Waking Up in Eden (21 page)

All of the above.

None of the above.

Who cares? Single life is vastly underrated.

The decade of my thirties had been fruitlessly spent searching for a second husband to father children, and it was clearly the most miserable of my life. I used to wake in the morning in a panic, as an emptiness stretched ahead. Somehow, somewhere, that feeling disappeared — poof! Now I felt that I should get down on my knees and thank the lord that I had not married any of those husband candidates. I endorsed an old proverb: It takes a mighty fine husband to be better than no husband at all. Some women secretly choose not to marry, unable to disclose the choice even to themselves. Once released from the hungry need for a partner, I found myself relieved. Without really knowing it I entered another realm, with few guides or signposts. The world of living alone and liking it.

How did I envision old age? There weren't lots of models for us single girls. Some women took themselves out of the game,
wore dowdy clothes, let their bodies go soft, and retreated into a sort of virgin status. Others engaged in serial affairs, or looked for rescue by Prince Charming as they approached sixty, feeling their lives still incomplete. I knew only a few women who got it right: those who had men in their lives, or not, had love affairs, or not, and went on with the business of living.

A
LTHOUGH
I
HAD
heard that the Allertons sometimes staged movie nights in the upstairs theater at the guesthouse, most of their film collection and home movies had been swept away by the hurricane. But when sorting through a file cabinet of Allerton documents, I reached into the very back of a bottom drawer and found a bulky stack of three large manila envelopes, each folded around something circular. I opened them. Inside were old 16 mm film reels. God bless Rick Hanna, the pack rat; he'd saved everything he found. The tapes were so brittle, black, and twisted that they looked unsalvageable. I brought them next door into the frigid air-conditioning of the Garden library, where Rick sorted slides on a light table, using a magnifying loop. “Look what I found,” I said, and held up the envelopes.

He moved over, and I unrolled a foot or two of the first one. “Adventures in New Caledonia,” was the handwritten title — obviously home movies from one of the Allerton trips. I put it away and turned to the envelope labeled “Slave.” The film seemed in better condition, too. Peering through the photo loop, I could see that it was a professional film that the Allertons had purchased. I made out the words
The Sultan and the Slave.

“Let's have a movie night!” I suggested.

It took a few phone calls to locate a vintage projector. To lend an authentic note of Allertonia to the atmosphere, I made curried duck baked in coconut shells from a John Allerton favorite recipe that their housekeeper Sarah, James's wife, gave me. Rick set up the rented projector, threading the film leader into it. The title image jumped up and down with the strain of disuse, but held. The story started with an image of the “Sultan” in brocade Arabian robe, a turban, and a fake goatee. “Slave” was naked, except for an itty-bitty triangle of shimmery cloth that covered an obviously generous endowment. All in campy pantomime, the handsome, young American actors enacted a story of the Slave stealing jewels and gold from his patron. Aside from lingering glances over alabaster bodies, no overt sex occurred.

Rick and I nearly rolled on the floor in convulsions at the costumes and the corny, theatrical gestures of a silent gay B movie. It ended with a scene of remorse. Slave returned the stolen treasure and willingly locked himself in golden chains. A parable for John Allerton, perhaps?

“Gee, I hope their parties were better,” Rick finally said, as the last frame faded to black. “This was so tame I could show it to my mother.”

S
ARAH AND
J
AMES
remembered the costume parties with fondness. The excitement started in the morning when John instructed Sarah to open the costume closets for airing and then selected the menu, most often his favorite roast lamb or a curry in a coconut. By the 1950s, Hollywood had discovered Kauai as a perfect jungle setting, a small island with epic locations. Sometimes the Allertons invited movie stars for dinner.
Once, while serving dinner, James accidentally knocked off a bangled headpiece worn by the actor Joseph Cotten, who shot him a furious look while suppressing a laugh.

