Miss Bang Bang

Ann Woodward was born in Kansas but was smart and talented enough to get a job in radio in New York

She won the odd title of “Most Beautiful Woman in Radio” and in 1942, her beauty caught the eye of William Woodward Sr. 

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At some point in 1942, William Woodward Sr. passed the 27-year-old Ann on to his son, five years her junior. It was love at first sight and very quickly the two were wed.

While her son’s marriage started off happy, Elsie Woodward, the socialite who ran the most exclusive parlor of the New York 400, saw her new daughter-in-law as a gold digger who latched on to her son merely to get her hands on his $10 million fortune.

Billy’s sisters also froze off Ann. Even though she had been famous in her own right — her work on radio had gained the notice of The New York Times — she was too gaudy and flashy for their tastes. She once made the unforgivable faux pas of wearing red shoes with a blue dress and was seen smoking in public long before such behavior was tolerated in their circles.

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The friction Ann felt in high society contributed to the problems at home. Both had roving eyes that created fireworks. Billy’s rumored bisexuality only made things worse.

Billy and Ann had one of those relationships that was too fractious to keep together and too strong to break apart. They sparred openly in public over many things, not the least of which were her affairs with the likes of the Aga Khan and Franchot Tone and his with any number of debutantes.

Franchot Tone found here

In between fights there was obviously affection, as the couple soon had two children, William III (nicknamed Woody) and Jimmy, born in 1944 and 1947.

At a swank party for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Billy and Ann Woodward were noticeably agitated, guests would recall later, talking incessantly about the recent spate of burglaries in their upscale Oyster Bay, Long Island neighborhood.

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No one at the party remembers Ann or Billy squabbling that night, although many guests do recall the event had been particularly boozy.

By the time the couple returned home, it was 1 a.m. and 11-year-old Woody and 7-year-old Jimmy were fast asleep in their beds. Ann and Billy bade each other good night and retired to their own rooms. Behind locked doors, Billy slept with a revolver nearby while Ann was armed with a double-barreled shotgun.

shotgun found here

Two hours later Ann awoke to find her dog, Sloppy, barking at her open door. Ann told authorities she saw a “shadowy figure” near Billy’s room, backlit against the pale moonlight streaming in from a hallway window. She reached for the 12-gauge shotgun and pulled the trigger.

“Almost immediately,” Ann testified later, “I realized it was my husband. I ran and fell on the floor beside him.” Ann pulled herself away long enough to call for help. She summoned an ambulance, police and, in a move that some would use to damn her, an attorney.

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In the face of widespread press coverage, the district attorney convened a grand jury to investigate the shooting. Shortly after she buried her husband, Ann Woodward appeared before the grand jury and told her account of events.

The jurors took just 30 minutes to deliberate and find that Ann had acted without malice and that the shooting was unintentional. She was completely exonerated in the eyes of the law.

Over petit fours and champagne, the grande dames whispered that Ann had once been a prostitute. She had been previously married and had killed Billy when he discovered that her first marriage had never been legally ended. Unfortunately for Ann, the rumors gained a measure of truth when it came out that her father was not the “late Col. Crowell,” as was listed in the Woodwards’ wedding announcement, but was, in fact, alive and well and estranged from his daughter (he erroneously thought the actress Eve Arden was actually his child).

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The Woodward boys were whisked off to European boarding schools shortly after their father’s death. They had slept through the shooting and could offer no helpful information to investigators. The move would have profound ramifications in later years, as neither boy was ever given a satisfactory explanation by mother or grandmother about the events leading to their father’s death.

Jimmy Woodward managed to make it through Switzerland’s exclusive Le Rosey school (its alumni included Prince Rainier of Monaco, the Shah of Iran and the King of Belgium) and volunteered for service in Vietnam so he could serve with a friend who had been drafted. When his friend was killed, Jimmy turned to drugs and drink. 

Prince Rainier found here

Jimmy became paranoid and convinced that people were spying on him through his television set. He attempted suicide by jumping out the window of a friend’s apartment and succeeded in breaking his arms and legs. It was while Jimmy was convalescing that he started seeing notorious prostitute Xaviera Hollander, author of the book “The Happy Hooker.” Hollander included several stories about Jimmy in her second book, “Xaviera, Her Continuing Adventures,” in a chapter called “Jimmy, Don’t Jump Again.”

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In time, the stories about Ann Woodward reached author Truman Capote, who ingratiated himself with Elsie’s circle and began collecting anecdotes and gossip. The idea for a novel based on real-life characters – began forming in Capote’s mind and Ann Woodward was at the center.

