The Witching Hour (83 page)

On January 15, 1899, in an enormous wedding held at St. Alphonsus Church, Mary Beth married Daniel McIntyre. It is interesting to note that up until this time the family had worshiped at the Notre Dame church (the French church of the tri-church parish), but for the wedding it chose the Irish church, and thereafter went to all services at St. Alphonsus.

Daniel seems to have been on very friendly terms with the Irish-American priests of the parish, and to have been lavish in his support of the parish. He also had a cousin in the Irish-American Sisters of Mercy who taught at the local school.

It seems safe therefore to assume that the change to the Irish church was Daniel’s idea. And it is also safe to assume that Mary Beth was almost indifferent to the matter, though she did go to church often with her children and great-nieces and nephews, though what she believed about it one cannot say. Julien never went to church, except for the customary weddings, funerals, and christenings. He also seems to have preferred St. Alphonsus to the humbler French church of Notre Dame.

The wedding of Daniel and Mary Beth was, as already mentioned,
an enormous affair. A reception of dazzling proportions was held at the First Street house, with cousins coming from as far away as New York. Daniel’s family, though much much smaller than the Mayfair family, was also in attendance, and by all reports the couple were deeply in love and deeply happy, and the dancing and singing went on late into the night.

The couple went to New York for a honeymoon trip, and from there to Europe, where they remained for four months, cutting short their journey in May because Mary Beth was already expecting a child.

Indeed, Carlotta Mayfair was born seven and one-half months after her parents’ marriage, on September 1, 1899.

On November 2 of the following year, 1900, Mary Beth gave birth to Lionel, her only son. And finally, on October 10 of the year 1901, she gave birth to her last child, Stella.

These children were of course all the legal offspring of Daniel McIntyre, but one can legitimately ask for the purposes of this history, who was their real father?

There is overwhelming evidence, both from medical records and from pictures, to indicate that Daniel McIntyre was Carlotta Mayfair’s father. Not only did Carlotta inherit Daniel’s green eyes, she also inherited his beautiful reddish-blond curly hair.

As for Lionel, he was also of the same blood type as Daniel McIntyre, and also tended to resemble him though he bore a strong resemblance to his mother as well, having her dark eyes and her “expression,” especially as he grew older.

As for Stella, her blood type, as recorded in her superficial postmortem examination in 1929, indicates that she could not have been Daniel McIntyre’s daughter. We know that this information came to the notice of her sister Carlotta at the time. In fact, talk about Carlotta’s request for blood typing is what brought it to the attention of the Talamasca.

It is perhaps superfluous to add that Stella bore no resemblance to Daniel. On the contrary, she resembled Julien with her delicate bones, black curling hair, and very brilliant, if not twinkling dark eyes.

As we have no blood type for Julien, and do not know that any was ever recorded, we cannot add that scrap of evidence to the case.

Stella might have been fathered by any of Mary Beth’s lovers, though we do not know that she had a lover in the year before Stella was born. Indeed, the gossip concerning Mary Beth’s lovers came after, but that may only mean that she grew careless about her lovers as the years passed.

One other definite possibility is Cortland Mayfair, Julien’s
second son, who was, at the time of Stella’s birth, twenty-two years old and an extremely appealing young man. (His blood type was finally obtained in 1959 and is compatible.) He was in residence off and on at First Street, as he was studying law at Harvard and did not finish until 1903. That he was very fond of Mary Beth was well-known to everyone, and that he took an interest all his life in the family legacy is also well-known.

Unfortunately for the Talamasca, Cortland was throughout most of his life a very secretive and guarded man. He was known even to his brothers and his children as a reclusive individual who disliked any sort of gossip outside the family. He loved reading, and was something of a genius at investment. To our knowledge, he confided in no one. Even those closest to him give contradictory versions of what Cortland did, and when, and why.

The one aspect of the man of which everyone is certain is that he was devoted to the management of the legacy and to making money for himself, his brothers and their children, and Mary Beth. His descendants are among the richest of the Mayfair clan to this day.

