If you think that all society “Swans” were white, that the beauty, intrigues, and elegant escapades of white women of privilege were only ever immortalized by Truman Capote, try reading Countee Cullen’s only novel, “One Way to Heaven” (1932). Based on Cullen’s dearest friends, it’s all about the fancy folks who lived on Strivers Row. In effect, the “Black Swans” he chronicled were ladies who could have given any “Real Housewife” a run for her money.
Favorably reviewed in the New York Times, “One Way to Heaven” portrays Bertha May Doyle Lee Cotton as the character Constancia Brandon. Cullen’s plot gently satirizes the pretentiousness and superficiality of the upper echelons of an African American high society that Cotton gladly led with great aplomb as among “the row’s” most notable hostesses.
In 1908, she became the wife of Dr. Norman Therkiel Cotton. Then, when a poor relation with more than a dozen children was about to have the two youngest placed in an orphanage, Mrs. Cotton, who was unable to have children, wondered how people would like seeing her as a devoted mother. “How sweet!” they said. People on Strivers Row loved these tiny tots. She took them in on approval; they were adopted, renamed, and just like that, Mrs. Cotton became the mother of cherubic Gloria Helene and Bertha Marie.
Originally Bostonians, Mrs. Cotton and her sisters, Minerva Lee Buckner and Emma Lee Layton, hailed from a family of abundant social standing but meager means. It was their ambition that each sister make an advantageous marriage.
One of 11 siblings, Dr. Cotton was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1885. A 1904 graduate of Lincoln University, he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha and practiced medicine in New York and New Jersey, where he became city health commissioner of Patterson (1924–1930).
He met his wife while a medical student at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston — only, initially, he was taken with her younger sister Emma. Disappointed by her boyfriend, she was due to steal him in exchange.
Back then, Bertha was keeping company with John Turner Layton, Jr. of Washington, D.C. He was born in 1894 and his father was a bass singer, music educator, and hymn composer. One paper reported he was “Professor of music in Race schools in Washington. D.C. who … directed the production ‘Hiawatha,’ by a stupendous Race chorus at the nation’s capital, bringing over … [Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor from England to appear personally as director and having the famous U. S. Marine band to play.”
Naturally, Layton provided his namesake with a formidable musical education. However, after meeting Bertha and being agreeable to her plans for a rich husband, he followed up by attending the Howard University Dental School.
Only once his beloved father died did Turner Layton have a change of heart. Moving to New York in the early 1900s, he met his songwriting partner, lyricist Henry Creamer. They are best remembered among their hit compositions for “After You’ve Gone” and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Layton also joined with Clarence “Tandy” Johnstone to perform. Both would sing as Layton played piano. The duo were a hit both in Harlem and among the elite of New York’s white worthies. While in Palm Beach in 1924, Lord and Lady Mountbatten suggested they try out London. The duo became an immediate success.
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with the Laytons housed at 152 West 133rd Street, the Cottons acquired 220 West 139th Street. They engaged Black contractor J. E. Reid and their neighbor, architect Vertner Tandy, to totally remodel their new house. The stoop eliminated, the entrance moved just below grade, and the hall ceiling vaulted, it was imbued with a Renaissance-Mediterranean ambience. Presided over by an East-Asian manservant, the Cotton household was the scene of generously dispensed hospitality in a commodious setting. As described by one journalist:
“The very well-fixed Dr. Norman T. Cottons … just about top the lofty and shaky pinnacle of [the] better listed. In fact, each time I drop in the Cotton mansion-like place, I find something new to make a mental note of. The Cottons have furnished their Spanish [sic] home with costly pieces from practically every leading capital in Europe. Each time Bertha visits her sister, Mrs. Turner Layton-in London, she manages to cross the channel long enough to visit Paris salons, and pick up a piece or two.
“Her bar is about 22 feet long, is completely equipped, and has four red-plushed stools and a rail. The rest of the house is indescribable in its elegance.”
