The Valentino Affair (35 page)

Uterhart asked Blanca about her various head injuries. She told how, as a little girl, she had fallen in the fireplace and banged her head on an andiron. It had affected her so much that she never fully recovered. “I believe I was kept in bed for some time.”
¹⁹

“Were there any permanent results of that injury?”

“Only pains in the head.” She pointed to an area just above her forehead. “The pains come and go.”
²⁰

Uterhart then asked what had happened when she and Jack moved into the lonely house at Larchmont. For her protection, she said, Jack had bought her a revolver. Uterhart handed her the nickel-plated .32 Smith & Wesson.

“Is that the one?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”
²¹
She took the gun without flinching in the least.

Uterhart next dealt with various letters Blanca had written to Jack, ones that displayed affection—a desperate attempt, according to Uterhart’s opening address, to save her crumbling marriage—and then compared them to the letters she had written to Nurse O’Neill, which, he said, revealed her true emotions. Blanca agreed that this was the case, embellishing the second string of letters with harrowing descriptions of her torrid home life, none of which, of course, could be corroborated. Across the court the de Saulles family sat with “incredulous expressions”
²²
and compressed lips as Blanca piled on the opprobrium. Caroline, in particular, glared venomously at her former sister-in-law.

Uterhart drew from Blanca an account of her life as an innocent manipulated by a deceitful, grasping husband who, even after discovering that his heiress wife did not have the fabulous wealth that everyone assumed, still managed to swindle her out of forty-seven thousand dollars. Further financial details followed, all designed to reveal the level of Jack’s duplicity.

After two hours of testimony, Justice Manning ordered a recess for lunch. The Long Island society set adjourned to the basement cafeteria to discuss the morning’s events. Over sandwiches and coffee, there was high admiration for Blanca’s courtroom demeanor. Very impressive. During this break it was Dr. Wight’s turn at the defense PR helm. He informed the pressmen that Blanca was bearing the strain better than he had expected, while the señora, oozing confidence and charisma, added that her daughter had taken “a little rest”
²³
and was ready to continue her evidence upon the resumption.

The opening of the afternoon session saw an astonishing scene in court. As the doors were thrown open, scores of women surged forward, fighting “madly and shamelessly”
²⁴
to secure a spot in the public gallery. Three women fainted and many were hurt. They “shrieked and howled so loudly”
²⁵
that Justice Manning, red-faced with anger, stormed from his chambers. “This is simply disgraceful,”
²⁶
he roared, pounding his fist on the bench. “This is not a performance. This is a solemn trial. . . . Sheriff, I want that hall and corridor cleared entirely. Make everybody get out except reporters and those who have passes properly accredited.”
²⁷

Easier said than done.

Seaman and his staff were simply overwhelmed by the mob of “frenzied women,”
²⁸
most of whom laughed when the court officers gave them orders to leave and fought their way back into the room. Another woman swooned and had to be carried out; others were trampled underfoot. Even veteran reporters had never witnessed such scenes; indeed, so bad did it become that some pressmen had to squeeze through windows to gain admittance to the court. After fifteen minutes of bedlam, Seaman was finally able to clear all the corridors.

When some semblance of courtroom decorum was restored, Blanca, who had sat through the commotion totally unaffected, resumed her testimony. Uterhart wanted to know more about the automobile accident in Chile. “Do you remember what kind of a motor car this was?”

Blanca smiled ruefully. “A Ford.”
²⁹
This sparked laughter in court, with most struggling to picture the affluent defendant in such a vehicle. She described being thrown from the car and landing on her head, and then being aware of nothing until she awoke later, under the care of physicians. She was told that the accident had caused a depressed fracture of the skull, leading to pressure on the brain. Afterward she had been confined to bed for two days with “severe headaches. . . . I was dizzy and nauseated.”

“Where is that fracture?”

“Right here.” She lay a hand on top of her head, near the forehead. “I can feel the depression. Whenever I combed my hair it pained terribly and every time something disagreeable happened my head hurt fearfully. Sometimes I can’t see and everything before my eyes gets blurred.”
³⁰

Uterhart was Blanca’s best audience. Every answer that she gave received some kind of accompanying gesture from the big lawyer, a sorrowful shake of the head or an encouraging smile, and with his towering bulk he had a way of leaning over her that gave him the air of protector rather than advocate. And judging from her testimony, this was a woman in desperate need of protection. After moving to The Box in May 1916, said Blanca, her husband’s callousness reached a new, more terrifying pitch. “He told me one day that if I did not like it I could get out—he said that more than once. He said the father knew best about what was good for the boy.”
³¹

And always there were other women. One in particular. A frisson rippled through the public gallery. At last! This was the kind of juicy detail that most had come for. Blanca told how Jack Jr. had returned from an outing to the zoo, saying that his father had another woman with him, one whom he had been instructed to call “Miss Jo.” “I almost died when I heard that. It was a terrible shock to me. I afterward learned that the woman the baby talked about was Joan Sawyer.”
³²
There was another coo of pleasure from the court. Blanca said that she’d learned of the affair from John Milholland, the brother of Inez Boissevain, the noted suffragist who had recently died and “whom I knew very well.”
³³
He told her that “everybody knew about it.”
³⁴

When she had confronted Jack about his affair with Joan Sawyer, he had rounded on her viciously snarling, “Do you think you are the only woman who has ever been in love with me?”
³⁵
Asked by Uterhart for her reaction, Blanca simply said, “I nearly died.”
³⁶
She described her husband as an abusive drunk who, most nights, stayed out till three and four o’clock in the morning. “He said he could not help the kind of life he was living as he was not made to settle down.”
³⁷
Blanca realized that she had become a figure of society fun when, at the Arrowhead Inn, she was publicly humiliated in front of a crowded restaurant.

