The Sad Dancer.
The frozen dancer blinks. She looks out, to somewhere beyond an audience, and bends down low, into a wooden curtsy. Slowly she rises, blinks again. Legs unsteady, feet dragging, she exits to the left. The stage is empty now.
The heavy curtain closes. Opens again.
A swath of gold light pours across the wooden floor.
The studio grows darker.
The painting glows.
It’s Diccon I hear first. He’s singing one of those old Welsh tunes he always loved.
Then I hear more voices, people laughing.
On the stage I see them all, all the familiar faces, lit up as if by candlelight.
Daddy is having a grand time, laughing with Diccon and Gabriele d’Annunzio. Gene glowers from the corner, pouring himself a glass of whiskey as Robert, standing a little too close, talks to him animatedly. Agnes leans over a little table, confiding something to Cecco and Georg. Mam sits in the center, her attention on the child in her lap—little Lorenzo, his red curls glowing copper in the candlelight.
The kaleidoscope in my mind settles into this golden scene.
In the morning, I’ll begin a new painting.
A Madonna, I think. Mother and child, faces candlelit. Half-sun halos, disks of gold.
I don’t know. I’ll decide tomorrow.
I’ll paint just as I feel. Just as I wish.
Pamela Bianco, 1922 (age 15)
Courtesy George Eastman Museum, ? Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
Line drawing of Margery Williams Bianco
by Pamela Bianco, c. 1918
Agnes Boulton O’Neill
Courtesy of Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, Louis Sheaffer-Eugene O’Neill Collection, ? Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
Eugene O’Neill, c. 1919
Courtesy Eastman Museum, ? Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
Peaked Hill Bars, Truro, Massachusetts. From left: Margery Williams Bianco, Shane O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill, Edith and Frank Shay (friends from Provincetown Playhouse), Agnes O’Neill, Francesco Bianco, Margery Boulton (Agnes’s sister)
Courtesy of Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College, Louis Sheaffer-Eugene O’Neill Collection, ? Nickolas Muray Photo Archives
Richard Warren Hughes, known as “Diccon” c. 1924
Photographer unknown*
Madonna with Angels and Children by Pamela Bianco, 1918 (age 11)
—author collection
The Old Barn by Pamela Bianco, 1921 (age 14)
—author collection
Pomegranate by Pamela Bianco, 1957-59
Digital Image ? The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY
The Appointment
The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution Photography by Cathy Carver
I’m Zita, just a gipsy lass.
They found me on a mountain pass.
Day in, day out, I wandered there
With thorns and catkins in my hair;
They hunted for me day and night.
And rescued me with lanterns bright!
Illustration and verse from Beginning with A by Pamela Bianco (1947)
Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press USA.
endnotes
Regarding the Authenticity of the Story
Discovering and collecting the various pieces of the puzzle that eventually arranged themselves into The Velveteen Daughter was a wonderful obsession. It continues to amaze me that this story has not come to light before now. To my knowledge, no biography of Margery Williams Bianco has been published, and Pamela Bianco has been forgotten almost entirely.
A reader who finishes a fictional work based on a true story always thinks, How much of that was real, I wonder? I hope that the following will provide a sense of how much of The Velveteen Daughter is “real.” As you will see, a great deal is.
The Bianco family. The story of Pamela and her family is historically accurate in terms of where they lived and when they lived there. Francesco was, in fact, an antiquarian book dealer and had stores in London and on West Eighth Street in New York. (The Gershwin brothers were known to frequent his shop.) He was an expert on Papal Bulls. He did, in fact, fall onto subway tracks soon after Margery died, which resulted in his death. The trajectory of Pamela’s fame and her art career is documented in numerous newspaper accounts, in the New Yorker archives, in university collections, and in family letters. Margery did suffer the loss of her father and sister when she was a child. Cecco attended Columbia University, was a fencer, was stationed in Germany for a while, and eventually got a job in Washington.
The Diccon and Pamela relationship. This not-quite-love affair between Pamela and Diccon, which constitutes a good portion of the novel, hews closely to the truth as depicted. The trove of letters in the Richard Hughes archives at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana (Bloomington) provided the basic tapestry upon which I could embroider events. Other facts were gleaned from Robert Graves’s biography of Richard Hughes. The initial meeting in Wales is based on fact. Diccon was engaged to Nancy Stalli-brass and the description of that relationship—Nancy’s officious mother, the insistence on a six-month separation, and Diccon’s cold feet just before the wedding—is all factual.
Pamela’s depression/madness. Sadly, her episodes of depression were all too real, and took place as described. She was hospitalized more than once at Four Winds in Upstate New York. Pamela herself documents her breakdown at age eighteen in a letter to Diccon written from Four Winds. The disease caught up with her at the end of her life, and she was institutionalized at the time of her death in 1994.
Eugene and Agnes O’Neill. Agnes was Pamela’s cousin, and the relationship between the O’Neills and the Biancos was, in essence, just as depicted in the novel. The Biancos often visited them at Peaked Hill Bars in Truro, Massachusetts, and at their home in Bermuda. Agnes’s account of her courtship and early years of marriage are taken directly from her own memoir, Part of a Long Story. The O’Neills’ volatile marriage has been well documented.
Gabriele d’Annunzio. The famous poet-warrior-lover did write a poem, reproduced in many newspapers, describing Pamela as a “new flower.” He also gave her a wooden box and told her to keep all future correspondence from him in it.
Pablo Picasso. It is true that Picasso was a friend of the Biancos during their Paris years. However, the scene in the novel when he and Fernande (his real-life girlfriend) come to dinner is wholly imagined.
Anne Carroll Moore and Bertha Mahony. Moore, the legendary children’s librarian at the New York Public Library was a close friend of Margery’s. She was also a strong supporter of Mahony, who opened The Bookshop for Boys and Girls and founded The Horn Book magazine.