Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Before the week was over, Jay had inveigled himself into Mae’s life. He declared, after sneaking into her taxi and accompanying her home, that he was in love and intended to marry her. She balked at that. Jay, wrote Mae’s biographer Jane Ardmore, “had a high-flown way of talking that shocked her with its excessive ardor. It made her feel like a schoolgirl.” She mustered the courage to turn him down, though, telling him, “I want to be free.” Until de Saulles returned, that is. He invited her to a party at his apartment. His studio, she remembered, “was so ornate and extravagant and luxurious,” and it seemed to her that “every celebrity on Broadway sat around the table.” They ate “pheasant and wild rice from silver platters, and drank champagne from crystal glasses.” A little too much champagne. De Saulles began to paw at her, pleading for a dance. “I want to hold you in my arms,” he said. And then he leaned in for a kiss.

  That was when Jay arrived, which was impeccable timing on his part, or perhaps that of Mae’s imagination.

  “Jay!” I cried, my hand going guilty to my wet, kiss-smeared cheek.

  “Hello party crasher!” said de Saulles.

  “So you’ve won, you skunk!” Jay shot back. “You said you’d get her to your apartment, all right, and you have. But before I pay you, I’ve got something else for you.”

  At which point, of course, he clobbered him. He knocked him onto the dining table, spilling rice and champagne and silver and crystal all across the floor. Then, as Mae remembered it, Jay seized her by the elbows, lifted her from the floor, and . . . well, again, it’s best to let her take over:

  “Why did you come here?” he asked me.

  “Jay! You’re mad!”

  “Why did you come?” he asked. “I don’t want you here.”

  “You’re hurting me. Let me down I tell you!”

  “Answer me first!”

  “I’ve told you before. I don’t belong to you or anyone. I want to be free.”

  “I told you that you couldn’t be free.”

  “Then I did something that broke the tension. I laughed.”

  So did everyone else. Apart from Jay. He blanched, started to shake, and then wrapped his fingers around her throat. Mae, always the heroine of her memoirs, said she told him, “Go on. You’ll justify all my doubts and answer every question I had about you.” Mae thought that it was her words that made Jay let go. It may also have had something to do with the two waiters who grabbed him by the arms.

  She left with de Saulles. She admitted that she didn’t have much choice about it, since he threw her over his shoulder and carried her out to his car. They drove out into the city, far from the San Souci, where Mae was meant to be appearing on stage that evening. De Saulles had an “evil smile on his face,” Mae said, “as if he were enjoying my upset night.” He cautioned her against seeing Jay again, though you’d think that after what had just happened, she would hardly have needed the warning. But then when she returned to her flat that night, she found that her bedroom was filled with red roses. Her maid brought her a note, from Jay, begging her forgiveness, pledging his love. But as Mae told de Saulles, “I don’t want to be ‘a woman’ in your and Jay’s lives, I want to dance, to make my own living and live my own life.”

  She was doing exactly that. The great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld—“Ziggie” to Mae—had just signed her up to perform in his famous Follies, “a salad of sex and art,” as one of his biographers put it; the front-row seats sold for one hundred dollars each. And Adolph Zukor, who had just founded Paramount, was trying to persuade her to move to Hollywood. Jay was beside himself, “tortured and jealous, in a constant state of depression.” He couldn’t stand having all these rivals for her affection.

  Enter Rudolph Valentino. He was only twenty then and still using his real surname, Guglielmi. “He was a magnificent specimen of humanity, and had a disposition which matched his physical beauty,” Mae said. “Just to see his expressive hand lying on the back of a chair was art.” She was utterly smitten. As was everyone else. Which explains why she was so ready to admit, “We were attracted to each other from that first afternoon. Call it sex, if you will, but I call it a dancing friendship.”

  As enraptured by Valentino as Mae was, she was beginning to realize that she was still obsessed with Jay. She noticed that he didn’t come to her opening night at the Follies. Her big number was an “oriental love dance” in the Elysium scene, set in a Persian harem. Each night she looked out into the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Each night she tore open the envelopes bearing notes from her admirers, hoping to find one signed by him. He never came, and never wrote. Heartbroken, Mae ended her affair with Valentino—who promptly fell in love with Jack de Saulles’s long-suffering wife, Blanca.

