Empire of Deception

by Dean Jobb

  In 1912, Mitchell established the Tuna Inn on a rocky island on the Atlantic coast. It was the first resort in the province to cater to deep-sea anglers who hoped to land giant tuna with rod and reel, and Mitchell promoted the lodge as an alternative to the popular sportfishing grounds off California. “Here is the new field for tuna,” he declared in an article in Rod and Gun magazine, claiming the fish swam so close to shore during the summer months that they had been spotted from the inn’s veranda. In 1914, Mitchell backed up his claims by reeling in a 710-pounder, establishing a world’s record for the largest fish caught using a fishing rod.

  The war forced Mitchell to put his tuna venture on hold. He enlisted in the Royal Engineers and served on the Salonika Front in the mountains of Macedonia, emerging with the rank of captain. By the time he returned to Nova Scotia in 1920, a fire had destroyed the lodge and wiped out his livelihood. That was how he wound up behind the counter in the rod and tackle department at Abercrombie and Fitch, which only hired expert outdoorsmen to advise its discriminating clientele.

  The latest customer seeking his advice introduced himself as Lou Keyte. “He was pleasant and agreeable and very much a gentleman,” Mitchell would recall, though he noted that the man did not appear to be in good health. Leo must have found it intriguing that a central character in the novel Nostromo by his favorite author, Joseph Conrad, was named Captain Mitchell. Laurie Mitchell, for his part, was led to believe that Keyte was a wealthy real estate promoter in search of a refuge from the city. And he knew just the place.

  Nova Scotia was less than five hundred miles northeast of New York, and no more than a day away by steamer and train, yet the Canadian province was a mystery to many Americans. A narrow peninsula—350 miles in length and as little as 50 wide—it was slightly larger than Massachusetts and Vermont combined and jutted from the Atlantic coast of North America as if the continent were dipping a foot into the Gulf Stream. The population stood at just over half a million; the capital and largest city, Halifax, was a historic port and had been a major naval base during the war. Ocean-cooled summers and a reputation for unspoiled, rustic beauty were just beginning to make the province a popular vacation destination.

  American sportsmen were among the first to arrive in search of game and solitude, and Mitchell was not the only one plugging the tourism potential of the province’s wilderness. “If one has never been in Nova Scotia,” Byron McLeod of Boston, a former resident, wrote of a 1906 hunting trip in National Sportsman magazine, “then he can form no idea of how quickly, reasonably and conveniently he can be landed, say from Boston or New York, in a Sportsman’s Paradise.” In 1908, the New York writer Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s confidant and biographer, published an account of a camping trip by canoe across southwestern Nova Scotia. The Tent Dwellers, with its description of “fairy lakes, full of green islands” and “clear, black water” swarming with trout, helped to put Nova Scotia on the map for the well-heeled sportsmen who shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch. This was also “big game country,” noted another American visitor, who wrote a glowing account of hunting moose “for fresh meat and dining-room trophies.” Lodges sprang up to accommodate an influx of hunters, fishermen, and tourists. In the fall of 1916, John D. Rockefeller Jr., heir to his father’s Standard Oil empire, made his third trip to the region to hunt moose.

  If Nova Scotia’s wilderness was good enough for a Rockefeller, it was good enough for the New Rockefeller. Mitchell told Leo about a lakeside lodge that might be the retreat he was seeking. Known as Pinehurst, it was located near the village of Caledonia in Queens County, in the heart of moose-hunting and trout-fishing country. Byron McLeod, the National Sportsman writer, had bought the ninety-five-acre property in 1905 and had built a two-story lodge with a long veranda overlooking First Christopher Lake. The lodge, which stood at the end of a long, curving driveway and was hidden from the main road, offered the privacy Leo needed. Pinehurst would be a good fit, too, for his new persona as a lover of books and literature: McLeod’s uncle, Robert McLeod, had written an illustrated book filled with glowing praise for the “commodious lodge” set among the “green-robed senators of the mighty wood.” The idyllic setting had inspired another local writer of note, William Marshall, to produce “Evening at Pinehurst,” a short poem describing a sunset that transformed the lake into a “rose-tinted mirror.”

