Real Lace (14 page)

As the date of the wedding approached, there was breathless news that the church had been changed from St. Patrick's to the Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Southampton, but Monsignor Sheen would still say the Mass. A wedding trip to Honolulu was planned. Three days before the ceremony, the Edsel Fords arrived in Southampton in their yacht, the
Onika
, and anchored in Peconic Bay. There was a hectic gaggle of prewedding parties, and a terrible crisis when it was discovered that the church would seat only five hundred people, although already there had been over eleven hundred acceptances. Sixteen armed guards were required to protect the two roomfuls of wedding gifts. The night before the ceremony, Henry Ford II took his first Holy Communion.

Among the hundreds of wedding guests were John F. Kennedy,
the Alfred E. Smiths, three Bishops, and dozens of priests. Speaking the words, Monsignor Sheen said, “Your marriage bond is
unbreakable
… because it is modeled upon the union of the divine and human natures in the unity of Our Lord … for all eternity … that timelessness which only death can dissolve into the eternal rebirth of the love of God.” Afterward, while little Barbara and Sean McDonnell gathered up the rose petals that had been scattered after the bridal pair, crowds of the curious uninvited thronged onto the McDonnell lawn, trying to peer under the canopy of the huge reception tent for a glimpse of the young Henry Fords. In the press of onlookers, one woman narrowly escaped suffocation. Inside the tent, where the bride was arrayed in flowing white tulle showered with orange blossoms, a morning-coated Henry Ford, Sr., then seventy-seven, danced with his new granddaughter-in-law to the strains of Strauss's “Tales of the Vienna Woods.” Photographs of the dancers went around the world, and newspapers praised “a Catholic wedding of people with their feet on the ground.” Mary Jane Cuddihy caught the bridal bouquet. If it was not the wedding of the century, it was certainly the last of the great weddings in America before World War II.

Only one slightly adverse public comment was made. It came from the Old Guard's Mr. Barclay Beekman, who said, a bit loftily, “The Murrays and McDonnells hadn't made the grade fifteen years ago. Their social aspirations were resented by the snooty. But they're kindly people who don't snub climbers.”

Uncle Tom Murray was at the Ford wedding, of course. But it was a different story, later that year, when his niece, Rosamund, was married to Mr. Byers, also a Yale man and a member of the crew. This was a mixed marriage, without a conversion on Mr. Byers's part, and Uncle Tom rather pointedly stayed away, even though every effort had been made to make the ceremony appear as Catholic as possible. It was held in the Murrays' East Side town house, one room of which had been converted into an
improvised chapel, complete with stained-glass windows and other ecclesiastical trappings imported from the bride's maternal grandfather's house—”Steel King” James Farrell. For similar reasons, Uncle Tom had removed himself from the marriage ceremony of his own sister, Marie, when she married Mr. Elgood M. Lufkin after her first husband, John Vincent McDonnell—a brother of James Francis—had died. Uncle Tom announced that he considered the Lufkins “mysterious”—as well as Protestant. The Church might condone mixed marriages, but he did not. Nineteen-forty was to be a big year for family weddings. In November, Catherine McDonnell married Peter Sullivan, and in December her cousin Mary Jane Cuddihy married James Butler MacGuire—both girls to proper Catholics, and both in fashionable New York churches, the first at St. Ignatius Loyola and the second at St. Vincent Ferrer. But after the Ford wedding, everything seemed an anticlimax, and these weddings received only routine society-page coverage.

