by Daniel Wakin
Then, just before the stock market crash of 1929, Rubel decided to focus his business on ice, selling the coal part of his company for $17 million. Doubling down on ice with refrigerators around the corner may seem like ramping up typewriter production at the dawn of the computer. But coal itself was succumbing to a coal derivative, called coke, and oil.
Throughout the rise that made Samuel Rubel the king of ice and coal, he was dogged by charges of bribery and unfair business practices. He was sued by competitors and partners and investigated by prosecutors and court-appointed special referees. Rubel’s lawyers constantly fought efforts to have him questioned in court cases. His methods were the classic targets of trust-busters.
Take the case of the Paramount Ice Corporation. Stockholders accused Rubel of bribing key directors of Paramount to make the Rubel company Paramount’s lone customer and limiting production to 50,000 tons a year, or 25,000 tons less than Paramount was used to producing, thus guaranteeing any other supply would stay out of the hands of potential rivals. Another Rubel tactic involved trying to win over customers from rivals by undercutting prices and even giving away free ice.
The authorities took note of Rubel’s expansion, and prosecutors indicted him for conspiring to run a competitor out of business. The case went nowhere, but a partner, Henry Senger, who had invested $4 million in Rubel’s company, promptly sued for fraud, claiming that the ice baron kept him in the dark about how the investment was used and gave him no say in management. Rubel countered by noting that he paid Senger a tidy salary of $50,000 a year and tolerated his three sons on the payroll. The case was settled, with Senger receiving most of his investment back.
By the early 1930s, Rubel was worth more than $30 million. He owned a thirty-two-room mansion in Roslyn, Long Island, and a home at 106 Marlboro Road in Brooklyn. He had the kind of wealth that attracted attention, especially from people looking to make a buck. Among them was a plumber’s assistant who did some work in the Brooklyn house. The worker, clearly no criminal genius, left a note demanding that Rubel deposit $10,000 at a cigar store or his wife and daughter would be killed. The man was arrested after an accomplice went to the cigar store and was welcomed by police officers.
Along with his homes, Samuel Rubel from Riga, who started with a horse cart in Brooklyn, had fifty coal and ice warehouses and offices in New York City—including one in Bath Beach that on a summer day in 1934 was to deliver $450 to an armored car that had caught the attention of criminals from Albany and Manhattan’s Hudson River docklands.
The proximity of the Bath Beach warehouse to the waters of Gravesend Bay lit a bulb in the minds of the planners of the robbery, some of whom had lived much of their lives on the east bank of the Hudson River. And so the gang, as their planning grew ever more baroque, decided that the escape route would be across the water close by the site of the heist. Now they had to add to their escape fleet. McMahon knew a boat owner from the Manhattan waterfront named John Hughes, and brought him to a meeting. The gang members told Hughes that they wanted to depart the scene from a dock close to the Rubel plant. Hughes promised to supply a lobster dory to ferry the loot and its procurers, and at another meeting suggested bringing his partner, Thomas Quinn, in on the deal. Quinn’s great virtue was that he owned a speedboat.
The scheme then ratcheted into high gear. It was becoming a reality. Like actors populating a set, the men hung around the Rubel loading dock to make their faces familiar to employees and residents in the area. Manning bought a three-wheeled wooden push cart, donned an apron, and made regular purchases of ice from the Rubel warehouse, which he later dumped. There was no reason to bother selling ice when serious money was soon to be made. Here, habituation was becoming the mother of inattention.
Everyone did his part. McMahon provided machine guns, Geary promised to bring sunglasses to conceal the robbers’ faces. They staged trial runs. On August 14, the gang was ready to go. Each man assumed his place, checked his weapon, and scanned the street nervously. But one important piece was missing: Quinn and his speedboat were not there. He eventually showed up late, but the delay spooked the gang and they aborted the operation. It was likely the careful John Manning’s decision. Geary had swooped in, the seasoned criminal, and Manning and McMahon had let him take the lead in planning the robbery. But Manning, with his steely calm, was the field general, the man on the ground calling the shots. “He had no great amount of brains, but he had no nerves either,” Jack Alexander wrote in the New Yorker.
