Chapter II

BLACK SUN PRESS

“Writing is not a game played according to the rules.”

—Harry

Roger Lescaret, printer of birth announcements and wedding invitations, must have wondered what benevolent fate guided two elegant young Americans to look through his fly-specked window at the shop on the bend of the rue Cardinale, 200 yards from the Deux Magots, the outdoor café-cum-club frequented by Hemingway and other improvident expatriates. The day they arrived on the doorstep simultaneously with Lescaret, he had been delivering printing orders on his bicycle:

. . . a bird-like little fellow in a black printer’s smock came to a very sudden stop . . . a fringe of unruly hair hung over his clouded glasses . . . he seemed quite unaware of the smudges on his face, as he took a huge iron key from the folds of his black alpaca, and opened wide . . . his domain. There was a desk bang up in front of the door and three straight uncompromising chairs . . . already occupied by toppling piles of printed matter . . .

Harry stooped to avoid the beams overhead as he entered.

“You do your own work?” he asked.

“Oui, monsieur. All except for the young girl en haut.” He pointed to the ladder at his back, leading to a loft which later would become the Crosby editorial office.

“And you print by hand?” Harry continued.

“Entirely,” Lescaret answered, pointing to the old-fashioned hand press protected by a large cloth cover. “I cannot afford another.”

Harry suggested that their job would be a large one; he soon might be able to afford a new press.

Lescaret protested, “A whole book is a lot of work!”

The Crosbys asked him to copy the layout and typography of the handsome deluxe edition from their own library they spread out before him.

Lescaret’s confidence returned.

“Mais oui, mais oui! But it will be très cher, the paper alone; and astrée italic, we must buy special type.”

Harry assured Lescaret that the cost was no object, the quality of workmanship was more important.

Roger Lescaret was a man with the skills of a master printer and deep pride in his craft. Two days later, he responded by producing proofs that exceeded all expectations, to the obvious surprise and delight of the Crosbys. Thus began a long-standing and successful literary collaboration that was to continue for more than 20 years.

To begin, Mary toyed with designs for the colophon of her first slim volume of lyrics, to be called “Crosses of Gold.” One of her first considerations was the name to imprint on the title page. The nickname “Polly” she considered unpoetic, too reminiscent of Boston and the Peabodys. The bluestocking Mary Peabody nobody used but the bank. Harry always referred to Mary as “Bunny” or “The Cramoisy Queen” in his diary. He suggested a new pen name to go with her artistic persona. They consulted the dictionary for names beginning with the alliterative “C” to go with Crosby and “to form a cross with mine,” Harry added. “Cara” was close, but they dismissed it as sounding too harsh. “Caresse” with a final “e” to conform to French usage was Harry’s final creation: it sounded right. Thus, at 32, Mary Peabody was born again as Caresse Crosby.

The change was registered at the mairie, and announcements were dispatched to the family in Massachusetts. Outraged comments arrived by return mail from the Boston matriarchs: “It’s like undressing in public,” one cousin replied. Undaunted, Caresse linked her new name with Harry’s in a golden cross for the colophon.

Of the evocative poems from the collection of Caresse Crosby’s early verse, “One Way Like the Path of a Star” emerged as an interesting example. Eulogizing the great lovers of the past—Tristan and Iseult, Thisbe and Pyramus—she draws the comparison with Harry and Caresse, contemporary lovers, who “choose the immortal path of love’s bright star,” going “hand in hand against the unknown . . . Forever to be, Harry and Caresse.”

The critics were kind. Poetry of London caught Caresse’s irresistible joie de vivre:

. . . a book that shows none of the pretentious gravity of the minor poet. Rather, it is a devout and joyous wantonness. It shows that there is one, at least, upon whom the shadow of our smoke-palled civilization has not fallen . . . if we do well to sorrow for those who weep, we must do well to rejoice that there are others whose laughter is naked and unashamed. . . . We may thank God for a poet who is intoxicated by the beauty of the world around her, wherever she may be.

