Perhaps their biggest coup came in late November 1917, and got them an item in Variety under the subheading of “Vaudeville.” The magazine reported, “Kings Bump Reader in Act.” By that was apparently meant De Kerlor’s expertise in phrenology (“he has appeared before the members of many royal households”) and that he had consented to make a short vaudeville tour. The doctor “makes a character analysis through the medium of one’s features,” the newspaper reported, “illustrated by slides and charts.” The doctor was also prepared to do some fortune-telling for members of the audience. One does not know which of them dreamed up that idea, but it should be noted that, decades later, Schiaparelli appeared at a costume ball dressed as a carrot. “The World Famous Dr. W. de Kerlor!” the Dutchess Theatre in Poughkeepsie announced in February 1918. “Studies in Character Analysis!” the Strand Theatre announced in May of that year. He was appearing on the same bill with Alla Nazimova, the Russian-born actress, which was another coup. It would be interesting to see whether the doctor had better luck on stage with his predictions than he had apparently had in Piccadilly in 1915. No such reviews have been found.
In many respects Schiaparelli was entirely conventional. She held to the notion that married women, with children, a home, and a husband to care for, were happiest. A comment about the “mad masculine furies,” suffragettes demonstrating for the vote whom she passed in Piccadilly on the day of her marriage, makes her viewpoint clear. “They got the vote,” she wrote, “and all their worries.” On the other hand, she had to find work somehow, if only to ease the strain on her husband, who kept coming up with ingenious schemes only to see them disintegrate with a puff of air.
She thought she had found her chance for a promising future after she met Ganna Walska. She was invited to her new friend’s house one evening for dinner and recalls seeing Walska, a celebrated Polish beauty, descending a wide staircase in a tight black dress and exhibiting the confidence and superb presence one would expect from a prima donna. There was only one problem. Walska was not just a bad soprano, she was terrible.
It is said that in Citizen Kane Orson Welles modeled the career of Kane’s second wife on the career of Ganna Walska. In the film, Kane is determined to make Susan Alexander Kane, a girl with a pleasant, undistinguished voice, into a famous singer. To that end he lavishes hundreds of thousands of dollars on her career and launches her as a prima donna, a career that goes nowhere. The resemblance is exact, with one crucial difference. The singer in Citizen Kane never wanted to be famous. Being famous, however, was Ganna Walska’s consuming passion. She also had a gift for persuading extremely wealthy men to marry her. When Schiaparelli met her, she was married to her second husband, a New York endocrinologist named Joseph Fraenkel. He died in 1920 and was rapidly replaced by, first, a wealthy manufacturer of carpets and then, in 1922, an industrialist, Harold Fowler McCormick, who spent thousands of dollars in voice lessons and then wangled a starring role for her in a Chicago Opera production in 1920.
That was in the future when Schiaparelli met Walska, probably in the summer of 1918. Dr. Fraenkel came to her with his concerns. His wife had accepted the title role in Umberto Giordano’s opera Fedora, based on a celebrated Sarah Bernhardt vehicle by Victorien Sardou. The problem was that Fedora was being staged in Havana, Cuba, and Dr. Fraenkel could not take time off to accompany her. Would Elsa go as her companion? No doubt a fee was involved. Elsa would be delighted.
In the next few years Walska would preside over one disaster after another. In the case of her Chicago Opera debut, she got into an argument with the director, Pietro Cimini, during the dress rehearsal and mercifully (for her) never appeared. In the case of Fedora, what with distance and the primitive recordings of the time, opera impresarios no doubt had to depend on advance publicity, and that was all too glowing. By the time the star and her entourage docked in Havana, the city had worked itself up into a froth of excitement. There were flower-filled hotel suites, champagne parties, mobbing crowds, and the usual frenzy of reporters and photographers. There was even a very small spotlight on Elsa, because Anna Pavlova, the renowned ballerina, was also performing in Havana just then, and Schiaparelli was being mistaken for her. Then the much-anticipated opening night took place before a packed house. Walska began to sing. Schiaparelli spares us the details of what happened then, but Cuban audiences were notorious for letting their feelings be known right away. Walska soldiered on. The catcalls and jeers became well-aimed ammunition. Was it flowers or rotten tomatoes? We shall never know.