CHAPTER 6.
No. 331: “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”
BEFORE THE AGE OF MASS-PRODUCED CLOTHING and modern department stores, women usually made their own dresses or hired dressmakers. Patterns published in magazines served as templates for the designs, giving birth to the modern fashion magazine. William Ahnelt, a German immigrant, played no small role in making that happen. He invented and patented a system that numbered the pieces of an article of clothing in a pattern so it could be assembled more easily. And he had another good idea: displaying those patterns not just as free-floating blouses and dresses, but illustrating them on actual people. The idea seems elemental given the fashion publishing industry of our time, but Ahnelt was a spiritual forbear of today’s glossy magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
Ahnelt was born in Berlin around 1864, and as a youth desired to enter the Berlin Academy of Art. His father wanted him to take up a more practical line, so Ahnelt went to work as an apprentice to a women’s clothing designer before emigrating to the United States in 1890 and finding work in the fashion industry. His idea of showing clothing illustrations on actual people caught on brilliantly, and by 1903, Ahnelt’s American Fashion Co. was producing fifteen magazines for the women’s garment and tailoring trade and the fur business. Nor was this his only accomplishment. He established a school for fashion designers and was one of the first to bring the latest Paris fashions to the United States. In 1899, he founded the magazine Pictorial Review, which was the last addition to the Big Six—the most popular and enduring women’s magazines founded in the second half of the nineteenth century—joining Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Delineator, Women’s Home Companion, and Good Housekeeping. By the mid-1920s, Ahnelt’s magazine, which grew from a pattern book into the most sophisticated and worldly of the six titles, had reached a circulation of more than 2.5 million—astonishing even by today’s standards.
For a decade, starting in 1915, Pictorial Review serialized novels by such celebrated authors as Edith Wharton (Age of Innocence) and lesser-known writers like Kathleen Norris, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Sir Gilbert Parker. Its core business, however, was the selling of patterns, through merchants and by direct mail, with Ahnelt’s patented “cutting and construction” guides, based on the chic garments illustrated in the magazine.
“Style gave Pictorial Review Patterns their initial success; Style is maintaining that success to-day; and Style will preserve it in the future,” crowed the company in a typical full-page ad in the Washington Times on June 4, 1922. “Every well-dressed woman craves smart Style, in a simple housedress as well as in an elaborate evening gown. This is why millions select Pictorial Review patterns.” Other ads carried more provocative headlines, like “Does a woman love her husband less when children come?” Ahnelt’s business grew to occupy a twelve-story building in the garment district, now 214 West 39th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, a hive of fashion businesses that still bears the majestic lettering PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY on the facade.
Even before the magazine’s circulation peaked, Ahnelt became one of the first owners of 331 Riverside Drive, which he bought sometime before 1912. (The previous owner acquired it in the foreclosure proceedings that befell the original developer.)
Ahnelt also owned property in New Jersey, much like R. B. Davis. In Anhelt’s case, it was a Tudor mansion with sixty-four rooms and a six-story tower in Deal Beach, New Jersey, which had been built by Daniel O’Day, a key member of John D. Rockefeller’s brain trust at Stan
dard Oil. It was Ahnelt’s summer retreat and became his residence upon his retirement in 1934. It was a short-lived retirement home.
Shortly before dawn on June 24 of the following year, a maid named Fannie Trunetz was asleep, alone, in the empty cavernous house. The barking of a dog entered her consciousness and she jolted awake to find her room filled with smoke. Fire was quickly spreading through the Deal Beach mansion. Four fire companies responded, but they were helpless: there was no source of water. They had to lay 3,000 feet of hose from the nearby town of Allenhurst to acquire enough water pressure to fight the blaze. Soon the house, on its fifty-four-acre plot, was reduced to smoldering debris. Ahnelt lost $20,000 in silverware, rugs, paintings, and books, along with all of his personal and business records. An invaluable archive detailing the history of fashion magazines was lost.
