NANCY AND PHYLLIS were bridesmaids at Irene’s wedding, “two of Virginia’s most charming little ladies,” as they were described, “fetchingly apparelled in exquisite French gowns of taffeta with long white gloves and large leghorn hats trimmed with white ostrich tips.” The ceremony affected them in different ways: Phyllis, aged fifteen, was overcome with tearful emotion; Nancy, dry-eyed, concentrated with delight on the thought that she could move into Irene’s old room that night.
The newspapers had immediately granted Nancy rights of succession and elected her a Belle. Ambition dictated that she should also inherit Irene’s fame and privileges. She imagined marking up proposals on her scorecard in the same way. Chillie’s sons having failed, the burden of success—or so it seemed to Nancy—was transferred to his daughters. Furtherance depended entirely on men, however, and therefore on marriage. But Nancy seemed to treat men like boys and younger brothers rather than suitors: she would rather, quite literally, compete than flirt with them. Ingrained in the girlish memory of Mrs. Beatty Moore is the way Nancy shocked the conventions of the Richmond horse show by entering in a man’s class. She remembered her “in a white linen riding habit on a lovely horse and I remember the name of the horse to this day—it was Queen Bee. Bareheaded, nothing on her head. She had lovely hair. And she was ruled out. She had no business entering a man’s class, of course, and she was furious and she dismounted and threw her reins over the pommel and gave Queen Bee a whack and stomped out of the ring and when she got to the fence some man gave her a foot up and she came over the fence like she was mounting a horse.”
Nevertheless, Nancy still expected the beaux to behave in the traditional way—which meant to propose almost as soon as they paid attention to you. If they hadn’t actually fallen in love, they were expected to play the part. There existed no other variation or form of courtship. She had some brittle confrontations: romance in her teens seemed to consist of counting up the proposals she had rejected and unfavorably comparing her score to that of Irene (by the time she was married, she counted only sixteen to Irene’s sixty-two). Nor did the beaux find Nancy as companionable as Phyllis, who genuinely enjoyed their company. “Nausea” was what Nancy felt when an admirer sent her a stream of letters and poems. But love was a difficult subject for Nancy, an abstract necessity to be conjured with. As in later life, it was the conquests that hadn’t quite worked that preoccupied her—the admirers who walked away without first being rejected. Phyllis would later say that Nancy never understood love in her endless struggle to separate the spiritual from the material, the spirit from the flesh (although the flesh was never a fierce combatant). Nancy seemed to like men only in some idealized form, like the figures she cut from the magazines. Otherwise, she was easily bored and irritated by them. It was perhaps something to do with these conflicts of identity that caused her, in her adolescence, to show signs of delicate health: melancholia, nervous debility, unexplained neuralgias. Nanaire, considering her too fragile to take part in her debutante season, forbade her late-night balls.
Instead, while the rich Yankees were sending their daughters south to learn manners, Chillie sent Nancy to a finishing school in New York, Miss Brown’s Academy for Young Ladies, to acquire polite accomplishments. It was a grave mistake, an experience that taught Nancy, if anything, precisely the opposite of the Miss Brown prospectus. Whatever Chillie and Nanaire thought was lacking in Nancy’s upbringing is not clear. Miss Brown’s seems to have been a social move, but they underestimated the impact of the worldly North on the sensibilities of a girl who had hardly been out of Virginia. Nanaire had packed Nancy’s entire wardrobe: one tailor-made and two homemade dresses. Nancy arrived to find that her roommate had eleven suits and dresses and her jewelry scattered about the room, which caused Nancy particular anxiety. She complained to the teacher: “What if they disappear?” The girls talked only of their wardrobes, of how much money their fathers made. But, worse, according to Nancy, were the “odd, and to me, quite revolting affairs going on between them and young men. I remember my shame and horror when one of my companions winked at a man in the street.” Nancy, feeling for the first time at a disadvantage with her contemporaries, reacted like a cornered cat to this sinful, unfamiliar Yankee world. She wrote later, “I have never forgotten how it horrified me.”
