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paintings that adorned its interior, the Conway residence bespoke the family’s unparalleled position in the community.
    From an early age, Gordon was treated like a little lady—not a little girl. Her parents were local apostles of high culture and considered it de rigueur that their daughter attend the numerous dance and orchestra performances they sponsored in their home. Gordon grew up on chamber music, poetry recitals, and salons staged on the long porch that wrapped around the Cleburne house, bounded on one side by a hand-carved balustrade.
    When Gordon was nine years old, her family—enjoying still greater prosperity from John’s lumber business—moved to a stately new mansion in Dallas, right on the corner of Ross and Harwood, a neighborhood known locally as “Silk Stocking Row” and the “Fifth Avenue of Dallas.”
    Dallas was a boomtown in those days, and Gordon was lucky to be among the “so-called 400,” the leading families who mattered most in the insular but wealthy community of Texas oil barons and lumber tycoons. There, in the blazing southwestern heat, the four hundred raised faux Gothic mansions and French châteaus, they lined their newly paved streets with tall trees from exotic places and paid one another visits in custom-made, horse-drawn carriages, each driven by a uniformed coachman.
    As the daughter of wealthy socialite parents, Gordon enjoyed a host of opportunities that equipped her with the sense of cosmopolitan style that would serve her well in her later career. Even after her father died young and unexpectedly in 1906, Gordon enjoyed a level of refinement and comfort unknown to most Americans of their era. Raised on a steady diet of opera, ballet, modern dance, classic and modern poetry, and symphony music, Gordon honed her already refined sensibilities as a student at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., where she studied piano, elocution, and dance and learned to speak Italian, Spanish, and French with relative ease, if not fluency. Tall, dark haired, and remarkably poised, Gordon was, according to her childhood friend Margaret Page Elliott, “as graceful as a fawn. 2 She was not a beauty like her mother in a classic way, but she could just toss an old shawl around her shoulders and look as glamorous as all get-out. If the rest of us tried that we’d look like rough-dried laundry hanging on a clothesline.”
    Gordon’s rigorous training in the arts and languages paid handsome dividends when, in August 1912, she and her mother sailed for Europe to spend the better part of two years traveling, studying, and meeting the men and women who were ushering in a modernist revolution in Western art and literature. In Munich, she gained extensive exposure to the work of continental futurists and cubists. “Ridiculous!” she wrote in her diary in response to the various works by Pablo Picasso and other leading innovators, though she would later help popularize these artistic conventions by incorporating them in her advertising and cover art.
    Gordon and Tommie spent their two-year sojourn deeply enmeshedin European culture—both high and popular. They became well-known American customers at the leading Parisian couture houses, roughly around the time Coco Chanel was launching her signature line, and they frequented tea parties, dances, and recitals with leading members of the American expatriate community.
    But the fun couldn’t last forever. As the clouds of war gathered in the summer of 1914, Tommie and Gordon found themselves on a mad dash from the Alps, where they had been hiking through the Maloja Pass. They somehow managed to talk themselves onto the last train bound for Zurich and then plodded their way onward to Lausanne, where Gordon sporadically attended school.
    As German soldiers broke through Belgium and headed west toward France, Gordon, holed up in her bedroom suite at the Hotel Royal, recorded her thoughts amid the steady clatter of heavy rain. 3 “I am very