Chapter VI

LIFE AFTER HARRY

“If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?”

—Ecclesiastes 4:11

On December 13, 1929—as originally planned—Caresse sailed for France on the Mauretania, accompanied by Henrietta. She carried the urn holding Harry’s ashes, wrapped in his red-and-gold Magyar robe, when she boarded, along with Harry’s holograph copy of Sleeping Together, “dreams for Caresse”—the last poems he wrote. On the title page, Harry had inscribed prophetically a verse from Ecclesiastes: “If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?”

It was bitterly cold on December 22 when Caresse and her mother-in-law arrived in Le Havre. They hurried to reach Ermenonville by Christmas. “There was a fine dry snowfall in the air. The cozy and twinkling appearance of the Mill filled my heart to bursting as we approached . . . I was at home,” Caresse wrote.

Mrs. Crosby stayed on, and several good friends came as soon as they heard the news. Gretchen and “Pete” Powel, devoted companions on many Paris escapades, stood by to offer support and condolences. Gerard Lymington was dispatched to Cheam to break the tragic news to Billy and to bring him home to the Mill to share his mother’s grief. Bill Sykes, the devoted friend who had smuggled gold pieces in his shoes to pay D.H. Lawrence for the Sun manuscript, went to fetch Polleen.

“I was at boarding school when Harry died,” Polleen recalled in her memoirs. “I had been awakened before dawn and put on a train from Gstaad, without explanation, on a cold, wet morning. A family friend met me at the station in Montreux and broke the news, not in detail, but in stark reportage, saying that my stepfather had shot himself. I was desolate—not with the feeling of bereavement for a beloved parent, but rather the shattering sorrow of a woman losing an adored lover.”

“It was a long journey, and when I arrived late that evening I found my mother in tears. We both cried in each other’s arms until I bedded down on the chaise-longue in her room for the night. Just before falling asleep, Mama called to me through the darkness: ‘. . . anyway, I am glad that he is dead because of you’.”

“To this day,” Polleen wrote, “I do not know how to interpret her statement.”

I presumed she meant that sooner or later, Harry would have seduced me, too? Or, could it be that she was frantically jealous of the special attention he gave me? His love letters to me—and they were indeed, love letters—she later found and destroyed. She was aware that something was going on between us. Her jealousy led her to steal, one by one, all of the little trinkets Harry had given me—a Cartier watch, books and paintings. (I knew she was doing this, but did not dare face her with the facts.)

Rivalry for Harry’s affection was so intense between mother and daughter, even before Harry’s death, that Polleen’s childhood admiration soon turned to cold resentment.

Caresse did not suffer alone in the months that followed. Many devoted friends looked after her.

“The Aviator” (Cord Meier), one of Harry’s companions from his flying days at Le Bourget, was among the first to appear. He had a handsome, foxy profile, was rich and worldly, and loved to dance, which Harry never did. “He brought beautiful furs, and he asked me on Christmas Day to marry him quickly so that he could protect me from the cruelty of the world,” Caresse recalled. “I’ll never marry again,” was her answer. “I’m still married to Harry.”

Caresse shut herself away in the Mill to capture in verse the essence of her life with Harry. While the snow fell in deep drifts, she gathered her memories around her in front of a bright fire. The poetry flowed, spontaneous and swift, “almost as though some urgent ghost was providing guidance.”

When she had finished, Hart Crane critiqued what he considered to be her best work, Poems for Harry Crosby. He particularly praised “Invited to Die,” in which Caresse described the Crosbys’ last day together:

Our eyes were opened to a blaze of Sun,

Clean sunbuilt dawn the day we owned New York

I did not guess

I did not guess

That madder beauty waited, unaware,

To take your hand upon the evening stair.

The poem, “My Heart,” Crane called “another YOU. You are meant to heartbreak people,” he added. “Love ways, pain ways, courage ways. I love YOU.”

After exorcising the ghosts, Caresse was ready again to say “Yes!” to life. “While I kept the secret place [for Harry] alive and lighted, I trod the hedonistic paths of play and the healing ways of work.”

“Mama was not one to be defeated by disaster,” Polleen conceded. “A great fighter, she always overcame the many setbacks that came her way.”

