The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Today Mariemont bustles with civic pride. Woe betide the Mariemont resident who fails to keep his lawn manicured, his hedges clipped, who leaves his garage door yawning or who fails to set out fresh spring bulbs each fall. The little shops, intended to provide the necessities, now sell Vitabath and L’Air du Temps. The theatre, designed for uplifting concerts and plays, offers Walt Disney movies. The Community Center, where Mariemontonians were to have aired their grievances, is now the scene of self-congratulatory town meetings. Mariemont matrons toil for the Art Museum, the Symphony, the Opera, and the Junior League … and for the betterment of Mariemont. Mariemont fathers canvass for the United Appeal, work for the Boy Scouts and the Little League.

  Mariemont’s rival suburb is Glendale, and in 1976 Glendale, another attractive community, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was later named a National Landmark. Mariemont would like the cachet of this honor, too, and feels it deserves it. In the summer of 1981 architects and historians of the U.S. Department of the Interior were reviewing Mariemont’s application. If granted, Mariemont would become the second community in Hamilton County to receive this designation.

  Life teems with ironies, of course, but it is particularly ironic that Mariemont, Ohio, pop. 4,500, the dream of a little lady who shunned society—who never had her portrait painted, who turned her back whenever a camera was pointed at her—should have become an address for those whose names and faces regularly appear on the Cincinnati society pages.

  * Several years ago, New York socialite Marietta Tree recalled being slapped sharply by her mother when, as a little girl, she remarked that one of her school friends was “rather middle-class.” “There are no classes in America!” her mother told her. Then, in a kinder tone, she added, “Of course there are classes. But to use the expression ‘middle-class’ is very lower-class.” Mrs. Tree’s mother was the late Mary Parkman Peabody, very much of Boston’s upper class. It was Mrs. Peabody who in 1964, at the age of seventy-two, led a sit-in by blacks and whites at the racially segregated dining room of a Florida motel. With the local police standing by with tear gas, cattle prods, and attack dogs, the silver-haired mother of the governor of Massachusetts was arrested and taken off to jail. As she was being led away from the demonstration, she expressed upper-class values perfectly when she said calmly, “We are just what they say we are—do-gooders.”

  * This situation contributed to a certain “coolness of relations” between the John J. Emery children and their Aunt Mary. It was clear that she had her half-share of the original fortune intact; the children’s share would have to be split five ways.

  * Chalmers Clifton, her former musical protégé, was also remembered. He and his wife were each given an annuity of $3,000 a year.

  PART SIX

  A Woman of Mystery

  18

  SECRETS AND SCANDALS

  There was no doubt that the dominant partner in California’s Big Four, the legendary quadrumvirate who built the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, was Collis Potter Huntington. It was a partnership which worked well because each of the four had a specialty that, when joined with the others’, resulted in an unbeatable combination. Leland Stanford was a politician—he would become governor of California—and, because he also appeared to be very dull-witted, he created an impression of the utmost honesty. Surely such a stupid man was incapable of craftiness or guile. Stanford, with his connections in the United States Congress and along the political hustings of the raw new state of California, was thus put in charge of bribing state and federal officials into granting rights-of-way as well as government funds to finance the foursome’s great railroad adventure. Charles Crocker was the workmaster. It was he who rode horseback along the miles where crossties and track were being laid, exhorting the Chinese coolie laborers to work harder and faster, and paying them in cash so that there would never really be any record of how much the railroad had cost. Mark Hopkins was the office manager, the detail man, the string saver, whose duty it was to see that the cost of operations was as low as possible. He kept such books as were kept at all.

  But Collis P. Huntington was the mastermind. When Stanford came home from Washington in 1862 with a pledge from Congress to underwrite the building of the railroad to the tune of $16,000 per mile for track laid over flat land, and $32,000 a mile for track laid over mountains, it was Huntington who had the ingenious idea of redrawing the map of California to show that it had many more miles of mountains than it actually had. Naturally, nobody in Washington knew the difference, and the boys were on their way.

