The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  John M. Kantor, who police say posed as ‘a senator from Iowa’ when making allegedly worthless oil deals, was lodged in jail Monday, charged with larceny.

  I don’t know if my grandfather saw that story, but I know he found out his father had landed in jail, because I have a letter dated a month later, a torn half of yellow notebook paper with a CENSORED BY SHERIFF’S OFFICE stamp and a folded notice about the rules of the Rockland County Jail. “My dear Mack,” the note began. “As Marie is absolutely without funds will you please send to her all or any part of the $200 you borrowed from me on your note in Montreal for your trip to your publishers seven years ago. If she had any money at all I would not ask.”

  My grandfather—who at the time of the alleged loan had been living on John’s meager allowance—never said how he had paid for that train trip to New York after Diversey was sold. If indeed he borrowed money from John, then it would be rich irony to think his father had been taken in by a promise to repay that was never fulfilled. More likely, in a fit of self-aggrandizing parental pride, John had simply bought him the ticket (which would have been far less than $200 back then—the entire trip with hotel and food included couldn’t have been more than $50 or so), and now was choosing to call it a loan.

  Just over a month after the first pleading letter, another arrived from the same address with a very different tone. This was typed instead of handwritten and began: “Dear sir: Some time ago I wrote you a little note asking to please send the $200 you borrowed from me. . . . The money I spent on you and Irene for clothing, food, shelter, hospital bills and making it possible to bring your first-born into the world in comfort I don’t mind. But the $200 that you borrowed as a business proposition I need. I need it so badly that unless you voluntarily send it to Marie at once I shall be compelled to take such steps as I am entitled to under the law, for no other reason than at the present time it is blood money.”

  Again, I found no record of a response from my grandfather, and quite likely there was none. Just over a year later my grandfather received a letter that tells the story well. It is from the John Kantor fraud victim who became a MacKinlay Kantor fiction fan, a woman named Emma who had been robbed of her life savings in part because she’d been impressed with John’s glowing pride in his son.

  My dear Mr. Kantor:

  Thank you so much for your letter. I knew that John Kantor—I do not like to refer to him as your father—has been out of jail since last fall. His attorney and mine decided to gamble in this way. They knew that if he stayed in jail no one whom he had defrauded would ever get any money, while if he was released and allowed to go to work there might be a little hope of his making restitution. Of course I have no faith in him at all, but am grateful for anything that may offset my loss. I really believe the man is unbalanced when I remember him as he appeared in our house and then realize how he schemed to defraud me. . . . Someday I should like to describe John Kantor’s technique in establishing a friendly footing in our house. Such finesse! Such histrionic ability and careful attention to detail to represent himself as the type of man he wanted us to believe he was.

  Then, sometime later, Emma updated the situation:

  Court was called for May 1st. I set out feeling it was a complete waste of time. But I was mistaken. John Kantor himself was there with his attorney. I hadn’t seen him in nearly five years and dreaded facing him because in all my life no one had ever done such an unkind thing, to use us as he had done. But nothing could have been more charming and easy than our meeting. He was looking very well and was his most polished self, without a trace of embarrassment. We fairly outdid each other in our exchange of pleasantries and you would have thought it was one of the happiest moments in his life when he saw his attorney count out the stack of $100s and $50s and place them in my hand. I couldn’t bring myself to thank him but instead said, “I am very glad indeed to have this money,” to which he replied with a bow and a charming smile, “And I am glad to have you have it.” All was Sweetness and Light and I made what I hope was a graceful exit and I almost broke the speed laws getting back to the bank.

  Another letter from the same correspondent dated a year later:

  Be sure to read the January 16th copy of The New Yorker which describes in detail the latest activities of John Kantor. Now all is clear on why he was able to pay restitution.

  The New Yorker piece, “Death Without Sting,” for the column A Reporter at Large, drolly describes a meeting of “a remarkable organization” called Associated Cemeteries Corporation. The reporter, Jack Alexander, explains that it was remarkable because it has brought to the usual sobering experience of buying cemetery plots “a technique that blends joy with mortality and music with salesmanship.”