Cousin Walter encouraged Caresse to submit her work to a commercial publisher. “I shouldn’t change a word, but if I were you, I’d send it off, exactly as it is, to Houghton-Mifflin in Boston. . . . They have just lost Amy Lowell,” he suggested.

“But I’m not in her class,” Caresse protested.

“You’re a lady poet from Boston . . . that’s a beginning,” Berry replied.

Such acclaim was heady wine for the young poet. She began to plan the next publication, Harry’s “Sonnets for Caresse.” Caresse, the designer, chose the paper, the typeface, the layout of the second handsomely-bound volume of Editions Narcisse. With a typical blend of serious intent and fey whimsical humor, they named their first imprint after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. Caresse designed a pool-gazing Narcissus for the title page.

For the young publishers, dropping into Lescaret’s small shop to see the pages emerge from the hand-worked press became an irresistible new diversion. The next two volumes of poetry, Painted Shores by Caresse and Red Skeletons by Harry, were more professional than the first private love messages and illustrated with attractive designs. In Painted Shores, Caresse’s verse is still personal and provocative:

All of the day’s delight

And half of the moon’s mad rise

I fling at the feet of “I saw you once

With deception in your eyes.”

This title poem was inspired by Harry’s current liaison—only one of many through their chaotic years together—this time, with Polia Chentoff, the Polish artist, who had just completed portraits of both Crosbys. Polia’s portrait of Harry, Caresse thought “strange and portentous.” Later, when the poet St. John Perse saw Caresse’s portrait by Chentoff, he remarked, “I’ve never seen the distaste of one woman for another so skillfully and subtly portrayed.”

Another poem revealed a disquieting personal life, an outwardly giddy façade superimposed on a suffering psyche:

For you remember that the voyage was made

To be a holiday of flight and thought

Since we have loved and learnt, and wept and played,

Have we not realized everything we sought?

Though you and I, my heart, are sealed with pain,

Would we not turn and seek it all again?

Caresse also dedicated a poem to her maestro, Antoine Bourdelle, who responded with this tribute: “I am very touched by your kind thought . . . Your poetry is very beautiful and emanates from your luminous and spiritual personality . . . The artist and the poet, the two are one . . .”

The frontispiece portrait by Manolo Ortíz showed the author reclining on a divan in a toga-like gown. Her friend Kay Boyle captured and interpreted Caresse’s persona:

Everything you write has that almost distressingly feminine and alluring you. Your letters are like bits of powder puff and a lovely smell—that graciousness of offering one’s young, strong lovely arm to help old gentlemen crossing streets—and you, like a very arrogant little figurehead carved in wood on the prow of a ship, going straight through the waves, because you are at the head of an adventure. Well, the poems have all of this, all of that enchantment in life.

The Crosbys first met Boyle through Eugene and Maria Jolases’ circle of writers. (In time, Harry was listed on the masthead of transition, the avant garde magazine the Jolases published.) Boyle was then living in the artists’ colony in Neuilly founded by eccentric, toga-wearing Raymond Duncan. According to Caresse, Kay was “built like a blade,” her black hair “arranged with panache to one side, her silver-green eyes the color of moss accented an oval face with high cheekbones like a Seminole maiden.”

Eugene Jolas had described the Crosbys to Kay as “madder than hatters and freer than the wind.” Boyle provided this vignette of her first meeting with her future publishers and lifelong friends:

That very early morning (two or three o’clock, it must have been) Eugene Jolas took me to the Bal Nêgre to meet Caresse and Harry Crosby . . . we eventually found them on the perilously high and crowded balcony of the nightclub that had become the current rage (it being the thing to have two or three negro friends, provided they were in the jazz scene) . . . Caresse and Harry were drinking champagne, talking, laughing . . . looking down on the chaos of the dance arena below. . . . The Bal Nêgre, near dawn, the wildly stepping dancers with no more than an inch between the coupled men and women  . . . are as vividly alive to me today as a Lautrec canvas; the saxophone wails louder and louder, the beat of the drums is almost deafening. In the white blaze of the lights . . . I see the features of Caresse’s face, her bronze hair cut in a bang across her forehead, and Harry’s face, already then committed to the look of the skull he paid daily and nightly homage to in the rue de Lille. . . .

