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

by Schechter, Harold

  Living off the money he had earned at Rockland from his artwork, Bob searched for a job that would utilize his sculpting skills. In early June, he was hired as an assistant by Gilbert Maggi, owner of Chelsea Realistic Products, a commercial sculpting firm on West 28th Street specializing in plaster display items. By all accounts, Bob was an exceptionally skilled and efficient worker and “was soon turning out little commercial statues faster than his employer.”12 With a seemingly secure job and a little extra money in his pocket, Bob decided to move out of his dingy room on the Upper West Side and into more congenial quarters. In early July, he returned to 240 East 53rd Street—the home of the Gedeon family.

  13

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  The Snake Woman

  NEARLY TWO YEARS had passed since Robert Irwin had last set eyes on Ronnie Gedeon. During that time, she had blossomed into a stunning young woman of seventeen. Headstrong and (as the tabloids never tired of reporting) “boy crazy,” she had dropped out of high school after three semesters to pursue a career as a beautician, enrolling in one of the franchised “academies” operated under the name of A. B. Moler. A renowned figure in American tonsorial history, Moler had opened the world’s first barber college in Chicago in 1893 and authored a number of standard textbooks in his field, including the 1911 Manual of Beauty Culture, the bible of the beautician’s trade. His course of study, however—which encompassed not only the intricacies of the marcel wave, the cable twist, and the bob curl but also the treatment of various scalp diseases and facial blemishes—proved too rigorous for Ronnie, and after six months she quit the school, joining the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed.1

  Out late virtually every night with a different boy, she clashed constantly with her Hungarian-born father, who railed against “this rotten American system where children laugh at their parents and start running wild before they cut their teeth.”2 On several occasions, after she brazenly ignored her curfew and returned home tipsy with drink, he resorted to corporal punishment.

  For her part (as she confided to her diary), Ronnie saw her father as “spineless and irresponsible” and felt a desperate need to escape from the household. She found it in the spring of 1933, just after her sixteenth birthday, when she eloped with Bobby Flower, a family friend whose parents ran a bowling alley on East 15th Street. The marriage was annulled within months, and by early 1934, Ronnie was living back home. Shortly afterward—fed up with his daughter’s disobedience and the way his wife always “took Ronnie’s side instead of mine”—Joseph Gedeon moved out of the apartment and took up residence in a cubbyhole space in his upholstery shop on 34th Street.3 He had recently decamped when Robert Irwin came to live at the Gedeons’ home, a dilapidated three-and-a-half-story brownstone on East 53rd Street, divided into a basement apartment for the family and upstairs rooms for the boarders.

  Bob was not immune to Ronnie’s physical charms, which—since she often lounged around the premises in dishabille—he had ample opportunity to observe. To his mind, however, she was nothing but “a beautiful, brainless, fluffy thing.”4 He was far more attracted to her demure, sober-minded older sister, Ethel.

  Following her own brief, ill-fated teenage marriage, Ethel had returned to school, taking a secretarial extension course at Hunter College in Long Island City. Having mastered the principles of stenography, she soon found a job at Vanity Fair magazine. Quick-witted, industrious, and possessed of a natural elegance, she was promoted within months to private secretary to Helen Norden, the magazine’s managing editor (and mistress of its publisher, Condé Nast). Before long, Norden had grown so fond of Ethel that she began to invite her “along on her prowls through Café Society,” where the working-class young woman mingled starry-eyed with “stage stars, society figures and a number of artists.”5

  From the moment of her annulment, Ethel had been courted by a longtime acquaintance, an aspiring lawyer named Joe Kudner. Though fond of him, she found herself intrigued by the good-looking young sculptor who had returned to board with her family. Their relationship began in earnest when Bob came downstairs from his attic room one Monday evening to pay his weekly rent of four dollars and found Ethel alone in the living room of the Gedeons’ high-ceilinged English basement.

  “These come hard nowadays,” she said with a rueful smile as he handed her the crumpled bills.

  “They do now,” he said. “But mark my words—my turn will come. I’m down now, but I’ll be on top someday.”

  “By your sculpting work?” said Ethel.