She set out to shock her fellow pupils and the staff by transforming herself through vaudeville and mimicry into a southern caricature, broadening her accent to fatuous elongations. She would put on a yellow blouse with a pink bow on one side and a green bow on the other; she told them that her father was a drunk and that her mother took in washing. She challenged the entire establishment, concealing her misery under war paint. They began to find her, as a result, exotic and exciting, rather than shocking, and then one day, to compound their confusion, when Irene Gibson arrived to take her riding on Long Island, Nancy claimed that she was her elder sister.
When Chillie and Nanaire came to visit, she pleaded to be taken out of this misery. She was returned to Mirador, to riding and picnics, and the last summer of her childhood. By the spring of 1896, she was back in the North, staying at Newport with Irene and Dana, and it was there on the polo field that she met Robert Gould Shaw.
She saw him playing spectacularly from a one-eyed pony, taking falls, getting up unscathed. He came over to talk to Nancy’s group and was introduced to her as “Bob Shaw, son of an old and distinguished Boston family.” Shaw took one look at Nancy and decided immediately that he was going to marry her. Nancy was seventeen, Shaw in his mid-twenties, a good-looking playboy, who had been on the Harvard polo team in 1890, whose friends knew that he kept a mistress and whose father, Quincy Adams Shaw, was, by Boston standards, an extremely rich man.
The Shaws were later relegated, in both oral and written family history, to insignificance, even obscurity. Nancy had reason to suppress her past but, otherwise, this lack of curiosity about these intriguing aristocrats of the Eastern Seaboard, with whom she was traumatically entangled for six years, is peculiar. Bob Shaw was a nephew of the famous Robert G. Shaw, killed at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, leading the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Negro soldiers in the Civil War, whose statue stands in Boston. His grandfather was Louis Agassiz, the greatest zoologist in the United States in the late nineteenth century, who had come from Switzerland to teach at Harvard in 1848. He founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and revolutionized the teaching of science in America.
His daughter Pauline, from his second marriage, married Quincy Adams Shaw, Bob Shaw’s father. “Old Mr. Shaw,” as Nancy later called her one-time father-in-law, had amassed Boston’s, perhaps America’s, greatest collection of Barbizon school paintings, including fifty-six works by Millet, whom he had befriended and commissioned in France in the 1870s. He was the younger son of a rich father who had speculated in real estate and traded with China. Quincy used his own inherited money to develop the purest seam of copper ever discovered in the New World, in the Midwest, and made his own fortune in the 1860s, all the while, from the 1850s onward, visiting France and building his art collection. By 1900, he looked like an old, bearded patriarch. He died eight years later at the age of eighty-three, having bequeathed most of his collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He must have been somewhat distanced by age from his son, Bob. He was no brash Yankee capitalist but a man of impressive scholarship and achievements. One can understand why Nancy, with her reverence for learning and respect for her “betters,” always liked Mr. Shaw.
When the rumors began of an engagement, it was thought there must be some mistake as Nancy was not officially “out.” Bob Shaw seemed to have made an impulsive move, to have merely declared his rights over the new catch of the season. Nancy was flattered to have made what was considered a spectacular conquest and to be suddenly at the center of the picture, where she had always yearned to be. She liked Bob Shaw—he was easygoing, charming. He was also a spoiled, willful, sheltered boy, with a tendency toward drink: attributes that Nancy didn’t seem to notice at the time. His family put his peccadilloes down to youthful ebullience, to the sowing of wild oats. They believed that marriage would settle him and perhaps even get him down to work.
In the wake of Irene, Nancy never found herself in the limelight in the way she expected. She wrote with commendable frankness, “The engagement of any Langhorne was a sensation, and mine was announced with the usual enthusiasm and excitement. I was supposed to be making a brilliant match, but I noticed that I was alluded to, still, as ‘the beautiful Irene Langhorne’s sister.’”
