Caresse Crosby

Caresse Crosby
Born	(1892-04-20)April 20, 1892 New York City
Died	January 26, 1970(1970-01-26) (aged 78) Rome, Italy
Nationality	American
Other names	Mary Phelps Jacob, Polly Jacobs, Polly Peabody
Occupation(s)	Publisher, activist, writer
Known for	Inventor of the modern bra Co-founder, Black Sun Press
Spouse(s)	Richard R. Peabody, Harry Crosby, Selbert Young
Children	William Jacob; Polly ("Poleen")

Caresse Crosby (April 20, 1892 - January 26, 1970), born Mary Phelps Jacob, was a patron of the arts, poet, publisher, and peace activist. She took on the name Polly in childhood. Her parents William Hearns Jacob and Mary Phelps were both descended from American colonial families, William from the Van Renssalear family and Mary from William Phelps. At age 19, she invented the first modern brassiere to receive a patent and gain wide acceptance. Her life at first followed convention. In 1915, she married the well-to-do Richard R. Peabody, whose family had arrived in New Hampshire in 1635. They had two children, but following Richard's service in World War I, Richard turned into a drunk who loved to watch buildings burn. Polly met Harry Crosby at a picnic in 1920 and they had sex within two weeks. Their public relationship scandalized proper blue blood Boston society.

Two years later Richard granted her a divorce and Harry and Polly were married. They immediately left for Europe, where they joined the lost generation of American expatriates. They embraced a bohemian and decadent lifestyle, living off of Harry's trust fund of USD$12,000 a year (or about $212,930 in today's dollars), had an open marriage with numerous ongoing affairs, a suicide pact, frequent drug use, wild parties, and long trips abroad.

At her husband's urging, Polly took the name Caresse in 1924. In 1925 they began publishing their own poetry as Éditions Narcisse in exquisitely printed, limited-edition volumes. In 1927 they re-christened the business as the Black Sun Press. They became instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many emerging authors who were struggling to get published, including James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Rene Crevel, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

In 1929 one of her husband's affairs culminated in his death as part of a murder-suicide or double suicide at the studio of a friend. His death was marked by scandal as the newspapers speculated wildly about whether Harry shot his lover or not. Caresse returned to Paris where she continued to run the Black Sun Press. She was friends with many of the eminent authors of her time, including Robert Duncan, Anais Nin and Henry Miller. She left Europe in 1936 and bought Hampton Manor in Virginia outside Washington D.C. She married Selbert Young, an unemployed, drunk actor sixteen years younger than her. She helped Henry Miller by taking over writing pornography for an anonymous Texas oil baron. Her guests at Hampton Manor included Buckminster Fuller, Salvador Dali, Ezra Pound and other friends from Paris. She began a long-term love affair with black actor-boxer Canada Lee despite the threat of miscegenation laws. She founded Women Against War. She continued after World War II to try to establish a Center for World Peace at Delphi, Greece. When rebuffed by Greek authorities, she purchased Castello di Rocca Siniblada, a fifteenth-century castle north of Rome, which she used to support an artists colony. She died of pneumonia related to heart disease in Rome in 1970.

Early life

Born on April 20, 1892, in New York City, "Polly" as she was nicknamed by her family was the daughter of a prominent New England family. She was the oldest daughter of William Hearn Jacob and Mary Phelps Jacob and had two brothers, Leonard and Walter "Bud" Phelps. Her family divided its time between estates in New York at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, Watertown, Connecticut, and Westchester County, Long Island. She enjoyed the advantages of an upper-class lifestyle. She took dancing lessons at Mr. Dodsworth Dancing Class, attended Miss Chapin's School in New York City, went to school at Rosemary Hall prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut, where she played the part of Rosalind in As You Like It to critical acclaim. She attended formal balls, Ivy League school dances, and horse riding school.

In 1914 she was presented to the King of England at a garden party. Her ancestry included a knight of the Crusades and the Allardyce family in the War of the Roses. She was descended from Robert Fulton, developer of the steamboat, from the Plymouth Colony's first governor, William Bradford, and on her mother's side she was the seventh great-granddaughter of Puritan colonist William Phelps.

Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions," and he lived high. She grew up, she later said, "in a world where only good smells existed." "What I wanted", she said of her privileged childhood, "usually came to pass." She was a rather uninterested student. Author Geoffrey Wolff wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams." In keeping with the American aristocratic style of the times, she was even photographed as a child by Charles Dana Gibson.

