The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation

by Schechter, Harold

  In the fall of 1924, a public librarian named Anne Mulheron filed a complaint charging seventeen-year-old Fenelon with the destruction of dozens of books. Convicted as a delinquent minor on December 6, 1924, he was given a suspended sentence on condition that he pay restitution of $53.88 as his share of the cost of the mutilated books. To earn the money—roughly $800 in today’s dollars—he found another job as a stock boy but was fired within weeks after flying into a rage at his supervisor and giving him a vicious beating. That June, his mother moved out of the house to reside for the summer at the Apostolic Faith Mission campgrounds. Penniless and alone, Fenelon went to the Domestic Relations Court and asked to be committed to reform school. His request was granted. On August 25, 1925, just past his eighteenth birthday, he joined Pember in the Oregon State Training School for Boys.22

  Mary’s fear that Fenelon would fill his younger brother’s ear with atheistic “poison” was not unfounded. From the moment he arrived at the reformatory, Fenelon made no secret of his contempt for religion. “He was a fountain of abuse against God,” Superintendent Gilbert later testified. “He was the most blasphemous infidel I ever beheld. So imbued was he with bitterness against Christianity that he could talk of nothing else for weeks after he arrived. He was possessed of an incredible fund of knowledge and seemed to take high pleasure in his incessant ranting against God.”

  Even more disconcerting to authorities than these antireligious tirades were his violent mood swings. “For no reason we could understand he would explosively transform from a smiling, pliable boy into a brutish, belligerent animal,” recalled a school official named Lloyd E. Darling. During these spells—which sometimes lasted for days—he was a danger to the other boys. “Once roused to a fighting pitch,” said Darling, “he had no other thought than to destroy his foe.”23

  Fenelon himself offered a reason for these murderous outbursts. As had happened at the Strickland Home, he was convinced that the other boys at the reformatory “looked upon me as a sissy.” “That happens all the time,” he told a psychiatrist some years afterward. “They all think I’m a sissy, so I smash them in the jaw and then I become their enemy.”

  He was particularly provoked by a boy named Danny, a swaggering bully who (in Irwin’s telling) “used to hog all the bread at mealtimes, which meant that somebody had to go without bread.” One morning at breakfast, as Danny and Fenelon were still seating themselves, “everybody else at the table grabbed the bread, so there was only one big slice left and one little heel.” Before Danny could reach for the remaining slice, Irwin snatched it away. Danny spat out an insult that brought Fenelon out of his chair with a roar. Only the intervention of the dining hall supervisor kept the two teenage combatants apart.

  Later that day however, Fenelon confronted Danny in the shoemaking shop, where both were employed as part of their industrial training. “You son of a bitch,” said Fenelon, “if you’re looking for a scrap just start something.” When Danny responded with a curse, Fenelon “smashed him in the jaw. For an hour about fifty people were trying to take me away from him. Finally when it ended, his finger was broken and I had given him a big cauliflower ear.”

  While Danny was led off to the infirmary, Fenelon was taken to the office of G. I. Stahl, the school’s designated disciplinarian, and given what the inmates called a “dinging”—a severe lashing on his right hand with a heavy leather strap. “When he got through with me,” Fenelon subsequently related, “my hand looked like a ham.”24

  He received another “dinging,” this time on the buttocks, in late June 1926 after trying to escape from the reformatory. For the previous few months he had gone without lunch, turning over his food to a boy from the machine shop who, in exchange for the extra portions, had tinkered together a small apparatus constructed according to Fenelon’s specifications. Built from the motor of an old Victrola phonograph, it functioned as a kind of metronome. As Irwin described it, the machine “ticked like a clock, only you could regulate it so that it ticked once every minute or whatever you wanted. By regulating the tick, I could find out how long I could concentrate.” The device was designed to help him develop the power that would make him the world’s greatest sculptor. He called it the “visualization machine.” When school authorities prevented him from using it, however, he ran away in a fit of anger, only to be caught and returned to the reform school that same night.25

