NOTE: My article on Syrie Maugham and Selina Hastings’ new biography of Somerset Maugham has been published on the Huffington Post. HERE. So I am reposting this slightly longer version of the story, complete with photo illustrations, as a complement to that piece. Enjoy!

Maugham’s the Word

Less known than her storied husband, author W. Somerset Maugham, Syrie Maugham (shot by Cecil Beaton, above) is still a legendary figure in the worlds of high style and interior design. With her signature “white on white” palette, she single-handedly revolutionized the look and business of decorating, helping to cure high society in the 20s and 30s of its addiction to Victorian clutter and move it into a sleeker, more sophisticated, “moderne” mode. Most people in the field, however, know little about Syrie Maugham as a person. Her life on many levels was shrouded in secrecy, as were aspects of that of her husband, who divorced her and then spent the rest of his life maligning her.

While there have been two previous biographies of Syrie Maugham that I know of, they are relatively obscure and pricey. One of them, Syrie Maugham, by Richard B. Fisher from 1978, sells for a fortune online. And Gerald McKnight’s The Scandal of Syrie Maugham from 1980 is nearly as scarce. A new bio by Pauline C. Metcalf is due out this coming spring. Perhaps the best known book about Syrie is the one by her friend Beverley Nichols — A Case of Human Bondage — published in 1966 that purported to pull back the pink silk curtains on Somerset’s “beastly” behavior towards her. It was a decidedly one-sided view of Syrie Maugham, painting her as a martyr and a saint, the queen of high style. And it was dismissed by Somerset’s acolytes as the work of a slightly balmy hack (even Nichols’s friend Noel Coward dubbed it “ghastly.”) But Nichols certainly knew where the bodies had been laid (and by whom), presenting a view of Somerset Maugham and his homosexual affairs that was well ahead of its time. But his cri de coeur in defense of Syrie Maugham lacked substance, being more an exercise in vitriol and catty gossip. We never got to truly know the real Syrie Maugham.

Now a new biography of W. Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings, above, has come out in England that is the latest profile of this much-analyzed author to study the strange ties that bound him to his wife, Syrie Maugham. Published by John Murray this fall, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham runs to over 600 pages and is as easy to read as one of Maugham’s novels. Known for her bios of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Selina Hastings combines an engaging prose style with ample amounts of gossip and insight. With unprecedented access to Maugham’s extensive private correspondence, much of which he had hoped would never see the light of day, Hastings has blown the lid off his life story, and shown those of us more interested in his wife Syrie, a side to her that has not been unveiled before. But in doing so, she raises as many questions as she attempts to answer.

The high-living Syrie Maugham, Hastings says, “was not quite the conventional society woman that she appeared.” Born in Hackney, England in 1879, Syrie was the daughter of the renowned reformer, Thomas Barnardo, above, founder of the Dr. Barnardo’s homes for destitute children. Born in Ireland, Bernardo and his wife, also called Syrie, but known in the family as “the Begum,” were members of an obscure American religious sect, the Open Plymouth Brethren. Barnardo was devoutly evangelical, a strict taskmaster and Bible-thumper, and advocate of the temperance movement. Young Syrie however (she shucked her unwieldy birth names Gwendoline Maud) wanted nothing to do with this sheltered life and showed little interest in her father’s charity work. While he hoped she would become a missionary and go to China, she longed to establish herself in London’s lofty circles and to escape the suffocating life she had known.

She found her means of escape in Henry Wellcome, above, a self-made man, some 25 years her elder, whom she’d met in Khartoum on a trip with her father. Wellcome, who’d been born in a log cabin in Wisconsin, had made a fortune in pharmaceuticals with his company Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline.) They were married in 1901. As Hastings makes clear, the marriage was a disaster from the outset. Wellcome was as cold and strict as her father and expected Syrie to be a simple, dutiful wife, traveling with him to remote sites in Europe, rather than the social hubs she craved, while he conducted business or bought arcane medical instruments for his vast collection. Two years later, they had a son, Mountenoy, who is said to have had learning disabilities. Hastings describes Wellcome, who had been strikingly handsome in his youth, as a brutal boor with a walrus mustache and a paunch who had sadistic tendencies in the bedroom. In 1909, while the two were traveling in Ecuador, Wellcome accused Syrie of adultery and they soon separated upon their return to England. It was during this period as a wealthy married woman on her own that Syrie met and fell in love with W. Somerset Maugham, below, who was already a successful playwright on London’s West End.

