REVEALING THE LONELY DOLL: THE STORY OF DARE WRIGHT
© 2007 Brook Ashley. All Rights Reserved.
No portion may be copied or reproduced without permission of the author.

Dare took hundreds of photographs of me from infancy into adulthood. These were not casual snapshots, but pictures where she applied the same quality of planning and craftsmanship that she used in her books. No royal child ever had as attentive a court photographer.
	Many of my early photographs were taken to illustrate magazine articles about child rearing for “Good Housekeeping” and other publications.
For a series about the life of a New York four year old...
Dare spent several days following me around my nursery school.
This shot shows me spending a Saturday with my father in Central Park.	I went to the country for my summer vacation.
Working with Dare was a delight. Long before Dare rediscovered her Edith doll, she was dressing me up in a handmade dress and white apron. Her mother, Edith Stevenson Wright, painted my portrait in the outfit.	And spent the weekend with my godmother, Tallulah Bankhead. Dare made my empire nightgown.
My costumes included a matador (with a ceramic bull), a Hindu dancer, Victorian child, and Christmas angel holding a similarly garbed Edith.	There was always plenty of time to play during a photo shoot. Dare’s contact sheets show my making faces at the camera between photographs, and she once provided a bottle of champagne to christen my toy boat.
As I grew up, Dare chronicled my teenage years. She dressed me as everything from an ethereal nymph to a swinging sixties schoolgirl.
Dare also let me write my own stories, which she photographed and bound into books just for me. “The Angel and The Doll” starred Edith and me as naughty angels, “A Walk in The Woods” was a drama where Little Bear fell asleep in a tree, and “The Great Camera Mystery” had Mr. Bear wondering who was borrowing his valuable camera and taking photographs of noses. What touches me greatly, is that Dare let me set up the shots and arrange Edith and the bears however I wished without any interference. Any other adult, even without Dare’s talents, would have adjusted the doll and bears into more photogenic poses.

***

Dare’s relationship with her mother was extremely close. Edith Stevenson Wright, always called “Edie”, was a renowned portrait artist and taught Dare to paint at an early age. I have sketches Dare drew as a teenager on a European trip that are as proficient as any professional artist’s.
From Edie, Dare learned to focus on the details of a subject. When I was a child, Edie would bend down and stare at my face with such intensity that I often took a step backwards. She painted my portrait when I was four, and I had to stand still for hours as she painted, put the brush down, came over to peer at me, blew a puff a cigarette smoke over my head, and went back to the canvas.
Dare and Edie’s relationship has been the subject of recent media speculation. Although their bond was intense, there was no deviant undercurrent. Even as Dare became an independent adult Edie continued to see her as a golden child—talented, kind, and always dutiful. Perhaps it was Edie’s nurturing that kept Dare an innocent throughout her life. Certainly Edie encouraged the fantasy that Dare should wait for the proverbial handsome prince to sweep her away.
The two shared a bed when Edie came to visit, but to Edie it was as if she was back sleeping next to her little girl.
Did Edie, as has been suggested, infantilize Dare by smothering her child with her own ambition, or did Dare simply inherit her mother’s way of looking at the world? Edie herself often exhibited a curious mixture of sophistication and naïvete . While she entertained Presidents and world leaders, Edie could also make astonishingly child-like responses to simple questions. I remember her opening her eyes very wide, forming her mouth into a circle, and just saying., “Ooooh!” when she didn’t know what to else to say.
However she may have hindered Dare’s growth, Edie did not render her child incapable of dealing with the world. Dare was a woman who lived five hundred miles from her mother, traveled to exotic destinations, forged a new concept in children’s literature, and had the business acumen to keep producing best-selling books.
Edie and Dare delighted in each other’s company. Edie’s tendency to take every sentence literally, combined with Dare’s dry witticisms, often gave their banter a Burns and Allen flavor.
They designed and sewed most of their own clothes, and Dare took hundreds of self-portraits in different costumes. As a child, she had loved dressing up, and as an adult she continued creating imaginative characters. She and Edie loved to visit remote beaches and set up scenes where Dare might photograph herself as a sea nymph wrapped in kelp or even in the nude. These photographs were created by two remarkable artists for Dare’s own collection. Some are playful, and others mysterious. All of them are artistically noteworthy.
There are stories now circulating about Dare that are based on uncorroborated conjecture and amateur psychoanalysis. Joyce Carol Oates has called this literary form of character denigration a “pathography”.
Dare would have been appalled to know that her most personal photographs are now in print, and would be incapable of understanding why someone would try to profit from them at her expense.