Capote never let the facts get in the way of a good story and wasn’t above using his skill as a storyteller to get back at those who had slighted him. When he and Ann quarreled at a debutante ball and Ann, her tongue loosened by drink, called him a “little faggot,” Truman responded by dubbing her “Miss Bang Bang.”

Capote found here

At the request of a friend who edited Ladies Home Journal, Truman penned a wicked story about a woman of loose morals known as “Madame Marmalade” by the boys of the French Riviera for a “trick she did using her tongue and jam.” The story proved too racy and too controversial for Ladies Home Journal and Capote looked elsewhere for a market.

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In September 1975, Ann received a shocking telephone call from a friend in the publishing business. Capote had sold his story to Esquire magazine. “In a few weeks, everyone would be talking about the thinly disguised Capote story in which someone very like Ann Woodward turns out to be a bigamist and the former girlfriend of a gangster who traps her rich society husband into marrying her by becoming pregnant.”

Ann became increasingly forlorn and depressed. As she prepared for bed, she made up her face with makeup, lipstick, eye shadow and mascara. Then Ann Woodward lay down on her side on her bed, took a single cyanide capsule, and died.

Jimmy never recovered from his mother’s death. The cocaine and heroin, guilt and remorse took its toll on him and less than a year after Ann Woodward died, Jimmy did jump again. This time he was successful in ending his life.

Woody married in 1985 and lived overseas in a life of comfort. But in 1996, his wife filed for divorce. The divorce and separation from his child took its toll on Woody who suffered from bipolar disorder and in 1999, after revising his will to leave his $35 million estate entirely to his daughter, the 54-year-old Woodward followed in the steps of his mother and brother, and leapt out the window of his Manhattan co-op.

fasten your seatbelt, it’s going to be a bumpy night

Alfred Loewenstein (1877-1928) was, at one stage in the 1920s, called the richest man in the world.

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Admittedly a brilliant financial mind, Loewenstein was devoid of either financial or personal ethics, with a reputation as a serial adulterer.

His first big break came when he joined the Belgian armed forces during the First World War and was sent to London, England where he was placed in charge of military supplies. Zeroing in on the incredible profits to be made contracting to the British Army, by the end of the war Loewenstein was a pound sterling millionaire. How he managed to accomplish this on the salary of a lowly captain was never explained.

Vote for Captain Kangaroo here

On the morning of July 4, 1928 a Fokker tri-motor aircraft took off from Croydon airfield just outside London, bound for Brussels. On board were the plane’s owner, 51 year-old Alfred Loewenstein, the pilot, former WWI ace Donald Drew, as well as mechanic Robert F. Little, a valet, a male secretary; and two female stenographers who had just been hired from a temp agency that day, making a total of seven people.

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According to the four people in the passenger compartment, soon after the plane crossed the English coast off Dover, flying at 4,000 feet, Loewenstein, who had been reading a book, laid it down after carefully marking the place, took off his collar and tie, went to the washroom.

Onboard lavatories were a new development in aviation comfort, this particular model of Fokker being one of the first ever equipped with such an amenity. It was in a small compartment at the back of the plane. After passing through the compartment door, Loewenstein went to the left and entered the bathroom. On the right was another door, which led out of the plane. There was also a door in a bulkhead separating the head from the rest of the aircraft, so anyone coming and going into rest room was not visible from the main compartment.

aircraft toilet in its case found here

After about ten minutes they noticed he had not returned and his valet went to check on him and found…nothing. The ‘richest man in the world’ had vanished. 

After circling for a short time in an unsuccessful search for Loewenstein, at about 6:30 pm the plane landed on a deserted beach on the Normandy coast for half an hour, and no clear account was ever obtainable as to what the passengers and crew did there. The plane took off again and made a three or four-minute flight, landing a second time at a French military airfield nearby, where the crew told authorities that their boss Loewenstein was missing.

Omaha Beach, Normandy found here

Speculation surrounded the possibility that Lowenstein may have become confused when leaving the lavatory and opened the wrong door, plunging several thousand feet to his death in the English Channel.

 Officials of the Fokker Aircraft Corporation said indignantly that their doors were intentionally designed so that the blast of air would make it absolutely impossible for them to be opened in flight, except by the united efforts of two very strong men. 

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Among the rumors surrounding his disappearance, some suspected a criminal conspiracy in which his employees murdered him, others speculated that a growing absent mindedness, noted by many of Lowenstein’s acquaintances, may have caused him to walk out the wrong door of the plane.

Because he had left behind a tangled web of business ventures, others theorized that his business empire was on the verge of collapse. Some even asserted that corrupt business practices were about to be exposed and that Lowenstein, therefore, committed suicide.

