The Marvels of Marseilles

("Marseilles" by Jean Dufy)

by Brooks Peters

[Having just seen the revelatory exhibit "Monet to Matisse on the French Coast" at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, FL, which covers life on France's coasts, in particular Provence, as captured by various artists of the era, I was reminded of a trip I'd made to Marseille many years ago for Travel & Leisure magazine. The editor who commissioned the piece was canned before I'd even finished the article, a not-uncommon ocurrence in the mercurial world of publishing, so the article, hélas, never ran. No doubt its details are no longer au courant. But I thought I'd share it here as a memento of time happily spent.]

For years I tried to interest friends in joining me on a journey to Marseille, the legendary, albeit notorious, port on the Mediterranean. But no one ever dared. Marseille, the fabled “Gateway to the Orient” of yore, loomed too immense and mysterious for them. I ultimately decided to venture on alone.

Even though it's the second-largest city in France, and the capital of Provence, most Americans know little about Marseille. Perhaps recalling The French Connection, they envision a corrupt backwater seething with gangsters and drug lords. Indeed, few cities have such a long-standing reputation for louche behavior and organized crime. In the 30s, the French themselves called it "Chicago-sur-Mer."  

When confronted with the news of my imminent departure, many of my friends issued frantic, and absurd, warnings. Watch out for thieves, kidnappers, white slave traders. Sailors will drop Mickey Finns into your drinks, then pocket your passport and you'll be picked up by the police and subjected to tortures not even hinted at in Midnight Express. Others questioned my taste. What appeal did that seamy metropolis have when more sophisticated playpens like Cannes, St. Tropez and Monte Carlo were merely a stone's throw away? 

Well, blame it on Marcel Pagnol. Ever since I first began studying French in high school, I'd been charmed by his novels, in particular the trilogy, Marius, Fanny and Cesar, that captures the plucky lives of the sailors, fishermen and their wives who live in and around the Vieux Port. I'd listen to Noel Coward's song, "Matelot", about mischievous French mariners, and be swept away. The works of Jean Genet, who lived for a spell among Marseille's pickpockets, drag queens and prostitutes, also inspired me, as did M.F.K. Fisher's fascinating gastronomic chronicle, A Considerable Town.   

But atmosphere wasn't the only lure. George Sand had courted scandal to come here with her consumptive lover, Fredéric Chopin, so he could take in the healthy air. Cézanne, Braque and Renoir made pilgrimages here to paint, seduced by the port's shimmering light. Le Corbusier came to prove his theory that "God is in the details" by building his stunning landmark of urban design, La Cité Radieuse.  

As for myself, I longed to explore the city's ancient Greek ruins, drown myself in bouillabaisse, sniff Pernod (I'd long ago quit drinking), toss boules under cloudless skies with young toughs I imagined would resemble Alain Delon. I had to see Alcazar, the nightclub in which Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour had risen to stardom; to hear the daring municipal Opéra where Placido Domingo and Leonie Rysanek had made their European debuts, and where audiences were known to boo performers they disliked for thirty minutes at a stretch. I desired to delve into the mystery that is Marseille, to experience its strange, exotic magic.  

My first impression upon arriving at Aéroport de Marignane, however, was one of disappointment. Everything was so pristine.  So clean! Where was the seediness I'd been cautioned against? I hailed a taxi, a comfortable Mercedes, and climbed aboard. The cab driver -- not exactly Alain Delon, but definitely handsome -- responded to my questions, posed in rusty French, with amiable answers in equally fractured English. He told me that Marseille was a great place to live but he wouldn't want to visit it. I was taken aback.  "There's no nightlife," he said. "Everything shuts down early, not like New York." But what about the Alcazar? "Closed."

This was disconcerting. My driver asked me if I wanted to view some of the sights before I got to my hotel. Bien sûr! We tore off, barreling across a causeway that hugged the shore. Outside my window, along the Quai de la Joliette, I gazed at gigantic cargo ships moored at fittingly immense loading docks. Intricate cranes towered high above the azure sea. Alain explained that this was the newer commercial port, built in the mid-1800s to supplement the shallower old port in town. Off to my left were warehouses that had been divided up and transformed into luxury apartments. We sped past tiny pastel-colored villages, each with its own fountain and outdoor cafe. Nothing here was as gentrified as similar enclaves along the Riviera, but they had an authenticity and unpretentious beauty that was lacking in many of those more commercialized spots. The slanted tiled roofs had a quirky appeal; everything was slightly askew. In a flash, I could see why Braque is credited with having invented Cubism here while visiting the fishing village L'Estaque. He simply painted what he saw.

       We raced through a tunnel and came out in the city's core, the Vieux Port, a narrow inlet packed tightly with brightly-colored yachts and sailboats, whose tall, pennant-bearing masts undulated and crisscrossed like giant pick-up sticks above the waves. When our car stopped briefly at the Quai des Belges, at the north end of the port, I asked my driver to wait a moment while I stepped outside. Fishermen were selling that day's catch on the dock. I could literally taste the biting brine of the sea.  The aroma of pine nut tea pervaded the air. A warm breeze flowed in from the south. The heavily trafficked square was framed by banks of old hotels, most notably the Pullman-Beauvau, which I recalled, had been George Sand's favorite hideaway. Catty-cornered to that was a newer establishment: The Tonic Hotel, with sleek, neon lighting. 

         All around me, the crowds were manageable; the denizens gracious and civilized. And what variety! Men in leather motorcycle jackets mingled with women in veils. Turbans alternated with berets. Sophisticates drove by in Range Rovers and Jeeps, dodging trams and swarms of bicycles. On the plaza, old women draped in black, tossed bits of baguettes to pigeons bathing in a fountain. Across the way, a giant ferryboat disgorged passengers returning from a cruise to North Africa.

Everywhere I turned my head, I saw something totally unanticipated. But the image that struck me most profoundly was Notre Dame de la Garde, a cathedral situated high on a hill to the East, topped by a gilded statue of a woman and child. "That's La Bonne Mère," Alain told me as I got back in the cab. "She watches over the city." The Virgin Mary sculpture reminded me vaguely of the Statue of Liberty, but here the effect was slightly pagan, exuding maternal affection and warmth, not monumental aloofness.  

Passing along the port, we drove via the Corniche John F. Kennedy until we reached my hotel, Le Petit Nice. Perched on a rocky promontory thrust into the sea, the inn had once been the villa of a famous opera singer. I had been expecting something out of The Night of the Iguana, but Le Petit Nice turned out to be a surprisingly chic little enclave with a balustrade terrace, swimming pool and circular parking area. My room, a small immaculate space with contemporary furnishings, offered endless views of mountainous shores, seaside villas and clear blue water. Even in early fall, the temperature was warm enough to leave my balcony windows wide open. Off in the distance, I could see a trio of arid islands, the Friouls. On one stood the ruins of Chateau d'If, the medieval fortress where Alexandre Dumas had set The Count of Monte Cristo.  

After unpacking, I called the one person whose number I had in Marseille, a student named Philippe whom a contact had recommended as a good guide. Luckily, Philippe was home and arranged to meet me later that afternoon to show me the town. But first lunch beckoned. Le Petit Nice is well-known in Provence for its Michelin-rated two star restaurant, Le Passedat. Sited on a bluff overlooking the sea, Le Passedat specializes in Provencal cuisine: aioli, bourride, daurade à la creme d'oursins. The decor is extremely simple, but the food is elegantly presented, and delicious. Outside the restaurant's large picture windows, fishermen were scaling the rocks that lined the shore, while risk-seeking swimmers dived in the choppy waves. What struck me inside was the serious air of the clientele. Here not a foreign word was spoken, not a tourist was in sight. These were locals who took to their plates with the relish of dedicated connoisseurs.  

Philippe arrived a little after six. A tall blond with classic Gallic good looks, he was in his mid-20s and casually dressed in gym clothes. He explained that he worked at a fitness club in his spare time. As we rode into town, Philippe took it upon himself to act as my guide, educating me about the city's rich history. He shared the legend of Protis, a Greek from Phocea, who founded the ancient city Massalia in 600 BC. Later, he explained, Mary Magdalene allegedly settled here, too, bringing Christianity to Europe. I had expected a bit more small talk, but Philippe seemed intent on conveying his deep sense of pride, his fierté for his native city. If the tables had been turned, would I have spoken so knowledgeably about New York? 

