(As anyone who has followed this blog knows, I am obsessed with the story of Jessie Reed, the ill-fated Ziegfeld Follies showgirl who married my grandfather Leonard Minor Reno. Several years ago, I published my account of her extraordinary life, "Haunted Melody" HERE on this blog.
Afterwards, I posted a follow-up discussing the problems I've had in finding out her roots. Since then I have come across new material that has helped answer some of those questions and dispense with others. Hence this update on the anniversary of her death. The older version has been retired.
I recommend to anyone reading this new post to read "Haunted Melody" first. I hope you will indulge me in this detailed deconstruction of her vital statistics. )
Perhaps the greatest enigma about Jessie Reed is who she really was. When I first learned of her, after my mother died, I found some papers related to my grandfather discussing his seven-year marriage to her. I also found a book about the Ziegfeld Follies written by Marjorie Farnsworth that claimed Reed's real name was Jessie Rogers. But I began to doubt that, especially since the account had other errors and didn't have any documents to support its statements. A lot of it seemed to have been compiled from third-hand sources. I decided to go and find out more on my own.
It's been quite an undertaking, literally and figuratively, like putting together a mosaic of Jessie's life from the small bits and pieces I've been able to cull from archives and historical records. She wasn't a diary writer and left no personal papers that I am aware of. Everything about her was mercurial, ephemeral and maddeningly elusive.
The first official document that I found was Jessie Reed's death certificate. She died on September 18, 1940, "age 42" which would put her birth year at 1898, if her birth month preceded September. (Her obit in Variety and elsewhere said she was 43.) There's not much information on the death certificate, aside from a few medical details. She died from pneumonia. Her birthplace was given as San Antonio, which might be inaccurate. Her father's name was given as Jessie Richard. No mother's name was given. The informant is a person named Wilson Brett, a man that I have not been able to find any record of. He may have been a friend or just a hospital official. And I suspect the mention of San Antonio had more to do with the fact that Jessie's daughter was living there at the time. It's possible she had been contacted by the nursing staff. It's doubtful she would have known much about Jessie's roots since they were completely estranged.Thanks to the death certificate, which had her Social Security number written on it, I was able to chat with someone from the SSA office near me who explained that he couldn't give me a copy of her application, but he was able to tell me that her name was listed as Jessie M. Reed. And her birth date as July 1897. She had applied to the program in 1936 around the time that newspaper reports first surfaced that she was hard-up and on relief.
How then did the name Rogers get attached to her? Apparently her first husband, Ollie Debrow, referred to her by that name during his murder trial in 1917. Or so I thought. I checked some of the court transcripts and didn't see that name mentioned. It turns out that the source for this alleged quote is a heavily redacted transcript of Ollie’s testimony that her second husband Dan Caswell had used in his spurious memoirs that were serialized in newspapers across the country in 1922 after their divorce. Either Caswell had misquoted Ollie or perhaps the court stenographer had heard him wrong. It could be that “Jessie Rogers” was simply Jessie’s stage name at the time (she changed her name so many times), although I have been unable to find any mention of her using this name in the numerous newspaper clippings I found from the period.
Apparently there is now a French Wikipedia page dedicated to Jessie Reed (here) that gives her maiden name as Richardson, citing her marriage license in 1912 to Ollie Debrow where her name was written as “Jessie May Richardson.” But just a year later in 1913 her name is listed as “Jessie M. Richards” on her daughter Ann’s birth certificate. So which is it? Richards or Richardson? I suspect the wedding license version was a clerical error since even Oliver's last name Durborrow is misspelled as Durbarow. I'm pretty confident that the last name is Richards.
I did manage in the end to find her in one census, the 1940 one, in Chicago, living at the Metropole Hotel. Her name is given as Jessie Reed and her age as 42. The page was filled out in April so that would mean she was born in 1897 if her birth month was in fact July. But as we know, census records are often erroneous. Her profession, for example, is mistakenly written on the line below her entry, as “nightclub hostess.” The girl whose entry it was mistakenly written in wasn't old enough to be working at a nightclub, so it makes more sense that it is intended for Jessie Reed (she was indeed a "nightclub hostess" at the time.) The most interesting fact about this document is that it says she was born in "Alabama," not Texas. More on that fascinating detail below.
