Personal History (3 page)

Rosalie, Elise, and their families were safe. They and their combined households, numbering twenty-eight, had taken shelter at Ro’s for two days. As the fire approached, they had moved first to the Presidio, then to Golden Gate Park, then to a summer cottage at Fair Oaks that one of them had rented. There my father found them. Ro looked up as he approached and said, “Eugene, I knew you’d come.”

Quite early on, my father became a collector, with a particular interest in Dürer and Whistler etchings, first editions of American manuscripts, and Lincoln letters. He met the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who was working on a head of Lincoln, and volunteered to buy it and give it to the nation. President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to Borglum’s request to show the bust at the White House before it was placed in the Capitol. My father thus went to Washington for the first time in his life, and met Roosevelt. With great foresight, he wrote to his sister Rosalie that Roosevelt should have worked out a “monetary mechanism that can prevent the kind of panics we have lately experienced. I should like myself to come to grips with these problems. But I have no doubt that they will still be with us by the time I am in a position to leave business behind me and follow through on my long-standing plan for some sort of direct participation in the management of government affairs.”

This was the man who entered the art gallery on that February day in 1908—a successful businessman, a person interested in the art world, a collector of manuscripts, and a man who was already thinking about public economic issues. Although he was wealthy, he was aware of the problems of poverty. He had high values and aspirations, but he was something of a loner, driven, a workaholic. He was very family-oriented, despite complicated relationships with his father and his brother-in-law George Blumenthal. He also was fundamentally shy, but at the same time he had a fierce temper. No doubt he must have been bruised by discrimination in
college, on Wall Street, and socially, but withal he was strong, brilliant, able, witty, and self-confident.

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN
Eugene Meyer had seen walking through the gallery had a thirst for the avant-garde of the art world and thought of herself as somewhat bohemian. She, too, was full of determination and self-confidence, but she was, in addition, completely self-absorbed. Born in 1887, in New York City, my mother had roots that were in some ways quite similar to my father’s and in others quite opposite. Their differences made for a complicated relationship.

On her father’s side, my mother came from a long line of Lutheran ministers in Hanover, in North Germany, whose number included, at least in more recent times, not a few black sheep. The Ernst family was handsome, gifted, driven, and, unfortunately, riddled with a tendency toward alcohol addiction. My great-grandfather Karl Ernst was clergyman to the last king of Hanover, but when Hanover was conquered by the Prussians in 1866, he sent his seven sons out of Germany to keep them out of the army. All but one came to America, which is how my maternal grandfather got to New York, where he became a lawyer, and later persuaded Lucy Schmidt, my grandmother, here on a visit, to stay and marry him. She, too, hailed from North Germany, her family, mostly seafaring men and merchants, having lived in a small village near Bremen for more than three centuries.

My mother grew up in a then-small country community, Pelham Heights, just outside New York City, where the young family moved when she was three. Describing the atmosphere in which she was reared as puritanical, austere, and familial, she wrote:

So conditioned was she to the virtues of this ritual bath that she continued it until after she was married.

Only when she was six or seven did her father, Frederick, become an important figure in my mother’s life. When she first became aware of him,
“he was a hard-working lawyer who supported his family in modest but comfortable circumstances.” Money was never mentioned in her family, a tradition she carried on into ours. More and more, her father became a dominant influence in her life, and she developed what she herself referred to as an “extraordinary Oedipus complex.” Her early childhood was infinitely brightened by this “luminous personality,” as she referred to him. My grandfather would take her for walks to see the sunrise, talking to her about music, poetry, and art. He spoke of the joys of Wagner’s “Ring” and sang Mozart arias around the house, particularly one from
Don Giovanni
, which I well remember, since, in her excitement, she hummed it out loud when we went to see the opera together much later in her life. She was certainly infatuated with her father, and he with her. Unfortunately, as time went on he philandered, tippled, and ceased paying the family bills, and she felt betrayed by him. The man she had loved as a child was replaced by what she called a “somber figure that haunted my adolescence like a nightmare.”

In addition to their schoolwork, my mother and her three older brothers were tutored at home in German and math. When Bill and she—both in the same class—were ready for high school, and Fred for college, the family moved to New York to benefit from its excellent free public education. She had to adapt to new ways, to cease battling with boys, to go to an all-girls school. She thrived, however, in the stimulating learning atmosphere of Morris High School, where she studied Latin, Greek, ancient history, math, French, and American and English literature.

During her high-school years, her relationship with her father continued to deteriorate, as he got further involved with women, drank more, and increasingly neglected his work and his family. He no longer earned a living but instead wrote what his daughter frankly called “incredibly amateurish” books and dramas. The family bills went unpaid and Agnes’s mother grew more and more anxious. This undoubtedly was the dominant emotional shock of my mother’s life. It turned everything upside down, and her adoration of her father turned to shame and even to hatred. Worst of all, having taught her to love learning, he no longer cared if she went to school; he would have preferred her going to work to help pay the bills. So long-lasting and painful were these emotions about her father that, although she spoke often with us about him, she hardly ever mentioned this dark side, and then only by allusion. I eventually came to realize that her very ambivalent attitude toward men clearly sprang from this experience. She was both attracted and repelled by the whole idea of sexual relations. However, she did keep his picture on her desk always, a handsome man.

The estrangement from her father had the salutary effect of making her realize she had to work even harder to win scholarships to college and
earn the money to pay her own expenses. Hard work also helped counteract her fears that in many ways she was much like her father and had within herself some of his weaknesses.

