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Prides Crossing

The Many Loves of Margarett Sargent McKean, Mad Brahmin Artist

For half her life, Margarett Sargent struggled against the strictures and demands of her Boston Brahmin upbringing. Then for the other half, she succumbed to it – and to madness and alcoholism.

A fourth cousin of another painter, John Singer Sargent, she suddenly abandoned her promising art career at the age of 44. Instead, she turned her passionate attention to gardening. Well, also to men. And to women.

“For twenty years, I worked,” she told her granddaughter. “And then I devoted myself to horticulture.”

Margarett Sargent in 1916

Margarett Sargent

She was born on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay in on Aug. 31, 1892 to Francis Sargent and Jane Welles Hunnewell. Her maternal grandfather, Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, was a railroad baron who spent much of his spare time importing and cultivating rhododendrons. Margarett took more pride in her paternal ancestors, who she viewed as more distinguished. The first Sargent had arrived in Massachusetts in 1689.

Margarett Sargent grew into an elegant beauty, nearly six feet tall. She had luxurious black hair, skin like marble and startling light blue eyes. And she had wit. One admirer later wrote, “Her words were swift as swallows in a gale…she was a blue brook broken to a thousand … bubbles by every conversational stone or water-soaked log of stupidity.”

She got kicked out of private school at the age of 16, so her family sent her to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Conn. After boarding school she agreed to marry Eddie Morgan, a handsome, brilliant, rich friend of her brother’s.

Morgan was devoted to her, but also to alcohol and horses. She broke off the engagement because, she said, she wanted to go to Italy to sculpt.

Margarett Sargent never forgot Eddie Morgan, though.

Art Career

She spent a year studying art in Florence, something her family wished she hadn’t done.

When she returned to Boston in 1914, she studied with a rising young sculptress named Bashka Paeff. Margarett Sargent had talent and she worked hard at her art. In 1916, she began to reap the rewards, with two works exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. A year later, she showed two more at the National Academy of Design.

In 1917, she went to study with Gutzon Borglum in Connecticut. There she met and befriended George Luks – a barroom brawling member of the Ashcan School of art. He later painted her portrait from memory, and called it The White Blackbird – a title her granddaughter would use in a biography of her.

Margarett Sargent, The White Blackbird by George Luks

In 1919 she moved to New York, where she took an apartment with a friend – and probably lover – named Marjorie Davenport. She pursued avant-garde painting and sculpture and hung out with Harpo Marx and her downstairs neighbor, Fanny Brice.

Her Bohemian revel was short lived, however. The next year she married Quincy Adams Shaw McKean, another Brahmin from an old New England family. He succeeded at dog breeding and polo playing, but business, not so much. Fortunately for him, his mother gave him an allowance to help pay for their 13 servants.

Pride’s Crossing

While attending Harvard Law School, Shaw McKean bought a First Period saltbox house in Beverly, Mass., with his friends Bayard Warren and Cole Porter.

The house, built in 1630 had first belonged to the King’s tax collector. Later, General Burgoyne appropriated it during the American Revolution.

Shaw McKean bought this house, known as the Samuel Corning House, with Cole Porter

McKean eventually bought out his two friends. He and Margarett expanded the house and property into a 54-acre estate and Yankee palace, which included a large studio for her. Shaw encouraged her art, and they had four children in three years.

But her family and friends knew what McKean also probably knew: He felt much more strongly about Margarett Sargent than Margarett Sargent felt about him. And he didn’t help matters by raping her on her wedding night, at least according to her recollection.

Both had extramarital affairs.

The Many Loves of Margarett Sargent McKean

“Margarett was a highly sexed woman,” said one of her friends.

She would arrive in New York, check into a hotel and telephone her old beau Eddie Morgan at the New York Stock Exchange.

“Eddie, I’m here,” she’d say, and he’d rush from the stock exchange floor, ready for red-hot sex.

She was admired, and probably not from afar by the newly married Archibald MacLeish. And the ‘wonderfully handsome’ Isabel Pell, an heiress who joined the French Resistance during World War II. And the novelist Jane Bowles.

As a virginal recent Harvard graduate, John Walker was staying at Pride’s Crossing one night when Margarett, twice his age, came into his bedroom in a negligee. She seduced him, not unwillingly. He went on to serve as director of the National Gallery of Art.

All the while Margarett Sargent McKean had been collecting modern art and creating it herself. She had a one-woman show in 1926 at the prestigious Krashaar Gallery in New York. She had her last exhibit in 1932 in Boston at the Doll and Richards Gallery.

