Early in my journalism career -- 1989, to be exact -- I pitched an idea to my news director at WEOL-AM in Elyria, Ohio, about producing a five-part radio-news series on a relatively new and misunderstood pandemic called AIDS, which had inexplicably surfaced in the rural parts of Lorain County. At the time, the average Joe was convinced that the virus could only be found in metropolitan areas like New York, L.A. and Cleveland. And it could only infect gay men. Or so nearly everybody thought.
My open-minded boss, Jeff Dettmer, intently listened to my many reasons for the series, not the least of which was the appearance of the first nine AIDS cases in the county in the latter half of the 1980s. I also told him that the morticians at the Cowling Funeral Home in ultraliberal Oberlin were refusing to embalm bodies of people who had died of the virus for fear that they also would contract the disease. (Preposterous, right?) But the deal-sealer that gave me the green light to proceed with production on the series was my open access to interview "Rob," a twentysomething-year-old gay man whose case was one of the nine reported to the county's health department. His partner was another.
I met "Rob" on a chilly October evening at his spacious lakefront apartment in a high-rise building in Sheffield Lake. He told me -- between bites of a cheeseburger and cottage cheese -- about the "cocktail" of drugs he was taking to minimize the ravaging effects of the virus. That he had to interrupt our interview several times to run to the bathroom and throw up his dinner only told me that scientists and researchers were worlds away from helping people with AIDS and HIV manage their failing health with any degree of dignity.
"Rob" died a few months after my interview with him. And his partner passed away not long after that. But to meet this couple planted a seed of an idea in my always inquisitive mind that finally would sprout and bloom into my free-to-the-public e-book, "Purple Armadillos: The Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Oddballs of Northeast Ohio's LGBT Community in the 19th and 20th Centuries."
For 21 years, I have toyed with the idea of writing about some of the region's most notable LGBTs and their allies. But I didn't get down to serious business until mid-March of 2009, when I identified nearly 40 people about whom I wanted to research and whose lives I wanted to chronicle. And each of them had to meet three criteria: They had to have lived in Northeast Ohio for at least parts of their lives; their life stories were not only entertaining and worthwhile but educational and inspirational; and they all had to be deceased.
A process of elimination whittled the field down to the 15 chapters that make up this e-book. There's Annie Perkins (Chapter 1), whose mission to make fashion uniform among the sexes in the 19th century is a classic story of lesbian activism long before the Stonewall riots against gays in New York's Greenwich Village in 1969. Stories about Leonard Hanna Jr. (Chapter 2), Langston Hughes (Chapter 4) and Philip Johnson (Chapter 7) clearly show the artistic and/or philanthropic contributions to mainstream society that LGBTs too often are not given enough credit. And the accounts of Gloria Lenihan (Chapter 5), Doris Palmer (Chapter 10) and Hank Berger (Chapter 13) prove that the straight community can be just as supportive of LGBTS as much as LGBTS themselves.
If you call up the "Bibliography" link on the menu, you'll see how many people I need to thank for taking time out of their busy lives to help me with my research. While there are too many to acknowledge in this introduction, I would like to point out a few resources that are immensely helpful to understanding the evolution and history of Northeast Ohio's LGBT community. First, the LGBT Archives at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland offers first-hand accounts of growing up gay in the region, thanks to personal papers, community newsletters and audiotape transcripts. A little-known gem, the Cuyahoga County Archives in Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood, is an excellent source of birth, marriage, death and property records. And public libraries in Cleveland, Akron and Lakewood have been heaven-sent, with their catalogs of old newspapers and high-school yearbooks along with trained staff members to help you pore through them.
So you may be wondering: Why have I called the people in my e-book "purple armadillos?" Three reasons, to be honest.
Reason number 1: Purple -- or, more specifically, lavender -- is considered the universal color of the LGBT community. Its symbolic origin dates to the 1920s, when gay composer Cole Porter included the lyric, “I'm a famous gigolo. And of lavender, my nature's got just a dash in it,” in his song, “I’m a Gigolo.” Lavender is also a combination of pink (for girls) and light blue (for boys).
Reason number 2: Scientific research proves that armadillos -- those sharp-clawed creatures with armored shields -- are the only mammals other than humans that are capable of having sex in the missionary position. A strange, but true, fact.
Reason number 3: The “Purple Armadillo” is a tasty, tropical alcoholic beverage. I share the recipe with you in the next link.
Cheers!
Cris Glaser
Lakewood, Ohio
June 30, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
"The Purple Armadillo"
The Purple Armadillo
1. Fill glass with ice.
2. In a shaker, mix one-and-a-half ounces of rum, a half-ounce of blue curacao and equal parts of sour mix and cranberry juice.
3. Shake vigorously.
4. Pour into chilled glass.
5. Top with lemon-lime soda.
Source: Cunningham, Stephen Kittredge, "Sam Malone’s Black Book: The Drink Recipe Collection for the 21st Century," Sixth Edition, Bartender’s Black Book Corporation, Brockton, Massachusetts, 2003, p. 117.
1. Fill glass with ice.
2. In a shaker, mix one-and-a-half ounces of rum, a half-ounce of blue curacao and equal parts of sour mix and cranberry juice.
3. Shake vigorously.
4. Pour into chilled glass.
5. Top with lemon-lime soda.
Source: Cunningham, Stephen Kittredge, "Sam Malone’s Black Book: The Drink Recipe Collection for the 21st Century," Sixth Edition, Bartender’s Black Book Corporation, Brockton, Massachusetts, 2003, p. 117.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Chapter 1: Anna Perkins
The Fashion Camel of Cleveland
Anna Perkins
1848-1900
The skin-blistering wind whipped off the Lake Erie shoreline on that mid-November afternoon in 1899. The first snowflakes of the season also began to blanket the hub of Cleveland’s commercial district on Euclid Avenue, giving downtown merchants a collective boost of hope that the wintry backdrop would put customers in the spending mood for the approaching holiday-shopping season.
On the southeast quadrant of Public Square, in front of the May Company department store, five-foot-tall “Newspaper Annie” violently stamped her feet on the pavement to ward off frostbite. Although she was clad in her daily garb of a man’s coat of coarse white flax, cotton stockings, sturdy boots and a floppy black hat that covered her ears, she uncontrollably shivered in the freezing elements as she cackled “'Penny Press!' 'Penny Press!' Fourth Edition!” with the piercing, nasal vocals that passersby had come to recognize.
Venerable grocer W.P. Southworth watched the pitiful sight from the window of his bustling Ontario Street market. Feeling sorry for the woman, he marched to her corner and, after a quick exchange of words, escorted her across the street to the E.R. Hull & Dutton clothing store. He then told manager J.C. McWatters that he wanted to buy a man’s overcoat for his frozen charge. “A woman’s cloak wouldn’t interest her, you know,” Southworth announced.
Longtime newspaperman Charles E. Kennedy witnessed the transaction. “I recall the old gentlemen counted out forty dollars for the purchase, and Annie passed from the store with a thick, comfortable, masculine outer garment reaching to the top of her ears and, at the base, covering entirely the white stockings,” reported Kennedy, who was in the store to sell advertising space to McWatters. “By disregarding the jeers of boys, who looked upon her with disapproval, meek little Annie, in her manly costume, pointed the way in Cleveland to greater freedom and comfort in feminine wearing apparel.”
Annie’s reputation as a 19th-century lesbian, feminist and fashion reformer finally had reached its zenith. But to understand her eccentricities is to trace her life back to her Seneca County birthplace of Adams Township about 25 miles southwest of Sandusky.
Born Anna Perkins in the summer of 1848, she was the elder of two daughters of Alva and Cynthia Parmenter Perkins. After the birth of a younger daughter, Fanny, in 1850, the family hitched a wagon and moved their belongings 30 miles east to the quaint Erie County burg of Berlin Heights, where her Massachusetts-born father -- who was known by his neighbors as “Boss” -- ran a thriving broom-making business. Her mother, a New York native, stayed at home and took care of the two girls.
At the same time, humorist Artemus Ward was giving the Perkins’ new hometown its 15 minutes of fame in a series of 1858 articles about the night when “I pitched my tent and enfurled my banner to the breeze in Berlin Hites, Ohio.” One story detailed his chance encounter with the Free Love Community, whose members migrated to the village from the East Coast to endlessly preach about a lifestyle that would rival the hippies’ movement more than a century later. The group’s tenets against marriage and in favor of communing with nature included bathing nude together in a public pond. Berlin Heights’ townsfolk was shocked. Ward empathized, after he set up camp in a field near “the Love Cure,” as the Free Lovers christened their outdoor bathtub. “A ornerer set I have never sawn,” he wrote in his trademark folksy style, complete with intentional misspellings and grammatical errors. “The men’s faces was all covered with hare, and they lookt half-starved to deth. Their pockets was filled with pamplits, and they was barefooted. They sed the Postles didn’t wear boots & why should they? That was their stile of argyment.”
The group’s fashion statement also appalled Ward, especially the women who wore men’s trousers and straw hats festooned with green ribbons. They also carried blue-cotton umbrellas. “I addrest them as follers: You women folk, go back to your lawful husbands, if you’ve got any, and take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful like other wimin,” he wrote. “I pored 4th my indignashun in this way til I got out of breath, when I stopt. I shant go to Berlin Hites again, not if I live to be as old as Methooseler.”
While the Free Lovers didn’t make a favorable impression on Ward, they certainly influenced Anna in her adult years. By 1880, she had attempted to reform the village’s dress code by shamelessly wearing pairs of men’s slacks cut off at the knees and snipping off her hair at the neckline. She also adopted a strictly vegetarian diet of raw fruit, cornbread and graham crackers and relied on hydrotherapy, or “water cures,” to rid her of disease, just like the Free Lovers promoted more than two decades beforehand. Not surprisingly, her sister fled the family homestead in embarrassment, unable to deal with Anna’s decadent behavior.
The way Anna treated her aged parents also stunned the Perkins’ neighbors. On December 9, 1880, Alva died at the age of 83 in a house that Anna refused to keep warm. By July 28, 1882, Cynthia had fallen so ill that Berlin Township’s law-enforcement officers had to forcibly tie up Anna with rope because she threatened to shoot anyone who tried to seek medical help for her mother at the Erie County Infirmary in nearby Perkins Township. A letter to the editor from “a citizen of Berlin Heights” set the record straight in the "Sandusky Daily Register" four days later. “Mrs. Perkins was afraid of Anna and dared not say a word,” the anonymous scribe declared. “Anna tore the roof off of their house and took down the chimney while her mother was lying sick within. It is only a wonder that the old lady did not die. It has been a case of extreme cruelty on the part of Anna toward her mother. And I have not told half of the facts!”
But Anna, all alone, focused on a more pressing matter: her poetry. In 1883, she commissioned Nashville printer W.S. Bailey to produce a limited-run edition of her poem, “What Is It?” Measuring three inches by five inches and protected by a yellow cover, each copy of the four-page work carried a five-cent price tag. Not a bad deal, if Anna’s fashion trend piqued a reader’s interest. In an A-B-A-B-C-C rhyming pattern, the poem tried to explain her mission for a uniform dress style between the sexes:
Is it man or is it woman?
Wonder question, is it -- oh, what?
Seems it nearly like the human --
Fashion’s Camel it is not.
It is this perplexes us --
This perchance that vexes us.
Anna broke from her rhyming scheme three-fourths of the way through the piece by placing the last five stanzas under the heading, “My Plea.” Switching to an A-A-B-B structure, she envisioned a society free of the restrictive garments of the late 1880s. A few readers even interpreted her words as a one-woman campaign for public nudity.
Yes, I know you think it queer,
That in this attire I appear;
But this suit is good and grand --
Leaves me free in foot and hand.
I can take the open air --
Be the weather foul or fair.
I can climb, and jump, and run,
Be it work, or be it fun.
Nature’s costume I desire --
Give me simple, grand attire.
Every muscle free to lay,
Clad in Nature’s easy way.
Costume should never impede,
But conform to human need.
Sack and trousers is the suit, --
All objections I refute.
Best for woman as for man,
Like to each was Nature’s plan;
It is easy, light and free --
Just the suit I know for me.
After her 74-year-old mother’s death in the infirmary on June 1, 1883, Anna was practically homeless for the next four years. The Perkins’ home had fallen into such disrepair that she “lived in a piano box in a gravel pit behind A.B. Phillips & Sons’ fruit farm” on East Main Street. She often returned to her makeshift hut to find that village hoodlums had either toppled or demolished it, said 80-year-old Irvin Schatz, the owner of the Village Basket retail shop and treasurer of the Berlin Heights Historical Society.
Thirty-nine-year-old Anna had endured enough of being the town outcast. In the summer of 1887, she scraped together a $1.50 fare, hopped on a streetcar and made her way to the Ceylon Junction depot three miles north of Berlin Heights. She then boarded the eastbound #200 interurban train for a one-way, 75-mile trip to Cleveland on the Lake Erie Electric Railway. After sitting through stops in Beulah Beach, Lorain and Rocky River, she would debut her plans for fashion reform to a more open-minded audience in the big city. Or so she thought.
From the moment she stepped off the train at the Bolivar Street depot, Anna was met with furrowed eyebrows because of her seemingly odd choice of attire and hairstyle. But she ignored the stared from the natives, who thought she resembled more of a circus act than the new girl in town. And she set out to find a one-room apartment at 385 Ontario St., the first in a string of sparsely furnished dwellings she rented during the rest of the century.
Anna’s proximity to Public Square made it convenient for her to land a job as an independent “news agent” for the "Cleveland Penny Press." Competing with teenage boys in a morning scramble to meet the horse-drawn delivery truck, she paid a penny for every two copies she thought she could sell. She then scanned the front page for the boldest headlines, before slinging her news bag over her shoulder and taking her post on the southeast side of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. At ear-splitting decibels, she screamed the news of the day and charged each customer a penny for a copy, doubling her investment in the process. To make the venture more lucrative, she cradled copies of “What Is It?” in one arm for any interested buyer. “'Penny Press!' Poems, two cents!” became her daily mantra.
At first, downtown pedestrians ridiculed and harassed Anna for her appearance, The cops who worked the Public Square beat arrested her at least once for challenging Victorian Age mores on clothing. But in time, she earned tolerance from her 238,000 fellow Clevelanders, who came to know her as “Newspaper Annie.” If anybody dared to question her fashion sense, she simply turned the other way and bellowed her sales calls even louder.
When she wasn’t barking out headlines, Anna occupied her time as an orator for both the Sorosis and Franklin clubs. Founded in New York City in 1868, the Sorosis catered to women who promoted the arts, literature and science. The coed Franklin group served as a forum for debates on such topics as economics, public policy and the role of women in society. Anna often pitched in her two cents in discussions on the Free Love movement that she admired during her Berlin Heights days.
But a cloud of lies and half-truths shrouded the rest of her personal life. For example, Anna concocted a sob story about how her parents died when she was a young girl, even though she was a 38-year-old spinster at the time of her mother’s death. She also tweaked the spelling of her name to “Ana Perkin” or the more peculiar “Ana Purkin.” And between 1889 and 1895, she hid her sexual orientation by telling the publishers of the annual Cleveland Directory -- a predecessor to the modern-day telephone book -- that she was married, although she could produce no document to back her claim.
Nearly year after year, Anna packed up her belongings and moved from one dingy apartment to another. From her Ontario Street digs, she lived for a couple years in “the saloon district” near George Davies’ watering hole at 652 Detroit St. (The busy thoroughfare became Detroit Avenue during a citywide street-name overhaul in 1906.) She then uprooted herself to a cramped room on old Race Street south of where Progressive Field is today. In an apparent yen to live by the lake, she subsequently rented a room for a year at 83 Davenport St. near the shoreline before relocating back to Alcohol Alley in 1899 to yet another dreary space at 171 Detroit St., just east of what is now West 25th Street and near the banks of the Cuyahoga River.
No matter where Anna called home, neighbors vouched that her only worldly possessions consisted of a bed, tin cup, eating utensils, small oil stove and, of course, a meager wardrobe of men’s clothes. That she scrubbed her room with soap and water every day was common knowledge. And her subsistence on raw fruit, crackers and cold water provided juicy gossip. Which takes us back to that brisk, mid-November day in 1899, when the generous W.P. Stallworth laid out $40 for her brand, new overcoat.
The looming afternoon snowstorm signaled the start of weeks of frigid weather during the 1899-1900 winter season. Even the coat couldn’t keep Anna from getting sick, despite her arguments that hydropathic therapy would cleanse her body of disease. By the middle of January, just a couple weeks after the dawn of the 20th century, she was bedridden with a raging 104-degree temperature. Yet, she refused help from her neighbors, who offered to rush her to the hospital.
For two weeks, Anna’s condition deteriorated so rapidly that her physician, L.B. Tuckerman, ordered her to check into St. Alexis Hospital on Broadway Avenue. On Monday, January 29, he diagnosed her in the last stages of typhoid fever, which is caused by a deadly bacteria that is transmitted by ingesting feces-contaminated food or water. But stubborn Anna declined medication and any meals that contained meat or vegetables.
Still, to the nurses’ surprise, her health started to improve. By Thursday, February 1, the fever that had completely left Anna flat on her back fell a few degrees. Shortly before 7 p.m., with two nuns keeping vigil in her room, Anna drifted off to sleep. But her condition suddenly shifted into reverse. Another St. Alexis doctor, S.D. Trowbridge, pronounced her dead at 9:30 p.m., and her body was transported to the undertakers of the Black & Wright Funeral Home at 142 Central Ave. to prepare for burial. Death records erroneously listed her age as 45 years old, another fib she consistently spread.
Anna’s demise made the front page of the next day’s "Plain Dealer," the same newspaper that she tried to outsell in nearly 13 years as a "Press" vendor. The headline to the story, which jumped to single columns on two other pages, screamed, “Ana Perkin’s Life Work Done,” with sub-headlines that characterized her as a “quaint character” who “tried to reform the world.” A pen-and-ink caricature of her dressed in men’s clothes, with a shoulder bag of newspapers slung over her left arm and a stack of poems tucked under her right, accompanied the article.
Toward the end of the byline-free piece, Lieutenant John Burns of the Cleveland Police Department’s Central Bureau described Anna as a “man-hater.” “As long as she has been known here in Cleveland, she has never formed masculine acquaintances,” the officer said. “She always lived by herself and usually in some small and miserable apartment.”
Burns also revealed one of Anna’s pet peeves of which most Clevelanders were not aware: She hated to be photographed. “Snapshot fiends were her special enemies,” he said. “If she noticed an amateur photographer endeavoring to take her picture, she would first do all she could to avoid it. If that failed, she would go for the photographer. I have heard that she made many a young photographer empty his camera of the plate on which was her photo exposure.”
In a fit of rage another time, Anna confronted a group of high-society ladies, who managed to get their hand-gloved mitts on a stray photograph of her image. “She noticed them and started for the pictures,” Burns said. “They retreated into one of the large stores in the neighborhood, and she followed. There was quite a scene in the store, but (she) came out victorious.”
One of Anna’s last wishes requested that her neighbors give Tuckerman the $15 she had saved to help defray her funeral costs. She also wanted to be buried next to her parents. So on Tuesday, February 6, she left Cleveland the same way she arrived: on a Lake Erie Railway interurban. Only this time, she was westbound, first to the Ceylon Junction railway station, then to Berlin Heights.
The next day, revered pastor and noted Erie County historian Hudson Tuttle led a 3 p.m. service at the village’s First Congregational Church at the corner of East Main and Lake streets. Unbelievably, despite all the torment and scorn that Anna endured before she skipped town 13 years beforehand, church records showed that the townspeople turned out in droves for the memorial to see the body of the legendary reformer for themselves. The church choir also sang spirituals to accompany Anna’s “passing to the great beyond,” the "Plain Dealer" reported.
Clevelanders also remembered “the newspaper girl,” who had created a stir when she rolled into town in 1887 with a passion to change fashion norms. At their annual elections meeting on February 14, members of Anna’s beloved Franklin Club met to vote for and swear in John Daykins as their president. As he accepted the honor, he devoted a part of his victory speech to “Newspaper Annie.” “As a society seeking social progress in all directions, we cannot help to admire the steadfastness with which she stood by in her convictions as a social reformer,” he told the roomful of members. “She was a shining example of all progressive people for the sincerity of truth in which she followed her ideals, loving martyrdom rather than conventional subjections.”
---
Anna Perkins was buried in an unmarked potter’s grave beside her parents at West End Cemetery on West Main Street in Berlin Heights. She was 51 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
Anna Perkins
1848-1900
The skin-blistering wind whipped off the Lake Erie shoreline on that mid-November afternoon in 1899. The first snowflakes of the season also began to blanket the hub of Cleveland’s commercial district on Euclid Avenue, giving downtown merchants a collective boost of hope that the wintry backdrop would put customers in the spending mood for the approaching holiday-shopping season.
On the southeast quadrant of Public Square, in front of the May Company department store, five-foot-tall “Newspaper Annie” violently stamped her feet on the pavement to ward off frostbite. Although she was clad in her daily garb of a man’s coat of coarse white flax, cotton stockings, sturdy boots and a floppy black hat that covered her ears, she uncontrollably shivered in the freezing elements as she cackled “'Penny Press!' 'Penny Press!' Fourth Edition!” with the piercing, nasal vocals that passersby had come to recognize.
Venerable grocer W.P. Southworth watched the pitiful sight from the window of his bustling Ontario Street market. Feeling sorry for the woman, he marched to her corner and, after a quick exchange of words, escorted her across the street to the E.R. Hull & Dutton clothing store. He then told manager J.C. McWatters that he wanted to buy a man’s overcoat for his frozen charge. “A woman’s cloak wouldn’t interest her, you know,” Southworth announced.
