Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937): elisa_rolle

Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930.
Born: January 24, 1862, New York City, New York, United States
Died: August 11, 1937, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France
Lived: Land’s End, Ledge Road, Newport RI, USA (41.45463, -71.30905)
Château Sainte-Claire, Hyères, Var Département, France (43.12054, 6.12863)
Le Pavillon Colombe, 33 Rue Edith Wharton, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, Val-d’Oise department, Île-de-France, France (48.99942, 2.356)
53 Rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, France (48.85445, 2.32166)
The Mount, 2 Plunkett St, Lenox, MA 01240, USA (42.33102, -73.28201)
882-884 Park Ave, New York, NY 10017, USA
Buried: Cimetière des Gonards, Versailles, Departement des Yvelines, Île-de-France, France
Spouse: Edward Robbins Wharton (m. 1885–1913)
Movies: The Age of Innocence, The Glimpses of the Moon, more

William Morton Fullerton was an American print journalist, author and foreign correspondent for The Times. A bisexual man-about-town, he juggled romances with Edith Wharton, Lord Ronald Gower and the Ranee of Sarawak. Wharton also had lesbian affairs, including one with writer Janet Flanner, and was friends with Teddy Roosevelt’s bisexual sister, poet Corinne Roosevelt Robinson. Fullerton and Wharton’s affair lasted from 1906 to 1909. They were introduced by mutual friend Henry James (brother of Alice James.) She undoubtedly considered him the love of her life, describing him as her "ideal intellectual partner". However they were never 'officially' together, as Wharton was already married and Fullerton's highly promiscuous personality prevented him from ever committing to a serious relationship. After the affair ended, Wharton, who was fiercely guarded when it came to her private life, requested that Fullerton destroy every letter she had ever sent him in order to avoid any scandal. The affair itself, although suspected, was not confirmed until the 1980s. Fullerton had ignored Wharton's request and had kept all of her letters, which were eventually published as a book, The letters of Edith Wharton, in 1988. Wharton wrote also several design books, including her first published work, The Decoration of Houses of 1897, co-authored by Ogden Codman, Jr.
Together from 1906 to 1909: 3 years.
Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937)
William Morton Fullerton (September 18, 1865 – August 26, 1952)

Days of Love edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
ISBN-10: 1500563323
Release Date: September 21, 2014
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The Mount is a country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, the home of noted author Edith Wharton, who designed the house and its grounds and considered it her "first real home."
Address: 2 Plunkett St, Lenox, MA 01240, USA (42.33102, -73.28201)
Type: Museum (open to public)
Hours: Monday through Sunday 9.00-17.00
Phone: +1 413-551-5111
National Register of Historic Places: 71000900, 1971. Also National Historic Landmarks.
Place
Built in 1902, Design by Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
The Mount survives today as an example of Wharton’s design principles. Edith Wharton wrote several of her novels there, including “The House of Mirth” (1905), the first of many chronicles of life in old New York. At The Mount, she entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James, who described the estate as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” Although she spent many months traveling in Europe nearly every year with her friend, Egerton Winthrop (John Winthrop’s descendant), The Mount was her primary residence until 1911. When living there and while traveling abroad, Wharton was usually driven to appointments by her longtime chauffeur and friend Charles Cook, a native of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts. Edith Wharton and her husband, Edward, lived in The Mount from 1902 to 1911. After the Whartons left, the house was a private residence, a girls’ dormitory for the Foxhollow School, and site of the theatre company Shakespeare & Company. It was then bought by Edith Wharton Restoration, which has restored much of the property to its original condition. Today, The Mount is a cultural center and historic house museum, welcoming close to 40,000 visitors each year. The house is open daily from May through October for house and garden tours. Speciality Ghost and Backstairs tours are also offered. In the summer, The Mount hosts performances, music, lectures, and outdoor sculpture exhibits. Additional special events are hosted throughout the year.
Life
Who: Edith Wharton, nèe Edith Newbold Jones (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937)
Edith Wharton was engaged to Henry Stevens in 1882 after a two-year courtship. The month the two were to marry, the engagement abruptly ended. In 1885, at age 23, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of the same social class and shared her love of travel. From the late 1880s until 1902, he suffered acute depression, and the couple ceased their extensive travel. At that time his depression manifested as a more serious disorder, after which they lived almost exclusively at their estate The Mount. In 1908 her husband’s mental state was determined to be incurable. In the same year, she began an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist for The Times, in whom she found an intellectual partner. She divorced Edward Wharton in 1913 after 28 years of marriage. Fullerton was bisexual and had affairs with Wharton, Lord Ronald Gower and the Ranee of Sarawak. Wharton had also lesbian affairs, including one with writer Janet Flanner, and was friend with bisexual poet Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, sister of Teddy Roosevelt.

