CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

_FRIENDS AND HOME_

One of the chief errors in the life of Gutzon Borglum was his belief that everybody loved him--or nearly everybody. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t quite that popular. His record for a public career that lasted just about half a century is, of course, the continuous story of a crusader who didn’t mind the noise. He was a positive, stubborn character who could never see why some people didn’t want his ministrations. But it must be admitted that what he wanted to do for human beings was all intended for their own good--and not, particularly, his. He was interested in beauty, and in other people ... and emphatically!

Lester Barlow, the inventor, who knew him well, said that Gutzon’s ambition was to show that he could do anything better than anybody else, from sculpture to tightrope walking. In a way he was right, for Gutzon was a perfectionist with unbounded confidence in himself. If he had gone in for tightrope walking, he would have tried to do it better than it had ever been done before, and, possibly, would have succeeded--possibly not. But the point that Barlow overlooked was that Borglum was always a critic of method and never of results if the work showed progress in technique. If a thing was better done, he never cared much how.

Many of those who knew him well thought he was a man of great humility. He accepted criticism with great calm and respect. He was an ideal father and husband and a pleasant, unexacting friend. That’s what those closest to him say--which is one of the things that makes Gutzon Borglum so difficult to understand.

There were hundreds of people in the United States who weren’t so close to him--the ones who thought he talked only about tons of rock, and man hours, and A-rigs, and dynamite--and many of them figured him for a hard businessman with a Class “C” temper. That, unfortunately, is the picture of Gutzon that he left for himself in so many parts of this calm and pleasant land. And the worst part of it is that in many particulars it is authentic.

Gutzon was intense in his work. He believed in himself. And when he ran into opposition in what he considered a perfectly obvious course, he had a devastating vocabulary and a voice like the crack of doom. He was afraid of nothing.

It is odd, of course, that such a man could be a dreamer and a poet. Those who stood up to him toe to toe in bitter wrangles would never be convinced that he could see both sides of anything--that he could be tolerant and kindly. But he was a poet, and those who put flowers on his grave remember him for softness and gentleness.

Once he said that a man who wasn’t a great poet could never become a great artist. He had a reverence for a child’s unspoiled outlook on life, and when asked what was his favorite poem he frequently cited Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley and the lines that begin: “Know you what it is to be a child?”

For all that he was still the man whom the hard-rock worker epitomized with the comment that he was a good stonecutter but he didn’t talk pretty.

He made a lot of remarkable friends, about half of whom never knew a thing about art. They liked him personally, and when he talked they listened. Otherwise, you can’t very well explain the financing of Stone Mountain, and Mount Rushmore, the work of liaison between two great political parties, the fantastic air investigation.

He knew countless people--politicians, artists, travelers, writers, soldiers, actors, cowhands, drillers, bankers--who would turn a hand for him if he asked them to. Quite likely he didn’t talk sweet to them either.

“Any man, in any walk of life, has something to tell you if you’ll listen,” he once explained. And he listened.

“It would be a godsend,” he mentioned when his bank balance was down nearly to zero after the Stone Mountain fiasco, “if every man had enough money so that he could do what he wanted to do.” But even then he was never able to keep what money he got. Somebody else always needed it.

Of his conflicting characteristics his friend “Missy” Meloney, the editor, once wrote this to him:

Dear Gutzon, Heaven bless you. What a glorious time God had of it when He made you. A glorious thought that, seeing the Infinite Hand reach down and gather up the dust of the mighty and the great and mold it with terrific force into the hardest--and softest--soul I have ever known. Out of Milton and a speck of Angelo, and a grain of Napoleon, an atom from Paul and a flame from the Immortal Redeemer. It is a thought to play with. Such a strange, complex, unlimited person you are ... counting a line of vital importance, throwing away a fortune, soothing a crying baby, harboring an army, fighting for peace, loving a friend. You and Mary are destroyers of weak faith, and I love you both.

“Missy’s” picture of him is the one that his friends knew best. He never felt that he or anybody else had been endowed at birth with superior talents, though he always felt that he had done well with what he had. His ability to be successful as an artist, he declared, was due to trained observation and hard work. As a matter of course, he never talked down to an individual or to an audience. Once a Texas friend of his, Ralph Bradford, remarked that he was going to a “little hick town” to give a speech and didn’t need to prepare for it. Gutzon disagreed with him. “You never know the brains of an audience by the size of the town,” he said. “How do you know you won’t be talking to some ‘king maker’ who’s just there waiting for a train?” So Bradford, who presently moved on to an important post in Washington, did so because he stopped to prepare what he had to say--and the ambient “king maker” was in the audience.

