Caresse Crosby

Relationship with Harry Crosby

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

In the pattern of other sons of the elite from New England, he was a volunteer in the American Field Service Ambulance Corps, along with Archibald MacLeish and Ernest Hemingway. On November 22, 1917, the ambulance he was driving was destroyed by artillery fire, but he emerged miraculously unhurt. His best friend, "Spud" Spaulding, was seriously wounded in the explosion, and Harry saved his life. The experience profoundly shaped Harry's future. He was at the Second Battle of Verdun. After the battle, his section (the 29th Infantry Division, attached to the 120th French Division) was cited for bravery, and in 1919 Crosby was 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 returning from World War I and while completing his degree at Harvard, Harry met Polly on July 4, 1920, at an Independence Day picnic. Polly's husband Richard was in a sanitarium drying out from another drunken spell. Sensing Polly's isolation, Harry's mother Henrietta Crosby had 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. Polly was 28, married, with two small children. Harry was 22, of slight build, with an unusual blonde hair style, a pale complexion, a weak constitution, a consuming gaze and enormous charisma. During dinner, Harry never spoke to the girl on his left, breaking decorum. By some accounts, Harry fell in love with the buxom Mrs. Peabody in about two hours. He confessed his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park. Crosby pressed her to see him alone, an unthinkable proposition for a member of Boston's upper class. She later wrote, "Harry was utterly ruthless... to know Harry was a devastating experience." On July 20, they spent the night together and had sex, and two days later Polly accompanied Harry to New York. He had planned a trip to France to tour battle sites. They spent the night together in New York at the Belmont Hotel. Polly said of the night, "For the first time in my life, I knew myself to be a person."

Polly was seen by her social circle as someone who had betrayed the trust placed in her as a chaperone, and as an older woman who had taken advantage of a younger man. To the Crosbys, she was dishonorable and corrupt. Polly and Harry's scandalous courtship was the gossip of blue-blood Boston.

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

Crosby pursued Polly, and in May 1921, when she would not respond to his ardor, Crosby threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him. Polly's husband was in and out of sanitariums 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 at her affair with Crosby, and that she would ask for a divorce. 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 meet with him, for despite his disapproval of Harry's irregular behavior, he loved his son. Stephen Crosby at first attempted to dissuade Harry from marrying Polly, and even bought him the Stutz motor car he had 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 attitudes toward her. Polly later described Harry's character as: "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.

Divorce from Richard Peabody

In June 1921, she formally separated from Dick, and in December he offered to divorce her. 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. Crosby had been working for eight months at Shawmut National Bank. He went on a six-day drinking spree and resigned. In May 1922, he moved to Paris to work in a job arranged for him by his family at Morgan, Harjes et Cie, the Morgan family's bank in Paris. This was fitting, for Crosby, after all, was the nephew of Jessie Morgan, the wife of American capitalist J. P. Morgan, Jr., but it was also awkward because he was both Richard Peabody's and Harry Crosby's godfather.

Polly had previously traveled to England to visit her cousins, so Crosby visited her there. From May through July, 1922 they lived together in Paris. In July, Polly returned to the U.S. In September, Harry proposed to Polly via transatlantic cable, and the next day he bribed his way aboard the RMS Aquitania bound for New York.

Move to Paris

On September 9, 1922, Harry reached New York aboard the Aquitania. Polly met him at the customs barrier, and they were married in the Municipal Building in New York City that afternoon. Two days later, they re-boarded the Aquitania and moved with her children to Paris, France. Harry continued his work in Paris at Morgan, Harjes & Co.

Polly's bubble in Paris burst when she learned shortly after their arrival that Harry had been flirting with a girl from Boston. It was the first of many flirtations and affairs that Polly would learn to live with. In early 1923, Polly introduced Harry to her friend Constance Crowninshield Coolidge. She was the niece of Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, and had been married to American diplomat Ray Atherton. Constance did not care what others thought about her. She loved anything risky and was addicted to gambling. She and Harry soon began a sexual relationship.

