With his death, the rift between the Jack Murrays and the other Murrays did not heal. Perhaps if Jack Murray’s widow had been willing to accept the family leadership that had been somewhat autocratically assumed by Tom, it would have been different, but the snubs which Jeanne Durand Murray had suffered from the family in the past still rankled, and she refused to turn to her brother-in-law for help or advice, as he clearly expected. Tom Murray, Jr. was the most like his father of all the Murray sons, and, as self-appointed head of the clan, he expected to be deferred to and to be consulted in all matters. Needless to say, the others in the family resented this and begrudged him his role as paterfamilias. At the time of Jack Murray’s death, it was discovered that Jack had been dipping heavily into capital. In his will, Grandpa Murray had given each of his three sons (excluding Daniel, who was by then institutionalized at McLean and “dead” to the family) a sizable sum “off the top” before the balance of the estate was divided. This in itself was bad enough—dividing the Murray sons and the Murray daughters over the matter of money—but when it appeared that brother Jack had spent his share, matters were only made worse. Tom Murray took the stand that his brother had “squandered” his inheritance, and that therefore Jack Murray’s widow and her children were not entitled to any further financial aid from the family. The Jack Murrays, understandably, did not enjoy being relegated to the role of poor relations. Whenever they encountered the Toms or the Joes—which was often in the family compound on Long Island—there was an undercurrent of hard, heavy feeling, all based on the disparity in their financial status.
As family head, Tom Murray, Jr. also considered himself the “conscience” of the combined Murray-McDonnell-Cuddihy families, and he was always offering counsel and advice—some thought pompously and condescendingly—on money. He also counseled them on religious matters and was, if anything, more pious than his father. Tom Murray maintained not one but two private chapels—one at New York and another at Southampton. But, whereas his father had received two Papal decorations, Tom Murray, Jr. had received three—which is the most that a single individual can ever receive. Once, when Tom Murray went to Rome for an audience with Pope Pius XII, and posed for a photograph with the Pontiff, one of his nephews commented slyly, “I see the Pope is posing for a picture with God.”
Tom Murray often lectured his relatives on the importance of sending their children to Catholic schools, and in this regard he was often at loggerheads with his brother-in-law, Lester Cuddihy, whose feelings toward the Church were somewhat ambivalent. Whenever Lester Cuddihy encountered a Jesuit, for example, he would inevitably say, “Why don’t you have one college that doesn’t have to bow its head to the names of Yale and Harvard and Princeton?”—always maintaining that the secular universities were scholastically better than the Catholic ones. Lester Cuddihy had also somewhat startled the family when he had bitten a Cardinal. It was none other than Francis Cardinal Spellman, and the occasion was a reception at the home of Mrs. Robert L. Hoguet. Mr. Cuddihy was about to kiss the Cardinal’s ring, and the Cardinal said, “Ah, Lester, I see you have some new teeth.” Mr. Cuddihy hissed, “I’ll teach you to call attention to my new teeth!” and bit the Cardinal on the finger. During Mass at Southampton, Lester Cuddihy and Joe Murray both regularly stood at the back of the church, and always walked out when it came time for Father Killeen’s sermon, Cuddihy explaining that, “Technically, the sermon is not a part of the liturgy,” whereas actually both men wanted a cigarette.
Tom Murray disapproved of all this, and would not even send his sons to Portsmouth Priory because it was considered “the most Protestant” of the Catholic boys’ schools. He did want them to attend Georgetown University. (From Portsmouth, boys often went on to sinful—and secular—Harvard.) Both Tom Murray and his brother Joe had gone to Yale Engineering School, and once when their sister Julia had been asked for a date by one of their Protestant classmates, she had asked her father for permission. Grandpa Murray’s reply had been “No.” She had said, “Just because I go out with him doesn’t mean that I’m going to marry him.” He had said, “I’m not going to give you the chance.” Tom Murray, Jr. adopted the same firm line with his own four daughters. It was not, perhaps, pure religious fanaticism. It was that, to Tom Murray, the Faith was a precious and inheritable treasure—as money and social position might be for others—something to be passed on from one generation to the next, pure and undiluted, as his father had passed it on to him. Out of devotion to the memory of his father, whose namesake he was, Tom continued to use the designation “Jr.” even after his father’s death in 1929, and finally consented to abandon it only in the late 1940’s.
