Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  Beginning in her teens, Elva Statler enjoyed riding at Pinehurst. Courtesy of Andrew Edmond.

  Although E.M. Statler was a kind and generous man and a devoted adoptive father, he does seem to have brought some of the same rigor and go-by-the-book perfectionism to parenthood that he applied to the art of making guests comfortable. He turned child rearing, like everything else, into a science designed for the betterment of mankind. Fortunately, Mary Statler was always around to temper E.M.’s masculine discipline with feminine warmth and acceptance.

  In the summer of 1924, E.M. Statler sold the family’s comfortable Buffalo home and moved his entire household, including twelve-year-old Elva, to New York City. There, they took up residence on the entire top floor of his Hotel Pennsylvania—the only one in his empire that didn’t bear the name Statler. His wife, he said, had had to spend too much time alone because of all the time he was obliged to spend in New York on business, and he wanted her near him.

  And then, scarcely a year later, on October 25, 1925, “a sweet and gracious woman passed on to her reward when Mary Idesta Statler, wife of Ellsworth M. Statler, formerly of Buffalo and later of New York, died in that city this week,” The Buffalo Courier wrote. “Mrs. Statler endeared herself to hosts of friends, for she was a woman of generous impulses and her charities were many. She had a special tenderness for little children, and particularly for those who were handicapped by poverty or illness.”

  Elva Idesta Statler would feel precious little of such tenderness from that day forward. She had a mere ten years left to live at the time her family moved to New York. And almost every one of those years seems to have dealt her some kind of emotional blow, major disappointment or personal upheaval. Each time, she would manage to pick herself up, only to get slammed back down again.

  Less than a year after her mother’s lingering death from pneumonia, thirteen-year-old Elva was packed off to Dwight School for Girls in New Jersey. She worked hard to make a go of it during her four years there, becoming heavily involved in sports and after-school functions and maintaining about a C average. She made a few close friends, who gave her the nickname that would stay with her after she moved on: “Stat.” She didn’t smile much—and no wonder. She had little to smile about during those few Dwight years, when three major events shook her life in quick succession.

  First, in April 1927, her sixty-four-year-old father surprised all who knew him—and disappointed many of them—by marrying his secretary of eleven years, the thirty-four-year-old Alice Seidler. It seemed beneath the dignity of the great hotelier, conservative Republican and staunch Presbyterian. And it raised obvious, if unspoken, questions about office hanky-panky.

  “Wedding plans were carried out with great secrecy, and nobody was more surprised to learn of it than the bridegroom’s associates at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York,” The Buffalo Times wrote. “It was said he arrived there this morning from Boston, saying nothing whatever about his intention of getting married.” So this is the point at which Alice, the woman who would play Wicked Stepmother to Elva’s Cinderella, enters her life.

  Then, only a few months later, on a stiflingly hot August day, Elva’s beloved older sister, Marian, died of pneumonia at the Statlers’ summer home in Long Neck, New York, shortly after returning from a cruise. She was twenty years old. Elva, then fifteen, stayed by her side to the end.

  It had been a wrenching year. As 1928 dawned, the Statler family—or its grieving remnants—desperately needed to get away from it all and seek what relief could be found in a change of scenery. Perhaps E.M. also thought a trip together might help expedite the never-easy task of cultivating an amicable relationship, or at least an armed truce, between a teenage girl and her new stepmother.

  Whatever the reason, E.M. took his new wife and Elva for a stay in a place that all of them had heard much about from their wealthy friends but where none of them had ever been before: Pinehurst, North Carolina.

  Statler had probably received frequent invitations from Leonard Tufts and his PR department, always eager to lure celebrities to Pinehurst Resort during those difficult Depression years so that their presence could then be exploited in press releases to drum up business.

