 I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and I would like to welcome you after our wonderful blizzard. We communed this morning, Emily and I, and we discussed that probably after everybody was hunkered in yesterday, there would be nothing nicer than to come out to the Brooklyn Museum and to hear a wonderful talk. So I'd like to welcome you. We have also a number of Bingham Clan people here, so I'd like to welcome you to the Brooklyn Museum and to the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art. This is Emily Bingham's book, and this is a great book, and I don't say that about every book that comes here that I talk about, and it was a joy for me to read. I'm going to start by introducing Emily's bio and then saying some things that I thought a lot about and felt a lot about while I was reading it. Emily was born in Louisville, Kentucky, into a journalism family. Early on, she decided she wanted to write. Among her grade school efforts was a poem inspired by the typewriter her father gave her as a child, and on which he would type bedtime stories as he told them. The poem typewriter weighed the options. She wrote novelist, journalist. She wrote for newspapers prior to graduating from college and reading the slush piles at a New York publishing house. After earning a BA in history from Harvard, Emily pursued academic work at University in North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her PhD dissertation took the shape of a family biography about her great aunt, Henrietta's courage and allure, the seed of which began as an oral history with her grandmother, Mary Caperton Bingham. She since returning to Kentucky, Emily has taught at Central College in Danville and at Bellarmine University, University of Louisville and St. Francis High School in her hometown. She lectured on domestic labor and the evolution of the state song, My Old Kentucky Home. As a New Yorker, I don't really know that much about it, it would be interesting. Emily's articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and The New England Review. Her books include Mordecai, An Early American Family, which was published in 2003, and is editor with Thomas A. Underwood, The Southern Agrarians and The New Deal. Thomas A. is after I'll Take My Stand as co-editor. She and her husband, Stephen Riley, have three children. So that tells us a little bit about Emily and I would like to say that Emily, you have written what I think of as a glorious romp as well as an intimate portrait of the, and yes it was, irrepressible life of Henrietta Bingham. For me it was indeed a thrilling romp to read through this beautifully researched yet breezy story of a woman as we say before her time. In addition to that, it was a historic and historic eye-opener as people whose names I have only known embedded in American cultural history fly by in their formative years. It would be the opportunity to put lives with the names to those that have become untouchable icons or department stores and the nascent analysis of Freud and Young, both intimately affecting Henrietta's exploration of her own sexual preferences and identities and teaching us about our history. Emily has built the surrounding culture of all these extraordinary people into a life-sized portrait that provides focus on pre-World War II life here and abroad and by extension the wasteland left behind by fascism and the narrow-minded. But we have the pleasure with this book of journeying through life, the Smith College's turn of the last century's elite. Most of Henrietta's tale comes full force in London where the children of Gordon Selfridge, and if you've been to London, you know all about Selfridges, sons of Constant Garnet, the extraordinary translator of Tolstoy, not to mention all the affairs of the married and unmarried people, two people of different genders, are all in full animation. Lives were filled with as much intelligence and hedonism and causing as much pain as they caused pleasure, and then contemporary but now historic characters, along with reoccurring acquaintances and close friends. They just speed by Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury group, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Diego Lev, Gerald Brennan, Lytton Stachy, Stephen Tomlin, John Banting, Lincoln Kirstein, George Ballantyne, Lincoln and Mr. B, George Ballantyne, actually teamed up after all of this period and founded the New York City Ballet, and I would suspect that maybe even Lincoln Center has something to do with Lincoln Kirstein. Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, the Schlesinger's, sports. Leopold and Loeb, we know about, or some of us do. Clarence Darrow, A.G. Spaulding, more sporting goods. Elizabeth Taylor and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, though later are threaded in to this extraordinary tale of connectivity. Clive Bell, Langston Hughes and his weary blues ain't got nobody in all this world, ain't got nobody but myself. I's going to quit my frowning and put my troubles on the shelf. This seems to encompass much of Henrietta's MO, but there are more. Jack Hausman, who changed his name to John Hausman, who collaborated with Worson Wells for the Federal Theater Project and Citizen Kane, founded the Juilliard School's Drama Division and years later with Archibald MacLeish. They hobnob with Florence Mills and Edith Wilson and were introduced to the Harlem Renaissance by Henrietta. And how wonderful to hear Philip Johnson, yes, the architect now engraved in iconic stature as a virile young man whom Lincoln Kirstein met at Harvard. By the early 1930s, even with anti-Semitism underway in Germany and Hitler's once clownish demeanor in full force and power, B. Lily and Noel Coward delighted everyone at a party Henrietta threw in London. One learns that women's tennis didn't begin and end and hasn't ended with Billie Jean King before her the beautiful Helen Hull Jacobs was playing Wimbledon and the US Open. The war may well have destroyed, if not played havoc, with all of women's participation from politics to art. In fact, without the rise of fascism and the spread of Nazi suppression, the history of women, of homosexuals and of artists may have taken a prolific and superior role. Biographer Emily Bingham speaks to the import of the WPA program in the states. The same year Leslie Howard comes fleeting by and Edward VIII marries Wallace Simpson. So I have spent the last ten minutes or more name dropping. More delightedly seeing the back story to what has become our cultural heritage. Throughout irrepressible, however, is the formidable experiment, if you will, an influence of psychoanalysis interwoven into a story of a woman moved by her will and her want, charming and vivacious, but ultimately caught up in a post-war world struggling to recoup and with little support for the eventuality of a life lived freely and with profound passion. So I thank Emily for creating a tapestry of the world and its intellectuals and artists whose relationship together we otherwise wouldn't know and to become acquainted again with the common thread and the common thread, of course, is Emily's great aunt, Henrietta Bingham. So please join me in welcoming Emily Bingham. That was just