The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Blanche—the second-youngest child, born in 1874—spent her earliest years in Westerly, Rhode Island. It was there, according to later accounts, that she lost an eye when an unruly playmate threw a rock at her head. She was fitted with a glass eye and remained so sensitive about it that, for the rest of her life, she refused to be photographed except in profile—and only then at an angle that hid her left eye from the camera.2

  Toward the end of her long life, Blanche—who would survive the other principals in the Molineux affair by many years—finally set down her memoirs. It is a work written in the sentimentalized style of the Victorian romances of her youth. (“In looking back, I see a girl—a young woman—who is now at a great distance…. She was in love with life—the life which her imagination painted in glowing colors. Naive, credulous, and filled with illusions, she did not recognize nor understand its verities until the enchanting rose color had turned to gray.”) In her recollections of her childhood, she glosses over some of the most painful episodes. Beyond lamenting her father’s lack of “sagacity in relation to money matters,” for example, she does not dwell on the hardships that his family was made to endure as his behavior grew increasingly erratic.3

  She was still a young girl when he dragged them from New England to the Midwest on another hopeless business venture. They were living in Minneapolis when Blanche experienced the “first stirrings” of the ambition that would dominate her life for many years to come. Her neighbors were a family named Beatty, whose youngest daughter, Louise, was Blanche’s best friend. One day, while the two girls played jacks on the front stoop of the Beatty home, Blanche heard Louise’s older sister practicing her singing lessons inside.

  “It was then that an intense desire took possession of my childish fancy, some day to become a singer,” Blanche would record in her memoirs.4 The dream was not entirely unrealistic. Blanche was blessed with a lovely voice. Her little friend Louise—under her married name, Louise Homer—would herself grow up to be one of the great operatic contraltos of the early twentieth century.

  Following his family’s sojourn in the Midwest, the footloose James moved them to the South, where they lived for a time in Louisville, Kentucky. Then it was on to a rambling old house in North Carolina. Blanche would always remember the lush, tangled flower garden, “growing and blooming in riotous disorder, with a sun dial and purple and white wisteria climbing over an old porch and wall.”5 She formed a close friendship with the little girl down the road, the daughter of the former governor of the state, who lived in an “old and stately mansion” that had been used as a makeshift hospital in the waning days of the Civil War. Once, Blanche’s little friend lifted a rug and showed her the bloodstains of the dying Confederate soldiers, still visible on the oaken floors.

  Their stay in North Carolina lasted only six months. When summer came, James took them to a cottage on Long Island Sound, so remote from the nearest village that the only noises to be heard were “the night song of the inarticulate creatures of grass and trees, the bark of a dog, or the call of a bird to its mate.”

  By then, only Blanche and her younger sister, Lois, were still at home. Their brothers—Frank, John, and James, Jr.—were married and living in different parts of the country. The oldest of the three Chesebrough sisters, Izcennia (“Isia,” as Blanche always called her), had also recently wed. And she had done quite well for herself, landing as a husband Waldo Harrison Stearns, scion of a wealthy lumber family.

  Toward the end of Blanche’s summer stay on rural Long Island, Izcennia came for a visit. A “proud and ambitious” woman (according to Blanche), Isia had already made up her mind to take her little sister under her wing. She would see to it that Blanche developed her talents, met the right people, and—most important—found a rich husband. Blanche was to come live with her in Boston, where Isia and Waldo would sponsor her musical studies.

  In short order, Blanche was comfortably ensconced in Isia’s lavish Longwood home, enjoying “an atmosphere of affluence which developed in me a rather lofty idea of living.”6 With Isia (or rather, Waldo) footing the bills, Blanche took private vocal lessons from the eminent George L. Osgood, director of the Emmanuel Church choir, the Boylston Club, and the Singers’ Society of Boston; learned to read music from a young piano instructor; studied French and Latin diction; and attended concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, along with other musical events. By the time the following spring came around, after months of practicing scales and doing endless breathing exercises, she was finally prepared to essay her first aria for the demanding Mr. Osgood—Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice.” She would remember the thrill of that moment for the rest of her life.

