Caresse Crosby
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Mary Phelps Jacob (April 30, 1891 - January 24, 1970) was a New York socialite, who in 1910 invented the first modern brassiere to receive a patent and gain wide acceptance. She was also known as Caresse and ghost-wrote Opus Pistorum for Henry Miller.
Polly marries Harry Crosby and joins the Paris intellectuals
After Polly sold her brassiere patent, she had two children: a son, William Jacob on February 4, 1916, and a daughter, Polly ("Poleen") born the following year on August 12, 1917. Her husband Richard Peabody was a well-educated but undirected man and a reluctant father. She found he had only three real interests, all acquired at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase fire engines. He would soon suffer the personal consequences of his WWI experiences and became an alcoholic. Polly's life was difficult during the war years and when her husband returned home, significantly changed, her life soon changed abruptly too.
The catalyst for Polly Jacob Peabody's transformation was her introduction to and eventual marriage to Harry Crosby, a wealthy scion of a socially prominent Boston family and another veteran and victim of the recent war. Harry attended private schools and until age 19 appeared to be well on the path to a comfortable life as a member of the upper middle class. His experiences in World War I changed everything.
In the pattern of other sons of the elite from New England, he served in the American Field Service Ambulance Corps. He was at the Second Battle of Verdun. Once, the ambulance he was driving was destroyed by artillery but he emerged miraculously unhurt, an experience that profoundly shaped his future. After the Battle of Orme, his section (the 29th, attached to the 120th French Division) was cited for bravery, and in 1919 Crosby was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
While completing school after World War I, on July 4, 1921, Harry met Polly. She was 28, six years older than Harry, with two small children. By some accounts, Harry fell in love with Mrs. Peabody in about two hours. He confessed his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park. Two weeks later they went to church together in Manchester-by-the-Sea, and spent the night together. Their scandalous courtship was the gossip of blue-blood Boston. Polly's husband Richard Peabody was in and out of sanitariums fighting alcoholism several times. In May 1921, Harry threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him. In June, she formally separated from Richard, and in December he offered to divorce her. In February 1922, after eight months at Shawmut National Bank, goes on a six-day drinking spree and resigns. In May he moves to Paris to work in a job arranged for him at Morgan, Harjes & Co., the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. Harry was the nephew of Jessie Morgan, the wife of American capitalist J. P. Morgan, who was also Harry's godfather. Polly had preceded him there, but in July she returned to the United States in a jealous fit. Harry proposed to her via Transatlantic Cable, and boarded the Aquitania the next day for New York.
On 9 September 1922 Harry and Polly were married in the Munincipal Building in New York City, and two days they boarded the Aquitania and moved with her children to Paris, France. Harry worked in a job arranged for him at Morgan Harjes, the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. However, he soon tired of the predictible banker's life and ultimately quit.
From 1922 to 1925, the Crosbys led the life of the rich expatriates. Polly and Harry purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then in April 1925 two more. They lived in a fashionable apartment on the Rue de Lille, and bought a mill outside of Paris in Ermenonville, France, that they named "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun"). In January 1925 they traveled to North Africa where they first smoked opium, a habit to which they would return again and again. Their glamorous and luxurious lifestyle included an open marriage, a mutual suicide pact, and cremation instructions they carried with them. In 1923, Harry fell in love with Constance Coolidge. In July 1925, he met a fourteen year old girl named "Nubile." In 1928, he inherited Walter Berry's considerable collection of over 8,000 mostly rare books, a collection he prized but which he also scaled back by giving away hundreds of volumes. He was known to slip rare first editions into the bookstalls that lined the Seine.
