Passing Strange (45 page)

Ada’s attorney explained that shortly before his death King asked Gardiner to accept his art collection in trust for Ada and the children. The existence of this art collection had been known to Ada’s legal team for only a short while, but it seemed to account for the funds she had received all these years.

King and Gardiner “shared each other’s confidence,” argued Ada’s attorney, Harris Griston. “They were like Damon and Pythias. He knew Clarence King’s love for the colored people, and particularly of his marriage with Ada King and of their offspring. To what person other than this intimate friend, who was fully familiar with all of these circumstances, should Clarence King have turned, in order to make arrangements for his loved ones, and save his family and friends from embarrassment? ” King’s relatives would have been “aghast” at his secret marriage, and he could not afford to bring more people into his confidence while protecting Ada’s privacy. “It is obvious, that the only person he could have turned to logically, to execute this trust, and the person who should have been willing to accept that trust, was his intimate and life long friend, Gardiner.”
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King had a love for his wife and children “so sublime and so beautiful” it would be unthinkable for him not to provide for them after his death.
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But to prove King’s good intentions, the plaintiffs had no legal documents. And to prove his affection for his family, they had only a handful of old love letters, along with the recollections of Ada King and a single one of her friends.

The twenty or so Clarence King letters, “yellowed and crumbling with age,” introduced into the trial came from two sources.
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Ada brought some herself, including the one written toward the end of his life in which her husband told her to enroll the children at the Logan School in Toronto. The defense team introduced four letters into the trial. Ada King said that she had long ago provided six letters to Gardiner to prove her relationship to Clarence King and to document his statements about the trust. But instead of bringing these original letters into the courtroom, the defense brought carbon copies of typed transcripts. And instead of bringing six letters, they brought just four. These included the key letter in which Clarence King revealed to his wife his true name, and another in which he directed her to move to Toronto. Ada identified these as truncated copies of longer communications. She accused the defense of deleting the passages that referred to the trust .
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A SIDE FROM ADA HERSELF, the plaintiffs’ attorneys called just one witness, Henrietta Williams, of Brooklyn; she was a “negro,” the papers clarified.
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Mrs. Williams testified that as a six-year-old she had attended the Todd wedding. “It was the first wedding I ever saw,” she said, “and I guess I remembered it. They had a cake with white icing and candies—chocolates and all kind.” Later, as a teenager, she moved into the Todd family house on North Prince Street to help Ada care for her children. “Mr. King was always at home when he wasn’t traveling,” she testified, “and when he was away, he always brought presents to all of us.” Mrs. Williams recalled for the court one of the last conversations Clarence King had with his wife. “The very night he left for Arizona, we were all in the living room sitting around after dinner when he told her she mustn’t worry because he had given Mr. Gardiner money to take care of her and the children all their lives.”
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After Mr. King’s death, Mrs. Williams sometimes accompanied Ada on her visits to Gardiner’s office.
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Clearly, Henrietta Williams was Ada King’s confidante. The judge questioned her closely on her recollections of the wedding, dubious that she could retain such vivid childhood memories.
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Ada’s lawyer could account for this. “How many weddings does the court believe, Henrietta Williams attended, in which a socially prominent white man and a negress were married?”
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The defense, too, tried to trip her up. They got her to identify a photograph of President Garfield as a portrait of Clarence King, a disingenuous ploy, since their bearded faces and receding hairlines gave the two men a passing resemblance.
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Moreover, as Williams explained when asked to read something in court, she had broken her glasses a year ago and could not see well. The defense attorneys even insinuated that she had been paid to appear in court. They asked about her finances. She replied that she and her husband were out of work, but that she earned some money singing in choirs. Asked how she could afford to wear pearls and a fur coat, she responded that they came from friends who “know I have nothing and they have things, so they give to me. We get some money that way, too, and food.”
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Mrs. Williams understood that a poor black woman had to prove her respectability in court through her outward appearance. She thus took care to dress well. But her well-born interrogators turned that against her, implying that she was dissembling in every regard.

