The Valentino Affair (12 page)

To her chagrin, she had been assigned a tiny interior cabin, all the way forward, always one of the uncomfortable spots on any ship in high seas. When she complained to the purser, he explained that the ship was packed to the gunwales with passengers fleeing Europe and that no other single cabins were available. Blanca thought quickly. Earlier, while waiting on the platform at London’s Euston Station to catch the boat train to Liverpool, she had bumped into her son’s godfather, Charles M. Schwab. Schwab had been in London to cancel a fifteen–million-dollar contract to build submarines for Britain and France, as such a deal was thought to violate American neutrality.
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Blanca asked the purser for Schwab’s cabin number. When she found him, she begged him to help her find a larger cabin. Schwab told her not to worry and secured her superior accommodation—though it was still forward and tucked away beneath the bridge.

The voyage was dreadful. Mountainous seas made it a nightmare for passengers and crew alike. In a letter to Jack, Blanca described how “the boat pitched and tossed about so that, lying in bed, one moment I stood on my head and the next on my feet.”
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Even an old hand like Schwab didn’t emerge unscathed. By his reckoning this was his fifty-second transatlantic voyage and the first time that he’d been seasick.

On December 23, the
Lusitania
finally found sanctuary in New York harbor. It was bitterly cold when the ship docked and Blanca shivered miserably on the quayside as she waited for her case of jewelry and silver to be extracted from the hold. By coincidence, her dinner guest from London, Harold Fowler, had also been on board and, like most men who met Blanca, he was instantly bewitched. He introduced her to a customs official named Downey, who was almost overcome. “Although we all know who Mrs. De Saulles is,” he gushed, “we have not all the honor of knowing her,”
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and he allowed her to pass through without a second glance at her luggage. Blanca treated Downey to a dazzling smile and topped it off by inviting the awestruck customs official to visit the family home. “Of course, he was in the seventh heaven of delight,” she wrote Jack. “You know better than anyone what saying that means to people of that class. It was all very amusing and very useful.”
²⁵

New York had pulled out all the stops to welcome Christmas. The streets blinked with twinkling lights, and Blanca was ecstatic upon reaching the apartment on 78th Street. “When I got home to Toodles boy my heart almost burst with joy,” she wrote to Jack. “He threw his arms around my neck and hugged and kissed me, and it thrilled me so that it almost made me cry.”
²⁶
The next day a heavy snowfall draped the city in white. Blanca and her little boy sat by the window and reveled in the spectacle. Finally, she thought, a turning point had been reached in her marriage; she had a husband, she had a healthy child, and now, at long last, she had the home that she craved. At long last, Blanca’s life seemed to be set fair.

SIX

Enter Ms. Sawyer

S
HORTLY AFTER
B
LANCA’S RETURN TO
N
EW
Y
ORK, HER HUSBAND’S BUSINESS
partner, Maurice Heckscher, acting on Jack’s instructions, deposited fifteen hundred dollars in her bank account. After several false starts, Jack’s business dealings were finally paying off. In one spectacular coup, he and the Duke of Manchester had cleared fifty thousand dollars on a single horse-dealing contract with the Canadian government. Whether Blanca knew of this windfall remains unclear as she always claimed that her husband kept her in the dark about his financial transactions.

Blanca’s domestic situation appeared to be on the upswing, especially when, in February 1915, she received a telegram from Jack begging her to join him in London. She gave notice to her servants and started packing at once. Then came a second cable announcing a change in plans: Jack told her to remain in New York. Blanca choked back her disappointment and began the chore of hiring new servants. She was just starting to keep house again when another cable arrived from Jack: “Have taken apartments at Paris. Come at once.”
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Understandably wary, Blanca hedged. But March brought another cable beckoning Blanca to join him. Just a few days later, he canceled again. Blanca was twisting in the wind.

In late April she received still another summons to Paris, and this time she had progressed to the stage of having her trunks packed and sent to the steamer . . . only to suffer yet another last-minute rebuff: “Don’t come; I think I am coming back.”
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Blanca just had time to contact the shipping line and arrange for her baggage to be removed before the ship sailed. It was a fortunate cancellation. The liner was the
Lusitania,
which, on May 7, just five days after leaving New York, was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans. In conversations with friends, Blanca would dramatize her near brush with death by declaring that she was “sorry she was not on it.”
³

However, the immigration records at Ellis Island tell a different story. By the time the
Lusitania
sailed on its doomed last voyage, Jack was already back in New York, safe and well and living at 78th Street. He had returned on April 24, “after serving three months with the Red Cross in France,”
⁴
as he told the press. Again, Jack was the only authority for this claim, and given his prodigious talent for autobiographical embellishment, it should perhaps be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. Interestingly, though, there are witnesses who claimed that it was Jack—mired in depression over his turbulent marriage—who made the notorious remark about wishing to have gone down on the stricken
Lusitania.
Like so many incidents in this complicated saga of “he said, she said,” it all depends on which version one believes.

