Last of the Cold War Spies (4 page)

One of Michael Straight’s earliest memories was of being taken by a nanny to his mother in Willard’s study where she had shut herself on learning that he had died. The two-year-old was meant to bring comfort but was struck by terror when he saw her at a desk, head in her hands. Michael was removed from the scene, kicking and screaming. It was one black spot in an otherwise good memory of his early life.

Later in life Straight hinted that Dorothy buried herself in her work after her husband died rather than finding solace in her children. Trendy child-rearing experts at the time suggested mothers should not be overly affectionate to their children. Michael had a British governess, May Gardner, but maintained that he and his siblings where shown love only in their limited quality time with Dorothy. Nevertheless, Straight’s upbringing seemed happy, healthy, and normal, allowing for the privileges he experienced. He was sent to Lincoln, a progressive school near Harlem, which had a mix of social backgrounds.

Another childhood memory was being chauffeured to school in a Packard limousine. The chauffeur would open the car door; Straight recalled then being set upon by his less privileged classmates. Yet Straight, a talker rather than a fighter, coped well enough. There were many pleasant memories from home and at Old Westbury on the weekends.

May Gardner reinforced the young Straight’s sense of superiority over the staff on the estate. Yet their proximity and the fact that there were few little boys of his own age nearby on Long Island meant he could not remain remote from the chauffeur’s son, Harry, or Jimmy Lee, the second son of the head gardener at Old Westbury. These working-class sons were Straight’s age, and both became playmates. They knew their place and were reminded of it in a milieu more akin to upper-class England than the mythological egalitarianism of early twentieth-century America.

Miss Gardner remained the constant in Straight’s early formative years to age nine. She was the victim of his earliest recorded deception. The diligent nanny gave him daily doses of cod-liver oil to correct a vitamin D deficiency. He pretended that it made him sick. Miss Gardner was sympathetic. This resulted in her reading aloud to him and bringing him supper in bed.

A few years after Willard’s death the occasional suitor would come to Old Westbury seeking Dorothy, who although in her 30s was still one of the most attractive prospects in the United States. If anything, her checklist for a suitable partner had increased after Willard. She found most of the hopefuls pale imitations of him. She would discourage them by always having other guests in their company.

In 1920, Leonard Knight Elmhirst, a Cambridge history graduate, came, not seeking her hand but a donation to save the Cosmopolitan Club at Cornell University, of which Leonard was president. Leonard wanted $80,000 to keep the club—which included students from twelve nations—afloat. Dorothy went to Cornell the following year and had a look. She was impressed.

“Of course I’m going to help,” she told the cheerful Englishman, seven years her junior. She found herself curiously attracted to this tall, smiling idealist whose polite charm was engaging. He had a few characteristics similar to Willard, such as a good tenor voice, the ability to quote verse at appropriate times, and an interest in Asia. And he was not rich. Yet that was where the similarities ended. Willard had a grand design to get rich in China. Leonard wanted to help the starving masses in India by increasing their agricultural productivity.

Leonard was the second of eight sons of a modest Yorkshire parson landowner whose forebears had cultivated the same land in West Riding since 1320. He had been expected to follow his father into the pulpit, but the war and the loss of two brothers in it had shaken his faith.

Leonard had gone to the United States to study the advanced methods of farming at Cornell. He liked Dorothy’s looks and charm, grace and bearing. Unlike the others, who saw an easier life through marriage to her money, he was more intimidated by it than attracted. It made him conscious of his impoverished state as he washed dishes to pay his way through university and struggled to find something other than a frayed shirt for visits to Old Westbury. Dorothy was aware of his circumstances and encouraged his friendship.

When Leonard graduated from Cornell, he took off for India to join the spiritual leader, Rabindranath Tagore, in rural reconstruction work in Bengal. Tagore commissioned Leonard to train students at the leader’s International University and carry out research. Inside two years, in a remarkable pioneering achievement, he was able to leave his project in the hands of an all-Indian staff. Leonard’s confidence grew through this
period as he reported his progress to Dorothy in a steady stream of letters, to which she responded with money for the project. He returned to Cornell as a man with missions in life, and he advised Dorothy on the design of a union building at the university, which would be her memorial to Willard. It was opened in 1924.

Leonard’s experiences with Tagore had determined his own career ambitions, which would include agriculture in England. He was bursting with radical ideas for rural development and education—in fact, a utopian community. This dedication and his selfless efforts in India on behalf of the poor attracted Dorothy and paralleled her own self-imposed destiny of social responsibility. She became even more impressed when he assured her his brave new world would include experiments in her passion—the arts. Leonard had matured. He seemed more at ease, so much so that he proposed marriage.

She rejected him, but he persisted. Leonard needed her for his dreams to materialize. She finally accepted. They were married in the garden of Old Westbury in April 1925.