  We shall step back here, just for a moment. Mae’s memoirs, which were serialized by the Hearst Corporation, were considered sensational, in more than one sense, when they were first published in 1942. Her friend Anita Loos called them “one long Valentine.” Even then people wondered how reliable they were. Years later, we can be sure that she twisted the truth for the sake of the tale and her sales. Jay’s own version of their affair, you suspect, would have read very differently had he ever written it. If, however, her account sometimes seems unbelievable, we should remember that Mae’s life was an incredible one, and her world was extraordinary. Nothing better illustrates that than this little side story.

  Blanca de Saulles, now in love with Valentino, was, understandably, desperate to get a divorce from her husband. Valentino agreed to testify that Jack de Saulles had had an affair with his dancing partner so that Blanca could secure her divorce and keep custody of her child. Jack, in turn, arranged to have Valentino arrested on vice charges by falsely alleging that the actor had been having an affair with a brothel madam. “This,” Mae wrote of the way de Saulles had Valentino arrested, “was a terrible and vicious thing to do, and Jack was to pay, for Rudy never deserved such treatment.” Soon after the de Saulleses’ divorce was finalized, Blanca drove to their country house in Westbury and demanded that Jack give her custody of their son, as the court had stipulated. When he refused, she drew a gun and pointed it at his head. When he tried to disarm her, she shot him dead. She was acquitted of murder, essentially on the grounds that de Saulles deserved it. It was, the New York Times said, “a popular verdict,” but one that had “no justification” other than the “emotional” one that she was a young, comely mother and he had been “dissolute, led an evil life, and had wasted her estate.”

  So the truth was sometimes even stranger than Mae made it seem. Remember that, as we move on to the most extraordinary chapter of her story.

  By the time of Valentino’s arrest, Mae had already quit New York for Hollywood, lured there by Zukor’s promise that he would arrange a red-carpet reception for her, with a brass band, when she got off the train. When she arrived, she was disappointed to find that Zukor had sent instead a fat man with a bunch of flowers. Mae saw Jay twice before she left the city. The first time was at a party, when he had ignored her as he offered his congratulations to all her co-stars in the Follies. “He never said one word that I might take personally! NOT ONE WORD! I felt the full cruelty of his blow then.” She flounced out. Jay’s somewhat transparent ploy seemed to be working. “His name rushed out and roared and tingled in my ears after every performance . . . and beat there cruelly in my heart when I was alone, disturbing me as I tried to rest.” The final time was when she bumped into him on Fifth Avenue. It was then she told him that she was moving to the West Coast.

  “I am a dancer and an actress,” she said. “I want to believe that I am, and with you I can’t believe anything. Not even that you love me.”

  “You seem to think it is what you want that counts,” Jay said. “It’s what you are. You are just a precious baby who belongs to me, not to Broadway, not to Hollywood. Dancing and acting and running away from me and doing the things I don’t want you to
do—they don’t count! You’re still my baby. Don’t you understand that by now?”

  And with that, he bundled her into the back of a cab, pressed his lips against hers, and then began to sob into her hair. Mae said, “I was more puzzled than ever about the strange bond between Jay and me”; he “was in torture because of me and I had been unhappy because of him. It did not seem right. His influence on my emotional life had not ended.”

  “All right, all right,” she said, out of pity as much as love. “I will marry you.”

  Jay and Mae agreed that she would go to Hollywood to work on her first picture—To Have and to Hold, co-starring “the screen’s most perfect lover” Wallace Reid—and then return to New York for the wedding. They parted the next day, with Jay telling her, “I intend to hold you to your promise, baby, about coming back after one picture and marrying me. Remember, if you don’t come back, I’ll come out and get you.” She did come back to New York, but only so she could break off the engagement. She was working for Cecil B. DeMille now and had fallen in love with her director on A Mormon Maid, Bob Leonard. Jay, just as he said he would, went out to Hollywood to persuade her to change her mind.