Nancy was never in love with Shaw, although for a time she forced herself to imagine otherwise. When her doubts made her break off the engagement, she came under enormous pressure, both from her own family and the Shaws, to go ahead. Mysteriously, Nanaire failed to read the signals. “Mother was amongst them,” Nancy wrote, “and I had always listened to Mother and tried to do as she wished.” Because Nancy liked and admired Bob Shaw’s parents, the pressure applied by his mother, Pauline, finally persuaded her to agree to be married. The fifteen months of the engagement gave Nancy pause for further doubts, as she saw distressing warning signs of Bob’s dissipation, which Chillie largely ignored. He did, however, feel it necessary to travel to Boston at one point for reassurance from the Shaws, which seemed to calm him. Nor did he come to hear of the strains of melancholia in Bob’s maternal Agassiz family, to which his mother, Pauline, would eventually succumb: Bob’s brother, Quincy A. Shaw, was already beginning a lifetime of confinement for manic depression. But what was locked away was evidently of no consequence.
The ceremony took place in October 1897 in the drawing room at Mirador, and was remembered by Phyllis, Nancy’s “maid of honour,” only for its “gloom.” It was never quite clear what happened at the Homestead Hotel, Hot Springs, where the couple began their honeymoon. Nancy, aged eighteen, and Bob Shaw, twenty-four, knew so little about each other that their first taste of proximity shocked them both profoundly, and effectively ended the marriage quite literally before it had begun. But Nancy later, in a rare moment of candor, told her niece, Nancy Lancaster, that she had slept on her stomach for three nights before Bob took her back to Mirador. She claimed officially that it was extreme homesickness that made her beg her husband to take her back to her father’s house. Apart from Miss Brown’s Academy, she had never been away. But there was the question of sex—a subject that Nancy later put very low on the scale of human activities. Hot Springs was either a disastrously failed initiation, which marked her deeply, or she naturally hated the idea of it.
It was Chillie who persuaded Nancy to go back to Boston and continue her marriage, and this must have required some courage on Nancy’s part. She was determined not to admit her mistake publicly. Divorce was an unthinkable disgrace, separation equally damning.
Bob Shaw, meanwhile, was “dismayed” by his wife’s frigidity and her strong disapproval of drink. He resumed his affair with his mistress, and was consequently “untruthful”—as Nancy complained. “He started drinking again,” she wrote later, “I was horrified and frightened … I learned that drink had been his trouble for a long time.” No doubt Shaw was also getting the sharp end of Nancy’s teasing wit and seemed to have responded, on occasions, violently. Nancy was never to forget the connection between her sufferings and alcohol.
Despite fleeing the Shaw home several times, or obeying her husband’s command to get out, three months after her marriage Nancy was pregnant. The only clue as to how this came about was Nancy’s later claim that she woke up one night to find her husband in the bedroom with a chloroform-filled sponge. When she finally left Shaw, she justified it on the grounds that she could not “risk having any more children by him.” Even more chilling than the suggestion of rape was the idea of the procreative male as a kind of incubus who comes in the night. Bobbie was born the following year, 1898.
Nancy turned her attentions to her son to take the edge off her misery, turning him into an ally, a bulwark against loneliness. It was the beginning of an intense emotional interdependence in Nancy’s life that she was never to loosen. Everywhere, Nancy was surrounded by optimistic advice. Bob Shaw could be “got right”; “marriage” would still do the trick. But in the summer of 1900, Nancy finally went to her father-in-law and told him that she couldn’t go on. He was very kind, she said, and “much distressed by the whole affair.” He told her to go back home for six months, that he would straighten out his son. But when Nancy came back, the situation was unchanged: Bob was drinking heavily, the mistress still in place. A letter written by Nancy to Mr. Shaw in 1906, refusing permission for her son, Bobbie, to visit his father, reveals more. Bob Shaw’s mistress was Mary Converse, née Harrington, born in London. “If you will remember before I left Bob,” Nancy wrote, “you & I both warned him of this woman … she was his mistress at that time & did all she could to break up & ruin his & my home & life.” Mrs. Converse was clearly in place during the whole period that Nancy was trying to restore her marriage—a fact she left out of her short memoir.
