The Devil's Gentleman Read online

  In the distance was Rough Point. Some days the wind came out of the North, and from the cliffs we could gaze far off and watch the flying spray. We could glimpse the ocean, tearing and racing and curling in long lines over the white sand.

  There were drives each afternoon when all of fashionable Newport society would be abroad in glittering equipages. The Casino and the tennis matches were also open to us. There were luncheons aboard the yachts of McKay’s friends, and for the first time in my life, I tasted champagne.6

  It was not merely the beauty and grace of her surroundings, however, that made her stay in Newport so special for Blanche. Something else occurred during those long, bewitching days: her sudden awakening to the power and allure of what, in her memoirs, she consistently refers to as the “masculine element.”

  Though by no means conventionally beautiful, Blanche was, by all accounts, a captivating presence, even with her peculiar left eye. As one chronicler describes her, she was “possessed of a divine figure and a splendid carriage. She was tall, sinuous, yet graced by those happy and promising curves which were the splendor of the Gibson girl, the regnant beauty of her time. She wore clothes with astounding effect, and had the poise of a woman of the world.”7 In her memoirs, Blanche confirms that, from her adolescence on, men found her “vibrant” and “arresting.”8

  Up until her twenty-second year, however—at least according to her late-life recollections—she had never “given the slightest consideration to men. Music had been my one absorbing interest.” All that changed, however, in the summer of 1897.

  On several occasions during her stay in Newport, a group of “fledging Navy officers” from a nearby training station came to dinner at Gordon McKay’s estate. Among them was a dashing lieutenant named Dillingham. In the company of these “smartly uniformed men,” Blanche “suddenly discovered something—something that I really didn’t understand. But whatever it might be, it was arresting! I decided that the masculine element…was rather disturbing and at the same time enormously interesting. I was suddenly infatuated with these gay young officers, with their poise and their savoir faire—their impressively good looks and sophisticated ways with women. I seemed to be treading on air. The flattery and attention was heady to a young girl experiencing it all for the first time.”9

  Though she “flirted outrageously” with the handsome Lieutenant Dillingham, Blanche rebuffed his physical advances. At the time, her sexual attitudes mirrored those of her mother: “Natural impulses and the sex-instinct must not be discussed or even thought about. Sex apparently was a thing to be ashamed of. The very word was tabu.” She came home from Newport with her virtue intact.

  From that point on, however, everything was different. She began to question her mother’s “old-fashioned precepts” about sex:

  I couldn’t understand why something that should be the most wonderful and beautiful of anything in existence must never be spoken of. It puzzled me a whole lot, and I began to study it out for myself. I decided it was all due to distorted vision. People were looking through lenses that were cracked; surely they saw only the doubtful and ugly reflections of their own minds! I wanted passion and love in my life; I wanted my existence to be fervid and glowing!10

  Because of her mother’s puritanical teachings, Blanche had been kept “from a full realization of sex.” Now, she “wanted to know it in its completeness, what it was all about.” It wasn’t mere curiosity that lay behind this desire, but the awakening of a long-suppressed hunger.

  As Blanche, many years later, would say of her urgent new interest in erotic experience: “I was breathless for it.”11

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  Mrs. Chesebrough’s extreme reticence in relation to sex was, of course, perfectly in keeping with the mores of Victorian America. It was an age when marriage manuals advised young brides to avoid all “amorous thoughts or feelings” when family physicians routinely recommended the cauterization of the clitoris as a cure for the ruinous habit of “self-pollution” and when a woman with a healthy libido was likely to be branded as a hopeless “nymphomaniac.” Adolescent girls from respectable families were kept in such complete ignorance of sexual matters that they commonly entered into marriage without the slightest conception of what coition entailed.1

  In short, from a societal point of view, there was nothing at all wrong with Mrs. Chesebrough’s prudery. On the contrary, it was Blanche, with her avid interest in sex, who would have been looked at askance. In her late-life memoirs, Blanche presents herself as an admirable free spirit, a precursor of the Jazz Age generation that would kick over the traces of their parents’ Victorian values. To many of her contemporaries, however, Blanche would always be viewed in a very different light: as a frivolous young woman of limited means who was more than happy to sacrifice her chastity in order to achieve those material pleasures she so desperately craved—“good clothes, good dinners, good seats at the theatre.” In short, as someone little better than a prostitute.2

  Avid as she was for sexual experience, Blanche—so she says in her memoirs—was in no hurry to find a husband. “I was subtly conscious that I was shying away from marriage. It seemed a narrowing of horizons, a curtailment of freedom.”3

  It was precisely that sense of “freedom” that made some of her relatives nervous. To her sister-in-law Ellen—a prim Bostonian with traditional ideas about the proper role of women—Blanche’s single life in New York City seemed dangerously “Bohemian.”4

  Blanche’s own sisters were less alarmed by her “bachelorette” lifestyle. Even they, however, were eager to see her settled. Lois’s marriage to the well-heeled Mr. Oakie had, to some extent, violated the natural order of things. By rights, Blanche should have been wed before her little sister.

