The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation

by Schechter, Harold

  In 1906, Taft, needing a larger workplace for his increasingly imposing commissions, took a lease on an abandoned brick stable on the Midway Plaisance. Almost at once, he began expanding the space by annexing a pair of frame barns. Eventually, the structure housed thirteen separate studios; a roofed courtyard with a fireplace, fountain, and sunken goldfish pond; and two dormitories for his growing corps of assistants.

  For the next two decades, Taft’s Midway Studio served as a mecca for aspiring sculptors throughout the country. Hardly a week went by without letters arriving from hopeful young artists, pleading for admission to his atelier. Others simply showed up at his door. No one with real talent was turned away by Taft, who cherished his role as mentor. Those accepted into Taft’s “studio family,” as he called it, could scarcely believe their good fortune. “If you can imagine yourself transformed into a place people call Heaven, that will give you some idea of how I felt,” wrote the renowned sculptor and medalist Trygve A. Rovelstad, recalling his own induction into that privileged realm. “My dream had been realized.”14

  When Bob first stepped through the front entrance of the Midway Studio on a radiant morning in May 1929, he found himself in an enclosed, cement-floored courtyard flooded with sunshine from a large roof skylight and suffused with the odor of damp clay, plaster, and stone dust. At the far end of the space loomed a statue that he immediately recognized from various magazine illustrations as the full-scale plaster model of Taft’s monumental Fountain of the Great Lakes—a dramatic grouping of five graceful maidens, allegorical symbols of the “inland seas,” each bearing a large scalloped basin.

  No one was in sight, though the studio was clearly not deserted. From behind closed doors came the sounds of a busy workplace: hammering, footsteps reverberating on the stone floor, the slapping of clay upon armature, somebody whistling one of the popular tunes of the day, “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine.” All at once, the door to Bob’s right flew open and out strode a strapping young man, floppy cap on his head, long workman’s apron over his coveralls, his hands caked with clay—clearly one of Taft’s assistants. Spotting Bob, he asked if he could be of help, then offered to escort him to Taft.

  They found him in the main workroom, supervising a half dozen of his helpers who were working on the figure of a colossal armored knight, a few perched on ladders, others on a wooden scaffold surrounding the half-finished statue. Tall, straight-backed, and still strikingly handsome in his late sixties, the elderly sculptor cut an elegant figure even in his shapeless linen smock. By contrast, Bob—who had hoboed his way from California—looked so unkempt that Taft initially took him for a “tramp.”15

  “Honored to meet you, sir,” said Bob, extending his right hand. “I’ve come two thousand miles to study with you.”

  After examining the sample that Bob had brought along and declaring it “the best head of Lindbergh he had ever seen,” Taft invited him “to come and visit the Midway Studio for a week, and see how he should like the studio family, and how it would like him.”16

  Between his innate abilities and the skills he had acquired during his year-long apprenticeship with Romanelli, Bob had no trouble impressing the members of Taft’s atelier and was quickly taken on at a pay of forty dollars a week. Besides his energy and raw talent, there was something else about the fresh-faced young sculptor that Taft warmed to. A product of the provincial West whose tastes ran to nineteenth-century neoclassicism, Bob cared nothing about avant-garde art—a sentiment he shared with the hidebound Taft, who viewed modernism with absolute disdain, deriding the work of Matisse, Braque, and their peers as “puerile effrontery,” “willful bungling,” and “sheer imbecility.”17 Within a short time, Bob had so worked his way into the older man’s affections that Taft began to regard him as his protégé. While his other assistants bunked in the barnlike dormitories, Taft found lodging for Bob at the home of his widowed stepmother, Mary.18

