The Valentino Affair (16 page)

After the cessation of hostilities, Blanca would have the boy from October to May, during which time she could take him abroad, provided that she returned him to the United States by June 1. When the boy reached the age of eight, Jack would assume entire control over his son’s education, and Blanca’s custody rights would be restricted to July through September, except for three-hour periods during the rest of the year, arranged in such a way as to not interfere with his schooling. Tacked onto the end of the decree came a paragraph stating that if Blanca remarried her three-hundred-dollar monthly alimony would be cut in half.

The published terms of the decree stunned the legal community. At the time, the guilty party in a divorce action usually surrendered most if not all custody rights, and yet here the courts had bent over backward to accommodate a proven adulterer. So why did such a tough negotiator as Max Steuer agree to a 7–5 split on custody? Despite Blanca’s subsequent claims of penury, funds weren’t an issue when it came to the child’s upbringing, so it is evident that some other factor informed Steuer’s atypical concession. One possible reason—and the only theory that makes sense—is that the opposing legal team dug up something shadowy in Blanca’s background.

For while no one doubted that Jack was the arch villain in the breakup, some wondered if Blanca’s antecedents weren’t quite as lily-white as painted in the press. The rumors refused to die down. Later, Blanca’s lawyers would twice be forced to deny publicly that her name had been “mentioned in connection with a cabaret dancer in a counter suit that was alleged to have been threatened by De Saulles.”
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As we have seen, Jack was convinced that Blanca and Rodolfo had slept together, and quite possibly there was a meeting between the two that hinted at some kind of intimacy. Rather than allow any suspicion of scandal to sully her name—especially because she was the more innocent party—Blanca followed Steuer’s advice and yielded to the other side’s demands. The decree was issued on December 23.
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And so, as 1916 drew to a close, the once glittering marriage of Jack and Blanca de Saulles officially reached its shabby conclusion. Jack went back to renovating The Box—spending thousands in the process—while Blanca picked up the broken pieces of her life in Manhattan.

To help her through this difficult period, she hired a new servant. Blanca had met Jean Mallock in London, where she served as nursemaid to the Chilean minister to Britain. The thirty-seven-year-old Scottish woman had jumped at the opportunity when Blanca offered her the job of looking after Jack Jr. in New York. On December 18, Miss Mallock cleared immigration at Ellis Island and reported immediately to the Hotel Gotham on Fifth Avenue, where her new mistress was staying while renovations were being carried out at Crossways. Mallock joined a household weighed down with depression. Blanca’s ordeal at the hands of the American justice system had left her feeling embittered and trapped, condemned by world events to live in a land for which she had no empathy and to which she had few ties apart from her son.

Although the full details of the divorce suit remain tantalizingly elusive—the files are not due to be unsealed until 2017—we know that in her eyes she was victimized by prejudice, more sinned against than sinning. For years the bedroom escapades of her husband, a drunken libertine, had titillated millions of newspaper readers, and yet he had emerged almost unscathed from the divorce. How much of this, Blanca wondered, was due to her nationality? Would the courts have treated her so harshly had she been American? She doubted it. Steuer had warned her that in divorce cases, American courts traditionally favored homegrown plaintiffs, especially where children were involved. But Blanca had ignored that warning and swanned off to Scotland during a critical phase of the divorce settlement. It had cost her dearly.

Guglielmi was puzzled. He knew Blanca had returned and was living on Long Island, yet every attempt to make contact with her resulted in disappointment. Letters went unanswered, telephone calls, too. Gradually and grudgingly, the realization dawned on him that his idealized Madonna-like inamorata wanted nothing to do with him. Having served his purpose, he was now thrown to the wolves.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, and the hurt was double-edged. Not only had he been duped by the woman he loved—and who he thought loved him—but three years after coming to America he was once again penniless. He had had a few uncredited parts in minor films that paid five dollars a day—but nothing to replace the kind of money he had lost since being fired by Joan Sawyer. As he exchanged hard-luck stories with other extras on the film set, however, one subject kept cropping up in their conversations: Los Angeles.