  Huntington liked to boast that he had started out with all the advantages—no education and no money. He had been born October 22, 1821, in the village of Harwinton Township, Connecticut, either the fifth or the sixth—accounts vary—of nine children of a local tinker whose house perched at the edge of a swamp known as Poverty Hollow. At fourteen he was apprenticed out to a local farmer, for whom he worked for a year at seven dollars a month. At fifteen, his formal education over, he struck out for New York. There, for a while, he peddled watches. For the next few years there is no clear record of his wanderings, though he apparently spent some time in the Deep South, where, he later said, he was appalled by slavery. By the time he was in his early twenties he had made his way northward to the upstate New York town of Oneonta, where he joined an older brother, Solon Huntington, who operated a moderately successful dry-goods store. Now, established in a solid trade, he returned to Connecticut to marry a Litchfield girl named Elizabeth T. Stoddard, who may have been a childhood sweetheart. Litchfield is just a few miles down the road from Harwinton. Huntington was twenty-three.

  He was a big man—as, indeed, were all the Big Four except the wizened Mark Hopkins. Huntington who weighed well over two hundred pounds, bragged that he had never been bested in a fight or been sick a day in his life. In 1849, lured by tales of new-found gold in California, Collis did what so many young men were doing and joined the Gold Rush, heading by steamship to Sacramento. In Panama, to pick up needed cash for the rest of the trip, Huntington did a little trading—in what commodities it isn’t clear, but it may have been gunrunning—which involved several trips back and forth across the jungle of the Isthmus. “I was too poor to hire a mule,” he would enjoy saying later, “and it was only twenty-four miles, so I walked it.”

  Once in Sacramento, he worked as a miner for exactly one day before deciding he didn’t like it. The real money, he noted, was being made by men who were selling hardware and mining equipment. Taking in another transplanted easterner, Mark Hopkins, as his partner, he opened a store in Sacramento, and presently the two were joined by Charles Crocker, also a hardware and dry-goods merchant, and Leland Stanford, who had studied law and thought he knew a few things about getting around it. The Big Four were born.

  The progress of the Big Four, much of it skulduggerous and all of it unscrupulous, has been well chronicled elsewhere. Suffice it to say that, by 1870, as controllers of one of the largest railroad systems in the world, all four were very rich men. But Huntington was still the dominant one. “Huntington,” Camille Weidenfeld, a Wall Street broker, once said, “was the cart horse … [He] carried all his associates on his shoulders.” This is not to imply that Huntington, or any other of the Four, made himself exactly popular along his ruthless road to riches. He had, said one associate, “no more soul than a shark,” and the San Francisco Examiner, Huntington’s lifelong enemy, was also reminded of slithery underwater things, calling him “ruthless as a crocodile.” Well, Huntington might have replied, one didn’t get rich by being a pussycat.

  Elizabeth Stoddard Huntington, meanwhile, was a modest, self-effacing lady, plump and plain as a New England apple pie. And while her flamboyant husband was cutting such a swath across California and elsewhere in the country, Betty Huntington kept so firmly in the background that most people who dealt with Huntington were unaware that he was even married. To those who knew, Huntington explained that his wife di
dn’t care for California. That was why he had comfortably established her in a house on Park Avenue in New York. He visited her there from time to time, when he crossed the country to deal with his bankers. He may have been embarrassed by his mousy spouse and her country New England accent full of a’n’ts and cahn’ts. The Huntingtons had no children, but when Elizabeth Huntington’s sister Clarissa—who had married a man named Edwin Prentice—became widowed and was left with four small children, the Huntingtons offered to take the youngest, one-year-old Clara Prentice. Though little Clara was never formally adopted, Clara Prentice became Clara Huntington.