  Leo was interested but wanted to see the property for himself. Mitchell, who was about to move back to Nova Scotia for the summer, agreed to take him there. Before they set out from New York in mid-March, Leo dropped by the Neighborhood Book Shop and told Temple Scott he was going to Nova Scotia for his health. They worked out arrangements for Scott to oversee the shop in his absence.

  Steamers ran from Boston to Yarmouth, a port near the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia. Leo appears to have had no problem crossing into Canada despite the alerts issued to border points when he fled Chicago in December. It may have helped to be traveling with Mitchell, a Canadian who knew the route and the drill at the border. At Yarmouth, travelers hopped aboard the Halifax and Southwestern Railway—local wags claimed the initials H&SW stood for “hellish, slow, and wobbly”—to continue on to Liverpool, a port town about a hundred miles west of Halifax. The bone-rattling ride took six hours.

  The main road from Liverpool into the interior was still snow-covered and impassible by car. Mitchell rounded up a horse and sleigh for the twenty-five-mile trip through forests and farms to Pinehurst. The property bordered on two lakes, each a mile wide, and the snow gave the setting a Currier and Ives charm. The lodge was less than twenty years old, and its builders had sacrificed aesthetics for panoramic views; a row of second-floor windows ran above a long veranda facing the lake, creating a boxy facade but giving guests an unobstructed view of moonlit waters and “rose-tinted” sunsets. Inside, a massive brick fireplace stood ready to warm the large main-floor room where hunters and fishermen gathered to clink glasses and swap tales. There was no electricity, no central heating, and no modern plumbing, let alone the other comforts found in Leo’s gilded world of hotel suites and limousines. But Pinehurst was remote and secluded, and that made it perfect. He told Mitchell it was exactly what he was looking for.

  They returned to Liverpool, where Leo stayed with Mitchell and his wife, Elizabeth, at their home. His arrival made news in the provincial capital, with the Halifax Herald describing Keyte as “a writer of reputation” who intended to buy property in the area. Liverpool was one of the oldest towns in Nova Scotia, founded in the 1750s by a contingent of New Englanders that included a long list of Mayflower descendants. It bordered the broad mouth of a river christened, appropriately, the Mersey. The turrets and gingerbread trim of the oversize homes lining the main street, built by ship captains and lumber merchants, spoke of prosperous times long gone; by the 1920s the biggest industry in town was building and supplying the swift schooners and powerboats needed to smuggle liquor into the United States. Shady characters with New York accents and wads of cash turned up, eager to have boats built and outfitted or to hire skippers and crews to deliver crates of rum, whiskey, and champagne to “rum row,” just outside US jurisdiction, for transfer to shore.

  Leo was one of the few Americans in town with money to spend and no interest in smuggling booze. He got the lodge for a bargain price, $17,500, and a brief announcement of the lodge’s sale to “L. Keyte, of New York, a critic of note in that city,” appeared in a local paper at the beginning of April. Leo hired Mitchell to manage the place.

  The arrangement was ideal for Mitchell, who had persuaded another well-heeled Abercrombie and Fitch customer to join him in Nova Scotia that summer to fish for tuna off Liverpool. He was Zane Grey, whose novels, with their gun-toting, trailblazing Old West characters, were enormously popular. Grey was the most successful author of the era; only two works outsold his many titles—the Bible and the Boy Scout Handbook—and he earned almost $300,000 in royalties in 1924 alone. He was, in short, the kind of author Temple Scott de
spised.

  When not churning out novels, Grey became an accomplished hunter and fisherman. He was a frequent visitor to California’s Catalina Island, where he fished for tuna and swordfish, but his trophies were puny when compared to Mitchell’s record 710-pound catch. Surrounded by the racks of fishing poles at Abercrombie and Fitch, Mitchell told Grey all about it, how the massive fish had dragged him “nine miles out to sea, and halfway back.” Mitchell’s record—and the prospect of beating it—“inspired me,” Grey recalled. That winter they plotted strategy, discussing the rods, tackle, and boats best suited for fishing off Nova Scotia. They agreed to meet in Liverpool in August, when tuna began appearing in Nova Scotia waters.

