The Valentino Affair (47 page)

NINETEEN

A Courtroom Bernhardt

O
THER NEWSPAPERS WERE EQUALLY HORRIFIED BY THE VERDICT.
Complainer-in-chief was the
New York Times,
with a blistering editorial, unable to fathom how Blanca had beaten the charge. “On a certain night last August this woman, having armed herself with a revolver, traveled . . . to the residence of her divorced husband and there shot him dead. She took the life of a human being, an act which the law forbids and makes punishable. The fact of the killing undisputed, the law was declared to the jury by the court. Yet the verdict was ‘not guilty,’ absolute acquittal. The jury, by that verdict, found that the woman in killing De Saulles had done no wrong; if they had some lingering doubts about the righteousness of her act, they declared that she should not be punished for it. It need not be pointed out that it is not the intention of the law that a person who takes the life of another shall go scot-free.”
¹

Thousands of taxpayer dollars had vanished down the drain on a case that looked open and shut. So who was to blame? The
New York Times
’s indignant lather spared no one. “Probably there was never a flimsier insanity plea presented in any court. It was surpassed, however, by the pitiful feebleness of the prosecution’s efforts to combat it.” And the judge, too, was roughly handled for his bizarre biblical reference. “In countless cases new trials have been granted—not possible in this case—on grounds far less substantial than that utterance. If it was not an impropriety to put that thought into the minds of the jurymen, then we do not know what would constitute impropriety in a judge’s charge.”
²

One thing was certain, it was another victory for the unwritten law. In Chicago—that hotbed of perverse verdicts when the defendant was female, attractive, and preferably young—one newspaper sighed, “An American jury again made its own laws when it gave a verdict of ‘not guilty’ and set Mrs. John De Saulles free. . . . The American mind seems convinced that law is an imperfect remedy.”
³

While the leader writers fulminated, the object of all this ink and ire was sitting for press photo shots in her living room at Crossways. Blanca smiled easily and affably. Her large dark eyes gleamed with life and happiness as she posed, wearing a fetching winter outfit of tan and white, complete with brown checked stockings. The zombielike stupor present from the day of her arrest had been consigned to history, leading one reporter to wryly observe: “The interim has wrought a marvelous change in the central figure of the most remarkable murder trial which Nassau County has ever witnessed.”
⁴

The morning had been tension-filled. From an early hour Uterhart and George Gordon Battle had been locked in negotiations over the custody of Jack Jr. Eventually, at 1:30 p.m., Uterhart heard that if he went to Maurice Heckscher’s home at 35 East 49th Street at 2:30 p.m., the boy would be returned. Uterhart immediately called for his car.

An hour later, he knocked at the Heckscher’s door. As promised, Jack Jr. was ready, wearing a sailor suit and proudly displaying the badge given him by Sheriff Seaman. Uterhart stood to one side as the boy kissed the two little Heckscher girls good-bye; then came a poignant moment as Louise leaned down, kissed Jack Jr., and said “good-bye forever.”
⁵
On the return journey Uterhart kept Jack Jr. amused by recounting fairy tales. The lad seemed particularly thrilled by “Jack the Giant Killer.”

Out on Long Island, as the shadows lengthened and the clock edged close to four o’clock, Blanca became anxious; Jack Jr. should have been here by now. She implored the reporters, “Can’t you do something to help me get him back?”
⁶
The words had barely left her mouth when she heard the crunching of wheels on gravel, a honk on a car’s horn, and the slamming of a car door. Moments later Jack Jr. came scampering into the room and threw himself into his mother’s arms.

“I’m so glad to be back, Bumby,” he said. “I would rather be with you than all the world.”

“And I would rather be with you than all the universe.”

“What’s that, Bumby?”

“The universe is all there is.”

“Well, I would rather be with you than twice that,”
⁷
he said, and a hug from his pudgy arms completed the pronouncement. Asked about his father, the boy replied, “He tried to take me away from my mother.”
⁸
Jack Jr. gave her a loving smile, then said that Uterhart told him that when Jack the Giant Killer slew the giant he stuck a sword in his head. This had puzzled the youngster. “Feel my head,” he said to his mother. “It’s hard and you can’t stick anything in it.”

“Well, giants may have heads like Dr. Cole,”
⁹
was his mother’s sardonic reply, and she dutifully grabbed hold of her son to accommodate the clamoring photographers. After another fusillade of flashbulbs had recorded the mother and son reunion, Amalia called from the dining room for Jack Jr. to come and have a cup of chocolate.

