Kid Carolina

by Heidi Schnakenberg

  Blitz was very unsupportive of Dick’s decision and Dick’s sons would soon learn what life would be like with a full-time absentee father. Dick spoiled them but found them annoying and too needy. He was often visibly relieved when he could get away from his family. While Dick spent time in recreational activities with the boys, he left it entirely up to Blitz to meet their everyday needs. Dick was never around anymore to take them outdoors, and Blitz wasn’t always the best caretaker herself. Once, Dick and Blitz threw a huge party at Devotion, with hundreds of people from Winston-Salem streaming into the mountain estate. The adults got terribly drunk and the children were running around, completely unsupervised, underfoot. The boys even rowed around in a canoe and helped fish drunken partygoers out of the estate’s large lake. The activities at Devotion were very often inappropriate for growing boys. Dick was oblivious.

  Before Dick left for war service, he attended the dedication of the newly refurbished Z. Smith Reynolds Airport, which was the last event over which he presided as mayor. Dick announced that Z. Smith Reynolds Airport would soon be Eastern Airlines’s North Carolina hub—a symbol of Winston-Salem’s economic future. Dick, his sons, and his nephews pulled the cover off of a large marble bust of Z. Smith, erected on the second floor balcony of the terminal. The caption below the bust described Smith’s global flight in 1932. Thus the late teenager, high-school dropout, aviation stuntman, twice-married father of two, and possible murder victim was forever memorialized at Winston-Salem’s airport and at the city’s most generous foundation.

  Dick had already taken a leave of absence from both the mayoral and DNC posts on June 17, 1942, and announced his plans to join the Navy as a lieutenant on August 9, 1942, after he completed his training. He issued a statement saying that he wished to keep his commission quiet “until he had completed preliminary training” and that he “had no desire to claim anything that he had not earned.” Dick was eventually selected for the naval air intelligence corps. He requested active combat and served as chief navigator of the USS Makin Island in the Pacific until 1945. Winston-Salem would need a new mayor.

  Marriage Abandoned

  When Dick arrived in California for training during the summer of 1942, he’d already begun several extramarital affairs with a variety of women he’d picked up around the country. He was back to collecting people for his entertainment. He had mistresses from San Francisco and Philadelphia, whom he lavished with expensive gifts, and whom he brought to meet him periodically during the training. He felt only a little guilty because he had Blitz and the boys visit him in California during this time, with all his girlfriends waiting on the sidelines.

  While Dick was away, Blitz spent her time volunteering at hospitals and gathering donations to aid the war effort. She did her best to entertain the boys at Devotion, now completely on her own. None of them heard from Dick much during his time in the service.

  Meanwhile, Dick’s most prized love interest in California would step into his life right before he deployed. Marianne O’Brien was a sultry film and stage actress whose real name was Marian Byrne, and she was arguably the most glamorous of Dick’s lovers. She was under contract with Warner Brothers and had been working in bit parts in various films when she met Dick. She was used to the attentions of rich and famous men, having been chased by Frank Sinatra, Prince Aly Khan, Aristotle Onassis, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. But only one would capture her heart.

  San Diego, California, 1944

  Dick was in San Diego docked on an escort carrier, the USS Sangamon, preparing to leave for combat duty in the South Pacific. At the time he was serving as an intelligence officer and shipped servicemen from San Diego to Hawaii and back. On one break, back in San Diego, a drunken Dick partied at the Hotel del Coronado with his fellow servicemen.

  He bought round after round for his comrades and surprised them with an extra treat that evening. Dick had called Warner Brothers Studios in Los Angeles and asked them to send down a few showgirls to entertain them before they deployed. Marianne O’Brien was one of them. She had been a chorus girl on Broadway for many years, and had even performed with the embattled Libby Holman years before, but she had so far landed only a few small parts in Hollywood. She was under contract but was far from carrying a major motion picture, and could use the extra work.