Hastings is of the opinion that Syrie really did love Somerset, but that doesn’t stop her from painting her as a gold digger right from the start. Here we see a new Syrie emerge, a shrewd, sometimes shrewish, schemer who uses her then trim good looks, charm and social connections to woo Maugham, then corner him into submission. As Hastings sees it, Syrie set up a snare to lure Maugham into marriage by deliberately getting pregnant (although the first time she tried, she miscarried). She gave birth to Liza (Mary Elizabeth) in Rome while still married to Wellcome. Not long after, Wellcome sued for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent. The parentage of the daughter was never brought up in court. Maugham, she argues, did what he felt was the honorable thing and married her in New Jersey in May, 1917 during a trip to the States. Hastings suggests he might also have been moved to pity since his own mother had died in childbirth.

Syrie’s master plan seemed to unfold as she had hoped. Or so Hastings argues. The details seem to fit together, but one wonders if the biographer’s image of Syrie as a cold, calculating adventuress isn’t too colored by Somerset’s own jaundiced spin on the issue. Maugham could easily have dropped her after the miscarriage, but he continued to see Syrie. One has to ask why? It’s possible that he might have been as captivated by her as she was by him. And it’s just as likely that Somerset was using Syrie as a beard to mask his homosexual nature. (Maugham, below, with his daughter Liza at her wedding to Lt.-Col. Vincent Rudolph Paravicini, 1936. She later married John Adrian Louis Hope, 1st Baron Glendevon.)

Maugham, at the end of his very long life, and perhaps on the verge of dementia, later accused Syrie of merely pretending that the child she’d had with Maugham, while still married to Wellcome, was actually his. He cited numerous lovers as potential fathers. Hastings also makes the bold assertion that Syrie threatened to expose the names of Somerset’s male lovers if he did not marry her, just as years later she would threaten to reveal them if he did not divorce her. Hastings also claims that Syrie staged a dramatic suicide attempt by swallowing an overdose of pills. But Hastings’s “Notes” cite Maugham’s memoir Looking Back, which he wrote at the end of his life, and which has been universally dismissed as being unfair, if not deliberately misleading.

Around the time Maugham wrote those memoirs (which were printed in Show magazine in the States) he attempted to disown his daughter, Liza, arguing that she had no legal right to his estate since she was not actually his child. He demanded that she return some paintings he had given her. He hoped to leave everything to Alan Searle, his male companion, who may have been behind the strange turn of events. The scandal that ensued was pretty shocking stuff for the time. Somerset lost his case and the daughter retained her rights. And it is generally believed today that she was in fact Somerset’s flesh and blood. Perhaps his unconscionable behavior to her had more to do with his own desire to rewrite history than his attachment to Searle. (Maugham with Alan Searle, below.)

Hastings recounts how shaky the couple’s marriage was from the start. Somerset, for all his charm, was not that different from the other two men of Syrie’s earlier life: her stern father and her demanding former husband. Somerset’s aloofness may have been inspired by misogyny, due in no small part to his then-repressed homosexuality, which he had shared with Syrie, but also from his intense shyness. His stammer was an outward sign of his fumbling timidity and feelings of inadequacy. He turned a cold shoulder to Syrie’s demands for physical attention.

Hastings takes the view that Syrie Maugham was overly needy: “the frequent scenes Syrie staged, the endless reproaches, the daily testing and questioning of Maugham’s feelings for her, maddening to him, were all symptoms of her emotional insecurity, her huge desire to be loved.” She was “desperate for any show of affection.” Her sexual demands, he told a friend, “were insatiable, intolerable.” Hastings uses Maugham’s own comments as evidence. But it seems obvious that he was a prejudiced observer. He most likely loathed having sex with his wife, not because she was overly demanding, verging on hysteria, but because he was gay. Hastings seems to underplay Maugham’s own assessment that he was 90% homosexual and 10% heterosexual. One can not fault Syrie Maugham for wanting more than a fraction of her husband’s affection, especially since he basically stopped sleeping with her after they were married.

