Death of a Pinehurst Princess

by Steve Bouser

  Though the matter of his Annapolis stop-off would come up a couple of times during testimony, no further mention was ever made of any such divorcée, vivacious or otherwise. One can only speculate on her identity. She might have been Brad’s former boss, Rella Abell Armstrong, wealthy owner of the Annapolis Roads development, who had left her philandering playwright husband, Paul Armstrong. In any case, the timing would have been right. It is known from an article in The Outlook that Brad was in Pinehurst on Valentine’s Day, February 14, dressed as a sailor. He would have had to get on a train immediately thereafter to make his Annapolis rendezvous the next day.

  So Brad was running around on Elva after all. And right after their marriage. That may well be the something that “hit the fan.” Whoever Vivacious Divorcée was, one thing seemed likely: if Elva later found out about Brad’s purported tryst in Annapolis, hatched on Valentine’s Day and brazenly carried out at the very time she was in Boston signing her fortune over to him, it might well have sabotaged their brand-new marriage and plunged Elva into the state she was observed to be in on the night of the parties.

  Elva Statler, at age fifteen, participates in a mule race at the Pinehurst Harness Track in January 1928. Courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst.

  But there was more. Readers of The Herald were titillated to learn the next day that Brad wasn’t the only party in that marriage whose recent past had harbored a passionate romance.

  Two of them, actually. And another source would tell of a third.

  It’s not clear who at The Washington Herald managed, through diligent digging, to shine a light into a hitherto unexplored area: Elva’s pre-Davidson love life. But apparently there was such a life—an intense one, in fact, whose unhappy end provided a possible explanation for her rather abrupt subsequent marriage to Brad.

  “When Mrs. H. Bradley Davidson Jr., young Radcliffe graduate and heiress to the Statler hotel millions, left Boston last June,” the paper reported in a story that bore a Boston dateline but no byline, “she is known to have been deeply in love with a wealthy young Yale graduate, Boston friends of the dead bride revealed today, while officials at Pinehurst, N.C., were probing her mysterious death.”

  So, pencil another previously unknown member into the dramatis personae of this play: Wealthy Young Yale Graduate. Where did he come from?

  “Because of her frank assertions that she loved the young New York heir to a great fortune, and would not consider marrying anyone else, friends here [in Boston] were stunned to learn of her sudden and unexpected marriage to Mr. Davidson,” the paper wrote. “She was quoted as saying, ‘If I married anyone, I would marry this New York boy. But I don’t want to be married, because I am afraid it would interfere with the ambition of my life—a career as a concert pianist.’”

  Elva’s purported romance with the nameless young man, it seemed, had begun a couple of years previously, when she was an undergraduate at Radcliffe and met the New York swain through a mutual friend at Harvard. “During those years, friends said, the girl telephoned him at least three times a week, and spent many weekends with him and his family at their sumptuous country estate in a New York suburb,” The Herald wrote. “She also visited him in New Haven to attend Harvard-Yale football games.”

  At that point, this particular trail grows cold. Having acted out his moment in the footlights (or the sidelights) without speaking a word of dialogue, Wealthy Young Yale Graduate exits the stage and hastens from the theater and into the noisy anonymity of the street, never to be heard from again.

  Would Elva’s aged best friend, the former Isabelle Baer, be able to shed any light on the matter? Her son, Richard Famiglietti, asked her about it not long before her death in 2009. He came back with an e-mail that was only marginally helpful. “In Cambridge, in the summer of 1934,” he wrote, “Stat [Elva] and my mother lived in a Penthouse in an apartment building located between the Radcliffe campus and the Harvard campus. They used to have ‘open-house’ parties (i.e., invited guests could bring friends). Toward the end, not long before they left for Pinehurst, among the guys ‘hanging around’ were ‘Harvard,’ ‘Yale’ and ‘Princeton.’”

  Richard said that his mother remembered Harvard’s real name, Johnny Dean, because she dated him in 1935 and 1936, when they were both working in New York City. But she knew nothing of the others. Whoever “Yale” was, did he and Elva drift apart? Did Brad catch her on the rebound? Whatever happened, the story can’t be a happy one. Elva Statler, already unlucky in life, was also clearly unlucky in love.

