POMPADOUR AND MEDICI
The year of Henry Huntington’s divorce, the great San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed Arabella’s Nob Hill palazzo. She never bothered to rebuild it, and, instead, donated the land to the city to be used as a children’s playground. Arabella had never cared much for California in general nor for San Francisco in particular. She was much more at home in Paris and New York, and she considered San Francisco parvenu, provincial. Nor was she amused by San Francisco’s obvious and abject attempts to imitate the society of older eastern cities—putting on great formal balls and cotillions, presenting as society debutantes the daughters of men and women who had started out as bartenders and chamber maids a generation earlier. When the rumors that she would now marry a Californian first began circulating, she took pains to deny them and, uncharacteristically, since she distrusted the press, went so far as to summon “a correspondent who called on her in her New York home last night,” according to an April 1906 report. The reporter wrote that she was dressed in “a magnificent black lace gown,” with “a pendant of pearls and small diamonds hanging from a chain about her neck.”
Though her husband had been dead for six years, she told the reporter haughtily, “Why, as you can see, I am still in mourning for my husband.” Then, as though somehow clarifying the situation, she added, “Henry E. Huntington is my late husband’s nephew.”
In California, Henry Huntington also issued a denial, calling the rumors “absolutely without foundation.”
But the fact was that Henry Huntington was already actively courting Arabella. It was she who was being coy, and holding out.
Henry Huntington had been born February 25, 1850, in the upstate New York town of Oneonta, where the whole Huntington family saga had really begun. For twenty years he had supervised the construction of his uncle’s network of railroads until it had become the biggest in the world, and in 1892 he had moved to San Francisco as vice-president and general manager of the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. He was a tall, dark, handsome man with a finely sculptured moustache and sideburns; he dressed conservatively, usually in black suits. Though he obviously had a sound business head, he was also something of an aesthete and a scholar. For years he had quietly been collecting rare books, with which he spent most of his nonworking hours, and—a far more cultivated man than his aggressively know-nothing uncle—he had also become a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. Personally he was rather shy and retiring, and had few close friends. But he was crazy about Arabella.
Probably he had been for years. Even as she approached sixty, it seemed, she had not lost whatever allure it was that made her so attractive to men. Did Henry know about her long extramarital relationship with his uncle? Did he know about the secret of Johnny Worsham? One can make an educated guess and say: Probably.
Unlike Arabella, Henry Huntington was fascinated with California—though not so much with San Francisco, which was busily trying to make itself seem “cosmopolitan” and “cultured,” as with a small, arid, mostly Mexican settlement in the southern part of the state that had been christened Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles, Our Lady Queen of the Angels.
Confronted with America’s third-largest city as it is today, it is a little hard to picture Los Angeles as it was in 1892, when Henry Huntington first visited it—a broad, sunny basin set dramatically in a semicircle of soaring mountains which, in spring, were ablaze with thousands of varieties of wild flowers and which, by midsummer, turned a rich ochre color. The air was clean and sparkling, and from the lower hills you could see for miles, out to a wide and brilliantly purple ocean and vast stretches of wide, white, unpopulated beach. The hills were alive with deer, bear, wildcat, and rabbit, and what is now Sunset Boulevard was a trail carved by grazing cattle across the hillsides. For some foresighted reason (the town’s meager water supply could support only a tiny population), Henry Huntington decided that the future of California lay in and around Los Angeles.
With his uncle’s sudden death in 1900, Henry Huntington found himself suddenly transformed from a high-salaried executive to a man of enormous independent means. He immediately began buying up large tracts of Los Angeles real estate. He purchased, and began expanding, the Los Angeles street railway system, with fast trains that could carry a city population from one part of town to another, and, with others, developed an irrigation system through which water could be supplied to Los Angeles from mountain streams and lakes by way of canals and aqueducts. For his own use, he bought in 1907 a 550-acre ranch, with ranch house and outbuildings. The property sprawled dramatically across the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains east of the city, and was called Rancho San Marino. Here his intent was soon clear. He intended to build a mansion and surrounding estate of such magnificence as Southern California had never seen. After all, if he was ever going to lure Arabella to Los Angeles, and get her to share his enthusiasm for the place, he would have to present her with a residence of such splendor and sumptuousness as would surpass anything she had known before.