Leonard Elmhirst had certain parameters in mind in April 1925 when he began his search for an English base for his utopian dream. Some were provided by Rabindranath Tagore, who urged him to look for a spiritual place because “the practical work of craftsmen must always be carried out in partnership with the divine spirit of madness, of beauty, with the inspiration of the same ideal of perfection.”

This was in accord with Dorothy’s desires. She too wished to experience a center with soul, even a mystical past. It shored up Leonard’s own shaken faith. He saw a London real estate agent.

“It must be beautiful, we’re starting a school,” Leonard told the man at Knight, Frank & Rutley. “We expect to make farming pay, it must have a reasonably productive soil and climate, and as much variety as possible, woods, forest, orchards et cetera.”

Leonard had the agent’s attention.

“See if you can give me all those,” he added, “and historical associations thrown in. Yes, and in Devon, Dorset, or Somerset.”

Unsaid was the fact that Tagore had suggested Devon first. It had deep, rich soil, rolling plains, and narrow valleys. Winding, tight lanes gave it a
sense of seclusion, which evoked a timeless separateness from busy, overcrowded London or England’s industrial heartlands. The region could attract “some budding poets,” Tagore suggested, “some scapegoats who no one else dares to acknowledge.”

The agent gave Leonard a list of forty-eight estates in the West Country. He looked at and rejected a “dull” Georgian Manor in Exeter, and then turned his attention to the second location on the list. It was South Devon’s Dartington Hall, a Tudor manor of the late fourteenth century. He inquired about the area prior to the 1390s when John Holand built it into a fine country house laid out as a double quadrangle on an acre.

Dartington, or Homestead of the Meadow by the River Dart, was first mentioned in the registers of Shaftesbury Abbey of 833. Leonard learned of its acquisition after 1066 by William de Falaise, one of the companions-in-arms of William the Conqueror. In 1113 it belonged to the Fitzmartin family, who added the property to their possessions in Wales and the southwest, leasing it as small manors and homesteads. They erected the first stone church and buildings above the archway of the north end courtyard. In 1290, a banqueting hall was added.

The Fitzmartins sold Dartington to the Audeleys in 1348. Because the Audeleys had no heirs, the property reverted to the Crown. In 1384, Richard II granted it to John Holand, his half-brother, whom he later created Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter. The Holands lost Dartington in the mid–fifteenth century during the War of the Roses. For the next one hundred years it was tossed back and forth between a disinterested Crown and several ambivalent owners.

In 1559, Sir Arthur Champernowne purchased Dartington, and his family remained its owner for the next 366 years—until Leonard arrived from London in a newly bought Talbot car. The Champernownes had Dartington on the market for some time. Its sad state of disrepair, which featured broken arches and buildings—minus the odd roof—as well as its placement in a small sea of mud, left a long line of unprepossessed potential buyers. But not Leonard.

He felt a nervous tingle bumping along a narrow road of the estate beside the river Dart until a path upward brought him to the Hall. Instead of an ugly skeleton ready for a bulldozer he imagined the beauty of its construction when the Holands set up the first rectangular court—the north wing with its archway, the barn, and extended Fitzmartin buildings; the east and west wings containing the lodgings of the private
battalions of armed retainers; and the south wing including the banqueting hall, the tower, the kitchens, the serving quarters, and the private apartments.

Leonard had done his homework. He appreciated the civilizing development that the Champernownes had achieved when the feudal system ended and there was no longer need for the rural aristocracy to keep armies and maintain a grand, fortified residence. The private apartments had been converted into a gabled mansion and the solar story had been reconstructed. The sunken garden for jousting tournaments enjoyed by John Holand had been turned in part into an Italian garden. The Champernownes had also put in a bowling green in about 1675, when it was fashionable.

Leonard was enchanted with the estate. He told Dorothy he worshipped the beauty of the property. It combined a natural setting with the work of “generations of men” who attended to its appearance. He saw it as a suitable home for the family and for her, “a squire’s wife.”
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Whether Dorothy, the heiress and fighter for women’s rights, saw herself quite this way is not recorded, but she was captivated by her husband’s optimistic vision. She came to Dartington and loved hearing what he would do to the courtyard and banqueting hall to make it suitable for her ideas. They encompassed singing, music, lectures, ballet, theater, and art.

Herbert Croly was one of several advisers who did not want Dorothy to migrate to England. He thought it would be a retrograde step for the three children. But Leonard won her over by informing her that the community they would create would include a progressive school.
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With their first child on the way, Dorothy returned to Westbury to prepare Whitney, Beatrice (“Biddy”), her friend Nina, Michael, and May Gardner for their big move. The boy Straight said his good-byes to his friends with the mixed feelings of a nine-year-old. Fate would draw one of them, Jimmy Lee, the gardener’s second son, into his life at a pivotal time four decades later.