The Worldly Sassoons
How such an unusual Jewish couple, she born in India and he in Malaysia, migrated to distant Tryon is a plot-line a novelist surely wouldn’t concoct. Yet history offers us their story which actually happened — a tale more interesting than the stereotypes — and people alive today recall fondly the impact Stella and William Sassoon had on their little community in the North Carolina mountains.
Stella as a student in England
In the early 19th century Jews who had lived for centuries in the Middle East were expelled from the withering Ottoman Empire. From Baghdad a group of them resettled in polycultural India, then being taken over by the successful colonialism of the British Empire. Bombay, a new trading port, was the springboard of their success in industrial enterprise and international commerce between the economies of Asia and Europe. Jews from what’s now Iraq were welcomed into the British hegemony, practicing their religion freely while working and investing ably, during that era when the Monarch’s more-privileged subjects native to the British Isles were apt to scorn “trade” in favor of the greater prestige of military service or government administration in far-off Asia.
In 1908 Stella Cohen was born at booming Calcutta (now Kolkata) into a Jewish family that had achieved success in the second-biggest city of the British empire. In 1896 William Sassoon was born at Penang, an important entrepot in the Straits Settlements, later to become Malaysia, which had a thriving Jewish community too. Both were English-speaking British subjects, well-educated and mobile. At an early age “Willie” was sent to Calcutta to work in the multinational firm of Andrew Yule. The two met, a love match. They married when she was 17 and he 29. Stella had attended a girl’s boarding school in southwest England, and Slade art academy in London. Stella lived and breathed Art, Willie wasn’t cut out for serious money-making, so after their 1925 wedding the newlyweds moved to Paris.
harbor at Penang, Malaysia during William Sassoon's youth
It was a heady time to live well-off in France. Creative Americans flocked there to live more cheaply than at home. Europeans from all countries came, including many Jews run out of new polities created after World War I. As in England, the Sassoon name bore cachet on the Continent as their extended family included prominent figures in the arts, enterprise and political affairs. A daughter and a son were born in Paris, but Stella’s attentions focused on Art so they were raised by nannies. She networked with contemporary painters and took courses at Delécluse’s academy which emphasized portraiture and still-life. Picart Le Doux became her mentor; one of his works (now at Tryon Fine Arts Center) came with their baggage to America, inscribed in 1936 “à Madame Sassoon.” While Willie was skiing in Switzerland, Stella was painting mountain landscapes. She always had her paintbox along when they traveled.
All was not pleasant, however. Nazis took over Germany and began their process of suppressing Jews. In many countries even secular Jews were blamed for troubles of all kinds. French political figures joined the fray, and in 1938 an international conference at Evian-les-Bains showed that conflicted British politicians wouldn’t stand up for Jewish rights abroad. In 1939 the Sassoons made their escape from Europe ostensibly to enjoy the New York world’s fair. Flying from Montreal into LaGuardia airport on Canadian Colonial Airways, with British passports, US Immigration recorded their ethnicity and nationality as English. The family quietly made their way to safe obscurity in Vermont, their possessions from Europe arriving there shipped as freight via Canada. Their winter proved the coldest any had ever experienced. English-born painter and writer Anne Bosworth Greene, a widowed American citizen who wintered in Tryon, arrived at her Vermont farm for the following summer. It was kindly Greene who arranged for the Sassoon family to migrate south for the winter of 1940 – ‘41. She found them a cottage to rent. The children enrolled at Tryon School. Stella and Willie, assisted by Greene, immediately went to work at Tryon for British support, months before the United States entered the second world war.
