The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  I walked from the Bennetts’ den through the small bathroom, a door on either side, and into Myrtle and Jack’s bedroom. In my mind I saw Jack slamming the bathroom door shut and running past the bed. I imagined his racing heartbeat, and Myrtle’s fury. The living room where Jack died was smaller than I had realized. The upstairs neighbor who escorted me here, curious about the long-ago killing, asked, “Where did the guy die?” I sized up his position, and replied, “You’re standing on Jack Bennett right now.”

  Instinctively, he took a step backward.

  II

  With local historians Worley and Ford, I walked past the decrepit structure at 1908 Main Street in downtown Kansas City, and looked up at Boss Pendergast’s second-story window, listening for the distant echoes of a vanquished political machine. We returned later to the Country Club District, lovely still with its upscale shopping plazas, bubbling fountains, and tree-lined streets. We passed Jim Reed’s sprawling house on Cherry Street, owned by his descendants until recently. Behind, I saw Nell and Paul Donnelly’s house, transformed into the Toy and Miniature Museum.

  Jim Reed’s political isolation was intensifying in 1931, his personal life increasingly complicated. Politically he was seen as old and obstreperous, with too many enemies. Though no longer a senator, and a pariah to the national Democratic Party, he determined to make one more run for the White House in 1932, against Franklin Roosevelt. At home, he waited for his elderly wife Lura to die, while Nell and his infant son lived next door in another man’s house. Reed immersed himself in a lucrative law practice and in his private trysts with Nell, who was anxious to become his second wife.

  During a visit to Kansas City in May 2006, a headline in The Kansas City Star’s Sunday magazine caught my eye: “The Secrets of Nelly Don: KC Once Whispered About the Private Life of This Dressmaker.” The story told of a new ninety-minute documentary about Nell’s life that disclosed publicly for the first time her extramarital romance with Senator James A. Reed and the birth of their son in September 1931—when both were married to others. The documentary filmmaker was Terence O’Malley, Nell’s great-grandnephew. Nell’s affair with the senator was only a small part of O’Malley’s otherwise loving documentary. Even so, not all Reed family members were happy about O’Malley’s decision to tell Nell’s secret. I saw the documentary and interviewed the affable O’Malley and also two of the senator’s grandsons, Peter Reed and James A. Reed II.

  They told me about a harrowing family story passed down to them. In December 1931, they said, Nell was kidnapped, and it became a national sensation. Word reached Reed in federal court in Jefferson City, Missouri, where he was prosecuting a million-dollar damage suit. He sped 160 miles to Nell and Paul Donnelly’s house. There, he learned that kidnappers had used their car to block the Donnelly driveway. When chauffeur George Blair pulled up in the Donnellys’ 1928 Lincoln convertible sedan, his millionaire employer in the backseat, Blair sounded his horn. While one kidnapper rushed to the car, jabbed a gun into Blair’s ribs, and took the wheel, others stormed the backseat, where Nell screamed and fought gamely, her lip bloodied as they put a muslin sack over her head. The kidnappers drove Nell and Blair to a remote farmhouse in Kansas where, by candlelight, they dictated a ransom note. Nell wrote to her husband, Paul, telling him to get $75,000 in unmarked bills or her kidnappers would blind her and kill Blair. She wrote a second such note to her company’s attorney, James Taylor, Reed’s law partner, knowing with certainty that word would reach the senator. Reed paced in the Donnelly living room, gnawing his cigar. He told the gathered newspapermen, “I will say this, if a single hair of her head is harmed, I and Mr. Donnelly will spend the rest of our lives running the culprits to earth and seeing that they are given the full extent of the law, which in this state is hanging.”

  Paul Donnelly stood by Reed’s side, emasculated but putting up a good front. He knew that Nell no longer loved him, fed up with his serial philandering, drinking, and idle threats to commit suicide if she became pregnant. Reed had masterminded a fiction for public consumption that Nell had traveled to Europe to adopt the infant named David Donnelly. That was a ruse. She returned from Europe and gave birth to the senator’s son in Chicago. Paul had agreed to keep quiet about the boy’s paternity. Their reputations were at stake, along with the well-being of the garment company.

