Sargent's Women Page 10

  The family’s arrival in New York became a trial for Lucia. Her sister Sally (“Satty”) was impossible: “I will whisper to you that I wish Satty would marry and go to Europe. . . . It would suit me better than to have her in New York,” Lucia wrote to Harry. Sally surely had her chances at marriage. Lord Bertrand Russell, mathematician, philosopher, and member of one of the most prominent aristocratic families in England, sounded like a smitten schoolboy when describing Sally in his Autobiography. She spent a long visit with him and his first wife at his estate in England in the summer of 1899. “Her movements,” he wrote “were the most graceful that I have ever seen.” He talked longingly of their walks together in the twilight, though confessed that he never dared kiss her. She had the same effect on his eccentric cousin, St George Pitt-Rivers, who would propose marriage. She declined—perhaps a wise move on her part. A confirmed Buddhist who wandered about Tibet visiting the Mahatmas, Pitt-Rivers was convinced that he had invented the electric light, not Edison, and he squandered his fortune in a series of futile lawsuits. Russell’s memoir notes that many others lined up for Sally’s hand—“She used to say that you could always tell when an Englishman was going to propose, because he began: ‘The governor’s a rum sort of chap, but I think you’d get on with him.’ ”

  Sally remained single and devoted to her mother. Even Sally would later admit that she might have taken filial devotion too seriously. Like a guard dog, she sometimes lashed out at people, barking at them to protect her dear mother from harm or hurt. She felt no such protective instinct toward her sister. From childhood on, she lorded over Lucia and resented any attention her younger sibling might receive. As children, the brothers and sisters all engaged in dares and contests, some of them dangerous. One day Lucia jumped from their high stoop on Commonwealth Avenue and severely injured her back. For a time she was restricted to a wheelchair, and when she didn’t improve, the doctor prescribed an extended stay at the spa town of Baden-Baden in Germany. Lucia went there, received daily mud baths for a month—and got lots of personal attention. Sally was livid, convinced that her sister was just faking it.

  Sally’s jealousy only worsened as they got older. She never failed to scold Lucia about minor things, and she surely seethed at the spotlight being cast on her younger sister who, by the late 1890s, was a respected presence in the art world. Why was Lucia gaining fame, and not she? After all, she had always been considered the beautiful sister, the one chosen by Sargent. And yet, by her late twenties the five-foot-one-inch Lucia had changed in looks. She’d lost her baby fat and, in fact, was growing thinner and thinner. She was quite lovely, with her brown eyes, and her hair parted in the middle, pulled back, and braided into a figure-eight pattern at the back of her neck. Lucia’s daughter would remember the precise way her mother had arranged her hair, and in the 1970s she described it in a letter addressed to “All Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren.” She wanted her descendants to know all about Lucia: what she looked like, how courageous and sensitive she was, how talented and beloved she was. Also how bold. During her lifetime many people told Lucia that she “thought like a man,” which was quite a statement back then.

  Lucia also smoked like a man, having taken it up after her father offered her a cigarette in Boston. (Yet another sore point with Sally: Her father let Lucia smoke, but not her.) Smoking seemed to confirm Lucia’s nonconformist, self-confident persona. Her letters to Harry, however, reveal another side to her character: her insecurities and her neediness, all of which she had to camouflage in order to forge ahead in her career. “If it had not been for marrying you I see that I should have suffocated,” she wrote to Harry in May of 1898.

  I am too weak to stand up to my guns. I can’t analyze and make epigrams and I’m terrified and abashed before the critical attitude. I needed love and kindness to develop at all, and . . . to make me feel at all competent in meeting other people, and you give it all to me Dear. I wish my nature were more open and that I was contented to be what I am without caring what people thought, but I’m not. And the consequence is I’m paralyzed unless I’m met with gentleness and tolerance. . . . I realize how much I owe to you, and I shall try to help you more in the future as you have helped me.

  She trusted and loved Harry. She had to. It was part of her armor.