Stella C. Sassoon
William Edward Sassoon (1896-1980)
Tryon Fine Arts Center
Mr. Sassoon, a British veteran of World War I, knitted wool knee-length socks on a machine; they went to British sailors on trawlers. Willie’s behind-the-scenes activities during 1941 are less documented than Stella’s. Tryon Daily Bulletin reports her novel fund-raiser, to elicit donations from prominent Tryonites by painting their portraits. "At the book shop in the Washburn building, her canvases are now on exhibit. Mrs Sassoon paints for the sheer joy of it and this quality is conveyed in her work imbued with a spirit of freshness and marked sincerity. In the study of Mark Vidal-Hall, she deftly portrays the elusive enchantment of childhood. Much character subject is conveyed in portraits of Captain Rufus Zogbaum, David Zogbaum, Miss Betty Meade and Mrs George Brannon.” Miss Genevieve Washburn from Minnesota made the sitting appointments and negotiated the money. And her young niece arrived for a long stay as her mother was slowly dying of tuberculosis in a Duluth sanitarium.
Minnesota author Bly spent a Tryon winter during World War II with her aunt and took art lessons with Sassoon.
This niece, who became famous author Carol Bly, much later published a creative non-fiction short-story An End to the Still Lifes. Bly’s vivid story describes her autumn train ride into Tryon: I saw more physical beauty than I had ever seen before. I was twelve. Carol was enrolled in Tryon School, a budding artist, and immediately became friend of the Sassoon daughter. One day Carol’s drawings were discovered by Aunt Genevieve, a sheaf of Crayola-drawn Marines bayonetted through the chest. Gestapo officers with peaked caps who whipped people with grey and white striped clothing. Nightmares were life’s verities, like everything else. My aunt was holding my drawing of an SS soldier torturing someone. My aunt said “If you’re going to be an artist you had better take it seriously. This is ghastly. I think I had better have Stella teach you charcoal and still lifes.”
So aunt and niece went for dinner at the Sassoons’. Of all the contingent of English stranded in Tryon, the Sassoons were the liveliest. They were always joyful, amused, hysterical or infuriated. The whole family liked music and painting and despised cruelty. They were always asking one another, what sort of a clot would do something like that? The Sassoons were heady stuff for me, a child raised on middle-ground opinions, middle-ground tastes. My feelings had no more weight to them than a lacing of first snow. Genevieve Washburn had brought along the drawings that so troubled her, but Stella’s reaction was unexpected. “Oh, I say” she exclaimed. “These are wonderful, Good God, All that blood!” She moved fast in her expensive, perfectly pleated grey trousers, dropping cigarette ash everywhere.
Mr. Sassoon was a quiet, witty person whose eyes literally glowed. He stopped to pick up things his wife brushed off table or easel as she went past. He showed me how to praise. “I say,” he said to me somberly, as if I were an adult, “Stella’s awfully good, isn’t she? Look at that expression! And the rich colors!” When he looked at me, I thought for the first time in my life, Why—that is a married man.
Miss Washburn, despite misgivings, let Carol go over for instruction in still life. Each week, Stella would screw up a tablecloth in the time-honored way. She placed on it an orange, a banana, and a pewter pitcher with dogwood sprays. She taught the girl how to make shadow. “If you get the shadow of a thing you have it,” she said in her British accent. But after a few weeks she said “I say, we don’t like doing these still lifes, do we? I think you should work on what you want to work on.” Eventually Aunt came back to the Sassoons for another dinner, and over martinis and a throaty laugh from Stella she learned what was going on lately at the studio.
Carol Bly (1930-2007), recipient of numerous awards for literature. Her story about Sassoon's studio was published before Stella's death. Fifty years after their time together, Bly phoned Tryon to thank her for changing her life. The elderly widow enthused "you had people being bayonetted, blood flying in every direction! I kept all your drawings, too!"
My drawing showed a lance corporal being killed by a Feldwebel. I had uniforms right because I was a morbid and patriotic kid. I knew a soldier’s shirt pocket tab is straight across with clipped corners, but a Marine’s curves down in reverse arch to the center button. What I didn’t have right was the locale. U.S. Marines didn’t fight Germans in that war. Nor had I got the wounds exactly: drops of blood don’t fly through the air with black waxy borders around them.