by Elisa Rolle

Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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Immediately after the death of her father, Alice Delamar rented a house on Park Avenue 270.
Address: Park Ave, New York, NY 10017, USA
Type: Private Property
Place
Park Avenue is a wide New York City boulevard which carries north and southbound traffic in the borough of Manhattan, and is also a wide one-way pair in the Bronx. For most of the road’s length in Manhattan, it runs parallel to Madison Avenue to the west and Lexington Avenue to the east. Park Avenue’s entire length was formerly called Fourth Avenue; the title still applies below 14th Street. Meanwhile, the section between 14th and 17th Street is called Union Square East, and between 17th and 32nd Streets, the name Park Avenue South is used. In the Bronx, Park Avenue runs in several segments between the Major Deegan Expressway and Fordham Road.
Notable queer residents at Park Avenue:
- No. 270: real estate titan Dr. Charles V. Paterno formed the Vanderbilt Av. Realty Corp. and commissioned the architectural firm of Warren & Wetmore to design a massive U-shaped neo-Renaissance building. Paterno envisioned two distinct sections—the mansion-like apartments that took the address 270 Park Avenue, and the apartment hotel that used the name Hotel Marguery. The residents would share a 70 by 275 foot garden with a private drive. As the restrained brick and stone structure rose, Manhattan millionaires rushed to take apartments. Construction was completed, as predicted, in the fall of 1917, at a cost of around $8 million, exclusive of the land. Twelve stories tall, there were 20 acres of floor space divided into 108 apartments. Deemed the “largest apartment building in the world,” a Dec. 1917 advertisement counted “1,536 living rooms; 1,476 closets; 100 kitchens; 100 sculleries.” Potential residents could choose apartments of 6 to 10 rooms with three or four baths, at an annual rent of $4000 to $6500. Larger apartments, from 12 to 19 rooms with four to six baths, would cost $7000 to $15000. The highest rent would be equivalent to about $23,000 per month in 2015. The moneyed residents could enjoy the convenience of the downstairs restaurant, run by the Ritz-Carlton restaurant. Rudolph Guglielmi had a spacious apartment in the building in Nov. 1925 when he applied for United States citizenship. Better known to American audiences by his screen name, Rudolph Valentino, the movie star had to dodge a battery of questions. His failure to do military service during the war was brought up—he explained it was due to “a slight defect in the vision of his left eye.” The Italian Government had listed him “as a slacker.” The New York Times reported that “it was discovered to be an error which was later corrected.” Then there was the question about why Valentine’s wife, Winifred, was living on 96th Street and not in the Park Avenue apartment. “Mrs. Valentino said that the only issue between her husband and herself was that he wished her to give up all business and settle down into home life, and this she would not do.” The 1920s saw the comings and goings of other internationally-known names. In 1926 Queen Marie of Romania stayed briefly in the apartment of Ira Norris; and a year later Charles Lindbergh’s family, including his mother, stayed at No. 270 Park Avenue following his triumphant June 1927 return from Europe. Acclaimed stage actress Gertrude Lawrence (rumoured to be the lover of Daphne du Marier) took an apartment in 1929. No. 270 Park Avenue occupied the entire block between Madison Avenue and 47th and 48th Street. The 12-storey complex containing 108 suites in two separate sections, which were connected by the architects by two triumphal arches over the Vander Bild Avenue. Alice DeLamar rented the largest apartment. The apartment building stood near the Delamar Mansion, which had to be sold. An American magazine, the St. Louis Star “told” the adventures of Prince Carol of Romania (future Carol II of Romania, son of Marie of Romania) overcome by love for the fair miss De la Mar, offering his heart and his titles, but without achieving the desired result. Miss De la Mar told in a few words: “I did not want to marry the prince because I didn’t love him. I own $10 million and if I want to marry then I do not wish to give up my freedom to marry without love." The prince wrote: "The American press blew the rumor that I came to America to find a rich woman. The Daily News even picked a few candidates ahead of me: Miss Millicent Rogers, Miss Abby Rockefeller and Miss Alice Lamar." King Carol II ruled from 1930 to 1940. Carol is more known for his amorous adventures than for his way of ruling: in it, he does not seem to have excelled. In 1920 Alice Delamar moved into a beautiful house on Sunset Boulevard in Palm Beach. The inherited house of Pembroke was sold a few years later. The auction took place on August 16, 1924 in the Great Reception Hall of Pembroke. On June 24, 1947 plans were filed by architects Harrison & Abramovitz for the more than $21 million Time Life Building. The Hotel Marguery, once the largest apartment building in the world, and its astonishingly colorful history, was soon bulldozed. In 1971, Alice wrote that the complex has long been demolished. Today the site is occupied by the JP Morgan Chase Tower, constructed in 1960 and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
