The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Tom Wolfe

Prev Next

The Luther of Columbus Circle

ONE LOOK AT THAT KIPLING STUFF HUNTINGTON HARTFORD had carved on the wall down by the elevator in his new museum—well, you can imagine how they sniggered about that. Kipling! It was practically the first thing they saw. Ah, the culturati. Hartford’s museum, the Gallery of Modern Art, the tallest art museum in the world, ten stories of white marble out on an island in Columbus Circle, opened with a series of special nights, one of them being for the leaders of the art world. Everybody came rolling into Columbus Circle and debouched from cabs and Carey Cadillacs and went gaggling past the golden subway stairs Hartford built out there and into the arcade at the bottom of the building and over to the elevators where—pow!—there was this stanza from Rudyard Kipling, cut in marble. You can almost see the scene, the sniggering, the nudging and so forth. Hartford himself was up on the fifth floor receiving guests. One minute he was in his mood of Paradise Island charm. He has terrific teeth and a great smile. The next he was in his distracted mood, in which he looks as if he were off walking in a mimosa grove somewhere. It didn’t matter. Either way the culturati missed the point, which was that Huntington Hartford, the megamillionaire, had come amongst them in the role of a Martin Luther for modern Culture.

Hartford’s Luther role has been suffering because for thirteen years now the New York intelligentsia has been taking him and his works lightly. Nobody ever knew what else to make of him. All of a sudden, in the fall of 1951, into the world of the arts came Huntington Hartford, G. Huntington Hartford II. He had been known chiefly as a playboy who squired around Marta Toren, Lana Turner and other Hollywood glamorosi and then married a cigarette girl in Ciro’s restaurant, Marjorie Steele. He was one of the couple of hundred or so richest men in the world, grandson of George Huntington Hartford, founder of the A&P, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, the fifth largest corporation in America, General Motors, Jersey Standard, AT&T and Ford being one through four. Hartford was then forty years old. He had all his hair. He was good-looking, boyish, shy, and well-preserved from playing a lot of squash and tennis and getting sun at great watering places in both hemispheres. And now he turned up with seventy-odd million dollars, an eye for Culture and the most flagrantly unfashionable taste anybody in New York had ever heard of.

Hartford always swung from the heels. From the first his transgressions against artistic fashion were so severe that nobody ever noticed the theme that ran through them, over and over. To begin with, in 1951 he wrote, paid the printer, and published a pamphlet entitled, “Has God Been Insulted Here?” which rebuked James Jones, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso and modern art and letters generally as unspeakably vulgar and profane. Was this guy serious? Several months later he publicly rejected a couple of artists who were applying to the Huntington Hartford Foundation art colony, calling them “too abstract.” This brought to light the art colony, which Hartford had set up on 154 acres in Pacific Palisades, Calif. On the face of it, it looked like the answer to everything American bohemians had been demanding of society in their manifestoes since 1908. Every budding talent got a cottage studio tucked amid sylvan verdure for peace, solitude, inspiration and unharried work; plus all the food he could eat and spending money. For bonhomie and fruitful discussion with one’s fellow artists there was a community house. The bohos, of course, turned out to be great flaming ingrates. One thing that got them was the way a little man came around at midday and left a basket of warm food on the cottage doorstep so they would not have to break off in mid-surge of genius to go get lunch. That, and the way a chauffeur showed up with eight cylinders cooing anytime somebody wanted to go into town. Besides, after the “too abstract” rhubarb, the place was unfashionable, even though Ernst Toch’s ninth symphony and some other important work had come out of there. By and by there were fewer than three hundred applicants a year for utopia.

In 1955 he bought a full-page ad in six New York newspapers and printed another Hartford creed. This one was entitled, “The Public Be Damned?” It said, in sum, that abstract and abstract-expressionist art were a piece of barbaric humbug being put over on the public by a cabal of museum directors, gallery owners and critics in sacrilege of the great tradition of representational art in the West. He singled out Picasso, Willem de Kooning and Georges Rouault as three of the sorriest of the lot. He himself began collecting some marvelously blatant back numbers such as Sir John Everett Millais, John Singer Sargent, Sir John Constable and Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones.

In 1958, at the peak of the pop-eyed gasper school of drama—in which the hero was always a kind of emaciated Jack London writhing at center stage with a leather belt strapped above his elbow squirting eau du heroin into his brachial artery with a Vicks nose dropper—Huntington Hartford wrote a thoroughly Victorian stage version of Jane Eyre and produced it on Broadway. You had to see it to believe it. It would have closed the first night, but Hartford kept it going six weeks with sheer money.