Longtime newspaperman Charles E. Kennedy witnessed the transaction. “I recall the old gentlemen counted out forty dollars for the purchase, and Annie passed from the store with a thick, comfortable, masculine outer garment reaching to the top of her ears and, at the base, covering entirely the white stockings,” reported Kennedy, who was in the store to sell advertising space to McWatters. “By disregarding the jeers of boys, who looked upon her with disapproval, meek little Annie, in her manly costume, pointed the way in Cleveland to greater freedom and comfort in feminine wearing apparel.”
Annie’s reputation as a 19th-century lesbian, feminist and fashion reformer finally had reached its zenith. But to understand her eccentricities is to trace her life back to her Seneca County birthplace of Adams Township about 25 miles southwest of Sandusky.
Born Anna Perkins in the summer of 1848, she was the elder of two daughters of Alva and Cynthia Parmenter Perkins. After the birth of a younger daughter, Fanny, in 1850, the family hitched a wagon and moved their belongings 30 miles east to the quaint Erie County burg of Berlin Heights, where her Massachusetts-born father -- who was known by his neighbors as “Boss” -- ran a thriving broom-making business. Her mother, a New York native, stayed at home and took care of the two girls.
At the same time, humorist Artemus Ward was giving the Perkins’ new hometown its 15 minutes of fame in a series of 1858 articles about the night when “I pitched my tent and enfurled my banner to the breeze in Berlin Hites, Ohio.” One story detailed his chance encounter with the Free Love Community, whose members migrated to the village from the East Coast to endlessly preach about a lifestyle that would rival the hippies’ movement more than a century later. The group’s tenets against marriage and in favor of communing with nature included bathing nude together in a public pond. Berlin Heights’ townsfolk was shocked. Ward empathized, after he set up camp in a field near “the Love Cure,” as the Free Lovers christened their outdoor bathtub. “A ornerer set I have never sawn,” he wrote in his trademark folksy style, complete with intentional misspellings and grammatical errors. “The men’s faces was all covered with hare, and they lookt half-starved to deth. Their pockets was filled with pamplits, and they was barefooted. They sed the Postles didn’t wear boots & why should they? That was their stile of argyment.”
The group’s fashion statement also appalled Ward, especially the women who wore men’s trousers and straw hats festooned with green ribbons. They also carried blue-cotton umbrellas. “I addrest them as follers: You women folk, go back to your lawful husbands, if you’ve got any, and take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful like other wimin,” he wrote. “I pored 4th my indignashun in this way til I got out of breath, when I stopt. I shant go to Berlin Hites again, not if I live to be as old as Methooseler.”
While the Free Lovers didn’t make a favorable impression on Ward, they certainly influenced Anna in her adult years. By 1880, she had attempted to reform the village’s dress code by shamelessly wearing pairs of men’s slacks cut off at the knees and snipping off her hair at the neckline. She also adopted a strictly vegetarian diet of raw fruit, cornbread and graham crackers and relied on hydrotherapy, or “water cures,” to rid her of disease, just like the Free Lovers promoted more than two decades beforehand. Not surprisingly, her sister fled the family homestead in embarrassment, unable to deal with Anna’s decadent behavior.
The way Anna treated her aged parents also stunned the Perkins’ neighbors. On December 9, 1880, Alva died at the age of 83 in a house that Anna refused to keep warm. By July 28, 1882, Cynthia had fallen so ill that Berlin Township’s law-enforcement officers had to forcibly tie up Anna with rope because she threatened to shoot anyone who tried to seek medical help for her mother at the Erie County Infirmary in nearby Perkins Township. A letter to the editor from “a citizen of Berlin Heights” set the record straight in the "Sandusky Daily Register" four days later. “Mrs. Perkins was afraid of Anna and dared not say a word,” the anonymous scribe declared. “Anna tore the roof off of their house and took down the chimney while her mother was lying sick within. It is only a wonder that the old lady did not die. It has been a case of extreme cruelty on the part of Anna toward her mother. And I have not told half of the facts!”
But Anna, all alone, focused on a more pressing matter: her poetry. In 1883, she commissioned Nashville printer W.S. Bailey to produce a limited-run edition of her poem, “What Is It?” Measuring three inches by five inches and protected by a yellow cover, each copy of the four-page work carried a five-cent price tag. Not a bad deal, if Anna’s fashion trend piqued a reader’s interest. In an A-B-A-B-C-C rhyming pattern, the poem tried to explain her mission for a uniform dress style between the sexes:
Is it man or is it woman?
Wonder question, is it -- oh, what?
Seems it nearly like the human --
Fashion’s Camel it is not.
It is this perplexes us --
This perchance that vexes us.
Anna broke from her rhyming scheme three-fourths of the way through the piece by placing the last five stanzas under the heading, “My Plea.” Switching to an A-A-B-B structure, she envisioned a society free of the restrictive garments of the late 1880s. A few readers even interpreted her words as a one-woman campaign for public nudity.
Yes, I know you think it queer,
That in this attire I appear;
But this suit is good and grand --
Leaves me free in foot and hand.
I can take the open air --
Be the weather foul or fair.
I can climb, and jump, and run,
Be it work, or be it fun.
Nature’s costume I desire --
Give me simple, grand attire.
Every muscle free to lay,
Clad in Nature’s easy way.
Costume should never impede,
But conform to human need.
Sack and trousers is the suit, --
All objections I refute.
Best for woman as for man,
Like to each was Nature’s plan;
It is easy, light and free --
Just the suit I know for me.
After her 74-year-old mother’s death in the infirmary on June 1, 1883, Anna was practically homeless for the next four years. The Perkins’ home had fallen into such disrepair that she “lived in a piano box in a gravel pit behind A.B. Phillips & Sons’ fruit farm” on East Main Street. She often returned to her makeshift hut to find that village hoodlums had either toppled or demolished it, said 80-year-old Irvin Schatz, the owner of the Village Basket retail shop and treasurer of the Berlin Heights Historical Society.
Thirty-nine-year-old Anna had endured enough of being the town outcast. In the summer of 1887, she scraped together a $1.50 fare, hopped on a streetcar and made her way to the Ceylon Junction depot three miles north of Berlin Heights. She then boarded the eastbound #200 interurban train for a one-way, 75-mile trip to Cleveland on the Lake Erie Electric Railway. After sitting through stops in Beulah Beach, Lorain and Rocky River, she would debut her plans for fashion reform to a more open-minded audience in the big city. Or so she thought.
From the moment she stepped off the train at the Bolivar Street depot, Anna was met with furrowed eyebrows because of her seemingly odd choice of attire and hairstyle. But she ignored the stared from the natives, who thought she resembled more of a circus act than the new girl in town. And she set out to find a one-room apartment at 385 Ontario St., the first in a string of sparsely furnished dwellings she rented during the rest of the century.
Anna’s proximity to Public Square made it convenient for her to land a job as an independent “news agent” for the "Cleveland Penny Press." Competing with teenage boys in a morning scramble to meet the horse-drawn delivery truck, she paid a penny for every two copies she thought she could sell. She then scanned the front page for the boldest headlines, before slinging her news bag over her shoulder and taking her post on the southeast side of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. At ear-splitting decibels, she screamed the news of the day and charged each customer a penny for a copy, doubling her investment in the process. To make the venture more lucrative, she cradled copies of “What Is It?” in one arm for any interested buyer. “'Penny Press!' Poems, two cents!” became her daily mantra.
At first, downtown pedestrians ridiculed and harassed Anna for her appearance, The cops who worked the Public Square beat arrested her at least once for challenging Victorian Age mores on clothing. But in time, she earned tolerance from her 238,000 fellow Clevelanders, who came to know her as “Newspaper Annie.” If anybody dared to question her fashion sense, she simply turned the other way and bellowed her sales calls even louder.
When she wasn’t barking out headlines, Anna occupied her time as an orator for both the Sorosis and Franklin clubs. Founded in New York City in 1868, the Sorosis catered to women who promoted the arts, literature and science. The coed Franklin group served as a forum for debates on such topics as economics, public policy and the role of women in society. Anna often pitched in her two cents in discussions on the Free Love movement that she admired during her Berlin Heights days.
But a cloud of lies and half-truths shrouded the rest of her personal life. For example, Anna concocted a sob story about how her parents died when she was a young girl, even though she was a 38-year-old spinster at the time of her mother’s death. She also tweaked the spelling of her name to “Ana Perkin” or the more peculiar “Ana Purkin.” And between 1889 and 1895, she hid her sexual orientation by telling the publishers of the annual Cleveland Directory -- a predecessor to the modern-day telephone book -- that she was married, although she could produce no document to back her claim.
Nearly year after year, Anna packed up her belongings and moved from one dingy apartment to another. From her Ontario Street digs, she lived for a couple years in “the saloon district” near George Davies’ watering hole at 652 Detroit St. (The busy thoroughfare became Detroit Avenue during a citywide street-name overhaul in 1906.) She then uprooted herself to a cramped room on old Race Street south of where Progressive Field is today. In an apparent yen to live by the lake, she subsequently rented a room for a year at 83 Davenport St. near the shoreline before relocating back to Alcohol Alley in 1899 to yet another dreary space at 171 Detroit St., just east of what is now West 25th Street and near the banks of the Cuyahoga River.
No matter where Anna called home, neighbors vouched that her only worldly possessions consisted of a bed, tin cup, eating utensils, small oil stove and, of course, a meager wardrobe of men’s clothes. That she scrubbed her room with soap and water every day was common knowledge. And her subsistence on raw fruit, crackers and cold water provided juicy gossip. Which takes us back to that brisk, mid-November day in 1899, when the generous W.P. Stallworth laid out $40 for her brand, new overcoat.
The looming afternoon snowstorm signaled the start of weeks of frigid weather during the 1899-1900 winter season. Even the coat couldn’t keep Anna from getting sick, despite her arguments that hydropathic therapy would cleanse her body of disease. By the middle of January, just a couple weeks after the dawn of the 20th century, she was bedridden with a raging 104-degree temperature. Yet, she refused help from her neighbors, who offered to rush her to the hospital.
For two weeks, Anna’s condition deteriorated so rapidly that her physician, L.B. Tuckerman, ordered her to check into St. Alexis Hospital on Broadway Avenue. On Monday, January 29, he diagnosed her in the last stages of typhoid fever, which is caused by a deadly bacteria that is transmitted by ingesting feces-contaminated food or water. But stubborn Anna declined medication and any meals that contained meat or vegetables.
Still, to the nurses’ surprise, her health started to improve. By Thursday, February 1, the fever that had completely left Anna flat on her back fell a few degrees. Shortly before 7 p.m., with two nuns keeping vigil in her room, Anna drifted off to sleep. But her condition suddenly shifted into reverse. Another St. Alexis doctor, S.D. Trowbridge, pronounced her dead at 9:30 p.m., and her body was transported to the undertakers of the Black & Wright Funeral Home at 142 Central Ave. to prepare for burial. Death records erroneously listed her age as 45 years old, another fib she consistently spread.
Anna’s demise made the front page of the next day’s "Plain Dealer," the same newspaper that she tried to outsell in nearly 13 years as a "Press" vendor. The headline to the story, which jumped to single columns on two other pages, screamed, “Ana Perkin’s Life Work Done,” with sub-headlines that characterized her as a “quaint character” who “tried to reform the world.” A pen-and-ink caricature of her dressed in men’s clothes, with a shoulder bag of newspapers slung over her left arm and a stack of poems tucked under her right, accompanied the article.
Toward the end of the byline-free piece, Lieutenant John Burns of the Cleveland Police Department’s Central Bureau described Anna as a “man-hater.” “As long as she has been known here in Cleveland, she has never formed masculine acquaintances,” the officer said. “She always lived by herself and usually in some small and miserable apartment.”
Burns also revealed one of Anna’s pet peeves of which most Clevelanders were not aware: She hated to be photographed. “Snapshot fiends were her special enemies,” he said. “If she noticed an amateur photographer endeavoring to take her picture, she would first do all she could to avoid it. If that failed, she would go for the photographer. I have heard that she made many a young photographer empty his camera of the plate on which was her photo exposure.”
In a fit of rage another time, Anna confronted a group of high-society ladies, who managed to get their hand-gloved mitts on a stray photograph of her image. “She noticed them and started for the pictures,” Burns said. “They retreated into one of the large stores in the neighborhood, and she followed. There was quite a scene in the store, but (she) came out victorious.”
One of Anna’s last wishes requested that her neighbors give Tuckerman the $15 she had saved to help defray her funeral costs. She also wanted to be buried next to her parents. So on Tuesday, February 6, she left Cleveland the same way she arrived: on a Lake Erie Railway interurban. Only this time, she was westbound, first to the Ceylon Junction railway station, then to Berlin Heights.
The next day, revered pastor and noted Erie County historian Hudson Tuttle led a 3 p.m. service at the village’s First Congregational Church at the corner of East Main and Lake streets. Unbelievably, despite all the torment and scorn that Anna endured before she skipped town 13 years beforehand, church records showed that the townspeople turned out in droves for the memorial to see the body of the legendary reformer for themselves. The church choir also sang spirituals to accompany Anna’s “passing to the great beyond,” the "Plain Dealer" reported.
Clevelanders also remembered “the newspaper girl,” who had created a stir when she rolled into town in 1887 with a passion to change fashion norms. At their annual elections meeting on February 14, members of Anna’s beloved Franklin Club met to vote for and swear in John Daykins as their president. As he accepted the honor, he devoted a part of his victory speech to “Newspaper Annie.” “As a society seeking social progress in all directions, we cannot help to admire the steadfastness with which she stood by in her convictions as a social reformer,” he told the roomful of members. “She was a shining example of all progressive people for the sincerity of truth in which she followed her ideals, loving martyrdom rather than conventional subjections.”
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Anna Perkins was buried in an unmarked potter’s grave beside her parents at West End Cemetery on West Main Street in Berlin Heights. She was 51 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
Chapter 2: Leonard Hanna Jr.
The Gentle Giant of the Jolly Set
Leonard Hanna Jr.
1889-1957
To liven the mood at one of Leonard Hanna’s many late-night parties in early 1934, a reveler on the star-studded guest list turned up the volume on the radio in the industrialist’s swanky New York City apartment. The strains of a woeful, country-western tune filled the room to the horror of Cole Porter, who bemoaned the song as sheer drivel with a monotonous melody and senseless lyrics. So the composer of such American-songbook standards of the ‘30s like “Night & Day” and “Don’t Fence Me In” plopped himself in front of Leonard’s sleek, black grand piano and started to improvise his own burlesque version of the ditty.
As Porter revamped the chords and reworked a campy storyline into the song, actor Monty Woolley tiptoed into the master bedroom to retrieve a morning coat from Leonard’s closet. He then picked up a silver tray on a hallway table and made his grand entrance into the living room portraying a butler. By now, he had memorized the lyrics that Porter had just ad-libbed: "Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch to-day-ay, Madam." Everyone burst into gut-splitting laughter and raucous applause.
“Miss Otis Regrets,” about a servant conveying the last words of a proper society lady who’s hanged for murdering her seducer, would become a huge Porter hit by October of that year. And Leonard -- a reserved wallflower at his own soirees -- quietly marveled at the talents of his close-knit collection of fellow gay comrades. “The extraordinary occurrences at his parties were created by other people,” wrote "Cleveland Press" society columnist Winsor French in a 1957 tribute to his longtime companion. “Leonard was no exhibitionist. He merely supplied the background and reveled in what it produced.”
Success and wealth surrounded Leonard all his life. Born on November 5, 1889, on Cleveland’s West Side, Leonard Colton Hanna Jr. was the only child of Leonard Colton Sr. and his second wife, Coralie Walker Hanna. His grandfather, Leonard, and great-uncle, Robert, made millions of dollars in profits in the wholesale grocery trade, then the manufacturing of Lake Erie steamships. His father -- a licensed physician -- and uncles Marcus Alonzo and Howard “Melville” partnered in 1885 to found M.A. Hanna & Company, which became one of the Great Lakes region’s preeminent iron-ore, coal-mining and shipping firms. (Marcus, a staunch Republican, later leaped into politics by managing William McKinley’s successful presidential campaign in 1896 and representing Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 1897 until his death of typhoid fever in 1904.)
The Hanna family fortune allowed Leonard Jr. the luxury of an intensive college-preparatory education at the tony University School in University Heights from 1900 to 1904 and at Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1909. On holiday breaks and during the summer, he retreated to his parents’ 40-room, yellow-brick mansion at 2717 Euclid Ave. on Cleveland’s famed Millionaires’ Row. With its fluted Corinthian pillars, double-armed grand staircase and Chinese gingko trees that swayed on the grounds, the Hanna home stood next to stately manors owned by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, arc-light inventor Charles F. Brush and Western Union Telegraph founder Jeptha Wade. Con artist Cassie Chadwick also lived on the boulevard, even as she passed herself off to bankers as the illegitimate daughter of steel mogul Andrew Carnegie.
In 1909, Leonard entered Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met Woolley, Porter and one in a parade of Porter’s lovers, Howard Sturges. All three men also came from privileged backgrounds: Woolley was the son of a New York businessman, who owned the chic Marie Antoinette Hotel on Broadway; Porter’s largesse came from his grandfather, who made a killing on the timber industry in Indiana; and Sturges was a Boston-born socialite, who tapped into his family’s treasure chest to afford a Yale education. And they all took advantage of a newfound freedom from their families to immerse themselves in a secretive gay lifestyle.
Because homosexuality was still taboo in mainstream society, Leonard tried to disguise his sexual orientation from straight classmates by joining macho organizations, like the Sword and Gun Club. He pledged membership in Delta Kappa Epsilon, whose candidates “combined the most equal parts of the gentleman, the school and the jolly good fellow.” By his senior year, the Class of 1913 elected him its treasurer. And in a rare display of extroverted frivolity, he once agreed to play a bit part in a fraternity musical that Porter had written.
Life after graduation proved just as closeted. Leonard returned to Cleveland to work in his father’s office for a few months before learning the ropes of the steel industry with internships at Republic Iron & Steel plants in Youngstown and Birmingham, Alabama. The company also sent him to study ore ranges in both Michigan and the Mesaba region of Minnesota.
But World War I interrupted his training. On June 5, 1917, Leonard began a 20-month enlistment in the U.S. Army for which he was stationed in Europe as a first lieutenant in its aviation division. He was later assigned to its Motor Transport Corps until he was honorably discharged on February 5, 1919, nearly three months after the war officially ended.
Upon his discharge, Leonard’s father and uncles made him a partner in M.A. Hanna, appointing him to the company’s board of directors and giving him managerial duties in its pig-iron division. He eventually held several offices, including vice-president and member of the firm’s executive committee.
On March 23, 1919, Leonard Sr. died, leaving behind a $3.6 million estate. His will bequeathed one-third of the money to Coralie, while the rest was equally divided between his son and two daughters, Jean and Fannie, whom he fathered from his first marriage to the former Fanny Wilson Mann, who died on July 11, 1885. Now that Leonard Jr. was independently wealthy, he stopped making daily treks to Hanna headquarters, although he remained one of its officers for the rest of his life.
He turned his attention to investments, none of which was more important than the stock purchase he made on December 6, 1923. Acting on a hunch, Leonard paid nearly $110,000 for 1,350 common shares of the little-known Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company. A year later, the New York-based firm changed its name to International Business Machines, or IBM. Yes, that IBM. The investment would balloon to $8.8 million by the time of Leonard’s death 34 years later, thanks to dividends, splits and additional purchases of the company’s stock.
On a train ride to New York in 1925, 36-year-old Leonard contemplated his growing net worth. Coincidentally, Cleveland attorney Harold T. Clark, who handled the old man’s estate, was booked on the same train. Leonard called him into his cabin to ask for advice. “I know it’s not going to be good for me to have more money than I need, money which I have not earned,” he told Clark. “I want to set aside some property so I can’t touch it, and it will be best used for good.”
The seed of an idea had sprouted: Leonard would support charities and cultural institutions with his inheritance. The Cleveland Museum of Art would become his first major beneficiary because he had served on its advisory council since 1914 and as one of its trustees since 1920. While the idea was admirable and appreciated, it caught a few insiders, including the museum’s directors, off guard. “He knew nothing about art. He had no training but he became very interested,” said William Robinson, the museum’s curator of modern European art, in a 2008 interview with Salt Lake City public-radio station KUED. “He collected Van Goghs and Cezannes and Picassos. Amazing things. And he was totally self-taught. He became one of the greatest collectors of modern art in the world.”
To say the least. Leonard’s purchase of Picasso’s "Figures in Pink" started him on a lifelong shopping spree. From Seurat’s "Café-concert" and Renoir’s "Mademoiselle la Caux" to El Greco’s "Crucifixion" and Aretino’s "Virgin and Child With Angels," his donations of 70 oil, pastel and watercolor masterpieces through the years collectively formed the foundation of the museum’s 19th-century and early 20th-century collections, particularly the post-Impressionist pieces that caught Leonard’s eye. “Essentially modest in everything he did, he wished no special recognition,” then-director William Milliken wrote in the forward of a 1958 book that the museum published as an homage to its great benefactor. “He merely wished to (help) like many others to the extent he could as one of Cleveland’s citizens working for the same civic ideal.”
By this time, Leonard and his mother had bequeathed their Euclid Avenue mansion to house the original Cleveland Museum of Natural History. They then moved closer to the art museum into a 30-room Florentine-Renaissance home at 10825 East Blvd. Equally as grand as their Millionaires’ Row digs, the 1918-built manse featured hand-painted ceilings, mammoth fireplaces and a super-sized dumbwaiter on which Coralie would often ride. There was also a secret staircase to a third-floor playroom for any children who visited the Hannas.