- No. 410: Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott’s latest apartment was in a very grand building at 410 Park Avenue, and they gave a large party for their friend. Maugham enjoyed the gathering, but when their upstairs neighbour Marlene Dietrich appeared, he felt upstaged and left. By the late 40s, Monroe Wheeler was a high profile New Yorker. His full-page portrait appeared in the Nov. 1948 issue of Vogue. At his parties at 410 Park Avenue were such celebrities as Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, Ben Shahn, Gore Vidal, and Christopher Isherwood. Among the regulars were Paul Cadmus, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Pavel Tchelitchew and Charles Henri Ford, Diana and Reed Vreeland, Joseph Campbell, the Kirsteins, E.E. Cummings, Brooke Astor, Philip Johnson, and others. Wheeler’s most amusing annual guests were Osbert and Edith Sitwell, the brother and sister poet famous for their double wit and set-up dry humor. In 1958 Monroe Wheeler learned that the grand old building at 410 Park Avenue would be demolished and replaced by a office tower. He found a small apartment at 215 E. 79 St. in a tall pale-blond brick building called the Thornely. They lived there for two years.
- No. 465, The Ritz Tower: Built in 1925 as the city’s most elegant apartment hotel, The Ritz Tower today remains one of Manhattan’s most luxurious and sought-after residential cooperatives noted for its spacious and elegant apartments, each one unique. Greta Garbo lived here for a time in the 40s. Most happy about this move was probably Mercedes de Acosta, who had an apartment at 471 Park Avenue, from where she could see Garbo's north facing rooms. Mercedes told the story that during the wartime, when people were not allowed to show light at night “we gave each other signs with candles. Why we were not arrested for this offence is still today a riddle to me.” In 1951 Garbo moved from the Ritz into a suite with four rooms located on the seventeenth floor of The Hampshire House at 150 Central Park South.
- No. 530: In 1950, Alice DeLamar’s address is still a house in New York at 530 Park Avenue. This 19-story, white-brick apartment building at 530 Park Avenue on the southwest corner at 61st Street next to the Regency Hotel was erected in 1940 and designed by George F. Pelham Jr., who also designed 41, 50, 785, 1130 and 1150 Park Avenue and 1056 Fifth Avenue. It was bought in 2007 for about $211 million by Blackrock Realty Advisors which then sold it to Aby Rosen, the owner of the Seagrams Building and Lever House on Park Avenue who converted the rental building to a condominium with 116 apartments in 2013. Handel Architects LLP was architect and William T. Georgis was interior designer for the conversion.
- No. 564: The second clubhouse of the Colony Club, was commissioned in 1913 and constructed from 1914 to 1916. It was designed by Delano & Aldrich in the Neo-Georgian style, with interiors designed by Elsie de Wolfe. See Colony Club.
- No. 570: On April 24, 1947, Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73 in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan.
- No. 695, 10065: Hunter College is an American public university and one of the constituent organizations of the City University of New York, located in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper East Side. The college grants undergraduate and graduate degrees in over one-hundred fields of study across five schools. Hunter College also administers Hunter College High School and Hunter College Elementary School. Founded in 1870, originally as a women's college, Hunter is one of the oldest public colleges in the United States. The college assumed the location of its main campus on Park Avenue in 1873. Hunter began admitting men into its freshman class in 1964. In 1943 Eleanor Roosevelt dedicated the former home of herself and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the college, which reopened in 2010 as the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. Notable queer alumni and faculty: Audre Lorde (1934-1992); Pauli Murray (1910–1985).
- No. 882-884: Ogden Codman, Jr. collaborated with Edith Wharton on the redesign of her townhouse at 882-884 Park Avenue, now demolished.
- No. 993: From the 1940s to the mid 1970s Marlene Dietrich kept, and often resided in apartment 12E, a four room apartment in this building. She relocated to New York to be close to her daughter Maria Riva and her grandchildren. 993 Park Avenue went co-op in the late fifties and Dietrich bought an apartment in the building. The full service, thirteen storey Italianite block had been built in the teens by Bing & Bing. Dietrich decorated her modest apartment (a two bed / two bath unit of 1600 square feet), in a mixture of styles: Louis XIV furniture was offset against glizy mirrored walls befitting a movie star. When she wasn’t travelling the world with her spectacular one-woman show, Dietrich divided her time between her New York home and a Paris rental on the Avenue Montaigne. Visting Dietrich in Paris in the late 70s, her friend Leo Lerman noted "the podge of the [Parisian] flat, which I find touching and that Gray [Foy] says is so unlike her New York controlled elegance. I like both and find both very much the way she is." After a stage fall in Australia in 1975 Dietrich went into semi-retirement in Paris, becoming increasingly reclusive. Her grandson, J. Michael Riva lived at the Park Avenue apartment during the early 80s with his then-fiance, Jamie Lee Curtis, when the latter was filming "Trading Places" (1983.) Dietrich died in 1992. Her heirs sold the apartment in 1998 for $615.000. 993 Park Ave #12E reappeared on the market in 2010. The refurbished unit was listed by Sotheby’s Real Estate for $ 2.250.000.

Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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The Château Sainte-Claire is a villa in the hills above Hyères, in the Var Département of France, which was the residence of Olivier Voutier and later of the American novelist Edith Wharton. Its garden is classified as one of the Notable Gardens of France.
Address: Hyères, Var Département, France (43.12054, 6.12863)
Type: Public Park (open to public)
Place
Built in 1820
In 1927, the property was purchased by the American novelist Edith Wharton, who used it as her summer residence. She called it "Sainte-Claire du Château" and created the garden in its present form, filling it with cacti and sub-tropical plants. The Château Sainte-Claire is located in the hills just above the old town of Hyères. Its park contains the ruins of part of the old walls of the city, dating to the end of the XII century. The walls were destroyed by the order of Cardinal Richelieu during the reign of Louis XIII of France. In the XVII century, the site was occupied by a convent belonging to the order of the Institute of Poor Women, created in Assisi in 1212, of which Sainte-Claire was the first Mother Superior. Following the French Revolution, the convent was closed and then demolished, and the land was sold. In 1820, the land was sold to the French naval officer and archeologist Olivier Voutier, best known as the man who brought the “Venus de Milo” from Greece to France. Voutier constructed the present villa, which he called La Villa Sainte Claire, and restored the ramparts of the old city between the villa and the ruins of an old tower. The villa was purchased by the city of Hyères in 1955, and the park became a public garden. Since 1990 it has been the office of the National Park of Port-Cros and the Botanical Preserve of Porquerolles (the island park off the coast of Hyères.)
Life
Who: Edith Wharton, nèe Edith Newbold Jones (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937)
The maritime officer and archaeologist Olivier Voutier built the peculiar neo-Romanesque villa. His gravesite can be seen at the top of the gardens close to the medieval tower. A few years later, Edith Wharton moved into the house and turned it into her own literary and botanical shelter. In a letter to Bernard Berenson in 1919 she extolled the region’s endless charms: “I read your letter stretched out on a bank of amaranth and moly, with the blue sea sending little silver splashes up to my toes, and roses and narcissus and mimosa outdoing Coty’s best from the centre all around to the sea. In front of us lay two or three Odyssean isles, and the boat with a Lotean sail which is always in the right place was on duty as usual — and this is the way all my days are spent! Seven hours of blue-and-gold and thyme and rosemary and hyacinth and roses every day that the Lord makes; and in the evenings, dozing over a good book! ….”