My aunt discontinued the lessons.
The humor and drama of Bly’s story is echoed in The Tryon Daily Bulletin editor Seth Vining’s accounts of the Sassoons’s interest to revive amateur dramatic performance. The Community players performed a tragedy at Oak Hall Hotel directed by Stella, with a cast of four women and two men (one of them John Landrum, then 26, who later became their banker and confidant), plus Stella and Willie themselves. Jane Dusenbury, author and wife of a Tryon artist, wrote later of Stella’s love for theater, and of her memorable role in 1969 when she performed in The Madwoman of Chaillot, the first play on the stage of the new Tryon Fine Arts Center: Stella made flamboyant entrances, with flurries of silk scarves, trailing Paris gowns, hugs and kisses and an avalanche of ‘Oh, darlings’ and when she wasn’t acting she was in the audience leading the applause, and issuing audible comments throughout, often eliciting a chorus of ‘shhh!’ Her presence made a party, and in retrospect the 1940s in Tryon were one long party. The Sassoons were gracious, frequent and generous hosts, with libations and laughter echoing until dawn on Sourwood Ridge.
Stella Sassoon
oil on canvas 1941
Portrait of Our Cook
Tryon Fine Arts Center
a meticulously-finished painting not typical of her Tryon oeuvre
The Sassoons' new home on the ridge – and it was to be their home until Willie’s death in 1980 and Stella’s in 2000 – was designed by architect Shannon Meriwether with a spacious atelier for Stella’s art activity. Interiors are paneled in pecky cypress, the public rooms spacious for entertaining in style, the service quarters generous to accommodate busy staff. Help were scarce then – so many being away for the war effort – and turnover was considerable. A number of black women found employment with the Sassoons but they weren’t driven hard; the only real difficulty was live modeling for Stella, who kept them captive for long portrait sittings. She chattered and chain-smoked while these portrait sessions were going on. Meanwhile unflappable Willie, who volunteered for the wartime Ration Board and enjoyed tennis, would relax as a servant would mix martinis and serve canapes from a silver tray.
Stella Sassoon
oil on canvas, undated
The Gold Dress
Tryon Fine Arts Center
The sitter for this elegant portrait has not been identified.
The Ration Board’s appeal was to stay home, to conserve cars and tires, and to walk to the library for books. At Lanier Library, Stella and seven other women performed Sophie Kerr’s one-act play The Dear, Dear Children to benefit the book fund in January ‘42. Admission was fifty cents. That month Tryonite Margery Strong authored her verse titled Singapore, which (like Willie’s birthplace Penang) fell to the Japanese the following month, the greatest surrender in British military history; 130,000 Indian, Australian and British prisoners of war were taken and massive civilian atrocities and executions carried out. “Little Tommy Atkins” is the personification of the ordinary British soldier:
Singapore
Little Tommy Atkins is sitting in the sun,
Sighing and crying for a plane and a gun.
Heigh! Tommy, ho! Tommy,
Now you’re high and dry,
But soon ‘twill rain great guns for you,
And then it’s Japs, goodbye!
Japan's cruiser Haguro, sunk by the Royal Navy off Penang in May 1945
But that Allied rescue of Tommy was not to be. The war dragged on for three more years. In March, A Sunny Morning play translated from the Spanish of Quintero was produced, at the Episcopal Parish House, to benefit Lanier Library’s book fund. Willey performed the part of Juanito. Yet all wasn’t glamour, to motivate the public for the war effort. In early ’44 the county Price and Rationing Board published paeans recognizing citizens who’d specially helped. Mr. Sassoon was singled out for “magnificent carpentry and window washing” while Mrs. Sassoon was commended for “her excellent, most illustrative, and colorful figures and lists.” The Germans surrendered Paris the end of August as the war continued in Europe; in November ‘44 the Sassoons received their first message from France, mailed September 8 by the manager of the auto garage near their Paris building. The man spoke of their privations, having lost 50 pounds and his wife 36. “Let us hope we shall have the joy of welcoming American and British armies, our nightmare will end soon, and shortly you will come and make a little tour in France.” As German forces retreated, they took nearly all of the food out of the city. Most French transportation destroyed, starvation was imminent. Allied forces and French country people cooperated in a massive effort to bring desperately-needed food into Paris.
