IBID (12 page)
Authors: Mark Dunn
6.
Bardock joined the firm in the summer.
The name of Jonathan’s new accountant was originally Joseph Berdache. When Joseph was six years old, his father was informed by a family friend, a linguist, that Berdache literally meant, “homosexual, cross-dressing American Indian male.” A legal name change was immediately petitioned for all members of the family. Ellery Reinhold,
The Story of Dandy-de-odor-o, the Little Company That Could…and Then Did
(New York: Christopher Street Press, 1972), 99.
7.
“Today I introduced Jonny to Winny. It was an instant match.”
Davison had known artist Winny Wieseler since the two were kids. His journal entry for the day goes on to say:
“I hardly needed to say a word beyond the briefest of introductions. She looked at him and he looked at her and she looked at his third leg and he looked down at his third leg and then up at her and she met his eyes with hers and smiled one of those big goofy Winny smiles and I knew instantly that he knew that this wasn’t going to be a problem and he smiled with obvious relief—one of those crooked, face-scrunching Jonathan Blashette grins and then they fell into a conversation originally about beer nuts which I had put out in a bowl on the table but then about everything under the sun and the conversation continued through the afternoon and into the evening and perhaps even well into the wee small hours of the morning (I excused myself after an hour or so). It is an amazing and wonderful thing to see two dear friends hit it off so easily and so completely. I will be patting myself on the back over this one for months to come
.”
Davison’s Diary, 6 January1923.
8.
“I think she’s the finest girl I ever met…and she even likes jigsaw puzzles
.” I bow to Lana Leggio, who, in her biography of Winny,
Winsome Winny
(Springfield, Massachusetts: Cohpannamo Books, 1958) evocatively describes the reasons for the attraction:
“Jonathan was quite taken with Winny. And it wasn’t simply the fact that she loved and accepted him as he was. He embraced everything about her—her commitment to progressive causes (woman’s rights, abolition of child labor, prison reform), her highly evolved taste in art and music, and her colorful, sustaining friendships. As Winny Wieseler evolved from shy country girl to a thoroughly modern force of nature, Jonathan Blashette eased back and enjoyed the ride, content to let this new and—he hoped—permanent love of his life navigate the couple’s destiny—a destiny lovingly shared, its catapult sprung
from the shimmy and shake of those wild, reckless, wacky, and feckless 1920s.
Nothing sums up better the winning wit and whimsy of Winny Wieseler than her parody of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem ‘My Candle Burns.’
My ice cream cone drips at both ends;
It will not last this heat;
But ah my tummy, and oh my tongue—
It tastes so good to eat!”
9.
Winny demonstrated her propensity for protest even as an outwardly timid and withdrawn young girl.
Safe and secure behind the private fortress of her correspondence, Winny pulled no punches, as this, one of many angry letters she dashed off to those public figures who raised her youthful hackles, will attest.
March 18, 1907
Dear Ex-President Cleveland,
Today you said that sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. You said that God in his infinite wisdom had worked out a social and political hierarchy with men on top.
Mr. Cleveland, I am only eleven years old but I am old enough to know that you are a fat, stupid man who would do well to keep his stupid, fat-headed opinions to himself.
The day will come when bloated, bullying men like yourself will be forced to give way to women of wisdom and fair-mindedness who will take this country in the
right direction.
In the meantime I will continue to remind men like you that such pronouncements make you appear ever the more stupid.
Sincerely,
Winny Wieseler
PS May I have a picture of you for my scrapbook? Thank you.
There is no evidence that the former president ever responded. Ibid., 14-15.
10.
She was a talented artist, to boot.
Winny was so heavily influenced by the first International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 that she immediately framed her next protest for mixed media. Her piece, “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” displayed at the Günther Gallery in Philadelphia in 1921, depicted a shellacked foot, described by Winny as “a symbol of the downtrodden, trampled upon by those of pride and privilege. I want people to see the foot and think of Sacco and Vanzetti who have feet of their own but who also have hands and hearts and lungs and want nothing more than use those lungs to breathe free and to use their feet to stand tall and unflattened by the boot of corporate greed.” The foot on display was Winny’s. Literally. She lost interest in the project after two exhausting days of standing behind a black curtain with her right unshod and shellacked foot exposed and extended out upon a pedestal, an inviting target for spitballs and mischievous feather tickles. Ibid., 143-47
11.
Jonathan was no fan of Coolidge, whom he found to be far too “lazy faire.”
