The Devil's Gentleman (47 page)

It seemed that, after a life filled with such tumult and strife, the General would finally enjoy the serene and honored old age he deserved.

But fate—in the form of his erratic son, Roland—wasn’t done with him yet.

Following his release from prison, Roland set about trying to readjust to life as he had known it before his arrest. He joined a gym in Brooklyn Heights in an effort “to recover his old skill and activity as a gymnast.” Within two weeks, he was “able to do some of his old stunts on the horizontal bar,” albeit “not with his former vim and vigor.”
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At the General’s urging, he also returned to his work as a chemist, this time in his father’s paint factory, putting his color-making skills to use in the laboratory.

His true ambition, however—developed during his years behind bars—was to become a man of letters.

In January 1903, just a few months after his acquittal, the New York City publishing firm F. W. Dillingham brought out his first book,
The Room with the Little Door.
Dedicated “To My Father General Edward Leslie Molineux, with Reverence,” the volume is a hodgepodge of sketches, poems, and ruminations about life in both the Tombs and the Sing Sing Death House. The reviews were less than glowing. The
World
damned the book with faint praise, describing it as “not lacking in such literary merit as lies in the simplest possible telling.”
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And while the critic for the
Times
conceded that it contained “certain touches of humor,” as well as a degree of “unforced pathos,” his final judgment was withering. In the end, he declared, “the book reveals nothing new touching prison, can serve no purpose (unless its sales are large enough to put money in its author’s pocket), and one cannot help but wishing it had never been written.”
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Undaunted, Roland turned his hand to fiction. The following September saw the publication of his novel,
The Vice Admiral of the Blue.
At a time when authors such as James, Twain, Dreiser, and Crane were producing some of the masterworks of American realism, Roland’s tome—the supposed late-life memoirs of Lord Horatio Nelson’s close friend Thomas Masterman Hardy—is a hopelessly overwrought bodice ripper, featuring the usual cast of Victorian stereotypes, from mustachio-twirling villains to bosom-heaving damsels in distress. (“He clasped her once more in his arms, once more lingeringly kissed her, once more whispered to her, ‘I love you!’ Then, pressing a handkerchief to the mouth he had just touched so fiercely with his own, he carried her through the secret doorway into the gloom beyond. As he did so, the drooping limbs and closed eyes told him that she had fainted!”)
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In addition to this fluff, he devoted himself to more serious matters, especially the cause of penal reform. Allying himself with famed social crusader Kate Bernard, Roland published a pamphlet urging the creation of “Courts of Rehabilitation”: tribunals that would vote to release a convict from prison only when he gave convincing proof of rehabilitation. Such a system, Roland argued, would serve society far better than the current method of predetermined sentences, which did nothing to encourage criminals to reform.
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As an author, however, Roland achieved his greatest success in the field of playwriting. As far back as 1903, he had taken a stab at drama, composing a one-act play,
Was It a Dream?
that had a short run at Proctor’s Twenty-third Street theater in March of that year. An insipid fantasy about socially mismatched young lovers who are finally able to wed thanks to the help of a crystal ball, the play was dismissed by the reviewer for the
Times
as a “mediocrity” whose “characters talk a good deal but say little that is of interest to anyone save themselves.”
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Roland persisted, however, and by 1912 had turned out a full-length drama,
The Man Inside.
That year, Roland’s parents, through the intervention of friends, obtained an interview with Broadway impresario David Belasco, who recalled the meeting in his memoirs:

His mother said to me, “My boy’s life has been ruined. His health is gone—he has never been the same since he was released from prison. He has written a play which he believes will do great good, and he has set his heart on getting it acted. If he is disappointed in this, on top of all the rest that he has suffered, we fear that he will die. If his play should be a success, it might open a new life to him. Will you read it and help us if you can?”

Belasco, who “had been tremendously impressed by General Molineux’s great fight for his son,” agreed to read the play and produce it, “if practicable.”