 Then there were those who believed he was an early model for D.B. Cooper, having originated the idea of parachuting out of the aircraft to be picked up by a waiting yacht and spirited off to an unknown destination in order to escape his collapsing empire. 

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Immediately following Loewenstein’s disappearance an air and sea search came up empty-handed, but two weeks later his body was found, wearing only underpants and socks, floating in mid-channel by a fishing trawler.

An autopsy was carried out by Belgian authorities and it was discovered that Loewenstein did not die of drowning, but apparently of the pulverizing internal injuries which occurred when his body slammed into the ocean after falling for about four thousand feet.

Which makes Vesna Vulovic’s survival all the more amazing:

Vesna found here

There was really nothing special about this lady, except for the fact that she fell 33,000 feet and lived to tell the tale.

On January 26, 1972 she was working an extra shift due to a clerical error. She took the shift anyway to earn a little extra scratch, probably to supplement her bear-wrestling hobby or something. Anyway, some terrorists decided to blow up her plane and succeeded in doing so at the worst possible time, when the plane was really high up in the air.

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Not only did she survive the explosion that blew the plane to pieces, but she was the only person to live after hitting the side of the mountain. It was winter so the mountain was also frozen 

She did in fact break a bunch of bones and fell into a coma, but when she woke up she looked around and asked for a cigarette. She was left paralyzed … but then regained her ability to walk through sheer force of will. She also didn’t suffer any of those New Age, sissy boy “psychological effects” and continued to fly like nothing happened. As a bonus she collected a Guinness World Record for her troubles.

Vesna receiving her award found here

a pimple on the arse of the empire

Sir Harry Oakes (1874-1943) was a wealthy goldmine owner who earned his fortune in Canada and moved to the Bahamas for tax purposes.

Sir Harry and the Duke of Windsor found here

On the night of 7 July 1943, Sir Harry Oakes went to bed in his magnificent home in Cable Beach. The next morning one of his house guests found the millionaire had been battered to death and his partly burnt body strewn with white feathers.

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The case that followed resulted in one of the most famous trials – and acquittals – of the day. His death is one of the great unsolved murders. It had everything: the involvement of the Duke of Windsor, who was governor of the Bahamas at the time; the Mafia; crooked lawyers; corrupt police; fake aristocrats and greedy playboys. There was even a walk-on role for the novelist Ernest Hemingway, and one of the American journalists sent to Nassau to cover the case was Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason.

Ernest Hemingway found here

Suspicion fell on Sir Harry’s son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, a French Mauritian. The “Count” was not popular among the Bahamian set. He was considered a cad, a fake aristocrat, and a gold-digger. Married twice before, he had eloped with Sir Harry’s teenage daughter, Nancy, the day she became old enough to inherit her father’s fortune. The Duke of Windsor despised De Marigny, describing him as “an unscrupulous adventurer with an evil reputation for immoral conduct with young girls”. De Marigny was equally rude about the Duke, dismissing him as “a pimple on the arse of the Empire”.

Count Alfred De Marigny found here

Sir Harry had been struck twice on the skull with a sharp instrument. There had also been an attempt to set his bedroom on fire, using inflammable insecticide. The case against De Marigny centred on discovery of his fingerprints on a screen in Sir Harry’s bedroom. But the defence proved the fingerprint had been lifted and placed in the bedroom, almost certainly by the Miami detectives. Despite being acquitted, De Marigny was deported. He fled with his bride to stay with their friend Ernest Hemingway in Cuba.

1940s Cuban postcard found here

The lack of a conviction led to speculation, including talk of a Mafia hit in revenge for Sir Harry’s opposition to the legalisation of gambling on the islands. His friend Harold Christie, a former rum smuggler as well as a property speculator, was also a suspect. Others named the tycoon’s lawyer, Walter Foskett, as the man responsible for the killing. Further evidence suggests the Duke may have stifled the murder inquiry, possibly to save his reputation and to protect two of his friends who fell under suspicion.

Duke and Duchess and friend found here

Oakes’s murderer was never identified by official investigation, and there were no subsequent court proceedings after de Marigny’s acquittal. The case received worldwide press coverage at the time, with photos of the beautiful and charming Nancy de Marigny in court. It has been the subject of continuous interest ever since, with several books and films, even into the 21st century.

Nancy Oakes found here

De Marigny and Nancy separated in 1945, and were divorced in 1949. Nancy left Cuba in the late 1940s, and lived in Hollywood, where she had a long love affair with 1950s actor Richard Greene. They remained close friends until his death.

Richard Greene found here

unnecessary wiles and villainies

Janet Smith was 21 when she took a position as the nanny of wealthy Frederick and Doreen Baker’s baby daughter.