Where else to look? I focused on Houston where she married Ollie Debrow in 1912. There were a lot of people named Jessie Richards in Texas. Even some named Jessie May Richards, and Richardson. But I have checked every possible candidate and found that they are invariably someone else, or tied to someone's family tree, and then are scratched off my list. It also appears that the name “Jessie May” was a popular name in its day. Thousands of girls born between 1890 and 1900 had that name, making research all the more difficult. It wasn’t until 1928 that Jessie Reed started to use the name Jessica. Curiously, the name Jessica rarely appears in the 1900 or 1910 censuses anywhere in Texas and I’ve come to the conclusion that Jessie just made it up later in life because it sounded more mature and perhaps, in her mind, sophisticated.
Adding to the confusion of Jessie’s roots is her marriage license with Dan Caswell, the document that was of such interest to reporters back in 1920. That too should be a slam-dunk, at least in a normal, non-theatrical world, since most people rarely lie or misrepresent themselves on official documents during such happy (one assumes) circumstances. But in Jessie’s case, nothing is ever simple, and never cut-and-dried. She had a genius for disinformation. Jessie gave her birth date as July 3, 1898 on that document. And claims her birth name was Reed, the stage name she assumed when she moved to New York and posed as the sister of Nora Reed in their act, "The Reed Sisters."
On her 1920 marriage certificate she names her parents as James and Anna Reed. This is odd since Nora's parents are named Ed and Sallie, but perhaps Jessie had dropped the sister act by then. No doubt Jessie was reluctant to give her name as the former Mrs. Debrow (or Durburrow, as it were), and she had already divorced Ollie in 1917. She used her alias here since it was the name she was best known by and because she didn’t want Caswell to know she had been previously married. She may also not have wanted the world to find out anything about her Richards family relatives. She may also have tweaked the birth year, perhaps because Dan was born in 1899 and she didn’t want him to think she was much older than he was. Dan too was chastised in the press for falsely claiming on his wedding application that he was an actor. He also misled people into thinking that he was a millionaire when the truth was more complicated. It's not inconceivable that both of them were well in their cups when they tied the knot. Accuracy was hardly their strong suit.
In an interview that occurred shortly after she wed Caswell, Jessie was
asked if her maiden name was Reed and she insisted it was. The
interviewer, perhaps hoping she’d slip up, asked her if her parents’
name was also Reed. Jessie said of course it was. But when asked about
her previous marriage, and daughter, Jessie cut the interview short. She had a lot to lose. She was a Ziegfeld headliner and her name could be seen alongside such big stars as W. C. Fields and Fannie Brice. A hint of scandal could derail her career.
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| (1920 ad featuring Jessie Reed in the cast.) |
The names James and Anna seemed like a perfect lead but I've never been able to find a couple in the 1900 Census named James and Anna Richards, or Richardson, with a daughter born in 1897. The 1900 Census is the only one I know of that included birth months as well as years, so it's possible to search all the Jessies in that census who were born in July 1897. And very often 1898. None fit the paradigm in Texas. Nor in Alabama for that matter.
I had better luck locating Jessie by consulting the Houston city directories. In the 1910/1911 edition, which was compiled in July 1910, there is a listing for a “Miss Jessie Richard,” “cash girl at Alkemeyer” living at 1505 Elysian. This is the first time this person appears and the last. Alkemeyer was a dry goods store very similar to Levy Bros that Jessie had claimed to have worked at in one of her early Ziegfeld interviews. She may have worked at both. Alkemeyer is also the store Ollie had been caught breaking into in 1908.
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| Levy Bros in Houston early 1900s. |
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| Alkemeyer's General Store, Houston |
There were several other people named Jessie Richard or Richards in Houston directories of that period. Most were clearly men, as a white female would customarily be listed as Miss or Mrs. Some were African-American. Directories added the letter "c" for "colored" in those segregated days. I was able to check these people out and cross them off the list. A young woman named Jessie Richards who lived at 836 Arthur Street seemed a possibility, but she committed suicide by carbolic acid poisoning in 1915. Several articles were written about her. A Miss Jessie Richards living on Hardcastle Street was arrested in 1914 for felony theft and is described as being from Beaumont. So we can eliminate her too. Our Jessie Richards was in San Antonio in those days living and performing as Jessie Debrow. (Oddly, in some reviews she is called "Miss Ollie Debrow." She appears on stage and in the San Antonio directory under that name.)