Queer Places, Vol. 3 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532906695
ISBN-10: 1532906692
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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“My years of Paris life were spent entirely in the rue de Varenne – rich years, crowded and happy years.” Edith Wharton
Address: 53 Rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, France (48.85445, 2.32166)
Type: Private Property
Place
When her marriage deteriorated, Edith Wharton decided to move permanently to France, living at 53 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II. Wharton was preparing to vacation for the summer when WWI broke out. Though many fled Paris, she moved back to her Paris apartment on the Rue de Varenne and for four years was a tireless and ardent supporter of the French war effort. One of the first causes she undertook in August 1914 was the opening of a workroom for unemployed women; here they were fed and paid one franc a day. What began with thirty women soon doubled to sixty, and their sewing business began to thrive. When the Germans invaded Belgium in the fall of 1914 and Paris was flooded with Belgian refugees, she helped to set up the American Hostels for Refugees, which managed to get them shelter, meals, clothes and eventually an employment agency to help them find work. She collected more than $100,000 on their behalf. In early 1915 she organized the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which gave shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees who had fled when their homes were bombed by the Germans. Aided by her influential connections in the French government, she and her long-time friend Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris), were among the few foreigners in France allowed to travel to the front lines during WWI. She and Berry made five journeys between February and August 1915, which Wharton described in a series of articles that were first published in Scribner’s Magazine and later as “Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort,” which became an American bestseller. Travelling by car, Wharton and Berry drove through the war zone, viewing one decimated French village after another. She visited the trenches, and was within earshot of artillery fire. She wrote, "We woke to a noise of guns closer and more incessant... and when we went out into the streets it seemed as if, overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground.”
Life
Who: Walter Van Rensselaer Berry (July 29, 1859 – 1927)
Walter Berry was an American lawyer, diplomat, Francophile, and friend of several great writers. Berry was born in Paris, a descendant of the Van Rensselaer family of New York. After attending St. Mark’s School and Harvard, he took a law degree at Columbia University, practicing law in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Paris, where he pursued a career in international law and diplomacy. After serving as a judge at the International Tribunal of Egypt from 1908 to 1911, he settled in Paris for the remainder of his life and became a strong advocate of France, tirelessly promoting its cause in the United States when WWI broke out in 1914; he served as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris from 1916 to 1923. After the war he vigorously opposed both Germany and the Soviet Union. A close friend of Henry James and Edith Wharton, who called him "the love of my life," he met Marcel Proust in the summer of 1916, beginning "a friendship that was to be one of the most rewarding of Proust’s final years." He was a cousin of Harry Crosby, leaving him in his will "my entire library except such items as my good friend Edith Wharton may care to choose." Edith Wharton is buried next to her long-time friend, Walter Berry, at Cimetière des Gonards, Versailles, Departement des Yvelines, Île-de-France, France.

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937)

Patrick Leahy & T. R. Knight

Elizabeth Reynard & Virginia Gildersleeve

Patrick Abner & Thomas Roberts

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