Author and Publisher | Inventor | Avant-Garde
A progressive and determined woman ahead of her time, Caresse Crosby’s life was a roller coaster ride from beginning to end. Born with the name Mary and nicknamed Polly, met and married Richard Peabody, had two children and, while Richard was away at war in 1920, she met a man seven years younger than her. Starting a scandalous, public affair within two weeks of the young Harry Crosby, when her husband returned from war he went back to drinking heavily and indulged in his favourite hobby of watching buildings burn. Harry and Polly married two years later when Richard finally granted her a divorce and then moved to Europe where they lived off of Harry’s trust fund. Decadent bohemians, Polly and Harry lived life to excess, had an open marriage, attended wild parties, took a lot of drugs, and had a suicide pact.
After changing her name to Caresse in 1924, the couple began publishing exquisite, limited edition volumes of their own poetry in 1925, rebranding their business to Black Sun Press two years later in reference to Harry’s fascination with death and the symbolism of the sun. Publishing stunning editions of unusual books, Caresse’s nurturing of new writers and passion for producing beautifully bound and typographically flawless saw Black Sun Press first publish the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and DH Lawrence.
In 1929, a year after Caresse’s husband met and began a relationship with a 20-year-old woman he affectionately called the Youngest Princess of the Sun or the Fire Princess, he committed suicide in what was either a suicide pact or a murder-suicide. Continuing to run Black Sun Press until impending war prompted her to return to America in 1936, she there met an unemployed, alcoholic man 16 years younger than her who she married and shared a rehabilitated Virginia plantation with until she divorced him. Moving to Washington DC and becoming involved in a long-term liaison with African-American actor cum boxer, Canada Lee, Caresse stood firm in the face of miscegenation* laws.
Going on to found the Women Against War movement, when Greek authorities opposed her founding of a Centre for World Peace in Delphi, she bought an actual 15th Century Italian castle to create an artists’ colony. She lived there until she died of pneumonia in 1970 after receiving experimental open heart surgery for heart disease.
As if this were not enough for one lifetime, in amongst all of this Caresse somehow found the time to invent and patent the modern bra and establish the Fashion Form Brassière Company complete with a two-woman sweatshop, host Salvador Dali and his wife for an extended period while he wrote his autobiography, dabbled in the ghost-writing of erotica, had an affair (one of numerous) with the man who inspired the design and name of the Spaceship Earth’s geodesic dome at Epcot, performed as a dancer in two experimental short films and opened the Caresse Crosby Modern Art Gallery in Washington DC.
*Sonorous Superlative: miscegenation
/ˌmɪsɪdʒɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/
noun | the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial typesMiscegenation laws mandate racial segregation and criminalise intimate relationships, marriage, and sex between members of different races. But let’s not go there right now, we are job hunting not questioning what in the hell is wrong with some people.
