Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [81]
At first Harry went through the motions with his job at Morgan, Harjes et Cie. Every morning, dressed in her bathing costume, Caresse paddled her husband up the Seine in a red canoe, dropping him off near the Tuileries gardens so that he could walk to the office in the Place Vendôme. He quit after eighteen months. Banal office work he neither enjoyed nor did well. Besides, it wasn’t worth it for $75 a month—less than the salary he paid his driver, and peanuts compared to his unearned annual income of about $12,000. He had decided to become a poet.
Their various relations brought them into contact with grand literary Americans-in-Paris like Edith Wharton and aristocratic French families in Saint-Germain who frowned on their eccentric evening clothes—a Vionnet man’s jacket and short skirt in cloth-of-gold for Caresse and a black silk gardenia in Harry’s buttonhole. The company they preferred was that of exiles, of artists and writers, émigrés from convention like themselves: the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, the poet Archibald MacLeish and his wife Ada, Frieda and D. H. Lawrence, a sprinkling of rich divorcees and bohemian wanderers.
Each year the Crosbys attended the art students’ riotous Bal des Quatz’Arts. After one ball, Harry wrote: “The room was hot and reeked with cigarette and cigar smoke, with fard [an archaic French word for cosmetics] and sweat and smell of underarms . . . there were shrieks and catcalls and there was a riot. I remember two strong young men stark naked wrestling on the floor for the honor of dancing with a young girl (silver paint conquered purple paint) . . . and in a corner I watched two savages making love.”
One year Harry recorded arriving home in a taxi completely naked, his toga “and even my drawers to which I had pinned a hundred francs” lost in the frenzy. Another year Caresse rode to the party on a hired baby elephant dressed as an Inca princess, stripped to the waist and wearing a long blue wig. She got home to find Harry in their huge bath with three girls, washing off each other’s body paint—and hated pink bubble bath from that moment on. There were seven sleepers in their bed that night.
Harry’s devotion to Caresse and the intensity of their relationship—“Your body is the golden spoon by means of which I eat your soul,” he wrote to her in one poem—did not curb his appetite for other women. He believed that “one should follow every instinct no matter where” it led. To save Caresse’s feelings he tried to be discreet but he could not accept restraints on his behavior or desires. Some of the relationships with his many mistresses were short-lived, women he met on the street or at the races and seduced over an afternoon or a few weeks; others were friends as well as lovers, and long-lasting. On these women Harry bestowed extravagant titles that fitted into his personal mythology: the Lady of the Golden Horse, the Sorceress, the Tigress, the Youngest Princess.
Soon after they were married Caresse tried to revolt “against sharing with anyone the queenship of my heart,” but Harry’s refusal to change forced her to accept his other women as long as she was preeminent among them, a queen (in his private lexicon) above the princesses. The fact that she too had other demands on her love was held against her. “He made me believe that my children balanced our account.” Ultimately she claimed to recognize only one real rival: Jacqueline, the Grey Princess, an imaginary woman Harry believed was his soulmate, whose name he had tattooed across his chest. “She was the dream—the girl of infinite mystery,” wrote Caresse. “No other loves were quite as true.”
Caresse consoled herself with her own cadre of admirers. Over the years her lovers included the Chilean painter Manolo or Manuel Ortiz; a glamorous war pilot, Cord Meier, whom Harry called “the Aviator”; an English lord, Gerard Lymington; and the