Collapse

By the 1930s, her marriage had descended into bickering and shouting. Margarett crawled into the bottle. In 1936, she stopped painting. Margarett instead devoted herself to gardening, as had her Grandfather Hunnewell.

In 1944, she got committed to a sanitarium for the first time. Her husband left her in 1947 for a champion tennis player, Katherine Winthrop.

Margarett Sargent McKean went in and out of sanitariums for the rest of her life, even taking electroshock therapy.

Her minders decided she couldn’t live unsupervised, and so she went to live in a Commonwealth Avenue apartment with a nurse.

She died in a nursing home in 1978. Sixteen years later, a New York gallery held a retrospective of her work.

Her granddaughter Honor Moore asked her late in life why she had abandoned her art.

“It just got too intense,” she told her granddaughter.

With thanks to The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter.

Images: Samuel Corning house, By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20996685. This story was updated in 2022.

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Eleonora Sears, Brahmin Bad Girl on the Tennis Courts (and Polo Field and Squash Court…)

Eleonora Sears pioneered women’s sports in the way only a Boston blueblood could. When she took up long-distance walking from Boston to Newport, R.I., her chauffeur followed at a discreet distance with a thermos and sandwiches.

Eleonora Sears on the tennis court.

Eleonora Sears was a model of social decorum in the mansions of the rich. On the athletic field, however, she shattered the rules during the first half of the 20^th century. She rode horses in pants, crashed men-only squash courts and shocked tennis spectators by playing in rolled-up sleeves. During her lifetime, she accumulated 240 trophies.

She succeeded in sports when it wasn’t thought important for women to succeed. “Sports were never seen as a proving ground for women, but Eleo made it a proving ground,” said her biographer, Peggy Miller Franck.

Multi-Champion

When Eleonora Sears died in 1968 at the age of 86, Boston Globe sportswriter Victor Jones wrote, she ‘was probably the most versatile performer that sports has ever produced — not just the most versatile female performer, but the most versatile, period.’

She was a four-time national tennis champion, the first women’s squash champion and an accomplished horsewoman who in 1909 became the first woman to ride a horse in a major polo match.

She played 19 sports, including tennis, ice skating, horseback riding, yacht racing, rifle shooting, boxing and football.

Off the field she walked, often commuting the 20 miles from her Beacon Hill home to her summer home in Prides Crossing, Mass. In her 50s walked the 42 miles from Fontainebleu to the Ritz Bar in Paris.

She also was one of the first women to race a car, to fight a speeding ticket and to fly an airplane.

Eleonora Sears, Brahmin

Eleonora Sears was a wealthy Boston Brahmin, born on Sept. 28, 1881, the second child and only daughter of Boston real estate and shipping tycoon Frederick Richard Sears and Eleonora Randolph Coolidge Sears. Her ancestors included Thomas Jefferson (her great-great-grandfather), John Winthrop and Massachusetts Gov. James Sullivan. She was Henry Cabot Lodge’s cousin.

“I began exercising the first time I fell out of my crib,” she said, according to her obituary in the New York Times.

She divided her time between tony Pride’s Crossing in Beverly, Mass., and Palm Beach. Along the way, she used her wealth and social standing to break down barriers for women who lacked that silver spoon at birth.

Her father introduced her to tennis. He was one of the first to play the game in America, with Dr. James Dwight in Nahant, Mass., in 1874. Her uncle Richard Sears was the first U.S. national tennis champion, winning seven straight championships from 1881 to 1887.

Eleonora Sears by John Singer Sargent.

Eleonora played tennis with the Astors and befriended the Roosevelts. She sat for a sketch by John Singer Sargent, at his request. “She looked fine in evening clothes, and didn’t look out of place behind a silver tea service,” wrote Jones.

Known as Eleo, she made the best-dressed women’s lists during the early 20th century. “It isn’t my ambition to be the best dressed women in Boston,” she said. “I think that interest in clothes should be perfectly casual.”

Pants and Cigarettes

She attended society balls, weddings and debuts, but she occasionally broke the rules of her social class even off the field. In 1910, she smoked in the lobby of Boston’s Copley Square Hotel because men were allowed to and women weren’t. Police arrested her.

Eleo Sears at a society wedding on Long Island in 1915.

In 1911, newspapers reported her engagement to Harold S. Vanderbilt, and in 1924 she made news by dancing with the Prince of Wales. But she never married and her contemporaries assumed she was gay.