  It was not more than a dozen years after a Huntington niece became a Huntington daughter that another Huntington “relative” appeared as though out of nowhere. She was a beautiful young widow who looked to be between twenty-five and thirty, dramatically tall, slender, full-bosomed, with dark hair, enormous and luminous dark eyes and a beautifully formed, if somewhat determined-looking, mouth and chin. She appeared in Austin, Texas, where she was said to be visiting some vaguely defined members of her family, and in December 1877, this beautiful creature broke into print with a small item in the Austin Statesman which reported, “Mrs. B. D. Worsham, mother, and son … are in the city, stopping at the Raymond House … Mrs. Worsham is a niece of Collis P. Huntington, the railroad man.”

  Ah, Austin thought, that would explain the beautiful clothes, the jewels, the poised, gracious, but slightly condescending carriage as Mrs. Worsham strolled elegantly through Austin hand in hand with her well-dressed, well-mannered little boy. She was obviously a woman of wealth and breeding.

  Obviously, yes. But she was no relation to Collis P. Huntington.

  Who, then, was this Mrs. B. D. Worsham, who sometimes called herself Mrs. Arabella Duval Worsham, who was at other times Mrs. Belle D. Worsham, and who, capriciously, occasionally spelled her first name Bell? It would be a hundred years before anyone would come close to being sure, and even then there would remain teasing questions, inconsistencies, ambiguities, uncertainties as to what was fact and what was fiction, what was mere speculation, guesswork, putting two and two together and coming out with—a conundrum. For few women in American history have so efficiently managed to conceal their pasts, and to confound biographers. Mrs. B. D. Worsham, it seemed, had no past.

  It has been said that a successful liar must have a good memory, but Arabella—as we shall call her, since that was the name she eventually preferred—defied that rule. Her memories changed and revised themselves, and the resulting web of confusion only served to create a smokescreen around her through which it was impossible to differentiate truth from falsehood—and that, it seems, was exactly what Arabella wished.

  There is, first of all, the question of her date of birth. When she became a woman of sufficient prominence to be of interest to researchers, she gave various years. To some she said that she was born June 1, 1852. While it might be logical for a woman to lie about her age to make herself younger, Arabella defied this logic by telling others that she was born in 1847, thereby adding five years to her age. The inscription on her mausoleum strikes a compromise, giving the year as 1850 and her place of birth as Union Springs, Alabama, but no city, county, state, or church record of Alabama reveals any record to indicate that anyone remotely like Arabella was born there that year, or in any of the years before or after. Nor do any records indicate that she or her family ever lived there. Arabella also told researchers that she had been born in Virginia.

  To her two-volume biography of Collis P. Huntington, Cerinda W. Evans certainly brought scholarly credentials. She was Librarian Emeritus of the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and in her necessarily sketchy—there was little hard evidence—section on Arabella, gathered from “relatives and associates,” Miss Evans wrote, “Arabella Duval Yarrington was the daughter of Richard Milton and Catherine J. Yarrington … The Yarringtons were natives of Alabama and Texas, but members of the family had resided in Virginia since 1850. There was an R. M. Yarrington—presumably her father—listed in the Richmond Directory from 1850 to 1856.”

  But right away the researchers began to quarrel. In The Twilight of Splendor, James T. Maher, noting the “rather odd reverse migration” of the Yarringtons—since most Americans of the era were moving westward and not eastward—agrees that Richard and Catherine Yarrington were probably Arabella’s parents. But Maher notes that Richard Yarrington, a sometime machinist and sometime carpenter, had presumably been living in Richmond at least since 1839, since in April of that year his marriage to Catherine, a childless sixteen-year-old widow, was recorded there.

  Miss Evans was forced to be a little vague on the subject of Arabella’s brothers and sisters. Mr. Maher is able to be more precise. Poring through old Richmond city records, he discovered that Richard and Catherine Yarrington had five children, three girls and two boys, and that four years after the last child was born, Richard Yarrington died and was buried in Richmond in 1859. Widowed again, Catherine Yarrington ran a boarding house to support her children.

