Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon BorglumCasey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
General
Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon Borglum
Casey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
Borglum, Gutzon, 1867-1941
She would allow him to do what he pleased to the second-floor rear
apartment, she said. So he rented it and transformed it completely and
extravagantly, equipping it with furniture built from his own designs.
The dining room had a round mahogany table six feet in diameter. Around
it were twelve circular chairs all painted green and rubbed to a soft
patina. There was a sideboard to match.
Gutzon passed out twelve keys to twelve friends who could come when they
pleased and find a place at his table. Among them was Adolph E. Borie,
called “Billy” by Gutzon and “Doppie” by everybody else. As president of
the Savage Arms Company he was of considerable help in the aircraft
investigation and in settling the affairs of the Sporting Club. He was
an ardent fisherman, and, therefore, one of Borglum’s own kind.
The sculptor would go almost anywhere fishing with anybody he trusted.
But now and then he would decline to make a second trip. Bob and Madge
Davis once invited him to fish with them in a Canadian lake. He didn’t
like it. Sitting in a boat and trolling was too tame a sport, he said.
“You might as well be pulling a suitcase aboard the boat as one of those
lake trout.” The trout stream near Hermosa was the chief reason for his
buying the Black Hills ranch. It was expensive and brought more debts
and embarrassment. But the fishing was a compensation--or so he said.
In the duplex apartment where he lived in New York before moving to
Stamford, close friends, Charles Rann Kennedy and his wife Edith Wynne
Matthison, occupied the flat upstairs. Gutzon became acquainted with
them through a neighbor, Henry Miller, who first staged Kennedy’s play
_The Servant in the House_. Edith was leading lady, and in the cast were
Walter Hampden and his wife and the elder Tyrone Power. The sculptor
engaged the company for a special performance in honor of the Howard
Lodge at the Masonic Temple. A special edition of the play bound in
vellum with the Howard Lodge emblem stamped in gold on the cover was
presented to each of the players and to distinguished guests.
There wasn’t much privacy about Gutzon’s home life. At Stamford there
were usually more outsiders than he had room for. He lived too far from
town for studio assistants to go back and forth. At least one of them
lived with the family all the time. And because he liked to do his
writing after work hours or on holidays, a secretary was another
permanent member of the group. A few of the outstanding ones came to be
friends.
In the earlier days there were Eugenia Flagg and Helen Johnson Keyes,
daughter of the historian. In Georgia, Lillian Taylor, who fought
through the Stone Mountain war, was always on Gutzon’s side and
frequently stayed with the Borglums in Stamford or out at Rushmore. Jean
Philip was also ready to take up cudgels for the chief and was
frequently called.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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