The Invisible Line (48 page)

From the time he married Minna Field, Preston Gibson became a fixture of high society. His life whirled among Chicago, Washington, and New York, a dozen exclusive clubs, and resort destinations from Georgia to Maine, Paris to Cairo. It was a world governed by elaborate rules and rituals, yet its denizens lived to flout conventional morality—smoking, drinking, gambling, engaging in all-night revels and love affairs. “A new scandal is like a Parisian model,” Gibson would write. “It wants to air itself every afternoon.”
²¹

Gibson's life revolved around cotillions and turkey trots, roulette, bridge and mah-jongg, polo matches and baseball games. He socialized with Astors and Vanderbilts, presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices, counts and princes and foreign ambassadors. When Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice visited Chicago, the iconic “New Woman” stayed with the Gibsons. Preston hosted balls that began at the stroke of midnight, was admired for swimming the Rhode Island Sound from Narragansett to Newport, and won a $500 bet when the catcher for the Washington Nationals, Gabby Street, caught a baseball that Preston had thrown from the top of the Washington Monument. Regarded by the society pages as one of the best dancers in his circle, he once revealed his secret to doing a successful Argentine tango: “the lifting of the body and holding it as the negroes do in the cake walk.”
²²

After briefly working for his wife's family, Preston turned his attention to higher pursuits. By 1905 he was contributing pieces to newspapers and establishing himself as a playwright. His plays were a garish parade of socialites, bounders, frauds, thieves, and gold diggers. Unhappy husbands tried to hang themselves. Long-lost lovers were reunited. The embraces were always “passionate,” the kisses unfailingly “violent.” A pistol placed on the mantel on page six was fired by page thirteen.
²³

Some of his work was performed with amateur actors from his social circle, providing them an excuse to don fancy costumes and grope one another, but several plays were produced on Broadway. The reviews were never positive. His most successful play,
The Turning Point
, merged highsociety comedy with Appalachian melodrama, as a member of the old Virginia gentry refuses to sell a railroad right-of-way to a Northern businessman intent on mining the area's coal, forms a competing company of his own, and then wins the heart of a fetching New York City heiress. The play also borrowed some of its best lines from Oscar Wilde's
An Ideal Husband
. As controversy raged, Gibson took the stage during one performance and addressed the audience, attributing any similarity in language to “the result of uniform human experiences” and comparing himself to Shakespeare and Rostand.
²⁴

Although his plays revealed some capacity for self-awareness, Gibson seemed unable to avoid becoming the kind of person he wrote about. He divorced Minna Field in 1907, moved back to Washington, and married another heiress in 1909. His best man was Reginald Vanderbilt, the Commodore's grandson, and among the notables in attendance were Justice White, Senator Elihu Root, and Admiral Dewey. After six years, two children, a dozen plays, hundreds of tea dances, and a series of publicly aired indiscretions involving a young woman in Baltimore, Gibson divorced again.
²⁵

As Gibson's second marriage dissolved, he found a new source of focus and meaning in his life: the war in Europe. He raised money for French and Serbian relief, and after a German U-boat sank the
Lusitania
in 1915, he underwent training in trench warfare at Plattsburgh, New York, with a group of prominent New York, Philadelphia, and Boston businessmen. In early 1917 Gibson headed to France, volunteered for the ambulance corps, and found himself on the Western Front in the Aisne Valley, sixty miles from Paris, just as the French were mounting a major offensive. Through the “stupendous disemboweling roar of the artillery,” the “cauldron of blood and mud,” Gibson worked ninety hours at a time without sleep, bringing the wounded to surgeons he described as “literally dripping.” The soldiers he saw had holes in their heads, chests, guts, and limbs; they could not stop crying from the mustard bombs and were coughing and vomiting blood from other gas attacks that clouded the valley. The shelling knocked him down and dented his helmet. While Gibson and a French soldier watched a dogfight overhead, “a piece of shrapnel about as big as a saucer simply cut [the Frenchman's] head off as he stood facing me, just as though an axe had done it.”
²⁶

