Born to Be Posthumous

In the fall of ’32, he entered third grade in Bradenton, at Ballard Elementary. He seems to have landed on his feet, catlike, in alien surroundings: he made new friends, had a dog named Mits, was a devoted reader of the newspaper strips (“I get all the Sunday funnies, but I want you to send down the everyday ones,” he wrote his mother), and earned high marks on his schoolwork.²³

But a December 1932 photo of him with his grandfather Benjamin Garvey tells another story. Sitting in a rocker on what must have been the Garveys’ porch or patio, the old man gazes benignly, through wire-rimmed glasses, at the dog on his lap, petting him; Mits—it must be Mits—arches his back in an excess of contentment. Ted stands behind him, a proprietary hand on his grandfather’s shoulder. He regards us with the same penetrating gaze, the same unsmiling mien we see in his posed photos as an adult. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only picture of Gorey touching someone in an obvious gesture of affection.

Gorey, age seven, in Bradenton, Florida, with his maternal grandfather, Benjamin S. Garvey, December 1932. (Elizabeth Morton, private collection)

Returning to Chicago in May of ’33, eight-year-old Ted was packed off to something called O-Ki-Hi sleepaway camp, an “awful” experience he managed to survive by spending all his time “on the porch reading the Rover Boys.”²⁴

Clearly there was more than enough unpredictability and inexplicability in his world to inspire his life’s goal, as an artist, of making everybody “as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.” “We moved around a lot—I’ve never understood why,” he told an interviewer when he was sixty-seven. “We moved around Rogers Park, in Chicago, from one street to another, about every year.”²⁵ By June of 1944, when he left Chicago for his army posting to Dugway Proving Ground, outside Salt Lake City, he’d called at least eleven addresses home: two in Hyde Park, five in Rogers Park, two in the North Shore suburb of Wilmette, one in the city’s Old Town neighborhood (in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments), and one in Chicago’s Lakeview community.²⁶ He’d been bundled off to Florida twice, the second time to Miami, where in 1937 he attended Robert E. Lee Junior High, returning to Chicago for the summer of ’38. All told, he’d gone to five grammar schools by the time he enrolled in high school.

In later years, Gorey would structure his everyday life through unvarying routines, some of them so ritualized they bordered on the obsessive-compulsive. It’s hard not to see them as a response to the rootlessness of his early years—existential anchors designed to tether a self he often experienced as unmoored, disconcertingly “unreal,” given to “drift.” Compulsive in the colloquial if not the clinical sense of the word, Gorey’s daily rituals may have provided a reassuring predictability, and thus a sense of stability, to a man marked by the frequent, never-explained disruptions that kept yanking the rug out from under him during his childhood.

Looking back from the age of seventy, he still couldn’t make sense of his family’s apparently arbitrary movements around the city. “I never quite understood that. I mean, at one point I skipped two grades at grammar school, but I went to five different grammar schools, so I was always changing schools … which I didn’t like. I hated moving and we were always doing it. Sometimes we just moved a block away into another apartment; it was all very weird.”²⁷

In 1933, the Great Depression hung on the mental horizon like a thunderhead, darkening American optimism. It was the year the economy hit rock bottom, with one in four workers out of a job. And then there was the waking nightmare of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. A year ago that May, a horrified nation read the news of a truck driver’s accidental discovery of the infant’s badly decomposed body, partly dismembered, his head bashed in. Charles Lindbergh was one of the most famous people in the world; the child’s abduction on March 1, 1932, and the unfolding story of the Lindberghs’ fruitless negotiations with the kidnapper, mesmerized America, as did the manhunt that followed the gruesome discovery of Baby Lindy’s remains.