absolutely lovely. Thank you and thank you for having me to this fantastic institution. I'm going to turn this a little higher. Can anyone hear me? This is such an honor. I will say from the outset that this isn't explicitly about feminist art, but I think from what Elizabeth has already said and the space that we are in and the spaces that Henrietta occupied in her interesting, beyond interesting life, we do understand something about how feminism and women's lives depend on these sorts of spaces and I hope you will see that with me. Okay, so this book was not supposed to happen. I knew nothing about Henrietta Bingham growing up, really almost less than nothing if you take into account that what I did here was so brush-offable and uninteresting, really, that it made me absolutely uncurious almost about her. And so she, by the time I came along, I was born a few years before she died in 1965, but by the time I came along she had been, what I say, pruned from the family tree. No one was talking about her and when they did, again, it was in such dismissive ways that I asked very few questions, even though I'm, by nature, quite a curious person. And I think that says a lot about how silence works, at least for a while, fortunately in this case not permanently. But my story with Henrietta truly began in 1998. I was pregnant with my second child. I didn't know if it was a girl or a boy. And I had a plan, though, if it were a girl I was going to name her Sophie. Because there was actually a woman, when I was growing up, who was Henrietta's great friend, who was named Sophie. And I just always had adored that name and unfortunately though, or fortunately, unfortunately, the name Sophie began coming across my desk an awful lot that year, in 1998. It seemed to be very, are there any Sophie's in the room? It seemed to be a very popular name and I thought I don't really want my daughter to be Sophie one, two, or three in her preschool class. So let's reach deeper and the only other sort of Victorian name that came to mind was this family name, which I knew, you know, Henrietta had hung out with some Bloomsburyites in London in the 20s and maybe she was bisexual or a lesbian and whatever. There was Etta James, you know, that seemed good, the blue singer, and so we gave our daughter this name. Almost immediately, this process began of people, once this name was out in the world, of people approaching me with talismans of Henrietta. And there were photographs like this one of her in the 30s or late 20s really in sort of animation. I love this picture. There were physical objects like sort of semi-precious stone encrusted cigarette cases that ex-husbands of my aunts had somehow kept around and decided that I should now, or my little girl, should now have. And then there were stories and my favorite one came from a sort of grand dom of Louisville social life and she told me one evening at a dinner that she's asked me what I was doing and, you know, I was talking about my little girl and my other children and she said, oh Henrietta and she told this story about sometime in the late teens or early 20s when her mother was at a debut party and she witnessed the scene where another debutante came shrieking out of the powder room at the Louisville Country Club into this reception room and screamed to the assembled, you know, black tie crowd that Henrietta Bingham just kissed me on the lips. And that's my, the Louisville Country Club remains my top submission for a historical marker in Louisville to Henrietta. I just think it would be especially appropriate. So today I'm going to take you on a little tour and Elizabeth has already warmed you up with a lot of these these these spots and sights and folks. A tour of queer, jazz age subcultures. Zones where as a connoisseur, a patron and a muse, Henrietta Bingham's charisma and transgressive allure were embraced in ways they never could have been in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. She found safety and exhilaration through the 1920s and 30s in the music of the time, the art of the time, and the theater of the time. And whenever she wove into those spaces and zones she dominated as the novelist David Garnett said any group of people among whom she found herself. And as you already have a sense what people they were. But before I sort of dive into her her journey through these wonderful realms I need to tell you that this book is assembled in a very unusual way. I was beginning to be interested in Henrietta. I started doing a little research poking around. I met with my editor and he asked me about my sources and I said he said well you know how about her diaries and letters how are they and I said well there aren't any to speak of. There were a few letters probably under 20 in her own hand that I had access to and there were no diaries. And so what I was forced to do and that's why it is so much of a tapestry but another metaphor I use is the mirror and the shards of the reflection of Henrietta in the lives of the people she touched that has then enabled me to very indirectly create almost a holograph of a person who sometimes a very shaky holograph that we can't quite see her all the time but we understand something about the the world that she was moving through. So these broken pieces of other pieces of people's incomplete stories because I don't know everything have been pulled together to form what I still think is quite an incomplete story and it's a as a biographer I want everyone to know that the stories they read the biographies they read are very incomplete. This one just happens to be more obviously I think so. So this is where Henrietta was born in 1901 in perfect time to hit the Jazz Age because she was you know a teenager as it got going in Louisville, Kentucky she this was her grandmother's house my grandfather called this house an exclamation point on the landscape of Kentucky architecture or Louisville architecture and unfortunately it has been demolished but she came into the world at 13 pounds and she was clearly a very determined person from a very young age. Here she is already eschewing girls clothes at the age of three or four maybe even younger wearing boots on the wrong feet and she's going to get that tricycle going. I also think this picture there's a lot to read in here not only the cigarette and the rough rider costume but the fact that she is posed with a tapestry or some sort of fabric on the back stoop of her grandmother's house and one thing to remember about Henrietta is she clearly from an early age understood the gaze. She understood what it meant to be looked at and to pose and to be accessible in some way and so it's not just that she's cross-dressing here it's also that she is using her brilliant indescribably blue eyes which everyone tried to tell about but no one could quite pinpoint because we have no colored pictures of them but sort of like Elizabeth Taylor had these remarkable eyes the first thing that anyone saw with her and remembered about her wore her eyes so there she is gazing at I'm not sure whom took that picture but it's a remarkable one. She was always an athlete and her being in touch with her body was one of the most important aspects of her own life and whether it was