Occasionally Gibson thought of his previous life. Firing antiaircraft guns at German spotter planes reminded him of “shooting quail in South Carolina.” But most of his experiences were entirely new. Many of the soldiers participating in the offensive had come from Senegal and other African colonies, rushing from the trenches armed only with grenades and long knives. “It seemed so curious, in a way, to go up to one of these fellows, a black Algerian, covered with mud, who had fallen or slipped down and help him up and have him put his arm over your shoulder,” Gibson wrote. “At the moment one only thought of him as one of your own.”
²⁷

Like his father, Gibson returned from war a hero. The French awarded him the Croix de Guerre. Back in the United States, he refused an army captain's commission and in 1918 enlisted in the Marines as a thirty-eight-year-old private. Working as a recruiter, he broke records by convincing 3,200 men to enlist during a two-week drive; a speech he gave at a New York theater raised $163,000 in Liberty Loans. A major press published his war memoir,
Battering the Boche
, which received the best reviews of his literary career.
²⁸

Poised to leap from society to substance, Gibson instead reverted to form at war's end. In 1919 he eloped to Greenwich, Connecticut, with a Standard Oil heiress who dreamed of being a movie star. Two years later she sailed to Paris and divorced him, complaining that she had married a “flock of outstanding bills.” Sued by creditors and auctioning his possessions, hair receding, mustache gray, Gibson spent years abroad, in Zurich and Deauville, cruising the Mediterranean. By his fourth marriage in 1925, he was a running joke in the society pages. “Preston Gibson gets his name in the headlines again,” wrote one wag. “You guessed it—Boston girl. He knows beans!”
²⁹

Gibson and his wife announced their intention to live in Paris, but they worked their way around the world. Like a character in one of his plays, Gibson resorted to writing bad checks when he was short on cash in Shanghai. He and his wife fled China but were arrested in Vancouver. Over the next year Gibson's Shanghai fraud and the protracted legal battles that followed provided fodder for his last great burst of national publicity, at least until his fourth divorce in 1928.
³⁰

Gibson spent the next decade languishing in a furnished room in New York, old, sick, and poor. He had outlived his two older brothers, one of whom had suffered years of mental illness and the other a bankrupt. He did not know any of his children. Two sons, one of whom was Henry Field, changed their names. When his daughter married in 1934, her stepfather gave her away. In 1937, at age fifty-seven, Gibson died at a veterans hospital in the Bronx. He was remembered as someone who “packed ten lives into one,” a “man with the fatal gift of charm.” Gibson was not a wit, wrote one reporter, nor did he have a “mellifluous voice.” What made him the embodiment of the Smart Set was simple: “Preston Gibson [was] never a bore.” He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
³¹

A
S THE TWENTY-ONE-GUN SALUTE blasted and the Soldier Field crowd waved flags and cheered, Will Rogers cracked a wad of gum in his cheek. The gesture was slow, almost thoughtful—to Henry Field it sounded like a Bushman's clicks. The two men were braving a May morning in Chicago, sitting together on the podium at the opening ceremony of the 1933 world's fair. Just as a dignitary rose to address the crowd, the humorist turned to the anthropologist.

“Hear you work in that marble mausoleum over there,” Rogers said. “Get any kick out of playing with mummies?”

“Sure,” Field answered. “They never say no.”
³²

All day a thick current of visitors flowed through the Hall of the Races of Mankind. For weeks it never stopped. Two long galleries—a procession of bronze statues resting on dark wood pedestals—met at an octagonal room, where a larger-than-life statue, the Unity of Mankind, celebrated the three central races, black, white, and yellow. In the diffused light of the galleries, the statues were warm and tactile. Although they bristled with life, they did not encourage viewers to see similarities between themselves and the figures. Rather, they presented incomplete stories that invited people to fill in the gaps with whatever they thought they knew about Africans, Asians, and Indians—from movies and newsreels, books and magazines, lectures and casual conversation. A “Shilluk Warrior” from the Sudan stood long and lean on one leg, contemplating something that museumgoers could only imagine, his spear stabbing the ground. A “Chinese Jinriksha Coolie” strained at an invisible load. A “Kalahari Bushman” peered off in the distance, pulling back his bow, his prey eternally unseen.
³³