  Reed knew the levers of power in Kansas City. He phoned Johnny Lazia, the genial, cologne-dipped chieftain of gangster corruption in Kansas City. Lazia had served time in a state penitentiary at the age of eighteen for an armed robbery conviction, and later returned to Kansas City, where he ascended to political power at the North Side Democratic Club. Pendergast could not ignore Lazia, so he co-opted him. While Lazia delivered votes on Election Day, the Boss used his police control to help protect Lazia’s vice and gambling operations in town. Lazia told Reed he had no idea who had kidnapped Nell, though certainly they were outsiders. He said no locals would dare kidnap a woman as prominent and politically connected as Mrs. Donnelly. Reed presented Lazia an ultimatum: find Mrs. Donnelly within twenty-four hours or Reed would purchase a half hour of time on national radio and expose Lazia’s corruption.

  An extraordinary hunt for Nell was carried out by Boss Pendergast’s underlings, both lawless and lawful. Two dozen carloads of Lazia’s men and at least that many police automobiles crisscrossed the city, working both the Misssouri and Kansas sides of town. Lazia’s men found Nell and her chauffeur walking near an all-night roadside diner. Feeling pressure, their fearful captors had released them after thirty-four hours, and fled. Lazia allowed Police Chief Lewis Siegfried to get the credit. Siegfried drove Nell and Blair home.

  The next summer Reed’s dream of the presidency died in the bright lights of Chicago Stadium. A tidal wave of adoration crashed down on Franklin Roosevelt at the 1932 Democratic National Convention. FDR was former assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson administration, and his camp was populated by more than a few former Wilson men. Nominated as an “Apostle of Americanism,” Reed sat in the Missouri section, and Nell was there, too. Days earlier she had engaged in a tense exchange with a St. Louis woman who wanted to put Missouri’s standard with Roosevelt. “You go and sit down and think it over,” Nell said. The woman replied, “You go and sit down and think it over yourself.” Nell stood firm: “Well, this standard is not going to be moved. It would be accepted as a slight to Senator Reed.” Shortly thereafter, though, Missouri, and its standard, went to Roosevelt. Amid thunderous cheers, a voice was heard, the voice that would soothe Americans in radio Fireside Chats for the next dozen years. His jaw set, a cigar clenched in his teeth, the defeated Reed perspired and blinked up at the stadium lights. There he might have seen an apparition of Woodrow Wilson smiling.

  That October, Lura Reed died at eighty-eight. Her husband of more than four decades was at her bedside, and The Kansas City Star reported the senator “crushed by the sudden loss of the wife to whom his devotion had been proverbial.” FDR sent a telegram: “Heartfelt sympathy from your old friend and Mrs. Roosevelt goes out to you in your great loss. I wish there was something I could do to be of service.”

  Thirty-four days later Nell filed for divorce, citing her husband’s “acts of cruelty and neglect.” She purchased Paul’s half interest in the Donnelly Garment Company for nearly $1 million. She also took custody of David.

  No matter their discretion, rumors about the senator and Nell had spread, even into the most widely read syndicated newspaper column in America, Walter Winchell’s. On November 27, 1932, six weeks after Lura Reed’s death, and two weeks after Nell filed for divorce, Winchell mused in his column of one-liners, Broadway news, and chatter about otherwise secretive romance: “Wonder if there is anything to the buzz that Mrs. Donnelly of Kansas City, who was kidnapped last year, and Ex-Senator Jim Reed may merge?…” At the University of Missouri-Kansas City archives, reading through the James A. Reed Papers, I found a letter Reed fired off to Winchell: “You may think wha
t you said was witty, but I think that a man who will couple another’s name with a woman when the ashes of that man’s wife are scarcely cold, is about the lowest order of animal life, and I shall be glad to tell this to your face if ever I meet you.” A year later, in December 1933, at Nell’s fashionable apartment at The Walnuts, she and the senator married in front of twenty guests who had no idea a wedding ceremony was about to occur. By New Year’s Day 1934, the senator, Nell and two-year-old David were living together on Cherry Street. Nell, fearful of another kidnapping, placed metal bars on the second-story windows. Their marriage must have haunted Paul Donnelly, now in Hartford, Connecticut, perhaps as much as his new young wife’s pregnancy, because he entered The Hartford Retreat, a hospital for nervous disorders. There, in September 1934, in a manic depressive state, he hanged himself.

