“what a dump”

More conversation with Cassandra Langer

Born today in 1874, painter Romaine Brooks celebrated her birthday every year with writer Natalie Barney, her partner for life after they met in 1916. In search of evidence of their secret adventures, my traveling companion is Brooks biographer, Dr. Cassandra Langer.

 

Cassandra Langer: In 1929, Natalie and Romaine were living in Paris.

Suzanne Stroh: Check. Amusing themselves with the young ladies of the Left Bank. Then suddenly the lights went out. The party was over.

They hightailed it to New York in November after the Crash. Neither had been hit very hard by the stock market collapse.

Financial conservatives. Social liberals.

But Romaine’s family had suffered a major business failure in mining.

Romaine had to find out whether the crisis had been caused by her alcoholic cousin, Waddie Waterman, who was managing the family business.

That’s right. She left Natalie in New York and traveled alone to Philadelphia to investigate. She did not find the decorating up to her standards.

Why do you think Natalie stayed behind?

Well, this is only the 50^thanniversary of Stonewall. We forget that gay lovers were not always well received in family circles. Especially in times of crisis.

Not even if they held joint bank accounts.

And besides, Natalie was very judgmental about financial irresponsibility, not to mention drunkenness.

Her father Albert had been a heavy drinker. And homophobic.

Yeah, we know that because he bought up all the copies of Natalie’s Sapphic love poems and had them destroyed.

So I get it: Romaine might not have wanted Natalie going postal on cousin Waddie. And Natalie had family problems of her own. Let’s get into Alice.

That’s right, Natalie’s mother was spending money like water out in Hollywood. Natalie and her sister, Laura Barney, were afraid Alice would run through her trust fund. Laura charged Natalie with crossing the Atlantic, then crossing a continent, to rein in their mother’s spending. No easy task.

Alice Pike Barney: Washington socialite, Whistler’s acolyte.

Romaine considered her an amateur artist.

If only she’d kept her opinions to herself!

Laura Barney almost stopped speaking to Romaine over an unkind remark she made about Alice’s talent.

Laura took it as a slight, but Alice would have probably laughed it off. Now there was a force of nature. The famous African explorer Stanley named Lady Alice Falls after her, remember? Before she broke his heart. At the end of 1929, Alice was an impresario producing stage plays.

With plots derivative of Oscar Wilde.

Big on witty banter and arch aperçus. It went without saying that Alice would do anything to promote herself. She started that bohemian theater company in Los Angeles, passing off Natalie’s plays as her own.

Which around Christmastime in 1929, Natalie was soon to discover….

…because Natalie and Romaine had plans for Los Angeles after Christmas!

 

Well, we don’t know how they spent Christmas. We do know that Alice Barney was planning a big party in January to show off the celebrity painter, “Mrs. Brooks.” Alice had invited every big name in Hollywood.  And I doubt that Romaine had any inkling of what was in store, either, when they boarded a train in New York that winter day, bound for Los Angeles. We think it was the first trip across the country for both women.

So, I’ve always wondered what Romaine sketched on that trip. We found out from her 1967 interview that, contrary to what we thought we knew, Romaine stated that she drew every day. Very little of that work has survived.

We know she carried notebooks with her, where she jotted down her thoughts and made quick sketches. It’s hard to imagine that in half a century of life together, Romaine never made a single nude study of Natalie.

What? Romaine Brooks painted giant portraits of celebrities in the nude! You’ve never seen a single drawing of Natalie?

Nobody’s seen one. That we know of, anyway…. I can’t imagine that Romaine would not have made sketches along the way from New York to Los Angeles. The rail journey alone would have taken about five days.

Thanks to the American Enterprise Institute, whatever it is that they really do, I’ve seen maps from 1932 published in The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States showing that people could cross the country in as little as three and a half days. I bet the girls took it at a slower pace. Natalie loved boasting that she was born in the age of horse-drawn carriages.

There were so many new and strange sights to be seen.

I always wondered if they made the trip in a Barney Smith car, but on a recent visit to Dayton, Ohio, I learned that the cars were never used on cross-country routes. And they had long been retired from general use by 1929. They could have ridden in a private car.

Which is probably likely. But I think what would have interested Romaine from the outset was the American Streamliner engine. There wasn’t anything like it in Europe.

 

What were her impressions as she looked out the window or changed trains? She was seeing horses, people…

 

 

changing landscapes…

And Natalie.

 

Dallying, as usual. Pfaffing about.

Enjoying herself. The only landscape she was ever interested in exploring was herself.

[LOL]

But you and I were real continental explorers! So intrepid! We tried to find them in Jerome, Arizona. I forget, why did we go there?