  Moreover, she wasn’t getting any younger. To be sure, in the summer of 1897, she was still a few months shy of her twenty-third birthday. But she lived in an age when an unmarried woman of thirty was regarded as an old maid. In another few years, Blanche would rapidly be approaching the bounds of spinsterhood.

  Izcennia in particular had made it her mission to see that her sister found a suitable husband. She had been playing Pygmalion for years, right down to the diction lessons she had provided for Blanche. Now, all that time, money, and effort were in danger of going to waste. If Blanche weren’t careful, she would end up as the wife of one of the poor (if admittedly handsome) naval officers she had been dallying with all summer. The time had come to introduce her to some more financially desirable prospects.

  In mid-August 1897, just a few weeks after Blanche returned from her idyll at Newport, a perfect opportunity presented itself.

  She had been invited to stay with Isia and Waldo at their summer home, Craigsmere, on the Rhode Island coastline. Despite the beauty of the setting, life at the seaside estate, according to Blanche’s testimony, was “uncommonly dull.”5 Waldo, though devoted to his wife, was something of a stick in the mud, a homebody with little interest in socializing. By contrast, Isia loved to go out and have fun. The long, placid, uneventful days at Craigsmere might have been a balm to Waldo; to his wife, they had grown unbearably tedious.

  When Waldo announced in early August that he had business in Boston and would be gone for two weeks, Isia pounced. Over breakfast that morning, she asked his permission to take Blanche on a visit to Jamestown. It would—so Isia assured him—be an excellent chance to introduce Blanche to some eligible young men. Waldo, always indulgent of his wife and considerate of his sister-in-law, agreed. What Isia didn’t emphasize, of course, was that the trip would be a treat for her, too—a holiday from her suffocating home life with the sweet but stodgy Waldo.

  No sooner had he departed than Isia packed a bag with several of her nicest summer frocks and some accessories to augment Blanche’s simple wardrobe. Then, leaving the servants in charge of Craigsmere, she and her sister took the ferry to Jamestown.

  There they were invited by an old friend of Isia’s—a socialite named Clark Miller—to accompany him and th
ree male companions on a cruise to Portland, Maine, aboard his schooner-yacht, the Monhegan. The two women accepted without hesitation.

  It was high noon when the Monhegan, flying the flag of the Larchmont yacht club, sailed into Portland harbor. “Bluest of skies were above, bluest of waters below,” Blanche would recall many years later as she described that splendid midsummer day “so freighted with import for me”:

  White sails and hulls gleamed in the light of a noonday sun. The brilliance caught and flashed back the shimmer of burning brass; rails and spars and polished surfaces of glistening decks reflected its rays. From one of the yachts, with its short, squatty funnels, fluttered the pennant of the New York Yacht Club, and below it the owner’s flag lifted and fell again in the light wind from across the bay.

  The waters of the harbor were dotted with a fleet of these craft, the luxurious toys of their owners. They rode at anchor, swaying lazily with the motion of the tide. They were like great white birds, lightly and gracefully resting on the surface of limpid sun-drenched waters.6

  The Monhegan slid into a berth beside an even more spectacular vessel, the Viator, skippered by Albert J. Morgan, a member of the fabulously wealthy family that manufactured the country’s best-selling brand of soap, Sapolio. Before long, a luncheon invitation had been extended by Morgan, who sent his motorized launch to convey Blanche and the others across the sparkling water to his “great white pleasure craft.”7

  Climbing aboard the Viator, Blanche saw “deep-seated, gaily cushioned deck chairs drawn forward on the polished decks. Awnings softened the intense light of mid-day.” After exchanging some pleasantries with his guests, Morgan disappeared belowdecks to issue orders to his steward, who emerged a short time later with a silver tray bearing pâté de foie gras sandwiches, small toasted squares piled with Russian caviar, and thin-stemmed flutes brimming with champagne.

  “We drank the iced Moët & Chandon, its liquid amber like gold,” Blanche rhapsodizes in her memoirs. “And the sun that day was gold, with the sea the color of sapphire. The wind was warm and sweet and came laden with the tang of salt—the flavor of the marshes. There was gaiety and lightheartedness and laughter, for happiness was abroad that brilliant midsummer’s day.”8

  Later that afternoon, Blanche found herself on the afterdeck, making small talk with Morgan, who stood quite close to her, his arm resting behind her on the railing. The warm attention of the millionaire bachelor made Blanche—already light-headed from the champagne—feel positively giddy.

  All at once, Morgan glanced over and noticed that a nearby deck chair—vacant only a few moments before—was now occupied by a young man with an open book on his lap. Morgan called to the fellow, who closed his book, dropped his feet from the low rail in front of him, tossed his cigarette into the water, then stood up and approached.

  Blanche would always retain a particularly sharp image of that moment:

  One noticed that he was not very tall, but his body was slender, muscular and beautifully proportioned. He carried himself very erect and gave a nonchalant air of self-possession, poise and breeding. He had the most charming manners, greeting us with a quiet, infectious smile. Something flashed between us.9

  Blanche, of course, had already been introduced to the handsome young man, though she had taken little notice of him, having been focused so intently on her host. Now, she felt her interest suddenly piqued by the debonair “Mollie,” as Morgan fondly greeted him—though his actual name, as she now recalled, was Roland Molineux.