The fashion magazine impresario owned the twenty-six-room No. 331 for little more than a half-dozen years. In 1918, it was sold to a “woman client” of a real estate firm, the Times reported, using a rather coy description. The client, it turned out, was the twenty-one-year-old mistress of the press baron and would-be movie mogul William Randolph Hearst, who naturally provided the funds to buy the house. Hearst lived with his wife Millie just a mile south, in the Clarendon, an apartment building on Riverside Drive at 86th Street. The family’s elevated palazzo occupied the building’s three top stories and featured a vast banquet hall, a ballroom with balconies on each end, a domed living room, a dining room on the roof, and a half-dozen suits of armor from Hearst’s medieval collection.
Hearst, whose son described him as “sort of a Stage Door Johnny,” met Marion Davies (originally Douras), when she appeared in the 1915 Irving Berlin revue Stop! Look! Listen! Hearst was fifty-two and had been married to Millie for twelve years, but he fell hard for the eighteen-year-old showgirl. Hearst bought 331 Riverside Drive for Marion as part of his campaign to turn the chorine into a star, mainly through his press empire and personal wealth. His newspapers relentlessly promoted Marion, to the extent that Hearst would kill an accidentally lukewarm review of one of her silent movies. Marion seemed to have unlimited expense accounts and showed no shyness about using them.
The Chief, as Hearst was known, spent a fortune, more than $1 million—$17 million in today’s dollars—remodeling the house on Riverside Drive. The love nest became a palace. A marble fountain adorned with cupids was placed in Marion’s sitting room. One room was transformed into a library, with wood paneling and calf-bound rare editions, although there is no evidence that Marion was much of a bookworm. She did tell a reporter for a fan magazine that she read plays and “things I think would film.” As for the calf-bound books, “I-I’ll r-read all of these when I’m an old w-woman,” the reporter quoted her as saying, reproducing a stutter that Marion overcame on stage and in front of the camera.
Hearst also installed two of Marion’s sisters, Rose and Reine, and her mother and a crew of servants in No. 331, and then proceeded to buy the house next door, No. 332, for Marion’s father, Bernard. He gave each woman money to furnish their own rooms. If Marion was going to be his mistress, no matter how secret their relationship and how eager he was to avoid scandal, it was important to Hearst that her family have status. As part of the Douras family improvement project, Hearst arranged for Bernard, a none-too-successful Brooklyn lawyer who was an amiable companion to the Chief, to be appointed a municipal magistrate. Marion supposedly told friends that the building was to be used as an office for her father, although it was apparent that he lived there. Rose’s husband, George Van Cleve, an executive of Hearst’s movie-making arm, Cosmopolitan-International Pictures, also lived at No. 331 in the effort to elevate the entire middle-class Douras family to a place of greater prominence in society. Yet it is telling that the 1920 census lists Davies as head of the household, with the occupation of “motion picture actress.”
The result was to surround Marion with a continuous retinue. She and her sisters liked to drink, and a biographer of the actress, Fred Lawrence Guiles, suggests the liquor delivery boys from Broadway made frequent visits to the houses. The Douras family excesses lead one to wonder what their next-door neighbors, the proper Jephsons, thought of the clan.
The Davies mansion figured in a scene described by Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the satirical novel about a gold digger with Hollywood ambitions. Loos had lunch with Hearst and Davies at Marion’s home up on 105th Street (aka No. 331), and later that evening dined with Hearst and his wife at their palatial apartment in the Clarendon. “And when I took my place beside W. R. at his wife’s table,” Loos wrote, “he observed, with a naughty twinkle, ‘Well, young lady, we seem to be sitting next to each other in rather diverse locations, don’t we?’”
Marion achieved film stardom during her years at 331 Riverside. In 1917, after a series of hit roles in shows, she began fielding offers for movies, the logical next step for chorus girls who had arrived. Just a few years earlier, the mother of her next-door neighbor, Lucretia Jephson, had warned her darling Lulu that she risked becoming a “low woman” if she were forced to pursue a stage career. Lucretia married respectably and inherited well, avoiding that dire fate. For Marion, that wasn’t even an issue, although the moralists of the day might have taken a different position. The stage was her entree into the world of a wealthy businessman and then a stepping-stone to Hollywood. Her first film, Runaway Romany, came out at the end of 1917, the first of a series of formulaic films featuring her in roles as a distressed damsel or maiden pure of heart. Hearst did not finance the movie, but was impressed and decided to back Marion’s film career.
