Chapter V

BORN TO MYSELF

“For me, events of last year or yesterday have lost their content . . . only persons are memorable.”

—Caresse

At first light on April 20, 1892, Mary Phelps Jacob of New York was born. An Aries baby, she puckered up her crimson face and commanded attention, even while her proud father was still passing out cigars.

The name Jacob is derived from the Jacobeans, who—after the War of Roses—settled into Chale Abbey on the Isle of Wight. Like his father before him, William Jacob was a quiet man, who inherited an islander’s love of silence. Unfortunately, he did not fall heir to his father’s business acumen. Mary’s Grandfather Jacob had arrived in America with no fortune but the good sense to marry an American heiress, Emma Lawrence. The then-popular brougham was the specialty of Riker Lawrence, manufacturer of gentlemen’s carriages. Riker also had the vision to acquire large tracts of Manhattan real estate. But his carefully acquired reserves dwindled away with the advent of the horseless carriage, and his shortsighted sons considered the midtown property worthless, and disposed of it as soon as they inherited it.

“Poor father never liked being a businessman,” his daughter Mary commented many years later. “He was an idealist who wrapped himself in a mantle of silence because the real world never lived up to his expectations.” Most of the projects William Jacob believed in were dismissed by his stern, New England-born wife, Mary Phelps, as “Will’s crazy ideas.”

Named after her mother, young Mary numbered among her distinguished ancestors the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, and Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat. Four generations later, her Grandfather Phelps inherited a coal and iron business in Irontown, Connecticut, and firmly established, consolidated his position by marrying Eliza Schenk of Philadelphia, a daughter of the first U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James. As a youth, Phelps had led the Irontown Brigade at the Battle of Antietam; his dress sword hung in the Jacob living room under a handsome, tinted daguerrotype in full regimentals. Mary later observed: “This may account for [mother’s] belligerent and caustic spirit. She was difficult to persuade and impossible to fool—she never avoided an issue.” “Stupid” was the word that Mary Jacob used most often. It stung her children to the marrow, and to Mary, she added, “You’re just like your father,” as reproof. But the oval face—a cameo framed in a delicate widow’s peak of dark hair, beautiful by candlelight—belied the inner strength of an unbending woman. Walter Jacob was her victim from the day they met at a midwinter skating party; he was in love with her until the day he died.

Hard and practical, yet an idealistic dreamer, was the child born of this union. At the time of Mary’s birth, the Jacobs lived on the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, in a comfortable family brownstone on an expensive plot of land now occupied by the Plaza Hotel.

“I was the first child, I should have hated not to be,” Mary noted. “I’ll never forget the day I was born—born to myself, that is.” She remembered the feel of soft snowflakes melting on her cheeks as, tucked inside a fur lap-robe, she was pushed by her devoted nanny around the edges of the duck pond in Central Park in an elegant Brewster baby sleigh of white enamel. Other early memories mingle with the faint aroma of baking pistachio cake, the scent of her grandfather’s Andalusian sherry, of silver polish and Mark Cross saddle soap; “a world where only good smells exist.”

Nicknamed “Polly” by her grandparents, she walked earlier and talked earlier than most babies, and at five, she was already lording it over Leonard (Len), only three, when the baby Walter (Buddy) was born. In the earliest photo of the three siblings, dressed in white, Mary shows the responsible look of an older sister who encouraged her younger brothers in fresh Christopher Robin haircuts to hold still and face the camera.

