Behind the Scenes Minis: Vinnie's Wild Life

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Vinnie Reem all week the Hall Week Listen. She's one of those people. I have many thoughts that developed while I was working on this one. I was just gonna do a one parter, and then I was like, how yeah, just no way. And I know we included a lot of quotes from the papers and whatnot, but I really felt like we had to establish just how vitriolic all the back and forth was about her, right whoo Yeah. Two, My position on her may have shifted a little, yeah, because I came into this episode and the research really ready to be like this poor girl. People accused her of a lot of things. She was clearly victimized because she was a young woman, And yes, I did more research. I was like, I'm not saying that she was, you know, the harlet she was painted to be, but she was definitely managing the situation to her benefit and knew that these men were obsessed with her well.

00:01:12
Speaker 2: And it's one of those.

00:01:13
Speaker 1: Things where I think multiple things are true at the same time, correct, right, correct. So where she really lost me was the guy telling her, you know, Albert Pike, being like, I am so in love with you, I cannot bear the thought of you with another man, and her going you can be in my wedding that. Yeah, I was like, this is weird. I also found it weird that she had sherman walk her down the island instead of her dad. I was like, this is why though, yeah, sherman apparently like his response was like, is this okay with your parents? And I guess they talked it through, but to me just kind of vibed a little weird of like are you just doing this for show? Because that seems like an odd choices. I said that I would read her description of how she met Franz list. Yes, I'm very excited for this.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: It's quite charming.

00:02:08
Speaker 1: So she described this where she says she's sitting in quote a chair almost immediately back of the piano at Liz's right hand. The wonderful magician swept his slender hands over the keys, fascinating all who heard, and with tremulous vibrations, touched some tender chords with such a spell that I was deeply affected. The tears which I could not repress, rose to my eyes, and being so near and fearful of making the slightest interruption, I dared not raise my hand to brush them away. The great artist felt the spell he was exercising over me. He noticed my emotion, and playing softly with his left hand, he reached his right hand over and laid it for an instant, tenderly on mine. We needed no introduction. We understood each other. And when he finished playing and all rushed to congratulate him and thank him, I waited silently by to try and speak, but he offered me his arm, and as we promenaded with the rest down the old convents halls, he said, you need not speak. I understand you, and you understand me. And during all my stay in Rome, this great Master was a constant visitor at my studio and my warm and devoted friend. I love that she has set up this scenario where like they were never introduced, and he's just like.

00:03:25
Speaker 2: You are my people. It's very fascinating. Yeah.

00:03:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's another thing that really really jumped out at me. Okay, as interesting in this we have talked so many times on the show about the civil war, I would say we also live in a time right now when our country is very divided. I don't think that's a controversial statement, and it is very hard for most people, myself included, to understand how people of side can be cool and hang with people from the other side of this, you know, political ideology split. But reading through Vinnie Reims stuff, I was really struck by it over and over, and she, like, for example, her brother Bob we mentioned, stayed behind in Arkansas when the family moved to Washington, and because he was in Arkansas when everything started, he fought for the Confederacy and he was actually missing for a little while, and she was like petitioning her contacts in Washington to like figure out if she could get a pass to cross the line and go try to find him, which didn't ever work out because she didn't have enough information. Really, it was kind of like you're just gonna run around the wilderness of the country yelling his name, like there's no you don't know where he is, And of course he pops back up later having surrendered during the war. But then her association with Pike, who if you don't know about Albert Pike, I'm making a face, because I don't even know how to describe him, very controversial, purported ties to the KKK, very much like a Southern military man, everything against all of the people that Vinnie Reem seemed to align with. But yet they did have a very close relationship and I think an actual romance of some flavor. He bought a little cottage that he called their Place or whatever, and like she allegedly it's it stated very oddly in some of the biographies, where it's like, well, she would stay there, but she slept in a room upstairs. Like I'm like, yeah, but this sounds this sounds like, you know, you're trying to protect her identity or the integrity of her you know, purity or whatever. And you know, his letters to her very much suggests that there was romance between them, and I'm like, but ha, how does that work with that? Because he was obviously against all the things you were four, and you supported both Lincoln and Johnson and you However, she also, this will not surprise anybody, I'm sure, had problems with the suffragettes, okay, because there had been write ups in several papers that were women's rights papers that kind of took the side of like, what is this kid doings? She seems to be doing something inappropriate, And so when it came time and they were like, do you want to sign any of our petitions, she was like, nope, nope. You treated me really badly. You don't get my name on your stuff. So it's weird. She has this life where she walks in both those worlds and associates with both those worlds in a way that to me seems very hard to envision, Like I would have a hard time envisioning that for myself, but I know people do it. But it was just one of those things where I was like, oh, we always think of particularly the Civil War and after as like we are in two groups and we look at each other with with leering anger, and that's all we get. But that doesn't seem to have been what was going on in a lot of cases. So that was fascinating. One of the things that also tickled me was all the stuff she bought in Paris, and okay, because she like, she just bought a lot of stuff she could not. I think it's one of those cases where, remember they were not a wealthy family, and then suddenly she was very famous and had some pocket money, and like when they were in Paris, she like bought herself a harp, Like what are you gonna do with a harp? I mean, she played, but like it seemed like everywhere they went, even if they were only staying a few weeks, she moved in like it was her new home and decorated and did all the stuff. We talked about her studio in Rome and how she set it up, like with full decor and furniture and you know, like a little a little beautiful gallery and work studio. I also don't understand why she sh she stayed in Rome, m because like Carrera is up in Tuscany, there are cities there. She could have stayed in Florence and been much closer. I don't I didn't find in any of my reading it may have been there, and I just didn't ide it an explainer for why she would choose to live four hours plus away from the place where her bust was being replicated in Marble well in probably longer than four hours right the time.

