The Devil's Gentleman Read online

  She had dressed for the occasion in a flowing chiffon gown, a broad-brimmed spring hat tied with a matching chiffon scarf, and long white kid gloves.6 A gardenia, presented to her by her unfailingly attentive lover, was pinned to her dress at the base of the V formed by her deep-cut neckline.

  As the two of them descended the stoop of Alice Bellinger’s brownstone, they noticed a man standing at the curb, apparently about to step inside a waiting hansom cab. Drawing closer, they were startled to see that it was Roland Molineux. In the months since they had last set eyes on him, he had grown a large handlebar mustache.

  Concealing his surprise with what Blanche described as “admirable savoir faire,” Barnet greeted him warmly. “We were just on our way to the Claremont for dinner,” he said after the two men shook hands. “Come along, won’t you?”

  Blanche hastened to second the invitation. “Won’t you come? Please do,” she urged. “It’s such a heavenly evening. You will come, won’t you?”

  Roland, however, merely regarded them coolly. “It sounds delightful,” he said with audible irony. “But thanks, no. I’m only in town for a short time tonight. I’m going over to Brooklyn.”

  “You’re sure you won’t join us?” asked Barnet.

  “I think not,” Roland said dryly. His eyes, Blanche noticed, “were suddenly hard.” With a curt “good night,” he turned and entered the cab.

  For the rest of the evening, even as Blanche tried to focus on Barnet and the splendor of the riverside setting, her mind kept reverting to Roland. She thought of his “calm, cold indifference—that note of sarcasm in his voice—that tightening about his mouth, drawing it to that thin immobile line.” It was clear that he still harbored a bitter resentment.

  As for herself, she was aware that something powerful had been stirred in her by seeing him again, though she was “unable to interpret” her emotions. One thing, however, was certain: the brief, seemingly fortuitous encounter with Roland had left her with a “strange feeling of uneasiness.”7

  18

  It’s conceivable that Roland just happened to be standing outside Alice Bellinger’s home when Blanche and Barnet walked out the front door. In view of subsequent events, however, it seems far more likely that he had come there with a specific purpose in mind—likely, to renew his relationship with Blanche. If that was indeed the case, he clearly hoped to have a private moment with her. It is hardly surprising that he reacted so badly when he found her heading out for a romantic evening with Barnet.

  Seeing her on the arm of his rival might have been galling to Roland. But it did not deter him from his goal. On the contrary, it only seemed to strengthen his resolve. Despite his apparent capitulation to Barnet, Roland meant to have Blanche back.

  First, though, there were certain problems that he had to take care of.

  Nicholas Heckmann, forty years old, owned a small advertising agency located at 257 West Forty-second Street in Manhattan, not far from Jim Wakeley’s saloon. To bring in extra income, Heckmann also rented out private letter boxes at the rate of fifty cents per month.

  At approximately ten minutes past six on the evening of May 27, 1898—just a few days after Roland Molineux’s encounter with Blanche and Barnet—the door to Heckmann’s office opened and in strode a well-dressed gentleman who looked to be in his thirties. Though he did not know the gentleman’s name, Heckmann recognized him right away, having passed him many times on the street. He was of medium height, with a slender, athletic build and the air of a man of breeding. He had strikingly handsome features and sported a large handlebar mustache.

  Did Heckmann rent letter boxes? the gentleman inquired.

  Heckmann confirmed that he did and quoted his rate.

  “Very good,” said the fellow, who explained that he wished to take a box for at least three months.

  Heckmann got out his ledger, and seeing that box 217 was available, assigned it to his new customer.

  “Name, please?” asked Heckmann, pen at the ready.

  As Heckmann inscribed the information, the man looked down and, spotting a misspelling, pointed out that there was only one t at the end of his name. Heckmann made the correction.