Harry’s poetry, in time, was more significant, more driven. Red Skeletons was inspired by his reading of Poe, Mallarmé, and his idol, Rimbaud. One sonnet was dedicated to Baudelaire: “Within my soul, you’ve set your blackest flag.” Bearing such titles as “Necrophile,” “Lit de Mort,” and “Uncoffined,” with grotesque illustrations created by the Hungarian artist Alastair, his verse was far more than an exercise in the macabre. Rather, Harry wanted to exorcise the war experience. One critic perceptively commented, “It was a litmus paper of his life, past and present.”

Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher (also illustrated by Alastair) was next, the production by which the Crosbys’ press broke into the English and American markets. For the first time, the credit page read Maître Imprimeur Lescaret. In limited edition, Poe’s oeuvre was an artistic success. In recognition of their determination to expand the publishing venture, the Crosbys changed the name of Editions Narcisse to the Black Sun Press. The new name was indebted to Harry’s favorite color, black, and his idolatrous worship of the Sun God, Ra. At this time also Harry began to adopt the eccentric habits that followed throughout his brief life—black suits, a black cloth flower in his buttonhole, wire-thin black whippets and black race horses.

Kay Boyle recognized that Harry was one of the early social dissidents. His black was

. . . more of a means of blacking out obstacles, imposing

the black of oblivion on conventional standards . . . so

that he might be free to function unencumbered in his

almost frenzied response to other writers, other poets, and to their work. Yet he believed that the black of this

undeviatingly practiced sacrament did not for a moment

signify the absence of light.

According to Harry, “Writing is not a game played according to the rules. Writing is a compulsive and delectable thing . . . writing is its own reward.”

Caresse was the driving force behind the Press, with an uncanny knack of picking winners among the vast smorgasbord of unknown writers in Paris. She had a rare gift for nurturing the poets, painters, and novelists who came, seeking recognition, tea, and sympathy. To those who drank from her cup, Caresse was the Life Force. Kay Boyle gratefully dedicated two of her books to “that small woman with the fierce courage of a hummingbird, whose belief and fervor never failed.”

During this era, the Crosbys subscribed to Shakespeare & Company, which in the 1920s functioned as informal club and mailing address for the American literary circle in Paris. Sylvia Beach, the legendary proprietress, was supportive of their efforts. She wrote that “Harry used to dart in and out of my bookshop, dive into the bookshelves like a hummingbird extracting honey from a blossom. The Crosbys were connoisseurs of fine books, but better still, of fine writing.”

On Beach’s recommendation, they first encountered James Joyce, whose Ulysses was brought out by Shakespeare & Company after U.S. publishers unanimously rejected it as pornography. The Joyces lived near the Boulevard des Invalides, back of the Gare Montparnasse, in a “tidy but unimaginative” apartment, Caresse noted after their first visit, “its only ornaments, an upright piano and a goldfish bowl.” Joyce was uncommunicative, “and seemed bored with us . . . retreating behind those thick, mysterious eyeglasses” (possibly because of the pain caused by glaucoma attacks, and the remedy, usually a large dose of Irish whiskey). Nora Joyce was heard to comment in an acrid Irish brogue: “You’re dumb as an oyster, now, so God help me, Jim. What is it ye all find to jabber about the nights you’re brought home drunk for me to look after?” Then something was said about John Sullivan, the great Irish tenor, and Joyce suddenly came to life “and asked if we’d like to join them after the concert next week.”

