FLINGS
Frank Marion Crawford’s name today, as a novelist, does not cause gasps of recognition. In Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations he is given only a footnote, for having written, “What is charm? It is what the violet has and the camellia has not.” Few people today read the swashbuckling, romantic, and purple-prosed novels that he produced in the 1880s and 1890s—Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India, Dr. Claudius, and Children of the King—but it is thanks to Isabella Gardner that these volumes were written.
When Crawford first met Belle, he talked of becoming an opera singer. He had a pleasant voice, but the trouble was that he could not stay on key. What he enjoyed most was going to parties, and his Boston relatives worried that his popularity and heavy social schedule would make him “too sensual.” They also fretted about what seemed an unusual fondness for alcoholic stimulants, and blamed his lack of productivity on the fact that he had a key to his aunt’s wine cellar. Belle’s influence, to her credit, would change all that. During the early part of their two-year relationship, she noticed that Frank’s drinking was causing him to gain weight. Belle herself disliked alcohol, but she disliked fat even more. Under the strict regimen of diet, exercise, and total abstinence from liquor which Belle put him on, he slimmed down. It was also Belle’s suggestion, since he did not seem cut out for a career in opera, that he try his hand at writing a novel. The result was Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India, a shortish work designed to capitalize on the popularity of exotic romanticism. It was completed in the spring of 1882, promptly sold to Macmillan, and published in December of that year. Crawford gave Belle the first printed copy of the book, with a handwritten sonnet on the flyleaf. At the time he wrote to her, “I think of it as someone else’s work; as indeed it is, love, for without you, I should never have finished it.”
Obviously it was thrilling for Belle to think of herself as the inspiration for a young novelist’s first book. And Crawford possessed other attributes that attracted her to him. He flattered her, fawned over her, showered her with compliments and flowers. It is possible, too, that she saw him as a kind of surrogate for her dead son. As for Crawford, his feelings toward Belle are harder to fathom. His letters and notes to her were full of “love,” and “my love,” and “my dearest lady,” but it is important to remember that this sort of effusiveness was fashionable at the time, and was perhaps not intended to be taken seriously. On the other hand, Crawford had grown up in Italy, where affairs with married women were not uncommon and no cause for alarm, provided they were managed discreetly. In Boston, noting the quaint custom by which married ladies received bouquets from other male admirers, Crawford may have assumed that Boston ladies routinely took lovers. Or he may simply, and rather cynically, have seen Belle as a lonely woman whose husband spent most of his time at his office and club, and found that she made a convenient sponsor who happened to like his work. Certainly he spent a great deal of time under her roof, eating her meals. When she made him expensive gifts—among them a gold watch—he accepted them. He had himself, it might seem, a good deal. As we shall see, there are indications that Frank Crawford was not a very nice fellow.
As to how Jack Gardner felt about the situation, there is no telling. On the surface, at least, he seemed unperturbed. No change in his behavior or demeanor was noted, though there are hints that he was growing a little tired of having Crawford almost constantly underfoot in his house. At one point Jack Gardner offered Crawford a job in his company, possibly to give the young man something to do besides read aloud to Belle from works in progress—Crawford immediately launched into a second novel—but the offer was refused. And whether Belle and Crawford ever had a sexual relationship is also a matter of conjecture. When Belle and her husband were “told” by her doctor that she could have no more children, this did not mean that a hysterectomy or other sterilizing operation—unknown in those days—had been performed. It simply meant that the doctor had advised the couple to refrain from activities that could result in childbirth. Assuming this, and assuming that Belle believed that if she conceived again it could cost her her life, her sexual frustration in a passionless marriage, and in an unconsummated new romance, might easily have added to her passion for Frank Crawford. Because passion it was on her part—it was obvious to everyone who saw them together. Clearly, Belle Gardner had fallen head over heels in love.
And the trouble was, it was not discreet. They rode together, strolled together, danced together, went to the opera and concerts together. Town Topics, the New York gossip sheet, soon got wind of the Boston romance, and began writing about it. Cleverly, to steer clear of libel, the paper referred to Belle as “a married belle.” Everybody in Boston, of course, knew whom the paper was talking about.
