Speed Kings (8 page)

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.

—

Y
ou'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 quit 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.”

It was during just such a party that Jay fell in love for the third time, with a lady named Laura Hylan Heminway. Everyone called her Dolly. She was twenty-nine, younger than both Mae and Irene. She wore her brunette hair up, piled in curls around her ears, and had eyes that came brilliantly alive when her lips, one a perfect cupid's bow, spread into a smile. Jay was absolutely enchanted by her. The problem was that Dolly was Julius Fleischmann's wife.

They had always seemed an odd sort of couple. The ceremony had taken place two days after Fleischmann had finalized his divorce from his first wife, Lilly. He had been with Lilly for twenty-three years, through his two terms as
mayor, and had three children with her. Until in 1920, in his late forties, he fell head over heels for Dolly. She was two decades younger than him and had two children of her own from her first marriage. The split from Lilly cost Fleischmann a one-off payment of two million dollars, a summerhouse in Connecticut, and another twenty-five thousand dollars every year in alimony. He didn't regret a cent. He said Dolly was “the most beautiful woman [he] ever met.” Fleischmann promised her that once they married, neither she, nor they, would ever want for money. He was almost twice her age, married, bald, beetle-browed, and needed a cane to walk. But for a single woman with two boys to support, his appeal was obvious, and irresistible. Especially since Dolly's first husband had lost the money he made manufacturing silk and was now working as a cashier at a movie theater.

Dolly, wrote a friend of hers in 1942, was a woman who had “always known what she wanted,” and if it didn't come to her, “she went after it, delighting whoever she met with her charm, wit, honesty, and her perennial youth and beauty.” There is no doubt she went after Fleischmann. It took her a year or two to persuade him to separate from Lilly, who cited their affair in her testimony during their divorce proceedings.

They said Julius was so smitten with his young wife that he never refused her anything—“a policy,” one paper put it, “that cost him a million dollars a year.” But it wasn't enough. Rumors about the affair between Dolly and Jay ran around North Shore, and those “casual innuendos” were starting to spread to the gossip columns. Julius tried to protect her, and himself, by paying hush money to some of the grubbier papers—he handed over five hundred dollars to the “noxious periodical”
Broadway Brevities
. It didn't work. Jay, the story went, had seduced Dolly over the course of his visits to the Lindens that summer of 1923. He was a decade younger than Julius, but the difference between them was so much more pronounced than even that gap suggested. When the scandal broke, several papers printed pictures of the two rivals side by side. Julius was shown in a heavy suit and hat, looking squat, short, and stoop-shouldered; Jay was pictured in his bathing costume, black hair swept back, a wry grin breaking out underneath his clipped mustache.

The marriage broke that summer. Julius discovered that Dolly had given Jay twenty thousand dollars, money that, she said, he “had invested for her on Wall Street.” He snapped at that, astonished that she was willing to entrust her heart and his money to such a man. In public, at least, he was still warm toward Dolly, but he was icily disdainful toward her lover, whom he considered a
playboy with a two-bit fortune. “What is he?” he asked. “He is just one of those strange figures on horseback who appear on the fringes of wealth and society and whose only means of support appears to be the four legs of a horse.”

Dolly was insistent. “I don't care who he is or what he is or how poor he is,” she said. “He alone understands me. He is the only person in all the world who ever did. I would gladly starve with him.”

No one ever fell for Jay in a little way. We may wonder, especially after Mae's account of her marriage to Jay, just what it was about him that was so irresistible. Jay, a friend explained, “possessed that curious and indefinable quality: charm. Call it the personal salt that makes an individual beloved by nearly everyone with whom he comes into contact.” Whenever he came up in conversation—which, as we've seen, happened rather a lot—“someone is sure to refer to him as ‘that perfect dancer.' Or perhaps it is ‘the perfect rider.' Or the man who makes ‘a perfect cocktail.'”

The newspapers nicknamed Jay “the King of Hearts,” and “the Romeo of the Sporting World.” As far away as Utah, the
Ogden Standard Examiner
was asking, “Is the dashing polo player, so well-known in the gay life of New York's Broadway and Paris' boulevards, about to add a third famous beauty to the collection of women who have called themselves Mrs. Jay O'Brien?”