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Henry Sleeper, Radical, Romantic Antiquarian Designer

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Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934) was a radical and romantic antiquarian. He always loved antiques and even collected them as a boy in Boston. Later, his summer home called Beauport on Eastern Point in Gloucester, known today as the Sleeper-McCann House, became a showcase of his expertise as an interior decorator.

The Sleeper-McCann House, also known as Beauport

Each of the 40 rooms brims with his ornate collections of folk art, chinaware, furniture, silhouettes and colored glass of amber and purple. He designed it so that each room depicted a different theme, color, shape or period of history. He had an excellent eye for color and detail. There is the China Trade room in green and gold, covered with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper; the Octagon Room with its black walls and red and gold décor; the circular Book Tower on two levels; and the Belfry Chamber in green, with slanted ceilings papered with birds and flowers.

The Pine Kitchen contains salvaged wood from his mother’s childhood home in Pembroke, Mass., also called the Pembroke Room. He had fun decorating and often juxtaposed large spaces with small spaces, and valuable objects with trivial ones. He also used hidden light sources and mirrors to create surprising effects.

Many famous people commissioned design work from Sleeper, including Isabella Stewart Gardner, several Hollywood celebrities and Henry Francis DuPont for his Chestertown House and Winterthur. He also decorated the Tyler Mansion in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Henry Sleeper

Beginnings of Henry Sleeper

Henry was born in Boston in 1878, son of Civil War veteran Maj. Jacob Henry Sleeper (1839-1891), and Maria Westcott. His grandfather was Jacob Sleeper (1802-1889), a tailor, co-founder of Boston University, and a staunch Methodist. It was a family with deep connections.

Henry Sleeper’s appearance in Andrew Piatt’s guest book.

According to Harvard Magazine, Henry was introduced to Eastern Point in 1906 by a friend, Abram Piatt Andrew, an economics professor at Harvard, and later Treasury Secretary and U.S. Congressman. Piatt Andrew had built a house there called Red Roof in 1902, and Henry became enamored of the area overlooking the picturesque harbor. Historic New England has two of Andrew’s guest books available online, 1907-1912 and 1913-1930. They contain many photographs. Henry Sleeper’s name and photo appear frequently.

In 1907 Henry purchased a house nearby and began his elaborate decorating, which continued for many years. He named it Beauport, for la beau port, the name given to the area by Samuel de Champlain, according to househistree.com. Beauport’s guest books from 1908-1921 belong to the Cape Ann Museum archives.

Beauport

Elaborate Parties and Relationships

Househistree.com described Piatt Andrew as a “party loving eccentric who entertained many of America’s leading intellectual lights of the day.” An article from Economics in the Rear-View Mirror about Red Roof also mentioned the ceaseless entertaining. It stated “one of Gardner’s biographers hints at the goings on at Andrew’s home Red Roof: Gossip had it that often all of the guests were men, their pastimes peculiar. Yet all the ladies on Eastern Point were fascinated by Piatt.“  Red Roof was noted for secret passages, elaborate costume parties and a hidden bar where guests would party during Prohibition. Piatt Andrew often entertained his students, one of whom was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Henry Sleeper and Andrew Piatt

Henry Sleeper and Piatt Andrew were close, and were possibly lovers, according to the website elisarollelivejournal. Letters written from Sleeper to Andrew from 1906-1915* suggested the intensity of his feelings. Also, elisarolle.com/queerplaces states that Piatt Andrew “had been the leading light of a clearly homosexual circle since his graduate days at Harvard in the 1890’s.”

Henry Sleeper, Piatt Andrew, and several other summer residents on Eastern Point belonged to a group called “Dabsville” for Davidge, Andrew, Beaux and Sleeper. Cecilia Beaux was a portrait painter and Joanna Davidge was an intellectual and head of a New York finishing school. Isabella Stewart Gardner and others often dined and partied with them. According to the blog from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, “Dabsville provided an important place for those deemed “other” by the social norms of the time. Many of the residents and their guests…would be categorized as gay or queer in today’s understanding of sexuality. These parties offered an opportunity for folks to mingle away from a heteronormative gaze.”

Dear Friend and Comrade

The elisarolle.com/queerplaces website also mentioned that Henry Sleeper had previously had a relationship with author Guy Wetmore Carryl. Ir states that Sleeper kept at least three photographs of Carryl in his bedroom. Carryl’s posthumous last novel (Far From The Maddening Girls) had also been dedicated to Sleeper. The dedication reads: “In furtherance of an unfulfilled intention, this book is dedicated to the author’s dear friend and comrade, Henry D. Sleeper.”

Guy Wetmore Carryl

Sleeper had spent a lot of time at Carryl’s bachelor cottage in Swampscott, Mass., according to The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, by R. Tripp Evans. Sleeper “described life there as idyllic…and Carryl…a most genial and communicative companion,” according to Evans.

Carryl died tragically from injuries as his house burned down in 1904. In 1906, after Sleeper’s first visit to Piatt Andrew’s Red Roof, he wrote that “he had never expected the good fortune again of finding anyone possessing the characteristics that made [Carryl] what he was.”

World War I

World War I temporarily changed the dynamics of the Eastern Point enclave, as both Henry Sleeper and Piatt Andrew served in France. Piatt Andrew drove an ambulance during the war and helped to create the American Ambulance Field Service in 1915, later the American Field Service (AFS).

Sleeper then became the U.S. representative and a major fundraiser for the American Field Service, according to Wikipedia.

[W]hile Andrew served in the battle zones, Sleeper crisscrossed the Atlantic with supplies and funds, and worked closely with the French Military. France awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.

Piatt Andrew eventually became a lieutenant colonel in the Army Field Service. In his book Eastern Point, Joseph E. Garland wrote that Sleeper joined him overseas as director of the headquarters in Paris in 1918 and 1919.