All the while, from Hollywood to the Bahamas, he was setting up what looked like such a mixed bag of projects, some of them staggeringly expensive, that magazines spoke repeatedly of his “eccentric whims”: A million-dollar legitimate theater for Hollywood (1953). A handwriting analysis (graphology) institute (1955). A $25-million-dollar conversion of Hog Island, off Nassau, into “Paradise Island,” a resort for refined people (1959). A gift of $862,500 to New York City for a Central Park café and pavilion (1960—still bogged down in law suits). Show, a slick magazine (1961). By 1958 he had paid between $900,000 and one million dollars for an old office building with a mansard slope, a Chevrolet sign and a clock on top of it on an island in Columbus Circle, where Broadway, Eighth Avenue and Central Park South converge. He tore the building down, hired Edward D. Stone, the famous architect, and started building his Gallery of Modern Art.

Just before the museum opened, Hartford came back from Nassau, his winter home, to give a final inspection. At fifty-three, he had lost none of the Hartford air. He was as boyish, shy, athletically graceful and distracted as ever. He was also—once more—as single-minded as a Ganges mystic. As he looked over the museum’s Aeolian-Skinner organ, built into an alcove between the second and third floors, Hartford turned to a visitor and said: “I thought a museum ought to have organ music. You know, it’s really like a church.” The moment someone mentioned his first book, Hartford underscored his own message: “I had a hard time deciding on a title. Before I settled on Art or Anarchy? I had wanted to call it ‘Armageddon of Art.’ Armageddon means ‘the final and conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil.’” And in the lobby, on the way out, he turned to the four lines from Kipling on the wall near the elevators:

But each for the joy of the working,
And each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are.

“It says exactly what I want to say,” said Hartford. “Do you know what I mean?”

Kipling! Hartford could scarcely have chosen a more unfashionable writer, of course. British intellectuals began denouncing Kipling in the 1920’s as a kind of P.R. man for colonialism, and ever since he has come to be known as the great Anti-Culture, even among culturati who have never read a line of him. For Hartford, however, there is the voice of the Lord and the voice of Victorian England—and what more is there to be said?

It is impossible to pay any attention to what Hartford has actually been saying about culture over the past thirteen years without noticing how often he speaks of good and evil, godliness, the moral order, sacred values—in short, religion. I mention paying attention, because his trouble is that nobody really has. The intelligentsia just thrill to the gaucheness of his gestures. Yet Hartford has been consistent all the way. First of all there was the odd title of the pamphlet he published in 1951, “Has God Been Insulted Here?”—a quote from Balzac. All through his essays on art, then and since, he has used expressions such as “the spiritual life of our times,” “right and wrong,” “that Deity,” “the Most High,” “a Man Who was once called the Prince of Peace,” “Jesus Christ Himself.” He speaks of his museum as “a church.” He carves a Kipling quotation about “the God of things as they are” on the wall. Yet the subject of all this gospel diction is art. Some of his phrases have a curious 19th-century antique quality about them. “A Man Who was once called the Prince of Peace”—I doubt that there is a minister in all of the Union Theological Seminary who would dare use such a phrase today.

That, however, would not faze Hartford. Much of his thinking is a deliberate return to the mental atmosphere of Victorian England, a Zeitgeist into which he was thoroughly initiated by his mother, Henrietta Guerard Hartford, a Southern gentlewoman.

There is a wonderful photograph of Hartford and his mother that says a great deal. In this picture he is sixteen years old and standing up straight in a double-breasted blazer and ice cream pants with his hair fluffing down over his forehead in golden Gainsborough curves. His mother is standing just behind him looking out from under a great loopy garden party hat with a smile that says, “My Boy.” The atmosphere is that of verandahs in Newport, R.I., singing-rounds in the parlor, croquet on the far lawn, straw hats, pique fans, iced tea, mint leaves, at-homes on Thursday, Tiffany candlesticks, batik parasols, tennis shirts, Morocco leather, verbena beds, blue flies and green-and-yellow afternoons in the shade; which is to say, the genteel life of about 1880. The picture was taken in 1927, two years before the Depression began.

Hartford was brought up in Newport, which in 1927 was already a period piece, left over from the fin de siecle. Hartford had the sort of isolated upper-class childhood that most Americans get a glimpse of only in Marquand novels. His father, Edward Hartford, was one of three sons of George Huntington Hartford, who founded the A&P. The other two, George L. and John, went into the business and ran it after the death of “The Old Gentleman,” as he was called. Edward, who was more the sensitive introvert, branched out by himself, invented a shock absorber and made a small fortune of his own. He died when Hartford was eleven. Hartford remembers him chiefly as a quiet figure who was always in his study with his back to the door and his face to the desk. So Hartford grew up with millions of dollars but without the slightest knowledge of or taste for the atmosphere of strong men using their fortunes as instruments of power. His uncles, George L. and John, lived and breathed the A&P and had little to do with him. The person who fashioned Hartford’s entire style of life was his mother.