Leonard’s dark side would emerge in the house’s hallowed halls. Between 1925 and 1927, he carried on a relationship with C. Reese Abednago, a 23-year-old orchestra musician who roomed at 17707 Euclid Ave. On the night of September 17, 1927, a violent fight erupted. Abednago’s attorney, Raymond J. Logan, filed a $50,000 lawsuit more than a month later, claiming that Leonard severely beat his client after breaking off their affair. “Abednago has been under Hanna’s influence for two years, but got mad when Hanna reversed the ‘humiliating act,’” a "Cleveland Press" reporter wrote in his notebook. The case never made it to trial, and there’s no surviving document to prove if Leonard settled out of court with his jilted paramour.
With the thwarted brush of public scrutiny about his homosexuality behind him, Leonard remained low-key for the next decade, except to join his mother in 1931 to make a $750,000 donation to University Hospitals to build Hanna House -- an in-patient rehab center -- as a tribute to his medically trained dad. He also began a quiet romance in the mid-’30s with the 31-year-old Winsor. The pair had much in common: They both adored the finer things in life, including art, theater and overseas travel. And together, they were generous, thoughtful and gracious to everybody they met. The only difference between the pair was that Leonard guarded his privacy while Winsor thrived on being the center of attention.
When Leonard’s mother died on December 3, 1936, he inherited yet another $4 million from her estate. His philanthropic kindness exploded. He donated the East Boulevard mansion to the Western Reserve Historical Society. And in honor of Coralie -- a Kentucky-bred belle who cherished the arts -- he started to make sizeable donations to institutions like the Cleveland Play House and Karamu House, the nation’s first theater devoted to performing the works of African-American playwrights. “He believed in art expression as a great social force,” Karamu co-founder Russell Jelliffe once told the "Plain Dealer." “He thought it helped people keep their heads up and their ambitions pointed, that it made for strong social order.”
Leonard also treated himself to some of the money. He rented a trendy apartment on East 49th Street in New York’s exclusive Amster Yards district. With its black walls, white throw rugs and draperies made of white pigskin, its modern-day touches dramatically contrasted with the elegant Victorian interiors to which Leonard had grown accustomed in his parents’ Cleveland homes. He also decorated the walls with 40 works of art he acquired on his around-the-world expeditions for the art museum.
While he was in the Big Apple, Leonard developed into a creature of the night. He never awoke before noon, always sleeping with black patches over his eyes to keep out the sunlight. After he drank his first cup of coffee, he planned his evenings that usually included a Yankees baseball game or club-hopping between the Century and 21 nightspots. He relished spicy food and became giddy when he discovered a new restaurant he liked. And his apartment turned into party central for the rich and famous, gay and straight.
On August 21, 1941, Leonard established the Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund with $1.2 million in M.A. Hanna stock for nonprofit and education-based organizations. He showered theaters, museums and hospitals with grants to expand their operations. And to keep the fund financially afloat, he continued to buy stock in no more than 11 companies, such as General Electric, General Motors and IBM. Financial advisers today would cringe at his modus operandi, since diversification -- investing one’s money in several companies in a variety of industries -- was not in his vocabulary. Leonard also dubbed his venture “the Hanna Fun” because of the joy that philanthropy provided him. “You could work with him,” said Henry Sayles, the art museum’s curator of paintings, prints and drawings from 1929 to 1967, in an early-1970s interview at his New Hampshire retirement home. “I used to go constantly to him about the various purchases we wanted to make. And so often, he would buy them outright.”
Leonard then made a startling announcement: He was going to volunteer for the American Red Cross for two years to establish rec centers for American airmen stationed in England during World War II. By early 1944, he had set up nearly 100 clubs before he asked to be transferred to the European continent as the war progressed across the English Channel. But a crippling illness forced him to return to the U.S. in May of 1944. The setback marked the beginning of years of deteriorating health.
To keep his mind off his aches and pains, Leonard focused on a real-estate project that would consume much of his time in the mid-’40s. In 1945, he paid more than $1 million for a 316-acre spread in Kirtland Hills. The estate featured a three-story Tudor home of brick and stucco that was built in England in 1472 and moved brick by brick to Northeast Ohio in 1924. Considered the oldest existing home in the state, the 7,600-square-foot main house was flanked by a gatehouse, caretakers’ quarters, barn, greenhouses, pool, bathhouse, stables and, of all things, a pig sty. Leonard christened the compound “Hilo” because of the rolling hills that surrounded the property. “When he first bought it, he once told me he used to walk barefoot at night through the meadows, almost unable to believe the soil he could feel beneath his feet was his own,” Winsor recalled in one of his columns.
After wintering in New York, Leonard spent his summers at Hilo, where he entertained a steady stream of celebrities, politicians and athletes, who collectively became known as “the Jolly Set.” At his lavish weekend parties, it was not unheard of to catch gay actor Clifton Webb talking sports with boxing champ Gene Tunney and baseball great Tris Speaker. Nor was it unusual to see silver-screen siblings Dorothy and Lillian Gish fawn over Pulitzer Prize-winner author Louis Bromfield. College buddies Woolley, Porter and Sturges even planted trees on the grounds to celebrate the prized home purchase. Above all else, if you were invited to the estate once, you had a standing invitation to stop by anytime.
Leonard again channeled his energy to the Hanna Fund. By 1953, he was making frequent and substantial contributions to at least 35 museums, schools and health agencies. He also maintained memberships in several social groups, such as the Tavern, Union and Mayfield Country clubs as well as the Cleveland chapter of the Yale Alumni Association, for which he served as its president in 1927.
But by October 27, 1953, Leonard sensed his failing health wasn’t going to correct itself. So he fired off a one-page missive to the fund’s board of trustees with directions for the “ultimate disposition” of his money after his death. The letter stipulated that the trustees should give the highest priority to the art museum, Hanna House and Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. It also specifically directed them to “remove discrimination in colored and white relations.”
One of Leonard’s last public appearances took place on July 14, 1956, when he attended the laying of a cornerstone for the art museum’s new $9 million wing to which he contributed half of its construction costs. His vision to turn the museum into one of the country’s foremost showplaces of important art had come true. “No one had done more than he to bring that dream to reality,” Milliken said after the ceremony. “But whatever he did was always done with complete and self-effacing modesty.”
Leonard wouldn’t live to see the opening of the wing in the spring of 1958. On Saturday, October 5, 1957, he died of natural causes at Hilo. He was survived by Winsor, his two half-sisters, eight nephews and nieces and 25 great-nephews and great-nieces, all of whom attended a private memorial service at the estate two days later. Naturally, the mourners eulogized his charitable work. “He had, so to speak, listening posts, and from them, he would learn, perhaps, that some youngster needed an artificial leg or that a brilliant, promising young student was going to have to withdraw from college unless given financial help,” Winsor wrote. “Actresses who had seen happier times were mercifully snatched from the greased skids. Drunks were rehabilitated, serious operations paid for and hospital expenses absorbed. He was convinced that you could find shreds of dignity worth retrieving in the most tattered skid-row bum.”
By all accounts, Leonard gave away $93 million during his lifetime, with one-third of the cash donated to the art museum. And an inventory of the estate valued the Hanna Fund at $29.4 million, with the bulk of the money invested in IBM, du Pont and both A and B classes of M.A. Hanna stock. Even his personal checking account at National City Bank contained more than $257,000 on the day he died.
Leonard’s will, dated November 7, 1952, told an even clearer story of his wealth. Filed in Lake County Probate Court, it listed an additional $10 million in assets. The art museum would get 70 percent of the money as well as the $1.5 million art collection in his Manhattan apartment. It left $500,000 each to Yale University and University Hospitals. And the Cleveland Foundation’s Community Fund received $250,000.
Other gifts included $100,000 in trust for each of his nephews and nieces. A cousin in Kentucky received $25,000. And bequests worth between $500 and $5,000 went to each of Leonard’s domestic staff members based on length of service. After all the disbursements were made, it became obvious that he was just as generous in death as he was in life. “I spent winters with him in Florida and California, traveled with him from Rome to Tahiti,” Winsor wrote in his final tribute. “Should a stranger ask me what sort of person Leonard was, I think I would tell him he was the most soft-spoken, truly tolerant and liberal man I have ever known.”
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Leonard Hanna Jr. requested that his remains be scattered at his Hilo estate at the corner of Little Mountain and Hart roads in Kirtland Hills. He was 67 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
Leonard Hanna Jr.
1889-1957
To liven the mood at one of Leonard Hanna’s many late-night parties in early 1934, a reveler on the star-studded guest list turned up the volume on the radio in the industrialist’s swanky New York City apartment. The strains of a woeful, country-western tune filled the room to the horror of Cole Porter, who bemoaned the song as sheer drivel with a monotonous melody and senseless lyrics. So the composer of such American-songbook standards of the ‘30s like “Night & Day” and “Don’t Fence Me In” plopped himself in front of Leonard’s sleek, black grand piano and started to improvise his own burlesque version of the ditty.
As Porter revamped the chords and reworked a campy storyline into the song, actor Monty Woolley tiptoed into the master bedroom to retrieve a morning coat from Leonard’s closet. He then picked up a silver tray on a hallway table and made his grand entrance into the living room portraying a butler. By now, he had memorized the lyrics that Porter had just ad-libbed: "Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch to-day-ay, Madam." Everyone burst into gut-splitting laughter and raucous applause.
“Miss Otis Regrets,” about a servant conveying the last words of a proper society lady who’s hanged for murdering her seducer, would become a huge Porter hit by October of that year. And Leonard -- a reserved wallflower at his own soirees -- quietly marveled at the talents of his close-knit collection of fellow gay comrades. “The extraordinary occurrences at his parties were created by other people,” wrote "Cleveland Press" society columnist Winsor French in a 1957 tribute to his longtime companion. “Leonard was no exhibitionist. He merely supplied the background and reveled in what it produced.”
Success and wealth surrounded Leonard all his life. Born on November 5, 1889, on Cleveland’s West Side, Leonard Colton Hanna Jr. was the only child of Leonard Colton Sr. and his second wife, Coralie Walker Hanna. His grandfather, Leonard, and great-uncle, Robert, made millions of dollars in profits in the wholesale grocery trade, then the manufacturing of Lake Erie steamships. His father -- a licensed physician -- and uncles Marcus Alonzo and Howard “Melville” partnered in 1885 to found M.A. Hanna & Company, which became one of the Great Lakes region’s preeminent iron-ore, coal-mining and shipping firms. (Marcus, a staunch Republican, later leaped into politics by managing William McKinley’s successful presidential campaign in 1896 and representing Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 1897 until his death of typhoid fever in 1904.)
The Hanna family fortune allowed Leonard Jr. the luxury of an intensive college-preparatory education at the tony University School in University Heights from 1900 to 1904 and at Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1909. On holiday breaks and during the summer, he retreated to his parents’ 40-room, yellow-brick mansion at 2717 Euclid Ave. on Cleveland’s famed Millionaires’ Row. With its fluted Corinthian pillars, double-armed grand staircase and Chinese gingko trees that swayed on the grounds, the Hanna home stood next to stately manors owned by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, arc-light inventor Charles F. Brush and Western Union Telegraph founder Jeptha Wade. Con artist Cassie Chadwick also lived on the boulevard, even as she passed herself off to bankers as the illegitimate daughter of steel mogul Andrew Carnegie.
In 1909, Leonard entered Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met Woolley, Porter and one in a parade of Porter’s lovers, Howard Sturges. All three men also came from privileged backgrounds: Woolley was the son of a New York businessman, who owned the chic Marie Antoinette Hotel on Broadway; Porter’s largesse came from his grandfather, who made a killing on the timber industry in Indiana; and Sturges was a Boston-born socialite, who tapped into his family’s treasure chest to afford a Yale education. And they all took advantage of a newfound freedom from their families to immerse themselves in a secretive gay lifestyle.
Because homosexuality was still taboo in mainstream society, Leonard tried to disguise his sexual orientation from straight classmates by joining macho organizations, like the Sword and Gun Club. He pledged membership in Delta Kappa Epsilon, whose candidates “combined the most equal parts of the gentleman, the school and the jolly good fellow.” By his senior year, the Class of 1913 elected him its treasurer. And in a rare display of extroverted frivolity, he once agreed to play a bit part in a fraternity musical that Porter had written.
Life after graduation proved just as closeted. Leonard returned to Cleveland to work in his father’s office for a few months before learning the ropes of the steel industry with internships at Republic Iron & Steel plants in Youngstown and Birmingham, Alabama. The company also sent him to study ore ranges in both Michigan and the Mesaba region of Minnesota.
But World War I interrupted his training. On June 5, 1917, Leonard began a 20-month enlistment in the U.S. Army for which he was stationed in Europe as a first lieutenant in its aviation division. He was later assigned to its Motor Transport Corps until he was honorably discharged on February 5, 1919, nearly three months after the war officially ended.
Upon his discharge, Leonard’s father and uncles made him a partner in M.A. Hanna, appointing him to the company’s board of directors and giving him managerial duties in its pig-iron division. He eventually held several offices, including vice-president and member of the firm’s executive committee.
On March 23, 1919, Leonard Sr. died, leaving behind a $3.6 million estate. His will bequeathed one-third of the money to Coralie, while the rest was equally divided between his son and two daughters, Jean and Fannie, whom he fathered from his first marriage to the former Fanny Wilson Mann, who died on July 11, 1885. Now that Leonard Jr. was independently wealthy, he stopped making daily treks to Hanna headquarters, although he remained one of its officers for the rest of his life.
He turned his attention to investments, none of which was more important than the stock purchase he made on December 6, 1923. Acting on a hunch, Leonard paid nearly $110,000 for 1,350 common shares of the little-known Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company. A year later, the New York-based firm changed its name to International Business Machines, or IBM. Yes, that IBM. The investment would balloon to $8.8 million by the time of Leonard’s death 34 years later, thanks to dividends, splits and additional purchases of the company’s stock.
On a train ride to New York in 1925, 36-year-old Leonard contemplated his growing net worth. Coincidentally, Cleveland attorney Harold T. Clark, who handled the old man’s estate, was booked on the same train. Leonard called him into his cabin to ask for advice. “I know it’s not going to be good for me to have more money than I need, money which I have not earned,” he told Clark. “I want to set aside some property so I can’t touch it, and it will be best used for good.”
The seed of an idea had sprouted: Leonard would support charities and cultural institutions with his inheritance. The Cleveland Museum of Art would become his first major beneficiary because he had served on its advisory council since 1914 and as one of its trustees since 1920. While the idea was admirable and appreciated, it caught a few insiders, including the museum’s directors, off guard. “He knew nothing about art. He had no training but he became very interested,” said William Robinson, the museum’s curator of modern European art, in a 2008 interview with Salt Lake City public-radio station KUED. “He collected Van Goghs and Cezannes and Picassos. Amazing things. And he was totally self-taught. He became one of the greatest collectors of modern art in the world.”
To say the least. Leonard’s purchase of Picasso’s "Figures in Pink" started him on a lifelong shopping spree. From Seurat’s "Café-concert" and Renoir’s "Mademoiselle la Caux" to El Greco’s "Crucifixion" and Aretino’s "Virgin and Child With Angels," his donations of 70 oil, pastel and watercolor masterpieces through the years collectively formed the foundation of the museum’s 19th-century and early 20th-century collections, particularly the post-Impressionist pieces that caught Leonard’s eye. “Essentially modest in everything he did, he wished no special recognition,” then-director William Milliken wrote in the forward of a 1958 book that the museum published as an homage to its great benefactor. “He merely wished to (help) like many others to the extent he could as one of Cleveland’s citizens working for the same civic ideal.”
By this time, Leonard and his mother had bequeathed their Euclid Avenue mansion to house the original Cleveland Museum of Natural History. They then moved closer to the art museum into a 30-room Florentine-Renaissance home at 10825 East Blvd. Equally as grand as their Millionaires’ Row digs, the 1918-built manse featured hand-painted ceilings, mammoth fireplaces and a super-sized dumbwaiter on which Coralie would often ride. There was also a secret staircase to a third-floor playroom for any children who visited the Hannas.
Leonard’s dark side would emerge in the house’s hallowed halls. Between 1925 and 1927, he carried on a relationship with C. Reese Abednago, a 23-year-old orchestra musician who roomed at 17707 Euclid Ave. On the night of September 17, 1927, a violent fight erupted. Abednago’s attorney, Raymond J. Logan, filed a $50,000 lawsuit more than a month later, claiming that Leonard severely beat his client after breaking off their affair. “Abednago has been under Hanna’s influence for two years, but got mad when Hanna reversed the ‘humiliating act,’” a "Cleveland Press" reporter wrote in his notebook. The case never made it to trial, and there’s no surviving document to prove if Leonard settled out of court with his jilted paramour.
With the thwarted brush of public scrutiny about his homosexuality behind him, Leonard remained low-key for the next decade, except to join his mother in 1931 to make a $750,000 donation to University Hospitals to build Hanna House -- an in-patient rehab center -- as a tribute to his medically trained dad. He also began a quiet romance in the mid-’30s with the 31-year-old Winsor. The pair had much in common: They both adored the finer things in life, including art, theater and overseas travel. And together, they were generous, thoughtful and gracious to everybody they met. The only difference between the pair was that Leonard guarded his privacy while Winsor thrived on being the center of attention.
When Leonard’s mother died on December 3, 1936, he inherited yet another $4 million from her estate. His philanthropic kindness exploded. He donated the East Boulevard mansion to the Western Reserve Historical Society. And in honor of Coralie -- a Kentucky-bred belle who cherished the arts -- he started to make sizeable donations to institutions like the Cleveland Play House and Karamu House, the nation’s first theater devoted to performing the works of African-American playwrights. “He believed in art expression as a great social force,” Karamu co-founder Russell Jelliffe once told the "Plain Dealer." “He thought it helped people keep their heads up and their ambitions pointed, that it made for strong social order.”
Leonard also treated himself to some of the money. He rented a trendy apartment on East 49th Street in New York’s exclusive Amster Yards district. With its black walls, white throw rugs and draperies made of white pigskin, its modern-day touches dramatically contrasted with the elegant Victorian interiors to which Leonard had grown accustomed in his parents’ Cleveland homes. He also decorated the walls with 40 works of art he acquired on his around-the-world expeditions for the art museum.
While he was in the Big Apple, Leonard developed into a creature of the night. He never awoke before noon, always sleeping with black patches over his eyes to keep out the sunlight. After he drank his first cup of coffee, he planned his evenings that usually included a Yankees baseball game or club-hopping between the Century and 21 nightspots. He relished spicy food and became giddy when he discovered a new restaurant he liked. And his apartment turned into party central for the rich and famous, gay and straight.
On August 21, 1941, Leonard established the Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund with $1.2 million in M.A. Hanna stock for nonprofit and education-based organizations. He showered theaters, museums and hospitals with grants to expand their operations. And to keep the fund financially afloat, he continued to buy stock in no more than 11 companies, such as General Electric, General Motors and IBM. Financial advisers today would cringe at his modus operandi, since diversification -- investing one’s money in several companies in a variety of industries -- was not in his vocabulary. Leonard also dubbed his venture “the Hanna Fun” because of the joy that philanthropy provided him. “You could work with him,” said Henry Sayles, the art museum’s curator of paintings, prints and drawings from 1929 to 1967, in an early-1970s interview at his New Hampshire retirement home. “I used to go constantly to him about the various purchases we wanted to make. And so often, he would buy them outright.”
Leonard then made a startling announcement: He was going to volunteer for the American Red Cross for two years to establish rec centers for American airmen stationed in England during World War II. By early 1944, he had set up nearly 100 clubs before he asked to be transferred to the European continent as the war progressed across the English Channel. But a crippling illness forced him to return to the U.S. in May of 1944. The setback marked the beginning of years of deteriorating health.
To keep his mind off his aches and pains, Leonard focused on a real-estate project that would consume much of his time in the mid-’40s. In 1945, he paid more than $1 million for a 316-acre spread in Kirtland Hills. The estate featured a three-story Tudor home of brick and stucco that was built in England in 1472 and moved brick by brick to Northeast Ohio in 1924. Considered the oldest existing home in the state, the 7,600-square-foot main house was flanked by a gatehouse, caretakers’ quarters, barn, greenhouses, pool, bathhouse, stables and, of all things, a pig sty. Leonard christened the compound “Hilo” because of the rolling hills that surrounded the property. “When he first bought it, he once told me he used to walk barefoot at night through the meadows, almost unable to believe the soil he could feel beneath his feet was his own,” Winsor recalled in one of his columns.
After wintering in New York, Leonard spent his summers at Hilo, where he entertained a steady stream of celebrities, politicians and athletes, who collectively became known as “the Jolly Set.” At his lavish weekend parties, it was not unheard of to catch gay actor Clifton Webb talking sports with boxing champ Gene Tunney and baseball great Tris Speaker. Nor was it unusual to see silver-screen siblings Dorothy and Lillian Gish fawn over Pulitzer Prize-winner author Louis Bromfield. College buddies Woolley, Porter and Sturges even planted trees on the grounds to celebrate the prized home purchase. Above all else, if you were invited to the estate once, you had a standing invitation to stop by anytime.
Leonard again channeled his energy to the Hanna Fund. By 1953, he was making frequent and substantial contributions to at least 35 museums, schools and health agencies. He also maintained memberships in several social groups, such as the Tavern, Union and Mayfield Country clubs as well as the Cleveland chapter of the Yale Alumni Association, for which he served as its president in 1927.
But by October 27, 1953, Leonard sensed his failing health wasn’t going to correct itself. So he fired off a one-page missive to the fund’s board of trustees with directions for the “ultimate disposition” of his money after his death. The letter stipulated that the trustees should give the highest priority to the art museum, Hanna House and Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. It also specifically directed them to “remove discrimination in colored and white relations.”