After her father's death in 1908, she lived with her mother at their home in Watertown. That same summer she met her future husband, Richard Peabody, at summer camp. Her brother Len was boarding at Westminster School and Bud was a day student at Taft School. Approaching her own debut, she danced in "one to three balls every night" and slept from four in the morning until noon. At twelve o'clock she [Marie, her French maid] got me up for my customary debutante luncheon.

Attends debutante ball

In 1910, at age 19, Mary Phelps Jacob was preparing to wear a sheer evening gown to a débutante ball one evening. In New York in 1910 the only acceptable undergarment was a corset stiffened with whalebone. Polly, who was generously endowed, had worn the gown to her own debut a few weeks previously, and had found her corset's whale bones visibly poked out around her plunging neckline and from under the sheer fabric. Dissatisfied with this arrangement, she worked with her maid Marie to fashion two silk handkerchiefs together with some pink ribbon and cord.

Polly's new undergarment complemented the new fashions introduced at the time. When she showed it to friends the next day, they all wanted one. Family and friends almost immediately asked Polly to create brassieres for them, too. One day, she received a request for one of her contraptions from a stranger, who offered a dollar for her efforts. She knew then that this could become a viable business.

Patent for the brassiere

Jacob's brassiere, from the original patent application.

In January On November 3, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent to Mary P. Jacob for the 'Backless Brassiere'. The modern brassiere was invented and popularized by Paris couturier Herminie Cadolle as early as 1889 and was a sensation at the Great Exposition of 1900, becoming a fast seller among wealthy Europeans in the decade that followed. In the U.S., patents for various bra-like undergarments had appeared as early as the 1860s. Polly's design was lightweight, soft, and naturally separated the breasts (or more accurately, did not force them together). While a definite improvement in terms of lightness and visibility, her brassiere did not offer breasts a lot of support, and was more flattening than flattering.

After she married Richard Peabody, Polly filed a legal certificate with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on May 19, 1920, declaring that she was a married woman conducting a business using separate funds from her husband's bank account. She named the company the Fashion Form Brassiere Company and located her manufacturing shop on Washington Street in Boston, where she ran a two-woman sweatshop that manufactured her wireless brassière during 1922. The location also served as a convenient place to go for trysts with Harry Crosby, who would become her second husband.

In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, Caresse maintained that she had "a few hundred (units) of her design produced." She managed to secure a few orders from department stores, but her business never took off. Harry discouraged her from pursuing the business and persuaded her to close it. She later sold the brassiere patent to the Warners Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut for USD$1,500 (roughly equivalent to $27,304 in current dollars). Warner manufactured the "Crosby" bra for a while, but it was not a popular style and was eventually discontinued. Warner went on to earn more than fifteen million dollars from the bra patent over the next thirty years.

In her later years, she wrote,

I can't say the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it."

Marriage and divorce

In 1915, Polly Jacob and Richard ("Dick") Peabody were married by his grandfather, Endicott Peabody, the founder of the Groton School, and whose family had been one of the wealthiest in America during the 1800s. By the early 20th century a case could be made that the Peabodies had supplanted the Cabots and the Lodges as the most distinguished name in the region. They had a son, William Jacob, born on February 4, 1916. Polly found that Dick was a well-educated but undirected man and a reluctant father. Less than a year later Dick Peabody enlisted at the Mexican border and joined the Boston militia engaged in stopping Pancho Villa's cross-border raids. Less than a year after he returned home, he enlisted to fight in World War I. Their second child, a daughter, Poleen Wheatland ("Polly"), was born on August 12, 1917 but Dick was already in Officers Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery. He became a Captain in the United States Army's 15th Field Artillery, 2nd Division, American Expeditionary Force. While she had been largely cared for by his parents, he had been enjoying life at the front as a bachelor.

Dick Peabody returned home in early 1921 and was assigned to Columbia, South Carolina. Polly and the children soon joined him, but when the war ended, Dick found himself left with nothing but a family allowance. He suffered from his war experiences and returned to drinking heavily. Polly found he had only three real interests, all acquired at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase after fire engines and watch buildings burn. Polly's life was difficult during the war years and when her husband returned home, significantly changed, her life soon changed abruptly too.

Meets Harry Crosby

Main article: Harry Crosby

Nantasket Beach and the Nantasket Hotel, State Bath House and Paragon Park in the background, circa 1910.

The catalyst for Polly Jacob Peabody's transformation was her introduction and eventual marriage to Harry Crosby, a wealthy scion of a socially prominent Boston family and another veteran and victim of the recent war. Harry attended private schools and until age 19 appeared to be well on the path to a comfortable life as a member of the upper middle class. His experiences in World War I changed everything.