  With forty dollars a week in his pocket—roughly equivalent to four hundred today—Bob felt prosperous for the first time in his life. He treated himself to a snazzy new wardrobe and, during his free hours, took advantage of the many leisure-time opportunities Chicago offered a footloose young man. A lifelong boxing fan whose ever-growing picture collection included dozens of photos of professional prizefighters, he attended matches whenever he could. He was particularly enamored of German heavyweight and future world champion Max Schmeling—“the best-looking man in the world,” in Bob’s estimation. He also enjoyed the movies and would see anything starring his favorite actor, the matinee idol Ramon Novarro, known to his swooning admirers as “Ravishing Ramon.” To Bob, Schmeling and Novarro (who would ultimately meet a grisly death at the hands of a pair of male hustlers he had brought home for sex) embodied opposite poles of his own character. “I have two sides to my nature,” he would later explain. “One is that I like force, and that’s why I like Schmeling. The other side of my nature is very spiritual—there’s something very spiritual about Novarro. He is very much like Sir Galahad or Tristan.”19

  Bob’s less spiritual inclinations found an outlet not only at the weekly fights but also in the city’s many brothels and burlesque houses. He would always remember a stripper named Sally Swan, endowed with “the most beautiful breasts I ever saw in my whole life. Her breasts were so big that they touched in the middle and yet they didn’t hang down one bit.” A “beautiful tableau” of topless women costumed as Indian squaws, one of the highlights of a show at the Star and Garter burlesque house, also left a lasting impression.20

  When the weather turned warmer, he liked to swim in the lake. There was one stretch of beach he particularly enjoyed, a secluded spot on the South Shore where people routinely went skinny-dipping. One sweltering afternoon in midsummer, as Bob later told the story, he was lounging there naked when another man—blue-eyed, blond-haired, and “sort of a fairy”—“swam towards me and came over to me and without warning said to me, ‘Can I suck your cock?’ ”

  “So I gave it to him,” Bob related. “I just said, ‘There you are, go to it,’ and he did it. I just sat there and enjoyed it. I came once and he just swallowed it up.”

  Bob—who’d been “Frenched” by only one person before, the young prostitute in Los Angeles—decided that oral sex “was a million times nicer with a girl.” Still, he had to admit that getting “sucked off by that fellow wasn’t so bad.” Of course, he would never do anything like that himself. It was one thing to be on the receiving end of the act. But performing fellatio on somebody else was “an abominable business,” “the lowest and dirtiest thing a guy could do.” Before he would “suck somebody else off,” he would “kill himself.” If there was one thing that made Bob Irwin “so goddamned mad” that he was ready to kill anybody who suggested it, it was being mistaken for that most loathsome of all creatures, a “queer.”21

  For a while, everything seemed to be going Bob’s way. Though his landlady, Mrs. Taft, was “so old and utterly wrinkled” that Bob found her “sort of repelling,” she treated him so kindly that he would forever feel a filial tenderness toward her.22 Lorado himself—“Rady” to his intimates—continued to take a fatherly interest in him. When the Steuben Club, a 2,500-member organization of prominent German-American citizens, was looking for a sculptor to make a bust of Max Schmeling, Taft recommended Bob. The club’s vice president, Judge Walter W. L. Meyer—a power in the Chicago Democratic machine—was so pleased with the result that he offered Bob an even greater opportunity: the chance to do a portrait bust of New York State governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was scheduled to speak at the Steuben Club in the fall. There was already talk of a Roosevelt run for the presidency in the 1932 elections, and Bob, as he wrote in a letter, could foresee a glorious future for himself should FDR agree to pose for him: “If he did get elected, I could be personal friends with the President of the United States, with all kinds of political pull & right in line for a lot of commissions!”23

  Bob had already done a bust of the man
Roosevelt would ultimately defeat, Herbert Hoover. When a friend of Lorado Taft’s, a fellow named Wardlaw, sent a photo of the bust to the White House, Bob received a personal reply from the president’s wife, Lou Henry Hoover, commending him “for the high order” of his work. “You are indeed fortunate to have been recognized by such a man as Mr. Taft,” Mrs. Hoover continued, “and I hope that you will work long and hard and some day be a great sculptor.”24

  For the first time in his life, Bob also had a large circle of friends. Taft’s quiet Hyde Park neighborhood was full of young men Bob’s age who shared his love of boxing. One of them owned some boxing gloves, and on warm summer days, they would gather in this fellow’s backyard and, stripping to the waist, hold amateur matches. Bob, proud of his physique and fighting prowess, almost always emerged victorious.