But as I soon learned, civic pride is very much a local trait. The Marseillais have always evinced a passionate, patriotic spirit, one not easily subdued. Louis XIV declared that the port's cannons should face the city rather than the harbor, since the populace itself was his greatest threat. During WWII, the Germans razed a large section of the old city, in a brutal, and ultimately failed, attempt at eliminating the Resistance. And during the French Revolution, of course, the city's rousing marching song, La Marseillaise, became the national anthem -- an irony not lost upon a people who for centuries have had to put up with snobbish Parisians looking down their noses at them because of their thick Provencal accents and penchant for pastis.

One didn't have to be Parisian, I realized, to underestimate Marseille. We parked the car close by the Cours Honore d'Estienne D'Orves, a public square that only recently had been a parking garage. But that convenience wisely had been moved underground, opening up the spacious plaza to pedestrians and cafe lovers. It is now the city's hub, teeming with young men and women, sipping drinks, smoking Gitanes and laughing noisily. It reminded me of Nice's crowded Cours Saleya, but there was nothing touristy or artificial about this meeting place. Crossing the Cours, we stopped by Les Arcenaulx, owned by local publisher Jeanne Laffitte. Her shop, featuring books on the arts and travel, was a noted center of intellectual and political discussions, but also contained a highly popular restaurant and salon de thé. The energy was more Latin, it seemed to me, than French -- yet the food was the essence of Midi.  

After dinner Philippe and I walked over to the Bar de la Marine, the timeless landmark that had played such a prominent role in Marcel Pagnol's trilogy. I had recently watched Marius, filmed in the 30s by Alexander Korda, and was delighted to see that very little had changed in the bar's decor. The funny murals, tiled floor and spiral staircase were still there. The droll little ferryboat, across the way, that shuttles passengers between the two sides of the port, is still there too. The distance it travels is no more than 500 meters, but that doesn't stop natives from treating it as a sacred ritual. Afterwards, Philippe and I snaked through maze-like backstreets lined with bistros and bars, many of which were no bigger than shoeboxes. Some of these, I soon gathered, were places of ill repute -- garishly painted women leaned against beaded doorways, lewdly inviting us to come inside for a drink. 

 Philippe and I walked along Rue Moliere, past the Opéra, an architectural jewel on a small public square. After checking out that week's schedule (I was not surprised to see that Marseille was performing "Lady Macbeth From Mtensk," a rarely heard masterpiece by Shostakovich), we slipped into O' Stop, a spot popular with opera lovers who come from all over Europe to take in Marseille's unusual productions. Here the mood was ecstatic; the laughter contagious, with pictures of famous opera stars on the wall. Philippe told me he'd once seen Dame Gwyneth Jones in here, enjoying a late sandwich with friends after an endless night singing Wagner.  

Back outside, I was losing my sense of direction, but Philippe assured me the port was just a block behind us. He led me along Rue Beauvau to a non-descript speakeasy called MP. Here one had to announce oneself at the door, before disappearing into its dark interior. A large crowd of young men was smoking up a storm. A few women were shooting pool in the back. Murky music videos were being played on TV screens over the bar. This was the local gay hangout, Philippe explained. I couldn't help notice the irony in the situation. I had fantasized for years about Marseille’s scandalous nightlife -- and here I was in a club that was no more raucous than an Elks Lodge.  

Around midnight, we headed up La Canebière, the world famous boulevard that English sailors had nicknamed "Can O' Beer." After years of steady decline, the major artery was finally experiencing a comeback as upscale art galleries, restaurants and cinemas have sprung up. Late at night, the energy was electric. Many of the cafes were crowded with college students and young couples having a late drink. But even a newcomer like me could see that it has a way to go before it recaptures its former glory.  

As we walked along the port, Philippe and I talked more about Marseille. I asked him pointed questions about the terrible things I'd heard over the years. Where were all the sleazy sailors, drug lords and thieves?  He laughed and explained that ever since the collapse of French colonialism, the port had diminished in prominence, if not size, and the city no longer had as many international sailors roaming its streets. Organized crime had given up its stranglehold on the city after the collapse of Communism in the Eastern Bloc since the bulk of the drug trade had moved further east to Poland and Berlin. 

         Later, Philippe's comments were affirmed by other Marseillais, who were amused and bewildered by the false impression I, and other Americans they had met, had of their city. If anything, Marseille is redoubling its efforts to attract tourism. The subway is finally finished, and running smoothly. The beaches have been enlarged; boardwalks and parks developed. The famous Gare St. Charles and its grand stone stairway has been renovated, making an entrance by train an unforgettable experience. Behind the Hotel de Ville, where recently yet another ancient ship was unearthed, plans are underway to restore the plaza destroyed by the Nazis.   

 But I was troubled by a swastika I'd seen spray-painted on a road sign earlier that day. I asked Philippe if Marseilles were succumbing to a tide of anti-immigrant hysteria as elsewhere in Europe. With nearly a million people, Philippe explained, Marseille has more than its share of ethnic tensions. The neighborhood Belsunce is home to les maghrebins, immigrants from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. But the city also houses numerous Orthodox Jews, Middle Eastern Arabs, Africans from Ghana and Senegal, Corsicans, Vietnamese, Chinese and Armenians. When France gave up its colonies, many pieds noirs came back here to live. The eclectic mix is a melting pot that is always in danger of boiling over with resentments. And yet, considering its size, Marseille has been spared the excessive violence that plagues so many European cities. In fact, according to the New York Times, it ranked twelfth among French cities in violent crime at that time.

That night, Philippe and I drove out of town, no more than a couple of miles really, but very quickly the terrain changed from urban to rural. We turned into a dirt road that slashed through a ravine and descended steep hills bracketed with brush until we came to an open space carved out amid high cliffs. Philippe explained that this was one of Marseille's celebrated calanques, or limestone coves. The coastline as far east as Cassis is carved out with thousands of these natural formations, rich with wildlife and challenging terrain for rock climbers. Many of the calanques feature fishing cottages decorated with hanging plants, flowering vines and gardens. This was a side to Marseille I had never even dreamed of.  

The next week flew by in a flurry of activity. I went back to the calanques during the day to enjoy the sun. I attended the Opera, a concert of Cameroon drummers, a comedy cabaret. Philippe and I dined at Patalain, a superb restaurant run by a charming chef named Suzanne Quaglia. Guidebooks in hand, I explored L'Abbaye Saint-Victor, a noble 9th century sanctuary, noted for its early Christian and Greek crypts; Musee Cantini, a former 19th-century hotel particulier now filled with contemporary art and faience, and Le Cours Julien, an area for avant-garde theater and trendy restaurants that turns into a lively antique book fair on weekends. My favorite area was Le Panier (or "breadbasket"), the city's oldest neighborhood, marked by narrow, steep streets and unusual architectural landmarks, such as La Vieille Charité, a magnificent 17th century baroque hospice designed by Pierre Puget, a Marseille native. Its four gracefully arched loggias embrace a beautiful chapel with an egg-shaped cupola.  

One afternoon, alone, I roamed the labyrinthine streets of Marseille's exotic Belsunce neighborhood, the Arab district located within a triangle formed by La Canebière, Rue d'Aix and Boulevard d'Athènes. Here I saw sights one might expect to find in Morocco: street vendors selling live chickens, wild boars dangling from hooks, white-washed mosques, and outdoor bazaars displaying vegetables and spices whose names in English I don't even know. Above me through shuttered yellow windows, I could hear the shrill cries of a young girl singing, or ululating. She was preparing, I was later told, for an upcoming wedding. At Place Jules Guesde, site of the city's Arc de Triomphe (a smaller version of the one in Paris), Africans dressed in colorful caftans and tribal costumes were hawking costume jewelry, carved sculptures and incense. On Cours Belsunce, I passed by the defunct Alcazar theatre, now nothing more than a graffiti-covered shell. There were plans of converting it into a department store. [It later was incorporated as the entrance to a towering sleek new library.] 

        Finally at the famous Gare St. Lazare, I paused for a cup of espresso. Standing on its grand staircase at sunset, I watched as the quarter's faded rose-stone walls were bathed in a fiery orange glow. Spread out before me was the vast skyline of the city, cascading down to the sea. I've been all over France, from Mont St. Michel to the Pyrenees, but I'd never seen anything to rival this for sheer dramatic intensity.   

