JANUARY 9 - 12, 2020 PART 3: THE ALLURE AND MAGNETISM OF ROCKWELL KENT

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

Part 3 -- The Allure and Magnetism of Rockwell Kent

January 9-12,  2020

ABOVE – Rockwell and Frances Kent in Greenland about 1930. Photo source.

BELOW – Sea Smoke, photo by Callie Bacon who works at Seward Properties. This week the temperature in Seward has stood between zero and ten degrees, with that fierce North Wind Rockwell Kent wrote about and painted. The wind-chill has been between 10 and 15 below zero. In freezing weather like this, the sea water is warmer than the air, thus what we call sea smoke rising above the whitecaps and whipped around by the wind. On his date 101 years ago, Rockwell and his son experienced this kind of weather while waiting patiently on Fox Island for their host, Lars Matt Olson, to return from Seward. He had left on January 2^nd to get the mail and had been expected to return within a few days. He did finally return on Jan. 11^th. Here’s my post from a year ago this time of year – THIS LINK.

At the time journalist Gladys Baker met Rockwell Kent in 1928 for an interview, life was looking good for both of them. Their careers were on the rise.

Kent had two popular books under his belt, several exhibitions, and had moved into book illustration. New York City was his “Gold Camp,” a place he could venture into various commercial projects that could earn him enough money to build a new home and finance a new adventure. He could be meticulous – a fussy perfectionist – even with his commercial work. All types of his work are collected today. Kent would soon be headed to Greenland. Now married to Frances Lee, Kent kept in touch with Kathleen and his children after the divorce, but his fame caused her to ask him not to visit the children in Stockbridge where she had moved after selling the Vermont farm. It would be too distracting. As David Traxel writes: Remarriage had not stopped Kent’s interest in other women. In fact one of the attractions of marriage seems to have been that it set boundaries to be transcended; it also served as a refuge from which he cold sally forth to explore new territory. Much to Frances’s surprise he continued to conduct affairs with a wide range of beauties. He usually did not try to hide these, but would bring the ladies home, and expect no complaints about it (156).

ABOVE -- From the May 18, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

I’ve read through some of the letters from this period, and Frances does complain. Kent’s responses and justifications seem uncannily similar to those he wrote to Kathleen during1916-1919. A $50,000 inheritance from his mother’s uncle in 1927 -- the Banker estate, combined with the earnings from his art -- put Kent in a comfortable situation. Both he and Frances had traveled to Europe, but Kent returned to pursue his career leaving his wife on her own. When she came home, Kent probably knew he was in a similar situation he’d been in with Kathleen – too many temptations in the “Gold Camp.”  Frances was not like Kathleen. She was much more independent and outspoken and, although she had a child from her previous marriage, she wasn’t tied down to a large family as was Kathleen. She had more options and seemed willing to take them. After Newfoundland, Kent struggled to pursue a career in the city. But his relationship with Hildegarde had put a strain on his marriage.  Fox Island was as much a refuge from that world and his personal problems as anything else. As David Traxel points out, Kent’s passion for nature’s beauty and solitude along with an affinity for risk, is reminiscent of Fredrick Church, John James Audubon and George Catlin. He needed hand-built sanctuaries – his cabins on Monhegan Island and Fox Island, even the small boat he used at Tierra del Fuego. As he had done with Kathleen, he and Frances went searching for the perfect place to build their new sanctuary – a place where could build a wall of thorns around them, as he had promised Kathleen – a place free from the city’s many temptations. They found it at Au Sable Forks in far Upstate New York – far enough away from the temptations of the city. There they built what became a working dairy farm they named Asgaard (Traxel, 157-8). Kent later wrote about their search for their new home in This is My Own (1949), a memoir covering the years 1928-1939.