When Mary Beth died, it was Cortland who prevented Carlotta Mayfair from virtually dismantling her mother’s financial empire by taking over its complete management on behalf of Stella, who was in fact the designee, and did not care what happened to it as long as she could do as she pleased.

Stella never “cared a thing about money” by her own admission. And over Carlotta’s wishes, she placed her interests entirely in Cortland’s hands. Cortland and his son Sheffield continued to manage the bulk of the fortune on behalf of Antha after Stella’s death.

We should stress here, however, that after Mary Beth died her empire began to fall apart. No one individual could take her place. And though Cortland did a marvelous job of consolidating and investing and preserving, the dizzying expansion which had gone on under Mary Beth essentially came to an end.

But to return to our principal concern here, there are other indications that Cortland was Stella’s father. Cortland’s wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, had a deep aversion to Mary Beth and to the entire Mayfair family, and she would never accompany Cortland to the First Street house. This did not stop Cortland from visiting there all the time, and he took all of his five children there, so that they grew up knowing his family quite well.

Amanda eventually left Cortland when their youngest son, Pierce Mayfair, finished Harvard in 1935, leaving New Orleans
forever and going to live with her younger sister, Mary Margaret Grady Harris, in New York.

In 1936 Amanda told one of our investigators at a cocktail party (a casual chance meeting had been arranged) that her husband’s family was evil, that if she were to tell the truth about it people would think she was crazy, and that she would never go south again to be among those people, no matter how much her sons begged her to do so. A little later during the evening, when she was quite intoxicated, she asked our investigator, whose name she did not know, whether or not he believed people could sell their souls to the devil. She said that her husband had done it, and he was “richer than Rockefeller” and so was she and so were her sons. “They will all burn in hell some day,” she told him. “Of that you can be sure.”

When our investigator asked if the lady really believed this sort of thing, she replied that there were witches alive in the modern world who could throw spells.

“They can make you believe you are some place you aren’t, that you’re seeing things when there’s nothing there. They did that to my husband. And you know why? Because my husband is a witch, a powerful witch. Don’t quibble over words like warlock. It doesn’t matter. The man is a witch. I myself saw what he could do.”

Asked point-blank if her husband had ever done any evil to her, Cortland’s wife said (to this apparent stranger) that no, she had to confess he hadn’t. It was what he condoned in others, what he went along with, and what he believed. She then began to cry and to say that she missed her husband, and she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“I’ll tell you this much,” she said when she had recovered herself slightly. “If I wanted my husband to come to me tonight, he’d do it. How he’d do it I couldn’t tell you, but he could make himself materialize in this very room. All his family can do things like that. They could drive you out of your mind with it. But he’d be here in this very room. Sometimes he’s in the room with me when I don’t want him to be. And I can’t make him go away.”

At this point the lady was rescued by a Grady niece, and no further contact was ever accomplished until some years later.

One further circumstance argues for a close bond between Cortland and Stella, and that is that after Julien’s death, Cortland took Stella and her brother Lionel to England and to Asia, for well over a year. Cortland already had five children at this time, all of which he left behind with his wife. Yet he seems to have been the instigator of this trip, and was completely in charge of
the arrangements and greatly prolonged the venture so that the party did not actually return to New Orleans for some eighteen months.

After the Great War, Cortland left his wife and children again to travel for a year with Stella. And he seems always to have been on Stella’s side in family disputes.

In sum, this evidence is certainly not conclusive, but if does indicate Cortland might have been Stella’s father. But then again, Julien, in spite of his great age, may have been her father. We don’t know.

Whatever the case, Stella was pretty much “the favorite child” from the time of her birth. Daniel McIntyre certainly seems to have loved her as if she were his own daughter, and it is entirely possible that he never knew she was not.

Of the early childhood of all three children, we know little that is specific, and Richard Llewellyn’s portrait is the most intimate we possess.

