The Devil's Gentleman Read online

  It didn’t take long for Edward Molineux to learn what the future held. On April 12, 1861—less than four months after he penned his New Year’s essay—Confederate forces under General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter.

  The Civil War had begun.

  On July 18, 1861, Edward Molineux and Hattie Davis Clark were married in her hometown of East Hartford. Three days later, Union forces were routed by the Confederate Army at Manassas, ending the fond hopes of Northerners that the war would be over in a matter of months. With his army shattered, Lincoln signed bills calling for the enlistment of 500,000 additional troops and extending the term of service from ninety days to three years.

  By then, Edward Molineux himself was back in uniform, as a major of the Eleventh Brigade of the New York National Guard. A few months later, he was authorized to organize a regiment, designated as the 159th.5 After several weeks of training at a camp on Staten Island, Edward and his men set out from New York City aboard the United States steamer Northern Light. On December 14, they joined a large fleet of transports at Ship Island, Mississippi, before proceeding up the river into enemy country.

  During his three years of active duty, Edward would participate in campaigns from the Louisiana bayous to the Shenandoah Valley and take part in more than a dozen battles.6 Following the fall of Savannah, he would be placed in charge of the city’s fortifications and, after Lee’s surrender, be appointed military commander of the District of Northern Georgia with his headquarters in Augusta.

  All of these duties and more he performed with grace, valor, and an unswerving sense of decency that won him the gratitude of his government, the love of his men, and even the respect of his adversaries. His energies seemed inexhaustible. At the height of the war, it was nothing for him to spend nearly twenty-four hours in the saddle, return to his tent for three hours of sleep, then rise at dawn and conduct drills for another twelve hours before attending to regimental paperwork.

  Stern as he could be when circumstances warranted it, Molineux was beloved by his troops for the fatherly care he demonstrated. His letters home are filled with requests for small gifts for his men—everything from candy and tobacco to stockings and sewing kits. At other times, he does what he can to relieve their anxieties about their loved ones back home. But it wasn’t just Edward’s concern for their welfare that endeared him to his men. It was his gallantry as a warrior. And nowhere was that courage—or the devotion it inspired—more dramatically in evidence than in the bloody engagement known as the Battle of Irish Bend.

  On the morning of April 14, 1863, the 159th, along with several other regiments, was ordered to make a bayonet charge across a muddy sugar field to drive a force of Rebel soldiers from a dense strip of woods. Edward, on horseback, was in the lead. The field was so heavily plowed, however, that his horse kept stumbling in the furrows, and he quickly dismounted. Charging ahead on foot, Edward and his troops came under a ferocious crossfire from the Confederates, who were entirely concealed behind fences, canebrakes, and trees. As he turned to shout encouragement to his men, Edward saw that they were being cut down by the score.

  Calling a halt, he ordered them to take cover in the ditchlike furrows and open fire. Under this fusillade, the enemy gunfire slackened a bit. Edward saw a chance to cover the remaining ground. Leaping to his feet, he called out, “Forward, New York!”

  No sooner had he shouted the words than his face exploded in pain and he was hurled to the ground.

  A rifle ball had torn through his mouth, blasting away the gums and teeth on the left side and exiting his cheek. Edward struggled to his feet and tried to urge his men forward, but—as he reported in a letter to his family—“I could not make myself understood and some stupid fool gave an order to retreat.”

  At that moment, the Rebels on their flank came charging upon them. Edward told his men to save themselves, but they would not leave him. “Such self-sacrificing fellows I never knew of,” he declared. Four of them were struck by musket balls—one through the forehead—while carrying him to safety.

  Within days, Edward hastened to assure his family that his wound was “nothing. It is ugly and painful, but not dangerous,” he wrote.

