www.montereycountynow.com january 2-8, 2025 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 Mrs. Cherry of the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel is poets Lena Yates, Lena Burton, Emma Yates, Lena Dalkeith and poet/ painter Jeanne D’Orge, a mercurial heroine of this story, an unstoppable force whose life story embodies a bohemian idyll. She was a woman who had a great role in shaping Carmel as a city of arts. In her later years, Mrs. Carl Cherry became an important arts benefactor, whose legacy, now commonly known as The Cherry, still lasts. Despite a troubled private life, Mrs. Cherry is a great example of artistic integrity; she was committed to be herself and reserved her energy not to play a certain societal role, but to practice arts. This red-haired poet, painter, feminist and harpist still surprises as she always did, walking around Carmel in the 1920s in one of her Chinese robes, splattered in paint. Abandoned by her father in early childhood, she always lived as if she had nothing to lose. Her personality was shifty, her urges immense, her interest in arts, poetry, music, visual arts and theater boundless. Did she love arts as much as she loved Carl Cherry, for whom she left her husband and her teenage children? Would she have risked a social scandal and leaving a bohemian life in England’s North Midlands, where she was born and grew up? It is important for Monterey County today to keep Mrs. Cherry in mind, 100 years after she started her life here. She was a staple in the history of bohemian Carmel. Jeanne D’Orge—as we will call her from now on, since that was her ultimate preference—left many treasures behind. The pearl is The Cherry, formerly the Carl Cherry Foundation, a multidisciplinary art venue, where poetry is still read, art is exhibited and music and theater thrive. Lena Yates didn’t like her given name. She had been experimenting with nicknames since childhood in the UK in the 1880s and ’90s when, in letters to her beloved mother, she called herself “Chicken” and “Speckles.” D’Orge’s father was a seed merchant named Walter Yates who disappeared from the picture immediately after she was born. On the contrary, she remained close to her mother and brother all her life. When she got married for the first time, she took her mother along to the U.S. from Europe. According to her friend, puppeteer François Martin, who in 1960 built and owned the Tantamount Theater in Carmel Valley, she eventually chose Jeanne D’Orge as her default artistic pseudonym because she greatly admired Joan d’Arc, another groundbreaking feminist who feared nothing and followed her instinct, the patron Saint of France. Her lover and second husband, inventor Carl Cherry, would always call her “Jan.” D’Orge grew up in Edinburgh, later in nearby Dalkeith—from where one of her nicknames comes from—and had traveled a lot in her youth, including to Paris. In the poems in her volume Voice in the Circle, one can trace her childhood experiences, including visiting a world where, unlike her, other children had a father. In 1900, D’Orge gave birth to a child who was given up for adoption, undoubtedly leaving another trauma that later certainly influenced future decisions in life, also regarding children and maternity. In 1906, while on a walking tour of France, she met Alfred Burton, an American topographer and at some point a dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—and a man 20 years older. They married the same year. While it’s hard to speculate if Alfred Burton filled the void and served as a fatherly figure in her early womanhood (she was 27), at some point, D’Orge told one of her friends that she married Burton because she thought he was a kind man. D’Orge came to the U.S. with her husband and mother. She first arrived in Boston, but D’Orge lived also in New York for a brief time, eventually settling in Carmel in 1920. Children were born, years passed, the marriage ended and somehow a new world of possibility opened: By abandoning her husband and teenage children, D’Orge finally found time to become her full self. It cost her close relationships with her adult children who moved on, picking up studies or living with relatives from Burton’s side of the family. She left for love and it certainly helped that both partners were committed to the same lifestyle. She left to pursue not only love, but also a bohemian lifestyle. While D’Orge had been a writer since she was a child and at the moment she arrived in Carmel, she was already a published poet, but not yet a painter. Only then, after leaving her family, she gained time to become a full-time artist. That was the beginning of the bohemian life of Jeanne D’Orge, now becoming her full self—with all the consequences, pain, hard work and poverty that comes with choosing that kind of path. Robert Reese has served as The Cherry’s executive director since 1987. Mrs. Carl Cherry—more widely known as Jeanne D’Orge throughout her adult life— photographed in her later years. Picnic, circa 1923. From left to right: Alfred Burton, painter William Silva, Jeanne D’Orge, Robinson Jeffers and his twins, Donnan and Garth Jeffers. Daniel Dreifuss Courtesy of Carl Cherry Center for the Arts Courtesy of Carl Cherry Center for the Arts
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==