***

Dare held on to a childlike wonderment throughout her life. She could write her books from the perspective of a doll/child without being patronizing, because she was not looking at childhood from the adult end of a telescope.
Dare’s intellect and wit were certainly those of an extremely intelligent adult, yet she kept the ingenuous curiosity of a six year old. The author of “Peter Pan”, J.M. Barrie, had a similar ability to channel a child’s true emotions. Where did this talent come from? Might they both have had a portion of their development halted in childhood? If so, wasn’t their ability to write for children as children, a gift rather than a pathological impediment?
For all her grown-up seductiveness, talent, and fame, Dare’s naiveté also made her as vulnerable as a child to the world’s slow stain.
Men naturally wanted a part of this intriguing package. Married and single, they fell under her spell. Proposals were proffered like bouquets. One suitor mailed Dare a live butterfly. When she opened the envelope, the insect’s powdered remains sifted slowly to the floor. Eventually, they all came to realize one astonishing fact; there would not, could not, be a physical relationship with Dare.
The success of “The Lonely Doll”, with Dare’s glamorous author’s photo on the back cover, brought out her female fans. Little girls scrawled thank you notes in crayon, while their mothers penned their gratitude to Dare for understanding a child’s intrinsic loneliness.
In her later years, Dare’s lack of guile drew a more predatory type of admirer. Her phone and address were listed in the Manhattan directory, and Dare would admit anyone who rang the bell. Jewelry, paintings and books began to disappear. What Dare did not give away to strangers, they took themselves.
As Dare’s guardian, I received letters from people all across the country. Their refrain was often similar, “I loved ‘The Lonely Doll’ as a child. No other book has ever had so profound effect on me.”
Most of those writing were sincere, but occasionally the stories became disturbing… Some women wrote that they had been lonely children themselves, with lives that paralled Edith’s isolation. Because of this connection, only they could really understand what Dare’s stories were all about. It was imperative that they meet her, write her story, create a cartoon of the characters, or make a feature film of the book. One woman sent me a letter stating that, per our verbal agreement, she now owned the rights to all of Dare’s works for $100. Another, whose credentials later turned out to consist of acting in porn flicks, wrote that she had a great deal of movie experience and wanted to produce a “Lonely Doll” film.
Even as Dare lay dying, a woman describing herself as obsessed with Dare’s story went to her hospital and convinced the nurses to place her name at the top of Dare’s emergency contact list.

***

It was a summer day in 1988. I telephoned Dare from DC late in the morning. Her voice seemed faint, but she said she had been resting. I asked if she had eaten anything, and she told me she had a Stouffer’s chicken pot pie in the oven. I told her I loved her, and would check in later. I tried calling Dare back all afternoon without any response. It took until evening for me to reach her building, and I buzzed all the neighbors until one let me in the main entrance. Rather than take the unreliable, coffin-sized elevator, I climbed the four flights of stairs to Dare’s landing. No one answered the bell at #4C, but I thought I heard faint sounds from behind Dare’s door. I ran outside to a corner payphone, and dialed 911. The police arrived within minutes.
Two officers broke down the triple locked door. Dare was lying in the dark kitchen covered in blood. She was barely alive. The tiny elevator couldn’t accommodate a stretcher, so she was carried down the marble staircase. I held her hand as the ambulance wove through cross-town traffic towards New York Hospital. The ER physician started a transfusion, and told me she would have been dead by morning without it. There were no empty hospital beds, so I waited in the hallway next to her gurney for several hours until one became available.
The doctors at New York Hospital said Dare had to stop drinking. Her brain was already permanently affected, and she might not survive another blackout. I knew from cleaning her kitchen, that there were no Stouffer’s chicken pot pies to sustain her. All I had found were liquor bottles.
One morning, Dare asked if I knew the name of the current President. She said a nice young doctor had asked her that question, and she couldn’t quite remember. She felt sorry, and a bit surprised, that he didn’t know the answer.
Dare stayed in the hospital, while I figured out what to do. I spoke with a hospital social worker about getting Dare into a respected treatment facility in the mid-west. The catch was that they would only accept her if she came voluntarily. I pitched the idea to Dare as a friendly place where she would feel happier and healthier. The papers were ready for her to sign when she smiled and said, “Not now, Brook. I feel much better already.” It was true; a week of regular meals and no alcohol had made a big difference.
I wasn’t certain that an institutional setting was right for Dare, anyway. Jerry had helped get Dare into a Manhattan treatment center a couple of years earlier, but she had run away from it dressed only in her nightgown. Dare felt secure in her apartment, and I thought it was the best place for her recovery.
An angel named Christine Corneille flew in from the Caribbean and landed on New York Hospital’s social service list. The social worker gave me her name, and I knew immediately that she was the right person to care for Dare. Christine wasn’t a trained nurse, but Dare didn’t require one anyway. What she needed, and got, was a loving woman who would see that she was fed and kept away from alcohol.
Christine brought Dare back to the apartment, and stayed with her for the remaining thirteen years of Dare’s life. She took the subway in from Brooklyn five days a week, and her niece, Marie, took care of Dare on the weekends. I moved from the East Coast to California later that summer, knowing Dare was beautifully cared for.
Dare retained her sense of humor even as her mind began to wander. We spoke about her doing another Lonely Doll book, and she suggested “Edith & The Bears Go To The Moon.” I promised to help her shoot it, wherever the location.
“Well, it must be on the moon, mustn’t it?” she replied.

