The Mad Sculptor (19 page)

Dazzled by his seeming erudition and his all-consuming devotion to art, Ethel, as she later admitted, was happy to play pupil to his master.
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For his part, Bob “fell for her like a ton of bricks.” Before long, he had convinced himself that Ethel was his soul mate and ideal visualization partner—a new and improved “edition” of his former fiancée, the Chicago dancehall girl Alice Ryan.
⁹

Bob’s fervent attentions to Ethel did not go unnoticed by Veronica. “Bobby is certainly making a play for my sister,” Ronnie noted in her journal in late July. “I think he is out of his mind. He will never marry her if I have anything to do with it. I am going to take the matter up with mother. She will help me put the kibosh on it.”
¹⁰
A few days later, Mary Gedeon—who knew of Bob’s troubled history as a psychiatric patient but regarded him as “a decent fellow, honest in his personal and financial dealings, and pitifully alone in the world”—took him aside and, in the most tactful way possible, informed him that she “was anxious that Ethel have nothing to do with” him. Hastening to assure him that she herself had only the friendliest feelings toward him, she explained that she was simply thinking of her daughter’s long-range comfort and security—that “she wanted Ethel to make a rich marriage.”
¹¹

Bob was undeterred. Since his release from Rockland, he had been keeping in sporadic touch with Dr. Wertham, sometimes by phone, sometimes in person. In early August, he sought out the psychiatrist at Bellevue and spent the entire visit rhapsodizing about Ethel. When he declared his intention to marry her, Wertham “protested that he was acting too rashly.” Much as he valued the doctor’s opinions, however, Bob left the meeting unshaken in his resolve.
¹²

Shortly afterward, while walking with Ethel along the 53rd Street pier, he blurted out a proposal. Ethel—who (so she claimed) had never felt romantically interested in Bob and had tired of his endless
talk of visualization—gently broke the news that, while she hoped the two could remain friends, she had decided to become engaged to Joe Kudner. Bob was devastated. “I just went crazy,” he confided in his diary. Two weeks later, he returned to the same East River pier, intending to drown himself. There were so many boats in the water, however, that he changed his mind, assuming that someone would come to his rescue.
¹³

Another blow fell in October when he was fired from his job at Chelsea Realistic Products. Since his rejection by Ethel, Bob had become increasingly sullen—“a surly devil,” as his boss, Gilbert Maggi described him. Fed up with his young employee’s “moodiness,” Maggi informed him one morning that he was letting Bob go. After handing him a severance check for twenty-five dollars, Maggi walked to the rear of the studio to fetch Bob’s sculpting tools. As he was gathering up the implements, he suddenly “had the feeling that there was something behind him. Turning, he saw Irwin standing there with an insane glint in his eyes and, in his right hand, a meat cleaver that had sometimes been used to chip plaster.”

“What the hell are you doing, Bob?” said Maggi.

“I’m going to split your head right down the middle,” Bob snarled. “Then I’m going to fry your brains and have them for supper. You won’t miss them. You never use them anyway.”

Raising the cleaver, he took a swing at Maggi, who somehow managed to dodge the blow. “Galvanized into life-and-death action,” the older man reached for “a pot of wet plaster nearby” and hurled it at Bob, hitting him in the face. As Bob “reeled drunkenly,” Maggi got him in a bear hug, wrestled him out of the studio, tossed him onto the street, and locked the door.

“This score isn’t settled!” shouted Irwin from the sidewalk. “I’ll get you for this!”