Now, early in 1883, there were new plans afoot. A journey to the Orient was being planned, and the travelers would be Belle and Jack Gardner—and Frank Crawford. Picking up the tab for Crawford’s ticket and expenses, naturally, would be the Gardners. At first Crawford seemed genuinely excited about the prospect of the trip, and he approached his uncle, Sam Ward, and invited him to join the jolly party and make it a foursome. Ward, however, sensing trouble ahead, was dubious about the whole idea, and declined. He had already expressed concern about what he called, in uncertain French, his nephew’s “affaire du coeur.” The next news was that Jack Gardner would not be accompanying his wife and Crawford to the Far East. Some sort of crisis seemed to be brewing, and Crawford asked his cousin, Maud Howe, to join the tour as his and Belle’s chaperone. Maud was also apprehensive, and the plans for the grand voyage remained in abeyance.
Meanwhile, in a number of hushed Back Bay drawing rooms, secret family discussions had begun. Matters were being weighed, arguments put forth, priorities considered. And in the course of these, while Belle Gardner was planning her wardrobe and packing for the trip with her young swain, Frank Crawford would be persuaded not only to withdraw from the tour but to slip out of Belle’s life entirely, without warning and without adieu, and under cover of darkness. In one of his letters to Belle he had written, “There is only to be one goodbye between us, and I do not think it will be spoken aloud, nor written, for it will come when one of us two reaches the end, and it will be very long before that. Goodnight then, and sweet dreams.…” Now, however, he was planning a very different sort of departure.
In her biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Louise Hall Tharp hints that Jack Gardner may have issued some sort of ultimatum to Crawford which prompted him to behave as he did. There is, however, no real evidence of this. To have threatened Frank Crawford in any way would not have been Jack Gardner’s style. Jack Gardner’s position in Boston society was unassailable. So was his wife’s. The Gardners were invulnerable to gossip. Jack Gardner knew he had married a spirited filly, and he had long ago given her her head. More than a domestic crisis in the Gardner household would be needed to understand why Frank Crawford chose to walk out on his adoring patroness in such an ungallant fashion.
To begin with, it is necessary to understand the new relationship that was developing between artists and American society. America in the 1880s was going through what would later be described as an artistic Renaissance. In the years immediately following the Civil War, the men who had made great fortunes—and their wives—had turned for Culture to Europe, where the great castles and châteaux and collections were systematically looted of the art treasures they contained. There was ample criticism of this, and new-rich American collectors were depicted by journalists almost as cartoon characters, waving sheaves of money in exchange for European Old Masters to decorate their mansions. The rich responded to the critics defensively. Breast-thumping patriotism was trotted out. America, it was argued, was now becoming the most powerful nation in the world. It was America’s right, its Manifest Destiny, to acquire the finest things that the world had to offer, including art from Europe, where fortunes were declining. The architect Stanford White, when reproached for importing so much European art to adorn the houses he was designing for moneyed Americans, would use this argument, claiming that “In the past, dominant nations had always plundered works of art from their predecessors … America was taking a leading place among nations and had, therefore, the right to obtain art wherever she could.”
Edith Wharton was also sensitive on this issue, and in The Custom of the Country she used the forced sale of Boucher’s famous Saint-Désert tapestries as a literary symbol for the transfer of power from a decadent old European aristocracy to the muscular new American plutocrats. Thus the looting was justified. America was merely taking what was justly her due.
But by the 1880s it had begun to seem possible that America could contribute artists of her own. This was a much more exciting notion than one that depended, abjectly, on borrowing taste and talent from across the Atlantic, and now, in another burst of patriotism, there was talk of the New American Masters in the arts. The rich were quick to jump on the bandwagon and to find, in the vision of an American Renaissance which would surpass anything that had occurred in Imperial Rome, Renaissance Florence, or Bourbon Paris, an outlet for any guilty feelings they might have had. The result of the new vision would be increased patronage of public buildings, monuments, painting, sculpture, poetry, and letters by American artists and writers. In the course of this Renaissance, the artists and writers themselves, especially if they were “attractive,” would find themselves swept into the highest circles of perfumed society. Celebrities such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Cassatt, and Cecilia Beaux were already socially well placed. But under the new rules more raffish types such as John Singer Sargent, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens were also asked to all the best parties.