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The Bakers were among the social elite in Vancouver. They lived on the fashionable West Side, then moved in May 1924 to the exclusive Shaughnessy Heights neighborhood.

Their Chinese houseboy, Wong Foon Sing, became infatuated with Janet Smith, giving her presents such as a silk nightdress. Although her friends would later testify that she feared him, her diary would reveal that she enjoyed attracting men.

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On 26 July 1924, Point Grey Police Constable James Green was called to the house. Wong claimed he had heard what sounded like a car backfire; in the basement he found Smith’s body. There was a bullet wound through her temple and a .45 caliber revolver near her right hand.

ivory handled colt 45 found here

Green picked up the weapon, making it impossible to obtain fingerprints from it. Despite there being no bullet, blood or brain tissue on the walls, no powder burns on her face (suggesting she had been shot from a distance), and the fact that the back of her head had been smashed in, Green concluded that she had committed suicide. 

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Undertakers were summoned, and instructed by both the coroner and the police to embalm the body, likely eradicating any clues that it might have yielded, for instance whether Smith had been sexually assaulted. It was the first time the undertaker had embalmed the victim of a violent death without a postmortem. He found unexplained burns on Smith’s right side but a jury bought the scenario that had Janet interrupting her ironing in the basement to walk upstairs to the attic where the gun was kept, carrying it back down to the basement and, holding the pistol at arm’s length, somehow shooting herself in the head.

Steve Martin ironing a kitten found here

Friends pressured the provincial government and Attorney General Alexander Malcolm Manson to reopen the case. The Vancouver Star, a scandal sheet published by Victor Odlum, was quick to pounce on the affair.

The body was exhumed on 28 August and a second inquest held. This time the jury concluded that Smith had been murdered. Manson appointed a special prosecutor, Malcolm Bruce Jackson.

Suspicion immediately fell on Wong, the only other person in the house when the crime was supposedly committed. In the 1920s, persons of Chinese descent could not become Canadian citizens, which meant they could not join professions such as medicine, architecture or law. They were barred from public swimming pools and restricted to the balconies of movie theatres. The Star published several articles in late July and early August in which it portrayed Wong as the likely killer.

read about this Chinese swimmer here

Victor Odlum was an “exclusionist”; he believed that Asians could not assimilate with whites and had run on an anti-Asian platform in the 1921 federal election. In August, he published an editorial called “Should Chinese Work with White Girls? He called for legislation to “preserve white girls of impressionable youth from the unnecessary wiles and villainies of low caste yellow men”

Bruce and Bolo found here

Interest gradually died down, until on 20 March 1925, Wong was kidnapped by a group of men dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes. They proceeded to torture their captive for six weeks, trying to elicit a confession, but Wong refused to cooperate. On 1 May, he was released.

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A scandal later developed when it was discovered that the kidnappers included “two Point Grey police commissioners, the chief of police, a detective sergeant and three prominent officials of the city’s Scottish societies.” One man pleaded guilty to kidnapping. A detective and his son were also convicted, but the jury gave a “strong recommendation of mercy”. The Point Grey policemen were acquitted, the government controversially barring prosecution of the others.

Meanwhile, Wong was put on trial for murder. In October, the case was thrown out of court due to lack of evidence. Wong went back to work for the Bakers. In 1926, he left the country for Hong Kong.

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Other theories gained popularity. According to one rumor, Smith had been raped and murdered at a wild party at the Baker house by wealthy playboys, who then bribed the authorities to cover it up. Writer Ed Starkins proposed Frederick Baker as the killer, portraying him as a drug smuggler. Some even claimed the killer was the Prince of Wales, who had recently popped into Victoria incognito, using the title Earl of Renfrew.

Prince of Wales and Mountbatten found here

A few years ago, a history student going through former attorney-general Manson’s private papers found a copy of a letter that was sent to Janet Smith’s parents in London.

It said their daughter’s killer had committed suicide in 1925 in a private New Westminster sanatorium known as Hollywood Hospital. Police had not arrested the killer, Manson wrote, because the publicity would have shamed the family of the lieutenant-governor.

Hollywood Hospital found here

That points to Jack Nichol, the playboy son of Lieutenant-Governor Walter Nichol, who was also the publisher of The Province. The only problem is that Jack Nichol did not die in Hollywood Hospital. He died in Victoria in 1941, more than 15 years after Manson wrote to Janet’s parents.

Gloria Steinem as a Playboy bunny found here

Constable Green left the Point Grey police force in 1926 and bought a half interest in a downtown hotel. The gossips always claimed, with no proof, that the money he used to buy his share was hush money from Frederick Baker, Janet Smith’s employer.

