by Dick Kreck
It was at the Jefferson Hotel that she met Springer and began her rise to the upper reaches of society. He was on his way to Kentucky to buy trotting horses when the two met. They hit if off immediately, and before summer’s end in 1906 she was visiting him in Denver and was seen frequently on the city’s streets, riding beside Springer in one of his finest coaches.
By that December, Isabel was in divorce court in St. Louis, seeking to end her marriage to Folck. She described Folck’s abusive behavior, although she was unable to supply dates and places. Nevertheless, the judge, noting that her husband did not contest the divorce, made it official on December 23, leaving her free to pursue life with Springer. The two were married at the Jefferson on April 27, 1907, and left immediately for their new home in Denver.
Isabel Springer arrived in a city that was shedding frontier dust and hardships. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Denver boasted fourteen parks covering twelve-hundred acres. There were two hundred miles of street railways, sixty hotels, twelve theaters, and sixty-five grade schools with more than thirty thousand pupils, and a hundred trains a day passed through the massive Denver Union Depot. There was a newly built U.S. Mint and a beautiful new public library. The city’s streets, some paved, were swarming with an estimated two thousand of the newest plaything of the rich, the automobile, a sure sign of sophistication and wealth. For these motorists, Mayor Robert W. Speer had begun
constructing an elaborate system of parkways. It wasn’t
St. Louis, but it wasn’t the wild frontier either.
No sooner did Isabel arrive in the Queen City than newspaper society chroniclers were gushing over her. “We always thought John W. was pretty fair looking, but his wife is a stunning beauty, and it is safe to prophesy that the Springer home is going to be a social center.” Denver Post columnist Eselyn Brown reported,
Yesterday’s bright sunshine brought forth a fine parade of automobiles and harness vehicles. Who failed to see the grand and shiny dogcart which traveled up and down Sixteenth Street just when the crowd was thickest? It looked as good as candied cherries and the color tallied exactly, too. The man who handled the reins wore an air of “See the conquering hero comes,” and the lady at his side was a sight to behold. Just as you are asking yourself, “Whence comes all this grandeur?” the handsome man in a perfect fashion-plate outfit of the new leather brown shade clothes, turns his radiant face toward you, and, behold, it is John W. Springer. So the stunning lady at his side
is the new Mrs. Springer? Well, she certainly is as queenly and beautiful as a three-sheet poster of Lillian Russell.
Isabel’s life in Denver was idyllic. In addition to overseeing her castle-like home on Springer’s ranch, she was mistress of the couple’s two-story mansion at 930 Washington Street. She fit smoothly into the city’s party circuit. Her name didn’t appear in the society columns for luncheons and bridge tournaments, however; most of the social functions that she and John attended, outside of theater parties, were connected with politics and politicians. She was part of the elevated level of Denver society. A year after her arrival in Denver, she was a guest at a reception for the wife of the governor of Wyoming. The guests also included the wives of Messrs. Guggenheim, Sheedy, Keating, and Kistler, all noteworthy Denver society names. Her dinner parties at the couple’s suite on the sixth floor of the Brown Palace were renowned, particularly for the vintage wines poured. But Isabel’s lust for adventure already was tugging at her.
Isabel was featured in the report in the Rocky Mountain News on society’s coming out for the opening night of the Follies of 1910 at the Broadway Theater. “Mrs. John W. Springer was one of the most strikingly beautiful women in the house and with her was Miss Louise Cherry, tall, graceful and blonde. Mr. and Mrs. Springer had a box party. Beside Miss Cherry in their box were H. F. Henwood and Frank Loveland.” The Springers and Henwood had become fast friends after Isabel met Henwood in her husband’s downtown office in March 1911. Weeks later, Henwood and Isabel were visiting the Springer ranch regularly, sometimes without Mr. Springer.