sexually or on the tennis court or a stride of horse fox hunting or driving a car the way nobody else apparently did very fast. This was a big part and she did not particularly look happy dressed up in dresses like this with the dropped waist and the ugly headband and probably a particularly you know goofy moment in her life but that's her mother Babes and her older brother Worth who very early was pretty much accepted as a lifelong alcoholic and her younger brother my grandfather and my cousin's grandfather Barry but at the age of 12 a little older than this Henrietta's mother and the family were traveling to a country house for the weekend and the car was hit on a railroad track and her mother broke her neck and died and so at that very sensitive age I mean for anyone is a sensitive terrible event but this I think affected Henrietta through her life whether she could feel safe that the people she loved would really be around forever or for as long as she needed them and my grandfather reputedly walked around for a year on his tiptoes and barely spoke. So while in the wake of the death of the mother Babes her father who is a very ambitious lawyer from North Carolina living in Louisville begins to court the richest woman in the country they had known each other this is Mary Lily Keenan Flagler when she was married to standard oil Baron Henry Flagler and he and Babes Henrietta's mother died the same year and so quite convenient for both of these sort of old boyfriend or girlfriend they they began to see each other and I think this is how Henrietta felt about it if any of you have ever had a stepmother maybe you will identify a little with this now even though she did not like Mary Lily obviously this was an amazing turn of events for the family in terms of their economic reality I mean Henrietta was brought up in in a very well off but nothing like standard oil money so so she couldn't even though she was not happy about Mary Lily per se she could not have I don't think wished upon her father what happened which is that Mary Lily died within seven or eight months of their wedding in 1916 and and not only that but she changed her will right before she died in such a way that benefited the Bingham family and the Keenan's her own family who also stood to benefit from her demise were very angry and very upset the point that they exhumed her body from its grave in North Carolina and the headlines were all over the country that Henrietta's father may have had a hand in his wife's death in order to acquire this five million dollar the quest which which was a very recent thing so she has tragedy and then she has scandal and her father does come to depend inordinately upon Henrietta again the older brother he looks really good doesn't he but he was not of much use to the father in his opinion so Henrietta is the strong one in the family he uses some of his money soon thereafter to purchase the newspaper the courier journal in Louisville and began a career as a publisher and exerting a lot of political influence through the state and the region and beyond but Henrietta was just a teenager and for her I what evidence I have tells me that she channeled a lot of her anger her anxiety at this time into music which any teenager can understand almost I think but the time that she was growing up and a teenager was a particularly rich one because the music that she was able to tap into was began with the local jug bands in Louisville Kentucky which were extremely modern and sophisticated actually we think of it as sort of quaint but it wasn't they this music was at the root of blues jazz and ragtime and beyond and she could walk down the street and and hear this or she could hire them for a party and she sure did. Edith Wilson very early blues performer and singer and recorded the blues was born in Louisville she went on to a career way beyond Louisville in fact she not only used jug bands in her own recordings but she preceded Ma Rainey in her recordings and prove it on the blues the wonderful song instead of describing Ma Rainey's lesbian same-sex relationships also had a jug in it by the way and then you have her own sheet music which I do have a bunch of her collection and here is a May west and a young May west in everybody shimmies now and just to show the kind of dance it was not not just the music but also the dances of the time that were moving from night black night clubs into the mainstream so the shimmy being one Henrietta's heavy drinking brother spent a brief time at Tulane and that enabled them all access to know how know something about the music scene there and reputedly when he came back to Louisville he and Henrietta would hire bands all from as far away as New Orleans to come and play at their parties and there's a story about the parties going all night long and their father who was very lenient apparently in the situations coming downstairs one night afterwards and picking the fried chicken out of the piano strings um so it wasn't a big jump for Henrietta herself to want to get in on this amazing movement of of african-american music and culture as it was leaping into the full American consciousness and so I have a receipt of the saxophone she bought in 1918 at a downtown music store and I put up these pictures of other female sax players of the era simply to underscore that for a girl to play the saxophone a debutante type like Henrietta Bingham in the south in 1918 was absolutely not okay this the Schuster sisters were a sideshow they were you know not at all respectable as they might look to us today and up there you have the Siamese twins saxophone players also you know you might see them at the local fair but she took her saxophone with her to Smith College in 1920 and that's where they had fun snow day activities like leapfrog on ice skates and I'm sure she took full advantage of that and it was very quickly because it was in her first semester of English that she met here she is on her bike at Smith I particularly like that image of her with her little flapper headband she met her professor Mena Kirsten Mena Kirsten was a recent graduate of Smith a sort of lefty you know interested in the Russian revolution she looks a little Russian here Jewish and she had gone and gotten a master's at Columbia and was back at Smith to start her career which went on as a biographer and so on but you know the name Kirsten because of her brother Lincoln who as Elizabeth told you helped begin the New York City Ballet and he really was one of the great gay figures of 20th century New York and we have someone here who actually knew him a little so he's he's quite quite the character but at that time he was just an annoying little brother anyway Mena and her brother came from their own Jewish fortune so you have the Kentucky Princess you know Henrietta and this Jewish princess Mena whose father helped begin Filene's department store and so Mena went around in a beautiful car and for coats even though she was also you know interested in Lenin but what to do so Henrietta and Mena like each other and I don't know exactly what happened until the break between semesters Christmas of 1920 or New Years of 1921 and the Binghams were in their suite at the Waldorf Astoria and spending a