After the war, Sleeper expanded his design practice. He won national recognition through prestigious periodicals such as Country Life and House Beautiful, which led to several high-visibility clients. Although his office was in Boston, it appears that he traveled to Eastern Point even during winter. For example, the 1920 census finds him at Eastern Point in January, age 43, no occupation listed. Even back in 1910 he was in Eastern Point as a real estate broker in April, and at his Boston residence in May – occupation: own income. The 1930 Boston census was the only one where he was listed as an interior decorator.

The Paul Revere Room at Beauport

Tribute to Henry Sleeper

Henry Sleeper died from leukemia at Massachusetts General Hospital on Sept. 22, 1934. Piatt Andrew wrote a tribute published in the Gloucester Daily Times, according to Linda Merrill’s design blog. In it, he wrote “A valiant soul left this world when Henry Sleeper’s life ebbed out the other day.” His longer tribute can be found at the AFS archive. Piatt Andrew died two years later, in June 1936. As Henry never married, Beauport was left to his brother Stephen, a real estate broker. Stephen sold the property in 1935 to Mrs. Helena Woolworth McCann, daughter of F.W. Woolworth. When she died a few years later, the property was donated to Historic New England. In 2003, Beauport, Sleeper-McCann House was declared a National Historic Landmark.

Antiques Magazine praised him in a 2009 article, “The Legacy of Henry Davis Sleeper.”

His vision was radical and is still influential: in his passion for Americana… and in his ability to create a treasure-filled house that still feels intimate.

Today, the Sleeper-McCann House is open from May to October. Since 2008, all tours openly acknowledge Henry as a gay man, according to the National Council on Public History. Staff also work with The History Project, which documents Boston’s LGBTQ history.

End Notes

Sources: Eastern Point by Joseph E. Garland; Ambulance No. 10: Personal Letters from the Front by Leslie Buswell [Sleeper wrote preface; Andrew wrote introduction]; The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, by R. Tripp Evans

Ambulance drivers wanted (advertisement), courtesy of AFS

*These letters were compiled and edited in 1991 by Andrew L. Gray and E. Parker Hayden, entitled Beauport Chronicle: The Intimate Letters from Henry Davis Sleeper to Abram Piatt Andrew Jr., 1906-1915.

Images: Beauport winter exterior By Ymblanter – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19575310. Beauport By Elisa.rolle – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57303341.

You can als see more photos of Beauport at the following links:

Rebecca Rector of Troy, N.Y., is a history and genealogy researcher, and retired librarian from Siena College. She has been transcribing letters and diaries for Newberry Library and National Archives for the past three years.

 

 

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Eight Fun Facts About the Insanely Talented John Singer Sargent

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How did the paintings of John Singer Sargent ever fall out of favor? He created stunning watercolor landscapes and oil portraits that reveal a virtuosity described as “insolent.” Sargent, it was said, could quickly sketch a likeness the way most people sign their names.

John Singer Sargent

As a boy, all he ever wanted to be was an artist. His parents, Americans who roamed around Europe, encouraged him. He showed up at the Carolus Duran studio in Paris and presented his work, hoping for acceptance as a student. He astonished his future classmates, who viewed him as a prodigy.

During his lifetime he created about 3,000 paintings, including 900 in oil and 2,000 in watercolor. They made him rich and they made him famous. But by the time he died in 1925, critics didn’t consider him “modern” enough. He went from prodigy to Gilded Age antique.

Here, then, are eight fun facts about the flamboyantly talented John Singer Sargent.

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The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

1. Roger Fry was his bete noire.

Art critic Roger Fry had no use for John Singer Sargent. That mattered – a lot. Fry had enormous influence over popular taste in art during the early 20th century. “In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry,” wrote art historian Kenneth Clark. Fry promoted the Parisian avant-garde, painters like Cezanne, Matisse and Van Gogh.

Roger Fry Self Portrait

In 1910, Fry organized an exhibit in London called Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Critics savaged the show, and so Fry responded by listing artists who supported that school of painting. He included John Singer Sargent, whose work he had already criticized. Sargent replied with two letters to the editor of The Nation making it clear he had no use for post-Impressionism. From then on, the two men feuded.

Unfortunately for Sargent, Fry outlived him. The year after Sargent died, the Royal Academy in London held a memorial retrospective of his work. Fry viciously criticized the show, destroying Sargent’s reputation for a good 50 years.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent. Maybe Fry was just jealous.

2. Sargent was not born in the USA.

He considered himself an American, though he didn’t set foot in America until his 20th year. His parents wandered around Europe for decades. They always sought a better climate or cheaper places to live.

Sargent was born in Florence on Jan. 12, 1856, to Fitzwilliam Sargent, a Philadelphia physician, and Mary Newbold Singer, an heiress. By the time he turned 18 he had lived in London, Paris, Pau, Biarritz, Salzburg, Nice, St. Moritz, Venice, Lake Maggiore, Dresden and various cities in Spain. He spoke English, French, German and Italian, all fluently.

His mother loved Europe and the nomadic life. His father hated it. But she had the money, and they could live inexpensively in Europe. So they did.

El Jaleo, courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Sargent considered Boston his American home. He had his first solo show at the St. Botolph Club in 1888, and won several major mural commissions in the city. Isabella Stewart Gardner, a friend, collected his work (you can see El Jaleo at the Gardner Museum). The Museum of Fine Arts Boston claims to hold the most complete collection of Sargent’s work, as well as his archives. When he died, the Boston Globe ran a front page story, Boston Claims Sargent, Great Master, As Her Own.

3. He preferred painting landscapes.

Sargent painted and drew landscapes since childhood. But making a living as an artist required critical acclaim for work shown at the Paris Salon, then the most important art event in the western world.