  “I learned something I am going to put to good use,” E.M. obligingly gushed in a promotional article in The Pinehurst Outlook on January 10, 1928. “I learned that if I can get a week off in winter I can play as much golf as I can if I get the week off in summer. There is only an overnight ride to Pinehurst, and a week will provide a man with seven full days of golf, without missing an extra day.” He and Mrs. Statler took up riding, he said, and did a lot of it.

  Though little else is known about that first excursion, it is clear that Elva loved the place, felt at home in it and quickly made some new friends there. Several things about Pinehurst appealed to her. The most obvious is that the outdoor sports she loved so much—such as golf, tennis and riding—were daily fare there. And where she might previously have imagined Pinehurst to be a boring haven for old folks, she found plenty of people her own age. On the way home, she begged her father to return, and he agreed to do so someday.

  But again, fate had something else in store. On April 16, 1928, just three months after the return from Pinehurst, Ellsworth Statler himself took ill, also with pneumonia. He seemed to rally near the end but then took a sudden turn for the worse and slipped from his anguished family’s hands. Statler’s doctors said that worry over a million-dollar lawsuit filed a couple of years earlier had taxed his health and hastened his death. Grief-stricken over losing his wife, he had canceled his annual Florida cruise, instead agreeing to lease his yacht, Miramar, to an acquaintance, E.M. Smathers. But before the craft could be delivered, it foundered in a hurricane off the Florida coast. All eleven hands on board perished, and their families sued. A federal judge dismissed the suit after Statler’s death.

  Elva Statler’s adoptive father, Ellsworth Statler Sr., poses with his adoptive son, Ellsworth Jr., while playing golf at Pinehurst in January 1928. Ellsworth Jr. is thought to have been Elva’s twin brother. Ellsworth Sr. died four months later. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  “Big in all that he visioned, he had his reward in far greater measure than falls to the common lot,” The Buffalo Times eulogized. Thousands of admirers were stunned at the sudden demise of this giant of a man. And Elva Statler, at age fifteen, was an orphan again.

  Two bereft teenagers, Elva and Ellsworth Jr., briefly remained at home in the Pennsylvania Hotel penthouse, living with a virtual stranger. (Milton, their older brother, was already out on his own.) Their father’s body was hardly cold in the family plot at Kensico Cemetery before Alice Seidler Statler, who had made quite a leap from secretary to filthy-rich heiress in a matter of twelve months, lost no time in letting them know that she didn’t want them underfoot anymore. She did everything but make them sleep by the hearth amid the cinders. She soon got rid of both of them, packing the mentally handicapped Ellsworth off to an institution in England and banishing Elva back to Dwight, where a sympathetic piano teacher informally adopted her for a time.

  Not long after her husband’s death, Alice filed a petition claiming that all the money and holdings of the Statler company legally belonged to her. She didn’t succeed in that, but she did in challenging the portion of the will specifying that each of the surviving children should take a seat on the board of directors with Alice when they came of age. Both Ellsworth Jr. and Elva ended up having to sign documents giving up their board seats in order to get their ten thousand shares each of preferred Statler stock.

  Despite all her crises and setbacks, Elva still managed to get back in the swing of things in her senior year at Dwight. She sang in the choir, the glee club and an octet; appeared in the school play, the banquet play and the Christmas pageant; played basketball, baseball and hockey; and served as choirmaster, chairman of charities, president of the Dramatic Club and house senator. She graduated from Dwight in 1930 and went on to Radcliffe College
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She majored in fine arts and practiced daily on the piano, which she learned to play with considerable skill. “Highly introspective,” The Pilot newspaper later wrote, “she became an accomplished pianist, and would have made her concert debut but for illness.”

  Elva Statler (upper left) was an accomplished athlete who played basketball in 1929 at Dwight School for Girls in Englewood, New Jersey. Courtesy of Dwight Englewood School.

  During winter breaks—and indeed in almost every year after that first family visit in 1928—Elva found time for relaxing trips to Pinehurst. She met many people there and early began to engage the services of Emanuel Birch as her butler. She often took friends along with her to North Carolina, especially her closest friend from college, the willowy Minnesotan Isabelle Baer.