  Lucia spent most of that hot summer of 1898 in New York and Boston, painting, giving art lessons, and sending checks to Harry as soon as she got them, despite being short of cash and unable to pay her own boarding house charges. Somehow Harry couldn’t even manage to get the checks into their bank account in a timely fashion. She occasionally grew exasperated with the way he’d leave her hanging by a thread, but she tried to remain optimistic. Surprisingly so. On June 18 she wrote that a three hundred dollar check from the Cabots would soon be arriving at the post office in Windsor: deposit it immediately, she instructed him sternly. “I have so little faith in your doing things promptly since you have so cheerfully let me be here, without any money. . . . It has really been very painful to me.” She was so exhausted, she told Harry, that she didn’t even know how she had found the strength to finish the Cabot order. But by the end of her letter, she’d already softened toward him. How could she stay mad at him? Terrific love, and art, defined her. “After all, it is the greatest thing in the world to paint, so far as one’s own joy goes, isn’t it? . . . Goodbye bad little boy.”

  The renovations on the Cornish house and studio soaked up a lot of money, and so did Lucia’s medical bills. Her health was failing once again—her nerves were frayed, her back ached, at times her right arm failed her. The doctor in New York visited daily, complained about not being paid, and suggested surgery. Exactly what kind, Lucia doesn’t say. She endured an operation all alone at the end of June—no Harry to hold her hand—and then had to spend ten days recuperating in bed. The New York heat was so brutal that the city’s poor children were dying in their tenements. She describes conditions in 1898 New York as if from the lowest circle of Hell: “It is simply burning here. Everything you touch is heated through. The air steams in through the blinds in hot puffs. . . . I hear the babies crying and my heart aches. . . . It is cruel to hear them, to read of their deaths. It is not the rich who are responsible, but everyone with a vote and a heart, who might help. They let water run in the streets late in the afternoon, and the children roll in it, and that is said to save many lives.”

  By the middle of the month she was up and about, her stitches removed, but her spirits low. Her back still ached and she felt on the verge of tears at any given moment. She was convinced that the surgery had been useless, that she was never going to get better. Her mood only darkened when her father stopped by one day, giddy over having made some quick money buying and selling stocks after getting an inside tip about the Spanish-American War. At least we don’t have to do that sort of thing, stepping all over other people to get ahead, she confided to Harry. “Artists have a more fortunate life.”

  More fortunate for Harry, perhaps, who could cloister himself in his New Hampshire studio. Lucia, meanwhile, had to cajole and please her clients. Desperate for money, she was grateful for the steady stream of commissions that came her way, but they held her pinned down, far from her family, lonesome and sick in New York.

  Lucia looked upon her rich and mighty patrons with a jaundiced eye. Her dealings with the J. P. Morgan family were instructive. Jane “Jessie” Norton Grew, Lucia’s childhood friend from Boston, brought the artist into the midst of that über-banking family, one of the brand names of Gilded Age excess. In 1890, Jessie had married John “Jack” Pierpont Morgan Jr., son and namesake of J. P. Morgan, the bulbous-nosed financier who would be characterized alternately as “the financial Moses of the New World” or as “a beefy, red-faced, thick-necked financial bully, drunk with wealth and power.” A man of huge appetites, Morgan Sr. stockpiled steam yachts and mistresses, as well as priceless cultural treasures—paintings, drawings, artifacts, manuscripts, musical scores, and bo
oks of the rarest quality. His private preserve would be turned into the Morgan Library & Museum after his death.

  A portrait of the financier/collector hangs above the mantel in his study—it’s a heavily edited version of the real man, his grotesquely oversized and reddened nose (he suffered from a skin condition known as rhinophyma) reduced to normal size. It took sheer willpower not to stare at that unsightly protuberance when in the great man’s presence. (Further proof that money and power are surely aphrodisiacs, for Morgan never lacked lovers.) The painting is an act of imagination on the part of the artist Frank Holl, who clearly wanted to get paid for his work. Delighted by the painting—perhaps even convinced that it looked like him—Morgan had photographs of it sent to friends. Some years later Morgan wanted John Singer Sargent to do yet another portrait of him. At first Sargent agreed, but then couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d grown weary of portraiture by that time, and there were limits to what he’d endure, even if offered a king’s ransom.

  Sargent did, however, paint Morgan’s daughter-in-law, Jessie, in 1905. It took thirteen sittings in his studio, and the artist arranged a mirror so she could watch him as he summoned up her image in paint. As usual, he chose her clothing from an assortment that she’d brought with her—he settled on a gown of white satin with a floral pattern, a voluminous fur of white fox that he draped around her, a single long gold chain, and an unopened fan in one hand. She appears quite elegant and demure.