Also left out of Nancy’s account is any speculation that Shaw had seriously fallen for her, found her fascinating and attractive, and was tortured by unrequited love. Drink can’t have been that much of an endemic problem. He later married quite happily and produced four sons. Nancy seems to have used drink as a smokescreen for the horrors of sexual and emotional incompatibility: of being locked up with someone who turned out to be a stranger. There is no doubt that they were extremely ill matched: Shaw brash and arrogant, both determinedly willful, “like two pieces of steel swinging at each other.”
Nancy refused the advice of her family, even of the Archdeacon Neve, to get a divorce. It was still something “that decent people had nothing to do with,” but most important, it was something not countenanced by her Bible. She signed a deed of separation in 1901, at the age of twenty-two, which would have prevented her marrying again,“cutting myself off from life completely,” and returned with Bobbie to Mirador, “unwanted, unsought, and part widowed for life” as she “laughingly” told her father.
Phyllis had also been sent north to a finishing school, with more success. The Langhorne plan, it seems, was for her to meet exclusively northern friends and beaux from now on. She had visited Nancy several times in Boston, and watched her marriage foundering, while she herself was being fêted as New York’s latest sensation in her debutante season. She had become the replacement Langhorne for 1900, effortlessly pushing aside the many other southern beauties who had now invaded northern society. Nanaire had many more cuttings to fill her “Mark Twain’s Scrapbook”—whose ready-glue stripes still shine and stick ninety-five years later. The coverage on Phyllis is phenomenal by the standards of those days. It is clear that she spent most of 1900 and 1901 in the North, ignoring the Richmond season, and even the hunting at Mirador, in favor of Newport, Long Island, Palm Beach, Boston, Philadelphia—the “homesickness for solitude” temporarily allayed.
She hunted in the area around Hempstead, east of New York, now a commuter suburb, then the height of social fashion in the country. She went, in Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, “wherever people played polo and were rich together.” She had many admirers among what her letters describe as “spotin’ gents.” Unlike Nancy’s, Phyllis’s heroes in her youth had been chivalrous and daring figures. But it was at that same polo field at Newport where, despite Nancy’s near banishment from northern society, Phyllis found her own polo player in 1900.
It was Irene, Phyllis’s chaperone, who arranged the meeting. His name was Reggie Brooks and he was, of course, very good-looking. His rich parents belonged to the inner circle of isolated Newport grandeur. His father, H. Mortimer Brooks, had a huge showpiece villa there, a blend of inflated Bavarian chalet and French Renaissance called Rockhurst, where he lived most of the year round and gave some of the most elaborate Gilded Age parties. In the city, they kept a permanent apartment in the Waldorf Astoria. The Brookses were very much part of the Astor and Vanderbilt set. H. Mortimer Brooks was one of the founders of the exclusive Spouting Rock Beach, a stockholder in the Casino, the Reading Room, the Country Club, and the Newport Golf Club. The real wealth, many millions of dollars, came from his wife, Reggie’s mother, Josephine Higgins, who had inherited from her father, a real estate operator. Reggie was her only male heir. Phyllis was being courted at the epicenter of the most concentrated group of millionaires on the Eastern Seaboard.
Reggie was not unlike Bob Shaw. He had been to Harvard; he was spoiled, idle, handsome. He played polo and drank steadily, in the style of most of his former classmates from the Porcellian club of Harvard of 1896, from whom he was inseparable. But to Phyllis he was the complete sporting gentleman, and she quickly fell in love with him that winter of 1900 in Aiken, South Carolina, the hunting ground of the Newport and New York rich, where the family had a large estate.
