The Valentino Affair (15 page)

While Blanca was soaking up the Highland hospitality in Scotland, Jack’s sense of injustice began to fester. Despite a frustrating lack of hard evidence, gut instinct told him that Blanca and Rodolfo had been a hell of a lot more than just dancing partners, and the thought of some greasy gigolo—a former taxi dancer, no less—sharing a bed with his wife proved more than this Yale blueblood could stomach. As jealousy gnawed away at his innards, he began to scheme.

SEVEN

“Revenge Should Have No Bounds”

O
N THE MORNING OF
S
EPTEMBER 5, 1916,
AT ABOUT HALF PAST SEVEN, A
task force of NYPD officers swooped in on an apartment at 909 Seventh Avenue, just up the street from Carnegie Hall. The raid, led by Assistant District Attorney James E. Smith, was supposedly part of an investigation into two vice squad detectives, William Enright and David Foley, who were suspected of offering protection to brothels in return for a weekly kickback.

Such accusations were commonplace in the early twentieth century. This was the era of the so-called “millionaire cops,” when a string of crooked NYPD officers banked fortunes from shaking down the very criminals they were supposed to catch. The most egregious of these was Lieutenant Charles Becker. For years the bluff and hearty Becker lorded over Manhattan’s red-light Tenderloin District—an area that consisted of portions of Chelsea, the Flatiron District, Hell’s Kitchen, and the Theater District—raking in thousands of dollars a month in bribes. But his sleazy reign finally hit the buffers in 1912 when he was convicted of ordering the murder of Herman Rosenthal, a small-time bookmaker who was threatening to blow the whistle on Becker’s corrupt empire.

Becker was undoubtedly crooked, but whether he arranged the shooting death of Rosenthal remains open to doubt. At the time, mounting unease over the conviction sparked numerous calls for a reprieve, but newly elected New York governor Charles Whitman—the very prosecutor who had put Becker on death row—was in no mood to see his own work undermined, and he declined to exercise clemency. Becker died in the electric chair at Sing Sing on July 30, 1915.

On this morning, however, when the officers—plus a gang of handpicked reporters—burst into the Seventh Avenue apartment, instead of the expected string of hookers and their red-faced clients the only people present were a fifty-year-old gray-haired lady named Georgia Thym and a young male companion who looked scared out of his wits. Assistant DA Smith stepped into the room and beamed, “Hello, Rodolfo.”

“Rodolfo hasn’t been here since last May,”
¹
the young man mumbled.

Smith gave him a disbelieving look and told him to try again.

Utterly crestfallen, Guglielmi caved in and admitted his identity. He and Thym were arrested and hauled off to the district attorney’s office on suspicion of running a brothel that paid protection money to the police.

The next day’s newspapers gloated over Guglielmi’s humiliation, denigrating him as “a bogus count or marquis.”
²
According to District Attorney Edward Swann, Guglielmi made statements “which, if true, are of immense importance in this investigation.”
³
He described the young man as “a handsome fellow, about twenty years, [who] wears corsets and a wrist watch. He was often seen dancing in well-known hotels and tango parlors with Joan Sawyer and Bonnie Glass.”
⁴
The reference to the corset was a clumsy slur on Rodolfo’s sexuality; so too was the comment about the wristwatch. In 1916 the chunky pocket hunter was the preferred choice for “real” men while the more slender wristwatch was still viewed with suspicion in some quarters.