  For the rest of the war, Edward suffered from severe, at times incapacitating, headaches, which he attempted to treat with homeopathic remedies supplied by his mother. Despite these bouts of illness, he carried on as steadfastly as ever, sustained by his absolute belief in the righteousness of the Northern cause. His military service came to an end on July 29, 1865, when he tendered his resignation. When he departed for home three days later, he did so with the rank of major general by brevet “for gallant and meritorious service during the war.”

  After three grueling years, during which he had conducted himself with unwavering dignity and courage, Edward Leslie Molineux was returning to his family to enjoy a life of peace, prosperity, and enduring honor.

  Or so he had every reason to expect.

  General Edward Leslie Molineux was not a man to rest on his laurels. Possessed of “superabundant energies” (in the words of one awestruck observer),7 he lost no time in throwing himself into a wide range of activities, from business and politics to military affairs and civic enterprises.

  Shortly after his return to Brooklyn, he had a falling-out with his employer and patron, Daniel Tiemann, and left to join a rival firm, C. T. Raynolds, which he soon helped transform into the largest paint-making concern in the country. (It would later merge with another company, F. W. Devoe.) He commanded a division of the New York State National Guard, was a founding member of the National Rifle Association, embarked on a campaign to make military instruction a standard part of the public school curriculum, lectured and wrote papers on the suppression of riots, helped organize the Union Veteran’s Patriotic League, served as a trustee of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, became the first president of the New York Paint and Coatings Association, and played an active role in local politics.

  Then there were the numberless Civil War ceremonies: the regimental reunions, the anniversary receptions, the memorial services, the veterans dinners, the concerts and picnics and parades. For Edward, however, the most meaningful occasions were the reunions of survivors of the 159th. During one of these, he was presented with a specially made badge emblazoned with the image of a bear—the proud symbol of his beloved regiment. In a moving speech, his old friend and comrade-in-arms Frank Tiemann testified to the filial regard his soldiers felt toward the man who was “in every sense the Father of his regiment—a manly man, a gallant soldier and a true friend.”8 By the same token, for as long as he lived, Edward would always refer to the men of the 159th as “family.”9

  His actual family, especially his children, consistently expressed the same veneration for him. Given his repute as a “manly man,” it seems fitting that Edward Leslie Molineux sired only boys.

  There was the oldest son, Leslie Edward, born in 1862, who—mirroring his father—would prosper in business, serve as an officer in the army, and try his hand at politics, running (unsuccessfully) for governor of New Jersey as the Prohibition Party candidate in 1934.

  There was the youngest son, Cecil Sefton, born in 1876, who—also like his father—would have a successful career in a paint company and involve himself in various patriotic organizations, most notably the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States.

  And then there was the middle son, Roland Burnham Molineux, born in 1866, whose notoriety would far outstrip his father’s fame, and who—at a time when Edward should have been enjoying an honorable old age—would turn the family name into a byword for scandal, depravity, and cold-blooded murder.

  2

  Given their father’s fervent belief in the importance of childhood exercise, it is hardly surprising that the Molineux boys were pushed to develop their bodies as well as their minds. All three grew into fine figures of young manhood. But Roland in particular matured into a superb physical specimen.
r />   He seemed fashioned by nature for gymnastics, with a lithe, compact frame, exceptional coordination, and a ferociously competitive spirit that even in his adolescence burned beneath a carefully cultivated mask of upper-class hauteur. His specialty was the horizontal bar. With a tenacity inherited from his father, he spent countless hours at the gymnasium, perfecting acrobatic moves—somersaults, twists, and spectacular dismounts—that dazzled onlookers.

  In 1882, shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Roland was pulled from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute—where, like his brothers, he was sent to study chemistry in preparation for a career in the paint business—and shipped out West. Little is known about this interlude in Roland Molineux’s life, since the reasons for his sudden removal were kept secret from all but his closest relatives. According to some later accounts, he spent the time working on a ranch. In 1884, his father traveled West to fetch him home.1

  His two years of rugged living had added muscle to Roland’s already well-knit physique. Back home, he lost no time in returning to his former life, earning his high school equivalency while throwing himself into the city’s flourishing athletic scene. One year later, in 1885, at a competition sponsored by the New York Athletic Club, he won the first of several national titles, becoming the amateur horizontal-bar champion.

