Outlaw Marriages (12 page)

From the moment Joe Leyendecker laid eyes on Charles Beach, he was smitten. Frank Leyendecker also found Beach appealing—both of the brothers, by this point in their lives, recognized that they were sexually attracted to men—but he didn't stand in the way of Joe becoming Beach's lover. J. C. Leyendecker biographers speculate that Beach was attracted to the illustrator, who was twelve years his senior, partially because the younger man admired the older one's artistic talent.
19

When the model began posing for the Leyendeckers on a regular basis, he rented a small apartment on West 33rd Street, within a few blocks of the brothers' studio. Joe's official residence continued to be the town house that he rented for his siblings and parents, but he spent most of his nights in Beach's apartment.
20

Beach's influence on J. C. Leyendecker's illustrations was both immediate and dramatic. Before 1901, the artist had concentrated on painting either women or street scenes. But as soon as Beach entered his life, Leyendecker's most frequent subject became men—most of them handsome and with well-developed physiques similar to his partner's.
21

For example, when Leyendecker received a commission to create a cover for the September 1902 issue of
Collier's
, he submitted the image of a brawny blacksmith who was shirtless as he worked at an anvil. This illustration was followed by others for the same magazine that also placed good-looking men front and center, including a track star with his muscles bulging as he leaped over a hurdle.
22

A few months after Beach and Leyendecker met, the model gave up acting and devoted all of his time to modeling and otherwise helping his partner. Norman Rockwell recalled that Beach initially merely washed the paint-brushes
after Leyendecker used them but then started taking care of business details, thereby freeing the illustrator to concentrate on his creative work. Meanwhile, Joe passed some of the more routine tasks on to his brother, Frank.
23

Before long, Beach was hiring and paying the models, buying the art supplies and renting the costumes and props that Joe and Frank needed, while also taking care of more and more of the financial details. Beach began negotiating the specific dollar amounts that magazines paid for each commission. Rockwell said, “Beach transacted all Joe's business for him, did everything but paint his pictures.”
24

Beach's role in his partner's professional life rose to a whole new level in 1903 after he read an editorial in the
Saturday Evening Post
that urged readers to celebrate not only Christmas and Easter but also other national holidays such as Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, and Memorial Day. With Beach's prompting, Leyendecker then went to the magazine's art editor and suggested that he begin creating covers specifically for the various holidays. From that point onward for the next several decades, Leyendecker provided the cover images for the weekly issue of the
Post
closest to each holiday.
25

Numerous of those covers showcased men. One Thanksgiving image was of a handsome athlete in a tight-fitting jersey preparing to kick a football. Other examples included a Fourth of July cover featuring a young patriot, with chiseled facial features and his shirt opened to show off his bare chest, playing a snare drum, and a Memorial Day illustration highlighting an earnest young man with long eyelashes escorting an elderly veteran toward a grave site.
26

Creating the holiday covers was an enormous boost to Leyendecker's career. “The public came to expect Leyendecker images for the holiday issues, and the magazine thrived,” one of the artist's biographers has observed. “So popular were Joe's holiday covers that
Post
subscriptions increased with each one; by 1913, circulation had risen to two million copies a week, making it the most popular magazine in the world.”
27

Beach used the magazine's soaring circulation figures as a negotiating tool. When Leyendecker had handled his own finances, the easily intimidated artist had accepted whatever the
Post
offered him for a piece of cover art. Once Beach entered the picture, however, he set the hefty fee of $2,000 per illustration—a higher figure than any previous magazine illustrator had been paid—and also persuaded the art editor to commit the magazine to purchasing a minimum of ten Leyendecker cover images each year.
28

In his next step, Beach used the fee he'd negotiated with the
Post
as leverage
to force other magazines to raise their payments to this same amount. With a plethora of commissions coming from such magazines as
Collier's, Life, Literary Digest, McClure's
, and
Vanity Fair
, Beach pushed Leyendecker's annual income to more than $50,000.
29

Of comparable importance to Beach's contributions to his partner's work with magazine covers was his success at persuading Leyendecker to create images for advertisements. This proposal was a controversial one, as Frank Leyendecker adamantly opposed it, insisting that he and his brother should avoid such blatantly commercial work.
30

Joe sided with Beach rather than his brother, however, and soon began splitting his time between painting magazine covers and painting images designed to sell products. Advertising to a mass audience was still a relatively new enterprise in the early 1900s, and Leyendecker became a pioneer in the field. “As early as just after the turn of the century, Leyendecker was already changing the course of advertising,” one scholar has observed. “Leyendecker was able to discern trends and advertisers' needs for satiating customers' demands. The times were evolving quickly from Victorian into modern.”
31

Physically attractive men appeared in Leyendecker's ads even more often than they appeared on his magazine covers. This frequency came about because many of the companies that hired him depended on his ads to sell men's clothing, which meant displaying items of apparel on handsome male models who showed the clothes to their best advantage. The first of the companies, B. Kuppenheimer menswear, was soon followed by Hart, Schaffner & Marx. Then came Interwoven socks, Cooper underwear (which later became the Jockey brand), and the full line of men's clothing sold by A. B. Kirschbaum and Carson Pirie Scott department stores. “His paintings for fashion advertisements,” the
New York Times
later reported, “soon were known throughout the country.”
32

Ultimately, the best known of Leyendecker's advertising clients was Arrow brand detachable shirt collars, with Charles Beach consistently being featured as the model in the ads that began appearing in 1905.
33