Ted couldn’t have been oblivious to the crime of the century, as the papers dubbed it. Maybe he followed the unfolding horror story in the Chicago Daily News, as his soon-to-be high school classmate Joan Mitchell did: the baby snatched from his bed in the dead of night; the creepy, barely literate ransom note (“warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police”).²⁸ Mitchell was sick with fear that bogeymen would spirit her away, too. And not without reason: her family was well-to-do, and Illinois, in the Depression years, was ground zero for kidnappings. Ransom payments from the rich were low-hanging fruit for gangsters, who grabbed more than four hundred victims during 1930 and 1931 alone, more than in any other state in the nation.²⁹ The abductions in Gorey’s little books—Charlotte Sophia carried off by a brute in The Hapless Child, Millicent Frastley snatched up by man-size insects in The Insect God, Eepie Carpetrod lured to her doom by the serial killers in The Loathsome Couple, Alfreda Scumble “abstracted from the veranda by gypsies” in The Haunted Tea-Cosy—may be post-traumatic nightmares reborn as black comedy.

Gorey’s awareness of the horrors of everyday life may have been heightened by his father’s experiences as a crime reporter, too. By the time Ted was born, Ed Gorey was covering politics, but it’s not inconceivable that the younger Gorey overheard his father reminiscing about his days on the police beat, writing stories like the ones Ben Hecht filed at the Chicago Daily Journal—gruesome fare such as the tale of a “Mrs. Ginnis, who ran a nursery for orphans in which she murdered an average of 10 children a year,” and the one about the guy who dispatched his wife, lopped off her head, and “made a tobacco jar of its skull,” as Hecht recalled.³⁰ Then, too, as a newspaperman, Ed Gorey would have been a voracious reader of the dailies; it’s easy to imagine his son riveted by the big black headlines screaming from his father’s morning paper, never mind its lurid front-page photos. Could Ted have acquired his appetite for true crime at the breakfast table? The imperturbable voice in which he narrates his tales of fatal lozenges, deranged cousins, and loathsome couples sounds a lot like a poker-faced parody of police-beat reporting, with its terse, declarative sentences and just-the-facts deadpan.

At the same time, there’s no denying the echoes, in his “Victorian novels all scrunched up,” of nineteenth-century fiction, with its whispered intrigues and buried scandals. His vest-pocket melodramas owe a debt, too, to what were known in Victorian England as penny dreadfuls or shilling shockers—cheap, crudely illustrated booklets featuring serialized treatments of unfolding crime stories. And then there were the detective novels Helen and Ed Gorey read by the bushel. “Both my parents were mystery-story addicts,” Ted remembered, “and I read thousands of them myself.”³¹ Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. Sayers left their imprint on Gorey’s imagination—Christie’s books especially, with their characteristically English blend of snug domesticity and penny-dreadful horrors. “Sinister-slash-cozy,” Gorey called it.³²

Christie became the infatuation of a lifetime, and her take on the tea-cozy macabre is a pervasive influence. Gorey’s devotion to the Queen of Crime was absolute, impervious to the passage of time and undeterred by snobbish eye rolling. “Agatha Christie is still my favorite author in all the world,” he said when he was pushing sixty.³³ By the time he’d reached seventy-three, he’d read every one of her books “about five times,” he reckoned.³⁴ Her death left him desolate: “I thought: I can’t go on.”³⁵

On top of all that, he grew up in Prohibition-era Chicago—Murder City, in newsroom patois. For much of Gorey’s childhood, Al Capone and his adversaries made the mental life of Chicagoans look like one of those spinning-headline montages in period movies. The horror of bloodbaths like the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which hit men lined gangsters up against a garage wall and raked them with machine-gun fire, reverberated in the mass imagination.

Given the time and place he grew up in, and his father’s days on the police beat, it’s hardly surprising that Gorey, asked why “stark violence and horror and terror were the uncompromising focus of his work,” replied, “I write about everyday life.”³⁶

Ted with his father, Edward Leo Gorey, in Wilmette, Illinois, circa ’34–36. Gorey is somewhere between nine and eleven.