But Maggi never saw Bob Irwin again.
¹⁴

Over the next few months, Bob—like millions of his countrymen—found himself in desperate financial straits. With the unemployment rate near its Depression-era peak of almost 25 percent, he was forced
to take whatever menial jobs he could find: elevator operator, coatroom attendant, dishwasher. None lasted more than a few weeks. By December, with his meager savings gone, he applied for Home Relief. On the day before Christmas, he received a welfare check for $19.10. Still obsessing over Ethel and plagued by suicidal thoughts, he visited Wertham, who “advised him as forcibly as I could to return to the state hospital.” Shortly afterward, on January 11, Bob voluntarily recommitted himself to Rockland, where—with the exception of one abortive attempt to return to society—he would remain for nearly two years.
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After suffering so many setbacks and frustrations during his six-month sojourn in New York City, Bob saw Rockland as a kind of refuge—a place where “life would be easier for him” and he “could work on his sculpture without being bothered.” Initially, however, he had trouble readjusting to institutional living. He found the confinement “more galling than ever” and was thrown into “despondency and despair” by his surroundings. “It is hard to live with people in an insane asylum,” he bemoaned in his journal. “The diseased, the degenerate, the violent are my mess mates.”
¹⁶
His mood grew even darker when, in late June, word reached him that Ethel had married Joe Kudner a few weeks earlier in a small ceremony in Manhattan.

It wasn’t long before his “combative spirit” (as he euphemistically described his dangerously volcanic temper) got him sent to the violent ward. Drugged, straitjacketed, and strapped to a bed, he endured several “weary months of discipline and deprivation” before being returned to the general population. Apart from one other incident—when he was accused of “a sexual lapse or indulgence” with a young female patient—he remained generally quiet and cooperative for the remainder of his stay and was permitted the freedom of the grounds.
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Bob proved to be such a model patient that he was not only allowed to use sharp sculpting tools but also encouraged to teach a class in clay modeling at the newly opened children’s pavilion, a facility
for youngsters with “juvenile conduct disorders.” At the dedication of the pavilion, attended by Governor Herbert Lehman and other state luminaries, several of Bob’s pieces were on display, including a portrait bust of the governor himself, who—as Bob proudly noted in his diary—“took much interest in my sculpture.”
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Another state official much taken with Bob’s work that day was Clarence Low, president of the board of Rockland State Hospital and treasurer of the Democratic State Committee. Struck by a small bust Bob had made of President Roosevelt, Low arranged to purchase it for fifty dollars and have it displayed at the Democratic headquarters. To show his appreciation, Bob offered to make a bust of Low, who sent him several photographs to use as references.
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Though so comfortably ensconced in the asylum that he was not eager to leave, Bob was discharged on July 15, 1936, his condition having once again been judged “much improved” by his supervising psychiatrist, Dr. Ettling. Arriving in Manhattan later that day, he went directly from the bus terminal to the Gedeons’ brownstone, where he learned that Ethel and Joe were residing in Astoria, Queens. That same evening, he paid the newlyweds a visit at their cottage, where he “presented to Mrs. Kudner the bust of her I had withheld out of mere spite. I told her that there was much of myself in the sculpture and now that she was married I did not want to bring back old memories.”
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Six days later—unable to find a job and so heartbroken over Ethel that he “felt like jumping in the river”—Bob had himself readmitted to Rockland.
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He would remain there for another three months. During that time, to salve his emotional wound—“take the sting out of my breast,” as he put it—he devoted himself to the creation of what he considered his masterpiece. Called
The Cobra
, the little sculpture was meant to symbolize what Irwin viewed as the essence of femininity. “So many women have the snake nature in them,” he explained. “They lure men to death by their enchantments. They inspire to great heights and debase to great depths.” The statue depicted a serpent with coiled tail, stubby body, and raised, hooded
head that seemed to be swaying, as if under the spell of a snake charmer. Two things made the creature uniquely unsettling. It had an enormous pair of naked breasts and the face of a woman who wore an expression of postcoital bliss and whose features, as anyone who knew her would immediately recognize, were those of Ethel Kudner.
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14

Canton

A
DECADE AFTER EMBRACING
the freethinking philosophy of his intellectual hero, Robert Ingersoll—the “Great Agnostic”—Bob Irwin underwent a change of heart. “I got so filled up with religion during my youth that for years I wanted none of it,” he explained. By the fall of 1936, however, he had developed a renewed “interest in the fundamentals of religion.” Art and religion, he had come to realize, were “closely related,” allowing us to transcend the suffering of the world by putting us in touch with an “unseen power,” the divine source of all creation.
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For a while, Bob—like his father before him—grew obsessed with the teachings of John Wesley. In typical fashion, he would expound at length on Methodist doctrine to anyone within earshot. One listener much impressed with his evangelical spiel was a hospital attendant named Kenneth Iles, who worked at the new children’s pavilion where Bob conducted his classes.