  Then, after paying for three months in advance, the gentleman—who had given his name as “Mr. H. C. Barnet”—turned and left the building.1

  Dr. Vincent G. Hamill, a graduate of the University of Buffalo, was president of the Marston Remedy Company, headquartered at 19 Park Place in Manhattan. It was a thriving business, serving as many as twelve thousand customers each year, all of them male and all responding to the company’s widely distributed advertising circulars:

  PERFECT MANHOOD

  AND HOW TO ATTAIN IT

  A BOOK FOR MEN MARRIED AND SINGLE

  A full explanation of a wonderful method for the quick restoration of PERFECT MANHOOD, in all that term implies.

  A method that overcomes EVERY EVIL CONDITION of the sexual system.

  Gives to the weakest organs and parts their NATURAL VIGOR AND TONE.

  And to those shrunken and stunted their NORMAL AND PROPER SIZE.

  IT EXPLAINS how to build up all sexual vigor.

  IT EXPLAINS how to avoid all the physical evils of married life.

  IT EXPLAINS how to cure sexual weakness in any stage for all time.

  IT EXPLAINS how to cure unnatural losses from dreams, in urine, etc.

  IT EXPLAINS how to cure nervousness, trepidation, lack of self-confidence.

  IT EXPLAINS how the entire sexual system of the male may be brought to that condition so essential to general good health and peace of mind.

  IT EXPLAINS how to develop, strengthen, enlarge all weak, stunted, undeveloped, feeble organs and parts of the body which have lost or never attained a proper and natural condition, whether through early errors, ill-health, or other causes.

  IT EXPLAINS how to be free from degrading thought, superior to debasing conditions, to feel

  A VERY KING AMONG MEN!

  The book, along with a one-month supply of an accompanying medicinal “remedy,” cost five dollars. On May 31, 1898, Dr. Hamill received a letter, signed “H. C. Barnet.” It contained the necessary amount of cash with a request that the manual and impotence remedy be mailed to box 217, 257 West Forty-second Street.

  Dr. Hamill immediately sent back a “diagnosis blank,” a four-page confidential questionnaire that potential patients were required to answer “as carefully as possible,” so that—as the instructions explained—“a full and perfect understanding of each case may be had, and the proper remedies selected.” There were sixty-three questions altogether, beginning with the applicant’s age (given as thirty-one) and occupation (“clerk”), and continuing on to the most intimate matters of sexual functioning.

  In answer to question thirty—“Have you had gonorrhea?”—the applicant answered yes. He went on to reveal that he had masturbated (“practiced self-abuse,” in the idiom of the time) for ten years; that his erections were “very feeble” and that “during connection” (sexual intercourse), his ejaculations were “very long delayed.”

  He was also asked for the size of his waist and chest, which he gave as thirty-two inches and thirty-seven inches, respectively.

  On June 6, one day after Dr. Hamill received the completed form, the book and impotence medication were mailed out to the person who identified himself as H. C. Barnet but whose measurements, as he gave them, were those of a man with a far trimmer physique.2

  Dr. Hamill was not the only peddler of impotence “remedies” in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Far from it. The 1890s were the golden age of patent medicines, a totally unregulated era when the American marketplace was flooded with snake oil. Generally compounded of little more than alcohol, opiates, and enough bitter-tasting ingredients to give them a suitably medicinal flavor, these high-sounding nostrums—Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, Munyon’s Miracle Phosphate, Horsford’s Neuralgia Tonic, and thousands more—promised to cure every ailment kno
wn to man, from head colds to consumption, asthma to arthritis. Beyond inducing a mild state of intoxication, however, they had no effect at all.

  Over a two-week period, beginning on June 4, 1898, packages addressed to Mr. H. C. Barnet arrived on an almost daily basis at his private letter box at Nicholas Heckmann’s establishment. Virtually all of them contained marriage manuals, books of sexual advice, and guaranteed cures for impotence. Some of the latter came in liquid form, like Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy for Impotence, sold by a physician named Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut. Others consisted of tablets or capsules, like a product called Calthos, touted in full-page newspaper ads as “the greatest sensation in the medical world today.”

