# At 48 West Tenth (memories of Juliet Thompson)

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-19 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Marzieh Gail, At 48 West Tenth (memories of Juliet Thompson), Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1983, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> At 48 West Tenth (memories of Juliet Thompson)
> 
> Marzieh Gail
> published in The Diary of Juliet Thompson
> 
> Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1983
> 
> Contents Chapter 2
> 
> At 48 West Tenth
> 
> by Marzieh Gail
> 
> Whether or not General Tom Thumb (Barnum's midget, and at
> the start of his career twenty-five inches long, weighing in at fifteen pounds)
> ever owned the Greenwich Village brownstone where Juliet and Daisy (Marguerite
> Pumpelly Smyth) lived so many years, we do not know. At the time when we knew
> the place, Daisy was renting it from Romeyne Benjamin, brother of Dorothy
> Benjamin who married Enrico Caruso.
> 
> Like its fellows in the row, it was narrow and high, with black railings to
> either side of the front steps, other steps leading down to a long basement
> room, and a strip of garden in back. Inside, up from the front hall, narrow
> stairs hugged the wall on your right.
> 
> The old house, painted light blue when we last saw it, long after the inmates
> loved by us were gone, might well have been the wealthy midget's, as Juliet was
> inclined to believe: it was just such a place.
> 
> When Daisy asked 'Abdu'l-Bahá how to live, He said, "Be kind to
> everyone," and Daisy was. The house was a haven for a motley crowd. Here,
> Daisy's brother Raphael told me he had once, during the Depression, left his
> bed briefly in the night, and returned to find a sailor in it, complete with
> live parrot. Here, at one given time, in an upstairs room Dimitri Marianoff,
> Einstein's former son-in-law, who had become a Bahá'í, was
> writing a book on Táhirih, while Juliet was revising her I, Mary
> Magdalene on a lower floor and I, at ground level, refugeeing from the
> family apartment uptown, was finishing Persia and
> 
> the Victorians. Here Daisy, like Juliet a fine artist,
> sat among their many guests at the firesides. Usually inaccessibly vague,
> Daisy would from time to time utter a great truth. Once when her cat
> unsheathed its claws and raked delicate upholstery, Daisy spoke: "Cats are
> more fun than furniture," she said.
> 
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been all over the house. His living presence had
> blessed it all. In a dark corner of Juliet's whispering old studio stood a
> fragile armchair of black oak--it would later be willed by her to Vincent
> Pleasant--surprisingly small, with a cord across it, none ever to sit in it
> again, the chair of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. He loved her studio room. He said it
> was eclectic, part oriental, part occidental, and that He would like to build a
> similar one.
> 
> Here, Juliet had read in manuscript the books of her friend and neighbour
> Kahlil Gibran. Here she had struggled with her love for Percy Grant. Here, by
> my time, we talked a little about the land in Chiriqui which (such is my memory
> of it) Lincoln had helped her father, Ambrose White Thompson, his close friend,
> to acquire. A rich tract of land in northern Panama it was, and Juliet
> believed that somewhere in Colombia, which then owned the area, a government
> building had burned down, and all the relevant documents about the property had
> gone up in flames.
> 
> After her father's death, Juliet and her mother were poor. Juliet could, of
> course, have married money. Many men sought, as they used to say, her hand.
> Two prominent Bahá'ís who proposed to her were John Bosch and Roy
> Wilhelm. Come to that, Mason, Admiral Remey's son, whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá
> wished her to marry, was not a poor man. Juliet told me that in those days
> Mason had
> 
> grown a red beard, and as they sat together he would talk of the
> children they would have, and Juliet would visualize, floating in the air about
> her, the Remey babies, each with a small red beard.
> 
> Mostly, we discussed the progress or lack thereof of our Bahá'í
> community in New York and the nation at large, and one day we decided that what
> our Faith most needed in America was the qualities of George Townshend.
> Immediately, we determined to cable the Guardian and ask him to send us George
> Townshend--a pre-eminent Bahá'í who was the former Canon of St.
