The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  It began on a wintry Monday evening in late January. Blanche had been asked to perform at a late-night soiree. Though Roland was to be her escort, her mind was focused entirely on Barnet. He, too, had been invited, and his presence was all she could think about.

  It would be, she writes in her memoirs, “the first time Barney heard me sing.”2 Eager “to look particularly well” for him, she dressed in a “filmy tulle gown, together with black satin slippers, the high heels of which were studded with brilliants.” Then, for the finishing touch, she added her diamond butterfly pin from Tiffany’s.

  It had, of course, been a gift from Roland. But she was wearing it for Barnet.

  Descending from her bedroom to the parlor, she found her landlady and friend, Alice Bellinger, seated before the glowing fireplace.

  “You look like a million,” said Alice.

  “Of course!” Blanche laughed. “And why not?”

  “Your frock—it is quite too lovely,” said Alice, surveying Blanche from head to foot. “It absolutely breathes Paris.”

  All at once, a shadow of concern crossed the older woman’s face and her tone became solemn.

  “I warn you,” she said, as though reading Blanche’s thoughts. “Stop your flirtation with Barnet or you are going to get into a lot of trouble. One can see in his eyes that Roland won’t stand for it.”

  “Why, that is nonsense,” said Blanche, with a dismissive wave of the hand. “That’s perfectly silly.”

  At that moment, the doorbell rang. Grabbing her long white gloves and throwing on the chinchillas loaned to her by Alice, Blanche hurried to the door. There stood Roland in a “mood of lightheartedness” and “looking awfully well in his evening clothes.”

  After a quick ride downtown in a horse-drawn cab, they reached their destination, a handsome apartment in Washington Square filled with laughing, chattering partygoers, many of whom had just come from the Met. Blanche quickly realized that she was not going to be performing that evening. The crowd was so large and raucous that singing was out of the question. What disappointed her most, however, was that Barnet was nowhere to be seen.

  When he did arrive, about twenty-five minutes later, he had an attractive young woman on his arm. Yet no sooner did his eyes fall on Blanche than he began to make his way toward her through the crowd. By the time he reached her side, he had managed to detach himself from his date.

  “You look wonderful,” he said. “Where’s Mollie?”

  “Over there,” Blanche said, nodding toward the anteroom, where Roland was chatting with the host. “And where’s your woman friend?”

  “Lost in the crowd.” Barnet laughed. “I’m sure she’ll have a good time flirting.” Then looking about, he said, “What a mob. Isn’t there someplace we can escape to and talk?”

  Before Blanche could reply he had taken her by one arm. “Come on,” he urged. “Let’s get out of this. I know where we can have a moment together. Shall we? Let’s go—we’ll get back before they miss us.”

  Still holding on to her arm, Barnet pushed through the crowd, then hurried outside while Blanche gathered up her wraps. By the time she emerged onto the street, he had secured a cab.

  “Where are we bound?” she asked in an excited, slightly breathless voice as Barnet seated himself close beside her. “What sort of escapade have you planned, Barney?”

  Even in the darkness of the cab she could see his rakish smile. “I have the keys to D——’s apartment,” he said, naming a friend from the KAC. “He’s in Europe, you know. For six weeks. Said I could have it until his return.”

  Less than five minutes later, Barnet was unlocking the door to the uptown apartment, just off Fifth Avenue. The time was shortly before midnight.

  The instant they entered, Blanche could tell from the decor that it was the residence of a well-to-do bachelor. She could tell something else, too: that arrangements had been made for a carefully orchestrated seduction.

  Barnet had prepared for this, I was sure. He must have planned our coming here, all in advance. The apartment was dimly lighted and a chaise longue was drawn up before an open fireplace. The logs were laid, and Barnet stooped to touch a lighted taper to them. The bits of paper underneath curled and blackened, and the flames raced to the driftwood, catching the heavy log which was upheld by massive old andirons of some early English period. The firelight played on the nearest objects and threw shadows on the opposite walls.

  Reaching behind her, Barnet removed the furs from Blanche’s bare shoulders and arms. He then disappeared into another room, returning a few moments later with a tray holding a bowl of ice, a flask of scotch, and a siphon bottle. Setting the tray down on a carved taboret, he mixed two highballs in tall crystal glasses and handed one to Blanche.

  “To you,” he said, touching the rim of her glass with his own. They drank. Then, rearranging the deep pile of damask-covered pillows on the chaise longue, Barnet said, “Lie there, where I can look at you.”

  She did as he asked while he seated himself close beside her.

  “You certainly have set the stage for something, Barney,” she said, sipping again from her glass.

  “For you,” he answered.

  “We’ve done a perfectly wild thing,” she said, “running away like this from the party. If they miss us, what then?”

  “They won’t,” said Barnet. “I’ll watch the time. No one will know we’ve escaped.”

  “Still,” she said, “if Roland finds out that I came here with you…”

  “Then why tell him?” asked Barnet.

  “I shan’t,” said Blanche.

  They spoke for a while about her feelings for Molineux. She confessed that, though she still entertained thoughts of marrying him one day, she was not really in love with him.