Another Jessie Richards, who worked at Nabisco Biscuit Company, seemed intriguing since Dan Caswell had once said that Jessie worked at a "cracker factory" in Houston before he married her. But this Jessie appears to be a man (no Miss or Mrs added), and a typo; he has the same address as "Jesse A. Richardson" in the previous year's listing, an "operator at the Cozy Theater," originally from Missouri. Born in 1888, he never married and is too young to be Jessie's father. And a glance at earlier census records shows he did not have a sister named Jessie. Could she have been a cousin or niece? Doubtful. He seems to be the only one living in Houston at the time and I could not find any family or marriage records for him.
Another possibility is a fellow named James C. Richardson, paving contractor, who was living in 1912 at 709 Rusk Avenue, which just happens to be where Oliver Debrow and his family were living around that time. As with so many people who might fit into the mosaic of Jessie's life this man never appears in the directory again nor any of the census records for that area. He's a one-off. Intriguing, yes, but a dead end.
I opted to double-down on the "Miss Jessie Richard" who worked as a "cash girl" at Alkemeyer's, residing at 1505 Elysian. By using the street guide that accompanies the directory, I found a woman named “Mrs. Willie McCorquodale” also at that address. The number 2 appears after her name, which means she was living there with one other person. She lists herself as “Widow of Glenn.” A genealogical marriage index for Texas reveals a “Willie Richard” who married “G. McCorquodale” in 1907 in Orange, Texas. Richard, as I mentioned, was the surname given for Jessie Reed's father on her 1940 death certificate. Could Willie have been a relation? Perhaps Jessie’s aunt or sister? Or even perhaps her mother? The Houston directory includes Mrs. Willie McCorquodale’s profession as
“operator at the American Laundry.” This fits with the anecdote
told by reporters that Jessie was working at a laundry when she was younger. She could
have been helping Willie at her job. An interesting aside is the fact that in the same directory Nora Flippen, Jessie's great friend, and the actress with whom she moved to New York in 1917, is listed as a "shirt folder" at Eureka Laundry in Houston.
It took some digging to find Glenn McCorquodale in the 1910 Census. His name was badly mangled. But he is still there in Orange, listed as a plumber, but also as “widowed.” This is funny, but telling. Both Willie and Glenn are listed as “widowed” in the same year even though they are both clearly alive. I suspect that means they were separated or divorced.
At first I had no luck finding any sign of Willie in the census from 1900 or 1910 or later. Nor in any of the Texas death indexes. She seemed to simply disappear from the records. (Her former husband, Glenn, however, did not. He was apparently shot and killed by his second wife in Orange, Texas in 1942.) But recently, I came upon a marriage record of a "Mrs. Willie McCorquodale" and someone named "Mr. Clint L. Hair" in Galveston on June 14, 1913. I had always looked for Willie's records in Houston, not elsewhere. Turns out Clint was also in the laundry business, a driver for the Pantatorium, and later the Model Laundry in Houston.
It was an easy step from there to find Willie's death certificate. In the past I had always been searching for either Willie Richard or Willie McCorquodale. But now I had the name Hair and found one for 1920. Her death certificate gives her maiden name as Clemons. This surprised me as I had assumed Richard was her maiden name. But this meant that she had been married prior to marrying Glenn McCorquodale.
After much probing, I found out that Willie is in fact in the 1910 Census, as “Richarts (wid),” living with her mother, Addie V Clemons, and siblings in Houston. Jessie is not there. And Willie is said to not have had any children. Confirming that her maiden name was Clemons led me to a fascinating break, an earlier marriage record for her, as “Willie Clement,” wed to a “J. B. Richards” in 1896, a year before Jessie was allegedly born. This took place in Caldwell, Burleson, TX where the Clements family (early records use Clements, while later ones invariably use Clemons) lived for many years on a farm and where I found Willie in the 1880 census with Addie and her large family, but incorrectly listed as an infant boy!
Willie's 1896 marriage record merely gives the names and the date, but no additional information regarding the families. I looked again at the 1910 Houston Directory and noticed a “Mrs. J. B. Richards” (widow) living at 611 Girard. This gave me pause because I thought perhaps these were two different people, but then I found Clint L. Hair living at the same address as Willie, and again in subsequent years with "Mrs. J. B. Richards" -- so she was indeed the same person, Mrs. Willie McCorquodale, who married him in 1913. I imagine they delayed getting married because C. L. Hair was previously married in 1903 to a woman named Lydia Ryan and their divorce was only finalized in April of 1913. He then married Willie in June. She only used the name Willie Hair from then on. They had three children together before her death in 1920. He remarried but died shortly after in 1922.