  “Certainly by my sculpturing work,” Bob exclaimed. “I’m on the track of something right now that will make me eternally famous—I call it visualization.”

  It was, as Ethel later explained, the first—though by no means the last—time she heard of “this idée fixe of Irwin’s.”6

  Impressed by some small pieces he had brought back with him from Rockland, she agreed to let him sculpt her head. While she posed for him in her living room, they engaged in lively (if largely one-sided) conversation about art, religion, and other of Bob’s obsessive topics. In the following weeks, she accompanied him on a jaunt to the Metropolitan Museum, where he showed her his favorite statue, a full-size plaster reproduction of the Colleoni of Verocchio—an enormous equestrian statue depicting the Venetian mercenary-soldier Bartolomeo Colleoni, accoutered for battle and astride a huge stallion.

  Steering “me past everything else in the West Hall—‘that drivel,’ he called it—Irwin told me to stop at the foot of the pedestal of the figure,” Ethel recalled. “He made me look at it first dead on and close up.” Then—speaking as if he himself had been to Italy and viewed the original monument—he continued: “This is the way it hits you in the open place in Venice, where it is gilded bronze. You come up right under it and get the feeling that horse is going to trample your brains out. And the feeling carries right in up to that head, as you step back.” After pausing for a moment to contemplate the statue, he said in a tone that startled Ethel with its vehemence: “Just look at the way it flows. Why, it’s more alive than nine-tenths of the fools who glance at it with dead eyes as they walk past and see nothing but a guy on horseback.”7

  Dazzled by his seeming erudition and his all-consuming devotion to art, Ethel, as she later admitted, was happy to play pupil to his master.8 For his part, Bob “fell for her like a ton of bricks.” Before long, he had convinced himself that Ethel was his soul mate and ideal visualization partner—a new and improved “edition” of his former fiancée, the Chicago dancehall girl Alice Ryan.9

  Bob’s fervent attentions to Ethel did not go unnoticed by Veronica. “Bobby is certainly making a play for my sister,” Ronnie noted in her journal in late July. “I think he is out of his mind. He will never marry her if I have anything to do with it. I am going to take the matter up with mother. She will help me put the kibosh on it.”10 A few days later, Mary Gedeon—who knew of Bob’s troubled history as a psychiatric patient but regarded him as “a decent fellow, honest in his personal and financial dealings, and pitifully alone in the world”—took him aside and, in the most tactful way possible, informed him that she “was anxious that Ethel have nothing to do with” him. Hastening to assure him that she herself had only the friendliest feelings toward him, she explained that she was simply thinking of her daughter’s long-range comfort and security—that “she wanted Ethel to make a rich marriage.”11

  Bob was undeterred. Since his release from Rockland, he had been keeping in sporadic touch with Dr. Wertham, sometimes by phone, sometimes in person. In early August, he sought out the psychiatrist at Bellevue and spent the entire visit rhapsodizing about Ethel. When he declared his intention to marry her, Wertham “protested that he was acting too rashly.” Much as he valued the doctor’s opinions, however, Bob left the meeting unshaken in his resolve.12

  Shortly afterward, while walking with Ethel along the 53rd Street pier, he blurted out a proposal. Ethel—who (so she claimed) had never felt romantically interested in Bob and had tired of his
endless talk of visualization—gently broke the news that, while she hoped the two could remain friends, she had decided to become engaged to Joe Kudner. Bob was devastated. “I just went crazy,” he confided in his diary. Two weeks later, he returned to the same East River pier, intending to drown himself. There were so many boats in the water, however, that he changed his mind, assuming that someone would come to his rescue.13

  Another blow fell in October when he was fired from his job at Chelsea Realistic Products. Since his rejection by Ethel, Bob had become increasingly sullen—“a surly devil,” as his boss, Gilbert Maggi described him. Fed up with his young employee’s “moodiness,” Maggi informed him one morning that he was letting Bob go. After handing him a severance check for twenty-five dollars, Maggi walked to the rear of the studio to fetch Bob’s sculpting tools. As he was gathering up the implements, he suddenly “had the feeling that there was something behind him. Turning, he saw Irwin standing there with an insane glint in his eyes and, in his right hand, a meat cleaver that had sometimes been used to chip plaster.”