In his biography, Guiles presents the full complexity of their relationship, which lasted thirty-five years. Hearst felt he had to spend on Marion and keep her accustomed to a gilded-cage standard of opulence as a way of countering the possibility of her having affairs with younger men. Davies depended on him to establish her as a star, but stuck by him—truly loved him—even when she had reached that status. Yet she felt trapped and unable to set herself free from Hearst’s support. If she was never going to become Hearst’s wife, she would take a film career instead. And Hearst might have felt that Millicent would accept his relationship with a film star, but not a simple chorus girl. In Guiles’s view, the blanket of Hearst-provided publicity and money helped shape the undeserved view of Marion as a mediocre actress—a judgment solidified by the pitiful depiction of Susan Alexander, the vaguely Marion-like wife of Charles Foster Kane, modeled after Hearst, in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles too believed that Hearst’s public relations campaign did not serve Davies well. In an introduction to Davies’s recorded memories, The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst, Welles wrote: “That vast publicity machine was all too visible; and finally, instead of helping, it cast a shadow—a shadow of doubt. Could the star have existed without the machine? The question darkened an otherwise brilliant career.”
Hearst took a keen interest in the screenplays, scenery, casting, and direction of Marion’s movies, determined to make her not just a star but a screen diva. He pushed her into historical and romantic roles ill-suited to her natural talents as a carefree comedienne. She made eighteen movies through 1924 with titles like Cecilia of the Pink Roses, Buried Treasure, Enchantment, Getting Mary Married, and The Young Diana. One of her biggest successes came in late 1922: When Knighthood Was in Flower. Based on a hugely successful 1898 novel of that name, Knighthood was a big-budget, lavish historical epic about Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, who is in love with a commoner despite her brother’s demand that she marry Louis XII of France. The movie was a big hit, receiving positive reviews from newspapers, including those not owned by Hearst. Three decades later, Davies recalled the movie’s opening night at the Criterion Theater. She had prepared a speech for afterward but the lights went up and the crowd left the theater before she had a chance to deliver it. She was glad of that, she said, despite having spent her dinner trying to memorize the words. Davies also
remembered the long rehearsals of fencing scenes.
A play based on the novel had a hugely successful and lucrative run just twenty years earlier—starring, and directed by, none other than the actress Julia Marlowe, who owned the townhouse just six doors down from Marion’s home (see Chapter 18).
Hearst’s other base of operations was in San Francisco, and he was busy in those years building the massive San Simeon castle retreat. Between that and the movie industry’s gravitation away from New York and toward Hollywood, Marion was spending an increasing amount of time in California. Then a New York scandal made the move permanent.
William J. Fallon was a prominent “mouthpiece” of the day, a lawyer for gangsters who was also involved with two stock swindlers, Edward Fuller and William McGee. Their firm, Fuller & McGee, operated with impunity in defrauding investors, thanks in part to the protection of the Tammany Hall boss Big Tom Foley—a backer of Hearst’s political nemesis, Al Smith. The swindlers, despite what appeared to be a strong case against them, managed to win acquittals at trial. The New York American, a Hearst paper, decided there was something fishy and assigned a crack reporter, Nat Ferber, to investigate. Ferber found evidence that Fallon had fixed the juries, and Hearst paid to put up witnesses in hotels so they wouldn’t back away from their stories.
Fallon hit back, accusing the Hearst publishing empire of a vendetta against him (it was more likely that Hearst wanted to wound Foley, the Tammany boss). And he pulled out a would-be ace: he hinted he had some juicy information about Hearst and an actress. Fallon went on trial, dropped Marion Davies’s name, and even intimated that he had birth certificates of her putative children. (The documents were never produced, Marion was not known to have had children, and historians doubt whether Marion ever became pregnant by the tycoon.)
The non-Hearst papers naturally went crazy over the story. To shield Marion, Hearst brought her out to California, eventually buying her a mansion in Beverly Hills.