by Steve Bouser
So what was a Southern Pines fireman doing in possession of a wool skirt that would soon be marked Exhibit A? “It turned out,” The News reported, “that the fireman had thoughtfully removed the skirt from the clothesline and carried it to the firehouse when he saw a couple of little Negro boys sidling up to the garment with the evident intention of stealing it.” Kelly, we are told, “heaved a sigh of relief when, a few minutes later, he deposited the clothing into the safekeeping of the sheriff.”
By mid-March 1935, once all the excitement was over and the big-city journalists had departed, most Moore Countians seemed more than willing to “shelve discussion of the case for the time being,” as The News wrote. There were several reasons for this willingness to put the thing out of mind. Many of the locals were tired of being the topic of sensation and eager to get back to their fun and games. Others were weary of trying to solve the seemingly insoluble Davidson mystery and ready to think about something else. Still others in the upper echelons of Pinehurst had more selfish concerns: the resort community had had more than enough damaging publicity and didn’t need any more.
The late Mary Evelyn de Nissoff said that Pinehurst, protecting its image as a carefree getaway place, did all it could to keep the lid on from day one. At the time Brad Davidson’s new bride died under such unsavory circumstances, she pointed out, the place had already been reeling in crisis mode for years. As the Depression dragged on, Pinehurst was hanging on for dear life, trying to put on a happy face, barely bringing in enough guests to keep the lights on. The last thing it needed was a world-class scandal on its hands. “The resort had scheduled a big tennis tournament in March or April of 1935 and didn’t want anything casting a pall over it,” Mary Evelyn said a month before her death in 2005. “I think Bill Tilden and Don Budge, the big tennis players, were going to come. Pinehurst and the Tuftses didn’t want Elva’s death to be the talk of the town and keep people from coming here for the tournament. So I think they pretty much tried to hush it up.”
If Pinehurst did try to soft-pedal Elva’s death, there was more than just Pollyanna squeamishness involved. It was also a matter of hard-nosed public relations and careful image cultivation. “First of all, you’ve got a resort here,” Mary Evelyn said. “And it’s dependent on people coming here. And they’d had a really good reputation for single women being able to come here and be safe and chaperoned and all that sort of thing. Also, they were very careful about gold diggers.” Bad press was bad news in Pinehurst, she explained, and the Pinehurst PR people routinely swept it under the rug. And she knew what she was talking about, since she did some of the sweeping herself. “You were never supposed to write anything bad about Pinehurst,” she said. “You were supposed to bury things. Always. I used to work for the resort. I knew about burying things.” She remembered that when obituaries were sent out to area papers for someone who had inconveniently passed away in Pinehurst, they routinely bore a Southern Pines dateline. “They never said Pinehurst,” she said. “If you saw an obit for a Pinehurst person in the Charlotte or Raleigh paper, it always said Southern Pines. It was all part of that ‘Nobody dies in Pinehurst’ thing.”
How far would the sunny little village go to perpetuate the myth that the Grim Reaper never visited its curvy streets? Old-timers swear that Carolina Hotel personnel, instead of using stretchers, sometimes put dead bodies in wheelchairs and rolled them out so they’d look like they were just dozing or kept them under wraps until the wee hours of the morning and spirited them down the freight elevator while everyone else slept.
Gay Bowman, a resident of the village since moving there at age fourteen in 1939, says Pinehurst had three golden rules in the old days: “No Negroes, no Jews and no funeral homes.” Bowman likes to quote a story told by the late Mildred McIntosh, the original Tufts archivist. It seems a man was sent out from Pinehurst in the middle of a spooky night to deliver a dead body to Southern Pines in a mule-drawn covered wagon, only to discover upon his arrival at the funeral parlor that the wagon was empty. The body had fallen out. He raced back the way he’d come in a panic, the mules almost trampling the corpse before he spotted it lying on its back there in the road, its sightless eyes gazing at a sky full of stars.
Not every Pinehurstian wanted the Elva case to go away, of course. Many remained tantalized by the story and unwilling to settle for the frustratingly anticlimactic verdict that had ended the coroner’s inquest on such an inconclusive note—“death of carbon monoxide poisoning under circumstances unknown to this jury.”
