TR noted to the World that thirteen people had recently died by drowning while ice-skating on frozen ponds but that didn’t mean Americans should stop ice-skating.
The Chapman case took a sudden dramatic turn between the time Roosevelt left for New Year’s vacation and when he returned. The World tracked down Little Egypt and somehow got a copy of H. Barnum Seeley’s long statement to Parker. “Little Egypt’s Own Story/She Was to Appear in Gauze…/Herbert Seeley Gives the Names of All His Guests … Parker Wins and Chapman’s Trial Is Ordered.”
Seeley was quoted as saying he didn’t want a “Sunday school” but rather a “gentlemanly stag entertainment.” He delved in great detail into his quest for performers. He complained that Chapman’s intrusion, especially his lecture, “threw a great deal of damper upon the dinner and the spirits of the company could not be restored.”
Many clubmen considered his voluntary revealing of the guest list as extremely bad form. Names included Marmaduke Tilden of Larchmont, New York; A. Gould Hamilton of South Orange; H. H. Flagler of Park Avenue; E. P. Delanoy, office at 1 Wall Street. Ten of the twenty-two guests were married; Wall Street dominated the occupations, though most were independently wealthy. Ages, besides the bridegroom’s, ranged from thirty to fifty-five.
The World interviewed Little Egypt at her apartment on Seventh Avenue, and she reenacted the couchee-couchee dance for the reporter. In her broken English, she told him she loved to dance “in zee all-togezher” (i.e., nude) and could not understand what the “fuss” was all about.
Within hours, public opinion took an abrupt U-turn. The guests were no longer wealthy men at a harmless but tawdry dinner; they were deviants befouling Sherry’s.
The Chapman trial began on Thursday, January 7. Commissioner Grant would preside, with Commissioner Parker at his elbow. Andrews and Roosevelt did not plan on attending.
Many people eagerly awaited the trial to hear under oath from the mouths of the vaudeville stars all the (sordid) details. Town Topics couldn’t wait for the verdict so it delivered its own: “We find all the diners guilty but as all the married ones have doubtless by this time received adequate correction from their wives, the matter need go no further.”
Oscar Hammerstein couldn’t wait, either. The theater impresario, who had opened the enormous blocklong Olympia entertainment complex, with a music hall, restaurant, theater, and roof garden, at 44th and Broadway, debuted Silly’s Dinner, starring Little Egypt playing herself. The whiskered police captain and one especially drunken guest, who dances while passed out on the floor, almost steal the show from Little Egypt’s red stockings, which can be seen dancing suggestively below a carefully placed curtain. Roosevelt’s police were now vaudeville comedians.
Spectators lined up at 1 p.m., two hours early, at 300 Mulberry Street to land seats for the Barnum-Seeley circus/trial in the police hearing room. (Commissioner Grant would ban female spectators on the second day.) Two top lawyers made surprise appearances. The Seeley guests had retained Colonel E. C. James (of the Devery trial) to help the police department with its prosecution of Chapman, and introduce every legal trick to keep the twenty-two blueblood guests off the stand. Little Egypt, who had blithely confessed to being hired to violate the law in her statement to Parker, retained florid, diamond-decked man-mountain William Howe of Howe & Hummel.
Close to 3 p.m., the vaudeville femmes fatales—all in elaborate hats and brightly colored theatrical dresses—began arriving; many of them were escorted by a stage-door Johnny. The dinner guests, impeccably garbed and sheepish, already milled in the hallway. Sometime after 3 p.m. a carriage rolled up and the acrobatic Algerian dancer slowly descended, bundled in layers under a hat “heavy with black ostrich plumes,” accompanied by her maid.
Since witnesses were forbidden to hear the testimony of other witnesses, a court officer guided the dancers and singers to a large police classroom, called the School of Instruction. Just as the trial was called to order at 3:20 p.m., someone realized that the twenty-two Seeley guests were also “witnesses” and therefore must leave the hearing room. A clerk began shepherding the dignified men toward the room already containing Little Egypt and a half dozen beautiful young women. “Gee! I wish I was a witness,” someone shouted. Commissioners Grant and Parker had trouble suppressing laughs.
