Mistress of Modernism by Mary V. Dearborn

Author:Mary V. Dearborn [Dearborn, Mary V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Back in New York in September, Peggy continued her search for a museum site in the city, eventually discovering a wonderful house at 440 East 51st Street, off Beekman Place, known as Hale House, a brownstone set on the East River (incorrectly said to mark the spot where Nathan Hale had been hanged). It had a dramatic two-story living room, where Max placed his throne and where Jimmy Ernst had his desk, and a lovely terrace looking out over the river. That fall Peggy brought her collection there and unpacked it, but soon learned that it was against local zoning regulations to open a museum in the neighborhood. Nevertheless, she installed herself in a bedroom facing the river on the third floor, giving Max a studio with another terrace facing the front. Pegeen had enrolled at the Lenox School, a preparatory school attached to Finch Junior College and the alma mater of many of New York's German-Jewish daughters, but she hated it, finding it a "snob debutante" outfit; she moved out of the dorm and onto the second floor of Hale House, which she had all to herself. Sindbad enrolled at Columbia College and moved into a dorm there, but often hung around the house. "Our house on the river is heavenly," Peggy wrote Emily in December.

When she and Max moved in, Peggy threw a housewarming party for fifty, starting a tradition of memorable evenings at Hale House. Charles Henri Ford, her old friend from the Paris days, now the editor of the surrealist organ View, got into a fistfight with the art critic Nicolas Calas at that first party (Breton had recently made a move to merge View with his idea for an art magazine, VVV, and Calas was very much in Breton's camp), and the battle was so bloody—Calas "bleeding like a raspberry pie," observed Ford—that Jimmy Ernst dashed in and got paintings by Kandinsky and by his father out of the way.

Peggy's parties were legendary. A friend observed,

[Hale House] seemed like partyland. I suppose because whenever I went there a big rambling party was going on with people draped everywhere, drinking and talking while someone sat in a sort of booth telephoning. The walls around the telephone were all bescribbled with numbers and messages, and this seemed bohemian, as the rest of the place was on the grand side and the living room was dominated by that outsized Alice-in-Wonderland throne of Max Ernst's.

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