  The lovely twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker was the daughter of a nightclub performer, Mae Byrne, and the stepdaughter of Abe Attell, a former featherweight boxing champion and nightclub host. Marianne grew up in the theater district and had only recently moved to Los Angeles. But California wasn’t home, and the older she grew, the more she was being passed over for leading lady roles. Still, the Warner Brothers girls were in high demand for servicemen either going to or returning from the war. She would be one of three beautiful women sent down to San Diego’s luxurious Coronado Island to entertain Dick Reynolds and his military boys.

  This particular job would prove to be a lucky one. Dick was smitten by Marianne. After the performance, Dick offered Marianne and the other girls a ride back to Los Angeles and sent them generous thank-you gifts. The exchange eventually sparked a romance that would last through the war.

  Dick was looking for someone who would be proud of his choices and who would represent a return to the playboy lifestyle he had long missed. He sought to renew his sense of youth at a time when he was feeling suffocated by his family and rejected by Blitz. Marianne seemed to be the woman that could give him a fresh start, and her breathtaking beauty didn’t hurt.

  Marianne was looking for a wealthy man to give her the status and comfort she sought as a struggling actress. Nearly all of her friends and peers were married, and her acting contract was about to expire. Dick seemed to embody her ticket out of the tumultuousness and unpredictability of Hollywood.

  By the time Dick’s unit shipped out, he was already considering divorce from Blitz. As he wrote to Marianne from abroad, he knew his relationship with Blitz was over. The hard part would be finding an efficient way of getting out of marriage.

  Dick and Marianne both had a passion for New York and made plans to rendezvous at the latest theater show once Dick returned from the service. As his year in the Pacific wore on, he wrote to Marianne regularly while he was lonely at sea, and her fanciful letters in response gave him just the boost he needed to get through some of the toughest moments in the war. By the summer of 1945, Dick relinquished his other women and proposed to Marianne via letter.

  Active Service

  When Dick shipped out to the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in 1944, his duty in the Pacific would be strenuous and long. For seventeen months at a stretch he was in combat as a chief navigator without leave. He’d served with the Navy’s Seventh Fleet under Admiral Calvin Durgin, who led a fleet of baby flattop aircraft carriers. Even under the great physical and mental strain, Dick was an excellent navigator. But the absence of liquor onboard made the strain of war much worse. Dick’s chef, Karl Weiss, used to send Dick whiskey and bourbon in tins marked “Berry Juice” and milk bottles marked “Sapelo Island Milk,” which he stashed away in his cabin. Every now and then the ships docked, letting the sailors go ashore, and Dick would open his tins of “berry juice” and “milk” and pass them around to his fellow sailors. After the war Dick proudly displayed one of the “milk” bottles, complete with white paint and a silver foil cap, in his library at Sapelo.

  Dick’s fellow officers included Price Gilbert, who went on to become the head of Coca-Cola, and Thomas Gates, who eventually became defense secretary under Eisenhower. Together, Dick and his shipmates fought the battles of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Leyte Gulf. They also fought in the Battle of the Philippines in January 1945, in support of General Douglas MacArthur.

  During the Battle of the Philippines, Dick had to navigate the Makin Island under constant enemy fire. Other American ships all around the Makin Island were being hit by kamikaze pilots, and Dick carried out a series of sixteen emergency turns in less than an hour to avoid the Japanese planes. Th
is was Dick’s first close encounter with the extreme danger of the war.

  Then, in the battle of Iwo Jima, Dick watched as 25,000 of his comrades lost their lives. Again, Dick’s expert navigating helped the Makin Island avoid kamikaze attacks. Ships all around the Makin Island did not have the same luck. Dick’s escort carrier helped land some planes from the sunken carriers, but not all. As Dick watched ships and planes all around him burn, he, Gates, and his fellow sailors knew they were changed men.

  Dick’s ship emerged unscathed by kamikaze planes in both the Philippines and at Iwo Jima. The Makin Island went on to support the battle of Okinawa, and Dick’s tour of duty ended after the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. After the war, Dick received two Bronze Stars and a Navy Citation from the president for meritorious service as a lieutenant commander and for his exceptional navigation skills. His comrades had nothing but praise for him and he felt the same about them.

