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  Novelist Hamlin Garland came to visit and recalled being greeted by Elsie in the Great Hall. The doors burst open and Palmer was wheeled in atop a couch, with two servants and two gigantic wolfhounds at his side. “On this couch lay the old soldier, his head propped by pillows,” Garland wrote. “He had the stern dignity of a disabled duke in the days of Elizabeth.”

  Like a duke of old, Palmer assembled his knights for a grand gathering, with Elsie at his side. In August 1907 nearly 280 members of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, his old Civil War regiment, convened in Colorado Springs for an all-expenses-paid reunion. It was nine days of revelry at the Antler’s Hotel, the fanciest hotel in town. The bottles of champagne and liquor piled to the stockroom ceiling were happily consumed. (So much for Colorado Springs as a “dry” town.) There were dinners, toasts, speeches, and a grand parade through town with the General leading the way in his Stanley Steamer. Palmer spent well over a million dollars in today’s money to celebrate his old comrades in arms. A photograph taken at Glen Eyrie shows the General in his wheelchair surrounded by his regiment—and Elsie in a fancy hat.

  Elsie’s role in life seemed set. She would forever be the caretaker for her family: first, for her sickly mother; then her quadriplegic father; and finally her sister Marjory, who contracted consumption about the same time her father was injured. She, too, had to be cared for at Glen Eyrie. As time went on, the General grew more demanding and cranky, and Marjory’s lungs grew weaker.

  At the moment when it seemed that Elsie would never be able to claim a separate life of her own, she did something remarkable. She stood up to her father and announced that she was going to marry and leave Glen Eyrie. The meek, mild, and dutiful Elsie revealed a streak of courage and determination that must have shocked the General. She also unveiled a secret. Over the years, she had made occasional trips back to England, where she felt so at home. While there, she apparently renewed her relationship with Leo Myers, the young man who had come to America in search of his dead father years earlier. Out of the blue, Elsie announced she was engaged to Leo. Close friends had no idea they even knew each other. Leo had his private papers burned after his death, so it’s impossible to discern exactly what drove their relationship. One thing is certain: He was not after Elsie’s money, as he had inherited his own substantial legacy in 1906, and was already known in England as a generous donor to the arts. Was it love? Perhaps. But it seems more likely that Elsie saw Leo as her escape; the only way she could break free from her father’s smothering demands.

  On the evening of January 20, 1908, Elsie, then thirty-five, married twenty-six-year-old Leo at Glen Eyrie. Her father and sisters were presumably in attendance. Guests arrived from New York and London. Elsie emerged in a wedding dress that not even Sargent could have conjured: a long, brown wrap covered with huge metal buckles. Cords holding tiny bronze figures of animals of all kinds—a thousand of them—crisscrossed her outfit. It was like a medieval coat of mail, more a piece of body armor than a dress. One can imagine the tinkling sound as she moved, with a thousand metal figures swaying and colliding in the Colorado stillness. The New York Times covered the event on the front page of its January 21, 1908, edition. The headline read, “Bride’s Wrap of Bronze.”

  After the wedding, Elsie bid farewell to her bedridden father, and the newlyweds began a new life together in London on the Chelsea Embankment overlooking the Thames—and just down the road from her former lover, Peter Harrison. Not long after returning to England, Elsie brought Leo to visit Peter. (Dos was apparently not there.) Perhaps Elsie felt the need to close that chapter of her life once and for all—and to prove to him that she could survive and prosper without him. Peter acknowledged that Leo was beaming with happiness. But, manipulative as ever, he wrote to Elsie that seeing her again “was like dew after a hot baking day.”

  On November 4, 1908, Elsie gave birth to a daughter named Elsie Queen (“EQ”). A rumor spread that the General had given EQ, his first grandchild, a million dollars as a Christmas gift. Under the headline “Not a $1,000,000 Baby,” the New York Times reported that Palmer’s business manager denied such a gift. When Elsie received news that the General’s health was failing, she and Leo rushed from London to Glen Eyrie with the newborn. Elsie wanted her father to meet his granddaughter. A photograph shows the General immobile in his hospital bed with the infant lying on his chest. The General died on March 13, 1909, while Elsie, Leo, and EQ were in Colorado. Elsie oversaw the funeral. Over seven thousand mourners lined the procession route to the cemetery in Colorado Springs where her father’s ashes were buried. The New York Times immediately began to speculate as to how much the General had left his daughters, with estimates ranging from $6 to $15 million.