An Out of Doors Study, watercolor, by John Singer Sargent

Thousands of people visited the exhibition, and the international press covered it. But the French Academie, which ran the Salon, held landscape painting in low regard. And so portrait paintings defined Sargent from the days of his early success.

He began to exhibit his bold and experimental watercolor landscapes after the turn of the century. They “caused a sensation in Britain and great excitement in America,” according to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. His watercolors still draw a crowd.

4. He had an illustrious family.

He came from an elite New England family. His ancestor Epes Sargent was one of the largest landowners in Gloucester, Mass., before the American Revolution.

Epes Sargent by John Singleton Copley

His well-known relatives include the “merchant prince” Daniel Sargent, author Lucius Manley Sargent, artist Henry Sargent, horticulturist Henry Winthrop Sargent and Mississippi Territory Governor Winthrop Sargent.

The Gloucester home of another ancestor, essayist and women’s rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray, is now a house museum.

5. Was Sargent gay or straight?

No one knows for sure. He had several romances with women, though he never married. And his many sketches of male nudes suggest he was gay. In London, he was friends with his neighbor Oscar Wilde.

But he kept his sexuality to himself. However, one of his clients said that when in Venice, he was only interested in the gondoliers. After he died, one of his former sitters said, “Sargent’s sex life was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.”

Gondoliers’ Siesta by John Singer Sargent

Richard Ormond, Sargent scholar and the painter’s great-grandnephew, argued that no one would ever know. “If [Sargent] had sexual relationships they must have been of a brief and transient nature and they have left no trace,” he wrote. “We simply do not know, and decoding messages from his work is no substitute for evidence.”

6. Sargent was Mr. Popularity.

Everybody liked him (except maybe Roger Fry). He was handsome, well mannered, well dressed and good at conversation, music and dancing. People sought him out to paint their portraits partly because sitting for him was so enjoyable.

He would visit the sitter’s home to see where the portrait would hang, and often went through the subject’s closet to pick out the right outfit. The frame he picked out himself. He earned about $5,000 per painting, or about $130,000. He used no assistants. In the 1890s he averaged about 14 portrait commissions a year.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw

While painting, he would stand back from the canvas, look at his subject, walk to the canvas, paint a few strokes, and then walk back, talking all the while. He estimated he covered four miles a day while painting portraits.

Sometimes he played the piano for his sitter. Eventually, he got tired of shucking and jiving for his wealthy patrons. “Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working…What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched,” he wrote.

In 1907, he vowed not to do any more portraits. “It is to me positive bliss to think that I shall soon be a free man,” he wrote, describing life after portrait painting. He closed his studio, but he did make a few exceptions for friends like Henry James.

7. Madame X was lazy and unpaintable.

His portrait of Mme. Emilie Gautreau, or Madame X, was the talk of the 1884 Paris Salon and not in a good way. A mob of Parisians flocked to the painting to make fun of it. The New York Times called it “absurd and atrocious.” Mme. Gautreau’s mother begged him to take the painting down, something Sargent couldn’t do. “All Paris mocks my daughter,” she cried.

The ridicule came as a shock. For a decade, nobody had said anything bad about Sargent’s work. But Madame X was different.

Madame X

Sargent, usually so deft with the brush, struggled with Virginie Amelie Gautreau. An American married to a French banker, she had a reputation for taking on lovers. Sargent had a hard time getting her just right, and she didn’t like to sit still for long. In a letter, Sargent complained to a friend about “the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau.” When he finished it, he exhibited it only reluctantly at the Salon.

What was so odd, so shocking about a painting of a woman with a heavily powdered face in a low-cut gown? After all, Parisians were used to seeing paintings of nudes.

It was her arrogance, her theatricality, her “come hither” look – something well-bred women did not do. Madame X (for X-rated?) seems about to pop out of her gown into the arms of a man not her husband.

Some people liked it. A French critic, Louis de Fourcaud, called it a masterpiece, as it eventually came to be recognized. Sargent later called it the best thing he’d ever done.

John Singer Sargent in his London studio.

8. His Boston Public Library Murals caused trouble.

He painted many Jewish people, but his mural The Church and the Synagogue got him into trouble with them. In the 1890s, he had a reputation as “the painter of the Jews.” He painted a number of upper-class Jewish subjects, including the family of Asher Wertheimer, the magisterial Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children and Joseph Pulitzer.

Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children

He started working on one of his masterpieces, the Boston Public Library murals, in 1890. He didn’t finish them by the time of his death in 1925. (See them here.) The Church and the Synagogue belong to The Triumph of Religion series on the third floor of the McKim Building in Copley Square. Sargent portrayed Judaism and the synagogue as a grim, austere hag and Christianity and the church as a lovely young woman.

Dr. Israel Abraham wrote that “no Jewish artist would do the Church the artistic wrong which Sargent has done to the Synagogue.” Sargent was hurt and confused by charges of anti-Semitism. He explained that he drew on medieval iconography for his inspiration.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Nutshell Studies: Frances Glessner Lee and the Dollhouses of Death

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In 1929, a depressed, divorced 51-year-old society matron decided to take up murder as a hobby. Frances Glessner Lee had just closed her New Hampshire antiques business, and she was looking for something to do. Chance and a family friend led her to create 20 crime scenes in dollhouses. She called them the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

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Frances Glessner Lee

Frances Glessner Lee for years featured her macabre dollhouses in weeklong training seminars for homicide detectives at Harvard. They’d spend hours figuring out how her dolls got bitten, stabbed, hanged, beaten and shot. Lee provided them with exquisitely crafted and accurately proportioned clues. A pencil made from a toothpick had real lead in it, while nail polish blood spatters were scientifically accurate.