“Scandal” might never have touched the Murray or McDonnell families at the time of the Ford wedding, but it was certainly to come, and it involved, of all people, Uncle Tom's son Frank. Young Frank Murray had been dispatched, by his father, to Los Angeles to “get something started” on the West Coast for Murray Manufacturing. Frank was a handsome lad and, in Hollywood, he became involved with a motion picture actress named Eva Bartok. What happened next provided the press with a spicy, if somewhat confused, account. At 11
P
.
M
. one April night, according to young Frank Murray, Eva Bartok and her ex-husband, a movie producer named Alexander Paal, barged into Murray's Hollywood apartment and tried to bully Frank Murray into marrying Eva, a Hungarian national, so that she could remain in the United States. The immigration authorities agreed that Miss Bartok was having certain “problems,” which marriage to an American might solve, and that her visa needed extending. Frank Murray claimed that in order to force him to the altar Paal knocked him down three or
four times and chased him around the house with a poker. The police were called when Frank Murray ran to a neighbor's house crying, “There's a crazy Hungarian who's trying to kill me!” Murray charged Paal and Miss Bartok with extortion. In her countercharge, Eva Bartok claimed that Murray was trying to “ruin my career”—she had made one film, called
Ten Thousand Bedrooms
—and that she had gone to Frank Murray's house to tell him that she was through with him, and that he had invited her in. As for extortion, Miss Bartok said, “Ha! I make five million dollars for a picture and he makes a hundred and fifty a week!” Mr. Paal claimed that he had seen Frank Murray knock Miss Bartok down and that, in her defense, he knocked Murray down. “He went right down—he's such a baby,” said Paal. Two days later, charges were dropped, but at the time of the publicity Uncle Tom could only shake his head in bewilderment and say, again and again, “Not our Frank … not our Frank!”

And it was not long after the Ford wedding that the Jack Murrays' daughter Constance announced her decision to become a Holy Child nun. In Catholic society, there are generally two reasons given for a girl's decision to enter a convent. Either a girl has very few young men friends or she has so many beaux that she cannot decide among them. In Connie Murray's case, her mother announced to the press that “She has a true vocation.” At the time, the
Daily News
noted that she “graciously gave in to her family” and made her debut before taking the veil. Whatever the true reasons for her decision may have been, there were those who suggested that she wished to become a nun “to atone for the sins of her relatives.”

Part Two

THE WHEELER-DEALERS

Chapter 9

“MA AND PA D.”

For all their feuds and fallings-out—and the occasional eruptions of bad press—families like the Murrays and McDonnells and Cuddihys strove earnestly to achieve an aura of respectability to accompany their wealth. They wanted to be regarded as “kindly people.” They also wanted to be honest and churchgoing and devout, daily communicants. Because they were aware of the Irishman's reputation for drunkenness, they were teetotalers or, at the most, cautious drinkers. They conducted themselves in much the same way as the “Uptown” German Jews—Schiffs, Loebs, Lehmans, and Warburgs—anxious to develop a proper self-image and to define themselves as against the Lower East Side “newcomers” from the
shtetl
of Eastern Europe. Even such families as the Joseph P. Kennedys cared enough about being accepted socially to move out of Boston, where they knew they could never make the grade, and follow the example of the Murrays and McDonnells and come to New York, where they
settled in Bronxville and where the Kennedy daughters made society debuts, and the Kennedy sons were invited to all the best parties. But, at the same time, there were other Irish-Americans who cared less about probity and the impact they made on society, and who concentrated almost single-mindedly on amassing huge fortunes. One of the most successful of these entrepreneurs was Mr. Edward L. Doheny.

Born in 1856 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the son of a poor Irish immigrant who had headed westward in a vain search for success, Ed Doheny ran away from home at the age of sixteen and worked, variously, as a booking agent, a fruit packer, a mule driver, and a waiter in the Occidental Hotel in Wichita, Kansas. At the age of eighteen he began what was to be his life-long occupation—searching for wealth underground—and became a gold prospector. He wandered about Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, sometimes striking it rich, sometimes going broke. It was a rough-and-tumble existence in the one-street towns of the Southwest, and Doheny developed a reputation as a rough-and-tumble character. He had learned early how to use a gun, and was quick to reach for his holster in tough situations, and it was rumored that he had once killed a man—or possibly several. In New Mexico, Doheny was known as the man who had cleaned up the little town of Kingston of local cattle thieves and bad men, one of whom was said to have fired sixteen bullets at him before Doheny was able to disarm and overpower him. As a prospector, however, he employed more mystical methods and, for a while, his principal mining tool was a divining rod. When the rod quivered and dipped in his hand, Doheny stopped on the spot and began digging for gold, sometimes finding it and sometimes not.