None of this, of course, is news, but what Hastings does do well is to show us Syrie Maugham, above, the mercantile wizard, the innovator in interior design. Her new life as a designer began when she and Somerset moved into a Regency mansion at 2 Wyndham Place in Marylebone. She channeled her restless energy into refurbishing the spacious house. When that was completed, she approached her friend, designer Ernest Thornton-Smith at Fortnum’s, asking him to take her on as an unpaid apprentice, something women of her class at that time would never dream of doing. “It quickly became apparent,” Hastings writes, “that Syrie had found her vocation, not only in decor but as a businesswoman, tough, tenacious, and with a keen eye for a bargain.” She’d inherited something of her father’s zealotry, and her ex-husband’s marketing skills, but used these to help the rich improve their lives, rather than the poor.

In 1922, Syrie Maugham opened a shop with capital she borrowed herself. Called Syrie Ltd, at 85 Baker Street, it was stocked with the contents of the Maughams’s previous residence in Regent’s Park. “With the strength of a typhoon,” Cecil Beaton wrote, Syrie “blew all colour before her… turning the world white…White sheepskin rugs were strewn on the eggshell surface floors, huge white sofas were flanked with white crackled-paint tables, white peacock feathers were put in white vases against a white wall.”

Hastings states that Syrie actually first conceived of her innovative all-white decors after visiting the house of Mrs. Ralph Philipson, one of her main investors. The white motif may have been Philipson’s idea, but it was Syrie Maugham who saw its potential. Part of the legend of Syrie Maugham is that she would “pickle” and bleach rare antiques, such as black lacquer Coromandel screens, or valuable Louis Seize pieces, stripping them until they were as pale as sun-blanched bones. But Hastings reveals that this part of her legend is probably apocryphal since Syrie more often than not used period reproductions that gave the same effect, yet generated a sizable profit.

Somerset took his wife’s success in stride, although he was not above teasing her about it when they had guests at their home. He warned the invited to sit down as quickly as possible before their chairs were sold out from under them. He, apparently had good cause to be nervous about such things. Hastings relates how he returned to his office one day to find that his beloved writing desk, which he had an almost supernatural attachment to, had been sold by Syrie without his permission or knowledge.

Syrie Maugham later moved her establishment to Duke Street, then opened satellite shops in New York and Chicago. Along with Elsie de Wolfe, whose style was a bit more theatrical and camp, and Sibyl Colefax, the classic English decorator, Syrie Maugham set new standards for chic. Beaton, a devoted fan, took his pal Stephen Tennant, below, to Syrie’s. The exquisite aesthete was smitten with her plaster-cast palm trees, artful rugs by Marion Dorn, and whimsical ornamentation. He hired her to redo Wilsford, his grand country house, as well as his rooms in London. “She made great use of Regency furniture, often decorated with shell motifs; and Venetian grotto furniture, with its bizarre gilded oyster and barnacle-encrusted rococo forms,” according to Philip Hoare’s biography of Tennant, Serious Pleasures.

It was a look that was visionary and inspiring, and soon, contagious. Everyone who was anyone wanted a Syrie Maugham room. Wallis Simpson, Marie Tempest, Mona Williams, Rebecca West, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Tallulah Bankhead all relied on her good taste. Even Belle Poitrine, the star of Little Me (a literary spoof by Patrick Dennis) brags about hiring Syrie. Evelyn Waugh immortalized her as Mrs. Beaver in his 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust. (Syrie Maugham-designed bedroom for Celia Clark, below.)

Syrie’s style captured the spirit of the Roaring 20s and its freedom from stuffy repression. Much of the look we associate with Hollywood glamour of the early 30s owes its simple elegance to Syrie Maugham’s pared-down, almost surreal, aesthetic. Edward Molyneux, who was the cutting edge of chic then, called her “the greatest designer of all.”

Outside her work, Syrie’s life was anything but simple. She and Maugham were barely speaking to each other, except when it came to the theater for which she had an uncanny appreciation. He often relied on her opinion. But at home there were endless arguments. In 1922, she hit a female cyclist while driving her car and the woman died from her injuries. Luckily she was found not to be at fault and was not charged. But the incident further alienated Somerset who feared Syrie was a liability. He, by now, was laying down his rules of engagement. They could remain married but he would lead his own life, which consisted mostly of spending all his time with Gerald Haxton, his controversial, and not very popular, lover. Beverley Nichols claimed he was a sex-crazed cad who “stank” and bragged of seducing a 12-year-old girl in Thailand. And Hastings confirms an incident in which Haxton hurled a dog out of a moving car because he found it annoying. Luckily it lived, although Liza, Maugham’s daughter, who was in the car at the time, did not know this and was traumatized by what he did.