Winny expressed similar distaste for the new president in letters she exchanged with Jonathan while on holiday in Cuba with her spinster aunts. Winny’s
antipathy for Coolidge had formed a few months earlier when, as vice president, he had accused women’s colleges of being hotbeds of Bolshevism. One imagines that the following letter, written on the day after the president’s swearing in (August 3, 1923), was received with a nod and a smile. Jonathan Blashette to Winny Wieseler, Wieseler Estate.
Dear Winny,
The invisible vice president is now the invisible president. I understand he was at his father’s farm in Vermont when he got the news of Harding’s demise. He was supposedly roused from a deep sleep. (Which raises the question: how does one know the difference between Coolidge awake and Coolidge asleep?) Here is how I imagine the conversation went.
SHERIFF
: Mr. Coolidge, Senior. I am sorry to disturb you at this hour.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: What time is it?
SHERIFF
(consulting his watch): 7:45.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: Botheration! Well, we’re all up now. What brings you here, Sheriff?
SHERIFF
: Is your son—?
COOLIDGE
(coming down the stairs, rubbing his eyes like a groggy toddler): Yes, I’m here, Sheriff. What is it?
SHERIFF
: I have some grave news, sir. The President is dead.
COOLIDGE
: President Harding dead? It is unthinkable.
(A long pregnant silence passes as all parties contemplate
what this means.)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: I suppose we should make things legal, son. Where’s the family Bible?
(The father administers the oath of office to the son. The father is a notary public. The son is now
officially
the President of the United States.)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: Will there be anything else, Sheriff?
SHERIFF
: I suppose not.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
(glancing out the window): The secret service men are mashing my pansies.
SHERIFF
: Yes, I see them. I will ask them to move. Goodnight, Mr. Coolidge. Goodnight, Mr. President.
COOLIDGE
: Good night, Sheriff.
(The sheriff leaves. Father and son sit for a moment in silence.)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: I forgot to mention: the vet came to see Bessie today.
COOLIDGE
: Teat still inflamed?
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: Not so much as before.
(President Coolidge nods. Another silence)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: Cup of Ovaltine?
(President Coolidge shakes his head.)
COOLIDGE
: Best be getting back to bed, Pa.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: Best you should. Long day
tomorrow.
COOLIDGE
: Ayah. Good night, Pa.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE
: Good night, son.
It should be an interesting eighteen months…if I can stay awake. I miss you.
Love,
Jonathan
12.
Jonathan postponed the road trip to follow the Scopes Trial.
Incidentally, a second, less publicized “monkey trial” docketed to get under way in Dawes Forge, Tennessee, on August 1 was to have included a brief appearance by William Jennings Bryan dressed in an ape suit. Out of respect for the family of Bryan, who, having concluded his prosecution of the Scopes case, promptly dropped dead of a heart attack, the judge granted both sides a continuance and forbade any references to Bryan or to monkeys at the trial. The case, in fact, never came to trial. Charges were dropped against the town’s young evolution-teaching high school biology teacher Miss Clorinda Pernell who promised to leave all mention of apes out of her classroom lectures in exchange for either a black Alaskan seal fur coat or an ermine with sable collar. The school board called her bluff and delivered her first choice, tied up with a big pink bow. So attached was Miss Pernell to the coat, that she was known to wear it year-round even as it became threadbare and she a sad, heavily perspiring remnant of her former self. Tightly swagged in the thick coat, she died of heatstroke during the heat wave of 1937. Sporting a thick moustache from an untreated hormone imbalance, Miss Clorinda Pernell, in the end, evolved into a life-drained replica of those very apes to which she had linked us all. A family court order prevented
the Dawes Forge Anthropological Museum and Arboretum from installing her embalmed body in its new Primate Display (Miss Clorinda Pernell having sold rights to her corpse to the museum in this last year of her life to feed an obsession for rose water parfum).
13.
U.S.A.: Union of Simian Anarchy.
Jonathan’s West Greenwich Village neighbor Cabe Knudsen errs when he decries “monkey trials all over the country.” I have found evidence of only these two, in addition to a somewhat heated exchange involving two divinity students in Normal, Illinois, which ended when one of the two young men tried to put out the eye of the other with the business end of a roasting fork. An interesting footnote to a footnote: Cabe Knudsen was deported three months after this conversation following another nationwide sweep for potential anarchists. He claimed Tahiti as his country of origin and happily spent the remainder of his life there, serving for a time as curator of the Gauguin Museum of Art. Knudsen may be familiar to some art scholars as the man who dared to answer Gauguin’s haunting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” His responses respectively: “Stupid Little Monkeys. Stupid Little Monkeys. To the zoo.”
14.
“There sat Aimee Semple McPherson, coifed in her signature bob.”
