CHAPTER FIVE
After Philip
Children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.
—SIGMUND FREUD, “The Uncanny”
Edie had assumed that, after their marriage, Philip’s family’s wealth would support Dare in style and, she hoped, herself too. Now that the marriage was off, Edie was once again concerned about her daughter’s financial future. She paid a second visit to Town & Country with Dare’s portfolio but, as on her earlier visit, she spent more time extolling her own talents than her daughter’s. And, as had happened in 1947, an assignment was cooked up with Dare as model rather than photographer. This time, the magazine thought it an interesting proposition to have Edie behind the camera. The only hitch, of course, was that Edie did not know how to take a good picture.
Although Edie would take the credits on “Silks Resurgent,” this spread was actually Dare’s debut as a fashion photographer. Dare did all the work on both sides of the camera. Edie’s contribution was to click the shutter and revel in the chance to get paid to play dress-up with her daughter. On the contact sheets Dare saved from this project, the first twenty-four shots follow the assignment. Dare models four silk dresses provided by the magazine; she wears her hair pulled back into a tight chignon and sports the same unsmiling, trapped look she had in the Cleveland News engagement photo. The next six shift to Edie, in the asymmetrically necklined gown Dare had worn in her engagement photos. Then back to Dare, who has changed into a low-cut gown, the bodice held up by thin straps, also her own and not part of the assignment. In several subsequent frames, one and then the other strap falls, as though she is on her way to a striptease. Next, she has changed into a leopard-print jacket and skirt, with a clingy leotardlike top, and let down her very blond hair. After a few shots in the leopard outfit, she reappears in the silk Town & Country dresses, her hair pulled back again.
Finally, there are a dozen shots of Dare in a transparent white nightgown posing in and around the bed, her naked body visible beneath the gown. In three shots, Dare buries her face in a floor-length tulle bridal veil hemmed with seed pearls, and in one she has placed the veil on her head as if playing the bride, a believable one, but for the see-through gown. This was the veil her mother had worn at her own wedding, the veil Dare planned to wear as Philip’s bride.
It was Dare who delivered the “Silks Resurgent” photos to Town & Country. She did not tell the editor that she had acted as the photographer, but she did mention her desire to become one. Just after the March 1949 issue of Town & Country appeared, Dorothy Tivis, the head of Figureheads, a new but successful modeling agency, received a call from the “Silks Resurgent” editor, who wondered whether Dorothy would see a model who was hoping to become a photographer.
Dorothy, a six-foot-tall natural beauty, had moved to New York in 1942 from Fargo, North Dakota. Three years later, as she was riding the Third Avenue El to her job as a writer on the foreign desk of United Press International, she was “discovered” by a Vogue editor. Irving Penn did Dorothy’s test shots, and she was soon gracing the cover and inside pages of Vogue. In 1948, while continuing to model, Dorothy had started her own agency. At their first meeting, Dorothy signed Dare on as a model. Equally impressed by her photography skills, she also hired her as a sort of in-house photographer.
The first assignment Dorothy gave Dare was to make up her own modeling cards. Edie and Dare carried out this project enthusiastically. They collected dress-up photographs from the Mayport and Ocracoke trips, which Dare reprinted, and took many more photographs in Edie’s studio of Dare in a full repertoire of apparel—from bathing suit to evening gown—all of their own creation.
But someone else would be making use of Dare’s stunning looks even before she had the chance to be launched by Dorothy’s agency. Dare had been introduced to Bayard Hale, a Harvard-educated advertising man, in the mid-1940s. Despite his real-world credentials, Bayard too had something of a problem with growing up and still lived with his mother. Bayard found Dare as gentle and fey as he was, even if she offered him no more than the chance to pal around together, often in the company of their mothers. In early 1948, Hale introduced Dare to his oldest friend, Fenimore Cooper Marsh, president of the Baker Castor Oil Company, and and his wife, Mary Veit Marsh. The Marshes were soon including Dare at cocktail parties in their Park Avenue apartment or weekend luncheons at their country home north of the city. After lunch, Dare and Mary liked to play badminton while the men talked.