Things came to a head in August 1925 when Syrie finally met Haxton at the Villa Eliza, above, she was renting in Le Touquet, a fashionable resort in France. Somerset brought him at her request. Among the guests were Beverley Nichols, Noel Coward and Gertie Miller, a famous musical comedy star, now Countess of Dudley. Syrie, understandably on edge, was perhaps too effusive in making her rival comfortable. She seemed hyper. The odd threesome, constantly on eggshells, raised eyebrows among the guests. Nichols described it as “Design For Living as written by Tennessee Williams.” Soon sparks were flying, words were exchanged (mostly over Syrie’s billing her husband for the laundry) and Syrie left her own party early for London, creating a mini-scandal at the time. The tense weekend became the focal point of Beverley Nichols’s later screed, A Case of Human Bondage, in which he felt Somerset had behaved like a scoundrel, flaunting his idiosyncrasies in Syrie’s face. The marriage, for all intents and purposes, was over, although the final official divorce decree was not granted until 1929. (Maugham, below, with Gerald Haxton and friend.)

Hastings chronicles another cause for scandal: an incident in which it appeared that Syrie had pretended to lose a valuable necklace for insurance purposes when in fact she had sold it. For Somerset it was the final nail in the coffin since he felt her mercenary approach to money might undermine his reputation. Or so we are told. It’s hard to know what really happened. And a lot of Hastings’s versions of events comes straight from Somerset’s side. Syrie had a nervous breakdown at this point, while traveling with her daughter on a business trip to the States. She told Cecil Beaton that she’d spent “three whole nights in Central Park too miserable to go home.”

Somerset bought the Villa Mauresque, above, in the south of France and began the free-wheeling, bachelor life there that has been so well-chronicled. With her daughter in hand, a Rolls Royce and a handsome alimony, Syrie stayed in London, redoing a four-storey Georgian manse on King’s Road, Chelsea and became one of the preeminent hostesses of the day.

Syrie’s life continued in high style until her death in 1955 at 79 years of age. She never remarried and always claimed she was still in love with Maugham. Somerset, of course, lived on until his 90s. His mean-spirited attempt to disown his daughter and to tarnish Syrie’s reputation blackened his name with some. But Liza luckily was raised by Syrie, not Somerset, and turned out all right in the end. And that, in my book, says more about Syrie Maugham’s character than any amount of speculation or innuendo ever could.

Every now and then, when I least expect it, I will stumble across a name that for some reason begins to pop up repeatedly, almost uncannily, in the books I’m reading at that moment. Very often it’s a name I am unfamiliar with up until then. Then suddenly there’s no escaping it! Such an occurrence has just happened to me with Emily Vanderbilt, a beautiful and sometimes scandalous figure who crops up in works by or about Thomas Wolfe, E. E. Cummings, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Mercedes de Acosta, Dolly Wilde and Dashiell Hammett, all of which I’ve been dipping my nose into recently. It’s almost as if the hand of fate were poking a finger at me, demanding that I take notice. Well, I have taken notice. Emily Vanderbilt is a fascinating and bewildering creature, an enigma who epitomizes the highs and lows of what Gertrude Stein dubbed “the Lost Generation.” (Emily, above and below, by Arnold Genthe.)

During her glamorous, yet often troubled life, Emily Vanderbilt in fact had many names. Her birth name was Emily O’Neill Davies. She was the daughter of Frederick Martin Davies, a New York banker, broker and noted horseman, who raised his family in a large private house at 20 E. 82nd Street. Her mother, also named Emily O’Neill Davies, was the daughter of Daniel O’Neill, the editor and owner of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. When Daniel O’Neill died in 1877, leaving a fortune valued at $8,000,000, his wife Emma (nee Seely) married his brother, Eugene M. O’Neill, who took over the paper. Some reports describe Emily Vanderbilt as the granddaughter of Eugene O’Neill, but she was not. An 1880 census clearly states that her mother was the “stepdaughter” of Eugene. (Not to be confused with the famous playwright of the same name.)

The Frederick Martin Davies family lived in high style at their posh Manhattan manse. In the 1910 census they are shown to have had ten servants: a parlor maid, waitress, cook, kitchen maid, two chambermaids, two nurses, a laundress and a lady’s maid. Young Emily grew up in a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, summering in Southampton, wintering in Palm Beach, weekending in Newport, and gallivanting as a debutante among the glitterati in Manhattan’s upper crust. It was a life of extreme luxury at the height of the gilded age.

