Word: chanler
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Robert Winthrop Chanler was born auspiciously enough on Washington's Birthday, 1873. His family was and still is socially prominent in apple-raising Dutchess County (above & east of Poughkeepsie), New York?a family full of "characters" and legends, a wealthy family that can indulge its eccentricities. At the age of ten Bob drew an indubitable horse on a large piece of paper, took it into the parlor for his parents to admire. They refused to believe that he had done it, punished him for lying. Discouraged, he did not try to draw again, for another 25 years...
When he was 22 he married Julia Chamberlain, younger sister of his brother Lewis Stuyvesant ("Loulou") Chanler's first wife, and went to Paris. It was there that he started seriously to paint, studied at the Beaux Arts...
Came another period of depression. He went back to Dutchess County, gave up painting, went into politics, ran for county sheriff. Having his own ideas of practical politics he eschewed such devices as bribing the electorate with drinks, kissing babies. Robert Winthrop Chanler bought a bull, the finest bull he could afford, and serviced all the farmers' cows gratis. The bull not only won him the election but kept him in the State Legislature for six years. He left politics when his brother "Loulou" was defeated for Governor of New York State by middleaged, ginger-whiskered Charles Evans Hughes...
Sheriff Bob went back to painting. Followed a second marriage to the tempestuous primadonna Lina Cavalieri. Another brother, John Armstrong Chanler, had attracted no little attention by running amuck, shooting his butler, and effecting a spectacular escape from the Bloomingdale Hospital for the Insane (Manhattan). He fled to Virginia, was judged legally sane, changed his name to "Chaloner" and set a brass plate in his dining room floor "To the Memory of a Faithful Servitor." No sooner did the news of Artist Bob's marriage to the spectacular Cavalieri reach Virginia than Brother John sent his most famous telegram...
...pantry, a dado of chimpanzees climbs up the stairs, round the walls of the yellow dining room stalks a procession of tall Mexican goddesses with bird heads. Night after night these rooms were filled with the intelligentsia, the talking, drinking, reciting, bright people of an inner world, while Bob Chanler sat on the floor, disheveled and benign like Praxiteles' Zeus...