Castles In The Air

By Irene Castle

Tells the story of Vernon and Irene Castle, who popularized modern ballroom dancing and set fashion trends in the years before the First World War.

“Vernon and Irene Castle were a husband-and-wife team of ballroom dancers and dance teachers who appeared on Broadway and in silent films in the early 20th century. They are credited with reviving the popularity of modern dancing. Castle was a stage name: Vernon (2 May 1887 – 15 February 1918) was born William Vernon Blyth in England. Irene (7 April 1893 – 25 January 1969) was born Irene Foote in the United States.

The couple reached the peak of their popularity in Irving Berlin's first Broadway show, Watch Your Step (1914), in which they refined and popularized the Foxtrot. They also helped to promote ragtime, jazz rhythms and African-American music for dance. Irene became a fashion icon through her appearances on stage and in early movies, and both Castles were in demand as teachers and writers on dance.

After serving with distinction as a pilot in the British Royal Flying Corps during World War I, Vernon died in a plane crash on a flight training base near Fort Worth, Texas, in 1918. Irene continued to perform solo in Broadway, vaudeville and motion picture productions over the next decade. She remarried three times, had children and became an animal-rights activist. In 1939, her life with Vernon was dramatized in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.”-Wiki

• Language: English
• Publisher: Braunfell Books
• Release date: Jan 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805230007

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© Braunfell Books 2023, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

DEDICATION 4

CHAPTER ONE 5

CHAPTER TWO 10

CHAPTER THREE 15

CHAPTER FOUR 22

CHAPTER FIVE 29

CHAPTER SIX 34

CHAPTER SEVEN 47

CHAPTER EIGHT 62

CHAPTER NINE 69

CHAPTER TEN 90

CHAPTER ELEVEN 94

CHAPTER TWELVE 99

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 106

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 113

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 121

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 131

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 139

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 161

CHAPTER NINETEEN 170

CHAPTER TWENTY 177

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 188

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 196

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 200

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 205

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 214

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 221

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 225

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT 228

CASTLES IN THE AIR

BY

IRENE CASTLE

DEDICATION

To My Enchanting Mother

CHAPTER ONE

THE first woman to make a balloon ascension in the United States was a fourteen-year-old adventuress named Annie Elroy Thomas. The first man in the United States to load a Civil War cannon and demolish the chemistry building at Cornell University was Hubert Townsend Foote.

These were my parents.

Annie came by her individuality quite naturally. Her father was David Stevens Thomas, press agent for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. In the 1870s he lived in New Haven, Connecticut, and developed a great love for balloons, not the small kind that children play with, but the large gasbags that could lift a man above the clouds.

It must have been an exciting day in his life when he learned that the intrepid Barnum was bringing the famous Captain Macdonald from the country-fair circuits in Europe to make a daring flight from New York to Boston, and that David Stevens Thomas would be in charge of publicity.

The flight was scheduled for August of 1875, at a time of year when the prevailing winds could be counted on to land the balloon close to Boston instead of sweeping it out into the Atlantic. The balloon would be launched through the roof of the old Madison Square Garden where the spectators on the street would have the best chance of seeing it.

The basket, suspended beneath a large gasbag, would hold a number of people. Grandfather Thomas soon filled it up with newsmen who could give it the space it deserved in the newspapers. He reserved one seat for himself.

At the last minute something must have happened. Perhaps Grandfather Thomas weighed too much, but more likely Annie advanced arguments which could not be stilled. Nevertheless, a substitution was made and Annie Elroy Thomas took her father’s place in the balloon! I have often wondered why they agreed to let her go, for she was a frail child, a victim of many illnesses and the only child of parents who had had the misfortune of losing four previous children.

As the hour of departure drew near, the newsmen climbed aboard and Grandfather Thomas placed the love of his life in the basket Captain Macdonald peered anxiously up at the bag, then gave the signal. The men dropped the guy ropes and scampered away as the balloon slowly rose through the hole in the roof. Unfortunately, in those days the wind velocity was not tested, and as the gasbag rose above the building, a vicious crosscurrent caught it and swept it toward the Gilsey House flag mast. A terrible cry arose from the crowd. The flag mast would puncture the gasbag and drop all the people in the basket to a horrible death on the street below.