Frederick Martin Davies was the cousin of Bradley and Townsend Martin, and best friend of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. Ironically, Davies died the day before Vanderbilt set sail on the ill-fated Lusitania and lost his life. So it seemed a fitting twist of fate that in a fairy-tale wedding at Grace Church in Manhattan in 1923, Davies’ beautiful young daughter Emily would marry Vanderbilt’s son, William Henry Vanderbilt III (below).

That marriage seemed, at least in the society-mad press, to be a storybook romance. But it did not fare well. They moved to Boston and Oakland Farm in Portsmouth, near Newport, which Vanderbilt had inherited in his father’s will along with $5,000,000. A daughter also named Emily was born in 1924. Three years later, William and Emily split up in a divorce that took only six minutes in court to implement. Emily claimed William had failed to provide. He was rumored to be cruel and over-protective. Some have speculated that he hired detectives to follow his wife who may have been having an affair with a handsome young theatre producer named Sigourney Thayer. In the end, Vanderbilt was granted custody of the child, permitting Emily to see her daughter only three months out of the year. William Vanderbilt III later married Anne Colby, started a bus company in Newport, then went on to become a State Senator, and ultimately Governor of Rhode Island. He died in 1981.

On December 7, 1928, Emily wed Sigourney Thayer (above). An Amherst grad, Thayer was a curious figure in New York circles. His father was William Greenough Thayer, headmaster of St. Mark’s, a tony New England prep school. When they wed, Time quipped that he was a “spasmodic theatrical producer, wartime aviator, Atlantic Monthly poet, socially prominent jokesmith.” Thayer dressed like a dandy and had a showy Proustian mustache. The marriage was a surprise to friends who didn’t think she took the affair that seriously, but perhaps she felt that it would be too big a loss to give up her daughter for a mere youthful indiscretion. She gave legitimacy to the relationship, but the marriage didn’t last. Both agreed it was a mistake. They divorced a year later.

(Above: Aline Bernstein; E. E. Cummings; Thomas Wolfe; Edmund Wilson)

Emily Vanderbilt Thayer led a gay social life in Paris and was a fixture in literary circles. She aspired to be a writer and critic, and surrounded herself with well-known authors. She knew Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and became chummy with dancers from the Ballets Russes. At a party hosted by Muriel Draper, she first encountered E. E. Cummings. He found her, according to one source, “blonde, statuesque, charming and gorgeous.” They had a two-month affair. She soon fell for Thomas Wolfe whom she met through Aline Bernstein. Emily “tried to make him,” according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who followed her comings and goings with a fascinated eye. She would write Wolfe urgent notes written in a childish scrawl, begging to see him. Wolfe reportedly was astonished by her beauty and seductive charms, but was wary of her insolence and sexually aggressive ways. He found her “fundamentally trivial.” Wolfe’s biographer David H. Donald says he was “disgusted by her systematic and rather dogged experience of the life of degeneracy and refused to join her in smoking opium.” He detested her gigolo Raymonde, “a bad Valentino.” Worse, she paraded Wolfe among her friends as someone “madly in love with her.” He fled to Rouen. Wolfe eventually used Emily as the basis of the character Amy Carlton in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again. Fitzgerald praised his description of her “cracked grey eyes,” and “exactly reproduced speech,” as “simply perfect.”

Emily didn’t limit her affairs to male writers. She was drawn to the lesbian demimonde, dominated by Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes. According to Zelda Fitzgerald biographer Sally Cline, Emily was most likely bisexual. She was close friends with Dolly Wilde, the notorious niece of Oscar Wilde, as well as Mercedes de Acosta, another social butterfly who achieved fame by her dalliances with great writers and movie stars.  I found a ship record for the two of them traveling together aboard the Olympic from France to New York in 1929. On it, Emily gave her birthday as August 10, 1903. Mercedes claimed to be 30, born in 1899, although she was actually six years older. At the time Emily maintained a home at 176 E. 75th St.