In the pattern of other sons of the elite from New England, he was a volunteer in the American Field Service Ambulance Corps. On November 22, 1917, the ambulance he was driving was destroyed by artillery fire, but he emerged miraculously unhurt. His best friend, "Spud" Spaulding, was seriously wounded in the explosion and Harry saved his life. The experience profoundly shaped his future. He was at the Second Battle of Verdun. After the battle, his section (the 29th Infantry Division, attached to the 120th French Division) was cited for bravery, and in 1919 Crosby was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Crosby wrote in his journal, "Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover when it's too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." He vowed that he would live life on his own terms.

After returning from World War I and while completing his degree at Harvard, Harry met Polly on July 4, 1920. Polly's husband Richard was in a sanitarium drying out from another drunken spell. Sensing Polly's isolation, Harry's mother Henrietta Crosby invited Polly to chaperone Harry and some of his friends to a party, including dinner and a trip to the amusement park at Nantasket Beach. During dinner, Harry never spoke to the girl on his left. breaking decorum. By some accounts, Harry fell in love with the buxom Mrs. Peabody in about two hours. He confessed his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park. Crosby pressed her to see him alone, an unthinkable proposition for a member of Boston's upper crust. She later wrote, "Harry was utterly ruthless... to know Harry was a devastating experience." On July 20, they spent the night together and had sex, and two days later Polly accompanied Harry to New York. He had planned a trip to France to tour battle sites. They spent the night together in New York at the Belmont Hotel. Polly said of the night, "For the first time in my life, I knew myself to be a person."

Polly was seen by her social circle as someone who had perverted the trust placed in her as a chaperone, as an older woman who had taken advantage of a younger man. To the Crosbys, she was dishonored and corrupt. Their scandalous courtship was the gossip of blue-blood Boston. She was 28, six years older than Harry, with two small children, and married.

In the fall her husband Richard moved back home. His parents supplied a small living allowance and Richard, Polly and the two children moved into a three-story tenement building. Crosby lived with his father while he continued his studies at Harvard. While Dick Peabody worked at the bank, Harry Crosby sent crates of flowers from his mother's garden to Polly's apartment and brought over toys for the children. They drove to the shore together. Richard volunteered to join the fire department and persuaded the fire chief to wire a fire alarm bell to his home so he could turn out at any hour. The fire chief soon let Richard go, and he retreated into drink again.

Crosby pursued Polly and in May 1921, when she would not respond to his ardor, Crosby threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him. Polly's husband Richard Peabody was in and out of sanitariums fighting alcoholism several times. Crosby pestered Polly to tell her husband of their affair and to divorce him. In May she revealed her adultery to Richard and suggested a separation, and he offered no resistance. Polly's mother insisted that she stop seeing Crosby for six month to avoid complete rejection by her society peers, a condition she agreed to, and she left Boston for New York. Divorce was "unheard of...even among Boston Episcopalians." Peabody's parents were outraged that she would ask for a divorce and at her affair with Crosby. Richard's father Jacob Peabody even visited Harry's father Stephen Crosby on January 4, 1922 to discuss the situation, but Harry's father would not engage in a conversation. Despite his disapproval of Harry's irregular behavior, he loved his son. Stephen Crosby at first attempted to dissuade Harry from marrying Polly Peabody, even buying him the Stutz he'd been asking for, but Harry would not be persuaded to change his mind. For her part, Polly's former friends pilloried her as an adulteress, leaving Polly stunned by the quick turn-about in their attitude towards her. Polly later described Harry's character as "He seemed to be more expression and mood, than man," wrote Caresse, "yet he was the most vivid personality I've ever known, electric with rebellion."

Divorce from Richard Peabody

In June, she formally separated from Richard, and in December he offered to divorce her. In February 1922, Polly and Richard Peabody were legally divorced. (Richard subsequently recovered from his alcoholism and in 1933 published The Common Sense of Drinking. He was the first to assert there was no cure for alcoholism. His book became a best seller and was a major influence on Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson.) Crosby had been working for eight months at Shawmut National Bank. He went on a six-day drinking spree and resigned. In May 1922, he moved to Paris to work in a job arranged for him by his family at Morgan, Harjes et Cie, the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. Crosby was the nephew of Jessie Morgan, the wife of American capitalist J. P. Morgan, Jr., who was also both Richard Peabody's and Harry Crosby's godfather.

Polly had previously traveled to England to visit her cousins, where Crosby visited her. In June, 1922, Polly returned to the U.S. In September, Crosby proposed to Polly via Transatlantic Cable, and the next day bribed his way aboard the Aquitania for New York.