At the post-concert party, “there was much song and ribaldry—I think we drank beer!—and Nora had cooked a special Dublin dish. Archie and Ada MacLeish were there, and Maria and Eugene Jolas. Maria took turns with Stuart Gilbert at the piano.”

Several weeks later, Caresse plucked up her courage to return and ask if the Black Sun Press might publish a section of Joyce’s Work in Progress.

“How many pages would you be wanting?” Joyce asked.

“It’s the meat not the water that makes the broth,” Caresse answered, which seemed to please him. She left with his promise to deliver a manuscript for a single limited edition, paid in advance.

The manuscript of two colorful Irish tales, “The Mookse and the Gripes” and “The Ont and the Graicehopper” soon was delivered by Joyce’s emissary, Stuart Gilbert. It was Black Sun’s most important acquisition to date, and Caresse determined to enhance it with an important illustration. She thought of her friend from the Grand Chaumière, Constantin Brancusi.

Brancusi loved Americans, and as one critic observed, “pranced about as the spirit of the jazz age, although at times wearing wooden sabots.” He was a great bear of a man, who seemed like a peasant saint to Caresse. She went to his whitewashed atelier on the rue Vaugirard, where he lived alone with his white spitz dog, Polaris. A plump pullet and potatoes were roasting on red-hot coals on the hearth, and he invited Caresse to join him for lunch à deux. He set the work-table with crisp white sheets of drawing paper as placemats and carved the pullet with a sculpting knife.

Of the two sketches of Joyce he submitted to the Press, the Crosbys selected an abstraction to illustrate the new title, Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. The realistic line drawing is also a classic of its kind, but the two perpendicular lines and the spiral curve represented Joyce’s inward-winding thought, they believed. As always, the Crosbys’ vision of contemporary art was well ahead of their time.

“The Black Sun Press writers and artists on the Paris scene in the 1920s were workers first and party-goers second,” Caresse later wrote. “Unlike the popular image, we were not forever drinking at the Dôme or getting into scrapes in Montmartre. Most of the BSP writers guarded their desks like fortresses, and only relaxed in the evenings when the one electric light bulb or gas jet in the studio up six flights cast a very meager light, then they gathered at their favorite eating places.” From the time he left the Morgan Bank until he died, Harry brought out 15 volumes of poetry and his diaries, Shadows of the Sun—a considerable output for any dedicated young poet. “Harry Crosby and I rigidly divided the work day in the rue de Lille: 9 to 12, closed in the library; 12 to 2, lunch (Harry went out alone, unless we had friends to luncheon); 2 to 5, more work.”

When the Crosbys entertained in the Sicilian dining room, it was a baroque affair at midday, with the black whippet Narcisse Noir seated next to Harry at the head of the baronial table. On his crimson cushion, Narcisse looked “like a Delta dog on a royal sarcophagus . . . very effective, black against red,” Harry wrote Henrietta Crosby. At first, Parisian guests were delighted at the novelty of dining with the trend-setting Crosbys on American cuisine spiced with a soupçon of French imagination: clam consommé with whipped cream, canard à l’orange, mashed sweet potatoes, tomato-cheese salad, and marshmallows with hot chocolate sauce. On one occasion, the madcap Douglas Burdens, just back from Africa, brought an uninvited guest—a honey bear!—to lunch. Led in on a leash, the lumbering brown beast was cuddled by the women, ignored by the men, and engaged in pitched battle by Narcisse Noir before they were pulled apart. “Worst of all, the dessert was gone before we others had a chance,” Caresse complained.

Nights en famille were rare. On such occasions, the Crosbys retired early to the ornate four-poster, (It was a practical necessity in winter, when Paris apartment furnaces seldom functioned until mid-­November, thereafter at a meager 60 degrees.)

“Harry loved bed. He loved to write in bed, to eat in bed, to entertain in bed,” Caresse noted, with a hint at double entendre. Caresse rarely complained when Harry read in bed until one o’clock.