“Even the most depraved Barbie doll collector couldn’t top this,” filmmaker John Waters told the New York Times after seeing her work.

stabbed

Dorothy Dennison, a high school student, was found dead in the Parsonage Parlor after her mother reported her missing. She’d gone to the store to buy hamburg meat. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Godmother

Plump and grandmotherly, Frances Lee had no business dabbling in criminology. She was a woman for one thing, and she had no formal education. But she used her money, her connections and her passion for dollhouses to change the way police investigate murders. Her philanthropy earned her the nickname “godmother of forensic science.”

Her most visible legacy – her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death — survives to this day and is still used to train detectives. Several books have been written about them. In 2017 the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum displayed the restored dollhouses for three months. The exhibit attracted 100,000 visitors, wowed by the extraordinary craftsmanship and attention to detail.

The Creator of the Nutshell Studies

Frances Glessner was born March 25, 1878, in Chicago, an heiress to the International Harvester fortune. She grew up pampered and protected inside a stone fortress, a Prairie Avenue mansion designed by H.H. Richardson.

The Glessner House as it neared completion. Photo courtesy Cornell University Library.

The Glessner house stood out as a monumental architectural masterpiece among the other Gilded Age mansions on Prairie Avenue. Frances’ mother, an accomplished seamstress and needleworker, decorated the house in impeccable Arts and Crafts style.

Frances had one sibling, older brother George, who suffered from hay fever. The family doctor advised the Glessners to take George away from Chicago during hay fever season. So they built a summer home on 1,500 acres in Bethlehem, N.H., called The Rocks. Family friend Frederick Law Olmsted landscaped the estate. Both Frances and George would move there permanently as adults.

Harvard

When George reached college age, he went to Harvard. Frances wanted to join him and study medicine, but her father – her “jailer,” she once called him – wouldn’t let her. Instead, her parents sent her to Europe with an aunt for 14 months and encouraged her to pursue music and the crafts.

At Harvard, her brother formed a close friendship with George Magrath, a brilliant medical student. Magrath would later have a major impact on Frances’ life. Back then, he and her brother liked to jump on their bicycles and race each other to big fires in Cambridge or Boston.

The year before graduation, in 1893, George Magrath joined the Glessner family at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. The next year, Magrath spent three days with the Glessners at The Rocks in New Hampshire. In his thank you letter to Mrs. Glessner, he wrote, “My visit besides being the source of much immediate pleasure has left with me the refreshing picture of a corner of the universe where the beautiful and the ideal are very fully realized and where true happiness exists.”

Lonely and Terrified

Frances found little happiness. She once wrote at 73, “This has been a lonely and rather terrifying life I have lived.”

In 1898, just shy of her 20th birthday, Frances Glessner married Blewitt Lee, a lawyer 10 years her senior. She barely knew him. Her father built them a house near his own in Chicago, and they had three children. Frances left her husband several times and then finally divorced him in 1914. Her father packed her and the children off to Santa Barbara in disgrace.

When Frances created her Nutshell Studies, most of the victims were women who died violent deaths at home. Perhaps she was commenting on her own marriage. Or was she expressing her feelings about the domestic role foisted on her?

After World War I she moved east, splitting her time between Boston and The Rocks. She and her daughter, Frances, opened an antiques shop in New Hampshire. But that enterprise ended just before she checked into Massachusetts General Hospital in 1929 for surgery.

Coincidentally, her old friend George Magrath was there, too.

Could this be a clue to a murder? In the 1930s, homicide detectives didn’t get any training to to determine whether it was or not. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

George Magrath

Florence Glessner Lee and George Burgess Magrath had such a close friendship that people wonder if they were lovers. Lee’s biographer, Bruce Goldfarb, doesn’t think so. He told an audience at the Kansas City Public Library that Magrath was probably gay.

Magrath was also eccentric. He ate one meal a day, typically at midnight at the St. Botolph’s Club. Big and rugged, he wore his hair long, smoked a calabash pike and always wore a flowing Windsor tie.

He had one weakness, wrote Goldfarb. Alcohol. Magrath maintained a steady state of intoxication. Perhaps he needed to self-medicate during a lifetime in which he investigated 21,000 deaths and testified in 2,000 trials.

In 1929, Magrath needed treatment for a severe bacterial infection of his hands.  He had served as the Suffolk County Medical Examiner since 1907, the first medical examiner with training in pathology. (He shared the office with Dr. Timothy Leary, father of the LSD crusader of the same name.)

Turning Point

Recuperating at Mass General with Frances, George Magrath entertained – no, enthralled — her with stories about his work. He had examined corpses in the Boston Molasses Flood, solved the Frederick Small case and proved a gun belonging to Niccolo Sacco had killed a victim in an armed robbery.

He said he refused to rely on hunches during his investigations. And he told her no medical school gave adequate training for medical examiners, while detectives had no training at all. George and Frances talked about the evils of elected coroners, vulnerable to political pressure during murder investigations.

Frances Glessner Lee left the hospital with renewed purpose. She began reading up on criminology and collecting books and papers on the subject. In 1931, she gave Harvard Medical School $250,000 to endow a chair of Legal Medicine for George Magrath, who had taught there for years.

In 1934 she donated 1,000 books to Harvard to start the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. Magrath, she said, had practically invented the field. The library opened in 1938 with training tools such as specimens of insects that infest corpses.

Then George Magrath died on Dec. 11, 1938.

The Nutshell Studies

By then, Frances’ father, mother and brother had died and she could dispose of the family fortune as she liked. So she made dollhouses.

It was a popular hobby among wealthy women of the era. Frances Glessner Lee had a friend in Chicago, Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who created exquisite dioramas documenting European and American rooms over seven centuries.

The gorgeous Thorne miniature rooms now reside at the Museum of Fine Arts. Glessner’s lived-in, sometimes shabby homes belong to Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

She created lower-middle-class shacks, poor tenements and workers’ modest houses. Sex workers, housewives and farmers lived in them. For each dollhouse of death, Frances compiled case notes and witness statements drawn from real murder investigations.

