Outlaw Marriages

 

…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beacon Press, Boston

Prologue

CHAPTER 1

Walt Whitman & Peter Doyle 1865–1892

Revolutionizing American Poetry

CHAPTER 2

Martha Carey Thomas & Mamie Gwinn 1878–1904

Opening Graduate Education to American Women

CHAPTER 3

Ned Warren & John Marshall 1884–1927

Building the Collections of America's Art Museums

CHAPTER 4

Mary Rozet Smith & Jane Addams 1891–1934

Breaking New Ground in Social Reform and Global Peace

CHAPTER 5

Bessie Marbury & Elsie de Wolfe 1892–1933

Founding the Field of Interior Design

CHAPTER 6

J. C. Leyendecker & Charles Beach 1901–1951

Taking the Art of Illustration to a New Level

CHAPTER 7

Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein 1907–1946

Expanding the Dimensions of American Literature

CHAPTER 8

Janet Flanner & Solita Solano 1919–1975

Pioneering a New Style of Journalism

CHAPTER 9

Greta Garbo & Mercedes de Acosta 1931–1960

Making Hollywood the Celebrity Capital of the World

CHAPTER 10

Aaron Copland & Victor Kraft 1932–1976

Inventing a Distinctly American Style of Music

CHAPTER 11

Frank Merlo & Tennessee Williams 1948–1963

Lifting American Theater to New Heights

CHAPTER 12

James Baldwin & Lucien Happersberger 1949–1987

Attacking Racism through Literature

CHAPTER 13

Robert Rauschenberg & Jasper Johns 1954–1962

Expanding the Definition of Art

CHAPTER 14

Ismail Merchant & James Ivory 1961–2005

Turning Literary Works into Sumptuous Films

CHAPTER 15

Frances Clayton & Audre Lorde 1968–1988

Raising a Voice for Women of Color

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Photography/Illustration Credits

The couples who come to life in the following chapters were social insurgents. That is, each pair of men and each pair of women defied the social order by creating sub-rosa same-sex marriages long before such relationships were legally sanctioned.

Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, for example, began their outlaw marriage in 1948—spending every day and night together, while loving and supporting each other to a degree fully comparable to that of any husband and wife. Their partnership continued until Merlo died of cancer in 1963.

Outlaw Marriages
tells Williams and Merlo's story, along with those of fourteen other same-sex couples who combined their lives either as husband and husband or wife and wife during eras when no legal institution and no church approved of such a union.

The other trait that these renegade couples have in common is that they all fully qualify as, in a word,
extraordinary
.

In many instances, that powerful adjective fits because of the remarkable contributions a particular couple made to the culture—the fields ranging from literature to modern art to filmmaking. The achievements of other couples include opening graduate education to American women and pioneering a new form of journalism in the pages of the
New Yorker
magazine.

With Williams and Merlo, their gift was creating some of the most memorable plays in the history of American theater. Williams was addicted to drugs and promiscuity when he met the rock-solid Merlo. The World War II vet then saw to it that the playwright regained his emotional and physical equilibrium, allowing him to write such theatrical masterpieces as the Pulitzer Prize–winning
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.

A few of the other extraordinary contributions that unfold in this book are

• Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle reinventing American poetry
  
• Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith revolutionizing the field of social work
  
• Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta taking the lead in transforming Hollywood into the celebrity capital of the world
  

When reading the statements above, you probably recognized only one of the two names in the pairings. That's because the achievements of one partner often became widely known, while those of the other partner stayed hidden—until the publication of this book.

Outlaw Marriages
is an apt title on two levels.

First, all fifteen couples created unions that defied the laws and mores of their day. Many of these de facto partnerships survived and thrived, despite their lack of support by church or state, for thirty or forty years—in some cases,
fifty
.

Second, these couples flouted convention. Aaron Copland was thirty-two years old when he met and instantly fell in love with a drop-dead gorgeous violinist named Victor Kraft, who was only seventeen. The composer's friends and family didn't take the relationship seriously, convinced the couple wouldn't survive the dramatic age difference. Copland and Kraft proved them wrong. The men not only stayed together but also jointly created a distinctly American style of music that critics today, eighty years later, are still praising.