  Another of Mae’s biographers, Michael Ankerich, says that she changed her story about what happened next almost as often as she did the year of her birth. In her preferred version, Jay promised to leave her to Leonard if she would just come to the train station to say goodbye before he got on the train to New York. When she arrived, she was met by Jay and his friends “Pud” Sickle and his wife.

  “Jay’s train doesn’t leave for an hour,” Pud said. “We’re going out in my car. We have a little surprise.”

  They drove until they reached a large white house. She assumed it was the Sickles’, but then they had to ring the door to get in. As they sat in the sitting room, Mae asked Jay, “Who lives here?” And he replied, “The judge who is going to marry us.” He put one arm around her and pulled her close, then slipped his other hand into his pocket.

  “You can’t do this, Jay!” she said

  “Yes, I can. It is all arranged. What do you think I have been doing in town all day?”

  Mae felt the coat pocket press into her side. “And I knew what I felt was a gun.”

  She looked around for Pud and his wife, but they had left the room.

  “You can’t do this, Jay,” she insisted. “I’ll tell the judge I don’t want to marry you and that you have got a gun in your pocket.”

  “You can take your choice,” Jay said. “I could kill you but I couldn’t have you then. I could kill your red-headed boyfriend and you couldn’t have him, and you couldn’t have your career either. Know why? The publicity of having a director killed over a movie star would fix everything for you with your public.”

  “I couldn’t scream or even try to get away from him any longer. He had thought of everything. Everything. For the first time in my life I knew fear, and that’s why the situation slipped from my control.”

  Pud Sickle and his wife came back into the room with the man who owned the house.

  “Judge,” Jay said. “This is the future Mrs. O’Brien.”

  “The gun punched into my ribs,” wrote Mae. “I felt my face stretch into a smile. I heard my voice say ‘Yes, yes.’ I was so frightened I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Then, with Jay’s arm locked through mine, with his gun still jammed painfully in my side, we went through with the marriage ceremony.”

  In her memoirs, Mae said the couple then headed back to the Alexandria Hotel. During dinner she slipped out the bathroom window and caught a taxi back to the studio, where she was reunited with Bob Leonard. Certainly she and Jay quarreled at their wedding supper. Anita Loos remembered the couple had come to the Hollywood Hotel, rather than the Alexandria. “We all stopped dancing to applaud the glowing bride as she made her way toward the broad staircase on the arm of Hollywood’s first socialite bridegroom. But it is dismal to report that a brief two hours later the bridegroom booted the bride down the same staircase, out into the night. What happened between those honeymooners in the bridal suite is a mystery still.”

  What few facts can we extract from all that? Jay and Mae were certainly married by a justice of the peace on December 18, 1916. The witnesses were, indeed, one “Mr. and Mrs. J. Harrington Sickle.” Both the bride and groom lied about their ages. And they were divorced on August 30, 1918. Mae testified in court that between the wedding night and the court date she had seen Jay only once, when he had “choked her and thrown her across a room.” She left the courthouse in tears.

  We have to leave Mae behind now. If it seems a sudden separation, it is no sharper than the break between the two of them. While they were separated but still married, they were once seen out at the same restaurant, each eating with someone else and refusing even to acknowledge the other. A fortnight after the divorce, Mae and Bob Leonard announced that they were engaged to be married. Her haste made Jay seem almost reserved: he waited almost an entire a year before he got engaged again.

  His second wife was Irene Fenwick, a star like Mae, but brunette rather than blonde, and a real actress rather than a dancer and showgirl. She had dabbled with the movies but was best known for her work in the theater. They were married on June 14, 1919. This time the marriage lasted beyond the wedding night, but not all that much longer. By the summer of 1922 the papers were full of rumors that Fenwick was in love with her costar in The Claw, Lionel Barrymore. When Barrymore divorced his wife in the winter of 1922, Irene decided to publicly deny the affair. She and Jay were “happily married.” This was a lie. It was common knowledge that the two of them had drifted apart, but Jay was refusing to grant her the divorce she wanted. Soon enough, the decision was taken out of his hands.