  To be an amateur sporting champion was no small distinction in 1885. In the decades since Edward Leslie Molineux published a widely reprinted essay deploring the “physical deterioration of the American race”2 and calling for mandatory military and gymnastic exercises in the public schools, the country had been seized by what one contemporary observer called a “passion for athletic sports.”3 It was an era that witnessed a nationwide mania for bicycling, a craze for “physical culture,” and the birth of modern sportswriting; when baseball became the national pastime; A. G. Spalding grew rich peddling sporting goods and guidebooks to the public; and heavyweight title bouts received the kind of frenzied, front-page coverage formerly reserved for Civil War battles and presidential elections.

  There were, of course, sharp class distinctions in the realm of American sport. While gentlemen and shopkeeps, bankers and bricklayers might mingle at the ballpark or follow the Jeffries-Fitzsimmons rivalry with equally obsessive interest, the members of the upper crust tended to gather in elite athletic clubs. The first of these organizations in America was the New York Athletic Club, founded in 1868 by a small group of socially prominent sportsmen looking for like-minded young athletes to compete with. Created to foster the Victorian ideal of “pure” amateur sportsmanship, the NYAC rapidly evolved into a highly selective social club—a bastion of snobbery whose membership requirements (including steep initiation fees and annual dues) were designed to exclude lower-class applicants.4

  By 1885, the NYAC—which had begun life in a rented flat equipped with Indian clubs, dumbbells, and a few other pieces of weight-lifting gear—had moved to an elegant building on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. In addition to its state-of-the-art athletic facilities—gymnasium, swimming pool, fencing and sparring room—it featured a luxurious dining hall, billiard parlor, and library. The unofficial credo of the club was articulated by one member, who told a New York Times reporter, “I have no aspersions to cast on men who work for their living with their hands, but they are not exactly desirable members for a club which wants to establish itself on the plane of social clubdom.”5

  It was a sentiment that Roland Molineux would have heartily endorsed. Not that he himself was a member of the very upper reaches of society. He was, after all, the son of a tradesman. To be sure, the General had done very well in the paint business. But his success and social prestige merely placed his family in the ranks of Brooklyn’s commercial aristocracy—a far cry from Mrs. Astor’s 400.

  Nevertheless, Roland, from an early age, put on the airs of a gentleman. Though certain of his acquaintances sneered at his pretensions, his own father looked upon them with tolerance, even a measure of pride. Why shouldn’t his boy aspire to the very heights of gentlemanly refinement?

  Despite his comparatively déclassé background, Roland developed a snobbishness worthy of Ward McAllister, tastemaker for the city’s social elite, who famously sniffed that “a fortune of a million” was nothing more than “respectable poverty.”6 Punctilious in his dress, Roland would only deign to patronize the same tailors and haberdashers who catered to the “upperdom.” Even when stripped for an athletic performance, he exuded an “air of aloof singularity and pride in station and form.”7 His most famous surviving photograph—taken during his reign as national horizontal-bar champion—shows him posing in his tight-fitting gymnast’s uniform, chest outthrust, short sleeves rolled up to reveal his chiseled shoulder muscles, a look of patrician ennui on his finely molded countenance.

  It was the image he would always project to the world: debonair, dashing, with a hint of aristocratic disdain. But his blue-blood persona masked a much darker reality.

