Burning boy, p.58
Burning Boy, page 58
According to another journalist friend, Charles Michelson, who first met Crane in Jacksonville and later worked side by side with him during the Spanish-American War, S.C.’s vanishing act in Florida was typical of his behavior in all the spots where he landed:
Crane always disappeared on his arrival in a new town. He dived into the deep waters of society and stayed under. His associates knew where to find him and haled him forth when the time came, but he never was to be looked for about his hotel or in the bright cafés where the rest of us sunned ourselves during the waiting-time.… Night after night Stephen loitered in the back room of a grimy water-front saloon, partially, doubtless, because it was so close to the dock, but largely because there people did not talk to him about his books—book, rather, for The Red Badge of Courage was the only one people knew about then.
This was the period when he was supposed to be sunk in debauchery. Actually he was consuming innumerable bottles of beer—I never knew him to take anything stronger—and listening to the talk of oilers, deck hands, sponge fishermen, wharf-rats and dock thieves, and all the rest of the human flotsam that is washed into a port that has the West Indies for a front yard. This was his way of soaking in knowledge … of the kind of men he loved to write about, and while he was at it he was one of them—a sombre, silent member, contributing no adventure of his own, never flushing his quarry with a word that was not in their vocabulary.
Crane on horseback with Sylvester Scovel, Jacksonville, late 1896 or early 1897. (COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
Of all the war correspondents who worked with Crane and later wrote about him, Michelson is the most acute and observant witness, the one who captures his elusive subject more fully than any of the others, but reliable as Michelson is, he overstates one small thing in this passage. While The Red Badge of Courage was unquestionably the only book of Crane’s most people were aware of, that did not hold true for all people, as Michelson seems to imply, and among those who happened to have read other books by Crane as well, there was a person in Jacksonville who owned and operated a business on the corner of Ashley and Hawk in the La Villa district, and that woman, who had entered the world in Boston as infant Cora Ethel Eaton Howorth and later became Cora Murphy and then Cora Stewart and now called herself Cora Taylor, would become the most important person in Crane’s life—his companion for the next three and a half years, the woman he called his wife when they set up house together in England, and the person who was in the room with him on the day he died.
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Her great-grandfather George Howorth was an art dealer and gallery owner who had invented a special process for restoring oil paintings that had produced enough money for him to invest it in Boston real estate and become a wealthy man. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Holder, had been the first manufacturer of pianos in New York. Cora’s father, John, was a painter, and among her uncles and cousins were decorated Civil War veterans (from both the army and the navy), naturalists, musicians, and the biographer of Darwin and Agassiz. Another relative on her mother’s side was John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet. Which is to say that Cora Howorth, an only child, was surrounded by a world in which art and literature were part of daily life and certain comforts were taken for granted. But Cora was a rebellious, high-spirited prankster, a blonde bombshell in pinafores who found her greatest pleasure in rousing her friends to insurrectionist acts of defiance and mischief. Years later, when she told Crane about one of her childhood stunts, he turned it into the catalyzing event of “The Angel Child” (in Whilomville Stories), which features a character named “little Cora,” a cunning provocateur who induces her playmates to follow her into a barbershop to have their long children’s hair cut down and drastically reduced without their parents’ permission. As for little Cora’s parents in Crane’s story, the mother is “quick, beautiful, imperious,” and the father is “quiet, slow, and misty.” Whether this is an accurate portrayal of the real Cora’s parents is uncertain, but what we do know is that her gentle, much-adored artist father died painfully and young, still in his mid-thirties when he was struck down by the same disease that would kill the other man of her life in 1900—tuberculosis. Cora was six years old.
The record becomes somewhat obscure after that. Her mother remarried, the family settled in New York, and some years later, after her mother died during a difficult pregnancy, Cora moved in with her widowed aunt, Mary Holder, at 125 West 128th Street. The rest of her early life is a blank, but on or around her sixteenth birthday she came into what her biographer, Lillian Gilkes, has called a “substantial inheritance” from her great-grandfather’s estate, the bulk of which had been passed on to the old man’s widow, then to Cora’s father, John, and after her father’s death, to her mother, Elizabeth, and now some of that money had found its way to Cora, and whatever the amount was, it was enough for her to strike out on her own. There had been no quarrel with her aunt, and they remained on good terms for years afterward, but for the willful, supremely confident Cora, the move was a declaration of independence—the beginning of her life as an emancipated being, for as time went on she would become one of the rare American women of the late nineteenth century who felt herself as free as any man to follow her impulses and do exactly as she wished.
Through it all, she read voluminously, insatiably, and by the time she reached her late teens or early twenties, she had begun copying out significant passages in a series of commonplace books. Mixed in among her quotations from Shakespeare, Dante, Ibsen, Byron, Dickens, Emerson, Thoreau, and scores of others, there are many from forgotten novels of the period, but some of them are highly pertinent and offer a clear passage into understanding who Cora Howorth was and, just as important, who she thought she was—an image of herself as expressed through the words of others. One example: “Sometimes I like to sit at home and read good books, at others I must drink absinthe and hang the night with scarlet embroideries.… I never know how I shall spend the evening until the evening has come—I wait for my mood.” Another: “If more allowance were made for the innocent impulses common to men, as gregarious animals, there might be less of the dangerous sense of the pleasure of forbidden fruit in their enjoyment.” And still another: “I am a strange woman to whom fear of many kinds is unknown. I could dare, or do some strange things without flinching if I were driven.”