In this “Pink Bathroom” Nutshell Study, Mrs. Rose Fishman, a widow, was found dead on the bathroom floor by the building janitor after people complained of a smell. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

She named her Nutshell Studies after a police saying, “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.”

The Case of Annie Morrison

In one of the nutshell studies, Annie Morrison lies face down on the ground underneath her second-story porch. A wet rag and a clothespin lie next to her. According to the notes Frances wrote, an undertaker discovered a bullet in Annie Morrison’s chest. Her husband owned a revolver with a .22, but he denied murdering his wife. He said he had been sitting in the kitchen when he heard a noise. Out on the porch he found laundry blowing in the wind and a chair resting against the porch railing.

Did the husband do it? The solution to the crime had less importance than the ability to read clues, according to Frances.

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Mrs. Agnes Butler, a neighbor, heard the Morrisons quarreling that morning. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Making the Nutshell Studies

Frances began making her nutshell studies in a workshop at The Rocks with carpenter Ralph Mosher and his son Alton.

They made everything to a 1:12 scale, the standard of the day. Frances consulted a forestry professor at Yale to find woods with fine enough grain to look real at that scale. She even knitted tiny clothes using pins and a magnifying glass. The Nutshell Studies had working mousetraps and carpet sweepers, real newspapers reproduced in miniature and murder victims that wore underwear under their bloodied clothing.

Robert Judson, a foreman in a shoe factory, his wife, Kate Judson, and their baby, Linda Mae Judson, were discovered dead by Paul Abbott, a neighbor. This is a detail from the crime scene, called Three Room Dwelling. Photo by Lorie Shaull.

Once Frances bought a tiny, solid gold electric mixer, made for a charm bracelet, and painted it gray so it could sit on a miniature kitchen counter. After spending thousands of dollars on a miniature cabin, she took a blowtorch to it and half burned it down.

Nutshell Studies Get Studied

In 1943, the New Hampshire State Police named Frances as their educational director and commissioned her as a captain. From then on she liked people to call her Captain Lee.

In 1945, Captain Lee brought her Nutshell Studies to Harvard’s Medical Law department for the first of the twice-yearly Frances Glessner Lee Seminars on Legal Medicine. She brought in speakers from around the world and invited 25 to 30 police officers.

For a week, trainees spent the morning listening to lectures, then after lunch they examined the Nutshell Studies in a dark room. They got a flashlight, case notes, witness statements and 90 minutes to analyze the crime scene. Frances didn’t make them all murder scenes. Some depicted accidents and suicides that just looked like murder.

The week ended with an elegant banquet at the Ritz-Carlton, planned to the last detail by Frances Glessner Lee. She bought a set of gilt-edged china for $8,000 to be used only for her seminars.

Rave Reviews

With her seminar and her Nutshell Studies, Frances Glessner Lee had a huge hit on her hands. In 1948, Erle Stanley Gardner attended to find plots for his Perry Mason novels. He wrote that police sought invitations to the seminars the way girls who aspire to be actresses sought bids from Hollywood. William P. Hancock, chief of the Maine State Police, raved about it, calling it the best of all the training sessions he attended. [botz]

Lee branched out, developing training courses for police officers in other states. Her granddaughter said she loved to be surrounded by young men in uniform. They called her “Mother.”

bedroom

Marie Jones, a prostitute, was discovered dead by her landlady, Mrs. Shirley Flanagan. Her boyfriend claimed she’d committed suicide. Photo by Laurie Shaull.

Aftermath

Frances Glessner Lee died in New Hampshire on Jan. 2, 1962. Her friend Erle Stanley Gardner wrote her obituary in the Boston Globe. “I collect characters as other people collect postage stamps, and Capt. Lee was one of the rarer items in my book.” He dedicated his story, The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom, to her.

Harvard disbanded the Department of Legal Medicine in 1967, and loaned the Nutshell Studies to an alumnus appointed as Maryland’s chief medical examiner. Since then they have resided at Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, still used as a training tool.

Corinne May Botz in 2004 published a book of essays and photographs about the Nutshell Studies. Susan Marks released a film, “Of Dolls and Murder, in 2012.” Then in 2017, the Renwick Gallery restored them and put them on exhibit.

Now the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests uses The Rocks as the North Country Conservation & Education Center.

Though many of the old Prairie Avenue mansions are gone, the Glessner House remains as a museum.

This story last updated in 2023.

With thanks to The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz and 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics by Bruce Goldfarb and Judy Melinek.
Images: Frances Glessner Lee by By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61712759. Nutshell Studies all by Lorie Shaull – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0. 

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John William Sterling, a Well-Respected Man With a Secret

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John William Sterling was a corporate lawyer during the Gilded Age, a conservative, upper-class businessman, the kind of man the Kinks describe as “a well-respected man about town.”

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John William Sterling

In 1911, his name and resume appeared in Distinguished successful Americans of our day. From it we learn he graduated with honors from Yale College and Columbia Law School. He advised railroad barons in building and dismantling railroads, and he served on the boards of nine large banks and gas companies. Appropriately for a man of his stature, he devoted his time to philanthropy—prestigious charities, the kind people noticed.  Eminently clubbable, he belonged to the exclusive Metropolitan, Union and American Yacht clubs.

Like the Kinks’ well-respected man, John William Sterling lived in a world built around punctuality. A Wall Street Journal correspondent described him as, “almost taciturn, and excessively devoted to his profession. He sat before his desk every morning, not later than eight o’clock, and was usually the last one in the office to close the desk and go home.”

That same correspondent also noted he had an unusual relationship that was ‘often spoken of and commented upon.’ That relationship was with a cotton broker named James O. Bloss.