Mary, who had married Marsh in 1940, was unhappy with her husband and was looking for a way out, but only if she could secure a good financial settlement and custody of their twin daughters. A charge of adultery was one surefire way. But Cooper Marsh, who was indeed wealthy—he had inherited some $5 million in securities at the death of his father in 1948 and ran a profitable company—was not a philanderer. Watching a friendship develop between her husband and Dare—Marsh was an amateur photographer who loved discussing his hobby with the more knowledgeable Dare—Mary hatched a plan. She encouraged her husband to give Dare a tripod he wasn’t using and to help Dare with the darkroom under perpetual construction in her bathroom at the Hotel Bristol. Marsh began visiting Dare at the Bristol, unconcerned because Mary seemed to have no objection to what she had to have known was a platonic relationship.
In March 1949, Mary Marsh put her plan into play. She hired a private detective to trail her husband, knowing the detective would pick up on his frequent visits to Dare’s hotel room. On May 26, a sting operation was carried out. The detective, Richard Shorten, Mary’s two brothers, Mary herself, and Ruth Mason, a psychic who had worked for Harry Houdini, would descend on the hotel and discover Dare and Marsh, if not “in the act,” in a situation that a jury might construe along those lines.
After the “raid,” which came off beautifully, especially as the raiders claimed Dare was wearing a negligee, “socially prominent Mary Amelia Veit Marsh,” as the newspapers referred to her, moved out of the couple’s Park Avenue apartment and into a hotel with her children. She filed for divorce, naming Dare as co-respondent and asking for a steep weekly alimony while the case was resolved. Hearings began in New York Supreme Court on July 7 and were covered by the tabloids in lurid detail over the course of their two-week duration: RAIDING WIFE SEEKS TO DITCH CASTOR OIL KING, JUST CAMERA PALS, SNAPS CASTOR OILER, SURPRISE IN HIS DARKROOM NETS WIFE $3,000 A WEEK. The July 9 report in the Daily News began:
A battle over Dare Wright’s attire—or lack of it—the night of the raid on her hotel room developed yesterday as castor oil tycoon Fenimore Cooper Marsh denied that he had been intimate with her, insisting they merely shared “a common interest in photography.”
In her affidavit, Dare declared that she was “flabbergasted, but fully clothed.” Mary maintained Dare was wearing a diaphanous flowing gown. Dare countered that “I was clad in a yellow silk shirtwaist and a quilted cotton skirt of red and yellow colors,” which she maintained was suitable for street wear as well as home.
Knowing that her profession as model might not sound wholesome enough, Dare told the court she was a professional photographer specializing in children’s portraits, although beyond the pictures she had taken of Jim Wynn and the Seawells’ daughter, Brook, she had little experience in photographing children. She claimed that Marsh had assisted in the construction of her darkroom. Marsh, in turn, said Dare had insisted on buying the tripod he offered to give to her. Dare pointed out that she was actually friends with Mary. She spoke of their lunches and said they had played a great deal of badminton together.
Dare—always “comely female photographer” and “pert blond model” in the articles—was being used. She knew Mary knew there was nothing untoward going on. She turned to Donald Seawell for help, and he and his partner Nahum Bernstein prepared a fool-proof defense, although they hoped ultimately to spare Dare the embarrassment of using it.
The trial began on December 8, 1949, and again the tabloids reveled. PEEPER SAYS HIS EYES POPPED, TELLS OF CANDID PEEP AT PAIR IN DARKROOM. Detective Shorten testified with unchecked glee to his first discovery, observed through a crack in the room’s transom: lights going on and off at intervals, accompanied by the sounds of laughter and giggling. It was, the detective suggested, proof positive of illicit activity. In fact, Dare and Marsh were developing photographs.
On the night of the “raid,” Shorten told the court he and his team pounded on the door for admittance. When Dare opened the door, he said, they saw Marsh “in the process of dressing.” In fact, Marsh had earlier taken off his necktie because the evening was a warm one and he was putting it back on. At 10 P.M., Mrs. Marsh herself arrived. She testified that Dare was wearing a yellow negligee and bedroom slippers. Was it diaphanous? Dare’s lawyer asked of Shorten. The detective wasn’t familiar with the word. Was it transparent, then? No, Shorten replied. Mercifully, Mary withdrew her case two days after the trial began, when Marsh agreed to pay her $28,000 in annual alimony. MARSH DIVORCE TRIANGLE SQUARED exulted the next day’s headline. It was also agreed that Mrs. Marsh would sign a statement of apology, clearing Dare of any allegations of misconduct. Under the headline CLEAR PHOTOGRAPHER AS DIVORCE SUIT IS SETTLED, the final article about the case, which ran on December 10 in the Daily Mirror, revealed Seawell and Bernstein’s ultimate defense. “Miss Wright’s attorney said after the settlement that he had subpoenaed two gynecologists who were prepared to testify his client was a virgin.”