The significance of all this exhaustive research back and forth is that these new findings confirm that Willie Richards is indeed the same person in all the various Houston directories and census records. Why she was listed at two different addresses in the directory in 1910 I can't answer, nor why she is listed in the census that same year, living with her mother Addie on a different street. The timing between the three distinct records is brief. I can only think that for some reason she bounced around between the three residences. Perhaps she felt it was more proper to have a separate residence for her and Miss Jessie Richards.
I wouldn't blame anyone for saying, at this point, that there's no proof that this Miss Jessie Richards who happened to be living at 1505 Elysian isn't just a crazy coincidence. How do we know she was related to Willie Clemons Richards McCorquodale Hair at all? Well, that's a good question. But two facts I recently uncovered convince me that this was no case of mistaken identity, but that there was an important connection between these two people.
First I had a lucky break when I located Willie Richards in the 1900 Census, living in Alabama with her husband J. B. Richards. Her name is twisted in the index as "Virllie" but if you look closely at the original document, and compare the lettering to others on the page, her name is clearly "Willie." Her husband is listed as “Jessie B. Richards,” born in Florida, now a farmer in Marengo County, Alabama. This stands out in my mind because on Jessie Reed's death certificate, as we know, her father's name is given as Jessie. And adding some support is the fact that in the 1940 census, as previously mentioned, Jessie gives her birthplace as Alabama, not Texas, as had always been assumed.
How do I know this Willie in Marengo, Alabama in 1900 is the same as Willie McCorquodale in Houston in 1910? One thing is slightly off. The record says she has been married six years to J. B. But we know they were married in 1896. That could just be a mistake. Not an uncommon occurrence in Census records. What clinches it for me is that I noticed that two of her Texas siblings, Capitola Clements, 16 years old, and Fred Clements, 7, are living in the same house with the couple. Fred is listed in other records as Willie's sibling and as a son of Addie V. Clements (Clemons). Capitola, I am not sure of, but I know that Willie's father had a sister named Capitola, so it is logical that he would have named one of his daughters after her. In the 1910 census Addie Clemons is reported to have had 12 children, four of whom had died. Capitola may be among them. Willie had a sister named Ola and I wonder if that was a shortening of Capitola. The only fly-in-the-ointment there is that Ola is listed in the 1900 Census with Addie in Burleson, TX earlier in the same month. Burleson is roughly 500 miles from Marengo. She could have traveled by train. Or Capitola could just be another sister, one of the siblings who died young. (One can't be too thrown by multiple listings in censuses, I've discovered. In 1920 I found Ollie Debrow listed twice, once in San Antonio and again in New York City. People got around a lot more than we think in those days.)
Adding to the intrigue, a daughter named Alma A. Richards is also in the household, 2 years old, born May 1898. It's tempting to think that this child could be Jessie May Richards. The year is appropriate since Jessie gave that year on her marriage license with Dan Caswell, and while most sources later on put her birth year as 1897, I am beginning to wonder if she may not have been born in 1898 after all.
I found a very reliable article published in a New Orleans newspaper in August 1916, containing police reports during Jessie's so-called tryst with theater manager P. E. Payne (see “Haunted Melody.") Jessie is quoted as insisting she was only 13 when she married Ollie in 1912. (They had married in February.) The article also says that she and Ollie had come to New Orleans from "their home in Florida." Perhaps this is a mistake since they were on tour at the time in Arkansas, but it does tie in to the fact that Jessie B. Richards had roots in Florida. Perhaps the couple did spend time there.
Further complicating things is the fact that Willie's daughter Alma A. Richards does not appear in any subsequent census or other vital records. She vanishes. So does Willie's husband Jessie B. Richards. He is not present in any other censuses. Perhaps they both died. Perhaps Jessie B. and Alma moved to another state or country. Who knows? It's a frustrating conundrum because this seemed to be a key to finally unlocking Jessie's roots. I've looked hard to find any records of Jessie B. Richards' parents since his father is listed as being born in Ireland, and his mother in Virginia. Usually that would make it easy to find them. But not in this case, of course. Without any further details about the father and daughter, it's hard to nail anything down.
