Caresse Crosby: How the Inventor of the Bra became the Literary Godmother of the Lost Generation

CARESSE CROSBY

Caresse Crosby was a trail blazing, free spirit who left an indelible impact on her era and is generally considered to be one of the women who made the 1920’s “roar”. Although the American Socialite was a notoriously bohemian figure in 1920s Boston and in Paris, her outrageous and fascinating life-story has been largely forgotten in this day and age. 

She invented the modern brassiere on the occasion of a Connecticut society debutante ball in 1910 and patented the garment in 1914, thereby freeing all women from the tyranny of corsets forever. She was a patron of the arts and helped to launch the international career of surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Along with her second Husband Harry Crosby she was a joint founder of the Black Sun Publishing Company, and was regarded as the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris" These included Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Kay Boyle, Charles Bukowski, Hart Crane, and Robert Duncan.

While in Paris, Caresse and Harry were eccentric ex-pat’s who lived a theatrically mad, bad bohemian existence with a list of associates and collaborators that reads like a cultural index of that post war era. They travelled widely and were seen to embody the moneyed, decadent glamour of the roaring '20s, so much so, that they could be considered the “poster children” of that era. Today, bar a couple of biographies, Caresse and Harry Crosby are all but forgotten; their once-famous names covered over by layers of history and scandal.]

A Privileged Childhood

Caresse Crosby was born Mary Phelps Jacob on April 20, 1891 in New Rochelle, New York. Her parents, William Hearn Jacob and his wife Mary were both descended from old aristocratic American colonial families. In 1807, her 4 x great grandfather, Robert Fulton, had created the first economically viable steamboat.

"Polly" - as she nicknamed herself - 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 and graduated in 1910 at the age of 19. She attended formal balls, Ivy League school dances, and horse riding school. In 1914 she had been presented to the King of England at a garden party. In keeping with the American aristocratic style of the times, she was even photographed as a child by Charles Dana Gibson.

CARESSE CROSBY

She was a rather uninterested student. Author Geoffrey Wolff wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams."  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." 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."

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, Marie, her French maid, got her up for her customary debutante luncheon.

Inventing the Modern Bra

At the age of 19, Polly was preparing to wear a sheer evening gown to a debutante 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 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.

On November 3, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent to Mary P. Jacob for the 'Backless 

Brassiere'. Polly's design was lightweight and soft but 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. Polly likened her design to corset covers which covered the bosom when a woman wore a low corset. Her design had shoulder straps which attached to the garment's upper and lower corners, and wrap-around laces attached at the lower corners which tied in the woman's front, enabling her to wear gowns cut low in the back. Polly wrote that her invention was "well-adapted to women of different size" and was "so efficient that it may be worn by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis." Her design was comfortable to wear, and naturally separated the breasts, unlike the corset, which was heavy, stiff and uncomfortable.

While Crosby's design was the first granted a patent within its category, The U.S. Patent Office and foreign patent offices had issued patents for various bra-like undergarments as early as the 1860s. 

After her first marriage in 1915, 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 founded the Fashion Form Brassière Company and located her manufacturing shop on Washington Street in Boston, where she opened a two-woman sweatshop that manufactured her wireless brassière during 1922.

In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, she 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. She later sold the brassiere patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut for US$1,500 (roughly equivalent to $22,000 in current dollars). Warner manufactured the bra for a while, but it was not a popular style and was eventually discontinued. Warner went on to earn more than US$15 million 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 to Richard Peabody 

POLLY PEABODY AKA CARESSE CROSBY

In 1915, Polly married Richard Peabody, another blue blooded Bostonian whose family had arrived in New Hampshire in 1635. They were married by his grandfather, Endicott Peabody, the founder of the Groton School.

After marriage, Polly found her husband’s temperament to be far from her own. When they had a son, William Jacob, on February 4, 1916, she found "Dick was not the most indulgent of parents and like his father before him, he forbade the gurgles and cries of infancy; when they occurred he walked out, and often walked back unsteadily."

Polly concluded that Dick was a well-educated but undirected man, and a reluctant father. Less than a year later, he 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.  Polly was largely cared for by his parents, but found: "My father-in-law was a stickler for polish, both of manners and minerals." Her mother-in-law wore "nun-like dresses and in bed or out wore starched cuffs as sever as piping." Her husband, meanwhile, was enjoying life at the front as a bachelor.

