Dan Gregory and Fred Jones

Dan Gregory and Fred Jones are joined in the recollections of Rabo Karabekian as constant companions whose public partnership, private loyalty, and shared death resist an easy label. Gregory is the famous painter; Jones, an old World War I aviator, is repeatedly at his side, driving him, accompanying him socially, and traveling with him. Their relationship is not explained away by the narrative: Rabo insists that they were “men’s men” and not homosexuals, leaving their closeness visible without claiming certainty about its meaning.

Identity and Public Partnership

Rabo remembers Gregory as a compact, commanding figure and likens his appearance to a phrase attributed to W. C. Fields: “a sawed-off Arapahoe.” Beside him were Marilee Kemp and Fred Jones, both seemingly at Gregory’s beck and call. The contrast between the artist’s authority and his companions’ availability gives their group the air of a carefully composed public tableau, though Rabo’s comparison to a Roman emperor with captives in tow is his own interpretation of how they looked.

Jones, rather than Marilee, was the companion Gregory most often displayed in public. Gregory took him to parties and Virginia fox hunts and brought him on cruises aboard the Ararat, his yacht. The recurring image is not of a single social occasion but of Jones accompanying Gregory through different settings, as a familiar presence in the painter’s life and public world.

Rabo marks the relationship’s limits as sharply as its intimacy. He says that he cannot explain it beyond calling the two men “men’s men,” and explicitly rules out homosexuality. The account therefore records a close male bond while refusing to turn its outward signs into a definitive account of private desire. That restraint matters: Gregory and Jones are presented through what they do together and how consistently they appear together, not through a fuller explanation the narrator says he does not possess.

Shared Scenes and Daily Roles

A scene outside the Museum of Modern Art makes the partnership visible in a small, concrete arrangement. On Saint Patrick’s Day in 1936, Gregory’s convertible Cord was caught in traffic near the museum, with Jones at the wheel. A parade was moving north on Fifth Avenue, and the four people—Gregory, Jones, Marilee, and Rabo—were wearing green. Jones’s place at the steering wheel put him in a practical role beside Gregory, but the scene also recalls the larger pattern: he was not merely an occasional acquaintance but the man who accompanied and transported the painter.

The same closeness surfaces when Gregory reacts to finding Rabo and Marilee at the museum. He says he will have Jones drive him to City Island, where the Ararat is in dry dock, and that he will live aboard the yacht until Rabo and Marilee have left Gregory’s house and all trace of their stay has been removed. Jones is thus the person Gregory turns to in the immediate aftermath of the rupture. The plan also carries an element of absurdity: Gregory proposes to live on an eighty-foot sailing yacht in dry dock, reaching it by ladder and relying on a boatyard’s facilities. In a moment of anger and displacement, Jones remains beside him as the companion expected to help carry out the plan.

Italy and Their Joint Public Identity

Before the United States entered the war, Gregory, Jones, and Marilee arrived in Italy and were received as celebrities. Benito Mussolini presented the visitors as an American endorsement of Italy’s supposed spiritual, physical, and economic transformation. Gregory’s fame and Jones’s aviation reputation made them useful to that public spectacle, while Marilee’s appearance and celebrity were also incorporated into it.

Their Italian status altered how Marilee was treated: she recalls that she was no longer dismissed as a fool but regarded as a celebrated figure, often entering before Gregory and Jones, who followed as part of her entourage. The arrangement complicates the earlier image of Gregory displaying Jones in American social life. In Italy, all three were made into public symbols, and Gregory and Jones’s companionship became one strand in a larger political performance.

The pair’s involvement with Italy ended in death. Rabo later says that Gregory and Jones would arrange to have themselves and Gregory’s only friend killed while wearing Italian uniforms. In his retrospective account of their deaths, they died as civilians, although in uniform, after fighting more or less for the Italian cause. Their deaths thus combine personal loyalty, public identity, and a wartime allegiance that the narrative presents as consequential without suggesting that the United States and Italy were then at war with one another.

Death, Memory, and Narrative Significance

Rabo learns of the deaths while serving as a master sergeant at Fort Belvoir. The newspaper accounts mention Gregory and Jones but not Marilee. Because the United States is still neutral, the two men receive respectful obituaries: Gregory is described as possibly the best-known American artist in history, while Jones is remembered as a World War I ace and aviation pioneer, though Rabo says the latter description was untrue. Their public reputations survive them, but the notices simplify Jones’s record and leave Marilee’s fate unaddressed.

Rabo’s response is partly a question about what became of Marilee. He supposes that she is still young and beautiful and may find someone wealthy to care for her, while recognizing that his low military pay leaves him in no position to make her his own. That thought sets the deaths within Rabo’s own life: Gregory and Jones are gone, Marilee’s future is unknown to him, and he is still a junior figure whose circumstances keep him from acting on his attachment to her.

Marilee later recalls that Gregory and Jones became heroes in Italy after dying for a cause aligned with Italy. Her celebrity persisted as a beautiful and charming reminder of their sacrifice and of the admiration some Americans supposedly felt for Mussolini. This later account fills in what the American obituaries could not convey: the deaths were not only the end of a partnership but also the material from which Italian public memory fashioned heroes. Across Rabo’s recollections and Marilee’s later account, the relationship is defined less by an explanation of its private terms than by its visible constancy, its entanglement with Gregory’s public life, and its final shared fate.