Move to Paris

Harry and Polly Crosby shortly after their marriage in Paris during September 1922.

On September 9, 1922 Harry and Polly were married in the Municipal Building in New York City, and two days later they re-boarded the Aquitania and moved with her children to Paris, France. Harry continued his work at Morgan, Harjes & Co., his uncle J. P. Morgan's family bank in Paris.

Flirtations, affairs, drugs and drinking

Their bubble in Paris burst when Polly learned shortly after their arrival that Harry had been flirting with a girl from Boston. It was the first of many flirtations and affairs that Polly would learn to live with. In 1923, shortly after they arrived in Paris, Polly introduced Harry to her friend Constance Coolidge, the Comtesse de Jumilhac, and they began a sexual relationship. Polly had her own courtiers, and she outwardly tolerated Harry's dallying. In her journals, she privately worried about Harry's continued loyalty to her. When preparing her autobiography years later, she read letters between Harry and Constance in which shortly after his marriage to Caresse, Harry proclaimed to Constance that he cannot continue with Polly or meet her demand that he "love her more than anyone else in the world."

Their glamorous and luxurious lifestyle soon included an open marriage and numerous affairs, and plenty of drugs and drinking. They pledged a mutual suicide pact, in which they planned on October 31, 1942, when the earth would be closest to the sun in several decades, to jump out of an airplane together. This was to be followed by cremation and dispersal by another airplane.

In July 1925, he had sexual relations with a fourteen year old girl he nicknamed "Nubile," with a "baby face and large breasts," who he saw at Étretat. In Morocco during one of their trips to North Africa, Harry and Caresse took a 13-year-old dancing girl named Zora to bed with them. Harry had sex with a boy of unspecified age, his only homosexual dalliance.

In 1927, in the midst of his affair with Constance, he and Caresse met Russian painter Polia Chentoff. Harry asked her to paint Caresse's portrait, and he soon fell in love with her. In November Harry wrote his mother that Polia was "very beautiful and terribly serious about art she ran away from home when she was thirteen to paint." He was also in love with his cousin Nina de Polignac. In June 1928, he met Josephine Rotch at the Lido in Venice while she was shopping for her wedding trousseau, and they began an affair. In her autobiography, Caresse minimized Harry's affair with Josephine, eliminating a number of references to her. Harry told Polly that Constance and Josephine wanted to marry him.

Expatriate life

From their arrival in 1922, the Crosbys led the life of rich expatriates. They were attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of the artists gathering in Montparnasse. Harry enjoyed betting on the horse races and frequently dropped in a Drosso’s, where he would smoke opium, and he sometimes stayed away from home for days at a time. They settled in an apartment at 12, Quai d'Orléans on Île St-Louis, and Polly donned her red bathing suit and rowed Harry down the river to the Place de la Concorde where he walked the last few blocks to the bank. Harry wore his dark business suit, formal hat, and carried his umbrella and briefcase. Caresse rowed home alone, and in her swim suit her generously endowed chest drew whistles, jeers and waves from workmen. She later wrote that she thought the exercise was good for her breasts, and she also enjoyed the attention.

After about a year, Harry soon tired of the predictable banker's life and quit, joining the lost generation of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the restrictive atmosphere of 1920s America. Harry wanted as little to do with Polly's children as possible, and after the first year, her son Billy was shipped off to Cheam School in Hampshire, England.

Polly and Harry purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then two more in April 1925. At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name. They briefly considered Clytoris before deciding on Caresse. They later named their second whippet Clytoris, explaining to Caresse's daughter Poleen she was named after a Greek goddess. They lived in a fashionable apartment at 19, Rue de Lille, and obtained a 20-year lease on a mill outside of Paris in Ermenonville, France, from their friend Armand de la Rochefoucauld for 2,200 dollar gold pieces (about $39,113 today}. They named it "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun"). In January 1925 they traveled to North Africa where they first smoked opium, a habit to which they would return again and again. In 1928, they traveled to Lebanon to visit the Temple of Baalbek.

In 1928, he inherited Walter Berry's considerable collection of over 8,000 mostly rare books, a collection he prized but which he also scaled back by giving away hundreds of volumes. He was known to slip rare first editions into the bookstalls that lined the Seine. Polly took on lovers of her own, including Ortiz Manolo, Lord Lymington, Jacques Porel, Count Armand de la Rochefoucauld, and Cord Meier. But behind closed doors, Harry applied a double standard, quarreling violently with Caresse about her affairs. Occasionally they strayed together, as when they met two other couples and drove to the country near Bois de Boulogne, drew the cars into a circle with their headlights on, and changed partners.

