The Valentino Affair (37 page)

Weeks kept up the attack. “Did you tell Mrs. Heckscher that if you had known what married life was you would never have married?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you tell her that he could run around all he wanted to if he would leave you alone?”

“No.”

“And did you not boast of your indifference toward any demonstrations of affection on the part of your husband?”

“No.”
²⁰

“Didn’t he write to you that you had never been a wife to him?”

“He wrote me a very long and very rude letter. If he said it, it was a lie.”
²¹

The “very rude” letter was then introduced. Weeks read from it slowly, “For the last four years you have refused to live with me as my wife.”
²²
Here, Weeks paused and peered at the witness. All he got back was a contemptuous wrinkling of Blanca’s nose.

On balance the correspondence proved damaging to Blanca, especially the time she wrote to Jack: “I got another beastly letter from my mother, so that I have given up trying to bridge the gulf. She is out of her mind.”
²³
Initially, Señora Errázuriz-Vergara, seated directly facing her daughter, appeared not to hear what had been said, but when everyone suddenly turned and looked in her direction, she asked the person alongside what she had missed. When Blanca’s words were repeated to her, tears began trickling down her face. Moments later, unable to control her emotions, she hurried from court. If Blanca saw this interruption—and it’s impossible to imagine that she did not—it made no difference. Her implacable expression remained fixed.

Weeks’s gentlemanly cross-examination continued. How, he wanted to know, could she pen such endearing communications if her heart were truly broken? “I wouldn’t for the world have let him know how offended I was.”
²⁴

Not even after the notorious “which one?” incident at the hotel in London, surely that must have been a gross humiliation?

“I had been offended.”

“You wouldn’t say humiliated?”

“I would say seriously offended.”
²⁵

Weeks next read out an extract from the Christmas Eve, 1914, letter Blanca wrote to Jack about her arrival in New York. It concerned the incident where she had flirted with the customs man, a Mr. Downey, who had eased her through the immigration formalities, and whose kindness she had repaid by inviting him to visit her family home in New York. “Of course, he was in the seventh heaven of delight,” she wrote. “You know better than anyone what saying that means to people of that class.”
²⁶
Over sniggers from the public gallery, Weeks continued, saying that, again, this letter gave no indication of the hurt that Blanca claimed she was feeling.

“It wasn’t meant to.”
²⁷

In that same letter, Weeks noted, she had mentioned spending a considerable amount of time in the company of Harold Fowler. It was Fowler with whom Blanca dined in London, it was Fowler who accompanied her on the
Lusitania
on the return from London, and it was Fowler whom she met and dined with in New York. The subtext was clear: Weeks was exploring the possibility that Blanca had found solace in someone else’s arms. “I should like to ask, was your heart broken at that time?”

“I was miserable.”
²⁸

More sparring followed. Weeks plucked a quote from a letter of February 28, 1915: “When you wrote, ‘I don’t love anyone more than I do you,’ did you mean it?”

“No.”

“Your heart was broken then?”

Blanca’s eyes flashed. “I answered that before, Mr. Weeks.”

“You wrote what you didn’t mean?”

“One can smile with a broken heart.”
²⁹
Again, Blanca’s flair for aphorisms thrilled the public gallery.

Weeks did manage to dent Blanca’s sangfroid when he resurrected her comment about so narrowly avoiding passage aboard the
Lusitania,
and her wish to have perished in the tragedy. “Is it not a fact that when you first heard of the sinking you and De Saulles were with Mrs. Mooney and that De Saulles said he wished he had been aboard the Lusitania?”

“I don’t remember.”
³⁰
This time Blanca’s stock answer to so many questions sounded thin and unconvincing. No doubt about it; she had been caught out.

Weeks began to press. After Jack had offered her a divorce if she so desired and she had sailed for Chile, she wrote a letter thanking him for his flowers and kind words. “Do you mean to say that when you wrote that your married life was at an end?”

“At an end, morally.”
³¹

“Will you please be frank and tell us what you mean by that? Did you mean that you wouldn’t live with him as man and wife?”

“I thought that as I was leaving him, I wouldn’t.”
³²

Blanca was a canny operator. Whenever the questioning became too pointed for comfort, she would look pleadingly at Justice Manning, and he would ease her distress with a few kind words, encouraging her to take her time and not to be nervous. Blanca’s palpable effect on the judge was echoed in Weeks’s next line of questioning, an attempt to show just how comfortable she was in the company of other men. Blanca reluctantly admitted that she had attended several social functions on her own, but only with a “heavy heart.”
³³

Abruptly, Weeks switched to events on the morning after the shooting, when Blanca was in a supposedly dazed state. He asked if she recalled phoning Frederic R. Coudert, asking him to call on her at the jail, that he had done so, and that she had selected, at his recommendation, the firm of Uterhart & Graham to represent her.