She won a scholarship and entered Barnard in 1903, focusing initially on math and physics but later turning to philosophy and literature. She was very independent and irreverent, and as a result was labeled “too irresponsible” to deserve further scholarships, at which point she determined to earn the daunting sum of $150 that was necessary for her to re-enter Barnard for her second year. She worked at least twelve hours every day. In the mornings and early afternoons, she was the principal of a Baptist summer school. From 6 to 10 p.m., she had charge of the Hudson Guild lending library. She was still short $50 when the superintendent of her school announced that two male principals had been driven to leave their schools in Hell’s Kitchen, the toughest section of the city, and called for volunteers at double pay; she volunteered and got the job. On her first day, she walked into a scene of turmoil, which she turned around by ejecting from the classroom a fourteen-year-old who turned out to be a gang leader and whose gang (half the boys in her class) followed him out. Quickly reading the situation, she parlayed with the ousted gang leader as well as with his chief rival, got the two leaders on her side, enlisted their help in keeping order, and thus came out on top of a difficult situation. She was only seventeen.

When she returned to college, Agnes was informed that the faculty had decided to give her the scholarship after all. It was manna from heaven. She didn’t have to earn extra money by tutoring, and she could help her mother pay the household bills, to which her father was now indifferent. She sailed through college thereafter, generally popular and beloved by various males. Alas, as she said, this gift “made me conceited and self-centered to an unbelievable degree.… For several years to come I was in love chiefly with myself, an ecstasy that cost me and others much pain before life cured me of this intoxication.” Not to put too fine a point on it, life had hardly cured her of her self-absorption.

Agnes was forced to return for her senior year with only two hours of formal study to complete, but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it was in her final year that she developed the first of a series of intellectual, yet highly emotional, crushes on men of distinction—most of them in arts or letters. She was often consumed by these strangely passionate friendships with well-known men. My father was once heard to mutter, “There’s always a stranger in the house.”

The first of these crushes was on John Dewey. As president of the college’s Philosophical Society, she had invited Dewey to speak and then got to know him better through his daughter Evelyn, a classmate, who would take her home to family meals. And she read everything he’d written. She
believed that his teaching to live life on a high plane made her come to terms with “the many frustrations, hardships and disappointments of my college years.… I believe I would never have married the man I did—the greatest good that ever befell me—if Dewey had not counteracted my
Sturm und Drang
with his inspired common sense.”

As she wrote later, when she told her family that she intended to do newspaper reporting, “My mother wept and my father said solemnly: ‘I would rather see you dead.’ ” In those days educated women worked either at teaching or at clerical work, and there were only a half-dozen women in journalism, most of them sob sisters, so it was quite a remarkable feat when my mother first started working on a free-lance basis for the
New York Sun
. She did “piece work,” which put a terrible strain on her to get or think up enough stories to support her family. Her income ranged from a high of $40 a week to a low of $5 or $10, but she persisted and soon became known as the
“Sun
girl.”

The quest for copy led her one day to a new modern-art gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. There, for the first time, photographs were presented as art, and she thought that the very avant-garde group of Photo-Secessionists working there, led by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, and including the painters Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, and Marius de Zayas, made a real story. She became so excited about the ideas and people she found there—they were ever after to be known as “291”—that, ignoring the rest of her duties, she sat down and talked for six hours straight. Though my mother had no sympathy with political radicals, she related totally to the artistic rebellion led by the group at 291. She made great friends there, especially with Steichen, and with Marion Beckett and Katharine Rhoades (they were known as the Three Graces), after whom I was named.

From then on, she had quite a flourishing artistic and social life. Despite my father’s interest in her at that time, he seems to have been only one of several beaux, and not taken very seriously except, possibly, for his affluence and what it could bring her. One important thing it brought her was a companion for her long-planned and yearned-for European sojourn. She had borrowed $500, which she thought could last her six months, but two days before she was to leave she confided to her wealthy new suitor that her friend Evangeline Cole—or Nancy, as she was known—found that she couldn’t afford to go with her. My father, wanting her to have company and a chaperone, loaned Nancy the money to go too. The two girls set off for France on August 4, 1908.

Agnes Ernst’s determination to go to Europe, undeterred by her pursuit by Eugene Meyer and at least two other young men, took her away from her family problems—leaving it up to her father to support his family while she was gone—and exposed her to a whole new world. In Europe, she plunged into a rich life of museums, theater, ballet, music, and
opera, often standing in line for hours for tickets. The two girls, Agnes and Nan, found a four-room apartment in Paris for $36 a month, including food and laundry and all minor expenses. This apartment quickly became a gathering place for students of all nationalities. The half-day-a-week cleaning lady earned thirty cents, including a five-cent tip.

Her only real entrée to the artistic and literary world was Steichen, who was in France with his family, but he proved to be enough. Through him, she met and became friends with many of the artists and intellectuals in France at the time. It was here that she deepened her friendship with Steichen, who remained close to her and to all of us for life. She met Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude—Leo, she admired and even adored; Gertrude, she dismissed as a “humbug.” She came to know contemporary French musicians, led by Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie. She dismissed Picasso as superficially clever. The only woman in Paris who impressed her was Madame Curie, whom she met twice a week when they appeared at the same place for fencing lessons. Here was a woman to emulate, my mother thought—the first woman to so inspire her.

Two of the more important relationships she began while in Paris were with Brancusi, who also became a lifelong friend of hers and our family’s, and with Rodin. It was my father, passing through Paris, who introduced her to Rodin. Rodin was famous for his amorous advances to young women, and she felt threatened one day when he locked the door of the studio, turned off the telephone, and started to embrace her. She pleaded with him that she loved him for his great art and his teaching, which she didn’t want to lose, and, amazingly, he accepted this. He still couldn’t understand why she was unwilling to pose nude on horseback, javelin in hand, for a statue of Boadicea, but he nonetheless took her under his wing.