The Valentino Affair (36 page)

As the electric light in the courtroom took over from the fast fading afternoon, Blanca, who had been on the stand for several hours, began to wilt. She turned to Justice Manning, placed a hand on the judicial bench, and addressed him in a voice that barely carried to the first juror. “I’m so tired, please.”
⁵¹

Justice Manning turned to Uterhart and suggested that she continue by telling the story in her own words, “If it isn’t too long.”

“It is quite a story,” said Uterhart.

“It won’t be if you let her tell it herself,”
⁵²
the judge replied tartly. Uterhart gave a gracious bow and sat down.

“Where shall I start?”
⁵³
asked Blanca. Uterhart told her to just outline the events of August 3. She began with frustration over the phone calls, how she thought that Jack was manipulating the situation. Even when giving her responses in narrative form, her delivery was truncated, not verbose at all, just a few sentences at a time, followed by a pause. Whenever Uterhart tried to intervene, he was silenced by the bench; Justice Manning was adamant that he wanted this story told in Blanca’s own words. The witness screwed her face into a frown, as if struggling to recall. Finally, she remembered making a phone call. “I told Mr. Iglehart that I was going to get the boy and I wanted him to go with me. He said it was too delicate a matter. . . . He offered to send his car, and I do not remember much of what he said.”
⁵⁴
Here, her voice trailed off, as if she was having trouble concentrating. Every pause only increased the tension in court. At times the breaks were so long that the only sound to be heard was the occasional rumbling of a radiator. No one, though, was distracted. Everyone seemed to be straining for the next word. Blanca continued.

“The maid and I started from Crossways and we took the dog. I wanted to take my baby right away with me and I didn’t want Jack to know”—this was the first and only time that she addressed her ex-husband by his Christian name—“so I ordered the taxi to stop a little distance from The Box on the roadway. As the maid and I got out I saw De Saulles’s car standing outside. I was surprised to see it there, as I had not supposed he would yet have returned from the Meadow Brook Club, where they told me over the phone he had gone to dinner.”
⁵⁵

The jury’s eyes were riveted on Blanca as she neared what they suspected would be the dramatic conclusion. “As I went into the house I saw my baby coming downstairs with Mrs. Degener, De Saulles’s sister. I wanted then to take the baby and run.”
⁵⁶
At this point Blanca paused to sweep a nervous hand over her brow, as if struggling to remember what happened next. “But then Mr. De Saulles came forward. I think I asked him why he had kept the baby past his time. I don’t know what he said then—something about it being his time to have the boy. But I said: ‘I want him and I’ve come to take him.’ Then he looked at me and said, ‘You can’t have him; you can’t ever have him.’ I saw a look come over his face. I think I was stunned then. I felt a frightful pain in my head.”
⁵⁷
Another of those pauses. Then she said, “I can still hear those words. . . . The next I knew Dr. Wight was bending over me. I suppose it was in the jail. It was the next morning.”
⁵⁸

A long, pained gap followed. There was perfect silence in the room. Everybody had been sitting on the edge of their seats. At length she murmured, “That’s all.” There was another pause. “Can I go now?”
⁵⁹

“Is that all you know?” asked the judge in kindly tones.

“Yes,” came the almost inaudible reply.

“And when did your memory return?”

“I think it was when I found Dr. Wight speaking to me.”

“Do you know now when that was—whether it was on the same night or the next day?”

The defendant just sat there, looking bewildered. Justice Manning asked if that was all she could tell the court. With a tired smile she said, “Yes.”
⁶⁰

It was clear that she had reached the limit of her endurance. Although there were still fifteen minutes of the scheduled session to go, Justice Manning looked at her and said, “You may go now.”
⁶¹
He banged the gavel. Blanca bowed toward the judge and the jury, stepped down from her chair, and followed the deputy out of the court.

Her ordeal on the witness stand had lasted five hours and she had not put a foot wrong.

FIFTEEN

“Flatter Him to Death”

T
HE
T
RIAL,
D
AY 7

S
EVEN DAYS INTO THE TRIAL SAW A TIGHTENING OF COURTROOM SECURITY
in an effort
to ensure no repetition of the unseemly scramble for seats that had marred the previous day’s session. As a result, an orderly procession filled the long corridor that led to the public gallery, with everyone buzzing at the spectacle to come. How would Blanca fare on cross-examination? Would she buckle under the pressure? Would she let slip details of secret lovers? It was all too exciting! Even Blanca, her face more ghostly than ever, looked apprehensive as she entered the court. Several jurors smiled encouragingly at her, and a deathly hush fell over the crowd as she took her place at the defense table, just in front of Señora Errázuriz-Vergara and her other children. As always, Blanca made no attempt to acknowledge their presence. Uterhart whispered a last few words of advice and then she was called to the witness stand. The next few hours would decide the course of her life—in its polar extremes, either freedom or a date with the electric chair.

As Weeks approached, Blanca greeted him with the sweetest smile. He began with general inquiries into the current state of her health, asking how she had fared since she went to jail; for instance, were her nails still brittle?

“They were nearly always brittle.”

“And has your hair been falling out?”

She smiled. “All women’s hair falls out.”

“Yes, but we are confining ourselves to your hair.”

