The Devil's Gentleman (4 page)

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F
ive years after the dazzling debut of the New York Athletic Club’s splendid Sixth Avenue quarters, another, even more spectacular clubhouse opened a few blocks away, on Forty-fourth Street and Madison. This one belonged to the NYAC’s longtime rival, the Manhattan Athletic Club. Boasting sumptuous restaurants, a luxury hotel, a theater, bowling alley, and library, along with a magnificently appointed gym and the largest indoor swimming pool in the city, it quickly attracted more than two thousand members, including some of the country’s best young athletes. Before long it was challenging the NYAC for supremacy in every field of amateur competition.

In just a few years, however, the MAC was in serious trouble, a victim of poor fiscal management, made worse by the Panic of 1893. By 1894, it had gone into bankruptcy.

One year later, it was resurrected by thirty-year-old J. Herbert Ballantine, scion of the famous brewery family, makers of New York’s most popular beer. An ardent sportsman, Ballantine renamed his new acquisition the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and set about to restore it to its former glory.

To that end, he instructed his handpicked president, James E. Sullivan, to hire the finest athletic director in the country. The man Sullivan chose was Harry Seymour Cornish.

At the time Sullivan recruited him, Cornish—born on August 4, 1863—was not quite thirty-two. He had spent the first twenty years of his life in Hartford, Connecticut, leaving in 1883 to take courses at a business college in Pittsburgh. For the next five years, he made his living as a businessman before returning to Hartford to wed Adeline Barden (whose older sister, Celia, was married to Harry’s big brother, William). Nine months and twenty-two days after the nuptials, Cornish and his wife became parents of a girl they named Edith.
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There was a swagger about Cornish, born partly of his proud heritage (he was a lifelong member of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution), partly of his own physical attributes. He was a bullnecked, burly man with a jutting jaw, a handlebar mustache, and a prematurely balding dome that only enhanced his aura of extreme virility. A superb athlete, he was dedicated—in the fashion of that calisthenics-crazed age—to the pursuit of physical excellence. (Indeed, in later years, he would attend anatomy classes at Columbia College in order to learn as much as possible about the muscular system.)

Gruff in manner, he brooked no insults and was ready to “knock someone’s block off” at the slightest provocation.
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Aside from bodybuilding, bicycling, boxing, handball, and swimming, his most cherished pursuits were attending athletic events and hanging out with his chums at his favorite watering hole. He was also not averse to the occasional visit to a high-class brothel. Men admired him. Women found him deeply appealing.

His career as a sports professional began in Boston, where, after running the summer school for physical instruction at Harvard, he became athletic director of the Boston Athletic Club. His specialty was track and field. As a coach and trainer, he felt he had no equal. He boasted that he could tell precisely how fast a man was running simply by looking at him, without the aid of a stopwatch. After two years in Boston, he was hired away by the Chicago Athletic Club, where he continued to make a name for himself as one of the country’s leading amateur sportsmen—a reputation reinforced when A. G. Spalding himself commissioned him to write a book on physical training,
All-Around Athletics,
for the popular Spalding’s Athletic Library.
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It was during his years in Boston that Harry—by all accounts an inveterate philanderer—embarked on an affair with a widow named Mrs. Small. In 1893, when he and his family decamped for Chicago, his mistress moved there, too. Harry continued to see Mrs. Small on the sly until she died during an operation—reportedly, the abortion of Cornish’s child. Cornish paid for her funeral expenses. Not long afterward, he became involved with another woman, Mabel Wallace.

When Harry left Chicago at the start of 1896 to take up his position at the newly formed Knickerbocker Athletic Club, his long-suffering wife remained in Chicago. The following year, she divorced him on the grounds of adultery and was given custody of their daughter, Edith, by then eight years old. Harry saw his child a few times a year, sometimes taking her to the Sportsmen’s Show in Boston, where Addie and Edith moved following the divorce.