  The purported invention of the “famous French specialist, Prof. Jules Laborde,” Calthos had (so its maker claimed) restored the “vital forces” of countless satisfied customers, including several thousand male insane-asylum inmates, who had been reduced to their pitiable condition by youthful self-abuse. Anyone who suffered from “Lost Manhood or weakness of any nature in the Sexual Organs” could receive a free five-day trial treatment by sending a request to the manufacturer, the Von Mohl Company of Cincinnati, Ohio.3

  On June 1, 1898—at precisely the same time that the man calling himself H. C. Barnet was sending out his requests for various remedies—an envelope of a distinctive blue color arrived at the Manhattan office of Dr. James Burns. In addition to his private practice, Dr. Burns sold a mail-order nostrum called the “Marvelous Giant Indian Salve.” Supposedly concocted from a secret Native American recipe—“buffalo tallow combined with healing herbs and barks”—Dr. Burns’s ointment was, according to its ads, a “guaranteed, permanent” cure for male “atrophy.” For twenty-five cents in cash, money order, or stamps, a sample box would be “mailed in a plain wrapper.”4

  The blue envelope was opened by Dr. Burns’s bookkeeper, Agnes Evans, who was struck by the elegance of the enclosed sheet of stationery. It was the same robin’s-egg hue as the envelope and embossed with a crest of three interlaced silver crescents. “Please find enclosed 25 cents, for which send remedy, and oblige,” read the handwritten note.

  The sender gave his return address as 6 Jersey Street, Newark, New Jersey—the location of the Morris Herrmann and Company paint factory. The letter was signed “Roland Molineux.”

  19

  In the middle of June—after daily trips to his private letter box at Heckmann’s—the man who called himself Mr. H. C. Barnet suddenly stopped picking up his mail. His disappearance coincided with the departure of Roland Molineux for a summer trip to Europe.

  When Roland returned at the end of August—minus his mustache—he took a room at Travers Island, the New York Athletic Club’s summer home on the Long Island Sound. He retained his living quarters at the Newark paint factory, though he rarely spent the night there anymore. He also made regular trips to Manhattan. Some of these were business-related.

  Others had to do with matters of a more personal nature.

  The offices of the Jersey City Packing Company—Henry Barnet’s employer—were located in the Produce Exchange Building, a vast, imposing structure in lower Manhattan, long since demolished but once considered a landmark of architectural design.

  On a morning in late August, not long after Roland Molineux’s return from his European vacation, a small, slender package arrived in the mail, addressed to “H. C. Barnet, Room 342, Produce Exchange.” Barnet was out of town, so his office-mate, a salesman named James J. Hudson, set the package aside.

  When Barnet returned a few days later, Hudson handed him the package. Barnet tore off the light-colored wrapping and exclaimed in surprise.

  Inside was a small white box containing a number of white, powder-filled capsules. The box, which had a sliding top, was labeled “Calthos, five days’ treatment. The Von Mohl Company, Cincinnati, Ohio.”

  There was no accompanying message or note, nothing to indicate why the pills had been sent to Barnet. Certainly he had no need for them, never having suffered from the condition for which Calthos was purportedly a cure.

  With a shrug, he stuck the little box in the side pocket of his jacket. Later, he put it in a drawer of his desk and forgot about it.1

  20

  Though Blanche was an old woman by the time she wrote her memoirs, she describes the key events of her earlier life in novelistic detail. She recalls precisely what gown she was wearing when she performed at Carnegie Hall with the Musical Arts Society, the way the sunlight sparkled on the water the day she met Roland aboard the yacht Viator, the furnishings of the room in which she and Henry Barnet first made love.

  So it seems odd—and highly significant—that she is unable to say exactly what happened on that fateful afternoon in early September 1898, when, with startling suddenness, she renounced her relationship with Barnet and reconciled with Roland.

  True, she remembers that it happened over lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria. She recalls the table by the “great windows that opened on Fifth Avenue” and the “throngs of passersby” visible through the panes. She even remembers that she and Roland dined on filet of sole and drank white wine.

