The Valentino Affair (23 page)

After several frustrating days, the teams of reporters that had been combing every inch of Long Island in an effort to track down the missing boy finally got a break. Uterhart had received a tip-off that Jack Jr. was holed up at the Heckscher’s summer place, two miles from The Box. Corroboration came from Maurice Heckscher. “There is no mystery and never has been in respect to the whereabouts of little Jack De Saulles. He is at my house at Westbury, under the care of his aunt, Mrs. Rudolph Degener, and of my wife.”
⁴⁹

Uterhart got busy, saying that, while he was happy for the child to remain in the custody of his grandfather, he would appeal to the de Saulles family to allow Jack Jr. to visit his mother. Although technically Blanca was the legal guardian, Uterhart conceded that the practicalities of keeping a child in jail overrode the law. With a sorrowful shake of his head, he passed along Blanca’s comment that, if custody of Jack Jr. were denied to her, she had “no desire to live.”
⁵⁰

Then it was back to trashing the dead man’s reputation. The letters Blanca had received from the public, Uterhart said, provided clear evidence that Jack was not, as he had been dubbed, the “most popular man along Broadway.”
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Nor was he unanimously adored in Washington, where one female columnist blasted Jack as a “promiscuous libertine,” accusing him of being “lax in habit and universal in taste.”
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Such criticism was music to Uterhart’s ears, and he kept stirring the pot by contrasting Jack’s hell-raising lifestyle with the selfless actions of his ex-wife. Why, Blanca had even taken a fellow prisoner under her wing. According to Uterhart, “Happy Lil,”
⁵³
as Blanca called her, had fallen into “evil ways,”
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but thanks to Blanca’s counseling she had resolved to make a new start in life when she left jail. Uterhart said that Dr. Wight had completed his official report on Blanca, and he quoted from its conclusion: “The woman is psychopathic and is in a distressed state. She has been seriously ill for at least a year and is still on the down track.”
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Mrs. Seaman also expressed concern about Blanca’s mental state. “If only we could do something to bring her out of this apathy. I am afraid if she continues in this frame of mind she will be seriously ill.”
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Newspaper editors, rubbing their hands in glee over the boost to their circulation numbers, targeted anyone who could keep the story running. Next on the journalistic hit list came Alfred B. Nathan, Blanca’s divorce lawyer, who was tracked down to his vacation home at Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks. The lawyer remained closemouthed, reluctant to discuss the divorce terms because he feared it might prejudice Blanca’s chances in the upcoming trial, which would be “a long, hard fight.”
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He characterized as “ridiculous”
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suggestions that he had cut a deal for Blanca on the custody issue in return for a blanket being thrown over certain of her actions. However, he did admit to having previously acted for Joan Sawyer, and he refused to explain how Blanca came to retain his firm as counsel. Some of the questioning made Nathan uncomfortable.

“Why was no appeal filed in Mrs. De Saulles’s behalf after the divorce decree gave her husband almost equal rights to the boy?” shouted one reporter.

“Because she did not instruct us to appeal.”

“Was she satisfied with the provisions of the decree?”

“Well, as I said, she made no attempt to appeal.”
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It later emerged that, before being run to earth by the press, Nathan had interrupted his vacation, returned hurriedly to his Lower Manhattan office, picked up the de Saulles divorce file, and then hightailed it back to Schroon Lake. One possible reason for Nathan’s sudden and hasty action may lie in a cryptic comment from an unnamed employee at the Heckscher office, who predicted that “the trial will develop a tremendous sensation in favor of Mr. De Saulles.”
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Although he refused to elaborate on this intriguing forecast, it seems clear that the employee was hinting at the rumors about Blanca and Rodolfo.

This provided uncomfortable reading for Uterhart and very uncomfortable reading for Rodolfo, who combed each day’s copy of the
Los Angeles Times
for the latest developments. There are claims that Rodolfo attempted to contact Blanca during this period. If he did—and it’s easy to imagine someone of his romantic nature at least trying—then much the greatest likelihood is that he was told to keep his head down. The last thing Blanca needed at this trying time was any contact with Rodolfo Guglielmi.

On August 7, the train carrying Charles de Saulles from Tulsa steamed into Penn Station. From there a car whisked him to Jack’s business premises on West 42nd Street, where he and Maurice Heckscher were closeted in a long conversation. The second leg of his journey took him to Jack’s apartment. There, Charles gazed down at the ruined body of his brother in its bronze casket. He shared his grief with a column of naval and military officers from various countries who filed solemnly past the open casket in a mark of respect. Charles dutifully shook hands and thanked everyone for their kindness and consideration. Then he and Heckscher left for The Box.

They arrived to some jarring information: Blanca’s family had left Chile en route to New York. The journey might take several days, but the financial firepower that the Errázuriz-Vergara dynasty was bringing to the fight would be awesome.

TEN

The Funeral

N
OT EVEN SIZZLING HEAT AND A BLANKET OF HUMIDITY
COULD QUELL
public
interest in the funeral of Jack de Saulles. Originally the service had been scheduled for Grace Church on lower Broadway, but the venue later shifted to Jack’s apartment on West 57th to afford greater privacy. That was the plan; it didn’t succeed.