The boarding school she sent him off to was not likely to insinuate much of the din of the outside world into his life. It was St. Paul’s, which, like all the best Eastern boarding schools, was a kind of country rector’s Emersonian version of an English public school. The place was calcimined and bleached with the good odor of 19th-century sententiae and precepts concerning God, gentility, noblesse oblige and the virtues of active sport. In an astounding confessional piece he wrote for his Harvard class of 1934 in 1959, Hartford told how St. Paul’s molded him into a miserable, self-effacing “mouse.”

At Harvard, Hartford had the money to cut any figure he wanted. But his classmates seem to remember him chiefly as this boy who was said to be fabulously rich and who stayed in his rooms reading Thackeray, Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. This was in 1930, at a time when—the literary histories assure us—all Harvard boys were reading Hemingway, Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Santa Barranza!—Sir Walter Scott!

Writers like Thackeray, Dickens and Scott were American Victorian fin de siècle ideals in Culture. They were British, which gave them the right cultural cachet. They had established their reputations a good fifty years before. They were diverting, but with a tendency toward the profound. They were morally sound; which is to say, they exposed the evil of man without trifling with the social order. The same set of names—British writers and painters favored as cultural idols by the American genteel classes from about 1880 to World War II—turn up again and again in Hartford’s life. He named his yacht Joseph Conrad. In his living room at 1 Beekman Place he has a bust of Conrad and leather-bound sets of Scott, Thackeray, Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson. The play he wrote and produced was an adaptation of Miss Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Many of the eighty paintings he has collected, at a cost of about $2.5 million for the lot, are by 19th-century British painters long out of fashion, such as Burne-Jones, Constable, Millais, Sir Edwin Henry, and Paul Gustave Doré—whose drawings illustrate those lush editions of the classics wealthy matrons gave their children fifty years ago.

In his second year at Harvard, Hartford married a girl named Mary Lee Epling, who is now Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The marriage may have been some sort of rebellion against the hold his mother had on his life—she had moved to Cambridge to be near him while he was in college—but he never lost his devotion to her style of life and intellectual ideals. For example, after Harvard, he went to work for the A&P but quit after a year, partly because his mother found the idea of his going into “commerce” repulsive.

The idea that no gentleman should be a businessman was left over from the British feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages, but has governed the thinking of many American millionaires, especially on the Eastern seaboard, once the money has been made. In the old aristocratic scheme the eldest son took over the property and assumed the dynastic power. For a younger son three acceptable careers were open: warrior, diplomat or clergyman above the rank of vicar. Many American millionaires’ sons have become diplomats, of course, and some, W. Averell Harriman for one, have wielded great influence. As for the role of warrior, the American armed forces are so highly bureaucratized and so lacking in style—the shabbiest South American colonel has a better-looking uniform than an American general—that the military is out. This category has hazed over into the general area of government service. An elected position is acceptable, so long as it is governor or better; Congressman is too lowly. A Cabinet or “Little Cabinet” appointment in any branch of government will do, or even assistant secretarial rank in the older branches, State Department (diplomat) or Defense (warrior).

But no matter how far the lines hazed, there was nothing in it for Hartford. First of all, he never had the slightest interest in politics or the exercise of temporal power. Second, even if he had, there would have been nobody to appoint him; his loyalties, when he felt them, were conservative Republican, and from his twenty-second to his forty-second birthday, there were nothing but Democrats doing the appointing in Washington. Besides, by his forty-second birthday, Hartford had already given up his dilettante-ish meanderings and entered the only sphere left open to him: religion.

Anyone who takes the trouble to read Hartford’s first manifesto, “Has God Been Insulted Here?,” will realize immediately that while the subject is arts and letters, the pamphlet is a religious tract. His thesis is that the artist, as “the spokesman for mankind,” has great power. But the modern artist, particularly in literature and paintings, has become the tool of barbaric forces that would destroy civilization through fear, despair, vulgarity and rebellion. He sees the modern artist as a man “engrossed with evil and the destruction of life,” wandering off “to some streamlined inferno in which he has burned in effigy the normal people of the earth. Nor have the people always objected, for it is often interesting to watch the devil at work, and a good bonfire is fun to see, even if it happens to be your own spirit that is going up in flames.” He exhorts America’s artists to reform. “A tremendous task it is!—the regeneration of the spiritual life of our times. Among all classes and all walks of people, the burden of this responsibility falls most weightily upon the shoulder of the artist.”

The tone of this manifesto is excruciatingly naive, even allowing for the old-fashioned Ruskinian rhetoric, and yet its argument is not unsophisticated. Plato makes much the same case in The Republic, arguing that poets who stress man’s despair and play up to his weaker passions, his faintings, his fallings, his swoonings, should be banished from the state.