John William Sterling

He was born in Stratford, Conn., on May 12, 1844. His father, also John William Sterling, was captain of the Splendid, one of the largest clipper ships during the China Trade. His mother, Catherine Plant, belonged to a prominent Stratford family; her father, David, served as a U.S. congressman and as the state’s lieutenant governor. His parents both had ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower.

sterling-house

Sterling Homestead

He studied at Stratford Academy, where he probably knew another young man who would lead his entire life as a bachelor, James Buchanan Mitchell. Graduating as class valedictorian, he entered Yale as the Civil War broke out.

Jonathan Ned Katz, a historian of human sexuality, notes in an essay that Sterling slept with Mitchell at Yale. His journal in September-October 1862 records: “I slept with Jim Mitchell last night an.” Katz suggests they had an ongoing relationship, as Sterling and Mitchell both chose to attend Columbia Law School.

sterling-and-classmate

Sterling and classmate at Yale.

His sleeping with Jim Mitchell may not have aroused much comment, wrote Katz, or at least it didn’t arouse much suspicion about what went on.

At Yale, Sterling belonged to Skull and Bones. He graduated with honors from Yale in 1864 and then from Columbia Law School in 1867 as class valedictorian.

Soon after his admission to the bar that year, he met a young cotton broker about his own age, James O. Bloss. Bloss also came from an old New England family, though he grew up in Rochester, N.Y.

Three lines of poetry clipped from the New York Times and pasted into the back of his Commonplace Book suggest Sterling’s feelings toward the man he called “Blossy.”

Once more I give me body and soul to thee,
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote those lines in his poem “In Guernsey / To Theodore Watts.”

In 1872 John William Sterling and James O. Bloss went house-hunting, and they settled on 21 West 25th St. They would live together for nearly 50 years.

Partners

John William Sterling rocketed to the top of the then-burgeoning corporate world. He went to work as a clerk in a New York law firm and made partner in 1870. Three years later he had his name on the door as a partner in Shearman & Sterling. He advised another close friend, James Stillman, chairman of the board of National City Bank, then the nation’s largest. (Stillman’s great-grandson, Whit Stillman, is an Academy Award-nominated film director.)

Sterling also advised William Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil and H.H. Rogers, whose firm merged with Standard Oil, as well as railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.

He once said the ideal client is ‘a very wealthy man in very great trouble.’ His clients paid him handsomely for his advice, and he made a fortune.

sterling-mansion

The Sterling mansion, now a community center

In 1886, Sterling built a stately mansion, Sterling House, in Stratford, presumably a weekend house he shared with his sisters. Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Sterling mansion, now the Sterling House Community Center.

By 1890 he and Blossy moved uptown to 221 East 47th St., where they had four servants. Eventually they moved to 912 Fifth Ave., overlooking Central Park.

Neuroticism

Sterling clearly valued his reputation as a man of means and prominence in society. And so as Katz points out, ‘his contravention of society’s marital standard, and, perhaps, its sexual proprieties, would have been a profound source of conflict and anxiety.’

His mother was said to be happy her son didn’t inherit his father’s love of the sea. Actually, he had more than a touch of hydrophobia. He had a ‘deep-rooted antipathy to the ocean,’ wrote John Anson Garver in a biographical sketch of Sterling. He didn’t even like to take ferries, and never traveled abroad.

Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary to Yale after 1899, recalled that Sterling wouldn’t go to bed until the housekeeper poked the closet with a stick and looked under the bed to make sure there were no burglars. He had iron bars on his bedroom window and an iron door with an electric lock he controlled with a button by his bedside. Bloss slept in the room with him and his valet in an adjoining bedroom.

In Harriman vs. Hill, author Larry Haeg describes Sterling as a chain-smoking, fast walker with a fear of public speaking and a penchant for scheduling meetings at odd minutes, like 3:17 p.m. He ate dinner in the same chair at the same table six nights a week at the Union Club.

He also locked his office at work and always paid for his investments in cash. That made him a very wealthy man.

A Strange Postscript

John William Sterling died suddenly in Canada on July 5, 1918. He left $18 million to Yale and the rest to Blossy, who he named as executor of his estate.

That caused a bit of trouble. Bloss died five months later, on Dec. 15, 1918, without having completely executed the will.

Further, Sterling had died before he could execute the will of another wealthy man, his friend James Stillman, who died March 15, 1918. And Stillman had been named executor of the estate of James Gordon Bennett, who died May 14, 1918.

The first three men who died left $75 million.

Eventually Yale got its money, the largest bequest to a university up to that time.

Sterling’s gift was used to build Yale’s Law School, the Divinity School quadrangle, a School of Medicine, the Hall of Graduate Studies and the Sterling Memorial Library. He also endowed the Sterling professorships, who have included such notables as William O. Douglas, Wilbur Cross, Harold Bloom, Edmund Morgan and Paul de Man.

With thanks to Jonathan Ned Katz, “An Understanding…Held Them Together“

NRHP: Sterling Homestead By Doug Kerr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/6439034575/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44722867; Sterling House Community Center By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/all-towns-and-cities/stratford-ct/stratfordsterlinghouse.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29522854. This story was updated in 2023.

 

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How Ptown Got So Gay, Gay, Gay

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Ptown, as so many know it, was once a shabby old seaport that had fallen on hard times. Yankees lived on one side of town, Portuguese on the other. When the railroad came, it put the Portuguese on the wrong side of the tracks.

The railroad, though, brought tourists to enjoy Provincetown’s wide, sandy beaches. So did the steamer from Boston and later, Route 6. Portuguese families discovered they could make a little extra money by taking in boarders. While the Portuguese men were away fishing, their wives accommodated visitors, often nice single men. They returned year after year, and they grew friendly with their hostesses.

From then and there, Provincetown was only a few steps away from becoming a gay mecca. But the town’s unique subculture had its roots in a long-ago past.

ptown-roofs

Provincetown roofs. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Ptown, The Beginning

Before they ever set foot on Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims made landfall on the extreme northern tip of Cape Cod. They did a little exploring, stole a little Indian corn, signed the Mayflower Compact and then moved on to Plymouth.