“Our bedroom light was very bright, but I learned to sleep in spite of it,” she recalled years later, with a sense of déjà vu. “Sometimes Harry would get up and dress and go out mysteriously, alone. I was never invited. But he was always there when I awoke in the morning.”

The nightly ritual was a game they played, in which Caresse conspired. Caresse and Harry always had enthused about the same people. It was Caresse who discovered the beautiful Bostonian, Constance Crowninshield Coolidge Atherton (more recently, Comtesse de Jumilhac), at a ladies’ luncheon, an event Caresse was loathe to attend. “From the moment she hurried in late, all sparkle and flutter, I was captivated. All through the Paris years, she was my most formidable antagonist, but I could not help immensely admiring her.” She had lived in a temple, raised Mongolian ponies, and defied convention as the wife of an American ambassador to China.

On the surface, at least, the glamorous “Lady of the Golden Horse” did not penetrate Caresse’s armor. “One marries a man because one likes him as he is, not as he will be whipped into some other shape,” was Caresse’s philosophy. “Harry made me believe that my children balanced our account . . . I had to play both the lead and the sustaining role in our drama, very exacting and dissimilar parts—a saint and sinner combination.”

Harry’s frequent, transitory flirtations, in addition to permanent belles amies, were assigned code names in the diary: “The Sorceress,” “Nubile,” and later, “The Fire Princess.” “All were substantial props to the poet’s dream . . . I was jealous of only one rival, the imaginary ‘Jacqueline’.” (Harry had become enamored with a Zorn etching—a shepherdess, “Val Kulla”—whose coincidental likeness was most extraordinary.) “Jacqueline” was Harry’s ideal Princess, the only one he could never touch, save in his dreams. Caresse knew very well that she was the Favorite: Among many Princesses, there was only one “Cramoisy Queen.” On his 30th birthday, Harry had written, “Our One-ness is the color of a glass of red wine.”

“Harry and I were free to do as we wished—alone, if not together—but alone was never really as good as together,” Caresse wrote. She had a healthy appetite for men, and early on, determined that what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose, particularly in the moveable feast of France. That summer, restless under the strains of Harry’s search for clandestine fires, Caresse went off to Cannes with Manolo Ortíz, the painter described by Polleen as “Mama’s Gypsy Lover.” In the diary, Harry jotted: “Caresse believes that woman is the equal of man; I, that woman is dependent and the slave of man.”

Kay Boyle described Caresse’s sexual promiscuity as “not anything she herself wanted or enjoyed. It was one of the demands Harry made upon her. She talked to me, almost in guilt, about these things, trying to make them funny . . . gallantry and humor were part of her courage.”

Harry was always ready to seduce her back home. Few wives have received a letter of equal intensity on their seventh anniversary as this one from Harry:

I have been feeling very physical. I hope you feel the

same way. We don’t make love often enough. I wish we

were making love together. . . . I think we are absolutely

and entirely made for each other. I know it . . . I wish my head right now between your legs. I love kissing you more than, anything in the world. I am all strong and excited thinking about it . . . I kiss you and kiss you.

Nights when they entertained at home were “a merry round of madness,” Caresse wrote. When it was time to change from daytime gear to deshabille, Harry wore his regal Magyar robe, embroidered with red and gold to match Caresse’s dressing gown. Both wore gold bracelets and gold necklaces they had purchased in a bazaar in Cairo—from King Tutankhamen’s tomb, they claimed. Half-moon tables were set up around the bed, on the bear- and zebra-skin scatter rugs. When astonished dinner guests arrived at eight—if novices, in formal evening dress—they were ushered into the bedroom by the parlor maid in full uniform with fluted cap and apron.

First caviar and champagne were served, followed by a simple American dish—perhaps chowder and corn pone. Guests were invited to bathe after dinner in the Pompeian tub. This divertissement was welcomed by even inhibited newcomers from the Latin Quarter, when bathtubs were more often down the hall or didn’t exist.

