Emily O'Neill Whitfield

NY Times Wedding Announcement:

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1928/12/08/95859225.h...

From http://www.brookspeters.com/?p=834

Every now and then, when I least expect it, I will stumble across a name that for some reason begins to pop up repeatedly, almost uncannily, in the books I’m reading at that moment. Very often it’s a name I am unfamiliar with up until then. Then suddenly there’s no escaping it! Such an occurrence has just happened to me with Emily Vanderbilt, a beautiful and sometimes scandalous figure who crops up in works by or about Thomas Wolfe, E. E. Cummings, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Mercedes de Acosta, Dolly Wilde and Dashiell Hammett, all of which I’ve been dipping my nose into recently. It’s almost as if the hand of fate were poking a finger at me, demanding that I take notice. Well, I have taken notice. Emily Vanderbilt is a fascinating and bewildering creature, an enigma who seems to epitomize the highs and lows of what Gertrude Stein dubbed “the Lost Generation.” (Emily, above and below, shot by Arnold Genthe.)

During her glamorous yet often troubled life, Emily Vanderbilt in fact had many names. Her birth name was Emily O’Neill Davies. She was the daughter of Frederick Martin Davies, a New York banker, broker and noted horseman, who raised his family in a large private house at 20 E. 82nd Street. Her mother, also named Emily O’Neill Davies, was the daughter of Daniel O’Neill, the editor and owner of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. When Daniel O’Neill died in 1877, leaving a fortune valued at $8,000,000, his wife Emma (nee Seely) married his brother, Eugene M. O’Neill, who took over the paper. Some reports describe Emily Vanderbilt as the granddaughter of Eugene O’Neill, but she was not. An 1880 census clearly states that her mother was the “stepdaughter” of Eugene. (Not to be confused with the famous playwright of the same name.)

The Frederick Martin Davies family lived in high style at their posh Manhattan manse. In the 1910 census they are shown to have had ten servants: a parlor maid, waitress, cook, kitchen maid, two chambermaids, two nurses, a laundress and a lady’s maid. Young Emily grew up in a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, summering in Southampton, wintering in Palm Beach, weekending in Newport, and gallivanting as a debutante among the glitterati in Manhattan’s upper crust. It was a life of extreme luxury at the height of the gilded age.

Frederick Martin Davies was the cousin of Bradley and Townsend Martin, and best friend of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. Ironically, Davies died the day before Vanderbilt set sail on the ill-fated Lusitania and lost his life. So it seemed a fitting twist of fate that in a fairy tale wedding at Grace Church in Manhattan in 1923, Davies’ beautiful young daughter Emily would marry Vanderbilt’s son, William Henry Vanderbilt III (below).

That marriage seemed, at least in the society-mad press, to be a storybook romance. But it did not fare well. They moved to Boston and Oakland Farm in Portsmouth, near Newport, which Vanderbilt had inherited in his father’s will along with $5,000,000. A daughter also named Emily was born in 1924. Three years later, William and Emily split up in a divorce that took only six minutes in court to implement. Emily claimed William had failed to provide. He was rumored to be cruel and over-protective. Some have speculated that he hired detectives to follow his wife who may have been having an affair with a handsome young theatre producer named Sigourney Thayer. In the end, Vanderbilt was granted custody of the child, permitting Emily to see her daughter only three months out of the year. William Vanderbilt III later married Anne Colby, started a bus company in Newport, then went on to become a State Senator, and ultimately Governor of Rhode Island. He died in 1981.

On December 7, 1928, Emily wed Sigourney Thayer (above). An Amherst grad, Thayer was a curious figure in New York circles. His father was William Greenough Thayer, headmaster of St. Mark’s, a tony New England prep school. When they wed, Time quipped that he was a “spasmodic theatrical producer, wartime aviator, Atlantic Monthly poet, socially prominent jokesmith.” Thayer dressed like a dandy and had a showy Proustian mustache. The marriage was a surprise to friends who didn’t think she took the affair that seriously, but perhaps she felt that it would be too big a loss to give up her daughter for nothing more than a youthful indiscretion. She gave legitimacy to the relationship, but the marriage didn’t last. Both agreed it was a mistake and they divorced a year later.

