The Mad Sculptor (21 page)

Dressed in a dark-blue pin-striped suit, a threadbare Chesterfield overcoat—its black velvet collar in such sorry shape that he generally turned it up to conceal its worn-out nap—a yellow scarf, a tan fedora, and gray suede gloves purchased several days earlier from the J. J. Newberry store on Main Street in Canton, Bob embarked for the city around midnight. He carried two beat-up suitcases, one tied shut with a length of rope, and a few small sculptures in a cardboard box, including the portrait bust he had done of Clarence Low, the state official he had met the year before at Rockland. He left the rest of his possessions at the Hosleys’ boardinghouse, explaining to his landlords that, depending on how his job search went, he would either be back in a few days or send a forwarding address.
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Arriving in midtown early on the morning of March 26—Good Friday—Bob went directly to Clarence Low’s office at 103 Park Avenue to present him with the bust, which had been modeled on photographs Low had supplied. Bob apologized profusely as he placed the little statue on Low’s desk. “It isn’t any good,” he kept saying, his voice so unsteady that Low feared he might burst into tears. “You should have posed for it, Mr. Low.” Though Low secretly agreed—“the side view was all right but the front was not so hot,” he later testified—he assured Bob that the statue was fine. Bob then launched into a tirade against the St. Lawrence Theological School, growing more agitated by the minute. “He talked wildly,” Low would say afterward, “and he looked just as wild as he talked.” Eager to get rid of Bob, Low made a show of looking at his watch and explained that he had a train to catch at Grand Central. As Bob accompanied him to the corner of Park and 43rd, he blathered nonstop about the job he hoped to get at the Museum of Natural History. “He talked like a maniac,” said Low. Before they parted, Low “advised him to take the job and make a name for himself.” He then shook Bob’s hand and hurried into the station, “glad to get away.”
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Bob’s next order of business was finding a place to lodge. Knowing that there would be no space for him at the Gedeons’ but eager to stay nearby, he scouted the neighborhood, finally settling on an attic room at 248 East 52nd Street, the brownstone home of a German-American couple, Charles and Matilda Ottburg. Identifying himself only as a “farmer from Utica,” he handed over a week’s rental—$2.50 plus a fifty-cent deposit on the key—and told his landlords not to worry about the daily upkeep of his room. “Don’t bother to clean my room or make my bed,” he said. “I’ll do that all myself.” He then lugged his belongings upstairs.

Besides a skylight, the room had a rear-facing window. Peering out, Bob saw that it commanded a view of the East 51st Street police station. He spent the next half hour or so settling in. Then he headed back outside, found a pay phone, and put in a call to an acquaintance, William Lamkie.
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For most of his fifty-eight years, Lamkie had been a model citizen. A graduate of Brown University, professor of municipal government at NYU, and member of the United States Shipping Board (precursor of the U.S. Maritime Commission) during the Great War, he had enjoyed an enviable life in a quiet Connecticut suburb with a devoted wife and two well-mannered sons. And then, in the spring of 1933, his life came unglued. For reasons he could never explain, he found himself committing a bit of small-time insurance fraud, claiming (falsely) that his car had been stolen and collecting five hundred dollars on his policy. When the insurance company discovered the scam, he was charged with perjury and second-degree grand larceny. In light of his sparkling résumé and spotless record, he was allowed to plead guilty to petit larceny and given a suspended sentence.

Not long afterward, he began to hear voices. Abandoning his family, he became a follower of the colorful cult leader Pierre Bernard, a.k.a. the “Omnipotent Oom,” the self-made swami and yoga pioneer who had founded a “utopian Tantric community” on a seventy-two-acre estate (complete with a thirty-room Georgian mansion)
in upstate New York. Within months of arriving at Oom’s bucolic headquarters, Lamkie was arrested for sending viciously threatening letters to a former landlady. Adjudged mentally unsound, he was committed to Rockland State Hospital, where he met Bob Irwin.
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During the course of their shared two-year confinement in the asylum, the two became good friends and confidants, Lamkie deriving bemused fascination from Bob’s quasi-metaphysical theorizing. Since their release, they had remained sporadic correspondents. By the spring of 1937, Lamkie was working as an industrial relations consultant and living with one of his two now-adult sons at 4039 43rd Street in Long Island City, a short subway ride away from Manhattan. It was there that Bob reached him by phone late on Good Friday afternoon.