Parker whispered to a clerk, who whispered to Captain Chapman, who walked to the School of Instruction and guided the female performers out of that room and up to the boardroom; he posted two guards.
The trial would occupy four and a half days, and the witnesses, with only minor discrepancies, would describe in detail the notorious night’s entertainment. Herbert Barnum Seeley had auditioned and hired a male singer and half a dozen female vaudeville acts to perform during the gaps of a fifteen-course banquet. For instance, he booked the Leigh Sisters to do their famed umbrella dance—first, only one pair of legs can be seen behind a large umbrella, then a third leg emerges, then a fourth, often at surprising angles. Miss Lottie Mortimer would sing the saucy “Jusqu’a-Là” (“Down to There”) describing an accident with her bathing costume while swimming in the Narragansett; Daniel Quinn, accompanied by banjoists, would sing “Put Me Off at Buffalo” and “Beer, Beer, Glorious Beer.”
All the females wore costumes acceptable on the stage. Observers, however, agreed that the entertainment, in a handful of areas, veered toward the “indecent.” The host hired plump and pretty Vitascope star Minnie Renwood to play an ingénue “Santa Claus Up to Date” and hand out gifts. He and a friend wrote out four signs to pin to her costume of mismatched tights and an army jacket. The World called the signs “bestial in the extreme” and refused to print them; that left half a million readers to wonder.
Santa (Minnie) also handed out twenty-two gifts, aptly selected for each guest, to be given while she recited some comic rhymes. Several newspapers called the verses “vile” and one paper judged the gifts “obscene … positively bestial for a man to receive from the hands of a woman.” This self-censorship left readers assuming the worst: erotic statuettes, phalluses, Spanish fly ointment?
A century-plus later it is a challenge to understand the Victorian fuss. The four signs were eventually revealed: MILK BELOW, THE HEART OF MARYLAND, HELD BY THE ENEMY, and SECRET SERVICE. Barnum’s grandson unconvincingly swore the placing of the signs on Minnie’s torso was random. The twenty-two gifts included a toy piano, a drum, a box of blocks, a miniature cradle with twins, an ear syringe.
Also pushing propriety was one elaborate drinking toast. Seeley had hired Lottie Mortimer—an established vaudeville star with a prominent nose and oversized mouth, whose specialties were songs and “coon monologues”—to deliver it. No newspapers would print it; the Sun described it as “pure filth.”
Miss Mortimer, who clearly had a gift for comedy, mentioned that several guests had requested pencils and asked her to repeat it slowly so they could write it on their menus. She referred to Little Egypt’s trousers as “mosquito netting.” She also recalled that during a break half a dozen impatient, tipsy banqueters had clustered around her and asked what would happen if one of the two straps of her clingy bodice broke. She told them, “Nothing” several times, but they didn’t believe her. “Some of them felt something would happen and so they cut it.” She paused. “Nothing happened.”
Another Victorian point of honor was why four men were in the women’s dressing room. One actress claimed the talent agent always sang out: “Ladies, I am coming through; put something around you.” This drew an unexpected laugh.
Ultimately, the vulgarity of the night hinged on what the Barnum heir had hired Little Egypt to do, and what she had actually performed. She was, appropriately enough, the last headliner at the trial, on Tuesday, January 12.
Her larger-than-life lawyer, William Howe, was sporting diamonds on both hands, at both cuffs, and a robin’s-egg blue tie; his gold stickpin—about two inches long—depicted a squatting devil with ruby eyes and an emerald tail.
Little Eg
ypt, while taking center stage, opened her sealskin coat to reveal she was wearing a silver-and-blue-striped bodice that appeared as if she had been “poured into it.” The press called her facial expression half defiance, half amusement. “She is a strange sort of creature, with a swarthy face that would be positively ugly were it not lighted up by a pair of big bright black eyes.” The fifty spectators drank in her exotic appearance. They craned and tilted to hear better so as to try to decipher her mangled French-English accent.