  Leo may have met Grey in New York through their mutual friend. They both spent time at Abercrombie and Fitch, getting to know Mitchell. A connection to Zane Grey through Mitchell might prove useful to Leo. Knowing—or claiming to know—the famous author would burnish Lou Keyte’s credentials as a writer and literary critic.

  21

  THE HIDEAWAY

  THOMAS RADDALL SAW him for the first time at a dance in Liverpool. In a town awash in lumbermen, fishermen, and rumrunners, this man was dressed like a dandy, in spats, a white vest, and a derby. “He was an odd sight,” Raddall would recall, “obviously a city type.”

  The dance was in the Assembly Room on the second floor of Liverpool’s town hall, a many-gabled, wood-frame building. The cavernous room, with its tin ceiling and dark Douglas fir woodwork, was a popular venue for banquets, teas, and other events. Dances were a big draw, and the Bambalinas, a group of young, tuxedo-clad local musicians who took their name from a popular fox-trot of the day, provided the music.

  Someone introduced the newcomer in the derby to Raddall as Lou Keyte, the New Yorker the local papers said was looking for property in the area. He was clearly a man of means, and as if to prove it, he sent out to a restaurant for sandwiches, sweets, and coffee for everyone. “This,” Raddall recalled, “made him popular at once.” He catered the dance the following Saturday as well, and this time hit the dance floor. He proved to be an excellent dancer, and Raddall noted, soon “he was dancing with the prettiest girls in the room.” Word quickly spread that the dapper, polite, and generous newcomer was a millionaire in his midforties who had just bought Pinehurst Lodge—and a bachelor to boot.

  Raddall and Leo hit it off. Keyte, he recalled, was “a jolly good fellow.” Raddall was much younger but mature and worldly for his age. He was short and stocky, with deep-set brown eyes capped by dark eyebrows—eyes that had seen a lot in just twenty years. Born in England, he had come to Canada in 1913. His father, a soldier in the Royal Marines, had died in the war, making Thomas the man of the house at an early age. When a munitions ship exploded in Halifax Harbor in 1917, leveling large sections of the city and killing almost two thousand people, Raddall had experienced the horror firsthand—he had been enlisted to help set up a temporary morgue. He had left school at fifteen, studied to be a wireless operator, and signed on to his first steamer in 1919. After a lonely year posted at a radio station on an island off the Nova Scotia coast, he had taken a bookkeeper’s job at a pulp mill just upriver from Liverpool.

  Leo promised to invite Raddall and his other new friends to parties at Pinehurst once his planned renovations were complete. In the meantime, he arranged a private dinner and dance at a hotel in Bridgewater, a riverside town northeast of Liverpool, and invited Raddall and a dozen other young people to join him. On the evening of May 26, the party set out in a fleet of six cars—Leo commandeered every taxi in town—for the thirty-mile trip. It was the Empire Day holiday in Canada, marking the birthday of Queen Victoria, and the weather was as warm as a summer evening. Leo hired the Bambalinas to play, and band members piled into the taxis as well. Raddall and his date had a car to themselves and found the backseat stocked with expensive chocolates and packs of cigarettes. Their destination was the Fairview Hotel, overlooking the town.

  The entourage discovered that their host had thought of everything. He had reserved two upstairs rooms, one as a powder room for his female guests, the other stocked with whiskey and liqueurs for the men. At their tables in the wainscoted dining room, a printed menu card announced the meal to come. The appetizers were consommé and asparagus tips with celery, tomatoes, and olives. A choice of entrées followed: fried salmon with potatoes, or roasted stuffed chicken with cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and creamed peas. There was sponge cake, vanilla ice cream, and coffee for dessert. When the meal was over, just before the Bambalinas began to play and the group hit the dance floor, Raddall passed around his menu and asked everyone to sign the card as a souvenir of their memorable night. Everyone obliged except Leo. When Raddall insisted, he took the pen and scribbled “& Lou Keyte” beside the name of a young woman who had caught his eye.

  After the dinner, as Raddall scanned the names on the back of the menu, he realized Keyte had not signed his name. He had printed it. Raddall was puzzled. It was as if his new friend, the American millionaire injecting life and glamour into his small-town world, was unaccustomed to writing his own name.

