Chapter XVII

ALWAYS YES! CARESSE

“Time yapping at our heels.”

—Caresse

In spring 1969, Caresse wrote to Helen Simpson from Rome that she had spent four and a half weeks in the Salvator Mundi International Hospital because “[the] doctors couldn’t cure me of a devastating asthmatic bronchial condition.”

Caresse already had outlived many friends of her youth, including Cole Porter. Of the creative people whose lives she had touched, she had lost Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway, Cummings, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, William Carlos Williams, Tristan Tzara (Dada), Giacometti, Brancusi, and George Grosz. Yet her sense of humor prevailed when she wrote to Matt Shermer in New York: “Don’t worry about me any more. I am alive and kicking at the idea that I may not live to 2000 A.D., since the papers say today that by 2000 we will be practically immortal and lovemaking will go on forever.”

Simpson reported the news from New York that she was planning to be in Italy in the middle of July if convenient. She held “a sort of castle reunion” on 91st Street the night before. Bill Barker and George Stillwaggon (“with a whole bush of hair”) were there, and both expected to visit the Castello that summer. George would be an art student at Positano, and Bill was “always a bit unpredictable.” Lorraine de Mun was “looking very beautiful.” She liked her new job at the Park Avenue branch of National City Bank with “big pay, she says,” and was sharing an apartment on East 76th Street now with an English girl friend.

Kerensky was not entirely happy in his last years, as he found his increasing infirmities demeaning and was nearly blind. He had moved to an air-conditioned sublet on East End Avenue, and Elena Ivanoff, a former research assistant at Stanford, was “his eyes and ears, his nurse, his pride and his most devoted servant.” (Robert Payne, Kerenskv’s biographer, called it an intricate and spiritual relationship.)

That summer in Roccasinibalda, Robert Mann was living down the hill in the former jail that had been converted first to a youth club and then to Mann’s living quarters. He remained a loyal retainer and Caresse’s contact with the villagers, as he spoke perfect Italian and could summon the men to do repairs, to lend a hand in times of practical problems or crises. Ruth and Steve Orkin, young teachers from the University of Nairobi, were “castle-keepers” that summer. (When the Orkins left, they wrote back nostalgically that “French and psychology are old hat, we hope to change our majors to castle-keeping.”)

In the fall, Caresse returned to Beny’s apartment on the banks of the Tiber. She urged Mann to join her, but he offered a counter proposal. To avoid another winter in Rome, Caresse should take a comfortable flat in London to use as off-Rocca headquarters. She had many friends, her daughter and granddaughter were there, and

the pace of life seems to me the only one for civilized people with any range of social and cultural appetites. God knows the weather there is no dream, but sunny climes and stimulating milieus don’t seem very often to coincide. As I remember, you got through December last year without any undue twisting of the bronchial tubes. . . . Why don’t you give it serious thought?

He ended the letter:

How astonishing and touching to find quoted . . . a line from a poem I wrote to you years ago! It suddenly gave a kind of “permanence” (I hesitate to say immortality) . . . one is struck by the patina which has aged in beauty, yet turned into something else, and removed from the grasp of their creator forever.

Caresse agreed to spend a traditional Christmas in London with Polleen and her youngest granddaughter, Serena North. After taking all “Firsts” at Oxford, Serena was pursuing a medical degree. Charles Olson was invited to join them:

Other members of the clan will be there. Robert Mann and I have taken this splendid flat for one month, i.e. until Jan. 2, and are seeing all we can of London in thirty days. Robert has a flat in the village of Roccasinibalda and is a very tried and true friend. . . . I hear that your book has made a great name for you in England and as I am so beautifully presented to the reading public with Ezra [Pound] beside me I can’t thank you enough for paying such a lovely tribute. I see a lot of Desmond O’Grady and we speak about you.

In her youth, she was as adept at expressing her finely-tuned emotions on the page as in the privacy of the bedroom. She took up her pen again to compose a verse for O’Grady on her 77th birthday:

. . . give us time

O Overlord of this your bestiary, our mating place

give us time to work it out . . .

A man with woman interlaced

the WE.

time was when time there was

but not today

We die a pressured death

Between the first emitted squeal

and final breath.

And as we strain for latest news

and circumvole [sic] the Globe a thousand ways

between this morning and the next

How can we touch our hands in quest?

Time yapping at our heels.

O’Grady wrote a moving tribute to his benefactor:

Like me, you covet your every habit: the morning scribbling in bed, the fixed speed of the car, the ritual change for dinner—all those daily reassurances that matter more than luxury or dull money. But one grand habit I admire and envy over all.

For years now, watching you—taking the stairs, easy on my arm, toasting with the first glass at dinner, helping you into your coat after an evening out—I never cease to marvel and admire the sheer vitality of your interest in all people and in all things, your persistent refusal to be bored. Your heart has not grown old. . . .

And when, like tonight, home again from the town, you have news in the mail of a friend’s death in another country—a new addition to a sadly long list—the light in your eyes pauses in remembrance, and in reverence, and then you get on with being all that you have always been and are: most dignified, most youthful, and most gay.

Caresse again invited friends and colleagues to a “BE-IN” at the Castle of Roccasinibalda during the first week of September 1969:

. . . in the central courtyard of this monumental stronghold, as a meeting place for Younger Citizens of the World, regardless of race, creed, color, religion or ethnic difference. You are invited to express new approaches to peace and your ideas to achieve One-World before it is No World. . . . We need the young in heart and limb, the strong in mind and spirit to give us guidelines, to turn the dreamers from their apathy, the greedy from their spoils, the mad from their wars.