“As a child, I lived almost completely in a world of make-believe,” she remembered. Summers were spent at East Island “in a cottage built entirely of pink and saffron-colored seashells; the encrusted white plaster appeared as a fine mosaic, glowing red when the sunset struck across Long Island Sound.” One mystical experience marred the idyll of endless summer days. Mary was lying flat on her stomach, fishing for minnows on the wharf, holding tight to the handle of a cumbersome bait hook, when she was dragged deep into the stream. Len, who was fishing nearby, also on his stomach, spotted his sister going under and braced himself to grab an ankle. Mary’s head was being sucked under when her gentle Papa heard Len’s shout and rushed to the other end of the pier. He hauled Mary out by both feet, while the heroic Len ran up the hill to tell Mama to call the Fire Department Rescue Squad. As Mary later described the experience:

Into my ears the waters poured strange sea lullabies . . . not only did I see and hear harmony, but I understood everything . . . and I watched my father at work on his boat, my brother, deathly frightened, hanging onto my spindly heels, and I, my hair like seaweed, pulled flat against the submerged bottom of the float. Thus, while I drowned, I saw my father turn and act . . . I saw the efforts to bring me back to life, and I tried not to come back.

There was no sadness or sickness from which I wished to escape. I was only seven, and a carefree child, yet that moment in all my life has never been equalled for pure happiness. Could I have glimpsed, while drowned (for I was drowned!) the freedom of eternal life? One thing I know, that Nirvana does exist between here and the hereafter—for I have been there.

For the most part, her early life was that of a typical upper-middle-class family at the turn of the century. The female children lived in a sheltered world of nannies and governesses. Mary was no exception. In the winter, little girls were fitted and fussed over by family seamstresses. “We were always completely clothed, even on beaches,” she remembered. “To wear a sunsuit next to one’s skin or to drive or ride without a coat and hat and gloves was unheard of.” The Gibson Girl was the prototype of Mary’s mother and aunts, who wore their hair piled high in pompadours, with sailor hats skewered on with devilish hatpins. Starched collars with bow ties fastened their finely pleated shirtwaists. In a Charles Dana Gibson photograph of 1904, Mary appears in a well-cut tan velveteen coat trimmed with a large Irish lace collar; a floppy hat with layer upon layer of accordion-pleated black chiffon was held firmly under the chin by an elastic band. She was also the subject of a Gibson sketch, as a member of The Younger Generation, being pulled along Fifth Avenue by an enormous St. Bernard dog with a governess at her heels.

In fall 1900, Mary’s Aunt Annie and Uncle Will Barnum decided that Ben, their delicate and sensitive only child, was to be educated at home by Miss Kimber, a young English governess of good family who came to New York to seek her fortune. Mary was invited to “Windward,” the Barnum manor house, to be Ben’s companion and weekday boarder.

“I could not have been at Windward long when the most exciting event of my life took place. I learned to read.” She carried a book everywhere, and rushed through meals to get back to it. She awoke early to read before breakfast. When headaches became a problem, she was forbidden to read more than one hour a day, after supper. (Headstrong Mary smuggled books into the bathroom and stayed there for long intervals.) Thus began her lifelong addiction to books, as a childhood escape from a restrictive environment. “My own world was snug around me like a chrysalis, but the vista before me had no bounds or limits,” Mary wrote.

Miss Kimber subscribed to St. Nicholas magazine, then edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, author of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. This broadened their horizons with short story and poetry contests. It also inspired Mary and her cousin Ben to publish their first literary venture, “The Madison Avenue Gazette,” on gelatin board with runny, purple ink. Mary wrote the lead editorial on the joys of skating.

The Burton Holmes’ lectures at Carnegie Hall were also looked forward to with great anticipation. They transported Mary to exotic, distant lands—Paris, Peking, Tibet, and Troy—all of which she vowed she would one day visit. “Seated in a dangling basket, we were pulled by Holmes’ seductive voice up the purple crags to fabulous heights of a Tibetan monastery. He would leave us dangling there, while my heart beat like a drum. What if the rope should break?”

After Mary’s fourteenth birthday, Mrs. Jacob decided that it was time to select a boarding school, and without any discussion, Mary was sent off to Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. “I was neither happy nor unhappy those years at boarding school. Unintuitive teachers and unimaginative scholars irked me. My life was mostly dreams, and adults were the pale untouchables. It never occurred to me, those years, that I might change the course of my life.” Admittedly, she was “as shy as a periwinkle withdrawing into its shell.”

