After returning from World War I, Harry attended Harvard under an accelerated program for veterans. Harry's mother invited Mrs. Richard Rogers Peabody (née Mary Phelps Jacob) to chaperone Harry and some of his friends at a picnic on July 4, 1920, including dinner and a trip to the amusement park at Nantasket Beach. During dinner, Harry never spoke to the girl on his left, breaking decorum. By some accounts, Harry fell in love with Mrs. Peabody in about two hours, confessing his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park. Two weeks later they went to church together in Manchester-by-the-Sea and spent the night together. Their public relationship was the gossip of blue-blood Boston.
She was 28, six years older than Harry, with two small children, and married. No matter what Harry tried, Polly would not divorce Richard and marry him. Harry took a job in Boston at the Shawmut National Bank, a job he disliked, and took the train to visit Polly in New York. In May 1921, when Polly would not respond to his demands, Harry threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him. Polly's husband Richard Peabody was in and out of sanitariums several times fighting alcoholism. In June 1921, she formally separated from him. Later that winter, Polly accepted weekend visits from Harry, who would take the midnight train home to Boston afterward. In December, Polly's husband Richard offered to divorce her, and in February 1922, the marriage was legally ended.
After eight months at the Shawmut National Bank, Harry got drunk for six days and resigned from on March 14, 1922. Polly intervened with Harry's uncle, J. P. Morgan, Jr., who agreed to provide a position for Harry in Paris at Morgan, Harjes et Cie. Harry already spoke and read fluent French and moved to Paris in May. Polly preceded him there but in July, angry and jealous, returned to the United States. On September 2, 1922, Harry proposed to Polly via transatlantic cable, and the next day bribed his way aboard the
Aquitania for New York which made a weekly six-day express run to New York.
Polly and Harry marry
On September 9, 1922 Harry and Polly were married in the Municipal Building in New York City, and two days later they re-boarded the
RMS Aquitania and moved with her children to Paris, France. There they joined the Lost Generation of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the loss of life in World War I and the moral and social values of their parents' generation. Harry continued his work at Morgan, Harjes et Cie, the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. They found an apartment overlooking the Seine, at the Quai d'Orleans on the Ile Saint-Louis, and Polly would don her red bathing suit and row Harry down the Quai d'Orléans in his dark business suit, formal hat, umbrella and briefcase to the Place de la Concorde where he would walk the last few blocks to the bank on Place Vendôme. As she rowed back home, Polly, who was well-endowed, would enjoy whistles, jeers and waves from workmen. She said the exercise was good for her breasts.
Harry barely tolerated Polly's children. After their first year in Paris, her eight year old son Billy was shipped off to Le Rosay, an elite boarding school in Gstaad. At the end of 1923, Harry quit Morgan, Harjes et Cie and devoted himself to the life of a poet, and later, publisher. Polly would attempt to create a family Christmas each year, if only in a hotel, but Harry regularly boycotted these events, making it clear that he would be looking for flirtations instead.
Life as expatriates
Both of them were attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of the artists gathering in Montparnasse. Even by the wild standards of Paris in the 1920s, Harry was in a league of his own. The couple lived a hedonistic and decadent life, including an open marriage and numerous affairs. Harry was a gambler and a womanizer; he drank "oceans of champagne" and used opium, cocaine, and hashish. They wrote a mutual suicide pact, and carried cremation instructions with them.
His inheritance, multiplied by the favorable exchange rate the American dollar enjoyed in postwar Europe, allowed them to indulge in an extravagant expatriate lifestyle. Harry's trust fund provided them with US$12,000 a year (or $}} in today's dollars). Still, Harry repeatedly overdrew his account at State Street Trust in Boston and at Morgan, Harjes, in Paris, which in blue-blood Boston was like writing graffiti on the front door of a church. He would wire his father to put more money from his inheritance into his account. His father complied but not without rebuking his son for his spendthrift ways. In 1929, Harry sent a drunken cable home to his father, an investment banker, which did not please his father:
PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LIVE A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE
Polly and Harry purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then two more in April 1925. At the end of 1924, Harry persuaded Polly to formally change her first name to Caresse, as he felt Polly was too prim and proper for his wife.
