The Devil's Gentleman

by Harold Schechter

  “I’m not going to talk about this matter until I see my lawyer,” he said. “So far as I can see, the only thing she has against her husband is that he was in prison for four years and she was deprived of some pleasure and enjoyment in that time.

  “So she refers to my son as ‘that man,’ does she?” he continued bitterly. “Well, I have always referred to her as ‘that lady.’ She has had the first say in this matter. Perhaps she will have the last word—and perhaps not.”5

  For a while, there was talk that Roland might contest the divorce. In the end, however, he chose to let the matter go. By the following September, Blanche was a free woman.

  Less than two months later, she married again. Her new husband was Wallace D. Scott—the young attorney who had handled her divorce.6

  Just a few weeks after her marriage, Blanche—intent on pursuing her aborted stage career—traveled to New York City for a meeting with representatives of vaudeville producer F. F. Proctor. On November 15, 1903, The New York Times reported that she had signed a contract for the unprecedented sum of $1,000 per week to perform at Proctor’s flagship theater on Twenty-third Street. She would sing “twice daily and also at the Sunday concerts,” beginning on Monday, November 23.

  The article noted that Blanche was known to possess “a cultivated contralto voice of such quality that it was once praised by Madame Melba.”7 Even Blanche, however, understood that Proctor was counting on her notoriety, not her singing voice, to pull in the crowds. To make sure no one missed the point, the ads for her engagement billed her as “Blanche Molineux Scott.”

  Neither Blanche nor Proctor, however, had reckoned on the General, who let it be known that he would seek an immediate restraining order to prevent his proud family name from being sullied in such a fashion. The threat was sufficient. Even before she could debut, her contract was canceled and Blanche was soon on her way back to Sioux Falls.8

  Blanche wasn’t the only person to try to capitalize on the Molineux case. As early as 1899, a writer named Randall Irving Tyler had dashed off a book called The Blind Goddess—a potboiler that anticipates by a hundred years those TV melodramas whose plotlines are “ripped from the headlines.”

  The novel involves a statuesque beauty named Helen Brownell, who receives a mysterious gift from an anonymous sender: a Tiffany box containing an expensive “holder with a socket resembling a candlestick” and “a bottle of effervescent headache powder.” That very night, while Helen attends a dinner party, her father and a friend named David West—both suffering from mild headaches—sample the medicine and immediately drop dead. The book features many other elements drawn from the Molineux affair, including a lengthy coroner’s inquest, private letter boxes, handwriting experts, and an unscrupulous press that “found in the Brownell poisoning case material for the greatest sensation the city had known.”9

  An even trashier piece of pop exploitation appeared less than a month after Roland’s acquittal. On December 2, 1902, a preposterously contrived stage melodrama, The Great Poison Mystery by one Victor C. Calvert, opened in a theater in Jersey City before making its New York premiere one week later at Blaney’s Theater on Driggs Avenue, Williamsburg.

  The play makes not the slightest effort to disguise its real-life inspiration. On the contrary, the names of its principal characters are—as one reviewer put it—“libelously like the names of the people they are meant to represent.”10 The dramatis personae consist of a young chemist named Robert Milando and his father, General Milando; Robert’s fiancée, Blanche Marlboro; his archenemy, Harrison Cornwall, athletic director of the Metropolitan Sporting Club; Cornwall’s elderly aunt, Mrs. Adamson, who dies when she drinks a glass of headache powder spiked with cyanide of mercury; and assorted subsidiary figures, including Assistant District Attorney James Osgood and ex-governor Blackstone, chief counsel for the defense.11

  Decried by critics as a “ridiculous paraphrase of the famous murder case,” Calvert’s play presents Milando as an innocent victim, framed by the villainous Cornwall—a character so one-dimensional as to make Snidely Whiplash seem like Iago. Constantly uttering cackling asides (“I have an idea—a brilliant idea, Robert Milando, and it means your ruin!” “Ha! Ha! Never shall she be his bride!”), Cornwall, as one reviewer reported, comes off as so “ridiculously comical” that the first-night audience could not even bring itself to hiss him. All “he got was a continuous roar of hilarious guffaws.”12