few days in New York no doubt catching a lot of shows and shopping and Mena came in and visited the family and she says in a very in a in a letter to a psychoanalyst that it was at that time that Henrietta made love to her in such a way that Mena realized that I was in love with her and she was in love with me so here is a teacher-student situation that I'm sure not unique but rare that we get such a frank assessment of it so what to do a sabbatical seemed in order and Henrietta took her saxophone with her to London with her teacher in the fall of 1922 they were ostensibly going to be studying at at London University and I have absolutely no data on whether that ever happened in any case I do know that they hung out at the Savoy the American bar which was a very hot place at the time and the Savoy Orpheans this great Dixieland style band was singing songs like you're in Kentucky as sure as you're born which Henrietta must have must have conjured images of home and it was populated by stars and and amazing interesting people like Tallulah Bankhead who at the time was bowling London over in her performance in a play called The Dancers her bisexuality was a sort of known thing even then and she and Henrietta certainly not only were associated but more than cross paths because years and years later at an Adley Stevenson fundraiser in Manhattan where they both were attending as a yellow dog Democrats Tallulah Bankhead came up to Henrietta and grabbed her pearl necklace and pulled her toward her and said you promised these to me in London but this wasn't the only world that Henrietta and then I were circulating in the other one was the world of art that and their their escort into that world is David Garnett whom everyone called Bunny he is a quite an interesting figure not terribly well known today but he at that moment had a best-selling novel short novella which I highly recommend called Lady Into Fox and he called it a reductio ad absurdum to the problem of fidelity in love and in this in the story it's about a couple and the wife actually begins to transform into a fox before her husband's eyes and there's just a little bit of problem of what what to do in this situation but anyway so he was running a bookstore and he had this sort of runaway well bestseller it was it was getting a lot of critical attention and winning prizes and he happened to meet in his bookstore Mina and Henrietta he was kind of a young adopted member of the Bloomsbury group he was about 10 years younger than them but he was lovers with half of them and including Lytton Strati the biographer on the left and Virginia Woolf and this is a wonderful picture from just the period when Henrietta encountered them the group was really built around Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell who was a painter and and a group of Cambridge men who who built a sort of society around these sisters and there was Duncan Grant who's standing on the left John Maynard Cain and Clive Bell the art critic very important role in in 20th century understanding 20th century art standing on the right and then I just put the extra picture of Duncan Grant there because he was so dishy everyone loved he was sort of like Henrietta everyone loved Duncan Grant I mean everybody men and women poor Vanessa Bell spent her whole life in love with him and got one daughter out of him but mostly he was interested in men but this group shared an attitude toward life which seemed to be natural to them but was really shocking in their day they rejected conventions which to them seemed irrelevant and pursued feeling desire and ideas wherever they led and an example of this is that David Garnett who began to have an affair with Mina Kirsten sent her a letter one day which is actually in the New York Public Library saying oh did I mention to you that today my wife gave birth to a beautiful son and Mina didn't even know he was married this is just an image of the kind of lifestyle bohemian this is the the studio in the country house that Duncan Grant shared with other Bloomsburyites and and just the the sort of style that they evoked is also been a source of why they've been so fascinating for so long to people now by this time Henrietta was seeing a psychoanalyst very important one in London and he and she and Mina were seeing a lot of David and so on and David really liked Henrietta as well he talked about her brilliant eyes and her caressing voice of the south and he really was interested he didn't think there was anything wrong with their relationship he was kind of bewildered why they thought a psychoanalyst was in order but that's what was going on unfortunately probably and so but he really wanted to bring these women into his circle and so the occasion for that was a party celebrating his 30th birthday so Henrietta arrived at the party with a cake a caramel cake that she is baked with a picture of Lady in Defox the cover on the on the top of the cake she also brings a wicker basket full of mixers and spirits and starts mixing cocktails for everybody and and then and there's a lot of wine and a few olives so everyone is getting really drunk and it's in the studio in London that Whistler was Whistler's studio and then was Duncan Grant's and Vanessa Bell's studio so all the Bloomsbury crowd were assembled so when the music ran down oh this is David sweet to Mina that's his little card when the music ran down Henrietta picked up a mandolin so not only the saxophone but she could strum a mandolin at least and she sang this this song Water Boy it was one of those moments right this is a chain gang tune adapted from if you know out in the world by Avery Robinson actually a Louisvillean it was recorded that year by Fats Waller and later recorded by Odetta and Paul Robson and it has the great lines there ain't no sweat boy that's on this mountain that runs like mine that runs like mine and this performance in all its rich contradictions was perfect Henrietta wore her difference as an as an American in this English surrounding and as a southerner channeling rebellion and blackness sorrowness sorrow and sex and being pursuing and being pursued sexually it was a mesmerizing moment sort of like Edie Sedgwick bursting on the scene of the factory she became the it girl for the Bloomsbury group one of the people who fell under her spell that night is Stephen Tomlin a sculptor who was her age and also a protege of David Garnett's kind of making his debut as well and his sexual and he's pretty hot but his sexual ambidexterity was also kind of a legend in the in the in the group one day David Garnett went over to his studio looking for Tomlin and he wasn't there and and he started writing a list on the wall of the different people who might be entertaining him and men and women and when Tomlin finally got back he painted a fig leaf over the graffiti of that list but Tomlin sculpted Henrietta that year as their affair began and this is a wonderful she actually commissioned this from him and gave it to her father who was extremely jealous this whole time and so that must have been quite the gift here's my boyfriend's head of me bust but the cocked head is I think important because Henrietta had a way of without saying very much herself bringing