When the manuscript arrived, Belasco found it “long and crude, but I saw possibilities in it and told the parents I would produce it. Their gratitude was very touching. Soon afterward, I met young Molineux, gave him several interviews and went to work to knock his play into shape.”
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The two continued to work on the play throughout the summer and into the early fall of 1913. On Saturday, November 8, three days before its scheduled premiere, Roland, then forty-seven years old, hastily wed a pretty twenty-eight-year-old play broker named Margaret Connell at City Hall, explaining to reporters that “his mother was dying and that it was her wish that the marriage should take place at once.”

By a bizarre coincidence, the deputy clerk who issued the license was none other than Edward Hart—the onetime coroner who had presided at the inquest into Katherine Adams’s death more than a decade earlier. Partly as a result of his perceived mishandling of the Molineux affair, Hart had been removed from the coroner’s office and was now a lowly functionary in the Marriage License Bureau. Apart from exchanging the few perfunctory words necessary to complete the transaction, both he and Roland did their best to ignore each other during their unexpected reunion.
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The Man Inside
debuted at the Criterion Theater on Monday, November 10, 1913. Judging from its title, critics expected it to be a frank, even shocking exposé based on the author’s personal experience as an inmate of the Sing Sing Death House. What they saw instead was a contrived melodrama about a handsome young district attorney named Richard Gordon who—intent on plumbing the criminal mind—descends into the urban underworld where he falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a small-time crook. Periodically, the action comes to a dead halt so that the hero can deliver a long speech about penal reform.

The reviews were not kind. Though the
Times
praised the grittily realistic sets and “exceptional cast” and conceded that there was a “certain suspensive interest to the proceedings,” the paper dismissed the play as hopelessly didactic and predictable—“mere sentimental rubbish.” It lasted only sixty-three performances, and its closing marked the end of Roland Molineux’s literary career.
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By then, however, the failure of his play was the least of his problems.

Even while
The Man Inside
was in rehearsal, Belasco had noticed alarming changes in Roland’s behavior. From a willing collaborator, he suddenly “turned sullen and very ugly,” the producer wrote in his memoirs. “Sometimes, instead of working, he would sit and roll his eyes or glare at me; and, what was very dreadful, he gave off a horrible, sickening odor like that of a wild beast.”

There soon came a point where Belasco began to fear for his safety:

I shall never forget the last night I ever had with him. He was furious because of the changes I was making, and I am sure he was going to attack me. Suddenly, I stopped arguing with him and, picking up a heavy walking stick, I said: “See here, Molineux, stop looking at me like that; I’m not afraid of you. If you had brought me a finished play instead of a lot of words, I wouldn’t have had to change your manuscript. Now it’s hot and I’m tired, so we’ll call the whole thing off for tonight, and you can go home and think it over.” He pulled himself together then and tried to apologize and say how much he appreciated all I was doing, but I wouldn’t have it and just showed him out of my studio as quickly as I could—and I took care
he
should walk in front of me all the way. There wasn’t another soul in the place, except the night watchman, away down at the stagedoor. I never let him come near me again.
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Roland continued to deteriorate. During a dress rehearsal he was allowed to attend, he sat quietly and attentively through the first act. As soon as the curtain came down for intermission, however, Roland “became so violently excited and created so much disturbance” that Belasco had him forcibly ejected from the theater. “It was hard to do,” the producer recalled, “but it had to be done. I really expected the man would break out and kill somebody.”

By the time the play premiered in November 1913, Roland had been shipped off to a “rest farm” in Babylon, Long Island. According to a statement released by his family, he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

Ten months later, in the early morning hours of Sunday, September 6, 1914, Roland—still residing in the sanitarium—escaped into town. He was clad in a bathrobe and shirt but no trousers. As he ran madly down the main street of Babylon, several people stopped to watch him. Roland rushed up to one man, seized him by the arm, and began to shriek incoherently.