The end of World War II in sight in the European theater, Stella painted her atypical streetscape of Tryon, a landmark of her oeuvre. In its foreground are depicted three Black youths, among them baseball star Fred Counts. The Sassoons were publicly thanked for their contributions to the rose festival at the CME church. Willie turned his attention to reorganizing the cub pack of Boy Scouts; his son Richard was in Tryon Troop 1. Daughter Babette at boarding school in Virginia was literary editor of her class paper, acted a lead role and directed another play. The family felt committed as Americans now, not expatriates, and plans were laid to achieve naturalization for all four as US citizens.
Stella Sassoon
Trade Street, Tryon
oil on canvas, 1944
After first hearing from friends still alive in Paris abobut the departure of German forces, with relief she painted this image of the village center.
Stella Sassoon
Daughter Babette at Tryon
oil on canvas, undated
The Seven Hearths Collection
The Lanier Club’s art show in early 1947 was a highlight of Tryon’s postwar life, organized by Stella and by Edward Bennett, architect from Chicago and watercolor painter. Fifty professionals and amateurs were juried in; Willie showed his artistic photographs. Stella painted in oil a portrait study of Mrs. Bennett while Bennett exhibited his portrait of Stella Sassoon. The exhibit celebrated, too, the earlier “greats” like George Aid and Homer Ellertson who had made Tryon a notable artists colony. Drama buffs were discovering Tryon, too, and experienced professionals from New York were gravitating into its orbit. The Vagabonds, for example, relocated to nearby Lake Summit. There Stella exhibited a number of her paintings at their playhouse lobby during its 1948 summer season.
Stella Sassoon
Brinkus the Tree Man
oil on canvas
courtesy of Alan Leonard
By no means was Sassoon most interested to paint the well-off or the glamourous. Nor did she need to, for money. Her Modernist 1948 oil of “Brinkus” Thompson is an example. A colorful figure essentially illiterate, he was rough, red-haired, short, all muscle and proud of his physique. A childhood acquaintance describes his features as “Neanderthal” and his nasal speech a peculiar accent of mountain hollows at that time. He did tree work around Polk County with only a bow-saw and coil of rope, and was expert at that. He traveled on foot only, his stamina and antics legendary. Stella’s portrait of Brinkus remained in her home until her estate auction five decades later. In September 1948 the artist and Willie departed New York on the great ship Queen Elizabeth to England, intending to return in December.
Their sojourn in Europe convinced them not to relocate from America. A week was spent in Switzerland with Willie’s cousin, a month in Paris. In Britain two of Stella’s sisters had married the two sons of famed orchestra conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Her amateur-painter mother, widow of Hon. Stratford Tollemache (author of a remarkable memoir of youthful experiences as fur-trapper in the remote Yukon), had taken up writing Modernist poetry. A slim volume of verse came out that year, illustrated for her by one of the oddest ducks in British art history, Francis Rose. Although grande dame Tollemache made a visit to Tryon, and the Sassoons kept up communications with their kin in Europe, they never visited there again. They chose to become American citizens.
Mrs. Tollemache, Stella's mother, with illustrator Francis Rose.
courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London
William Sassoon’s report on European conditions in January ’49, for a special Lanier Club meeting at Tryon’s Congregational church, was of such regional interest that Spartanburg’s radio station sent their rep up to record the talk for broadcast. It was well-received and his live audience a full house. Club programs at that time were focused on international affairs; distinguished academics and the former assistant Secretary of State were visiting Tryon to share their perspectives. Domestic issues, including race relations, came to the fore and Tryon’s civic clubs heard speakers saying America, though victorious during the war, could do better. These messages were reinforced by audiences who had served on active duty abroad, working with people from other cultures, of unfamiliar religions. As speaker for Kiwanis Club, say, Willie was considered an expert, a person who knew personally other authorities around the world. One of his messages was that Communists were working 24 hours a day, while Democracies were working “9 to 5.”
