Who was Blanche Reynolds-Gourmajenko, the ghost of Stagioni?
September 30, 2024
A century ago, a woman named Blanche held society luncheons and seances, hosted artists from around the world, and pushed Charlotte’s cultural scene in new directions. Some say she’s still around.
by Kayleigh Ruller
I have fallen in love with a woman I do not know. Her name is Blanche Morgan Reynolds-Gourmajenko.
Blanche — the woman donning avant-garde dresses with tulle and sparkling lights, the one making grand entrances and driving a dark blue Cadillac along Providence Road.
However, there’s only a small, supernatural chance I could ever actually see that sight for myself.
Because it was exactly 100 years ago when this woman — all 4 feet, 11 inches of her — walked the streets of Charlotte. It was 100 years ago when she built and designed the first Tuscan-style villa in the city at 715 Providence Rd. — a home where artists floated in and out, seances were held, laps were swum nude in what’s believed to be the city’s first in-ground pool, and French and Italian art energized the space.
The Italian restaurant Stagioni now occupies her former home, and many Charlotteans have heard of “Miss Blanche” and her fun, frilly, freaky story — a famed Gatsby-like ghost of Stagioni.
This ornate building — both then and now — is so striking and staunchly different from its surroundings that it could have only been occupied by someone with that same independent flair. Someone with a perverse freedom and lack of convention that contrasted with the traditional values of Charlotte’s wealthy class — people like the Alexanders, Dukes and VanLandinghams — in the early to mid-1900s.
William L. Bottomley of New York City was the architect for the villa, which was constructed in the 1920s.
An unconventional woman
“To me, she was a woman way ahead of her time,” says Alexander Stick, Blanche’s great-grandson. Stick, who lives in northern California and never got to meet Blanche, recalls stories passed down from his mother, Rosalie Reynolds, Blanche’s granddaughter. “She was independent, she had her own money, she made her own decisions,” he says. “[Blanche] held her own,” Stick says, and her alternative lifestyle often seemed incongruous with conservative Southern norms at the time.
In a city shaped by church, status and industry, Blanche lived and breathed hospitality and pushed art to the surface. She was a magnetic woman with a strong intellect, Stick says, capable of nudging others to expand their horizons.
Both, and
After poring over newspaper articles and conversing with Blanche’s family, my sense is that Blanche was on the fringe, straddling the line between taboos and convention.
The dichotomy of her life choices reveals a complex, multi-layered human being who simultaneously prioritized indulgent desires but still fit society’s molds, especially in the context of her inherited wealth and privilege. A Durham native, Blanche grew up in Durham and in Richmond, Virginia, where her father, Samuel Morgan, led a large and lucrative fertilizer company.
She was believed to have psychic abilities, but she went to church every Sunday. She fell in love with a younger man of modest means, but she first married a businessman at Southern Cotton Oil Co. She was one of 82 women who organized North Carolina’s branch of the National Woman’s Party for women’s suffrage, but she was still quite “feminine and flirtatious,” says Stick. She held seances in the top floor of her house but served on the board of sponsors for the Charlotte Debutante Club. She fled Charlotte half the year, but, when in town, she leaned in, hosting grand, risque parties with barbecued pig for dinner and Champagne bottles floating in the pool.
Forever Blanche’s home
To be clear, this villa is still Blanche’s home.
Bruce Moffett, who owns Stagioni, learned that right away when he built this concept in 2014. Blanche’s granddaughter, Rosalie Reynolds, told him this: “She still lives there you know … you’ll feel her presence in the building from time to time.”
Among the mystical happenings through the years: a few thrown forks, a vision of Blanche in the periphery at the servers’ after-hours wine club, flickering hood lights and even a whisper into the assistant manager’s ear, Can you hear me now?
In the upstairs “seance” room, Stick recalls that Blanche “had the walls covered in brown leather because it’s conducive to spirits … and there was a secret door.”
The secret door, Moffett says, was in fact a bookshelf that, when pushed, revealed where Blanche stashed her liquor during Prohibition. A little gin, a few spirits, a seance or two, and a couple of stately, society women — what could possibly go wrong? Or rather, what could possibly go right?
In an effort to pay homage to Blanche — or avoid a peeved ghost — Moffett designed the restaurant according to Blanche’s likes and dislikes: “She liked angels, she loved to cook, she loved to read and she loved the color red,” says Moffett, who collected these details from Rosalie.
“Blanche must approve of Stagioni,” says Ted Stick, another great-grandson, because the restaurant is still going after 10 years. It’s almost as if her spirit, motivated by hospitality and lavish parties in her earthly life, serves as some sort of fortuitous omen.
A hospitality hub
“She really loved hosting and entertaining in her home,” Alexander Stick says. “She invited who she liked, and they didn’t have to conform to the old Myers Park standards.”
During World War I, she opened her villa to a renowned violinist-turned-soldier, Israel Dorman, who returned again and again to play the violin at her parties. She offered lodging to visiting artists showing their work at the Mint Museum.
“She liked to get a rise out of people,” Moffett says, and once invited a naked man to recite poetry from a tree limb for her girlfriends, according to Stick.
Stagioni today, left (photograph courtesy Stagioni). Violinist Israel Dorman, center was a frequent guest at the villa. Blanche and guests poolside at the villa, right.
In later years, Blanche would host Rosalie’s friends. Tom Kenan, one lucky visitor, reminisced on how he and his friends “were the envy” of others when they got to sleep over at the villa. A classic American breakfast took place at 9 a.m. sharp, and the boys were expected to dress with a coat and tie — a detail that illustrates the standard of elegance Blanche embodied.
