Passing Strange (44 page)

In November 1931 both sides filed motions for bills of particular, requesting that they be supplied with more detailed answers to specific questions before going to trial.

For her part, Ada King had to account for her long delay in filing a legal complaint. She explained that she and her children had been threatened and told that their monthly allowance would end if they initiated legal action. She had long tried to learn more about the trust, but Gardiner and his associates had deliberately concealed “the true facts.” Her family had waited a long time to file charges, but it was “no fault of their own.”
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Ada’s lawyer again pressed Winne to disclose the name of the Kings’ secret benefactor. But Winne refused, replying that “he is long since deceased and his address is unknown to this defendant.” As for the financial records charting thirty years of cash disbursements, he professed to have nothing.
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“Why all this mystery?” asked Ada’s lawyer. Surely, this mysterious “friend” must be “a person who made monthly payments to the plaintiffs, not merely out of charity and from his own funds, but in fulfillment of an equitable and legal obligation” held by Gardiner. Why wouldn’t Winne disclose his name?
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But Winne would not reveal what he so clearly knew. As his attorney explained, they didn’t “intend to expose another set of people to a suit of this character. Their names have been preserved anonymous for nearly thirty years; the statute has run against your clients, so far as we are concerned doubly, and the question of who has been doling out charity to your clients for thirty years is wholly irrelevant to the issues in this action, so long as the money doesn’t come from our decedent or any of his children or representatives.”
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“It is difficult to understand why you are so determined to make a secret of the identity of the person,” replied the Kings’ attorney.
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He could draw only one conclusion. There was no mysterious benefactor. And if there was no charitable benefactor, there must be a trust fund. From evidence submitted by the defense, Schwartz now knew about the sale of King’s art collection in 1903. And that, he thought, must be the source of the original trust.

 

 