Though he reprimanded others of his family for what he considered excessive spending, Tom Murray, Jr. was not himself above spending money on costly trifles that amused him. In 1941, for example, he bought the entire ice-skating rink from the New York World’s Fair, and had it shipped to his Southampton place—freezing plant and all—so that his children could enjoy summer skating. Lester Cuddihy, meanwhile, was a friend of Mr. Robert Moses, and Moses presented the Cuddihys with illegal slot machines that had been confiscated by his Commissioner’s office. One was set up in the entrance hall of the Cuddihys’ Water Mill house. It was a constant problem to keep the Cuddihy servants from depositing their life’s savings in the device, but Father James Keller, visiting from Maryknoll, once won the entire jackpot from a twenty-five-cent investment, proving that the Lord watches over those who pray. Uncle Tom, on the other hand, had in 1932 been named receiver of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, and remained in that capacity until the city took over the subway lines in 1940. He brought home all the nickel slugs that were extracted from the subway coin boxes, but these, he told his children, were for use only in the Cuddihy slot machines.
While all this bickering was going on among the Murrays, the McDonnell cousins seemed to be doing nothing but becoming richer, led by their doughty family patriarch, “Little Caesar” James Francis McDonnell and his McDonnell & Company. The obvious prosperity of the McDonnells was the cause of still more jealousy among the various Murrays, who, though they might consider themselves the “grander” family in terms of background and lineage, could not seem to hold a candle to the McDonnells when it came to wealth. Nor were feelings between the Cuddihys and McDonnells eased when the Lester Cuddihys had a weekend guest from Smith & Watson, the antiques firm, who, after visiting both the Tom Murrays’ and the James Francis McDonnells’ houses, and inspecting both with his expert’s eye for “wood,” declared that while Uncle Tom Murray’s furniture was terribly good, Aunt Anna McDonnell’s was truly of museum quality. The Murray and Cuddihy houses had all been elaborately decorated by McMillen, but, declared the Smith & Watson man, Mrs. McDonnell’s furniture was so magnificent that no decorating was really necessary.
If there was one thing that could bring the disparate and feuding members of the large and interrelated families together, even briefly, it was the prospect of a family gathering, or wedding. And, early in 1940, such a prospect was at hand with the announcement of the engagement of blonde and beautiful Anne McDonnell to the young and handsome Henry Ford II. At first, Uncle Tom Murray was highly displeased with this news—Ford had been raised an Episcopalian—but he was quickly mollified when it was explained to him that Ford had agreed to accept religious instruction, and to convert to Roman Catholicism. To an America grown weary of dispiriting war news from Europe, and tense with apprehension over entering another war, the impending union of two attractive young people from two of the country’s richest families came as a kind of intoxicating relief, and no sooner had the engagement been announced than newspapers across the land began extolling the approaching marriage as “The Wedding of the Century.” Perhaps, indeed, it was, and only the romance, a few years earlier, between Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson and King Edward VIII of England received wider national and international coverage.
For months before the July 13 wedding date, the newspapers were
filled with news of Fords and McDonnells, along with peripheral social doings of McDonnell relatives—Mary Jane Cuddihy being squired at the Stork Club by Harry K. Smith and Claudine Goodwin; Patricia and Jeanne Murray at this or that fashionable party; a note that Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, a relatively recent arrival on the New York scene, would be copatronesses of the Barat Settlement House dinner—and so on. Elaborate attempts were made in the press to sort out, for readers, who was who in the McDonnell-Murray clan—that the bride-to-be had sixty-two first cousins, six aunts, and six uncles on her mother’s side alone. On her father’s side, she had twenty-one more first cousins, three aunts, and three uncles. She also had thirteen brothers and sisters, or a grand total of 116 new in-laws for young Henry Ford. Ford, meanwhile, had only two brothers, a sister, and one aunt. Henry’s parents, it was pointed out, were Episcopalians, and his father, Edsel Ford, was a Mason. “But the Fords like Anne,” the Daily News reminded its readers.
Social credentials were also trotted out—that Anne McDonnell was a graduate of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and had studied at the Grotanelli School in Siena, Italy. Henry Ford, a graduate of the Hotchkiss School, was Yale ’40, where he had managed the crew and been a member of Book and Snake and Zeta Psi. The papers omitted the fact that Henry Ford II had not quite made it through Yale, but had been asked to withdraw after submitting a paper that had been prepared for him by “Rosie,” the well-known ghost writer for Yale undergraduates.
