Tiffany blues, p.1
Tiffany Blues, page 1
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To Carolyn Reidy:
You always say how honored and proud you are that we authors entrust our books to you. Truly, the honor is all mine.
Your enthusiasm and unwavering support have given me the freedom to dream on paper and for that I am so very thankful.
The expression of beauty. That has been my quest.
Louis Comfort Tiffany
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1902, Louis Comfort Tiffany began building Laurelton Hall on Long Island’s Gold Coast, not far from where, years later, F. Scott Fitzgerald would place Gatsby’s fictional mansion.
Housed on 580 acres in Laurel Hollow, the eighty-four-room estate would take three years to finish and would cost Tiffany $2 million—$54 million by today’s standards. Laurelton Hall was Tiffany’s personal effort to create a vision incorporating every aspect of his love of beauty, from the stained-glass windows and mosaics he designed himself, to the rooms of antique Japanese, Native American, and Indian objects he had collected during his lifetime, to the more than sixty acres of impeccably landscaped gardens complete with imported peacocks that roamed the grounds.
In 1918, Tiffany created the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation at Laurelton in order to aid artists, endowing it with his own funds as well as the estate and its contents.
Two years later, eight students attended the first summer session. They included two silversmiths, one sculptor, one designer, and four painters.
During the remainder of Tiffany’s life, until his death in 1933, artists lived at Laurelton and attended one of two eight-week summer sessions during which they were afforded the time to imagine and create while surrounded and inspired by nature and the beauty that Tiffany had cultivated and brought into the world.
After Tiffany died, the Foundation struggled, and the mansion fell into disrepair. By 1949, parcels of the estate had been sold off, and the main house and a surrounding three acres were purchased by Thomas H. Hilton for what today would be $100,000. Over the next eight years, Hilton did nothing to restore the house, and it was virtually abandoned.
On March 6, 1957, at five p.m., a neighbor spotted flames coming from Laurelton Hall. The fire lasted until two a.m., with outbreaks continuing for days. The grand house, along with what was left of its gardens, was destroyed.
To this day, the cause of the fire has never been discovered.
I have been fascinated with Louis Comfort Tiffany since childhood. My great-grandparents’ house in Brooklyn contained a Tiffany window of lush red roses with a border of verdant green leaves. I loved to watch its colorful reflections move across the oak floors as the afternoon slipped into dusk.
My mother, who always encouraged and nurtured my interest in the arts, sought out other Tiffany windows in New York, and we visited them all.
In 1978, when the Metropolitan Museum installed the Laurelton Hall Loggia from pieces salvaged from the Long Island mansion, my mother and I were among its first visitors, and it was in the pages of the catalog accompanying the exhibition that I first read about Tiffany’s magnificent estate and its fate.
I don’t think I’ve ever gone longer than a month without visiting the Metropolitan Museum, and I always stop in the American Wing to sit in front of the wisteria windows from Laurelton Hall and rest for a moment—surrounded by all that beauty.
It’s easy to look at artifacts from the estate and wonder what it must have been like to study under Tiffany’s tutelage. Who were the students? What did they go on to create? How did the setting and the master influence them?
But most of all, why did the estate burn down in the first place?
In response, my creativity-prone brain began: What if one summer there was a student who . . .
I’ve written Tiffany Blues through the eyes of Jenny Bell, a young artist who, in the summer of 1924, studied at the renowned Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.
While Jenny and her story are fictional, Mr. Tiffany, the history of his family and namesake store, his windows, his aesthetic and personality, the estate, and the Foundation are fact. If I’ve included a famous name, he or she was indeed involved in some way. For instance, Thomas Edison was a friend of Mr. Tiffany’s and was working on a Spirit Phone. The amazing artist Paul Cadmus was a student at Laurelton in the summer of 1924. Stanley Lothrop did manage the Foundation, Sarah Eileen Hanley was Mr. Tiffany’s companion (in every sense of the word, many said). The Art Students League, the Institute of Psychic Research, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and her studio are all real.
