The Devil's Gentleman (6 page)

9

P
artly through the offices of her teacher, Frank Damrosch, Blanche became the contralto soloist at a church in Brooklyn Heights, whose choir included the wife of the famous American composer Harry Rowe Shelley. Her salary was ten dollars a week—a respectable sum for a part-time position at a time when the average yearly income for an American workingman was less than a thousand dollars.
¹

By then, her family was in desperate need of her earnings. Her father’s improvident ways and successive failures had driven the little household perilously close to penury, and James was too proud to turn to his affluent offspring for help. As his material prospects grew grimmer by the day, he looked to religion for comfort, becoming increasingly caught up in a particularly zealous brand of evangelical Christianity.

Finally, in 1894, just before Blanche’s twentieth birthday, James abandoned his worldly pursuits altogether. With his wife in tow, he returned to Rhode Island and consecrated himself entirely to church affairs, becoming, as newspapers later reported, “a constant attendant at revivals.” In April 1895, Harriet died after a brief illness. Six months later, James himself fell ill. He refused medical attention, putting his faith in the Lord. He died shortly thereafter, in mid-October.
²

By then, Blanche’s younger sister, Lois, was living in high style on West End Avenue and Seventy-second Street. Following a “whirlwind courtship,” she had married Howard Oakie, a member of a socially prominent family with a big estate on Long Island.
³

Alone and unwed, Blanche chose to remain in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, moving into a “diminutive” apartment at 51 East Twenty-third Street.
⁴
Her belongings were few: a console holding a silver-framed portrait of her parents alongside a slender flower vase; stacks of books and music cluttering the floors; a few nice sketches and drypoints adorning the walls; a bed and dresser, couch and easy chair. And, of course, her beloved piano.

Losing both parents within so short a time filled Blanche with a “terrible sense of desolation and sorrow.” She distracted herself with her choir work, her vocal studies (now with the celebrated operatic teacher Emilio Agramonte), and her friendships with fellow students and other struggling young artists. She earned extra money by singing for socialites at “private musical evenings.”

On one of these occasions she so impressed a wealthy female philanthropist that, as Blanche later wrote, the woman declared her “intention to help me realize my consuming ambition to study in Europe.” Before this promise could be fulfilled, however, the woman took a transatlantic trip on the French liner
La Bourgogne,
which collided mid-ocean with a merchant vessel and went down with more than seven hundred crew members and passengers, including Blanche’s would-be patroness.
⁵

Blanche was introduced to another potential patron through her wealthy new brother-in-law, Howard Oakie, whose family was on friendly terms with Gordon McKay, the millionaire industrialist who had earned his fortune in the shoemaking business. Hearing enthusiastic reports of Blanche’s singing abilities from Howard’s cousin, Corinne, the elderly McKay paid a visit to Blanche’s modest apartment one early spring night in 1897. There—after serving him tea in one of the Sévres cups she had inherited from her mother—Blanche so impressed him with her rendition of Manuel Ponce’s “Aimant la Rose” that he invited her to accompany Corinne on a visit to his Newport estate that summer.

It turned out to be a magical vacation for Blanche: her first direct experience of “what the possession of unlimited wealth really meant.” Nearly fifty years later, she could still conjure up in her imagination every detail of that enchanted scene:

It was early June and we sailed through the Sound on the steamer
Puritan.
Upon our arrival, the beauty of the place was revealed in all its allure. With a background of blue waters, there were undulating grounds of velvety green, masses of foliage, blossoming shrubs and a rose terrace sloping away in the direction of the sea. There were also stables and a carriage house with the inevitable victoria and landaulet and phaeton of that day.

The greenhouses were a marvel to me, with their forced growth of flowers and fruit. Ripening in the warm sun, which filtered through the ceiling of glass, were grapes that dropped in great clusters from the vines overhead. Beauty was everywhere! Hedges of Japanese roses ran along the edges of a portion of the grounds. A profusion of wild roses was growing and blooming in natural loveliness—pink and coral coloring against a purple and cobalt sky.

In the distance was Rough Point. Some days the wind came out of the North, and from the cliffs we could gaze far off and watch the flying spray. We could glimpse the ocean, tearing and racing and curling in long lines over the white sand.

There were drives each afternoon when all of fashionable Newport society would be abroad in glittering equipages. The Casino and the tennis matches were also open to us. There were luncheons aboard the yachts of McKay’s friends, and for the first time in my life, I tasted champagne.
⁶

It was not merely the beauty and grace of her surroundings, however, that made her stay in Newport so special for Blanche. Something else occurred during those long, bewitching days: her sudden awakening to the power and allure of what, in her memoirs, she consistently refers to as the “masculine element.”