Dick 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 chase after fire engines and watch buildings burn. His had an alarm bell installed above their marital bed. As arranged with the local fire chief, this would ring whenever the emergency bell rang in the station, so Peabody could wake, dress in a firefighter's uniform, and wear it while he watched real firemen tackle the flames at any hour of the day or night. When the fire chief terminated this arrangement, Richard Peabody turned to drink again. 

Affair with Harry Crosby

Polly met her second husband Harry Crosby, who was 7 years her junior, at a picnic in 1920 - they had sex within two weeks and their public relationship scandalized Boston society.

Harry Crosby’s rebelliousness wasn't inherited - quite the contrary. Harry's extremely pious and caring mother, Henrietta, loved nature and founded the Garden Club of America, while his banker father, Stephen, was a former college football star who lived for his Ivy League and Boston society connections.

HARRY CROSBY

As a young boy, Harry boarded at Boston's foremost prep school, St Mark's, and spent summers with his family in a house built by his uncle, Jack, aka J.P. Morgan, the most celebrated banker in American history. Growing up, Harry had one sibling, a sister, Katherine Schuyler Crosby, nicknamed Kitsa, who was born in 1901. They lived in a home with a dance floor that could accommodate 150 people. Although his parents instilled in him a love for poetry, while still young he was a bit of a tear away and he would toss water bombs off the upper stories of the house onto unsuspecting guests. The teenage Harry was being groomed for Harvard, but he felt a conflicting pull when the US entered WWI.

In July 1917, Harry and several schoolmates set sail for France, where they were to serve in the relative safety of the American Field Service Ambulance Corps, along with Archibald MacLeish and Ernest Hemingway. Before too long, Harry was soon in the thick of the bloody and exhausting business of ferrying those wounded in battle on the Western Front. 

On November 22, 1917, the ambulance Harry 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 Harry's future. He declared later that that was the night he changed from a boy to a man. From that moment on he never feared death.

Harry 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 one of the youngest Americans 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 the war, Harry returned to Boston and spent three years at Harvard. He left with a full-blown loathing for New England's obsession with etiquette, order and morals. He had seen too much in France to stay in what he called "dreary, drearier, dreariest Boston" and to put up with "Boston virgins who are brought up among sexless surroundings, who wear canvas drawers and flat-heeled shoes".

Harry’s taste for mischief and pretty girls was becoming an embryonic philosophy of living for the moment, whatever the risks and consequences. Any patience Harry once possessed was steamrolled by his lust for the now.

After returning from World War I and while completing his degree at Harvard, Harry met Polly on July 4, 1920, at an Independence Day picnic arranged by his mother. 

NANTASKET BEACH 1920'S

Polly's husband Richard was in a sanatorium 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.

Harry never spoke to the girl on his left - he fell in love with the buxom Mrs. Peabody instead – and the whole thing happened 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 two days later Polly accompanied Harry to New York. He had planned a trip to France to tour battle sites. They spend the night together 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 as someone who had perverted the trust placed in her as a chaperone, an older woman who had taken advantage of a younger man. To the Crosby’s, 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.

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 was in and out of sanatoriums several times, fighting alcoholism. Crosby pestered Polly to tell her husband of their affair and to divorce him. In May, she revealed her adultery to Dick and suggested a separation, and he offered no resistance. 

Polly's mother insisted that she stop seeing Crosby for six months 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. Dick'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 talk to him; despite his disapproval of Harry's irregular behaviour, he loved his son. Stephen Crosby at first attempted to dissuade Harry from marrying Polly, and even bought him the Stutz car 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. 

HARRY CROSBY

Polly later described Harry's character: "He seemed to be more expression and mood, than man," she wrote, "yet he was the most vivid personality I've ever known, electric with rebellion." Although he was also a war veteran and heavy drinker with eccentric habits, Harry was very different to Richard Peabody. In comparison, Harry never lacked passion, and he could start fires with just a hard stare – at least, that's what the many women who loved him said. 

Harry was a most beautiful man. Although slight and pale, he had a distinctive blond hairstyle, a consuming gaze and enormous charisma, somehow exuding a presence that belied his stature. Later, he would accessorize this with black suits, black-painted fingernails and a black flower in his buttonhole

In February 1922, Polly and Richard Peabody were legally divorced. Dick subsequently recovered from his alcoholism and published The Common Sense of Drinking (1933). 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.

Marriage to Harry Crosby and The Move to Paris

Harry Crosby had been working for eight months at Shawmut National Bank before Polly got divorced. He then 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 both Richard Peabody's and Harry Crosby's godfather.

Polly had previously travelled to England to visit her cousins, where Crosby also 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.

