Queer Places:
Yale University (Ivy League), 38 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06520
An American Place, 509 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10022
Old Gray Cemetery
Knoxville, Knox County, Tennessee, USA
Cary
Ross (September 28, 1903 - August 27, 1951) was a Yale educated poet,
published in several literary magazines and friends with Zelda and F. Scot
Fitzgerald. In 1924, Philip Johnson’s
father had given him stocks in Alcoa, the Aluminum Corporation of America; by
the time he graduated from Harvard in the spring of 1930, he was a millionaire
in his own right. By now he was having a passionate affair with the would-be
poet Cary Ross, whom he had met through friends associated with the new Museum
of Modern Art in New York. Ross was said to have been a friend of
Ernest Hemingway and the
F. Scott Fitzgerald in
Paris in the 1920s. They resumed the affair, with a little less frenzy, in
Paris in the summer. They took to spending a lot of time with an architecture
scholar, Henry-Russell
Hitchcock, also gay.
William Cary Ross, Jr, was born on September 28, 1902, Knoxville, Tenn.,
the son of William Cary Ross (1879–1956), secretary and treasurer of the United Equipment
Co., and Lida McClung (1882–1968). He attended Ashville School and then Yale College, B.
A. 1925. Yale relatives include Calvin M. McClung (grandfather), Lee McClung
(great uncle), William N. Mallory (cousin).
He was assistant in charge of publicity of the Museum of Modern Arts, New
York, from 1930 to 1932 and secretary to
Alfred Stieglitz in 1932. Cary Ross was assistant director of the American
Place Art Gallery in New York City and exhibited some of Zelda Fitzgerald’s
art work and tried to out-drink F. Scott Fitzgerald and lost. Once when Zelda
thought she had upset him she promised to make him a “pink and dreamy picture”
and he in turn write a poem for the couple entitled “Seashores in the Sun for
the Scott Fitzgeralds” He travelled to Paris, Germany, and Russia, writing,
socialising, and translating Rilke, He spent time with
Gertrude Stein,
Virgil Thompson,
Georgia O'Keefe, and the
Cone Sisters of Baltimore among many
others. He was there for the start of the Museum of Modern Art working closely
with Alfred Barr, and believed in the cultural significance of museums,
donated art work from several famous artists to museums across the US.
A true intellectual and an artist, he spent his short life with some of the
greatest, most famous names of the 1920s and 30s.
He died August 29, 1951, Baltimore, Md., and is buried in Old Gray
Cemetery, Knoxville, Tenn.
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