They rejoined Charles, who had drinks waiting for them in the main hall. They eventually excused themselves and left to eat at a restaurant in town. Dick wanted some quiet time alone. As they settled in with drinks and food, Dick opened up to Muriel about what he knew of Smith’s shooting. He explained that while many people felt Smith was suicidal, Dick believed he never intended to carry out a suicide, no matter how desperate he became over Libby. But he had also accepted the fact that it was unlikely that Libby deliberately murdered him. Dick thought maybe Smith threatened to commit suicide and held up the gun, but Libby tried to grab it from him and it went off accidentally. No matter what happened, it was very hard for them all to cope with the uncertainty of it.
Dick told Muriel about the fight they had with Libby over the estate and how Smith’s death motivated him to become a philanthropist. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation had turned out to be a huge success.
Dick wanted Muriel to see the house, Merry Acres. Dick had designed it with the help of architects from Northup & O’Brien for Blitz and he missed it terribly. When they were building it, Dick flew the architects down to Sapelo to discuss the plans, and Blitz constantly interrupted their meetings to express her ideas. When she left the room, Dick turned to one of the designers, Luther Lashman, and said, “I let Blitz talk all she wants, but when you do the house, do it my way.”
The next day they drove to the estate, which sat on several acres on the edge of town, not far from Reynolda. The land was once owned by Dick’s Uncle Will, who gave him permission to design his dream house there. When they pulled up, Muriel started laughing. No wonder Dick loved the place. It was built entirely in the shape of one huge yacht. It was long, sleek, and as smooth as a sailboat, and looked as if it belonged on a beachfront somewhere. Dick excitedly got out of the car.
He checked the back door and it was open. Muriel followed him inside and he switched on the lights. The house appeared to be unattended.
The inside was as lovely as the outside. Nearly every wall had floor-to-ceiling windows, filling the house with sunlight. Dick told Muriel he had thrown lots of parties at the ship deckhouse—he considered it his personal showplace.
Dick lingered a little longer, remembering the many good times he had there. Maybe one day he would buy it back from Blitz, if she was interested.
That evening, Dick and Muriel went to dinner at the Coyner house, and Dick wanted to spend the night there. As they lay down in the guest bedroom, Dick had trouble getting to sleep. Being back in Winston-Salem brought back many feelings.
The following day, Dick took Muriel to the site where his father’s old Victorian Fifth Street house once stood; it had recently been torn down. While still married to Marianne, Dick had donated the home, at the time valued at $100,000, and the surrounding land to the city so they could build a public library there. Dick did it on an impulse in celebration of Marianne’s birthday in December of 1948. As he stood on the block, he told Muriel stories about his father and his childhood. This spot, unlike Reynolda, was filled with happy memories for Dick. Dick wrapped up the tour by showing Muriel Reynolds Park and the hospitals he and his family had funded.
The Launch at Gosport
When Dick finally had his fill of Winston-Salem, he abruptly changed direction again. It was time for him and Muriel to get back to England to launch the Aries, which was finally completed. They planned to fly from Winston-Salem to Miami and then on to England.
Muriel would see one more of Dick’s creations before they left. They pulled up to the small municipal airport that Dick had built in his brother’s honor just a decade earlier—Z. Smith Reynolds Airport. The airfield was abuzz with small charter planes and aviation enthusiasts, but not many commercial travelers. When they walked in, Muriel thought it looked more like Dick’s private hangar. A mural of Z. Smith looking out over Winston-Salem covered the upper half of one wall. Dick had commissioned Charles Augustus Jenkins to paint the image of Smith looking out over the city of Winston-Salem, although the painter never publicly confirmed the identity of the man in the picture. Near the entrance, the marble bust of Z. Smith looked down on them. Muriel read the caption documenting Smith’s aviation accomplishments.
Dick glanced up at the bust for a moment before they walked out to meet their private plane. It was time to say goodbye to Winston-Salem.
