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Overview
Henrietta rode the cultural cusp as a muse to the Bloomsbury Group, the daughter of the ambassador to the United Kingdom during the rise of Nazism, the seductress of royalty and athletic champions, and a pre-Stonewall figure who never buckled to convention. Henrietta's audacious physicality made her unforgettable in her own time, and her ecstatic and harrowing life serves as an astonishing reminder of the stories that lie buried in our own families.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374536190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2016 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Irrepressible
The Jazz Age life of Henrietta Bingham
By Emily Bingham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Emily BinghamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9464-6
CHAPTER 1
COQUETTING
Early on, a friend warned Robert Worth Bingham that a daughter could make a "fool" of a man. No child sets out to do such a thing. Still, evidence of Henrietta Bingham's extraordinary seductiveness, and the bravado that appealed to so many, can be found early in her life. Someone photographed her in a meadow, costumed as a four-year-old geisha, her raven hair crowned with white blossoms, her expression dead serious. In other pictures, turn-of-the-century sepia tones contrast with assertive, even masculine poses: commanding a tricycle, a look of pure determination on her face; astride a pony, decked out as an Indian princess with fringed chaps and a headdress; posing as a rough rider in a cowboy hat, military jacket, and someone else's boots, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. Almost from the beginning, Henrietta showed little interest in expressly feminine activities. In so doing, she invited gazes and questions.
Born at the outset of a new century, Henrietta Worth Bingham grew up in bustling Louisville, Kentucky. The leading city in what was widely called the northernmost southern state, Louisville's population was double Richmond's and four times Atlanta's. And Louisville literally glowed. For five summers in the 1880s, this transportation hub in the nation's midsection hosted the Southern Exposition, featuring the world's largest installation of Thomas Edison's new electric lighting. Cement, agricultural implements, whiskey, and tobacco poured out of Louisville, and Frederick Law Olmsted's firm designed an impressive network of parks and connecting parkways.
On her mother's side Henrietta had deep roots in the River City, so-called for its placement on the great interior avenue, the Ohio. An Irish immigrant great-grandfather named Dennis Long amassed a fortune assembling steamboat engines and cast-iron cookstoves in the mid-nineteenth century. Long's heirs adapted the foundries to the municipal water systems being built from Chicago to Birmingham, and the firm became the nation's leading producer of cast-iron pipes. Dennis Long's daughter, Henrietta, married a flour mill manager, Samuel Miller, who eventually headed the Dennis Long & Company. Miller also brought a light heart and a passion for art and literature to the union, though he gave up his political aspirations (the Longs were Republicans and he had been a Democrat). Henrietta's mother, the second and most attractive of Samuel and Henrietta Miller's three children, grew up in an imposing limestone house with a mansard roof and a tower, arguably the city's most opulent residence, once described as "an exclamation in the language of High Victorian Gothic."
Henrietta's mother, Babes, had wavy dark hair that she swept up from her forehead into a soft crown. Her mouth played with smiling even when she didn't want it to, and she had a habit of spontaneously breaking into song. However, when Babes's friends were fielding wedding proposals or starting families, darkness fell on the Miller household. For the better part of a decade, her father had been spearheading the drive to build and finance a railroad bridge over the Ohio River. A series of delays and misfortunes plagued the bridge's construction, however, and on a Saturday in December 1893, a freak gust of wind blew a crane off a span and onto a two-million-pound truss. Forty-one men were laboring on the truss when it collapsed into the frigid waters. More than half of them perished. It was national news. The Courier-Journal's banner headline read ANOTHER APPALLING ACCIDENT ADDED TO THE ALREADY LONG LIST OF HORRORS — for sixteen lives had previously been lost during construction. In the wake of the disaster, Samuel Miller fell into a severe depression. His doctors sent him, with his family, to Asheville for a change of air. In the evenings, the Millers gathered, with other guests and well-to-do locals, on the broad porch of the fashionable Battery Park Hotel. Here Bob Bingham, a teacher at a nearby military academy, met pretty Babes Miller before she and the family returned to Louisville.
Eighteen months later, Samuel Miller was still battling "acute melancholia" and, accompanied by his son Dennis, had gone back to Asheville for further treatment. Twenty-five-year-old Babes journeyed from Louisville to visit him, but as her train pulled into the station, her father "eluded the vigilance of his son, ran between two of the [railroad] cars and was immediately knocked down and instantly killed, two cars passing over his body." The ghastly scene deeply shocked Babes, and of course the news raced through the resort town.
Bob Bingham offered his services. "My whole heart throbs for you," he told Babes.
* * *
For longer than anyone alive in 1895 could remember, the Binghams had run a school for boys in North Carolina. The academy's history reached back to the 1780s, when the first member of Henrietta's patronymic line arrived from Scotland, having been recruited to prepare students for the new state university at Chapel Hill. In 1895, the school was headed by Bob's father — who fought for the Confederacy, and was captured, released, and reenlisted in time to witness Lee surrender at Appomattox. A subsequent honorific from the governor of North Carolina made Bob's father "Colonel Bingham," a title he embraced to the end of his days.