  “What the hell are you doing, Bob?” said Maggi.

  “I’m going to split your head right down the middle,” Bob snarled. “Then I’m going to fry your brains and have them for supper. You won’t miss them. You never use them anyway.”

  Raising the cleaver, he took a swing at Maggi, who somehow managed to dodge the blow. “Galvanized into life-and-death action,” the older man reached for “a pot of wet plaster nearby” and hurled it at Bob, hitting him in the face. As Bob “reeled drunkenly,” Maggi got him in a bear hug, wrestled him out of the studio, tossed him onto the street, and locked the door.

  “This score isn’t settled!” shouted Irwin from the sidewalk. “I’ll get you for this!”

  But Maggi never saw Bob Irwin again.14

  Over the next few months, Bob—like millions of his countrymen—found himself in desperate financial straits. With the unemployment rate near its Depression-era peak of almost 25 percent, he was forced to take whatever menial jobs he could find: elevator operator, coatroom attendant, dishwasher. None lasted more than a few weeks. By December, with his meager savings gone, he applied for Home Relief. On the day before Christmas, he received a welfare check for $19.10. Still obsessing over Ethel and plagued by suicidal thoughts, he visited Wertham, who “advised him as forcibly as I could to return to the state hospital.” Shortly afterward, on January 11, Bob voluntarily recommitted himself to Rockland, where—with the exception of one abortive attempt to return to society—he would remain for nearly two years.15

  After suffering so many setbacks and frustrations during his six-month sojourn in New York City, Bob saw Rockland as a kind of refuge—a place where “life would be easier for him” and he “could work on his sculpture without being bothered.” Initially, however, he had trouble readjusting to institutional living. He found the confinement “more galling than ever” and was thrown into “despondency and despair” by his surroundings. “It is hard to live with people in an insane asylum,” he bemoaned in his journal. “The diseased, the degenerate, the violent are my mess mates.”16 His mood grew even darker when, in late June, word reached him that Ethel had married Joe Kudner a few weeks earlier in a small ceremony in Manhattan.

  It wasn’t long before his “combative spirit” (as he euphemistically described his dangerously volcanic temper) got him sent to the violent ward. Drugged, straitjacketed, and strapped to a bed, he endured several “weary months of discipline and deprivation” before being returned to the general population. Apart from one other incident—when he was accused of “a sexual lapse or indulgence” with a young female patient—he remained generally quiet and cooperative for the remainder of his stay and was permitted the freedom of the grounds.17

  Bob proved to be such a model patient that he was not only allowed to use sharp sculpting tools but also encouraged to teach a class in clay modeling at the newly opened children’s pavilion, a facility for youngsters with “juvenile conduct disorders.” At the dedication of the pavilion, attended by Governor Herbert Lehman and other state luminaries, several of Bob’s pieces were on display, including a portrait bust of the governor himself, who—as Bob proudly noted in his diary—“took much interest in my sculpture.”18

  Another state official much taken with Bob’s work that day was Clarence Low, president of the board of Rockland State Hospital and treasurer of the Democratic State Committee. Struck by a small bust Bob had made of President Roosevelt, Low arranged to purchase it for fifty dollars and have it displayed at the Democratic headquarters. To show his appreciation, Bob offered to make a bust of Low, who sent him several photographs to use as references.19

  Though so comfortably ensconced in the asylum that he was not eager to leave, Bob was discharged on July 15, 1936, his condition having once again been judged “much improved” by his supervising psychiatrist, Dr. Ettling. Arriving in Manhattan later that day, he went directly from the bus terminal to the Gedeons’ brownstone, where he learned that Ethel and Joe were residing in Astoria, Queens. That same evening, he paid the newlyweds a visit at their cottage, where he “presented to Mrs. Kudner the bust of her I had withheld out of mere spite. I told her that there was much of myself in the sculpture and now that she was married I did not want to bring back old memories.”20