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 Harry also 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 behavior, and she soon had her own courtiers. In her journals, she privately worried about whether Harry would remain loyal to her.

Their glamorous and luxurious lifestyle soon included an open marriage, numerous affairs, and plenty of drugs and drinking. At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name. 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 Polleen she was named after a Greek goddess.

In July 1925, Harry had sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl he nicknamed "Nubile," with a "baby face and large breasts," whom he saw at Étretat, a town in Normandy. In Morocco, during one of their trips to North Africa, Harry and Caresse together took a 13-year-old dancing girl named Zora to bed with them. Harry also had sex with a boy of unspecified age, his only recorded homosexual dalliance.

In 1927, in the midst of his affair with Constance, Harry and Caresse met the Russian painter Polia Chentoff. Harry asked her to paint Caresse's portrait, and he soon fell in love with Polia. In November, Harry wrote to 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 said to be 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. In her autobiography, Caresse minimized Harry's dalliance with Josephine, eliminating a number of references to her. Harry told Caresse that Constance and Josephine wanted to marry him.

Expatriate life

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

Harry enjoyed betting on the horse races. They first smoked opium together in Africa, and when their friend Constance Crowninshield Coolidge knocked on their door late one evening, they jumped at her invitation to join her at Drosso's apartment. Invitations to Drosso's were restricted to a few regulars and occasional friends, as it was an opium den. At Drosso's she found small rooms filled with low couches and decorations evoking a middle-Eastern setting. Caresse made a sensation when she arrived, because she had been ready for bed when Constance knocked, so she quickly put on a dress, but wore nothing underneath. After that introduction, Harry dropped in at Drosso's frequently, and it sometimes kept him away from home for days at a time.

After about a year, 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 wanted as little to do with Caresse's children as possible, so after the first year they shipped her son Billy off to Cheam School in Hampshire, England.

The couple cared little for the future, spent their money recklessly, and never tried to live on a budget. This was in part because they had made a suicide pact, which they planned to carry out on October 31, 1942. On that date the earth would be closer to the sun than it had been in several decades, and they promised to jump out of an airplane together. This was to be followed by cremation, after which heirs would disperse their ashes from another airplane.

Spending freely, Harry bought a silk-buttonhole gardenia tuxedo from an exclusive tailor on rue de la Paix. Caresse bought hats from Jean Patou and dresses from the fashion house Tolstoy's. On special occasions she wore an evening suit made of gold fabric, featuring a short skirt tailored by Vionnet, one of the most important Parisian fashion icons. Although perfectly chic by Parisian standards, it was nevertheless unacceptable to her cousins and aunts who lived in the aristocratic neighborhood of Faubourg in Paris.

Caresse and Harry purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then 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 on the grounds of the Château d' Ermenonville, which belonged to their friend Armand de la Rochefoucauld, for 2,200 dollar gold pieces (about $41,330 today). They named it "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun"), and she used a wall as a "guest book" for guests to paint pictures and sign their names.

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

In January 1925 they traveled to North Africa, where they again smoked opium, a habit to which they would return again and again. In 1928, they traveled to Lebanon to visit the Temple of Baalbek.

In 1928, Harry inherited his cousin 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. 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. Occasionally they were swingers together, as when they met two other couples and drove to the country near Bois de Boulogne, drew the cars into a circle with their headlights on, and changed partners.

Affair with Cartier-Bresson

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. Harry 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 Harry and Caresse'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 Caresse and Harry, Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her. In 1931, two years after Harry's suicide, the end of his affair with Caresse Crosby left Cartier-Bresson broken-hearted, and he escaped to Ivory Coast of French colonial Africa.

Marriage to Bert Saffold Young

While taking her daughter Polly to Hollywood, where the latter aspired to become an actor, Crosby met Selbert "Bert" Saffold Young (1910-1971), 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 described Bert as "untamed" and "entirely ruled by impulse."

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

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. Crosby and Young were married in Virginia on March 24, 1937. There were problems, however. He was always asking her 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 he did not come back to Virginia until the next year.