(Above: Aline Bernstein; e. e. cummings; Thomas Wolfe; Edmund Wilson)

Emily Vanderbilt Thayer led a gay social life in Paris and was a fixture in literary circles. She aspired to be a writer and critic, and surrounded herself with well-known authors. She knew Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and became chummy with dancers from the Ballets Russes. At a party hosted by Muriel Draper, she first encountered E. E. Cummings. He found her, according to one source, “blonde, statuesque, charming and gorgeous.” They had a two-month affair. She soon fell for Thomas Wolfe whom she met through Aline Bernstein. Emily “tried to make him,” according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who followed her comings and goings with a fascinated eye. She would write Wolfe urgent notes written in a childish scrawl, begging to see him. Wolfe reportedly was astonished by her beauty and seductive charms, but was wary of her insolence and sexually aggressive ways. He found her “fundamentally trivial.” Wolfe’s biographer David H. Donald says he was “disgusted by her systematic and rather dogged experience of the life of degeneracy and refused to join her in smoking opium.” He detested her gigolo Raymonde, “a bad Valentino.” Worse, she paraded Wolfe among her friends as someone “madly in love with her.” He fled to Rouen. Wolfe eventually used Emily as the basis of the character Amy Carlton in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again. Fitzgerald praised his description of her “cracked grey eyes,” and “exactly reproduced speech”, as “simply perfect.”

Emily didn’t limit her affairs to male writers. She was drawn to the lesbian demi-monde, dominated by Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes. According to Zelda Fitzgerald biographer Sally Cline, Emily was most likely bisexual. She was close friends with Dolly Wilde, the notorious niece of Oscar Wilde, as well as Mercedes de Acosta, another social butterfly who achieved fame by her dalliances with great writers and movie stars. I found a ship record for the two of them traveling together aboard the Olympic from France to New York in 1929. On it, Emily gave her birthday as August 10, 1903. Mercedes claimed to be 30, born in 1899, although she was actually six years older. At the time Emily maintained a home at 176 E. 75th St.

(Above: Djuna Barnes and Natalie Barney; Zelda Fitzgerald; Mercedes de Acosta; Dolly Wilde)

During this period, as the Jazz Age reached a fever pitch before the inevitable plunge, Emily was swept up in the decadence of cafe society, flouncing around with a bunch of Hemingwayesque expatriate socialites who’d come to live it up in Europe. Zelda Fitzgerald said that she “was sorry for her. She seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill.” Scott, hoping to bolster Zelda’s spirits, who was jealous of Emily’s sophisticated allure, dismissed her in a letter as someone who “could not dance a Brahms waltz, or write a story. She can only gossip and ride in the Bois and have pretty hair curling up instead of thinking.” Scott may have been projecting his own sense of insecurity among the very rich. Thomas Wolfe considered him a social climber. Fitzgerald, despite his misgivings about her, had an affair with Emily in 1930, when Zelda was in Prangins recovering from a breakdown. But it didn’t amount to much. Fitzgerald later wrote that she “was too big a poisson for me.” He remained mesmerized by her, however. Both he and Zelda kept clippings about her in their scrapbooks.

Emily in fact did have higher dreams than just being a transatlantic party girl. She wrote books and articles but never tried to get them published. Asked if she would ever write for publication, she coyly answered: “I will tell you in twenty years.” In 1929 it was announced with fanfare that she would become a reader for the publishing firm Boni & Liveright (one of the foremost houses in publishing at that time). Its founder Horace Liveright was a bon vivant and ladies man who managed to lure the leading lights of the literary firmament to his doors. Eugene O’Neill, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser were all published by him. Emily relished her role as reader and used her contacts to aid Liveright. Lillian Hellman first took note of Emily Vanderbilt at the 1934 opening night party of her first play The Children’s Hour, which was about a lesbian scandal in a girl’s school. Hellman described her as a “a handsome, boyish-looking woman” seen at every literary cocktail party. Judging by photos of Emily taken by Carl Van Vechten in this period (below), she was still striking looking, but perhaps not as innocently radiant as before.