* * *
The Marsh incident had been an ordeal, but Dare walked away from it as though it had not happened—or had happened to someone else. She never lost her composure or betrayed any sign of emotion. Dorothy Tivis, who stayed by Dare’s side throughout the case, became an important friend in this period, although one who kept the requisite distance. “Dare was never very vocal about her feelings or her private life,” Dorothy said. “I didn’t pry.”
One afternoon, finding herself near the Hotel Bristol, Dorothy went in and called up to Dare’s room from the lobby. A few minutes later, Dare walked into the lobby accompanied by a “gorgeous man.” Just as she was feeling a twinge of envy at Dare’s handsome beau, Dare introduced the stranger as her brother. The three of them began spending time together and Dorothy fell in love with Blaine, even if Blaine and Dare’s mutual adoration often left Dorothy feeling like a third wheel. She also met the “strong-willed, dominant woman who ran Dare’s life” and was struck by how differently the siblings viewed their mother. Blaine, she learned, detested his mother, and not just for her treatment of him. “Blaine once said to me, ‘If I could tell you the wreckage she has wrought, and my sister is part of it.’” Dorothy recalled shouting matches when she would arrive with Blaine at the Bristol to find Edie there. “Blaine would see Dare all dressed up like a fairy princess and scream at his mother, ‘My sister’s not a doll!’”
Dorothy soon joined the “going to Pot” circuit, where, each weekend, Blaine’s island became the scene of free-flowing house parties. Other guests might include outdoors writers whom Blaine knew through the Phoebe lure or Suzie Vaillant and her children. While Blaine’s female visitors might seem far too glamorous for his accommodations, roughing it didn’t seem to bother anyone. When it was too cold to swim in the river, they would heat water on the stove and wash in the kitchen in a big basin. They used the outhouse and, when all available beds were occupied, slept on the floor.
If Dorothy had no objection to the physical discomforts on Pot, she was put off by Dare and Blaine’s endless game playing. They would shoot Necco wafers off the porch for hours, or Blaine would entertain his sister by telling stories acted out by his monkey hand puppet, or Dare would hop onto Blaine’s lap, muss his eyebrows, and teasingly address him as Victor.
Sometimes, their interactions were more intense. One witnessed by fourteen-year-old Henry Vaillant became the basis for a school essay on an unforgettable character. In the summer of 1949, while Blaine, Dare, Henry, and some others walked through a field in Walton, Dare discovered she had lost an earring. “First,” recalled Henry, “Blaine scolded the bejesus out of her for wearing it in the country to begin with. Then he went and got a pair of scissors.” Blaine spent the next eight hours on his hands and knees cutting the high grass blade by blade. Despite Dare’s entreaties to stop, amid assurances that the earring didn’t matter, Blaine continued. When he had cut a patch roughly a hundred feet square, he did stop—but only because he had located the earring. “His fingers were bleeding like crazy,” Henry said, “but he kept on until he found it. It was so unnecessary. In the essay, I called this an example of self-destructive perfectionism.” Or an example of the lengths to which Blaine would go to try to make things right for his sister.
On the back steps of Blaine’s cabin on Pot, top row, left to right, Dorothy Tivis and David Goodnow, second row, Blaine, Dare, Hermann Kessler, 1950s.
* * *
While Dare had made little headway in her career as a photographer, she was more in demand than ever as a model. Increasingly high-profile jobs were coming her way, thanks to Dorothy’s management. At the start of 1950, just after the resolution of the Marsh case, Dare was featured in the Maidenform bra “I dreamed…” advertising campaign, which had been launched the previous year. Dare’s ad, which appeared in women’s magazines in 1950 and 1951, identified her as “Sally Starr,” a movie actress. The copy ran: “I dreamed I had a screen test in my Maidenform bra. Lights! Camera! Action! I never felt so like a star … and all because my Maidenform bra plays my best supporting role!” Dare, shown in five different poses, wears a black hat with a floor-length net train, full-length sheer black gloves, high heels, a full skirt, and the bra, the “3-way Maidenette-Declatay.”
Dare was also shot for an October 1950 Esquire magazine feature, “All American Model,” in which four models were singled out for their ideal features: face, legs, bust, or back. Dare was represented by a full-page nude shot of her back, from her head down to her buttocks. That same month she was photographed for a future cover of Cosmopolitan.