“I don’t recall seeing him at that time.”
³⁴

Weeks looked incredulous. “You don’t recall my walking into the woman’s part of the jail that morning and finding you at a table with Suzanne Monteau, your maid, across the table from you and when I found you reading a newspaper?”

“I do not.”
³⁵

“Do you remember reading that Mr. Uterhart said that he would ‘acquit this woman’ . . . or hand his certificate of admission to the judge?”

“I didn’t read that,” she said, smiling across at her lawyer, who smiled right back.

Weeks next raised the exhaustive biography that had been delivered to the papers within forty-eight hours of the killing. “Didn’t you give all that information to your lawyer in the conference you had with him immediately after the shooting?”

“I don’t recollect it. I have no knowledge of any talk with Mr. Uterhart then.”
³⁶
Her first claimed memory of meeting Uterhart came on August 13, ten days after the shooting. Nor could she remember phoning Mrs. Roma M. Flint and asking her to bail her maid out. Then Weeks produced a check, payable to the order of Mrs. Flint. It was dated August 4. “Do you recall drawing that check?” Weeks handed her the check. She studied it for several moments.

“No, I do not.”

“You know that it was used as the cash bail resulting in the release of your maid, Suzanne Monteau, don’t you?”

“I think I heard of it later.”
³⁷

It had been an arduous morning, and as the recess hour drew near, one of the jurors, retired firefighter Alexander Norton, yawned audibly. The crowd tittered and Weeks suggested to the judge that the jury must be getting tired and that maybe it was time to break for lunch. To general astonishment Blanca broke in. “I should think anybody would be tired.”
³⁸

Weeks spun around. It had taken more than two hours, but at long last a flash of emotion colored his face. “Are you tired?” he barked at the witness.

“No, I don’t blame the juror for being tired, though.”

“Are my questions tiresome to you?”

“Yes.”

This brought a gasp in court.

“Do they bore you? Do you think I should not ask you about these things?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Weeks. I know you have to do that.”
³⁹

A couple of exchanges later, Weeks said, “When you said that you didn’t mean any disrespect to me, I hope?”

“Oh, no,”
⁴⁰
she said innocently. On this note, the morning session ended.

During the lunch recess, members of the public gallery exchanged views about the morning’s testimony. Reactions were mixed. Some thought Blanca had withstood Weeks’s admittedly bland cross-examination with admirable panache. Others were more critical. For the first time Blanca’s highly developed sense of entitlement was beginning to grate. The incident with the customs man, in particular, had raised hackles, with one woman marking Blanca down as “a frightful little snob.”
⁴¹
And then there was the tactless remark that had driven her own mother from the court. All in all, the prosecution had just about shaded the session, but not by much.

After the recess, Weeks sharpened his focus, taking aim at Blanca’s finances and defense claims that Jack had been a mercenary predator content to sponge off his wife’s inheritance. “Is it not the law in Chile that when a woman marries, her goods and all she owns belong to her husband?”

“Yes.”

“I object,” interrupted Uterhart, “and ask that the answer be stricken out. When this lady married the American, even down in Chile, she became an American citizen too, and her property was subject only to the American laws.”
⁴²
Uterhart was skating on the thinnest of ice, legally, and he knew it, and his objection was swiftly quashed by Justice Manning. When the question was restated, Blanca repeated that such was the case under Chilean law. And was it not also the case, said Weeks, that at the time of the divorce, Jack signed back his interest in your Chilean property? Again Blanca agreed. And what about the diamond stickpin that he gave you? “It belonged to me,”
⁴³
she protested. More dispute over expenses followed, in which Blanca grudgingly admitted that even in her current allegedly impecunious state she was still able to afford three maids.

With these questions about domestic finances, Weeks finally found some chinks in Blanca’s armor. Previously, her allegations of Jack’s abusive behavior had been largely unverifiable; now they were moving into an area that left paper trails. Her face tightened when Weeks pointed out that in 1916 she had borrowed twenty-five hundred dollars from the New York Trust Company and turned the money over to Jack, who had repaid her with three checks. In another transaction she gave the same trust company a note for three thousand dollars.

“You never paid it, did you?”

“Part of it.”

“How much?”

“What he didn’t pay.”
⁴⁴

Weeks showed that all of the checks that cleared the loan were signed by Jack. “Your husband paid all those, did he not?” he said, clinching his point.

“Yes.”
⁴⁵

There then followed a heated exchange over household expenses, who paid what, and so forth. When Weeks claimed that, on one occasion, Jack had paid bills for Blanca’s expenses, amounting to $4,990.80, Blanca just shrugged. Eventually the judge tried to clear the air, “Do you dispute the payment by Mr. De Saulles for these things?”
⁴⁶

“Oh, I wouldn’t dispute a small amount like that,”
⁴⁷
she said. A groan from the public gallery showed that, once again, Blanca had misjudged the general mood. Such flippancy might play well at a cocktail party, but in this grim setting her levity succeeded only in setting teeth on edge.