  Already, by adolescence, he was embroiled in trouble. Though years would pass before the world learned the truth, there was a shocking reason for his sudden withdrawal from high school and lengthy sojourn in the West. At just fifteen years of age, he had engaged in a dalliance with an older married woman—a neighbor named Mrs. Kindberg—and was named as a corespondent in the divorce suit brought by her husband when the affair came to light. Roland’s father had hurried his boy out of town until the scandal was resolved.8

  Given his own high moral standards—to say nothing of his admitted primness as regards “the genus female” (as he fondly referred to the opposite sex)—Edward Leslie Molineux could not have been pleased with his son’s sexual misconduct. Perhaps he wrote it off to wild oats. Still, the General stood steadfastly by Roland, taking quick and decisive measures to save his son—and the family’s good name—from public dishonor.

  Following a brief course of study at Cooper Union, Roland, at the age of twenty-one, was put to work at his father’s company, where he honed his skills as a chemist. He also continued to compete in gymnastic events, defending his title at the yearly competitions sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union and making audiences “wild with enthusiasm” at the annual exhibitions held at the Adelphi Academy.9 To all outward appearances, he seemed to have matured into a responsible young man—the prodigal son who, as the General hoped, had put his shameful ways behind him.

  But Roland was nothing if not devious. Even at the C. T. Raynolds Company, under the watchful eye of his father, he could not keep from flirting with trouble and courting disgrace.

  3

  Edward Leslie Molineux’s children left few accounts of their upbringing. He appears (as one would expect of so strictly disciplined a man) to have been a stern and exacting but affectionate father—the type who would insist on the precise performance of household chores before allowing his boys to dip into the candy jar; who might bestow a handsome new pocketknife on one of his sons, then dock him a dime if he failed to keep it clean; who saw to it that his children knew the correct way to fold an American flag, administer emergency first aid, and escape from a burning building. He was also a deeply pious man, whose faith had sustained him during many a dark hour in the Civil War and who raised his sons as devout Episcopalians.1 Certainly, his loyalty as a father was unfaltering.

  It is one of the great mysteries of parenthood that two children brought up in the identical way can grow up to be radically, if not diametrically, different human beings. And so it was in the Molineux household. The General’s oldest son, Leslie Edward, turned out to be straitlaced to the point of priggishness. A staunch advocate of Prohibition, he never permitted a drop of alcohol to cross his lips. He stopped his car to bury roadkill and swept debris from the road with a special broom he kept in the trunk. Though obsessively punctual, he was once late for an important appointment because, just as he was about to leave the house, “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play on the radio and Leslie felt obliged to remain standing at attention until the anthem
stopped. He rarely missed Sunday service at St. Luke’s Church, actively supported the American Red Cross, and enjoyed nothing better than spending an evening poring over the latest issue of National Geographic magazine.2

  By contrast, Leslie’s younger brother, Roland—born only four years later and raised in precisely the same way—grew up to be a libertine.

  Her name was Mary Melando, though everyone called her Mamie. She grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, a grim, smoky city of oil refineries, industrial plants, and railroad lines—a place, as one writer puts it, “short on greenery and long on fumes.”3 Before quitting to become a cop, her father worked for nearly twenty years at the Bayonne paint factory owned by the C. T. Raynolds Company, and in 1887, Mary went to work there, too.

  It was shortly thereafter that she met Roland Molineux, the debonair son of the company’s co-owner, who had just gone to work for his father. Within a few months of his arrival, Roland, twenty-one at the time, had seduced her.

  With her small eyes, long nose, and heavy jaw, Mamie was not an especially attractive girl. She did, however, possess the vibrancy—and extreme vulnerability—of youth.

  At the time their affair commenced, Mamie Melando had just turned thirteen.

  Roland spent six years at the Raynolds factory in Bayonne, producing pigments for his father’s company. Then, in March 1893, two New York City businessmen, Morris Herrmann and Leonard Levi, opened a paint factory in Newark and hired him as superintendent and chief chemist.4

  Besides his salary, he was given a two-room apartment on the second floor of the big wooden factory building. Roland proceeded to furnish it in style, with Oriental rugs, a mahogany bed and matching bureau, a leather-upholstered settee and easy chair, and a handsome sideboard.