  Elsie cabled Peter Harrison, who had recently been at Glen Eyrie with Dos, to break the news of her father’s death. Peter wrote back saying that the end was probably merciful, for living in such a diminished state was intolerable for a man like the General. But Peter, ever the cad, couldn’t resist an opportunity to attempt seduction once again. Speaking of the secret “bond” he still shared with Elsie, he said that their relationship was beyond anything felt by mere mortals. He expected nothing from her, he said, except knowing that she loved their bond as much as he did. As the years went on, he wrote Elsie occasionally and always expressed his undying love for her—while maintaining his relationship with Dos. Elsie didn’t take the bait. She was beyond that.

  As for Dos, she moved to London after the General’s death and lived openly with Peter. She moved to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea—conveniently, on the same street as Peter’s wife. Peter and Alma never divorced, but remained neighbors. Sargent’s mother and sister also resided on Cheyne Walk, and, for a time, Elsie and Leo were just a short stroll away. Dos became a social worker in London, served with great distinction during World War I, and lived in England for the rest of her life.

  Elsie and Leo forged their own life together in England, moving from one place to the next. Elsie had a second daughter—Eveleen Myers, named after Leo’s mother—in 1910. Leo became a writer and maintained a tenuous connection with the Bloomsbury Set of intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, but he was so high strung and argumentative in that competitive orbit that he was considered impossibly difficult. Elsie had achieved her freedom but it came at a cost. Her marriage to Leo was unhappy. A tortured soul, he recognized his own contradictory nature and resented it. He declared himself a communist, but had a passion for expensive car racing and a taste for fine food. (He was part owner of a very chic and costly French restaurant.) When Leo and Elsie moved to Cambridge in the late 1920s, he had the walls in his study painted a shiny black.

  Life with Leo was turbulent, and at times they lived apart. Elsie focused her attention on her daughters, much as Queen had done a generation earlier. Over the years Elsie also remained devoted to the memory of her father—but at a distance, never returning to Colorado. Not long after the General’s death, she wrote to Sargent asking him which American artist he’d recommend to create a monumental sculpture of her father. From Corfu, Greece, where he was on a painting holiday, Sargent wrote back that he was at a loss. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had died several years earlier, would have been his choice. An equestrian statue of the General that stands in the center of Colorado Springs was eventually completed in 1929, and, much to Elsie’s delight, a World War II Liberty Ship was christened the SS William J. Palmer in 1943.

  Despite his personal demons, Leo gained renown for writing The Root and the Flower, a trilogy set in sixteenth-century India that was published between 1929 and 1935. His work became all the rage in the 1930s, but his literary success brought him no solace. Leo once wrote that living was “a very over-rated pleasure,” and in 1944 he took his own life. He wanted to usher himself into that other world that intrigued him so.

  Elsie survived for another decade, dying in England on September 17, 1955, when she was nearly eighty-three years old. She was helped in her final years by a man wh
o’d worked in the stables at Glen Eyrie for her father. He served as her chauffeur and gardener, and took her on long afternoon walks through the serene English landscape—as her father would have approved—during which they could reminisce about the old days in the Garden of the Gods.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  It is the greatest thing in the world to paint, so far as one’s own joy goes, isn’t it?

  —Lucia Fairchild Fuller to her husband, June 18, 1898

  THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM, the grand old private library and museum, is essentially an enormous vault where Beacon Hill and Back Bay families have deposited their heirlooms, books, paintings, and prints for over two centuries. Located at the whimsical address of 10½ Beacon Street, the Athenaeum permits well-behaved dogs into its hushed and atmospheric precincts. The galleries and library spaces are full of comfy chairs and gorgeous artwork, Sargent paintings among them; huge windows look out onto the leafy seventeenth-century Granary Burying Ground where Paul Revere and other Revolutionary heroes rest.