(Above: Djuna Barnes and Natalie Barney; Zelda Fitzgerald; Mercedes de Acosta; Dolly Wilde)

During this period, as the Jazz Age reached a fever pitch before the inevitable plunge, Emily was swept up in the decadence of cafe society, flouncing around with a bunch of Hemingwayesque expatriate socialites who’d come to live it up in Europe. Zelda Fitzgerald said that she “was sorry for her. She seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill.” Scott, hoping to bolster Zelda’s spirits, who was jealous of Emily’s sophisticated allure, dismissed her in a letter as someone who “could not dance a Brahms waltz, or write a story. She can only gossip and ride in the Bois and have pretty hair curling up instead of thinking.” Scott may have been projecting his own sense of insecurity among the very rich. Thomas Wolfe considered him a social climber. Fitzgerald, despite his misgivings about her, had an affair with Emily in 1930, when Zelda was in Prangins recovering from a breakdown. But it didn’t amount to much. Fitzgerald later wrote that she “was too big a poisson for me.” He remained mesmerized by her, however. Both he and Zelda kept clippings about her in their scrapbooks.

Emily in fact did have higher dreams than just being a transatlantic party girl. She wrote books and articles but never tried to get them published. Asked if she would ever write for publication, she coyly answered: “I will tell you in twenty years.” In 1929 it was announced with fanfare that she would become a reader for the publishing firm Boni & Liveright (one of the foremost houses in publishing at that time). Its founder Horace Liveright was a bon vivant and ladies man who managed to lure the leading lights of the literary firmament to his doors. Eugene O’Neill, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser were all published by him. Emily relished her role as reader and used her contacts to aid Liveright. Lillian Hellman first took note of Emily Vanderbilt at the 1934 opening night party of her first play, The Children’s Hour, which was about a lesbian scandal in a girl’s school. Hellman described her as a “a handsome, boyish-looking woman” seen at every literary cocktail party. Judging by photos of Emily taken by Carl Van Vechten in this period (below), she was still striking looking, but perhaps not as innocently radiant as before.

Emily’s interest in literature was serious and well-informed. It might explain her marriage in 1933 to the writer Raoul Whitfield. One of the big names at Black Mask magazine, a pulp that published Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and defined the “hard-boiled” genre, Whitfield was a former aviator who fought in World War One and claimed to have won the Croix de Guerre for distinguished service, although some critics have suggested that such an honor was more likely a “flight of imagination.” One biographer described him as sporting a “cane, elegant leather gloves and a silk scarf around his neck, looking aloof and imperious. His mustache is carefully trimmed, his dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle. Every inch the gentleman.” (Below, Raoul Whitfield from Argosy).

Whitfield’s family traveled abroad when he was young and he was raised partly in the Philippines. His middle name was Falconia but he used the name Raoul Fauconnier Whitfield when describing himself. He was something of a mystery himself, and remains so to his most devoted fans. Throughout his life he held many odd jobs, including fire fighter in the Sierra Madre range, a bond salesman in Pittsburgh, and a newspaper reporter. He even tried his hand at acting in silent films. Widely considered one of the top detective story writers, he was a close friend of Dashiell Hammett’s. Hammett later had an intimate affair with Whitfield’s first wife Prudence Smith after the couple’s divorce.

Emily saw in Raoul a way out of her wayward existence in cafe society. She admired his writing ability and wrote a play with him called Mistral. But the marriage was tempestuous from the start. By this time she was drinking heavily and using sleeping pills at night. She became increasingly moody and difficult. Today she might be diagnosed as suffering from manic depression. Yet at first the marriage seemed successful. They bought a rambling spread in Las Vegas, New Mexico which they called “Dead Horse Ranch.” Here they raised cattle, built a polo field, a golf course and entertained friends from both coasts on a lavish scale. But the union soon devolved into jealous rages and accusations of infidelity. Raoul was allegedly having an affair with a local barmaid named Lois Bell.

The final chapter in Emily’s life reads like the climax of one of Whitfield’s violent novels. Shortly after starting divorce action against Whitfield, Emily was found shot to death in her bedroom at the ranch on May 24, 1935. A hastily assembled coroner’s jury found that she had committed suicide, despite the fact that the gunshot wound was on her lower left side and she was right-handed. The bullet, from a Colt .45, passed through her lungs and hit her heart. The New York Times reported that she had become “despondent after a conference yesterday on a divorce suit.” Her friend Mrs. Virginia Haydon Stone was with her earlier but did not spend the night. Emily retired at 11 PM. “The body, clothed in pajamas and a dressing robe, was found at 7:30 o’clock [the next] morning, on the bed, a revolver clutched in the outflung right hand.” The body was discovered by an employee at the ranch. But almost immediately speculation grew that someone had killed Emily Vanderbilt Whitfield. Lillian Hellman did not mince words when she wrote later: “she was murdered… and neither the mystery story expert nor the police ever found the murderer.” (Below: Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett.)