HARRY & CARESSE

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., the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. From their arrival in 1922, the Crosbys led the life of rich expatriates. The newly married couple even sent Harry’s father a telegram saying PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE.” 

They were attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of the artists gathering in Montparnasse. Even by the wild standards of Paris in the 1920s, Harry was in a league of his own. The couple lived a hedonistic and decadent life.  Harry was a gambler and a womanizer; he drank "oceans of champagne" and used opium, cocaine, and hashish. 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. Polly 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 enjoyed the attention.

Polly's bubble in Paris burst when she learned 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. Their glamorous and luxurious lifestyle soon included an open marriage, numerous affairs, and plenty of drugs and drinking.

Harry wanted as little to do with Polly's children as possible, and after a year, her son Billy was shipped off to Cheam School in Hampshire, England. Polly would attempt to create a family Christmas each year, if only in a hotel, but Harry regularly boycotted these events, making it clear that he would be looking for flirtations instead. Harry soon tired of the predictable banker's life and quit, fully joining the Lost Generation of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the restrictive atmosphere of 1920s America. They were among about 15,000–40,000 Americans living in Paris. 

HARRY & CARESSE

They embraced a bohemian and decadent lifestyle, living off Harry's trust fund of US$12,000 a year. The couple cared little for the future, spent their money recklessly, and never tried to live on a budget.  Spending freely, Harry bought his silk button-hole gardenia from an exclusive tailor on rue de la Paix. Caresse bought hats from Jean Patou and dresses from Tolstoy's, an exclusive fashion house. On special occasions she wore a gold cloth evening suit, featuring a short skirt, tailored by Vionnet, one of the most important Parisian fashion houses. Although chic by Paris standards, it was unacceptable to the cousins and aunts who lived in the aristocratic neighborhood of Faubourg in Paris.

Harry repeatedly overdrew his account at State Street Trust in Boston and at Morgan, Harjes, in Paris, which in blue-blood Boston was like writing graffiti on the front door of a church. It was common for him to wire his father to put more money from his inheritance into his account. Although his father always complied, it was not without rebuking his son for his spendthrift ways.

They became known for hosting small dinner parties from their giant bed in their palatial townhouse on Quai d'Orsay, and afterward everyone was invited to enjoy their huge bathtub together, taking advantage of iced bottles of champagne near at hand.

In early 1923, Polly introduced Harry to her friend Constance Coolidge. She was the niece of Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, and had been married to American diplomat Ray Atherton. Constance didn't care what others thought about her. She loved anything risky and was addicted to gambling. 

Constance and Harry soon began a sexual relationship.

HARRY & CARESSE

In the fall of 1923, Polly could not put up with their affair any longer and left for London. Harry told Constance that he could not meet Polly's demand that he "love her more than anyone in the world. This is absolutely impossible". But Crosby would not leave Polly, nor did Constance ask him to.  But when Constance received a letter from Polly, who confessed that Constance's affair with her husband had made her "very miserable", Constance wrote Harry and told him she would not see him any more. Harry was devastated by her decision. "Your letter was bar none the worst blow I have ever received."... I wouldn't leave her under any circumstances nor as you say would you ever marry me." But the three remained friends, and on October 1, 1924, Constance married the Count Pierre de Jumilhac, although the marriage only lasted five years. Polly appeared at least outwardly to tolerate Harry's dallying unconventional behaviour, and she soon had her own courtiers. In her journals, she privately worried about Harry's continued loyalty to her.

Harry enjoyed betting on the horse races and gambling. Polly and Harry purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then bought two more in April 1925. They rented 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 $31,415 today). They named it "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun").

HARRY CROSBY

In the first year there, they made friends with the 32 students who attended l'Academie des Beaux-Arts, located at the end of their street. The students invited Harry and Polly to their annual Quartre Arts Ball, an invitation the couple embraced with enthusiasm. Harry fashioned a necklace of four dead pigeons, sported a red loincloth, and brought along a bag of snakes. Caresse wore a sheer chemise to her waist, a huge turquoise wig on her head, and nothing else. They both dyed their skin with red ochre. The students cheered Caresse's toplessness, and she was carried around on the shoulders of 10 students.

At Le Moulin Du Soleil they hosted their own wild parties, which included playing drunken polo on donkeys. Harry would spend hours sunbathing naked atop the mill's turret. Contrary to fashion of the day, he would not wear a hat. Harry once hired four horse-drawn carriages and raced them through the Paris streets.