One of Leonard’s last public appearances took place on July 14, 1956, when he attended the laying of a cornerstone for the art museum’s new $9 million wing to which he contributed half of its construction costs. His vision to turn the museum into one of the country’s foremost showplaces of important art had come true. “No one had done more than he to bring that dream to reality,” Milliken said after the ceremony. “But whatever he did was always done with complete and self-effacing modesty.”
Leonard wouldn’t live to see the opening of the wing in the spring of 1958. On Saturday, October 5, 1957, he died of natural causes at Hilo. He was survived by Winsor, his two half-sisters, eight nephews and nieces and 25 great-nephews and great-nieces, all of whom attended a private memorial service at the estate two days later. Naturally, the mourners eulogized his charitable work. “He had, so to speak, listening posts, and from them, he would learn, perhaps, that some youngster needed an artificial leg or that a brilliant, promising young student was going to have to withdraw from college unless given financial help,” Winsor wrote. “Actresses who had seen happier times were mercifully snatched from the greased skids. Drunks were rehabilitated, serious operations paid for and hospital expenses absorbed. He was convinced that you could find shreds of dignity worth retrieving in the most tattered skid-row bum.”
By all accounts, Leonard gave away $93 million during his lifetime, with one-third of the cash donated to the art museum. And an inventory of the estate valued the Hanna Fund at $29.4 million, with the bulk of the money invested in IBM, du Pont and both A and B classes of M.A. Hanna stock. Even his personal checking account at National City Bank contained more than $257,000 on the day he died.
Leonard’s will, dated November 7, 1952, told an even clearer story of his wealth. Filed in Lake County Probate Court, it listed an additional $10 million in assets. The art museum would get 70 percent of the money as well as the $1.5 million art collection in his Manhattan apartment. It left $500,000 each to Yale University and University Hospitals. And the Cleveland Foundation’s Community Fund received $250,000.
Other gifts included $100,000 in trust for each of his nephews and nieces. A cousin in Kentucky received $25,000. And bequests worth between $500 and $5,000 went to each of Leonard’s domestic staff members based on length of service. After all the disbursements were made, it became obvious that he was just as generous in death as he was in life. “I spent winters with him in Florida and California, traveled with him from Rome to Tahiti,” Winsor wrote in his final tribute. “Should a stranger ask me what sort of person Leonard was, I think I would tell him he was the most soft-spoken, truly tolerant and liberal man I have ever known.”
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Leonard Hanna Jr. requested that his remains be scattered at his Hilo estate at the corner of Little Mountain and Hart roads in Kirtland Hills. He was 67 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
Chapter 3: Hart Crane
The Poet in the Ivory Tower
Hart Crane
1899-1932
The "U.S.S. Orizaba" picked up steam as its barreled along its usual Mexico-Cuba-New York route, when the clock struck high noon on that tropical April day in 1932. On each of the ship’s decks, passengers marveled at the blazing sun, just minutes after the 443-foot liner left the Havana dock and set sail on the Gulf of Mexico. To painter Margarite “Peggy” Baird, the trip back to New York signaled a new beginning; she was returning to the Big Apple a soon-to-be-divorced woman from her second husband, literary critic Malcolm Cowley.
As she sat in her stateroom, a horrific scene was playing out on the top deck. A fellow artist had walked to the railing, neatly folded his topcoat over it and raised himself on his toes. He dropped back for a couple seconds and shouted, “Goodbye, everybody!” before he vaulted himself over the rail into the warm waters below. Some passengers said he frantically flailed his arms in a desperate motion for help; others simply chalked up the hand-waving as his way of bidding a final farewell. Cries of “Man overboard!” pierced the air. But the crew’s search of the gulf in several lifeboats was fruitless. The poet had sunk to his watery grave. “He had rapped on my stateroom door before he jumped from the deck and said that he wanted to say goodbye,” Baird told the Associated Press once the ship docked in New York Harbor several days later. “Of course, I didn’t dream what he meant.”
If she had only known the truth. The spur-of-the-moment suicide leap marked the end of Hart Crane, a Lost Generation writer whose tormented life was riddled with financial woes, long stretches of writer’s block and a homosexual existence in a largely homophobic, 20th-century society. But whether or not he realized it, critics already had hailed his poems as some of the most influential literary contributions of the Jazz Age. And it all started in Northeast Ohio.
An only child, Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in the small Portage County town of Garrettsville about 45 miles southeast of Cleveland. His grandfather, Arthur, and father, Clarence Arthur (“C.A.”), ran a flourishing maple-sugar cannery in town. His mother, the former Grace Edna Hart, was a beautiful, cultured yet neurotic Christian Science practitioner. To outsiders, the Crane clan that lived on Freedom Street came from the best stock the village could offer.
The Crane men expanded their company to Warren in neighboring Trumbull County in 1903. Business exploded and C.A. decided to sell the plant to a Chicago refinery. The profit he made on the deal helped finance his new venture: the Crane Chocolate Company.
Meanwhile, friction between the incurably frisky C.A. and the prim and proper Grace grew so intense that they shuttled young Harold to Cleveland’s East Side in 1908 to live with his maternal grandparents, Clinton and Elizabeth Belden Hart. The separation would spare him the constant bickering between his parents, they reasoned. In a three-story house at 1709 E. 115th St., Harold spent most of his time in “the ivory tower” on the top floor, where, at 14 years old, he started to jot down pieces of poetry as his Victrola blared recordings of Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner compositions.
Harold’s East High School classmates were well aware of his passion for the written word, even more so when "Bruno’s Weekly" published his Oscar Wilde tribute, “C33,” in September of 1916. This first taste of literary recognition convinced him to drop out of school a year before graduation and move to New York City to pursue a career as a writer the following December at about the same time his parents’ divorce became final. The social and sexual liberties he discovered in the big city amazed his Northeast Ohio sensibilities. “New York is a series of exposures intense and rather savage, which never would be quite as available in Cleveland,” Harold wrote to his dad in his first letter away from home.
Once he was in New York, he rented an apartment on Gramercy Park, where he acquainted himself with seasoned writers and poets like Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank and Allen Tate. He also befriended fellow Cleveland natives, including painter Carl Schmitt and publisher Harrison “Hal” Smith. At the end of March of 1917, his poem, “The Hive,” appeared in "Pagan." This latest publication of his work prompted an excited Harold to write to his dad to pick up a copy of the magazine at Laukuff’s, a recently opened bookstore run by German immigrant Richard Laukuff at 40 Taylor Arcade in downtown Cleveland. His mother also insisted that he adopt his middle name, Hart, as his byline to give her side of the family part of the recognition for his success. A lack of steady income, however, forced him to board a train and head back to his grandparents’ home in June of 1918.
The homecoming proved a disaster. Hart couldn’t keep a job, lasting three weeks as a riveter in a munitions plant on the Lake Erie waterfront. He tried his hand at newspaper reporting, only to quit his $20-a-week, police-beat assignment at the Plain Dealer after two months. He also rushed downtown to the Army’s recruitment office to volunteer for overseas duty, but the military turned him down.
The string of rejections and setbacks led to frequent drinking binges that the 19-year-old Hart couldn’t handle well. In his half-crocked stupors, he explored his sexuality by trolling sleazy saloons in Little Italy to try and pick up men. His unwanted advances naturally sparked violent brawls that left him bruised, battered and sitting in a jail cell. He also broke down in an alcohol-fueled letter and confessed to his mother that he was gay. He pleaded with her to never tell his father.
By February of 1919, Hart successfully persuaded his dad to give him regular $25-a-week allowances so he could return to New York. He first moved into a three-room, $3.50-a-week basement rental on West 70th Street with three roommates, including Alexander Baltzly, who was a Harvard alumnus, Army lieutenant and champion tennis player. He then lived alone in a $10-a-month, two-room flat on West 16th Street above the offices of the "Little Review" magazine, for which he took the unpaid position of advertising manager. He also volunteered for editor Joseph Kling at "Pagan." But his father’s allowances suddenly stopped and, once again, Hart’s bank account dried up. For the second time in two years, he had no choice but to return to Northeast Ohio in November of 1919.
Good thing, too. By this time, C.A. had expanded his candy company by building a factory at 208 St. Clair Ave. in downtown Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga County Justice Center is located today. He had opened a small tearoom on Playhouse Square and rented retail space in Akron, where Hart worked as a soda jerk and sold boxes of Crane Chocolates from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day during the holiday season. The size of the family business made him think of dollar signs. “Things are whizzing, and I don’t know how many millions (my father) will be worth before he gets through growing,” he wrote in a letter to Gorham Munson, a Pagan writer whom he had met through Kling in Greenwich Village earlier that year. “If I work hard enough, I suppose I am due to a goodly share of it, and as I told you, it seems to me the wisest thing to do now is to join him.”
His father’s business acumen in 1919 had sharply improved from that of eight years earlier, when he arguably made the stupidest move of his candy-making career. In 1911, while still in Warren, C.A. tinkered with a recipe for “Crane’s Peppermint Life Savers” to boost his profit margin during the usually slow summer season for candy sales. He chose the treat’s name because each of the hard, round sweets looked like a miniature life preserver. But because he shipped packages in cardboard tubes that absorbed the candies’ minty flavor, the product was virtually tasteless by the time his distributors received it. Besides, nobody wanted to pay a nickel for a package of mints “with a middle made of thin air.” Production proved costly, forcing him to sell the recipe and its trademark to a two-man advertising firm in New York for a measly $2,900. The partners re-packaged the candy in foil to retain the taste and, by 1930, their company was raking in a quarter-million dollars a year in Life Savers sales.
Business blunder aside, C.A.’s company was thriving by the end of 1919. So was Hart’s personal life. He had been transferred to Cleveland after the holidays to manage a basement warehouse in his dad’s factory. And after writing a glowing review of Sherwood Anderson’s short-story collection, "Winesburg, Ohio," he was regularly corresponding with the Elyria-born author. He also frequented Laukuff’s bookstore, where he met other artists like Swiss-born painter William Lescaze, Cleveland Play House set designer Richard Rychtarik and Cleveland Institute of Music student Jean Binet, who was studying under Cleveland Orchestra conductor Ernest Bloch.
And in more letters to Munson, Hart described a “love affair” with an unnamed paramour from Akron, although he failed to reveal to his friend that the relationship involved another man. “Whatever might happen, I am sure of a wonderful pool of memories,” he pounded out on his Corona typewriter. “Perhaps, this is the romance of my life. It is wonderful to find the realization of one’s dreams in flesh, form, laughter and intelligence -- all in one person.”
But in a December 27 confessional, Hart revealed his secret, trumpeting it as “the most intense and satisfactory one of my whole life,” he wrote. “I am all broken up at the thought of leaving him. Yes, the last word will jolt you. I have never had devotion returned before like this, nor ever found such a soul, mind and body so worthy of devotion. Probably I shall never again.”
The distance between his work in Cleveland and his boyfriend in Akron led to the romance’s fizzle by the spring of 1920. That autumn, Hart had been assigned to temporarily manage his dad’s new store in Washington, D.C., where he found the nation’s capital “all rather dead,” even though he managed to hook up for one-night stands with a small stream of soldiers and sailors on leave. He found the anonymous encounters disgusting and cheap. After his return to Cleveland, he resigned from the family business on April 19, 1921, claiming his position was “a terrible, old grind.”
Hart floated from one odd job to the next. For a $2.50-a-day wage, he distributed sales fliers door to door. He lasted one day. He then landed a gig as a copywriter for the Corday & Gross Company at 1771 E. 24th St. After work, he partied with his circle of artist friends and played host to out-of-town visitors like Anderson and Munson. He also continued to trick with total strangers. “I have been driven at last to the parks,” he wrote on the Fourth of July in 1922 to Wilbur Underwood, a gay poet and government worker he met in Washington. “The first night brought me a most strenuous wooing and the largest instrument I have handled. As this happened only two nights ago, I am modest and satisfied. Still, I am uneasy. I fear for all the anti-climaxes that are surely now in store for me.”
Five months later, he was sharing one of his ultimate fantasies: To have sex with a black man. He even called his imaginary lover “L’Afrique.” “My anticipations were so strong and my desire to give you a shock was so gleeful that I announced it as a fait accompli, when, in reality, it was only dependent on the promise of another person to arrange such an assignation,” he wrote in another letter to Underwood on December 10. “I am sorry to relate that it never came to pass. I am still limited to the experiences of a single race. The dark and warm embrace is yet to come!”
Fearing that his job at Corday & Gross provided no room for a promotion, Hart sought work in the winter of 1923 from Stanley Patmo, who had started a direct-mail advertising firm that would become the Roger Williams Company at 3804 Payne Ave. He was hired to bang out ad copy for clients like Pittsburgh Water Heaters, Pittsburgh Plate Glass and the Akron-based Seiberling Tires. He was dependable and cheerful in the office, never letting his late-night drinking bouts get in the way of his work in the morning.
At home in his grandparents’ ivory tower, Hart obsessed over what would become one of his first important poems of his literary career. The three-part “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” was his answer to T.S. Eliot’s perceived cultural pessimism in the 434-line poem, “The Waste Land.” Hart described his piece as “a bit of Dionysian splendor” with rhythmic jazz meters and interwoven symbolism that painted the “basic emotional attitude toward beauty that the Greeks had.” It took more than a year for a magazine to agree to publish the poem in its entirety.
Hart contemplated his next “new enterprise,” one that would consume the next seven years of his life. The modernist epic, "The Bridge," would result in a collection of 15 poems that traced the history of American civilization, from Christopher Columbus’ discovery of it in 1492 to the Civil War to modern advancements such as its subway system. And the Brooklyn Bridge, a New York landmark that Hart admired, would serve as the piece’s focal point. The project also would be his first and, ultimately, only attempt at long-form poetry. In its preliminary stages, the piece captured “the mystical synthesis of America,” he wrote in a February 18 letter to Munson.
But Hart faced yet another professional obstacle: Patno’s ad agency had to let him go in March of 1924 because the company had no assignments to give him. For fear that C.A. would think of his son as a failure, Hart persuaded the company to concoct a scheme that would take him to New York on a month-long “business trip,” when, in fact, he would look for another job. When he found work, he could return to Cleveland and feign resigning his position.
The plan worked. After a series of a half-dozen interviews with its executives, Hart was hired by the J. Walter Thompson Agency in late May to work in the firm’s statistical department for a $35 weekly salary, a substantial pay cut from the $50 a week he was earning at Patno’s place. But he was at the point of accepting any kind of employment; he was literally down to his last handful of pennies as he temporarily stayed with Munson and his wife, Lisa, in their apartment.
Once he was back on his feet, Hart settled into a room on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. After work, from five at night to two in the morning, he worked on The Bridge to capture the “feelings of elation…that one experiences in walking across my beloved Brooklyn Bridge,” Hart said. Above all else, he insisted that no magazine could ever publish this series of poems in bits and pieces as a few publications tried to do with “Faustus and Helen.” But because of his drive to write poetry full-time, the drudgery of daily office work dragged him down. He abruptly quit his Thompson position in October. He’d never have financial stability again as he sponged off friends for money, food and a roof over his head to concentrate on his art.
Enter Emil Opffer. In the spring of 1924, Hart met the Danish-born merchant marine through their mutual friend, Sue Jenkins. At her house, the career sailor regaled his audience with tales of every port of call he visited. Hart fell in love with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Emil, who was three years his senior. The couple was soon living together in Emil’s father’s house on Columbia Heights in, ironically, the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Because Emil was often at sea, they were apart more than they were together. And Hart documented his feelings of separation in a series of six love poems appropriately titled Voyages.
His catalog of original poems continued to grow and, by the spring of 1925, Hart decided the time had come to self-publish his first book of pieces, including the Voyages series and “Faustus and Helen.” Greenwich Village publisher Samuel Jacobs even offered to donate his expertise to typeset a run of the book’s first 500 copies when he wasn’t working on other projects. "White Buildings," whose titled was inspired by the artwork of Greek surrealist painter Giorgio di Chirico, hit bookstands later in the year.
To keep himself further occupied, Hart continued to work on "The Bridge," but he needed money to support himself. On a whim, he fired off a letter on December 3, 1925, to ask respected arts financier Otto Hermann Kahn to financially back his epic. Three days later, the two men met in Kahn’s apartment, where Hart stated his case. It was impossible to write such a complex piece in a reasonable amount of time if one had to spend half his day in a menial office job, he argued. While he was timid about asking for help, he was convinced that "The Bridge" would “enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America.” Kahn bought the sales pitch and agreed to loan the poet $2,000 to be paid in four installments, the first of which he immediately issued. Hart couldn’t believe his good fortune. Somebody was actually going to pay him to write nothing but poetry, he told a few friends.
With the first loan payment, Hart planned to buy a ticket to sail to his maternal grandmother’s winter retreat, Villa Casas, on the Isle of Pines directly south of Havana. Discovered by Columbus on his third trip to the New World in 1494, the island had inspired scenes in both Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Treasure Island" and James Matthew Barrie’s "Peter Pan." Its sandy beaches, tropical fruit orchards and legendary tales of pirate invasions could add to the romanticism of writing The Bridge, Hart reasoned.
The arrangement didn’t quite work out as he imagined. The house was virtually uninhabitable. The roof leaked, its gardens were overgrown, and mosquitoes swarmed everywhere. But it provided the privacy that Hart required to write freelance book reviews and shorter poems to supplement Kahn’s generous loans while he toiled on his epic. And there was Mrs. Simpson, the house’s caretaker, to keep him company.
Still, Hart’s frequent jaunts to the mainland to smoke Cuban cigars and pound back bottles of native beer nearly exhausted the next two loan installments. Another pleasure trip to the nearby Cayman Islands and an emergency doctor’s appointment in Havana for an ear infection added to his financial misery. He wrote to Kahn in August to ask for the last $500 of the loan. Unfortunately, his benefactor was traveling and didn’t receive the letter until two months later.
Hart had no choice but to stay put at Villa Casas to immerse himself in "The Bridge." Poems like “The Mango Tree,” “Cutty Sark” and “Ave Maria” emerged from the marathon writing session. Then, as anticipated in the Caribbean in the middle of October of 1926, a hurricane slammed into the island. And Hart loved every minute of it.
As ferocious winds whipped through the house, he huddled under his bed with Mrs. Simpson and her chatty pet parakeet, Attaboy. In the morning, they celebrated their survival by dancing to Spanish music from Hart’s record collection. But they decided that there was no sense in staying on the island since it would take months to repair the storm-battered house. So Hart returned to New York with a suitcase of clothes and drafts of his poems. He also collected the last installment of the loan that Kahn promised.
Hart moved back in with Emil’s father (and Emil, whenever he was home on leave). He also presented the drafts to Kahn, who was pleased with what he read and offered to loan yet another $300 for Hart to continue the project, this time on the Caribbean island of Martinique. C.A. also sent a $100 check “in order that you have plenty of cash to start off with,” he wrote in an accompanying letter.
But the trip never materialized. A mentally irrational Grace -- who was living in Hollywood with her widowed mother -- claimed she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If she did go crazy and he went back to the Caribbean, she groaned that his grandmother would have no one to take care of her. An angry Hart canceled his steamer ticket and immediately left for California to move into a cottage that his mother was renting. But Southern California offered him no motivation to work on The Bridge, with such distractions as the roar of the surf and the glamour of movie stars.
Emil, who was sailing on the "U.S.S. California," also arrived one evening in March of 1927 on a few hours’ leave. The pair ended up in a speakeasy in San Pedro, where five thugs robbed them of their belongings and practically left Emil for dead. He recovered on the ship as it sailed to its next stop in San Francisco. “He always seems to get the hardest end of things,” Hart wrote to his friends, Bill and Sue Brown, in New York.
On April 3, exactly six months to the day when he announced he was going to California, Hart walked into a travel agency and booked a one-way train ticket to New York. He couldn’t wait another minute to get out of town and finish "The Bridge." The five-day trip drummed up much-needed inspiration, especially when the train lumbered into New Orleans. There, Hart could see the mouth of the Mississippi, about which he had written in “The River” section of the piece. “There is something tragically beautiful about the scene, the great, magnificent Father of Waters pouring itself at last into the oblivion of the Gulf,” he wrote to his father, who had opened a restaurant and inn, Crane’s Canary Cottage, at the corner of West and West Orange streets in Chagrin Falls.
Hart gave himself a July deadline to wrap up "The Bridge" upon his New York return. But the guilt he felt at leaving his mentally ill mother only sparked another bout of writer’s block. The imposed target date came and went. Before he knew it, 1927 turned into 1928. He still had not finished the project.
In September, his beloved Grandmother Hart died. While he waited for word on any kind of inheritance from her estate, Hart’s drinking escalated. Stories circulated that, when he was smashed, he accused anybody within earshot of cheating him out of money, success and fame. Then came the final blow: He learned in November that Grace -- who was the executrix of her mother’s will -- refused to sign the papers to release Hart’s $5,000 inheritance unless he rejoined her in California. He never spoke to her again.
Another of his closest relationships came to a screeching halt in 1929. Home on leave, Emil caught Hart in bed with another man in the Columbia Heights apartment. A “stupid betrayal,” the sailor lamented. After five years, the lovers parted ways romantically, but they remained friends for the rest of Hart’s life.
The beginning of 1930 brought a happier note. After seven years, Hart finally finished "The Bridge," and publisher Horace Liveright was going to order a 250-book run of its first printing. But with the country in a newfound economic depression, Hart worried that nobody would buy a copy. He was equally anxious how literary critics would review it.
The book drew mixed reaction. An early critique by Herbert Weinstock compared Hart’s style to that of Walt Whitman. "The Nation" reviewer Granville Hicks wrote that the poems’ imagery was “sound and amazingly original.” "New Republic" critic Malcolm Cowley -- one of Hart’s first acquaintances in New York -- considered “The River” as “one of the most important poems of our age.”