Emily’s interest in literature was serious and well-informed. It might explain her marriage in 1933 to the writer Raoul Whitfield. One of the big names at Black Mask magazine, a pulp that published Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and defined the “hard-boiled” genre, Whitfield was a former aviator who fought in World War One and claimed to have won the Croix de Guerre for distinguished service, although some critics have suggested that such an honor was more likely a “flight of imagination.” One biographer described him as sporting a “cane, elegant leather gloves and a silk scarf around his neck, looking aloof and imperious. His mustache is carefully trimmed, his dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle. Every inch the gentleman.” (Below, Raoul Whitfield from Argosy).

Whitfield’s family traveled abroad when he was young and he was raised partly in the Philippines. His middle name was Falconia but he used the name Raoul Fauconnier Whitfield when describing himself. He was something of a mystery himself, and remains so to his most devoted fans. Throughout his life he held many odd jobs, including fire fighter in the Sierra Madre range, a bond salesman in Pittsburgh, and a newspaper reporter. He even tried his hand at acting in silent films. Widely considered one of the top detective story writers, he was a close friend of Dashiell Hammett’s. Hammett later had an intimate affair with Whitfield’s first wife Prudence Smith after the couple’s divorce.

Emily saw in Raoul a way out of her wayward existence in cafe society. She admired his writing ability and wrote a play with him called Mistral. But the marriage was tempestuous from the start. By this time she was drinking heavily and using sleeping pills at night. She became increasingly moody and difficult. Today she might be diagnosed as suffering from manic depression. Yet at first the marriage seemed successful. They bought a rambling spread in Las Vegas, New Mexico which they called “Dead Horse Ranch.” Here they raised cattle, built a polo field, a golf course and entertained friends from both coasts on a lavish scale. But the union soon devolved into jealous rages and accusations of infidelity. Raoul was allegedly having an affair with a young local barmaid named Lois Bell.

The final chapter in Emily’s life reads like the climax of one of Whitfield’s violent novels. Shortly after starting divorce action against Whitfield, Emily was found shot to death in her bedroom at the ranch on May 24, 1935. A hastily assembled coroner’s jury found that she had committed suicide, despite the fact that the gun shot wound was on her lower left side and she was right-handed. The bullet, from a Colt .45, passed through her lungs and hit her heart. The New York Times reported that she had become “despondent after a conference yesterday on a divorce suit.” Her friend Mrs. Virginia Haydon Stone was with her earlier but did not spend the night. Emily retired at 11 PM. “The body, clothed in pajamas and a dressing robe, was found at 7:30 o’clock [the next] morning, on the bed, a revolver clutched in the outflung right hand.” The body was discovered by an employee at the ranch. But almost immediately speculation grew that someone had killed Emily Vanderbilt Whitfield. Lillian Hellman did not mince words when she wrote later: “she was murdered… and neither the mystery story expert nor the police ever found the murderer.” (Below: Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett.)

Whitfield was a prime suspect, even though he had proof that he was in California at the time of Emily’s death. Some suspected he hired someone to kill her. For the rest of his life he lived under a cloud. He inherited a small fortune, then married Lois Bell and moved about constantly, almost frenetically. He went through the money like a dose of salts. Adding to the tragedy was the suicide of Lois Bell, who leaped from a hotel window in San Francisco in 1943. Raoul Whitfield’s health deteriorated. He had tuberculosis. Hammett, in a typically generous gesture, asked Hellman to send him a check for $500. Whitfield died, broke, in a military hospital on January 24, 1945.

Not surprisingly, the story of Emily Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield has fascinated writers for 75 years. Recently a novel based on the case has been published which delves into the circumstances of her death and offers a very dramatic, yet plausible solution. Written by Walter Satterthwait, the novel is Dead Horse. I won’t give away the ending, but it is utterly convincing. You can read more about it at the author’s website: www.satterthwait.com.

As for Emily’s daughter, she was raised by her father William H. Vanderbilt. Nicknamed “Paddy,” she married Jeptha Wade, an attorney, originally from Cleveland. They lived in Boston. He died this past August at 83. She is a Life Member Emeritus of the MIT Corporation, and President of MITS, Inc.