At the last minute the gasbag missed the flag mast by a scant two feet but slammed the crowded basket against it with such force that the flag mast snapped in two. The basket swayed crazily. A coat and hat hanging on a peg outside the basket were dislodged and floated earthward. The great sea of upturned faces parted like Jello for fear of being hit by what they thought was a falling body.

The balloon rose above the buildings of New York. The south-westerly wind caught it and began to waft it toward the northeast, in the general direction of Boston. Macdonald had agreed to put my mother on the ground before dark as it did not seem proper for a young girl to remain in the basket with male companions overnight. New Haven lies in the middle of the straight line between New York and Boston and Macdonald hoped to set her down someplace reasonably near her home, but, as it developed, the descent was not as easy as he had expected.

Near New Haven, Captain Macdonald tossed an anchor overboard and then shouted through a megaphone for somebody below to catch it and attach it to a firm object. But at the first sight of the balloon overhead, farmers left their horses and plows in the field and ran for cover. The swaying anchor caught in church steeples and treetops, jerking and swaying the basket, finally lodging in a stone wall, making it possible to pull the basket to earth.

Out stepped little Miss Thomas, and I can imagine her curtsying politely and thanking the captain for the ride, then waving as sandbags were dropped and the balloon soared heavenward again before she started for the nearest farmhouse to request a buggy ride home.

Shortly after my mother’s spectacular ascension, and largely because of her health, she was sent to friends in Paris to be put in school there for two years, followed by two years in Germany before she returned home. Not only did the change of climate improve her health, but she also returned speaking French and German fluently and playing the piano with a remarkable degree of charm and ability.

The pictures of her at eighteen are enchanting. They show her wearing the latest fashions from Paris, a little fur toque tipped over one eye, her hands hidden in a tiny round muff and high (for the times) French heels. I am sure her new appearance startled the neighbors and caught every masculine eye. Not long after her return she married Hubert Townsend Foote, a childhood sweetheart. The Footes and the Thomases had long been friends, both living in New Haven.

When my father proposed marriage to my mother he was practicing medicine with his father, Dr. Edward Bliss Foote, at 120 Lexington Avenue in New York City. He had become an M.D. by the skin of his teeth and the Cornell episode almost ended his career as a medical student.

With a dozen other medical students, he had decided that Cornell needed a new chemistry building. The simplest method of obtaining it, so they reasoned, was to get rid of the old one. They found an old Civil War cannon decorating the lawn, loaded it with black powder, and aimed it at the chemistry building. The cannon erupted with a belch of smoke and flame and a roar that could be heard all over Ithaca. The cannon ball smashed through a laboratory wall, igniting some chemicals. Within a few hours the old structure had burned to the ground.

After he was expelled from Cornell he went to New York University, which was closer to home, and completed his M.D. degree under the watchful eye of his father.

By the time he started to practice he had become a homeopath, a very popular form of medicine of the times. As a homeopath he dealt in a great many herbal remedies and was violently opposed to serums, believing that if you put anything alien into the blood stream, it would eventually damage the heart and cause serious complications.

As a child, I remember being watched very closely by my father. He looked on me as frail and was afraid that something was going to happen to my lungs. Life with Father was one continual round of questions about my digestive and elimination processes, and I can imagine that no patient at the Mayo Clinic has ever had a more detailed or continual diagnosis than my father gave me.

I was never allowed to suck on candy between meals, and when I was allowed candy (only after meals) it had to be of the proper quality. Cheap candy was considered injurious. I was not allowed to have meat until I was eight years old. My father believed that children developed too fast if they were fed meat, because it would heat up their blood and rob them of their childish vigor.

My father was a consultant and since his office was in New York City, he commuted each day on the train from New Rochelle. My mother drove a horse well and took my father to the station every morning in a smart buckboard. She looked very well driving with our groom and Jack-of-all-trades sitting up behind her in a little coachman’s seat.

We had thirty-five acres in that section which is now known as Halcyon Park in New Rochelle. North Avenue was only paved about a mile north of the railroad station at that time. The rest of North Avenue, including the part which passed our gates, was just a dirt road. There were few houses from the end of the trolley line, a mile away, to where we lived, and so the estate seemed larger than thirty-five acres. The old French house, at the end of a driveway lined with huge horse-chestnut trees, was pretty well hidden from the road, and no sign of the big red barn and the many kennel buildings that my father had erected in back of the house could be seen.