THE JUDGE OVERSEEING THIS pretrial discovery phase of the case sided with the Kings and ordered Winne to reveal the source of Ada’s monthly stipend. But Jessup continued to disparage “this negro-plaintiff, calling herself Ada King.” The attorney counseled Winne not to disclose any names in order “not to unleash these plaintiffs on the trail of another set of defendants.”
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And he again asked the judge to dismiss the case. His clients would give Ada clear title to the Kalmia Avenue house; they had no stake in that. But her claims about a trust fund were preposterous. The plaintiff, “calling herself Ada King, claims to be the widow of one of the most distinguished and brilliant and nationally known geologists and men of letters of the nineteenth century. The executors of Mr. Gardiner are three well-known, honorable and highly reputable members of the New York community. It is inconceivable that they could have converted a trust fund of Eighty Thousand Dollars; or of any amount.”
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Jessup then posed a rhetorical question: why would these “negro plaintiffs” continue to accept $600 a year for thirty years, if they knew they were entitled to a fund of $80,000, or the yearly interest of $4,000? “Making all allowance for the fact that they are poor and ignorant people,” he said, “they are certainly chargeable with the knowledge and skill of seven successive legal advisors.” Ada’s race made her prone to dissembling and foolish behavior; his clients’ whiteness and elite social status, on the other hand, seemed proof of their moral probity. Jessup suggested that the Kings ought not be allowed to make charges “of such a character against people of repute and integrity.”
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The Kings’ attorney thought claims about the credulity of human behavior worked both ways. In fact, a benevolent donor seemed less likely than a misappropriated trust fund. Why should his clients believe that their money came from someone “out of the rare goodness of his or their generous hearts?”
That
seemed “incredible.” The defendants continued to “submit to the court the fantastic and mysterious explanation involving a non-resident, unknown benefactor, whose identity, they insist, must be kept a secret. Surely, the court will not permit this veil of mystery to remain drawn so that the plaintiffs’ just demands will be forever obscured.” The Kings could draw only one conclusion from the defendants’ case: “A substantial trust fund rightfully belonging to these plaintiffs, is being concealed.”
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Schwartz felt frustrated, and he complained to the judge about the defense’s prejudicial language. They “repeatedly referred to the plaintiffs as ‘negroes,’ in a manner contemplated to prejudice these plaintiffs,” Schwartz contended. “It is true that the plaintiff Ada King, widow of Clarence King, deceased, is a negress and that Clarence King was white. But when the proper time comes, it will be made apparent that the relationship which existed between the plaintiff Ada King and her deceased husband was one of deep love and devotion, notwithstanding that they were persons of different race.”
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The
Chicago Defender
picked up news of the lawsuit. “Millionaire’s ‘Love Wife’ Sues for Share in Huge Fortune: New York Aristocrats Shocked by Suit of Oil King’s ‘Maid.’ ” The paper set the tone for the coverage by the black press. This was the story of a secret alliance between “the scion of a wealthy white family and a Race woman.”
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In early 1932 a judge denied yet another defense motion to dismiss the case and charged the defendants $10 in court costs.
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He ruled that no statute of limitations applied to Ada’s claims to the house she had occupied for thirty years, nor to her efforts to obtain the trust. “Since the payments are alleged to have been made with trust moneys . . . and in recognition, in part at least, of a trust obligation, the defense of a statute of limitations cannot be sustained.”
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The
Defender
reported that Mrs. Ada King, “the inamorata of the now dead scion of an old New York family,” had at last achieved “a measure of legal recognition” in her long legal struggle.
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But the press had little grasp of the true facts of the case, and Wallace King refused to clarify anything for the reporters who knocked on the family’s Kalmia Avenue door. Even the local black papers spun out a tale of untruths about the African American woman who allegedly met her white husband while he was prospecting for oil in Arkansas. When his search “became successful,” reported the
Amsterdam News,
“he made a fortune and returned to New York with her and established her in the Flushing home which he purchased for that purpose.”
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No matter that the Arkansas oil boom occurred in the early 1920s, two decades after King’s death, or that Ada moved into her Flushing home only after her husband died.
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Accurate reporting took a backseat here to more sensational stories about interracial sex and the rags-to-riches tale of a poor black woman. Both the
Amsterdam News
and the
New York Age
mistakenly reported that Mrs. King still lived in the very house her husband had bought her at the start and that there she raised their two children (not their four or five).
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An
Amsterdam News
reporter dredged up the old story about the younger Ada’s involvement in the 1929 John Ancona murder case, implying that the current financial dispute might somehow trigger a new investigation of that unsolved crime. And he underscored the “startling similarity” between this case and the 1927 case of Letitia Brown, a black “former maid,” and Carleton Curtis, “the millionaire scion of a socially prominent white family,” which had provided such salacious gossip for the press a few years before.
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The King trial promised a comparable story.

 

 

THE DEFENSE DEFIANTLY PREPARED for trial. They would not disclose the name of the benefactor who provided “for these negroes after Mr. King’s death—the reason being to spare his aged mother the shock of learning of this liaison.” They accused the plaintiffs of mounting little more than “a fishing expedition to discover another group of people” remarkable only for their kindness and generosity.
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And they argued that the plaintiffs had waited too long to press their claims: “Assuming that these negro plaintiffs are ignorant and misguided, it is obvious that the Statute of Limitations has run against the assertion of a claim—thirty years after the death of a distinguished man whom, it is now claimed, had married, or agreed to marry, the negro plaintiff, Ada Todd, claiming to be Ada King.”
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They would not only raise doubts about Ada’s matrimonial claims but in effect put her race on trial, questioning the integrity of any “negro” plaintiff.

When Ada arrived in Justice Bernard Shientag’s Manhattan courtroom on Monday, November 20, 1933, she and her son Wallace braved the
Daily News
photographer who stood in wait for the “colored mammy.”
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The old phrase evoked a buffoonish image that belied the seriousness of the moment and predisposed readers to doubt Ada’s credibility. In a picture taken as they exited the courtroom, Wallace looks anxious as he escorts his mother past the press. Formally dressed in his coat and tie and ever-present hat, he protectively steers his mother through the crowd. Ada, by contrast, appears bemused, with the slight hint of a smile on her face. She wears a long fur-trimmed coat and a dark, close-fitting hat; a “smart outfit,” thought one reporter for the black press.
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She looks younger than her seventy-some years.

