Edwardian Pink

MANNERS & MORALS

When Muriel Draper was a little girl in Haverhill, Mass., her father, who had promised her a trip to Boston, took her with him to his bank, where he tried to cash a check for $100 that he planned to spend on the trip. After a moment's delay, the cashier announced, "Sorry . . your account won't carry that." Smiling, Muriel's father wrote out another check and handed it to the cashier, saying, "Well, give me ten ones." Then, on $10, Muriel and her father went to Boston.

Muriel never forgot that. It taught her that mundane reality need never interfere with pleasure, provided one had excitement and enthusiasm. For a long time, however, mundane reality did not interfere with Muriel at all. Though her father had his ups & downs, his children were brought up in genteel New England comfort, and in 1909, when Muriel was 22, she married wealthy Paul Draper, brother of Monologuist Ruth Draper. The newlyweds pleasured off to Italy, where Paul, who wanted to become a concert singer, studied.

Always Interested. In Italy, Muriel had her first son, Paul Jr. In Italy, too, she fell under the spell of the gilded intellectual and artistic set of pre-1914 Europe--Art Critic Bernard Berenson. Violinist Albert Spalding, Actress Eleonora Duse, Dilettante Mabel Dodge, and John Reed, who later glorified the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World, and now lies buried beneath the Kremlin wall.

In 1911, the Drapers moved to London, where Victorianism was deeply buried under the lush Edwardian bloom. Muriel set about creating a salon to rival Mabel Dodge's villa in Florence. To the Draper home at 19A Edith Grove came such notables as Painter John Singer Sargent, Writers Norman Douglas, Gertrude Stein and Henry James. The great preoccupation at 19A Edith Grove was music, some of it provided by husband Paul, more of it by Cellist Pablo Casals. Pianist Artur Rubinstein or Singer Feodor Chaliapin. Beginning late in the evening, the music often lasted till morning, when everyone would adjourn to the dining room for breakfast, which sometimes included champagne--and raspberries. The raspberries were especially favored by Impresario Montague Vert Chester, who cared little about what he ate, provided it was pink. Through the pleasant confusion moved Muriel, her eyes alight, her large mouth working fiercely as she denounced Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata or praised the writings of her friend, Gertrude Stein. To Muriel, said Mabel Dodge a little wearily, "everything was interesting."

Human Relations. In 1914, the golden age ended for Europe, and for Muriel. Paul, who fancied himself a judge of horseflesh, came home from the Derby to announce, "All the money is gone . . . The last went this afternoon." Said Muriel: "Will you have a cup of tea?" A year later, Muriel gathered up Paul Jr. and young Sanders, who had been born in London, and came back to the U.S. There she divorced Paul Sr., and settled down to make a living by interior decorating.

For the next few years, Muriel's income was small and irregular. (She later claimed she lost about $35 on every decorating job she did.) But in a succession of shabby East Side New York apartments, generally furnished with a few gilt chairs and remnants of the splendors of 19A Edith Grove, she once again became a famous hostess. By 1929, when she published Music at Midnight, a lively memoir of her European triumphs, Muriel's parties were a focus for visiting artistic lions and earnest contributors to the little magazines. Muriel helped to keep excitement alive by outrageous remarks and outrageous hats.

In the 1930s, however, the prime pastime at Muriel's New York parties ceased to be music. Now, like many another patron of the modern arts, Muriel began to discover "the creative impulse . . . in the field of human relations," i.e., Communism. In 1934, she went to the U.S.S.R. "to see firsthand the Russians' new way of living." Three years later, she made a visit to embattled Loyalist Spain, where she discovered that when she looked at a Spanish worker or peasant, "we could both know that we spoke the universal language of truth."

Still Chic. Returning to New York, Muriel cast the cloak of her social and artistic background over a host of Communist intellectuals and pro-Soviet organizations. After World War II, all the intensity which she had once devoted to arguing the merits of Beethoven or Gertrude Stein was given over to stock denunciations of "fascistic tendencies" in the U.S. and stock praise of life in the U.S.S.R. By 1949, still chic, still full of zest, she was president of the Communist-fronting Congress of American Women. The House Un-American Activities Committee in its report of that year gave Muriel nine pages.

Last week, with the golden days gone, 65-year-old Muriel Draper died in New York's University Hospital, after nearly two weeks of suffering under an oxygen tent. With her was her dancer son, Paul Jr. Two years before, during his unsuccessful libel suit against Greenwich housewife Hester McCullough, who had labeled him pro-Communist (TIME, June 5, 1950), Paul had attempted to explain his mother --and in so doing had characterized quite a lot of U.S. intellectuals and their hangers-on. Said he: "She has made statements that are not so. They are not lies . . . They are things that she sees and exaggerates to fit what her heart very much wants . ."

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