The Devil's Gentleman (46 page)

88

T
hough most of the crowd had long since dispersed, a dozen or so newsmen were still congregated outside the Molineux home when, at around 6:00
P.M.
, the front door opened and George Gordon Battle emerged. He was immediately surrounded by the reporters, who bombarded him with questions. The ever-gracious Battle took a moment to explain that, at the family’s request, he was on his way to the Murray Hill Hotel to escort Roland’s wife home. A moment later, he had boarded a waiting carriage and was gone.
¹

By the time he arrived at the door of her suite, Blanche had already heard the news. Entering, he announced with a smile, “Roland is free.”

From her seat in the parlor, Blanche merely looked at him, her face taut. Battle was no fool. He had known for a long time where matters stood between Blanche and her husband.

“You needn’t tell me—I think I know,” he said as her silence continued. “I appreciate how hard it’s been for you. But you must go on a bit longer.”

When Blanche finally spoke, there was such bitterness in her voice that even she felt “as though it came from another’s throat.” “Their son is returned to them. They have him. They don’t need me any longer.”

Battle’s tone was pure gentle persuasion. “But you’re wrong. They do need you. It’s imperative that you should be in the General’s home at this time. You can see why. The newspapers will blow it into a tremendous sensation if they learn you have not rejoined the family.”

Blanche struggled to control the emotions that threatened to engulf her: anger, resentment, despair. Nowhere among them was the slightest pleasure or relief at Roland’s acquittal.

“Oh, can’t I have my own life now?” she cried. “Or what’s left of it?”

“But think of the old General,” Battle urged.

Blanche was sobbing now. “I don’t want to hurt him,” she managed to say. “Only please, don’t ask me to go back. Let me go away!”
²

But Battle persisted until, regaining a measure of control, Blanche made herself ready and allowed herself to be led down to the carriage. Throughout the drive to Brooklyn, she stared blankly out the window. She felt, as she would record in her memoirs, “quite dead.”

Beside her on the cushion lay a large bouquet of American Beauty roses. Battle had purchased them from a florist’s shop, so that Blanche would have something to present to Roland when she saw him—a token of her joy at their reunion.
³

When the coach drew up at 117 Fort Greene Place, Blanche—handsomely dressed in a big feathered hat, dove-colored shirtwaist, black skirt, with a boa around her neck
⁴
—stepped onto the sidewalk and, ignoring the shouted questions of the newsmen, ran up the high stoop. Battle followed at her heels. In the excitement of the moment, he did not see that, either by accident or design, she had left the roses behind. By the time he noticed, the coach had already driven away.
⁵

The front door was opened by the General, who held out his arms in welcome. Blanche, however, was so eager to see her husband that she rushed past her father-in-law and into the front parlor. At the sight of her, Roland—who had been seated in a chair reading congratulatory telegrams—sprang to his feet and the pair flew into each other’s arms. They spent the next several hours in loving communion behind the closed doors of the parlor, while the rest of the family left them discreetly alone.

That, at any rate, was the account that appeared in the next day’s newspapers.
⁶
Blanche’s memoirs tell a different story.

Upon entering the Molineux home—her “dead heart carried inside me”—she strode directly “through the high ceilinged and paneled halls” and, without so much as a word to Roland or any other member of the family, proceeded straight “upstairs to my former sleeping chamber.”

Removing her wraps and hat but otherwise remaining fully clothed, she sank into an easy chair beside a window. From below stairs, voices floated up to her. “Roland was there with his family. The world believed I was lying in his arms. Yet I sat in my room alone, all night.”

By the time the “first faint streak of gray light” showed in the east, she had made her final decision. Moving to the desk, she took a sheet of stationery from a leather portfolio and began a letter.

It was addressed, not to her husband, but to the General. In it, she described “the slow death that had left me numb and cold. I wrote him of my hopes for their happiness, of my love and respect for himself, and my prayer that God would bless him.”

As for his son, “I left no word for him”—though she did not fail to deliver an eloquent message.

After sealing the letter with wax, she placed it on the mahogany table. Then she pulled off her wedding ring and set it on top of her farewell note.
⁷

When the sun had fully risen, Blanche snuck downstairs and boarded a carriage that took her back to Manhattan.

