Rosa’s attribution of May’s motive was probably apocryphal, since accounts of the Hope diamond being unlucky were just starting to emerge in the newspapers in 1908, and had not yet been articulated as a “curse.” An old photograph of May with her autograph which Rosa Thomas showed to reporters was also problematic. Supposedly, it was from 1908 and inscribed to Rosa with “affection.” However, it was signed “May Yohe-Smuts”—a name May did not have until 1914.
In December 1935, Robert Thomas filed a lawsuit in New York’s Supreme Court, claiming that May Yohe was a callous mother who had hidden the birth of her child, and then, some six months later, handed him over to the Thomases, thus depriving him of his birthright. Despite public statements by Robert Thomas about the chance discovery of his adoption papers and his desire to meet May and get to know her as a “warmly affectionate friend,” the lawsuit was really an effort by Thomas to establish the right to inherit a portion of the estate left by Mary Urania Strong, Captain Strong’s wealthy mother.8
Robert Edgar Thomas and Rosa M. Thomas, 1935. (photo credit 15.1)
Mrs. Strong had died in 1921, leaving an estate reputed to be worth some two million dollars. If Robert Thomas was born to May, who was at the time married to Putnam Bradlee Strong, he could claim to be their legal offspring. Thus he would be the rightful grandson of the deceased, and entitled to a portion of the estate. While maternity was the means of proving his case, Thomas was after the Strong money.
Rosa Thomas, the adoptive mother said, “There is no doubt that Robert is the son of Miss Yohe and her former husband Putnam Bradlee Strong … We have all of the necessary proof. All that is required is for the courts to pass upon it.”9
Thomas’ suit claimed he was born on October 1, 1908 (even though some of the documents mistakenly said September 1). He asserted his rights to the estate of Mr. Strong probated in 1901, the estate of Mrs. Strong, a trust fund she’d established, and the benefits due as the son of both May Yohe and Captain Strong.
“It’s all rubbish … It seems funny to me that he didn’t get in touch with me when he learned he was supposed to be my son,” said Yohe.10 Instead, Thomas talked to the newspapers and filed a lawsuit. May accused Thomas of looking for fame and “a share in the Strong fortune.” “We’ll fight it to the end,” she declared.11 John Smuts even went so far to say, “We’ll testify for Putnam Bradlee Strong, if he wants us to.”12
The suit took two and a half years to resolve, including an appeal. Strong, now graying and in his sixties, testified in front of court-appointed referee Jeremiah Connors in New York. He denied parentage, claiming that he had only seen May Yohe once since their separation in 1905, in Yokohama, for one day, in 1909—months after Robert Thomas was born. He reasserted before the court that he and May had been married in 1902 in Buenos Aires and divorced in 1910 in Oregon.
Strong’s testimony provided highly convincing evidence that he was not the biological father. Indeed, even under appeal, the judge in the case opined that there was not “one scintilla” of evidence that Strong was the father. But was May the mother? And since they were still legally married at the time, if May was the mother, did Thomas then have a claim on the Strong family estate, given a legal presumption that any offspring of the mother are the legitimate children of the marital union?
Robert Thomas supported his contention with several documents filed at the time of the adoption. One was the Petition for Adoption signed by the Thomases on May 4, 1909. It read in part,
IN THE COUNTY COURT OF
THE STATE OF OREGON
FOR MULTNOMAH COUNTY
Your Petitioners E. R. Thomas and Rosa M. Thomas, his wife, respectfully represent unto this Court that they are husband and wife, residing in the City of Portland, Multnomah County, State of Oregon, and that they are desirous of adopting Robert, a male child, born on the 1st day of September, 1908; that Mrs. Mary Strong is the mother of, and the surviving parent of the said child, and we further say that we have sufficient ability to bring up the child here referred to and furnish him with suitable nurture and education, and that the consent of the mother, through her attorney, is herewith given, and that your petitioners desire to have said child’s name changed from Robert Strong to Robert Edward Thomas.13
A companion Power of Attorney document was duly signed by May on the same day. It said,
I, Mary Augusta Strong, mother of the minor child referred to in the petition of E. R. Thomas and wife, to which this consent is attached, do hereby and by my attorney in fact consent in writing to the adoption of such child by the said E. R. Thomas and Rosa M. Thomas, his wife.14
While the petition indicated May was the mother, it also referred to her as the “surviving parent,” implying the other parent was deceased, and thus weakening the claim that Strong was the father. In May’s 1910 petition for divorce from Strong, she stated that there were no children of the union—further evidence against the Thomas’ assertion.