people out and making them feel very intimate and close to her so I think but and also she has a little double chin she was only 22 years old at this time so there's just this real sweetness to it I think and I like this picture of of Henrietta with Tomlin who to whom she became engaged at one point or at least almost he begged her to marry him and they are at Lytton Stray Cheese house she's in her riding tog and it's almost as if he's the bride and she's the bridegroom but Tomlin wasn't the only one interested in this new fangled Kentucky and on the scene and Dora Carrington who was a painter prize winning painter and went to the Slade school was also very taken with her so Carrington had a very unusual and made an unusual decision to move in with Lytton Stray Cheese this was a again this sort of arrangements that an unmarried woman and a gay man well you couldn't say gay man but a queer man living together in the country this is a her painting of their first home together was just extraordinarily unusual and and risky in many ways as well they the Bloomsburyites sort of just didn't seem to they seem to be able to put aside social convention in a way that's I think still pretty surprising to us today but Lytton described the situation thus ladies in love with buggers and buggers in love with womanizers and the price of coal going up too so this is a still from a film named called Carrington that is based on the on the relationship between Dora Carrington and Lytton Stray Cheese unfortunately the director Christopher Hampton decided to delete Carrington's same-sex or as he called polymorphic aspects from her story and so you are left with I think a very partial picture of who Carrington was and the other thing that doesn't come through the film is her her own gender dysphoria and she's the first historical figure that I've come across where I feel I can read back into her experience of her body something that we now have a little better sense of and understanding of but that didn't stop her from being interested in Henrietta's body and she called Henrietta a Giotto Madonna and here I think is a pairing that says a little bit about how she saw that in her that coolness and and depth as well and they had a wonderful few days together in what Carrington in her diary called the secret house this was a house in in London on Trevor Square that Henrietta had rented for Mina Kirsten and Lincoln and the other Kirsten brother George to spend the summer in but they hadn't arrived yet so it was empty they took it over they had delicious time together and it may have been there that Carrington produced these two sketches of Henrietta one of which is in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire and they're interesting for a number of reasons the strength of the of the pose the the nude obviously the bedroom slippers with heels and little straps going up the ankles being the only adornment and then I have to say there is an anatomical unusualness here too in Henrietta's sex and I don't know what may have been but I can say that Dora Carrington knew how to draw female nudes and she chose to depict Henrietta's sex in an unusual way but Henrietta was continually being called back to America specifically to Kentucky where her father actually had plans to bring her into the publishing business big surprise to me because I thought all along that this was only a business that sons had been considered for but that was one of the silences I grew up with around Henrietta not knowing that she was considered as a as a target for that but she she lived in Kentucky a little bit in 1924 got back to London as fast as she could but when he pulled her back she said okay but I'm gonna live in New York this time and so it was 1925 she's living at 25 Fifth Avenue and working for this very respected publication called Theater Arts not surprising that she would find that a good a good way to spend time she's selling ads for them and one of the first people to come into her life in that period was John Hausman Jacques Hausman as Elizabeth said you set me up so well he changed his name to John Hausman we know him more now for his collaborations with Orson Welles which fell apart over Citizen Kane actually and for his role in the paper chase Oscar winning role in the paper chase in the 70s he had first encountered Henrietta in London he was British Jewish also half Jewish and he came to New York as a grain trader at this time even though he was an aspiring creative person and became a very creative person he thought he needed to make money and yet he remembered this girl this American he'd met in London wearing a purple dress sitting on a piano and playing her saxophone at a party full of African American performers and Bloomsburyites so he looked her up and the first night they evening they spend together Henrietta drives him uptown to the all black reviewed Dixie to Broadway where Florence Mills is performing with Edith Wilson they meet the cast in the intermission she's got her open Chrysler in which she bragged that she could cover 13 blocks without hitting a stop light she was going especially fast and her enormous silver flask I wish I had it with me it's this big on the seat in between them just in case they got thirsty between stops and then ultimately they arrived at Smalls Paradise which was the best of the great nightclubs I'd say in that 1925 moment it was the most mixed in terms of clientele and had some of the best music going and they didn't even stop there they then went to a rent party in a railroad flat off Lenox Avenue where John Houseman certainly for the first time in his life ate chitlins and greens and he so he saw heard and tasted via Henrietta the Harlem Renaissance that night Van Vechten's profiles of blues women in Vanity Fair didn't come out until the next year Henrietta was already deeply into this scene they were also enjoying theater together this was a pretty important time in theater here's Catherine Cornell and Leslie Howard in the green hat which was a risque production that included not subtle references to abortion and and adultery and then B. Lilly in a mixed race review both of both Lilly and and Cornell were lesbians who became part of Henrietta's inner circle of support through the 30s and 40s and I don't know how well she knew them at this point but but they were early in their career but Henrietta had her own love of theater independently which she shared with my grandfather Barry and here they are posed in the 30s he's got those amazing shoes and and they together in about 1928 produced the only creative work that I know that has survived Henrietta's life so her ability to touch people I have pretty well documented but this is the only thing that's been that's left and it's a very autobiographical melodrama sort of a gothic one called shadows and they wrote it together and it benefited largely from all the psychoanalysis that she's been undergoing but in it the character who resembles her in every way is called a wild ambitious unbridled feature. Halsman who called her a who loved her deeply I mean was mad about her for years said that sometimes she seemed excessively feminine and other times like a smooth muscled boy he said that with her it was