Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues

by Paul Martin

  Joyce had plenty of ammunition to back up his charge. Both Peggy’s maid and her social secretary testified against her during the Chicago divorce trial, naming four New York gents—Barton French, Evan Spaulding, Ernest Hudson, and Joe Pani—that she’d canoodled with. French had even met Peggy in England while she was on her honeymoon and continued their affair. In Europe, she’d had liaisons with Paris newspaper publisher Henri Letellier, tango dancer Maurice Mouvet, Englishman Edgar James, Albania’s Prince Noureddin Vlora, and the Spanish playboy the Duke of Durcal.14

  Joyce shored up his argument that his wife was a faithless gold digger by providing a list of the jewelry he’d given her—some three dozen separate items that included multiple bracelets, necklaces, and rings set with diamonds, emeralds, or sapphires, along with a diamond tiara, a jade necklace and pendant, three pearl necklaces, several diamond watches and pins, and a gold cigarette case and jewel-encrusted cigarette holder. In their two-year courtship and marriage, Joyce said he had lavished close to a million dollars worth of jewelry on the woman. In all, he claimed to have spent $1.4 million for his wife’s jewelry, clothes, and cars (about $17 million today).15

  As her defense, Peggy claimed that her husband had been cruel to her, sometimes striking her in a jealous rage. That was true enough, although Peggy always gave as good as she got. Her maid said that she often clawed Joyce’s face like a tigress. An out-of-court settlement in November 1921 left Peggy with most of her jewelry, two fur coats, a Rolls-Royce, and $80,000 in cash.16 Although she received no alimony, she’d scored a million-dollar windfall in her brief marriage to the lumber king, who probably counted himself lucky to be rid of this avaricious slattern at any price.

  After her divorce, Peggy continued to bounce around European and American high society. In 1923, she returned to the stage, headlining the first of producer-songwriter Earl Carroll’s Vanities, a theatrical revue cum girlie show that had the men panting and newspapers snickering at its star (“She cannot sing, dance, or act,” wrote a critic for the New York Evening Post).17 Peggy’s part consisted of little more than lending her scandalous reputation to the show and flouncing around onstage in a succession of provocative outfits and expensive jewelry. In other words, she was simply there. For this lightly taxing role, Earl Carroll reportedly paid her $5,000 a week, which also granted him visitation rights in Peggy’s dressing room.

  In 1924, Peggy wed Husband Number Four, a minor Swedish count named Gosta Morner. The marriage lasted barely two months. For that brief span, Peggy was a legitimate countess, which she tried to leverage by seeking exorbitant theatrical fees.18

  In the years that followed, Peggy made intermittent appearances on stage and in film. Her last play was 1928’s short-lived The Lady of the Orchids, in which she portrayed, appropriately enough, a courtesan. Her final movie and only talkie, International House, came out in 1933, with Peggy essentially playing herself, a character the entire country had become intimately familiar with. Because of her notoriety, she got top billing in the occasionally racy comedy, above W. C. Fields, Rudy Vallee, and Burns & Allen. That same year saw the publication of Peggy’s lone—and universally panned—novel, Transatlantic Wife, a giddy depiction of the rich and lustful in the Jazz Age based on her own experiences.19

  When Peggy’s novel appeared, the heady times it described were already drawing to a close in the face of the Great Depression. Peggy’s years in the spotlight were soon to end as well. She turned forty in 1933, and her looks were starting to go. She continued to be a part of the American and European social swirl, but she was becoming a sad figure, a boozy, bloated character that bore little resemblance to the lithe, glamorous creature she’d once been.

  In 1945, Peggy wed California engineer Anthony Easton, a union that ran its course in six months. In 1956, she married retired New York bank clerk Andrew Meyer, a lonely lifelong bachelor more than twenty years her junior. It was her sixth excursion into marital bliss, a mundane anticlimax to her tumultuous wedded life.