Before coming to Rockland, Iles had been a divinity student at the St. Lawrence University Theological School in Canton, New York, a village in the extreme northern part of the state, less than
twenty miles from the Canadian border. In late summer 1936, he wrote a highly laudatory letter about Bob to the dean of the school, John Murray Atwood. Though Bob did not have a high school diploma, he was, as Atwood learned after contacting him directly, “better informed and better read than the majority of students.” Since the school “occasionally had students with irregular educations who made good,” Bob was accepted into the program on a nonmatriculated, trial basis. With the blessing of Rockland’s superintendent, Dr. Russell E. Blaisdell, Bob, who was there on a voluntary basis, gave his ten days’ notice of departure. On September 25, 1936, toting a couple of battered valises and a carton containing a few small sculptures, he headed north by bus to his new home.
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For much of his time in Canton, Bob’s life was as normal and contented as it would ever be. He enjoyed his classes in religious education, homiletics, and Biblical literature, and impressed his instructors as an earnest and unusually well-read person. That Bob had spent time in an insane asylum “only made the professors more anxious to help him.”
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Far from being disturbed by his psychiatric history, they saw him as a sympathetic figure, a twenty-nine-year-old man seeking to rehabilitate his life through Christian service.

He found a room in a boardinghouse run by a couple named Hosley, who supplemented their income by keeping bees. To defray his rent, Bob lent a hand when the time came to harvest the honey. He also took on other odd jobs: delivering the
New York Times
, mowing lawns, shoveling snow.
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Deeply impressed with Bob’s artistic abilities, one of his teachers, Dr. Angus MacLean—professor of religious history and future dean of the seminary—arranged for him to teach two classes in clay modeling, one for adults and one for children, who paid twenty-five cents per lesson. Since Bob’s living quarters were too small to accommodate a work space, MacLean also “allowed Irwin to use his own home as a studio.” Before long, Bob had become “an object of much admiration and curiosity” in the little community, invited to address the members of St. Lawrence Rotary Club, interviewed by a
reporter for the
Syracuse Post-Standard
, and appearing on the local radio station to discuss “his own work and art in general.”
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He also had a small but devoted circle of friends, including his landlord’s wife, Mrs. Hosley, who developed such a keen “maternal affection for him” that, when her brother died in November, “she arranged for Bob to be given his clothing.”
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Among his fellow students, he became especially close to a well-to-do young man named Anders Lunde and a twenty-year-old from far humbler circumstances, Izzy Demsky.

A powerfully built, strikingly handsome nineteen-year-old, Demsky had endured a grim, Dickensian boyhood. One of seven children of poor Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms of Russia for the supposedly gold-paved streets of America, he had grown up in a hardscrabble section of Amsterdam, New York, where his father—a bitter, uncommunicative man given to outbursts of drunken rage—barely made a living as a junk peddler and ragman. Food was so scarce in the Demsky household that young Izzy was reduced to stealing eggs from a neighbor’s chicken coop. To shield their ramshackle house from the cold, the walls were insulated with manure collected year-round from his father’s dray horse. Every daily walk to school was a perilous gauntlet through neighborhoods filled with Jew-hating gangs.

Thanks to his native talents—and the patronage of an infatuated English teacher—Demsky flourished in high school, distinguishing himself in public speaking, acting, and essay writing. With money scraped together from various odd jobs—newspaper delivery boy, department store clerk, bellhop, waiter, factory hand—he managed to enroll at St. Lawrence. He found part-time work as a janitor and lived frugally, scrounging food from other students and renting a cubbyhole room in a cheap boardinghouse.