  Some evenings, Bob and his buddies went to the Trianon in the hope of meeting girls. A palatial ballroom with mock-Versailles decor and a white maple floor big enough to accommodate more than a thousand twirling couples, the Trianon, situated on the South Side at Cottage Grove and East 62nd, was Chicago’s classiest dance hall. It was there, sometime in late summer 1929, that Bob met Alice Ryan.

  Apart from her age—twenty-two—and her love of the Charleston and fox-trot, virtually nothing is known about Alice. Bob himself assumed she was “fast,” since she readily accompanied him back to his room on one of their first dates. When he began to “neck with her,” however, he discovered that she was really “quite maidenly.” As soon as he fondled her breasts, she burst into tears and exclaimed, “Oh, you men are all alike.” Bob immediately desisted. Though his sex drive was as strong as any other young male’s, he was happy to keep their relationship platonic since making love to Alice was far less important to him than enlightening her about the great truth he had discovered: the awesome potentialities of visualization.

  Alone with her in his room, seated together on the edge of his bed, he would spend hours expounding on his theories, which had grown increasingly bizarre in the months since he left California.

  “There’s only one thing in the universe that counts,” he explained. “Some call it the Universal Mind, some Spirit or Soul or the Life-Force. The Old Greeks called it the Logos. Today we call it God. It has a thousand different names but they all mean the same—that unseen Something that fills the whole wide universe with life and meaning, the way a broadcasting station fills the air with music.

  “Now, in every human being evolution has given us a mechanism to make contact with that station—our brains. But since we are creatures of the material world, our brains can only catch a tiny portion of that heavenly music. We’re like Hottentots. Give a Hottentot a radio and tell him to turn it on and he’ll just turn the dial around and around and all he’ll get is a bunch of squawks. But someone who knows how to run a radio can get beautiful music out of it from any station he wants.

  “Do you get what I’m saying?” he continued, growing more excited by the moment. “This Universal Mind I’m talking about is, by its very nature, all-wise and all-powerful. It knows every damn thing there is to be known and can do any damn thing that can be done. So once we know how to work our mental radios correctly, we’ll be able to learn anything just by tuning in to the right station and pulling it out of the air—Greek or Latin or art or mathematics. And not just any mathematics but such mathematics as would make Einstein’s head swim. The Universal Mind would broadcast it directly into our brains, just”—here he stuck out a hand and gave a sharp snap—“like that!”

  The question, of course, was “How do we learn to run this radio? How can we enter this new and glorious world?” And the answer, according to Bob, was obvious: through visualization.

  “Let me ask you this,” he said, leaping to his feet. “How do we manage to move or lift a finger or do any god-darn thing? Through our five senses, pretty miss, through our five senses. All our perceptions of the material world are transmitted to us through sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell. So if you put two and two together, you can see that the only way we can ever hope to explore the higher world is to develop our mental senses. Now the sense we use most is sight. So it naturally follows that if we can develop our inner, mental sight—if we can see things absolutely clearly with our mind’s eye—we’ll achieve such mastery over the world as no man ever dreamed of. And here’s the whole thing in a nutshell: to develop this sight, you simply exercise it just as you would exercise a muscle. In other words, you sit down every day and practice visualizing.”

  Exactly how developing a visual skill would allow someone to hear heavenly music wasn’t entirely clear. Alice, however—who, despite her exerted attempts to follow Bob’s harangue, was finding it harder and harder to keep up—said nothing.