  She would also remember—even more intensely—another experience that happened to her a short time later. It was the last week in June, “the day before school closed for the summer.” Even as an old woman, the moment would remain vivid in her mind:

  On the way home that afternoon, I cut across a little park where there were spots of dim shadowy shelter from the sun. A few benches were scattered here and there, and some ducks were floating around on a pool nearby. I was hot and tired and sat down on one of the benches to rest. I laid my books down beside me, took off my hat and fanned myself.

  Across from me in the shadow of the trees were a boy and girl. They were both much older than I. I remember them as being quite grown and I was envious of their added years. They must know so much more about things than I did!

  At first, I only glanced in their direction. Then I noticed they gave up their seats on the bench, and the boy pulled the girl down beside him on the cool shaded grass. They sat there for a few moments. Suddenly, the boy put his arms about the girl and pulled her into his embrace and down beside him on the ground. I watched—fascinated. He leaned over and kissed her. He drew her face and held it with both hands, close to his own. They lay there oblivious to everything, clasped in each others’ arms.

  His gesture—when he drew her toward him and in a sort of masterful way held her—did something to me. My breath came in little gasps. Something stirred within me that made me feel first hot and then cold. I shivered and a little chill ran up and down and all over me.7

  Blanche desperately “wanted to go home and tell Mother about having watched that boy making love to that girl.” She wanted “to ask her why I felt so funny; why it affected me so.” But she knew that she couldn’t. Her mother—whose “outlook on life reflected the Puritan attitudes of her time”—would have been “horrified.” Beyond cautioning her daughters that they must be “ever on their guard” against the coarse familiarities of men, Mrs. Chesebrough had never spoken a word about sex.

  And so Blanche was left in confusion. She had no way of defining the erotic sensations that had been awakened in her. She knew, however, that something had changed forever. On that summer day in Boston, shivering with pleasure at the sight of the young couple embracing on the grass, “my childhood days ended.”8

  8

  After staying with Isia for slightly more than a year, Blanche moved back in with her parents, who had taken a modest apartment in Boston. The cramped flat off Boylston Street—so small, Blanche later wrote, that “there was barely enough space for the piano and ourselves”1—took some getting used to after the luxury of her sister’s Longwood mansion. Boston, however, like every place else she had ever lived, would prove to be only a way station.

  Within months of his arrival, her father—bowing to what Blanche called his “irrepressible impulse to travel”—ordered his family to pack up their belongings yet again. This time they were going to New York City, where, so he assured them, he was absolutely certain to strike it rich with his latest invention. Though Isia offered to take Blanche back in and continue her musical studies, James wouldn’t hear of it. A few weeks later, Blanche and her parents, along with her little sister, Lois, were settled in a small apartment on East Twenty-third Street, near Gramercy Park.

  Despite the modesty of their living quarters, Blanche
was delighted to find herself in “that great center of metropolitan life.” In her memoirs, she describes, in a tone of breathless excitement, the thrill of those early days in New York City, as she wandered the surging streets, taking in the sights: “the splendid shops, the hotels, the restaurants and theatres.”

  Broadway offered a particularly dazzling spectacle with its endless procession of fashionable couples, the men with their “flawless top-coats, high-hats, and silver-headed walking sticks,” walking arm in arm with their female companions, who were likewise arrayed in the “very best hats, shoes and gloves.” Every block was a bazaar, lined with alluring shops—jewelers, florists, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners. “Pompous doormen in immense coats, shiny brass belts and buttons” posed in the doorways, while liveried coachmen in “tan boots, white tights, blue jackets, waited obsequiously for the mistresses of carriages who were shopping inside.”2

  At dusk, the electric “fire signs” of the “Great White Way” blazed to life. Hansom cabs drew up beneath the brilliant marquee lights, disgorging laughing, chattering patrons who streamed into the Olympia, the Casino, Daly’s, and a dozen other theaters to watch Miss Julia Marlowe in When Knighthood Was in Flower or Miss Ada Rehan in Sweet Nell of Old Drury or young Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines.