But if Strong was not the father, who was? At the time May was maintaining a Portland household as Mrs. James Fellows. James paid the household bills and came down from Vancouver on the weekends, staying in her bedroom. There was little doubt they were intimate and living as man and wife. However, Fellows was alive in 1909. If he were the father, May could not have stated in the adoption petition that she was the sole “surviving parent.” And what about the mysterious Murphy, the Canadian lumberman May was said to have married in Portland? Was he, perhaps, the father?
Nothing in the court case or appeal answered the question about paternity. In a surprising twist, the determination of maternity turned out to be equally difficult, despite the 1909 petition and affidavit for adoption. In short, was May really the mother?
One way to answer that question would have been to call May to testify under oath. The court issued summonses to bring her to the court referee handling the case. She avoided all of them, making good use of the fact that while the case was filed and heard in New York, she was living in Boston. She had been in the hospital after a bad fall, she said, and preferred not to travel, but was willing to provide a deposition at home. But that never happened. Time after time, one excuse after another was offered; and when servers and constables tried to locate her, somehow she always managed to disappear—much to the consternation of Thomas’ attorneys.
Other testimony, however, gave credence to the Thomas’s charge that May was the mother. The elder Thomases got to know May in 1908 as a result of her visits to their drugstore. According to testimony, May browsed the store as a customer and made purchases related to a pregnancy and the care of a baby. Several of May’s neighbors and acquaintances from Portland in 1908 confirmed that she looked and seemed pregnant. Her stomach was extended and she said she was pregnant, according to acquaintances Bruce Billings, Louise Glover, and Mrs. Beale.
Rosa Thomas testified that she was called over to May’s house on Northrup Street the first week of October 1908 and given a recent newborn baby by May, who’d said it was her child. May had become friends with the Thomases, knew they didn’t have a child but wanted one, and offered them the newborn for adoption. They agreed, and May left town the next day or so, purportedly for a performance tour to Australia. The formal adoption petition was filed months later.
The case turned on the testimony of Dr. Harry S. Lamb, May’s physician at the time. According to Dr. Lamb, he visited May periodically at her home in Portland, treating her for a variety of illnesses. He addressed her as Mrs. Fellows and sent his bills for service to Mr. Fellows in Vancouver.
At one point May told him she was about five months pregnant. Dr. Lamb took her statement at face value and believed her to be pregnant. A few weeks later, examining her for another ailment, the physician noticed that her abdomen was not as enlarged as he would have expected. He suggested a complete examination. Yohe came to his office, where Lamb conducted “a complete abdominal and vaginal examination” and ascertained that “she was not pregnant at all at any time.”15 Despite that examination, Dr. Lamb
was aware that May continued to tell people she was pregnant and to visit the Thomas’ store, buying things indicating she expected a baby.
According to Dr. Lamb’s testimony, he was called to Yohe’s home in late September or the first week in October. He found her alone and she informed him that a baby was about to be brought to the house. Lamb testified, “After a few minutes, a woman came to the house with a male baby then about a week old, left the baby with Yohe and shortly departed. This woman was poorly dressed and wore street clothes and a hat.”16 Lamb said he had the impression the baby had been brought from Idaho. May put the baby to bed.
The next day Yohe again telephoned the doctor to come over to her house. This time, the Thomases were present. To Dr. Lamb, it appeared that Yohe had already made arrangements with them to adopt the baby. Mrs. Thomas fondled the baby. According to Lamb, May didn’t hug or breast-feed the infant or otherwise act in a maternal way. She even said to Mrs. Thomas, “I don’t know what to do with this baby, he is so hungry and all.”17 Then May turned over the baby to the Thomases.