  Irene and Jay had separate charge accounts at the same Fifth Avenue jewelry store, which they had once used to buy each other surprise gifts. The bookkeeper there mistakenly billed her for “a number of expensive trinkets and baubles” that she hadn’t bought. When Irene questioned the salesman at the store, he soon spilled the story that Jay had been there buying jewelry. This would have been little more than embarrassing if Jay had ever given Irene those same “trinkets and baubles.” But whoever they were for, it wasn’t her. So Irene hired a private detective, Val O’Farrell, to tail Jay. O’Farrell followed him to the McAplin Hotel and watched him dine with a “28-year-old girl in a Hudson seal coat and hat.” After dinner they went to an apartment on West 144th Street. A short but judicious wait later, O’Farrell kicked the door down and caught the two of them “en déshabillé.” The divorce process started soon after. It was discreetly done, with all references to Irene’s profession and stage name omitted from the papers and proceedings. Jay had been entirely outwitted by his wife—and, you suspect, by Lionel Barrymore. He and Irene were married in Rome on July 14, 1923, four days after her divorce from Jay was made absolute.

  —

  You’d think going through two divorces in the space of five years might change a man, or at least teach him a thing or two. Not Jay. The only real differences between the man who married Mae and the one who was divorced by Irene were his pastimes, and the company he kept while he was at them. He still bet big money on baseball. In 1922 he lost at least $2,700 to Rothstein backing the Yankees against the Giants (Rothstein always backed the Giants). But Jay played golf now, not cards, and had taken up polo instead of horse racing. So he was in more rarefied air, at a remove from the seedy New York scene he had been in.

  In the summer of 1923, he had to step back from it after getting caught up in the “Fuller-McGee mess,” a bankruptcy case that had spun out into a high-profile fraud scandal. Rothstein was called to testify and was grilled about a mysterious entry in his books called “Account No. 600,” which the lawyers were convinced would provide evidence of his complicity in fixing the 1919 World Series. There were two names on the account. One was Rothstein’s, the other was Jay’s. So he qu
it town for a time, headed down to Miami to play a little golf. And then, when the heat had died down, he traveled up to Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, to take part in a polo tournament at the Lindens, a grand country pile owned by a man named Julius Fleischmann.

  Jay and his friends were wealthy, but Fleischmann was in a different bracket altogether. His father had created the United States’ first commercially produced yeast, and, cannily enough, set up a distillery to make gin from the alcohol that was left over from the process. His factories supplied the yeast that allowed people to bake warm, fresh bread, and his distilleries turned the by-product into the booze they used in their martinis. That formula made him a millionaire many times over. Julius, his eldest son, was worth at least sixty million dollars, even though he had to share the family fortune with three siblings. And he had political power. He had been mayor of Cincinnati, the youngest ever at the age of twenty-eight, and he had served as William McKinley’s aide when he was state governor. He had a stake in almost every major commercial interest in the city, from the Market National Bank right down to the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, which he co-owned with his brother.

  Fleischmann, born in 1871, was a great philanthropist and an even better bon vivant, in his pomp a prototype Gatsby. His house in Cincinnati sat in the middle of two square miles of land. Great glass doors opened from the indoor pool out onto the lawn, where a fountain ran down to the moat encircling the house. Alongside the pool was a ballroom, and beneath that, a wine cellar. If he wasn’t there, Fleischmann was as often as not on his steam-powered yacht the Hiawatha, at 138 feet long one of the largest privately owned vessels in the world. Or he was in Kentucky, where he kept a stable of thirty thoroughbred steeplechasers. Or he was at his house on Long Island, the Lindens. He played polo, poorly, but loved it so much that in 1922 he had built his own ground at the Lindens, with a six-room stable for twenty-four ponies, alongside a kennel that housed a pack of fifty Sealyham terriers. People came for the sport and stayed for the parties, where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would put it in The Great Gatsby, “floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot,” and the women were accompanied by “men said to be their husbands.”