by Susan Ronald
She avowed her “mistake” in marrying Henry Heynemann. Frank had made two mistakes of his own, so she was on safe ground. More doubtful is her recall of the scheming and plotting to hook Henry and take her back to California. She would have been mad to admit to such hardhearted behavior to a future stinking-rich husband. Her confidences made, Florence would have moved on as rapidly as possible to her attributes, including her athleticism, knowing that Frank was a sportsman millionaire and keen dancer. Dancing onstage was athletic, too, as if his lascivious eye hadn’t noticed.
For Frank’s part, yes, he was married when they met—twice altogether, twice unhappily. Yes, he had twin daughters by his first marriage, Helen and Dorothy. Yes, he had custody of the girls. Yes, his second marriage was in defiance of his sister, Helen, who some years earlier had married Finley J. Shepard, aged forty-four. Yes, he hated any government interference in his affairs—especially federal taxes. Yes, he was a staunch Republican. Still, he loved his racehorses, his dogs, and France. Then, significantly, yes, admittedly he drank far too much. Yet there was far more to Frank than that.
Frank had intended to go into the railway business after graduating from the school of engineering at New York University.* In 1901 he had fallen in love with and married Helen Kelly, the independently wealthy daughter of an old Wall Streeter and ally of Jay Gould. It all began so well. He worked in the family business for a while, but the social life of a millionaire in New York proved too alluring. He became a New York clubman based at the Union League Club, still situated today on the corner of Thirty-Seventh Street and Park Avenue. He owned dog kennels and was the first to show St. Bernard dogs at New York’s annual dog show at the Westminster Kennel Club.11 Vying to beat his brother Howard for the title of “Gould Sportsman,” Frank bought his first yacht from the Charles Seabury yard in Morris Heights, New Jersey.12 By February 1909 he was elected the Commodore of the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club of New York as captain of his steamer Helenita.13
His divorce from Helen that same year was sensational and acrimonious, filling dozens of newsprint pages around the world. Eventually, it sent a woman to jail for perjury. The New York Times header declared: “MRS. TEAL’S TRIAL FOR PERJURY BEGINS—Miss MacCausland Tells of Offered Bribe to Swear Falsely Against Frank Gould.” Margaret Teal, the supposed mastermind of the bungled affair, found herself facing the charges alone when her cohorts, Julia Fleming and private eye Harry Mousley, turned witnesses for the state. The case revealed a plot that could only benefit Helen Kelly Gould.
* * *
In July 1908 after the Gould divorce case was announced, Margaret Teal, who was known to Mabel MacCausland through Mabel’s work as a milliner, suggested that in exchange for promises of a sum of money and a trip to the country, Mabel “had, in March 1908, seen Frank Gould in the apartment of Bessie DeVoe, a chorus girl, in the Hotel Glenmore.… And while waiting for Miss DeVoe in the sitting room had seen Frank Gould leave the actress’s bedroom.”14
Mabel, an honest girl, had nothing against Frank personally, and thought Teal’s story was morally wrong. So she told the authorities. Mrs. Teal went to jail, and a referee needed to be appointed for the Goulds to reach a divorce settlement. After some horse-trading, Helen Kelly Gould got her divorce, Mrs. Teal her comeuppance, Mabel acquitted herself with honor, but alas, poor Bessie DeVoe didn’t bag her millionaire. She did get some modicum of revenge by publishing Frank’s love letters to her, but only after Frank paid $10,000 for breach of promise to marry her.15
Instead, Frank married the English showgirl Edith Maud Kelly on October 27, 1909. An acclaimed singer and dancer, Edith was as beautiful as her sister, Hetty, who was young Charlie Chaplin’s first love. Within months of the wedding, Frank put his American investments and properties into the hands of managers and moved to France, making it permanent in 1913. His goal seemed to be to devote his life to his personal pleasures and the life of a grand seigneur in France. He bought the domain and château of Le Robillard in Normandy, once the home of Dumas’s real-life musketeer, Pierre de Montesquiou d’Artagnan. After some $200,000 in renovations that included American-style indoor plumbing, the domain was fit for a king—and Frank “settled down” to breed racehorses with his showgirl wife.16