She said the agent Phipps had asked her to dance for a “party of artistes” at Sherry’s. She was supposed to do her dance and then “a leetle Egyptian pose on a leetle pedestal in zee altogether.” She was asked to define “in zee altogether” (a phrase made famous by Du Maurier’s massive best-seller Trilby).
Little Egypt replied: “Oh, monsieur, just a little pose in zee altogether, a leetle Egyptian slave girl, comprenez vous? The pose in zee altogether was for zee encore.” She added she would only do what was proper for Art. She said Captain Chapman’s arrival had nixed that part of her act; so instead she climbed down from the stage to dance.
LAWYER: Did any of the guests put their hands on you?
EGYPT: Oui, oui he just take me that way there on my leetle leg.
LAWYER: Did he pinch your leg?
EGYPT: Oui.
She was asked if the guests said anything to her. “Zee gentlemen zay: You no dance leetle Egypt. You a leetle black nun.” No one was certain what much of her testimony meant, not even the translator. She had clarified “leetle” but soon after, the defense rested its case. The climax was a bit anticlimactic, which was probably how the Seeley guests felt that night.
Commissioner Grant adjourned the proceedings for the evening. Little Egypt and Cora Routt rushed over to the Olympia to perform in Silly’s Dinner. The Sun stated that the trial had “occupied all the time of the police commission for nearly a week and … has been the principal topic of conversation in the city all of that time.”
During the trial’s final half day of lawyer motions and testimony by bit players, Commissioner Grant called a ten-minute recess so he could very briefly attend a Police Board meeting. Many of the reporters for the Sherry’s trial trooped with him to the boardroom. With this press audience, board members indulged in a little stage-whispered banter. Roosevelt turned to Grant, the judge: “Is it true that the Seeleyites [i.e., the guests] have been closeted in the School of Instruction with Little Egypt?”
Grant replied that they had been cooped together only briefly at the beginning. “Nothing is so laughable,” chipped in Commissioner Parker, “as to see the regiment of disconsolate chappies filing through the courtroom after something to eat or drink.”All three commissioners laughed. Roosevelt commented that he expected “the trial will have a healthy effect upon dinners of this kind in the future.”
Grant walked back downstairs and resumed the trial. After Colonel James recalled the assistant manager at Sherry’s and two theatrical agents—all denying any nudity—he rested his case. As the dozen lawyers and several dozen newspapermen and the participants began to file out, it was realized that the twenty-two Seeley guests and host had been forgotten. They had spent four and a half humiliating days waiting to testify and had never testified. A court official unlocked the door and let them out. They walked out of the building, refusing to comment but “smiling.”
Protocol called for the commissioners to review the trial testimony, then render a verdict, which they would … in two weeks.
Captain Chapman, while awaiting his fate, did not slow his quest for moral purity; he started a new campaign to root streetwalkers out of the Tenderloin. On Monday, January 18, around 10 p.m., his policemen arrested twenty-four women. “This man,” Eva McMonigal said, pointing to plainclothes detective Leazenbee, “came to me and asked me where I was going. I told him I was going home, whereupon he seized me by the arm and took me to the station.” The judge—with great irritation—dismissed that charge and the charges against five others out of the two dozen arrested. This led the Herald to do some math and postulate that twenty-five of every 100 women arrested by Chapman’s patrolmen would be innocent.
The newspaper warned that shopgirls couldn’t return home alone, and wives with husbands working evenings couldn’t visit friends or run errands because “unscrupulous” policemen wanted to “make a record” number of arrests. One woman wrote in: “Will it be necessary for a woman [wanting to walk alone at night] to obtain a permit from this crass executor of the law to prevent her arrest as a member of the demi-monde?”
Chapman vowed to keep arresting disreputable women in his precinct. He had come through the trial unscathed except for the revelation that he had exchanged photos with an eighteen-year-old dancer; he claimed he admired her purity. The Herald published a map of his precinct (14th to 42nd Street, Park Avenue to Seventh Avenue) alerting single women to the dangers of going there at night without an “escort.”
The escalating war against prostitution, however, took a sudden surprising toll. The Parkhurst Society’s lead investigator went insane. Arthur “Angel” Dennett, undercover crusader who had masterminded the brothel probes in the precincts of Devery and Eakins, began babbling about being the Count of Monte Cristo during a meeting with the mayor.
