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In deciding on a career in the arts. Herter was following in family footsteps. His German-born grandfather, the first Christian Herter, was an architect and interior decorator who designed and lavishly adorned the Fifth Avenue mansions of such gilded-age moguls as J.P. Morgan and William H. Vanderbilt. In his early 40s, having piled up a million of his own, Grandfather Herter said farewell to his family and went off to live in Paris, where a few years later he died of tuberculosis, leaving behind a sadly dwindled fortune and two gifted sons. Son Christian (uncle of Christian Archibald) became an eminent New York surgeon-biologist, suggested to John D. Rockefeller the idea of creating the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Strapping son Albert inherited the artistic bent, went to Paris to study painting, grew the inevitable beard, married an aspiring American painter named Adele McGinnis, stayed on in Paris as a bohemian expatriate for several years before going home to the U.S. and a prosperous career as a muralist.
Giggle at First Sight. Young Christian, born to Albert and Adele Herter in Paris, grew to be a strikingly tall, alarmingly thin lad who had to wear hip-high steel leg braces for six years to correct a curvature of the spine—forerunner of the osteoarthritis that was to afflict him in later years. ("I had no trouble with it for 40 years. Then it came back. Retribution, I guess.") He became a passable golfer, tennis and baseball player during his Harvard years (he is still an avid Boston Red Sox fan), but despite these normalities, many of his Harvard classmates found him a bit odd, with his string-bean shape and undeviating interest in the arts. Classmates recall that he showed scant interest in the two fields where he was to win success, politics and foreign affairs. Said one old Harvard chum a few years back: "He was the last man in the class we would have imagined becoming Governor of Massachusetts."
Chris also seemed a bit odd, at first sight, to Standard Oil Heiress Mary Caroline Pratt when she met him on a blind date. "He was a great, gangling thing with a cap and plus fours," she recalls. "All I could do was stand and giggle." Four years later they were married.*
A Night in Jail. After graduation from Harvard, cum laude, Chris enrolled at the Columbia University architecture school and New York's School of Applied Design. But at his class's first reunion back at Harvard, in 1916, a classmate who was about to leave for a minor post in the U.S. embassy in Berlin told the aspiring architect about another opening at the embassy, urged him to apply for it. A week later young Herter sailed for Europe with his friend.
Herter served as a fledgling diplomat in Berlin and then in German-occupied Brussels, spent a night in jail in 1917 when he was arrested as a suspected spy shortly after the U.S. got into the war.