by Steve Bouser
He didn’t lose his job at Harvard Law School, as his outraged opponent, gentlemanly J.M. Broughton, had said he should. On the contrary, he went on to distinguish himself in it, not retiring until 1969. He was named Story Professor of Law in 1950 and became a nationally recognized and honored authority in the fields of private property law and national defense issues.
But one accusation hurled at Leach in that long-ago North Carolina confrontation seems to have stuck: that the professor was a domineering male who took satisfaction in asserting himself over young women.
In 2003, when Elena Kagan (who recently joined the U.S. Supreme Court) became the first female dean in the long history of Harvard Law School, an interviewer for Ms. magazine marked the occasion by noting how far the school had come since the pre–women’s lib days of the early 1960s, when “Professor W. Barton Leach, who taught property, would allow female students to speak only on Ladies’ Days.”
Judith Hope Franklin, class of ’64, recalls one of those days in her book Pinstripes and Pearls:
On Halloween 1961, like trained seals doing tricks for an eager audience, the five women in Leach’s section, dressed in high heels, skirts, blazers and pearls, were ready. They left their seats in the front row of the large, fan-shaped classroom seating, mounted the steps to the dais, sat down on five folding chairs that had been arranged in a line facing the rest of the class, crossed their ankles, and waited calmly for the first question they knew was coming.
Leach left the dais and went to the middle of the classroom, where he stood to interrogate them, surrounded by 140 or so male students, who hooted and laughed and sometimes stomped their feet, thinking it was marvelous fun. Actually, most of the women thought it was fun, too. It seemed totally normal for Harvard Law School then. Nancy (my classmate) remembers, “It was sort of like Picnic at the Zoo Day—and we were the animals in the cages.”
W. Barton Leach, born with the century, died at age seventy-one on December 15, 1971 (just eight months before Brad’s death), after falling from a second-story window of his home in Weston, Massachusetts. Like several other characters in this story, he had been married three times.
CHAPTER 22
The One-Hundred-Pound Bulldog
The hardy souls who had sat through both the weeklong inquest and, a year later, the weeklong caveat hearing may have thought they knew about all there was to know about Henry Bradley Davidson and Elva Statler Davidson. But they were denied access to key bodies of evidence that are available to us today—and that would have heavily impacted their theories about what happened on that winter morning behind Edgewood Cottage. For one thing, they didn’t know about a remarkable body of work by a diligent Washington reporter whose revelations only recently found their way into the modern consciousness.
Those attending the Davidson inquest in March 1935 knew nothing about a reporter named Pat Frank except that he worked for The Washington Herald and that he got in a bit of trouble when he accused Elva’s butler, Emanuel Birch, of perjury.
“The little colored man is lying and he knows it,” Frank told a New York Times reporter. “Birch told me they [the Davidsons] fought all the time.” That story got back to Solicitor Rowland Pruette, who at that point was regrouping and scrambling to revise his witness list after being deprived of his smoking gun, the nonexistent (or at least undetectable) “subtle poison.” On March 6, he required the reluctant Frank to take his place in the official rocking chair and violate a confidence by revealing what Birch had told him in an exclusive interview the previous Sunday. Under oath, Frank told the jury what the butler had confided in him: that the Davidsons slept in separate bedrooms “because of misunderstandings” and that “sometimes they quarreled.”
End of testimony. But as it turns out, that was only the beginning of what he was able to dig up about the Elva Statler Davidson story.
The story had clearly created a sensation in Washington, D.C., where Brad Davidson was something of a hometown boy. So The Washington Post and The Washington Herald, which duked it out daily for dominance of the morning newspaper market in the nation’s capital during the Depression, transferred that bitter rivalry to Pinehurst for a few days by dispatching dueling journalistic superstars to cover the inquest.