Guests were ushered upstairs into the guesthouse costume gallery to make their choices. Undoubtedly they
ooohed
and
ahhed
as they unfurled the silks and satins, twirling them in the sunlight to glimmer like giant butterflies: lavender and pink silk kimonos from Japan; gold-threaded cloaks from Indonesia; monks' robes from China; iridescent blue saris and scarlet pantaloons from India. Triangular corner cabinets held scores of hats and headdresses, everything from an opera top hat made of beaver to a Punjabi turban. Dozens of pointy shoes and glittery sandals lined the lower shelves, while shallow drawers held ropes of pearls, stagy rhinestone earrings, a hundred bracelet bangles, shiny buckles, and sparkly brooches.

Robert had begun the costume parties back at Allerton Park, his estate in central Illinois, where he scripted a transformation for arriving trainloads of weekend guests. He wanted them to leave behind their everyday life and proper city dress to assume a different persona when entering the garden. For Robert, the garden was an alchemist's stone that allowed him and his guests to discard societal conventions and become whoever, whatever, their fantasies could conjure. It was the place to converge foreign cultures and to mix up time and place, as in a dream, for a bright kaleidoscope of fancy. And for those who spent their whole lives in elaborate disguise, the costumes were a way to be themselves.

On Kauai, after guests had donned their finery, they were invited to pick up a lacquer box that held a picnic supper. As the sun descended in operatic splendor, torches lit the pathways and
the plank bridge that spanned the Lawai Stream. Guests could wander as they wished, to find a ledge of trembling orchids or a glen of scented grasses.

To me, the whole Allerton story seemed a little too pat. Rich gentlemen stumble on paradise and move lock, stock, and barrel to a remote island. I had a hunch that something must have been going on in Chicago that would precipitate such a break. People seldom travel to such extremes unless they are escaping something. So on a visit to relatives outside of Chicago, I drove downtown to the University of Chicago's Joseph Regenstein Library. A historian of gay culture had pointed me to the archives of sociologist Ernest W. Burgess. Predating Alfred Kinsey's work at Indiana University by a decade, Burgess led the earliest extensive studies of American homosexual life. He assigned dozens of his students to take notes at nightclubs, interview gay men and a few women, and write term papers on the subject.

To my astonishment, I found that Burgess and his students recorded in detail a growing gay underworld culture, which peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s in what came to be known as Chicago's Pansy Craze. Gay cabarets, drag shows, and nightclubs openly proliferated throughout the Near North and South Side neighborhoods, a Chicago version of what was also happening in New York City. Annual Halloween balls drew hundreds of men in drag and women in tuxedos. The nighttime entertainments did not just attract the “queers,” as they were then called. High society and the middle class flocked to the cabarets for the prurient thrill of dancing with one of the “homos,” or just to gawk.

There's no record that either of the Allertons went slumming at the drag shows along with others of their wealthy class. It's
hard to conceive that they would not, though perhaps they preferred their own, private entertainments. Years later when John Allerton was alone and elderly on Kauai, he described to a young botanist over late-night cocktails how he and Robert had consorted with their own kind among the Illinois elite at carefully arranged and clandestine male-only dinner parties. A neighbor had outfitted his Chicago mansion dining room with a hydraulic lift to raise the dining table from the kitchen already laid with food, to keep the servants away. That was important, because all the guests were naked.

The Pansy Craze and the accompanying voyeuristic tolerance by the straight world didn't last long. By the Roaring Twenties, Chicago had descended deeply into its reputation as Sin City. Gangsters declared an open season and profited by flouting Prohibition. In 1933, as all of Chicago prepared for the Century of Progress International Exposition, fair organizers, criminals, and social reformers geared up for what turned out to be a last blowout. City leaders legalized beer again. Dozens more cabarets opened on the South Side.

Then the full weight of the Great Depression descended. The tourist trade evaporated. Reformers demanded that newly elected mayor Edward J. Kelly clean up nightlife and campaigned against strippers and female impersonators. By 1935 Kelly had eliminated queer nightlife. Chicago and the rest of the nation then hurtled into a full-scale sex panic over what was named “the Moron Menace.” A series of crimes, both petty and heinous, by peeping toms, rapists, child molesters, and murderers surged onto tabloid front pages. Homosexuality was seen as a mental aberration and its practitioners equated with psychopaths and child molesters, all of them declared “sex morons”
and “sex fiends.” There was some legitimate concern — more than two dozen women and children were attacked over two years. But few by homosexuals. That didn't stop police from stepping up their surveillance of theaters and cruising spots, including the popular stretch of South State Street. Reformers pressed for a law to castrate sex criminals.