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  Describing that moment many years later, Blanche would strike a particularly portentous note: “On that day, how could I have guessed that Fate had already begun to spin her web? How casual that first meeting! Weighted—unknown to me—with such a significance! But the sun had shone and the wind was sweet, and lighthearted happiness was abroad that day. And now, even as it had been earlier at McKay’s estate at Newport, the sea and all its allure was the background.”1

  Perceiving the spark of attraction that had instantly flashed between “Mollie” and the charming Miss Chesebrough, Morgan excused himself to attend to his other guests. No sooner had he gone than Roland led Blanche “to a couple of deck chairs in a snug corner, sheltered from the sun and wind.” There, they “drank champagne and laughed over the most inconsequential things.” Blanche could not fail to be captivated by the handsome and cultivated young man:

  He was clever and witty and amusing…. He had charm, grace of manner, and a bearing that was aristocratic. Normally rather fair, he was now tanned by exposure to wind and sun. He was debonair, and his poise and air were those of the cosmopolite. He possessed a decided gift for repartee, and about him there was a gay insouciance, an ease, a smiling indifference. For a time we both forgot the others in the party. I was absorbed in him as we talked together and he lounged there in his summer flannels.2

  As their talk grew more intimate, Roland confessed that he had felt an immediate attraction to Blanche but had held back because he thought that she “had eyes only for Morgan.” Blanche assured him that Morgan, though a delightful host, meant nothing to her.

  By then, she had discovered something else about Roland that strengthened her belief that she and the handsome young man were, as she put it, en rapport: Roland was a music lover. “He had gone frequently to the Opera and numbered amongst his friends a few gifted people known in the musical life of New York.”

  When Blanche told Roland of her “own ambitions and work,” he revealed that he held season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.

  “If you wish,” he said with his engaging smile, “you shall have a surfeit of music this winter.”

  “To be surfeited would be impossible,” she cried. “But to have a feast of music—how wonderful that would be!”3

  Soon afterward, their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the appearance of Morgan and the others, who came over to join them. Blanche records in her memoirs that, for the rest of that day, “there was only a brief word or two exchanged between us; but I found myself frequently turning to glimpse him as we mingled with the others; and always his eyes followed me; and it was as though a silent and intriguing understanding had already begun to exist.”4

  According to Blanche, her first encounter with Roland Molineux ended around sunset, when she, Isia, Clark Miller, and his two male friends returned to the Monhegan aboard the launch that had carried them to the Viator earlier that day:

  We descended to the motor boat which had been bobbing alongside. Once more it noisily churned the waters and, leaving a long path of white foam in its wake, swung back to the other pleasure craft. The sails of Clark’s racy schooner-yacht bellied out to the wind. Turning, she nosed into the channel and cruised slowly out through the sparkling blue waters of the bay….

  The Viator with Morgan’s guests aboard still lay anchored in Portland harbor. Those of us aboard the Monhegan were now heading in before a stiff breeze that swept the waters off Beaver Tail. The sky had faded from rose—that shade like the inner heart of a shell—to opal and mother-of-pearl. The pearl drifted into blue-gray against the horizon, and the sea and sky blended into one. The wind stiffened and ruffled the surface of the waters into wavering threads of white. The great sails also caught the force of it, and we were cutting through, clean as the blade of a knife. We keeled far over, and soon the decks were awash so that we were drenched with the flying spray. I sat huddled on the upper edge of the companionway. My hair was wet, my frock limp with the spindrift….

  Clark came and wrapped a great coat about me. We laughed in high glee, like children. How tremendously exciting it was!5

  That, at any rate, was Blanche’s official version of events. Other people privy to what transpired on board the Viator had a different tale to tell.

  According to these sources, at the end of that intoxicating, champagne-soaked day, the men and women aboard Morgan’s yacht—Blanche and Isia included—paired off, and a mock marriage ceremony was held for each couple. Then each set of
make-believe newlyweds retired to a stateroom, intending to indulge in a very real consummation of their union.6

  Which of these accounts is true has never been definitively established. In any case, the outcome—in one very crucial sense—was the same.

  As events would show, Blanche, despite her earnest wish to divest herself of her virginity, returned from her trip aboard the pleasure-craft Viator still innocent of (as she put it) the “full realization of sex.”

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  Roland returned from the yachting cruise determined to pursue the enchanting young woman he had met aboard the Viator. First, however, he had to sever his ties with Mamie Melando.

  If Blanche, in her memoirs, often sounds as if she’d sprung from the pages of Sister Carrie (“Life’s shop windows were filled with alluring things,” she exclaims at one point. “I desired them with a great intensity!”),1 Roland himself, in the fall of 1897, had come to resemble a character from a Theodore Dreiser novel: a young man caught between a coarse if devoted factory girl who had grown increasingly repellent in his eyes and the infinitely more refined, elegant, socially suitable woman he craved. Sometime in late October, in an effort to free himself of Mamie, he dismissed her from the Herrmann paint factory, giving her—as a reward for her many years of varying sorts of service—a new dress.2