“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, Late September, 1922, 23 rue de Boitie; and Morgan, Harjes et Cie, 14 Place Vendome, Paris

Olga Picasso, 31, is recuperating at home after an emergency operation.

She and her family—husband Pablo, 40, and their son, Paulo, almost 20 months old—were having a lovely holiday, despite the bad weather, in Dinard on the Brittany Coast.

Suddenly Olga became seriously ill and they had to rush her to the hospital in Paris, 400 km away. The five-hour trip was a nightmare:  Paolo was car sick and Pablo kept putting ice packs on Olga’s head.

She’s feeling a bit better now that she is home. But Pablo has gone back to Dinard to retrieve all the paintings and drawings he’s been working on since they arrived there in July.

Women Running on the Beach by Picasso

The Spanish painter has never learned to drive, saying that it would affect his wrists and hands. So he bought a posh new car and has hired a chauffeur to take care of the driving for him. He tells Olga that, back in Dinard, he is quite a celebrity. His arrival is in the local paper and everyone wants to see his new car.

Olga is more concerned about her “woman’s problems.”

*****

Nearby in the city, about 2 km away, American ex-patriate Harry Crosby, 24, is at his desk in the Morgan, Harjes et Cie bank in Place Vendome.

Morgan, Harjes et Cie bank in Place Vendome.

Harry’s not doing much work. He rarely does. His aunt, Jane Norton Morgan, 54, wife of the bank owner, J. P. Morgan, Jr., just turned 55, arranged this job for him. Harry had already walked out on a banking job in Boston, after only eight months of putting up with it and a six-day drinking binge.

But Aunt Jane didn’t send him off to Paris this spring just to restart his career. She wanted to get him away from his mistress, Mrs. Mary “Polly” Phelps Rodgers, 30, with whom he has been conducting a scandalous affair for the past two years. All of Boston is talking.

Didn’t work. Polly finally divorced her husband earlier this year, and at the beginning of this month she finally said yes to Harry’s most recent marriage proposal, via transatlantic cable.

Harry was over the moon. He collected on the $100 bet he’d made with his roommate, raced to Cherbourg to get the next boat, used the money to bribe officials so he wouldn’t have to quarantine, and managed to sail to New York City on the RMS Aquitania on September 3^rd. He won some money gambling on the ship but used that to buy champagne for his fellow passengers. He dressed up and crashed the posh restaurant on board, but while he was eating caviar, mock turtle soup and hummingbirds on toast, a steerage inspector tossed him out.

RMS Aquitania

Harry arrived in Manhattan after six days at sea, broke, and Polly was waiting for him at the dock. They got married that day and made a quick trip to Washington, DC, to try to reconcile with his family. That didn’t work.

Wedding picture of Harry and Polly Crosby

Back in New York City they collected Polly’s two children, and the responsibility of actually being a stepfather sunk in to Harry. He disappeared for a few hours.

But all four members of the newly blended family boarded the RMS Aquitania for the trip back to Paris.

Harry returned to this cushy job, and Polly found them an impressive apartment on the Right Bank so they could move out of the hotel they had been living in. And every workday, Polly, in a stunning red bathing suit, rows her new husband—somberly dressed in a business suit, hat, umbrella and briefcase—down the Seine to Place de la Concorde. He disembarks and walks the few blocks to his job here at the family bank. Polly rows back, often to the delight of the Frenchmen who whistle and wave at her and her large breasts. She loves it.

Harry likes this life, too, but not the job. He spends a lot of time reading poetry rather than banking and has even tried writing some himself.

Right now, he thinks it’s time to leave this office and go across the street to the Ritz Hotel Bar.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Later in the year I will be talking about the centenary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, mid-September, 1920, Boston, Massachusetts

Irish-American lawyer, John Quinn, 50, and his family—sister Julia Quinn Anderson, in her mid-thirties; niece Mary, 13; two household servants and a private nurse—are at the Boston South Station waiting for their train back to Quinn’s home in New York City.

Boston South Station

They have all just finished a lovely long holiday in a cottage in Ogunquit on the coast of Maine, courtesy of Quinn. John wasn’t able to join them until just a few weeks ago. But he really appreciated relaxing at the resort. He hired a car and driver from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to bring them here to Boston—well worth the cost, including $12 tip.

Quinn notices that Boston is, as he later writes to a friend,

turned over to the Irish, who turned out…one hundred thousand strong to greet [Irish politician Eamon de Valera, 37]. I am told that 70 percent of the population of Boston is Irish…There is one spot on the earth where the Irish are on top.”

De Valera, self-proclaimed President of Dáil Éireann, the Parliament of the newly proclaimed Irish Republic, addresses a crowd of 50,000 at Fenway Park near the end of his American tour, selling bonds to support his new government.

De Valera audience at Fenway Park

Nearby, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco, 29, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 32, are indicted for a robbery and double murder at a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, last April.

For silent newsreel footage of de Valera’s trip to Boston, click here. 

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This fall I am talking about writers’ salons in Ireland, England, France and America before and after the Great War in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

My “Such Friends” presentations, Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, and The Founding of the Abbey Theatre, are available to view on the website of PICT Classic Theatre.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 14, 1920, Home Market Club, Boston, Massachusetts

Ohio Senator and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Warren G. Harding, 54, has just finished his speech before the Home Market Club, publisher of The Protectionist magazine.

His campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, 60, had urged him to go ahead with this speech. They were both very disappointed by the results of last month’s Ohio primary. He won his own state by only 15,000 votes, gaining only 39 out of the 48 delegates. And then he came in fourth in Indiana with no delegates at all.

A fortune teller had told his wife Florence, 59, that Warren would become president and then die in office, but both Florence and Daugherty had convinced him to stay in the race anyway.

Warren and Florence Harding campaigning

In his speech, Harding told the conservative crowd,

My countrymen, there isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational…America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy…If we can prove [to be] a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government and country rather than what the country may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded…My best judgment of America’s need is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet…Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war…”

Harding will record this and all his speeches for sale as phonographic discs.

You can listen to Harding’s full “Return to Normalcy” speech—only five minutes long—on the Library of Congress site here.

 

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning program.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.