(Elizabeth Morton, private collection)

Sometime around April 16, 1934, the Goreys moved from 1256 Columbia Avenue, in the North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park, to the snug, tree-shaded North Shore suburb of Wilmette. (Little is known about Ted’s time on Columbia Avenue beyond the fact that he spent fourth grade at Joyce Kilmer Elementary School, a short walk from the Goreys’ red-brick apartment building, and that he received straight Es—for “excellent”—on his progress report.)³⁷

This change of address was weirder than most, since his father had just landed a new job, not in Wilmette but in downtown Chicago. In 1933, he’d reinvented himself as publicity director of two luxury hotels, the Drake and the Blackstone. Both were bywords for elegance, playing host to champagne-by-the-jeroboam high rollers, backroom deal makers, and even presidents. Why Gorey’s father moved his family farther from his workplace, to the suburbs north of the city, is a puzzler.

Maybe he wanted a better life for his family, a piece of the gracious living advertised by North Shore realtors. The Goreys’ rental was “a cube shaped elephant grey stucco house” at 1506 Washington Avenue in West Wilmette, with “an upstairs sunroom that managed to have windows on all four sides,” as Ted recalled it.³⁸ In the fall of ’34, he enrolled in the sixth grade at Arthur H. Howard School, a cross between an elementary and a junior high school that spanned kindergarten through eighth grade. He was nine years old. How he managed the trick of skipping fifth grade we don’t know; presumably, he tested out of it. As in Bradenton, Ted fit right in. “He does very superior work … with apparent ease, and socially he is well adjusted,” his homeroom teacher, Viola Therman, noted on his spring ’35 report card.³⁹ She was, she wrote, “anxious to see what he will accomplish with an activity program in the form of the puppet play [he is] now planning”—a revealing aside in light of the puppetlike nature of Gorey’s characters and his fascination, near the end of his life, with puppet shows, which he staged in Cape Cod theaters with his hand-puppet troupe, Le Théâtricule Stoïque.

As of June ’36, the Goreys had moved across town to the Linden Crest apartments at 506 5th Street, a block from the 4th and Linden El stop.

That September, Ted enrolled in the eighth grade at a nearby junior high, the Byron C. Stolp School, a shorter walk from his new address than Howard. Gorey, famously not a joiner as an adult, was the quintessential joiner in junior high: alongside his photo in the 1936–37 edition of the Stolp yearbook, Shadows, he’s listed as assembly president as well as a member of the typing club, the Shakespeare club, the glee club, and, not least, the art club.

Gorey’s art teacher at Stolp was Everett Saunders, a former WPA painter and dedicated mentor to would-be artists. Saunders oversaw the art club, whose ranks included Warren MacKenzie and, improbably enough, Charlton Heston. MacKenzie would grow up to be a master potter whose Japanese-influenced clayware is prized for its understated beauty. Now ninety, he remembers Heston as “a real poser,” a characterization confirmed by Heston’s Stolp yearbook photo, in which the man who would be Moses, sporting a budding pompadour, gives the camera an eighth grader’s idea of a smoldering gaze. (What can it mean that “Gorey always claimed with a straight face,” according to his friend Alexander Theroux, that “Charlton Heston was ‘the actor of our time’”?)⁴⁰

MacKenzie, who coedited the 1937 Shadows, recalls Gorey’s “really funny” cartoons for the yearbook’s club pages. Ted executed nine full-page line drawings, among them a picture of a cat in an artist’s smock and beret holding a palette and a dripping paintbrush (for the art club); a cat in an eyeshade, sweating bullets, up against a deadline from hell (for the journalism club); and a feline Romeo in a Renaissance cape, tearfully pacing his balcony under a crescent moon (for the Shakespeare club). They’re cute in a Joan Walsh Anglund meets Harold and the Purple Crayon way that clashes with our image of what’s Goreyesque.