By April, 1956, Baker had moved to Qualicum, on Vancouver Island. On a visit to Vancouver to see his doctor, Baker checked into the St. Regis Hotel. He was in the room with a Doris MacAuly when, as MacAuly would tell police, he suddenly said, “I’m suffocating,’’ opened the window and climbed out on the fire escape.

Despite MacAuly’s attempts to hold him back, the 65-year old Baker then tumbled 15 metres to the sidewalk. Baker had checked into the hotel under the name L.L. Smith.

home improvement ideas from the rich and famous

***William Beckford (1760-1844) was once the wealthiest man in England. Wherever he travelled he was accompanied by his personal doctor, cook, valet, baker, two dogs, three footmen, 24 musicians and a Spanish dwarf.

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It was said that for one trip to Portugal, he even took with him a flock of sheep in order to improve the view from his window. Wherever he stayed, he supplied his own bed, cutlery, crockery and wallpaper.

Vintage wallpaper found here

He also appears to have been a paedophile. (I’m not condoning the behaviour, just reporting a sad, strange, interesting and possibly wasted life)

By the time he died at the venerable age of 84, he had built the loftiest domestic residence in the world, had assembled a virtual harem of boys, had his own militia to protect his Fonthill estate of 6,000 acres, had written the first Oriental-Gothic horror novel in English literature, and had become the most scandalous connoisseur of hedonism in the modern world.

Fonthill Abbey ceilings found here

Beckford received a brilliant education, and was widely learned in French, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, philosophy, law, literature and physics by the age of 17. His private piano teacher was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — at least that is the legend, too romantic to be discouraged.

piano students found here

When this self-styled Caliph was 19, he fell in love with the Hon William Courtenay, later 3rd Viscount and 9th Earl of Devon, then ten years old and regarded as one of the most beautiful boys in England. Beckford and Courtenay saw each other frequently for nearly six peaceful years.

William Courtenay found here

But in 1784, a visitor to Powderham claimed to have heard some “strange goings on” in Courtenay’s bedroom, with Beckford apparently in bed with the lad. Soon the newspapers started circulating rumours about the country squire and his “Kitty,” as the beautiful Courtenay was effeminately dubbed. Beckford and Courtenay were forced to separate to avoid further reprisal.

The scandal of 1784 was partly fabricated or at least exaggerated by Courtenay’s vindictive uncle Lord Loughborough, and we cannot be sure that specific sexual acts took place; but the general charge was almost certainly true.

Laughing Lord Loughborough found here

Upon his eventual return to England, Beckford shielded himself behind an eight mile long, twelve foot high wall topped by iron spikes, surrounding his estate (it was also built because he loved animals, and wanted to keep out hunters). He imported a dwarf to be his doorkeeper (and with whom he shared the pornography occasionally sent by Franchi from London), an abbé from France as spiritual advisor (and also as tolerant confidant concerning boy-troubles), a physician from Italy, and a harem of boy-servants for diversion, some picked up in England.

More paintings by Velazquez here

His household of young male servants were all given revealing gay nicknames: “there is pale Ambrose, infamous Poupee, horrid Ghoul, insipid Mme Bion, cadaverous Nicobuse, the portentous dwarf, frigid Silence, Miss Long, Miss Butterfly, Countess Pox, Mr Prudent Well-Sealed-up, The Monkey, The Turk, and others.

“Butterfly Boy” by Jerome Leibling found here

His exclusion from society was compensated for by the transformation of Fonthill Abbey into a Gothic cathedral to rival nearby Salisbury Cathedral. With the help of the leading architect of the day, James Wyatt, he raised a tower that was nearly 300 feet high.

By the 1820s, Beckford had spent so much money on Fonthill that he was forced to mortgage it. In 1823 he sold it to a gunpowder maker for nearly five million dollars. He then bought an estate near Bath and built what he called Lansdown Baghdad, with a much shorter tower. Then in his late sixties, he became respectably eccentric, rather than scandalously debauched, until his death.

Fonthill Abbey found here

Beckford’s personality still remains enigmatic, even for his modern biographers. “He was,” in the opinion of Alistair Sutherland, “as much a martyr as Wilde, and almost certainly a more interesting and civilised man.” He was immensely intelligent as well as a hedonist, a serious artist as well as a social rebel, and more honest than eccentric.

***Excerpted from the web page of Rictor Norton found here

Khashoggi’s cosmos

Adnan Khashoggi was once touted as the richest man in the world, which was probably an exaggeration, but he certainly knew how to spend.