Though by no means conventionally beautiful, Blanche was, by all accounts, a captivating presence, even with her peculiar left eye. As one chronicler describes her, she was “possessed of a divine figure and a splendid carriage. She was tall, sinuous, yet graced by those happy and promising curves which were the splendor of the Gibson girl, the regnant beauty of her time. She wore clothes with astounding effect, and had the poise of a woman of the world.”
⁷
In her memoirs, Blanche confirms that, from her adolescence on, men found her “vibrant” and “arresting.”
⁸

Up until her twenty-second year, however—at least according to her late-life recollections—she had never “given the slightest consideration to men. Music had been my one absorbing interest.” All that changed, however, in the summer of 1897.

On several occasions during her stay in Newport, a group of “fledging Navy officers” from a nearby training station came to dinner at Gordon McKay’s estate. Among them was a dashing lieutenant named Dillingham. In the company of these “smartly uniformed men,” Blanche “suddenly discovered something—something that I really didn’t understand. But whatever it might be, it was arresting! I decided that the masculine element…was rather disturbing and at the same time enormously interesting. I was suddenly infatuated with these gay young officers, with their poise and their
savoir faire
—their impressively good looks and sophisticated ways with women. I seemed to be treading on air. The flattery and attention was heady to a young girl experiencing it all for the first time.”
⁹

Though she “flirted outrageously” with the handsome Lieutenant Dillingham, Blanche rebuffed his physical advances. At the time, her sexual attitudes mirrored those of her mother: “Natural impulses and the sex-instinct must not be discussed or even thought about. Sex apparently was a thing to be ashamed of. The very word was tabu.” She came home from Newport with her virtue intact.

From that point on, however, everything was different. She began to question her mother’s “old-fashioned precepts” about sex:

I couldn’t understand why something that should be the most wonderful and beautiful of anything in existence must never be spoken of. It puzzled me a whole lot, and I began to study it out for myself. I decided it was all due to distorted vision. People were looking through lenses that were cracked; surely they saw only the doubtful and ugly reflections of their own minds! I wanted passion and love in my life; I wanted my existence to be fervid and glowing!
¹⁰

Because of her mother’s puritanical teachings, Blanche had been kept “from a full realization of sex.” Now, she “wanted to know it in its completeness, what it was all about.” It wasn’t mere curiosity that lay behind this desire, but the awakening of a long-suppressed hunger.

As Blanche, many years later, would say of her urgent new interest in erotic experience: “I was breathless for it.”
¹¹

10

M
rs. Chesebrough’s extreme reticence in relation to sex was, of course, perfectly in keeping with the mores of Victorian America. It was an age when marriage manuals advised young brides to avoid all “amorous thoughts or feelings” when family physicians routinely recommended the cauterization of the clitoris as a cure for the ruinous habit of “self-pollution” and when a woman with a healthy libido was likely to be branded as a hopeless “nymphomaniac.” Adolescent girls from respectable families were kept in such complete ignorance of sexual matters that they commonly entered into marriage without the slightest conception of what coition entailed.
¹

In short, from a societal point of view, there was nothing at all wrong with Mrs. Chesebrough’s prudery. On the contrary, it was Blanche, with her avid interest in sex, who would have been looked at askance. In her late-life memoirs, Blanche presents herself as an admirable free spirit, a precursor of the Jazz Age generation that would kick over the traces of their parents’ Victorian values. To many of her contemporaries, however, Blanche would always be viewed in a very different light: as a frivolous young woman of limited means who was more than happy to sacrifice her chastity in order to achieve those material pleasures she so desperately craved—“good clothes, good dinners, good seats at the theatre.” In short, as someone little better than a prostitute.
²

Avid as she was for sexual experience, Blanche—so she says in her memoirs—was in no hurry to find a husband. “I was subtly conscious that I was shying away from marriage. It seemed a narrowing of horizons, a curtailment of freedom.”
³

It was precisely that sense of “freedom” that made some of her relatives nervous. To her sister-in-law Ellen—a prim Bostonian with traditional ideas about the proper role of women—Blanche’s single life in New York City seemed dangerously “Bohemian.”
⁴

Blanche’s own sisters were less alarmed by her “bachelorette” lifestyle. Even they, however, were eager to see her settled. Lois’s marriage to the well-heeled Mr. Oakie had, to some extent, violated the natural order of things. By rights, Blanche should have been wed before her little sister.

Moreover, she wasn’t getting any younger. To be sure, in the summer of 1897, she was still a few months shy of her twenty-third birthday. But she lived in an age when an unmarried woman of thirty was regarded as an old maid. In another few years, Blanche would rapidly be approaching the bounds of spinsterhood.

Izcennia in particular had made it her mission to see that her sister found a suitable husband. She had been playing Pygmalion for years, right down to the diction lessons she had provided for Blanche. Now, all that time, money, and effort were in danger of going to waste. If Blanche weren’t careful, she would end up as the wife of one of the poor (if admittedly handsome) naval officers she had been dallying with all summer. The time had come to introduce her to some more financially desirable prospects.

