During his bachelor days in New York, Gutzon occupied a quaint brick apartment on 104th Street where other artists lived, including the Boardman Robinsons. It had been built by a strange woman who, in her youth, had gone abroad to study art and life. She had come back with strong distaste for the respectability of her well-to-do relations. After erecting this flat building, she had taken up her abode in the basement amid an assortment of art treasures gathered up in Europe. The sculptor admired what he called her wild streak, by which he meant her defiance of the conventions, and they got along quite well.
She would allow him to do what he pleased to the second-floor rear apartment, she said. So he rented it and transformed it completely and extravagantly, equipping it with furniture built from his own designs. The dining room had a round mahogany table six feet in diameter. Around it were twelve circular chairs all painted green and rubbed to a soft patina. There was a sideboard to match.
Gutzon passed out twelve keys to twelve friends who could come when they pleased and find a place at his table. Among them was Adolph E. Borie, called “Billy” by Gutzon and “Doppie” by everybody else. As president of the Savage Arms Company he was of considerable help in the aircraft investigation and in settling the affairs of the Sporting Club. He was an ardent fisherman, and, therefore, one of Borglum’s own kind.
The sculptor would go almost anywhere fishing with anybody he trusted. But now and then he would decline to make a second trip. Bob and Madge Davis once invited him to fish with them in a Canadian lake. He didn’t like it. Sitting in a boat and trolling was too tame a sport, he said. “You might as well be pulling a suitcase aboard the boat as one of those lake trout.” The trout stream near Hermosa was the chief reason for his buying the Black Hills ranch. It was expensive and brought more debts and embarrassment. But the fishing was a compensation—or so he said.
In the duplex apartment where he lived in New York before moving to Stamford, close friends, Charles Rann Kennedy and his wife Edith Wynne Matthison, occupied the flat upstairs. Gutzon became acquainted with them through a neighbor, Henry Miller, who first staged Kennedy’s play The Servant in the House. Edith was leading lady, and in the cast were Walter Hampden and his wife and the elder Tyrone Power. The sculptor engaged the company for a special performance in honor of the Howard Lodge at the Masonic Temple. A special edition of the play bound in vellum with the Howard Lodge emblem stamped in gold on the cover was presented to each of the players and to distinguished guests.
There wasn’t much privacy about Gutzon’s home life. At Stamford there were usually more outsiders than he had room for. He lived too far from town for studio assistants to go back and forth. At least one of them lived with the family all the time. And because he liked to do his writing after work hours or on holidays, a secretary was another permanent member of the group. A few of the outstanding ones came to be friends.
In the earlier days there were Eugenia Flagg and Helen Johnson Keyes, daughter of the historian. In Georgia, Lillian Taylor, who fought through the Stone Mountain war, was always on Gutzon’s side and frequently stayed with the Borglums in Stamford or out at Rushmore. Jean Philip was also ready to take up cudgels for the chief and was frequently called.
When the barracks of the Czecho-Slovak volunteers were vacated the Borglum part of the community was enlarged to care for casual visitors and studio staff. In looking after all these tides of people Banks, the chauffeur, became an invaluable help and seemed so much like one of the family that Mrs. Borglum’s nieces and nephews referred to him in their prayers as “Uncle Banks.” Another indispensable person came to Stamford in those early days—James Reilley, the Irishman who has now been there for thirty years. His children grew up with Gutzon’s, and one of them reached a position of importance at Rushmore. Old Reilley is still there, still keeping count of the empty acres.
The sculptor was likewise a dutiful son and brother. Very often some member of his family was living with him. With the first large amount of money he received for a monument commission he sent his father and others on a six-month trip to Denmark. Again he brought to New York a younger brother and his family, to keep them for a whole year while the brother was taking a medical course. There are many letters to show that moments of crisis were not infrequent in the Borglum family and that Gutzon was always ready to aid.
When his son Lincoln was born Gutzon’s happiness was touching. This was his miracle, he virtually announced, and his alone. Within a week he was quarreling with the trained nurse because she would not let him pick up the baby when he pleased, day or night. There was also some resentment about the timing of the boy’s appearance. He had arrived on April 9, 1912, and, in keeping with the name the sculptor had in mind for him, his birth date should have been Lincoln’s birthday. Some friend fixed up this worrisome situation by mentioning that April 9 was Appomattox Day.