  “I wonder if you realize just what this whole thing means,” said Bob, staring down at her. “Everyone’s read Shakespeare. How much do you remember? Very little. And yet it’s all there, right in your head, every line, every word, every syllable. And let me tell you, baby, once you learn to visualize, you’ll be able to go to bed at night and lie there in the dark and open Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello in your mind and read the whole damn thing with your eyes closed. And what’s more you’ll be able to see those plays enacted in your mind. Those characters will step forth in living projected reality and play their parts like actors on the stage—only with infinitely greater artistry and majesty and power. Have you ever seen a movie twice? We all have. Well, once you learn to visualize, you’ll be able to stay home the second time and see that movie in your mind any time you please.

  “Do you sense the magnitude of this thing?” he cried, waving his hands so wildly that Alice feared he would knock over the bedside table lamp. “Holy mackerel, there are no limits to it. It’s beyond our dreams. After you became an expert at visualizing, you could amass more knowledge than the wisest man ever dreamed of possessing. How? Just go to the library every day and pick up book after book and turn the pages without reading them, and you’d have every word in every book in that library by heart and you could read it any time in your mind without any effort at all.”

  Stepping to his bureau, Bob rummaged in a drawer and came out with an art-book illustration that he handed to Alice. “Here, take a look at this picture of Napoleon for a minute. Now close your eyes and try to visualize it. Can you see him standing there on the rock of St. Helena, wearing that old hat of his and the great gray overcoat? Can you see the set look on his face? His great sad eyes, his Roman nose, his mouth, his binoculars hanging from his neck, his hands clasped tight behind his back, his white pants, his black boots on the rock? Can you see how he sticks out his jaw in that stubborn way of his? Can you see the majestic ocean rolling beneath the rays of the setting sun, can you hear the roar of the surf, can you feel the stiff ocean breezes on your cheeks, can you smell the salt tang of the sea? Can you see it clearly just as though you were there?

  “Pretty tough, isn’t it?” he said, removing the picture from her hand and returning it to the drawer.

  “Here’s the thing, though,” he said, coming to stand before her again. “You’d be surprised how easy and interesting it becomes when two people work on it together. All the difficulties disappear and it becomes the most fascinating game you ever tried.”

  When Alice expressed some confusion about the exact nature of the “game,” Bob explained that, over the years, he had clipped nearly ten thousand pictures from books, newspapers, and magazines. Each had been glued to a sheet of paper and labeled with a title. He was looking for a partner who would play the role of “title caller.” Seated across the room from him, the caller would select a picture at random and, holding it so that Bob couldn’t see it, read its title aloud. Bob would “then proceed to describe the picture in minute detail from memory.”25

  Dropping to one knee in front of the startled young woman, he took her hands in both of his. “Alice,” he said, staring into her eyes, “if only you and I could work together on this, there’d be no li
mit to the things we could do. You know what I’d like to do? Go off to some lonely lighthouse with you. It would be just the thing for us—nothing to take our attention away, no eight-hour workday, no dances, no shows, no friends to bother us. I want so much to get away from the trouble and turmoil of this material world into the solitude of some such place until I could master this. I don’t know what you think, but I could be happy—supremely happy—out there with you.”

  It took a moment for Alice to find her voice. “Are you proposing to me, Bob?”

  “God knows that if you want looks, connections, money, and all that sort of thing, you can make a hell of a lot better match than me,” he said. “But if you and I could just work together, what progress we’d make. Why, the potentialities of the whole business are almost beyond our grasp. Of course, it will take some time until we get our ears fully attuned to the music of the Universal Mind—maybe twenty years. But in the meantime, you and I would be so in love with mastering this thing that material pleasures wouldn’t really matter to you.”26

  Unless she dreamed of living in a lighthouse and practicing visualization for twenty years, Bob’s idea of wedded bliss couldn’t have seemed very alluring to Alice. Still, it’s easy to see how an impressionable young woman might be taken by his good looks, talent, ambition, and seemingly brilliant mind. In the fall of 1929—the precise date is impossible to determine—Alice Ryan agreed to become Bob Irwin’s wife.