  By then, she had finished her drink. “You know, Barney,” she said with a smile, “it is terribly risqué, our being alone like this.”

  “Are you afraid of me?” asked Barnet.

  “Somewhat,” she said.

  In truth, she felt no fear at all, but rather “an uncontrollable desire to touch him—to have him touch me.”

  Wanting him “to be conscious of the faint indefinable perfume of my hair, my flesh,” Blanche bent forward. Barney’s eyes shone as he stared at her, his gaze “like a caress as it rested on the little hollow between my white breasts, plainly discernible under the revealing outlines of my bodice.”

  All at once, “as though with an overwhelming impulse of desire, he caught me up in his arm, pulled me down against him, and buried his lips in mine.”

  I don’t know how many minutes I lay there with his arms about me. He kissed my hair, my neck, my shoulders and breast. My heart pounded against his heart, and my breath came in little gasps. It was like a torrent, his passion.

  “My God, what lips, what a body you have,” he whispered. “You are like a flame. You have made me on fire for you!”

  He was drunk with the madness and passion of the moment, and I was trembling. He bruised my mouth, and afterwards there were little black and blue marks on my flesh. The brutality of it was an ecstasy!

  They were still lying on the chaise when they heard the mantle clock strike one. Barnet rose, then reached out his hands and pulled Blanche to her feet.

  “We have gone mad,” said Blanche.

  “Yes,” said Barnet. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  They kissed again. Then, throwing on their garments, they made their way to the street, found a cab, and drove off to rejoin the party.

  16

  When they met again a week later, Barnet showed none of his former ardor. Seated across the table from her at an uptown café, he extracted a cigarette from his engraved silver case and smoked it in silence, looking at her calmly—even coldly.

  Blanche was fighting back tears. “What has happened?” she said in a tremulous voice. “What has Roland said to you?”1

  “He knows I’m interested in you,” said Barnet.

  “Have you told him abo
ut us?” asked Blanche with a little gasp.

  “No, but he knows it,” Barnet said. “He says you are wearing his ring—that you are going to marry him. Is that so?”

  Blanche took a moment to answer. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “If I did, it would be through selfish motives. He has money—his father is very wealthy. You know how desperately I wish to study music abroad.” She paused for a moment before adding: “But I am not in love with him.”

  “Then it is the promise of Europe?” he said, a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Nevertheless, he has made it perfectly plain to me that he wants you and means to marry you. He said I was to keep out of this.”

  “How did he come to tell you so much?” Blanche asked.

  “Well, you know what good friends we are,” said Barnet with only the slightest hint of irony. “I knew all about your affair from the beginning. He told me all about you, how gay and alive you were, how much in love with life.”

  Barnet took a long drag on his cigarette before expelling the smoke from his nostrils. “I know what happened on the yachting trip. He told me that you were a virgin.”

  A flush rose to Blanche’s face—not of shame but of anger. Clearly, Roland had let it be known, either directly or by implication, that he had deflowered Blanche on board the Monhegan. It wasn’t the dishonesty of the claim that upset her. She prided herself on being a free spirit, a woman who had overcome the benighted sexual attitudes of her puritanical mother. Had Roland proved capable of performing, she would happily have relinquished her virginity to him.

  What sent the blood rushing to her cheeks was her sense of violation. To have been made the subject of such unseemly talk was, she felt, a terrible betrayal—not only by Roland but by Barnet as well.

  “And what else did he tell you?” she said, making no attempt to hide her indignation.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry this came up at all. I never intended that you should realize all I know.”

  “You must have thought I would be an easy mark,” she said in the same scornful tone. “That’s what men usually think, isn’t it, if they know a woman has already capitulated once to a man?”

  “Stop!” he cried. “Don’t say that! You insult both yourself and me. I’ve told you I’m crazy about you.”

  A short time later, they drove back in silence to Alice Bellinger’s brownstone. Barnet walked her into the dimly lighted vestibule. In her hands, she clutched the bouquet of gardenias he had brought her. She was still upset at Barnet. But as they stood facing each other in the faint light that filtered in through the delicate grillwork of the entrance doors, she felt the stirrings of that “ecstatic something” which existed between them.

  She began to say good night, but before the words were out of her mouth he took her in his arms. “You are trembling,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “I won’t let you go.”

  Then they were kissing madly.

  That night, after Barnet had left, Blanche found herself unable to sleep. Her thoughts were not on her departed lover, but on the man who—even while claiming her as his future bride—had spoken so cavalierly about such intimate matters. “There smoldered within me,” she writes in her memoirs, “a wordless displeasure and the sense of an injury which I felt Roland had dealt to me.”

  The next day, she telephoned Roland at the club and demanded that he come see her at once. He arrived within the hour.

  “There followed a stormy interview,” Blanche writes. “A meeting between us full of bitterness and reproach.”

  Pulling the mizpah ring from her finger, she tossed it onto a table. It bounced from the surface, rolled across the floor, and came to a rest in a far corner of the room.

  “Why did you discuss with Barnet what you ought to have kept inviolate?” she cried. “There are things between us that ought to be deep and secret. But you talked of them—boasted to him!”