  And then there was Fifth Avenue, site of the city’s most extravagant homes: the “magnificent abodes,” as Blanche writes, “that gave the impression of royal palaces—the owners royal not because of birth but because of wealth!” Passing the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifty-second Street—a massive redbrick replica of a Renaissance chateau—Blanche wonders “what it must be like to possess such riches.” She sounds (very aptly, as it would happen) like a character out of a Theodore Dreiser novel: a real-life Sister Carrie, a young girl from the provinces with her nose pressed to the glass, hungering for the glamorous life and glittering possessions just beyond her reach.

  Blanche, of course, was hardly unique in her obsession with the social elite. It was an age when the doings of the city’s moneyed aristocracy were followed with feverish interest by the public at large—when newspapers lavished coverage on everything from Chauncey DePew’s departure for Palm Beach, to the gown worn by Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes at the Easter cotillion at Sherry’s, to the unforgivable lapse of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Gould’s English butler, Tibbs, who—having surreptitiously sampled his master’s wine—became tipsy at an “intimate dinner” for two dozen guests in honor of Senator and Mrs. John M. Thurston.3 A particularly extravagant event such as the Bradley Martin ball of 1897—attended by seven hundred elaborately costumed guests and featuring a fifty-piece orchestra, floral decorations composed of six thousand orchids and twice as many roses, and a three-hour champagne dinner served by liveried waiters in knee breeches and powdered wigs—could monopolize the front pages for days.4

  Most ordinary people, of course, could only view such excess with a mixture of tongue-clucking outrage and titillated envy. Blanche, however, had only to look at her older sister to see that, while the enchanted realm of the city’s “upperdom” was closed to all but the fashionable few, a life of wealth and privilege was certainly available to a young woman who knew how to land the right husband.

  Thanks to the generosity of her brother Frank, who was prospering as a businessman in Boston, Blanche was able to continue her singing lessons. She attended a studio near Union Square, where she joined a “little coterie of embryo artists”—among them Bessie Abott, who would become one of the leading sopranos of the day.5 Later, Blanche studied with Frank Damrosch, a prominent figure in the New York City musical scene, who served as chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera House and founded the Musical Arts Society, an a cappella organization composed of experienced soloists who held concerts at Carnegie Hall.

  Blanche displayed such talent that Damrosch invited her to join his group. A few weeks later, she was performing at Carnegie Hall in a gown of pale blue tulle, fashioned by her mother. Her future seemed limitless. “In that great whirling vortex of metropolitan life,” she recalls in her memoirs, “my ambition soared.”6 Before long, she was auditioning for Jean de Reszke, the great Polish tenor, and singing for the world-famous diva Madame Melba, who seconded De Reszke’s opinion that Blanche ought to study in Europe.7

  It was a heady time for Blanche. Escorted by her musician friend Victor Harris, she was part of the first-night audience to see De Reszke and Emma Eames perform Verdi’s Otello at the Metropolitan. She sang for the popular composer Robert Coverly at a private gathering and dined with Stanford White, the city’s leading architect, designer of the Washington Square Arch, the New York Herald Building, and the Century Club, among other landmarks.8 The meal—a typical Gilded Age blowout that began with oysters before proceeding to soup, sweetbreads, filet of beef, canvasback duck, celery salad, French peas, and string peas, with pistachio ice cream, fruit, and coffee to close—took place on the rooftop restaurant of Madison Square Garden, another building designed by White, who held forth during dinner with his usual bon vivant flair.

  Nine years later, White would be shot to death on that very site by the millionaire madman Harry Thaw, whose showgirl wife, Evelyn Nesbit, had been White’s onetime mistress. The killing of Stanford White in 1906 would become the city’s second wildly sensational murder case of the new century.

  The first, of course, was the one that Blanche herself would soon be embroiled in—a scandal that would consume her life and effectively put an end to her dreams of artistic glory.