She never saw Roland Molineux again.

89

T
he story broke on Tuesday, November 18, exactly one week after Roland’s acquittal:
MRS. MOLINEUX SEEKS A DAKOTA DIVORCE
.

The morning after absconding from the Molineux home, Blanche had boarded a train at Grand Central Station and decamped for Sioux Falls, South Dakota—in those days, the quickie-divorce capital of the USA (a position later assumed by Reno, Nevada). She took a room in the Cataract Hotel, the most luxurious lodging in town, though hardly princely in comparison with the accommodations she had enjoyed in Murray Hill. One newspaper described it as “a rather sordid habitation, filled with ill-mannered men and chemically complexioned women seeking the same end as Mrs. Molineux.”
¹

Given the nationwide notoriety of the Molineux case, her presence generated a great deal of excitement in the little town. For the most part, Blanche kept a low profile. Despite early reports that she planned to hire “an automobile and make extensive sightseeing trips throughout the surrounding country,” she spent most of her time “immured in her modest apartment, reading bundles of New York newspapers, writing, and glancing over the magazines.”
²

As soon as her whereabouts became known, reporters descended on Sioux Falls. For the first time, she openly admitted what many had long suspected: that “her apparent loyalty and love for her husband were all for appearances’ sake.”

“For four years I have been waiting, living in an agony, to see what would be done with that man,” she declared in her first published interview. “Now it’s all over and I want to rest. I made myself a martyr for the sake of General Molineux. I love the General, and for his sake I buried myself for four years. There is not another member of his family that I would have done so much for. I promised him I would wait until he had done all possible to save that man.”
³

Her plan, she explained, was to remain in Sioux Falls for the six months required to establish legal residency. She would then promptly file for divorce. She had already engaged a local firm, Kittredge, Kinans & Scott, to represent her. The grounds for the suit would be extreme mental cruelty.
⁴

Informed of her statement by reporters back in Brooklyn, General Molineux—for the first time since the long ordeal had begun—became “speechless with rage.” It was not until the following morning that he could bring himself to speak about his daughter-in-law. Even then he had little to say, though his tone left no doubt that he viewed her desertion of Roland as an act of the rankest treachery.

“I’m not going to talk about this matter until I see my lawyer,” he said. “So far as I can see, the only thing she has against her husband is that he was in prison for four years and she was deprived of some pleasure and enjoyment in that time.

“So she refers to my son as ‘that man,’ does she?” he continued bitterly. “Well, I have always referred to her as ‘that lady.’ She has had the first say in this matter. Perhaps she will have the last word—and perhaps not.”
⁵

For a while, there was talk that Roland might contest the divorce. In the end, however, he chose to let the matter go. By the following September, Blanche was a free woman.

Less than two months later, she married again. Her new husband was Wallace D. Scott—the young attorney who had handled her divorce.
⁶

Just a few weeks after her marriage, Blanche—intent on pursuing her aborted stage career—traveled to New York City for a meeting with representatives of vaudeville producer F. F. Proctor. On November 15, 1903,
The New York Times
reported that she had signed a contract for the unprecedented sum of $1,000 per week to perform at Proctor’s flagship theater on Twenty-third Street. She would sing “twice daily and also at the Sunday concerts,” beginning on Monday, November 23.

The article noted that Blanche was known to possess “a cultivated contralto voice of such quality that it was once praised by Madame Melba.”
⁷
Even Blanche, however, understood that Proctor was counting on her notoriety, not her singing voice, to pull in the crowds. To make sure no one missed the point, the ads for her engagement billed her as “Blanche Molineux Scott.”

Neither Blanche nor Proctor, however, had reckoned on the General, who let it be known that he would seek an immediate restraining order to prevent his proud family name from being sullied in such a fashion. The threat was sufficient. Even before she could debut, her contract was canceled and Blanche was soon on her way back to Sioux Falls.
⁸

Blanche wasn’t the only person to try to capitalize on the Molineux case. As early as 1899, a writer named Randall Irving Tyler had dashed off a book called
The Blind Goddess
—a potboiler that anticipates by a hundred years those TV melodramas whose plotlines are “ripped from the headlines.”