  Paroled in November 1926, Fenelon returned to live with his mother, who had just received word that Benjamin Hardin Irwin, the man who had abandoned her sixteen years earlier, had died at the age of seventy-two in a boardinghouse in Brickstore, Georgia, where he was cohabiting with a forty-year-old widow named Fannie Norris.26 For a few weeks, Fenelon labored in a cast-iron stove factory before taking a more congenial job with a firm specializing in ornamental modeling. His employment there ended in the usual way, when he assaulted a fellow worker who cast aspersions on his manhood. As he explained in a subsequent interview: “There was a fellow there who was a fairy and one of the other fellows said to me, ‘That guy will give you five dollars if you suck him off. You have a nice ass—why don’t you take a chance?’ So I jumped up and beat him up and got fired.”27

  Still enthralled by the “Great Agnostic,” Irwin not only used his earnings from his two short-lived jobs to purchase his own copies of Ingersoll’s essays but also announced that he was adopting the first name of his intellectual hero. For his mother, it was the final proof that her middle son was beyond redemption. Sometime in the early weeks of 1927, he returned home from an outing to find that she had burned all of the offending books in the kitchen stove. They quarreled violently. The next morning, twenty-year-old Robert Irwin packed a bag and left Portland.

  He never saw his mother again.28

  8

  * * *

  Romanelli and Rady

  WORKING AT A VARIETY of manual jobs—dockhand, lumberjack, fruit picker, cannery worker—Irwin made his way to San Francisco. In a published reminiscence, he described the tawdry temptations of that “Sodom-by-the-Sea”: its “liquor joints, dance halls with lurid dames…coke dens, and all the vices one could pay for.” While others happily wallowed in such wickedness, Irwin (so he claims in his memoir) wanted no part of it. The fleshpots of the Barbary Coast might exert a forbidden allure, “but not enough for me to dwarf the soul I had been blessed with.”1

  Toting a battered suitcase stuffed with his precious collection of art illustrations, he hitchhiked down the coast, arriving in Los Angeles in late summer 1927, not long after his twentieth birthday. By then, he was in a desperately bedraggled state. “I had been on the road for a long time and presented a horrible picture—in dirt and rags.” Wandering around a “tough section of town,” he came upon a barbershop and stopped in for a haircut and shave.

  “There were two barbers there,” he told one of the many psychiatrists who would examine him in later years. “One was small and one was big, and the big one immediately took me for a fairy. When he was shaving me, he got some hair in my mouth and he said it looked like I had been sucking somebody.” For reasons he could never understand, Irwin was always being “mistaken for a queer,” something that never failed to lash him into a rage. He managed to suppress his fury until the haircut was done, then sprang to his feet and “tore into the son-of-a-bitch.” As he “beat the tar out of him with my fist,” the man’s partner came up behind Irwin and “hit me on the head with a bottle.” Swiveling, Irwin delivered a punch to the smaller man’s jaw that knocked him senseless. With his two adversaries dispatched, Irwin, still in the grip of his frenzy, rampaged through the shop, knocking every bottle of hair tonic, eau de cologne, and aftershave off their shelves and onto the linoleum floor. He then strode out the door and hurried away, just as the neighborhood beat cop—alerted by a passerby who had witnessed the brawl through the barbershop window—showed up.2

  Shortly afterward—seeking work as a sculptor and trusting to his “guiding star”—Irwin presented himself at the stu
dio of Carlo Romanelli. Member of an eminent family of Florentine artists, Romanelli had come to America at the age of thirty and, after settling in Hollywood, quickly established himself as a highly successful commercial sculptor. During the silent-movie era he produced props for dozens of motion pictures—everything from a marble reproduction of ingenue Clara Kimball Young’s hands for the 1922 melodrama The Hands of Nara to replicas of monumental Roman statuary for the 1925 version of Ben-Hur. His best-known works, however, were the life-size lions and elephants commissioned by pioneering movie producer William Selig for the entranceway to his personal zoo—a menagerie of more than seven hundred animals assembled for the studio’s popular jungle pictures.3

  In his periods of seeming normality—when he wasn’t flying into a murderous rage or spouting his wild-eyed theories about art—Irwin could be a thoroughly engaging young man: polite, well-spoken, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. He was attractive, too, with wavy brown hair, boyish good looks, and a compact build sculpted by his long months of physical labor. Freshly barbered and wearing a fresh suit of clothes he had purchased with his last twenty dollars, he made a favorable enough impression on Romanelli to be hired on the spot.

