1933, Jan 1: HMK to RH -- Shaker Hollow Purchase

Shaker Hollow
South Salem, Westchester Co., NY
Telephone South Salem 133

January 1, 1933

My dear R.H., Happy New Year,

Thanks R.H for your Christmas card and forgive one for not having written so long ago - And here is ....for you-- When in ... at a loss of him which may turn but still secure in the knowledge that there much the same way with God-- their place was offered to us--this as a refuge and near as something holding greater hope of the time at hand-- It is a lovely old house belonging to Juliana Force who is head of the Whitney Museum of American Art -- She had owned it for seven years. Never lived in it and out of a clear blue sky asked us to occupy it-- as it was being neglected frightfully by a ... caretaker-- The house is so lovely and has done so much to restore it that Mrs. Force has sent up from another house in Pennsylvania what is probably the finest collection of old Shaker furniture in America-- We have christened the place Shaker Hollow. The furniture is really ... on which shall give our visitors tea or lunch or dinner and I shall run that end of it. -- which brings me here to a confession that in the world of motion pictures I have a really great reputation as a cook. I used to cook for relaxation for it just s much an art as painting or music if you love it and know it-- and I do. So if you have any sacred family recipes-- send them on. Mrs. Force gave me this stationary for Christmas but I will write you soon all about the home. Norma & HB came and stayed with us a week and went on to Kingston for Christmas and hated to go away again from its beauty and its peace.

And so opens a new chapter and we look forward to it with anticipation-- Do wish me good luck and write me a birthday letter for on Wednesday I shall be 21+.

HMK

1933: Feb 24: HMK to RH-- Farrar Lunch

Thursday, February 24, 1933

Dear R.H.;

Last night I lived with ghosts for I went to see "Ah Wilderness." If you have not seen it, you will see none other than myself almost to the last crossing of the "t's", the Swinburne poems, the Rubiyat, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the girl, the temptation, the defiance, the tempter, the inability to go through with it, all, all the lovely tragic lost dreams, dreamed so bravely as to make one weep at the memory of them. It is Niles when I was 17 and I saw the picture through a mist. It was all there save that my father and mother had long been gone and there was no one to tell me the things about life that I should have known for those were still the days when such tings were looked upon as too vulgar and obscene ever to be talked about honestly and youth was left to stumble on in darkness sometimes never to find the truth.

The boy in the picture is perfect to poignancy, poor brave little lad with his lovely dreams, his sweet ambitions but he is not alone for the picture seems almost flawlessly cast. If you have not seen it, do not, I beg of you, miss it for it is one of the loveliest things that the cinema has ever given us and how they ever did it, is a mystery even if they did broaden it in parts-- it cannot harm the heart of it.

Freckles send her love and RH says he owes you a letter and one day when he is reckless enough he will write you. If you knew how we blessed you on nights at 17 below for those bed socks, tho we doubted if we should ever be soft enough to wear them.

Did I tell you we had tea with Geraldine Farrar last week and that she is one of the loveliest ladies we have ever known and is growing old with a grace so rare as to be almost incredible. She lives not far away, quite simply and surrounded with souvenirs of a career as great as any woman ever had, yet with not the slightest indication of regret that it is passed. She took us to some friends in Stamford, southern folk with a lovely house and a sunken music room with a pipe organ and a concert grand. The buffet was bountiful and as delicious as old black servants long in the family could make it and afterward Farrar gathered us all about her at the piano and led us in songs of a simpler and far happier time and at the end a hymn. I cannot recall a Sunday night so sweet since the time of "Ah Wilderness" itself.

Nothing new in the line of radio except that the other stations listening in made almost too good a report on my broadcast and I'm duly grateful.

The radio just said that we might expect more snow which sets RH and CV into cursing but I'm silent being secretly glad.

Write me all the news and thanks again and do see the picture of the small, brave, dreaming youthful Knight who is gone.

Faithfully,
HMK

1933, April 11: Shaker Hollow Opening Week-- HMK to RH

Tuesday.

Dear R.H.,

Well, here is little Miss Underwood restored to good health and able to work for me again, for which you will no doubt be grateful as you no doubt have had to struggle over that feared scrawl I sent you last. In looking thro your letters, out fell the sample of that lovely print, which I hope you are really having, with all the purple and magenta, a combination much favored of Lady Duff-Gordon ("Lucile") when I was her manager, but perhaps I never told you that. She was the greatest of all the geniuses in the art of dress and it was an experience to see her work.

And speaking of artists something too exciting has happened to us here. Mme. Elise Weber-Fulop, one of the greatest of contemporary Austrian painters was so intrigued with our apricot and black dining room that she asked permission to paint it. As she is the most famous painter of interiors in Europe and never gets less than 1 to 3 thousand for a painting, we are thrilled, I can tell you, and she is here at this very moment beginning her canvas. It being Holy Week and we had planned not to take anyone but to open officially on Easter, it gives her the time and the room to herself. No doubt some of the better magazines will want to use a reproduction, perhaps Country Life, and so you will see it too. I am as excited as I can be watching her at work. She heard of us and of the pink room in Vienna and when she saw it, said that she had never seen anything so lovely and that she could never be satisfied till she got it on canvas.

Well the second broadcast went over pretty well, I guess from the fan mail pouring in. Too well I guess, for Martha Deane, was advised not to have me again: I was too good. I wish you could see some of the letters but I take their extravagances with a large helping of salt. Just the same they are nice to get and will help me to my ambition. These pathetic women with no outlet and an unconscious craving for romance in their dull lives. That's what one of them said I did for her and that I put so much romance into food and cooking that she loved to do it now. I told them that no one could be a good cook who did not cook with gratitude and affection-- deep reverent gratitude for the things with which we cook and which we accept so casually when they are one of God's mysteries and his blessings. And affection for those we cook for is the great secret of real cooking and makes it a ritual not a bore. And they knew what I meant and some of their letters are pathetic and I do want to help them to see the beauty in the plain things of life which they understand and which are ever with them.

