Caresse Crosby

Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1892 – January 24, 1970) As an American patron of the arts, she and her second husband, Harry Crosby, founded the Black Sun Press, which was instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many authors who would later become famous, among them Anaïs Nin, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Hart Crane, and Robert Duncan. She was also the recipient of a patent for the first successful modern bra. She was nicknamed "Polly" to distinguish her from her mother.

Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions," and he lived extravagantly. In 1914, the family presented her to the King of England at a garden party.

Development of the backless brassiere

That same year, Crosby prepared to attend a débutante ball one evening. As was customary, she put on a corset stiffened with whalebone and a restrictive, tight cover Mary had worn that same dress at her debut to society a few weeks earlier. Crosby likened her design to earlier covers over the bosom when a woman wore a low corset. Her design had shoulder straps to attach to the garment's upper and lower corners, and wrap-around laces for the lower corners which tied at the woman's front, enabling her to wear gowns cut low in the back. Crosby wrote that her invention was "well-adapted to women of different size" and was "so efficient that it may be worn by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis."

While Crosby's design was the first granted a patent within its category, The U.S. Patent Office and foreign patent offices had issued patents for various bra-like undergarments as early as the 1860s. Other brassiere designs had previously been invented and popularized for use within the United States since about 1910. By 1912, American mass-market brassiere manufacturers included Bien Jolie Brassieres and DeBevoise Brassieres. The latter first advertised its bust supporter in Vogue in 1904.

Leading European couturier Lucile actively endorsed bras, and both Lucile and Paul Poiret refined and promoted the brassiere, influencing fashionable women to wear their designs, Paris couturier Herminie Cadolle introduced a breast supporter in 1889. Her design was a sensation at the Great Exposition of 1900 and became a fast-selling design among wealthy Europeans in the next decade.

Business career

After she married Richard Peabody, Crosby filed a legal certificate with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on May 19, 1920, declaring that she was a married woman conducting a business using funds that were from her husband's bank account. In 1922 she founded the Fashion Form Brassière Company, locating her manufacturing shop on Washington Street in Boston, where she opened a two-woman sweatshop to manufacture her wireless brassières. The location also became a convenient place for romantic trysts with Harry Crosby, who would become her second husband.

In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, she maintained that she had "a few hundred (units) of her design produced." She managed to secure a few orders from department stores, but her business never took off. Harry, who had a distaste for conventional business and a generous trust fund, discouraged her from pursuing the business and persuaded her to close it. However, Warner would go on to earn more than US$15 million from the bra patent over the next thirty years.

In her later years, Crosby wrote, "I can't say the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it."

Crosby concluded that Peabody was a well-educated but undirected man, and a reluctant father. Less than a year later, he enlisted at the Mexican border and joined the Boston militia engaged in stopping Pancho Villa's cross-border raids. Less than a year after he returned home from that adventure, he enlisted to fight in World War I. Their second child, a daughter, Polleen Wheatland ("Polly"), was born on August 12, 1917, but Peabody was already in Officers Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery. He became a Captain in the United States Army's 15th Field Artillery, 2nd Division, American Expeditionary Force. Baby Polly was largely cared for by Peabody's parents, but Crosby recalled that "My father-in-law was a stickler for polish, both of manners and minerals." Crosby's mother-in-law wore "nun-like dresses and in bed or out wore starched cuffs as sever as piping." He was at the Second Battle of Verdun. After the battle, his section (the 29th Infantry Division, attached to the 120th French Division) was cited for bravery, and in 1919 Crosby was one of the youngest Americans awarded the Croix de Guerre. Crosby wrote in his journal, "Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover when it's too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." He vowed that he would live life on his own terms. During dinner, Harry never spoke to the girl on his left, breaking decorum. By some accounts, Harry fell in love with the buxom Mrs. Peabody in about two hours. He confessed his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park.