“If there hadn’t been any ‘king maker,’” Gutzon commented afterward, “it would have been just the same; somebody, if it was only Bradford, would have known that the orator was doing a good job.”

Among the sculptor’s oldest friends was the painter Martin Borgord, a man of Norwegian extraction whom he had known in California and France. Borgord received honors in Paris and late in life returned to California. He stopped to visit Gutzon in South Dakota. Through him Gutzon met another well-known painter, William Singer, and his wife, and visited them in Norway. Mrs. Singer bought two of his marbles for her museum in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Another friend of the early Paris days was the Belgian sculptor Paul Nocquet, who came to New York to be near Gutzon and lost his life in a balloon ascension. After his death Gutzon collected his art works, had some of them cast in bronze and arranged an exhibition. The sale netted several thousand dollars for Nocquet’s mother and sisters in Belgium. Among the patrons of the show, whose names appeared in a handsome catalogue, were President Theodore Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, and the French and Belgian ambassadors to the United States.

Gutzon took care of Nocquet’s burial in Mt. Kisco and prepared a calf-bound volume, _In Memoriam_, which contained, among other mementos, prints of the first air photographs of Long Island. Nocquet had taken a camera on his final trip, and the films were found in his pocket. Though wet, they were successfully developed and are probably the first pictures taken from the air to be reproduced in the public press.

Gutzon, after his return from Europe in 1901, met the Herbert Wadsworths of Washington and the Genesee Valley. They were horse enthusiasts. So was Gutzon. Martha Wadsworth was a dominating personality, and she was a social power in Washington. But once she motored all the way to Hermosa, South Dakota, and again to Stamford, Connecticut, just to visit with the Borglums.

Herbert Wadsworth’s attitude toward his wife’s activities was one of whimsical tolerance and his view of Gutzon’s enthusiasms was much the same. In 1912 he wrote this to Borglum:

Any indication that you are recovering from the Too-Many-Things-at-Once disease is most gratifying. Once I wanted to reform the world and now I’m too exhausted to reform myself. By and by, when you can take a long time off, come up to Ashantee--The Dawdlers’ Do-Nothing Roost--and do nothing with me. Say, where is home, anywhere?...

Another equally old friend and brilliant woman who also motored out once to Texas to spend the winter near Gutzon was Edith Cornell Smith, wife of Sydney. She and her husband lived in Thirty-eighth Street, near Gutzon’s studio. They were old New Yorkers to whom tickets at Carnegie Hall and the Opera House, and various club memberships, were as much a part of the annual budget as taxes and rent. Edith was deeply artistic and after her husband’s death spent most of her summers in Stamford where she was a welcome part of the Borglum family. There were many such travelers. In time Gutzon came to look on their arrivals as he did the rains or the rising of the sun. But he was overcome with wonderment when Julian Lee Rayford, then an obscure young artist, thumbed his way from North Carolina to Texas just to talk to him. “I don’t think I ever meant that much to anybody before,” said Gutzon. And he meant it.

During his bachelor days in New York, Gutzon occupied a quaint brick apartment on 104th Street where other artists lived, including the Boardman Robinsons. It had been built by a strange woman who, in her youth, had gone abroad to study art and life. She had come back with strong distaste for the respectability of her well-to-do relations. After erecting this flat building, she had taken up her abode in the basement amid an assortment of art treasures gathered up in Europe. The sculptor admired what he called her wild streak, by which he meant her defiance of the conventions, and they got along quite well.

She would allow him to do what he pleased to the second-floor rear apartment, she said. So he rented it and transformed it completely and extravagantly, equipping it with furniture built from his own designs. The dining room had a round mahogany table six feet in diameter. Around it were twelve circular chairs all painted green and rubbed to a soft patina. There was a sideboard to match.

Gutzon passed out twelve keys to twelve friends who could come when they pleased and find a place at his table. Among them was Adolph E. Borie, called “Billy” by Gutzon and “Doppie” by everybody else. As president of the Savage Arms Company he was of considerable help in the aircraft investigation and in settling the affairs of the Sporting Club. He was an ardent fisherman, and, therefore, one of Borglum’s own kind.

The sculptor would go almost anywhere fishing with anybody he trusted. But now and then he would decline to make a second trip. Bob and Madge Davis once invited him to fish with them in a Canadian lake. He didn’t like it. Sitting in a boat and trolling was too tame a sport, he said. “You might as well be pulling a suitcase aboard the boat as one of those lake trout.” The trout stream near Hermosa was the chief reason for his buying the Black Hills ranch. It was expensive and brought more debts and embarrassment. But the fishing was a compensation--or so he said.

