Helen Candee

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Helen Candee in 1901

Helen Candee , née Helen Churchill Hungerford (born October 5, 1858 in Brooklyn , New York City , USA ; † August 23, 1949 in York , York County , Maine , USA) was an American writer , journalist , feminist and interior designer .

Career

Helen Candee was born in New York to the merchant Henry Hungerford and his wife Mary Elizabeth Churchill. She spent most of her childhood in Connecticut and attended private schools in New Haven and Norwalk . On November 17, 1880, she married Edward Willis Candee (1856-1907), a wealthy New York businessman. They had two children, Edith Churchill Candee (1883–1974; later Mrs. Harold Chauncey Mathews) and Harold Churchill Candee (1886–1925). The marriage was unhappy as Edward Candee was violent and drank. After years of separation, the marriage divorced in 1896, which made headlines locally.

After separating from her husband, Helen Candee supported her family with fictional stories for popular magazines such as Harper's Bazaar , Scribner's , Woman's Home Companion , Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal . While she initially only wrote about related topics such as etiquette and housekeeping, over time she specialized in subjects such as the liberal arts , the Orient and women's rights . She was an active feminist, which was reflected in her first bestseller, How Women May Earn a Living (1900). In it she stated how a woman could get along without the support of a man. Having lived in the small town of Guthrie , Oklahoma for several years , her second work, An Oklahoma Romance (1901), was about the benefits of settling in Oklahoma. Her interest in interior design was first reflected in her book The Tapestry Book (1912), which became her most commercially successful book.

After settling in Washington , Candee became one of the city's most famous interior decorators. Her customer base included US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and US President Theodore Roosevelt . Her book Decorative Styles and Periods , published in 1906, embodied Candee's sense of decorative style elements: It is evidence of thorough historical research and absolute authenticity. In 1913, she was one of five women who led a suffragette march on horses in Washington under the motto “Votes for Women”.

During her time in Washington, Candee was very socially and socially active and served on several boards. She also came into contact with the Democratic Party . Her circle of friends included politically very different personalities such as the liberal presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan or the ultra-conservative First Lady Helen Taft . They also had a long friendship with Theodore Roosevelt and his wife Edith . In 1909 she advised the architect Nathan C. Wyeth on the renovation of the west wing of the White House .

Titanic

In the spring of 1912, Candee traveled through Europe to research her book The Tapestry Book . Meanwhile, she received a telegram from her daughter Edith informing her that her son Harold had been injured in a traffic accident . Candee therefore went on April 10, 1912 in Cherbourg as a passenger on board the RMS Titanic to return home. She occupied a first class cabin. During the trip she was in the company of the artist Francis Davis Millet and Major Archibald Butt , whom she knew from Washington. One of her table mates in the first class dining room was millionaire Hugh Woolner, son of British sculptor and pre-Raphaelite co-founder Thomas Woolner .

When the Titanic sank on the night of April 14th to 15th after an iceberg collision, Candee was put into lifeboat No. 6 by three male acquaintances , which the Titanic landed at 0.55 a.m. despite a capacity of 65 people with only 23 people Board left. On board were two male crew members and two male passengers, the rest of the rescued women and children from the first class, including Alice Cleaver , Molly Brown , the suffragette Elsie Bowerman , Andrew Saks ' daughter Leila Meyer and Sigrid Lindström, the niece of the former Swedish Prime Minister Arvid Posse . Candee fell while getting on the boat and broke her ankle . Before boarding, she gave the architect Edward Kent a gold-rimmed ivory cameo from her mother, believing that it would be safer with him.

She was one of the women in boat no. 6 who wanted to row back to the sinking site after the sinking to rescue swimmers from the freezing water. The commandant of the boat, helmsman Robert Hichens , refused to do so. Together with the other survivors, Candee was taken to New York on board the Cunard steamer RMS Carpathia . Edward Kent was killed in the sinking. His body was found and the cameo was sent to Candee. After the accident, she gave the Washington Herald a short interview about her experiences and a detailed report appeared in Collier's Weekly . Because of her ankle injury, Candee had to use a walker for almost a year.

Late work

During the First World War , Candee worked for the Italian Red Cross in Rome and Milan . One of her patients in Milan was Ernest Hemingway . She was honored by the Red Cross for her services. After the war, she traveled through Japan , China , Indonesia and Cambodia . On some of these trips she was accompanied by her son, with whom she explored the jungle on the back of an elephant . She later traveled to these regions with a friend, the illustrator Lucille Douglas .

These trips inspired her two books, Angkor, the Magnificent (1924) and New Journeys in Old Asia (1927). For these two works Candee was awarded by the government of French Indochina and the King of Cambodia. She was also invited to give a reading of Angkor, the Magnificent at Buckingham Palace to King George V and Queen Mary .

Angkor, the Magnificent was the first English-language study of the temple complex Angkor Wat in the region of Angkor in Cambodia , which is a major national symbol and is among the bemerkenswertesten temples in the world. Until then largely unknown in Western cultures, Angkor, the Magnificent laid one of the foundations for later tourism in Cambodia. The success of the book and its successor, New Journeys in Old Asia, earned Candee a second career as a lecturer and reporter on the Far East . She also became a member of the learned society India Society in London and the organization Les Amis de l'Orient in Paris . Their journalistic activities, however, decreased. In the early 1920s she was briefly editor of Arts & Decorations in Paris.

In 1925, Helen Candee was among the nine founding members of the Society of Woman Geographers. In the mid-1930s, when she was already approaching 80, Candee traveled extensively abroad and wrote reports for National Geographic Magazine . Her two books on interior design, The Tapestry Book and Decorative Styles and Periods , were republished as collector's editions in 1935 and 1938, respectively.

Helen Candee died on August 23, 1949 at the age of 90 "after a short illness" ( New York Times ) in her summer home in York Harbor near York (US state Maine ).

Posthumously

Helen Candee appeared as a supporting role in the novel No Greater Love by Danielle Steel , which has the sinking of the Titanic as a backdrop. In James Cameron's documentary about an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic , Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), Candee was played by the actress Adriana Valdez. The film shows the scene in which Candee walks to the bow of the ship on the evening before the sinking . Candee herself had described this event in one of her reports after the accident. It is said to have inspired the sunset scene with the two main characters Rose and Jack on the bow of the Titanic in Cameron 's movie of the same name .

Several personal items that Candee rescued from aboard the Titanic were auctioned in 2005 and 2006 , including a hip flask and a medallion. Letters and a manuscript were also sold by Candee's heirs. In 2007, her former home in Washington, 1621 New Hampshire Avenue, was bought by the non-profit The Fund of American Studies. In 2008 Angkor, the Magnificent was reissued with a new foreword and some biographical details about the author.

In 2009, Carol Rodley, the newly appointed US Ambassador to Cambodia, presented a gift of Angkor, the Magnificent to Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni on her inaugural visit .

Works

  • Susan Truslow (1900)
  • How Women May Earn a Living (1900)
  • To Oklahoma Romance (1901)
  • Decorative Styles and Periods (1906)
  • The Tapestry Book (1912) digitized
  • Angkor, the Magnificent: The Wonder City of Ancient Cambodia (1924)
  • New Journeys in Old Asia: Indo-China, Siam, Java, Bali (1927)
  • Weaves and Draperies (1931)

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personal data
SURNAME Candee, Helen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hungerford, Helen Churchill (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City , USA
DATE OF DEATH August 23, 1949
Place of death York , York County , Maine , USA