Perhaps Arabella had made the construction of San Marino the condition under which she would marry him. Because, from the beginning, her views on the design and construction of the California house were very much taken into consideration. Much of the planning took place at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, in Arabella’s drawing room, where she met constantly with Henry and his architect, Myron Hunt. She saw to it that Joseph Duveen was brought into the picture, and needless to say Duveen had ideas of his own—and merchandise of his own—in terms of art, tapestries, furniture, and décor. Meanwhile, the long, low house, theatrically white against the rugged mountainside, grew. Because it was to be very large, and because the terrain was difficult, it grew slowly. Begun in 1908, San Marino was still not entirely finished by 1912, and of course neither Arabella nor Henry was getting any younger. Both were entering their middle sixties, and though it was by then generally assumed that Henry and Arabella would eventually marry, the question had become: When? Someone had the temerity to ask architect Hunt, “Why does Mr. Huntington want to marry Mrs. Huntington?” The answer was simple. “He loves her,” said Mr. Hunt.
Still, Arabella would not say yes.
Then, in the spring of 1913, Arabella sailed for Europe. Though she had not set eyes on the house, she had supervised the details of its progress in a series of letters, telegrams, and directives from the East Coast to the West. And now it was nearly finished. Not long after her departure, Henry followed Arabella to Europe. They met in Paris, and on July 16 they were married there at the American Church. The dynastic Huntington-Huntington nuptials, and the reconsolidation of the Huntington fortune, made headlines everywhere, though the Los Angeles Times appeared to have been woolgathering throughout the previous seven years of marriage rumors and speculations. “The wedding was entirely unexpected,” it wrote.
Apparently the sixtyish newlyweds had not expected to become celebrities, but they were certainly that in Southern California. Sunset magazine, in a rapturous account of the house Henry had built for Arabella, described San Marino as “The most truly magnificent residence in the whole of California,” and Los Angeles breathlessly awaited the date when the Huntingtons would move in. They shortly returned from their European wedding trip, but they remained in the East while weeks turned into months. Each new trainload of furniture and art objects which arrived in Los Angeles from Joseph Duveen spurred new speculation that the Huntingtons were about to appear, but the couple remained elusive and the house stayed empty except for caretakers. Finally, in January of 1914, when the Huntingtons did arrive, their private car was met with such a raucous crowd of well-wishers and the merely curious that Arabella was actually frightened. For this reason, perhaps, they remained only a few weeks. Then they were off again, for somewhere else.
Arabella clearly was not ready to commit herself to living in California. Nor would she ever be. For the rest of their lives she and Henry Huntington would limit their stays at San Marino to a month or so each year. Where Arabella led, it seemed, her adoring Henry followed. At the same time San Marino was becoming the main repository of their collective treasures.
As collectors they had become a team which has probably never been surpassed. Henry, working through such celebrated book dealers as Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, concentrated on his rare volumes, and presently he was building another magnificent edifice just to house his library. Arabella, working largely through Duveen—though she also used other dealers, much to Duveen’s annoyance (he could actually turn threatening and abusive on the subject)—concentrated on art. Through Duveen she bought such celebrated works as Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. She was assembling one of the most important private art collections in the world, while he, according to Oscar Lewis, was turning San Marino into “one of the world’s most important storehouses of the literature and history of the English-speaking people.” Huntington once told Dr. Rosenbach that “the ownership of a fine library is the … surest way to immortality.” And when he died his library was “the largest ever gathered together by a single man in the United States.” It still is.
James Maher describes the joint efforts of the Huntingtons this way: “If Arabella, in her great years as a collector-patron, became the American equivalent of Madame de Pompadour and Isabella d’Este, then Huntington must be accounted a latter-day Medici prince for his achievements in the Florentine humanist tradition.”
Though Henry Huntington was totally serious about his collection and his bid for immortality, he also had a sense of humor. Dr. Rosenbach’s biographers, Edwin Wolff II and John F. Fleming, tell of a bedside incident when Huntington, in the hospital and about to undergo minor surgery, summoned both Rosenbach and Duveen to his room. Noting that there “was no love lost between these two giants,” the authors describe the following scene:
When the nurse announced that Mr. Huntington was ready to see them, the two men soberly entered the room. Huntington lay on the bed in his hospital shirt, his head only slightly raised and his two arms extended. With a slight motion he pointed to chairs on either side of the bed.… The two dealers sat stiff in their chairs, looking at Mr. Huntington and each other and uttering words of encouragement in a manner … far from encouraging. Suddenly, Huntington, rather amused … turned to Duveen and asked, “Sir Joseph, do I remind you of anyone?” Nonplussed, Duveen answered, “Why, no, Mr. Huntington, I don’t believe so.” Then he turned his head toward Dr. Rosenbach. “Tell me, Doctor, do I remind you of anyone?” The Doctor, quite as much at a loss as Duveen, muttered that he really did not know. “Well, gentlemen,” said Henry Huntington, still lying flat with his arms outstretched, “I remind myself of Jesus Christ on the cross between the two thieves.” The Doctor and Sir Joseph smiled weakly.