Whitfield was a prime suspect, even though he had proof that he was in California at the time of Emily’s death. Some suspected he hired someone to kill her. For the rest of his life he lived under a cloud. He inherited a small fortune, then married Lois Bell and moved about constantly, almost frenetically. He went through the money like a dose of salts. Adding to the tragedy was the suicide of Lois Bell, who leaped from a hotel window in San Francisco in 1943. Raoul Whitfield’s health deteriorated. He had tuberculosis. Hammett, in a typically generous gesture, asked Hellman to send him a check for $500. Whitfield died, broke, in a military hospital on January 24, 1945.

Not surprisingly, the story of Emily Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield has fascinated writers for 75 years. Recently a novel based on the case has been published which delves into the circumstances of her death and offers a very dramatic, yet plausible solution. Written by Walter Satterthwait, the novel is Dead Horse. I won’t give away the ending, but it is utterly convincing. You can read more about it at the author’s website: www.satterthwait.com.

As for Emily’s daughter, she was raised by her father William H. Vanderbilt. Nicknamed “Paddy,” she married Jeptha Wade, an attorney, originally from Cleveland. They lived in Boston. He died a year ago August at 83.  She is a Life Member Emeritus of the MIT Corporation, and President of MITS, Inc.

Emily O’Neill Davies Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield may have been a character of many names, with three troubled marriages, but she was not easily categorized. As a debutante, she enchanted high society. As an heiress, she married “well” only to find that fairy-tale romances are bittersweet. As a mother, she was devoted to her daughter despite years of separation. But she was also a woman who defied the strictures of her age, became a respected devotee of the finest authors of her day, and ended as an iconoclast who lived and loved on her own terms. Whether tragic muse or literary butterfly, her legacy will haunt us for generations to come.

I don’t normally like to post knee-jerk reactions to the news of celebrity deaths. There are far too many graveyards in the blogosphere where eager hearse chasers leave bunches of thorny roses in honor of recently deceased stars for me to compete with. But every now and then a figure passes away who touched my life, albeit briefly, in a singular way. Such a figure was Ruth Ford, who was 98. I first met her thanks to Vanity Fair magazine which hired me to do an interview with her for my column on “Curious Collectors.” The column was not a great success and it did not run for very long. (I had had much more success with my earlier “Conspicuous Coffee Tables” column.) And Ruth Ford was an odd choice for the series since her collection consisted of a vast number of paintings by Pavel Tchelitchew, many of which belonged to her brother, the writer Charles Henri Ford, who had lived with Tchelitchew for many years.

But nothing could stop me from doing it. Ruth Ford was a glamorous figure to me. I knew of her work in several B-movies, and of her work on Broadway as Estelle in Sartre’s No Exit and Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. Plus she lived in the Dakota, that somewhat gloomy edifice on the edges of Central Park where John Lennon and Rex Reed also lived. The Dakota had been the setting for Rosemary’s Baby, starring that other famous Ruth, Ruth Gordon. It has an eerie fascination for me. I had always wanted to get inside. I was not disappointed.

Walking into the apartment, which seemed to occupy an entire floor and wound around like a labyrinth, I was immediately struck by how dark everything was. Most of the shades were drawn. Heavy curtains further obscured the light. The atmosphere reminded me of some Victorian mansion in an old Hollywood horror film. The Spiral Staircase, in particular, sprang to mind. Miss Ford, who at this time had to have been in her 70s, appeared like a ghostly mirage, draped in exotic fabrics and lavish Oriental jewelry. The space reeked of incense and dust. She was a slight figure. Her famous dark hair had now become grayish blond (at least that’s how I remember it, and I vaguely recall it was hidden behind a turban). She stared into my eyes and spoke with a dramatic actressy voice, but one that was graced with laughter and amusement. She was seductive and charming, and I immediately felt welcome, but not necessarily at ease. (Ruth Ford, fitted by Balmain, below.)

From the moment she took my hand, it was obvious who was in charge. I rarely got a question in edgewise as Miss Ford led me on an extended tour of the apartment, showing me posters and fliers from various shows she had appeared in, digging out old photographs and family albums of her youth in Mississippi while regaling me with name-dropping reminiscences of her days in the sun on the stage. It was clear after just a few minutes that we weren’t going to be talking much about Tchelitchew, and we barely glanced at the paintings (of which there were dozens on the walls, on easels, and leaning against each other on the floor.) The interview was about Miss Ford and Miss Ford alone. (I later learned that she was eager to sell some of the Tchelitchews, but the market for his style at that time, mid-80s, was in decline.)