Affair with Henri Cartier-Bresson

In 1929, Harry Crosby met Henri Cartier-Bresson at Le Bourget, where Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant had placed him under house arrest for hunting without a license. Crosby persuaded the officer to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days. They found they both had an interest in photography, and they spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil. Harry later said Cartier-Bresson "looked like a fledgling, shy and frail, and mild as whey." A friend of Crosby’s from Texas encouraged Cartier-Bresson to take photography more seriously. Embracing the open sexuality offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse, Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her. In 1931, two years after Harry Crosby's suicide, the end of his affair with Caresse Crosby left Cartier-Bresson broken-hearted and he escaped to Côte d'Ivoire within French colonial Africa.

Publish poetry and new writers

Main article: Black Sun Press

Cover of Tales of Shem and Shaun by James Joyce published by Caresse Crosby and the Black Sun Press

In April, 1927, they founded an English language publishing company, first called Éditions Narcisse, after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. They used the press as an avenue to publish their own poetry in small editions of finely-made, hard-bound volumes. In 1924, they first published a volume of poetry by Caresse, Crosses of Gold, followed by Graven Images in 1926. They enjoyed the reception their initial work received, and decided to expand the press to serve other authors, renaming the company the Black Sun Press, following on Harry's obsession on the symbolism of the sun.

They printed limited quantities of meticulously produced, hand-manufactured books, printed on high-quality paper. Publishing in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s put the company at the crossroads of many American writers who were living abroad. In 1928, as Éditions Narcisse, they printed a limited edition of 300 numbered copies of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe with illustrations by Alastair.

In 1928, Harry and Caresse changed the name of the press to the Black Sun Press in keeping with Harry's fascination with the symbolism of the sun. The press rapidly gained notice for publishing beautifully bound, typographically flawless editions of unusual books. They took exquisite care with the books they published, choosing the finest papers and inks.

They published early works of a number of avant-garde writers before they were well-known, including James Joyce's Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (which was later integrated into Finnegans Wake. They published Kay Boyle's first book-length work, Short Stories, in 1929. and works by Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Laurence Sterne, and Eugene Jolas. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. In 1929, she and Harry both signed poet Eugene Jolas' The Revolution of the Word Proclamation which appeared in issue 16/17 of the literary journal transition. After Harry died in a suicide pact with one of his many lovers, Caresse Crosby continued publishing until 1936, when she left Europe for the United States.

Harry's suicide

Main article: Harry Crosby

On July 9, 1928, Harry met 20 year old Josephine Noyes Rotch, whom he would call the "Youngest Princess of the Sun" and the "Fire Princess." She was descended from a family that first settled in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1690. Josephine would inspire Crosby's next collection of poems called Transit of Venus. Though she was several years his junior, Harry fell in love with Josephine. In a letter to his mother, dated July 24, 1928, Crosby wrote:

I am having an affair with a girl I met (not introduced) at the Lido. She is twenty and has charm and is called Josephine. I like girls when they are very young before they have any minds.

Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until she married, when it temporarily ended. However, Josephine rekindled their affair, and in the late fall of 1929, Harry and Josephine met and traveled to Detroit where they checked into an expensive, USD$12 a day hotel as husband and wife. For four days they took meals in their room, smoked opium, and had sex.

On December 7, 1929, the lovers returned to New York where once again they attempted to end the affair, and Josephine agreed that she would return to Boston and her husband. But two days later she had delivered a 36-line poem to Crosby who was staying with Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem read:

Death is our marriage.

On December 9, Harry Crosby wrote in his journal for the last time:

One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved.

Harry was found at 10pm that night in bed at Stanley Mortimer's studio in the Hotel des Artistes. He had a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple next to Josephine, who had a matching hole in her left temple. They were in an affectionate embrace. Both were dressed but had bare feet. Harry sported red-painted toenails and tattoos on the bottom of his feet. The Coroner said the Josephine had died at least two hours before Harry. There was no suicide note, and newspapers ran sensational articles for days about the murder or suicide pact—they could not decide which.

Later work

Illustration by Alastair from Harry Crosby's book Red Skeletons, published in 1927.

Harry left Caresse USD$100,000 (about $1,774,419 today) in his will, along with generous bequests to Josephine, Constance, and others. His parents Stephen and Henrietta had it declared invalid, but reassured Caresse that she would receive USD$2000 a year until she received money from Walter Berry's estate. Upon her return to Europe, Polleen was brought from Chamonix by Caresse's friend Bill Sykes, Billy was brought home from boarding school by another friend,, and the family and friends spent some time at the Mill. Polleen stayed with her mother for a few months, refusing to return to school. Billy returned to Choam, and in 1931 returned to the U.S. to attend the Lexox School.

