Tiffany Girl (61 page)

Four months after Aggie left Tiffany’s to marry her butcher, Clara learned via the newspaper that Aggie committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid. In Aggie’s pocket was a letter she’d written, stating that the butcher had revealed he’d never had any intention of marrying her. Ever. Clara left work immediately to seek out Aggie’s family in the tenements and to offer what comfort she could. So, so sad. I should mention that they didn’t call her Aggie. Her name was Agnes, but since the premiere designer’s name was Agnes Northrup, I nicknamed our Swede “Aggie” to avoid confusion.

Here’s an inside peek at some of the others who make cameos in my book:

ELLA EGBERT:
In my novel, she was the selector who worked with Elizabeth, and that “team” was Flossie’s and Nan’s major competition. None of that is true. What is true, is that at twenty-eight years old, Ella was one of the oldest, one of the six originals, and she had a penchant for tea. She couldn’t say enough against marriage compared to a life of work in the realms of art. At age thirty-five, she married a man sixty-seven years old and
“was nearly two years bringing her mind to it.”
When he died three years later, she returned to Tiffany’s.

LOUISE KING:
She designed windows for Tiffany in the early 1890s and really did marry her instructor (though she did it in 1892). Together they painted the dome I described in the Manufacturer’s Building—though her husband, Kenyon Cox, was the one who was noted in all the write-ups about the fair. According to the scholars, she wasn’t classified as a Tiffany Girl, but as one of the “Other Women.” Whatever that means. (Unless otherwise stated, all the girls listed are considered “Tiffany Girls.”)

LOUISE STURTEVANT:
Since there were two Louises,
I nicknamed this one “Lulu.” I have no idea of her temperament. I made all that up—about her being shy, and a fast cutter, all that. It was simply a story device on my part to up Flossie’s level of concern. She did, however, study at the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She is classified as one of the “Other Women.”

AGNES NORTHRUP:
One of the six originals who really did hate being manager of the girls and was only too happy to have Clara come back and take them over. She was one of Tiffany’s most talented and coveted designers. As such, she had her own private studio—as indicated in my book, though her studio was not adjacent to the girls’ workshop. It was a small room located down a labyrinth of halls, with flower studies and manila paper tacked to her walls. She won several awards for Tiffany. (She was part of the “Other Women” group.)

MARY MCDOWELL:
Her cartoon pictured at the beginning of Chapter 30 was the exact one exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. She briefly shared an apartment with Clara and left Tiffany’s in 1898 when she married. She was considered an official “Tiffany Girl.”

GRACE DE LUZE:
Grace was one of the six originals. She designed windows and had sketches displayed at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She’s considered an official “Tiffany Girl.”

LYDIA EMMET:
She designed Tiffany windows for Mark Twain’s house and painted a mural in the Woman’s Building. I didn’t have room for Flossie to go see two murals, so I chose Louise’s instead. Lydia was considered one of the “Other Women.”

ELIZABETH COMYNS:
In my book, she’s the one who got sick and couldn’t go to the fair. None of that happened. Total fabrication on my part. She had, however, illustrated books and had three designs for china painting published. She designed windows for Tiffany and was one of the “Other Women.”

THERESA BAUR:
She was a typewriter girl, but as far as I
know she never painted nude figures in Paris and never had stiff fingers or hands. I made that part up. She landed her job as a “Tiffany Girl” because her brother was an office boy of Clara’s new fiancé. (Clara didn’t end up marrying the guy, though.)

As for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the chapel was, in fact, late in being finished. How late? I don’t know. I was never able to find out. So I had it there by the end of May—a total guess on my part. None of the Tiffany Girls went, though—not even Clara. The Tiffany Girls did, however, have a display in the Woman’s Building and there was no way I was going to write this whole book and not go to the fair and see it! So, I made up the competition and the demonstration at the Woman’s Building. In that vein, I have no idea if Louis Tiffany had intended to keep the newly hired Tiffany Girls permanently from the get-go or not. I have no idea if he laid anyone off or not. So, I took creative license there as well and pretended like they had a probationary status. Might’ve been true, might not have. I could never confirm it one way or the other. For my purposes, I needed Flossie to have her job in jeopardy, then I needed her to get laid off, so that’s what I did.

My description of the chapel was accurate. I don’t know if the whole thing was completed by the men, other than the windows, but I could never find any reference to the women working on anything for the chapel other than the windows, so I decided to keep things simple and focus on those. The chapel really did win fifty-four awards—more than any other exhibit in the entire World’s Fair—and it launched Louis to stardom. He squeaked his exhibit in under the “Ecclesiastes” umbrella as described in my book, which gave him a tremendous advantage over his American stained-glass competitors, since none of them were allowed to exhibit. That said, his first love was portraying nature, not religious figures. So, he cherished it when he was able to get private commissions for nature-themed pieces.

Tiffany really did have the chapel sent back to New York and
had it reassembled. After that it changed hands several times, spent some time in basements, all kinds of things. Down in Winter Park, Florida, though, the Morse Museum has taken what original parts of the chapel they could recover and have re-created it in full for us to walk right into and experience. Is that the coolest thing ever? You must, must put it on your bucket list.