Threading my way through Marseille’s myriad neighborhoods, many of which could definitely use a splash of fresh paint, I was constantly reminded of something Philippe pointed out. In Marseille, one must never judge by externals -- an hotel particulier might seem on the brink of ruin, but behind its shabby exterior lies a lavishly appointed home with a private courtyard and garden. Circling the Place Castellane are dozens of haute bourgeois mansions whose stone and brick facades are fading, but the families inside still prosper. Outside town, the rich live in crumbling bastides with expansive gardens overlooking the sea.  

The next morning, I visited La Treille ("the Trellis"), the hilltop village near Aubagne that Pagnol brought so vividly to life as Les Bastides Blanches in his novels Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs. Having seen the recent film versions by Claude Berri, I was enchanted to find that here too nothing has changed. The village fountain sits where it was, and men still gather under an arbor to play pétanque. They looked like santons, the little clay figurines popular in Marseille's yearly folk festivals, come to life. Winding my way up the dusty steep streets, I was greeted by half a dozen dogs, petted a few stray horses, and admired the sanctity of the jumbled medieval houses, many decorated with bright lavender shutters and flowering trellises.  

One of the villagers in La Treille, an old man with the gravelly voice of a seasoned raconteur, took me to see Pagnol's grave in a small cemetery at the base of the mountain. He had known Pagnol personally, he told me, as he swept some leaves off the tombstone. They'd been close friends, and had worked together on the original film versions of Pagnol's rustic fables. "Nothing has changed," he assured me, indicating the olive groves, the rolling hills and the cemetery. "Marseille will always be the same." 

"Marseille?" I asked, somewhat confused. My guide pointed to a street sign that read IXème Arr. I was astonished to discover that we were still inside the city's limits. I turned to look behind me. Off in the distance, I could just make out a sliver of blue, the Mediterranean, and set into that, like a gemstone, was the port. The moment was uncanny, but it's the one that comes closest to describing the strange spell cast by Marseille. A city that time has ignored, it retains a joyful eccentricity while everything else on the Côte d'Azur is being over-commercialized and made commonplace. Yes, Marseille remains a mystery, but not the one I expected. Rather, it's a place that stays with you, like memories of a good friend, long after you've said "au revoir." 

Architect of the Moon

  by Brooks Peters

Whenever I’m feeling unusually crotchety and/or particularly misanthropic (which is more often than I’d care to admit these days) I pick up a copy of John Fothergill’s infamous 1931 memoir, An Innkeeper's Diary, recounting his days as the proprietor of the Spread Eagle at Thame, one of the in-est inns in England at the time. His exceptional blend of bitchiness, vitriol and snobbery always smooths my rougher edges, and reminds me that subscribing to very high standards is often a recipe for disappointment and disillusionment, if not outright hostility. But more often than not, it’s a ticket to hilarity.

For Fothergill’s exploits as the original “host with the most” are exceptionally funny. He turned the eternally sleepy Spread Eagle into one of the most famous hotels in England, if not the world. Evelyn Waugh memorialized it in Brideshead Revisited as the inn Blanche and Ryder sneak away to in Thame (pronounced ‘tame’). Waugh told Fothergill (shot at top, by Angus Bean) that he was “Oxford’s only civilizing influence.” Fothergill implored him for more of  “his Waugh stories.” Sir John Gielgud praised it as his favorite hotel. H. G. Wells came for weeks at a time to write and had his own room. J. B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole, Max Beerbohm, Lord and Lady Colefax are all names the owner drops as he details the inn’s “petty domestic vacuities.” For ten years it drew an illustrious and diverse crowd, ranging from beauties Hermione Baddeley and Princess Galatzine to the Aga Khan and Field Marshal Jan Smuts. Some came for the food and the ambiance, others to marvel at Fothergill’s eccentric personality.

A curmudgeon and an obsessed puritan, Fothergill was not just any old snob. He was the ne plus ultra. Sporting knee breeches, a dark green “over-garment that has been described as a cross between a page boy’s and a parson’s,” a flamboyant foulard, an Eton collar, buckled shoes, and a lorgnette that dangled on a black cord down to his navel, he inevitably cut a curious, if romantic figure. In summer, he favored a suit of white duck. Craggy-browed and quick with the barbed bon mot, Fothergill was a dandy out of the age of aesthetes. But that is not surprising considering his background.

Born in Kent, England in 1876, John Rowland Fothergill was part of a long line of Lakeland gentry, descended from Norman barons, deeded land by William the Conqueror. His mother died when he was only two days old, and although his father remarried, he remained aloof and cold. Fothergill was bullied and caned as a boy at the Old College in Windermere, a cause against which he became a fanatic later in life, writing heated letters to the Times denouncing corporal punishment. He attended public school at Bath College in Cumbria, then studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, before dropping out after one term, having flunked his exams.

Fothergill quickly fell into a smart crowd surrounding Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s close friend. At that early age, Fothergill was strikingly handsome, with a notable élan. Wilde, who cherished being in his company, called him the “architect of the moon” for reasons that escape me, but I sense it had something to do with his dark, mysterious looks and perhaps a penchant for late night romance. Whether Fothergill was intimate with either Ross or Wilde is not exactly clear, although it’s hinted at by some biographers, including himself. He claimed that he was “mauled over” by various men while at Oxford, but managed to fend them off. He liked to play his own revelations close to his chest. Unlike other acolytes, who turned their backs on Wilde, Fothergill remained loyal to his former mentor after the playwright’s disgrace, staying in touch with him during his painful exile in France.

From Oxford, Fothergill went to Leipzig to study art, then the Slade School of Art. He became friends with artists Augustus John, Walter Sickert and author Reginald Turner. At some point he traveled to Greece and immersed himself in antiquities. He penned an English translation of Emanuel Lowy’s The Rendering of Nature in Greek Art and contributed on art to the famed 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I first learned of Fothergill by reading David Sox’s fascinating biography Bachelors of Art about Edward Perry Warren and the homophile-inclined Lewes House brotherhood, a fraternity of art enthusiasts and experts. Warren had been a primary source for the antiquities purchased by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as well as the owner of the much-coveted and controversial “Warren Cup,” a Roman drinking vessel that depicts explicit homoerotic scenes. In 1898, with the backing of William Rothenstein, Fothergill opened the Carfax Gallery of art in Oxford, where he catered to a sophisticated clientele.

Fothergill seemed destined for a life as an aesthete, or at least a dilettante, surrounded by his gay artist friends. But something happened. He turned his back on the world of art and archaeology, and went straight. He married Doris Elsa Henning. But the marriage was a disaster from the start and ended abruptly. Fothergill suffered a nervous collapse. Finding himself, at 46, a broken man with few prospects, he was, as he says in his memoir, “counselled to take an inn.” In 1922, he and a new wife, Kate Headley Kirby, heard about a place near Oxford called The Spread Eagle in Thame that was “very shabby but very possible.” Fothergill asked his friend Lady Pollock to go vet the space for him. She approved and he pulled together the money he needed and bought the lease.

For a man of his status and class in 1930s England, this was a rather outré step. But it proved to be a perfect fit. For Fothergill thrived at cooking, gardening, keeping house, catering to his often distinguished guests’ wishes. He used his skills as a gallery owner to create a vivid backdrop for his services, filling the space with his own prized antiques, paintings and decorations. One of his strokes of genius was to ask Dora Carrington to paint the sign outdoors, topping a lamppost. He channeled his enthusiasm for fine wine into creating one of the finest wine cellars in the area, and crafted a menu that focused on what he called “real food” — not the usual hotel fare of prepared meals, but an ever changing menu of tavern standards such as jugged hare or saddle of mutton, mixed with then exotic French dishes, and fanciful desserts such as “lemon flummery,” an 18th-century dish.

Soon the Spread Eagle became one of the best known eateries in England, luring literary swells as well as the titled set (from Great Britain and as far as India). London’s “Bright Young Things” descended in droves, as did writers Rebecca West, L. P. Hartley, G. B. Stern, H. R. Barbor, Elizabeth Bowen, C. K. Chesterton, E. M. Delafield, Storm Jameson, Evelyn Waugh and the Sitwells. Alan Pryce-Jones and Peter Watson were regulars. Romaine Brooks, an early friend, painted his portrait (below).