At length the curtain descended on act 1. By then Schiaparelli was frantically trying to prevent the delivery of such extravagant floral tributes as are required when a prima donna takes her triumphant bows. All too late. The audience expressed its feelings some more. Once in Walska’s dressing room, Schiaparelli pleaded with her not to go on for act 2. One imagines the scene: the manager banging on the door and Schiaparelli, using all the tact she can muster to save Walska from herself; the singer, in tears, powdering her face and refusing to stop. Then act 2 began, and the audience was making so much noise Walska could not be heard. People were standing up and shouting, about to storm the stage.
Schiaparelli grabbed Walska, hustled her out of an obscure stage door and into a waiting horse-drawn fly. They returned to the U.S. on the next boat, the SS Miami, bound for Key West. On the ship’s manifest Schiaparelli has signed herself in as Elsa de Kerlor Wendt, in the manner she had learned from her husband for using some sort of disguise, however transparent. She called herself an artist and said she was Polish.
At that moment De Kerlor was using an alias himself, but for rather a different reason. For some time, he had billed himself as a detective or, as he called it, a “criminal psychologist,” although even he did not claim to have had any training for that role. His expertise, as he explained, was to perceive criminal tendencies (“Are You Born Coward?”) on the basis of bumps on the head, fingerprints, palm readings, and the like. Using such self-proclaimed abilities he had insinuated himself in 1916 into the final hours and days of the hapless dentist. By 1919, he was claiming to have solved two murders. One, which happened in Annapolis, Maryland, he had heard about through a reporter for the Washington Times. He boasted that he was retained as a psychological consultant, “and within ten minutes I gave to Major Pullman of the District of Columbia Police … the correct theory on which an arrest was made within 48 hours.” He learned about a second case through the Poughkeepsie Eagle News, the “Pseudo LeRoy” murder. That turned out to be a murder instead of a suicide or perhaps a case of mistaken identity. Although he claimed another victory within days, the role he played is unclear.
Then he heard about a third case. A certain William K. Dean of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, had been murdered on August 13, 1918. The doctor’s brother, Frederick K. Dean, was a writer living in New York and, as it turned out, had the same publisher as De Kerlor. Elsa and Frederick Dean’s wife had become friends. Elsa shortly learned that the brother of the murdered man had very little confidence in the ability of the New Hampshire police to solve the case. Would De Kerlor (“I am a psychologist, a criminal psychologist, a doctor, and a lecturer”) consent to make a trip up there? He would. Frederick Dean, De Kerlor, and their wives, arrived in Jaffrey ten days after the murder, on August 23. De Kerlor thought it might be wise to use an alias and was introduced as Dr. Kent, an interested friend, rather than the “world-famous criminologist.” (This transparent ruse was soon discovered and abandoned.)
De Kerlor’s apparently altruistic interest in the Dean murder case was highly misleading. In fact, he was in pursuit of a career in journalism and looking for a sensational story that would take him out of the freelance state and into a plum job as an investigative reporter. And in fact it was beginning to work, since he was building a totally unmerited reputation for himself as an oracle, detective, and psychic authority based on not much, making use of the fact that very few papers of the day were going to follow up an assertion, true or otherwise. In
the Dean murder he must have thought he had found a winner. The Dean homestead on the outskirts of Jaffrey was situated on a hill, overlooking a wide valley and the Monadnock Temple range of mountains. It was rumored that suspicious lights, perhaps signals, were flashing at night. Dean, a somewhat eccentric doctor-turned-farmer, liked to milk his cows at midnight, which gave him a front-row seat on the nightly light show, which was becoming the talk of the village.
One day Dean asked a neighbor, who was on her way to Boston, if she would get in touch with the police. He had some important evidence. He would not tell her what it was; no woman should have to know. She readily agreed. That same evening Dean was attacked by person or persons unknown. He was bound hand and foot. Then he was strangled and dumped into a cistern. There were possible suspects but no arrests. The murder seemed ideal for a big splash in a national newspaper.