  The young Peggy Hopkins Joyce had been a woman of predictable ambition. All she desired was the best of everything—the most expensive jewels, furs, houses, clothes, cars—and then a just a bit more of it. “It is marvelous to be rich,” she gushed shortly after marrying Stanley Joyce.20 That may be true, but Peggy didn’t do much that was laudable with her wealth. For as long as she could manage it, she simply wallowed in luxury, always anticipating her next acquisition. “Why be beautiful if you can’t have what you want?” she babbled in her memoir, her vacuous self-absorption worthy of a ten year old.21

  For Peggy, love came down to the sparkly things she could wear on her neck, wrists, and fingers. Her shameless gold digging is said to have inspired the character Lorelei Lee in Anita Loos’s 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.22 In 1949, the story was made into a musical of the same name. Four years later, the movie version featured Marilyn Monroe cooing her unforgettable rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” which could have been Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s theme song (her most famous rock was the 127.01-carat Portuguese Diamond, which is now in the Smithsonian National Gem Collection).

  In June 1957, Peggy died of throat cancer at the age of sixty-four. By then, she possessed less than half of the fortune she’d amassed through her earlier marriages, having been forced to sell off her worldly treasures one by one when the money stopped rolling in. She left the bulk of her estate to Andrew Meyer, but she also bequeathed $25,000 to her sister, $25,000 to a cousin, $10,000 to a friend, and $5,000 to her maid. That $65,000 was the same amount she’d paid for the sable coat she bought before her honeymoon with Stanley Joyce, an extravagance, she’d assured her Daddy Warbucks husband, that was “really quite cheap considering.”23

  For a moment in time, Peggy Hopkins Joyce blazed across the firmament like a skyrocket, an explosion of color and excitement that, inevitably, drifted back toward earth in a shower of fading sparkles. In her bawdy love life, she’d bedded more men than probably even she could recall. At least two of them were said to have committed suicide because of her.24 Her serial marriages inspired several songs and countless jokes. Her seductive image appeared on magazine covers and in advertisements—the famous beauty who was . . . well, famous. For a decade or more, the public had stared at her in wonder, and when the show was over, they turned away and soon forgot her name.

  Maxwell Bodenheim

  In the summer of 1925, a slender, sandy-haired man in a rumpled three-piece suit casually descends a stairway in a crowded house in New Rochelle, New York. Like a European nobleman about to make a grand entrance before his court, he pauses to gaze across the room with his uncommonly pale blue eyes, a sardonic smile on his lips. The people packed into the home of publisher Horace B. Liveright jabber in each other’s faces, their conversation animated by their host’s generous supply of bootleg hooch. A raucous jazz number blares from a radio, the frantic live-for-today yowl of Prohibition-era America. Maxwell Bodenheim—“Bogie” to his many friends and admirers—lights his ever-present corncob pipe and ambles on down the stairs. For Bodenheim, the party is a candy store, and all the bright young flappers enthusiastically laughing and tippling bathtub gin are so many bonbons. Bodenheim is smiling because he knows he can have his pick of these tasty treats. In his early thirties, the rakish Greenwich Village bohemian has several volumes of critically acclaimed poetry to his credit and a novel in the bookstores that everyone is talking about. As always, fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

  Flash forward two dozen years to a lonely side street in Greenwich Village. A middle-aged Maxwell Bodenheim sits by himself on a park bench. Attached to the wall behind him, scraps of paper flutter in the chilly breeze of a spring afternoon. The papers bear Bodenheim’s latest poems, all of them for sale—for ten cents, a quarter, whatever anyone is willing to pay. Bodenheim huddles in a filthy overcoat, his once handsome face eroded to a fright mask by years of hard living. He clutches a pipe in his hand, filled with tobacco from cigarette butts scrounged from the gutt
er. Bodenheim’s eyes are downcast, his expression blank. From the heights of literary success, Bodenheim has fallen to the depths of squalor. Still famous in the Village, he’s become a figure of derision, a pathetic panhandler and peddler of doggerel, always desperate to collect enough change for his next shot of rotgut.1

  Those two scenes bracket the career of one of America’s most intriguing writers, a once immensely popular figure who began his ascent in the years just before World War I. During the 1920s, his most productive period, Bodenheim turned out a dozen books of poetry and prose, including a controversial bestselling novel, Replenishing Jessica. His decline sputtered across three decades, from the 1930s to the early ’50s. It was triggered by the Great Depression, the national hangover that brought the gaiety of the Roaring Twenties to a sudden and painful end. For most of the 1930s, Bodenheim struggled to keep a roof over his head and food in his stomach. Although World War II pulled the country out of the Depression, Bodenheim never recovered. Mentally, he was ill equipped to handle either poverty or prosperity.2 The story of this eccentric artist with a bent toward self-destruction encapsulates the highs and lows of the 1920s and ’30s. It’s also a reminder that fame is often written in erasable ink.