In that heyday of no-holds-barred journalism, afternoon papers still dominated most cities. The Post and The Times, the fourth and fifth newspapers in a five-newspaper city, were struggling to survive in a market that The Evening Star and two other p.m. papers had largely sewn up. Both morning papers had new, ambitious, aggressive executives in key jobs who were determined to turn them around, and the Elva story gave them something to get their teeth into.
Just five years earlier, in 1930, William Randolph Hearst had installed the feisty but inexperienced Eleanor Medill Patterson as editor in chief of the then-failing Herald. One of the few prominent female editors in the country, she was in the process of proving herself by doubling The Herald’s circulation to over 100,000. As the granddaughter of Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill and sister of New York Daily News publisher Joseph Medill (and, incidentally, cousin to Betty Hanna Davidson, Brad’s sister-in-law), “Cissy” Patterson was a proud and highly competitive member of an American newspaper dynasty and not above resorting to yellow journalism to get ahead. A juicy story from the hinterlands about the death of a socialite could only help boost street sales.
As for The Post, it had also been floundering when Eugene Meyer bought it on the bankruptcy auction block less than two years earlier, on June 13, 1933. It had been run into the ground by previous owner Edward Beale McLean, described as a “pathetic man with no chin and no character” who had been tied to the Teapot Dome scandal. Far from the national institution that the aristocratic Meyer would eventually turn it into, The Post was still a feeble entity hanging on by its fingernails, its circulation scarcely half that of The Herald.
But though he would not willingly take a back seat on any story, Meyer was determined to achieve his lofty goal of turning The Post from a pitiful rag into the nation’s newspaper of record by taking a more principled and professional route than the often-sleazy Herald. By coincidence, Meyer laid out his principles in a speech delivered on the very day the Davidson inquest began—on March 5, 1935. The Post, he said, “shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it, concerning the important affairs of America and the world.” But in disseminating that news, he stressed, “The paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman.”
In Pinehurst, that genteel attitude would put a newspaper at a disadvantage in covering a story fraught with seamy undertones and titillating rumors.
The Herald’s Cissy Patterson and The Post’s Gene Meyer, once close friends, had come to hate each other as their papers engaged in mortal daily combat. They even fought a long, angry legal battle over the rights to publish four popular comic strips: Andy Gump, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley and Winnie Winkle. Patterson learned during the week of the Davidson inquest that she had lost that battle when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia gave the comics to The Post. So bitterly did Cissy resent the loss that she sent her triumphant rival a piece of raw, bloody meat nestled amid orchids, a Shylockian pound of flesh that greatly offended the Jewish Meyer.
The Post, with its more sober and serious approach, had the edge on covering the rapidly expanding federal government and keeping tabs on the ins and outs of the proliferation of New Deal alphabet-soup agencies. The Herald covered government as well, but it also devoted considerably more ink than its staid rival to stories of the kind that supermarket tabloids specialize in today.
Just during the week of the Davidson inquest alone, The Herald published lurid stories about:
• A 100-pound bulldog that had to be shot after going on a rampage in Maryland, killing a 1,200-pound prize bull.
• An elderly woman, “Baby Doe” Tabor, once the toast of Colorado society and the wife of a U.S. senator, who was found frozen to death in a squalid ho
vel.
• A twenty-five-year-old D.C. woman, victim of sleeping sickness, who committed suicide in the hospital by binding her mouth shut with adhesive tape.
Billing itself as “an American Paper for the American People,” The Herald endeared itself to its blue-collar readers by playing up blustery, right-wing, unfair and unbalanced articles that made little attempt to separate news from opinion. Next to its March 5 top-of-the-front story on the Elva case, for instance, The Herald ran an exposé about sinister Soviet propaganda movies supposedly flooding U.S. theaters. “The multi-armed octopus in Moscow,” warned the lead paragraph, “has many of its colossal, death-dealing tentacles wound around America.”
Once the Davidson story broke on March 1, both Washington papers relied on the wire services for their first stories. But Cissy Patterson and her fellow editors at The Herald were quicker to see the need to send their own man to the scene. They considered the story of such importance that they immediately decided to put one of their best and most skilled digger/writers on a train to go down and cover it.
