt too late & found everything had been bought up by the Metropolitan but he was able to find a few little things & then he looked at his bust of Rameses II. For goodness sake,” Winlock instructed Lythgoe, “admire it when you see it. I think it is an ideal thing for [Morgan]—and he does too.”
At Asyut a few days later, Morgan fell in love with two very fine model funeral boats, each about three feet long, for which a dealer was asking £2,500. Winlock pronounced them unique but the price ridiculous. Morgan offered £1,000 each, which Winlock also thought ridiculous. The dealer understood enough English, however, to reject Winlock’s offer of £750. Winlock took Morgan back to their boat, returned to the shop, and argued for two hours but could not get the price down to £1,000; he refused to pay more. At dinner that night, Morgan told his friends: “I know Mr. Winlock thinks I am a fool but I want the boats & I don’t want the £1000.”
He had a point—a thousand pounds meant nothing to him—but Winlock had his way. He did think Morgan foolish, and also inept, having “spoiled it all by blurting out his price.” Winlock’s professional pride, and his concern to keep the antiquities market in reasonable line with value, led him to hold out against the dealer’s demands. The party sailed without the boats, “and everybody has suffered,” Winlock told Lythgoe.
When Maspero, the director of the Cairo Museum, identified Morgan’s black granite head of “Rameses II” as from another period altogether, Winlock, having called it “Ramesside,” told Lythgoe that “Morgan likes it as a Rameses the Great and doesn’t like it as anything else. When you see it don’t try to wean him too suddenly.” And reporting that Morgan had asked Thomas Cook to submit designs for a dehabiyeh of his own because “he likes it all so much he wants a boat” permanently on the Nile, Winlock groaned: “You may accept this letter of mine as a tentative resignation from the M.M.A. if he is going to continue to come out & if I have got to [be] going through Cairo” doing his errands.
At the end of the tour, Winlock complained t
hat he was worn-out and fed up. Still, Morgan had given the Met a group of extraordinarily important XIX Dynasty reliefs, the greater part of a chapel from Abydos dating back to the time of Seti I; Winlock thought them among the finest reliefs the museum had, and wanted them put on prominent display.
The following winter, Morgan took the Lythgoes, Mary Burns, and Bishop and Mrs. Lawrence up the Nile in his own dehabiyeh, which he named Khargeh†—and managed to buy the model boats Winlock had held out against in 1911 after all, for £1,000. He refused to let them out of his sight during the cruise, but afterward gave them to the Met, along with a complete XII Dynasty burial that Lythgoe praised as “the most superb thing of its kind in any museum.” Morgan also in 1912 commissioned an expedition house for Winlock’s work at Deir el-Bahri and in the Asasif Valley on the western bank of the river at Luxor, ancient Thebes. This area proved enormously productive over the next twenty years. Morgan helped choose the furnishings and design for the expedition house, which was built to resemble a Coptic church; it had domes, arcades, missionary furniture, twelve bedrooms, a shaded veranda, thick walls to keep in cool air, and a high-ceilinged living room—luxurious accommodations for archaeologists accustomed to life in the rough.
Both Winlock and Lythgoe recognized Morgan’s ingenuous excitement over the archaeologists’ finds, but what the younger man characterized as bumbling and childish seemed to the elder a genuine—and extraordinarily useful—passion. In 1912, when Winlock’s workmen at Luxor uncovered a bronze Coptic incense burner with a lioness attacking a boar on top, Lythgoe reported to Robinson that “Morgan was able to lift it out of the ground with his own hands, and he carried it back in triumph to the steamer. He was delighted, and it is now his most treasured possession. His only fear is that Maspero will take it away from him, but I have assured him that we can arrange the matter …”‡
Bishop Lawrence later sketched in another dimension of Morgan’s fascination with Egypt. As they sailed along the Nile in 1912, Lawrence recalled, Morgan pointed to the shore and said, “There is the place where Moses was hidden in the bulrushes. It doesn’t look it now; critics may say there never were any bulrushes or any Moses, but I know that there was a Moses and that he was hidden in the bulrushes, for there is the spot. It must be so.” As post-Darwinian rationalists questioned the fundamental assumptions of theology, Morgan insisted that Egypt’s ancient geography confirmed the literal truth of the Bible. Lawrence reflected: “It was in this somewhat humorous but serious way that his religious conservatism met the onslaughts of the critics.”
From Egypt each winter Morgan went on to Italy and France. In Rome in 1911, after the trip with Winlock, he made several visits to the site of the new American Academy on the Janiculum. He had bought additional property nearby, and proposed to transfer ownership to the academy once its directors came up with detailed plans. In Paris, he gave the French government a reliquary head of Saint Martin that turned out to have been stolen from a village church; the grateful President of France installed a plaque honoring Morgan in the Galérie d’Apollon at the Louvre.
In London at the end of May 1911, the American financier was presented to the new King, George V, and the next day went to Belfast with J. Bruce Ismay, president of the IMM and chairman of the White Star line, for the launching of the 46,000-ton RMS Titanic.
In June, he took Charles Lanier to Kiel for a German-American yacht race. At lunch on board the Kaiser’s yacht, Hohenzollern, Morgan gave his host a letter written by Martin Luther to Charles V, the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, which he had bought for $25,000 the previous spring. “Emperor very pleased,” reported Lanier, “and presented to Mr. Morgan the decoration of the Red Eagle—a high honor.” The Americans won the yacht race, and the Kaiser gave Morgan and Lanier use of a royal railroad car for the return trip to Calais.