In 1924, they rented an apartment in the Fauberg St. Germaine for six months from Princess Marthe Bibesco, a friend of Harry's cousin Walter Berry, for fifty thousand francs (the equivalent of $2,200, about $27,998 in today's dollars. When they moved in, they brought with them "two maids and a cook, a governess, and a chauffeur."

CARESSE & HER DOG CLYTORIS

At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name as Polly sounded to prim and proper. They briefly considered Clytoris before deciding on Caresse. Harry suggesting that her new name "begin with a C to go with Crosby and it must form a cross with mine." The two names intersected at right angles at the common "R," "the Crosby cross." They later named their second whippet Clytoris, explaining to Caresse's young daughter Poleen that the dog was named after a Greek goddess.

In January 1925 they travelled to North Africa, where they first smoked opium, a habit to which they would return again and again. Harry had sexual relations with a young girl he nicknamed "Nubile", with a "baby face and large breasts", whom he saw at Étretat. In Morocco, Harry and Polly both took a young dancing girl named Zora to bed with them. Harry also had sex with a boy of unspecified age, his only homosexual dalliance.

HARRY & CARESSE

In North Africa, Harry had hadcrosses and pagan symbols tattooed on the soles of his feet. Harry developed a obsessive fascination with imagery of the sun and his poetry and journals often focused on the planet as a symbol of perfection, enthusiasm, freedom, heat, and destruction. Crosby claimed to be a "sun worshiper in love with death." He often added a doodle of a "black sun" to his signature which also included an arrow, jutting upward from the "y" in Crosby’s last name and aiming toward the center of the sun’s circle: "a phallic thrust received by a welcoming erogenous zone."

Their Opium smoking habit continued back home in the USA. When a friend knocked on their door late one evening, both Harry and Polly jumped at the invitation to go to The Drosso's apartment which had been converted to an opium den, subdivided into small rooms filled with low couches and decorations befitting an Arabic setting. Ready for bed, Polly quickly put on a dress with nothing underneath. Invitations to Drosso's were restricted to a few regulars and occasional friends. After that introduction, Harry dropped in at Drosso’s frequently and sometimes stayed away from home for days at a time.

Crosby met Ernest Hemingway on a skiing trip to Gstaad in 1926. In July 1927 Crosby and Hemingway visited Pamplona for the running of the bulls. Hemingway wrote that "H. could drink us under the table."  

Writing Poetry & Black Sun Publishing  

Caresse and Harry published her first book, Crosses of Gold, in late 1924. It was a volume of conventional, "unadventurous" poetry about love, beauty, and her husband. In 1926, they published Caresses’ second book, Graven Images, through Houghton Mifflin in Boston. This was the only time they used another publisher. 

Crosby later wrote that Harry's cousin, Walter Berry, suggested that Houghton Mifflin would publish Caresse's poetry because "they have just lost Amy Lowell". Crosby's poetry remained relatively conventional, "still rhyming love with dove", by her own admission. A Boston Transcript reviewer said her "poetry sings", and a Literary Review contributor admired her "charming" child poems and French flavor. But a critic in the New York Herald Tribune wrote that "[f]or all its enthusiasm there is no impact to thought or phrase, the emotion is meager, the imagination bridled."

In April, 1927, they founded an English language publishing company, first called Éditions Narcisse, after their black whippet, Painted Shores, in which she wrote about their relationship, including their reconciliation after one of his affairs. Her writing matured, and the book was more creatively organized than her prior efforts. 

Narcisse Noir. They used the press as an avenue to publish their own poetry in small editions of finely-made, hard-bound volumes. Their first effort was Caresse's

In 1928, she wrote an epic poem which was published as The Stranger. The writing is addressed to the men in her life: her father, husband, and son. In an experimental fashion she explored the various kinds of love she had known. Later that year, Impossible Melodies explored similar themes. The Crosbys enjoyed a positive reception from their initial work and decided to expand the press to serve other authors.

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, Éditions Narcisse published 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 death and the symbolism of the sun. Harry developed a private mythology around the sun as a symbol for both life and death, creation and destruction. 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 the writers 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, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Jolas, D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound, and Laurence Sterne. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. In 1929, Polly and Harry both signed poet Eugene Jolas' The Revolution of the Word Proclamation, which appeared in issue 16/17 of the literary journal transition.

"If you're interested in the best of what came out of Paris at that time," says antiquarian books expert Neil Pearson, "a Black Sun book is the literary equivalent of a Braque or a Picasso painting – except it's a few thousand pounds, not £20 million."