***

           Dare had always been susceptible to bouts of pneumonia. Perhaps it was a legacy from her mother’s chain smoking. Edie’s sense of appropriate space was different from most adults. I remember her speaking and smoking just inches from my face.
Most winters, Dare simply received a course of antibiotics that soon cleared her lungs. In the winter of 1995, she developed a minor cough, and Christine made an appointment with Dare’s regular physician. His decision to perform an invasive bronchoscopy on an eighty year old precipitated Dare’s medical decline. She was too frail to tolerate the procedure and went into respiratory distress in the doctor’s office. Christine phoned me in tears to say that Dare was being transferred to the nearby Lenox Hill Hospital. Dare’s breathing was painfully labored, and it was clear she wasn’t getting enough air into her lungs. When a hospital physician said that he would put Dare on a ventilator to make her more comfortable, he assured me that it was “…only for a few days.”
The doctor made a tracheotomy incision in Dare’s throat, and inserted a breathing tube. He attached it to the ventilator machine, which began blowing air into Dare’s lungs. She would never breathe on her own again.
The days became weeks, as Dare became increasingly dependant on the machine. The Lenox Hill staff made several attempts to wean her off the ventilator, so that I could bring her to California with me, but none were successful.
The hospital would no longer keep her after she was classified as a chronic care patient. New York City has several long-term care facilities, but I had no choice in deciding where Dare would be sent. A Lenox Hill Hospital social worker told me they were transferring Dare to Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island.
No one would choose to put a loved one in long-term care, but choices and options evaporate in the face of medical necessity. The reality is that most of us are only a medical error away from ending up in a public hospital. Dare was on life support, her care was costing $1,300 a day, and there was no place else that would take her.
Goldwater Public Hospital rests on a former island of the damned, separated from Manhattan by the treacherous currents of the East River. The City of New York bought the island 1828, and built several institutions to house its outcasts. These included a penitentiary, workhouse, smallpox hospital, and lunatic asylum. Destitute women from the island’s almshouse were pressed into service to care for the City’s foundlings, who usually died in their care. Goldwater Hospital was built in 1939 as a chronic care facility. Dare entered Goldwater in 1995, and died there in 2001.
Hospital time runs differently from real world time. In Dare’s case, it initially went very quickly. There was a brief window where she might be rescued from remaining ventilator-dependent. The longer the machine had been breathing for her, the less likely it was that she could ever be weaned from it. Her weeks at the Lenox Hill had almost closed that possibility.
At first, the staff at Goldwater offered some hope that they could succeed where the Lenox Hill had failed. The physician overseeing Dare’s case seemed exhausted by his workload, but committed to rescuing Dare from the machine.
Ventilator weaning is a harrowing process. The doctor had to let Dare try breathing briefly on her own, while she panicked from lack of oxygen. There was no way to let her know that it was for her own good. What if few more seconds of struggle could help her regain lung function?
In spite of their efforts, the respiratory team was unable to get Dare off the ventilator. I was told she would live six more months, but she lasted six years.
Christine tied Dare’s hair up in a side ponytail, so she could rest her head against the pillow. Dare’s mouth remained partially open, but she could make a kissing gesture with her lips when she saw me. The muscles in her arms retracted, and Christine kept a block of paper in each of Dare’s hands so her nails wouldn’t dig into her palms. I brought replicas of her Edith doll and Little Bear, and tucked them in her elbows.
The susurrus of Dare’s breathing apparatus was an incessant undertone. I have read that the sound of the machine can drive you mad. But when it stops (and it often malfunctions) the silence means suffocation.
I flew out from California each month to be with her, spending Thursday through Sunday at the hospital. Dare’s apartment rent was very low, and I didn’t want to break the lease if there was any chance that she could come back home. I asked the nurses and physicians at Goldwater whether there was a mobile ventilator that Christine could monitor in Dare’s apartment. They told me that even if it were possible to have a ventilator in a private home; it would have to be maintained by a specialized team. No private insurance or Medicaid would pay for it.