After Harry Crosby's suicide, Caresse dedicated herself to the Black Sun Press. She also established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture, Crosby Continental Editions, that published paperback books by European writers including Alain Fournier, Charles-Louis Philippe, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Paul Eluard, George Grosz, Max Ernst, C. G. Jung and Americans like Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, and Kay Boyle, among others. Her paperback books, an innovative product in the 1930s, were not well received, and she closed the press in 1933.

Crosby pursued ambitions as an actress that she had since her 20s, and appeared as a dancer in two experimental short films directed by Emlen Etting: Poem 8 in 1932 and Oramunde in 1933. The Black Sun Press broadened its scope after Harry's death. Although it published few works after 1952, it printed James Joyce's Collected Poems in 1963. It did not officially close until Caresse's death in 1970.

Affair with black actor

In 1934, she had begun a love affair with black actor-boxer Canada Lee despite the threat of miscegenation laws. They had lunch uptown in Harlem at the then new restaurant Franks where they could maintain their secret relationship. By the 1940s, Lee was a Broadway star and featured in the nation-wide run of the play Native Son. But the only restaurant in Washington D.C. where they could eat together was an African restaurant named the Bugazi. Unlike so many of her lovers, he didn't ask for money, even when his nightclub The Chicken Coop had a difficult time. When Crosby's brother Walter expressed his dismay at their relationship during a dinner in the early 1940s, Caresse was offended, and had little contact with Walter over the next 10 years. Crosby and Lee's intimate relationship continued into the mid-1940s and contributed to her world-view. Crosby wrote a never-published play, The Cage, transparently based on their relationship.

Marries again

While taking her daughter Polly to Hollywood where she aspired to become an actress, Caresse met Selbert "Bert" Saffold Young, an unemployed aspiring actor and former football player 18 years her junior. When he saw her staring at him in a restaurant, he immediately came over and asked her to dance. She described him him as "handsome as Hermes" and "as militant as Mars." Her friend Constance Coolidge described Bert as "untamed" and "entirely ruled by impulse."

Without a job, he convinced Caresse he just wanted to own a farm and they decided to look for land on the east coast. They drove into Virginia looking for an old plantation house smothered in roses. When their car broke down, she accidentally discovered Hampton Manor, a Hereford cattle farm with a dilapidated brick mansion on a 486 acres (197 ha) estate in Bowling Green, Virginia. It had been built in 1838 by Virginia Legislator Daniel Coleman De Jarnette from plans by his friend Thomas Jefferson.

On September 30, 1936, she wrote to the New York Trust Company and instructed them to send 433 shares of stock that she used to buy the property, which was in need of renovation. They were married in Virginia on March 24, 1937.{{rp}334}} Bert was always asking Caresse for money, he crashed her car, ran up the telephone bill, and used all her credit at the local liquor store. Bert ended one bout of drinking with a solo trip to Florida and did not come back to Virginia until the next year.

Writing pornography

In Paris during 1933, Caresse had met Henry Miller. When he returned to the U.S. in 1940, he confessed to Caresse his lack of success in getting his work published. Miller's autobiographical book Tropic of Cancer was banned in the U.S. as pornographic, and he could get no other work published. She invited him to take a room in her spacious New York apartment on East 54th Street where she infrequently lived, which he accepted, though she did not provide him with money.

Desperate for cash, Miller fell to churning out pornography on commission for an Oklahoma oil baron at a dollar per page, but after two 100-page stories that brought him USD$200, he could do no more. Now he wanted to tour the United States by car and write about it. He got a USD$750 advance, and persuaded the oil man's agent to advance him another $200. He was preparing to leave on the trip but still had not provided the work promised. He thought then of Caresse Crosby. She was already pitching in ideas and pieces of writing to Anaïs Nin’s New York City smut club for fun, not money. In her journal, Nin wrote, "Harvey Breit, Robert Duncan, George Barker, Caresse Crosby, all of us concentrating our skills in a tour de force, supplying the old man with such an abundance of perverse felicities, that now he begged for more." Caresse was facile and clever, wrote easily and quickly, with little effort.

Caresse accepted Henry's proposal. She wrote at the top the title given her by Henry Miller, Opus Pistorum (later republished as Henry's work as Under the Roofs of Paris), and started right in. Henry left for his car tour of America. Caresse churned out 200 pages and the collector’s agent asked for more. Caresse's smut was just what the oil man wanted, according to his New York agent. No literary aspirations, just plain sex. In her journal, Nin wrote, "'Less poetry,' said the voice over the telephone. 'Be specific.'" In Caresse the agent had found the basic pornographic Henry Miller.