Reggie did nothing all year other than follow the seasonal migration of rich sportsmen. Aiken was the winter headquarters for hunting, and for quail shooting in April, then Boca Grande in Florida in May for “Mr. Tarpon” as Reggie called it (“Until you have killed one,” he wrote to Phyllis during their courtship, “your sporting education is incomplete”). In Florida, he shot alligators, duck, snipe. Early in the summer, he went to Newport; in 1900, “to get my boat in commission [Reggie owned a thirty-foot yacht called The Wawa] also if possible to reserve my berth on the new [America’s] Cup defender, which I believe is to be launched Saturday.” There was the polo at Newport, tennis tournaments, more social than sporting, in which Phyllis took part in 1901, and then back to Aiken. Between these fixtures there were bear hunts, deer hunts, and moose hunts in Alaska, Canada—and many shooting parties. His parents had discouraged Reggie from working. They seemed proud that he remained with his old classmates, playing boys’ games, even six years after he had left Harvard.
One reason that Reggie took to Phyllis was that she seemed to understand the natural need for all this, and took part in some of it herself. In this somewhat asexual world, which excluded women for most of the year, she seemed to be an exceptional catch. In one of the few jolly, excited letters of Reggie’s that survive, written after their engagement in August 1901, he told Phyllis how pleased he was that one of his Porcellian friends had described her as “the best girl he ever met,” adding, “He also says that usually when a friend got engaged it means [sic] losing him to his sporting friend. My case he considers different as it is merely ‘the addition of a congenial spirit to the family circle’ [“family” comprising those who hunt, race, shoot, play polo, etc.].”
They planned to live permanently in Aiken, South Carolina, after their marriage. There was a quorum of classmates, a country club, hunting all winter. Reggie’s letters are full of shopping lists—horses, saddles, bridles, stable staff. He was fastidiously attentive, sending her presents from Tiffany’s, making sure her riding boots were properly dispatched from the menders, sending shoelaces ahead by mail. He had given up drink, he said, and taken to a milk diet. Otherwise, he wrote of sporting achievements or defeats, like a little boy writing from boarding school: qualifying rounds, finals, cups, rivals, excuses. Soon he began to sign himself “Rege Pege”—the name Phyllis gave him—and he called her “dear Old Pills,” or simply “old man.” He wrote to her, “When I come to Greenwood you will probably say ‘poor old Rege Pege, how bored he looks, too bad it is so quiet down here and there is nothing for you to do.’ You old rascal if you attempt any of this line of talky talk I’ll spank you.”
They were married on November 14, 1901, at the Brandon Hotel, Basic City, Virginia, now Waynesboro, a few miles from Mirador, within a month of Nancy’s separation from Bob Shaw. Chillie took the whole hotel: the guests could check in straight off the train. Hitched to the Fast Flying Virginian Vestibule Limited from New York were two private railroad cars for the guests, “one with ushers sports and dudes,” as Reggie described it, “and the other one for their females—wives, daughters, cousins.”
The Richmond Gazette reported it as a “gathering of the ‘400’ on Southern soil.” It also reported that after the lunch “there was a summons that hushed all talk, while a voice of infinite melody and singular pathos to the soft accompaniment of an orchestra, began to sing the old song, ‘I’m going home to Dixie,/I’m going where the Orange blossoms grow.’”
It was, of course, “the incomparable Chillie Langhorne” doing his now-famous turn, the audience listening, apparently “with some deep emotion to the simple, plaintive tones.” It was all a lot gayer than Nancy’s wedding, four years earlier, when Chillie didn’t sing. Phyllis had no doubts about her own wedding, believing, as she said later, that she had married “a real gentleman and a sportsman.” Only Nancy, who hadn’t liked Reggie Brooks from the moment she met him, thought that Phyllis had made a mistake.