When Ada King took the stand and spoke in her quavering voice she gave her first and only public accounting of her life with Clarence King. Despite the many complexities of their relationship, her account was spare, focused on details that would prove their common-law marriage and establish the existence of the trust fund her husband created for her. She said that she met King while she worked as a nursemaid for a family in downtown Manhattan, explained that a Dr. Cook married them in 1888 at the home of a friend on West Twenty-fourth Street, and laughed as she tried to recall the birth dates of the five children born between 1889 and 1897. She claimed that she traveled with her husband to Washington, Boston, and Newport, though that claim seems hard to square with any other surviving evidence. She recalled the address of her old house on Skillman Street in Brooklyn and described the large home in Flushing where she once lived with five servants, including a cook, a maid, and a laundress. She explained that before he left for Arizona “to die” her husband reassured her that he had left $80,000 for her with Mr. Gardiner. She kissed him good-bye, for the very last time, as he boarded the train west.

Ada King said she was in Toronto when her husband’s physician in Phoenix contacted her to inform her of King’s death. She returned to New York and placed her ad in the paper, trying to find Gardiner. “I wanted to find out how I was going to live,” she testified. Gardiner’s secretary, Howard Dutcher, responded to the ad. He brought her money, gave her advice, and took “half a dozen letters from Mr. King in which he mentioned the trust fund.” She never saw them again. “They were all my evidence, all my principal letters.” She had not gone to court before, she said, because “they threatened me.”
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For all that Ada King related in her testimony, however, she left much unsaid. No one asked her (nor did she reveal) anything about her maiden name or place of birth, the details of her first meeting with Clarence King, or what she really knew or believed about her husband’s identity. Nothing came out in the trial about Clarence King’s false identity other than the fact that he used the name “James Todd.” No one commented on his alleged career as a Pullman porter, a clerk, or a steelworker. No one speculated about how he deceived his friends and led a double life. No one alluded to his shifting racial identities. And nobody ever raised the possibility that Ada herself had been deceived. As she tried to establish herself as the common-law wife of a loving husband, it was scarcely in Ada King’s best interests to confess that she, too, had been deluded by James Todd, the mysterious man from Baltimore (or was it the West Indies?). The defense wanted to portray her as a fool, and she would not play into their hands.

At the conclusion of the trial, Justice Shientag expressed his skepticism about the plaintiffs’ case. “The most that plaintiff has shown is that she lived with Clarence King and either was married or was his mistress; that for a short time before Clarence King went West for his health he wrote her letters which indicated that he was pressed financially, but he always indicated he would take care of her.” Such letters, in conjunction with the chattel mortgage due John Hay, seemed to explain the situation. “Those people interested in Clarence King, in keeping his memory from their point of view unsullied, made these payments voluntarily to this woman; that is all I can see in this case.”
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But the judge agreed to delay his final decision until a review of the trial memoranda submitted by the two sides.