Emily O’Neill Davies Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield may have been a character of many names, with three troubled marriages, but she was not easily categorized. As a debutante, she enchanted high society. As an heiress, she married “well” only to find that fairy tale romances are bittersweet. As a mother, she was devoted to her daughter despite years of separation. But she was also a woman who defied the strictures of her age, became a respected devotee of the finest authors of her day, and ended as an iconoclast who lived and loved on her own terms. Whether tragic muse or literary butterfly, her legacy will haunt us for generations to come.

A Writer's Crimes Of Passion

By OTTO PENZLER | February 7, 2007

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"Dead Horse" by Walter Satterthwait (McMillan, 182 pages, $30), is a lousy title for a terrific mystery novel, enhanced by an enticing dust jacket that reproduces an early issue of "Black Mask," the greatest pulp magazine of them all.

The story begins on May 26, 1935, with the death of a famous socialite, Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield. Although separated, she was still married to Raoul Whitfield, one of the most famous mystery writers in America at the time: a prolific contributor to pulp magazines, author of several crime novels and numerous books and stories about the newly blossoming and exciting world of flying.

The death was instantly ruled a suicide, though Sheriff Tom Delgado thinks it odd that a right-handed woman would choose to shoot herself on her left side, just below the rib cage. Go ahead, try it. It's not impossible, but it sure seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble when the heart or the head requires less of a contortionist act.

"Dead Horse," the name of the Whitfields' ranch, makes the homespun sheriff scratch his head.

The dashing Whitfield is a tall, handsome pilot, extremely wellpaid for his stories and, by all accounts, possesses exceptional charm, his circle of friends and acquaintances extending to socialites, writers, and aviators.

When he meets Emily Thayer in Paris, he has been married to Prudence Whitfield for 10 years. He is quickly smitten by the beauty and she falls just as hard and fast for the sophisticated author. Their wild, outrageously romantic courtship is so beautifully evoked it will make you want to take your wife to Paris, too, though you probably couldn't fly your own plane, as Raoul does.

Married almost immediately, they move to New Mexico, where Emily's wealth gives them the freedom to throw extravagant parties, travel, and indulge their decadent lifestyle. As his drinking, already of mythic stature, increases, Whitfield's ability to produce coherent prose remains merely a promise and the idyllic marriage is scarred at first by tiny fissures, then a cataclysmic earthquake.

It's name is Lois Bell, a pretty, 19-year-old barmaid. Raoul and his lawyer walk into her joint one night, moving toward her "with the stiff, precise walk that men used when they were hiding the big fat secret that they were bombed."

Drunk, male, and stupid, Raoul takes an opportunity he should have let go and gets caught when an anonymous phone call brings Emily to Lois's house, where she finds Raoul less than fully clothed. The heartbroken Emily throws her husband out. His entreaties go unheeded, and he moves to California, returning to the inherited ranch upon news of Emily's death. And little Lois, right there to comfort him, soon becomes the third Mrs. Whitfield. A year-long, around-the-world trip, and continued dissipation, inevitably follow.

During all the fun, Sheriff Tom, offended by the cover-up, remains on the case and relentlessly pursues Raoul. After being gently provoked by the lawman, Raoul irritably tells him, "I'm a writer. I've been inventing people like you for over 20 years. Cops, cons, private detectives. Shrewd country sheriffs. There's nothing you can say — nothing — that I haven't already put into someone's mouth."

Delgado's unceasing detective work pays off with a stunning conclusion to the saga.

Mr. Satterthwait has used real historical characters before in his mysteries, notably Oscar Wilde in "Wilde West," slightly less plausibly than Whitfield in the current book, and convincingly in "Miss Lizzie" with astute observations and deductions on the notorious Lizzie Borden murder case.

Most of the characters in "Dead Horse" are real, and the chronology of their lives is more or less accurate. It's a novel, however, not a biography, so the reasonable solution to the mystery confronting Sheriff Delgado — a fictional — character) may not be historically accurate.

Mr. Satterthwait has brought the neglected Whitfield to full life, painting a bright portrait of a man whose carnal appetites cut short his career, much as they did his old pal Dashiell Hammett.

Booze and women. Women and booze. The yellow bricks that built a road away from the typewriter for those talented old scribblers. One wonders if, at the end, they thought it was a fair trade.