  Bodenheim was born in Hermanville, Mississippi, in 1892, a first-generation American. Both his parents were from Alsace. (The family name was actually Bodenheimer, which Maxwell shortened to Bodenheim to downplay his Jewish heritage.) Maxwell’s mother, Caroline, came from a well-to-do background, making his father’s lack of business acumen a source of constant friction. Solomon Bodenheimer worked as a traveling whiskey salesman and clothing store clerk, both without success. The family relocated to Memphis, then Chicago, always hoping to find a prosperity that never came. Intense arguments poisoned the home, leaving young Maxwell disillusioned with family life. When he expressed an interest in poetry, his father berated him, pushing him toward the usual middle-class path to respectability. Maxwell ended up loathing all forms of tradition and authority, an attitude that stuck with him his entire life, coloring his personal relationships as well as his writing.3

  When he was sixteen, Bodenheim either quit or was kicked out of high school. He fled his unhappy home and joined the army, an odd choice for a teenager who chafed at discipline. It may have been the first example of what would become a pattern of self-abuse. Bodenheim had an Eeyore personality—always expecting the worst and doing whatever was necessary to make sure it happened. Predictably, he hated everything about the military. He went AWOL, was arrested, and finished his tour of duty behind bars at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Years later, he spun fanciful stories about his time in the army, claiming to have fought against Pancho Villa and to have earned his dishonorable discharge by bashing an anti-Semitic officer over the head with a rifle.4 After his time in the service, Bodenheim went on the bum for a couple of years, hopping freight trains, picking cotton, and mixing with migrant laborers, hobos, and petty criminals—a walk on the wild side that provided material for his future novels and kindled his sympathy for the underdog.

  Late in 1912, Bodenheim returned to his parents’ Chicago home, his suitcase stuffed with poems. He began to submit his work to Chicago literary magazines, earning a name for himself as a bright new voice. Luckily, he came along near the beginning of the Chicago Renaissance, the heady period between 1910 and the mid-1920s when Chicago was awash with talented writers and influential literary journals. Bodenheim was befriended by Harriet Monroe, founding editor of Poetry magazine, and Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review. The two women gushed over the young writer, Monroe calling him “a new genius in American poetry,”5 and Anderson anointing him as “probably one of the greatest in America.”6 The two editors argued over who had discovered him and been the first to publish his work. Bodenheim seemed to have that effect on women. As he hit the coffeehouses and literary salons, the ladies swooned over his good looks and lyrical endearments. “Your face is an incense bowl from which a single name arises,” he was heard to whisper in the ear of more than one admirer.7

  Bodenheim came to know all the leading Chicago writers, including Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson. His closest friend was Ben Hecht, then a budding newspaperman but destined to become a prolific screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. (The screenplays Hecht wrote or worked on include such Hollywood classics as The Front Page, Stagecoach, Some Like It Hot, Gone with the Wind, Notorious, A Farewell to Arms, and Mutiny on the Bounty.) Hecht and Bodenheim pulled off some interesting stunts. Frequent speakers at literary gatherings, the pair once scheduled a meeting on the following topic: “Resolved: that people who attend literary debates are imbeciles.” Arguing the affirmative viewpoint, Hecht looked out over the crowded room and announced, “The affirmative rests.” Bodenheim then stood up, surveyed the audience, and proclaimed, “You win.”8 In the heat of discussions, Bodenheim wielded ridicule and sarcasm with gleeful abandon. Hecht described him as “the ideal lunatic,” one who “greets an adversary’s replies with horrible parrot screams” and finishes his own thoughts with “ear-splitting guffaws.”9

  Despite his rise in the Chicago literary world, Bodenheim began to feel slighted by his friends. He decided it was time to move on. Early in 1915, he showed up at the home of New York poet and critic Alfred Kreymborg, who’d written to Bodenheim and praised his work. Kreymborg gave Bodenheim a place to stay and introduced him to the city’s literary crowd. The older writer made Bodenheim an editor of Others magazine, bringing him in contact with leading poets such as William Carlos Williams and Conrad Aiken. Bodenheim continued to produce poetry of his own, and he tried his hand at writing plays, becoming friends with Eugene O’Neill. After a few years, Bodenheim had a falling out with Alfred Kreymborg, again over perceived slights. Bodenheim’s friends found that sustaining a relationship with the touchy poet was like petting a porcupine.10