They arranged to meet that evening for dinner at a Schrafft’s restaurant in midtown. Bob arrived with a thick manila envelope that turned out to contain a manuscript he had been working on since his arrival at Canton: a handwritten fifty-page autobiography—“the highlights of my varied life and wide experiences with all kinds and classes of people,” as Bob described it. Accompanying it was a typed, formal letter requesting, in effect, that Lamkie serve as Bob’s ghostwriter: “You can take this sketch of my career, add to or subtract as you think fits the purpose,” Bob wrote. “Take any liberty you think best.…This life story would of course appear over my signature and what you might add would be my words. You would be just expressing my thoughts.”
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Exactly where Bob thought his autobiography would appear wasn’t at all clear, though he obviously believed that there would soon be enough curiosity about his life story to merit its publication. He was determined that the world know the truth. “I’m damned sick and tired of being misunderstood,” he nearly shouted. When Lamkie seemed reluctant to take on the project, Bob became violently agitated. “He was shaking,” Lamkie said afterward. “He was irrational.” Alarmed at Bob’s emotional state, Lamkie relented. By the time he returned home a few hours later, manuscript in hand,
Lamkie was concerned that his friend was on the brink of doing something desperate. “I could see,” he would report, “that everything was coming to a climax.”
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After saying good-bye to Lamkie, Bob wandered aimlessly for a while. Drifting over to Times Square, he passed the entrance to Hubert’s dime museum. A tawdry showplace located in the basement of a penny arcade, Hubert’s was home to Professor Heckler’s celebrated flea circus, along with an assortment of carnival freaks, sideshow performers, and celebrity has-beens, among them the African-American prizefighter Jack Johnson, one-time heavyweight champion of the world. With his love of boxing, Bob couldn’t pass up the chance to see the legendary pugilist, now pushing sixty. Paying his fifteen-cent admission, Bob descended into the seedy underworld of Hubert’s, where he listened to the nattily dressed Johnson recite—for the dozenth time that day—the tale of his epic 1910 bout with the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries. Afterward, Bob approached Johnson and asked permission to draw his portrait. The old fighter agreed to sit for him the following day. But Bob never returned for the appointment.
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Leonora Sheldon, the fiancée of Bob’s friend Anders Lunde, had come down from Vassar for the holiday weekend and was staying with family friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Mullens, at their apartment on Riverside Drive. At 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, she and Bob met by prearrangement on a street corner near the Mullenses’ home and walked to the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. There, Leonora introduced him to her brother, William, who had agreed to help Bob find work in the Department of Preparation and Installation, responsible for creating the museum’s dramatic habitat dioramas. For unknown reasons, however, the job, as Bob later put it, “didn’t pan out.”
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Though badly disappointed, Bob—who could see that Leonora felt almost as crestfallen as he did—put on a cheerful face and asked her to come along with him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, across the park on Fifth Avenue. Inside, he treated her to the same
talk on his favorite statue—Verrocchio’s Colleoni—that he had given Ethel. An amateur artist herself, Leonora was so taken with Bob’s lecture that she agreed to meet him again the next afternoon for a more extended tour of the galleries.
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With severely limited funds and no job in the offing, Bob returned to his room at the Ottburgs’ to fetch one of his sculptures, a small portrait bust of Marlene Dietrich. He then proceeded to the 42nd Street offices of
Stage
, “The Magazine of After-Dark Entertainment,” as it billed itself: a slick, lavishly illustrated monthly devoted primarily to the professional doings of Broadway and Hollywood stars, along with current happenings in the worlds of popular music, radio, and dance.
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Explaining to the receptionist that he was “seeking commissions to execute busts of actors for the magazine, Katherine Cornell and Cole Porter in particular,” he was informed that the art director, Scudder Middleton, was away for the holidays and was told to try again next week.
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By the time Bob left the building, a terrible depression had descended on him. Heading east, he made his way toward the 53rd Street pier, where Ethel had once rebuffed his marriage proposal and where, two weeks after that shattering rejection, he had seriously considered throwing himself into the river. Now, once again, his thoughts turned to suicide.