Caresse spent some of her time while her husband, Bert Young, fell into a drunken stupor every night churning out another 200 pages of pornography. In her diary, Anaïs Nin observed that everyone who wrote pornography with her wrote out of a self that was opposite to her or his identity, but identical with his desire. Polly or Caresse grew up amid the social constraints imposed by her upper-class family in New York. She had a doomed and troublesome romanticism with Harry Crosby. She participated in a decade or more of intellectual lovers in Paris during the 1920s.

Political and artistic activity

Although her husband Bert was often drunk and infrequently home, Caresse did not lack for company. Caresse extended a invitation to Salvador Dali and his wife, who were long-term guests, during which he wrote much of his autobiography. In 1934, Dalí and his wife Gala attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by Crosby. Other visitors included Buckminster Fuller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Max Ernst, Stuart Kaiser and other friends from her time in Paris.{{rp}313}} By 1941, having divorced Bert, Caresse moved to live in Washington D.C. full-time where she owned a home at 2008 Q Street NW from 1937 to 1950, and she opened the Caresse Crosby Modern Art Gallery, what was then the city's only modern art gallery, at 1606 Twentieth Street, near Dupont Circle.

In December, 1943, she wrote Henry Miller to ask if he had heard about her gallery and asked if he would be interested in exhibiting some of his paintings there. In 1944, she spent some time with at his home in Big Sur, and later opened his first one-man art at her gallery.

Publishes Portfolio

She also published under the Black Sun Press Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, in which she sought to continue her work with young and avant-garde writers and artists. She printed issues 1, 3, and 5 in the U.S. The second issue was published in Paris in December 1945, less than seven months after the end of the war. It featured primarily French writers and artists; the fourth issue was published in Rome and focused on Italian writers and artists; and the last issue was focused on Greek artists and writers.

During World War II and for some time after, paper was in short supply. Caresse printed the magazine on a variety of different sizes, colors and types of paper stock printed by different printers, stuffed into a 11.5 inches (290 mm) by 14 inches (360 mm) folder. Caresse printed 1,000 copies of each issue, and as she had done with the Black Sun Press, gave special treatment to 100 or so deluxe copies that featured original artwork by Matisse, Romare Bearden, and others. She secured contributions from a wide variety of well-known artists and writers, including Jean Paul Satre (The End of the War), Robert Lowell, Albert Camus (Letter to a German Friend, his first appearance in an English-language publication), Henri Matisse, Weldon Kees, Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso, René Char, Henri Cartier Bresson, Louis Aragon, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Rene Char, Paul Eluard, Jean Genet, Natalia Ginzburg, Victor Hugo, Weldon Kees, Robert Lowell, Henry Miller, Eugenio Montale, Anais Nin, Charles Olson, Francis Ponge, Kenneth Rexroth, Arthur Rimbaud, Yannis Ritsos, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Shapiro, Stephen Spender, Leo Tolstoy, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. After the sixth issue, she ran out of funds and sponsors. This was her last major publishing effort.

Visits Europe

Having left Europe in 1936, she yearned to visit her daughter Polly who had been living in London the entire time. Civilian travel was still very restricted after the war ended, and she reached out to Archibald Macleish, now Assistant Secretary of State, who helped her make travel arrangements and obtain a Visa. She traveled aboard a military British Overseas Airways Corporation flying boat, the sole civilian passenger, hand-carrying her Elsa Schiaparelli hat box that contained Pietro Lazzari's drawings of horses, and Romare Bearden's Passion of Christ watercolor series.

She learned after the war that Nazi troops set up base in her home "Le Moulin du Soleil," the French Mill. Caresse was upset when she learned that the German troops had painted over the wall of the home that had doubled as her guest book. Ironically, along with painting over the signature of Spanish painter Salvador Dalí (he intertwined his name with that of a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer), D.H. Lawrence (who drew a phoenix), they also painted over the signature of Eva Braun. She signed her name when she visited Harry and Caresse along with an Austrian big game hunter she was dating.

Post-war activity

View of the Rocca Sinibalda castle's maschio (tall tower) fronting the residential palace.