“Yes.”
¹

Weeks’s opening—not so much a salvo, more a gentle salve—had shocked many, as he barely raised his voice above a polite enquiry. And the emollient tone continued. “When did you first find out that your husband had ceased to care for you?”

“I think it was at the time when I went to Europe before the war began.”
²

“When you went to South Bethlehem about the time the baby was born, you were unhappy?”

“Yes, but I was very fond of him [Jack de Saulles],”
³
Blanca said, punctuating her responses with deep, theatrical sighs and a lifting of her shoulders, as if relieving a great weight.

Weeks then reached down for a sheaf of letters that lay on his desk. One day earlier Uterhart had read extracts from the voluminous correspondence that passed between the couple to prove the extent of Jack’s cruelty toward Blanca. Jurors had wept openly as defense counsel highlighted those passages that painted Blanca as the devoted but downtrodden wife, waiting at home with the baby while her husband was out raising hell on Broadway. Now it was Weeks’s turn to wring some advantage from the correspondence. He began with a letter Blanca had written from South Bethlehem just after the baby was born, in which she addressed her husband as “My precious Dada Boy” and thanked him for all his kindnesses to her. “You have been such a perfect, ideal husband and now you are a sweet father. I want to show my gratefulness to you by being a good wife and a devoted mother.”
⁴

Weeks peered over the top of his spectacles at the witness. “You meant what you wrote in that?”

“In a way I did.”

“He was very kind to you?”

“He was kind because he stayed with me when the baby was born.”
⁵

Weeks repeated the line about Jack being a “perfect, ideal husband.” Was that true?

“Yes,”
⁶
she said falteringly.

Next came questions about her 1916 visit to London. It was, said Blanca, a miserable time, made worse “because I was away from all my family and friends.”
⁷
This puzzled Weeks. But what about this letter, he asked, written from London on June 29 rhapsodizing about the glittering attractions and social life in Europe? “It is fair for us to assume you were having a pretty good time?”

After considerable hesitation she said, “Yes.”
⁸

This question appeared to flag a warning signal in Blanca’s mind. Thus far, she had answered briskly; henceforth, her replies were shaped more carefully and took much longer to deliver, as she sought to reconcile her alleged unhappiness with the upbeat tone of the letters. Weeks moved it along. “You went to the dances and private theatricals, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And had a pretty good time?”

“No, I was bored to death,”
⁹
she said emphatically. “My heart was broken when I wrote that letter.”
¹⁰

How, Weeks wondered, if your heart was broken, could you disport herself so gaily at London dances? The answer came back, quick as a rapier. “We don’t dance with our hearts.”
¹¹
Blanca’s long eyelashes fluttered in triumph as the court cooed with delight over her bon mot.

No amount of pretrial coaching from Uterhart could have provoked such good responses from Blanca under cross-examination. She was a natural. And she clearly held the upper hand in the early exchanges. When Weeks, thoroughly flustered, turned to a letter written the next day, June 30, in which she proclaimed her love for Jack, and asked why she had adopted such amorous tones, she smiled, “I thought the surest way to hold a man was to flatter him to death.”
¹²
Weeks immediately asked that this answer be stricken out and Justice Manning agreed, but it was too late. The damage had been done; Blanca had scored yet another big point.

Weeks hurried on to another letter in which Blanca expressed concerns about the influence certain people might be having on Jack. “You spoke of Louise and Maurice; was that Mr. and Mrs. Heckscher?”

“Yes.”

“Are they friends of yours?”

“I thought they were.”

“Are they now?”

“I don’t know.”
¹³

This allowed Weeks to raise the incident on the Duke of Manchester’s boat off Huntington, when, according to Blanca’s earlier testimony, she and Louise Heckscher had seen Jack and the duke frolicking with “a lot of girls.”
¹⁴
Weeks tried to get Blanca to admit that she grossly exaggerated the number of women present. She was unflinching. Weeks continued: “Don’t you know that at that time your husband was working on war contracts with the duke?”

“One doesn’t work on war contracts at Huntington” was Blanca’s sardonic riposte, managing to make the prim Long Island resort sound like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

“Don’t you know that the firm of Heckscher & De Saulles cleaned up $50,000 as a result of this contract?”

“I never knew of it.”
¹⁵

Hundreds of killers have talked their way into the electric chair. Blanca de Saulles was not about to make that mistake. This far she had proved to be a textbook witness, never volunteering information, never argumentative, merely answering each question with the fewest words possible.

When Weeks asked about a letter she had written Jack while en route to Chile, Blanca replied that she thought the marriage was “morally ended.”
¹⁶
Was this an admission, Weeks mused, that she had discontinued sleeping with Jack? “Is it not a fact that since the birth of your boy you had not lived with him as man and wife?”
¹⁷

This sparked a considerable rustling in court, with everyone pressing forward to catch Blanca’s reply. “It is not,” came the hot response.

“Didn’t you tell Mrs. Heckscher that?”

“I did. She was always prying into my married life.”
¹⁸

“But didn’t you tell Mrs. Heckscher that you didn’t mind Jack seeing women, so long as he left you alone?” Again Blanca admitted saying this, but only to fob off Louise Heckscher, who was “constantly prying into her affairs.”
¹⁹