Qhen they met in 1905, she was a 26-year-old blue-eyed, thin-lipped brunette, in love with books and eager to make her way in life. He, on the other hand, was a man of great power by now close to his seventies, a banker and iron and steel magnate, as well as the owner of the White Star Line, the shipping company of the Titanic. Father of a family in tepid relations with his last wife, he was very much courted by the ladies of the New York high society. John Pierpoint Morgan had hired Belle da Costa Greene as librarian to manage his immense collection, housed in the Morgan Library he created in New York, now a public institution open to all. In a short time, that smart and efficient girl had won JP’s trust, becoming his confidant, secretary, responsible for welcoming important guests but also the personal assistant who chose the flowers to send to the latest lover of the his employer. Perhaps Morgan saw in her the daughter she would have liked to have: relations with her offspring were not idyllic.
Belle da Costa Greene in 1911, with a model inspired by the collection of the Parisian designer Paul Poiret. Photo: Clarence H. White / Princeton Art Museum
Belle Greene, the friend to tell secrets to
At the same time, however, Belle was also the friend to whom to tell intimate and secret thoughts. It was not the lover, as some malicious speculated. The Big Boss, as the young woman had nicknamed him, knew how to pay handsomely, but demanded total dedication. JP was sometimes an insufferable and capricious despot, but Belle knew how to defend herself. She was a true American self-made woman, proud of her economic autonomy and cunning to understand that a break with Morgan was absolutely avoided. Otherwise, goodbye important salary, evenings at the theater, acquaintances in the beautiful world to which she did not belong and home in a chic and white neighborhood of the metropolis. And goodbye adored ancient books and manuscripts, which she knew how to recognize, evaluate, appreciate like few others, with the talent of an expert bibliophile. The truth was that they both needed each other.
The highest paid woman in America
Skinny John Pierpoint Morgan (Photo by © CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images)
Who really was Belle da Costa Greene, who went on to be America’s highest paid woman? The sober and disciplined girl that JP had hired after the tycoon’s death, in 1913, she became a queen in the New York cultural and social scene. Confirmed in her role as director and high priestess of the Morgan Library also by JP Morgan jr, Belle called Bull (the bull) by her friend and colleague Ada urston, is now a character. “It’s not that since I’m a librarian, I have to dress as a librarian!”: It’s a joke she uttered that the writer Alexandra Lapierre reports in the fictional biography that he dedicated to her, Belle Greene (Edizioni E / O), elaborated in three years research. Client of the Parisian designer Paul Poiret, Belle becomes his testimonial overseas. Impossible not to notice her for her whimsical feathered hats and extravagant jewels, but also because there weren’t many women, at the time, cruising Long Island on a red Pierce-Arrow. Alcohol, lovers, important friendships like the dancer Isadora Duncan and the English actress Ellen Terry fill her private life. She flirts, falls in love, receives marriage proposals, but life as a couple doesn’t seem to be for her. Those who know her know that she would not give up her profession for anything in the world. At auctions he is a magician: he manages to conquer the rarest and most precious books for the Morgan Library. One of the biggest hits of his career is the acquisition of 17 incunabula made by William Caxton in the 15th century in English, convincing the surly Lord Amherst to give them to him. The money is obviously JP Morgan’s, but the skill is all Belle’s.
The love of a life
Bernhard Berenson, critic and art historian loved by Belle Greene. Berenson Library, I Tatti / The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, courtesy of The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Beyond her personal and professional choices that make her an emblem of unconventional femininity at a time when women above all aspired to a good marriage, Belle had her secrets. “Nothing can change the truth of the fact that I loved you in the most complete and absolute way that one can love” he wrote in 1910 in a letter to the man of his life: Bernhard Berenson, famous critic and art historian, of fourteen years older than her. Their love story drags on for a long time, with peaks of passion and jealousy, moments of oblivion and backfires, always hidden from prying eyes and gossip, which could cost Belle her job. Mary is an accomplice, with whom Berenson was married and who accepted an open relationship. In reality, Bernhard’s wife is not the obstacle to a married life between the two lovers: as a girl, Bull had decided not to marry and not to have children. The reason? Belle took him to her grave in 1950, when he died at the age of 66 of a tumor.
The shattered American dream
The biography Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre
Only in the 1960s, as Lapierre recalls, did the veil on the mystery of the da Costa Greene family begin to tear. And over time it emerges that Belle did not have Dutch or English ancestry, as she had wanted to believe, with a touch of Portuguese blood – that of the da Costa aristocrats – at the origin of her brown hair and her olive complexion. Belle Greene was the daughter of Richard Greener, a black rights activist, as well as the first African American to graduate from Harvard. A brilliant but absent father, who disappeared from the lives of his five children, placing the burden of providing for the family on his wife Geneviève. She, like her husband, was of mixed descent and white-skinned. Until 1964, American laws defined even those who had a single drop of black blood as “colored”, regardless of their physical appearance. There were people qualified as such who had blond hair and light eyes. For them, the social elevator of the American dream was closed: fate offered only underpaid, black jobs. This is why some chose to forge documents to go white. An act defined as “passing”. Lapierre tells us that this was the choice of Belle and her family. But to make the scam believable it was essential not to father children, because the combinations of genetics could accidentally revive black blood. And fake whites were severely punished by the law. Belle remains faithful, to the end, to her promise to remain single, hiding her origins from everyone. On the other hand, no girl with a drop of black blood could have become one of the most highly regarded international experts in ancient books in those years. The segregationist and racist rules then in force would have allowed her to walk through the doors of the Morgan Library only to clean the bathrooms.
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