  Six days later—unable to find a job and so heartbroken over Ethel that he “felt like jumping in the river”—Bob had himself readmitted to Rockland.21

  He would remain there for another three months. During that time, to salve his emotional wound—“take the sting out of my breast,” as he put it—he devoted himself to the creation of what he considered his masterpiece. Called The Cobra, the little sculpture was meant to symbolize what Irwin viewed as the essence of femininity. “So many women have the snake nature in them,” he explained. “They lure men to death by their enchantments. They inspire to great heights and debase to great depths.” The statue depicted a serpent with coiled tail, stubby body, and raised, hooded head that seemed to be swaying, as if under the spell of a snake charmer. Two things made the creature uniquely unsettling. It had an enormous pair of naked breasts and the face of a woman who wore an expression of postcoital bliss and whose features, as anyone who knew her would immediately recognize, were those of Ethel Kudner.22

  14

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  Canton

  A DECADE AFTER EMBRACING the freethinking philosophy of his intellectual hero, Robert Ingersoll—the “Great Agnostic”—Bob Irwin underwent a change of heart. “I got so filled up with religion during my youth that for years I wanted none of it,” he explained. By the fall of 1936, however, he had developed a renewed “interest in the fundamentals of religion.” Art and religion, he had come to realize, were “closely related,” allowing us to transcend the suffering of the world by putting us in touch with an “unseen power,” the divine source of all creation.1

  For a while, Bob—like his father before him—grew obsessed with the teachings of John Wesley. In typical fashion, he would expound at length on Methodist doctrine to anyone within earshot. One listener much impressed with his evangelical spiel was a hospital attendant named Kenneth Iles, who worked at the new children’s pavilion where Bob conducted his classes.

  Before coming to Rockland, Iles had been a divinity student at the St. Lawrence University Theological School in Canton, New York, a village in the extreme northern part of the state, less than twenty miles from the Canadian border. In late summer 1936, he wrote a highly laudatory letter about Bob to the dean of the school, John Murray Atwood. Though Bob did not have a high school diploma, he was, as Atwood learned after contacting him directly, “better informed and better read than the majority of students.” Since the school “occasionally had students with irregular educations who made good,” Bob was accepted into the program on a nonmatriculated, trial basis. With the blessing of Rockland’s superintendent, Dr. Russell E. Blaisdell, Bob, who was there on a voluntary basis, gave his ten days’ not
ice of departure. On September 25, 1936, toting a couple of battered valises and a carton containing a few small sculptures, he headed north by bus to his new home.2

  For much of his time in Canton, Bob’s life was as normal and contented as it would ever be. He enjoyed his classes in religious education, homiletics, and Biblical literature, and impressed his instructors as an earnest and unusually well-read person. That Bob had spent time in an insane asylum “only made the professors more anxious to help him.”3 Far from being disturbed by his psychiatric history, they saw him as a sympathetic figure, a twenty-nine-year-old man seeking to rehabilitate his life through Christian service.

  He found a room in a boardinghouse run by a couple named Hosley, who supplemented their income by keeping bees. To defray his rent, Bob lent a hand when the time came to harvest the honey. He also took on other odd jobs: delivering the New York Times, mowing lawns, shoveling snow.4

  Deeply impressed with Bob’s artistic abilities, one of his teachers, Dr. Angus MacLean—professor of religious history and future dean of the seminary—arranged for him to teach two classes in clay modeling, one for adults and one for children, who paid twenty-five cents per lesson. Since Bob’s living quarters were too small to accommodate a work space, MacLean also “allowed Irwin to use his own home as a studio.” Before long, Bob had become “an object of much admiration and curiosity” in the little community, invited to address the members of St. Lawrence Rotary Club, interviewed by a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard, and appearing on the local radio station to discuss “his own work and art in general.”5

  He also had a small but devoted circle of friends, including his landlord’s wife, Mrs. Hosley, who developed such a keen “maternal affection for him” that, when her brother died in November, “she arranged for Bob to be given his clothing.”6 Among his fellow students, he became especially close to a well-to-do young man named Anders Lunde and a twenty-year-old from far humbler circumstances, Izzy Demsky.