Surrounded by pressmen, Swann held up visiting cards found in the prisoner’s possession. These proclaimed him to be the “Marchese Guglielmo Roma,” an affectation, said Swann, adopted by Guglielmi “to please the ladies.”
⁵
The district attorney said he was investigating reports of widespread blackmail involving rich people “on the fringes of New York society.”
⁶
He claimed that 909 Seventh Avenue had hosted “many vicious parties,”
⁷
at which prominent members of society had been inveigled into compromising situations with young women and then blackmailed. It had been a sophisticated operation, said Swann; three adjoining houses opposite Carnegie Hall were used as brothels. In the event of a police raid on any one of them, the occupants could flee upstairs and escape across the roof to avoid being traced. The way Swann told it, he had single-handedly wrapped up an entire white slavery ring. When pressed, however, he reluctantly conceded that the raid failed to provide the conclusive proof that he was seeking of New York’s “gilded vice.”
⁸

While Rodolfo was in custody at the DA’s office, he asked to make a phone call. In the presence of surprised investigators, he rang no less a personage than the Deputy Police Commissioner Frank A. Lord, saying, “I’m in trouble, Frank. I wish you would come down here and help me.”
⁹
Lord hung up immediately, according to Swann.

Journalistic ears pricked up. How come some foreign nightclub dancer knew the deputy commish? And why had Lord been so quick to hang up? Smelling a good story, reporters soon tracked down Lord to the Prince George, an elegant hotel on East 28th Street. The deputy commissioner was cagey. After much spluttering he grudgingly admitted knowing Rodolfo but couldn’t recall where they had first met. Philadelphia, Rodolfo told the police; he and Joan Sawyer had dined with Lord in the domino room of the Café L’Aiglon when Lord had taken an extended vacation from his duties. Lord flatly denied this. “I would find it quite difficult to remain away from New York for three weeks, as this fellow charges.”
¹⁰
His only recollection of Rodolfo had been as Miss Sawyer’s dancing partner, and he professed astonishment that this semistranger had called him to ask for assistance. “I told him I was unable to help him.”
¹¹

An already peculiar case now took another puzzling twist. Although neither Rodolfo nor Mrs. Thym was charged with running a brothel or any other vice offense or blackmail, they were held as “material witnesses”
¹²
in the ongoing investigation against Enright and Foley. Judge Otto Rosalsky set bail in the jaw-dropping sum of ten thousand dollars. As neither prisoner had a prayer of raising this kind of money, it meant a trip to the gloomy Tombs prison. Rodolfo was frantic. If convicted of any crime that came under the catchall phrase of “moral turpitude,” he ran the risk of losing his immigration status and being deported. His dream of a life in America would come crashing down. After two anxious days behind bars, his bail was lowered to the more reasonable, though still high, sum of fifteen hundred dollars, and he was set free. How he was able to secure such a sum has sparked wild speculation. Some have claimed, without a jot of proof, that Blanca was the anonymous benefactor; other, equally unsubstantiated claims point to Mae Murray.
¹³

Quite why the Seventh Avenue apartment should be raided on such flimsy evidence initially perplexed reporters, but whispers suggested that the operation had been engineered by none other than Jack de Saulles. The official police version stated that they had been tipped off by “a well-to-do businessman who said he had been victimized.”
¹⁴
This could well be de Saulles. But it does not begin to explain the most puzzling aspect of this incident: What was Rodolfo doing at the apartment at half past seven in the morning? If the apartment did double as a cathouse and he’d gone to procure the services of a prostitute, then he was out of luck. And if that was the case, why spend the night? Unless, of course, he really did have some dubious dealings with the enigmatic Georgia Thym? Stranger still: If Jack’s was the hidden hand behind this operation, how did he know that Rodolfo would be present when police raided the place?

Much the likeliest scenario is that Jack had Rodolfo shadowed—probably by one of Dougherty’s hirelings—and then all it took was a phone call to a police contact to exact his revenge. This would also explain why Assistant DA Smith, who had never before set eyes on Rodolfo, was able to address the terrified young man by name when he entered the apartment. De Saulles might have come up short in gathering evidence to prove that Blanca had slept with Rodolfo, but he was determined to make the phony marchese pay a terrible price for crossing him.

