The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  Blanche, in the meantime, had moved to a different apartment. Wishing to be closer to her younger sister Lois, she had taken rooms at a fashionable boardinghouse on West Seventy-second Street, owned by a landlady named Mary Bell. An enormous bouquet of roses, sent by the ever-thoughtful Roland, was waiting to welcome her to her new living quarters.

  It was only one of many gifts—baskets of fruits, boxes of sweets, the latest best-selling novels, such as Mr. Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware—that he would lavish on Blanche that fall, as he set about wooing her with the same singleness of purpose he applied to all his pursuits, from his amateur athletics to his persecution of Harry Cornish.

  As promised, he provided Blanche with a surfeit of social activities. On a typical Saturday evening, they might take in a Broadway show or a comic operetta—Marie Dressler doing her star turn as Flo Honeydew in The Lady Slavey at the Casino Theater or Lillian Russell performing her piping high Cs in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience at the Bijou.

  Even more glorious were those nights when they attended the Metropolitan to hear the celebrated De Reszke perform the title role of Le Cid, or the great dramatic soprano Lillian Nordica sing Siegfried. Eyes fixed raptly on the stage, heart thrilling to the strains of Wagner or Verdi or Bizet, Blanche would, at certain moments, feel so overcome with emotion that she could not keep from reaching out and seizing Roland’s hand. During intermission, they would stroll among the glittering crowd and excitedly discuss the performance. Their “mutual love of this enchanting art,” writes Blanche in her memoir, “established a sympathetic bond between Roland and myself.”3

  Afterward, they would dine at the Waldorf or Delmonico’s or Louis Martin’s smart new establishment on Twenty-sixth Street, outfitted like a Parisian café with marble-topped tables and cushioned banquettes. Or perhaps Roland would take her to Louis Bustanoby’s Café des Beaux Arts on Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street, where a gypsy violinist would greet them at the door and serenade them with a polonaise as the headwaiter escorted them to their table.4

  When they weren’t together, they were in constant communication by letter, telegram, and the telephone in Mrs. Bell’s parlor. As the winter approached, Roland’s gifts became more expensive: an opal broach and a diamond butterfly pin, both from Tiffany’s, where he had an account.

  Then came the costliest—and most serious—gift of all.

  It was a diamond ring, also from Tiffany’s, inscribed with the Hebrew word mizpah, typically translated as “watchtower” or “lookout.” Implicit in its meaning is the prayer: “May God watch over you when we are apart.”

  For Roland, the ring carried a solemn significance. By that time, he had not only resolved to marry Blanche but had made his intentions known to her.

  Blanche, however, felt deeply divided about her suitor. She was happy to accept the diamond mizpah ring as a token of his friendship. But whenever the subject of marriage came up, she “would not be serious about it; always parried it; always laughingly told him I did not think I cared deeply enough for him.”5 Her teasing demurrals were partly a game, a way of playing hard-to-get. But she also had serious doubts about Roland.

  With his physical beauty, charm, and money, he was certainly a good catch. And then there was their shared love of the opera.

  At the same time, however, he seemed strangely deficient in that “masculine element” so prized by Blanche. She had certainly given him every opportunity to display it. Indeed, by November 1897, Roland had taken to spending so much time in Blanche’s room—entire nights included—that Mrs. Bell’s chambermaid, Rachel Greene, assumed the two were already husband and wife.6

  And yet, despite Blanche’s obvious willingness, their relationship remained unconsummated. Recalling that long-ago summer day in Boston, when she’d first been aroused by the sight of the teenaged boy pulling his girlfriend to the ground, she longed for a man who would take her in the same “masterful way.” “When a woman senses an elusive intimation of mastery in a man, it is irresistible,” she would declare in her memoirs. “There is a kind of brutality which is part of a great tenderness in the lovemaking of some men, and it is absolutely overwhelming.”7

  It was that “brute masculine force” that she dreamed of surrendering to. And Roland, she had come to conclude, “possessed none of it.”8

  13

  Residing down the hall from Roland on the second floor of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club was a thirty-two-year-old bon vivant named Henry Crossman Barnet. Brown-haired, blue-eyed, with a small, neatly trimmed mustache and a decided paunch, he had joined the club, as one commentator put it, “with a pleasant hope of reducing his weight.”1 With his robust appetites and cheerful aversion to exercise, however, he had quickly abandoned that goal. Still, though he made little use of its impressive athletic facilities, the social life of the club perfectly suited his temperament. A thoroughly gregarious creature, he was well-liked by men and possessed an easy charm that made him—despite his fleshy cheeks and pudgy frame—highly attractive to women.