As often as possible, Mr. Tiffany’s dialogue about art, architecture, and his own philosophy and quest are, if not verbatim, then influenced by his actual words recorded in letters, books, or articles. The same is true for Mr. Edison’s espousing on his ideology.
Other parts of the novel are a combination of fact and fiction. While Tiffany did have many grandchildren, Oliver Comfort Tiffany is my creation. The history of Ouija boards is as described, but the Garland family and the Reverend are my invention, as are Minx and her family, Edward Wren, and Ben Montgomery.
All cities and towns mentioned are real, but the Reverend’s specific church, the Weber Falls Cemetery, and the Fond du Lac Mausoleum are fictional.
And so I present Tiffany Blues as my way—as a novelist fascinated with art and history and where they overlap—of imagining an answer to the lingering question of who set the Laurelton Hall fire in 1957 that destroyed so much beauty, and why. It is my hope that through my heroine, Jenny, readers may experience what guests and students at Laurelton were able to during its 1920s heyday, what Tiffany himself wanted them to experience, what he wanted everything he created to express: beauty. And while this book is a tribute to that opulence and beauty that were Tiffany’s legacy, it is also a tribute to the power of art to overcome the worst of traumas.
PROLOGUE
March 13, 1957
Laurelton Hall, Laurel Hollow
Oyster Bay, New York
I lost my heart long before this fire darkened its edges. I was twenty-four years old that once-upon-a-time summer when I fell in love. A love that opened a door into a new world. A profusion of greens, shades of purples, spectrums of yellows, oranges, reds, and blues—oh, so many variations of blues.
I never dreamed I’d come back to Laurelton Hall, but I always trusted it would be there if I ever could visit. Now that will be impossible. For all that is left of that arcadia is this smoldering, stinking mess.
Somewhere in this rubble of charred trees, smashed tiles, and broken glass is my bracelet with its heart-shaped diamond and benitoite charm. Did my heart burn along with the magical house, the primeval forest, the lush bushes, and the glorious flowers? I’m not sure. Platinum is a hard metal. Diamonds are harder still. Or did just the engraving melt? And what of the man whose hand had grabbed at the bracelet? His muscle and flesh would have rotted by now. But what of the bones? Do bones burn? Back when it all happened, no report about a missing artist was ever made.
I take a few tentative steps closer to the rubble of the house. Bits of glass glint in the sun. A shard of ruby flashes, another of deep amethyst. I bend and pick up a fragment the size of my hand and wipe the soot off its surface. With a start, I recognize this pattern.
Patterns, Mr. Tiffany once said, be they found in events, in nature, even in the stars in the firmament, are proof of history repeating itself. If we see randomness, it is only because we don’t yet recognize the pattern.
So it shouldn’t surprise me that of all the possible patterns, this is the one I’ve found. This remnant of the stained-glass clematis windows from Oliver’s room. I remember how the light filtered through those windows, radiating color like the gems Mr. Tiffany used in his jewelry. How we stood in that living light and kissed, and the world opened up for me like an oyster, offering one perfect, luminous pearl. How that kiss became one more, then a hundred more. How we discovered each other’s tastes and scents. How we shared that alchemical reaction when our passions ignited, combusted, and exploded, changing both of us forever.
Clutching the precious memory, I continue walking through the hulking mass of wreckage, treading carefully on the broken treasures. I listen for the familiar sounds—birds chirping, water splashing in the many fountains, and the endless rushing of the man-made waterfall that I always went out of my way to avoid.
But everything here is silent. Not even the birds have returned yet.
· · ·
I learned about the fire seven days ago. I was at home in Paris, having breakfast, eating a croissant, drinking a café crème, and reading the International Herald Tribune. The headline popped out at me like the obituary of an old friend with whom I had long been out of touch.
Old Tiffany Mansion Burns
An eight-level structure with twenty-five baths, the house was owned originally by the late Louis Comfort Tiffany of the jewelry firm that bears his name. At one time the estate covered 1,500 acres of woodland and waterfront.