There was a quarry, a sand pit, an apple orchard, grapevines, a cider press, pigsties, pigeon lofts, a pond with an island in the middle of it; everything to make a fairyland of a playground for children. I don’t think there’s a childhood I would trade for mine.

In the winter lanterns were put around the little island in the pond and my family and their guests went figure skating. In the summer we children made boats to row in the pond, working laboriously for months sometimes, only to have them sink at the launching. The babbling brook which led into the pond through beautiful trees was a never-ending source of amusement. We built dams; we skipped back and forth across it from stone to stone, until the day generally came to a close with my having been put to bed for having twice soaked my clothes and disobeyed orders to stay away from the brook.

My mother had the very embarrassing habit of spanking my invited playmates as well as me if we were caught breaking boughs off the cherry trees or trampling on the hay in the barn so that the cows would not eat it The barn was almost a quarter of a mile from the house, and I can well remember scampering for the house with my mother switching her riding whip across my bare legs all the way—my accomplices having been sent home, but not soon enough to escape my humiliation.

The Fourth of July was always a very special occasion in our lives. My mother insisted on dressing us in wool on the Fourth of July regardless of the soaring temperatures outside, because a wool dress wouldn’t catch fire from flying sparks. We couldn’t wait for the morning to arrive when we could go out and pop the first firecracker, even though it meant wearing a stifling wool Peter Thompson dress.

Life in the country suited my mother very well. She rode a horse fearlessly and loved to saddle Vesta, a wild and nitwitty thoroughbred mare someone had left on our estate, and take her over jumps that would have terrified most horsemen. It was typical of everything she did. She was afraid of nothing.

The top half of the Dutch door leading to our dining room was always left open on summer days, and as we sat having lunch one afternoon, a German gardener, whom my mother had fired that morning, came and hurled oaths and abuse at her. My mother, who was a fine shot along with her other accomplishments, took down a rifle and, as the man fled down the driveway, shot him in the leg.

My father remonstrated very mildly with her over that one, saying, Now, Nell—as he called her—do you think you should have done that? Her answer was that she had only meant to wing him to teach him a lesson. My gentle father always resorted to the same old calming, sympathetic line to end an argument, Now, Nell, don’t excite yourself. The effect upon anyone around her never made the slightest difference to him.

My father never allowed himself to be shocked by anything my mother did. He regarded her as a creature more precious than gold. As he kept an eagle eye on my digestive tract, he kept a similar vigilance on her emotions, believing that an emotional upset was just as damaging as poor elimination. Rather than upset her, he took the easy way out and it did not take her very long to learn that anything she did was all right with him.

Never one to follow the current vogue, her originality and defiance of mode and custom made her cut her hair at a time when women let their hair grow to the ankles if they could manage it. One of my mother’s friends was such a favored creature. Her hair was so long she had to drape it over her arm to comb it. This took two hours every morning, in addition to the time it took to plait it and wind the masses of braids around her head before she could start her day.

Perhaps my mother would have tolerated it had she not been born with fine straight hair that would not hold the big bone pins of her day. At least once during every trip into New York a young man would dash down the street after her to return a pin that had dropped from her hair and she would discover, to her horror, that her hair was hanging down her back.

Finally she could stand it no longer. She went to the hairdresser’s and had it cut off.

I can remember her telling me that she rushed straight home and hid behind a screen, leaving the huge coils of straight hair on my father’s desk to await his return, expecting the worst. She was quite disappointed. My father arrived, walked into his library, and showed no concern at all over the shearing. I presume it was a bit of a let-down for my mother, like coming into a drawing room wearing a false nose for laughs and not getting any!

CHAPTER TWO

THE one flaw in my idyllic childhood was my sister, Elroy, who was the first part of what my mother referred to as the plan. My mother would not have made a good suffragette. The suffragettes were in favor of making birth control popular and giving women equal rights. My mother already had more than equal rights and birth control was a practical reality with her.

Elroy was born in 1887 and my mother decided, in the interests of harmony, to have her next child six years later. Then the six-year-old child could help take care of the new baby and there would be none of the continual bickering between two children too close to the same age. It was wonderful in theory, but, practically speaking, it was a miserable failure.