ABOVE -- Asgaard farm circa 2003. Capra photo

BELOW -- Rockwell Kent's studio cabin at Asgaard circa 2003. Capra photo

At the time of Gladys Baker’s interview with Rockwell Kent in late 1928, her fame was also reaching its peak. Only a few years later she was known worldwide. Over the 1931 New Year’s holiday, Baker felt the need to get out of New York. By this time, she was so well known that it was probably difficult to find the solitude necessary to meet her many deadlines. As the New York correspondent for the Birmingham News-Age Herald, (BN) every week she did a full-page story. She also contributed a column – “Keeping an Eye on Father Knickerbocker” – covering celebrity gossip and theater reviews. Her syndicated articles appeared in many papers across the country. She wrote a monthly article for Psychology and other magazines, but only on assignment. H.L Mencken recently requested a series of articles for The American Mercury. With her small typewriter in it’s cozy case, and a suitcase full of clothes and lists of things to do – she quietly slipped out of her New York studio at 305 West Seventy-Fourth Street that looked over the gardens of the Charles Schwab estate and the Hudson River. She headed south, silently creeping into her old stomping grounds in Jacksonville, Florida where she checked into the Windsor Hotel.  She had work to do and wanted no one to know she was in town.  Baker wrote steadily and in secret through the holiday, and by Jan. 17^th she finally let word slip out that now should could be found at her mother’s home on Riverside Avenue in Jacksonville.

Though she had been born in Brunswick, Georgia in 1899, it was in Jacksonville where her newspaper career began, and where she would eventually die in the home of her brother. After the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, one story says she tried to join the ambulance corps but was turned down. Another article in the March 9, 1930 BN says this beautiful and timid young girl entered the offices of The Florida Metropolis, now The Jacksonville Journal, hoping to find some sort of work to compensate for her rejection from Red Cross canteen service because of her youth. She wanted to contribute to the war effort by writing stories about Red Cross activities. She got the newspaper job, but her friends were skeptical. Gladys belonged to elite Southern society – a popular member of the debutante contingent, as newspapers said. Friends considered her job as a joke and expected her resignation as soon as the novelty of the situation lost interest. But Gladys showed tremendous talent and persistence, and began interviewing and writing profiles.

BELOW – One of Gladys Baker’s early Red Cross stories from the November 11, 1920 Tampa Bay Times.

BELOW -- By 1935 when Baker published this story, she was giving advice about how to conduct a successful interview -- with humorous stories about her experiences.

When Metropolitan opera prima donna Anna Case came to Jacksonville and sequestered herself in the Hotel Windsor, Gladys learned her room number and showed up unannounced. You can throw me out if you want to, she told the famous diva, And I think I would if I were you. But this is my first assignment and I’d like to get a story. Anna Case. The singer was so delighted with the young woman’s audacity that she invited Gladys to join her for breakfast – hot waffles, it was -- and agreed to the interview. The Met was so pleased with the article that they asked the newspaper’s permission to use it on Case’s American concert tour. I have not been able to find that Gladys Baker interview with Anna Case, but it may have been on Feb. 4, 1918 or Feb. 3, 1919 when Case performed in Jacksonville.

ABOVE – Anna Case in 1917. Wikipedia photo.

BELOW – A typical publicity insert you’ll find about Case in various newspapers throughout the United States. This one is from the December 17, 1919 Pantagraph (Bloomington, Illinois).

Case has been called one of the great characters among American opera divas, but one who never gained international fame. She was said to have had a uniquely American approach to opera singing. One source says her voice was one that wouldn’t travel. She was born in New Jersey in 1887, the daughter of a blacksmith, and had no formal training. She was Thomas Edison’s favorite soprano and we have many recordings of her voice. According to her January 18, 1984 obituary in the New York, she debuted at the Met in 1909. Her last appearance there was during the 1919-20 season, after which she toured America and Europe doing 50-60 concerts a year. In 1931 she married music patron Clarence H. Mackay and announced the end of her career, though she occasionally sang at private recitals as Mrs. Clarence H. Mackay. She had a step son, and step daughter who married Irving Berlin.