It seems possible that Harry’s decision to leave Chicago was motivated at least partly by his desire to extricate himself from an exceptionally messy private life. Or perhaps Ballantine’s offer was simply too attractive to turn down.

Whatever the case, his appointment was big news in Manhattan sporting circles. “Harry Cornish Coming Here,”
The New York Times
trumpeted in a headline on December 18, 1895. “As a mentor and promoter of athletics,” crowed the story, “Mr. Cornish is without a peer.” After describing his accomplishments—which included staging the athletic games at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—the paper predicted that, with Cornish at the helm, the club was sure “to be heard from in track and field sports in 1896…. If given good material, he will surely develop a team that will prove a worthy rival to any legitimate New York athletic club team.”
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It was only the first of many times that Cornish would be extolled in the press as the leading light of the KAC—a situation that, in the heart of at least one club member, would rankle bitterly.

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T
o ensure that his new athletic manager had what the
Times
called “good material” to work with, J. Herbert Ballantine set about recruiting the finest athletes he knew for membership in his club. Among these was the country’s leading amateur horizontal-bar performer, the man typically referred to in the city press as “Champion Molineux.”
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By the time Cornish arrived from Chicago, Roland was already ensconced at the club. Though he retained his private apartment in the Newark paint factory, he also rented a room on the second floor of the Manhattan clubhouse. With his highly developed sense of self-importance, he took it for granted that he would assume a position of authority in the club and managed—largely through his friendship with Ballantine—to get himself appointed as an officer on both the house and athletic committees.

Though admired as a gymnast, Roland, according to later accounts, was not an especially popular figure. Even in that citadel of snobbery, there was something about his highbred airs that set people’s teeth on edge. His mouth seemed fixed in a patronizing smirk, and he held his head at a tilt that allowed him, quite literally, to look down his nose at the world. For all his prowess on the high bar, he struck more than one observer as a spoiled, slightly dandyish fellow—“a queer sort of person,” in the words of one commentator.
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Queerest of all were his feelings toward Harry Cornish. From the moment he first set eyes on the new athletic director, Roland seemed to detest Cornish with a ferocity that left other club members baffled.

While the city’s sportswriters spoke of Cornish in near-reverential tones, Molineux saw him as a mere employee and bristled whenever a story referred to the Knickerbocker athletes as “Cornish’s men” or “Cornish’s team.” In an outraged letter to the Board of Governors, he demanded that all press announcements regarding club competitions refer to the participants as the Knickerbocker Team.

He was also relentless in his complaints about Cornish’s performance as club supervisor. The evening exercise classes were not being conducted in the proper way. The restaurant was being mismanaged. Friends of Cornish were being allowed to use club facilities: foulmouthed “rowdies” whose “vile and obscene language” was deeply offensive to the delicate sensibilities of gentlemen like Roland. Cigar butts and expectorated tobacco juice had been left on the floor around the pool after a swimming competition.
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According to Roland, Cornish thwarted him at every turn. When Roland was put in charge of organizing the club’s annual amateur circus in the spring of 1897, he asked Cornish to put together a list of the necessary props, costumes, and equipment. Cornish delayed until the last possible minute, then strode into Roland’s bedroom, tossed the paper on his bed with a contemptuous flick of the hand, snarled, “There it is,” and left.
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A short time later, after discovering that three of the gym’s horizontal bars were broken, Roland ordered new ones from a manufacturer he knew and liked, a firm that “made bars for professionals.” When the equipment arrived, however, Roland was shocked to discover that it had come not from his preferred supplier, but from the A. G. Spalding Company. Checking into the matter, he found that Cornish—who had a longtime association with Spalding—had altered the order form.
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The episode sent Roland into an even higher pitch of indignation. He had already lodged complaints about Cornish with various club officials, even writing to Herbert Ballantine himself that “Cornish could do more harm to the club in a minute than I could do it good in a year.” Now he embarked on an active campaign to have Cornish demoted, if not dismissed entirely.