  “Barney,” as he was known around the club, had formed a warm friendship with Roland, based partly on their shared dislike of Harry Cornish. To be sure, Barnet wasn’t weirdly fixated on the swaggering athletic director, the way Roland was. Still, he had his complaints. Cornish, he felt, was doing a poor job of managing the club facilities and was especially lax about supervising the janitorial staff. The pool area was always a mess after swim meets, and the hallway floors weren’t kept clean enough—a particular problem for Barnet, who liked to walk barefoot between his apartment and the bathroom.2

  One evening in early November 1897, Roland took Blanche to the Metropolitan Opera to hear the Banda Rossa, a highly popular touring group that had only recently recorded their sprightly rendition of “Funiculi Funicula” for Mr. Edison’s latest technological marvel, the phonograph.3 During intermission, Roland spotted Barnet in the foyer, called him over, and introduced him to Blanche.

  “From this encounter,” Blanche would later write with atypical understatement, “a friendship developed that came to have great significance.”4

  Following the concert, the three of them proceeded to Delmonico’s, where they were joined by the popular playwright Clyde Fitch, whose presence, as Blanche recalled, “gave the evening an additional bit of that glamor and brilliancy that so appealed to me.” As the supper progressed, she found herself drawn to Barnet. Though he possessed none of Roland’s cultivated wit, there was something about him—a “forcible, virile” quality—strangely absent from the infinitely more athletic Molineux.5

  The following night, Barnet dined with the two of them again, this time at the club. By the time the coffee and liqueur were served, “a delightful camaraderie,” in Blanche’s words, had developed among them.

  The subject of the forthcoming Club Carnival arose, and Roland—who was to perform on the horizontal bars as part of the festivities—asked Barney if he would mind serving as Blanche’s escort until the show was concluded. Barnet was only too happy to oblige.6

  Blanche, too, was secretly pleased. From her very “first meeting with Henry Barnet”—as she confessed many years later—she “was conscious that he possessed a little more than the average qualifications for holding one’s interest. I sensed a hidden strength and a brute force in him, and it was as natural as breathing that I should capitulate to that!”7

  On the night of the carnival, after thrilling to Roland’s typically dazzling routine, the three of them repaired to his room to share a bottle of champagne. Though Blanche, who had never seen Roland perform before, gushed over his skill, her thoughts were really on Barnet. Indeed, by that time—less than a week after their first encounter—she was already entertaining highly charged fantasies about him. “Mentally, I had already yielded to him, and I was secretly thrilled at the thought of surrender.”8

  It didn’t take long for Roland to sense the growing attraction between Blanche and Barnet, and he was quick to stake his claim. One evening shortly a
fter the carnival, while the three of them dined at the club, Barney, in his jocular way, began telling Mollie how much he envied him.

  “Congratulations, old man,” he exclaimed, clapping him on the shoulder. “What a lucky fellow you are.”

  “Why, what does that mean?” said Blanche, feeling a sudden rush of irritation. “Roland and I are not going to be married.”

  “Oh, yes, we are,” Roland coolly replied.

  “But we are not even engaged!” said Blanche, laughing to soften her petulant tone.

  “True, but we are going to be,” said Roland, casting a pointed look first at Blanche, then at Barnet.