  Jim Reed legally adopted his own son, and David Q. Donnelly became David Q. Reed. In the process, the boy earned the unusual distinction of having been “adopted” by both of his biological parents. Cocktail-hour whispers passed through the Kansas City Star crowd, and the Kansas City Club. On Independence Day 1935, U.S. senator Harry Truman, a risen star in the Pendergast machine, wrote to his wife, Bess, from Washington to say he was preparing speeches on farming, foreign trade, the bank bill, Social Security, and bureaucratic government. Truman must have expected criticism from Reed, always a voluble critic of Roosevelt. “If Mr. Reed gets smart,” Truman wrote to Bess, “I’m thinking of telling him what I know about him.” The secret Truman knew, one can only guess.

  Reed turned from Tom Pendergast even before the Boss was brought down on income tax evasion charges in 1939 by Roosevelt’s prosecutors and sentenced to fifteen months at Leavenworth. Reed lived long enough to see what once seemed impossible: Jackson County’s Harry S. Truman nominated as vice president. A party loyalist, Truman never forgave Reed for his assault on Wilson and the League of Nations. “I am happy you find my logic infallible,” Truman had written Reed in 1937 about the proposed reorganization of the Supreme Court. “Logic which takes into consideration loyalty to party and friends is rather unusual in a United States Senator from Missouri.” In 1942, in a crowded elevator at the Kansas City Club, a friend whispered to Truman, “There’s Reed. Don’t you want to speak to him?” Truman later reported in a letter to Bess that he had answered his friend by saying of Reed that “the old so-and-so didn’t mean a thing to me, and unless I had to I didn’t care to notice him.” Stepping from the elevator, Reed said, “Why, hello, Harry! I didn’t see you.” Truman replied, “Hello, Senator, it was always hard for you to see me.”

  The stories about the extramarital romance between the senator and Nell, and the birth of their son, went untold for decades in the Reed family. The silence created problems. In the mid-1970s, a family friend told Peter Reed, grandson of Nell and the senator, that his father David had been adopted by Nell in Europe. Peter Reed had never heard that. He needed to know the truth. He put to good use his education (Andover and Cambridge University, with a master’s degree in art history) and his journalistic skills as a critic of art and design. He read old newspapers and magazines, and interviewed members of both sides of his family, the Reeds and the Warricks. He told me he learned about the extramarital affair between the senator and Nell, and much more. When he had gathered his stories, he approached Nell, then in her middle eighties.

  Grandmother and grandson shared a close relationship. They talked plainly, honestly, though Peter knew that, in her formidable way, Nell would reveal only as much as she chose. (Peter learned that his father, a Kansas City lawyer for thirty-nine years and a one-term Republican legislator, had promised Nell not to disclose the story of his birth during Nell’s lifetime, a promise he kept until his own death in 1999.) Nell had told Peter about the Bennett trial. She said that Jim Reed told her that Myrtle and Jack had had too much to drink on the night of September 29, 1929—a fact that never made it into the trial, or the newspapers. “They were drunk as skunks,” Peter Reed told me. A great admirer of his grandfather, Peter said, “He was Sir Galahad coming to rescue Myrtle Bennett, who wasn’t going to get a fair trial.”

  Peter and Nell once shared a pedal boat on a lake at the property the senator purchased during the 1930s, Reed Ranch in northern Michigan, where he and Nell had hunted and sat by a great log fire on cool summer and autumn nights. “Grandmother, I need to talk to you about something that is a bit personal,” Peter said that day. “People have been trying to tell me that you and I are not related. People are saying that Dad is adopted.” For two hours, they talked about life. Nell confided her story, the way it happened. As Peter slowly pedaled in the fading sun of late summer, he was transported to the early 1930s. He learned about Paul Donnelly and his threats to kill himself if Nell became pregnant. He heard of the senator’s first meeting with Nell in his office on the nineteenth floor of the Telephone Building. From Nell herself, the grandson heard how the senator had met Paul Donnelly, man to man, to discuss the pregnancy that sent Nell to Europe.

  Peter told Nell he understood why she and the senator had kept the birth quiet. “But I don’t understand,” he said, “why later in life you didn’t just start to whisper into a few ears what the real story was so that the people who really counted in the community understood that he was really your son.” Peter saw his grandmother look at him “as if I was a great deal more stupid than she had ever imagined.” Nell Donnelly Reed would die in 1991 at the age of 102 after 47 years as James A. Reed’s widow. On the pedal boat, she only shrugged and answered, “We expected them to figure it out.”