At the same time, they do foreshadow the Gorey we know in their careful attention to costume—his fondness for patterns (plaids, checks, stripes) is already in evidence—and in their shading, where there’s no mistaking his preference for neatly parallel lines as opposed to smudged effects or solid blacks. There’s a naive charm to Gorey’s illustrations, off-set by a self-assurance that’s remarkable in a twelve-year-old. “His things all had a common feel about them,” MacKenzie recalls, “and the instructor who was in charge”—Saunders—“said, ‘Well, [his drawings are] going to be the theme of the yearbook this year,’ and they were, and they were wonderful.”

No one seems to know exactly when Helen and Ed Gorey divorced, though just about everyone agrees it happened in 1937. Betty Caldwell, then Betty Burns, a friend Ted had made at the Linden Crest apartments, recalls the “sad day” when she had to tell him, “‘Ted, I can’t see you anymore. We’re going on a vacation; we’re going to be gone for two weeks.’ And he said, ‘Betty, it’s worse than that. My mother’s divorcing my father. We’re moving to Florida.’” On October 7, 1937, having graduated from eighth grade that June, Ted left for Florida with his mother.

Then and ever after, Gorey was silent on the subject of his parents’ divorce. Beyond a passing remark that he saw more of his parents after the divorce than before, he took the Fifth on the whole business, especially on any psychological fallout he experienced as a kid. “I don’t think I had even noticed they parted,” he claimed, preposterously, in a 1991 interview.⁴¹ In four years’ worth of diary entries, he doesn’t so much as mention his father, perhaps because they weren’t in touch, possibly because they’d never been that close, or maybe because Ed Gorey’s departure was clouded by scandal.

Corinna Mura in Casablanca (1942). (Warner Bros./Photofest, Inc.)

When he left Helen, sometime after June ’37, it was for another woman: Corinna Mura, a guitar-strumming singer of Spanish-flavored torch songs. She was thirty-five; Ed was thirty-nine. It seems likely they met at the Blackstone: Mura played the nightclub circuit when she was in town. In addition to her career as a nightclub chanteuse, she was an occasional movie actress. There she is, about a half hour into Casablanca: the raven-haired singer in Rick’s Café, strolling from table to table, troubadour-style, as she gives “Tango Delle Rose” her throbbing, emotion-choked all. And there she is again, a coloratura soprano amid the citoyens in the rousing scene where everyone belts out “La Marseillaise.”

On screen and on recordings such as “Carlotta” (from the original cast album of the 1944 Broadway musical Mexican Hayride), Mura’s persona was that of a glamorous Latina—a “Spanish songstress,” in the showbiz patter of the day, at a time when “Spanish” was a blanket term for anyone we’d now call Latinx.⁴²

Truth to tell, Mura was born Corynne Constance Wall in Brown-wood, Texas, to David and Lillian Wall (née Jones). (Mura is what muro, Spanish for “wall,” would be, presumably, if the noun were feminine.) Her Latina persona satisfied white America’s racial fantasy of a colorful yet unthreatening otherness—“a dignified American girl” who “has the gay manner of a Latin” (as a newspaper profile put it), “cultured” enough to sing opera yet still “Mex” enough to take audiences on a journey down Mexico way.⁴³ That said, her passion for the musical traditions and cultures of Latin America was sincere. She toured South America, where “they absolutely loved her,” according to her daughter Yvonne “Kiki” Reynolds—testimony not only to her virtuosity but to her genuine rapport with her audiences as well, since she didn’t speak a word of Spanish. (She learned her Spanish-language songs phonetically.)

On July 2, 1937, Ed Gorey was in Austin, Texas, “getting married— quietly,” he told a friend in a letter.⁴⁴ By October of that year, Ted and his mother were on their way to Florida. He plotted their road trip in green crayon on the map in his travel diary. As always, he confides next to nothing to his diary, despite being uprooted, yet again, from his home and friends and despite the emotional upheaval of his parents’ divorce and his grandfather’s death. (Benjamin St. John Garvey had died the day after Ted’s birthday in 1936, shortly after speaking to his grandson on the phone.)