Springer traveled frequently for his banking, cattle, and other business interests and sometimes took his young bride with him to New York. It looked like heaven to the lively and impetuous Isabel. In New York, she fell in with a group of bohemians and began living a life she dared not mention. She was drinking heavily, using drugs, and even was known to pose nude for the city’s artists. Her behavior at home was equally liberated. She had left one ardent admirer, Tony von Phul, in St. Louis, and had taken up with another, Frank Henwood, in Denver. It was inevitable the two men would clash.
When Henwood gunned down von Phul in the barroom of the Brown Palace on May 24, 1911, Isabel’s life began to unravel. Despite attempts to keep her name out of the shooting incident and out of the local press, less than a week passed before her connection popped up in print. Her husband, having seen passionate letters she penned to von Phul, began divorce proceedings. On June 5, Springer’s attorney, Archie M. Stevenson, filed the divorce suit in district court. Already humiliated by having his name dragged through the public prints, Springer denied to the press that he had filed, or that he planned to. “Emphatically no,” he told The Denver Republican. But it was true.
His complaint charged Isabel with “wholly disregarding her marital vows” and said she “has been guilty of extreme and repeated acts of cruelty toward the plaintiff.” It went on to charge that “for many months prior to the 20th day of May 1911, the defendant was engaged in an unwifely and clandestine correspondence with one Sylvester Louis von Phul.” The letters were specifically mentioned, “letters...of such a character as to render the continuance of the marriage relation...impossible and intolerable.” He was embarrassed.
When the existence of her letters became public, Isabel fled to Chicago, in part because of fears that she would be called as a witness for Henwood in his trial, which was to begin on June 21. She returned to Denver on June 11, hoping for a reconciliation with her banker husband. What followed was little more than a settlement negotiated in the public prints. She took apartments on the fifth floor of the Savoy Hotel, the same place she had stayed when she visited Springer in the summer of 1906. One of her attorneys, George A. H. Fraser, proclaimed, “The sole object of her return was to effect a reconciliation with Mr. Springer and the first conferences along that line were held this morning.” Springer was uninterested in a reconciliation. His attorneys warned that if Isabel contested the divorce she would be cut off without a financial settlement.
Isabel and John never again met face-to-face, then or ever. He pointedly remained out of town or at his ranch and ignored her lawyers’ letters sent to his offices. The couple’s lawyers, however, negotiated for several weeks. In what was merely a legal shadow dance, Springer was granted a divorce on July 1, a Saturday morning, in the chambers of District Court Judge George W. Allen. The hearing lasted barely fifteen
minutes. The settlement had been reached the previous evening, and it only remained for Springer to take the stand in front of his attorney Stevenson, Isabel’s attorneys John T. Barnett and Daniel B. Ellis, Deputy District Attorney Dewey C. Bailey Jr., and Springer’s friend, Dr. Charles Heberton, and recite his grievances. Both sides agreed to withhold the letters and other damaging (to Springer’s standing in the community) evidence. A substitute decree, listing only the charges, was filed.
Isabel’s problems were piling up. While divorce negotiations were going on, Sheriff William Arnett served her with a
subpoena on June 14 to appear in court on behalf of the defense in Henwood’s first trial. Arnett described her as “greatly overwrought” and “decidedly hysterical” when she was served. “She was very hysterical and cried nearly all the time, but promised to appear in court to testify when the time comes.” She did appear, testifying on June 23 and June 26 for Henwood, but doing his case little good with disjointed and rambling testimony that emphasized her attempts to get him to withdraw from her af
fairs.
After the divorce was settled, the Rocky Mountain News reported what Mrs. Springer asked for and what she received in the settlement. She sought, according to the News,
twenty-five thousand dollars in cash; her favorite automobile, a five-thousand-dollar Victoria; her diamonds and other
jewelry; and the right to remain Mrs. John W. Springer. She received something less: only five thousand dollars in cash, the car (which she sold back to Springer for twenty-seven hundred dollars the following October), her jewels, her
personal property, and his name. And she was to leave Denver immediately and never return.