I really struggled to describe the window-making process in a simple and engaging manner. If someone were to ever ask me what my weakness in the craft of writing is, that’s what I’d list. It’s so hard to weave in factual information without what the publishing industry calls “information dumps.” So I work really, really hard to have no dumps. None. Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes I don’t. (The reviewers are quick to let me know.) In any case, I have to gather a plethora of information so I can educate myself, and as hard as I looked, there was scarcely a peep on how Tiffany windows were made back in the day. There were tons of books about his glass, but none about his process. I ended up piecing it together through a lot of different sources—the majority of which were from the 1890s. I also spoke with museum curators and other art professionals.

When I was weaving it all into the novel, I so wanted to compare the carbon copies of the cartoons to paint-by-numbers, but they didn’t have paint-by-numbers back then. Argh! And it took me forever to realize that an “easel” was a big old honker of a piece of glass that they leaned against the window and to which they stuck their glass fragments. You wouldn’t believe how many times I had to rewrite those scenes as I’d uncover a new source (or picture) and realize I’d originally depicted it all wrong. I hope you were able to picture the process without too much confusion. And though I think I exhausted the sources, there’s always the chance that I still have something wrong. So I’ll state here and now that any and all mistakes are solely mine and I apologize profusely for them.

Before we shift gears, let me just mention that though Clara
described in her letters a couple of receptions Tiffany invited her to, none of the Tiffany Girls other than her and, perhaps, Agnes Northrup, were ever included. I made that part up because I needed Reeve to find out about the bustle pinchers, and—what can I say?—I’m a devoted fan of Cinderella and balls. So, there you go.

The other theme touched upon in the book—other than the New Woman theme which I cover in the Note to Readers at the beginning—is the boardinghouse. What a surprise that turned out to be. I’d merely set out to research a place for Flossie to live and instead ended up in a swirl of controversy about appropriate places for single, unmarried women to reside in. At the time, a home with wife, children, and a picket fence was nirvana. Boardinghouses, however, took that ideal and commercialized it—charged money for it. Horror!

As such, it became fodder for essays, political cartoons, sermons, novels, and serializations. Women who lived in them were suspect. Men who lived in them were of questionable character. You’d think that all-women boardinghouses would solve the problem, but they were cast under even more suspicion than coed ones, because brothels would disguise themselves as boardinghouses.

As a defense mechanism, boarders—particularly female boarders—tried to turn their boardinghouses into homes the way Flossie did. They, in essence, tried to pretend they were one big happy family. I ended up reading several books and not a few first person accounts of life in boardinghouses. I only had time to give you a glimpse of it here, but it was a very fascinating look at a country trying to adjust not only to an industrial revolution, but a women’s revolution as well.

The Trostles’ shenanigans were based on a real swindle done back in the day. Not the art gallery part—I made that up—but the part about them moving in, ingratiating themselves with everyone,
the husband “going out of town,” while the wife stayed behind with promises of payment as she stole from fellow boarders, then one day disappeared completely. All in all, the whole boardinghouse thing made for some very interesting research. I wish I could have included more of it, but it wasn’t germane to the story, so I had to leave it out.

In conclusion, a few miscellaneous items: The Twenty-sixth Ward YMCA in Brooklyn didn’t open until November 1893, yet I have Reeve moving in in August. Also, this particular Y didn’t have rooms, but I needed Reeve to be close to the Gusmans, so I gave it rooms. Everything else about it, right down to the Women’s Auxiliary decorating it for Christmas, was accurate. Basketball was a brand-new sport back then, and it was invented as described. I should point out, though, that the “International YMCA Training School” was actually part of Springfield College, not the YMCA—which creates a lot of confusion over basketball’s birthplace. As for the boys at the Twenty-sixth Ward, they did, indeed, have to play around the support columns in their gym.

Bustle pinchers were a real problem, but it wasn’t until 1909 before women were given their own car. They absolutely loved it, but the men kicked up a fuss and launched a newspaper campaign ridiculing it. Reporters referred to the cars as the “Jane Crowe Car,” the “Hen Car,” and the “Old Maid’s Retreat.” Some men stormed them, claiming discrimination. The railway company said it was no different than having a smoking car for the men, but that didn’t go over very well and within three months the ridership dropped off and the program was abolished.

As an interesting footnote, in 2012 the
New York Times
reported that Czech Railways, as well as railways in Austria, Japan, Egypt, Iran, Brazil, and India, all have women-only compartments. These were established in response to women complaining of men groping, exhibiting lewd conduct, thieving, and even molestation. Men aren’t banned from these cars, but women have priority seating.

Thanks for coming along with me on this ride. I’ve loved linking my three most recent books—
It Happened at the Fair, Fair Play,
and
Tiffany Girl
—to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. It was a fun, exciting, and fascinating place to camp. Glad you joined me!

Speaking of which, I’d love to get to know you better, so come on over to my website (
www.IWantHerBook.com
) and drop me a note. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for my newsletters, because my subscribers are privy to exclusive perks, inside peeks, contests, deleted scenes, and giveaways. You can also find me on Facebook at
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See you there!