Once in England, they drove to Gosport for the Aries launch party and invited all their friends. The launch was held on an exceptionally beautiful day, and several guests arrived at Camper & Nicholsons’ Gosport yard for the party. Muriel’s ex-husband Richard Greenough, whom Dick had befriended since his courtship with Muriel, was in attendance, along with Muriel’s former New York Times friends, Dick and Muriel’s London friends, and of course, Muriel’s mother, Eleanor. Eleanor brought two friends, a Major Rutherford and Cedric Taylor, who had once worked with Muriel’s stepfather in business. The Duke of Edinburgh was also due to show up, but canceled at the last minute.
The launch party doubled as a second wedding reception for those in England who hadn’t been able to see Dick and Muriel get married at Sapelo. There were smiles and congratulations all around, and the yard expressed tremendous satisfaction with the ship, which had taken sixty men to build. Dick again joked that he had built the yacht for the express purpose of buoying England’s economy.
The unique yacht sat proudly in the shipyard, surrounded by British and American flags, while guests were served food and drinks from Harrod’s of London. The one-of-a-kind sailor had a full set of majestic black sails, with the zodiac sign of the ram, Aries, embroidered in gold at the top of the mainsail. Black sails were considered bad luck, but Dick enjoyed going against nautical tradition. The Aries was the only sailing yacht registered in the country with black sails.
After a few speeches, it was Muriel’s job to break the bottle of champagne against the ship. She had great difficulty cracking it open and had to take three swings before the bottle broke. That was also considered a sign of bad luck in England. They brushed it off as another silly superstition.
While they had been in America, Dick secretly ordered Peter Barber and his crew to take the White Heron to Tahiti to wait for them. Dick surprised Muriel with the news that they were going on a honeymoon in the Pacific.
After a month of rare, uneventful normalcy, they left for New York, where they would catch a plane to California, and then be on their way to Tahiti and Fiji. More frenzied adventures were in store.
After a brief passport issue in New York, they flew to San Francisco. When they arrived, thick Bay Area fog had already rolled in and their flight to Hawaii would be delayed until the next day. They caught a cab to the Mark Hopkins Hotel and dined at the Top of the Mark, which had panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. They toasted the beginning of their honeymoon, and Dick told Muriel more stories of his days in California during the war.
They flew to Honolulu first thing the next morning. They were due to stay at the beautiful Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki and leave for Fiji the following evening. They were flying over the Pacific not more than an hour away from Honolulu when their left engine caught fire. The quick-thinking pilots managed to put out the fire but the plane was gradually losing elevation. Dick had been drinking, but he quickly sobered up in case he’d have to assist in a water landing. The pilots sent out an emergency call over the radio and received word that four destroyers were on their way. The plane continued to drop.
By the time they spotted the ships coming for them, the plane had dropped to a hair-raising two hundred feet above water. The plane was able to land on one of the ships and they were taken safely to Honolulu.
It was nine at night when they arrived. There was only one way to cap off the night. Dick and Muriel were so happy to be alive, they went straight to Trader Vic’s for rum punch, and enveloped themselves in the romance of steamy Hawaii as if it were their last night on earth.
Muriel eventually dragged Dick to the Royal Hawaiian
at three in the morning, when he turned around and pulled another “Hôtel du Nord.” Just as he was settling down to bed, he got up, put his clothes on, walked out the door, and disappeared for the night. This time Muriel wasn’t going to look for him.
Dick turned up at the hotel at eleven the next morning. They weren’t scheduled to catch their next plane until that evening, so Muriel helped Dick get into his pajamas. He looked so haggard and desperate, Muriel couldn’t get mad at him. She thought it was funny. She was starting to get used to this.
After Dick rested awhile, they got ready for the next leg of the trip. Because of the delays they had suffered, they decided to skip Tahiti and go straight to Fiji, where Dick had chartered a yacht to take them to the Yasawa Islands.
Dick still looked terrible. Luckily, they had reserved a sleeper suite with their own bunk beds and bathrooms on the transpacific flight. Muriel tucked Dick in as soon as they boarded and he slept all the way to Wake Island, where they had a brief layover before continuing on to Fiji.