By far, the most beautiful of all their books, according to Pearson, is the Hindu Love Manual that Harry and Caresse found in Damascus and reprinted in 1928, in a release of just 20. It was bound in navy leather, which was stamped with gold in a nod to ancient Persian manuscripts. Its grey pages were handmade and decorated with a gold border, and each illustration in each copy was hand-colored.

ALASTAIR ILLUSTRATION FOR HARRY'S BOOK

Harry commissioned Alastair, a spectacularly camp German creator of beautifully decadent and Gothic fantasies to illustrate his second collection, Red Skeletons. The book included Harry's most famously purple piece of adolescent expression, a sonnet to his corrupting hero Baudelaire. "Within my soul you've set the blackest flag/And made my disillusioned heart your tomb/My mind which was once young and virginal/Is now a pregnant spleen-filled womb."

.Writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos were in Paris, and had served with Harry during the war. Harry's cousin, Walter Berry, invited them to his salons, where novelist friends, like Henry James, Marcel Proust and Edith Wharton, would come to talk books in his unrivalled library. In 1928, Harry inherited his uncle 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.

The Black Sun Press published exclusive extracts from the most anticipated novels of the '20s and '30s. The Crosbys' fastidious French printer even went behind their backs to ask author, James Joyce, if he'd mind padding out the last page of his book with a few lines to make it look prettier. He complied. 

Pablo Picasso, Caresse's first choice of illustrator, gladly met her, but ultimately turned down the offer on the grounds he didn't do portraits. Harry decided to pay another Black Sun Press writer, D.H. Lawrence, in gold coins, a gesture which he decided the author would appreciate. He did.

Max Ernst, the surrealist painter and a close friend of Caresse, provided haunting images for her tomes and the Crosby’s branched out early into books about an art form then thought unworthy: photography. 

Harry developed a keen eye for photography during the second half of the '20s. According to Caresse, it was Harry's gift of a camera that inspired Henri Cartier-Bresson, who became the century's most noted photographer, to give up painting and return to photography.

Beyond the book business, the Crosbys' spectacular bacchanals, open marriage and prodigious ingenuity at marketing, gave them a certain mystique. The Crosbys have probably been neglected in literary history because they were what Neil Pearson calls "dilettantes", frivolous interlopers in the serious world of 20th century literature.

The Croby’s affairs

HARRY & CARESSE

Harry’s seductive abilities became legendary in some social circles in Paris, and he engaged in a series of ongoing affairs, maintaining relationships with a variety of beautiful and doting young women, whilst he was married to Caresse.

In 1927, in the midst of his affair with Constance, Harry and Caresse met Russian painter Polia Chentoff. Harry asked her to paint Caresse's portrait, and he soon fell in love with Polia. 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, Harry met Josephine Rotch at the Lido in Venice, while she was shopping for her wedding trousseau, and they began an affair that was to later end in tragedy and scandal. 

Josephine had left Bryn Mawr after only two years because she planned to marry Albert Smith Bigelow. "She was dark and intense... since the season of her coming out in 1926-7, she had been known around Boston as fast, a 'bad egg'...with a good deal of sex appeal." They met for sex as often as her eight days in Venice would allow.

Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until June 21, 1929, when she married Albert Smith Bigelow. Their affair was over—until August, when Josephine contacted Crosby and they rekindled the affair as her husband became a first year graduate student of architecture at Harvard. Unlike his wife Caresse, Josephine was quarrelsome and prone to fits of jealousy. She bombarded Harry with half incoherent cables and letters, anxious to set the date for their next tryst.

CARRESSE CROSBY

Caresse took on lovers of her own, including Ortiz Manolo, Lord Lymington, Jacques Porel, Cord Meier, and in May, 1928, the Count Armand de La Rochefoucauld, son of the duke de Doudeauville, President of the Jockey Club. But behind closed doors, Harry applied a double standard, quarreling violently with Caresse about her affairs, whilst telling her that both Constance and Josephine wanted to marry him. 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.

Harry experimented with photography and saw the medium as a viable art form before it was widely accepted as such. In 1929, Harry 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. The men found they shared 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 Caresse which was to last until two years after her husband’s untimely death.

Harry also learned to fly solo in November, 1929 when the aeroplane was so new that its spelling had not been agreed upon.

Harry’s Suicide & The Aftermath

On July 9, 1928 in Venice, Harry had 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, 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 the affair temporarily ended. However, Josephine rekindled their affair, and in late November 1929, Harry and Josephine met and travelled to Detroit, where they checked into an expensive, US$12 a day Book-Cadillac Hotel as Mr. and Mrs Harry Crane. For four days they took meals in their room, smoked opium, and had sex.

On November 29, 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.