In 1892, when he was thirty-six years old and when prospects for discovering a real bonanza had begun to look exceptionally dim, Ed Doheny turned up in the still-raw city of Los Angeles. His mining adventures in Arizona and New Mexico had all lost
money, and he was virtually penniless. But then one of those strokes of incredible luck that have marked the beginnings of so many American fortunes occurred to Ed Doheny. Passing in the street one day, he noticed a black man driving a horse and wagon-load of black, tarry stuff. Doheny asked the man what the substance was, and was told that it was
“brea”
—Spanish for pitch—and that it bubbled from a pit on the edge of town, and that the poorer families of the city collected it and used it for fuel. From his diggings around the West, Doheny knew enough to recognize the
brea
as crude oil, and set off to investigate the bubbling pit. He located it in Hancock Park, decided it looked promising, and, with a small amount of hastily borrowed cash, leased the land. Within a few months he had brought in one of the first gushers ever to flow in the city of Los Angeles. Armed with this success, he went on to drill other wells in other parts of California and, within five years' time, practically controlled the entire oil production in the state.

He next turned to Mexico, where he had prospected as a young man, this time in search of oil, not gold. He found profitable lands in the jungles beyond Tampico and leased over a million acres there. His Mexican Petroleum Company cleared the jungle, built roads and railroads, docks, pipelines, shops and houses for laborers and, from lavish bribes to Mexican officials, earned the intense good favor of the Mexican Government. By 1922 Doheny's income from his Mexican company alone netted him $31,575,937, and his total worth was reported to be more than a hundred million dollars. By 1925 he was reliably reported to be even richer than “the richest man in America,” John D. Rockefeller.

As a rich man, Edward L. Doheny, former Southwestern gunman, affected a monocle, a walrus mustache, British tailoring, and an autocratic manner. He also became devoted to prodigious spending, and bought a large portion of what is now downtown Los Angeles which he converted into a vast park and estate called
“Chester Place.” His yacht, the
Casiana
, was one of the most luxurious in the country. He surrounded himself with an entourage of servants and bodyguards, and “Chester Place” was so heavily protected that once, when a fire broke out in one of the many buildings on the estate, the Los Angeles Fire Department had difficulty getting through the security at the main gate. His second wife, who had been his secretary, was decked out in ropes of sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, and rubies. Mr. Doheny was not particularly philanthropic, but he did contribute heavily to the Irish Freedom Movement and to the Democratic Party. In fact, it was probably his wife, who was shrewder about the handling of money than her husband, who was responsible for conserving Ed Doheny's fortune, and for seeing to it that it was not all spent as rapidly as it was made. Once, surveying a gathering of her children and stepchildren, “Ma D.,” as she was called, commented, “None of them would have anything if it weren't for me. I'm responsible for every penny they have, right down to that big diamond ring on Lucy's finger.”

Ma D. was the undisputed empress of “Chester Place.” She had been made a Papal Countess and enjoyed using the formal title, “Countess Estelle Doheny.” Physically, she resembled Queen Victoria—small, ugly, and imperious, with a decidedly Victorian manner. At “Chester Place,” one descended a long, wide marble staircase lined with footmen and maids to be ushered into the presence, or Presence, of Ma D. Though she became almost totally blind, one was never permitted to comment on, or to remind her of, her infirmity, and small, carpeted ramps were built across the thresholds of doorways and up steps so that Ma D. could move through the rooms of her house unaided. For all her grand ways, Ma D. had a middle-class American's love of showing off her home to visitors, leading her guests along the vast marble corridors, into the Pompeian Room where she pointed out the vaulted ceiling covered with gold leaf and her priceless collection of antique
watches, into the conservatory which was big enough to contain tall trees as well as her prize-winning collection of orchids. For her dining table, a long silver centerpiece was created just to contain the specimen orchids, which were changed daily. Before each meal, Ma D. memorized the name of each variety of orchid up and down the centerpiece so that she could recite to her guests the names of the blooms which she could not see. Inevitably, each tour of the house ended with an elevator ride up two stories to Ma D.'s private chapel with its magnificent reliquary and where the Eucharist was reserved. Outside the chapel entrance stood two tall Spanish armoires filled with hats and scarves in a variety of styles and colors from which ladies could choose in order to cover their heads before going inside.