  The librarian there had never seen the uncatalogued artifact before, so he watched nervously as the fragile two-foot-tall scrapbook was opened, its hand-sewn binding barely holding the brittle pages in place. The scrapbook, entirely dedicated to Sargent and his career, had been compiled by the artist’s devoted second cousin. The book is a hodgepodge of photos, newspaper and magazine clippings, and reproductions of his paintings. There is no particular order or chronology, but the book begins and ends with photographs taken on the beach at Nahant, Massachusetts, a craggy summer colony on the North Shore. There Sargent vacationed with the extraordinary Fairchild family. The snapshots are not in the usual square format but round, and draw the eye right into the scene, as if looking through a telescope, so in an instant one feels privy to an intimate circle.

  By God, here’s Sargent winking at the camera, his mouth half open, perhaps smiling (hard to tell with that bushy beard and mustache), as he shares a jovial moment with the unseen person behind the Kodak. That newly invented box camera had become the gadget of the moment, just the thing for a seaside holiday. On that bright summer day, thirty-four-year-old Sargent—riding the high tide of fame, fresh from a triumphant painting tour in New York City, sought after by some of the richest and most powerful potentates on earth—appears to be enjoying himself in the sunshine on a rocky cove, even if he is a tad overdressed in dark suit and cravat and watch chain. Behind him, in the distance, can be seen palatial summer houses, one of which rises up above the water like a medieval cathedral.

  Sargent shared a series of languid summer days from 1889 to 1891 with the Fairchilds in England, Paris, and Nahant. They commissioned work from him, and Charles Fairchild, a Boston banker, advised Sargent on his finances. The relationship grew much deeper than a professional one. Sargent chose the “ever-hospitable Fairchilds,” as one friend called them, to take in his twenty-year-old sister Violet when she was besotted with a Swiss charmer whom Sargent viewed dimly. Violet had befriended one of the Fairchild girls, Sally, in England; so when Violet seemed determined to leap into an unsuitable marriage, Sargent whisked her away to the New England household of the “wonderfully decent and understanding people with a grand home life.” After a frenetic stretch of painting in New York, Sargent chose to relax and refresh himself among the Fairchilds. Of course, he never really stopped working. On a summer afternoon on the beach at Nahant, inspiration seized him, and he produced one of his most enigmatic portraits—vastly different from his usual work, as if the seaside sun and breezes had released him from invisible coils.

  Years later, Sally Fairchild, the oldest daughter, recalled details of the great man’s visit—the excitement that swirled around the Fairchild household that summer of 1890 when she was twenty-one—Sargent’s nonstop activity, painting, playing the piano, puffing furiously on his cigarettes, expounding on the beauty of his current favorite color, magenta. Sally enchanted the artist, as she did seemingly everyone. One smitten contemporary—and there were many of them—described Sally as a “legend,” with a face “so outgiving—so generous . . . it strikes me as a sunburst!” Sargent brought Sally outside to paint her. She remembered that he set her against the shadowy stone cliffs. Wild vegetation—beach grasses, evening primrose, and staghorn sumac—covered the steep granite inclines on the far eastern end of the island where they were staying, and in deft strokes he captured several layers of that tangled plant life. Yellowish, pod-like shapes can be seen on one side of Sally, and slashes of his favorite magenta on the other. The young woman, dressed in stark virginal white, pops out of the dark verdant background. It’s as if she is illuminated from within, an ethereal presence emerging out of nature.

  And then the stroke of genius. Sargent covers that beautiful face—the one that everyone adored—with a long, translucent turquoise-blue veil that he wraps sinuously around her neck in thick curves of paint. He obscures Sally’s features except for a commanding eyebrow, a purplish magenta splotch of eye, and the barest hint of a nose and ear. Her cheek has a healthy rosy hue—here’s a young woman unafraid of the sunshine and sea air. The veiled Sally is in profile, and a jaunty straw hat sits atop her auburn-colored hair. Her dress is iridescent, though tan shadows fall across part of it—a passing cloud perhaps. One can almost hear the crash of the waves in the background.

