The Fire Princess
On July 9, 1928, Harry met 20-year-old Josephine Noyes Rotch, the daughter of Arthur and Helen Ludington Rotch in Boston. Ten years his junior, they met while she was shopping in Venice at the Lido for her wedding trousseau. She had belonged to the Vincent Club and the Junior League and graduated from Lee School before she had attended Bryn Mawr. After only two years at Bryn Mawr she left because she planned to marry Albert Smith Bigelow. "She was dark and intense... since the season of her coming out in 1926-7, she had been known around Boston as fast, a 'bad egg'...with a good deal of sex appeal."
They met for sex as often as her eight days in Venice would allow. He would later call her the "Youngest Princess of the Sun" and the "Fire Princess." She was also from a prominent Boston family that first settled in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1690. Josephine would inspire Crosby's next collection of poems which he dedicated to her, titled Transit of Venus. In a letter dated July 24, 1928, Crosby detailed the affair to his mother, in whom he had always confided:
I am having an affair with a girl I met (not introduced) at the Lido. She is twenty and has charm and is called Josephine. I like girls when they are very young before they have any minds.Josephine and Harry had an ongoing affair until June 21, 1929, when she married Albert Smith Bigelow. Their affair was over—until August, when Josephine contacted Crosby and they rekindled the affair as her husband became a first year graduate student of architecture at Harvard. Unlike his wife Caresse, Josephine was quarrelsome and prone to fits of jealousy. She bombarded Harry with half incoherent cables and letters, anxious to set the date for their next tryst.
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Famous quotes containing the words fire and/or princess:
“It began with begging.
In the beginning it was all Gods icebox
and everyone ate raw fish or animals
and there was no fire at night to dance to,
no fire at day to cook by.”
—Anne Sexton (19281974)
“How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!”
—Bible: Hebrew Lamentations 1:1.
Said of Jerusalem.