In Mary’s second year at Rosemary Hall, an invitation to her first Yale prom was arranged by cousin Ben Barnum. Aunt Annie and Miss Flynn, the seamstress, designed a demure white-eyelet dress with a voluminous, ruffled petticoat, high-boned guimpe of Valencia lace, and skirt that fell just above the ankles. With sun-burnished hair hanging long down her back and tied tight with a huge, black taffeta ribbon, Mary was miserable, completely overlooked by the sophisticated college girls in silk ball gowns, with curls piled fashionably high on their foreheads. She led the Grand March with Buster Barnum, but she wished she had stayed at home.

Mary had just accepted in her mind that she was a wallflower when a miracle occurred. Cole Porter of Whiffenpoof fame invited her to dance. Cole was a freckle-faced, equally shy Midwesterner who tripped over her feet, but, with his newly-acquired status as the composer of “In an Old-fashioned Garden,” he could be forgiven. While they were dancing, he whispered a coveted invitation to rendezvous in New York the following Saturday, adding, “Don’t bring a chaperone!” When Mary slipped away in borrowed finery to meet Cole at the Belmont Hotel, the long-anticipated date became a comedy of errors. For even though they laughed amicably about it in later years, she could never quite forgive Cole, an “older man,” who called her a “funny kid” and offered what he presumed to be appropriate entertainment—tickets to the Barnum and Bailey Circus!

The next summer, the Barnums rented a camp on the Upper St. Regis in the Adirondack Mountains and invited their favorite niece to join them. While there, Mary met Richard Peabody, who was to play an important role in her life. She noted in her diary that he looked shy and that one of his front teeth was chipped at an angle. But she was smitten with the pint-sized skipper in white duck pants who sprinted ahead of the pack to win the Idem Class with his 22-foot boat, built for speed and endurance.

Several weeks later, Dick Peabody asked Mary to the Saturday night dance at Paul Smith’s Hotel on the lake. He was just her age, a sophomore at the Groton Academy. But before the evening was over, he impetuously asked if she would marry him when he graduated from Harvard. Even at that early age, Mary loved to say “Yes.” She promised to wait seven years, though Dick was too shy to kiss her goodnight. The next morning, she recalled, they met and sat together in church, “feeling solemn, scared, and very old.” Both families, when informed of the engagement, made it known that they were much too young to consider “keeping company.” But if they still felt the same way, they would give more thought to the proposal after Dick graduated from Harvard.

That winter, Mary learned the joys of sleigh rides under fur lap robes, of beaux taking the long way to Fraunces’ Tavern, of cotillion flowers pressed between the pages of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems, of a cherished lace handkerchief “accidentally” left in a pocket, of ardent messages written on prom cards.

“Flirtation is the minuet of love,” Mary later wrote of that lost art. “It takes grace and precision—a time of ease—to flirt. To flirt is not to court, to ‘go with,’ or to chase; ‘going with’ narrows the field and excludes one from fun and frivolous delights.”

During the 1908 Christmas season, Mary’s gentle, beloved father died. It was one of the great losses of her life, and she cried inconsolably for the quiet man who left her, “before I really knew him.” Until she was eight, he had been her “whole world.” In recent years, he had lived in the only place where his asthma was bearable, a Utopian community on the Brazos River in Texas. In those early days before the field of psychiatry developed, doctors failed to deduce that his physical symptoms worsened when he came East to face the harangues of his petulant wife. “Idealists are all crackpots until they become heroes or saints,” Mary wrote in later life. In her view, Will Jacob was a saint, although her mother never learned to see him as such.

Early that fall, her father had come home from San Antonio for his annual visit. He arrived unexpectedly at Rosemary Hall on a bright Sunday afternoon in October to say goodbye. Mary sensed it might be the last time. “I catapulted into his arms. I saw at once that he was very ill, and I wanted to comfort him.” A great surge of maternal love washed over her when she noticed that her father was carrying a white wicker basket of grapes, “like a votive offering.”