At 37, Caresse was still a beautiful woman. Life at the rue de Lille resumed its heady pace. Polleen wrote: “Mama draped herself in yards of black crepe, wore sheerest black-silk stockings, and donned a little bell-shaped toque. Clutching a bunch of violets, she set out to reconquer man—that is to say, practically any man in sight! Her favorite black whippet Narcisse Noir, in a Hermes morning coat, accompanied her in the long, green limousine of immense chic, a Voisin Coupe de Ville. She was exciting, wildly pretty, and wore elegant clothes that were delivered in shiny white boxes with labels that read: Paquin, Worth, Chanel, Schiaparelli. Frequently I was dragged along to my mother’s fittings—in a blue-serge coat with brass buttons, short pleated skirt, grey socks, and shabby shoes, with long straight bangs I could almost chew! Mama moved fast on those slim, thoroughbred legs, after the first will-o’-the-wisp that caught her fancy, often altering course in mid-flight on some quixotic impulse. Her children were often left stranded in odd places. But I became quite used to this way of life . . .”

In the spring of 1931, Caresse began the difficult task of editing Harry’s collected poems in four volumes. For each volume, she asked “a distinguished man of letters,” many of whom were former Black Sun authors, to write an introduction: D.H. Lawrence for Chariots of the Sun, T.S. Eliot for Transit of Venus, Stuart Gilbert for Sleeping Together, and Ezra Pound for Torchbearers.

Throughout their long correspondence about the publication of Ezra’s Imaginary Letters, the Crosbys and Pound had never met. But Caresse liked his introduction best. Ezra wrote that Harry’s was “a death from excess vitality, a vote of confidence in the cosmos.” As his life was “almost a religious manifestation,” so his death was “a magnificent finale.”

In early spring, “when we Parisians were rigidly pale with winter,” Caresse noted, “Ezra arrived from Rapallo, bronzed and negligé. There was a becoming shabbiness to his beard.” (Polleen’s view of the eccentric poet was quite different. “In his loud checked trousers, looking a bit crazy with his yellow beard in disarray, smelling of booze, he tried to kiss me on the mouth, on the stairs of our flat . . . I was outraged for a week, in fact, I avoided him every time he came back.”

Ezra wanted to savor the flavor of Paris by night. They went to the Boule Blanche, a bôite where a band from Martinique was beating out hot, tropical merengues at a frenetic pace. Caresse and Ezra had a ringside table, but because of her broken heart, Caresse would not, could not dance. As the music grew in fury, Ezra suddenly leapt to the floor and seized a tiny Martiniquaise vendor of cigarettes in his arms, eyes closed, chin out, as he began a hypnotic “voodoo prance.” The music grew hotter, as did Ezra, and one by one the dancers drifted from the floor to form a ring to watch “that Anglo-savage ecstasy,” until the music crashed to an end. “From that time,” Caresse recalled, “Ezra and I became the best of friends.”

“After my stepfather’s death, the list of Mama’s lovers grew longer,” Polleen observed wryly, “and was very inconsistent in quality. There was a Tartar prince, who told me the gory tale—and I believed him—that he cut off the ears of his enemies and strung them on his belt. Perhaps that is why he was soon replaced by the gypsy painter, Manolo Ortíz. Ortíz displayed such fearsome jealousy that often I was taken along on outings to his studio to forestall any verbal or physical assault on Mama, who clearly—he declared—‘had done him wrong.’ With flashing eyes, paint brushes and palette in hand, he stormed around the studio until he ran out of breath.”

“Then there was Mother’s lover who lived on a barge in the Seine, Franz de Geetere. He was a wild-looking Dutchman, very tall and wiry, with the extraordinarily beautiful hands of a painter—which he was, by profession. (I discovered folio upon folio of erotic drawings in a wooden trunk on the barge!) More interesting to me at that time was the fact that he also made kites, and when the breeze was right, we would fly them from the deck. . . .”

“Mama was always partial to titles, especially the British,” Polleen confided. Gerard Lymington (later to become Earl of Portsmouth) she had known from the earliest days, when the Black Sun Press published his poetry, Spring Song of lscariot. Lord Lymington—poet and peer—Harry and Caresse had formed a special trio. Now there were two.

On May 23, Gerard wrote: “Will you be in Paris or at the Moulin if I come over next Thursday? Let me know if you don’t want me. Bless you, Caresse. You know so much that lies between these lines, so I won’t say [it].” Even after Gerard’s presumably happy marriage, Caresse often visited the Lymingtons at Farleigh-Wallop, their country estate near Portsmouth. He never failed to end his letters to Caresse, “With my dearest love and devotion,” even through the last year of her life.