From the day I came into the world on April 7, 1893, my sister considered me a millstone around her neck. Elroy was appointed my warden. If she decided to go someplace she had to take me, and I was not a comfortable burden. Too, there was the matter of the hair. My mother had been born with straight hair and Elroy had been born with straight hair. But I popped into the world with naturally curly hair, something my mother could not resist, so I became a favored and highly spoiled child, much to Elroy’s disgust.

So the war began. It was not a subtle war in which we used propaganda on our parents to win a larger share of attention. It was a direct, straightforward honest type of warfare, in which every skirmish was an open and often bloody affair.

Once, for instance, my mother told Elroy to drive the buckboard down to the grocer’s and, since I was not present at the time of the assignment, there was no provision made for me. When I first got wind of the excursion the groom had already hitched the horses to the buckboard and Elroy was perched on the seat with the dressy buggy whip clenched firmly in one daintily gloved hand.

She flicked the whip and the horses trotted off. I made a mad dash for the buckboard, screaming for her to stop and let me go with her. I managed to catch hold of the tail end of the buckboard just as the horses began to go faster and Elroy began to shout at me to give up and go home, which of course I wouldn’t do. The horses gained momentum. I was clinging to the end rail of the buckboard and was being carried along, making six-foot leaps, when Elroy hit on an excellent strategy. She turned the dressy whip on me with inescapable flips. The leaps and the whipping proved to be too much, I let loose and fell smack on my face in a mud puddle in the middle of North Avenue.

Usually, however, our fights were on foot and she discovered that my bare feet, encased in the brown sandals all children wore in my youth, were especially vulnerable to a good sharp heel. When she stepped on my toes I began to cry. This made no impression on her, so I limped upstairs and set fire to her stamp collection and watched it turn to ashes with great satisfaction. Another time, with the scars of battle on my foot, I found her hoard of photographs, which she had collected from her dearest friends, and with a pair of scissors I destroyed them.

Fortunately she was sent to school at St. Mary’s Episcopal Convent in Peekskill long before I was ready to go to school, and the battles were punctuated by long truces, simply because the armies couldn’t get together.

Even with Elroy gone, life was never dull at the house in New Rochelle. One night when everybody was asleep there was a clatter of breaking glass from downstairs and my mother and father awoke with a start. My mother had a cabinet of cut glass of which she was very proud, and her first thought was that somebody or something had broken it. She nudged my father and told him to hurry downstairs and see what had happened.

My father tore downstairs and turned up the lights just in time to see a man stepping through the shattered dining-room window. My father seems rather fearless, as I think of it, because, dressed just in a nightshirt, he said, What the hell are you doing here?

The man said, Don’t worry, Dr. Foote. I’ve just been sent by the government to buy your house.

Being a doctor, my father immediately recognized that his visitor was mentally unbalanced and no ordinary burglar, to say the least. Any accomplished thief could have broken in without waking the whole house. Very calmly my father suggested that they sit down in front of the fireplace to discuss the price.

The man sat down and began to take off his gloves. He said he had been authorized by the President to offer three hundred thousand dollars if he had to. This was at a time when three hundred thousand dollars wasn’t spoken of above a whisper.

Well, my father said, feeling every bit like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. That seems like a good price.

In the meantime my mother had trickled down the stairs in her robe to see what was happening. After listening to the conversation, she decided to call the police. Unfortunately the telephone was on the landing and, since it was the kind you cranked, it made an awful clatter. Nevertheless, she had no choice.

Both my father and the man heard the great jangle of the telephone bell. The man craned his neck, trying to see up the staircase at the other side of the room, then turned back to my father.

Is someone calling the police? he said in a low voice.

It’s just possible, my father said.

The man relaxed in his chair. That’s quite all right, Dr. Foote, he said. The police know me very well and I won’t have any trouble with them. But I do think we should settle the details of the purchase before they arrive.

By all means, my father said.

They chatted amicably about mortgages and terms and in a few minutes the police wagon clattered up under the porte-cochere, the horses’ hoofs crunching on the gravel.

Well, I must go. My wife will be worried about me, the man said. He arose and shook hands with my father before he went out to climb into the police wagon. My father stood at the door, watching his visitor drive off with the police, waving gaily.

In less than a week my father’s visitor had killed his caretaker by splitting his head open with a carafe, and had been committed to an institution for the criminally insane.