But then word came to the Figureheads office that Good Housekeeping magazine was hiring photographers. Dare submitted her portfolio, met with one of the art editors and Margaret Cousins, the managing editor, and was hired to shoot illustrations for an editorial section called the Baby Center, which ran monthly articles on child care. She was later reassigned to the Beauty Clinic section, where her first photo credit, for a story advocating pin-curl rather than chemical permanents, misidentified her—shades of the name-tape incident—as “Bare Wright.” Over the next six years she would complete dozens of assignments for Good House, as the staff called it, and see 122 photographs published, illustrating mostly how-to articles on everything from car care to skin care.
With the promise of steady work at Good Housekeeping, Dare needed a more professional darkroom than she had been able to create in a hotel bathroom, and a real studio in which to hold her shoots. With savings from modeling jobs, Dare decided she could afford to rent her first New York apartment. She found one in a subdivided four-story townhouse at 29 West 58th Street, a few doors west of the side entrance of the Plaza Hotel, that had once been the home of Nancy Carroll, a popular cherubic-faced movie star of the twenties and thirties, whose nickname was Babyface. Dare’s second-floor apartment had been Carroll’s ballroom. The floor was dropped—one descended a couple of steps on entering—and the ceilings were high. It also boasted a working fireplace.
Dare sectioned off the room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that she built herself. She also made draperies and some of the furnishings and did most of the upholstery work herself. As in Edie’s first apartment in Cleveland, she painted the wood floors black with stenciled white squares, and then echoed this motif on the concrete on the north-facing “terrace,” which she reclaimed from the roof of an adjoining building. The only way to get onto the terrace was by climbing out the window, so she built a set of steps for this purpose. And she dressed up the terrace, suspending a striped awning she sewed and rigged herself off the side of the building. “She did things with nothing,” marveled Wanda Ramsey, who met Dare through the Seawells and whose husband Robert, a set designer, was particularly impressed with Dare’s inventiveness. “It was a stage set,” said Dorothy.
Dare’s first Good Housekeeping assignment, for an article on “Psychosomatic Ailments in Childhood,” was shot in her new apartment in May 1950. The image, evoking a mother trying to coax her baby back to sleep in the middle of the night, featured Wanda Ramsey’s sister Iza Warner and her infant daughter Daphne. Dare dressed Iza in one of her own flowing white nightgowns.
That same year, Edie too arranged a live-in studio for herself. Since 1926, she had worked out of a succession of Hanna Building office suites, but none were suitable or big enough to live in as well. Edie had long had her eye on the building’s penthouse, as it was called, on the ninth floor of the Hanna Building annex. For most of her tenancy it had been used for the purpose for which it was built—a love nest. Knowing it was now empty, Edie asked if she might take it over. In 1950, Dan Junior agreed. This thousand-square-foot apartment, with a foyer, a large central room perfectly suited for a painting studio, a sectioned-off bedroom, high ceilings, and north-facing windows, was, in Edie’s view, the perfect home and studio. While the word penthouse calls to mind a swank Art Deco aerie out of a 1930s movie, aside from its north light and its hidden location, the virtues of Edie’s new apartment were few. But in Edie’s hands it was quickly transformed, and as soon as it was she invited curious newspaper reporters in for a look—a close look, right down to her bed’s white satin sheets. They came away impressed, marveling at this unlikely dwelling at the top of an office building, its walls covered with art and with what one described as a “lavish boudoir all cream and gold with a taffeta-canopied bed.”
As Edie consolidated possessions from her former studio and her room at the Hotel Cleveland, she sent several trunks of Dare’s belongings that she had been storing to New York. In one trunk, to Dare’s delight, was her childhood’s very survival kit: her books and her doll Edith. The return of this long-ago companion called up powerful feelings. Unlike Dare’s animate friends who caused complications, Edith was an ideal friend. She could make no confusing demands or force Dare beyond her limited interpersonal abilities. Without self-consciousness, Dare played with Edith—and photographed her. When Iza Warner brought her daughter, Daphne, back to Dare’s apartment to be photographed for an article on Christmas toys, Dare took photographs of Daphne sitting on her bed beside her own “new” child, Edith.
* * *
In May 1951, Dare’s face, sultry this time, stared out from the cover of Cosmopolitan. The photograph is a tight head shot of Dare’s heavily made-up face partially concealed by a “whimsy,” a black net veil gathered at the top with a bunch of silk flowers. It was Dare’s last appearance as a model.