I didn’t realize my hand was shaking until I saw a splotch of coffee soak into my white tablecloth.
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The reporter wrote that a neighbor out walking his dog noticed flames coming from the clock tower of Laurelton’s main house. Within hours, the mansion was ablaze. Fire companies came from as far as Hicksville and Glen Cove. Firemen drained all the neighboring swimming pools using the water to try to contain the conflagration. They carried hoses a half mile down to the Long Island Sound to siphon off that water, too. At one point, 435 firemen worked on the blaze, but the fire raged on and on for five days, defeating them. Those who lived nearby said the skies blackened as metal and wood, foliage, ephemera, and fabric burned.
The sky here is no longer black. But the smell of the fire persists. And no wonder, considering it burned for so long.
Once the present turns to past, all we have left are memories. Yes, sometimes we can stand where we stood, see our ghost selves, and relive moments of our life. See the shadow of the man we loved. Of the friend we cherished. Of the mentor who made all the difference. Our memories turn specific. The terrier that played by the shoreline, joyously running in the sand. We can remember the smell of the roses. Look at the azure water and see the glimmer of the sun on the opposite shore and hear a fleeting few bars of jazz still lingering in the air.
If you were the only girl in the world . . . Staring into the remains of what is left, I see ghosts of the gardens and woods, the gazebo, terraces, rooms ablaze with stained glass—everywhere we walked and talked and kissed and cried. With my eyes closed, I see it all in my mind, but when I open them, all of it is gone, up in flames.
Mr. Tiffany once told me that there is beauty even in broken things. Looking back, there is no question I would not be the artist I am if not for that lesson. But would he be able to salvage any beauty out of this destruction?
No, I never dreamed I’d come back to Laurelton Hall. The Xanadu where I came of age as both a woman and a painter. Where I found my heart’s desire and my palette’s power. Where depravity bloomed alongside beds and fields of flowers, where creativity and evil flowed with the water in the many fountains. Where the sun shone on the tranquil sea and the pool’s treacherous rock crystals reflected rainbows onto the stone patio. Where the glorious light streaming from Mr. Tiffany’s majestic stained glass illuminated the very deep darkness that had permeated my soul and lifted me out of despair. And where I found the love that sustained me and remained in my heart even after Oliver and I parted.
Standing here, smelling the acrid stench, looking at the felled trees with their charcoal bark, the carbon-coated stones and bent metal frames that once held the master’s windows, at the smoky, melting mess that was one of the greatest mansions on Long Island’s Gold Coast, I know I never will see it again, not how it was that magical and awful summer of 1924.
The fire is still hot in spots, and a tree branch snaps. My reverie is broken. Leaves rustle. Rubble falls. Glass crushes. Twigs crack. Then comes a whisper.
Jenny.
But it can’t be. The wind howling through a hollow tree trunk is playing a trick. Fooling me into thinking I am hearing his sapphire voice, its deep velvet tone.
As I listen to the repeated whisper—Jenny—I raise my hand to wipe at my tears and tell myself that it is the smoldering ash making my eyes water. The charms on my bracelet jingle as I lower my arm. And again the whisper . . . and again my name—Jenny.
1
March 20, 1924
New York, New York
I hadn’t expected to find a waterfall in the middle of Central Park. Even there, so far away from home and the scene of the tragedy, the rushing water that pounded on the rocks made me shudder. The waterfalls in Ithaca and in Hamilton had been powerful, beautiful forces of nature, but I’d grown to hate them.
“Jenny, certainly this early-spring scenery is going to inspire you to use some color,” Minx said, as we set up our easels.
A dozen of us from Professor Robert Pannell’s class at the Art Students League of New York had scattered around the pond, preparing to spend the afternoon painting en plein air in the tradition of the impressionists. We’d walked from the school on West Fifty-seventh Street north into the park and then continued along manicured pathways into this untamed, romantic area.