Ada King’s lawyers mounted one last argument. Ada King knew the trust existed and the defense had not proved otherwise. The defense had failed to provide “one word of proof that Gardiner ever denied the trust” and had concealed the people—Gardiner’s executors and Mrs. Payne Whitney—who would know about it. As a mere secretary, Winne could not be expected to know of Gardiner’s secret arrangements with King. “What more do the plaintiffs have to prove to establish a case, and entitle them to judgment? ”
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But the defense saw it differently, arguing that the trial established only three things: an affectionate relationship between Clarence and Ada King; the 1903 auction of King’s art collection; and the fact that from shortly after King’s death until the commencement of this legal action, Gardiner and then Winne made periodic payments to Mrs. King, who lived in a house in Flushing still held in Gardiner’s name. But that was all. They insisted the plaintiffs had not proved the existence of a trust.
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Justice Shientag issued his final ruling in January 1934. He conceded that Clarence King had “great affection and love” for Ada King and that they lived together as Mr. and Mrs. James Todd, though “Clarence King was white and Ada King was a negress.” But he ruled in favor of the defendants. The burden of proof lay with Ada King, and she had never established the existence of a trust. Nonetheless, since the defendants had indicated their willingness to let her gain legal possession of her Kalmia Avenue house, he directed that the title be signed over to her.
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The
New York Times
simply noted that “Mrs. Ida King, elderly Negro,” lost her case.
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The
Herald Tribune
likewise identified her as a “Negro” in its account of the ruling, but at least it got her name straight.
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The legal endgame played out in a matter months. One of Ada’s previous attorneys, Morris Bell, went to court to get the money he thought due him. Since Ada had recovered no cash, he could only ask for a lien on her newly acquired house. The court rejected his claim.
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In the meantime, her current attorney (also unlikely to get any money) filed an appeal of Shientag’s ruling. An appellate court denied the appeal in September 1934.
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Ada King had lost, and the monthly stipends she had relied on for over thirty years were gone for good. As the
Amsterdam News
put it, “she fought the group of wealthy white society folk to regain the trust fund” and she lost.
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Ada King and her family dropped from the public eye, their high-stakes gamble lost, and settled back into life in the Kalmia Avenue house. For whatever it was worth, they had established their familial links to Clarence King. And they had won the title to their home. But without their monthly stipends, without an unknown benefactor to pay their property taxes, without any hope of gaining the money they had always believed to be theirs, life became more difficult. Wallace picked up occasional gigs as a musician, and the younger Ada worked as a store clerk. Despite their newly straitened circumstances, however, the Kings retained their middle-class aspirations. Family stories would recall as a point of pride that the younger Ada continued to wear matching shoes and hats, and that neither she nor her niece, Thelma, would leave the house without nylon stockings, the seams arranged just so.
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CLARENCE KING REENTERED THE public consciousness, not so much because of the trial as in spite of it. The revelations about his secret family made it difficult to speak of King with the undying adoration that had characterized talk of him during his lifetime. Francis P. Farquhar, the director of the Sierra Club from 1924 to 1951 and an ardent student of California mountaineering, issued a new edition of
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada
in 1935 with a preface in which he described King as bold and impetuous, charming and vigorous. In passing, he noted that King’s last ten years “were not happy ones,” dogged as he was by “financial troubles and disappointments.”
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Neither here, nor in the introduction to a new edition of “The Helmet of Mambrino” published in 1938, did Farquhar allude to King’s marital life. But in his “Mambrino” essay, Farquhar tried to second-guess the tone of disappointment he sensed in the memorial essays that King’s friends had published after his death. The decline of King’s final years seemed attributable to something other than “mere financial catastrophe.” He seemed, indeed, a tragic hero, “in the sense of Aristotle—‘One highly renowned and prosperous, whose misfortune is brought upon him by some error of judgment or frailty.’ ”
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Other writers felt compelled to pay lip service to the story about King’s family, even if they scarcely knew what to do with something that seemed vaguely scandalous and undeserving of explanation. John Hay’s biographer Tyler Dennett, writing in 1933, asserted without documentation that once Hay learned of King’s marriage, King’s “name was never again mentioned over the ‘Five of Hearts’ teacups.”
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Bernard DeVoto’s stirring 1943 book on westward expansion,
The Year of Decision: 1846,
sought to resurrect King as one of the unsung scientist-heroes of American expansionism, but the taint of the trial colored his characterization. “Clarence King survives as a man to be mentioned in appraisals of our civilization through his friendship with a literary person of considerably inferior intelligence, Henry Adams, and through a rumor of scandal that has been attached to him.”
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Likewise writing in the wake of the trial, the great western novelist and historian Wallace Stegner remarked in 1954 that King ended up “defeated and damned,” with “a clandestine Negro wife and five unacknowledged children.”
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