A’Lelia Shirley Layton, goddaughter of A’Lelia Walker. (Jan. 22, 1938, issue of the AmNews) 
Dr. Norman T. Cotton. (Public domain photo) 
Layton & Johnstone: John Turner Layton, and Clarence “Tandy” Johnstone. (Public domain photo) 
“The House of Cotton,” 270 West 139th Street on Strivers Row. (Michael Henry Adams photo)
Besides their Harlem home, what papers liked to call the “houses of Cotton” included the family farm down south, a Montclair place, and a summer getaway at Oaks Bluff, Massachusetts.
It’s hard to convey how renowned these forgotten figures were in the Black world of yesteryear. Not a week went by that their comings and goings were not reported on in the AmNews. Married to a nationally known, well-invested doctor who gave thousands to his alma mater, even having her imposing house on Strivers Row raided hardly threatened her position. Police were able to recover $40,000 in stolen jewels from Cotton, but, after cooperating with the investigation into more than a million dollars worth of goods purloined by an acrobatic interracial cat burglary gang, Mrs. Cotton was neither indicted nor shunned socially.
Recalling how even as adolescents, her adopted daughters were made to stay awake all night cleaning dishes from her incessant parties, they still resented her long after she died. They could not overlook how their dear, affectionate father, returning from working in New Jersey each weekend, was made to spank them for infractions she kept track of in a notebook. “She made him beat us to satisfy her pleasure in dominating others. She controlled him with the lock on her bedroom door,” they told me during an interview in 2013. Without hesitation, 65 years later, the girls said of her in unison, “she was a bitch!”
Evelyn Waugh’s diaries give an account of his encounter with the Turner Laytons. He wrote of going to a party given by “Layton the black man” at the studio of an artist called “Stuart Hill. All very refined — hot lobster, champagne cup and music. Florence Mills, Delysia, John Huggins, Layton and Johnstone[,] and others sang songs.” If Waugh was okay with jazz and as a brief encounter, even so unsavory a social occasion, the sexual risk of someone like fashionable singer Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson, who “carried-on” with women and men, from the highest strata of London, was not.
This was what threatened the success of Layton and Johnstone, and what accounted for the open hostility they encountered after a 1934 divorce case naming Johnstone as correspondent. In 1930, he’d taken up with Raymonde Sandler, the wife of respected violinist Albert Sandler. Public scorn was so great that Layton felt compelled to break up the group and continue solo.
Johnstone suffered disgrace and ruin. He was mandated to pay his new wife’s former husband damages of £2,500. After his flat was robbed of his most valuable contents, he declared bankruptcy and the Johnstones retreated to Harlem. His hoity-toity persona and sound unpopular there, he was forced to work as a janitor and had a nervous breakdown. His wife at last left him and remarried. He died broke in 1953.
Layton, meanwhile, performed in clubs and theaters, and on the radio. As he had with Johnstone, he continued to record extensively. His proficiency enabled his family to live well, as his wife attested to: “We do the theaters in season and have considerable company at our home. Our intimate friends, however, are rather few. Of course we have a bridge club which meets once a week.” Mr. and Mrs. Lesiie Hutchinson, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Robeson, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Browning, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Johnstone, and Miss Violet Harrion, an English woman; John Payne, and Ivan Hutchison were the original members.
Geraldyn Dismond, editor of the Tattler, with her own PR firm and radio show, lived across 139th Street from the Cottons. She was not someone whom it was easy to impress, but during an interview with Emma Layton in 1932, she was clearly taken with all she saw and heard about. In their stylish 14-room house where, like the Cottons, husband and wife had their own suites, the five liveried servants, all English except for the French lady’s maid, were without precedent in Harlem. The Rolls-Royce and Talbot, however, were not exceptional in a place where fine automobiles were a commonplace.
The same situation was true concerning fine furs, French haute couture, and jewels. Mrs. Layton boasted ownership of a fox scarf, “a marvelous nine skin sable scarf”; a matching Russian sable coat and a Russian ermine evening coat; leopard and beaver skin sports coats; an Eastern mink cap and muff; and 10 diamond bracelets, a set of diamond earrings, 10-carat diamond ring, 10-carat emerald ring, diamond arrow pin, and string of “genuine” pearls, relayed to Dismond, made a significant impact due to their quality and great quantity.