But they realized the deep, sheltered harbor teemed with fish, and they took advantage of it. For the next decades, Plymouth Colony regulated and taxed the fishery, hoping to raise money for a school. The governor, Thomas Prence, got a deed for the land from local Indians in exchange for some blankets, kettles and tools.

Unlike other colonial towns, Ptown didn’t get a charter. And unlike other Puritan towns, it didn’t have to support a minister. The residents lived outside of the Puritans’ strict social order. Well outside.

 

Ptown was a transient, seasonal community, described as a wild place inhabited by “fishermen, smugglers, outlaws, escaped indentured servants, heavy drinkers and the ‘Mooncussers’.”

It’s unclear when year-rounders moved to Provincetown. In 1692, Massachusetts absorbed Plymouth Colony and Provincetown became known as the Province Lands. The Massachusetts General Court made those lands part of Truro, and then in 1727 incorporated the Town of Provincetown.

But again, Ptown retained its uniqueness. The Massachusetts General Court didn’t grant the inhabitants the right to own their land. They were allowed to squat in the built-up section, so long as they fished and farmed. But the colony owned the dunes and the scrub forest.

It wasn’t until 1893 that the General Court allowed the residents of Ptown to hold title to the land they lived on. So for 166 years, Ptowners were squatters.

PTown in the 19th Century

Throughout the 18th century, Provincetown’s population fluctuated. It reached about 200 people when the American Revolution started. But then the residents abandoned their homes during the war, as British warships would just sail in, stop the fishing and demand provisions.

ptown

Northeastern view of Provincetown in the 19th century. Image courtesy New York Public Library.

Fishing families returned after the war, but the Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 interrupted its growth. Finally, when that war ended, Ptown came into its own.

The town grew steadily as whaling took off. By the 1840s the Portuguese, mostly from the Azores, began to arrive. Hired to work on whaling ships, they then followed the Yankees into fishing. They fished for herring, bass and mackerel in the harbor, and for cod off the Grand Banks and in the Bay of Chaleur.

Ptown prospered and grew. Its year-round population reached its zenith in 1875, with 4,357 people – about 50 percent more than today. By 1885, the town had 55 wharves and 114 schooners.

But then came hard times. Petroleum replaced whale oil, and whaling declined. Then the fisheries started to dwindle, and fishermen had poor catches in 1889. A depression followed in the 1890s, which caused fish prices to plummet. Then in 1898, a storm known as the Portland Gale wiped out nearly half of Ptown’s wharves and sunk 20 boats in the harbor. Businesses already struggling couldn’t afford to rebuild.

The Pilgrim Monument

ptown-monument

Bradford Street. The Pilgrim monument is in the background. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

But PTown was poised for the next chapter. Even before tourism dominated Ptown’s economy, hotels accommodated the mariners who spent most of their lives at sea. The town had four major hotels in the 19th century. It also had regular steamship service from Boston and, starting in 1873, a rail link from Wellfleet and the mainland.

map

These maps show how East Harbor was diked, making way for the railroad and then the automobile. By Top: Graham, Maj. James D., Hood, Washington, U.S. Topo. Engrs., United States Topographical BureauBottom: Henry Gannett and Marcus Baker, US Geological Survey (USGS) – United States Topographical Bureau (top), US Geological Survey (bottom), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19809334.

By then the colonial revival was in full flower, and the Yankees in town decided to make as much as they could of the Pilgrims’ five-week layover in the area.  In 1910, the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association erected the Pilgrim Monument, and made much of the values of freedom and tolerance.

They might have chosen differently had they known what would come next. Within a few decades, “freedom” in Provincetown meant nude beaches, sex among the dunes, out-of-control parties and flamboyant drag queens.

The playwright Tennessee Williams, then 29, arrived in the summer of 1940. He joined a group “dominated by a platinum blonde Hollywood belle named Doug and a bull-dike named Wanda who [was] a well-known writer under a male pen name.” Ptown, he wrote, was “screaming with creatures not all of whom are seagulls.”

ptown-handholding

A Ptown street scene around 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Light and Water

How did it happen?

Some of it had to do with Provincetown’s remoteness. Virtually surrounded by water, the town’s isolation let visitors shed their inhibitions in anonymity. They could do as they pleased without fear of discovery by the censorious community back home.

Some of it had to do with the clear Cape light, along with cheap boardinghouses and studios Charles Webster Hawthorne started the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown in 1899. Then the Summer School of Painting opened the next year. Free-thinkers from Greenwich Village began to flock to Ptown, including gay painters Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth.

A Provinctown art class.

And some of it had to do with the Portuguese boardinghouse owners. Karen Christel Krahulik, in her research of Provincetown history, found that confirmed bachelors and maiden ladies formed trusting relationships with their Portuguese hosts and hostesses.

They returned year after year and became friends. “As long as sex- and gender-bending men and women were white and arrived with income to spare, Portuguese homeowners were pleased, more often than not, to take them in,” wrote Krahulik.

ptownfishermen-tourists

Fishermen chat with a summer visitor in a tourist bar. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Great Summer of 1916

Marsden Hartley called it “the Great Summer of 1916.” Many artists, like Hartley, had recently returned to America from Berlin, Paris and London because of World War I. They had experienced the relaxed attitudes toward sex in those cities, and they liked it.

The artists flocked to Provincetown, which that year had six art schools. The Boston Globe ran a page one story headlined, “Biggest Art Colony in the World in Provincetown.”

But Provincetown was attracting writers as well as artists. Hartley had arrived in Ptown with a group of friends from Greenwich Village. They were into theater, Freud, Marx and free love. Among them were John Dos Passos, John Reed and Emma Goldman.

