A few weeks later, Bob received a letter from Joe Halliburton, a friend from his days in Los Angeles. Halliburton—who regarded Bob as “one of the most talented people he ever knew”—had a younger brother, Arthur, who had just moved to Chicago from Alabama to study at the Art Institute. Arthur had been staying at the local YMCA but was unhappy because the place (so he claimed) was full of sexual degenerates. Joe was wondering if Bob knew of any decent, affordable lodgings for his kid brother, someplace where he wouldn’t be surrounded by “a bunch of perverts.”
As it happened, there was another vacant bedroom on the second floor of Mrs. Taft’s home that she was happy to rent for the same rate that Bob was paying—five dollars a week. In October 1929—at around the time of the great Wall Street crash—Arthur Halliburton became Bob Irwin’s housemate.
Though he was an art student at the time he knew Irwin, Halliburton would end up as a journalist, with a long and varied career as a reporter for the King Features Syndicate, an editor and crime writer for the New York Sunday Mirror, a contributor to national magazines like The New Yorker, and, in later life, the owner of a small Florida weekly, the Baker County Press. Years after his former housemate gained nationwide infamy, Halliburton would recall his time living with Irwin, providing a firsthand account of that moment when Bob’s life—and sanity—began to seriously unravel.
At first, Halliburton reported, Bob was “very friendly” to him, introducing him to the other young men on the block, who welcomed him into their little group and included him in their various recreational activities, including their regular backyard boxing matches. It wasn’t long, however, before Bob began to get on his nerves.
“He always talked about himself to the exclusion of any other subject,” wrote Halliburton. “He was a complete egomaniac.” He seemed shockingly ungrateful to Lorado Taft, who had given him so much encouragement and support. The path to fame that Taft had followed—his slow, patient rise, through unrelenting effort, from obscurity to renown—filled Bob with nothing but scorn.
“I don’t intend to gradually build up a reputation,” he declared. “Sooner or later I’ll hold in my hands and in my head an inconceivable power—and once I do I’ll have this world by the tail. And then I won’t need anybody’s backing!”
When Halliburton expressed curiosity about this “inconceivable power,” Bob took him into his room, showed him his “immense file of pictures,” and gave him a lecture on visualization. Far from being impressed, Halliburton became convinced that “Irwin had no pre-imagination, none whatsoever. That was his whole problem. He could imitate things. He couldn’t create things.” Halliburton’s failure to appreciate his housemate’s genius did not sit well with Bob. Their relationship quickly deteriorated.
A few weeks later, while hanging around with their neighborhood pals, Bob challenged Halliburton to a friendly sparring match. They spent most of the first round circling each other and exchanging a few jabs. No sooner did the second round start, however, than—as Halliburton later recounted—“Irwin tore into me very furiously and surprised me by knocking me down.” Bob, who loved to flaunt his physique and boast of his fighting prowess, raised his arms in triumph, as though declaring himself champ. It was a “great injury to his pride,” therefore, when, during the following round, Halliburton unleashed a flurry of blows that sent Bob sprawling. His face flushed with anger and humiliation, he demanded another round, but Halliburton refused. For days afterward, Bob refused to speak a word to his housemate.
The climax of their relationship occurred about a week later. Halliburton, who never forgot the terror of the moment, vividly recalled it years later:
One cold night I came into the kitchen. Mrs. Taft used to leave food for me to eat. I sat down in the corner of the kitchen at the table. The stove with the oven door was open and the gas was turned on. Irwin was drying some socks in the stove. I said to him: “Bob, that doesn’t seem like a very good place to put your laundry, in a place where someone is eating.” Without any comment or word of warning, he suddenly attacked me, leaned over the table and hit me some hard, stunning blows. I was trapped and almost helpless. By the time I could wiggle my way out, I was badly hurt. He was off in a fury. To me the situation was very bad.…I was trying to push him off, but then I saw it was hopeless and tried to fight, but I was already beaten. I was bleeding so much from the nose and mouth that the floor became slick with blood. I wanted to end this, picked up a milk bottle and was going to hit him on the head. But I didn’t have the strength do it. He just kept beating me on and on and on. By then a man from next door came running in and tried to stop him. But he was too little. Somebody called the police. Suddenly Irwin slipped on the blood. I seized the opportunity to run downstairs. I ran down and he ran after me. We struggled a while but then I got away. I went next door to a friend’s and spent the night. The next day I moved to a hotel nearby.