In the art realm, Stella Sassoon was considered Tryon’s art expert, the curator. For the 1949 Lanier exhibition, her husband took charge as CEO and formed a strong committee which took the bold step to charge 75 cents admission to the eagerly-anticipated event. Students were charged just a quarter, but that was an hour’s wage for many humble adults at that time. Arts professionals and avid amateurs were flocking to little Tryon and a postwar economic boom was on. The Tryon Daily Bulletin reports the show was a grand success, and that Mrs. Sassoon is conducting drawing classes to help along Tryon’s future artists. (Reported as well is how the Sassoons’ personal possessions, left behind in Paris ten years before, arrived by ship at Charleston – fine furniture, important French rugs, antique Greek vases 2000 years old, Ming-era porcelain, unusual lamps and a polar bear rug. Winston Churchill’s first painting is soon to be auctioned – his scene of Sir Philip Sassoon’s blue room, Sir Philip being Willie’s cousin.)
Stella's lost canvas depicting Dodee Wick and other actors in Lake Summit Playhouse dressing room
Her big media event was Sunday morning, July 31, 1947 when Stella appeared on New York City television, Channel 4 NBC. (TV viewership was growing like wildfire although “reach” remained much less than radio. August that season, the first World Series broadcast was on TV for the all-New York games between Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees.) New York’s station sent a film maker down to North Carolina to capture Sassoon on-stage painting and discussing a monumental 4-foot by 5-foot canvas which depicted semi-clothed actors and actresses dressing, backstage at Lake Summit Playhouse. Their film wasn’t broadcast on other stations, but her racy painting survived for many years in Tryon, until after her death in 2000. (An image of it is here e-published, for the first time.)
Mrs. Sassoon’s reputation expanded beyond the Tryon orbit. In 1950 she exhibited some thirty drawings and paintings in Greenville, South Carolina in city hall at the Civic Art Gallery. Her completed near-life-size canvas “Backstage” from her TV appearance was her most impressive work. Actors depicted were Horace Burr, Henry Hamilton, Rosemary Prinz and Dodee Wick. Dodee, née Hilda Ekström, was a Broadway player who owned a theatrical school with her husband, a journalist. Miss Prinz later achieved stardom in TV’s soap-opera As the World Turns. A reviewer wrote that Stella “obviously did not paint portraits to please the sitter’s kith and kin . . . Her brush shows love of people, understanding of personality, much humor and a flair for the dramatic.” A show favorite was her crayon portrait of Polish prince Czetwertynski “beauty created in a face by breeding, much suffering and deep understanding.” (Three times tennis champion of Poland, the prince fled Europe in ’37 and settled in Tryon in 1944.)
Actress Dodee Wick (1907-1984), frequent house guest of the Sassoons in Tryon.
A player in Broadway productions, Dodee starred in USO troop shows in Europe as well. Over radio she was heard with Tallulah Bankhead, Arlene Francis, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
During the early Fifties equestrian activity accelerated, making Tryon well known for steeplechase, hunting fox with hounds, and culminating in the nation’s 1956 Olympics equestrian trials. Entries and visitors came from many states and foreign countries for annual spring Horse & Hound Show at Harmon Field. All of Tryon shut down and even the county courthouse closed. Willie and Stella co-chaired its committee to serve thousands of boxed lunches. Mrs. Sassoon was known for whirlwind “performance cooking” at their home, exotic curries her specialty. Copper cookware hung overhead from one end of their kitchen to the other; outside a window was her bay leaf tree she tenderly wrapped over for winters. Willie served on the board of Tryon Little Theatre and as a trustee for Vagabond School of Drama (at nearby Flat Rock, after its relocation from Lake Summit Playhouse). Dodee and husband James Wick were frequent guests in the Sassoon home, staying weeks at a time there; Dodee, after acting in North Carolina with the Vagabonds, would return to New York to appear on TV or leave for foreign countries with James Wick on his journalism jaunts.