Yet there was also a chorus of disapproval. In "The Bookman," writer Odell Shepard bemoaned that the poems “proceed with frenzy in the wrong direction.” "Hound and Horn" reviewer Allen Tate trashed the book for its lack of a coherent plot. And thanks to critic Percy Hutchinson, the revered "New York Times Book Review" panned "The Bridge" for its “lack of intelligibility.”
Despite the jolting feedback, Hart decided to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship and an accompanying $2,500 grant to study and write abroad. He mailed his application on August 27 and prepared to wait until the following spring, when the foundation would announce its decision. Hart then packed his suitcase and moved to Chagrin Falls to stay with C.A. and his new wife, the former Bessie Meacham. He helped out in his dad’s candy factory during the holidays. He also made daylong trips to Garrettsville and Warren to visit aunts, uncles and cousins he hadn’t seen in years.
The Guggenheim news came on March 15, 1931. Of 712 applicants, Hart and 76 other scholars, writers, artists, musicians and scientists had scored one-year grants to create and research in other parts of the world without financial worry. One catch: Because Hart wasn’t married, his grant could not exceed $2,000. It didn’t matter; his money woes were seemingly over so he could study in France.
But at the last minute, he changed his mind about his ultimate destination. Instead of Europe, where most fellows chose to study, Hart asked to live south of the border. There, he could write an epic poem about Montezuma’s conquest of the Mexican people. His supervisor, Henry Allen Moe, approved, and Hart boarded the "Orizaba" steamer in early April with his stipend: $300 in cash in his wallet and a certified letter showing a $1,700 line of credit.
The liner embarked from New York for the southward four-day sail on the Atlantic to its midway stop in Havana. The second leg took Hart west to the port of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. The last part of the journey included a 264-mile train ride over mountain ranges to the Mexico City suburb of Mixcoac, where he rented an eight-room Spanish villa, complete with his own manservant.
Between Cuba and Mexico, Hart developed a new passion: tequila. For weeks, he drank a lot and wrote very little. His drunken tears through town resulted in frequently obnoxious brawls and jail stints. He even disrupted a formal tea party at the American Embassy in Mexico City, which prompted a string of anonymous complaints that were wired to Guggenheim headquarters. Moe had no choice but to issue a letter in which he scolded the rowdy poet for making the foundation look bad and ordered him to “get down to work.”
On July 6, Hart received an unexpected cable from his stepmother, Bessie, who let him know that C.A.’s health was quickly failing. A follow-up telegram later in the day confirmed that his 56-year-old father had died of a stroke. Hart immediately booked an airplane flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then a train ticket on the Santa Fe Railroad’s Grand Canyon Limited back to Chagrin Falls.
Hart stayed in Northeast Ohio for six weeks after his dad’s funeral and burial on July 12 in Garrettsville. He also learned that he would inherit $1,000 from C.A.’s estate and collect as much as $2,000 annually from the profits of his father’s candy factory, retail stores and Crane’s Canary Cottage. The latter part of the inheritance was a long shot since, in the depths of the Great Depression, most of the ventures were losing money. In fact, his father was nearly bankrupt when he died.
Hart returned to Mexico at the end of August to find that Peggy Baird Cowley had arrived to initiate amicable divorce proceedings against her husband. Twelve years Hart’s senior, she also knew the poet well. The pair bonded. And for the first time in his life, he fell in love and had sex with a woman. At a New Year’s Eve party that Peggy was throwing in the town of Taxco north of Acapulco, the couple officially declared their love and faith for each other.
The affair fueled a much-needed burst of poetic creativity. On January 27, 1932, Hart started work on “The Broken Tower,” a piece that scholars have determined is both an affirmation of his introduction to a straight life and a denial of his past gay relationships. But it had nothing to do with Montezuma, Mexico or anything thing else he promised to write for the Guggenheim folks. His never-ending drinking binges and at least three threats to commit suicide by drinking iodine didn’t help matters, either.
The end of Hart’s fellowship came in April, but he had little to show after an entire year in Mexico. Depressed and defeated, he made arrangements for him and Peggy to sail back to New York. “Altogether, I have had a terrible time lately,” he wrote to his stepmother on April 22. “I wouldn’t have thought of staying here another minute anyway. Do you wonder I’ve been anxious to get off as soon as possible? It certainly has made a nervous wreck of me.”
Hart and Peggy boarded a train to Veracruz the next night and left the country on the New York-bound "Orizaba" two days later. The ship reached its halfway point in Havana on April 26, when the pair accidentally separated and couldn’t find each other. They finally reunited in the liner’s medical clinic after Peggy severely burned herself from a box of matches that exploded in her hands as she lit a cigarette in the ship’s lounge.
Hart -- who had downed a few cocktails in his search for her -- was furious. In a moment of irrational thinking, he was convinced that Peggy had burned herself on purpose to grab attention. His behavior then switched gears to sympathy. And in a clear sign that his mind was unraveling, he again became infuriated, locked himself in his cabin and bolted the door shut. While it’s debatable if this particular date helped alter his frame of mind, April 26 marked Emil Opffer’s 35th birthday.
To this day, rumors and secondhand stories continue to haze the account of Hart’s last hours on the ship on Wednesday, April 27. Some passengers heard that he picked up a sailor and had a gay fling during the Havana stopover. Others recalled that he sneaked out of his room at 1 a.m. for another round of drinking, only to be escorted back at 4 a.m. by a steward. Hart even told ship personnel that a stranger attacked him in his cabin and stole his ring and wallet.
Peggy stopped by the doctor’s office later that morning to have her burns re-bandaged. She returned to her room shortly before 10 a.m. to find a nervous Hart waiting for her. He was shaking uncontrollably and said he needed a drink. At 11 a.m., a steward saw him swilling shots of whiskey in his cabin. Just before noon, Hart stuck his head into Peggy’s room to announce that he was “utterly disgraced” and abruptly left.
Dressed in pajamas and a topcoat, he walked to the top deck and leaned against the railing. He took off his coat and folded it. After a couple seconds of contemplation, he flung himself off the stern into the gulf waters. He made no effort to reach out to one of the lifeboats that had been lowered to save him. And for two hours, at the direction of Captain J.E. Blackadder, rescue crews circled the area, with Peggy and her fellow passengers watching for some sign of life. Hart was never seen again.
For decades after his suicide, critics analyzed Hart’s life, including his homosexuality. In a 1937 "Plain Dealer" review of Philip Horton’s biography, "Hart Crane," writer Ted Robinson blamed the poet’s “perverse personality” on a “terrible psychopathic handicap that set him apart from normal men and women, and alienated the major portion of his intellectuals.” The newspaper’s contributing editor, N.R. Howard, wrote in a 1962 article that Hart’s sexual orientation was an “inversion” that led to his “alcoholic, shabby and hungry” existence. And a 1981 story by reporter Tom Kaib characterized the poet’s “sexual persuasion” by mentioning “alcoholic and sexual debauches.”
On the other hand, Hart remained a literary icon among fans of his work. Performers at Kent State University’s Blossom Festival School memorialized him in a 1974 concert of his poems set to music. The school even wanted to hang a plaque on Hart’s childhood home in Garrettsville. Unfortunately, the man who owned the house served with the Ohio National Guard. Because of the shootings that killed four Kent State students during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration four years earlier, he wanted nothing to do with the university and refused to have a marker attached to his house.
But the memorials continued. Noted Cleveland sculptor and Shaw High School graduate William Mozart McVey created "The Hart Crane Memorial," a bronze statue that was installed near the intersection of East Boulevard and Bellflower Drive across the street from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The piece joined the 16-foot "Long Road" wall relief at Cleveland’s Jewish Community Center and a seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Olympic track-and-field star Jesse Owens on Lakeside Avenue as one of 48 publicly displayed sculptures in McVey’s repertoire.
The Ohio Canal Corridor also earmarked $500,000 for its historic- and cultural-enhancement initiative in 1994. The organization then purchased a half-acre of land to build Hart Crane Park at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Merwin Street near the Commodores Club in the Flats of Cleveland. The agency also bought a 1992 master work dedicated to Hart by artist and former Cleveland State University professor Gene Kangas, who designed a two-piece metal memorial flanked by two light-blue structures that simulated crashing ocean waves. Stanzas of Hart’s poetry were etched into the structure for the enjoyment of commercial and recreational boaters alike as they sailed past the park on the Cuyahoga River:
Far strum of foghorns
Fog-insulated noises
Midnight among distant chiming buoys adrift.
A tugboat wheezing by
Wreaths of steam
Lunged past a sound of waters bending astride the sky.
Follow your arches
To what corners of the sky they pull you
Where marble clouds support the sea wreck of dreams.
---
Although Hart Crane’s body was never recovered, his father’s family added the inscription, “HAROLD HART CRANE, 1899-1932, LOST AT SEA,” to the base of C.A.’s tombstone in Section A, Lot 601, Plot 17 of Park Cemetery at the corner of Center Street and Brosius Road in Garrettsville. Hart was 32 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
Hart Crane
1899-1932
The "U.S.S. Orizaba" picked up steam as its barreled along its usual Mexico-Cuba-New York route, when the clock struck high noon on that tropical April day in 1932. On each of the ship’s decks, passengers marveled at the blazing sun, just minutes after the 443-foot liner left the Havana dock and set sail on the Gulf of Mexico. To painter Margarite “Peggy” Baird, the trip back to New York signaled a new beginning; she was returning to the Big Apple a soon-to-be-divorced woman from her second husband, literary critic Malcolm Cowley.
As she sat in her stateroom, a horrific scene was playing out on the top deck. A fellow artist had walked to the railing, neatly folded his topcoat over it and raised himself on his toes. He dropped back for a couple seconds and shouted, “Goodbye, everybody!” before he vaulted himself over the rail into the warm waters below. Some passengers said he frantically flailed his arms in a desperate motion for help; others simply chalked up the hand-waving as his way of bidding a final farewell. Cries of “Man overboard!” pierced the air. But the crew’s search of the gulf in several lifeboats was fruitless. The poet had sunk to his watery grave. “He had rapped on my stateroom door before he jumped from the deck and said that he wanted to say goodbye,” Baird told the Associated Press once the ship docked in New York Harbor several days later. “Of course, I didn’t dream what he meant.”
If she had only known the truth. The spur-of-the-moment suicide leap marked the end of Hart Crane, a Lost Generation writer whose tormented life was riddled with financial woes, long stretches of writer’s block and a homosexual existence in a largely homophobic, 20th-century society. But whether or not he realized it, critics already had hailed his poems as some of the most influential literary contributions of the Jazz Age. And it all started in Northeast Ohio.
An only child, Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in the small Portage County town of Garrettsville about 45 miles southeast of Cleveland. His grandfather, Arthur, and father, Clarence Arthur (“C.A.”), ran a flourishing maple-sugar cannery in town. His mother, the former Grace Edna Hart, was a beautiful, cultured yet neurotic Christian Science practitioner. To outsiders, the Crane clan that lived on Freedom Street came from the best stock the village could offer.
The Crane men expanded their company to Warren in neighboring Trumbull County in 1903. Business exploded and C.A. decided to sell the plant to a Chicago refinery. The profit he made on the deal helped finance his new venture: the Crane Chocolate Company.
Meanwhile, friction between the incurably frisky C.A. and the prim and proper Grace grew so intense that they shuttled young Harold to Cleveland’s East Side in 1908 to live with his maternal grandparents, Clinton and Elizabeth Belden Hart. The separation would spare him the constant bickering between his parents, they reasoned. In a three-story house at 1709 E. 115th St., Harold spent most of his time in “the ivory tower” on the top floor, where, at 14 years old, he started to jot down pieces of poetry as his Victrola blared recordings of Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner compositions.
Harold’s East High School classmates were well aware of his passion for the written word, even more so when "Bruno’s Weekly" published his Oscar Wilde tribute, “C33,” in September of 1916. This first taste of literary recognition convinced him to drop out of school a year before graduation and move to New York City to pursue a career as a writer the following December at about the same time his parents’ divorce became final. The social and sexual liberties he discovered in the big city amazed his Northeast Ohio sensibilities. “New York is a series of exposures intense and rather savage, which never would be quite as available in Cleveland,” Harold wrote to his dad in his first letter away from home.
Once he was in New York, he rented an apartment on Gramercy Park, where he acquainted himself with seasoned writers and poets like Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank and Allen Tate. He also befriended fellow Cleveland natives, including painter Carl Schmitt and publisher Harrison “Hal” Smith. At the end of March of 1917, his poem, “The Hive,” appeared in "Pagan." This latest publication of his work prompted an excited Harold to write to his dad to pick up a copy of the magazine at Laukuff’s, a recently opened bookstore run by German immigrant Richard Laukuff at 40 Taylor Arcade in downtown Cleveland. His mother also insisted that he adopt his middle name, Hart, as his byline to give her side of the family part of the recognition for his success. A lack of steady income, however, forced him to board a train and head back to his grandparents’ home in June of 1918.
The homecoming proved a disaster. Hart couldn’t keep a job, lasting three weeks as a riveter in a munitions plant on the Lake Erie waterfront. He tried his hand at newspaper reporting, only to quit his $20-a-week, police-beat assignment at the Plain Dealer after two months. He also rushed downtown to the Army’s recruitment office to volunteer for overseas duty, but the military turned him down.
The string of rejections and setbacks led to frequent drinking binges that the 19-year-old Hart couldn’t handle well. In his half-crocked stupors, he explored his sexuality by trolling sleazy saloons in Little Italy to try and pick up men. His unwanted advances naturally sparked violent brawls that left him bruised, battered and sitting in a jail cell. He also broke down in an alcohol-fueled letter and confessed to his mother that he was gay. He pleaded with her to never tell his father.
By February of 1919, Hart successfully persuaded his dad to give him regular $25-a-week allowances so he could return to New York. He first moved into a three-room, $3.50-a-week basement rental on West 70th Street with three roommates, including Alexander Baltzly, who was a Harvard alumnus, Army lieutenant and champion tennis player. He then lived alone in a $10-a-month, two-room flat on West 16th Street above the offices of the "Little Review" magazine, for which he took the unpaid position of advertising manager. He also volunteered for editor Joseph Kling at "Pagan." But his father’s allowances suddenly stopped and, once again, Hart’s bank account dried up. For the second time in two years, he had no choice but to return to Northeast Ohio in November of 1919.
Good thing, too. By this time, C.A. had expanded his candy company by building a factory at 208 St. Clair Ave. in downtown Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga County Justice Center is located today. He had opened a small tearoom on Playhouse Square and rented retail space in Akron, where Hart worked as a soda jerk and sold boxes of Crane Chocolates from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day during the holiday season. The size of the family business made him think of dollar signs. “Things are whizzing, and I don’t know how many millions (my father) will be worth before he gets through growing,” he wrote in a letter to Gorham Munson, a Pagan writer whom he had met through Kling in Greenwich Village earlier that year. “If I work hard enough, I suppose I am due to a goodly share of it, and as I told you, it seems to me the wisest thing to do now is to join him.”
His father’s business acumen in 1919 had sharply improved from that of eight years earlier, when he arguably made the stupidest move of his candy-making career. In 1911, while still in Warren, C.A. tinkered with a recipe for “Crane’s Peppermint Life Savers” to boost his profit margin during the usually slow summer season for candy sales. He chose the treat’s name because each of the hard, round sweets looked like a miniature life preserver. But because he shipped packages in cardboard tubes that absorbed the candies’ minty flavor, the product was virtually tasteless by the time his distributors received it. Besides, nobody wanted to pay a nickel for a package of mints “with a middle made of thin air.” Production proved costly, forcing him to sell the recipe and its trademark to a two-man advertising firm in New York for a measly $2,900. The partners re-packaged the candy in foil to retain the taste and, by 1930, their company was raking in a quarter-million dollars a year in Life Savers sales.
Business blunder aside, C.A.’s company was thriving by the end of 1919. So was Hart’s personal life. He had been transferred to Cleveland after the holidays to manage a basement warehouse in his dad’s factory. And after writing a glowing review of Sherwood Anderson’s short-story collection, "Winesburg, Ohio," he was regularly corresponding with the Elyria-born author. He also frequented Laukuff’s bookstore, where he met other artists like Swiss-born painter William Lescaze, Cleveland Play House set designer Richard Rychtarik and Cleveland Institute of Music student Jean Binet, who was studying under Cleveland Orchestra conductor Ernest Bloch.
And in more letters to Munson, Hart described a “love affair” with an unnamed paramour from Akron, although he failed to reveal to his friend that the relationship involved another man. “Whatever might happen, I am sure of a wonderful pool of memories,” he pounded out on his Corona typewriter. “Perhaps, this is the romance of my life. It is wonderful to find the realization of one’s dreams in flesh, form, laughter and intelligence -- all in one person.”
But in a December 27 confessional, Hart revealed his secret, trumpeting it as “the most intense and satisfactory one of my whole life,” he wrote. “I am all broken up at the thought of leaving him. Yes, the last word will jolt you. I have never had devotion returned before like this, nor ever found such a soul, mind and body so worthy of devotion. Probably I shall never again.”
The distance between his work in Cleveland and his boyfriend in Akron led to the romance’s fizzle by the spring of 1920. That autumn, Hart had been assigned to temporarily manage his dad’s new store in Washington, D.C., where he found the nation’s capital “all rather dead,” even though he managed to hook up for one-night stands with a small stream of soldiers and sailors on leave. He found the anonymous encounters disgusting and cheap. After his return to Cleveland, he resigned from the family business on April 19, 1921, claiming his position was “a terrible, old grind.”
Hart floated from one odd job to the next. For a $2.50-a-day wage, he distributed sales fliers door to door. He lasted one day. He then landed a gig as a copywriter for the Corday & Gross Company at 1771 E. 24th St. After work, he partied with his circle of artist friends and played host to out-of-town visitors like Anderson and Munson. He also continued to trick with total strangers. “I have been driven at last to the parks,” he wrote on the Fourth of July in 1922 to Wilbur Underwood, a gay poet and government worker he met in Washington. “The first night brought me a most strenuous wooing and the largest instrument I have handled. As this happened only two nights ago, I am modest and satisfied. Still, I am uneasy. I fear for all the anti-climaxes that are surely now in store for me.”
Five months later, he was sharing one of his ultimate fantasies: To have sex with a black man. He even called his imaginary lover “L’Afrique.” “My anticipations were so strong and my desire to give you a shock was so gleeful that I announced it as a fait accompli, when, in reality, it was only dependent on the promise of another person to arrange such an assignation,” he wrote in another letter to Underwood on December 10. “I am sorry to relate that it never came to pass. I am still limited to the experiences of a single race. The dark and warm embrace is yet to come!”
Fearing that his job at Corday & Gross provided no room for a promotion, Hart sought work in the winter of 1923 from Stanley Patmo, who had started a direct-mail advertising firm that would become the Roger Williams Company at 3804 Payne Ave. He was hired to bang out ad copy for clients like Pittsburgh Water Heaters, Pittsburgh Plate Glass and the Akron-based Seiberling Tires. He was dependable and cheerful in the office, never letting his late-night drinking bouts get in the way of his work in the morning.
At home in his grandparents’ ivory tower, Hart obsessed over what would become one of his first important poems of his literary career. The three-part “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” was his answer to T.S. Eliot’s perceived cultural pessimism in the 434-line poem, “The Waste Land.” Hart described his piece as “a bit of Dionysian splendor” with rhythmic jazz meters and interwoven symbolism that painted the “basic emotional attitude toward beauty that the Greeks had.” It took more than a year for a magazine to agree to publish the poem in its entirety.
Hart contemplated his next “new enterprise,” one that would consume the next seven years of his life. The modernist epic, "The Bridge," would result in a collection of 15 poems that traced the history of American civilization, from Christopher Columbus’ discovery of it in 1492 to the Civil War to modern advancements such as its subway system. And the Brooklyn Bridge, a New York landmark that Hart admired, would serve as the piece’s focal point. The project also would be his first and, ultimately, only attempt at long-form poetry. In its preliminary stages, the piece captured “the mystical synthesis of America,” he wrote in a February 18 letter to Munson.
But Hart faced yet another professional obstacle: Patno’s ad agency had to let him go in March of 1924 because the company had no assignments to give him. For fear that C.A. would think of his son as a failure, Hart persuaded the company to concoct a scheme that would take him to New York on a month-long “business trip,” when, in fact, he would look for another job. When he found work, he could return to Cleveland and feign resigning his position.
The plan worked. After a series of a half-dozen interviews with its executives, Hart was hired by the J. Walter Thompson Agency in late May to work in the firm’s statistical department for a $35 weekly salary, a substantial pay cut from the $50 a week he was earning at Patno’s place. But he was at the point of accepting any kind of employment; he was literally down to his last handful of pennies as he temporarily stayed with Munson and his wife, Lisa, in their apartment.
Once he was back on his feet, Hart settled into a room on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. After work, from five at night to two in the morning, he worked on The Bridge to capture the “feelings of elation…that one experiences in walking across my beloved Brooklyn Bridge,” Hart said. Above all else, he insisted that no magazine could ever publish this series of poems in bits and pieces as a few publications tried to do with “Faustus and Helen.” But because of his drive to write poetry full-time, the drudgery of daily office work dragged him down. He abruptly quit his Thompson position in October. He’d never have financial stability again as he sponged off friends for money, food and a roof over his head to concentrate on his art.
Enter Emil Opffer. In the spring of 1924, Hart met the Danish-born merchant marine through their mutual friend, Sue Jenkins. At her house, the career sailor regaled his audience with tales of every port of call he visited. Hart fell in love with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Emil, who was three years his senior. The couple was soon living together in Emil’s father’s house on Columbia Heights in, ironically, the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Because Emil was often at sea, they were apart more than they were together. And Hart documented his feelings of separation in a series of six love poems appropriately titled Voyages.