  Morgan Sr. wasn’t terribly fond of his daughter-in-law, whose frosty manner made it evident that she didn’t approve of his flagrant extramarital affairs. The financial titan deemed her prim and judgmental, and made fun of her in private, referring to her as “cold roast Boston.”

  Jessie may have been testy with the old man, but she had a soft spot for Lucia, despite her unconventional life, and understood her friend’s plight. A commission was arranged for Lucia to paint Jessie. This, in turn, led other members of the Morgan family to request miniatures. In October of 1898, Lucia was summoned to Cragston, J. P. Morgan Sr.’s estate—or rather his “barony”—on the Hudson River near the village of Highland Falls, not far from West Point. Cragston was set on the decidedly less fashionable western shore of the Hudson; the eastern side of the river was populated by Livingstons, Astors, Chanlers, and other eminences.

  Morgan had purchased Cragston in 1872 when it was still a working dairy farm of 368 acres, with a wooden farmhouse set on a bluff overlooking the Hudson. He nearly doubled the acreage by buying adjacent lots, had huge wings added to the house, and relandscaped the grounds in the manner of an English country house. He built greenhouses, tennis courts, kennels for his prize-winning collies (the kennels alone cost over a quarter million dollars in today’s money), and stables for the finest horses he could buy. He constructed an L-shaped dock to accommodate his enormous steam yacht—the favorite plaything of the Gilded Age rich and a source of endless jockeying over who had the biggest one. Morgan generally did—and if not, he’d build a new one, always named Corsair. The yacht served as a kind of clubhouse for Morgan’s male friends and assorted mistresses, and a refuge from his wife. It also made a huge impression when closing business deals.

  Lucia was not bowled over by either Cragston or its occupants. Though an article in the New York Times had gushed over the estate’s grounds and the “charming and artistic” thirty-room house with its “many gables and harmonious lines,” Lucia found little charm and less artistic spirit. “The house is one of the regular Deadly Bores,” she wrote to Harry, describing a warren of “endless rooms covered with big chintzy flowered papers.”

  Lucia had wandered into a country-house comedy, by turns hilarious or boorish. Jack Morgan and others would enter her workspace unannounced, criticize her work, and exclaim, “Lunch!” Aghast to find that Lucia subsisted on cold potatoes, the Morgans insisted she join them en famille for their gargantuan midday meal that consisted of soup, a beef entrée accompanied by corn, potatoes, and eggplant, all washed down with wine. Next came pie, fruit, and coffee. No wonder the Morgans are all extremely fat, Lucia wrote. Table conversation revolved around money. They discussed how much interest they were getting from their bank accounts. When Jack, who earned a conservative 2 percent on his account, learned that another family member was earning 3.5 percent, he was nearly apoplectic—not with envy, but with fear that such a high interest rate was dangerous. He advised closing the account immediately. Lucia, who didn’t have two cents to rub together, could only listen with incredulity as they recounted the shocking tale of the friend who’d died broke, leaving to his wife and daughters only a life insurance policy of $350,000. How could they live on such a pitiful amount?

  Lucia, of course, couldn’t even imagine such a windfall. Mrs. Morgan knew all too well about the Fairchilds’ financial collapse and she suddenly remembered her luncheon guest. “Well,” she said to Lucia, “we aren’t all talented like you, Mrs. Fuller, to be able to earn a living, when we lose our money.” And then, as if to embrace an egalitarian tone, she pronounced, “I think we all ought to have a trade.” Turning to her daughter she went on, “I think Annie could be an accountant.” Annie, the independent, defiantly unmarried youngest daughter, countered to her mother that she’d rather be a manicurist. Then someone told a story of a manicurist who’d saved $25,000. Lucia wrote with amusement that the two butlers serving silently at the table bore “a discreet air of promising not to remember what we said.”

  The Morgan commissions added up to a thousand dollars worth of work—some $26,000 in present-day money—a huge payday for Lucia. That is, if they’d ever pay. Extremely reluctant to part with money, the Morgans decided to delay payment until all the portraits were done, which left Lucia in a hole. (Her brother Charley advised Lucia not to press the Morgan family, and he offered her one hundred dollars to tide her over.) This slight wasn’t entirely because she was a woman or a young artist. J. P. Morgan Jr. also nickel-and-dimed Sargent over money due for a portrait of his wife. The painting had been made in London, where Sargent lived and worked full time; thus the canvas had to be shipped abroad, making it liable for duty fees. Irked at this relatively small surcharge, Morgan argued that he shouldn’t have to pay it since the artist was American. He urged Sargent to get an exemption at the American consulate.