Much was made, needless to say, of the Ford family fortune, and of the story that Henry Ford had once sat for four hours in a New York night club because he was afraid to offer his personal check for three dollars for two beers. (He finally did, and it was accepted.) The McDonnell money was not overlooked either, and the newspapers wrote enthusiastically of the fifty-room McDonnell house at Southampton, with its pool, tennis court, and polo field, and of the twenty-nine-room New York apartment which had a separate kitchen just for the children. The McDonnell automobiles were listed—three sport coupés, five station wagons, three limousines, uncounted Fords and Chevrolets for the children, and a custom-built Chrysler with a special body and red-leather upholstery. It was noted that the Joseph B. Murrays, the future bride’s aunt and uncle, had been threatened by kidnapers in 1938, and that their chauffeur carried a gun.
Next came the public announcement that Henry Ford would indeed become a Catholic, over only minor objections from his father, that the wedding would be in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and that none other than Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen would handle Ford’s conversion—a process that would involve anywhere from forty to a hundred hours of religious instruction. Immediately a quarrel broke out between two newspapers, the New York Mirror and the Journal, over which publication had carried the conversion story first. The Journal’s Cholly Knickerbocker claimed that he had published the story first, on March 16, 1940. Not so, replied the Mirror’s Walter Winchell, insisting that he had reported the news more than a month before, on February 15.
Next came the news of Henry Ford, Sr.’s gift to the wedding pair—not surprisingly, it was to be a superspecial custom-built Ford car, complete with its own chauffeur. Then the list of bridal attendants: Catherine McDonnell, the bride’s sister, maid of honor; Charlotte McDonnell, another sister; Marie and Rosamund Murray, both cousins (Uncle Tom’s and Uncle Joe’s daughters); Jeanne Murray (Uncle Jack’s daughter); Cousin Mary Jane Cuddihy; Josephine “Dodie” Ford, the groom’s sister; and Dorothy Morgan, Helen Macdonald, Mavis Coakley, and Kathleen Kennedy, daughter of the Joseph P. Kennedys, all bridesmaids. Benson Ford would be his brother’s best man, and the twelve ushers would be brother William Ford; the bride’s brothers James F. McDonnell, Jr., and T. Murray McDonnell; Raymond Peter Sullivan (fiancé of Catherine McDonnell); Buckley Byers of Sewickley; Jesse Davis, Jr. of Baltimore; Harry Quinn of Lebanon, Pennsylvania; Hood Bassett of Palm Beach; Ralph Browning of New Rochelle; Jerome DuCharme and George R. Fink, both of Detroit; and John MacSpovran of Orange, New Jersey. It was also rumored that usher Buckley Byers would soon announce his engagement to cousin Rosamund Murray (it was true, and they would marry a few months later), and it was noted that “Bucky” Byers’s father, J. Frederic Byers, the Pittsburgh steel magnate, had once been sued by an ex-show girl named Kitty Ranelett who claimed that the senior Byers had promised her $31,000 for medical care for her dead daughter—but that the case had been tossed out of court. Of the Murrays and McDonnells, the newspapers commented, “None has been sued. None has been divorced. None has been the object of a whispered scandal.”
Still another rumor was of the engagement of Anne McDonnell’s sister Charlotte to young John Fitzgerald Kennedy. This engagement, which lasted only briefly, was thoroughly disapproved of by the Murrays and the McDonnells, particularly Uncle Tom Murray, who considered the Kennedys upstarts. They regarded Jack Kennedy as a “moral roustabout,” and his father as a “crook and thorough bounder.” Needless to say, that marriage did not take place. “If he had married me,” Charlotte McDonnell says today, “I’m sure he would never have become President,” meaning that her own freewheeling and party-loving style of life would have perhaps not been an asset to the White House. Several years later, the then Senator Kennedy was riding up in an elevator in New York with Mrs. James Francis McDonnell to attend some Catholic function. “Did you know I almost married your daughter?” he asked pleasantly. “I did,” said Mrs. McDonnell, “and I’m happy you didn’t.”
As the date of the wedding approached, there was breathless news that the church had been changed from St. Patrick’s to the Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Southampton, but Monsignor Sheen would still say the Mass. A wedding trip to Honolulu was planned. Three days before the ceremony, the Edsel Fords arrived in Southampton in their yacht, the Onika, and anchored in Peconic Bay. There was a hectic gaggle of prewedding parties, and a terrible crisis when it was discovered that the church would seat only five hundred people, although already there had been over eleven hundred acceptances. Sixteen armed guards were required to protect the two roomfuls of wedding gifts. The night before the ceremony, Henry Ford II took his first Holy Communion.
