Caresse Crosby Socialites Information

Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1891 – January 24, 1970) was the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra, an American patron of the arts, publisher, and the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris." She and her second husband, Harry Crosby, founded the Black Sun Press, which was instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many authors who would later become famous, among them Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Kay Boyle, Charles Bukowski, Hart Crane, and Robert Duncan.

Crosby's parents, William Hearn Jacob and Mary (née Phelps) Jacob, were both descended from American colonial families—her father from the Van Rensselaer family, and her mother from William Phelps. In 1915, Mary (nicknamed Polly) married Richard R. Peabody, another blue-blooded Bostonian whose family had arrived in New Hampshire in 1635. They had two children, but following Richard's service in World War I, he became a drunk who loved to watch buildings burn.:79 She met Harry Crosby, who was 7 years her junior, at a picnic in 1920 while her husband was still with the army in Europe, and they had sex within two weeks. Their public relationship scandalized proper Boston society. Two years later, Richard granted her a divorce, and Harry and Polly were married. They immediately left for Europe, where they joined the Lost Generation of American expatriates. They embraced a bohemian and decadent lifestyle, living off Harry's trust fund of US$12,000 a year:397 (or about $175,000 in today's dollars), had an open marriage with numerous ongoing affairs, a suicide pact, frequent drug use, wild parties, and long trips abroad. At her husband's urging, Polly took the name Caresse in 1924. In 1925, they began publishing their own poetry as Éditions Narcisse in exquisitely printed, limited-edition volumes. In 1927, they re-christened the business as the Black Sun Press.

In 1929, one of her husband's affairs culminated in his death as part of a murder-suicide or double suicide. His death was marked by scandal as the newspapers speculated wildly about whether Harry shot his lover or not. Caresse returned to Paris, where she continued to run the Black Sun Press. With the prospect of war looming, she left Europe in 1936 and married Selbert Young, an unemployed, alcoholic actor 16 years her junior. They lived on a Virginia plantation they rehabilitated outside Washington, D.C., until she divorced him. She moved to Washington, D.C. and began a long-term love affair with black actor-boxer Canada Lee, despite the threat of miscegenation laws. She founded Women Against War and continued, after World War II, to try to establish a Center for World Peace at Delphi, Greece. When rebuffed by Greek authorities, she purchased Castello di Rocca Sinibalda, a 15th-century castle north of Rome, which she used to support an artists' colony. She died of pneumonia related to heart disease in Rome, in 1970.

Born on April 20, 1891 in New Rochelle, New York,:1 she was the oldest daughter of Mary Phelps and William Hearn Jacob, and had two brothers, Leonard and Walter "Bud" Phelps. She was nicknamed "Polly" to distinguish her from her mother.

Her ancestry included a knight of the Crusades and the Allardyce family in the War of the Roses. Her family was descended from a prominent New England family,:1Puritans. On her mother's side her seventh great-grandfather, William Phelps, departed from Plymouth, England in 1630 and founded Dorchester, Boston. She was the granddaughter of General Walter Phelps, who commanded troops at the Civil War Battle of Antietam. On her father's side she included among her ancestors Robert Fulton, developer of the steamboat, and the Plymouth Colony's first governor, William Bradford.:78

Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions", and he lived high. In 1914, she was presented to the King of England at a garden party. And in keeping with the American aristocratic style of the times, she was even photographed as a child by Charles Dana Gibson.

She grew up, she later said, "in a world where only good smells existed". "What I wanted", she said of her privileged childhood, "usually came to pass". She was a rather uninterested student. Author Geoffrey Wolff wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams".

Her family divided its time between estates in Manhattan at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, in Watertown, Connecticut, and in New Rochelle, New York, and she enjoyed the advantages of an upper-class lifestyle. She attended formal balls, Ivy League school dances, and formal horse riding school. She took dancing lessons at Mr. Dodsworth's Dancing Class, attended Miss Chapin's School in New York City, and then boarded at Rosemary Hall, a prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut, where she played the part of Rosalind in As You Like It to critical acclaim.:77

After her father's death in 1908, she lived with her mother at their home in Watertown, CT. That same summer she met her future husband, Richard Peabody, at summer camp. Her brother Len was boarding at Westminster School, and Bud was a day student at Taft School. Approaching her own debut, she danced in "one to three balls every night" and slept from four in the morning until noon. "At twelve I was called and got ready for the customary debutante luncheon.":8 She graduated from Rosemary Hall prep school in 1910, at age 19.