What had been a run-down country inn soon became the country crash pad of high society. But not everyone was welcome. Fothergill had not shed his aesthetic standards. If a customer was “ill-shaped, ugly or ill-dressed,” he was known to snub them and to charge them an added fee, what he dubbed “face-money.” Fothergill defended the policy by arguing that most establishments charge the beautiful and famous extra, so he was only reversing the practice.

But it wasn’t only the unattractive that he disapproved of. Fothergill was outraged by lewd or common behavior. If students from Oxford came in and proceeded to get drunk and cause a ruckus, he threw them out and told them never to return, unless of course they were attractive. One of the delights of reading Fothergill’s first book An Innkeeper’s Diary is the offhand way he mentions the good looks of the young men who frequent his establishment, such as the Marquess of Graham: “the most beautiful youth we’ve had here.” You often have to read between the lines but it’s clear when he’s entranced by a boy. His wife is slaving away in the kitchen or the office, while Fothergill is sharing a pint with some comely Adonis or an old Oxford mate such as Harold Acton whom he praises for his timeless wit and literary style.

He also seems to have had a fetish for especially tall men, for whom he often offered a free pint. He kept a tally of them, with a measuring stick, marking their heights on a wall. (This record keeping is even more remarkable since Fothergill refused to keep a hotel register for over eight years, a fact that became embarrassingly apparent when the police came one day to check up on a suspect.) But beauty did not always guarantee special treatment. One boy who mistakenly ordered a pint of Angostura, thinking it was an aperitif, was given it and made to drink it. Another fellow who demanded steak, even though it wasn’t on the menu, had to endure a stringy tough cut of beef that Fothergill ordered directly from the butcher to punish the brute.

Some of the funniest passages have to do with Fothergill’s rabid distaste for travelers who stopped in merely to use the lavatory. Even though it was common practice among inns at the time to offer this service, as part of an arrangement with the automobile touring association, Fothergill was determined to make it as unpleasant for these uninvited guests as possible. If they hadn’t personally approached him to thank him for his hospitality, he would follow them outside, berate them publicly, insult them and tell them never to set foot in his hotel again. Often if they slipped out before he could get to them, he would take down their license numbers and write them a scathing letter. Eventually Fothergill canceled his membership in the auto club to prevent people from complaining to it about him. The travel writer Hilary Rubinstein wrote that Fothergill “had no capacity to cloak his feelings.” One time he asked one of these intruders, a rather grand lady, for her home address “in case I need a pumpship when I’m passing your home.”

Whether a pose or not, it makes for fun reading and Fothergill’s first book flew off the shelves, becoming a bestseller in England. The loony loo bits guaranteed it notoriety. “Robbie Ross said that the Englishman,” Fothergill wrote, “went about pretending that he didn’t empty himself.” So it struck a chord with readers and became everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure. Perhaps, too, people responded to its cantankerous spirit. “Snobbery is after all a universal emotion,” Fothergill wrote.

In a sequel written in 1938, Confessions of an Innkeeper, Fothergill described the Diary as “that nasty little book.” But it had put him on the map. He stayed at the Spread Eagle for ten years. But his lack of any real business sense was his undoing. When he bought the place, he paid 1400 pounds for the furnishings alone, then sold them for 85. He was flippant and willful, and overspent frequently on food. “I can not get enough money out of the place to educate children or to have anything in hand to retire upon.” No doubt his wife must have had the patience of Job, a biblical figure Fothergill quotes in his book. Nor were the royalties on his books sufficient to keep the place going. He sold it at a loss after ten years, then took over the Royal Hotel Ascot, a white elephant that proved insurmountable. He left there after a tortured year, then landed on his feet at the Three Swans in Market Harborough, below, which he maintained until he retired at the age of 77. He died in 1957 at 81.

In 1943 he penned a cookbook, and along the way also managed to find time to write a book on rare plants for the garden. One of his more peculiar creations was Mr. Fothergill’s Plot, a mystery based on an idea of his own, written in consortium by fourteen of his famous literary friends, including Chesterton, West, Stern and Hartley. His last book, in 1949, was a compendium entitled My Three Inns. While amusing and fun to read, it lacks the punch of his first book. And it is for the Diary alone that Fothergill will be remembered. One reviewer, he says, “called me a systematic browbeater, and a clown, and implied that I was a fraud and a cad.” What it boiled down to, he argued, was simple prejudice since they didn’t like “the cut of my hair.”

Fothergill’s flaming personality certainly raised a few eyebrows. When he chastised an unmarried journalist who came to stay with his lady friend, complaining about his immoral liaison, the journalist shot back that Fothergill held to a double standard since he didn’t object when two “male friends” shared a room. The implication was obvious. Likewise a young man he particularly admired who’d been caught sneaking a girl into his room and had been dragged out on the carpet for it the next day, said “If Mr. Fothergill hints at a male friend surely he wouldn’t mind a female one.” But part of what makes Fothergill an intriguing character is that he did indeed mind. One can’t help suspect that he was put out more from jealousy than any high moral dudgeon, and no doubt the venom that leaked so divinely from his pen was due in no small part to his own self-hatred.

There’s a telling moment in one of Fothergill’s sequels to the Diary, after he’d left the Spread Eagle and took over The Three Swans in Market Harborough. His son Johnny was telling an Oxford chum about having grown up there and the friend carelessly said, “Didn’t a closet write a book about that place?” To which Johnny responded, “Yes, indeed. I am the son of that closet.” In Britain, “closet” means “toilet” but it could also be inferred here to mean “closet case.” Like many other famous “closet cases,” Fothergill channeled his queer sensibilities into his work, creating an unusual atmosphere of good taste, excellence and idiosyncratic charm, and a diary that Nigel Nicolson assured him would remain a valuable volume in people’s libraries for years to come. 

The Mystery of Emily Vanderbilt

Every now and then, when I least suspect it, I will stumble across a name that for some reason begins to pop up repeatedly, almost uncannily, in the works I'm reading at that moment. Very often it's a name I am unfamiliar with up until then. Then suddenly there's no escaping it. Such an occurrence has just happened to me with the name Emily Vanderbilt, a figure whose beautiful and sometimes scandalous presence crops up unexpectedly in books, articles and works by or about such literary figures as Thomas Wolfe, E. E. Cummings, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Mercedes de Acosta and Dashiell Hammett, all of which I've been dipping my toe into recently. It's almost as if the hand of fate were poking a finger at me, demanding that I take notice. Well, I have taken notice, and I like what I see. Emily Vanderbilt is a fascinating enigma.

During her glamorous yet often troubled life, Emily Vanderbilt in fact had many names. Her birth name was Emily O'Neill Davies. She was the daughter of Frederick Martin Davies, a wealthy New York banker, broker and noted horseman, who raised his family in a large private house at 20 E. 82nd Street. Her mother, also named Emily O'Neill Davies, was the daughter of Daniel O'Neill, the wealthy editor and owner of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. When Daniel O'Neill died in 1877, leaving a fortune valued at $8,000,000, his wife Emma (nee Seely) married his brother, Eugene M. O'Neill, who took over the paper. Some reports describe Emily Vanderbilt as the granddaughter of Eugene O'Neill, but she was not. An 1880 census clearly states that her mother was the "stepdaughter" of Eugene. (Not to be confused with the famous playwright of the same name.)

The Frederick Martin Davies family lived in high style at their posh Manhattan manse. In the 1880 census they are shown to have had ten servants: a parlor maid, waitress, cook, kitchen maid, two chambermaids, two nurses, a laundress and a lady's maid. Young Emily grew up in a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, summering in Southampton, wintering in Palm Beach, weekending in Newport, and gallivanting among the glitterati in Manhattan's upper crust. It was a life of extreme luxury at the height of the gilded age.

Frederick Martin Davies was the cousin of Bradley and Townsend Martin, and best friend of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. Ironically, Davies died the day before Vanderbilt set sail on the ill-fated Lusitania and lost his life. So it seemed a fitting twist of fate that in a fairy tale wedding at Grace Church in Manhattan in 1923, Davies' beautiful young daughter Emily would marry Vanderbilt's son, William H. Vanderbilt III. 