Bob Bingham's childhood had ended at fourteen with the death of his mother. Delphine Worth Bingham, whom Bob idolized as a quintessential selfless southern lady, weathered the hard times of war and Reconstruction while keeping the (by then) military academy operating. She bore responsibility for the welfare of cadets marooned in the school's Spartan atmosphere, and even while she lived Bob, born in 1871, may not have gotten the attention he sought. When she died, two older sisters doted on him, but his angry bereavement continued into his twenties, abetted by the fact that Colonel Bingham emerged from his own catatonic grief as an even more rigid disciplinarian. Bob detested the former schoolteacher his father took as his second wife.
All the Bingham men attended Chapel Hill. Bob enrolled in 1888, but two years into his studies he transferred to the University of Virginia to pursue a course in medicine. The Bingham academy's good reputation was the result of three generations' labor, and Colonel Bingham expected his son to extend that tradition, whereas Bob looked to his mother's father, Dr. John Milton Worth, for professional inspiration. Worth, an M.D., had found a career in state politics and riches as a textile mill owner. When the Colonel refused to pay the Virginia tuition, Bob borrowed against a small legacy of Worth Manufacturing stock left by his mother.
Bob's turn from family duty came at a time when his father had taken out large loans to move the academy from near Chapel Hill west to Asheville. On a mountain overlooking the French Broad River, he erected a state-of-the-art campus — encompassing a pool, gymnasium, and fireproof dormitories — an $80,000 gamble that would take years to pay off, if it ever did. Bob wanted none of it. (Thomas Wolfe later declined an offer to teach at the school for fear of becoming "a sour, dyspeptic small-town pedant.") Bob was perfectly willing for his younger brother, Will, a student at Chapel Hill, to assume the family mantle, but just before the Asheville complex opened, Will died from a burst appendix. In the wake of this tragedy, Bob came home from Charlottesville (sans diploma) to teach Latin alongside his father. He may or may not have admitted that his difficulties in science class had boded ill for a future in medicine.
Bob badly wished himself away from "Bingham Heights" in 1895, and falling in love with Miss Miller of Louisville promised an escape. Though women pursued him, Bob told Babes that his experience with the female sex "had bred a considerable measure of contempt"; Babes, one year his elder, was different. The Millers were obviously rich, and Babes's mother openly questioned Bob's merits and intentions. Her recent family trials reinforced her determination to guard what remained of her social and financial status, and Mrs. Miller felt sure Babes could do better. Bob naturally took offense. He told Babes that if he seemed "distrustful and suspicious ... that's the only way to save oneself from constant defeat in this so-called 'battle of life,' and I don't take to defeat very kindly." He would soon visit Louisville to explain to her mother "my present position and future prospects from a business standpoint." He lectured Babes that "as I have remarked to you before she has no ground for objection to me on the score of birth, position, character, or prospects, and I do not anticipate any long continued disapproval." Meantime, he took out a subscription to The Courier- Journal, the local Democratic paper, to familiarize himself with Louisville's politics, business, and social life. Babes loved him; she was also a smoother-over and devoted to her mother, who, unlike any woman Bingham had contended with, had power over him — and money.
Bob (and love) won the day. The wedding was set for June 1896, the end of the school year. The couple exchanged vows at the Episcopal Church, where Bingham willingly forfeited his family's Presbyterianism. The carefully scripted marriage announcement that ran in the newspaper emphasized not the legacy of Bingham educators but the bridegroom's relationship to John M. Worth, "perhaps the richest man" in North Carolina. Babes's mother was said to have signaled her disapproval by insisting on wearing black sixteen months after her husband's suicide. Dr. Worth extended his grandson $2,500, with a stern warning against indebtedness.
Working his way up in the cast-iron-pipe business that had made Babes's family wealthy was never Bingham's plan. He wanted a more public position in Louisville. Eighteen months after moving to Kentucky, he had obtained a law degree from the University of Louisville, passed the bar, opened a practice, and fathered a son, Robert. The young family saved money, indeed would do so for nine years of marriage, by living under "Ma" Miller's Gothic-Victorian roof.
Bob persuaded a Chapel Hill classmate, Texan-born William Watkins Davies, to join his legal practice. The two of them speculated in mining ventures in Kentucky and the West —"Dame nature holds ... something for us and we will find it yet, by gum!" Davies exclaimed — but more than anything Bob hankered for public office. He pasted articles about state and city politics into ledgers and in time his name began appearing in the papers. Louisville politics were notoriously dirty, however, and he faced an uphill battle. Four years into his marriage, twenty-nine-year-old Bob told Babes he had aborted a run for elected office even though he felt sure that he could defeat his opponent. Bob thought it would require "a great deal of money" and he had no war chest.
Bingham's life wasn't supposed to turn out like this. He took his wife and baby boy to North Carolina to see his failing grandfather, but when John Milton Worth died a few months later the bulk of his estate went to Bob's aunt and her family. Instead of inheriting an even share of $200,000, Bob's old loan was forgiven — a mere 1.25 percent of his grandfather's wealth. One of Bingham's cousins quoted the old man saying, "Bob seems to care more for his old Grandaddy's money than the Grandady [sic] himself."
