The Valentino Affair (45 page)

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Uterhart, especially when he had to explain those troublesome letters exchanged between husband and wife. He knew they were a double-edged sword. In some Blanca came across as a sympathetic victim, scarred mentally by her crumbling marriage; in others—the majority—she was the embodiment of gaiety, a fun-loving society belle, prepared to abandon her own son in New York so that she might gad about Europe, indifferent to everything except her own pleasure. Ignore this latter impression, said Uterhart; it had all been a subterfuge. “The letters of 1914 indicated a tremendous change. She had been neglected and deserted. She was trying to be the kind of woman that he liked—the frivolous Broadway type. . . . She feared he was drifting from her. She was trying to pretend she was not the same girl who rejoiced over the appearance of baby’s first tooth. But other letters showed she hadn’t really changed. She was pouring out her love, changing her character even, to hold the man’s love—and he was away from her practically the whole time. That’s what the district attorney has proved by putting in these letters. Do you jurors think she was a vain, frivolous woman, or a loving wife who wanted nothing but her husband by her side?”
²⁴

The best gauge of Blanca’s genuine state of mind, said Uterhart, lay in the “Dinky Boy” letters, one in particular. “At the time it was written De Saulles was selling her house and pocketing $7,500. It was a case of a woman’s heart against a man’s cold, calculating mind. Her saying in a later letter that their unhappy married life was due to her, is merely the letter of a noble woman and a loyal wife.” He paused to glance across at Blanca. “She had come to the parting of the ways. It takes a big person to say they are in the wrong and yet feel they are in the right. That’s exactly what she did in this magnanimous letter she wrote her husband when she went to Chile in 1915.”
²⁵

Uterhart dwelt on the letters at length, contrasting the district attorney’s “theory that De Saulles was a wonderful husband” with the fact that “he didn’t give her five cents in their early married life and got from her $18,000. . . . And yet, we find this woman . . . writing to her husband and asking him to forgive her.”
²⁶
By this time Uterhart’s cajoling was having a plainly visible effect on the jury, most of whom sniffled back tears or dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs.

Uterhart’s voice rose and rasped as he outlined Jack’s misuse of Blanca’s fortune, buying and selling property using her money and putting the title in his own name. Any ordinary real estate man who acted in so cavalier a fashion would be “up in Sing Sing now,”
²⁷
roared Uterhart. Jack de Saulles, he insisted, didn’t want the boy, he wanted Blanca’s money. It was “fraud and deceit and larceny, only this time he capitalizes not only her wifely love but her mother love [
sic
]. There’s a little vignette of John De Saulles’s character—a man who swindles his own wife and cashes in on the love of her child. That’s John De Saulles.”
²⁸
He spat the name out like he was trying to get a bad taste from his mouth.

He even vilified de Saulles for daring to keep a copy of the letters he wrote to his wife. There had to be some underlying motive at work; after all, Uterhart said, “No man ever keeps a copy of a letter to his wife.”
²⁹
This was the action of a scheming husband who was “making a record for future use.”
³⁰
And what nerve! Why, at the very time he wrote this letter, Jack was enmeshed in “a low, coarse love affair”
³¹
with the Broadway dancer Joan Sawyer. Uterhart’s look of disgust was more eloquent than a thousand insults. And as for de Saulles’s complaint that she had not lived with him as a wife, “Why, good God, gentlemen, she chased him all over the world to live with him.”
³²

All through Uterhart’s speech, Blanca had watched intently, hands folded in her lap, but, as always, the only real signs of animation came when Uterhart dealt with the medical evidence. Then Blanca’s eyes, usually so dull and glazed, took on a new sharpness. “No matter what Dr. Cole, the X-ray man, says, you saw a depression in that woman’s skull, and we say it is not a fontanel but an unclosed fracture.”
³³
Uterhart glossed over the X-rays, aware that his trio of expert witnesses had fared poorly when compared to Dr. Cole, whose vast experience in radiology had given his testimony an unbreachable authority. Instead, he quickly turned to the shooting itself. “If she had wanted to kill him she easily could get him to Crossways on some pretext and kill him when nobody else was around. She could have shot him from behind, yet the bullets sprayed all over his head like a machine gun. You can’t get away from the fact that the first bullet hit the front knuckle.”
³⁴

As no evidence had been adduced during the trial to substantiate this outlandish claim, Weeks’s failure to object was astounding. But the district attorney remained glued to his seat, a legal eunuch, seemingly content to give Uterhart his head. What followed next was pure pantomime, as Uterhart offered his version of how the shooting had occurred. Twisting his bulky frame this way and that, he insisted—again without an iota of evidence—that the bullet to the back had been fired last. And he dismissed Marshall Ward’s account of the shooting as “a fabrication,”
³⁵
because Ward had not even been in the room at the fateful moment.