Other facts came out in the testimony. May did in fact leave Portland the next day. No certificate was ever filed for the birth of the child, in contravention of state law. Certainly it could not have been filed by Dr. Lamb, who, when questioned about the state requirement, said that he had neither attended nor witnessed the birth. In his view, the child was clearly not May’s.
Despite the Thomases’ search, they could not locate a birth certificate anywhere. No one who witnessed the birth came forward. May employed an almost full-time nurse on her household staff, but that nurse was excused from her duties while the infant was in the house. Nor were any of May’s other servants present; all had been given leave. While Louise Glover saw May with the baby during the “second day,” she did not see the birth. Seven months later, the formal adoption petition and May’s statement were filed, but not by May. Her lawyer represented her.
As the judicial referee, Jeremiah O’Connor, found, “It was not pregnancy at all; it was a well staged, well acted, imitation of one.” The only reasonable inference to be drawn from all the testimony is that Yohe wanted it generally believed that she was about to have a child. She purposefully bought things in the drugstore, said things to people, and distended her abdomen or made it appear large. “At the same time,” wrote the referee, “she desired to keep secret certain of the details of her private life.”18 The conclusion of the referee, backed up by the court on appeal, was that Putnam Bradlee Strong was not Robert E. Thomas’ father, nor was May Yohe his mother.
The court had two further conclusions. One was that May had avoided testifying because she was still trying to hide what she had done. The court could not determine her ulterior motive, but that was not its task.
The other was that the entire case was motivated by a certain Frank Evans, who had served as the secretary to Putnam Bradlee Strong’s sister and brother-in-law, the Shattucks. Evans had been dismissed from his job and was obviously disgruntled, harboring ill-will toward the Strong family. When Strong’s sister, Mrs. Shattuck, died in 1935, Evans realized that the estate would now go to Mrs. Strong’s surviving son, Putnam Bradlee Strong. If it could be proved he’d had a child, then at some point that offspring would be an heir and come into a fortune. Evans apparently contacted the Thomases and encouraged them to file suit. Evans knew about May’s involvement in the 1909 adoption case from a cache of the Shattucks’ “confidential papers” that he had unethically kept. Those papers included newspaper clips from 1909 reporting on the birth and adoption of May’s baby. Evans probably made a deal to split any resulting funds with the Thomases. As it turned out, they might have been somewhat disappointed with the result. Testimony in the case revealed that the trust fund was not worth $2 million, but rather only about $150,000. The chance of that passing through the hands of the spendthrift Strong to an heir would be most unlikely.
If Dr. Lamb’s definitive testimony is to be believed, why then did May feign pregnancy and cover up the birth of a baby by falsely asserting she was the mother—and then arrange for the newborn to be adopted?
It is hard to imagine that Dr. Harry Lamb was bribed by May to offer his astounding testimony. He was a solid member of the community. He’d been born and raised in Oregon, attended normal school, earned a teaching certificate, served as a school principal, and received his B.A. and M.D. degrees from the University of Oregon by the time May was his patient. Granted he was only a year out of medical school when he gave her the examination in 1908, but determining pregnancy or lack thereof at five months or so was not difficult. In the intervening decades between that time and the Thomas lawsuit, Lamb had married, operated a successful medical and surgical practice, and earned a completely respected reputation. A few years after the lawsuit, he became the president of the county medical society.
Since she had not been pregnant, who was May helping and protecting?
With the maternity case pending, May planned a trip from Boston to Victoria, British Columbia. She didn’t tell anyone why she actually made the difficult trip—she claimed it was to see her lawyers. Perhaps May was heading back west to finally close the door on the mysterious adoption.