“I don’t know why he loved my mother so faithfully for so long,” Polleen commented, “since he was sorely neglected, and in those early years, often was left alone with me and one of my dreadful governesses. On such evenings, he would put on his pajamas and go out for a walk; perhaps by so doing he felt part of the crazy Bohemian world of the Left Bank. (Meanwhile Mama, in widow’s weeds, was dining and dancing with someone else!)”

“It was not until spring that I came alive again,” Caresse recalled later, “after I met Jacques Porel, son of the famed French actress, Réjane . . . that is, I remet him for the first time since he separated from his beautiful wife Anne-Marie, and I became a widow.” She was calling for her mail in the Morgan Bank in the Place Vendôme, and Jacques was there changing francs. “We met in the revolving doors and revolved together out into the brisk sunshine. So off we went down the rue St. Honoré to Le Crémaillière, the most fashionable small restaurant in Paris, and once inside that revolving door, I realized the die was cast.” Jacques and Caresse were the hottest gossip item of le tout Paris.

There was an amorous evening when they took the Bateau Mouche down the Seine to a riverside café beyond Versailles. There was love in the afternoon after a thunderstorm at Melun, with Roquefort and burgundy and a mechanical piano that played “Et puis ça va,” over and over again.

That summer, Caresse and Polleen were invited by the Philip Barrys for a holiday on the Côte d’Azur. The Barrys were old friends who had accompanied Caresse on the Mauretania to France with Harry’s ashes. They had taken a villa in Cannes for the season with the royalties from Barry’s Animal Kingdom, a resounding hit on Broadway, and offered their quiet retreat with a garden and view of the sea for Caresse’s recuperation.

But soon after Caresse arrived, she was besieged with letters from Jacques, writing from the Pavillon Henri IV in St. Germain-en-Laye: . . . It’s three o’clock . . . my bed is still undone, . . . I feel like having you here in my room . . . if you were here, I should take off your clothes (I have got none) one by one and stand hard against you, kissing your neck, near your hair and your ears . . . and then I would push you smoothly on the bed . . . and come so near you that we would make only one. But I should watch those eyes—when kissing your little mouth—to see in them that grey cloud moving . . . and hear that wonderful and imperfect song you sing . . . Come back to the Mill and let me have you in my arms again, and kiss you everywhere—and let me remain long in you like I did during those marvelous days in Primavera.

Caresse, who could never be quiet for long, succumbed and invited Jacques to come down. Soon, they shared cold lobster and vin rosé on a balcony overlooking an indigo sea, with the shadow of ochre sails dotting the harbor at Marseilles.

In midsummer, Jacques and Caresse motored back to Paris from Cannes, leaving Polleen behind under Ellen Barry’s watchful eye. They first visited friends at Biarritz, and while there, impulsively decided to cross the Spanish border into San Sebastian to see the American bullfighter, Sidney Franklin, make his debut. They had heard that Ernest Hemingway planned to be there. He was researching a book (later to be titled Death in the Afternoon).

For Hemingway, bullfighting was the emotional substitute for war, “the only place where you can see life and death, i.e., violent death, now that the wars were over, and I wanted very much to go to Spain to study it.” In his view, the so-called “self-hardening process” was necessary to the experience of a developing writer.

Caresse arranged to meet the Hemingways at a cafe frequented by the toreadors, on a corner near the bullring.

Hemingway, Pauline, and his eldest son—a boy of about six—were there already. The child, Bumbi, was being given lessons in the handling of the cape by one of the elderly bullfighters. We found Hemingway straddling a chair in a far corner, the old Spaniard explaining an intricate maneuver. The boy had to repeat it again and again; his father was a difficult taskmaster.

Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway’s second wife, was seven months pregnant, and they were hurrying back to the States so that the child would be native born and eligible to become President. Ernest was one of the few men who did not succumb to Caresse’s charm. From the beginning, the chemistry was not right, and future encounters between the two would be difficult and stormy. Their first meeting was marred by an unfortunate mishap. When they left San Sebastian, Pauline forgot her bag with the passports in the back seat of Caresse’s car. The fact that Caresse did not discover the loss until she had crossed the French border started the relationship on an uneasy footing. Caresse attempted to compensate by offering to pay for their return passage to New York in exchange for a manuscript.