  Blanche instantly understood what was going on. Roland had been observing her “growing infatuation for Barnet.” He was “determined to leave no one in doubt concerning his feelings for me, and he would discourage any interest that might develop elsewhere.”9

  But Blanche was not about to be pressured into marriage. She was not in love with Roland. Nor, for that matter, with his friend. But she was determined to act on the powerful physical attraction she felt for Barnet.

  She knew, of course, that she was playing with fire. But the element of danger only made the situation more “exciting and alluring.” And why shouldn’t she fling herself into an affair with the virile Barnet? After all, she told herself, “I was free, free as air and owed no allegiance to anyone.”10

  She made that position unmistakably clear on Thanksgiving Day, when Roland got down on one knee and formally proposed to her.

  Blanche—trying to take the sting out of the rejection by assuring him that she might feel otherwise in the future—turned him down.

  14

  The holiday season of 1897 was an unhappy time for Roland Molineux. First came Blanche’s rejection of his marriage proposal on Thanksgiving Day. Then, just before Christmas, his protracted feud with Harry Cornish reached a sudden and—from Roland’s point of view—exceptionally bitter climax.

  The unwitting catalyst was a gentleman named Bartow Sumter Weeks. The son of a Civil War colonel, Weeks had gotten his law degree from Columbia University before going to work in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. In the fall of 1897, he had just entered into private practice with another former assistant DA, George Gordon Battle. Eventually, Weeks would become a New York State Supreme Court justice.

  Besides the law, amateur athletics was the great passion of Weeks’s life. A long-standing member of the New York Athletic Club, he had served as two-term president, chairman of the Athletic Committee, member of the Board of Governors, and captain of the club’s athletic team.

  He was also a close family friend of the Molineuxs and had known Roland for many years.

  In October 1897, the pugnacious Harry Cornish had become embroiled in a dispute with Weeks, accusing him in print of an ethical violation. According to Cornish—who published his charge in Harper’s Weekly—Weeks, in his eagerness to win an international meet, had paid a track star named Bernie Wefers, holder of the world record in the 100-yard dash, to switch membership from the Knickerbocker Athletic Club to the NYAC. Cornish was incensed over this payoff, a flagrant breach (so he argued) of the amateur code.

  Cornish was after Weeks, not Bernie Wefers, whom he considered a friend. So when the Amateur Athletic Union suspended Wefers from competition until a hearing could be held, Cornish backpedaled and refused to testify. The hearing was canceled, Wefers was reinstated, Weeks was exonerated, and Cornish himself ended up receiving an official reprimand for bringing “false and malicious charges.”

  Afterward Cornish—seeking to mend fences with Bernie Wefers—sent him a letter on official KAC stationery. Though he apologized for the trouble he had caused the track star, he remained unrepentant in regard to Weeks. “I have got it in for Weeks,” he wrote, “for I consider him to be as far beneath me as one man can be with another. He has been guilty of a dirty piece of business.”1

  Somehow, this letter ended up in Weeks’s possession. And Weeks lost no time in showing it to Roland Molineux.

  Whether Weeks had any sense of Roland’s obsessive hatred of Cornish is unclear. In any case, the “Wefers letter” (as it came to be known) drove Roland to new heights of outrage.

  Appearing before the Board of Governors, he demanded that Cornish be fired at once. After taking the matter under advisement, the board members—who were, on the whole, quite pleased with Cornish’s performance as athletic director—opted for little more than a slap on the wrist. The Wefers letter, they concluded, was Cornish’s private affair. He had every right to express his opinion of Weeks in however churlish a manner he wished—though not with the imprimatur of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Henceforth, he would be deprived of the use of club stationery for his personal correspondence.

  As a gesture befitting the gentlemanly code of clubdom, the board also voted to throw a dinner for Weeks, at which they offered their formal apologies and expressed their admiration for the leadership of the NYAC. Weeks was placated, and the whole unfortunate incident appeared to be settled.2

  Roland, however, would not let the matter rest. Not long after the conciliatory dinner, he issued an ultimatum to the board: either Cornish must go or he himself would quit the club. On the evening of December 20, 1897, the board met again. After deliberating for half an hour, they let Roland know that, while they valued his membership and sincerely hoped that he would reconsider his position, they had voted to retain Cornish. With a little bow, Roland promptly resigned.