Robert Valkenburgh, a BOI agent, and a colleague, Feri Weiss, were in fact already at work on a related case, which involved German espionage in New Hampshire. He gave his testimony at grand jury hearings on the death of Dean in the spring of 1919. By then World War I had ended, so the BOI case was moot. However, it represented the most thorough investigation so far into the Dean murder, and he was questioned at length. He and Weiss suspected a certain Mr. Colfelt of New York. This mysterious personage and his family were renting Dean’s summer house, a spacious home that had an uninterrupted view over the valley and the Monadnock mountains. The Colfelt family were living there year round, even though the house was not insulated and poorly heated, a factor that, given the frigid winters, would disqualify most houses. Valkenburgh told the county solicitor, Roy M. Pickard, that in their opinion Dean “was removed because he knew too much about German activities in and around East Jaffrey, and every line we follow leads that way.”
Colfelt had an alibi, and the conclusion did not suit De Kerlor at all. Charles Rich, who was a district judge, cashier of the town bank, town moderator, and church choir director, had received a suspiciously black eye the night of the murder. He said a horse had kicked him. De Kerlor was sure he knew how Rich really got his black eye. The problem was that Dean’s brother did not share De Kerlor’s conviction that Rich, a highly respected citizen of the town, could possibly be a murderer. Who knows what De Kerlor, alias Kent, suggested to Dean in order to convince him? Did he cite a nose that was too aquiline or earlobes that stuck out? Whatever it was, he was not successful, and that led to a parting of the ways. Frederick Dean said to him in exasperation, “Can’t you see they don’t want you here?” which was not quite true, as yet. Instead, the selectmen wanted to hire the newcomer to replace a Pinkerton agent who had not succeeded in finding the murderer. They would try Dr. Kent as a consultant. For expenses only, of course.
Elsa was somewhere in the background of these investigations, aiding and abetting, acting in the wholly disingenuous role of the friend of the murdered man’s sister-in-law. She was poised to make coffee, make lunches, even dinner, and invited over whichever suspect her husband wished to question that day. Verification of De Kerlor’s actual motives, that April of 1919, is contained in his complaint to the grand jury about how much money the investigation had cost him, six thousand dollars in fact. Had he remained in New York, he said, he would have been hired full-time by the World or the Globe. He would have sold to the Hearst chain or published another book and started making a film. As it was, he and Elsa had to leave their New York office when their monthly rent went from $125 to $150, and so “I felt my wife [had] better go to a hotel.”
It is probably true that he was kept in New Hampshire far longer than he expected, trying to decipher a multitude of clues far beyond his competence to unravel and which, in his hands, only led to dead ends. He claimed a major breakthrough, one that was described in the Boston Post in January 1919, three months before the April 1919 hearing, and subsequently explained to the attorney general of New Hampshire, Oscar L. Young, and the assembled jurymen. Reuben Greene of the Post interviewed “the great criminologist” while he was staying with friends in the Back Bay area of Boston. “He is a rather short man, fairly stout, talks quickly and rolls his R’s,” Greene wrote. What he had discovered was a sensational piece of evidence, marvellous, unbelievable, like something out of a Sherlock Holmes novel. He had achieved the miraculous.
De Kerlor told Greene that he had photographed some blood spots on the porch near the scene of the crime and discovered a small, whitish formation on the negative plate. On examining it closely he was “amazed to behold a human face,” and one he had seen before. He looked again and found several other faces, one of them a woman’s. How could he explain that?
“The psychologist paced about restlessly. ‘It is a state of consciousness,’ he replied. ‘The old man was struck. He whirled about and struggled with his assailants for a moment. Then it was he saw the faces peering at him with bloodlust in their eyes. He died, but that agonized consciousness remained. It was still strong enough to impress itself on the negative …’ ” What face did he recognize? Why, it was the face of the bank cashier, Charles Rich.