In Boston, the aristocratic Wards and Howes were particularly concerned about what was happening to the reputation of their cousin, Frank Marion Crawford. He was now a published novelist, which gave him the credentials of a serious artist. But the affair with Belle Gardner had gone on too long, and too many tongues were wagging. Furthermore, the gossip was not damaging Belle’s social position—it was damaging his. By continuing in the public role of protégé of a wealthy older woman, Frank Crawford was in danger of not being taken seriously by Boston society. He was becoming a laughingstock, the butt of lewd jokes. Cousin Maud was particularly emphatic to her relative on this point. His position in society was something Frank Crawford cared more than a little about, and her arguments were obviously persuasive. Thus the plot evolved for Frank’s secret escape from Boston.
If he even considered a farewell meeting with Belle, or a message to her, he was dissuaded from both courses. A meeting would have meant a confrontation and a “scene,” and a message would have left Belle with something in writing that she might have used against him. He should leave, Cousin Maud told him, like a man, if not exactly like a gentleman, without a farewell or an explanation, and abandon Belle in the fashion of a bride left jilted at the altar.
On the night of May 12, 1883, dressed elegantly in dinner clothes, Crawford and Cousin Maud sat in her library hastily correcting proof for A Roman Singer, a magazine serial he had dashed off a few weeks earlier; Belle had assured him it was the finest thing he had ever written. That done, Frank and his belongings—including the various gifts from Belle—were hurried out into a waiting taxi and driven through the night to the pier, where he boarded a midnight boat that would carry him back to Italy.
The next afternoon, Frank and Belle were to have met at four, their customary hour. When he had not appeared by five, Belle sent her coachman out to make inquiries. She was told that Frank Crawford had left Boston “permanently”—she was not immediately told where he had gone—and would not be back.
She was devastated. Then heartbreak gave way to rage. She took his departure not only as an insult but as an act of cowardice and treachery. She felt betrayed. She immediately collapsed into another “nervous breakdown,” and closed her door to all visitors.
Her husband, as he had done before—and as he would do many times again throughout their married life—came to her rescue with updated plans for extensive foreign travel. Within weeks, the Gardners had boarded a train for San Francisco, where they sailed for Yokohama. Then on to China, Cambodia, Java …
A kindly man, he wanted to give her something to repay her for her loss.
One of the lessons Belle Gardner might have learned from all this was that it was unwise for a patroness of the arts to let herself become emotionally involved with the artist she was patronizing. The lesson was certainly there, but it was one, alas, that she would never learn. Jack Gardner once patiently described his wife as “a little girl who never grew up,” and this was accurate enough. Girlish she remained—her age always something of a mystery—and subject to schoolgirlish crushes. In London, in 1886, through Henry James, the Jack Gardners met John Singer Sargent. Sargent had already had a number of successful exhibitions at important salons in Europe, had been acclaimed as a major artistic talent, and was receiving commissions from prominent people for portraits. He had also, through no fault of his own, become notorious. In 1884 he had exhibited a portrait of Madame Gautreau in Paris under the title Madame X. The trouble was that everyone recognized Madame X as Madame Gautreau—who was fond of a particular lavender shade of face powder—and she was the mistress of the French Republican leader Gambetta. The portrait was not a flattering one. Madame Gautreau had been made to look, it seemed, like a whore, and Sargent had been accused of painting an anti-Republican political cartoon. The French press had raged at him for weeks over this, and, in the end, the controvery caused Sargent to angrily close his studio in Paris and move to England.
Belle Gardner admired the portrait of Madame Gautreau. Something in the lady’s defiant stance and haughty, almost brassy look of challenge may have appealed to Belle’s own sense of unconventionality. (Eventually she would see to it that a Sargent portrait of Gautreau came to her museum.) Belle also liked John Singer Sargent the man. There were disturbing similarities between Sargent and Frank Crawford. Like Crawford, Sargent was an American born and brought up by an American family in Italy. Like Crawford, Sargent was tall and dark and lean and handsome. As the painter Julie Helen Heyneman described him, he had “an air about him of singular freshness and calm, he had a look as of some serene and beneficent Jove.” Like Crawford, Sargent was some years younger than Belle—sixteen years younger, in fact.
Naturally, Belle Gardner immediately wanted John Singer Sargent to paint her portrait. But unfortunately there was no time. The Gardners were due to sail for America within a few days. Before departing, however, she got Sargent to promise to paint her on his next trip to the United States.