Even the religious rubric of Hartford’s writing, for all its archaic flavor, is curiously appropriate. For by the time the pamphlet appeared, 1951, Culture was already becoming the new religion of America’s intelligentsia, not figuratively but quite literally. For example, it was no happenstance that the 1961 Presidential Inaugural ceremonies included a succession of Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Greek Orthodox clergymen reading prayers, followed closely by Robert Frost reading a poem. For untold thousands of intellectuals today Culture, not church, is the favored form of religious rejection of the world. Young men and women may be seen riding to work on the subway every morning in New York with volumes by Rilke, Rimbaud, Hermann Hesse and LeRoi Jones or somebody like that in their laps as if to say, This filthy train, this filthy office, this rotten Gotham and this roaring rat race are not my real life. My real life is Culture. Prints and paintings are on every wall today like ikons. Renoirs are virtually unobtainable; they are clutched like Columbus’ bones. Bach, Mozart, Monteverdi and Schoenberg issue forth from the hi-fi with liturgical solemnity.

Hartford, then, is a curious combination of the shockingly old and the startlingly new. He arrives as a Martin Luther to reform modern Culture even before its religious nature has been generally recognized. Like Luther, he comes from out of nowhere with a manifesto decrying the evil and corruption of the established religion, i.e., modern art. Like Luther, he calls for a reformation, a return to a simpler and more blessed age. He has an age in mind: Victorian England—which the cultural religicos regard as the most reactionary phase of cultural history. They would, says Hartford. To go back “to the much-despised Victorian era might do less harm than the artists of our day believe,” he wrote in “Has God Been Insulted Here?”

That pamphlet, like Luther’s opening blast, the “95 Theses,” was addressed to the high priests of the religion; in Hartford’s case, artists and curators of Culture. Getting nowhere with the hierarchy, Hartford, like Luther, appealed directly to the people. He published his second big manifesto, “The Public Be Damned?,” in daily newspapers.

He exhorts the multitudes: “Ladies and gentlemen, form your own opinions concerning art. Don’t be afraid to disagree—loudly, if necessary—with the critics. Stand up and be heard. And when the high priests of criticism and the museum directors and the teachers of mumbo jumbo begin to realize that you mean business you will be astonished, in my humble opinion, how fast they will change their tune.”

Hartford’s attempt to take his Reformation to the people had actually begun in Los Angeles. He had hit upon the idea of holding a huge art exhibition—requiring the cooperation of Los Angeles’ leading museums and galleries—in which the critics would select the paintings they liked best and the public would vote for the paintings they liked best. Hartford felt sure the discrepancy in taste would be crushing to the critics. In any case, he says, the project was blocked at every turn by the museum directors and he began to sense the extraordinary power of the museums in the art world. In New York, he says, the situation was even more dictatorial. One museum—the Museum of Modern Art—was determining the whole course of American painting, and much of European painting, through an extraordinary control over reputations and publicity. The strategy of his Gallery of Modern Art was to provide a counterforce to the Museum of Modern Art, even to the point of insisting on the same phrase—Modern Art—in the name.

Meantime, many of the other Hartford projects, his “eccentric whims,” have actually been integral parts of the same religious crusade. His art colony was an attempt to create a benevolent environment in which a non-bitter, non-despairing, nondestructive generation of Thackerays, Constables and Sir Walter Scotts might develop. A legitimate theater he bankrolled in Hollywood was an attempt to plant wholesome Culture in the heart of the evil movie industry. Paradise Island, the resort, has been Hartford’s idea of reintroducing the fin de siecle, Victorian gentility of Newport, R.I., into the lives of influential Americans who might want to loll in the Bahamas. His Central Park pavilion scheme has much the same idea behind it. He founded Show magazine with the idea of re-creating Vanity Fair, an elegant cultural magazine of the 1920’s. Hartford could appreciate the photographs he saw in bound copies of Vanity Fair, often of polished-looking men in wing collars, wide foulard cravats and double-breasted waistcoats exuding an air of leisurely British drawing room grace.

Throughout, Hartford has been far from the mild millionaire with “whims” that he is often depicted as. He has been a plunger. He has taken risks that would make an oil millionaire flinch. By his own estimate, he has gone through certainly a fourth and perhaps as much as a half of his $70 million fortune, although the figure could go back up if certain investments, such as Paradise Island, pay off. He has devoted himself to his chosen field—the religion of Culture—with a zealous and enduring disdain of the cultural Establishment. And if the culturati still do not fathom his Luther role, even with this white marble tower on Columbus Circle to illustrate it, Hartford will not be downhearted. He is taking the long view. For as it says in the rest of the Kipling poem, “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” whose last stanza is on the wall down there by the elevators, someday even the youngest critic will be out of the picture:

When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two.
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.

And those that were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from—Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all.

Prev Next