The final straw came when she read the notorious edition of
Town Topics,
with its sensational coverage of the yacht party thrown by the Duke of Manchester and Jack de Saulles. How did that make you feel? asked Uterhart. “I was terribly scandalized,”
³⁸
she whispered. Life was becoming unbearable, made worse by Jack’s erratic behavior on his frequent visits to London. In a string of telegrams he would first beg her to join him, only to break her heart with a succession of last-minute rejections. She explained how a “peculiar trick of fate”
³⁹
had prevented her from taking passage on the
Lusitania
on its fateful trip. Only a misunderstanding of her husband’s wishes had prevented the trip, she said, adding, “When I heard of its going I wished I was on it.”
⁴⁰
A sigh from the public gallery reinforced Blanca’s witness-stand sadness. Such comments might have made for good theater, but Weeks noted the remark with grim satisfaction. There was an opening here.

Further humiliations followed, said Blanca, with Jack squandering her fortune on a succession of loose women. When Uterhart tried to explore details of the divorce, he was abruptly halted by Justice Manning, with a reminder that under the terms of the settlement, each party was sworn to silence. “The law sealed her mouth,”
⁴¹
said the judge. Uterhart knew this, of course. But his intent was to fix in the jury’s mind the notion that, because of some legal constraint, he was prevented from revealing even more damaging details about Jack de Saulles’s colorful sex life.

Blanca
was
allowed to describe the aftermath of the divorce, how she had not dreamt that Jack Jr. would be taken from her, until her lawyer warned, “You know you are a foreigner and the child is an American citizen. No judge would permit you to remove the boy from the country to be brought up other than as an American.”
⁴²
Because of this, she agreed to the split custody. Only later did the full implications of the agreement sink in. “I felt as if the world was coming to an end when I realized what this meant to me.”
⁴³

Blanca’s head lowered as she spoke. Her distress was mirrored in the jury box, where several members dabbed at stray tears. Even Justice Manning, with all his years of experience on the bench, was visibly affected. Uterhart, who came from the old school of lawyering that believed a face full of tears was worth an ocean of evidence, and who had been mopping his cheeks lavishly ever since the beginning of Blanca’s testimony, now blew his nose noisily and contented himself with waiting in gentlemanly fashion until the witness composed herself. With the court at an emotional fever pitch, he decided that the time was now right to lay the groundwork for his defense. “Do you remember the week of July 30?”

“Yes.”

“The weather was hot, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”
⁴⁴

Right on cue, Uterhart produced a weather record for that week that showed temperatures in the range of eighty-three to ninety-three degrees. On the day of the shooting the mercury stood at eighty-three degrees and the humidity had reached a soggy 86 percent, its maximum for this period. These were, said Uterhart, the hottest days of the year. “I know,” grumbled Justice Manning, “I was holding court at the time,
⁴⁵
and, taking over, he asked Blanca if she suffered from the heat.

“Terribly,”
⁴⁶
she replied. “I felt on fire. I was terribly sleepy, but couldn’t sleep. I tried to keep cool with showers. The pains in the head were almost unendurable.”
⁴⁷
Her memory had lapsed two or three times. And there were physical problems, as well; for instance, her fingernails broke off and her hair fell out, both symptoms, she now knew, of her previously undiagnosed thyroid condition.

Skillfully, Uterhart created the impression that because of this long-standing medical condition, on the night of the shooting, Blanca was not responsible for her actions. And the defendant played her part to perfection. Mostly, her answers were brief and she wisely avoided creating the impression of being a vengeful harridan. Her actions were inevitable and unavoidable, a view shared by many in the public gallery judging from the sympathetic expressions on the faces of the women who craned their necks to better hear her softly spoken answers.

And she also had plenty of allies among the sob sisters. One of these, Mrs. Wilson Woodrow,
⁴⁸
struggled to keep her own emotions in check as she described the defendant: “Is she real? Is she flesh and blood, or some being woven of moonbeams? Women of her type, if normal, do not commit murder in hot blood or cold blood, either. They are statuesque, gentle, docile, and obedient.”
⁴⁹
Then came a dash of pseudo-Freudian insight—very popular at the time—the murder, declared Mrs. Woodrow, “was the irrational act of a woman mentally irresponsible for her deeds. There is no question of a sudden brainstorm or temporary insanity. Her condition is obvious. She is a melancholic subject in a state of fixed apathy. Her place is in a hospital and not in a courtroom.”
⁵⁰