“We liked to experiment with bath oils and bath salts, rose and geranium,” Caresse wrote. A Boston friend was shocked to be invited by Harry to watch—through a concealed peephole—Caresse sponging off in the bubbly tub!

Not everyone was intrigued by these nocturnal fêtes. Some never came back. Harry described the dissenters as bourgeois bores, and thereafter, expendable.

But for mischief and spectacular hijinks, drunkenness and fornication, no private party could equal the Quatre Arts Ball, marking the end of the academic year at the École des Beaux Arts. When spring came around, the Crosbys and others began preparations for the orgy. Held in the huge halls at Luna Park or the Porte d’Auteuil, as many as 3,000 artists and models and ladies of the evening (if French) or well-connected ladies slumming (if American or British), joined the students in the confetti and confusion.

The motif in 1924 was Incan, a memorable first to be followed by many others. Costumes consisted of not much more than body paint and loin cloths, with an elaborate headdress. Harry, always macabre, rubbed down with red ochre paint and around his neck, festooned a necklace of dead pigeons. He was carrying a bag of live snakes. Caresse, as mascot of the atelier, recalled that she “was hoisted into our paper dragon’s jaws, my long blue wig flowing over painted shoulders, proudly displaying my nichons, as on the prow of a New England whaling ship . . . we marched undraped and wholly uninhibited up the Champs Elysées.”

While back at the hall, all hell broke loose, if one can believe Harry’s diary: “At one o’clock, it was WILD . . . men and women stark naked dancing . . . from our loge, I opened the sack, and down dropped ten serpents . . . Later in the evening, I sat next to a plump girl who was suckling one of them!” Lord Lymington, lance in hand, was dancing savagely with Caresse, when “one brave knelt in my path, embraced my painted knees, and covered them with kisses. I felt deliciously pagan! Stepping over entwined bodies, returning ardently the kisses of passers-by, I reached home before Harry, and found him with three pretty girls soaking in pink bubbly soapsuds together, scrubbing off paint. That crazy night, our bed slept seven, not counting Narcisse. We never knew who the seventh was. He wandered in, in a loincloth, and pushed us over. He left early the next morning, pinning a note to the pillow, ‘Had to get to the Department by nine.’ What Department? We never saw him again. I wonder if he arrived at his desk in the loincloth?”

During this era on the rue de Lille, Polleen came to know the servants well and depended on them for survival, “like a passenger depends on a lifeboat in a sinkling ship.” Downstairs, on the other side of the green baize door, there was a bell system: one ring for the personal maid, two rings for the parlor maid, three rings for the chauffeur, and four for the children. “Four rings were seldom heard,” she recalled wistfully, “but I never stopped listening for the extra buzz.”

Louise, the cook, with the figure of a stevedore and a splendid moustache, shared a room off the kitchen with Henriette, the parlor maid, who giggled when Louise pinched her bottom. (Les Chansons des Bilitis, required on Harry’s reading list, enlightened Polleen about their lesbian relationship.) The lady’s maid (who answered the No.1 bell) was the Downstairs stool pigeon. “I hated her! I used to call her ‘La Reine’ because she gave herself superior airs when Mama visited friends or relatives, clutching the keys to the suitcases, carrying the expensive boxes and parcels that accompanied them. But it was rumored in the attic quarters where the footmen were lodged that she was not so dignified.”

Caresse’s secretary was a pathetic woman who came in by the day, her limp hair framing a pale face that registered her many disappointments in life. “She had dreamed of being a ballet dancer on the Opera House stage, instead of spending her days banging the typewriter and walking the dogs . . .”

The daily bonne à tout faire, Hélène, was a pretty girl with bright eyes and a tantalizing derrière—Polleen’s favorite, and Harry’s, too. He dallied with Hélène while her husband worked the night shift at the Champs Elysées restaurant, and Caresse soon dismissed her.