  Though The New York Times praised the “thrilling climax”—in which Cornwall, reaping his just rewards, plunges to his death from the newly erected East River Bridge—other papers were merciless in their derision (“when the curtain fell, everyone in the audience cheered—because the play was over”). Calvert’s play had a deservedly brief run, closing before it reached Broadway.13

  For hacks like Tyler and Calvert, the Molineux affair was simply a ripe subject for commercial exploitation. But to another American writer, one of our country’s greatest novelists, it seemed powerfully emblematic, a story with the potential to be transformed into great tragic art.

  Theodore Dreiser was just putting the finishing touches on his scandalous first novel, Sister Carrie, when the Molineux story broke. Obsessed with themes of lust, money, and power, the young author was determined to write a book dealing with what he regarded as a peculiarly American brand of crime: a murder committed by a young man whose lethal act is sparked by an explosive mix of sexual hunger and social ambition. In the Molineux case, Dreiser felt he had found the perfect real-life basis for such a tale and began to compile a research file, composed largely of clippings from the World, along with painstakingly transcribed copies of other newspaper accounts.14

  Years would pass before he began work on the manuscript, which he titled The “Rake.”15 Its protagonist is young Anstey Bellinger (a name Dreiser took from the real-life Alice Bellinger, Blanche’s friend and landlady). The son of a revered Civil War hero, Colonel Bellinger (a “dapper little man” of “Spartan” mettle), Anstey possesses many of Roland Molineux’s traits. He works as a chemist and color maker; is a singular combination of dandy and champion athlete; engages in sexual dalliances with factory girls; falls in love with one Celeste Martzo, “a girl of rare beauty but of a very nebulous character” and belongs to an exclusive Manhattan athletic club whose physical director, Victor Quimby, bears more than a passing resemblance to Harry Cornish (“His eyes were of a steely gray-blue, fixed and steady, not unlike those of a bull-dog, his hair was brown but a little thin above the forehead, his chin full, pugnacious, thick, like the broad end of an egg.”)16

  After producing seven rough-draft chapters, however, Dreiser abandoned the project. In the end, he “had trouble reconciling the Molineux crime with the kind of murder he wanted to portray.” What Dreiser wanted was a case involving “a young man whose social ambitions lead to murder.” To be sure, Roland Molineux was not lacking in social pretensions. Ultimately, however, he was too upper middle class—not enough of an outsider—to suit Dreiser’s fictional needs.17

  Four years after Roland’s acquittal, a young man named Chester Gillette drowned his pregnant girlfriend, Grace Brown, in an Adirondacks lake. It was the ideal crime for Dreiser’s purposes, and from it he would forge his masterpiece, An American Tragedy.18

  On the evening of Friday, January 9, 1903, just two months after Roland’s acquittal, General Molineux, his wife, and his son Cecil went into Manhattan to dine with friends. At around 10:30 P.M., they started for home. There was a trolley stop not far from their friends’ home, at Broadway and Eleventh, right in front of the St. Denis Hotel. The night was clear but piercingly cold. Taking refuge in the entranceway to the hotel, the Molineuxs waited for the trolley to arrive.

  When it finally pulled up a few minutes later, the General assisted his wife onto the car. Cecil boarded next. The General had just placed his foot on the step and begun to mount the trolley when the conductor rang the bell, and the car started forward with a violent jerk.

  The s
udden motion caused the General to lose his footing and fall from the car. Reflexively holding on to the hand bar, he was dragged along the street.

  Cecil, looking around and seeing that his father was not behind him, shouted for the conductor to stop, but the trolley continued another full block before coming to a halt. By then, the General had released his grip and was lying in the middle of Broadway, a crowd already gathering around him.