  Back in his room, he composed a letter to the club secretary, John Adams:

  My Dear Adams,

  Although I have resigned from the K.A.C., do not for one moment suppose that I wish it other than success. I entertain the highest personal regard for its officers, but I have been a disturbing element in its counsels because, with the very best intentions, I have opposed what I am confident is a wrong policy, that of allowing an employee to use the club for personal advertisement and to get even with gentlemen who displease him. This I am not in sympathy with. Believe me, it is best that I resign, which I do regretfully. I hope you will show this to Mr. Ballantine, that he may know how I stand on this matter. Wishing you all the compliments of this happy season, I am,

  Yours most cordially,

  Roland Molineux3

  He sealed the letter in an envelope. Then, descending to the main floor, he strode across the empty lobby to Adams’s office and slipped the envelope under the door.

  As he returned to his room, he encountered Harry Cornish on the stairs.

  “You son of a bitch,” sneered Cornish, who had just learned of the board’s decision. “You thought you’d get me out, and I got you out instead.”

  These were, as Cornish knew perfectly well, fighting words. If any man had dared utter them to him, Cornish would have promptly answered with his fists.

  Roland, however, did not rise to the bait. Instead, he merely gave his strange, enigmatic smile, waved his hand blithely, and said, “You win.”

  Then he mounted the stairs to his room, where he proceeded to pack his belongings. By the following morning he was gone from the club, never to return.4

  In the nineteenth century, the word molly (derived from the Latin mollis, meaning “soft”) was derogatory slang for a male homosexual, the Victorian equivalent of the later slur fairy. It was also, as it happened, phonetically identical to Roland’s nickname, “Mollie.”

  On the evening of his climactic encounter with Molineux, Cornish, as was his custom, visited Jim Wakeley’s saloon. There, beneath the portraits of bare-chested pugilists and other athletic luminaries, he regaled his drinking chums with an account of his triumph over his longtime adversary.

  As he repeated Roland’s submissive parting words, Cornish snorted with contempt. It was just the sort of response, he and his cohorts agreed, that a man would expect from the aptly named Mollie.

  15

  Increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of Henry Barnet, Blanche was oblivious to Roland’s trouble
s with Harry Cornish. Nor did Roland inform her of his resignation from the club. He had, after all, suffered a humiliating defeat in his final showdown with his nemesis and wasn’t eager to reveal it to the woman he sought to impress.

  The day after New Year’s 1898, Blanche herself changed living quarters, moving in with a family friend named Alice Bellinger, a forty-year-old divorcée who quickly became her closest confidante. In the meantime, Roland retreated to his apartment in the Newark paint factory, where amid his books, laboratory equipment, and shelves of toxic chemicals, he passed much of his time brooding.

  He had a good deal to brood about. His heart still rankling with hatred, he sent letters to various acquaintances, detailing Cornish’s transgressions, which—so he insisted—were doing such harm to the KAC that Roland could no longer associate himself with the club.1

  Blanche’s relationship with Henry Barnet had also begun to eat at him. Roland had made it very clear that he desired to marry her, and he had no intention of putting up with her increasingly open flirtation with Barney.

  In all of the public statements she was ever to make on the subject, Blanche would insist that her relationship with Harry Barnet had been purely platonic—nothing more than a warm friendship, conducted with the approval, even encouragement, of Roland Molineux. Only much later, when she set down her memoirs in old age, would she confess the truth.

  Her description of the fateful evening when her flirtation with Barnet took a far more serious turn occupies an entire chapter of the manuscript. It reads—as does so much of her writing—like an overheated excerpt from a pulpy true romance magazine. Precisely because it is so clichéd, however, it serves as a revealing self-portrait of the author. More revealing, perhaps, than she intended, since it shows her in a not-very-flattering light: as a hopelessly histrionic woman who sees herself as the star of a glamorous grand opera even while coming across as a character in an embarrassingly cheesy bodice ripper.