Wills generated Dickensian drama in Robert Worth Bingham's life. He went to court, claiming that his grandfather had been subject to undue influence. Driven by righteous fury, Bob wrote that to permit this travesty to stand would be "the most contemptible thing in the world."
On January 3, 1901, when Babes delivered their second child, Henrietta Worth — named for her rich great-grandfather and even richer grandmother Miller — Bob was still disputing the will. In the end, he and his sisters won $3,500 each. It was hardly the legacy he sought.
Babes admired her husband's feverish energy, his passion for whatever crossed his path, and his chivalric sense of honor — it was what made him so appealing. But he could also be reckless and exhausting. Besides his legal practice and burgeoning political interests, he joined Confederate veterans groups, fraternal organizations, gentlemen's clubs, and charitable boards. A crack shot and avid angler, he helped establish clubs for the pursuit of quail and largemouth bass. All this frenetic activity was accompanied by physical ailments. Bob suffered from eczema, intestinal problems, headaches, and high blood pressure, and one summer he took an expensive cure in Carlsbad, the Austro-Hungarian spa town. Such luxury was not unusual; other years he made solitary tours of the English countryside seeking out records of prominent ancestral origins.
His self-importance occasionally provoked ridicule. In-laws remembered Bingham's habit of practicing public speaking on the landing at Babes's uncle's Thoroughbred horse farm, holding forth before a full-length mirror like Demosthenes, his mouth full of pebbles the better to train his tongue. Bingham speechified at every opportunity, it seems. By his own admission, he could also be a "badtempered [sic] fool," trying his wife "with my pettiness, my little meanness of temper and disposition." His career advanced in fits and starts and he needed constant reassurance that he was in the right. Babes understood and responded generously. When Henrietta was one year old, Babes soothed her husband: "You are so perfect to me and my life with you has been perfect, so don't you forget that I always want you with me."
In 1905, when Henrietta was four, her father's political star was rising. Bingham was serving as Democratic county attorney, a plum post he won in some of the dirtiest balloting ever documented in Kentucky. Mrs. Miller never liked his political maneuvering to start with, and when a sudden stock market drop left her son-in-law's account exposed, she covered his margin. Ma Miller then seized the opportunity to castigate Bob for his failures as a family man. His poor health, which she blamed on his heavy cigarette smoking, was impacting his legal practice. He had two children and Babes was expecting a third but the young family still lived for free, sharing the Miller house's single bathroom, and depended on Babes's trust fund for income. Bob had been managing the assets and distributions, but her mother announced that henceforth she would "invest Babes [sic] money for her and give her the interest. I will make no explanation to her except to say that after five years you should be able to take care of your family without her help."
To Henrietta, who came into her conscious years amid these souring relationships, the family conflict would have been difficult to untangle. Her father was the preoccupied and elusive prince; her grandmother the ever- present queen; and her mother a benignant handmaiden to them both. The turreted grandness of her grandmother's house appealed to the child. A grand piano filled a parlor where her mother sang and played. As her grandmother's favored namesake and only female grandchild, Henrietta was told the home might one day be hers.
Henrietta associated the birth of her brother in 1906 (he was named Barry after the Fifth Baron Clanmorris, an Irish peer who shared the Bingham name) with the breakup of her childhood home. Grandma Miller deeded Babes two lots on a hill edging Frederick Law Olmsted's new Cherokee Park along with $50,000. Plans took shape for a Tudor-style house with a garden for Babes and a baronial library for Bob. However, this liberating act of generosity failed to dampen the smoldering conflict between Bob and his mother-in-law. For reasons not known, Mrs. Miller asked Babes to return the deed to her, though she acceded to Bob's desperate request that the change be left out of the official records. In retaliation, perhaps, Babes appointed Sadie Grinnan, Bob's sister, as her children's guardian should she and their father die. During the same period, Bob's judgeship was in jeopardy, as the entire 1905 election was being contested. Unable to get what she needed in the emotional shuffle, Henrietta withdrew. According to her mother, the child almost never cried.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Irrepressible by Emily Bingham. Copyright © 2015 Emily Bingham. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: Herein Lieth Hid a Creature 3
Part 1
1 Coquetting 11
2 Pretty Boxes 25
3 Detriment to Community 46
Part 2
4 An American Girl of Twenty-One 63
5 Free Associations 77
6 O Let's Get Married 92
7 Effects of Henrietta 112
8 An' I Wish I Was Happy Again 126
9 Jug Band Ordered 146
10 A Red Damask Suite 159
Part 3
11 Hunting 181
12 Speed Six 196
13 Miss America 205
14 A Joyous and Satisfying Life 223
15 Our House with Our Horses 235
16 My Nerves Are Bad Tonight 248
17 The Not At All Solved Problems of Henrietta 267
Postscript: Extant 289
Notes 295
Acknowledgments 347
Index 349