  After the long siege of work in New York, Lucia was finally able to go home to Cornish to their newly renovated house. Bliss. The children could scarcely believe their good fortune, for they adored their mother. But for about six months Lucia remained bedridden with what they believed was rheumatism. She’d barely regained her strength when disaster struck. On a chilly December night in 1899, a fire started in the attic. Bells in the village rang out and volunteers quickly arrived to fight the blaze. As the house burned, Lucia calmly oversaw the removal of every stick of furniture and every piece of china. Young Clara and Charley were carried across the way to a neighboring house. Years later Clara remembered standing frozen at the window, staring across the way as their home burned to the ground, terrified that her mother would be consumed by flames. Lucia survived unscathed, but she wasn’t able to save her wedding dress, locked away in a trunk in the attic. Harry’s whereabouts during this emergency goes unmentioned.

  Their home had to be completely rebuilt. The family moved into an empty house nearby and watched as a new Italian villa rose up atop the bones of the old place. The desolate, charred classical columns that had survived the fire became the foundation for a pergola, covered in grape vines, which surrounded the central open courtyard. An even grander transformation took place. At the extravagant cost of two hundred dollars, workers excavated a large portion of the courtyard (seven feet at its deepest point), placed a foot of stone at the bottom of the open pit, installed pipes, and constructed sidewalls. The result: a pool, twenty-eight-feet long and twelve-feet wide. The courtyard was enclosed on four sides making the pool entirely private. Spring fed, and deliciously cold on a warm summer day, the pool became the centerpiece of life
among the children of the Cornish colony. They gathered there and learned how to swim, and practiced diving off the deep end. The children swam naked. It was utter freedom floating in the water beneath that blue, blue sky. (Ethel Barrymore rented the house in the summer of 1906 and famously hosted pool parties of a much more mature nature. A neighboring poet said the twenty-seven-year-old actress had a penchant for diving into the pool from atop one of the columns. And if one should feel the need for a bathing suit? Well, they were arrayed on pegs, “and the fit shall be as God wills.”)

  A question was posed among Clara and Charley’s friends one day when they had assembled for a swim: “If you couldn’t have your real mother, whose mother would you like to have?” At once, the children exclaimed, “Mrs. Fuller!” (The only holdout was little Mabel Churchill, daughter of best-selling novelist Winston Churchill, who piped up, “If I couldn’t have my real mother, I’d like my father to be my mother.”) Lucia was a special favorite among the children. She paid attention to them, took them seriously. She encouraged their imaginative and theatrical spirits. She designed costumes for their staged productions. Clara remembered how beautifully her mother read aloud to them—it might be Dickens or James Fenimore Cooper or Thackeray. On the day when the children agreed that they’d want Lucia as their mother, she joined them in a game of planchette, an early kind of Ouija board. The Fullers had four new kittens and the children asked the planchette to name them. The children and Lucia put their fingers on the saucer that served as the pointer. It circled furiously and spelled out without hesitation: “Drat it, Dash it, Damn it, and Drown it.”

  The Fairchild-Fuller family papers are housed at Dartmouth College, not far from Cornish. The papers include thousands of Lucia’s items—handwritten diaries, letters, photographs, calling cards, bills (always bills), a list of wedding gifts, receipts, bits of poetry, sketches, her childrens’ report cards, and assorted oddities. Lucia saved clippings about unsolved crimes and murders from all over the country with headlines like “BLOODY HARLAN. A STORY OF CRIME IN THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS” and “DOOMED TO DIE ON ONE SCAFFOLD . . . THREE BROTHERS AND THEIR TWO COUSINS SENTENCED TO SWING TOGETHER FOR MURDER”; accounts of stabbings involving domestic disputes; and reports about H. H. Holmes, the notorious serial killer who stalked the Chicago Exhibition where Lucia’s Women of Plymouth had been exhibited. Lucia’s seemingly bizarre obsession had a professional purpose—among the papers is a draft of a murder mystery she was writing.