  Cecil leapt from the car, followed closely by his mother. By the time they reached him, the General—protesting that he was all right—was attempting to get to his feet with the help of several bystanders. He was loaded into a cab and driven home, where the family physician was immediately summoned. According to the news accounts that appeared the following day, one of the old man’s “kneecaps was badly injured and several of his ribs were crushed in.”19

  It took him months to recuperate. The following October, he was still not well enough to attend the seventieth-birthday celebration given in his honor by his old comrades from the 159th Brigade. Cecil and Leslie were there on their father’s behalf to accept the various tributes, which included a handsome floral shield of chrysanthemums, roses, and lilies of the valley (meant to symbolize the General’s role as a “shield for the preservation of his country’s honor” during wartime) and a commemorative tablet consisting of a framed photographic portrait of the General and a Maltese cross inscribed with the names of the battles in which he had distinguished himself.20

  The old man, however, was nothing if not resilient. By February 1904, he was well enough to perform yet another act of heroism, when a gas pipe broke in the Devoe & Raynolds paint factory and the General—who was working in his office at the time—led a rescue party down into the cellar to save several unconscious workers.21 In succeeding years, each of his birthdays was celebrated by his (progressively dwindling) band of former comrades, who would arrive at his Fort Greene Place home with floral tributes, speeches, and occasional poems:

  And on your shield, my gallant Ned

  (I claim the right to speak)

  Shall ever shine in letters gold

  The name of Cedar Creek,

  And history will ever enshrine,

  While ages come and go,

  With that unique and brilliant fight,

  The name of Molineux!22

  The newspapers, too, took note of his birthdays. In October 1912, when Admiral George Dewey turned seventy-five, the New York World, in an editorial headlined A HERO OF THE REPUBLIC, reminded its readers “that there are other distinguished men living in the past who have served the Republic splendidly.

  “Of these,” the editorial continued,

  it may be safely said, none hold a higher place in the public esteem than General Edward L. Molineux, who has just reached his seventy-ninth year. With the details of General Molineux’s career in the Civil War our readers are familiar. That career is part of the History of the United States. It shows that patriotism is capable, when emergency arises, of performing deeds of great valor, and that, too, from the loftiest motive. We know of no man whose life affords greater inspiration or a better example than that of General Molineux. That life is replete with honor and distinction, of triumph over difficulties and a stern adherence to high ideals worthy of the sincerest admiration.23

  It seemed that, after a life filled with such tumult and strife, the General would finally enjoy the serene and honored old age he deserved.

  But fate—in the form of his erratic son, Roland—wasn’t done with him yet.

  Following his release from prison, Roland set about trying to readjust to life as he had known it before his arrest. He joined a gym in Brooklyn Heights in an effort “to recover his old skill and activity as a gymnast.” Within two weeks, he was “able to do some of his old stunts on the horizontal bar,” albeit “not with his former vim and vigor.”24 At the General’s urging, he also returned to his work as a chemist, this time in his father’s paint factory, putting his color-making skills to use in the laboratory.

  His true ambition, however—developed during his years behind bars—was to become a man of letters.

  In January 1903, just a few months after his acquittal, the New York City publishing firm F. W. Dillingham brought out his first book, The Room with the Little Door. Dedicated “To My Father General Edward Leslie Molineux, with Reverence,” the volume is a hodgepodge of sketches, poems, and ruminations about life in both the Tombs and the Sing Sing Death House. The reviews were less than glowing. The World damned the book with faint praise, describing it as “not lacking in such literary merit as lies in the simplest possible telling.”25 And while the critic for the Times conceded that it contained “certain touches of humor,” as well as a degree of “unforced pathos,” his final judgment was withering. In the end, he declared, “the book reveals nothing new touching prison, can serve no purpose (unless its sales are large enough to put money in its author’s pocket), and one cannot help but wishing it had never been written.”26

