Robert Chanler: Over the top wasn’t enough

Robert Winthrop Chanler

According to Clemmie Randolph’s grand-daughter, Patricia “Pookie” Godvin, Chanler often told Clemmie of lying on his bed as a boy in Rokeby, and staring out across the Hudson at the Catskills. “One day I’m going to live in those mountains,” he often promised himself. Fulfilling this vow, Chanler bought Randolph an infamous Woodstock house in 1920, previously owned by friend and collaborator Hunt Diederich. The house was rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a black man murdered when encountering the rape of his wife by a neighbor. Clemmie reported often seeing this dark, “youthful figure” walking after a rain at the edge of the property.

Naturally, Clemmie and Bob would have visited Woodstock long before purchasing the haunted property. In fact, Godvin’s same “Grandmother always said,” chain of reminiscences, appoint Chanler chief advisor to Hervey White’s original Maverick Festival in 1915. Here the legend of an ungovernable, Eden-like Woodstock really began. White’s unpublished memoir won’t grant Chanler this distinction but will admit: “Not one of the least things that drew him [to Woodstock] was the gay abandon and talent of the Maverick Festivals. He reveled in the communal spirit of its pageantry…its riot of beauty and humor appealed to him, the daring of its effects and its ideas. He, himself, entered into it graciously, contributing time, thought, and money for weeks before.”

Chanler’s debauched, far less beautiful mistress — and Clemmie’s bete noire! — Louise Hellstrom, inherited a house at The Maverick Colony (after her husband fled back to Europe) which she drunkenly burned to the ground. To be fair, however, Louise also opened an avant garde gallery in Manhattan compared often to that of Steiglitz. She’d been DuChamp’s lover and when Clemmie heard Hellstrom accused of stealing one of his “ready-mades” heralding the birth of conceptual art, the rival brayed: “Of course she stole it! Louise steals everything!”

The original “fremenies,” Louise and Clemmie took turns officiating as hostess at Chanler’s “House of Fantasy.” And though Louise always tried to usurp Randolph’s “primary” position in Chanler’s bed, Clemence obviously tolerated the triad. She once even allowed Louise to spend part of a winter in the haunted house in Woodstock, for which she was rewarded by Louise painting a Steinway baby grand Chinese Red.

Hervey White’s memoir champions his friend — with Chanler’s posthumous reputation already a decade in decline — as: “probably the most imaginative artist America has produced.” Praising, “his great intellect, his correlated learning, and his freedom from convention,” White goes on to provide a fascinating detail (likely connected to an automobile wreck entailing RWC’s hospitalization for several months): “One of the things that kept me from him was a physical defect in his speech. I could never more than half understand him and it was a weariness to be asking for repetition.”

“Bob took me to see his old home across the Hudson,” White continues, “and introduced me to his sisters and his daughters. He showed me his old room when he was a boy, decorated by himself with landscape and flying ravens. I asked him about his sister-in-law, Amelie Rives, whose book The Quick or The Dead, had moved me so in youth. ‘She was the woman who showed me the way out of all this,’ he said. ‘She was the one that helped me to my freedom.’”

Chanler’s tour included an inspection of his rented yacht, during which he urged White sail to Manhattan with him to visit the fabled Fantasy House. “I agreed,” wrote Hervey, “if he would let me steer the boat.” The journey would become chilly, so White accepted a wool union suit. Though he’ll never admit it in print, the original Maverick was essentially homosexual. And what he now writes of Chanler becomes a compliment unique to his remembrances: “…we went into the cabin and stripped to the buff. I was surprised to see his bulky figure was mostly clothes. He had the body of a cupid [in] heroic scale…It was midnight when we climbed his stairs of vines and monkeys, but a clamorous party was assembled for his return. ‘What a night!’ he remarked the next morning. Carousing and beating drums till almost dawn, girls, women, men who were almost girls….pandemonium to a hermit like myself.

“The next day he drove me home or [rather] had me driven. The car was open, we sat bareheaded, gray, and stalwart like old vikings. On the way I told him I was going to built a theater on the Maverick [erected in ‘23]…That day he talked European history like the creator, though he had not slept and had been drinking all the night. He could correlate his subjects in any period, the politics, sociology and art. He could elaborate with the customs of the populace, he could give incidents for illustration of his points, then break off with a personal explanation… He was a man of great emotion and great mind.”

No other character save Clarence Darrow, of the hundreds Hervey portrays, comes anywhere near commanding such praise in the autobiography of “the Godfather of Woodstock.”

Careless of his own behavior and its resulting reputation, Chanler found an extraordinary “handler” and press agent in Ivan Narody, an illustrious Russian who arrived on these shores with Maxim Gorky in 1906. (Their purpose being to “explain the Revolution to America.”) Narody spent many summers on the Maverick, helping to mastermind two of the festivals. Due to the almost eerie symbiosis between Narody and Chanler, it becomes highly likely “Sheriff Bob” was more than included in the adventure. Chanler likewise orchestrated permission for Clemmie and a hopelessly opium-addicted John Colton, to adapt a Somerset Maugham short story into play form. Bob insisted the two set to work in “the Gobi Desert Room” — Chanler’s Sanctum Sanctorum, off limits to all. The collaboration resulted in the Broadway hit, “Rain” — adapted to screen three times, its success supplying Clemmie a measure of financial independence. Additionally, upon his death Chanler left Clemmie’s children, Kiki and Don, a shared trust, the interest from which supported their mother for life.

A last story identifies Chanler’s sense of noblesse oblige, [“the responsibility of Nobility”].

It was understood that Woodstock artists didn’t bother one another until four in the afternoon. At this hour, then, it became Chanler’s custom to visit a great many painters in succession, praising and toasting their work with ample refreshment supplied by himself. Often quite a train of artists would pile into Chanler’s limousine and the “praising tour” would cover considerable ground. Finally, he’d invite the entire bunch to “Clemmie’s Place” for a party on Saturday night. At the end of what, by Woodstock standards, was certainly a royal celebration, a line of inebriated artists would file into the night, stopping briefly at a table near the door to help themselves to a five dollar bill, dozens of which were stuffed into Bob’s upturned Panama hat. Even if no art sold that week, a Woodstock painter could live quite comfortably on five dollars; after which even atheists among their number would pray for a return visit from Bob Chanler.

There’s much more to be told and no room — but the good news is this. A few years ago the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, in Miami (where a most important Chanler installation has been lovingly restored) hosted a symposium dedicated entirely to the artist. A panel of experts lectured with such authority and excitement, most them became the authors of this book: a co-venture involving the Vizcaya Museum and The Monacelli Press. And so aside from wishing that direct Chanler descendent, J. Winthrop Aldrich, had been given more space, and that Chanler’s painting of Clemmie Randolph and her daughter Kiki (which I happen to know well) had been color corrected — we are gratefully overjoyed to add this most important volume to the history of Woodstock, where Bob Chanler’s comet crashed at last to Earth in 1930, at fifty nine.

Finally let me add that with this publication, we are at last provided a book which may indeed be fairly judged by its cover, since graphic designer, Yve Ludwig, has given Discovering the Fantastic, an astoundingly fresh look. The very first screens Chanler ever showed in public indeed grace the back and front covers. However, Monacelli’s duplications of the scalloped tops of these first “Peacock” panels stop just short of the volume’s top edge, revealing title stamped in gold against black cloth above. Chanler, himself — before even cracking this heroic rescue of a book — would’ve been overjoyed. And that is saying something.