Henrietta Bingham

To hide from her father that she could not continue her education, Bingham pretended that the college was allowing her time away to study in Europe and Kirstein contrived to be granted study leave in Europe at the same time. The Bingham family travelled to England separately from Kirstein but, when it was time for the rest of the Binghams to return home, Henrietta persuaded her father to let her stay on with Kirstein as chaperone. The two women, besotted with each other, set off on a grand tour of continental Europe.[18]

Kirstein did not see a future for them as fully sexual lovers and from Carcassonne she wrote a twelve-page letter to Ernest Jones – the leading Freudian psychoanalyst in Britain at a time when psychoanalysis was generally regarded as dangerously aberrant. Her letter asked for help for an attractive 21-year-old American woman with irrational fears and a "homosexual tendency" possibly due to her childhood experiences. Bingham, she wrote, had developed an attraction towards Kirstein herself. She said that neither of them was ashamed of their relationship but they wanted to move on to another stage in their lives – "I am not a homosexual, though I love her very much". Bingham reluctantly agreed to psychoanalysis in London and refused to return to America even when her father asked for her urgently. When the Judge traveled to England at the end of 1922 he visited Jones and was satisfied that Henrietta's anxiety was being treated properly.[19]

Kirstein and Bingham enjoyed the bohemian nightlife in London and through David Garnett they made contact with the Bloomsbury Group.[20] To allow them to stay in Britain Garnett suggested the couple might rent Tidmarsh Mill, the home of Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and her then husband Ralph Partridge, while the owners were going to be away for the summer. When they arrived to view the property Carrington found Kirstein lovely, with a perfect slim figure, and Bingham was "my style, pink with a round face, dressed in mannish clothes, with a good natural style".[21][22][23] Carrington was disappointed when they left, but they had seemed to pay little attention to her. Anyway, Strachey refused their offer to rent the mill – he could not face having them living in the house. Back in London they met Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant.[24] Although not an intellectual Bingham was in her element – her exoticism and sensuality enraptured the Bloomsberries[note 3] – and was in the vanguard of bringing the Harlem Renaissance to Britain by playing the saxophone[note 4] and singing spirituals and songs of the American South in her dusky voice. Carrington wrote she "almost made love to her in public" and then found from Garnett that Bingham had been continually asking after her and wanting to see her again.[25][26]

In his continuing therapy sessions Jones, with Kirstein's agreement, had been encouraging Bingham to take a male partner. She had already caught the eye of Stephen Tomlin who was charismatic, widely read, and an accomplished writer and sculptor. They became lovers but she also turned to other partners from time to time. Both she and Tomlin had partners of both sexes.[27]

After returning to America, Henrietta disliked living in Kentucky so she moved to a newly built apartment at 25 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan where she started working for the monthly magazine Theatre Arts to increase its advertising receipts and circulation. She was rapidly accepted into New York society and her apartment became a gathering place particularly for Southerners, both black and white. When she met John Houseman she swept him off his feet and, as he later reflected, it was the first and only time he "was ever really in love". He was invited back to her family home for Christmas and by the new year they were secretly engaged – their relationship was intense, romantic and unconsummated. 1926 was spent mostly on the moors of Scotland and in London where she formed a loving relationship with Alix Strachey. After a separation of over a year Houseman joined her in England where they consummated their relationship and let it be known they would marry and would go to live in America. Even on the voyage back they seriously quarrelled and by the summer of 1927 the relationship was over.[40]

Bingham's relationship with Houseman having ended, Kirstein and Jones encouraged her to find another heterosexual male partner; however, she was being deluged with letters from Beatrix Lehmann, an actress she had met in Britain and who she had invited to join the Bingham family's 1927 holiday in Scotland where they had been "more than just friends".[41] When her family returned home Henrietta stayed with Beatrix at the home of Rosamond Lehmann, Beatrix's sister, and wrote syndicated articles for U.S. newspapers about the English social scene, later turning to more serious topics such as the treatment of prisoners in European countries.[42][43] By the end of the 1920s her father had come to realize, and even tolerate, her sexuality provided that, when in Kentucky, she wore a skirt.[44]

On the spur of the moment in 1930, Henrietta bought a Bentley Speed Six Mulliner drophead coupé and she and Beatrix set off on a tour of Europe going via Stockholm to Berlin, Munich and Paris, enjoying the Roaring Twenties night life. In 1932 she joined the Judge in actively and financially supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign for the presidency, leading to her father's appointment next year to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. She accompanied her father and her stepmother to London where she easily socialized with the younger aristocracy.[45][46][47]

Helen Jacobs in 1933

In 1934, the embassy held a reception for the U.S. Wightman Cup team. As a girl, Henrietta had been good at tennis and had won many trophies so she knew of Helen Jacobs, the leading member of the U.S. team who was daring enough to wear shorts on court. Henrietta set about attracting Jacobs and went to all her matches. The U.S team won easily but at the Wimbledon Championships Ladies' Singles Jacobs lost in the final to Dorothy Round, and then, according to the press, "rested ... with Miss Bingham ... at her [weekend] home in Sunningdale".[48][note 10] After winning the 1934 U.S. Open, Jacobs sailed to Britain with Henrietta and stayed with her until she could rent her own apartment where she started writing a novel.[note 11][51] The two women spent the winter together with Jacobs taking up foxhunting, already a passion of Bingham's and becoming enraptured with her partner. On an occasion while the ambassador and his wife were away, Henrietta threw a party at the family residence – the Prince of Wales and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. were there[note 12] – Jacobs wrote that it was a glorious success.[53] Jacobs effectively became part of the Bingham household and she formed a good mutual friendship with Henrietta's father.[54]

In 1935 the two women went to live together near Louisville while the ambassador and his wife stayed in London. Henrietta purchased a magnificent 450-acre country estate, called Harmony Landing, at Goshen intending to use it for breeding thoroughbred horses and pedigree dogs.[55] By 1936 there was strong anti-Nazi feeling in Britain (and particularly in the Bingham family) so when Jacobs won her Wimbledon singles final against the German Hilde Sperling there was, according to the New York Times, "probably the most wholehearted ovation Wimbledon will ever know". Jacobs and Bingham were photographed together and were reported as being "almost inseparable".[56] Robert Bingham resigned his ambassadorship shortly before his death in December 1937 but at his funeral in Kentucky the two women felt they had to stand away from each other because anti-homosexual attitudes were strengthening in America at this time.[57]

• Bingham, Barry (January 13, 2015). Barry Bingham: A Man of His Word. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-5878-5.
• Bingham, Emily (2015). Irrepressible: The Jazz Age life of Henrietta Bingham. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-8090-9464-6. The author is a writer and historian and Henrietta Bingham's great niece. (See Bingham, Emily. "Emily Bingham: About". emilybingham.net. Archived from the original on March 15, 2018.)
• Bingham, Emily (2015a). "Kentucky in Bloomsbury: Henrietta Bingham, Black Culture, and the Southern Gothic in Jazz Age London". In Sullivan, Regina D.; Hampton, Monte Harrell (eds.). Varieties of Southern Religious History: Essays in Honor of Donald G. Mathews. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-61117-489-2.
• Carrington, Dora (2017). Chisholm, Anne (ed.). Carrington's Letters. London: Chatto and Windus. ISBN 978-07011-87583.
• Gerzina, Gretchen (1995). Carrington : a life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. London: Pimlico. ISBN 0-7126-7420-9.
• Holroyd, Michael (2015). Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (Google ebook). Head of Zeus. ISBN 9781784971380. (edition first published 1994 by Chatto and Windus)
• Tifft, Susan; Jones, Alex S. (February 1993). The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-79707-2.