After all of the delays and the agonizing travel, they finally arrived in Fiji that night. Hopefully, they would have the chance to enjoy their honeymoon at last.
CHAPTER 16
Things Fall Apart
1953–1959
As Dick’s personal life spiraled downward in the final decade of his life, his increasingly irrational behavior reflected the sentiment of the times. The country was in a state of heightened Cold War paranoia with espionage and nuclear deadlock haunting the public consciousness. The number of millionaires in the world was skyrocketing but they were nervous. Fellow tycoons like Stavros Niarchos and J. Paul Getty were increasingly fearful of threats to their families due to their wealth. Technology was all the rage—space exploration was budding, commercial aviation was becoming a way of life, and Dick’s primal passion, yachting, became more and more sophisticated, not without the help of Dick’s advancements in the field.
It was also a time when people refused to accept that alcoholism was a disease or that smoking wreaked havoc on the body. To the contrary, these comforts were welcomed and indulged. Dick was still a dangerous drunk, emptying entire bottles of liquor in a day, even while taking medication for emphysema. Tobacco’s harm had been documented but largely ignored, particularly by tobacco companies and their producers. Dick fell ill about once a week starting in the mid-1950s. As his illness and alcoholism progressed, so did his erratic behavior.
Dick and Muriel’s marriage continued at the same frenetic pace as their courtship. The next seven years would move very quickly. Dick’s health continued to falter, and in spite of the warning signs, he drank and smoked heavily every day. Rarely could he be seen without a drink and an unfiltered Camel.
In 1953, less than a year after Dick and Muriel visited her, Mary died of stomach cancer. Dick’s instincts had been right—she had been seriously ill and had waited too long to be treated. Mary had no idea how grave her situation was; she had accepted an invitation to see Dick and Muriel right before she died.
That same year, Nancy divorced her husband, Henry Bagley, after twenty-three years of marriage and four children. With the loss of Mary and her husband, Nancy grew closer to Dick.
Dick and Muriel attended the funeral at Reynolda and continued to visit Winston-Salem periodically over the next few years. Soon Muriel became a prominent member of Roaring Gap’s country club and was on everyone’s lunch invitation list, including Blitz’s parties at Merry Acres. She spent time with Mackie, Strat Coyner’s wife, and a variety of other society women regularly. She loved buying gifts for them and often had custom-made clothing sent down from New York, making her a very popular society wife. They visited the four oldest sons much more often than Dick had before.
The Copenhagen Debacle
In May of 1954, Dick and Muriel set sail from Brunswick, Georgia, in the Aries, the yacht they had worked so hard to complete, on a trip to Europe. This trip would be no different from Dick and Muriel’s usual escapades, except that it threatened their marriage for the first time.
Dick had hired a new, experienced skipper, Arved Jeannot Rosing, to be master of the Aries. Dick also hired Arved’s Estonian wife, Irma Orras, to clean. Karl Weiss was brought along to cook.
They got as far as Bermuda when the radar and the gyroscope failed, causing a delay of ten days. While mechanics flew down from New York, Dick started drinking—mainly because he was extremely irritated by the machinery holding up their well-laid plans.
One evening he and Muriel went ashore and hopped from bar to bar, and came back to the boat to find that the repairmen had fallen asleep in the deckhouse and the yacht was drifting out to sea. It was 2:00 A.M., and Dick was furious. There was a fast and dangerous tide, but Dick got undressed and said he was going to swim to the yacht.
Dick jumped in the water and pulled Muriel in behind him, even though she was still in her evening clothes. As they splashed and flailed in the water, Muriel pleaded with Dick to get back on the dock, but he replied with an angry “no.” Muriel grabbed hold of the dock and struggled to pull herself out of the water. She hailed a taxi and begged the driver to help her retrieve Dick. The driver ran over to the dock and shouted at Dick, who was still treading water, to get out. He finally gave in and the driver hoisted him up on the dock. With the help of the taxi driver, Muriel got Dick to a hotel by four.
