A Mom-umental Failure

There's arguably a creepy, smothering, borderline-necrophilic tinge to Mother's Day as envisioned by Anna Jarvis. She suggested that the carnation be the symbol of the holiday, as "the carnation does not drop its petals, but hugs them to its heart as it dies, and so, too, mothers hug their children to their hearts, their mother love never dying."

Woodrow Wilson signed Mother's Day into law in 1914, but whatever joy Jarvis felt at her accomplishment was soon overtaken by rage, as the holiday quickly became an excuse for merchants to peddle posies and greeting cards. Jarvis spent the rest of her life trying to undo the damage. She lashed out at sons and daughters who would rather buy a card than write a letter. She formed something called the Mother's Day International Corporation and sued retailers and festival organizers who she felt violated her copyright. Like all good wild-eyed visionaries, she died penniless in a sanitarium. Naturally, she was buried next to her mother.

As for children, she never had any.

SOMETIME EARLY IN 1924, William Clark Noble and Daisy Calhoun met. She'd been kicking around the idea for a mothers' memorial for close to four years but had been unable to get anything built. Now a famous sculptor had shown up in Washington, and not only did he want to build a mother's memorial, too, he had already designed one.

In June, the executive committee of the Woman's Universal Alliance announced that Noble's design had been chosen for the memorial. Having given up the Dean estate, Calhoun had bought an option on 40 acres near Massachusetts Avenue and W Street NW called Clifton, planning to sell bits of it to other investors while keeping the prime spot for the memorial. While the designs that had been halfheartedly contemplated over the previous four years had been fairly simple -- some pillars, some inscribed names, a statue or two -- Noble's creation was something else entirely. It looked as if someone had crammed a library's worth of architecture and sculpture books into a gigantic blender and pushed "puree."

Noble's centerpiece was a white marble arch 297 feet high -- that's three times the height of the Lincoln Memorial -- sitting atop a shallow ziggurat of marble steps as long as a football field. Crowning the arch was a group of figures, including a heroic mother holding the "Torch of Enlightenment" in one hand while offering a just-kindled torch to "Young Manhood" and "Young Womanhood." Bronze panels on either face of the arch featured complicated bas-reliefs. Four tall pedestals surrounded the arch, each topped by an allegorical statue. There were mothers sending sons off to battle, women ministering to injured soldiers, flocks of winged angels, packs of gargoyles spewing water into fountains. Within the arch were meeting and function rooms.

All the monument lacked was a bowling alley and a zeppelin landing strip. Had the Mothers' Memorial been built -- and, no, you haven't missed anything; it wasn't -- it would have made the World War II Memorial look like a highway rest stop marker.

Noble spent the summer of 1924 in his studio at 15th and Euclid streets NW, tinkering with the design and shaping a scale model out of plaster and a similar substance known as compo. A likeness of his memorial was printed in a fundraising brochure. The pamphlet described the monument as: "A tribute to the mothers of the past. A service to the mothers of the present. An inspiration to the mothers of the future." Donors could support the Woman's Universal Alliance at levels ranging from $5 for a "link membership" to $1,000 for a "founder membership."

If money was being raised, however, Noble had yet to see any of it. Despite the announcement that he was the winning designer, he hadn't signed a contract stipulating how much he would be paid and on what sort of timetable. At first, he didn't think he needed to. "She seemed like such a lovely lady," he later said of Calhoun.

By December, Noble was starting to get anxious. Calhoun had advanced him money from her personal account -- she told him she'd hocked a ruby -- but she claimed to be having cash-flow problems of her own. Throughout the winter and spring of 1925, Noble's lawyer drew up contract after contract and tried to determine who at the WUA was actually empowered to sign it.

In April, Noble put aside his Mothers' Memorial work to earn a much needed $1,000 designing a coin for the Guatemalan government. But by June, he had fallen $2,000 behind on the rent for his studio. Still, there was no agreement.

DOES IT DETRACT FROM OUR STORY to suggest that Daisy Calhoun was maybe not the best mother in the world? Is it a case of: Those who can, do; those who can't then spend their lives trying to build a memorial to those who can?

Calhoun seemed to dote on her mother, Josephine Marr Breaux, and her memoir is filled with mentions of the European trips the two took together and the way Josephine comforted Daisy after the deaths of her first two husbands.

As for the brief chapter she titles "The Advent of a Daughter," Calhoun starts the story this way: "The only thing apparently [my husband] Andrew wanted most in his life had up to this time been denied him. We had been married for several years, and his longing for a child had become almost a painful obsession . . . I would willingly have done anything within human power to help bring about the ungratified desire of his life."

His life. Ouch.

Calhoun's daughter, Margaret, eloped when she was about 18. Her secret suitor was a wealthy young Washingtonian named Arthur Drury, whom Calhoun described as "feckless and not suited to business." The marriage didn't last long, and Margaret later married Charles Waring, a Charleston lawyer.