That first year, his horse Leremendado won the mile-long race for two-year-olds at Le Prix des Fourres at St. Cloud. The victory was all the sweeter for beating William Vanderbilt’s horse Garcero Duro. At Maisons-Lafitte, Frank’s Jerretière won the Prix Maintenon. July brought victory to his horse Pauvrerose, as well as a purse of $800. In October, his horse Aimette won the Prix de Ballon. Frank had thirty horses in training at his stable, but only six horses ran. Between March and September, the racing calendar season, he had won a piffling 69,995 francs to Vanderbilt’s 800,000 francs—but Vanderbilt had been racing for three years and had run more horses.17
Frank’s pride and joy, though, was a bay colt, Combourg. While finishing only second to Baron de Rothschild’s horse in his first race at Longchamps, Combourg was “the chief feature of the day,” The New York Times reported. Combourg was the great stallion, son of Bay Ronald out of Chiffonette. He won a purse of $67,000 in his first four years racing. Combourg won the Prix de Nice, the Noailles, and the Greffuhle Stakes. He placed second in the Grand Prix de Paris and won the Royal Oak and the Prix du Cadran. And Combourg was only the beginning. Frank’s finest horse, Amphiction, a chestnut gelding, won sixteen races in quick succession. Then, in the steeplechase at Deauville, Amphiction fell at the Irish Bank hazard and broke his leg. It was a severe compound fracture. Despite Frank’s offering of $20,000 to any veterinarian who could save his horse so he could live his life out to pasture, no vet came forward, and Amphiction had to be destroyed.18
* * *
Frank’s happy marriage with Edith was short-lived. Within two years, he was drinking so heavily that on awaking at eight a.m., he would down a quart of whiskey, then go back to sleep for the rest of the day. He’d get up in time for dinner, always holding a glass of some spirit in his hand, and serve himself from his collection of alcohol at the ready on the sideboard, until he passed out. On the nights when he left the house, he would invariably be brought home by his chauffeur or taxi drivers, legless. By 1913 he was a regular at Paris’s finest maisons de joie—brothels—where he met a shady lady he called “Sonia.” Whenever Edith was away from Le Robillard, Frank brought Sonia home. He had already granted the lady an allowance of $1,200 a month, an automobile, and, of course, jewelry. Given his daily stupors, it didn’t take long for Frank to be caught with Sonia in flagrante, but rather than divorce him, Edith sent him to a sanatorium. Twice.
Frank spiraled downward, regardless. In 1917 he tried to kill Edith, breaking down the door to her bedroom and beating her. During that same incident, he tried to make her swallow a vial of something he claimed was poison, and when she refused, he threw the bottle at her. Then he called in the fourteen household servants to forbid them from ever serving Edith again. Frank had gone completely off the rails.
He rented an apartment for a demimondaine with the unlikely name of Leone Ritz. Each evening, Leone would serve up a menu of young girls, perhaps two or three at a time, so that Frank would never get bored. The apartment house residents complained to the owner, who informed Frank he must find his accommodations elsewhere due to his scandalous behavior. So Frank set up Leone Ritz in a suite of rooms at the Hôtel Meurice instead. Naturally, Edith could take no more. When she moved out of the family home in disgust in the spring of 1918, Frank incredibly set the wheels in motion for a divorce on the grounds of adultery. In the meantime, one of Frank’s bevy of lawyers, Charles G. Loeb, had already introduced him to another client, Florence Lacaze.19
* * *
In a story that ran for years, Edith contested the French divorce. Apparently, Frank had done the unchivalrous thing and hired a private detective to follow his wife. Shortly before midnight on Friday, October 25, 1918, Edith and her Mexican friend, Mario Casasus, the son of twi
ce Mexican ambassador to the United States Señor Don Joaquin de Casasus, a graduate of Princeton and member of the American Ambulance Corps during the Great War, were arrested in a hotel for “improper relations.” In accordance with French law, they were each fined fifty francs. But that was only the beginning.
The Washington Times carried a full-page spread in its Sunday, December 15, 1918, issue entitled “The One Almost Comic Episode in the Sombre [sic] Details of the Frank Gould Divorce Suit Which Has Startled Even Gay Paris.” The article described a scene worthy of the best French farce. Apparently, in a dawn raid on Saturday, October 26—the morning after the midnight raid on Edith and Señor Casasus—three policemen stood guard outside the doors to rooms 208, 210, and 212 in a quiet hotel off the rue de la Paix. They had received a tip-off from Edith Gould.