Divorce from Richard Peabody

In June 1921, she formally separated from Dick, and in December he offered to divorce her. In February 1922, Polly and Richard Peabody were legally divorced. Dick subsequently recovered from his alcoholism and published The Common Sense of Drinking (1933). He was the first to assert there was no cure for alcoholism. His book became a best seller and was a major influence on Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson. Crosby had been working for eight months at Shawmut National Bank. He went on a six-day drinking spree and resigned. In May 1922, he moved to Paris to work in a job arranged for him by his family at Morgan, Harjes et Cie, the Morgan family's bank in Paris. This was fitting, for Crosby, after all, was the nephew of Jessie Morgan, the wife of American capitalist J. P. Morgan, Jr., but it was also awkward because he was both Richard Peabody's and Harry Crosby's godfather.

Polly had previously traveled to England to visit her cousins, so Crosby visited her there. From May through July, 1922 they lived together in Paris. Polly appeared at least outwardly to tolerate Harry's dallying unconventional behavior, and she soon had her own courtiers. They later named their second whippet Clytoris, explaining to Caresse's young daughter Polleen she was named after a Greek goddess.

In July 1925, Harry had sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl he nicknamed "Nubile," with a "baby face and large breasts," whom he saw at Étretat, a town in Normandy. Harry also had sex with a boy of unspecified age, his only recorded homosexual dalliance.

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

After about a year, Harry soon tired of the predictable banker's life and quit, fully joining the Lost Generation of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the restrictive atmosphere of 1920s America. Harry wanted as little to do with Caresse's children as possible, so after the first year they shipped her son Billy off to Cheam School in Hampshire, England.

In 1928, Harry inherited his cousin Walter Berry's considerable collection of over 8,000 mostly rare books, a collection he prized but which he also scaled back by giving away hundreds of volumes. He was known to slip rare first editions into the bookstalls that lined the Seine. Harry later said Cartier-Bresson "looked like a fledgling, shy and frail, and mild as whey." A friend of Crosby's from Texas encouraged Cartier-Bresson to take photography more seriously. Embracing the open sexuality offered by Caresse and Harry, Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her. In 1931, two years after Harry's suicide, the end of his affair with Caresse Crosby left Cartier-Bresson broken-hearted, and he escaped to Ivory Coast of French colonial Africa.

In 1928, Harry and Caresse changed the name of the publishing house to the Black Sun Press, in keeping with Harry's fascination with death and the symbolism of the sun. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. In 1929, Caresse and Harry both signed poet Eugene Jolas' The Revolution of the Word Proclamation, which appeared in issue 16/17 of the literary journal transition. After Harry died, Caresse continued publishing until 1936, when she left Europe for the United States.

Harry's suicide

On July 9, 1928, Harry met 20-year-old Josephine Noyes Rotch, whom he would call the "Youngest Princess of the Sun" and the "Fire Princess." She was descended from a family that first settled in Provincetown, Cape Cod in 1690. Josephine inspired Harry's next collection of poems called Transit of Venus. Though she was ten years his junior, Harry fell in love with Josephine. In a letter to his mother, dated July 24, 1928, Harry wrote:

Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until she married, when their relationship temporarily ended. However, Josephine rekindled the affair, and in late November 1929, Harry and Josephine met and traveled to Detroit, where they checked into an expensive Book-Cadillac Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Harry Crane. For four days they took meals in their room, smoked opium, and had sex. She pursued ambitions as an actress that she had had since her 20s, and appeared as a dancer in two short experimental films directed by artist Emlen Etting, Poem 8 (1932) and Oramunde (1933).

Crosby broadened the scope of the Black Sun Press after Harry's death. Although the press published few works after 1952, it printed James Joyce's Collected Poems in 1963. Despite the slowdown, it did not officially close until Crosby's death in 1970.