That the couples were willing to bend the marital rules doesn't mean they all succeeded in creating relationships that were made in heaven—far from it. A regrettable scenario that plays out in several chapters begins with the lesser-known partner being absolutely essential to the better-known partner's rise to success, but then … the high-achieving partner getting what might be called the “twenty-year itch.” Martha Carey Thomas set the standard back in the 1890s, summarily dumping her partner of two decades, Mamie Gwinn, for another woman. Janet Flanner went a similar route in the 1930s, as did Audre Lorde in the 1980s.

In the instances listed above as well as in others where the outlaw marriage eventually falls apart, readers hear the whole story—which typically includes infidelity, deceit, and betrayal. These unfortunate factors are revealed in full detail, as they're the realities that often confront any long-term relationship, gay or straight.

To help the various outlaw marriages come alive in the reader's mind, I've included photos of all fifteen couples. Tracking down these images was often a challenge, especially in the instances when one or both members of a couple—as with Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta—didn't publicly acknowledge their relationship. And so, in some cases, I've had to use two separate photos of the partners, since a single photo of them together either didn't exist or wasn't available. There are also instances—as with Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith—when I've used a photo of poor quality because it shows the partners together, even though higher-quality photos of the two individuals separately could have been used.

Whether a chapter begins with a single image or a pair of them, each story that follows is a page-turner. Sometimes the most compelling element in it is the contribution the couple made; other times, it's the internal dynamics of their relationship. But one theme runs through them all:

Two people joining together to create an outlaw marriage plays a central role not only in the couple's extraordinary achievements, but also in each individual partner's very being.

Revolutionizing American Poetry

…

Many literary scholars consider Walt Whitman this country's most influential poet. Widely referred to as the father of free verse, he liberated poetry from rhyme and meter, opening it up to the flexible rhythms of feeling and voice. The works collected in Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
pay homage to the freedom and dignity of the individual while celebrating democracy and the brotherhood of man, even though early critics condemned his references to same-sex love as being obscene.

Peter Doyle was a twenty-one-year-old conductor on a horse-drawn streetcar when he and Whitman, who was forty-five at the time, began their romantic relationship. During their quarter-century outlaw marriage, Doyle became Whitman's muse. In that role, the younger man inspired some of his partner's best-known works and also caused the general tone of Whitman's poetry to become more optimistic.

Walter Whitman was born into a working-class family on Long Island, some fifty miles east of New York City, in 1819. His father was a carpenter and sometime farmer, and his mother cared for the couple's eight children.
1

Whitman left school at the age of eleven. One of his first jobs was as a printer's apprentice for a newspaper, and he then read dozens of books so he could become a schoolteacher. By his late teens, his focus had shifted to journalism, and, in his early twenties, he was editing New York's
Brooklyn Daily
Eagle
.
2

At the same time that Whitman was working at his various jobs, he was also jotting down poetic phrases in a notebook he carried with him. The lines came spontaneously in flashes of emotion and were written in the loose way that people talked rather than in a formal structure. The subjects he wrote about ranged widely, from nature to city life and religion to sexual mores.
3

In 1855, Whitman gathered together twelve of his poems and used what he'd learned as a printer to self-publish a volume titled
Leaves of Grass
. The punctuation was erratic, with few commas or periods but an abundance of ellipses, and the content was unconventional, with some lines being straightforward—such as, “The regatta is spread on the bay … how the white sails sparkle!”—while others were a challenge for a reader to understand—such as, “And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over.”
4

Reviewers who critiqued the poems condemned both them and their author. The critic for the
Boston Intelligencer
, for example, called the book a “mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense,” speculating that the author must be “some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium.”
5

Whitman soon produced two more editions of his book, adding new poems each time. Scholars who've studied these early editions note that they communicated a sense of desperation. In one poem, Whitman spoke of “dark patches” in his soul brought on by feelings of “guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak.” In another, he made the violent statement, “Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” The pessimistic tone reflected the struggles in Whitman's personal life. After his father died, he assumed financial responsibility for his mother and two brothers.
6

In the third edition of
Leaves of Grass
, published in 1860, Whitman added the “Calamus” poems. These works included erotic passages describing homosexual affection. One poem read, “But the two men I saw to-day on the pier, parting the parting of dear friends / The one to remain hung on the other's neck and passionately kissed him—while the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.”
7

When the Civil War broke out, Whitman moved to the nation's capital to volunteer as a nurse for injured Union soldiers. He supported his family by working as a clerk for the federal government, initially in the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and later in the attorney general's office.
8