In early 1937, Michigan passed the nation's first sexual psychopath law, allowing anyone even suspected of deviance to be sent away for an indeterminate length of time to a psychiatric hospital or penitentiary. Illinois legislators agitated loudly for similar measures. The following year, just as the Illinois legislature prepared to enact a bill to lock up homosexuals, Robert Allerton and John Gregg sailed to Australia for an extended vacation.

R
EAL LIFE IS MESSY
and full of mixed motives. The increasing hostility toward homosexuals may well have provided the needed push for them to escape from the social restrictions of conventional Illinois in favor of the more accepting — and private — Kauai.

But they had also gotten bored. Sifting through another cache of documents, I began to think that these refined men of movie-star appeal must have felt confined in their baronial mansion surrounded by a sea of cornfields. Allerton Park, Robert's Monticello property, was a gift from his famously rich father, Samuel. Perhaps it was a form of banishment as well. As I dug deeper, I sensed an estrangement between the artistic Robert Allerton and his bullish, gauche, and utterly nouveau-riche father. Yet I also laughed over their so-American story of a fortune built on pigs funding a heavenly Hawaiian garden. From stockyard to paradise, all in one generation. And when I finally
visited Robert's Allerton Park in Illinois, I saw how its creation had served as a rehearsal for his masterpiece, Lawai-Kai.

Samuel W. Allerton was nicknamed “Farmer Sam,” for his habit of expounding on the importance of working the land, an occupation that he actually didn't do much himself. Born in upstate New York, Samuel inherited a lofty lineage as a descendent of a
Mayflower
passenger, but it was of dubious worth — the early Pilgrims blamed Isaac Allerton, a former assistant governor of Plymouth Colony, for its mounting debts and mismanagement of the books, and possibly even embezzlement.

Sam Allerton's genius for making money lay in his ability to use the railroads to transport livestock. When he moved his operations to Chicago in 1860, he located his Allerton Swine Yards strategically at the terminus of the Hudson River Railroad, entry point for most of the hogs coming into the city. According to legend, when the price of pigs dropped to as little as one cent a pound, Sam borrowed eighty thousand dollars, bought every hog in Chicago, and cornered the market for a day and a half. He rail-shipped them to Ohio and Pennsylvania to fatten up before selling them to the Union Army, which was so desperate for provisions it was paying sixty cents a pound. It wasn't pretty — the livestock traveled without water or food, sometimes arriving half-dead.

Sam was a key partner in founding the Pittsburgh stockyards in 1864. He pushed hard for Chicago to create similar stockyards, which opened on Christmas Day 1865 and were ten times bigger than Pittsburgh's. Although their historical role has been overlooked, Samuel Allerton and his family built a livestock empire that enabled them to dominate and influence shipping costs from the Midwest to New York City.

He was so successful that he bought his own Pullman car so he could live in luxury while overseeing his far-flung operations, which soon stretched from New York to Wyoming. He made so much money he had to establish his own bank. Sam Allerton and nine friends founded the First National Bank of Chicago to fuel their enterprises, which became the source of more Allerton wealth.

The
Chicago Tribune
ranked Allerton as the city's third wealthiest man, right behind the retail magnate Marshall Field and meat packer Jonathan Armour. To survive and triumph in Chicago's commodities market required the ruthlessness of a bandit and the ethics of a horse trader. A pirate's glint gleamed in Allerton's dark eyes.

His money allowed him to marry well — to Pamilla Thompson, the daughter of a wealthy Peoria cattle farmer. She bore a daughter, Priscilla, in 1871, and two years later, a son, Robert. The slender, willowy Pamilla contracted scarlet fever and died. Robert, then six, also caught the fever, which left him nearly deaf, motherless, and lonely. Sam quickly married again, to his wife's sister, Agnes. Sensitive and gentle, Agnes shone a light into her isolated nephew's life. She encouraged him to enroll in art lessons at the new Art Institute of Chicago, and successfully lobbied Sam when Robert wanted to go to Europe at age nineteen to pursue painting.