Okay, fine, but we still haven't established a concrete link between Willie Richards and Jessie Reed other than that street address in the Houston Directory in 1910 and the fact that Willie had been married to Mr. Jessie B. Richards. That concerned me, so I dug around a bit more. And I came upon a new fact that in my book convinces me they must be related. I found a death notice for one of Willie's brothers, Robert G. Clemons, who died of TB in 1918. An obituary was posted in the Houston paper mentioning that five of his sisters attended his funeral. One of them was Ola now "Mrs. Fulghum," another was Allie (Mrs. Wilson), and Willie (as Mrs. C. L. Hair) and a fourth named Mrs. J. B. York, most likely Ruth Clemons, the youngest of Addie's children. She was an actress. (I found a J. B. York, manager at the Empress Theater in Houston, at that time but so far no marriage record for the two.) The fifth sister was the key; she is listed as Mrs. Kate Debrow. This confirmed it for me, because I realized that this was the Kate who married Will Debrow, Oliver's older brother, in 1916. Their wedding registration lists her as Kate Clemons. This makes Kate Clemons the sister-in-law of Jessie Reed -- and perhaps her aunt, if Willie was in fact her mother.
I then was startled to find out that Ruth Clemons and Kate Clemons performed alongside the Debrow Brothers as the Clemons Sisters. Ruth seems to have joined the act shortly after Kate married Will in 1916. Just a few weeks before Jessie ran out on Ollie and fled to New Orleans, as documented above, she was performing in a show with Kate and Ruth. She got good notices too. And just a few days after the incident she was back on tour with Ollie and the Debrows in Little Rock, Arkansas. They went on performing together after Jessie left for New York, appearing in Houston at the Cozy Theatre in the 20s.
In the 1920 Census, "Dainty" Ruth was living with Kate and Will Debrow. Later she appeared to move to Los Angeles to make her mark as an actress. She's there in the 1930 Census, and appeared in a few product ads. But eventually she came back home and got remarried. Kate Debrow died in 1936. She was buried in Houston as Kate Clemons.
One of the big questions I have regarding Jessie Reed and her early career is why no one ever came forward and discussed her Houston roots. Many of the Clemons family were still alive when she died in 1940. And at the peak of her fame. But none of the obituaries of Jessie I've found in the Houston papers and the San Antonio ones ever talked about Jessie's roots in those two towns. Did they not know that she was performing in vaudeville there? No mention of the murder trial in San Antonio appears in these write-ups either. Surely there must have been some reporters who remembered her, or family members who could have corrected errors in some of these articles or written their own tribute to her. If only they had told us who she was none of this archival sleuthing would have been necessary.
One last thing, I did ultimately manage to find some tangible relics of Jessie's life -- a few brief letters of hers, including her autograph, that I bought from a book dealer a few years back. They were sent in 1922 to John Myers O'Hara, a poet and wealthy stockbroker, and a lifelong bachelor, who was a close friend of Sara Teasdale. He was staying at the Plaza Hotel. Jessie was in-between marriages, vacationing in Palm Beach, and jotted down a few wry comments to him about how "nice and green" everything was in Florida, how she was "spending a few dollars here," as well as the telling statement: "remember I have not forgotten your promise." If one reads between the lines, it seems she was hinting she could use some greenbacks to pay for her expensive stay at the Royal Poinciana Hotel.
O'Hara, above, is best known for his translations of Sappho's love poetry and the poem "Atavism" which was quoted in Jack London's Call of the Wild. He must have been fond of Jessie because he glued her note cards and a newspaper image of her in his copy of Arthur Symon's Lesbia. Perhaps it was meant with a touch of irony. The first poem in the volume is "The Vampire," a ghoulish bit of verse that offers such lines as "She may not rest till she have sucked a man's heart from his breast," ending with "his lips sigh her name with his last breath, As the man swoons ecstatically on death." How would you like to bet that he sent Jessie the money?
I've decided to pause my research at this point. I have exhausted all outlets. Perhaps someone out there might know more about Willie's husband Jessie B. Richards and his time in Alabama. Or of Alma. Could he have had a previous marriage and daughter? Was Jessie May Richards a niece, or even a cousin of his? Was she related to Willie? Or one of the Clemons family? Let me know what you find out. My email address is on the home page.
Ultimately, it's fair to say that none of this is vitally important. Jessie lived her life the way she wanted to, having closed the door on her past. She left a legacy of broken hearts, unfulfilled dreams. Perhaps it's fitting that Jessie remains an enigma. As Roald Dahl once wrote: "Sometimes mysteries are more intriguing than explanations."