It didn’t take them long to settle on Pat Frank.
Wiry of build and somewhat nerdy looking, the bespectacled, heavy-smoking Frank was just twenty-seven. Born Harry Hart Frank in 1908, he had already made a name for himself in that golden age of colorful, hard-nosed newspapering and would go on to a successful career not only in journalism but also in popular literature. After learning his way around the corridors of power first as a reporter and then as a public-relations man for various governmental bureaus, he would turn his hand to fiction later in life. His novels include Alas, Babylon, a bestselling apocalyptic tale of life in the aftermath of a thermonuclear war.
Frank arrived in Pinehurst on Sunday, March 2, and filed his first story by telegraph that evening. It was the one that appeared in the next morning’s paper under the headline “Poison Suspected in Strange Death of Statler Heiress.” On his first day in town, the prolific Mr. Frank also wrote the sidebar story telling of slot machines and gossipy socialites and overpriced eleven-cent Coca-Colas—and another one based on that exclusive interview with Emanuel Birch. Not only did the Davidson butler tell him in dramatic detail about discovering his mistress’s lifeless body after noticing her foot hanging from the open door of her Packard convertible, but he also obligingly climbed into the car and showed Frank the position in which he found her.
“Here Birch kneeled on the running board,” Frank wrote. “He thrust his head and body through the open door of the car, his head resting on the foot pedals, his hands outstretched before him. ‘She was like that,’ he said.”
Buried in Frank’s body copy the next day was a brief but significant revelation involving Davidson acquaintance Bernard Freeman, a Pinehurst publicist who had been a guest at the charity ball on the night before Elva’s death. He was the one who testified in public that she had said “I’m going to get tight,” though he didn’t know whether she had carried out her vow. But he privately told Frank that she had downed “three quick drinks, one of whiskey and two of wine.” So Elva may have gotten pretty well plowed on the night in question after all.
Chafing at reading Frank’s dazzling array of provocative, readable details in the March 3 Herald, Gene Meyer’s editors back at The Post realized belatedly that they had to put their own ace on the case. That’s when they called in their widely respected White House reporter, Eddie Folliard, and told him to start packing his bags.
But no sooner had Folliard taken the taxi from the depot in Southern Pines and arrived at his hotel in Pinehurst than he ran into Frank, the man who would become his nemesis for the next few exasperating days. Far from feeling intimidated by the arrival on the scene of the older and more widely esteemed Folliard, Frank took it as a personal challenge. He already had a two-day jump on Folliard, and he clearly resolved to stay a couple of steps ahead of the newcomer for the duration, hitting him with a scoop a day if possible to keep him off balance.
By week’s end, poor Folliard must have felt like that lumbering, 1,200-pound bull back in Maryland, with a nimble, 100-pound dog running circles around him and biting him from every angle.
On Tuesday, March 5, Frank—or at least his paper—published an eye-opening sidebar offering a whole new take on the character of H. Bradley Davidson. Somebody on The Herald’s staff, possibly Frank himself, managed to get an exclusive telephone interview with Brad’s ex, Jessica, who had remarried and was living back on “her vast forested estate on the mountainside above Berryville, Va.”
Puzzlingly, she had only the most tender and complimentary things to say about the man who had walked out on her and her three children, failed to keep up on his child-support payments and now stood all but accused of murdering the woman who took her place as his wife. “I am in deepest sympathy with Bradley Davidson,” Jessica said. “He was of a gentle, kind nature and is suffering now that his wife is dead.”
Gentle? Kind?
“I have been asked today about our divorce,” Jessica told the anonymous reporter, “so I must speak about it for his sake, now that his trial is on. Our separation three years ago was due to our misunderstanding each other. This was because his business took him out West, where he stayed for several years. I had to live in Baltimore with mother and the children. That separation made us feel like strangers when he came back. We were divorced last May, after a separation of three years. During those three years he came to see the children frequently. He is a devoted, affectionate father.”