She became politically active again and founded the organizations Women Against War and Citizens of the World, which embraced the concept of a "world community" which other activists like Buckminster Fuller also supported. Caresse continued her work to establish a world citizen's center in Delphi, Greece, where in 1942 she bought a small house that overlooked the Grove of Apollo. In 1950, she divorced Selbert Young. In October 1952, she attempted to visit her property, but she was met by armed guards at Corfu as she got off the ferry from Brindisi. The police placed her under house arrest in the Corfu Palace Hotel, and after three days she was told she was not welcome in Greece, and ordered to leave. The American consul told her that the Greek government thought she was still "considered dangerous to the economy and politics of Greece." When this failed, she sought to create the "World Man Center" in Cyprus, which was to include a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. This effort too came to naught and she continued to search for a center for her world citizen project.

In 1953, Caresse wrote and published her autobiography, The Passionate Years. She wrote it mostly based on her personal recollection rather than a specific set of sources. It contained "many amusing and intense anecdotes... but precious little about what was going on with him [Harry] is revealed."

Billy's death

In the winter of 1954-55, her son Billy Peabody was in charge of the Paris office for American Overseas Airlines. He and his wife Josette had a small third-floor walk-up apartment on rue du Bac that they heated with a fireplace and a stove. On January 25, 1955, Billy died in his sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning. Josette was found unconscious and revived. Caresse traveled to Paris for his funeral between appearances at colleges where she talked about her life and the Black Sun Press.

Supported artist's colony

She was first introduced to a run-down castle named Castello di Rocca Siniblada 70 kilometres (43 mi) north of Rome in 1949 during a tour of Italy. Designed by Baldassare Peruzzi and built between 1530 and 1560 for Cardinal Alessandro Cesarini, in the 1950s she rented and later paid USD$2,600 (about $25,542 today) for the estate. It came with the Papal title of Principessa (Princess). She paid to electrify the castle and thus brought electricity to the neighboring village. She told a reporter that the castle had 320 rooms, "at least that's what the villagers tell me." (The deed listed 180 rooms.) Many of the rooms had 21 feet (6.4 m) ceilings and the palace was virtually impossible to heat. "I wouldn't live here if you paid me," she told a reporter.

The residential portion of the palace contains three main apartments and two courtyards. The walls of the main hall are decorated by frescoes from the sixteenth century. She used the castle to support various artists, including poets' seminars. Henry Miller described Rocca Sinibalda as the "Center for Creative Arts and Humanist Living in the Abruzzi Hills." Other artists visited for a weekend or an entire season. Caresse for a time divided her time between Rocca Sinibalda, which in the winter was too cold and unlivable, Hampton Manor in Bowling Green, Virginia, a home in Washington, D.C., a sprawling apartment at 137 East 54th Street in New York City, as well as a residence in Rome. In 1953, Alvin Redman published her autobiography, The Passionate Years. She put Rocca Sinibalda up for sale in 1970, shortly before she died.

Death

Suffering from heart disease, she received what was then still-experimental open heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic. She died from complications from pneumonia in Rome, Italy on January 24, 1970, aged 78. Time described her as the "literary godmother to the 'lost generation' of expatriate writers in Paris." Anais Nin described her as "a pollen carrier, who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships."

But she lived long enough to see many of the aspiring writers she nurtured in the 1920s become well known and accepted authors. The bra she invented went through a number of transformations and become a standard undergarment for women all over the world. Her first two husbands and her son Bill preceded her in death. She was survived by her daughter Polleen Peabody de Mun North Drysdale and two granddaughters.

Works

As author

• Crosses of Gold Black Sun Press, Paris, 1925
• Painted Shores Black Sun Press, Paris, 1927
• The Stranger Black Sun Press, 1927
• Impossible Melodies Black Sun Press, 1928
• Poems for Harry Crosby Black Sun Press, 1930
• The Passionate Years Dial Press, 1953

As editor

• Portfolio: An Intercontinental Review Six editions, Washington, D. C.

Additional reading

• Crosby, Caresse (1953). The Passionate Years. New York: Dial Press. ISBN 0912946660.
• Hamalian, Linda (2005). The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby. Southern Illinois University. ISBN 0809318652.
• Wolff, Geoffrey (2003). Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby. New York Review of Books. ISBN 1590170660.

External links

• Mary Phelps Jacob Inventor of the Week Archive November 2001 (December 2003)
• "Caresse Crosby, Infield." Cosmic Baseball Association, 1998 (December 2003)
• Mary Phelps Jacob, Inventor of the Modern Brassiere
• Caresse Crosby Papers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale Special Collections Research Center
• The Crosbys: literature's most scandalous couple
• Caresse Crosby from "Always Yes, Caresse," 1962 (Video)

This article was originally based upon material originally written by Brian Phelps and licensed for use in Wikipedia under the GFDL.