  But as an entirely different source revealed, “Yale” wasn’t the only love interest who had moved in and out of Elva’s life before she met Brad Davidson. There had been somebody else. And he wasn’t a boy at all. He was a man—a dark-eyed, hot-blooded, fast-fingered musician.

  And this one had a name: Conrad.

  Though superstar Washington Herald reporter Pat Frank got more than his share of scoops, he did miss out on one tantalizing morsel regarding Elva. The only known mention of it came in a cryptic sentence that an anonymous Associated Press journalist let fall while reporting on court proceedings building up to the 1936 caveat case. In the story, attorney Bart Leach tossed off a powerful little bombshell while giving an otherwise mundane deposition about the legal assistance he had provided to Elva before he switched his allegiance to Brad.

  “Leach said he was employed by Miss Statler before her marriage,” the AP report said, “to handle legal angles growing out of a love affair between her and a Bostonian named Conrad, described by counsel as an orchestra member or a band leader.”

  That was all. “A love affair between her and a Bostonian named Conrad.” Newspaper readers scarcely had time to raise their eyebrows before the report moved on to other topics. “The incident was merely mentioned in Leach’s narrative,” the reporter wrote, “and was not enlarged upon.”

  Might it be possible to enlarge upon it all these decades later? Who was Conrad? Did he play a role in the lead-up to Elva’s death?

  Isabel Baer Famiglietti, speaking through her son Richard, was of no help. On the Internet, various search engines revealed that there were several musicians named Conrad during the 1930s—two of whom, Con and Lew, jumped out as strong possibilities. Con Conrad was a jazz band man in the 1930s, and he played in and around the Boston scene. He was successful enough to make his way out to Hollywood in 1936, where he died that same year. There were fewer references to Lew Conrad. One site included an elusive mention that Lew would be playing at a social function at MIT. Another site said that Lew Conrad was a hit with the East Coast society crowd during the late twenties and early thirties. Clues were otherwise scarce, and both men might well have been using stage names.

  Then, a chance access to the professional research service Proquest provided the key that unlocked that part of the puzzle. An advertisement gave more details about the party at MIT. And the name of the band playing there was “Lew Conrad and his Boston Statler Band of Musketeers.”

  Bingo. The name “Statler” shouted out across the decades. It seemed all but certain that this was the Conrad in question and that Elva must have met him while staying at her late father’s hotel in Boston. One could easily imagine her wandering down to the lounge during a boring evening, whereupon he approaches her table and introduces himself during a break, the sparks fly and the rest is history.

  Besides leading his own hotel band, Lew both sang and played violin with the Leo Reisman Band. At one point, he wrote a song for the band called “Moanin’ Low,” which was performed in a Broadway production called The Little Show by Libby Holman, who was about to get caught up in a highly publicized death scandal of her own. Lew performed on the radio regularly, broadcasting for NBC from New York. But there was a gap, from 1933 to 1935 or so, when he dropped out of sight and wasn’t on the air. That would have to have been the time when he and Elva would have been together. Then Lew surfaces again, listed as filing with the Southern District Bankruptcy Court of New York in February
1935. He owed more than $8,000. And the date was two weeks before Elva would go to Boston and change her will.

  What had happened during those two missing years? How torrid was this love affair between Elva and Lew? They would have had to keep their involvement quiet for any number of reasons. Had they been shacked up at some point? Is that why he dropped out of sight? What were those “legal angles” that Leach was helping with? Was Lew after Elva’s money, too? Could Elva have perhaps made Lew a loan that he couldn’t repay? Were they both over their heads in the relationship? How had it ended?

  One does not have to go too far out on a limb to wonder if Elva had received a desperate call from her old flame just before she left Pinehurst for Boston. Could he have pleaded with her to help him out of his financial ruin? Could the “legal angles” have involved some kind of not-so-subtle attempt at blackmail? If her death was thought to be murder, should Lew have been considered a suspect? Given the timing, if nothing else, police at the time certainly would have considered him a “person of interest.”