“Her sexual orientation certainly formed her character, and gave her the drive,” Franck told the Windy City Times. “She was tremendously courageous in the way that she was willing to challenge, in a very public way, the very narrow role that woman had.

Her aggressive style of play made her a fan favorite on the tennis courts. She won the U.S. national doubles title four times between 1911 and 1917, and the national mixed doubles championship in 1916.

In 1909, Eleonora shocked people by riding onto the Burlingame Country Club’s polo field wearing pants. Ministers delivered sermons against her wardrobe choice. The California Mother’s Club condemned her as immodest and unbecoming. “Such unconventional trousers and clothes of the masculine sex are contrary to the hard and fast customs of our ancestors,“ the club said in a statement.

Mother of Squash

Eleonora Sears broke through the Harvard Club’s ban on women, and by 1918 she was playing men on its squash courts. She excelled at the game and brought many women into it as president of the U.S. Women’s Squash Racquets Association. She was known as the ‘Mother of Squash.’

Eleonora Sears astride her polo pony. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

As a girl she loved horses, and she bred and rode them until she died. She displayed saddle horses, rode in jumping events, drove harness horses, rode to hounds — and even helped pay for the Boston Police Department’s mounted police unit.

She rode in steeplechases and once, on a bet in 1912, drove a carriage pulled by four horses down Fifth Avenue in New York. That same year she won a quarter horse race in San Diego.

Land and Sea

She also raced yachts and speedboats, and swam the 4-1/2 miles from Bailey’s Beach to First Beach in Newport, R.I. — the first to do so.

Her habit of long-distance walking came from her father. In 1925, she walked the 47 miles from Boston to Providence in 9 hours and 53 minutes. At the age of 46, she competed against Olympic marathoner Bill Agee in a walk from Laurel, Md., to Baltimore. She also once walked the 73 miles from Newport to Boston in 17 hours.

Eleonora Sears died on March 16, 1968 at age 86, four years before the enactment of Title IX, which prohibited discrimination against women in school sports. She was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, the Show Jumping Hall of Fame, the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame and the United States Squash Hall of Fame.

This story about Eleonora Sears was updated in 2022.

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11 Things You Didn’t Know About William Loeb

William Loeb had an outsize influence on national politics as publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, New Hampshire’s statewide newspaper. From 1946 until his death in 1981, he published pugnacious conservative editorials on the newspaper’s front page.

Presidential aspirants feared and courted Loeb because of his impact on New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation Presidential Primary. Candidates for state office fell into line with his demand they take a no-tax pledge – that is, if they wanted to win.

Loeb called Gov. Nelson Rockefeller a “wife swapper,” helping to derail his presidential campaign during the 1968 New Hampshire primary.

opined that President Eisenhower “has done more to destroy the respect, honor and power of the United States than any President in its history.” Eisenhower’s sin? The treaty that allowed the Soviet Union to continue influence over Austria.

“Jerry Is A Jerk” blared one headline about President Gerald Ford because he had offered amnesty to draft dodgers. Loeb had not served in World War II, but claimed he didn’t fail the physical on purpose. Critics said he drank huge quantities of alcohol before his physicals so his ulcer would flare up.

William Loeb, Mr. Low Ebb

Loeb famously crippled Sen. Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign in 1972 by publishing a forged letter that accused Muskie of saying “Canuck,” a derogatory term for French Canadians. Muskie responded with a speech in front of the newspaper office that forever after was called “the crying speech.” David Broder of the Washington Post reported Muskie broke down three times. Others, including Muskie, said snow melted on his face.

Though Loeb could generally run down people, he was less successful building support for politicians. One exception was his support of New Hampshire Meldrim Thomson, a three-term governor who suggested nuclear weapons for the state’s National Guard.

Detractors called him Mr. Low Ebb.

Here are 11 things about William Loeb you may not have known:

1. His father was Teddy Roosevelt’s right-hand man.

William Loeb, Jr., served as executive secretary to President Theodore Roosevelt. He was the son of a barber who had immigrated to Albany, N.Y., from Prussia. Loeb became a stenographer and court reporter, and got interested in politics.

He received an appointment as an official stenographer when Roosevelt won election as governor of New York. Roosevelt liked his ability to perform tasks without specific instructions and his familiarity with Albany politicians. He went to the White House with Roosevelt as one of his most trusted advisors.

When William Loeb III was born on Dec. 26, 1905, Roosevelt stood godfather to the child.

William Loeb Jr., father of the New Hampshire publisher, was press secretary to President Teddy Roosevelt.