00:08:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.

00:08:44
Speaker 1: My opinions on this are like definitely influenced by having been to Rome and Tuscany, like recent times and our very long bus trip between the two.

00:08:55
Speaker 2: Very long bus trip.

00:08:57
Speaker 1: But like, I mean, that has no bearing on what it was like in the nineteenth century.

00:09:01
Speaker 2: Who knows.

00:09:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm not clear at all about that. I also was kind of fascinated by the fact that it became very apparent and we didn't really break it down, but I tried to include it in the narrative so that people could kind of get the workings of it. How a memorial statue is made. It's not like someone hands her a hunk of marble and she gets her chisel. You know, she creates the model that is then recreated by master chiselers who their whole job is recreating artists right clay models in marble. So that was very interesting because some of them, you know, the really snarky commentary by Mary Todd Lincoln's friend was very like, she doesn't know what a chisel is, and it's really need to do exactly what you're talking about.

00:09:50
Speaker 2: That was kind of fascinating.

00:09:52
Speaker 3: Too, Okay, Mary Todd Lincoln.

00:10:04
Speaker 1: One I will say I didn't find I'm sure it's out there. I never managed to get my eyeballs on it. Anything about what Mary Todd Lincoln thought of the statue when it was completed. We know she wasn't in favor of any ream and she said a lot of nasty stuff right that whole, like burn this, don't I'm not like, you know what you're doing is wrong when you're like burn this letter. But I never saw anything about it. And now it's possible because her son did go see the statue and he seemed to like it, that that was enough for her and she didn't want to get involved past that.

00:10:40
Speaker 2: But I don't know what she thought.

00:10:43
Speaker 1: I have always known that Mary Todd Lincoln is a mixed bag, but I really was kind of startled at how kind of petty she could be. Yeah, I didn't really know much about her at all personally, and Patrick was reading I think maybe Team of Rivals was reading, you know, some work about Abraham Lincoln and said something offhandedly about her, and I was kind of like, well, you know, a lot of times the historical counts of women are like particularly vindictive and harsh because ofh blah blah blah. And then he told me some details about some stuff and I was like, oh, well, okay, two things are true at the same time, as we said earlier. Yeah, yeah, I mean we know, right, Like we talked about her. She came up briefly in our live show episode we did on spirit photography, right, yeah, and she came up in our episodes about mediums at various times. Like we know that she was like kind of into the occult and this idea of spiritualism that was sweeping the nature at the time. She was not an outlier in this regard, so we knew, like I always knew she was. She could be perceived as a bit kooky because of that, but I really did not have a sense of just how vindictive she could be. Yeah, and like the whole like I don't know, you like she perfected that well before.

00:12:05
Speaker 2: Mariah Carey was like.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was sort of like death of a child, death of a husband, Like it just seems like so much was happening in her life. But then I will hear specific, you know, accounts of particular things that happen. I'm like, whoa, Okay, I don't feel like what I just said can really mitigate that story. Yeah, some of it's really venomous. Also, she was notoriously it came up and I didn't mention it to you. Beforehand, and it was in a passage that you had to read. Hmm, her, Listen, we write out stuff and sometimes there are lots of typos and whatnot. But I know there was a weird moment in one of them, and I had forgot to mention to you that I had copied it directly because her punctuation was fast and loose, like where I would be writing it, reading it and being like, there shouldn't be a period here. That completely breaks the concept to this sentence. What is this fragment that's off on its own, like just held out by dashes? What is She's pretty notorious in her letter writing for having kind of a I will call it a very staccato style of community. Yeah, fascinating, fascinating.