  An auditorium full of marks, lured by acts including “a man who plays a musical saw, a vocal soloist, a recital by kiddies of a dancing school,” were softened up for the big sell. The article made it clear this was a pyramid scheme. People were solicited to buy plots, but even more so to solicit friends and relatives to buy plots as well, who were to entice their friends in turn. In so doing, they all became “coworkers” entitled to a cut of the action.

  After the kiddies danced and the sawist sawed, the crowd was treated to a series of speakers on economic topics, but all was a preamble, a mere tease, for what was to come.

  “‘And now,’ the emcee cried, ‘I want to make way for the man everybody is waiting to hear, the man everybody loves!’ . . . There was a ripple of applause,” Alexander wrote. “I turned and saw a towering, Lincolnesque man moving down the aisle in slow, deliberate strides. He ran a hand through a mane of jet-black hair and smiled paternally. ‘That’s Mr. Kantor,’ my neighbor said. Mr. Kantor had a deep rich voice, and as soon as he turned it on, he seemed to take everyone right up on his lap for an intimate chat. His delivery was easy, except when he was emphasizing something. And then he roared. He was definitely a personality lad, frankly conscious of his power and appeal.”

  According to The New Yorker, John Kantor had created Associated Cemeteries in February 1936. What they didn’t know was that this was the same month that he had been released from jail upstate, with the idea that he could then go to work and make his restitution. Go to work, he did.

  After warming up with a few fables and Bible stories and homilies—“I know a lot! It would be false modesty for me to say I didn’t!”—he talked about the immense profits to be made in burial-plot speculation. It was a simple matter of supply and demand. Considering the huge numbers of Jews dying every day in New York, and the shrinking supply of space in nearby Jewish cemeteries, someone wisely buying up plots now could sell them at jacked-up prices in the near future. “Jerking his head back and looking ceilingward, he raised a hand aloft and cried, ‘Why I can see vast funeral trains moving through the air for the Jews of New York—who must be buried before sundown! . . . After all, man is born to die, is he not?’”

  What the New Yorker piece missed was this: Aside from the questionable sales technique, the naked greed and callous eagerness to take advantage of the newly bereaved, something was not quite right with Associated Cemeteries. Apparently, John Kantor was so enthusiastic about the sale of these burial plots that he sold them two and three times over—to the chagrin of the second and third owners. Or maybe he only sold the plots a single time, plots he didn’t happen to own or that didn’t happen to exist.

  Here’s another in the fat pile of letters to Mack, begging intercession with his father:

  Dear Mr. Kantor:

  Would you be so kind as to inform me as to how I could get in touch with your father, Mr. John Kantor. I bought some plots in the new Montefiore Cemetery from a firm of which Mr. Kantor was a member. Since then I have been unable to contact anyone with whom I did business.

  In a biographical sketch of my grandfather, I came across an amazing quote about John Kantor that Mack attributed to a major figure in American history. I was skeptical of it at f
irst—how would this man have known my great-grandfather at all, much less well enough to have a strong opinion about him? Then I discovered that both had been active in Chicago’s tight-knit Democratic political machine in the early 1900s, both sought-after orators on the party’s behalf. So it’s probably true that Clarence Darrow once said, “If John Kantor had been content to climb slowly, he might have risen to one of the highest offices in the land.”

  —

  In 1938, a remarkable scandal broke, often called one of the biggest financial scandals of the twentieth century. Here’s what I pieced together from dozens of articles about it: An Italian-American named Philip Musica had made a fortune many times over, each time fraudulently. First, he cornered the market on imported Italian food products by underselling his competitors—something he was able to do by paying bribes to avoid taxes at New York ports. He was finally caught, but served only six months before using political clout to win a pardon from President William Howard Taft. He then went into the hair business—long natural human hair for wigs was a valuable commodity. Musica assembled a vast inventory of crates filled with the stuff, but only the top layer was actual quality hair. The rest: sweepings from barbershop floors. He used the fake inventory as collateral for large loans and as paper assets to sell stock in his company until he again made millions. When the fraud was uncovered, Musica was nabbed in New Orleans on the way to Panama with steamer trunks filled with ill-gotten loot. But he wheeled and dealed his way to a suspended sentence in return for making partial restitution (about ten cents on the dollar) and informing on others.