Back home in Boston in the late autumn of 1886, Belle Gardner found no shortage of attractive young men. One was twenty-five-year-old Denis Bunker, who Belle quickly decided was a painter of great promise. Denis Bunker, whose family background was a little vague, had been born Dennis Bunker but, after studying art in Paris, had Gallicized his first name by dropping an “n,” and become Denis. He liked to explain that his prosaic surname had probably originally been Boncoeur. Bunker, blond and handsome, had already had some experience as a rich woman’s pet. He had been taken up by one of the great operatic sopranos of her day, who called herself Nordica (née Lillian Norton of Maine). Bunker had been Nordica’s escort and constant companion for the better part of a year, but he had finally dropped her, claiming that she had become “trop exigeante,” too demanding. Now Belle Gardner filled Nordica’s place, and presently Bunker was receiving commissions to do portraits of nearly all the members of the large Gardner clan.
Bunker also delighted Belle by introducing her to all sorts of little night spots and cafés that were frequented by students and theatre folk, and that Belle had never known existed. He also helped her arrange some Bohemian entertainments of her own. In those days women were not permitted to attend prize fights. With Bunker’s assistance, Belle decided to correct this injustice. They hired a hall, a referee, a pair of local boxers and their trainers, and staged an invitation-only fight, to which all of Boston’s society matrons were invited. The women-only audience cheered and stamped and practically stood on their seats with excitement through the event, loving it all the way through to the bloody end.
That Belle’s unconventionality did not shock and scandalize Puritan Boston is interesting. If Belle had had children, of course, it might all have been different. Mothers might have cautioned their own children not to associate with Belle’s, lest they pick up her worldly ways, and Belle herself might have been ostracized. But, as it was, Belle’s behavior posed no threat. In fact, it was welcome; Belle dared to do all the things that Boston women had always wanted to do but had been afraid to try. In the winter of 1886–87, the boxing career of John L. Sullivan was at its height, and Belle Gardner was going through a kind of prize-fighter phase. That was the winter when she invited a group of her women friends to tea at 152 Beacon Street, where, she promised them, she would offer them a special treat. The treat was a young prize fighter, whom Belle had asked to strip down to his trunks and pose against a window, but behind a semitransparent screen, so that the ladies could admire his physique. The ladies, however, would have none of the screen, and demanded that the young man come out in full view to flex his biceps and ripple his pectorals before their wondering eyes.
The ladies of Boston had grown accustomed to the fact that, whenever Belle went out, she was usually accompanied by one or another of her youthful protégés. It seemed hardly worth noting that, as Belle approached fifty, the young men she sponsored got younger and younger. Again, she posed no threat, since she seemed to have no interest or designs whatever on the husbands of her contemporaries. Belle’s young men were beautiful aliens, strangers from another place who had come for a while to nest with her. Most of them, like Denis Bunker, were witty and amusing, attentive to women’s comforts and pleasures. They opened doors, kissed hands, ran little errands. If one of Belle’s women friends wanted something from a shop, one of Belle’s young men could be dispatched to fetch it for her. Some of the young men were even recognizably talented. One was named George Santayana; another was a fledgling poet, T. S. Eliot.
Another such was a twenty-one-year-old youth just out of Harvard. A young Jew, born in Lithuania, he had been brought up in the mean poverty of Boston’s North End, but he had the face of a poet or, some said, an archangel. His nose was long and thin and aquiline, and his brown eyes were large and deep-set. His cheekbones were high and his lips so full that they were almost feminine. This extraordinary face was set off by a mane of long, wavy dark hair. He resembled the youthful Byron, and he exuded a kind of androgynous sexuality which women, and even some men, found almost disturbing. What his talent was, precisely, was not yet clear, but it was obvious, even then, that some exceptional future was in store for this young man. His name was Bernard Berenson, and Belle and a group of her friends set up a fund for him to travel and study in Europe.