As our interview drew to a close, and photographs had been taken, a man entered the apartment. He was even older looking than Miss Ford, with a shock of white hair and a half-crazed expression that made one think either he had just escaped from a lunatic asylum or was the next recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was her brother Charles Henri Ford. (If the Times obit is correct and Ruth was 98 when she died, then she was in fact Charles’s older sister. He was born in 1913. Charles, below, shot by Cecil Beaton.)

I must admit at that point in my young career, I was not fully aware of his accomplishments, although his name was familiar to me. But he rectified that immediately by inviting me up to his apartment a few days later where he showed me back issues of the surrealist art magazine View which he had edited, as well as many poems, paintings and sketches he had done. He lived in what he described to me as a “valet’s room” on the top floor. It was a fraction the size of his sister’s pad and I was surprised that there were no Tchelitchews in it. Instead, it was spare and ascetic, a monk’s cell. Charles was a whirlwind of energy, despite his advancing age. He reminded me of the saintly lama that Ronald Colman meets towards the end of Lost Horizon, and considering Charles’s fascination with Tibet and Nepal, this was not entirely by accident. His young companion, a Nepalese, joined us for tea. We passed a pleasant afternoon. As I was leaving, Charles gave me a copy of his “coffee table book” Spare Parts, signing it with a flourish.

Later, after my article appeared, Ruth Ford (shown, above, modeling for the artist Armin Hansen) called me and invited me over for tea. I did not go. There was something vacuum-like in her need for constant stroking that made me wary. I had already devoted a great deal of my earlier life to taking care of my mother, a bewitching narcissist, with mental problems, whose need for attention was titanic. I felt the same way about Ruth Ford. She wooed you with mountains of charm, but left me with that sinking feeling you’d be lucky to escape with your life.

I did run into her several times at museum openings, cocktail parties and sometimes on the street, since I lived just a few blocks away. I have always chided myself for not getting to know her better. My fear of being subsumed by her Sunset Boulevard persona was unwarranted. I could have handled it. I had, in fact, managed to be quite friendly with Diana Vreeland who was known to be “difficult.” But Mrs. Vreeland had created her formidable personality through sheer force of will. While Ruth Ford, whom Sondheim (according to the obit in the Times) considered a great “salonniere,” was more dependent on the famous names surrounding her. She had been married to Zachary Scott, who played Monte Beragon in Mildred Pierce, opposite another fiery larger-than-life presence, Joan Crawford, below. And later in the 70s, Ruth Ford was the companion of Dotson Rader, whose books on the rebellious 60s were favorites of mine.

I did, however, keep up with Charles. He was, I soon discovered, the author with Parker Tyler of The Young and Evil, one of the best, and most important, early gay novels. Written in 1933, it was published in Paris by Olympia Press. And soon became a much-sought-after collector’s item. Later it was reprinted in paperback, with a Tchelitchew cover, and it was in this edition that I read it and realized what a genius Charles Henri Ford really was.

One irony of the Ruth Ford story for me is that when I wrote the column about her Tchelitchew collection, I included a throw-away line about the artist being “the lover” of Charles Henri Ford. My editor insisted that I take that out. It might get us in trouble, he argued. “In trouble?” I asked incredulously. “Everyone knows they were lovers. They lived together until Tchelitchew’s death in 1957.” This was the 80’s, for God’s sake! (Detail of Tchelitchew’s The Bathers, below.)

Faced with what I considered homophobic censorship, I bristled and refused to change it. But I was overruled, the change was made (”lovers” was replaced by “friends”) and a lingering resentment on my part for having to couch my terminology in order to “pass” at Vanity Fair caused me to be less accommodating in the future, and might even have “queered” my position with the magazine. There were other factors, of course, but I don’t think that it was a total coincidence that my contract was not renewed a year later. I went off to write for other magazines where I could let my hair down fully, including Out which became a mainstay of my writing career in the 90s. I noticed with some amusement today in the New York Times obituary that now, in 2009, the Times had no problem with calling Tchelitchew Charles’s “lover.” We’ve come a long way, baby. And somehow I think that Charles’s fascinating sister, Ruth Ford, would have approved.