In the duplex apartment where he lived in New York before moving to Stamford, close friends, Charles Rann Kennedy and his wife Edith Wynne Matthison, occupied the flat upstairs. Gutzon became acquainted with them through a neighbor, Henry Miller, who first staged Kennedy’s play _The Servant in the House_. Edith was leading lady, and in the cast were Walter Hampden and his wife and the elder Tyrone Power. The sculptor engaged the company for a special performance in honor of the Howard Lodge at the Masonic Temple. A special edition of the play bound in vellum with the Howard Lodge emblem stamped in gold on the cover was presented to each of the players and to distinguished guests.

There wasn’t much privacy about Gutzon’s home life. At Stamford there were usually more outsiders than he had room for. He lived too far from town for studio assistants to go back and forth. At least one of them lived with the family all the time. And because he liked to do his writing after work hours or on holidays, a secretary was another permanent member of the group. A few of the outstanding ones came to be friends.

In the earlier days there were Eugenia Flagg and Helen Johnson Keyes, daughter of the historian. In Georgia, Lillian Taylor, who fought through the Stone Mountain war, was always on Gutzon’s side and frequently stayed with the Borglums in Stamford or out at Rushmore. Jean Philip was also ready to take up cudgels for the chief and was frequently called.

When the barracks of the Czecho-Slovak volunteers were vacated the Borglum part of the community was enlarged to care for casual visitors and studio staff. In looking after all these tides of people Banks, the chauffeur, became an invaluable help and seemed so much like one of the family that Mrs. Borglum’s nieces and nephews referred to him in their prayers as “Uncle Banks.” Another indispensable person came to Stamford in those early days--James Reilley, the Irishman who has now been there for thirty years. His children grew up with Gutzon’s, and one of them reached a position of importance at Rushmore. Old Reilley is still there, still keeping count of the empty acres.

The sculptor was likewise a dutiful son and brother. Very often some member of his family was living with him. With the first large amount of money he received for a monument commission he sent his father and others on a six-month trip to Denmark. Again he brought to New York a younger brother and his family, to keep them for a whole year while the brother was taking a medical course. There are many letters to show that moments of crisis were not infrequent in the Borglum family and that Gutzon was always ready to aid.

When his son Lincoln was born Gutzon’s happiness was touching. This was his miracle, he virtually announced, and his alone. Within a week he was quarreling with the trained nurse because she would not let him pick up the baby when he pleased, day or night. There was also some resentment about the timing of the boy’s appearance. He had arrived on April 9, 1912, and, in keeping with the name the sculptor had in mind for him, his birth date should have been Lincoln’s birthday. Some friend fixed up this worrisome situation by mentioning that April 9 was Appomattox Day.

In due course the baby was taken to Bridgeport to pose for the baby faces spouting water from the rim of the Wheeler Fountain. In that same fountain he was christened by his uncle, Rev. Marshall Montgomery, after which he was registered in near-by St. John’s Church, for which Gutzon had made the reredos.

The child, apparently, was the most important thing that had yet come into the sculptor’s life. He took him everywhere he was allowed to, presented him to friends up and down the Atlantic coast, and presumably was grateful that the child’s mother was a calm and tolerant woman. Once, when Lincoln was four years old, Gutzon picked him up suddenly and said they were going to Boston on a two-day trip. But they weren’t back in two days--or in thirty days. By that time the anxious mother was telegraphing to every place where she thought Gutzon might have chanced to go. And from Atlanta she got an answering wire: “Don’t worry. Both boys here. And well.”

When his daughter Mary Ellis was born on her father’s birthday, March 25, 1916, he began to make plans to have her with him wherever he went. But he learned that the arrangements were not so easily taken care of. However, by the time of the Stone Mountain break, Mrs. Borglum had learned to drive a car and the four Borglums were constantly on the go, exiles from home, but, wherever humanly possible, together.

Life at the Stamford home and studio is recalled by those who took part in it as a continuous carnival. Michow Ito, Japanese dancer, moved onto the old campsite of Mrs. Lanier and the Greenwich girls with a summer school. He taught dancing and listed classes in history and provided some art theory, taught by an old American artist. His men pupils and his staff, including a Japanese cook, lived in tents. The girl students were billeted in the old Czech barracks. One of the girls, Angna Enters, stayed on after the rest had gone. She wrote several books and became famous as a dancer, but is known best locally for _Silly Girl_, in which the days of the fantastic summer school are recalled.