After a fleeting and curt review of the prosecution’s medical witnesses, Uterhart lacerated the state for not calling Dr. Guy Cleghorn, the county physician and the first medical man to examine Blanca and who kept her under constant surveillance in the jail. “Is it not plain why the district attorney has discarded the testimony of a competent medical man on his own staff”
³⁶
to tell the court of Blanca’s mental state? Instead the state chose to rely on the testimony of witnesses such as the Countess Salm, whom Uterhart branded as nothing more than a spy “sent over to the jail by members of the De Saulles family to frame up this little woman.”
³⁷
This was sharp enough, but like Weeks one day earlier, Uterhart reserved his most venomous attack for someone lower down the social scale. Anna Mooney—“that hard faced, vicious harridan”
³⁸
—was condemned as a vengeful ex-servant “trying to swear her former mistress’s life away.”
³⁹

Uterhart had been on his feet for more than two hours and not a word had been wasted or ignored. The climax of his speech saw him stand before the jury, arms spread wide, like some preacher before his congregation. “I say to the defendant who sits there that she can trust you gentlemen. She is looking into the faces of the strong, true American gentlemen who are going to give her full and ample justice by acquitting her.”
⁴⁰
He then turned to Blanca and declared his belief that the jury would acquit her. She returned his gaze without smiling. Uterhart faced the jury one more time. “I feel now that there is a spirit in this room that is going to fill your hearts—the spirit of the Man who stood on the Mount and said, ‘Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy.’ ”
⁴¹
Then Uterhart slumped down at the defense table, utterly drained by his effort.

Some in the press box thought that, for the first time in the trial, the ice princess had been moved to tears, with one reporter noting that when Justice Manning announced a fifteen-minute recess, “she went out weeping and leaning on the arm of her physician.”
⁴²
Blanca’s red-rimmed emotion was mirrored in the jury box and the public gallery. For those few moments the courtroom was awash with maudlin sentiment.

After the break Weeks took center stage. The jowly, bespectacled district attorney stood up knowing that he faced a thankless task. Uterhart’s address had been adrenaline-charged, jammed full of emotion, and he had a copybook defendant, beautiful, vulnerable, almost schoolgirlish. All Weeks could offer in response was cold, hard facts; thin gruel, indeed, for the task ahead. He began by reminding the jury that it was Blanca de Saulles who was on trial, not her former husband. “The only issue—the only thing for you to determine—is whether this defendant knew what she was doing that night.”
⁴³
He noted that Uterhart had spent forty-five minutes trashing a dead man’s reputation. “I don’t care how base a man may have been, how much he may squander his wife’s money, that does not give a woman the right to shoot him down like a dog,”
⁴⁴
he said. “John De Saulles is dead, and his faults, they say, were many, but it has seemed to me that this trial has changed from a trial of Mrs. De Saulles to a trial of John De Saulles.”
⁴⁵

And what about the defendant’s character? Weeks wondered. Was she really as angelic as she would have everyone believe? He reminded the jury of her patronizing, often grossly insulting references to other people: There was “the little man” who had helped her at the steamship pier; Constable Thorne, with his “nasty voice”; and “the black thing”
⁴⁶
who had testified at the Carman trial. These were not the utterances of a kindly nature, argued Weeks, but rather the products of a warped and narcissistic disposition, disdainful of any perceived underling. “Has one word of pity or one of regret come from the defendant, or from her witnesses or counsel?” Weeks asked. “Has even decent respect been shown to his relatives? No, it seems that even the family of the dead man cannot be mentioned without a snarl or a hiss, even the aged mother must be referred to discourteously as ‘Old Mrs. De Saulles.’ ”
⁴⁷

Weeks cited the letters written by Blanca as proof that Jack really was the “perfect husband”
⁴⁸
that she had once called him. The defendant’s courtroom performance had been a sham, delivered by “one of the keenest minds that ever faced a jury.”
⁴⁹
At this point Blanca shook off her apathy for an instant and speared the district attorney with a withering glare as he continued. Regardless of Jack’s marital shortcomings, this was a murder trial and the defendant had killed her husband with premeditation. “What was the first sight this distracted mother saw when she opened the door? Her own child. Did she grasp him to her bosom or speak to him? No, she did not, but she did speak to Mrs. Degener. If she had grasped the child and held him, and then said, ‘Come on, Jack De Saulles, you committed grand larceny’ and then had shot him she would never have been held by the Grand Jury of this county.”
⁵⁰

Weeks ridiculed Uterhart’s reenactment of how the shooting had unfolded, and he was similarly scathing about Suzanne Monteau’s evidence that Jack had been only three feet from his wife and facing her, saying that if such had been the case Jack would have knocked the gun aside. “No one contends that he was not a brave man.”
⁵¹
Weeks also mocked Blanca’s claims of amnesia. All her actions after the shooting, he said, were those of someone in full possession of her faculties. “Do you remember when I was cross-examining and a juror yawned, and, quick as a flash, that woman said, ‘Do you blame him, Mr. Weeks?’ Quick to see her opportunity and keen enough to turn it to her own advantage.”
⁵²

The DA maintained that any shock Blanca suffered came not when she shot Jack, but later in the jail when the full realization of what she had done sank in. The so-called amnesia, he said, was a convenient ruse to wipe out the time for which she should be held to account. She was entirely sane, as evidenced by her words to Countess Salm just days after the shooting. “Could anything be more rational than her warning to a visitor at the jail to be careful what she said, as there might be a Dictaphone in the cell?”
⁵³
And even before this, just seconds after the shooting, she had calmly instructed the eyewitnesses to call the police. Again, this was powerful evidence of sanity, said Weeks. He looked directly at the jury. “I wouldn’t care if the experts stood in one long line from here to New York. . . . I would take the evidence of my own eyes—the commonsense evidence that you jurors must consider. Mrs. De Saulles knew what she had done, and this calling for the police showed that she knew her act was a crime.”
⁵⁴
Weeks reminded the jury that they had taken a solemn oath to render a fair and impartial verdict on the evidence alone and not to permit themselves to be swayed by sympathy. After this plea, Weeks sat down. He had been speaking for eighty-five minutes.