Grande Dame

So today I took the day off and rode the train up to Windsor, CT to look over the Katharine Brush papers in the Loomis Chaffee archives. Loomis Chaffee is a private high school just north of Hartford; Kay's son Thomas Stewart Brush, Jr. went there (Class of '40). In the late 60s, TSB gave money to Loomis to build a new library, completed in 1970 and named after his mother. And he gave them all of his mother's papers, too, which, as I mentioned, they very graciously let me examine. 

Hanging in the library is this colossal portrait of Kay. And "colossal" is hardly an exaggeration: it's 8 or 9 feet tall!

It was painted in 1933 by Leon Gordon, who was known for his celebrity portraits: Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, Helen Keller, Will Rogers, and Dorothy Gish (to name but a few) all sat for him.

If we take Kay at her word, the diminutive authoress was somewhat abashed by the grandiose scale of the thing: "...the effect is distinctly that of a billboard ad for cigarettes, even though the painting is superior."

The portrait originally hung in Kay's apartment at 322 East 57th Street. 


"I'm already beginning to wonder," Kay wrote in 1940, "what the portrait's future is, if any. 



"I think ahead to the days when it will be known to my son and his wife and their offspring as 'Grandma's portrait,' and when the problem of what to do with it will plague them ceaselessly. I even  seem to hear the treble pipe of childish voices, inquiring wonderingly, 'Was Grandma really nine feet high?' 

"No darlings, no. Not really. She was five feet three in her stocking feet. It was just that she took life in a big way, there, for a while."

Kay Brush never had any grandchildren.

112 Years Ago Today...

With a little bit of help from the wonderful staff at Middletown's Russell Library, I was able to locate the house where Kay was born, 112 years ago today. I had come across a biographical sketch which happened to mention that Kay was born in the home of her maternal grandparents, D. Ward and Mary Northrop. 

A 1900 Middletown telephone book was all we needed to locate the Northrops at 174 Church Street. Though we at first thought the house was no longer standing, a little more digging by the Russell Library staff revealed that the house had at some point been renumbered as 154, and is now owned by Wesleyan University.

D. Ward Northrop, ca. 1885

The Northrops were a prominent Connecticut family, all the way back to Revolutionary War days. D. (avid) Ward Northrop was born in Sherman, Connecticut in 1844.  He was graduated from Wesleyan University (Class of '68), opened a law practice in Middletown in 1870, and later became a judge. He subsequently held a number of important political posts, including Mayor of Middletown, and Secretary of State of the State of Connecticut (1883-85). D. Ward Northrop died of pneumonia in 1918.


Built in 1874, the Northrop house, though charming, seems remarkably modest compared to some of Middletown's other homes, especially when one considers that D. Ward Northrop was one of the city's preeminent residents.

The house is used today as student housing. I imagine that the exterior remains little changed since 1900; and the floor plan provided at Wesleyan's Web site would seem to indicate very little, if any, alteration to the interior, as well. Alas, the house was locked up for the summer vacation when we visited, so we didn't get to see the inside.  

But Kay didn't live there long; shortly after she was born (a month or two, it would appear), the family were living in Washington, DC, where Kay's father was employed as a housemaster and instructor at Washington School for Boys, now defunct.

Never Ask a Lady Her Age!

Here's a contemporary account of Kay and the house in Haddam:

VERY interesting (and completely incidental to the story) is that the year of Kay's birth is given as 1900 (though the day was actually August 15); by this time she had already started shaving two years off her age. Even today, most sources indicate 1902 as the year of her birth, a fiction promulgated by no less than the Grey Lady herself, The New York Times. The 1900 date is confirmed, however, by the family's grave marker in Old Saybrook. 

One wonders--did Kay slip up, or did the newspaper have more reliable information?

The Haddam House

On the way to Old Saybrook yesterday, we stopped at Haddam to see the Nehemiah Brainerd House, which was built around 1765, and which Kay owned from 1932 until some time in the early 1940s. Kay moved the house some 400 feet back from the road, creating quite a sweep of front lawn, and had the house enlarged with the addition of two wings.

After years of neglect, the house was purchased by Maryan and Jeff Muthersbaugh in 2002, who have lovingly restored the house, retaining as much period detail as possible--period detail that acknowledges both the the house's Colonial Heritage and its later Deco Era transformations.

 

Maryan and Jeff started operation of The Nehemiah Brainerd House B&B three or four years ago. They are two of the nicest people you'll ever meet, and, despite a houseful of company, they were so sweet to give us a tour of the entire house, and part of the lovely property.

The Connecticut River is hidden
from view during summer months

Perhaps the most charmingly alluring feature of the Inn is the cottage, which has its own kitchen and bath (recent additions by Maryan and Jeff), and a commanding view of the Connecticut River, which was mostly hidden by the lush foliage when we visited. It's not clear if the cottage was there in Kay's time (it doesn't appear on the blueprints of the house and property), but Maryan and I like to think that Kay may have used it as a studio, where she could write in quiet solitude... 

Dennis, Gloria, and Maryan on the cottage patio

The cottage was chosen by Yankee Magazine as Editors' Choice Best of New England, Best Hilltop Cottage for 2011.

Urban Oasis

Joseph Urban

Kay's sumptuous (9 rooms, 5 baths) duplex on East 57th Street was the last interior design work of Joseph Urban, the famous Austrian architect and designer who had emigrated to the US in 1912. The Hearst International Building (with later additions by Norman Foster) and the auditorium of the New School are two of his architectural projects that can still be seen in New York today. Urban also designed productions for the Ziegfeld Follies and the Metropolitan Opera. Joseph Urban died shortly before work on Kay's apartment was completed. He's buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

The two-story living room was 30 feet by 40 feet!

Most of the furniture was custom-built to Urban's designs.

Kay and Me

It started with a photograph.  I have in my collection a book, acquired years ago, titled The Decorative Twenties. In this book was--is--a photograph of a living room in a New York City apartment.  It was, in this young Long Island boy's eye and mind at least, the epitome of art deco style and elegance, and I thought, “someday  I will have an apartment in Manhattan with a living room like that.” And that was it; I never, over the course of several decades, paid any attention whatsoever to the who, what, where or when...

Flash forward twenty years, and I am working at an art and architecture non-profit (which shall forever remain nameless in these pages) in Manhattan.  

David Garrard Lowe, whose book Art Deco New York has recently been published, presents an illustrated lecture.  And, don't you know it... there's that photograph of that living room I know and love from my book!  So Mr. Lowe tells us that this is the living room in the Joseph Urban-designed apartment of the writer Katharine Brush.  

I confess that the name Joseph Urban didn't really mean anything to me at the time (more on him later), but I made note of the name Katharine Brush, and thought, “I wonder if her books are any good...they might be worth a look.”

I then discovered that Brush had written the novel upon which the movie Red-Headed Woman had been based.  I of course was familiar with the picture and had seen it.  It is, as I mentioned previously, a classic of pre-code Hollywood; I felt as though I already knew Katharine Brush...

Since I was so familiar with Red-Headed Woman, I figured it best to start with a different Brush novel, something that would be entirely new to me.  I decided on Young Man of Manhattan, from 1929.  Halfway through it I was hooked. 

Young Woman of Manhattan:
Katharine Brush

By the way, I did get the apartment in Manhattan...

but the living room looks nothing like I had planned.