  Now Musica thought it prudent to change his name. As Frank Costa, he went into another hair-related business: the manufacture of shampoo. Shampoo containing alcohol. During Prohibition, hair-product companies could still legally buy the alcohol they needed to manufacture shampoo, and Musica bought all he could—then sold it illegally at hugely inflated prices to bootleggers, covering up the sales with phony paperwork.

  When someone tipped off Treasury agents, they raided the company, but its owner, Frank Costa, had disappeared.

  Musica/Costa reappeared with yet another alias, F. Donald Coster, claiming to be a physician-turned-businessman. He used the wealth accumulated in two decades of scamming to buy another hair product company, again to act as a front for sales to bootleggers, including some of the biggest in the country. This time his efforts were more sophisticated, and he used his profitable bootlegging operation to support and develop the legitimate side of the business. By 1926, he’d become successful and respected enough to buy the century-old pharmaceutical company McKesson & Robbins. He placed three brothers, his sister, and his mother into company management, all under assumed names. Using his usual bookkeeping tricks of fake inventories and bills of sale, he made the company look like a profit magnet. Wall Street fell in love and Coster and friends prospered mightily. McKesson became one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country. Under Coster, the firm put together a national product-distribution chain, and even managed to break up foreign monopolies on raw materials, to public acclaim. He became popular with socialites and politicians, and was even asked to run for the Republican nomination for president. (He humbly declined.) He bought an eighteen-room mansion on a seven-acre estate in Connecticut, a large yacht, and a dozen chow show dogs.

  When McKesson’s treasurer became suspicious about the operation of a Canadian subsidiary controlled solely by Coster, it all began to unravel. Supposedly a center for the purchase and storage of exotic materials used in pharmaceutical manufacture, the subsidiary turned out to consist of a single secretary in a mail room, whose sole responsibility was to route incoming mail to Coster’s home address. The exotic-materials stockpile didn’t exist. The money supposedly used to buy the stuff had ended up in Coster’s pocket. Altogether he had stolen the contemporary equivalent of $50 million.

  Coster denied everything. Of course his photo appeared prominently in the news. A veteran investigator recognized the man in the photo as twice-convicted fraud Philip Musica. Fingerprints confirmed that one of the country’s foremost corporate execs was actually a career criminal.

  As federal agents moved on Coster’s mansion to bring him in, he fired a bullet into his brain, leaving a note blaming it all on bankers, lawyers, accountants, and auditors.

  The scandal unfolded across front pages for weeks as Coster/Costa/Musica’s bizarre web of lies and deceit spread in unexpected directions, including a gunrunning scheme to foment a revolution in Honduras.

  Naturally, John Kantor was involved.

  A Chicago Tribune article on December 21, 1938, nearly two years after the New Yorker article about John’s cemetery plots, contained this revelation: “John Kantor, a stock promoter, who said he had been approached by representatives of McKesson & Robbins to aid them in a gun running deal involving a foreign power, was held on bail of $25,000 in the Tombs prison. . . . Kantor, regarded as ‘an important witness’ by the government, is also wanted in Connecticut in connection with stock fraud.”

  In 1945, ten years after John Kantor had walked off with her life savings, and nine years after he’d been forced to make restitution, my grandfather heard once again from Emma, and once again her letter included a clip. Another scandal story, this one about Elliott Roosevelt, son of the recently deceased president of the United States.

