West of Guam (3 page)

From the very start of his writing career, so much of which was bound up with aviation, Whitfield claimed to have flown during the war. He stuck to his guns like a flyboy in a dogfight. Here is a portion of the 1926 headnote to “Delivered Goods”:

… served my time overseas in the Big Show. Started in the Ambulance and was taken into the Air. Trained at Kelley [sic] Field, San Antonio. Know Kelley Field? Went over on the rough-riding “Louisville.” Ferried planes to the Front from Romorantin; towed targets at St. Jean de Monts; mixed in a bit myself. Wings and bars ’n’ everything. I still like joy-hopping.
¹⁵

Not everyone, however, is willing to buy Whitfield’s version. Ruber and Berch speculate that he’d fluffed up his record in order to lend greater credulity to his aviation tales. They write, “Whitfield also claimed that he was a second lieutenant, but the National Personnel Records Center states Whitfield was discharged on April 2, 1918 as a Private First Class in the Flying Cadets, United States Army, hardly the rank of a fighter pilot.” This, however, is not the whole story. He may have been discharged on April 2, but, according to several reliable sources, was commissioned again as Second Lieutenant in the Aviation Section of the Signal Reserve Corps in May of that same year.
¹⁶
A story in the
Washington Post
, dated February 24, 1919, has “Lieut. Raoul F. Whitfield” returning to New York aboard a U.S. cruiser after a stormy voyage. This matches Raoul’s statement in the
Argosy
profile: “One crash after the armistice; homeward bound in charge of troops (believe it or not) on a flat-bottomed freighter that took eighteen days between Brest and New York.” Whatever else we can pin on Whitfield, he wasn’t lying about his rank or service.

The only serious misdirection in Whitfield’s
Argosy
account has to do with his alma mater: “Educated at Trinity School and Lehigh University.” Trinity, yes. Lehigh, no. A 1981 letter from the Executive Director of the university’s Alumni Association in the Hagemann papers states that the group has “absolutely no record of [Whitfield] ever attending.” What he says about his activities after 1919 and before his writing career took off is difficult to verify, but believable:

In Pittsburgh steel mills, doing experimental engineering work, for three years. Selling bonds for three months. On Pittsburgh Post for almost a year. Started to write fiction and got married. More successful in one than in the other. Went to Florida and became more successful in the other. Went to California and stayed married in Hollywood. Wrote.
¹⁷

Though no one has yet tracked down Whitfield’s reporting for the
Post
, his fiction—like
Green Ice
and the story “Inside Job” (
Black Mask
, February 1932), which Joe Shaw included in his
Hard-Boiled Omnibus
—testify to his first-hand knowledge of the newspaper trade.

Furthermore, Whitfield’s version of events lines up with what Prudence Whitfield told Hagemann in a 1981 telephone conversation, the notes to which sit in his papers:

RFW went to Pittsburgh “to learn the steel business”; he hated it; began to work on Pittsburgh Post as a reporter (among other things, he covered concerts, etc); was working for paper when his 1st story was pub (no date given by PW)

PW says that during this time, RFW was writing boys’ stories, girls’ stories, & poetry (!); … PW says that his interest in poetry was how she met him, for she, too, was a “poet” & working on the Post (again, PW vague in specific memories)

She may have been vague, but her memory served her well. If we are to trust the editors of Street & Smith’s
Sport Story Magazine
, the first piece of fiction Whitfield published appeared in their issue dated March 8, 1924. It was an airplane racing yarn titled “Flashing Towers.” Soon after, Whitfield began to appear in
Sport Story
,
War Stories
,
Breezy Stories
,
Droll Stories
,
Triple-X Magazine
,
Air Trails
,
Boys’ Life
,
Youth’s Companion
,
Telling Tales
—in short, just about everywhere, including
Everybody’s Magazine
. It was in
Battle Stories
, Nolan tells us in
The Black Mask Boys
, that Whitfield’s “output was so prolific he was forced to use a pen name, ‘Temple Field,’ in addition to his own byline.”
¹⁸

In her conversation with Hagemann, Prudence was forthcoming about her former husband, but she was reluctant to reveal much about herself. Relying on a “Pittsburgh contact,” Ruber and Berch tracked down the couple’s marriage certificate. Raoul and Prudence were wed on April 28, 1923. Whitfield’s address is given as 27 West 84
^th
Street, New York City. Prudence is listed as “unemployed.” The authors conclude that this “casts doubt on [the claim] that the two met at the Pittsburgh
Post
.” But it should be noted that a groom, especially if he’s boarding in a stranger’s home, might very well list his parents’ permanent address on an official document. And a young woman “poet” who makes occasional contributions to a local paper might very well describe herself as unemployed.