She wasted no time leaving. Five hours after the court settlement, Isabel departed her hotel and took a taxi to the Union Depot, where she boarded the Burlington’s luxury Chicago Limited. Her outfit would have looked familiar to anyone who had seen her on the witness stand at Henwood’s first trial. She was wearing the same blue serge suit with a white lace collar, a veil covering her face, and she carried a black velvet bag.
Arthur Patterson, her brother, and Elizabeth Speers, her nurse, followed her to the depot in a separate cab and helped her board her stateroom in the Pullman car Pantheon.
The shades were pulled to prevent the public and, more pointedly, reporters from looking in on her. Patterson stayed with his sister in her room until the train got under way at 3:45 p.m. As it slowly passed Nineteenth Street, he jumped off. Isabel was gone.
As a young woman, Isabel Springer possessed beauty and wealth. But she had one flaw on a grand scale—she had
terrible taste in men. Her first husband was a drinker and abusive. Her second husband, Springer, was an egocentric horseman and entrepreneur who fancied himself a politician. Her relationship with von Phul was marked by physical abuse and, ultimately, his threat to expose their relationship to her husband. Henwood was a charming ne’er-do-well who immediately won her over with his familiarities and outgoing demeanor. Her passionate letters to von Phul reveal an insecure woman seeking constant reassurance. “Why don’t you write to your little sweetheart?” she asked. “You can’t imagine how I have longed for you.” And, “You know I am expecting a letter.” She was susceptible to flattery and frequently remarked to her friends how Mr. So-and-So found her attractive.
Following her divorce from Springer and the hasty departure from Denver, she spent two years in Chicago, where she took to wearing white hair to hide her identity—a ploy that didn’t disguise her but made her look old. Isabel made her
way back to New York City in 1913 and resumed her life of dissipation. But she was no longer a doe-eyed young beauty.
She looked much older than her thirty-three years. A
tiredness surrounded her once-riveting eyes. She had fast-forwarded to middle age. Years of drinking and drug abuse had taken their toll, adding pounds to her figure and years to her once-classic face.
As she did wherever she went, Isabel quickly made friends in New York, among them Audrey Munson, the city’s leading model, whose face and figure were the inspirations for more than thirty nude public sculptures, including those at the Hotel Astor, the Municipal Building, the Custom House, and the New York Public Library. Her likeness adorned the Mercury Head dime and the Walking Liberty half-dollar. Munson was a star; Isabel was never more than a bit player.
When Munson’s career began to wane in 1921, she wrote “Queen of the Artists’ Studios,” a series of supposedly tell-all articles for the New York American newspaper. The tales, largely woven from whole cloth and self-serving to Munson, were distributed to newspapers nationwide, including The Denver Post, once Isabel’s hometown paper.
Readers of the Sunday supplements devoured the accounts of Munson’s artistic life in New York. In one installment, she claimed that the murders at the Brown Palace were over a nude painting of Mrs. Springer, executed during her lively times in New York. In Munson’s version, someone (apparently von Phul) threatened to show the painting to Isabel’s husband unless she paid him hush money. After Isabel died, Munson wrote, a small circle of Isabel’s friends “went to [her] rooming house and watched while the painting was burned.” No other evidence exists that points either to the painting or to its fiery demise as related in Munson’s superheated stories.
Munson dispensed one piece of advice that the adventuresome Isabel would have done well to follow. “Girls who go to the studios to pose thinking it fun and a nice diversion will soon find their mistake. It is hard work and the girls who fail are generally those who are not sincere,” she wrote. “How can a woman be a bacchante all night and become an angel at ten o’clock in the morning?” She summed up Isabel’s desperate efforts to carve a career for herself: “She sought work in respectable studios as a model for the nude. Here and there an artist took pity upon the fallen woman and engaged her, but none found her satisfactory because the woman who uses opium cannot hold a pose with necessary firmness.”
