Queer Places:
81 Gerard Walk, Sayville, NY 11782
Kay
Guinness (1903-1989) was an iconic Cherry Grove figure. Independently wealthy
and closeted, she had affairs with women while also being married three
different times to men. She flew small airplanes, had her own motorboat, and
loved to be part of fashionable society. In the 1950s, Guinness was arrested
in Cherry Grove for nude sunbathing on the beach. Her cottage was named No
Man’s Land.
In 1938 Kay was visiting friends in Ocean Beach when her companion suggested they go five miles east to Cherry Grove to visit her friends Marty Mann, the founder of the National Council on Alcoholism, and Priscilla Peck, an attractive woman who was art editor at Vogue. Fifty years later, sitting on the shady deck of her Cherry Grove cottage during her eighty-fifth birthday party, Kay still remembered knowing during that very first visit to Peck and Mann’s house that “Cherry Grove is where I want to live!”
Kay had come to New York in 1926, where she got a job as publicist for Paramount Pictures. She also seems to have parlayed family money into more money in the booming stock market of the 1920s.
Kay lived with her husband, of whom she was very fond, in New York City. It was more like a friendship, she said, and he knew the score; he was in his sixties and didn’t want sex, he was “finished with all that.” During the winter they entertained their business friends and family jointly—cocktail parties, dinners, evenings at the theater. She came to the Grove often in the summer, he went to his golf club. As if to emphasize that the summers were hers she named her Grove house No Man’s Land. Kay never discussed her life in the Grove with her husband and didn’t find it necessary to discuss being gay with her other straight friends either.
Kay once offhandedly told she supposed she was bisexual, but only the first of her three marriages was a love match, and it was quickly annulled. Several of her friends laughed derisively at the notion.
Patricia Fitzgerald, Kay Guinness, Mary Ronin, and Bea Greer, Duffy’s Hotel
c. 1950
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Gay Nathan and Julie Paradise
In 1938 she was thirty-five years old, an exceptionally beautiful and stately natural blonde with luminous large blue eyes. Flying small airplanes, driving fast cars and speedboats, Kay was a risk-taker and a legendary seductress; much more of a party girl than the intellectually inclined Natalia Murray, her Grove friend and sometime lover, Kay’s real affinity had been with the sophisticated Jazz Age clubs and cabarets. Among her friends and conquests were pretty showgirls like Dottie Justin, who had danced in the Ziegfeld Follies and at Texas Guinan’s Prohibition speakeasy, where she and Kay had met. Another friend was Peggy Fears, a “human dynamo,” recalled Ray Mann.
When Kay bought her small East End cottage in 1948 people asked her why she was “buying out there in the woods.” Kay’s friend and lover was tap dancer Dottie Justin. Kay, the “grande dame” and “party girl,” had sexual relationships and friendships with the “follies girls,” like Dottie Justin and Peggy Fears, who figure in Grove history.
When Kay, Camilla Munklewitz, and Kay’s friend were arrested for nude sunbathing in the late 1940s, the friend gave the address of a Chicago brothel as her own in order to confound the police.
Among the gay “girls,” only Kay seems to have regularly thrown a big theme party—the Pumpkin Party on Halloween—at the larger of her two cottages, Katherine the Grape (which was painted purple). It is not clear how often gay women were invited to the big theme parties, but they attended only now and then. After claiming that most parties, big and small, were mixed, Cris contradicted herself in the next sentence: “We [she and her companion, Agnes] were always invited to the men’s parties. More than often, we were the only two women.”
According to Kay and other Grovers, she and Natalia Murray were lovers for a period around 1948. Kay often said that despite their “really hot affair,” Natalia was too bossy for her, a real “general” who “like[d] things done exactly her way.” One night in the summer of 1948, Kay said, she called a man who she knew had two lots and a house in the then undeveloped East End and told him she’d buy them for $5,000. He agreed, and she said she wanted to move in that night and he said sure, there was a bed there. So she walked out of Natalia’s house that night and ended the affair. This picture is rather at odds with Natalia’s published self-portrait (1985) as a kind of devoted grass widow to Janet Flanner, who insisted on living in France. When I mentioned this to Kay she snorted. “I’m very fond of Natalia, but, honey, she was no widow!” She said Janet harbored no rancor toward Kay over the affair and “just didn’t want to know about it.” Kay, Janet, and Natalia remained good friends; Janet even stayed with Kay in the Grove occasionally. Natalia attended Kay’s memorial service in 1989.
Several narrators mentioned that Jane Bowles and Patricia Highsmith, though not central or longtime participants, were in and out of the Grove scene; the latter had a brief affair with Kay, who also remembered Jane Bowles climbing a ladder to try to get into her bedroom.
In an 1968 article by Emmett Murray, a photo of Camilla Munklewitz with Kay was included and the caption identified Kay as “a liker of women.” Kay was supposed to have suffered serious repercussions from one relative as a result of being “outed”—old-timers were still referring to this twenty years later as a reason why the Grove should avoid publicity.
Kay fell in love in the late 1960s and spent the last twenty years of her life in a relationship with a member of the young crowd, although the two never lived together, even after Kay’s husband’s death.
Until the 1970s Kay was a bountiful party giver; Laura recalled Kay’s giving a mixed cocktail party for one hundred people followed by a buffet brunch for a somewhat smaller group. She was revered not only for giving parties, but also for her ingenuity, what Laura called “her good ideas.” Laura remembered the birthday party Kay held for her toy poodle. Eighteen “ladies” and their dogs were invited.
Gay Nathan had once been Kay’s lover and eventually bought Kay’s cottage.
My published books:>
Newton, Esther. Cherry Grove, Fire Island . Duke University Press. Edizione del Kindle.