Arriving in Miami in November of ’37, Ted and his mother moved in with Helen’s sister Ruth—then Ruth Garvey Reark—and her children, Joyce and John (called Jack). The Rearks were living in the house Gorey’s grandmother Mary Ellis Blocksom Garvey had bought after she and Benjamin divorced. The Goreys lived in the one-bedroom, one-bathroom “independent suite,” which had a screened porch of its own.⁴⁵ (It’s worth noting that, for a boy on the cusp of puberty, sharing a bedroom with his mother may have been more than a little awkward.)

On first impression, Ted struck his Reark cousins as a cosseted creature—Little Lord Fauntleroy, if he’d been “raised in a high-rise in Chicago” and “doted on by females” is how Joyce puts it. “We picked on him some,” she allows, recalling that her aunt Helen was “rather appalled at my brother and me. My mother always thought [Ted’s mother] was overprotective…. Prue and Helen just doted on Ted. She didn’t think it was good—too much feminine influence. He needed to get away from Mama, maybe.” Joyce vividly remembers Aunt Helen solemnly instructing her niece and nephew that her little wonder’s IQ was 165. “I remember being a little resentful when we were told what his IQ was…. My first reaction was, ‘Well, I don’t think he’s that special!’”

Helen’s insistence that the Rearks regard her fair-haired prodigy with appropriate awe notwithstanding, Joyce has fond memories of Ted. “He was fun,” she says. “We played card games and we rode our bikes to school. Ted seemed to fit in [at Robert E. Lee Junior High].” He kept a baby alligator as a pet, which wasn’t unusual in Miami in those days, says Joyce. “They’re relatively harmless when they’re babies. You’d just put it in the canal when you were tired of it.”

Of Ted’s inner life during the five and a half months he lived in Miami we know next to nothing. Entering the hormone-addled years of adolescence, he showed no sign that his thoughts were turning to romance. As always, the objects of his affection were cats. His five-year diary reads like a case history of an obsession, with its “biographical sketch” of his cat Oscar and his breathless daily updates about Mrs. Reid’s newborn kittens.⁴⁶ Cats, like books, were always there for Ted, offering uncomplicated affection and escape from the vexing complexities of human society.

But even cats could be a source of anxiety. The threat of euthanasia is ever present in his diary entries. He never knew if his kitten Goofy would have to be chloroformed because he couldn’t be housebroken or if Susie II, the cute little tiger cat who “would chase [a] ball like [a] dog and bring it back,” would have to be “put out of the way” after just four months because her “nervous system [was] broken down.”⁴⁷ Diary entries solemnize the parade of little deaths. “One year ago today Bingo died,” writes Ted on March 21; a drawing of a cross on what appears to be a burial plot accompanies the entry. A year ago that day, “Bingo’s ear infection spread to brain, paralyzing front legs. Was put out of the way. Pretty broken up!”⁴⁸

On April 18, 1938, having graduated from Robert E. Lee that March, Ted returned to Chicago. Helen rented rooms in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments in the city’s Old Town neighborhood, then moved, in the fall of ’39, to a high-rise apartment at 2620 North Lake-view.

This time they would stay put: apart from his time in the army, Ted lived there until he packed his bags for Harvard in September of ’46; Helen would call 2620 North Lakeview home until she moved to the Cape in the mid-’70s.

Chances are she picked that address because it was convenient—a walk of about a half dozen blocks—to the Francis W. Parker School, where, a year earlier, thirteen-year-old Ted had entered the ninth grade. It was there that Gorey’s sense of himself as an artist would take shape. At Parker, the outlines of the Gorey persona—eccentrically brilliant, quick with the offhand quip, charismatic and sociable yet unselfconsciously himself—would come into focus.

The Parker Gorey attended was housed in a picturesque pile in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. “The building looked like a Gorey,” says Paul Richard, a Parker alumnus (class of ’57) and, from 1967 to 2009, art critic for the Washington Post. There were “little secret compartments where you could hide in the different rooms,” he recalls, “and every classroom [was] a different shape and size. It had a kind of spooky quality, especially if you had an imagination.” It’s unthinkable, says Richard, that a kid like Gorey—fond of mysteries, drawn to the gothic—didn’t soak up the building’s cozy spookiness.

