Louisville Magazine

JUL 2015

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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28 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.15 Henrietta might just be the most famous Jazz Age personality we've never heard of. "Henrietta, who was born in 1901, knew and deeply loved black music, and she came of age with this great American movement, but her quality of being everywhere and with everyone was a complete surprise to me. As I learned more about her, I recognized the Zelig quality to her life. She rubbed shoulders — and sometimes much more! — with early jazz giants like Will Vodery, James P. Johnson and Florence Mills. Tere were steamy and wildly popular actresses like her contemporary and fellow Southerner, Tallulah Bankhead; bisexual 'Bloomsberries' in London like Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington, who became utterly obsessed with this 'Kentucky princess'; and the young John Houseman, who wanted to be a writer and frst saw Henrietta dressed in purple playing a saxophone on top of a piano at a mixed-race party in London in 1923. "Houseman — who worked with Orson Welles through the 1930s and won an Oscar for his role in the flm Te Paper Chase — caught up with her in Manhattan two years later. She toured him around the theaters and clubs and railroad fats where the Harlem renaissance was exploding. He never forgot driving north from her apartment near Washington Square with her body emanating erotic energy and her enormous silver fask, which I still have, lying on the seat between them. With her hands on the wheel they covered 13 blocks before hitting a stoplight." What's a discovery about Henrietta that surprised you? "She accompanied her father, Robert Worth Bingham, to London in 1933 after his appointment as ambassador to Great Britain. He contributed heavily to Franklin Roosevelt's election and was a lifelong Anglophile, so the post was an ideal capstone to his career. Te relationship between Henrietta and her father proved much more complex than I ever imagined, but a very unexpected twist came during this period at the embassy. "Te ambassador ofered shelter to the American tennis champion Helen Hull Jacobs, and, in doing so, provided tacit social protection for the two women's afair. Tere was no question of speaking openly about this lesbian relationship, but by having Jacobs living with the Binghams at the embassy, and also sharing the house they rented in the countryside, the ambassador provided a platform for what Jacobs called 'a joyous and satisfying life.'" Tere's an interesting mental-health thread throughout Irrepressible. Henrietta begins psychoanalysis while in London with Ernest Jones, Freud's most signifcant ambassador planetftness.com viastudio.com

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