In London in July, Morgan ordered himself a claret-colored Rolls-Royce with a six-cylinder, 50-horsepower engine, custom-equipped with an electric cigar lighter, silver flower vases, mother-of-pearl trays, brass fittings, a Frodsham clock, hat racks, velvet carpets, leather hassocks, silk curtains, a long trumpet horn, and “JPM” on the doors. The cost came to £1,455 ($7,275). He liked it so much, when it was delivered to him in London the following spring, that he ordered an exact duplicate sent to New York, and gave a third to his friend Lewis Cass Ledyard for Christmas.
Also in July of 1911, Morgan embarked on a new romance, with Lady Victoria Sackville. He had visited Knole, her uncle’s estate in Kent, with Fanny in 1876, but did not meet Victoria herself until 1900. After that, she had often come to see his collections at Princes Gate. The illegitimate daughter of the Honorable Lionel Sackville-West and a Spanish dancer named Pepita, Victoria had been educated in a French convent, served as her father’s hostess when he headed the British Legation in Washington in the 1880s, and married her cousin, another Lionel Sackville-West, in 1890.§ For about ten years she and her husband “adored” each other, she later wrote. They had a daughter, Vita, and divided their time between London and Knole, the complex of gray stone buildings covering six acres that Lionel inherited from his father. Given to the Sackvilles by Queen Elizabeth I, it was the largest house in England still in private hands. It had seven courtyards, a hundred chimneys, crenellated turrets, four-hundred-year-old gardens, vast parklands, galleries hung with ancestral portraits, dozens of tapestries, a Poet’s Parlour (where Pope, Dryden, and Congreve had dined with Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset), a King’s Bedroom (James I), heraldic leopards everywhere, hothouses, a carpenter’s shop, and a forge. Vita, who once met up with a stag taking shelter from the cold in the Great Hall, called it a medieval town.
The estate yielded an income of about £13,000 a year, which was enough to maintain Knole but not to support the Sackvilles’ expensive tastes. Finding that Lionel had more interest in sporting expeditions than in managing his property, Victoria took over the family finances. She speculated on the Stock Exchange (probably on advice from male friends), modernized the running of Knole, and opened a shop on South Audley Street called Spealls, which sold candles, stationery, and sachets. When, after a decade of marriage, Lionel’s affections began to wander, she turned to a series of older men. According to her grandson, Nigel Nicolson, “she made a corner in millionaires and lonely elderly artists.” Her admirers were said to include Rudyard Kipling, Lord Kitchener, W. W. Astor, Auguste Rodin, Sir Edward Lutyens, Gordon Selfridge, Cecil Spring-Rice, Sir John Murray Scott, Henry Ford—and Morgan. Spring-Rice told her: “You are an accomplished mistress in love. You play with it and use it and manage it, like a seagull in the wind, on which he floats but is never carried away.”‖
Lady Sackville was forty-nine when she took up with Morgan in the summer of 1911, and still quite beautiful, with flawless skin, blue eyes, and masses of softly curling dark hair drawn up in a thick knot; loose, it fell almost to her knees. Speaking French-accented English, this “accomplished mistress in love” was also vain and self-dramatizing. She made up legends about Knole as if its legitimately grand heritage were not enough, wrote out her admirers’ compliments, endearments, and entire conversations, and was given to exclaiming in her diary, “Quel roman est ma vie!” Her daughter preferred Lionel, and later described Victoria as “ruthless and completely unanalytical”—also “adorable … tiresome … wayward … capricious, and thoroughly spoilt; but her charm and real inward gaiety enabled her to carry it all off.”
Victoria’s principal beau in the first decade of the twentieth century was Sir John Murray Scott, the wealthy bachelor-trustee of the Wallace Collection at Hertford House. Their intimate friendship had grown out of a shared appreciation of beautiful things and her appreciation of his ample bank accounts. It probably did not include sex. Nicolson thought his grandmother “enjoyed adulation, but in her middle age was repelled by physical lust.”
Scott—whom Vita nicknamed “Seery” because his French servants called him “Seer John”—gave Victoria about $400,000 over the course of te
n years, and made generous provision for her in his will. Her husband encouraged this profitable connection, handling the negotiations when Seery paid for a Sackville house in Mayfair. The “capricious” Victoria fought constantly with her patron, however, and in 1911 he was threatening to cut her out of the will: “it would be a terrible thing for you,” he warned, “if I were to die suddenly and you were to find all your hopes shattered.”
Her precarious economic balance had already been thrown off when Lloyd George, the new Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, put through a budget in 1910 that sharply increased inheritance, land, and income taxes—in order, he said, to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.”a Winston Churchill, president of the Board of Trade, supported what the Liberal press called “the People’s Budget.” Conservatives denounced it as revolutionary and socialist, and London bankers warned Prime Minister H. H. Asquith that it would cripple business, employment, and wages. It had an immediate effect on landed gentry such as the Sackvilles, who early in 1911 determined to evade the death duties and raise cash by selling off some of their heirlooms.
The first item to go was a Gainsborough portrait of Miss Linley and her Brother, sold to a dealer in February for £36,000. “Alas! Miss Linley is gone!” mourned Victoria in her diary: “We suppose some American will buy it eventually—alas, alas!” The American who bought it in London that spring was Morgan. When Victoria saw him at a party in July, she avoided him “most carefully,” she noted, “as we have got tapestries to sell, and I did not want him to think I was running after him.” Fluent in the language of covert glances and studied disregard, she was all innocent surprise when he followed her to her car and said (according to her): “Why did you not tell me direct & not through dealers that you had some heirlooms to sell!? I must see you—Give your own time and come. You know that I have always taken great interest in you so you must come and tell me your troubles.”