At seventeen, she became the mistress of Jerome Stivers, the thirty-two-year-old heir to a carriage-manufacturing fortune known as “an all around man about town” and “a friend of the Duke of Manchester.” During one prolonged stretch in the four years they were together, Stivers owned or managed the London Club on West Twenty-ninth Street just off Fifth Avenue, a chic gambling house at the eastern edge of the Tenderloin where Cora worked as the hostess. Prostitutes undoubtedly worked there as well, but that was not Cora’s trade and never would be, although the lessons she learned at the London Club must have been helpful to her when she opened her own night spot in Jacksonville a decade later.
During that early period, she also tried her hand at the theater and proved herself a capable enough singer and dancer to secure a role in the chorus of a comic opera, Pepita, or The Girl with the Glass Eyes, which starred the celebrated Lillian Russell and opened at the Union Square Theatre in March 1886. The production had a successful nine-week run, and while Cora did not pursue other roles after that, the mere fact that she had auditioned for this one on a blind whim and had been offered the part confirms that she was a young woman of spirit, a person who was both unafraid and willing to try anything.
At twenty-one, not long after the affair with Stivers ended, Cora married Thomas Vinton Murphy, the twenty-five-year-old son of the wealthy, well-connected Thomas Murphy, a former state senator and collector of the Port of New York during the Grant administration who was now in charge of the racetrack at Monmouth Park, just outside Long Branch, New Jersey, which had been one of Stivers’s favorite haunts. The marriage crashed, ending in divorce two years later, in large part (most likely) because Murphy’s devout Catholic father was opposed to it and pressured his son into extricating himself from the clutches of a scarlet woman who had lived openly in sin with another man in the years before her marriage. Daddy got his way, and Cora was dumped.
Not long after, she formed a new liaison with still another feckless, gadabout son who lived off his father’s money (in this case a father who had helped found the First National Bank of the City of New York in the 1860s and Chase National Bank in the 1870s), but Ferris S. Thompson was a cut above the others, a young man not only of immense wealth but of infinite charm who had excelled on the Princeton track team and was now planning to devote the remainder of his youth to traveling around the world and living the good life. He was everything Cora wanted. She fell in love with him, ferociously in love, and as soon as her divorce with Murphy was finalized, she was fully expecting to take the plunge again and change her name to Thompson. Meanwhile, the two vagabonds, armed with a line of credit as long as the Mississippi, set off on an extended round of travels through the major capitals and neglected backroads of Europe, at one point journeying all the way to Constantinople on the Orient Express, but the handsome, magnetic Thompson, the most generous donor to Princeton in the history of the college, was prey to self-destructive impulses as well. He drank too much and could not control it; beautiful women kept throwing themselves at him, and he could not control it; he had no interest in books, music, or art (matters of vital importance to Cora) and could not control it. There were disputes and breakups, reconciliations and more breakups, and once, after they had reconciled yet again, Cora met up with him in Paris, only to discover that he was in the midst of an affair with a French actress. Enraged and distraught, Cora picked up the object closest to hand—a penknife—and stabbed Thompson in the arm. They reconciled again, and then he betrayed her again, and Cora took off for London.
Cora Crane, 1889. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
As if to punish him for what he had done to her, she took up with someone else, a man she might have met as far back as her early days with Stivers or as recently as during one of her protracted visits to London with Thompson, but however long she had known ex-captain Donald William Stewart of the 92nd Gordon Highlanders, she now decided to marry him. The military son of a military man who had been made a baronet after his retirement as commander in chief of Her Majesty’s forces in India, young Stewart had served under his father’s command in Afghanistan, where he was gravely wounded in battle. After a short stint in the Transvaal, he was transferred to India, where he worked as his father’s aide-de-camp for two years and was again nearly killed in battle—the noble record of a tall, strapping man who seemed to embody all the self-proclaimed virtues of the British Empire—but Stewart was also a spendthrift, a womanizer, a gambler, and an angry drunk, and in 1888 he was forced to resign his commission because mounting debts had pushed him into the embarrassing spot of having to declare bankruptcy. When Cora understood that he had married her for her money, she backed off. Thompson reentered the picture, the affair resumed, and as the cuckolded victim of his wife’s treachery, Stewart sought to cash in by suing Thompson for “alienation of affection” in the amount of fifty thousand dollars, the equivalent of more than a million dollars today. The case dragged on until it was ultimately dismissed, no doubt because Thompson had settled the matter quietly out of court. Still going by the name Lady Stewart, Cora imagined that divorce would be the next step, but Stewart exacted further revenge by refusing to grant her one. She was stuck. The romance with Thompson puttered along for a while, but whatever chance she had had of marrying him was now gone. Bit by bit, she would have to train herself how to stand on her own two feet, and when Thompson finally vanished from her life, she began to take her first steps forward.