  When the war ended, he funded and published a book, a catalogue of his time as a navigating officer on the USS Makin Island, for his fellow sailors and their families, to the tune of $60,000—chump change to Dick. He produced thirty thousand copies of Escort Carriers in Action in the Pacific for the military personnel involved in the conflict and sent copies to Carnegie libraries throughout the country.

  Postwar Activities

  For the past several years, Blitz had made no secret of her resentment over Dick’s activities, which not only kept him away from home but persisted despite the continuing opposition of their peers and his own family, who still disapproved of his high-tax, New Deal politics and ambitions. Blitz also opposed many of Dick’s decisions as mayor, which led to more taxes on the rich to support the poor—and stood in support of his angry, wealthy Winston-Salem constituents. Her constant resistance to Dick’s choices concerning his military service and political policies left some wondering if Blitz’s opposition had more to do with intimate troubles at home. People speculated that Blitz had paid allegiance to the Republican Party purely out of spite. Although Blitz knew nothing about Dick’s extramarital affairs, they fought often. It also didn’t help that Dick, although still quite young, had become a full-fledged alcoholic before he even left for the war. All the sophistication and responsibility of politics and White House dinners couldn’t stop his habit. Those who knew Dick intimately noted that he was never quite the genius he could have been because of his increasing dependence on the bottle.

  When Dick left for the war, he was succeeded as mayor by J. Wilbur Crews and had no more obligations to the city. Dick was honorably discharged from duty in September of 1945 when his unit returned from the Pacific. When he finally arrived on American shores after the war was over, he didn’t go directly to Winston-Salem. In fact, he had lied to Blitz and told her he wouldn’t be home until Thanksgiving. He immediately got in contact with Marianne, who met him in California, where they resumed their love affair. Dick was stateside for two weeks before he even called Blitz.

  Dick’s plans for divorce were already in motion. No one knows where he learned such sophisticated tactics to get out of his relationships, but he would implement a doorstopping technique that would become his trademark. The first step was to hide his intentions behind a smokescreen of affection, nonchalance, and unpredictability. Then he would activate his lawyers: This usually meant preparing some kind of advanced maneuvering to protect Dick’s finances and make the coming legal action as efficient as possible. One of these maneuvers was the famous “residency trick,” which Blitz would soon get to know. Then, when he was ready, he would deliver the final blow, the coup de grâce, to knock his unsuspecting opponent off balance.

  On September 21, 1945, at 6:30 A.M., Dick finally called Blitz and said he was in New York, stopping for a visit. What Dick was really doing was seeking the advice of lawyers in New York and courting Marianne. When Blitz asked him what he was doing there and when he would be back home, he hung up. Blitz was baffled by the call, and she didn’t hear from him for another five days.

  When Dick finally did call again, he informed her that he wanted a prompt divorce so he could marry a new lover he’d acquired in New York. Blitz was shocked. Dick had just written her a sweet letter telling her how much he missed her and the boys and that he couldn’t wait to see her. It was the smokescreen ploy to catch her off guard as he initiated divorce proceedings—a diversionary tactic that Dick would use repeatedly in the future. Dick had also purchased a house in Sunset Island, Florida, for Marianne, and he sought to establish residency in the state, which had more relaxed divorce laws—this was the “residency trick.”

  Blitz begged and pleaded with him to return to his family. How could he do this to her? To the boys? Dick coldly said there was nothing she could do about it, and if she fought it, he’d report it to Walter Winchell, leaving Blitz embarrassed and ashamed. Just to make sure she understood, he called back a few minutes later and repeated himself. This was the final coup de grâce.

  It turned out that Winchell had already been informed, and the news that Dick Reynolds was getting a divorce hit Winchell’s radio show. Gossip columnists also reported that Dick had already given Marianne $100,000 in gifts.