When Henry and Arabella were not collecting, they found time to prepare their joint wills. San Marino and its contents were to become the Huntington Art Museum. The library was to become the Huntington Library. A trust fund of $8,000,000 was set aside to provide an income to maintain these institutions, which, of course, remain two of the great cultural adornments of Southern California today.
As she grew older, Arabella began losing her eyesight, and thick corrective lenses were prescribed. In 1924, when she was—if we are to believe the date on the Huntington Mausoleum—seventy-four, Oswald Birley was commissioned to paint both her and her husband’s portraits. According to Maher, Birley originally intended to paint a portrait of Arabella that the average wealthy society woman would want—that is, a kind and flattering one. But Arabella, whose eyesight was still sufficiently keen to recognize what Birley was up to, would have none of it. He was ordered to start over, and to paint her as she actually looked.
At the Huntington Museum, where the Birley portrait hangs, it is possible to see the extent to which Birley followed her orders, and the result is both powerful and unnerving. Arabella’s height has already been noted, and even though Birley painted her three-quarter length, seated in a brocade chair, it is obvious that here is a woman of towering strength and determination. The years had added to Arabella’s girth, too, and here is a massive figure. The beauty of her youth is gone, though the chin, doubled and dewlapped, is still strong. The lips are pursed, unsmiling, arrogant, and her nostrils are flared in such a way as to suggest that she had just detected some unpleasant odor in the air. For her portrait she chose to dress all in black. A voluminous black dress covers her almost entirely, and her large white fingertips emerge from a pair of black lace half-mittens. Two strands of black beads descend across her bosom. Most extraordinary is her enormous black headdress, which rises in great folds of fabric above her head and falls in great cascades about her shoulders. The huge hat seems like a milliner’s interpretation of the headpiece of the Great Sphinx at Giza.
Arabella’s face is dead-white, and apparently she insisted that Birley paint her with her glasses on. Behind the thick lenses and the heavy black frames her eyes gaze out balefully, challengingly, at the viewer: I dare you to come closer!
Why, one wonders, did Arabella want to present herself to posterity in such an unattractive way? Was her final statement intended to be: Listen, most of the story of my life has been invention and deception, burying the facts, distorting the truth, and so now, at last, you can really see me as I am, as the tough and ruthless old woman I became? In the past, I have been dishonest. But I will give you honesty at the end.
Perhaps. But perhaps not. Even at the end Arabella was an enigma, a woman who would not offer all the answers. Arabella died not long after the Birley portrait was completed, and her husband died three years later, in 1927. The answers lie buried with them at San Marino.
Her near-blindness, for example. How much of that was fiction, how much of it was theatre, a device she employed, perhaps to gain attention, or to provide her with some inner source of amusement? Or did she find that a handicap offered a useful tool with which to further control and dominate her world?
In Merchants of Art, Germain Seligman, a Paris art dealer from whom Arabella also bought, recalls a visit to his gallery in 1923, the year before her death.
She had just dropped in to say hello, she said, as she was no longer in a buying mood and had everything she wanted to own. She was in her seventies by then, but still carried her unusual height with a splendid bearing. I seated her in one of the rooms opening onto the garden where we chatted for a while and then, with no other thought than to please her, I showed her a number of objects of a type which I knew she enjoyed, among them a delightful little marble Venus by Falconet. Looking at me somewhat reproachfully through thick-lensed glasses, she said, “You really shouldn’t go to so much trouble for me. You know my sight has become so bad that I can hardly see anything.” Whereupon she leaned forward for a closer look at the little figure, not over a foot high overall, and exclaimed, “What a lovely thing. Isn’t it a shame that the little finger of the left hand is broken!” I couldn’t help bursting into laughter as I congratulated her upon her bad eyesight, for the whole hand was certainly not over half an inch long. Almost before I did she threw her head back in a hearty laugh.
Just out of curiosity, she said, just because she liked to keep up with what the art market was doing, what was the price of the little Falconet?
Seligman named a figure. Arabella bought it.