NEWSPAPER REPORT ON MURDER - SUICIDE

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.

The good times were drawing to a close financially too. In January 1929, Harry had written to his father asking him "to sell $4,000 worth of stock to make up for past extravagances in New York". In May, he sold another $4000 worth "to enjoy life when you can". 

Then, on December 10, 1929, six weeks after the first Great Crash saw the New York stock market lose $14 billion; Harry shot himself and Josephine in a friend's studio apartment overlooking Central Park. He was 31 years old.

On the evening of December 10, 1929, Harry's mother, Caresse, and Hart Crane met for dinner before attending a play, but Harry was a no-show. It was unlike him to worry Caresse needlessly. She called their friend Stanley Mortimer at his mother's apartment, whose studio Harry was known to use for his trysts. He agreed to check his studio and had to enlist help to break open the locked door.

Harry’s body was found at 10pm that night in the apartment in the Hotel des Artistes. Harry had a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple and was lying dead 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 that Josephine had died at least two hours before Harry. 

There was no suicide note, The steamship tickets he had bought that morning for the return to Europe with Caresse were in his pocket. The coroner also found a cable from Josephine addressed to Harry on the Mauretania before they arrived in New York: "CABLE GEORGE WHEN YOU ARRIVE AND WHERE I CAN TELEPHONE YOU IMMEDIATELY. I AM IMPATIENT."

Harry's wedding ring was found crushed on the floor, not on his finger, where he always promised Caresse it would remain. Caresse refused to witness the carnage and begged Archibald MacLeish, who was in town from his farm, to take charge. 

Newspapers ran sensational articles for days about the murder-suicide or double suicide pact. The Herald Tribune reported "the authorities were unable to obtain information pertaining to a motive for the deaths". But there was plenty else to gossip about: Harry and Josephine Rotch-Bigelow had smoked opium and drunk whisky. London's Daily Mirror speculated on psychological motives, while New York's Daily News blamed poetry and passion. Death itself had been the motive, others said, just as aspiring poet Harry's life had been his greatest artwork. He called cigarettes "coffin nails" and knew the drugs he took were dangerous. The New York Times front page blared, "COUPLE SHOT DEAD IN ARTISTS' HOTEL; Suicide Compact Is Indicated Between Henry Crosby and Harvard Man's Wife. BUT MOTIVE IS UNKNOWN He Was Socially Prominent in Boston—Bodies Found in Friend's Suite."

Gretchen Powell had lunched with Harry the day of his death. Her memory of the luncheon supported the notion that Josephine was one of Harry's many passing fancies. She related that Harry had told her "the Rotch girl was pestering him; he was exasperated; she had threatened to kill herself in the lobby of the Savoy-Plaza if he didn't meet her at once."

The deaths polarized the several prominent families affected. The Rotch family considered Josephine's death to be murder. Josephine's erstwhile husband Albert Bigelow blamed Harry for "seducing his wife and murdering her because he couldn't have her."

Harry's poetry possibly gave the best clue to his motives. Death was "the hand that opens the door to our cage the home we instinctively fly to." His death mortified proper society. Harry's biographer Wolff wrote, 

He had meant to do it; it was no mistake; it was not a joke. If anything of Harry Crosby commands respect, perhaps even awe, it was the unswerving character of his intention. He killed himself not from weariness or despair, but from conviction, and however irrational, or even ignoble, this conviction may have been, he held fast to it as to a principle. He killed himself on behalf of the idea of killing himself.

Crosby's death, given the macabre circumstances under which it occurred, scandalized Boston's Back Bay society.

Harry's friend Hart Crane committed suicide less than two years later. Malcolm Cowley, who Harry had published, wrote in his 1934 book Exile's Return that the death of "Harry Crosby becomes a symbol" of the rise and fall of the Jazz Age. He recited the excesses typified by Harry's extravagant lifestyle as evidence of the shallowness of society during that era. When he edited and reissued the book in 1951, he softened his opinion of Crosby somewhat. "I had written at length about the life of Harry Crosby, who I scarcely know," he wrote, "In order to avoid discussing the more recent death of Hart Crane, whom I know so well that I couldn't bear to write about him."

In her autobiography, Caresse minimized Harry's affair with Josephine, eliminating a number of references to her.  After Harry’s death Caresse returned to Paris, where she continued to run the Black Sun Press.

Harry left Caresse US$100,000 in his will, along with generous bequests to Josephine, Constance, and others. His parents Stephen and Henrietta had the will declared invalid, but reassured Caresse that she would receive US$2000 a year until she received money from Walter Berry's estate. Upon her return to Europe, Poleen 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. Poleen 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 Lenox School.