Blanca turned back to the audience of eager pressmen. The questions came in a flurry and she fielded them like a seasoned pro. Asked if the boy had been told of the tragedy, she said yes, but that she regretted him having his head filled with stories of her being a murderer. So what do you think of American courts? “They are wonderful,” she said. “I shall always have the kindest feelings for Americans.”
¹⁰
Asked what she thought was the most impressive thing about the trial, she gave the questioner a pitying look. “The verdict, of course.”
¹¹

So what about the future, do you intend taking Jack Jr. to Chile? “I do not know that I shall ever leave North America,” she said. “I love North America. I think it is just fine. Probably we shall remain right here for a time at least, as I believe the country is the place for a child.”
¹²

Did you see the juror wink at you when he came back into court? “Of course I did. I would not have missed that for the world.”
¹³

But the revelation that really jolted those reporters present was Blanca’s frank admission that her catatonic demeanor during the trial had been a charade, a ruse calculated to deceive the court and win over the jurors. “I schooled myself in repression,”
¹⁴
she announced in matter-of-fact fashion. It took a moment or two for such candor to sink in, but when someone pointed out that such self-control was unusual in a murder case, her response was a knowing smile. “Well, one can do anything if one has to.”
¹⁵
She expanded on her technique. “I knew that I would have to use every faculty of which I was possessed. I knew every amateur psychologist and ‘sob sister’ would be studying my features, my expressions and my every movement. I studied all the time, the judge and the jury, the lawyers and the newspaper men.”
¹⁶

This was no idle boast, as it became clear that she really had absorbed every last courtroom detail. For instance, there was the reporter who wrote with his left hand; he had really irked her. So too had the telegraph messenger who kept brushing against her chair every time he ran out of court with copy from the reporters. Nor was she pleased with certain members of the press. “I didn’t like what two of the women writers said about me. Oh, those women—”
¹⁷
Before she could elaborate, her words were broken off by Jack Jr., who came charging in from the dining room and launched himself onto his mother’s lap. Blanca smiled, but then those dark eyes gave that familiar flash of anger as she mentioned another female journalist’s comment that her plight “was the more pitiful because she had never read a book and was short of intellectual resources, which might have kept her brooding over the trial.”
¹⁸

Overall, though, she had been delighted by the coverage. “I didn’t mind the publicity at all—I liked it,” was her surprising admission. She also made it plain that she would make no attempt to recover any money from her husband’s estate, nor to recover any of the money she allegedly gave him. “I would not touch a penny of it under any circumstances,” she said. “I do not wish to have anything to do with the De Saulles family,”
¹⁹
even if it meant finding a job, because “I need money.”
²⁰
A glance at the luxurious setting in which these words were uttered made the reporters chuckle. “The way she said it didn’t carry any conviction,” wrote one. “She gave the impression that she was still practicing repression.”
²¹

When asked if she had been impressed by Mr. Uterhart’s closing speech, Blanca replied, “It was wonderful, but his opening address was greater.”

“Did he make you cry?”
²²

The eyes blazed once again. “Do you think I would go through what I did at the trial and then cry over myself?”
²³
And while on the subject of counsel, she also thought Weeks had “not been very nice” to her, in spite of her attorney’s praise for the district attorney’s “gentlemanly”
²⁴
conduct of the trial.

Blanca’s attention began to wander. There was nothing more to be said. The reporters had their quotes and their photographs, and it was obvious that she now had no further use for them. A few minutes later she instructed Jack Jr. to say good-bye and excused herself, saying it was time for tea. She vanished into the dining room, with Guillermo closing the door behind her. Her flirtation with the American press was over.

But they were far from being done with her. Nobody likes to be hoodwinked—least of all the press—and one newspaper that early on had been a staunch supporter now rounded on their former heroine. Under a blaring headline, M
RS.
D
E
S
AULLES . . .
A
DMITS
R
OLE OF
A
CTRESS AT
T
RIAL,
the paper dubbed her a “greater actress than Bernhardt,”
²⁵
and wondered sarcastically if, in light of her alleged financial difficulties, she might find employment on the stage. The bile continued: “While psychologists . . . were studying her in court, analyzing her apathy and likening her to the canvas painted dreams of dead and gone genius, the beautiful guileless child was playing a part.”
²⁶
The role, the paper suspected, had been cooked up by Uterhart and Blanca together, though it had little doubt that Blanca’s had been the controlling hand. “Those who saw her through the trial little dreamed the great help she was to her attorney in getting her verdict of acquittal. Hidden behind the face of a child was the mind of a master, a mind which grasped everything going on about her, while the spectators were convinced that that mind was a blank.”
²⁷