  The eighty-two-year-old senator died on September 8, 1944, at Reed Ranch, two days before his son’s thirteenth birthday. He had fished in a rainstorm at six o’clock in the morning, against Nell’s better judgment, and caught pneumonia. Nell later said, “There were some things you could tell him and some things you couldn’t.”

  SIXTEEN

  New York

  I

  “Mrs. Bennett was so good-lookin’.” This narration, delivered in a sunny Irish brogue, came from Michael O’Connell, a ruddy-faced native of County Limerick, Ireland, and for fifty-seven years a doorman at The Carlyle. So good-looking was Myrtle Bennett, O’Connell told me, he couldn’t resist flirting with her, even though she was thirty-seven years older than he. “I kidded her once and said, ‘Mrs. Bennett, how come a beautiful lady like you isn’t married? You should be married and have a husband.’ She smiled at me and said, ‘I’m doing just fine,’ and she made a big joke of it.”

  Following Bill Armshaw’s lead, I had phoned The Carlyle to ask about its long-ago employee Myrtle Bennett. A hotel spokeswoman told me she was not permitted to comment on any current or former employee, but amiably suggested I might speak with a soon-to-retire doorman who had served at the elegant hotel for more than a half-century. Perhaps, she said, Michael O’Connell might have known my Myrtle Bennett.

  So I took a taxi through New York’s Upper East Side to The Carlyle at Seventy-sixth Street and Madison Avenue, a high-rent district. Built in 1930, and named for the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, the storied hotel offers glamorous views of nearby Central Park. Its neighbors include the Whitney and Metropolitan museums. I asked at the front desk for O’Connell, and was told to wait for him in the polished marble lobby. Just then, an older, still spry doorman, in uniform, returned from a walk in the park, holding a schnauzer on a leash. It was O’Connell, who introduced himself, handed off the schnauzer to another doorman, and escorted me to a comfortable couch near the entry to the hotel restaurant.

  “Yes, Mrs. Bennett—we all called her that, even Mr. Robert Huyot, who hired her. She was a very elegant person,” O’Connell said. He arrived from Ireland in 1949, just seventeen years old, and started work in the hotel’s package room. Over time O’Connell became The Carlyle’s griot, his memory filled with the history of the hotel, and its people. He was given a PT-109 pin by Senator John Kennedy and White House cufflinks by Ronald and Nancy Reaga
n. O’Connell reveres The Carlyle, and devoted his working life to it.

  Myrtle Bennett worked as executive head of housekeeping at The Carlyle after World War II, and throughout the 1950s. Classified advertisements in The New York Times seeking chambermaids and linen room attendants at the hotel appeared during these years, touting “pleasant working conditions,” and listing the contact as “Mrs. Bennett.”

  O’Connell recalled the luminaries during Mrs. Bennett’s tenure, some hotel guests, others apartment owners, a Who’s Who of American celebrity: David O. Selznick, Myrna Loy, Judy Garland, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, Senator John Kennedy (and later his brother Robert), Henry Ford II, Harry Truman and family. O’Connell remembered the president’s daughter, Margaret Truman, later a novelist, and her husband, Clifton Daniel, of The New York Times, living in 29A. Former president Truman, during one visit, asked O’Connell about the crowd lurking outside the lobby. “They’re photographers, Mr. President,” O’Connell replied. Truman smiled and said, “Well, I’ll give them a hell of a walk,” and, like a Pied Piper, led them down Park Avenue.

  O’Connell said Myrtle took care of The Carlyle clientele’s needs while living rent-free in 3B, a third-floor apartment. From O’Connell, I learned that Myrtle did play bridge after Kansas City. She liked cards, he remembered, and often played bridge with friends in her apartment. He said she was as classy as The Carlyle’s guests, dressed and coiffed immaculately, always patient with the staff. He once saw her leaving for dinner with film stars Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers. He also saw her lunch with Broadway star Nanette Fabray. He watched her help interior designer Dorothy Draper put up chandeliers in the lobby and saw her chat with Henry Ford II, whose thanks for her work included a kiss on the cheek. The girl from Tillar, Arkansas, had made it on her own as a hotel administrator in the biggest city of all, awash in elegance and surrounded by politicians, movie stars, and millionaires. She poured her life into her work. And she held her secret, telling no one—a form of denial, but also a show of power. She flourished.