The investigating officer, one Inspector Vallet, quietly opened the door with the pass key to room 208. A man in pajamas leaped from his bed. As expected, it was the American Frank Gould, as infuriated as any self-respecting millionaire could be. Gould sensed that this was Edith’s swift retaliation. Still, the inspector could see, Gould was in bed alone. Then what of room 210? When that door was opened, Vallet saw that the salon had a dining table set for two. Then surely the young lady he was looking for must be in room 212, Vallet asked his fellow policemen rhetorically. When that door was opened, Florence Lacaze sat up, grabbed the sheets to her bodice in mock modesty, and demanded, “What is this outrage?” “Do you know the gentleman in room 208?” Vallet asked. “No,” she replied with a pout, “I do not know him.” Gould was asked the same question of the lady in room 212. “I have not had the honor of her acquaintance,” he declared. Then how can he explain the dinner table set for two? “It is for me alone,” Frank insisted. Florence asserted she knew nothing of rooms 210 or 208.20
Despite their protestations of innocence, surely Edith would have the evidence she required against her husband for a divorce and a juicy settlement? Yet Frank struck first, filing the divorce papers secretly. The unwitting Edith was “served” with the papers, tossed through the open window of her taxi. She claimed she never picked them up, assuming the packet was either mistakenly thrown into the cab or that it was part of some sort of prank. The next she heard about her Paris divorce was when she read the morning newspapers. Her lawyers were consulted and proof of the farce in the hotel off rue de la Paix handed over. How could this “divorce” be valid? She had never been properly served. The lawyers agreed. Although they tried to get the decree overturned—not least to receive an equitable divorce settlement—Frank triumphed. He was a drunk, he told Florence, but he was no fool. He was also very well connected, enlisting the still powerful, former French premier René Viviani to his cause. When her countersuit came to court, Frank’s divorce was upheld as valid.
As the woman scorned, Edith determined to make Frank pay dearly for his ungentlemanly behavior. She raced to New York to file another countersuit to overturn the French divorce decree, naming Florence Lacaze as the reason for the breakup of her marriage. Naturally, the talons of the San Francisco press were out again to slash at Florence and her new millionaire. If Frank were to prevail, then “big things must be done if big fortunes are to endure and substance is not to fade into the shadow.” Frank was painted as an utter ne’er-do-well, and his Parisian pad was drawn as a palace worthy of Nero with accessories that “Europe as a whole did never possess and probably never will understand.” This wastrel’s lifestyle, the San Francisco Chronicle declared boldly, included a “mirrored bath large enough for 100 to swim in at a time,” and “the old Roman [Nero] would have given more than his empire that he burned and fiddling would have gone out of fashion in his own castle.”21 That was in November 1918.
* * *
Florence remained, by and large, oblivious to the horrors of the Great War and how it had deeply changed the Parisian cultural landscape. She hadn’t known a frozen apartment in the long winters, waiting interminably for rations of coal dust, straw, and peat called boulets. She was with Frank. They could buy anything at any price, and did; dispensing largesse where it could grab the most beneficial headlines for themselves by sending champagne and food to French soldiers. They were not among the National Treasures deemed worthy of boosting morale and the glory of French culture, and did not receive special treatment like the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who was dying of pulmonary congestion and was mercifully gifted a cartload of coal through the intervention of a cabinet minister. Nor did they help other cold and starving artists during the conflagration. They were too self-absorbed.
Foreign artists were less fortunate during the war and its aftermath. Picasso’s first mistress, Fernande, was reduced to breaking up Louis XV chairs to make a fire for the visit of Foujita, the Japanese painter, to Picasso’s studio. Sylvia, the daughter of clergyman Sylvester Beach, was psychologically scarred when she saw a direct hit on the church of Saint-Gervais that killed ninety-one worshippers outright. In his first bombing experience during the war, Ernest Hemingway stood near the Madeleine when the façade of the church was blasted to smithereens, and reported his near-death experience. More prosaically, potatoes, carrots, and beans were planted, uprooting the fashionable Luxembourg Gardens, among others, to feed the local population. Parisians’ senses were heightened at the thought that they might die at any moment from bombardments or starvation even after the guns ceased firing.22
* * *
In November 1918, the Great War was over at last. The United States flexed its muscles at the Treaty of Versailles, with its Fourteen Points laid down by President Woodrow Wilson. Reading about the unsavory antics of American millionaires like Frank within spitting distance of the blood-soaked Western Front made thousands of heads shake and tut-tuts be muttered at breakfast tables across America.