For reasons unknown, she landed in Jacksonville, Florida, in early 1895. Also for reasons unknown, she was now calling herself Cora Taylor, and under that name she bought the property at the corner of Ashley and Hawk Streets from Carrie B. Mudge on March twenty-first. For some time, Mrs. Mudge had been leasing the two-story structure to a woman named Ethel Dreme, who ran a boardinghouse there that in all probability was more than just a boardinghouse, and when Cora agreed to pay off Ethel Dreme’s debts in addition to the purchase price of the property, she took sole possession of what would soon become the pearl of Jacksonville nightlife, for if anyone understood the meaning and the power of the night, it was Cora Howorth, the woman of many names. “Whatever is too precious, too tender, too good, too evil, too bashful for the day happens in the night,” she wrote in her commonplace book. “Night is the bath of life, the anodyne of heartaches, the silencer of passions, the breeder of them too, the teacher of those who would learn, the cloak that sets a man in with his soul.”
In a town where the local population shared space with countless transients—tourists, Spanish spies, American reporters, Cuban rebels, and Michelson’s “human flotsam”—there was little else for a displaced man to do after dark beyond drinking away the hours in a saloon or “going down the line” on Ward Street to visit one of Jacksonville’s many brothels. Cora’s new place in La Villa was far from that seedy row of fornication houses, and once she had revamped Mrs. Mudge’s old property into the elegant sporting club she had mapped out in her imagination, she hung a sign over the door that read HOTEL DE DREME and opened for business.
From kept woman and wayward wife, Cora had advanced to a new level of self-knowledge, and by sheer strength of will she had finally taken control of her destiny. Through long and often painful experience, she had come to understand what men wanted, but now she would give it to them without paying a personal price, as she had in the past. Instead, the men would pay the price in the form of dollars, and by reversing the old formula, she would transform her wisdom into a lucrative operation that would grant her a life of total independence.
Cora’s establishment was both a whorehouse and not a whorehouse, and if sex was one of the services offered to clients of the Hotel de Dreme, it was no more than an accompaniment to the roulette wheel, the good dinners, and the inexhaustible bottles of champagne. No girls lived on the premises, and no girls were employed by Cora as prostitutes, but if one of her male visitors chose to use the hotel for a private assignation, he was free to conduct his private business in one of the upstairs rooms after Cora herself had retired for the night. The downstairs parlor was where she entertained her guests, and with a man called the Professor playing tunes on the piano, the atmosphere was discreet, civilized, and even decorous. From the Gilkes biography:
Cora remained in the parlor rooms during the first part of the evening to greet the guests and start things off. For she knew they came to see her. Her personality and wit drew them back and kept their dollars rolling in. With her luminous smile and a bright word for each, she passed among the tables, joining in conversation when some youth or balding cavalier pleaded to buy her a drink—beer or champagne: no spirits or hard liquor was served to the public. Cora disliked drunkenness. Beer was one dollar a bottle, the standard price “down the line.”
Later, as couples began to leave or drift upstairs, Cora said good night and … withdrew to her own apartments, to which none but the inner circle gained entrée. To these favored few she was “Miss Cora,” or sometimes “Ma.”
Attractive but far from beautiful, an impressive bearing but small in stature and decidedly plump, no one special, it would have seemed, and yet Cora had whatever it is that endows certain women with the self-assurance to make men want to look at them, to know them, to stand near them and breathe within their orbit. Her best features were her abundant blond hair—shimmering, spectacular—and her vivid blue eyes. Arresting, to be sure, though not enough to make a real difference in the long run. That she read books, could draw well, and wrote a decent sentence were all points in her favor, as was her gift for subtle, intelligent conversation, but what counted most was her inordinate vitality and, just as important, her utter lack of cynicism. She had entered a profession that makes women hard, but in the two years she ran her little pleasure resort in Jacksonville, Cora never became hard. She was an optimist, and in spite of the knocks that were dealt to her over the years, she never lost faith in herself or the promise of her own future. When she met Crane in early December, she was thirty-one. She told him she was twenty-eight, and because of who she was and how she must have said it, he believed her.
* * *
By one account, the affair began when Crane saw her reading a book of his that was not The Red Badge of Courage. She had bought an early printing of the war novel back in 1895, but this was something more recent, most likely George’s Mother, although it could have been his newly published story collection, The Little Regiment. She didn’t know that the author of the book, who happened to be one of her favorite contemporary writers, was the person watching her read the book, however, since he had come to her place under the guise of shadow-man Samuel Carlton, but when one of his friends blurted out his real name, our source tells us, “the news pierced the lady’s very liver” and caused “an instantaneous mutual attraction.”
So says Ernest W. McCready,* in any case, who purports to have heard about the incident from Ralph D. Paine,† who was supposed to have witnessed the scene on a night when McCready wasn’t there, although the latter visited often enough to have retained a sharp memory of Cora, whom he calls “handsome, of some real refinement, aloof to most” (Crane was the exception). “Fact is,” he goes on, “she was a cut above us in several ways, notably poise and surety of command of herself and others. If she had any false notes I was then all too unskilled in recognizing authentic ‘class,’ or lack of it, to detect any.”