Turnover was also great among chauffeurs, assigned a daily list of expendable chores on a few francs, and fated to long waits. Victor, the most memorable, was the shortest in stature and longest on patience. He could barely be seen over the steering wheel of the “green dragon,” a magnificent 1920 Coupe-de-Ville Voisin, with spare tires encased on the running board, an open box in the forefront for two footmen. The two black whippets, in Hermès designed coats and gold collars, sat inside with the passengers as befitted their rank. (Narcisse had acquired a mate, which Harry christened “Clitoris,” telling Polleen the bitch was named after a Greek goddess. It was several years before his stepdaughter caught on to the origin of the name.)

After Mme. Doursenaud, governesses came and went, not because of Polleen’s behavior, but because the pay was stingy, the atmosphere so Bohemian “they were consistently shocked by my parents’ life-style, from which they half-heartedly attempted to protect me.”

Polleen caviled that on the rare occasions she was invited upstairs, it was likely for a dinner of corned-beef hash—or coconut cake with homemade ice-cream, churned in a wooden bucket immersed in crushed ice and sea salt. Downstairs—whether to suit the servants’ tastes or the meager kitchen allowance—meals were more imaginative. Caresse took pride in “making the coppers glow,” her euphemism for pinching pennies on household expenses. “I never balanced a budget in my life, unless I added the necessary heading of Experience or Fun,” she boasted.

Polleen learned to savor the servants’ gourmet fare: pigeons stuffed with olives and bread, fish flavored with herb-spiced sauces, pigs’ “trotters” and—to her horror—pigs’ ears, flattened with a hammer and cooked in bread crumbs.

But all was not fun and games in the nursery. Once, when Polleen became very ill, the resident doctor called on his little Choulette. When he left, he kissed her tenderly on the forehead, and was very grave.

Sometime later, Harry appeared, squeezing along a narrow passage used to stack the musty tomes he inherited from Cousin Walter’s library to the child’s tiny cubicle. He entered brandishing a glass of champagne. “Here,” he said, “drink this, my Wretched Rat. The doctor said you might die, but this might help you!” He disappeared as miraculously as he had come, not lingering to explain.

From that time, Polleen adopted the “Wretched Rat” as a term of endearment. In her eyes, Harry could do no wrong. (Polleen had very exceptional eyes, and learned at an early age to use them.) “Even when I was very young, I understood that my stepfather’s flirtations with me were very different from the normal love of father for daughter. I was passionately in love with Harry. He alone was allowed to kiss me on the mouth, which he did frequently, hiding under the rug at the back of our Voisin so the chauffeur could not see, or sometimes in the nursery when no one was about. It was a deep secret between us, and remained so until he died.”

Harry had an incredible talent for make-believe, and could talk anyone into indulging his wildest fantasies. Total strangers fell under his spell. Polleen recalled that he read Hans Christian Andersen and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and told stories of his own creation, in which he played his part with utter conviction.

One evening, I was dressed for bed, in my pajamas and robe, when he spontaneously decided to pretend he was the Prince and I was the Princess. Grabbing a bag of pennies he brought home from the Bank, he took me by the hand and rushed into the street, hailing one of those old-fashioned taxis with a rolled-down top. He told the driver to take us to Le Marais. In those days (before the Centre Pompidou of course), Le Marais was a very poor quartier of Paris. There we were, sitting on the folded roof of the taxi, throwing coins to our startled “subjects”!

“Harry was mad, no doubt about it . . . in a sort of extravagant, glorious way. He had a child’s mind. I could understand his sort of madness.”

When Harry entertained Polleen’s brother Billy on infrequent school vacations, the two of them dropped beer-filled balloons from the balcony onto the heads of passers-by on the rue de Lille, to the delight of Billy’s school chums.