If the event were true, it would have constituted one of the most bizarre in Jonathan’s life. I haven’t found evidence that a single contemporary of Jonathan’s assistant Davison believed his story, and Jonathan’s diary, tellingly, is silent on the alleged meeting. Davison was apparently acquainted with a female acolyte of the evangelist who committed suicide when McPherson disappeared and was originally feared drowned, a fact that could very well go to plausible motive for Davison’s concocting the story that clearly paints the popular
revivalist as liar and schemer and fully disputes her claim that she had been kidnapped and tortured. (She was allegedly burned with a cigar on her knuckles.) I found the following account among the notes Davison had made for an unfinished memoir he was writing at the time of his death in 1971. HD.
I spied her in a dark corner of the hotel dining room. There she sat, coifed in her signature bob. I nudged Jonny and whispered, “The woman in the corner, do you see?”
Jonny peered and nodded. “It’s Aimee Semple McPherson. Perhaps her kidnappers allow her to come down to the dining room to take her meals.”
“What should we do?”
“Why don’t we go over and ask her what’s what?”
Jonny, like me, had little patience for women who pretend to be kidnapped and get everybody on the West Coast in a lather over it.
McPherson saw us coming and looked a little unnerved. We had her cornered.
“Excuse me,” Jonny says. “Are you the famous, allegedly kidnapped evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson?”
“No, I am not.”
She took out a compact and began to powder her nose, hoping, I would suppose, that we would simply go away.
“I must say that you bear a very strong resemblance to the woman,” Jonny pursued.
“People tell me that. Now if you don’t mind—”
To my surprise, Jonny sat down. Taking his lead, I pulled up a chair and did the same.
“Excuse me, but you are not welcome at this table. I wish to be alone.”
“Why did you do it?” Jonny asked, relentless.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, nervously. The woman appeared quite undone by our visit. She had powdered her nose to such point that she now resembled a Geisha.
“What if I were to put it thusly?” Jonny replied. “Let’s suppose you
were
Aimee Semple McPherson, what would you guess would be the reason you would be sitting in this dining room eating—what is that?”
“It’s pâté of braunschweiger with capers. Would you like a nibble?”
It appeared that she was now attempting to win her release through forced hospitality.
Jonny declined. I took a bite. It tasted like liver cheese.
“Let’s say that I am who you say I am—the world-famous founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.”
“Throw out the lifeline,” Jonny sang.
Aimee smiled. “Yes,
that
Aimee Semple McPherson. Let us say that I were she. Well, wouldn’t you think I would be entitled to a vacation? It’s exhausting work healing cripples all day. Sometimes you think they’re totally healed and they start to walk toward you and then they fall flat onto their poor, generally homely faces, and you must return them to their wheelchairs or whatever jerry-rigged
contraptions they have assembled to move them about because they’re too poor to afford a decent conveyance. Well, wouldn’t I be entitled to a few weeks rest and relaxation here in Carmel? If only for all those tens of thousands of passports I’ve stamped for entry into the kingdom of gold and myrrh?
Jonny was about to respond but I was too quick: “A young girl killed herself when she thought you had drowned.”
“I suppose the poor young thing wanted to join me at the Gates of Heaven.”
“But you aren’t there.”
“Well, I admit, she’d be in for a little bit of a wait.”
“Are you aware that two men also died — trying to ‘
rescue
’ you?”
“Yes, I do read the papers, but it must have been clear to most with some degree of common sense that I was not out there. Were there cries for help? Was I seen thrashing about in those waves? No, I was not. Because I was kidnapped. I was tied up and kept against my will in an undisclosed location, and at some point, I will have to escape and return to my flock with a fantastic story to tell. Yes, gentlemen, that is what I would say if I were Aimee Semple McPherson, but I am not. I merely favor her. Now, may I be left to finish my appetizer before my boyfriend comes down? I’d rather he not see you here. He is very jealous and what’s more, has himself been reported missing by his wife several weeks ago. The poor dear has enough to worry about right now.”
Jonny had been holding his tongue through all of this, but now spoke in angry sputters. “What makes you think that I won’t go to the police at this very moment and report
your presence here?”
Aimee smiled, a caper lodged stubbornly between her upper two incisors. “This is why.” At that moment I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head and then I was out. Apparently, Jonny, too, was similarly rendered unconscious. When we both came to, Aimee was gone. All that was left was the faint whiff of her floral perfume and a smudge of pâté upon her plate.
Jonny decided that it would be best not to go to the authorities with our story. “She’ll resurface soon. Nobody will buy the story. She’ll convict herself the moment she opens her mouth.”
Two days later Aimee showed up at the Angelus Temple with one whopper to tell—swallowed hook, line, and sinker by her fawning followers. A story that had absolutely nothing to do with pâté.