According to the 1900, 1910, and 1920 U.S. Censuses, which were conducted when Prudence was still living with her parents in Elizabeth Township and East McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and before she had taken to lying about her age, Prudence Ann Smith was the second youngest of five children born to John G. and Mary E. Smith. The Social Security Death Index lists her birthdate as August 19, 1895. She passed on August 16, 1990, a few days before she could mark (secretly, no doubt) her 95
^th
birthday.

Continuing her recollections of life with Raoul, Prudence told Hagemann that “some time in late ’20s, probably 27/28, the Whitfields went to Florida to live & for RFW to write full-time; they lived in Pasadena on the Gulf.” This is confirmed by Joe Shaw in a note in the June 1932 issue of
Black Mask
: “When we had the pleasure of [Whitfield’s] first acquaintance, he was on his way to Florida to hole away from interruption and settle down to the serious business of making a first-rate newspaperman into a better writer.”
¹⁹
The couple’s next destination was Hollywood, as Shaw tells. A note Whitfield sent to the editors of
Everybody’s
, who published it in their first issue for 1928, reads: “In three weeks I am driving to California, via the Old Spanish Trail, stopping off at the Border Air Patrol fields, and getting into Mexico at several points. Shall finish up then, and settle down for six months or so on, perhaps, a small ranch.”
²⁰

The Whitfields lived in Southern California, but took trips to San Francisco, where Raoul finally met Hammett, with whom he had carried on a long correspondence. In the May 1948 issue of
Ellery Queen
, Frederic Dannay writes: “Whitfield and Hammett talked shop—naturally. It was terrifying, recalls Mrs. Whitfield, to hear them seriously debate whether a particular story should have seven murders—or twenty-seven!”
²¹
What they did besides talking shop was try to drink one another under the table.
²²
Any table would do. According to what Prudence told Hagemann, Erle Stanley Gardner paid the couple a visit as well; he came seeking Whitfield’s criticism and advice.

The 1930 U.S. Census has the couple living in New York, but they would soon sail for Europe—for Paris and Cannes, Prudence told Hagemann, “where they had a villa.” They also “took trips to Sicily (flew over there from Cannes ‘in a small plane’), Italy (Naples, esp) & Tunis.” The March 20, 1932 issue of the
New York Times
noted the couple’s return stateside:

Raoul Whitfield, whose latest crime novel,
The Virgin Kills
, was published a short time ago by Alfred A. Knopf, returned recently from Europe on the S.S. De Grasse. He says that the trip was delightful, chiefly because there were only seventy-five people on the boat, and not one of them was a writer. Mr. Whitfield’s modesty is refreshing.

In the June 1932 issue of
Black Mask
, Joe Shaw announced that “Raoul Whitfield has hied himself hence to Hollywood on a long period contract with Paramount on terms that take all the press out of Depression.” His Hollywood novel,
Death in a Bowl
, had been optioned. Nothing came of that. Raoul’s third stay in Hollywood resulted in “story by” credit, a very slick Warner Bros. production titled
Private Detective 62
(1933), directed by Michael Curtiz, and starring William Powell and Margaret Lindsay. The Rian James script centers on a government agent who gets kicked down to the level of a private dick in a low-class agency; it was based on Whitfield’s story “Man Killer,” which ran in the April 1932 issue of
Black Mask
. But that was it.

And then came a change. Raoul and Prudence separated in 1932 and divorced in 1933. He had initiated a whirlwind romance with a socialite named Emily O’Neill Davies Vanderbilt Thayer—a whirlwind that would end in a tailspin. The couple tried their hand at collaboration, adapting Raoul’s European detective story, “Mistral,” which was originally published in the December 15, 1931, issue of
Adventure
, into a play in three acts, which was submitted for copyright on January 11, 1933.

Whitfield and Thayer married on July 19, 1933, and an article in the
New York Times
the following day declared that the “wedding will be a surprise to their friends.” Thayer had previously been married to William Henry Vanderbilt III and theatrical producer Sigourney Thayer, who had himself been an aviator in the war. Neither union lasted long.