Gladys Baker’s interview with Anna Case became one of those stepping stones to the young journalist's fame. Another soon after was a profile she wrote of famed newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane, who told her editors that the article was one of the cleverest he had read. It is with early stories like these that Gladys Baker’s career, and perhaps the legend, begins. After the war ended, the Jacksonville newspaper offered her a permanent job. (BN 9/29/29 and 3/9/30). From many accounts, Gladys Baker had a special charm that was difficult to quantify. We see that noted as early as her first marriage to William Holt Oates in 1919. The bride is a beautiful woman with a magnetic personality that has endeared her to countless friends. During the past two years she has been prominently connected with Red Cross and charity work in the publicity line, writing human interest stories that have circulated all over the south, appealing for help for kiddies in want, or any human being in need. (Pensacola News Journal, 12/16/19). Gladys was twenty years old. William Oates, a 27-year-old lawyer, had served in France during the war and had been a prisoner of war in a German camp for several months. 

One source described her conducting an interview: Watching her “be herself” is an answer to some of the possible queries as to how and why she has succeeded so wonderfully in her chosen work. Her attractiveness of appearance, her chic and wholly satisfying choice of things to wear, her poise, her flashing wit, and sage, straight-to-the-mark comments, all may be part of the reason why her celebrities are such willing and happy victims when she goes forth to interview… She has that spontaneous friendliness that puts the other person immediately at ease; that rare ability to efface herself, that makes the other person feel interesting and important, and so give forth his best to the girl who has come to get the best for the readers, in short, Gladys Baker has the qualities, whether inborn or deliberately acquired, that make it possible for her to get people to yield up without a struggle all their habits, yearnings and innermost dreams, their past, present and future – and like to do it!  (BN Jan. 18, 1931).

She wrote poetry as a luxury, she would tell interviewers, and some had been published. She didn’t like to write fiction -- though back in the early 1920’s two serial novels of hers had been published by a New York syndicate. In 1924 Sallie’s Temptations appeared across the country. One newspaper introduced the first installment like this: Sallie is a modern, pretty young creature, with all the emotions and desires you yourself had when you were at that glorious age that lies somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five. Sallie is everywhere. The eyes of the world are upon the ultimate outcome of her moral code. Is she going to weaken her creed of right and wrong and stretch her philosophy to that of the girls who have a good time? Your little girl is just where Sallie is. She must decide for herself. They are all Sallies at heart. Sallie’s experience, put down truthfully from the pages of her life, may help your Sallie’s. Each chapter is complete in itself. Read this week. You will enjoy (Adams County Independent (Littleston, Penn, Jan. 8, 1925). Early on in her career, as the flapper and Bohemian culture began to permeate into the middle class, Gladys Baker learned how to tap into parents’ fears for their vulnerable daughters. Sallie experiences some dangerous (and perhaps ribald) situations that she's able to squirm out of with a degree of dignity.

Baker's marriage to William Oates ended and she wed William Henry Kettig in 1925. In 1937 Gladys married Howard Earle Coffin, who died that same year. In 1942 Gladys married Roy Leonard Patrick who died in 1952. As I mentioned in the last entry, she converted to Catholicism, influenced by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, and wrote a memoir describing that conversion and a novel. Gladys Baker died at her Vermont home in December 1957. 

NOTE – Some of you may be wondering – okay, but what about Rockwell Kent and the interview. I promise you I’ll finish that in the next entry. But Gladys Baker and Anna Case represent some of the fascinating characters circling the world Kent lived in during his rise to fame. Some rabbit holes are worth tripping into – especially if little has been written about the occupants. I have found some websites about Anna Case. More seems to be written about her than about Gladys Baker, but both women and their fame have faded into the fog of history. I find almost nothing written about Gladys Baker except newspaper interviews with her, her articles, and her obituaries. Most of the information I’ve gathered about these women I have not found in books, but in primary sources and a genealogical search.

I’ve titled this series The Allure and Magnetism of Rockwell Kent because this interview one of the best sources to give us valuable and specific clues from an outsider as to what made him so attractive – not just to some women. He was attractive to some men as well.

BELOW -- Dec. 18, 1957 obituary for Gladys Baker Patrick in the Tampa Bay Times.

BELOW -- Dec. 18, 1957 obituary for Gladys Baker in the New York Times.

NEXT ENTRY

PART 4

THE 1928 GLADYS BAKER INTERVIEW WITH ROCKWELL KENT