When Mary Phelps Jacob was nicknamed Polly, when she married her first husband, she became Mary Phelps, Jacob Peabody. Harry Crosby, her second husband, renamed her Caresse Crosby. He liked the alliteration and the pun on caress.
When Harry died a suicide in 1929, Caresse carried on with the Black Sun Press and the support of artists and writers, especially the supporters of Surrealists, who were among her principal guests at the summer picnic at her estate in Ermenonville in 1934.
Intended to be flashy but silly in hindsight, the picnic was an homage to Petronius (d.66 CE), the Roman satirist and hedonist. * Guest matching the mayhem was Surrealist writers and artists, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, and Salvatore Dali, among others. In an impromptu film improvised during the picnic, Caresse appeared wearing a safari jacket, white riding pants, and a pair of shotguns.
Dinner at Ermenonville, prepared by the cook, was boiled lobsters, snails, champagne, wine, and other alcoholic beverages. A steady supply of drugs, probably hashish and opium, is not mentioned.
Decades later, in her memoir, Caresse does not mention the Ermenonville picnic. However, she recalls a picnic elsewhere with a Breton sailor she met the night before and wanted as a lover. “The picnic was a success à la limité. I shall never forget the moist high grasses matted with poppies and cornflowers, nor the drone of the ancient mill wheel—nor Bobbie—so reminiscent of mahogany and the sea—the fact that I could not find my sapphire clip when we gathered up our belongings at dusk in no way marred the perfection of the day.
Featured Image: Salvatore Dali. Caresse Crosby (1934)
* Petronius’s Satyricon is a sarcastic description of Roman decadence under Nero. “The Dinner at Trimalchio’s” inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s parties in The Great Gatsby (1925).
See Caress Crosby. The Passionate Years. New York: Dial Press, 1953; Carolin A. Young in “Shocking the World,” Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art (2003); Anne Conover Carson. Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda. Capra Press, 1989; Linda Hamalian. The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby. Southern Illinois University 2005