The novel involves a statuesque beauty named Helen Brownell, who receives a mysterious gift from an anonymous sender: a Tiffany box containing an expensive “holder with a socket resembling a candlestick” and “a bottle of effervescent headache powder.” That very night, while Helen attends a dinner party, her father and a friend named David West—both suffering from mild headaches—sample the medicine and immediately drop dead. The book features many other elements drawn from the Molineux affair, including a lengthy coroner’s inquest, private letter boxes, handwriting experts, and an unscrupulous press that “found in the Brownell poisoning case material for the greatest sensation the city had known.”
⁹

An even trashier piece of pop exploitation appeared less than a month after Roland’s acquittal. On December 2, 1902, a preposterously contrived stage melodrama,
The Great Poison Mystery
by one Victor C. Calvert, opened in a theater in Jersey City before making its New York premiere one week later at Blaney’s Theater on Driggs Avenue, Williamsburg.

The play makes not the slightest effort to disguise its real-life inspiration. On the contrary, the names of its principal characters are—as one reviewer put it—“libelously like the names of the people they are meant to represent.”
¹⁰
The dramatis personae consist of a young chemist named Robert Milando and his father, General Milando; Robert’s fiancée, Blanche Marlboro; his archenemy, Harrison Cornwall, athletic director of the Metropolitan Sporting Club; Cornwall’s elderly aunt, Mrs. Adamson, who dies when she drinks a glass of headache powder spiked with cyanide of mercury; and assorted subsidiary figures, including Assistant District Attorney James Osgood and ex-governor Blackstone, chief counsel for the defense.
¹¹

Decried by critics as a “ridiculous paraphrase of the famous murder case,” Calvert’s play presents Milando as an innocent victim, framed by the villainous Cornwall—a character so one-dimensional as to make Snidely Whiplash seem like Iago. Constantly uttering cackling asides (“I have an idea—a brilliant idea, Robert Milando, and it means your ruin!” “Ha! Ha! Never shall she be his bride!”), Cornwall, as one reviewer reported, comes off as so “ridiculously comical” that the first-night audience could not even bring itself to hiss him. All “he got was a continuous roar of hilarious guffaws.”
¹²

Though
The New York Times
praised the “thrilling climax”—in which Cornwall, reaping his just rewards, plunges to his death from the newly erected East River Bridge—other papers were merciless in their derision (“when the curtain fell, everyone in the audience cheered—because the play was over”). Calvert’s play had a deservedly brief run, closing before it reached Broadway.
¹³

For hacks like Tyler and Calvert, the Molineux affair was simply a ripe subject for commercial exploitation. But to another American writer, one of our country’s greatest novelists, it seemed powerfully emblematic, a story with the potential to be transformed into great tragic art.

Theodore Dreiser was just putting the finishing touches on his scandalous first novel,
Sister Carrie,
when the Molineux story broke. Obsessed with themes of lust, money, and power, the young author was determined to write a book dealing with what he regarded as a peculiarly American brand of crime: a murder committed by a young man whose lethal act is sparked by an explosive mix of sexual hunger and social ambition. In the Molineux case, Dreiser felt he had found the perfect real-life basis for such a tale and began to compile a research file, composed largely of clippings from the
World,
along with painstakingly transcribed copies of other newspaper accounts.
¹⁴

Years would pass before he began work on the manuscript, which he titled
The “Rake.
”
¹⁵
Its protagonist is young Anstey Bellinger (a name Dreiser took from the real-life Alice Bellinger, Blanche’s friend and landlady). The son of a revered Civil War hero, Colonel Bellinger (a “dapper little man” of “Spartan” mettle), Anstey possesses many of Roland Molineux’s traits. He works as a chemist and color maker; is a singular combination of dandy and champion athlete; engages in sexual dalliances with factory girls; falls in love with one Celeste Martzo, “a girl of rare beauty but of a very nebulous character” and belongs to an exclusive Manhattan athletic club whose physical director, Victor Quimby, bears more than a passing resemblance to Harry Cornish (“His eyes were of a steely gray-blue, fixed and steady, not unlike those of a bull-dog, his hair was brown but a little thin above the forehead, his chin full, pugnacious, thick, like the broad end of an egg.”)
¹⁶