May was traveling by transcontinental bus. In mid-February 1937, she was on a Union Pacific stage as it wound its way along the Columbia River Highway between The Dalles and Portland. According to reports of the time, all of a sudden May started screaming. She was shouting that “gangsters had seized the bus and were shooting traffic officers.”19 May apparently tried to leap from the bus—several times—in order to escape.
May was taken into custody by the Portland police and detained in jail. The police believed she was hallucinating. Able to identify her as both May Yohe and Mrs. John Smuts, they cabled her husband in Boston, who then cabled back instructions. She rested, and then, appearing better, was soon released—her secret intact.
A tantalizing clue to that secret may be another cross-country trip by one of May’s relatives—Dianne Beattie—some six decades later.
May was like an aunt to Dianne Cummings Beattie, the daughter of her cousin Adeline Parke Cummings, the grand-daughter of Anna Yohe Parke. These were May’s closest relatives, those with whom she maintained lifelong contact. Ever since they had spent the summer of 1919 together in Quebec, Dianne had looked up to May and May reciprocated with a fondness for the young woman.
Dianne lived most of her life in New York. Her elder brother, Parke Cummings, a sports writer and humorist, died in 1987. After his death, Dianne, at the age of about seventy-six, for no obvious reason, relocated to Portland, Oregon, where she died some sixteen years later.
Dianne may have gone to Oregon to try to solve the mystery of May’s adopted newborn, armed perhaps with a clue from reading her deceased mother’s papers, which could have been passed on to her when her brother died. She may have suspected that Robert Thomas was actually her half-brother.
Dianne’s elder brother, Parke Cummings, was born to Adeline in 1902. Dianne was born in 1911. Though it is purely a matter of speculation and hypothesis, Adeline could have had an affair in 1908, gotten pregnant, gone to the house of her elder cousin May in Oregon, and asked for help in hiding the infant from her lawyer husband. It is difficult to imagine May going through the pregnancy ruse for a stranger but easier to envision her trying to protect Adeline, who was most like a sister to her. In any case, without additional evidence, the true motive and the actual circumstances of May’s feigned pregnancy remain a mystery.
I’m like a rubber ball, the harder I fall, the higher I bounce.
—May Yohe1
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Poor, Ill, & Un-American
BEFORE SHE DIED, May had to fight the United States government. Not surprisingly, she won.
By early 1938, May and Smuts were in a desperate financial situation. They lived in a small, sparsely furnished apartment next to the railroad tracks in Boston’s Back Bay. The only possession bespeaking May’s fame and
wealth was a framed photograph of Edward VII when he was the Prince of Wales hanging on the bare wall. It was personally autographed by the future king to May, a keepsake from when she was cheered by London and in line to become a duchess.
Smuts had been hospitalized for six months. He had severe arthritis. The couple had exhausted their meager savings. With the nation still in the Depression, there wasn’t much support for an old couple like the Smuts. May, always the fighter, sought work.
Even though she had still not fully recovered from her last fall or the broken bones from the year before, May applied for a job through the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA was created as a centerpiece of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a way of providing relief to and work for millions of Americans. Normally, only one spouse was entitled to a WPA job, and since Smuts was infirm, May applied.
May was in for a surprise when she did. A check of her citizenship status revealed a problem. Prior to the passage of the Cable Act of 1922, a female American citizen who married a man of another nationality automatically lost her U.S. citizenship, as it was presumed she would become a citizen of her husband’s country. May had lost her citizenship with the marriage to Hope, though authorities referred to the fact that when she married John Smuts in 1914, he was a British citizen. May argued that Smuts had immigrated to the United States in 1918 and had become a naturalized citizen in 1928. No matter, said officials. Smuts’ becoming a U.S. citizen did not nullify May’s loss of citizenship.
May had a long history of being proudly American. She felt this tie and often expressed it viscerally as a core aspect of her identity. It emboldened her as an “outsider” with her female classmates in Dresden and in her interactions with the British aristocracy. Even though she travelled the world, and more than once vowed not to return to America, she always did. Now she needed a job, and she was outraged that the U.S. government had taken away what she regarded as her birthright—no matter what the law said.
Madcap May Page 18