  Undaunted, Roland turned his hand to fiction. The following September saw the publication of his novel, The Vice Admiral of the Blue. At a time when authors such as James, Twain, Dreiser, and Crane were producing some of the masterworks of American realism, Roland’s tome—the supposed late-life memoirs of Lord Horatio Nelson’s close friend Thomas Masterman Hardy—is a hopelessly overwrought bodice ripper, featuring the usual cast of Victorian stereotypes, from mustachio-twirling villains to bosom-heaving damsels in distress. (“He clasped her once more in his arms, once more lingeringly kissed her, once more whispered to her, ‘I love you!’ Then, pressing a handkerchief to the mouth he had just touched so fiercely with his own, he carried her through the secret doorway into the gloom beyond. As he did so, the drooping limbs and closed eyes told him that she had fainted!”)27

  In addition to this fluff, he devoted himself to more serious matters, especially the cause of penal reform. Allying himself with famed social crusader Kate Bernard, Roland published a pamphlet urging the creation of “Courts of Rehabilitation”: tribunals that would vote to release a convict from prison only when he gave convincing proof of rehabilitation. Such a system, Roland argued, would serve society far better than the current method of predetermined sentences, which did nothing to encourage criminals to reform.28

  As an author, however, Roland achieved his greatest success in the field of playwriting. As far back as 1903, he had taken a stab at drama, composing a one-act play, Was It a Dream? that had a short run at Proctor’s Twenty-third Street theater in March of that year. An insipid fantasy about socially mismatched young lovers who are finally able to wed thanks to the help of a crystal ball, the play was dismissed by the reviewer for the Times as a “mediocrity” whose “characters talk a good deal but say little that is of interest to anyone save themselves.”29

  Roland persisted, however, and by 1912 had turned out a full-length drama, The Man Inside. That year, Roland’s parents, through the intervention of friends, obtained an interview with Broadway impresario David Belasco, who recalled the meeting in his memoirs:

  His mother said to me, “My boy’s life has been ruined. His health is gone—he has never been the same since he was released from prison. He has written a play which he believes will do great good, and he has set his heart on getting it acted. If he is disappointed in this, on top of all the rest that he has suffered, we fear that he will die. If his play should be a success, it might open a new life to him. Will you read it and help us if you can?”

  Belasco, who “had been tremendously impressed by General Molineux’s great fight for his son,” agreed to read the play and produce it, “if practicable.”

  When the manuscript arrived, Belasco found it “long and crude, but I saw possibilities in it and told the parents I would produce it. Their gratitude was very touching. Soon afterward, I met young Molineux, gave him several interviews and went to work to knock his play into shape.”30

  The two continued to work on the play throughout the summer and
into the early fall of 1913. On Saturday, November 8, three days before its scheduled premiere, Roland, then forty-seven years old, hastily wed a pretty twenty-eight-year-old play broker named Margaret Connell at City Hall, explaining to reporters that “his mother was dying and that it was her wish that the marriage should take place at once.”

  By a bizarre coincidence, the deputy clerk who issued the license was none other than Edward Hart—the onetime coroner who had presided at the inquest into Katherine Adams’s death more than a decade earlier. Partly as a result of his perceived mishandling of the Molineux affair, Hart had been removed from the coroner’s office and was now a lowly functionary in the Marriage License Bureau. Apart from exchanging the few perfunctory words necessary to complete the transaction, both he and Roland did their best to ignore each other during their unexpected reunion.31

  The Man Inside debuted at the Criterion Theater on Monday, November 10, 1913. Judging from its title, critics expected it to be a frank, even shocking exposé based on the author’s personal experience as an inmate of the Sing Sing Death House. What they saw instead was a contrived melodrama about a handsome young district attorney named Richard Gordon who—intent on plumbing the criminal mind—descends into the urban underworld where he falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a small-time crook. Periodically, the action comes to a dead halt so that the hero can deliver a long speech about penal reform.

  The reviews were not kind. Though the Times praised the grittily realistic sets and “exceptional cast” and conceded that there was a “certain suspensive interest to the proceedings,” the paper dismissed the play as hopelessly didactic and predictable—“mere sentimental rubbish.” It lasted only sixty-three performances, and its closing marked the end of Roland Molineux’s literary career.32