Rather than counterclaim against Edith’s allegations and protect Florence’s good name, Frank chose the wiser road, almost certainly on the advice of Charles G. Loeb. The French divorce was valid, the French courts said, and recognizable under international law. Edith was no longer an American citizen, since their divorce was recognized in the United States. There was simply no case to answer. The New York courts agreed. Several times over. Thousands of column inches, twelve court hearings, and four years later, Edith finally gave up. Or so it seemed. The question remained, however, would Florence ever be able to tame her Frank?
PART TWO
THE CRAZY YEARS
Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved—to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
8
TAMING ALL THOSE MONSTERS
A son may bear with equanimity the loss of a father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.
—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
While America and the Allies were hammering out the peace in Paris, another war raged on. Frank had nearly fallen out with his brother back in 1910 when George, as the executor of their father’s estate, refused to recognize Frank’s second marriage to Edith Kelly. George called Frank “a damned fool to marry that showgirl.” When George was proved right, Frank vowed never to forgive him.
George was a monumental hypocrite, Frank fulminated. It was galling that George and Guinevere Sinclair had two children without the benefit of wedlock—since he was still married to Edith Kingdon Gould—yet the children were educated, fed, and clothed from the family trust. These births could not be kept a secret from the Four Hundred, nor would the press be gagged. Helen Gould Shepard lamented George’s affair with Guinevere. Edwin was compassionate to the poor children. Howard thought it wildly funny; and Frank and Anna vowed revenge. George also opposed Anna’s second marriage to the Duke of Talleyrand, and enlisted Helen’s flat opposition to the union. Anna’s resentment was more to do with fretting that her income had dwindled to $750,000 annually than with family disapproval.1
Yet Anna’s bitterness was nothing to Frank�
�s fury. George had tried to stop Frank’s marriage to Edith Kelly, and as sure as the sun rose daily, brother George would not approve of Frank’s next choice, Florence Lacaze. While Frank ranted about George’s mercurial nature, his extravagances, and self-indulgence, Florence—the arch-schemer—led Frank into hatching a plan. Time was on their side, she advised. Frank’s French divorce was still contested by Edith. Until the outcome of her countersuit was certain, they would be unable to wed. Besides, George was the soul of indiscretion, and everyone knew what he was thinking before he uttered a word.
Consequently, the “War of the Goulds” began. While Frank staved off Edith with one hand, Florence was masterfully wielding her new power in the campaign against George. Her love affair with Frank had been printed in most good newspapers as part of Edith’s efforts to win a New York divorce. George, therefore, needed to be handled very much like any other important business transaction: coldly, with a great deal of forethought and the element of surprise.
The Gould family trust had dwindled steadily since the Knickerbocker Panic of 1907, when on October 15, the F. Augustus Heinz Mercantile Trust Company experienced a run on the bank. One bank after another collapsed, while Heinz scrambled for cash to pay out its depositors, even borrowing $1.5 million from Edwin Gould. As the banks failed, the stock market fell, and billions were wiped off the value of most stocks. Railroad stocks were hammered, hitting the family trust hard. Fortunately, Frank, Edwin, and Howard had already taken their dividends and accruals and plowed them into less volatile investments, meaning that by 1907, the three brothers were earning their own fortunes outside the family trust. In Frank’s case, he had the foresight to see that electricity and power generation would be the next big thing.
Whereas Jay would have known how, when, and where to invest instinctively, George proved too profligate and too unwise. Vast swathes of Gould railroad stocks were dumped at panic prices onto the market and scooped up by John D. Rockefeller, the Deutsche Bank (once swindled by Jay), and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. investments.* In the spring of 1911, these three minority shareholders grouped together to oust the Goulds from the Missouri Pacific, the Denver and Rio Grande, and the Western Pacific railways. George was forced to resign as president; and while all the Goulds remained shareholders, they no longer called the shots.2