It worked. Rodolfo’s reputation was ruined. He had been arrested at an alleged brothel, spent time in jail, and now had a permanent police record. Overnight, he became a showbiz untouchable, a pariah. He had already been dumped by Joan Sawyer—understandably miffed at having her sex life paraded in public, courtesy of her perfidious dance partner—and, although all charges against Rodolfo were dropped quietly in mid-September, the perception endured that he was somehow mixed up in white slavery and blackmail. It was a stain on his character that would never fade. And there were wider ramifications. All this talk of vice and white slavery tolled the death knell for those afternoon tea dances where Rodolfo had performed and squired wealthy female patrons. It was guilt by association. Within a year
thé dansants
and the exhibition dance craze had twirled into show business history.

Rodolfo was in a daze, stupefied as his world collapsed around him. Not just dancing but films, too. Like millions of others he had caught the motion pictures bug. Stars of the fledgling industry like Charlie Chaplin were earning fabulous salaries—as much as ten thousand dollars a week—and Rodolfo desperately wanted to join the party. All summer long, he’d hung around the Fifth Avenue studio of the Famous Players-Lasky Motion Picture Company, which later became Paramount, scrabbling for any kind of casual work.

And his persistence had paid off. He landed a bit part in
The Quest of Life,
starring the dance team of Maurice and Florence Walton. Although an uncredited extra, Rodolfo is plainly identifiable, and most film historians count this his first confirmed appearance. Unfortunately for Rodolfo the movie came out barely two weeks after his arrest. The timing couldn’t have been worse. More isolated than ever, he had reached rock bottom. With Blanca enjoying the Scottish shooting season and with dancing opportunities all dried up, he could only hunker down and await her return to America.

That happy day came on November 4, when the SS
Baltic
docked at New York. Also aboard were Amalia, Guillermo, his twenty-three-year-old wife, Maria, and their infant daughter, Maria. When Anna Mooney walked down the gangway, she left Blanca’s employ forever and went to work for Jack instead. He knew how fond his son was of Boobie, and Blanca always suspected that he had deliberately hired Mooney to drive a deeper wedge between her and Jack Jr.

Blanca’s legal team gave her an update on the divorce proceedings. As she studied the papers, she recalled that the family home on East 78th Street had been bought with her money, and that Jack said he later sold the property for $5,500. But documentation revealed that Jack had disposed of the property through his secretary, Stephen S. Tuthill, for $14,500. Blanca demanded the balance of $9,000. Yet her lawyers oddly dissuaded her from pursuing this perfectly justified claim on grounds that it might “disturb”
¹⁵
the divorce negotiations. Nor could such a strange directive be blamed on poor advice because Blanca’s legal team had brought in Max D. Steuer, nicknamed “The Magician,” to plead her case before the judge.

Steuer was arguably the top civil attorney on the East Coast, and he didn’t come cheap. On one occasion a client came to Steuer with a problem and didn’t quibble at Steuer’s demand for a ten-thousand-dollar retainer. When the animated client launched into details of the case, Steuer cut him off sharply, reminding him about the fee. Undeterred, the client insisted that the funds would be forthcoming, but Steuer was adamant, snapping, “I can’t even think about the case until I’ve had the money!”
¹⁶

Nowadays little remembered, Steuer was a legal titan of the early twentieth century. A story—possibly apocryphal—goes that when Chase National Bank found itself threatened with a serious lawsuit, one that threatened the company’s very existence, an anxious board of directors gathered together and the chairman said, “Gentlemen, we must have the best lawyer in the world. I am going to pass out twelve cards, and I want each director to think of the man he believes to be the world’s best lawyer and write that lawyer’s name on the back of the card.”
¹⁷
When the cards were collected and given to the chairman, he spread them out on the table in front of him: On every one of the cards was written “Max Steuer.”

After two secret hearings, neither of which Jack attended, the divorce decree was issued. The court found that de Saulles had misconducted himself with “a woman not his wife.”
¹⁸
The decree also made references to adultery with another woman (Mae Murray’s was the most oft-whispered name on the grapevine). The decree, double the usual length, with five pages devoted to the custody issue, ordered that Jack Jr. remain in America until the end of the war. Until then, Jack would have custody of the boy for five months and Blanca seven, on an alternating monthly basis.