> Patrick's cathedral in Dublin and Archdeacon of Clonfert--to travel nation-wide
> and teach. Far from ignoring our doubtless brash suggestion, the Guardian at
> once replied, with a radiogram received 19 February 1948:
> 
> JULIET MARZIA 48 WEST 10TH STREET NEW YORK
> 
> REGRET TOWNSHEND'S EFFORTS DUBLIN VITALLY NEEDED
> 
> SIX YEAR PLAN LOVE SHOGHI.
> 
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá teaches that we must never "belittle the thought of
> another" (Bahá'í Administration, p. 22), and although
> Shoghi Effendi was carrying the whole Bahá'í world on his back,
> he did not belittle ours, and he took the time to answer.
> 
> Once, when the powers that be were making life difficult for me in another
> city, Juliet wrote them a letter in my favour. To this, there was no reply.
> What status did Juliet have? She was only one, the Master said, that future
> queens would envy, only one who would be remembered long after the rest of us
> were gone and forgotten.
> 
> She was always a rebel. She did not hesitate to speak well of the Germans
> during World War I, and to exhibit the Kaiser's picture on her living room
> table. Something like setting up a statue of Herod in a cathedral, at the
> 
> time. In later years, she decided to rewrite I, Mary Magdalen
> and make Judas a certain leading individual who afterward lived on to
> receive great honours in our Faith.
> 
> Juliet was a Celt, from a long line of early bards, and she was kin to Edward
> Fitzgerald, of the Rubaiyat. Her Irishness did not, apparently, extend
> to that country's religion. She told me that when her father was dying, he was
> by chance in the hands of the nuns, and they moved about, seeing to it that
> Extreme Unction (as it was then called) was duly administered, while her
> non-Catholic mother wrung her hands. Reassuring, the moribund raised his head
> and said: "Never mind, Celeste, it doesn't amount to a damn."
> 
> Rebels are valuable, but they are not always right. Once, contrary to
> everyone's advice, Juliet's strong feelings about an individual led her and
> Daisy astray. She made us all come to the man's talks, or rather talk, which
> was always about love. We got so we hated love. "No wonder he advocates
> love," was Harold Gail's comment, "look what it's done for him." It had
> certainly given him Juliet and Daisy, and only later on did they see the
> light--the light being that his main interest seemed to be Daisy's bank
> account.
> 
> As the Guardian once commented, our World Order is founded on justice, not
> love. Our governing institutions are Houses of justice, not love.
> 
> The man did bring many to hear about love at Juliet's, which used to remind me
> of Romeyne Benjamin's gloomy prophecy, that the ceilings would fall in.
> 
> It was the unconventional, rebel quality in Juliet--this, plus her sympathy and
> true love--that attracted so many to her, particularly the young. All ages,
> 
> sexes, skin colours, and degrees of wealth and servitude, used to
> foregather at 48 West Tenth. Her name was, incidentally, in the New York
> Social Register, along with her brother's--"but I am only there as a junior,"
> she laughed.
> 
> This unconventional quality of hers, frightening to any establishment, appealed
> to the Guardian, as it had to the Master before him. We remember writing to
> the Guardian once, about a town where the activity was barely detectable, and
> he replied that the situation was due to "the lethargy and conservatism of
> certain elements in the community."
> 
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá praised Juliet repeatedly for her absolute truthfulness.
> On her second pilgrimage, when the Guardian asked her, "Do you like the
> (Wilmette) Temple?" She answered: "No, it looks like a wedding cake." She
> added, relaying the conversation to me: "We used to call it 'Mrs True's
> church.'" (Mrs Corinne True, later a Hand of the Faith, was known as "the
> Mother of the Temple.") She said Mason Remey withdrew his design, in favour of
> Louis Bourgeois', although each received the same number of votes.
> 
> Needless to add, the ethereal, lacy, floating House of Worship at Wilmette does
> not look like a wedding cake, but Juliet had an opinion and she voiced it.
> "Let us remember," the Text says, "that at the very root of the Cause lies the
> principle of the undoubted right of the individual to self-expression, his
> freedom to declare his conscience and set forth his views."
> (Bahá'í Administration, p. 54).
> 
> We read in her diary of the Master's telling Juliet "a thing so wonderful" that
> she could not repeat it. In after years she confided to Bahá'í
> pioneer Bill Smits what that
> 
> thing was. "You are nearer to me than anyone here,"
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá had said, "because you have told me the truth." Asked what
> He meant by " here," she said, "Oh, New York, the United States--I don't
> know."