  Roland stiffened, as if he had taken a blow. “That’s a damned lie. I’ve known Barnet for a long time,” he said coldly. “I know the sort of man he is. He will have a fling with you—then forget all about you.”

  “You think that?” she said scornfully.

  “Has he said anything about marrying you?” Roland asked. “I’ll wager he has not.”

  “We’ve never discussed it,” Blanche said. “You yourself know I’m not interested in being married—not now. I want my music and a career.”

  “I’ve offered you both,” said Roland. “But why prolong this? It’s getting us nowhere.”

  He reached for his hat, which he had tossed onto a chair. “It is ended, you say? Very well, if that’s the way you wish it.” His voice was steady and cool. He bowed to Blanche, then crossed the room.

  Just before he disappeared through the doorway, he paused, looked back at her, and with a hard, bitter laugh, said, “Tell Barnet the coast is clear—he wins.”

  It was the same apparent admission of defeat he had made to Harry Cornish. And like Cornish, Blanche had no way of knowing just how ominous those words really were.

  17

  By 1898, Sigmund Freud had already embarked on his fearless exploration of the unconscious mind. Among his many discoveries was a phenomenon that seems particularly relevant to the case of Roland Molineux.

  Freud describes it in an essay called “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” which deals with “psychical impotence”—that is, impotence rooted in psychological, as opposed to physiological, causes. Men who suffer from this disorder, according to Freud, are not totally impotent. They are able to sustain an erection—but only with prostitutes or partners they view as degraded. With their well-brought-up wives or other respectable women, they find themselves unable to perform. As Freud puts it: “Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.”1

  Certainly Roland Molineux seems to fit this pattern. After all, he had engaged in sex with Mamie Melando—an uneducated factory girl and part-time prostitute—for nearly a decade. With the well-bred Blanche, however—a woman from his own social circle who shared his class biases and cultural pretensions—he apparently suffered from a disabling inhibition.

  There is another, less psychoanalytic, explanation for Roland’s behavior with Blanche. Evidence strongly suggests that he had contracted a venereal disease from Mamie, the symptoms of which had begun to manifest themselves by 1897.2 Sexual debility, shame, or possibly the fear of infecting the woman he planned to marry might have kept him from consummating his relationship with Blanche.

  Whatever the case, one thing seems clear: between his sexual problems with Blanche, her attraction to the more virile Henry Barnet, and Harry Cornish’s gloating victory over him at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Roland Molineux, in the waning days of 1897, suffered a series of humiliations that could not fail to undermine his sense of manhood.

  Little is known about Roland’s life in the months following his falling-out with Blanche. Though he joined the New York Athletic Club at the invitation of his friend Bartow Weeks, he continued to live in his room in the paint factory, where despite their breakup, he received an occasional unbidden visit from Mamie Melando. It was during this period—so the evidence suggests—that he also began frequenting some of the city’s less savory haunts.

  Throughout the 1890s, “slumming” was a popular pastime among the smart young members of the better classes. Looking for cheap thrills in the seedy precincts of lower Manhattan, they visited the dance halls, dives, and other vice-ridden hangouts, where they mingled with showgirls, “dope fiends,” and prostitutes of both sexes.

  Their tour guide, more often than not, was a colorful character named George Washington “Chuck” Connors. A onetime bouncer who affected a gaudy costume of “bell-bottom trousers, a blue-striped shirt, a bright silk scarf, a pea jacket and big pearl buttons everywhere,” Connors became the public face of the Bowery: a lowlife impresario who squired parties of upper-class slummers around the various “degenerate resorts,”
and even set up his own bogus opium den where his customers could gawk at “a white woman named Lulu and a half-Chinese man named Georgie Yee, who posed as addicts.”3

  There were, of course, a considerable number of actual opium dens in Chinatown: dark, squalid cellars where the noisome air was thick enough “to float wooden chips.” There, for a fee of twenty-five cents, a person could lay on his side on a narrow shelf, his head pillowed on a wooden block, while the proprietor prepared the narcotic in a clay-bowled pipe, then extended the bamboo stem to the smoker.4

  While a look inside an opium den was de rigueur for the serious slummer, few were moved to sample the product, let alone smoke it on repeated occasions. Only someone with a strong taste for the forbidden and a serious bent for disreputable behavior would be drawn to such an experience.

  Someone like Roland Molineux.

  Blanche and Barnet, in the meanwhile, continued their affair, conducted largely under the roof of Alice Bellinger’s home, where Barnet had taken to spending the night.5 Blanche rarely set foot inside the Knickerbocker Athletic Club anymore. A rare exception occurred in the spring of 1898, when she attended the yearly Amateur Circus as Barnet’s guest—a delightful evening for Blanche, capped by an unchaperoned visit to her lover’s second-floor bedroom.

  For six months, neither one of them saw or heard from Roland. But Roland wasn’t in hiding.

  He was simply biding his time.

  He reappeared suddenly, and as if by accident, on a summerlike evening in the second week of May. Barnet had promised to take Blanche to one of her favorite dining places—the restaurant of the Claremont Hotel, whose terrace offered a spectacular view of the Hudson and the Palisades.