When word of Bob’s savage assault got around, he found himself an outcast. “None of the fellows in the neighborhood would speak to him after that,” wrote Halliburton. “One fellow told me that Bob came up to him a few days later and tried to start a conversation,” wrote Halliburton. “But he just turned away.”27
Having alienated his entire circle of friends, Bob proceeded to cut himself off from the man who had shown him such kindness and done so much to advance his career. Leaving Taft’s studio, he took a job at a company called United Pressed Products, designing plastic novelty items for sixty dollars a week—twenty more than Taft had been paying him. Money had become increasingly important to Bob since he hoped to quit work entirely and live off his savings while perfecting his powers of visualization. He had a fantasy of becoming rich by mass-producing little plaster busts of celebrities—Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Jack Dempsey—and selling them for one dollar apiece. Recognizing the star power of America’s most infamous gangster, he even put in a phone call to Al Capone, who had just been paroled after serving ten months on a concealed weapon conviction and was holed up in the Lexington Hotel. Bob, who hoped to persuade “Scarface Al” to pose for him, managed to get through to Capone, who politely refused, explaining that he was about to leave for his Miami estate.28
Bob’s job at United Pressed Products ended in the usual way, after he beat up the factory foreman because (as Bob explained) “he wanted to boss me around and butt into my business.” He then found similar work at a place called Silvestri Art Manufacturing but lasted only three weeks before being fired for starting a fight with a coworker. By the summer of 1930, the only job he could find that related even remotely to sculpting was carving tombstones for a Jewish stonecutter. (Bob, who prided himself on his open-mindedness, believed that “the Jews have some objectionable traits but they have some good traits, too, and if I were a Jew I would hold my head up as high as anybody.”)29
Desperate for a way to put his artistic talents to better and more lucrative use, he decided that his prospects were much brighter in New York City. Telling Alice that he would write to her as soon as he was settled, he headed east by train, arriving in Manhattan in August 1930, just as the economy was slipping into chaos.
Part III
The Shadow of Madness
9
* * *
Depression
CONTRARY TO POPULAR MYTH, the sidewalks around Wall Street were not littered with the bodies of suicidal stockbrokers who had flung themselves from the rooftops following the catastrophic events of late October 1929. In truth, though the market continued to fall until the second week in November, concerted efforts by the titans of finance put a halt to the slide. In the early months of 1930, the stock market turned upward again. Optimism was in the air. President Hoover pronounced the economy “fundamentally sound,” while John D. Rockefeller proclaimed that the crisis was a strictly temporary state of affairs. “In the ninety-three years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again.”
In the end, however, it was the recovery that prov
ed fleeting. By April 1930, it had fizzled out. In June, the stock market plunged again. By the time Robert Irwin arrived in New York City on August 8, the country was headed inexorably toward a decade of hardship and suffering. Before the year was out, the unemployment rate—though still nowhere near the staggering 25 percent it would hit at the depth of the Depression—had nearly tripled from its 1929 low of roughly 3 percent. Breadlines were growing throughout the country.1
At first, however, Bob had little trouble finding well-paying work. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he had been hired as an assistant at the Ettl Studios on West 13th Street, a sculpture-casting firm that specialized in enlarging small-scale plaster models into full-size bronze statues. He managed to hold onto the job until mid-January 1931, when he was discharged after a string of fights with other employees.