  Though she didn’t set the woods on fire academically at Radcliffe, Elva excelled in many activities—and had one brief, potential brush with international athletic acclaim. Just as she had at Dwight, Elva dominated almost anything at Radcliffe that had to do with sports and extracurricular activities. She excelled in swimming, and if it hadn’t been for a diving accident that injured her spine in her junior year at Radcliffe, she might well have made the U.S. Olympic swim team, competing before Hitler and the world in 1936.

  It was also in her junior year at Radcliffe, in December 1933, that Elva learned that her older brother, Milton Statler, had died in an automobile crash on a dark, winding road near Tucson, Arizona. He was twenty-seven. That plunged Elva into yet another period of intense grief and left her with only one living sibling—her apparent twin brother, the institutionalized Ellsworth Jr.

  Elva, who had been so heavily involved at Radcliffe, surprised her friends by dropping out in early 1934. She seems to have had two reasons for her abrupt decision to end her academic career. The first was that she was still suffering health problems from her diving accident. One cryptic note from a school doctor, included in some of her file material in the college archives, says that Elva’s “headaches have ceased” but that she is “still worried over litigation and being sued from the second accident.” It is unclear what that refers to. Whatever the “second accident” was, it was probably automotive. She appears to have been at fault in it and may have been worried that the other party had learned about her wealth and saw an opportunity to latch on to some of it.

  But Elva had another, more compelling reason for turning her back on Radcliffe and walking away just when she had a degree in her grasp. She had been back down to Pinehurst and met someone. She was in love. For once in her life, it looked as if something might finally be going her way.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Many Faces of Elva

  The more you learn about Elva Statler, the more hauntingly elusive the young woman remains. Just when you think you’ve pictured her face, she slips through your fingers like an evocative melody that you’ve become obsessed with but suddenly can’t hum. Even her name, which could be mistaken for a feminine version of Elvis, is ambiguous. One source says Elva is a variant on the name Olivia. Another says it comes from the Anglo-Saxon for “elf.”

  There are a number of photos of Elva from various sources. Oddly, though, each one looks like a different girl. You go through them repeatedly and place them side by side and search in vain for a common thread, like face-recognition software failing to make a match. It isn’t the Three Faces of Eve being examined here, but the Many Faces of Elva.

  It is even hard to tell for sure whether she was pretty. Several reporters referred to her as “the pretty heiress,” and one went so far as to call her “the beautiful heiress.” But you get the idea that they were merely engaging in cookie-cutter journalese straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novel or L.A. Confidential. After all, none of those reporters ever saw her in person. Neither did former Tufts archivist Khris Januzik, but from the pictures she declared Elva to be “not pudgy, just healthy-looking by the standards of her day—not outrageously gorgeous, but pretty.”

  Though the late Mary Evelyn de Nissoff never became friends with Elva, who was ten years older, she did know her as a child. Mary Evelyn said not long before her death:

  This portrait shows Elva as a youthful horsewoman. Courtesy of Andrew Edmond.

  She was quite athletic. She played golf and played tennis and rode horses. She did not have a pretty face. I would say she was more sharp-featured or pinched, although in one or two pictures, she looks quite attractive. She was kind of innocent-looking. Dirty blonde, I would say. And everybody said she was “pigeon-breasted,” whatever that meant. I think it meant there was a bone in there that stuck out or something. She wasn’t really that attractive…As for her personality, all I remember is that she just seemed lost.

  In one likeness, a copy of a three-quarters sketch by The New York Times artist Tom McCoy, Elva appears positively glamorous. Looking as if she’s going out for the night, she has her hair in a fashionable crimp and wears elegant pearl earrings. Since it’s a drawing instead of a photo, it was no doubt unrealistically flattering. But there’s something compelling in the vulnerable, accusatory stare of her eyes and the slight pout on her small, Clara Bow mouth, as if she’s somehow demanding honesty of the viewer.