That marriage seemed, at least in the society-mad press, to be a storybook romance. But it did not fare well. They moved to Boston and Oakland Farm in Portsmouth, near Newport, which Vanderbilt had inherited in his father's will along with $5,000,000. A daughter also named Emily was born in 1924. Three years later, William and Emily split up in a divorce that took only six minutes in court to implement. Emily claimed William had failed to provide. He was rumored to be cruel and over-protective. Some have speculated that he hired detectives to follow his wife who may have been having an affair with a handsome young theatre producer named Sigourney Thayer. In the end, Vanderbilt was granted custody of the child, permitting Emily to see her daughter only three months out of the year. William Vanderbilt III married Anne Colby, started a bus company in Newport, then went on to become a State Senator, and ultimately Governor of Rhode Island. He died in 1981. 

On December 7, 1928, Emily became Mrs. Sigourney Thayer. An Amherst grad, Thayer was a dashing figure in New York theatrical circles. His father was William Greenough Thayer, headmaster of St. Mark's, a prep school. When they wed the Times quipped that he was a "spasmodic theatrical producer, wartime aviator, Atlantic Monthly poet, socially prominent jokesmith." Thayer dressed like a dandy and had a thin Proustian mustache. The marriage was a surprise to friends who didn't think she took the affair that seriously, but perhaps she felt that it would be too big a loss to give up her daughter for nothing more than a youthful indiscretion. She gave legitimacy to the relationship, but the marriage didn't last. Both agreed it was a mistake and they divorced a year later. 

Emily Vanderbilt Thayer led a gay social life in Paris and was drawn quickly into literary circles. She aspired to be a writer and critic, and surrounded herself with writers. She knew Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and befriended dancers from the Ballets Russes. At a party hosted by Muriel Draper, she encountered E. E. Cummings. He found her, according to one source, "blonde, statuesque, charming and gorgeous." They had a two-month affair. She soon fell for Thomas Wolfe whom she met through Aline Bernstein. Emily "tried to make him" according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who followed her comings and goings with a fascinated eye. She would write Wolfe urgent notes written in a childish scrawl, begging to see him. Wolfe reportedly was astonished by her beauty and seductive charms, but was wary of her insolence and sexually aggressive ways. He found her "fundamentally trivial." Wolfe's biographer David H. Donald says he was "disgusted by her systematic and rather dogged experience of the life of degeneracy and refused to join her in smoking opium." He detested her gigolo Raymonde, "a bad Valentino." Worse, she paraded Wolfe among her friends as someone "madly in love with her." He fled to Rouen. Wolfe eventually used Emily as the character Amy Carlton in his novel You Can't Go Home Again. Fitzgerald praised his description of her "cracked grey eyes," and "exactly reproduced speech", as "simply perfect." 

Emily didn't limit her affairs to male writers. She was apparently a frequent figure in the lesbian demi-monde, dominated by Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes. According to Zelda Fitzgerald biographer Sally Cline, Emily may have been bisexual. She was close friends with Dolly Wilde, the notorious niece of Oscar Wilde, as well as Mercedes de Acosta, another social butterfly who achieved fame by her dalliances with great writers and celebrities.  I found a ship record for the two of them traveling together aboard the Olympic from France to New York in 1929. On it, Emily gave her birthday as August 10, 1903. Mercedes claimed to be 30, born in 1899, although she was actually six years older. At the time Emily maintained a home at 176 E. 75th St.  

During this period, as the Jazz Age reached a fever pitch before the inevitable plunge, Emily seemed to get swept up in the decadence of cafe society, flouncing around with a bunch of expatriate socialites who'd come to live it up in Europe. Zelda Fitzgerald said that she "was sorry for her. She seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill." Scott, hoping to bolster Zelda's spirits, who was jealous of Emily's sophisticated allure, dismissed her in a letter as someone who "could not dance a Brahms waltz, or write a story. She can only gossip and ride in the Bois and have pretty hair curling up instead of thinking." Scott may have been projecting his own sense of insecurity among the very rich. Thomas Wolfe considered him a social-climber. Fitzgerald had an affair with Emily in 1930, when his Zelda was in Prangins recovering from a breakdown. But it didn't amount to much. Fitzgerald later wrote that she "was too big a poisson for me." He remained fascinated by her, however. Both he and Zelda kept clippings about her in their scrapbooks.

Emily in fact did have higher dreams than just being a party girl. She wrote books and articles but never tried to get them published. Asked if she would ever write for publication, she coyly answered: "I will tell you in twenty years." In 1929 it was announced that she would become a reader for the publishing firm Horace Liveright (one of the foremost houses in publishing at that time). Lillian Hellman first took note of Emily Vanderbilt at the 1934 opening night party of her first play The Children's Hour, which was about a lesbian scandal in a girl's school. Hellman described her as a "a handsome, boyish-looking woman" seen at every literary cocktail party. Judging by photos of Emily taken by Arthur Genthe in this period (see above), she was strikingly good-looking, with a vague resemblance to Amelia Earhart.

Emily's interest in literature was serious and well-informed. It might explain her marriage in 1933 to the noted mystery writer Raoul Whitfield. One of the big names at Black Mask magazine, a pulp that published Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and defined the "hard-boiled" genre, Whitfield was a handsome  former aviator who fought in World War One and won a Croix de Guerre for distinguished service. One biographer described him as sporting a "cane, elegant leather gloves and a silk scarf around his neck, looking aloof and imperious. His mustache is carefully trimmed, his dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle. Every inch the gentleman." His family traveled abroad when he was young and he was raised partly in the Philippines. 

His photo, which appeared in Argosy magazine, shows a swarthy figure with exotic features, exotic at least to the WASP social circles Emily had been born into. His middle name was Falconia but he used the name Raoul Fauconniere Whitfield when describing himself. He was something of a mystery himself, and remains so to his most devoted fans. Throughout his life he held many odd jobs, including fire fighter in the Sierra Madre range, a bond salesman in Pittsburgh, and a newspaper reporter. He even tried his hand at acting in silent films. Widely considered one of the best of the "hard-boiled" detective story writers, he was a close friend of Hammett's despite the fact that Hammett allegedly had an intimate affair with Whitfield's first wife Prudence Smith. 

Emily saw in the dashing Raoul a way out of her wayward existence in cafe society. She admired his writing ability and wrote a play with him called Mistral. But the marriage was tempestuous from the start. By this time she was drinking heavily and using sleeping pills at night. She became increasingly moody and difficult. Today she might be diagnosed as suffering from manic depression. They bought a rambling ranch in Las Vegas, New Mexico which they called Dead Horse. Here they raised cattle, built a polo field, a golf course and entertained friends from both coasts on a lavish scale. For a time they were happy but the marriage soon devolved into jealous rages and accusations of infidelity. Raoul was allegedly having an affair with a young local barmaid named Lois Bell. 

The final chapter in Emily's life reads like the climax of one of Whitfield's classic hard-boiled novels. Shortly after starting divorce action against Whitfield, Emily was found shot to death in her bedroom at the ranch on May 24, 1935. A hastily assembled coroner's jury found that she had committed suicide, despite the fact that the gun shot wound was on her lower left side and she was right-handed. The bullet, from a Colt .45, passed through her lungs and hit her heart. The New York Times reported that she had become "despondent after a conference yesterday on a divorce suit." Her friend Mrs. Virginia Haydon Stone was with her but did not spend the night. Emily retired at 11 PM. "The body, clothed in pajamas and a dressing robe, was found at 7:30 o'clock [the next] morning, on the bed, a revolver clutched in the outflung right hand." The body was discovered by an employee at the ranch. 

But almost immediately speculation grew that someone had killed Emily Vanderbilt Whitfield. Lillian Hellman did not mince words when she wrote later: "she was murdered...and neither the mystery story expert nor the police ever found the murderer." Whitfield was a prime suspect, even though he had proof that he was in California at the time of Emily's death. Some suspected he hired someone to kill her. For the rest of his life he lived under a cloud. He inherited a small fortune, then married Lois Bell and moved about constantly. He went through the fortune like a dose of salts. Adding to the tragedy was the suicide of his third wife, Lois Bell, who leapt from a hotel window in San Francisco in 1943. Raoul Whitfield's health deteriorated. He had tuberculosis, and was already hospitalized. Hammett, in a typically generous gesture, asked Hellman to send him a check for $500. Whitfield died in a military hospital on January 24, 1945. 