Crowds began gathering just after dawn, and by eleven o’clock, the time of the funeral, the blistering sidewalks so teemed with an estimated two thousand spectators that twenty-five policemen, many on horseback, were called in to control the crush. Despite family requests for a private funeral, a few rubberneckers slipped through the police cordon and sneaked in to the building. Across the street two “over-dressed” women took in the commotion with knowing nods. “Jack sure was a spender,” said one. “He spent it as fast as he made it.”
¹

One of the few funeral vehicles brave enough to negotiate the crowded street bore Major de Saulles. As he stepped out and saw the size of the throng, his haggard expression turned grayer still, and his knees buckled. His elder daughter, Georgiana, and the chauffeur dashed forward, grabbing hold of the ailing major and helping him inside. The major’s other daughter, Caroline Degener, had volunteered to remain with Jack Jr. at the Heckscher’s residence. So many floral tributes filled the apartment that it scarcely had room for the mourners. Most were male, either old friends from Yale or business associates; others came from the political world. A blanket of white roses covered the casket, banked at both sides and at the back with masses of flowers. A single wreath of lilies of the valley dominated the display.

The Right Reverend Bishop Ethelbert Talbot of the diocese of Eastern Pennsylvania and Dean Frederick Beekman, rector of the Church of the Nativity of South Bethlehem, shared the duties of the service. They gave no sermon, just the Episcopal service for the dead and a few hymns, including “Peace and Lead, Kindly Light,” performed by a quartet from Grace Episcopal Church. After the brief service, the funeral cortège made its way through the heaving crowd, bearing Jack de Saulles to his final resting place.

It was originally thought that Jack would be buried in South Bethlehem, but this was changed to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Here he would lie among the likes of newspaper publisher Horace Greeley; the fabulously crooked William “Boss” Tweed, who stole an estimated two hundred million dollars from New York taxpayers; noted abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher; and Leonard Jerome, grandfather of Winston Churchill. The honorary pallbearers included Marshall Ward, Dudley Malone, the Collector of Internal Revenue “Big Bill” Edwards, Rear Admiral Louis Gomez of the Chilean navy, Captain Philip M. Lydig, Maurice Heckscher, French naval officer Captain Raymond Michel, William F. McCombs, and Lyttleton Fox.

Major de Saulles did not attend the gravesite. After his near collapse at the service, his family thought it unwise for him to go to the cemetery. His wife, Catherine, tiny and white haired, did make it to Green-Wood, but the strain of it all overwhelmed her. She broke down completely and had to be helped away.

After the funeral, Charles de Saulles held a press conference at his brother’s real estate office to announce that attorney George Gordon Battle had been engaged to investigate the charges against Jack and to vindicate his name. Charles was shaking with indignation as he handed out copies of a prepared statement. After denouncing the attack on his brother as “grossly and incredibly false,”
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he tore into Uterhart: “I should have thought that even the malignity of a hired slanderer would have waited until after the funeral of his victim. But this Mr. Uterhart has been so zealous in his efforts to traduce and defame the memory of the dead that he has not observed even that measure of ordinary decency.”
³
Charles then read out a lengthy statement:

I should greatly prefer to say nothing in this matter and to await the proper processes of the courts, which will in good time disclose all the facts and vindicate the good name of my brother. But Mr. Uterhart’s extraordinary conduct in continuing to make these charges renders it necessary for me, in justice to the memory of my brother, to state very briefly some of the salient facts. Mr. Uterhart has stated that the decision of the Supreme Court of this state giving the custody of my nephew, little Jack De Saulles, to his mother for seven and to his father for five months, was a surprise and a disappointment to Mrs. Blanca De Saulles. The fact is that this division of custody was pursuant to a written stipulation, signed by Mrs. De Saulles and her attorney, and approved by the Referee who heard the case, and by Justice Finch of the Supreme Court, who granted the decree. Furthermore, it was expressly agreed by letters between my brother and his wife that she should have the boy in July and he should have him in August. And she expressed herself in her letters as perfectly satisfied with this arrangement. So that there can be no shadow of pretext that my brother did not have every right, legal and moral, to the custody of the boy in August.

And it has been stated that my brother misused a part of his wife’s fortune. This charge is entirely without foundation. My brother not only did not misuse any of her private funds, but was most generous in his financial dealings with her, spending large sums to gratify her expensive tastes and to pay her debts. As to their married life, I shall not follow the example of Mr. Uterhart. I shall make no charges or recriminations, but I shall say that my brother was a devoted and loving husband in the earlier days of their married life, and that it is the opinion of her friends, as well as of his, that the change in their marital relations was due to her conduct and her treatment of him.

I have it in writing over her own signature that their domestic differences were chiefly due to her own fault. It is certain that her friends continued to like and respect my brother after the divorce proceedings. I can mention no better illustration than the fact that the Ambassador from Chile, an old friend of Mrs. De Saulles and her family, had dinner with my brother only a few days before the tragedy.

Nor do I believe that her act was caused by an overpowering affection for the boy. She had agreed to a division of custody and even when she had him in her charges she did not spend all her time with him by any means. During the divorce proceedings she went abroad for several months, leaving the boy in this country. And the fact that she shot his father in the back, firing five shots in the presence of the little boy, my aged father, and my sister, seems to me to indicate that the welfare of the boy was not in her mind at the time. What more dreadful heritage could she have bequeathed him than that memory? The cold deliberation of her act: her statement immediately after the shooting: “Now send for a policeman,” and her whole conduct seems to show a mind moved by cold fury and not by sudden anger.