Devoted? Affectionate?
The Herald published a large, two-column photo of Jessica, showing her to be a lovely, full-lipped, passionate-looking brunette with an aristocratic but fragile bearing, an anguished expression and a rather revealing neckline.
Jessica and Brad still had one thing in common, it seems: both had a taste for much younger second spouses. The former Mrs. Davidson, age forty-one, was now Jessica Riely, having married twenty-one-year-old Lee Riely the previous June, not long after her divorce. The callow Lee was the son of a retired army officer. The newlyweds and Jessica’s children were back living at Retreat, her 1,150-acre estate stretching along the east bank of the Shenandoah River. The beautiful old mansion, to which Brad and Jessica had moved after their marriage back in 1915, had been closed for several years before they reopened it.
“It was on the vast boundaries of ‘Retreat’ that high-spirited young ‘Brad’ Davidson wooed and won her for his bride two decades ago,” The Herald wrote. “Mrs. Riely was then the beautiful Jessica Aylward, heiress to a vast fortune. Davidson and his heiress bride remained there only two years, and then they went to her family home in Baltimore. In the years before their separation, two sons and a daughter were born.”
To shield the children, Jessica had allowed no newspapers with stories about the goings-on in Pinehurst on the premises and hadn’t told them anything about the fix their father was in. Since learning about the tragedy herself, she said in a subdued voice, she had been in ill health and unable to receive visitors—which explained the telephone interview. Young Riely, who had taken over the day-to-day running of his new wife’s estate and was also “associated with the management of the Charles Town race track,” also got on the phone. He said he knew Brad Davidson and liked him fine. He had never met Elva.
All this took some getting used to. Was the arch villain of the Elva tragedy not such a bad guy after all? There seemed two potential explanations. It was possible that Jessica had simply lied about him—that for the kids’ sake, she had chosen not to badmouth their father publicly. But her tone sounded more like that of a woman who knew in her heart that she bore some of the blame for the breakup of her marriage and felt genuine pain at the current plight of her ex-husband.
This question of some “mitigating fault” on Jessica’s part came up in an earlier chapter during the discussion of the divorce agreement, which granted liberal visitation rights and at the time seemed oddly amicable, almost forgiving, in tone. The apparent reason for that would rem
ain a mystery for seventy years—until Jessica’s grandson, Henry Bradley Davidson IV, happened to shed an intriguing new light on that subject in a telephone interview subsequent to the one reported on earlier in this book. It was well known in the family but never publicly discussed, he said, that Grandmother Jessica suffered from “some kind of drug habit.” She had been “sickly and addicted,” he said, perhaps to pain pills. And her young son, Brad III, frequently had to “go traipsing somewhere to get drugs for his mother.”
This certainly modified the image of Brad Jr.’s first marriage—and of why it possibly might have ended. Had Jessica become some kind of junkie? When had the habit developed? Had it continued into her second marriage, and might that be why she had pleaded that she was “in ill health and unable to receive visitors” during the Elva scandal? Had her first husband, Brad, been obliged to go out and procure her drugs before he abandoned his family and lit out in despair for the Midwest? Had that sad and demeaning chore then fallen on one of their three children? If so, all this would help explain why Jessica had been so hesitant to speak judgmentally of Brad for walking out on her.
CHAPTER 23
A Faded Summer Love
The diligent Pat Frank, reporting from Pinehurst, had another jolt or two for his Herald readers.
On February 15, 1935, he wrote, “twelve days before her limp body, half clad, was found in Mr. Davidson’s three car garage back of their pretentious mansion here,” Elva had been in Boston alone, making out her will, leaving her husband a half million dollars.
Then, “while she was in Boston, Mr. Davidson left Pinehurst. At about this same time he was reported seen in Annapolis with a vivacious divorcée who had been his constant companion before he married the athletic, studious Elva.”