Billy was always on a more formal footing with his mother. Perhaps because during his first Easter vacation, he climbed into her bed and “fell asleep on my pillow, almost before his head touched it. While I was still drowsing in the morning,” Caresse wrote, “I felt his fingers combing my hair at the nape of my neck, as he cuddled close.”

“I love you,” Billy whispered.

“I love you, too,” Caresse answered. Frightened of—or unwilling to acknowledge—the latent sexual attraction a mother has for her young son, she jumped up and fled into the bathroom.

“Time to get up, Billy,” she called over her shoulder, slamming the door shut behind her.

“I never dared unfathom half my love,” she said. But through the years, they were good friends and conspirators.

Polleen, like Billy, spent much time away—at Chalet Marie Jose, a hôme d’enfants, or other boarding schools—“23 between the ages of 5 and 15” (if her diary is reliable)—perhaps because of Caresse’s jealous fears about Harry’s clandestine liaisons with his stepdaughter. Harry had forwarded to her schools precocious reading material: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, the poets Rimbaud and Baudelaire. “He wrote the most beautiful love letters, which I read, hidden away in the gymnasium, also learning vicariously about sex, love and romance from books hidden in plain brown wrappers. It was frustrating to be so young, to be stuck away in school, unable to enjoy such diversions,” she wrote.

But despite such unconventional upbringing Polleen was not a withdrawn, wistful child. To the contrary, the headmistress reported that she was: “plus emancipée, plus independente . . . lovable et loved . . .” more than the other girls in her class. She had a lovely face and carried herself well, like her mother. All of the children wanted to dance with Polleen, to sit with Polleen; Polleen had the rare ability to count each one special.

On May 20, 1927, the historic date when Lindbergh arrived in Paris, Harry, Caresse and Stephen Crosby (who was visiting at the time) were among the thousands converging upon the Route de Flandres, the highway over which Marshal Joffre had led his taxicab army to stop the Germans at the Marne in 1914. Their friend, Major “Pete” Powel, a World War I ace, had gotten passes through the police cordon onto Le Bourget field.

A $25,000 prize was offered for the first transatlantic flight, but four American and two French pilots had already lost their lives in pursuit of it. Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year-old mail pilot from St. Louis, was making the latest attempt to fly 3,000 miles over treacherous seas in a Ryan monoplane with wooden wings. There was no radio communication to guide him, no backup team of Mission Control. He took with him a bedraggled kitten for company, a thermos of coffee to keep awake, and a half-dozen ham sandwiches: “If I get to Paris, I won’t need any more, and if I don’t get to Paris, I won’t need any more either.”

At the military field where the Crosbys waited, the afternoon crowd of 45,000 had swelled to 150,000 by nightfall, when the kleig lights were trained on the runways; police and airport personnel were erecting barriers to keep the growing crowd at bay. Anxious and confusing reports came through—the lone airman had gotten off course, was forced down in Ireland. Then someone who knew announced that Lindbergh had been sighted over the Eiffel Tower and could not seem to locate Le Bourget. Caresse reported:

My ears, which are unusually keen, of a sudden picked out a delicate hum of lightest calibre away up in the clouds, which were now scudding across a misted moon . . . a small clear burring as of a toy, and then it was lost. . . . Suddenly, there was a silver flicker like the fin of a darting minnow out of one cloud into another.

“He’s circling the field. C’est lui!”

“C’est Lindbergh!” the cries grew.

Suddenly, from the nearest cloud the bright wings flashed and veered downward, straight and sure to the waiting lane of flare-lit faces. He hit the runway precise and clean.

When Lindbergh climbed down from the cockpit to be hoisted onto the shoulders of the waiting crowd, Caresse reported that he looked boyish and tousled and very much like Harry. “I heard a Frenchman say, ‘C’est n’est pas un homme, c’est un oiseau.’” For his part, Harry would have given his life to change places with the Lone Eagle for that brief moment of triumph.