A Dollmaker, and So Much More: Joan Weingartner Brings Grace Storey Putnam to Life Through Letters

Through the young eyes of Joan Weingartner, Grace Storey Putnam was a spectacular woman.

She was tall, elegant and an early feminist, often wearing pants with a long, open jacket — a rebellious outfit of choice in the 1920s. She kept her white and gray hair in a fashionable bob of the time, complete with bangs.

She lived in a large brown house in Sag Harbor, where Weingartner and her older brother, John, would visit and sip tea, play with green clay, and listen to music on a large polyphon disc-playing music box.

One day, Putnam took the young girl into the woods behind her home, and there, under a toadstool, she swears she saw a tiny fairy drinking from an acorn.

Putnam was kind, imaginative, optimistic and generous — though, for Weingartner, the full story would come much later, when she opened a box stuffed with letters.

They were addressed from Putnam to Weingartner’s parents, Belle and John Anderson, who were her dear friends and confidantes. In them, she shares her insights, wisdom and inspiration, as well as her challenges and hardships, the harsh realities of her life that Weingartner couldn’t have understood as a child.

She didn’t know that when Putnam made them tea, she would melt snow on her Bunsen burner not for fun but because the electricity had been turned off due to an overdue payment. Or that the clay she played with had been dug up from the ground. Or that the house they visited had been purchased when Putnam was doing well financially.

After all, she was an artist and a sculptor, and the creator of the Bye-Lo Baby, which was a sensation and launched her as one of the most well-known doll designers of all time.

But Putnam had lost her wealth during the Great Depression, Weingartner — who is now 95 years old — explained during a recent telephone interview from her home in Maryland. And she wouldn’t have known it.

“We never thought of her as being poor because she didn’t act like she was poor. I know more from the letters than I remember as a child,” said Weingartner, who grew up in North Sea. “Because of her wonderful attitude toward life, we just thought of her as a great, wonderful friend.”

Born on March 16, 1877, in San Diego, California, Grace Storey wanted to be an artist since age 8. She was an art school student when she met sculptor Arthur Putnam, and they married in 1899. While he pursued his career, she raised their children. But in 1909, he began experiencing neurological problems, which led to a brain surgery and subsequent stroke.

“It changed him,” Weingartner said. “He became very abusive. She had two children — she moved away with her children, but she really, really loved this man, and it was very, very difficult for her to move away. But she did it to save her children.”

After they divorced in 1915, Putnam started giving painting and drawing lessons, and sculpted dolls to support her family. As the story goes, in 1920, she visited a Salvation Army day nursery in Los Angeles where she studied a 3-day-old infant. Using clay, she quickly worked at the baby’s side to sculpt its likeness, aiming to make the doll as lifelike as possible.

While most dolls of the 1920s had a prettier, cutesy face, Putnam’s doll — which would become known as the Bye-Lo Baby — was more realistic and wildly successful, prompting retailers to dub it the “Million Dollar Baby.”

And though it was the Bye-Lo Baby that propelled Putnam to stardom, she barely referenced it in her letters to Weingartner’s parents, which began in 1933, shortly after the artist married another sculptor, Eugene Morahan, in 1927 in New York — and they moved out to the East End.

“When my father met Grace Storey Putnam, I don’t know where he met her, but he told her about my mom — she was an artist,” Weingartner said, “and, from then on, they were friends.”

In 1929, the Andersons had moved from Connecticut to a cottage in North Sea, which the family still owns. Her father sold real estate, her mother stayed home with the children, abandoning painting until later in life — though she scratched that artistic itch by making paper dolls for her daughter.

Joan Weingartner fondly remembers her childhood on the East End — reading, swimming in the ocean with her father after work, having picnics and building bonfires on the beach. But above all else, she loved dolls, and the prototype of the Bye-Lo Baby, which Putnam gifted her, would become one of her most prized possessions.

“That was the doll that she originally worked on,” Weingartner said. “The eyes are painted and the mouth, the nose. The doll is, you can see, it’s a very well-loved doll.”

Decades later, Weingartner and her daughter, Tammy Lynne Ramos, visited a historical museum and wandered up to the top floor, where they were met with a doll collection. Among them was a Bye-Lo Baby, which she pointed out.

“The lady who was in charge, who was a specialist in dolls, she came over to me, she said, ‘You know the Bye-Lo doll?’” Weingartener recalled, “and I said, ‘Oh yes, my parents were friends with Grace Storey Putnam.’ Well, she just couldn’t get over it.”

The museum curator immediately invited her to give a series of talks about the doll and its creator. And, in order to prepare, Weingartner dove back into the box of letters, often reading excerpts from them during her lectures. In them, Putnam vibrantly expresses her opinions on women’s issues, fashion, art, literature, diet, family, current events and, of course, dolls. She shares stories about her marriages, her relationships with her children and even the local gossip, and it gave Weingartner greater perspective on her own life.

“You learned about your mom, too,” Ramos, who also lives in Maryland, said to Weingartner, “the relationship of what it was like for these two women who were artists, who were very isolated and how they encouraged one another respectively in what they were pursuing.”

Out of the lectures, the idea for a book was born. Weingartner passed off the letters to her daughter, Jodi M. Altendorf, who transcribed and formatted them among photos and paintings that tell Putnam’s story. They titled it, “Affectionately Yours — Grace Storey Putnam: Letters from the Designer of the Bye-Lo Baby.”

“The letters come alive, that’s what I felt,” Weingartner said. “They come alive because you see what’s going on. They’re not just letters. They’re really letters of action.”

“Like a conversation,” Ramos added.

“You realize that you have shared in her life,” her mother said. “That’s the feeling I had.”

Putnam spent her final years in Malibu, California, as a single woman, having divorced her second husband in 1941. She died there six years later, on February 26, 1947. She was 69 years old.

“She really wanted my mother — she felt she had the potential of being a great artist — to move there and, with Grace, they would paint together and so forth,” Weingartner said. “My mother did end up painting beautiful pictures, and I have them all over my house. She had one picture that was in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at one point.”

When she can, Weingartner travels to the East End to stay at her childhood home, always stopping to see her brother, who is now 97 and lives in Sag Harbor. Here, she can’t help but remember Putnam, or see fairies in every acorn on the ground, and hopes to someday share her book with local audiences in person.

“I would hope they would come about thinking that anything is possible — really dream about doing something,” she said of future readers. “I’m a very positive kind of person, but I feel there’s such an inspiration of a person who had a lot at one point and had nothing, and she made a life. She made a life and she lived every day.”