00:13:22
Speaker 2: Have you gotten it? Do you know the Lincoln statue?

00:13:25
Speaker 1: Uh? I looked at it because I wanted I did not know immediately what statue were talking about. And there is also like a Lincoln Emancipation Memorial statue, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't that one, because I did not remember who had sculpted that one or the story behind it. It is not that one. The Emancipation statue has like a whole complicated history, but the visual representation of it is like there's Lincoln and then at Lincoln's feet a sort of worshipfully adoring looking freed black person, and like it's, uh, yeah.

00:14:07
Speaker 2: There is you.

00:14:08
Speaker 1: You bring up a thing that I did not include in our show because I simply it's it's in the exact same vein as this. But in write ups about the unveiling of the Lincoln statue, there were also present black people at that unveiling, and the way they are described as reacting is very much in line with this, Like that really does the whole white saviorism thing. And I was like, oh, we don't need to put in a show. Yeah, not yourmane. Yeah. And I also like I have no idea whether like was the Cherokee nation involved in the Sequoia statue. I don't know, I would I would think probably not. Yeah. Yeah, it's all a little it's all a little KOOKI Again, I mostly came away with like the Pike story of like, hm, hmm, I'm obsessed with you cool? Will you wear a suit and a boot near for my wedding? It's not to you, Like that's a whole level of I'm curious what your thoughts are. Do you think she was calculating or do you think she was like a go with the flow that was like this is working out for me in terms of anything in particular.

00:15:25
Speaker 2: I think just in.

00:15:26
Speaker 1: General her behavior with men, like obviously she lobbied at various times. Yeah, but I don't have a good sense. I don't have a firm stance on whether I think she was like, yes, I will flirt with these old dudes to get what I want, or if she was like, I'm just being super nice. I'm just a super nice person that's friendly. Like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I mean, there is part of me that's like, girl, you know a lot of people writeing you very aggressively romantic letter. Surely it must have clicked at some point that you were getting what you wanted because they thought there was some promise at least of some romance with you.

00:16:05
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:16:06
Speaker 1: I feel like that's a whole tangle. It is a full tangle, and it's hard, and you don't want to like get into shaming her. There's also part of me that's like, Okay, what if that was the case. What if she was conniving a hack and she was like, listen, they can fall in love with me.

00:16:23
Speaker 2: That's fine.

00:16:23
Speaker 1: I don't need to love them back, but there is no other way I'm gonna be able to do what I want to do with my life. Well, and we also know that, like attractive women, public figures often get a lot of unwanted attention from men, yes, and then are accused of having encouraged that unwanted attention by existing. So like, I'm super reluctant to make any kind of conclusive Oh yeah, I mean she was interacting with all of these people in a way that I'm like, it's not quite the same as that in my mind, you know, like when apparently I didn't I didn't read all the letters between them. But apparently when she started dating Hoxy for example, and people like Pike, Pike in particular obviously was writing her and she was telling him like no, no, it's nothing to worry about.

00:17:17
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no, it's fine.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: When she was obviously dating this other person, right, I'm like, Okay, what is the impetus for that, Like you are lying to him? Is there a way that I can see that she is doing so that is benevolent and not weasily. I don't know, unless she just thought he's quite an elderly man. I don't want to scare him to pieces, don't.

00:17:39
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:17:41
Speaker 1: That's part of why her legacy is so difficult. Boy, I do think we didn't talk that much about her art. Actually, I mean, I think she was a perfectly fine artist. I don't I she is not an artist. You have seen me fall apart in front of sculptures before. Her art does not inspire that in me. But I always do think it's lovely, like no part of me is like, what is this? So the jury will be out on Vinnie Ream forever. We don't know anymore really about whether or not she was the cause of Charles Francis Hall's death, but that even seems fascinating to me. If that was the sticking point that motivated Bessel's and he did in fact kill Charles Francis Hall, that's a weird thing like that. If that's the case, that speaks to her appeal that they knew her for a couple of weeks and out of that he was like, I will kill for her. That's a lot and kind of does again bring into focus how much like franz List, people just could not.

00:18:46
Speaker 2: Not fall in love with them wild.

00:18:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, franz List, he just knew we were the same. I love it anyway. That was Vinny Reem. I feel like we could do and somebody could do a long, like twenty seven part series on her and there would still be stuff left unturned because it's a lot.

00:19:10
Speaker 2: We hope that if.

00:19:11
Speaker 1: You have time off in the coming days, you do not have to deal with anything or anyone that is a lot unless you like that. If you don't have time off, we still hope you get some rest and relaxation in the mix, because everybody needs it. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode and then on Monday with something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.