Another of her father’s idealistic experiments was the Home Club on East 45th Street, where the Jacobs stayed in town every winter. Uncle Will and several of his Wall Street partners backed two brownstone fronts with a communal dining hall designed to cut heating bills and other expenses by half. It was there that Mary made her debut in 1910. Forever the nonconformist like her father, she rebelled against the boxlike armor of whalebone and pink cordage locked in place by a “corset cover” of muslin or silk that encased every debutante of that era. It was the cause of great embarrassment, peeping out from the neckline of a low-cut ball gown, forever being pushed back out of sight.

“I’m not going to wear that thing tonight,” she stubbornly told Marie, her ever-present lady’s maid cum chaperone.

“But you can’t go out without a soutien-gorge,” Marie insisted.

“You’ll see. Bring me two handkerchiefs and a needle and some thread,” Mary ordered. She pinned the handkerchiefs together, on the bias, and stitched the pink ribbons to the two points below the breast bone. Then she instructed Marie to tie the ribbons tight around her waist.

In the dressing room during the dance, her companions flocked around to peak at her new invention. She promised to have Marie make copies for her friends, if they’d supply the handkerchiefs. Mary called the device a “backless brassière,” referring to the fact that it slipped over the arms in front, leaving the back bare.

Several years later she hired a young Harvard Law clerk with the firm of Mitchell Chadwick & Kent to draw up an application for “The Brassière, Invented by M.P. Jacob,” registered on February 12, 1914 at the U.S. Patent Office. After her marriage, Mary Jacob Peabody sold copyright #1,115,674 to Warner & Company for $1,500, which appeared to be a large sum at the time. “I can’t say the brassière will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it,” she was reported to have said.

Through the years, Mary’s friendship with Dick Peabody ripened, and although they quarreled often, they always reconciled with chaste kisses. As Dick’s graduation from Harvard approached, the families decided on a final test of their young love and sent Mary to London for the social season in 1913. She was presented at the King’s Garden Party, and an English spring, crowded with new experiences and admirers, helped her to forget the Harvard boys. But by August 1914, Mary was back in Boston again, engaged to marry Dick Peabody.

Before she left London, she had written Dick to let him know she was coming home, fearing that by now he might have found someone else. But consistent to the Peabody character, Dick was waiting on the dock when she landed and rushed her off to a glorified summer palace on the North Shore where the family and servants adjourned from Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue during the warm months.

The engagement was announced formally at the dinner party of a family friend, Bayard Warren. Across the candle-lit table, in the murmur of polite conversation, she heard the news that England was going to France’s aid and had just declared war on Germany.

“It can’t last more than a few months,” predicted their host.

“I’d like to take a crack at those Huns,” Dick added.

“Wonder if we’ll get into it?” asked his good friend, Ollie Ames, one of the most envied undergrads in Boston. Ames was seated next to—and falling in love with—a dark haired beauty, Kay Fessenden.

“The British will clean them up in no time. It’ll be over by Christmas,” Oliver Ames’ father predicted.

On that happy night, no one could imagine that Ollie would be among the first casualties of Chateau-Thierry; Kay, the first war widow of their circle. Or that Dick, also at Chateau-Thierry, would return to Mary seriously flawed.

Both families were reluctant to set the wedding date for early January, 1915. “Poor Richard might as well be marrying a Hottentot as Polly Jacob of New York,” complained one aristocratic Bostonian. Tight-lipped Mary Jacob, the bride’s mother, had a premonition that Dick’s drinking might become a problem. (At Harvard, alcohol played a dramatic part in academic and social life.) “New York boys are far better behaved,” she commented wryly.

Despite all the objections, Dick Peabody and Polly Jacob were duly joined in matrimony at the Barnums’ “Windward” estate, with Uncle “Cottle” (the renowned Reverend Endicott Peabody) coming down from Groton to officiate. For the small family wedding the bride wore a blue dress with the wide sailor collar to please Uncle Will. But for the festive reception afterwards, she changed into white panné velvet and Venetian-point lace. Late that night, after the last guest departed, Mary and Dick walked (ran as soon as they were out of sight) down the hill to the stone cottage on the edge of the property where Mary’s mother and father had also been initiated into the rites of conjugal life.