  CALEDONIA, THE VILLAGE CLOSEST to Pinehurst Lodge, was located midway between Liverpool and Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy coast. Home to a few hundred—disgruntled Bayano investors probably outnumbered Caledonia’s residents—it was a cluster of stores and hotels lining the unpaved main road, with a sprinkling of churches and Victorian-style houses. The name of the local weekly paper, the Gold Hunter and Farmers’ Journal, was a reminder of a gold rush that had drawn thousands to the area in the late nineteenth century. It was said to have begun when a couple of men hiding in the woods to escape the law—Leo could identify with that part of the story—spotted gold in a vein of quartz. Boomtowns had sprung up at mine sites, but the good times had ended in 1905, when the last major pit closed and the newcomers moved on.

  Twenty years later, a wealthy American named Lou Keyte became the new gold rush. “Money was nothing to him,” a local man, Walter Scott, said of Leo with considerable understatement. “He was a real big spender.” Few people who encountered Keyte had seen such displays of extravagance. Waitresses who served him could count on a five-dollar tip, and according to a story told and retold in the area, he once bought ice cream, tendered a $100 American banknote, and left the shop without asking for change. Leo soon had two automobiles, a Chevrolet and an open-cabbed Franklin, a luxury car worth at least $1,500 with a distinctive engine hood that sloped like the tip of an upturned knife blade. He picked up the Chevy at a local garage, writing a check for the $850 asking price when almost everyone purchased such big-ticket items on a payment plan.

  Then there was the small army of workmen hired to renovate Pinehurst. To furnish the place, Leo scoured stores and placed classified advertisements in the Liverpool Advance for antique furniture as well as the old books he needed to fill his latest library and bolster his literary credentials. He made the hundred-mile drive to Halifax on shopping trips; spotting a display of lamps in a shop window, he bought all six. Leo estimated he spent roughly $18,000 to renovate and furnish the lodge, which was more than he paid for the building and the surrounding woodlands. Renovations were still under way in mid-May when he moved in. The Gold Hunter made sure the entire community knew that Keyte “is now living at this beautiful summer home.”

  People were never quite clear how the newcomer had made his money. He rarely talked about himself, and when he did, it was only in vague terms. Some people were under the impression he was a retired New York financier. Others recalled his mentioning that he had made his money in real estate down south. “He spoke of the States with contempt,” Raddall recalled, “and said he wanted to get away from it all.” He seemed to be well traveled and claimed to one new friend that the few months he had spent in Nova Scotia was the longest he had been in one place in a decade.

  As for what he did now, the Halifax Herald had introduced Keyte as “a writer of reputation” upon his arrival, and Leo did everyth
ing he could to play the part. He was spotted walking along Liverpool’s streets with armloads of books. He styled himself as a literary and drama critic in search of a quiet place to work. He claimed to have written several plays, but it turned out none had been produced. He spoke of writing articles and book reviews for American magazines. W. B. McKay, a Liverpool businessman who spent a lot of time with him, often saw him jotting in a notebook. He was making notes about people he met and things he saw, he told McKay, material “to use later in his writings.” Pinehurst’s literary connections—Robert McLeod’s book, William Marshall’s poem—rubbed off on Leo as well. And he discovered, to his delight, that people often called him Keytes by mistake, adding an s to his new surname as if he were a distant relative of the famous poet John Keats.

  Secluded Pinehurst Lodge, near the village of Caledonia in southwestern Nova Scotia, after Leo’s extensive upgrades and renovations.

  Leo offered another explanation for his decision to put down roots in Nova Scotia—his health. When he arrived in March to check out Pinehurst, he was so pale that everyone he met assumed he was seriously ill. It must have been the effects of diabetes, but Leo brushed off questions with vague references to being on the mend after a long illness. His condition improved within a few weeks, and his health became a convenient way to explain why he had grown a beard. He was recovering, he said, from a serious infection of his teeth and jaw that had left his face temporarily deformed. The beard masked the effects, and the explanation encouraged the squeamish to quickly change the subject.