That same month, he was arrested for disorderly conduct after assaulting a cabbie. As Bob later told the story:
There was a taxi driver and he was bigger than me and he was just a big pile of crap. We had an argument about the fare and he said to me, “You goddamned little pansy, I’ll smack your face if you don’t come across with the money.” So I said, “Why the hell don’t you try to?” We got out the cab and he hit me in the face and I only hit him once in the face and I was never so astonished in my life because he was so big and he just turned around and ran like holy Moses, all the time yelling, “Help!” Finally I caught him by the coat tails and he started yelling like hell. A cop came and he had me arrested.
After a night in jail, Bob was taken to Magistrate’s Court, where the charge was dismissed.2
Soon afterward, he got a job at the venerable taxidermy shop of Thomas Rowland, a world-renowned figure in his field who had mounted many of the specimens in the American Museum of Natural History. By the time Bob went to work there, the business—now run by the founder’s son, Elmer—dealt mostly in hunters’ and fishermen’s trophies, though it also did a steady business in deceased domestic pets.3 Bob remained there for eight months, stuffing everything from parrots and pug dogs to moose heads and marlins.
It was during this period, sometime in April 1931, that Bob came across a book that had a decisive—and deeply unfortunate—impact on his life: Will Durant’s 1926 best seller The Story of Philosophy. A highly readable survey aimed at a lay audience, the book devotes each of its nine main chapters to one of the giants of Western philosophy beginning with Plato and ending with Nietzsche. It was the section on Arthur Schopenhauer, however, that proved disastrous for Bob.
As Durant explains in his direct, clear-spoken way, the famously pessimistic Schopenhauer saw the world and everything in it as the product of a ceaseless, striving force he called will, whose primary manifestation in human behavior is the sexual impulse. Though we think of ourselves as rational beings, we are dominated, like every other living thing, by the blind, unconscious drive to perpetuate the species, at the inevitable cost of our own individual existence. “Reproduction is the ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct; for only so can the will conquer death,” writes Durant. “From the spider who is eaten up by the female he has just fertilized, or the wasp that devotes itself to gathering food for offspring it will never see, to the man who wears himself to ruin in an effort to feed and clothe and educate his children, every organism hastens, at maturity, to sacrifice itself to the task of reproduction.”4
Schopenhauer’s bleak view of existence—his insistence that we are the slaves of desires that can never achieve more than fleeting satisfaction, that suffering is the essence of life, that we inhabit the worst of all possible worlds, and that death is the only cure for the sickness of being alive—had a profound effect on artists and thinkers from Tolstoy and Turgenev to Wagner and Wittgenstein to Nietzsche and Freud. For Bob Irwin, the whole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy boiled down to a single revelation. Since the will, the all-powerful life force, “uses every living organism for its purpose of prolonging the race,” we would have enormous reserves of energy at our disposal if we managed to free ourselves from the compulsion to reproduce. In short, if the sex drive could only be “bottled up,” it could be “utilized for higher purposes”—namely, the attainment of the “inconceivable power” of visualization.5
His first step was to break up with Alice. Though their relationship had remained platonic, it would certainly turn sexual once they were wed. He felt bad about giving her up, but the sacrifice was small relative to the ultimate reward—like “foregoing five dollars to get a million,” as he put it. With all the energy of his pent-up sex drive devoted to visualization, he would finally break through the barrier of material reality and merge with the Universal Mind. When that happened, he would achieve powers that were nothing less than godlike: communication through mental telepathy; senses so acute that he could “detect odors on Mars”; the ability to transform himself into “anything in the universe—a jackrabbit, a dragon, a thunderstorm.”6
That June, less than two months after he devoured Durant’s book, he sent Alice a brusque letter calling off their engagement. A few weeks later, in early August, he lost his job at the taxidermy shop. The problem, for once, wasn’t his violent temper but the economy. In the short time since he had gone to work there, business had fallen off so dramatically that the owner had no choice but to let him go.7
At first, Bob wasn’t entirely unhappy about losing his job. Though it paid a decent salary, he had always regarded the work—arranging dead creatures into lifelike poses—as a poor use of his sculptural talents. It quickly became clear, however, that—with the Depression in fill swing—even taxidermy was a more creative occupation than any job he was likely to find.