He demanded that the athletic director be stripped of various administrative responsibilities. He insisted that Cornish’s desk be removed from the boardroom and placed in the gym, and that Cornish keep regular office hours. Most seriously, he asked that Cornish—who in addition to his $1,800 yearly salary had been given a room on the second floor of the clubhouse—be evicted.

Though Ballantine and other board members were quite satisfied with the performance of their new athletic manager, who had quickly made the KAC into a force to be reckoned with in the world of New York amateur athletics, they finally yielded to Roland’s onslaught of complaints. Cornish was stripped of all his duties besides the training of teams and supervision of the athletic facilities. He was made to move his desk to the gymnasium. And in October 1897, he was forced to give up his room in the clubhouse and rent an apartment on West Eighty-fourth Street, just off Columbus Avenue.

At the time it was happening and for years to come, those who knew of the goings-on in the Knickerbocker Athletic Club were utterly baffled by Roland Molineux’s relentless persecution of Harry Cornish, which seemed all out of proportion to any ostensible cause. What in the world was behind it?

Certainly, the two men couldn’t have been more different in terms of their personal styles. Cornish was cut from much coarser cloth than the suave, supercilious Molineux. Interested in little beyond sports, whiskey, and women, the blunt-spoken Cornish was the type who would be found drinking with his pals at Jim Wakely’s Sixth Avenue hangout or whoring at a brothel across the tracks on Forty-seventh Street, while Roland was attending the Metropolitan Opera or slumming with other swells in the titillating underworld of lower Manhattan.

Indeed, in Cornish’s eyes, Roland, for all his athletic gifts, was nothing more than a spoiled little rich boy with absurdly prissy manners, and a hypocrite to boot, in view of certain stories Harry had heard regarding Roland’s supposed involvement in various dubious activities.

Still, these differences can’t account for the sheer inordinate intensity of Roland’s instantaneous and abiding detestation of Cornish. How then to explain it?

Armchair Freudians would have little trouble in identifying several unconscious factors behind Roland’s irrational hatred, beginning with his problems with authority. Here was a man who had grown up in the shadow of a strict, powerful, universally esteemed father. Roland himself never professed anything other than the deepest veneration for the General. At the same time, from his adolescence onward, he would contrive ways to inflict heartache, public ignominy, and financial ruin on the old man: a certain sign that, beneath his ostentatious avowals of love, there lurked far more destructive impulses toward his father. In the grip of such an acute Oedipal conflict (as a Freudian critic might say), it is little wonder that Roland projected his unconscious patricidal feelings onto the overbearing figure of the club’s celebrated new athletic director.

And then there is the old standby of latent homosexuality. Just a few years before Roland Molineux and Harry Cornish had their first fateful encounter, Herman Melville, long forgotten by the public, died at home in Manhattan, leaving behind the unfinished manuscript of his final masterpiece,
Billy Budd.
The villain of that story, John Claggart, is possessed of such a bizarre, inexplicable malice toward the beautiful young hero that Melville can attribute it to nothing beyond “natural depravity.” Some modern critics, in seeking to explain Claggart’s motives, have found evidence of an unconscious homosexual attraction to Billy, feelings so profoundly threatening that Claggart must destroy the object who arouses them.

Could something similar have been operating in the case of Roland? Could his obsessive hatred of Cornish been the flip side of a feared homoerotic attraction? Certainly, as the case progressed, the newspapers would be filled with hints and innuendoes about Molineux’s masculinity—his difficulties with women, his fondness for books on “sexual perversion,” his friendship with men who lived in apartments “fashioned after the rooms occupied by Oscar Wilde.”
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But all this, of course, is sheer and perhaps unwarranted speculation. All that can be said with certainty is that, from the moment Harry Cornish assumed his new job in January 1896, he became Roland Molineux’s bête noir.