But when the promised manuscript arrived at the Black Sun Press, “It looked like a discarded passage from Farewell to Arms,” Caresse complained. “The whole thing amounted to about 1,000 words mostly one-word lines of four-letter words—nothing to do with toreadors. I was so indignant and disappointed, I wanted to cry,” she later admitted. Instead, she impetuously composed a letter to the author, noting at that price his prose was “mighty precious.” In reply, Ernest fired back that no one could call Hemingway “precious” and get away with it!

The Hemingways were back in Paris, stopping at a small Left Bank hotel halfway between the rue Cardinale and the rue de Lille, when Caresse finally located them. She hurried over, manuscript in hand, to demand the return of their advance passage-money in exchange for her “precious” package. Taken by surprise, the Hemingways were still in bed. Ernest muttered something about “that bitch,” but on the verge of departure, he was willing to negotiate. With some reluctance, he promised rights to reprint Torrents of Spring as the first Crosby Continental Edition.

That autumn—in the library of 19 rue de Lille where the Black Sun Press was conceived in 1927—Caresse and Porel planned to transform the Black Sun from a small press specializing in finely printed limited editions into a commercial firm in direct competition with the prestigious German publisher, Tauchnitz. At that time, it was the only firm on the Continent reprinting English classics. Caresse was optimistic that there was an even larger market for inexpensive editions of the best of the young expatriate American writers and avant-garde European authors.

She wrote to Ezra Pound about her new publishing venture:

They say they have a big demand for English printed books . . . not to exceed 20 francs each, preferably 15 francs each. . . . [I plan] to do an edition of two books per month to begin with at least 2,000 copies each. The first few books must be good sellers . . . after that, [I have] . . . carte blanche. Hemingway promised me three stories . . . I’ve just seen him in Spain . . . I am going to call it:

The Crosby Library European Editions
-or-
The Crosby Continental Library
Crosby Collection Continental Editions?

I think Torrents of Spring the best book to do because, to many people, it will look like something new, as few of Hemingway’s admirers have read it, and it has not been reprinted.

Ezra soon replied with wise counsel and encouragement. Thanking him, Caresse wrote: “Your wonderful and enthusiastic letter about bucking Tauchnitz gave me a thrill, for if you really will help, I’m sure we can do wonders.” (She appeared to be unaware that Torrents of Spring was a satirical, and to many, an unflattering portrait of Sherwood Anderson; she selected it to “get hold of a public.”)

Never one to hold a grudge, Caresse mended fences with Hemingway in an Open Letter (which became the Introduction to Torrents of Spring, the first Crosby Continental Edition):

Dear Ernest:

. . . Do you remember that torrential day in Spain last August . . . when we all foregathered after the corrida, you, your wife, Jacques and I and the boot-black . . . in the little posada behind the arena? The place was full of English and Americans; you and Charlie [Chaplin] were the focus of many admiring eyes and I felt very jealous of you. . . . I wanted to do something as you two had done something; I wanted to make something out of all this Anglo-Saxon alertness and zest for discovery of new things in ancient lands.

The barrier that separates us and always will . . . is the difference in language. Local color, bulls and blood are all very well, but one wants to know what the people are saying and thinking . . . that is what I was thinking of, across the din and pageantry of that afternoon—my thoughts were revolving round a new idea, to give all these eager travelers a glimpse into the minds of the people they were visiting; something more than local color, rather the racial consciousness that makes and mixes the color, as the painter mixes the paints of his palette.

I am beginning the collection with an American book, your book, because I admire it and because I know I am not the only one to admire what you write; a few million others do, too. I am going to publish books that I like, that have merit, and that interest me, amuse me personally . . . the colors of the titles should match the countries . . . green for the Torrents of Spring in honor of Diana and the woods of Michigan!

. . . you and those Miura bulls are, between you, responsible not only for this edition of Torrents of Spring, but for many CCE’s to come.

Good fishing, and again, many thanks.

The summer romance with Porel intensified in the fall. In October, Jacques wrote to say that his break with Anne-Marie might be a permanent one:

Yes, I was wise in leaving. . . . I have now to decide whether I shall ever live again in Laurent Pichet or not. I can’t very well be all my life going from place to place, and the exchange of letters between Anne-Marie and myself does not show that things are going to an end of any sort. Anne-Marie seems to think quite natural to go on living in my things, with my child, without taking the slightest care of whatever happens to me. . . .