When they returned the next night to the now anchored yacht, Dick stumbled down the steep gangplank, slipped, hit the stanchion, and injured himself. Muriel covered him with a raincoat and called two local doctors for help—a Dr. Fulton and Dr. Leon Fox, who rushed to the dock to examine Dick. Fulton advised him to rest and strongly suggested they X-ray his ribs, which he thought might have been fractured. But Dick insisted that he wanted to sail the next day and refused to have it treated. Dick admitted to the doctors that he had a history of falling down and injuring his chest, but he had always been fine in the past. The doctors noted on their medical report that Dick was “obviously drunk.” Muriel threw up her hands, exasperated by Dick’s stubborn refusal to get the help he needed.
Meanwhile, Dick was exasperated by the way he had let Muriel alter the yacht when it was being designed. He said if he had never met Muriel, eight feet of the yacht would have been entirely different, and that she’d taken up too much valuable space for unnecessary luxuries like deck chairs. He even blamed her when machinery broke down. Muriel said, “You should have thought of that before you proposed.”
After her anger, Muriel always found excuses for Dick’s behavior, no matter what he did. She still told herself that he was sweet and kind and generous at heart, if she could just get him to lay off the bottle.
The next day, they sailed across the Atlantic to the Azores Islands, en route to Lisbon. By now it was June 1954, and there was a terrible storm that lasted the entire crossing. Muriel thought for sure she wouldn’t live to see the Azores port of Horta.
Muriel had also developed a habit of taking out her anger toward Dick on the servants. Muriel and Irma, the skipper’s wife, weren’t getting along so well. Irma was upset because Muriel changed her wishes too often and was rude to her and Karl. Muriel ridiculed Karl’s knowledge of cooking, and Irma hated that they could never make Muriel happy. Every morning, she insisted she have a tablecloth at breakfast, and if Irma forgot to bring it, Muriel would have a fit. In a typical morning, Muriel would buzz Irma for a cup of coffee; Irma would bring it and leave. Moments later, Muriel would buzz Irma again. “This coffee is cold.” Irma would retrieve the cup, warm it, return it to Muriel, and leave. Moments later, another buzz. “This coffee is too hot.” And so it went.
Karl was having terrible bouts of seasickness, so Irma had to cook for everyone most of the time. Muriel insisted she have her breakfast at 7:30, and the crew was to have breakfast at eight. But Irma was usually so busy heating and cooling Muriel’s coffee and tending to her every need, she was always late serving the crew. She concluded that Muriel simply ordered everyone around just t
o make everyone as miserable as she was.
When they arrived in Europe, an old acquaintance of Dick’s, Christian Nissen, who was recommended to him by Sparkman & Stephens, joined them to sail. Nissen had met Dick during the British Fastnet race in the 1930s, when Dick raced with the Lizzie McCaw. Nissen was known among the yachting set by his captain nickname, “Hein Muck,” named for the famed World War I shipyard carpenter, Hein Muck of Bremerhaven.
When they arrived in Hamburg, Germany, Dick disappeared from their room at the Atlantic Hotel and was out all night. Having grown accustomed to Dick’s disappearances and “Hotel du Nords,” Muriel didn’t worry about it until six in the morning when he still hadn’t shown up. She went out looking for him and finally discovered him at the Reeperbahn—Hamburg’s red-light district—with a dozen “derelicts.” Dick pretended not to know who she was, so she sat in the corner of the bar until nine to make sure he was safe. She finally asked a manager and head waiter to help her get him home. Dick wouldn’t budge, so she called Nissen and asked him to retrieve Dick for her. At noon, Nissen pulled Dick out of the bar, and discovered that he’d spent $4,000 at the establishment.
After Dick recovered on the yacht, they sailed to the Baltic Sea, stopping at the Kiel Yacht Club where Dick’s sister Nancy and his niece Susan joined them. After everyone had gone to bed, Dick stayed up all night again in another drunken binge, and Muriel had to stay up with him until morning, trying to prevent him from embarrassing himself in front of his family. The next morning, Dick was bedridden, so Muriel helped Nancy and Susan get breakfast and catch a train out of town without having a wink of sleep herself.
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