  But having learned this much, Mr. Maher runs up against a baffling stone wall. Referring to the United States Census taken in 1860, the year after Richard Yarrington’s death, Maher finds listed in the Yarrington household Catherine Yarrington, the mother, and the proper complement of five children, listed as Eliza Page Yarrington, seventeen; Emma J. Yarrington, fifteen; Carolina B. Yarrington, nine; Richard M. Yarrington, seven; and John D. Yarrington, five. Where, then, was Arabella Duval Yarrington? If, indeed, she was born in 1850, she would have been too young to have left home, and she would also be about the same age as nine-year-old Carolina B. Yarrington. Could Carolina B. have later changed her name to Arabella Duval? Possibly. Or, if Arabella was actually born before 1850, she could also have been the fifteen-year-old Emma J. The answers to these riddles may never be found. All that Maher was able to discover was that no birth, baptismal record, or certificate exists in Richmond or elsewhere in the state to attest that anyone named Arabella Duval Yarrington was ever born there, though Catherine Yarrington told the 1860 census taker that everyone in her household was a native of Virginia.

  Next, it is necessary to turn to the equally confusing question of how Arabella Duval Yarrington, whoever she was, became the glamorous “Mrs. B. D. Worsham,” widow and mother of a seven-year-old son. Again turning to Miss Evans, who was relying solely on facts as Arabella herself chose to present them, we learn that, “In 1869, at the age of eighteen, Arabella married a Mr. Worsham of New York. He lived only a short time after the wedding, leaving the widow with a son born March 10, 1870.” Significantly, Miss Evans omits the date of the wedding, which further beclouds the date of Arabella’s birth. If she was born in 1850, she could have been either eighteen or nineteen when she was married, depending on the time of year.

  Searching for marriage licenses or church records in both Richmond and New York for that year, Maher found himself in another blind alley: there were none. He did, however, discover a good deal about Mr. Worsham. Johnny Worsham ran a Richmond faro parlor, and since faro is a game in which the house acts as banker for the players’ money, Worsham was able to designate his profession as “banker.” Richmond, during the early years of the Civil War, was a wide-open, hard-drinking, fast-living town, a far cry from the city of gentility and culture it has since become. Bandits prowled the streets at night, and holdups and murders took place in broad daylight when disgruntled losers at Richmond gambling houses avenged themselves against the winners. Johhny Worsham’s brother was himself gunned down in one of these high-noon shootouts. Hard by the gambling palaces, of course, were the bars and bawdy houses, and all of these establishments were popular with the Confederate soldiers stationed there.

  From what Maher was able to discover, Johnny Worsham’s place was one of the most popular in the city, gaudily fitted out with the customary gilt, red plush, chandeliers, and velvet hangings. Johnny himself was well liked in the “sporting fraternity,” and in those happy-go-luc
ky days he always had money in his pockets. Just how and under what circumstances he and the beautiful Arabella Yarrington met is one of a number of uncertainties about her early life, but meeting him would not have been hard. The Yarringtons’ little house was only six blocks away from Worsham’s lively faro parlor.

  As the war drew toward its unhappy close, however, things changed dramatically in Richmond. In April 1865, as Union troops advanced on the city, the Confederate soldiers fled. Entering Richmond, the Union soldiers put much of the town to the torch, and less than a week later Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. In the next few years, Richmond’s sporting fraternity dispersed, many of them, including Johnny Worsham, heading northward to New York. Arabella followed him. She was, perhaps, nineteen, or even younger.

  Not long afterward, Catherine Yarrington and her other children followed Arabella—once again it is not clear why, unless Mother Yarrington felt that Arabella stood to become the family’s chief breadwinner, which was not, as things turned out, a bad hunch. It was in New York that Arabella would marry Johnny Worsham, and become pregnant by him. Or at least this was how she would tell the tale.