In mid-August 1897, just a few weeks after Blanche returned from her idyll at Newport, a perfect opportunity presented itself.

She had been invited to stay with Isia and Waldo at their summer home, Craigsmere, on the Rhode Island coastline. Despite the beauty of the setting, life at the seaside estate, according to Blanche’s testimony, was “uncommonly dull.”
⁵
Waldo, though devoted to his wife, was something of a stick in the mud, a homebody with little interest in socializing. By contrast, Isia loved to go out and have fun. The long, placid, uneventful days at Craigsmere might have been a balm to Waldo; to his wife, they had grown unbearably tedious.

When Waldo announced in early August that he had business in Boston and would be gone for two weeks, Isia pounced. Over breakfast that morning, she asked his permission to take Blanche on a visit to Jamestown. It would—so Isia assured him—be an excellent chance to introduce Blanche to some eligible young men. Waldo, always indulgent of his wife and considerate of his sister-in-law, agreed. What Isia didn’t emphasize, of course, was that the trip would be a treat for her, too—a holiday from her suffocating home life with the sweet but stodgy Waldo.

No sooner had he departed than Isia packed a bag with several of her nicest summer frocks and some accessories to augment Blanche’s simple wardrobe. Then, leaving the servants in charge of Craigsmere, she and her sister took the ferry to Jamestown.

There they were invited by an old friend of Isia’s—a socialite named Clark Miller—to accompany him and three male companions on a cruise to Portland, Maine, aboard his schooner-yacht, the
Monhegan.
The two women accepted without hesitation.

It was high noon when the
Monhegan,
flying the flag of the Larchmont yacht club, sailed into Portland harbor. “Bluest of skies were above, bluest of waters below,” Blanche would recall many years later as she described that splendid midsummer day “so freighted with import for me”:

White sails and hulls gleamed in the light of a noonday sun. The brilliance caught and flashed back the shimmer of burning brass; rails and spars and polished surfaces of glistening decks reflected its rays. From one of the yachts, with its short, squatty funnels, fluttered the pennant of the New York Yacht Club, and below it the owner’s flag lifted and fell again in the light wind from across the bay.

The waters of the harbor were dotted with a fleet of these craft, the luxurious toys of their owners. They rode at anchor, swaying lazily with the motion of the tide. They were like great white birds, lightly and gracefully resting on the surface of limpid sun-drenched waters.
⁶

The
Monhegan
slid into a berth beside an even more spectacular vessel, the
Viator,
skippered by Albert J. Morgan, a member of the fabulously wealthy family that manufactured the country’s best-selling brand of soap, Sapolio. Before long, a luncheon invitation had been extended by Morgan, who sent his motorized launch to convey Blanche and the others across the sparkling water to his “great white pleasure craft.”
⁷

Climbing aboard the
Viator,
Blanche saw “deep-seated, gaily cushioned deck chairs drawn forward on the polished decks. Awnings softened the intense light of mid-day.” After exchanging some pleasantries with his guests, Morgan disappeared belowdecks to issue orders to his steward, who emerged a short time later with a silver tray bearing pâté de foie gras sandwiches, small toasted squares piled with Russian caviar, and thin-stemmed flutes brimming with champagne.

“We drank the iced Moët & Chandon, its liquid amber like gold,” Blanche rhapsodizes in her memoirs. “And the sun that day was gold, with the sea the color of sapphire. The wind was warm and sweet and came laden with the tang of salt—the flavor of the marshes. There was gaiety and lightheartedness and laughter, for happiness was abroad that brilliant midsummer’s day.”
⁸

Later that afternoon, Blanche found herself on the afterdeck, making small talk with Morgan, who stood quite close to her, his arm resting behind her on the railing. The warm attention of the millionaire bachelor made Blanche—already light-headed from the champagne—feel positively giddy.

All at once, Morgan glanced over and noticed that a nearby deck chair—vacant only a few moments before—was now occupied by a young man with an open book on his lap. Morgan called to the fellow, who closed his book, dropped his feet from the low rail in front of him, tossed his cigarette into the water, then stood up and approached.

Blanche would always retain a particularly sharp image of that moment:

One noticed that he was not very tall, but his body was slender, muscular and beautifully proportioned. He carried himself very erect and gave a nonchalant air of self-possession, poise and breeding. He had the most charming manners, greeting us with a quiet, infectious smile. Something flashed between us.
⁹

Blanche, of course, had already been introduced to the handsome young man, though she had taken little notice of him, having been focused so intently on her host. Now, she felt her interest suddenly piqued by the debonair “Mollie,” as Morgan fondly greeted him—though his actual name, as she now recalled, was Roland Molineux.