“That last season together, we made serious plans,” O’Grady remembered. “I calculated possible courses and professors, on working/writing holidays, who could teach at the Castle.” Polleen was mentioned often. Quite clearly Caresse wanted her daughter to carry on the Creative Center after her death. It was extremely important to her, but apparently Polleen wasn’t interested.

At Christmas, as always, Caresse heard from absent friends throughout the world. Gerard, Lord Lymington, her devoted lover from rue de Lille days, communicated from Kenya:

I am writing this last Christmas card from the farms up here. They are all being bought out by the Government in the New Year, and nearly 22 years of work, planning and building plus some achievement will be over. . . . I shall think wistfully that you have never seen these lovely hills and valleys. It is all rather melancholy, especially as the garden is looking so beautiful and the farms are fruitful and flourishing, and the cattle . . . the finest herd in Kenya. . . I am trying to be objective. “Les lauriers sont coupés nous n’irons plus aux bois.”

I shall still be in Nairobi when with luck you can come and visit me. In the meantime, there is nobody I would rather write to in what should be a time of peace and good will toward men. You are one of the rare people who possess it. . . . I will be coming via Italy to see you in the summer. Keep well my darling wench. I loved you all the years and love you just as much now God bless you.

She was making plans for the New Year with her usual enthusiasm, following up a number of projects, not the least of which was the grand plan for the World Man Center on Cyprus. She wrote to Zenon Rossides that she planned to leave for Beirut at the end of January. But on January 16, when Volume III of Anaïs’s just-published Diary arrived on her doorstep, she wrote to her:

I was terribly pleased with the way you treated me, with amaze and gaiety—a will-o’-the-wispish quality . . . I envy you your ability to put your fingertip on the very nerve that controls a secret zone of the other’s self . . . You use words like golden needles of the Chinese acupuncturists . . . you heal or hurt by remote control.

She added prophetically: “I have such little stamina these days that I can’t write more than a line or two without feeling exhausted.” The possibility of the anticipated trip to Beirut actually happening seemed remote.

A Parisian fortune-teller once told Caresse that some day she would live in a castle and die at age 77. Both prophecies would come true. “She was aging more rapidly than any of us were aware,” O’Grady remembered. “She was so joyful up to that last week. We had dinner together in Rome, and then the next day or so, suddenly she was in the hospital.”

With a bronchial condition, complicated by the strain on an already weakened heart, Caresse lived with the constant threat of pneumonia. Even in the comparative comfort of Roloff Beny’s apartment in winter, she had difficulty breathing. On a chill evening in mid-January, despite Robert Mann’s admonishments, Caresse insisted on making an entrance in a thin cocktail gown. She was taken to Salvator Mundi that night, where she remained the following week with a tube of oxygen in her nose, making it difficult for her to speak. Mann suspected that by the end of the week she was too tired, too tired of living, to care.

Polleen was called to her mother’s bedside, but did not arrive in time. “I was there. She sent for me,” wrote O’Grady. “She died well. I must have looked sad. She smiled her big Caresse smile, and then she went to sleep.” Death came quietly during the night on January 24, 1970, when the tired heart simply stopped.

A wake was held in Rome at Roloff Beny’s apartment, where Caresse haunted friends with her symbolic presence. She was toasted in pink champagne, her favorite libation. Peggy Guggenheim, who, like Caresse, “whirled through life in a kind of dream . . . [and] never quite realized what was happening,” sat in a corner with a gloomy face, perhaps foreseeing her own death a year later.

During one of Caresse’s earlier prolonged stays at Salvator Mundi, a Jewish psychologist suggested that they make tape recordings of her life story, so that he could better understand her psyche. She loved to be the center of attention, even at the end, and was quite amused by it all. When Malcolm Cowley edited the autobiography, he asked Caresse to “dig deeper into the motives and purposes of your actions.” She replied with true understanding of her own character: “As for the ideas underlying the actions . . . I haven’t the foggiest notion. . . . I am not introspective, nor do I ever judge motives, only actions. . . . I am 100 percent extrovert. . . . I can’t describe . . . ideas, only what we did.”

“Vitally alive and interested, curious and aware to her last gasp, never bored in any company,” O’Grady remembered Caresse in her last years. “She was a shrewd giver—she held nothing back if she had to give, asked nothing for herself except dignity. Caresse delighted in all forms of freedom, all demonstrations of love. She was a loving and lovable woman, a whole human being. She was trusting of humanity, anti-war and anti-apartheid—hers was the vibrancy of Humanism.”

Harry Moore wrote an admiring obituary for the London Times, praising Caresse Crosby’s many positive contributions to world peace and to the lives of artists and writers of her time. Back in New York, her friends gathered with Frances Steloff at the Gotham Book Mart for a memorial service on February 18, 1970. Buckminster Fuller was master of ceremonies. Steloff praised Caresse’s joy in life, her gaiety and charm, for which she will be remembered, as well as her positive achievements. Kay Boyle, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin, who could not be present, sent tape recordings from California. Robert Snyder showed the evocative film of Roccasinibalda, with flashbacks of Caresse in other places with other companions throughout a memorable life—from Salvador Dali to Bob Hope. “Always ‘Yes!’ Caresse”—the perfect epitaph.