Using the euphemism of the time, Mary had promised to “wait for” Dick. The line was primly drawn at Harvard between “nice girls,” whom undergraduates married, and the “chippies” they consorted with at roadhouses on the Boston turnpike. Exploratory sessions with “Flossie” at Ferncroft had made Dick Peabody an adept, if not ardent lover. That he married a “nice girl” who acted like a “chippie” both frightened and delighted him. If, in retrospect, the “first time” with Dick failed to evoke the most erotic fantasies of Mary’s girlhood, she discovered new delights with him. For a brief time, Mary was happy and fulfilled, “busy with my new household toys.”

To support his new responsibilities, Dick decided not to return to Harvard in the fall. He took a position in sales at Johns-Manville Company, commuting to New York. When snow covered the ground and made the front steps slippery with ice, the Peabodys moved into Manhattan to be nearer to Dr. Thomas, the gynecologist who delivered all of the “best babies” on Manhattan’s East Side. William Jacob Peabody was born on February 4, 1916.

But Dick found it difficult to adjust to married life, impossible to accept his new status as paterfamilias. He himself had been an only child, who was never allowed to play with other children—or even to cry—by his stern New England parents. When he first forbade his infant son Billy to do so, inevitably, Billy cried louder than before. Dick fled from the apartment and often took refuge in the corner bar. To his credit, he always returned, but usually long after Mary had gone to sleep.

In April Dick resigned from Johns-Manville as precipitously as he had left Harvard, and the Peabodys moved back to Quaker Ridge. He persuaded a reluctant Mary to invest the small inheritance from her father in a private shipping venture. Some months before declaring bankruptcy, he found an easy out with Groton classmates leaving for the Mexican border. They persuaded Dick to join Boston’s Battery A, the crack militia, and Mary was left behind with an infant son, deposited on his parents’ doorstep the day he left. There was no alternative for Mary. Her legacy was gone—and so was Dick.

Bringing up a child in a household governed by her mother-in-law’s strict rules must have been penitential for spirited, fun-loving Mary. The house at Danvers, Massachusetts, had been brought over from England, brick by brick, by an ancestral ship owner from Salem, not long after the witchcraft trials. It was too often shuttered to be healthy, quite different from Mary’s “enchanted” East Island home. Her mother-in-law, Florence Wheatland, had been a sensational beauty before marrying Colonel Jacob Peabody, a rigid stickler for military polish in manners and minerals. He had ground her down into plainness until she took refuge in illness, both real and imagined. Day and night she wore knitted bed jackets and nun-like dresses in solid grey, brown, or black.

When Mary entered this strange, muted household, marked only by visits from the doctor or grocer, her mother-in-law kept to herself, in the other part of the house, except to mutter complaints about the behavior of a wayward, burdensome daughter-in-law, Mary was sinking deep into depression, with only a six-month-old baby for companionship, when Dick came home briefly, just long enough to sign up for World War I. He was stationed in a Plattsburg, New York training camp, scheduled to sail for France in ten days. The baby conceived in October arrived on an unbearably hot July day. A daughter, she was christened Polleen Wheatland Peabody. Before Dick sailed, they had several nights in New York at the Belmont, which exhausted Mary and alienated Dick. He was ashamed of Mary’s conspicuous bulge during pregnancy and couldn’t find much to love about a limp, dispirited young mother, carrying a red-faced crybaby.

Again, Dick escaped and Mary was back “in the shadow of disaster,” as a young war-widow under her father-in-law’s roof. “Many of my friends were caught in the same cruel trap,” she recalled philosophically, “but I was one of the luckier ones. Dick came back.”

Even at this early date, she began to consider the horrors of war, to formulate her future campaign for peace. (“To me, then as always, war was a cruel and brutal form of “exhibitionism.”)