“Your assignment is not to paint what you see but what you feel. Paint the atmosphere,” Professor Pannell instructed. He always pushed us to go beyond convention.
After a half hour, I was still struggling to get something worthwhile down on my canvas. The ceaseless noise of the water falling distracted me and made me anxious.
“So you’re not going to use even a little bit of color?” Minx coaxed me. Christened “Millicent,” she’d come by her nickname honestly. She had been a hellion growing up—bold, flirtatious, and cunning, much to her parents’ chagrin—but she was just beguiling enough to get away with it.
I forced a small smile but didn’t proffer an actual answer. I didn’t need to. She hadn’t really been asking for one but was rather expressing her never-ending surprise at how uninspired I was by the things that moved her so much.
“I know you are fascinated by the shapes of the trees and the negative spaces and patterns they create, but there are colors out there, Jenny. Look at the colors. Winter evergreens and spring’s very first buds.”
Minx had been questioning my reluctance to use color for months and knew that nothing—not spring or fall or flowers or fabrics—would inspire me. Despite my unchanging black, white, and gray palette, she believed she could help and refused to give up trying. I loved her for that and for her generosity.
She was the daughter of the Deerings, a wealthy shipping scion and a socialite whose fabled family had helped found the Bank of New York. Her parents, Eli and Emily, had spoiled her, and in return, Minx spoiled her friends. All her life, she’d witnessed her father showing his love and his remorse with gifts; for her, then, expressing love meant showering people with her largesse. And as her best friend and flatmate, I was often on the receiving end of her generosity.
Minx’s family was wealthy and worldly. She’d grown up in a mansion on Sixty-second Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. The first time she took me home with her for dinner, I’d been awed. Yes, I’d seen opulence in museums, theaters, and government buildings but never in a home where people lived.
The Deerings were also serious art collectors with eclectic tastes. The walls of their mansion were crowded with Renoirs, Manets, Monets, Rembrandts, Titians, and Renaissance drawings. There was even a Leonardo da Vinci sketch done in sepia chalk. Marble stands showcased seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bronzes. Mantels were crowded with bejeweled bibelots from Fabergé, Cartier, and Tiffany. Plants were potted only in majolica. Sofas and chairs upholstered only in silk and damask. There was not a corner that didn’t hold a treasure, not a wall that didn’t showcase a masterpiece.
“Miss Deering, are you painting your canvas or Miss Bell’s?” Professor Pannell called out.
Minx rolled her eyes at me, and as she returned to her own canvas, she picked a sprig of holly and tucked it behind her ear. In the sun, the leaves gleamed like jade.
Even there in the park in painting clothes, Minx was distracting. She never walked into a room without eyes turning. Everything about her gleamed, from her bobbed helmet of blond hair to her couture clothes in the palest shades of beige, pink, champagne, topaz, and citrine.
Like Minx, my hair was bobbed. But unlike hers, mine never agreed to lie flat and exploded in a profusion of curls that fell over my forehead. It made me look bohemian and mussed, whereas her smooth helmet of gold made her look chic and coiffed.
When Minx moved, the silks and satins glowed like liquid candlelight. Her deep brown-red lipstick blazed. Even her perfume shimmered: Ombré Rose from the House of L’Etoile in France. It contained minuscule flecks of gold, and sometimes you’d catch a glimmer where she’d applied the spicy, rich scent.
Despite all her dressing up and embellishments, I always saw the frantic light behind Minx’s electric green eyes, her longing for something she couldn’t name and didn’t know how to satisfy. Gifted as both painter and sculptor, she was trying to find that something in art. And when she wasn’t in the studio, she was trying to find it in too many glasses of champagne or in bed with men she never knew well enough. Like so many of our generation, even if we hadn’t been at the front, we were shell-shocked in the aftermath of the war, and someone like Minx tried to chase away the sadness and loss with whatever it took—drink, drugs, frivolous theater, literature, music, forced gaiety, or a lot of sex.