Thayer is a fascinating figure. Lillian Hellman described her as “a handsome, boyish-looking woman at every society-literary cocktail party.”
²³
The “handsome” and “boyish” are good descriptions, judging by photographs, but they may also be code. Thayer spent some time in Paris in the late-1920s, where she found her way into Dolly Wilde’s coterie of lesbian and bisexual intellectuals. Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda had been infatuated with and bewildered by Thayer in those days. In fall 1930, Zelda wrote to Scott from the Prangins Clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, saying she “was sorry for [Thayer], she seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill.”
²⁴
Thayer may have had serious literary talent, and she certainly had taste, but her troubles proved too deep for her to see her ambitions through.

Raoul Whitfield must have represented a new life for her—a chance to fulfill her promise. He was handsome, smart, successful, and life with him wouldn’t be dull. The new couple settled in New Mexico, where they bought an expansive new home called Dead Horse Ranch. They entertained. Raoul left his typewriter more and more often to join those cocktail parties going on around him. His production dwindled. Decades later, Prudence told Keith Alan Deutsch that Whitfield “was bored with writing; plotting came too easily.” Maybe so—and maybe other things proved too hard.

During her stay in Paris in the 1920s, Thayer had set her sights on another author, Thomas Wolfe, who immortalized her a decade later as Amy Carleton in
You Can’t Go Home Again
(1940):

Amy Carleton was many things, but no one could call her good. In fact, if she was not “a notorious woman,” the reason was that she had surpassed the ultimate limits of notoriety, even for New York. Everybody knew her, and knew all about her, yet what the truth was, or what the true image of that lovely counterfeit of youth and joy, no one could say.
²⁵

In a letter to his daughter, Scottie, dated December 1940, Fitzgerald applauds Wolfe’s depiction of Thayer in a rather vicious manner:

The picture of “Amy Carleton” (Emily Davies Vanderbilt who used to come to our apartment in Paris—do you remember?), with the cracked grey eyes and the exactly reproduced speech, is just simply perfect. She tried hard to make Tom—sans succès—and finally ended by her own hand in Montana in 1934 in a lonely ranch house.
²⁶

Not quite. According to a number of newspaper accounts, after spending the evening at Dead Horse Ranch with a friend named Virginia Haydon Stone, who declined an invitation to stay the night, Thayer retired, alone, at around 11 p.m. on May 23, 1935. Esequiel Segura, a ranch employee, found her dead the next morning—“[c]lad in pajamas and a flowing robe,” as the Associated Press reported in an article printed in the
Washington Post
on May 25. She died “of a revolver wound,” the article continues, “which, authorities concluded, she inflicted while despondent at the prospect of a divorce from her third husband.” It was Thayer who had filed for divorce; Raoul had moved out, and was miles away in Hollywood when the fatal shot was fired.

Whitfield returned to the Ranch via TWA Comet and took over arrangements for the funeral. According to a
New York Times
story of August 28, 1935, Raoul was declared the sole heir of his wife’s substantial fortune, thanks to a will drawn up in New York on November 15, 1933.

The events surrounding the couple’s separation and Thayer’s death will remain a mystery. Indeed, they’ve served as material for an excellent detective story, Walter Satterthwait’s
Dead Horse
(Tucson, AZ: Dennis McMillan, 2007). There’s plenty to speculate upon, but a few things seem clear. Drinking and jealousy played a factor, and a younger woman was involved. Raoul had been seeing a local barmaid named Lois Bell, born September 9, 1915, who would become his third and last wife.

Two years after Thayer’s death, Whitfield would publish his final story—the appropriately named Jo Gar mystery “The Great Black”—in the August 1937 issue of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. The
Washington Post
was reprinting some older Gar mysteries in July and August of that same year. Thereafter, darkness.

Whitfield spent Thayer’s money at breakneck speed. Sometime at the turn of the decade he was stricken with T.B., perhaps a recurrence of the illness that sent him back to Hawaii and the States as a teenager. In his 1942 World War II draft registration card—signed by Whitfield, but not filled out in his hand—he is listed as a resident of the Veterans Hospital in San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. The most poignant field on the card—“Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your Address”—lists Raoul’s father, William, who was then living in Carmel, California, with his wife Mabelle. Lois was no longer in the picture.