The story was by no means over. There would be an entirely new trial of sorts, and a dramatic one, in which two teams of legal titans would contest the hastily drawn will in which Elva had left everything to her husband. But the wheels of justice ground slowly, then as now, and it would be nearly another year before the court in Carthage would hear days of explosively heated arguments in that case.
The lull gave all the lawyers a chance to return to their various home bases and prepare their cases. It also gave local curiosity-seekers at the time—as it does us today—a chance to step back, fill in some blanks and seek answers to some basic human questions that had gone neglected: Just who was Elva Statler, this bad-luck orphan for whom nothing seemed to go right? Who was Henry Bradley Davidson Jr., the opportunistic mystery man who swept her off her feet? And what do we know about their brief, doomed marriage?
CHAPTER 13
The Style to Which He Was Accustomed
Though Elva Idesta Statler clearly fell heavily for Henry Bradley Davidson when friends introduced them in Pinehurst in 1934, many wondered why. He was clearly a lazy, charming, enigmatic man who combined some of the least admirable characteristics of the con man and the gigolo. Having been born to wealth and then lost it, he appears to have set out to maintain his status in life by whatever means necessary.
Henry Bradley Davidson Jr. was born on September 10, 1892, to Henry Davidson Sr. and his second wife, Mary Stannard Porter. The Davidsons lived at 1413 G Street, Washington, D.C., and Mr. Davidson was in the real estate business. Brad had a much older stepsister, Louise, from his father’s first marriage. His brother, Richard, would come along eight years later. Brad’s father and grandfather were both well known as sportsmen and well established in old-line social circles. One of their ancestors was Scottish-born Samuel Davidson, who came to America before the Revolution and acquired extensive landholdings that later became part of the new national capital. He is said to have sold off a tract that later became the sites of the White House, Treasury Department and Lafayette Park.
“The Davidson family at one time owned a large portion of southern Montgomery County, Md., which adjoins the northwest section of the District of Columbia,” The Buffalo News wrote in a Washington-datelined sidebar to its March 4, 1935 United Press story about Elva’s death. “Several years ago, most of this land was broken up into residential subdivisions now known as Somerset and Chevy Chase…The old family house, not now occupied by the Davidsons, still stands in Somerset, looking out of place among the smaller and more modern houses that have been built around it.” To this day, Chevy Chase includes a Bradley Boulevard and a Davidson Drive.
Young Brad, then, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But it got jammed down his throat pretty early when his tribe fell on hard times.
In 1912, when Brad was just getting out of high school, his father and some fellow investors hatched a plan to make a killing by carving out a posh development on the shores of the Potomac where the well-to-do could escape Washington’s miasmal summers. They aspired to out–Chevy Chase Chevy Chase, and they called their new venture Bradley Hills. Sales brochures told of plans for a country club, a golf course and ample room to ride to the hounds—sort of a Pinehurst North.
But from the beginning, the Bradley Hills undertaking seemed shaky, if not shady. In the end, the developers got no further than building a road, a trolley line, a small amusement park at the Great Falls of the Potomac and a few demonstration homes before the thing
fizzled out. Besides questionable finances, Bradley Hills fell victim to the recession of 1913–14, compounded by the outbreak of World War I and the subsequent influenza epidemic. By 1920, creditors had pulled the plug on it.
The Pinehurst Outlook would later say that Brad Davidson had graduated from the National Cathedral School in Washington and from Cornell University, no doubt relying on information he had provided. But he never finished at either institution.
He began his education at the exclusive Jacob Tome Institute, housed in a brand-new cluster of Georgian Revival buildings on a two-hundred-foot bluff overlooking the Susquehanna River near Port Deposit, Maryland. He was seventeen years old in the fall of 1909, when his parent packed him off to the National Cathedral School in Washington for his last two years of secondary education.