  At twenty years old, Bob Irwin was still a virgin. He had been masturbating regularly since the age of ten, when his big brother, Vidalin, took him into the bathroom of their Los Angeles home and showed him how to do it. At eighteen, he had his first girlfriend—the sister of a fellow inmate at the Oregon State reformatory who took a shine to him on a visit to her brother. On subsequent visits, she had snuck into his room, where the two engaged in some furtive petting—“monkeying around,” as Bob put it. Owing to his own bashfulness, however, they never had sex, though the girl was more than willing.4

  Shortly after he went to work for Romanelli, he was finally relieved of his virginity. He was out with a buddy one night when they were approached by a pair of prostitutes who took them to a seedy hotel. Bob got the prettier of the two. “She was a very beautiful girl,” he recalled. “I went upstairs with her and as soon as I got in there I began to stutter and she took in the whole situation at a glance. She said, ‘I’m glad I got you. I’ll take care of you.’ I was deadly afraid of her and she took off her clothes and she washed off my penis with that warm stuff and saw if I had any clap. Then she lay me down on the bed and put her arms around me and made me forget about being afraid.” To his astonished delight, she eagerly performed fellatio on him—“gave me a good French,” in the words of Irwin, who would remember the moment as “the nearest I ever got to heaven in this world.” As soon as he climaxed, “she immediately jumped up and went out and washed out her mouth and then she laid me down in the bed again and instead of being like a prostitute she was very nice and I played with her awhile and sucked her breasts. Then I had real intercourse with her.” He “saw her quite a number of times after that” until she got arrested and vanished from the streets.5

  Though he would continue to patronize prostitutes on a regular basis, sex was always secondary to Irwin’s main preoccupation: his increasingly obsessive efforts to achieve artistic supremacy through the practice of visualization. During cigarette breaks at Romanelli’s studio or over coffee at a local greasy spoon with the other assistants, he would hold forth on his favorite subject, waving his hands excitedly and speaking with an intensity that more than one of his listeners would describe as “fanatical.”

  “Sculptors today are like blind men feeling around in the dark,” he proclaimed. “We keep on changing and changing our sculpture till we get it pretty near as we want it, but it’s a long and laborious process, and we’re never satisfied because we’re copying something we can’t clearly see.”

  Even Augustus Saint-Gaudens—the master sculptor best known for the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on the Boston Common and his design for the 1905 “double eagle” gold piece, considered the most beautiful coin ever minted in the United States—went about his art in a misguided way. “He spent fourteen years on the Shaw Memorial, making it over and over again because he could never get it quite like he wanted it,” said Irwin, “Fourteen years! And in the end he still wasn’t satisfied. Yet he had all the academic training in the world.”

  Traditional academic training, Bob insisted, was precisely the problem. “The sculptors of today think the only way to develop artistic talent is to practice drawing and modeling from the nude. They don’t realize that artistic genius resides not in the hand but in the brain, and by all this modeling and drawing, they’re using material methods to remedy a mental fault. I say, why not get at the heart of the trouble from the start and develop your mental sight by practicing visualization? If Saint-Gaudens only could have gotten his mental picture clear, he could have finished his memorial in two or three days instead of fourteen years.”