Not surprisingly, the story of Emily Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield has fascinated writers for 75 years. First because of who died, a beautiful very rich heiress. And second because her husband was a celebrated mystery writer and a dashing, romantic figure. Recently a novel based on the case has been published which delves into the mystery of her death and offers a very dramatic, yet plausible solution. Written by Walter Satterthwait, the novel is Dead Horse. I won't give away the ending, but it is utterly convincing. You can read more about it at the author's webiste. 

As for Emily's daughter, she was raised by her father William H. Vanderbilt. Nicknamed "Paddy," she married Jeptha Wade, an attorney, originally from Cleveland. They lived in Boston. 

Emily O'Neill Davies Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield may have been of a woman of many names, with three troubled marriages. But she was also a woman who defied the strictures of her age, a respected devotee in literary circles, a maverick who lived life on her own terms, and a mother who loved her daughter despite years of separation. Her legacy will linger on as a fascinating tragic muse. 

Death of a Flapper: Part Two

The brownstone in which Dot King died is of more than passing interest. In his memoirs, the great financier, Bernard Baruch, born in 1870, told of moving in 1881 with his family from South Carolina to 144 West 57th Street, where they holed up in a tiny attic room and were taken care of by an elderly landlady named Mrs. Jacobs.

Destined to become an immensely rich stock market speculator (an interesting career, considering the later denizens of 144 West 57th Street), Baruch may have been exaggerating his early poverty, and his living quarters. For the 1880 census clearly shows that this particular address was not a boarding house at all, but a private residence owned by H. L. Horton, a now-forgotten, but at the time, leading broker on Wall Street, who had extensive dealings with J. P. Morgan (the partner so closely-tied to E. T. Stotesbury.) It's possible that late in life Baruch got the address wrong (there was a boarding house a few doors further East), or maybe he simply didn't realize that he and his family were guests of the Hortons (Baruch's father had been a noted surgeon in the Civil War and not quite as poor as Baruch liked to paint him.)

Harry Lawrence Horton, the owner of 144 West 57th Street back then, was a typical Horatio Alger figure of the Gilded Age. Born in 1832, in Sheshequin, Pennsylvania, Horton started out as a clerk in a general store, then traveled out West to seek his fortune. He ended up a grain dealer in Milwaukee. His first wife, Nellie Breen, had died there in 1864, leaving two sons, Oliver and Eugene, both of whom later died at an early age, one vanishing at sea. Horton picked himself up, started over, and moved to New York in 1865 where he set up a brokerage house on Wall Street. He took as his second wife, a New Yorker, Sarah Patten, and had two daughters with her: Blanche (1879) and Grace (1881).

Horton first settled on Staten Island, in New Brighton, but relocated to 144 West 57th Street sometime in the 1870s. Horton later expanded the property by buying the house next door at 146, which had belonged to Thomas Tileston, another well-known broker. He combined the two structures, reconfigured the insides, added a lavish ballroom, and entertained often with his socially-inclined wife. They had at least five servants to run the house. Horton also bought the two lots behind his houses (139 and 141 West 56th Street), facing south. These included a carriage house and a hostelry. The lot was connected to the house on 57th Street by a long, narrow wooden shack. (The photo, below, shows the house at 139, the four-story at the center.) Ironically many years later I actually worked directly across the street from these buildings at 156 W. 56th Street, but paid no attention to them at the time.

Horton's daughter Blanche would marry one of her father's business acquaintances, a rising star from San Francisco by the name of E. F. Hutton. His office at 61 Broadway was right next to Horton's at 60. Hutton had not yet made his fortune, and no doubt, a marriage to Horton's daughter was a step-up the ladder for the ambitious businessman. The young couple wed in 1906 and lived at 144-146 West 57th Street, until old man Horton's death in 1915 (Sarah had died in 1899 in London). The Huttons had one child, a son, Halcourt. (As an interesting side note, Harry Horton was sued in 1905 by a woman named Elizabeth P. Berg, many years his junior, for breach of promise. She claimed he had told her he would marry her, but he reneged. The case was settled out of court.)

According to the terms of his will, Horton left the property to Blanche, while her sister Grace inherited $100,000. Grace had been wed quite young to Ernest M. Lockwood. But by the time of Dot's death, she was divorced from him, and had married Edwin F. Raynor, an automobile executive from a prominent New York family. It was probably through Edwin's influence that Grace Raynor bought a Simplex in 1914, one of the more fashionable cars of the day, popular among Vanderbilts and Morgans.

In 1917, Blanche and E. F. Hutton, above, decided to sell the property at 144-146. An announcement was made in the New York Times that the noted art gallery owner, Mitchell Kennerley, was going to buy it and move his enterprises there. (57th Street, by then, had become a fashionable center for art galleries and studios. The Art Society was just up the block.) But for some reason that deal fell through. Perhaps Kennerley had difficulty raising capital, or perhaps there was trouble with the deed. The Huttons also rented space to a furrier named Morris Schatz and later to Robert B. Mussman, who had a gallery of "paintings, etchings and mezzotints."

The same year that the Kennerley deal fell through, Hilma Louise Dunlap, a Swedish immigrant, rented the space on the ground floor of 146 and relocated her restaurant, the Yellow Aster Tea Room, which had originally been at 35th Street and Fifth, to 57th Street. Tea houses were all the rage in the Teens and '20s, and the Yellow Aster was one of the more popular. It's hard to tell from period photographs of the building's facade, which are murky and grainy, but it looks to me as if the restaurant occupied the ground floor of both buildings, and was entered by the door at 144 where the lobby was. Hilma Dunlap at some point also became the superintendent of 144-146 West 57th Street.

Blanche Hutton (bust, above) died very suddenly at the tail end of the flu epidemic in 1919 and E. F. Hutton inherited the property outright. How this must have sat with her younger sister, Grace, the Horton family's sole survivor, who'd grown up there, is open to speculation. The only clue I could find was a notice of a lawsuit between the Raynors and E. H. Hutton (his real estate holdings were called Nottuh; Hutton backwards) but I was unable to read the actual terms. I suspect they settled out of court.

Grace Horton Raynor, above, moved into 139 West 56th Street, the former carriage house behind her childhood home, and lived there throughout the 20s, devoting herself to sculpting, an art form she turned to, she explained in an interview, as a way to surmount her grief over the loss of Blanche. Her work soon gained recognition, and she received several key commissions. The building at 139, refitted with "housekeeping studios," became the hub of what appears to have been a madcap, bohemian artist community, including the well-known rhythm-dance instructor Ruth Doing, dancer Doris Canfield, opera singer Gail Gardner, photographer Delight Weston, as well as arts enthusiast Louise Bybee, all of whom lived there together and never married. (The Dance, below, by Delight Weston.)

E. F. Hutton didn't waste much time after Blanche's death to extend his rise to the top. He married cereal heiress Marjorie Meriweather Post, the recently divorced Mrs. Close (who had inherited roughly $20 million when her father, C. W. Post, died the year before). He moved to the East Side with her and bought an estate on Long Island's East End, where his son Halcourt died in 1920 after a fall during a horse-riding accident. (Death trailed E. F. Hutton a lot in those early years. But he and Marjorie, below, had a child themselves, the future actress, Dina Merrill.)

In 1920 Hutton sold the Horton property to the real estate developer Robert E. Simon, who had snatched up many of the other houses along that stretch of 57th Street under the name SIDEM Corp. He bought 150 West 57th Street in 1919, as well as rights to 148 (then owned by the Horace E. Garth family) and its back lots on 56th Street. Simon added the jewel in the crown, Carnegie Hall, to his holdings a year later, purchasing it from Carnegie's executors. According to a tribute to Simon I read, there were outcries at the time from those who feared he planned to demolish Carnegie Hall, a theme that would resurface in the 1980s when Isaac Stern once again "saved" it.