A private institution, the school was founded in 1901 by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, an enlightened educator who was staunchly opposed to the notion of the K–12 system as an assembly line for mass-producing standardized minds. Happily for Gorey, the arts were central to the Parker curriculum, a by-product of the colonel’s belief that education must serve the whole child, fostering not only intellectual growth but civic engagement, aesthetic appreciation, and self-expression, too.

Gorey would have been Gorey even without Parker’s influence, but the school’s celebration of creativity, its embrace of interdisciplinary thinking, its foundational faith in the importance of making room for every style of mind to bloom—“Everything to help and nothing to hinder” was the colonel’s maxim—undoubtedly played a part in making Gorey the artist he was, encouraging his restless intelligence, emboldening him in his intellectual idiosyncrasies, nurturing his growing sense of himself as an artist.⁴⁹

The teacher who, more than any other, brought out the nascent artist in students like Gorey was Parker’s self-appointed liaison to bohemia, Malcolm Hackett. A big man whose “strong, handsome face” was dominated, as a worshipful student recalled, by “deep-set eyes” and a bushy mustache, Hackett worked the van-Gogh-of-the-WPA shtick to the hilt, wearing lumberjack shirts and loose-fitting cotton pants and sandals at a time when teachers, even art teachers, wore suits and ties.⁵⁰

Gorey’s signature getup, in his New York years, recalls Hackett’s insistence that “artist” isn’t just a job description but an all-consuming identity, too, reflected in the way you dress. Playfully quirky (as opposed to calculatedly shocking), the classic Gorey look was every bit as self-consciously “artistic” as Oscar Wilde’s famous “aesthetic lecturing costume” of velvet jacket and knee breeches. In fact, Gorey’s New York persona is a textbook illustration of the Wildean truism “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”⁵¹ (This holds true, in spades, for Gorey’s art.) Hackett urged his students to stretch their minds by seeking out the work of timeless masters like Titian, Goya, and Manet at the Art Institute and, at showcases for vanguard art such as the Arts Club of Chicago, the work of modernists like the Viennese expressionist Oskar Kokoschka and the morbid magical realist Ivan Albright. But no less important, he preached, was the gospel truth that art isn’t just something you do but, equally, something you are; the true artist is an artist in every fiber of his being, looking at the world with an aesthetic eye, using personal style to make an artistic statement.

Hackett was the only Parker teacher Gorey ever mentioned—“I had a good art teacher in high school,” he said when his friend Clifford Ross, himself an artist, asked about his formal training—so he must’ve made some impression.⁵² Certainly Hackett’s emphasis on oil painting may have had the unintended consequence of disabusing Gorey of the notion that he was destined to take his place alongside the Old Masters. “I was going to be a painter,” he told Ross. “The fact that I couldn’t paint for beans had very little to do with it. I found out quite early in the proceedings that I really wasn’t a painter at all. Whatever else I was, I was not a painter.”⁵³

Hackett himself was a painter of modest gifts. “You didn’t really learn anything except his attitude,” Paul Richard recalls. Then again, “if he didn’t teach you how to cast shadows or render, he did teach you something: scorn for the proprieties,” he says. “What he taught Joan [Mitchell] and Gorey was not a history or a discipline or a skill set but a subversion: Be an artist. Show it. Do anything you want.”

But épater-ing the bourgeoisie in the Chicago of Gorey’s youth was more complicated than it sounds. On one hand, the city was easily caricatured as the Vatican of Babbittry. The city’s reigning art critic, Eleanor Jewett of the Tribune, was a former agriculture major who was implacably hostile to everything but academic kitsch. Josephine Hancock Logan, whose stockbroker husband sat on the board of the Art Institute, raised the alarm about cubism, futurism, and other horrors by founding the Society for Sanity in Art in 1936. Chicagoans fell hard for the fanfare-for-the-common-man hokum of regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood (whose American Gothic the Art Institute had acquired in 1930). On the other hand, the city was home to the black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s and the New Bauhaus, founded in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhausians who’d fled the Nazis.