The man was so badly frightened that he shouted for help. His cries brought Constable Luke Devin running. At first, Roland appeared to calm down. Suddenly, “he flew into a screaming rage and struck out right and left.” It took several men, including Devin and a burly youth named Ray De Garmo, to subdue him. Roland was finally bundled into a car, driven to the Babylon police station, and locked in a cell, where he hurled himself against the bars and jabbered wildly about lending money to the federal government. A few hours later he was arraigned on a charge of disorderly conduct.
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By Sunday afternoon, Dr. W. J. Cruikshank, the Molineux family physician, and a Brooklyn psychiatrist (or “alienist,” in the jargon of the day) named Arthur C. Brush had been dispatched to Babylon. After interviewing Roland in his cell, they pronounced him insane. “Roland Molineux, defendant in one of the most sensational murder cases this country has ever known,” reported the
World,
“is a raving maniac.”
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The following morning, Roland’s father, older brother, and new wife, Margaret, traveled out to Babylon, where—along with doctors Cruikshank and Brush and the family lawyer, Hugo Hirsh—they met with a judge named Nicoll. The disorderly conduct charge was dropped, and—deemed “a person dangerous to be at large”—Roland was committed to the State Hospital for the Insane at King’s Park, Long Island.

As Roland—still raving about his stupendous wealth—was placed in a motorcar and driven off to the asylum, General Molineux wept openly. For the first time in his life, the old man, according to one observer, seemed “broken.”
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Less than one year later, on the evening of Thursday, June 10, 1915, General E. L. Molineux—just a few months shy of his eighty-second birthday—died of complications following surgery at the Roosevelt Hospital. Until he went into the hospital, he was at his office every day, actively attending to business. “So he may be said to have died in the harness of daily duty,” wrote one of his many eulogists, “a departure doubtless suited to his indomitable military spirit.”
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His will, like every other document he put his hand to, speaks loudly of the man’s fundamental decency—of that unwavering sense of rectitude that, with the advent of the modern era, was already an anachronism.

It is a simple, straightforward document, barely three typed pages long. The first provisions are charitable bequests, offered in memory of his “beloved wife, Harriet,” who had died in February 1914: one to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church; one to the Brooklyn Home for Blind, Crippled, and Defective Children; the third—and largest—to the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn.
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There are also several donations, made in his own name, to his beloved veterans’ organizations “for the benefit of needy members.”

The bulk of his estate—or what was left of it after the financial toll exacted by his four-year defense of Roland—was divided equally among Leslie, Cecil, and Roland’s wife, Margaret, “by her to be used for the maintenance of herself, my said son Roland B. Molineux, and any child that may be born” to them.

The General left another, equally revealing document—a handwritten note, inscribed on Devoe & Raynolds Company letterhead, declaring his “personal desire that my funeral be very simple and without any ceremony except that of a Christian burial.” He gives two reasons for his wish, both reflecting his characteristic concern for the welfare of others. First, “funerals of a public character would take hard-earned wages from employees of all sorts by loss of time.” Second, such elaborate ceremonies often prove a strain on “feeble and aged persons”—like the General’s much-reduced band of Civil War brethren—leading to “subsequent illness and distress.”

“I believe I have quite a number of friends, faithful and true,” the letter ends, “and I want to remain where I am now—in their hearts—while my body will be resting under a simple and small Cross with the short inscription:

E
DWARD
L M
OLINEUX
A VOLUNTEER OF
1861–5.

“P
EACE
&
GOOD WILL TO ALL.
”
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In accordance with his wishes, the General was given a funeral “of the simplest kind.” At 2:00
P.M.
on Sunday, June 13, his casket was borne to the First Presbyterian Church on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, where the Reverend L. Mason Clarke read from the Scriptures and offered prayer. No eulogy was given. A quartet sang two of the General’s favorite hymns. Then a bugler blew taps.

Afterward, the casket was taken to Scarsdale, New York, for burial beside the grave of the General’s wife in the churchyard of St. James the Less.
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