Margaret had children by both men, and the testimony as to what sort of mother her mother was depends on which branch of the family you talk to.

"We never speak poorly of her at all," Andrew Drury, Calhoun's grandson, told me. "My mother absolutely loved Daisy, thought she was an absolute blast, always very affectionate. I never heard of any problems there at all."

The widow of Andrew's half-brother, Charles Waring, has a different memory. "She was a horrible mother," Jane Waring said of Calhoun. "I mean, she was the antithesis of what you'd want for a mother."

Margaret, Jane Waring said, was raised by nannies. "Her mother was always gallivanting around, having her fine ideas. I find the whole [Mothers' Memorial] thing ironic."

Jane Waring summed up her mother-in-law's opinion of Calhoun with an anecdote about a phone call she received from Margaret: "She called me and said: 'Jane, tell your husband to come get the bitch. Daisy fell off the wall. That damn portrait came within inches of killing me.'"

Charles Waring collected the portrait of his grandmother that had almost brained his mother and brought it home.

And what of Noble's relationship with his mother? Well, what maternal attachment can an orphan form? Except he wasn't an orphan. Noble's father died aboard that ship, but his mother, Emma Noble, didn't. She moved to the Maine farm -- her father's farm -- along with Clark and his older brother. She just didn't seem to figure in the well-honed stories the artist told over the years.

Looking back, Calhoun and Noble may not have been the best two people to create that memorial.

IN THE FALL OF 1925, Calhoun announced the launch of a $15 million fund-raising campaign and unveiled yet another memorial design. This one wasn't by Noble but by Joseph Geddes, an architect who had been working with Noble to design the interior spaces of the monument.

Noble had had enough. "Sculptor Wrathfully Quits Motherhood Memorial Drive" read the headline in the Washington Herald on January 27, 1926. Said Noble: "They have ruined my life's work, destroyed my dearest dream, and now I am through."

Noble spent the next three years trying to pry money out of Daisy Calhoun and the Woman's Universal Alliance. On August 7, 1929, it looked as if he was finally going to get paid. He agreed to meet with the Calhouns in his lawyer's office in the Munsey Building at 13th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. A check for $30,000 was produced, and Noble was told it was his if he signed a document agreeing not to publish charges derogatory to the character of the Calhouns.

Noble thought that odd, but he signed. So did his third wife, Emilie, their lawyer, James Bird, and two people who had entered the Nobles' orbit in the previous two years: a businessman named Stephen A. Armstrong and a nurse named Anna Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand was the head of a women's group called the Alma Mater that was supposedly interested in building Noble's design. Washingtonians with a good memory might have recalled she'd once been accused of coercing an elderly woman she was caring for into changing her will, making Hillenbrand the beneficiary.

These, then, were the characters assembled in the conference room when, at a prearranged signal from an undercover officer the Calhouns had brought along ("Quick, get my glasses"), three deputy marshals burst in. Bird, the lawyer, started ripping up the agreement, but a deputy grabbed it from his hands. As Noble and his supporters were arrested for extortion, Daisy Calhoun jumped up and down, clapping her hands and shouting, "We caught you just like mice in a trap."

WHY DO WE LOVE OUR MOTHERS, ANYWAY? And why do our mothers love us? These are questions that science has been asking for years.

If you take an infant rhesus monkey from its mother and give it a choice between a fake mother made out of a bare wire cylinder and a fake mother made out of a cloth-covered wire cylinder, it will prefer the latter. It will cling to the cloth-covered wire model even when the model hits it with a blast of compressed air preceded by a honk from an air horn. "Although the infant monkeys soon learned what to expect, instead of taking evasive action they did just the opposite," wrote psychiatrist John Bowlby in his classic treatise "Attachment and Loss." "They clasped the model with increased vigour and so received on face and belly a blast of maximum intensity."

Evolutionarily speaking, we love our mother because, despite her faults and frailties, she is our best hope for security. We cling to her because she keeps us from being carried off in the night by a leopard. And our mother loves us because we are the future, the only way her genes can live on. She doesn't think in those terms, of course, but she reacts -- physically, chemically -- to the warm touch of our unblemished skin, the soft penumbra of our fuzzy newborn head.

But what about when we're no longer cute and cuddly and our mother's hormonal maternal frenzy has subsided? What about when we're old enough to fend off leopards on our own and we don't need our mother? There's no evolutionary mandate for us to stay in touch. But who knows us better than our mothers? And who has a bigger investment in how we turn out? What pair of humans are linked quite so inextricably, for better or worse?

THE TRIAL STARTED ON MAY 8, 1931, before Justice Jesse Adkins in the District's Criminal Court No. 3. In his opening statement, assistant U.S. attorney Irvin Goldstein said he would prove that Noble and his codefendants had concocted a plan to extort from the Calhouns sums ranging from $30,000 to $300,000. He called as his first witness Daisy Calhoun, who testified that in July 1929 Noble's associate Hillenbrand told her that the sculptor possessed information about Calhoun's private life and character that would "shake the capital" if made public.