His ardor for Caresse increased, in spite of this November message: “I received yesterday a cable saying that I was father of a magnificent boy and that he and his mother were as well as could be. I don’t know how much he weighs, or how he will be called . . . Life is strange.” Characteristically, he added the only other important news—in his view—of that day: “I lunched yesterday at Dolly Radziwill and played croquet the whole afternoon.”

Jacques, who had always been dependent upon his wife or mother for support, added a note in the margin to his new benefactor: “You have been a dear about that Impremir . . . How can I thank you? I shan’t thank you, because you are always like that . . . you are made like that.” Caresse was the quintessential “giver,” but the men in her life were more often “takers.” They left her emotionally exhausted and financially exploited, and in the end, wrung out like a discarded sponge. Her daughter deplored that in spite of the many acclaimed artists and writers Crosby discovered, “She died without a bob [shilling].”

Later in the fall, Caresse traveled to Berlin to buy inks and fine papers for the press, while Jacques’ letters remained constant. He was exceptionally perceptive of her nature:

Caresse, you don’t understand me, and I understand you so well and you are such a dear and I am so fond of you . . . I like your letters because they’re like you, spontaneous and childish. You are more clever than the women I know who are stupid, conventional . . . I only find beauty in what might happen, in that lyrical and deep interior of a clever mind. You find me dull, funny, incomprehensible, because you are much more “in life” than I am and you want to be happy, as young people want to be sailors or diplomats, and I consider it an accident, not a vocation. . . .

I can see you from this silly little room with a beautiful view, surrounded by dogs, friends, servants and other impedimenta . . . and lots of talk will take place.

Again in January, when Jacques was in the U.S. visiting a married sister while trying to sell Crosby Continental Editions to New York publishers, he wrote from the St. Moritz Hotel:

Sweet darling,

I have already written this morning, but I want again to write tonight. . . . It was wonderful hearing your voice from the middle of the ocean . . .

Darling, you are a wonderful little woman, and I kiss you all over, all around everywhere, and I love you and your little thing of which I am thinking often and often. I am writing from my bed . . . I want to be alone with my little woman against a wall with sun and shade and heat and make love to her with that wet noise that excites me, and for H’s sake, no bloody fools, . . . either of the Ritz or Montparnasse!!

After a month’s absence, the correspondence from the St. Moritz remained ardent:

Just one week now and I shall be sailing again towards you. How wonderful it will be to meet again . . . I will hold your hand, kiss your mouth repeatedly and caress your hair (not forgetting looking into your eyes!) I hope you are well, not too tired, and taking care of yourself. I hope that Polleen business is coming off alright. We spoke of it, Mrs. Stuart and myself, the other evening, and she seems to think also that the child . . . who stayed in the country with her and talked . . . needs a more regular life. Be firm, . . . I am afraid you have to. If not, this is also going to be an awful mess, like the one that was made of my stepdaughter.

Polleen, for her part, was not taken in by her mother’s elegant Parisian lover. “I believe that Mama was truly in love with Jacques. He was on the scene much longer than most. The servants hated him, because his conduct was truly outrageous. He spent most of his time flirting with anyone in sight, including myself and my classmates when they came home with me. I myself felt that he was using my mother and all of her glittering entourage, rather than truly caring for her as he pretended. But he was good looking and clever; he had a sort of seductive charm, even if he was a bit of a pic-assiette:” [The closest English equivalent for this French idiom is “sponger.”] “After one particularly stormy encounter, Mama was ensconced for some time in Lady Carnavon’s smart nursing home in London with a heart ailment . . . whether there was any connection between Mama’s malaise and Jacques’ behavior, I could only guess.”

Polleen guessed rightly. Caresse’s illness followed a particularly stormy exchange, in which Jacques had written to Caresse “dans sa langue maternelle” to better express his true feelings. The line “Je ne vous ai pas trompée” [I have never deceived (or cheated on) you] was ill chosen. Caresse returned that page of the letter to Jacques, with the phrase underlined in red pencil. In a marginal note, she added: “Why? This is rather beastly and has made me feel physically sick.”

A telegram from Jacques followed: “Terribly hurt by your letter.”