Well think of us on the 19th. We are giving a buffet for Geraldine Farrar and she has asked four big bugs from the National Broadcasting Co. who are her friends, and who knows what may come. Help me by thinking it Will Come dear R.H. as you have helped me with so many other things. Write me all about your Easter. I will have eggs for Pat and the rest. It will be fun.

Gratefully,
HMK

1933, May 22: Gardening and Shaker Hollow Opening

Shaker Hollow
May 22, 1933
Sunday, 6.30 A.M.

My dear RH,
    I have been remiss, I know, but surely not so much as to have deserved such a greeting as “MY DEAR MR. SMITH.”  Couldn’t it at least have been “Dear HMK?”  or were you just in one of those formal modes?  Anyway, the box that came with your note with the petunias and delphinium made up for it so I will forgive you, provided, of course, that you too will forgive me.  It seems incredible that one should be too busy ever to steal a moment’s time for a trusted friend but that is my only excuse.  The weather finally turned and I have been in the garden since from dawn till dark and then have fallen into my bed and not stirred till dawn again.  I am as brown as the earth almost and have lost countless pounds and every one tells me I have not looked so well or so happy for years.  I am happy digging in the kindly earth and you should see how your pansies have responded to affection.  They are masses of bloom.  The white ones go to my little marble Virgin here on my desk before me and yesterday when Mrs. Force sailed I sent Dick in with a big box of white lilacs and with them a great cluster of pansies of all the other shades and it was beautiful.  Thanks again for thinking of me and of sending me these lovely little friends who are the symbol of friendly thoughts.  We have done a magnificent garden with flower borders all around and a long oblong vegetable garden in the center all outlined with rocks that we have dragged up ourselves.  In it are every old fashioned flower in the seed catalogs and they are all up and thriving with the lettuce and radishes and beets and carrots and peas and what not.  The east wall, which must be two hundred feet or more, is one mass of old lilacs all abloom, and there are apple trees and cherry trees as well.  And a lot of tulips along the stone walks.  In the woods at the back we found thousands of white blood root and tine anemones and violets and even Jack-in-a-pulpits, so the place really looks too beautiful.  And we are doing some business altho we won’t open officially until the first of June.  We had a wedding party here to start off with, and when I brought on the white and silver cake, which I had made with love and affection, as the clippings you sent me rightly said was the only way to succeed with cakes, the little bride-to-be burst into tears and said, “Must I really cut it?  It’s the first time in my life that I ever had a cake all by myself.”  “Of course not, my dear,” I told her.  We will pack it up and you shall take it home with you.  I had to think up a substitute dessert quickly but I managed it and she went off happy with her cake, which, if I may say, it was modestly a handsome one.  On Wednesday, Mrs. Force was out and we asked sixteen of her closest friends and we had a gay party and she was amazed and delighted with what we had done to the place.  Our awnings are striking ones, of gray and black and white with a shell pink lining and on this white house with its black shutters are very effective.  I made a tracing of one of the old door hinges and a long strap like affair and had an iron worker make me some flower pot holders for the windows so that I might keep changing the pots as the different flowers came on.  They are filled now with pink geraniums and English ivy and are nice with the pink lined awnings.  HB and Norma are still south but he is going to Spain this summer to study I think.  We are all well and as busy as two men can be but we love it.  Richard’s mother was up fourteen days.  She is ninety-two and is complaining because her hair is showing traces of gray and she kept us on the jump, I can tell you.  Charles Vincent is better of his operation but insists privately, of course, on showing Dick and me his incision with altogether Victorian pride.  My sister [likely Anna Schmidt Elbel d. 1935] is very ill again and it cannot be long now.  Yesterday was her wedding anniversary poor dear and it seems only yesterday that I helped as a small boy to bring in the apple blossoms and I can see my mother sitting among them up for the first time in three years for she died in the following September and I can hear the pearl passementeries swishing on my sister’s wedding dress again.  Sweet memories if they are sad and I think God is for them. 
    Well dear RH, I must do all the many letters I owe this early Sunday morning but yours has been the first so do forgive me and don’t write again to Dear Mr. Smith.

Faithfully,
HMK

1933, c. June 1: HMK to RH -- Attached To Shaker Hollow Advertisement

[Undated Letter, c. June 1, 1933]

Dear R.H.

I reserved your letter and itinerary so carefully that now I cannot find it all in the welter of a neglected desk so do write me at once again the day and hour and the boat. H.B. is sailing for Spain on the 25th. I only just heard from Norma that he is in New York and not very well and I have just written him to come out at once and perhaps you may see him yet at any rate I shall try to arrange it for you. The pink snapdragons you sent me are in flower and the gay little Rosy Morn petunias and the pansies continue to bloom and smile as plentifully and as gaily as ever. This is our announcement and map made for me by Bill Longyear who gets fabulous prices for doing them but he made mine as the negro says "Free, Gratis and fer Nuthin'." Let us hope the foolish fates will not send me a mob on the day you sail but promise to phone me at the appointed time. Go on with your packing and hatting and dressing and whatnot now. You should learn to trot the globe like I did in a single bag. They do sell toothpaste and soap and the like in Europe. Norma, by the way, is not mad with me and I am glad of that. She may go to Ashville for the summer. Do write me at once now about your sailing. Peter stays out still but at four yesterday when a terrific thunder storm came up he was asking meekly from the terrace to be let in. No, I'm wrong, he was demanding that I come down and open the door at once whereupon it was I who came meekly down to do it.

Faithfully,
HMK