Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor

Biography

On a raw Chicago morning in March 1865, Adelaide Chatfield Taylor presented her husband, the farm-machinery magnate and future Elgin Watch director Henry Hobart Taylor, with a son whose name—Hobart Chatfield Taylor—would one day sprout an extra Chatfield and a hyphen. Cornell claimed the boy in 1882; four years later he left Ithaca clutching a double degree in science and literature and the memory of several seasons spent keeping the varsity nine in line as student-manager. An ocean away, his Uncle Wayne Chatfield lay dying. A single clause in the will dangled two and a half million dollars before the recent graduate—provided he stitch the donor’s surname to his own. Overnight, Hobart Chatfield Taylor turned into the resonant mouthful Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor, and the windfall bankrolled a literary gamble: a weekly review christened *America*. Critics applauded; accountants wept. When the magazine collapsed, he sailed for Europe, notebook in pocket, and filed sketches to the *Chicago Daily News*. Idle hours in Paris produced his debut novel, *With Edge Tools* (1891); its successor, *An American Peeress* (1894), rang the cash-register loudly enough to persuade him that ink, not iron, was his true patrimony. For the next four decades he never stopped. Comedies, histories, travel sketches, biographies—titles tumbled off his pen: *Two Women & a Fool* (1896), *The Vice of Fools* (1897), *The Secretary of the Legation* (1899), *The Idle Born* (1900, written with his brother-in-law Reginald De Koven), *The Crimson Wing* (1902), *The Middle West Discovers Outdoors* (1905), *Molière* (1906), *The Land of the Castanet* (1906), *Fame’s Pathway* (1909), *Goldoni* (1913), *Chicago* (1917), *Odyssey of a Modern Ulysses* (1926), and the late-career valedictory *Charmed Circles* (1935). France pinned the Légion d’honneur on his lapel for resurrecting Molière; Italy bestowed the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus and the Crown of Italy for reviving Goldoni. Spain, Portugal, England and Venezuela added their ribbons to the collection. The day after Rose Farwell stepped out of finishing school in 1890, she stepped into marriage with the newly solvent author. Rose was the daughter of Senator Charles B. Farwell and sister of the composer who would later co-write *The Idle Born*. The Chatfield-Taylors took up golf with missionary zeal, laying out what many still call the first eighteen holes west of the Hudson on her father’s Lake Forest acreage. Four children followed: Adelaide (1891-1982) trod the boards, then owned a nightclub, then won the Croix de Guerre for running a wartime canteen for Free France. Wayne (1893-1967) traded Treasury and Commerce for the presidency of the Export-Import Bank and a seat at the Marshall Plan table. Otis (1899-1948) wrote plays and produced them, flirted with actress Miriam Battista, and died of injuries suffered in a car crash outside Ossining. Robert (1908-1980) made money, made headlines, and—briefly—made debutante Brenda Frazier his wife; after their divorce she still called him “a gentleman in every sense of the word.” Rose died in 1918. Two years later Hobart married Estelle Barbour Stillman, Detroit banker’s daughter and widow of a New York banker felled by typhoid and meningitis in 1907. Finley Peter Dunne once chaired a delegation that asked whether Chatfield-Taylor would stand for mayor of Chicago; Dunne joked that if the full name was too much ballot, perhaps they could run just the middle third. He corralled modern art for his walls, duchesses for his dinner table, and—after a coronary at Edward VIII’s coronation—announced in 1937 that the curtain had fallen on public life. On 17 January 1945, in the quiet of his Montecito ranch, the echo of that resonant name finally faded. He left behind Estelle, four children, a shelf of books, and a drawerful of foreign decorations.