> 
> This diary we have here is not the original, longhand one. She destroyed that.
> She was essentially a private person and all those secrets have blown away.
> This diary is the core of the original: she kept whatever she wanted posterity
> to have, sat up in bed with the portable on her knees and typed it herself. I
> was one of (necessarily) few to receive a carbon, and mine has some of her own
> hand-written notes in the margin. Some years afterward I had the carbon
> professionally typed for the National Spiritual Assembly, but years later it
> could not be discovered in their files. Also, Philip Sprague mimeographed
> parts of it, but where that material is, we do not know.
> 
> Still more years later, when Harold and I were back from Europe and living in
> New Hampshire, I became aware that with so few copies in the world it might be
> lost forever, and consulting with fellow Bahá'ís we had xeroxes
> made, so it would stay safe. Meanwhile someone--was it Daisy?--had brought out
> a handsome booklet, printed by the Roycrofters, East Aurora, New York, and
> titled 'Abdu'l-Bahá's First Days in America, From the Diary of Juliet
> Thompson. It bears no date or copyright, is forty pages long and contains
> only excerpts: a teaser, as it were.
> 
> The truth seems to be that during her lifetime the Bahá'ís in
> charge of publishing did not cotton to the dairy. "Too personal," they said.
> They probably meant that there was too much love in it. We understand this,
> but we note that the mass of the believers were always eager for it. Here was
> a woman blessed as perhaps no
> 
> other occidental Bahá'í was blessed. Not only was she
> received by 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the Holy Land, in Switzerland and the
> eastern United States, but she had an artist's eye and a writer's pen, and
> thus, better perhaps than any, she was able to evoke those so often
> irretrievable days and hours.
> 
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá prophesied of her that: "In the time to come, queens will
> wish they had been the maid of Juliet." Certainly she received priceless
> opportunities, and proved adequate to her good fortune.
> 
> Love is not blind, it is "quick-eyed," George Herbert said.
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá likened Juliet to Mary Magdalene because she loved, and
> saw, so much. She had that same storied love that Mary had--that love which
> after all is the only thing that holds the Bahá'ís together, or
> for that matter holds the Lord to His creatures, or keeps the stars in their
> courses.
> 
> She says here that one early morning (on that breathless, ecstatic,
> tear-drenched pilgrimage) she gave up her will, made over her desires and her
> life to the Will of God, and saw how, when we are able to do that, "the design
> takes perfect shape." Then peace comes, she says, and "beauty undreamed of
> blossoms upon our days."
> 
> Again she tells how the Master once gathered the American pilgrims
> together--they being symbols of all--and said He hoped that a great and
> ever-growing love would be established among them. He knew that their one main
> desire was to live in His presence, and He told them how this could be done.
> 
> "The more," He said, "you love one another, the nearer you get to me. I go
> away from this world, but Love stays always."
> 
> Juliet's death notice in the New York Times says that she was born in
> New York, but the jacket to her book, I, Mary Magdalene,
> undoubtedly more to be trusted, has her a Virginian by birth, and brought
> up in Washington, D.C.
> 
> She was a cult figure. People became possessive about her, regarded her as
> theirs and only grudgingly doled her out. This was particularly true of Helen
> James, who came from the Caribbean area and was a long-time companion. I can
> remember Helen angrily barring the door to me one day, when Juliet was sick.
> It did not bother me too much--I knew from mythology that dragons guard
> treasures. Then there was another time when I had prevailed on a man to come
> over to the Village all the way from Brooklyn, and record Juliet's voice as she
> read from her diary. (On wire, it was. The business was new then.) And Helen
> tried, in the midst of it, to break in from the other room and let in even more
> noise, besides what was already being reproduced from the traffic on West
> Tenth.
> 
> You can say for Helen that she was a true friend to Juliet, and faithful. One
> mid-day, years after all this, as Juliet lay in her bed, it seems that she
> looked up at Helen and asked, "Do you want to come with me, and be with
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá?"
> 
> "No," Helen told her, "I am not ready yet."