“It was sort of exotic to stay there … I remember being impressed that the sheets were all silk … they were very, very elaborate,” says Kenan, a longtime friend of Reynolds who currently lives in Chapel Hill. It was believed that her chauffeur would wait outside the pool as Blanche swam laps in the nude, ready to cloak her in a fur coat after her swim, Kenan recalls.
While this is all indulgent and cinematic, it can’t be separated from the reality that she employed servants of color during an era fraught with racial division and inequality. In her will, Blanche left reasonable sums of money to her servants — John Henry Harrison, Buelah Harrison and Vista Billings — who undoubtedly contributed to the hospitable nature of the home over the years.
Pleasure, written in the stars
As I learned more about this woman’s staunch commitment to pleasurable delights, entertainment and the occult, the story became less about uncovering a pretty prankster of a spirit, and more of a query into the unapologetic pursuit of pleasure.
“She was a true romantic,” Ted Stick says. Married to Billy Reynolds, the cottonseed oil executive from South Carolina, in 1904, she was widowed in 1928. A few years later, she traveled on a European cruise and met a man, or rather, sought out a man named Alexis Gourmajenko — a Russian immigrant 11 years younger who escaped the Russian Revolution. He was a server where she dined, and, as the story goes, she invited him to come over and buy her a drink. They married quietly in New York, and she brought him to her home in Charlotte. Lucky him.
Blanche by the pool, left; with her husband Alexis Gourmajenko, center; and dancing, right.
Sanpriti Ireland, a local astrologer and intuitive, notes a clear affinity for pleasure in Blanche’s dominant astrological placements.
Blanche’s sun was in Libra, where “it’s [about] relationships … it gets a sense of self through reflection,” Ireland says. Her moon is in Aquarius, which is “art, it is genius … it is very rebellious … taking one’s cues outside of the status quo, in favor of one’s soul.”
A lot of these elements are ruled by Venus, which emphasizes “expression and evolution through sensuality, through not just the experience of pleasure, but the pursuit of pleasure,” Ireland says.
An advocate for the arts
Whether due to personal whims or her birth chart, Blanche propelled beauty and the arts forward in the Queen City.
“Blanche had an inherent flair for the dramatic and wanted to become an actress, but social norms of the day held that acting was not a suitable vocation for a lady,” Ted Stick says.
Instead, she took to the city. She dreamed of creating an “artistic colony” in western North Carolina, according to her contributions in the Sunday Observer column, The Literary Lantern. She enthusiastically took charge as director of the nascent “Little Theater League,” now Theatre Charlotte.
She was also active in the birth of the Mint Museum in 1936, and once loaned her living-room desk and a painting of Lady Stapleton to the museum for an exhibit.
Blanche’s art advocacy was a way of asserting agency over what culture often deemed frivolous, petty or feminine — a reality true for many women at that time. “The women who worked [at the museum] … they were working, they just weren’t paid,” says Ellen Show, archivist at the Mint.
“Other than having a passion for the arts, [the women] seemed to be very conventional, so I wondered if this was a welcoming place for a woman so unconventional,” Show says.
“I would like to think that Charlotte was just as queer, just as other, just as colorful, just as taboo as it is now, but not on the surface,” adds Ireland. “Was [Blanche] the only one making those types of splashes in Charlotte? Absolutely not. But perhaps was she the loudest one? Maybe.”
What would Blanche think of 2024 Charlotte, with music venues, restaurants, pop-up galleries and even movies and TV shows filmed around town. “She would be kind of jazzed and stimulated by the growth because there’s so many more things to do and see,” muses Alexander Stick.
Blanche died in 1962, but when I walk into Stagioni, she still demands to be seen. Upon entry, a painting of a pale woman with green eyes and framed by red hair peers into the dining room. There’s also a letter showing her elegant and artistic handwriting. “The way she wrote was like poetry,” Alexander Stick says.
A photograph of a Paul Swann painting of Blanche by Ted Stick. Blanche and guests, right.
Blanche by the water
Aside from the portrait, there is one more painting of Blanche of note. The painting by artist Paul Swann shows Blanche standing on a beach, with the waves rolling in. “She’s dressed in a white, gauzy outfit … so that the sheer material covering [her arms] billows in the breeze. Dramatic!” Ted Stick says.
It reminds me of another image found in the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s Robinson-Spangler archives of Blanche beside her beloved pool.
What’s striking about the photo is her long red hair, and the mere fact that it’s down. In the 1930s, pin-ups and formality were en vogue, and put-togetherness was demanded.
While it’s clear that Blanche was known for her decorum, it seems she also had an undoneness about her, an ache for expansion and freedom that conflicted with the conventional standards of well-behaved women of her era.
At Stagioni, as I sip the aptly named Blanche negroni — a combination of Lillet Blanc, Suze and gin — in the very room where Blanche hosted luncheons and dinner parties, I think of this commanding woman. I marvel at how, beneath the decorum, was a woman with a resolute undoneness, a whimsy and a joy that transcends decades. I look at the back corner of the restaurant, where a pizza oven burns for guests’ viewing and tasting pleasure — a spectacle, as Blanche would’ve liked.
I lift my glass to Blanche, I say a cheers to her silently, let the bitter burn of the negroni make its mark, and still, as I sit alone at the bar, I am far from alone. I am her guest, and this is her home. SP
Historical photographs courtesy the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.