probably the first and only time he fell in love though he was married several times and he said that late in life so I can say in retrospect but women kept calling to Henrietta and the next one in line was an actress named Beatrix Lehman Beatrix was an understudy for Tulula Bankhead no coincidence and she also came from her own very intellectual family her brother John was a famous editor John Lehman and her sister Rosamund was a best-selling novelist Beatrix herself wrote a novel that has a lesbian theme that's just below the surface I think it's actually deserves a little attention and she became in the 30s and 40s and 50s of very communist leaning which definitely damaged her acting career but you can see her in several episodes of Doctor Who as an older woman she plays this hilarious professor anyway here they are at a country house in Hunt Country where Henrietta was spending some of the winter months and Rosamund was sharing this house with them as well what I really like about this picture is the two men that you can barely see behind the fence looking at these rare birds and they must have been I've been to this village it's like nothing it's very tiny so these women really must have stuck out but Henrietta was again pulled back to the states her father was engaged in FDR's campaign for the presidency in 1932 and she helped him with that project and it didn't hurt that while she was in New York and in around traveling around the hottest lesbian actress of the time was Hope Williams who was also called Tallulah's best girl Tallulah was was maybe preceded Henrietta by a little but they got along really really well sorry Hope Williams is not remembered today because she deliberately decided not to be remembered this woman retired from the stage very early and didn't ever want to be famous she came out of the social register she Philip Barry saw her in an amateur production and wrote actually wrote the the play holiday for her which Catherine Hepburn her understudy took to Hollywood and is a wonderful film actually so the same role and Hepburn in her autobiography says it was from Tallulah that she picked up her swagger and her tough you know kind of demeanor that she really broke the ground for women in that in that way so Hope had been just starring in this Cole Porter review in which there was a great song that still listen to today called Let's Fly Away that's what Henrietta and Hope did with a mutual friend Edie from Louisville and here they are at Hope Williams ranch in Cody Wyoming Hope is there all dooted up with her ladies watch and her blue jeans hiked up and here is Hope standing in total cowboy gear Edie and then Henrietta in the hat and here they are outside the tent they were attended by dudes they rode all over the mountains they fished and they had champagne at night Beatrix who was then living in Berlin was more than a little upset by this she said she was having ride on cowboy fantasies and and declared in this very rare letter which she wrote to Henrietta but somehow ended up in Rosamond Lehman's papers in Cambridge or excuse me Oxford she said I should think it was an ideal country for bringing out most any girls subconscious wish for spectacular masculinity and here is Hope posed on her horse in a picture that was found in my family attic there was the next production that Hope was in was a expat comedy set in Paris where she plays a fashion designer and Henrietta may have actually held back this play but she certainly was very interested in it and it it premiered on the night that it was written by the Perlman's of later New Yorker fame it was premiered in New York on repeal night as they said goodbye to prohibition after their entire youth had been spent illegally drinking now they could do it in the open I think it might have been less fun at that point but and in any case that that opens and about the same time Henrietta's father gets his reward for all of his work for President Roosevelt and is appointed ambassador to the court of Saint James but he says that he will only take the position if Henrietta comes with him so even though she's got this thing going on with Hope and finally might be nice to stay in the U.S. for a while it's time for a second act for her in in Britain John Houseman said she he thought that she was quite happy there she led a very high profile life as what he called an English lesbian in you know lots of time in Hunt Country there was a long affair that she began with Helen Hull Jacobs the tennis champion and here is a picture of this from this period at taken at the weekend house that she shared with her father and Helen so Henrietta is is the second from the left I guess I have a pointer this is her father the ambassador this is Helen Jacobs the tennis star I'm not sure who these folks are it's called a dog party they all have dogs on their laps this is what you do in the country I guess but this is Man Ray so this is the kind of and this picture only came to me after the book was published I that's the kind of people that were just running in and out of on a regular you know on any regular weekend apparently so you could be you know forgiven if Henrietta just seems like another zealot going through the teens 20s and 30s you know knowing everybody but not really maybe not real but I think this just I just want to emphasize how much I don't know still I don't know what her relationship with Florence Mills was like Florence Mills died young of tuberculosis she had the largest funeral Harlem had ever seen at the time when she died Henrietta had championed her work she was a pre Josephine Baker she paved the way for Josephine Baker's success and some of her friends who lived in Paris other by performers were continued to be people Henrietta knew and had connections with but I don't know what they thought of each other exactly or what they did together who took this beautiful picture of hands that was in the trunk that I found in in my family's attic are those Henrietta's hands was this a you know an artist it looks like an artist's print in the spokes of a bicycle and even Dorothy Holland who was the last woman in Henrietta's life she starred in Cole Porter's first Broadway play she patented a bra strap holder this is all I know she was a voice and piano teacher and Henrietta's companion to the end of her years so wind this up Henrietta leaned into queer culture in realms of music and art and theater for a reason because creative people challenge and often trump convention and she needed to be among them her radiance inspired musicians writers artists and actors and in their company she could live more truly to herself Henrietta's extravagant capacity to move hearts served both as my key entry point so many years later to understanding something about her life but also her own way of distracting herself from inner darkness and loss my great aunt rode the wave of the jazz years as long as she could by the 1940s her beauty was fading this is actually a 50s picture but her beauty was fading and the culture clamped down on queerness like hers this new world and its treatments and medications which are documented in books like the Valley of the Dolls aimed that were and were aimed at rendering her more acceptable really