So you’re teenage Ted Gorey, under the spell of the first artist you’ve ever known up close, a “wholeheartedly, authentically, continually subversive” bohemian (in Paul Richard’s words) with the untamed mustache to prove it.⁵⁴ How do you put into practice his credo that an artist must be free, break the rules?

The answer, if you’re Gorey, is: by turning your back on the future and forging boldly into the past. At a moment when everyone’s talking about the Shock of the New, jolt them with the Shock of the Old: proclaim your love of silent film, insisting, “I really do believe that movies got worse once they started to talk.”⁵⁵ Provoke the provocateurs by announcing that although you’re “perfectly willing to admit that Cézanne is a great, great painter … anybody who followed him is a lot of hogwash,” then watch jaws drop when you add, “And Picasso I detest more than I can tell you.”⁵⁶

While we’re on the subject of subversion, it’s fascinating to speculate about Gorey’s aesthetic as a witty riposte to another aspect of the town, and time, he grew up in: the “stormy, husky, brawling” manliness Carl Sandburg extolled in his poem “Chicago” (1914), a concept defined, in the City of the Big Shoulders, in corner-bar, working-class, Polish-Irish-Italian terms.⁵⁷ Stanley Kowalski notions of masculinity, in the Midwest of the late ’30s and early ’40s, were more frankly homophobic than they are now, and an odd bird like Gorey would’ve found them oppressive.

Hackett, for instance, had no great love for gays; his plaid shirts, he-man mustache, and rough-and-ready aesthetic were a reaction, writes Patricia Albers, in Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, “to the American stereotype of the artist as clubwoman’s lapdog.”⁵⁸ In The Boardinghouse, a chronicle of life in a house full of Art Institute students den-mothered by Hackett, Donald S. Vogel recalls the time the art teacher was “really mad, shouting mad,” after catching a guy named Jules in flagrante with a male friend.⁵⁹ “Hackett’s roar was heard throughout the house,” and by day’s end Jules’s room was for rent.

What did Hackett make of Gorey? No one from his Parker days remembers Ted being anywhere near as flamboyant as he would later become, at Harvard. He wasn’t openly regarded as gay by the Parker community, and whether he was or wasn’t, says Robert McCormick Adams, who was a year behind him at Parker, was “insignificant in comparison to the fact that we were looking at a different aesthetic.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine that Hackett wouldn’t have picked up on the cultural subtext of Gorey’s emerging aesthetic, which Adams characterizes as “implicitly homosexual … concentrating on matters of style and presentation, and literature that was not common in our parents’ homes at that time.” As for Gorey, what would he have made of Hackett’s boho macho? Would he have pushed back against it, following his teacher’s admonition to reject received truths? Maybe that’s the impulse behind Gorey’s earliest recorded act of eccentricity: sometime during his Parker years, he painted his toenails green and went for a walk, barefoot, down Michigan Avenue.⁶⁰

At Parker, Gorey’s dawning awareness that his knack for drawing just might lead to something, maybe even a career, kept pace with his deepening interest in art. He soon fell in with the art clique: Joan Mitchell, who would go on to international fame as an abstract expressionist painter; Mitchell’s close friend Lucia Hathaway; and Connie Joerns, all of whom were smitten, to varying degrees, with the Hackett mystique. “There were four of us … whom [Hackett] inspired, and who existed as a group in the art studio,” remembered Joerns. (A close friend of Gorey’s for life, she would work alongside him in the art department at Doubleday and, like Ted, pursue a career as a freelance illustrator, authoring several children’s books along the way.) “We referred to him as ‘Mr. H’ and the four of us quite frankly adored him.”⁶¹