***

By the summer of 1997 it was clear that Dare would never live independently again. As Dare’s legal guardian, I was responsible to the court, and could no longer justify holding on to her home. Taking two weeks off from work, I arrived in New York to go through Dare’s possessions. Anything of worth would be sold to pay her bills. The rest would have to be disposed of. Sentimental value fell in between those categories. Dare had named me her only heir and, although her savings had gone to pay the hospital bills, I cherished the albums, photographs, and letters she wanted me to have.
The apartment was almost airless under a duvet of heat. The building’s heyday as The Bloomingdale Mansion was long past, and Dare’s little sliver of the structure got little ventilation or light. The walls had been artlessly repainted so many times that the molding was obscured by thick layers of coating.
I enlisted the help of my friend, Winkie Donovan to help me sort through Dare’s belongings. Winkie and I had been classmates at The Brearley School, and she had often accompanied me to Dare’s apartment when we were children.
Winkie found an art appraiser, "Zina", to help value the paintings and art books. Zina had the expertise and enthusiasm we needed. She was also entranced by the work of Dare’s mother, Edie, whom she considered an unacknowledged genius. Winkie and I thought Zina was the perfect person for the task, but someone, or something, seemed to think otherwise.
Zina began her assessment by climbing on a stepstool to reach some leather bound classics. Just as she put her hand on volume of Keats, a barrage of books flew off the upper shelves directly at her head.
“Oh dear,” she said quietly backing away. “Oh dear…”
The three of us looked across the room at Edie’s self-portrait. She did not seem pleased.
Dare had converted the apartment’s only closet into storage for her mother’s portraits. The paintings were hung on an elaborate pulley system. As Winkie walked into the closet and tried to move a painting, a coil of rope dropped from the ceiling and wrapped around her neck in a noose.
We all agreed that the spirit could only be Dare’s late mother. Perhaps she was trying to protect Dare from beyond the grave. We stopped our work, and I addressed Edie’s portrait,
“Edie, we understand that you think this is a violation of Dare and her belongings. Please know that we are doing this task with love and respect for her and for you. Winkie is now going to light a cigarette, and we will leave it burning in an ashtray for you to enjoy.”
Winkie put the cigarette on the mantle, and the three of us slipped quietly out of the apartment.
When we returned the next morning, the cigarette was down to a stub. We worked cautiously all day, but there were no more supernatural assaults. That evening I gave Zina the box of Edie’s ashes from Dare’s bedside cabinet. Zina was as delighted to be taking Edie’s mortal remains away with her, as Winkie and I were to see them go.
Zina finished her inventory after a few days. She sent the dreadful bust of Voltaire to be auctioned at an art gallery. Paintings, furniture, antique toys, and art books were placed for sale in appropriate venues. No gallery wanted Edie’s portraits. Unknown dead subjects weren’t valuable unless they were children. Even unappealing tots could find homes with available wall space, where there was none for an anonymous Cleveland banker. Zina fumed that Edie’s work was so underappreciated.
Winkie was tiny enough to wear Dare’s clothes, and it made me happy to see her put them on. Dare had made most of them on a child’s hand-cranked sewing machine. It didn’t matter that they were out of style. Empire waisted dresses from the 60s, the striped jumpsuit that Dare used as a bathing suit in the 70s, bias cut wool skirts, big belts with silver buckles to fit a twenty-three inch waist, gossamer nightgowns and peignoirs—would all get a second life with Winkie.
The volume of photographs Dare had amassed weighed a couple of hundred pounds. I knew there wasn’t time for me to sort the pictures in Dare’s apartment, so I loaned them, along with Dare’s childhood books and some sketches, to a person who wanted to research Dare’s life. It seemed like an innocuous thing to do, but I didn’t realize there were some very personal photos buried in the stacks that Dare would never have wanted published.

