The Valentino Affair (20 page)

Oblivious to the frenzy, Blanca dressed slowly in the white silk outfit that she had worn the previous night and sat down to a breakfast of special delicacies that she had ordered. The meal was cooked by the sheriff’s wife, Estella, who also acted as matron of the jail. While the dishes were being cleared away, Blanca summoned a guard: “Please call my attorneys and ask them to see that I am released on bail at once. I must see Little Jack.”
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She frowned as the guard explained apologetically that bail was out of the question for such a serious charge. Only then did the gravity of her situation seem to sink in. After some thought she asked to use a phone. Her first call was to the firm of Uterhart & Graham. Why, she demanded, had someone not been to see her? Because they had not yet been officially hired, was the answer. Blanca remedied this omission and was told that someone would be with her within the hour. After completing her phone calls, Blanca settled down with the morning papers.

The shooting of ex–football star Jack de Saulles was front page news not just in New York but across the nation. M
URDER IN “400”:
H
EIRESS
S
HOOTS
A
THLETE,
announced the
Tacoma Times,
while another paper boomed FAMOUS
BEAUTY
KILLS
HER
DIVORCED
HUSBAND
.
What made this second headline so significant was that it was splashed in the
Los Angeles Times,
a breakfast staple of just about everyone in Hollywood—including Rodolfo Guglielmi.

Mae Murray, another recent Golden State immigrant, tells how, with “heartbreak in his eyes and voice,”
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Rodolfo showed her the newspaper, sobbing bitterly over what had happened. Like Blanca, he had seen the inside of a prison cell and knew the desolation that it could inflict. But his concerns hit closer to home. He had crossed a continent to efface the memory of his involvement in the sordid de Saulles divorce action and his subsequent arrest on trumped-up vice charges only to find that even at this distance his past was threatening to catch up with him. Not that he had much to lose. Since moving to Los Angeles, it had been tough sledding. Even in 1917, the City of Angels drew throngs of young, good-looking hopefuls, just like him, all fighting to get a foot in the door. So far Guglielmi had come up short. To make ends meet he’d been forced to fall back on that old standby: taxi dancing. That was degrading enough. Now this.

The biggest difference that money can buy in any criminal trial is time, and Blanca de Saulles and her family could afford boatloads of the stuff. Not for her some harassed court-appointed attorney, whose only interest would be in getting the case to trial as quickly as possible, pleading her out, and then moving on to pick up the next legal crumb on offer. Million-dollar defendants get million-dollar defenses, tailor-made, meticulously prepared over several months, with access to the very best (and most expensive) expert witnesses, and, most important of all, a superbly orchestrated PR campaign.

The man chosen to lead this crusade arrived at the jail just before midday. Most days of the week, Henry A. Uterhart spent his time unraveling tax or divorce problems, but he was also a top-notch performer in the criminal court. A giant of a man—he stood six feet four, and that was without the omnipresent brown derby—he had an intimidating presence inside a courtroom and out. Although clean-shaven in the modern style, he was disarmingly Victorian in dress, with a fondness for high-wing collars. Like most courtroom high-flyers, he was a shameless grandstander. In one case, acting on a dare from opposing counsel, he gulped down two sedative tablets to prove that he would be awake and active the next day in court, thereby proving that the testator in the case, a woman who had swallowed a single tablet, couldn’t have been drugged when she made her will, as she claimed. He won his point. (Whether the court factored in the difference in stature between Uterhart and the pocket-sized testator is not recorded.)

On this morning Uterhart entered the Mineola jailhouse, his pockets bulging with money. He carefully peeled off a thousand dollars, enough for the bail that would free Suzanne. (It later emerged that the funds had been furnished by a Mrs. Roma M. Flint, one of Blanca’s fashionable Park Avenue set.) After her release, Suzanne was besieged by reporters who bombarded her with questions about the fateful night.

“Mrs. De Saulles merely asked me to go with her,” she said, pushing her way through the crowd. “I didn’t know where or why she was going. I didn’t know she carried a revolver.”
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Then a waiting car whisked her away to Crossways. She stayed just long enough to pack a box of her mistress’s clothes before returning to the jail. Also in the box was a photograph of Jack Jr. that Blanca set up on the little dressing table thoughtfully provided by Mrs. Seaman. Her duties complete for the day, Suzanne was then driven away to seclusion.

In her wake, Sheriff Seaman willingly fielded questions from the press. His sympathies were immediately apparent. “If the child is brought here to see his mother, she may see him and caress him all she wishes,” he said. “The boy is all she seems to think about, and I certainly would not do anything to stop her seeing him as often as possible.”
⁴

Constable Thorne, too, seemed dazzled by the jail’s star inmate. “The way she talked to me, I am sure she did not have the slightest idea in her head of shooting her husband.”
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Up on the second floor, Uterhart was hard at work. His first consultation with Blanca lasted two hours. By meeting’s end, the big lawyer had formulated a clear strategy. He would rely on a tried and trusted legal maxim as relevant today as it was in 1917: If you can’t attack the evidence, attack the victim. This would be the linchpin of his defense, an all-out assault on the character of Jack de Saulles.