On the eve of Polleen’s first birthday the next July, Dick returned to the States on leave. His orders called for further training in Columbia, South Carolina before shipping out again for France. Mary, who had never been south of Philadelphia, was summoned to join him. She sat up all night on a stifling, wartime train, arriving 18 hours later in a incongruous navy blue taffeta dress. There had been no money or time to replace her winter wardrobe.

Their reunion was brief and ardent. Dick’s lanky body looked hardened and handsome in uniform, and he was sporting a new moustache. Mary’s desire for him had never been stronger, but there was no room at the Inn, and Dick had to report back to camp by eleven that night.

“I’ll go with you,” Mary pleaded.

“Wives are not allowed in the BOQ,” Dick replied. “But I know a place. My platoon dug it this morning. We’ll get a blanket.”

Dutifully, Mary went along, still wearing the taffeta dress. In her memoirs, she recalled the rude awakening of the Captain and his lady when the caissons came rolling along the path the next morning. She discovered that she had spent an ardent night in a trench.

Resourceful as ever, Mary soon found housing in the war-crowded Southern town, and went North to fetch the children. In the artificial world of belles and courteous gentlemen, of Officer’s Club dances and dark-skinned nurses to look after the babies, the Peabodys spent some of the happiest months of their married lives.

Dick was spared by the Armistice from returning to France. By Thanksgiving, they had returned to Back Bay and acquired a Marlborough Street house described as “Boston as baked beans,” smelling deliciously of cardamom and spice, brought back by a Yankee trader. “We could have been as happy as we were in South Carolina, but Dick was soon out of uniform, and he had not accepted the reality of our marriage,” she wrote later. Jobs were few, Dick was restless and frustrated; whisky was plentiful. “I lived like a nun while he was away, but in France it was hard to live like a monk. Glorious memories of France obscured his vision.”

While Dick was at war, Mary had matured in her new role of mother. “Ours was a boy-girl affair,” she confided in her memoirs. “I was supposed to remain the perfect playmate.” She discovered that it is very difficult to “play” with an irresponsible husband after a full day in the nursery.

After one hopeless, confining winter, Mary had reached a nadir. Dick’s health began to suffer, and special nurses were required to watch over him around the clock. Mary’s father-in-law was overseas with the Red Cross, her mother-in-law sinking deeper into invalidism. It was too much for Mary to cope with alone. She thought of Uncle Jack. Richard Peabody was his godson and they had always been exceptionally close. He now lived at East Island, which the Morgans bought from her paternal grandfather and rechristened “Matinacock.”

Her first visit as a Peabody to her childhood home was a disappointment. Her Grandfather Phelps’s house had been swept away “like some cobweb fantasy.” The carriage block, the pebbled paths, the spring house, the kitchen garden, and the duck pond were missing. Even “the little wooden pier, the purple mussel shoals, the languorous seaweed, and ‘sand-locked diamonds’,” Mary remembered were gone. Instead, she found a long, level lawn and a formal, uninviting mansion. But Uncle Jack’s welcome was genuine. “He must have known by my voice when I rang up that I needed help desperately.” The busy financier responded by offering a check and some very sound advice.

“Can you get a friend of Dick’s to go with you to my Adirondack camp? And someone to stay with the children?” She assured him that she could. Morgan made two phone calls, putting things in order. His son Junius would see to the railroad tickets. “I’m here whenever you need me,” he added, before the phone beckoned again from the Wall Street office.

The dreary winter landscape at the Lake was brightened by good company, an open fire, and a library well stocked with books. Mary hoped that clean air and solitude, without the problems of family and commercial life, would heal Dick’s wounded psyche. They took long rides in a fur-piled sleigh and fished through the ice on the lake. But one unfortunate day, a delivery boy smuggled in a bottle of Scotch, and Dick became menacingly difficult again. Mary telephoned Junius. In a last effort to save his life, the Peabody-Morgan alliance rallied to her support and committed Dick to a sanitarium for alcoholics.

“That was the spring I met Harry.”