2. He always carried a gun.

A New York magazine profile of William Loeb called him the “pistol-packing publisher.” He always carried Charter Arms .38 in a shoulder holster; his wife carried hers in her purse. He was reported to have shot the office cat, an accusation he denied.

In 1971 he told the New York Times Magazine that everyone should know how to use a gun. “It might lead to a few more wife killings and that sort of thing,” he said. “But it would lead to a great diminution in armed crime.”

3. He fired Ben Bradlee.

Ben Bradlee

Benjamin C. Bradlee, the storied Washington Post editor, cut his teeth as a reporter for the New Hampshire Sunday News, absorbed two years later by the Manchester Union Leader.

After Loeb fired him, he went to work for the Post. Bradlee later published the Pentagon Papers with the New York Times, and he supported the reporters coverage of the Watergate scandal.

Bradlee also had a close friendship with John F. Kennedy, later a nemesis of William Loeb.

4. He tried to keep his second marriage secret.

As a 20-year-old Williams College student he secretly married a Smith College faculty member, Elizabeth Nagy, on May 29, 1926. She was eight years his senior. He dreamt of becoming a lawyer and got into Harvard Law School, but Elizabeth discovered his affair with another woman. She accused him of violating the state’s anti-adultery laws and he had to leave Massachusetts.

Then he married Vermont resident Eleanore McAllister in 1947, a union that lasted until 1952. He tried to hide his first marriage from his second wife, but he couldn’t hide his second marriage from his third wife, Nackey Scripps Gallowhur. They were both married when they began courting.

5. His mother and father cut him out of their wills.

His father disinherited him when he married Elizabeth Nagy. William Loeb, Jr., didn’t even mention William Loeb III in his will. His mother did mention him, but only to say she was leaving him nothing. The bulk of her million-dollar estate went to his daughter, Penelope, by his second wife. He remained estranged from his daughter for the rest of his life.

William Loeb, Jr.

One reason for the animosity between mother and son was that she believed he tried to cheat her. He deposited $250,000 in securities as collateral for a loan from her to buy the paper. Then she discovered the securities were missing.

Loeb sued her estate, draining it of most of its money and ending up with about 10 percent of it.

6. He ran the newspaper from his estate and his ranch.

Though William Loeb struck fear into the heart of New Hampshire politicians, he didn’t run the paper from New Hampshire. He called in his editorials from his mansion in Pride’s Crossing, a wealthy enclave in Beverly, Mass. (It was once featured in a General Motors ad for a luxury car.)

Loeb also called them in from his ranch outside of Reno, Nev., where he and Nackey got their divorces. He also declared Nevada as his legal residence so he could pay fewer taxes than in he would have in Massachusetts.

7. He published his baptismal certificate.

President Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent

He did it twice, on the front page of newspapers he owned — the St. Albans Messenger, the Burlington Daily News and the Manchester Union Leader. Some said he did it to prove Teddy Roosevelt was his godfather. Others said he did it to prove he wasn’t Jewish.

8. He spent a night in jail.

How exactly he ended up spending a night in jail is unclear. He himself admitted to it. According to one story, George Gallowhur, first husband of Loeb’s third wife, sued Loeb for alienation of affections under an old Vermont law. Loeb couldn’t post bond and spent a night in jail.

According to another story, the local police chief tried to serve both him and Nackey while they were having dinner with his mother. Nackey slipped out and Loeb wouldn’t say where she went. So the police chief arrested him.

9. He falsified his resume.

William Randolph Hearst

He claimed in a 1974 editorial to have worked for eight years as a reporter for the Hearst Corporation’s New York World.

Hearst denied it, pointing out the newspaper folded eight years before Loeb claimed to have worked for it.

10. He couldn’t crack the Boston market.

During a Boston Herald strike he tried to import the Union Leader into the city, but stopped when crime figures threatened him because the newspaper printed incorrect sports information.

11. JFK denounced William Loeb.

JFK delivering a speech.

He called Sen. John F. Kennedy “the No. 1 liar in the United States” after Kennedy denounced the Union Leader on the day before the 1960 New Hampshire Primary:

Kennedy timed his attack carefully, so Loeb couldn’t do him any damage. He did it on the day before the 1960 New Hampshire Primary.

“I believe there is probably a more irresponsible newspaper than that one right over there.” said Kennedy. “But I’ve been through 40 states and I have not found it yet. I believe that there is a publisher who has less regard for the truth than William Loeb, but I can’t think of his name.”

Images: Ben Bradlee By John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA – Ben Bradllee, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75081998. This story updated in 2022.

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