  Elliott had been a good soldier in World War II, but a bad businessman. In 1939, hoping to curry favor with President Roosevelt, John Hartford of the A&P grocery chain made Elliott a large loan to buy a Texas radio network. The younger Roosevelt’s network quickly went south, and two years later, again under White House influence, Hartford agreed to forgive the $200,000 loan for a measly repayment of $4,000—then promptly wrote off the $196,000 loss on his taxes.

  This all came out, and was investigated by Congress, in 1945, shortly after FDR’s death. One name popped up in the middle of it. The name was there in the clip Emma had sent, in a column by muckraking journalist Westbrook Pegler. The name was: John Kantor.

  Kantor, Pegler said, had been hired by Elliott to solicit loans for the station and sell airtime. When the project began to crater, John tried to buy Hartford’s bad debt for pennies on the dollar.

  “Kantor, who is a hustler, might have figured that some loyal Democrat with the interests of the administration at heart would buy them from him at face value to avoid a scandal.”

  As an aside, Pegler noted, “John later had to go away for twenty months for some monkey business about cemetery plots.”

  Along with the clipping, Emma had sent a note:

  I have often wondered what had become of John Kantor and if he was still in circulation—What a man! Well, the best thing your father ever did in his life was to pass on to you his great gift as a story-teller, and you glorified it into something worthwhile.

  TWELVE

  After months of research, I had grown used to having assumptions about my grandfather reversed. But this one I never could have seen coming: As I read through an otherwise mundane letter from Mack to his sister from 1936, I came across this: “I flatly declared all along that I didn’t want to build in Florida. It cost far more than [the contractor] said it would cost, even counting his revised estimate, and I told him to call a halt on any expansion when I was in England, but he went ahead sublimely.”

  I had always thought of that house as his haven, the calm center of the creative storm, the one place he could retreat from all the demands of mundane life—editors, agents, publicists, producers, even family, and especially children—to hunker down in the cedar-scented, memento-crammed, surf-soothed writing room overlooking a wide slice of tropical paradise. It just didn’t add up that the man who wrote his first book under assault of dripping diapers and a baby’s wail could tell his sister of that seemingly ideal setup: “I can’t work down there in the way I need to work and want to work.”

  He wasn’t just venting. Despite his c
oncern about the cost overrun on the house, he rented an apartment in New York, and furnished it, so he could stay and work while Irene and the kids went down to Florida.

  “It means that Irene and I will have to be separated much of the time this winter, but in the circumstances it is a necessary evil.”

  I would soon begin to think the phrase “necessary evil” was only half right.

  It turned out that even in the solo New York apartment his literary production remained negligible. Now he decided what he really needed was . . . a solo Central American vacation.

  Another letter to his sister from late November or early December of that same year of 1939:

  Wednesday—I think.

  One rather loses track of days down here. . . . I am having a lazy week—too lazy perhaps—but at least I ought to be saving up a lot of emotional energy, since I’m not spending any. I got sold on Costa Rica when I met a gal on the boat coming down—a native who gave it quite a boost. In fact, if you only looked at her you’d get quite a boost! We had one of those week-long, fleeting, provocative shipboard things that occur sometimes in life, and so I stopped over. Not on her account. . . . I needed to go to the end of the earth if I were ever going to write another line, and this is a good three-quarters of the way there.

  At the bottom he wrote, “By this time I trust you’ve decided this letter isn’t for general family consumption.”

  And I knew what he meant. As a member of the general family, this was genuinely difficult to swallow, even three-quarters of a century later.

  —

  Though these exact words never formed in my mind, I knew my grandmother and grandfather as the perfect couple. He always portrayed their marriage as a great love story—and of course he even named part two of his autobiographical volumes I Love You, Irene. My grandmother always paid tribute to Mack’s genius, but he seemed even more eager to praise her youth and beauty. In fact, the few photos of Irene in her twenties and thirties reveal her to be plain, almost homely—a too-narrow face, a too-wide mouth, a scrawny figure, and crimped hair. But Mack never described her as anything other than mystically alluring.