Daisy Calhoun was an entertaining witness, frequently provoking eruptions of laughter in the courtroom. When asked by a defense attorney if she had in fact written a letter praising Noble's work, she responded, "Well, you know what a woman will do to encourage a man to work." At another point in her cross-examination, she turned to the judge and said, "Does a poor little woman like me have to submit to being picked to pieces by each of those great lawyers?"

Adkins said she did, though he hoped the attorneys would not "avail themselves of the opportunity."

Calhoun maintained that Noble's design had been for "illustrative purposes only" and that the Woman's Universal Alliance never made a legal commitment to build his memorial. She spent three days outlining the alleged plot against her and parrying defense attorneys' questions. When she finally left the witness stand, she crowed, "They've been trying to break me down for three days, and they've failed."

During his testimony, Clarence Calhoun said that Noble's design had never really worked and that the sculptor was reluctant to make the radical changes necessary. He said it would have been "criminal" to pay Noble the money he was demanding. Clarence Calhoun admitted that the expenditures of the Woman's Universal Alliance far exceeded its receipts. It had spent $100,000, and the only thing erected so far was a 4-by-5-foot pyramid topped by an American flag.

The defense seemed fixated on the Calhouns' finances, and it became clear why when the substance of Noble's alleged blackmail threat was revealed: The Calhouns had allegedly diverted to their own use millions of dollars belonging to the Woman's Universal Alliance.

Emilie Noble testified that Daisy Calhoun told her she had never intended to build the Mothers' Memorial -- that it was all a scam. There was the hint that the Calhouns had used the donations to buy Braemar Forest, the 100-acre woodland they'd purchased in Chevy Chase. Daisy's plans for the Clifton estate had fallen through, and Clarence had donated five acres of Braemar Forest to Daisy's group for the memorial. But all that had been built was the Calhouns' 30-room mansion. Dubbed "Rossdhu" and patterned after a Scottish castle, it was the third house Daisy had designed.

Noble took the stand a few days after his wife did. He was 73, in ill health and had suffered through the previous two days with chest pains. But he elicited as many laughs as his accuser. He claimed that Calhoun wanted one of the memorial's sculptural groups replaced with a 50-foot statue of herself seated on a throne.

"I told her that was too much Calhoun," Noble testified.

Of another encounter with Calhoun, he noted: "Mrs. Calhoun said her husband is a Southerner and shoots to kill. She said if I tried to collect my debt from her, he would shoot me. I told her if he came to my house with a pistol, I'd punch it down his neck, and that, anyhow, he didn't look like he'd carry a very big gun."

He was still the fighting art student.

The trial lasted nearly a month. Finally on Friday, May 29, the defense rested. When the court gathered on the following Monday, the judge had a surprise: He announced there was insufficient evidence to prove the defendants' guilt. They were all free to go.

Noble took one step toward his attorney, spun on his heels, and collapsed from a heart attack.

WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING WITH YOUR MOTHER TODAY, it will not involve a trip to the Mothers' Memorial. The publicity from the blackmail trial and the financial woes of the Depression, along with a pronounced coolness from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, ensured that it would not join Washington's skyline.

Did Calhoun dupe her donors and pocket the Mothers' Memorial money? That's impossible to say. She was never charged with a crime. She may merely have been guilty of having grandiose plans but no ability to pull them off.

The Scottish-style castle the Calhouns built in Chevy Chase proved too expensive to maintain. A year after the trial, they converted it into a restaurant. It was torn down in the 1950s to make way for new houses. Only the turreted gatehouse on Woodbine Street remains, a fanciful structure that is now a private home.

Clarence Calhoun died in 1938. Daisy Calhoun promised to publish another memoir recounting how she had been "prey for many of the scoundrels and racketeers that infest Washington." She never did, though her cookbook, Favorite Recipes of a Famous Hostess, proved popular. She moved back to Charleston in 1948 and died there the following year at age 85. Her obituaries did not mention the Mothers' Memorial.

The dramatic heart attack in the courtroom didn't kill Noble. He lived another seven years, but his art career never recovered. His last major commission, a memorial to Pierre L'Enfant, was never built. He died in 1938 and was buried in an unmarked grave in South Gardiner, Maine. In 2000, Maine writer and historian Gay Grant raised money for a headstone. She says the statue atop the Maine Capitol building is Noble's greatest work. As for the Mothers' Memorial: "Thank God it was never built is all I can say."

For, really, did we ever need an avalanche of limestone and bronze to prove that we love our mothers? Shouldn't we just try to be the children they hoped we'd be all those years ago: courteous of manner and clean of underwear? And today, shouldn't we just call them up or take their hands and say those words they long to hear: "Thank you, Mom. Happy Mother's Day."

Metro section columnist John Kelly is spending the year at Oxford University. His blog is at www.voxford.blogspot.com.