  9

  Partly through the offices of her teacher, Frank Damrosch, Blanche became the contralto soloist at a church in Brooklyn Heights, whose choir included the wife of the famous American composer Harry Rowe Shelley. Her salary was ten dollars a week—a respectable sum for a part-time position at a time when the average yearly income for an American workingman was less than a thousand dollars.1

  By then, her family was in desperate need of her earnings. Her father’s improvident ways and successive failures had driven the little household perilously close to penury, and James was too proud to turn to his affluent offspring for help. As his material prospects grew grimmer by the day, he looked to religion for comfort, becoming increasingly caught up in a particularly zealous brand of evangelical Christianity.

  Finally, in 1894, just before Blanche’s twentieth birthday, James abandoned his worldly pursuits altogether. With his wife in tow, he returned to Rhode Island and consecrated himself entirely to church affairs, becoming, as newspapers later reported, “a constant attendant at revivals.” In April 1895, Harriet died after a brief illness. Six months later, James himself fell ill. He refused medical attention, putting his faith in the Lord. He died shortly thereafter, in mid-October.2

  By then, Blanche’s younger sister, Lois, was living in high style on West End Avenue and Seventy-second Street. Following a “whirlwind courtship,” she had married Howard Oakie, a member of a socially prominent family with a big estate on Long Island.3

  Alone and unwed, Blanche chose to remain in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, moving into a “diminutive” apartment at 51 East Twenty-third Street.4 Her belongings were few: a console holding a silver-framed portrait of her parents alongside a slender flower vase; stacks of books and music cluttering the floors; a few nice sketches and drypoints adorning the walls; a bed and dresser, couch and easy chair. And, of course, her beloved piano.

  Losing both parents within so short a time filled Blanche with a “terrible sense of desolation and sorrow.” She distracted herself with her choir work, her vocal studies (now with the celebrated operatic teacher Emilio Agramonte), and her friendships with fellow students and other struggling young artists. She earned extra money by singing for socialites at “private musical evenings.”

  On one of these occasions she so impressed a wealthy female philanthropist that, as Blanche later wrote, the woman declared her “intention to help me realize my consuming ambition to study in Europe.” Before this promise coul
d be fulfilled, however, the woman took a transatlantic trip on the French liner La Bourgogne, which collided mid-ocean with a merchant vessel and went down with more than seven hundred crew members and passengers, including Blanche’s would-be patroness.5

  Blanche was introduced to another potential patron through her wealthy new brother-in-law, Howard Oakie, whose family was on friendly terms with Gordon McKay, the millionaire industrialist who had earned his fortune in the shoemaking business. Hearing enthusiastic reports of Blanche’s singing abilities from Howard’s cousin, Corinne, the elderly McKay paid a visit to Blanche’s modest apartment one early spring night in 1897. There—after serving him tea in one of the Sévres cups she had inherited from her mother—Blanche so impressed him with her rendition of Manuel Ponce’s “Aimant la Rose” that he invited her to accompany Corinne on a visit to his Newport estate that summer.

  It turned out to be a magical vacation for Blanche: her first direct experience of “what the possession of unlimited wealth really meant.” Nearly fifty years later, she could still conjure up in her imagination every detail of that enchanted scene:

  It was early June and we sailed through the Sound on the steamer Puritan. Upon our arrival, the beauty of the place was revealed in all its allure. With a background of blue waters, there were undulating grounds of velvety green, masses of foliage, blossoming shrubs and a rose terrace sloping away in the direction of the sea. There were also stables and a carriage house with the inevitable victoria and landaulet and phaeton of that day.

  The greenhouses were a marvel to me, with their forced growth of flowers and fruit. Ripening in the warm sun, which filtered through the ceiling of glass, were grapes that dropped in great clusters from the vines overhead. Beauty was everywhere! Hedges of Japanese roses ran along the edges of a portion of the grounds. A profusion of wild roses was growing and blooming in natural loveliness—pink and coral coloring against a purple and cobalt sky.