Dennett was a lanky, animated man from New Hampshire who rarely slept at night; his specialty was wandering the streets till dawn dressed as a gentleman looking for streetwalkers. He often lulled the young ladies into sharing details of their lives by warmly praising their beauty or offering them sympathy for their condition.
Reverend Parkhurst wrote an open letter to the newspapers, blaming the Angel’s madness on the slack police department.
“We do not quite understand why the men on our staff should have to work day and night and grind themselves into insane asylums doing police duty for a city that is supposed to be equipped with a reform Police Board and a reform Chief of Police.”
Parkhurst complained that he had expected widespread vice under Tammany but not under a reform administration. He targeted the “disintegration of the police board” for “demoralizing” the police force. “Speaking in behalf of an indignant community and in behalf of the blackmailed and persecuted, we demand that they should find some way out of their quarrel.”
Chief Conlin testily denied any responsibility for Dennett’s delusions, and pointed out that the police, especially the reform captains, had repeatedly cooperated with him.
The World found one of Dennett’s most recent reports, and that document offered a huge hint as to the frustrations that might have tipped him over to madness.
The streets of New York City are infested at the present time by throngs of women and girls of low character. Their number has increased greatly in the last few months, especially on Broadway in the vicinity of 34th Street, on Third and Sixth Avenues, and on 42nd Street. The increase is startling and from personal investigation I am prepared to say that it can be attributed almost entirely to the Raines hotels.
He blamed not police corruption but that paradigm of unintended consequences, the Raines Law. The Angel stated that 95 percent of streetwalkers now used Raines hotels, and added that the even greater evil was that “semi-respectable” women would go there. He said he questioned 100 prostitutes on where they first “became vicious” (i.e., lost their virtue, trafficked sex for money) and sixty-eight replied that it was in “easy-going hotels” like these.
After acting violently during a sanity hearing, the Angel was committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane.
Judgment came for Chapman. Although Colonel James submitted a long, well-argued brief defending the dinner guests’ right to privacy, Commissioner Grant didn’t bother to read it before the day of the vote, February 3.
Commissioner Andrews glanced at it and quoted the maxim “A man’s home is his castle,” but Grant cavalierly quipped: “Well, if a man uses his home for immoral purposes, I think the police ought to break into it.” Subtle
Parker then added: “That may be bad law but it is good doctrine … it is easy to raise a storm against the captain but Captain Chapman did what mighty few captains would do.”
The commissioners were in harmony over a policeman’s right to investigate an immoral performance in a hired room of a public restaurant.
They voted 4–0 in favor of acquitting Captain Chapman.
Roosevelt, though he said he wished Chapman had not exchanged photographs with one of the performers, hailed the verdict and the propriety of the raid. “If he erred at all,” said TR, “he erred on the right side.”
oosevelt’s quest to return to D.C. as assistant secretary of the navy stalled sometime during that odd four-month interregnum between post-election euphoria and the inauguration of a new president. Senator Lodge was working the room, along with several other senators, as were the Storers, but they all found the path blocked. Lodge unsuccessfully probed for concrete answers. Other names were bobbing up, such as Henry W. Raymond, who had served in the cabinet under Secretary of the Navy Tracy. TR began to downgrade his chances.
Meanwhile, the reform board moved to put Big Bill Devery back on trial, which would mark his fourth major legal battle in four years. Frank Moss of the Parkhurst Society had finally delivered the evidence to the Rules and Discipline committee of Parker and Grant, who approved moving forward. Chief Peter Conlin agreed to bring official charges of neglect of duty (i.e., not closing dozens of brothels in 1893).
Commissioner Andrews set Devery’s trial for Friday, February 12.
Just as the ruckus over the Seeley dinner was dying down, a new banquet took center stage. “New York is now convulsed over the Bradley Martin ball, owing to that fool [Rev.] Rainsford having denounced it,” Roosevelt wrote to his sister, still in Europe. “I shall have to protect it by as many police as if it were a strike.”
Island of Vice Page 41