By the next post, a note without salutation was dispatched to London:

Caresse:

I have one more word to say. If you are a woman capable of writing what you wrote to me in that short note, because there was one page in one of my letters that did not please you, it means for me to have to regret completely all that happened between us . . . I am quite unwell here, doped with veronal and tobacco—in an awful state of nerves.

Thank you for this last American punch.

Caresse, who had fled to England in an attempt to forget Jacques by enjoying the London season, was stricken with the first of the crises cardiaques that plagued her for the rest of her life. She was attending a gala showing of Siegfried Sassoon’s collection at Lymington’s London townhouse. “As I mounted the great ancestral staircase . . . the stairwell whirled like a spinning top and I quietly wilted down beneath the spangled slippers and heels of polished boots. . . . My heart seemed to suffocate inside the bodice. . . . I tried to pull open the high-boned collar at my throat—and then, all was oblivion. . . . When I came to, a white-capped nurse and other unfamiliar faces hung above me. . . .”

Jacques did not rush to her side.

So your doctor says you have done too much and must not. Well, darling, there is no doubt, you do much too much. You go here and there, and fuss a lot. All that is terribly bad for your heart. It’s all very fine to say it is . . . on account of me, but what about the wrong food, the wrong drink, that life of a movie star, and those dresses and fur coats, and [between the lines] . . . all those attractive boys!

Caresse recovered sufficiently to return to New York for Christmas, with Jacques following soon after. Spirited and full of charm, he became the most sought-after man about town. “He still possessed a key to the Press, but it no longer fitted my heart,” Caresse reported wryly. “When I sailed away, Jacques stayed on as the cavalier of a much-publicized New York matron.”

Some six months after its launching, Crosby Continental Editions had taken in profits amounting to only $1,200. The question uppermost in Caresse’s mind was whether to continue the series, and if so, for how much longer. She wrote to Kay Boyle, whose opinion she respected, for advice and encouragement.

Kay’s response was quick and positive. “Consider how many years it takes to build up most publishing houses, and you have started off with an almost unprecedented publicity bang. . . . I should think you would simply have to give it another year’s trial.”

In reply, Caresse confessed: “I find it discouraging to have to wait on time. If an idea could not materialize at first trial, I move on to another and another, getting no further in the end. I hate to compromise. I’d almost rather give up.”

In one last attempt to sell the idea of paperbacked books—20 years ahead of its time—to American publishers, Caresse returned to New York. Even the editors she knew best (including Dick Simon of Simon and Schuster, with whom she had traveled the route enchantée to the Côte d’Azur and shared “adjoining balconies”) advised that the American public would never buy paper-covered editions as Europeans did, at any price.

In May 1933, Caresse reluctantly replied to Kay Boyle that the Crosby Continental Editions “had not one cent of working capital” and would not accept any more manuscripts. She explained the reasons for her decision to cease publication in a letter to Ezra Pound:

About CCE . . . I am completely discouraged in that particular form of publishing. I lost lots of money and didn’t have any really good fun out of it. I only did one book that hadn’t been done before, Bob MacAlmon’s (that one you advised), and it was a complete flop. I must sell 3,000 to pay expenses, and I’ve only sold 800 of Bob’s. I’ve not had one book completely sold out yet!! So I’ve definitely abandoned the CCE. But I have not given up the Black Sun Press . . . and a wonderful new scheme is in the air. . . .

Between publishing ventures, Caresse concentrated on the Parisian social scene. Her activities were picked up by William Leeds, who reported for the Universal Wire Service:

Caresse Crosby, alone, is carrying on the publishing tradition [of the Black Sun Press]. . . . It is the reality behind her flashing social success of which everyone here talks so much.

It has been said of Mrs. Crosby that she is herself a poem. At any rate, . . . these poems of hers account for her present position, without parallel in the history of society in this capital of art and letters and pleasure. . . . Mrs. Crosby has become one of the great hostesses. . . . Even the French speak of her “salon” with awe: It has never been done before by any American, or by any foreigner—except the mother of the Empress Eugénie [emphasis added]—for the French, outwardly hospitable to money spenders and tourists, close their doors to any stranger seeking to cross the threshold into their inner circle.

There are many explanations . . . the simplest being that she is very pretty and a very charming woman. . . . But fortuitous circumstances also have played a part in the metamorphosis of this society butterfly into a welcomer of the great who come as callers, to create that impressive entity known as a salon.