  The portrait feels like a frame from a film of that Nahant summer. In the movement of the brushstrokes we can see a gust of wind blowing in. The breeze must be strong because the netting cleaves tightly to Sally’s face. The edge of her veil lifts aloft and she gathers the sheer fabric with her hand, pulling it back against her neck. In a few deft strokes Sargent—a genius at making hands—creates her fingers, so tapered and well-groomed, the hand of someone very well tended. A blue ring sparkles with the same color as the veil. And beneath the veil, a curving and imperious eyebrow. “One look at that eyebrow and you know who she is,” the owner of the painting notes. Indeed. Sally was an imperial presence, a diva.

  Here is the forthright and vibrant presence of youth, yet wrapped in netting, like an art installation by Christo. Sally’s beauty and strength of character seep right through the fabric that caresses her face. A veiled woman—what could be more exotic and alluring? Who was she? With a veil she could be anyone—like an actress taking on a role. But which persona was it? Sargent had a fondness for the theater, for artifice. And what of the artist himself, a man who carefully kept his own personal life under wraps, unwilling to share his world, his secrets. He was no stranger to veils.

  The previous summer the Fairchild family had vacationed near Sargent in England. The Fairchilds were staying in the picturesque village of Broadway, an outpost in the Cotswolds favored by artists, including Sargent and Henry James. Indeed, James might have conjured up this spirited American family traveling around Europe, collecting art with a discerning eye, and mixing easily with creative spirits. The rock-solid father (banker, stockbroker, and Civil War veteran), poet mother, and their seven red-headed children formed a cultured, literate, exquisitely refined clan that brimmed with that American self-confidence and energy so admired by Sargent.

  Broadway and its surrounding landscape evoked Elizabethan times, a well-preserved backdrop for tragedy or comedy—honey-colored limestone buildings, gabled houses with mullioned windows, picture-perfect cottage gardens, hedgerows and country lanes, and meadows full of sheep. Everything was ancient and redolent of historical drama. The Fairchilds stayed at the Lygon Arms where Cromwell had stayed in 1651, when the Lygon was already a venerable establishment. The Bostonians traversed the inn’s stone floors through somber wood-paneled rooms with enormous stone fireplaces. It was at once gloomy and majestic. Sally’s memory of it revolved around herself: she talked the inn’s coachman into teaching her how to drive a tandem of horses, a daunting trial that the daring young woman relished.

  Sargent was ensconced with his sisters and mother ten miles away in the tiny village of Fladbury. They, too,
were in an atmospheric perch—a large, stately parsonage on a steep bank overlooking the River Avon in Shakespeare country. From his back windows Sargent could admire a scenic brick mill on the other side of the swiftly moving river. In the waning light at the end of day, he could see the mill’s perfect reflection in the water. Next door was a twelfth-century stone church with a walled-in graveyard that tumbled down to the river. There were thatched-roof cottages but not much else in town. In that rural outpost, the Sargents entertained a succession of guests, including some of the most famous artists of the day. The Fairchilds became enveloped in Sargent’s world that summer, and Sally immediately befriended Violet Sargent. They were kindred, free-spirited souls—one hanging around with the hotel help, the other intent on pursuing a love affair with a forbidden suitor. Months later, while in America, Violet went off to rejoin her friend in Boston and settle in with the prosperous Fairchild clan.

  Charles Fairchild was a Midwesterner—an outsider in parochial Boston society—but he was a Harvard man, class of 1858. He married the daughter of a prominent Boston judge; he had fought for the Union—a definite plus in a city still consumed by the Civil War. In late-nineteenth-century Boston the miasma of the war, and the memory of its patrician sons lost during the conflict, continued to haunt the drawing rooms of the Brahmins who prided themselves on their abolitionist and patriotic fervor. The wounds were still fresh, the war heroes still celebrated.

  During the postwar financial boom, Charles Fairchild worked his way up the ranks in a paper manufacturing company in Boston; he was also astutely managing the profits rolling in from the Fairchild family’s substantial real estate holdings. His father had been the first mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, where the family owned valuable commercial downtown property. Charles seemed to have a golden touch and his investments in real estate, railroads, banks, typewriter and knitting companies prospered. (Interestingly, one of his brothers missed a bonanza when he declined to join George Westinghouse in forming an electric light company, opting instead to invest in gas light.) In the boom years, Charles Fairchild became a financial eminence in Boston.