In 1924, they rented an apartment in the Fauberg St. Germaine for six months from Princess Marthe Bibesco, a friend of Harry's cousin Walter Berry, for fifty thousand francs (the equivalent of $2,200, about $}} in today's dollars. When they moved in, they brought with them "two maids and a cook, a governess, and a chauffeur."
Lifestyle
Harry and Polly rented a fashionable apartment on 19, Rue de Lille on November 19. They became known for hosting small dinner parties from their giant bed in their palatial townhouse on Quai d'Orsay, and afterward everyone was invited to enjoy their huge bathtub together, taking advantage of iced bottles of champagne near at hand.
They took extended traveling tours. In January 1925 they traveled to North Africa where they first smoked opium, a habit to which they would return again and again. Harry had tattoos on the soles of his feet - a cross on one and a pagan sun symbol on the other.
Harry developed a obsessive fascination with imagery centering on the sun. Harry's poetry and journals often focused on the sun, a symbol to him of perfection, enthusiasm, freedom, heat, and destruction. Crosby claimed to be a "sun worshiper in love with death." He often added a doodle of a "black sun" to his signature which also included an arrow, jutting upward from the "y" in Crosby’s last name and aiming toward the center of the sun’s circle: "a phallic thrust received by a welcoming erogenous zone."
Crosby met Ernest Hemingway on a skiing trip to Gstaad in 1926. In July 1927 Crosby and Hemingway visited Pamplona for the running of the bulls. Hemingway wrote that "H. could drink us under the table." Harry and Caresse published the Paris edition of Hemingway's
The Torrents of Spring.
In early 1928 they traveled to the Middle East, visiting a number of countries. Later in the year they secured a 20 year lease on a medieval mill outside of Paris in Ermenonville, France, for living quarters, which they named "Le Moulin du Soleil" ("The Mill of the Sun"). There they hosted wild parties, including drunken polo on donkeys, and entertained famous guests like Salvador Dali. He would spend hours sunbathing naked atop the mill's turret. Contrary to fashion of the day, Harry would not wear a hat. He often wore a black carnation in his lapel, and was known to color his finger- and toenails. Harry once hired four horse-drawn carriages and raced them through the Paris streets. He would frequently drop in at Drosso where he would smoke opium. He would stay away from home for days.
Harry experimented with photography and saw the medium as a viable art form before it was widely accepted as such. In 1929, Crosby met Henri Cartier-Bresson at Le Bourget, where Cartier-Bresson's air squadron commandant had placed him under house arrest for hunting without a license. Crosby persuaded the officer to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days. They found they both had an interest in photography, and they spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby's home, Le Moulin du Soleil.
Harry also learned to fly solo in November, 1929 when the aeroplane was so new that its spelling had not been agreed upon.
Extra-marital relationships
In 1923, shortly after their arrival in Paris, Caresse introduced Harry to her friend Constance Coolidge, with whom he immediately began an open sexual relationship. In Morocco during one of their trips to North Africa, Harry and Caresse took a 13-year-old dancing girl named Zora to bed with them. His seductive abilities became legendary in some social circles in Paris, and he engaged in a series of ongoing affairs, maintaining relationships with a variety of beautiful and doting young women.
In July 1925, he met a fourteen year old girl named "Nubile." He slept with a 13-year-old Berber girl in North Africa and a young Arab boy in Jerusalem. His wildness was in full flower during the drunken orgies of the annual Four Arts Balls (
Bal des Quatz' Arts). One year, Caresse showed up topless riding a baby elephant and wearing a turquoise wig. The motif for the ball that year was Inca, and Harry dressed for the occasion, covering himself in red ocher and wearing nothing but a loincloth and a necklace of dead pigeons.
Embracing the open sexuality offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse, Henri Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her that lasted until 1931.