I enjoyed my stay at home without Elroy but when I reached the age of seven I was sent to Peekskill to join her. My father was not well and they were going to Mexico for the winter, hoping the mild tropical climate would help his lungs. For ten years he was to make the trek, experimenting with different parts of Mexico, discarding the high altitude of Mexico City for the Isthmus, where he and Mother rode muleback through the jungle and felt thoroughly comfortable and at home.

I was not old enough to understand that he had tuberculosis and that it was eventually to kill him.

I went to Peekskill. I was not happy there. The first day I arrived a girl came up to me and said, Are you Elroy Foote’s sister?

That cranky thing? I snorted. I certainly am not.

The next summer Elroy and I returned home together. We did not like each other any better and I still continued to plague her by peeping down the stairs when boys came to call on her, but both of us realized my father was a very sick man and called a truce when we were around him, for fear of upsetting him.

There were times when he did not appear to be suffering very much, and those times were happy ones for the entire family. He and my mother led an active life in New Rochelle. They went bowling one night a week, carrying their bowling balls in handsome monogrammed cases. They went on parties to New York and had friends in for dinner. On the evenings when they entertained, my mother was always the life of the party, playing the piano and singing while my father retired to the billiard room with the gentlemen or gathered them around the poker table to indulge in his favorite sport. He was an inveterate gambler who would bet on anything (even what the weather was going to be the next day), and poker was his forte.

It was my greatest delight to be invited to play poker when he wanted to fill out the table. He taught us to pay our gambling debts and take our losses with good grace. He was not a lucky man at cards or at business, and in his one great speculation on a sugar plantation in Mexico he lost all the money he had received from his mother. But his patients brought him in a comfortable living and he greatly loved my mother and their life in the country, so, despite his ill health, he was a happy man.

In the hope that exercise might help his lungs, my mother insisted that they take up bicycling. It was a fairly new sport in America and my father took to it as a duck takes to water. The morning after my mother suggested it, a delivery wagon clattered up to the Foote household bearing two shiny new bicycles for Elroy and me and a tandem for my father and mother.

A room off the garage became the cycle room and my father devoted every Saturday to tuning up the bikes, tightening the spokes, oiling the wheels, and inflating the tires; preparing for the Sunday run. You had to take care of your own bicycles. There were no service stations along the road then. If something went wrong, you were out of luck.

To find the proper space and distance for cycling, we would climb aboard a ferry and go over to Sea Cliff, Long Island, every Sunday. Cycling on Long Island took the legs and stamina of an Olympic runner. Bicycling in sand, as one did most of the way across the island, was worse than bicycling in knee-deep mud, and no matter what direction we were going, it always seemed that we were pedalling against the wind.

My mother always took the front seat on the tandem. They were made that way; ladies first. One late afternoon, while they were plugging along in a wind, she happened to look to one side at their shadow and there, sitting behind her with his feet propped up on the handle bars, was my pixy father, watching her work. My mother said nothing. She wheezed on up the hill and instead of putting on the brakes as they topped the hill and started down the other side, she let it go full force. In fact she helped the speed along and run away with him. The gear pedals spun crazily so that my father couldn’t get his feet to connect with them. It was all he could do to stay on as the bicycle veered around sharp curves and finally came to a sudden halt in a sandbank. It never happened again.

The next time we went for an all-day pedal each of them was equipped with a separate bicycle and everybody pulled for himself.

Elroy and I always brought up the rear and my mother held back for us while my father went pedalling off over the distant dunes, supposedly to give himself a workout, rejoining us much later at the tavern called Wheelman’s Rest, which was about the middle of our course.

After the first two or three such flights my mother began to suspect that there was more to this muscle flexing than my father cared to admit. So one day she left Elroy and me to dig out as best we could and pedalled off in pursuit of Father, arriving at the tavern just in time to see him emerge.

I just stopped for a little refreshment, my dear, my father said. I thought it would be a good place to wait for you and the children to catch up.

On the next trip I noticed my mother wore a little silver whistle on her chatelaine, and when my father got too far ahead she let out a shrill blast to slow him down. But once in a while when we made our Sunday excursions she would not blow the whistle at all, for his sickness kept him in pain much of the time, and a drink or two was warming and made him happier. She didn’t