dimmed her light in the 50s she was back living in New York City she had a stint in Kentucky during the war and through the war and the isolation that she experienced there was pretty pretty grim and severe but she was back living in New York and in one I think it was 1953 she was admitted to Doctor's Hospital on the east side across from Gracie Mansion with acute toxic psychosis this was a fashionable treatment center at the time they advocated very hard and it wasn't the first time for her to have a lobotomy she resisted that fiercely she told her brother she would crawl out the window she was subjected to shock treatment in 1955 she got married she'd obviously thought about getting married many times Catherine Cornell the actress of the green hat who became a great friend hosted the reception Catherine was married to a gay man theater producer this was a very very well known way to especially come the 1950s to help cover for queer people so this is Henrietta's husband Henrietta my grandfather Dorothy Holland her companion and I don't know who that was the McCarthy era brought terrible times as everyone who knows anything about gay history in this period the lavender scare thousands and thousands and thousands of people lost their jobs for being suspected of being you know non-conforming sexually and Henrietta the marriage did not last very very brief but she ended up in an apartment on the upper east side this is the last thing I have in her writing it is a shopping list it says milk sugar barley note paper cigarettes gin hairpins oil medicine dropper aspirin phenodorm sonoril and amatol the last three were all barbiturates and she seemed to need them all a month before she died she was talking about Proust she died in the summer of 1968 a year before the stonewall riots began a movement that demanded tolerance for gay lesbian and bisexual people but for a long time before that and after her death Henrietta was simply unmentionable John Hausman said to Mina in a letter written in the 1950s that Henrietta belongs for us both oh and by the way Mina and John Hausman had a relationship and Mina had an abortion of a pregnancy that resulted from that relationship but Hausman never got over Henrietta and neither did Mina Kirsten despite their later marriages and so forth but he said to Mina I couldn't call you after you called me after Henrietta's wedding I simply couldn't bear to hear about what has become of her and she said she belongs for us both to the Tampere du where she plays a warm and moving and very special part we share a little guilt about her in that we allowed her to be witches with her deepest weakness no less than with her very real and positive charm but today thanks to Elizabeth Sackler and her center brave and flawed and spectacular Henrietta is not entirely hairdue but in some sense with us so thank you I'm happy to answer questions if anyone wants to to start yeah thanks yeah so so so I was already on Henrietta's trail in beginning to look into things about her in the 2000s when my father was really ill and he said you know you're interested in Henrietta you've talked to me about Henrietta I don't know why you're interested in Henrietta but if you are there's a trunk in the attic and he had told me about this before he died in 2006 but I didn't do anything about it because I knew there was really nothing in there I'd looked in and it was a lot of disintegrating feather boas and literally riding crops you know old clothes and such and things like that I just was kind of disappointed but I took it upon myself finally to actually really inventory the trunk in 2009 and what I found were many things I found out that she had a head tiny head like me or like mine and and that she wore a size seven and a half shoe which was pretty big for the time but I still have those shoes I'm not sure what to do with them but she she did have in the trunk two things one there was a separate trunk I really hadn't noticed and at the very end I dug down in it and there were letters from Hausmann and Tomlin at the very bottom tied up still in their envelopes I have there over 100 from Hausmann about 60 from Tomlin and those enabled me to tell a story about her relationships with men that I otherwise really wouldn't have been able to tell and the other huge find what proved to be a huge find were some tennis clothes that showed up in the trunk there was a shirt with a monogram that said HHJ and a bunch of shorts with stripes down down the sides and I saw these I knew that she maybe had a relationship with a tennis player named Helen Jacobs I went online and saw that Helen Jacobs in pictures is wearing shorts just like that and a shirt just like that and that she was the first woman in tennis to wear shorts at a major tournament so I thought these shorts don't belong in an attic these are kind of famous shorts and and just thought I'd be doing the right thing I sent them to the tennis hall of fame in Newport Rhode Island and they get back to me eventually and say that's so nice of you we would like the shorts they'll go with our Helen Hall Jacobs collection and because the Hall of Fame's archives are not in any databases I had no idea that there was a Helen Jacobs collection and when I ran up there as fast as I could opened the boxes and there were diaries all in which Henrietta was written all through them sometimes blacked out when things got a little too intense sexy or maybe some bad parts but mainly just how absolutely divine she was and their life was together and so it was a huge find and under my nose my entire life above my bedroom childhood bedroom just sitting there waiting yeah Lenore Carrington I don't know not of my not to my knowledge I'm Carrington had no children Henrietta had no children Mina had no children one of the things that strikes me in this story and struck me as I was working on it is how much harder it is to recover people's lives when they choose not to have children because there is no automatic person to carry on a memory or a or a relationship and but so Carrington really very interesting and deserves some more work I think but no yeah yeah from what I can tell through the 20s and she did write some journalism when she was abroad sort of profiles of of interesting British people and she did a series on penal systems across Europe it's just I don't know to what degree those were things she really was pulled to do on her own or things she was pushed to do by her father or was even doing to make him happy she's a very good writer but I also say in the book that I think she was dyslexic she had a very difficult time reading and or she had some disability around text so I think this was one of the ways reason she was so magnetic and charming she was compensating for for that and there's a very poignant book I found in well my mother found in the family's attic again this attic that keeps giving it's a mark it's a huckleberry fin edition which she gave to my cousin Clara's to her nephew worth Bingham in the 40s and in it her she inscribes partly to him about the chapter that's her favorite when Huck cross dresses and dresses as a girl and he's found out but but he tries and she her writing is a little loopy and there are spelling errors that you