North Michigan Avenue (Illustration from Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1916) |
Mme. Marguerite always said
that she arrived in Chicago as an understudy to the French actress Sarah
Bernhardt. When the theater company returned to Europe, Marguerite decided to
part ways with the Divine Sarah.
Ta-ta!
It was 1910.
She stayed in Chicago and became a modiste
– that’s a word you don’t hear anymore.
It means a designer and purveyor of fashionable women’s clothing. Between
1912 and 1948, Mme. Marguerite reigned over the wardrobes of the city’s
wealthiest women.
Her first shop, House of
Marguerite, opened on North Michigan Avenue to the delight of Mrs. Armour, Mrs.
McCormick and other ladies who wanted custom-made gowns.
Their husbands and fathers were
industrialists, bankers, entrepreneurs; perhaps the heirs to great fortunes. But
when it came to fashion, Marguerite was the authority:
“I’m pleased
to say, not a chi chi dress in sight!”
and
“There was white
satin at all of the important French collections last spring.”
Wedding gown by Mme. Marguerite, 1916 |
Except during wartime, Mme. Marguerite traveled to Europe twice yearly to see the shows in Paris. She became very successful. By the early twenties, she had three shops, three cars, a chauffeur, and a country home in Michigan.
Around that time, Marguerite
married for the first time. Henri Farre also was French, although it’s not
clear whether they met in France or Chicago.
A painter
and aviator, he had held an unusual position during World War I. Just after
Farre enlisted, the Governor of Les Invalides (also director of the Army Museum)
asked him to serve as a military artist.*
Farre would “paint certain
phases of action, so as to immortalize on canvas true pictures of fighting in
the field,” the governor told him.
When Farre explained that he
was an aviator as well as a painter, the governor said:
Eh bien, c’est parfait; I had
not thought of the fifth weapon. Would you like to be a painter of aviation?
He immediately appointed
Farre to the first group of French bombing squadrons: 1er Groupe des Escadrilles de Bombardement.
And so Farre
flew through the war, capturing the shattered landscapes and bursting bombs in pencil
and paint. He watched and sketched over Metz, Verdun, Zeebrugge, the Somme, and
the North Sea. He also painted many officers’ portraits.
In 1918, Henri toured the
United States with a collection of his war paintings entitled “Sky Fighters of
France.” The Art Institute of Chicago presented a major exhibition of his work.
His visit was said to be a propaganda mission because Farre and other officers
asked for more American planes and ships. But the tour also raised money for
the American Fund for French Wounded.
After the war, Farre received
the Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre from the French government. He and
Marguerite married in 1922. Settling in Chicago, Farre continued to paint – the
Chicago River Bridge, football games at Soldier Field. The Smithsonian’s Air
and Space Museum owns 75 of his World War I paintings. He died in 1934.
An Aviation Fight at 12,000 Feet, painting by Henri Farre that was exhibited in New York, 1918 |
One year
later, Marguerite married Dr. John F. Pick. Born in Austria, he would become a
leading plastic surgeon in the United States. He studied at Rush Medical
College in Chicago and at the University of Prague, where he became an
assistant to Professor Frantisek Burian. This was a great honor, for Burian is
considered one of the founders of plastic surgery.
Back in the U.S., Dr. Pick developed
a theory about recidivism. He believed that performing plastic surgery on the
faces of prisoners, to correct features that were deemed irregular or
unattractive, would give them the confidence to reinvent (to borrow a twenty-first century word) themselves upon release.
Between 1937
and 1947, Pick worked at Stateville Prison in Illinois, where he performed 663
surgeries on 1,376 inmates. Of those discharged, 1.7% became recidivists. Pick
published his results in medical journals, insisting that “the correction of
physical defects would mentally straighten out many inmates.” The theory never
caught on.
In 1949, Dr.
Pick’s interest swayed from plastic surgery to cancer when he and several
colleagues became obsessed with an anti-cancer drug called Krebiozen. A
Yugoslavian doctor, Stevan Durovic, created it and brought it to the U.S. that
year.
A prominent physician and
vice president of the University of Illinois, Dr. Andrew Ivy, became convinced
of the drug’s effectiveness. Others, including Dr. Pick and the eminent Senator
Paul Douglas of Illinois, joined him.
There were clinical trials,
and hundreds of physicians nationwide tried the medication for their patients. But
the claims proved unsubstantiated and Krebiozen was discredited. The Krebiozen
Research Foundation, led by Dr. Ivy, later accused the American Medical
Association and American Cancer Society of subverting data. Lawsuits and trials
would follow into the mid-1960s.
Brochure promoting Krebiozen, 1950s |
In 1952, John F. Pick announced
that he had treated his wife, Marguerite, with Krebiozen during the last 15 months
of her life as she fought breast cancer. She had died one year earlier with
four society dames at her bedside.
1951 |
*The details
of Henri Farre’s experience appear in his book, Sky Fighters of France, Aerial Warfare, 1914-1918.
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/10/a-dress-shop-in-chicago.html
That plastic surgeon story blows my mind. Fascinating theory! I can just imagine what the inmates thought when told they were going to be operated on. It must have been a bit terrifying.
ReplyDeleteToday is the 145th anniversary of the start of the Great Chicago Fire.