  One of the few relationships that endured was Bodenheim’s marriage to Minna Schein, a petite, attractive woman he met in 1918 in a Greenwich Village tearoom. They were wed for twenty years and had a son, although their marital arrangement was unusual. Bodenheim made attempts at supporting his wife and child, but he often acted as if he were still a swinging bachelor, living apart from his family and carrying on with other women. Despite her husband’s very public reputation as a Don Juan, Minna didn’t seek a divorce until 1938. Stranger still, the unfaithful Bodenheim wrote his wife passionate letters, assuring her of his love and telling her how much he missed her when he was away. His first book of poetry, Minna and Myself, published in 1918, contained tender love poems about her. Clearly, Bodenheim was a better husband on paper than in reality. Having an ordinary marriage would have made him too much like his parents.

  By 1920, Bodenheim had become a fixture in Greenwich Village. The American equivalent of Paris’s Left Bank, the Village provided the perfect bohemian setting—rents were cheap, and the speakeasies and cafeterias stayed open every night into the morning hours. It didn’t take much income to sustain a life of doing precisely what you wanted, society’s rules be damned. Following the approval of Prohibition in 1919, Greenwich Village became a sustained, over-the-top circus, and Bodenheim was one of its ringmasters. He presided at drunken all-night poetry slams in MacDougal Street bars, using a hammer for a gavel. Along with millionaire poet Robert Clairmont and other pals, he founded the Greta Garbo Social Club, whose chief aim was to seduce the New York working girls who flocked to Greenwich Village looking for excitement. Partygoers cavorted at artists’ soirees such as the Blaze Ball, where the women were said to be—in a take-off on the old Ivory Soap advertising slogan—99 and 44/100ths percent naked.11

  Like Greenwich Village—and the entire country—Bodenheim seemed to be riding a shooting star all through the 1920s. He turned out a prodigious stream of poetry and novels. He wrote literary criticism for top magazines such as the New Yorker, the New Republic, and American Mercury. He traveled to England and hung out with fellow poet T. S. Elio
t. Among the avant-garde, he was the poster boy for Jazz Age cool. Bodenheim’s 1925 novel Replenishing Jessica increased his notoriety after New York censors declared it obscene. Bodenheim’s publisher, Horace Liveright, was prosecuted—and ultimately acquitted—in a farcical trial that involved reading the entire novel into the court record. Far from titillated, the jurors fell asleep as the prosecutor droned on for three days. The novel about a rich young woman who dabbled at painting and promiscuity was actually quite tame. Thanks to the newspaper coverage of the trial, it hit the bestseller list.12 Bodenheim realized a cash windfall, but as he’d done all his life, he quickly burned through it.

  The uproar over Replenishing Jessica had women throwing themselves at Bodenheim’s feet. For two frenzied months in the summer of 1928, the clamoring turned tragic. First came Gladys Loeb, an eighteen-year-old aspiring poet who sought Bodenheim’s literary guidance. After a brief affair, Bodenheim callously dumped her, telling her that her poetry reeked. Brokenhearted, Loeb went home and put her head inside the oven while holding a photograph of her lover. Loeb was lucky. Her landlady smelled the gas and rescued her.13 Next came twenty-two-year-old Virginia Drew, who followed Loeb’s script except for the oven. Drew threw herself into the Hudson and drowned. The Drew suicide made front-page news: “Bodenheim Vanishes as Girl Takes Life,” the New York Times blared.14 Papers in London and Paris picked up the story, which was about to turn more bizarre.

  Following Drew’s suicide, another Bodenheim admirer decided she couldn’t go on living. Like Gladys Loeb, Aimee Cortez stuck her head in the oven while clutching a photo of Bodenheim, an apparent copycat suicide. This time, no one was around to come to the rescue.15 Finally, a girl with the felicitous name of Dorothy Dear presented herself to Bodenheim. The poet-libertine wrote her a series of love letters, which Dorothy kept in her purse. She had them with her the day she boarded a subway bound for Greenwich Village, a destination she never reached. Her train crashed at Times Square. Dear was killed, her treasured love letters scattered like leaves among the wreckage.16 Bodenheim himself never suffered from any of these tragedies, although in retrospect they appear to be a harbinger of what was headed his way.