As he crossed First Avenue, he saw something lying in the gutter—an old ice pick, dropped or discarded by an ice deliveryman. He snatched it up and slipped it into his coat pocket.

Seating himself at the edge of the pier, he stared into the river for a long time, trying to work up the courage to jump in. He was just about to take the plunge when he was vouchsafed a glorious vision. “The water turned light and was swirling all around like liquid light,” he later recounted. “It was just as beautiful as can be.” As he watched in mounting wonder, “the water of the river rose up and moulded itself into the form of Ethel. Her hair was gold.” “I saw it,” he declared, “just as clear as I see flesh and blood.”

A tremendous exaltation suffused his spirit. He “had the distinct feeling that electricity and sparks were vibrating about his head and
that lights were flashing all around.” At that instant, he realized that his painful years of struggle to perfect his powers of visualization had led to this culminating moment. He was on the brink of attaining godhood, the ultimate goal of visualization. On the very weekend marking the Savior’s resurrection, he himself was about to be transmuted into Jesus Christ!

Only one thing was lacking. He knew he “could not quite accomplish the role of Christ, without making a sacrifice, for a sacrificial rite was necessary to bring the wisdom of heaven upon earth.” The problem, of course, was that, “while Christ went down into the grave and rose from the tomb in immortality,” Bob worried that if he himself “went to the grave, which meant suicide by drowning,” he might not rise again, in which case “all the principles for which he had worked for so many years would vanish.”

The solution presented itself in a flash of inspiration. He would sacrifice Ethel. The internal pressure generated by her murder would be so intense that he “would be liberated from all the bonds of mortality and would arrive at the stage of Redeemer.”
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Believing that Ethel was still living apart from her husband, he decided to seek her out at Mary and Ronnie’s apartment a few blocks away. First, however, he went in search of an open hardware store. Finding one on Second Avenue, he purchased a small hand file. He then returned to his room at the Ottburgs’, where he sharpened the ice pick he had retrieved from the gutter. Back outside, he walked the streets until nightfall, then turned his steps toward 50th Street.
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Part IV

The Mad Sculptor

16

Bloody Sunday

I
T WAS ALREADY PAST NOON
when Joseph Gedeon crawled out of his cot on Easter Sunday—no surprise since he hadn’t gone to bed until after 3:00 a.m. He quickly performed his daily ablutions—scrubbed his face, brushed his teeth, trimmed his mousy moustache, splashed some water on his armpits. He couldn’t take a shower since the sink and a toilet were the only bathroom fixtures in his living space—a screened-off corner of his workshop, barely big enough to accommodate his cot, a table and chair, a small woodstove, and a plywood closet he had built for his meager wardrobe. Still he felt relatively fresh, having bathed just two days earlier at his estranged wife’s apartment.
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After affixing his pince-nez eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose, he donned a well-worn gray suit and checked himself in the full-length mirror attached to the outside of his bathroom door. The wall adjacent to the door was papered with Gedeon’s extensive collection of cheesecake pinups, clipped from the pages of his favorite girlie magazines:
Beauty Parade, High Heel, Silk Stocking.
Then he shrugged on his overcoat and headed outside.

Despite the wintry weather, the streets were full of holiday strollers—men, women, and children resplendent in their Easter finery.
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Heading east on 34th Street, he rounded the corner onto Third Avenue and ducked into Corrigan’s Bar and Grill, where—except for a couple of brief interruptions—he had passed the previous evening from 7:00 p.m. until 2:55 a.m., just before closing time. He had drunk so many beers that he had staggered home in a state of semistupefaction. Even so, he had managed to roll the evening’s highest score at skee ball—the popular, bowling-style arcade game that involved sending a small ball up an inclined ramp into holes ringed with rubberized targets. His winning score—310 points—was inscribed on a blackboard above the machine.