Kid Carolina

by Heidi Schnakenberg

  The elusive Annemarie has never been more mysterious or well hidden, and she still lives in the same tiny Swiss mountain town where Dick died. Annemarie still has a view of Dick’s grave in the little churchyard in Emmetten, although his plot has been turned over and reoccupied twice since he died.

  Neighbors who are acquainted with Annemarie and her daughter seem unaware that the two women are the heirs of a deceased American millionaire, with the exception of the staff at St. Anna Clinic, who still remember Dick and Annemarie fondly. According to the general public in Winston-Salem and the residents of Sapelo Island, Annemarie is friendly and good to them but keeps herself distanced from most Reynolds family affairs.

  Annemarie’s introduction into Dick’s life continues to be inexplicable to many who knew him. She became a huge influence over the last two years of Dick’s life and ultimately retained all of the power over the estate of a man she had known for only a few years, causing her to become the target of suspicion that continues today. She never remarried while she quietly raised her daughter and is a large benefactor of many charitable institutions in Switzerland.

  Annemarie reportedly does little business in the United States, except to tend to the Sapelo Foundation in Georgia, of which she is honorary president, and to donate funds to the Reynolda House Museum of American Art and other stateside institutions for the Reynolds family.

  Today, the Sapelo Island Research Foundation, still presided over by Annemarie, Irene, and Nancy’s children, is a respectable institution that continues to fund marine biology, oceanography, and limnology (the study of inland waters) research in conjunction with the University of Georgia. The University of Georgia Marine Institute facilities are housed on the island and maintained by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The lovely South End House is now a park museum, and large groups can rent the mansion for the weekend to sample the multimillionaire’s life. Wake Forest University, which still owns the marble bust of Dick that Muriel purchased for them in the 1950s, remains an excellent school today. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which is run by Nancy’s family, continues to fund charitable programs throughout North Carolina.

  Patrick Reynolds, that young twentysomething who once entertained the idea of raising his father’s coffin with Muriel, didn’t go away quietly. In 1989 he published a multigenerational family history titled The Gilded Leaf. The book was received with trepidation by most of his brothers and outright anger by his cousins. But it was clear that Patrick shared many of his mother’s and Muriel’s suspicions, although he tried to be fair. It was also evident that Patrick had not quite forgiven his father for disinheriting him and sought answers he was never able to find.

  Irene is Dick’s only other living child. The older she grew, the more she looked like Dick, even sharing his distinctive dimpled chin. It looked like Irene wasn’t an “impostor” child after all, and that Dick had missed out on the life of his only daughter. Zachary Taylor, an eccentric young man who was a living legend in North Carolina and renowned for motorcycle racing, ham radio operations, and aerobatic flying, died tragically in a plane crash in 1979. John died in 1990, Josh in 1995, Michael in 2004, and Will in 2009. Of all the children, only Irene presumably understood Dick’s actions before he died. And only Irene would reap the benefits of his fortune and his legacy.

  Dick Reynolds, the yachtsman, the aviator, the philanthropist, the businessman, grappled with the tragedy of his parents’ deaths as a teenager, and then grew into an unsupervised, daring young adult who took great gambles with his life and money. He had everything he could ever want except discipline and restraint. When the excitement of his youth tapered off, so did his ability to stick with any one enterprise for long. Seized by the thrill of new technology, Dick would peak into intense periods of entrepreneurship, and then ditch the whole endeavor when the buzz wore off.

  Throughout his years as a generous, friendly, carefree playboy, partying at posh clubs like El Morocco, “21,” and Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, Dick would marry four times in all and produce six sons and one daughter, leaving each set of children to pursue a relationship with the next wife. He partied too much to devote any meaningful time to his family members—his love of the sea and the bottle and his desire to escape would reign over them all.

  Dick, who behind the jovial façade was a lonely, sad, and private man, consistently yearned for the solitude of his boats. When all else came and went, Dick closely guarded his yachts, building them larger and grander with each passing year. He would put up with life-threatening adventures to stay on a boat, but he wouldn’t put up with the hardships of a relationship and parenthood. It was too painful and too difficult to face his own failures, and his cherished vessels became his primary escape route when those failures caught up with him. But Dick loved alcohol just as he loved the sea—and he ultimately drowned his destiny in alcohol instead of giving the promises of his life a chance.

  Dick had been born amid great fanfare and opportunity and died in bitter, cold obscurity. His suddenly landlocked and suspicious end seemed indicative of a life that was no longer his own, and his dreams died with him. How would things have been different if Dick had lived up to his legacy? How many more opportunities could his boys have had? RJR Tobacco is now almost completely out of the Reynolds family’s hands—did it have to be that way? And how many more lives would have been changed if Dick’s boys could have carried on his generosity? Instead, Dick’s family would live out the rest of their lives with their pain and outrage, silenced by their own blood relatives for reasons they would never understand. Just as Dick before them, they would carry the scars of a fatherless childhood that would never heal. Their own children would start virtually from scratch instead of enjoying the legacy of R. J. Sr., a hardworking ancestor who surely never dreamed that the fruits of his labor would be removed from his own grandchildren.