An unknown mariner, Eugene O’Neill, joined them, as well. His father was an actor and he had tried without success to find a stage for his plays. The year before the Greenwich Village group had formed an  amateur theater company, the Provincetown Players.  They agreed to put on O’Neill’s play Bound East for Cardiff. Unlike anything the audience had ever seen before, it revolutionized American theater.

ptown-oneill

Charles Demuth and Eugene O’Neill in Provincetown. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Twenty four years later, another young playwright arrived in Ptown. It was 1940, and Provincetown was established as both a gay village and as an arts colony.

Four Types

Tennessee Williams later described the four groups who made up Provincetown’s residents. He belonged to the first two: The flamboyant gay summer visitors and the elite artists and writers who came to write, paint, dance or act. Third, gay wash-ashores who came as visitors and stayed year-round to work or run businesses. Finally, the Yankee, Portuguese and mixed-race native gays.

By the 1950s, an entertainment culture evolved, with nightclubs featuring drag acts. At Weathering Heights, for example, the waiters and waitresses cross-dressed, and the entertainment included female impressions.

In 1952, Provincetown selectmen enacted regulations that banned drag shows and forbade bars and restaurants from encouraging ‘the habitual gathering place for home-sexuals of either sex.’ “Selectmen Clamp Down on Gay Spots with New Regulations to Curb Evils,” reported the Provincetown Advocate in 1952. The regulations failed to curb any evils.

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Provincetown’s historic district. Image of map:  Gay flags By Elisa Rolle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21184817.

The selectmen then wrote a letter to the editor called “An Appeal to All decent People in the Town of Provincetown.” In it, they asked the town to get rid of the ‘nests where the homosexuals congregate.’ In July of 1960, the selectmen shut down the Weathering Heights club by denying the owner a liquor license.

Shopkeepers responded with their own “Shopkeepers Plea,” saying Provincetown was no longer a comfortable vacation spot and was become less interesting and less entertaining.

The shopkeepers won, and they’re still winning.

With thanks to Cape Queer? A Case Study of Provincetown, Massachusetts and Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort by Karen Christel Krahulik, and Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape by Peter Manso.

This story was updated in 2024.

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The Mysterious Death of Cape Cod’s David Bacon

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In September of 1943, witnesses saw David Bacon drive his sports car off a California highway and into a bean field. As would-be rescuers rushed to his aid, he pleaded for help. Blood soaked the interior of the car. Who had done this to him, they asked the dying man. Bacon didn’t answer then, and the question remains unanswered to this day.

David Bacon

David Bacon

Born in 1914, Bacon came from a privileged Brahmin background. His parents named him Gaspar Griswold Bacon, Jr. His grandfather, Robert Bacon, worked as a partner in J.P. Morgan’s financial empire and took a political turn, serving as U.S. ambassador to France. His father, Gaspar, had entered Massachusetts politics, rising to the rank of Senate president and then lieutenant governor. He peaked in a run for governor against James Michael Curley, the populist mayor of Boston.

Curley caricatured Bacon as an elite Republican. During the campaign Curley hired a Bacon look-alike to drive around and shout at public works employees to “stop leaning on your shovels.”

His parents probably expected David Bacon, born in Barnstable, to rise to prominence, as well. Educated at Deerfield Academy and Harvard, the younger Gaspar Bacon took a different path, however. He wanted to act in movies. Bacon trained to fly planes and hobnobbed with the well-to-do. He was a family friend of the Roosevelts and a visitor to the White House.

Acting Career

Starting out in theater on Cape Cod, Bacon got friendly with Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, then unknowns. And he would later use these and other connections to struggle up the rungs of success in Hollywood.

But there were hints at a less savory side to Bacon’s playboy life. For a brief time he lived in New York, and he was rumored to be a gigolo. With his acting career failing to take off immediately, Bacon moved to Los Angeles in 1939, just two years after graduating from Harvard.

In Hollywood Bacon got a screen test and a contract with aviation magnate Howard Hughes, who also produced movies. Hughes saw the name Gaspar as a non-starter and gave the young actor the stage name David Bacon.

But Bacon had another problem. He was gay.

For Bacon, the solution was to find a gay woman he could marry: singer and actress Greta Keller. The two married in 1942, and Greta soon got pregnant. Greta’s career would span nearly 50 years. She revealed later in life that they married merely for  convenience so that both could pursue their careers.

Greta Keller

David Bacon as the Masked Marvel

David Bacon’s acting career slowly got off the ground in 1943. He had small roles in Hughes’ pictures, and Hughes agreed to loan him to Republic Pictures. Republic produced many serials, including a 12-part series about the Masked Marvel. The Masked Marvel was a man in a business suit with a face obscured by an iron mask. His mission was to fight Japanese spies.

Bacon belonged to the four-man team, which included the Masked Marvel, that investigated the spying. He landed the role because four other actors had gotten injured and could not play the part. He joked that the role would probably lead to an injury. Then he was murdered.

Greta had a difficult pregnancy, and in the aftermath of David’s death she lost the baby. Police investigated the case for months. David had been stabbed with a knife with a six-inch blade, but no one ever recovered it. The theories run from the wild to the pedestrian.

Howard Hughes in 1938.

Speculation

Some speculated a hitchhiker killed David Bacon. Greta later told people she believed Howard Hughes had something to do with the murder, that it had to do with a homosexual affair between Hughes and Bacon. Others speculated the murder resulted from a blackmail attempt gone wrong. Police found David’s body in the car with a camera in his car. A roll of film inside contained just one photo, a picture of David standing nude at the beach.

Prosecutors never charged anyone in the murder of Gaspar Bacon, Jr. And no one probably ever will.

David Bacon found the role of the Masked Marvel embarrassing, though people remember him most for it. Oddly, David was not the only member of the cast of the Masked Marvel to be murdered. A fellow actor, Rod Bacon, also was murdered a few years later in 1948.

This story was updated in 2023.

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