In 1934 Whitfield married his second wife, New York intellectual/socialite Emily Vanderbilt Thayer, and his life changed. They bought a ranch in New Mexico, they traveled extensively, and he stopped writing. The couple broke up in 1935 and that summer Emily committed suicide. Whitfield inherited everything, but by 1944 he had squandered it all. He was destitute and fell seriously ill; Hammett sent money, but Whitfield, forty-six, died of tuberculosis in a military hospital in January, 1945. Whitfield never matched Hammett in quality, but he was an important writer for Black Mask, which has more information about him at this site. Green Ice is a classic, and his Ben Jardinn stories (Death in a Bowl, 1931, above left) are praised by critics. His most enduring contribution may turn out to be the first Latino private eye, Jo Gar, whose stories even appeared in the slicks (August 1937 Cosmopolitan). These stories have been reissued.

Almost immediately after their divorce became final, and barely a week after the release of Private Detective 62, Whitfield surprised friends by marrying socialite Emily Davies Vanderbilt Thayer on July 19, 1933. The New York Times reported that the wedding was "extremely quiet and took place at the home of the bride." The paper also noted that the new Mrs. Whitfield was the former wife of William H. Vanderbilt and Sigourney Thayer," and is "one of the leaders of New York's social intelligentsia."

Playwright Lillian Hellman observed that Emily Whitfield was "a handsome, boyish-looking woman [seen] at every society-literary cocktail party."

The newlyweds honeymooned throughout the Southwest and purchased the Dead Horse Ranch near Las Vegas, New Mexico. "The ranch was large enough," William F. Nolan commented, "to accommodate its own polo field and golf course, and Whitfield settled here to live 'the good life.'"

Knopf published Danger Circus that year, his last book; and according to bibliographic records, he published only 8 stories that year, all in Black Mask. Those which appeared in the early months of 1933 are presumed to have been written in the Fall of 1932. Late in 1933, Whitfield delivered his 89th and 90th stories to Black Mask and disappeared from the publishing scene. He would write only three more stories over the next four years.

Whether he succumbed too completely to the "good life" on his wife's money or if his creativity was drained from years of heavy drinking is not known; but it's definitely suspected that alcohol had affected his interest in writing. Hammett stopped writing pulp fiction in 1930, after the publication of The Maltese Falcon, and overindulged his whims writing occasional screenplays in Hollywood (in between bouts of heavy drinking), letting his reputation support him.

4. A Tale of Three Wives

Whitfield's second marriage wasn't destined to last either. Emily filed for a divorce in February 1935. He moved out of the sprawling ranch and returned to Hollywood. During a house-check late on the night of May 24, a ranch employee discovered Emily's body draped across her bed, her left hand clutching the .38 caliber revolver she been accustomed to carrying in recent months. Based on medical evidence, interviews with the ranch staff, and friends who had seen her that day, a coroner's jury ruled that the bullet wound was self-inflicted.

According to a lengthy New York Times front page feature article on May 25, 1935, and another in the Santa Fe New Mexican, friends said Emily had become increasingly despondent -- not just over her pending divorce action -- but over her failing eyesight and a desire to see her 9-year-old daughter, who was then vacationing in Cannes, France, with her father, William H. Vanderbilt, the son of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt who lost his life on the Lusitania. Emily lost custody of the child when she divorced Vanderbilt in 1928. She then married theatrical producer Sigourney Thayer and divorced him in 1929.

A meeting with her lawyers that afternoon in Santa Fe discussing the divorce proceedings had left her highly agitated. The Times article's subhead said that she was divorcing Raoul Whitfield because he "depressed her." No further details were given as to why her husband affected her in that manner, but it was pointed out by several of her friends that Emily had a history of emotional instability which could have been the cause of her three failed marriages.

Authorities told the newspapers that Raoul Whitfield was in Hollywood at the time his wife shot herself and was flying home. Her brother and sister were coming from New York to claim the body. Whitfield became the sole heir to her considerable estate and the Dead Horse Ranch, which newspapers described as being on a large tract of land, with cedar-strewn hills, where blooded cattle were being raised.

https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.2.1/33RP-S7B