Dare’s baby photos were enchanting. One showed her at about eighteen months in a floor length fur coat and hood. Her hair had clearly turned brown by the time she was ten, but Edie always painted her child as a blonde. That was the only hair color I ever saw on her, as she began dying it in her twenties.
I found several packets of letters tied in blue ribbons in a desk drawer. It was the correspondence between Dare and her fiancé, Philip Sandeman. Dare had been such a private person, that I felt I knew what she would have wanted me to do with them. The denouement of their love story had wounded Dare terribly. Whatever feelings she had poured out to Philip, whatever lies he had told her, didn’t belong to me. I put the unopened letters in the incinerator.
Philip had sent a telegram to Dare’s brother, Blaine, explaining his reasons for breaking the engagement. Blaine must have given it to Dare, because I discovered it in another desk drawer. Philip wrote that he was sorry for his abrupt actions, but that he needed someone who, unlike Dare, could be a “real woman.” Did Dare read that and know what Philip meant, or did she always wonder why she wasn’t considered “real?”
Walking through Dare’s apartment for the final time, I was aware of all the energies, both creative and destructive, that had followed her to this address. Marvelous books and paintings had been fashioned there, but Edie’s death, and the violence Dare endured, overshadowed any positive images. It felt as if I had spent the previous two weeks inhaling the dust and skin particles of all the people who had passed through the rooms. Their microscopic detritus filtered through my lungs and lingered in my chest. I closed the door and hurried out to the street.

***

Dare’s friends winnowed to a small cadre. Those who had made excuses to avoid seeing Dare in her apartment on East 80th Street would never cross the river to visit her at Goldwater. Their usual justification was, “Oh, I want to remember her as she used to be.”
Christine Corneille had been Dare’s caregiver since Dare was discharged from New York Hospital in 1988. Although there were no funds left to employ her, Christine arrived at Goldwater when she finished her day job. She would bathe Dare, suction her tubing so she didn’t choke, braid her hair, and turn her to avoid bedsores. Christine’s niece, Marie, also came by in the evenings to spend time with Dare.
Christine and I were the only people Dare seemed to recognize, and she cried when I came into the room.
“Ah, your mother is crying because she is so happy to see you. You two look so much alike,” a nurse once exclaimed.
Christine, a native of St. Lucia, laughed. “Do know that the day I brought Dare to Goldwater, the nurse asked if Dare was my mother? This white lady? I think they are all crazy here.”
Jerry Mayro remained loyal to Dare in spite of his own ill health. His lungs were so compromised from emphysema and asthma that he had to pause frequently on the long walk from the tram station to the hospital. Still, he visited her until his death.
Winkie was three decades younger than Dare, but only outlived her by two years. She would arrive in Dare’s hospital room like Pippi Longstocking on helium. I’d given her a fox-trimmed, belted, short tweed coat that Dare had made back in the early 70s, knowing that only she could pull the look off. Winkie had embellished the outfit with fishnet stockings and fingerless gloves. Dare smiled as Winkie pulled a bottle of scented lotion out of her cavernous purse. Keeping a running monologue of anecdotes, Winkie began with Dare’s delicate fingers and carefully worked her way over the fragile parchment of Dare’s flesh.
“You are so beautiful,” Winkie would tell her, as Dare opened her eyes wide in delight.
One Saturday, the Goldwater security guard refused to let us enter the hospital.
“Visiting hours are over,” he said dismissively.
I looked at Winkie, who was wearing a Serpico meets St. Laurent in The Bowery outfit. There were no visiting restrictions on Dare’s ward, but it shared the floor with a lockup for criminals with AIDS and tuberculosis.
She burst into a throaty laugh. “Brookie, he thinks we’re whores!”

***

I had Dare’s ashes sent to Winkie for safekeeping while I considered where to scatter them. Zina had dispersed Dare’s mother’s remains on Long Island in an intriguing homage to Jackson Pollock, but I believed Dare would have wanted to stay in Manhattan.
Winkie met me at the entrance to Central Park. She was carrying a picnic basket with the box of ashes hidden in a napkin. A summer storm was threatening, and the hot wind blew newspapers and trash around our ankles. We climbed up to the rock where Dare had shot her first “Lonely Doll” photos five decades before.
Assuming that urban ash scattering was an infraction of some New York municipal code, we sat down and pretended to be having a picnic.
“Have an egg salad sandwich,” Winkie said digging into the wicker basket. She brought out a handful of ashes and let them fall through her fingers.
“Are there any cucumber ones?” I asked scooping the last bit of ash from the basket and spilling it over the side.
Suddenly, a group of young children raced up the rock. They ran past us, through Dare’s ashes, and down the other side. Whatever part of Dare the wind didn’t carry away, left on the soles of their shoes.
We wiped our hands on a picnic napkin, and I noticed Winkie had a streak of ash on her espadrille.
“Brookie,” she said, “It’s time we had a drink.”

***