Kentucky-born Moredcai author Emily Bingham discovered treasure trunks in the attic that would one day unlock a lifetime of family history only she could illustrate to the world. Her painstaking research would result in Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham.
Emily explained, "In 1998, 30 years after Henrietta Bingham died in New York City on the eve of the Stonewall Riots, I had a daughter and named her after this great-aunt I knew very little about—except that she had spent time in London in the 1920s and had been acquainted with some members of the Bloomsbury Group, the sexually and artistically avant-garde circle around Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. And that she would upset my father when he was a boy by slipping the bacon out of his BLTs when he wasn't looking. And that my grandmother, in an interview I conducted with her in the early 1990s, noted in passing that her sister-in-law Miss Henrietta was 'you know, an introvert.'"
An introvert with a colorful past, some might say.
"She was clearly a big character. I liked the strong Victorian name and the association with Etta James and felt it was worth reviving," Emily said. "My father walked into the hospital room where I was holding the tiny new Henrietta and said, 'How could you do this to a child?' Clearly there were things I had not been told everything about Henrietta. He had some harrowing tales from her later years—of addiction and dependency—but once there was a new Henrietta in the world others approached me with stories and photographs and objects, thrilled to have the chance to speak about someone they had found devastatingly fascinating. Slowly, I began to think that Henrietta deserved another moment in the limelight."
Henrietta died when Emily was just 3 years old. The mystery of her great aunt's reputation piqued her curiosity and, to this day, Emily still harbors questions. For instance, if given an hour to sit and chat with her departed, she would likely pose the following questions:
—"When you began psychoanalysis with Dr. Ernest Jones, the leading Freudian in the English speaking world, did you know that he wanted to make you transfer your desires 'from women to men,' as he wrote? Did he help you—even though you continued to love mainly women—or did your time with him leave you with a layer of shame for not 'moving beyond' what he considered neurotic behavior?"
—"You spent so much time with African-American musicians and performers. You taught yourself the saxophone in the early 1920s when white Southern belles were not supposed to be blowing on horns. You loved the Charleston and the Black Bottom. What about jazz, blues, jug music and African-American culture appealed to you. You crossed the color line regularly and introduced many people to these artists you befriended, but whose music did you most love? Count Basie, Florence Mills, Bessie Smith? So many people were in love with you—did any of them fall under your spell, as well?"
—"Tell me about your relationship with your mother, who died in violently in a car accident ( you were there ) when you were 12 and how that affected your rocky but highly interdependent bond with your father, the newspaper publisher and active Democratic Party supporter, Robert Worth Bingham. He adored you, spoiled you, and wanted you to succeed him in his media empire. Why didn't you?"
In lieu of these questions that shall forever go unanswered, Emily did discover quite a backstory to her great aunt's love life, which included "over 200 love letters from two men she almost married in the 1920s, Bloomsbury sculptor Stephen Tomlin and the producer/actor John Houseman," she said.
The love letters were at the bottom of a trunk in her family attic, just a few feet above her childhood bedroom, her entire life. However, noticeably missing were the love letters written between Henrietta and her lady loves, which included tennis great Helen Hull Jacobs, actress Hope Williams and artist Dora Carrington.
"All three of these women were strong, somewhat androgynous, and achieved remarkable things professionally in a time when most women were expected to fulfill very traditional familial roles," Emily explained. "None were classically beautiful, but all had their own magnetism. They were all 'known' and willing to risk their reputations to pursue their desires."
Emily also said, "Carrington was a remarkably complex person, perhaps gender dysphoric, and Henrietta was able to give her a degree of physical pleasure ( Carrington was over 30 ) she had never come close to. Unfortunately, the screenwriter of the 1995 biopic, Carrington, decided that her 'polymorphous' side was simply too complicated to include! But Henrietta slipped between her fingers, as she did with almost anyone who tried to hold on to her hard. Hope Williams, who taught Katherine Hepburn her trademark swagger, was a very private person and a supremely gifted performer—I wonder if Henrietta was too indiscreet for her. Helen was younger. She idolized Henrietta, and with her Henrietta found the most stability long term."
Progressive Henrietta was sent to Freud for an analysis of her bisexuality.
"Henrietta was 'pushed' into treatment not by her family, but by one of her first lovers and her Smith College professor, Mina Kirstein," Emily said. "Mina had decided that she needed to move away from lesbianism. Henrietta did cultivate affairs with men during this period as Dr. Jones and Mina hoped she would, but she never stopped seeing women, too. I only wish I had her perspective on the effort she put into her analysis and whether she would do it if she had the chance to start over."
Emily recalled that "Freudian analysis was very new and quite scandalous in the early 1920s. Many bookstores refused to stock Freud's writings, seeing them as obscene. Many homosexuals found in analysis a safer place to discuss things considered taboo in the wider culture—sex, desire, anger, abuse. On one hand, Freud saw homosexuality as a neurosis and an unfortunate sign of an incomplete resolution of the Oedipal stage of life. On the other hand, his theory acknowledged its existence and that all people are born bisexual."
In comparison to Emily's life, Henrietta might possibly be bored had she been alive today.
"Henrietta had a degree of allure, of magnetism, that I simply don't possess," Emily said. "It attracted men and women, though it also repelled some, my grandmother, for instance, and a contemporary who said that Henrietta 'wasn't congenial—she liked girls and I liked boys.' I sometimes wished I had that kind of ability to draw others in, but ultimately I feel that it derived from very deep wounds, as a way to exert power when she felt so afraid, a way to seize love and passion when she feared it would never last and could be snatched from her at any moment. I feel lucky not to be operating from such hurts."
Henrietta ran as far away as she possibly could from the Emily family's media empire, while, with Irrepressible, Emily appears to be right in the middle of it.
"My family sold its media properties when I was in college," Emily explained. "Before that, I expected to be 'in the running' to play a large role in that world, but things changed dramatically. In many ways, this was dislocating, but as a result of the sales, I have been far freer to chart my own course than I might have been. I'm very progressive politically, but I have a strong sense of duty and would have done my best to keep the businesses afloat in what would have turned out to be highly challenging times. Henrietta was extremely loyal to her father and also ambitious, but the public role she was offered would have made her unconventional lifestyle completely impossible."
The younger members of the Emily family have responded positively to the rehashing of dirty laundry, so to speak.
"My 11-year-old son told me, 'I want to know all the Henrietta stories,' and, now that she is back on our family tree, he will," Emily shared. "That said, if my grandparents [Henrietta's little brother and his wife] were living, I'm not sure the book could have been written."
If Henrietta were alive today, Emily imagines she would very much have approved of the Supreme Court's decision to pass marriage equality nationwide.
"Oh, she would be absolutely thrilled," Emily said. "To do away with the terrible silence and secrecy about sexuality would have been a huge relief and might have saved her from great anguish and self-destructiveness."
Being that Emily uncovered quite a bit about Henrietta from trunks left in the attic, does it inspire her to leave her own trunks in the attic for future generations?
"I keep all my old diaries and many letters," Emily said. "I even save emails. God knows what will become of them. But I encourage everyone to keep a box that tells about their life and turn it over to a local or national archive. Historians need primary material like this to put together the stories of the past and the Twitter archive simply won't convey the interaction of inner and social/public life that we most need to understand to know what it felt like in other times."
Emily Bingham is married to Stephen Reily and they share three children. The book Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham is available now on Amazon and other retailers.