With reliable sunshine that allowed for longer shooting days, the City of Angels was just beginning to overtake New York as the movie-making capital of America. Guglielmi mused over whether to join the exodus. Although contemporary popular taste dictated that romantic leads were generally blond, square-jawed, All-American types, Rodolfo suspected that his brooding, saturnine looks would be perfect for those directors looking to cast “heavies” in their movies. But he had no contacts on the West Coast. What few roots he had lay here in New York, so he stayed put, resolving to tough it out, find work as a dancer, and maybe win back the hand of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Blanca, on the other hand, didn’t spare a thought for the savior who had changed her life so radically. Since returning to the refurbished Crossways, her mind had been consumed by the custody issue, which now escalated into full-scale domestic warfare. The boy was being batted to and fro like a shuttlecock and picking up some pretty undesirable personality traits along the way. For instance, Blanca noticed that whenever the lad returned to her custody he was recalcitrant and fractious, newfound idiosyncrasies that she blamed on Anna Mooney. Once, when the boy came home from staying with his father, he allegedly told his mother: “Boobie said that she loved me more than you [do].”
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Another time, he threw himself on the floor, kicking and screaming, for no apparent reason. After calming down, he announced: “Boobie told me that I must be a bad boy when I’m with you.”
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Just about the only consolation for Blanca during this painful period was that her name finally had disappeared from the newspapers. Good old “Broadway Jack,” on the other hand, was still bagging headlines, and, if the gossip columns were to be believed, it wouldn’t be long before Blanca had a new Mrs. de Saulles to contend with.

Ruth Shepley was a twenty-five-year-old blonde actress, who, in early 1917, was playing the part of Grace Tyler in the stage comedy
The Boomerang.
The show had been a hit on Broadway eighteen months earlier and was now touring the country on an extended run. On March 14, Miss Shepley—“a vision to behold”
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—was besieged at Powers’ Theater in Chicago by local reporters following up on a hot story on the wires. A New York tabloid had fired off a cable to one Chicago newspaper: “Please ask Ruth Shepley if she will marry Jack De Saulles in the fall?” When queried, Ruth was at first evasive, then decided to laugh it off. “It is a unique proposal,” she said. “I have never been proposed to in that manner before. May I have that telegram? I shall keep it to my dying day.”
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If news of this development filtered through to Blanca it must have made her shudder. Her worst fears were coming true. Jack Jr. was already mentioning his father’s latest paramour. Apparently, after returning from a visit to The Box, Jack Jr. said that his father told him he was going to have “two mothers,” the second being Ruth Shepley. “Daddy says she will love me as much as you do.”
²⁵
Blanca felt more marginalized than ever.

While Blanca’s situation roiled, events on the world stage had taken a pivotal turn. In January 1917, British Naval Intelligence intercepted a coded telegram sent by the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmerman, to his country’s ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt. When the code breakers in the Admiralty’s Room 40 decrypted the message, they could scarcely believe their eyes. In it, Zimmerman revealed Germany’s intention to wage unrestricted submarine war on any ship from any country starting on February 1.

As such action would undoubtedly result in drawing neutral America into the conflict, Zimmerman proposed an alliance with Mexico against the United States. To sweeten the deal, the German foreign secretary promised to cede New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona back to Mexico in the event of a successful invasion. The “Zimmerman Telegram,” as it became known, caused diplomatic outrage, especially when, as forecast, German U-boats began laying waste to shipping in the North Atlantic regardless of what flag they were flying. On April 6, after seven American ships had been sent to the bottom, Congress finally declared war on Germany.

Five days later, Jack was sworn in as a special deputy mechanic at the port of New York by his old friend Dudley Malone. At age thirty-eight, Jack was too old for the draft—initially restricted to men between ages nineteen and twenty-five—and he was delegated to inspect several German and Austrian ships that had been interned in New York harbor. His duties were far from onerous. They left him plenty of time to oversee the construction of his own polo field at The Box—an obsession with him—and also to exhibit his string of polo ponies. On April 19 his gray mare, Vinilla, won second prize at the Brooklyn Horse Show. Seven days later she went one better at the New York Spring Horse Show, an annual event held at Durland’s Academy on the Grand Circle in Central Park.

To judge from the favorable press coverage, Jack had sailed through the divorce action with his name and reputation if not fully intact, then largely unsullied. At the same time, his real estate business was thriving on news that he and Heckscher had leased twenty thousand square feet of space in the new sixteen-story Heckscher Building at 244 Madison Avenue to the National Aniline and Chemical Company. The hefty commissions that Jack earned on these deals were plowed back into improving the polo facilities at The Box and building a child’s playground, complete with merry-go-round and swings, for when Jack Jr. came to visit.

The harsh New York winter of 1916–17 saw Rodolfo Guglielmi at his lowest ebb. Job opportunities had dried to a trickle, he was flat broke, and Blanca, by her continuing silence, had banished all hopes of reconciliation. Once again he began to eye the West Coast. His chance to make the big break came in April 1917 when he auditioned for a musical comedy called
The Masked Model.
The producer, John Cort, thought the young man showed promise and offered him a place in the chorus. Rodolfo jumped at the chance.