Crosby retained Mary, her birth name, and was known after her husband's death as "Mary Caresse Crosby". She pursued ambitions as an actress that she had had since her 20s, and appeared as a dancer in two short experimental films directed by artist Emlen Etting, Poem 8  and Oramunde (1933). 

CARESSE AT WORK

The Black Sun Press broadened its scope after Harry's death. Caresse established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture to publish paperback books when they were not yet popular, which she named Crosby Continental Editions. Ernest Hemingway, a long-time friend, offered her a choice of The Torrents of Spring (1926) or The Sun Also Rises (1926) as a debut volume for her new venture. Caresse unfortunately picked the former, which was less well received than the other volume. She followed Hemingway's work with nine more books in 1932, including William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Kay Boyle's Year Before Last, Dorothy Parker's Laments for the Living, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Night-Flight, along with works by Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Alain Fournier, George Grosz, C. G. Jung, and Charles-Louis Philippe. After six months of sales the books had only grossed about US$1200. Crosby was unable to persuade U.S. publishers to distribute her work, as paperbacks were not yet widely distributed, and then publishers were not convinced that readers would buy them.

Interracial affair with Canada Lee

CANADA LEE

In 1934, Caresse 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 nationwide 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, Lee 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 worldview. Crosby wrote a never-published play, The Cage, transparently based on their relationship.

Caresse Marries Third Husband Selbert Young

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 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  estate in Bowling Green, Virginia. It had been built in 1838 by John Hampton DeJarnette 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. Polly and Bert were married in Virginia on March 24, 1937. He was always asking Caresse for money, he crashed her car, he ran up the telephone bill, and he 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.

Caresse Ghost-writes 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 US$200, he could do no more. Now he wanted to tour the United States by car and write about it. He got a US$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. 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.'

Caresse spent some of her time while her husband, Bert Young, fell into a drunken stupor every night, churning out pages of pornography. In her diary, Nin observed that everyone who wrote pornography with her wrote out of a self that was opposite to his or her identity, but identical with his or her desire. 

Artistic activity with Salvador Dali

PORTRAIT BY DALI

In 1934, Dalí had made his first trip to the United States via steamboat.  Caresse Crosby was on that boat with him, and ended up being  the centre of his social universe in New York for the next two years, 1934 and 1935. It was really well documented, not just by him and not just by her, but also in the press, and in Time magazine, and in the New York social scene.

When Dalí and Caresse, along with his new wife and muse, Gala, disembarked in New York, they greeted the press waiting for the Surrealist celebutante with an impromptu lecture about the movement as Dalí showed off his Portrait of My Wife. It made it into all the morning newspapers. 

Although her new husband Bert was often drunk and infrequently home, Caresse did not lack for company. She extended an invitation to stay to Salvador Dalí and his wife, who were long-term guests at her home, 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.

Dali painted a portrait of Caresse entitled The Passionate Years. The painting is made all the rarer by the fact that Dali was not primarily painting portraits at this time; though he would come into his own as an improbable society portraitist—a fun-house-mirror reflection of John Singer Sargent—he was still in the burgeoning stages of his career, painting the surrealist dreamscapes that are emblematic of his work.

Dali and Crosby remained lifelong friends, even as she crisscrossed between Virginia, New York, Paris, and Rome in later years.

 Other visitors to her home in the 1930’s included Max Ernst, Buckminster Fuller, Stuart Kaiser, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and other friends from her time in Paris. 

Divorce from Burt 

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 him at his home in Big Sur and later opened his first one-man art show 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 World War II. 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 the war and for some time afterward, 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 Romare Bearden, Matisse, and others.

 She secured contributions from a wide variety of well-known artists and writers, including: Louis Aragon, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus (Letter to a German Friend, his first appearance in an English-language publication), Henri Cartier-Bresson, René Char, Paul Éluard, Jean Genet, Natalia Ginzburg, Victor Hugo, Weldon Kees, Robert Lowell, Henri Matisse, Henry Miller, Eugenio Montale, Anaïs Nin, Charles Olson, Pablo Picasso, Francis Ponge, Kenneth Rexroth, Arthur Rimbaud, Yannis Ritsos, Jean-Paul Sartre (The End of the War), 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 to 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 Caresse reached out to her friend 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 had set up base in her former home "Le Moulin du Soleil" . Caresse was upset when she learned the German troops had painted over the wall 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, who had signed her name when she visited Harry and Caresse, along with an Austrian big game hunter she was dating.  "I wish I might have taken it with me when I left," Caresse wrote decades later, hinting she might have done something extraordinary with the wall when she left the mill in 1936 - if she'd known what would happen four years later.