Young Davidson excelled at tennis, track, baseball and basketball at the Cathedral School. He was even athletics editor for the school paper, The Albanian, which published a photo in which Brad, already taller than most of his teammates, was seen holding a basketball with “Champions 1911” lettered on it in white paint. But he left behind an undistinguished academic record, maintaining a C-minus average. And though he was considered a member of the class of 1912 and identified himself as such, he in fact left the Cathedral School—later renamed St. Albans—in the middle of the year without graduating.
Henry Bradley Davidson (center) played basketball at National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.Courtesy of Washington National Cathedral.
For the next three years, Brad helped his father and uncle in their D.C. real estate business, Davidson & Davidson, and virtually dropped out of sight. He next shows up in the Collegiate Church of New York City on September 9, 1915. That’s when he married Jessica Aylward, of Berryville, Virginia. He spent the next two years on her sprawling estate in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, during which time they became parents of a baby girl, whom they also named Jessica. They would have two more children, sons Henry Bradley Davidson III (whose friends called him “Dave”) and Herbert Aylward Davidson (Herb).
In 1917, when the United States entered what was then known as the Great War, Brad left Virginia, moved his family to Baltimore and enlisted in the army. He was commissioned as a pilot and sent to Europe, where he achieved the rank of captain and served in France. There appear to be few available records about his military service.
In 1919, Captain Henry Bradley Davidson came back from World War I to find the nation heading into the Roaring Twenties and the Bradley Hills subdivision gasping into its death throes. He rejoined his father and uncle, who tried to make a go of it with their real estate business during the next ten years, but the twenties didn’t roar for them. The stock market crash of 1929 administered the coup de grâce, pretty much sending what was left of the family fortune gurgling down the drain.
By then, Brad had already been gone for a year. For reasons that remain mystifyingly unclear, he had headed west in 1928—essentially abandoning his young family, though he and they apparently stayed in contact. He spent three years in the Midwest, working first in Waukegan, Illinois, and then at a lock manufacturing plant in Milwaukee, before returning to Baltimore.
In 1931, three big things happened to Brad: his father died. Jessica filed for legal separation. And, demonstrating his usual acute business judgment, Brad became involved for three years with another ill-fated development on the Potomac. But this time, his involvement wasn’t as an investor (there was nothing left to invest) but as an employee of a flamboyant woman named Rella Abell Armstrong, widow of playwright and screenwriter Paul Armstrong, who set out to turn the family farm into an ambitious development to be called Annapolis Roads. She needed someone with real estate experience to help sell the lots, which may have been where Brad Davidson first came in. But soon he was being listed as manager of the Annapolis Roads Club.
Things went swimmingly at first. But then the real estate market turned sluggish as financial pressures mounted and the country sank into the Depression. In January 1934, the Equitable Company of Washington foreclosed on the mortgage, and Rella and her employees were out in the cold. Annapolis Roads had gone the way of Bradley Hills. Though he apparently worked briefly in an unknown capacity with Sherwood Oil Company in Baltimore, H. Bradley Davidson Jr. was assembling quite a record of failure.
As 1933 ended, he was still a hanger-on in the upper-class Greater Washington circles amid which he had grown up, though he no longer had the wealth to support himself in the style to which he had grown accustomed. And things just wouldn’t break his way. Not only was his job disappearing under his feet, but his estranged wife, Jessica, sued him for divorce in March 1934 in Bethesda, Maryland. The judge granted the petition in May. He ordered the penniless Brad to make alimony and child support payments, but Jessica clearly wasn’t holding her breath.
In early 1934, then, Henry Bradley Davidson’s life was in pieces. He had no wife, no job, no money and no particular prospects. Down and out and needing a rest and a change of scenery, he took the train down to visit his brother Richard, who had taken out a season’s lease on a house in the brand-new development of Knollwood, near Pinehurst, North Carolina. Brad had already established a habit of turning to his smarter, better-looking and more socially nimble brother when things got bad. According to information from local courthouse dockets, Richard Porter Davidson had shown up in Pinehurst to take up residence and try to bring some of the rich hangers-on there to put up money for some kind of unidentified business deal.
Brad Davidson plays golf at Pinehurst, probably in 1934. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.