just would never expect just in that short passage and so that gave me a real clue that when she wrote a letter she had to probably try hard and so that may have dissuaded her but the real reason I think she didn't she didn't want to be with her father she didn't want to be brought knit in and forced to live in Kentucky I mean imagine how hard that would have been and yet the fact that she had an opportunity in the 20s or 30s to play a you know k-gram like role is astonishing both for what it says about what he believed in her or wanted for her and what somebody at least you know was able to imagine right so the you know understanding why there are no letters I mean even if it wasn't most pleasant task for henry I had to write a letter she wrote thousands in her life that's what people did that's how they communicated so I minute kirsten has a extensive archive in at smith college which she herself carefully put together in her she had a long life so in her later years she absolutely intentionally scrubbed her relationship with henry out of from that archive I found one thing in that archive written about henry out of and I think it was in the back of a journal from her teenage years so predating henry out of so I think she may have just missed it or else she left intentionally one clue that said you know I'll never love henry anybody like I love henry out of this never will she's been here and she's gone and this seems my fate I'm always being left and and especially by her so henry she was scrubbed I think this is pretty purely you know just discrimination again you know a fear of the repercussions of same-sex relationships if they are known and minna was acutely aware of that to the degree that she was constantly trying to get her brother Lincoln into analysis and make him stop seeing men so so she she but even other lovers I think you know lots of letters go astray but I think kerington deliberately destroyed henry at his letters because she was so heartbroken by her she had a ritual burial of henry at his cocktail shaker so if she did that to the cocktail shaker she probably did you know put the letters in the fire and actually there's a wonderful story of a friend of Minna's witnessing her putting letters into the fire and how he was so Leo Lerman who was a great journalist fashion world journalist in New York in the in the 60 50s and 60s and friend of Minna's and he watched her do this and he said how can a biographer do this so I don't know if henry at his were among those but it just across the board I was so you know facing these these silences these either enforced or self-regulated or just out of hurt you know and even houseman you know she didn't keep she didn't keep the letters from her female lovers you know and it must have been out of caution it's a sad loss it's really I mean to have those letters from her male lovers and not have the companions is just it's very it is frustrating right so henry at his political life is a really interesting question and I have just a few clues here and there I know that she was absolutely engaged in anti-racist stuff and she was appalled by and you know very much for changing things on that on that in that realm but and she was also involved in some labor a little bit of labor protests as well in the 20s in the 30s her father was the most anti-fascist person in the State Department as ambassador and she was absolutely sympathetic with the you know you know resistance to Hitler I have I don't know how aware she was of what was going on but she had spent time in Germany she knew tons of people who had spent time in Berlin I have to think that by 33 34 35 36 37 it was becoming evident to her what was going on and he was almost he was actually put on restriction by the State Department and not allowed to give a speech without permission because he kept railing against Germany in his in his talks so so we're probably what is it 315 should we be one more question if there is one anybody yes right this is something that Elizabeth also refers to the impact of fascism on not only queer culture but women in general African American culture as well to a certain degree it's almost like I mean I like to tell people that you know just you this book came out at this amazing moment last summer when marriage equality was was you know made the law but just because we have these moments of of celebration and achievement it doesn't mean things can't change it's not you know progress is not a straight line so this is something that I think we still haven't totally figured out there wasn't sort of a single event but but war itself is a very conservative I mean countries that are a war at war tend to become more conservative the 20s and jazz you know babies and and all of that there was a backlash against the frivolousness of that time and like we have to get more serious the depression itself was probably the first thing to even mention is just you know as economic times got worse people had less patience for and there was looking for scapegoats to understand why things weren't as good as they used to be but it really lasted that that pressure lasted through the 50s through the 60s aided and abetted by the medicalization of of homosexuality and seeing it as an illness rather than just an expression of you know what someone might feel or be great question that was absolutely fantastic thank you so much Emily I I would like to add that indeed in Hitler's Germany homosexuals were as sought after and sent to concentration camps as Jewish people and Roma and other people and that was really the very beginning of a very terrifying sweep around and it of course continued here in the United States and McCarthy era didn't help any to say the least also I believe in my history may be wrong so anybody can correct me but I believe that Bingham was brought back and replaced by Joe Kennedy and Joe and Joe Kennedy actually was a more pro-Hitler ambassador and indeed if things had gone differently the United States might have become more involved in World War II earlier if in fact Bingham had remained and if FDR had had paid attention listened he did so thank you all for coming this is absolutely marvelous afternoon if you would like your friends to see it it will be online we're videotaping and you just go on to www.brooklynmuseum.org slash EASCFA which stands for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Family Story slash video and you can see all of our programming including this wonderful one Brian Stevenson author of Just Mercy is going to be speaking on March 13th and it's going to be a fantastic program it will be taking place in the auditorium with Ray Hinton and Ray had been on death row in Alabama for over 35 years and he will be speaking with Brian here it's the beginning of our three part series it's a starting program for spring for states of denial the illegal incarceration of women children and people of color and we have a lot more programming everything is available online or on brochures downstairs and our Sackler Center first two awards will be on June 2nd so there'll be more about that and they'll be very exciting this year thank you all for coming and have a good afternoon get home safely thank you Emily it was marvelous