  But as for what brought about her sudden change of heart, she claims a complete loss of memory. “In some way—I hardly remember—Molineux and I bridged the separation between us” is all she writes of that moment.1

  It is hard not to conclude that Blanche is being deliberately evasive here, that she simply prefers not to recall—or not to confess—the real reason for her surprising turnaround. Still, it is possible to speculate.

  We know from her memoirs that Blanche’s dearest dream was to visit Paris. It was a dream, as she had discovered by then, that she was unlikely to realize as the wife of Henry Barnet, whose financial circumstances were far less comfortable than Molineux’s. Roland himself had just returned from a month-long vacation in Europe—proof positive that it was he, not Barnet, who was more likely to give her the kind of life she craved. Indeed, had Blanche accepted his earlier proposal, she would have been at his side on his trip. Her dream would already have come true.

  While it is fair to assume that Blanche made some such calculation on that autumn afternoon, it is impossible to know exactly what was going through her mind. One thing is certain: by the time she left the restaurant, she had agreed to give up Barnet and marry Roland.

  “Before the end of our luncheon,” she writes in her memoir, “I had promised Roland I would again wear his ring—and this time with a pledge!”

  However Roland managed to persuade Blanche to marry him—whatever inducements he offered—he couldn’t change her feelings for Barnet. In the days following the luncheon at the Waldorf, she found herself “consumed” by thoughts of her lover. His “influence over” her—that power “which from the beginning had so swept me off of my feet”—had in no way diminished. Try as she might “not to think of him,” she yearned “to see Barney.”

  She left messages at his club but received no reply. Finally, after a protracted silence that left her baffled and hurt, he telephoned her at Alice Bellinger’s.

  Yes, he knew about her engagement to Molineux, he said. He had “heard about it from someone at the Racquet Club.” Despite the coldness in his voice, the mere sound of it brought a terrible longing to her heart. “I suddenly wanted him back more than anything in the world.”

  He agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to see her. They met in her apartment on an evening in late September. Barnet was understandably angry. What did Blanche expect of him? he demanded. She had erected an insuperable barrier between them by agreeing to wed Molineux.

  “That is silly,” she said. “There are no barriers. Can’t we remain friends?”

  He gave a harsh laugh. “That is ridiculous.”

  “But why?” she persisted.

  “Good God!” he cried. “Molineux knows perfectly well that you and I have been seeing each other. You must know that. He hates me!”

  “That is preposterous,” Blanche said. “You
two are old friends. He doesn’t hate you.”

  “The enmity is veiled,” said Barnet. “But if he ever knew I saw you again, it would be open hostility. You ought to know that. This is good-bye—it has to be.”

  Before Blanche could respond, Barnet took her in his arms and “kissed her with savage abandon.” Then, pushing her away from him, he turned and strode from the room.

  Blanche followed him into the hallway and “cried out to him” as he hurried down the stairs. But Barnet, turning a deaf ear to her pleas, “made no reply.”

  “I stood there on the lower landing of the stairway,” Blanche writes in her memoir. “I believed he would return. But he went straight out the door.”

  She never saw Henry Barnet again.

  21

  In addition to his duties as night watchman of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Joseph Moore, a forty-year-old Englishman, performed valet services for various members, including Henry Barnet.

  Early on the morning of Friday, October 28, 1898, Moore received an urgent summons to Barnet’s room. He found the thirty-two-year-old clubman stretched out on his bed, ashen-faced and clutching his stomach. The normally dapper Barnet was wearing only an open-collared shirt and trousers, as though he’d been stricken while getting dressed for the day. His breakfast—which had been brought up to his room earlier—lay untouched on its tray.

  “Moore,” gasped Barnet. “Call Dr. Phillips.”

  Hardly had he spoken the words than Barnet let out a moan, leapt from the bed, and ran for the toilet. As Moore made for the staircase, he could hear the sound of violent retching through the closed door.1

  The residence of Dr. Wendell C. Phillips, a surgeon at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital and a longtime member of the KAC, was located on Madison Avenue, only a block away from the clubhouse. By 9:00 A.M.—less than fifteen minutes after Joseph Moore dispatched an errand boy to his home—Phillips was standing at Barnet’s bedside.