  Bob had no intention of making the same mistake as Saint-Gaudens. “I mean to be able to get my mental picture clear. And then I’ll be able to do things that no sculptor ever dreamed of. I’ll be able to make a bust of somebody I haven’t seen for years, just by copying my mental picture of that person. And I’ll do it so fast that Michelangelo himself would say to me, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ ”6

  Bob remained at Romanelli’s studio for nearly a year—the longest he would hold onto any single job in his life. Like other mentors he would find in the coming years, Romanelli took a shine to the earnest young sculptor, regarding him as “an excellent workman, clean in his habits and with talent and unusual ambition.” Romanelli’s wife, on the other hand, developed an active distaste for Bob’s pontificating and saw him as “overbearing and a braggart.” Several of the other assistants, too, grew fed up with his pompous pronouncements on art and told him so to his face. When Bob responded with his fists, Romanelli was compelled to let him go.7

  He wasn’t entirely unhappy to be relieved of the job since it had demanded so much of his time. Now that he was free, he could devote himself to the far more urgent matter of developing his visualization skills. To keep body and soul together, he took a string of part-time jobs. He did some life modeling for the Norwegian-born sculptor Finn Frolich, best remembered today for his bust of his good friend and sailing buddy Jack London. He spent a few months crafting celebrity likenesses in the waxworks studio of “encausticist” Katherine Stuberg, Hollywood’s answer to Madame Tussaud. He did ornamental plasterwork for a concern called the A-1 Decorating Company.8

  By the spring of 1929, however, he found himself longing for more fulfilling ways to exercise his artistic gifts. Like other young sculptors before him, he was an ardent fan of the eminent Chicagoan Lorado Taft, responsible for some of the city’s most impressive monuments. He had read captivating accounts of Taft’s famed atelier on the grounds of the 1893 World’s Fair. In the first week of May 1929, Bob packed up his ever-growing picture collection, along with a sample of his work—a small plaster bust of Charles Lindbergh—and hopped a freight train bound for Chicago.

  There were some odd affinities between Lorado Zadok Taft and the former Fenelon Arroyo Seco Irwin, beginning with their parents’ habit of bestowing highly eccentric names on their offspring. Lorado and his siblings—his brother Florizel and sisters Zulime and Turbia Doctoria—were the children of Don Carlos Taft, a Congregational minister and teacher of geology at the University of Illinois (then known as Illinois Industrial University). Taft traced his fascination with sculpture to an incident that occurred in 1873, when a shipment of carelessly crated statues, destined for the university’s new art museum, arrived from Europe in badly damaged condition and thirteen-year-old Lorado was called upon to help his father reassemble them.9

  After graduating from the university in 1879, he spent four years in Paris, mastering the traditional techniques of clay modeling at the venerable École des Beaux-Arts. Back in America, he eked out a living with whatever odd sculpting jobs he could land: everything from death masks and parlor statuettes to bas-relief fireplace screens and butter sculptures for county fairs. Gradually, as h
is reputation grew, he won larger and more lucrative commissions—portrait busts of prominent citizens, Civil War monuments, and other public memorials. None of this work, however, was especially fulfilling to a man with Taft’s exalted sense of calling, his determination to improve his fellow citizens by exposing them to the glories of classical art—statuary in particular.

  His breakthrough came in 1893 when, at the invitation of Daniel Burnham, chief of construction for the Chicago’s World Fair, he helped design the facade of the Horticultural Building, one of the architectural splendors of the great “White City.” Other major commissions quickly followed: large-scale public monuments done in the classical Beaux Arts style and reflecting Taft’s belief that the purpose of art “was to convey a noble message, to teach, to uplift.”10 Typical of his lofty, allegorical approach was The Solitude of the Soul, a group of four idealized nudes—two male, two female—who, clutching at one another’s hands as they weave their way around a central core of stone, symbolize the poignant “truth that each one of us, despite the best will on all sides, must pass through life more or less alone.”11

  As important to Taft as his sculpture was his role as cultural missionary—“an evangelist preaching the gospel of art,” in the words of his brother-in-law, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hamlin Garland.12 When he wasn’t in the studio, Taft was on the road, delivering lantern-slide lectures on art history and related subjects to rapt audiences throughout the Midwest and beyond. In his popular “clay talks”—performed, by his own estimate, more than 1,500 times in virtually every state of the union—he would set up a mock studio on stage and sculpt the portrait bust of a “Grecian beauty,” explaining the process of clay modeling as he went along. For more than four decades, he also taught classes at the Art Institute, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois. His lectures were collected in various volumes, and in 1903 he published his authoritative History of American Sculpture, which remained the standard text on the subject for more than fifty years.13