High above the clouds, Adnan Khashoggi’s DC-8 is cruising noiselessly toward his estate in Marbella, Spain. His guests, sipping 1961 Chateau Margaux from crystal goblets, lounge on the jet’s cream-colored chamois-and-silk banquettes. His masseur, his valet, his barber and his chiropractor — they accompany him everywhere — are relaxing as well because “A.K.,” as he is known to his employees, is fast asleep on the $200,000 Russian sable spread covering his 10 foot wide bed in one of the plane’s three bedrooms.

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In the plane’s fully equipped kitchen, Khashoggi’s chef is preparing hors d’oeuvres. They will be served on white china, embossed in gold with the letters AK, designed, along with the crystal and flatware, at a cost of $750,000. The plane, which Khashoggi bought for $31 million and had reconfigured for an additional $9 million, has the streamlined and futuristic feel of a flying 21st century Las Vegas disco. In the sumptuous lounges, digital panels indicate the time and altitude, and electronic maps chart the jet’s current position. Inside a coffee table, a color monitor shows a view of the ground. Built into the ceiling is an elaborate electronic map of the cosmos, a 50th-birthday gift to Khashoggi, who is fascinated by astronomy. One by one, against a dark background, the outline of the constellations lights up, the tiny stars winking against the blankness. Aquarius . . . Cancer . . . Gemini . . . Then there is Leo, Khashoggi’s birth sign, and as the constellation brightens, a small image of the round-faced, mustachioed Saudi Arabian arms merchant and businessman flashes on and off, on and off.

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Fantastic parties are a Khashoggi signature. Christmas was a simple tea compared with his 50th birthday fete in 1985, at which he entertained more than 400 guests at a three day extravaganza. His birthday cake, a model of Louis XIV’s coronation crown, was created by a chef who was flown to the Louvre to study the original.

Moroccan pillow cake found here

Khashoggi’s parties also take place in his 30,000 sq.ft. quarters incorporating the 46th and 47th floors of the Olympic Towers in Manhattan. Created out of 16 separate apartments, the abode has a pool that overlooks the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

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His wife Lamia dresses according to the Joan Collins Dynasty handbook, complete with diamonds and decolletage. With her, as with her husband, more is definitely more. Her idea of casual is to wear a one-inch ruby-and-diamond ring with matching ruby earrings. Her 40- carat diamond wedding ring covers the lower half of her ring finger. She asserts that size does not matter. “It’s the sentiment that counts,” she says.

Lovely Lamia found here

how the rich party and do business

Ron Rosenbaum did some great interviews back in the 1980s. Here’s an excerpt from a lunch interview with Malcolm Forbes.

“We’re in Forbes’s baronial drawing room having drinks and getting into the intricacies of investigative yachting. To hear Forbes tell it, the yachting experience is a powerful investigative tool.

“If you spend all day with a man and his wife on a boat and see their interplay with other CEOs on the boat, you get a gut feeling….”

Every year Forbes targets about 150 CEOs who are ripe for an investigative cruise. In a veritable investigative blitz, invitations go out to up to 25 CEOs for 6 weekend cruises with the Forbes family up the Hudson.

Malcolm’s toy boat collection

Then there’s the wine cellar which is the inner sanctum of investigative lunching at Forbes.

“All four walls are lined from floor to ceiling with racks of ageing bottles in repose. And hung from the ceiling are dozens of silver wine cups with dangerous looking silver antlers projecting from the rims.

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“We bring some CEO here who likes wines. Sometimes we’ll give him a bottle of the year of his birth. The only promise we extract from him is that if he opens it and it’s vinegar, he won’t tell us. We engrave two of these silver wine cups with the date of his visit, then a year later we send him one and keep the other here. The idea is we tell them if their cup is in the wine cellar, anytime they’re in the neighbourhood they’re entitled to come down here and open any bottle of wine they want.”

Forbes Wine Cellar

Forbes chose the Palais Mendoub in the northwestern city of Tangier, Morocco to host his 70th birthday party. Spending an estimated $2.5 million, he chartered a Boeing 747, a DC-8 and a Concorde to fly in eight hundred of the world’s rich and famous from New York and London. The party entertainment was on a grand scale, including 600 drummers, acrobats and dancers and a fantasia (a cavalry charge which ends with the firing of muskets into the air) by 300 Berber horsemen.

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mutton chops for me

When I was growing up in New Zealand we ate a lot of lamb roasts and mutton was considered suitable only for stews. You may remember Colonel D’Alton Mann thought they were a delicacy best paired with a bottle of champagne. Here’s another newspaperman who thought they made a worthy meal.