In 1929, there was one American mining operation that was going strong. Somewhere between Phoenix and Sedona–

It was west of Sedona.

If you say so.

I do. If we left the driving up to you….

God forbid you should let anyone else drive the horseless carriage!

[LOL]

As you were saying.

So basically, out there in the Midwest…

Or, as it’s commonly known, The Southwest…

…in the middle of nowhere, this Jerome mine was producing more copper than anywhere else in the world. And we found out that the whole operation was funded by high hats from the east coast.

Mostly from Pennsylvania! Aha! 

Pennsylvania mining industry—Isaac Waterman Jr.—Romaine Brooks!

So, only three degrees of separation from Rittenhouse Square to the Gold King Mine in Jerome, Arizona. Mysterious! Do we think the Watermans had an interest?

 

Well, we weren’t sure. So we went there to find out.

 

I rather wish we hadn’t.

 

What a dump. Romaine and Natalie would have stepped off the train to be welcomed by throngs of streetwalkers.

 

Like, hundreds of them. Their portraits are collected in the local museum.

Like a stage set erected inside a touristy shop selling t-shirts, tchotchkes and healing crystals.

Talk about bad energy! The womens history exhibit lionizes Jerome’s prostitutes for their industry and entrepreneurship. Then we learn how many of them were riddled with disease or beaten and left for dead on the job. Today, Jerome’s claim to fame is that it’s a ghost town. It makes you wonder if all the grumpy, unwelcoming shopkeepers we met aren’t the reincarnated spirits of working girls from days of yore.

 

Please, no ouija boards. Romaine was traumatized enough without awakening the ghost hookers of Jerome. Her heiress mother, Ella Waterman, was a spiritualist who subscribed to Lucifer magazine and was a great séance holder. Romaine always steered clear of the occult. Whatever they knew about the history of Jerome, Natalie and Romaine would have sensed right away that they were out of their element.

 

We stood there imagining the looks on their faces.

We could almost see them on the hotel steps, checking the timetable for the earliest train out.

Have I mentioned that Jerome, Arizona was named for Downton Abbey?

No, it wasn’t. It was named for Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill.

Exactly! 

So do you think Romaine Brooks ever had a financial interest in that mine?

We haven’t found any record of that yet, but there was one fact that raised our eyebrows, remember? It seems like almost every engineer or senior manager came from Pittsburgh or companies with Philadelphia owners, and one of the exhibits explained that there were lots of silent partners backing many of the Arizona investors, who were trying to get a foothold in the state. So who knows?

Since we’re on the topic of the robber barons…. Romaine and Natalie had another life partner, Lily de Gramont, remember?

How could I forget her?

When you and I got to Jerome, we wondered if Lily could have been behind the whole visit. Lily was such a provocateur, such a harsh realist, so political. We could almost hear Lily daring Romaine to confront the source of her wealth in the exploitation of the mine workers.

The subject matter of women’s oppression always interested Romaine. One of your favorite Brooks paintings depicts a doleful sex worker undergoing one of the physical exams that were compulsory in Paris.

 

The Girl in the Red Jacket. In France, prostitution was legal. In Jerome, just deadly.

Natalie, Romaine (and Laura, for that matter) were aligned in their opposition to patriarchy and misogyny. Only a few years earlier, Romaine had painted another masterpiece, Weeping Venus, based on Natalie’s poem on that subject. The history that might have confronted Romaine in Jerome would have angered her.

So whether Romaine would have gone to Jerome on a dare (or someplace like it–maybe the Borax mining operation in Death Valley, run by another muckety-muck); or went there seeking a better investment to pitch to Waddie; or whether she would have been managing an existing stake in the operation…we could imagine them making that stop on the journey.

Which would have made everyone around them deeply uncomfortable.

It’s another reason why there’s more work to be done to unearth Romaine’s and Natalie’s accounts and ledgers. It would tell us so much about two pioneers of gay American life before Stonewall.

It just goes to show, gay icons like Romaine Brooks have left us the legacy of their artworks. But the details of their lives remain mysterious. I don’t know if Romaine and Natalie made that stop in Arizona, but I do know that both women were out and proud lesbian feminists, with Natalie in the vanguard of what we see today being celebrated by Stonewall 50.

Happy birthday Romaine and happy birthday Gay Pride! Many happy returns!

PS, don’t ever throw a surprise party for Romaine Brooks in Hollywood! That’s probably not going to go over very well.

We saw Garbo’s name on the guest list.

I wonder if there’s a lost drawing of Greta Garbo out there somewhere. Let me know if you find it.