Barely noticed in all the press clamor about the
Lusitania
was the revelation that, on May 8, a second jury had acquitted Florence Carman of shooting her husband’s lover. The jury, apparently, took to heart the defense counsel’s novel closing argument that Celia Coleman and two other black witnesses should be “tied in a bag . . . and thrown into the river.”
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Such vicious bigotry was part and parcel of acceptable courtroom strategy at this time, and it was commonly agreed that Mrs. Carman’s team of high-priced lawyers had pulled off a legal miracle.

The prosecution retired to lick its wounds, disappointed but hardly surprised. In early twentieth-century America, trying to gain a murder conviction against any female defendant was tough enough; trying to put a white, middle-class woman in the electric chair was frankly impossible. Mostly this was due to the so-called “unwritten law,” a murky legal concept that every attorney knew existed yet few would admit to having adopted. In essence, it granted women, especially wives, the emotional license to kill any errant male with little fear of retribution. The reasoning worked along the lines of: “The bastard had it coming.” Since the turn of the century only four women had been executed in the United States; two were black, and all were dirt poor. Women might not have had the vote yet, but in capital cases across America female defendants enjoyed a judicial leniency that their male counterparts could only dream about.

Florence Carman left court rejoicing, her liberty restored and her marriage intact.
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The acquittal racked up another triumph for the unwritten law, and although Blanca was not in court to see the outcome, she doubtless read the newspaper accounts and agreed with the verdict. Little did she realize how, not so far off in the future, her interest in the Carman case would come back to haunt her.

That same day, half a world away, the Italian government gathered in the aftermath of the
Lusitania
outrage to discuss that nation’s position regarding hostilities. Like the United States, Italy had remained neutral, but growing alarm about German military ambitions had sparked a public backlash against political fence-sitting, with mobs taking to the streets of Rome and demanding that Italy join the Allies. On May 23, the cabinet buckled, and Italy declared war on the Central Powers. This had two immediate consequences: All young men were banned from leaving the country, and any Italian male citizen under the age of forty was eligible for the draft—even if he lived abroad. Failure to return to Italy would be regarded as desertion, the penalty for which was a jail term or even death. In light of such drastic penalties, many Italian emigrants did indeed return to their homeland.

Rodolfo Guglielmi found himself trapped in a quandary. He loved living in America and was desperate not to jeopardize his immigration status, but he also felt a patriotic duty to his homeland. And, of course, always at the back of his mind was the specter of a disapproving father taunting his worthless son. Driven to prove himself, Rodolfo duly presented himself to the draft board in New York City, only to be rejected because of his poor vision. He might have been spared the horror of Europe’s killing fields, but as a letter to his mother, dated September 20, 1915, and written from Washington, DC, makes clear, the young man’s conscience was clearly troubling him. In it, he tells of meeting “a gentleman . . . who has a great influence in politics” who had promised to help him obtain US citizenship, “so this saves me in an honorable way to be obliged to return for the war.” The identity of this “gentleman” remains a mystery, and as several years would pass before the young Italian did attempt to obtain US citizenship, we can only assume that nothing came of this promised assistance. Later in the same letter, he mentions being offered a chance to “make a lot of money” in San Francisco, along with talk of trying to get into the movies. It was already clear that Rodolfo Guglielmi knew where his future lay.

In the fall of 1915, Blanca had a new problem to contend with. Jack had always been a heavy drinker, but now his alcohol consumption was getting out of hand. It played havoc with the couple’s already skimpy social life. On those rare occasions when Blanca invited friends for dinner, Jack brandished his contempt either by fleeing early to hit some nightclub or, if he was really loaded, by stumbling off to bed, leaving his embarrassed guests still sitting at the table. Deep in her heart Blanca feared that the marriage had come to an end. In August she sat down with Jack and poured out her feelings. She told him that his behavior was “driving her crazy.” He allegedly replied that he “couldn’t help it, that he wasn’t made to settle down.”
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In that case, Blanca said, she wanted to return to Chile. Jack just shrugged and said, “You get a divorce and take the boy.”
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The finality of this response jolted Blanca. Although by no means a staunch Catholic, she still harbored a deep-rooted revulsion for divorce, due in large part to the fact that divorce was not even recognized in her homeland.
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If she returned to Chile bearing the stigma of a divorced woman, she ran the risk of being permanently shunned by the deeply conservative upper class. Before taking such an irrevocable step, she needed to clear her mind, and that meant having a complete break from Jack, from New York, from everything. In October she booked passage to Chile. Before leaving she signed, at her husband’s request, a deed transferring ownership of 22 East 78th Street to Jack’s business secretary, Stephen S. Tuthill.