Continuation of Black Sun Press

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

Crosby accepted Miller's proposal. She wrote at the top the title given her by Henry Miller, Opus Pistorum (later republished as Miller's work as Under the Roofs of Paris), and started right in. Miller left for his car tour of America. Crosby churned out 200 pages, and the collector's agent asked for more. Other visitors included Max Ernst, Buckminster Fuller, Stuart Kaiser, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and other friends from her time in Paris. Crosby moved to live in Washington, D.C. full-time, where she owned a home at 2008 Q Street NW from 1937 to 1950, and she opened the Caresse Crosby Modern Art Gallery,

In December, 1943, she wrote Henry Miller to ask if he had heard about her gallery, and if he would be interested in exhibiting some of his paintings there. She secured contributions from a wide variety of well-known artists and writers, including: Louis Aragon, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus (Letter to a German Friend, his first appearance in an English-language publication), Henri Cartier-Bresson,

Post-war activity

Crosby became politically active again and founded the organizations Women Against War and Citizens of the World, which embraced the concept of a "world community," something other activists such as Buckminster Fuller also supported. Crosby continued her work to establish a world citizen's center in Delphi, Greece, where in 1942 she bought a small house that overlooked the Grove of Apollo. In October 1952 she attempted to visit her property, but she was met by armed guards at Corfu as she got off the ferry from Brindisi. The police placed her under house arrest in the Corfu Palace Hotel, and after three days they told her she was not welcome in Greece and ordered her to leave. The American consul told her that the Greek government thought she was still "considered dangerous to the economy and politics of Greece."

Son's death

In the winter of 1954–55, Crosby's son Billy Peabody was in charge of the Paris office for American Overseas Airlines. He and his wife Josette had a small third-floor walk-up apartment on rue du Bac that they heated with a fireplace and a stove. On January 25, 1955, Billy died in his sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning, while Josette was found unconscious and was able to be revived. Crosby traveled to Paris for his funeral, yet somehow making time for appearances at colleges where she gave talks about her life and the Black Sun Press. She paid to electrify the castle, and thus brought electricity to the neighboring village. She told a reporter that the castle had 320 rooms, or "at least that's what the villagers tell me," and the deed actually did list 180 of them. Many of the rooms had ceilings and the palace was virtually impossible to heat. "I wouldn't live here if you paid me," she told a reporter.

The residential portion of the palace contained three main apartments and two courtyards. The walls of the main hall were decorated by frescoes from the 16th century. She used the castle to house various artists, and she held poetry seminars. Henry Miller described Rocca Sinibalda as the "Center for Creative Arts and Humanist Living in the Abruzzi Hills." Time described her as the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris." Anaïs Nin described her as "a pollen carrier, who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships."

She had lived long enough to see many of the aspiring writers she nurtured in the 1920s become well-known and even canonical authors. The bra she invented went through a number of transformations and became a standard undergarment for women all over the world. Her first two husbands and her son Bill preceded her in death. She was survived by her daughter Polleen Peabody de Mun North Drysdale and two granddaughters. including more than 1600 photographs from her life, along with the papers of her friends James Joyce and Kay Boyle.

In 2004, Fine Line Features optioned Andrea Berloff's first screenplay Harry & Caresse. Lasse Hallström was initially attached to direct and Leslie Holleran was attached as a producer.

Works

As author

Crosses of Gold Éditions Narcisse, Paris, 1925
Graven Images, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1926
Painted Shores Black Sun Press, Paris, 1927
The Stranger Black Sun Press, 1927
Impossible Melodies Black Sun Press, 1928
Poems for Harry Crosby Black Sun Press, 1930
The Passionate Years Dial Press, 1953

As editor

Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly Six editions, Washington, D. C.

References

External links

Mary Phelps Jacob (Caresse Crosby) at Phelps Family History
Mary Phelps Jacob Inventor of the Week Archive November 2001 (March 2003)
"Caresse Crosby, Infield." Cosmic Baseball Association, 1998 (December 2003)
Mary Phelps Jacob, Inventor of the Modern Brassiere
Caresse Crosby Papers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale Special Collections Research Center
The Crosbys: literature's most scandalous couple
(Video)

This article was based upon material originally written by Brian Phelps and licensed for use in Wikipedia under the GFDL.