It was late in 1887 when John Singer Sargent arrived in Boston to begin working on Mrs. Jack Gardner’s portrait. In New York, Town Topics raised its eyebrows over the fact that Sargent had moved, bag and baggage, into the house of “the married belle.” In fact, it was common practice for a portraitist to live in a client’s house while he worked. Sargent, meanwhile, had become an artistic star of the first magnitude, and le tout Boston did its enthusiastic best to see to it that Sargent had no idle evenings. So did Belle and Jack Gardner, opening the doors often to guests who wanted to meet the celebrity of the moment, driving Sargent out for week-end rambles in the Massachusetts countryside. One week end they drove him up to visit the Groton School, where Gardner nephews had studied, and to meet the famous Rector, Dr. Endicott Peabody, who was a Gardner relative by marriage. A student at the school at the time was young Ellery Sedgwick, later to become the well-known editor of Boston’s favorite magazine, The Atlantic Monthly. In Sedgwick’s memoir, The Happy Profession, he describes the following scene from the Gardner-Sargent visit:
The time was a lovely Sunday morning in the late ’80s. There were two hours before church, and I well knew the danger of running across a master and hearing his suggestion that there is nothing like a Sunday morning walk in God’s sunshine. I had other views, and with a copy of Ben Hur, which had just burst on my excited world, I slipped into the gymnasium and, piling two wrestling mats, rolled them up in one corner, tucked myself securely behind them, and was lost to the world. For an hour I was buried in my book, when suddenly the gymnasium door was thrown wildly open and a woman’s voice thrilled me with a little scream of mockery and triumph. Cautiously I peeked from behind my concealment and caught sight of a woman with a figure of a girl, her modish muslin skirt fluttering behind her as she danced through the doorway and flew across the floor, tossing over her shoulder some taunting paean of escape. But bare escape it seemed, for not a dozen feet behind her came her cavalier, white-flanneled, black-bearded, panting with laughter and pace. The pursuer was much younger than the pursued but that did not affect the ardor of the chase. The lady raced to the stairway leading to the running track above. Up she raced, he after her. She reached the track and dashed around it, the ribbons of her belt standing straight out behind her. Her pursuer was visibly gaining. The gap narrowed. Nearer, nearer he drew, both hands outstretched to reach her waist. In Ben Hur the chariot race was in full blast, but it was eclipsed. “She’s winning,” I thought. “No, she’s losing.” And then at the apex of my excitement, “He has her!” But at that crucial moment there came over me the sickening sense that this show was not meant for spectators, that I was eavesdropping and, worse, that I would be caught at it. There was not one instant to lose. The window was open. Out I slipped and slithered to safety.
For me that race was forever lost and forever won. The figures go flying motionless as on the frieze of the Grecian urn.
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
I knew not then whether it was lost or won. What I did know was that the Atalanta of that Sunday morning was Mrs. Jack Gardner and Milanion Mr. John S. Sargent. It was that same year he painted the famous portrait of her with her pearls roped about her waist, her beautiful arms glowing against a background that might have been the heart of a lotus.
The portrait that resulted from Sargent’s Boston stay is certainly extraordinary. Sargent painted Belle standing, full length. The design of the painting was a series of curves and ellipses. There are the curves of her hips and bosom, of the double strand of pearls at her waist. Then there is the downward curve of her white arms, joined loosely at the fingertips. Finally there is the curve of the heart-shaped neckline of her dress and the curve of the enigmatic half-smile on her face, giving the impression that she is just about to speak. The whorls of the floral tapestry which Sargent used as a backdrop appear to be a series of halos radiating about her face.
Mrs. Gardner’s portrait went on exhibit at the St. Botolph’s Club, a literary-artistic men’s club in Boston, and drew considerable comment from the press. But from the published accounts one wonders whether any of the reporters had actually seen the painting. One reporter wrote that Belle’s dress was white. The dress is black. Another claimed that the dress was cut very low at the back, but Belle’s back is not even visible. Still another wrote that Sargent painted Belle dripping with diamonds. The only jewels are the pearls, and a ruby pendant at her throat. One report claimed that the dress was sleeveless; the dress, which was by Worth of Paris, has short sleeves. The most damaging comment was that Belle’s dress was “very décolleté,” though it is certainly no more low-cut than anything that was fashionable at the time. Still, rumors that Sargent had portrayed more of Belle’s poitrine than was entirely proper continued to circulate, and one wag commented that Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner “all the way down to Crawford’s Notch.” The reference was to a popular resort in the White Mountains, but was there another meaning intended here? Was the name of Frank Crawford also being slyly dragged into the controversy?
Word of the possible double-entendre got back to Jack Gardner. Usually serene, he was not amused. He would not tolerate his wife being made the butt of coarse jokes, and the portrait was withdrawn from exhibition. Despite many requests, the painting was never again shown publicly during Mrs. Gardner’s lifetime, though Belle always insisted that it was the finest work Sargent had ever done. Today it hangs as one of the centerpieces of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.