Sure enough, Uterhart emerged from the jailhouse spitting fire. His first move was to let slip a rumor that ten days before the shooting, Jack had savagely beaten Blanca, a beating so bad that it pushed her over the brink. Although not a shred of evidence existed to prove that such an assault ever occurred, it didn’t matter. In criminal cases it’s not truth that matters, it’s perception; the denials or apologies could come later. Uterhart had the gloves off, ready to say and do whatever was necessary to blacken Jack’s name and to sway public opinion in favor of a woman who had been “deeply humiliated and wronged.”
⁶

Uterhart rumbled that all the facts of Blanca’s tragic home life would be made public at the appropriate time. He also stated his belief that on August 3, pursuant to the court ruling, Blanca was entitled to custody of her son. De Saulles had given “his word of honor as a gentleman to a woman that the boy would be returned in the evening—early in the evening—and the boy was not returned. Mr. De Saulles broke his word.”
⁷
Blanca, he said, was perfectly within her rights to attempt to claim him. She had devoted her life and the whole of her love to little Jack, and “the retention of the boy by De Saulles was the culminating blow and struck her very deeply. It was as if her troubles and anxiety reached the very breaking point.”
⁸

Uterhart then gave the sympathy button an extra push for good measure. Blanca was, he said, “practically a stranger in the country, with her relatives and friends in Chile, she could not bear the loneliness of her situation.”
⁹
And he sighed that eliciting details of the tragedy from Blanca had been fiendishly difficult; her only concern was for the safety of her only child. Throughout their conversation, he said, her gaze rarely left the photograph of her son. Despite this distraction, she had managed to provide Uterhart with a lengthy and exhaustive account of the de Saulles marriage, dating from 1911 when the couple first met in Chile. Uterhart detailed five years of abuse and neglect for the scribbling reporters. At the memoir’s conclusion, he was quizzed on the whereabouts of Jack Jr. The big lawyer professed ignorance but declared that, once the boy was tracked down, he would obtain visiting rights for him. Uterhart finished his first press conference on an upbeat note, repeating a promise he had made to Blanca: “I will throw away my license to practice law if any jury which hears your story does not free you.”
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Defense counsel Henry A. Uterhart (right), with his partner, John G. Graham

This was no idle boast. Uterhart had sentiment and precedent on his side. Just six years before in Denver, another society belle, the stunningly beautiful Gertrude Gibson Patterson, had also resolved a messy divorce by shooting her husband in the back. Conviction had looked a certainty. But, against all the odds and all the evidence, the jury set Gertrude free. The astonishing acquittal led a brother of the victim and himself a lawyer, to declare ruefully, “The verdict means that a pretty woman can commit murder and get away with it. I know from my practice that conviction of a woman criminal is almost impossible.”
¹¹
And that was Uterhart’s trump card: the blinkered refusal of all-male juries in the early twentieth century to convict any attractive woman of murder. The male conscience, apparently, was unwilling to countenance the prospect of those winsome features being twisted and blackened by a hangman’s rope or else seared by 2,200 volts of electricity.

Even though Uterhart proclaimed his confidence about the outcome—ergo the remark about relinquishing his law license—he wanted a slam dunk, and that meant digging up as much dirt on the dead man as possible. Assistance came in the shape of John E. Bleekman. Just one day after the shooting hit the headlines, the forty-seven-year-old civil engineer—he had helped construct the Union Depot in Cincinnati—motored the fifteen miles from his home at Elmhurst, Queens, to the Mineola jailhouse to offer his services to Blanca. He obviously bore a powerful grudge against de Saulles, most likely the result of having been bested in some business deal. In the event, Bleekman wasn’t permitted to see Blanca, but he did throw the hungry reporters some tasty morsels.

For instance, he claimed that he could prove that in 1911 Jack had bragged of his intention to “marry a woman for her great wealth.”
¹²
And then there was Jack’s arrogant claim that he could “win any given woman with flowers in the morning, a ride in the afternoon, and a dinner in the evening.”
¹³
Further allegations made by Bleekman went considerably beyond what any newspaper was prepared to print and far exceeded anything leveled by Blanca against the dead man. Clearly Uterhart didn’t trust Bleekman’s so-called evidence, as, after this interlude, nothing more was heard from the vengeful engineer. But some useful mud had been thrown; some of it was bound to stick.

When asked if temporary insanity would play any part in the defense, Uterhart nodded, saying it would enable him to get details of Jack’s adultery into evidence.

“Do you think she was insane at that time?” one reporter asked.

Uterhart grew thoughtful. “Yes, I think so. Imagine her mother love and the purity of heart that she possessed—being so young and separated from her own family, and then the absolute possession of him being questioned.”
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