Visitors bought postcards of the sculptures by the thousands, and they paged through a leaflet that Henry Field had prepared with his curator Berthold Laufer. On paper Laufer sought to distinguish “the physical traits acquired by heredity” from “experience and the total complex of habits and thoughts acquired from the group to which we belong.” Laufer spoke of cultural assimilation, something he believed in deeply as an educated German Jew, even four months after Adolf Hitler had taken his oath as chancellor. It was possible for blacks to assimilate in America, he wrote, as long as the “social and legal restriction and segregation that [keep] their race consciousness alive” were eliminated. The only difference would be physical. “Our Negroes belong to the African or ‘black' race and will always remain within this division,” he wrote. “Even intermarriage with whites will not modify their racial characteristics to any marked degree.” The exhibition, however, undermined Laufer's premise: the statues suggested it was impossible to separate physical from cultural traits. The physicality of the sculptures—the narratives inspired by every furrowed brow and flexing muscle—implied character, culture, and difference. The images, reproduced in encyclopedias, atlases, and textbooks, would supply a generation of schoolchildren across the United States with their first introduction to the concept of race. Henry Field's vision rooted race in art and imagination but gave it the authority of science.
³⁴

Day after day Henry Field spent hours giving personal tours of the exhibition to visiting dignitaries. He took special care to show them materials at the end of the hall that illustrated how anthropologists measured racial difference; it could be discerned in the shape and size of the skull, “variations in the outlines and proportions of the body; variations in the shapes of the eyes, nose, chin, and lips; and age changes in dentition.” A series of transparencies “indicate[d] the true skin colors of the human races.” But the sculptures were what everyone had come to see.
³⁵

Field took his time guiding his guests through the exhibition, past the “tiny African Pygmies portray[ing] the seriousness of family life . . . , the African dancing girl, ... a jungle Pavlova ... the merchant from Lhasa, Tibet, wear[ing] the look of the philosopher.” And then, among the busts and heads, Field would see someone familiar: the “Ubangi Woman,” his “gay acquaintance of the Paris boulevards.” Her face was tilted upward, eyes narrowed to a squint, mouth opened wide. “The urge to touch her elongated lower lip has proven irresistible to many visitors,” Field wrote. In time thousands of fingers wore through the bronze patina. “Reminiscent of St. Peter's toe kissed by the faithful in Rome,” it began to shine.
³⁶

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE LITTLE GIRL WAS exhausted. The drive had seemed endless, hours upon hours through small towns on small roads all the way up from Texas. She had gone south with her parents during the war. Her father's employer, the Hudson Mohair Company, had sent him from Massachusetts to train workers at a new mill fifty miles north of San Antonio in the Texas hill country. When the Germans surrendered, the girl stood on her father's shoes and danced. Soon afterward her father finished his job. They bought a Model A Ford that had been on blocks when gasoline was being rationed, and they headed back to New England. They took their time driving up the East Coast, visiting what family they had.
¹

Alone in the backseat, the girl passed the time staring out the window and talking to her teddy bear. They spent a month in central Florida, staying with her mother's sister and her family while the girl finished third grade. They stopped in Washington, D.C., where her mother had grown up; her father tried to get a job with the government, but nothing worked out. The next day they turned off Route 1 and headed into New York City. After staring up at Manhattan's skyscrapers, they crossed the East River and meandered for two hours through Queens. City suburbs gave way to quiet villages along the south shore of Long Island. In Freeport, just shy of Jones Beach and the Atlantic Ocean, they finally reached the house on Cottage Court.

The house was tall and narrow, a relic of the early part of the century when New York's actors would retreat to Freeport when the theaters closed for the summer. As the girl walked inside, her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She could tell something was wrong. It was getting hard to breathe. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke—charred wood. The house seemed to be crumbling from the inside out. After days of boredom, she felt jolted, almost queasy with fear.
²