Since coming to New York City, he had lived in a succession of Manhattan boardinghouses. Now, to husband his meager savings, he moved out to Brooklyn and found a cheap room in a flat owned by an elderly woman.8 Abandoning his hopeless search for fulfilling work, he spent days at a time in his darkened room, practicing visualization. With the shades drawn and his eyes shut tight, he strained to transform mental images into material objects. The abject failure of these attempts plunged him into a severe depression, made worse by some news that had recently reached him from the West. Both his brothers had been arrested and sentenced to long terms in the Oregon State Penitentiary, Vidalin for car theft, Pember for armed robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon.
His deteriorating mental state was manifested by a host of physical symptoms. On September 5, 1931, he was treated for chronic abdominal pains in the outpatient department of Kings County Hospital in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. Three days later, he was back at the hospital, complaining of “headaches, disturbed vision, and a queer taste in throat.” The examining physician noted that Bob had Hutchinson’s teeth—notched, narrow-edged incisors, a common sign of congenital syphilis. Bob acknowledged that he had been diagnosed with the condition as far back as 1919. A Wassermann test, administered on September 9, came back positive. Informed of the result the following week, he was urged to undergo a regimen of salvarsan injections, the preferred pre-penicillin treatment for the disease. He ignored the advice.9
Back in his room, he began contemplating suicide. “I was living with a nice old lady in Brooklyn and she was just like a mother to me,” he later explained to a psychiatric interviewer, Dr. Samuel Feigin. “I was so miserable and so sick that I thought I would commit suicide. But I wasn’t going to kill myself. I thought I would kill her and go to the electric chair.”10
On October 5, alarmed by his increasingly violent fantasies, he presented himself at the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital. Complaining that “his nerves were shot, that he could not concentrate, and that he had ‘figured on suicide’ by killing someone so that he would be hung,” he was admitted to the ward, where his condition was described as “psychoneurosis, psychasthenic type” (a now-obsolete diagnosis referring to a disorder “characterized by phobias, obsessions, compulsions, or excessive anxiety”). Exactly three
weeks later, on Monday, October 26, 1931, he was discharged as “improved” and sent to the Burke Foundation in White Plains, New York.11
Named after the mother of its benefactor, the Winifred Masterson Burke Relief Foundation (as it was officially known) was created with a $4 million endowment by the New York City merchant John Masterson Burke, a lifelong bachelor who made his fortune in the South America trade and—except for some piddling bequests to long-serving domestics and a handful of cousins—left it all to charity. Situated on sixty acres of rolling lawns and wooded groves, it was established as a convalescent care facility, its stated purpose to provide for “the relief of worthy men and women who, notwithstanding their willingness to support themselves, have become wholly or partly unable to do so by reason of sickness and misfortune.” Work on the complex—twelve neoclassical buildings designed by the renowned architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White—began in 1912. Three years later, the first patients were admitted. By the time of Bob’s arrival, it had treated nearly 100,000 men and women recuperating from various disorders, primarily heart attacks, pneumonia, ulcers, thyroid disease, and “borderline nervous, mental and other psychoneurotic conditions.” During their stays, patients were offered “fresh air, sunlight, good food, quietness, mild recreational opportunities, and occupational therapy.” Those who remained for extended periods were generally put to work for three to six hours a day at modest wages.12
During his nearly nine-month residence at Burke’s, Bob was assigned a part-time job as a dining hall waiter. Working alongside him was his best friend at the institution, a fellow convalescent named Charles Smith. In later interviews with investigators seeking insight into Irwin’s psychology, Chuck (as everyone called him) would recall his former friend’s more notable peculiarities. “It seemed like he had a lot of nervous energy,” Smith reported. “He would overdo anything that he undertook. He would talk about the benefit of deep breathing and in cold weather would run around without a coat. On two or three mornings I heard him singing loudly at 5 o’clock in the morning. He explained that he did it to develop his lungs.”
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Page 11