  A couple of papers printed a photograph of Elva that is so similar to the sketch that The Times artist must have based his work on it. The angle and the expression are the same, though in the photos she looks a little rougher around the edges. Pretty? Hard to say.

  Another picture, a high-quality photocopy of a sepia-toned, soft-focused snapshot, shows a younger Elva, perhaps in her late high school or early college years. But there is more than just a time difference between this face and the almost delicate, somewhat more mature one with the pearl earrings. Here she is athletic-looking, with a powerful neck and shoulders from all that swimming. She appears to be wearing an open-necked blouse and some kind of jumper. She’s unsmiling here, too, and her hair is severely parted, combed back and tucked behind her ears, as if she might have let it dry that way after coming out of the pool. Kind of a female jock. Not the same girl.

  Elva Statler (third from left) and her close friend, Isabelle Stone Baer (second from left), enjoy a day at the Pinehurst Gun Club, probably in 1932. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  Elva (right) and an unidentified woman hold live turkeys after winning a turkey shoot at the Pinehurst Gun Club. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  In some photos, she looks just a bit boyish. In others, quite feminine. (The Washington Herald described her as “buxom.”) In some pictures, she appears warm and gracious. In others, distant, pensive and uncomfortable. In one, she looks like a typical happy teenager hanging out with her dog. In another, which shows her coming out the front door of her new brother-in-law’s house after her Pinehurst wedding, she’s wearing an ungainly gown and an unfortunate white cap and looking up at Brad with a moon-faced, worshipful expression that can only be described as embarrassingly goofy.

  It is hard to escape the suspicion that the Many Faces of Elva are at least partly a reflection of what must have been a troubled personality—a lost soul who didn’t know who she was and spent her short, unhappy time on earth in an unsuccessful search for herself. If she went from version to version of her own identity, it shouldn’t be surprising that she looked different every time one saw her or snapped her picture.

  Regrettably, there is virtually nothing in her voice. One wouldn’t expect a recording—just something she might have said or written, something in her own phraseology that might open a door onto her personality. Other than a few snatches from letters and telegrams to the man who was so fleetingly her husband, and her supposed last words, “Goodnight, darling”—themselves of uncertain authenticity—little seems to remain but impenetrable silence.

  Whether the leading lady of our story really said “Nobody likes me” or “Nobody loves me” on the night before her death, she obviously had plenty of reasons—even on the surface of things—to feel unloved and
abandoned. But it went even deeper than that. Despite her many advantages, it is all too touchingly clear that she felt like a nobody herself.

  That would have seemed strange to the millions of down-and-outers standing in urban soup lines during those turbulent thirties, out of money and out of hope. She was a member of the wealthy, self-indulgent stratum of that era, which became the closest thing to a nobility or a ruling class that America had produced at least since the robber barons of the late nineteenth century. They wielded much power and indulged many extravagant whims in those unregulated days. The papers were full of their exploits and scandals, which entertained the restless masses trying to make ends meet. Elva was a member of that aristocracy. To the suffering commoners looking enviously across the social void, that would have made her Somebody. But to herself, at some profound psychological level, she was poorer and more deprived than they.

  Elva Statler plays golf at Pinehurst in 1932.Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  “Be kind to her,” Elva’s great-grandnephew, Andrew Edmonds, said when interviewed for this book. “Elva wasn’t perfect, but her life was so tragic.” And so it was. She started out her sojourn on earth by being found in the bullrushes and placed among strangers, with no idea about her real parents or her real station in life. Then, at an age at which most sheltered American children have never experienced a single death in the family, she had already watched almost all those near and dear to her die agonizingly, one by one. She had two remarkable skills, as a pianist and as a swimmer, and showed promise of great accomplishment in either or both. But illness deprived her of one and injury of the other. Before she had even reached her twenty-first birthday and entered adult life, she was already a walking disaster area.