> 
> And then, as she watched, she saw Juliet die. It was 4 December 1956. They
> had moved by then, the Times said, to 129 East Tenth. I was glad that she did
> not die at number 48.
> 
> The Guardian's cable, received by Daisy Smyth on December 7, said "DEEPLY
> GRIEVED" and "HER REWARD
> 
> ASSURED." To the National Spiritual Assembly he cabled, "DEPLORE
> LOSS," and he directed that a memorial gathering be held for her in the House
> of Worship. In this cable among other praises he referred to her "IMPERISHABLE
> MEMORY," said that she was "FIRED WITH ... CONSUMING DEVOTION" to the Centre of
> Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant, and called her "MUCH LOVED, GREATLY
> ADMIRED ... OUT-STANDING EXEMPLARY HANDMAID [OF] 'ABDU'L-BAHá."
> 
> __________
> 
> 48 West Tenth Street was a house dedicated to 'Abdu'l-Bahá.
> Often when you were let in the front door, you heard His voice--the recorded,
> spontaneous chant made in 1912--loudly reverberating through the rooms.
> 
> One day Juliet took Robert Gulick and me up the street to the corner of Fifth
> Avenue, and we entered the beautiful Church of the Ascension that had once been
> Percy Grant's pride before his ruin, and she showed us exactly where
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá stood, delivering His first American public address on 14
> April 1912.
> 
> He came out of the vestry on the right, just as the choir burst into "Jesus
> lives." He sat in the Bishop's chair--which broke the nineteenth canon of the
> Church, for the unbaptized may not go behind the chancel rail. The red plush
> chair with its high back was still there, just as it had been that other day,
> although no flame burned on the altar then. When He spoke as you looked past
> the low steps to the altar, He was on the right, and He stood on the fifth
> flagstone.
> 
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá had told Juliet she must either break with Percy Grant or
> marry him. She had broken with him. Percy had arranged this meeting for the
> Master as a peace offering to Juliet. From this very pulpit, to win Juliet
> away from her Faith, he had often inveighed
> 
> against the decadent East, had even denounced "the
> Bahá'í sect," but today he had filled the church with lilies and
> arranged for One from the East, and Head of the Bahá'ís, to
> speak.
> 
> Juliet said that she used, in her story of Mary Magdalene (whom, as
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá remarked in the diary, she even physically resembled) many
> things she learned from the Master himself. This book has inclined many a
> heart toward our Faith, and Stanwood Cobb considered it "one of the most
> graphic and lofty delineations of Christ ever made in literature."
> 
> She illustrated her story with portraits, three of them: one haloed, of the
> Master's face; Mary wears Juliet's face, they being look-alikes; and the
> handsome lover, Novatus, wears the face of Percy Grant. She was a serious
> artist, frequently exhibited, and a member of the National Arts Club. She had
> studied at the Corcoran Art School, then at Julien's in Paris, and with Kenneth
> Hayes Miller in New York.
> 
> During the Coolidge era, Juliet's beauty and social background, along with her
> artistic gifts, carried her into the White House. (It is interesting to note
> how many Bahá'ís have been received at the White House, all the
> way from 'Alí Qulí Khán and Florence, and Laura
> Barney, in the early days to moderns like Robert Hayden and Dizzie Gillespie).
> Juliet was there to make a portrait of Mrs Coolidge, incidentally one of the
> most popular of First Ladies.
> 
> "The President came in to watch," said Juliet, "chewing on an apple, and I told
> Mrs Coolidge I could not put up with that."
> 
> The portrait she did of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, described here in the diary, no
> longer exists, except in a photograph.
> 
> Time-damaged, it had to be restored, and Juliet felt the original was
> gone forever. The Kinneys maintained that He did like it because He said it
> made Him look old. 'Abdu'l-Bahá greatly encouraged her art, and told
> her it was the same as worship, but toward the end she no longer cared to go on
> with it, nor even cared for her once-loved New York as it had become, and all
> she wanted to do was teach the Faith.