But Simon had bigger plans for his 57th Street lots, including the music hall, envisioning a skyscraper that would dominate the street, and house automobile showrooms, offices and apartments. (He also bought the stylish but somewhat faded Rembrandt next door to Carnegie Hall, one of the city's first apartment houses. It is now the site of Carnegie Tower. Next door, at 150 West 57th Street, then the Pupke residence, Fiat had its Manhattan office. One of the fashionable Strebeigh Twins, daughters of Mrs. Jerome Bonaparte, apparently ran it. That building would later become the famed Russian Tea Room, which is the only one of these brownstones still standing today.)

Back in the '20s, there had been feverish talk about building a massive bridge across the Hudson, above, at the end of 57th Street to Union City, New Jersey. Savvy developers like Simon (who was backed by his wife's millionaire brother, Henry Morgenthau) scooped up as much of the boulevard as possible in hopes of a coming land boom. A turf war ensued. The bridge never materialized, however, and the market turned south. Simon abandoned his plans to erect a tall tower there. In 1929, 144-146 West 57th Street was turned into the Little Carnegie Theater, a fine-art movie house. It stood there until the 80s when Harry Macklowe tore them down and erected his notorious "Knife Building," the sharp-edged black glass tower there. Today a Starbucks stands on the exact same spot where the Yellow Aster Tea Room once was. (142 to 150 West 57th Street, below: The Little Carnegie, at left; Russian Tea Room.)

I mention all of this real estate background because I've a hunch the building and its location played a role in what happened to Dot King. In all the news reports about Dot King's slaying, the other people in Dot's building are never mentioned by name, except Hilda Ferguson, her former roommate; and the chance mention of the Grahams by the elevator operator. That strikes me as revealing, especially considering that the police theorized that the killer had to be someone that Dot King knew and trusted, since there were no signs of a break-in. The door was locked when the maid arrived on the 15th. Only two people had a key, the maid Billy Bradford informed the police: she and her mistress, Dot. But was that true? Another report I read said that Dot kept a set of keys in the elevator, enabling her visitors to come and go as they liked. The elevator man, John Thomas, was in charge of them, receiving tips each time someone used them. If that were true, then anyone could have nicked them and gotten into her flat unannounced. But it seems unlikely that Dot would do that, especially since she was complaining to her mother, and the lawyer who drafted her will, and anyone who would listen, from her maid to her masseuse, that she was scared for her life.

What could have caused her to be so afraid? Just a few days before she died, Dot had been accosted on the street, witnesses said, by a woman who grabbed her by the hair, threw her to the ground and started pelting her, screaming at her. This was written up in the papers after her death, but no one knew who this assailant was. One paper speculated it was Mitchell's wife, Frances, Stotesbury's daughter, but that is impossible since she was in Palm Beach at the time, and by all accounts was a mild-mannered lady who had no idea her husband was having an affair with Dot King. I'm surprised people didn't speculate that it was Hilda Ferguson, her roommate. Hilda always said she moved out of Dot's flat because she couldn't stand her late night lifestyle. But that's ridiculous since Hilda was known for her own very fast-and-loose lifestyle. Perhaps she and Dot had had a knock-down, drag-out cat-fight which led to her either leaving in a huff, or more likely, being thrown out. That could explain the attack on the street (Hilda, below, had moved back to the Great Northern Hotel, just down the block.)

And on Tuesday, March 13th, shortly before her death, Dot had been allegedly beat up by Guimares himself, probably because she had just returned from a week in Atlantic City without him. Or did she have reason to be angry with him? An article I found from a few months later, tells of a bobbed-haired bandit, claiming to be Mrs. Albert Guimares, who was arrested for shoplifting from a tailor. She was wearing a fur coat identical to the one apparently stolen from Dot King's apartment. I began to wonder if Guimares hadn't been cheating on Dot around the time she was killed. And perhaps that was the woman Dot was fighting with. It would explain the marks on Guimares's hands, if he and Dot had fought. And it might also explain who the mystery woman was who phoned in later about the "pink toes" letter. She would have had reason to deflect attention away from Guimares and onto Dot's sugar daddy, Mitchell.

If one removes Guimares and Mitchell as suspects, the field opens up to include not just Hilda Ferguson and this mysterious Mrs. Albert Guimares, but also the residents in Dot's building. It would have been easy for someone living there to knock on Dot's door after 2AM, or early that morning, gain entrance and then poison her. (The swirl of cotton found on the umbrella by the door would seem to indicate that they grabbed Dot as she opened the door, then led her back to the bed where they finished her off, wittingly or unwittingly.)

And if they didn't come through the door, they might have been able to enter through a dumbwaiter that stretched from the top floor of the building to the lobby. In fact, one of the neighbors in the apartment below Dot's had told police that she had heard the sound of scuffling feet in the apartment above, and smelled a horrible odor in the dumbwaiter (chloroform has a very potent, sickeningly sweet smell.) It's possible this neighbor was Mrs. Graham, mentioned in the police report, along with her husband, as being the last people to use the elevator that night. She lived on the fourth floor. But extrapolating from census reports in 1920, it seems there were two apartments per floor. While researching the building, I came across notices placed in the New York Times by Hilma L. Dunlap, advertising rooms for rent there. An apartment on the fifth floor, which could have been the same one Dot had lived in, or the one adjacent to Dot's, facing front, included a roof garden! So it must, therefore, have had access to the roof. It's not inconceivable to imagine the killer entering from above, by swinging down into Dot's window in back.

Who were these other residents? At first, my focus remained fixated on Hilma L. Dunlap, the superintendent, who owned the Yellow Aster Tea Room, and undoubtedly had a skeleton key to all the apartments. But she's not listed in the 1920 census as a resident of 144 or 146 (the census records for the house that year are particularly confusing and poorly executed.) In fact, Dunlap does not show up anywhere in that year's census. But by sifting through real estate records, I was able to find out that Hilma Dunlap actually owned 142 West 57th Street, the townhouse next door. This came as a big surprise to me, especially since the Yellow Aster was in 144/146. And how could a single woman, who had come over from Sweden in 1883, have the capital to buy an expensive brownstone on ritzy 57th Street?

I find it particularly perplexing that Robert E. Simon would go to such great lengths to procure all the properties on that stretch of 57th Street, from Carnegie Hall east to 144 West 57th Street, but he would have let 142 slip through his fingers. Hilma Dunlap bought it a few years before Dot's death from a real estate developer named Frederic Culver. If she was working for Simon as the super of 144, the two could not be construed as rivals. It must have been an amicable relationship. But why wouldn't Culver have sold it to Simon? Was Hilma a front? But Simon would have had no reason to use a front since he'd bought the other buildings without any subterfuge. The fact that Frederic Culver was found dead later that fall, an alleged suicide, only makes the situation more intriguing.

Hilma, it turns out, was born in 1875 in Stockholm, but it's not clear when she became Mrs. Dunlap. She lived with her close friend and partner Katherine Jewett Smith for many years. Hilma and Katherine ended up moving the Yellow Aster Tea Room out of Manhattan in 1927, relocating it to Lenox Road in Pittsfield, MA where it thrived until Hilma's death in 1940 (and remained open under different owners, and names, until recently.) Kate, widow of William Smith, moved to Pasadena where she died four years later. (In her will, Hilma Dunlap left everything to her "good friend" Kate. She had no other kin and I can't help wondering if Hilma invented having been married. The 1910 Census, shows her living with "Katherine Jewett", on 58th Street; both are listed as "single." The 1930 census, in Pittsfield, shows her living with Katherine Jewett Smith, her "sister-in-law." That makes little sense since Hilma would have had to marry Katherine's brother or vice-versa. But Katherine's maiden name, I found out, was Behan, not Dunlap. One could go quietly insane trying to unravel all these loose ends.)

As for the tenants of 144, it's more difficult to get a handle on who actually lived there in 1923 when Dot was killed. The 1920 census lists a handful of people, including actress Ethel Winthrop, above, who had played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest when it was revived on Broadway in 1910. She'd also appeared in films with the silent star Clara Kimball Young. I am certain Ethel was still there in 1923, although she shows up on 58th Street in 1930. She strikes me as the perfect candidate to be the "professional woman of the highest standing" who complained about the noise coming from Dot's flat. None of the other women living in the house were working, per the census records. And I suspect any actress who could succeed as Lady Bracknell, must have had an imperious streak. That "professional woman" had been described as having lived there for six years, so she should be included in the 1920 census, making Ethel really the only logical candidate. If she was that lady, who had ties to J. P. Morgan, then it dovetails nicely with the Hortons who also had ties to J. P. Morgan, and Mitchell, whose father-in-law Stotesbury, was J. P. Morgan's right-hand man. Researching a bit into Ethel Winthrop's life, I discovered that she was a widow, born in Canada, formerly married to James Gibbs, with whom she had a son, Harold C. Gibbs, and was friends with Fania Marinoff, Carl Van Vechten's actress wife. On the eve of Dot's death, Ethel Winthrop was appearing on Broadway in a short-lived play, The Sporting Life.

