"Born in 1901, she came of age amid tragedy and enormous wealth, and spent much of her twenties and thirties ripping through the Jazz Age like a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel."
- From "Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham
Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham
By Emily Bingham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, $28, 369 pages.
By Paul Nyden
Author Emily Bingham was only 3 years old when her great aunt Henrietta Bingham died in 1968. Emily's father said Henrietta was a mess, an embarrassment, "a three-dollar bill," fascinating but dangerous.
But before her father died in 2006, he urged Emily to look through Henrietta's old trunks in the attic in her former home, a large stone Georgian mansion overlooking the Ohio River on the outskirts of Louisville, the biggest city in Kentucky.
Inside there were 200 love letters sent to her by Stephen "Tommy" Tomblin, a British sculptor, and John Houseman, a British-American actor who was born in Romania. Henrietta attracted both of them with her violet-blue eyes, her Southern accent and magnetic personality.
Emily Bingham has just published an intriguing biography about the person many relatives thought was the "black sheep" of her family. It portrays Henrietta Bingham as part of an elite social environment in the early 20th century, where typical conventions of marriage, art and domestic life were often flagrantly disregarded.
Emily calls her new book "a story of one complicated person acting on her drives and her desires, finding shelter in enclaves where sexual freedom and same-sex love were tolerated, giving great pleasure and sometimes generating immense emotional distress."
Henrietta came to love race horses, fast cars, jazz music and jazz musicians. And whenever she could, she put on men's clothing.
Robert Worth Bingham, Henrietta's father, bought the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1918, becoming its publisher. Some of his critics called the Harvard-educated Bingham "pink" because he supported labor.
Robert met Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the 1928 national Democratic Party convention. In 1932, both Robert and his daughter Henrietta were active in FDR's successful campaign for the presidency.
After Roosevelt took office, he appointed Robert to be ambassador to Great Britain, a post he held from 1933 to 1937, when he was succeeded by Joseph P. Kennedy.
During the 1920s, many of Henrietta's friends and lovers -- including Tallulah Bankhead, Hope Williams, Bea Little, and Katharine "Kit" Cornell -- belonged to an open "transatlantic lesbian and bisexual theater set," Emily Bingham writes.
But in the 1930s, "hard times brought a resurgence of traditional social mores, and the relative freedom of these actresses with regard to sexual identification dramatically diminished."
A photograph in the book's opening chapter shows Henrietta, about 6 years old, sitting on a bench with a cigarette hanging from her lips. Dressed like a rough-rider cowboy, she wore a big hat, heavy coat and oversized boots.
Other photographs show Henrietta riding her tricycle "with a look of pure determination on her face" and sitting on a pony "decked out as a Indian princess ... with a headdress."
Henrietta, Emily writes, was never very interested in "girly" things. From an early age, "Henrietta showed little interest in expressly feminine activities. In so doing, she invited gazes and questions."
Later in her life, Henrietta became close friends with Eleanor Carroll Chilton, an aspiring poet. Her father was William Edwin Chilton, a Charleston businessman who served in the U.S. Senate from 1912 to 1918. In 1907, Chilton bought the Daily Gazette and changed its name to The Charleston Gazette. Ned Chilton, the late publisher of the Charleston Gazette, was his grandson.
In the fall of 1921, Eleanor Chilton returned to Smith College in Northhampton, Mass., for her senior year, when Henrietta was a freshman.
"Henrietta and her peers demanded looser regulations for smoking, playing records and excursions (often with Amherst College boys) ... They scored a small victory when Smith abolished its 10 o'clock lights-out rule," Emily writes.
After the 1922 commencement, Smith officials cited Henrietta for too few credit hours and for being a "detriment to community."
But "no one who spent time with Henrietta doubted her intelligence, which was demonstrated less in scholarship than in her razor social awareness and her ability to charm ... . She was there long enough to cultivate a profile as a prototypical flapper."
After being suspended from Smith, Henrietta went to London with her father and brothers Robert and Barry. Eleanor Chilton also moved to England.
A few weeks after Henrietta arrived in London, Mina Kirsten, her professor and lover at Smith, also arrived in London.
During her life, Henrietta created a long list of broken hearts, of both men and women with whom she had close relations, from Louisville to Massachusetts and during her travels from New York to London.
Emily thinks Henrietta was plagued in some ways by her "demanding, needy father" who inherited millions from his second wife who died shortly after they married.
Tennis star Helen Hull Jacobs was Henrietta's close friend for a number of years. Unlike most of her liaisons with men and women, Emily writes, this one lasted the longest.
British author Geordie Greig described "Irrepressible" as a "taboo-shattering sexual odyssey" that is a "literary masterpiece of groundbreaking social history."
Reach Paul J. Nyden at pjnyden@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5164.