“Over the next twenty-five years,” according to one Leyendecker biographer, “the ‘Arrow Collar Man' became the symbol of fashionable American manhood. Leyendecker, through the Arrow ads, defined the ideal of the American male as a dignified, clear-eyed man of taste, manners, and quality.” One advertising scholar has written, “The term Arrow Man became a popular expression referring to a handsome, desirable, stylish man. Tall and well built, with broad shoulders, a strong jaw, chiseled features, and muscular
hands, he was a visual representation of the New American Man and the male equivalent of the Gibson Girl who represented the New American Woman.”
34

The quintessential image in the Arrow campaign had Beach wearing a white shirt and cream-colored trousers as he stood casually on the deck of a ship, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow and his light green necktie blowing in the spring breeze. The handsome model with his soft smile shaped by gently curving lips exuded the confidence of a young man who didn't have a care in the world. His light brown hair was perfect, as were his bone structure, his light brown eyes, and the creamy texture of his skin. Beach's broad shoulders and a muscular torso tapered down to a slender waist.
35

Another popular ad featured Beach sitting astride an elaborately carved table stacked with leather-bound books; the perspective this time focused the viewer's eye on the model's impressive chest, as the front of his pleated shirt fit snugly against his well-toned pectoral muscles. A third ad had Beach positioned on a flowered sofa and holding a book; his head was turned to the side to show off his matinee-idol profile, complete with long eyelashes and straight-as-an-arrow nose.
36

These flattering images that appeared in the country's leading magazines hundreds of times during the first three decades of the twentieth century transformed the Arrow Collar Man into what scholars have labeled the nation's first male sex symbol.
37

“Today, it is difficult to imagine the sensation the advertisements caused,” one author has written. “In one month in the early 1920s, the Arrow Collar Man received 17,000 fan letters, gifts, and marriage proposals—a deluge surpassing even actor Rudolph Valentino's mail at the star's apex. The term ‘Arrow Collar Man' became a common epithet for any handsome, nattily dressed gent, and the Arrow Man was the subject of admiring poems, songs, and even a Broadway play. In 1918 Arrow Collar sales rose to over $32 million.”
38

The images made Charles Beach such a widely recognized celebrity that strangers who saw him walking on the street or sitting in a restaurant frequently stopped to ask him if he was the man they thought he was. Despite the fame that became a routine element in Beach's life, his millions of admirers had no inkling that this handsome symbol of American manhood was a gay man whose heart belonged to the artist who painted the images of him.
39

At the same time, Beach took great pleasure both in his celebrity status and in the wealth that he and Leyendecker now enjoyed. The model routinely carried a walking still as he strolled down the streets of Manhattan. In the winter, he wore an elegant wool overcoat that was accented with a Persian lamb collar and more fur at the cuffs and hem.
40

From soon after they met in 1901 and for the next fifty years, J. C. Leyendecker and Charles Beach were a same-sex couple fully devoted to each other's well-being. Likewise, they shared a commitment to keeping their outlaw marriage out of the public eye, fearing that the stigma attached to homosexuality would jeopardize their livelihoods.
41

For the first decade and a half they were together, Leyendecker and Beach maintained separate residences, keeping up the charade of living apart in deference to the Old World values of Leyendecker's parents. Joe told people he lived in the Washington Square town house with his family, and Charles said he lived in his efficiency apartment near the Leyendecker studio.
42

In reality, though, the two men spent almost every minute of the day and night together. Their after-work schedule typically began with a steak dinner at Longley's, a popular restaurant in the Manhattan theater district. Later in the evening, the two men had drinks and conversation at one or more of New York City's bars and lounges where they socialized with the actors Beach had come to know during his days in the theater. When it came time for bed, the couple spent the night together in Beach's apartment.
43

This living arrangement continued after Leyendecker's mother died in 1905 and the family rented a house in New Rochelle, a suburb sixteen miles from midtown Manhattan. Another change came in 1910 when the Leyendecker brothers moved to a larger and more luxurious studio at 40th Street and Sixth Avenue. The new studio included a side bedroom where Beach slept—with his partner next to him.
44

In 1914, the Leyendecker family moved into a fourteen-room house in New Rochelle that Joe designed and had built on a new street that he named Mount Tom Road, an Americanized version of the name of the German village where he'd been born. Although Charles Beach played a major role in the construction of the house by serving as clerk of the works, he continued to list his residence as the Manhattan studio.
45

It wasn't until after Leyendecker's father died in 1916 that he and Beach finally began living full time under the same roof. About this same time, Beach set out to help his partner secure even more advertising commissions. Beach's strategy is well summarized in the phrase “mixing business with pleasure.”
46

That is, Beach exploited his celebrity status as the Arrow Collar Man by organizing lavish social events where his and his partner's friends from the theater world rubbed elbows with the top executives of the nation's leading companies, along with such wealthy and socially prominent glitterati as Walter Chrysler and Reggie Vanderbilt. Thanks to the contacts J. C. Leyendecker
made at the parties, he was soon creating ads not only for men's clothing but for an impressively wide range of products—from Karo syrup and Pierce-Arrow automobiles to Kellogg's corn flakes and Amoco oil, and from Chesterfield cigarettes to a whole array of household products manufactured by Procter & Gamble.
47

Despite the hefty commissions that made Joe the most successful and wealthiest illustrator in the country, neither Frank nor Mary Leyendecker agreed with Beach's strategy, believing it was unsavory to use social contacts to advance business ventures. The brother and sister grew so resentful of Beach, who always had Joe's support, that in 1923 a huge confrontation erupted, culminating in Mary Leyendecker slapping Charles Beach and then spitting in his face. After that incident, Joe's two siblings moved out of the house and set up separate residences of their own, while Frank also left the firm.
48