  To this day, Dick’s heirs and observers can’t account for his actions toward his family in his final years. The man he once was—the kind, generous philanthropist, the brilliant businessman, the merry, one-of-a-kind sailor—vanished too soon like a cloud of Camel cigarette smoke, forever.

  But in their hearts and minds, the unforgettable spirit of R. J. “Dick” Reynolds Jr.—aka Kid Carolina—lives on.

  The turreted Victorian home on Fifth Street in Winston-Salem, where Dick grew up. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  R. J. Sr. with his four young children in front of their beloved Fifth Street house. From left to right: Nancy, Mary, Dick, baby Smith, and R. J. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  Katharine and R. J. Sr. pose with their children in front of the Fifth Street house. Katharine holds Smith in the background, while Mary, Nancy, a cousin, James Dunn, R. J., and Dick are seated. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  Twenty-two-year-old Dick at a cafe in Paris after he became “fed up” with Broadway and moved abroad. His love of alcohol would soon land him in serious trouble in Europe. (CORBIS)

  Dick at the time of Smith’s death in 1932. (CORBIS)

  Dick and Blitz join Mary and her husband, Charlie Babcock, to watch Uncle Will’s horse, Mary Reynolds, win the Hambletonian–and its top prize of $50,000. (CORBIS)

  Blitz and Dick with their friends Katherine and Harkness Edwards, in a photo taken just a month after Dick had come into his $25 million inheritance. Dick was well known throughout the 1930s among the yachting and horse-racing sets, where Edwards was also a regular competitor. (CORBIS)

  Dick’s 55-foot cutter Blitzen sails into Havana harbor to win the St. Petersburg-Havana race of 1939. (CORBIS)

  Dick and Blitz celebrate Blitzen’s Honolulu Fastnet win at Pearl Harbor Clipper Base. (CORBIS)

  Dick and Blitz’s Winston-Salem showplace, Merry Acres, built to resemble the deck of a ship, in 1940. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  A rare image of Lieutenant Commander R. J. Reynolds Jr.
and CQM A. K. Horton in the chart room of the USS Makin Island during World War II. (Courtesy National Archives Still Picture Division)

  Dick and his second wife, Marianne O’Brien, at their wedding in New York in 1946. The ceremony took place in the bride’s mother’s apartment on East Fifty-second Street. None of the Reynolds family attended. (Associated Press)

  Dick and Marianne holding their young sons, Michael and Patrick, in their Miami home, December 1948. A year later, they would be separated. (CORBIS)

  Blitz with her and Dick’s four sons, Josh, John, Zach, and Will, at their country estate, Devotion. Their father had been gone almost ten years at the time this photo was taken. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  The vast Reynolda estate that Katharine Reynolds completed in 1917. The mansion can be seen at upper right, with Lake Katharine behind it. The farm buildings are to the left, and the greenhouse and gardens are at the bottom. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  Dick and his third wife, Muriel Greenough, depart Miami for London to launch the Aries and begin their long honeymoon in the Pacific. (CORBIS)

  Dick and Muriel on a tour of Dick’s private island off the Georgia coast. (Associated Press)

  Dick and Muriel in front of the famous South End House on Sapelo Island, three days after their wedding was held there. (Associated Press)

  Dick and Muriel recovering at the Monte Carlo Hotel in Miami after they abandoned their burning yacht, the Scarlett O’Hara, and made it to shore in a dinghy. Such adventures were commonplace for Dick and Muriel by that time. (CORBIS)

  Blitz with her and Dick’s four sons, Zach, John, Will, and Josh, at Merry Acres, Christmas, 1957. Dick’s boys grew up spending very little time with their father. Just a few years after this photo was taken, they would lose Blitz, the only parent they knew, to cancer. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  Dick and his fourth wife, Annemarie Schmitt, on Sapelo Island, where Dick announced their recent marriage in the South China Sea. (CORBIS)

  Dick and Annemarie after their March 15, 1961, wedding on the USS Rotterdam in the South China Sea. Dr. Hans Lindemann can be seen to the left of Dick, and his wife, Ilsa, is to the right of Annemarie. Previous wives Muriel and Marianne believed this photo was doctored as part of a conspiracy. (Associated Press)

  Dick’s sister Nancy dedicates a portrait of Z. Smith Reynolds at Wake Forest University. Nancy was said to be so traumatized by Smith’s shooting and the subsequent publicity, it caused her to become obsessed with controlling the family image. (Courtesy Forsyth County Public Library Photograph Collection)

  Katharine Reynolds’s 64-room “bungalow” as it looks today. The home’s two side wings are hidden by trees and foliage, making it look in this view a third of the size it really is. (Author Collection)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  During the course of writing this book, my research evolved from being introduced to Dick Reynolds by Muriel’s papers to my own quest to find the most objective sources I could. This was no easy task. Considering the fame of the family, very little has been written about Dick or the first-generation Reynolds tobacco heirs, apart from the countless news stories of their era and Patrick Reynolds’s admirable, but at times biased, account in The Gilded Leaf. I spent hundreds of hours cross-checking often conflicting accounts in news stories, interviews, books, and other publications. Information I received from individual interviews also frequently conflicted with other sources—so much so that I relied very little on interviews in my final draft. I have concluded that because so much secrecy surrounds the legacy of the Reynolds family, not even the descendants and acquaintances know or understand the complete details of the family’s history, apart from censored accounts.