That De Kerlor, working on behalf of the selectmen, could claim to see the faces of murderers in the victim’s blood, “psychic pictures,” they were called, was examined at length during the grand jury hearings. One might view such conceits as an early manifestation of surrealist imagery. By coincidence or design, Salvador Dalí’s hallucinatory paintings make use of miniature faces encased on pebbles, tears, and the like, as in The Accommodations of Desire (1929). On one of Dalí’s later works, there is a masterly miniature portrait of Hitler (The Enigma of Hitler, 1938). One can also see just what the citizens of a small New Hampshire town were going to make of this kind of explanation. De Kerlor also claimed to find, among the roster of damned faces, a portrait of Reginald Smith of Boston, a lawyer who did not even join the case until several months after the murder, in January 1919. What about that, Young wanted to know. How could the image of a man who was not a suspect possibly be mirrored in the victim’s blood? De Kerlor thought it could be explained as “a prophetic projection of the event.” Young pressed him on the matter. De Kerlor continued, “I would say … that in reality all the lives of men form but a very small link in the important chain of cosmic events, and … in the life of man the future is nothing but the past unfolded.” No doubt Elsa approved.
In summing up, De Kerlor believed the town was in a conspiracy to protect the real culprits, which was why so many people had rudely refused his and his wife’s offers when invited. He would have locked up a dozen of them and “let them all squirm” for two or three weeks until they came to their senses. Attorney General Young reminded him that locking people up for weeks without cause was not quite the done thing in the U.S. Well, it was wartime, De Kerlor shot back. As for the citizens he had invited, by then they knew all about De Kerlor’s psychic pictures. They also knew what they were going to do with the great criminologist. If he did not get out of town, they would come after him with guns. Another fast exit seemed appropriate.
The hearing adjourned with the verdict: murder by person or persons unknown. (It has never been solved.) Agents Valkenburgh and Weiss continued their work on the case but finally abandoned the project. Some months later they happened to meet Young and chatted informally. Young said “that he cannot understand how two sensible men … could be tied up with a man like Kent whom he, the Attorney General, regards as a lunatic.”
CHAPTER 3
* * *
THEMES OF LOVE AND DEATH
As World War I shuddered to a halt, Willie and Elsa continued their madcap course, zigzagging from one harebrained scheme to another and in and out of New York apartments with bewildering speed. Wherever they went, some agent of the Bureau of Investigation would eventually track them down. One brief stay that found its way into BOI files concerned an apartment at 207th Street and Booth Avenue. A complaint was lodged, presumably by the landlady, that the couple were experimenting with chemicals and had started a f
ire in their rooms. Sinister sounds of someone at a typewriter could be heard into the small hours.
In the summer of 1918 they escaped to Boston but the agents followed. It was no longer simply their anti-British, pro-German activities that were suspected, although the bureau must have found it curious that De Kerlor, an enemy sympathizer, was now hiring himself out as a detective in a suspected German murder case. Willie and Elsa’s change of address to Beacon Hill coincided with the turmoil in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, the assassination of Nicholas II and his family, and Lenin’s rise to power. Such events led to fears in the U.S. of strikes, belligerent unions, and suchlike, lumped together with anarchistic threats to the public peace of any kind.
If Willie and Elsa knew this, they seemed superbly indifferent. De Kerlor already knew Louise Bryant, the American feminist and author, a Marxist who married John Reed, author of the seminal account Ten Days That Shook the World. De Kerlor knew by then that the authorities were keeping a close eye on their movements. But his particular brand of compulsive boastfulness was his undoing, time after time. When Agent Weiss visited them at 11 Walnut Street, Boston, in the spring of 1919, De Kerlor had just returned from a postwar visit to see his parents in the south of France. He showed Weiss a postcard purporting to be the school, or was it a college?, that he headed at 35 Rue de France in Nice. The whole conversation was, of course, fiction, but he half-convinced Weiss that he did indeed direct a school (“the largest male institute of its kind”) for the teaching of psychology and spiritualistic enterprises. De Kerlor said he was travelling on a French passport.
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 6