As the children grew older, there was more and more talk about dissension, however; and when Carlotta went to board at the Sacred Heart at the age of fourteen, everyone knew it was against Mary Beth’s wishes, and that Daniel, too, was heartbroken, and wanted his daughter to come home more often than she did. Carlotta is never described as a happy child by anyone. But it is difficult to this day to gather information about her, because she is still living, and even people who knew her fifty years ago are extremely afraid of her, and of her influence, and very reluctant to say anything about her at all.

The people who are willing to talk are those who most dislike her. Possibly if the others were not so afraid, we might hear something to balance the picture.

Whatever the case, Carlotta was admired for her brilliance from the time she was a little girl. She was even called a genius by the nuns who taught her. She boarded at Sacred Heart through high school, and went on to Loyola law school when she was very young.

Meantime, Lionel began attending day school when he was eight years old. He seems to have been a quiet, well-behaved boy who never gave anyone very much trouble, and to have been liked. He had a full-time tutor to assist him with his homework, and as time passed, he became something of an exceptional student. But he never made friends outside the family. His cousins were his only companions when he wasn’t at school.

The history of Stella was markedly different from the start. By all accounts Stella was a particularly beguiling and seductive child. She had soft black rippling hair and enormous black eyes.
When one considers the numerous photographs of her from 1901 to her death in 1929, it seems impossible to imagine her living in any other era, so suited to the times was she with her slender boyish hips, pouty little red mouth, and bobbed hair.

In her earliest pictures she is the image of the luscious child in the Pears Soap advertisements, a white-skinned little temptress, gazing soulfully yet playfully at the spectator. By the time she was eighteen, she was Clara Bow.

On the night of her death, she was, according to numerous eyewitnesses, a femme fatale of unforgettable power, dancing the Charleston wildly in her short fringed skirt and glittering stockings, flashing her enormous jewellike eyes on everyone and no one as she commanded the attention of every man in the room.

When Lionel was sent off to school, Stella begged to be allowed to go to school also, or so she told the nuns at Sacred Heart herself. But within three months of her admission as a day student she was privately and unofficially expelled. The talk was that she frightened the other students. She could read their minds, and she enjoyed demonstrating the power, and also she could fling people about without touching them, and she had an unpredictable sense of humor and would laugh at things the nuns said which she considered to be blatant lies. Her conduct was mortifying to Carlotta, who was powerless to control her, though by all accounts Carlotta also loved Stella, and did make every effort to persuade Stella to fit the mold.

It may be surprising to learn in light of all this that the nuns and the children at Sacred Heart actually liked Stella. Numerous classmates remember her fondly, and even with delight.

When she wasn’t up to her tricks she was “charming,” “sweet,” absolutely “lovable,” “a darling little girl.” But nobody could stand being around her very long.

Stella next attended the Ursuline Academy long enough to make her First Communion with the class, but was expelled immediately after in the same private and unofficial manner and more or less for the same complaints. This time, apparently, she was crushed at being sent home, because she regarded school as great fun, and she did not like to be about the house all day with her mother and Uncle Julien telling her they were busy. She wanted to play with other children. Her governesses annoyed her. She wanted to go out.

Stella then attended four different private schools, spending no more than three or four months in each before ending up at the St. Alphonsus parochial school, where she was the only one,
among an Irish-American proletarian student body, to be driven to school each day in a chauffeured Packard limousine.

Sister Bridget Marie—an Irish-born nun who lived at Mercy Hospital in New Orleans until she was ninety—remembered Stella vividly, even fifty years afterwards, and told this investigator in 1969 that Stella Mayfair was undoubtedly some sort of witch.

Once again, Stella was accused of reading minds, of laughing when people lied to her, of flinging things about by the power of the mind, and talking to an invisible friend, “a familiar” according to Sister Bridget Marie, who did Stella’s bidding, which included finding lost objects and making things fly through the air.