After producing seven rough-draft chapters, however, Dreiser abandoned the project. In the end, he “had trouble reconciling the Molineux crime with the kind of murder he wanted to portray.” What Dreiser wanted was a case involving “a young man whose social ambitions lead to murder.” To be sure, Roland Molineux was not lacking in social pretensions. Ultimately, however, he was too upper middle class—not enough of an outsider—to suit Dreiser’s fictional needs.
¹⁷

Four years after Roland’s acquittal, a young man named Chester Gillette drowned his pregnant girlfriend, Grace Brown, in an Adirondacks lake. It was the ideal crime for Dreiser’s purposes, and from it he would forge his masterpiece,
An American Tragedy.
¹⁸

On the evening of Friday, January 9, 1903, just two months after Roland’s acquittal, General Molineux, his wife, and his son Cecil went into Manhattan to dine with friends. At around 10:30
P.M.
, they started for home. There was a trolley stop not far from their friends’ home, at Broadway and Eleventh, right in front of the St. Denis Hotel. The night was clear but piercingly cold. Taking refuge in the entranceway to the hotel, the Molineuxs waited for the trolley to arrive.

When it finally pulled up a few minutes later, the General assisted his wife onto the car. Cecil boarded next. The General had just placed his foot on the step and begun to mount the trolley when the conductor rang the bell, and the car started forward with a violent jerk.

The sudden motion caused the General to lose his footing and fall from the car. Reflexively holding on to the hand bar, he was dragged along the street.

Cecil, looking around and seeing that his father was not behind him, shouted for the conductor to stop, but the trolley continued another full block before coming to a halt. By then, the General had released his grip and was lying in the middle of Broadway, a crowd already gathering around him.

Cecil leapt from the car, followed closely by his mother. By the time they reached him, the General—protesting that he was all right—was attempting to get to his feet with the help of several bystanders. He was loaded into a cab and driven home, where the family physician was immediately summoned. According to the news accounts that appeared the following day, one of the old man’s “kneecaps was badly injured and several of his ribs were crushed in.”
¹⁹

It took him months to recuperate. The following October, he was still not well enough to attend the seventieth-birthday celebration given in his honor by his old comrades from the 159th Brigade. Cecil and Leslie were there on their father’s behalf to accept the various tributes, which included a handsome floral shield of chrysanthemums, roses, and lilies of the valley (meant to symbolize the General’s role as a “shield for the preservation of his country’s honor” during wartime) and a commemorative tablet consisting of a framed photographic portrait of the General and a Maltese cross inscribed with the names of the battles in which he had distinguished himself.
²⁰

The old man, however, was nothing if not resilient. By February 1904, he was well enough to perform yet another act of heroism, when a gas pipe broke in the Devoe & Raynolds paint factory and the General—who was working in his office at the time—led a rescue party down into the cellar to save several unconscious workers.
²¹
In succeeding years, each of his birthdays was celebrated by his (progressively dwindling) band of former comrades, who would arrive at his Fort Greene Place home with floral tributes, speeches, and occasional poems:

And on your shield, my gallant Ned

(I claim the right to speak)

Shall ever shine in letters gold

The name of Cedar Creek,

And history will ever enshrine,

While ages come and go,

With that unique and brilliant fight,

The name of Molineux!
²²

The newspapers, too, took note of his birthdays. In October 1912, when Admiral George Dewey turned seventy-five, the
New York World,
in an editorial headlined
A HERO OF THE REPUBLIC,
reminded its readers “that there are other distinguished men living in the past who have served the Republic splendidly.

“Of these,” the editorial continued,

it may be safely said, none hold a higher place in the public esteem than General Edward L. Molineux, who has just reached his seventy-ninth year. With the details of General Molineux’s career in the Civil War our readers are familiar. That career is part of the History of the United States. It shows that patriotism is capable, when emergency arises, of performing deeds of great valor, and that, too, from the loftiest motive. We know of no man whose life affords greater inspiration or a better example than that of General Molineux. That life is replete with honor and distinction, of triumph over difficulties and a stern adherence to high ideals worthy of the sincerest admiration.
²³