“But you haven’t asked me anything about A’Lelia,” she complained. “She is to study harmony this winter. And what did you think of the records which she made with her father?”
“She is quite the most charming girl of fourteen I have had the pleasure to know, but she is another story,” agreed Dismond. “How could I concentrate on even the most delightful child, while visions of Rolls Royces, sables, and diamonds danced in the air.”
Although queer, living with a man in a cottage on the Thames just outside London, Ken “Snakehips” Johnson had become engaged to Turner and Emma Layton’s daughter by 1940. He was celebrating at the Embassy Club with cocktails for A’Lelia and friends when air raid sirens sounded just as he was due to walk to work nearby. Asked not to go, he only laughed as he dashed off to work. He was just lifting his baton when the chic nightclub was bombed. Only because it was deep underground, below a large theater, was this realm of revelry allowed to remain open. Plunging through an air shaft, the Nazi bombs fell directly on target. Decapitated, Johnson died instantly.
The AmNews reported on the death of the Harlem-trained band leader with the subheading “A’Lelia Layton’s Beau,” on May 31, 1941: “Of great interest to New Yorkers will be the fact that Ken was engaged to A’Lelia Layton. beautiful and charming daughter of the Turner Laytons, who, with her mother, was here last year visiting her aunt, Mrs. Bertha Cotton of New York and Montclair, N.J. After the Laytons flew to England on the Clipper, their luxurious London home was destroyed by bombs [19 Aberdare Gardens, replaced by acquiring 77 Aberdare Gardens]. They are now living peacefully in South Wales.”
A few years later, this report was followed by, “California hears vague chit-chat [that] A’Lelia Layton, living in Scotland with her parents, wears a telltale diamond these war-torn days. That’s heartening news (if true), for we do know A’Lelia took the sudden death of her last cavalier (in the Cafe De Paris bombing in London) rather hard …”
“She became very odd. She never got over his death,” said Dr. Rae Alexander Minter, who met A’Lelia Layton through their father’s tremendous friendship.
What Layton no doubt would have taken even harder was learning that Johnson had lived with a notorious 20-year-older white lover, Gerald Hamilton. Called “the wickedest man in Europe,” he too was distraught by Johnson’s death. Calling the bandleader “my husband,” Hamilton kept Johnson’s photograph nearby for the rest of his life.
One imagines that A’Lelia Layton, who never married, might have done so as well. Toward the end of her life, A’Lelia’s doting mother lamented how “lonely life was in England,” how aloof and standoffish the English were, “even with each other.” Her parents’ only heir, A’Lelia Shirley Layton bequeathed the greater part of a fortune in music rights to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children when she died in 2002.
It was a soulmate I was united with after first contacting “Berdie” Cotton. I found her through her first cousin Macon Cotton, heir to the family funeral home business, in 2013. “Why,” I wondered, “had I never seen a notice of a debutante tea or dance, for her or her sister? Where were Harlem notices of their weddings?” “We moved to Montclair from Harlem around 1940. Our father finally got fed up with the constant parties and social stuff. She made him work so hard and then insisted on going out. It was exhausting!”
With historian Tom Wirth and A’Lelia Bundles, I met Berdie at her apartment. She had her sister Gloria come as well. Neither had “come out” but both married; Gloria, twice, to become Gloria H. Carter-Westcott. She died not long after we met, in September of 2013. She was 91. Four years later, on March 19, 2017, at 92, it was Berdie Collins’s turn.
All these women who came to experience circumstances and enjoy material comforts that many lack — what had it meant? Stealing her sister’s boyfriend, ending up alone at 249 Orange Road in Montclair, New Jersey — was Bertha Cotton happy?
“It burned her up, that she gave her sister Turner Layton. She never got over it!”