Among the hundreds of wedding guests were John F. Kennedy, the Alfred E. Smiths, three Bishops, and dozens of priests. Speaking the words, Monsignor Sheen said, “Your marriage bond is unbreakable … because it is modeled upon the union of the divine and human natures in the unity of Our Lord … for all eternity … that timelessness which only death can dissolve into the eternal rebirth of the love of God.” Afterward, while little Barbara and Sean McDonnell gathered up the rose petals that had been scattered after the bridal pair, crowds of the curious uninvited thronged onto the McDonnell lawn, trying to peer under the canopy of the huge reception tent for a glimpse of the young Henry Fords. In the press of onlookers, one woman narrowly escaped suffocation. Inside the tent, where the bride was arrayed in flowing white tulle showered with orange blossoms, a morning-coated Henry Ford, Sr., then seventy-seven, danced with his new granddaughter-in-law to the strains of Strauss’s “Tales of the Vienna Woods.” Photographs of the dancers went around the world, and newspapers praised “a Catholic wedding of people with their feet on the ground.” Mary Jane Cuddihy caught the bridal bouquet. If it was not the wedding of the century, it was certainly the last of the great weddings in America before World War II.
Only one slightly adverse public comment was made. It came from the Old Guard’s Mr. Barclay Beekman, who said, a bit loftily, “The Murrays and McDonnells hadn’t made the grade fifteen years ago. Their social aspirations were resented by the snooty. But they’re kindly people who don’t snub climbers.”
Uncle Tom Murray was at the Ford wedding, of course. But it was a different story, later that year, when his niece, Rosamund, was married to Mr. Byers, also a Yale man and a member of the crew. This was a mixed marriage, without a conversion on Mr. Byers’s part, and Uncle Tom rather pointedly stayed away, even though every effort had been made to
make the ceremony appear as Catholic as possible. It was held in the Murrays’ East Side town house, one room of which had been converted into an improvised chapel, complete with stained-glass windows and other ecclesiastical trappings imported from the bride’s maternal grandfather’s house—”Steel King” James Farrell. For similar reasons, Uncle Tom had removed himself from the marriage ceremony of his own sister, Marie, when she married Mr. Elgood M. Lufkin after her first husband, John Vincent McDonnell—a brother of James Francis—had died. Uncle Tom announced that he considered the Lufkins “mysterious”—as well as Protestant. The Church might condone mixed marriages, but he did not. Nineteen-forty was to be a big year for family weddings. In November, Catherine McDonnell married Peter Sullivan, and in December her cousin Mary Jane Cuddihy married James Butler MacGuire—both girls to proper Catholics, and both in fashionable New York churches, the first at St. Ignatius Loyola and the second at St. Vincent Ferrer. But after the Ford wedding, everything seemed an anticlimax, and these weddings received only routine society-page coverage.
“Scandal” might never have touched the Murray or McDonnell families at the time of the Ford wedding, but it was certainly to come, and it involved, of all people, Uncle Tom’s son Frank. Young Frank Murray had been dispatched, by his father, to Los Angeles to “get something started” on the West Coast for Murray Manufacturing. Frank was a handsome lad and, in Hollywood, he became involved with a motion picture actress named Eva Bartok. What happened next provided the press with a spicy, if somewhat confused, account. At 11 P.M. one April night, according to young Frank Murray, Eva Bartok and her ex-husband, a movie producer named Alexander Paal, barged into Murray’s Hollywood apartment and tried to bully Frank Murray into marrying Eva, a Hungarian national, so that she could remain in the United States. The immigration authorities agreed that Miss Bartok was having certain “problems,” which marriage to an American might solve, and that her visa needed extending. Frank Murray claimed that in order to force him to the altar Paal knocked him down three or four times and chased him around the house with a poker. The police were called when Frank Murray ran to a neighbor’s house crying, “There’s a crazy Hungarian who’s trying to kill me!” Murray charged Paal and Miss Bartok with extortion. In her countercharge, Eva Bartok claimed that Murray was trying to “ruin my career”—she had made one film, called Ten Thousand Bedrooms—and that she had gone to Frank Murray’s house to tell him that she was through with him, and that he had invited her in. As for extortion, Miss Bartok said, “Ha! I make five million dollars for a picture and he makes a hundred and fifty a week!” Mr. Paal claimed that he had seen Frank Murray knock Miss Bartok down and that, in her defense, he knocked Murray down. “He went right down—he’s such a baby,” said Paal. Two days later, charges were dropped, but at the time of the publicity Uncle Tom could only shake his head in bewilderment and say, again and again, “Not our Frank … not our Frank!”
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