The only people I could confirm from primary records, including passport applications and voters lists, as living there in 1923, proved to be fascinating in their own right. One was an elderly lady named Fermine B. Catchings who was a Christian Scientist and a writer. Her son Benjamin Catchings, who lived with her, was a real character, one of those eccentric letter writers fond of conspiracy theories. He was arrested years earlier for making threats to Teddy Roosevelt. He makes for a good candidate for a deranged killer, but he seems to have ended his days peacefully, having settled down with a wife, avoiding future run-ins with the law.

Also in residence was a widow in her 50s named Frances Henrietta Stoddard (listed erroneously as a "male" in the 1920 census) who was originally from Vermont. Could she have had a grudge against Dot King? And what of Robert C. Sanborn, who also lived in the building? He's listed in the city directory that year as living at 144. My research uncovered that he was an executive at the Mitchell Publishing firm, which specialized in advertising products, (and, although tempting, seems to have had no tie to J. Kearsley Mitchell.) Robert Sanborn had a dark side. His wife Florence, a former vaudeville actress from Massachusetts, had once accused him of trying to kill her. She herself was a shady character, having been charged with forging her father's will in her favor. It was her own son, Robert W. Sanborn, an interior decorator, who brought the charges! Shades of the Brooke Astor saga many years later.

As I dug into the lives of Stoddard and Sanborn, I was suddenly reminded of something buried deep in my brain, a tiny fragment of information I'd filed away from one of the articles surrounding the Dot King case. When Albert Guimares was indicted for stock fraud in Boston, the police said that he had concocted a company called "King and Scott" in order to dupe people into buying securities. The "King" was for Dot King; the "Scott" was for Guimares, one of his many pseudonyms, just as he had used the name Morris and Santos at other times. But the article also mentioned that he and Dorothy kept an office at the Giske Building in New York, under the name "Stoddard and Sandborn." Searches for any information on this company yielded nothing. City directories did not have any listing for "Stoddard and Sandborn" or even "Sanborn." (The name "Sandborn" is practically non-existent and must have been a typo in the article.) Nor does the company name "Stoddard & Sanborn" show up in any news archives. Could this be Frances Stoddard and Robert Sanborn?

The similarity is too uncanny to be a mere fluke. My hunch is that Dot King and Guimares set up a fictitious company using the names of her neighbors. Why? Because she had probably convinced them to invest their savings in one of her Ponzi scams. That was the modus operandi of a pyramid scheme. She and Guimares had done it before. And there's no reason to think they wouldn't do it again. They might have even been the reason Dot moved to 144 West 57th Street. Could Robert C. Sanborn have figured out he was being duped and attacked her to get back his money? Or could he possibly have tried to recover incriminating documents that she had in her possession? It's no less far-fetched than the outlandish blackmail theories the police were bandying about. In fact, one of the news reports at the time of Dot King's death described how she was physically attacked at the Ben Hur Club on City Island the summer before by an angry investor who had been duped by her and had lost his life savings.

That was no isolated incident. She'd been arrested in Atlantic City in 1920 after a brawl in a hotel suite. A man named John Chapman had gone to her room, where she was entertaining a handsome young aviator named E. Kenneth Jaquith, and attacked her. She accused Chapman of stealing her jewelry, but had actually hid her jewels in a flower vase. She'd registered there under an assumed name. Was Chapman a jealous boyfriend, or another victim of a Ponzi scheme? Did Jaquith, below, resurface in her life? Was he the man she'd been with in Atlantic City just a few days before her death? What if Dot King had been threatened again? Wouldn't that be cause for her to fear for her life and make plans to skip town?

Let's look at that blackmail plot theory a bit more closely. Unlike the "bucket shops" criminal activity that we know for a fact Dot King and Guimares were involved in, there's no evidence that Dot King or Guimares ever threatened anyone with blackmail. It was only her brother Francis who was accused of that, and then only because he wanted a job, not a payoff. Second, it doesn't make any sense that J. Kearsley Mitchell would have feared being blackmailed over that "pink toes" epistle since he had not even signed it. And it would be hard to trace it back to him. He only came forward because he knew he had been seen at the building the night before she died and he wanted to clear his name. At that time he was the primary suspect. He needed to defuse the situation. As far as I know, he never once claimed he was being blackmailed. It was only the press that speculated along those lines, and with absolutely no evidence.

The Stoddard & Sanborn link I've uncovered does point to one other potential suspect, perhaps the best candidate for the killer I can come up with: Guimares's friend and alibi Edmund J. McBrien. When McBrien was interviewed by the police, he explained that he too worked at "Stoddard & Sandborn" with Guimares. He was described as a stockbroker (which is how he is listed in the 1930 Census, living with his brother Harry, in Manhattan). There is some confusion over his exact name. Most often his name is spelled "McBryan" in news reports. But he shows up in most census records as "Edmund J. McBrien," born 1899 in New Haven, CT. His father Christopher was a mason; his brother Christopher, Jr., ironically, was an IRS agent.

McBrien's name reappeared in the papers in 1929 when he was involved in another sensational scandal, the suspicious death of his girlfriend Aurelia A. Fischer. She was the same "mystery blonde" who had played such a prominent role in establishing Guimares's alibi in the Dot King case, swearing to police that she had spent the night with him and McBrien at the Embassy Hotel, before fleeing to New Haven, where the authorities questioned her. In October 1923, just six months after Dot King's murder, Aurelia Fischer had married a much-older stockbroker named Herbert M. Dreyfus. This strikes me as odd, since she was obviously McBrien's girlfriend earlier on. But by 1928 her marriage to Dreyfus was over; McBrien had been named a correspondent in her divorce case.

In October 1929, Aurelia, above, was visiting her family in DC. She'd been to a party at the Colonial Canoe Club where her brother William was Secretary. McBrien was with her. She'd gone out with him to take the air and stood at the edge of a promontory overlooking the Potomac. Her body was found later on the boat landing where it had fallen. Many believed McBrien had pushed her because she had threatened to expose the truth about what really happened to Dot King. He denied it. Her parents demanded a trial. A grand jury was formed.

At the inquiry, it was revealed that shortly before her death Aurelia had told her family that she feared for her life because she had perjured herself in 1923 when interviewed by the police. She claimed that she had not been with Guimares on the fateful night. The jury decided that there was insufficient evidence to press charges against McBrien and the case was deemed an accident. Since then commentators have speculated that McBrien killed her to hush her up, lest his best friend Guimares be arrested for Dot King's murder. This strikes me as implausible. Nothing would implicate Guimares more than Aurelia's sudden death. It would be the last thing Guimares would have wanted, especially since by then Guimares had served his prison term for gun possession, and had married a rich woman. I don't buy that theory. (Guimares, for the record, died at 56 years old in 1952. He died at the Madison Hotel in Manhattan, where he was registered under the name Albert Santos.)

So where does all this leave us? It leaves us with Eddie McBrien, stockbroker and partner of Dot's with the phony "Stoddard & Sandborn" company, and boyfriend of Aurelia. It seems far more likely to me that if the death of Aurelia Fischer was his doing that it would be to save himself from the gas chamber, not Guimares. Perhaps he was the one who visited Dot King that fateful morning, and had brought the chloroform (possibly from Guimares's reported stash) along because he knew she would not have willingly given him entrance to her rooms. They were business associates, not lovers. Was he there then at Guimares's bidding? I doubt that too. I think, if he was in fact the killer, that he had his own motive, most likely related to the collapsing Ponzi scheme surrounding Stoddard & Sanborn. Perhaps in the future, the entire story of what happened on the Ides of March, 1923 at 144 East 57th Street will finally come to light.

[Part One of the Dot King Scandal can be found Here