Ito, who was an odd character, is now known to history principally because one of his pupils posed for the leading figure in Gutzon’s “Wars of America” group. Ito had plans for establishing the peace of the world through the promotion of fine arts. But he wasn’t consistent at it. One day, when he heard that a Japanese envoy had arrived in Washington to take part in the 1922 naval conference, he borrowed a Bible and hurried down to the capital with a message. There he created something of a sensation by arguing with the Japanese delegate that it would be better to throw away the sword altogether than to haggle about its relative length. The envoy thanked him kindly and paid no attention.

Probably because of friendship with Henry Miller, Gutzon knew many actors. They were in and out of Stamford for years. When Margaret Anglin was rehearsing her play _The Bronze Woman_ she sent her leading man, who was playing the part of a sculptor, to the Borglum studio to pick up local color. He borrowed some authentic stage properties such as a mallet and chisel.

Later Gutzon, who knew Edgar Davis, tried to get a part for Miss Anglin in _The Ladder_. This play was about Davis’ thoughts on reincarnation, but that is not what one remembers it for now. Its Broadway record was established chiefly by the fact that nobody had to pay to see it. The tickets were given away free. And it went on almost to a performance record with virtually nobody in the house. Miss Anglin, however, never played in it.

With much interest the sculptor liked Laura Hope Crews. She played in _The Great Divide_ by William Vaughn Moody, another of Gutzon’s favorites. Gutzon found a resemblance between Moody’s philosophy and his own, particularly as shown in the poet’s _The Fire Bringer_. Gutzon frequently talked of Shelley’s _Prometheus Unbound_ as he might have concerned himself with somebody living, breathing and immortal. He was a glamorous, free spirit, and anyone who had anything to do with his chronicle was a demigod.

Another seldom chronicled trait about Gutzon is the fact that he was passionately fond of the violin. He had to give it up in order to find time for his modeling, but he cherished an old fiddle for years until vandals broke into his Stamford studio and smashed it and other things to bits. Toward the end of his life Congressman Kent Keller gave him another violin which is somewhat remembered by those about him. He received the gift on the ranch in Hermosa and, thereafter, it was his custom to rise at five in the morning to practice before the day’s work began.

Whatever one’s criticism of this almost secret work as a virtuoso, it must be conceded that he liked good music and probably tried to learn to play it. He knew and loved the great classics--and also the country’s folk tunes. He hated grand opera, but he liked brass bands.

He had a remarkable love for motion pictures. This was partly due to the fact that at Rushmore there was hardly any other diversion. But it was likewise because actors who first appeared to him only as people who moved about the screen suddenly became real and interesting to him. Anyway, he used to go to the theaters in Rapid City several times a week whether they changed programs or not. He saw Jeanette MacDonald seven nights in succession in _Naughty Marietta_, and Grace Moore, Irene Dunne, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and others of the sisterhood with less concentration.

Almost as much as the glamour girls he loved the pictured cowboys. Not that he cared whether the cowboy was a good hand or bad, but he liked the horses.

For more quiet relaxation he enjoyed Wild West stories of the good old dime-novel kind. He and Mrs. Borglum used to read them aloud to each other on long cross-country trips. Although there are countless Wild West story magazines on the newsstands, they discovered that only one is recognized by connoisseurs. In the sparsely settled regions of the West--even in San Antonio--this magazine was hard to find, and Gutzon sometimes used to lay out a trip so that on a special day he would be at a place where it would be available. Thus he would miss no time getting to the next installment of some continued story.

Gutzon used to look for stories by Max Brand on the ground that his literary style was superior. Long afterward he discovered that Max Brand was actually a well-known writer who had made a fortune writing under different pseudonyms.

In meeting friends new or old the sculptor’s outstanding trait was his unworldly attitude, totally unaffected by praise or blame, by newspaper gossip or radio commentators. This is exemplified in a story that he used to tell on himself.

During his early days in New York the actress Blanche Bates, who had known him in California, invited him to a matinee where he found himself the lone male in a box of women. He noticed that opera glasses were being turned on the box, presumably because of the exceptional beauty of the woman beside him, and tactfully he withdrew into the background.

As he was filing out after the performance he overtook Miss Bates and asked, “Who was that striking woman sitting next to me?”

Her laugh was spontaneous as she called to her friend, “Oh, Lillian, here’s one man in the world who never heard of you!”

He had been spending the afternoon with the most glamorous woman in the world, Lillian Russell, and he hadn’t realized it. He was not embarrassed. He never liked to be told in advance the names and positions of people he was likely to meet.

“I don’t care to be hampered by other people’s opinions--or guesses,” he said. “I like to discover people for themselves. And I do.”

“You certainly do,” conceded Miss Bates.

And, of course, he did.