The press outnumbered the principals in the courtroom of Justice Shientag, a former labor lawyer and state industrial commissioner, who had been elected to the New York Supreme Court in 1930.
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The Kings’ attorney, Herman Schwartz, now had help from Harris J. Griston, an Austrian-born lawyer and Shakespeare scholar.
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And the defendants had new counsel altogether. The elderly Henry Jessup had handed the case over to George W. Martin of Emmett, Marvin & Martin, a law firm founded in 1805 that once counted Franklin Delano Roosevelt among its partners.
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The trial took an unexpected turn at the very start. In their opening statement, the defense again denied the existence of any trust fund. But finally, they revealed the source of Ada King’s money.

Her secret benefactor was Clarence King’s old friend John Hay.

 

 

WILLIAM WINNE, GARDINER’S ONETIME secretary, at last related what he knew. He testified that the nation’s secretary of state had provided the money for Ada King’s house. And the checks she subsequently received every month for more than thirty years all came from the extended Hay clan: first from Hay, then from his widow, then from their son-in-law Payne Whitney (“one of the richest of Americans”), and finally, after his sudden death in 1927, from his widow, John Hay’s daughter Helen Hay Whitney. Mrs. Whitney had suspended the monthly stipends when the Kings commenced their legal action, but she had secretly paid the taxes on the Kalmia Avenue house right up to the present day.
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The defense described James Gardiner as the link between the Kings and the Hay family. “Mr. Gardiner was a prominent and respected citizen of New York,” they explained, “and undoubtedly regarded the situation that he discovered about a year after King’s death as a terrible nightmare which he was obliged to see through to the finish because he was King’s oldest friend.” Since Gardiner himself was not wealthy, “he reported the matter to Mr. Hay.”
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Winne explained—with a sometimes confused chronology—how the payments worked. After King’s death, Hay transferred to Gardiner all of King’s art collection and whatever else he held as collateral for unpaid loans, instructing Gardiner to sell it and establish a trust fund for the maintenance of King’s mother, Mrs. Howland. Hay made additional payments into the fund so that Gardiner could also write Ada King monthly checks, and he provided Gardiner with $2,000 to purchase a home for Mrs. King. After John Hay’s death in 1905, Gardiner stepped out of the arrangement and Clara Hay provided money for Ada’s family directly to Winne. In the beginning, Winne himself gave Ada the money. Later, after various altercations, he funneled her monthly stipends through the Legal Aid Society. After Mrs. Howland died in 1911, John Hay’s executors, his sons-in-law Payne Whitney and James Wadsworth, met with Gardiner to do an accounting of the trust fund, and Gardiner turned over to them the remaining assets. The two men agreed to continue on their own their family support of Ada King and her children. Wadsworth—later a U.S. senator and then a congressman from New York—knew about the arrangement. But Whitney, and then his widow, handled the payments.

It was stunning news. But as Winne admitted, neither he nor the other defendants had any receipts, account books, or bank records to back their claims .
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ADA’S ATTORNEYS—WHO HAD no paper trail either—seized the moment to offer an alternative version of events. They contended that because Clarence King sought “to placate his family and friends, and yet to protect his wife and children,” he could not put in writing the covert agreement he made with James Gardiner. “His family and friends were Newport society people. His wife was a negress. The children were of half blood. If the miscegenation, or the intermarriage of black and white were disclosed to the public, particularly as matter of record, it would obviously prove embarrassing to his family and friends, who did not view the colored race and miscegenation in the same favorable light as Clarence King. Under these circumstances, it is, of course, obvious why it was impossible to have the trust appear in writing, without defeating the end which was sought.”
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