In 1910, at age 19, Polly was preparing to attend yet another débutante ball one evening. As was customary, she put on a corset stiffened with whalebone and a restrictive, tight corset cover:6 that flattened and jammed her large breasts together into a single monobosom. A corset was cinched in to form as tiny a waist as possible, and the woman's torso was held very erect. A corset was very confining, and it would have been difficult to feel comfortable dressed in one. Mary wore a dress she had worn on her debut a few weeks previously,:6 a sheer evening gown with a plunging neckline that displayed her ample cleavage. But the corset cover, a "boxlike armour of whalebone and pink cordage," poked out from under gown, and this time she called Marie, her personal maid. She told her, "Bring me two of my pocket handkerchiefs and some pink ribbon ... And bring the needle and thread and some pins." She fashioned the handkerchiefs and ribbon into a simple bra.

Mary's new undergarment complemented the new fashions of the time. She was mobbed after the dance by other girls who wanted to know how she moved so freely, and when she showed her new garment to friends the next day, they all wanted one.:7 One day, she received a request for one of her contraptions from a stranger, who offered a dollar for her efforts. She knew then that this could become a viable business.

Polly filed for a patent for her invention on February 12, 1914 and in November that year the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted her a patent for the 'Backless Brassiere'.:54 Polly likened her design to corset covers which covered the bosom when a woman wore a low corset. Her design had shoulder straps which attached to the garment's upper and lower corners, and wrap-around laces attached at the lower corners which tied in the woman's front, enabling her to wear gowns cut low in the back. Polly wrote that her invention was "well-adapted to women of different size" and was "so efficient that it may be worn by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis." Her design was lightweight, soft, comfortable to wear, and naturally separated the breasts, unlike the corset, which was heavy, stiff, uncomfortable, and had the effect of creating a single or "monobosom" effect.

While Crosby's design was the first granted a patent within its category, The U.S. Patent Office and foreign patent offices had issued patents for various bra-like undergarments as early as the 1860s.. Other brassiere designs had previously been invented and popularized for use within the United States by about 1910. By 1912, American mass market brassiere manufacturers included Bien Jolie Brassieres and the DeBevoise Brassiere. DeBevoise Brassiere's bust supporter was first advertised in Vogue in 1904.

Leading European couturier Lucile actively endorsed bras, and both Lucile and Paul Poiret refined and promoted the brassiere, influencing fashionable women to begin wearing their designs, Paris couturier Herminie Cadolle introduced a breast supporter in 1889. His design was a sensation at the Great Exposition of 1900 and became a fast selling design among wealthy Europeans in the next decade.

After she married Richard Peabody, Polly filed a legal certificate with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on May 19, 1920, declaring that she was a married woman conducting a business using separate funds from her husband's bank account. She founded the Fashion Form Brassière Company and located her manufacturing shop on Washington Street in Boston, where she opened a two-woman sweatshop that manufactured her wireless brassière during 1922.:18 The location also served as a convenient place for romantic trysts with Harry Crosby, who would become her second husband.

In her later autobiography, The Passionate Years, she maintained that she had "a few hundred (units) of her design produced." She managed to secure a few orders from department stores, but her business never took off. Harry, who had a distaste for conventional business and a generous trust fund, discouraged her from pursuing the business and persuaded her to close it. She later sold the brassiere patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut for US$1,500 (roughly equivalent to $22,000 in current dollars). Warner manufactured the "Crosby" bra for a while, but it was not a popular style and was eventually discontinued. Warner went on to earn more than US$15 million from the bra patent over the next thirty years.

In her later years, she wrote, "I can't say the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.":cover

In 1915, Polly Jacob and Richard ("Dick") Peabody were married by his grandfather, Endicott Peabody, the founder of the Groton School, and whose family had been one of the wealthiest in America during the 19th century. By the early 20th century, a case could be made that the Peabodies had supplanted the Cabots and the Lodges as the most distinguished name in the region.

Polly found Dick's temperament to be far from her own. When they had a son, William Jacob, on February 4, 1916, she found "Dick was not the most indulgent of parents and like his father before him, he forbade the gurgles and cries of infancy; when they occurred he walked out, and often walked back unsteadily."

Polly concluded that Dick was a well-educated but undirected man, and a reluctant father. Less than a year later, he enlisted at the Mexican border and joined the Boston militia engaged in stopping Pancho Villa's cross-border raids. Less than a year after he returned home, he enlisted to fight in World War I. Their second child, a daughter, Poleen Wheatland ("Polly"), was born on August 12, 1917, but Dick was already in Officers Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery. He became a Captain in the United States Army's 15th Field Artillery, 2nd Division, American Expeditionary Force. Polly was largely cared for by his parents, but found: "My father-in-law was a stickler for polish, both of manners and minerals." Her mother-in-law wore "nun-like dresses and in bed or out wore starched cuffs as sever as piping." Her husband, meanwhile, was enjoying life at the front as a bachelor.:10

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