  The Southern Bankruptcy Court of New York offers little enlightenment. Individual bankruptcy records have long since been tossed, and nothing remains beyond Conrad’s docket number and a note that his proceedings ended in the summer of 1935, a few months after Elva’s death. There is no creditor list or other clue to follow any further. The last mention of Lew Conrad has him playing at a USO show in 1941. Then he appears to have dropped off the face of the earth.

  But not before leaving behind a good look at his face.

  A now-empty song sheet cover, marketed in 1931 by Leo Feist Inc. of New York and found recently on eBay, was originally folded around the sheet music for a foxtrot ballad called “A Faded Summer Love,” written by Phil Baxter. And there on the front, inset along with a color sketch of trees in autumn, is a three-by four-inch photo of “Lew Conrad, Exclusive NBC Artist.”

  Gazing confidently, almost cockily, from the black-and-white picture is an exotically handsome young man of about thirty, dressed in a well-tailored suit, vest and tie. With his swarthy Rudolph Valentino face and combed-back black hair, he has a definite “ethnic” look about him, leading one to doubt that “Conrad” was his original family name. He could have been of Lebanese extraction. Then again, he bore a slight resemblance to George Gershwin, who came from a Russian Jewish background.

  Whatever his history, the Conrad of this photo has a brooding, intense, passionate expression, with a vague danger smoldering about the eyes. He would have been about ten years older than Elva, easily exerting a strong attraction on a none-too-stable young blonde with a rebellious streak. It is entirely possible that she was seeing him in Boston while her new husband was seeing Vivacious Divorcée in Annapolis.

  Phil Baxter’s “Faded Summer Love” was a popular and oft-performed song in 1931. Feist also marketed the sheet music under a different cover, in which a more amiable-looking Bing Crosby has replaced Conrad in the photo. The lyrics, found elsewhere on the Web, seem to echo eerily across the years as background music to a mysterious and apparently tempestuous love affair that went wrong for reasons now lost in the mist of time:

  This song sheet shows musician Lew Conrad, with whom Elva Statler apparently became romantically involved sometime between 1932 and 1934. Courtesy of Diane McLellan.

  You left today but you didn’t say goodbye.

  I wonder why.

  I’m standing now where you made your vow,

  So blue for you I could cry…

  I’m like the poor leaves that swayed with the breeze.

  I thought that life was sweet.

  You are the sweet breeze that tried hard to please,

  Then swept me off my feet.

  Summer morning dew turns to frost.

  Leaves that once were new pay the cost—

  Beautiful to see, but reminding me

  Of a faded summer love.

  CHAPTER 24

  A Distant and Faraway Look

  Newspaper reports about doomed romantic affairs weren’t the only startlingly relevant writings that juries in 1935 and 1936 were deprived of but are available for our perusal today. Another key document that was never made public at the time has only recently turned up in an unexpected place in the basement of the Moore County Courthouse. It was in a bundle that a clerk had long ago filed away under “B” for Isabelle Baer, perhaps simply because Elva’s friend Isabelle was the only plaintiff to show up in person at the hearing. Its contents make painful reading.

  The tattered old brown file folder contains a hodgepodge of several incidental items: a summons for Pinehurst Resort president James W. Tufts to appear in court and testify (he got out of it); an order to produce all telegrams sent or received by Brad or Elva during their engagement and brief marriage (some of them would be read to the jury); and a request from the Packard Company asking that the car in which Elva’s body had been found, the 1934 Roadster purchased on April 21, 1934, for $5,950, be impounded since Brad—surprise!—had not kept up the payments on it.