JGB and the first motor car in Granada

James Gordon Bennett and his son published the New York Herald. Gordon Bennett Jr., while devoted to the paper was also an avid sportsman and playboy, who, like Colonel Mann, liked to dine at Delmonico’s. One night while drinking there, a fire alarm went off nearby. Totally inebriated, he dashed outside in his evening clothes and made such a nuisance of himself trying to direct the firefighting operations that one of the firemen turned the hose upon him and sent him sprawling down the block. The next day when he sobered up he ordered rubber overcoats for all firefighters as he’d “never been so wet in all his life”.

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He considered his income of a million dollars a year to be almost inexhaustible and once threw a large roll of bills into the fire because it interfered with the use of his pocket and spoiled the line of his pants. Occasionally he moved through restaurants pulling the cloths off tables and crunching crockery beneath his feet, telling the maitre’d to send the bill to his office.

Gordon Bennett was a dog fancier who sometimes judged the men in his office by how his dogs responded to them. Staff who were out of favour were known to secret portions of meat about their person to gain acceptance from the various Cocker Spaniels, Pomeranians and Pekinese who accompanied their master to work each day.

Pomeranian

A keen sailor, he also practiced the gentlemanly sports of auto racing, pugilism and ballooning. He was a master of the lost art of coaching and was often seen riding his coach and four naked at midnight, destroying the formal gardens of his neighbours in the process and paying for repairs later.

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One of the many incidents for which he was well known was the fighting of the last duel in New York. The ludicrous affair began when he arrived at the home of his fiancée, Caroline, in a partying mood. After consuming prodigious amounts of wine he proceeded to relieve himself in the astonished lady’s fireplace. He was flung out in the street and the next day Caroline’s brother waylaid him outside the Union Club and attacked him with a horsewhip. Bennett challenged him to a formal duel two days later with a retinue of surgeons at Slaughter Gap. No one was hurt as both men, who were excellent shots, settled the matter by firing in the air.

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Bennett was always the master of the grand gesture. On a bet, he once coaxed a cavalry officer to ride his horse into the library of Newport’s most distinguished men’s club. When the board of directors chastised him he bought a huge plot of land nearby and built the Newport Casino, a far more extravagantly elegant club. When his favourite mutton chop-serving restaurant was too full to accept his booking he promptly bought it on the spot for $40,000. As the new owner, he had a table cleared and sat down to lunch. When he left he tipped the waiter most generously by handing him the deed to the restaurant with the proviso that there must always be a table reserved for him and that mutton chops would always be on the menu.

not these mutton chops

Dude!

Berry Wall (1860-1940) was known as King of the Dudes.

His father and grandfather each left him more than $1 million between his 18th and 22nd birthdays, which enabled a certain grandeur. Thereafter, Wall never drank water – only champagne – and sported a walrus mustache, gleaming monocle, and high, stiff collars encircled by one of his 5,000 flamboyant neckties. Wall eventually owned a wardrobe of 500 outfits, useful for someone who completely changed his clothing at least six times daily.

Unlike the classic dandy Beau Brummell, who aspired to quiet sartorial perfection, Wall liked color, in not only his neckties but his waistcoats of tropical pattern, loud checked suits, lavender spats, and at least one outfit described as “an amazement of tweeds.” His justification: “People should wear what suits them.”

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One sultry August evening in Saratoga, Wall escorted a pretty girl to a ball at the Grand Union Hotel while wearing what was the first dinner jacket publicly seen in the Americas. An incandescent manager immediately ordered him off the floor. He was only readmitted after he went to his room and changed into an acceptable evening coat with tails.

how to fold a dinner jacket napkin

Wall became famous after meeting Blakely Hall, a reporter hungry for good copy. Thereafter, every week or so, Hall’s articles publicizing Wall’s adventures in clothing appeared in newspapers across the country. Then one of Hall’s competitors set up a rival, actor Robert “Bob” Hilliard, another flashy dresser. Thus began the Battle of the Dudes, in which each sought to eclipse the other in sartorial extremes. According to the Times, Wall finally won when, during the Great Blizzard of 1888, he strode into the Hoffman House bar clad in gleaming boots of black patent leather that went to his hips.

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Wall won another contest in Saratoga when daredevil financier John “Bet-A-Million” Gates wagered that he could not wear 40 changes of clothes between breakfast and dinner. On the appointed day, Wall repeatedly appeared at the racetrack in one flashy ensemble after another until, exhausted but victorious, he at last entered the ballroom of the United States Hotel in faultless evening attire to wild applause.

John Bet-a-Million Gates

Wall and his wife were famous members of the French social elite, with a society that included the Duchess of Windsor, the Grand Duke Dimitri, the Aga Khan and ex-king Nicholas of Montenegro, whom Wall called a “magnificent old darling”.