It was Richard’s wife, Betty, who—with the encouragement of Hemmie Tufts and others in the gang they hung out with—decided to play matchmaker and lend some focus to Brad’s social life by bringing him together with a likely companion of the opposite sex. Looking around for an available match, she settled on an unattached young socialite from Buffalo, New York, who shared Brad’s enthusiasm for sports.
Her name was Elva Idesta Statler.
CHAPTER 14
Poor Little Rich Girl
Nobody knows to whom the blonde baby girl who would later be named Elva Idesta Statler was born, but the date is known: June 7, 1912—two months after the Titanic disaster. She is thought to have come into the world in New York City, the port toward which that unsinkable ship was headed when it sank.
Though Elva’s life would later turn into something of a shipwreck itself, marked by much heartbreak and bad luck, she and three other unwanted or orphaned children had a singular stroke of good fortune at early ages: they were all plucked out of poverty and anonymity and adopted by an altogether extraordinary gentleman, Ellsworth W. Statler.
E.M. Statler’s life was the original Horatio Alger story—a rags-to-riches drama that saw this son of a poor, obscure Pennsylvania country preacher rise to become one of the captains of American business. By age thirteen, the hardworking and courteous Ellsworth had landed himself a job as a bellboy at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia. By fifteen, he was head bellboy. Then night desk clerk. Then head desk clerk. By the time he was nineteen, he had learned about all there was to learn about hotels and was running the place.
The year 1895, when James Walker Tufts launched Pinehurst, was also a banner year for the restless “Bellboy of Wheeling.” He married Mary Manderbach, of Akron, Ohio. After a successful venture into the food-service business, he took a bold chance by opening a massive temporary hotel in Buffalo, New York, for the Pan-American Exposition held there in 1901. Neither the exposition nor the hotel did very well, but Ellsworth repeated the venture with greater success by building the Innside Inn for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Though things went better there, he suffered a near-fatal accident involving a coffee machine and was confined to a wheelchair for many months.
Having recovered from that, and having saved up enough money from his two temporary hotels, he decided the time had come to open a permanent one back in
Buffalo in 1907. He called it the Statler. He designed it to be as efficient and guest-friendly as possible, making good use of every square foot of space and offering “a room and a bath for a dollar and a half.” He was the first to put telephones, full-length mirrors and built-in closets in every guest room.
Over the years, E.M. opened Statler Hotels in Cleveland, Boston (his flagship, with thirteen hundred rooms), Detroit and New York. He kept pace with advances in technology, equipping all his rooms with radios beginning in 1927. He always demanded only the best performance from his workers, but he also gained a reputation as an enlightened employer, initiating a five-day workweek and programs of job and retirement security that were way ahead of their time.
As good as E.M. Statler was at cranking out spectacularly successful hotels, he and his wife, Mary, failed to produce the one thing they both wanted most: children. (One story has it that the coffee-machine accident in St. Louis had rendered him impotent.) Mary was active in programs to help underprivileged youngsters, and E.M. was said to have a special way with kids and some pet theories on how they should be raised. The two of them often had “orphanage charity gatherings” at their home.
“It was the irony of fate that a man who loved children as he did should never have had any of his own,” The Buffalo Times wrote in an editorial at the time of E.M.’s death. “But even that did not faze him. He adopted four babies, turned the third floor of his house on the Parkway into a nursery, and with the first Mrs. Statler watched these youngsters grow and develop.”
The first of those babies brought home to 154 Soldiers Place in an upscale residential section of Buffalo was a boy, Milton Howland, born in 1906. Then came a girl, Marian Frances, born in 1907. Both were six or seven years old when adopted. Elva Idesta and Ellsworth Morgan were the last two, both born in 1912 and adopted two years later. Nothing was ever revealed about the birth parents of any of the four, although there are intriguing hints that some or all of them could have been children of Ellsworth’s brother, Osceola, who seems to have had problems holding down a job and putting down a bottle and might not have been able to support them. The fact that Elva and Ellsworth Jr. were born on the same day, June 7, strongly suggests that they were twins.