His catalog of original poems continued to grow and, by the spring of 1925, Hart decided the time had come to self-publish his first book of pieces, including the Voyages series and “Faustus and Helen.” Greenwich Village publisher Samuel Jacobs even offered to donate his expertise to typeset a run of the book’s first 500 copies when he wasn’t working on other projects. "White Buildings," whose titled was inspired by the artwork of Greek surrealist painter Giorgio di Chirico, hit bookstands later in the year.
To keep himself further occupied, Hart continued to work on "The Bridge," but he needed money to support himself. On a whim, he fired off a letter on December 3, 1925, to ask respected arts financier Otto Hermann Kahn to financially back his epic. Three days later, the two men met in Kahn’s apartment, where Hart stated his case. It was impossible to write such a complex piece in a reasonable amount of time if one had to spend half his day in a menial office job, he argued. While he was timid about asking for help, he was convinced that "The Bridge" would “enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America.” Kahn bought the sales pitch and agreed to loan the poet $2,000 to be paid in four installments, the first of which he immediately issued. Hart couldn’t believe his good fortune. Somebody was actually going to pay him to write nothing but poetry, he told a few friends.
With the first loan payment, Hart planned to buy a ticket to sail to his maternal grandmother’s winter retreat, Villa Casas, on the Isle of Pines directly south of Havana. Discovered by Columbus on his third trip to the New World in 1494, the island had inspired scenes in both Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Treasure Island" and James Matthew Barrie’s "Peter Pan." Its sandy beaches, tropical fruit orchards and legendary tales of pirate invasions could add to the romanticism of writing The Bridge, Hart reasoned.
The arrangement didn’t quite work out as he imagined. The house was virtually uninhabitable. The roof leaked, its gardens were overgrown, and mosquitoes swarmed everywhere. But it provided the privacy that Hart required to write freelance book reviews and shorter poems to supplement Kahn’s generous loans while he toiled on his epic. And there was Mrs. Simpson, the house’s caretaker, to keep him company.
Still, Hart’s frequent jaunts to the mainland to smoke Cuban cigars and pound back bottles of native beer nearly exhausted the next two loan installments. Another pleasure trip to the nearby Cayman Islands and an emergency doctor’s appointment in Havana for an ear infection added to his financial misery. He wrote to Kahn in August to ask for the last $500 of the loan. Unfortunately, his benefactor was traveling and didn’t receive the letter until two months later.
Hart had no choice but to stay put at Villa Casas to immerse himself in "The Bridge." Poems like “The Mango Tree,” “Cutty Sark” and “Ave Maria” emerged from the marathon writing session. Then, as anticipated in the Caribbean in the middle of October of 1926, a hurricane slammed into the island. And Hart loved every minute of it.
As ferocious winds whipped through the house, he huddled under his bed with Mrs. Simpson and her chatty pet parakeet, Attaboy. In the morning, they celebrated their survival by dancing to Spanish music from Hart’s record collection. But they decided that there was no sense in staying on the island since it would take months to repair the storm-battered house. So Hart returned to New York with a suitcase of clothes and drafts of his poems. He also collected the last installment of the loan that Kahn promised.
Hart moved back in with Emil’s father (and Emil, whenever he was home on leave). He also presented the drafts to Kahn, who was pleased with what he read and offered to loan yet another $300 for Hart to continue the project, this time on the Caribbean island of Martinique. C.A. also sent a $100 check “in order that you have plenty of cash to start off with,” he wrote in an accompanying letter.
But the trip never materialized. A mentally irrational Grace -- who was living in Hollywood with her widowed mother -- claimed she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If she did go crazy and he went back to the Caribbean, she groaned that his grandmother would have no one to take care of her. An angry Hart canceled his steamer ticket and immediately left for California to move into a cottage that his mother was renting. But Southern California offered him no motivation to work on The Bridge, with such distractions as the roar of the surf and the glamour of movie stars.
Emil, who was sailing on the "U.S.S. California," also arrived one evening in March of 1927 on a few hours’ leave. The pair ended up in a speakeasy in San Pedro, where five thugs robbed them of their belongings and practically left Emil for dead. He recovered on the ship as it sailed to its next stop in San Francisco. “He always seems to get the hardest end of things,” Hart wrote to his friends, Bill and Sue Brown, in New York.
On April 3, exactly six months to the day when he announced he was going to California, Hart walked into a travel agency and booked a one-way train ticket to New York. He couldn’t wait another minute to get out of town and finish "The Bridge." The five-day trip drummed up much-needed inspiration, especially when the train lumbered into New Orleans. There, Hart could see the mouth of the Mississippi, about which he had written in “The River” section of the piece. “There is something tragically beautiful about the scene, the great, magnificent Father of Waters pouring itself at last into the oblivion of the Gulf,” he wrote to his father, who had opened a restaurant and inn, Crane’s Canary Cottage, at the corner of West and West Orange streets in Chagrin Falls.
Hart gave himself a July deadline to wrap up "The Bridge" upon his New York return. But the guilt he felt at leaving his mentally ill mother only sparked another bout of writer’s block. The imposed target date came and went. Before he knew it, 1927 turned into 1928. He still had not finished the project.
In September, his beloved Grandmother Hart died. While he waited for word on any kind of inheritance from her estate, Hart’s drinking escalated. Stories circulated that, when he was smashed, he accused anybody within earshot of cheating him out of money, success and fame. Then came the final blow: He learned in November that Grace -- who was the executrix of her mother’s will -- refused to sign the papers to release Hart’s $5,000 inheritance unless he rejoined her in California. He never spoke to her again.
Another of his closest relationships came to a screeching halt in 1929. Home on leave, Emil caught Hart in bed with another man in the Columbia Heights apartment. A “stupid betrayal,” the sailor lamented. After five years, the lovers parted ways romantically, but they remained friends for the rest of Hart’s life.
The beginning of 1930 brought a happier note. After seven years, Hart finally finished "The Bridge," and publisher Horace Liveright was going to order a 250-book run of its first printing. But with the country in a newfound economic depression, Hart worried that nobody would buy a copy. He was equally anxious how literary critics would review it.
The book drew mixed reaction. An early critique by Herbert Weinstock compared Hart’s style to that of Walt Whitman. "The Nation" reviewer Granville Hicks wrote that the poems’ imagery was “sound and amazingly original.” "New Republic" critic Malcolm Cowley -- one of Hart’s first acquaintances in New York -- considered “The River” as “one of the most important poems of our age.”
Yet there was also a chorus of disapproval. In "The Bookman," writer Odell Shepard bemoaned that the poems “proceed with frenzy in the wrong direction.” "Hound and Horn" reviewer Allen Tate trashed the book for its lack of a coherent plot. And thanks to critic Percy Hutchinson, the revered "New York Times Book Review" panned "The Bridge" for its “lack of intelligibility.”
Despite the jolting feedback, Hart decided to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship and an accompanying $2,500 grant to study and write abroad. He mailed his application on August 27 and prepared to wait until the following spring, when the foundation would announce its decision. Hart then packed his suitcase and moved to Chagrin Falls to stay with C.A. and his new wife, the former Bessie Meacham. He helped out in his dad’s candy factory during the holidays. He also made daylong trips to Garrettsville and Warren to visit aunts, uncles and cousins he hadn’t seen in years.
The Guggenheim news came on March 15, 1931. Of 712 applicants, Hart and 76 other scholars, writers, artists, musicians and scientists had scored one-year grants to create and research in other parts of the world without financial worry. One catch: Because Hart wasn’t married, his grant could not exceed $2,000. It didn’t matter; his money woes were seemingly over so he could study in France.
But at the last minute, he changed his mind about his ultimate destination. Instead of Europe, where most fellows chose to study, Hart asked to live south of the border. There, he could write an epic poem about Montezuma’s conquest of the Mexican people. His supervisor, Henry Allen Moe, approved, and Hart boarded the "Orizaba" steamer in early April with his stipend: $300 in cash in his wallet and a certified letter showing a $1,700 line of credit.
The liner embarked from New York for the southward four-day sail on the Atlantic to its midway stop in Havana. The second leg took Hart west to the port of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. The last part of the journey included a 264-mile train ride over mountain ranges to the Mexico City suburb of Mixcoac, where he rented an eight-room Spanish villa, complete with his own manservant.
Between Cuba and Mexico, Hart developed a new passion: tequila. For weeks, he drank a lot and wrote very little. His drunken tears through town resulted in frequently obnoxious brawls and jail stints. He even disrupted a formal tea party at the American Embassy in Mexico City, which prompted a string of anonymous complaints that were wired to Guggenheim headquarters. Moe had no choice but to issue a letter in which he scolded the rowdy poet for making the foundation look bad and ordered him to “get down to work.”
On July 6, Hart received an unexpected cable from his stepmother, Bessie, who let him know that C.A.’s health was quickly failing. A follow-up telegram later in the day confirmed that his 56-year-old father had died of a stroke. Hart immediately booked an airplane flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then a train ticket on the Santa Fe Railroad’s Grand Canyon Limited back to Chagrin Falls.
Hart stayed in Northeast Ohio for six weeks after his dad’s funeral and burial on July 12 in Garrettsville. He also learned that he would inherit $1,000 from C.A.’s estate and collect as much as $2,000 annually from the profits of his father’s candy factory, retail stores and Crane’s Canary Cottage. The latter part of the inheritance was a long shot since, in the depths of the Great Depression, most of the ventures were losing money. In fact, his father was nearly bankrupt when he died.
Hart returned to Mexico at the end of August to find that Peggy Baird Cowley had arrived to initiate amicable divorce proceedings against her husband. Twelve years Hart’s senior, she also knew the poet well. The pair bonded. And for the first time in his life, he fell in love and had sex with a woman. At a New Year’s Eve party that Peggy was throwing in the town of Taxco north of Acapulco, the couple officially declared their love and faith for each other.
The affair fueled a much-needed burst of poetic creativity. On January 27, 1932, Hart started work on “The Broken Tower,” a piece that scholars have determined is both an affirmation of his introduction to a straight life and a denial of his past gay relationships. But it had nothing to do with Montezuma, Mexico or anything thing else he promised to write for the Guggenheim folks. His never-ending drinking binges and at least three threats to commit suicide by drinking iodine didn’t help matters, either.
The end of Hart’s fellowship came in April, but he had little to show after an entire year in Mexico. Depressed and defeated, he made arrangements for him and Peggy to sail back to New York. “Altogether, I have had a terrible time lately,” he wrote to his stepmother on April 22. “I wouldn’t have thought of staying here another minute anyway. Do you wonder I’ve been anxious to get off as soon as possible? It certainly has made a nervous wreck of me.”
Hart and Peggy boarded a train to Veracruz the next night and left the country on the New York-bound "Orizaba" two days later. The ship reached its halfway point in Havana on April 26, when the pair accidentally separated and couldn’t find each other. They finally reunited in the liner’s medical clinic after Peggy severely burned herself from a box of matches that exploded in her hands as she lit a cigarette in the ship’s lounge.
Hart -- who had downed a few cocktails in his search for her -- was furious. In a moment of irrational thinking, he was convinced that Peggy had burned herself on purpose to grab attention. His behavior then switched gears to sympathy. And in a clear sign that his mind was unraveling, he again became infuriated, locked himself in his cabin and bolted the door shut. While it’s debatable if this particular date helped alter his frame of mind, April 26 marked Emil Opffer’s 35th birthday.
To this day, rumors and secondhand stories continue to haze the account of Hart’s last hours on the ship on Wednesday, April 27. Some passengers heard that he picked up a sailor and had a gay fling during the Havana stopover. Others recalled that he sneaked out of his room at 1 a.m. for another round of drinking, only to be escorted back at 4 a.m. by a steward. Hart even told ship personnel that a stranger attacked him in his cabin and stole his ring and wallet.
Peggy stopped by the doctor’s office later that morning to have her burns re-bandaged. She returned to her room shortly before 10 a.m. to find a nervous Hart waiting for her. He was shaking uncontrollably and said he needed a drink. At 11 a.m., a steward saw him swilling shots of whiskey in his cabin. Just before noon, Hart stuck his head into Peggy’s room to announce that he was “utterly disgraced” and abruptly left.
Dressed in pajamas and a topcoat, he walked to the top deck and leaned against the railing. He took off his coat and folded it. After a couple seconds of contemplation, he flung himself off the stern into the gulf waters. He made no effort to reach out to one of the lifeboats that had been lowered to save him. And for two hours, at the direction of Captain J.E. Blackadder, rescue crews circled the area, with Peggy and her fellow passengers watching for some sign of life. Hart was never seen again.
For decades after his suicide, critics analyzed Hart’s life, including his homosexuality. In a 1937 "Plain Dealer" review of Philip Horton’s biography, "Hart Crane," writer Ted Robinson blamed the poet’s “perverse personality” on a “terrible psychopathic handicap that set him apart from normal men and women, and alienated the major portion of his intellectuals.” The newspaper’s contributing editor, N.R. Howard, wrote in a 1962 article that Hart’s sexual orientation was an “inversion” that led to his “alcoholic, shabby and hungry” existence. And a 1981 story by reporter Tom Kaib characterized the poet’s “sexual persuasion” by mentioning “alcoholic and sexual debauches.”
On the other hand, Hart remained a literary icon among fans of his work. Performers at Kent State University’s Blossom Festival School memorialized him in a 1974 concert of his poems set to music. The school even wanted to hang a plaque on Hart’s childhood home in Garrettsville. Unfortunately, the man who owned the house served with the Ohio National Guard. Because of the shootings that killed four Kent State students during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration four years earlier, he wanted nothing to do with the university and refused to have a marker attached to his house.
But the memorials continued. Noted Cleveland sculptor and Shaw High School graduate William Mozart McVey created "The Hart Crane Memorial," a bronze statue that was installed near the intersection of East Boulevard and Bellflower Drive across the street from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The piece joined the 16-foot "Long Road" wall relief at Cleveland’s Jewish Community Center and a seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Olympic track-and-field star Jesse Owens on Lakeside Avenue as one of 48 publicly displayed sculptures in McVey’s repertoire.
The Ohio Canal Corridor also earmarked $500,000 for its historic- and cultural-enhancement initiative in 1994. The organization then purchased a half-acre of land to build Hart Crane Park at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Merwin Street near the Commodores Club in the Flats of Cleveland. The agency also bought a 1992 master work dedicated to Hart by artist and former Cleveland State University professor Gene Kangas, who designed a two-piece metal memorial flanked by two light-blue structures that simulated crashing ocean waves. Stanzas of Hart’s poetry were etched into the structure for the enjoyment of commercial and recreational boaters alike as they sailed past the park on the Cuyahoga River:
Far strum of foghorns
Fog-insulated noises
Midnight among distant chiming buoys adrift.
A tugboat wheezing by
Wreaths of steam
Lunged past a sound of waters bending astride the sky.
Follow your arches
To what corners of the sky they pull you
Where marble clouds support the sea wreck of dreams.
---
Although Hart Crane’s body was never recovered, his father’s family added the inscription, “HAROLD HART CRANE, 1899-1932, LOST AT SEA,” to the base of C.A.’s tombstone in Section A, Lot 601, Plot 17 of Park Cemetery at the corner of Center Street and Brosius Road in Garrettsville. Hart was 32 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
Chapter 4: Langston Hughes
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes
1902-1967
Langston Hughes scholars have debated the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance writer’s sexual orientation for decades. The African-American community’s notorious refusal to admit that any black man is gay only exacerbates the matter. The “down-low” phenomenon, in which closeted homosexuality runs rampant in minority circles, also adds to the aura of a gay enclave in Urban America.
In Langston’s case, one side of the aisle has concluded that he was gay, citing passages from several poems that shed light on his perceived homosexuality. They point to published personal letters in which he describes intimate encounters with other men. A couple of low-budget biographies for both the silver and small screens also fuel their argument.
Their detractors, including those who personally knew the poet and playwright, insist that Langston exhibited no behavioral traits that suggested he was attracted to men. Even his official biographer isn’t convinced that he was gay. That the same biographer is now the co-director of Langston’s estate leaves one to think that his position may have influenced his conclusion.
The fencer-sitters also have chimed in with their opinions, claiming Langston was asexual, in which he had an indifference to both men and women. The theory is definitely plausible since the infamous 1950s Kinsey study on sexuality showed that 1.5 percent of the male population fits the description. So why don’t you decide?
Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, James Mercer Langston Hughes came from a line of trailblazing civil-rights pioneers. His maternal grandmother, the former Mary Sampson Patterson of North Carolina, was one of the first women to ever enroll at and graduate from Oberlin College in Lorain County. In October of 1859, her first husband, the 24-year-old harness maker Lewis Sheridan Leary, was gunned down as he crossed the Shenandoah River during John Brown’s unsuccessful slave revolt in Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Together only a year, the couple produced a daughter, Louise, who was six months old when her dad was killed.
Mary married a second time 10 years later to Charles Henry Langston, who was born in Virginia to a white plantation owner and an emancipated slave of African- and Native-American ancestry. Like his wife, he went into the history books. In 1835, he, with his older brother, Gideon, was one of the first blacks to be accepted at Oberlin. And by 1858, he and his younger brother, John Mercer, co-founded the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society to fight for equal rights, suffrage and the same educational opportunities afforded to whites. Three years earlier, John became the first African-American in the country to be voted into office after he was elected clerk of the Lorain County township of Brownhelm. In 1888, after moving back to Virginia, he made more history with his election to the U.S. Congress as the first black representative from the state.
Meanwhile, Charles had bought a 125-acre farm and apple orchard north of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1868. He then returned to Northeast Ohio to wed Mary in Elyria on January 18, 1869. After the ceremony, the couple relocated to Kansas, where he continued his mission in America’s heartland to campaign for equal rights for all blacks. Mary, meanwhile, bore two more children: Nathaniel Turner in 1870 and Carolina “Carrie” Mercer in 1873. The couple also took in a foster son, Dessalines, who was named after a leader of the 1790s slave revolt in Haiti, which subsequently became the first independent nation ever ruled by blacks.
In 1872 in Kansas City, Charles became principal of the Quindaro Freedman’s School, the first state-chartered, four-year university for African-Americans west of the Mississippi River. The Kansas Republican Party also nominated him that year as one of its four delegates to cast the state’s votes and give Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant a second term as U.S. president. Weary of the rural life, he sold his farm 16 years later and moved to a home in Lawrence, where he partnered with businessman Richard Burns to operate a grocery store.
By the time he died of chronic stomach problems on November 21, 1892, the 75-year-old Charles helped establish the Interstate Library Association, led the Colored Benevolent Society and served as a grand master of the Colored Masons. He was also deeply involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “For nearly three decades, (Charles) had been a leader of the campaigns in Kansas for black suffrage and for blacks’ rights to serve on juries and in the state militia,” historian Richard B. Sheridan wrote in his 1999 essay, "Charles Henry Langston and the African-American Struggle in Kansas." “Moreover, he was a leader in seeking improved social and economic conditions for black citizens.”
Daughter Carrie graduated from high school a year after Charles’ death and before she enrolled in a two-and-a-half-month program for a certificate in kindergarten and elementary education at Kansas State Normal School in Emporia. By 1898, she was teaching school in Guthrie in the Oklahoma Territory. There, she met Indiana native James Nathaniel Hughes, a 27-year-old law clerk whose mixed-raced heritage of Scottish, Jewish and African-American ancestries prevented him from taking the state bar examination.
The couple married in Guthrie on April 30, 1899. The match was like oil and water. The fun-loving Carrie adored the theater, literature and shopping sprees; the aloof James was tight-fisted with his money and harbored fierce resentment toward the African-American race, presumably because of the barriers he faced because of it. Despite their personality differences, the newlyweds moved across the border to Joplin in the southwest corner of Missouri, where James landed a $25-a-month job as a stenographer for a lead- and zinc-mining company. Carrie also learned she was pregnant. Their first son, however, died after his birth in February of 1900. A year later, the pair headed east to Buffalo, New York, where she became pregnant again, this time with Langston.
Despite the pregnancy, the Hugheses’ marriage stood on rocky ground that led to a separation. James fled to Cuba, then to Mexico City, where he worked as the personal secretary to the head of the Pullman Palace Car Company, a leading manufacturer of sleeper cars, streetcars and trolley buses. Meanwhile, Carrie returned to Joplin to give birth almost two years to the day after the death of her first son.
Langston seldom saw his mother as a toddler after Carrie accepted a job as a stenographer for an African-American lawyer in the Kansas capital of Topeka. Instead of taking her son with her, she left him with her mother in Lawrence, where, as an elementary-school student, he discovered an inherited passion for the theater and books. He began to write poetry. He also delivered both The Saturday Evening Post and the town’s weekly newspaper to subscribers.
It’s not clear when Carrie’s divorce from James became final. But by 1915, when Langston was 13 years old, she married Topeka cook Homer Clark, who had custody of his two-year-old son, Gwyn Shannon, from a prior marriage. After Grandmother Mary died in the wee hours of April 8 at 79 years old, the Clarks settled that summer in Lincoln, Illinois, about 30 miles northeast of the capital of Springfield.
Langston enrolled in the eighth grade at Central School, where he impressed teachers with his intellect, friendliness and even temper. He also was elected class poet because of his skin color, he reasoned. “There were only two of us Negroes in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry,” he said years later. “Well, everyone knows -- except us -- that all Negroes have rhythm. So they elected me as class poet.”
Langston delivered his graduation poem during a ceremony on May 31, 1916, on the same day his unemployed stepfather left Lincoln for Cleveland. At the end of the summer, he, his mother and stepbrother joined Homer, who eventually found work as a machinist in the steel mill. The family lived in a dank basement apartment at 11217 Ashbury Ave. between Superior and Euclid avenues and near Wade and Rockefeller parks in University Circle. Langston also signed up for his freshmen year at Central High School and found an after-school job peddling ice cream in Bessie Kitzmiller’s confectionary at 3943 Central Ave.