Even when surrounded by a retinue of admirers, Caresse never ceased her quest for new adventures. Of a typical evening at “Le Jokey” (the famed Jockey Club), Caresse wrote: “We were six . . . all of us old friends, sitting at the best table, receiving the best attention from the lofty proprietor down to the lady of the lavabos. We always did receive the best everywhere, and we were the gayest, the most lavish, the most envied in Paris that season. Extravagant in talk and action, I was often the center of an exhilarating group.”

On such a night, she spotted a very young man, tanned a deep brown by the southern sun, whose wide black eyes looked contemptuously in her direction. He drew a pipe from his pocket, lit it, and flung the match beneath her table with an insolent gesture. Leaving the glittery crowd, Caresse excused herself to use “the telephone.” She searched for her chauffeur, patiently waiting outside, and ordered: “Follow that young man, Victor. Offer to give him a lift wherever he is going. I want to find him again . . . tomorrow,” (Polleen observed that “Mama’s chauffeurs . . . often rebelled at waiting for hours outside the bôites, not to mention the daily assignations.”)

The next day, Caresse was wearing a blue denim apron-dress with a cartwheel straw hat as she waited at one of the sidewalk tables of La Rotonde. She had packed a picnic basket, with patés and cheese, fruit and a rare bottle of Cointreau. The youth approached, leading a large black-and-white Dalmatian—a perfect excuse for conversation. In the bright light of morning, he looked even better than the night before.

“Wouldn’t such a fine dog like a romp in the country this balmy spring day?” Caresse suggested.

Years later, she reminisced that “The picnic was a success, à la limité. I shall never forget the moist high grasses matted with poppies and cornflowers, nor the drone of the ancient mill wheel. Nor Robert—made of mahogany and the sea—so strong, so gentle.”

That spring season, Surrealist painters and avant-garde writers rubbed shoulders with le tout Paris at Le Moulin du Soleil, where Caresse enthusiastically welcomed them. She brought life again to the abandoned Mill. “I was Queen Mistress of my own small realm.”

Acres of wild strawberries were in full flower in June 1933, when Caresse sent out invitations to one of her fabulous parties. It was to be a ball, in matelot and matelotte costume. Harry’s cousin Nina de Polignac replied that she would transfer the necessary magnums of champagne from the cellars at Rheims to the springhouse at Ermenonville.

“For how many people?” she queried.

“About a hundred,” Caresse guessed.

Eighty magnums of Pommery Nature soon arrived as a family contribution from the Polignacs. Max Ernst, the birdlike doyen of the Surrealists and a noted gourmet, agreed to help with the food. He traveled down to Marseilles to buy lotte, the necessary prime ingredient of a good bouillabaisse. Armand, now the Count de la Rochefoucauld—“sandy-haired and full of love and the devil”—acted as master of ceremonies. Elsa Schiaparelli produced the prizewinning costume—an above-the-knee skirt over fishnet stockings, with a maribou boa draped rakishly around her shoulders.

“I invited the most amusing Parisians, regardless of society’s approval, and a few friends from home—among them Louis Bromfield, the writer, and ‘Bunny’ Carter (Harry’s former chief, president of Morgan et Cie.), Both men arrived without their wives: “I was told later that the ladies were afraid to risk their Boston reputations.” With her usual gift for exaggeration, Caresse reported that “We had royalty from England and Spain, princes of India by the score, not to mention Afghanistan. There was only one large bathroom for everyone to share . . . I caught royalty off guard as I went to brush my teeth.”

After all the guests were gone, she sank down on a cushion by the hearth “where I could look up through the chimney into the sky that was filling with stars, just as a theater fills with people—one by one, two by two, until the place is a sea of nodding heads—and now the stars above me were crowding the heavens that way. Are they the audience and we the actors? I wondered. If so, then night is the time to play our part to perfection.”

An Eastern religious sect—brothers of the Hare Krishna—has replaced the Crosbys and their glittering entourage at the Chateau at Ermenonville; shaved Yul Brynner-like heads bow in contemplation and leather-thonged sandals flip-flop across the cobblestones. Parisians on motorcyles and tourists in small rented voitures come out on holidays and Sundays to picnic. They have pulled up the Lilies of the Valley by their roots, and there are no more carpets of wild flowers in the Forest of Senlis.