Isabel was far from alone in her addictions. “An entire industry supplied nerve tonics, blood builders, sedatives and bromides for women,” H. Wayne Morgan noted in Yesterday’s Addicts, his study of drug abuse. “The invalid was a kind of heroine. But ‘the vapors’ or ‘la Nervose’ which became a way of life for many matrons rested also on social pressures and inhibitions. Middle-class women had few accepted outlets for aggression, tension and frustration, which increased the temptation to use drugs or alcohol to relieve boredom and anxiety.” It was estimated that there were three hundred thousand addicts in New York City in 1917. In Denver, estimates of those addicted to cocaine and morphine varied wildly, ranging up to five thousand. It was an environment where prescriptions for morphine were available for fifty cents before 6 p.m. and seventy-five cents before midnight.
Opium and morphine were the drugs of choice. They were used readily in a variety of cough syrups, tonics, elixirs, and cure-alls to promote a sense of well-being. Drugs even made their way into the upper reaches of society. In Menace in the West, his survey of drug use in Colorado, Henry O. Whiteside wrote, “Ambitious and hardworking men, including doctors, lawyers and even ministers, used drugs to overcome fatigue and then to bring sleep. But among ‘opium eaters’ or drinkers, women were believed to outnumber men by a margin of greater than ten to one.” One reason advanced was that while women tended to remain homebound, men were able to frequent saloons and imbibe equally relaxing amounts of cheap whiskey and lager beer.
Her health declining rapidly, and left destitute by medical bills, Isabel was admitted to Metropolitan Hospital on Blackwell’s Island in New York City on March 28, 1917. In a lonely bed in the charity ward, death came to her in the middle of the night on April 19. Her death certificate gives evidence that Isabel Springer was doing more with her body than posing unclothed for the “Titians of the attics.” The official cause of death was ruled to be “cirrhosis of liver (hypertrophic),” an enlargement that indicated a longtime abuse of alcohol. A contributory cause was “alcoholic neuritis.”
She almost certainly was also addicted to opium and/or morphine, the latter a habit she may have shared with Henwood. Only one friend, an actress with whom she had worked, was at her side when she died near midnight. Perhaps it was Isabel herself who, in her dying days, gave the information found on her death certificate because both her parents’ names (and her mother’s maiden name) are listed. The death certificate listed her age as thirty-one and her status as married. She was neither.
Isabel, who long ago had spent her way through the divorce settlement she received in 1911 and had earned a bare living with bit parts in silent pictures and by posing for artists, was penniless. When she died, she was living in a rooming house at 343 St. Nicholas Avenue. According to Munson’s memoir, “In her meager effects, strewn about in the sordid rooming house where she had found shelter, there was nothing that could be sold for enough to provide even a casket for the Potter’s Field.”
Her body went unclaimed, and she seemed destined to an anonymous burial. Telegrams to her
brother, Arthur Patterson, and to her former husband, John Springer, went unanswered. A few of her New York friends, including theatrical producer William A. Brady, musical comedy star Kitty Gordon, and actress Eileen Fredericks, donated enough money for her to be buried on April 23, 1917, at Fair View Cemetery in Fairview, Bergen County, New Jersey. The high-spirited woman whose beauty was praised universally, who became the belle of Denver society, for whom an admirer killed two men, had no monument to mark her burial plot.
Her death attracted no notice in the New York newspapers, but famed evangelist Billy Sunday was moved enough by her demise to tell a crowd of twenty thousand during a series of revival meetings at his New York tabernacle, “Take warning from the fate of Mrs. John W. Springer. A few years ago she was a society woman, with all the jewels and trappings that go with society women. A day or two ago she died a pauper at Blackwell’s Island. Sin did that. She used to be called one of the most beautiful women in the United States or Europe.” And, he said, “I knew her when she was in Denver, and when she was the pet of international society. She had great wealth and a palatial home. But she yielded to sin, the sin of society; she drank at hotels and cafes.”
Reporters descended on John Springer, still a well-known figure in Denver. He declined comment on the death of his former wife. “I have nothing at all to say,” he told the Rocky Mountain News. “If you were to consult my wishes, you would say nothing at all about it.”