Sassoon (left) in costume for The Madwoman of Chaillot with player Adline Lohse, whose husband was an influential Tryon painter. Karl Lohse was born in Brussels, son of a German manufacturing executive, and was familiar with seven languages. 1969 photo by Jane Brown
By the Sixties it was apparent professionally designed facilities and coordinated management would benefit visual and performing arts. Tryon Fine Arts Center was designed by Ernst Benkert, architect from Chicago, funded by the Sassoons and people they knew using no government grants. It opened in ’69 with a black-tie gala for locally-produced The Madwoman of Chaillot translated from French, a satire starring an eccentric Paris woman who struggles against greedy, corrupt authority figures. Stella wowed the house in her role. (Katharine Hepburn, a year older than Stella, starred in a film version that year. It bombed, a critical and financial disaster.) The Sassoons made the Center their passion-project the rest of their lives.
In 1991 the Center hosted a modest retrospective of Stella’s art. Seven works, sampling her portraits of Black people in Tryon, were exhibited in conjunction with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Day program in 2005.
Fred Counts and friend reminisce during 2005 Martin Luther King Jr. Day program. Counts and two young buddies were depicted in the foreground of Stella Sassoon's 1944 oil painting of Trade Street, in permanent collection at Tryon Fine Arts Center.
Stella Sassoon
Carrie Lee Massey (1922-2003)
oil on canvas 1984
Polk County Historical Association
gift of Arthur L. Farwell
Miss Massey attended Benedict College in South Carolina and graduated from beauty college in New York. Her influence inspired Farwell to donate a substantial sum benefiting pupils at the integrated schools.
A portrait of Carrie Lee Massey is her best-known portrait now on public display, at Polk County’s history museum. Miss Massey was a Black community leader on Tryon’s school board, the county NAACP chapter (which was already going when the Sassoons arrived in Tryon) and League of Women Voters. Massey’s beauty shop, long located where Rogers Park later was constructed, was a crossroads for African Americans steps from Tryon’s main thoroughfare. No doubt Willie Sassoon, while strolling from his home into the village center, recalled Josephine Baker, American-born entertainer in Paris of the ‘20s and ‘30s celebrated by artists and intellectuals. The first Black woman to star in a major motion picture (a French silent in 1927), Baker married a white French industrialist in ’37 and raised their children in France.
Stella Sassoon (1908-2000) donor, with Tryon sculptor Philip Dusenbury (1948-2013) at the installation of "The Greeter" for the lobby of Tryon Fine Arts Center.
Her daughter Babette [Barbara Nancy] appeared in our 7th grade. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, but I was equally impressed by her artistic ability. My fondest recollection is watching her draw a rose while munching an apple during lunch break. I’d never seen anyone draw like that – she was just doodling with pencil on ordinary paper, but that rose and its leaves looked real, startling depth and clarity of detail, because of her shading and the heavy and light pencil strokes. She had her father’s black hair and features.
Stella Sassoon
School Girl Babette
courtesy Frances & Garland Goodwin
Not long ago my friend Ambrose Mills III called one day, he’d drop over right then. He soon appeared carrying a large package. He thrust it into my hands. As I pulled apart the wrappings I got a glimpse of dark hair followed by striking eyes. “It’s Babette Sassoon” I shrieked with delight and disbelief. Ambrose had just bought the painting for me at auction of Stella’s household goods. She’s forever young and beautiful here, and thanks to his incredible thoughtfulness and generosity, I get to see her again every day.
Michael McCue 2024
