As Jane Grant stood in the doorway of the Salmagundi Club’s gallery late one night in 1915, it occurred to her rather quickly that she was out of her league.  She was on her very first reporting assignment for The New York Times, covering the club’s annual costume bash.  Through the haze of cigar and cigarette smoke she could see the revelers, all of them men, streaming by in their ornate getups.  She saw suffragettes; she saw Teddy Roosevelt’s various personae – rough rider, big stick carrier, wild game hunter.  She saw mermaids; she saw fauns and satyrs.  Most of the costumes were meticulously conceived – and all of them had vulgar touches -- which was hardly a surprise, as the club’s library held nearly 800 books on costumes, many of them bawdy, and many of them French.  Not to mention that the Salmagundi Club’s membership was comprised entirely of artists – painters and sculptors – who were given to embellishment as well as libertine tendencies.  Despite their aesthetic expertise, some of the men, she could see, wore nothing much at all.

She could not have fit in less; Grant was still a few years away from the slim, modern sheath dresses and sophisticated bob she would sport through the 1920s.  That evening, her petite figure hid beneath long skirts, and her dark hair, pinned in careful curls, softened the angular line of her jaw and her small, plain brown eyes. 

She was dumbfounded, frozen in the doorway, even as she mentally noted the colorful balloons and streamers that decorated the walls, and the heavily draped lamps – the muted light they threw made the scene even steamier.  She clutched her reporter’s notebook in her hand, forgetting entirely what she was supposed to do with it.

It wasn’t as if the parties she had attended with her cosmopolitan actor friend, Grace Griswold, had taught her nothing about New York, or about becoming a social creature.  They had.  And it wasn’t as if she had never been to a costume party before, either.  She loved them.   But it seems nothing in Grant’s early New York social education, and certainly nothing in her more modest Kansas upbringing, could have prepared her for a costume party in Greenwich Village. 

Even though the Salmagundi Club was a self-admitted minor player among Greenwich Village’s more notable saloons, salons, cafes and social clubs, life inside the brownstone at West 12th Street managed to capture the freewheeling atmosphere that defined the Village in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Early in the club’s life – 1871 was its first year -- members gathered in a small studio on Fifth Avenue ostensibly to sketch but would often end up grilling sausages and holding boxing matches in the tiny space.  In 1888, when the club moved to larger quarters, their housewarming party featured the first pipes smoked on Fifth Avenue.  It also featured the first beer keg apparently seen in a Fifth Avenue dwelling.  The keg stood at the head of the stairs until it was rolled into the front room and emptied into one hundred stone mugs.  Every member of the club, according to the impressed reporter who covered the event for The New York Sun, smoked a cigarette an inch thick and indulged in, unsurprisingly, sausages and Roquefort cheese.  The Salmagundians continued their tradition of ribald hedonism into the 20th century – proudly.

On the other hand, if there was ever an organization that was not hedonistic it was the New York Times, the newspaper Jane Grant represented that night.  Although many of the brownstones surrounding the Times building on 43rd Street in midtown Manhattan were actually whorehouses, and the neighborhood was at no loss for saloons, Grant was used to life inside the paper’s offices, where patriarchy and tradition still reigned and licentiousness did not.  The Times, in fact, unhesitatingly criticized free-thinking behavior within its pages: In 1912 the paper blasted feminist schoolteacher Henrietta Rodman for allegedly leading a scandalous, free love lifestyle at Greenwich Village’s popular Liberal Club, and in 1913, it reported that heiress Mabel Dodge’s Washington Square gallery show, which featured Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, threatened to destroy not only art but society as well.

So when the Salmagundians, already well into their drinks by the time Grant arrived at the club at 10 pm, first noticed the wide-eyed young woman representing the sober New York Times, they were just as shocked to see her as she was to see them.

But they got over it faster. 

The men who weren’t grabbing napkins and tablecloths to try and make themselves presentable gleefully flocked to Grant and ushered her into the long, narrow gallery.  They plied her with flowers they grabbed from tables’ centerpieces.  They sat her down and urged her to join their feast.  She refused.  They begged her to stay.  She declined. 

Grant had forgotten all about her reportorial duties.  Gregarious as she was, she had nothing in her social repertoire that could help her determine how to behave in the situation in which she found herself.  She was good with men, having grown up in a large family dominated by male relatives and having learned early in life that coy, understated charm could be powerful.  Grant had mastered that and felt comfortable with the dominance it frequently gave her.  But that didn’t mean she knew what do with the flirtatious attentions of the near-naked, drunk men who were crowding around her at the table.  The Victorian Age may have been eroding fast in Greenwich Village, but Grant hadn’t caught up with it yet. 

As soon as Grant found an opening, she extricated herself from the scene.  A gaggle of the rakish, and presumably clothed, men escorted her down the gracefully curving staircase, through the hall lined with ebony-framed paintings created by club members, out the door of the brownstone, and into a taxi.

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