A bright student, Langston was one of a handful of African-Americans in a class of predominantly white kids whose parents had immigrated from Europe. He excelled at graphic arts, ran on the school’s track team and, during the summer after the ninth grade, earned more spending money by running a dumbwaiter at Halle’s department store downtown. The job, he later wrote, awed him when he saw wealthy shoppers buy pricey perfumes and cigarette lighters that cost six times the rent his parents were paying every month.
But Langston’s home life abruptly collapsed, when his stepfather walked away from his marriage and hopped on a westbound train to Chicago. Carrie, hoping for a reconciliation and with Gwyn in tow, soon followed and left Langston to fend for himself in a room in a boarding-house attic at 2266 E. 86th St. north of Quincy Avenue. (The Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation of Cleveland bought the dilapidated home for $100 in November of 2009, with tentative plans to renovate it into a museum of Hughes memorabilia.)
Because the only meal he knew how to make for himself consisted of boiled rice and hot dogs, Langston spent much of his time at the home of his closest buddy, Sartur Andrzejewski, a blond-haired, Polish-Catholic classmate whose mother and two sisters fattened up the boys on sausage and cabbage. He also sought respite at the “Playground Settlement,” the first community center that Russell and Rowena Woodham Jelliffe founded in 1915 to showcase the best African-American writers, actors and dancers of the day. The husband-and-wife team would play a pivotal role later in his life.
During the summer of 1918, Langston decided to join his mother in Chicago. Homer again had split town, leaving Carrie and the two boys in yet another drab one-room apartment in the Windy City. The trio, however, made the best of the situation, with Langston earning his keep by delivering hats for a milliner who hired Carrie as a maid. But Chicago, teeming with whites who despised minorities, proved too dangerous, and he boarded a Cleveland-bound train by himself to start his junior year at Central High.
Langston immediately plunged into school life. His class elected him to a seat on the Student Council. He served as president of the patriotic American Civic Association and secretary of the French Club. His extra-curricular activities also included membership in the Home Garden Club.
On top of all his after-school interests, Langston embraced the world of journalism by signing up as a writer for the school’s newspaper, "The Monthly." He submitted poems and short stories, including one that depicted a backwoods girl inviting a paperboy and his family to her wealthy aunt’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. He also was appointed the editor of “The Belfry Owl,” a satirical section of the newspaper in which contributors submitted written observations of the goings-on at Central. And because of his work on the publication, Langston honed his poetic writing style. His English teacher, Ethel Weimer, helped by introducing him to pieces by such poets as Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, whom he described as his “guiding star.”
One of the highlights of Langston’s junior year came in the spring of 1919, when Carrie and Gwyn came back to town and rented a shoebox of an apartment at 5709 Longfellow Ave. south of Carnegie Avenue. His mother found work as a waitress. And unexpectedly, his father, James, wired a telegram to invite his son to spend the summer with him in Mexico. Langston jumped on the offer.
The south-of-the-border sojourn proved eye-opening. Langston learned that his dad had acquired three pieces of property: his home in Toluca, a spacious ranch 40 miles away in Temascaltepec and a rental house another 44 miles away in Mexico City. He also discovered that his father was a vociferous racist, who told his son to “look at the niggers” as they passed a field of laborers picking cotton.
Langston’s prolific poetry-writing helped soothe the tension with James. His writing style evolved with a maturity that was invigorated by his observations of the escalating racial and political battles in the U.S. He also depicted Cleveland in his pieces. “I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day,” he explained years later.
In September, Langston booked a seat on a Pullman for the train ride home to Cleveland to begin his senior year at Central. He amazed his fellow track-and-field teammates by clearing the high jump at five feet and six inches, a spectacular feat considering the bar was set two inches higher than his five-foot-four-inch frame. He continued his responsibilities for both the Student Council and French Club. He also tried his hand at acting in school plays.
Langston’s final year of high school flew by quickly. On June 16, 1920, his 127-member senior class graduated in Central’s auditorium, where he pondered his academic future. Should he stay in Cleveland and enroll at Western Reserve University with Andrzejewski and a few other classmates? Or should he follow his instincts and apply to the more exclusive Ivy League college, Columbia University, in New York City to be near other writers? If he headed to the East Coast, he’d certainly need financial help from his dad in Mexico. So a month later, he traveled back to Toluca to argue his case. The reunion unexpectedly lasted a year.
During his stay, Langston made a living as a tutor to the children of the city’s mayor. He often spent his free time at the bullfights in Mexico City. And, on at least one occasion, he patronized a bordello, although there’s no evidence to suggest that he had sex with any of the female prostitutes.
In June of 1921, African-American scholar, author and editor W.E.B. Dubois published Langston’s 14-line poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the NAACP-sponsored magazine, "Crisis." The piece became his signature lyric, primarily because of its focal line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The nationwide exposure of its publication must have impressed James because he offered to spring for his son’s Columbia tuition, but only if Langston majored in engineering and not creative writing. The gesture, however, was ill-fated. Although he maintained a B-plus grade point average, Langston dropped out of school a year later, citing on-campus racial prejudice for his decision.
Instead, he started to absorb the mushrooming arts-and-music scene of the black community in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. And, under the wings of the much older gay “father of the Harlem Renaissance,” Alain LeRoy Locke, he moved from his seven-dollar-a-week, fourth-floor room at the YMCA’s Harlem branch to a boarding house at 267 W. 136th St. that he and fellow writers Countee Cullen, Wallace “Wally” Thurman and Richard “Bruce” Nugent affectionately dubbed “Niggeratti Manor.” Nugent went so far as to make the rooms more festive by painting homoerotic murals on the walls. And the housemates developed a reputation for their all-night parties.
The question, then, remains: Was Langston gay? With the exceptions of an exhaustive two-volume biography and a couple of docudramas, historians seldom have written about his sexuality, even with hypotheses and conjecture. The guessing games start with his collection of gay comrades, including Cullen himself.
A year younger than Langston, Countee Leroy Porter was abandoned at birth by his parents and raised by his paternal grandmother until her death in 1918. At 15, he was adopted by Episcopal minister Frederick Ashbury Cullen in Harlem. He won many poetry-writing contests as a teenager and edited his high school’s magazine. Although he later married twice, he told his first wife that he was sexually attracted to men. His laundry list of potential suitors included Langston, who showed no reciprocal interest.
Langston also maintained a friendship with openly gay writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who championed the Harlem Renaissance stable of artists and writers. His 1926 novel, "Nigger Heaven," about a librarian and a writer who try to keep their romance alive in the face of rampant racism, created a stir after its publication. The book’s title alone referred to a Jim Crow-era phrase about theater balconies, where African-Americans were corralled during stage performances while white audiences sat in the more comfortable seats below.
To further analyze Langston’s sexual orientation, consider his six-month voyage to West Africa as a crew member aboard the "S.S. Malone" in June of 1923. The freighter made several stops, including the Nigerian capital of Lagos and the largest Canary Island of Tenerife. In both ports of call, he experienced his first two man-to-man sexual encounters with a couple of frisky crewmates. Both of them wanted him to play the “male” role in bed, he told his secretary decades later.
On his way back from Africa in early 1924, Langston left the ship to work in the kitchen of a Parisian nightclub for a few months. By November, he was living with his mother in Washington, D.C., where she was staying with relatives from the John Mercer Langston side of her family. He also found a job as the personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. But the demands of the position left him little time to write. So he resigned to bus tables in the restaurant of the Wardman Park Hotel in the heart of the nation’s capital.
Good move, too. One evening, as he cleared dirty dishes and silverware in the dining room, Langston spotted Vachel Lindsay, who was one of the era’s most heralded American poets. He seized the moment and presented the Illinois-born, Hiram College-educated writer with copies of three of his poems. From that night on, an obviously impressed Lindsay declared he had discovered new African American talent.
At the same time, Langston scored a first-place prize for his poem, “The Weary Blues,” in a writing contest sponsored by "Opportunity" magazine. Thanks to Van Vechten’s connections, he inked a book deal with the Knopf Publishing Company. His debut collection of poetry, "The Weary Blues," featuring the five-year-old “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,“ hit bookstore shelves in January of 1926.
Langston still wanted to complete his college education, despite his disconcerting freshmen year at Columbia. He enrolled for the winter semester at Lincoln University in the Pennsylvania town of Oxford near Philadelphia. Founded in 1854, the college staked its claim as the oldest historically black school in the country. And Langston immersed himself in campus life with other classmates, including future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He also pledged membership in the Omega Psi Phi social fraternity, whose motto, “Friendship is essential to the soul,” spoke for itself.
Langston’s first semester at Lincoln ended in June, just in time for "The Nation" magazine to publish his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The memorable “manifesto,” as some historians have described it, addressed both the struggles and achievements of African-Americans writers, painters and musicians. “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote. “If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter, either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how. And we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”
In early 1927, Langston’s sophomore anthology of poems, "Fine Clothes to the Jew," stormed the literary world to the dismay of many African-American book critics. Its title itself raised a few eyebrows because it referred to poverty-stricken Harlemites, who traded their wardrobes for cash in Jewish-owned pawn shops. Many black reviewers railed against the book because it concentrated on the poorest segment of black society. Yet, the work further established Langston as an artistic force in the Harlem Renaissance.
The distinction made an impact on Charlotte Osgood Mason. The wealthy widow of a distinguished surgeon, parapsychologist and hypnotherapist, her inheritance financially backed several Harlem artists, including painter Aaron Douglas and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. The feisty, overbearing “Godmother,” as she insisted her young beneficiaries call her, added Langston to the mix that spring and oversaw his work on his first novel, "Not Without Laughter," about an African-American boy and his impoverished family in the Midwest.
Langston graduated from Lincoln with a bachelor’s degree in 1929 and returned to Harlem to write his book, insisting that he would always make New York City his home. “I’ll never leave Harlem for anywhere else,” he told his Niggeratti Manor housemates.
Yet, right before "Laughter’s" release in 1931, he and Mason quarreled over creative differences in his writing. As a result, Langston retreated to Cleveland for a homecoming with his mother, who had returned from Washington to rent a home at 4800 Carnegie Ave. He didn’t tell his benefactor about his whereabouts.
Langston only intended to stay with his mom for three weeks, after which he would pay for a trip to Florida with the next check that Mason sent him. Ten days later, however, the matriarch of the arts wrote that she was financially cutting him off for good.
Three weeks turned into three months before good news materialized. The Harmon Foundation awarded "Laughter" its annual gold medal for Langston’s contributions to fine arts in the African American community. The prize came with a $400 check that would help him finance a trip to the South. At the suggestion of the Jelliffes, who had since founded the predominantly black Gilpin Players theatrical troupe, he chose Zell Ingram, a 21-year-old gay man as a traveling companion. The pair took turns behind the wheel of Carrie’s Ford to Miami, then hopped on a train to Key West. From there, they boarded a boat to Havana, where Langston was treated like a celebrity as he alighted onto Cuban soil. His published works had electrified readers as far as the Caribbean.
Biographers have well documented the second half of Langston’s life in his ascent as an influential poet, playwright, novelist and newspaper columnist of the Harlem Renaissance. For these pages, though, the focus now will shift to his Northeast Ohio connections since the region remained a magnet for him, primarily because of the Jelliffes’ theater, Karamu House, at 3807 Central Ave.
In the fall of 1935, Langston’s mother moved from her Carnegie Avenue digs to a three-room apartment at 212 S. Pleasant St. in Oberlin. The town occupied a special place in her heart because both of her parents graduated from Oberlin College. Because of his proximity to Cleveland, Langston made frequent trips to the city for poetry readings. And he regularly visited the Jelliffes, who asked him if he would like to become Karamu’s playwright-in-residence. They needn’t say more. The offer was a no-brainer.
Langston’s debut offering, "Little Ham," took a farcical look at the numbers racket in Depression-era Harlem. For the most part, the play wowed theater critics after its Karamu debut on March 24, 1936. They trumpeted it as “hilarious” and “side-splitting,” with predictions of a possible run on Broadway and an adaptation on the silver screen. Langston’s next Gilpin Players production, "Troubled Island," was staged in May. The two plays marked the beginning in a long line of scripts that he would write for the troupe.
Although Langston returned to live in Harlem -- he would buy a townhouse at 20 E. 127th St. in 1948 -- his subsequent Cleveland visits in the ‘40s and ‘50s included several poetry readings at the main branch of the city’s public library. He also served as master of ceremonies at the Cleveland Black Folk Festival in 1952. One of his last public appearances took place at the Jelliffes’ golden-anniversary party for Karamu House in 1965.
On May 6, 1967, in New York City, Langston felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He was rushed to New York Polytechnic Clinic, where, six days later, he underwent prostate surgery to remove a potentially cancerous mass at the bottom of his abdomen. The operation went well. However, Langston’s condition started to take a downward turn three days later, when physicians diagnosed him with bronchopneumonia. His temperature also skyrocketed to 103 degrees, causing him to slip in and out of consciousness.
Two more days passed with no signs of improvement. Wheeled into the hospital’s intensive-care unit, Langston lapsed into a coma. At 10:40 p.m. on Monday, May 22, he died of septic shock, a virulent medical condition that kills half of its victims.
About 200 invited mourners, including chanteuse Lena Horne and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche, gathered at Benta’s Funeral Home in Harlem on May 25 to pay their respects. Playwright Arna Bontemps, with whom Langston had sometimes collaborated, read some of his buddy’s poems. Later, at a Manhattan crematory, a handful of friends broke into a recitation of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
After Langston’s death, accolades continued to mount in his honor. Among them, the City College of New York awarded its first Langston Hughes Medal in 1973 to recognize an influential and entertaining African-American writer. New York City officials bestowed landmark status on his Harlem home and renamed East 127th Street as Langston Hughes Place. And in 2002, the U.S. Postal Service celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth by portraying his image on a postage stamp in its Black Heritage series.
Literary scholars and historians alike have also studied Langston’s poems to glean even a hint of his sexual orientation. Some analysts have determined he was asexual. Other researchers have concluded that he kept his homosexuality in the closet for fear its discovery would make him a pariah in the African-American community. And there’s yet another army of intellects, who are certain that he led a gay lifestyle. “He was always eluding marriage. He said marriage and career didn’t work,” said Jean Blackwell Huston, former head of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in an "Esquire" magazine article in February of 1992. “It wasn’t until years later that I became convinced he was homosexual.”
Throughout the course of his career, Langston made noticeable changes in the subject matter of his poems and short stories. While most of his early works depicted the plight of Black America, his later pieces exhibited a homoerotic nuance. For example, in the poem, “Trumpet Player” --- which appeared in his 1947 collection, Fields of Wonder -- a reader can visualize the protagonist in the act of oral sex with another man: “The music from the trumpet at his lips is honey mixed with liquid fire/The rhythm from the trumpet at his lips is ecstasy distilled from old desire.”
The unpublished “To Beauty” similarly radiated a homosexual overtone. The first line of the piece, “To worship at the altar of beauty,” was a well-known gay code phrase during the Jazz Age to describe intimate, same-sex encounters. And “Café: 3 A.M.,” which made its debut in his 1951 anthology, Montage of a Dream Deferred, clearly described a police raid on a gay nightclub.
Detectives from the vice squad
With weary, sadistic eyes spotting fairies.
Degenerates, some say.
But God, nature or somebody made them that way.
Police lady or lesbian over there?
Where?
Langston also seemed to go out of his way to draw parallels between himself and the main character in his 1961 story, "Blessed Assurance." The piece, about a father who flips out over his son’s effeminate nature, portrayed Delmar as “a brilliant, young queer, on the honor roll in high school, and likely to be graduated in the spring at the head of his class.” In the story, he also was a member of the French, Glee and Drama clubs, and dreamed of going to Paris after graduation.
The likenesses were more than coincidental. For starters, Langston, like Delmar, excelled at academics. He was an officer in Central High’s French Club and acted in theatrical productions during his senior year. He also spent a few months in France after his West African stint on the Malone.
Furthermore, both boys were products of broken, dysfunctional families. They even were named after ancestors on the maternal sides of their families. And as if Langston again was writing in code, the name of Delmar’s church-choir director, Manley Jaxon, gave readers pause to wonder. The choral maestro’s first name obviously referred to virility; his surname was that of five-foot-two-inch Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, a popular African-American drag queen of the ‘20s and ‘30s.
At least two filmmakers have weighed in on the debate. In 1988, British director Isaac Julien made the 42-minute, black-and-white flick, "Looking for Langston," to memorialize the writer’s contributions to the Harlem Renaissance from a black, gay vantage point. Julien also intended to “construct a narrative that would allow viewers to meditate and to think, rather than be told,” he said in interviews. The tribute eventually won a Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the 1989 Berlin International Film Festival.
Upon its 1990 release in the U.S., the executors of Langston’s estate tried to censor the film, claiming they never gave Julien permission to incorporate readings of the writer’s poetry into the script. They also demanded that movie houses had to cut off the sound during screenings when Langston’s work was heard. “Clearly, (Langston) never wanted to be known publicly as gay,” wrote Stanford University professor Arnold Rampersad in his biography, "The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World." “In the absence of clear evidence that he was, how could (former estate administrator George) Bass do otherwise than oppose Julien’s willful, even flagrant, abuse of (Langston’s) name and of the wishes of his estate?” (You, the reader, should know that Rampersad is now one of the estate’s co-administrators.)
The film, "Brother to Brother," by documentary filmmaker Rodney Evans received less controversy after its debut at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where a jury awarded a “special prize“ to the piece. Set in modern-day New York, the movie portrays a gay art student who meets Langston’s former housemate, Richard “Bruce” Nugent, in a homeless shelter. As the movie flashes back to 1920s Harlem, the author and painter can be seen cavorting with such writers as Langston, Wally Thurman and Zora Neal Hurston in scenes that suggest that nearly every Niggeratti Manor tenant was homosexual. After Sundance, the movie made the rounds of gay film fests as well as occasional airings on public television.
Before his death of AIDS-related complications at 38 years old in November of 1995, gay black poet and activist Essex Hemphill continued to challenge African-Americans’ ignorance of homosexuality within its community. To explore the sexuality of black icons like Langston is to unearth the truth behind their legacies. “The silence surrounding black, gay and lesbian lives is being meticulously dismantled,” he said. “Every closet is coming down. Those closets are ancestral burial sites that we rightfully claim and exhume.”
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Langston Hughes’ remains were interred beneath a medallion embedded in the foyer of the Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd. in New York City. He was 65 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
Langston Hughes
1902-1967
Langston Hughes scholars have debated the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance writer’s sexual orientation for decades. The African-American community’s notorious refusal to admit that any black man is gay only exacerbates the matter. The “down-low” phenomenon, in which closeted homosexuality runs rampant in minority circles, also adds to the aura of a gay enclave in Urban America.
In Langston’s case, one side of the aisle has concluded that he was gay, citing passages from several poems that shed light on his perceived homosexuality. They point to published personal letters in which he describes intimate encounters with other men. A couple of low-budget biographies for both the silver and small screens also fuel their argument.
Their detractors, including those who personally knew the poet and playwright, insist that Langston exhibited no behavioral traits that suggested he was attracted to men. Even his official biographer isn’t convinced that he was gay. That the same biographer is now the co-director of Langston’s estate leaves one to think that his position may have influenced his conclusion.
The fencer-sitters also have chimed in with their opinions, claiming Langston was asexual, in which he had an indifference to both men and women. The theory is definitely plausible since the infamous 1950s Kinsey study on sexuality showed that 1.5 percent of the male population fits the description. So why don’t you decide?
Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, James Mercer Langston Hughes came from a line of trailblazing civil-rights pioneers. His maternal grandmother, the former Mary Sampson Patterson of North Carolina, was one of the first women to ever enroll at and graduate from Oberlin College in Lorain County. In October of 1859, her first husband, the 24-year-old harness maker Lewis Sheridan Leary, was gunned down as he crossed the Shenandoah River during John Brown’s unsuccessful slave revolt in Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Together only a year, the couple produced a daughter, Louise, who was six months old when her dad was killed.
Mary married a second time 10 years later to Charles Henry Langston, who was born in Virginia to a white plantation owner and an emancipated slave of African- and Native-American ancestry. Like his wife, he went into the history books. In 1835, he, with his older brother, Gideon, was one of the first blacks to be accepted at Oberlin. And by 1858, he and his younger brother, John Mercer, co-founded the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society to fight for equal rights, suffrage and the same educational opportunities afforded to whites. Three years earlier, John became the first African-American in the country to be voted into office after he was elected clerk of the Lorain County township of Brownhelm. In 1888, after moving back to Virginia, he made more history with his election to the U.S. Congress as the first black representative from the state.
Meanwhile, Charles had bought a 125-acre farm and apple orchard north of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1868. He then returned to Northeast Ohio to wed Mary in Elyria on January 18, 1869. After the ceremony, the couple relocated to Kansas, where he continued his mission in America’s heartland to campaign for equal rights for all blacks. Mary, meanwhile, bore two more children: Nathaniel Turner in 1870 and Carolina “Carrie” Mercer in 1873. The couple also took in a foster son, Dessalines, who was named after a leader of the 1790s slave revolt in Haiti, which subsequently became the first independent nation ever ruled by blacks.
In 1872 in Kansas City, Charles became principal of the Quindaro Freedman’s School, the first state-chartered, four-year university for African-Americans west of the Mississippi River. The Kansas Republican Party also nominated him that year as one of its four delegates to cast the state’s votes and give Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant a second term as U.S. president. Weary of the rural life, he sold his farm 16 years later and moved to a home in Lawrence, where he partnered with businessman Richard Burns to operate a grocery store.