  Everyone in Winston-Salem and even Sapelo Island was up in arms. Dick’s family and his own employees loved Blitz and couldn’t understand his actions. Blitz’s father, John Dillard, hurried to New York to try to talk Dick out of it, but Dick wouldn’t budge.

  Faced with the humiliation of divorce and the prospect of becoming a single mother of four, Blitz still fought to keep the marriage intact. On October 19, 1945, she heard rumors that Dick was ill in a hotel in New York. She rushed up to see him and found him suffering from a bad cold and alcohol poisoning. In spite of her kindness, Dick belittled her from his sickbed and again reiterated his desire for a divorce with much hostility. Blitz left in tears, again, humiliated.

  A week later, Dick told Blitz he was going down to Winston-Salem and asked her to meet him at the rail station in Greensboro. She thought he intended to reconcile, but when he arrived, it became clear that he had no intention of patching things up. He was only there to greet his boys and, more important, retrieve his things. On arrival in Winston-Salem, Blitz refused to let him in to Merry Acres or to see his sons.

  In retaliation, Dick phoned all the stores where he kept credit accounts for her and the kids and had them closed. Dick then left town to tend to business at American Mail Line in Seattle. In November, he called Blitz at five o’clock one morning and simply said, “You will never know how much I hate you.”

  Blitz had had enough. When Dick filed for divorce (after he had safely established residency in Florida) from Dade County, he argued that he had told his wife he had no intention of living with her upon his discharge from the Navy and accused her of “mental cruelty” and an “ungovernable temper”—another trademark legal tactic. Blitz immediately countersued. After fourteen years of marriage, Blitz formally filed for divorce in Forsyth County. She accused Dick of “extreme” cruelty and said he publicly embarrassed her, verbally abused her, and deserted her and their sons. She said it would be detrimental to the children to be around their father and that she should be awarded full custody. She fought for at least half of the estate. With four kids to care for, Blitz had a lot of sympathy from the courts and Dick didn’t stand a chance in limiting the amount of money she would get out of him. With little fanfare, the divorce was finalized in 1946, and Blitz was awarded $9 million in cash and assets for their sons, along with the fabulous townhouse, Merry Acres, and the country estate of Devotion, outright. Dick kept his yachts, private plane, and Sapelo Island. It was considered the most lucrative divorce settlement in U.S. history.

  Although they were well provided for, the boys would never feel close to Dick. They would not see him for two years after the divorce. Dick wasn’t the slightest bit heartbroken over his split from Blitz, except for the breathtaking amount of money he had to part with. He quickly recovered and made plans to marry Marianne as soon as h
e could.

  Mary and Nancy were furious with Dick for leaving Blitz and abandoning his sons. They were even more incensed that he had run off with a woman who, in their minds, was a gold digger. More than anything, Mary and Nancy were embarrassed by Dick. Nancy, especially, would later seek to bury in obscurity Dick’s mistakes, including the products of those mistakes—his children.

  Dick was relieved to be out of the marriage. He had moved on to a new life in New York, Florida, and Sapelo with Marianne. But this break from Winston-Salem and the solidarity of his family would be the beginning of the end for him. His alcoholism would engulf him, and despite wild successes, his businesses would fail to satisfy him. All of the things money could buy would not bring him the happiness he sought. Only his boats would bring him hints of joy.

  Enter Wife No. 2

  As soon as the divorce was final, Dick was married to Marianne in New York on August 7, 1946, in her parents’ apartment by a city magistrate, Raphael P. Koenig. Marianne’s mother, stepfather, sister, and a few other friends and family witnessed the nuptials. None of the Reynolds family attended. Dick was happy to be back in one of his favorite cities, and Marianne saw her childhood dreams fulfilled when Dick bought her a huge twenty-two-room duplex at One Beekman Place. The Beekman Place apartment included a sixty-foot living room with one entirely glassed-in side that overlooked the East River. It was just blocks from where Marianne grew up as a child in a much more modest apartment.