  Because Dick spent so much time in his life involved in litigation, I often turned to court documents to help me analyze and conclude the likely facts of any given event to offset the conflicts in other sources. Dick and Muriel’s two divorce trials alone included eight thousand pages of detailed testimony about their lives. I believe that if my readers followed my research and analytical footsteps, they would reach similar conclusions about the story of Dick Reynolds.

  Muriel Reynolds’s compilation of letters, papers, diaries, transcripts, and manuscripts, which are based on her recollection of Dick’s life story as he shared it with her during their marriage, is one of the largest known original collections of documentation about the Reynolds family, going back as far as Hardin Reynolds. To honor her monumental efforts and work, I centralized Muriel’s perspective and her marriage to Dick in this story. I was well aware that Muriel had her own biases as well, and her memories of events, dates, and times were sometimes in conflict with other sources. At other times, her memory of events was stunning in its accuracy, scope, and detail. I cross-checked Muriel’s accounts using the same analytical exercises, and where there were no other sources to confirm Muriel’s memory, especially during her courtship with Dick, I took her at her word when it was reasonable and made sense contextually.

  I also made a point to tell the story of Dick and Muriel’s divorce from Muriel’s perspective. Muriel was vilified in numerous accounts of the trial at the time, but the court transcripts tell a very different story—one in which Dick’s actions were just as irresponsible, scheming, and often vicious. I thought this was important to relay, because Dick was normally a good-natured and giving man, and his turn toward extreme vengeance in the trial set the tone of the final years of his life and provided clues to his state of mind when he married Annemarie, escaped to Switzerland, and ultimately disinherited his six sons.

  When Dick died of “too much oxygen to the brain” it inspired confusion that continues in some circles today. Most have accepted that Dick died of emphysema, since he had fallen so ill from the disease in the last few years of his life, but Dick said himself only months before he died that he expected to go on quite a bit longer, and his servants agreed with him. Marianne O’Brien and Muriel felt certain there was more to the murky story of his death, and these suspicions only grew when the boys were disinherited. The actions of Nancy Reynolds and Annemarie didn’t help. Nancy had likely intervened quickly because she was fixated on keeping scandal out of the family name. Many who knew her in Winston-Salem have confirmed that she was obsessed with sanitizing the family’s image and that she considered Dick’s womanizing and drinking a family embarrassment. His divorce from Muriel, double marriage to Annemarie, disinheritance of his sons, his obscure death by too much oxygen, and the birth of a daughter he never knew were likely more scandal than Nancy could bear.

  Annemarie was said to be traumatized by her wild ride with Dick from the start. First she dealt with the contentious divorce from Muriel, in which she played the part of the shameful other woman and was a focal point of the bloodthirsty second trial. Next, Annemarie would rapidly learn the stress of Dick’s on-again, off-again health problems, ailments, and tobacco and alcohol withdrawal. The final blow was Dick’s unexpected death at a time when she was due to deliver her first child. Annemarie’s difficult birth of her daughter just three days later sent her into a whirlwind of emotion. She gained a beautiful baby girl and lost a new husband she had left everything for—a career, her family, and her own autonomy—just a few years earlier.

  Her troubles didn’t end there. When the news broke that the boys were disinherited, Annemarie became the subject of hatred and rage. Her only ally, Nancy, likely made the situation worse by her secrecy and suspicious proposals to silence the boys. Presumably only Annemarie, Dick’s oxygen therapist, Sergio Amati, Dick’s longtime assistant, Guenther Lehman, and possibly other medical assistants knew exactly what happened to Dick in that oxygen tent. Was it an accident, did someone cause his death, or was there even more to the story?

  There were allegations that Annemarie kept Dick “drugged and incapacitated,” that she “willfully and feloniously” caused his death six months earlier and his death
was concealed, and that his last will was forged. The circumstances of Dick’s death were unusual and it was unlike Dick to handwrite an unwitnessed will and let it stand. Therefore, the suspicions of Dick’s family members weren’t unreasonable. That said, I have found no proof of wrongdoing on the part of Annemarie or anyone else.

  Annemarie would continue to be sued for years to come. Her defenders say she was blindsided by the Reynolds family drama from the beginning and never sought the wealth or trouble that marrying Dick brought her. Dick’s descendants have little sympathy and say she could have done more to reach out to them if she had really cared about Dick or the family and if she was innocent of any wrongdoing. They say she knows more about Dick’s death and his disinheritance of his sons than she has revealed, and she need only break the silence to mend the family wounds. To this day, Dick’s heirs in Winston-Salem regard her as “the one who got everything” as they live with pint-sized coffers that are less than 10 percent of the size of their cousins’.