By the time he died of chronic stomach problems on November 21, 1892, the 75-year-old Charles helped establish the Interstate Library Association, led the Colored Benevolent Society and served as a grand master of the Colored Masons. He was also deeply involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “For nearly three decades, (Charles) had been a leader of the campaigns in Kansas for black suffrage and for blacks’ rights to serve on juries and in the state militia,” historian Richard B. Sheridan wrote in his 1999 essay, "Charles Henry Langston and the African-American Struggle in Kansas." “Moreover, he was a leader in seeking improved social and economic conditions for black citizens.”
Daughter Carrie graduated from high school a year after Charles’ death and before she enrolled in a two-and-a-half-month program for a certificate in kindergarten and elementary education at Kansas State Normal School in Emporia. By 1898, she was teaching school in Guthrie in the Oklahoma Territory. There, she met Indiana native James Nathaniel Hughes, a 27-year-old law clerk whose mixed-raced heritage of Scottish, Jewish and African-American ancestries prevented him from taking the state bar examination.
The couple married in Guthrie on April 30, 1899. The match was like oil and water. The fun-loving Carrie adored the theater, literature and shopping sprees; the aloof James was tight-fisted with his money and harbored fierce resentment toward the African-American race, presumably because of the barriers he faced because of it. Despite their personality differences, the newlyweds moved across the border to Joplin in the southwest corner of Missouri, where James landed a $25-a-month job as a stenographer for a lead- and zinc-mining company. Carrie also learned she was pregnant. Their first son, however, died after his birth in February of 1900. A year later, the pair headed east to Buffalo, New York, where she became pregnant again, this time with Langston.
Despite the pregnancy, the Hugheses’ marriage stood on rocky ground that led to a separation. James fled to Cuba, then to Mexico City, where he worked as the personal secretary to the head of the Pullman Palace Car Company, a leading manufacturer of sleeper cars, streetcars and trolley buses. Meanwhile, Carrie returned to Joplin to give birth almost two years to the day after the death of her first son.
Langston seldom saw his mother as a toddler after Carrie accepted a job as a stenographer for an African-American lawyer in the Kansas capital of Topeka. Instead of taking her son with her, she left him with her mother in Lawrence, where, as an elementary-school student, he discovered an inherited passion for the theater and books. He began to write poetry. He also delivered both The Saturday Evening Post and the town’s weekly newspaper to subscribers.
It’s not clear when Carrie’s divorce from James became final. But by 1915, when Langston was 13 years old, she married Topeka cook Homer Clark, who had custody of his two-year-old son, Gwyn Shannon, from a prior marriage. After Grandmother Mary died in the wee hours of April 8 at 79 years old, the Clarks settled that summer in Lincoln, Illinois, about 30 miles northeast of the capital of Springfield.
Langston enrolled in the eighth grade at Central School, where he impressed teachers with his intellect, friendliness and even temper. He also was elected class poet because of his skin color, he reasoned. “There were only two of us Negroes in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry,” he said years later. “Well, everyone knows -- except us -- that all Negroes have rhythm. So they elected me as class poet.”
Langston delivered his graduation poem during a ceremony on May 31, 1916, on the same day his unemployed stepfather left Lincoln for Cleveland. At the end of the summer, he, his mother and stepbrother joined Homer, who eventually found work as a machinist in the steel mill. The family lived in a dank basement apartment at 11217 Ashbury Ave. between Superior and Euclid avenues and near Wade and Rockefeller parks in University Circle. Langston also signed up for his freshmen year at Central High School and found an after-school job peddling ice cream in Bessie Kitzmiller’s confectionary at 3943 Central Ave.
A bright student, Langston was one of a handful of African-Americans in a class of predominantly white kids whose parents had immigrated from Europe. He excelled at graphic arts, ran on the school’s track team and, during the summer after the ninth grade, earned more spending money by running a dumbwaiter at Halle’s department store downtown. The job, he later wrote, awed him when he saw wealthy shoppers buy pricey perfumes and cigarette lighters that cost six times the rent his parents were paying every month.
But Langston’s home life abruptly collapsed, when his stepfather walked away from his marriage and hopped on a westbound train to Chicago. Carrie, hoping for a reconciliation and with Gwyn in tow, soon followed and left Langston to fend for himself in a room in a boarding-house attic at 2266 E. 86th St. north of Quincy Avenue. (The Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation of Cleveland bought the dilapidated home for $100 in November of 2009, with tentative plans to renovate it into a museum of Hughes memorabilia.)
Because the only meal he knew how to make for himself consisted of boiled rice and hot dogs, Langston spent much of his time at the home of his closest buddy, Sartur Andrzejewski, a blond-haired, Polish-Catholic classmate whose mother and two sisters fattened up the boys on sausage and cabbage. He also sought respite at the “Playground Settlement,” the first community center that Russell and Rowena Woodham Jelliffe founded in 1915 to showcase the best African-American writers, actors and dancers of the day. The husband-and-wife team would play a pivotal role later in his life.
During the summer of 1918, Langston decided to join his mother in Chicago. Homer again had split town, leaving Carrie and the two boys in yet another drab one-room apartment in the Windy City. The trio, however, made the best of the situation, with Langston earning his keep by delivering hats for a milliner who hired Carrie as a maid. But Chicago, teeming with whites who despised minorities, proved too dangerous, and he boarded a Cleveland-bound train by himself to start his junior year at Central High.
Langston immediately plunged into school life. His class elected him to a seat on the Student Council. He served as president of the patriotic American Civic Association and secretary of the French Club. His extra-curricular activities also included membership in the Home Garden Club.
On top of all his after-school interests, Langston embraced the world of journalism by signing up as a writer for the school’s newspaper, "The Monthly." He submitted poems and short stories, including one that depicted a backwoods girl inviting a paperboy and his family to her wealthy aunt’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. He also was appointed the editor of “The Belfry Owl,” a satirical section of the newspaper in which contributors submitted written observations of the goings-on at Central. And because of his work on the publication, Langston honed his poetic writing style. His English teacher, Ethel Weimer, helped by introducing him to pieces by such poets as Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, whom he described as his “guiding star.”
One of the highlights of Langston’s junior year came in the spring of 1919, when Carrie and Gwyn came back to town and rented a shoebox of an apartment at 5709 Longfellow Ave. south of Carnegie Avenue. His mother found work as a waitress. And unexpectedly, his father, James, wired a telegram to invite his son to spend the summer with him in Mexico. Langston jumped on the offer.
The south-of-the-border sojourn proved eye-opening. Langston learned that his dad had acquired three pieces of property: his home in Toluca, a spacious ranch 40 miles away in Temascaltepec and a rental house another 44 miles away in Mexico City. He also discovered that his father was a vociferous racist, who told his son to “look at the niggers” as they passed a field of laborers picking cotton.
Langston’s prolific poetry-writing helped soothe the tension with James. His writing style evolved with a maturity that was invigorated by his observations of the escalating racial and political battles in the U.S. He also depicted Cleveland in his pieces. “I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day,” he explained years later.
In September, Langston booked a seat on a Pullman for the train ride home to Cleveland to begin his senior year at Central. He amazed his fellow track-and-field teammates by clearing the high jump at five feet and six inches, a spectacular feat considering the bar was set two inches higher than his five-foot-four-inch frame. He continued his responsibilities for both the Student Council and French Club. He also tried his hand at acting in school plays.
Langston’s final year of high school flew by quickly. On June 16, 1920, his 127-member senior class graduated in Central’s auditorium, where he pondered his academic future. Should he stay in Cleveland and enroll at Western Reserve University with Andrzejewski and a few other classmates? Or should he follow his instincts and apply to the more exclusive Ivy League college, Columbia University, in New York City to be near other writers? If he headed to the East Coast, he’d certainly need financial help from his dad in Mexico. So a month later, he traveled back to Toluca to argue his case. The reunion unexpectedly lasted a year.
During his stay, Langston made a living as a tutor to the children of the city’s mayor. He often spent his free time at the bullfights in Mexico City. And, on at least one occasion, he patronized a bordello, although there’s no evidence to suggest that he had sex with any of the female prostitutes.
In June of 1921, African-American scholar, author and editor W.E.B. Dubois published Langston’s 14-line poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the NAACP-sponsored magazine, "Crisis." The piece became his signature lyric, primarily because of its focal line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The nationwide exposure of its publication must have impressed James because he offered to spring for his son’s Columbia tuition, but only if Langston majored in engineering and not creative writing. The gesture, however, was ill-fated. Although he maintained a B-plus grade point average, Langston dropped out of school a year later, citing on-campus racial prejudice for his decision.
Instead, he started to absorb the mushrooming arts-and-music scene of the black community in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. And, under the wings of the much older gay “father of the Harlem Renaissance,” Alain LeRoy Locke, he moved from his seven-dollar-a-week, fourth-floor room at the YMCA’s Harlem branch to a boarding house at 267 W. 136th St. that he and fellow writers Countee Cullen, Wallace “Wally” Thurman and Richard “Bruce” Nugent affectionately dubbed “Niggeratti Manor.” Nugent went so far as to make the rooms more festive by painting homoerotic murals on the walls. And the housemates developed a reputation for their all-night parties.
The question, then, remains: Was Langston gay? With the exceptions of an exhaustive two-volume biography and a couple of docudramas, historians seldom have written about his sexuality, even with hypotheses and conjecture. The guessing games start with his collection of gay comrades, including Cullen himself.
A year younger than Langston, Countee Leroy Porter was abandoned at birth by his parents and raised by his paternal grandmother until her death in 1918. At 15, he was adopted by Episcopal minister Frederick Ashbury Cullen in Harlem. He won many poetry-writing contests as a teenager and edited his high school’s magazine. Although he later married twice, he told his first wife that he was sexually attracted to men. His laundry list of potential suitors included Langston, who showed no reciprocal interest.
Langston also maintained a friendship with openly gay writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who championed the Harlem Renaissance stable of artists and writers. His 1926 novel, "Nigger Heaven," about a librarian and a writer who try to keep their romance alive in the face of rampant racism, created a stir after its publication. The book’s title alone referred to a Jim Crow-era phrase about theater balconies, where African-Americans were corralled during stage performances while white audiences sat in the more comfortable seats below.
To further analyze Langston’s sexual orientation, consider his six-month voyage to West Africa as a crew member aboard the "S.S. Malone" in June of 1923. The freighter made several stops, including the Nigerian capital of Lagos and the largest Canary Island of Tenerife. In both ports of call, he experienced his first two man-to-man sexual encounters with a couple of frisky crewmates. Both of them wanted him to play the “male” role in bed, he told his secretary decades later.
On his way back from Africa in early 1924, Langston left the ship to work in the kitchen of a Parisian nightclub for a few months. By November, he was living with his mother in Washington, D.C., where she was staying with relatives from the John Mercer Langston side of her family. He also found a job as the personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. But the demands of the position left him little time to write. So he resigned to bus tables in the restaurant of the Wardman Park Hotel in the heart of the nation’s capital.
Good move, too. One evening, as he cleared dirty dishes and silverware in the dining room, Langston spotted Vachel Lindsay, who was one of the era’s most heralded American poets. He seized the moment and presented the Illinois-born, Hiram College-educated writer with copies of three of his poems. From that night on, an obviously impressed Lindsay declared he had discovered new African American talent.
At the same time, Langston scored a first-place prize for his poem, “The Weary Blues,” in a writing contest sponsored by "Opportunity" magazine. Thanks to Van Vechten’s connections, he inked a book deal with the Knopf Publishing Company. His debut collection of poetry, "The Weary Blues," featuring the five-year-old “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,“ hit bookstore shelves in January of 1926.
Langston still wanted to complete his college education, despite his disconcerting freshmen year at Columbia. He enrolled for the winter semester at Lincoln University in the Pennsylvania town of Oxford near Philadelphia. Founded in 1854, the college staked its claim as the oldest historically black school in the country. And Langston immersed himself in campus life with other classmates, including future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He also pledged membership in the Omega Psi Phi social fraternity, whose motto, “Friendship is essential to the soul,” spoke for itself.
Langston’s first semester at Lincoln ended in June, just in time for "The Nation" magazine to publish his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The memorable “manifesto,” as some historians have described it, addressed both the struggles and achievements of African-Americans writers, painters and musicians. “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote. “If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter, either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how. And we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”
In early 1927, Langston’s sophomore anthology of poems, "Fine Clothes to the Jew," stormed the literary world to the dismay of many African-American book critics. Its title itself raised a few eyebrows because it referred to poverty-stricken Harlemites, who traded their wardrobes for cash in Jewish-owned pawn shops. Many black reviewers railed against the book because it concentrated on the poorest segment of black society. Yet, the work further established Langston as an artistic force in the Harlem Renaissance.
The distinction made an impact on Charlotte Osgood Mason. The wealthy widow of a distinguished surgeon, parapsychologist and hypnotherapist, her inheritance financially backed several Harlem artists, including painter Aaron Douglas and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. The feisty, overbearing “Godmother,” as she insisted her young beneficiaries call her, added Langston to the mix that spring and oversaw his work on his first novel, "Not Without Laughter," about an African-American boy and his impoverished family in the Midwest.
Langston graduated from Lincoln with a bachelor’s degree in 1929 and returned to Harlem to write his book, insisting that he would always make New York City his home. “I’ll never leave Harlem for anywhere else,” he told his Niggeratti Manor housemates.
Yet, right before "Laughter’s" release in 1931, he and Mason quarreled over creative differences in his writing. As a result, Langston retreated to Cleveland for a homecoming with his mother, who had returned from Washington to rent a home at 4800 Carnegie Ave. He didn’t tell his benefactor about his whereabouts.
Langston only intended to stay with his mom for three weeks, after which he would pay for a trip to Florida with the next check that Mason sent him. Ten days later, however, the matriarch of the arts wrote that she was financially cutting him off for good.
Three weeks turned into three months before good news materialized. The Harmon Foundation awarded "Laughter" its annual gold medal for Langston’s contributions to fine arts in the African American community. The prize came with a $400 check that would help him finance a trip to the South. At the suggestion of the Jelliffes, who had since founded the predominantly black Gilpin Players theatrical troupe, he chose Zell Ingram, a 21-year-old gay man as a traveling companion. The pair took turns behind the wheel of Carrie’s Ford to Miami, then hopped on a train to Key West. From there, they boarded a boat to Havana, where Langston was treated like a celebrity as he alighted onto Cuban soil. His published works had electrified readers as far as the Caribbean.
Biographers have well documented the second half of Langston’s life in his ascent as an influential poet, playwright, novelist and newspaper columnist of the Harlem Renaissance. For these pages, though, the focus now will shift to his Northeast Ohio connections since the region remained a magnet for him, primarily because of the Jelliffes’ theater, Karamu House, at 3807 Central Ave.
In the fall of 1935, Langston’s mother moved from her Carnegie Avenue digs to a three-room apartment at 212 S. Pleasant St. in Oberlin. The town occupied a special place in her heart because both of her parents graduated from Oberlin College. Because of his proximity to Cleveland, Langston made frequent trips to the city for poetry readings. And he regularly visited the Jelliffes, who asked him if he would like to become Karamu’s playwright-in-residence. They needn’t say more. The offer was a no-brainer.
Langston’s debut offering, "Little Ham," took a farcical look at the numbers racket in Depression-era Harlem. For the most part, the play wowed theater critics after its Karamu debut on March 24, 1936. They trumpeted it as “hilarious” and “side-splitting,” with predictions of a possible run on Broadway and an adaptation on the silver screen. Langston’s next Gilpin Players production, "Troubled Island," was staged in May. The two plays marked the beginning in a long line of scripts that he would write for the troupe.
Although Langston returned to live in Harlem -- he would buy a townhouse at 20 E. 127th St. in 1948 -- his subsequent Cleveland visits in the ‘40s and ‘50s included several poetry readings at the main branch of the city’s public library. He also served as master of ceremonies at the Cleveland Black Folk Festival in 1952. One of his last public appearances took place at the Jelliffes’ golden-anniversary party for Karamu House in 1965.
On May 6, 1967, in New York City, Langston felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He was rushed to New York Polytechnic Clinic, where, six days later, he underwent prostate surgery to remove a potentially cancerous mass at the bottom of his abdomen. The operation went well. However, Langston’s condition started to take a downward turn three days later, when physicians diagnosed him with bronchopneumonia. His temperature also skyrocketed to 103 degrees, causing him to slip in and out of consciousness.
Two more days passed with no signs of improvement. Wheeled into the hospital’s intensive-care unit, Langston lapsed into a coma. At 10:40 p.m. on Monday, May 22, he died of septic shock, a virulent medical condition that kills half of its victims.
About 200 invited mourners, including chanteuse Lena Horne and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche, gathered at Benta’s Funeral Home in Harlem on May 25 to pay their respects. Playwright Arna Bontemps, with whom Langston had sometimes collaborated, read some of his buddy’s poems. Later, at a Manhattan crematory, a handful of friends broke into a recitation of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
After Langston’s death, accolades continued to mount in his honor. Among them, the City College of New York awarded its first Langston Hughes Medal in 1973 to recognize an influential and entertaining African-American writer. New York City officials bestowed landmark status on his Harlem home and renamed East 127th Street as Langston Hughes Place. And in 2002, the U.S. Postal Service celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth by portraying his image on a postage stamp in its Black Heritage series.
Literary scholars and historians alike have also studied Langston’s poems to glean even a hint of his sexual orientation. Some analysts have determined he was asexual. Other researchers have concluded that he kept his homosexuality in the closet for fear its discovery would make him a pariah in the African-American community. And there’s yet another army of intellects, who are certain that he led a gay lifestyle. “He was always eluding marriage. He said marriage and career didn’t work,” said Jean Blackwell Huston, former head of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in an "Esquire" magazine article in February of 1992. “It wasn’t until years later that I became convinced he was homosexual.”
Throughout the course of his career, Langston made noticeable changes in the subject matter of his poems and short stories. While most of his early works depicted the plight of Black America, his later pieces exhibited a homoerotic nuance. For example, in the poem, “Trumpet Player” --- which appeared in his 1947 collection, Fields of Wonder -- a reader can visualize the protagonist in the act of oral sex with another man: “The music from the trumpet at his lips is honey mixed with liquid fire/The rhythm from the trumpet at his lips is ecstasy distilled from old desire.”
The unpublished “To Beauty” similarly radiated a homosexual overtone. The first line of the piece, “To worship at the altar of beauty,” was a well-known gay code phrase during the Jazz Age to describe intimate, same-sex encounters. And “Café: 3 A.M.,” which made its debut in his 1951 anthology, Montage of a Dream Deferred, clearly described a police raid on a gay nightclub.
Detectives from the vice squad
With weary, sadistic eyes spotting fairies.
Degenerates, some say.
But God, nature or somebody made them that way.
Police lady or lesbian over there?
Where?
Langston also seemed to go out of his way to draw parallels between himself and the main character in his 1961 story, "Blessed Assurance." The piece, about a father who flips out over his son’s effeminate nature, portrayed Delmar as “a brilliant, young queer, on the honor roll in high school, and likely to be graduated in the spring at the head of his class.” In the story, he also was a member of the French, Glee and Drama clubs, and dreamed of going to Paris after graduation.
The likenesses were more than coincidental. For starters, Langston, like Delmar, excelled at academics. He was an officer in Central High’s French Club and acted in theatrical productions during his senior year. He also spent a few months in France after his West African stint on the Malone.
Furthermore, both boys were products of broken, dysfunctional families. They even were named after ancestors on the maternal sides of their families. And as if Langston again was writing in code, the name of Delmar’s church-choir director, Manley Jaxon, gave readers pause to wonder. The choral maestro’s first name obviously referred to virility; his surname was that of five-foot-two-inch Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, a popular African-American drag queen of the ‘20s and ‘30s.
At least two filmmakers have weighed in on the debate. In 1988, British director Isaac Julien made the 42-minute, black-and-white flick, "Looking for Langston," to memorialize the writer’s contributions to the Harlem Renaissance from a black, gay vantage point. Julien also intended to “construct a narrative that would allow viewers to meditate and to think, rather than be told,” he said in interviews. The tribute eventually won a Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the 1989 Berlin International Film Festival.
Upon its 1990 release in the U.S., the executors of Langston’s estate tried to censor the film, claiming they never gave Julien permission to incorporate readings of the writer’s poetry into the script. They also demanded that movie houses had to cut off the sound during screenings when Langston’s work was heard. “Clearly, (Langston) never wanted to be known publicly as gay,” wrote Stanford University professor Arnold Rampersad in his biography, "The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World." “In the absence of clear evidence that he was, how could (former estate administrator George) Bass do otherwise than oppose Julien’s willful, even flagrant, abuse of (Langston’s) name and of the wishes of his estate?” (You, the reader, should know that Rampersad is now one of the estate’s co-administrators.)
The film, "Brother to Brother," by documentary filmmaker Rodney Evans received less controversy after its debut at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where a jury awarded a “special prize“ to the piece. Set in modern-day New York, the movie portrays a gay art student who meets Langston’s former housemate, Richard “Bruce” Nugent, in a homeless shelter. As the movie flashes back to 1920s Harlem, the author and painter can be seen cavorting with such writers as Langston, Wally Thurman and Zora Neal Hurston in scenes that suggest that nearly every Niggeratti Manor tenant was homosexual. After Sundance, the movie made the rounds of gay film fests as well as occasional airings on public television.
Before his death of AIDS-related complications at 38 years old in November of 1995, gay black poet and activist Essex Hemphill continued to challenge African-Americans’ ignorance of homosexuality within its community. To explore the sexuality of black icons like Langston is to unearth the truth behind their legacies. “The silence surrounding black, gay and lesbian lives is being meticulously dismantled,” he said. “Every closet is coming down. Those closets are ancestral burial sites that we rightfully claim and exhume.”
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Langston Hughes’ remains were interred beneath a medallion embedded in the foyer of the Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd. in New York City. He was 65 years old.
Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser
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