By Skip Moskey

One of Larz Anderson’s most loyal friends over the years was New Orleans lawyer and businessman Walter D. Denègre. Walter and his wife Berthe spent holidays and vacations with Larz and Isabel, and the two men shared many interests. Though the origins of their friendship are uncertain, they were both Harvard grads and members of the Metropolitan Club in Washington. The Denègres had homes in New Orleans (2343 Prytania St.), Washington (1313 16th Street), and Manchester-by-the Sea in Massachusetts.

Though born in the U.S., Walter spent the first several years of his life in Paris where his father, a southern sympathizer, sat out the Civil War years. Walter returned to the U.S. after the war and was educated by the Jesuits in New Orleans and at St. John’s College (Fordham) in New York. He earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1879. After getting a law degree from Tulane University, he was admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1881. He is still remembered as a civic leader who helped suppress organized crime in New Orleans. In 1899, he was King of the Mardi Gras carnival.

Like Larz, Walter had an interest in automobiles. In 1905 he proposed the development of a multi-compartment luxury vehicle with a separate room for servants, an early version of what was later known as a “land yacht,” such as the one shown in this still from the 1941 Preston Sturges film, Sullivan’s Travels starring Joel McCrea and my favorite sultry actress, Veronica Lake. 

One area where Larz and Walter did not agree was politics. Walter was a lifelong Democrat. In 1932, he served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president. Walter may have been instrumental in getting Larz, a lifelong Republican, to vote for Roosevelt, though Larz could have easily come to that conclusion on his own: many of the nation’s wealthy elites feared that Hoover was destroying the economy. “Hoover goes out the greatest failure as President that has ever been imposed on this unhappy Nation,” Larz wrote in his diary in 1933.

The Denègres’ summer home in Massachusetts, set on a hill overlooking the Manchester-by-the-Sea and Marblehead beaches, was designed by the Chicago architect Arthur Heun (Berthe was a native of the Windy City). Heun based the design on that of the Spanish villa exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. “Villa Crest,” the Denègre estate, included exquisite gardens that were photographed by Washington photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1924. Villa Crest is well known in the architectural history of Boston’s North Shore. It was featured in Pamela Fox’s fabulous book, North Shore Boston, published in 2005 by Acanthus Press.

Illustrations

 “Walter D. Denegre [ca. 1900]”
Digital Public Library of America, via New York Public Library Digital Collections, Image No. 1221927.
“Land Yacht” [1941].
“Villa Crest Garden, 1924”
Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress,
LC-J717-X110-214