Magnificent Old Darling

They lived with their chow dog Chi-Chi in the Hotel Meurice, where he had his signature “spread eagle” collar shirts and cravats custom-made for both himself and his dog: Wall always dined at the Ritz with his dog, whose collars and ties were made by Charvet in the same style and fabric as his master’s.

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Wall ascribed his longevity to having nothing to do with physicians, claiming: “There are more old drunkards than there are old doctors.” His self-indulgent life brought him great happiness, and he remained a fixture of fashionable life, whether in Paris, Deauville, Biarritz, or Aix-les-Bains, until his death in Monte Carlo on May 5, 1940. Wall’s timing was impeccable: He left only $12,608, having squandered nearly every cent on pleasure.

Cinderella of my heart

Pierre Arnold Bernard (1875-1955) had an abiding interest in Tantra

“Known in the popular American press as “Oom the Omnipotent,” Bernard became notorious throughout newspapers and journals as a spiritual leader and philosopher as well as a philanderer, seducer of women and purveyor of scandalous indecencies.

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Wily con man, yogi, athlete, bank president, founder of the Tantrik Order in America and the Clarkestown Country Club …the remarkable “Doctor” Bernard was all of these.

Bernard simulating his own death

In 1904, Bernard established a clinic in San Francisco where he taught his own versions of self-hypnosis and yoga, which eventually became known as the “Bacchante Academy.” Even then, Bernard had become something of a scandal in the California press, who charged that the Academy “catered to young women interested in learning hypnotism and soul charming by which they meant the mysteries of the relations between the sexes”

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Teaching Hatha Yoga downstairs and offering secret Tantric initiation upstairs, his Oriental sanctum quickly became an object of scandal in the New York press: the notorious “Omnipotent Oom” was charged with kidnapping and briefly imprisoned, though the charges were later dropped. “I cannot tell you how Bernard got control over me or how he gets it over other people,” said one of the alleged kidnapees, Zella Hopp, “He is the most wonderful man in the world. No women seem able to resist him.” The press reported “wild Oriental music and women’s cries, but not those of distress”

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Apparently, Bernard also believed that for certain individuals (particularly overly-repressed women of the Victorian era) more drastic surgical measures might be needed to liberate their sexual potential. Sexually unresponsive women could be helped by a form of partial circumcision in which the clitoral hood was surgically removed, an operation believed to improve female receptivity by exposing the clitoral gland to direct stimulation.

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One of the wealthy men associated with Bernard was Ed Browning, better known as Daddy Browning.

Real estate multi-millionaire Edward West Browning married Nellie Adele Lowen in 1915. He built a 24 room Manhattan penthouse for them that included an interior aviary, a miniature lake stocked with Japanese goldfish, and a turtle and frog garlanded fountain that spewed the colors of the rainbow. In 1918 Nellie adopted three-year-old “Little” Marjorie, and in 1920 five-year-old Dorothy “Sunshine.” But by 1923, Adele had had her fill of Edward, and she ran off with a dentist, taking Little Marjorie with her. Divorce followed.

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Browning tried to make up for the loss by providing Sunshine with ponies and miniature railways. For transportation she selected a peacock-colored, stretch Rolls Royce “equipped with a 4 foot high motion picture screen.” The child, however, still suffered from loneliness and Edward placed adoption ads in 1925: there were 12,000 applications from which he chose 16 year old Mary Louise Spas. The adoption was later annulled as it was discovered she was 21.

To assuage his failure at marriage and adoption, Edward became active in sponsoring youth-oriented dancing clubs and high school sorority dances where he met Frances Belle Heenan, a tenth grader. She was described as buxom, with a peaches and cream complexion. “Peaches is the Cinderella of my heart,” he said. Thirty-seven days later, on her sixteenth birthday, fifty-one-year-old Daddy married Peaches.

Daddy doted on Peaches, spoiling her with a four and one-half carat diamond ring and Fifth Avenue shopping rampages. There was much activity after their marriage, including social engagements and a stroll along the Long Beach boardwalk with their pet African Honking Gander on a red ribbon leash. But six months after the marriage, Peaches left Daddy, claiming abuse.

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Court room details of Peaches’ assertions of Daddy’s excessive eccentricity, included contact with the “Love Cult” High Priestess of Oom, sandpapering shoetrees at night, prowling and barking on all fours, and placing at the end of his lit cigar a white tablet that produced a large snowflake.

Michael Greenburg has written a book about their exploits called “Peaches and Daddy”. And on this site here you can see more photographs like the one below of their pre-marital abode.