Marilee Kemp and Dan Gregory

Marilee Kemp and Dan Gregory’s relationship is at once intimate, violent, and shaped by unequal power: he calls her a daughter while beating and ultimately throwing her down the stairs, and she is later displayed as a glamorous public symbol whose celebrity helps serve Italian propaganda.

A Benefactor’s Household

For years, Marilee’s life with Gregory is bound to material security as well as affection. She loves him, and his resources help both her and Rabo Karabekian survive the Great Depression. That dependence helps explain why her playful companionship with Rabo does not become a straightforward escape from Gregory: she does not rank Rabo above a pest and playmate, and, as the narrator puts it, “First things first.” The relationship’s private arrangements are thus set against the practical shelter Gregory provides.

Gregory’s household also includes Fred Jones, whom he takes to parties, on Virginia fox hunts, and on cruises aboard his yacht, the Ararat. Marilee and Rabo take long walks around Manhattan, attracting second and third looks because of her beauty, yet Gregory does not object to their outings. From the outside, their companionship can be mistaken for romance; when Rabo tells Marilee that people think they are in love, she answers, “They’re right.” Her answer registers real feeling, but it does not erase the unequal circumstances that keep her attached to Gregory.

The Museum Visit and Rupture

The relationship’s balance broke in 1936, when Gregory discovered Marilee and Rabo leaving the Museum of Modern Art. They had gone there repeatedly, despite his prohibition: by this visit, Rabo had accompanied her perhaps fifty times. The Saint Patrick’s Day parade on Fifth Avenue trapped Gregory’s open-top Cord in traffic directly outside the museum. Fred Jones was at the wheel; Gregory climbed over the car door, pushed through the crowd, and confronted the pair, trembling with rage, feet planted wide and fists clenched. He had often hit Marilee, though he had never hit Rabo.

The confrontation exposed a conflict Gregory would not name directly. The stolen outing carried the charge of youth, attraction, and forbidden pleasure, but Gregory spoke instead of gratitude, loyalty, and modern art. He told Rabo that he had treated him like a son and Marilee like a daughter, casting their visit as a betrayal of familial obligations. What wounded him most, he said, was not simply that they had entered the museum, but that they had looked happy as they came out—as if their pleasure mocked him and everyone who had tried to control a paintbrush. Art became the language through which he expressed a grievance rooted in their private intimacy.

Gregory announced that Fred would drive him to City Island, where his eighty-foot sailing yacht, the Ararat, lay in dry dock. He would live aboard it until Fred could assure him that Marilee and Rabo had left his house on Forty-eighth Street and that every trace of their presence had been removed. His punishment was not a direct assault on Rabo but a withdrawal of shelter and a demand to erase the two younger people from his household. The master realist’s threat to reside on a stranded yacht, reaching it by ladder and using the boatyard’s facilities, made the rupture both theatrical and materially consequential.

The Violence Behind the Filial Language

The later account of their relationship overturns the protective, almost familial language Gregory had used in the street. Marilee tells Rabo that her father beat her every day, that members of her high-school football team raped her after the Junior Prom, and that a stage manager at the Ziegfeld Follies threatened to fire her and have acid thrown in her face unless she joined his group of prostitutes. She places Gregory’s violence within that history of men calling abuse love: he, too, “loved” her, she says, and threw her down the stairs because she had sent Rabo expensive art materials.

The disclosure also clarifies why the quarrel over an apparently ordinary gift had such grave consequences. Marilee says Gregory pushed her down the stairs after learning she had sent Rabo the materials that helped lead to his apprenticeship. Rabo had assumed Gregory liked his pictures; Marilee corrects him: that was not why he had been chosen. Her account ties Gregory’s control over Rabo’s career to violence against her, making the apprenticeship part of the same household power that he later invoked as a father’s claim on both of them.

Marilee recalls another beating after she and Rabo made love and Rabo then disappeared from her life. She says she took it “on account of you,” before turning the conversation toward what Rabo had actually given her: their happy, silly, beautiful walks. The contrast is central to her recollection. Gregory’s violence and Rabo’s absence belong to the injury, but the walks remain a source of happiness she names without denying the harm surrounding them.

Italian Celebrity and Afterlife

Years later, Marilee’s account shows how the power dynamic between her and Gregory continued beyond their New York household and took on a public, political form. Before the United States entered the war against Italy, Germany, and Japan, Gregory, Marilee, and Fred Jones arrived in Italy as celebrated Americans. Mussolini presented them as living proof of Italy’s supposed spiritual, physical, and economic transformation: Gregory as America’s greatest living artist, Fred as one of its greatest aviators, and Marilee as an incomparable actress. The acclaim did not undo the private violence. Instead, it gave Marilee a public standing that Gregory and Fred had to acknowledge, even as their celebrity was being used to advance a cause she had not chosen.

The propaganda reception changed the terms of Marilee’s appearance. In New York, Gregory had described her as a daughter while exercising control over her through beatings; in Italy, she was treated by the press and at social events with the respect accorded a famous actress. She remembered the reversal as a release from being dismissed as a dim-witted floozy: she had become a jewel in the crown of a new Roman emperor. Because the country was so admiring of blondes, she went first when the three made an entrance, while Gregory and Fred followed as her entourage. Her public precedence briefly inverted the household hierarchy, though it arose from her usefulness as a symbol of Mussolini’s propaganda.

Marilee also gained a new practical authority through language. She learned Italian quickly and soon spoke it better than Gregory, who had studied it in New York; Fred never learned it. The contrast sharpened her independent place in the group: her fluency exceeded Gregory’s even while all three remained bound to the public role imposed by their celebrity. The relationship’s old imbalance therefore did not simply disappear. Rather, Marilee acquired forms of recognition and competence that the domestic language of daughterhood had denied her.

After Gregory and Fred died fighting more or less for the Italian cause, Marilee’s celebrity survived as a beautiful and charming reminder of their sacrifice and of the admiration many Americans supposedly felt for Mussolini. The public story preserved the men’s deaths as service to Italy and made her a living emblem of that narrative, while her private history with Gregory included beatings and the stairway assault. At the time of her reunion with Rabo, she was forty-three, still beautiful even without makeup and in widow’s weeds, and later became Europe’s largest Sony distributor. Her life after Gregory was not reduced to the role his household had assigned her: the woman once presented as his daughter and then as propaganda’s jewel continued into a future of her own.