  But the primary document in the folder is a bulky statement filed with the clerk of Moore County Superior Court on July 11, 1935—four months after the inquest in Pinehurst and eight months before the caveat case would be heard in Carthage. The statement bears the signatures of the lawyers for Elva’s institutionalized brother, Ellsworth Morgan Statler, and her little niece out in Arizona, Joan Marie Statler. They set forth the argument they will be making for throwing out Elva’s second will, the one leaving everything to Brad. The further they go, the more they describe a young woman who had suffered so many psychological blows that she had been reduced to practically a zombie state:

  The caveators are informed and believe and so allege that the said purported will was not and is not the last will and testament of Elva Statler Davidson, deceased, for that in the execution of the same…the said Elva Statler Davidson was unduly influenced with respect to such execution of the same and with respect to the provisions contained therein, such undue influence so exerted being of such nature and to such extent as to destroy the free agency of said testator with respect therein and to cause her to do that which she otherwise would not have done.

  The legal language flows on in its almost Elizabethan majesty. In lay terms, the lawyers—apparently getting paid by the word—are saying that Elva’s will doesn’t reflect her true wishes, since she wrote it at a time when she was under such pressure that it had destroyed her ability to make an independent decision. And the document leaves little doubt as to who was doing the pressuring. “That the propounder, H. Bradley Davidson Jr. or W. Barton Leach…or both acting in concert, unduly and unfairly and wrongfully induced the said Elva Statler Davidson to execute said purported will against her will and contrary to her natural wishes and desires.”

  When Brad had met Elva, the lawyers say, he was “practically without funds or financial resources.” And shortly before the marriage, he was heard to state boldly that he “expected to live on Elva’s income.” The paper notes that Elva, though “utterly untrained and impractical in matters of business and property,” had come into possession of “a very large estate” on February 14, 1935, and executed a new will on the very next day, making her new husband the sole beneficiary and fixing him up with an annuity for life. And twelve days later, the lawyers remind, “the said Elva Statler Davidson was found dead in the garage of her home at Pinehurst, North Carolina, under strange and mysterious circumstances.”

  Attorney Leach, it is noted, received “very large compensation, in excess of $25,000” (more than a quarter of a million dollars in today’s terms) as legal advisor to Elva. But then, after objecting “strenuously and violently” to the marriage, he suddenly saw on which side his bread was buttered and “changed his attitude and became exceedingly friendly with the said H. Bradley Davidson Jr.” Thereafter, the domineering Leach, “acting at the instigation of and for and on behalf of said H. Bradley Davidson Jr.,” is accused of repeatedly badgering the already unstable and impressio
nable Elva to change her will—going so far as to send her a letter to that effect while she was still on her honeymoon. In other words, they ganged up on her.

  The Caveators are informed and believe and so allege that the insistence on the part of said H. Bradley Davidson Jr. and on the part of said W. Barton Leach with respect to the said Elva Statler Davidson making a will had a very depressing and troubling effect on the mind and will of said Elva Statler Davidson…

  That frequently after said marriage and prior to the date of the execution of the said will she was observed to be in moods of despondency and evident unhappiness and distress; that as caveators are informed and believe, such unhappiness and distress was due very largely to the fact that the said Elva Statler Davidson was being unduly induced and virtually driven to the execution of a will which she did not desire to make…

  That the said Elva Statler Davidson…was subject to moods of despondency and mental depression, which condition was augmented and accentuated by the death in the late fall of 1933 of her brother, Milton Statler, who was killed in an automobile accident…that subsequent thereto the condition of said Elva Statler became such that she was treated by a prominent psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of nervous and mental diseases in Boston, Massachusetts.

  So she was seeing a shrink. And the depositions prepared for the caveat hearing make clear who this “prominent psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of nervous and mental diseases” was: Dr. Richard P. Stetson of Boston and Cambridge. He testified on paper that he had treated Elva in the Harvard University hospital in 1934, while she was a student at Radcliffe. In describing her condition, he painted a portrait of a virtual psychological basket case. Elva had come (or been sent) to him, he said, because of symptoms such as “halting speech” and “crying spells,” which Stetson said were “entirely emotional.” He assigned her symptoms to “an emotional shock to her unstable nervous system” and said they were probably attributable to the death of her foster brother, Milton. And we now know that they might also have been aggravated by a couple of intense love affairs gone bad.