Post-war activity

Caresse became politically active again after the war and founded the organizations Women Against War and Citizens of the World, which embraced the concept of a "world community”. 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 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 they told her she was not welcome in Greece and ordered her 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 her plan 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 & Castello Rocca Sinibalda 

In the winter of 1954-55, Caresse's 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, while Josette was found unconscious and revived. Caresse travelled to Paris for his funeral, between appearances at colleges where she talked about her life and the Black Sun Press.

She was first introduced to a run-down castle named Castello di Rocca Sinibalda 70 kilometres north of Rome in 1949 during a tour of Italy. Designed by Baldassare Peruzzi and built between 1530 and  for Cardinal Alessandro Cesarini, in the 1950s she rented and later paid US$2,600 for the estate. It came with the Papal title of Principessa. She paid to electrify the castle and thus brought electricity to the neighbouring 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.

CARESSE AT ROCCO SINABALDA

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 16th century. She used the castle to support various artists, including poets' seminars. Henry Miller described Rocca Sinibalda as the "Centre for Creative Arts and Humanist Living in the Abruzzi Hills." Other artists visited for a weekend or an entire season. In 1962, filmmaker Robert Snyder made a 26-minute documentary about Caresse's history and her plans for the castle. The short film, Always Yes, Caresse took the viewer on a tour of the castle, led by Caresse. At one point in the film, she pulled down her blouse to reveal her ample bosom. He learned about the writer's retreat when he was in Rome filming a documentary on the Sistine Chapel, The Titan; The Story of Michelangelo.

                                                    A CLIP FROM "ALWAYS YES CARESSE"

CARESSE AT ROCCA SINIBALDA

Caresse for a time divided her time between Rocca Sinibalda, which in the winter was too cold to live in, 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 and Legacy

Suffering from heart disease, she received what was then still-experimental open heart surgery at 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." Anaïs Nin described her as "a pollen carrier, who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships."

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. Crosby was buried in the Cimetiere de l'Abbaye de Longchamp, in Boulogne, Departement de la Vendee Pays de la Loire, France.

Most of her papers and manuscripts are held in the archives of the Southern Illinois University Special Collections Research Center in the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, including more than 1600 photographs from her life, along with the papers of her friends James Joyce and Kay Boyle.

Despite her outrageous life - Caresse remains less known than her eccentric peers. Her husbands and lovers adored this magnetic person to whom all these other amazing historical literary and artistic figures were also attracted to.

The Heart is a burial Ground by Tamara Colchester 

TAMARA COLCHESTER

Now Caresse's remarkable story is being told, and in parts re-imagined, in a book written by her great-granddaughter, Tamara Colchester.

“Caresse was someone I wanted to try to get to know beyond the myth – she was my great-grandmother” says Colchester, who lives in West Sussex.

The Heart is a Burial Ground, which has been eight years in the making, begins with Harry Crosby’s suicide. The book describes how:

 “tattooed suns on the soles of his long, gentle feet gave the police cause to raise their eyebrows, but it was his ochre-painted toenails that really got them talking”.

Harry, the wide-eyed, wild-spirited Bostonian had chased and coveted Caresse, transforming her life, and much of Colchester’s book explores that emotional legacy. “There was always something incendiary about Harry. He had an otherworldly charisma, which had fascinated me growing up,” Colchester says.

Her book was first intended as a biography, but when Colchester’s laptop was stolen, a year’s work was lost and she was forced to start again. That setback gave her an opportunity, she says, to turn the book into something that “it seemed to want to become”. “The voices were so alive, it really didn’t feel like me. It was like the characters were there, having it out with each other and I was just writing it down. It was quite a strange experience,” she recalls. 

The final version of The Heart is a Burial Ground shifts back and forth in time, weaving fact with fiction. Colchester, used the writings and recordings of Caresse as a starting point, but wanted to dig deeper into “what was not said, what we don’t know, what’s been too painful to talk about. I wanted to look at what happens when you live your life like Caresse. What’s the fallout?” “Even at 19, there was something in her essence that knew she wanted to be free,” says Colchester. “Inventing the bra was perfectly symbolic. She was breaking away from the restricted life that she’d been born into.” 

The Heart is a Burial Ground, by Tamara Colchester, is published by Simon & Schuster

             TAMARA COLCHESTER TALKS ABOUT HER BOOK ON  CARESSE CROSBY