In the period that Dare was moving from modeling to photography, Philip Sandeman, too, had been making career changes. In 1950, he left the Kordas to work in an insurance group affiliated with Lloyd’s of London. He also joined the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, training pilots for the Korean War. He told his family he had other changes in mind as well, leading Marie Sandeman and Brian to wonder whether he might attempt to rekindle his relationship with Dare, whom they both still considered Philip’s true love. Although Philip and Dare were not in contact, Marie and Dare continued to exchange letters and occasional phone calls.
On the evening of June 19, 1951, Dare received a phone call from Marie. Philip was dead. His Meteor plane had collided with another plane over the Biggin Hill RAF station in Kent. Three planes had taken off simultaneously, one piloted by Philip, one by his student, and the third by his flight sergeant. The student’s plane failed to climb at the end of the runway and crashed into a house about 100 yards beyond. The flight sergeant, his eyes on the blaze below, did not see Philip’s plane until it was too late.
Dorothy’s phone rang at 3 A.M. It was Dare, sobbing so hard Dorothy could not even make out what she was saying. When she arrived at Dare’s apartment, Dare could only point to the pencil drawing hung at eye level to the left of a mirrored wall over the mantelpiece. It was the sketch of Philip in uniform that Dare had made during the week of their first meeting. Dorothy had never even noticed it. Just as she had never heard of Blaine before she met him in the Bristol lobby, she had never known of Philip’s existence. As Dorothy tried to comfort her distraught friend, Dare confided the story of Philip or, rather, a story of Philip, and why they had not married, falling back on Edie’s old fiction of her refusal to convert to Catholicism.
The modeling years: below left and counterclockwise, Dare’s card for the Figureheads Modeling Agency, 1949; the Maidenform ad, 1950; the Cosmopolitan cover, May 1951.
After that night, the story of Philip never altered. Her fiancé, an RAF pilot and heir to the Sandeman family port and sherry empire, her great love, her one true love, was shot down over the English Channel during World War II. After his death, she could never love another. She told this tragic and romantic story so convincingly that she must, in some way, have come to believe it herself. Death had frozen Philip in time. In many ways, he had become more real to her than when he had been alive. Now he provided the oft-cited and perfect alibi, one she would hold up to each of the long chain of men who would meet and fall in love with her.
A few weeks after Philip’s death, Edie and Dare went off to Ocracoke, where Dare could take solace in its wilderness of sand and sea and in her mother’s arms.
* * *
Back in New York that fall, Dare, who had begun wearing her long blond hair in a high ponytail with short bangs, turned her attentions to the other Edith. As she went about Edith’s refurbishment—transformation might be the better word—she gave her doll the exact same look. She detached Edith’s curly mohair wig and fashioned her a new one from her own false chignon. She even pierced her doll’s ears with gold hoops, miniature replicas of the earrings she herself was never without. The clothes that Dare made to replace Edith’s original outfit (an orange organdy dress, felt bonnet, and felt slippers), however, were still a little girl’s: white ruffled cotton panties and a white eyelet cotton petticoat worn under a pink-and-white gingham dress, over which was tied a white cotton apron.
In Edith’s original incarnation, she looked like a baby. Now she looked like a sort of effigy of her owner—and, for a doll, oddly sexy. Her face appeared made up, and her petticoat and dress did not completely conceal her ruffled underpants. Clearly this was intentional: Dare’s sewing skills were more than up to the task of measuring a dress that would have better obscured Edith’s underwear. Dare also chose not to hide the stitch marks of Edith’s wig, but left them visible. Whereas her own mother’s love was predicated on perfection, Dare could love Edith in the way she herself had always wanted so desperately: unconditionally, however imperfect.
Once Edith’s look was established, Dare also constructed a personality for her doll, assigning to Edith many traits she may have wished were her own, traits that for myriad reasons Dare had had to suppress. Through Edith, Dare could begin to explore a lost side of herself, a self who transgressed, who could risk being mischievous and disobedient, adventurous and independent.
With her look and persona in place, Edith was ready for her debut. “I started her sitting for the camera,” Dare later told an interviewer, shades of her own mother starting Dare sitting for portraits. But unlike Dare in her early years, Edith would not be left to languish alone. Dare held a cocktail party to introduce her long-lost companion to her friends. No one present quite understood just what this doll meant to Dare or could have predicted that, in Edith, their hostess would find a springboard for a new career, not to mention a guiding purpose.