> 
> Sometimes Juliet and Marjorie would recline at the top of Juliet's large bed,
> while Daisy and I would sit on chairs at the foot. The sooty warm spring air
> would blow in from the little back garden, down where Rebecca--a statue picked
> up by Romeyn Benjamin--stood scanning the horizon, endlessly waiting on her
> pedestal, left hand to brow. It was one such time when the conversation
> centred on Percy Grant, that dramatic preacher who, in our view, certainly
> merits a biographer, not only for his small role in our Faith but because he
> represents so much of New York history at the century's turn.
> 
> "Poor Julie. How long did you love him?" I asked.
> 
> "Seventeen years, darn it." (In those days it went without saying that the
> love was Platonic.)
> 
> And that is how, reinforced by Marjorie, Juliet told me how things turned out
> for Percy Grant. Significantly, his end is relegated in the dairy to a
> footnote. The story of it goes like this:
> 
> Grant was--as 'Abdu'l-Bahá remarked to 'Alí Qulí
> Khán, comparing the popular society clergyman to his disadvantage
> with the fine Unitarian minister, Howard Ives--a womanizer. (Here,
> 'Abdu'l-Bahá used a graphic Persian word.) His remark was prompted by
> the fact that, as they were leaving the church by a side door, they
> accidentally encountered the rector with a woman in his
> 
> embrace. Later the Master, father to daughter, even more graphically
> but in other words, warned Juliet to the same effect. And in the long run, it
> is of note that finally a woman toppled Grant down.
> 
> She was a Cuban--descended beauty of great wealth, whose luxurious car would be
> seen outside Grant's rectory by day and night. She had a dead-white face with
> bright, red-painted lips, and was a given to wearing evening gowns which did
> not hide the fact one breast had been completely removed, while the other
> remained without flaw. No intellectual, she was what Marjorie called
> "eruditized" by her association with famous artists and scholars.
> 
> Wherever Percy Grant went, she went, gazing up at him as he towered over her,
> and calling him "Little Rector." Without his knowledge, she spent $60,000
> redoing his house. When she had their engagement announced in the Paris
> Herald, his only comment for the press was: No comment.
> 
> Next, she sensed that Percy was unfaithful--it was his chambermaid this
> time-put detectives on his trail, and turned over their findings to the
> vestrymen (the Episcopal administrative body) of his church. On a given
> Sunday, when Grant was scheduled to preach, they forced him to resign, and took
> down his name.
> 
> He was also required to pay back the $60,000, which wiped him out, and at that
> time Juliet went about among the parishioners, collecting funds to help. Most
> of the press, except for the Times, was brutal, she said. No church but one,
> Guthrie's, St. Mark's in the Bowery, would let him preach. In any case, the
> words would not come any more.
> 
> As to the woman, she lived on, constantly under the
> 
> surgeon's knife, constantly giving sumptuous dinner parties at which
> all she herself could eat was a little rice from a silver bowl--meanwhile
> assuring the guests that this was simply the best way of maintaining her (slim
> and lovely) shape.
> 
> At the very last meeting Percy and Juliet ever had--it was in a drug store, and
> the conversation languished--she asked herself how she could ever have loved
> him.
> 
> __________
> 
> With her final moments in the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Juliet
> brings her diary to a close.
> 
> On 5 December 1912, the ship sailed away, taking the Master out of this
> hemisphere for always. Physically, He would be unobtainable now. That was the
> last, sad day when He uttered His final spoken words to America, words in time
> to be read by millions, then heard by only a few. Florence
> Khánum remembered only four automobiles coming to the pier, she
> and 'Alí Qulí Khán being in the second one. These
> two believers, as well as Juliet, although they could not know it that day,
> would never look upon His earthly face again.
> 
> Juliet tells how, aboard the Celtic, more and more Bahá'ís
> crowded into the Master's cabin, and how they all went above to a spacious
> lounge. There, 'Alí Qulí Khán translating (as the
> Star of the West reports, giving his Bahá'í name,
> Ishti'ál), the Master paced up and down as He spoke:
> 
> "The earth is ... one home, and all mankind are the children of one father. ...
> Therefore ... we should live together in ... joy. ... God is loving and kind
> to all men, and yet they show the utmost enmity and hatred toward one another.
> ... You have no excuse to bring before God if you fail to live according to
> His command,
>
> — *At 48 West Tenth (memories of Juliet Thompson) (Used by permission of the curator)*